A Table In Heaven
April 11th, 2008
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.
Lazy Sunday Morning at Home
March 16th, 2008
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.
Reputation Problems
February 10th, 2008
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.
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How Do Things Get This Far?
November 30th, 2007When I got the e-mail reminder about an International Day of Action on Global Climate Change, I thought it was interesting. When I read, “Hundreds of people are needed, some to form the shape of an hourglass and the rest to move from the top of the hourglass, one by one, to the bottom of the hourglass,” on Siesta Key Beach, I thought it might be kind of fun–in an aging hippie sort of way. Probably not as much fun as the drum circle, but my Saturdays are mostly flexible anyway.
But when I read that “A helicopter will be overhead with a camera team to record the movement symbolizing that time is running out to stop global warming” I thought, “Are they serious?”
How do things go to such extremes? A well-intentioned someone has managed to charter a helicopter for at least an hour to hover above Siesta Key Beach in support of a “green” cause? Did this person not consider that aircraft are prodigious burners of fossil fuel? More specifically, a “TV-news” type helicopter, say, a Bell Longranger, or Jet Ranger, consumes approximately 40 gallons of fuel per hour. That’s nearly three tankfulls of gas for my car.
And if, indeed, hundreds of people show up to be part of the human hourglass—or the human sand—it doesn’t seem likely that many of them will get to Siesta Key Beach by public transportation. Even with a downturn in real estate values, the people who turn out for events like this probably don’t live within walking distance. So, even if they come by twos, the choreography of the hourglass will demand fifty or more cars that might otherwise have sat in the driveway on a Saturday.
But getting back to the issue of energy consumption, I wouldn’t expect the organizers of this event to know a lot about aviation fuel. But it’s not the unleaded stuff that Mom puts in the Camry at RaceTrac. Aircraft fuel, “avgas,” contains lead. While, on the surface this whole beach “happening” seems noble, I don’t think any cabbage-palm hugger wants to stand around on a public beach while a helicopter burning leaded aviation fuel hovers approximately 500 feet overhead.
Whoever is underwriting this event must have some deep pockets—or maybe a donor with a helicopter. I’ve just checked, and it costs approximately $1,300 per hour to charter a helicopter. I’m not even sure if that includes gas, but these days, if you want to fill up at Dolphin Aviation, it will run around $6.00 per gallon.
Now a day at the beach is always fun. But it seems more reasonable to me that with that kind of budget, it would be a no-brainer to hire a Computer Animation major at Ringling College of Art to do a stylized presentation of sand falling through an hourglass. There would certainly be enough money left to hire the local news anchor, or perhaps one of the understudy baritones from the Sarasota Opera Company to read the voice-over litany with the appropriate amount of gravitas. Furthermore, I feel confident that at least one of our local television stations would be only too happy to broadcast the piece as a public service, if they had not already covered the stunt as a news event. And, of course, someone could post it on YouTube.
I know Al Gore spends a fair amount of time traveling by aircraft. Nonetheless, I think he’d agree that while the time to avert the catastrophe of global warming is running out, we are already in the midst of a full-blown crisis of common sense.
