Drownout France

Last Licks, of Paris

At Claireobscure.com you can find pictures from my latest explorations in Paris.

I quite like some of them.

One is a hazy aerial shot where I label for your interest the major sites in our neighborhood.

Others could make good desktop backgrounds. Everybody wins!

Our Old Street

Le Marché aux Puces

At the end of line 4 to the northern end of Paris is the town of St. Ouen and the largest flea market in Europe.

It's perpetually running and a major destination for US antique dealers, gay couples, or late-middle-aged hetero couples.

You can find literally everything from Louis XIV furniture to 1960s butterfly hair clips, from US colonial woodwork to Henley-boat bookshelves, Napoleonic military uniforms (or lingerie), or early radios.

It's on the must-see in Paris list, though utterly peripheral to the center-city's many splendors. When you go, make sure to ignore all the stalls of ridiculous African knicknacks, sneakers and cell phone accessories. Head for the big covered buildings like Marché Dauphin on the other side of the highway from where you come out of the Metro.

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.

This Old House in Montmarte

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.

Parks of Paris

The Luxembourg Gardens have little if anything to do with Luxembourg the country. They feel about the size of Luxembourg, though, which is to say enormous if you consider they are just smack dab in the center of Paris. They are, by turns, the grounds surrounding the French Senate building, a manicured park of flowers and fountains, the premiere destination for mothers with children seeking sandboxes or pony rides or tennis, shaded places to lie in the grass, the home of one of Paris's several copies of the Statue of Liberty, also home to several Rodins, and on and on. For example, Wednesday afternoon, it appears a girls' school chooses to run its girls through the park as part of their occasional exercise regimen.

You can really tell it's France, when you watch the girls running by. Legs covered, no shorts. This seemed bizarre for a warm day. Some even in jeans. While many wore creditably athletic-looking pants, the overall impression was of a team of perfume sales counter girls running from one assignment to another. Figure hugging tops in stripes, tasteful patterns, and sometimes buttoned shirts. Not the usual sporting logos. On the contrary, there was one girl wearing a sweater set.

I remember smallish cotton shorts and t-shirts emblazoned with the school mascot (at my school, a Peglegged Dutchman) designed perhaps to ease the pursuit of escaped students.

The french girls seemed cooperative--none were dodging off into bushes, even though they were put to the humiliation of running through a crowded park full of businessmen, tourists, and little old ladies, at lunchtime.

The Street Story in Geneva

Graffito.

What can you tell from some graffiti?

In the only neighborhood that I'd recommend spending any time in Geneva, Carouge, there is graffiti literally on every wall. Architecture in Geneva is a bit plain, but suprisingly the upkeep is rather easy-going. It needs to be more vigorous, since numerous graffitti writers have covered the walls everywhere.

Interesting thing about this writing, is that it is singularly uncomplicated and direct (perhaps just as the Swiss are otherwise). There isn't an artistic contest going on. They are trying to be as prolific as possible.

This bit up to the right seems to say "clairez" under an X, and to have some purple arabic writing above it.

The battle for the streets of the french-speaking youth and the arabic imports, disaffected all around and lashing out against the uncaring walls of the world? It's not for me to judge, I think.

A bizarre and ridiculous counterpoint, the billboards of the Protestant Church of Geneva are preaching a quasi-religious economic message all over town. See here. As best as I can understand, the billboards say things like "Recovery is...moving in together" or "Recovery is...always aiming higher". Odd thing, "recovery" in this context is meant to refer to economic recovery. So, the Church is encouraging those hoping for an economic recovery to think also about the spiritual recovery. Is there any spiritual movement in America (leaving devotion to Greenspan or the Maharishi Mahesh aside) that makes any reference at all to macroeconomic conditions?

The Old Philosopher's Almanac of Paris

From Chatelet. 10 Aout.

If you loved Paris in the spring-time, might I recommend summer?

June, July average temperature was in the neighborhood of 70. I came with just a couple of "pullover" items and I wore them often. We were prepared for a hot August. Nothing doing. The French have been complaining for the last two weeks how it was not "summer" enough. I have been smiling as the sometimes-cloudy skies have kept things cool and easy-going. Beautiful evenings; not quite hot enough for shorts (only Americans and Germans wear them anyway), and not cold enough for jackets.

We spent last weekend at the Jardin de Luxembourg, doing some french exercises in the shade of a big tree.

Facing up to the facts, however, the northern latitude will soon bring its disadvantage: darkness at noon, to quote Koestler, but more like increasingly early evenings. I am told this is a gloomy place in the heart of winter, and perhaps that is true.

We will be gone by then. Though we have extended the stay: at least through September, and perhaps through October. There's really no reason to be back in the US just now (and if there will be war, terrorism, recession, and so on, perhaps not for a little while).

Low, Low, Low. The Low Point

Last night at the Moulin Rouge. Let me dispense with post hoc commentary and give you the live feed:

Falling Stocks. 05 Aout.

"This sucks. Oh God, this is terrible. What time is it? It's only been one minute? Crap. This sucks. This sucks. I can't believe they just did that. [...edited for length...]"

The ultimate Parisian tourist trap. What, in fact, is the Moulin Rouge?

As the film would tell you: to the north of Paris there was a village called Montmartre, a bit of a laisser-faire district for the unusual characters. More or less, a red-light district. And so it is still, though Paris has grown to encompass this part of town (and McDonald's has installed itself there).

The Moulin Rouge ("red windmill", named after the way the girls kick their stockinged-legs in windmill fashion) is perhaps one of the oldest or grandest but surely the most famous.

And now they have a bawdy show there, twice a night with an additional dinner sitting. On average $100/seat.

Bawdy show? Think of the lowest, most miserable, tinny-music, painted-dancer, glitter-and-feather-costume, wooden-choreography splash you saw on your last lame bachelor party in Las Vegas. Except it's 2 hours long. Worst part: as the performers lazily rehearse their parts I could not escape the impression that they were thinking, "Keep on clapping you moron tourists!".

Le Renouvellisation de Paris

Now showing.

When this show opened in Paris, it was just weeks before modern France's showdown with its atavistic past. Literally millions of people took to the streets against Le Pen, and they may as well have stepped out of these photos. Klein has photographed the new Paris and the new French in the 25 years of photos on show here.

That was the political message then.

But there is another aspect: renewal. Paris renews itself, pastiche upon the classics. Just as they entertain rock concerts, pot smokers, World Cup boozing, summer beach volleyball and even "the Fastest Waiter in Paris" competitions in front of the Hotel de Ville, plausibly among Europe's most impressive buildings--just as they installed the massive Pyramid in front of the Louvre or built La Defense to echo the Arch de Triomphe--Paris constantly preserves and renews itself.

The french politicians are invariably interviewed in their beaux-arts offices with striking, colorful modern abstract paintings in the background.

Long-replaced, the palaces of the French kings are still sitting around: as art museums, tourist sites, public spaces, government buildings, and so on. Still around, but suddenly modern.

New York, on the other hand, is another thing.

Renewal? Buildings come down, sure enough: the old Penn Station, for example, or even the twin towers. And they are replaced. Cell by cell, the city erases its past and replaces.

There is a kind of preservation too: achieved through acts of law or litigation, for Historical sites. Such places don't get revised or updated.

Soviet Bullet-holes

Restored Reichstag. 28 Juillet.

The Reichstag remains riddled with bullets. This contemporary government building, in the condition of the war-torn, burning capital.

But the bullet holes are patched over.

But not simply filled in with paving. Instead, delicately excavated and refilled with quadrangular fillings.

Disorder re-ordered? Scars healed or only bandaged?

Why did they choose to do it quite this way, just this funny way, with concrete that does not match?

Serious Security

U.S. Embassy. 29 Juillet.

In Berlin, you can't even get within a two blocks of the U.S. Embassy. It's right in the heart of downtown, and they have railroad cars and barbed wire blocking all access ways.

But if you thought we were "all in this together" -- i.e. that the Europeans were even slightly worried about equivalent types of terrorism -- you would be mistaken. They are not. While all kinds of US buildings are cordoned off with concrete blockades and guards, things are different in Europe.

The old terrorist threats have anti-terrorism policies to defend against them. So there's this VigiPirate program in France, originally started to prevent attacks from Algerian terrorists. But government buildings are not in the condition that U.S. sites are in.

That is to say: people expect attacks against the U.S. not their half-hearted allies. And therefore, isn't it nice to live under the global America security guarantee without paying the price (either in tax dollars or terrorist incidents)?

Berlin, The Divided City

Un-reconstructed. 29 Juillet.

Berlin, in recent memory, has suffered a lot of history: * supine to the Western Allies of WW1, * capital of the Third Reich's war machine, * headquarters of the Holocaust, * strategic ground zero for the Cold War.

Now's it's been restored to its deserved position: capital of the democratic German republic at the heart of Europe.

But what can you find in Berlin? A crisis of monuments.

Here to the right is Kaiser Frederick's church, damaged during the war and never rebuilt. This is a formidable, massive stone church ruin on Berlin's finest, upscale shopping street in the heart of old West Berlin: the Ku'Damm. It's as if St. Paul's Cathedral on 5th Avenue were a massive empty hulk.

There is an uncomfortable dynamic, however, between these scars and reminders of war and the many histories that intersect in Berlin. The Germans regret the atavistic impulse to war--they leave this monument at the center of the consumer and tourist quarter. This church was built as a memorial to Kaiser William II's father shortly after he acceded to the throne. William was the modernizing leader of great ambition who ultimately led Germany to its defeat in WW1 and the disastrous Versailles peace (recall his Chancellor Bismarck's doctrine of realpolitik and game of machtpolitik).

The violent, imperialist aspirations of the newly-born state are quite apart from some of the other horrors to follow.

Arendt. 29 Juillet.

This is what Hannah Arendt is pointing out in the video they have of her at the Jewish Museum. Everything else could have been repaid she says, except for the Auschwitz. When the Germans themselves learned about the Holocaust, they learned about an unforgiveable horror.

The Holocaust had a moral status quite apart from ordinary war. How can you address a cataclysm at the roots of modern Germany? The East Germans chose to distance themselves from it, but the West German government had inherited the culpability of Hitler's defeated regime.

At the over-architected Jewish museum, less than a year old, they have attempted a history of German Jews. The dominant theme is of a diasporic people that have suffered at the hands of their German hosts always, never worse than in the disaster of the Holocaust.

The basic project: reconciliation through engagement with history. But who is party to this reconciliation? The Germans. The people invented by 19th Century nationalists like Bismarck, in fact the race invented for Nazi ideological ends. And on the other side are the German Jews. The museum is not a history of the Jews. You do not hear about their fate in Spain (or the Catholic Inquisition) or in Eastern Europe (or in Stalin's gulags).

Inside the Void. 29 Juillet.

In fact, the basic principle that organizes this monument to and document of Jewish ethnic history and apology for the crimes of the German state, is a conception of a national race: on the one hand the German race that murdered and the German race that suffered.

Not many Jews remain in Germany after all, and here in the old quarters of the Berlin Museum they have built a history of German Jewry that ends in 1945 and extends thereafter not with Jews but with stories of the successor state that has struggled with Marx's Jewish Question recast.

The old problem was a Christian state oppressing its Jewish subjects, a problem of religion. The problem is a German state oppressing its Jewish subjects, a problem of peoples in opposition.

If that is not the problem, then what have the Germans to apologize for? The state itself is not guilty. It is a people that sits guiltily. It is the conception of a nationhood underwritten both by the nationalistic notion of a German people and by the supra-religious notion of Jewish identity that continues to prevail. They are locked in historical struggle in virtue of their very existence. How can the dialectic be superceded if both parties linger on, their existence itself pointing vividly to the other party's identity?

Holocaust Memorial. 29 Juillet.

A few meters from the un-wrapped, glass-domed Reichstag is a patch of verdure that reminded me of Prague's old Jewish cemetery not because of the long grass but because of the huge grave stone. This sign marks the future site of the memorial to the Romani ("Gypsy") people murdered by the Nazis. Just a few blocks away is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, just now beginning construction after a long controversy.

What can you build? Will it be enough?

Just to the left of the Brandenburg Gate is the site, surrounded by a fence.

All the while there is an entirely separate history carefully being erased: 50 years of division and escape attempts in the shadow of the Berlin Wall.

The wall is gone, there is no trace of it. At the old Checkpoint Charlie, there is a small, private museum and its documents of the division. And the builders are quickly eradicating any memory that one half of the city is 50 years behind the other.

Another famous sign. 29 Juillet.

West Germany, US bases, soldiers in Berlin discos, defectors and dissidents, and all the Cold War souvenirs. They are neatly separated in Berlin. Two cities entirely with two unrelated histories. You are meant to pity one of them, and stare at the other's horror in awe. And for the old Romantic Germany of Goethe and Schiller, Humboldt and Helmholz, which built the muscular, bald wise men that adorn the places wher the French would have put Beaux-Arts blindfolded Muses, there is yet another attitude: the history lessons of the lately-born lately-industrializing European states.

Of course there is also a cute and cuddly art show all over Berlin. Giant polar bears painted up in various designs, like the traveling cows that came to New York some years back.

The construction is everywhere in Berlin. How difficult it will be to build on these foundations!

Angels over Berlin. 29 Juillet.

Berlin was only capital of Germany for 74 years when the Allies split it up and the Soviets took possession of the burnt shell of the Reichstag. But now it's back and from it is broadcast the future of Europe. A continental European war between the major powers seems impossible now, not only for the facts of history but because of the international order they have mutually constructed (in part De Gaulle's vision of a Europe to rival America, but also a vision of multilateralist commune of non-militaristic powers in Kantian perpetual peace).

They have certainly built this into all the transparent glass government buildings in Berlin. They can see themselves. But where will be the fund of their national identity and pride in the future. It is not easy to define your statehood on the crimes for which you apologize. Inside the glass buildings, into which everyone can see so easily, what do you find? What do they have inside? There is nothing inside.

Automatic Transit

Chatelet. Juillet.

This is line 14.

You may know the good things about the Paris metro:
- frequent trains! Every 90 seconds or something.
- many stops! You're never more than a few blocks away.
- reliable service! Point-to-point: add 2 min for each stop and 5 min for each train-change, accurate within seconds.

The bad things:
- it stinks like the sewer just inches above. :(
- the train-changes can be long.
- short-ish trains (made up for by the frequency?)

Now for something you wouldn't have guessed: strikes. Damn near everyone in France is in a syndicat (union) and damn near all of the go on greve (strike). Even neurosurgeons (if you remember Adam Gopnik's Paris book) and even the train drivers.

Apparently they wait until December each year. Why? Not to disrupt la Noël! Over the years they have negotiated, get this, 13 months of pay for 12 months of work. So they get paid double in December. And if they strike in December, they don't need to get the last unit of pay; they can last the strike.

But what you see here, John Henry, is the driver-less metro train of the future. Running from Madeleine to BNF Francois Mitterand, this lovely train doesn't give a damn if your leg is caught in the door.