Sarasota Soundings

Sirio Maccione

Featured in this year’s Sarasota Film Festival, A Table In Heaven presents an arrestingly candid look at the family dynamics behind one of New York’s most glittering restaurants, Le Cirque.

Granted remarkable access, filmmaker Andrew Rossi, spent four years chronicling the family of Sirio Maccione at work and at home. A Tuscan immigrant, Signor Maccione started as a handsome young waiter who rose to power as maitre d’ and restaurateur, all the while feeding and flattering a celebrity clientele that included Onassis and Henry Kissinger. The unscripted drama of reinventing the restaurant with his American-born sons plays out with passion and humor.

Though Le Cirque’s original menus were French haute cuisine, Sirio, as he was known to all, came to personify the idea of Italian culinary elegance, as exemplified by his 1978 invention of Pasta Primavera. Today, Le Cirque serves haute cuisine with a global twist, but the courtly Italian, now in his 70’s, still holds sway over the operation.

Although red sauce is barely in sight, for those interested in the evolution of restaurants in America and the forces that drive an Italian-American family business, the film is utterly compelling.

Contemporary film and literature are loaded with romantic, frequently funny images of couples sharing The New York Times over the breakfast table. Perhaps they linger well into a lazy Sunday morning as they enjoy a second cup of coffee, each waiting for the other to finish with the Magazine Section or the Book Review. But we’ve just noticed a telling phenomenon right here at home. Instead of exchanging sections of the Times, we send each other Tiny URLs, across the breakfast table via E-Mail. Our laptop computers are no more than eighteen inches from each other. (*In case you and your significant other haven’t encountered this nifty cyber-trick, a Tiny URL creator is an application that instantly abbreviates those unwieldy 137-character links to Web pages.)

It could be worse. We could share our hot picks and reading matter via Instant Messages with Blackberrys. But, so far at least, sending a text message that says something like, drlng, u shud c ths seems too disembodied. Still, it’s a sign of the times that a couple who spend their professional time writing and reading online, should share the ritual of the Sunday paper digitally as well.

So far this morning, the links we’ve emailed back and forth have included—the latest Op-Ed from MoDo (Maureen Dowd), Carl Hiaasen’s Top Ten reasons why any “do-over” of the Florida Primary would be a disaster, a feature on Wal*Mart’s new, Muslim-friendly policy to stock hijabs and instant felafel mix at one of their suburban Detroit stores, and a lament that the Gators will get a miss in this year’s NCAA basketball tournament.

Sure, we’re old enough to be nostalgic for the notoriously smudgy ink of the real paper of record and wouldn’t mind being in the Tri-State delivery area. We wish our coffee were from Zabar’s, the bagels from lower Delancy Street, and that the whole ritual were taking place at an outdoor cafe on Central Park West. But lazy Sunday mornings retain their power regardless of location. Besides, we still haven’t gotten to the latest on Eliot Spitzer’s adventures in interstate commerce, Barack and Hillary’s campaign spats, or what canyons the dollar may test next week.

Even without ink on our hands, we know that Sundays are for catching up on the news.

This morning, on National Public Radio, we heard that Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice had no comment on the ground-breaking concert the New York Philharmonic gave yesterday in North Korea.

We are dismayed that Dr. Rice, herself a concert pianist, declined to publicly endorse such an effort. Later in the day, we’ve found her quoted as saying, “I don’t think we should get carried away with what listening to Dvorak is going to do in North Korea.”

We think she missed a huge opportunity to encourage other cultural exchanges with so-called “rogue states.” According to The Christian Science Monitor, the orchestra’s trip was “arranged through private channels.” Nevertheless, we find it hard to believe that all those instruments got through the airport metal detectors between Manhattan and Pyongyang without the State Department having had a hand in the arrangements.

We’ve always felt that music and its sibling art, the preparation of food, have more potential to end conflicts than weaponry and rhetoric. Journalists have employed a different vocabulary, introducing instant catch phrases like “ping pong diplomacy” when the U.S. Table Tennis Team visited China in 1971, and “sing song diplomacy” for this trip by the New York Philharmonic. The Times of London was more subtle in calling the trip “a clashing cymbal of détente.” But they all make the same point—that there is indeed a universal language, if only governments will remove the gags. Gags not only silence, they prevent the enjoyment of a good meal.

To put it simplistically: people who make music together, people who share their recipes for beans and rice, are far less likely to shoot each other.

In 1997, guitarist Ry Cooder helped to reunite several venerable Cuban musicians and brought them to New York for a wildly successful concert at Carnegie Hall, and then quickly pulled it off again in Amsterdam. As the Buena Vista Social Club became ambassadors for mambo and merengue, they rekindled Americans’ interest in travel to Cuba, thus further opening that country to broad-minded tourists. By exposing Cubans to a freer society and aspects of America that no amount of Radio Martí ever managed to broadcast, the BVC & Ry Cooder demonstrated the collaborative spirit of all who live to make music. The State Department is still probably wondering how it might claim credit for that breakthrough. We wish it would at least pretend to be pleased about the latest one in Pyongyang.

The late Danny Kay and Victor Borge were known all over the world as ambassadors of music. The desire to share their own love of music was constrained by neither boundaries nor political ideologies. And to return to our food analogy, Danny Kaye’s gastronomic passions are evident in his legacy; a major lecture hall bearing his name stands on the campus of the Culinary Institute of America.

And when Mr. Borge wasn’t concertizing all over the world, he was home in Glastonbury, Connecticut, raising Rock Cornish Game Hens for local gourmands.

 
More recently and with more controversy than Ry Cooder’s Cuban overture, Chicago Symphony conductor, Daniel Barenboim has put together the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

 
Comprised of Jews, Muslims, and Christians (from Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon) the 100 musicians have played Mozart and Beethoven in Rabat, Morocco, and in Ramallah, in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank. Maestro Barenboim and his orchestra have also given a concert at the Great Hall of the United Nations in New York.

Even if there is no panacea for all the ills of the world, we know that food and music already unite far more people than they divide. Dr. Rice, even if you will soon be leaving center-stage, are you listening?

I confess to some ambivalence about the reputation I’ve developed among my neighbors. I’m now known as “that guy who walks down the street with a can of beer in his hand—at ten o’clock in the morning.”

It’s remarkable how often I fit their description. With more than a bit of glee, I also admit that it’s a great conversation starter. Just today, as the couple who live across the street were backing out of their driveway, I was able to give them a cheerful salute with a sixteen-ounce can of Miller Lite. They winked at me.

Moments later, I toasted another neighbor who commented that I was “getting an early start.” I gave him my heartiest “Go Gators!” cheer.

There’s just one hitch: I haven’t had the pleasure of having actually drunk the beer. The can I was carrying today, like those every other morning, was one I’ve picked up from someone’s lawn—very likely the property of someone trying to sell his house.

I don’t go out looking for litter; if I did, it would keep me pretty busy. But occasionally, when the weather is making me feel particularly smug about having moved here from Connecticut, and if I happen to see a can on someone’s lawn, I’ll bring it home and add it to my recyclable bin. The fellows who come by to pick up our recyclable trash have yet to say anything about the volume of our aluminum contribution, but I think it’s only a matter of time…

I did the same thing back up north. But—small-town Yankees being who they are—people seemed blind to my altruism but wide-eyed at the prospect that I was a more-than-social drinker.

Here in my Sarasota neighborhood, I seem to be most productive on the streets near the hospital, between Osprey and Orange. Perhaps it’s a measure of the relative quiet here, that those bent on littering find these unpoliced streets with plenty of nice homes for sale a convenient place to toss their empties.

I confess that I too, enjoy tossing the odd bit of litter out the window of a moving car. However, I try to confine myself to organic matter like apple cores and banana peels. It’s sort of fun…I think of it as compost in motion.

Probably it would be best if no one threw anything out of any vehicle. But if someone felt the overwhelming urge, well then, if it were, say, a bottle of Belgian lambic rather than a 16oz. tallboy, I might be more tolerant. And who knows, maybe one day, someone will toss out a full one. When that day comes, I promise, I’ll dispose of it properly.

[ad#bottom]