Keeping a watch

After years of being off our mind, left to the weird realm of luxury items advertised in the Wall Street Journal and such, we seem to be ready to start thinking about wristwatches again. The rumor mill is chirping that Apple and Android are working on Dick Tracey jobbers, which I guess would be a more accessible and convenient than the dinner table platters some smartphones are beginning to resemble. Reading up on it, I realized that I hadn't even worn a watch since July, which got me around to fixing my favorite and I'm really much happier because of it.

I love watches, really, dating back from when they were intense objects of desire, mostly because my mom wouldn't get me one until I could tell time on a regular analog clock — which was probably pretty wise. I finally got a Casio digital watch once, which I wore until it fell apart, and lusted for one of those calculator watches, which could have permanently altered my relationship with school mathematics. I still remember noticing them, and I particularly remember my Uncle Gerry showing me his, which could keep military time which he said he could never keep straight from when he was in the service.

I bought my current watch in spring 2000, and it remains very special to me. I'd long wanted a Swiss Army watch since I saw a friend in college with one, and when my previous one broke I decided the time was right. I bought mine at one of those odd Midtown electronics stores, which was in my office building on Broadway and 57th. It is a Wenger  — which I guess is the RC Cola to Victorinox's Coke — and I likely paid too much, but it is still with me. It was important because I was still even then getting over a nasty break-up, and the idea of marking my future hours and days in a totally new way was very appealing to me. I thought about all the time I'd looked down at my old watch waiting to meet whats-her-name, etc., and it was like getting a totally fresh start.

And together we had a lot to mark! I counted down the minutes before my wedding on that watch, I timed the minutes between my wife's contractions when our daughter was being born on it. Nothing about it suggests "bling," it is serviceable, now considerably scratched and scuffed, but wholly a part of my life.

And in July, I very nearly lost it. I mentioned earlier that getting home from my trip to Croatia this summer involved a six-hour bus trip from Istria to Venice, which finally ended at San Basilio ferry terminal. After I grabbed my bag and jumped off the bus, I was about halfway to the terminal when I looked down to check just how awfully late we were when I saw that the watch was gone. I ran back to the still parked bus, urged the driver to open up, and prowled around what had been my seat on my hands and knees, pulling up the cushions, running my hand between the cracks (and really: yuck). No luck. The magnificently annoyed driver stood behind me watching, commenting that I probably lost it at the rest area where we stopped near Trieste on the way. I knew that wasn't the case — I'd been checking regularly at the end of our trip because I was desperate for it to be over. I knew the driver wanted to get going, that it was nowhere to be seen, and I quietly made peace with the idea that I'd lost it, somehow, in Venice. It was sad, but sometimes things just fly away when they have to.

To make perfectly sure, I left the bus through the rear door as I had the first time, and made sure to look around on the ground nearby just in case. I took a quick peak underneath the bus and, voila, there is was, just about beneath the rear tire, moments away from getting unceremoniously pancaked. Seems the strap had broken when I pulled on my backpack, and it had dropped. That strap, which I had gotten in Hungary a year earlier, had been giving me problems for awhile. I snatched it up, held it up for the driver to see (jerk), and put it snugly in my pocket, where it would remain for the rest of the trip.

Back home I put the watch on the shelf by my keys, and there it remained. In our age, it is pretty easy to get away without having a watch — we have our phones and their are clocks all over and there is blessed routine as well. But since I got around to fixing it and wearing it again I've felt much more relaxed in a hard to pin down way. Wearing a wristwatch is like having a temporal map on your arm, an non-intrusive presence that helps you locate yourself within your surroundings. Perhaps ironically, it gives you the comfort and security to live in the moment.

Just as long as you make sure the thing doesn't fall off.

The Negozio Olivetti

The strangest five euros I spent this past summer were at the Negozio Olivetti, which is just off the Piazza San Marco in Venice and a place that would be very easy to brush right past. It is near one of the passages on the far end of the square, closer to the Museo Correr than the Basilica, just beneath the arched arcade that lines the square. The little museum is a faithfully recreated typewriter shop, and in its way a statement of how Italy's fame for commerce and innovation evolved into a flair for design and the curation of lovely things. 

The place caught my eye on a blisteringly hot afternoon when I almost by accident found myself in the tourist Bermuda Triangle between the Basilica and the Rialto. I don't know what precisely I thought I was doing, but when saw all those typewriters in the window I stopped in my tracks. I've been obsessed with the machines since I bought my first one at a second-hand electronics and gadget shop in Jersey City in 1999. My somewhat decrepit, rebuilt Royal electric was a great start, so fun to draft out things with its noisy ease. Through the years I picked up more typewriters, often as gifts from people who knew my weird fascination. My current favorite is an Olympia SM9 from the early or mid-1960s, a great triumph of West German industrial craftsmanship that is as reliable as it is heavy (it is lovingly described by some as only "semi-portable"). I love when it rests next to my MacBook on the desk, like the twin poles of function and design, content and form.

But I've always longed for, maybe lusted for, an Olivetti, especially a Lettera, preferably with some cool candy-colored casing. Those guys are sleek and portable, and their very "thwack" seems both more sharp while mysteriously effortless and nonchalant — sort of like the way Italian dudes can pull off wearing a scarf and jeans.

So on that summer day I had to know why there were all those vintage machines lined up in the window. I walked inside, which was mercifully air conditioned, into what looked like a showroom, or possibly a museum. Turns out it was both. I asked the lovely young lady reading a very serious, thick book behind a desk what this place was, and she explained in her heavily inflected English that it was basically both: a museum about a shop.

Back in 1957, the Olivetti company commissioned a Venetian architect named Carlo Scarpa to design what they hoped would be a "business card" for the company. The place was ostensibly supposed to sell typewriters, but also the brand. Already Venice was awash in tourists, and the company was ready to spend to make sure that some of those international jet-setters would get an eyeful of Italian typographical excellence.

And boy did they! The space was small and narrow and dark, but Scarpa completely reshaped it and loaded it with brilliant design elements. The most important feature is a central staircase right in the middle of the two-story space, with stone slabs that form a sort of zig-zag pattern that looks a bit like the Black Flag logo, and similarly gave me a sense of movement, of pistons pumping or the arms of a typewriter rhythmically fwapping the paper. The slabs are Aurisina marble, from near Trieste, which honored local building traditions, and the shelves are of rosewood with teak flooring, which almost feels Asian in its clarity. Simple steel rods hold the wood up, very modest and very functional. The light is diffuse and insistent, and the sound of clacking keys is played on the soundsystem, which is a touch of overkill if you ask me. The various typewriters — and calculators, cash registers, etc. — are displayed with the dignity they deserve. But it's a shame you can't touch anything. It's also a shame the whole thing takes minutes to get through, which makes the admission fee feel a bit steep (also, the reason I don't have any photos from the inside is that I refused to pay extra for the photo ticket).

The company closed the shop in 1997, but in recent years a government agency called the Fondo Ambiente Italiano got involved to restore it to what it was like in its glory days. The FAI lists as its mission to "serve as the mouthpiece for the interests and expectations of the public, actively supervising and intervening on their behalf across the country to defend Italy's landscape and cultural heritage."

Venice is the sort of place that demands the kind of melancholy and nostalgia that made me imagine whether in a hundred years or so we'll have in America a similar group that will painstakingly recreate the first Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Twelve years on

I can't be the only one who feels that the anniversary of Sept. 11 has sprung up on us with remarkably little attention. That the epoch-making horror of our lifetime would become something that would remembered in the context of the calendar, set amongst events and memories great and small, new and old. For years I was certain that that this would remain the thing around which all else revolved, and it certainly did for awhile. But this year feels like the first time I've noticed that its place in our imagination has evolved — that we have processed the details well, choosing what to cling to and what to forget — even as we continue to stumble through the world born that day.

I can see it in the way the day is commemorated, which is similar to how it always is: the gathering at Ground Zero for the recitation of the names. It is an event that is always touching and sad, but is certainly no longer "news" the way it was for many years. One of the most telling things about our culture over the past few decades has been our insistence on remembering tragedy through each individual name. It reflects in part our understanding of the value of each human life, which is a sort of triumph of human empathy if you think about it in a historical context. But I would suggest it also reflects the way we perceive the world, of our (post)modern divided consciousness that includes what we see and know face to face, and what we absorb through images and broadcasts and the internet. It is as though each individual one of us can't process enormous, inhuman tragedy unless we can get a human handle on it. A long time ago, you heard news about things like this by word of mouth, or a newspaper, and what you heard was a story. Someone — an eyewitness, a reporter, basically, another person — began putting it into a narrative that made sense for you. All we have now is a fractured jumble of images and sounds and bits of commentary. So I wonder we choose to remember with such loving attention on the names as a crutch, out of the fear that otherwise we'll make too great an abstraction of something we instinctively know should remain personal and immediate.

But the trouble with doing so is that time wins this argument, as it wins all arguments. Today, the names are being read once again, and it means something desperately important to a lot of people, but less and less to most of us. I just checked, and you have to scroll halfway down the NY Times website to find any mention of Sept. 11.

What is real, and what remains, are the ideas that sounded like trite pundit-speak from the moment they appeared. That we do truly live in another world, that nothing has been the since. So much that has happened in these 12 years reflect this. Consider how we've trundled off to war and come back again, and now find ourselves paralyzed by what to do about Syria. There is a lot we can look back upon with remorse, because we know that if we hadn't squandered so much goodwill from that day — the one point of hope in an otherwise perfectly horrible thing — we might live in a better world today. We live with all that, everyday.

On anniversaries you are reminded to "remember," as if there is a danger we might forget, and it's perhaps too painful to think about how they remind us how far we've gone. Perhaps this is natural, but this year seems like the first that I've felt Sept. 11 was a very long time ago. This is the first year that I've looked at snapshots of the victims and noticed how out of style their glasses and shirts are.

What doesn't change is how shocking the images remain, no matter how familiar they are. If you think about it, you don't really see them that often because we've done an astonishing job of censoring them from ourselves. We saw the images of exploding airplanes, of tumbling towers, of falling bodies, of clouds of rubble, and knew they were stuck with us. We tagged them as "very super important" and carefully filed them away, and we don't live with them in anything like the way I thought we would.

And since this is a moment to reflect on the past, there is also bound up with it a moment to think about the future. Without being morbid, just realistic, it is likely the next great tragedy, will be recorded on a million smartphones. Already, our experience of the next thing is being shaped, and it will be very different than Sept. 11.

When there are no good options

Secretary of State John Kerry's testimony before Congress this week arguing for military action in Syria is incoherent nonsense because it couldn't be any other way. Everyone who honestly tries to think about this unspooling catastrophe ends up bound in loops and knots. It's just more dramatic for Kerry, who has to explain in a steady voice that we aren't going to war, just authorizing a "response," and we aren't clear what that might look like, but it certainly won't entail "boots on the ground." Round and round, explained with professional earnestness. From the man who once, a generation ago, asked Congress how you could ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake. I feel bad for him.

This is what happens when a nation has to honestly discuss matters of life and death and the course of nations. This is an important moment, but it is not a repeat of the run up to the war in Iraq. While it is certain that the Bush administration's foolishness hangs heavy over everything that we do, it is only in the sense that we wasted every scrap of goodwill we once had with the wider world, which makes everything harder. But Obama is not Bush. There is no malice, no cynical efforts to twist matters for hidden ends.

No, this is nothing like 2003. We are having an actual debate. Those of us who were against that war remember how much worse it was, the feeling of hopelessness, isolation, and helplessness in the face of mass delusion. Today, half my twitter feed is made up of anti-war sentiments. We are in a different world. And it is insulting to hear pundits claim it is the same. Recovering warmongers like Andrew Sullivan talk about this like AA members badmouthing about demon alcohol.

We should be grateful we are going through this process. I applaud President Obama for throwing the matter to Congress, which is not only politically savvy in spreading the blame, but it forces that cracker factory of a legislature to grow up and behave. And not coincidentally, it is the right thing to do according to our Constitution, which has been ritually ignored in these matters since 1964. (Among the most unpleasant aspects of this is how often I have to agree with Sen. Rand Paul).

There is nothing black or white here, and those that think it is, whether Sen. John McCain and Medea Benjamin, are profoundly misguided. It comes down to this: whether you are for war or against, whether it happens or not, you should feel uncertain and shitty about it. Because this is a perfectly uncertain and shit moment.

After thinking about this months, I've decided I'm opposed to action because I don't think it will help anything, and I we have neither the ability nor the will to bring order to this hornet's nest. More killing courtesy of our expensive cruise missiles won't help.

But that alone doesn't feel right. Perhaps the Congress can do is approve conditional military action if we can prove there is another chemical attack. Because there are people in Damascus now who live in terror of another gas attack, and perhaps if the regime has that kind of threat hanging over it, it might make them pause. At least that would be a moral thread to grab at.

The Garbage Patch's pavilion at the Venice Biennale

A work by Maria Cristina Finnuci at the Ca' Foscari reminds us of the problem of stray plastic in the ecosystem.