Matthew Stadler's Personal Weblog

I'm super excited about this new weblog way of writing and grateful to the Urban Honking weblog group for sponsoring my personal "blog." Expect me to post about once a week.

So last Thursday, I threw my "Oregonian" in the bag after a quick glance at the Jack Ohman cartoon, and took off from PDX bright and early Thursday for a long weekend (OK, five days, who's counting?) in Paris. Awfully sorry to have to miss the Seafood and Wine festival, but I figured they'd have enough of both in France. I'd brought a few different possibilties for reading along on the plane, but when I realized that The Atlantic's big feature story was "Jihadists in Paradise" (yikes!) I ended up with Obama's "Audacity of Hope." Yes, I know the Post rolled its eyes at what they called the "Mr. Obama Goes to Washington" tone, and they may have a point, but the guy can write. And you've got to love a politician who says he's "so overexposed that I make Paris Hilton look like a recluse." We won't hear anything like that from Mitt Romney anytime soon.

Connected in Chicago, and then got into the City of Lights about 10 AM. Oscar Wilde quipped that when good Americans die they go to Paris, and despite the rain and chill I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Of course that leaves wide open the question of where good Parisians go when they die. Maybe Ted Haggard can help them out with that one. I was sorry to get the news in Paris that the famous Rue de Rivoli art squat has finally been shut down by authorities. Proust wrote, "Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments," but I suppose you can't recreate reality ad infinitum when the zoning laws are against you.

Such places are having their doors shut all over town, and the French think it's a lamentable attack on high culture. "This is all about Nicolas Sarkozy," said the theatre director who ran Le Barbizon (that was another well-known art squat; don't think me too well-read here, it's just something I happen to know.) Sarkozy's center-right, in the way only a Frenchman can be center-right (what would it count as over here, I wonder?) and I'd love to see him try and go on Colbert. The Word of the Day could be Camembert. I had some, by the way (Camembert, that is) in a cheese tray that came as my final course at L'Os a Moelle, a bistro near the Eiffel Tower. The phrase apparently means "Marrow Bone," which, you've got to admit, is no weirder a name for a restaurant than "Blue Dragonfly" or "Noble Rot." (Timothy Egan and I had a wonderful flight of Old Vine Australian Reds once at Noble Rot; I'm not criticizing them!) Just don't ask me to pronounce it.

I did manage to get out to the Marmottan ("off the beaten path," they say, and it definitely is) ostensibly to put in an appearance at the Camille Claudel exposition, but really I was more interested in seeing Monet's early works. I strolled through the basement room that contains several drafts of "Water Lillies," a few of which look like they were painted on mind altering drugs. The neighborhood is a bit Washington DCish - towering old apartment buildings, intermittent greenspace. I had to take a taxi out to the Marmottan, since the public transport was disturbed by a large labor protest. This apparently happens every week or so in France; the public sector is upset about pension reductions. It's hard to imagine that many Americans upset enough about anything to take action on it, other than Congress being annoyed that Nancy Pelosi said they’d actually have to work five days a week Although I saw on Wonkette that since Congress reconvened, they haven’t actually worked one single five-day week yet.... (Forgive the sarcasm; it's not like I worked five days this week, but still...) And even if we Americans could muster some nice European-style political outrage, we'd probably forget the issue as soon as "American Idol" came on. (Did you know, incidentally, there's a whole discusion going on online about the possibility that some "Idol" contestants are so inept at discerning social cues that they don't realize they're being humiliated? "Does humiliation require self-awareness?" one blogger asked. Now there's a philosophical question. I know I'd have felt a little better if I hadn't been aware I had no idea how to say "L'Os a Moelle." )

I should change the subject, because I've probably already been upstaged in reflecting on such questions by BHL (that's actually how the French refer to Bernard-Henri Levy, the writer "New York Magazine" called "a rock-star French philosophe" - you know, the guy who did the big re-enactment of de Toqueville's cultural-analysis trip through the USA) in "American Vertigo" (isn't that a U2 song?) So... back to my travel narrative. Not much left, I'm sorry to say, other than the fact that I was afraid for awhile my flight wasn't going to go, since a number of them were cancelled due to the strike. But all was well and I got back just in time to see on Channel 8 that I apparently was grabbing a Booya Juice smoothie at the airport just about the same time they were arresting that sexual predator there. Too bad it was all secret, or I could have been on the news, my jet-lagged face weary with Parisian excess but still speaking up for the safety of our youth. Just kidding; it was a great five days, and I don't have to go back to work till tomorrow morning. Before then, can anyone tell me what happened on "Lost"?