Nijinsky

By now you probably realize my affection for cemeteries. I did grow up next to one, but beyond that Parisian cemeteries to me have always seemed almost like an index in the back of a really good history book. When you come across one that's interesting, it invites you in for a closer look. I'm including four pictures from the tomb of Vaslav Nijinski. Although born in the Ukraine and buried, originally, in London, Paris was where he did his most famous work, particularly the choreography that he did for Stravinsky's Rites of Spring (which caused riots in Paris) and Debussy. His memorial in Cimetiere Montmartre is an amazing piece of art. The first time I walked up to it I really did think that some live person was resting on the tomb. Nijinski suffered from depression and schizophrenia late in his life, and the statue seems to have captured his mental condition amazingly well.

So Bourgeois

My favorite work of impossible scholarship of the 20th century is Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project. Benjamin's opus aimed at nothing than being an encylopedia of life in Paris in the mid-1800s, post Haussmann. Suddenly blessed with a city opened up by the expansive bureaus and a period of relative economic and political stability, Paris saw an explosion of the middle class. The arcades of the title refers to the covered shopping areas that suddenly started popping up at this time. These arcades became a place to be a flaneur, a person with the time and means to stroll, a voyeur who also wanted to be seen. These are often called the original shopping malls, although when you see them today they seem one heck of a lot more charming. I've included a series of pictures from some of the arcades and passages that are still standing, as well as a picture of the covered walkway at the Place des Vosges, which was actually built in the early 17th century for the same purpose, and even included stores in the promenade. Of course that was for a more moneyed class.

The Holocaust

One of the things that I admire about France is the way that it seems compelled to confront the horrors of WWII and the holocaust, as well as the complicity of the Vichy government. It's human nature to try to repress the worst things that we do and see. Considering how long it took America to confront the horrors of slavery and institutionalized racism, I think France has done an admirable job of putting the spotlight on the atrocities. The pictures today are mostly from public memorials at Pere Lachaise, although I've also included on of the dozens (if not hundreds) of poignant signs found on school buildings in Paris, noting how many students in the district were among the more than 11,000 children deported, "avec la participation active du gouvernement français de vichy."

Metro Update

Nothing should strike more fear into a lover of the Paris Metro than the announcement that the RATP is "beautifying" its stations. Lest one forget, it was a similar beautification project that almost led to the loss of all of Hector Guimard's iconic art nouveau station exteriors. As the RATP tore out Guimard's stations, they were approached by a U.S. museum that wanted to buy one of the stations in complete form. This prompted a rethinking of that beautification project. The picture I've included here announces a currently ongoing beautification of 250 stations. While there are many that did need sprucing up (and sometimes the new stations are pretty stunning), I worry that they'll cover over what makes the Metro stations so damn wonderful and unique in the world. Like Paris itself, there's a sense of deshabille about the stations, an elegant state of tatters that is lovely and charming and authentic. Ok, they can paint over the blood stains and wash out the homeless piss, add a few historical signs such as the moving tribute to the roundup of Jews at Vel' d'Hiv now at the Bir-Hakeim station, but for god's sake, leave the rest reasonably intact.

Two videos for a rainy day

Ok, a bit of a cop out. It's a rainy, blustery day here in California, and I want to post something on the blog, but am completely without energy. I just downloaded the last of the videos from the trip, and found two short clips of the Eiffel Tower at night. Always worth sharing, right? I promise something more original next week.

Batignolles Cemetery

Of all the cemeteries that I visited, perhaps the most melancholy was Batignolles. It's in the north of the 17th, at Porte de Clichy. This was an area of unrest during the banlieue riots a few years ago, and overall was perhaps the sketchiest area I visited during the trip. I was propositioned (at 10 in the morning!) by two aging Parisian prostitutes on the way to the cemetery, which tells you a little something about the area. The cemetery itself is quite big, but its nestled up against the Peripherique, and in general seems less maintained than the other cemeteries. One gets the sense that like the surrounding neighborhood, the cemetery has seen its time pass. Most of the memorials are moss covered, and there are more broken stones here than at the other cemeteries I visited. Most of the celebrities are 19th century actors or dancers who mean little to the foreign tourist, although there are two big names in the cemetery. Andre Breton is hidden almost directly under the raised Peripherique in the back of the cemtery, but the poet Paul Verlaine's tomb can be found at the first circular intersection one encounters. Verlaine's tragic life (divorced, imprisoned for shooting his lover Arthur Rimbaud, late years as a denizen in absinthe bars) seems to suggest that the punishment for going astray can be banishment to a second-rate cemetery, but how does one explain Breton's final resting spot? At any rate, I only brought the small camera out to the site because of the sketchy neighborhood, so sorry for the quality of the picts. Along with a couple of shots of Verlaine's grave, I've included some of the general cemetery, as well as a scan of a postcard of the older Verlaine in an absinthe bar.

Parisian Cemeteries

Maybe it's because I grew up next to a cemetery, but I've always had a fascination for funereal art, and no place is better for strolling through cemeteries than Paris. In an earlier blog I included some amazing art from Pere Lachaise; today I'm including some pictures from my favorite cemetery, the beautiful Cimetiere Montparnasse. The first three pictures beg the question, "do you really want to be under that for eternity?" I'm sure were moving reasons to be under a big bird with holes in its wings or a pelican, and I realize these aren't art galleries but rather memorial gardens, but still I couldn't help but be puzzles, particularly by that rather scary looking [and presumably flightless] mirrored bird. I take pictures of the Charles Pigeon Family tomb every time I go to Paris, and each time I find myself wondering if my wife would like us to spend eternity in the family bed, waiting to greet each person who wanders by. At the very least, I suspect she's want her laptop and her dogs with her. The final picture is of an originally subdued and understated tomb that has been taken over by the fans of Serge Gainsbourg. 

Lunch time

It's lunch time here in Santa Maria, and being hungry (and without lunch) I thought I might share a few pictures on the theme of Parisian food. Anyone who has only experienced American supermarkets will find the process of shopping in Paris to be quite an eye opener. In the states we tend to hide where our food came from (at least until there's a salmonella recall). Our steak comes wrapped and packaged and looking in no way bovine. Good luck even identifying what's in our hotdogs. In France you know what you're getting. The first picture is a bit blurry, but it presents a rabbit (lapin) opened up, with it's liver, heart and kidney presented on its ribs. The second picture shows a series of chicken (poulet) hanging from the shop window, adorned by their lovely red feathers, looking nothing like the frozen bag of chicken wings we got from Costco for Superbowl Sunday. I love escargot, but I've got to admit that it's easy to pretend that they are nothing more than little spongy garlic butter foodstuffs, until you're faced with the dish of shells or, better yet, the wonderful storefront for L'escargot Montogueil, the best known Parisian escargot restaurant. I love not only the giant golden snail, but also the smaller ones climbing across the store front sign, looking for all the world like the ones crawling through my back yard garden. The last picture is of a disappearing French tradition, the horse butcher. I don't know if I could eat horse, knowing how smart they are and how each has his own personality, and I've read that the market for horse meat is shrinking in Paris, as well. The few remaining places where you can buy horse meat, though, don't try to hide what they do. There's a certain honesty in French cuisine that I admire, although it requires pushing beyond my own cultural predilections. 

Iconography

Well, once again we've survived Superbowl Sunday, an event that has less to do with football than with the buying and selling of the American identity. More people watch the game for the advertisements than for the football game itself. In a twist, this year the game was exciting, while the advertisements were an almost universal disappointment. I'm not sure if it's because business didn't know how to respond to the current economic crisis or if ad agencies are just at their creative nadir, but very few of the commercials yesterday seemed to resonate with me. This is surprising in that in this last year we saw one of the most successful ad campaigns ever. Shepard Fairey's "Yes We Can" poster for Obama instaneously turned the candidate into a recognizable brand. More so than "I Like Ike" or any other political poster in memory, the poster became the iconographic marketing tool that stuck in the American and world's mind. The poster was all over Paris this Christmas, including the one that I include above which, I think, includes President Sarkosy's image and asks for fair wages and better work conditions. Sorry for the quality of the picture. I saw it in a work site and had to quickly navigate into an area where I wasn't supposed to be to get the picture. This led me to thinking about iconography in general, and the way that cities become branded in our imagination. Is there a city more defined by its icons than Paris? From the various monuments (Eiffel Tower, Sacre Coeur, Arc de Triomphe) to the sweeping Haussmann era Boulevards and the slightly yellow stone facades that glow in the late afternoons, the patisseries, cafes and street markets, Hector Guimard's art nouveau Metro stations, all create a visually unique fingerprint for the city. One couldn't recreate and brand a city like this from scratch, and recent attempts like Orlando, Florida or Dubai, to me have always seemed inorganic (and slighty apocalyptic). I think if you dropped me anywhere in Paris, within three blocks I'd know what city I was in. In America, perhaps the same could be claimed for San Francisco and maybe Manhattan, but I'm not sure if anywhere else is quite as instantaneously recognizable. Perhaps that's a function of our country's youth; it took Paris (and London, Rome, Tokyo and other great world cities) a millennia to evolve into what they've become. The last image I'm including today is a true Franco-American icon--the Statue of Liberty. When Frédéric Bartholdi made the statue for America, he kept a smaller one behind. It now sits just south of the Eiffel Tower, in the middle of the Seine, across from Radio France, a reminder of how the histories of our two countries remain interconnected, although we don't always like to admit it. 

Fables

One of the things that I most enjoy about traveling is being placed outside of the narratives that I know. Although much of Paris feels familiar and negotiable, one is confronted daily with stories and cultural traditions that don't resonate. I think, for example, of David Sedaris' hilarious recounting of how America's Easter traditions differ from France's--"The teacher sadly shook her had, as if this explained everything that was wrong with my country. "No, no," she said. "Here in France the chocolate is brought by a big bell that flies in from Rome." I called for a time-out. "But how do the bell know where you live?" "Well," she said, "how does a rabbit know?" All this leads to a statue that I found in a playground outside of the Marmottan Museum. It seems to be retelling a fable, something about a crow with a coin in its mouth, and a fox. The statue had no explanation, and the man in the statue, who I assume is the author, clearly isn't Aesop. Does anyone know the story or the author?

---update

Thanks to Yakbeard the Pirate, the fable came from La Fontaine, probably retelling an Aesop fable, called Le Corbeau et le Renard. The title is Le Corbeau et le Renard

Maître Corbeau, sur un arbre perché,
Tenait en son bec un fromage.
Maître Renard, par l'odeur alléché,
Lui tint à peu près ce langage :
"Hé ! bonjour, Monsieur du Corbeau.
Que vous êtes joli ! que vous me semblez beau !
Sans mentir, si votre ramage
Se rapporte à votre plumage,
Vous êtes le Phénix des hôtes de ces bois."
A ces mots le Corbeau ne se sent pas de joie ;
Et pour montrer sa belle voix,
Il ouvre un large bec, laisse tomber sa proie.
Le Renard s'en saisit, et dit : "Mon bon Monsieur,
Apprenez que tout flatteur
Vit aux dépens de celui qui l'écoute :
Cette leçon vaut bien un fromage, sans doute. "
Le Corbeau, honteux et confus,
Jura, mais un peu tard, qu'on ne l'y prendrait plus. 

The Crow and the Fox

Master Crow perched on a tree,
Was holding a cheese in his beak.
Master Fox attracted by the smell
Said something like this:
"Well, Hello Mister Crow!
How beautiful you are! how nice you seem to me!
Really, if your voice
Is like your plumage,
You are the phoenix of all the inhabitants of these woods."
At these words, the Crow is overjoyed.
And in order to show off his beautiful voice,
He opens his beak wide, lets his prey fall
The Fox grabs it, and says: "My good man,
Learn that every flatterer
Lives at the expense of the one who listens to him.
This lesson, without doubt, is well worth a cheese."
The Crow, ashamed and embarrassed,

Swore, but a little late, that he would not be taken again. : 

Christmas time, once again

I'm usually not a big fan of Christmas; I grumpily accept it for the kids, but I personally am turned off by the mixture of consumerism and religion, as well as the transparency of so much Christmas cheer (God, I sound like Scrooge). However, when I first visited Paris with my family during the holiday season two years ago, I found myself softening a bit. Maybe it was the cold, maybe the wine, but something felt a bit more cheery than the average mall Santa. This year I continued to begrudgingly accept the season by visiting the Christmas market out at La Defense. La Defense itself is a rather graceless, antiseptic part of the city, but when they put up a few holiday lights and a sprawling Christmas village, it almost makes one want to whistle a holiday tune. Below are some pictures of the village, with the arc of La Defense in the background. The andouillette baguettes there were simply wonderful. 

Still in Paris

I'm home now, in California, but I'm still in Paris, at least mentally. I'm going to continue this blog for awhile, working my way through the many thoughts and 1000+ photos, at least until I've repatriated fully into the USA. Lately I've been thinking quite a bit about the village of Bercy and how it represents so many French ideas. I've already included pictures of the Passarelle bridge linking Bercy to the hideous Mitterand library district, as well as pictures of the Frank Gehry building that now houses cinema expositions. Bercy, until the middle of the 19th century, was outside of Paris, and up until the 1970s it was best known as a wine processing district. To me it really helps illustrate how Paris is a series of villages, loosely held together. In France, deconstruction actually means something, unlike here in America, where it has become a pop cultural phrase denoting anything that is confusing or postmodernish. In French urban planning, though, deconstruction is an actual strategy. Urban spaces show the inherent contradictions that compose a city like Paris. Take, for example, the "village" of Bercy. The pictures today show how they have maintained public gardens and wooden bridges, amidst  glass structures and Frank Gehry's architecture. Over the village park looms the Palais Omnisport, a large glass and metal stadium wrapped in vertical grass lawn [and note the homage to I.M. Pei's Louvre pyramid, which in itself is an echo of Napoleon's 1798 Egyptian campaign). Like all of Paris, Bercy is a palimpsest, where past and present coexist--but they coexist because of public policy, and this coexistence strains coherence. I love this tension throughout the whole city. The Champs Elysee still has artifacts of its pre-revolution status as the place where aristocrats escaped the city, and the glory of the middle of last century gives way to modernization, as you can buy your Hermes scarf and then walk into a McDonald's for a Big Mac. Haussman's grand boulevards codified the bourgeoisie into the city, but it also created pockets of poverty which, over time, either became worse (the banlieues) or became priveleged for not being bourgeouisie (Montmartre, the Latin Quarter, etc.). Ok, too much rambling. By the way, the large taco seller statue was part of the Dennis Hopper exhibit in the cinema exposition hall located in the Gehry building. 

signs in the metro, part 1

One of my favorite aspects of the Paris Metro is being surrounded by French advertisements. Just as in America, some are annoying (I am so sick of the 2007 French beauty pageant winner letting us know that, "Je suis volcanique"), some are bewildering, and some are quite artful. Even if you don't know French, you probably know enough about decoding signs and advertisements to get the gist of most of them. One of my favorites, one that I've seen in previous years, is the one advertising "soldes" or sales. By law, French stores can only hold sales twice per year. The chief of gendarmes sets the date for these sales, and limits it to a set amount of time. January is always one of those dates, and the advertisement I've posted show a harried but happy shopper. The ad is perfectly arranged in color and in composition. The model is impossibly balanced, tugging a plaid shirt (I think). Her collection of goods almost seems to be exploding from the bag, matching her unruly hair. If you blow up the picture, you'll see that she has bloody scrapes on her arms, presumably from shopping. Despite all this, her face displays carnavelesque joy. Doesn't make me want to shop, but I suppose I'm not the target group, since I seldom where yellow and black leggings. The other ad (just two today) falls more in the category of the inexplicable--at first blush. I'm not making light of leprosy, but if one spoke no French, I'm afraid the immediate reaction would be to wonder why the Metro station felt the need to ban zombies from the underground. Did the foundation really need to make the face of leprosy look so much like one of the extras in Michael Jackson's "Thriller"?  The giant X made out of caution tape doesn't work at all. Much of the Metro system is now undergoing renovations, and similar tape is found throughout the system, so the immediate reaction is to think that sign isn't to be taken seriously, which takes away from its message. If you're like me, you probably thought that leprosy was, for the most part, a thing of the past, so if it is still prevalent, educating the populous may be important, but I think this sign deconstructs itself in an unfortunate and unintended way. By the way, if you click on the images they will load full sized. 

Two days to go

As my time quickly runs out here in Paris, I thought I'd share of few of the interesting signs I've come across these last few days. The first is from the still somewhat dodgy area in Belleville where Edith Piaf made her entrance into the world on the steps below the sign. I've also included a sign from the Place des Vosges, which basically says that the grass is sleeping--so stay off. Before France joined the EU (and adopted many new laws), reclining and walking on the grass in parks was forbidden (Dejeuner ser Herbe to the contrary, so this is probably a leftover of the Gallic need to protect the grass from humans. The final sign was scribbled on a closed HSBC bank--no translation necessary. Next post--signs in the Metro.