Cler

For a while now I've been meaning to write about a Parisian market and post plenty of photos of the many horti-fruti stands in their full glory.  The catch is one's assaulted by a swarm of eager shoppers on Sundays, either those who are ambitious enough to go to the market before Mass at 11o'clock or those who will skip Mass but will spend the rest of the morning sitting at a café with the newspaper before going home to cook lunch.  I'm in neither category, choosing either market or Mass and not reading newspapers anymore.

So instead of negotiating my way past a million elbows attached to arms pushing trolleys over my feet, I went to rue Cler yesterday morning.  It is a pedestrian street lined with fruit & veg stands, cafés, florists and all kinds of commerce, with far fewer people than the market, especially before 11am.

I like this street for many reasons. One can have a feeling of being somewhere other than a big city, because it is a pedestrian street; my fav café in town is located there; and, like most of the city, everywhere you look there's something pretty or interesting to see, which seems to be Parisians' specialty. I never tire of how they make a conscious effort to make a pleasing visual ensemble  even if sometimes it can make one lose one's patience (i.e. you go to the bakery, buy a tiny tartelette aux cerises, and the person spends fourteen minutes wrapping it up in a lovely little box with an intricate ribbon around it making sure the bow she ties becomes the object of every sailor's jealousy.)

Rue Cler fruit&veg stands have another advantage over standard street markets.  There is a smaller quantity of each product, so the quality tends to be better, and the variety greater, like this flat peach (pêche plate). 

Having grown up completely disconnected from 'nature', I only relatively recently learned the right season for this or that fruit.  In France, greengrocers must disclose the origin of the products, so it becomes easier for me to know when to buy things that haven't flown 8,000Kms to get to my kitchen. 

 

 

 

 

Salve

Your mission, should you wish to accept it, is to pick one out of these-- for whatever reason.

Fryderyk

Bill

Jacques

Jaco

Meddy

Bottom of the Pits of the Universe in a Barrell Rolling Down into a Swamp 

Full of Melted Marshmallow & Meringue

A few months ago I posted an entry of five different versions of the same song, one I like a lot, in order to make comparisons more easily.

Today, I will post a similar entry, only this time of songs I can't stand.  "But why?", you may ask. Because what we dislike says as much as what we like. 

Dreadful, no?

But how about this one?--

Q: Did I go through the torture of listening to these as I posted them?

... oh, yes, for the love of all that's sacred, please, stop. 

But out of all, I think Kate Bush awakens the murderer in me the quickest. Such competence. Murder is illegal, and yet this woman was allowed to record a "song" and release it, committing mass torture from afar.

Ugh.

In this song, the Beatles managed to include the Marseillaise, one of the best songs, in the repetitive half-hearted whine they think is singing. For that alone they deserve to go to my very own private Gulag. (Though there are some songs they wrote that I enjoy. Few.)

There are many, many more, though I won't post them today.

Oh, no, wait, wait!  No list of Songs I Dislike A Lot would satisfy me if it didn't feature at least one reggae 'tune' - i.e. a sequence of 3 chords, so:

My God, appalling.

I need a shower forthwith.

Hephaestus meets Thor


... on the Equator...

"...Tu veras lo que va pasar..."

Truth & Meaning

Last week I went to a Cranach the Elder exhibit at the Senate Museum.  I knew next to nothing about Cranach, only being familiar with his allegory of Justice, which I like; his Justice is naked, not blind(folded), and her scales are tipped, not perfectly level.  His Justice is partial, like Truth.

The first two rooms of the exhibit left me cold. There were far too many people there, despite the fact we went as soon as it opened.  Very quickly I lost patience and decided not to look at the paintings in the order they were presented. Instead, I kept moving forward to the next one in front of which I could stand without someone else's head or torso blocking my view, otherwise I'd have spent 3 hours in there, to see about 50 paintings.

Justice was in the 3rd room, in the company of about 12 Adam&Eve paintings, all good, but none moving (to me).  I thought I'd seen the best when, walking to the last 2 rooms I was pleasantly surprised by a sudden sense of humour firmly grounded on thought.  Let's just say I have a soft spot for intelligent humour, so my immediate reaction was "Cranach, you dawg! Hiding this sense of humour under piles and piles of delicate nudes with the same face! Duuuuuude!"   Yes, because his women all have the exact same face.  Salome holding the silver tray with John-the-Baptist's head looks as angelic as Lucretia stabbing herself, as angelic as Eve hiding her private bits.  Subtle.

As his sense of humour.  Subtle but... powerful!  Because it provokes one to think a certain number of things through.  Here's the painting which stunned me:

It is called "La Bouche de la Verité" (= The Mouth of Truth).  The idea comes from an Ancient Roman sculpture (la Bocca della Verità), a human face in whose mouth a person puts his hand and affirms whatever; if it is the truth, nothing happens, if it is a lie, the mouth closes on the person's hand, severing it.

In the painting, Cranach substituted it with an animal, but the idea is the same.  

The twist here, however, is that the woman depicted in it is not having her hand severed, so she is telling the truth.  But what is she saying? 

She's been told by her husband to affirm she's never been unfaithful to him.  Oh, but she has!  What will she do? How come the mouth isn't chopping off her lying hand?

Well, this lady is cunning.  She had her lover dress up as a jester and touch her when she put her hand in the Mouth of Truth, while she said:  No man apart from my husband and this jester has ever laid hands on me.

It is the truth, she is safe.

Does it mean what it purports to?  Nope.

Truth and meaning are therefore separate entities, which can meet, and often do, but are by no means inextricably linked.  They can run parallel or they can intersect, but it is seldom a "natural" thing; it doesn't just happen, it is a conscious effort which involves intentions and the right words, a constant quest for it, between the apparently candid lines and deceivingly unambiguous statements.

I'm not saying every single truth is this way, of course there are things which are said clearly and simply and truthfully, while complex formulations can hide many lies.  Rather, my idea is to convey the thought that the truth is not always simple, clear, and easy to grasp. It can be traumatizing, layered, complex-- it can also be meaningless. 

This brings a question to me: is a meaningless truth any better than a lie? 

And another: is a truth whose meaning (as is the case in the painting) opposes the sentiment expressed in a statement worse than an outright lie? (i.e. Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman.)

To me, this painting is a good example of the cliché "a picture is worth a thousand words", but it is a good example of how the cliché is not true.  

Look, if you stand before this painting for 3 hours without having read what the caption next to it says, you'll never know what its intention is, even if you know about the Bocca della Verità. It is not going to be possible to grasp exactly what the apparently innocent woman has done.  One cannot guess who the jester is.  There's no clear husband figure depicted in it.  It is a representation of an idea which had, in order for it to be meaningful, to be previously thought through and verbalized/written down.  A picture is only worth a thousand words when/if words aren't even necessary in order to explain something.  This invalidates even the premise of such a statement.  

A picture is therefore worth... no words at all, not a priori.  If words aren't needed to explain something, then why would a picture be worth a thousand... nothing at all?   So to me, a picture can provide added value to words, but cannot substitute them.

Pictures, photos, footage of something... do not tell a meaningful truth.   

Now I want to find a metaphor that's worth a thousand pictures.  Help?  

What links?

Nelson Mandela and Timothy McVeigh

"Timothy McVeigh chose the poem Invictus, which means "Unconquerable" in Latin, to be his final statement. He handed a handwritten copy of William Ernest Henley's poem to the prison warden, Harley Lappin, just before his death."

"While incarcerated on Robben Island prison, Nelson Mandela recited the poem to other prisoners and was empowered by its message of self mastery."  

My first instinct was always to look for a legal link among revolutionaries (it works, too -- Mandela, again, is a lawyer, and was, already, when he was imprisoned; Robespierre, Fidel Castro, Danton, Lenin, and others-- OK, Ché was a medical doctor, but there are always exceptions...), maybe poetry and literature a bigger source of inspiration than the law?

Obviously, the way these two men made use of the same poem differs enormously; McVeigh saw in it a way to legitimize his feelings, while Mandela found in it solace and strength.  It amuses me to think these two men who couldn't be more different from each other, at least in how they're portrayed in the media, have this, the love for a poem, in common.

One can see how both saw elements which exist in the poem, no distortion of the sentiments expressed in it was necessary.  Is this a worry? Yes.  Is it exciting? Yes.  A poem, a piece of music, also becomes what the reader/listener sees in it.

William Ernest Henley

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gait,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

And here I'm afraid I'll appeal to my more vulgar tendencies and say I find this poem very good provided I manage to keep the song "The Captain of Your Heart" well away from my mind... otherwise... it is anachronistically ruined.

SuBuS

The Hunt for the Red October is one of my fav films. I've watched it dozens of times, each time with renewed enthusiasm and a quasi-miraculous ability to "forget" the plot, so that each time I watch it, the main developments and twists come as a "shock" to me.

Since I can't be on a sub, I make do with a bus... and today* as I made my way home from a Cranach the Elder exhibit (more on that later), I notice things I hadn't paid attention to before.

There are rules posted on the buses, which isn't surprising or unusual. What I found interesting was how the bus company decided to frame these messages, playing with language, ideas, and humour, instead of taking the opportunity to use that Billy-no-mates of grammar, the imperative.  (I am a mate of the imperative, but most seem to dislike it!  Go figure! as it were...)

OK, so, mesdames et messieurs, here's the reading material provided by the buses in the city of Paris (plus translations, provided by I - Mmovable Feast--)

"Si chacun fait ses propres règles, tout se dérègle."

"If everyone makes his own rule, everything becomes disordered."

(Much better in French, but I can't make it keep its original wordplay... and here, I don't even think it's my incompetence!)

"J'ai réinventé le passé pour voir la beauté de l'avenir." ~~Louis Aragon, Le fou d'Elsa

"I reinvented the past in order to see future's beauty."

"La RATP vous souhaite une année 2011 pleine de poésie."

"RATP wishes you a 2011 full of poetry."

(I dig this part! A bus company wishing me a year full of poetry is quite funny and lovely to me - poetry itself plus the possible poetic life?)

"Jean-Luc a un prénom.  Ce n'est donc pas la peine de le traiter de tous les noms."

"Jean-Luc has a name. Therefore, there's no need to call him names.

(Please address others with courtesy.)"

The boring sociolinguistic question that's burning the tips of my typing fingers as well as the corner of my brain, though, is: does this approach work better than straight, vertical orders?

So far, I only saw an altercation on a bus once; well, it was kinda sorta on the bus.  Some of it was on the pavement.

We were coming back from a dinner party at my other half's cousin's place out in Suresnes when, as the bus arrived and a young woman dressed in a provocative way (frankly, it looked like she'd got fashion tips from an 'exotic' dancer in Pigalle- NTTAWWT - Not That There's Anything Wrong With That-) attempted to get on it, her brother (as we later found out) attempted to stop her by pulling her arm and hair and handbag and whatever else he could grab, all hell broke loose, as hell does.  Invariably.

Two passengers (both females) and the driver (male) got involved; the passengers tried to make the guy see the error of his ways (by evoking women's right to dispose of their bodies and conduct their lives as they see fit) while he shouted he did not want his sister to enter some night club dressed as though she'd been hired by the hour; the driver tried to make him see the error of his ways by reminding him no one would be able to see his noble intentions through his violent behaviour (though not without first having physically removed him from the bus and pinned him against the bus stop Plexiglass shelter...)

Long story short... she got on it while the passengers continued to discuss the merits of feminism and the barbarism of Islam, while the driver... drove.

Maybe it'd help if the RATP had a special sign reminding us not to remain too attached to our individual beliefs when using public transport...

*Actually, yesterday, Thursday, but Blogspot wasn't working... so I copied it to post it when it went back to normal.

Thoughtful Humour

Once again, reading Zizek, I found a very good passage from another book quoted in In Defense of Lost Causes, and it made me smile, so I looked for it online (because sloth is one of my vices and I didn't want to type it all up if I could help it--) and found it.  I haven't read the book, but the context in which this passage was quoted tells me I don't have to, in order to understand the meaning here:

"Sir Arthur St. Clare, as I have already said, was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him. When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else's Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs. St. Clare was an old Anglo-Indian Protestant soldier. Now, just think what that might mean; and, for Heaven's sake, don't cant about it. It might mean a man physically formidable living under a tropic sun in an Oriental society, and soaking himself without sense or guidance in an Oriental Book. Of course, he read the Old Testament rather than the New. Of course, he found in the Old Testament anything that he wanted -- lust, tyranny, treason. Oh, I dare say he was honest, as you call it. But what is the good of a man being honest in his worship of dishonesty?"

G.K. Chesterton, The Sign of the Broken Sword

http://books.eserver.org/fiction/innocence/brokensword.html

Mad Men

A Few of My Fav Formulæ

Saturn + Sun

Tho according to me something's missing in the first one at the leftop... 

Music = Everything + Kite

... to be cont'd

High, Light

My last two weeks have been dedicated to Zizek's The Parallax View.  It would be daft of me to attempt to condense this book for many reasons, the main one being the sheer number of seemingly unrelated topics he manages to bring together in a tight, rigorous centre ("pero sin perder la ternura, jamas"...) with a solid base on philosophy (from what I can tell-- my knowledge of philosophy being comparable only to my scientific inaptitude -- tho the former is  a question of being able to think and the latter depends on specific skills) which provides his foundation, along with Lacanian psychoanalysis, for his critical examination of political theory and ideology, pop culture, literature, etc.

There are so many points and passages which provide endless mental nourishment, it becomes difficult to isolate only one.

But... I will do just that, because ... I feel like it.  

*****

"Humoresque," arguably Schumann's piano masterpiece, is to be read against the background of the gradual loss of the voice in his songs: it is not a simple piano piece, but a song without the vocal line, with the vocal line reduced to silence, so that all we actually hear is the piano accompaniment.  This is how one should read the famous "inner voice/innere Stimme" added by Schumann (in the written score) as a third line between the two piano lines, higher and lower: as the vocal melodic line which remains a nonvocalized "inner voice," a kind of musical equivalent to the Heidegger-Derrida "crossed-out" Being.  What we actually hear is thus a "variation, but not on a theme," a series of variations without a theme, accompaniment without the main melodic line (which exists only as Augenmusik, music for the eyes, in the guise of written notes.)  (No wonder Schumann composed a "concert without orchestra," a kind of counterpoint to Bartók's "concert for orchestra.")  This absent melody is to be reconstructed on the basis of the fact that the first and third levels (the right- and left-hand piano lines) do not relate to each other directly, that is to say, their relationship is not that of an immediate mirroring: in order to account for their interconnection, we are thus compelled to (re)construct a third, "virtual" intermediate level (melodic line) which, for structural reasons, cannot be played.  Its status is that of an impossible-real which can exist only in the guise of a writing: its physical presence would annihilate the two melodic lines we hear in reality (as in Freud's "A Child is Being Beaten," in which the middle fantasy scene was never conscious, and has to be reconstructed as the missing link between the first scene and the last.)  Schumann brings this procedure of absent melody to an apparently absurd self-reference when, later in the same fragment of "Humoresque," he repeats the same two actually played melodic lines, yet this time the score contains no third absent melodic line, no inner voice -- what is absent here is the absent melody, that is, absence itself.  How are we to play these notes when, at the level of what is actually to be played, they exactly repeat the previous notes?  The actually played notes are deprived only of what is not there, of their constitutive lack -- or, to echo the Bible, they lose even that which they never had.

Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View, pp. 365-6