Serenissima

The Popula kids have published another one of my "Me Today" columns, about a Sunday last winter.  Spoiler alert: nothing remotely dramatic happens.

What I think about when I think about thinking about not thinking

Last month, after finishing Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright, I decided to do a little experiment.  In the book, Wright looks at Buddhism through the lens of evolutionary psychology.  The Buddha taught that desire is the cause of our suffering; modern evolutionary biologists, according to Wright, have validated the Buddha’s hypothesis.  The evolutionary argument goes that the human brain was designed by natural selection to be guided by those perceptions, thoughts and feelings that will ensure that our genes get passed onto another generation.  So we’re programmed to chase pleasure through things like eating, having sex, besting rivals, etc.  However, this pleasure is fleeting and marginally declining, so our brains need to play tricks on us – to delude us – to keep us desiring those things.   We end up stuck on what a psychologist would call “the hedonic treadmill,” and what a Buddhist would call samsara.  This is all kind of abstract, but one need look no further for concrete evidence than the opiate epidemic in my home country, or a subway car full of people all staring at their smart phones.  The practice of meditation, Wright argues, is a means of appreciating what’s going on here, of seeing the world as it really is, and, ideally, of finding a way out of this vicious cycle.  I’m not doing justice either to Robert Wright or to the Buddha here, and there are a bunch of other complicated ideas like emptiness and not-self that I’m not going to get into, but hopefully you get the main idea. 

I happened to finish the book on June 30^th, so I decided that, starting on July 1^st, I would try to do mindfulness meditation for 20 minutes per day, every day, for a month.  Practically, I followed a basic technique that Wright describes: I set the timer on my phone for 20 minutes (“Slow Rise” is a good alarm tone for this purpose, by the way), and I would try to focus my thoughts on my breathing.  When I found my thoughts drifting to something else, I would try to observe where my thoughts were going (and perhaps ask myself why they might have gone in that direction), and then gently guide them back in the direction of my breathing.  And repeat.  I also tried to write down some notes after every session to capture whatever insights I might run into while they were still fresh.

Beforehand, I had dabbled a bit with meditation but never really tried to do it seriously or for any length of time.  By the end of July, I didn’t encounter any great truths during the month, and my life didn’t change dramatically (both Wright and the Buddha would argue that expecting those things to happen after a month would be missing the point).  But, slowly, and without my fully realizing it at the time, a few things started to become clear, or at least clearer.

1.       If you make even a small effort to think about what you’re thinking about (or rather, what you find yourself thinking about when you’re trying not to think about anything), you may learn a thing or two about yourself.

Whenever I had tried meditating before, it was always when I was alone, usually on an airplane or in a hotel room.  So my first observation was that for some reason I was hesitant to meditate at home, and with other people around.   Why was this?  Fear of feeling vulnerable, of being perceived as one of those “people who meditates?”  I felt this even more clearly when hearing footsteps down the hall during my session: tension in my neck/throat and upper chest at the thought of someone seeing me.  Once I recognized this feeling, it went away (Wright describes this as well).

“Shallow Grave” by Elvis Costello was playing in my head as I was thinking about my breathing becoming shallower.  20 minutes felt like they went by fast.  I felt more relaxed, gentler, more open toward people and things directly afterward.  (July 1^st, Geneva)

The thoughts that take you away from your breathing almost always have to do with the future or the past.  Most of mine tend to focus on obligations: things I need to do, like my taxes, or work things, or money things.  I may have had a fleeting moment of “observing myself” today: I thought of the fact that I am, like many Americans who live overseas, a bit delinquent in the filing of my US tax returns.  This thought triggered a kind of twitch, at four points in my lower and upper back. 

One notices the birds a lot when meditating in our guest bedroom.  (July 2^nd, Geneva)

I had seen a story on my phone about a fight that had broken out during a basketball game between Australia and the Philippines, and I thought about how I would mention it to Gerard, the guy who cleans our apartment who happens to be Filipino, when I saw him next on Saturday.  It got me thinking about people’s motivations: mine, in this case, and in many others, was about being liked and accepted, in this case by the Filipino guy who cleans our apartment. 

Near the end of my 20 minutes today, the guys and the truck showed up outside to pick up the garbage, and the usual sounds ensued: motors, banging of metal, guys yelling.  It’s easy to imagine this being perceived as an annoying or unpleasant , but I didn’t experience it like that.  They were there, at that time, doing their work, which is pretty important work in terms of the overall functioning of things.  An easy example of Wright’s point about things being how / what we perceive them, or rather having whatever significance we choose to give them, not significance (essence) in themselves.  (July 3^rd, Geneva)

2.       Meditating can be the gateway to more empathy, which is categorically a good thing.  (Or: Your thoughts are not all bad.)

Wright develops the argument that our thoughts “think themselves:” that our brains, programmed to motivate us to get our genes to the next generation, can very often give us a distorted view of reality.  One of the “goals” of meditation is to see these illusions for what they are.  Taken too literally and too far, though, one can conclude from this idea that every thought that comes into your head is somehow illegitimate, which can quickly lead to feeling like you’re a character in a Kafka novel.  Indeed, this speaks to one of the criticisms of Wright’s work: that he binds himself too tightly to a strict, mechanical view of how our minds work (see paragraph 1 above), and that he ends up boiling down an ancient, complicated mystical tradition into a self-help seminar.

In any case, today I found myself remembering of a hole-in-one that I once made in Greenville, Maine.  The train of memory went from hot summer day à the sound and smell of Maine on a hot summer day à that particular summer day in Greenville.  I must have been around 12 or 13, because I remember my father was on the balcony holding my sister Amanda who was a baby at the time, and he was watching me play the par 3 behind our condo over and over again, and I remember him cheering when one of my shots bounced onto the front of the green, rolled about 25 feet, and dropped into the cup.  And I thought about my thinking about this memory, and I didn’t think of it as dukkha / desire for past glory.  My thoughts instead went to how proud my father must have felt to see his (quite young) son do that.  A similar pride that I feel when I think about my daughters girls doing the things they do and being the people they are.  In other words, experiencing this memory while meditating made me experience it through a more empathic lens.   (July 4^th, Geneva) 

3.       Meditating when you’re really tired or sleep-deprived is pretty much a waste of time.

You would think that it might be okay because you’re all “relaxed,” but all you do is spend 20 minutes trying not to fall asleep and feeling that electric jolt in the back of your neck every time you fail and your chin bounces off your suprasternal notch.  (July 7^th, Geneva)

4.       However, meditating when you’re a little bit tired can be kind of cool, even if it’s not so “productive.”

In that situation, even if I don’t fully fall asleep (which definitely happens sometimes), the experience is less like mindful awareness and more like the kind of lucid dream you sometimes experience in peri-sleep.  Not the really cool kind of lucid dream where you can control your dream experience and fly around and stuff, but instead one where the brain symbolically sorts out the experiences of the day.  Since much of my experience for the past few days has been about cat food / medicine in small ceramic dishes (one our cats had surgery last month; she’s much better now), these were the types of images flashing through my mind.   (July 8^th, Geneva)

5.       Mortification is not all bad either.

Meditating immediately after running 5 miles in 90 degree heat is a different experience.  My exhales were sharper and deeper, not like the slow breaking of waves they usually are.  Once the air conditioner turned off, I acutely noticed the cacophony / symphony of sounds in my apartment, and I could make out several unique ones.  There were, in stereo, sounds like an engine idling at a distance.  There was the ringing of my ears.  There was a kind of subtone, like a faint, low-pitched moan.  Every once in a while the oven would snap as it preheated.  And every once in a while footfalls would thud from somewhere else in the building.  (July 11^th, Cambridge, MA) 

6.      Meditating on a moving TGV to Paris is difficult, especially when the other three seats of the four-seater compartment you’re in are occupied by French guys speaking excitedly about the World Cup.

7.       When entering a meditation center, remember to remove your shoes.

I left the apartment at 6:30 to take a Blue Bike to the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center near Central Square.  Taking the bike was not the best idea, as I had broken a healthy sweat by the time I got there, but fortunately there was at least one dock left at the nearest Blue Bike station thing so I didn’t have to rush the rest of the way and I still arrived a little early.

The Cambridge Insight Meditation Center is located in an old Victorian house veiled by several low-limbed trees, on Broadway in a cluster of New Agey establishments: next door is the office of Jungian therapist I saw for a while, and is also home to several other “spiritual” type outfits: studios for yoga, and Pilates (which for some reason gets lumped in with a bunch of New Agey things, but really doesn’t deserve to be), and something called “Authentic Voice Finding” (which almost certainly does). 

I thought the place might be closed, as it looked pretty dark when I walked up, but the front door was open, and there was a light on, so I walked in.  There was a 70-something woman with long grey hair in a bun kind of pacing around.  She stood in front of the stairs for a while, and I thought she might be blocking the way so no one went in early (?), but then she said she was considering whether to take the stairs or elevator.  She ended up taking the elevator, and I walked up to the third floor, where the “morning drop-in meditation” was scheduled to take place.  The temperature got hotter as I went up, but mercifully there was AC in the large meditation hall on the top floor of the house.  A big open space under vaulted ceilings.  Polished wood floors with a small stage in the front, on which sat a mid-sized Buddha statue (there were smaller ones on the windowsills at each landing on the way up the stairs), and a bell gong (is this what these are called?  I say “bell gong” to show that it’s big and hollow and heavy, and to differentiate it from the big round flat gong that rock drummers used to have behind them in the 1970s), and a couple other small objects which I forget now.  Emanating from this small stage were several rows of cushions, arranged in an arc and facing the stage, and hemmed in by a back row of chairs.  At the entryway there were a bunch of cushions and small wooden stool-like things that I couldn’t immediately identify the function of.  I was the first one in the room.

I had realized on the way upstairs that the woman with the bun had had no shoes on, and it occurred to me that I had probably committed a faux pas by not taking my shoes off right at the front door.  I quickly took them off and put them under a chair at the side of the room under my backpack. I did a couple tours of the room, looking out the windows on three walls.  A couple minutes before 7, people started arriving.  A tall fit-looking guy in cargo shorts and a t-shirt, probably in his 50s.  Another slightly older guy, smaller.  A couple of middle-aged women who looked like they belonged in a meditation center.*  A younger guy with a bald head and a beard and thick-rimmed glasses.  A younger woman with her hair in a ponytail who wouldn’t have been out of place at Orange Theory, except she seemed to move a little more gracefully, but maybe I projected this onto her.  Anyway I had already taken off my glasses in anticipation of meditating (I’m not exactly sure why I do this, but since my eyes are closed they serve no purpose), so I couldn’t really see anyone well.  No one greeted anyone else.

I was kind of waiting for someone to show up and kick things off, but people just started sitting down, so I did too.  Everyone seemed to have their own particular system: the younger guy sat on a chair to my left, with a pillow placed behind his lower back.  One of the middle-aged women was in lotus position on a cushion on the floor.  Another was on one of the wooden stools, kneeling with her calves under her (I believe this may be called “Japanese-style”).  The other men just sat in chairs, so that’s what I did, thinking that 45 minutes on a cushion on the floor might end with me unable to stand up and walk.  At one point the fit guy reached forward to touch one of the mats, and I thought he was going to relocate down there, as if his time on the chair was just for warming up or something (?), but he only straightened the mat so it formed a neat arc with the rest of the cushions in that row.  It was already a minute or so past 7, so I closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breathing, as I’ve been doing for the past two weeks.

Almost immediately, I heard to my right gurgling sounds emanating from the midsection of the old woman from downstairs, who had taken the chair next to me.  My initial reaction was annoyance, as if this was going to be “a distraction from my meditation.”  But almost right after that, I had the thought that there was nothing for me to be annoyed about.  These noises were not her fault obviously, and her stomach was just doing what it should be doing. 

I noticed the other noises in the room.  The Dopplered shoosh of cars going by.  The low whoosh of the air conditioning.  Higher-pitched hissing from the ringing in my ears (perhaps I should get this checked out).  The occasional gentle noise of the other meditators shifting around or clearing their throats. 

At some point I noticed the weight of my feet on the floor, as if I could feel gravity’s pull more profoundly.  I noticed this in my ass too, but maybe it was just starting to hurt from sitting on the chair for so long.  I didn’t really try to pay close attention to time.  My thoughts drifted to things I needed to do that day, or sometime soon, or to other things other than now.  And then I would try to guide myself back to my breathing again.  I don’t remember much other than that.

I started a bit at the sound of the gong: an abrupt metallic ping that quickly dove underwater and sustained.  It rang three times, and seemed to get quieter each time.  I opened my eyes and saw that a middle-aged woman with curly hair and loose-fitting clothing was now sitting Indian-style on the stage.  She had a small wooden stick in her hand, which she had evidently used to strike the gong.  The other meditators started to stir slowly.  After a moment the woman on stage put her hands together namaste-style and everyone else followed suit.  Then everyone did a small bow.  I quickly followed along, feeling like I used to feel on one of my rare trips to the Catholic church as a child, unsure about which gesticulations to do when.  The curly-haired woman said a few words in a quiet voice which I didn’t completely make out, but I inferred that her point was that Meditation Center Members could hang around if they wanted to, but that guests like me needed to vamoose.

Down on the first floor, I picked up a couple of pamphlets and added my name to the email list.  I sat on one of the chairs next to the front stairs to put my shoes back on, and I saw some shelves on which other people had put their shoes.  The curly-haired woman sat down next to me to put her shoes on too.  She asked me “How’s it going?”  I said, “It’s going well, thanks.  How about you?”  She replied, “So far so good.”

* The irony of describing these women this way (in terms of their stereotypes, their conceptual beings, rather than their actual beings – there’s a term for this that I forget) in the context of a Buddhist activity is not lost on me.   (July 12^th, Cambridge, MA)

8.       Use caution when meditating on an airplane when seated behind some guy who wants to offer his views on “spirituality” to the guy sitting next to him.

I tried to meditate on the plane to Milan this morning, while sitting a row behind a French guy who was speaking English loudly to the guy sitting next to him, saying things like: “spirituality…can help you bring the things to you in your life that you want.”  It took every ounce of discipline I had to contain myself; and I occupied myself by trying to mentally construct the French phrase for “Would you please shut the fuck up.”

A problem with meditation sometimes is that it makes you more acutely aware of what’s going on around you, and in that period after you’ve become more acutely aware but before you can see things non-judgmentally, annoying things like the guy in front of me become even more annoying.  (July 18^th, Air Europa flight 1065, MadridàMilan)

9.       Meditation may or may not improve your tennis game.

I played 6 sets of tennis over the weekend, but I felt better physically that I would have thought.  I happened to win all six, and the small internal tournament at they organized at my club over the weekend, so maybe that helps.  I spotted the The Miracle of Mindfulness on the bookcase in the guest room the other day and brought it down and started rereading a bit.  I think I might like Thich Nhat Hahn’s approach to meditation better than Wright’s, especially his advice that one shouldn’t try looking “for” anything for the first 6 months of meditation, just focus on breathing and being aware of the mind.  Maybe that’s as far as one can go with only 20 minutes a day for a month.  And maybe that’s actually pretty far.  (July 23, 2018, Geneva)

It occurred to me while running this morning that perhaps meditation contributed to my tennis performance last weekend.  Obviously sitting for 20 minutes a day doesn’t directly do anything for one’s first serve percentage, but I did feel myself much more mentally focused during my matches.  Actually, “focused” is the wrong word, as it implies kind of a concentrated effort.  What I was doing was not thinking about things like the score, or winning, or losing, or the fact that I’m up a break and it would be a missed opportunity if the other guy broke me back.  In other words, I was in the moment.  I found myself repeating a mantra of “play *this point* well.” 

And this is actually contrary to what I had been thinking: that meditation would make me too detached or spaced-out or uncaring to do competitive sports well.  Go figure. (July 24, 2018, Geneva)

10.   When meditating directly after showering, it’s a good idea to Q-tip one’s ears beforehand, or else the water in there can get pretty distracting.

11.   Practice.

I’d been fighting a nasty gastro for the last few days, so I hadn’t found the energy to meditate again until this morning.  Perhaps it would have helped to have at least tried, but it was tough to find the strength and motivation, and, given my GI condition, a little dicey sitting cross-legged for an extended period of time.  I realized this morning that, as with anything, you get out of practice (that term itself being pretty rich and significant) when it comes to focusing on your breathing.  But then again there is a certain freshness when it comes to rediscovering basic things which start to get taken for granted when you do them every day.  And this applies to so many things: the very basic Pilates exercises that our teacher has us do after holiday breaks.  The whole-stroke drumming rudiments that Joe Morello taught me.  Indeed there is something holy in the true practice of anything, whatever that anything might be.  This is a good thing to pass onto one’s children.

Maybe the main benefit of all this comes from the discipline of just doing something healthy for 20 minutes.  It could be walking around the block, or knitting, or doing pushups, or something else.  (July 28^th, Geneva)

Tell me more tell me more

Hi:

The Absolute Ceiling has been on a bit of a summer break, but not to worry: we'll be back soon with more riveting tales of long-haul flights and ontological head-scratching.

In the meantime, the good people at Popula have published something I wrote about some recent travels to Paris, which you can find here, alongside some other really great stuff by some really great writers.

Machina ex machina

Last week, I sat in a room in San Francisco with 40 of my colleagues for four days, listening to business school professors and start-up founders talk about Disruption and Transformation.  One presenter talked about how all of the innovation – as measured in companies with a market cap of $1 billion or more – is coming out of the US and China, and that Europe has been left way behind, presumably because the Europeans worry too much about the welfare of their citizens and not enough about their start-ups.  We visited a start-up incubator where young ambitious CS majors pitched us on their ideas to solve the problem of the “data abyss.”   We talked about how Wal-Mart – the largest private employer on the planet – is investing heavily in automation and AI, and that many of the 1.5 million people who work for Wal-Mart could be out of a job soon.*   

Outside, homeless people drifted around Market Street like zombies.  A leathery-skinned black man approached me on Monday as I was walking up to Chinatown and laughed as he punched himself in the jaw repeatedly.  Thursday I saw another man with a scraggly beard, prone on the sidewalk in front of the Nordstoms and flailing violently every few seconds, while a policeman and an EMT stood by, not quite sure how to approach him.  My colleagues reported encounters with people copulating on street corners and defecating in alleyways.

The weekend before, I took my daughters to Panera for dinner one night (highly recommend the blood orange lemonade, BTW).  Panera has always pretty operationally efficient as far as I could tell: the workflows are well organized and they give you the flashing tile thing that buzzes when your order is up so you can find a place to sit down in the meantime.  Now they’ve taken things up a notch and installed touch-screen ordering monitors, which are placed in offensive-line formation in front of the regular counter, which is at this point still manned by a human being.  Evidently, this is part of “Panera 2.0,” and the business press has unsurprisingly talked about this as a cost-saving measure and that people will lose jobs, all of which is true.  Perhaps more frightening is that most people would prefer interacting with yet another screen to having even fleeting, transactional contact with another human being.  But this shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point.

On the flight home, I read an article in the Guardian about how the Church of England has taught Amazon’s Alexa to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

* Not that Wal-Mart employees have it so great, but still.

Lent Rolling

I gave up eating meat for Lent this year.  To be honest, this wasn’t a major sacrifice, as I didn’t eat that much meat beforehand.  Still, inspired by a Bulgarian colleague whom I had dinner with during Orthodox Lent last year, I opted to split the difference between Roman Catholic (no meat on Fridays) and Orthodox (full-on vegan).  So 40 days of no meat or poultry, but fish and dairy were okay.

I encountered one unexpected benefit of not eating meat: it makes ordering in restaurants (or on airplanes) a lot easier.  Most of the time, when you redact all the meat dishes from the menu, you’re left with only a few things, or only one, to choose from, thus completely eliminating any choice-related angst.  (See also: Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice.)

I’ve heard about people whose lives completely changed after quitting meat – you know, “I have so much more energy now,” “I lost all this weight,” “Now I sleep a lot better,” etc.  I didn’t experience anything like that, but maybe one needs to go full vegan for the transformative effect.  I’ve also heard about people who were repulsed by even the thought of eating meat after a long time away from it, or who had some kind of gastrointestinal meltdown after their first meat post-vegetarianism.  That didn’t happen to me either, although the massive plate of spiegeleier mit speck I ordered in South Tirol on Easter Sunday might not have been the smartest way to break my meat-fast.

I suppose I can feel good about this from a certain ethical perspective, as eating less meat has all sorts of environmental benefits.  Although given the obscene nature of my personal carbon footprint, any ecological points I can claim are marginal at best.* 

But giving up something for Lent is not supposed to be about reducing stress, or about Getting in Shape for Summer, or even necessarily about doing something good for Mother Earth (although that’s probably closer).  It’s supposed to be about putting yourself in the right frame of mind, through prayer, mortification, and self-denial, to contemplate the death and resurrection of Christ, and to emulate, however poorly, his suffering.  Now I will be the first to admit that my opting for the tortellini rather than the beef tenderloin while sitting in business class is not exactly the Stations of the Cross.  But it was just inconvenient enough to make me think about what I was doing, and about what I was forgoing.  It was, in even the most modest way, a sacrifice, for someone whose life is pretty comfortable and abundant, and who spends most of his time chasing after even more comfort and abundance.  This seems to me like a gesture that is somehow good and right.  A reminder that the word “discipline” (which these days seems to signify only “punishment”) comes from the Latin discere (to learn).  Maybe even (bear with me) a feeble wave in the direction of the Eightfold Path, or to what JC was referring to when he spoke of the idea of losing one’s life in order to save it (Mk 8:34-35).  A means of learning that many of the things you do that make you feel good, many of which you don’t really ever think about, and which strong forces are often trying to get you to do even more of, are not necessarily the things that will bring you joy.

* I’m not even going to attempt to get into a discussion of the ethics of killing animals for food.  I can imagine a not-too-distant future when people look back on eating meat the way people today look back on slavery.  Meanwhile, suffice to say that I’ve come to terms with my hypocrisy on this issue.  

Book Swap

Last week, I came across a book exchange cart near one of the gates at Orlando International Airport (MCO).  None of the titles on display called to me (Nora Roberts and Outdoor Photographer magazine were heavily represented), and I hadn't yet finished any of the books I had on me, so I didn't take or leave anything.

I'm not sure who or what was behind this; there's no mention of this on the MCO website.  And I don't know if there's any connection between the book cart and the National Women's History Month display behind it, featuring Oprah and J. Lo alongside Amelia Earhart.  I thought for a minute that all the books on the cart might have been written by women in keeping with that theme, but I see Daniel Silva and Gordon Thomas in there, so that's not it, unless somebody else left those there.

Anyway.  This is not a revolutionary concept: there's a book exchange at our office in Amsterdam, and a couple more within a few blocks of where I live.  Still, this seems like something hopeful and good: an island of art and ideas and slowness and sharing and human connection (albeit anonymous), in a river of haste and commerce and transience.  Like a flower on a highway median.  This book cart will probably suffer the same fate as the flower, but we can appreciate it while it's there.

Airport Ceilings, Vol. 1

The architects who design airports seem to put a lot of effort into ceilings.  Maybe they anticipate that those of us inside will spend a lot of time gazing upward -- out of boredom, or exasperation, or in search of divine succor in one form or another. 

Paris Charles de Gaulle, Terminal 2, F Gates.  Beautiful, impressive, audacious, and generally uncomfortable to spend any amount of time in.  Not unlike Paris.  Although this is a step up aesthetically from the rest of of CDG, which has the design sensibilities of the Death Star.

Geneva International Airport, A Gates.  My home airport tries hard to be sophisticated and modern yet approachable, with little touches like the Rick and Ilse photo display here (Rhett and Scarlett are downstairs on the way to baggage claim).  I'm not sure if they completely pull it off, but I'm not complaining, especially as I can get from my front door to a departure gate in less than 30 minutes.  A direct to Boston would really be nice though.

Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, Schiphol Plaza.  Steampunk mushrooms.

Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, Terminal 1 Security.   Heh, heh, "grass," get it?  I sense a theme developing.

Boston Logan International Airport, Terminal E.  Going for the high school gymnasium vibe -- I expect to see a "State Champions, Girls Tennis, 1983" banner around the corner.  The nod toward internationalism is welcome, especially in a US airport, although the super-sized stars and stripes doesn't let you forget who's numero uno here.

I found this in my photo files without a label, and I'm actually not sure where this is.  I think maybe Porto, Portugal?   It's pretty though.

Aeroporto di Milano-Malpensa.  Not much to look at on the ceiling, but the floor looks like outer space, especially if you squint your eyes a little.

Flughafen Zürich, my Favorite Airport in the World.  Calm, quiet, well-conceived with earth-tone marble and high windows and the corny-but-irresistable tram to Terminal E with the cowbell / alpenhorn soundtrack and the Zoetrope Heidi.  Swiss Quality, indeed.