Miettes Porcines

Been laid out by the flu this past week, which may explain some of the gloom of the previous post, although there are also very good reasons to be gloomy, as this video shows. (Nobody who makes a living writing should fail to watch it). Dunno if it's The Pig or not, but mostly I sleep and stay indoors and feel like my brain's filled with cotton.

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However, I do go out from time to time, and today was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, something I worked very hard to miss by 48 hours, having been in Berlin until the 7th. I had to content myself with our fair city's pathetic attempt at it, and so I wandered onto the Esplanade about 4 this afternoon. The crowd wasn't as big as the one in Berlin probably is, but then, this is France.

(I especially like the evil cop being menaced by the hammer-wielding guy with a West German flag on his shirt).

The event, and the Wall itself, was sponsored by the Maison du Heidelberg, a cultural organization from one of Montpellier's many twin cities, and one of the guys from there gave the first speech, in which he noted that Montpellier was the only city in France with a "hard rock" replica of the Wall. "Other cities have them made out of styrofoam and cardboard, but the one here is hard rock." Concrete, actually, but who's picking nits at a time like this? "There are many Germans in Montpellier," he said, "and there are a quarter-million French people in Berlin." This, although true, will probably come as a bit of a surprise to some Berliners, because they keep to themselves so thoroughly that nobody knows they're there. A friend of mine was out with one of her friends, a French woman who suggested they go to the bar where she used to work. There was a guy at the door who said the French woman could go in, but the American couldn't. They also have their own free newspaper, which, as someone who tried for three years to start a free English-language newspaper, I have to admit chagrins me somewhat. (Okay, a lot).

Anyway, my notes after the Heidelberg guy stepped down read "speeches speeches speeches." There were also a lot of people protesting the wall in Palestine, which is both just and annoying, since after 15 years in Berlin, I feel a little bit of pride in the Germans (true, not Berliners, but largely Leipzigers) who brought about the change in East Germany, and I didn't like their unsung achievements being overshadowed, especially because the Palestine folks are out on the Comédie at least once a month.

One of the speeches was by Montpellier's mayor, Hélène Mandroux, who is tiny. During her speech, the wireless mike began to go out, and the Palestine people were pressing closer and closer. It was also getting too dark to photograph, but just as I walked away, they started playing Beethoven's setting of Schiller's "Ode to Joy," the last movement of the 9th Symphony, and handing out sparklers. I tried and failed to get a shot of that, and walked behind the wall in time to hear some very pathetic hammering going on over on the other side. One thing became clear: the Montpellier wall was not only too small, it was also hollow. But something must have happened, because when I passed by the Esplanade a couple of hours later, it was clearly not there.

Instead, I tried to photograph the sunset on the Comédie, because I'm trying to do a banner for this blog. This won't be it, but it's what it looked like about an hour before I typed these words:

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I got it into my head on Saturday that I could chase this flu with soup. In the distant past, I'd always bought Progresso Minestrone, but I know from experience that I can cook a better minestrone than that, and so I did. I made about four gargantuan portions in the process, but I used up a lot of the market vegetables I had lying around, so I hope I'm in some kind of shape to get down there tomorrow. (Although if not, I'll live).

One vegetable that went into it was those spherical carrots I wrote about a while back, and for those who disbelieve, here they are after I got them back from the market:

The sink looked like I could plant some more carrots in it when I got through scrubbing them, and they still had to be peeled, but they were really good. I'm going to get some of the other odd carrots they have down there when I see them.

Highway: 61

There's no getting around it: I got a year older yesterday. And, as always seems to happen, I found myself ruthlessly looking into the metaphoric mirror, trying to figure out what the past year had meant, and what I'd accomplished.

Fortunately, there was a palpable answer to that: a little over two weeks after my last birthday, I said good-bye to Berlin after 15 years of living there, five of which were miserable, for the most part. I realized my dream of moving to Montpellier, and I've been there ever since.

Of course, that's not a totally positive situation: I have been here ever since, only getting out to explore the surrounding countryside once. And the reason for that is that at the beginning of this year, a major part of the grand plan fell apart: the move here was made possible by a project of ghost-writing the autobiography of a minor music business figure of low reputation, who convinced me that his miraculous and medically baffling remission from leukemia had totally changed him. This, in part, was why he wanted to write the book.

Unfortunately, it wasn't true: he announced in late March that he wasn't going to continue, leaving me to realize that $15,000 of the budget I was working on wasn't going to materialize. Worse, a further $5000 which he owed me for work I'd already done, as it developed, he had no intention of paying me. Unfortunately, I have very little recourse. A lawyer has been writing letters to him on my behalf as a favor, but I haven't heard anything since August, so maybe he's stopped. And, since I hadn't been looking for work in the six months I'd been working on this guy's book, I was caught with no income.

Thus, a lot of plans had to be pulled back. A lot of them. Like buying health insurance. Like getting this flat in order by buying bookcases and getting help installing some lights (I still have unpacked boxes from the move, and haven't a clue about the contents of at least one of them). Like travelling around. This apartment costs over double what my last apartment in Berlin cost, and is only about half as large. It's kind of a slum, but so was that Berlin place, which not only had more room, but a better kitchen. Plus, of course, the dollar has continued to slide since I got here, which, with the higher expenses, has also hurt.

So I haven't been out much, haven't made many friends, and haven't integrated much into the community. I know these things take time, as they did in Berlin, where at least I knew a dozen or so people by the time I wound up living there. Going out for a drink is ridiculous: a beer here costs twice what it did in Berlin -- and it tastes nasty. A glass of wine tastes better, but is the same price.

But there's my other problem, the one I couldn't have anticipated, but which weighs down on me as badly as sitting among the dusty, unpacked cardboard boxes: in April, shortly after my ghostwriting client retreated, saying "sue me," I got a cold. Big deal; it happens. Somehow, the cold caused a polyp to grow in my left sinus, and this, in turn, squeezed the nerve taking taste to my brain. I lost my sense of taste. Weirdly, the squeeze mostly happens at night: I can smell and taste during the day, and then, perceptibly, between 6 and 8pm, it fades. I've gone to a doctor, and he's been treating me, and I've recovered a very small amount of my taste at night, but not enough. At the beginning of the treatment, what must have been some radical drugs fixed me right up, as I mentioned here. But as I went off that regime, things got worse.

I figure I'm lucky: I can't afford expensive wines, or to go to a restaurant unless someone else pays, so being broke during this situation isn't too bad. But the part of being broke that means I can't travel, or that I feel incredible guilt when, as happened this weekend, I had to buy a new CD player for €67 because my old one died, or that I have to seriously consider each time I want to do anything whether I can afford it is oppressive.

I'm also lucky in that I have an ongoing gig with Fresh Air, although it is sporadic and pays public-radio wages, so I'm not getting rich. Unlike a lot of the 14,000 professional journalists who lost their jobs in the past twelve months, I do work some. In fact, that was what I did for my birthday: I wrote a story for the Oxford American, for which I'll get paid in a couple of months. That kind of thing doesn't happen enough, but I'm grateful that it happens at all.

It's really not a good idea to try to plan a year in advance, but I do have some goals. First, of course, is to regain my sense of smell and taste as quickly as possible. I should be seeing the doctor later this month, so I'll know how likely that is. Second, try to get more work. I woke up a couple of weeks ago with an idea for re-casting the Berlin book I had so much trouble with a couple of years ago, the one nobody seemed to understand. I think I've got it now, and I've been working on it every day. The agent I've been talking to is sceptical, but I hope to change his mind -- or find another agent who does believe in the project. There are a couple of ghost-writing gigs also in the air, although they're a long way from coming to fruition, and I'm very open to hearing about others.

Long-range, I hope I can get financially comfortable enough to get out more next year, and, in the very long run, I'd like to get a bigger apartment, although in a country that's even more suspicious of self-employed people (and anyone over 60 who's still working and not living on a pension) than Germany was, that's going to be next to impossible without a huge stroke of luck. But at least, as the Willem de Kooning quote by the PayPal button says, at least I'm not poor; I'm just broke. One's a state of mind, the other's a state of bank account.

So I set foot on the highway numbered 61. For those of you who aren't familiar with American folk culture, US Highway 61 was and is the road that ran north from the Mississippi Delta to Memphis, the road that meant freedom and a perilous new life for those brave enough to get on it. A lot of them couldn't handle the big city, but those who could frequently found the power to change not only their lives, but American history. I guess the fact that I'm still working on it is good news. We'll see what's up when I get to 62. Not that I'm in a hurry.

Autumarket

Time for another market post before I head into shopping hell to buy myself an early birthday present with money I don't really have: my CD player has blown up and I'm in the middle of writing an article for the Oxford American and have a new batch of Fresh Air pieces due soon, so I can't allow that to happen.

The markets are now filling up with root vegetables that I can't identify. One guy even had a single-purpose stand of black turnips, complete with brochures. They're apparently famous -- or he wants them to be. But there were other turnips, some things that looked like carrots only were a pale yellow color, spheres with purple on the top, and carrots that looked like mutants, although I'm holding out for the carottes parisiens I've seen on occasion, which are spherical. Why? Because they look cool. And before long it'll be time for me to make my beef-and-carrot stew using a cut of beef called plat de côte, which GBD up in Paris hipped me to, and which I saw today: super cheap, but super good.

But that's all for the future. Right now, what I've got here is this:

Starting in the upper left-hand corner, a couple of apples called reinette de something, a heritage variety. I bought two kinds on Tuesday, one small and red, and one large and green, and the red ones almost destroyed my plastic lower teeth. I may get some more to make pork chops and apples with, but they also didn't see terribly blessed with flavor. The green ones were juicy and more easily bitten into. Below them, two kinds of pears, one with a red blush which are for eating out of hand (and one of which will be history by the time most of you read this), and the elongated ones, which I suspect will contribute to a salad with pear, walnuts, and the last of my Roqeufort sometime soon. For that, I've got two kinds of salad mixture, which has just started showing up. The one on the left was labelled "Japanese," while the other was just regular old mesclun. And, in front of the parsley, there's a butternut squash left over from Tuesday's market. I'm not at all sure what to do with this, but after the fiasco of the last orange squash I bought, I'm going to research this one thoroughly. (And yes, I know it makes great stuffing for ravioli, but that's a two-person job, and I'm missing the other person).

It's going to be harvest time soon on the balcony, I think. The jalapenos have come in in number, but they're really small:

I guess there'll be enough for one salsa, though, but I'm waiting for some of the smaller ones, like that guy on the right, to catch up. The serranos are, belatedly, starting to bloom, which is nice because they won't cross-fertilize with the jalapenos, but not so good because we're almost certain to get chile-killing weather before they're anything close to ready.

I'm thinking that there's simply not enough sun at my place for successful agriculture, although the summer heat is nice. Or maybe I have to have fewer than three plants per pot. I'm also going to try to start the seeds earlier next year, probably indoors, which should be fun, since I have no idea where I'll put them. Or maybe I just have a black thumb: the basil came up, produced two aromatic leaves, and turned brown. That was depressing.

Okay, time to gird the old loins and head out to the Odysseum with the other 50,000 people who'll be out shopping there. This will not be fun but it has to be done. Unlike last time, though, I'm taking the tram both ways this time.

The Languedoc Video

I've never posted a video before, but if this works, you'll get to see the region's new tourist video. No voice-over, no annoying music (well, almost no annoying music), and some durn good photography. There's very little Montpellier here, and nothing showing the old part, but when you see the blue tram, you'll be around the corner from my house.

Well, there ya go. Be sure and let me know before you come down so I can help you find a decent hotel!

Oh, and thanks to Peter.

Our Lady Of The Boiling Oil

As I said, yesterday I went for a long walk to Celleneuve, and what had occasioned this was that the day before I'd gone on a much shorter walk to find out where this stream that is channelled through a part of town goes. Marie told me about a historical site on the river which I'm not sure I saw, and sent me to this site to read about it.

Well, I wasn't going to stop there. I started reading the Old Montpellier part of it alphabetically, and got down to the e's, e being for église, or church. As I'd thought, most of the churches here are 19th Century, even the Cathedral, which only has bits of the old building (most notably its towers), with the rest dating from the 1860s. They really didn't like Catholics here!

But one picture caught my eye, since the church in it was obviously very old. Aha! I said, I had to go seet this. And it was in Celleneuve. I'd been to Celleneuve before and it seemed like it took a very long time on the bus, but looking at the map, it didn't seem too much further than Castelneau, so off I went.

The church, for all that it's of imposing height, taller than anything around it, is still amazingly invisible. There's a parking garage named for it, so I knew to turn off the main road I'd come along at the right time, and I'd even seen a bit of it rising above the other buildings, but it took me a while to find it anyway, since the maze of ancient village streets surrounding it was so complicated. In the end, I turned a corner and there it was.

That's the tower jutting out into one street. The street to the left in the picture is narrow:

The fact that this makes it dark doesn't matter. The church has virtually no windows. I didn't get inside -- it's only open for three hours on the first Sunday of the month and this was the last Sunday of the month -- but I'd bet it's pretty gloomy in there. I tried a few more pictures, but there was no way to get the whole thing:

Just to get this much, I had to back up against a wall and hunker way down. That narrow window is some ways off the ground.

Walking back home, I reasoned that any church that well fortified had to have something to do with the Cathars, but I was wrong. Apparently the defense was there for when the Routiers hit town. These were bands of mercenaries in the employ of Henry II of England, who roved around the French countryside causing mayhem during the Hundred Years War. (For more on them, there's a Wikipedia article, of course). This fits: according to the entry on it on the historical website, the church was built in the 12th century as the Abbot of Aniane extended his influence into the area, but it was severely modified in the 14th century to defend the citizens, who could gather there when the Routiers were heading to town. According to the article, among the weapons used were large rocks and boiling oil.

At any rate, you should look at the historical website's page for a picture of the whole church, which must've been gotten from the telephone tower or maybe a balloon. I certainly couldn't have taken it from anywhere I was. The entire little neighborhood around it, though, seemed much more ancient than most of even the center of Montpellier, and I wondered what the housing in some of those ancient buildings was like. Probably awful, since the French mostly don't want to live in these old buildings.

They might, just barely, want to live in one of the old "folies," built in the 18th century by nobility eager to show off, however: I passed one, which seemed deserted, except for a bunch of construction equipment, which, according to the notice posted on the gate, had something to do with the new tramway, which is headed out that way. It's called Domaine de la Piscine, and given that a lot of wines have named beginning with "domaine" I'm glad they don't make it there because "piscine" means swimming pool.

On the way, back, I discovered a hiking trail which follows an 18th century aqueduct. Hmmm, might be time to see what that's about...

Things I Like

Ow. I took an 8-kilometer hike today (that's about five miles) to Celleneuve, an ancient village that's been engulfed by Montpellier, and I'll have some on that tomorrow, but along the way I snapped some photos of stuff I like.

Like street art (so much more fun than the Berlin variety, for the most part):

and lizards:

(Thanks for standing still, dude. Have a nice winter!)

And gigantic pine trees, even though their falling pine cones can dent your cranium real good:

It was a great day for a walk, and I know there aren't many more left this year.

Tomorrow, my somewhat anticlimactic goal.

Midmonth Miettes

The Sud de France people set up on the Comédie this weekend, and as you might expect, it was a celebration of fall. The two products most in evidence were ones I don't have much use for: chestnuts and honey. Guys roasting chestnuts over open fires drew large crowds, weirdly enough, although maybe I'm just blasé from having seen this so much in New York. It smells good, but I just don't like the taste of chestnuts. As for honey, I can't really think of anything I want to make that I could use it in.

Another big draw was a truck whose side opened up to show a small kitchen, where several chefs prepared meat dishes while an MC to the side made comments. I didn't have the patience to stand there and watch, and I'm not eating that much meat as it is, thanks to finances. There were a few wineries represented, although nothing too interesting, and a couple of olive producers. The biggest hit with me was the best Roquefort I've yet tasted, from a firm called Carles. Creamy, tangy, with just a hint of the barnyard in it, I regretted not having the cash to buy a wedge from M. Carles, who was handing out little slivers on pieces of bread. I also picked up guides to tourism and gastronomy in the Aude, which is Cathar castle country.

There was also a guy selling squash of various kinds, and I finally got to get a slice of this long, green-skinned squash with a bright orange interior, about five inches in diameter that I've been seeing around the markets. On the recommendation of some cooking experts, I coated it with olive oil, wrapped it in foil, and stuck it in the oven for an hour. It barely softened, but at least I know what it tastes like now, so I'll try to score another disc and try again. The variety was listed as Langue de Nice, and may be known in America as banana squash, but I'm not sure. The guy who was selling it was too surly to engage in conversation: I made a small grammatical error and he switched to bad English, refusing to change back, and sneered at me. I've only had that experience with Germans in the past; maybe he was a spy.

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I frequently awaken in the middle of the night, thanks to Les Lunkheads downstairs coming in and firing up their stereo and throwing bottles at each other, although this has tapered off as the cool weather has come in because they've been keeping their windows closed. But one thing that helps me get back to sleep is a drone that happens in the early morning hours, a drone with a hissing beneath it. It's the sound of the streets being buffed, the streets and, of course, the vast expanse of the Comédie. Small vehicles with buffing brushes cover the square and the many pedestrianized streets, which are made out of polished limestone. As I fall asleep, I never fail to wonder that I live in a town where they polish the streets.

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Since I've wanted to add some art coverage to this blog, I trooped up to the St. Anne church the other day, alerted by one of the free magazines we get in our mailboxes, an "independent information magazine" with the bizarre name Chicxulub, which, it turns out, is the name of the crater in Mexico where the meteorite which allegedly caused the extinction of the dinosaurs hit. They were among the sponsors of the first "Salon du dessin contemporain" there, and although I took a notebook along, I didn't see a thing to engage my interest. I also wondered what it was I'd gone to see. "Dessin," my dictionary confirms, means "drawing," and yet there wasn't a lot of drawing there. There were a bunch of canvases which looked like the kind produced for interior decorators, some of the usual shocking-to-be-shocking stuff, and one piece which impressed me: someone had arranged a bunch of matchheads in the wall in the shape of a phoenix, then lit them. The smoke stained the wall, and after it was all out, four more matchheads, red, were placed where the bird's eye would be. But for the most part, my guess is that this was an occasion for the local galleries to haul out the stuff they haven't been able to sell in order to entice prospective customers to shop under one roof. Oh, and for Habitat, which I understand Ikea is trying to unload, to hand out their new catalogue.

The other bit of art news is some photos by local news photographers being displayed on the Esplanade. Like the pretty-but-depressing Earth-from-above photos by Yann Arthus-Bertrand which had been out there until recently, I thought there would be a larger show inside the Pavillion Populaire, but apparently not. I was going to write about the Arthus-Bertrand show, but it moved on before I got the chance. Suffice it to say that the captions got wearisome, each image of abstract beauty explained, but no matter how uplifting the image seemed to be, there was always a downer at the end about how the resource pictured is disappearing, harming the environment, or wasn't able to be saved. There are other ways to present this material that don't make the viewer want to slash his wrists afterwards.

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But there's another new artwork up on the Esplanade, if only briefly.

That's right, folks! Montpellier now has its own Berlin Wall. Of course, those of us who have seen the real thing will realize, thanks to the street-buffing guy walking in front of this one, that this one's much shorter than the original. Also, the rounded top isn't made of a different material, and isn't even round all the way: it'd be easy to hop this wall. It's also thinner than the original:

But there's a good reason for that: apparently on November 9, the 20th anniversary of the opening of the German-German checkpoints between East and West Berlin, the city's going to hand out sledgehammers for people to knock this one down. I may wander out to see this, although I certainly heard enough chip-chipping from Mauerspechern 20 years ago (the souvenir market must be fed!) and I know this one's not made from asbestos-riddled concrete and reinforced by iron rods.

This little installation is the gift of the Maison du Heidelberg, which is the German cultural presence here. I'm not sure why there's not a Goethe-Institut, but maybe Montpellier doesn't rate high enough with the German culture bureaucracy for one. As someone who lived three blocks from the death strip on Bernauer Strasse for eleven years and then another year by Mauerpark, where the Wall crept up north, I find this sorta pathetic, but it'll probably be fun to knock down anyway.