Our Sunday day trip

France-Méteo was set to rain on our Sunday, so we decided to pack the umbrellas and set off to Deauville, the paramount summer resort on the French side of the Channel.

At Bastille métro station the quais were unpeopled, the trains almost totally empty. At Châtelet we changed to the driverless train on line 14th towards Saint Lazare station. This line was inaugurated in its full length in 2007, and the technology has proven so successful that line 1, crossing Right Bank Paris from East to West (Défense to Château de Vincennes) is being outfitted for automation. Line 1 was already famous for running on rubber tires instead of steel wheels.





It takes two hours from Saint Lazare to Deauville Trouville, with a stop at Lisieux, site of the shrine to Saint Therèse of the Child Jésus with its large hilltop cathedral. Nicknamed the twenty-first Paris arrondissement, because of its closeness to Paris, Deauville is a very popular and posh seaside resort, the center of the Côte aux Fleurs.



The beneficent nature of bathing in sea-water was popularized by the 1822 visit to Dieppe by the Duchess of Berry, although it had been popular in England since the last decades of the 18th Century. The main resort on the estuary of the Touques river was Trouville, and when the town built a sea-break wall and mole, the river diverted a lot of sand onto the neighboring marshes. In the 1860s a group of entrepreneurs, led by a local physician, invested 360,000 francs in the purchase of the marshes adjoining the magnificent beach. They interested the Duc de Morny, Napoléon III’s half-brother and noted financier, in the venture. Avid horseman, Morny promoted the construction in 1862 of a race-track and in 1863 the extension of the rail line from Lisieux to facilitate communication with Paris. The developers then started planning the layout of the new town, modeling it on the plans that Haussmann was developing for Paris, so that a Parisian would feel immediately at ease on arrival.


Bathers, by Boudin, 1863

The rich and famous began building summer residences in Deauville, and Normandie became the horse-breeding center of France. The heyday of Deauville came shortly before the First World War when Monsieur Le Hoc, town mayor, met with the manager of the famous Maxim’s restaurant in Paris, and set in motion the building of a Casino, a boardwalk and the major hotels, the Normandy and the Royal. Paul Poiret, noted Parisian fashion designer, opened a boutique in Deauville and Coco Chanel, as yet unknown, followed suit on the way to her fabulous career. After the First World War a second race-track was built, as well as a golf course, The crazy years were on!

Everybody came to Deauville in the summer to see and be seen. Painters like Raoul Dufy and Picasso, musicians like Satie and Stravinsky, horse-lovers, golfers, financiers, financier wannabes, mountebanks, bookies, poets like Apollinaire and his friend Paul Guillaume, the collector and gallerist, as well as all kind of gawkers and hangers-on rubbed shoulders on the race-tracks, in the streets and at the parties.

Claude Lelouch made his film “A Man and a Woman” in Deauville and was awarded the 1966 Cannes Palme d’Or. Nowadays Deauville hosts two film festivals every year, the American and the Asian.


Place de Morny

We came to Deauville because I am a sucker for seasonal towns out of season. They look melancholic, its character uncloaked by the crowds. We had also taken the precaution of coming well prepared for the continuous rain forecast, and therefore not only did it not rain, but was somewhat sunny all day. So we strolled from the station towards the center of town, in search of the tourist bureau. The townscape was inviting and polished, favoring the fake half-timbered architecture called Norman. Houses are two or three stories high on average, and the sidewalk spaces offer an assortment of boutiques, cafés and restaurants, as expected in such a fashionable place. Streets are clean and well groomed, parking stripes fresh and gleaming.. The main square is called (a bit obviously) Duc de Morny, and is laid out in star form, like the Étoile in Paris, assembling eight spokes. But soon the town reverts to an orderly grid pattern, all right angles and squares. The main shopping area is around the Casino, with the usual luxury goods like Sonya Rykiel, Eric Bompard, Ralph Lauren, etc.

The Tourist office, where we got a town map and a restaurant list, is next to Town Hall, a timbered, turreted extravaganza, bedecked with yellow, tan and crimson hardy mums. Conversely the Casino, the original one from 1912, was thoroughly disappointing, sporting the usual claustrophobic red-velvet wrapped, twinkly appearance of most casinos in the world, except in Las Vegas. The basement houses a movie theater.



We walked along the boardwalk on the edge of the immense, carefully tended and combed sands of the stupendous beach, several miles long and half a mile wide, with an outgoing tide. Beyond the horizon, unseen but certain lay Dover’s white cliffs. We roamed out to the end of a jetty to a lighthouse marking the entrance to the harbor basin, where we lingered to watch the sail boats catch the lively breeze, lean into the wind and split the oncoming waves into plumes of spray. Then we turned around towards the boardwalk along the beach with a long row of cabins named after film stars from all countries. In summer, according to the postcards, you can also rent umbrellas with surround curtains to ensure your modesty while changing. On this Sunday the beach was populated by kite flyers, sand buggy riders, or families just soaking their feet, shoes in hand. Dads carried giggling ecstatic little girls on their shoulders, mothers ran after energetic four year olds. And dogs are banned from the beach, not a bad idea.



At around one pm we started looking for a place to eat. I kept pulling us towards the sea and we discovered precisely the place we had hoped for, called Bar de la Mer (Sea bar), with tables in the open, sheltered from the wind by plexiglass partitions, and heated with those propane powered mushrooms that transform al-fresco dining into all-warm meals. We eagerly sat down to an excellent menu of oysters and a grilled bar (a fish) with braised fennel for me; a sauteed salmon filet with braised endives for Linda; and a nice bottle of crisp Sancerre.

And we sat there on November 15th enjoying the wintery English Channel sky streaked with blue, greyish clouds lazily drifting by, looking at the quiet Atlantic, washed-out pale green waves carrying surfers in rubber suits amidst the backward spray. After a lazy hour we picked ourselves up again, walked southward along the beach towards some architecturally distinctive villas in the distance. All were shuttered, and looked asleep. One of them actually sported a crenelated tower. The chains closing the parking lots were encrusted with saline rust, defending empty spaces from non-existent four-wheeled trespassers.

Slowly we circled back to the center of town, past apartment blocks closed for the winter, along straight, plane tree lined streets, now bereft of leaves. We sat again on a café terrace among couples still working on the remnants of their meals. I noticed one pair who, having disposed of half a lobster each and an assortment of shellfish, were relentlessly attacking a tureen of boeuf bourguignon.

Our needs were more modest: coffee and a cassis sorbet and rum raisin ice cream. Then, on our feet again, across the river Touques to Trouville, the town whose thunder was stolen with panache by its parvenu neighbor. This was a working harbor with rusty vessels instead of shiny yachts, the quays lined with light trucks proclaiming that their trade was to grow mussels, “boucholer”, on poles out in the shallow bay. Another Casino here, also run by the Barriere organization, and an establishment offering “cures marines”, marine cures, but some letters had fallen off the sign.

By three o’clock we felt that we had reached the plenitude of what the local deities had to offer and we withdrew towards the train station, physically and spiritually sated. On the trip back I reflected on the quiet charm of these places once they are abandoned by the crowds that overrun them in season. All bluster aside, all passion spent, they go back to their real structure, start breathing and hoping and preparing, like Nature itself, for the renewal, the fun yet to come.

There is no such thing as French identity

Don’t you believe that the French do not like the USA! They may object to some things that we do, but they do love some of our stuff.



On Saturday, November 7th, quite deliberately, we walked up (or is it down?) the rue de Rivoli, to the Louvre. Now that the weather has turned to chilly and grey, the masses of tourists have thinned and some neighborhoods have become available again. As we approached the entrance to that super glitzy Carousel du Louvre underground mall, however, we saw a group of people standing on the sidewalk. Because there is a blockbuster show at the Louvre on the competition between Veronese, Titian and Tintoretto in Venice in the middle years of the sixteenth century, we were not much surprised. But the cloud of security guards around the main entrance, discreetly shepherding people, made us aware of something else going on. We skirted the line that started out in the street, and walked along its flank, into the vestibule, down two long flights of stairs onto the main concourse with its opulent stores on both sides. It was not really a line but a pipeline of hundreds, four or five abreast, of many ages, from young adults to seniors, some excitedly talking to each other, some quietly standing in expectation. We walked on for a quarter mile on this underground golden causeway, towards the main piazza, where the Louvre’s glass pyramid inverts, and its apex touches the floor. The pipeline was exactly constrained and delimited by velvet cords, on each side, separating the waiting crowd from the normal traffic of shoppers. A hubbub of commotion exploded afar every thirty seconds.



As we approached the main octagonal concourse, flooded in natural daylight from above, we could see to our left the main entrance to the Louvre’s hallowed precinct, with the security check-lines and ticket booths, in front of us the huge Virgin megastore. To our right, the line expanding into a controlled audience, a space occupied by a dozen of vigorously exercising youths in red and black and blue T-shirts, hollering and jumping up and down in a staged frenzy beneath a huge white apple on a glass pane. As traffic permitted, they admitted groups of people into the store.



The Apple Store has arrived in Paris, the first one on the European terra firma!

In characteristic style the storefront is all glass and the trademark glass staircase can be seen illuminated in the center of the store. The only identification is the brand’s logo, the white apple, floating on a pane of glass, from ground to ceiling, two floors high.

We did not attempt to enter the crowded store. It had opened at 8:30 am, now it was close to ten. Inside you could watch the people milling around the wooden tables loaded with all the Apple wares, as they are in New York, San Francisco and London. A trickle of people were walking out with the characteristic Apple shopping bag, closed by a drawstring. After Paris, openings are planned in Frankfurt and a second store in Paris. Apple is now selling in their stores more than a billion dollars worth of merchandise per year, worldwide.

The French seem to have taken to this American brand with enthusiasm. Apple computers are seen in corporate settings more in Paris than in the USA. You see them in hairdresser shops, lawyers offices, real estate agents. From our apartment’s window we look out into our neighbor’s window across the street: they own two iMacs. When the network fails, as it sometimes does, I check across the street to ascertain whether it is only my router or a more general downturn.

No wonder that Steve Jobs has been nominated as the CEO of the decade. The disciplined deployment of a brand concept over a wide array of products, the attention to detail, the controlled build-ups of excitement through a mixture of secretiveness and confidential glimpses that precede any launch, and, of course, the pace of innovation have moved Apple from an almost failed computer manufacturer in 1998, to the modern behemoth that drives whole segments of technology forward. Apple does not merely introduce a new product, it establishes a business model based on a specific product. The evolution of the iPod from an MP3 player to hub of the music business ls legendary. Similarly the iPhone could have been just another player in a much disputed arena, and instead it became a game changer, imitated by all. Relentlessly Apple stays abreast of others by evolving their products with continuous improvement setting a grueling pace for the industry and for us, the consumers.

France has launched, again, a debate on what it means to be French. What is the “identité nationale”? Periodically, since the industrial revolution, the French ask themselves the same question: do we have to evolve, do we have to become part of the nineteenth, twentieth or twenty-first century? Forests have been demolished and oceans of ink consumed on this question. The catastrophic 1940 defeat suffered under the onslaught of a new way of making war, the teutonic way, led to a soul-searching examination of “decadence”, the “vigor” of the race, the “essences” of Frenchness. The attacking nation, Germany, had undergone a similar gut-wrenching re-evaluation after its own defeat in 1918, leading into the Nazi dozen years. In France, in 1940, it led into the Petainist Vichy régime. Fernand Braudel, the illustrious French historian pointed out in an interview in the 1980s, at the end of his life, that you should not play games with identities (je ne veut pas que l’on s’amuse avec l’identité), as those discussions often end in totalitarianism.

It is, of course, the pervasive appearance on French urban landscapes of foreign brands, and especially American, like Starbucks, MacDonald’s, Subway, that launches the French psyche into these quests. The French have indulged frequently in inferiority complexes towards the USA. A famous book by Jean Jacques Servan Schreiber, “Le défi americain” (1967) -”The American challenge”- proposed an “americanization” of French “savoir-faire”, just as the Petainists wanted a new France of small farmers and shopkeepers. Braudel’s last work was called “L’identité de la France”, France’s identity, in which he concluded

« ni l'ordre politique, ni l'ordre social, ni l'ordre culturel ne réussissent à imposer une uniformité qui soit autre chose qu'une apparence »

“neither the political organization, nor the social organization, nor the cultural order can achieve a degree of uniformity that is more than an appearance.”

In the daily “Le Monde”, Jean François Bayard is quoted: “Il n'y a pas d'identité française" (“French identity, there is no such thing”) Of course, the present debate centers, not so much around business icons like the Apple store at the Louvre, but at the presence in France of the residual fruits of empire, the ethnic minorities from North and sub-Saharan Africa, who, already in the third and fourth generation are still trying to find a role in the country.




In the Institut du Monde Arabe (the Arab World Institute), a posh modern building on the Left Bank (by French architect Jean Nouvel), in an auditorium with leather covered reclining seats that felt like the inside of a Lexus, we heard the other night a fabulous jazz concert by Elie Maalouf, a keyboardist who describes himself as “Lebanese-Parisian”, surrounded by a multi-coloured, multi-gendered pick-up team of musicians.

Seems that some of those petro-dollars are coming back.

Rome!

This chronicle is dedicated specially to Leila Whittemore, our guide and inspiration on this trip to Rome.

Rome? On Seville, Camilo José Cela wrote: ...es una gran señora con la cara pringosa de literatura." (a great lady with a sticky face from all the literature). Rome is this wonderfully grand lady, albeit overripe, enveloped in picturesquely chaotic flowing robes, whom we would like scented with less patchouli, with a bosom that is a tad firmer, a girth more conducive to embraces, somewhat more attentive to personal hygiene and maybe more carefully coiffed before showing herself, but that we admire for her wit, generosity, opulence and welcoming smile; we know that she has made so many happy, and the scars of her many miseries are all too evident, and we perceive the smoldering fires in her eyes and heart, yes, she can and will make you happy too, if you have the courage to talk to her and the wisdom to break away before she possesses you. Her gifts are offered to all to the point of meaninglessness, but the wisdom of her hidden favors holds the sweetest taste and promise.

Lila Kedrova playing Bubulina in “Zorba, the Greek”? But Linda put it best: “We now know that Fellini was making documentaries.”

On a cool and crisp Sunday morning the only fitting thing to do was to wander into Saint Peter’s basilica, past the security checks, the magnetometers watched by inattentive blue blazered functionaries, into the stream of humanity. At some point a sloppy decision, mass only to the right, visit the architecture to the left; we went right, past the bronze doors, discreetly shepherded by impeccably clad young men in grey, with red ties. Rows of plastic chairs on the multicolored marble floors, mostly occupied, but with plenty of spaces to chose from. We were handed booklets, in Latin and Italian, from which we gleaned that the Holy Father himself was to officiate. Linda, always partial to royalty, rooted right there. From high above, from loudspeakers apparently made of marble, came soft angelic choirs. In our world electronics crackle and dissipate; not here, the sound floated down like dust from the hazy heights of the Bramante-MichelAngelo-Bernini-dellaPorta dome. Far away, but of a size that made it immediate, stood the Bernini “baldacchino”, the portal on four 100 feet tall elegantly twisted bronze columns shielding the papal altar. Sun was streaming in through the side widows of the cupola’s cylinder, leaving the rest of the immense space in half-dusk.



The music changed in texture and rhythm. This was going to be a mass to close the conference of African bishops, the Catholic Church's new frontier, and softly beating African drums underlaid Swahili, Kwa-Zulu, Twi, Afrikaans hymnals. The cyclical lyrics were underscored by swaying soft percussion, rounding and softening any primevalism, as if saying that the Church, mother to us all, expects its African children to lead it into the next centuries; it offers them redemption and a path to civility.

At ten o’clock sharp, a processional hymn preceded a bobbing stream of black heads in white hats and green chasubles, followed by cardinals in red. Finally, behind the cross on a staff, marched a small German gentleman all in white, also in a green chasuble. When he reached the baldacchino, he began the steps, evolutions and rituals of the High Catholic Mass. The choir worked through the Introito, the Kyrie, to the Homily. By the time the Credo came around, I was expecting a powerful blast of the organ pipes to “Credo in Unum Deum, Patrem Omnipotentem….”. But the Choir tastefully continued in the genteel tone of universal blandness. No Church triumphant here, but a kinder, gentler sea of thousand points of light.

We did not stay for the Eucharist, but discreetly stepped past the Swiss guards in their workaday powder-blue uniforms and képis, into the Bernini “columnata”, the twin ellipses of columns embracing the faithful gathered on Saint Peter’s square. Giant, high-definition screens provided a view, a highly and impeccably produced live view of the proceedings inside the Basilica. The cameras lovingly dwelled on the exotically clad black ladies in tall head-dresses, that brought readings and tidings from the Dark Continent. Vivid scarlet, blue, gold, stepped in and out of camera range. Close-ups of African nuns in grey white and blue veils bringing chalices of hosts for consecration. The German gentleman, who had counseled “corrrraggio” (courage) to his listeners with his guttural rolling “r’s”, very earnestly touched every chalice proferred. He looked slim, slight but without any frailty, a schist in a multisecular structure.

The outside audience and spectacle rounded out the interior, more mystical and atmospheric proceedings, into a well-organized, highly engineered package. The mediated representation becomes the real world.

From St. Peter’s we walked across the Sant’Angelo bridge, under the shadow of Hadrian’s tomb and the piled on superstructure that conforms the castle from whose battlements Floria Tosca is supposed to jump into the river Tiber in the eponymous opera by Puccini. Sant’Angelo is probably the structure that best represents Rome: on a millenial base, peoples. locals, invaders, have wrought their best and worst, destroying, robbing, repurposing, rebuilding to the whims of their moments. In the streets, whenever a Roman monument protrudes, we look down ten or twenty feet to the excavated bases of temples. The present city is built on the rubble of all the older ones.

But it is glorious rubble. Hitler wanted to rebuild Berlin to emulate Roman ruins. He did not get the opportunity for the glory, just for the rubble. The German imagination has always tended to the Classical South. From Goethe’s “Werther” to Sandra Nettlebeck’s “Mostly Martha”, the German gaze looks to Italy. So did the British, with their 18th and 19th Centuries “Grand Tours” and the spate of ladies wandering through Tuscany and Firenze to relieve their widowhood; even Noel Coward sung the adventures of Mrs. Wentworth-Brewster (rhymes with “goosed her”) in Capri.

We understand today that historical taxonomy fails us here. You cannot talk of pre-Christian Rome as separate from Papal Rome or present-day Rome because they are so closely interwoven. The Pantheon may be the oldest fully preserved site of worship in the world, but already at its erection it was meant to encompass and digest all the deities (Pan denotes ‘all’, and Theos refers to divinity) past, present and in effect future, as there is a fully functioning Catholic church, dedicated to Saint Mary and the Martyrs, but known in Rome as Santa Maria Rotonda (the round one) and the worship has ben repurposed today into a secular movement that drives thousands of visitors under its “oculus” (round opening in the cupola).

Any and all of the noted buildings in Rome have been constructed using ideas and materials ‘borrowed’ or looted from somewhere else. As the saying goes: “quod non fecerunt Barbari, fecerunt Barberini.” (What the Barbarians did not do, the Barberini - a Roman papal family- did.)

The Barberini Arms

The French flavor

What constitutes the charm of Paris? Which are the elements that have made it the tourist Mecca, the “must-see” capital of the Western world?

It is an ancient city, on a site inhabited continuously for over two thousand years; but other world cities, not only in Europe, have been occupied for even longer periods. Paris is built along and around a river, but this is rather common when you are thinking of establishing habitation. A river provides you with water, and with sanitation, as well as a means of transportation for people and supplies.

Does the attractiveness reside in the charm of its inhabitants? Many visitors complain that Paris would be perfect without the Parisians, of sharp and intemperate wit, and little patience for foreigners. Or in the leisurely pace of daily life? Paris is clogged with traffic and fast-paced crowds, like New York, London or Tokyo.

Yet there is no doubt that Paris is endowed with a distinct atmosphere, that makes its streets immediately recognizable and that has been imitated in many places around the world. The urban environment here is not strictly commercial and “bottom-line”, like New York, where art in the streets is added as an after-thought and a fiscal device. There is a deliberate effort by the people in charge of administering Paris to provide the urban furniture that will make life on the streets more pleasant and add the “flavor” that we so appreciate.

For instance during many years Paris was known for its “vespasiennes”, or “pissotières”, the public conveniences provided for the relief of urgent bodily functions, and so dear to the French novelist Roger Peyrefitte. The distinctive design covered the torso of the gentlemen inside, but left the feet and heads visible to passers-by. They have now been replaced by the automated concrete pill-boxes, flushed and sanitized after each user, that provide the privacy required to make them available to women. Initially they required the insertion of coins, but with the advent of a socialist Mayor, the fee was waived.

The most famous of the urban accoutrements on the streets of Paris are, without doubt, the Métro access stairs designed and built between 1900 and 1913 by the architect Héctor Guimard (1867-1942). Trained at the Êcole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris, in the principles and theories of Viollet-Le-Duc, he is one of the European architects who defined the style of Art Nouveau, with Victor Horta in Belgium, the Hoffmann workshops in Vienna as well as, in Barcelona, Gaudí and Puig i Cadafalch.

Some days ago I travelled with a friend of mine to GHM, a foundry east of Paris, in the little village of Sommevoire, where the Guimard entrances to the Métro were cast, and where the moulds are kept. This foundry was established here in 1840, on the site of an older foundry going back to about 1157. The iron ore was available without mining, on the surface, and abundant woods provided the fuel, while a small river assured the water. This conjunction of inputs gave birth in these areas to a profusion of large and small foundries and metallurgical workshops. Pont-a-Mousson with its steelworks lies a bit further east, on the Moselle river.

On the western approaches to the Alsace, this is flat and pleasant countryside, very much “la douce France” (sweet France), worked and reworked by the plow, providing the rich produce that is essential to Frenchness. The small villages cluster around old churches, there always is a bar or an inn, a boulangérie, a monument to the village dead in one or all the wars of the last two centuries. If you step out of the car you will be assailed by the smell of freshly baked bread, of the cattle near by.

Sommevoire is a company town. Most of the population works for the foundry and the jobs are handed on from father to son.

GHM has provided the urban furniture for Paris for more than a hundred years. In addition it owns the moulds to hundreds of figures and monuments designed by its own and other artists. The heyday of the industry came after the First World War, when any village of any relevance needed to put up monuments to its dead in the awful carnage of the Flanders battlefields.



From the GHM workshops also come the charming four caryatid green water fountains found in many Paris streets (one of them flows in the rue Saint Paul, near to my flat), as well as the candelabra on the Pont Alexandre III between the Invalides and the Grand Palais. GHM has provided lamp-posts to cities in the Middle East, and all over the world. On the day of my visit visitors from Morocco were looking at a range of fixtures to be installed on the streets of Rabat and Fés.

Near Sommevoire, on a little hill, lies Brienne-le-Chateau, site of the school where Carlo Buonaparte deposited in 1779 his 10 year old son, Nabulio, to be trained for an army career. Thirty-five years later Napoleon Bonaparte returned to Brienne with an army of 30,000 raw recruits to stop the advance of the Prussian army of the Sixth Coalition on Paris. Although he is reported to have won this battle, he abdicated for the first time on the 30th of March 1814. The school closed long ago, but the old chateau houses a small Napoleonic museum, where you can find, among other things, a hat that Napoleon might have worn.

In France, wherever you go, somebody or something is related to Napoleon.

Let's go to the movies!

Since the Frères Lumière held their first public exhibition of the “cinématographe” to a paying audience on December 28th 1905, in the basement of the Grand Café at the Boulevard des Capucines, Paris has been the city of movies. You may think that Los Angeles or Hollywood deserves that name, but where else than in Paris can you find 500 films shown per week in 365 venues? Where else can you catch up on any film that you may have missed, you lazy movie buff, in the last fifty years? And I don’t mean video, but real 35mm, 24 frames per second, film. Does Los Angeles have an authentic hundred year-old Chinese pagoda with attached cinema? Don’t give me that, Grauman’s is but a fledgling pastiche.

As I speak, Billy Wilder, Robert Aldrich and Truffaut retrospectives are running in three separate venues, Chaplin’s Gold Rush is to be seen at La Pagode. Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart go cheek to cheek at the Action cinemas, while the latest Tarantino and Soderberg blanket the city. Every Friday at midnight the Rocky Horror Show happens at the Studio Galande, (http://www.studiogalande.fr/), both on screen and in front of it. At the downtown monstrosity of Les Halles the UGC complex houses 23 screens with current movies, while two bays away the Forum des Images remasters and shows all the films owned by the Paris Municipality, some 6500, since the beginning of the 20th Century. Digitalization is proceeding as we speak, 5000 hours of films are already available in digital form, to be watched on demand in individual booths, group cabins or large screen.

Then there is, of course, the Cinemathèque Francaise, located in a made to measure building by Frank Gehry in the new Parc de Bercy. It is the love child of Henry Langlois, who undertook in 1936 to preserve, collect and show the best of the world’s moving images. This institution and the publication of the “Cahiers du Cinema” (Cinema notebooks), an unavoidable publication for filmmakers, film theorists, critics and film buffs, established Paris as the world capital of the art of cinema.

And in what other city can you find a street named “cours du Septième Art”? (reference to the Confucian six arts -rites, music, archery, charioteering, reading, writing, and arithmetic- and the seventh had to be added). It is in the 19th arrondissement, and I walked on it this morning.

I am trying to put together a list of historic venues, meaning movie houses that have been operating continuously for seventy five years ( a totally arbitrary number), and my spreadsheet contains over twenty already. Some of them are still run by the great-grandchildren of the original owners, and have suffered vicissitudes as the film industry has evolved. They have survived so far because of their owner’s passion for this art form, because there will always be a public who needs help in understanding the human condition and because a film lens is a wonderful instrument in skilled hands to examine its splendour and miseries.

You encounter film on the streets of Paris. During one of our walks Linda and I stopped to have coffee on a terrace, near the Gobelins metro station. At the next table sat a man, with retinue, who looked very familiar. We spent the evening searching for who he was: an elderly movie director, we concluded, and went down the list of alive 80 year olds. We discarded Claude Chabrol and Woody Allen, and settled on Eric Rohmer. But we did not muster the courage to bother him at his table, to find out who he might be. How do you do that? Ask him: “Ahem, we know that you are famous, we have enjoyed your work, but who are you?”

Meanwhile we have figured out that it was not Rohmer but Jacques Rivette, one of the surviving Nouvelle Vague film directors, director at some point of the Cahiers du Cinéma, and a seminal figure in film theory.

Immediately after this fortuitous encounter we watched the latest Tarantino. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, as Linda and I were walking south of the Jardin des Plantes, into the high-bourgeois Boulevard Arago, Glacières and Gobelins. We had been discussing some days ago whether I should see the film on my own, but as it came along in one of the cinemas we passed almost at starting time, she volunteered to come in with me and spent most of the film hiding her face on my shoulder while QT spilt everybody’s guts on the floor.

The way I read it Tarantino wanted to make the ultimate Nazi-hunter film, to end them all, while he is really talking about moviemaking and loving movies. He spoofs the Audie Murphy legend and film as well as all the John Wayne/Stallone Green Beret stuff. And the good guys are all Jewish and this is how they should have behaved instead of walking into those nasty camps. This is how wars are won, guys, not with your namby-pamby situation room meetings, and assessments and Congressional committees. In the end Hitler gets blown-up while watching a movie in Paris (sorry, I blew up that surprise) and the Second World war ends in Europe one year early.

There is a much-talked-about part of SS Col. Landa that Christopher Waltz hams way over the top, while Brad Pitt is spoofing John Wayne. There are graphic scalpings, people smithereened by machine gun fire (have you ever wondered how German machine guns never jam) and explosions galore, all that fun stuff. Nemesis turns out to be a blonde Jewish girl. Brother, that clever QT must have had a great time making this one!

As contrast watch, as we had done some days before at the Forum des Images, Truffaut’s “L’enfant sauvage” (The wild child), an ungimmicky retelling of the universal story of abandoned children reared by animals. Remember that Rome’s founders. Romulus and Remus, were reared by a she-wolf. Rudyard Kipling used the image to create Mowgli, child of the jungle, and Kim of India, and its most notable representation is, of course, Tarzan. The Anthropology Museum at the Quai de Branly, in Paris, recently staged a great exhibit on the latter.

But Truffaut’s film takes as a base the extant writings of Dr. J. G. Itard, considered the father of special education. In 1798 three hunters capture a naked boy in the forests of the Aveyron, of an estimated age of 11 or 12. Itard takes charge of him and tries to reincorporate him into the human species by providing the boy with sensory stimulation, and developing his communication skills. The film is a wonderful meditation of the things that make us human, on our basic animal instincts, on the predominance of nature/nurture in our humanity.

Films have formed all of us, influenced our outlook on life, shaped our opinions, our way of dressing, loving and living with each other. Each of us carries in our mental repertory images, a bit of dialogue, an attitude, a certain look or aspiration that we have learned, drunk or received from some film that we watched somewhere sometime. That was “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

La rentrée

The French, if you have forgotten, take four or five weeks of paid vacations, generally during the month of August. When we arrived on the 19th the city was half uninhabited, many restaurants and shops shuttered and exhibiting the sign asking the reader to “Patientez” (Be patient) and come back on the 30th or the 10th of September.

At that time the fifth season of Paris began. Apart from the usual Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter, in France, in September, there is “La rentrée”, the comeback. Movies open, theaters première new work, galleries stage new artists, and publishers launch new writers or new titles by known writers. The public is supposed to pay attention and admire all the newness.

Because in France, like everywhere else, too many writers compete for eyes. As a wannabe published writer said in Le Monde: “…..unless you have been raped by your father, have killed him or your best friend, or are recovering from any addiction, no publisher will touch you.” Among this year’s launched titles, apart from the inevitable Amélie Nothomb, a newcomer, Mathias Énard, freshly enthroned with the Livre Inter 2009 mention, offers "Zone", a thriller à la Dan Brown, but written in a breathless stream of consciousness flow of prose, à la James Joyce. I started to scale, with trepidation, the 515 page mountain of words, and was quickly taken captive.

Talking of Rome, the protagonist’s destination, he says: “….Rome’s center has been emptied in the same way, no more inhabitants, no more shops to feed the mouth, baubles and baubles and more baubles to lose your head in thousands upon thousands of T-shirts, hundreds of thousands of sneakers ties in the millions scarves to cover St. Peter’s, to surround the Colosseum to bury everything under this crap forever and let the tourist dig into this immense religious crapola to lighten their eyes with the avidity of discovery……”

Is this the destiny of every place that becomes a destination for tourists?. Confronted with the avalanches of people transported hither and thither by the mass tourism industry, in wide-body jet after wide-body jet, in caravans of buses, the uniqueness that was supposed to be their asset progressively gets buried in a worldwide wave of sameness. The three or four day tourist becomes the raw material of a massive machine whose marketing promises unending marvels and delivers long treks, long days, long lines to increasingly bored and dispirited individuals. The photo and the souvenir are their prize, the way to recall that, yes, indeed they have been there, they have filled their tedium filled days with more ambulatory tedium.

The destination becomes mere background, a disembodied collection of theatrical sets. In order to catch this unending flow of revenue producing humanity, the set pieces get refurbished, polished, covered in gold leaf, and vague narratives of history without context offered mechanically to increasingly jaded and glazed individuals, shuttled from hotel to hotel, from meal to meal, and from location to location. A marvelous time for everybody, photograph after photograph digitized to be viewed a couple of times and then, as zeros and ones, recorded deeper and deeper into layers of computer hard drives, never to be seen again.
This fever possesses also Paris. The surroundings of the Louvre, the arches of the rue de Rivoli are densely crowded with postcard racks, shelves of housewares inscribed with “I love Paris”, T-shirts, mugs and assorted paraphernalia that can be found with similar inscriptions in other cities all over the globe. The huge bateaux-mouches cruise the Seine beaming succinct mechanical references in four languages to what the incidental argonauts should be looking at, in spite of their more immediate interest in photographing each other or dozing off in the warm sun, and discharging them after an hour’s cruise towards their buses. The steps of the Sacré Coeur basilica are a sight to behold, blackened with hundreds of people sitting on them and looking out over the incomparable view of the huge city.

That is Paris’ saving grace. It is big, it can swallow those crowds and digest them, process them and send them on their way. Once you have decided to stop being a tourist you can easily step out of the flow, out of the predictable routes and become part of the city itself. Two short anecdotes: Some days ago a small group of Skidmore students had retained the services of a tour guide and a time slot to visit the fabulous Musée d’Orsay. All gathered at 9:30 am before the closed gates. At 10:00 am the expected opening did not happen. The lines of prospective visitors grew longer and longer until hundreds of people were milling around in the forecourt. 10:30 came and went. Close to 11 am the group was finally processed and let loose with the throngs of other visitors. People stood three and four deep before the paintings. By 11:30 everybody was tired and impatient and hot and dispirited. The reason for the delay: the Museum’s director had called a staff meeting for 9:30 am to outline plans for upcoming organizational changes hoping to dispatch it in half an hour. But the staff was allowed to ask questions and the Director had to answer them all….meanwhile, outside the world was waiting at the doors.

Two days later, Linda and I took a walk to the Trocadéro, had a lovely lunch at a café on the Ave. du Président Wilson, and walked into the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris. This City owned and run museum shows, among other things, the huge painting by Raoul Dufy, “La fée electricité” (The electric fairy). And I mean huge: over one hundred feet long and thirty feet high, commissioned for the 1937 Expo in Paris, it depicts 140 people who described, tamed, and used the electrical force, from Aristotle, through Galvani to Helmholtz and the President of Eléctricité de France (who paid for the painting) and, in the background, the effects and application of electricity, from jerking frogs’ legs, to moving trains.

That museum also houses the roomful of Matisse dancers that he painted for Dr. Barnes’ museum in Merion, PA. Due to faulty measurements they had to be painted twice, and a final version added for Matisse’s own satisfaction. And the set of furniture commissioned by the City of Paris for Georges VI of England state visit to the City...and paintings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Rouault, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Francis Picabia, Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio de Chirico, Kees van Dongen, Pierre Bonnard, Chaïm Soutine, André Derain, Suzanne Valadon, Maurice Utrillo, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, František Kupka, Juan Gris, Hans Bellmer, Jean Fautrier, Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Yves Klein, Pierre Soulages…

Two dozen other people wandered at their leisure with us through the halls. And it is free.

I am not telling you not to visit the Musée d’Orsay. It is a must. But pick your times, avoid the crowds and keep in mind that Paris is big and has many museums worth visiting. Use the cheaper fares and accommodations that the tour operators offer, but be creative and strike out on your own. Your rewards will surpass your expectations. Don’t buy any T-shirts!

Life and nothing but!

We have been in Paris a month now. Hard to believe!. Slowly we have embedded ourselves into the soft texture of the quartier. The blond lady at the news stand, walking back from the neighboring café, coffee cup in hand (a cup on a saucer, not a mug), greets me with a smile and a “Bonjour, Monsieur”. She assumes her post, framed by colorful magazine covers, shelves cluttered with newspapers and publications in several languages (French, English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, German). To step into her booth, she has to swing the front, articulated in the center, like a revolving door. She places her coffee cup carefully on the front shelf, steps up, sits down on a stool, adjusts her skirt and swings the front back around herself. It reminded me of a sequence in the first “Alien” film, the Ridley Scott one, when Sigourney Weaver, having detected the alien in the escape pod, carefully dons a space-suit, her armor, to face her altered surroundings. So this average French lady dons the information structure of the world, the interface of the world and the city. Then she stirs her coffee, sips it, takes my coins, hands me my paper. We are not strangers any more, we engage in this almost daily ritual, we share a structure.

Here begins my differentiation. Although you cannot be said to have “gone native” until you have familiarized yourself to the coins you handle, until you can tell whether the change that you have just received is correct by just glancing at them, and not turning them to read their denomination, this mutual recognition constitutes the shaping of a space in the daily fabric of the city for me to occupy.

We are beginning to adopt habits and actions that, although in some way mirroring our usual actions at home, are specific to the place, to the environment. We go to the market at Richard Lenoir on Thursdays and Sundays, we have settled on the boulangerie that offers the most tasteful baguette, I have found the two cafés in the neighborhood that will brew a cup of expresso for one euro flat. The bus numbers at the shelters have fleshed out to evoke destinations, schedules and streetscapes. Linda tells me that every day she instinctively finds a new route to walk to her classes, mazing and wending through the narrow streets with the unfamiliar names.

When we venture daily out of the quartier, I feel a bit adventurous, but I also distance myself from the throngs who people the guidebook sites; I am not a tourist anymore, I elevate myself to a different dimension. In the streets filled with fast-food places offering shawarma, falafel, hamburgers and fries, I quicken my pace and try to look alien to that civilization. If I want an ice-cream, it has to be Berthillon, I look askance at the heaps of prepared subs on the Place Saint Michel, and to the T-shirt vending pushcarts with their loads of aluminum Eiffel towers, adopting the practiced snobbery of the initiated. Linda reported excitedly that she had been stopped in the street by someone needing directions! And she was able to comply. The strike of the blade on her shoulder!

Yet I do not feel the quotidian as tiresome or faded. There is still the sensation of rebirth, of excitement, of newness. This familiarity is exciting in itself, the feeling of being able to master a new environment, of experiential enlargement. The little walk that I undertake most days, to get the newspaper, to buy a croissant, to walk along Saint-Antoine’s sidewalk, looking into the cafés and shop windows, the fromager with hundreds of cheeses, the chocolatier and his confections, the several wine-shops, past the restaurants, reading the slates where the daily menus are displayed, every day a similar trajectory, but always something new. I relish being able to feel the season changing; although it is still warm, and sunny most days, the trees near Saint-Paul are beginning to turn, and in the evenings a little chill presages a killing frost in the making. But most of all the changing displays of fruit in the stalls, every day a different offering, the mushrooms, first girolles, now cèpes, the first chestnuts and walnuts. Huge blackberries have joined the trays of raspberries, and two weeks ago the purple figs appeared, at seven Euros a kg.; they are now taking over every display, prices tumbling daily.

The menus in the restaurants have also evolved with the season, they are shorter on salads and the boeuf bourguignon and blanquettes de veau, food for the colder weather, have appeared on their slates. On some of the cooler days, the merchants do not push out the refrigerated ice-cream chests any more.

As I am sitting here now, in the apartment, windows open, I relish the city sounds pouring in the open window. The steps, the conversations of the passers-by, the rumble of the scooters, the children’s muted din in the schoolyards around us, the bells in the churches pealing the passage of time. Life all around me.

The New Grand Paris

Herzog and deMeuron


Let me say to begin with that I am a big city creature. I grew up roaming the streets of a rather ramshackle Madrid, still creaking and straining to overcome the miseries and deficiencies of the Spanish Civil War. Kids of my age, after school, used to test our manhood by jumping up on the bumpers of electric trolleys as they rolled by and jumping off when policemen came in sight. A thrill was seeing an aluminum coin placed on the rails as the tram arrived to watch it flattened by the behemoth. I used to spend my weekly allowance in the local cinema, two blocks from home, for a double feature of mostly American films.

Then I saw the city grow and develop around me. Open, derelict spaces that used to provide fields of dreams to me and my buddies, where we pursued redskins and became French Foreign Legionnaires, were built over into blocks of flats. Sundays, after homework, I used to ride the trams and the subway on a single ticket all around the system, to test how far I could go. New quarters filled up with people from the provinces, new shops and workshops sprung up in the commercial bays under the residential flats. Our curiosity had infinite possibilities to find new experiences.

That is why I was so interested today in an exhibit at the Palace de Chaillot on the concept of a Grand Paris, a look into the future. President Sarkozy called on ten architectural firms to provide visions of how Paris may look fifty years from now. Bernard Delanoe, the Socialist Mayor of Paris, is a great proponent of a new vision for Paris.

The Paris we see now, the city of lights, is largely a creation of the 1870s. The wide, tree lined boulevards, with broad sidewalks, the uniform height of the buildings, crowned with grey rounded mansarded roofs, are the result of the 17 years of planning by the Prefet de Paris, Baron Haussmann from 1853 to 1870. Whole intricate quarters of tightly crowded buildings on dark, narrow, insalubrious streets were razed to create straight lines of intersecting arteries. One of the unstated objectives was to provide clear fields of fire for the troops when called upon to repress the all-too frequent rebellions and mutinies. Enormous opportunities for speculation opened up and enriched many. To his credit the Baron lived exclusively on his salary as civil servant and died almost impecunious.

A trove of pre-Haussmann photographs of Paris have been found and are just now being exhibited at the Louvre des Antiquaires. Many libertarians, then and now, deplored the Haussmann vision as authoritarian. But the result is the Paris that we know today, and that millions of people come from all over the world to admire, to be charmed by this Parisian “je-ne-sais-quoi” which is synthesized and bowdlerized into the bundles of aluminum Eiffel towers of all sizes offered by mostly African street vendors.

Classical Paris has a rounded, vaguely elliptical shape. It has always been delimited and encircled by successive concentric defensive walls, from Phillippe Auguste, to Charles V, Adolphe Thiers and nowadays the Périphérique, the circular freeway built in the 1960s. Anything beyond that has been considered “banlieue”, the suburbs. Sarkozy, when he was Minister of the Interior, had a very fractious relationship with the “banlieusards”, the inhabitants of the municipalities surrounding Paris, mostly from the French-speaking countries in Africa. France offered them French citizenship while they were living in their home territories, but became much less welcoming once they arrived over here.

A quiz question: name the largest African city (after Cairo). Clue: it is not in Africa. Paris is home to 20% of the population of France, and, according to EU statistics is the largest urban area in Europe, ahead of London. Both London and Madrid have however larger densities of population (over 5,000 inhabitants per km/square) than Paris (3,200).

The architects who have been thinking over how Paris can confront the challenges of the twenty first century mention the uneven building density of the city, and point to in-fill development. All of them recognize the need for faster communications as the core of any plan to weave the different quartiers together, by using monorails and a network of high-speed trains, in addition to expanded Metro and RER lines.

But what all of them emphasize is the needs of post-Kyoto development, i.e. reducing the carbon footprint of the city, by encouraging the use of low emission individual means of transport, the use of communal transportation systems, the interweaving of rural areas into the mixed use residential and industrial areas, the rational use and reuse of water and that heretofore forbidden word: skyscrapers. See the heading image.

In what direction is the city going to develop? One team points to the Seine valley, toward Rouen and the Havre; another shows how present population centers around Paris could be expanded into 20 satellite cities of 500,000 inhabitants each, linked by high efficiency transportation networks.

None of this is possible without the political will to legislate deregulation and even without the possible creation of a super-authority to write the rules that would apply to the future Grand Paris, and finding the means to finance the needed infrastructure. The dialogue, however, has started, the exhibition is well attended and schools are bringing young students to visit it and comment on it. Some of the architects have remarked that the tenor and language of the different supervising authorities, the Paris City Hall, the regional Ile-de-France administration and the French Government is beginning to converge.

Today Reims

Yesterday Linda and I decided, almost on the spur of the moment, to traipse to Reims. I wanted to see the cathedral, the purest of Gothic edifices; some even call it the most perfect Gothic cathedral ever built. Clovis, the first acknowledged king of France, was baptized there, bringing the Frankish kingdom into the realm of Christendom. Most Kings of France have been consecrated there, the last one in 1825 and the Germans, during their last Eastern offensive in September 1914, to demonstrate their “Schrecklichkeit”, almost destroyed it. France moved immediately after the end of the war to rebuild this symbol of nationhood, and international philanthropy by the likes of John D. Rockefeller helped finance the effort.

From Bastille the Gare de l’Est is only five stops away. The station has recently been redone, a very pleasant shopping center added, with direct access to lines 5 and 7 of the Métro.Ticketing is electronic, on touch-screen kiosks, or at pleasant well-lit counters. We encountered only nominal lines, and within minutes were sitting in the Train de Grande Vitesse (TGV) that left sharply on time. The 90 miles were covered in 45 minutes, and we arrived right into the center of town, the station opening onto a large park with a statue in the middle, and on the other side a wide pedestrian boulevard lined with an endless array of restaurants and cafés, terrace after terrace, for the repose of the weary traveller.

We directly proceeded to the cathedral, dominating the city. The towers are visible up to 30 miles away, casting their sacred glow over the Champagne plain. No wonder that the Germans, recently rebuffed on the Marne and consolidating their line on the Aisne, were tempted to exercise their marksmanship.

It is richly decorated, covered with close to 3,000 statues, of kings, bishops, saints and angels, many of whom are very damaged by weather and pollution. Now and ever, the cathedral has been a work in progress. The story of its construction, damage by diverse fires and wars, reconstructions, remodeling and preservation is endless. There seems to have been, over the centuries, a continuous cloud of scaffolding around the church. Today it is the left western tower where the activity is concentrated. In the adjoining museum, le Palais de Tau, next the archbishop’s palace, many of the original XII and XIII century statues, four to seven meters tall, are being kept in their eroded state, having been replaced by more or less modern reproductions. The artists now employ digitisation to “feel” the outlines of the sculptures. But because of the weather and time ravages, these outlines are not what they were originally, so the last inch or so has to be imaged (and imagined) before being recreated in stone anew. I find the originals, in their fuzzy state, to be very much more moving than their replacements.

It is such a powerful site! I have to admit that certain places have the accumulated strength of other people’s belief, efforts and faith. The continuous energy, the mobilization of the means to preserve, to recreate, the demands of the endless struggle against time and the elements. It reminds you of the unlikely places where trees and plants will take root, in nooks and crannies, in the slightest accumulation of dirt, the will to life.. It gets to you. Many other sites have this energy, the Parthenon in Athens, the Temple Wall in Jerusalem, well Jerusalem as a whole.

Linda was overpowered by the spirit of the place, and she decided to light a candle to, in a way, join the feeling of communal pleading.

And Reims is overpowering. The cathedral is the most vertical, pure straight lines and lances and arrows to heaven, such a pleading to a manifestation from above, under a silent grey sky-dome. The inside is austere and soaring and light. Many of the stained glass windows were destroyed, but many remain, and some are modern. In 1957 the Champagne wine industry donated a magnificent window about vintners and wine and vines. Chagall, in 1974, completed three windows in blues and reds with a strong happy Christ, more open-armed than crucified.  

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21506908@N07/2108492950/

To see a Gothic cathedral, skip Notre Dame, overcrowded and overpublicized. There is not much in it left after the successive revolutions in Paris. Go to Reims, or Amiens, or Beauvais.

Thereafter we drifted into more mundane stuff: I had found a restaurant, “Les Crayeres” on the Pommery estate (http://www.lescrayeres.com/lechateau_4.html). We had a dreamy meal. No cuisine nouvelle, the good old techniques, lightened up and très réussies.

It takes its name from the deep wells dug since Gallo-Roman times to extract chalk from the subsoil, deep to 100 feet or more, and transformed by the wine industry into cellars to let Champagne bubbly mature and become. All the brands have connected these pits with miles and miles of galleries. We visited, after lunch, the Pommery caves, 116 steps down a long staircase, where, in the moist and cool depths of the earth a modern art exhibit was being prepared for opening that same afternoon. 22 million bottles of Champagne in that cellar alone. Quite a party!



Striking to me was that the industry seems to have been founded by women, once their husbands had stopped bothering them: Mme. Jeanne Pommery established the first underground cellars; and we have also Phillippe Clicquot’s widow, born in 1777, who became the moving spirit of the House of Clicquot, whose CEO is nowadays Mme. Cécile Bonnefond.

Well fortified and at peace, we walked back to the station and boarded a slower train back. We had to change at Epernay, and coasted along the River Marne towards Meaux (good mustard! and another cathedral) and Paris. I reminisced on those days in September 1914, when the German armies decided to retreat along these same grounds, from Epernay and Dormans towards the North, pursued by Sir John French and the exhausted British Expeditionary Force, and the French Third Army under Maunoury, reinforced by the troops out of Paris, travelling to the front in the famous taxicabs (600 of them, and some demanded their fares from the Minister of War). The Germans settled for three more years along the heights above the Aisne river, and trench warfare was invented.

We arrived back home, tired, happy and fulfilled.

Day to day electronics

We all know, because we have been told many times, that the USA is the most electronically advanced country in the world, has the largest number of personal computers in the world, and that nowhere is the broadband penetration larger: 60% apparently. We have just read of a computer whiz who has been sued by Goldman Sachs for stealing another esoteric algorithm that enables the banks to trade shares away from you in milliseconds when you have shown an inclination to buy them, and then resell them to you for a couple of pennies more. Wondrous!

Which is why I was so flabbergasted to see, on the streets of Paris, several clever and useful applications that actually do something for the average citizen:

Linda and I went into a small post office on the rue des Francs Bourgeois, because she wanted to mail a letter to the USA. There was small line, about five people. It was about lunch time. Suddenly a postal worker in shirtsleeves approached us to find out what we were trying to do. When we explained, he smiled, turned around and pointed to a yellow and blue box, standing about three feet high; Linda placed the letter on top of the machine. A screen lit up, with the letter’s weight and five destination buttons, marked EU, USA and the Americas, and so on. She pressed the USA button and the screen indicated that we should deposit 0.85 Euros. After the last coin had dropped, it printed and spit out a self-adhesive stamp of that value. I affixed it to the letter. The gentleman pointed towards a letterbox next to the machine. He said: “Et voila!”, smiled again, returned to his cubicle and waved us on our way.

The municipal buses in Paris are GPS equipped. As they approach a stop, a screen lights up with its name; in some a voice will tell you whether the next stop is Sèvres-Babylone or Vaneau, whatever the case may be. The screen will remind you what line you are on, the end of the line, and the estimated time to get there, as well as the estimated time to certain critical points on the line. While you are waiting for the bus in the glass kiosk, an LCD screen will tell you how many minutes you will have to wait for the next bus, and guess what?…. it is right.

If for some unlikely reason while lying in the sun on the lawn in a Paris park, say the Tuileries, or the Luxembourg gardens, or the new Park de la Villette, you should feel the urge to check your email, you can do so, via WiFi courtesy of the Paris municipality. Cost to you, zero, zilch, nada. You will say, yes, but the taxpayer pays for it, and you will be right. The taxpayer pays also for many other things that are not useful to him directly, and here the young, who are the most likely to want to use a laptop while in the park and pay the least taxes, will have an advantage.

In restaurants, originally no doubt because of the distrust of Europeans towards credit cards and the much publicized frauds connected with them, the waiter does not collect your card to walk it to the cash register any more. S/he will bring a small gadget to your table, swipe the card in front of you, and the gadget will spit out two receipts, one for you to sign and hand over, and the other for you to keep. No wires, no fuss, fully transparent, efficient.

And another adventure, that even flabbergasted some French friends when we told them: Linda came home from the supermarket, and she was uncertain to have received the correct change out of a 20 Euro note. We went down again, receipt in hand, to the supermarket, located the cashier, and very calmly I explained our doubts to her, requesting that she take our phone number, and to call us if at the end of the shift she noticed an overage. She smiled, finished her next customer, and said that she would do it right away. She called the supervisor, and while s/he was on the way, produced from under the counter a device that turned out to be an electronic scale. In a few seconds she was weighing each of the coin receptacles in her cash register, followed by the bundles of bank notes of five, ten, twenty and fifty Euros. They are equipped with electronically readable denomination strips. Within a minute she had completed the survey of her cash receipts, and had a total. The supervisor arrived with the amount the computer indicated that register had sold to that moment, and “Voila, Madame!”, a ten Euro note was produced and handed over. Then she turned to her next customer and continued with her work.

What I liked the most is that at no time the word “sorry” was used. It was treated matter- of-factly, cleanly, expeditiously. Another successful transaction in a busy day.

Aren’t you tired of people giving you profuse excuses instead of solutions?

Stepping towards food

Roger Cohen’s column in yesterday’s New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/opinion/31iht-edcohen.html?_r=1) beautifully said much of what I had been mulling for some days. To wit: I posit that the French have a different attitude toward food than Americans, even Michael Pollan. Let me say first that I hesitate to use the term “American” in the sense of covering all of the inhabitants of the USA. This is an old Spanish hang-up, because we feel that Argentinians and Brazilians and Venezuelans and Panamanians can also be designated by that geographic term. But it is a sign of the US predominance and weight both North and South, that they have come to designate themselves with a toponymic that actually should be shared.

And, of course, not all of the US Americans share the same attitudes about food and eating. Whatever they are, they are different from the French. I suspect that I could safely generalize by saying that Americans approach food with suspicion, they want to know what is in it (unless it is a raw carrot, for instance), and wonder if it will harm them. The French are more trusting, they aim at a finished product, a flavor effect that is understood. To explain myself, they know what to expect from “moules marinière” without having to know that it is a dish of mussels steamed in white wine and broth, seasoned with onions and garlic and parsley. They will -I would include myself- argue about the particular merits of a “boeuf bourguignon” and attribute the success of the production on the inclusion or exclusion of a certain ingredient, even if they do not identify it (that is where the expression “un certain je-ne-sais-quoi” -a certain I do not know what, comes from).

I remarked the other day that it is rare to see anybody munching a sandwich while walking on the streets, or carrying a large latte in their hands. It is part of that attitude towards eating that understands that it will take a certain time, it is best done sitting down and in the company of friends. At 12 noon the terraces, cafés, restaurants, trattorias, bistrots, estaminets and casse-croutes fill with office employees all over town who will devote the next hour or so to consume a meal offered under the name “formule” -as in proposal- covering generally a meat, mostly beef in different forms, with a salad, french fried potatoes and possibly a dessert. The price will lie, according to location and quality of the establishment, between 8 and 20 Euros (presently $12- $30), will include bottled water, though generally not the concluding expresso. If you want, MacDonald’s offers much of the same, and I am sure that their Paris establishments do brisk business, but they are not the favored venue for most people.

Therefore I reach the conclusion that the French are more inclined to devote both more time and disposable income to what they ingest than the average American. They also seem to enjoy it more.

The fact that many people walk through the streets of Paris has to do, in my view, that they have more places to walk to, like restaurants and cafés, movie theaters and other venues, as well as a plethora of shops of all descriptions spread out all over the city, in all quarters, and of many price ranges. As most tourists or three-day visitors to Paris never find out, you do not have to pay $10 for a small bottle of Perrier or a short beer. It is available for half that two or three blocks away from the madding crowd. As an example I can drink a morning coffee with croissant on the rue de Rivoli, near the Louvre for $7.50, or downstairs from my apartment on the same rue de Rivoli, now called rue Saint Antoine, for $4.

Nothing is pleasanter, in my opinion, than stepping out in the morning, walking two blocks to buy a baguette and a newspaper, coming back home and, after a while, descending again to the fruiterer, or to the fishmonger or wine merchant, stopping for an expresso on the way. It is not a matter of being modern or not, it is pleasant. Even if you have a busy morning making money instead of spending it, you will find pleasure in closing a deal initiated over email at a restaurant table. And as long as they find it pleasant, people will want to continue doing it.

It is this pleasure, and the walking, and the eating only at certain traditional times and nothing in between, that keep, I think, the remarkable outline of Parisian bodies.

Somebody commented on Roger Cohen’s openly Francophile article, saying that the USA’s per capita GDP grew last year by 50% more than France’s. Seeing that per capita GDP is an average and therefore a very fallacious measure, I think that such a remark can only stem from envy.

But, of course, I could be wrong.

Paul Krugman: Missing Richard Nixon

August 31, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Missing Richard Nixon

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Many of the retrospectives on Ted Kennedy’s life mention his regret that he didn’t accept Richard Nixon’s offer of a bipartisan health care deal. The moral some commentators take from that regret is that today’s health care reformers should do what Mr. Kennedy balked at doing back then, and reach out to the other side.

But it’s a bad analogy, because today’s political scene is nothing like that of the early 1970s. In fact, surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.

But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.

As many people have pointed out, Nixon’s proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger. Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers; Nixon proposed requiring that all employers, not just large companies, offer insurance.

Nixon also embraced tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to “approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures.” No illusions there about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems.

So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?

Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the “death panel” lies?

But there’s another reason health care reform is much harder now than it would have been under Nixon: the vast expansion of corporate influence.

We tend to think of the way things are now, with a huge army of lobbyists permanently camped in the corridors of power, with corporations prepared to unleash misleading ads and organize fake grass-roots protests against any legislation that threatens their bottom line, as the way it always was. But our corporate-cash-dominated system is a relatively recent creation, dating mainly from the late 1970s.

And now that this system exists, reform of any kind has become extremely difficult. That’s especially true for health care, where growing spending has made the vested interests far more powerful than they were in Nixon’s day. The health insurance industry, in particular, saw its premiums go from 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1970 to 5.5 percent in 2007, so that a once minor player has become a political behemoth, one that is currently spending $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress.

That spending fuels debates that otherwise seem incomprehensible. Why are “centrist” Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota so opposed to letting a public plan, in which Americans can buy their insurance directly from the government, compete with private insurers? Never mind their often incoherent arguments; what it comes down to is the money.

Given the combination of G.O.P. extremism and corporate power, it’s now doubtful whether health reform, even if we get it — which is by no means certain — will be anywhere near as good as Nixon’s proposal, even though Democrats control the White House and have a large Congressional majority.

And what about other challenges? Every desperately needed reform I can think of, from controlling greenhouse gases to restoring fiscal balance, will have to run the same gantlet of lobbying and lies.

I’m not saying that reformers should give up. They do, however, have to realize what they’re up against. There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a “transformational” president — but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system.


Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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I am sure they will not be missed

Things that I do not need and will not miss!

Grande lattes
Supersizing
Those plastic chairs that they sell at Home Depot for $6 that bend this way and that, and that some outdoors terraces use for their customers to sit down in. Don’t see them here, and good riddance.
Lots of ice in your drinks. Get them cold from the refrigerator, but don’t dilute them.

More to come.

I will have to write about small things, while still in the thrall of exoticism. After some weeks I presume that the observations will get subsumed in the quotidian.

The homeless are present on the street of Paris, like everywhere else. They are not called homeless, though; they are designated under the nicely taxonomic and unemotional name of “sans addresse”, without an address.

On our way along the Faubourg Saint Antoine (a busy street) we saw a lady in a raincoat and a headscarf lying on the ground next to her crutches, stirring sugar into her expresso cup, before starting her daily begging job.

Everybody does a lot of walking. It is rare to see anybody eating or drinking while they walk, and those are mostly tourists. I used to think that thirty minutes per day on the Precor qualified as exercise: here, in the first days, I was charleyhorsed to death, but now I am building real stamina.

Yesterday,Thursday, we walked for four hours. Because Linda was feeling unwell, we requested an appointment at the American Hospital, where we were snottily dismissed until next week, and threatened with a $150 charge if we did not show up. Consequently we located a clinic downtown and walked there. We could easily have taken the Metro or the bus, but we thought it would be more fun to walk and watch the neighborhoods and the people. We got to the clinic, next to the Gare St. Lazare, at around 10 am, without an appointment. We waited for about fifteen minutes, and were seen by a general practitioner, in a well equipped small office, who looked at Linda’s throat, wrote a prescription for three products, put her mind at rest with a laughing reference to “Microbes, microbes!” and sent us on our way. Cost: Euros 28 (about $45), and the receptionist was not very sure on how to handle a paying customer. In the pharmacy, just across the street, as we lacked the universal medical card that everyone carries, there was some confusion on how to enter a cash transaction for Euros 19 ($27 aprox.),
The whole medical event took about an hour. Then we happily went to lunch on the roof of Le Printemps for an all-around spectacular view of Paris under a cool blue sky.

Steps and stones

In the two narrow streets where our third floor apartment overlooks a corner the most reverberating sounds are the scooter engines flitting by day and night, and the clickety -clack of shoe heels against the pavement, until the last neighbors have retired home. It is summer and as people like to stay up and enjoy the cooler evenings their conversations flow out of the open windows, a higher-pitched, staccato sound over the background buzz of the great city around us.

We are just three blocks south of Saint Antoine, a busy thoroughfare that becomes rue de Rivoli to the West, and, to the East, across the Bastille with its high green column crowned by golden angels and its carousel of cars swirling around it, becomes the rue du Faubourg de Saint Antoine. This is revolutionary Paris; even today the great convocations of the left meet where the Bastille used to stand and unfold toward the Place de la Republique, further North. The column commemorates the three days in June 1830 when the people of Paris rose up to overthrow the ancient, tired, inept Bourbon monarchy, who, as the saying goes “neither learns nor forgets”.

Few cities in the world have a history as soaked in blood as Paris. A very fanciful writer said that if you stepped hard enough on the cobblestones of what is today the place de la Concorde, you could see the blood seeping up. The romantic Seine flows over myriad bones. As late as the 1960’s the Paris police rounded up Algerians in the wake of a succession of terrorist bombings, and stupidly dumped hundreds of their bodies into the river, where they bloated and floated. Modern attempts to clean up the Marsellaise, the French national anthem, eliminating that part of its lyrics that refers to the enemies’ blood soaking the homeland furrows, have successfully been resisted.

Cobblestones, that other component of the romantic haze, have been the people’s weapon of choice, century after century. A call to the barricades was a call to dig up the streets and use the stones to obstruct the way of the cavalry. After the violent and protracted student uprising in 1968 the municipality finally decided to repave the Boulevard St. Germain with asphalt.

The relationship between the French Government of whatever stripe and the people of Paris, be they subjects or citizens, has always been fraught. The temper of the city is skeptical and sour towards whoever holds power. In spite of being the cradle of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the French nation has loved few of its rulers, and those it loved often showed little respect for that document. The Revolution was not made for love or by charismatic men and women, it was driven by indignation and power-grabbing.

Napoleon, to a point, was loved because of the adroit propaganda that he unleashed around his person. The concept of French glory and grandeur he took from the overthrown monarchy; but when the cost of so much war started to weigh too heavily, the love was gone.

De Gaulle was probably more respected than loved to the end. Fortunately he was a wonderful foil for cartoonists and comedians, who imitated and spoofed his style, manner and diction, thus bringing him nearer to everyday man.

The most recent uprising of Parisians in the latter years of the 1900’s was against the building of skyscrapers in down-town Paris; a protracted media campaign under the motto “Paris-Las Vegas, a city that only Americans could love” after the Tour Montparnasse was built, pushed developers towards the outskirts in La Défense, and the Francois Mitterand National Library was planted out of the way upstream of classical Hausmannian Paris.

One step more and there we are!

We have been in Paris since Wednesday morning. On arriving, sticky and disheveled, the luggage hall was packed with pasty people in funny clothes in various degrees of sunburn. Air Madagascar’s Airbus had just disgorged its load of French vacationers, still disbelieving that they were back home. The baggage conveyor along the wall was slowly spewing forth their belongings, and we stood four deep peeking over shoulders to recognize ours. For the most part deodorants and air conditioning had given up, and our three hundred strong Newark contingent added more heat to the gathering. A man at the baggage desk was holding a long conversation in Arabic, pouring vowels into the phone and pausing for short periods of listening. Into one of his silences I tried to explain how I did not expect our luggage to be on the plane and could we start the paperwork right away? Please, of course? He looked at me with a slightly reproachful mien for having interrupted so rudely his fascinating exchange….but three pauses later he smiled and asked me not to worry, as soon as the last piece of baggage was on the conveyor a faithful informer would phone him (if he ever hung up), and we could get on with our business then. Meanwhile, please scoot.

At the conveyor I made the acquaintance of a man, like myself just arrived on Continental, who told me all about all of his experiences with luggage retrieval in various airports of the world (but he did not seem to want to hear of my similar experiences), and how his friends in Paris were waiting for him to join them on the Glacier Express in Switzerland. 91 tunnels and 291 bridges were in his 6000 feet high future.

Luckily and amazingly and comfortingly our three pieces of checked luggage were in our present. Those guys at Continental really did a heroic job in rushing them from the arriving flight onto the departing one in less than fifteen minutes. They also took time to draw smiley faces on the labels. Thanks guys, you are amazing!

Any airport looks good compared to JFK. In NY the taxis and buses are dirty and dented, personalized to the temper of the city. Here we were surprised as the security guys, the French Army in full gear, a man and a woman, gently nudged us towards a queue where we picked up a spotless Mercedes taxi in less than ten minutes, with throngs of returning vacationers swirling around us. Thirty minutes later we reached our address in central Paris.

In front of the house that contains our apartment stood a man of about my age, looking somewhat agitated. His daughter had asked him to feed the cat and water the plants while she was on the beach, and this morning the electricity had failed and none of the security devices on the building’s doors would work. He could hear the famished cat, but was unable to raise anybody to come down and open the door. Everybody must be away on vacation, probably including the repair people!. We deposited our bags in the hall of a neighboring small hotel and left to have some breakfast. When we returned about 45 minutes later the gentleman must have done his job and gone home. We never found out what had happened.

Carefully following the instructions we had in writing we conquered two successive doors with different codes and pin numbers on separate keypads and one key. Thirdly the apartment door was also secured with a massive key. But, we were in, ready, dirty and exhausted. But that café au lait with croissant was heaven.

Travel with the Ullmanns! See the world! Listen up! This is how we began.

As planned, and with a friend’s kind help, we loaded the five pieces of luggage resulting from weeks of negotiation into a van and set off for Albany International and Paris. Summer clothing, winter clothing, two laptops, a suit and a coat in a garment bag, our pills, our snacks assured our survival for the next four months in the wilds of Europe.
Five hours later, in mid-afternoon, we had made it as far as the Wolf Road Best Western’s triteness.

USAirways was having a bad day. The sign showed 1:10 pm as the departure time for our flight and three hours later, after boarding, watching the engines revving up and down, deplaning and retrieving cabin luggage that did not fit the cabin of the Dash airplane, it was still flashing “on time”.

Meanwhile two more feeder flights to Boston and Buffalo had been scrapped. We were told that it must be the heat. US Airways does not do “hot”. Maybe it is considering moving to Canada.

The ladies at the podium demonstrated, in my opinion, the superiority of the female gender: unflappable, their fingers embroidered at lightning speed proposals of alternatives on the computer keyboard. Firmly but gently they steered us away, one after the other, from the impossibilities, to the probabilities and impassibly expected our decisions.

We decided on Best Western, for which we had negotiated a voucher from another very festive supervisor called April. Again her demeanor and competence, time after time, towards all comers, was admirable and enviable.

The next morning (now we are talking August 18th) we negotiated our expeditionary luggage back onto the somewhat ramshackle shuttle and to the terminal This time we were trying our luck with Continental flight 3202 to Newark, ETD 12:50 pm. The tension mounted when that time arrived and passed, and no plane materialized at the end of the ramp. Our connection was with a flight to Paris Charles de Gaulle at 6:10 pm….so there seemed to be no reason to fret.

But fret and sweat we did. The gentleman at the podium kept us informed of the fact that he had no information...two other flights to different locations came and went, while he assured us that the flying time to Newark was only 35 minutes….if only we had a plane.

We boarded at around 2:30pm, but by that time the company had missed its “wheels up” time with traffic control, so we sat at the end of the runway until we finally left around 5 pm. In Newark we deplaned at a quarter to six and galloped through what seemed miles of terminal (of course, most of the people movers were “being repaired”). Suffice to say that we made the connection with no minutes to spare .

In the 21st century there must be a better way. Where is Scottie when we need him to beam us up? It is clear that air travel has had its day, that the repeated declarations of chairmen of airlines of being focused on getting us to our destinations safely and quickly look good on the monitors but are totally removed from reality. Twenty six hours from Albany to Newark! In the most technologically advanced nation in the world! What a joke!