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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Dateline: Beneath the English Channel

That’s right: I’m currently underwater AND underground. I’m aboard the Eurostar, the high-speed train from London to Paris, after a couple of days in the UK. I had originally planned to head to Scotland after my days on Polar Bear, but it turned out that my sister-in-law and two eldest nieces were going to Paris, so I figured I’d join them there for a bit. Since I was always planning on heading to France while over here in Europe, this development simply sped up the process.

The two-plus days in London were interesting. It’s been — gulp — 35 years since I was last in the city, and that visit was for about 24 hours or so, as best as I can recall. I remember playing rounders, a precursor to baseball, in a park with a bunch of locals who were the children of a friend of my mother’s, and I remember being the cliché boorish American — even at 10 years of age. I was yelling and screaming and win-win-win and…ugh. I recoil to this day at the image of my behavior.

This time, I was slightly more subdued. The emphasis on this visit, however, like the last one was sports: I caught two English Premier League matches in two days, and was thoroughly entranced by both.

In the first, a sunny afternoon at Craven Cottage saw Fulham host Blackburn. Craven Cottage is pastoral site for a football match, with swans and rowers passing alongside on the Thames making the scene all the more scenic. The match played out to a 1-1 draw; not surprising since neither team is exactly setting the Premiership on fire at the start of this season.

One other point worth mentioning about the match: the moment of silence observed before the opening kickoff to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 tourist attacks was without question the most sincere and deeply moving moment of silence I’ve ever experienced at a sporting event. Perhaps that was due to the fact that there was an American, Clint Dempsey, on the pitch, but whatever the reason, it moved me to tears. Indeed, the memory of the sincerity of the local fans in their gesture is getting me choked up now.

Last night, the 12th of September, I caught the Queens Park Rangers-versus-Newcastle United match at the former’s Loftus Road stadium. “Cozy” is putting it mildly: at Loftus Road I had neighbors’ elbows in both sides, knees in my back and head at my knees — and I had paid for good seats. And good seats they were: at midfield, about six such rows from the pitch, on which there was less than a meter to the touchline.

I’ve been a fan of the Premier League to varying degrees for a while now, but seeing the players this close made the game a whole new experience for me. Full disclosure: I was always a horrible soccer player. Truly awful. So I’m not trying to build the pros up because I fancy myself as being just a notch below them. But the fact remains: watching the skills of those players and the precision with which they played the game was hypnotic. The split-second timing and execution was magnificent — and we’re not talking about a lot of international-caliber players in this particular game. Color me way more impressed than I was before.

This match ended in a 0-0 draw, somewhat surprising since Newcastle is off to a great start this season and Queens Park featured five new signees playing their first match for the squad.

While both games ended up in kissing-your-sister outcomes, the experiences made the trip so worth the venture. The cozy parks where the games were played were like cleaned-up versions of the pitch where your kids play. Craven Cottage and Loftus Road are such intimate venues that they make Fenway Park seem like the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium.

Beyond the football, I cruised the underground (which is not, as Otto in “A Fish Called Wanda” believed, a terrorist organzation), drank Guinness on tap, wandered Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square and Covent Gardens and Trafalgar Square, and got the next stages of my European travels in order.

Which has led me here: racing across the French countryside at…how fast? Two hundred miles an hour? Whatever the speed, it was slightly unnerving as we stormed through southeastern England at that pace, the buildings and highways whirring by in a blur. Here in France, the farms and fields and villages — all with red, ceramic-roofed homes and a stone church with steeple — are more easily digested, visually, than the mayhem of urban and suburban England.

Which brings up another point I wanted to make: I rode a train into London on Sunday from Oxfordshire, northwest of London. I’d spent the night in a tiny little inn above a pub in a tiny little village out there in the English countryside. It was a wonderful place to stay and I felt oh-so-propah driving to the train station in the sun the next morning. All I needed was a tweed jacket, some leather driving gloves and a wool cap and I’d have made the very picture of a gent.

But what caught my attention was this: we were a brief, hour-long train ride from the heart of London, and yet this was full-on rural countryside. And that’s when it hit me: freeways are the scourge of the United States. If I’d been back in the U.S., that area would have been infested with subdivisions, strip malls and shopping centers, the farms and fields having long since been paved over. And why? Because we’d have built a couple of God-awful freeways enabling suburbia to sprawl out there, bedroom communities sprouting like mushrooms from a dung heap.

Instead, driving in the UK is a more genteel activity. Slower, to be sure, but less stressful than back home. Granted, it’s a much smaller country so taking your time still enables you to cover the length and breadth of the place fairly quickly. But lacking the sterile and utilitarian blacktop that we have in the U.S. has helped the UK retain its non-urban areas. I feel kinda sorry for us after having experienced what a viable rail system can do for a country.

Or countries, plural. This high-speed thing is awesome: comfortable, clean and without all the hassles of airports and snotty security people and indifferent airlines. I could get used to traveling like this.

And perhaps I shall. I’ll spend six days in Paris (where I rented a small house, a cheaper and better option than a hotel room) and then head on to Munich, where I’ve not been since I was playing hockey near there back, oh, 21 or 22 years ago. And I’ll be there for Oktoberfest, no less. Just a coincidence, I assure you. After that, we shall see.

But for now, my destination is the Gare du Nord in Paris in an hour-and-change, so to get in the spirit I’ve been enjoying a little vin rouge avec a croissant. Oh la la!

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