Voter suppression in Saratoga Springs

In the USA we do not take elections very seriously. I mean, we like the spectacle, we like the suspense, we like the winners and losers part of it. But not their significance in the democratic process.

You will by now be bristling: “yes, the elections are the core of the choice, of the government by the people, elections are what keeps us free.” But that is only the conventional lip service. In reality, we hold them in low esteem, we think that they are bothersome and interrupt the flow of our daily life and the pursuit of happiness.

How do you explain otherwise the fact that we hold elections on Tuesdays, in the middle of the work week, instead of on Sundays when people have time to go to the polls.? Or that the peopling of the polls is entrusted to the old and retired, and they get paid a pittance for a looooong day of work, at present barely above minimum wage.? Or that fewer and fewer people bother to vote at all.? In 2004 President Bush ’43 won the election with 50.7% of the vote, and barely 56.7% eligible voters showed up at the polls. 28% of the eligible voters chose a President, the ship’s captain, the Commander in Chief!

No wonder then that more and more people are delegitimizing the electoral process, declaring that they do not feel represented, that it is all a charade.

And to top it all off, as soon as Republicans are in control, all kinds of concerns of voter fraud are raised, in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary, as justification for all kinds of barriers to access, from the old practice of re-drawing electoral districts that they can control, to pre-requisites to voting. As soon as feasible, prospective voters cannot register while obtaining their drivers licence, or photo ID is required to access the voting booth.

According to the Huffingon Post, citing a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, “a string of laws passed in 13 states -- and proposed in 21 more -- could disproportionately suppress turnout of younger voters, minorities and lower-income voters.”

A study by Ari Berman, published at the end of August 2011 in Rolling Stone reports that “All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots.”

We are not immune to these trends; the tide has reached Saratoga Springs. The Scott Johnson administration has refused to recognize the validity of 2300 signatures of residents requesting that a referendum be held on a proposed change of the charter, the document that defines and lays out the rules for the governance of the City. After Judge Nolan rejected the City’s claims of defects in the citizen’s initiative, the Republican dominated Administration chose to engage and pay legal fees to outside counsel to appeal the decision, drawing out the process in the hope that a victory in the November 8th election would make such referendum impracticable.

The Johnson Administration has in effect denied the legal and legitimate rights of close to 10% of its residents to decide on the future course of Saratoga Springs governance. The pattern of Republican campaigns of voter suppression repeats itself in our “City in the Country”. We are grown up now!

Towards a new capitalism

Decades ago the European countries, facing the sudden windfall of oil production of their very own and within easy reach -in the North Sea- made the choice of pricing it high, tagging on hefty taxes to put a high price on energy consumption. In the long run the increased revenue on the one hand allowed the governments to invest heavily in costly public ground transportation: high speed trains, urban subways. With smaller cars on the roads, the European per capita energy consumption is half of what it is in the USA.

In the United States abundant domestic oil production and the aversion to letting government intervene in the pricing of energy has led to wasteful use of resources. The deliberate dereliction of public investment in communal transportation and cheap oil have encouraged spread out development of bedroom communities, with the concurrent perverse effects of traffic congestion and pollution.

The oil companies’ need for private profit has denied the government the resources to implement rational policies and undertake investments conducive to energy efficiency. The quest for easy growth encourages more consumption instead of smart consumption. As long as the pricing power remains in the exclusive hands of the private economy, we may be sure that the outcomes will never benefit the consumer. The interest of the large corporations will always be to defend their profits at the expense of the final user.

People have been redefined, and diminished, as consumers. Paul Krugman in the New York Times of April 21st, points to the semantic change that has happened also in the health care industry: people are no longer in need of health care, but mere consumers of health services.

The invisible hand of the market, when it reigns supreme -even Adam Smith warned against this outcome- does no longer intervene, at the present stage of capitalism, to produce the results most beneficial to the population at large. Industrial and commercial behemoths dominate the market, and can co-opt any emerging competition. They can absorb technological developments and manipulate its price until the competitor cannot survive. If that fails the large corporations can buy up any competition that they feel might threaten their dominance.

The world-wide crisis that we are living through is a fundamental crisis of capitalism as we practice it.

Capitalism is a resilient beast and will no doubt survive, but in its present form has reached its boundaries. Let us hope that in the next iteration it will root in humanism and democracy. Capitalism for the people as we practiced it in the mid-twentieth century.

Heat in the depth of winter

What is going on in Wisconsin? The media are compressing the reasons for this conflict into an anti-union tinged fight to bring the much-reviled public employees to heel, and that is the view that the conservative right would like us to have.

But the conflict is actually a much wider one and fits the Republican ever present agenda of privatizing and, yes, union-busting. I have still to see any evidence that private enterprise is any more efficient or mindful of the public good than public bureaucracies. Corruption and inefficiency are evenly spread over human enterprise.

Under the noisy conflict of the Wisconsin governor and his employees, the disputed budget bill, 144 pages long, contains language that allows privatization of any public utility, and declares any such decision to be automatically labelled as “in the public good.” To reassure us, the Koch Brothers, lately so much in the limelight, have announced that they are not interested in acquiring any of those utilities. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Privatization of public property benefits private interests. We have seen how Russia’s oligarchs rooted their huge fortunes in the deals that denationalized all of the State’s properties. At the very least such privatization can lead to cronyism and corruption on a grand scale.

And the one obstacle on this road are the few public employees that are exercising their legal rights to collective action to oppose this law. Which contains also language to delegitimize…...collective action. Under the cloak of freedom corporations are promoting the idea that each worker negotiate on her or his own, standing alone, confronting the corporate lawyers and human resource professionals. Each employee, ignorant of what his or her colleagues’ position is, will stand naked in the howling winds of corporatism.

Mind you that I am not against the corporate entities looking for their own profit and best interests. But I believe that, for the sake of a level playing field, the individual worker or employee, that is all and any of us, should be able to have access to shared resources to establish his or her best interests. That is what unionization is all about. And it must have worked, or how can we otherwise explain the unrelenting and ferocious attacks of the corporate right on them.

There is a space for groups of people banding together to profitably produce goods or services under the banner of corporations, and there is a similar space for the common man, the citizen, to band together and defend her or his rights as an individual.

The corporate world rightfully exists to promote the creation of wealth that did not exist before, within the laws democratically adopted in a representative democracy that delimit and define the proper territory of their activity. The government has a duty to preserve the balanced and equitable distribution of the common wealth among all citizens. But, as David Brooks points out in today’s New York Times, in this country this debate has yet to take place.

A referendum in Saratoga Springs?

Last Tuesday’s City Council meeting brought us a long-awaited unsurprising declaration by His Honor Scott Johnson, that the City was filing a notice of appeal with Judge Nolan’s Court.

The rationale for such a move was very much in tune with Republican thinking: to keep the pitchforks at bay.

The Mayor proclaimed himself the citizen’s Defender, not only of the city of Saratoga Springs (where pitchforks are a boutique item anyway), but of all the municipalities of the state of New York, and even nationally. What would happen, he said, if this people’s initiative to change the form of government were left unchecked, and other groups at another time would request revisions again and again and again.?

The City’s Charter of 2001 explicitly endorses periodic revisions; as John Maynard Keynes famously replied when challenged: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”.

Even more to the point, New York State’s municipal law allows referendums as a manner of improving or changing a municipality’s form of constitution. When a group of citizens perceives a way to ameliorate the conventional wisdom the weapon of choice is the citizen’s initiative of a referendum. Unlike elections, a citizen’s initiative is usually bipartisan or non-partisan, interesting all citizens without labeling them.

Mayor Johnson’s opinion is very much in line with the explicit policy of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives of consolidating the oligarchical hold of the well-to-do on the political system of this Republic. Why the less affluent would support measures that are clearly against their own self-interest is probably best explained by the New Yorker’s caption on a cartoon: “As a potential lottery winner I support tax cuts for the wealthy.”

In today's Huffington Post:

Man versus machine

Tonight I watched Jeopardy. Why am I even saying that? Jeopardy, the popular and very durable classic of game shows, was surely watched by many, and some did so with a deep-seated feeling of guilt, as a secret, unmentionable addiction.

But today was different. The venue was in New York state, on an IBM campus; the players were two old veterans, the highest prize winners of Jeopardy’s history. The third participant was an IBM computer, a huge array of servers, programmed by a team of artificial intelligence engineers over the last three years. They fed the computer with encyclopedias, treatises, even the Bible, and a battery of algorithms to bring together all the interrelationships of known facts that are considered the basis of human intelligence. We all have tried to shout at the screen the frequently quirky questions responding to the answers offered as clues. Puns, rhyming slang, literary allusions, lists, sports statistics and pop-song lyrics are the common fare of this game, that tests not only factual knowledge, but also worldliness and with-it-ness.

The purpose of the experiment, according to the IBMers involved, was, not to create a murderous HAL of 2001: a space odyssey fame, but a true thinking machine that could take over many of the human’s tasks, unburdened by human emotions and sentimentality.

It is all the stuff of movies, and many films have presented sinister outcomes to the doings of similar machines. The reasons why there is such a sustained interest in this kind of lucubration are obvious: we are persuaded that humans are at the apex of creation, but taken aback by the imperfections and aberrant behavior that humans frequently exhibit. Also we are profoundly disturbed by our incapacity of defining what makes us human, distinct from other animal species, and why we deserve the exalted position that we have assigned to ourselves. We are hoping that by creating machines that exhibit our brilliance, and are devoid of our faults, we will be able to get to a perfect world. Our perfect offspring, albeit mechanical, would also conquer our destiny: aging and death.

The IBM computer competitor is named Watson, not after Conan Doyle’s character, but the company’s founding family. In this first confrontation, the simple Jeopardy first level, Watson did quite well, ending in a draw with one of the human contestants. The next two days will see Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy. Definitely worth watching on ABC at 7 pm.

After Egypt, what about us?

Finally, somebody said it. I do not feel alone any more:

"While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance."

read more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12herbert.html?_r=1&ref=bobherbert

State of the Spanish

As an outer space explorer I descended on 2011 Spain expecting a country, as described in the US press, devastated by crisis, tottering in financial morass, beset by hordes of unemployed beggars in the streets.

Arriving in Barajas Airport, a messy collection of the super-modern and 1960s constructivism, nothing much felt changed from a year ago: the lights were dimmed to save energy, but the unending way from plane to baggage collection is speeded by extensive rolling walkways. Baggage carousels were all functional, and the bags arrived in a reasonable 10 minutes after passport controls. I was struck by a new sense of purposefulness: the usually sleepy police passport stampers were crisp and polite, almost no lines cluttered the vast halls. Customs were perfunctory and, once outside, taxis were immediately available, next to several municipal transportation buses. The weather was cold but sunny, some remnants of morning fog visibly melting away.

Traffic on the urban highways to downtown was brisk, the small cars buzzing along into their particular hive of business. At mid-morning the cafeterias did not lack their usual customers, as Spaniards are habitually imbibing small cups of coffee when they get fed-up with whatever they have started doing at 9 am.

All-in all, a picture of familiarity. But Madrid breathes a renewed air of efficient competency. The streets are well groomed, abundantly provided with urban furniture, well marked bike paths, glass bus shelters, freshly painted pedestrian crossings. Most buses run on natural gas. The extensive subway system is clean, on time and very affordable. Escalators, a frequent harbinger of disruption when non-functional, hummed contentedly moving 3 million travelers per day.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the landscape of a modern European city, Madrid is composed of residential high-rises, a product of fifty years of uninterrupted building activity, around the centuries-old city core. The spindly construction crane had become the landmark of post-Franco democratic Spain, and its disappearance has quieted the urban picture, signaling the most obvious symptom of recession. New construction, except for Government supported public works, has stopped.

The Socialist government, now eight years in power, has used all the capitalist tools on hand to sustain the economy, battered by the collapse of the real estate bubble and by the bond traders, in the wake of Greece’s and Portugal’s difficulties. Several stimulus programs, aimed at improving infrastructure, are visible in Madrid and outside of it. Sharp cuts in civil service salaries, reduction in elected officials’ entitlements, and, now underway, a broad dialogue between unions, business leaders and the Government with a view to raise the retirement age, entitling workers to full pensions after 40 years of work, in exchange for more flexible employment regulations.

Investments in the public health system are being increased. It is generally recognized that the present health care is almost on par with France’s and that the best equipped hospitals belong to the single-payer Government-run network. There is also a private health insurance system, but there seems to be agreement that the public system provides the best care available.

The result is an outward picture of normality. Last year 53 million visitors came to Spain, eight million to Madrid. Hotel prices have fallen by as much as 20%, and occupancy has increased as a result.

Restaurants and bars are full, and I am told that night-life is booming. Downtown, around the Puerta del Sol, the commercial and shopping hub of the city, the usual crowd of shoppers and layabouts commingle. This area tends to seediness, because of the very old buildings and the heavily used facilities. But now Apple is installing there their first retail store in downtown, and Galerias Preciados, the largest department store in Spain and the fourth largest retailer in Europe, holds increasing sway over the street that bears its name.

The present crisis seems to be providing impetus to rationalization and increased productivity, as well as diversification of the Spanish economy. The country looks better than it did a year ago, and although the mood in the street is gloomy, the average citizen does not seem overly depressed. Everybody talks about “the crisis” and their reduced spending power, but tries to carry on as usual.

Nevertheless, in spite of generally competent management of the crisis, the polls predict that the Socialist party seems headed for defeat in the 2012 elections. We shall see.

A Mayor for our time

In Madrid, Spain, twenty five years ago, Dr. Enrique Tierno Galván died on January 19th. He was a Marxist scholar, university professor, sociologue, lawyer and writer. During the last years of the Franco regime he organized a political party, the Popular Socialist Party (or PSP) whose membership almost exclusively consisted of lawyers, civil servants and some businesspeople, all living in one of the most affluent districts of Madrid. Whether the irony was intentional, he did not say.

The PSP later was absorbed into the mainstream Socialist Party, and, in the first municipal elections in 40 years, in 1979 Dr. Tierno became the first Socialist mayor of Spain’s capital, Madrid, until his death of cancer in 1986.

During those six years he became the most beloved character in the new political firmament: among politicians who feigned gravitas and knowledge, he always addressed the people with a twinkle in his eye, and mischievousness on his lips. His public pronouncements, or “Bandos” announcing new regulations or just admonitions, are couched in high classical Spanish, cloaking the underlying informality of purpose. At a time when the fledgling democracy was hesitatingly and haltingly stepping out into the minefield of governance Dr. Tierno lovingly reminded his listeners to remain flexible in spirit and to remember to smile through the tribulations.

When the Pope visited Madrid this Marxist stoic rationalist greeted him in latin. To define who had the right to be Madrileño, he said: “To live in Madrid is to be of Madrid.” His sense of humor oscillated from the surrealist to the streetwise laconic. Standing in front of the TV cameras next to a young actress suffering from a complete “wardrobe malfunction”, Tierno keeps a straight face with a broad guffaw in his eyes.

He was called “the old Professor” by the young cohorts who followed him with delight. His political enemies and some of his friends feared and envied his ready and wise tongue. As a journalist said recently: “He tickled us when we needed it badly.”

Dr. Tierno’s burial was a multitudinous affair. He was carried, again ironically, in a pompous black carriage, drawn by six black horses, carapaced and beplumed in black. Only the people surrounded his casket, no police or security were needed along the way, over three miles, to his resting place.

A man looks for the moment where he may best fit into the stream of life. Dr. Tierno found his avocation and filled a providential role at the exact time when he was needed. He is now timeless and an example to us all.

Education and the Saratoga Film Forum

Our local jewel, the Saratoga Film Forum recently screened the controversial film “Waiting for Superman”, that has been playing to ecstatic audiences all over the country. Authored by Davis Guggenheim who directed “An inconvenient truth”, in which Al Gore displays his findings in relation to man-made climatological and environmental change, this film tackles the insufficiencies of our education system. Fiercely dogmatic, after highlighting how our present system of public education fails our children, the film proposes various forms of charter schools as the remedy.

As it became known that the film would be shown, and that discussion forums would follow the screenings, demand for seats skyrocketed, and in addition to the usual three screenings in a week, an unusual Saturday screening and an extraordinary second screening on Sunday afternoon was added.

Over 500 people crowded the Dee Sarno theater over the week-end, and the panels had to address many questions thrown at them by passionate parents with children in the Saratoga Springs schools.

But what really struck me was the generally complacent responses of the panelists, from Janice White to David Patterson. They reassured the audience that the problems outlined in the film were not our problems, but inner-city dissonances that, thank Heaven, did not apply to our panglossian reality in Saratoga Springs.

The corporate world, the film seems to say, is willing to underwrite primary and secondary education, pouring oodles of money to subsidize desired results and unburdening the taxpayer. Bill Gates himself was interviewed several times to explain how the future of this nation as a first rate power is being undermined by the poor outcomes of our public education system.

Most remarkable were the facts that the film did not mention, as they might detract from the passionate attacks on teachers’ unions, school administrators and the tenure system.

In my opinion we are losing sight of the goal that a public system of education was meant to achieve. Bismarck, in the beginnings of the German empire in the 1840’s pointed to the need of bringing together the children of different classes, ethnicities and geographical areas to forge a sense of common purpose and destiny. This, more than ever, still applies today in these United States. “E pluribus unum”, out of many, one.

As Dr. Michael Stanford, of Suny Buffalo, in the audience on Sunday evening, reminded us: “Education is a revolutionary activity.” Forging unity and a civic discourse, embracing all components of our diverse and splintered nation into a coherent and forward looking entity, seem, in the present political climate, truly revolutionary endeavors.

This vision is not served if the educators are allowed to attend only to those communities that will be high-performing, abandoning the considerable percentage of children of deprivation to inferior financing and lackadaisical methodologies.

It may well be that in order to serve all needs more money will be needed than we have been so far willing to earmark for education. But are we really willing to abandon another slice of the civic realm to corporate money and interests.?

Happy 2011! a homily for the new year.

You, and I, have woken up today and are living in a year with a new label: 2011.
As the saying goes, the past is gone, the future is a mystery, we are left with only the present.

But we still believe that the future will become present, and that we can shape it by our actions and decisions. Hence the long lists of New Year resolutions, mostly forgotten come January 15th.

The most common resolution probably is to lose weight. Let me challenge you to be more ambitious. Forget changing your body, change your mind.

Open your mind to ideas that you have never before entertained: look at them, grasp them with your mind’s fingers, extract them from the context by which you know them, and look at them in the cold light of your reason.

Better still: talk to the people that you thought alien to you, with whom you think that you have nothing in common. Ask yourself why (and if) there is a distance between you and them. Ask them how they see you. Tell them how you perceive them.

At the end of the conversation you may still be apart, separated by custom and convention, by habits and outlook. But your will be enriched by new insights, by perceptions of their motives that you did not know before.

The Italians coined the word “sprezzatura”. It expresses the public image that we all want to project to others, the spreading of feathers by which we want to show how big and beautiful we are, how fearsome and admirable we are. Shed your own “sprezzatura”, look behind the others’ feathers, and try to understand that the other is moved by most of what moves you, and misunderstands you because of the show that you are putting on.

The Chinese say that your friends hate you for your qualities and successes, and love you for your failings. Try to take this with you into the new Year.

Our universe, misbegotten.

We are fortunate to have in Saratoga Springs quite a few resources to enrich our lives. The Film Forum is one of them; formed sixteen years ago by a group of enthusiastic friends dismayed by the poverty of films on offer at the malls around the City, and by the lack of a downtown venue for movies, they started renting films from national distributors on 35 mm stock, and discussing what they had just seen in impromptu gatherings.

The miracle is that they are still active, they still show films at the Arts Center three times a week, and their audience is still engaged, interested and faithful.

On Sunday December 19th the Film Forum was showing an Israeli film, “Lebanon”, a first long feature by Samuel Maoz. It attracted an average of 30 people per showing on each of the frigid nights, and a discussion group on Sunday.

“Lebanon” shows the face of war that nobody wants to talk about. The war professionals insist on methodologies, tactics, technologies and leadership. The politicians see war as an instrument of policy and governance. Disdaining the tropes of glory this film brings it down to the individual in battle.

Four twenty year old kids are sitting in a tank, a steel behemoth identified as Rhino, a code name, an enclosure that binds them into a universe, an acting unit. It works out as a metaphor for our own lives: the radio crackles instructions and directions from unknown speakers, from time to time the hatch opens and admits an agent of the outside world, the local commander. Casualties are called angels in the war lingo and dead angels are lowered into their world through that hatch, captured terrified aliens descend into it. What the four soldiers see is limited by the electronic gun sight; unlike aircraft pilots they can see and amplify the faces of the people they have to shoot at, as well as the havoc that spreads from their fingertips on the trigger.

This universe is dark and dirty and self-contained. The steel enclosure provides its inhabitants with a measure of invulnerability. They carry with them, in cans or at their feet, all their bodily fluids. The floor of the tank is covered in dark liquids, of uncertain depth, punctuated by swaying cigarette butts. The certainty of death floats in the air they are breathing: a tank does not break down, it either burns up, or it drives.

And yet this universe, constrained, filthy, uncertain, and distorting is their home; their enemies, the world outside. The voice over the radio is their link to it; it is a lifeline over which they receive instructions, orders, information, from some unknown dimension, punctuated by an archangel’s arrival, often as confused as they are, but willing sense out of their chaotic situation.

During the few hours of transit through an unknown hell the boys forge themselves into a family, a squabbling, mourning and living world that includes us, the voyeurs watching them through the director’s camera view. The hostile outside world is impossible to decipher, the enemies look like themselves, the information given is of doubtful meaning, the value of their designated friends is uncertain.

A paradise is promised at the end or their ordeals, an objective at the end of the road suitably named St. Tropez. But to get there the tank has to rely on its own strengths, alive with hydraulic howls, steely grinds, jerks and uncertain responses to fingers pressing buttons, switches and triggers, the skill of the driver and the unkillable engine, pushed by their collective will to get there alive.

The big question that this film is asking: who has the right to place their own young people into such extreme situations? What doctrine, policy, ideology can justify such havoc, such personal apocalypses.?

War, they say, is hell. But it is a completely man-made hell. Dante could not imagine in his fifteen circles anything that compares to the catastrophes we humans have demonstrated the capability to manufacture.

How is the weather on your planet?

Just because you can do something, does not mean that you should. Just being secret does not make anything interesting.

I have been trying for some weeks to get my head around the Wikileaks thing, and all the furore being whipped up. The way that I see it, nothing that I have read is either unknown, intuited or not boring. The only titillation flowed from the fact that all this verbiage was classified, not meant for general consumption.

A declaration of secrecy very often does not correspond to the content of the document. The power to make anything secret can be irresistible to many, reinforcing their own sense of importance. Claiming to know secrets, and not sharing them, enhances your sense of self. If those secrets then get divulged, the holder feels diminished.

Now we all know that the diplomats’ views on their interlocutors diverged depending on whether their statements were made to the world at large or to their bosses. Is that lying? Who among us has not smiled on somebody that we really hate?. Such are the social compromises that lubricate human interactions. My grandmother used to demand that we do not speak ill of the absent, but who is able to live up to that exalted standard?

When we negotiate a deal among us, each of the parties hopes to have some asset that will ensure the other side’s compliance to our wishes. The whole crux of the matter is that this asset remain secret until the deal is clinched. Why should negotiations between governments be any different? They happen between humans after all.

Suddenly Julian Assange, unknown to most of us, is a celebrity on the strength of millions of words handed to his organization by other people in search of notoriety. Whether the crimes and misdemeanors that he is being charged with are real or manufactured he can hardly be seen as a victim. He must have known that he was making powerful enemies squirm.

To those of you who still believe that conspiracies have been unveiled, or that every last comma of government verbiage is sensational, please let me know how the weather in your planet is behaving at this time.

Should energy efficiency be found only in cars?

Say “carbon pricing” or “cap and trade” and you are likely to be run over with invective in this country.

But that does not mean that the world is standing still. Carbon, in the form of CO2, is priced at present at Euros 22 per ton, and trending upwards. I know of a Spanish company, with an office in Panama, that sells small co-generation energy plants, and smart garbage dumps to developing South American municipalities and governments, and finances the customer by taking over the emission credits earned with the new technologies; then turns around to sell them to electric utilities in Poland.

There is a growing international market for “clean development mechanisms” that enables developing markets around the world to adopt low-emission (carbon footprint) technologies in a variety of fields. Whatever the outcome of the Cancún climate conference, it is not expected that this market is going to slow down. The international financial community is actively investing in carbon trading markets. Point Carbon, a Thomson-Reuters company, has just published a report forecasting the continuing growth of demand for emission rights. It also reports that Poland has just sold four million units to the Japanese Government. The demand from Eastern European electrical companies is the main engine for continuing growth of this market.

A report by Ernst and Young, the international management consultants, based on interviews with more than 700 executives, points to a continuity of investment in sustainability processes.

A new website, Shippingefficiency.org, tracks the energy efficiency of more than 65,000 ships the world over. Shipping, as an industry, emits more CO2 than Germany, but is unregulated. The website will make information available to enable shippers to choose the most energy efficient vessels, or some Port Authorities may ban the most contaminating ships from docking. Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, supports such increased market transparency, that could lead to penalize the most contaminating practices of the industry.

The US Congress may want carbon pricing to go away, but the rest of the world is not listening. And money is being made elsewhere.

Upcoming: Black Friday

Black Friday is fast approaching, and the mood in Saratoga Springs is cautiously optimistic. Yesterday I briefly chatted with Marc Strauss, of Mabou memory, while strolling through the Downtown Marketplace, the closest thing to a department store in the city. He owns the place, and the largest retailer in it, Pangea. Marc commented that business was picking up, and if the next six weeks held up as expected, it would be a good year. This sentiments were echoed by other merchants on Broadway.

The rate of sales tax collections as presented by the Finance Commissioner last week are also pointing to a steady pace of business.

Is this extensive to the whole of the Capital area? Not according to Mr. Strauss: “We have built a moat around Saratoga Springs.”

The metaphor is bit too defensive for my taste, redolent of Maginot line rhetoric. But it points to the fact that Saratoga Springs downtown has built a business model that seems to hold up in these lean times. Residents complain that nothing of their everyday needs is being offered on Broadway, that the trade is geared towards the tourist, the transient, the visitor. Still we meet acquaintances and friends every day strolling on Broadway, either to do banking, sip coffee, have a meal or on the way to somewhere else.

Maybe Saratoga Springs can be modeled on what Germany has been doing in the world economy. With strong unions, high labor costs and an extensive social network Germany has outcompeted its way to becoming the second exporter in the world (after China). How? By concentrating of educating its population, and enabling them to produce real material goods known by quality and advanced design that can command a premium in world markets. Can Saratoga become a premium destination by offering a unique shopping experience in quality and design?

Parking is still mainly a summer issue. Nowadays open slots along Broadway’s sidewalks are easy to find, sometimes even right in front of our destinations. Should the City move to some form of paid parking? This is not a question that should be deferred, because any finite resource in growing demand needs some form of allocation method. It can be done intelligently and the Downtown Business Association should participate in its design and administration. Surely offering parking facilities close to their storefronts is in the merchants’ interest.

The Budget debate in Saratoga Springs

You would think that budgets are about money. Really?. Last Sunday the New York Times put online a new game. It asked the players to become politicians and slash the deficit, enumerating their preferred places to cut or increase budgets by filling in little squares, grouped in chunks of 100 billion dollars.This game invites us common mortals to step into the minefield of our convictions. Now we are asked to play like the big boys.

During the election campaign -now, thank God, behind us- the goading MLM (main line media) journalists liked to embarrass candidates by pressing them to state where they would cut the local, state and federal budgets to flesh out their assertions. Then they feigned surprise at hearing back generalities, platitudes and impossibilities.

A budget is an edifice of assumptions and choices; the assumptions evaluate the present state of affairs and its evolution (try to do that eschewing ideology!), and then make the choices of resources that have to be employed to achieve the overarching desired results. Which goes to show that there is no such thing as a non-political budget. We have to rewrite the slogan into “it is the politics of the economy, stupid.”

At our local level most of us will look at the one figure: what decisions have been made about the property tax rate. We call it “the bottom line”, a distillation of magnitudes into one simple, understandable number; we disregard the rest, the steps that lead to that result, as chaff and at our own peril.

Because the budget is above all a statement of intentions, a program, a blueprint of where the imagination of the people putting the figures together aims to take the community. Fleshed out, it should provide a narrative of the future.

In Saratoga Springs there is only one budget officer: the Finance Commissioner. The agents of the 2001 Charter Revision, no doubt in thrall to the continued failure of the Albany legislators to provide the State of New York with a timely budget, inserted the requirement that if the five Commissioners could not reach an agreement on the yearly budget before November 30th, the budget presented by the Finance Commissioner would become law, making him the most powerful person on the City Council. This escape clause did provide last year a spending blueprints without the approval of the full Council. The legislators refused to legislate.

So the City’s finances have been in default mode, freeing each Commissioner from the disciplined constraint of a negotiated agreement, and leading to piecemeal ad-hoc discrete decisions that will, in time, come home to haunt us.

It is also true that a very large part of the City’s expenditures are determined by State and Federal mandates, some of them unfunded, as well as by New York State procedural requirements.

Previous administrations had worked to write procedural manuals with detailed handbooks and nomenclatures with a view to create a bedrock of consensus on which to build each year’s budget; this excellent work seems to have been set aside, replaced by obfuscation and short term reaction-ary short term poultices. Deficits are announced and disappear at will, money is found in unexpected places, rainy-day funds are raided repeatedly and exhausted. The Finance Commissioner emerges as an all-conquering hero, wrestling with intractabilities like Laocoon and his serpents.

On the other hand, modest man that he is, never boasting of “the vision thing”, he has been filing all along with the State Comptroller a long term budget projection, as required by law and common sense.

Who knew?

Spectacles 2

Opera was an Italian invention but very soon in the 17th Century an Italian, Jean-Baptiste Lully, was composing for the French monarch Louis XIV full theatrical spectacles, “tragedies en musique”.

No wonder that Paris has not one, but two great Opera houses, three if you count the Opera Comique near the Boulevard des Italiens. The most famous one is the big building at the end of the Hausmannian Avénue de l‘Opéra, also called Palais Garnier, after its architect. It was conceived during Napoléon III’s reign, but not completed until after he had lost power in 1875.


Looking up towards the Chagall ceiling.

Rumor has it that when Garnier was asked by Empress Eugènie whether he was designing in Classical Roman or Greek style, he replied that it was in Napoleonian style. A very appropriate reply as this building reflects and exemplifies the worst of that excessive style. No staircase is spared a sweep, no column is unfluted and uncrowned, no moulding is uncurved, no window lacks in foliage, no opening is un-curtained, no cornice or finial un-gilded, no surface is bereft of a bas-relief, no wall lacks a sconce or a niche, nor will the niche stay empty, no urn is not overflowing, no wall-panel will remain un-treated, no nymph lacked a placement, no cherubim was denied a presence, no greek god or European composer will be without an abode. Garnier must have believed that an inch of undecorated space showed a weakness of purpose, and he was trying to exhibit the exuberance and satiety of a society that was enjoined to get rich as fast as possible and spared no vulgarity to flaunt it. The quietest part of the decor is Mark Chagall’s 1965 cupola design in the main hall, a magical, dreamy confection of blues, reds and yellows, stuck thirty years ago over the old, original painting and reportedly sagging because the old adhesives cannot hold up both.

The interior spectator space of the Opéra Garnier is really overpowering in plush velvet and gold. We attended a matinee, and I found it surprising that all those slobs in jeans and T-shirts, in denim jackets and leather were not feeling inadequate and out of place. The surroundings demanded more “sprezzatura” from the audience.

What we saw that afternoon was in stark contrast with the framework. Three short ballets, Amoveo choreographed by Benjamin Millepied, with music by Philip Glass, Répliques by Nicolas Paul, to music by György Ligeti, and Genus by Wayne McGregor, to music by Joby Talbot and Deru.

Amoveo was danced against luminous chromatic computer-generated intersecting lines and rectangles over the top four fifths of the background slowly evolving to Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach music supporting the exquisitely difficult sequence of pas-de-deux, trios and ensemble dances that developed against the black lower fifth.

In contrast, Répliques is a ballet closely matched with and derived from Ligeti’s music, on a black stage, with architectural sets of tulles, both in front and in back of the action, separating scenic spaces and simultaneously linking them by dancers moving in close synchronicity, like time-delayed mirror images. It is a spare and moving reflection on identity and its perceptions.

The highlight of the evening was McGregor’s ballet Genus, reflecting upon Darwin’s theories of evolution. McGregor is fascinated by how changes in the mind and one’s sense of self inform physical movement. The dancers begin as swarms of protoplasm in a sea of primal life and evolve into sea creatures through evocative choreography, to finally come on land and triumphantly become humans. Toward the end of the piece, a screen reveals a kaleidoscope of images, glimpses of humanity’s greatest intellectual discoveries.

The other Opéra is on the vast Place de la Bastille that can accommodate the towering bulk in greys and blacks. It most closely resembles a stack of silver hat-boxes, curving out towards the Colonne de Juin over a massive staircase leading up to a third floor colonnade. The facade is broken up in squares, like the tiles on the space-shuttle, the windows are contained in the tesselated pattern and the building extends backwards several blocks down the rue de Lyon, that leads to the railway station of the same name, and the Avenue Daumesnil. There are no curlicues on this edifice, no gilded finials; only a sense of powerful repose, a presence of contained energy, a mountainous rootedness.



It was built between 1984 and 1989, designed by a then unknown Uruguayan architect, Carlos Ott, and opened on July 13th 1989, to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the taking of the Bastille prison. President Mitterrand intended the new Opéra to be more welcoming to the masses, more sociable than the Palais Garnier. Its 2700 seats, 500 more than Garnier, have all unobstructed views of the stage. The common areas have all the charm of an airport lounge, with polished marble floors and large glass windows offering sweeping views of the traffic swirling around the Bastille column. A succession of long straight staircases transport the audiences to the upper realms of the edifice.

The scenic space is reputed to be the largest in Europe, and allows for the sets to be erected completely off-stage and wheeled in whenever there is a change of scenery. The acoustics have been described as less than perfect.

Garnier nowadays specialises in ballet performances, and Bastille offers a solid program of classical and modern operas, 20 productions per season.

We watched “The Barber of Séville”, Rossini’s much beloved and much performed opera buffa, in a good production that ended, to the audience’s delight, in a patriotic display of soccer enthusiasm to support and celebrate the French national team, the cast suddenly producing small French flags and the tenor donning a blue T-shirt.

The famous melodies -from other performances- Largo al factotum (), La Calunnia () and other favorites are fresh and attractive for all kinds of audiences and we had a very good time .



Unfortunately we could not get tickets for any of the shows of the Opéra Comique. But we were able, with the help of friends, to see a fascinating show of varietés, at the theater of that name on the boulevard Montmartre. Four musicians, Pierre Ganem , Laurent Vercambre , Jean-Yves Lacombe , Jean-Claude Camors, once thwarted in their lofty artistic ambitions, pooled their abundant talents to create a show of musical comedy, a kind of Marx brothers with violins and other string instruments. For thirty years now they have presented a yearly renewed season of musical slapstick, a jubilant potpourri of jazz, classical, pop-tunes, film scores and inventions set to surrealist juxtapositions and evolutions. One hundred minutes of boundless talent exhibited to an adoring and enthralled audience.

Christmas markets in Cologne

When you arrive in the very busy Cologne Main Station (Hauptbahnhof), on the banks of the Rhine and next to the huge cathedral (Dom), as you come down the stairs and walk to the main concourse, because it is Christmas time, you will see a diorama , depicting a nativity scene (or crèche in French and Krippe in German). In all loving detail it represents a scene during Christmas 1944, a scene of rubble, burnt-out houses, small people pushing carts filed with broken bricks and masonry. The wall sign describes that the artist went into East Germany to find historically correct debris to strew around his work. He researched archives to find the proportions, dimensions and characteristics of the narrow houses along Cologne’s still medieval streets, to show them on that desolate Christmas before the end of World War II.



The main railway bridge out of the Bahnhof and over the Rhine into Deutz on the right bank is shown collapsed into the river, as are two other bridges further upstream, and, in streets leading from the station, the figure of the cardinal archbishop of Cologne helping with the moral uplift and redressing of the ancient city.

The artist’s intention is to remind the passer-by that Cologne was bombed two hundred and forty two times from the 30th of May 1942 onwards, and its downtown incinerated during frequent attacks by British and US air strikes on the German rail network. And, miraculously some will say, the enormous Gothic cathedral survived intact, or almost so, until the end of the conflict.

The Hohenzollern rail bridge over the Rhine, now rebuilt, is the busiest in Europe, carrying a train every two minutes, both local and regional passenger traffic, merchandise, and long-distance trains linking, for instance, Paris to Moscow. As the passenger emerges from the bustling station, s/he is immediately overwhelmed by the massive bulk, dark and spiky, of the Dom, the center and heart of Cologne.

The Cathedral was started in the 13th Century, and stood unfinished for many centuries. Germany’s unification and rise to power in the mid-1800s sufficiently inflamed the will of the people, coming together in a Society for cathedral building (Dombau Verein) to raise close to one billion of today’s dollars to complete the main façade and the two spires. In 1880 the cathedral was reconsecrated.

Its towers were during the following four years the tallest structure in the world surpassed in 1884 by the Washington Monument. Cologne cathedral is the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe, and follows the design of Amiens cathedral. It was conceived as the inspiration for Christianity and the fulcrum of German Catholicism. As such it is a pilgrimage site, as well as tourist attraction, and is a Unesco World Heritage site described as “a masterpiece of exceptional intrinsic value" and "a powerful testimony to the strength and persistence of Christian belief in medieval and modern Europe”.

From the square in front of the station the cathedral is more than all that. It stands, huge, massive and forbidding, darkened by wind, weather and smoke, thrusting spikes, towers, flying buttresses skyward, like a stone porcupine. It is inspiring and dreadful, a bridge from humanity to heaven, or maybe a desolate prayer to stop this ceaseless rain of death and destruction.



Once inside the scale of the building becomes apparent. The main nave extends backwards and upwards and the silvery organ hangs from the third floor on the side of the main vault. The temple is devoted to worship, and red-frocked church servants guard the entrance to the main body of benches in the center. A low wooden barrier separates the flock from the gawkers, and the mass proceeds for a double audience: the engaged believers and the outside churning crowd of onlookers. The High Mass as grandiose spectacle.



On Sunday the immense pealing of bells calls the faithful to prayer from the tall spires, answered and seconded by the bells from other churches in the city. On this First Sunday of Advent the crowds undoubtedly are arriving to fill the Christmas markets set up around the Dom, on the old market squares and the riverbanks. The merchants offer from wooden sheds all the wares associated with the Christmas celebration, from fir trees, silver and golden wraiths, stars, crystal balls, candles to children’s toys, presents for the grown ups and an unending variety of victuals, sweet and savoury, sausages, roast meats, christmas cakes, spice breads, cookies, marzipan, glog and beer to satisfy anybody’s palate, however jaded.

Nothing remotely medieval or ancient is left in Cologne outside the Römisch Germanisches Museum, right next to the cathedral. The city was destroyed during the second world war and was rebuilt, following the old street map, in the 1960s and 1970s. The architecture is solid, unpretentious and functional. Only lately some architects have begun to design landmark buildings. Some towers are rising, all at a respectful distance from the cathedral’s spires.

The old Cologne was founded by the Roman Empire as a garrison town in the mid first century. By AD 80 the city had a permanent aqueduct to supply it with water from the neighboring Eifel region. The Rhine was the natural barrier that the legions were unable to breach in any permanent way, although many attempts to bring this frontier to the river Elbe had been undertaken. German nationalism in the 19th century played-up the defeat of three Roman Legions under Publius Quintilius Varus by Arminius, chieftain of the Cherusker, himself educated in Rome and an officer of the auxiliary troops supporting the Roman advance. The Hermann monument, erected in 1870, commemorates (at the wrong site) the battle as the core of the German identity.

At the Römisch Germanisches Museum the Roman lifestyle of the city is documented by the excavations of sites uncovered around the cathedral as a result of Allied bombardment. Two wonderful mosaics from wealthy residences are the museum’s core holding, with domestic fixtures from Roman kitchens, bathrooms and sitting rooms. Today, while the subway lines are being built through the city, and whenever demolitions uncover medieval foundations, careful preservation is put in place to ensure full accessibility and visibility.

As we arrived in Cologne on Saturday evening, from a stop in Aachen, Charlemagne’s capital, the streets were teeming with shoppers, all stores open and lit-up. We wandered around for a while, and ended up in our hotel, a bit outside the downtown, quiet, functional and solid. Remember that German double beds sport individual cloudy comforters, for personal nesting. Once we had dropped our light luggage we left again to find a place for dinner. We ended at the Hotel Ernst am Dom, where we managed to persuade the concierge to get us a table in their Hanse Stube.

The meal can only be described as memorable. Both the concierge and our waiter were polished women, smoothly and smilingly polite without being distant. None of the jocular familiarity, frequent in US restaurants, that Stanley Fish portrays and deplored recently in the the New York Times. The word that most often is used in response to the customer’s requests is : “Gerne!”. that can be translated as:” I will do it with pleasure”. Compare that to the detestable “No problem” used in the US. Good service is about the client’s wishes, not her/his problems.!

Linda ordered and was served glazed crayfish in a light foam with miniature gnocchi, and I opted for sauteed veal sweetbreads on a bed of broth-braised brunoise of carrots and celery. As an amuse-gueule we were given small cups of superb consommé, covered in puff-pastry crust, as well as tiny canapés of salmon tartare, and foie-gras, green and black olive tapenade. With it I chose Auf der Mauer, a dry Riesling from the Rhein-Pfalz by Dr. Bassermann-Jordan.

On Sunday morning we had breakfast at the Café Riechert, next to the cathedral, to the pealing of ceremonious Christmas bells. Fresh, crisp croissants with preserves and a small pot of the superb full-bodied coffee that we found to be the rule in Germany. The rest of the day we spent poking around the Christmas markets and we ended up at the cafeteria of the Chocolate Museum, overlooking the Rhine, while the day slowly darkened. Then to the Thalys train, and three and a half hours later, back in Paris and home.

Spectacles1

I will now begin to share with you some the different spectacles that we have enjoyed during our stay in Paris. I have been repeatedly asked: “And what will you do for three months in Paris?”, predicting long stretches of boredom once the Tour Eiffel and the Bateaux Mouche and the Moulin Rouge have been exhausted, the last room of the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay explored (is that even possible?!) and all those croissants devoured. To which I used to respond by turning the question into: “And what will I not do while in Paris?”

The only limitation is the girth of the purse. So we have not done all that is available, but have chosen, from the infinite offerings of a large, civilized city, what we thought was worth while, and we could afford. And could get tickets to…..because, in the middle of the financial crisis every spectacle seems to be sold out quickly and several months in advance. For instance two days ago we saw an advertisement for a Jacques Offenbach concert in the Royal Theater at Versailles. By the time it took us to go to FNAC, the official venue for all concert tickets in Paris, only three seats at Euros 130 ($190) each were left. Guess what? We did not buy them.

One of the attractions of a large, civilized city is that it offers more than you can ever encompass and gives you the freedom of not doing anything at all. Like a restaurant with a huge menu that you read with pleasure, but then decide to fast.

Now let me warn you that I am not an Arts critic, I am not qualified, nor specialized to express any kind of criticism on any art form. What you will read in these chronicles entitled “Spectacles”, will be my view of what I witnessed, my opinion and the thoughts that crossed my mind before, during and after the spectacle.

Let me get started with the most recent, the freshest in my mind:



She is a barbarian! she is a romantic! She is a barbarous romantic!

Pina Bausch-- Juilliard, Paul Taylor and José Limón trained--was essentially the offspring of German Expressionist dance master Kurt Jooss. She died suddenly, only five days after being diagnosed with cancer, in June 2009.

The Paris Cinemathèque organized an homage to her work as choreographer and dancer for the Tanztheater Wuppertal, on occasion of her troupe’s yearly appearance at the Theatre de la Ville at the Châtelet. Jerome Cassou had been filming performances of the Tanztheater for four years with a shoulder-held camera, and the Cinemathèque Française premièred a ninety minute extract from this work.

Mr. Cassou emphasized repeatedly in his pre-show remarks that all the rushes had been viewed and approved by Pina herself, as he was progressing in his work. At no time was the choreography modified to allow for the filmographer’s presence, and the camera had to find its space in the ensemble, maneuvering along with the dancers in the very dynamic scene. The camera took the place of a spectator, a very intrusive yet invisible participant.

Rolf Bausch, Pina’s son, introduced the film with a short notice, where he stated the cinema’s two-dimensionality as a shortcoming in properly representing such a tridimensional art form as ballet. The close-up, he said, compensates only partially for this handicap.

Like many of us I first encountered Pina Bausch’s work in Pedro Almodovar’s film Talk to her, which features two of her ballets, Café Müller as prologue, and Masurca Fogo as end piece. Both pieces deal with break-ins and break-outs, of women imprisoned, dealing with isolation, un-communication, physical and psychological barriers.

Ms. Bausch frequently uses popular music, jazz tunes, Afro-caribbean drum beats, flamenco percussion to move her dancers. The pieces chosen by Mr. Cassou are all very dynamic, swiftly paced flows of movements and emotions. Ms. Bausch emphasizes highly energized swirls, circles, gyrations, of hair, arms, fabric, and props like water, petals, sand, flowers that the camera, because of its cinematic visual retentiveness of the image, decomposes and amplifies. The dancers circle in and out on themselves, around and against each other, around the stage in frantic rushes, alone or in duos and trios and repetition progressively intensifies the emotion that carries the movement.

Clothing is used to emphasize gender: reminiscent of Martha Graham, women wear long, flowing gowns or dresses with wide, expansive skirts, while male dancers are often clad in suits, or elements of suits, ties hanging out of pockets, flying from belts, shirts untucked. The flowing drapes in the back-ground have little to do with Fellinesque wispiness, but billow with the gravitas of canvas or taffeta.

That male-female relationships are often marked and marred by violence is a recurring theme in her work. Women are pushed, pulled, restrained by male dancers using various means, even furniture. Men fight and grab each other as well as their partners in recurring circles of caleidoscopically interchangeable partnerships.

But not all is grandiloquence: in every work shown are passages of small gestures, tenuous caresses to each other and to oneself, a lingering touch, the arms surrounding the head and face, hair as protection and titillation, fingers extended in defiance or splayed in desperation.

Ms. Bausch emphasizes the essential sexual nature of male-female interactions, throwing bodies together in violent encounters and rending separations, glorifying the haphazardness of desire’s unconscious impulses. Emotions are expressed by having the dancers dredging the audience’s deep repertoire of links between sounds and movement, movement and sensation, feelings and sounds, perception and rhythm, as continuously implanted by our interaction, day in and day out, willing or unwilling, with media.

The Tanztheater is meant as an extension to our established notion of ballet: highly trained and athletic people executing a sequenced series of movements to music. The name, in German, can mean “danced Theater” and it begins with dancers and music. But whereas classical and modern ballet is more about pure movement and a quest for formal beauty, Pina Bausch wants to show us the things that we, the audience, feel and do not know how to express, to tell us, with highly trained and athletic people moving to music, that we are not alone, that others feel the same, and show us how they feel it. Her work is composing stories, but distilling them away from the distracting plot, leaving only the pure expression of the meaning of being human, the signs and gestures that we give each other to break, as Kafka says, the ice that binds our souls.

Eating in Paris

Street markets


How do you shop for food in Paris? Mostly you walk the streets. Yes, there are the large supermarkets (grandes surfaces), like Carrefour, but they are limited to the outlying areas, where real estate prices and zonings make it possible to put together large venues. The problem, since the inception of the city, is how to distribute the day to day necessities to the consumer level.

There are smaller supermarket chains, like FranPrix and Monoprix (both flaunt the word prix in their name, to implant the idea that price is what they are all about) spread all through the city. And then there are the infinite variety of grocery stores, fruit and vegetable stores, bakeries (boulangeries) crowding each other on the most frequented sidewalks. Next to them you will find the different kinds of “traiteurs”, doing what we would call the take-out business.


Rue St. Antoine, 4th Arrondissement, Paris


For instance in my neighborhood, two blocks away on rue Saint Antoine, I turn left and I find a “charcutier” offering a dizzying array of meat-loaves (patés), baked in ovenware (terrines) or in crust (en croûte), with mushrooms (forestière), with different kinds of meats, mixed or side by side, plus pre-cooked entrées like sweetbreads with mushrooms in cream sauce, or salmon layered on crêpes with mayonnaise and blanched shredded vegetables, whole salmon baked and jellied, salads like celery root in mayonnaise, pasta salad, shredded carrot salad. My favorite lunch is hure parisienne, pressed pork tongues with pistachios and sherry jelly. The business of the charcutier goes back to the Middle Ages, when at the time of the slaughtering of animals, around St. Martin’s day, November 11th, in preparation for the winter months and the coming festivities at the end of the 40 day Martinmas fast (which in the Christian tradition is called Advent), the meats had to be prepared to last. The most common way of preserving meats is salting, making salt a prime trading commodity in the Ancient world. The via Salaria, bringing salt from the sea to Rome and to other points inland, runs right through the Roman Forum.

The charcutier would devise different ways of precooking, seasoning and preparing meats and poultry. The patés, by pressing the ingredients together and so excluding oxygen as much as possible, and then sterilizing by cooking in a closed container, plus a covering with a baked crust or a jelly, were meant to provide duration to perishable ingredients before mechanical cooling was possible. The coming winter in northerly latitudes helped to ensure the integrity of the larder.

In southerly climates the techniques were salting, spicing, curing and drying, leading to the unending array of andouilles, chorizos, capicolas, salumes, and merghez found around the Mediterranean.



Continuing along rue St. Antoine after my charcutier I find a cheese shop (fromager), where in this fall season, apart from the three hundred-odd cheese varieties common in France, on a huge paella flat pan, heated on a butane burner, a raclette is cooking, sliced potatoes cooked in bacon fat, covered in cheese slices. Walking on I can get a bottle of wine from either of the three small merchants within three hundred yards, a baguette from three different boulangers, some foie-gras (two merchants), fruit and vegetables from a fruiterer, who right now is offering cranberries and pomegranates from Southern France, cherimoyas (custard apple) and kaki’s from Spain and Tunisia, red and white Muscat grapes from Italy (I have reacquired the taste for grapes with seeds, so much more flavorful than the uniform seedless varieties obtainable in US supermarkets), artichokes, celery beets and fennel from around Paris, Italian and Spanish tomatoes, and seven varieties of wild and cultured mushrooms.

Further on two chocolatiers offer dozens of chocolate confections for every taste. Next door you can buy twenty varieties of honey. In between, a refrigerated counter displays Asiatic take-out, presented as any French traiteur. A bit further another shop specializes in sushi, and moving on chicken is roasting on a an eight spit roaster, with potatoes at the bottom to soak up all the good fat and juices. If you order you will have to decide on free-range (fermier) or battery bred. The happiness of chicken will cost you money.

In between all this abundance there is a straightforward meat merchant (boucher), offering the traditional cuts of meat, plus pre-cut trimmed and rolled pieces for your oven at home. Across the street a new fish-monger has just set up a gleaming shop, with twenty kinds of whole fish, and all the fillets thereof, plus fish and shellfish salads, and some four tables to eat right there. At this time of year oysters are on display everywhere, of French origin, Arcachon, Cancale and Marennes plus a number of smaller breeders (cultivateurs) with their own distribution networks.

Another block away, across the street is LeNotre, legendary patissier, exhibiting its confections in Art-Deco-ish frugality.


Boulevard Richard Lenoir. The Bastille column in background.

Once I have finished scoping my street, if it is Thursday before one pm I will walk five blocks further to the Boulevard Richard Lenoir to a neighborhood street market. It also sets up on Sundays. This market is medium sized, and combines with discount clothing. There are fish-mongers, fruiterers, cheese merchants, bakers, Italian specialties, Middle eastern dried fruit and pastries, fried dough in different forms, charcutiers, bouchers. Some are cooking paella, or boeuf bourguignon, wafting irresistible aromas towards you .

The fruit stands are predominantly peopled with North-African Maghreb (Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan) vendors who will tout their wares loudly and exchange loud taunts rich in the gutturals of their berber Arabic dialects. You will be enveloped in cries of “Goutez Monsieur” (taste it, Sir) while dodging proffered slices of melon, orange, peaches, and “Avec ceci?” (and with this?) encouraging you to purchase something else.



Marché des Enfants Rouges

Should I not be well provided for, I can walk a little further into the third arrondissement (ten blocks), to the covered and permanent Marché des Enfants Rouges accessible from the rue de Bretagne, reputedly the oldest in Paris, dating back to the 17th century. I read that it used to be an orphanage, and the children wore red tunics, hence the name. Being in the fashionable North Marais this little market is certainly more expensive than Richard Lenoir. Some of the merchants will serve a dozen tables within the market with their Moroccan, Latin American and Antillais meals.

Or, on the other side of the Bastille, following the Faubourg Saint Antoine for about a mile, I could reach the covered Beauvau and place de l’Aligré open markets, available daily.

At the latest count I identified 81 street markets, covered and open-air, active in the twenty arrondissements of Paris. They are supervised by the City of Paris, which provides the electrical outlets for the refrigeration equipment that the merchants need to bring to their sites, as well as the basic tube framing for the individual booths. The merchants pay a fee to the City, plus a sales tax, and the Value Added Tax that goes to the European Community, and the City will also take care of the clean-up after the periodic markets close.

Most of the food that comes into Paris passes through the huge Rungis market, the largest wholesale market in the world, near Orly Airport, on the crossroad of three main motorways, and with dedicated railroad access. It covers 573 acres, handles 1.5 million tons of fresh products per year, and employs 12,000 people. Owned by the French State, Rungis market rents facilities to 1300 wholesalers and importers and serves 18 million consumers. Food quality controls are done on site, by private enterprises to regulations from the French government and the European Community, monitored at local and regional level by Government experts.

The good thing is that sampling all those markets requires much walking around, which consumes calories. Enough, I hope.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day

In Cologne, Germany, the 12th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of 11th month of the year marks the beginning of Carnival season, that will end on Ash Wednesday 2010. But the 11th minute is still devoted to remembering the end of the First World War of 1914 to 1918.

Nowhere more so than in Paris. For the first time a German Chancellor, Ms. Angela Merkel did attend a ceremony under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris together with President Sarkozy. For it was the First World War, and what many consider its consequence, the Second from 1939 to 1945, that forged the European Union of today.

France was defeated by an upsurging German Empire in 1870, and lost two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. Since the end of the 17th century the Rhine had been France’s eastern frontier, but the 1870 war was fought to the tunes of “Die Wacht am Rhein” (the watch on the Rhine), the unofficial anthem of the German Empire proclaimed on France’s own soil at Versailles on that same year. Remember the sequence in Michael Curtiz’ Casablanca, when the Germans start singing in Rick’s café, and start a riot?

Still everybody claimed to have been surprised by the start of the next war in 1914. War by inadvertence? Some historians claimed that during the doldrums in July and August, the rigid plans of the General Staff’s on both sides let a minor conflict in the Balkans between the Austrian Empire and Serbia roll into a full fledged conflagration.

“Christmas in Berlin” was the cry on Paris’ streets in 1914, while German regiments in grey (Feldgrau) rolled through Belgium in punctual execution of a long-standing battle plan by Schlieffen, exerting Schreckligkeit (frightfulness) to ease their advance. The French went to battle in red pantaloons and blue jackets. Not for long, though.



The best laid plans ground to a standstill. The Schlieffen plan did not work out. The High Command on both sides had misinterpreted the consequences of the high technology that they were using. For the first time industrial warfare devoured resources at an unimaginable rate. The machine gun favored the defense, gun preparation of the battlefield could use a million shells in a few hours, units got lost as telephone wires from the front were cut by artillery fire. General staffs laid out plans and executed doctrines for a different age.

For instance the all-powerful British navy went into battle formation at Jutland (May 31st 1916) under Jellicoe, in steel ships throwing car sized projectiles to five miles away, with a Nelsonian mindset of wooden ships and close-up broadsides. Distrusting the information received by wireless, the Navy reverted to communication by signal flag in the dusk, along a twenty mile long line of battle.

In France the battles sank into the mud and the trenches. The high point of this warfare came at the defense of Verdun where the French and the German sacrificed millions of men in a six month confrontation without outcome.

The end came in exhaustion in November 1918. The world as it was then known had also ended. Germany and Austria sank into revolution, inflation and famine. The influenza, brought to Europe by the American soldiers, ravaged the weakened populations. The “victors” looked for righteous compensation.

Ads for fashion in 1920s France featured wedding dresses “for second marriages” and “widow’s clothing”. Because of a new awareness of human fallibility and the fragility of life and happiness the roaring twenties broke all the rules.

Disconcerted populations looking for stability and certainties turned to saving formulas and dogmas, and their strongmen. In response and emulation of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Dollfuss, Horty, and Pétain offered renewal, return to the old stability, by fire and discipline.

An enraged Germany thirsted for revenge. Pointedly, after France’s renewed defeat of 1940, Hitler insisted on signing the armistice in the same railcar in the forest of Compiegne where the German plenipotentiaries had signed the 1918 Armistice.

In 1945 Europe had reached its nadir. Again it had squandered its wealth and its young in six years (nine if you count the Spanish Civil War of 1936, where all the belligerents of 1939 were already involved) of immensely destructive warfare. 1945 was year 0 of European history.

The reconciliation of France and Germany was the precondition for the avoidance of continued conflict. Precursors like Jean Monnet, Robert Schumann, Konrad Adenauer, Kurt Schumacher worked, under US tutelage, to bring about an economic system that would make future wars impossible. From the initial Coal and Steel Community the framework evolved towards the Treaties of Rome in 1957, the Single European Act of 1987, and the European Union Treaty of 1992.

And on this 11th November 2009, one minute before the start of the Cologne Carnival, Germany and France came together under the Arc de Triomphe.

I would strongly recommend to watch the Michael Haneke film “The white Ribbon” (Palme d’Or in Cannes 2009) as a primer on German attitudes before 1914.