Climbing up a steep ski slope for two hours seems, at least to me, like a dumb thing to do. But the view on top was worth it. The framing was rather tricky. After eight tries my hands got too cold for more, but this one works for me.

There should be places where they teach how to give interviews. Of course there are such places. But these places don’t teach what is really important.

Say you sell art. Why not say this: “I only do conventional shit. Just look for yourself, and you’ll see. I do what everybody does, and it kind of works. I don’t have much taste. I don’t really question things, nor have I ever questioned myself. Those are luxuries I can’t afford, and don’t need. Hardly anybody could tell the difference anyway.”

Now that would be unconventional.

Mia: “In conversation, do you listen, or wait to talk?”
Vincent: “I have to admit that I wait to talk, but I’m trying hard on this.”

Sometimes it’s a good idea not to go for the summit. I made this one right before the decision to turn around. 30 minutes later, on the way back down, the temperature dropped significantly and snowfall became heavy. Lucky.

I searched the web for recipes that resemble my own minestrone, but I didn’t really find anything. The only photo where the soup looks somewhat like my soup is from a Californian-French-Italian food blog, Citron & Vanille. But it’s so easy to get it right that detailed recipes seem somehow misguided. You just throw the vegetables in a pot and combine them with whatever you feel like, pasta, potato, dumplings, tortellini, and so on. Here’s a tip for vegetarians, or people like me who love vegetarian soups and accordingly use no meat, bacon, or anything of that kind for flavor. Heat some olive oil in the pot before you start, and slowly roast some raw slices of potato in it until they are slightly brown; then add boiling water and the vegetables. Add another shot of olive oil when the soup is done. Perfect!

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.