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Letter from Paris #6

February 6, 2023 by Richard

“I have always viewed every area of photography — reportage, illustration, fashion, advertising, portraits, and personal work — as a pretext for traveling and meeting people, a way of life, and a means of self-expression.” 
~ Sabine Weiss

“I mean planning and chance seem almost to be the same thing.”
~ Robert Smithson

© richard pelletier La Saône – Lyon, France

I have Sabine Weiss (and Smithson, too) to thank for pointing the way — for showing me how to write this sixth installment in the series. I began in a stone cottage in Umbria surrounded by ancient olive trees, of which more in a future letter. There was a roaring fire in the wood stove that night, but we were still cold. As I continue, the stone cottage, the wood stove, the olive grove, the cold, and Umbria, too, are stored away on the hard drive someplace. Right now I’m in a lovely, modern kitchen in Genoa. The Mediterranean is just down the hill. It’s Thursday nite, February 2nd. The return to Paris is two days away. 

To talk about Lyon I have to talk about what’s already happened. This trip has turned out to be so many things but, much to my surprise, it’s been a miraculous journey of chance, and something of a photographic odyssey. I had vague notions of trying to investigate Paris to see if any good photography shows were happening. But I did very little planning or research. Instead, by chance, we have fallen into one illuminating show after another. The first was Made in Chicago, a small show of black and white work centered around photographers who either worked or lived there. That was at La Galerie Rouge in the fourth. 

Then – chance again – came Boris Mikhailov at the  Maison Européenne de la Photographie. In Letter #2, I talked about the 800 print retrospective by one of Ukraine’s greatest living artists.

There was more work right around the corner from our apartment in the Marais. Polka is a photo center here. They publish a magazine, they have a small, well designed exhibition space and a bookstore. The day I went, (after happening upon the space by chance) they were showing a Russian photographer, Alexander Gronsky.

© Alexander Gronsky Moscow, 2012
© Alexander Gronsky, Nekrasovka, suburb of Moscow, January 2022

I loved this work so much I asked the staff if they could translate the show’s information sheet and they spent half an hour working it out and then handed me a sheet — in English — that talked about how Alexander works and how he balances his image making instincts against intense political constraints. “My work is deliberately neutral. I prefer that it remains so that it does not turn into propaganda, for anyone.” I’ve since learned he was arrested and briefly detained after protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (The excerpt below is from .coda.com, and not from the show. In the same interview he revealed that his mother views him as a traitor.)

“As a Russian person I feel powerless, ashamed and furious about everything that’s going on. I cannot influence it in any way and I perfectly understand that blame as a result will be put on everything Russian: Russian culture, Russian language and that in the nearest hundred years people will not make films about Nazis, but about awful Russians. Overnight, from being strange, mysterious, aggressive, foolish people we turned into monsters and we will not be able to wash this blame off for a very long time, it’s terrible. I am afraid that my son will hide the fact that he is half Russian when he grows up.”

~Alexander Gronsky

We didn’t plan for chance to play such a role in all of this, but chance has been walking with us down every cobblestone street and up every punishing hill, to deliver one pregnant moment after another. Chance took us by the hand and worlds have opened up.

The Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation (nearby in the Marais) mounted a beautiful show of Jan Groover’s work. I knew some of her pictures from years back, but only a sliver. I hadn’t realized she is one of the medium’s truly great artists. I think of her as the traveler in this Antonio Machado poem.

Traveler, your footprints

By Antonio Machado

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.

Jan Groover made her own path, again and again. She did whatever she wanted to do; still life’s, conceptual work, portraits. She worked in platinum for a while. Everyone knows Cindy Sherman, but Jan Groover is easily her contemporary, but is less well known, I think, because she was so restless—she experimented with everything. With Cindy Sherman, you know it’s her right away.

© Jan Groover
© Jan Groover, Untitled 1979

If that weren’t enough, there was a terrific show (again, found by chance, around the corner in the Marais) at the Mexican Cultural Institute. They were showing the work of the Mexican and Franco-Hungarian photographer, Nadja Massun, (1963-2022). This was classic black and white documentary work with some truly memorable pieces.

Onto Lyon. The train from Paris to Lyon was strangely quiet and quick. (Perhaps because we had booked the quiet car?) No one spoke. An hour into the journey, I looked out the window, and to my great surprise, snow.

© richard pelletier Ligny-le-Chatel

A confection upon the fields of France? I realized much later, it was a foretelling. The gods had dusted the world white at precisely the right place—on the way to Lyon, the gastronomical capital of France. Like all the other children on the train, I pressed my face against the glass to stare at the wonder flying past and to store the beauty in my memory. (And on my iPhone.)

Cover of promotional book by Gil Lebois, photographer.
© Gil Lebois

What were the chances? Arrival in Lyon. A swarming mass of humanity. A cold, big city train station, foreign and funky. My stomach rumbled. By chance I’d booked a houseboat for our Airbnb. I’d been given a set of clear, specific directions I could barely make sense of. Beyond the station the city clanged and churned. Sleet blew in furious horizontal sheets. It was absolutely freezing. Somewhere in Lyon was Tram No. 1. Tram No. 1 would take us to a bus. The bus would take us to the houseboat on the Saône river. A warm dry bed would be waiting.

Small miracles. The houseboat was found. Locals pointed this way then that, and after what seemed like the trek of the damned, (the walking in circles, the tram, more walking in circles, the luggage, more walking, the argument, the sleet, the wind, the bus), the houseboat appeared and we were welcomed on board. There was more than a warm bed waiting. So much more. 

Our Airbnb hosts would turn out be Florence and Gil Lebois. Gil was a fine art photographer and how could he not be? Chance was now fully in charge of this operation. Gil was an exceptionally fine, fine art photographer too, the best of his kind. Technically skilled at portraits, landscapes, with an unusually good touch with people. Creative and possessed of a sensitive heart. (By which I mean he was and is, an artist. He has left still photography behind and turned to video.) He is a voracious reader and lived for years in America making photographs. It was surprising and not surprising at all then, that we both loved many of the same photographers. 

There was a glorious dinner in La Croix-Rousse, Lyon’s Arts District. There was laughter and wine and incredible food and stories. There was friendship too, which is more sustaining than food, books, photographs, snow, travel, trams, buses, cathedrals, or the sea. They loved Genoa, they said. Come to Whidbey Island, we said. 

© Sabine Weiss Gypsy Girl, Pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, 1960

So now I am leapfrogging over a few places (Orvieto, Florence, Umbria, Genoa) because I want to talk a little bit about photography, and chance, and the Swiss born photographer and longtime Paris resident Sabine Weiss, and her notions about photography. 

I wasn’t familiar with Sabine; not her name, or her work. I certainly didn’t know there was a retrospective of her life’s work in town at the Palazzo Ducale. But as we wandered the caruggi of Genoa, we looked up at one point and the image you see above, that gypsy girl, was staring us in the face. It was probably 30’ across, affixed to a brick wall. This massive, beautiful thing. And so we went in. Linda noticed Sabine’s words about photography being a pretext for meeting people, for travel, for self-expression. As a way of life.

© Sabine Weiss

As a younger man, I had very serious ambitions around photography. I wanted to be the next Robert Frank. Or the next Atget. Or Koudelka, or Josef Sudek, or any number of practitioners. I wanted books with my name on the cover. I wanted gallery shows. (Gil Lebois always wanted to be a writer.) I wasn’t wise enough to understand photography could be a means to a rich life, a way in, a way forward, a road to walk down to find other people, to hear their stories, to be invited into their lives. It was the supremely talented photographer Sabine Weiss, a member of the French Humanists, who combined photo reportage with street poetry, who taught me this. It was 2023, in Genoa, when we met in the street by chance—and it was pure poetry. Traveler, your footprints.

She died in Paris, at the same address she’d maintained her entire adult life. She credited her long and amazing career to a series of chance encounters and happy accidents. Au revoir, Sabine. Merci.

© Sabine Weiss Self-Portrait 1954
{January 23, 1924 – December 28, 2021}

Filed Under: Letter from Paris

Letter from Paris #5

January 21, 2023 by Richard

In Mauritian, the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis Mauritian, when compared to the old, provincial Mauritian, cannot compensate for a certain lost grace, which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old postcards, whereas before, when that provincial Mauritian was before one’s eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if Mauritian had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was.

~ from Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino (Cities & Memory 5)

I have no idea how to photograph Paris. Luckily the city (the current one) just throws itself at you in a hundred lovely ways. Would you like long rows of chestnut trees in perfect symmetry with lovely park benches artfully spaced throughout? How about long narrow streets that glow in the late afternoon light, with walkers throwing long deep shadows your way? Would you like a canal that suddenly surfaces in the arrondissement where you live? Perhaps a wide, slow moving river with barges and bridges and lampposts and a thousand-year-old cathedral straddling an island in the middle of said river? How about a (possibly intoxicated) French dancer magnificently sculpted across a sofa?

Black and white image of a woman reclining on a sofa.
Satiric Dancer, 1926, By Andre Kertész

More to the point. I don’t know how to see this city. Making pictures in a situation like this, in a city like this, isn’t exactly doomed, but it’s weird. I don’t know this place. I think it helps to know a place before photographing it. I do not wish to disappoint the inhabitants.

Still, a traveler can make some nice pictures here. Given the intense beauty everywhere you look, you simply keep your eyes and heart open, keep moving, stay on the lookout for the light, and try to stand (sort of) in the right place. And then hope for the best. If all else fails, steal from the masters. If an image needs a touch of lipstick, there’s always the last minute rescue, the guilty pleasure, the cheap trick of the Instagram filter. (I like Crema, Juno, and sometimes Inkwell.)

Among the photographers I care about and love most in the world are two men who made so many memorable pictures of Paris it’s like they created the city in theIr viewfinders and poof there was Paris for all the world to see and visit and love. They didn’t just know Paris, they were Paris. The first is Andre Kertész, who was born in Budapest, but moved here in 1925. He didn’t know exactly why he came here, but he has said, “he had to come.” (And there you were wondering to yourself if Andre Kertész was a romantic by nature.) By 1927, his reputation was flying so high over the city’s chimney pots he became the first photographer in Paris to have a solo show. Kertész had bought one of the first Leica’s in Paris and in every way, in the late 1920s, Andre was the man. On the night of his one man show at Au Sacre de Printemps, Józef Śliwiński, a Polish classical pianist performed, and the Dadaist poet, Paul Dermée, read this piece below, created for the occasion.

KERTESZ
By Paul Dermee, 1927 

(Translated by Jill Anson)

his child’s eyes see each thing for the first time;
they see a great king naked when he is dressed in lies; they are frightened by the canvas-shrouded phantoms
who haunt the banks of the Seine;
innocently they delight in new pictures made by three sunlit chairs in the Luxembourg Gardens, Mondrian’s door opening onto a staircase, Eyeglasses tossed near a pipe on a table.
there is no method, no arrangement, no deception, no embroidery,
your style as true your vision.
in this asylum for the blind, Kertesz sees for us.

Later, in the dark days of 1936, Kertész made a decision that would have grave ramifications for his creative life. Being a Jew in France wasn’t safe, (see Letters from Paris #4, down below) so he left the City of Light to take a two-year assignment with an agency in America. The war brought complications and he couldn’t get back. America had absolutely no idea what to do with an artist like Andre Kertész. It’s no exaggeration to say this move cost him twenty years. At the time he left Paris, Kertész was single-handedly reimagining modern photography and the city’s painters, writers, poets, publishers, gallery owners, and other photographers like Cartier-Bresson and Brassai, (who were looking to him for inspiration) knew it.

From left to right: Montmartre, Paris, Andre Kertesz | Gypsy Children Kissing, Esztergom, Hungary, 1917, Andre Kertesz

He sailed away to a stupid job and a country that couldn’t have cared less who he was, or how loving and beautiful and intelligent his eye was. Years later, around the mid 1970s, the world finally woke up and realized oh my god Andre Kertész is still with us—we better start paying attention. And then came the one man shows again — but this time in America, in New York, at MOMA—right where he belonged. It was then, as his bitterness had begun to lift, that his beloved wife Elizabeth died after a long bout with lung cancer. Maybe the lesson is to never leave Paris.

A selection of black and white photos of Paris by Andre Kertesz

Images top left to right: Chez Mondrian 1926, Paris, Andre Kertesz | Modrian’s Glasses and Pipe, 1926, Paris, Andre Kertesz | Tuileries, Paris, Andre Kertesz | Eiffel Tower, 1929 Paris, Andre Kertesz

Andre Kertesz had no formal art training—he found his own way. He served as a photographer in the First World War, got injured and made pictures (Google The Swimmer by Kertesz) during his convalescence. There is charm and music and love for the world in nearly every single Kertész photograph. There’s a deep and intuitive understanding of what a photograph is and can be. Paul Dermee had it right. No method, no arrangement, no deception, no embroidery. (And no Instagram filters). Henri Cartier Bresson said, “Every time Andre Kertész’ shutter clicks, I feel his heart beating.” You look at the pictures today and you can feel that beating heart still. He created Paris. The one that is here right now today, and the one in the postcards, too.

In the very same year that Andre Kertesz got his one man show, Eugene Atget died. During the previous thirty years that he photographed Paris, Eugene Atget never once had an exhibition of his work. Least of all one that involved a classical pianist and a Dadaist poet. (He would have flown out of that scene as fast as his French legs could take him.) 

Photo of organ grinder in old Paris by Eugene Atget
Organ Grinder 1898, by Eugene Atget

Atget lost his parents as a young boy, became a merchant marine for a while, took a turn as an actor and traveled around France with a small repertory company. Around age forty, he picked up a camera and set about documenting one of the great cities of the world, and in so doing, became one of the most beloved, inspired practitioners to ever make pictures. And it wasn’t just any camera he picked up, it was a massive bellows camera, that along with tripod and plates, pushed 40 pounds. He lugged that kit all over the place for three decades. Atget is the one who shows you where the bandstand used to be, the one where the overpass is now, covered in graffiti.

From SciHi.org:

Around 1897, Atget’s customers were the architects and artisans who wanted examples of old architectural models as well as the amateurs of the ancient city who deplored the modernization projects of Napoleon III and his agent, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann who had razed and rebuilt much of Paris during the last half of the 19th century. Atget also sold his pictures to illustrators and independent painters.

Old Paris staircase by Eugene Atget
Series of photographs of old Paris by Eugene Atget

Images top left to right: #1 Arbre Trianon 1919-1921 | Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve | Hotel de Barbancois, Rue de Quatre Fils 20 | Ville d’Avray – Etang de Corot | Parc Delessert, 32 Quai de Passy | Buttes Chaumont, 1926 | Hotel Lepelletier Saint-Rargeau, Rue de Savigne

To say why is futile but I’ll try anyway. I love the work of Atget and Kertesz because their pictures are lyrical and elegant and they do more than describe, they evoke. Turning the pages of their books is like turning the pages of memory and imagination itself. We are all indebted to Eugene and Andre, who made music out of parks and trees, fountains and alleyways, rivers and staircases, and left us these beautiful images to live by.

~~

Looking ahead, how do I even begin to talk about Lyon? I’ll have to think long and hard because Lyon was pure magic. For tonight, we lay our heads down in a very quiet, very beautiful room. A few steps away, across the center of town, is the Duomo of Orvieto, one of the most beautiful in all of Italy. This traveler has been here before. One night many years earlier, he found himself in a wine cave with a dozen travelers all from his own hometown. Everyone ate rabbit stew and got roaring drunk.

When in doubt, copy the masters.
In Buttes Chaumont, Paris | Ile Saint Louis, Paris
(Following in the footsteps of Atget, who made pictures in both of these locations.) 

Filed Under: Letter from Paris

Letter from Paris #4

January 6, 2023 by Richard

“To the memory of the children – students of this school deported from 1942 – 1944 because they were born Jewish. Victims of the Nazi barbarity with the active complicity of the Vichy government. They were exterminated in the death camps. Let us never forget them. October 5, 2002.”

“In memory of the young girls brought up in this establishment, formerly a sewing school in the city of Paris, deported and murdered from 1942 to 1944 because they were born Jews, innocent victims of Nazi barbarism with the active complicity of the Vichy government. More than 11,400 children were deported from France including more than 500 living in the 3rd arrondissement in Paris. They were exterminated in the death camps. Simone Weill high school students will never forget them.”

Simone Weil Schoole – 7 rue de Poitou Paris

I sit here in the Marais and type these words and the horror runs down my spine. As I walk the streets of the Marais, Paris’ Jewish quarter, I keep seeing these black plaques. I’ve seen at least a couple dozen and almost certainly have passed many more. If I have the numbers right, there are over 300 posted at various spots (often hotels and schools) around the city. To my shame, I have been in the Marais a few times before and never noticed. Linda spotted one and now we see them everywhere. They haunt.

Moving through the city over these past weeks, I can’t help noticing that there’s a lot going on a few floors down inside of me. Up at street level, I am struck by how rich and beautiful the city is. The shop windows, the architecture. The boucherie. The traiteur. The boulangerie. The cafes. The fashion you see everywhere. Modern Europe flowing past like some eternal river. But there’s a subterranean zone within me that got activated in this foreign country. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s about coming into contact with place and time and culture in a way that is beyond language, beyond words. Something is happening at the cell level. I am here, I am away from home; alert in a new way, primed for adventure, open (hopefully) to new input, new sensations—food, visual stimuli, people, stories, art. A new sense of self. What is this place? And who am I in this place? This is why we travel. 

One recurring motif I have felt from the beginning here is a sense of the history of Paris. (Warning, I’m a poor historian.) My mind freezes at the juxtaposition of a city this beautiful, this cultured, this elegant, being occupied by Nazis. The city of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Monet, of Simone de Beauvoir and Apollinaire, of Atget and Andre Kertesz, of Edith Piaf and Degas, of Marcel Proust, and countless others. It’s too hideous, beyond imagining. But it happened and even worse, the French were complicit. Those plaques all over the city—every one of them says it—with the active complicity of the Vichy government. It’s not just a deeply uncomfortable story, it’s monstrous.

When the nightmare came, it came fast. It took just six weeks for France to fall. From my readings, the German forces were vastly superior on multiple levels. They launched a bold attack. The highly regarded French Army (and Allied forces) weren’t ready, weren’t fast enough, and got outflanked. A million and a half French soldiers were taken prisoner. Over 100,000 French soldiers died in the fighting. France’s Marshall Philippe Pétain, (a WWI hero) asked for a cessation of hostilities and then came this… 

“The Franco- German Armistice of June 22, 1940. Surrender. Hitler insisted on signing the document of capitulation in the same railway carriage used when Germany had surrendered in 1918. The humiliation of France was complete.”

— From The Fall of France, by Dr Gary Sheffield

There are certainly hundreds, if not thousands of terrible stories about collaboration — and to this day, France is still dealing with all of this. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the French state accepted responsibility for the actions of the Vichy government and began to make amends.

I am fairly certain that I moved through this next story as we visited the Shoah Memorial Le Marais yesterday, but there was an astonishing amount to take in and I think I missed it. I’m talking about the most ghastly moment in the city’s history of complicity…this is the story of René Bousquet. 

“Assassinated in 1993, before he could go to trial, Bousquet was accused of coordinating with the Gestapo to organize the largest round-up of Jews in Paris. In July 1942, 13,000 Jews (including 3,000 children) were gathered at the Vel’ d’Hiv’ bicycle stadium in the 15th Arrondisement, from which they were shipped to French transit camps, and from there to Auschwitz. Part of the public’s attention focused on the French justice system. The French press had reported Bousquet’s role in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ round-up as early as 1978, but it took twelve years for French courts to take up the case filed by French Jewish organizations.”
— From the Brookings Institute

Beyond Bousquet, two vile, notorious figures have achieved infamy in this tale. They are Pierre Laval, a politician, and  Marshal Philippe Pétain, the aforementioned French hero of WWI. Between the two of them, they led the Vichy government and aided the Gestapo as they rounded up Jews by the thousands. Both were sentenced to death after the war. De Gaulle commuted the death sentence of Pétain, as a means of honoring his service to the nation in WWI. But after the war he spent the remainder of his life in prison. 

This is all to say that we visited the Shoah Memorial Le Marais yesterday. It was an utterly profound and shattering experience. In the image below look at the name ESKENAZI and note how many were taken. As we moved through these carved names outside the Shoah Memorial every letter was the same. You’d see entire families, and extended families, listed.

One frame in one long horror film.
This is a very tiny fraction of the children who were taken from their homes and families and schools in Paris and executed in the death camps.

“Is Paris burning?” This is what Hitler asked General Dietrich von Choltitz when the end finally came. It wasn’t. Hitler’s order to burn the place to the ground was ignored. (Choltitz ignored the order and had tried later to claim that he was largely responsible for Paris remaining intact. It’s a more complicated story and his role is not quite the noble moment he claims it is.)

So as I wind this down I just want to take a moment…I want to pay homage to those who suffered and to those who defeated the Nazis. As I walk the streets, as I take pictures, as I notice the historical markers on the way to coffee, as I peruse the work of photographer Jan Groover at the Henri Cartier Bresson Foundation, and as I visit the Shoa Memorial that tells of the horrors that took place here, I want to reflect and I want to remember. So many thousands of people known and unknown, famous and lost to history, took unimaginable risks and did what needed to be done to stop the madness. So all of us can walk these narrow and beautiful and crowded streets. So we can experience the wonder that is Paris.

December 29, 2022 11:40 am

Filed Under: Letter from Paris

Letter from Paris #3

December 27, 2022 by Richard

Cooking in Paris, random, beautiful encounters, traveling to Brittany, reading Proust… 

Where to even begin? We just crossed the one month threshold for our stay in Paris, which seems impossible. I don’t want this moveable feast to ever end. (In case you were wondering how I’m feeling about things.

Rue de Seine and Rue de l’Echaude, December 29, 2022 at 11:52 am.

Anyone who travels has had this kind of experience, but I’m just going to highlight it here because it’s fresh in my mind. There is something so tender and precious in the encounters you can have with strangers across culture and languages. (Paris isn’t that remote and exotic, but still…it is a foreign country.) But in the fleeting whirl of daily life abroad, the quick, kind encounters you can have with strangers live inside you because they touch you in places that don’t often get touched and affirm our capacity for decency and humanity.

I’ve been cooking up a storm since we got here (roast chicken, spaghetti and meat balls, cassoulet, Beef Bourguignon, roast pork, etc.) and it’s been wild fun. Especially the shopping for ingredients. Getting dinner worked out at home is kind of a chore based day. Simple. But here, it’s pure adventure. ‘Okay, let’s get our produce from the organic guy at Marché des Enfants Rouge, I’ll check with the butcher there and see if he’ll sell me a small amount of pork shoulder, we’ll go up to Coeur, have a coffee, say hi to Vanessa, get a baguette around the corner, check in with that butcher and see if he’s got duck leg confit, then we’ll get olives at Marché Bastille…’ Most of these moments come with a little bit of tension or anxiety, ‘how do I ask for duck leg confit?’ (easy, all the butchers have this) and what if no one speaks English? How do we find Saucisse de Toulouse? Etc, etc,. Up on Rue Saint-Maur, across from Chanceux, (1.2km) is Côte à Côte Boucherie. No reviews, no listings in Google, no apparent online presence…at all. And yet. The first time in there, we found ourselves fumbling. There was a lot of hand waving, Google translate, pointing at various meats in the case, but we had a sublime experience. We kept finding ways to communicate — and then as it all worked out you’re just watching the loveliest man behind the counter smile like his first born has just arrived. It’s beautiful and affirming. It changes you. There have been many other such moments (involving a different butcher at the same shop who found us a pork roast at a different shop, and called around for us as we tried to find a meat thermometer) and as much as anything we are doing here, these little moments where you throw yourself on the mercy of others goes surprisingly deep. 

On December 15th, Linda and I hosted a dinner party here at Boulevard Beaumarchais, our current digs. (We made a cassoulet and it was rich and hearty.) In attendance, Noah & Janet, Cessy & Joel, (Noahs’ parents) and Linda’s long time friend from Maine, Kathleen. Absolutely great evening. Suffice to say that some rather remarkable wines accompanied that meal. Thanks to one remarkable wine steward. 

Cassoulet
Cassoulet with assistance from Mark Bittman

The next morning, filled with cassoulet, we taxied over to Gare Montparnasse and boarded a train to Saint Malo, in Brittany. Which, in a word, was spectacular. Trying to somehow capture that experience in a string of sentences here is doomed to failure. It was impossibly beautiful in all ways. There was sun, there was pouring rain. There was a long, long drive. There were crepes. I could spend the rest of my time trying to get it all down and it still wouldn’t work. It was epic. Splendid. Splendiferous. Sublime. Surprising. Stunning. How was the Chateau Richeux? See previous list of adjectives. And the dinner there? Beyond belief, utterly. Refer to list, please. 

A freezing cold morning on the English Channel.
From Paris, to St. Malo, to La Trinitie-sur-Mer
Chateau Richeux in Brittany

St. Malo is Brittany — draw a straight left line out of Paris, and you’ll spot St. Malo on the English Channel. From St. Malo, (two nights) down to Dinan for lunch (the famed crepes of Brittany!) and a freezing walk through town (I would live there tomorrow, and so would Linda) then down toward Vannes, and La Trinite-sur-Mer on the North Atlantic. Brittany is similar the to the Pacific Northwest so we saw a lot of gray, wet weather. And speaking of that…if you’d told me all those years ago that one day I’d be hurtling through rainy Brittany with my daughter at the wheel of a Citroen, and my wife in back with Riggins, the world’s greatest Brussels Griffon, while listening to Van Morrison, Buffalo Springfield, Al Green, the Police, Nick Drake, Ray LaMontagne, well, I would have said you were nuts. I would tell you I would not be able to handle such happiness. But reader, it was thus. From our walks and our hotel rooms and our trains and our rental cars we gazed out over the Channel, the North Atlantic and vast stretches of agricultural lands on the way to our destinations. Janet plotted a course from Dinan to La Trinite-sur-Mer through 900 roundabouts and pouring rain…and then we touched down at Les Petit Hotel des Hortensias, which was, are you surprised? Charming, warm, small, elegant, perfect, friendly. 

So…where do things stand? Linda is taking care of Riggins over in the 6th while I’m holding down the the fort in the Marais. Riggins’ people, Janet & Noah, are in Cairo. I’ve started to try and walk & shoot in the footsteps of Eugene Atget. Ha! We’ll see if I can keep it up. I bought my second Annie Ernaux novel today…I Remain in Darkness. I am trying to read Proust. Stay tuned.

Oh, and we had riots in the streets here a few days back — all related to the racist-based killing of three Kurds. I’m sure I’ve forgotten something, like how amazing Mont Saint Micheal was. It was!

Filed Under: Letter from Paris

Letter from Paris #2

December 8, 2022 by Richard

{Some of this is on my Instagram account, so apologies if you’re seeing things twice.) 

Bread and art, is there anything else? In Letter #1, I talked about the ‘baguette tradition’ and our chat with Vanessa, at Coeur. I asked if she could help me understand this notion of two categories…. The common version and this mysterious (to me) traditional version. She stuck her head in her tiny office and came out with a copy of Drift, an American magazine dedicated to coffee culture. The current issue (Fall of 2022) was centered on where else…Paris. She opened it to the middle to show us three Boulangerie that make outstanding traditional style baguettes. Chanceux, 10 Belles, and Sain Boulangerie. All three are within walking distance of us in the Marais. We hit Chanceux first. I believe I mentioned in my previous letter, that it was still warm when we got it… It so happens that I was making Boeuf Bourguignon that night, and what might accompany that dish better than a still warm, traditional baguette? Soft, airy, that incredible texture, a bit of a crunch on the crust — slathered with butter, oh my goodness. When I had asked her how I should ask for it, she said, “Un tradition, sil vous plait.” And so I did. At table, it disappeared in short order. 

Here’s a lovely remembrance of things (and bread) past by Alice Waters. We might call this the inciting incident…’that first taste of apricot jam…’

“When I was in college in the ’60s I went to France for my junior year, and that’s when I really woke up to real food. I remember that first taste of apricot jam on a baguette that was still hot from the oven—I just immediately wanted to eat that every single day. And I did! Back then every corner in Paris had a place where baguettes were baked in the wood oven. Everyone went to the bakery, and you waited in line in the mornings for your baguette. I liked that the apricot jam I found there had a tart-sweet taste to it—not sweet-sweet, but with a hint of acidity. At the time I thought apricots were apricots, but what I learned later is that there are all these amazing varietals, and when you get the right one in the right microclimate—like a Blenheim apricot in mid-summer in Brentwood—they’re ethereal.”

Photo of a boy on a bicycle with a baguette.
Photograph by Eliot Erwitt

Can you just imagine this notion in the United States of America?Regulated bread, decreed by the government? Here’s the criteria: 

A traditional baguette must be made with only the following four ingredients: wheat flour, water, salt, and yeast, and it must weigh between 8.8 and 10.8 ounces and measure between 8.8 and 10.6 inches long.

This is Communist ideology, pure and simple. Thank god that in America we are free to throw in all the additives, dyes, and preservatives we want.

Speaking of ideology and Communism. 

We visited The Maison Européenne de la Photographie the other day. This is a gorgeous center for contemporary photography and as luck would have it, (truly incredible luck I’d say) nearly the entire space was given over to the work of the photographer, Boris Mikhailov. He’s from Kharkiv, of all places. The show is 800 images (!) and the range of his work has to be seen to be believed. 

Photo by Boris Mikhailov from the series At Dusk 1993

From the MEP website:

Boris Mikhailov’s pioneering practice encompasses documentary photography, conceptual work, painting and performance. Since the 1960s, he has been creating a haunting record of the tumultuous changes in Ukraine that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disastrous consequences of its dissolution. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition brings together more than 800 images drawing on more than twenty of his most important series, up to his most recent work. 

***

Haunting is right. Here’s what I found so moving about this show. Boris has developed countless, alternative ways to push photography in every imaginable direction in order to convey his wildly varied subject matter so that the content and the process are both telling the story . (See image above.) He has mastered the medium and made it his own. Beyond that he’s courageous, deeply sensitive, funny, and compassionate—there’s a big heart beating inside the man and the pictures show it. He’s 84 now, so he’s both seen and lived through a lot. I urge you to read of this piece in the NYT; it gives a great overview of the man and his work.

We made our first visit (there will be more) to Père Lachaise Cemetery, the legendary resting place for an extraordinary collection of humans. Who’s here? Jim Morrison, Marcel Proust, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Guillaume Apollinaire, and many, many others. It opened in 1894 and continues operations to this day.

Historical image of Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Headstone of Guillaume Apollinaire in Pere Lachaise cemetery Paris.
I love everything about this headstone. The shape of the stone itself, the beautifully carved letters, so in keeping with the artistry of the man himself.

Filed Under: Letter from Paris

Letter from Paris #1

December 2, 2022 by Richard

Hello friends ~

This begins a series of dispatches for posterity and memory, and as a writing exercise, and of course to share some of this extremely lovely Parisian experience Linda and I are starting out on. I can’t guarantee future dispatches but perhaps…

Le Chicken

Poulet Bresse
Poulet Bresse

Roast chicken (Poulet roti) is akin to religion in France. The French obsession with food is well known but until you parachute in and wade through any number of markets that dot the city you can only know this in the abstract. On the ground the scene is wildly abundant. Multi~ethnic, multi~sensory, and multi~dimensional. A gourmandistan with sounds and sights and smells to live and die and walk miles for. There’s a butcher on nearly every block.

At Marché Bastille, the outdoor market a few blocks from here, there are snails and olives and flowers and breads and fish and cheeses (more than I could possibly ever figure out) and there are butchers and organic farmers selling the most beautiful produce ever seen. On our first visit last Thursday the mood was cheerful from top to bottom. The huge bag of olives we brought home, oh lord. 

Onto le chicken. I wanted to roast a bird French style and soon I was so far down the trou de lapin I thought I’d never resurface. It seems that the French revere their poultry so much that there are official designations of birds based on region. Just like wine. The bird that reigns supreme is from Bourg~en~Bresse, four hours south of Paris near Lyon. The bird, Poulet de Bresse, is, I learned, best for long slow cooking methods, not so much for roasting. (I think this is true, but the internet is a tricky realm.) In order to be so designated, a Bresse bird must come from that region, eat certain foods, and live free for most of their lives.

The next level down in the pecking order (see what I did there) is the Label Rouge. I had determined to get myself one of these red label chickens. I even saw them in the window at various butcher shops on my walks through the neighborhood, but in the end I succumbed to my local butcher. With the help of an intermediary I stated my need: a good roasting chicken for four people. The beautiful thing was no packaging. Our man reached into his chilled (glass door) cabinet ~ there were easily eight to ten birds sitting in there quite unlike the basketball shaped sheathed~in~plastic creature we in the US are familiar with. He picked one, thought it over, put it back and got one slightly larger. Wrapped it up in butcher paper and handed it over.

Back home, I removed the wishbone, trussed it, and followed an Alice Waters recipe. The dinner guests arrived, my beloved daughter and son in law, (who are making all this possible) and the champagne was poured. Then the red. It all worked. Thanksgiving in Paris 2022. 

Coeur

Coeur Cafe, Paris
Coeur, Le Marais

This perfect and lovely space is a bit of touchstone for us. A fifteen or twenty minute walk through the Marais and voila, a small, exquisite Parisian experience . Organic foods, great coffee, and a most gracious barista named Vanessa. On the last visit we spoke of baguettes. That’s for next time. 

PS 

I am barely scratching the surface of things here, so I’ll be curious to see what sorts of things emerge in the next installment. But for now the word reverence springs to mind. And beauty. The scale of things, these massive and impossibly beautiful buildings, along with the little cafe you see above. The food everywhere. The Seine. Is it winding, snaking, flowing, coursing? At any rate it’s on its way to the English Channel and I have nothing to add that hasn’t already been said about the Seine; It’s everything. And the clothes ~ in the windows and on the people of Paris. It’s all quite something. You could even say it’s a movable feast. 

Au revoir!

PS. At Chanceux , we’ve just scored our first ‘baguette traditional’ ~ this is the much beloved, iconic baguette (government regulated) that’s just been awarded World Heritage status by UNESCO. protection. Reader, the flute is still warm. 

Richard

Filed Under: Letter from Paris, Paris Images

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