A Moveable Feast

Paris, as Hemingway wrote, is a moveable feast, which is why I ended up handing out water bottles to Canadian runners during the Paris Marathon. It all started out innocently enough, the Latin Quarter,

Notre Dame, Sainte Chapelle,

a short walk over the bridge to Shakespeare & Co. to see which authors were reading. Shakespeare & Co. is my favorite bricks and mortar bookstore on the planet. This is probably true of almost anyone who has come here.

The first level has floor to ceiling shelves of books, all for sale, all in English and mostly literature, though there is a modest selection of everything else as well. The second floor is also floor to ceiling books, but not for sale, being a sort of library for the highly literate, and those who aspire to write.

There are a few spaces with, of all things, typewriters, and many places to sit or sprawl and read. The people who have written, read or stayed at one or other iteration of this bookstore include James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford and later, at this particular location, William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg, and many other Beat Generation writers.

As well there is a piano. Anyone can come in off the street and hang out as long as they like, write a novel, play the piano, it's all very casual and happening and intelligent and it's possible to meet people who are astonishingly gifted. It is pretty much terra sancta with regards to who has spent time upstairs writing or who has spent time downstairs reading.

It was here that I met Nubilia, who was singing some Beatles tunes for a few Brits that were milling about. She had a lovely, if untrained voice, and singing English lyrics with an Italian accent added to the charm. Suddenly the pianist had to leave, and the Brits didn't leave, and I asked her if she knew any Pink Floyd, and she said she was a huge fan, so I sat in and played through most of the vocal numbers from Dark Side of the Moon, ending with Great Gig in the Sky. Nubilia did a brilliant job of the vocalise, so much so that a bunch more people gathered. I wanted to stop but everyone cheered us on, so after a bit of consultation we did a couple of Elton John numbers, then ended with the Louis Armstrong classic, Wonderful World. Someone asked if we took requests, and I looked at her and she looked at me and I just knew this was coming, "Do you know any Doors?" came the question from someone with a decidedly non-British accent. "Only if you'll sing along" I said, and that's exactly what happened, with a chorus of American, French, Italian, African, British, Canadian, Dutch, and probably many other nationalities singing Break on Through, Love Her Madly, Love Me Two Times, and so on... A curious thing happened as I was just getting into the extended keyboard solo on Light My Fire; a dude pulled up a chair and started improvising on top of my bass line, something very funky and in keeping with the piece, but this guy was really pounding some solid jazz chords. He motioned me to keep jamming, which I did, and he went off on some wacky wild tangent totally in keeping with the psychedelic-nightmare-carnival-keyboard-style of Ray Manzaric but also very jazzy. We probably extended that solo section to almost 20 minutes, then we each signaled that we should probably bring it home, and as I started in on the recap of the familiar riff, he played it as well but in Blues block chords, all very hyper cool! Then everyone sang the final verse, and there was huge applause, now the crowd being quite packed in and spilling down the narrow stairs. This was absolutely hilarious and we were all having a really intense fun time and I asked him where he was from. As it turns out Nathan is a jazz pianist from Montreal, and was here to accompany his girlfriend and a bunch of other Canadians who were running the Paris Marathon the next day. He played a couple more numbers solo, his own compositions, very cool and mellow blues, then when the group had thinned a bit we decided to all have lunch at the bistro next door. Despite my initial reluctance because I noticed the menu boards were in English, they assured me this place was cool, and it was. I guess I should stop being so paranoid about how Parisians treat tourists... They asked if I'd like to help hand out water to Canadians participating in the run tomorrow, and I said sure, and that's how I spent the next morning, on the lower banks of the Seine, looking out for shirts that had a red maple leaf on them and helping out with the distribution of water bottles. The things that happen in Paris...

I spent a great deal of time visiting galleries and museums, mostly studying paintings. The Louvre, unlike D'Orsay, has a very enlightened policy on taking pictures: knock your socks off, but no flash, which is very civilized indeed, considering the tumultous history of some of these paintings. While I took a few overall pictures of some paintings, mostly I took lots of extreme close ups, especially of some of my favorites, like the Vermeers. I hope in the future that museums will publish extremely high resolution pictures on-line so that aspiring painters can study them without having to travel vast distances. Nevertheless, the experience of actually seeing an important painting close-up is a tremendous luxury. From studying these paintings in art books one soon forgets how huge some of these are, like the Gericoult,

or how tiny, like Vermeer's Lacemaker, which is not much more than 7" square.

Needless to say I did not spend any time milling about trying to get a first row picture of the Mona Lisa.

This one is definitely worth seeing on-line or in high grade close-up in an art book. Still, as a cultural icon it is important to some people, a great many people, in fact, and this has the benefit of leaving all of the rest of Leonardo's works uncrowded. The recently discovered Prado copy of the Mona Lisa by one of Leonardo's Spanish apprentices is here at the special St. Anne exhibition which is on through May, and that copy is far more instructive with respect to the original in terms of colors, the background, the chair she's sitting on, her clothes, etc. Studying this painting one realizes just how damaged the original is, after hanging in King Louis' personal bathroom for many years. When the oils darkened someone took a scrub brush to it and took off her eyebrows. During the 19th century it was stolen, but eventually recovered, and every time the painting is taken down for cleaning, Paris holds its breath.

No visit to Paris would be complete without a walk up to Montmartre, and especially handy for me because that is where my hotel is.

The area is famous for all the painters that have lived and worked here, and many famous Impressionist works depict the area. Though there are still many painters who work here, they are by and large pretty lackluster, and I really wonder who it is that actually buys these paintings; tourists obviously, but why? Do they really not know any better? If so, why even come to Paris?

Maybe that's something I could do when I retire, live here and paint really bad Impressionist paintings for tourists.

 

Some more random photographs of the many hundreds I have taken can be found here.

 

 

 

 

The Importance Of Being The Lizard King

I recently overheard a young American couple talking at a sidewalk cafe in Barcelona who were apparently on some sort of pre-packaged tour of Europe. The wife was of the opinion that people here were friendlier than in Florence. The husband asked "which one was Florence again?" The wife replied, "that's where we had that really bad sushi at the hotel, remember?"
People who understand the profound tragedy and horror (as in Conrad's character Kurtz "the horror..." ) of this cringe-worthy exchange will perhaps think I have joined that motley crew of unfortunates who routinely stumble through Europe, led by bored guides who could point to a Giotto and declare it to be a Delacroix and not generate so much as a raised eyebrow in response, when I describe my next pilgrimage site. Such are my travels that as well as taking in the important, the obscure, and those places that might only have meaning by virtue of what they historically represent, on this tour of ten pilgrimage sites I am also visiting places which have become important relatively recently, while ignoring the vacuous or sordid reasons why anyone would make a point of coming here in the first place.

On today's program, another double header, pilgrimage site number 8 is the last resting place of "The Lizard King" himself, Jim Morrison, lead singer of "The Doors." That Jim Morrison died at the age of 27 of a drug overdose is not entirely unexpected or even unusual. Jimi Hendrix died at age 27, as did Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and most recently Amy Winehouse. Twenty-seven seems to be the age at which pop stars shuffle off their mortal coils. As F.Scott Fitzgerald once wrote "there are no second acts in American lives", and Morrison may very well have been a spent force as he retreated to Paris, with his trial for obscenity pending in Florida. If the poetry of his posthumous work "An American Prayer" was a sign of the direction his oeuvre was heading, Morrison's legend was well-served by dying at his own hand. Morrison suffered from asthma, which apparently he did not bother to control very well. He had been coughing up blood for two weeks, but still insisted on getting drunk on whisky every night and snorting cocaine. The combination of out of control asthma, whiskey, cocaine and heroine eventually caught up with him, and after a long night of drinking and shooting heroine, his lungs filled with blood while asleep in a bathtub on July 3, 1971. The official French coroner's report put the cause of death as "heart failure", which is not unlike writing "lead poisoning" after getting shot.

Morrison is buried in a simple tomb at Cimetière du Père Lachaise in the 20th arrondissement. Whether he deserves to be buried in the company of such notables as Bizet, Balzac, Callas, Chopin, Delacroix, Modigliani, Piaf, Pissarro, Proust, Seurat, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Marcel Marceau and countless other greats is debatable. Nevertheless, so many hordes of American pilgrims, and others, have come here to pay their respects and leave mementos that damage has been done to adjacent tombs by those who routinely camp out overnight to sing Doors tunes by candlelight, holding spontaneous happenings, and generally making pests of themselves with their total disregard for the overall sanctity of the place. A tree nearby is covered in bubblegum as it is now some weird totemic part of the pilgrimage experience to "chew one for Jim". Needless to say it's a disgusting habit, but it seems to be tolerated in lieu of the damage which could be done to all the adjacent tombs. The thinking by some that this piece of ground is somehow American soil, and the frequent conflicts between the ground's keepers and the Mongol hordes of pilgrims who come to pay their respects have caused this tomb, of all others at Père Lachaise, to be a matter of continuous consternation. Morrison's tomb is now permanently guarded and fenced off to prevent graffiti, vandalism and such to other surrounding tombs, and while I was there I asked the guard, who appeared to be very bored and spoke with a raspy voice between long drags from the cigarette that precariously danced on his lips, if this was still an issue. Apparently not so much since they have tightened surveillance. However, he was of the opinion that of all the places to be buried at this cemetery, being anywhere near Morrison's grave was the worst, "un fiasc".

There is a Greek inscription under his name which I make out to read "to his own daemon accordingly" (apologies in advance to any Greeks). In ancient Greek mythology a daemon was an inspiring guiding spirit of Nature which at times was like a muse to philosophers, writers, painters, etc. Consequently if we translate it as: "He was true to his spirit" , it would describe him well.

The fact that a drug-addicted singer of pop tunes with delusions of being an important poet should be buried in this Paris cemetery only because he happened to drop dead here is mildly ironic. The choice of Paris as a destination in the first place was no doubt because he was harboring a fantasy of joining that class of expatriate artists which have included F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Luis Bunuel, and many others. In many respects, Morrison's mediocrity is the diametric opposite of the immense talent of the subject of pilgrimage site number 9, the tomb of Oscar Wilde. Unlike Morrison, Wilde was supremely well-educated, perfectly fluent in English, Irish, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, and being thoroughly well read, he could effortlessly extemporize on any subject and come up with the most brilliant witticism or remark on command. His works have stood the test of time, and his plays, especially his masterpiece "The Importance of Being Ernest", are regularly performed by theatrical groups all over the world. His humor is as fresh now as it was 120 years ago, and the pathos and depth of his poetry has few equals. That he died a lonely, penniless death in exile after brilliantly defending himself on the charge of homosexuality (illegal at the time in England) and serving his time in brutal prison conditions is one of the great tragedies of English literature. Who knows what masterpieces of Wilde's later years we have been deprived of.

The tomb of Oscar Wilde has me a bit perplexed; it is fairly rectilinear Art Deco-ish affair and depicts what appears to be an Assyrian gryphon. I am missing the connection between Oscar Wilde and this mythological Middle-Eastern animal. The answer might be as simple as someone having gone to "Tombstones R' Us" and chosen something "nice", but again, there is no interpretive plaque.

According to the very friendly guard at the Morrison grave, Oscar Wilde's final resting spot has also seen some damage, though this time inadvertent from those making the pilgrimage to pay their respects. The tradition for over a hundred years by admirer's of Oscar Wilde has been to kiss his gravestone while wearing red lipstick. So many women (and possibly men?...) have done this that it has left enormous deposits of crimson on the porous stone, at times colouring large parts of it, which in turn has been repeatedly cleaned off. As lipstick is deeply penetrating , slowly the stone has been worn away with each cleaning. The Irish government stepped in and provided the funds to restore the monument and to surround the tombstone in glass, thus allowing the custom to continue, but stopping further "accelerated erosion." In lieu of this unsanitary pathogenic custom, I purchased a single red rose to place at the foot of his tomb.

Messages from all over the world are written on the glass, usually with lipstick, and all four panels of glass are covered with hundreds of kisses. As usual, click to embiggen:

Paris, in the Spring, is lovely; the city shines, the air is clean, the tourists have not arrived, and if they could only stop all that ridiculous accordion music which seems to be everywhere, including the metro...

For those who are still worried, yes I did revisit the Louvre and caught the new DaVinci installation (by itself worth the trip to Paris) and yes, I did revisit the Musee d'Orsay, Notre Dame, Sainte Chapelle, and yes, I will be going to the poetry event at Shakespeare and Co., and yes, I do know Paris reasonably well, this being my fourth visit. Traveling around Paris on my mountain bike is a bit like driving a Sherman tank through a rose garden. I feel self-conscious when stopped at lights surrounded by French cyclists riding a type of bicycle that doesn't really exist in North America; a city bike, similar to a ten speed with thin wheels but upright horizontal handlebars, fenders with integral lighting, chain guards, internal hub gears, and integrated racks and locks. It's terribly thin and elegant, nothing like the (literally) military-grade machine I'm riding around in. Unlike British Columbia, where the mountain bike is the default choice of bicycle, no-one here rides mountain bikes in the city. In a subtle way it is the equivalent stupidity, though not as grotesquely egregious, as those urban North Americans who own SUV's that have never seen so much as an unpaved city parking lot, much less the undeveloped tracts for which they were nominally designed. Parisian bikes seem to say "Paris is lovely in the Spring, let's just wander about aimlessly, taking in the beauty of it all, stopping at bistros and listening to accordion music." My bike says, "Let's invade Iraq, whaddayasay? Anyone?... Anyone?... Bueller?..."

The Costa Brava

Today's travels cross off two pilgrimage sites in one day, numbers 6 and 7 for those keeping track in the Ten Pilgrimage Sites Magical Cycling Tour(tm) . For those not keeping track, (what, you don't like my blog? Well fine, be that way ...) here is the list so far:

• 1).Tabernas, where the Spaghetti Westerns were born,
• 2).Seville, where Columbus is buried,
• 3).Seville, where Velasquez was born,
• 4).Trujillo, where Pizarro was born,
• 5). Santiago de Compostela, where The Big Lie was born.

Pilgrimage site number six is the home and studio of Salvador Dali, the greatest painter of the 20th century, and the leading Surrealist of his generation. I have come to Portllegat not so much in homage, as curiosity; not so much "why?" as "how?". Dali produced a prodigious quantity of work, and in the process made many hundreds of millions of dollars; the total will never really be known as he preferred to be paid in cash or solid gold. Whether his talent warranted such largess is another subject, and is in my experience invariably a bitter point of departure in discussions with other painters who see him as a third rate hack with serious psychological traumatic issues. Dali never denies any of this, and in his memoirs wrote: "I am a third rate painter, but of all third rate painters, Dali is the best, Dali is the greatest, as my name predicted, Salvador Dali is the savior of painting of the twentieth century." In this vein, the doors on the outside of the building are worth special mention. The fishing boats in the bay are made of wood, even now, and thus require annual painting. Dali encouraged the local fishermen to dry out their paint brushes after painting their boats on his doors, thus creating, he claimed, the greatest abstract painting in the world. Needless to say, Dali did not hold abstract painting in high regard, and that is perhaps being generous.

Dali's egocentrism is legendary, but not without some external re-enforcement, and it was all part of a carefully crafted persona: whenever he was in public, he was "on", playing the role of Salvador Dali, mad eccentric Catalan Surrealist. I walked from the near-by town of Cadaques to Portllegat and the first thing one notices upon cresting the hill into the bay is that Dali's house, surrounded on all sides by high walls, is essentially the whole town. It all started accidentally; he lived in the family's vacation home in Cadaques, and would walk over to Portllegat to paint. He talked some fisherman into allowing him to use one of the shacks they used to store nets to store his painting supplies, rather than have to bring everything back and forth everyday. Eventually he asked if they might like to sell him the small building. Dali's relationship with his father was not ideal as he did not see Salvador's talent and worried how he was going to support himself. After some argument to that effect, he decided to leave Cadaques and stay full time in the small fisherman's shack. In this little structure, he set up his studio, and slowly started buying adjacent structures as he gained stature and wealth, till he essentially owned a large chunk of the town, which consisted of just a few houses. Largely through his wife Gala's brilliant marketing and strict managing of his career, he became a larger than life legend. Basically he came up with the wackiness, and she took care of the business end of it. He was a major cultural icon and the carefully crafted celebrity image he created with his outrageous stunts are so legendary as to almost eclipse his art. Consequently he needed his private space to create, but the crowds who came to this previously remote bay would sit outside his window just to catch glimpses of the master. This fed the already outrageous ego of his persona, to the point where he would watch beatifically at the gathered crowds below fighting over olive pits he tossed at them while he had lunch.

The house is set up such that there is an entrance hall (with a stuffed polar bear) which leads upstairs to the studio. There is a small reception room to the left. After that, all of the rooms were strictly private, and no-one except Dali and Gala's most close friends or personal assistants ever entered. His rigorous work schedule, set by Gala, was intense. During the height of his career, she would not have the maid bring him his breakfast until he had made at least $250,000. Once out of bed he would work feverishly in his studio completing commissions and design contracts until noon. After this he would meet with guests and business appointments for a few hours, have lunch, and then work continuously until sunset. Occasionally he would take tours on his boat, parked in front, around Cap Creus, never actually steering. Though he owned several Cadillac's, Dali never learned to drive, and was always taken places by his chauffeur and faithful assistant. He actually invented a set of kaleidoscopic eye glasses to relieve the boredom of long car trips. Also of note is that there are no televisions anywhere in the house, Dali considered televisions as being the most insidious instruments of "cretanisation" ever invented.
What strikes me about the house is that despite his incredible wealth, the house, with it's many mad idiosyncrasies, is actually quite simple. More than anything else it was an appendage to his studio, which was set up to maximize his productivity in the most relaxed and comfortable setting possible. Dali always painted sitting down on comfortable sofas, and the studio includes an elaborate easel which he designed and had built which involves a massive steel frame that moves up and down through the floor. At the touch of a button the frame onto which the canvas was attached is electrically raised and lowered, so that even while working on enormous canvases, he could still retain his overall comfortable seating position. The windows are set up following Leonardo daVinci's treatise on painting, allowing the maximum amount of natural but indirect light to filter in.

As Dali had the resources and did not want to be bothered going out for supplies, he purchased all of his paints in bulk. Down a narrow staircase directly from his studio he had a small warehouse of supplies.

The brushes he used were Escoda brand, made in Barcelona, which from experience I know are very fine brushes indeed. The paints he used are made by a small Belgian firm called Blockx, who use only raw pigment and linseed or poppyseed oil, and are all ground by hand. Rather than a factory, Blockx paints are produced at a lovely chateau in the country side. As might be expected, the price for a single tube of paint is stratospheric, but then when the color is lapis lazuli, for instance, it really is this crushed semi precious stone without any fillers or additives whatsoever. Possibly most critical to Dali's unique ability of capturing the blue of the water, sky and light of the Costa Brava was his choice of medium. Blockx makes a liquid amber which contains, you guessed it, amber. According to Dali's book "50 Secrets of Magical Painting" Dali further modified this medium by submerging wasps into it, which he claimed greatly increased the particular qualities he found essential to make his colors flow and stand out. Whether any of this is important is questionable. Modern technology has produced some very fine colors and mediums, and the choice of amber has certainly had an effect on many of Dali's works; many canvas are already showing signs of cracking and crazing.
I have posted many more pictures of his studio/house here.




Just a few short kilometers away is pilgrimage site number 7. That so many amazing things have happened in such a small area speaks highly of the amazing light, landscape and beauty of this magical place, and to the industrious creative energy of the Catalan people in general. The Costa Brava has seen many of the world's rich and famous vacation here, but more importantly artists have come here to create. Truman Capote wrote his amazing masterpiece "In Cold Blood" during three long summers in Palamos. Other famous artists in residence have included Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Garcia Lorca, Luis Bunuel, Richard Hamilton, Dieter Roth, Orson Welles, John Cage, and many, many others. Since Ferran Adria arrived in Cala Montjui near Roses in 1982, the educated palates of half the world have come here in pilgrimage and learnt to relate to food using all five senses. The contemporary high cuisine of the area owes much to Ferran's wild experiments in molecular gastronomy. Though elBulli restaurant is now closed, reopening in 2014 as a creative center, the meals that were served here were legendary. An army of chefs, waiters, sommeliers, and assistants would serve up thirty-five course meals with the occasional amuse bouche, each course paired with a certain wine, and sometimes even with a special olfactory component. Waiters would hold distillates of various ingredients or spray essences of rare herbs from perfume bottle atomizers under the noses of patrons as they sampled various dishes. Diners often did not know whether to touch, simply observe, other times listen, smell, or finally taste what was before them. In an ironic Post Modernist twist, an interpreter or narrator was assigned to each table to describe each particular course, sometimes recite a poem or Haiku, but mostly advise, since diners would invariably not understand what it was they were eating or even looking at. A giant hollow sphere which is in reality an asparagus soup with various herbs from the area, or an egg omlette that appears to be some sort of foamy dessert served in a champagne glass, a series of hollow ice cubes with flakes of gold with some flourescent-green pearls in their centers. The restaurant was only open for 7 months of the year, but the 8000 available reservations for the 250 euro 35 course meals sold out within hours of becoming available, often getting in excess of two million requests. Despite being voted Best Restaurant on the planet for an unprecedented 5 years, and being always filled to capacity, the place lost vast sums of money due to the large staff, high overheads, small seating capacity, and the enormous cost of producing the highly individually crafted ingredients of each meal. Adrian made most of his money selling books, consulting and selling the results of his extensive research.

There are still restaurants in the area which continue with this same tradition, many of them run by or employing some of the army of chefs who worked at el Bulli. Fortunately, for people planning on staying longer, there are also regular restaurants which serve traditional Catalan food prepared in time honored fashion (i.e.: without the aid of liquid nitrogen, cryogenic emulsifiers, microwave flash dehydrators, liquid drop solidifiers, and many other high-tech gizmos and laboratory equipment Ferran is famous for using), so without going too far out on a limb, it is easy to eat well, exceedingly well if one wishes, in the nearby town of Roses or Cadaques.

El Bulli is situated in a fairly remote area, several winding kilometers out of town, and while the many hordes of the Super Rich no doubt arrived on the beach after being dropped off from their mega yachts, I wondered how many others would have had trouble finding the small coastal access road that leads to the restaurant and become hopelessly lost.
Not far from this former gastronomic Mecca are some interesting dolmens, dating back to around 4500 BC, proving that early Iberians also thought this place special in some way.

Up the road from the Dolmens is the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodas, which has a stunning setting overlooking the sea, and also the Eastern most starting off point towards Santiago for those contemplating doing the grueling Camino Catalan.