ANACHRONISM, WAITING, ROOMS

This reporter has had the happy use of the refreshed Damen Brown Line station on the west side of Chicago this summer.  The environs thereabout have been, still are gentrifying, fast, like a rapid heartbeat.  Just north Lawrence Avenue is getting a new surface and median planters down the street.  The “ask” for condos and homes rises with sellers wondering if they’re asking “enough.”  We are in the days of Never Enough.

The couple of blocks around this elevated train station are small, local, neighborhood businesses, eating spots that don’t rely on the week-end aggression of high-end brunching, places where you can slide in and still get a malted milk…unless the chocolate malt you’re trying to pull through the straw is actually a retro-malted “like in the day.”  Hard to tell what’s real these days when nostalgia stands for history and a higher “ask.”

But this little dot of a neighborhood has the real feel of the real deal in large part because of the way you get in and out of it:  by the Brown Line, Damen Station.  This 1907 station was the design work of CTA engineers.  No frills, a compact, functional station part of moving people through a changing city.

Today we can look on-line at Yelp comments presumably posted by the “users” of this station.  They are mixed, from completely alienated (homesick?) to delighted tourist, to wanting more attention to where Chicagoans meet Chicago, on an unsheltered el platform in any kind of weather.  And there are the posts by people who simply love the waiting room.

They and we dwell on the finishings, the glazed brick, the wood paneling and the waiting room furnishings made of suitcases.  We love to be in this waiting room because it is artful anachronism.  The old leather luggage with its brass fittings remind us of the fortitude of travelers whose empty luggage was heavier than anything they could put in it.

We recall a time when a subway station was treated like a train station, with people sitting inside, waiting for their train to pull into the station.  Even if the 1907 station was a crowded panicky place with passengers rushing to their trains, this waiting room suggested something more genteel, like a miniature Union Station, the gateway to America.

The most annoyed Yelp commenters are fixed in their own, current time.  They know they have no time to “wait” in a sheltered waiting room or sit on an artful bench.  They will never use time that way.  They “have places to go” in the words of one.  They have a device to consult that waits for nothing, even as they bound up the stairs up to the platform and closing doors of the train they are missing because someone back there on the stairs wouldn’t get out of the way.  Places to be, places to go, no time, time is money, out of time.  Damen Brown Line Station.

DAMEN BROWN LINE EL STATION
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Additional Sources:

http://www.chicago-l.org/stations/damen-ravens.html

HISTOIRE DE PLACE

POST NO BILLS 1881
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Post POST NO BILLS 2012

This week Primary Source had intended to give herself a treat and, in the absence of real Paris, tour some 2012 snapshots of the place.  Our world is off its axis, however, as we are beginning to suspect, and even the modest pleasure of a simple “stay-cation” is quickly compromised by current events. French and European demonstrations, pro-Palestinian or pro-Peace,  have been held the past few days.  

According to a July 22 New York Times article, most of the demonstrations have been non-violent.  Over the week-end riots, fights with French police, vandalism of businesses characterized as “Jewish” (especially in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles) and “smoke bombs” thrown around synagogues have taken what many French intended as political discours into the nasty realm of flagrantly, inescapably anti-Semitic acts.  

The French government’s immediate ban on more Gaza demonstrations instantly turned into a free-speech controversy as political organizations and parties to the right and left complained.  The French government then quickly issued permits for demonstrations this week-end.

The French nation, its people of all political persuasions, and the French state, currently presided over by a socialist, are caught in a problem that’s over 60 years old, the seemingly intractable Palestinian/Israeli violence.  Whatever its origins, the poverty and violence of the place are a fact.  Other political interest groups in other parts of the region and the world including Europe will use Gaza for their own internal contexts, if and when it suits them.  What happens locally, whether in Paris or Berlin or Amsterdam, has very local reasons for happening.  That is where the analysts should look.

The French nation and French state carry the weight of over 200 years of French history of their relations with Jews.  French Jews and Jews seeking asylum from other parts of the world, found France of the 1789 Revolution a place where citizenship, the highest form of hospitality, was theirs for the reasonable price of the civic contract: come here, stay here, but be French.  What a French citizen believed or practiced (for example religion) was entirely their own business. But in all that concerned the community of citizens there was an endorsed culture.  

That civic nationality, not based on ethnicity, gave France a durable luster in the world Jewish community that was dimmed by the “black years” of Nazi Occupation/Collaboration, when some French citizens helped or tried to help escaping or hiding Jews but others, notably French administrations like the Vichy government and Paris Police, cooperated with the Nazis for their own reasons.  

Part of the post-WWII history for the French, people and state, has been acknowledging that part of their history and then making or trying to make a new bond with the French Jewish community.  This has been a difficult, emotional, wrenching few decades on all sides and it is one that a great many French, gentile and Jewish and secular, have put their hearts into.

French nation and state also live in the awareness of nearly two centuries of history with the Arabs (now called Muslims) who were their colonial subjects in North Africa and also, after World War I, in the Levant.  Since approximately the 1960s, they have related to these populations in a post-colonial context and seen a number of immigration waves, some solicited, some endured, as French speaking Muslims familiar with French culture, found a place, made a place in France for themselves and their children, then grandchildren and now great-grandchildren.  

Post-Algerian War anti-Arab racism was virulent in some quarters in France, and with it the kind of pejorative racist slurs that Americans from the same period were all too familiar with in the United States.  Those were harsh years, during and after the Algerian War, late ’50s-early ’60s.

Since then the French live with the burden of that war and of the racism that followed in France. The point being here that for periods of crime and cruelty in the culture, committed by the very few to be sure, the culture as a whole feels the need to atone and that process seems to proceed at the slow pace of one generation after another maturing and aging into the next generational bloom.  

We do it in the United States for our own terrible reasons.  We understand it or we should when we witness it in another country. So that brings us to last week-end’s French riots.  The riots seem to have been very few (compared to the number of demonstrations around the country) and small scale (compared to the perhaps 10’s of thousands who stepped into the street to march).  

But as it stands, we are all at the ready to judge the French nation and French state for the crimes of a very few.  If the government and political organizations are not managing to make this all better right away, it’s complicated.  

Those 200 years of history suggested above just make things harder.  When we attempt to assess contexts and actions right now, are we not in our bones mindful of what has gone before?   We see what is happening in our now through a great historic blur of rights and wrongs.

Should we declare a World Day of Weeping for the murky ways our past obscures our present.  Or is this is the only way to live a human life and the only way to return to the humane when we momentarily leave it behind?  In our pasts we have done some things wrong but many things right.  We might begin to say it out loud, when contemplation of the past enters into our attempt to muddle through the present.  That would be a start.

 

HOT DAY HO-HUM, PARIS

 

Paris bus ride with paper
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Here’s the heart of the ho-hum.  You’ve boarded this bus in the Latin Quarter, the Seine’s behind you, you just crossed it.  You are currently on an island, the place the Romans occupied first, their Lutece; your Ile de la Cite.  And here, just this instant you are passing the Palais de Justice where only the biggest fry are fried.   You mainly see their lawyers in black robes rushing up and down the steps.  Your bus will take you over more Seine in a minute and then up as much of the incline of the Right Bank as you want today.  It’s summer, there are clots of tourist in otherwise unimpeded Parisian circulation and then there’s you, in a seat, on your way to some place precise, reading your paper as usual.  Why look out the window when you’ve already seen it?  You’ve already seen it so you don’t see it and you won’t see it, again and again.  Ho-hum, hot day.  In Paris!

FRIDAY AFTERNOONS!

Breezy
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Isn’t this the best time of the week, Friday afternoon and it’s all ahead.  

Leave the rest behind, that was Thursday.  Waiting for that week-end bus to Saturday.  Buses like elephants in a parade, here’s your number, climb aboard, what’s next, who knows!

PLENTY OF PLACE ON WABASH

Wabash at the River
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Today we’re running a few more random snaps of Chicago’s Wabash Avenue, a place that has recently caught the eye again of groups bent on downtown improvement through something they’re calling “place making.”  Our pictures suggest all along the Loop blocks of Wabash the places are already made.  

One is reminded of Eric Wolf’s seminal anthropology text Europe and the People Without History.  His approach to colonialism helped a new generation of scholars get interested in one of colonialism’s strongest rationales:  territories and the people to be taken had no history; had not taken optimum, modern advantage of what they had and therefore, could have it taken from them by those more worthy of the task.  Wolf shined his light on the conquerors claim, “There’s nothing there.  We can take it.”

Primary Source sometimes wonders if applying the place making concept to parts of the city that are already full of vitality is not a kissing cousin to the “people without history” argument.  Just wondering.  

Meanwhile, enjoy your own promenade under the “El” and see yourself some sights.  Thanks for the visit, it’s always good to see you.  We’ll have a few more of the sights along Wabash tomorrow.

ANOTHER LOVE LETTER rue VERNEUIL

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Dear Serge…

Welcome back, always pleased to see you!  We can’t seem to leave Paris in this start to 2014 and we want to continue thinking of the city as text.  Most of our cities are glazed with a layer of graffiti, a coat of confusion over every attempt to create urban order.  We are so accustomed to graffiti it has become nearly another building material to our eyes.  Night painters are sometimes despicable sometimes -grudgingly-admirable, from the quality and boldness or mediocrity of the work they appear to be a very mixed population.  But there’s a place in Paris, one of the truly “good addresses” in the rue Verneuil in the Seventh, where the graffiti seems to come from  common emotions loss, longing, admiration, a never ending bereavement.  The place, not unlike Jim Morrison’s grave in Pere Lachaise Cemeterey, has become a Parisian, and international site of pilgrimage.  It is the little townhouse that Serge Gainsbourg shared with Jane Birkin.  One day it might become a museum and while we wait travelers, whether from down the street or across the world, continue to make it the place they show that some art and some rebellions endure.  Serge Gainsbourg died in 1991, not such a long time ago by “immortal art” standards but to those many who loved his work and by his death felt the great tenderness that strangers might feel for strangers, Serge has been away for infinite time and in his absence a world is made smaller.  This photograph is the wall in front of the house.  The central figure, in a corner in blue pochoir stencil print is Serge at his coolest- heroic.  No matter how many leave their marks the figure has remained undisturbed.   Much graffiti is a literal layer of text over the city now and much of it remains  obscure text that communicates secretly to a very few.  The markings rue Verneuil are city text for a world of comprehension.  More than any great museum the Serge wall gives this comfort that somethings do survive.  We cannot get him out of our heads, Gainsbourg’s music and his tender disdain for a world that loved him when it should not.

FOR MORE SERGE GAINSBOURG:  This Vanity Fair story is as good as anything and it begins with an interview in the rue de Verneuil house that Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin shared.  But look for more links on Serge and his career and listen to his songs on youtube if your discotheque is not already full of his collected works!  His French songs are often infused with the outlaw side of American culture.

<http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/11/gainsbourg200711&gt;

OLD STONE & HOTCAKES IN PARIS

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FOR SALE FOR NOW

As close as we ever come to it, an old story, just look up, the centuries beckon, all those years, all those souls, yours for a song and the song is all the grand operas in the world.  City as text today considers all the real estate windows, all the FOR SALE or FOR RENT signs hanging on all the cities of the world, icing those urban cakes with their butter cream promises of new lives to be lived here, up here, behind this sign.  Give them everything you have or will have, make them believe you are good for it and you can remove this sign, take it to the temple and burn it on the highest altar of possession and ownership now NOT FOR SALE because it’s mine.  Except it’s not except it might be.  This is a story that’s never over.

 

 

ALL HOURS APPETITE = CHEWY TEXT in PARIS

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Hungry Streets Paris

This photograph taken by hands wanting a gushing sandwich in them.  It’s the Ace of Falafel, The King of Falafel is not far.  All good, all big and cheap and to be eaten outside in the street, where you stand, bending over so as not to drip that sauce on your shoes.  Rue des Rosiers is now the rare street where people will stuff their smart phones and cameras into their pockets for some  two-fisted eating.  And isn’t that a bit part of what makes a great city great?  Appetite is unconfined by schedule, appetite serves inspiration, what is the story of this day?   The Parisian, ever the hunter-gatherer, sets out in the city to find the taste to give purpose to the step.  Our cities are:  In Search Of…Paris is overlaid with dozens or thousands of loving accounts  like this: walked 3 kilometers for the perfect eclair, the tenderest flan, just warm from its baking.  Or – unlikely contrast – this deep-fried vegetable sandwich that crossed latitudes and war zones to make it into our welcoming hands, here, just barely across the Seine but already in deepest Paris, the village of rue des Rosiers.

Food is the foremost story in the city as text. Tourist or local, clerk or exec.  We like our town best of all walking through it, chewing something well-chosen, acknowledging with that collegial lift of a brow other Parisians of la bouche, chewing as we celebrate appetite and city.  All of our cities are over-written with food, food and memory and discovery and understanding, streets, people and food.  Today’s the coldest day in Chicago and a few other places too.  They’re saying not to go out, the same thing they say in California when it’s snowing forest fire ash.  “Don’t go out today.”  But some people will be out and they’ll be looking for something to eat.  Come back tomorrow.  It’s supposed to be just about this cold again and they might tell us not to go out again, but we’ve got to eat, n’est-ce pas?  We live where the food lives,  in the city.

SUMMER NIGHT, OPEN WINDOW, PARIS

nan turpin photograph   An Opening / Paris Street 

An open window is a gift, n’est-ce pas?  An open window at eye level?  Like a properly hung picture in a gallery that suddenly comes to life, is a dream.  If we are thinking about city-as-text, as we have been for this New Year, the window, this window, wants us to wonder about what is in its frame.   This window, windows pushed out to the street on a summer night, could be a Greek taverna or some Mediterranean place where inside and outside, even urban, can be the same thing if it’s warm enough.  It’s actually in Paris, in the most teeming part of the Latin Quarter, a short wander off rue Saint-Jacques, as you turn the bend near Saint Julien Le Pauvre.  The medieval labyrinth of the Latin Quarter confounds the passage of time.  A certain fragrance and warmth to the evening air and we may, if we wish, simply see lives in these stones.  The window in this photograph opens upon a tiny restaurant scene, but a restaurant where people seem to walk about freely and loiter and watch and interrupt as if they were in their home in a large gathering of people they know too well.  This evening’s temperature allows us to see them and them not to care.

Now we’ve read the text of this street a little farther into its story and next time we walk here we’ll think about these people and that window even if it’s closed.  Please do join us again tomorrow for another episode in reading our cities.  It was very nice to see you again!

 

 

 

 

 

 

PARIS STREET QUIET AS TEXT

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Hidden Perspective

Welcome back.  We continue our New Year’s visit of Paris to discover how Parisians use the city to speak to each other; the City as Text.  There’s an austere  pocket of the Fifth arrondissement, beyond the Pantheon that always seems it should feel more interesting than it does to walk through.  It’s old enough, cobbled enough, has split-level topography with steps up to a cafe terrace.  It even has a “through the looking glass” air about it with cut-throughs that put you suddenly in the Mouffetard street market or within view of the Pantheon Dome or suddenly facing where Pierre and Marie Curie handled radioactivity like it was a kitten.  This part of the Fifth is a little maze of the quietest streets in the 21st century.  The buildings are filled with populace yet you never seem to see them on the street.  Are they transported magically from their apartments to the street market crowd just down that shadow?  Is the garage door in this photo a map, city text for any to read, the clue to how the people hereabouts transport themselves.

They live in a hidden part of the city and that gives them a different perspective.  The hidden parts of our cities, the quiet streets with no one on them, are just the start of other quartiers beyond.  So glad you could come today and please come back tomorrow.  Shall we linger in Paris just a bit longer?  Oui?  Quite frankly it’s just too cold in Chicago to go outside.