Thematic photographic - Repetitious

Carmi at the blog "Written, Inc." posts a photographic challenge each week at Thematic Photographic. This week, the theme is "Repetitious."

Carmi writes: "Life continues to be complex, so I'm compensating by selecting a really simple theme, repetitious, this week. As you can see from the photo... any simply repetitive scene will do."

I am fascinated by the new trend in cities to provide rental bikes to be picked up and dropped off as users choose. And I like the way they look, lined up against the curb. Whether it's in Paris, London, or New York, I like the idea.

So when we went to Mexico City this spring, I was thrilled to see the rental bikes there, too, in all their repetitive glory in Alameda Central Park - but with an extra feature - a papier mache calaca, or skeleton!

More bikes - in Paris!

A blurry shot in London, from the top of a bus on Bethnal Green Road.

A bike docking station in East London's Brick Lane with most of them checked out - showing how popular the bikes are!

Pink Saturday - Paris pinks

Summer in Paris - time for the promotional sales of rose wine at the Nicolas wine stores!

A painted scene on a security shutter at a stall in the Marche des Puces, the Flea Market at Porte de Clignancourt.

Flowers at a nursery on the Ile de la Cite.

A pink bike, on a street on the Ile de Saint Louis. I like the grafitti on the sign, too!

Paris Pinks!

Spent

Vacation is exhausting! Big cities are stressful, even when one is visiting in leisure.

We're trying to fit a lot of experiences into a short series of days, and, frankly, it's overwhelming.

Lots of walking. Shopping. Lots of eating and drinking.

Incredible food. Amazing sights. Sore feet.

I am just plain tired.

Paris street art

On a wall in the 4th arrondisment in Paris.

Dining in a magical world

Detail from the walls at Julien

When you step inside the doors of the little brasserie, Julien, as its website says, you step into un monde féérique - a magical world.

Julien is located at number 16 on the narrow Rue de Faubourg St, Denis, just north of the great golden stone arch of the Porte St. Denis.

The arch, built in 1672, was erected to commemorate the military victories of King Louis XIV, and replaced a gate built in the medieval walls of the city. Naturally, urban renewal followed, and the street north of the arch, the Rue de Faubourg St. Denis, became a busy, high-class district.

Ah, Paris!

Gargoyles on the belfry of the church of St. Severin

Saturday night, after midnight, the storms broke and we heard thunder and lightning crash above the sheltered medieval courtyard in Dijon. Sunday dawned with blue skies chased with fast-moving puffy clouds. We took the 11:01 TGV from Dijon, and as the high speed train bucketed across the rolling countryside toward Paris, the skies darkened and roiled with more stormclouds.

It only takes an hour and a half to cover the 163 miles between Dijon and Paris, and the speed is almost dizzying. The rain caught up with us briefly, streaking the windows with water, but soon we left it behind. We made it to our Paris apartment in time for an evening stroll and an early dinner.

The two garret windows at center are ours

Our flat is in a touristy neighborhood, so the evening streets are full of roaming camera-hung hoardes. Directly across our building is the beautiful old church of St. Severin - our garret windows look out onto the belfry.

If you crane your neck, you can see the top of the Eiffel Tower from one window, and from the other the towers of Notre Dame.

Notre Dame's towers, on the right

We found a grocery and provisioned ourselves for breakfast, then ate serviceable couscous and tagine at a tiny Tunisian joint. Later, we sat at an outdoor table of the brasserie on our doorstep and sipped a glass of wine while watching the crowds pour by.

Our street

The restaurants here are all geared to the tourist crowd, with menus in English, serving popular French dishes like soupe a l'ognion or "authentic" Savoyard fondue. We'll be wandering further afield for our fare, but in the meantime, there's nothing wrong with a glass of cheap rose and a dish of peanuts as we people-watch.

Mes Devoirs

More French homework! I got an "A" on my second pop quiz, but this Wednesday is our first real exam!

Reading chair at Shakespeare et Companie, in Paris

Yikes!

The reason I'm not blogging is that I'm hitting the books!

Thematic Photographic - Water in any form

Each week Carmi at Written, Inc. has challenged readers with a theme for photographic inspiration. This week the photographic challenge continues with the theme WATER IN ANY FORM.

It was one of those misunderstandings that happen between people of two different cultures. The first night we were in Paris, we'd bought a bottle of white wine in the store, and wanted to chill it for an evening apertif.

We called down to the concierge to ask if there was an ice machine in the hotel. No, he said, but he would be happy to have some brought up. Ah, merci! we thanked him.

Within minutes there was a tap on the door, and the bellman brought....a glass with a few cubes.

Not what we had in mind, we said, and showed him the bottle of wine, gesturing and trying out our poor French. Could he bring an ice bucket?

He went away. Time passed. Much time. We called the concierge again and explained that we had asked for more ice, and wondered if our request had been forgotten. Non, non, we were told; the bellman had to be sent out to get it, that was the reason for the delay.

More time passed. The tap came at the door. This is what was delivered.

We gave up. We were learning.

The Passages of Paris - What's for sale?

Passage des Panoramas

In Paris's 2nd Arrondissement, the ancestors of our modern shopping malls remain today. Called "passages" or "arcades" - they are narrow walkways, lined with shops and covered with iron-framed glass roofs, that meander between two buildings and offer a short-cut through urban boulevards.

Great-Uncle George's Baedekar guide to Paris, published in 1900, showing the Passage des Panoramas, Passage Jouffroy, and Passage Verdeau.

Scholar and writer Walter Benjamin was fascinated with the way the covered shopping arcades of Paris contributed to the rise of consumer capitalism in the 19th century.

The arcades are the center of commerce in luxury items. In fitting them out, art enters the service of the merchant.

Housewares shop in the Galerie Vivienne

So I thought I'd give you a glimpse of what's on sale in Paris's covered passageways.

Bookseller, Passage des Panoramas

By providing a sheltered place where commodities could be displayed and admired, where even those who couldn't buy them could still see them and envy them, the very architecture of the arcades spurred a new era of consumerism.

Art Gallery, Passage Joffroy

Benjamin called the passages "temples of commodity," and noted the vast array of items for sale all in the same place. He likened the glass shop windows one gazed at to:

those great encyclopedic works World and Mankind, New Universe, The Earth, wouldn’t our gaze always fall first on the color illustration of a “Carboniferous Landscape” or on “Lakes and Glaciers of the First Ice Age?” Such an ideal panorama of a barely elapsed primeval age opens up when we look through the arcades that are found in all cities. Here resides the last dinosaur of Europe, the consumer. On the walls of these caverns their immemorial flora, the commodity, luxuriates and enters, like cancerous tissue, into the most irregular combinations. A world of secret affinities; palm tree and feather duster, hair dryer and Venus de Milo, prosthesis and letter-writing manual come here together as after a long separation. The odalisque lies in wait next to the inkwell, priestesses raise aloft ashtrays like patens. These items on display are a rebus; and how one ought to read here the birdseed kept in the fixative-pan from a darkroom, the flowerseeds beside the binoculars, the broken screws atop the musical score, and the revolver above the goldfish bowl – is right on the tip of one’s tongue. After all, nothing in the lot appears to be new. The goldfish come from perhaps a pond that has dried up long ago, the revolver will have been a corpus delecti, and these scores could hardly have preserved their previous owner from starvation when her last pupils stayed away.

Needlepoint shop in the Passage Verdeau

He wrote about the collectors shops - taxidermists and shell shops and a shop selling only buttons. Commemorative spoons, lingerie, hairpins. There were cafes, hairdressers, bookstalls, and wax museums - the Musee Grevin Wax Museum is still in the Passage Jouffroy today.

The line between art and commodity was blurred. The shopping arcades were a habitat much like one's own home, wrote Benjamin:

glossy enameled shop signs are a wall decoration as good as, if not better than, an oil painting in the drawing room of a bourgeois; walls with their “Post No Bills” are its writing desk, newspaper stands its libraries, mailboxes its bronze busts, benches its bedroom furniture, and the café terrace its balcony from which it looks down on its household.

Passage Jouffroy

Walter Benjamin was intrigued by the artificiality of the decor style, which aped other worlds and eras, and mixed it all up without discrimination.

Bicycle in the Passage Verdeau

He quoted his friend Franz Hessel, who called the 19th century the "dreamy epoch of bad taste."

Yes, this epoch was wholly adapted to the dream, was furnished in dreams. The alternation in styles - Gothic, Persian, Renaissance and so on - signified: that over the interior of the middle-class dining room spreads a banquet room of Cesare Borgia's, or that out of the boudoir of the mistress a Gothic chapel arieses, or that the master's study, in its iridescence, is transformed into the chamber of a Persian prince.

Antique store, Galerie Vero-Dodat

Antique and secondhand shops were common. So were specialty shops, like one that sells fancy canes.

Le Bonheur des Dames, Passage Verdeau

Benajmin was interested in the names of shops, like "La Fille d'Honneur," "Le Page Inconstant," "La Chamiere Allemande" (The German Cottage), "Au Coin de la Rue" (At the corner of the road), and "Au Mamelouk." Some of the names reflected the popularity of theatrical revues and operettas of the day.

Toy shop at the Palais Royal

Benjamin wrote about how fashion created the need to purchase each new item, that it "prescribed the ritual by which the fetish Commodity wished to be worshipped." Both buyer and sellers were constantly watching one another, selling themselves as surely as if they were prostituting themselves.

Boutique in the Palais Royal

Women here look at themselves more than elsewhere, and from this comes the distinct beauty of the Parisienne. Before any man catches sight of her she has already seen herself reflected ten times.

He quoted Karl Marx, who wrote how the "murderous, meaningless caprices of fashion" led to the formation of the factory system of exploitation in the Industrial Revolution. The constant need to have the latest thing kept the system going.

Passage des Panoramas

By the end of the 19th century, the passages were also where less seemly commerce took place, including prostitution. Prostitutes were, perhaps, the ultimate expression of the commodity fetishism, since they browsed in the passages for clothing and jewelry to enhance their ability to sell themselves to the men who frequented the passages.

Contemporary accounts, including the novels of Emile Zola, describe the world of the passages and the excess of commerce conducted there. In "Nana," a novel about a theatrical courtesan, he describes her stroll through the Passage des Panoramas:

She adored the Passage des Panoramas, still obsessed by the passion she had felt in her youth for fancy goods, fake jewelry, gilded zinc and cardboard made to look like leather. She could not tear herself away from shop windows any more than when she had been a street urchin in down-at-heel shoes, lost in wonder over a confectioner's wares, or listening to a musical box in a neighboring shop and above all going into ecstasies over cheap gaudy knickknacks, such as nutshell workboxes, ragpickers' baskets for holding toothpicks, and thermometers mounted on obelisks....

Confectioners in the Passage des Panoramas

Walter Benjamin worked on his study of the shopping arcades for over ten years, amassing a collection of notes, quotes, and interconnected essays. It was his obsession, and if he'd been able to publish it, it would have been his most important book.

Instead, in 1940, Walter Benjamin died while fleeing the Nazis. His death by supposed suicide in a mountain town on the border between Spain and France is still a mystery. So, too, is the fate of a lost manuscript he carried with him. Was it his finished "Passegenwerk," on the arcades of Paris?

A collection of his notes - perhaps his unfinished manuscript - was hidden by a friend in the Bibliotheque Nationale. It was this fragmentary, montage-like collection of writings that was finally published in 1980.

Rotunda, Galerie Colbert

Today the Galerie Colbert is part of the Institut Nationale d'Histoire de l'Art, a training and research center. Its beautiful rotunda now restored, it houses reading rooms, seminar rooms, and exhibit space. One of the seminar rooms is named after Walter Benjamin.

"Even the eyes of passersby are veiled mirrors", Walter Benjamin wrote.

The Passages of Paris - Cashmere fever

Pink Saturday - Beverly at the blog "How Sweet the Sound" hosts Pink Saturday. Let the color pink inspire you!

Shawl seen through the window of Wolff et Descourtis, Galerie Vivienne

In 1798, Napolean Buonoparte brought a gift home to his wife, Josephine. It was a shawl woven from yarn made from the hair of mountain goats in the Himalayas. It was soft, but held the warmth, and yet it was light and gracefully complimented the informal, flowing muslin gowns worn by the court ladies which, following the political aesthetic at the time, evoked classical Greek and Roman images, to celebrate the democratic ideals playing out in the streets of France.

Portrait of Empress Joséphine, 1805, Pierre-Paul Prud'hon

Empress Josephine was being re-gifted - the Ottoman imperial ruler of Egypt, Mameluke Pasha Mehmet Ali, had been given the shawl earlier in the century by an envoy of the Mughal rulers of Kashmir. When Napoleon defeated the Mameluke's army in 1798, the Mameluke gave the French Emperor the Kashmiri shawl in appeasement.

Empress Joséphine, 1809, Antoine-Jean Gros

Josephine loved it. She wanted more shawls. So, too, did all the fashionable ladies in Paris, and that hunger invigorated not only the weaving industries in India and Kashmir, but also French and British entrepreneurs who decided to import and breed the Himalayan goats and start home-grown weaving industries of their own.

Images from Journal des Dames et des Modes, New York Public Library

Scholar and social scientist Walter Benjamin, writing about the covered shopping arcades that sprang up in Paris during the first half of the 19th century, mentioned this fad for Indian cashmere, called "cashmere fever" in newspaper and magazine accounts he quoted in his notes.

Madame Riviere, 1805, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Image from the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris

Empress Josephine went on to collect over a thousand cashmere shawls. Every high-class and bourgeoise woman wanted a shawl, and if they couldn't get a cashmere shawl, they wanted something that looked a lot like one.

French fashion plate 1803, New York Public Library

It was kind of like back in the 1990s when everyone wanted a pashmina. Remember that? The pashmina craze of the 1990s was a re-run of the cashmere fever of the 1790s. The same thing happened - the sudden introduction of a new product from the Third World fed a hunger for exoticism, and started a craze that spurred an industry - and inspired a whole lot of charlatans and imitators.

French fashion, 1800, New York Public Library

If you couldn't afford a pashmina, you got something that was blended with rayon and viscose (I have just such a wrap I bought from a street vendor in New York City for $25 and still wear today - it's lovely!)


In Paris during the 1820s and 1840s, ladies wore them to the theatre, and to stroll among the galleries at the Palais-Royal, and as they browsed at the boutiques in the glassed-in passages. Bridegrooms gave them to their wives as wedding gifts. As time went by, mothers passed their cashmere shawls down as heirlooms to their daughters.

French and British weavers learned how to mass-produce the fabric using less luxurious fibers, and soon a woolen shawl woven with a paisley pattern was a common commodity bought by women of all classes, to warm their shoulders in the cold of winter.

This summer, we walked through the Galerie Vivienne, where the Wolff et Descourtis shop sells shawls and quality yard goods. The shop was closed, for lunchtime, but we peeked through the glass at the bolts of brilliantly colored cloth on display.

Lunch was a good idea. We sat down at the Bistrot Vivienne, and enjoyed a nice meal - including a dessert of tarte aux peches.

What a tasty way to enjoy the passages couverts of Paris! I'll make do with my knock-off shawl, and just eat this ice cream.