I received this short clip so often, I finally have to post it. Postmodernist omnivore Slavoj Žižek debates with his seminar where to go for lunch. My vegetarian and vegan friends — almost all of them living in Manhattan — will forgive me, I’m sure (or not?). For the record, I certainly understand what people find worrisome about industrialized cattle farms and large-scale slaughterhouses. But I come from a remote place in the mountains, where farms are by necessity, and newly, by conviction, small. And where the farming is so traditional that, by now, it is trend-settingly modern. Lovely and comparatively thin-looking animals graze on places called “alm,” that is, steep meadows that belong to some farmer who tends to the animals, and to the grass and flowers on which they feed.

Either way, in my experience, there is a sphere of life in which vegetarianism does not work: mountaineering. I’m in the Italian Alps right now, working on my Mountain Project. This morning I had two bowls of cereal, two eggs with bacon, two slices of bread with cheese, a bowl of fruit salad with yoghurt, a large piece of cake, green tea, grapefruit juice, and a cappuccino. For today’s tour, I’ll bring more bread with cheese and a healthy supply of Gran Cereale cookies. Tonight’s dinner (I just looked at the menu) will be: salad with bresaola, a kind of beef-prosciutto, dumplings with little bits of bacon in them, consomme royale, rabbit cooked in red wine, and lemon sorbet. This is my normal diet here, and I usually lose weight while I’m in the mountains. I know a woman who sees herself as a fairly radical vegetarian. But during her yearly trips to the Himalayas, she eats meat all the time. She learnt that otherwise she’s just not going to make it to the summit (she failed a couple of times, and the sherpas finally persuaded her to eat what they considered a ‘real’ meal). Oh yes, there are probably a gazillion scientific studies claiming that you don’t need to eat meat to have lots of energy. Tell that a farmer in the mountains…

In that sense, and whether he’s joking or not, it always warms my heart to see the Slavoj Žižek clip above…

Spiegel Online International just published an amusing interview with the maker of Chatroulette, 17-year-old Moscow student Andrey Ternovskiy. Excerpt:

“I am a nerd. The web is everything for me. School bores me. I have my own way of learning: I read Wikipedia. School is a waste of my time and I’d rather use that time to program and for business negotiations.”

That’s the spirit! More here.

This image from yesterday, near the Italian border. Apparently, someone skipped this week’s NYC art fairs, which you can see reviewed here (I believe Alec Soth is a soft spoken man; if he uses the word “vomit,” something is rotten in the state of Denmark…).

This one from earlier this week. It is the mountain where, a little more than one year ago, I fell and smashed my elbow (here). Returning to the scene of the accident and making a photograph of it feels good.

While I thought about this entry for Jens’ blog, a word formed in my mind: reverse culture shock. I must admit that I had not encountered this expression before. But then I searched it, and a whole world opened up. There are web-sites that are entirely devoted to this topic. Australians, having lived in Europe where a trip between Tuscany and Paris is nothing, feel trapped when they move back home. Students counsel other students who return from a semester outside of the US. And so on.

Why did I think of this? I’m back in northern Italy, after a long time of absence and “naturalization” in Manhattan. Tonight, I was waiting for dinner with some relatives and aimlessly flipped through a fashion magazine. The editorial was devoted to a surprising topic: the X-ray diet. What is this? While the world wonders whether the newly introduced body scans at airports support our safety or affect our privacy, Italian culture takes a different perspective. Why discuss privacy rights, why take up the issues of security and freedom, when there are bigger worries? It is not enough, says the author, that ever thinner models and celebrities have imposed ever more rigid notions of thinness on us; now we have to go on a yet more grueling diet. While up to now we could hope to hide some imperfections under perfectly tailored clothes, we are finally visible in all our flaws. We have to become even thinner – this is what world politics and airport security do to us! We need to go on the X-ray diet.

I was shocked, and I knew, I’m home.

I’m personally invested in this piece on Skepticism, published two days ago, and in its author – hence the digression. As one waiter in Miami smoothly calmed my doubts when he recommended chocolate pudding for dessert: “It will be a breeze for you…”

But now I have more. Today I met up with some friends at Sancho Panza, a tiny Spanish bar in Munich, the kind of place that is not on the web (sic! now it is…), and that lives from locals who are devoted customers. The name of the place, Sancho Panza, is a bit too predictable, as if the only thing one knew about Spain was Don Quixote. But otherwise, it is an absolute gem. The chef and owner, Mrs. Barrón, serves home-cooked Spanish tapas, little cakes and coffee, and she sells Spanish wine. There is also a small selection of especially good sweets, such as mazapanes de soto from Segura and chocolates from Alemany. But Sancho Panza’s most charming feature is the home-made food. Everything looks as if it just came out of an upscale family kitchen, and tastes entirely genuine. Today, we ate some kind of eggplant cakes, which were simply masterpieces.

What is more, Mrs. Barrón continues a tradition dear to the heart of my friends. They tell stories of their parents, having the same kind of bar food when the place was still owned by Mrs. Barrón’s predecessor, whom they all know by name, but whom I hesitate to name on the web. The small tapas bar has been a Bavarian incarnation of Spanish cuisine for decades. All the time, it was the kind of place where kids go with their parents, and where they would eventually take the person they hoped to marry. Not really cool enough for hanging out in the years in between, but part of the family, and a truly personal place. Sancho Panza gets my highest ranking, five stars *****.

“The site activates your webcam automatically; when you click “start” you’re suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they’re staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click “next,” instantly calling up someone else. The result is surreal on many levels. [...]

I entered the fray on a bright Wednesday afternoon, with an open mind and an eager soul…”

I strongly recommend to read more of the fine print first, by New York Magazine’s Sam Anderson, here. If, on the other hand, you feel brave today, here’s the link: Chatroulette.

But I was prompted to send Jens this entry for a different reason. Some of the people at the meat counter at Citarella — the Upper West Side store — are just marvelous. They are the incarnation of people taking care and tending to meat. Sometimes, I make an Italian dish that I associate with a place where I ate it in its ideal form, Villa Tuscolana near Frascati, a few kilometers from Rome.

Villa Tuscolana is a beautiful hotel, which I found by accident. I had booked a couple of nights in another Frascati hotel, which turned out to be a nightmare (disco music until the early morning hours). My friends and I took off in our car the next morning, looking for something better, and we found the Villa Tuscolana. There we had very thin-cut beef over rucola, with olive oil and lemon. The absolutely perfect summer meat dish, fresh, hearty, and lovely; however, not easy to reproduce: the meat needs to be perfect. Today, when I asked the guy at the meat counter at Citarella’s whether he could cut one beef steak into several thin slices, he suggested that he could cut it into five slices! This is the spirit, I thought, and was thoroughly impressed. I said “four is enough,” and he cut see-through-thin layers of beef. I love this kind of craftsmanship. Five stars for Citarella *****.