Dimanche

Perhaps our top Paris experience was an impromptu late afternoon / early evening Velib ride. On your next trip to Paris, you must rent a Velib and bike around, and please please please, go to the Louvre courtyards after dark, when the exterior is lit up, and the pyramid is glowing, and then ride across the Seing and watch the Eiffel Tower's spotlight shine against the sunset.











PS: I'm back in NYC, and catching up on the blogging -- I'll post a few more "from" the Loire and Paris.

Samedi

For almost our entire time in France (and I'm writing this on our eighth day), the weather forecast for the coming days has been gorgeous: sunny, 70s, breezy. And then the day comes, and it's grey and windy and damp. It's rather like a "Jam yesterday, and jam tomorrow, but never jam today."



However, Saturday was gorgeous — a perfect Parisian spring day, with everyone out and enjoying the parks, streets, outdoor cafés, and plazas. We finally made it to Grande Epicerie (one of my favorites), the huge food hall at Le Bon Marché. For home, I bought preserves, tea, tisane, and crunchy sugar, and for lunch in the adjacent park, we bought roquefort, comté, two mini baguettes (one white, one multi-grain), brandade de morue, marinated baby artichoke hearts, grapes, blood oranges, and mineral water. It was quite a feast.



We then hit Hugo + Victor, a highly hyped modern pastry shop, where I bought more preserves (my luggage is getting heavier and heavier), as well as an exquisite box of chocolates. And then, just to top off the afternoon, we wandered along the Seine, basking in the late afternoon glow.

Saturday night was the birthday party that was the excuse for this trip in the first place: a splashy blowout in a beautiful 19th-century building near Parc Monceau, complete with hip new band, fancy finger food, and a deadly pastry and cake selection.

Vendredi

OK, I've fallen behind, but what would you rather do in Paris: post blog updates, or hunt down more delicious treats?



Friday was another late start. We picked up formule déjeuner at Erik Kayser, one of my mainstays from my 25 days in Paris two years ago. This time for me: roasted chicken and roast tomatoes with mayonnaise on baguette, eau minèrale, and an insane tarte aux abricots et pistaches. We ate our picnic on the grounds of the Musee Rodin, where the flowers were just coming out. It wasn't the crazy riot of tulips I remembered from my first visit to Paris, 15 (!) years ago, but it was still a welcome sight to my winter-weary eyes.



The museum itself is charming, in a down-at-the-heels way. We noticed the water stains, the crumbling plaster, the cracked glass — and then saw a sign that basically said, We know you've noticed the water stains etc., and we're doing our best with what we have. Understood.

Dinner was with R.'s friends, at their home: more roast chicken (all the chicken here is clearly injected with concentrated chicken flavor, making it so beyond the chicken we get back home — even the expensive happy chickens at Whole Foods. I can't figure this one out — explanations are welcome.

Jeudi: Le Marais

We’re not exactly springing out of bed and dashing outside to conquer the city. We’re more slowly emerging from a cocoon of jet-laggy sleep, letting some coffee soak into our systems, and only then, after much puttering and researching and wrapping of scarves and packing of notebooks, do we amble outside, in search of the next delicious treat.

Thursday we struck gold, at Au Fil des Saisons, a small, traditional-looking spot in the Marais where we set up camp for a couple of hours. We arrived at the tail end of lunch, but the chef, Loïc, not only welcomed us, he served us, and helped us choose the wine (a snappy and delicious Joseph Drouhin white burgundy), and answered our string of questions about the items on the chalkboard menu. (“Ça c’est egg with mushrooms and cheese; ça c’est snapper, ça c’est ….)





We had the egg (served in a gratin dish with cream and a mushroom puree and plenty of butter, all broiled together into a beautiful mess) and the escargots, which were stuffed into phyllo cigars and served with a cream sauce infused with 18 cloves of garlic (“Dix-huit?! Non!!”) For plats principaux, we had snapper en papillote with julienned vegetables and a “French risotto” with parmesan, and duck breast with a fine layer of crispy fat, served with potatoes and stir-fried vegetables with soy sauce. This is just the kind of meal that has a certain French flavor and quality (and liberality of fat) that you cannot find in the States, even in New York. I couldn’t do it every day, but for a treat, it was certainly welcome.





Then we set off to wander the Marais, one of my absolute favorite places in the world. Hausmann didn’t get his hands on this neighborhood, so it has old winding streets, back alleys, courtyards, vest-pocket parks, a hodgepodge of building shapes, sizes, and styles that you don’t see in the grand and stately arrondissements.

Paris, unlike New York, has museums scattered throughout the city; you’re forever stumbling across some little jewel that has its own lovely treasures. One of the more interesting ones is Le Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (The Hunting and Nature Museum), housed (of course) in a pair of handsome hôtels particuliers in the Marais. The exhibits have clearly been designed by someone with a quirky sense of humor; the exhibit on the fox, for instance, has a taxidermy fox in a glass case, around which is built a cabinet with various drawers (one has casts of a fox’s pawprints, another casts of a fox’s leave-behinds), some sliding panels that show a mini-installation of fox drawings by a contemporary artist, and a kind of hologram that shows you the fox’s territory.










There was also a room with birdcalls, which you could call up from a vintage-y box of labeled buttons, and then rooms organized by theme (The Wild Boar and the Stag, The Big Game Hunt, The Unicorn), filled with artifacts, taxidermy, and art. Somehow, it didn’t feel creepy, but instead smart and urbane and elegant.



Already in need of fortification, we window-shopped our way over to Mariage Frères for some Assam and thé vert, and a green tea financier and a citron macaron.



We then lingered in Place des Vosges, undoubtedly one of the most serene, most dignified spots in the city. As always when I’m in Place des Vosges, it was overcast, which makes the place even more somber and reserved.







We strolled along the arcades, peeking into hotel lobbies and jewelry shops, before working our way back to the lively part of the Marais, where we had an aperitif at Les Philosophes, a classic corner café on Rue Vieille du Temple (with an amusing sign in la toilette), next to La Chaise au Plafond, where I had my daily breakfast coffee years ago, on my first trip to Paris.






Our last stop of the evening was Breizh Café, where we had maybe a bit too much of the rich, buttery galettes (Bretonese buckwheat crepes). I couldn’t resist trying the famous Bordier butter, especially when I saw there is a smoked version (beurre fumé!), so we started with that, and probably could have wrapped it up right there. But on we went: galette with egg, mushrooms, and cheese for R., and galette with Reblochon, potatoes, bacon, and salad for me.



We had to cab it home, we were so full and wiped out and footsore. In the Marain, even in one day, you can really live a very full and filling life.

I'm baaaaack.....

This blog is the descendant of another, 25 days in paris, which chronicled a trip I took almost two years ago now. I'm back in Paris, in another apartment — alas, for only eight days — and ready to pick up where I left off: gorging on pastry, cheese, bread, chocolate, wine, and (hopefully) duck confit.



We arrived yesterday at 6 a.m., after a couple hours of fitful Ambien-induced sleep. One bleary RER ride later, and we were at our rental, a sixth-floor set-up one block from the lovely Jardins du Luxembourg.



We took a highly necessary nap, then made our way to Cuisine du Bar, the cafe next to Poilâne, which serves madly delicious tartines such as sardine with vinegar and lemon, and smoked salmon with mayonnaise, all on toasted Poilâne bread. (The smoked salmon is so different from what we're used to in New York — richer, with less smoke flavor and more fish flavor. I approve.) Salad, glass of vin blanc, and perfect café served with a butter-cookie spoon — thank you, Paris, for the lovely welcome back.

Post-lunch wandering included an unsuccessful shoe-buying attempt on my part (they didn't have my size in the navy patent wedges!), a restrained visit to Pierre Hermé (we took only one tarte vanille infiniment, which I will not even attempt to describe [but you can read about it here] and one almond-rose petal croissant, which I ate just moments before scribbling this down), a stroll along the Seine, and a quick stop for staples at Monoprix.



It was rather grey and chilly over the afternoon, and everyone kept apologizing to us for the weather. Meanwhile, I believe New York is entering its sixth month of soul-crushing winter, so to be somewhere with flowers and green grass and a light drizzle, where I don't have to wear five layers and gloves and hat and scarf and boots and STILL be cold.... my entire personality has promptly done a one-eighty.

Dinner was with friends Catherine and Loic and their three lovely (and fun) daughters, celebrating Loic's birthday at their home with delicious food and even more delicious wine, ending with a platter of pastry that, for me, was highlighted by the mille-feuille. This puff pastry / vanilla cream delight, which we call napoleon in the States, is one of my early experiences with the glory of French foods. Back in junior high in Connecticut, my friend Annick and I would head downtown to a rather remarkably good bakery called Versailles and pick up a box of two of napoleons, then sit on a park bench and devour them in a couple seconds flat. Unlike so many of my other childhood food obsessions, this one has held up quite nicely.

a string of words

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.

This week, I tore through Just Kids by Patti Smith, an alternately envy-producing and heartbreaking account of her life in New York in the late 1960s and ’70s, when she lived with Robert Mapplethorpe and struggled to find her path in life. Envy-producing, because of the crazy energy and the primacy of the arts scene back then. Heartbreaking, both because we know what’s ahead for the young Patti (way too much loss, as friends and icons, including her beloved Robert, overdose or die of AIDS), and because she imbues her gritty, clear-eyed book with such delicacy and sweetness.

When Robert and Patti first live together, it’s in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, near Pratt. They have no TV, no money to go out, barely any money for books or magazines, so they spend all their time writing and making art. They’ll draw for hours, side by side, figuring out their styles, incorporating new influences, pushing each other to be better. It’s so sweet, how excited she was by the life she and Robert created for themselves. They were so broke that they’d stand on the street in a state of indecision, trying to choose between a meal at the diner or supplies from the art store; they only had enough money for one or the other.



They move into a tiny room at the Chelsea Hotel, where Patti finds a family of sorts, a family of slightly damaged, driven outcasts, an Island of Misfit Toys, or, as Patti refers to it, “a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone.” You could get by on very little money in New York in the ’70s. Not only could Patti and her compadres trade art for rent at the Chelsea or for drinks at Max’s Kansas City, but they could find raw space downtown for next to nothing, and maybe get the landlord to give them a couple months for free if they agreed to clean out the junk.

For example, since their shared room at the Chelsea doesn’t give him enough space to make art, Robert finds them a new home: an entire floor above the Oasis Bar, on the same block as the hotel. (Can you even imagine? It wasn’t that long ago that two chronically broke, near-starving artists could rent an entire floor in the heart of Chelsea. OK, maybe there was no toilet or shower, but still. A whole floor, with big windows and lots of light and plenty of space, smack in the middle of NYC. Damn.)



As she moves through the years of her young life, Patti leads with her heart and lays bare the enormous vulnerability she felt then, a vulnerability that must have been visible a mile off, given the way so many people offered help and encouragement. She gets songwriting advice from Bobby Neuwirth, Todd Rundgren takes her to hear music at the Village Gate, Sam Shepard buys her a lobster dinner when she doesn’t have anything to eat, Jimi Hendrix commiserates with her about being shy and awkward.

At one point, she’s scrounging around the Chelsea Hotel room, looking for enough change to get a cheese sandwich. She digs up 55 cents and heads down the block to the Automat, only to find the price has gone up. “Can I help?” says someone behind her:

I turned around and it was Allen Ginsburg... Allen added the extra dime and also stood me to a cup of coffee. I wordlessly followed him to his table, and then plowed in the sandwich.

Allen introduced himself. He was talking about Walt Whitman and I mentioned I was raised near Camden, where Whitman was buried, when he leaned forward and looked at me intently. “Are you a girl?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Is that a problem?”

He just laughed. “I’m sorry, I took you for a very pretty boy.”

I got the picture immediately.

“Well, does this mean I return the sandwich?

“No, enjoy it. It was my mistake.”

All right, so Ginsburg’s relationship with Patti didn’t start from a sense of protectiveness or altruism, but he ended up becoming a mentor, one of the many who helped her find her way. And now I’m listening to the result of all that encouragement, and all her hard work: her first album, “Horses,” where her fierce confidence comes roaring out at you, showing you everything she’d been through, and how she survived it all.



I don’t want to romanticize the whole starving-artists-in-the-garret scene, but it’s hard not to be wistful for Patti’s world, where nothing was more important than art and music and writing. I have to admit to feeling a bit melancholic about the choices I’ve made, ones that have given me a degree of comfort, but have taken me farther and farther from a life of creativity.

OK, maybe more than melancholic — maybe more like in a tailspin about what now look to me less like smart, practical life decisions and more like lame compromises. I’m trying not to beat myself up too badly — what’s done is done, indulging in regret means I’m living in the past, not in the present moment, and I’m causing myself pain. But I’ve learned that I can’t just put aside my regrets; I need to resolve them. So I’m trying to stay aware of the vibrations that Patti’s book set off in me, to remember the sense of loss I felt as I read her story, and to resolve to make some changes in my life.

One way that I can easily derail any resolutions to write more or to make art is to say, “But what’s the point? Where will it get me? Will I ever really be good enough?” Patti had her moments of self-doubt too, of course (and probably still does), but she finds a way forward that I’m taking to heart:

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos—the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?... Robert had little patience with these introspective bouts of mine. He never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.

my buddy

I had some bad news recently: last month, my good friend Damon died suddenly, without warning, at his home in Santa Monica. I want to write about him, but I’m in fear of sounding trite or clichéd, since Damon loathed triteness and clichés. But I’m going to try to get something down on paper, as much of a tribute as I’m capable of.

I’m in that state of shock, of disbelief, of confusion and incomprehension that comes after someone close dies. After all, we know that things don’t just disappear. Maybe in a movie, a magician can make something vanish in a pouf of smoke, but in real life, nothing disappears; it transforms, perhaps (water into steam, wood into ash), but it doesn’t disappear. So how can a person — a personality, a force, a bundle of irony and wit and loyalty and irreverence and love — be here one minute, gone the next? How can it be that there will be no more reminiscing, no more dinners out, no more commiserating over life and its travails… How can it be that we’ll never again talk about Mapp and Lucia, or The Pursuit of Love, or Brideshead or Diana Vreeland or Frank O’Hara or our imaginary gardens or Abbot Kinney or Martha Stewart or moving to Bridgehampton/Montauk/the Springs or Alec Guinness or bread pudding or Palm Springs or Follies? This makes absolutely no sense at all.

Damon and I were neighbors at the beach in Venice for the five years that I lived there. Our building was small, with two units on the ground floor (mine in front, Damon and John’s in the rear) and one upstairs. Our apartments shared a patio, so we could zip from one kitchen to the other, if only to commiserate about the latest dreadful upstairs neighbor. (One trashy couple plagued us endlessly. One morning, Damon came to my kitchen door to tell me that in the middle of the night, he just couldn’t stand the TV noise any more. “I tiptoed outside and flipped the circuit breakers for their apartment. Ah, blessed silence. I stayed up all night, enjoying the quiet. Then at 5 a.m., I tiptoed back out and flipped it all back on.” The brilliant crowning touch was a few days later, when the power went out in all of Venice and Santa Monica. Damon and I were standing in the front yard, surveying the darkness, when the upstairs neighbor joined us. “I can’t believe the damn power has gone out again,” he said. “Mmmmm,” Damon replied, studiously not looking at me.)

Damon worked from home and was known to raid my fridge during the day if he was out of coffee or milk, or if was just looking for a snack. I called him one day on his home phone and got “The number you have called has been temporarily disconnected” — he hadn’t paid his phone bill. I thought a moment, then called my home phone number, and Damon picked up on the first ring: “Oh, hi, Siobhan — I’m hanging out in your kitchen till my phone gets turned back on. I drank your Diet Coke.” It’s not everyday (not ever, really) you end up with a neighbor who feels free to commandeer your apartment, and you’re delighted.


Once I moved to New York, Damon and I struck up a feverish email correspondence; the pile of printouts currently stacked on my living room floor is a good four inches thick. They range from frivolity (shopping as therapy) to angsty (the big life questions) to utterly, delightfully inane (the imaginary adventures of our alter egos, a pair of drug-addled b-list types who apparently traveled the world getting into situations with everyone from Henry Kissinger to Jackie O), with a significant portion devoted to books and theater. Pretend you’re me, ten years ago, working at a bland and dreary job, watching the clock, trying to keep up the hateful billable hours, listening to the woman in the next cube (possibly the most inane woman on the planet) endlessly plan her daddy-funded dream wedding, when *ping!* comes an email that starts off like this:

6/6/00: Furthermore, understand completely about states of dispiritedness as have been in one for years. Have often had trouble with idea that Life Is A Cabaret. More often have felt it to be an 8 a.m. lecture on Applied Physics that goes on through lunch. You fall asleep, you wake up, you fall asleep, you wake up, and still some old bald man is droning on about Infrared Frequencies. Talk about your Gravitational Pull! Talk about your Inertia!

Really, is it any surprise that for years, as evidenced by the printed-out pile next to me, I apparently did nothing but email Damon?

We were as like as peas in a pod. A good portion of our email exchanges would probably be incomprehensible to anyone else, since there’s a lot of “As you well know” and “I don’t need to tell you” and “It goes without saying.” The emails are funny — really, remarkably funny, I must say — but they’re also almost painfully honest and raw, filled with our fears and disappointments and doubts (often draped in irony), and our inability to figure out how to proceed.

Checking in before heading off to therapy, the notion of which now bores me to pieces. Can’t get into a talking-about-myself-and-all-my-little-problems mode these days, so just sit and stare at therapist who, in obligatory therapeutic manner, just stares right back. Tick tock tick tock.

We had an ongoing game of coming up with memoir titles. Damon was a pro at this: he had a whole series of imagined memoirs, starting with “I Don’t Mind Walking” (later revised to “No Thanks, I’ll Crawl”) and culminating in what he saw as his late-in-life look back at everything, “Enough Already.” He also had a title for a self-help book on an as-yet-to-be-determined subject, “Brace Yourself.” In real life, he worked in development for the movies, which involved contact with lots of people — famous and not — who were ripe pickings for his acid pen.

2/22/01: Well yesterday was a garden of earthly delights. I had a 3 p.m. meeting at Warner Bros. which is in Burbank or something. It took me four freeways and one hour to get there. It was stop and go much of the way until the clouds finally broke on the 134 and we got up to speeds of 40 m.p.h. However a truck in front of me lost its tarp and its contents began to rain down upon us. Millions and millions of Saltine crackers and dried corn — I AM NOT KIDDING! — snowed the skies. I had my window open so my car quickly filled with these delicious tidbits — meant, no doubt, for the slaughterhouse chickens of West Covina. I mean I was literally picking Saltines and dried corn out of my hair and sweater during the meeting. Plus, I was meeting with one Paula Weinstein who had a toothpick in her mouth the whole time! I AM NOT KIDDING!

Damon’s boyfriend, John, tells me that he wishes that Damon could have had the garden he always dreamed of, and in our emails, there is a surprising amount of garden talk, given that we were each living in apartments, tending at most to a few potted plants. Gardening, I think, represented a way of life outside the day-to-day concerns of the working stiffs, a connection not to nature, but to a civilized, quiet, private life, away from the travails of city living, and perhaps away from our own time (especially after 9/11), back into some idealized 1930s British idyll:

10/9/01: Nerves decidedly shot as evidenced by huge start at sound of barking dog this a.m. Must seriously consider moving to countryside where plan would be to obtain pair of half-glasses and sweater with elbows out which would indicate to world that I am harmless old he-spinster who is to be left alone to write memoirs. Plan includes learning to put up fruit and veggies (“canning” I believe they call it) with possible cottage (literally) industry such as mail-order truffle business to bring in coin. You know what I mean?

My last contact with Damon was after my most recent blog post. Among our many, many joint obsessions was Marian Seldes and her inimitable, regal Grande Dame bearing; in fact, it was Damon who gave me the copy of Bright Lights that Marian signed for me. After reading the Marian post, he wrote simply, “This, of course, has special meaning for me, for several reasons. Thanks for it.”

Since John called me with the news of Damon’s death, I’ve spent a lot of hours remembering my time in Venice, and a lot of hours reading our old emails. I remember Damon telling me that after his mother died, his friends got used to him bursting into tears out of the blue. I feel like that now, going through the emails. In fact, I feel a bit like Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve: zipping from one emotional state (laughing helplessly at some classic Damonism) to the next (in tears at the idea that there won’t be any more Damonisms) and onto the next (so angry at myself that I didn’t keep up the friendship as well as I could have, and thereby depriving myself of the fun and reward of Damon’s presence in my life).

All those emails serve not only as the chronicle of our friendship, but also as a journal of my first few years in New York. Reading them over, I’m struck by how difficult a time it was for me. I was struggling to figure out a career that made sense (still working on that one, but with less angst), struggling to find friends, struggling to meet that elusive “someone special.” I was lonely and isolated, and felt quite at sea most of the time. Our cross-country, 90-percent-digital friendship, it occurs to me now, was probably my most vivid and reliable relationship in those years.

Never having looked back at these emails before, I’d had in my mind that they were mostly just silly, fun exchanges, but I realize now that they played a much more important role in my life. Through his steady stream of emails, Damon shored up my fairly unstable self and helped me through some dark days of the soul. And on top of that, he provided me with a lot of outright joy.


I have a sweet snapshot of Damon and me propped up on my desk, taken during a weekend in Vegas that involved listening to a lot of Abba. Damon is mugging a bit, but I’m just smiling away, clearly so happy — and feeling so lucky — to have such a great pal.