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Letters From London - April, 2007
by Isabel Bass
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When The Sun Runner publisher asked if I’d send a monthly column from London, my reaction was “Dunno.”
We were having coffee in Denny’s and I wondered what hi-desert people might want to know about from over there. He assured me he sees a “significant interest” in the audience he serves in the “European arts and cultural realm.” In English stuff. And since saying no to the publisher is like saying no to the Safeway checkout packer, here I am.
So what does he want me to do? Talk about how fed up we here are with Prime Minister Tony Blair’s never-ending goodbye (and worried about what’ll happen under
Gordon Brown)? How with a one-bedroom London apartment costing upwards of
£500,000 (nearly $1m.), we can’t afford to move? How this town, once stultified and uptight and, well, English, is now the buzziest, liveliest, expensivest, heavingest (Pub. Note: This must be English, not American, usage.) and maybe most exciting if not youthful city in all of Europe? And why this is, and where to see it, and who to check out?
Yes, he says, all this I want, and more. Would I do it as a fun letter to you readers, with all the information and everything, but fairly light in
tone? “Have fun with it,” he says, but be careful not to make too many references to things American readers won't understand, unless you can easily explain them.
Ok, so here we go.
It’s been a warm (warmest on record) winter,
but wet, wet, wet. The theatre’s under par – I walked out of three shows. One was the National Theatre production of The Man of Mode – a Restoration comedy tarted up for young audiences into 21st century London warehouse apartments, swanky fashion boutiques, bars and restaurants, and with many things wrong and boring.
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Another was the Indian (as in India) version of Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed in a gaggle
of languages, and more nightmare than sensational, sexy or spectacular.
Then Boeing Boeing, a rerun of a 1960s hit which the critics (strangely) loved, but which I thought clunked like a pair of old Amsterdam clogs.
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And then there was Patrick Stewart, who traded Star Trek for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which he played
magician Prospero, one of his lifetime ambitions. It was set in some Arctic-Star Trek wasteland rather than Shakespeare’s island in the sun. It was full of the strangeness of a dream, with Patrick Stewart
knitting extraordinary elements together in his earnest, well meaning and, well, somewhat wooden performance.
And so, I thought ,why not segue to Paris? April in Paris, and so on. A touch of spring, fun, romance…
Let me remind you that cheap overseas travel is big here. Why go to Manchester or Stratford-on-Avon when
it costs less to go to Verona or Bratislava, Slovakia ( £01 each way (sans tax) with Ryanair, if you’re lucky). Or Hamburg for £23 return (about $46).
And thanks to Eurostar, the high speed train that connects London to the Continent via the Channel tunnel,
you avoid luggage weight problems , airport queues, complicated security checks, and fiddly transport arrangements to airports.
What could be easier than walking out my door to the Holland Park underground station, transferring at
Waterloo to a Eurostar, and pitching up in Paris’ Gare du Nord in just under 3 hours? Not much.
I was thrilled to see that Paris was absolutely radiant with sunny blue skies that seem to last beyond
dinnertime. I think it’s one of the loveliest, friendliest, safest and easiest-to-get-round capitals in Europe, and it’s full of places that evoke key moments or moods of my life.
I don’t mean the noted or listed beauty spots of the travel brochures.
I’m talking about the places carved into the map of your being: places that do for your spirit what the Madeleine cake did for Marcel Proust after he dunked it in his mug of tea.
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For me, it’s the Carousel in the Tuileries Gardens. Joan of Arc’s statue. The Grand Palais
roof. Carnavalet Museum in the Marais, where you can see Proust’s bedroom where he wrote Remembrance of Things Past. People rushing to work in the early mist along the Champs Elysees.
My hairdresser Baki Boulanouar, a true artist, a Berber from the village of Ned-Roma, Algeria, near the Moroccan Frontier, a one-time henna-longhaired silver bracelet hippy and now a married father of two who commutes one hour daily to the Vallee de Chevreuse outside Paris. “There’s air to breathe. Who could live in an apartment?” he says.
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And on to an amazing exhibit of Samuel Beckett, (best known as playwright of the play in which “nothing
happens”) which runs at the Centre Pompidou, till June 25. In this beautifully curated, white, stark exhibit, Paris pays homage to Beckett, the ultimate expat and Nobel prizewinner who became part and parcel
of the French cultural heritage. You see works by painters like Bruce Nahum who were influenced by Beckett, his detailed handwritten scripts, and videos of famous actors and actresses performing “Happy Days,”
and “Waiting for Godot.”
Walking is a joy in Paris, and I love it especially late at night with my friend Chantal and her
huge black puppy Athos, named for one of Alexander Dumas’ Three Musketeers.
I don’t mean to denigrate the nighttime allure of the desert, but it’s pretty special in Paris too –
especially around about midnight - striding with Athos and Chantal under a star-studded black velvet sky. We meander past the Hermes shop on Faubourg St. Honore, down the rue Boissy d’Anglas, and into Place de
la Concorde. This is where Athos goes wild: he has a big following with the gun-toting police outside the US Embassy, and the Elysee Palace, and he loves to jump up to their shoulders for a hug.
We mosey
along the wide open spaces of the lower Champs Elysees, skirt the California Sequoia the US gave to France in 1989, past the Grand Palais with its magnificent rooftop statues, and up towards the Arc de Triomphe which glitters at the end of the Champs
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To the casual visitor, Paris is a place of well-stocked municipal flower beds and sit-down lunches, but I
hear all’s not happy here. My onetime “guardian” Maurice tells me that after 12 years of unkept promises President Jacques Chirac steps down to leave a confused country that longs for something completely
different. My friend Don, a semi-retired US expat agrees. “France is a problem waiting to explode,” he says. But he also says that Paris is reverting to the Paris of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. The
financiers and corporates have migrated to London, and the American community now consists of many semi-retired folk who monitor their financial portfolios, write novels, gather for wine tastings, lectures and lead
a life of “infinite variety.”
Don and I chanced on the Musee des Lettres et Manuscrits on the rue de Nesle, one of Paris’ off-the-wall
museums, and we saw an amazing exhibit of Calamity Jane’s letters to Jean McCormick, her daughter with Buffalo Bill or was it Wild Bill Hickock. It was called “Calamity Jane ou les Legendes de l’Ouest,” and it
was honoring what the French call “the first symbol of women’s liberation in the United States.” Some of
Calamity Jane’s letters were written helter-skelter in a leather-bound Victorian photo album, and one went like this: “I am not old, Janey, but I fear to have reached the end of my sofa.”
As for me, I ended my trip on avenue Montaigne, a beautiful avenue that runs from the Rond Point to Place
de l’Alma and the Seine. I went to check out spring fashion in Ungaro, Chanel et al - not that I can afford them but to steal an idea or two (bright colors, short skirts, silk, and ridiculously huge handbags).
I was having lunch at the Bar du Theatre there, one of my favorite brasseries, when I chanced upon a guy
called Samuel. He was sitting at the table next to me. He was darkhaired, somewhat world-weary, and he had an insouciant charm, which, it turns out serves him well.
He told me his day job is a masseur.
“Business is booming,” he says.
“Do hotel concierges on avenue Montaigne call you in?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
“Well, like who calls you?” I say.
“Like women I know,” he says.
I’m starting to put things together, and I ask if he’s a gigolo. He gives me a smile.
“I deal in contemporary art too. African masks, paintings,” he says. (So where does he get money to buy
that stuff, I wonder. I ask how much gigolos earn these days.)
“What’s it cost?” I ask.
“Isabel,” he says, “it’s not like a prostitute. I have a big price range.
Very big. It depends what somebody wants. I don’t do everything. Well, not necessarily. And things are up for negotiating,” he says.
Samuel offered to drive me to my hotel, but I felt it was better to hold him at arm’s length, at least for
the time being. It turned out to be a wise decision, seeing as he left me with the bill for our wine and cafes.
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Copyright ©1995-2010 The Sun Runner, The Magazine of California Desert Life & Culture
PO Box 2171, Joshua Tree, CA 92252, USA
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