gr8bertino

[gr8bertino]

Work

I’m perennially tired. But i am never broken. I work two jobs in addition to my studies. In one, I manage a small Mediterranean Restaurant, sometimes working the floor, sometimes the kitchen. I am equally comfortable arranging a catering order, building a schedule, de-boning a lamb, or schmoozing guests into a bottle of wine. To pay the bills while season is slow, I also tend bar in Miami. I have no problem in a restaurant; after years, I am remarkably at ease. I hate changing the frying oil but otherwise I am quite comfortable. I love hob-nobbing and regaling my clientele with stories, sometimes embellishes, of my Middle Eastern exploits. I hate tending bar. It is a thankless job in a thankless city. But it pays. And tuition isn’t free. My dream is to leave all this behind. I want to work for the foreign service. I want to help build policy and represent the United States abroad. I would relish the chance to leave Miami behind and be sent even to Ouagadougou if it meant a career in which my work had consequences. I want to make impact and apply my knowledge on issues to something more spiritually fulfilling than selling falafels. One day, it will be. Until then, 60 hours a week pays well enough.

[gr8bertino]

My least favorite city

So, after adventures on four continents and counting, what city do I despise the most? No, actually, it’s not Baltimore. Although I frequently rave about my negative experiences in Charm City by the Chesapeake. For all of its faults, Baltimore is a real city full of history, culture, and a fiery (read violent) population. Just because I’ve had negative experiences doesn’t mean I can’t respect it. No, there is a much more sinister place in this world, within our beloved union of states: Orlando. Orlando is the natural product when you combine the bold consumer capitalism of the United States with the whimsical fictitious nature of Spanish Florida. In the grand tradition of Don Quixote, the giants are only windmills, and Dulcinea is a tavern wench. This state was founded on the falsehood that its waters gave eternal youth, now people seek such healing from a mouse, by the millions.

It is the illusion of being somewhere else, of being on the big screen, of being a fairy-tale princess, of any number of experiences that will cost you $100 a day just to be surrounded by others drinking the opiates of consumable entertainment. All brought to you by an army of young people paid minimum wage. Because their treat is the mere privilege of being part of the magic.

Everything in the Big Orange is canned and consumerist. There is an Ponderosa or a Chili’s on every corner, but does anyone know a good bakery? Where is the real culture? The ethnic character that clearly must exist in a young and growing metropolis? Unless it is upscale and whitewashed in Winter Park, it isn’t there. From the Haitian and Jamaican communities in Pine Hills to the Puerto Ricans of Kissimmee, they are kept out of view in low-income areas riddled with crime all conveniently located to make them into a wave of hotel maids, waiters, and tram drivers for the greatness of the entertainment industry.

Orlando is one of the most sprawled out metropolises in America, preventing the formation of communities which might cure this animate corpse of a city from its zombification. Rather, it is cookie-cut into ore-fabricated gated communities where the well-enough-to-do can retreat into their Whole Foods lifestyle and the hotels blanket the landscape. Like Las Vegas, it is a parasite of a city, producing nothing but existing only to take the money from those lacking an imagination of how to better spend it. Everything is a tourist trap. Everything is specially priced only for you. The breakfast is free if you’ll hear out our timeshare. Unlike Las Vegas, however, the crass consumerism isn’t just for adults seeking sin in the desert. It is geared directly towards children with the purpose of indoctrinating them into a new generation of the city.

[gr8bertino]

My Favorite Book

My favorite book is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Firstly, I love Romanticism as a genre and as an artistic epoch. The idea that deeper truths can be found deep within our emotions and sentiments than from brute rationalism holds a passionate attraction for me. Mostly, and what I enjoy so much about this book is the slow-burning vengeance nurtured by Edmond Dantes. It is not cold, though it is served so. It is the swang song of a character who spends loses everything in his life and finds the means to bring it all 360. No stone is left unturned. Every detail is methodically and psychologically used towards its cruelest extent. Other books in this genre, such as Les Miserables, I also love for their gritty and thorough walk through the psyche of a dozen characters whose backs are against the wall, but what sets Monte Cristo apart is its singular devotion to one hero cum anti-hero. As he descends into a vindictive rage, he loses his humanity and it is delicious to read.

[gr8bertino]

São Paulo: Cidade de Garoa

Buenos Aires is the ‘La París de América ’, Rio de Janeiro is the ‘Cidade Maravilhosa’. So what sobriquet was earned by South America’s largest metropolis? This is the center of Brazil’s economy, it is a rival in size to New York. They call it Cidade de Garroa: City where it drizzles. The city is vaccuus: 24 million people in a blob of urban jungle impossible to navigate.The inner historic districts are covered in grafitti and fallen into disrepair. Grandiose art deco masterpieces are prey to broken windows and facade collapse. The city claims that Avenida Paulista is akin to New York’s 5th Avenue: in reality, it is all banks with one museum. The city imagines itself as Brazil’s cultural capital, but al of their music and film is recorded in Rio. The city is vast, but lacks any instantly recognizable vista (behind me is MASP- Museo de Arte do São Paulo, a contender for the most famous). There are many tall buildings, but no skyscrapers. The city has no coastline, no defining moutains or mighty rivers (the Tiete is essentially a drainage canal here and only widens deeper in the countryside). To be sure, the cachaça flows liberally. And the setanejo and pagode play all night. But this is not tourist trap Brazil. This is a city of the edge. It is on the edge of becoming first world. It is the tip of a rising Brazil that has almost made it. It is Chicago in the 1920′s, the Jungle of Upton Sinclair, where one meets frequently abused and overworked people who came thousands of miles from their homes just for a factory job. It is Manhattan of the 1910s, where the bourgeois children of Italians and Lebanese where fine clothes and look away from the squalor of millions around them. It is Paris; center of culture and learning for a language spanning the globe. It is Tokyo, where it is impossible to ever be alone. It is Detroit, where the factory workers punch out and build a city that rocks all night. It is Miami, a city where migrants toil all day and dream of the homeland they shall never return to. It is Los Angeles; an endless and growing parking lot of concrete and apartment blocks. It is Cairo; sheer bedlam. São Paulo is the biggest city in the world that nobody knows. But I know it. It is raw kinetic energy of 24 million voices of a city that refuses to be defined by cliches.

[gr8bertino]

Professional Writing

I have frequently used writing for my studies (almost all closed-form). All of my upper division classes have required lengthy research papers, sometimes in excess of 20 pages! It requires extensive organization but if you really dive into your material and know it, then the words tend to fly onto the keyboard. I have also had an internship with a congressional campaign where one of my tasks was to write editorials for the local newspapers as well as emails to benefactors and dignitaries. This was fun for the obsessive formality that comes with professional begging for money.

[gr8bertino]

“Up in Memphis the music's like a heatwave White lightning, bound to drive you wild Mama's baby's in the heart of every school girl ‘Love me tender' leaves 'em cryin' in the aisle“- Alannah Myles “The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past. “- William Faulkner “We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you're doing so.“- B.B. King My favorite city that I have yet visited in our country is Memphis. Memphis is poor, but not ashamed. Memphis is raw, but juicy. In Memphis the food is savory and the music is soulful. The past surrounds you, but doesn’t seem to be the past. It lives in the wails of a thousand harmonicas and the strings of scores of bass guitars. Every restaurant has a family secret, every citizen tells a story. At night, the whiskey is cheap and the music is hot. Get off of Beale Street and throw yourself into a dark, dirty, smoke-filled club where the heat is immense and the passion of the artist is palpable. The city sits upon the Mississippi, watching forever as the last century flowed down with millions of cotton barrels and the current one with legends of the pen such as William Faulkner, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams and of song such as B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Elvis Presley, and Al Green. Memphis, you could say, is for better or for worse, a bastion of the Old South, but it is also a cultural mecca, especially for African-America. It changed my perception of the South, and of the entire country.

[gr8bertino]

“One of the most notable traits of the Mexican's character is his willingness to contemplate horror: he is even familiar and complacent in his dealings with it.” -Octavio Paz ‘ “The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern. “ -Octavio Paz “Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves.“ -Octavio Paz

I spent my winter break in Mexico, where i kept a running journal of my experiences and acquaintances. Mexico City is a unique city. It constantly reminds you of its past with Aztec monuments, amazing museums, and crumbling turn-of-the-century and colonial edifices. It constantly reminds you of its past, but does little to preserve it. Its nicer districts are more modern than most American cities; its outer slums are some of the bleakest i’ve ever seen. It is a city that defies stereotype or cliche. Mexicans were open and honest about life and the world around them, sharing opinions candidly and unabashedly with a Spanish-speaking Yankee. It is a place rotten to the core with corruption, intimidation, and all manor of illicit trade, yet fiercely proud of a half-remembered past. This was Tenochtitlan, center of Aztlan. This was (and is) the largest city in the New World. It is where the Spanish empire was born and died, and where. The culture has an obsession with the occult, with violence, with death. I spent much time in Coyoacan, where I visited the national archives and library. I sat in on some poetry readings in the house of Octavio Paz, Mexico’s poet laureate and nobel prize winner. The city is easy to feel and give inspiration.

[gr8bertino]

My name is Michael Bertino, I was born on Long Island, New York, and grew up in Hollywood, Florida. I work two restaurant jobs and am studying a bachelor’s of International Relations at Florida International University. Among my interests are nature, travel, cooking, and I believe that life is a long adventure and value things base on the memories and stories that they can generate.