Merry Miettes of May (With Socialism and Rabbit Turds)

As I said in my last post, it's not like nothing's been happening around here, and besides the pretty much related stuff in the last post, there's been a bunch of miscellaneous miettes-like things piling up on the desk. So, because I hate clutter (short pause for audience laughter), let's clear some of it up. 

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I haven't been over to the Pavillon Populaire recently because it's been one dreary academic photo show after the other. While it's commendable that the city sees the acquisition and exhibition of a municipal collection of art photography, as well as an ongoing number of curated shows during the year as part of its cultural mission, the selections tend to be pretty uninteresting and the rationale behind them full of artspeak. 

The current show, La Volonté de Bonheur (approximately, The Desire for Happiness), however, is something else. Subtitled "Photographic testimony of the Front Populaire, 1934-1938," it documents a tumultuous period in French history, during which some fairly amazing stuff happened. One thing was a huge workers' movement, as strikes turned into general strikes, and the right-wing government was brought down and a socialist one under Léon Blum was installed. As you might expect, the horrors of socialism were inflicted upon France immediately: in 1936 alone, women were given the right to vote, workers were given a 40-hour work-week, and for the first time, everyone got paid vacations. Quelle horreur, non?

It's amazing history, but not such great art, but once you walk through the show, you'll be okay with that. You'll see such familiar names as Robert Capa, Brassaï, André Kertész, and Henri Cartier-Bresson on the poster, but you'll barely notice their presence on the walls. You'll see a lot -- a lot -- of pictures of  cute kids with their fists raised, sometimes along with proud mère and père, sometimes just marching along by themselves in demonstrations or parades. You'll see workers on strike at automotive and machine shops dancing and eating lunch while they're on strike. You'll see lots and lots of pictures of gigantic demonstrations filling the streets of Paris (as with much of French history, you'll never guess that some of it actually did happen outside that city), and I gotta say, the picture used for the poster, by Fred Stein, of the guy perched on the rooftop giving the clenched-fist while a huge crowd below is milling around waiting for a parade is pretty dramatic. 

Stein, a German who relocated to Paris in 1933 and whose work is virtually unknown these days, is the discovery of the show, mainly because he got some good shots while embedded with the Front Populaire, as the huge coalition of all of the French Left was known in these years. There's a Capa that's identifiable as a Capa, but this is reportage, not art. The one exception is Cartier-Bresson's famed 1936 series of photos of French working-class families on their first vacations. There are a couple of vitrines in the show with magazines that are approximately "how-to" guides to vacationing, and a separate series by Pierre Jamet shows daily life at an "auberge de jeunesse," or teen summer camp, and you might want to check out the slideshows of his work here if you can figure out how to get in. 

This is the kind of show you want to go to on a rainy day, because there's lots of reading to do, and, if you're not up on French history, some of it will require catching up with later via some online resources. As Hitler grew in power, the Front Populaire went from being "like a convivial village fair," as one of the captions describes the general vibe, to the usual squabbling of the Left, with the Stalinists (surprise!) not helping a lot. By the end of 1937, it was over. 

La Volonté de bonheur: Témoinages photographiques du Front populaire 1934-1938, until June 9 at the Pavillon Populaire, Esplanade Charles de Gaulle, open Tue-Sun 10am-1pm, 2pm-6pm. Admission free. The show will also be at L'hotel Fontfreyde, Clermont-Ferrand, from Oct. 8-Jan 4. 

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Je suis désolé, mais je le doute

* * * 

Now that it's getting warmer, street life is picking up, and there are more beggars than before. As I was doing the laundry the other day, though, there was a young couple in the laundromat who looked familiar, talking in a language I didn't understand, but which sounded familiar. Aha! It came to me: Russian. Their familiarity was explained when a third person joined them, with his dirty clothes in a knapsack, and a cardboard sign which fell out as he was getting them ready for the machine: J'AI FAIM! AIDEZ-MOI! I just knew that the three or four people I saw with these identical signs had to be  connected, and I was right. That they were Russians didn't surprise me at all. They always have a small dog of some sort, too, because they know that that softens the hearts of the old ladies they depend on for their take. And just a few days ago, a new guy joined them. Of course, he had to have his own sign, and I guess they didn't have a spare dog at the moment, but they did manage to come up with a gimmick that was even better for attracting attention: his sign read J'AI FAIM! AIDEZ MOI! VIVE LA FANCE! It worked, but it was only temporary: I saw him the other day with a new sign and a dog. 

* * * 

Ever since I got here, there's been a "tropical" store on the rue de Faubourg du Courreau, which is what St. Guilhem turns into when it crosses the Boulevard de Jeu de Paume. I always wondered how they made money, since they were in a huge space and didn't have much stock, and then they expanded next door and started selling wigs. I just noticed today that they're gone, but people who need South American stuff, frozen African fish, and, on rare occasion, fresh corn tortillas (yes!) can still find them. A much smaller (and, for me, closer) store has opened. 

La Pangée keeps long hours and seems to have most of the good stuff from the old place. They're kind of hidden, but maybe word of mouth will keep them open. There are lots of things like sweet potatoes and yam and plantains and okra, and mysterious Central and South American things I don't recognize. As I keep saying, I have nothing whatever against French food, but I also like to encourage diversity. 

La Pangée, 12, rue de Balances, 34000 Montpellier. Open Mon-Sat 9:30am-8pm, Sun 10:30am-5pm. 

* * *

Finally, some news from the suburbs. I keep passing a parked car with one of those things you don't see the first few times you notice it: a sticker for a local baseball team. Yes, baseball. (I still remember my shock at having to have it pointed out that there were a bunch of Bulgarians playing baseball when I was there: apparently it's a very popular sport in that country.) 

But yes, they're the Clapiers Rabbits. I'm not sure what this is all about, but "clapier" is a word for a rabbit hutch, although the name of the town is derived from an Occitan word, according to the official Clapiers website. And, although I can't find the word I'm looking for, I was in Clapiers a couple of years ago with a couple of French women who noticed a sign on a local bakery and started giggling. It mentioned that among the specialties you could buy there (it was Sunday and it was closed, sorry to say), were XXXXX de Clapiers, the famous candy. The missing word, which provoked the giggles, I was told was a slang word for rabbit turds. Which, assuming they're made from chocolate, might be good. Meanwhile, best of luck to the Clapiers Rabbits for the upcoming season. 

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Gotta go. I swear, I had another item here, but Mme. Merde's been screaming into her cell phone out in the hall for the past half-hour and I've lost the ability to concentrate. More news as it happens!

The Ugly, The Bad, and The Good

I've inverted old Sergio Leone's formulation for the simple reason of leaving you, dear reader, with an uplift rather than a, um, downlift at the end of this post. And I'm writing the post because I haven't written anything here for a month, and gee, you'd think nothing had happened. Of course, you'd be partially right. Still, if you have a delicate constitution, you might want to skip down to the bad.

The Ugly

One of the best things about this past summer was that the family that lives directly above me was gone.  I say "family," but I'm not quite sure what the actual structure up there is. One thing that's inescapable is that there is a woman, who is much younger than she sounds, and she has two children, a boy of perhaps eight (I'm terrible at guessing kids' ages) and a toddler who is sort of pre-verbal, or just on the cusp of talking. Who the kids' father is, I have no idea. There are two men who are sometimes there. One is young, like the woman, and dresses sort of hip-hop. The other is tall, skinny, and much older, and is prone to long spells of coughing, the kind you expect to end with the thud of a body hitting the floor and, soon, the arrival of an ambulance crew. When I see him on the stairs, he's rarely without a cigarette. But he's apparently still alive. 

The thing about this crew is that the woman, who is clearly the alpha of the group, knows only one way to keep them in some kind of order, and that's by yelling. I have to say, for someone as short and slight as she is, her voice just cuts through everything, including the doors, windows, and walls of my apartment. You have met her here as Madame Merde, in honor of her most-used word. It's like the punctuation at the end of most of her sentences, at least those declaimed at the highest decibel-count in her range. I have no idea what, if anything, she does for a living, but we do have an opera company in town, and it's occurred to me more than once that with a little training, she could project right to the back of the auditorium. 

She's got a very cavalier attitude towards the fact that she has neighbors, though. She shakes out the bedding and the rugs every morning, which hasn't been a problem lately because my windows are closed. That's not going to be the case very much longer. She smokes constantly, which means ashes. When the window here by my desk is open, it accumulates cigarette ash -- far more than it ever did back when I smoked. She's got troubles, too, ones she doesn't want the kids to hear about, so she takes her cigarettes and her cell phone and sits in the stairwell and talks and talks and smokes and smokes, and sometimes she sobs. I don't listen in, despite the fact that her already loud voice is amplified by the acoustic chamber of the stairwell, or the fact that she sometimes repeats things over and over, like the other night when whatever she was talking about involved Sète, Aix, and Montpellier, words I heard a lot. You'll notice I didn't mention her taking an ashtray out into the hall with her. Guess how I know that. 

Her boy is, of course, a problem. Well, hell, I was at that age. And although I've heard her yell it now for a couple of years, I have no idea what his name is. He seems to be a nice enough kid, sometimes kicking a football around in the street, sometimes hanging with another kid his age, but he does torment his little sister, and he went through a period of being fascinated with gravity: two of the apartments across the courtyard have broken windows from his throwing toy metal cars. 

Besides his name, the words most commonly yelled upstairs are "merde" (of course), "dépêche" (hurry up), and "arrête" (stop). He often whines back in protest, which just causes his mother to raise the decibel level some more. The other day, they really got into it. Eventually, he bolted, ran outside, and, agitated beyond his usual level, leaned over the railing of the stairway and puked his guts out. 

The stairwell in happier times

I was here, working or reading or something when this all happened, but shortly afterwards I had to go out. Unconsciously, I grabbed the railing there on the right and...it was slimy. And it burned. And I ran back into my apartment and washed my hands with soap. It had been an hour or so since this incident, and, as I discovered on my next venture out, not only had Mme. Merde not cleaned the railing, she hadn't cleaned the steps, either, where the majority of the discharge had landed. 

Nor has anyone, over a week later: this was last Tuesday, and there's a reason for my noting that. We supposedly have a cleaning service that comes in and does the public areas of the building, and I get charged €30 a month for them, but that now-dried patch remains. 

The Bad

There's a cumulative effect to this constant conflict upstairs. It's that listening to angry people all the time is wearying. I'm not the one being yelled at, yet there's an unconscious perception of the emotion that acts sort of like it would if I were. This shouldn't be a problem I have to deal with, but it's just one element in the growing dissatisfaction I have with my immediate environment. When I was on the road in March, I found myself pondering an odd question: why is it that I had no problem putting my pants on in hotel rooms, yet I occasionally lose my balance when doing it at home? I had thought I was getting unstable in my old age or something, but really: zip zip and my pants were on. So I consciously thought about this when I got back here and made a discovery which led to a set of discoveries. My bedroom is so small that I don't have room to spread my legs out enough to put on a pair of pants. Moreover, I realized the other day, I've become used to stepping over the corners of the bed to get over to the window leading to the tiny balcony, which is open during the day to let in what little sunshine gets to me, and, in nice weather, fresh air: hop, hop. To get to the closet-like thing where my socks live, I have to shut one of the panels of the window, which ordinarily blocks it. And this led to other discoveries: unconsciously pulling back one shoulder or the other as I go down the hall to the bathroom or kitchen, so as not to knock over anything or spill a cup of coffee going from the kitchen to the desk. In short, I'm too big for this apartment, I have too much stuff in it, but I'm not prone enough to claustrophobia to have noticed this. 

This is what you see from the door when you enter this place.

And this is the view from the other direction

Come November, I will have been in this place, with its insane tenants and obscene rent (which was raised at the start of the year), for five years. Five years of cooking on two electric elements jammed as close together as they can be, showering with an implement that's essentially a hose with a showerhead on it that barely reaches the top of my head and that requires the use of one of my hands at all times because it doesn't hook onto the wall, and navigating without bumping into anything. With luck, come November, though, I won't be in this apartment. 

Where I will be, though, remains a big question. There's the fantasy of renting a big, inexpensive apartment in Barcelona. In fact, an old friend from Austin put me in touch with a friend of hers who's lived there for many years and is in the process of buying a new place and divesting herself of exactly the kind of apartment I've fantasized about, and at some point I'm going to head over there to look at it, although neither of us knows when it'll be empty or when I'll have the dough to make the move. There's also the question of whether I want to learn two new languages (Catalán and Spanish, although just Spanish in a pinch) in order to make this move practicable. Whether I want to, hell: if I can is more like it. I picked up a teach-yourself-Catalán course and...am not making brilliant headway. Or, to be honest, any. 

Where I will not be, most likely, is France. Which I hate to admit, because I know the language here and there's a lot I like about the place. There's a part of me that wonders if it's not time to go back to the States, although it seems, in many ways, the most foreign of my choices. The politics scare me. The lack of a social safety net scares me: imagine my health crisis in December happening in the U.S. I would likely not live long enough to see myself get out of debt. But French society, as I have noted elsewhere on this blog, is set up in a way that's antithetical to the way I live, urging a regimentation on people that I resist almost on an organic level. 

So what's to do? I hear Portugal's nice. Stay tuned. 

The Good

As I said, the incident with the kid upstairs happened a week ago this past Tuesday. As a lot of you know, that's one of the market days, where I walk across town to the outdoor market and buy stuff to eat for the next couple of days. On this particular Tuesday, one of the vendors had plentiful wooden baskets of tiny strawberries, garriguettes, so I bought one and enjoyed them on some breakfast cereal the next morning. There was also the first reasonably-priced asparagus, some fat peas in their pods, and what may be the last spinach for a while, which became part of a northern Indian chicken, spinach, almond, and raisin curry. 

This week's, not last week's, and only what's left two days after purchase.

These twice a week trips have gotten me eating better, losing weight (and not just from the two-mile walk that a trip to the market entails), and increasing my cooking skills immensely, even on that wretched excuse for a stove in my tiny kitchen. (Another sad thing about the space-crunch in this apartment is that it's far too small for me to have anyone over for dinner, which has been part of my socializing routine for decades). They're reminders that I'm in a part of the world, which, unlike Berlin, pays close attention to the seasons and rests in surroundings capable of producing a huge variety of natural products. (Incidentally, for my friends in Berlin, I just read a book which casually noted that the ancient Prus, the ancestors of the Prussians, were pre-agricultural until the thirteenth century! Dang, no wonder they never developed a cuisine worthy of the name.)

Wherever I wind up next, I'm pretty committed to continuing this way of life. It doesn't cost a lot, and it's good for me. I'm very thankful that I discovered this, even if it took me most of my life to do so. 

And I'll be back here with another post soon, believe me. It's just that the post-trip comedown this time was hard to deal with, and, as you can see, I'm still dealing with some of the fallout. 

Unpacking: Miettes and Other Observations From the U.S. Tour '13

For a number of reasons, this year's trip didn't lend itself to being blogged in great detail. Ah, but that's okay. I know you folks don't care about my personal and spiritual journeys, the little epiphanies that make up daily life. No, what you're really wondering is what did he eat? So...that and more follows.

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Actually, I didn't have many more food revelations in Austin, and in fact one evening I even had cold leftover pizza for dinner! Other than that, it was mostly returns to old favorites or stuff that doesn't bear writing about. Some of this, of course, is due to my current dental woes, the next big project to be worked on. 

Odds are, however, that I'll be back before this time next year, so I'll probably be blogging that. 

Meanwhile, what's sticking with me is my journey back to France, which happened over a week ago. I've known for a long time that it's not a particularly smart thing for me to be on the road for over three weeks at a time, and this was no exception. By the time I got to New York on the way back, all I wanted to do was leave. I saw some friends for dinner one night, and that was fun (although several were missing from the usual crowd), but the next day I mostly stayed in the hotel room and counted the hours til I could go to JFK. I was looking forward to Barcelona, and, eventually, to being back here in The Slum. Go figure. 

* * * 

I was more pooped than I'd figured, but at least I got out to the Good Friday procession I photographed in the last post. The prose accompanying that was supposed to be zippier, but the so-called high-speed Internet at my hotel was anything but. When I post a picture here, it can take as long as a minute to upload, since some of them are big files. Those pictures took between 12 and 35 minutes each. I complained to the lady at the desk as I was checking out and it appears she listened: she took a day's use off. (And Swisscom, the company that charges an absurd €17 for this "high-speed" service, actually had the temerity to send me a customer satisfaction questionnaire. Which I filled out, of course.) Anyway, between the endless wait for the pictures to upload and my jet-lag, I wasn't as inspired as I might have been. Sorry. 

That first evening, I had the address of a tapas bar that had been recommended to me, but I wasn't about to venture into a new part of Barcelona. Instead, there was a Slow Food-connected restaurant on the corner, so I decided to splurge a little. Mata Mala turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. A huge, spacious room with texts as decoration, selling wine and cooking equipment as well as meals, it also has a tapas bar. Everything is dedicated to local recipes and sourcing, and the waitress not only spoke English, but was extremely knowledgeable about everything. I started with an onion soup that had some cabbage and -- nice touch! -- pieces of pear in it. The soup bowl arrived with the ingredients laid out in the dry bowl, and then the broth -- which was much like the broth of the classic French onion soup -- was poured from a pitcher onto them. A quick stir, and there you go. The waitress also did something unexpected. She asked me if I'd like some bread with it, and then brought a basket of excellent bread. I'd noticed on the menu that bread with olive oil and salt was €3.95. This was €1.00, without the olive oil and salt. The soup was then followed by an incredible rabbit cooked in vermouth.

It was garnished by the biggest green olives I've ever seen, big old mouthfuls, each of them. The vermouth is a nice touch: lots of bars in Barcelona advertise that they make their own, and this seems like it's worth investigating at some point. I know very little about vermouth except that it's essentially a fortified wine, and I've done some cooking with it long ago. (In fact, I just remembered one thing I made that may make me purchase another bottle...) This was rich and complex. It was also accompanied by a bottle of Alonso del Yerro, a 2010 tempranillo, that was just as rich and complex as the rabbit, with undertones of spice and earth that were still developing as the meal went on. And no wonder: I doubt I'd have ordered it if I'd seen the label first. It weighed in at a whopping 14.7%! A magnificent meal and, should one not spend as much as I did on the wine (which was half the entire bill), surprisingly affordable. Barcelona has a bunch of good restaurants in it, so it almost seems like a shame to keep going back to the same ones, but Mata Mala will see me again. 

* * * 

In Which I Learn A New Word In Spanish: If only the next day had been as wonderful as that meal was. All that remained was to pick up my ticket back to Montpellier. I'd ordered and paid for it on line once my schedule for the end of the trip, which had never been fixed, became clear. It had been bad enough changing the New York-Barcelona ticket on Delta, none of whose online stuff was working (they even told me to go to the wrong terminal at JFK!), so I figured this would be easy: I had two codes which, when presented with the card I'd bought the tickets with, would result in the issuance of my ticket. I'd even gotten a nice bargain: first class tickets for the same price as second class. So I took the subway to Barcelona Sants Station. 

First, I stood in the wrong line. Then, I stood a while longer in the right line. The ticket agent spoke no English or French, but he refused to give me a ticket. "Go to France," he said, and then took to ignoring me. Ridiculous, I thought. I'd bought a ticket on Renfe, the Spanish national railroad, in Montpellier, so why couldn't I get a Renfe/SNCF ticket in Barcelona? I went to the Customer Service department. There, nobody spoke English, either, but "No" is easy enough to understand. I protested: I'd spent €80 on the piece of paper in my hand! Where was my ticket? The woman at the counter and her boss stared at me, then extended their arms with the palms of their hands facing down. Putting their fingers at a 90-degree angle to that, they made little sweeping gestures with them. "Fuera, fuera," they said. 

"Get lost. Go away." 

I remembered that, a couple of years ago when I'd missed a connection in Barcelona, the tourist information people had been very friendly and helpful, so I went and stood on that line. The woman there didn't really speak English, nor could she figure out why I couldn't get Renfe to give me a ticket. But I had to wait until her colleague, who spoke much better English, she assured me, came back. This took about 15 minutes, during which I helped a couple of English tourists understand how to get to the airport, thereby helping out the tourist info lady. Finally, the other woman returned, and her English was worse! But a tall, elegant Spanish woman who'd just been helped said, in virtually accentless English, "I speak English. Perhaps I can help." And she did. I told her what my problem was, she translated, the tourist info lady then went off with me to some machines to enter the code. Which didn't work. Back to the Customer Service desk, where the same two unfriendly people were, and they told her that it was impossible. Finally, she deposited me with a ticket seller who told me that the only thing I could do was buy another ticket -- for a little over €80 -- and issued one for me. Same train, same time. But it cost me €160 to get home. Of course, when I was back, I looked at the ticket I'd bought. The first half, to Figueras, was non-refundable. The Figueras-Montpellier ticket was non-refundable after the time of departure. The moral of this was simple: have a hard ticket and don't expect any cooperation between Renfe and SNCF. You don't want to get fuera-fuera'd. 

* * * 

The rest of the day consisted of going to the Corta Inglés, the huge department store on the Placa Catalunya, to buy boxes of chicken broth (a product utterly unavailable in France!) and some ham chips to season food with, then hiding in my hotel room from the hordes of tourists until it was dinner time. 

Fortunately, I was in good enough mental shape to attempt a trip to a neighborhood I'd never been to, Born, for a visit to the Bar Celta, famous for its Galician-style octopus. Yes, it's a tapas bar, but the prices were so low I wasn't sure I'd ordered enough. The waiter, though, had good impulses, and here's 3/5 of what I ordered. 

Padrone peppers, ham croquettes, the famous octopus. Let's not forget the anchovies:

Again, those mammoth olives. And, although oil-cured, these weren't those aggressively fishy, super-salty anchovies you get in American pizzerias. Gotta figure out how the Spanish do it. The star of the show wasn't the surprisingly underflavored octopus for which the joint's renowned, though. It was something that, I calculated, I hadn't eaten in 43 years, and I'd already started in on before I thought of photographing and then decided not to. Razor clams! These were tiny next to American ones, but no less flavorful. Quickly cooked, then doused with olive oil, they were sweet and nutty. What a meal! I'll be back to this place, too, next time. 

I had a 6am wake-up for the train, and still had to pack, so I walked back to the hotel and collapsed. The next morning, I was all too ready to leave. The incident at the train station had affected me disproportionately, and made me wonder if I really did want to move to Barcelona. I can't make that decision now, at any rate: I don't have the money or enough information. But it did puncture the fantasy some. Still, isn't that what fantasies are for? 

At least the trains on Easter Sunday were deserted, and I looked off into the Pyrenees as we sped along towards France. Summer wasn't even a hint yet. And the year ahead is more of a mystery than ever. 

Good Friday In Barcelona

Oboy! More narrative discontinuity!

On the plane to Barcelona from JFK, most of my neighbors were Delta flight attendants, headed to Barcelona to crew some future flights to the U.S. One of them was new, and asked the crew what its being Good Friday when we landed meant in terms of things being open and so on. One of the folks was from Barcelona himself, and he said that not much would be open -- restaurants excepted -- and that there would be a huge parade. I asked him for details of this, and he gave some. Basically, what he had to say was a condensed and less specific version of this.

As I checked into the hotel, the lady at the desk said that oh, yes, it was definitely not to be missed, and so around 4:45, I headed down the Ramblas to the street where the parade would cross on its way to the Cathedral, carrer de l'Hospital. Remarkably, the thing seemed to be starting on time, as a couple of horsemen made their way up the street and the cops pushed people back from the parade route, hemming it in with some tape.

The first to arrive were two guys in old-time uniforms atop two magnificent horses.

That, however, was all we got to see for a long time. Off in the distance, though, Jesus was coming.

First, however, were these spooky people, some of whom were women.

The various devotional articles they carried were beautiful, and, like the shrines being carried, no doubt lived most of the year in the church. There was an honor guard for Christ, and everyone in the parade took it very seriously, as the woman below seems to show. The priestlet (I guess he's actually an altar boy) is giving a dirty look to the guy whose head is at the lower left, who was snapping the parade with an iPad. Note to digital idiots: if you want to take a picture, buy a camera. Don't hold something the size of a magazine up and block everyone else's view. He became so obnoxious the police moved him on.

At any rate, Jesus had his own band, made up of bagpipers, and I wished I'd recorded them, because the music was sweet and not the kind of thing one hears every day.

Following these folks came barefoot penitents, carrying crosses.

Some of them enhanced the experience.

More KKK-looking guys, this time with green velvet caps and doublets and white gowns.

I haven't researched any of this particular phenomenon, but I believe these all are members of societies within the congregations devoted to worship of a particular saint or aspect of the religion.  At any rate, they were the honor guard for the guest of honor, whose float was next.

The Virgen de la Macarena is the patroness of Barcelona, and as she passed, a man in the crowd near me, head thrown back in ecstacy, shouted "MACARENA!" to which the crowd responded, then "MOST BLESSED VIRGIN!" and ditto, then "QUEEN OF HEAVEN!" and as before and then three more MACARENAs before subsiding. Me, I was fascinated by her little buddy riding on the front of the float.

No idea what that's about. Finally, her float passed (these floats are borne by men, who, invisibly, do this all as a demonstration of faith, and considering the amount of silver and gold on them, this is a fearsome feat of endurance), a brass band (with a single bassoon, something you don't see much), visible on the left,  played solemn music, and the parade moved on to the cathedral.

Much props to the Guardia Civil and the police, who kept order without raising hackles, controlled young kids with a sense of humor, and kept the show on the road. I was hoping to have this posted while the parade was still going, and it may still be, but the Internet at this hotel, which charges €17.95 a day for access, has taken between 12 and 35 minutes to upload each of these photos, there's a restaurant across the street I've wanted to try for a while, and I'm starving. So if you'll excuse me...

U.S. Tour '13, Part 3: Eating Louisiana

Hope you don't mind a bit of discontinuity here. I'm busy trying to sort out what bits of SXSW '13 belong here and which belong in my other blog, for which I get paid. Much of it will probably be posted in a follow-up miettes post. But the fact remains that, after the circus left town, things got a whole lot better. My friend the great composer Carl Stone came to Austin, and plans were laid to head over to Acadiana to investigate the year's crawfish crop, as well as to ascertain whether or not Ville Platte really is the "Smoked Meat Capital of the World," as it advertises. It would be an arduous trip, but meanwhile we had to eat.

Chef George came through like gangbusters on the first evening: he'd found a real good Mexican restaurant and wanted us to try it. He lives in a part of town that I don't think was a part of town when I moved to Austin in 1979, and I sure had never seen before. We had to pick him up, but the actual directions to the restaurant, which is called Mi Ranchito, are easy: find Manchaca Road and follow it until it ends. (If you wind up on Lamar you've gone the wrong direction and must be from out of town). Many Austinites are unaware that Manchaca has an end, but it does, at some FM (farm-to-market road for the rest of you), and as you sit at the light, it's just to the right and across the street. It's easy enough to order, too: everything's eight bucks. Well, except for a basket of chips, which cost a rather amazing $3.00, the most I think I've ever seen. But without them, you can't sample the incredible salsa bar, which has a poblano salsa and a "spicy avocado" salsa, both of which look like they're mayonnaise-based and aren't, a roasted tomato salsa, some pico de gallo, and some basic salsa ranchera, as well as other things you might want for your meal. Oh, and the meal: George's was carne asada, perfectly grilled strips of marinated beef mixed with nopalitos (cactus pads), Carl got a couple of mole enchiladas with the best mole sauce I've ever tasted, and I got three fat tamales (pork, chicken, and jalapeno-cheese). Our friend Jon was along, too, and I'm damned if I can remember what he got. There's no alcohol sold there, but the food'll get you high enough.

(Mi Ranchito Taqueria, 1105 FM 1626, Manchaca, TX. Open daily 6am-10pm, except Sunday, 10am-3pm)

Our second dinner in Austin, however, was a massive disappointment: Maharaja, the amazing Indian joint we'd found last year, also with George's help, with the Goan fish dishes and wide South Indian menu, including several goat dishes, had turned into a tame North Indian joint with all the stuff you can get anywhere, a couple of Goan fish dishes, and one goat dish. I'm sorry to have to retract my endorsement of this place, because they've obviously had to knuckle under to customer pressure from customers who are ignorant of Indian regional cuisine in order to stay alive. What Austin needs is a whole passel of Tamils to come work in the tech industry!

On Wednesday, we headed out, and found ourselves ready for lunch as we hit Winnie, Texas, home of the great (but disgraced) record producer Huey P. Meaux, where Al T's advertises heavily on the highway and enjoys a good reputation. Undeservedly, I'd say: my boudin link was dull and contained MSG (although not a lot), but the fried okra was good. Don't remember what Carl had, but he was not impressed. We pressed on and got to Breaux Bridge, where we started trying to connect with my old pal Dickie Landry, who currently plays with the Little Band of Gold, CC Adcock's smokin' outfit, and once played with the Philip Glass Ensemble. Oh, and Otis Redding, but that was a while back. He didn't call back, so we went in to downtown Breaux Bridge to the Cafe des Amis, where I'd tried to go last time. Last time I couldn't get in because it was closed. This time, the place was jammed and the hostess (honest to god) had no idea when we could be seated. I'm going to get there some day, but not this trip. Instead we settled for an old local favorite, Pat's Fisherman's Wharf in Henderson, up against the levee. Great gumbo, and half-and-half crawfish (half fried, half etoufée). The fried weren't as good as the etoufée, which I should have figured out. Just as we got there, Dickie called back, apologizing because he'd been entertaining visitors as usual. This time it was Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz from the Tom Tom Club (and of course Talking Heads before them) and they were at Don's Seafood in Lafayette. So we joined them for drinks, except that the bar was already closed (at 9:30!). Still, it was nice seeing them again, and the three-inch oyster shell on the table signalled that Don's might be worth a revisit. The evening ended with Dickie showing us the photos he'd selected for an upcoming book of his photographs (he also paints, being a multi-talented guy), which includes the only known photo of William Burroughs smiling.

Thursday was the investigation of the Ville Platte claim. It's a lovely drive up there, and once you're there, the Chamber of Commerce/Visitors Center is one of the friendliest places on earth. They explained that the smoked meat title was due to the many small meat markets that were just about everywhere in town, and set about pinpointing a few of them on the map. We were on the trail of a young chef who'd served a tremendous meal to an Austin musician friend, but he turned out to be the son of the best friend of one of the women in the office, and she said he now worked in Baton Rouge, which was a little far to go for lunch, especially since we hadn't yet chased down the smoked meat. We had some seafood boudin waiting for us at Paul's, the first one on our list. It was part of a gas station -- as were many of these little places.

It turned out that Carl avoids offal -- weird, since he lives in Japan, where they eat even odder fare -- and so wouldn't touch regular boudin. A real shame. But the seafood boudin was flavorful and chunky with pieces of shrimp and crawfish.

Teet's is diagonally across town -- not that that's a great distance. They also do mail-order, apparently, and I'm all in favor: we wound up scoring a hunk of tasso and a pound of severely delicious smoked garlic sausage there, and the counter personnel couldn't have been friendlier, especially as we introduced ourselves as being from Tokyo and France.

The guys at Teet's know their meats. 

The younger guy was concerned that perhaps I had never had boudin (when I lived in Texas, I consumed twice my weight of the stuff, but I didn't mention that) and he came up with a link. Not their greatest product, not even close to the best I've had, unfortunately. And we struck out at lunch at a café I won't name, because the people there were super-friendly, but the food was totally undistinguished. It would appear that there's something in the water in Ville Platte that makes the people friendly: after lunch we stopped in at the headquarters of Slap Ya Mama hot sauce, which Dickie had recommended, and one of the fellow customers, who was from St. Martinville, struck up a conversation with us, too, and we had a great discussion of eats with the gal behind the register, who was horrified at the idea of eating eels. Problem: Ville Platte doesn't have a decent restaurant, from what we could make out. Someone needs to fix this.

We'd heard that the very best boudin in Acadiana was at T-Boy's, but it turned out to be in Mamou, which was going to be our next stop anyway. It's not on the touristed main street (which is a nice change from the long line of abandoned storefronts I remember from years past), but out in a remote corner of town, because it's not only a meat market, but a slaughterhouse, too. I was too full to get a link of boudin, though -- a problem with travelling with Carl that's similar to matching drinks with a British or Finnish person. How do they do it? Nobody knows. But I've stored this info away, and the way T-Boy's winning awards, I have no fear that he'll vanish.

Dickie had been raving for years about a crawfish place called Cajun Claws in Abbeville, and I was eager to try it (although not as eager as Carl). My concern, though, was that my teeth would have problems with the crawfish. I'm down to two properly-working teeth, and can't bite at all. Proper dental attention will come soon, but at the moment, I'm dentally challenged. Dickie assured us there was stuff on the menu I could eat -- etouffée, bisque -- and there was a branch of Cajun Claws right in front of our motel, but I knew all they had was boiled crawfish. So we trucked all the way to Abbeville to find...that all they had was boiled crawfish! The waiter helped us mix a concoction of mayonnaise, worcestershire sauce, Cajun Power garlic sauce, horseradish, Tabasco, and granulated seasoning like the kind that was on the crawfish into a dip which I used for my potatoes, but which turned out to be for the saltines on the table. No matter, the stars were the mudbugs:

Obligatory mouthwatering crawfish photo

On the one hand, we could have walked to the Cajun Claws in Breaux Bridge, but on the other, these giants -- really the largest crawfish I've ever had in quantity, although any beer-tray full often has some big ones -- were perfectly prepared (my dental fears were quashed because the tails were easily extracted) and the whole crowd in the place was fun to watch.

Big Al is Prejeans' famous mascot. 

Breakfast has always been a problem in Cajun country, but we made an amazing discovery. Prejeans in Carencro is hardly unknown, being that rare thing, a tourist trap with great food and great live music. It's also one of the very few places around that serves a real breakfast, and it opens at 7am for it. We had something called a Napoleon, which was a potato patty, topped with a crab cake, topped with a poached egg, smothered in a hollandaise sauce with shrimp and crawfish tails in it. Not something I'd want every day, but sufficient fuel to get us out of town.

Soon enough, we were across the border.

Odd sign; SXSW was already over!

Once back home, there was nothing to do but to grab the groceries I'd bought and get cooking: my famous jambalaya recipe, which I hadn't had in years, smoked garlic sausage and tasso being very hard to find in Europe.

Once the rice absorbs the liquid, it's dinnertime!

And now, I believe I won't eat much more for a while. How long do you think I'll stick with that resolution? I'm still in Austin, after all.

U.S. Tour '13: Entr'acte

I finally made it to Austin, and look who I bumped into at the airport. We hadn't seen each other in something like 30 years and he still remembered me.

photo by the lovely and talented Patricia Collins

Then I checked into my hotel, and a couple of days later emptied a coffee-cup into my computer. This was because the hotel's wi-fi had fried my e-mail program and I was trying to fix it. Yes, it was a stupid thing to do. But it happened and I had to take the laptop down to the Apple Store, which took just under a week to fix it.

I'll detail this whole thing a bit more, but I've only had the machine back for about 24 hours, and have a lot of stuff yet to do. Tomorrow I'm leaving for a couple of days in Louisiana, and I'm taking the camera. I have some good food news about Austin (no pix: I'm getting a little self-conscious about shooting food pix in public), and I'm sure I'll have some from Louisiana. Kind of impossible that I won't.

On the music front, please be on the lookout for these two guys:

That's Marquise Jones on the left, and Julian Agacannoo on the right, dunno the percussionist's name, but I owe them $5 for making joyous avant-garde jazz in the streets, probably the most creative music I heard in all of SXSW Music. I talked to them briefly, and Marquise explained that the plastic tube gave each of them access to overtones they wouldn't normally have been able to blow. It was like the World Saxophone Quartet cut in half, or some of the loft jazz from the '70s, played by young guys with skill and enthusiasm. I only had some $20 bills, and I was only able to listen for a few minutes, so I owe 'em. Power to those who respect and build on the tradition, and may they thrive and prosper.

Back soon with a much larger post.

U.S. Tour '13, Part 2: Brooklyn and Art

Yes, it's a real nice hotel. Not cheap. And, while it's easily accessible to Manhattan by subway and water taxi (more on that in a moment), it's not easily accessible to the rest of Brooklyn, where the alleged action (and the Brooklyn Museum) is. Plus, this has been an action-packed couple of days here: edit and record Fresh Air scripts, lunch with my agent to talk about this huge book project I've spent the last year writing just the proposal for, and wanting to squeeze in a little culture as horrible weather descended. I'm writing this now with three inches of snow out the window, hoping I can get to JFK in time for my flight to Austin. I can, but it's not going to be fun.

But still: this is the view from the terrace to my room:

At night the Woolworth Building and the U.N. light up real nice, too.

I'm also real near the pier where the New York Waterways' water taxi stops. It's a slam-bang cowboy ride across the East River, and they take off the second the last passenger gets on. Here's the view from the pier. Not shown: a number of cats who seem to live among the concrete slabs.

I've mostly liked it here. The mixture of Poles and hipsters is workable, although I fear gentrification is on its way, and when it comes to eating, it's the former who rule. I went to a restaurant called Anella which is very highly rated, not as expensive as you'd suspect, and so French in execution vis a vis ingredients and seasonality that I was put off -- I can do that at home! But it's worth your time. More attuned to the terroir of the street is Krolewskie Jadlo, where an ex-employee of hot New York restaurant Nobu is doing excellent traditional Polish food. I started with bacon wrapped around prunes, and moved on to stunning venison meatballs in a rich mushroom gravy, studded with pine nuts (I think) and surrounded by slices of potato dumpling with flecks of spinach. The meal starts with an amuse-bouche of cracking fresh cucumber pickles and a little dish of some kind of pâté and slices of immaculate white bread, obviously from one of the bakeries lining Manhattan Avenue. There's also a terriffic, um, I hate to use the word "gourmet shop," but I don't know what else to call it in the neighborhood called Eastern District, with a great beer selection, as well as cheese and charcuterie. They even stock Moxie, America's most undrinkable soft drink! They're challenged in the charcuterie department by the many Polish meat markets (and mini-markets with meat counters) lining Manhattan Avenue, and passing them on a cold rainy day when a customer sweeps out of the store trailing a garclicky smell of fresh sausages is a swoon-worthy experience.

* * * 

I had lunch Tuesday with an old friend, and at meal's end, he did some prestidigitation with his iPhone and determined that every single art museum and gallery I wanted to visit was closed. Who closes on Tuesday, for cryin' out loud? New York, apparently. So I swept up to the Whitney on Wednesday, and was overwhelmed: five floors, four shows, the permanent collection (which isn't that permanent, since they keep changing out the artists), and pretty much all of it great. 

I went to see the Jay de Feo show, which is the big buzz, and deservedly so. I of course went to see "The Rose," the gigantic work on which she toiled for eight years and then, evicted from her apartment, donated to the San Francisco Art Institute, which then built a wall in front of it so it remained unseen for twenty years, until it was rescued by the Whitney and restored. No biggie: she kept going, and your response to this show will likely be mine: how could such a major talent paint so many great paintings and be pretty much totally unknown? Part of the answer is that San Francisco's art scene is about as philistine as it gets: I once interviewed a very famous artist there who told me that as soon as the paint was dry he'd crate up his painting and send it to his dealer in New York, because nobody in San Francisco would touch him. He liked living there, but he couldn't make a living there. De Feo eventually did, and as you wander through the galleries getting your mind blown, you see her story come to a satisfying end. 

Then, on another floor, we have Sinister Pop, a really audacious look at a movement you thought you knew well. I actually followed a lot of this carefully as a teenager and saw a lot of it in galleries and group shows, so I wasn't as surprised as I might have been, but the curation, the way these pieces are brought together and hung, is right on the money. You don't have to see Warhol's huge quartet of electric chair paintings to realize that Pop, in its critique of consumer society and the Vietnam War and the oppression of women and minorities -- and yes, it did all of that -- had a side that wasn't all soup cans and Great American Nudes. Here it is: great stuff. 

The only show I wasn't totally wild about was Blues For Smoke, on tour from the L.A. Contemporary, a kind of, um, well it's hard to say. Examination of the theme of the blues in contemporary art? Curatorial concept gone pear-shaped? Overthought, theory-laden mess? Doesn't really matter: I loved individual pieces, like Kerry James Marshall's Souvenir IV, a tapestry showing a black angel on a couch as the spirits of blues and jazz musicians hover above her, or Martin Wong's La Vida, a huge painting of a couple of tenements with the denizens at the windows (click the Images link on the exhibition's page to check these out). On the ground floor is an odd video piece called Hors Champs (off-screen) by Stan Douglas, interesting mostly because it's a documentation of Albert Ayler with a very small band playing "Spirits Rejoice," which is worth your 13 minutes or so.

The current selection from the permanent collection, American Legends: From Calder to O'Keeffe, is of course worth your while, loaded as it is with masterpieces. This whole thing was so amazing that it made up for all the other downsides of this trip, and just revisiting it for this post makes me happy. I've only been to the Whitney once before, ages ago, and I can't remember what I saw, ecept one piece does stick out: a tiny village made out of clay hidden behind a window on the staircase, one of several that a local artist was bombing the city with in the '80s. It's still there: Dwellings, by Charles Simonds. Check it out. 

Time for me to shut the computer down and check out and hope that I get out of here on time. More news as it happens!