Drownout France

Artists' Squats

On my first day back to the office (read: library), I decided to swing past an interesting building I've seen many times near where I live. Plainly in the middle of Paris, 59 Rivoli is not at all like the smooth commercial building that dominates the Louvre-Hotel de Ville district.

59 Rivoli is an artists' squat in the heart of Paris. It looks a lot like a university's studio arts building, but even more lived in. All the artist residents have put their painting, sculpture and other inventions all over the place. It's part studio and part gallery, since everyone is invited inside.

Les Manifs

The French love to protest. The biggest marches in generations happened after the elections last Spring, when most French youth declined to vote.

This week is notable for a new cropping up of rallies. The truck drivers closed the roads on Monday morning. Imagine America's proud Teamsters doing anything close. (In Britain, meanwhile, the firefighters have actually been striking. In the US, if the trade workers strike, there is an injunction.)

This lovely image courtesy of the marching lycéens (or school children), protesting a cut in teachers this year. They seem to be 12-5 years old down there (outside my window, en route to the Mayor's office).

Supposedly, there are 10,000 strikes a year in France (1,000 in Paris). Which is more than the number of rainy days; they list "today's strikes" in the paper next to the weather.

This Old House in Montmarte

Photo Gallery: Claireobscure

My chum Matte has put up a great photo gallery. It's at www.claireobscure.com. I've started putting a gallery up there of photos from November etc.: Amol's Paris.

Digital photography is one of the best things about traveling. An efficient way to post photos has been what's been missing. Looks like tools are developing.

The Canal and Locks in the 10th

Working locks. November 16.

Astonishing discovery of a broad, long canal that connects the Seine to districts well outside Paris.

Apparently, it was built by Napoleon to expand the water-freight radius. It's still in use. On the day we were there, a man sailed a radio-controlled sloop for some hours. Pairs of men sat along its green banks sipping cans of beer.

It's a funny neighborhood, just a few blocks from the well-visited Place de la Republique (and its wingéd liberty statue), with no one really around. The old waterway was clearly once an unsightly blight -- the buildings along the boulevard are shabby, and some of them are brand new 'developments', conspicuously-placed and cheerful residential towers that smack of government intervention.

But as we headed up, the graffiti became edgier and the first boutiques sprang out of the strings of dull, inexpensive tabacs and restaurants. Some stylish ateliers, miscellaneous shopping, a hip restaurant called Le Sporting and another one with a crazy live folk band on a Sunday afternoon. Prediction: this place will keep getting hipper.

The locks themselves (pictured to the right)? A mathematical thrill. Some guy I knew once went to Panama for a holiday with his girlfriend. At the time, I thought of the tales of mass-scale malaria deaths among the workers digging that trade lane. He came back and told me, "It was cool. We saw the canal." At which point I thought of the US military over-running Panama City in pursuit of ex-CIA operative and sometime drug-runner, Manuel Noriega. Returning to his comment, it seemed patent idiocy. But here, in the Northeast of Paris, I had that little thrill. (I'm still not booking tickets for Panama or Suez.)

The distant lock passes into a tunnel, which then heads the distance to the Seine. Since the canal is covered for the last leg, you wouldn't have seen it from any of the more central districts.

Haussman's 6 Story City

The New View. November 16.

The new apartment is on Rue De Mauvais Garçons (Bad Boys) right near the heart of the Marais. 3 minutes walking to Notre Dame, Pompidou, Rue du Temple, Hotel de Ville. And here you see a lovely view that includes the roof of the Pompidou and the lit-up Sacre Coeur.

If you get to any height in this town, you will see big open spaces. A great book at Artazart, an art book shop near the Canal St. Martin in the 10th, was all about Paris from rooftops.

Across those rooftops are so many neighborhoods--upgrading, delapidating, repopulating, going bohemian. All without radical discontinuities of wealth per district -- no Greenpoints in the limits of Paris that I've seen yet -- and without major smashing up of existing infrastructure. Smallish buildings lend themselves to being repurposed.

Haussman's skeleton contains the damage of bad neighborhoods, and provides the shelter for new experiments.

From Shanghai to the Moon

Back in Paris. November 16.

Can leaving a city you're only visiting give you perspective on it? I can now definitively answer this question.

After 5 and 1/2 months in Paris, I took a little 2 week sejour to the States. Mostly New York, and a bit of DC and NJ. What a lovely time of year to be in the US Northeast (leaves changing, that sort of thing).

So here's the nutshell: I was a bit nervous on the plane, sitting behind some grossly overweight, loud-talking boors. Is this my America?

The relief was in NY. It ain't the same place it used to be. Arriving to Terminal 4 at JFK is like a miracle, like arriving in Tokyo. But it's also old: old friends, my neighborhoods, LIRR, the 1 line. No more 9 line. Steams up your glasses. NY is A-OK.

So now one last amiable month in Paris before a hero's return to NY.

Parisian Philosophe à la New-yorkais

French Chicken, American-style. November 9.

Hello, America, I am visiting you. Sadly, my comments on France must pause.

Of course, I could serve up my trenchant insights on France-in-American-culture. But I'll spare you. Let me just say Le Monde appears 2 days late at $2 per.

Be sure to visit my Drownout News for my quotidian observations.

The Philosophical Profession

Epicurus at the Louvre. October 31.

"Waow!" is how the excalamation is spelled and pronounced in France. Two syllables, not the anglophonic singleton. This is what people say when I tell them what my dissertation is about. Isn't that funny? It's as if, in the US, you said "It's about rocket propulsion." Philosophy is a bit of a loser in the States, I guess?

The handsome man to the left is a philosopher, though: Epicurus. The Greeks have lots of famous sculptures of unknown philosophers and some with guessed names. There are the well known Plato and Socrates of the ancient school of Athens. I have a little model of Socrates that I picked up at a tourist shop in Athens some years back.

We all know well, I'm sure, Raphael's famous mural fresco at the Vatican called the School of Athens, where you can find well known figures from philosophical antiquity. To my mind, this reflects a Medieval revival in all things Greek via slavish imitation rather than genuine adoption. They weren't democrats in the Vatican you know, and neither did their great contemporary philosophers get their portraits made. (They did paint George Bush Junior's favorite quite often though, the political philosopher Jesus Christ.)

One hears a lot about the rise of the merchant classes in the Italian city-states at the dawn of the Rennaissance, but one sees quite a lot of the merchant classes in the painting of the next 300 years. Lots of patrons like the Medicis, merchants and political leaders. No philosophers though!

Though the occasional fellow shows up, in paintings specifically modeled on The School of Athens, such as Ingres's Apotheosis of Homer. (Homer? He didn't even exist.)

Cast the net wider in the modern age, and you don't even see scientists in paintings. It's common to point out the great impact of Enlightenment ideas on art, or even specific things like that of Einstein on Picasso, but you don't see much Einstein. More on this some other time, I guess. But worth noticing, don't you think?

At the Louvre

Detail from David's Coronation. Oct 31.

Monday and Wednesday the Louvre is open late, and this is the time to go. Tourists are off seeing the Moulin Rouge. This past Wednesday, we chose Italian sculpture and large-format French painting.

Call me an undergraduate Art Hum bore, and perhaps it has influenced my thinking about painting too much, but the Jean-Jacques David room at the Louvre has got to be the best in the whole place. It's the room which really has the quintessential paintings that the project of the Louvre itself embodies -- the bulk of the collections got their start as Napoleon's plunder. And it's fitting that the most awesome paintings regaling the pride of Gallic civilization.

Here on the upper-right is a detail from the Coronation of Napoleon, a painting which captures a moment of the supremest arrogance and surely a lasting endowment to the French patrimony. Bonaparte, standing in front of the weakly blessing Pope and his worshipful wife Josephine, sets the imperial crown of France and Italy on himself.

The detail here highlights one of the great figures of history looming in the background, the French foreign minister Talleyrand. On the canvas, he is nearly life-size -- it's a huge canvas that's maybe 25 feet high.

In the next room, there is more Delacroix, Geircault and Ingres. They might be more recognizable -- Gericault's "Raft of the Medusa" and Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People" are pretty well recognized-- and they're less in the model of a supine court painter than David. Delacroix's scenes of Napoleon on a donkey crossing the Alps, meeting diseased Arabs in Egypt, and standing over corpses in the battlefield, reveal the gloom of France's glory under Bonaparte.

Delaroche's Portrait of Portales. Oct 31.

At the end of the long room were some smaller format portraits by Delaroche -- whose name is a marketing problem on the scale of Monet/Manet. This is a marvelous painting and I must confess to the cheap thrill of its incredible realism. The bit I've detailed here literally dissembles to a modern color photograph. The light reflecting of the various materials (the silk lining of the jacket and bronze/gold base of the vase on the left) in particular.

There's only so much you can see in one night, by 9.45. The Louvre is just enormous.

Keep Your Eyes Skinned!

Seen on a poster this summer in the Paris Metro (a poster produced by the Paris Metro in fact), warning people to take precautions with their valuables while riding. Don't let it out of your sight. Keep your eyes...skinned. (Skin a cucumber? Peel a cucumber?)

Despite what you think people here don't really speak English. Young, educated people do. But that's sort of like saying young, educated people in American have learned Spanish. Hablas tu espanol? English is really heading for a latinization, I'd bet, though I probably won't get to see it. It won't be long now before you need an American English-Indian English dictionary to do business in South Asia.