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October in Paris
We must have brought the curse of the Billy Goat with us.
The weather was perfect here until we arrived, but ever since it has been unseasonably chilly -- hovering around 50 most of the time -- sometimes sunny, sometimes gray, with occasional light rain.
This does not make for long strolls through the Parc Monceau or long sits on café terraces (though most are decently sheltered and heated.). Nevertheless, it is Paris, its charms dimmed only slightly by the overcast skies.
One can’t find a whiff of anti-Americanism in Paris these days. Again and again, someone volunteers immediately to aid in English if you’re looking to find the right bus stop or metro station. This degree of tolerance exists despite continued questioning about Iraq and the madman who got us there, The Madman in Chief.
There was much comment about how shaken—deservedly—Paul Wolfowitz was when his Baghdad hotel was fired upon, and plenty of speculation as to whether he was, in fact, the target. The consensus: is no one should make a martyr out of this crypto-fascist; but instead let him otherwise reap what he has sown.
No one here seems to understand the Schwarzenegger phenomenon. (Does anyone there?) Some suggest the Southern California fires are a providential retribution for those who elected him. If I believed in providence …I might agree.
On the Parisian home front, there was much delight in progressive quarters over the arrest and prosecution of a man who assaulted and spit upon a rabbi here—one of numerous acts of anti-Semitism that have been reported but not aggressively investigated in recent years.
It’s a hopeful sign that French officialdom will finally get on the case, which means pursuing the young, reckless Arabs who are the perpetrators of virtually all the acts of violence here.
Fanny San Donato, the young woman from southern France who stayed with us in Chicago, came up to Paris for a weekend of dining and gallery going. She seems to get a big kick out of being shown around Paris by a couple of Americans who also showed her around America.
We saw a magnificent collection of works from Gaughin in Tahiti, the current blockbuster art show. His stature grows and grows. Most notably displayed here is his superb craftsman in sustaining classical composition while interpreting the seemingly loose and “primitive” island scenes.
Fanny grew fond of my cooking at home so I served her one of my rare home-cooked Parisian meals. On the wonderful market street a block from my apartment, we picked up some fabulous veal chops (only $7 per lb) and a big batch of chanterelles ($3 per lb). I turned them into an accompanying sauce using balsamic and crème fraiche—the meal then capped by a wedge of Vacherin cheese, which comes into its brief season in late October.
You can’t import this rich, runny, savory cheese into the US because of certain bacteria that give it its unique flavor—though some denatured Vacherin makes its way in. (Don’t tell anybody but we’re planning on sneaking in some of the real thing. Come visit us in the customs jail if we’re caught.)
With only minimal cooking in, we’ve hit several splendid new-wave bistros that seem to be, at the moment, undiscovered by the locust-like plague of foodies who swarm a place, then eat, tip, and move on to the next chic discovery—though at least one of the spots seems to be at the edge of cultural stardom, judging by how packed it was on a Tuesday night plus a lot of overheard English conversations that indicate it is the next place to be.
For the advance celebration of Judy’s birthday we went to Le Cinq, the newest Michelin 3-star restaurant I visited alone last spring. It was a real winner then, and held up beautifully. We created our own tasting menu that included a magnificent tartar of scallops in cauliflower crème sauce with a schmear of oesetra caviar, as well as a nice chunk of sautéed fresh foie gras with rhubarb compote and elderberry juice, and on and on and on. Schlurp.
But before we went to Le Cinq we spent a weekend in Lodeve, a small town near Montpelier, due south of Paris, where former Tribune editor Dennis Ginosi and librarian/unionist Kathleen Pendergast have been living for the past six or seven years. Through beaucoup sweat, tears, toil and blood—to say nothing of money—they have fashioned a charming “estate” on a three-acre patch of land with a mountain view. The rustic farm-type house is being turned into a gem, what with a glassed in tower room KP uses as a studio, an enormous fireplace, a vine-covered peragola on one side and a gorgeous winter garden on the other, which still needs a bit of patching.
The nicely wooded property now has a contemplative rock garden, a babbling fountain, cypress trees and productive olive and fruit trees. They even cure their own olives. This says nothing about the large vegetable garden with Dennis’s home-built drip-irrigation system. After solving—or at least bitching about—the world’s problems while sitting on their terrace or before a fire, it’s either dinner picked up at Lodeve’s picture-perfect town market or a visit to Le Mimosa, one of those sparkling little restaurants one occasionally stumbles upon in the back roads of France.
There are, as usual, some wondrous exhibitions back in Paris, including a fabulous show dedicated to Marlene Dietrich and the making of her legend. I still get misty eyed when I hear her version of “Lili Marlene,” so it was quite a treat to catch all kinds of photos and film clips plus a spectacular display of her wardrobes from the 20’s —with commentaries frequently noting her styles as either masculine or androgynous. The show included much info on her role at battlefronts in WWII, where she was given the rank of captain in case she was captured by the Krauts. Earlier in Paris this year they dedicated a “Place Marlene Dietrich” in a small square near where she lived.
An even larger show at The Pompidou is devoted to one of Marlene’s polymorphous lovers, the poet, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (yes, he did an occasional woman). This was livened by loads of stills and clips from his surreal masterwork “Blood of a Poet” and his popular hit, “Beauty and the Beast” – the film that introduced those moving arms emerging from the walls and holding chandeliers.
There was a rich showing of Botticelli works at the Palais du Luxembourg, featuring an un-Botticelli-like, highly detailed drawing of the descending circles of hell. But the real revelation this trip was an immense retrospective of Edouard Vuillard, whose early pre-fauvist works are touched with magnificent colors and filled with mysterious patterns upon patterns that slowly reveal their mysteries—in some cases like his buddy Bonnard—and may in fact have inspired Matisse among other modernists. He later moved into a kind of neoclassicism and portraiture without losing the colors and the mysteries.
There are now two vast new spaces in Paris devoted to huge, cutting-edge installations. One of them, the re-habbed Palais de Tokyo, where I’ve seen some real dreck, has an intriguing show by the late Chinese sculptor/installation artist Chen Zhen, who converted dozens of chairs and bed frames into massive drums by stretching hides over them. Everyone is shown how to pat these drums, which create a roaring, rhythmic undercurrent throughout the entire exhibit. A couple of other works make use of walls of boxes containing Chinese herbal medicines, huge glassed-in walls filled with herbs and odd bio-morphic forms resembling viscera impaled with surgical tools. (Sorry, but an adequate, detailed description of these would take pages!)
Another big exhibit we’re trying to hit before leaving is devoted to Edith Piaf, a free exhibition at city hall. It’ll be dinner with friends Wednesday night, then homeward bound. A bien tot.