U.S. Tour 2012 Part Four: Texas, Food and Miettes

New York sighting: The Long Island Railroad can take you from very near JFK airport to Penn Station in one nonstop journey, and on it you'll pass a large Presbyterian church. On its side, in non-movable letters, is the most enigmatic Bible verse I've seen in a long time, albeit one which sort of makes sense for New York:

"But you who pass by, to you all this means nothing."

My guess is that, if you take this back to the original Greek or Aramaic or whatever, it might just be translatable as that wonderful New York mantra: "Fuck you, you fucking fuck."

Okay, that's today's Bible lesson.

* * *

Austin thinks it's in France. After getting here and getting settled in and all, I called up Chef George on Monday to see if we could hit some barbeque joints for lunch. First stop was John Mueller's trailer on S. 1st St. The son of the legendary Louie Mueller of Taylor, John had a great shop here a few years back which disappeared after being open just long enough for me to have lunch there. Boy, was that good. Now, this place is reaping the kudos. But it's closed on Monday. And Tuesday, for that matter. Then there was the thought of hitting Franklin's, because he's doubled his pit capacity and allegedly the lines aren't as long. But no, he's closed on Monday. 

"Well," George said, "that taco truck out in Montopolis that has the quail enchiladas doesn't put on airs. It'll be open." So we drove and drove and drove and pretty soon we were in Montopolis and found the laundromat where this place sets up and it was closed on Monday. 

It's okay for the French to do this. It's part of being French: why start the working week by working? But you expect better from Texans. However, on the way to the nonexistent quail, we'd passed a place I'd never seen called Ray's. At least it was open (or at least it had cars parked in front of it). We went in the door and...

Oh, my. Tender, moist, flavorful brisket. Fall-off-the-bone ribs, including an end-piece that was pure heaven. And -- and Texas barbeque fanatics will understand this -- even the sausage was good. Ray is a genial guy with a sure hand when it comes to meat. The idea was we'd try this and then George would take home the leftovers. George left empty-handed, albeit very, very happy. As was I. Sauce from that squeeze thingy down there in the lower left was just enough to let you know it was there, but not overly obtrusive. 

Ray's is on the corner of Montopolis and (I swear) Monsanto. He's open from 11 to 3 Monday thru Friday. And yes, he does catering. 

*  *  *

Stuff always happens when I leave a place. I left Austin and it turned into a food town. I left Berlin and there are Mexican restaurants -- good ones -- there now. Unfortunately, some of the more interesting stuff I've heard of is happening at food trailers, and it's currently cold and rainy in Austin. Nobody's complaining, since they're coming out of a two-year drought, but it does make it difficult to seek that genre of food out. So instead I've been visiting some old favorites and taking recommendations from friends. 

One friend wanted to go to Hai Ky, voted Best Vietnamese 2011 by the Austin Chronicle. I guess a lot of students who don't know much about Vietnamese food must be voting, or else this is the only Vietnamese place they've ever been. There's phô, of course, and a lot of Chinese stuff as well. But my friend had a secret weapon: number 101 on the menu is something called Hu Tieu Ap Chao Chay, which is like nothing else I've had. Really thick rice noodles are cooked and laid on top of one another, and then the mass is chopped into squares along with other vegetables, stir-fried, and sauced. 101 gets you tofu, but there's also a meats version with shrimp, pork, and chicken. It's not going to change your life for $8.99, but it's worth investigating for its fascinating mix of textures and tastes if you're at one of their outlets. 

Another friend met me for dinner at a place she chose, full well knowing that I'm trying to avoid French  food, which I can get anytime in France, on this trip. I won't embarrass her, but the place we went, Eleven Plates, was, for all intents and purposes, a French restaurant. The wines (both of the ones I had were excellent, a zinfandel I didn't recognize, and an Olema Cabernet) were well-chosen, and the dishes were perfectly cooked. I remember Patricia Wells saying that if you want to scare a French chef, you should order roast chicken, so I did. It was fine. Being a nice guy, as I said, I'm not going to embarrass my dining partner, but, ahem, where are we going next? That's not French?

And in other dining-out news, my old friend Sappachai, who's had his ups and downs in the Austin food world ever since he was passed over for promotion at his grocery store job in my neighborhood, probably because he wasn't American enough for the brass 35 years ago, has had another bump in his career when his wife, with whom he managed the three Madam Mam's Thai restaurants, featuring the fantastic cuisine of northern Thailand where they were both from, divorced him. She got two of the restaurants, but I'm happy to report that Sap's Fine Thai Cuisine, at 4514 Westgate Boulevard, the one he wound up with, maintains the quality in fine style. Even though he reported to my friends last night that we've known each other for 35 years (impossible, since one look at him and you know he can't be that old), I'm going back before I leave. 

*  *  *

However, some food things in Austin never change. I was stuck in traffic (another thing that doesn't change, but only gets worse) the other day behind a car with a bumper sticker that said "I [heart] TOFU!" and, with traffic moving so slowly, I had plenty of time to think about that. I mean, there are plenty of Ron Paul bumper stickers (unaccountably, lots of the local geeks love him), and I saw one touting black powder and the NRA this afternoon, but...well, I like tofu, myself, with a good ma po do fu or homestyle bean-curd showing up often enough in my own cooking, but a bumper sticker? What kind of person gets enthusiastic enough about tofu to stick that on their car? 

Ah, well. It's only Austin. I'm slowly entering the waters of SXSW Interactive for my other blog, and will spend most of tomorrow there, if all goes as planned. And the tour goes on. 

U.S. Tour 2012, Part Three: Art, Travel

I wasn't quite sure what to do. The hotel required me to check out by noon, and my plane didn't leave until 8:20pm. I'm an avid enough museum-goer, but was without an idea for one to go to. Sort of out of cowardice about having to make a decision, and after finding out that the Museum of the City of New York was way the hell uptown, I settled for the Museum of Modern Art.

MOMA has always been an odd place for me. For one thing, it was the only museum in New York that I went to that charged money. Big money, too: something like $8, when I was a kid. When I worked at the Metropolitan, though, we got a Museum Employees Identification Card which got us in free to any museum in town charging money, so I'd go frequently, and ogle a first-rate, if stuck in time, collection.

Now there's a whole new building with an apartment tower stuck in the middle of it, and the reviews when it reopened were devastating, although it was so long ago now and I hadn't had any recent experience to judge the criticisms against that I can't remember what the foofaraw was about. But I had about six hours to burn, so I figured why not. There was also something I'd read in the New Yorker about a photo exhibition of John Cohen's work, so I scrawled the info onto a pad, left my luggage with the bellman at the hotel, and headed uptown.

It was a good choice. I took the elevator to the top floor, and went into the current blockbuster, the Cindy Sherman retrospective. Sherman has always fascinated me, an artist who takes pictures of herself made up as any number of other people, but never pictures of...herself. (A recent Times story had a picture of her by someone else, the first I'd ever seen. She doesn't look anything like those people!) She came to my attention via her justifiably famous series of "Untitled Film Stills," back in the punk era, but I'd only paid attention sporadically since then. Her stuff didn't seem to come to Europe, or at least not at the shows I attended, so I knew her mostly from the odd photo reproduced in the press. Seeing them all together, though, especially the post "Film Stills" period, with large, glossy color prints, paradoxically made me less, not more, interested in her than before. Other than finding newer and cleverer ways to disguise herself, was there anything happening in these pictures? There were ideas explored -- Cindy as a bunch of classic paintings; Cindy as clown; Cindy as rich women -- but besides Cindy, what was there? Invoking feminism, it seems to me, shuts off the discussion prematurely: yes, she's critiquing how women are portrayed in photography, but that's easy enough meat, and are those many shots of (Cindy as) middle-aged Long Island dowagers even critiques? Furthermore, critiques aren't exactly art itself. It stops short of art. After walking through the gallery (and love her or hate her, you'll find ample material to support your view), I felt like...I'd seen a bunch of glossy photographs of Cindy Sherman made up as a bunch of stuff. Um, okay. What's downstairs?

Oh, what was downstairs was James Rosenquist's F-111, one of my favorite paintings. It was hung in Leo Castelli's gallery in 1965, and was the subject of a brutal review in Time magazine, which I read. Some weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon, three high school students from the suburbs walked up the stairs to Leo Castelli's gallery to see it, only to find the gallery closed. Castelli heard one of them trying the door, and opened it. "Can I help you?" he asked. I stammered something about wanting to see F-111 for myself, since I didn't believe it could be as bad as Time had made it sound and he ushered us all in to the gallery to take a look. And it wasn't, although all three of us were devoted peaceniks and compeltely against the Vietnam War, so we were inclined to be sympathetic. But we got the consumer critique along with the anti-war message and the message of the bright poppish colors, plus, of course, the mammoth size. Boy, is that sucker big. "Do you like Robert Lichstenstein?" Castelli asked, whipping out a soon-to-be-shipped copy of Dante with illustrations by the renowned Pop pioneer. And there was more. It was a magical afternoon, and I sure can't say anything against Rosenquist or F-111 to this day. Or Castelli, for that matter. It was nice to see.

From there it was a quick trip through the remembered favorites in the 20th Century Paintings and Sculpture galleries greeting other old friends and, as with the mammoth DeKooning Woman, meeting new ones I had ignored or hadn't figured out yet on previous visits. And I have to say, right up to where my frequent trips to MOMA ended, the collection is absolutely first-rate. The policy of switching works off meant some of my favorites weren't around (Yves Tanguy's Multiplication of the Arcs! That huge-ass black swipe of a Motherwell!), but there was certainly enough that I didn't feel cheated.

(There's Tanguy for you).

It's only when the collection gets into the era in which I wasn't visiting, basically from 1970 to the present, that I begin to wonder what's happening. Was there a boat they missed or something? Because my memory of that era doesn't really jibe with theirs. Hell, even the Metropolitan's work from that era beats some of these lackluster things. It's like there's some dull obligation to recognize AIDS and reply to the Gorrila Girls when they reminded them of how few females were in their collection, but the best works to remedy those situtations had already been sold. There are some good things, make no mistake: a first-rate Keith Haring mural, for instance, and three floating basketballs courtesy of Jeff Koons. Or maybe I was suffering from visual fatigue, although I don't think so. Anyway, from there I found the photographs, and a huge amount of space devoted to Sanja Ivekovic, one of the tiresome hectoring Eastern European post-Communist "political" artists I moved out of Berlin to avoid, and I began thinking about lunch.

Oh, but I also thought about John Cohen. Hm. Ten short blocks north on Madison. Okay, why not?

My decision was motivated by my discovery that some of the photos documenting Happenings I'd seen the day before were taken by Cohen, whom I'd first discovered as 1/3 of the great folk group the New Lost City Ramblers. I knew he made films and photos and also did field recording, but I'd been ignorant of the degree to which he'd been involved in the larger Bohemia of his era (he turns 80 this year). I also knew he was currently (sometimes) playing with Peter Stampfel (and Stampfel's 20-something daughter and some other crazed types) in a band called the Ether Frolic Mob, which I hope to see some day. It seems that Cohen gets more interesting by the day, so I rang the bell of the L. Parker Stephenson Gallery, was buzzed in, and entered a room hung with black and white photos like the above (used without permission but with a plea for forgiveness), of Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, and Gregory Corso, all no doubt plotting something nefarious. I was given a tour of the photos -- the earliest of Cohen's work, showing some street scenes in New Haven, taken when he was still at Yale, pictures of gypsies, and some remarkable shots grabbed at storefront churches during gospel programs -- by L. Parker Stephenson herself, which formed a nice framing parenthesis to my memories of Castelli. Gallerists: they're not all in it for the money, no matter what yesterday's stroll in Chelsea might lead one to believe. Anyway, this show's up until April 12, held over by popular demand, so get up there and check it out if you have the chance. Yes, it's early days, and yes, he'd get a far sight better, but this is still good stuff.

* * *

This proved the perfect way to waste the afternoon before heading to Austin. It occurred to me, typing the above, that the museum I need to hit next is the Whitney, because then maybe I'll get another clue to contemporary art acquisition politics in New York. I'll be back at the end of the month, but, after a 90 minute delay getting out of the gate, a short trip through the weather systems that spent most of yesterday destroying the Midwest and South, and a lot more flying, we landed in Austin after 1am, the rental car counters were all closed, and I took a cab to my friends' place. I scored a car this morning, and now I'm ready to rock, so maybe the next post will be...later. But there'll be one, no worry about that. See you then. 

U.S. Tour 2012: Part Two: Art, Food, Art, Food

My, how things change. There are now so many galleries clustered over by the waterfront in Chelsea that empty storefronts post "This is not a gallery" signs and this building seems to boast its dichotomy of tenants. Although really, who's to say Moleskine and Stella McCartney don't produce art of a sort?

I was over to look at a show of some early works by Ned Smyth at Salomon Contemporary, which was reassuringly difficult to find. Small room, too, although they may have more space than I saw. Smyth, whom I interviewed about a year ago, is best-known for his public art, began his career with pieces made from concrete which were quite unlike anything anyone had seen before: straight lines and arches placed in classical proportions. They were abstract, but also partook of the dimensions of the Renaissance Italian palazzos he'd seen as a kid accompanying his art historian father to Europe. I shot some pictures, and I'd like to say the reason the tops are cut off is to preserve the copyright, but it's mostly because it's the best I can do with a phone.

Another reason these photos don't work is evident from my having seen the originals: the placement of each object, simple as it is, is crucial. That third work, for instance, is way off. I stood in the wrong place, or else I was looking at it wrong, and I didn't get it. The photograph doesn't communicate the proportions. At any rate, this show is part of a series Smyth is curating for Salomon, and I'll be back at the end of the month to see one by my old friend Dickie Landry and to see his solo performance at the Guggenheim.

As long as I was down there in Artland, though, I decided to go looking for another show I'd read about which interested me at the Pace Gallery. (Also, I have to admit, the fact that it was advertised on banners attached to the lampposts didn't hurt in jogging my memory.) I'd taken part in a very late Happening by Alan Kaprow at one of the New York Avant-Garde Festivals while I was still in high school, a collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen that also involved Allen Ginsberg and who knows who else, and by "taken part" I meant that I was there. A lot of the Happenings were intended to break down the barrier between "performers" and "audience," although, as I realized when I finally found the right branch of the Pace Gallery (a very sniffy young man at the first of their locations I found gave me the address, just a few blocks away and then asked me if he should write it down, obviously thinking I was senile) not all of them were. I hadn't realize the extent to which Red Grooms and Jim Dine had been a part of the scene, either, but one thing this show did was make it crystal clear that written documentation and descriptions, and even blurry contemporary black-and-white films don't capture what it was like to be there while these things were happening. Pardon the pun.

The other thing I wanted to do while I was on the first part of my U.S. trip was to hit the Strand Bookshop. 18 Miles of Books! the awning says, but I didn't find any of the ones I was specifically looking for. Browsing, however, found a couple, thereby proving my oft-cited adage that you can't browse a bookstore with a browser. The rest of my browsing I'll save for the fantastic Book People in Austin, which is a dangerous place for me.

At that point, I realized that all this walking (I'd walked all the way from the hotel, through two galleries and gotten misdirected by Google on my phone) had made me ravenous, so I solved that with a big bowl of ramen in a spicy broth with ground chicken in it and a six of gyoza to start at a place called Ramen Takumi at 90 University Place, between 11th and 12th St. The gyoza were feather-light, crunchy on the bottom, with a flavorful pork filling, and the noodle soup was astounding. I haven't had ramen this good since I was in Tokyo in 2001. Check it out.

And I finished the day out with a visit to a Thai place which had come highly recommended, Zabb Elee, in the East Village. It was a mixed bag: the spicy mixed seafood salad had a wonderfully piquant dressing, the little hunks of pickled garlic were a nice touch, but the squid was inedibly hard. Lighter touch, folks! I'm still curious enough to go back, since it's a novelty serving food from a region in Thailand that hasn't generated a lot of restaurants in the U.S. Fortunately, it did in Austin, where my friend Sappachai and his wife Mam eventually opened three stunning restaurants featuring this cuisine. Recent news has them divorced, so I'm waiting to find out what that means to their restaurants, since she got two and he got one.

I'll find out soon enough: I leave tonight for Austin, and have a whole afternoon ahead of me to do more exploring, but I have to check out of the hotel now. Stay tuned as the U.S. tour 2012 moves to Texas for a couple of weeks.

U.S. Tour 2012: Part One, Acculturating (With Miette)

And so it came to pass that it was time for my annual U.S. tour. Sunday morning I boarded a plane to Paris, and soon found myself at GBD's place high atop a hill in the formerly unfashionable 20th Arrondissement, where he and I caught up on old times, he got to play with my iPad (these things are just not happening in France, oddly enough), and we had a typically wonderful home-cooked meal, the product of collaboration between him and his partner Anne. The next morning, he drove me to a bus stop, where I saw a last vestige of Montpeller: a tesseract Space Invader, set into the screen of an old Mac icon, mounted on the Pelleport Metro station. The bus took me to the Gare de Lyon, and I caught an Air France bus to Charles de Gaulle Airport. The bus goes through some of the most hideous of the Paris suburbs, and runs a very short loop of videos. I was glad they weren't running the sex-tourism one that I probably saw 15 times during a bus-trip into Paris one time when the bus got stuck in a traffic-jam. It was about the terrible penalties imposed on pedophile (male) sex tourists, and featured a bald guy with a bunch of teenaged Thai girls getting whisked off to prison by the Thai police.

The trip was uneventful, I'm happy to say, since I was on an Airbus 380, the new gigantic double-decker plane which might just be the future of profitable passenger aviation. One very nice and soothing feature of this behemoth is that it has three cameras, one in the nose, one in the tail, and one facing straight down. That latter one makes for soothing ambient video, since the resolution isn't so hot, but you can see clouds or water or landscape in a sort of abstract way. I mostly read (this trip's big experiment is loading all the books and magazines I'd usually take onto the iPad, although I'm afraid I'm going to wind up buying some books as soon as I pass a bookstore), but I also watched The Artist. All I can say is, if that's the best movie of the year, I don't regret not going to movies. Was it better than the disappointing Midnight in Paris? Not really.

Thanks to Marie, I knew to take the AirTrain to the Jamaica Station and catch the LIRR in to Penn Station, and the fabulous (and inexpensive, thanks to PriceLine) New Yorker Hotel. The rooms are small, but worth it to stay in such a magnificent Art Deco pile. Turns out Marie works right next door, which is good, because she had my new phone, and handed it off to me before going back to work. I got the thing set up (yes! I now have a US phone number!) and after I tried to figure out how to use it, I went out to dinner with her at a pretty mediocre joint attached to the hotel. I was too pooped to do otherwise, and I had a full day ahead of me.

My plan was to go up to the Metropolitan Museum shortly after it opened and spend as much time as I could there. Along the way, I learned a valuable lesson: sometimes it pays to think about popular music. The A train stops just downstairs from my hotel, and seemed to be a good way to get uptown fast. Right. It is, but if I'd remembered the lyrics to the Duke Ellington classic, I would have gotten to the Museum faster: after stopping at 59th St. it rockets up to 125th St and you're in Harlem. Which is nice, but I wanted to be at 86th St., so I turned around and got a different train back. I got off, and walked through Central Park, and soon the bulk of the Museum loomed into view.

I'd worked there in the fall-winter of 1966-67, and had barely been back since. It's grown, and there are some magnificent new additions, including a greatly expanded Egyptian area (not my favorite part, but there are some excellent things there, including this guy):

When you can spend your lunch hour hanging out with artworks, you get so you have friends you visit, and he was one of them, because the employees' cafeteria was just off the Egyptian section.

The big news there was the American Wing, recently opened and supposedly state-of-the-art, and I eventually found my way back there. It's two things in one: paintings and sculpture, and "decorative arts," ie, representative rooms with furnishings, off of which there are displays of ceramics, china, and other such things. I was interested only in the paintings, since anyone who's ever visited me at home knows that interior decoration isn't exactly one of my passions -- or talents. And the paintings are spectacular, particularly because although the Museum didn't cotton to them earlier, in recent decades, it's begun to include more "naive" or "folk art" style works. This means that there's a distinctly modern feeling to a lot of the older stuff there, as paintings made by itinerant painters are hung in rooms near rooms lined with painters of the elite. Of particular interest were some "rack pictures," in which various items are painted as if they were sitting on a board, tromp l'oeil style.

This one's by John F. Peto, but the one that really impressed me was John Haberle's A Bachelor's Drawer:

The incredible skill here is hard to see in this reproduction, but suffice it to say that the black and white girly photo there in the lower right center is, like everything else in the picture, painted. These oddities are absolutely part and parcel of American art, if only as weird footnotes, and they keep the collection from grandiosity and masterpiece fatigue. Because, as everyone now knows, Washington Crossing the Delaware is in this collection, as is Singer's Madame X, a goodly selection of Winslow Homer, and it finishes up with some superb Ashcan School stuff I'd never even heard of, and want to revisit.

The other notable thing in the Museum -- but only until March 18 -- is The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini, which is one of those shows I forced myself to go to because it isn't really in my sphere of interest. It convinced me. It's fascinating following the development of the actually recognizable portrait through the years. You start out with pictures which are as notable for the haircuts and clothing (and boy, did Renaissance dudes have some haircuts!) and wind up with representations you could pick out of a lineup. As a bonus, they often throw in landscapes in the background which demonstrate the growth of that art as well. Some of these artists were real cowboys: Pisanello was famous for his two-hour sittings, out of which he'd make pencil sketches and send you on your way, then get to work with the oils. If need be, he could work quicker than that. This is a fun show, believe it or not, and Berliners have already had a chance to see it. If you're in New York, you shouldn't miss it. If you do, however, there seems to be something of a virtual visit if you click the "artworks" link on the URL above.

Did I have enough culture for one day? Man, I hit the Arms and Armor, with this Colt masterpiece, recently acquired:

(click the photo and look at that decoration up close), the European Painting, the Arts of Oceania (very weird stuff, like this longboat and its prow)

and Greece and Rome, never my favorites, although this lion is a piece I have uncommon affection for because it lived very near the door where we went to pick up our paychecks.

But no, I wasn't through with culture yet. I had a 6:15 appointment downtown with Justin Kantor, one of the folks who run Le Poisson Rouge, a nightclub which often presents classical music. He's going to be on a panel I'm moderating at SXSW, and I figured I should at least see what his joint was all about. He kindly let me stay for the evening's concert, a program of French music by the chamber ensemble ACJW, made up of Juillard students and at least one instructor. They started with Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and ripped right along, finishing up with the Poulenc Sextet for Wind Quintet and Piano, a favorite of my youth, and evidently a lot trickier to play than I'd thought. It was the only piece of the evening where there were small stumbles, but the palpable energy with which they played it made up for them. Around me, people were eating, drinking, and not talking. Dang, how civilized!

After dinner at a nearby Vietnamese place on Mac Dougal St. that Justin recommended (okay, but not great: I should have hit the Indian street food place next door), I went back to the hotel and crashed. Jetlag and considerable energy did me in.

* * * 

FOOD NOTES: So far, except for lunch, the food's been pretty disappointing. A nearby deli breakfast proved to be horrendous, the Vietnamese place, like I said, was so-so, but The Cafeteria, at the Metropolitan Museum, was a find: good value for money, excellent variety, and child-friendly (although the way the kids I noticed were acting, I wonder if it isn't too much for parents to wait until they ask to go, rather than force the experience on them). I had a nice tempura roll from a skilled sushi guy, but I could also have had fried chicken or various pasta things, or a salad. Today, I was wary of my agent's lunch suggestion of a place called Mà Pêche, which seemed to have too many puns in its name, and was run by a celebrity chef called David Chang. But it turned out to be just swell, kind of a progressive take on traditional Vietnamese ideas like summer rolls and banh mi sandwiches. I make a better summer roll sauce, but otherwise the ingredients were top-notch. I've got some other suggestions I'm eager to try, and I'll post when I do. 

Outsidering At Vinisud '12 And Elsewhere

Two years ago, I was excitedly looking forward to Vinisud, the Mediterranean wine trade show which happens every two years here, and which, the "Mediterranean" notwithstanding, is largely a showplace for Languedoc, Provence and Rhône Valley wine. Unfortunately, in the weeks leading up to Vinisud '10, sinus polyps caused me to lose my sense of smell and taste, as documented elsewhere on this blog. So this year, with the faculties working much better (I still don't think I'm 100% healed, but this will do), I was really looking forward to it. Not only is it a great opportunity to see all the local wineries under one roof without having to drive hither and yon (and then miss them), but this year, the Outsiders were doing a tasting -- one that was as out of the ordinary as it could be. And, with the weather warming up, it was sort of a harbinger of spring, even though, as I keep having to remind myself, it's still February here.

So bright and early Monday, I headed down to the Mercure Central hotel in the deserted section behind the old city hall, and joined a bunch of other folks waiting for the shuttle out to the Parc des Expositions. I'd gotten an invitation from someone through Les Vins de Charlotte, the new little wine shop near me which I wrote about earlier, and a friend from New York who was in town got me a second one, which I handed off to E, so he could continue his education on local wines -- and red wine in general. We agreed to meet at 2, and a third party, Michael, a young guy who distributes wine in Germany, was going to join us, thanks to his knowing a couple of my friends in Berlin. A merry time was in the offing.

Meanwhile, though, I figured I should wander around and get the lay of the land, which isn't easy: the Parc des Expositions, like most trade-fair facilities, is made up of several freestanding halls, linked together by pathways, and each containing a theme: Provence, for instance, takes up all of hall 10, while hall 5, right next to it, is the Spain/Italy/Portugal ghetto, along with "other countries." That connects to Hall 1, Hall 6, and Hall 11. Halls 2 through 4 don't seem to exist. So you can see how this gets confusing, especially once you've begun tasting. I held off on that until our crew assembled in the early afternoon and still spent most of my time trying to figure out how to get from one place to another. Square mats on the floor used their corners to point in the general direction of the other halls, but after being walked on for most of a day, they became askew and, thus, generally unrealiable.

I was trying to get to the AOC Languedoc halls, 7, 8, and 9, so that I could chase down some wines that interested me and find some old favorites to see how they've fared. Somehow, I always managed to get back to Hall 6, which was dominated by Corsica's huge banner hanging in the air with its scary slogan:

That gets filed under "Please use a native speaker when making these sorts of decisions," although I have to admit, it's the same in French. Maybe in Corsican dialect it sounds less threatening.

One thing I'd kept hearing, especially from Jean-Michel at Les Vins de Charlotte, is that in the past couple of years, Pic St. Loup has been discovered as a major source of fine wines, and it's driven the price up. Certainly, the display at Vinisud bears this out:

It was hard to photograph this: there was a door inbetween, leading to the enclosed area where a couple dozen winemakers offered their wares and in the center, a chef gave three hour-long demonstration-lectures on "Fusion Food and the Wines of Pic St. Loup." Yup, sounds like Pic St. Loup has arrived, all right. Meanwhile, I like the silhouettes of the Pic and its faithful limestone companion l'Hortus on the enclosure.

At 2, we assembled at O'Vineyards' stand, as planned, and Joe O'Connell gave us a generous tour of his wines. He's an American, with a French-Vietnamese wife, and a son, Ryan, who is a dynamo for both proselytizing for Languedoc Wines (he has a blog, Love That Languedoc Wine, which I started reading early on to educate myself about this region) and for using social media and the Internet to promote your winery. For all his contagious enthusiasm, though, very few have taken his advice, at least given the overall numbers. Meanwhile, the reason he proselytizes like this continues to exist: nearly all small winemakers skate on the edge of poverty, no matter that some of their wines sell for (relatively) big money. Maximizing the potential, you have to do several things simultaneously. The O'Connells manage it with Joe making the wine, his wife Liz running a B&B on the property, and Ryan making his own wines, giving tours, and doing the cyber-wine thing. (It's actually not that simple, because everyone does everything, but the point is that there's a lot more you have to do to keep your winery's head above water, and the old joke about how to make a million dollars farming -- start out with five million -- applies).

One thing O'Vineyards is good at is branding, with everything featuring that O', and everything with a characteristic sturdiness which then finishes in a firm blaze of flavor. Their efforts have been rewarded by the Hotel de la Cité, Carcassonne's noted luxury hotel, putting their Proprietor's Reserve on the menu. It's a remarkable, complex but friendly wine -- and it's not cheap. Still, they've made it to the point where now Ryan has been able to buy some outside grapes to fashion his new wine:

This has to sit a while, but as a wine for a non-special occasion, as something to drink with some down-home cooking, it's going to be excellent.

There's a problem, though, and it is one which hangs over all of the halls at the Parc d'Exposition: you can't get O'Vineyards wine anywhere in Montpellier. I remember a couple of years ago, Ryan filled the car with bottles and came down here, hitting store after store, and being told, yeah, good wine, but it's from too far away. How far? You can drive the 150 km to Carcassonne in an hour and a half, or so says Google. And while it's true that the geology of this region is pretty tumultuous and that terroir changes every mile or so, these micro-distinctions don't do anyone any favors. I'm all in favor of supporting our local winegrowers, of course, but it sure would be nice if a few wine shops in the bigger towns here would take the risk of stocking a little broader selection from this huge Languedoc-Roussillon area.

We thanked Joe for his superb tour and E and I pushed on to a couple of winemakers I wanted him to check out. Or, rather, that he'd already checked out. Regular readers will remember that it was E's birthday last year that wound up in our getting in the car and driving to St. Chinian, having been inspired by the bottle of Les Eminades we'd enjoyed that evening. It turned out that, of course, Les Eminades had a stand in the St. Chinian area of Vinisud, and since we hadn't met the young couple who run it last year, it was easy enough to do that now. Patricia and Luc Bettoni turned out to be both enthusiastic and extremely knowledgeable, as well as in possession of some very old plants -- their Carignan vines are 110 years old, the Grenache between 30 and 60 years old, and the Syrah and Cinsault 40. That explained part of the great complexity they achieve with their wines, and another part, Patricia explained as she guided us through their four reds, has to do with sunshine management.

While we were tasting, all hell broke loose as a large number of people in robes carrying signs started parading through the hall. I only managed to get a couple of blurry shots, including this one with an embarrassed woman looking to empty her spittoon only to be blocked by the parade:

I'm still not sure exactly what was going on here, but it appears that these are members of organizations dedicated to the winemaking efforts of various Languedoc AOCs, chevaliers devoted to celebrating the area's food and wine.

Our next stop was my old favorite, Mas de la Serrane, whose wines I've enjoyed for years, thanks to their distinctive complexity, wide variety, and comparative affordability. I was already very familiar with all but the highest-end wine they make, Antonin & Louis, which I'd had but not particularly enjoyed. "It's broken; it just doesn't work," a wine expert told me a few years back, but I'm happy to report that whatever it was that was the problem seems to have been fixed.

"I get it," said E, as we hightailed it to the Outsiders' tasting, "it's like a family. All the wines have something in common, something which unites them, but they're all different." Exactly, and we'd just been afforded three excellent demonstrations of that fact.

The Outsiders tasting was definitely going to be something different. Ryan had been talking it up for weeks on Facebook, and so had the indefatigable Louise Hurren, publicist for a number of Languedoc wineries and another proselytizer for the area's top wines. In the short speech he gave before we got going, Ryan gave a hilarious presentation of word-clouds used by the tasters in the Wine Spectator's notes for its top-rated wines -- all of which were bland but enthusiastic. He then crunched some comments on his own wines into machine-generated reviews and machine-generated words. The point was simple: there are more ways of communicating ideas about wine than the standard, and exhausted, vocabulary of today's wine journalism allows. To this end, they had assembled 24 pictures -- a bunch of kittens, a Swiss Army knife, a bunch of ice-cream cones, a Lego guy, a firebomber, an ancient Citroën truck -- and asked us to taste the wines and, instead of making a comment, match each one with a picture, or a couple of pictures. Michael, the German guy, had joined us, and we were sitting next to each other. I was curious about what he'd do, as a professional, against me, who's only not been allergic to wine for 20 years and missed over a year's education to taste failure. We got pours of a Domaine de Cébène 2009 Felgaria from Faugères. We tasted. We spit. We tasted some more. We scribbled numbers in the tasting book. We compared notes.

We had picked the exact same picture: the multicolored ice cream cones. "Okay," said Michael, "this is interesting." What was also interesting is how utterly different from the mainstream virtually all of these wines were. Not just Jonathan Hesford's odd "mistake" MO2 wine, which was sort of orange and got matched to an odd face-shot which was half female, half male, but things like Château d'Anglès' Grand Vin Red (can't get more ordinary than a name like that), which got matched to the Swiss Army knife, Château de Combebelle AOC St. Chinian Rouge (old books), and my favorite, Domaine Jones' Fitou Rouge 2010 (four Renaissance portraits).

Everything was on the same high level, and I was approaching taste-bud fatigue. Also, no matter how much you spit, alcohol does get into your bloodstream through your tongue and mouth lining, so now that it was 5pm, I was about tasted out. Yesterday, I begged off because I had my other blog to write, and briefly considered going in today when I realized that I still had enough residual sensory information to process that it probably wouldn't increase any of it very much. But I'm very happy that it worked out that way: too much tasting beats not being able to taste hands down.

* * * 

There was a larger issue, too, which began coalescing as I sat at home after Vinisud and thought about all that had happened. The Outsider issue stuck in my mind: as the webiste says, the members of the group come from all over -- the UK, New Zealand, Sweden, the U.S., other parts of France -- and predominantly not from winemaking backgrounds. They came down here and got to work, and many of them discovered that they were "outsiders" in another way: the French can be cold and clannish, particularly, it appears, when a sacred part of their culture is being threatened by "outsiders." Not, it should be emphasized, the other small winemakers: lots of these people belong to organizations which purchase farm equipment in common and share it out, and lots of them exchange tips (and bottles) with their winemaking neighbors. No, it's others who seem they'd rather you weren't there.

And I felt relieved hearing these stories, because after three years here, I've felt the same thing. It's different from the experience I had when I first moved to Germany: the Germans, many of them, were friendly towards Americans for obvious reasons. But not in France. My solution has been simple: ignore it. I know it's not all French people who feel this way, so I'm not offended. And I know another thing: the day E and J and I went to Ambrussum, we were walking along and J said "You know, of all the places I've lived, I've never felt so much at home as I do here." Which is a pretty odd statement for someone living under these conditions -- and yet I knew exactly what she meant, even if it's supremely difficult to articulate it myself.

I like it here, and I'm going to stay if I can. I'll be an outsider the whole time and I don't care. There's enough of this place for us all to share and enjoy our own pleasures, and, I bet, enough friendly French people, hard as they are to find, to clue us in to some of the nuances. All of this takes on a greater meaning now that I'm readying my annual trip to the States. I'll be leaving Sunday to visit a friend in Paris, then flying to New York on Monday. I'll also hit Texas, California and, well, the end of the trip hasn't been figured out yet. The next few posts will be from the trip, and I'm happy to have the break.

But I'm really looking forward to coming back here in April. As an outsider. Go figure.

Miettes of Bleak Midwinter

I've been a bit remiss with the local news, both because there hasn't been much and because I've been busy launching my weekly arts and culture blog over at realeyz, which has been dogged with technical problems. I've also been getting ready for my annual trip to the States, and, like most everyone I know here, hunkering down inside, away from the arctic temperatures and the occasional windstorms which push the wind-chill factor down, down, down. Damage to the fruit, wine, and olive crops is being bruited around, but I don't have any solid facts to add to the rumor. There were, however, some hapless flamingoes down on the shore near Narbonne, which is about an hour southwest of here, who died when their legs froze in the water they were standing in and couldn't get away to eat or seek warmer places to hang out. I feel like I should be typing with gloves on, but instead I'm just watching the weather map, hoping the Ukraine doesn't have another gift of frigid air for us.

Not that there's a valid basis for complaining, of course: not long ago, all we could say was that it was chilly. One did feel sorry for the intrepid campers out by the Fountain of the Three Graces on the Comédie, a half-dozen or so hardy souls who comprised Occupy Montpellier. The sunshine was something of a compensation during the day, but they must've been cold at night. They'd first appeared in the bandstand over on the Esplanade, then camped out in neat tents in the nearby park, then been rousted over to the Com, where they set up by the fountain, competing with the Christmas tree.

And there they stayed. It was hard to figure out exactly who they were, let alone what, besides the spreading of the 99%/1% meme, they were doing. Some days they appeared to be idealistic youth, others they appeared to be the usual run of street people with dogs and beer. So it was only a slight surprise when, one day, I went to do some errands and ran into the final moments of Occupy Montpellier as the garbage trucks hoisted lawn chairs and signs into the maw of their compactors and one guy with a shopping cart, dreadlocks, and a can of beer that he was careful to keep sight of railed at the cops and sanitation workers. It looks like in the end, the 99% was undone by the 9% -- the quantity of alcohol in the nasty beer the street people favor.

*  *  *

I live on what is probably the most dangerous street in Montpellier. Oh, sure, there's the odd drug deal going down on the corner, or, late at night, the occasional raving drunk in the street, but that's not what I mean. It's mostly dangerous during broad daylight owing to two factors: 1) it's pedestrianized and 2) there are two driving schools around the corner from each other. During the day, people walking down the middle of the street, which is their right, are constantly menaced by terrified teens, gripping the steering-wheels of their cars, heading straight into a mass of humanity. I haven't heard of any disasters yet, but the potential is sure there. 

So imagine my surprise when, on my way to the supermarket a month ago, I walked into a nest of bristling automatic weapons. This wasn't in my neighborhood, but, rather, at one of the subterranean entrances to a shopping complex called Le Triangle, underneath the other shopping mall, the Polygone. This is a rather deserted area, adjacent to, but invisible from, a café which is, I believe, called Le Cappuccino, and it's a place where occasionally a mentally ill man hangs out, eating out of cans and playing with plastic bags, which he sometimes ties around his hands. Other times, teenagers congregate to smoke joints, breakdance, or make out. 

There's almost always someone there, so it wasn't a surprise to see people as I climbed the stairs, and, as always, I was probably miles away, thinking about something I was (or wasn't) writing, or what the hell I was going to make for dinner. It wasn't until I'd stepped into the tableau that I saw what was going on. Against the wall were two muscular young North African guys, feet spread, hands clasped tightly behind their heads. About a foot away from them, a soldier aimed an automatic rifle at their chest level. One policeman was in the process of conducting a very thorough body-search on one of them while another policeman watched, and behind the soldier stood four more soldiers, guns at the ready. 

My instincts, I think, were correct. I just walked behind the soldier, and carried on into the plaza. Once on the escalator up to ground level, I looked back, and things were much as they had been. I have no idea what was going on, what those two guys were suspected of (because after all, being Maghrebi in public isn't exactly headline news in a city with a higher concentration of Algerians than any other in France), or what the outcome was. I gotta say this, though: those two dudes weren't sweating, and they were perfectly cool with five machine guns pointed at them. I'm not sure I could pull that off. Not that I have any intention of trying. 

*  *  *

And thinking of the crazy guy with the plastic bag fetish who hangs out there reminds me that last year's sudden disappearance of pink plastic bags from Monoprix was apparently a trial run. The chain has announced that as of Feb. 15 -- yikes! That's Wednesday! -- there will be no more free plastic bags available. I've stashed a bunch of them to use as garbage bags, since they're strong and hold two or three days' kitchen refuse -- just enough time before it starts smelling bad in the summer -- and, like almost everyone else around here, that's what I reuse them for. Now, it appears, we'll all have to buy our garbage bags. Bad advertising for Monoprix, and another expense for us. Grrr. 

*  *  *

It's been a while, but the E&J Express is back on the road. J has been waylaid by dental issues (which I'll soon be confronting), and I've also been busy with some paying work (!) (not highly-paying, mind you, but paying), and when that hasn't been a problem the weather's been awful. But this weekend the Swiss Visitor was in town for a whole day, a friend of theirs from their previous residence, and J was itchy to go back to Sète to see new shows both at the Centre Régionale d'Art Contemporaine (CRAC) and the Musée International des Arts Modestes (MIAM). Plus, there would be lunch. Who could say no to that? 

Not me, so I blasted off on foot at 11:30, and we hit the road. The Swiss Visitor has been here before, but never out of town, and even though the scenery between here and Sète is pretty mundane -- for around here -- he was awed. And I had to admit, it was nice being out in the country again. We got lost looking for a restaurant E and J had eaten in, and then, after driving out of town and discovering that the long stretch of beach highway was closed, decided that that wasn't where the restaurant was anyway. We eventually found it and three of us had Rouille Sétoise, which is the little cuttlefish known as seiches and a sauce which is warm saffron-infused mayonnaise, alhtough this version also had a tomato sauce. J did something smart and ordered a whole dorade fish, grilled on a griddle, in the form known here as à la plancha. I wasn't awfully impressed with the Rouille, but the other guys liked it. 

Now it was museum time, so we headed back into town, parked under the canal, and fought the cold wind to MIAM. In keeping with their reputation as the most eccentric art museum in France, the current show is called My Winnipeg, and features 250 works by no fewer than 70 artists, all from this rather obscure provincial city on the plains of the Canadian midwest. If you think this is a mixed bag, you're right, but if you're inclined to sniff and dismiss it you're wrong. Winnipeg stands at the confluence of the Red River and the Assiniboine River, and has a considerable Native/Indian/First Peoples population as well as a number of strong immigrant presences driven by its importance as a railroad center and a place where the grain grown on the surrounding prairies was processed and shipped. All of this has its echoes in the art in this show. 

Which is not to say that all the art is good. Far from it: I began to wonder, as I looked around at the various displays, if there weren't some sort of center for outsider art or some art-therapy movement going on in Winnipeg. Nonetheless, there are some standouts. Diana Thorneycroft's photos of toy figures in strange circumstances from her series Group of Seven Awkward Moments are enjoyable, but are trumped by her sculpted tableau Early Snow with Bob and Doug, showing America's favorite Canadian stereotypes steated at a picnic table surrounded by snow-covered cases of beer  and wolves prowling through the landscape. Hauntings, an installation by Guy Maddin, purports to show lost bits of films by famous early directors, and makes for an interesting few minutes' viewing, since they're all on loops and running simultaneously, and, with their blurry black-and-white images, all look like they could well have been what Maddin says they are. I'm not sure whether the color film that purports that Bing Crosby and Bela Lugosi are buried next to each other and shows a woman with bright red lipstick cavorting with the corpse of a white wolf is by him, but it's borderline disturbing. So is Sarah Anne Johnson's House on Fire and its surrounding installation, a sort of dollhouse with stylized fire coming out of its roof, and rooms you can only slightly see into, with furniture knocked over, maybe a dead person, and fire damage, surrounded by treated photographs which were inspired by her grandmother's treatment for post-partum depression, in which she was hospitalized and used by CIA-funded LSD researchers. 

Much of the rest of what's on display is either silly or dull, but the silly pieces do provoke a chuckle, like Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Milian's exploration of lesbian stereotypes (that's them on the poster for the show, ready to show you around a Canadian national park somewhere), the Royal Art Lodge's long stretch of pairs of little square paintings which are compositionally identical, with wildly varying content, and Jon Pylypchuk's weird assembly of dolls relating to a comic strip character he's invented. Finally, there's Kent Monkman's eerie diorama The Collapsing of Time and Space in an Ever-expanding Universe, which plays on a lot of Canadian and gender stereotypes, as a transsexual Indian, seated in an overstuffed Victorian parlor equipped with a record player, a wolf, and a beaver (who is chomping away at the piano bench) stares out a window, tears streaking his/her mascara as s/he stares at a kitschy painting of a noble Indian on horseback surrounded by buffalo in a forest. (Buffalo? In a forest?)

But the show doesn't stop there: MIAM founder Bernard Belluc, whose obsessive collages of objects arranged around a theme were the highlight of our last visit there, has replaced most of the ones we saw last time with...more weird assemblages! Of course, as a co-founder of the museum, he has every right to have his own floor, but with work like this, he's earned it. 

Thus refreshed, we hiked to the other end of town, where CRAC was filled with two exhibits, one of the winners of some local art prize for young artists, the other a "dialogue" between Martine Aballéa and Patrick Sorin. The juried show was just unbelievably sterile and devoid of content, although I kind of liked a piece installed by the stairway in which digital drops of water dripped down the surface of a painting made up of colored stripes. I'd credit it, but I can't find it on the map they handed us. 

The dialogue was even stupider, since here we have two apparently established artists. Sorin is one of those irritating artists who thinks people want to watch him do silly stuff. He spits colored ink at a camera on a loop, cavorts around holographically in a fish tank in his underpants, has a multi-screen installation in one room called Une vie bien remplie (A really full life) which is a bunch of loops of him doing silly things on a bunch of different screens, and some documentation of a visit to an invitation art show in Tucson in 1994 with his lover, Pierrick et Jean-Loup, which will dispel any stereotypes about gay men having taste that might have lingered in your stereotypticon. 

Ms Aballéa's contribution was three entire gigantic rooms filled with windows and doors placed sparingly around with lights making them look dramatic. La maison sans fin (The endless house), it was called. People get support from the state to produce art like this. I suppose it's better than letting them starve. 

"Next time, we have to do this in the opposite order," J said after we got out. True: it's like eating your spinach before you can have dessert. There's definitely a feeling of empty calories around MIAM, but that's a guilty pleasure. Thin unseasoned broth like CRAC offers isn't even fun. 

Birth Announcement

No, no, I'm not pregnant. But on Wednesday, I did give birth to a new blog, The Ward Report.

Every Wednesday for the forseeable future, I'll have a post relating to some aspect of arts and culture. In a way, this is a kind of rebirth of my old gig at the Wall St. Journal Europe, only without the subsidized travel. It also, as you'll see from the first one, gives me the chance to explore some of the issues in the current changing landscape of how arts and culture are presented and distributed. I think it's going to be fun.

I'd like to thank the good folks at realeyz.tv for the chance to do this, and suggest you check out the other stuff they offer over there.