Belle Epoque City

 

We live in The Belle Epoque City. 

The Belle Epoque City, my new city, is but a single city, and yet the very expression of an entire era!

Or so I've decided.

A dear friend of mine, Matthew, now dead for already an alarming amount of time (do people simply die and then stay dead forever? WTF), was my original introduction to the Belle Epoque. He was my first friend in art school, supremely talented, and posessed of a rich, florid aesthetic taste. And one of his main points of reference was the Belle Epoque. He had many other aesthetic points of reference, and I came to my own understanding of most of them, the Baroque, Rococo, Neo Classicism, as I studied and advanced my career into the world famous genius you see before you, but the Belle Epoque is the most important, and the last of them to click into place.

To be more specific, it clicked into place sometime yesterday, having taken just a smidge under 40 years to do so.

This is because The Belle Epoque is an invention and fabrication, named and made after its era was over, and perhaps with too much material to cover, it also suffered horribly from an immediate, glossy nostalgia. So even as it was named it was already lying about itself.

Which might cause one to think the whole "Belle Epoque" thing is useless.

But, strangely, no. 

Because despite all that, here it is, in my city, exactly the very definition of the thing. References to the Belle Epoque usually center on the bolder, grander city of Paris, but the Belle Epoque in Paris is a mere historical layer among dozens. It is swallowed up in Paris. Here it is the whole expression of the city, its heart and soul. It is in the old world cafes, the ornate and fanciful architecture, and in every of a million paintings by some of the best artists over 50 years all lionizing the place. It is in its famous buildings and dreams of beauty, the belle epoque! It is in the food and old candy shops, in the vibrant street life, in the grand old stores, and in the flood of tourism that, in strange contrast to other cities full of complaint about such things, curiously built this city. This isn't a city ruined or lessened by tourism. It is a city built by tourism!

Which is weird.

And, well, a bit Belle Epoque.

At this point you might want to know "What is The Belle Epoque then?"

Wikipedia doesn't know. I mean, their answer is basically: Late (very late) 1800's to WWI. A time of industrialization, stability, quality of life improvements for a new (not all that big) middle class, technological invention, and economic growth, but read between the lines a little and the answer is "We don't really know".

But I know! 

I know now. And I wish I could tell my friend Matthew. And I wish I could tell you. But I think you might have to come here. Cause you sort of have to see it to get it. And you'd probably get it right away.

But if not we could walk around and I could say "See all that building ornamentation." and "Let's have a coffee here at this cafe with a hundred fancy tables." and "Taste this pastry." and "That corner tower on that building" and "Note these colors, the pinks and oranges and brilliant umbers." and "See all these posters?" and "Check out all that marble" and  "Have a spritz, note the glassware." and before long you'd totally get it.

Or you'd feel nauseous and want to go home.

Trippin in Monaco

 

Yesterday I showed you one picture of Monaco's Teddy Bear themed Christmas Market and told you about our getting drunk on Vin Chaud in the ancient principality.

I did take other pictures of Monaco, and inspired by our drunken revels I made them into hallucinatory renderings. As your eye is assaulted by the sheer psychedelia of them try to keep in mind that the unaltered images didn't tell all that much about Monaco anyway. It's a bit of a tricky place to take in. This probably says it as well as anything.

Monaco

We woke up yesterday morning and decided to go to Monaco. So we walked through the city for a few minutes and took the train and in about 20 minutes we were in Monaco.

What?

Yes, an 800 year old city-state is about 15 miles from here.

Which is handy if you quickly need a city-state.

Which we did, largely because their Christmas Market has a teddy bear theme. We are very pro teddy bear!  And let me tell you (which I guess is what you're doing by reading clerkmanifesto), Monaco did not let down the teddy bear lovers of the world. 

 

I don't much do the more documentary style of photography because I rarely know what I'll be writing about and have limited photo taking windows, but I do a little regret I didn't get more pictures like this, because I could have had hundreds! In between the food stands and shops and amusement park rides of the Monaco Christmas Market, they had little buildings one could look in and see full sized animated teddy bear scenes! Teddy bears baking in the patisserie, teddy bears lolling about in the library (with real books. I saw a nice old Gerald Durrell in there!), teddy bears getting ready to open all their presents. Not to mention teddy bear rides, teddy bears sitting in giant Christmas wreaths, and teddy bears up on all the buildings. It was darling.

Also, and there is always the risk of alienating my audience here with too many too glorious to be true tales (I think is why the Peter Mayles of the world complain so much, to level things out), but I must mention the vin chaud.

The vin chaud. Oh the vin chaud.

I like a vin chaud. And in the days of yore, when I celebrated the christmas markets of Minnesota, as I passed by everything else, I often managed to get a cup of vin chaud. It was good, expensive, but good. And having a nice souvenir mug of spiced hot wine in a warming tent is a good time if one can manage it. But in Monaco, among the teddy bears, the billion dollar yachts, and the old city up above on the clifftop, the vin chaud was unbelievable.

First, I'd like to point out that it came in flavors because, why not, there's more than one way to cook a wine. We had a glass of the traditional and one of the daily special. One was more ginger based, one more lemony. The vin chaud also came in sizes and was not very expensive. Our cups of normal sized vin chaud made us drunk! The large size would have left us drooling on the cobblestones. Is this a good thing?

I believe in choice.

It was the best Christmas Market ever! And I could tell you more about Monaco, The slightly odd quality of the street life, the sheer amount of Winter construction work going on, and our climb up to the beautiful old city, but, why bother. 

I think we've covered the important things here.

The sidewalk problem

I may have suggested here yesterday a problem involving shit on the sidewalks. It is no secret that France has something of a problem when it comes to shit on its sidewalks. It is way too unpleasant to imagine any of these people or their dogs could be responsible for it. Surely these people are too civilised for such rude and barbaric behavior?

So I think I have figured it out.

It falls from the skies above.

Walking in a perfect France

 

It was the plan all along. Like all our vacations to places like this, it would just be natural to walk a lot living here. And as people in our sixties, walking five or ten or 15 miles a day is simply a good idea. But whereas an entire adulthood in Saint Minneapolis had walking as an ambition, exercise, or a thing to do, it already seems unimaginable here to say something like "Let's go for a walk." or even "Maybe we should take a walk and get a coffee?"

We say here "Let's go look at the water." or "I need some parmesean." or "We need a phillips head screwdriver." or "I want a better ice tray." or "I should get some purple artichokes." or "It's time for our appointment." or "We need chocolate." or even "Let's check out Monaco." And off we go.

With our feet.

We go down so many flights of stairs that one hopes one's mind wanders and one arrives at the ground floor only to think "Wow, here already?" instead of worrying about some pain in the knee the whole way down. And then it's out into the world. And we walk. Because everything we do is a walk, so it's not really of note.

And out in the world we walk and the light and air here, my god, and the life and the buildings, it's always a kind of shock and privelege in its loveliness. There is such a freedom to it. And then, invariably, one of us turns to the other and says "Watch out for that shit."

100 greatest albums of all time: My Favorite Things

 

Before today, I would not have chosen "My Favorite Things" by John Coltrane as the greatest album of all time.

But there are a lot of greatest albums of all time. More and more all the time. 

And anyway, this happened:

We decided to get a record player here in our new city in France. It suits the charms of our darling and cozy little attic apartment. We bought a really cheap one from a store called Darty. It's kind of a little suitcase record player and reminds me of one handed down to me from my sister almost 50 years ago. It fits beautifully on a narrow built-in media cabinet we have in our apartment until you open it to play a record. Then it doesn't fit anymore. So we bought a phillips head screwdriver from the hardware store more or less downstairs from us and unscrewed the lid hinges. It was perfect!

But we didn't have any albums.

So we went out to the local record stores on a rainy evening and were sad to find that... they aren't very good. And they're very expensive. The second one, called Yusumi, or something like that, was much better than the first, but very very expensive. However, we found a nice French copy of My Favorite Things by John Coltrane we wanted, but it cost the sun and the stars. So we looked at every other album in the Jazz section and nothing quite worked.

So, figuring just this once we could accept the whispers of fate, we bought My Favorite Things even though it was more expensive than our actual record player!

Which is kind of funny.

Today I made us some coffee as the sun was setting and we listened to it.

McCoy Tyner is the piano player and he is wonderful.

I mean, everyone is brilliant.

What am I supposed to say? All old Jazz albums sound like Christmas music, or maybe Christmas music from a perfect world. Maybe all the greatest albums of all time are recordings smuggled out of a perfect world.

Somewhere there is a perfect world.

And occasionally, rarely, if you look just so, it's right here.

Journey to the past

 

Japan felt like a world from the seventies to me, thus something out of my early childhood. It was a quality from before the glamorization, competition, fracturing, and corporatization of America. And though Japan was obviously denser and more wonderful than the suburban desolation I knew as a kid, it also shared in a feeling that was already disappearing as I became conscious of the world around me, a kind of human scaled world where everyone experienced the same institutions and schools and stores, and the distance between success and failure, while still tragic, was at least not so astronomical.

France is something else.

Living in this grand old city feels like something from well before I was born. It feels like something I imagined belonged to my parents or even more, my grandparents and great grandparents. It is a world of the fifties or, maybe better, the early nineteen hundreds. It is all my dreams of New York City. It is a much more wild sense of city.

We live now in a small attic apartment on what to you is probably the sixth floor, though here it is the fifth. And although it is a nice building in a frankly lovely and brilliantly situated area, it is also a small apartment in a building full of modest apartments that fill the place up, and it is sitting on a street and in a city among hundreds, no, thousands of more buildings much like it, all six and seven and eight stories high. The neighborhood teems with businesses, shops, bakeries, corner stores, cafes, all to serve the very, very many people who live here. And when I walk up and down the staircase of my building, which I so often do, well, that is what I wanted to tell you about.

I feel like I live in a tenement building. Maybe even, strictly speaking, I do. And though I don't at all mean to compare to the miserable side of tenement living; poverty, rats, poor ventilation, crowding, and discomfort, there is something. There is a sense of so much life here. Every flight of stairs I take has different smells, sometimes different sounds. A mere trip outside might include on our way down our single stairwell of solid stone, wrapping an ancient elevator, and leaning with age, the scent of burning rubber, sewage, herbs, mouth watering cooking, perfume, murmuring voices, smoke, raw onion, and more. I can hear children playing on the third floor. Outside the streets are always full of people, even as today in the rain and in Winter. It is all modern and full of modern things, but my god, it just seems like it has been like this forever.

Today we had some things delivered, including a turntable, and then waited for some item that never came. We went out finally, after giving up, in the early evening, to buy chocolate and a record album by John Coltrane. We walked down to the stones of the empty beach and watched the storm waves roll in. The ocean is all dark at night, but when there are waves and they crash, the foam of them is brilliantly illuminated.

I brought home an "Oaklahoma" burger from a great burger place run by an exhuberently manic man, but we ate the french fries from the brown paper bag while we walked, steaming hot out of its carton, finishing them at the top of the stairs and as we entered our apartment, and surely leaving our own smell for whoever would be coming home next.

 

Massena at night

 

As you might have seen here a couple of days ago, we visited the Massena Museum, a bright and lovely Belle Epoque mansion on the Cote D' Azur. It is full of history, though maybe it is not all the history, if you know what I mean. It's the sunny history. 

I didn't see any of the night history.

So I did a little reimagining...