Ein Prosit

The Oktoberfest beer tent of my fave German brewer: Augustiner. Prost!

Right off the bat, let me restate something I’ve been saying for 22 years: Oktoberfest (or “Wiesn” as they call it locally) is the best party on the planet. Period. Imagine your own state fair — or for you friends in SoCal, the San Diego Fair — multiplied by a million. Yes, a million. (For Alaska friends, it’s the AK Fair times 10 billion.) Now you’re getting close to Oktoberfest in Munich.

The beer tents at Oktoberfest are not tents, they’re convention centers. I’m not kidding. And each Bavarian brewery has at least one on the grounds.

The festival also has the best thrill rides I’ve ever ridden, Disneyland included (sorry, Cher).

And there’s food everywhere, most of it oh-so-tasty but horrible for you, yet not on the level of the deep-fried Snickers bars you see at state fairs. And some of the food is completely legitimate health-wise and simply fantastic. I went for lunch one day just to make sure I could savor one of the oven-roasted half-chickens. Wunderbar! I don’t know what kind of spices they use but the result is a succulent feast. And I was ecstatic to learn that the Augustiner still makes its mushroom soup the way they did two decades ago: the soup is so thick you can stand your spoon up in the bowl. It’s a meal in itself and simply magnificent.

Finally there’s the people-watching. Oktoberfest isn’t really about the beer and food and the rides, it’s about the people. Everyone (including American tourists who really ought to know better) are decked out in lederhosen and dirndls, and the result is often humorous (in the case of the men in their lederhosen) and tantalizing (in the case of the women in their dirndls).

Especially the latter. They really ought to call Weisn the Push-Up-Bra-Fest. If I owned a lingerie company, I’d be over here in Bavaria throughout the summer pitching my product to every woman in southern Germany. Every single woman wants her cleavage — no matter how much or how little she might have — out there for all to see. I met author Jim Harrison at a signing once and we got to discussing a mutual friend at Sports Illustrated, about which he complained that the swimsuit issue was “all tits and not enough ass; it’s like the NASCAR of women.” Jim Harrison probably wouldn’t like Oktoberfest, but I sure did, and the dirndls do offer the redemption of being great for showing off women’s legs.

As for the thrill rides, the roller coaster features five full loops that get ever tighter, resulting in increased G forces and more fun per second. The view out over Munich from the highest point, right after the ride starts so you’re still going slowly, is beautiful. And there’s no eight-mile-long line like there is at every amusement park you’ve been to.

The flying swings (I don’t know what you call them: the ride where you’re in a swing that goes in a circle way up high) at Wiesn take you up to a height of 50 meters over the festival grounds, giving you another phenomenal view of the city (albeit at fairly high speed). And there were a couple of new rides that got riders inverted and twisted and topsy-turvy, though I didn’t bother to buy a seat; but just watching them was enough to make me giggle. How people can take such rides after drinking a bunch of Oktoberfest beer is beyond me. Tip: hit the rides during the day, before you hit the beer tents.

Ah, yes, those beer tents….

There are a few things you should know before you arrive in Munich looking to get stupid drunk while joyously singing “Ein Prosit” with your new German buddies.

For starters, Oktoberfest beer isn’t very good. It’s stronger than normal beer and has a higher alcohol content, but it doesn’t taste very good — even Germans will tell you that. It’s certainly not as good as the Bavarian breweries’ normal concoctions. However, it comes in those gigantic glasses that we Yanks call “steins,” so combine its strength with that kind of quantity and if you’re looking to get schnockered, Oktoberfest beer is your tool.

The problem is getting your hands on one. When I was here 22 years ago, I was playing for a local hockey team, a team that had a player whose father owned a small restaurant-bar in the area. As a result, we had a reserved table and a dedicated server — we partied like rock stars and I had the hangover for two days to prove it. And when I went on other days I was still in a group of locals who were known; we got great service.

If you’re on own it doesn’t matter how authentic your lederhosen is, you’re up a creek. Ask if a seat is free and you’ll get nothing but scowls from those already seated — even when a kindly beer server is asking on your behalf. You’ll wind up standing around the perimeter of the table area hoping to catch the eye of a beer server as she goes by. And if you’re a foreigner, you have a better chance of being invited to lead the band in song than you do of getting a seat at a table in one of the beer tents. The bottom line is: Parisians are a hell of a lot nicer than Muencheners, if you can believe it.

But there are solutions. Go during the day and you’ll have room, just don’t expect the raucous partying that goes on at night. And given the aforementioned strength of the Oktoberfest beer, you can write off your afternoon and evening if you stay for more than one beer.

Oktoberfest beer is a lubricant and its viscosity rivals anything Castrol puts into its high-performance race-car formula — and the evening scene in the beer tents is a Formula One race with Reifenstahlian overtones. It’s a miracle there aren’t any brawls during the fortnight of Oktoberfest, but if you combine the nonstop singalongs, the uniform dress and the “eins, zwei, g’suffa!” gestures, it’s not hard to envision how these people wound up in brown uniforms marching in goose-step formation. Thankfully Oktoberfest is all fun, but it’s easy to look at an Oktoberfest beer tent during the singing of “Ein Prosit” and understand how “a people” are not the same as a “group of persons.” But then the band starts into a new tune and the entire beer tent is screaming, “Take me home, country roads, to the place I belong, West Virginia!” in bad, imitation-Schwarzenegger accents and you’re back into homogenized-frat-party mode.

The bottom line is that Oktoberfest is a tremendously good time. And it’s completely family-safe (they even have deals on all the rides on Tuesday, which is known as “family day”). If you’re all about the beer tents and rockin’ out to cliche polka tunes, I highly recommending securing a reserved table, however you can do it, but I’d also allow time for the rides.

I’m glad I went back to Oktoberfest. Do I need to go again? No, I don’t need to…but I suspect I will. Someday. Prost!

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Further Ruminations on Art

Full disclosure: I had zero interest in going to the Louvre while I was in Paris. Being swarmed by 50,000 tourists all clamoring to get a Chevy Chase-like glimpse of the Mona Lisa was not my idea of a good time.

But I did catch the Musee d’Orsay and the Musee Rodin. And in both places I took up an internal discussion I’ve had going for some time. It’s nothing new; in fact, the discussion is one that billions of people have been having since time immemorial. It’s a question of art: what is it? What constitutes quality in art? And why does it matter?

As I looked at various pieces of art in the two museums, some of them really moved me and others didn’t. Some that were especially powerful had me contemplating time and the meaning of life and death, and what the subjects of the painting (or sculpture) must have thought they felt the artist was capturing.

For instance: the prevalence of classic themes such as angels and morality made me wonder about whether such themes even matter. I mean: if we’re really all about biology (remember Snowden’s secret in “Catch-22”), does striving to lead a good but simple life as a farmer in ancient times really matter? Why should it matter that that two lovers embracing are married to other people given the all-consuming passion they’re obviously feeling? And what does the subject of that statue feel when he realizes that those viewing this monument to his all-too-short life won’t really be able to tell who it is without being told by the artist?

But not all great art deals with the big questions. Or does it and I am just too simple to make the leap? The various still lifes done by great artists aren’t really about anything but a moment in time, right? But maybe they’re really about that moment and its relation to the continuum of time?

ARGH! I don’t know and it makes my head hurt to consider such things…but in a good way. Art makes you think and feel, and if it doesn’t, check your pulse because you may already be dead.

But then there’s the question of quality: what makes one piece better than an other? I know nothing of technique, nothing of the methods artists use to create emotion in a piece of work. But does that even matter? If a piece evokes strong emotion does it matter that it’s not technically “good?” Do Monet’s brush strokes make his paintings better than Gauguin’s or is it the subject matter that’s most important?

When I first came to jazz I asked a buddy of mine who had seen Miles Davis and John Coltrane play live what made certain pieces of jazz good (I’m looking at you here, Five-O Jay). As was his style, my friend evaded the question, but he did turn me on to some of the greats and for that I’m grateful.

I don’t know what makes Miles so great but I do know that when I hear “Kind of Blue” I feel better — about me, about people in general, about the world, if only for a little while. Similarly, I don’t know why seeing certain paintings makes me ponder and analyze and contemplate, but they do — before I run back to the comfort of a non-analytical life.

This debate about the nature and meaning of art is a good thing. It makes me feel more alive, makes my brain (and heart and soul) feel more engaged and vibrant, then I do when I’m not so prompted. That might be what I like most about Paris: the constant evocation of such feelings the emphasis on art provokes.

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An American in Paris

So, what do you want to hear about? I could go into the places I went and the sights I saw here in the City of Lights, but you know what the Eiffel Tower is like, you know what Sacre Coeur is like. You’re in Paris, you gotta do ’em (or some of ’em, at least).

I hit my share of cliche Paris attractions but I skipped a lot of them, too. In keeping with the mode I’ve been in all summer — being a tourist via sailboat, you’re perceived by the locals much differently than if you just stepped off an airliner — I was trying to immerse myself in some semblance of the Parisian lifestyle, however briefly.

To that end, I rented a small house/apartment, I didn’t stay in a hotel. I used VRBO.com and the place I wound up in was cozy, comfortable and quite charming. It featured a loft area with a big, comfy bed, and a main-floor living area with a kitchen and bathroom. The place was off the street: you’d pass through the coded front door and then a small courtyard. Unlock the gate and travel down a narrow outdoor corridor between rose-covered walls, walking on a cobblestone path before turning right, through an ivy-covered gate and into a small patio of your own. It really was an oasis, a haven from the city that seemed light years away through those doors.

Not that it needed to be. The area I was in — the 17th arrondissement — was nice and also useful. I was a two-minute walk from the La Fourche stop on the Metro’s 13 line, in the trendy Batignolles district. There were plenty of cliche ethnic restaurants (Turkish, Italian, Indian), plenty of brasseries and bars with sidewalk drinking and dining, and useful services such as a supermarket 100 meters from my front door in one direction and a coin-operated laundromat 50 meters in the other. All things considered, I dug being somewhat out of the mainstream — not in the 7th or 8th, for instance — but having easy access via the Metro to any destination in town.

And tour Paris I did. I typically made a mental note of a place or two I wanted to see, or more likely a general area I wanted to head toward, and then I’d just wander. As a result, I covered a ton of ground — which I also dug since it enabled me to see and experience a wide range of Paris. I like to think it helped me learn some things along the way.

For instance, what a change from England to Paris in one major way. In the former, you can’t smoke anywhere public anymore, not even football matches or pubs. In Paris, everyone smokes everywhere. Kids, adults; men, women; indoors, outdoors. OK, that’s not true: they couldn’t smoke inside the bars or restaurants but that meant they just stepped outside the door and created a nice fog for you to walk through on the way out. And by the time 90 minutes of football was over at the Parc des Princes, my lungs felt like those of an asthmatic with a bad case of pneumonia. Not pleasant.

And what is it with the women smoking? Who told them that smoking makes them look good? I’m sorry if it’s a double-standard (though it’s not because I detest smoking by anyone regardless of gender), but talk about a turnoff.

Which is a shame because the beauty on display in Paris was awe-inspiring. There’s such a focus on style and fashion and just plain looking good that even unattractive people looked, well, good. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to me but that’s why I’m able to offer this observation: I was on the outside looking in. A dispassionate observer, if you will.

Maybe it’s just a result of the city’s size, maybe it’s the same thing in New York. But as a fan of beauty, I quite enjoyed the scenery in Paris.

Which is not to say that I took a lot of photos. In fact, I didn’t take any. I shot two quickie photos with my iPhone of the Champs Elysee, but not once did I take my real SLR out of the bag. Nothing from atop the Eiffel Tower or Montmartre; nothing from the garden at the Rodin Museum; nothing from along the Seine. Not that any of the photos would have been any good anyway: every location that I might have shot had eight gazillion people swarming around. So the memories will have to suffice.

Though I might look into making more memories. One thing that occurred to me while in Paris was that if I were going to do city living, I think I’d do it somewhere overseas. I am most assuredly NOT a city mouse so if I were going to live someplace as foreign as a city I’d just as soon do it in a place where EVERYTHING is that foreign: the language, the culture, the mentality…everything. And I may just do that. I was looking into apartments in Paris before I left.

That may or may not come to pass. I find myself torn between heading back to someplace a little lower key (Reykjavik? Back to Alaska?) or even heading back to the States…I’m even feeling an urge to get back into the game with regard to working for someone else. Hell, I’m even very intrigued by a sailboat that’s for sale in Maryland right now; I may go check it out in the next week or two.

But living in Paris really intrigues me. No, it’s not a case of a fan doing something oh-so-Hemingwayesque because really, that era is so long gone that any attempt to recreate that Lost Generation thing is more doomed to failure than Deadheads thinking a Further show is gonna recreate a show with Jerry on guitar (and, to be honest, my zeal for Hemingway fades as I age). But it does feel as though maybe going out of my comfort zone — living someplace where I don’t have easy, regular access to the things I normally do and love such as surfing, fishing, hiking, hockey, etc. — might be a good way to force a really deep dive into the creative side.

And Paris is someplace that really encourages the creative side. The emphasis on art at the high end and style at the everyday low end can’t help but encourage one’s creative side to come out. Standing in the Musee d’Orsay and contemplating a painting by Monet inspires whether you want it to or not. Contemplating what in the world Rodin had going through his mind as he created The Gates of Hell gets you thinking about what it means to be alive and be human even if the main thing you care about in life is how the Red Sox are doing.

To experience the art that is all around in Paris — from the buskers on the Metro to the masters in the museums to the hacks sketching Notre Dame to listening to the whispers of departed greats at the Pere Lechaise cemetery and other historic sites around town — and the importance placed on art by the French as a whole makes you want to go out and create something of your own, something that puts your voice out there into the universe. Tapping into that urgency might be worth exploring.

And in that case, maybe that would be doing something Hemingwayesque. As I said: there’s no way to resurrect anything resembling the Lost Generation. Literature is so discounted in modern American society that there may not be enough would-be writers left to fill even a bar or bookstore discussing their work. And there’s nothing like a just-concluded world war to cause a great sea of people asking the big questions; nowadays everyone just seems to want to know how to get their own piece of the pie. It seems as though the whole world is just so jaded now. But settling into a foreign culture in order to enforce the living of an artistic life, well, if that’s what Papa and the others were up to then maybe I ought to sign up.

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