Les Élucubrations de Monsieur Smartypants

They Swat Flies, Don't They?

2008-07-14T13:58:00.027+02:00

Mes petites punaises:

As if the Bush administration hasn’t given Europeans enough American criminal behavior to complain about, the U.S. recently heaped yet another affront on this poor continent—in the form of The Fly, an insufferable new opera based on David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of the 1958 classic schlock horror movie.

Perhaps my bad reaction stems partly from having recently seen the video of a 2005 Live from Lincoln Center presentation of Leonard Bernstein's Candide, and The Fly therefore suffers by such on-the-heels operatic comparison. (I can say now with all honesty, "I know Bernstein’s Candide, and Fly, sir, you are no Bernstein’s Candide.") It's not that simple, though. The real problem here is that no one, though heaven knows how many umpteen opportunities must certainly have arisen, thought to suggest that an opera based on The Fly is just, well, wrong.

Think about celebrated past musical stage adaptations: Man of La Mancha was based on the work of Cervantes; Kiss Me Kate and West Side Story drew from Shakespeare; Fiddler on the Roof from the tales of Sholem Aleichem; and the inspiration for Bernstein's Candide was, of course, the master satire by the great Voltaire. And though Victor Hugo and T.S. Eliot surely turn in their graves over the abominations of Les Miz and Cats, even those travesties of the stage were given a starting chance based on the quality of their source material. But to base an opera on a Vincent Price B-movie? Or rather, a remake of a Vincent Price B-movie!? You don’t have to know more about The Fly than that to know that even throwing in a leggy Ann Miller to hoof a steamy version of Cole Porter's "It’s Too Darn Hot" — or raising Maria Callas from the dead to sing "L'altra notte in fondo al mare" — wouldn’t convince a homosexual theater major on a good hair day that this idea had legs. There’s just no other way to state it: This mosca ain’t Tosca.

The Fly’s music by Howard Shore (best known as the award-winning composer for such high-brow box-office boffo as The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King), never belies its Hollywood roots. The film-length opera is one long Hobbit adventure score, without an aria to be heard. And lacking any melodic verse, the players simply belt out a rambling dialog in operatic sing-song. You really haven't suffered in a theater seat until you’ve endured the repetitive sprechgesang of lines like "All hail the new flesh! The new flesh has arrived!" and an adolescent chorus chanting an explanation of how the lead character (whose hailed new flesh transforms him into half-annoying-human/half-annoying-insect) is learning to compensate for the leprous melting away of his fingers by sucking up his food and vomiting it back up as an unpleasant liquid—which, come to think of it, is exactly what I wanted to do with the pre-theater croque monsieur I’d consumed (in the traditional chewing-and-swallowing human way) for lunch.

Cronenberg designed the set, which with its high-tech "teleportation pods" (by which the story's hero mistakenly commingles his DNA with a housefly) and its grim grayness successfully confers upon the theatergoer’s emotions the director’s distinctive, depressive cinematic mood, and the 1950s-style costumes (by Cronenberg’s sister Denise) encourage the imagination to drift back in time and yearn even more for Eisenhower-era musical theater, a reverie broken only momentarily by the brief frontal nudity of the story’s protagonist after he sheds said threads to leap in and out of the set's genetically destructive machinery. (Thank God lead tenor roles requiring nudity weren't offered back when Pavarotti was looking for work between snacks!)

Among the program credits' big names is Placido Domingo's, as The Fly's musical director, although the sight of the crown of the famous tenor’s head poking up from the orchestra pit as he conducted provided a less-thrilling brush with celebrity than my chance collision a few weeks ago with Anthony Bourdain (or maybe just his doppelganger) when I took a short-cut through an alley and tripped over the chain-smoking chef as he sat enjoying a cigarette amidst the fetid dumpsters behind a schmancy Champs Elysées restaurant. If Domingo's intention was to drown out the voices of the cast by sheer volume, he succeeded; I don't follow celebrity gossip enough to know if Domingo is known as a temperamental sort of fellow, but supertitles projected above the players in English along with their French translation lead me to imagine that the show's director found it easier to order up the English supertitles than to risk a temper tantrum by suggesting that the conductor tone the musicians down a notch so that the words the performers wailed could be discerned.

I know this curmudgeonly review is a break from the subject matter of my usual intolerant rants, but I offer it up as a warning to anyone looking for diversions when The Fly makes its U.S. debut in Los Angeles come September. If you don’t heed my advice and save yourself the cost of a ticket, I will have no sympathy when you cry, in the immortal, squeaky (and ultimately fruitless) last words from the original 1958 movie version, "Help me! Heeeeelp meeeeeee!"

Jusqu'à ce que la grosse dame chante,

###

News from NeoBoHo

2008-06-16T15:29:00.023+02:00

Mes chers dissipateurs touristiques,

Unlike the subway systems of Paris, San Francisco, and other cities with digital displays that inform riders of the number of minutes until the next train’s arrival, Prague’s metro system tells only how many minutes have passed since the last train left. In other words, when Prague trains are running late, the Czech people can ask not how long they must suffer, but how long they’ve been suffering. This is a sad metaphor to inflict on the people of Bohemia as a constant reminder that the answer (regarding their history, if not their efficient metro system) is “a really, really long time.”

The most recent suffering, so it appears, is the result of the Czech Republic’s switch to a market economy after the end of Communist rule. Capitalism has brought the country an astounding number of KFC outlets, McDonalds, and gambling casinos, along with every other Western store brand you can think of; tourist shops are awash with Russian nesting dolls in Harry Potter, George Bush, Osama Bin Laden, and American football-player motifs; and the streets of Prague’s historic center are clogged with so many foreign visitors that it’s hard to find a seat in which to suck down a six-dollar espresso at one of the city’s many Kafka-themed cafes. Today’s invaders, waging their assault with tourist dollars, pounds, and euros, cannot be beaten back across the Charles Bridge with stones and swords as were Prague’s aggressors of yore.

Of course it’s too easy to poke fun at the over-the-top tackiness of any city’s touristic pandering—such is the stuff that has kept the worldwide market for refrigerator magnets and commemorative floaty-pens afloat for decades now—but Prague seems somewhat more damaged by the phenomenon, more over-the-top, and a bit sadder than other cities.

There’s no doubt that Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders offer Czech gastronomes a lighter, healthier alternative to traditional Bohemian cuisine, and I’m not suggesting in any way that the yoke of Sovietism provided a more desirable or beneficial economic paradigm, but wander a few streets out of the well-kept and upscale historic center and Prague’s outer neighborhoods still exude a certain Soviet je ne sais quois, with some soul-deadening architecture and a shabby, unkempt air that’s often downright depressing. Graffiti cover vast surfaces of concrete, and weeds grow from cracked sidewalks. Save for the lovely, lush gardens surrounding Prague Castle, the city’s parks have gone to seed and untrimmed trees and shrubs force Sunday strollers to duck or push branches away to navigate their broken footpaths.

High above the Vltava River across from Prague’s former Jewish ghetto of Josevof, skateboarders and graffitists have taken over the area around a giant metronome (designed by either David Černý or Vratislav Novák, depending on whom you ask) that replaced the colossal Stalin monument which once dominated Prague’s skyline before its destruction by Leonid Brezhnev, who in a fit of post-Stalinist spin control ordered it razed in 1962. (The massive Stalin monument, which could be seen from nearly everywhere in Prague, took 5½ years to complete and its sculptor, Otakar Švec, dodged attending its unveiling by doing himself in three weeks before the ceremony. His was a relatively simple way of getting out of having to look at the damned thing; it required 800 kilos of dynamite to finally remove it from the sight of Prague's citizenry.)

By contrast, Josevof itself offers a fabulous combination of Jewish-persecution tourism and upscale shopping amid spectacular—and spectacularly maintained—architecture wonders. Visitors whose attention wanes in the long queues outside Josevof’s many synagogues and those which snake slowly through the ancient Jewish cemetery can load up their credit cards at Gucci, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Cartier between having their emotions jolted by the displays of artwork by doomed children at Terezin or having their hearts broken at the Holocaust memorial that honors the hundreds of thousands of Czech Jews who perished during World War II.

The Museum of Communism in the Nove Mesto district, which wryly promotes its address as “upstairs from McDonalds and next to the casino,” despite its relatively shabby and haphazard displays gives visitors a rather good history of the rise and fall of Czech Communism, most effectively through historic video footage and recreations of the classrooms, shops, and police interrogation rooms of yesteryear. It’s also a good place to find out the background of various historical landmarks, like the apartment building my friend Joanne and I stayed in on Wenceslas Square where Vaclav Havel announced the end of the Soviet era in a 1989 speech from the second-floor balcony and which now houses a well-stocked Marks & Spencer store for the well-heeled former Communist (or anyone with a few thousand extra Czech korunas burning a hole in his pocket).

For those who find the medieval charms of Prague’s oldest buildings not charmingly old enough, there’s good news come dinnertime: Doba Kamenná (Stone Age) is a caveman-themed restaurant in a basement in Nove Mesto where a young shirtless host wearing an animal-fur loincloth and face paint and dragging his knuckles on the floor leads you lumbering, apeman-style, to your table where he cheerily explains the ordering policy in a me-Tarzan-you-Jane vernacular: “You pick food from extensive menu; you pick drinks; you write food/drink choices on paper and pound fists on table, attract cavewaitperson’s attention.” (OK, that’s not verbatim, but close enough.) I was not aware of this, but apparently man learned to snap his fingers and whistle to get his waiter’s attention sometime after the Neolithic era. He demonstrates the proper use of Stone-Age #2 pencils and a promising fist-pounding technique and then lumbers off to greet and instruct new customers.

The restaurant is dark, furnished with roughly hewn furniture and decorated with animal hides, bones, antlers, and enormous tusks that are hung in rough sisal netting, the effect remarkably reminiscent of the fishing nets entangled with lobster traps and buoys that New England seafood restaurants commonly use to add a seaside ambiance.

The price of dinner includes a floor show whose story line loosely concerns a caveman named Toro and is acted out by a few of the waitstaff who grunt out the script in Czech (which to someone like me who knows not a word of Czech sounds surprisingly Paleolithic when spoken by a guy with his tongue tucked between his lower lip and teeth), although it is hard to hear much of anything over the din of frantic drumming by the three or four secondary players whose bit parts have no dialogue.

The menu, to simplify the ordering process, assigns IKEA-style nonsense names to all the dishes: Grilled tenderloin of pork in cream-pepper sauce served with mixed vegetables is “Býk,” Rib-steak with sautéed snow peas and roasted eggplant is “Pán," etc. Red wine, white wine, and beer are “Toro’s blood,” “Toro’s sweat,” and” Toro’s pee,” respectively; “non-alcoholic Toro’s pee” is available for Stone-Aged 12-steppers. (Mojitos are “mojitos.”)

A woman scantily coutured in simulated mammoth and Nikes brings plates of Býk and Pán and mojitos in rough clay cups, but no silverware because, of course, forks and knives would not be epoch-appropriate. The cocktails have plastic bendy straws. Every detail of the Stone-Aged theme has been attended to; a primitive roll of paper towels substitutes for the more-civilized man’s napkin.

Napkins bad. Food? Food good. Yum! Individually wrapped toothpicks, good! Take Visa? Good! But what does one tip in a place like this? European restaurant-goers aren’t as generous as American ones and, in France at least, over-tipping is seen as vulgar. Is it possible to be vulgar in a place like this? On the other hand, what is vulgarity in a city that sells “Czech me out!” tee shirts and Silvio Berlusconi nesting dolls and advertises Day-Glo performances of Cats under black-lights and abbreviated versions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni staged with opera-belting marionettes?

Back to anni domini and above ground, there is much of Prague to see nestled midst the Kurt Cobain and Che Guevara tee shirt vendors and street artists selling Angelina Jolie and George Clooney caricatures. Most of the attention to Prague’s historic architecture is paid to the more-ornate churches, municipal buildings, and apartments, but as spectacular are early 20th-century Cubist structures. The cubist movement in Czech architecture and furniture design borrowed from the style best-known through the paintings of Picasso, de-structuring familiar or expected forms into flat and angled facets. Amid Prague’s plethora of uber-fancy iron and stonework, the Cubist buildings don’t beg for attention, but to stop and admire them is one of the unexpected pleasures of Prague sightseeing, and a museum dedicated to the Cubist movement is housed in one of the city’s finest examples, the House of the Black Madonna, and inside the delightful building three large galleries tell the story and display examples of the most influential Czech practitioners of Cubist art, architecture, and design.

Another hidden treasure awaits the inquisitive visitor willing to search and repeatedly ask locals for clues to the whereabouts of the tomb of Tycho Brahe. The 16th-century Danish astronomer was buried in one of the interior support pillars of Prague’s old Tyn church after his untimely and rather bizarre demise in 1601. As the story goes, Brahe did not wish to offend Petr Vok, the aristocrat at whose home he was dining, by excusing himself to the little boy’s room before Vok had finished his chow. Apparently Vok was a really slow eater, and poor Brahe’s bladder burst before an opportune time between dessert and coffee arose for him to make a crotch-clutching beeline for the loo. (Talk about suffering! Oh, the humanity!) Brahe was a well-recognized man-about-Prague in his day, easily spotted by his false nose made of gold and silver. The sniffer his mom gave him was lost in Rostok before his arrival in Prague, sliced off with a sword by a man with whom he was dueling for the love or honor of a woman. (I’m unsure which, although knowing how polite-to-the-point-of-bursting Brahe could be, I’d like to assume he was defending the latter.) The relief carved in marble of Tycho Brahe’s likeness is a dead giveaway of who’s interred there, with his prosthetic proboscis clearly scribed in the stone. Had the carver who completed the tombstone not been such a stickler for detail, it would be easy to mistake an adjacent tomb for that of Brahe, as the bug-eyed expression on the face carved upon it seems to be of someone else in serious need of a whiz. Anyone who knows the sad tale of the noseless man’s passing from not pissing would be forgiven, by me at least, for any confusion.

Bons voyages,

###

More Dead History

2008-05-15T16:12:00.049+02:00

Mes semblables de Dieu,

One of the wonders of Paris is that when not stepping in dog turds one is forever stepping back in history, and yesterday I stumbled into the Cimetière de Picpus, site of the mass graves of 1,306 final victims of the Terror. Picpus is just a short tumbril ride from the Place du Trône Renversé (or “overturned throne,” its name itself later beheaded to be simply the Place du Trône), where the guillotine was moved in the summer of 1794 after shopkeepers near its more stylish and central location in the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde) began to complain that the stench from the blood-soaked cobblestones was driving away customers.

(I suspect this may well have marked the beginning of the now-annual tradition of nearly all Parisians to flee the city during the hottest summer months, and perhaps even of their disinclination to pick up after their dogs. Maybe they originally hoped that the perfume of pervasive poop might mask that of baking blood, and when that failed—their canine poopers of choice being so small and the guillotine so busy—they fled to the seashore until cooler weather returned.)

But I digress. Parisians did grow tired of the daily carnage downtown, and moving the Big Blade to the Place du Trône allowed the Committee of Public Safety to continue a steady separation of corps and têtes, including the aforementioned 1,306 whose 2,612 parts were carted down the street and dumped in a couple of big holes at Picpus during the brief period from 14 June to 17 July—a mere ten days before the public got truly cranky, turned against the Committee, and sent its leader Robespierre to the scaffold himself.

You enter the grounds of the cemetery through a courtyard across the street from a Renault repair shop. Inside, a man takes three euros, opens a locked gate, and sends you wandering through a pretty little park to look through another locked gate at two big patches of gravel and grass with explanatory plaques. Picpus is really two cemeteries, one containing two mass graves of the decapitated, and then a rather sad little graveyard of the decapitateds' relations who died later from mostly bladeless causes. (I couldn’t help picturing them all interred wearing tee shirts silkscreened with the words “I’m with headless” and a little arrow pointing in the direction of the mass pit.) This area contains a few notable corpses whose heads were intact upon burial; the Noailles are buried here (the Comtesse of Noailles was to Marie Antoinette sort of what Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers was to Joan Fontaine's character in Rebecca), as is the Marquis de Lafayette, who we all know and love as the French guy who lent his military expertise to help out our own revolution and now has a park named for him across from the White House where our own grouchy citizens gather to complain.

When I arrived at Picpus, the caretaker was very chatty, and after determining my nationality he asked, "So, tell me: Why do you speak English?"

"Huh?"

He repeated the question. "Why do you Americans speak English?"

"I don't think I understand what you’re asking me," I told him.

"It's the language of your oppressors! Why would you want to speak that? Didn't you fight to free yourself from the British? It makes no sense that you'd go through all that trouble, and then continue to speak their language!"

"Um..." I hesitated, not really sure if he was joking. "Well we were British for a long time. What would you have us speak? What do they speak in France's former colonies, like those in Africa?"

He grinned broadly. "Well they speak French, of course! But French is the language of freedom! English, well, ha, that's the language of slavery!!"

"Well, I suppose our Navajo might agree with half of that," I told him.

He laughed, shook my hand, welcomed me, and handed me two little pamphlets. One contained information about the cemetery and its history and the other was a small tract titled The Sixteen Blessed Carmelites of Compiègne. Before unlocking the inner gate and showing me how to let myself out at the end of my visit, he pointed to the entrance of the adjacent church and told me not to miss checking that out too. “It has the most important Virgin Mary in France,” he told me. “Very important, even if you’re not a Christian. It’s been recognized by a number of Popes, including Pope Pius X and that last one, the Polish one.”

Inside the cemetery, I read through the little tract he’d handed me. It tells the story of the Carmelites of Compiègne, a knot of nuns who since their order’s foundation in 1641 have been "doing good" by remaining silent, poor, and prayerful. In June of 1794, 16 of them were arrested, condemned to death (according to the tract, “for their fidelity to the religious life and for their great devotion to the Sacred Heart”), beheaded on July 17, and tossed with the others into the Picpus pit.

“What happiness to die for one’s God!” one was reported to have cried out from the scaffold. “May we be the last ones to die.”

As proof of the power of the sisters’ prayers, the tract tells that “just ten days later, ended the torment that for two years had shed upon France’s son’s (and daughters).” Say what? Granted, this little chapel with its "most important Virgin" is nowhere on the Magnificence Scale compared to Venice's
Santa Maria della Salute, but c'mon! Stop already with the adoration of Holy Virgins who seem to be everywhere blessing—with little or no success—the bejeezus out of people who are doomed! If she had been a real, live, breathing human being, no doubt she'd be vilified instead of venerated, and she'd be marched to the scaffold lickety-split. And I thought the deaths of Nixon and Reagan brought on amnesiac, rosy-hued posthumous saint status! Heh.

The tract then provides a prayer (which I will spare you) “for obtaining graces through the intercession of the Blessed Carmelites of Compiègne” and an address where anyone who has received graces and healings through such intercessions should immediately send notification of same, so that beatification procedures can be started, tout de suite.

Despite the multi-Pope appeal that Picpus presents, and an entertaining painting hanging in the church that depicts the martyred nuns silently, poorly, and devotedly praying beside the guillotine under the watchful (if ultimately no-count) eye of the Blessed Virgin, I must admit that more graveside fun was to be had on the other side of town, at the Cimetière des Chiens in Asnières.

If any of you were wondering where little French doggies go after they’ve taken their last supper at their favorite Parisian brasserie, it is here in this pet cemetery on the banks of the Seine. The sentiments engraved on their headstones are no less sappy and sentimental than those at the Pet’s Rest outside San Francisco, and they’ve been engraving sappy and sentimental doggerel and best wishes on headstones here considerably longer—since the late 1800s, in fact. Here too lie rabbits and cats and something that I think was a monkey (though possibly some breed of canine that was stylish for a mercifully brief time in the 1960s) and whose tombstone is adorned with her likeness, posed in what must have been her favorite gingham dress.

As I strolled past the many tombs of long-deceased Fifis and Mouchettes, I nearly stumbled over a woman who, looking quite fetching with a miniature French bulldog under her arm, sat weeping over the grave of another dog, now departed. I did not wish to disturb her by asking if the deceased was her current dog’s mother or if perhaps it was of a breed that no longer matched her shoes and I’d solved the mystery of what happened to all of Paris's no-longer-fashionable Jack Russell terriers. Whether the former or the latter, her grief over the dog-loss seemed genuine and bottomless, and if I’d been to Picpus first, I might have provided her with the words of prayer she could use to obtain the graces and intercession of the 16 headless, martyred virgins of Compiègne, but as it was I just left her and Fifi II to continue unassisted with their own miracle-free grieving process.

À bientôt au paradis,

###

Fureur Antionette

2008-04-17T15:20:00.029+02:00

Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
Les aristocrates à la lanterne!
Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
Les aristocrates on les pendra!
Si on n’ les pend pas
On les rompra
Si on n’ les rompt pas
On les brûlera.
Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira

Ah! It'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine
Aristocrats at the lantern
Ah! It'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine
The aristocrats, we'll hang them!
If we don't hang them
We'll break them
If we don't break them
We'll burn them
Ah! It'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine
— "Ça Ira," popular tune of Revolutionary France

"Nevermind."
— Gilda Radner as Emily Litella on Saturday Night Live

Citoyennes et Citoyens,

For those of you who didn't get the memo, the French recently had a change of heart regarding their past grumpiness that resulted in the separation of Marie Antoinette’s head from the rest of her package. Just as we Americans are easily distracted from truths and are encouraged what to think about political figures by trivialities hammered into us by the media and special interests, so too were the French during the reign of Louis XVI. When the incredibly unhappy populace, starved for liberté, égalité, fraternité, and (perhaps most importantly) food, were worked up into a revolutionary lather by round-the-clock pamphleteers who placed much of the blame for their troubles on Louis’s high-living and seemingly uncaring bride, they cheered on their bloodthirsty leadership to hack first and ask questions later—sometimes two centuries later.

Two-hundred and some years after the executioner's celebrated slam dunk of Her Majesty’s noggin, a well-researched and well-reasoned biography of Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser and (more effectively) the 2006 Sofia Coppola film that used Fraser’s work as its basis, has convinced the French people of their poor public judgment back then and transformed modern opinion from "mad at" the woman to "simply mad about" her. The only bit of restraint I’ve been able to discern among all the gaga is their failure to honor her as they honor Mona Lisa, by manufacturing day-glo flip-flops bearing her image. Such footwear is one of the very few items of commemorative memorabilia not available in the gift shop of the Grand Palais, where people this month are paying ten euros a head and lining up for hours, sometimes in pouring rain, to suck in all-things Marie-Antoinette at the current smash-hit expo there that chronicles her life.

I haven’t had the chance to run a poll since I attended, but I may be the only person in Paris who’s disappointed by this oversight and a couple of others. Certainly there is an embarrassment of other riches from which the chotchke-starved Marie Antoinette-o-phile can choose, including Marie Antoinette needlecraft pillows in assorted sizes; Marie Antoinette gowns for four-year olds; Marie Antoinette parasols; Marie Antoinette ballpoint pens; Marie Antoinette Post-It note pads; Marie Antoinette CDs and DVDs; dozens of Marie Antoinette book titles; replicas of Marie Antoinette’s Versailles dinnerware; and umpteen styles of Marie Antoinette postcards. But Marie Antoinette zories? Zilch.

I entered the shop excited about the prospect of finding a postcard of my favorite item in the exhibition, but was terribly disappointed that whoever ordered supplies for the show—likely the same old fart who didn’t think a proper nod of apology for mistakenly chopping off a woman’s head should include printing her picture on a pair of made-in-Taiwan plastic sandals—neglected to make a postcard using the illustration from the frontispiece of a small volume of slanderous 18-century filth on display called Fureurs Utérines (Uterine Madness), a racy little inking that depicts the queen with her skirt pulled up high to reveal the most precious royal jewel. In a silent financial protest (which I understand probably went unnoticed by the cashiers processing the long line of customers whose arms were piled high with merchandise) I bought rien de la reine. Nothing.

The small volume is tucked away in a tiny case in the exhibit's final room, which focusses on anti-Marie Antoinette mudslinging, and would have been easy to miss save for the fact that the room has surprising little else in it despite reports that Revolutionary propagandists were prolific and relentless in such pursuits. According to Fraser and other historians, print shops in France worked round the clock churning out anti-monarchist matter, much of which characterized Marie Antoinette as a woman with an uncontrollable carnal appetite who denied herself little in her attempts to satisfy it, bedding both men and woman, and even her own son.

Overall, the show is disappointing in its lack of new information for anyone with a passing familiarity with French Revolutionary history, and with the exception of side-by-side portraits by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun it's rather uninteresting. Le Brun might be considered the mother of modern Photoshop journalism, the genre that brought us a blacker O.J. Simpson on the cover of Time Magazine. To present a more innocent image of the increasingly unpopular queen, Le Brun was asked in 1786 to re-paint a portrait she’d done three years earlier, but this time losing the jewelry and haute couture. Using royal portraits for spin control was hardly new, especially for the Court of Versailles (another famous portrait, commissioned after the disastrous “Affair of the Necklace” from which Marie Antoinette’s public image never really recovered despite her complete innocence in the matter, shows her as the doting and relatively simple mother, more concerned with family values than sucking peasants dry to pay for sparkly neckwear), but this pair of paintings is interesting in that the artist actually re-painted the exact same portrait, changing only the queen’s clothing and accouterments. It’s a treat to view the two together, and fortunate that the original wasn’t destroyed. (Keeping it around strikes me much like leaving the original jpeg image on your hard drive so investigators can retrieve it to prove your questionable journalistic ethics.)

While overall the show’s a disappointment, it is morbidly fascinating to me to witness this hubbub over the old girl, and to refresh and expand my understanding of those times while reflecting on them in a modern context. A comparison of those days to these doesn’t reveal any newfound reluctance by people to react rashly, with one exception—and granted, its a huge exception: Today there’s no guillotine sitting in the Place de la Concorde, lopping the heads off of everyone who suddenly finds herself (or himself) on the wrong side of public opinion.

When I arrived here in September, public approval for French president Sarkozy was enormous, but in a few short months plummeted after a combination of political and social blunders to the point that now it’s hard to find anyone in Paris with a good word to say about him. Some of it’s superficial, concerning general distaste for his recent marriage to Italian supermodel/pop star Carla Bruni, some of it is policy related (which confuses me, since none of the dreadful things he’s said or done politically should surprise anyone who was paying attention before the election), and some of it has to do with a complicated sense of what it means to the French to be French and their general horror over Sarko’s low-brow cultural tastes. At the height of the Terror in 1794, any one of these things would have gotten him dragged to the scaffold after a speedy trial with a predetermined guilty verdict.

I don’t think Sarkozy will be much remembered in 200 years, or at least not remembered or studied by French schoolchildren the way the last monarchs of France are remembered, or the Girondins, or the Jacobins, or any the those who went from being ahead to losing their heads during the Terror. I do think that Carla Bruni is very, very fortunate that the French aren't as quick to behead as they were back then, even if they are as fickle. As a foreign-born, wealthy, and highly visible wife of a French leader and the subject of much negative public sentiment and a lot of negative media hype in a country facing severe problems with unemployment and rising prices, her story sounds quite a lot like Marie Antoinette's. If the French still dispatched the objects of their scorn the way they did back then, there’d be a very good chance that one day thousands of people would be lined up at the Grand Palais to view an apologetic retrospective of her life and to buy whatever the 23rd-century equivalent will be of Carla Bruni Post-It notes and ballpoint pens (and perhaps some cheap made-in-USA flip flops), disappointed that there are no postcards of the more entertaining fureurs being hyped by today’s media.

Ça ira...

###

ADDED NOTE (22 APRIL): These nifty lollipops from Archie McPhee aren't sold by the unimaginative vendeurs at the gift shop of the Grand Palais, either.

Further Adventures in Live Performance

2008-04-12T14:10:00.055+02:00

Bougeurs et trembleurs,

I haven't suffered an overdose of creative self-expression like last night's since I went to art school in the early 1970s. (And if any of you say you recall my having said I miss the experience of art school in the early 1970s, either you're hallucinating or you're a liar.)

Gwen told me she'd be performing at the same theater near the Place des Fêtes that Sandra's baby has been known to frequent, and though I felt improperly attired, not having yet had the chance to locate a tee-shirt that said, "Je ne fumerai pas dans le bac à sable si vous n'amenez pas votre enfant au théâtre" (I won't smoke in the sandbox if you don't bring your child to the theater), I was delighted to go. Gwen is an extraordinary performer—a jazz singer whose talents I've been loathe to write about before because I can't come up with a description to do her justice. Whether singing a familiar jazz standard or an obscure gospel hymn, she's astonishing on stage, with an incredible vocal range and an infectious energy. She's absolutely electric, vibrating from within even when still, yet evincing a center of calm when at her most frenetic. And she can get very frenetic.

Her appearance last night was no disappointment, a ten-minute improvisation with her dance instructor, Elsa, and the drummer from Sandra and Julien's last performance. Gwen entered the theater imitating a freight train, hissing steam. Then, crying "All aboard!" she launched into an old Peter Yarrow/Paul Stuckey number styled after a negro spiritual, in a solemn a cappella moaning…

This train…
done carried my mother…
well, this train…

Gwen took long pauses between the lines, as if she was waiting for the words to find their way from deep inside her and bubble up to the surface…

This train…
done carried my mother…
well, this train …

With Gwen center stage, Elsa appeared from the side and approached her as if pulled, physically, by the sound of Gwen's voice.

This train, done carried my mother
my mother, my father, my sister and my brother
this train, done carried my mother, well this train…

Her tempo quickened and she and Elsa faced each other. While Gwen sang, Elsa danced as if she were a marionette whose strings were being jerked by the rhythm of Gwen's words, and then the drummer started in and Gwen and Elsa just went wild as if possessed, and the initial plaintiveness of the spiritual dissolved into a joyous, crazy, raucous frenzy.

When they finished, the audience went nuts applauding, and well they should have, because it was just stupendous. It was wildly creative and simultaneously funny and moving, a combination I don't understand how one arranges or choreographs for, but from witnessing it in Gwen's previous engagements and in Sandra and Julien's dance that Elsa had conceived and directed, I know isn't accidental.

But Gwen and Elsa's performance was the last of the evening, and Gwen shouted her initial "All aboard!" after 10:30 p.m.—long after the train that I wished done carry me—home—had left the station. Because aside from this spectacular finale and the act that immediately preceded my friends’—two shirtless, contortionist break dancers who whirled themselves into pretzels accompanied by a young man who recited the articles and advertisements from a tabloid newspaper in a beat-box, forward-and-back turntable-scratching style—the rest of the program was at best lackluster and was at worst right out of Alfred University circa 1974, had all Alfred's ceramic arts majors taken up modern dance. The motley assortment of entertainment began at the very un-artfully early hour of 6:45 p.m., and performances took place in various corners of the multi-room theater building over the next four hours.

First up were two middle-aged men with shaved heads, wearing jock straps over nylon track pants, who to space-age techno music danced the roles of space explorers in a wayward rocketship. This was represented by a seven-foot cube of steel tubing, its walls formed by a criss-crossing of bungee cords in which were entangled a couple of dozen G.I. Joe dolls in various military get-ups, adventurer costumes, and cowboy suits. The two space cowboys swam in slo-mo through their simulated weightless environment, making emergency announcements in futuristic-computer voices and picking up random G.I. Joes and waving them back and forth while making whhzzzzhh-ing sounds (which, as all boys know, indicates that your G.I. Joe flies really, really fast).

Some time after I exhausted all hope of finding answers to the question "What the fuck??" that was begged by this spectacle, the music segued into something less techno-sci-fi and more techno-gay-dance-club, and the pair donned boxing gloves and head guards, thus transforming their bungee-and-steel space station into a bungee-and-steel sparring ring in which they first did a little pole dancing like the girls down at the Badda-bing do, and then re-created the slow-motion fight scenes from Raging Bull, but without the sweat and blood, the crisp black-and-white cinematography, or any of the drama Scorcese offered attendees of the film version.

After they had sparred for a few minutes, and their last right-left right-left jab-jab ended in a sexually ambivalent embrace, the pair stepped apart and in an apt metaphor for the artistic masturbation their performance embodied, they each reached down into their jockstraps. But rather than stroking their cocks they instead pulled dental protectors from their crotch protectors and inserted them (in their mouths) for some final bit of symbolism that in all honesty escaped me. A more literal interpretation might be that they feared violence by their patience-stretched audience. I have no idea. (And to be truthful, their audience was far more generous than I am being, enthusiastic in their appreciation of all the evening's performers. I admit that only I was the crab.)

A long intermission followed, during which attendees had a choice of listening to an “intervention musicale à l’harmonica” (which is exactly what it sounds like) or stepping outside to smoke with a couple of other artists on the program, two young men who had hung a large canvas on a wall in the courtyard and were covering it with spray paint. The burning cigarettes dangling from their lips and from those of the theatergoers as the small outdoor space filled with volatile paint fumes added some otherwise-lacking suspense to the evening.

Upon my return to the auditorium, two solo dancers wordlessly challenged me to endure them until Gwen’s promised appearance. The first did a dance I can only describe as an interpretion of the hypothetical existence of an unlucky love child borne of Anna Pavlova and Marcel Marceau, in which said offspring inherits the dancing talents of his father and the miming talents of his mother. (If this was indeed the motivation for this dance, it was sheer brilliance.) The second, by a woman who was a much more gifted dancer, but who occasionally reminded me of the character in the Jules Pfeiffer cartoons who was always offering up a dance to some modern-day neurosis or political situation, was simply way too long.

One more intermission to inhale paint fumes and risk self-immolation with a much needed nicotine fix, and then a drawn out performance piece (I won't call it dance) in which a woman wearing nothing but a 20 x 40-foot satin tarpaulin that completely covered the stage ever-so-slowly rose from the floor where she lay as the audience filed in to take their seats, reciting a long list of first names of people who may or may not have known, know, or will know each other, winding the enormous fabric around her all the while, and I was inspired to choreograph my own performance, “A Dance to the Stay-at-Home Parisian.”

And tonight, I am doing just that. (Not developing a dance, but staying home.) And that’s my latest news from here, where the daylight already lasts late into the evening, the weather is warming up, the public gardens are a-riot with blooming flowers, and Spring has greatly improved the mood of the average Parisian.

Profitez des beaux jours,

###

Little Insufferable Distractions

2008-03-17T02:58:00.066+01:00

Participants et participantes,

Last Friday evening, my friend Gwen and I attended a dance recital in Belleville in which two of her friends, Sandra and Julien, were performing. I'd met Sandra and Julien on numerous prior occasions, and I've also been to the studio near République where they and Gwen study with a woman named Elsa, a well-known figure in the world of modern dance and choreographer of Friday's piece. Elsa had saved us two of her block of reserved seats for the sold-out event at the small theater, and Gwen and I sat in the second row, just behind and a few places to the left of a man with a small child.

Sandra and Julien's dance, "Les Amants," was the second of five in the evening's program. When the lights came up, Julien appeared stage right crouched in a frozen pose with his back to Sandra who, to the quiet rhythm from a drummer at the back of the stage, approached him cautiously from stage left. It was a slow, suspenseful advance expressing both curiosity and hunger, and nothing in Julien's posture or facial expression revealed how he would receive her as the distance between them finally closed. Would her stalking be foiled in some way? Would it be violent? Tender? The subtle, rhythmic drumming continued, building ever so slowly ... the predator/lover closing in on her prey/lover ... and ... the infant on the man's lap started babbling!

Oh! My! God! I was so enraged!

I tried to ignore the kid and regain the lost sense of suspense, but the infantile "ba ba bleh bleh" continued as Sandra arrived within two feet of Julien and with a dramatic flourish and thunderous boom of drums, Julien leaped from his crouch, spun 180 degrees, and was caught in Sandra's tight embrace with his legs firmly wrapped around her waist, his cheek to her shoulder, his eyes closed.

Silence.

Sandra stood absolutely still with Julien locked to her upper body. Their stillness was as suspenseful as Sandra's approach had been. Where was this going? Was this to segue into something violent? Tender? Julien's eyes remained closed, content … his legs and arms held tight around her, one hand cupping the back of her head … the drumming started up again as they … "ba ba bleh bleh bibbebeb!"

What the fuck was this guy thinking bringing this kid in here? What the fuck were the theater people thinking letting this guy in here with a kid?

The dance between the lovers continued, magnificent. Dramatic and exciting, it wove a marvelous path through sweet and savage emotions with its earthy, almost tribal drumming and the dancers' sensual, expressive movements. The kid quieted down about a third of the way through, but he was waving his hands in the air and fidgeting through the remainder of the piece, and the distraction caused by him—and by my rage at him—from the one dance in five I specifically came to see made me completely crazy.

Many of you may recall that years ago, before my earnest attempts to learn the French language, I had arrived for the very first time in Paris knowing only one French phrase—the unusual and rarely useful words one would use to tell someone that her children were insufferable. After two weeks, I returned to San Francisco greatly disappointed that I never found just the right circumstance to say, "Madame, vos enfants sont insupportable!" This memory returned to me as I tried to watch my friends on stage while in the corner of my eye a two-year old squirmed, his chubby fingers searching his daddy's pockets for who knows what.

After all these years, finally, an enfant insupportable! I had just been to another event the previous evening, a performance by Gwen in a gallery in my neighborhood, at which I'd had had a long conversation with someone entirely in French. I was ready for this. I was so ready!

After Sandra, Julien, and the percussionist left the stage and the applause for them ended, I leaned over and tapped the guy on the shoulder. Understanding that I really couldn't blame the child for the insufferable sins of the father, I adapted my dusted-off admonition:

"Monsieur," I said to him, "vous devriez emmener votre enfant à l'extérieur. (You should take your child outside.) C'est une distraction insupportable!"

And he replied, "Avez-vous un problème?!" (Do you have a problem?)

And I said "Oui! J'ai un GRAND problème!" (I don't know how to say, "You bet your ass I have a problem," but I plan to learn it soon.)

And then the guy had the audacity to tell me, "SORTEZ!" (Leave!)

Man, was he pissed off! I was expecting someone else nearby to support me—or rather I was expecting the entire audience in this small theater to rally behind me—but no one did, and then he turned again to face the stage and I sat back in my seat, and we were both fuming. And then, just before the next dance started, the guy got up and left the theater with his kid.

Good riddance.

And that's when Gwen leaned over to me and said, "That was Sandra's husband. That was their baby."

Cough.

So, as I said, that was Friday. Tonight I went to meet Gwen again and took Alex, my former San Francisco neighbor who's here for the week, to a small jazz club where a trumpet player whom Gwen had worked with was appearing. When we arrived, we descended some stairs to a tiny basement performance space where a trio was making the kind of atonal, arrhythmic jazz that even under ideal conditions isn't my favorite type of music. The trumpeter was there doing a kind of wheezy thing on his horn, and there was another guy sitting pigeon-toed in a chair and leaning so far over his electric guitar that his long hair fell forward to give the audience the impression that the Addams' cousin Itt had taken up jazz guitar. As he slowly scraped macabre, dissonant sounds out of the strings with an under-rosined violin bow, he and the trumpeter tapped their feet at unrelated tempos (maybe "tempos" isn't an accurate word, but I would call it tapping … I think) and the drummer—well, the drummer was doing something else altogether.

I think this kind of jazz was better before Paris's smoking ban took effect, when little rooms like this quickly became too dense with smoke to let patrons see too much foolish detail, or perhaps I just need to take up heroin to properly appreciate this particular musical genre, but it really wasn't what I had expected or hoped to endure. I didn't want to make an immediate beeline for the door, and Gwen hadn't yet arrived, so I gestured to Alex that he take the one available seat while I stood against the wall and watched for a few minutes from behind a row of chairs, and that's when I noticed that seated in them were a woman and her small child, about the same age as Sandra's kid. The child was sucking quietly on a bottle, and the mother had a whole passel of baby-pacifying paraphernalia on her lap.

I made a quick inference from her definitely-NOT-a-smack-whore appearance that the mother wasn't there in search of Paris's quintessential smokin' jazz-club scene—and because she, her baby, and the drummer were the only three Asians in the room I guessed that they were all related. The reason for the umbrage Sandra's husband took at my invitation for him to step outside two nights earlier was suddenly apparent, too: It seems I still had more French vocabulary to learn, and performance du jazz and représentation de la danse are actually Parisian slang terms for "baby night." (I'm just sending out a little warning to any of my readers who dream of coming to Paris, taking up heroin, and playing sweet jazz in a smoky club with other cool daddy-o's: Those days are over, man, and the term "daddy-o" has a completely different meaning now.)

Fortunately, I had no urge to ask this parent to remove her child from the joint. If anything, I would have welcomed some dulcet-voiced babbling during this show. And if the baby had piped up, likely no one would have thought a "ba ba bleh bleh" in b-flat (or even some outright caterwauling) hadn't been arranged as part of the evening's presentation.

I did, however, practice great restraint in not exclaiming, "Madame, vos musiciens sont insupportable!"

A 'toot' à l'heure.

###

Angelo/Diavolo

2008-01-28T23:56:00.005+01:00

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"The cathedral … says something to the people of this village which it cannot say to me; but it is important to understand that this cathedral says something to me which it cannot say to them. Perhaps they are struck by the power of the spires, the glory of the windows; but they have known God, after all, longer than I have known him, and in a different way, and I am terrified by the slippery bottomless well to be found in the crypt, down which heretics were hurled to death, and by the obscene, inescapable gargoyles jutting out of the stone and seeming to say that God and the devil can never be divorced. But I must accept the status that myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth."
— James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village," 1953, Notes of a Native Son

"I read everything I could get my hands on—except the Bible…"
— James Baldwin, autobiographical notes, Notes of a Native Son

"I love to eat and drink … and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh."
— ibid

Convito in Casa di Levi, 1573, Paolo Caliari, Il Veronese (1528-1588)
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
Click here for larger (but still horribly lacking) view.

Ciao, belli ragazzi!

It would be near impossible to select one of the countless astounding paintings one sees by wandering into any of Venice's dozens of churches and museums and declare it a favorite, but one that ranks way up on my list would be Veronese's Feast in the House of Levi—for its story as well as the wonders of the painting itself.

Veronese's ambitious effort was originally intended to illustrate that seder-of-all-seders, the Last Supper, but his imagination and sense of humor got the best of him and the final product landed him before a tribunal of the Inquisition, accused of heresy for his inclusion of superfluous characters not normally associated—in appearance or behavior—with more orthodox depictions of Christ's oft-represented final repast. He was spared being spit-roasted for his crime, but rather than compromise his artistic vision by making changes to satisfy his detractors, he simple renamed the painting so that future charges of heathenhood would be avoided. Apparently, heresy ain't heresy unless your rendering of drunks, dwarves, dogs, and idiots gamboling around every Christian's favorite Lord and Savior as he sups his last is actually called "The Last Supper." By playing with semantics Veronese avoided future run-ins with the religiously crazed (to whose obsession the whole of Venice is a monument), and saved his thrilling masterpiece for heathens like Yours Truly to enjoy for centuries to come.

One can't say that heretical artists don't run into trouble today. But it's probably hard for youngfolk to imagine in this era of the Piss Christ (whose creator, Andres Serrano, didn't receive as much as a yanked fingernail or public flogging for his artistic transgression) that it hasn't been too many centuries since including a midget in a painting of Jesus could get you dragged before a tribunal whose members would've loved nothing better than to nail you to a cross—or worse.

Being somewhat of a heretic myself, I was able to use my short time in Venice to seriously enrage a devout Catholic with whom I was traveling. Things started out just fine, and ended amicably, too, although only after I apologized for offending her religious sensibilities and not, I noted to myself, because any apologies were offered for bruises made to my own tender sensibilities. (I took early umbrage to find certain areas of all churches off-limits to anyone not entering to pray, and it wasn't until the third or fourth stop that I realized I could just pull up my scarf to conceal my un-Christian proboscis, sneak to a pew and fake piety, thereby getting a gander at a few extra, exquisite Carpaccios and Tiepolos.) But there was a moment when I apparently went too far in poking fun at Venice's dazzling display of Catholic excess.

B—, an Argentinian friend of someone I know from l'Alliance Française, is one of those people who would irritate the hell out of me if she were not so entertaining. I hadn't met her until the day before she, my schoolmate Aurie, and I left for our Venetian adventure. B— speaks about as much French as I do, maybe a bit more, but rather than slowing down her discourse by explaining her way around words she doesn't know in French by using French words she does, she simply substitutes their Spanish, Italian, or English equivalents—whichever ones come to mind first. She's also a fearless and intrepid traveler who starts up conversations with anyone and everyone, and we rarely entered a restaurant or boarded a vaporetto without B— starting some animated and enjoyable conversation with those around us.

Now that I'm no longer in language classes and I have to make a pointed effort to find ways to practice my French in Paris, this was a welcome opportunity to really exercise my foreign language skills. Unfortunately, I had forgotten nearly all the Italian I once knew, and it seemed that for every Italian word I recalled I would forget two words of French or English, and trying to keep up with B—'s rapid-fire Francoitalispanglish had me talking like her in no time, so at times I had no idea what was going to come out of my mouth when I spoke. (I do believe that in trying to find out whether it was faster to walk or take the water bus to Venice's main square, I asked, "Si je quisiera andare to la piazza San Marco, è celui-ci le vaporetto justo, or est-ce que c'est piu bene pour y caminar à pieds?" I don't think my Argentinian accent was half bad, either.)

Anyway, I don't know when it was that I started to annoy B— by interrupting her multilingual socializing with my running heretical commentary. I don't believe it was when I pointed out the attendant in St. Mark's Basilica who was removing all but one of the recently lit candles from a votive rack, leaving the last as a shill to encourage the next throng of tourists to buy a moment of God's listening time. I'm sure it wasn't when I wondered aloud why a relief of the Madonna and Child on the Basilica's wall had an 18th-century rifle attached to it.

It could have been when I picked up the receiver on the device that in one's choice of languages gives the story of the Pala d'Oro, described as "the most precious and refined expression of Byzantine genius … , understood as the raising of man towards God" but which struck me as just the most vulgar expression of Christian obsession, painstakingly created from enough gold and precious gems to have probably ended poverty and starvation among the Church's followers at the time. The listening device looks much like a pay phone, and I asked B— if I might use it to have a word with God. At the center of the enormous Pala sits Jesus holding what the recording claims is the Good Book, its text replaced with precious jewels. B— did not smile when I told her that I wished to ask the Lord if it was really a Bible, and not a copy of an appraisal book that Jesus was using to tot up the value of his loot.

It's not that I was trying to be rude or anything. I was just attempting to add a little levity amid an impressive display of excess whose beauty shouldn't really be gawked at without at least a weensy nod to its darker side—the arrogance, oppression and bloodshed it represents despite its inarguable splendor and artistry.

Perhaps what tipped B— over the edge is when I told her the story of finding an atheist bride for my single and nonbelieving brother by writing my future sister-in-law—who didn't know me from Adam— a persuasive letter of proposal. (Anyone reading this who knows me is familiar with the tale of Michael and Julia.) Rather than finding my story warm and adorable, she was visibly shaken by it and one didn't need to speak four languages to know that her polyglottal muttering conveyed sheer dismay. I admit that I was a bit taken aback by her reaction because she is the first person ever, even counting people who have assured me that a place in hell awaits me, who didn't find the story worthy of a smile and a hearty congratulations. I couldn't quite understand what she found so unsavory about Michael and Julia's impending nuptials, but she did mention Satan himself. "Allons!" I cajoled her. "Come now, you don't really believe Satan had a hand in it! Why would you assume it was work of the devil when the two of them seem happy and obviously meant for each other? I can't see how it had much to do with anyone but the earthly parties involved."

"C'est pas possible!" She shook her head, sad as could be. I had just ruined her otherwise lovely pizza lunch. I didn't want to keep digging, but at this point I was beginning to take some offense myself. We had just left Santa Maria della Salute, the magnificent baroque church built to give thanks to the Virgin Mary for ending the plague that in 1630 brought the deaths of more than a third of the city's population. The church is so grand, so splendida magnifique bellissima, that I hadn't been able to resist asking what seemed such obvious questions: What more astounding place might the Venetians have built had more people been "saved?" Why didn't they build it sooner to make it worth the Virgin's while to put in an earlier appearance? Rather than thanking the old girl for saving two-thirds of their population, why didn't they build something condemning her and honoring the third she and Mr. Big let perish? Of course, to the faithful these questions aren't considered, nor are they considered valid. God, Jesus, the Madonna—they're responsible only for the good stuff, and only they do good stuff.

"So, what if instead of giving myself the credit for putting my brother and Julia together, I said it was God guiding my hand when I wrote Julia the proposal? Then would you like the story better?"

"Oui. Ça serait mieux." That would be better. Peace was restored. Until we were wandering through the Gallerie dell'Accademia and I told her that all the gay Catholic men I know (as well as a few gay non-Catholics) give St. Sebastian—always depicted with his oh-so-brief yet coyly placed loincloth, handsome features, and arrow-pierced flesh, and frequently enjoying some form of bondage—full credit for helping them discover the pleasures of their own flesh when they were teens.

Now that I think back on B—'s berserk-ish reaction, that's probably when I crossed the line from what devout Catholics might be able to shrug off as good-natured kidding to the kind of talk that makes them keep a safe distance for fear that when God strikes me dead their faith might not suffice in protecting them from flying debris.

There's certainly more to tell of Venice, as the above conflict was neither so awful as to diminish our good cheer at being there, nor upsetting enough to anyone on high that Venice sank any further into the sea than it would have had I not asked where Bellini got his magic mushrooms that inspired his Madonna with Red Cherubim; or not noted the irony in the fact that in the gift shop of the basilica whose religious leaders once threatened unconventional artists with death and eternal damnation one can now buy keychains made from rosary beads and bearing the logo of the local gambling casino; or not guffawed loudly at the sign in St. Mark's that read "SILENCE! OUT OF RESPECT FOR THIS SACRED PLACE, IT IS FORBIDDEN TO GIVE EXPLANATIONS INSIDE THE BASILICA."

I have a slew of new favorite painters whose names I'd never heard before (notably Bernardo Strozzi and Giuseppi Angeli), and I am now firmly of the Veronese-beats-Tintoretto-anyday school of thought. (B— says that the lack of detail in Tintoretto's larger-scale canvases compared to other Venetian painters of the day is insignificant because they're all meant to be seen from afar, and they're just as powerful despite their lack of fuss. They don't need no steenking detail; "their force comes from God," she explained. Cough.

This weekend also marked the beginning of Carnevale. I think I may be the last person among my circle of friends and family to finally get to Venice, and I confess to a bit of trepidation beforehand at the idea of arriving for what I pictured as drunken throngs à la New Orleans at Mardi Gras or Halloween in San Francisco's Castro district in a city that might be just too overrun with tourists for my tastes, but I was dead wrong. Of course the place is rife with tourists (of which I am one) and the businesses that cater to them, but it is (as if I am not the last to say it) magnificent. And mysterious, quirky, comfortable—at night sometimes sorta creepy. I loved everything about the place.

I do suspect that one of the city's problems in keeping its head above water is the sheer weight of the chotchkes for sale on Venice's streets and store shelves. Along with the genuine-but-costly Venetian-made glass, lace, and costumery, the Taiwanese goods that are imported to feed visitors' rapacious appetite for more-affordable souvenirs must double the weight of this city made of stone. But their affordability and availability also allowed everyone to join in the spirit of Carnevale, and there were very few people in the street who didn't at least wear a small mask or hat, if not all-out, wildly over-the-top costumes. (On B—'s suggestion my mask was two-tone: Half white to represent my angelic side, and half red to represent il diavolo.) The party got off to a rocky and sad start after two workers were killed in a construction accident and the city called off all celebration on Saturday out of respect and mourning. (Imagine canceling New Years in Times Square or Mardi Gras in New Orleans to honor the memory of two American workers!) The streets were nearly deserted on Saturday evening and then filled with sober-but-nutty revelers the following morning. (Good coffee instead of alcohol fuels a completely different, less sinister-feeling celebration than similar-type gatherings in the States.) San Francisco's Halloween crowds would die of envy to see such a spectacle.

Back in Paris I am trying to shake my new Argentinian accent and recover my lost French vocabulary. I have yet to see what reversals have been dealt my already frustratingly slow progress with la langue française.

a dopo…

###

At least they don't call small "Tall"…

2007-12-23T15:03:00.000+01:00

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Drogués et Droguées :

I swore I would never (ever!) set foot in a Starbucks in Paris because, well, why would anyone? If you've seen one Starbucks you've seen all Starbucks, so why would anyone come here and go there when throughout Paris there are unique French cafes offering wonderful coffee, flaky croissants, and people-watching opportunities that can keep any voyeur occupied for hours?

Okay, so forget that I said anyone. That's probably just caffeine-fueled hyperbole. I suppose, because Starbucks is an espace non-fumeur, that if you're a crabby nonsmoker who likes to use ridiculously complicated commercial jargon to order a drink (like un double crème-brulée latté moyen avec supplèment de mousse de lait s'il vous plait, or as they say in Starbunglish, "a double tall crème brulée–flavored latte with extra foam, please") and drink it from a paper cup rather than risk the possibility of a wisp from someone's cigarette ruining your day, I can understand that. But then I'd also recommend that you place your order in another country and avoid France and its smokers altogether.

My friend and neighbor Alexis frequents the Starbucks on the rue des Archives, around the corner from my apartment. I found this out after we had already become acquainted and began to rely on each other for the kind of mutual support Americans sometimes require after a brush with one of the rare Parisians who, despite their tiny numbers, are obnoxious enough to perpetuate the erroneous but widely held belief that all French people are astoundingly rude. If I had known she frequented Starbucks, Lex and I might not be friends, and I would be running home after my occasional cultural collisions to climb under the bed and do my impression of a frightened fetus.

Instead, I will call her on my way home from an especially harrowing attempt to buy stamps or what seemed like a death-defying triumph in a cheese shop to see what she's up to, and now and then she will tell me she's at Starbucks, and suggest since I'm nearby I should drop in and join her. But when I arrive and see her through the window I have to bang on the glass and pantomime that she should come out because I will not be seen in there. I don't even like banging on Starbucks's window and making the universal sign for "you should be ashamed of yourself; finish that immediately and meet me across the street at a real cafe or I'm going home," because it lets people on the street know that I associate with someone who's a Starbucks customer. This is completely unacceptable, and I have had a number of stern discussions with Lex to try to explain to her about friendships and boundaries and mutual respect, although I sometimes get the feeling during these heart-to-hearts that she is not giving the topic the serious attention that it deserves.

That said, there is the problem of the U.S. dollar's fall from grace and value, and the resulting fiscal strain it adds to asking professionals to prepare all the coffee I drink in a day. Before I sold my house and ended the financial woes that made it difficult for me to buy a cup of coffee anywhere in San Francisco, I justified the extravagant purchase of a home espresso machine by calculating that it could pay for itself rather quickly if I considered that every cappuccino I prepared myself represented about three dollars I was saving by not wandering down to the corner cafe to buy it ready-made. My financial situation at the time being especially dire, I decided it was would be irresponsible not to have at least three double homemade cappuccinos per day and thereby pay for the machine within only a couple of weeks of its purchase. I tried to explain this stroke of economic genius to friends at the time, but was greeted with confused expressions, and in retrospect I wonder if perhaps I was twitching too much and speaking a little too quickly at the time to make the logic of my accounting sufficiently clear to them.

Europe's 220-volt electrical system rendered it pointless to bring the American machine with me, so I've been using the stovetop coffee maker that came with my apartment when I brew my own coffee at home. Unfortunately, freshly roasted beans like they use in most Paris cafes haven't been so easy to find, and after my arrival in September I was buying unsatisfying, packaged ground coffee at the supermarket. While not as cheap as the freshly roasted stuff I used to buy in San Francisco, it was a relative bargain—prices for a 250g package (about a half a pound) run between 2€50 and 4€ ($3.25 and $6)—but it wasn't good enough to warrant buying a new 220-volt espresso machine. Even if I employed my previously effective coffee economics to pay for the device, I knew the supermarket coffee wasn't worthy. I might add what a shame this really was to discover, because despite the strength of the euro against my own currency, the fact that I have been unable to order coffee in any of the neighborhood joints without also requesting a croissant or pain au chocolat means that by making my coffee at home and accounting for the additional savings on pastries I would not be eating, I might have offset the currently abysmal exchange rate as well as accelerating the pay-off of the espresso machine.

Desperate to meet my need for thrift with a more satisfying drink, but unable to locate a source of beans, I finally broke down and did the unthinkable. I wrapped my scarf high around my neck and chin and pulled my hat down low and donned dark glasses and I dashed as quickly as I could into Starbucks to buy a bag of freshly ground espresso (5€ for 250g) and, well ... it was fucking delicious. But before you start with the gloating, please note that I am not about to concede for a second that I'm a Starbucks whore. This was just a desperate measure to see me through a week or maybe two, an experiment while I dug a bit further to find an alternative coffee-bean source, and I didn't actually buy a coffee drink—just the ground beans—and to take my mind off the dirtiness I felt about the transaction I tucked my purchase deep inside my knapsack and stopped to have a quick coffee in three or four cafes in my neighborhood on the way home.

My friend Arlyn, visiting from California and made instantly aware of this dilemma, did a bit of research while I was busy in school and was good enough to jot down the address of a place within walking distance of my house that advertised the sale of freshly roasted beans. When the level of coffee in the Starbucks bag became dangerously low, I strolled down to the address Arlyn had left me and walked into a lovely little shop whose two young owners, standing by an enormous, fragrantly churning roasting machine, greeted me excitedly.

"Bonjour," I responded to their cheery bonjours, and I told them I would like to buy some coffee, and without the slightest wince at my accent or derisive snickering over my verb mis-conjugations, they described all my choices and asked me my preferences, and together we decided which of their beans was best for me. It was then that I noticed that the prices marked on all the bins of beans, which I thought were costs per kilo, were actually the cost for 250g, and each quarter-kilo of the coffee we had just determined would suit my tastes was 9€95, or just insignificantly under $30 per pound.

Because these young men were so earnest, and I was their only customer, and they were so friendly, and also because I don't know how to blurt out "Are you fucking shitting me??" in French, I decided to take 250g of the stuff, and after they gave me five cents in change for the last ten-euro note I had in my wallet I took one of their little brochures and instead of just wishing them good evening said, "Until next time!" and I went straight home (past nine cafes without stopping) to see what these magic beans were all about. Amazing. Simply amazing. These guys are selling coffee that tastes exactly like the cheap stuff from my local supermarket.

Yesterday, as these "gourmet" beans dwindled towards the bottom of their bag, I called another friend to hear a familiar voice. Audrey lives in Florida and orders raw coffee online to roast in her counter-top roaster. You may get the impression from what you've read so far that I am somewhat obsessive about coffee, but not really. This quest simply comes from being in a city where there just doesn't seem to be any reason one should have to drink bad coffee, and my idea of "obsessive" (at least on the subject of coffee) is to buy unroasted beans and roast them yourself each morning before you've had a chance to first have a cup of coffee. I told Audrey my predicament, and she advised me to order up beans from her supplier in the States, and then she said, "Now I know what to get you for Christmas!"

"You are not sending me coffee, Aud," I told her. "Are you insane? Shipping will cost more than the coffee, and there's really good coffee here. I just have to find it. Do. Not. Send. Me. Coffee." I was sorry I even mentioned it to her.

Today, my thirty-dollar beans ran out and I slinked back into Starbucks to buy another bag of espresso roast from a sullen teenager who has the same I-don't-want-to-work-here expression on her face as many American Starbucks employees and an attitude that as she matures will prove valuable in upholding common French stereotypes. Feeling a little defeated, I returned to my apartment, made myself a cup, and spent some time online looking for a coffee source that was less damaging to my sense of self. A search turned up the place in my neighborhood, and a few others doing online-only business in France with prices that range from reasonable to outrageous, and shipping charges that make the reasonable prices outrageous and the outrageous prices whatever the superlative of outrageous is, although one place does waive shipping charges on orders of 140€ ($210) or more.

I also found a purveyor of unroasted coffee for about three times what Audrey's U.S. supplier charges, and before I came to my senses I checked out the cost of roasters, and then the cost of grinders (which would become necessary if I were to begin a pre-morning-coffee coffee-roasting ritual), and before I even did the euro-to-dollar conversion to see what all those beans and gadgets and a new 220-volt espresso machine would cost, I realized I would be an old man or dead from a caffeine overdose long before a thirty-double-tall-extra-foam-cafe-lattes-per-day habit made the slightest dent in paying off all those purchases.

This is only temporary. I will find where people buy good coffee here, I know. But in the meantime, please, if you see me occasionally in Starbucks, note that I am just buying a small bag of beans—nothing more—and don't say hi or do anything else that might draw attention to my presence there.

À votre santé...

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