Friday, July 24, 2015

The Spiffero: Making sense of why Italians mostly despise air conditioning...

Italians despise air conditioning. Or at the least most of them don't even consider it an option. I'm bitter because I'm suffering sweltering days and nights in an apartment in Italy with no AC. Maybe silly, but I long for the days in the US when I'd run my central air conditioning unit for three months straight during the summer months. No doubt this was a particular brand of American gluttony and lack of ecological sensitivity. Not to mention the cost. But have you ever lived in an apartment with full sun exposure, directly under the tarred roof of a building in an East Coast city? Even in springtime at 70° Fahrenheit outside ( 21° Celsius), the temp in our place would reach as high as 95° F/35° C. When the external temp reached 95°F, then we were officially in an oven. So judge 'ye not...

Contrast that to how I live here in Italy where you simply have to block out heat mechanically. The shutters are strategically closed to keep the sun out, with the windows open to let the air in and if I remain still most of the day with the fan on high blowing directly at me, I won't sweat. My renovated apartment, originally built likely sometime in the 16th century doesn't have a hole in the wall for the AC. Imagine that.

I'm trapped inside this place with shutters closed during the day...

For an American, this situation is unthinkable - close to comical if I weren't living through it. On the one side of the pond, find Italians during the sweltering summer by locating those who remain stubbornly committed to wearing their foulard.

Italian with giant scarf on in summer...

No, it isn't carefree insouciance - it is surely a bit of Italian style but most of all fear of the spiffero, that deadly draft that may ill-affect different parts of one's body, but in particular the throat or neck. The spiffero could cause problems digesting, various cramps and muscle aches, sinus, ear and lung infections with exposure on those respective body parts, but the fear and prevention of sore throat is really where Italian talents lie. Ferrari or Pucci may beg to differ...

While New Yorkers and Americans in general revel in the frigid contrast of arctic air on skin, damp with sweat, as they walk off the NYC street to enter seemingly single digit temperatures, listen for those lamenting the icy airstream, looking for a way to protect themselves as though their clothes had been forcibly ripped from them. Those would be the I-talians.

Think about the BTUs* in terms of American military force.  Operation ICY Storm. Of course, Americans are extreme in many areas of life: the amount of space we require to store our stuff, the size of our refrigerators, the number of lanes we have on highways, our food portions, yes, American military force, the temperature of our coffee, the number of flags we fly...and the size of them. Our AC just fits into the larger culture so sweetly. One barely needs to explain it.

America's biggest flag, flying in Hoboken, New Jersey
But how to explain the extreme response of Italians to AC. The most recent data available show that only around 10% of Italian households have AC compared to 87% of Americans. This is an incredible contrast. My guess would be that even fewer than 10% use AC regularly at home while offices are most likely using them more frequently but never with the defiant love of it that Americans have.

Certainly, Italians don't like extreme weather of any sort. Rain is often an excuse to stay home, and they are invariably well-equipped with any kind of technical clothing for whimsical turns of the barometer. This weather preparedness, based in fear of the spiffero, becomes a fantastic vehicle for their inimitable sense of style in part fueling a high-earning fashion industry. It is not dissimilar to how fear of gluten is inspiring the growth of a whole new product division of gluten-free foods.

At the same time, Italians also don't like too much processing of any sort - they are more likely than Americans to want to take a natural approach to certain things - of course to their cuisine, being full of pure, primary flavors from fabulous ingredients and whose Mediterranean diet enjoys World Heritage status at the UN. As an aside, this is related to Italian rejection of GMO foods, an unthinkable interference in their food traditions. But they also seem more likely to want a softer, less extreme approach to many things: to medications and medical treatments, to exercise, to their general pace of life. Not to exaggerate the Eat, Pray, Love stereotype, but there is a shred of truth to it.


So maybe the voltage capacity here might play a role? I know few people even in quite elegant and well-equipped homes that could run more than two major appliances without blowing a fuse (I've done the permutation: [dishwasher + washing machine + espresso machine] ~ dryer; [washer + dryer + espresso machine] ~ dishwasher). But I don't think that's what's going on.

Instead, what might be at the base of it all can be summarized as the unwillingness of Italians to alter their immediate surroundings (through AC) when they can change their geography quite easily - that is, they'll eventually go on vacation. The work/leisure balance in Italy plays an important role in the annual life rhythm: Italian families have the feeling that beyond their work and home life, they are entitled to leisure time and that consists of mare e montagna - seaside and mountains- and they often take time during summer to enjoy the health benefits of both. In about mid-March you can begin to hear the din of what will happen come June, until this reaches a deafening pitch and people talk about nothing else at a certain point. With ten national paid holidays, plus four EU mandated weeks of vacation, they have the sixth highest amount of vacation time globally, so Italians just move to seaside or mountains in search of the relief they need.

Ultimately, it isn't as simple as just changing the temperature - whose variation alone would leave them vulnerable to all manner of spiffero-centric maladies. Italians forego AC as sort of an agreement that they can be relieved of the heat by being part of different landscapes on which they can lay claim as their natural heritage - there are coasts and mountains in every direction. In fact, the mare e montagna idea takes the Italian concept of wellbeing (or benessere) even further - mothers are often heard talking about how their child requires the seaside for their very health, making it part of your parental duty to offer your child the necessary curative properties of an Italian seaside or mountain holiday.

In contrast, Americans, with little vacation time, vast distances to travel to see something new and a lot of industrialization over the past 150 years have been cut off from nature in a way that Italians have not. Italians live life in and accept more readily the rhythm of the seasons while Americans make their home into a leisure landscape, take a staycation and deal with that difficult reality of life by removing some of the summer pain with a snazzy HVAC.

Certainly, the food movement is bringing more awareness of seasonality back into the American mindset. And the Chinese also have very advanced theories about the role of drafts or wind in illness which in turn confounds Americans. In the end, the issue of AC often doesn't even enter the Italians' mind or, when it does, it just seems excessive and slightly dangerous.

In the meantime, I'd like to go on vacation for my own seaside escape, or to the Dolomiti, more or less in my backyard. But when I'm home, I'll admit I'd rather be blasted by the cold air...in front of a spiffero-machine!



*BTU or British Thermal Unit is the amount of energy is takes to heat or cool one pound of water. We measure the strength of our air conditioners in terms of BTUs, where a good sized room of about 450 square feet requires an AC of about 10,000 BTUs.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Hunger for stories? Anthologies satisfy the craving...

Have you seen Orange is the New Black (OITNB)? It is the original series from Netflix about women in a minimum security prison in Danbury, Connecticut (just a few miles outside of NYC). I'm following this show which has been adapted from the memoir of Piper Kerman, an upper-middle class white woman who landed in prison for drug trafficking for her girlfriend, got out and now works to improve prison conditions for women. It struck me recently that it is similar in its narrative structure to another show that is fueling my story addiction, High Maintenance, about a friendly pot dealer in Brooklyn who services varied Brooklyn clientele in need of their smoke. They are both anthology style series which tell a different story each episode.

"The Guy" From High Maintenance
Though the cultural content is different -one show is about pot smokers and the other prison women- the common anthology structure allows you to deepen your broader cultural understanding of each of these subjects (taking account of the fact that this IS television and not reality, after all). This anthology structure is generative: rather than simply deepening or extending the plot lines of the same four or so characters, the structure displaces the primary characters in favor of narrating the stories of myriad others, who sometimes have only cameo roles.

The payoff is a deepening of an entire profile, archetype or persona, rather than a single individual character. For example, instead of learning about one woman gone bad in Piper Kerman in OITNB over the course of three seasons, we learn about "female prisoners" or "prison dynamics" or, from High Maintenance, which takes the formula even further, "pot smokers". In High Maintenance, we don't even know the pot dealer's name; he's called simply "The Guy" (call "your guy"). He is the vehicle to these varied stories, ranging from comic to melancholic, bringing you all over New York on his bike. The people to whom he delivers, it is their stories that assemble the complex profile of those who smoke pot - these are not stoners รก la Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The characters are like a stack of the veritable Carte-de-visite from the 1800s (later known as "cabinet cards"), only in a narrative version. For the ADD types, it will be very satisfying: it offers a lot of stimulating and changing material so you don't have to invest too much in any single story.

A collection of the Carte de visite from the 19th century

In the case of OITNB, the show certainly grounds itself in and ultimately banks on an ongoing fascination with female same-sexuality (alongside the SCOTUS decision to declare same-sex marriage constitutional).  While there is no doubt many flaws in the representation of prison life on this show, on the sex front, the show is said to be keepin' it real; there is a much discussed strap-on sex scene with Lea Delaria (butch and proud). As much, the show is about the lives of women in prison under a patriarchal supervisory regime in an era of extreme corporatization where, by the third season, the new owners of the prison are creating deeper efficiencies by serving inedible slop in the cafeteria and bringing in bunk beds to double up on the number of inmates. Of course the one key difference between us and them - we are not imprisoned so we can watch the shenanigans from the safety of our couch. While there is a certain camaraderie we could all envy, much of it looks miserable.

With this setup, it is certainly easier to give each of these topics their due: as an audience, we are aware that people are individuals but at the same time, we're so inclined to let single iconic characters represent an entire group. A more nuanced understanding can be built, forcing us to find the thread that runs through all of the character's experience. And because there are so many stories - OITNB fluctuates between the quotidian meanderings of inmates and staff and each of their backstories - what they were like and how they arrived in Danbury while High Main explores the smoker- the personae constructed is multi-dimensional. OITNB has its flaws but in this way, we are allowed to see how we, as the non-prisoners, may not be so different.



So what do we learn about prison women, aside from how they're often low income and that they organize into groups by race, and ethnicity? If you had to choose a defining quality that comes through for all of these stories it is that female prisoners are vulnerable. Vulnerable to rape and pregnancy and violence, to heartbreak both from the loss of time spent with children and family members, the heartbreak of finding love in prison and losing it, to friends leaving, to physical and mental illness, to poverty from the loss of earnings. The list goes on.

High Maintenance, pulls us in with the fantastic absurdity of the characters that one finds in New York. An It Girl who's actually homeless, a recluse caring for his mother in a tiny apartment, a young couple trying to make money by turning their own tiny place into an Air B&B business, a successful writer with writer's block, passing time as a stay-at-home dad cross-dressing and smokin' dope while his wife goes out to work every day. Please open a new browser immediately to go watch the majority of these episodes for free on Vimeo (the final episodes cost a few bucks but well worth the symbolic amount). In the closing credits, The Guy is often found observing a friendly neighborhood nutter.


If you have any ambitions in the world, you might ask yourself how The Guy, this sweet, cool, articulate and sensitive person, perhaps in his late 30s, could not find any other job beyond riding his bike to deliver people drugs. I so crave to know a bit more about The Guy, as much as I enjoy all of his clients' stories. On the flip side, while he suffers certain annoyances in working with demanding people looking for drugs, I find myself asking instead why can't *I* have a job like this? He doesn't have to sit at a desk all day, he is getting a kick ass workout without thinking about it, he gets paid right away in cash and he can afford to occasionally indulge by taking time out to partake in a toke with his favorite clients. These are some of the best moments of the show (case in point is the first episode, only five minutes long where he sits in a bathroom chatting away with a cute hypochondriac from LA). I digress.

More than anything we learn over the course of about 10-15 episodes that The Guy's clients seem stressed and need to relax. Suffering the intensity of urban and middle-class life, they aren't going to Headspace on their IPhones to solve their problems through a meditation app - that would be a very Silicon Valley thing to do. Instead, they are self-medicating in a sort of live-hard-play-hard mantra as they experience the extremes in NYC. It isn't that they are enduring life in a favela - the characters are overall livin' pretty. But the kind of stimulation and human stew you find yourself in in NY lends itself to needing concrete ways of decompressing and this group goes to The Guy for that.

Both of these series are breaking boundaries as part of the first-wave of shows to emerge from the web and mess with the format of television in a number of ways including releasing twelve episodes at once or varying the program length - High Maintenance can tell a story in five minutes or in eighteen. And like the internet itself, the anthology format of these two shows allows us more to think about, play with, explore, identify with. Its format gives us the best hope for not reducing characters to simple stereotypes and it gives us abundant material - it satisfies the craving for stories- for meaning, for understanding and contextualizing our own lives, as well as for recreating them and finding our comfort in the world. They give us some new scripts. They connect us more deeply to different realities. It is fitting that both of these shows originated on the internet, which connects us to those people with whom we can identify. We can see our inner antics out there in front of us and, in the words of Cindy from OITNB, "Suddenly shit be perfectly normal."