The broad, broad view of the Washington Post sale

When I worked at Newsweek, when it was a part of the Washington Post family, Donald Graham used to appear in the office every few weeks. Everything you hear about the guy seemed to be true. He had to be pointed out to me — a gangly, awkward, fellow in a terrible suit. He seemed shy, and smiled the same way to everyone he passed in the halls, from our big cheese world-beating editor in chief to me, a nobody on the absolute bottom of the corporate ladder.

Part of my job was to sit in on the editorial meetings and report on them for our far-flung foreign affiliates. This meant standing in the back of the room, and quietly taking notes. Sometimes I'd perch on the window sill, overlooking Eighth Avenue and Columbus Circle. A few times, Mr. Graham ended up perched next to me, just watching, deflecting whatever remarks or questions were aimed at him.

And I remember looking at the guy, amazed that he ran a global, powerful media empire, and was the steward of one of the most important institutions in American journalism. There was so much resting on his metaphorical shoulders, I thought, as I wondered if that was dandruff I spotted resting on his actual shoulders. It was amazing that so many vital human endeavors ultimately came down to one actual person. And thank goodness that at that time and place the guy who signed my checks was decent and dedicated to the same mission that I was.

And now he sold it. Instead of that one man, who was really part of a family, he sold the thing to another man, Jeff Bezos. It wasn't to a private equity firm, or any of the many bottom-feeder newspaper chains still sulking about, which is good (they've long since sold off Newsweek, whose sordid afterlife as an increasingly unloved old nag was shaping up to be the big media story this month before the sale).

The Post sale, along with the Globe being snatched up by John Henry, raises a ton of questions that high-flying media folk like to publicly mull over. The emerging consensus, I think, is that these are pretty awesome developments. At last, fabulously wealthy, smart business leaders realize the value of "old media." Don't dwell too long on the depressing fact that they were able to buy major metropolitan and national institutions with as much thought and sacrifice as most of us buy new iPods, and what that says about what we value. These guys are new, and they "get it." The can negotiate change, and aren't used to failing. And becoming beholden to a person, a personality, is way way better than the fate most newspapers face, in which some market buys the papers on leverage and cuts them to death. The nagging voices chime up that these men represent such vast bundles of conflicts of interest, that the basic mission of fair and honest reporting is doomed. There's the essential plot development of uncertainty.

But I would like to take the long view. The media-land conversation is fascinating in New York, Washington, Silicon Valley, and among the dwindling corners of the industry where people still make a decent living. In other words, this is the one percent talking to itself. In the broader view, this is a snapshot of life in our present plutocracy, in which most of us can only look on and shrug.

I'm going to wander around a moment, but bear with me. In college I had a close friend who was full of ridiculous ideas that were pretty funny at the time, but I keep thinking about. Both of us were English majors, and very interested in topics like the future of poetry and the role of the arts in society. Sometimes this friend was eerily prescient: he said it would be a good idea to write about vampires, which were an enduring human theme and destined for a comeback (at that moment Stephenie Meyer was still only a receptionist who had never written a word). He thought hip-hop and opera were destined to meet someday (and perhaps it did, if you think R. Kelly counts. We can argue about whether that's a good thing). But one of his sillier idea was that the less profitable arts, like poetry, would have to revert to a model you saw in Renaissance Italy, of finding patronage from powerful families or institutions. The bizarre example he gave was that Bill Gates and Microsoft could be talked into needing a court poet. This spawned a million jokes about Pindaric odes to celebrate the arrival of Windows 95.

What my friend grasped far earlier than I did, was the cynical reality of how we live. I was too busy being earnest and judgmental to see that things don't really change much. I was alive to the idea that the story changes, but didn't realize that it usually happened in ways that I was able to anticipate. I remember in one of my poetry classes talking to a senior who had just accepted a job at a company in Seattle that sold books over the internet. I was sure that was the stupidest idea on earth — who'd deal with that when there was a Borders or a Barnes & Noble on every block? I was just about to start a summer internship at my hometown newspaper — a family run, essential service for my community that was as permanent as the mountains. That was how I'd build a stable and reasonable future. Joke's on me (that college friend I mentioned, by the way, is a investment banker now. He's doing alright).

For all the talk of change, things aren't changing, and to take a much, much broader view, there is great peril lining our future. Consider Venice, which for hundreds of years was a true merchant republic, governed by an evolving and surprisingly fluid class of wealthy businessmen, with the occasional nudge or shove from an angry mob. Unlike the rest of Europe, where wealth and power and social order was determined by land and conquest, Venice was about commercial skill, political dexterity, and luck.

It worked for a long time, until the 13th century when the ruling class decided to pull the ladder up behind them. They restricted access to the circles of power to families that already had it, who over time became a formal self-perpetuating, autocratic nobility. That came with all the nonsense that entails — inbreeding, the creation of surplus offspring that loiter about at parties and in convents and waste resources, and an ossified, entitled, unimaginative ruling class that props itself up until something new and vibrant knocks it over.

Venice slammed shut the door just over 500 years into its existence. Our American republican experiment just hit year 237.

By any other name... still a bad idea

Croatia has a vibrant and diverse wine culture. Among my favorites from Istria is teran, a kind of red-to-black, dry wine that from the right vineyard is sublime.

But Croatians have this insane quirk, which I think is specific to them, of serving wine mixed with Coke, over ice. This summer, I learned that this madness has a name, "Bambus" (they also serve wine with Fanta, which is a "Miš-Maš"). 

I'm just, shaking my head.

The Berkshires to Istria, and back (2/2)

Rovinj, Croatia. Dawn, July 27.

I knew I was in for an interesting journey home from the start. I had bought the round-trip ferry ticket because it was cheaper, which meant I had to get to the dock very early — a lot of day-trippers get these tickets, so you have to present for boarding at 6 a.m. That makes for a sad night's sleep, but it's always rewarding to remind yourself what dawn looks like. That morning had a spectacular Mediterranean sunrise, with blues and pinks and golds like some Tiepolo absurdity.

I took a cab to the pier, and once there got into an argument with the driver. There was a dispute over the charge — 90 kunas (that's around $15) for a three minute ride, instead of the 60 kunas the meter read. This is apparently the official "shakedown tourists leaving town" rate, because it had been quoted to us the previous day when we called a different cab company. We had hung up on them.

There were a lot of people already milling about the good ship SS San Gwann, when a group of Venezia Lines officials appeared and set up a makeshift ticket counter. Then proceeded to inform us each that the boat was broken and couldn't sail, so we could take a refund or go on a chartered bus. The daytrippers left, but I figured I would get through it alright. But it wasn't easy. What would have been a three-hour trip turned into a six-hour one, thanks to traffic between Trieste and Venice. Even worse the air conditioner unit above me began leaking — not dripping really, leaking — on my head for the last hour of the trip. I made a makeshift tent out of the curtain and did my best to hide.

In Venice, I found my hotel very quickly — again without a map — and had a few days in the Serene Republic. I'll write more about that later. I continued on on Monday. There is a strange feeling the morning of a heavy day of travel, when you shower and put on your socks and realize the next time you are going to go through these motions it will be at your own home, on the other side of the planet, in about two days.

I had a few hours to kill before having to head to the airport, so I left my bags and hiked around the city. I stopped for lunch of cicchetti at a little place on Campo San Margherita, but I was so distracted by flipping through La Gazzetta dello Sport that I dropped a huge dollop of olive oil on my right knee. I thought despondently about how long I was going to have to look at that stain in the coming hours.

Marco Polo Airport is a remarkably undistinguished airport, not what you might expect from a place like Venice. Its best feature is the little food court on the north end of the departures area, which has a striking view over the lagoon toward the city, which looks remarkably large and close from there. I spent awhile there having a Peroni, watching a Carnival cruise ship maneuver away through the lagoon toward the sea like some kind of moving apartment block. Very strange.

I had to spend the night in Istanbul, which was a surprisingly easy. I wandered around a bit, hit the duty-free for some lokum, drank an Efes and watched things swirling around. I was in Istanbul for a few days a year ago, and I would have loved to get into the city for awhile. But it was the middle of the night, so I had to settle for the strange tableau of the globalized world you see at an international airport. In the dead of night in Istanbul there are a lot of flights to the former Soviet Union, to central Asia and the Gulf states. Lots of women in hijabs, tough-looking CIS dudes in track suits or polyester casualwear, guys that look they are going from one place to another and will never make it back. The thing about the people you observe in an airport is that you really can't match what they are going through the way you can in a place with the usual amount of gravity. You feel like you are in the background of what might be someone's very interesting movie.

Happily for my effort to not completely destroy my sleep schedule for a month, the airport is pretty spacious, and I didn't have trouble finding a pair of seats on which to stretch out. I'd brought along an eyeshade to block out the pervasive dull light, and was tired enough that I could tune out the occasional Turkish announcements over the PA system. Had to leave bright and early in the morning. Flying to America seems to now involve another layer of security theater, so we had to get our passports checked again at the gate, which was time-consuming and pointless. Then the long flight back.

Once again, the menace of getting the times to line up failed me. I had a few hours to get from JFK to Port Authority Bus Terminal, and a big suitcase, so I decided to hang out in the arrivals hall because at least there was coffee and a place to sit. Good choice. Port Authority seems to have been somewhat cleaned up since the last time I really saw it — they seem to have gotten the homeless problem under control. But it is still a profoundly dispiriting place, with its dark tiles, an absence of sunlight, and a general sense of dropping a few scales down the socioeconomic ladder. I would like to get into the minds of those designers who made this place, and see what it was like the first day it opened. Did it seem like a bracing peek into a bold and efficient future, or was it always a grim warning of an impending dystopia of ugly buildings and social freefall? And did they deliberately create this disorientating sensation around the place, is it some kind of brutalist prank? How come it looks so enormous when you see it from the outside, yet the inside feels like a rat tunnel? Is it supposed to be a vision of some alternate reality, a place that should have never happened? A cautionary, counterfactual lesson about where America's postwar obsessions with automotives and fossil fuels would lead?

And what is most striking is how inefficiently it handles the basic task of providing information to ensure travelers get to the right place. How can a place that purportedly handles nearly a quarter million people a day not have any timetables or information boards anywhere? To find my gate I had to wait in line at the ticket window to ask, because nothing else at all seemed trustworthy.

Anyway, my hatred of long-distance bus travel is deep. It reminds me of those desperate, poor days in college when I would have to stand for hours to get home for Thanksgiving (pleased to see that no less a lover of travel and the open road than Jack Kerouac was on my side about bus travel).

And the fact that there is just no need for it. There are functioning railroad tracks running all the way from Manhattan to the old Williamstown train station three blocks from my house. That this is how generations of people travelled from here to there. Instead, I was stuck on a belching, rattling emissions-spewing contraption, winding around the old state roads of far western Connecticut and Massachusetts. There were three of us left on the bus by the time we reached town.

I wasn't done yet though! I still had to walk from the Williams Inn across the center of town to my house, dragging the suitcase bravely along behind me. I was at the end of my street, across from my driveway, when the right wheel finally gave up and popped out. And that was that.

So I've spent two blog posts complaining about the details of modern travel. But I haven't offered a word about what I did in between. I haven't written about watching my daughter learn to snorkel in the Adriatic, the pleasantness of having a glass of Favorit beer watching the sun set into the sea, the taste of a big plate of spaghetti al nero di seppia, standing beneath Titian's Assumption at the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, sitting on the ledge of a canal at an enoteca in Cannaregio, with a glass of wine, watching people walk by.

I try always to remind myself of some of my summers in high school. I worked mornings and evenings, and would sometimes spend afternoons sitting in the backyard. Usually I'd read, sometimes I'd read travel books about Italy and France that I'd taken from the public library. I'd sometimes see a speck of silver from an airliner impossibly high up, and wonder if I'd ever be on one.

So, yes, I'd happily do it over again.

The Berkshires to Istria, and back (1/2)

Terminal San Basilio

If you travel with any degree of awareness, you realize how inconceivable many of the things we take for granted would have been not a generation ago. You can buy a ticket to pretty much get anywhere you want on earth, at a shockingly low price if you think about it. Then you are zipped around in the stratosphere over oceans that once took weeks to cross, and think so little of it you fall asleep. 

For my grandparents, Venice was a place where rich people sometimes saw, but was nothing more than a thing in books, movies and legends. Istria was completely off the map, a neglected, poor, sickly forgotten part of the socialist bloc.

I say all this as a preamble because what follows will look a lot like complaining, and I don't want to leave the impression that I don't appreciate being able to get around. I sure do.

Yet there are trade-offs. This was the first year of the four that I've gone to Croatia that I went from the U.S. and not from Russia and Croatia (I wrote about last year's trip here). And now I realize how vanishingly rare it is to see another American when I'm there. Getting there and back was something of an odyssey, especially coming from Williamstown. The first leg was a five-hour bus ride on Peter Pan from the center of town to Port Authority, then a night in New York. I was trying to do things in an affordable manner, which meant that none of the times lined up neatly, meaning a lot of dead time.

This year, I ended up with tickets on Turkish Airlines, which had by far the cheapest fares over the Atlantic this summer. It was a pretty grim year for ticket prices to Europe, and it took weeks of searching to find the right price. I'd heard on travel websites that Turkish was luring more North American business, trying to turn Istanbul into a hub, so that explains our brief burst of luck.

I first left the country in 1999, and have done so quite a few times since, and each time seems to usher in a new era of discomfort and nuisance. On the plus side, Turkish Airlines leaves JFK earlier than most other European flights, so you avoid the late afternoon / evening crush that makes getting through security an ordeal. But the planes keep getting more and more absurd. I realized this time with alarm that the exact distance from the back of your seat to the one in front of you is the same as the distance from my tailbone to my knee. So, for anyone an inch taller than me, you're talking about physical impossibilities. As it is, this distance is too small for what we remember as a standard tray table — now you have these bisected mini-ones, which are perfectly useless if the guy in front of you has his seat back. The one thing that has gotten better are the new entertainment systems newer planes have rigged up for each individual seat. These are pretty cool, and if you are lucky create a kind of cocoon experience that can make a long trip bearable.

I landed in Istanbul, and had a few hours in Ataturk International Airport, where I had coffee and read Jan Morris' The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage once again. Then a short flight up to Venice. Air travel is so cognitively disruptive if you graft it into a historical context. In Venice's best days, its wealth and fame and riches relied heavily on managing the treacherous trade from one city to the other. The republic was the direct product and inheritor of Byzantium's Roman heritage, its overseas empire was born by conquering the city in the Fourth Crusade, and after the Turkish Conquest, this was the epicenter of all sorts of existential terror. That's a lot of history flowing back and forth over that distance from point to point, and in 2013 I jumped from one to the other almost as an afterthought, in a two and a half hour flight over the once-formidable Balkan interior.

The one part of this whole voyage that made me nervous was finding my way from the airport in Venice to the ferry terminal. I know that the great fun of Venice is allowing yourself to wander and get lost amid the campi and the ponti. But getting from Point A to Point B with a big suitcase and a time limit made me nervous. I studied the route on the map ahead of time, and made my way along with lots of self-doubt from Piazzale Roma down Fondamenta Cazziola to Fondamenta Cereri Dorsoduro to Fondamenta Rossa to Fondamenta Briati to Fondamenta San Sebastiano to San Basilio. And I made it with time to have a sandwich and check my email.

The ferry trip was a product of the necessity of timing. The usual way to get over to Istria would be to take the train to Trieste, then catch a bus down the coast. But my flight arrived so late that I would miss the connections, meaning that I'd have to spend a night. It was cheaper to spring for the ferry. I secretly really wanted to do this, because it sounds so romantic and proper — one really should arrive and leave Venice by the sea. The reality of the modern voyage was not so charming. The ship was more like an airliner than I thought. The windows were filthy, so you couldn't really see out, and the air conditioner was blasting far more than necessary. But it gives you a sense of the scale, that it is three hours of motoring over the open sea before you reach what was the heartland of the Venetian overseas empire.

My wife was waiting at the pier, with the owner of the flat we rented who had driven to give me a ride. That was very welcome.