On Crafting A Surprise

Advance warning for those of you who are only in this for the pretty pictures: I didn't see any reason to take my camera or my phone along on this. Sorry. It's read-only today.

Hannah, winning

Long-time readers of this blog may remember that when I first moved here I participated in Quiz Night at the Vert Anglais. The team I was on was Hannah's Bitches, and our team leader, Hannah, was an English woman who'd grown up down in these parts and spoke impeccable French. Somewhere in the talk around the table, I mentioned to her that I knew a couple of the guys who play with Bob Dylan, and she told me that I had to meet her father, who was a big Bob Dylan fan. I told her I'd love to, and that I'd let her know if Dylan was coming to town, which he had in the past. (Tony, the bassist, remembered Montpellier for one thing: great couscous. Not where he'd gotten it, unfortunately).

So now it's three years and some later, I stopped going to the Vert Anglais long ago, bad stuff started happening there, the owners vanished, Hannah got married and had a kid, and life went on. Of course, we friended each other on Facebook. And, earlier this year, in an idle moment, I noticed that this year's Dylan tour of Europe was stopping by in Nîmes, and not only that, was playing the Arènes, the Roman bullring built in 25BC. Hannah immediately got in touch. Her plan: her parents would be visiting, and we'd go to Nîmes "just to have a look around," at which point we'd spring the surprise that not only was Dylan playing, but I'd hooked up some really fine tickets.

And that's pretty much what happened -- pretty much. I got hold of Tony, we talked some, he said tickets were no problem, and we'd talk again when the band got in. Yesterday, I went down to Hannah's tram-stop and in short order a car pulled up, her husband Arnaud at the wheel, and Hannah and her parents in the back seat. It was on the way down that I realized I hadn't been out of town -- at all -- since April. I [heart] Montpellier, but damn, it's nice to leave once in a while. It turned out that Hannah's father, Graham, is such an obsessive that he already knew about the gig, so he'd figured that part out. Hannah told him I was coming along because I needed a trip out of town, which was true.

Obligatory Maison Carré photo, 2011

It was at this point that Arnaud, who'd lived in (and played football for) Nîmes some years back, came into his own. Not only did he find us a legal free parking space about two blocks from the Arènes, giving himself incredible local cred, but we went on a walking tour of the city, saw the Maison Carré, the big Augustinian temple in the center of town, the mysterious Roman ruin near the cathedral (there is no sign or anything on this building, but it obviously is what it is), and, then, we walked to something I didn't even know existed, although I've spent time in Nîmes, le jardin de la Fontaine.

This is a huge park which appears after a walk along a small stream which runs down a paved canal. The walk ends at a large multi-spigoted fountain which is spraying water into the air through some very utilitarian brass outlets: it's not, except for the water itself, an ornamental fountain. Then you turn right and you're in a huge park which ends in a hill, with stairs going up it. These eventually lead to the Tour Magne, a watchtower built on Celtic ruins which is itself a ruin, but we declined the journey. Instead, we just walked around the park, which is filled with basins of water. There is also the "Temple of Diana," which is, like the Maison Carré, all part of the cult of Caesar Antoninius, whose mother was from somewhere near Nîmes. People have been carving graffiti into it forever -- or at least since 1844, which was the oldest date a cursory examination turned up. It turns out that all this water comes from a nearby river, which has been diverted to the city for the textile trade by which Nîmes made its fortunes for centuries. Its signature produce was an indigo-dyed light cotton canvas called tissue de Nîmes, and became known to English speakers as denim. The dyers needed pure water to maintain quality, and that's the reason for all these basins in the park. From what I saw, though, they'd need to clean it up some if they were going to be dying cloth today.

The whole park is very grandiose and French, and was made far more formal in the half-century before the Revolution. Next time, I will walk up the hill, but we had to go get my tickets, so we took another route back and next thing we knew, the Arènes hove into view. I called Tony and he said he was about to do soundcheck, but would be over around 6:30, so I said I'd call again when we got inside. We walked over to the ticket office and right on time two women appeared and, exactly at 7, the windows opened. In a move that was widely approved by the various fanatics gathered around, Hannah was first at the window, yelled at me to come over and hand the lady some ID (a Texas drivers licence was good enough) and next thing I knew I had three tickets and three backstage passes. Sixth row center, on the floor. Man alive.

Once we were at our seats, I called Tony again, and in due time he appeared at one side of the stage, so we walked up and talked to him. He'd gotten an iPod Touch, and was showing off a photo he'd taken in Mexico City recently of "me and another bass player," one Paul McCartney. He even got some playing tips from him! (And this, no doubt, was responsible for the appearance of a Rickenbacker bass late in the Dylan set). Eventually, we went backstage and found Charlie Sexton, whom I'd first seen as a 13-year-old playing with the Eager Beaver Boys, a rockabilly band in Austin in the '80s, and whom I'd seen with Tony the first time I saw Dylan in Berlin. It was great catching up with these guys, and I have to say that Graham and his wife behaved themselves, although Graham, at least, was in fan heaven.

Back outside, we sat through an opening set by Adam "Son of Leonard" Cohen, who is a nice enough guy, I guess, but not ready for prime time. He joked that he had a famous parent -- Céline Dion -- and closed with one of his father's songs, which was a major oops. He was accompanied by a guy who played guitar and keyboards and bass drum, sometimes simulteaneously, and a cellist who was very attractive, but then, I have a decades-long problem with falling for female string players, which is why I've never mocked women who tell me they only go for guitar players.

The Dylan set -- well, I'm sure you can read about it elsewhere, especially since Graham is about to upload a piece to either Expecting Rain or Isis -- was the best I've seen since going to shows thanks to Tony. The band burned, and worked together superbly, and Bob was clearly having fun, spending most of the show at a grand piano on which stood his Oscar for "Things Have Changed," draped with three strands of Mardi Gras beads -- let the interpretation begin! -- and singing in great voice. I was quite impressed with his stage togs, too: white pants, a big round Spanish-style had, and an amazing black jacket with no collar, a V-neck, five silver buttons and three more at each cuff. Bob Dylan, fashionista! I just wasted a bunch of time looking for a picture of him with this gear on, but he and the band had just come from Spain, so maybe he got it there.

I don't go to gigs much any more, but this was a great deal of fun. Graham said this was the best Dylan show he'd ever seen, but he was high on having gotten half the band to autograph his ticket. Still, it was pretty wonderful, and I'm happy to have been able to pull off this nice deception with Hannah.

And, of course, to have gotten out of town for a night!

Mountains, Rain, and a Walled City

Some weeks ago, my old friend John, who, in the years since I've last seen him,  has acquired a doctorate in archaeology, a post at the University of Guam, and a new wife, informed me that he had to come to Europe for a conference and had added some vacation time to that so he and his wife could do some travelling. Montpellier was on the list.

Everything should have been perfect. Oh, it was a little late in the year, sure, and it was neither as sunny nor as warm as it usually is down here, but that shouldn't matter. And then our recent storms hit. More rain than is normal for this time of year. More severe winds than usual. And John had rented a car for three days.

They got in on Friday morning, with intermittent showers, and of course the hotel wasn't ready yet. (He'd managed to score a room at the Hotel du Palais, about which I'd heard good things, which he confirmed: room small yet comfortable, location unbeatable). We walked around town, but the storm held off until we were eating dinner, when it pounded down for a short bit. Fortunately, that was while we were inside, and it didn't start up again until all concerned were back home.

I'd wanted to test out my Languedoc's Greatest Hits tour on someone, and now I had my experimental subjects. Picking up the car the next morning, we did the usual ritual of getting lost getting out of town, but my many expeditions with E. and J. over the summer has taught me a lot about getting in and out of Montpellier despite the horrid one-way tangles and badly-marked roads. Soon we were on our way to the first stop, Sommières, where I learned a valuable lesson: park at the ruins of the supermarket that got done in by the 2002 flood and walk across the Roman bridge into town. It was sprinkling on and off, but the car, a great honking Ford thing, was dry enough, and after we'd run around the town some -- it being a fine introduction to the villages dotted around the area -- we got back in the car, pointed ourselves through the vineyards, and headed to St. Martin de Londres via the road which goes between Pic St. Loup and l'Hortus, with the two mountains appearing and disappearing in the mist from the rain showers which were getting stronger.

We surprised a small herd of wild boars just past the mountains as we headed down into the valley which took us to St. Martin. There, we jumped out of the car, climbed the hill, and looked at the 12th century church and surroundings. This is where the lucky tourist begins to see the magic set in. There's no explaining it, but this tiny once-walled village really has It, whatever It is. It also has a very good little restaurant that makes better-than-average pizzas, and we repaired there for a late lunch.

The next stop was the Pont du Diable and St. Guilhem le Désert, if the rain allowed. It did and it didn't. It was coming down hard enough that we didn't even bother to get out and walk to the bridge (it's visible from the highway anyway) and turned off to the road up the mountain to St. Guilhem in the last gasp of the rainstorm. The Hérault River was in full force, thundering along with plenty of white water, a couple of flash-floods crept across the road, and at one point, a spume of water shot out of a hole in the mountain right by the river, making a dramatic temporary waterfall. This just made St. Guilhem all the more atmospheric when we got there. There's a stream which goes through the town, and it was right up to the top of its banks, making lots of noise. John, as a card-carrying UNESCO consultant, was blown away by the town, its ruins up the mountain, and the near-perfection of the church, a masterpiece of French Romanesque architecture. The absolute lack of tourists, too, contributed to the atmosphere.

So I'd just proved that the Greatest Hits tour worked. John was ecstatic, we'd hit lunchtime perfectly, and we were back in Montpellier by 5:15 in the afternoon, plenty of time for some downtime and preparation for dinner.

The next day, John had two goals. First was to see Nîmes, with its Roman stuff. Second was to go to Aigues-Mortes, a walled city which had once been an important port, not only to see the sights, but to look at the surrounding area, its salt flats, and the way it had silted up, killing the port. He does a lot of work with the archeology of climate change, and he suspected that Aigues-Mortes would confirm a lot of his theories.

We got to Nîmes and did the usual -- the Roman temple, called the Maison Carrée, and the arena -- and would have headed up the hill to the other temple, but we were running out of time, and really, Aigues Mortes was the most important. It's conveniently located between Nimes and Montpellier, and, being a major tourist attraction, it was easy enough to find. And sure enough, it had walls.

We walked in through a main gate and soon found ourselves in the center, where the church that St. Louis used to launch the two last Crusades in 1248 and 1270 is still standing.

As you can see from my typically awful photo, there is lots and lots of tourist tack in town, with lots of souvenir shops open even on a Sunday afternoon. And there were even some (French) tourists! 

The big attraction, however, is the Constance Tower, built to defend the king's house from everything else. The King not only led Crusades out of here, he hung out a lot because the town was built expressly to be the French kingdom's port on the Mediterranean. It wasn't until 1481, 223 years after the port in Aigues-Mortes was developed, that the kingdom of Provence joined with the French crown, at which time the combination of the harbor silting up and the far better facilities in Marseille transferred the royal port over there. Some 204 years later, in 1685, the Edict of Nantes was revoked and being a Protestant became a crime. This caused another uptick in Aigues-Mortes' fortunes, because the towers in the walls became prisons to hold Protestants, many of whom were found right in town, while others came from neighboring communities: the entire Languedoc was a hotbed of Protestantism. 

The Constance Tower is the one visible in the first photo here with the lighthouse sprouting out of its top, and you can go up it and along some of the ramparts for €7, unless you can provide a magic card which says you consult for UNESCO and get in free. It's a pretty cool building (considering that it was a prison) and has a great view of the town from the roof. 

In addition, there are two levels to the tower, and a small window set in its roof, which slightly lessens the gloom -- although today, electric lights also help. 

We didn't even go out to the ramparts, becasue once again dark was settling in, and John had his sights set on something one could see from the tower's top:

That's salt, and they've been pulling it out of the salt flats since the first century AD, when a Roman engineer named Peccatus (an interesting name for all you Latin scholars out there) opened the salt works there. Today, in season, you can visit them by driving to the Sauniers de Camargue plant and getting on a little train which takes you around the modern version of Peccatus' enterprise. Salt-water seagrass grows alongside the road as you go there, and John was happy that his assumptions about what had happened there were apparently correct. 

From there, we headed to Grau de Roi, which wasn't, as I'd thought, just a summertime beach community, but also had a small working fishing fleet. We walked down a short street to the beach, and the Mediterranean stretched before us as dark came on. I made a mental note to come back some time and check out some of the fish restaurants, which were intriguing and not as commercial-looking as some of the others I'd seen. 

Like the ones in Sète, which was our last day's journey. John wanted a plate of raw seafood, and that would be Monday's lunch. To whet our appetites, we climbed the hill in the middle of the town (in the car: we're not stupid) and looked at the panorama from there. There was a bit of haze, so I'm not sure we could see all the way to Montpellier, but there was a great lot of high surf crashing into the breakwaters and the beaches beyond. I'm no judge of these things, but it looked like it was a rare instance of good surfing being possible in the Mediterranean. We walked into the center of the lookout area, where there's a huge cross and a sound installation which was turned off for the season, and John kept staring at the rocks at our feet. "There's a lot of pottery here," he said, picking some up. Then he grabbed another rock. "A stone tool." Really? "Sure. You can get one or two of these breaks naturally, but this has obviously been worked." Great: an unknown Neolithic site right in the middle of Sète. Stupidly, I didn't take the tool home with me, so it's still up there -- along with who knows what else. 

We were about to head down, but saw some signs for another panorama, at a site called Pierres Blanches, white rocks. Curious, we headed down the other side of the hill and found a parking lot. It's a nice park, with lots of local cedars and pines, from which you can see a lot that the other, higher, vantage doesn't show, particularly to the west and north. On a clear day, you can evidently see the Pyrenees, which I certainl didn't expect. You can also see all the oyster beds in the Étang de Thau from both of them, so after John paid his respects at Paul Valéry's grave in a dramatic hilltop cemetery, we headed back down for a lunch of local seafood. A great end to a tour of the immediate area, I thought. 

So this morning, after a visit to the market to stock up on local cheeses and sausages, they headed to catch a train which will take them to Milan tonight, and, tomorrow morning, to Venice. 

Now...who's the next lucky person who gets to take this tour going to be?

Germans in Nîmes

I got an e-mail a couple of days ago from E & J asking if I'd like to go to Nîmes ("the city with an accent," as their current tourism campaign has it) to see the Albert Oehlen show at the Carré d'Art, the Norman Foster building which incorporates the city's contemporary art gallery and its public library. Since it sure beat sitting in front of the computer waiting to hear if my agent's sold my book proposal or not, I said sure, and also notified Gerry, the only person I know in Nîmes, that I was coming.

It's an easy drive on the motorway to Nîmes, and I hadn't been there since about six or seven years ago when it was raining hard all the time and I stayed in the scariest hotel I've ever stayed in, a whorehouse run by a former AP correspondent from the Caribbean. Yesterday, in contrast, was sunny and very warm, and the place seemed to have sprouted dozens of restaurants since I was last there -- or maybe they only come out for tourist season.

I was disoriented at first because the parking structure we parked at was being torn up in a big way. If it hadn't been, I'd have known where we were instantly, so after a bit of confusion we made it to the museum and Gerry was waiting.

Naturally, my photo does no favors to Foster's building, but when E offered to buy us some coffee, we went to the café on top of it and there was a nice view of Nîmes' historic center. That's where the picture of the spic and span Maison Carrée at the top of this post comes from. Last time I was here it was decidedly greyer, but on the other hand you could just walk in and see the miscellaneous antiquities. It's a former temple to Caesar the Romans threw up, and part of its renovation has involved a multi-media show of some sort, which is why there are so many people there on the front porch: limited access -- and no longer free unless you live in Nîmes.

Gerry had business to do before he left town for a visit to Quebec, but we went about doing what we'd come for. Oehlen interested me because he was a student of the late Sigmar Polke, who was probably my favorite contemporary German painter, mostly because of his sense of humor, something many of the guilt-wracked postwar German artists lacked. Not that Polke couldn't be serious, it's just that that wasn't all he could be. To me, that makes a difference. Oehlen has traces of Polke's influences in his work, and in his abstract (and semi-abstract) work from the '90s, he shows a real flair for color, one of the few non-pop artists I've seen who uses actual dayglo in his work and uses it intelligently, peeking out of a corner or coming through a window-like structure that's showing itself through another layer of paint. The next decade brought in his grey paintings, not as interesting, although there's a certain tension between representation and non-representation. It also brought the paintings which are the only out-and-out clunkers in the show, early primitive computer graphics, obviously from something like an Apple ][, blown up to ridiculous size. The things I liked best were paintings with the FM label, short for Fingermalerei, or finger-paintings. These consist of blinding white canvasses with smears of paint, sometimes very bright colors, streaking along them. They look like they were done very fast, although it's also possible Oehlen spent hours worrying over the next move.

Some of them are done over photos, like the one excerpted for the exhibition's posters, which takes a huge photograph of an old woman at a swimming pool, slices it so her face isn't recognizable and then turns it 90° on its side and takes up the right hand of the canvas. Running along the bottom, in some kind of joke, are three stripes in the colors of the German flag.

The pictures are big, but there really aren't any blockbusters here. I suspect his best work is to come.

Downstairs, the permanent collection is a surprise. One kind of expects mediocrity in provincial museums, and one is almost never surprised, but nestled in among the so-so works here (one of which is a long text-driven set of photographs by Sophie Calle, who I'm beginning to suspect might be France's answer to the over-adored German Josef Beuys) are some very pleasant surprises -- many of them by German artists like Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter. They show they're aware of recent trends, since there's a Big Photo by Massimo Vitali of a beach, and a couple of nice Andres Serranos, and, in a dark part of the museum, a really amusing work by Hans-Peter Feldmann which casts magical shadows from really mundane sources turning around on little carousels, and, in the final room, a very subtle work by Christian Boltanski, who has made a career out of obsessing over the losses of World War II while creating works of such deep humanity that you never feel like you're being preached to. I'd say that the curators of the Carré d'Art in Nîmes are doing a good job, given their budget, focussing in on the best stuff they can get. Oh, and the latest acquisition? A FM by Oehlen that's one of his best.

We wandered around a bit afterwards, stumbling on the École des Beaux-Arts that Gerry's wife Shoko is attending, which has a nice staircase in it.

Then we found Nîmes' most enigmatic Roman ruin, which doesn't show up on any of the tourist maps and isn't marked in any way. It is, however, right on the ancient Via Domitia, the Roman road which went through a lot of this area and can be seen marked on the motorway at various points as well as in downtown Narbonne, so who knows what it used to be?

Then we drove back and I got home to find a message that another publisher had turned the book down. Ah, well, there's always another day!

* * *

I'll really be getting out of town next week, heading to Cro-Magnon country to get in touch with my roots. Meanwhile (and utterly irrelevantly), here's a link to me talking about meeting Little Richard.