Paris – Page 2 of 2

Democrats

Winter returned for its curtain call this weekend. Temperatures fell, a little snow flurried around and quickly departed, and I stayed home except for a visit to the American Church for a meeting of Democrats Abroad. This kind of event doesn’t hold much interest for me but I am committed to exploring as much of Paris as I can, and I thought a few hours of conversation in English would be a mental vacation.

This was the Annual General Meeting which meant most of the time was given to parliamentary procedures like reading the minutes of the last meeting and proposing changes to the by-laws. Yawn. I had hopes for the political summary but it was just a recap of the number of seats at stake and how much money had been raised for the next election. There was little discussion, few questions, zero conflict. I’d bet a directive had come from the DNC that mandated unity: There shall be no disagreements. We are united in opposition to the odious buffoon in the White House. This is not only boring, it’s anti-democratic and totally contrary to the spirit of the Democratic Party, which has never been unanimous in support of anything. Thank you, Barbara Lee. But when you want to stifle disagreement, overstuff the agenda with procedural minutiae and promise there will be time for questions later. There won’t be.

The only spark of controversy came from the appearance of Owen Franken, brother of former Senator Al. Owen was having none of this peace and love thing. He was mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. What set him off was an announcement of a new party policy on sexual harassment. The terms of the policy haven’t been released yet, but the announcement gave Owen a platform to defend his brother and denounce Senator Kirsten Gillibrand who took the lead in taking him down.

Al Franken was shafted by his party and unnecessarily thrown to the wolves. This meeting was an appropriate place to discuss it, but the leaders were having none of it, and he was shut down by the chairwoman for violating parliamentary procedures. I called Owen to ask him what he was trying to get across and he told me that he just wanted to open a discussion of sexual harassment in the hope of creating a policy that might prevent someone else from being thrown under the bus over unproven allegations. He left when it became clear that wasn’t going to happen.

Wine and cookies were served.

Spring in Montparnasse

A beautiful weekend. Temperature climbing, no rain, even the sun made an extended appearance. Saturday I discovered a lovely little museum dedicated to the work of Antoine Bourdelle, a sculptor of monuments. Really big images of horses and generals, but also friezes to decorate theatres and museums. The man never thought small, but the most evocative room in the museum was his studio. Perfect.

Entrance to the exhibits is free, but since I always manage to find a way to spend money—and you cannot leave without passing through the bookstore—I picked up a guide to the legendary locations of Montparnasse: cafés, ateliers, hotels, all the good stuff. And since I’m immersed in Paris culture of the twenties and thirties, Sunday became a walking tour.

La Rotonde, Le Select, La Coupole, and Le Dôme are all within one block on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, so bar-hopping could be managed with a minimum of exertion, an important consideration in a time when drinking, smoking, and sex were the primary forms of exercise. The guide has historical as well as contemporary photographs and it’s interesting to see how things have changed. Of course, prices have gone up along with skyscrapers but in the 1930’s these places weren’t really restaurants, as they are now. Back then, there were more people than cars, so the sidewalks were wider, the roadway narrower, and the cafés spilled out into the street. There are night photos by Brassaï—the man only slept when the sun came up—that show crowded café tables stretching to the curb.

Of course it all changes and maybe it’s surprising how much is still recognizable. Rue Delambre still houses the three hotels where Man Ray, Simone de Beauvoir, and André Breton once lived.

The rue de la Gaïté is still a street of theaters and the crowds were there for Sunday matinees. The Hotel Istria is still on the rue Campagne-Première although Duchamp, Satie, Rilke, and Kiki de Montparnasse no longer roam the halls, and down the street, behind a shop where Atget sold his photographs, there is a long low building known as Ateliers d’Artistes, a haven for those who abandoned Montmartre (too many tourists?), to settle down around the corner from Bal Bullier and La Closerie des Lilas. The rent wasn’t much, the neighbors were sometimes rowdy but always interesting. A few doors down, a plaque marks the former home of the writers, Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. Probably a quieter place.

Weather

All those years in San Francisco, I forgot about the weather. In winter it rains, except when it doesn’t and, twice a year—spring and fall—there’s a heat wave. Good lord, it’s 90⁰, who can live like this? But the fog returns after a few days in hiding and we’re back to normal 60 and freezing tourists buying sweatshirts at Fisherman’s Wharf.

Then I moved to France and suddenly Weather became the most used app on my phone. In Maury it was 100⁰before summer even started and I was miserable for the next six months. I’d check the forecast and raise a glass to days when it wouldn’t rise above 90. I’d look longingly at long pants, sweaters, and people huddled under blankets at Giants’ games. So I moved to Paris and the rains came in Biblical volume, flooding the Seine, and showing no sign of retreat—until it got cold and, of course, the snow arrived. Funny how that works.

I grew up in New York and went to college in Maine, so I’m no stranger to winter, but all those California years stripped away the insulation and left me with a thin skin and chilly bones. Or maybe that was just the years and California had nothing to do with it. “Buck up,” you say. “Get a grip, buy a hot water bottle, wear your socks to bed, and, please, stop your whinging.”

Good advice. Thanks. After all, I came to France for the challenge of something new, and Paris is beautiful in the snow. Enjoy.

Statue of Marguerite d’Angouleme, Reine de Navarre Luxembourg Gardens

River High

Either the river has overflowed its banks OR….

We’re looking at a rather unusual production of Swan Lake.

Gypsy Jazz

La Chope des Puces translates as a “Jar of Fleas”, the jar usually referring to a mug for serving beer, but on this Saturday afternoon the drinks of choice were Champagne and Scotch and Coke. La Chope is a bar, restaurant, lutherie (factory of string instruments), and a school of jazz manouche, but most of all it is a temple to Django Reinhardt, the great French Gypsy guitarist who lived nearby.

Located on the rue des Rosiers in Saint Ouen, adjacent to the Porte de Clignancourt Marché aux Puces, la Chope comes alive every weekend with the music of jazz manouche led by Ninine Garcia, head of Paris’ first family of gypsy jazz. Seated beneath a portrait of his late father, Mondine, and a glass case of honored guitars, Ninine and his son, Roky host a family party every week, playing guitar all afternoon along with friends and family.

Marcel Campion, the Proprietor of La Chope

Everyone seems to know everyone and many are, in fact, related but I can say with the confidence of experience that strangers are more than welcome. When one of the guests, a man named Samuel, raised his glass to me and said: “L’Chaim”, I thought I was at a Bar Mitzvah, and when the Garcias played Hava Nagila I was sure of it. Although there wasn’t enough room for a hora, and no one was carried aloft in her chair, the vibe was exactly the same. I had landed in a French Gypsy affair.

A little while later, fresh glass in hand, I returned the compliment, toasting Samuel with L’Chaim. He sipped and said: “Vous êtes Americain, non?”

“Oui”

“Et l’origine juif?”

“Oui.” That brought a big smile and a hearty hug.

So it doesn’t matter where you go, you’re always the sum of where you’ve been. The past is never lost, it just takes a different shape today.

Bits and Pieces of Paris

The river is high, about five meters now, expected to rise another meter by Saturday. The embankment is underwater, Métro stations are soggy, nearby RER stations are flooding. None of this is particularly surprising because every day seems to bring some rain. Damp winters are expected but the persistent precipitation this year is extraordinary. But with convenient public transportation and numerous indoor activities, Paris keeps me busy.

I took in a reading by Nathan Englander at Shakespeare and Company. The book was a new novel: Dinner at the Center of the Earth, a tour de force of literary talent with multiple points of view, time frames, and locations, all skillfully woven together into a spy story and a meditation on peace in the Middle East. Or its absence. Englander’s prose is crystalline, his speech, a rapid-fire stream of consciousness that can accommodate four ideas in one sentence. If he wrote as fast he talked, there’d be a new novel every week.

Christopher Dickey addresses Democrats Abroad

Went to a meeting of Democrats Abroad the other night. It was, as expected, an hour of recounting the horrors of the past year, followed by an optimistic preview of Democratic prospects for the mid-term elections. The most striking, and perhaps discouraging aspect of the evening was the amount of gray hair in the audience. I might be wrong, but I think it possible that I was not the oldest person in the room. I doubt that’s a reflection of the Democratic Party in general, most likely just a function of how many old liberals have been able to retire to Paris.

Now for something I never thought I’d do: I’ve joined a writing group. I’ve avoided them in the past, thinking they were another form of group therapy, something I’ve also managed to avoid, but the need for feedback on a new book that’s been a struggle so far, and the desire to make new friends finally overcame my prejudice. This is a good thing. I like the members, there are about seven or eight regulars: from Australia, England, the US, all unpublished but skillful writers. Their criticisms are never cruel and sometimes helpful, it’s interesting to read pieces of other work in progress, and it pushes me to work harder to bring something new each week. This is causing some changes in my process. On previous books, I blazed through a first draft to the end of the story, then went through multiple revisions. Looking back, I think I never went far enough, needed more multiples of those revisions. The writing group is forcing me to revise and polish as I go along because first drafts are simply too rough for anyone to read. Now I’m revising each chapter down to the sentence level multiple times before presenting to the group. There are still flaws—must give my colleagues something to criticize—but I think working this way allows me to be more self-critical and helps me get closer to the precise prose I’m seeking. And I just read an article in which Zadie Smith talks about a similar approach so I’m thinking fame and major awards can’t be far behind.

Mimi, Rodolfo, the Spacemen and the Mime

Formerly known as La Bohème.

Unusual, provocative, a new approach, absolutely, but how it relates to the music and libretto I cannot tell you. It seemed like the management had double-booked the theatre. There were two unrelated productions on the stage simultaneously. On stage-right you have Mimi and Rodolfo declaring their love, falling out, and reuniting before the inevitable tragic end, while on stage-left mute spacemen wander around a white moonscape of an unnamed planet. Except when they’re inside the doomed spaceship and the spacemen are floating outside the window. They never seem to merge until the end when instead of a quiet death, Mimi walks through an annoying, shimmering silver curtain and wanders off the planet.

I get it. I think. In a world without hope, only love and art make sense. Or something like that. But all this spaceship nonsense was totally unnecessary and impossible to reconcile with the action. So the production team led by Claus Guth stopped trying and just let the spacemen hang around while the lovers played out their fate.

I can imagine the early meetings when Mr. Guth presented his concept:

“To make this romantic trifle relevant to today, we must move ahead in time to make the demise of our civilization real. Exaggerate, exaggerate, it’s the only way. Their love can only be meaningful to us if it takes place in a world where love is impossible. Their art can only touch us if it exists beyond the end of the world.”

“Brilliant, Claus. Make it happen. Make this music speak to us again.”

Then they get into production and the questions begin: “Excuse me Claus, but if we open on a spaceship, how do we bring in Mimi?”

“No problem. Stop thinking literally. We do not need to hold the hand of the audience. We’ll just bring her in as if she was in another room. It’s a big ship.”

“They were on the same ship but had never met?

“As I said, it’s a big ship.”

“Excuse me, sir, but is it big enough to hold the Café Momus?”

“Hmm. Yes. I see what you mean. Think, people! Outside the box.”

“I’ve got it, sir. It’s a dream. Rodolfo takes a little nap and dreams the left bank of Paris, which, of course, doesn’t exist anymore. That world is dead.”

“Brilliant. That’s what I mean, people, outside the box. Now, let me tell you something else I hate about opera. The house is huge, the singers are small, the world is dying. The audience has to see the emotions to feel them but they’re so far away and they’re checking their phones or reading those damn titles. How do we grab them?”

“I’ve got it sir: video. We bring a camera on stage- it will look like all the other tech spacey garbage already on stage – and we project a huge close-up of the singer on the wall behind him.”

“Good, I like it. But remember, exaggerate! We’re talking really close. I want to see his tonsils.”

“I’m not sure the Rodolfo still has tonsils, sir.”

“Nobody likes a smart-ass, junior. OK, video, I like it but it’s not enough and we can’t do it for everyone. How about a mime?”

“Everybody hates mimes, sir. Those guys on the Pont des Arts can’t even make a living anymore.”

“Good. They’ll work cheap.”

“But no one likes them, sir.”

“Exactly why I want them. This audience needs a good slap in the face.”

“The critics will hate it. The audience will boo when you take your bow, maybe even during the performance.”

“Perfect. Better to give them something to hate than something they’ll forget. What time is my train to Berlin?”

A final word: not even this kind of nonsense can kill this music:

Conducted by Gustavo Dudamel with Sonya Yoncheva as Mimi and Atalla Ayan as Rodolfo, it really was possible to close your eyes and listen to Puccini.

This is a photograph from Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s production of La Boheme in San Francisco in 1978. At the time, it was considered to be provocative, the work of a willful director imposing an inappropriate vision on a classic. But it was beautiful, affecting, illuminating and it has stayed with me all these years.

Settling In

It’s getting dangerously close to real life around here. I found a new doctor, joined a gym, shopped for groceries, and went to the movies in my neighborhood.

But this is Paris and I came here to make sure my life was more than shopping, cooking, eating, and sleeping. So I stopped by a favorite wine bar last week, did I mention drinking? I ordered a glass of Brouilly and the bartender replied: “Non, non, monsieur, aujourd’hui c’est le Beaujolais Nouveau.” Of course it was. All over Paris were signs proclaiming the arrival of this year’s vintage and I was lunching at ground zero. Tasted pretty good, too. More a testament to the context than the wine, but still.

I jumped into the cultural life of the city when Tia and John, the lovely propriétaires of my building invited me to Paris Photo last week. This is a gigantic marketplace: galleries from around the world displaying and selling contemporary and historical photography create a comprehensive survey of the history of the medium. Two hours was as much as my brain could absorb, but just being there made me feel part of the city.

Then I got carried away and booked tickets for a futuristic La Boheme at Bastille. I’m not sure what to expect—the only image I’ve seen looks like a spaceship has crashed in a snowy forest— but Dudamel is conducting and I can always close my eyes, listen to the music, get off the spaceship and return to Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This all followed a propitious return to the city. I rented a van to haul my stuff and what Jess had stored in our house and as I approached the city, a rainbow appeared. No kidding. A rainbow. I’m not making this up and it gets better. We unloaded at her house, drove across Paris to my apartment where I found a parking place in front of my house just as the clutch gave out. Couldn’t drive another meter. When I finally reached the rental company they told me not to worry, those Renault vans are famous for faulty clutches, and they’ll send a tow truck.

So I’m getting there. The bureaucratic details are being ticked off my list, I have a comfortable work space in my little house, central heating, a good baguette only a block away, and all of Paris within minutes on the Métro. I’m home.