French 75

16h30

As seen from the Avenue Président Wilson, 16eme.

Snow Day, January 5

In/around Luxembourg Garden, 6eme.

Upstairs and to the right

Musée Baccarat, Place des États-Unis, 16eme.

10 Days/10 Things

Yes. I returned from my New Year's visit to Paris six weeks ago. Six. To explain why I was unable -- despite my very best intentions, I assure you -- to post anything more than this slim list at this late date would be to bore you endlessly.

And that I could not bear to do. And so I offer the following. (It's a crappy medium, I grant you, but it is not as if I didn't take a moment to reflect on its contents. Items that came close but in the end did not make the top 10 include the Vodka Negroni at the Hotel Meurice; the ease of hailing a taxi in the rue Maubeuge; the Maximilien Tapestries at the Louvre; the 68 bus; the smoked salmon from l'Épicerie d'Olivier Pitou; the Église d'Auteuil metro stop.)

 10. Les toilettes, Musée Baccarat. I still have not recovered fully from the demise of the beautiful green marble powder room at I. Magnin in downtown San Francisco. But this place makes my loss easier to bear. Even though I can never recall where the paper towel dispenser is.

9. Making grown-up choices. Is my love for La Pagode strong enough to endure a screening of "Australia"? This was the question. The answer was no.

8. 30 ans ou La Vie En Rose. The Raoul Dufy retrospective at the Musée de l'art Moderne was exhaustive and exhausting. Hundreds of paintings, yards and yards of fabric, and la Fée électrique that made me feel as if I were in the bottom of a Fauvist Grand Canyon. Despite such a riotous excess of color and image, it was this particular painting (which at first glance I could have taken for something by Matisse), that stuck in my head for weeks afterward. It is perhaps one of the most edible shades of pink ever.

 7. Le croquant praliné. Yay for nuts, for butter, and for sugar. This dessert is best enjoyed slowly, with your hands as well as your spoon (how else to break up the wafery tuile and dip it in the praliné?). Some day this item will disappear from the menu of Willi's Wine Bar and thusly the face of the earth (much like all that green marble at I. Magnin) and I will be very sad. 

 6. Un anti-cyclone sibérien. This, apparently, is the meteorological phenomenon to which we are to attribute the glacial cold -- and snow -- in Paris during the first week of 2009. I admit that it was with a somewhat resentful heart each morning that I put on my puffy coat, leaving my sleeker, "pretty" one hanging in the closet. Cold and crappy though it was, it only served to underscore basic quality of winter beauty, i.e., how very tenuous and likely to rupture at any moment it can feel. I am thinking of the ultra-violet pre-dawn skies, and those twilight hours -- coming on just barely after four in the afternoon, it seems -- where the bare bones of the trees set off perfectly the fragile sky which seems on the brink of disappearing before it turns deep blue. It makes me think that there isn't any better place on earth than this particular city to be just a little bit lonesome, and not unhappy to be so.

5. Monoprix. On the way to just about everywhere, and so damned handy. I have the receipts to prove it.

4. Sous l'empire des crinolines. Everything exquisite and Second Empire at the Musée Galliera, aka le Musée de la Mode. Beyond the ball gowns, lace parures, and the satin slippers worn by the Empress Eugénie (such little feet she had), however, were to be found in a glass case a few carnets de bal. Dance cards. How do I even describe this? Imagine what looks from the back to be a silver long-handled mirror, small enough to fit into the palm of your hand. Now imagine how upon closer inspection it reveals itself to be a fan, and when opened you can write on the mirror-shaped pages with the tiny silver pencil that accompanies it.

 3. Mistinguett, Madonna, et moi. I have been a fan since the first time I saw the video for her eighties superhit on French TV, but with this, her one-woman/one-accordion show, Caroline Loeb has become one of my favorite Frenchwomen of all time. Long may she reign.

2. Inflection. Sometime between 9:30 and 10:30, nearly every morning of my visit -- I think I may have skipped New Year's Day -- I walked through the gardens of the Palais Royal to enjoy my café crème at the counter of the Nemours café overlooking the Place Colette. The evidence of my having become a regular was not to be found in my having shown up every day for 10 days, but in the changes in the "Bonjour, Madame" with which I was welcomed. The inflection morphed over the course of the week, to the extent that on my last day, it sounded very nearly as if I were being greeted by my first name.

 1. Friends. I love Paris, of course, but the truth is that the city itself is blind to me. It is ignorant of my coming and going. It keeps my secrets out of deafness, not loyalty. Its indifference to me is part of the terms of engagement.

Not so with friends. I exist fully in Paris because of them. Otherwise I'd be just another pair of boots scuffling along a winter sidewalk. When I come back they say, "Welcome home," and they want to know where I have been and what I have been doing.

And they ask when I will be coming back again, and to stay. It is a question I can only answer with a question. "Soon?"

GPS

The airport was by no means quiet that morning, but the autoroute had a Sunday vibe on it. I had never before had a female taxi driver in Paris, and had never before come into the city by way of the Porte de la Chapelle. I know well the route that comes in through Bercy, with the Seine emerging almost out of nowhere on your left, and the stately tableau that presents itself as you cross the Pont d'Austerlitz -- 180° or so taking in Notre Dame, the gates of the Jardin des Plantes, the Gare d'Austerlitz.

But even so, I wasn't paying good attention, as I had spent the bulk of the ride entering into the directory of my new phone the numbers of my Paris peoples. Only once were we safely intra-muros, did I finally pop my head up.

It took me a minute to get my bearings. Of course, we were unmistakeably in Paris. The regularity of the buildings; the telltale monochrome palette, dashed with bits of red (that is, signs reading "Tabac;" "SFR;" "Paris Match"); the sooty sidewalk dotted with sherbet-green trash receptables; the square-shouldered bus lumbering a few car-lengths ahead. I strained to see a street-name but couldn't get a firm grip on one. There was a metro station, a few blocks later a Monoprix on the left. Wait: what street is that on the right, the one that looks like an overpass? It was as if I had caught a tiny whiff of something on a breeze. I sat forward in my seat, alert, scanning for another landmark. There should be a church, I thought, also on the right.

Indeed. There was that church. I had walked right past it, hardly six months prior. And just like that, the picture came into focus.

I had been on a random outing on a Sunday afternoon, hoping to learn something about la Goutte d'Or, a neighborhood that could be no further -- figuratively nor literally -- from Montparnasse. I remembered a small crowd of people, more or less my age, gathered on the sidewalk, chatting and laughing and smoking. From a certain distance, neither their light summer clothes, nor their posture, nor anything, really, betrayed their identities. We could have been in any one of a dozen analogous American neighborhoods -- the Mission District, the Lower East Side, Echo Park.

A petite, smiling dark-haired woman served coffee from a carafe. It was only up close that the scene became distinctly French: the language, the gestures, the pursed lips and little moues necessitated by complicated vowels; the plastic cups from which the coffee was sipped (which bear a startling and clinical resemblance to something one would use to rinse well at the dentist). As I passed, the woman raised the carafe and offered me a coffee; out of reflexive shyness I said no, thank you.

And so it was that my personal GPS -- the world's most wonderful piece of software, human memory, every bit of information loaded by hand, in real-time, infinitely cross-referenced -- kicked in. I knew instinctively that Madame and I were rolling south in her taxi, down rue Marx Dormoy about to cross over into the 10th arrondissement, and soon thereafter past the Gare du Nord.

An MRI of my head might have revealed something like this:

Coordinates established, I relaxed, sat back in my seat, and got on with my first day back in Paris.

Pushing Off

Heading home on the Vélib. Blvd Port-Royal, April 2008

Going to Paris for New Year's. We were presented with a perfect storm of cheap airline tickets, a somewhat stronger dollar, and no full-time work here in Austin. Ten days in France seemed the only rational response. I suppose this is my personal equivalent of heading for higher ground.

It also seemed a nice way to kick down the door that is 2009.

The forecast calls for highs in the upper thirties and low forties, long visits with friends, aimless wandering, and gratitude both for what is and what will be.

Full report to follow.

The Land of the Free

It was high December, just over a week before Christmas. Kate, my California homegirl, was not long for Paris. She was soon to return to where the skies are not cloudy all day (that would be San Diego). She and I had a plan to meet up that night, and to take a big walk around the center of the city to photograph the Christmas lights. The Santa hats I bought for us to wear as we did so were just a last-minute inspiration.

Kate and I met at her office at the Bibliothèque Nationale. I presented her with her hat -- which she loved, and promptly put on -- and we thumbnail-sketched a route that was to include the Palais-Royal, the Place de la Concorde, the rue Saint-Honoré, the Place Vendôme, and perhaps the Madeleine. Our first stop was for a quick drink at the Nemours, the nearby café where she and I had sat many times over the previous two years. We even had a favorite waiter, who generally would let us know by the infinitesimal twitch of his left eyebrow that he was happy to see us.

But that evening, our arrival at the café was akin to something out of a "Cheers" episode. "Salut, les filles!" A little roar went up as we crossed the terrace and pushed open the door. I felt a shuddering ripple of self-consciousness, and the uncertainty that comes with finding yourself on new territory.

Had we been in midtown Manhattan, I doubt anyone would have batted an eye at two girls in Santa hats having a drink the week before Christmas. But apart from their encounters with roving bachelorette parties, Parisians aren't prepared for women voluntarily looking silly. (The bride-to-be in Paris undergoes "un enterrement de vie de jeune fille" -- i.e., a burial of the single life -- which requires her, like her Vegas counterpart, to endure ritual public humiliation at the hands of her friends).

No surprise, I guess, certainly not in a town, and in a culture, that places a premium on elegance, and on staying pretty (and particularly on girls' staying pretty). One does not aspire to achieving holiday silliness along the lines of Santa hats worn as outerwear. One aspires to being cool, i.e., desirable. The idea of benign, pleasurable goofiness is actually difficult to articulate in French. The equivalent words tend to have the stain of judgment on them; they imply literal craziness, idiocy, inappropriateness, or outright stupidity.

Translation: a girl would have to be engaged, insane, or an imbecile to dare such a thing.

(Or she would have to be performing two shows a night at the Crazy Horse, in which case the hat would add a bit of frisky festivity as well as much-needed warmth to a costume otherwise consisting of a g-string, thigh-high stockings, and heels.)

Or, perhaps, to dare such a thing, a girl would have to be foreign.

It is not uncommon for women, especially American women, coming to Paris to hope for the day when they pass for a local. It's understandable. The conventional wisdom -- and the literature -- on the subject is oppressive. The Parisiennes are chic. They don't get fat. They can tie scarves. They've got that je ne sais quoi. And on and so. Insert your sweeping generalization here.

For the record, I have never passed. What's the point? I am a curvy, smiling, size-14 blonde, and that right there pretty much screams "not from here." What is more, I speak fluent French with a foreign and difficult-to-place accent, and I know as much about French seventies pop singers as I do post-structuralists. So in Paris, I do not wish to pass, because it is more fun to be something that I am resolutely not back home: mysterious and exotic.

It is also more rewarding. I had a special friend for a while whose eyes tended to glaze over as I spoke. Sometimes on the phone I could hear him not hearing me. I thought it was perhaps that my grammar was so bad he just couldn't bear to follow along. I finally asked him. He explained that it wasn't that he didn't understand me: it was simply that he liked listening to me talk.

Crazy.

Someone told me once that French women don't like to laugh out loud -- or perhaps not to laugh too loud -- because they don't think it's sexy. I do not know if it's true. I do know that most French comedies, and French comedians -- with one or two exceptions -- aren't particularly funny. So it's possible that women (and men, for that matter) are short on occasions to laugh.

But to me, that prospect -- even if it is only half true -- is just sad. Laughter is breathing, only better. My childhood heroes were comediennes: Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett. Cloris Leachman and Gilda Radner. Even Cher, one of the stars in my personal firmament, whose glamour and platform shoes fascinated me, was a great comedienne.

And by the way, I like Santa hats. I had a good-luck ritual for years when I lived in Los Angeles. It entailed wearing a Santa hat on the drive north home for Christmas every year. I did a lot of waving at folks on I-5. It kept my spirits up and kept me from being scared shitless that a Rutger Hauer-Hitcher situation might back up on me before I cut over to 580.

So yeah, I guess that makes me kind of a "love me, love my hat" kind of person.

As Kate and I sat down, removed our coats, and adjusted our red and white faux fur stocking caps, I realized that this uncertainty was not the result of having crossed over some good-taste boundary into deep embarrassment.

On the contrary. I was simply coming to appreciate fully that to be "not from here," and to be at home with who you are, is to be free. Amen.

Difficile à Photographier, Cette Lune*

Pantheon with Christmas Trees and Tough-to-Photograph Moon, Dec. 2007

*Flowers? Easy to photograph. Kids? Piece of cake. Myself? Can-do. But for the life of me I have yet to take a decent picture of the moon, or with the moon in it. So be it. It's a flawed photo, to be sure, but it was a nice moment on my Christmas landscape last year. Amen.

Column, Capital, Entablature, Pediment

Mairie, Fifth Arrondissement, December 2007

Tapis Rouge

Galerie de Valois, Palais-Royal, December 2006

Fiat Luxe

Hotel de Crillon, December 2007

Climbing Down for a Cig

 

Rue de Lille, December 2007