Tag Archives: American culture

American culture

Freakin’ at The Freakers’ Ball

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San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair

A few years ago, a friend took me to San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair, “the world’s largest leather event.” No, they’re not selling purses. The Fair is the culmination of Leather Week, “a seven-day celebration of all things leather and kink! Each year, the week before Folsom Street Fair is filled with motorcycle rides, the Leather Walk, special events, sex parties and other fun activities.” (quote)

I knew what I was getting into, and I’m not easily shocked by anything consenting adults want to do or have done to them. Some other tourists, however, may have been misled by the mayor’s welcome letter, in a brochure handed out all over town, describing this as a “family event.” Uh, Addams Family event, maybe. I did see a few families of mild-mannered middle-American tourists, looking very lost and confused at the Fair.

For me, it was weird, wild, and fun. As you can see in photos at the above-linked sites, it’s a sort of S&M carnival and parade, with people wandering around in various states of undress, and the bits that are covered are generally covered with leather. As a straight woman, I can enjoy crowds of gay men – more often than not, they’ve got bodies well worth leering at, and I don’t have to worry about them leering back (not at me, anyway).

In the context, I could understand the profusion of leather chaps (like cowboys wear, except that real cowboys wear trousers under them), chains, etc. Given the “hellfire” theme of many of the S&M clubs represented, I could also understand the demon costumes: huge leather bat wings, horns, and tails. Some people wore elaborate leather masks like gargoyle heads, others more standard S&M face-covering masks with zippers and chains, and studded leather collars and leashes.

One costume left me completely puzzled. This person’s head was skillfully made up, wig and all, to look like one of the dancers from “Cats.” But his or her (I couldn’t tell) blubbery, barrel-shaped body was covered from neck to toe in a bright purple rubber jumpsuit. Sado-masocats?

There were participatory events, but I declined to be spanked, especially in public. I simply enjoyed watching the sea of leather-clad humanity flow by. Part of the amusement for me was running into people I knew who did not at all expect to seeme there. Nor I them. One colleague caught me completely by surprise. “Not wearing your usual buttoned-down look today,” was all I could think of to say.

*article title from a song by Shel Silverstein:

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American culture, food, Italian culture, Italian food

Italian vs. American Diet

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^ ravioli at Lanterna Verde – yum!

One of the most boring things in the world is listening to people talk about their diet (hearing them complain about their weight runs a close second). However, in America today there’s nothing to discuss, because everyone is on the Atkins diet (no carbohydrates, but you can eat as much of anything else as you want).

Food companies and advertisers have been swift to adapt. In the supermarket I saw “low-carbohydrate bread.” I did not read the label to learn how they accomplished this miracle; I had a feeling it would involve chemicals I’d never want to put into my body.

Magazine articles, books, and news items give alarming statistics about obesity, and offer ways to combat it, both in yourself and your children. It seems to me that maintaining a healthy weight is not rocket science, and doesn’t require a diet plan that you have to buy a whole book about, let alone pre-packaged diet meals with counted calories etc. etc. Didn’t we all learn the basics of nutrition in school, the four major food groups and all that? The major lesson I remember is that it never hurts to eat more fruit and vegetables, especially when those replace starches, fats, and sugars in your daily intake.

Perhaps what Americans really need is to revise their attitude towards food. Food seems to occupy two diametrically-opposed places in American consciousness. On the one hand, food is simply fuel – you shovel in whatever comes to hand, to keep you going. It’s this attitude that leads to families rarely eating together, as everyone is rushing off to their extra-curricular activities, grabbing whatever they can to eat along the way.

But food also has a psychological role. Cookbooks, menus, and people tout the concept of “comfort food,” which, when eaten, is supposed to make you feel secure or loved, perhaps by reminding you of your childhood. (Never mind that most of us never had this mythical comforting childhood or that kind of food with it.)

Comfort is a very dangerous role for food to play. You hear the same story over and over again: “I wasn’t overweight, but then I went through a rough patch and felt depressed. I turned to food for comfort, and became a blimp.” At the blimp stage, food is re-cast as the enemy, the secret sin, and the indulgent reward for good behavior (most often, diet-related good behavior: “I was good today, I only had salad for lunch, so I’m entitled to have a brownie now”).

The attitude towards food is one area where Italy really gets it right. This attitude is made explicit by the Slow Food movement, but I think is pervasive throughout Italian culture. In Italy, a meal is neither mere refueling nor comforting self-indulgence. It’s a time for a family to be together, to enjoy good food and each others’ company. It’s not something to be rushed through, neither in preparation nor in consumption. So dinner is eaten far later than in the US, usually around 8 pm. Meals are spread over at least two courses, which also slows you down. You have time to appreciate the food and wine, and to talk to each other. And there’s no rushing through the meal to watch TV afterwards. (I have never heard an Italian, not even a child, leave the table on that pretext.)

The Italian style of family meal has several beneficial side effects. On the nutritional side, everyone tends to eat a more balanced diet, in part because parents are at the table with their kids to ensure that they eat what’s good for them. Taking your time over a meal also ensures that you digest it better. And spending time together is good for families: you know what’s going on with each other.

Needless to say, the Atkins diet is not taking off in Italy, the home of pasta, risotto, polenta, and tasty, crusty bread. Thank god.

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Italian culture, living in Italy

Making Friends in Italy

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This question came up recently on one of the expats-in-Italy boards I hang out on (it had coincidentally already been on my mind): How do you make friends with Italians?

Although most of the Italians I’ve met are warm and friendly and great fun to have dinner with, I’m not sure that I have any really close Italian friends. There are Italians with whom I can enjoy a long chat when the occasion happens to arise, but no one I’d call up and pour out my heart to when I need an understanding ear. I do have friends like that, both in Italy and elsewhere, they just don’t happen to be Italians.

I’ve observed, over the years I’ve been here, that most Italians don’t make friends as easily as many Americans do. I think it’s a matter of practice. Many Americans move around a great deal (most within America, some outside), and have repeatedly faced the need to make new friends. When you move a lot, you learn to get to know people quickly.

Most Italians stay all their lives in the city of their birth (if they possibly can); some never even move out of their original neighborhood, though they may commute across town for work. Some commute between cities, working somewhere during the week and returning home on weekends. Some are forced to migrate for work, but still maintain strong ties with their paese, a word meaning both “town” and “nation” – which reflects Italy’s long history as a collection of separate city-states.

Hometown ties extend even to strangers. When we first moved to Italy, our car (donated by my husband’s parents) had a license plate from Teramo, a town in Abruzzo. We drove it to Milan for our first reconnaissance visit. Late at night, at a toll booth just outside the city, a man in a car beside us shouted excitedly: “Are you from Teramo? That’s where I’m from, but I live here. I’m in the Guardia di Finanza. If you ever need any help, just look me up!” (The Guardia di Finanza are the financial police, who investigate accounting frauds, tax evasion, etc. – I hope never to need him!)

Kids usually stay in the same school for the complete cycle at each level: five years of elementary school, three of middle school, and five of high school. As far as I can tell, Italians form their enduring friendships during their school years, and, even if they grow up to be very different from those friends in lifestyle, experiences, careers, etc., they don’t feel a strong need for new friendships in later life.

I just ran across an article in the International Herald Tribune which suggests that this is also true in other European cultures: “the therapist stated categorically that people just did not make friends any longer in middle age. That advice, suggested Draguns, reflects cultural traditions in Germany and the Netherlands, where people tend to limit their friends to those they made in school and to keep the same friends through old age…”

I’ll be curious to hear from my European readers about this, to agree or refute or expand. I wonder: do Europeans feel that American-style friendships are shallow, because they happen so quickly? Some undoubtedly are, but not all. Some of my closest friendships have been formed very quickly, often with other third-culture kids who feel the same need I do to find the right people and make friends quickly.

See also: Rebecca’s view

Update: A few years later I began meeting and hanging out with il popolo della rete – Italians who are active online – and then began to find like-minded Italians to be friends with.

What’s your experience of making friends in Italy?

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opinion

National Self-Esteem

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Can a country have an inferiority complex? Certainly the US strongly feels its own superiority, and this is reflected in its media. As pointed out in a Doonesbury cartoon years ago, a lot of American advertising uses the word “America” to sell products that have nothing to do with nationality. Mike Doonesbury asks: “Why are Americans so insecure about themselves? Do any other countries make ads that are so relentlessly chauvinistic?”

As a matter of fact, they don’t – at least not that I’ve seen. But Mike had the wrong end of the stick: the driving force here is not insecurity, but pride. Americans have a strong sense of what it means to be American, and it’s the kind of warm, fuzzy feeling that makes advertisers want to create a link (in the public mind) between their product and “being American.”

Watching American TV, you might get the idea that American is not only the best thing to be, it’s the only thing to be. The American media tends to ignore the rest of the world, at least until forced by events to sit up and take notice.

To a point, this is understandable; most news organizations report to a local/national audience whose interest in faraway events is limited. In reports of, say, an airline disaster, the local news will say that “x number of people from our country were involved, x others;” I’ve seen this in both the UK and Italy. The disasters that no one local is likely to be involved in get short shrift indeed: “x thousand people killed in floods in Bangladesh. End of story.”

But the United States is the leading player on the world stage, so other countries’ news media report extensively on America’s affairs, both internal and external. What happens in America affects the world. (This, by the way, is a huge responsibility, but one that most Americans seem unaware that they carry.)

Italy, on the other hand, seems to have an inferiority complex. It’s the world’s fifth or sixth largest economy, yet Italians seem to feel that Italy doesn’t really deserve much of a position on the world stage. Maybe I’m just imagining things, but I get this impression most strongly from the Italian news media.

The US public probably would not have noticed that Italy sent troops to the Gulf War, but the Italian TV news gave “our boys” lots of coverage, partly, I suppose, because it was easier and cheaper to interview them than soldiers of other nationalities. But sometimes it felt as if the Italian journalists were like the nerdy kid who tries too hard to get noticed by the rest of the class: “See, see! We’re there, too!”

A couple of Italian pilots managed to do something newsworthy: they were shot down, captured, and beat up by the Iraqis. The Italian press was delirious: finally, we have something momentous to say about Italy’s participation in the war.

Italy’s lack of national self-esteem shows in other ways. There are some things that everyone acknowledges the Italians are good at: food, design, leather. But beyond that, many Italians are convinced that the Americans do it better. Back when I was with Incat Systems, a small Italian company bent on conquering the global CD-R software market, we had trouble selling our software to Italians; some thought that software from Italy couldn’t possibly be any good. When half of the company moved to California and the same Easy CD software had an American address on it, more Italians were eager to buy it: it’s American, it must be good. (Whether Italian or American, Easy CD went on to take the lion’s share of the worldwide CD-R market; that’s why Adaptec bought it.)

As far as American customers knew, Easy CD was always an American product. Years later, when Easy CD Creator 4 was released, the suggested retail price (SRP) was $99 in the US, with a $20 rebate. In Europe SRP was set at the after-rebate price of $79. I got vitriolic email from an American: “How dare you give a lower price to foreigners on an American product?”

My response was: “The original Easy CD Creator was the offspring of Easy CD, developed in Italy, and CD Creator, developed in Canada. Even today, of the engineering staff in California, at least half were not born in America. So what exactly is an ‘American’ product?”

Never heard from him again.

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