Mon Parnasse

The light is green, you may step into Montparnasse.

This happens to be my favourite part of the city, not because of the rooftops, over which the icon of icons can be glimpsed (I'm not referring to the McDonald's arches),

Not because of the oysters at Le Dome or the design of La Coupole,


not even due to the ghosts of Picasso, Soutine, Modigliani, Sartre, De Beauvoir, etc., that walk the boulevards. Not because of Rodin's depiction of Balzac which overlooks one street corner, nor the nighttime neon wonderland, nor the cheerful cinema crowds, nor how pretty everything looks after the rain.

It's thanks to Anouk

and the rest of them. I have a Parisian family, the best of all Parisian families imaginable. An Antwerp-born, distant cousin of my father ended up here, marrying a Marrakesh-bred professor of computer science. Their apartment on the boulevard, four floors beneath where Eugene Eunesco used to live, is where I learned major lessons in how to love Paris, people and life. A warm double kiss at the door, a room full of white books, a sunday lunch that lasts until dinner...

The above photo is obviously completely burned, yet nothing could give a better clue of what this place feels like, full of light,

Full of cheese.

It's almost a sin to leave it. If only Paris hadn't been directly outside the door...

Fire

What makes a house warm? Design helps, or lack thereof.

Cooking and wine help.

But sometimes that's just not enough. For this reason, logs of wood are piled along the fence seperating our house from the railway tracks.

All that's left is to shave thinner woodchips out of them in order to start the fire.

How many people spend their Parisian sojourns doing this? I don't mind it too much. Being dependent on firewood is part of what made me love places like Finland. Chopping wood is an act that's supra-historical. It connects you to all societies that ever breathed winter, it gives good muscle,

And it makes a house warm in more than one way.

The Old Boogiedown

I remember once stepping into an uptown 5 train. A man getting seated on one of the benches was sighing and saying: "Back to the old Boogiedown." My local friend had to explain to me that that was a nickname for the Bronx. I loved that. It's got to be a pretty juicy place to be named something like that.

East-side Paris, March 2009, is the old Boogiedown. We live in a house that was built by hand by an Italian documentary filmmaker along an abandoned railway-line in the 20th district. There's a burning fireplace and an old globe and lots of toys belonging to the filmmaker's two-years-old girl. Outside, wild graffiti screams across the concrete barier, seperating us from the projects. Beyond them rise old-world Housmanian rooftops dotted with little windows of chambres des bonnes. They overlook the Rue des Pyrannees as it climbs through noisy Gambetta Square, offering blood sausage and cheap wine in scratched carafes. At night elderly women rock it out with young hipsters at the bars of Oberkampf, while Congolese guys hit on pretty girls from the western quarters without much success. Don't be discouraged. Boogiedown, brothers, boogiedown.

The Underground Art Scene

We left the region of Champagne yesterday and are gladly in Paris. Still, the journey was so fine and bubbly, that I must pay Champagne another tribute.

In other words - there's a place I must rave about: a castle with a pile of supermarket trollies in front of it.

The founder of the Maison de Pommery died in some obscure 19th century war, soon after beginning work on the winery's maze of cellars. His wife, Louise Pommery, was patron of the arts in the city of Reims and commissioned large scale works to be hung in the tunnels, some of which are cavernous, while others are cathedral-like in proportions. In 2002 the winery was bought from the Louis Vuitton conglomerate by a local champage mogul. He decided to fulfill Vauve Pommery's vision of an art palace and turn the fully functional production cellars into a contemporary art gallery.

Art welcomes you even when overground. The centerpiece in this photo of the winery's lobby was created by visiting Reims schoolchildren, once they emerged from the cellars.

Then begins the descent. The estate has 18 kilometers of underground tunnels. The first few are filled with art, with exhibitions that change yearly each June. The current one was curated by Fabrice Bousteau, the editor of Beaux Arts magazine. It features works from each member country of the EU and discusses the concept of European culture. First there's a sound installation. A line from a song by Gainsbourg plays as you descend the 160 stairs to the underground labyrinth.

Then there are tunnels over tunnels of contemporary European art to experience. Here's my absolute favorite: a work by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot which allows birds to play the electric guitar. Mandarin birds, seeds, amps and instruments were placed in a warmly lit tunnel for magical purposes. It works, they play beautifully.

Birds are not the only creatures in the cellars. The diagonal racks that allow champagne residue to sift into the necks of the bottles make perfect home for spiders as large as the palm of my hand.

You walk and walk, it's endless. Terike Haapoja's lightbulb throws shadows of nonexistant objects on the walls.

João Pedro Vale's sunken ship rests beneath an enormous wooden bas-relief comissioned by the Vauve Pommery.

I also liked works by Rada Boukova, Abigail Lazkoz, Katrina Neiburga, Adel Abidin, Su-Mei Tse, Anette-Mona Tchisa and Lucia Tkasova, but something has to be said for the art lying there in moldy bottles. The sharp flash of my camera gives it that extra conceptual element - making it look somewhat like a Beuys installation, though it most certainly won't taste like one.

In Champagne

Note on the last photo: at 183 centimeters, Itka is a tall girl, but she's not that tall. The bottle at her feet is a small 37.5 centiliter one. I threw it into the shopping cart with the toothpaste and oranges at the grocery store. It happens to be Henri de Verlaine, one of the best Champagnes you'll ever taste.

You know you are in France when you're Impulse-shooping for Champagne. We are in Epernay, completely surrounded by the Champagne vinyards. Champagne is like water here. You can literally drink it for free by visiting the wineries. We're doing a lot of that, researching for a travel article on the region before hitting the big city. There we'll probably have to settle on equally inexpensive red wine from the Rhone, Burgundy or Bordeaux. Such a bitch life is.

Chicken Soup for the Renegade Soul

It's raining and hailing outside and I'm here listening to old Lenny Bruce routines and sipping chicken soup. The house is very clean - tomorrow my subletter is moving in, then Saturday night Itka and I are going to take over her apartment in Paris for a month.

Paris has a liberating effect on my spirit and God only knows what will happen there. Right now liberty is on my mind, this Lenny Bruce guy, a man who was too free for his time so they had to keep handcuffing him, what a disaster.

I had an encounter with two other free spirits this week. The Berliner Ensabmle came to town with its production of the Threepenny Opera. Brecht was too free for his own good and too socially aware, so he teathered himself up in post war DDR. Weill wouldn't hear of it. Even before the war he split up from Brecht, saying he couldn't compose music to Communist manifestos. Still, while they were together, their work was truly free and balanced in its freedom. it was all about freedom: first and foremost - freedom from the most hidden prison walls that surround us, those of materialism and the bourgeois order.

"What's a thief's ladder next to a stock share?" asks Mack the Knife on the scaffold, "What's robbing a bank next to founding a bank?" We're leaving for Paris with nearly no money. The current crisis, bourne of greed, is hitting Israel and everywhere else quite hard. This is precisely the time to break loose, hitchhike a bit, eat a "demi-baguette", ramble around looking for adventure and grow intensely richer.

Kadita

I spent my worst hair-day ever in Kadita.

Thankfully, I was not the only one with coiffure issues.

How do you dress up for a place like Kadita? That's a riddle. This secluded hilltop community looks like nothing else in Israel, to say nothing of the greater Middle East. It's peaceful in the deepest sense of the word.

Kadita should really require nothing in the way of attire. About thirty years ago, a few hippies came and built homes with their own hands on the foothills of Mt. Meron. Their cummnity was never recognized by the state. It is only due to the nearby tomb of Mishnaic sage Rabbi Tarfon that a road even leads there. It's not a very good road.

While driving on it we met a local Druze man who was picking wild dill in the pastures. I believe a secret garden of wild dill deserves for me to comb my hair and put on a nice shirt.

But what Kadita really requires today is a yarmoulka. Much of the community turned religious over the years. We were fortunate enough to be invited into the home of Eliran and Elinor, two devotees of hassidic rabbi Nachman of Breslau. They made us good coffee, gave us some homemade olive oil and boiled eggs from their henhouse for a picnic lunch we planned.


We got to play with their kids, Michael, Noya and Avinoam, in the pleasant winter air. We also heard two very special life stories, though seperately. In Religious Jewish society it would be inacceptible for a man to even speak with a woman not of his family. I stayed in with Eliran and flipped through the photo album of his secular days. Meanwhile, elinor took Itka out, showed her the chickens and introduced her to her nother in law.

Then we were out to roam the hillsides. Itka looks great in rural surroundings,

but she's an unrequited animal lover.


As for me, I felt a natural longing for the grassy knolls and stone fences of Scotland and Ireland. If not for Eliran's overgrown sideburns and timidness towards Itka, I could believe that we've been transported there. Turns out we haven't. Israel is Israel, for better or worse. It offers us gracious Celtic pastures on which to sit and enjoy glatt kosher eggs.