Are we in Paris yet?

Flea Markets and Food Markets

2012-02-13T00:00:00.000-08:00

Mauve pink clouds of blossoms are lining the streets as I drive down the hill; the plum trees are in bloom again. Every February they light up the neighborhood with the realization that spring will in fact return, and that this month, typically the rainiest of the year, has its upside.

This year of course we've had very little rain and the usual talk of drought is beginning, less worrisome so far than other dry winters because 2011 was a wetter than usual year and the reservoirs are not yet at dangerous levels. The skiers aren't happy though.

We went last weekend to the flea market at the closed Alameda Naval Air Station where the hangars and docks have become home to various businesses and organizations, including Hangar One Vodka and a monthly flea market.

It's been several years since we were here and it's grown enormously. The parking lot takes 15 minutes to walk through before you even reach the sales stalls, and they go on as far as the eye can see, much farther than the foot can walk, at least mine.

The rules of the market require that everything sold must be at least 20 years old. I think I had one of these staplers about 30 years ago myself.

I notice that a lot of the items for sale have at least a passing connection to France; clearly I'm not the only one drawn to French-ness.

We spent an hour or so wandering the aisles and at least that much time trying to leave Alameda; the traffic moved at a snail's pace and I swore I'd never do that again.

Unlike the last time we were there, when the food options for weary shoppers consisted of a couple of greasy fast food trucks, there were half a dozen choices that looked and even smelled interesting. And then there was the French thing again.

Since I won't be going back to the flea market barring a helicopter ride in and out, I was pleased to find a food truck buffet one afternoon last week in Berkeley itself.

Food trucks have become quite popular in the Bay Area and a group called Off the Grid has started sponsoring collections of trucks in various locations on specific days. Somewhat like Paris's street markets, regulars know where to go when to find their favorites.

And on Wednesday evenings Berkeley is now allowing food trucks to park on a blocked off section of Shattuck Avenue where chairs are set out on the grassy street median and people go wandering from truck to truck deciding on their meal.

From Korean barbecue to felafel to Japanese specialties, these are "gourmet" options, worthy of a site only a block away from world-famous foodie heaven Chez Panisse.

Here's at least one area in which Berkeley surpasses Paris; the big news in the City of Light has been the burger truck Le Camion Qui Fume, which has Parisians lining up for hours for a real American burger. We've got them beat for sure.

Through the Looking Glass

2012-01-31T18:16:00.000-08:00

We don't get to San Francisco often these days, as the traffic has become fierce and unpredictable. Time was if you avoided rush hours you could get to SF as fast as you could reach Oakland from Berkeley; no longer. So visiting The City, as we learned to call SF when we moved here many years ago, has become a very occasional outing.

But the rumor of good food will finally move us and last week we decided to have lunch at Mission Chinese Food, a once pop-up, now permanent restaurant on, what else, Mission Street, in what else, the Mission District. It wasn't hard to find.

I first heard about this place in Mark Bittman's New York Times column. A modern, completely untraditional Asian restaurant sharing space with a classic Chinese greasy spoon, cooking entirely different menus out of the same kitchen. In the Asian food desert that is Paris, this made me sit up and salivate.

And so we lunched on fabulously spicy and biting fermented Sichuan pickles of cabbage and cucumbers with peanuts, jalapenos and herbs, sizzling cumin lamb with bits of delicious chili-marinated long beans, and Li Bao dry braised noodles. The room was ill-lit and I wasn't able to get any decent photos of the food, but the New Year dragon over my head looked like he wanted some of our meal. No way; we ate until we groaned.

And then we stepped out into Latin America.

The Mission District is traditionally Mexican and Latin American. The stores cater to this market and the signs are predominately in Spanish. You could live your life here speaking only Spanish, and some people do. It's the kind of place where they still sell "used clothes" in two languages rather than "vintage" in one.

But things have changed in recent years and the El Capitan theater is now a parking garage, badly needed in this overcrowded part of town especially since the demographic is changing from ethnic to hipster. It reminds me in some ways of the Marais in Paris, once poor and Jewish, now pricey and hip.

The Mission hasn't completely capitulated, but it's getting harder to find an affordable apartment and the hottest restaurants are in these streets. Cappucinos and single room occupancy hotels are cheek by jowl. (Stir-fried pork jowl and radishes is on the Mission Chinese menu; oh sorry, that was my stomach forcing my fingers to type. So many dishes yet to try!)

On the way back to the car, I couldn't resist this evidence of the changing neighborhood. Do you think they got that phone number by accident or was someone at PacBell in a good mood the day they opened the account?

Not Your Father's Winter

2012-01-12T16:47:00.000-08:00

See that? That is not what this winter is like in Paris. Of course not. We left.

In fact the winter of 2011-2012 is the mildest in many years and on its way to beating all records. The temperature has not reached freezing at all; even in the unusually warm winter of 2006-2007 the temperatures fell to -1º/-3ºC. Weather this mild has not been recorded since the early 1970s.

Luckily we're quite happy here in the equally oddly warm Bay Area, where I've been swanning around in a T-shirt and cardigan. I'd be royally p.o.'d if we had left a warm Parisian winter for a cold and dreary Berkeley sojourn. Instead we're hanging out with equally lightly dressed friends and sitting outside enjoying global warming.

Here's where I'm sitting right now:

Well, no, I had to get up to take the picture, but you get the idea. Sun and warmth and greenery outside the window. Mmmm...

During these Berkeley sojourns we've always tried to take French lessons. It's hard to really learn a language without being immersed in it. When we're in Paris it's all around and speaking in English to each other, while not ideal, is not as bad as it is here, where all the world is speaking English and we have to go out of our way to listen to French TV or radio to work on comprehension.

So Gene and I have been trying, rather awkwardly, to speak French to each other recently. Since speaking in French to anyone requires more concentrated effort than speaking English, you can imagine what stilted and repetitive conversations we're having when speaking to each other: "Quoi? Comment? Qu'est-ce que tu m'as dis?" There's a lot of repeating.

Our regular Berkeley French teacher has had serious health problems and is not available, so we've both signed up with the local Alliance Francaise for weekly French lessons and we're looking forward to a bit more fluency with each other. We'll see how it goes, or as we should be saying to each other, on verra comment ça va aller.

Slip Sliding Along

2012-01-06T10:38:00.000-08:00

There have been only a handful of days in the last month that have been anything but sunny and clear. Our decision not to spend the winter in Paris has been vindicated in terms of weather, no question. Waking up to sunny skies rather than gray rain feels great. And wearing a sweater rather than a heavy coat, muffler and gloves? Priceless.

Our original thought in moving to Paris the first year was to see how it felt to live there all year round rather than the spring and fall visits we'd been making for years. Californians to the core, now we know. We're not big fans of cold, gray, rainy, snowy, slushy days. Sometimes just being in Paris makes up for it though.

And sometimes the lack of bagels added to the weather tips us over the edge. How I would kill to see a selection like this in Paris!

I'm kidding. Bagels are great, but I don't actually feel the need to recreate Berkeley in Paris. Perhaps Paris in Berkeley...now that would be a good thing. Gerard Mulot croissants for breakfast...miam. Although I was given a loaf of the best bread I've ever had last week, baked in the wood-burning pizza oven at Pizzaiolo in Oakland. Not so bad as a croissant stand-in. And the pizza if fabulous too.

Meanwhile, we are doing our usual cocooning. We're spending much less time here going out and much more eating at home, reading, watching television. It's a good version of life and a different one.
A pot of soup on the stove is just as nice if the sun is shining.

The holidays passed lightly over our heads, with a few parties, a few friends, a few relations; this year we had no feeling of Christmas overload, no annoying songs stuck in our heads, playing over and over. We stayed out of stores, exchanged few gifts, just enjoyed the love and health we were lucky to have. Gene had a long-scheduled surgery and has come out of it just fine. We're happy.

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T19:15:00.000-08:00

A bright and sparkling, happy and healthy 2012 to all of you. Thanks for sticking with me for another year!

More Venice

2011-12-30T17:22:00.000-08:00

A glimpse of painted ceiling in a restored palazzo at the anchorage of the Accademia Bridge.

Parking your boat seems a lot easier than parking your car in other cities. I wonder if you need a permit?

Canals and streets are often the same width and the paved ways cross the watery ones.

Over the years this church portico has become squeezed by the encroaching buildings.

Pigeons perch everywhere there's an available surface.

Wellheads in the campos used to supply water to the locals. Now they offer places to play or to sit.

Kids after school climbing on a wellhead in Campo San Barnaba.

Just in case you thought you were heading in the right direction.

Sometimes all there is to do is stop in a caffé and watch the world go by.

Let's Go Back to Venice

2011-12-26T21:48:00.000-08:00

Photographically, that is. I've got quite a few photos from that gorgeous city that I'd like to share.

Let's start with some food from the Rialto market:

For the mathematically challenged, I suppose it's useful to be reminded that if five artichokes cost three euros, 10 will cost six euros. Maybe it's me, but wouldn't it be a better sales tactic to offer six for five euros? Just asking...

This is clearly the season for gas-producing vegetables and in this market you know exactly where they come from; the growing area is identified on the signs.

Aren't these the most beautifully shaded pears you've ever seen?

And the mushrooms are huge and perfect, needing only some olive oil and garlic.

Not a lot of butchers in the area, but fishmongers galore and the fish too are identified as to their place of origin.

Some shellfish doesn't seem intuitively edible to me. Wouldn't you have to be really hungry to think these razor clams were going to taste as good as they do as a sauce for pasta?

But crayfish look like there'd be a bite or two of good eating under those shells.

And once you open up the pretty scallop shell the meat is irresistible.

But come on, octopus? Really? Tasty, I grant you, but who first had the nerve to find out?

Holiday, Shmoliday, It's All Chow Mein to Me

2011-12-24T23:09:00.000-08:00

photo courtesy of www.tablet,com

The playwright David Mamet drew this cartoon that's taken on a life of its own, popping up all over the net.

When Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was asked during her confirmation hearing where she had been on Christmas Day she laughed and replied, "You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant." It's an old joke based on a real tradition.

And then you go to a movie.

photo courtesy of Pony Jigger on Etsy

(link: http://www.etsy.com/listing/57599170/jewish-christmas-card-chinese-food-and-a-movie)

And for those of you who do celebrate in a different tradition, Merry Christmas and Joyeux Noël!

photo courtesy www.crazyauntperl.com

Playing Catch Up

2011-12-24T10:00:00.000-08:00

We're finally in our own Berkeley home after five months, after some rather luxurious, if unplanned, couch-surfing at relatives and friends homes since mid-August. Our actual Paris stay lasted only two months of the time, much shorter than our typical sojourn. It seems like we've been away forever.

On our arrival in the Bay Area we spent a week at my sister and brother-in-law's house until our tenants skedaddled and we were able to move home. Pleasant as it was to wake in the morning and share a cup of coffee with my much-missed sister, we couldn't wait to get home, take a bath in our huge tub (we don't have one in our Paris life) and get into our very own bed. Ahhhhh.....

The skies are blue and the sun shining, the temperature cool by Berkeley standards but mild by ours now. We have been seeing friends for meals at our favorite restaurants and flicking through television channels trying to find anything interesting, with little luck. Feels like old times.

My multi-talented friend Paulette Traverso had a show of her artwork this month at Jimmie Gallery in Berkeley. I had heard about what she was doing but hadn't seen any of the work until last week.

Old portrait photographs are the base for meditations in ink and etching knife and are shown mounted on antique photo pullers. Paulette comes to "know" the people in the photos and her work seems to be an expression of connection between herself and them.

Packing Up

2011-12-04T07:09:00.000-08:00

It seems quite strange to be leaving Paris only two months after we arrived but last year we had decided not to spend the winter here after the last two really cold, snowy hivers. The first one was kind of fun and we were assured by Parisians that it was not at all the usual winter weather. When the next one was worse, we stopped believing them.

We're Californians after all and have a perfectly nice house in which to sit out the chillier months, so that's what we're going to do.

And naturally this winter has been, at least so far, much milder than the previous two, has been in fact more like an extended autumn. Virtually no rain and temperatures ranging 10F-15F higher than normal for the season. I'm actually kind of pleased that it's gotten a bit colder this week and that there's been some rain the last couple of days, enough for me to think that spending the winter in Berkeley really was a good idea.

Meanwhile we haven't been doing much other than the inevitable round of "last" dinners and coffees and our daily strolls around the city.

Which, you will agree, is lovely in any season.

Well, the sun helps of course, highlighting the gold on the statuary

and turning the occasional planted terrasse into someplace you'd like to be invited to visit because, as the dial tells you, this time is fleeting.

The large Maillol sculptures of ronde ladies in the Tuileries don't seem to get the attention of the men in the area, no matter what their ages. Not the preferred body shape for today's males apparently.

Some wall art that caught my eye included these fellows who seem to have dropped down from Notre Dame to look over the courtyard wall at the human goings-on

and this agreeable response to the typical injunction not to post on the walls.

And so we're leaving in a couple of days for several months. The blog will not be on hiatus

but it is likely to be even less frequent than it's been lately unless life gets unusually exciting in Berkeley.

Paris store windows are dressed for Noël, but this one around the corner from our apartment seems appropriate for us right now. It's all in English, although the date is written in the European manner.
Happy holidays, tout le monde.

In the Lagoon

2011-11-28T04:25:00.000-08:00

It's probably sacrilegious to say this, but after three days in the streets and canals of Venice we wanted a break, and so we got on a waterbus at Fondamenta Nuove to go have lunch on Torcello, the tiny island housing Locanda Cipriani, a 13th century church and 16 full-time residents.

Since there's no direct vaporetto to Torcello we went first to Burano, known for its lace and multi-colored houses. This is not the better known Murano, with dozens of factories turning out tourist glass only 10 minutes from Venice itself. Burano is a good 40 minutes from La Serenissima and unfortunately no longer turns out even tourist lace; nearly everything but the most expensive handmade stuff comes from Asia.

However the sun remains shining, and the tourist trade keeps the residents in their brightly painted houses, and all's right with the world.

Even here on Burano though, history more recent than the time of the Doges makes its mark. This little piazzetta has been renamed in honor of the 9/11 victims.

Another boat takes us on to Torcello, where we find ourselves walking a paved path along the single canal, surrounded by fields, the occasional house, and a couple of cafés along the path. This couldn't be farther from the bustle and buildings of Venice.

We have a very pleasant if overpriced lunch at Locanda Cipriani, disappointed that this late in the season they are no longer serving in the garden. With only vaporetto every 40 minutes or so we decide that getting back for a rest is the better part of valor and so we decide to skip the church in favor of catching the next vaporetto back to Venice.

This fellow is patiently waiting for the boat as well.

And when it comes we retrace our route past several of the other islands, including the one that holds the cemetery, and return to the city, ready to deal with airport security and crowds on the way back home.

Venice Once Again

2011-11-24T10:28:00.000-08:00

On a recent Friday I was idly checking the weather forecast for various locations in Europe and noticed that Venice was about to enjoy four straight days of sun. Within an hour I had booked flights and a hotel room and two days later we found ourselves on a vaporetto, watching the multihued palazzi go by.

This is the kind of thing we thought we'd be doing often while living in Paris but as you might have noticed we don't often manage to leave town. We had missed a previously planned visit to Venice when we had to delay our departure for Paris in September and it suddenly seemed the thing to do. We'd been looking forward to seeing the Biennale, the international art exhibition Venice holds in odd-numbered years and we realized we could still see it if we went right away. So there we were.

It felt a bit like visiting an old friend and a bit like a brand new acquaintance. We checked into an adorable little hotel, dropped our bags and hit the bridges. I use that word advisedly since it seems they have proliferated since we were last there; I don't recall quite as many quite as ubiquitous.

One of the greatest Venetian pleasures is getting lost and even I, the ultimate control-freak, enjoy that...to a certain extent. I had my very detailed map in hand and benefited from the directional recall I had from previous visits. Nonetheless, it took a very nice pierced-face young woman walking her dog to walk us in the right direction when I got lost trying to find a restaurant I'd been to three times before. This is shaming to such as moi.

But the weather was incredible, the crowds manageable, and the food delicious.

One is always startled in Venice to see the normal routines of the outside world given a Venetian twist; here your packages are not delivered by a van.

We managed to see tons of art in churches we'd never visited before, including the incredible Veroneses in the Church of San Sebastiano. We avoided museums per se but found ourselves peering into the courtyard of the Ca d'Oro and couldn't resist going in.

We were told that we were the lucky beneficiaries of an unusually low tide that left the mosaic floors of the canal level palazzo entry uncovered to view.

And as for the higher floors, I was much more taken by the remaining architectural wonders than by the art on the modernized walls.

Memorably Musée d'Orsay

2011-11-14T11:28:00.000-08:00

This weekend we attended an event for the American Friends of the Musée d'Orsay, a group recently formed to help the museum raise private funding for its work. We were particularly excited about going because we had been saving our first visit to the newly renovated and expanded Impressionist galleries so that we could see them at their best, i.e. with only 300 other people rather than the thousands typically in the galleries on any given day.

In addition, the museum had provided several of its curators to talk to the guests about specific works. For example, we heard a discussion of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe by the curator responsible for last spring's major Manet retrospective. Not your typical museum visit by any means.

The newly revamped café was the site for champagne and hors d'oeuvres supplied by Dalloyau and the intriguing "make your own art" gimmick was the opportunity to use tinted chocolate to color a Parisian street scene stretched out on a long table.

When the "painting" was entirely colored, a layer of white chocolate was poured on, leaving a fresh "canvas" to be painted anew.

As much fun as this part of the evening was, the true delight was seeing the galleries, newly painted in strong tones of green, gray, blue or purple, showing off the rehung and rearranged paintings to their best advantage. The new director of the Orsay, Guy Cogeval, had had a lot of resistance to the new wall colors, but they're a wonderful background for the work. We were asked not to photograph in the galleries, so you'll have to go see yourself.

It's unlikely you'll have them to yourself though. That was the truly memorable part of the event.

Mashed in Museums

2011-11-10T03:43:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of museums in Paris and many of them are crowded with people. These people tend to fall into two categories in my experience: first, visitors determined to see the well-known treasures they've read and heard about, and second, locals who are determined to see the new exhibitions they've heard and read about. Mostly, they're not in the same place, but they take up equal room when you're trying to do either of these things.

We've mostly fallen into the second category recently. Yes, it's true that with all the incredible museums at our disposal we tend to go to see the temporary exhibitions and ignore the full time residents of the galleries of Paris museums. Our bad.

So which crowds have we been battling recently? One rainy afternoon we started out to go to the Jacquemart-André museum to see the Fra Angelico show but the gloomy weather kept us closer to home and we walked to the Musée Maillol to see the show on Pompeii instead. I keep forgetting how these little, and I mean tiny, old ladies push and maneuver themselves to the front, luckily too short to block others' views but shameless in their determination to ignore anyone else who might be in their way.

The Maillol, like many of the smaller museums in Paris, is not designed to handle large crowds, having one big room and lots of little ones connected by narrow corridors. Blockages are inevitable, and when one of the small rooms contains the "erotic" wall paintings, one can feel like the cork in the bottle. Naturally they book popular exhibitions that tend to draw crowds.

Had we managed to get to the Jacquemart-André we would have been in even worse shape, as there the rooms set aside for temporary exhibitions are even smaller, and for some reason the museum seems to encourage tours, so one is often stuck behind or pushed away by groups with guides explaining what they're seeing to people with bad eyesight who need to get RIGHT UP to the paintings and study them for A LONG TIME.

It isn't only in smaller museums that these hazards arise. We went to the Louvre to see the exhibit of Macedonian art from the dynasty that culminated in Alexander the Great. Lots of small objects and detailed descriptions on the signage encouraged people to move very slowly along in lines before the display cases. Once again the tiny ladies (the same ones, maybe? they all look alike) practicing their maneuvering skills manage this time to block the views, leading me at least to skip whole displays.

So what to do? Why, visit the less popular and thus less populated exhibitions and museums of course. So we're off to the Pinacothèque de Paris to see a show on German Expressionism. This museum is interesting in that it's private and seems to have fewer connections with large international museums so that their exhibitions, while not bad, don't manage to borrow the best examples of what they're showing. And once again we have the Curatorial Dilemma we last ran into at the Cezanne and Paris show.

It's nearly impossible to mount an exhibition anymore without a "hook", and no, that's not a pun. Curators seem to need a reason to show work that's not new, no matter how flimsy. In this case, the difference between die Blaue Reiter and die Brucke schools of Expressionism was the hook. While there were clearly theoretical differences between the two, explained in language I found impenetrable, the work itself didn't seem to reflect those differences in any consistent manner. Or maybe I was just tired.

There were only 3 other people in the museum.

Deconstructing Construction

2011-11-07T11:51:00.000-08:00

I knew that in Paris one often has to bring the furniture into one's apartment through the windows to the street, since the stairs tend to be too restrictive.

I had never thought though about how one might bring in a new I-Beam.

Walking home one day recently we were stopped by a construction crew blocking the street while maneuvering the beam. Having walked quite a way down a long block we were reluctant to turn around and retrace our steps; we weren't in a hurry, so we'd just wait. It took a while, but it was fascinating.

The I-beam must have been 25 feet long and the window it had to come through was about 3' by 5'.

The combined efforts of a crane operator, a man at the end of a rope and two men in the window sending hand signals to the other two managed to thread that needle in about 15 minutes.

I'm really curious about what it looks like inside.

Close-ups

2011-11-04T02:58:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to walk as much as possible to strengthen the somewhat limited leg function I have after my recent operation. I had been in the habit of walking miles at a relatively fast pace and lately that pace has slowed and the miles have become fewer, leaving me more time to notice the little things I might have zipped by in the past.

The great flood of 1910 had the Seine overflowing its banks and left Parisians suffering for months. On several streets on the Left Bank one can find these markers showing the height of the flood at that time. The one below is near the Boulevard St-Germain, several blocks from the river.

And while we're on the subject of water, these green fountains, known as Wallace fountains for Sir Richard Wallace, who had them built after the Franco-Prussian War to provide free drinking water to the poor, are still operating nearly a century and a half later, with perfectly drinkable water. No need to buy non-green plastic bottles when wandering around Paris, visitors!

Sneaking into courtyards is still one of my favorite pastimes and this one had a lovely vine setting off the almost English mews look of the building, with its whitewashed brick and black curved windows.

And even when I'm not on foot, the irresistible photo op presents itself, as did this one when I was on a bus passing the Assemblée Nationale, the French sort-of equivalent to our House of Representatives. These guys were marching out of the gate to the accompaniment of a drummer. Not the kind of thing you're likely to see on the streets of D.C. Do you think they wear those uniforms going home on the metro?

Happy Halloween

2011-10-31T03:16:00.000-07:00

I roasted a pumpkin for dinner last night, but it wasn't one of these, which would have melted all over the oven. These gorgeous faux potirons are another one of chocolatier Patrick Roger's sculptures in chocolate, in the window of his boutique on Boulevard St-Germain. Notice the little fresh chestnut in there too?

Less appealing, and less Halloween appropriate, is this fellow in the other window. Keeping watch over the pumpkin patch, maybe?

Not a lot of Halloween in Paris this year, at least among Parisians. I know of several parties for ex-pats, but the Halloween fad here among the French seems to have passed. On the other hand, what's going on with this fellow leaning out the window of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs?

Although it's been there since way before Halloween, a skeleton is always appropriate, even if in Pepto-Bismol pink, and whoever stenciled this rather lively one on the street took good advantage of the existing elements in the sidewalk. Great sixteen-pack!

Tomorrow is the big fall holiday here, Toussaint, and lots of folks have taken off for the last week since the schools have been closed. Toussaint is traditionally the day people go to cemeteries and care for the graves of the dead. Not likely to be what we will do, but you never know.

On the other hand, Candelaria, the great little Mexican bar and restaurant in the Marais, will be celebrating Dia de los Muertos with special drinks and tamales. Now that's more likely!

A Bit of This and That

2011-10-29T01:37:00.000-07:00

The yearly Salon du Chocolat took place without me last week. I like chocolate, but not enough to go to a trade show and battle the crowds to see the latest ideas of what to do with the cacao bean, although some of them were apparently quite risqué. For some more detailed information, see here.

Parking is at a premium on the streets of Paris and bumper kissing is typical. I liked the primary colors this pairing presented.

While there is an Avenue de New York in Paris, I much prefer this ad hoc renaming of a street someone stuck on the side of a random building. I guess someone other than me remembers the old TV show of my childhood: "There are 6 million stories in the Naked City. This is one of them."

And just in case you didn't know where to put the car:

Although in view of the trash cans, maybe GARBAGE would be more appropriate.

In the last couple of years there has been a rash of huge product ads covering the scaffolding surrounding public buildings undergoing renovation. Watch ads on the Louvre, YSL ads on the Musée d'Orsay, and this ad on the Conciergerie. It would appear however that the complaints about these ads have reached a point where they had to be addressed. This sign is prominently placed next to the Swatch ad:

It says "This signage contributes to the financing of the restoration work on the Palais de Justice, part of the national patrimony." So there!

Traipsing Through the Tuileries

2011-10-28T09:41:00.000-07:00

I think Jack Russell terriers are the breed of dog I see most often in Paris, which is odd. Though small, they have an enormous amount of energy and living in a typically small Parisian apartment must be tough for them. This one however was having the time of his life chasing his ball in the Tuileries garden last weekend.

It was a beautiful day to be out and about and it was only by sticking to the side paths that we avoided the crowds of people enjoying the weather and the art installations that had been placed in the gardens as part of the annual FIAC contemporary art salon.

You probably know that French parks typically don't allow people to walk, play or picnic on the lawns. These boys, who kicked their ball onto the adjacent lawn, were standing stymied at the lawn's edge, not knowing quite what to do: should they go onto the lawn to retrieve the ball or not?

They looked back and forth at each other for a minute or two and finally the smaller one got up his courage and dashed onto the lawn, grabbed the ball, and ran off as quickly as possible. I left them playing happily once more.

It seems the chairs surrounding the lawns have had a new coat of paint this year, and unlike the darker green of previous years, this time the paint matches the green of the lawn with uncanny precision.

And then of course there were the other colors to see, like this enormous sculpture that looks like a huge multi-colored peanut

and this shipping container turned pop-up movie theater.

I love the guy with his bag of popcorn in hand, ready for the show to begin, but that balloon is going to cause an argument!

The largest piece I saw in the garden was this one, a cylinder that must have been more than 50 feet long, widening as it went.

I was more interested in the view of Sacre Coeur between the buildings though.

(Sorry I didn't make notes of the artists and the names of the pieces.)

Sunning in the City

2011-10-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

The last two weekends have been bright and sunny and Parisians are taking full advantage of what may be the last of the season. They're out in the parks and cafés, faces turned to the sun as if storing it for the gray days to come.

Last week we went up to Belleville to see some friends who live just at the top of the Parc de Belleville and spent the afternoon sitting on the terrace of the café at the top of the part of the park in the photo below. We weren't the only ones there and the sun had a chance to shift and hit each of us before we finished our lunch and reluctantly got up to go.

Many others had simply stretched out on the lawns for picnics and naps. This park is really used by the inhabitants of the quartier as well as others who come from farther away for the pretty surroundings and the 180 degree view of Paris from the top.

On our stroll down through the park to the bus stop we came across this church shining in the sun and read the historical information plaque at its base to learn that it was a headquarters for the Commune of 1871 and the priests assigned to it were condemned and executed by the revolutionaries.

It's beautiful city, but there's a lot of blood that's soaked into its soil over the years.

This is the courtyard of our friends' building. Typical of the buildings on the street, it's hidden behind flat and dull facades that give no hint of what's behind. Since this is one of the few affordable areas left in Paris, the apartments are becoming more in demand and consequently prices are rising. Gentrification looms, but the population is still very mixed and kids of all colors were playing in the streets and the park.

By the way, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that one bus will take us all the way from our house to Belleville. Our goal has become to avoid the metro if we possibly can. The buses can be crowded, but not as unpleasantly as the metro, and since we're rarely in a hurry it's our transport of choice.

The gadget on the home page of the transport system, www.ratp.fr, will tell you the way to get where you're going using any mode of transport, at any time of the day, and giving you a choice of fastest, least walking or fewest connections to make. Although it occasional goes bonkers and wants me to go somewhere I know is slightly out of the way, all in all it's a great tool.

Market Saturday

2011-10-20T05:58:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted photos from a market and last Saturday we took a bus over to the big and upscale market on Avenue President Wilson, just outside the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d'Art Moderne.

In contrast to our favorite market on Boulevard Richard Lenoir, near Bastille, the President Wilson market has fewer stalls and fewer of the stallholders and shoppers are of North African origin.
Some of the products are rather more expensive as well, but maybe the locals don't mind.

I was sorely tempted by these ready-to-cook escargots; can we all admit that the rubbery little bodies are only a vehicle for the delicious garlic butter?

I've recently been told that scallops, coquilles Saint-Jacques, have a season, and this is it. They're found on restaurant menus at the moment, and piles of them were available at the market, sold with their coral roe, which is valued here. In the States I think they throw it away before sale; I never see the scallops sold with the roe attached.

It's mushroom season too, and piles of girolles are available for the buying. I bought 250 grams (I'm getting used to European measurements at last), sautéd them with some chervil and scrambled some eggs into the pan for lunch the next day. Yum!

I wish I knew more about fish; I'm always reluctant to try a species I don't know, but there are so many and they look so interesting! Maybe if I cooked at home more, but there are so many restaurants and so little time, as they say about other pursuits.

There were dessert choices to make before we went home and that little pear tarte...see the one just on the far side of the strawberry one?...came home with us.

All that shopping tired us out and we spent a pleasant hour sitting in the sun on a café terrace at Place d'Alma, sipping coffee and enjoying what was probably gong to be the last of the good weather before getting back on the bus to go home.

Sunny Update

2011-10-15T01:20:00.000-07:00

I have mentioned we've been eating, right?

But we have been waking a bit earlier and managing to get out and see a bit of the world. We get the newspaper and walk over to one of our favorite cafés in the middle of tourist St-Germain des Prés for coffee and the crossword puzzle and a bit of people-watching.

Lots of English speakers; many of them not native but German, Scandinavian, Italian or Eastern European who use English as a common language when traveling. It's usually the language the café waiter can most easily understand if the customer doesn't speak French. Not to say there aren't a lot of Americans and British as well, along with the occasional Australian.

I've been walking a bit slower than usual since I have a bit of residual difficulty after my back surgery and felt some comradeship with this building, whose vertebrae seem to lack much cushioning between them.

The sun has finally come out for the first time since we arrived and we've been promised three days of it before the gray returns, and maybe another day or two next week. Lunch yesterday on a sunny café terrace allowed us to shed our jackets and enjoy a salade Nicoise.

The "Cezanne and Paris" exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg was interesting, but yet another example of how curators reach for themes that don't really support an exhibit. Cezanne did work in Paris, coming back and forth from his native and beloved Provence for most of his life, but little of the work was specifically about Paris and other than three or four cityscapes location wasn't particularly important to the work in the show.

Last summer we went to Normandy to see a show of the work Bonnard did after moving there and that was interesting because it was completely different than the city-based interiors I had known him for. That wasn't the case with the Cezannes, but it was a show worth seeing nonetheless.

Apparently there has been a rash of telephone thefts, mostly iPhones and smartphones I imagine, in the metro and on buses, inspiring the authorities to suggest you be careful using them in public. The pickpocket who took Gene's phone out of his pocket must have been terribly surprised to get the cheapie Nokia we bought for 24 euros in Italy two years ago.

Nonetheless, it caused us to waste an afternoon looking for another cheapie phone (yeah Darty!) and the enormous frustration of trying to program it and understand how to use it. Luckily our landlady's 23 year old grandson was kind enough to spend some time helping out. What do you do if you don't have an available under 25 year old around?

Day and Night

2011-10-09T04:57:00.000-07:00

We're still living a nocturnal existence, getting out only for a short time in daylight and making dinner the big event of the day. While we're hoping that will shift soon I'm not pushing it, particularly since we are now definitively into autumn. The skies are leaden, it's been raining nearly every day, and we've pulled out the warm jackets and mufflers. An occasional walk or outing for coffee is all I feel the need for at the moment.

Since this is typically one of the loveliest seasons of the year in Berkeley we've been getting reports of soft days and pretty sunsets back there and we keep telling ourselves, "but we're in PARIS!" That can make up for a lot of gray sky. The art exhibits are beginning to open, there's lots of music scheduled, game and mushrooms and pumpkin soup are on restaurant menus. Now we just need to wake up and go.

The first few days here we spent seeing some of the friends from California still in Paris after E's big party, along with E and D themselves. They've left now, and some local friends are back after the rentrée. Last night was the first time I spent much of the evening speaking French and I was pleased that it wasn't too bad. It is time though to go back to taking regular classes. Maybe that will get me out of the house.

Evening Outings

2011-10-06T05:14:00.000-07:00

We manage to get out of the apartment in the evening, when our jet lagged bodies still imagine it's morning back where they came from. Luckily the day after we arrived we got an email that put a spring in our step.

The super-talented Braden Perkins and Laura Adrian of Hidden Kitchen Supper Club are in the process of opening a wine bar and a restaurant just off Palais Royal. The process has been tortuous and getting all the appropriate permissions from the city has left a long trail along the way, back one step, forward two steps, back another.

They thought they'd finally be able to open the wine bar, called Verjus, at 47, rue Montpensier, the other night but were foiled once again and need to wait another two weeks for final permission to sell the lovely wines they'll be offering with the help of Juan Sanchez of la Dernière Goutte. And so meanwhile, a little party sans alcool but with lots of Braden's wonderful food. What a great welcome back to Paris.

Verjus should finally be open, unencumbered, on October 20. Fingers crossed.

And the next night we dined with friends at Vivant, a restaurant that's been getting a lot of attention for its impeccably sourced products cooked simply and very well and its wide offering of natural wines.

A 10:00 p.m. reservation meant that some of the options had run out, but the burrata with capers and fruity olive oil and the crisply sautéd boudin and the perfect poularde with crunchy vegetables (thank god! the French tend to over cook vegetables, I think) made us very happy. Delicious as the food was, the setting was equal to it.

The old tiled shop walls had been left in place and accompanied by a mix of flea market chairs and tables and charming servers. Classic Paris setting melded with modern Paris eating made for a special meal.

Home is Where the Heart Is

2011-10-05T03:39:00.000-07:00

Well, we've made it back to Paris, ensconced in our little garret and feeling just fine. We thought for a quick minute to have escaped our usual horrible jet lag when we slept through the first night after a genial evening spent with our friends C and J on their last night in Paris before leaving for Italy, but the gods were just fooling with us.

Last night we juggled sleep aids at 3:00 a.m. and I've just woken at 11. Gene is still asleep and I'm wondering whether to let him stay in dreamland or make him get up and face the world.

Although we missed E's big birthday party, which was fabulous by at least five different accounts, she and D are still in Paris and thanks to E's wonderful idea, we'll be dining with them at Restaurant Petrelle, where the party took place, to get a bit of the atmosphere we missed.

We've got a month's worth of catching up to do. Stay tuned (now that's a phrase from the dark ages...does anyone still remember when you 'tuned in' to radio and television?)

Who Are They?

2011-09-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

Driving through an industrial area of Oakland we came across these enormous sculptures in an empty lot. We couldn't get close enough to tell what they're made of but my best guess would be heavy guage metal wire. The squatting figure must be over 15 feet tall and the standing women easily 20 to 30 feet.

The group below seems to be praying or performing sun salutations. I don't have any information about the sculptor but would love to know. Does anyone out there have any information?

Birthday Blessings

2011-09-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

It's always been my belief that a birthday celebrated away from home doesn't count towards the years piling up quickly in one's wake and so for the last decade or so I've celebrated most of mine in Paris. However this one in spite of my best efforts is happening here in Berkeley, although as a friend pointed out, now that I live half the time in Paris, maybe birthdays don't age me in either place...or maybe in both.

In any case, it turned out to be a gorgeous sunny day here at Chez Hilgard, the house where I'm lucky enough to be recuperating while its owners go to Paris instead. Much as I love our little Parisian apartment, I'd move this place to St-Germain des Prés in a minute; beautiful and comfortable, it's the perfect place for someone alternating between napping, pill-popping and staring at the view of the bay.

From what I can tell, I've also gotten the better deal in terms of weather, sunny and warm, a lazy afternoon spent with my sister, whom I miss like crazy when I'm in Paris, and dinner shared with F. and M. at the much talked about Cotogna in SF, which was at least as good as any Parisian bistro I've tried in a while. Life is good.

At the same time, friends in Paris are keeping us up to date on what they're up to so we can imagine we're there with them. I was touched today to learn from L., who visits our favorite Au Comptoir du Relais religiously on her Paris visits, that one of our favorite servers there was so happy to have news of us that she served L. a glass of wine on the house. How sweet is that? Or maybe it was because of how sweet L. herself is. (I suspect that bolt has been shot, by the way; I wouldn't imagine any more freebies for anyone else dropping in to say hi from Shelli and Gene, would you? Clever L.)

Vicarious Paris

2011-09-14T18:57:00.000-07:00

Since I'm not there myself, I'm going to be living vicariously. I mentioned that several friends from Berkeley will be spending much of the month of September in Paris for various parties, events and incidental excitement. Their calls and emails are the IV connecting me to what's going on way over there.

Today I had tickets for the Theâtre du Chaillot at Trocadero to see the legendary Mikhael Baryshnikov starring in "In Paris" described in the New York Times review as "a stark, experimental theatrical adaptation of a 1940 short story by Ivan Bunin, the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature... 'In Paris' uses music, song, mime, video and poster-size images of old Paris postcards to create a somber world in black and white."

Apparently the audience had hoped for something else. Baryshnikov, looking for the bright side, was quoted as saying "They didn’t boo!...Someone told me, ‘They didn’t boo, and if they don’t boo, that’s good.'"

Of the three friends who saw it, two used the always lukewarm descriptor "interesting" while the third called it "creative and interesting". I have no way of judging the work or the performances myself, but it does raise the question of expectations: if you decide to see a performance because Mikhael Baryshnikov is in it, what do you have the right to expect? Dance? From a 64 year old genius? Not likely to be at the top of his form anymore. Acting? From someone whose performance in the last season of Sex and the City was painful? Even less likely. Creativity? Absolutely. And that seems to be, if the reviews are to be believed, what the audience got. Not a bad payoff.

Baryshnikov financed a large part of this production himself, claiming it as a labor of love, one that allows a synthesis between his Russian self and his international self, formed of necessity after his defection from Soviet Russia in the early 1970s. He was in his mid-twenties when he made the decision that changed his life. It doesn't seem out of order for him to be reviewing that life at this point in it.

I wish I'd seen it, despite the dismal reviews. And oddly enough, it will be mounted in Berkeley next year, so I might get to see it after all.

Back in the Land of the Living

2011-09-08T21:23:00.000-07:00

The coffee at Coutume in Paris is so good and so pretty it needed to have its picture taken last time I was there. And although I wish I were there now, looking at that crema and recalling the taste makes me happy, particularly since I will be there soon.

The miracles of modern medicine never cease to amaze me. Years ago I was a lawyer representing people who had been injured in accidents, many with back injuries that they were told required surgery. In way too many cases major surgery delivered minor relief and sometimes made things much worse.

So when my doctor told me that I probably needed back surgery my first response was an unequivocal no. I would wait, I'd have therapy, I'd get better. Besides, I was leaving for Paris in a few days. By the time I got results from the MRI it was the night before our departure and I was all packed to go when a call from my brilliant retired doctor pal made me rethink that decision. Early the next morning my internist managed to get me in to see a neurosurgeon (thanks for pulling whatever strings you pulled, Dr. CK) just hours before we had to leave for the airport.

The surgeon told me I could fly and there was maybe a 70% chance the problem would resolve on its own. But if not, I might be left with a foot drop that would accompany me to my grave. Since I hope that's going to be a long time I really didn't want to have that companion for that long. So just like that I decided to take the 100% fix option, even if it meant no Paris that day.

And guess what? Here's where the miracles of modern medicine come in. Things have changed enormously in the years since I last noticed. This was no major deal; micro-surgery, a one-inch incision, a bit of scraping, and back home the same day. Good drugs although very little need for them, a good night's sleep for the first time in a couple of weeks and looks like I'll be good to go very soon. Go where? Guess. That coffee is calling my name.

A Minor Change of Plans

2011-09-01T21:30:00.000-07:00

The world doesn't always go along with our plans and this week, mine haven't been working out. I should be in a plane on the way to Paris tonight and instead I'm in Oakland, hoping that the herniated disc in my lower back will stop pressing on the nerve root so I can avoid the surgery scheduled for next week. Whether that happens or not, we won't be returning to Paris this month. We've changed our flights to go at the beginning of October instead.

Much as I will miss the wonderful month of September and the bustle of the rentrée, I'm saddest about not being able to attend the major birthday party of my friend E., a festivity we and all the other guests, many coming from the US to help E. celebrate in her second city, have been looking forward to with pleasure. We'll also be missing the 2 week visit of my dear friend B. I feel rather guilty about convincing her to come to the party and spend time with us now that we won't be there. Oh well, at least she'll have Paris.

Our planned visit to Venice and Asolo will also be off the calendar, although it's possible we can reschedule that if Easy Jet is feeling generous. A medical excuse doesn't get you as far as it once did with airlines. This should teach me to buy travel insurance.

Back on the Mainland

2011-08-29T16:43:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, movie travelogues always ended with "...and so as the sun sinks gently in the west, we leave lovely_____." And so we left Hawaii and moved to Oakland for the last week of our stay in California.

I used to work in Oakland for many years many years ago, and the Oakland Museum used to be one of my favorite places there. A striking building set in terraced gardens, this oasis in downtown Oakland fell off my radar in recent years. During that time it was remodeled, the collections re-curated, and recently re-opened to some local acclaim.

Yesterday we had lunch on the terrace and wandered through the gardens, admiring the pollarded trees and the outdoor sculpture.

The collections are divided into history, art and natural science. On one wall I came across this quote:

Sort of shuts down the ongoing discussion, doesn't it?

Another wall in one of the courtyards has a vast blackboard with hooks on it and lots of chalk around. You can choose to make art, sit, hang chairs, rearrange the furniture, or just loll in the sun. We did some of each.

The art galleries are subdivided, with a large collection of Bay Area figurative art as well as landscapes, California Impressionism, and other "categories".

Tucked away in one sub-gallery is an old faded red screen door with this sign above it:

When you pass through the doorway you find yourself looking through a chain link fence at a desert diorama at dollhouse scale, every detail painstakingly finished. This is the end of the trail for some desert rat who has spent many years collecting the items littering the yard outside the battered old Airstream trailer, the window of which is emitting a lonely light against the last minutes of the blood red sunset. Amazing.

Paradise Recalled

2011-08-21T19:52:00.000-07:00

As we spend hours deciding whether to move from the spectacular white sand beach to the blue-tiled pool or vice versa we remember why we loved this place. What's not to love?

The weather has been perfect, the sun warming without burning (since we're vigilant about reapplying sunscreen), the drinks tropical and delicious and the food costs outrageous, a small price to pay for spending a little time in heaven.

Our stay overlapped one day with our friends D and J and their daughter and it was an unlooked for pleasure to have dinner with them on the terrace overlooking the beach at sunset and a walk and quick dip in the ocean the next morning.

Because Hawaii time is three hours earlier than California we wake at a much earlier hour than we're accustomed to, feeling virtuous, and hit the pool or beach before many others are stirring. Clean, bright, beautiful and empty...priceless in these days of crowds everywhere.

We're renting a roomy house with bedrooms for us, R & L and their two-year-old, and resort privileges for us all. Ryan loves the babysitter R and L have engaged to allow us to go out to dinner every other night for adult meals. The other nights we cook simple meals and hang out being lazy in the big room that encompasses the kitchen, dining and living areas, reading, playing cards, watching TV. When we get tired of sharing the beach and pool at the resort we can retreat to our own tiny pool and hot tub on the lanai. I said it was paradise, didn't I?

I noticed today some sailing trophies on a back wall that, in conjunction with some wine-related items, would seem to indicate that the house belongs to one of the Mondavi wine family. We haven't yet managed to find the wine cellar. It must be here somewhere, don't you think?

A Different Vacation

2011-08-19T11:11:00.000-07:00


Lava flows on the Big Island of Hawaii

Our obsession with Paris has grown over the years, and we’ve been visiting that city first once and then twice a year for nearly 20 years. As our visits grew more frequent, and our time and income failed to grow as enthusiastically as did our obsession, we gave up vacationing elsewhere.

While we used to go to New York regularly, we haven’t been there since our visit to see the Christo Gates in Central Park in 2005. And where we used to go to the Big Island of Hawaii every year for nearly a decade, we haven’t been there in over 15 years. Until today.

Wailea uplands in the distance

One of the ways we manage our bi-continental lifestyle is by renting our house in Berkeley when we’re living in Paris, and since it’s Berkeley our tenants are nearly exclusively visiting professors who are tied to the academic calendar.

That hasn’t been an issue so far, but our current renters needed to be in the house in mid-August and our flight back to Paris isn’t until the first of September, meaning we had to leave our house and find someplace to lay our heads in the meantime.

Typical "graffitti" of white stones on black lava background

R and L and their toddler had wanted to visit us in Paris last Thanksgiving but traveling long distances with a small and restless child for 10 days didn’t seem like a good plan, so we decided back then that we would all go to Hawaii together instead after we got back to California. What better time than our homeless period?

Ahhh...

And so we’re on an airplane on our way to Kona at this very minute. I can almost smell the plumeria already.

Notes from the Other Ground

2011-08-11T10:36:00.000-07:00

You may recall that I used to post pictures of wonderful chocolates snapped (and sometimes snapped up) in the windows of Parisian chocolatiers. After a while I had to stop because they are ubiquitous in Paris.

So this is not Paris but there are resemblances. A friend brought me to Chocolatier Blue, on a nondescript block of University Avenue in Berkeley and these gorgeous colorful geometric bites of chocolate were irresistible. I limited myself to two.

And this is not in Paris either although with a name like this it should be:

In Hayes Valley in San Francisco, this little restaurant could pick itself up and drop itself down in the 11th arrondissement and look perfectly in place, although the soup I had for lunch was better than any I'd had in the City of Light.

Also in Hayes Valley was this macaron shop, which unfortunately didn't inspire the same admiration we feel for Ladurée.

On the art front however, San Francisco has nothing to be ashamed of this summer.

We've often passed close to the closed-for-renovations Musée Nationale Picasso on rue de Thorigny in the last year or so to find bewildered tourists wondering where the Picassos had gone. Now we know. They're at the San Francisco Museum of the Legion of Honor, the one built as a copy of the Paris Legion of Honor Museum in the 7th arrondissement. A show worth seeing if you're a Picasso fan, but I've never thought his best work is in the eponymous Paris museum.

Even better Picassos and many other masterpieces including Cezannes and Matisses can be found currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is hosting an exhibition of the extraordinary collections (now dispersed and reassembled for this show) of the Stein siblings: Gertrude, Leo, Michael and Michael's wife Sarah.

If you're in SF before September 6th, do everything you can to see it.

But if not, don't despair. The Steins' collections are going back home. The exhibition will be mounted at the Grand Palais in Paris in October and in New York in 2012. Don't miss it.

Some more French resemblances in the countryside on our visit to the Napa Valley. Outside a boulangerie/patisserie called Bouchon this little bird perches on a French-style chair waiting for crumbs from the delicious croissants and tartes.

And what is more French than a grappe de raisins hanging from the vine?

Maybe an olive tree in the middle of a field of lavender?

Driving Me Mad

2011-07-25T12:03:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to be back in Berkeley. I'm happy to have four times the space to live in, enjoy mild and sunny weather, speak English, pay less than $20 for a hamburger and spend time with my friends and relatives. I'm not happy about driving.

Driving does not bring out the best in me. I notice that as soon as I get into traffic I act as if everyone else on the road has at least 50 fewer IQ points than I do. I swear at them, I accuse them of idiocy, I ask where they learned to drive, I mutter and curse. I am not a nice person on the road.

If only public transportation were as feasible here as in Paris.

Back in the USA

2011-07-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

We seem to have gotten out of Paris at the right time. Reports are that cold and rain are dampening enthusiasm for Paris Plage. Who wants to go to even a fake beach when the weather makes you want to shelter indoors? Parisians usually leave for their summer vacations because it's too hot in Paris; not this year apparently.

We're back in Berkeley for the rest of the summer, except for a short trip we have planned in August. At the time we left Paris it had been hot and muggy and coming back to the cool afternoon fog of the Bay Area seemed a lovely thought, but no one had notified the weather gods that fog all day long wasn't supposed to be on the agenda. Luckily that changed after the first week and now, like the little bear's porridge in the fairy tale, it's "juuussst right".

There are benefits and drawbacks to our split life. As one of my friends said, "we never know if you're home or not." Well, we're always home, it's just hard to keep connections in each home active when we're in the other. But since we've been here we've been quite busy; we've seen lots of friends and picked up relationships as if we hadn't been away. Lucky.

Bustling Through Life

2011-07-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

We try to walk as much as possible in Paris, but sometimes our best intentions are foiled by a bout of tiredness or laziness or a tempting bus stopping in front of us at just the right moment, which is what happened the other night.

The 87 bus that would take us from the Eiffel tower area, where we had been having dinner with friends, to our neighborhood stops running relatively early and so we know we'll be walking home when we dine there. It was a pleasant evening and the walk through part of the 7th arrondissement, past dark government offices housed in former hôtels particuliers, was fine, but when we reached the Boulevard St-Germain and spotted the 63 bus just beginning to pull away from the stop we rushed a bit to catch it and hopped aboard.

Looking down into my wallet to find tickets, I muttered "merci" to the driver for re-opening his door for us. I was startled by his reply.

"Je suis la" he said: "I'm here". It took me a second to realize that I had committed the cardinal sin of discourtesy. I had not said "bonsoir" as I entered his bus.

One of the first things you learn here is that the French consider that any interaction between people should first and foremost politely acknowledge the existence of the other. On meeting someone in the street, on entering a shop, on stopping someone to ask directions, in any encounter, a polite "bonjour Monsieur" or "bonjour Madame" is required. You greet the other people in a doctor's waiting room, you greet the person behind the counter in the boulangerie, you greet anyone with whom you speak or plan to speak. I had failed to greet the bus driver on his very own bus. My bad.

I apologized, said "bonsoir", assured him that I really was bien elevé, well brought-up, but had forgotten my manners in the rush of getting on and searching for my ticket. He smiled and forgave me. It was a very human encounter that we both clearly enjoyed.

When we got off the bus several stops later I made a point of moving quickly along the street from the exit door at the back to the front of the bus. Through the closed door I mouthed "au revoir" to the driver. He gave me a thumbs up and drove on, smiling.

Noticing Nothings

2011-07-12T10:15:00.000-07:00

A post-movie walk from Montparnasse to home led us down rue de Rennes at about ten o'clock at night. Looking up I realized that the lingering evening light allowed the absolutely clear reflection of the old 19th century Felix Potin building to appear on the 20th century glass-clad FNAC store.

And in one of the Loire valley villages we walked through this wrought iron address number looked remarkably like the eyeglasses worn by I.M. Pei and Harry Potter, depending on your artistic frame of reference.

The tile space invaders one sees on walls all over Paris seem to be feeling a bit insecure if one were to go by the armored car this one has been provided with.

One often sees old street names incised in the stone walls of corner buildings, streets whose names have been changed since, perhaps a number of times. This one is now rue de l'Hôtel de Ville, but I just spent some time researching where the original name came from, since it made me think of a slaughterhouse or killing field of some kind. The word 'mortel' means 'deadly' in French. All I could find however were references to a famous painting called Barricade at Rue de la Mortellerie. If anyone knows more, I'd love to hear.

And finally the Parisian habit of peeing in corners has gotten this merchant up in arms. "This place is not a urinal" it says. "You're not an animal. Hold it until you find an appropriate place to go." Naturally French courtesy requires the addition of a 'merci' at the end.

Paris Rocks

2011-07-11T09:04:00.000-07:00

Coming home on the metro the other night I looked up as we pulled into a station and literally did a double-take. The classic blue tile name frame at Duroc station had been changed and now read "Durock", in a pretty fancy font. I had just enough time to pull out my camera and memorialize it and to realize that all the enormous ad spaces on the walls of the station had posters for an upcoming event, Rock en Seine, an annual rock concert held on the outskirts of Paris every summer. This year it will take place on August 26-28 at the Domaine de Saint Cloud.

The metro system rocks!

Shop Til You Drop

2011-07-04T01:50:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the year again, the semi-annual sales. While you see more and more "promotions" during the year, this is one of the two legally regulated sale periods. Merchants are forbidden to bring in extra merchandise to sell at discounted prices; this is meant to clear the shelves for the next season's items.

These photos were taken on one block. Every window is plastered with soldes signs, and many of them have taken merchandise out of the windows and fill them with mannequins dressed only in white shifts or t-shirts.

The classier stores may have more discreet signs indicating that the sale items are to be found in à l'interieur. Some of the classiest, like Hermès, don't have store sales but rather ventes privés held in a different location so as not to sully their image with anything as bourgeois as markdowns.

For those of us raised in the "sell it at any cost" atmosphere of the US, these markdowns are not remarkable. Thirty percent? Nordstrom's will often do 70 percent right out of the box, and that's all year long.

But I must admit, the temptation remains; when all the windows call you you may respond.

Heat Waves, Chateaux and Wine

2011-07-03T02:01:00.000-07:00

We spent two nights in the Loire valley last week, the first time we had been there in many years. This is part of our campaign actually to leave Paris once in a while for other parts of France. It's hard for us to do for some reason; probably a combination of laziness and our mad love for this city.

An American friend married to a Frenchman and raising their two kids in a small town in the countryside told us she'd welcome a visit, if only to break up the rural regularity, and when we discovered a pretty manoir with a Michelin-starred restaurant in the same tiny village we thought the stars were correctly aligned for our little outing.

Well, some of the stars were. We left Paris in a heat wave and three hours in an air conditioned car relieved us of the heavy heat we would have felt in Paris. On the other hand, when I had closed the door of our apartment behind us and put my key in the lock to turn the bolt, the key wouldn't go in. Gene's key was still in the lock on the inside and wouldn't allow mine into the opening. We'd never had this problem before, but there it was. How were we going to get back in when we returned late Wednesday evening?

A call to my landlady at her country house wasn't returned, a very unusual thing. I called the cleaning lady and told her the problem and asked her to see if she could do anything about it when she came the next day. If we needed a locksmith it was going to be really, really expensive, as they charge two arms and a leg for anything. I've known people to be charged nearly 1000 euros to get into the house when they've locked themselves out. I think all those chateaux in the Loire belong to retired locksmiths.

Two days of worry while I waited to hear were relieved when I learned my landlady had had time while in Paris on her way to England to stick a skewer in the lock and push Gene's key out of the way! Take that, you lurking locksmith!

Meanwhile we made the most of our visit. Gene went off for an afternoon of wine tasting and came back with several bottles for our tiny wine collection. A dinner with our friends at their converted farmhouse that included quite a bit of wine tasting as well, a swim in the pool at the manoir, and a couple of days of driving to visit Fontevraud Abbey, Chinon, the Chateau of Langeais, Saumur, the Chateau of Ussé, Clos Lucé in Amboise, and a village or two with the odd 13th century church kept us pleasantly occupied.

I had been wanting to visit the Abbey for years. An enormously influential place in the early centuries of the second millennium, it was ruled by an abbess rather than an abbot and sheltered hundreds of nuns. The monks lived outside the walls in their own quarters. The tombs of Eleanor of Aquitaine and her husband Henry II of England, along with that of their son Richard the Lion-Heart are here. This is where Eleanor retired once she had finished interfering in the rule of her husband, her son Richard, and her son John (you remember, the Magna Charta guy? Robin Hood's nemesis?).

The tombs retain some of their polychrome decoration, and here and there in the church you can see the remains of painted walls and ornament. We never seem to remember that the clean stone churches we visit today did not look like that in their heyday. Blues, reds, golds, were everywhere. I must admit I prefer clean stone, particularly the lovely white tufa that is the primary building material in the area.

Lots of charming details in the cloisters and halls of the Abbey remain, like this chubby little nun. I love her little hands clenched in front of her.

The tile floors in the great hall have the coats of arms or initials of the aristocratic abbesses over the years. Naturally they came from the best families and wielded a great deal of power. It was one of the few ways for a woman to have power in those days, unless you were the wife or mother of kings.

We managed to get lost a time or two and we hit a few traffic jams along the river in the larger towns, but a thunderstorm the first night cleared the air and dissipated some of the heat and all in all it was a lovely country outing. We may even manage to leave Paris again sometime in the not so distant future.

And it was an incredible relief to get back to our front door late Wednesday and find our key worked. It was reason to open one of those new bottles of wine.

Midsummer Music Madness

2011-06-22T01:20:00.000-07:00

Oddly enough we had never before been in Paris on the day of the Fête de la Musique, an annual street jam that brings professional and amateur musicians, in fact anyone who wants to play, out into the streets all over town.

We were eating dinner when suddenly we heard Beatles songs from the street. This guy with the guitar was playing, and playing well, outside the restaurant downstairs. We decided it was time to see what was going on in the streets.

The Brazilian spa on the place just south of our street had a band that was taking a break, but the recorded music had us moving anyway.

A couple of young men had set up in front of the church of Saint Sulpice and were also pretty good.
A block away these colorful folks were part of a fanfare, the French term for a brass band,

While at the other end of the block this thrash band was having a great time playing for all the diners on the restaurant terraces.

On Blvd. Saint-Germain most of this band was missing as we passed, but across the street a crowd was gathered and spilling into the street.

I'm sorry not to have been able to get a better shot of this band and the super singer, but the music was sooo much better than the focus. I wish I'd been able to learn their name, but moving along was the order of the evening.

Around the corner on rue de Seine this duo played inside a restaurant for the crowd in the street
and held us for a few minutes, but we were on a quest; we had to see as much as we could in as short a time and space as possible.

On the pretty Place Furstenberg a Latin group had handed out song sheets to the crowd and everyone was singing along in Spanish. The singers' voices blended well with the audience and there was a palpable sense of community.

When we had decided to turn left to hear the Spanish singing we missed this band which had been straight ahead; by the time we got back to them they were taking a break. Oh well, no time to waste, we have to move on.

And so we came across this classical singing quartet, their lovely voices making a change from all the loud instrumental music.

Like another fanfare, this one playing a brass version of "Don't Worry, Be Happy" to accompany us down the street.

It breaks my heart not to be able to show you the enthusiasm generated by this man, who was simply leading a large crowd in singing the songs he had printed up in a spiral bound book and handed around to the dozens, if not hundreds, of people gathered around him.

The songs were clearly well known to the crowd, who sang enthusiastically along with him. At the end of each he would call out another page number and everyone joined in on the next one. the crowd took up the entire width of the street and this biker had to lift his bike into the air while sidling through to get to wherever he was going.

In front of the Institut de France this well-coordinated group had stopped playing for a while and their audience was sitting in small groups on the forecourt, chatting and drinking.

Heading back to find a drink ourselves we passed this café with a band set up in front and tables moved so they spilled out into the street. We listened to a French rock song about Bonnie and Clyde before moving on.

Back in the Place St-Germain des Près we settled into a table at the Café Bonaparte where this rhythm and blues band played a few songs before taking a break that allowed us to hear the rock band in front of the church.

The outing had taken just over an hour and we had covered an area no more than six blocks in any direction from home. This little odyssey was being duplicated all over town by thousands of people. Fête de la Musique indeed.

Brides and Beaches

2011-06-21T00:50:00.000-07:00

Leaving cool gray Paris for a wedding in sunny Tel Aviv was not hard. We settled into the hotel across from the beach and went out to discover what has been called the Barcelona of the Middle East.

The bride, my cousin Maya, knows everything and everyone in town. She steered us to Tapas 1 on Ahad Ha'am Street for our first evening, where we perched at the bar and fell in love with the bartender. Eric brought us complimentary drinks and desserts, recommended the most interesting items on the menu and generally made us feel happy to have come.

We were even happier the next day when we hit the beach for an hour or so and then got ready for Maya and Omer's incredible wedding. It was held in a nightclub and we partied until early morning. Who says weddings have to be serious?

And the next day we took a walking tour of Tel Aviv's architectural history, from Ottoman style buildings in the early decades of the 20th century to the important Bauhaus neighborhood built by German and Austrian architects fleeing the Nazis.

Much of Tel Aviv has been allowed to run down while newer and ever bigger buildings went up, but a recent law requiring restoration has begun to show effects.

One of the earliest areas, Neve Tsedek, has become the hippest area to live, full of little shops, cafés and restaurants. This house apparently belongs to someone with a whimsical sense of humor.

I noticed a lot of stenciling on the building walls, much prettier and more interesting than graffiti.

After another day or two at the beach we went to Jaffa for a drink and found ourselves in yet another version of the Mediterranean. The pretty little bar called Kalamata might have been lifted off a Greek island and set on the top of this Israeli hill.

With the sunset we walked back to yet another great meal at Cantina, a place so good we ate there twice. That Maya knows her food.

Garden

2011-06-12T08:53:00.000-07:00

We hadn't been to Monet's garden in Giverny in many years and might not have gone this week were it not for the exhibition Bonnard en Normandie at the Museum of Impressionism at the other end of the town. The work in the exhibition was interesting, very unlike the Bonnards I'm familiar with, the interiors and family scenes looking from inside to the outside. Here he was painting the outside front and center, landscapes reminiscent of Monet, with whom he was quite close.

And since the exhibition was smallish and took less time than we had thought, we strolled down to visit M. Monet's garden.

Whatever memory we had of it was faint and we were overwhelmed by its loveliness.

The sky was overcast and the clouds reflected in the pond, making the lotuses appear to float on them, or on the trees also reflected in the water.

I think I recall that Monet had had the river diverted to supply his pool, and the narrow stream flowed between lily-edged banks.

It's been an unusually warm spring and many of the blooms had been convinced it was summer.

It was definitely worth the walk down the street.

Arriba, Arriba!

2011-06-08T13:00:00.000-07:00

Not a title you would expect to find on a blog about Paris, is it? And no, we didn't take a quick trip to Oaxaca. Much closer than that. Wandering around the upper Marais the other day after our French classes, looking for someplace a bit different to have lunch, we nearly fell into Candelaria.

A tiny storefront with a full bar hidden behind a door in the back, this taqueria has been getting a lot of bigtime press lately, including a couple of mentions in the NY Times. It was on our radar but we hadn't yet gotten there and I'd heard it was always, always jammed. Not at lunchtime on Thursday.

We had our choice of seats at the 6 person counter or the 6 person table; we chose the counter so we could chat with Luis and Melissa while they cut, cooked, cleaned and served. Luis is from Mexico via cooking school in Barcelona and a stint in the kitchen at Les Ombres, the high end restaurant at the Quai Branly. He makes his own tortillas from masa harina imported from Mexico and now that he's so busy he's hired someone else to press them painstakingly out on the hand press.

A limited menu of guacamole and chips, 2 kinds of tacos and 2 kinds of tostadas is all they can manage, but oh boy are they good! And real agua fresca to drink.

Apparently evenings are swamped and I hear the movement between the front room for tacos and the back bar for cocktails needs a cop to control traffic, but it's not to be missed by a Californian craving the real goods.

Aimless Ambling

2011-06-06T03:52:00.000-07:00

The incredible spring weather has everyone outside, even this fellow. Yes, that's a real live person who has managed to get out on the miniscule balcony and shut the exterior shutters behind him so he could clean a year's worth of grime off of them. Now that's what I call dedicated spring cleaning. I didn't stay to watch how he managed to get back inside.

The building, on the quai Anatole France, was one of the late Art Nouveau, early 20th century apartment buildings you find in Paris that seem to be looking for a style of its own. In this case it seems to have borrowed from a lot of styles. Note the tiled zigzag eave over the front doors, the rounded windows on the left and the iron balconies on the right.

Looking up there are columns and a loggia and pointy turrets, and the facade is this striking floral rondelle tiling, set off by several different patterns of molding under and around the windows. No fear of 'too much' here.

And all proudly signed by the architect, Richard Bouwens, who was quite well-known and important at the time.

Not far away across the Seine is the Petit Palais, a museum that is less well-known than it should be. Entrance to the permanent collection is free and there are often very interesting temporary exhibitions. Currently it is featuring the designer and photographer Charlotte Perriand who is less well known than her friend and contemporary Le Corbusier but who may hve been just as talented.

But on this gorgeous day the best part of the museum is its garden, with a cafe opening onto the terrace and the elaborate architecture to look at.

The symbol of the city of Paris, a sailing ship, watches over the garden. Why a sailing ship? That's what the tourist next to us asked and who knows, maybe you'd like to know too.

Googling gives us the usual choice of answers, but the one everyone seems to agree on is that the island in the center of the Seine, now the Ile de la Cité, which was where Paris began, is shaped like a boat. As good an answer as any other I suppose.

In this weather all I really wanted to know was where my next citron pressée was coming from.

Breathe In, Breathe Out

2011-06-01T03:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we got on a bus for a ride that would take about 20 minutes. It appeared that all the seats were taken so we stood toward the back, as the recorded announcement asks you to do, hoping that someone would get off and open up a seat. After a few minutes a man who had just taken his seat near the back began to laugh with the woman in the adjacent seat (whom he hadn't appeared to know when he sat down) and they both got up and moved to the door, he saying to us "There are seats at the back, all the way at the back." He sort of smirked as he said this.

We moved back, took the seats they had vacated, and breathed in. Oops, bad idea. It took about 10 seconds to realize that someone had done something really stinky, or rather not done something to avoid being really stinky. I hadn't noticed that people were avoiding getting close to the man in the back corner, just behind the seats we had taken, who was clearly the source of the really putrid smell..

Just then a couple of individual seats opened up a bit farther forward and we moved quickly to grab them. That's when the sociological experiment began and I had what I think is a new French cultural insight. Or maybe it's international. You'll let me know, right?

At least six people in the course of the ride moved to take advantage of the empty seats in front of M. Smelly, which were the only empty ones on a crowded bus. After several moments all of them either changed seats or simply got up and stood farther forward.

Not once did any of those who knew what was happening mention to those moving back to get the seats that it might not be a good idea. This is why I suspect it's a French thing; you don't talk to people you don't know, you don't offer unsolicited advice. I murmured to a woman as she passed that she might not want to do that, but she paid no attention.

The look on her face a couple of seconds later...priceless.

Add Two Letters

2011-05-30T05:44:00.000-07:00

There are signs on the métro cars with quotes from various literary sources, well-known and not. Last night I noticed one that said "Ajoutez deux lettres à Paris, c'est paradis". Add two letters to Paris and it's paradise. The last few days even the additional letters haven't been needed.

Where else but paradise would you see this poster offering a reward for finding someone's lost unicorn? Just to be sure you've found the right one the description specifies a large white female with a horn in the center of her forehead, very friendly, last seen at the Concorde entrance of the Tuileries gardens. No other unicorn will do.

We spotted this on our way to visit the annual Portes Ouvertes of Belleville, the open artists studios we've done before, although this time in another part of the quartier. Aside from the possibility of coming across some art that interests you, this event offers the opportunity to sneak peeks at the courtyards and gardens behind locked street doors. In this one we found several artists showing paintings and sculpture, but what we were taken by were the carnets de voyage of Nicholas Dupayron.

Scattered on a table top were the charming notebooks he had kept from dozens of trips, filled with watercolor and ink sketches, bits of ephemera like tickets or brochures, and notes about what he was seeing and his reactions to it. We fell in love with these not-for-sale carnets and came away with several prints from limited editions he had made of some of the pages. It's almost like visiting Burma or Ile de la Réunion with him.

Along with being an artists' enclave, Belleville has many immigrant communities. These kids were likely of Chinese origin but the crêpe stand interested them as much as it would have any other kids.

The last studios we visited were on a street that was a work of art in itself. Serious graffiti effort was expended on the walls here, and the combination of summer weather, open studios and French Mother's Day had hordes of people sitting, standing, walking and dancing in the street.

And as for that unicorn? I suspect she's run off with this fellow, always ready for a party.

Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome

2011-05-27T07:58:00.000-07:00

I went to Berlin last week for the first time since I left it as a toddler. I come from a background that leads me to avoid Germany rather than to visit it. The sound of the language grates on my ear. Gemütlichkeit is a mask for horror.

But virtually everyone I know who has visited Berlin in recent years has urged me to go, saying it's the most exciting city in Europe at the moment, young, arty, happening. And Gene wanted to go, so we went.

It was confusing. There's no attempt to hide the Nazi era. If anything, it's right in your face in the center of town. The Topography of Terror Museum, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Jewish Museum, all upfront. Lots of acknowledgement, but somehow...

I noticed occasional metal squares placed in the sidewalk in front of buildings, random buildings anyone might have lived in, some pre-war, some newly built, probably after being bombed during the war. These two said that Hanna Niegho, 22 years of age, and Elvira Niegho, 4 years old, had lived there before being deported and murdered at Auschwitz.

Much of Berlin is post war construction, since the city was bombed to bits by the Allies. During the Occupation the city was divided into four zones, Russian, US, British and French. Crossing between them meant crossing a border, with all the attendant limitations. Today Checkpoint Charlie remains, non-functional except for providing a photo opportunity for tourists.

On Unter den Linden, the once-fashionable boulevard leading eastward from the Brandenburg Gate that found itself in the Russian zone after partition, the huge Stalinist Russian embassy remains, more functional than Checkpoint Charlie.

There's still a lot of construction going on and areas that had been empty for years are filled with highrises. There are occasional pre-war buildings and a walk in the streets of Charlottenburg can give you some feeling for what this upscale area must have been like in the early 20th century.

The art in Berlin is phenomenal, both what you find in the many, many superb museums as well as in the numerous galleries scattered all over town. We finally felt sated by the German Expressionist work we saw at the gorgeous Mies van der Rohe Neue Nationalgalerie, with a show called "Modern Times" in the galleries below ground,

at the "Max Liebermann's Rivals" exhibition at Liebermann Haus next to the Brandenburg Gate, and the wonderful auction house we wandered into where hundreds of works were being previewed before an auction to take place on the following day.

We also went to the Gemäldegalerie, enormous and nearly deserted, to see art from the 13th to 17th centuries. I was exhausted, ready to leave, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a Botticelli Venus in a room I hadn't even gotten to. We had to spend another few minutes after all.

The museum I knew I wanted to visit was the Pergamon, which holds many of the spoils of 19th century German archeology. The huge Pergamon Altar, Nebuchadnezzar's Ishtar Gate were on my childhood bucket list.

We had breakfast one morning at the Reichstag.

I had heard that it was difficult to get permission to visit the building and Sir Norman Foster's Dome at its center, but that restaurant patrons were sure to be allowed to visit, so I emailed for reservations. After sending our full legal names and birth dates 48 hours ahead of time to be screened, we arrived to get in the security line, pass through the metal detectors, and wait for a jam-packed elevator to take us to the top. Security lines guarded by German uniforms and elbow-to-elbow crowded spaces didn't feel great, I must admit, but we got to the top and found this fabulous structure.

Oh, and there's a view.

Music, another highlight of German culture, was also on the list. We saw a lovely production of Mozart's Magic Flute and managed to get tickets to Daniel Barenboim conducting a program of Mozart and Mahler at the Philharmonie. What else? Sports? We arrived in Berlin to find the streets awash with blue-shirted soccer fans in town for the Germany Cup. Later that night the streets were more litterily [sic] awash with beer and plastic cups.

There're still tons to do and see. We drove through the Tiergarten but didn't walk or picnic. We were too late to get a boat ride on the river the day we arrived and never had the time afterwards. We never got to Kreuzberg or Prenzlauer Berg, the younger, supposedly hipper areas of town. We didn't see the other three museums on the Museum Island, or the contemporary art at the Hamburger Bahnhof, or the Berggruen Museum's Klees, Picassos and Matisses. We saw art that we wanted to buy but didn't in galleries in the West but never got to see the more 'street' artists' work in the East. It was a full visit.

I think it's my last.

Law & Order, Live

2011-05-16T10:06:00.000-07:00

As you might imagine, the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, in New York for attempted rape among other charges is the major, not to say only, subject on the lips of the French at the moment. The television shows have brought out all the talking heads, the newspapers are all over it, and the bail hearing is being televised live as we speak. The French will be getting a quick lesson in the American judicial system, very different from their own, and the experts are all over the TV news shows, explaining it all.

The general response seems to be that although Strauss-Kahn has a history of sexual escapades that is well-known to the journalists who cover politics as well as to the public that interests itself in the private lives of politicians, it has remained just that, his private life, not so different from Chirac, Mitterand, and many others.

The notion that a man who looked, until yesterday, to be the likely next president of France could possibly be so out of control as to sexually attack a hotel chambermaid makes at least the French left talk about set-ups, about mental illness, about anything other than crime.

The news program I'm watching has just announced that the judge has denied bail until he can be brought before a grand jury. He'll be in jail until at least Friday. He was scheduled to be in Germany at a meeting of the Eurozone finance ministers, discussing the Greek economic crisis. Not this week.

Leviathan

2011-05-16T02:23:00.000-07:00

Every year Paris selects an artist to create a piece of art in its Monumenta series. It's called Monumenta because the art is meant to take advantage of the enormous volumes of the nave of the Grand Palais to showcase an installation of equal spacial importance.

Previous artists have been Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra and Christian Boltanski. I've seen them all and written about them here. While the Kiefer has been my favorite, they've all been extraordinary in their own, very different, ways.

This year's installation is by Anish Kapoor and is called Leviathan. You'll recall that Leviathan was a biblical sea monster and a Melvillian whale. Kapoor's version is a three-lobed sculpture made of a fabric of PVC fibers and filled with air pumped from the outside. An enormous balloon in effect, it reminds one of anatomical structures, zeppelins, stranded sea creatures. It's stunning, enormous and overwhelming in its size and complexity of construction.

And then you enter it.

In daylight the sun throws the shadows of the roof struts of the Grand Palais' glass roof onto the piece and you're in the center of a translucent whale. Noah's got nothing on this experience.

The three lobes are connected and from the inside you can understand how. It's like being at the convergence of two wormholes. The softly radiused edges of the openings to the side lobes tempt you to slip over them and slide down. Luckily they're too high and the way up to them too steep. The fabric is actually relatively fragile and we were asked nicely not to knock on it to hear the resonance.

When the cloud cover obscured the direct sunlight you can see the seams of the Leviathan itself, looking remarkably like a Japanese lantern. We've already been twice to visit it. And this boy is doing what you want to do in there.

Paris Destroyed

2011-05-12T01:10:00.000-07:00

Lovers of Paris have long been grateful that German General Von Choltitz defied Hitler's order to destroy Paris before surrendering to the Allies in World War II. The idea of this beautiful city blown to bits is horrifying. That's why the images included in the exhibition now showing at the Hôtel de Ville are so startling. Paris was blown up, by Frenchmen themselves, less than 100 years earlier.

After the disastrous 1870 war between Napoleon III and Prussia and the terrible siege of Paris, the workers revolted against the caretaker government and established the Commune, a revolutionary, participatory government meant to finally establish the rights of the common man and woman (there were women on the barricades as well) against what they viewed as the capitalist oppressors. The Commune never extended very far beyond Paris itself, despite calls for other cities to join.

The government of President Thiers retreated to Versailles and used the army, recently defeated by the Prussians, to take back the city of Paris. In a bloody internecine battle, Paris was shelled by the French army and its defenders were killed in the hundreds. Survivors were rounded up and shot, jailed or exiled. The painter Gustave Courbet was among them.

The picture above shows the Legion of Honor building in the foreground and the Orsay Palace in the back. The palace was so badly damaged that it was razed and eventually a railway station took its place. As you know, that has since become the Musée d'Orsay.

This picture shows the rue Royale, with the Madeleine church in the background. This is probably just about where Maxim's is today. The Belle Epoque roistering at that restaurant was only a generation away from this scene.

And this is the rue de Lille, very near our apartment. Looks like Berlin in 1945, doesn't it?

Pssst...

2011-05-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

It's not completely unknown in France to see men discreetly (or sometimes not so discreetly) using a wall instead of a toilet. They seem to have been told from childhood that outdoor urinating is OK. Why anyone would think this is beyond me, especially when passing a particularly fragrant corner.

However, this little graffiti'ed schoolboy is so adorable that I would forgive him even this.

Drink Like It's the '50s

2011-05-08T08:57:00.000-07:00

My friend Alisa Morov, she of the cookbooks and Sweet Pea Baking, and her partner Louise Brody of the gallery Atelier 7, launched their new project the other night and we jumped right in. Very Swell is an underground concept party project that will be putting on themed parties, teas, and events on a regular basis in Paris, with guests paying to take part. It sort of takes off from the underground restaurant idea that's been growing so popular in the US, as well as in Paris.

Their launch was a Mad Men Cocktail Party in the very mid-century modern environs of Atelier 7, once Picasso's studio.

Guests were asked to dress in the spirit of the time and classic drinks and hors d'oeuvres were served. Ladies with French twist chignons and bright red lipstick chatted with men in suits and narrow ties. Don Draper himself would have fit right in. Luckily Gene had a suit here and looked spiffy in his gray striped tie.

Alisa's updated twist on canapés and rumaki went perfectly with the old-fashioneds and gin gimlets bartender Brian was turning out at warp speed. It was a lot of fun, with a mixture of anglophone and French guests; très cosmopolitan (although Cosmos themselves would have been anachronistic). We felt like grown-ups.

The next Mad Men Cocktail Party is on May 20 and then come Tea and Arsenic and the Beat Generation Coffee House night at Coutume Café, the very hot new coffee roaster/shop. Tom, the extremely tall and charming Australian owner of Coutume was a guest at the launch and made me anxious to drop into the café, if only to gaze at him again. (Shhh, don't tell Gene that's why we're going).

On the Way to the Park

2011-05-07T03:44:00.000-07:00

For the first time in many years there is no scaffolding on the church of Saint Sulpice. It feels like we've never seen the entire facade at the same time, though I know that's not true. The scaffolding on the bright shining clean north tower and across the ground floor facade was up for the last several years and I think the south tower had been enshrouded for years before that. Looking at it now, I have the terrible feeling that they may want to go back and clean up that south tower again. It's gotten kind of schmutzy, out there in the open air and all.

We were passing the church on the way to the Luxembourg garden. We're so lucky to have this huge expanse of green and water and statuary within easy strolling distance, and we're not the only people who take advantage of it. Around lunch time on a sunny day many of the pale green chairs are occupied by a range of folks,

from solitary snackers to suited business meeting types.

And then after lunch, the chairs with the relaxing slanted back are at a premium.

Unless you're a duck; in which case you get to sleep on the grass.

I've walked on rue de Vaugirard along the Luxembourg garden wall many times but somehow never stopped to notice the entrance to what was once a convent of the Daughters of Calvary, the land for which was given to the order by Marie de Medici while she lived up the street in the Luxembourg Palace. She also built the chapel, of which this is the only remaining vestige. Behind it is the winter garden of the Petit-Luxembourg, the residence of the President of the Sénat. I do love tripping over things that are new to me in areas with which I thought I was very familiar!

The Course of True Love

2011-05-04T12:22:00.000-07:00

We were crossing a bridge over the Seine the other night when I glanced down at the quai and saw what appeared to be a young couple kissing. As I watched, one of the figures dropped to its knee and, looking up at the other, proposed marriage.

No, I didn't hear it, but it was such a classic pose, one we've all seen in pictures, films and even cartoons time and again, that I had no doubt. And because the next time I glanced back they were once again kissing, I'm sure the second figure accepted.

I have no idea whether they were male, female, mixed or the same. I do know they they were both very happy just then. I left them to their moment and crossed the bridge, smiling.

Happy (Belated) Birthday

2011-05-02T13:56:00.000-07:00

Gene's birthday was last week and we sort of ignored it. Oh, we went out to dinner, but it didn't feel like much of an occasion. We're both at the point where we've had a lot of these already...

But on Sunday we were invited to lunch at the home of friends who don't have much to be happy about at the moment, but who made us very happy to be there. We really enjoyed their company, the lovely and extravagant lunch in the garden, and finally a gorgeous raspberry cake from Fauchon, with macarons on top. And sweet X, because one of the "H" candles had broken, very cleverly made the remaining "H" do double duty. We were charmed.

Not all birthdays are the same, after all.

Pomp and Circumstance(s)

2011-05-02T10:59:00.000-07:00

Yes, I admit it, we spent several hours on Friday sitting in front of the TV, watching The Wedding. I loved The Dress, the hats, the uniforms, the Abbey full of people dressed in odd outfits they would wear on no other occasion, and the idea that this couple, unlike the one I also watched 30 years ago, knew and liked each other, had lived together, slept together, fought and made up together. I hope they'll be happy together.

Later that day I happened to be near the Pont de l'Alma, where a copy of the flame on the Statue of Liberty has become a de facto shrine to Princess Diana. Floral tributes and pictures of Diana and William had been left there, but I think it's interesting that there were no photos of Kate Middleton. It was as if the Diana loyalists wanted to keep William free for his still-young-in-their-minds mother. Odd.

"Get the Picture"

2011-04-29T08:13:00.000-07:00

We've been hearing about John Morris from friends in Paris for several years. He's the legendary photo editor of LIFE magazine during World War II, having edited Robert Capa's D-Day photos, executive editor of the Magnum photo agency, photo editor at various times of The New York Times, The Washington Post and Ladies Home Journal, for which he edited the exclusive photos of the wedding of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier, and the European correspondent of National Geographic. His autobiography is titled "Get the Picture."

He edited the indelible photo of the Viet Cong prisoner being shot in the head on the street in Saigon, photos of the moon landing, and other iconic images. He worked with Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, Elliot Erwitt among others. He knew Robert Doisneau and Brassaï, and many many others, photographers, reporters, and newsmakers. He's lived in Paris for nearly 30 years. He was awarded the Legion of Honor. A couple of years ago he was instrumental in the Obama campaign in France. He's 95 years old.

We were lucky enough to be invited to a dinner with him and his lady friend at the home of a mutual friend and were thrilled to meet a man who appeared 20 years younger than his age and who had fascinating stories to tell. Before we left that evening Morris gave us an invitation to the opening party for the auction of his own personal photo collection, going on the block on April 30, 2011 at 15 avenue Montaigne.

There must have been a couple of hundred people sipping wine and looking at the incredible prints on the walls, from versions of Dorothea Lange's migrant mother to Robert Capa's gypsy wedding, to Alfred Eisenstaedt's photo of his and Morris's shadows on the beach, to a happy family picture of the Kennedy brothers and sisters at JFK's wedding. We were blown away to see this incredible record of the 20th century and to have met a man who had been intimately involved in preserving it.

Spring aka Summer

2011-04-28T04:28:00.000-07:00

This faux summer seems to have come to at least a temporary end after the long Easter weekend, but Paris was taking full advantage while it was happening. This fellow relaxing on the deck of his houseboat moored near the Pont Alexandre III might have been on the Canal du Midi, bike ready to ride along the towpath.

We would happily have joined this family having lunch on Easter Monday (a national holiday).

For someone who has never had allergies, it took me a while to realize that the sudden sneezing fits and throat tickles were likely caused by the gorgeous and ubiquitous chestnut trees flowering all over the streets and parks. Yes, just like the song says, "chestnuts in blossom". Achoo!

I don't know if this is a Citroën or a Peugeot or some other make, but by god it's still running on the streets of a holiday Paris, with the family within grinning proudly as it drives by
.

It didn't cool down much in the evening so a party on the quai was probably more appealing than one in a stuffy apartment. This was just one of many we passed on the way to our own pleasantly cool place. Those old stones make for great insulation.

Easter Monday

2011-04-26T09:18:00.000-07:00

I know nothing about this exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but boy do I not agree.

My mood is reflected more by this bike parked in the window of a decorating shop. Yesterday we walked a wide circle around Paris, first from Saint Germain des Prés to Boulevard Haussmann to see the exhibition of paintings by Gustave Caillebotte and photos by his brother Martial at the Musée Jacquemart-André. We loved the paintings, virtually all of which came from private collections and were thus ones we might never get to see again. The photos, while interesting in the context of family and history, were not particularly thrilling to view.

(Neither are the ones I took during the day, or at least that's what my software seems to think, since it won't let me post any of them.)

A walk over to rue Montorgueil to find an open restaurant on this holiday brought us finally to a place that claims never to close, Au Pied de Cochon. After a mediocre meal and a final walk across the river on the Pont des Arts, which, like the quais, was jammed with groups sitting on blankets, chatting and drinking from bottles of wine, we arrived back home, having circled the center of the city.

April in Paris

2011-04-23T14:50:00.000-07:00

We arrived to spectacular summer weather. People sprawled on the lawns of parks, sitting on fountain edges, taking advantage of an entirely atypical spring. The song "April in Paris" is said to have been called that because the lyrics scanned, not because the weather is usually very nice, but it's hit the jackpot this year.

We left SF on time, flew northward over these pretty snow-capped mountains, and arrived early in Frankfurt. Where we sat for several hours waiting for our connection. How I hate United for cancelling the direct flight from SFO to Paris some years ago!

But now we're back and walking our usual paths again. We've been to the Marais,

had lunch in the Palais Royal gardens,

and dodged sunbathing tourists in the Tuileries. April in Paris indeed.

Leaving on a Jet Plane...

2011-04-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

The weather forecast is summery, we have plans set up with friends, our little apartment awaits us.

We're at the airport, leaving for Paris in two hours...

Transition Time

2011-04-13T13:14:00.000-07:00

When we got this notice included in our daily newspaper I suddenly felt a kinship with the writer. I often feel my French, especially written French, must appear like this to a native speaker.

I know I've been a bit remiss in writing on this blog. I think it's because all our good intentions of keeping busy here in the Bay Area, going to museums and concerts and events have petered out and I spend many of my evenings sitting in front of the TV, watching reruns of House, Bones, or Without a Trace; i.e. mindless hours vegging out in my chair. I can only say in my defense that it's a comfortable chair.

Of course I'm exaggerating. We do go places; we drove to the Napa Valley last week, we go to San Francisco, we run around Berkeley. And everywhere I go I've been seeing bright colors. This for example is a hand-knitted bicycle rack cover. Doesn't everyone need one of these on his street corner? How fabulous is that?

And a stroll on Hayes Street in S.F. yielded this touch of France, just down the street from what must be a clothing store for elves, judging by the teeny tiny sweater hanging on the door.

The theme for the neighborhood is spelled out in enormous letters on the side of a building: Brighter, Faster!!! Very Easter-y, don't you think? It might be the motto for the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. "I'm late..."

And for those of you with questions about the afterlife, this tagger in Oakland isn't waiting. "Enjoy Earthly" is his advice.

A la Mémoire d'un Ami

2011-04-03T18:31:00.000-07:00

We got some very sad news from France today. A good friend died unexpectedly, and much too soon.

We've known M for nearly 25 years, through his marriage, through the birth of his children. We were welcomed into their family circle, included in birthday parties and holiday dinners with their parents and friends They have always made us feel as if we had family in France.

I was shocked to get an email from M last week, sent from his hospital bed, telling us he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Today we got another email, this one from his daughter, saying that M was no longer with us.

M traveled a lot for work and was often away, in Sudan, in Venezuela, in Mexico. I wish one could just pretend he was on another of those trips, due back soon. No such luck.

Cue the Twilight Zone Melody

2011-03-28T19:43:00.000-07:00

A few weeks before we left Paris we were having a coffee at Café Danton at Odéon when a man sitting at the next table struck up a conversation. He was American, spent a lot of time in Paris and lived the rest of the time in Los Angeles. He was just the slightest bit creepy and we didn't linger.

Last week I was sitting in our rental car in a parking lot in LA, waiting for Gene to get back from somewhere when I happened to glance at the man getting in the car next to me. Yup, you guessed it. It was Mr. Slightly Creepy. And how creepy is that?

He didn't see me. I didn't say hello.

LaLa Land

2011-03-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

We left a storm-tossed Bay Area to visit Los Angeles for the weekend and the storm followed. We've had a couple of weeks of rain with rare breaks and had been hoping for a bit of Southern California sunshine, but it was not to be.

We decided to stay in downtown LA this time rather than on the West Side where we usually do because I'd heard about how hip and interesting downtown had become. Someone had recommended the Los Angeles Athletic Club, which functions as a hotel as well, and we stayed there. Beautifully decorated in men's club style, huge rooms, free breakfast and use of the three floors of gyms, courts and swimming pool made it a real bargain. (So I didn't use the gym; who are you to judge?)

And how hip is downtown? Our first stop was for lunch at Bottegha Louie, a hanger size restaurant and patisserie a block from the hotel. The take-out boxes reminded me of Ladurée in their pastel prettiness, and the pastries looked almost as good.

The place was jammed with well-dressed and good-looking customers, a far cry from the derelict wanderers I recalled from my early years in LA decades ago.

Sated with poached salmon and prosecco, we wandered a bit ourselves, stopping to visit the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall (Disney and concerts don't fit comfortably in the same phrase in my mind, but it's a cool building), and moving on to the MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, where I was pleased to find a very good permanent collection. I hadn't been here in many years and liked it a lot.

The next day, after an excellent Italian dinner the previous evening at Drago Centro, also within easy walking distance of our hotel, we drove to LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the mid-Wilshire district. I grew up not far from here and had been visiting this museum since it was first established. I had even applied for a curatorial job here shortly after I graduated from school but I hadn't been back in years. This time I barely recognized it. It's huge!

We spent a couple of hours in the galleries, took a short docent tour of some Abstract Expressionist pieces, and had a strange lunch in the brand-new Ray's and Stark Bar, part of Joachim Splichal's Patina Group. People who think Parisian waiters are rude need to be served by the young woman at Stark Bar. Brrrr....

But the nice young manager at Ray's next door made up for it.

That night we drove into the Warehouse District, through what looked like rain-saturated homeless encampments to dinner at Lazy Ox Canteen, a non-Japanese outpost in Little Tokyo. The rain-slicked streets were deserted but the tenements had been replaced by lofts and parking places were hard to find. When we opened the not-very-well-marked door to the Ox we were greeted by a blast of music and conversation and convivial service and the food was good too. Not your father's downtown LA.

The rain continued to follow us the next morning when we checked out and headed for Beverly Hills, thinking we'd kill some time in one of the shopping malls before leaving for the airport. The closer we got to BH, the sunnier it got. Maybe it's true that money counts. Can one pay off the weather gods?
Our last meal in LA was on a patio on Beverly Drive, in full sun.

Blossoms, Dearie?

2011-03-22T17:08:00.000-07:00

A drive through San Francisco recently on the way to Golden Gate Park offered these views from the back seat of a friend's car. In case you're wondering where you are, the sign on the window above will tell you. Did that help?

Speaking of windows, there are lots of them in these downtown high rises, allowing workers in them to watch others working too. They can't shout greetings to each other though, as few of the windows actually open. The bay windows of the classic Edwardians on the flank of Nob Hill do open and I have to think it's a lot more pleasant, even if what they open to is the noise and exhaust fumes of the cars working their way uphill.

The buildings are not more than ten minutes drive from each other and similarly hued but more than a century separates them.

We were going to Golden Gate Park after a dim sum lunch downtown to visit "Bouquets to Art" at the DeYoung Museum, an annual fundraising event for which entrants design floral arrangements "inspired" by the art at the museum.

I had been under the mistaken impression that it was held at the Legion of Honor Museum and that the flower arrangements were meant to be copies of those found in the paintings. This might have made sense if it had in fact been at the Legion, where there are more still life paintings than you can shake a flower stalk at. At the DeYoung however these are far fewer and the collection is heavily weighted to more modern work.

The crowd, and it was an enormous crowd, was heavily weighted toward the elderly and female, and much more interested in the flowers than the art. Luckily, I'd say, because the art wasn't much enhanced by the flowers.

A Couple of Days

2011-03-15T19:05:00.000-07:00

A short visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last week had me looking outdoors as well as in. From the glass-walled corridor on the fifth floor linear downtown buildings piled up behind each other and only their tops gave them any individual identities.

The sculpture court had more rounded shapes, real or shadow.

Another day found me back in downtown Oakland for lunch at Bakesale Betty's, whose wonderful fried chicken and spicy coleslaw I make a point of having whenever we come back home. You can often see Betty herself in her blue wig with her child on her hip. The wait is never more than a few minutes, despite the length of the line on the street.

Take-out or eat-out; there are no tables in either of her locations, but recycled ironing boards on the sidewalk serve very well if the weather permits.

And finally a couple of shots I couldn't resist, next door to Betty's and across the street. From the 1930s to the 2010s within a block.

The Science of Night Life

2011-03-09T15:20:00.000-08:00

My niece asked me out for a date the other night, just us, no spouses or children allowed. We went to the weekly Thursday night party at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. It was a blast.

Full of hipsters and dating couples and tourists and families, with bars strategically placed to keep you moving through the various spaces, the Academy makes science fun. We had dinner at the acclaimed Moss Room, where the silvery guy up above swam through the under-stair aquarium. The larger aquarium below the main level allows you to walk between and under the tanks.

And the most famous resident of this watery world is the albino alligator (or is it crocodile...my science is deserting me I'm afraid) who moved in from his previous home that this new Academy building replaced.

We saw a show in the planetarium, walked through the room containing dioramas of African animals (I've loved dioramas since my parents took me to see the ones at the New York Museum of Natural History in the Dark Ages) and avoided the snakes (I'm squeamish.)

I'm stretching the French connection here, but the Academy has a Foucault pendulum, not quite as impressive as the one in the Pantheon in Paris, but cool nonetheless.

Docents were stationed here and there demonstrating various things and we stopped by to hear a fellow who was enthusiastically displaying some items on the cart in front of him. "Hold this" he asked virtually everyone who stopped by, handing them a large bone, sort of like a badly warped baseball bat. "What do you think it is?" You know where this is going, don't you, dear reader?

It was a display of penises; the bat had once been the treasured member of a long dead walrus.

On that note, we went home.

Paris When You're Far Away

2011-03-05T10:46:00.000-08:00

We're halfway through our stay in the States and I'm looking in both directions, like Janus.
This video by Luke Shepard, a student at the American University in Paris, has been making the internet rounds. Called Le Flâneur, it's an incredible collage of still photos formed into a video tour of a deserted Paris. It calls me back.

I apologize for not being able to upload it directly here, but either my non-existent coding skills or a block by Blogger won't let me embed a Vimeo video.

Clicking on "Le Flâneur" in the highlighted hyperlink above will get you there. Don't miss it!

Signs of Other Times

2011-03-03T17:44:00.000-08:00

I had parked my car recently in front of a rather nondescript building across from the university campus when I saw this sign on the building's wall. I was aware that the United Nations Charter had been signed in San Francisco; I hadn't realized that Berkeley had played a role as well. History is made in the most unexpected places.

Berkeley's streets hold many surprises, some unpleasant, some wonderful. Among the latter are the poems have been embedded in the sidewalk along a downtown street, some on metal plaques, some on multi-colored tiles. One could spend quite a bit time reading them and have more to show for it than merely a stiff neck.

Other sidewalk tiles recall important events in the history of the city. Berkeley's reputation for leftist politics is not recently acquired.

Nor are the non-native trees covering the hillsides.

And the '60s refuse to be forgotten.

At San Francisco's Edge

2011-02-25T18:51:00.000-08:00

The weather forecast is for snow in San Francisco this weekend. Decades pass between snowfalls here, particularly ones where the flakes don't melt as soon as they hit the ground. This may be our year for not being able to avoid snow no matter where we are.

Meanwhile, it's sunny and clear between rainy spells.

A couple of weeks ago we drove along the edge of the city, following the coastline on the north, under the Golden Gate Bridge, and stopping at Baker Beach, just west of the bridge. This urban beach can be crowded in the summer but was virtually empty in February except for the occasional fishermen, walkers, or crows.

I wonder if they actually caught anything.

This view of the city is looking east from the Legion of Honor Museum in Lincoln Park near Land's End, the farthest northwest point of San Francisco. The terracotta-colored dome is Temple Emanuel. The hills in the distance are Berkeley and Oakland, separated from the city by the Bay.

I've written before about the Museum of the Legion of Honor and how it was copied from the one in Paris. It's a lovely building in a spectacular location and does have a French feeling to it. The inscription across the entrance doesn't hurt.

It even has its own little glass pyramid in the courtyard, much smaller than the one in the courtyard of the Louvre, but I suspect that's where the idea came from.

There are several monuments around the museum; this one I had never noticed before. Frances E. Willard was a president of the National Council of Women as well as of the National Women's Temperance Union and an organizer of the Prohibition Party. As a feminist and a lover of a good martini, I'm one tempted human who is mixed in my admiration for her.

The George Segal sculpture of a lone survivor standing by a barbed wire fence in front of a pile of bodies is the San Francisco Holocaust Memorial. On the wall next to it is a list of names of concentration camps and killing centers in France, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine in which families of San Franciscans perished.

Revolution at the Nail Salon

2011-02-14T12:23:00.000-08:00

We've all watched breathlessly the incredible story of relatively non-violent revolution in Egypt. From our American point of view it was thrilling to see young people finding a new way to begin the voyage down the road to democracy. After the Tunisian overthrow of their dictator it was clear that other countries in the Middle East would be looking at these successes and hoping the wave would continue to build. I didn't realize quite how far that hope might spread.

On the day that Mubarak conceded defeat I had a manicure appointment in Berkeley. As I sat down facing Thuy, the Vietnamese manicurist, we exchanged a few words about the weather before she asked me if I had been following what was happening in Egypt. Her eyes were shining.

She told me she was incredibly excited to see the possibility of a revolution in a country thought to be an unchangeable autocracy. She was living vicariously, she made clear, because she didn't believe such a thing could happen in "my country Vietnam." Explaining that since the Internet in Vietnam was tightly controlled and computer access less available, she thought social media wouldn't be as strong a weapon as it appeared to have been in Egypt. The police control, she said, would tamp down any movement toward freedom. She used the word freedom repeatedly. And in spite of her pessimism about the possibility of change in Vietnam, she was thrilled at the idea of freedom coming as a result of the actions of a people anywhere.

So Eastern Europe in the 1990s, North Africa in 2011... Southeast Asia in...?

Catching Up

2011-02-13T18:12:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking of getting a new camera and borrowed a friend's for a week to try it out. When I went to download the photos just now I discovered that my computer refuses to recognize them without additional software that I don't have. Sooooo....no new photos for you. I'll try to get the software soon.

I've been taking a lot of them because we've been doing a lot. Realizing that our Paris life has been slowing down a bit as we become more "resident" and less "visitor", we thought we'd try to speed up our Berkeley life by reversing the equation, i.e. becoming a bit more "visitor" while we're here.

And so we saw a great dance piece called Eonnagata at the excellent Cal Performances, made by a company called Ex Machina and including director (and for this piece also dancer) Robert Lepage, ex-Paris Opera Ballet and Sadler's Wells dancer Sylvie Guillem, and choreographer/dancer Russell Maliphant.

[photo credit: Erich Labbe]

Based on the life of an 18th century French transvestite diplomat, spy, and soldier, known as the Chevalier d'Eon, it was an extraordinary melange of Japanese theater, dance, prose, music and acting, with costumes by the late Alexander McQueen, and we saw it at its US premiere performance. Super!

One beautiful sunny afternoon we drove out to the Legion of Honor Museum (I wanted to show you the views of the Golden Gate on the ride out there, but that camera problem...oh well). The featured exhibition was a collection of clothing reproducing in three dimensions the clothes worn by historical characters in paintings, such as Eleonora de Toledo, the wife of Cosimo de' Medici as painted by Bronzino. It's a stunning portrait we happened to see last year in Paris at the Trésors de Medicis exhibition at the Musée Maillol.

The clothes were all made from paper painted, sewn, folded and constructed by Isabelle de Borchgrave, a Belgian artist. I would have enjoyed the exhibit much more however if the dresses had been juxtaposed with more pictures of the original inspirations for her work. I don't think there were more than three or four of those and the impact of the exhibit was lessened by their absence.

Gene and I are both taking classes, he one on architectural theory and I a class called "Proust and his World", which keeps me at least partly in Paris, if the Paris of the late 19th and early 20th century.

We're also trying to keep using our painstakingly acquired French in classes or in conversation. With any luck we won't forget it all before our return.

We've got theater tickets for two different performances in San Francisco in the next two weeks, and plan at least a couple more museum visits. Being a "visitor" can be hard work, but we're having a great time working at it.

Seasonal Surprises

2011-02-06T14:29:00.000-08:00

I can't get over how nature has managed to provide us with spring in the middle of winter but I'm not complaining, no not at all. I'm marveling at the bright pink plum blossoms on the street trees in my neighborhood, and on the stunningly blue skies swept clean every once in a while by winds strong enough to knock over the patio umbrella standing on the deck.

The view from my front windows often includes spiraling turkey vultures, wings spread wide, searching for the movement of small animals in the canyon across the street.

The Monterey Market remains an incredible source of fresh fruits, vegetables and bulk foods, along with nearly everything else one could want in the way of edibles. Anything they're missing is probably available across the street at the Monterey Fish Market, the meat market, or the cheese and tea store. These places could hold their own with many Parisian purveyors.

Recently we drove past one of the remaining old movie "palaces", the fabulous Grand Lake Theater, and spotted this lovely sight. The streetlight farthest from the wall is visibly stronger than its mate and thus casts a shadow of the weaker one onto the wall, 15 feet high. Getting the shot before the traffic moved on was a challenge, one of the drawbacks to being in a car most of the time.

On the first Friday night of every month the nascent Oakland art scene holds an open house/street party called Art Murmur in downtown Oakland and we dropped over to 23rd Street the other evening to see it. Stands were set up in the street selling anything from homemade clothes, to postcards, to food. Crowds wandered between galleries and music played. Old movies were projected onto an adjacent building wall. It's a scene.

A very good dinner at Flora, a restored Art Deco flower shop decorated with original blue and silver tile work, followed, beginning with a cocktail called Carter Beats the Devil; how can you not order that?

Across the street was the recently renovated Fox Oakland, another former movie palace now used for live shows that attract the crowds. For someone who worked in a virtually dead Oakland for many years, this new vibrant city is a revelation. There is definitely a there there.

Exercising my Right (and Left and Middle)

2011-02-02T13:59:00.000-08:00

Thanks for saying so, guy, but if only I were. I've hit the dreaded lazy place. I've mentioned before, probably multiple times, that I hate to exercise and that one of the many wonderful things about living in Paris is the amount of walking that I am forced to do and actually enjoy doing and that keeps me in reasonably good shape without extra effort.

Not so in Berkeley. Living on a hill gives me the excuse I need to avoid walking the less-than-a-mile to the nearest shopping street because walking back up with bags would be no fun at all. Having a big comfortable house means I spend more time hanging around in it. Suffice it to say that I've been sitting around on my fesses instead of out doing this (OK, maybe without the masks, but it is flu season):

Or walking around looking at the beautiful blossoming plum trees all over the neighborhood.

Or borrowing a very nice dog and walking her:

Or spending more time playing with the cutest little guy in the world:

This morning the jeans felt tight. Somethings gotta give, and I don't want it to be the button at the waist. Workouts start today.

Sunny Morning Thoughts

2011-01-27T09:07:00.000-08:00

We're taking a break from Paris for the rest of the winter. Berkeley has welcomed us with open arms and an incredible spring-like burst of sun and warm weather which I hope never ends. We missed the severe storms here at the end of 2010 and have been absolutely stunned to be walking around in shirtsleeves and sandals. Woo-hoo!!

I love the first days of jet lag when we come back here; waking up at 4:30 A.M. full of vigor and the desire to unpack, rearrange, do the laundry. By 8:00 we're ready to hit the market and take a walk before breakfast. This is not my usual pattern, people. In Paris we rarely see the sun partly because when it is around it's in the mornings, and we're not. I suppose there's something to be said for alarm clocks, but I had enough of them in my working years. Now I just go with the flow.

Jet lag is over now, but I'm still waking earlier than usual and feeling good. However our 20 year old car is not feeling so great, and we're going to have to replace it, one of my least favorite things. The reason we even have a 20 year old car is because I hate, hate, hate, car dealers and negotiating. I bought this last one over the phone, calling every dealer in the area until one would give me a price without my having to come in and haggle in person.

It's lucky I'm feeling so sunny now, it helps in girding up for the search. We're gone at least half the year, so having a nice car isn't as important as it would be if I were in it every day, but finding something decent at a low cost will be a challenge. I'm off to look at one this morning. Wish me luck!

Sayonara for Now

2011-01-24T10:10:00.000-08:00

We went to the movies at this Japanese temple a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it really is a movie theater, and I'd been meaning to go for years and never gotten around to it, but when the new Sophia Coppola film was showing at La Pagode, we decided to see it here rather than at one of the multiplexes at Odéon, where we usually go.

Supposedly built by an executive of le Bon Marché for his wife as a ballroom adjacent to their house, this building became a movie theater in the 1930s. The main screening room has walls covered with lovely carvings and in good weather there is tea served in the garden. It's unfortunate that the roof needs to be covered by a tarp in the winter, but it's an exquisite building and I believe has landmark status so isn't likely to be torn down and replaced by one of the god-awful modern buildings that sometimes appear in the 7th arrondissement.

The movie wasn't as good as the theater, but in retrospect worth seeing; one of those you think you don't like but spend an hour analyzing afterwards. Lost in Translation would have been more appropriate for that theater, though.

Sold!

2011-01-16T09:06:00.000-08:00

This is what's going on in Paris at the moment, the fall session of the twice yearly official sale period. Yes, for those of you who have lived in the free-for-all American consumer economy, where the merchant gets to decide whether and when to have a sale, it's different in France. Here the government decides, and woe betide any merchant who doesn't go along. At least, until recently.

Twice a year, in January and in June, all of France goes on sale. This is known as "les soldes" and traditionally everyone goes rushing out to the stores to take advantage of the 30%-70% discounts on last season's merchandise. In past years it was possible to have "promotions" or sales in advance of remodeling, or various other workarounds, but those were relatively few. Since the economic downturn the government appears, to me, to have turned a relatively blind eye to the discounts being offered during the year, outside of the official soldes periods.

In any case, windows in even the toniest stores have signs indicating that inside one will find that pricey sweater, flat-screen TV or shiny pair of boots at a price you're willing to pay, and that if you have the sharp elbows and good nose for a bargain necessary to fight the crowds, you too can score. And if you have a gambler's instincts, waiting a while will get you an even lower price, since the discounts get deeper as the soldes get shorter.

As for us, we're packed and ready to leave and have no more room for even the best bargain...well...if it's really good maybe we can wear it on the plane.

Winter Winding Down

2011-01-11T08:31:00.000-08:00

I walked out of the house the other day grinning like a madwoman because this is what I saw: sun, sun, sun! I wasn't the only happy camper on the street either. People seemed pretty perky, for Parisians.

Among the things you miss in sunless climes are shadows. It's nice to see them falling on the buildings and on the sidewalks when the sun's shining. Sitting on a café terrasse still requires a coat and a space heater, but the feel of the rays on your face is wonderful.

Of course we're convinced the weather is improving because the gods are punishing us for our intended departure for California; "see," they say, "what we can do if we want to? Stick around and we'll give you more."

But in fact we are leaving next week for several months back in the States and are looking forward to spending time with our family and friends there. Meanwhile, suddenly realizing we need to touch base with people we haven't seen in a while, we've booked ourselves to go out nearly every evening between now and our departure. And we've been out on the streets more as the rain and snow have stopped for the most part and we're back to taking long walks every day.

Passing by le Bon Marché on the "back" side, I stopped to look at the lovely example of 19th century tile work surrounding the doors, advertising the wonderful wares to be found inside. Who wouldn't want to buy rubans (ribbons) here? How different it must have been to live in a time when ribbons were a major consumer item.

I'm going to indulge myself in a minor rant about something that's been annoying me all winter. Several years ago the city put in a traffic circle between the Louvre courtyard, the one with the I.M. Pei pyramid, and the Tuileries, presumably to slow traffic in a busy pedestrian area. So why, do you suppose, do they block off the sidewalks around that circle, chaining blockades to the light posts, and forcing those pedestrians to walk in the soggy sandy area instead? Not a lot of fun after a heavy rain I can tell you.

We find ourselves here a lot because it's the direct route to the tons of Japanese noodle joints on rue Sainte Anne, and noodle soup has been high on our list of winter foods. Yes, even during the season that holds foie gras, chestnuts, oysters, game and chocolate galore. We eat those too, but it's hard to beat a bowl of udon on a rainy day...

Lighten Up!

2011-01-04T15:26:00.000-08:00

I complain all the time about how gray and dismal the weather is and one day I go out for a late afternoon walk and see this. Clear sunset skies over the Tuileries gardens make your breath catch for a moment while you remember that winter isn't all bad.

Paris light is special, indescribable. It helps make all the drizzly days tolerable, knowing that soon every buildng, every monument, every bare tree will be outlined against that sky and that you will realize that there are in fact hundreds, thousands of shades of gray and each of them is seen at its best in Paris.

The food doesn't hurt either.