Barbie falls for Mad Men!

I admit I’m getting confused about reality. I thought Mad Men, the US TV show, was about real life, admittedly an outrageous little patch of it during a certain era. I confess I love the show and can’t wait for season 3 to be available in Switzerland on DVD in another couple weeks. I love the women who think they are Barbie dolls, the silly glitz, the – but wait, now it seems that Barbie has invited Mad Men to be part of her world! Don Draper, with those wonderfully creased suits and some of the dubious people he works with, will be showing up in her dollhouses, complete with their wardrobes.

They will all get along famously, I’m sure – old Barbie standby Ken, Don’s wife Betty, oohlala Joan.

Maybe the overdose of sleeze and glamour will encourage the next generation of women to give up these dollhouse fantasies. But don’t hold your breath, feminists, and please don’t turn over in your grave, Mr Ibsen.

Meanwhile, I’m getting the popcorn ready for the next episode. Now I can fret over which clothes Don will take to Barbie’s house.

Ed. note: all work and no play makes for a dull editor.

The world is a funny inter-connected kind of place when you’re sitting in a small town near Geneva, Switzerland and you see in the Los Angeles Times page for local animal-lovers that a couple of kangaroos have had a gooooood kissing and cuddling session in Basel. Check them out (warning to Australians: you might find them less cute than some of us). Much easier than going to the zoo in Basel in this icy Swiss weather. Clearly, Australian animals win the cutes prizes today.

GenevaLunch covers little celebrity news because we don’t think this is why most of our readers (70,000+ mainly news pages viewed a month) follow us. They’re looking for local or regional news or world news that has an impact on them. And boosting our site traffic with yet more stories about Michael Jackson isn’t part of our business plan.

But two CNN stories today, about two recent actors’ deaths, do give pause and should touch us.

US actress Brittany Murphy’s autopsy results have come out and they show that she suffered from acute pneumonia without being aware of it and died from a combination of drugs that were all legal and were being used mainly to treat common cold and flu symptoms. There’s a warning for all of us in this: get to the doctor early enough and don’t just pile on over-the-counter medications assuming they are safe.

The other death is of 41-year-old actor Andrew Koenig, whose body was just found in Stanley Park in Vancouver, Canada. His father, also an actor, announced the news. He pleaded with other families not to ignore signs of depression in their family members – and addressed those contemplating suicide, saying “If you’re one of those people who can’t handle it anymore, you know, if you can learn anything from this, there are people out there who really care,” he said. “You may not think so and ultimately it may not be enough, but there are people who really care.”

Shirley Curran, who provides the GenevaLunch Jura ski report every Friday, also writes our Monday book review column. Once in a blue moon she writes about crosswords, a subject on which she is an expert, as the creator of published crosswords. Her most recent column highlights the rarefied (note the spelling, crossword fans!) world of creators of crosswords, pointing to a very special man who has created 3D crosswords. Congratulations to Shirley, whose GenevaLunch post is now one of the first you’ll find if you google “3D crosswords”, because of the interest sparked by what she’s written. Check it out!

Geneva, a city you’ve probably never seen, even if you live there

The pot at the end of the rainbow, for British bankers, might be in Geneva

Some things never change, and a certain class of wealthy Brits seeing quaint little Switzerland as a playground is one of them. Another is the itch of UK newspaper writers to get the editor to pay for a trip, preferably during the ski season, to trot along on the heels of the rich to write about this fabled, gorgeous, expensive, boring little police state where people survive on chocolate and cheese. The Times has just done it and so has the Telegraph.

If you’re determined to see a place as an old cliché, you will, and they did. Clichés work, of course, because they have an element of truth in them. The younger brother of a friend was put under my care for a long 24 hours in Paris when I lived there, and at the end he dismissed the city as boring, with terrible food and ugly people. The women were short and bony, he said, and restaurants didn’t even serve ketchup with their hamburgers which were, by the way, awful, he added.

I couldn’t disagree, but I did think he’d missed something.

So did England’s newspaper writers. Geneva officials might be annoyed with the articles, Times and Telegraph fans will lap it up, and the rest of us will roll our eyes in wonder.

Once a year people in Geneva dress alike, many in gray, it is true (photo: Laila Rodriguez)

When I began to work as a journalist in Switzerland my editor at Business Week, who was based in Paris, admonished me to always include something about cheese with holes, cuckoo clocks or gold under the streets of Zurich. Why, I asked, assuming that my job was to add something new, preferably intelligent to what the world knew about the place. “The editors back home want it. They say that’s what readers like, and they’ll never read the more serious stuff if we don’t give them the clichés first.”

I also worked for Time magazine then, and asked the bureau chief there if he agreed. Absolutely, he said. It helps the editors in New York keep Switzerland and Sweden straight in their minds. Those white, snowy capital S places.

A little cliché-busting

The Times and Telegraph reporters got some of the basics wrong and don’t appear to have entirely understood the Swiss tax system.

Sign out for British bankers?

Here is a summary of the news story, the more or less serious stuff that’s prompted editors to shell out the cash for an EasyJet flight from London, I assume (times are tough in the media world). Hedge funds are moving out of London to Switzerland: 8 of them made the decision in December. British media are increasingly focusing on the story because UK tax rates on bank bonuses and high income levels will go up sharply as of 1 April 2010, and this is prompting some companies to move.

Here are my two bits on the story: Geneva’s Ivan Pictet, president of the board of the Geneva Financial Center, said in October when asked about hedge funds moving in, that Switzerland is and will continue to have only a tiny role to play in the international hedge funds business. He used a figure of maybe up to 2 percent of the global business. Geneva would welcome more companies moving in, but it’s not about to replace The City as a hedge fund capital, he noted.

End of story. But if you want the editor to pay for that trip to the fabled playground you have to have a bit more to write. So here’s what we get: Geneva is boring, expensive, people all dress alike, and communes dictate how you live. Taxi drivers think only about money (well, you probably do recognize that one, but London has a couple of these, too). The place is crazily racist.

Geneva and Switzerland, as viewed by London’s newspapers

From the Times:

• Hedge funds and wealthy people want to take up Swiss residence so they can get a tax forfeit: lump sum taxation (GenevaLunch: Some  confusion here: the rules are clear that this is only for people who “do not pursue an occupation in Switzerland”, which lops out anyone employed by a hedge fund, no matter how much they make. There were, 5,000 people who paid lump sum taxes, less than 0.1 percent of the Swiss population, in 2008)
• “There are hardly any normal shops: most seem to sell only diamonds and furs.” (GL: That’s not called Geneva – it’s called a two-block area)
• “. . .supper at a studenty restaurant where they serve only steak and chips: £150 [CHF220] for three, excluding service (GL: That’s a silly price for what you ate unless it was in a trendy restaurant and included a bottle of wine. The wine is generally better and cheaper than in London – and service is included, by the way)
• A Geneva lawyer says he buys his groceries in France because Switzerland is too expensive (GL: ask him what he buys: some stuff is cheaper in France, other stuff cheaper in Switzerland, and the great thing about Geneva is you can do your shopping in both – toilet paper in Switzerland, steak in France)
• Geneva is boring. (GL: No, it’s small. There’s a difference. I have been to Cardiff three times, a city about the same size as Geneva, and thought it was boring, too – everything shut before 6 in the evening, food was either bad or else it was good but way too expensive. I had the good grace not to write that because I figured there might be more to the place, if I took the time to find out.)
• Communes rule people’s lives with police-state style rules (GL: okay, at this point the writer veers off into fiction, with visits from Interpol and commune rules about flowerbox colours, which is fun, but I’m starting to wonder if she really caught that EasyJet flight or just cobbled together the story over a nice cup of tea in London.)
• CHF40 an hour for cleaning help. (GL: that’s the rate you pay for a cleaning company, not a regular cleaning woman, who gets CHF20-25, and for this you get someone who is used to cleaning to Swiss standards, which is nice)
• Crans-Montana is not as well known as Gstaad because wealth whispers. (GL: Rubbish. Italians have been flaunting wealth for years in Crans-Montana, but the Brits don’t mingle with them – a language problem?)
• You can’t make friends in Switzerland. It’s an expat’s life or nothing (GL: The woman quoted is 26, can’t have been here long or have lived in many cities, and she goes home to London every weekend – a little reminder needed here that life in any city is what you make it, but you do have to make an effort).
• Switzerland, and especially Geneva, is racist (GL: Calling kettles black, etc. – look around you when you get back home).

The Times is having a hayday with Geneva-drubbing in its Sunday 16 January edition: we get another Times article, by a different Times writer, saying Geneva has no nightlife, so it won’t be able to attract London’s high-flying financial companies. He quotes the Economic Development agency in the city and some relocation agencies, looks briefly at the Glocals.com website. He doesn’t find much going on. It’s not at all clear that he actually visited Geneva  to write this. He makes the weird remark that a lack of nightlife and no show-off flashy lifestyles “constitutes one of the main obstacles facing Geneva, along with the rest of Switzerland, in the quest to attract the financial sector away from London.” (GL: Surely people with the smarts to make that kind of money can figure out how to spend it having fun? And outside London, not many people think Switzerland is scrambling hard to attract these people.)

And then the Telegraph jumps into the fray, but with a much more upbeat story, which appears the same day. I suspect they heard about the Times articles and decided to write the opposite story. But it, too, suggests London’s financial crowd wants its Little London in Zug or Geneva. Some do. Many don’t, from what I’ve seen.

From the Telegraph:

• “Jay-walking [is] an arrestable offence” (GL: And yet people do it all the time, but people are very rarely stopped for it unless they do it in front of a bored police offier – but hasn’t the journalist ever been to California? Switzerland is pretty relaxed on this, compared to a lot of places)
• “Each of Switzerland’s 27 self-governing cantons sets its own tax rate, many with ultra-low levels to attract foreign finance firms and workers.” (GL: true, but the thing that makes Switzerland interesting for staff is the relatively low income tax rates for individuals, which apply to all of us, not just rich bankers)
• “The Swiss, a conservative nation, generally expect mothers to look after their own children.” (GL: an urban myth related to the idea that Swiss women don’t work – although this was true 35 years ago. Things change. Switzerland has one of Europe’s highest number of couples where the husband works full-time, the wife part-time: twice as many as the number of couples where the wife does not work, which is about equal to the number of couples where both work full-time. And it has one of the highest percentages of couples where both work part-time, according to 2008 figures published by the UN’s Economic Commission for Europe. Childcare options are limited, but changing. The Swiss political system reacts slowly.)
• Switzerland’s 27 cantons (GL: 26 – more on them at www.ch.ch)

I’m left with a sense that the British, or maybe just British bankers and wealthy Brits, don’t relocate well. Fortunately, I know quite a few of them in Switzerland, and I suspect that the ones who like to live well and who know how to spend their money well were all out doing that when the UK journalists came to town for a day. The problem might be that these people are hard to spot: they’ve learned how to fit in and enjoy life.

Links to other sites:

• Times, UK: “Bonus supertax sends the City’s super-rich to Switzerland”,
• Times: “Lack of Nightlife could dull Geneva’s appeal”
• Telegraph, “British bankers find the good life in Switzerland – even before tax“
• Swiss federal government page on tax forfeits (lump sum taxation)
• social networks popular with English-speakers in Switzerland: English Forum, Glocals
• to keep track of what’s happening in the Lake Geneva region: our own very popular blog for newcomers in Geneva, Geneva’s best-read source of news in English (guess who!) and GenevaLunch resources and events
• radio in English
• Geneva Welcome Centre has a What’s on page in English, and the Sortir web page at TSR (public television) has the most complete listing around of music, movies, shows and other entertainment in the region.

Gizmodo shows us Amnesty International’s ad against domestic abuse and it’s a real eye opener, so to speak – but as they point out, a one-off ad campaign in Hamburg, Germany has its limits.

If you’re like me, watching Eurovision this weekend on TV was low on my list of things to do – weather was fine, the garden needed weeding, a boat ride on Lake of the Four Cantons in Lucern beckoned, family had plans – and I’m not a huge Eurovision fan. But if you’re like 100 million Europeans, a number that’s pretty impressive, you made time for it.

I contented myself with reading NPR’s review from the US, which at least made me go watch it on YouTube. And look at those viewing numbers going up and up.

Geneva-based American songwriter and banker Gregg Robins wrote “Morning in America,” an upbeat song about the US after the election of Barack Obama. It’s making the rounds in Geneva and elsewhere. Check it out!

The New York Times carries a review of the Super Bowl ads, which is already a comment on the American way of life – I rarely see reviews, in other countries, of advertisements. I love the first paragraph of the story (I’ll let you go there on your own) and maybe author Stuart Elliott is right in saying that “After Sunday, you could add Super Bowl advertising to that lengthening list of letdowns.”

But if you live outside the US and you get only sporadic American TV time, the case at our house, it’s great fun to watch these ads and be reminded of another way of life. Not that the Audi chase scene makes me think of US roads, where I mainly find that people drive too slowly. Or that I connect with the celebrities. I worked for People magazine off and on for several years, but I hardly recognize any of these people, which goes to show how short-lived fame can be.

I especially appreciated Elliott’s high point/low point remarks, including one about Pepsi rewriting history when it brings on Bob Dylan and crowd: it was known as the drink of the Republican party back in the days of Richard Nixon versus hippies and protestors (undesirables then, cool now). The ad didn’t do much for me.

GoDaddy’s enhanced ad left me thinking geeeeeez guys, even if boys who like sports like pinup calendars like sexism, my post-feminist friends and I could have made an ad that got the message over a lot better and that was a lot more fun!

Was there an ad I loved, since there usually is at least one? I have to agree with Elliott in the end: not a single one. So now I’m worried that the glutten financial system has eaten alive not only the economy but the spirit of creativity in the US.

Ok, I admit it: I’m not a hockey mom. The closest one of my kids ever got to ice skates was this:

Snowboarding & skating in China, YouTube.

And my other child is a severely disabled special needs kid. But that doesn’t put me any closer to the woman who thinks Alaska is the heartbeat of the US. I grew up  in Iowa: I know better.

So when Janet, a friend in Paris, sent a message wishing us all “good luck” tonight, that included this video, I just had to sing along. Don’t cry for me, Sarah Palin . . . (thank you, Salon.com)