ART
Letter from Paris:
Politics, Art & Food
By Don Rose
The weather was close to a Chicago July when I landed late April. The only thing hotter was the French election campaign. Sadly, however, a miasmic haze of impending defeat hung over it all like a Chicago smog.
Segolene Royal, the hope of socialism and feminism was down in the polls but fighting gamely on after a number of what should have been avoidable gaffes that made it appear she was not ready for prime time. She started the campaign last fall even or ahead of Sarkozy, the law-and-order guy with the beady, untrustworthy, eyes who appeared to be the thuggish Jean Marie Le Pen in an Armani suit. He seemed to promise a political Rolfing treatment, putting the French patient through considerable pain in order to realign the flagging economy.
Royal, meanwhile, offered a strange buffet of standard socialist nostrums and party-line deviations that managed to keep the left split into meaningless fractions and factions. (Imagine that—factionalism on the Left!) Anyway, for while it looked as if she might even come in third to Sarko and Bayrou, the would-be centrist. But on the night of the first round of elections she showed a fairly strong 25-plus percent to the bad guy’s 31 with the centrist scoring about 18 and the far-right Le Pen down to 10 (that’s because a lot of his vote was going to Sarko). Nevertheless, the political arithmetic was clearly against her.
On May Day, only 5 days before the final election, my cousin Bob Salita and I attended a Sego rally that pretty much told the story. In the shadow of the Bastille was a huge sound-truck with platform facing a decent but essentially under-sized crowd of mainly women—though a terrific drum corps was offering up some lively syncopated rhythms.
This rally was thrown by a NOW-like women’s org and all the signs and speeches were out of a retro, first-generation feminist handbook: free contraceptives…equality of payroll…let a woman do the job, etc etc etc. Fine sentiments indeed, but at this stage of the game she should have been well beyond such hard-core, base-building sloganeering. Anyway, Bob and I joined the parade that followed, chanting Seg-O-lene Pres-i-dente—Seg-O-lene Pres-i-dente--all the way up to the Place de Republique where the big unions and hard-left were stepping off the traditional May Day march.
Interestingly, virtually all of those marchers bore signs and shouted anti-Sarko chants—nothing pro-Segolene. So on Sunday the 6th, attending a small election-night house party at a French family’s apartment, it was no surprise at all to see the initial poll results flash across the TV screen at 53 percent Sarko, 47 for Sego—later corrected to 52-48.
The president-elect gave a first-rate appeal for unity and sincere-seeming pledge to bring us all together and be a uniter not a divider—but most of the French in the room, people of all ages, hooted back at the TV. OK—maybe he’s Bush in an Armani suit. At least he doesn’t support the war in Iraq—and contends that he is a friend of Barack Obama—heart-warming words to most of the French.
Speaking of TV, during my month here I had the
chance to see a lot of the new English-language Al Jazeera channel and it
was kind of a revelation.
I could not detect one note of definitive partisanship in their broadcasts.
No calling any suicide bombers “martyrs,” no sense that this was
the Fox News of the militant Arab world—not even in its reporting on
Israel. Example, even while some leftish French newspapers were saying things
to the effect of Israel is invading Gaza, the Al Jazeera anchors and reporters
were calling it correctly, announcing Hamas was breaking the truce.
Yes, there was a lot of serious body-counting in Iraq, as there should be, and lots of talking heads fining fault with Bushism in the Muslim world, but it was hardly stronger than you get on BBC International. I feel quite comfortable making the channel part of my extensive English-language news diet.
Eyeballing the art
Sad as the impending political news might be, there was—as always—much more to keep one happy in this still magical town. Such as a new museum devoted to architecture in the Palais de Chaillot—itself one of the most hulking, least attractive architectural sites in the city, though it offers one of the most elegant views across town when you’re looking away from it across the river to the Eiffel Tower and beyond.
All the serious work was done remodeling the interior into a crisp, muitilevel sequence of rooms in the international style. The first big show was dedicated to Christian Portzamparc, who designed the Cite de Musique (Music City) here and who has several admirable projects completed or under way in New York—plus some amazing large-scale site developments in places such as Dubai, turning it into a city of the future. On display were a series of architectural models paired with breathtaking digital videos detailing every aspect of the buildings and site plans.
A night or two later I caught both sets of a one-nighter by Dave Douglas and his new sextet at the avant-garde jazz club New Morning. This guy is not simply one of the two or three best trumpet players working these days, but a remarkable conceptualist and composer who is always forging ahead without ever losing important elements of the jazz tradition. Having missed his recent gig in Chicago I was doubly grateful for the opportunity.
BBQ in the French Southwest
A brief side trip found me back down in Lodeve a tiny village southwest of Paris for another visit with my friends Dennis Ginosi and Kathleen Prendergast on their lovely little estate. Dennis craved a spare-rib barbecue so I brought some rub with me from Chicago and he managed to get his local butcher to cut a piggy into something resembling our classic ribs, though with a thick extra layer of meat. Whilst slurping up Pernods under a cloud of wisteria hanging from the trellis over his rear terrace, we managed to smoke that there French-cut rack of ribs on his decaying Weber and come up with a treat rivaling Leon’s finest back home.
The return of Mlle. Y
Then too, there was the return of the mysterious Mlle. Y, who visited last November and was so inspired she decided to drop by again to celebrate her birthday. A stop at the world’s finest falafel stand, followed by our tour of the Salon de Mai, an annual artist-organized exhibition of about 150 current works, followed by beaucoup foie gras at Alain Senderens magnificent restaurant started her quaint stay. The next day it was time for the Paris Fair, where we sampled sausages, foie gras, honey and other comestibles from the hundreds of vendors, then chose an Alsatian restaurant from among those established at the perimeter of the gigantic food/wine pavilion.
Her birthday being on the 5th day of the 5th month, we went to the three-star Le Cinq (meaning 5) in the Hotel George V for a wine-drenched, three hour luncheon followed by a visit to the Maillol Museum for a glimpse of works by Jules Pascin, an early 20th Century “realist” of some interest, but no bells went off.
After a brief rest we shifted ethnicities to
attend a Cinco de Mayo party at the home of Marc Cogan, a Chicago-raised professor
and author recently retired from Wayne State University in Michigan. His houseful
of guests were scarfing up a great buffet of Mexican dishes in honor of the
occasion—my first Mexican dinner ever in Paris. All in all it was a
pretty full day of birthdaying for the Mlle. as well.
Gallery tripping
A few other significant art exhibits caught our attention, most importantly a huge restrospective of the loose mid-century group of Frenchmen known as the “new realists.” These included the strange mechanized machines of Tinguely, the wrappings of Christo, the crushed automobiles of Cesar and some miscellaneous works thrown into the mix by Robert Rauschenberg and Lee Bontecou.
The Louvre featured an unusual show called Contre-Pointe, where they invited several contemporary sculptors to create site-specific works to intersperse throughout their 18th Century gallery of classic statuary. The stunner among these was a 20-foot-long, four-foot-high, concave, C-shaped piece of highly polished stainless steel by Anish Kapoor, who established Cloud Gate (“the Bean”) in Millennium Park. This remarkable work mirrored with funhouse distortions the entire environment of marble works—upside down and right-side up—as well as we viewers milling through the displays.
The winner among several grand exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art in the Pompidou Center was a roomful of 20 exquisite paintings from the 30s and 40s by Arshile Gorky, the Georgian emigrant who worked the surrealist terrain of Miro and Klee, then became part of the movement into abstract expressionism.
Now you want weird? I give you the strange exposition at the Maison Rouge of Tetsumi Kudo, a penis-obsessed Japanese painter-sculptor whose variegated, modulated phalluses are displayed in every possible medium, slightly morphed, nailed to the wall, trapped in birdcages or flying overhead. More pricks than an acre of cactus garden—all enticingly done of course.
Maybe even weirder was a trip into the wondrously bizarre mind of David Lynch, best known as the creator-director of Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Eraserhead and other cult films. Turns out he is a painter as well and dozens of his dark, eerie canvasses (many also penis-obsessed) of ghostly houses, damaged women and rambling graffiti were displayed at the Cartier Foundation gallery, along with reams of sketches and meanderings from his notebooks, tons of photographs and a couple of hours of experimental films. If you think he makes odd movies, wait till you catch these products. (I loved many of them while Mlle. Y had understandable reservations about others.)
Not weird in the same sense, but wonderfully thought-provoking in its own way was a series of award-winning photographs on display at the Jeu de Paume’s Sully gallery in the Marais: a young German photog, Jurgen Nefzger did a series of several dozen images showing nuclear power-plant chimneys in the background with pastoral, everyday scenes in the foreground. One striking shot had a group of men putting on a golf course with an entire nuclear plant behind them in the near distance; another had a guy lazily fishing in a stream in front of three smoking chimneys, oblivious to how the stream might be polluted by the nukes.
Mo’ eats
Yo! You didn’t think I was through with
the food and wine, did you?
Must mention Mlle. Y’s second three-star experience of the trip at L’Arpege,
a lovely (and quite expensive, thank you) place across from the Rodin Museum,
where chef Alain Passard turns simple veggies such as spinach into little
symphonies punctuated with grilled foie gras; he turned a few strands of turbot
into an opera with a delicate mustard sauce. These and other delectations
were enjoyed with some new friends, Mary Herman, who shares my passion for
decoding the city’s arcane public transportation system, and husband
Bob who shares my obsession with three-star restaurants and five-star jazz.
We also learned why Paris’s leading critic, Gilles Pudlowski, named a spot called Chez Geraud as his bistro of the year. Need I mention only the salad of steamed baby leeks in a creamy vinaigrette smothered in shaved foie gras?
Don’t go there—you Americans might
spoil the place, as you have come close to doing at L’Ami Jean, this
marvelous contemporary Basque bistro near the Eiffel Tower, which I have mentioned
in past letters.
Recently the New York Times wrote it up glowingly and the secret is out. Always
crowded, it is now engorged, essentially with a lot of our countrymen. Fortunately
the Americans did not know about the special selection of charcuterie available
because it is not on the front page of the modestly priced menu.
I placed an order to be shared by Mlle. Y and myself, consisting of a huge country terrine, a big bowl of fried cracklings and about nine (phallic) sausages—all of which one slices and eats until totally sated or cholesterol alarms sound loudly.
So I am slicing each of these distinctive little delicacies and passing a portion of the slew on to her. It is getting to be like the eating scene in Tom Jones, while increasingly six or eight pairs of eyes at the other tables widen and we hear a lady muttering “I think I ordered the wrong thing” and all the rest of the ladies (and even the men) at the surrounding tables are staring in awe and chanting, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
