kmazz

Everyone is smiling. Unexpectedly, we encounter many neighbors on our desultory walk, loping unhurriedly with children and dogs. From the trail behind the wooded lots of houses, young girls squeal over something delightful. The gardeners are all unleashed to stuff huge garbage cans with winter’s debris in anticipation. The sky is a piercing blue and we pick up the perfume of early Eudora as we continue along blocks once too far to merit the additional dousing. We comment on the trill of birds busy at their seasonal rituals. A baby squirrel narrowly escapes being flattened by people on a joy ride. Forsythia is bursting out from multiple yards and stretching out to the sun like a yoga pose. On a day like today, it is easy to forget there ever was rain.

Embarrassing. I just bought my first pasta machine. Made in China for $25.00. So I wait for the whole “made in Italy” thing to be going down the tubes to decide to go Old World.

I know, I know. What took me so long? I had watched my mother make pasta at home from time to time, and it was just so labor intensive. Tagliatelle always made for a great meal, and I’d beg for it on birthdays and special events, but I never thought I would take the time to do it myself. And the machine only does part of the job and has that hand crank…not worth it. I thought.

But I was wrong! All those wasted years! Pasta is at least as easy as pie. Of course it took my mother forever to make it. She had six mouths to feed besides her own (and she never seemed to have time to put any morsels in it and was a rail most of her life). And she forsook the machine for the old rolling pin and knife because there wasn’t a machine her whole life that she liked. As Old World as I am now about my pasta, I am modern compared to her. And, I have to say, happily, contentedly, so.

Back on February 15, I had a post about the new Camel cigarette packaging. It is snazzy stuff, designed to appeal to gurrls.

And here’s proof! While walking the dog past the neighborhood junior high school, this is what I spotted.

Time was, no one in Italy could have been accused of rushing madly through life. Meal time with family was sacred, as was the post-prandial “riposo”.

A walk in the piazza, a caffe break, an apertivo at the end of the day were moments to kick back and enjoy the day. Adoption of new technology lagged behind the rest of the industrialized world, so no one was checking email or surfing the Internet.

Well, that’s all changed and now Italians have to actually think about taking it slow. Feb. 19 has become the “Giornata della Lentezza”, or Day of Slowness, when people are reminded that efficiency and productivity aren’t everything. To celebrate the day, there was a “slow marathon” in Rome and a cloud-watching event. The media spotlighted the 55 “Cittaslow” or “Slow Cities” that are part of the Slow Food movement (also originating in Italy). And now there is even a movement promoting slowness.

Milan Kundera wrote about the dehumanizing, pleasure-depriving fact of going fast in his 1993 book Slowness.

Speed is definitely associated with our modern, Internet-time, multi-tasking (and reptitive motion injury as my chiropractor reminded me today while cracking my computerized neck) lives. An Internet search under “slowness” brings up questions and answers about slow computers. Speed is a user benefit many computer industry vendors identify when selling. We live in such a pumped-up era, that is still undergoing so much change as it hurtles into the future, that implicit in its culture is the low value placed on remembering how life was before. Kundera says slowness is associated with memory, speed with forgetting.

And where do relationships come in? If speed is a value, does depth matter? Women have always enjoyed spending time, lots of time, chatting and relishing the rapport we feel with women friends. I’m always amazed when I see the clock on the phone recording the amount of time I’ve just spent talking with a friend. Where o where did the time GO?

Men marvel, or perhaps more aptly, scoff, at this trait. But it is something that depends on slow and is part of the female nature. Sadly, it is hard to find female friends who aren’t too busy to indulge in a good natter these days.

One local place I go, where people end up positively euphoric over the effect of lingering over good food and hours of conversation is The Busy Corner. It is the antithesis of speed and efficiency. And it fulfills a need for the solace of slow.

Thanks to art critic Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times I discovered a painter yesterday. Howard Hodgkin is well known by art lovers everywhere, but is a new one for me. Maybe I need to get out more.

In language clearly animated and inspired by the works exhibited, Kimmelman labels Hodgkin a “voluptuary”, and speaks of “the ravishment of color” inspired by “emotional situations” in “the redolent fragment or vignette”. (This is why I read the New York Times. You can’t get this stuff in any other newspaper.)

The review prompted my Internet search on the artist, and my response to what I saw was similar to my response to works by Helen Frankenthaler. These artists care about beauty.

And in fact, Kimmelman touches on the subject of beauty and “how as a culture we got ourselves into a mind-set whereby beauty is suspect and elegance seems a weakness.”

I wonder about this frequently because I grew up surrounded by aesthetic standards that seem to be out of date, but have never diminished as a standard by which I consciously or subconsciously measure the world around me.

Why is beauty no longer relevant? I wonder if it has to do with a socio-political culture that equates beauty with elitism. If one admires beauty, so the thinking might go, then perhaps it assigns low value to things that do not have it. A pretty face then would be more deserving of attention and care than a homely one. It might be okay to bomb an ugly city, but a crime against humanity to bomb world heritage sites. These are scary thoughts, and justifiably unpopular in a civilized, tolerant, diverse world where beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

But maybe we don’t study beauty as a set of esthetic principles associated with the spirit and philosophy of humanism. In that context, beauty should be a source of optimism, joy and an awareness of what separates us from other animals. That’s what it means to me.