OMG. I'm Back.

...just by my lonesome and staying at the Hotel Lutetia a little further down the Blvd. Raspail from the Cayré. I have a view of the Eiffel Tower from the balcony of my room, and I'm surprised people all over this town don't complain about it. The damn thing turns into a light show for a few hours after dark, and it's the most annoying thing imaginable. That, and I also got food poisoning for two days. WTF?

So far, the most I've done has been to walk around the gardens near the Natural History Museum (lovely), buy fruit, jam, and bread at La Grande Epicerie (yummy), and sleep a lot (first to get over the time zone difference, then to get over the food poisoning). I have some favors to do for friends back in the states, and hope to visit some of the folks I met here last time.

And yeah, don't bother asking: all you're gonna get is the tee shirt.

Home Thoughts, From Abroad (After Robert Browning)

Music: Finale from Chopin's 2nd Sonata in B flat minor, Maurizio Pollini, pianist.

ETA: Rats. The still image that appears on the closing chord (and in this Bloggerized version, immediately vanishes) is of the receipt showing that it is from the Starbucks in the Louvre:

I put this video up at youtube, but the Flashification of it made it suck royally—from a technical perspective. As a piece of agitprop, it sucks as well, because I should have had more footage of the Paris Metro working, which is exactly what it did during the strike, which was more of what we in the Anglosphere would call a job action than a strike. I mean, reliable displays of when the next train is going to arrive? The New York City subway should work so well.

A common canard given us in the US is that if you don't "incentivize" workers by holding the threat of job loss (and attendent benefits) over their heads at all times, they won't do a good job. I think this is empirical evidence to the contrary. From what I wrote at the youtube page:

Level of service on the 14 and 12 lines, Wednesday, November 14. It's not a random sample of overall service and isn't meant to be. My 0,02EU is that the rail workers are doing a good job and Sarkozy should have a hot steaming cup of STFU and stick his "reforms" where the sun doesn't shine. Alas, I think the French will have to go down the same rotten road that Ronald Reagan took the USA before realizing how important giving your infrastructure workers a good deal is. Mes amis, if you want to know what the SNCF will be like in twenty years if Sarkozy gets his way, look at Amtrak, and be afraid, be very afraid.

Music:

The overbearing orchestral work is "Pacific 231" by Arthur Honegger. It was a piece of music about a train by a French (OK, Belgian) composer. I thought it would work, but it didn't.

The closing piano music is the reprise of the theme from Frederic Rzewski's 36 Variations on "The People United Will Never Be Defeated!" with Rzewski himself at the piano. If you haven't heard the whole thing, go listen to it.

US Cultural Imperialism in Paris

NB: the point, for those who might be scratching their heads, is that US pop culture seems to blanket the globe. Something I didn't mention in the video but should have is that the last two stores are in what appears to be an Arabic/North African neighborhood, less than five minutes by foot from not one but two Halal butchers, a rather sharp data point that ought to puncture the rhetorical/theoretical balloons of the “Clash of Civilizations” numbskulls.

The sad thing about US pop culture is that it's not a universalizing force, but a homogenizing one. I wonder how many young 'uns coming to age in areas where radical Islamic sympathies are a real force see the Jihadists as les vrai Jedis. Please note: I'm not saying this neighborhood is such a place, just extrapolating wildly and perhaps irresponsibly from a brief observation. OTOH, I still think I pwn Samuel Huntington's racist crap.

"American Collective" used without permission of, but with deepest respect for, the late, great, George Jefferson Airplane.

...and Despite This, They Don't Hate Americans

How to Avoid Raiding the Minibar, or Paris on as Much Money a Day as You'd Spend if You Had to Shop at a Fancy Grocery Store You Can't Afford Anyway

The problem:

This is your hotel room's minibar. It's stocked with beer, soda, juice, hard liquor, and—Mon Dieu!—a 375ml bottle of champagne. Now, this is all very cool, but—


This is the menu for your hotel room's minibar, and it's fucking outrageous. I mean, 3.50€ for a teensy bottle of Coke, and the same for an even smaller bottle of sparking water? If it were $1.00 = 1.00€ that would be bad enough, but with the exchange rate the way it is right now... ai yi yi...

“Aw, quit yummering. Just some ice from the machine and regular water. What's wrong with that, ya snob?” Two things: 1—no ice machine, and 2—the tap water tastes gross. Mind you, I've had worse water—Columbus, Ohio comes to mind—but Paris tap water (at least as it is at the Hotel Cayré) is nothing to write home about.

Aside: I am not a bottled water person per se. I think those parts of New York City that get their tap water from the pristine reservoirs upstate have some of the best water going. OTOH, Evian, to me, tastes like ass. I have no clue why people drink it. It's somewhere between Paris tap water and Oklahoma City's in my experience (with Columbus, Ohio being dead last behind Oklahoma City.)

Anyway, here's the answer:

Of course, this only works when the temperature is sufficiently cool—and you can open the window of your hotel room, and there's a ledge, and it doesn't overlook the street...you get the idea. A liter o' fizzy water, some jambon blanc from La Grande Epicerie, a hunk of goat cheese, some flat water...and all for...well, OK, La Grande Epicerie charges a lot for the jambon blanc, but it still beats the minibar. Besides, if, like me, you were old enough to go to college back in the day when people didn't have dorm room fridges and you had to find some way to keep your beer cold...brings back memories, I tell you...

Place de la Concorde

This ended up being an exercise in matching images to music, in particular, the prelude to Richard Wagner's Das Rheinhold, which should explain the bit of snark at the end about the Germans winning. OTOH, the performance is the notorious Boulez/Chéreau 1980 one, so....?

<PlugForTheGF>Piano music at the end by Suzanne Davis, "My Offering."</PlugForTheGF>

Two Things About the Paris Subway

More Saint Cloud

OK, so this is not a very good photo (or perhaps even less acceptable than the others), but I like it because it reminds me of the unfinished house in Jules Dassin's Riffifi where the bad bad guy is holding the son of one of the good bad guys.

I don't think the house was actually in Saint Cloud, because it was accessible by the subway. But damn, it sure looks like the same house—completed of course.

Welcome to Saint Cloud! Now Go Away.

I spent a fair amount of time Sunday and Monday before in a suburb (I guess you'd call it that) called Saint Cloud. WTF was I doing in a suburb? you ask. Well, the GF is playing a few jazz gigs in Paris and she was practicing with the other musicians in a school there. As suburbs go, Saint Cloud seems well-to-do, very clean, and pretty much hostile to anybody who doesn't live there. It's not a gated community in the USian sense, but there were numerous blocks that were closed off to the general public by gates. People with cars have to have a key, and visitors have to get themselves buzzed in.

I guess the urge for the well-to-do to say “fuck off” to the less fortunate is universal.

For example, here's a street in Saint Cloud that isn't gated but is par for the course: high walls, dense shurbs, all connive to make sure that you can't see in, you rotten busybody. And this despite (or because of?) the near-urban density of houses.

I suspect you're thinking I'm reading too much into this. Maybe...pictures of the gated streets would have driven home the point, though.

I will say this for Saint Cloud: it has a Rue de Maurice Ravel and that earns it +5 by me.

More photos:

The main drag in Saint Cloud:

Some trees getting trimmed on the street leading to the school where the GF practiced with the other members of the quartet, the ECLA, which seems to be some sort of arty place where kids can learn music and dance and adults can try to hook up under the guise of trying to learn to paint. I recall that in The Red and the Black, (or in a footnote to it in my college edition) Stendahl decried the French preference for trimming trees. He evidently thought they should be let alone. I haven't thought about it myself, but it might be one of those little things that makes places in France have their distinctive look. And people say you can't put express these things in everyday language.

The building at the ECLA where the band practiced. Both practice rooms smelled like mold, and had peeling paint. Not something that would fly back in the US. On the other hand, while the mold I could definitely do without, I think there's a lot of pointless maintenance that gets done in US homes and buildings out of the childish fear that people will think you're poor and/or dangerous unless everything is brand-spanking new.

Mandatory Cliched Sunset Photograph

Random Thought

OK, that's the entrance to the Defense Ministry, which is about a 10 minute walk (give or take—I wasn't trying to find it but just happened on it when I was out for a stroll) from my hotel. By my observation, there are at least two other government ministries headquartered in this arrondissement.

Question: could being in a real city as opposed to an artificial government backwater (e.g., Washington D.C.) have an effect on the bureaucrats working for the various government agencies? I'm not saying that because I have a terminal case of Francophilia. It's just that I can't help but think that if the DoD were headquartered in New York's SoHo, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the neocon crew would have been too preoccupied with nailing hawt models to get it together to invade Iraq.

Construction Near the Ministry of Defense

This is the sort of picture I always try to take, yet rarely manage to get:



Maybe it's just easier to take pictures here? In the same way that William Eggleston's photos just look like the South? I dunno.

...and Despite This, They Don't Hate Americans

I Just Got Here

So here I am, another ugly American in Paris.

This is where I'm staying. This is the Hotel Cayré in the 7th arrondissement. I didn't know anything about it when I chose it (in a panic, but my neuroses are only interesting to myself) except that it had no-smoking rooms. As things turned out, not only did I get a really-o truly-o non-smoking room, but I got upgraded to a larger room. Could business be slow this time of year? Who knows. Anyway, it's a nice place, even though it costs an arm and a leg.




Here's a view from one of the windows. I hope this doesn't sound intolerably pretentious, but there's something . . . Parisian about the architecture. Maybe it's only because they don't pull down every good looking building just because some scumbag with $ (or in the case of France, €) wants to put up a monument to his ego. Imagine how cool New York would still be if the original Pennsylvania Station were still there. But I digress.


The hotel is across the street from the Rue du Bac subway station. Unfortunately, the Rue du Bac subway station is under construction until sometime in December, so there's a fence around it, and a lot of debris within, as you can see from the photo at left. The hoop with a green bag hanging from it is the moral equivalent of a trash can. It's ugly, but it makes a lot of sense. Besides, this town has looks to spare. To whit:



On the right is a view down (up?) the Boulevard Saint Germain (whoever he was.) The Hotel Cayré is on Boulevard Raspail just off the intersection with Blvd. St Germain.

That's all for now because I'm really tired.