We set off very early on a Friday morning, with E’s sister Kacsa being so gracious to drive us to the airport as we watched the sun breach the horizon like a slow-moving whale, taking it’s time to crash down with joyful abandon 14 hours later on the other side of the sky. Meanwhile, we flew first to Milan, as there are few direct flights to Florence that are not a) on a completely bad schedule, b) prohibitively expensive, and c) took less than 7 hours to arrive (many flights went to hub countries such as Germany or even the Netherlands before going to Firenze). Milan is 90 minutes from Budapest, and another 3 hours by train to Florence, so we thought this the best, if not only, solution.

However, upon arrival at “Milan” airport, we found out that it’s actually an hour from Milan. Upon arriving there around 10:30am, we found out that the rail workers were on strike and that no trains would leave for Milan before 2:30pm, and were the slow, local trains instead of the Eurostar cruisers. We bought a ticket for that anyway, thinking in dismay about spending the most of the day in Milan, a teeming and inglorious industrial pit. However, upon closer inspection of the regular departures, we saw a train leaving for Rome that would stop in Firenze, albeit at a different station. Hasta courva! we deemed the idiots who had sold us the tickets, and jumped on this train thinking we could pay the difference with the conductor.

As (luck) would have it, the conductor never appeared to check our tickets, perhaps as part of the strike or perhaps because the train was so overloaded, so we got to Milan only an hour later than planned, for a much reduced ticket. This was the highlight of the weekend.

We met up with my parents at the hotel, a forgettable yet fantastically-located B&B just steps from the Duomo. This was it’s only major benefit, as otherwise we found it cramped and lacking in services. Upon exiting into the ever-flowing river of tourists (“tourrerists”), we spent the next 36 hours being ushered from one tourist trap to the next, interspersed with solicitations from overpriced street vendors selling sunglasses, fake luxury bags, toy trains made with alphabet letters, giant insects made of leaves, and so on.

Seeing the art – our ostensible reason to be there – was possible, thanks to the excellent master planning of my parents, who secured advance tickets to the most important repositories: the Uffizi, home to Botticelli’s Primavera and The Birth Of Venus, among other masterpieces, and the Academia, housing Michaelangelo’s David. When not dodging Japanese tour groups and roving packs of Italian high-school kids, we caught glimpses of these works and frankly, they are fantastic.

David especially is a wonder, and worth at least an hour of contemplation from many angles. Approaching from a long hall you are first struck by it’s size – 5.17 meters, which is more than three times my height. Moving closer I began to feel the vibrant life still emanating from the cool marble, and in perceiving the mastery by which the artist conceived the perfect male form, one gets the impression this giant is about to step off his pedestal and stride leisurely, yet confidently, off to a mid-afternoon lunch. It’s almost as if you can see his bones, enmeshed in fibrous tissue and finally shrink-wrapped in a milky translucent skin that allows touches of the marble’s grain to resemble bluish veins through which blood must still surely flow. And here I’m still over 100 feet away.

To say the least, getting close can be overpowering. When standing to the right side of David I kept swearing I could see it blink. From over his left shoulder, with just his profile in view, one gets a sense of fear from his gaze, widely thought to be just after his encounter with his nemesis, but this fear is mixed with a one might say manly resignation of fact – he may not want to fight, but he will. Moving into the path of his gaze and away into the far corner is a different story altogether, for here one gets a sense of a ferocity in that leisurely stance – a puma about to strike – and you could swear you saw blood in those surely unblinking eyes.

Apart from the art, Florence was a drag. I did not find it any more beautiful than Venice, and much less charming, as at least in Venice we can safely move about without risking our necks dodging flying motor-scooters and other impatient traffic. The services throughout the city were almost entirely tourist-centered, and completely disregarded anyone as actual people. I suppose with all the millions of tourists that come each year, pissing off a few won’t hurt business too much.

Perhaps the worst moment was dinner Saturday night, which we at first attempted to take in a touristy square filled with outdoor eateries, but after two impossible minutes attempting to read the menu while a duet of accordion players carved our ears off with rusty spoons (you pay them to leave you alone, apparently, or at least to go bother somebody else. I wonder if in the “high” season this leads to bidding wars between increasingly irate tourists at competing restaurants, incensed that the noisemakers had returned after collecting their cross-court rivals’ ransom money), we took off in search of somewhere slightly off the beaten track, settling for a somewhat dingy but empty cafeteria-style place a few blocks away.  And my poor mother had already chosen her meal!

The trip back was much less exciting, and we paid the full fare. I had a slight moment of panic as the check-in person for Alitalia waffled when I did not present a ticket back to the United States as “proof” of my non-intention to take up permanent residence in Hungary. While I will refrain from going into much detail here, I would just say that employees of international transit and control systems in other European countries take their job far more seriously than their Hungarian counterparts, who barely give me a second look at most border crossings. Hopefully this tension will be alleviated in coming months, as I am crossing my fingers to receive, well, maybe it’s best not to jinx it.

I digress. The real piece of work that I wanted to criticize this evening was Tommy L. Friedman’s eco-warrior locker-room pep talk entitled “The Power of Green” in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine. It was, in fact, also the cover story. Now, Tom is popular because he is the perfect embodiment of the boomer mentality for northeast US fair-weather liberalism (i.e. those who worship the NYT), with a healthy dose of “real world economics, sonny boy” to go along with that feel-good consumer democracy we all voted for. This piece of work is the companion piece to his recent worship of free-market capitalism otherwise known by him as “the flattening of the earth”, and complement it well it does, as in both cases he couldn’t be farther off the mark. Friedman seems to live in this top-down rationalist version of the world where everything comes down to a question of “getting tough” and soccer-dad positivity, armchair quarterbacking the fate of the world in the safe arms of his op-eds. Where he had it wrong in the flat earth article was the contention that a more globalized society levels the playing field in global economics. Suddenly because they have the Internet in Bali, Indonesians can start shipping tscachkes off to mid-town Manhattan at 600% the cost and be like the Bill Gates of the archipelago, right? Wrong. If anything, we’ve seen the richest countries get massively more powerful and the wealth contained in those countries become consolidated in even fewer hands, while the third world continues to starve, burn, and slave away harder than ever. The connection to the “Green” piece is right here: the vast amount of environmental damage that will (not might, will) occur in the next 50 years has been caused overwhelmingly by the rich countries, but will affect these poor ones to a vastly greater degree. That’s why the world’s not only not getting flatter, but is beginning to look like Noah on the high ground flipping the bird to all the animals he left behind in the flood plain.

The Power of Green, as Friedman has it, is the notion that America should strive to spearhead the battle against global warming and severe climate change by becoming a model world citizen: setting high emissions standards, pursuing alternative fuels, and most of all, using it’s entrepreneurial spirit to the task of stabilizing the global climate. With fence-sitter favorite Arnold Iwonteventrytospellhisnamegger as one of his key points of reference, he argues that only through economic leadership and/or massive industrial change can we avoid disaster. Now, I admit I’m going pretty hard on the guy. While absolutely nothing of what he’s preaching is anything new (“oil prices go down, freedom goes up?” Thanks, Coach Pro), at least he’s preaching it, albeit mostly to the chorus. Big projects are no doubt in the works, but what Friedman misses are the hundreds of smaller projects, on the human scale, which will really amount to a fundamental lifestyle rearrangement for most Americans, that can also be used with much success to slow or reverse the damage. Friedman says our cars need better efficiency. What about the 3+ billion cattle, sheep and goats whose methane and other fumes create more greenhouse gases than human transportation combined? I don’t see any advocation of us all becoming vegetarians. He advocates nuclear power as a “reasonable alternative”. Umm, ever heard of nuclear waste, regional arms races, the black markets for uranium and spent fuel rods? He also argues that China and India won’t play nice if we ask them to develop greener than we did. I say no, probably not- unless we start taxing their imports and buying things from Korea. Or better yet, not buying them at all. Do we need cheap plastic junk filling up our landfills anymore?

In the end, Friedman comes up short with the “Green” piece because of his top-down vision. He thinks we Americans can just think, bully and buy our way to being the leader of environmentalism, and then export the technology (for a profit, of course) to the third world and call it humanitarianism. For him, it all starts with the guys in government – a “green president” to go with a black one, totally disregarding the fact that environmental action and innovation has always occurred at the grassroots level and has never caught on in the mainstream, much less in the white house. Look what happened to Carter, and Gore! Sure, plenty of oil companies have CSR campaigns on how their saving the rare African white tiger or investing in biofuels. Nevermind the fact that they’re subcontracting militias to forcibly displace villagers from the path of pipelines and devastating the wetlands of Louisiana (which allowed hurricane Katrina to retain force when it slammed into N’ollins). As for China, there has been more success in challenging the insatiable quest for growth that has sullied the environment there from illiterate guys with no shoes who challenge local labor and pollution laws than their supposedly benign leadership. I seriously doubt they’ll pay much attention to US “leadership” in saving the world. Wake me up in November 2008.

Thankfully, there is no profound and preachy ending, irreconcilable plot-twist, insulting clichés or borrowed and overused metaphors. It was, as duly advertised, a “dazzling” and ”compelling” work, written with an incredible amount of steady dedication and purpose. However, I couldn’t shake the sense that the book was in some way academically superior, devoid of mistakes and assumptions, while at the same time lacking some of the very soul its main character ponders with such vigor on his day off. For example, the main character is referred to as “Perowne” throughout the first 3/4 of the story, but becomes “Henry” as we are drawn into sympathizing with him during the climax - a clever device. That’s not to say there weren’t parts I disliked, and I feel that every good book should have parts that the reader dislikes; for example there are at least ten pages devoted to his squash match, which, while exactingly plotted, detailed and executed, are still ten pages about squash, reinforcing to me that it must be much better to play squash than to read about it.

Another example is McEwan’s lengthy descriptions of Perowne at work in the operating room, or “theatre” as it’s apparently known in Britain, which are heavy with medical vocabulary, procedure, and vivid detail. Reading the acknowledgements, I saw that McEwan had spent no less than two years researching this aspect of the novel, and was clearly eager to prove he had picked up much in his time watching brain surgery. What’s missing from his portrayal of skilled and experienced Perowne in his professional element is a discussion of how much chance, malpractice, guesswork, and ethical dilemma still exists in medecine, despite the vast advances made in technology. He does make mention on multiple occaisions of Perowne’s toughened skin in the field, both to bad results and administrative challenges, but I came away feeling of him as a robot at work, unaffected by the groundswell changes he is subjected to otherwise on this day. It’s difficult to express, but while the book essentially makes a point of living life to the fullest, recognizing the gifts of comfort and privilege and achievement that are given, and most of all, not wasting time, once I finished it I almost felt as if I had wasted my time in reading it. Am I like Perowne, unconcerned with literature unless it’s a non-fiction work of importance to my knowledge? Or like his daughter, wrapped up in the great works of luminaries long dead and gone? Surely there are better things to be doing than reading a book about not wasting time, but what if it’s a really good book?

Saturday deserves an “A”, and you should probably read it. It will undoubtedly make you think about yourself, life and others as it so obviously intended. But, as pointed out in the book, thinking about a war doesn’t affect its outcome, so you may not want to think about it at all.

Anyway, I had skimmed a couple of reviews of the film, mainly to certify that it would not be an “America – F yeah!” rah rah go get ‘em type, which in these cynical days of wasted good will I could honestly imagine. Satisfied to that regard that it was a serious portrayal of the events of that day, I decided to forgo further research and see the thing for myself. I was not ready for what I saw.

About fifteen minutes into the film, I wanted to leave. I think that over these five years we’ve wanted to just forget what happened. It’s hard – damn near impossible – to watch the events unfold, knowing in the back of our minds the inevitable, terrible ending. Although the hijacking itself takes place relatively late in the film, the tension builds at a constant rate, based on our collective knowledge and memory of the sound-bites, images, and unfocused thoughts of that sunny morning. I stayed, biting my tongue and trying to steel myself for the questions that would be addressed as the film went on. As crushing as the ending inevitably was, I emerged knowing that it was important to have seen this film, if only to have one more image of the horror of humanity burned into my conciousness, reminding me that, victims or terrorists, we are still all human.

To their credit, the filmmakers put together an amazing work. No shortcuts were taken, and a careful balance is maintained between sympathy, fear, heroism and faith. We are given just the slightest chance to see the terrorists both as sympathetic and also monstrous, filled with their own fear and clearly driven by it to commit their act. The confusion of the day is also well-demonstrated, by all the flight numbers of what was, is, could be and isn’t a hijacked plane being thrown around by air traffic controllers, military personel and so on. The politics of the film, as well, are played close to its chest; there are no statements or references to the President, for example, that are outrightly supportive or critical, but they could be (and likely are) debated in many a chat-room or editorial space.

Perhaps the only thinning of the plot was in the reconstruction of the events on board the airplane. The question of if, how, and to what extent a struggle occurred to regain control is no doubt timeless, and to tell the truth is pointless to argue. Surely any attempt to fight their captors was heroic – but does this make those on the other flights, who likely and reasonably thought they were being taken hostage and that their safety would be negotiated for, less heroic?

Just as pressing is the question we must ask ourselves: in the same situation, would we have acted differently than any of the passengers portrayed or not, on any of the flights? United 93 deserves credit for tapping our collective subconcious to construct what I at least had already constructed for myself in terms of what really happened. In the end, the details are less important. The horror is what remains.

Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich. A classic account of investigative journalism, in this case into the sub-classes of low-wage workers in the United States. Why should you care? Because without these people, who must work 2 jobs if they intend to sleep indoors and eat from a convenience store if they can afford to eat at all, are the pillars of the nation’s economy. If they disappeared, we’d be toast.

Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. If you haven’t read this, stop everything you’re doing and get it. If you have, read it again. Although short, the tale of friendship and honor is timeless. If life could imitate literature, this would be it.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson. Although the craziness of this “gonzo” journalist is largely due to the simultaneous consumption of several mind-altering substances at any given time, the truth is between the white lines – there is a very dark, very different side to the American dream.

Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. This is NOT a book about comics. It’s about how we perceive all visual things, especially art and literature. By brilliantly analyzing how we interact with “a series of juxtaposed pictoral images”, McCloud makes some profound conclusions about how our minds work.

I am currently in the middle of another book, Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and am finding it equally intriguing. It’s a Stanford Law Professor’s analysis (in layman’s terms, thank God) of the ways in which technological advancements (from FM radio to inexpensive photography to the internet and P2P) enable a revolution in terms of creative potential, and the corporations who try to stifle it, defying what Lessing calls “our tradition of free culture”. Definitely worth a look if you care about media.

Not to be outdone by their higher-society brethren, I have also seen several quite interesting, bizarre and moving films of late. Maybe I just don’t see as much crap anymore, but it seems like there are two distinct shifts occurring in the film world. We’re seeing the rise of a large crop of intensely focused, artistically challenging and thought-provoking works on one hand, and the grasping for straws of emotional content in the absurdly expensive blockbusters. I’d like to think that the democratization of distribution that we’ve seen as a result of the internet (see Free Culture above) is spurring a creative shift geared towards niche markets. Anyway, dig out your Blockbuster card (irony noted, thanks) and rental yourself up some of these prime cuts.

Pi [the symbol, like 3.14 . . .] - A captivating mindbender about a mathematician descending into madness as he trys to find a pattern in the NY stock exchange. He is further antagonized by a government agency and a religious cult [Note: aren't they one in the same? - Ed.]. It’s kind of like an auteur DaVinci Code, I think.

Brazil – Terry Gilliam’s (of Monty Python fame) epic exercise in abstraction manages to both confuse the hell out of us and still make serious comments on friendship, love, and the future of air conditioning repair. With Robert DeNiro in a brilliant bit part.

The Motorcycle Diaries – Inspiring film about Ernesto Guevara’s, well, inspiration- a 3500km odyssey through South America, partly on a motorcycle. If nothing else, it makes you want to take a road trip and learn Spanish.

The Corporation – A fast paced and information-heavy tour of the history of the corporate entity, from humble “servants of the public interest” to nation-rivaling power mongers. If markets are to be trusted, the pursuit of profit comes second to nothing short of self-destruction. We should be very afraid.

Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener, and The Manchurian Candidate. True stories or just entirely possible, these three drama/thriller vehicles raise very pointed questions as to what the hell we’re doing in the rest of the world.

King Kong (the new one) – Dizzying and hyperactive but touching remake of the classic story. Could have done without 50% of the action sequences (especially the giant bugs attack scene – eew!) and the intensely old-fashioned “natives” scenes, the main subjects of which look suspiciously like orcs from LOTR. Computer animation has come so far and is truly spectacular, but one gets the sense that it’s a bunch of techies sitting around smoking pot and saying “Yeah! And after the brontosaurus stampede scene we’ll have Kong fight THREE t-rexes! On a web of vines! While he’s juggling the woman around in the air!”. Chivalry has surely reached the limits of absurdity. At least they don’t kiss.