wicked sanctuary: March 2008

Ten days after I landed in Los Angeles after an interlude in the Alps, Morocco, Paris and Avignon, I am off to Europe again. The closest I’ve ever come to something this extravagant was to fly to L.A. for dinner from my San Francisco home. Not quite the same as circling half the planet twice in a month.

Unreal.

To get myself to the airport, I rented a sexy set of wheels. Accidental, of course, for I doubt I would spring for the actual cost of this convertible. The Saturn Sky may not sprint from 0 to 100 in a heartbeat, but it handled the hilly curves of the Malibu back roads with aplomb. At twice the recommended speed, its power stunned me. The roadster is a two-seater with a minuscule (think hat box) trunk. I placed my travel bag in the passenger seat figuring its weight would prevent it from flying off.

The purpose of this quick trip is to cover the London press conference introducing the inaugural Air France Heathrow-LAX nonstop flight. Before work, some play time in Paris. And before play time, I sit in business class again. Of the comforts that might justify a price tag many times the cost of an economy ticket, the one I will miss most when I return inevitably to “the back of the plane” is the almost fully reclining (and wider) seat. The ability to relax trumps any and all other upgraded touches. My body aches already.

After quickly settling in a charming hotel room and stealing a view of the Opera – the Opéra Garnier, more grandiose than its younger cousin at the Bastille – I headed to see my mom. For the first time in a quarter century, I delivered her birthday present in person.

My traveling group convened in the grand Napoleon III dining room of the Paris Intercontinental where we sampled superlative dishes paired with exquisite aperitifs, wines and digestifs. I was too tired to join them in their quest for more liquor at an absinthe bar. Complex regulations dictate the amount of thujone, a chemical compound present in wormwood, allowed if a beverage is to be called absinthe. Banned in 1915, the sale and consumption have been reintroduced in Europe since the mid 1990s but the U.S. only produces imitations. It was wildly popular in artistic and intellectual circles in the late 18th century. Drinkers of every stripe soon bellied up to enjoy the “green fairy” but morality groups managed to label it as a psychoactive drug and it was eventually banned. I had one in Prague several years ago and enjoyed it. Ricard and Pernod are my substitutes. A web site devoted to spreading the good word about absinthe in the U.S. is called Green Devil. The choice of word exemplifies the difference in perspectives from one shore of the Atlantic to another.

Before falling asleep, I caught a program on “huissiers de justice,” the French legal professionals who carry out court decisions like evictions and seizure of goods. Even as they face traumatic situations, the huissiers in the program disposed of their charges with respect and humanity, a behavior quite a distance from the condescending officers who perform the same duties here.

I seized a few hours of freedom on Saturday morning to visit my mom again, taking the bus instead of the underground subway to check out the sights. While I lived in this apartment for a minimum of 10 years and had ample opportunities to visit it, the closest I ever got to the Rodin Museum was to ask visitors to its garden to kick back soccer balls that had strayed over the fence that separates it from my high school.

“The Thinker” was here, of course. Many were cast and it is present in many other institutions. But also “The Gates of Hell,” “The Kiss,” “Ugolino and his Children,” pictured here. The sculptor’s “The Burghers of Calais” strikes a patronymic chord that surfaced periodically during my childhood.

For the first time, I beheld what the improvised soccer players saw. Not just the garden and the sculptures, but the backside of my high school, the Lycée Victor Duruy. The building dates to 1820 when a religious order began the education of young girls. Not until 1970 would it welcome its first boys. I showed up in 1973 for the 6th grade, the first year of junior high, called “collège” in French. With an education calendar that counts backwards, high school begins in the 2nd grade and finishes with “Terminale.”

Lunch was served on the water. So many people crowded the several boarding docks that I feared I would not meet up with the rest of the group. Recognizing no one, I feared they had already gone. By luck, I was first.

The bateau-mouche sailed downriver instead of the customary route because of high water levels. No need to scrape the underside of bridges, I understand. The Statue of Liberty looks positively puny against the Eiffel Tower!

After dessert and coffee I headed for the sewers and not because of the meal. If you understand French, I recommend this unusual and quite educational tour. In Southern California, most people know the origin of the drinking water, quite aware of the heroic dimensions of its trip to their faucet. In Paris, I had never met anyone who knew. No one suggested it came from the River Seine, but it does, in fact. But quite a distance downstream, above its confluence with the River Marne, also a source. The water is filtered and treated before finding its way to the city mains. Effluents and waste water collect through underground conduits that channel the bloody mess to a purification station northwest of Paris. The visit includes a fascinating historical account of the politics of sewers.

I boarded the subway (in truth the RER, an “express regional train”) at the Pont de l’Alma station that I heard an American visitor pronounce “pont d’la mamma.”

Two stops later, I surface at the Musée d’Orsay station for a visit to the impressionism museum. I head to a cafe for an espresso and a crèpe topped with crème de marrons to fortify myself.

The museum is out of brochures in French and I pick one in Italian. Dov’è comenciamo? I devote most of my time to a Fantin-Latour gallery since I am unfamiliar with the realist painter. Echoes of Courbet’s December exhibition reverberate as parallels between these two painters who rocked the artistic boat emerge. Figures of the literary world linger about in “Le Coin de Table,” with absent-minded gazes. Except for a young Rimbaud whose affectionate reverie settles on the man on the far left of the canvas, beyond sanctioned practices.

I don’t need much more to absorb the excitement of breaking conventions.

I strut along the Quai. My phone rings.

Mathieu – Matthew the nephew – is at the Gare St. Lazare train station with friends and we arrange an improvised get-together in front of the Opéra. A demonstration by disabled people (“Ni pauvre, ni soumis”) handicaps traffic and I resolve to walk. Once more, I happen upon the Arc du Carousel that forms a grand perspective through the Tuileries Gardens past the Concorde obelisk to the Champs-Elysées and the Arc du Triomphe. There is a third arc in the business district of La Defense, the Grande Arche, but it is too far to be discerned.

Mathieu informs me he wants to come to the U.S. with his three friends this summer. Cool, cool, cool!

The clock ticks away. I have to be at the Gare du Nord train station to catch a Eurostar to London. The first time I went over land to London, it took the train/boat/train combination a good seven hours. Tonight, it will take about 2h30mns.

The U.K. is not a signatory to the Schengen Agreements, the brilliant accord that allows border-free travel between most EU member countries as well as Norway and Iceland, which belong to a Scandinavia-wide union. Nevertheless, document control for EU passport holders is all but perfunctory. And any EU citizen can move and work in the U.K. or anywhere within the EU, no questions asked. They may vote in local elections, too!

On my last visit to London, I got caught at Waterloo with an expired passport. The ticket agent appeared flustered and did not know what to make of a French citizen about to travel to France. “Do you have any other ID?” she asked. My California driver license only confused her further. She contacted another agent and agreed to let me in the waiting area with the understanding that I would have to take my case to the border control officer. I paced nervously, at a loss for a justification to re-enter France.

When boarding began, I just walked onto the train. There was no control that night …

We sped through the night without the possibility of checking out the scenery. Eurostar chugs along at 300 kph overland. It crawls at 160 kmp inside the tunnel under the North Sea because of wind displacement. North of Paris, high-speed tracks parallel the freeway. Driving back from Amsterdam once, the speed of a passing train left me dazed in its wake, even as I zipped along at about 150 kph. Impressive as they are, these speeds don’t approach the 574.80 kmph (357.17 mph!) TGV record.

The ease of transport has turned the northern coast of France into a second-home haven for the British. The film “Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis” examines with humor how the French disparage the region for being too far north (read: cold and rainy), but for the British it lies more to the south than anything in their own country.

The easy relocation also benefits French professionals who have turned London into the sixth largest French city, explained one such person returning home after a weekend in Paris.

Eurostars now pull in at St. Pancras and we pulled up at a champagne bar.

My first trip abroad, my first trip on an airplane, brought me to London with my sister Josiane a couple of months shy of my thirteenth birthday. An hour after takeoff, we landed in an altered reality. With a little over a year of formal English language classes I was the de facto translator. It was a precipitous realization and a heady plunge into an otherness.

A decade of counter culture was ebbing and punk has not yet arrived. The songs of the Beatles filled my young head belatedly. They combined with the Rolling Stones to capture the extent of my musical repertoire. The two bands expressed a sensibility far edgier than any homegrown outfit. Even if I labored to grasp the full meaning, I sensed that John, Paul, George and Ringo, Mick, Keith, Bill and Charlie seethed with discontent over the established order.

London was exotic, mysterious.

I embarked on repeated cross Channel adventures. Soon, I had developed a level of comfort with the city. I perused the pages of Melody Maker or the New Musical Express for sale ads on records that I would export to France in advance of their release there.

I might have been to the UK about 30 times by now. Returning to London reacquaints me with distant but not forgotten memories.

From the upper deck of a Red Routemaster, I let the city sights pass me by. Green Park, last seen under a thin winter blanket of snow, replaces Piccadilly. Knightsbridge and South Ken file past before I alight, as they say quaintly, on Fulham Road. With only a couple hours to spare (no rest for the weary on press trips), I had to go to Chelsea.

This borough is the home that never was. The rambunctious sixties have receded. Chelsea is far more sedate. The pulse of King’s Road has slowed considerably and a whole new batch of folks prizes the neighborhood. Upwardly mobile professionals (we shan’t call them chavs, shall we?) inhabit the quiet and picturesque streets. They jump in their shiny tractors to get their prescriptions filled at the Chelsea Drugstore.

In late October the gentleman farmer’s lifestyle will turn dearer. A new pollution charge will supplant the existing congestion fee. To drive most SUVs and some mini vans into central London will cost £25 a day. Fifty bucks: that ought to put a dent in sales of gas guzzlers. Owners of the least polluting cars will pay nothing while others will continue to pay the current £8.

Forty years after the fact, the streets of Chelsea resonate with the ghosts of its musical past. Old Church Street is still where Pink Floyd recorded. Cheyne Walk is still where Mick Jagger and Keith Richards lived (in separate flats). Sloane Square is still a leafy refuge in the village.

A single tube ride in the city center goes for a princely £4. Eight freakin’ dollars! A flight attendant on the plane back to the States said that he and two coworkers opted to share a cab to go out to a restaurant, a less onerous option than the £24 ($48) tube fare. Insane!

Granted, the fare plummets to £1.50 if you have an Oyster Card, a smart card that stores money used for public transit. For my needs, a £3.50 for an unlimited day bus pass (with complimentary views) was a better value.

I met up with the group in front of the London Eye, another quite popular attraction with big crowds. We had fast track tickets that, for £25 apiece, virtually eliminated the wait for the 20-minute “flight” around a Ferris wheel. The capsules don’t shake and the views from the wheel’s apex unfold as far as one is able to recognize the sights. The Eye is immediately downstream from Westminster Bridge. The Thames flows in front of Parliament, Big Ben and the Abbey. Squeezed between the imposing Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence, the Prime Minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street manages to sneak out on Whitehall. It is not a long walk across St. James Park to Buckingham Palace.

The striking shape of the Swiss Re highrise stands out against the City skyline, but I can’t decide whether I like the Norman Foster design. Its windows open – imagine that – and it has been crowned the world’s first environmentally sustainable building .

From this perch, I’m not able to distinguish any wave of demented avengers although I have good reasons to suspect there may be dogs about. Things are not what they seem. I am aware of a certain unease in the air. Meek and obedient, some follow the leader and pretend the danger’s not real.

What a surprise! No little piggy hovers in the sky over the defunct Battersea Power Station, but it still dominates the middle of London, stark and oppressive but no longer belching smoke.

Katherine, the Air France publicist, accompanied me on a protracted walk along the Thames past Waterloo and Blackfriars bridges to the Tate Modern. We proceeded to Eat, a purveyor of clever sandwiches, soups, savory pies and salads with locations throughout London. I chased my Wiltshire Ham with Parsley Sauce and Cheddar with Branston with a shandy. Katherine, an American, is a rare lover of shandy, and we toasted our kinship with a visit to a photography gallery.

The museum houses international modern and contemporary art collections in another former power station recast with a new mission. I opted for the Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia exhibit and skipped the main galleries out of an urgent need to minimize intellectual activity. Halfway through, I paused the audio guide to wake myself with a cup of coffee.

Public museums in Britain do not charge for admission to their regular collections. It might explain why a survey tallied 25.2 million visitors to leading art galleries and museums in 2007. The figure for the U.S. is slightly higher (25.3 m) but the country has a much larger population. France recorded 17.7 m trips to view art.

Another unrelated (or perhaps not) gem culled from the pages of the Herald Tribune. The firearms homicide rate in the U.S. is the highest of any industrialized nation, about 100 times the rate in Britain or Japan. The risk for kids under 15 to die from gunfire is 12 greater than in the 25 other largest industrialized countries combined. Make art, not guns!

The ice sculpture at the foot of the wavy steel suspension Millennium Bridge melts, slowly, but it does thaw even under a timid sun. It functions as the temporary frozen equivalent to watching the grass grow.

In front of St. Paul’s, I hopped on another double decker that ceased operations abruptly in front of Charring Cross. No worries, mate: have bus pass, will travel. On to Marble Arch (Marble Arch, the white marble arch) and a souvenir shop on Oxford Street where I unwittingly acquired a pencil sharpener disguised as a miniature Routemaster and a tiny phone booth, both deeply red.

Black cabs, even purple variety, also figure as London icons. To drive them requires The Knowledge, an in-depth familiarity with central London streets. The process takes two to four years. And no, cabbies don’t rely on GPS units.

After the press conference, our group retreated to a Mayfair restaurant for lunch. Jean Claude Cros, vice president and general manager for Air France in the U.S., regaled me with his adventures in Africa and a certain Saturday night in Dodge City, Kansas.

British Airways opened its new state-of-the-art terminal at Heathrow to great fanfare a week before. Unfortunately, the airline and its hapless passengers were beset with monumental delays and piles of lost luggage when the T5 operating system failed on successive occasions.

I spied a picture of the beleaguered terminal as the plane taxied behind a Royal Air Jordan jet. Click on the play button (not the macaroons, you gourmand) and you will view a videologue of the entire trip in which I make two cameo appearances, courtesy of Johnny, one of the writers on the trip.

At LAX, I recognized the immigration officer from two weeks before. He recognized his handwriting in my passport. Ain't it weird?

31 March, 2008

Kalaallit Nunaat

28 March, 2008

(rolling) stones and arches

concealed

revealed

exposed

compelled

viewed