Paris Journal I: La Cordonnerie

Photograph by Hallie Cohen

If you can get a table in the kitchen of La Cordonnerie on the Rue St. Roch near the Tuileries stop on the Number One Line of the Metro (direction La Defense), you will get to see a gastronomic one man show, which is very much like magic. The chef Hugo's parents sent him to England for one month every summer, when he was a boy. So he speaks assez bien Anglais and he will talk to you about n’importe quoi, as he single-mindedly cooks up huge slabs of entrecote, lovingly garnishing the accompanying pile of pommes frites with parsley and coarse salt. Amongst the other specialities de la maison are escalope de veau, steak d’agneau and terrine de canard. His nephew waits on the tables and always asks moi je peut? as the finished dishes begin to decorate the counter. Hugo is a Baryshnikov of the kitchen and he moves balletically with great speed and grace around the small space in which he works.  For all this he still has energy to spare and at the end of a recent evening he was found experimenting on a full side of salmon which was to be the substance of the kitchen's dinner. We can assume the antique premises refer to the fact that the space the restaurant occupies once housed a shoe repair shop.  Hugo will flambé your banana and run your credit card, just in time for his next culinary triage.

One Desperate Actress In Search of a Soap

The notion of killing off a character in a television series because the actress who plays her irritates the producer has dramatic possibilities in and of itself. According to a piece in the Business Section of the Times (“A ‘Desperate Housewives’ Mistrial,” NYT, 3/19/12), Nicolette Sheridan’s suit against “Desperate Housewives” producer Marc Cherry and ABC ended with a deadlocked jury. According to the Times, Sheridan, who was paid $175,000 per episode of the series, was suing for damages totaling approximately $6,000,000, after her character, Edie Britt, in a scene reminiscent of the Thomas Eakins painting, “The Gross Clinic,” met a tragic end. The new series would actually be a drama of Pirandellian passions and Jacobean revenge. Let’s call it  “One Desperate Actress in Search of a Soap Opera.” Usually characters are killed off in television series when an actor or actress is moving on or the series is taking a new twist which makes the role that was being played superfluous. When you think of it, the notion of killing a character off out of revenge against the actress who played her is unique. OK perhaps Sheridan was hard to work with, but she wouldn’t be the first primadona on the sound stage. No, to go to the lengths he did, Marc Cherry must have been pretty fed up. “Hell knows no fury like a woman scorned” and we can be reassured that “One Desperate Actress” would be filled with sex and violence. The character who plays Marc Cherry would undoubtedly have an order of protection issued against the lead actress who, though she would be playing herself, would be fueling her rage with lines from Medea. In fact, life has already begun imitating art with regard to all the legal wrangling. The Times quoted, Camilo Becdach, 29, a fan of the show as saying, "It's been like watching 'Desperate Housewives' again,  but in the courtroom. It really would be like a storyline in the show, which makes it ironic. It's something that Edie would have done."

The Future is Publishers Weekly

The future is Publishers Weekly. There you can read forecasts about forecasting. Two recent futuristically orientated novels generated author interviews in their fiction preview pages. The first from the February 6 issue of the trade journal, entitled “Sex, Lies and Virtual Reality,” was a talk with a software designer named Michael Olson whose forthcoming novel about the future is called Strange Flesh. Within the interview, conducted by Ken Salikof, reference was made to MMORPG’s or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. The question was, will this increasingly be the way humans spend their time and will these “games people play” eventually, as PW’s interviewer asked, “take the place of real sex?” The book is coming out April 3 so you’ll soon be able to find out. The other Q&A with the veteran sci fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson and called "The Future is Fun" appeared in the March 5th PW.  In that interview, Robinson talked about his forthcoming novel 2312 and “a solar system-spanning civilization” which could make possible a romance  “between two people from Mercury and Saturn.” The interviewer, Susan De Guardiola, then tossed him Robinson a zinger. “Do you see parallels between terraforming planets and the intentional self evolution of humanity?” Robinson’s answer was “that we are going to be changing both ourselves and our environment.” Like in the case of the Olson novel, sex ultimately came into play in a return to the “tradition of feminist and utopian science fiction” epitomized by the work of Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. LeGuin. Robinson’s point was that “science fiction is not just for dire warnings about dystopia or apocalypse, but can celebrate our potential for greatness and joy.” 2312 is no l984 from the sound of it and Strange Flesh, doesn’t sound like Brave New World. If these two novels are any harbingers of the future of science fiction itself, then the days when the purpose of the genre was to blow the whistle on the depredations of the current world (as for instance Orwell's and Huxley's allegories once did) are plainly gone.

Bad Behavior

Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images

President Obama was quoted in the Times about North Korea, “They need to understand that bad behavior will not be rewarded (“In South Korea Visit, Obama Visits Border and Warns North," NYT, 3/25/12). The Agence France-Presse photo that ran with the story showed Obama in the DMZ looking though a pair of binoculars at North Korea. “Dildo shopping, spying on neighbors, getting high and getting a facial” is the beginning of the on-line description of the 2004 movie Bad Behavior. There was a more high brow Bad Behavior with Stephen Rea and Sinead Cusak from l993 and that blurb begins, “The McAllister family house is the setting for Gerry and Ellie's grapples with work, children and how to get the bathroom fixed.” Bad Behavior means a lot of things to different people. For those of us who attended public school back in the 50’s, before educational reform changed the punitive nature of many elementary school classrooms, bad behavior meant “no recess.” Obama’s jeremiad to the North Koreans, in the light of their imminent launching of a new satellite, is reminiscent of such 50’s warnings. Kim Jong-un, his dad Kim Jong-il and his grand dad Kim Il-sung are all like those bad kids who continued to do even worse things because they had nothing to lose. Since they can’t be good like Angela, little Nick or Barack they excel by getting very good at being bad. We all know how the bad kids responded to threats of missing assembly or having to go to the principal’s office. It rarely did any good at all. The bad kids simply got so bad that they were expelled. They might not have been the sharpest tacks, but they were the ones everyone feared. They were the kids who waited for the Angelas, Nicks and Baracks to come out of school so that they could beat them up for their lunch money. Only Vladimir and that new Chinese kid were able to protect themselves, but they practiced the martial arts.

'Tis Pity She's a Whore

                                                                photo: Richard Termine

Gasper Noe’s Enter the Void deals with the incestuous love between a brother and a sister. Set against the strip clubs and drug dens of a hallucinatory Tokyo, with a nod to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the film also provides a good deal of backstory that enables the viewer to believe in the characters. The British Company Cheek by Jowl now offers a production of one of the most infamously incestuous dramas of all time, the Elizabethan playwright, John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Where the brother and sister of Enter the Void have been brought together earlier in life after their parents are killed in an automobile accident, the challenge of staging 'Tis Pity lies in the fact that the intimacy of Ford’s two characters is de facto, functioning primarily as a premise to ignite the ensuring revenge drama. Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary is transformed to John Ford Our Contemporary for Declan Donnellan’s production at BAM. The adolescent Annabella’s (Lydia Wilson) room is covered with film posters from classics like Gone With the Wind,  Breakfast at Tiffany’s and True Blood. True Blood is the one citation that has some relevance to a bloody revenge tragedy that ends with a broken hearted lover sawing out his beloved’s heart; the red set of the teenager’s bedroom also recalls Brian De Palma's  film version of Stephen King’s Carrie. Though Ford was censored for ‘Tis Pity, there is no doubt that the perversity of the love is one of the reasons it has survived and continued to attract directors. Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (presented in theatrical form with Carrie Mulligan last summer) also dealt with incest between a brother in sister who like Noe's characters are orphaned albeit in a more metaphorical sense--by a narcissistic artistic parent. Cheek By Jowl’s production helplessly flails with surfaces in an attempt to lay its mark on Ford’s work. It’s one distinction lies in showing how an interpretation that initially turns tragedy into bedroom farce can result in a bloodbath.

Children of Paradise

Could it be that the carnival scenes in Marcel Camus Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro, l959) were inspired by the final scene of Marcel Carne’s great classic Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis, l945), in which Baptiste, played by Jean-Louis Barrault is trapped in a crowd of revelers chasing the carriage in which his great love Garance (Arletty) is swept out of his life forever? As for Children of Paradise, currently playing at Film Forum, it's inspiration is theater, though the fourth wall, behind the famous painted scrim on which both acts or "époques" of the movie unfold, is constantly broken. One wonders to what extent Jacques Prevert who wrote the script was influenced by Brecht. Indeed Epoque One, “Le Boulevard du Crime,” is curiously reminiscent of Threepenny Opera with its cast of criminals. Lacenaire (Pierre Brasseur) is a fence, Garance, a stripper and prostitute, Frederick, a sometime thief and con artist. The fact that they also writers and actors creates a metaphor: the artist as con man or woman. In addition the really great moments of the movie such as the farcical scene where Frederick usurping the plot of a mediocre play by willfully dis-suspending disbelief remind us that while Children of Paradise may be set in the l9th century, it's no period piece. Its palette is thoroughly modern. Ironically the film for all its sophisticated meditations on theater and acting is, as a movie, the greatest filmed melodrama of all time (with David Lean's Brief Encounter, also l945, coming in a distant second). Baptiste is in love with what he can’t possess, Garance with no one, and the tragic Nathalie (Maria Casares) the innocent victim of imagination gone awry. As a melodrama Children of Paradise is so over the top it almost defies Joyce’s famous definition of sentimentality as “unearned emotion”; in the dramatic finale Barrault, who was one of the stars of the Comedie-Francaise, sounds like he’s speaking his lines in alexandrines.

Tony Judt: A Final Victory

Readers of The New York Review of Books will vividly recall the essays Tony Judt, the NYU historian, published in the months leading up to his death from ALS. Now Jennifer Homans, his wife, has offered an intimate look at the process by which Judt worked in the last months of his life when his “locked in syndrome,” left both him and her in “what we came to call the bubble. The bubble was a closed world, an alternative reality, a place that we lived in and peered out of." (“Tony Judt: A Final Victory,” NYRB, 3/22/12) The beauty of the prose is belied by the horror it describes. A famous New York Times reporter named Nan Robertson, who also wrote about battling illness, once described a fatal plane crash with a similar lush prose; the ability to find beauty in tragedy (which is after all the substance of Lear and Karenina ) never ceases to astonish, particularly when its brought to bear on real events. The title of the book that Judt was working on at the end of his life was Thinking the Twentieth Century and a brief excerpt from it appears in TNYRB along with Homans memoir. Homans essay describes the writing of the book as the means by which Judt escaped his imprisonment in the bubble. “There were…portals to the world where he could find his way, at least momentarily, out of the bubble and back to himself…Thinking the Twentieth Century was part of that: a portal to the world. The past was still the engine of his thoughts. Not history anymore, but memory. Memory was Tony’s only certainty…It was the thing the disease could not take from him.” Judt could have called the book Remembering the Twentieth Century, but thinking is much more powerful since it accounts for both the present from which he is writing and the past and recalls other great works of intellectual history like the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill. In an especially riveting part of the essay Homans says “Tony was tormented by the idea of his own absence not in itself (he was as hard a realist as any) but for his two boys.” But as Homans describes it, the book also provided a reprieve from the pain of that loss. “Here he did something extraordinary: he projected himself beyond his own death and found a way to reach ‘back’ from the abyss. I didn’t truly understand it at the time but I now see that the dead can extend feelings across the divide separating the living from the ever after. But—and it is a big but—they can only do it if they think of it in advance, before they actually die.”