Back In The USA

Living in Paris was everything I’d expected it to be: exciting, indulgent, transcendent. I worked, I played, I ate. I lived my dream of living in Paris as a young man.

I’m spending the summer in Port Orchard, a smallish town on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington state. Kitsap is a strange splotch of land that looks like New York State, Florida and Thailand has a bizarre love triangle and planted the child in the midst of the Puget Sound. We’re only about 12 miles from Seattle as the bird flies, as they say, but we’re a good 1:30 travel whether you go by boat or by car, and like other American spaces which lie outside of one hour’s travel to the nearest city, we’re pretty rural out here.

It’s been quite a change, moving from one of the most cosmopolitan spaces in the world to an mildly-economically-depressed small town. Culture shock. I look around and see a town full of people motivated by boredom and fear. The two create a deep ugliness, as they always do when they parade together. You don’t always see it, but you always sense it, just underneath the surface of every interaction.

But life in a small town isn’t all bad. It’s also beautiful here. Actually stunningly so. From our back porch you can see the Sinclair Inlet, Bainbridge Island, Bremerton and the Manette Bridge, the carrier base, lines of clouds over the Hood Canal, and on clear days the eastern Olympic Range, the Brothers and Mt. Constance and the lesser ridges stretching all the way to Juan de Fuca. It’s paradisaical… and there are some good people here too, people who’ve escaped the traps that decaying rural cities lay and live in peace out here. They’re friendly. They wave when you drive by.

In the coming weeks I’ll be sharing more about the Northwest cities I’m considering moving to, as well as what I’m doing during my work hours these days.

Thanks for everything,

Jon O

Notes from the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts

This is one of my favorite art museums in the world.

I take an art museum hard. They overwhelm me. Paintings are not like books. In a bookstore you can ignore all the books except the three you’re looking for. The ideas in books need time to get their hooks into you, and if you don’t give them the time, they’re just dead trees on the shelves.

Physical art, on the other hand - painting, sculpture - is like an odor. Unless you’re blind, you can’t ignore it. It assaults you.

I like going to new museums, but I love returning to one.  Knowing a collection makes it easy to do what I like, which is put my head down and make straight for what I’m interested in. Only after digesting what I came to see am I encounter something new.

I go to the Musee de Beaux Artes for the Bruegels.  More than just simple celebrations, Brueghel’s paintings present an alternate history, like Don Delillo’ Underworld, which posits that what’s really happening is what’s happening in the layers deep beneath what’s reported as happening.

In this small but (and) wonderful collection, Bruegel says: We want to dance with our ugly townsfolk, because we are the ugly masses ignorant of Icarus and other big dreams.

Says, turn off the TV, the Icarus of Fortis and Lehman Brothers et all aren’t all that important to you and me.

Says, go to work (plough or sail), play, drink, go forth lustily and lust after fat wenches - as Jordaens in the next room down says, you too can be KING (but don’t forget to change the brat’s diaper).

Says, to mash-up Gary Snyder and Tom Waits: Fuck the noisy machinery on the boob-tube, get behind the mule in the morning and plow.

Says, let the angels have their battles with the world’s absurdities. Maybe even kick back with a beer and watch it on a quiet Sunday, while the kids ice skate and build snowmen. But don’t fret it. It’s their fight, not yours. You and they both shall pass, and you’ve got better things to worry about.

***

After Brueghel I checked out one of Cravach’s Venuses (Venusi?), poked around the collection of adoration imagery, and spent some time checking out the temptation of St. Anthony. But I decided to skip most of the older works, including Reubens, and headed downstairs to the modern wing.

***

Delvaux:

Look what flesh does to bones, yes, but like St. Anthony upstairs will tell you, flesh turns to bone as well.

And his train coming in the night, with the girl hiding behind the fence that she’s outgrowing… it is adolescence arriving in the spooky night, and it’s also an appreciation of the heavy feeling of a night train arriving at an empty provincial station.

***

Seurat inventing the pixel.

***

Dali’s St. Anthony resisting his giantess temptations. He kneels and with wiry arms holds up the most pathetic simple cross. Making a firm & what appears to be a final stand in the middle of the mind’s broad plain, no kind of defensive position.

Left me laughing, thinking hell, resistance? 21st Century American doesn’t even try. 21st Century American asks the elephant where to stick his credit card. 21st Century American sits making snide, ironic comments about stilts while his wants trample him to mush.

***

But finally the best - Khnopff and his Caresse! (Has to be said in French, ‘luh caw-ess’, to realize that it’s an onomatopoeia, in our integrating it into English we’ve managed to trample the romance out of the word - certainly not the first time it’s been done.)

The Caresse is like Leda and the Swan reversed. It had me scribbling a poem, which I’m leery about posting here, since it’s not really fleshed out much beyond a first draft at this point, but here goes:

In or Out?

Like when, handling our staff
we find our other hand
finger-deep in a tuft
of coarse fur, feeling
another strange heart beating
the ribs & teats of a long & lean torso
& a face in our face
whispering “Like to?”

A silly girl.
Her taut thighs ripe for the spreading
if we’d like to.

But watching that long, thick tail throb
and the points of claws on a belly
we remember being bitten by a kitten
who’s line of play didn’t align with ours
and would a cat care how we answer?
All the ways she has to shred a swan
if she’d like to.

3 Days In Bourgogne

Riding the rails from Alsace to Burgundy: Green France under May showers and spotty sunshine. The woman next to me hums away. I’m reading Wikipedia articles I’ve saved about Beaune and the Cote de Or - the Cote de Or is part of the Rhone watershed instead of the Seine as I’d assumed.

The old farm converted to a guesthouse in Ciel, Bresse, 15 miles out of Beaune. Reading in the evening sunshine. A dip in the blue pool - cold water on a warm evening after all day on trains. Dinner with a winemaker and a wine seller - amuse bouche, entree, plat, fromage, dessert. Cremant de Bourgogne, Meursault Chard, Ladoix Pinot, Marc de Bourgogne. Stumbling up stairs to sleep with the windows open to birdsong and country smells.

Elizabeth’s French country breakfasts, taken on the veranda in the morning sun: croissants, bread, fromage blanc, muselix, fresh squeezed orange juice, homemade confitures, that wonderful butter.

Tear-assing in a 6-speed Peugot through the hills above Beaune. Walking in the woods. Learning: The prize of taking a good photo in the woods is not the photo, but how the work of taking a good photo changes how you walk in the woods.

Over the hills and into the valley of the Ouche. A dour Dutch woman running a frites stand. “Speak English Good” says her sign. She does.

Walking into the yellow, swallowed by yellow, overcome by yellow.

Learning (again) that Bourgogne is prounced “Boor-goyn“, and wondering (again) why we have to call it Burgundy and not Bourgogne.

The afternoon is given to the wine route: Gevrey-Chambertin (Jev-Ray-Sham-Burr-Tah), Nuits-St.-Georges, Vougeot, Ladoix, Aloxe Cotron. Tasting. Spitting. More good pinot than I’ve had in my life. Walking along the primer-cru vineyards, the roses, the old stone walls. An English couple making wine in Aloxe Corton, daring to mix two primer-cru vineyards “they gave us these Gaullic shrugs and figured it’d never work, but it did, here taste - ”

Back home, more wine - a nine year old Savigny-les-Beaune, a twelve year old Vougeot. A big chicken dinner - poulet de Bresse.

The next day, the Cote de Beaune. Meursault. Rully. Stopping alone the winerows to watch the workers spray the grapes. The town of Beaune, heat in the streets, a sandwich at a cafe table between Japanese and Brits. Cows in the hills, horses in the hills. Silent Savigny-les-Beaune on a hot afternoon. Fish for dinner alongside a Languedoc pinky.

One last dip in the pool. One last walk under the cerise tree with all those cherries reddening for June. One last big breakfast.

Answering The FAQ

So, uh… what the hell are you up to over there, dude?

I find most podcasts difficult if not impossible to listen to. This one’s no different: It’s an eclectic mix. I took the ten albums I’ve been listening to most frequently and jammed together a collage of songs around some spoken word about life over here. There’s some Aretha Franklin, some Bad Religion, some Clinic, some Astor Piazzolla. Like I said, it’s an eclectic mix. And there’s plenty of me talking about the neighborhood, writing, food, wine, and even a little macro-econ.

Enjoy!

Listen to my Paris Podcast (80-something MB)

The Louvre is a 7500 word sentence without punctuation

(just an occasional ‘and’ to segment its burst into semi-discrete thoughts)

…and I. M. Pei’s pyramids placing the 21st century in the old palace courtyard

and Egypt those hieroglyphic triumphs of the desire to preserve informata

and kitty-cat svelte is the dominant sexy

and they oughta crank the heat in the Egyptian wing because check the climate for Cairo it don’t get cold expect at night when the winds would blow the pleasant reek of Nile fertility into the open homes

and Pharaohs seated promising a decent life in return for obedience

and the seated scribe with eyes forward representing maybe some foreknowledge of us to come & how amazed would he be by what we call our daily trivialities

and the sarcophagi those boxy monuments to the will to live forever forever forever

and Ozymandias Ozymandias Ozymandias

and Phoenicia which means We Sail The Seas but how many seas did they sail which means what secrets do they hide in their own sarcophagi & Neptune-headed busts

and in Assyria a child’s fascination with castles & ramparts & defensive positions

and babble on about Babylon

and what’s more pathetic that a man splayed squirming struggling to remove a spear from his throat while another man (bigger, wearing a bull horn helmet) straddles him

and The Code which was a concession because to write the law is to lose power by losing a bit of your arbitrary randomness (even if those laws are written on a giant phallus with your visage up top)

and Victory

and Victory on her prow her posture suggesting the ultimate celebration of the triumph of a species over the thoughtless meat masses of animalia

and Victory was champagne cracked before we learned irony or self-pity

and Victory at the top of the staircase a masterpiece of curation & display

and Everyday Greece the pots the pans the water jars the wine jugs

and an old man disemboweling an animal showing life in primary colors the triumph of humanity in raw

and a satyr dancing madman in marble

and Artemis stone faced all alone except her buck who she holds back while preparing to draw an arrow knowing she’s going to be flattened by Western Civ but her face  the feminine strength says I Do Not Give A Fuck I Have A Job To Do

and you don’t have to know history or poetry to enjoy the Louvre but it sure as hell helps

and Venus de Milo towering over her daily hordes with a made sexy a DIY sexy a Punk Rock Sexy a sexy that says I’m Sexy Damn It a just-larger-than-life visage of sex on the square-shoulder & I don’t need my damn apple or the arm the held it to exude what I exude

and speaking of sex here’s Cupid reviving Psyche driving a mad reminder that what is fundamentally sexy is far from new & cheap porno cannot touch the play in this work

and Rome the gallery of rogues with their pompous oscillations between regulation and debauchery

and Rome the iron ribbons of a centurion’s armor

and Rome the first stab at thrusting a European order into the primitive body

and Rome Rome Rome what the column means to the barbaric analogue

and Roman soldiers spitting over the futility of rotting out here in Lutetia while their wives aged cruelly back home

and The Etruscans who an American does not know because we only know Greeks & Romans but they lived vibrant lives full of their own wine full of their own stories full of their own pisspot & homes which thrived or did not in the small-scale of grand grand grand scale

and all of it along the stream of Western Civilization black and white but as the Louvre says in Monty Python French “Of course Western Civ is an unbroken stream when seen from far enough away, don’t be ridiculous.”

and Paint

and Flemish portrayals of cat & dog after the lamb which has her head still intact to remind us of where meat comes from & the thin line between a life’s sole (soul) possession & food

and Rubens using what will become impressionist sensibilities in flowing backgrounds which fade into haze like he and Bruegel also invented a camera’s depth of field

and the eruption of Vesuvius with men gathering to witness this gnash in the earth this exposure of his internal fire & primal minerals

and the Dutch showing how ice skates and little games are their triumphs over hopeless winter reminding you how you cannot be unhappy on ice skates

and Jacques-Louis David’s idiotically romantic take on Leonidas at Thermopalayae making the whole shebang seem more fun that teacups at Disneyland with wreath-tossing nymphs triumphant Spartans & Leonidas himself striking an easy pose in the near-nude

and right next door is another ridiculous cartoon is Clytemnestra and Aegisthus come sneaking to slay the hero of Troy Agamemnon in is sleep but honey oh honey did you happen to notice that your TITTIES are hanging out of your dress

and far more serious the lithe David having Goliath by the hair with the sling flung to the ground showing technology’s triumph over the brute ways of other men

and Mona who ain’t never gonna get tired of looking so smug

and all the long Italian gallery showing scenes and saints

and crescendo after crescendo

and an orgy of dramatic climax as the paintings go on and on and on down the long hall

and so much flesh and so much godly succumbing and so many perfect painterly diagonals

and worst of all is Panini’s painting of paintings his gang of aristocrats front & center drowning themselves in canvases so that the only thing that could quench their thirst would be Japanese simplicity but that will never happen

and way back in the corner near the Porte des Lions exit are Lady Macbeth’s terrorized eyes her finger pointing upward because she feels in the centerless sphere her guilt her guilt her guilt…

The Snow Painter

In the Musee des Beaux-Artes at Rouen, France they keep their best paintings in the corner. A tiny room, a third the size of most in the gallery, it contains several Impressionist classics, including Monet’s take on the cathedral from St. Catherine’s Hill and a windblown plazascape which makes you shiver and feel alone in the world.

But the painting that grabbed my heart was Alfred Sisley’s take on a couple walking towards (or away from?) a village in the snow. So much sentiment he packed into the painting, so many suggestions… why do we go out in the snow? To be cold? Why? It’s these really naive but also really old questions that really interest me.

This poem is an obvious riff on Wallace Steven’s The Snow Man. It’s not the first time I’ve riffed it, and it definitely won’t be the last - I love The Snow Man, and have a relationship with it, and my appreciation of winter and snow is colored by it.

My writing is a lot like my cooking. I make the same dishes over and over again, refining them, twisting them, learning the role each ingredient plays, and always paying homage the source.

The Snow Painter

Sisley made his mind into winter
in order to describe
two intwined in the white hush
crunching towards town, the inn
where smoke rose from the chimney -

And far from misery, Sisley
said without a word how it’s better
to be cold, and going to be warm
than to be warm forever -
January now. Wait. Make warm soon.

She crunched. Accompanied him to the inn.
Couldn’t conceive an other that wasn’t.
Even the land is composed of our ticks
tocking to the wind which is cold, or isn’t -
no snow can deny her her perceiving.

Spring in Paris

Then one warm afternoon in late April the air comes alive with white gnats. Only they aren’t gnats. They’re seed pods. Because even the trees are so astounded by the cult of warmth spreading that they’re shooting their seed into it.

Too busy bursting to notice that already the spreading is slowing…

Warmer Today

the pop of a cork from a terrace
5:15, a Tuesday in Paris
the last of this March.

one nose in the noisy mess
falling down the Boulevard de Port-Royale
foaming home, bubbling home, pouring home.

Why I Love Paris - The Short Answer

Paris has juice.

It’s not the only place, of course. San Diego has juice. The Bay Area’s floating in it. Seattle has juice. Even SLO has juice, though you have to go looking for it. I think Portland has juice - I’ll find out this fall.

I’ve learned by banging my head against the wall a hundred times - You find a place in the world with juice, you get in there and guzzle up. Don’t be shy, or picky, and for God’s sake don’t be cynical about it. Just drink. Learn to like it if you don’t. Because if you down enough, and if you’re also disciplining yourself and exercising properly too, you’ll get ripped on it.

What do I mean by Juice? I mean this:

Interested people doing interesting things.

Paris is merrily, warmly, wonderfully, wantonly drowning in its own juice. A flavor I’ve never had anywhere else. I’d like to call it Pamplemousse, because that’s such a fantastic word, but there’s a better title for the essence of Paris:

Supreme devotion to the savoring of detail.

All over Paris, on the streets, in the cafes and brasseries, in the markets, in the artisan shops and in the metro, in the parks and along the Seine, on the Champs Elysees and in La Goutte d’Or, in the Arab groceries and in the tower mazes of La Defense, you find the juice. You watch long enough and learn a little of the language, you start to see how it’s made. Study the processes. See how you can make it on your own back home. And of course, provided you can pay, you can guzzle all you want.

When you’ve had your fill of Paris, you pay up and leave, like anywhere. But you don’t forget the taste. Or what you’ve learned. And if you squeeze your arms, you can feel the nice muscles you’ve built on the delicious juice of Paris.

La Première Semaine à Paris

Paris on a Friday night. A gargantuan meal at Chez Denise - Tripe au Calvados which is the French menudo, then a big hunk of baba au rhum. The midnight metro, packed with kids buzzing on Friday. Jazz in a cave, a walled up part of the catabomb, beers and stumbling home at 3AM over the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve, remembering the same mistaken turns stumbling home in the same state in 1998 and taking them anyway.

Market shopping on a Spring Saturday. A wander up the Mouffe going oh that looks good, oh that smells good. A pungent cheese, a nice sausage, a good baguette and a bottle of Languedoc pink make a nice lunch. A million bones in the catacombs. Chocolat Chaud on the sidewalk at Deux Magots in the interim between a spring rain and a spring hail. The Italian shop across the street makes the best gnocchi, and I make the best tomato-cream sauce.

Lazy Sunday arranging things in my new apartment. Everything in town is closed but the cafes and the big stores, and it’s ok because I shopped on Saturday. A long walk home from the Gare de l’Est, and it’s impossible to get lost in Paris if you have money in your pocket, because there’s never a need to go anywhere but somewhere warm with good food and good drink.

Monday morning and I ain’t gotta go to work so I get up real late. A lazy walk up the Mouffetard to the Place de la Contrescarpe and a coffee at the cafe.

My first poulet roti, with pomme puree riding shotgun and a bottle of Chablis for company.

Long morning hikes to the Seine and to Montparnasse for coffee on the sidewalk at Cafe Odessa.

Wine shopping at Caves Augé, only the most beautiful little wine shop in the world. When it’s time for lunch the kids working there put a table out on the sidewalk and lay out a spread, with a simple bottle of red burgundy of course. I ask about it and they say, sure, this is a very nice bottle. I get a Cote du Rhone red too, and a nice Loire white to have with oysters, and take the metro home to work.

Friday. I head to the Sacre Couer, thinking Ah wow this is where they hacked Denis’s head off and then he carried it down the hill giving a sermon the whole way - but it’s foggy and there no view, and the thing is swarmed with tourists, and hawkers assailing the tourists, and people pretending to enjoy this beautiful place but mostly feeling frustrated and there’s the pervasive sense of ‘I spent 12 hours on a flight for this, fuck, well at least I’ll get a gazillion photos.’ I don’t take any. I leave the throng. I walk down the other side of Montmarte, find a quiet cafe, have a beer in the sun. Better than any damn cathedral anyway - even the Sacre Couer.

A good week working and living in Paris. Ready for another - but first, a lazy Saturday afternoon cuddling up to that very nice bottle of premier cru Pinot Noir.