I could excuse myself by saying that just about everyone has something or someone they idealize; something or someone who has to be purely and simply better in every way. My sister, for example, a total Francophile, remembers everything she has ever seen, or experienced, or eaten in France. She is, even more than I, held in a kind of mindless thrall.
So why now do I have to confess to my elevation beyond reality of this city and its people? Picture this: you are riding the Metro. It moves quickly. Someone has given you their seat. (It almost never happens in Toronto.) This time I am riding the RER, a double-decker train system that operates alongside the Paris Metro. I am looking at the windows, or rather; I am looking at the carefully scratched out “tags” on the windows. Unlike any other surface, they can’t be erased, washed off, or painted over. In my idealization of this city, I can’t accept that there are brain-dead miscreants who do this criminal vandalism living in the City of Light. I wonder about it all the time.
When I am home, it simply makes me angry. No subtle shades of distaste and disappointment, just anger. The police say that “tagging” unlike creative graffiti, is done by gang members. They are I guess, like dogs with fire hydrants, marking their territory and daring anyone else to invade. Now I am really flying far too high for such a low subject.
What do you think? Are there thousands of these people among us? Or are we being besieged by a small but active number? I don’t know. I have no idea whether or not authorities could tell me how many of these “taggers” there really are.
I am deeply offended. Not that the “crime “is so heinous, but that I live here too, or my heart lives here, and you are stepping all over it. You make me a non-person.
I think sometimes about how the people who developed “fixing broken windows” dealt with the problems of social misbehaviour. They insisted that minor things, if unattended, became major. They wouldn’t overlook minor stuff. A few years ago we had a great man David Gunn, running our transit system and not appreciated nearly enough – he and Howard Moscoe were like cats and dogs. Anyway, he left for New York. He dealt with the epidemic of graffiti on that city’s transit. He simply did not tolerate it. Every night, if necessary, he would have the cars washed or even repainted so the taggers would not have the satisfaction of seeing their work immortalized.
It is in a way, not unlike the nonsensical love messages people paint all over the beautiful pre-Cambrian rocks that run through Muskoka.
Like I say: if it happens at home – I get mad. If it happens in Rome, where it is rampant, I am sad. But when in happens in Paris I am devastated. Someone make them stop.
Friday, April 23, 2010
LETTER FROM PARIS #7 revelations
Rachel told me that if you visited the Louvre every day it would take four months to see gallery. Not only that it is too vast, but there seems to be almost no organized way to see it. Unlike say – the Uffizi, which is so viewer-friendly you simply follow your nose in and out each room and see everything. And because it is more orderly, like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, you do not appear to trip over people going every which way.
I’ll try to avoid another screed against boisterous and uncaring tourists, even though nothing, with the possible exception of the palace at Versailles, more exemplifies that sort of thing than the Louvre.
I was both irritated and amused. Irritated by the “guardiens” who seem so busy chatting with each other that it became an interruption to ask them a question. In one case two of them stopped talking long enough to confer over the answer to my question about where to find the Breughel paintings. They agreed and sent me in precisely the wrong direction.
Is it because visitors have little taste? Is it because they know little about art? Is it because they have all heard of the Mona Lisa? They crowd the room, choking one end of it, jostling, shoving and pushing to take a photo. I wonder if any really see what they are photographing. The other traffic jam is at Nike or as explained to Rachel, The Victory at Samothrace. But when I visited the room that is full of enormous Rubens painting, it was virtually empty. Maybe I just got lucky.
When my granddaughter leaves, my wife and I will lose something special: the chance to show it all to someone who truly wants to see. She wants to soak it up. She wants to Email friends about it. She spends time on Skype talking home about it. She is thrilled to be here. We are thrilled to have her with us.
I am going to try to attach a picture of her standing in the Promenade Pereire, the slender flowered park that runs down the middle of Boulevard Pereire just around the corner from us. You would not care to see more pictures of the Arc de Triomphe or the Eiffel Tower or the pyramid at The Louvre, or any other standard Paris beauty shot.. But this picture is so very Paris. It is leafy and flowery. It is full of children sometimes with parents, sometimes with nannies. Unlike Toronto, where nannies tend to be Philippina, here they are I think from places like Senegal and Mali.
Finally – on the way back from the boulangerie for a baguette to make a tomato/cheese/lettuce, ham sandwich – I stopped at the corner pub. An older man and his wife were having an angry conversation with the bartender and owner (he also owns the boulangerie) and pointing next door to a large office building which houses, among other things, a school where the French learn English. I took a deep breath \and approached him. I explained why I was in Paris. He agreed to speak a little more slowly. I asked him why he seemed so angry. He told me because these people stood outside and threw “detritus” “ordure” on the sidewalk. I suspect his anger runs a little deeper but I did not persist. France does have a record of intolerance for strangers. But that is, once again, another story.
P.S. We met again yesterday. He was ready to leave but when I ordered a blonde Pelfort, he ordered another and we began to talk. He continues to try hard to speak slowly enough for me to get it all. We talked about the great wind that blew through Paris about eight or nine years ago, destroying so much of the gardens at Versailles. He says he contributed to the fund to rebuild. Then he used a word that sounded like “cockall.” He kept trying. Finally he got it right. I learned another French word: “cocktail.” And it was pronounced exactly that way. Go figure French.
I’ll try to avoid another screed against boisterous and uncaring tourists, even though nothing, with the possible exception of the palace at Versailles, more exemplifies that sort of thing than the Louvre.
I was both irritated and amused. Irritated by the “guardiens” who seem so busy chatting with each other that it became an interruption to ask them a question. In one case two of them stopped talking long enough to confer over the answer to my question about where to find the Breughel paintings. They agreed and sent me in precisely the wrong direction.
Is it because visitors have little taste? Is it because they know little about art? Is it because they have all heard of the Mona Lisa? They crowd the room, choking one end of it, jostling, shoving and pushing to take a photo. I wonder if any really see what they are photographing. The other traffic jam is at Nike or as explained to Rachel, The Victory at Samothrace. But when I visited the room that is full of enormous Rubens painting, it was virtually empty. Maybe I just got lucky.
When my granddaughter leaves, my wife and I will lose something special: the chance to show it all to someone who truly wants to see. She wants to soak it up. She wants to Email friends about it. She spends time on Skype talking home about it. She is thrilled to be here. We are thrilled to have her with us.
I am going to try to attach a picture of her standing in the Promenade Pereire, the slender flowered park that runs down the middle of Boulevard Pereire just around the corner from us. You would not care to see more pictures of the Arc de Triomphe or the Eiffel Tower or the pyramid at The Louvre, or any other standard Paris beauty shot.. But this picture is so very Paris. It is leafy and flowery. It is full of children sometimes with parents, sometimes with nannies. Unlike Toronto, where nannies tend to be Philippina, here they are I think from places like Senegal and Mali.
Finally – on the way back from the boulangerie for a baguette to make a tomato/cheese/lettuce, ham sandwich – I stopped at the corner pub. An older man and his wife were having an angry conversation with the bartender and owner (he also owns the boulangerie) and pointing next door to a large office building which houses, among other things, a school where the French learn English. I took a deep breath \and approached him. I explained why I was in Paris. He agreed to speak a little more slowly. I asked him why he seemed so angry. He told me because these people stood outside and threw “detritus” “ordure” on the sidewalk. I suspect his anger runs a little deeper but I did not persist. France does have a record of intolerance for strangers. But that is, once again, another story.
P.S. We met again yesterday. He was ready to leave but when I ordered a blonde Pelfort, he ordered another and we began to talk. He continues to try hard to speak slowly enough for me to get it all. We talked about the great wind that blew through Paris about eight or nine years ago, destroying so much of the gardens at Versailles. He says he contributed to the fund to rebuild. Then he used a word that sounded like “cockall.” He kept trying. Finally he got it right. I learned another French word: “cocktail.” And it was pronounced exactly that way. Go figure French.
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