Good Old French Know-How

Posted on January 31, 2024 by admin

No shortage of odd press releases lately. The first few lines of one that came recently read:

Bonjour à tous,

Voici notre catalogue Le Luxe Artisan pour ceux qui n’ont pas pu venir à Paris.

15 artisans d’art français venant des 4 coins de France étaient présents pour expliquer leur savoir-faire. Une très belle aventure humaine et un travail d’équipe. Scénographie de la talentueuse Julia Bancilhon, créatrice de papiers peints – studio Made of Matter.

I couldn’t let that go untranslated, since the machine now offers that service. So by machine translation, I got:

Hello everyone,

Here is our Le Luxe Artisan catalog for those who were unable to come to Paris.

15 French artisans from all over France were present to explain their know-how. A great human adventure and teamwork. Scenography by the talented Julia Bancilhon, wallpaper designer – Made of Matter studio.

Interesting that savoir-faire is translated know-how, which suggests a more workaday meaning in French for a term that acquired some social graces when it drifted into English.

Castell de Montjuïc

Posted on June 21, 2023 by admin

Late in the afternoon of our last day in Barcelona, May 22, on the way back from Montserrat, we spotted this building from a distance.

We weren’t sure what it was, and it was too far to wander over for a look considering we’d spent the day on our feet, bringing them to a slow-burn. I’ll figure it out later, I thought, and so I have: it is the Palau Nacional (National Palace). Main site of the 1929 world’s fair and current home to the National Art Museum of Catalonia.

This is the view back to where we were at that moment. Ah, well. Metro Barcelona’s a big place; can’t see everything in a few days.

The palace is on Montjuïc (Jewish Mount), a broad hill overlooking the city and the Mediterranean. It is large enough that, when we visited Castell de Montjuïc a few days before, we didn’t realize the palace was up there as well.

Plus a lot of other things: some former Olympic structures; the Magic Fountain of Montjuïc – I assume that’s a fanciful name – Fundació Joan Miró (a museum); a large cemetery including the graves of Miró, doomed Catalonia President Lluís Companys, anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, and about a million other permanent residents; a medieval Jewish cemetery; some botanic gardens and some other museums. Enough sights for another couple of days, at least.

Castell de Montjuïc is a fortress dating from the mid-18th century, though there were earlier fortifications up there. One way to get there is by cable car. I knew that because before the trip my friend Tom Jones had told me about a cable car ride he took up to a cool fortress during his visit to Barcelona some years ago, though he couldn’t remember the name; and then from the roof of Barcelona Cathedral on our first day in town, we saw a cable car running up the hill. We determined to go.

First you ride the subway to a stop at the base of the hill. Then you ride a funicular that is part of the transit system (our five-day cards were good on it) part way up the hill. Then you ride a cable car, which costs extra, to the walls of the former fortress.

The flag of Spain wasn’t to be seen on the walls. That means one thing for sure: Franco is still dead.

Tom was right. It’s a cool old pile of stones.

With a cruel past down the centuries, up to fairly recent times. Republicans and Nationalists both languished in its cells.

A set of reproduced photos notes that Companys was executed in the courtyard in 1940. He got away from Franco for a short while, but didn’t go far enough. Vichy France handed him over.

In our time, the fortress is a peaceful place with terrific views of the city.

And of the sea, which reveals a Barcelona of little interest to most tourists, but of considerable importance to the regional economy.

Barcelona is, and has always been, a port for commerce, and is among the top 10 container ports in the EU. Note also the cruise ships behind the container terminal. I assume that’s where they dock to turn loose their hordes. They’re the reason I had to book the Sagrada Familia ahead of time.

One more thing: a small plaque marking an important spot in the history of measurement. Especially for the French. The castle was one of the few places in Barcelona we saw signs in Catalan, Spanish, English and French. Usually tourist signs were only in the first three of those languages, which might well annoy the French. Heh.

Anyway, this plaque was French only, concerning the history of the meter.

The meter was to be one ten-millionth of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole, according to French revolutionists, but how to determine the length?

“In 1792, astronomers Pierre Méchain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre set out to measure the meter by surveying the distance between Dunkirk, France, and Barcelona, Spain,” explains NIST. “After seven or so years of effort, they arrived at their final measure and submitted it to the academy, which embodied the prototype meter as a bar of platinum.”

The southern end point for their measurements was atop Montjuïc, as noted by the plaque. I’m sure the French scientists did their best, but this was the 18th century, after all, and they didn’t quite measure it right. Peu importe, a meter is a meter. (The length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second; easy to remember, no?)

One of the cooler things to find on this Catalan pile of stones, I think.

Fort Necessity National Battlefield

Posted on April 2, 2023 by admin

I walked about a quarter-mile from a parking lot to get to the reconstructed log palisade on the site of one hastily built by men under the command of Lt. Col. George Washington, age 22. Fort Necessity, he called it. These days, the site is called Fort Necessity National Battlefield.

It is the only battlefield associated with the French and Indian War preserved by the National Park Service.

By the time I got there, I’d worked myself into a counterfactual frame of mind. Just what didn’t happen here — that easily could have – that proved so important for the future course of events in North America? Affected the fate of the unborn United States in unknowable but profound ways?

Those are the kind of Big Thoughts you get alone, under a pleasant late afternoon sun, in a meadow amid the rolling hills of rural southwest Pennsylvania, with nothing but a paved footpath and the palisade ahead. I do, anyway.

Consider: Washington and his men had surprise-attacked a French force at nearby Jomonville Glen a few weeks before the battle at Fort Necessity, defeating them and resulting in the death the French commander, Joseph Coulon de Jumonville. Washington was well aware that the French weren’t going to let that incident go unanswered, so he ordered the completion of Fort Necessity to prepare for the counterattack.

Louis Coulon de Villiers, who was Joseph’s brother, led the French response and besieged Fort Necessity from an advantageous position and with a larger force. Many British — mostly members of the Virginia Militia — were cut down, dying in the mud from recent rain. It seems likely that the French could have killed most, if not all of Washington’s command, but Coulon asked for parley and ultimately gave Washington generous surrender terms. Essentially, get out of here, and promise not to come back for a while.

Would a man of a different temperament more aggressively ground the British to defeat, perhaps to the point of seeing its commander dead with his men? Washington, that is. Dead at 22. You can see how this line of thinking puts some counterfactual ideas in your head.

What motivated Louis Coulon to do what he did? Motive’s a hard thing to pin down even in someone alive today, much less a French military commander of the 18th century. From what I’ve read, he was under orders not to massacre the British, and his men were tired and low on ammunition even though the defenders of Fort Necessity were in much worse shape. Those seem like fairly compelling reasons. Still, a more aggressive or ruthless commander could have continued the fight, not really held back in the wilderness by mere orders. This was the force that had killed his brother, after all.

On the other hand, young Washington had a number of near-death experiences as he was surveying in the Ohio Valley before the war. What’s one more?

So many questions. Big history pivoting on small fulcrums. I got closer.

Inside the palisade.

The site isn’t just that. Worn earthworks linger nearby.

Maybe Coulon was intensely proud to be under French arms, which were magnificently powerful in those days, even at such a far-flung place, and wasn’t about to dishonor his command with a massacre. Or maybe he didn’t like his brother that much, and was inclined to be philosophical about his fate. C’est la guerre, dear brother.

Down the road from Fort Necessity, U.S. 40 that is, is the grave of Major Gen. Edward Braddock.

I won’t go into details about why he’s there, except that it’s only indirectly related to the battle of Fort Necessity. He’d been sent with a much larger British force to confront the French the year after that battle. Things didn’t go well for him, and he ended up buried under the military road he had had built as part of his campaign to take the Ohio Valley from the French.

The wooden beams mark the course of the road.

The monument was erected in the early 20th century. He’s probably under it, but we can’t quite be certain.

This plaque adds an extra layer of poignancy.

Nineteen-thirteen. It’s probably just as well that the officers of the Coldstream Guards didn’t know what was coming.

Art Institute Spaces, Small and Large

Posted on December 8, 2022 by admin

I’d like to say I visited this room recently — looks interesting, doesn’t it? — but I only looked into the room.

An English great room of the late Tudor period, 1550-1603, according to a nearby sign. I couldn’t get in because one inch within this room equals one foot in an actual room of that kind, so at best I could get a hand in.

The Art Institute doesn’t want anyone to do that, and for good reason, since random hands would completely wreck any of the Thorne Miniature Rooms. So they are behind glass in walled-in spaces, and not at eye level for someone as tall as I am.

Still, I leaned over to look in. The fascination is there. Not just for me, but for the many other people looking at the rooms on Saturday. Each room evokes a different place or time, heavily but not exclusively American or European settings.

English drawing room, ca. 1800.

French library, ca. 1720.

Across the Atlantic. Pennsylvania drawing room, 1830s.

Massachusetts living room, 1675-1700.

The fascination isn’t just with the astonishing intricacy of the work, which it certainly has, but also the artful lighting. Artful as the light-play on a Kubrick set. I know those are electric lights in the background, but it looks like the rooms are lighted the way they would have been during those periods. With sunlight, that is.

“Narcissa Niblack Thorne, the creator of the Thorne Rooms, herself had a vivid imagination,” says the Art Institute. “In the 1930s, she assembled a group of skilled artisans in Chicago to create a series of intricate rooms on the minute scale of 1:12.

“With these interiors, she wanted to present a visual history of interior design that was both accurate and inspiring. The result is two parts fantasy, one part history — each room a shoe box–sized stage set awaiting viewers’ characters and plots.” (More microwave oven–sized, I’d say.)

Thorne (d. 1966) had the wherewithal to hire artisans during the Depression by being married to James Ward Thorne, an heir to the Montgomery Ward department store fortune, back when department stores generated fortunes. Bet the artisans were glad to have the work.

It wasn’t my first visit to the Thorne Rooms, but I believe I appreciate it a little more each time. I know I feel that way about the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room, which I also visited on Saturday.

The Thorne Rooms are an exercise in constrained space. The Trading Room is one of expansive space. So much so that my basic lens really isn’t up to capturing the whole. Still, I try.

No one else was in the room with me. It is a little out of the way, in museum wayfinding terms, and it is the artwork, rather than being mere protective walls and climate control, so maybe people pass it by.

Not me. I spent a while looking at details.

Overhead.

Such a grand room. Victorian ideas at work, striving to add uplift to a space devoted to grubby commerce. I’d say they succeeded.

“Designed by Chicago architects Louis Sullivan and his partner, Dankmar Adler, the original Chicago Stock Exchange was completed in 1894,” the museum notes on a page that also extols the room as a place where as many as 300 people can meet.

“When it was demolished in 1972, sections of the Trading Room, including Sullivan’s elaborate stenciled decorations, molded plaster capitals, and art glass, were preserved and used in the 1976–77 reconstruction of the room here at the Art Institute.”

I attended an event there myself for some forgotten reason about 20 years ago. Suits and ties (a while ago, as I said), dresses, and drinks in hand, the room hosted such a crowd with ease. If I had 300 people to entertain, I’d certainly consider renting the place.

Armistice Day 2022

Posted on November 11, 2022 by admin

It occurred to me not long ago, though it’s been true for a good many years, that every bit of writing, photography, film and other work created during the Great War is in the public domain. So I went looking for images of the first Armistice Day or thereabouts.

At the front. Really something to celebrate.

Paris.

London.

New York.

Actually, there’s some hint that the NYC pics are from November 7, when the AP erroneously reported that an armistice had been signed. No matter. The celebratory spirit is there.

First Thursday of the Year Musings

Posted on January 6, 2022 by admin

Little wind today, which made the outdoors marginally better to experience. But not much. Tonight will be really cold, an illustration of the superiority of the Fahrenheit scale for everyday use, with 0 degrees being really cold and 100 degrees really hot.

I can’t remember exactly when I read it, but years ago there was an item in Mad magazine lampooning the midcentury notion — the quaint notion, as it turned out — that Americans were going to have a surfeit of leisure time in the future, including a vast expansion of the number of holidays. Millard Fillmore’s birthday was a suggested holiday.

Well, that’s tomorrow, and I have to work. That idea about leisure time didn’t pan out anyway. But I will acknowledge the 13th president’s birthday, because why not. Besides, I paid my respects to President Fillmore in person recently.

Today’s also a good day to acknowledge the expansion, ever so slow, of the public domain, eking out growth despite the rapacious efforts of certain media oligopolists whose mascot is a rodent. Works published in 1926 are now in the public domain.

I’m happy to report that The Sun Also Rises is one of those works, to cite one of the better-known novels of 1926. I could have quoted it previously, and in fact I have, relying on notions of fair use. Now all the words are freely available, no questions asked.

“Here’s a taxidermist’s,” Bill said. “Want to buy anything? Nice stuffed dog?”

“Come on,” I said. “You’re pie-eyed.”

“Pretty nice stuffed dogs,” Bill said. “Certainly brighten up your flat.”

“Come on.”

“Just one stuffed dog. I can take ’em or leave ’em alone. But listen, Jake. Just one stuffed dog.”

“Come on.”

“Mean everything in the world to you after you bought it. Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog.”

“We’ll get one on the way back.”

“All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.”

Speaking of life between the wars…

If that song doesn’t make you smile, what will?

Allouez Catholic Cemetery

Posted on September 15, 2021 by admin

The village of Allouez, Wisconsin, which counts as a suburb of Green Bay, was named after missionary Claude-Jean Allouez, S.J.

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913): “Allouez, Claude, one of the most famous of the early Jesuit missionaries and explorers of what is now the western part of the United States, b. in France in 1620; d. in 1689, near the St. John’s River, in the present State of Indiana. Shea calls Allouez, ‘the founder of Catholicity in the West’… Allouez laboured among the Indians for thirty-two years. He was sixty-nine years old when he died, worn out by his heroic labours. He preached the Gospel to twenty different tribes, and is said to have baptized 10,000 neophytes with his own hand.”

Besides the village, the Allouez Catholic Cemetery and Chapel Mausoleum has his name. The missionary isn’t buried there, however, but in Michigan.

I visited on the morning of Labor Day. The cemetery is on a long slope between two major streets in the area, Riverside Dr. and Webster Ave. Nearly two centuries old, it still has a lot of room to grow.

In the developed area, so to speak, the stones are fairly dense.

According to the cemetery web site, there are a number of Green Bay bishops in on the grounds, but I wasn’t looking for anyone in particular.

The cemetery is home to only a handful of individual mausoleums, such as this one.

An intriguing stone. People get around, until they aren’t able to any more.

As always, some stones reflect unalterable sadness. This stone silently speaks of a terrible recent incident: a boy run over by a man in a truck.

He says accident, the DA says homicide by negligent operation of a vehicle.

1917

Posted on January 21, 2020 by admin

A while ago I saw the trailer for 1917, before I knew anything about the movie, or even that such a movie was in the works. Often enough you can judge a movie by its trailer. You know full well that it would be a waste of time. The 1917 trailer didn’t inspire any confidence in me that I wanted to see it. Hell’s bells, World War I is getting the Pearl Harbor treatment, I thought. Lots of brainless CGI.

I was completely wrong. We saw the movie over the weekend and I was astonished by how good it was. Much has been made about how the action seems to happen in real time, in one movie-long shot (117 minutes), though of course the cuts are hidden. In that sense, the film is a technical tour de force, but it’s much more than that.

It’s an Iliad and an Odyssey, following two tommies from their own trenches, across no man’s land, into abandoned German trenches, and into places previously behind the lines, all the while facing the strong likelihood of injury or death. It’s one damn thing after another. It’s suspenseful, since there’s a clear objective whose resolution is always in doubt until the end.

It’s also a work of high verisimilitude, including the maze-like aspects of the trench systems, the danger and gore and misery of WWI battlefields, and the ruins of French villages, but also the pleasant springtime countryside beyond the immediate fighting. The cinematography of some of the scenes, especially the bombed out, smoldering ruins, dazzles the eye.

The back stories of the main characters aren’t fleshed out in much detail, though there is a brief but remarkable discussion of cherry trees as part of one soldier’s personal history — the symbolism of which I did not miss — and a few other intimations of a life outside the war zone. I understand that bothered some critics, but it doesn’t bother me.

This isn’t a Hallmark movie. I don’t want them to sit around discussing their feelings — as if two Great War soldiers on a harrowing mission through some hellish landscapes would do that. You don’t need their details. They’re Everymen, and they’re fully human without the exposition, focused as they are on their own situation. The lead actors conveyed all they needed to about their characters through some dialogue, but mostly their reactions to all that they encounter, not quite all of it the horrors of war.

So 1917 is a remarkable movie in many ways, but not without flaws. I wasn’t sure, for instance, that the central conceit of the mission was even plausible. The two tommies were sent to relay a vitally important order countermanding an attack by an out-of-communication British regiment that had followed the Germans after they had made a tactical retreat to the Hindenburg Line in the spring of the title year.

That two men and two men alone would have been sent on such an incredibly dangerous mission, if it were so important, seems a little strange. Some redundancy would have been called for, to help ensure the message got through. Besides — couldn’t the mission have been accomplished by delivering a message by airplane? Even if a plane couldn’t land in such a forward area, it certainly would have been able to communicate with the ground.

“These early aircraft were not fitted with radio sets, but messages about enemy troop movements needed to be communicated quickly,” the Imperial War Museum explains. “Pilots could either drop messages in weighted bags or use message streamers to drop messages to forces on the ground.”

Never mind. 1917 is an epic story, well worth watching on a big screen. Good work, Mr. Mendes.

Une Impitoyable Savate Japonaise

Posted on September 16, 2019 by admin

Ah, marketing blarney. The other day I noticed a big plastic bottle of body wash on a shelf. Let’s leave aside for the moment the fundamental question of how that’s different from soap, other than a higher price per oz., and look at the text on the back of the bottle. Hogwash for body wash.

I won’t give the brand any free advertising, however microscopic. Enough to say that it’s a well-known and longstanding brand of personal care products, owned by a conglomerate. Almost everyone my age with access to American TV in the latter years of the 20th century, and probably a good many people older and younger, could whistle its jingle, so catchy and ubiquitous it was.

Also know that the brand has long been aimed at men, encouraging them to be manly men who do manly things, and in no way ironically. Still seems to, as you will see.

Anyway, the body wash bottle has text in English and French, since I suppose Canadians buy it too. As follows:

Doesn’t leave you feeling dry or rob you of your dignity.

Hm.

Like wearing an armor of man-scent.

Armor’s an interesting choice. More manly than residue, I guess. But the last line was my favorite. It made me laugh. Out loud. Chuckle, that is.

Drop-kicks dirt, then slams odor with a folding chair.

French isn’t my language, but the French text seems to hew pretty close to the English, until that last line:

Lutte contre la salete et les odeurs et le envoice au tapis pour le compte grace a une impitoyable savate japonaise.

I won’t vouch for its accuracy, but I did find one online translation for the last part of that sentence that seems plausible: “Sends [odor] to the mat with a devastating Japanese roundkick.”

Maybe that’s what the French call a roundhouse kick, for reasons best known to them. Maybe not. I’m amused all the same.

Thursday Scraps

Posted on August 15, 2019 by admin

Declining summer is a touch melancholy, but it has its charms. Such as soft cricketsong by night.

Late July and early August were drier than the wet weeks of late spring and early summer, but we did get some rain this week, mostly the non-thundering, gentle sort. Earlier this week, I stood outside under the eave over my back door, and heard water flowing vigorously.

Not something you necessarily want to hear near your roof. Soon I figured it out, to my relief. The dry spell had completely dried the gutters out, so that the new water flowed much more freely. That was the sound: rainwater as it coursed through the gutters on its way to the downspout.

Something I’ve noticed in recent years: when you buy an inexpensive men’s belt, you don’t get a decent belt that lasts a few years, though a little worn at the end. You get cheap crap.

That’s the latest belt of mine to fall apart. There’s an industry for you to disrupt, Mr. Millennial looking for the main chance. Make decent belts. Probably someone’s doing that. Decent, maybe, but also priced five times an ordinary belt.

Recently I finished Everybody Behaves Badly, subtitled “The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises,” by Leslie M.M. Blume (2016). Well written and full of interesting anecdotes. I knew Sun was a roman à clef but I didn’t know much detail or just how lightly Hemingway fictionalized some of the events, much to the embarrassment of the people who went to Spain with him in the summer of ’25.

Some tidbits: in an early draft of the novel, one of Brett’s brief affairs was said to be with an American named Tom who kept polo ponies. Possibly an allusion to the character Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Didn’t make the final cut.

Robert Cohn was based on Harold Loeb, an unflattering portrait that shadowed Loeb the rest of his life. Loeb and Hemingway didn’t quite come to blows in Pamplona, however, unlike their characters. They were angry enough at each other to fight, but apparently thought better of it.

Not long after the book came out, Hemingway left his first wife for the woman who would become his second. As part of the divorce, he agreed to give wife #1 Hadley Richardson the royalties from Sun, which would have been considerable. Then again, in marrying wife #2 Pauline Pfeiffer, he was marrying into money.

Now I want to read something different than that milieu. So I picked up a book of Eudora Welty short stories.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: France