Asking questions of beauty in Paris, city of women

Back in early February after our long weekend in London, I mentioned that we were headed to Paris in the Spring. A commenter who is also a poet pointed out that London is usually seen as a man’s city, Paris a woman’s, and that he was interested in seeing my take on Paris as opposed to London.

In the meantime - a week or so before we left - A Guide to the Pretty Women of Paris was published. Written by the French foreign minister’s speech-writer, it caused a bit of a stir in feminist circles because it points out where to find the city’s most beautiful women according to age, manner of dress, income level, where you might catch a good view up their skirts, where to find the best-looking legs…

That shred of the lingering adolescent in me was tempted to grab a copy as soon as we got there as a bit of a lark, maybe check out a quarter or two to see if any of it had any truth, but I’m glad I didn’t. Around noon on our first day there, I’d already come to the conclusion it must be more joke novelty than guide.

Unless you’re blind or have a fetish for the morbidly obese, it’s impossible to walk more than a block or two in Paris without coming across a woman who is worth much more than a passing glance. It is full of well-dressed, attractive women of every age and race.

So it’s perhaps fitting that a city whose reputation celebrates the ultimate in feminine beauty should be hosting an exhibition entitled Femmes du Monde - The World’s Women.

The artist Titouan Lamazou spent six years collecting photographs of women in some of the most remote recesses of the planet, using those photos as a basis for portraiture in pencil, charcoal, pastel and watercolour.

Like the life-sized photo of a Mongolian woman sitting in her yurt, the images tempt you to step in and learn more about who they are, what their lives are like, where they’ve come from and where they’re going. A Sao Paolo garbage-picker who became a fashion model, a lone female UN soldier on an African peacekeeping mission, an Australian Aboriginal artist, refugees, factory workers, strippers, prostitutes… All are given equal weight with not a whiff of judgment on their choices or maudlin pity of their circumstances.

Saving the best for last, the exhibition hall terminates at where the concepts of idealised feminine beauty, freedom of choice and the market collide: our mania for plastic surgery and the phenomenon of the Real Doll - made-to-order life-sized male masturbation aides which sell for $8,000 US apiece. If you’ve never heard of the Real Doll, I suggest you click on that link.

On one side, a collection of photos of about 20 women - some pre- and post-op - from Calí, Colombia, the South American capital of surgical silicone.

On the other, a wall-sized photograph of the inside of Real Doll’s factory, their lifeless, spread-legged, open-mouthed female effigies suspended on a curving track along the ceiling like so much quartered beef at a slaughterhouse.

The best for last because the questions are almost screaming at you: Is the Real Doll the pinnacle of beauty that every woman should strive for no matter what the cost and no matter what the risk to her health? Or are the silicone breasts, suctioned hips and trimmed-back labia these women carry around the ideal for Real Doll? Which is the model for which?

This photo doesn’t do the room justice and is actually a little blurry because I took it furtively. But if you’re headed to Paris and would like to see the exhibition in person, it is in the Musée de l’Homme just a stone’s throw across the river from the Eiffel Tower. Due to popular demand it has been extended several times.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Place des Vosges, Paris

We walked from our hotel near the Gare de l’Est through the streets of Paris to the Marais, which is where what’s left of the old Jewish quarter can be found. It was the Pentecost holiday Monday so not many shops were open, but we didn’t care. We were winding our way to find the school where K had worked as a teaching assistant at Lycée Victor Hugo 27 years ago.

A quick snap of her in front and we were on our way again, this time to Place des Vosges, one of her favourite hangouts during the year she stayed here.

We’d just turned a corner when we stumbled upon this scene: two police cars blocking the road, a half-dozen cops standing around, one holding a grumpy homeless man they’d handcuffed moments before. By the crumpled mass of soiled sleeping bags and dirty blankets, you could tell they’d used the grand covered sidewalk of the south side as a place to crash, and I guess they’d gotten into such a fight upon waking that someone called the police.

That’s not what I found interesting, though. It’s what was happening across the street in the park.

A whole row of kids on a school outing, or maybe in the park at recess, checking out the cops busting the bums.

They were gawking at the scene for a good five minutes before a teacher came along and shooed them away.

This is what we enjoyed most about Paris. Just being there, taking our time and taking it in.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Paris sunset

Paris. Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 2045.

It was a wonderful trip.

More later.

Into the ghosts of 1968

I’ve never been one to hit the streets with enough guts and grit to throw paving stones and firebombs, overturn cars and land in jail for a night or two.

Not a rebel, about the only thing I ever did to resist the deep-channel path my parents had laid out before me - of course you’ll go on to university - was to say Fuck It one day in Spring 1980, use the money I’d earned over the Winter to buy a backpack, a ticket to London, Let’s Go Europe and a Eurail pass, putting off for the second year in a row a university program I had no interest in continuing.

Arriving home a year later to begin a different program, I soon got restless again and started looking for a way to get back to Europe. Since I was now majoring in French, it made sense to go to France to learn it there for a year.

By the time I arrived in Grenoble in 1982, the flame and fury of the May 1968 Paris riots were already ancient history. Landing in the wrong place at the wrong time, this is about all the mischief in France I ever got up to:

When my wife and I get to Paris in a few days for a week of revisiting old friends, old haunts and old memories, it will be tempting to wander down a street or two which 40 years before was barricaded with burning cars and strewn with debris, but I doubt we’ll actually do so.

Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Chicago, Paris, Prague: I started paying attention to the news in 1968 after taking over my brother’s Vancouver Sun paper route. I was amazed to learn how the world outside our quiet, isolated little burg dug out of a corner of a still-undiscovered fjord on the West Coast of Canada could be roiling in such chaos, but I was only eight years old and too young to grasp much of anything, especially why the world was going through what it was.

Just an object of derision to my brothers’ friends, one of whom pointed and laughed at me from the back of a car one day and said: he still thinks his prick’s just for pissing!

Vive la révolution? Vive l’amour!

I can’t wait. Did I mention it’s going to be just the two of us?

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Former US Attorney general Ashcroft has heart attack in Hamburg

We have once again roused our reporter out of hibernation for another Definitely Not the Daily News world exclusive.

By Kathy Kitzler

Hamburg (DNTN) Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft has suffered what appears to be a heart attack while on a personal visit to the northern German port city of Hamburg.

Ashcroft, whose brilliant career at the US Justice Department included having a statue’s naked boobs covered up so he wouldn’t be photographed in front of it at press conferences, keeled over just as he was about to enter the tropical aquarium exhibit at Hamburg’s zoo.

“There’s this funny-looking house-like thingy outside the entrance with all this carved wood and stuff,” said a family friend. “John’s a little short-sighted, so he got up on tippy-toes to get a closer look. Poor bastard had a seizure right on the spot.”

The temple was hand-made in Nepal using ancient woodcarving techniques. It is dedicated to Lord Shiva, one of the principal deities of Hinduism.

“That Cheever guy must have been one sick and depraved bastard as well,” said a weakened Ashcroft in a telephone interview from his hospital room, adding he thought the temple’s location couldn’t be worse.

“Imagine putting full-colour carvings of people engaged in such disgusting and immoral acts right in plain view at the entrance to a zoo, right where all those kiddies walk by!

What the hell is wrong with German people, anyway?“

The temple has been standing for nearly five years at the entrance to Hagenbeck’s, famous for being the first zoo in the world to come up with the idea of displaying animals in natural settings rather than cages.

Witnesses say they never noticed anything unusual about the building until the Ashcroft incident.

“It’s a good thing he wasn’t watching the boob tube,” said one 10-year-old zoo visitor. “You see this sort of thing on TV all the time here.”

Antipodean reaction to Ashcroft’s apparent angina attack was swift and decisive.

“That’s it, I’m headed to Hamburg,” said one well-known Australian nurse and blogger, adjusting her corset while logging on to a travel website. “I just love all those cute little figurines and stuff. Do you think they’d let me make a few plaster casts?”

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Views of a London long weekend

Since the weekend was already a week ago, better wrap this London thing up with a few photos.

Our friend Douglas works hard for the money, and on a Friday night, he likes to nip around the corner to the local for a beer or two and have a bite to eat. We joined him. After dinner, the ladies bid so long, so the two of us ordered a couple more, then a couple more. Sometime toward the end of our evening we got talking to the people at the next table, who were laughing a lot and taking photos of each other One asked if we’d like to have our photo taken. Sure! Just don’t put it up on some website or some BLOG. So they took our picture. Then I asked if I could do the same.

I told them that I have a blog, and that I was going to publish it. They were OK with that, so I gave them this address. Hey guys, I hope the rest of the night was fun.

(Guaranteed not photoshopped.)

If you’ve got time in London to do some touring, but not much, at least check out the Tower of London. Sure it will cost you five times more than what Ryanair claims their tickets cost to get in, but once there, you could spend the whole day poking through crannies and getting lost in corners. We took the tour, offered free once you’re in. Hang around the entrance, and if you spy this guy, make sure you take a tour from him. Name’s Kevin, and he’s an absolute scream.

Douglas lives at the London studios where Alfred Hitchcock shot many of his earlier movies. It’s been recently converted to residential and offices, but the great director’s legacy lives on. This sculpture dominates the central courtyard. Not sure what the watch symbolises, but then again, I may just be exposing some cinematic / cultural illiteracy or complete laziness to go looking on Google for the umpteenth time today. Sometimes, I just like to keep a little mystery in life.

We dropped by St Pancras station, the new terminus for the Eurostar train via Channel Tunnel from Paris. It’s stunning, and even on a Saturday, swarming with people. I’d love to have seen it when it was dirty and gritty.

Canadian readers will get a kick out of this one. We all knew the guy was a crook, and now he’s finally in prison. But why did they waste all that time with a trial? He already came with a warning label, and you can find it within a shout of Buckingham Palace at the Canadian war memorial there, just inside Canada gate.

The Millenium Bridge is one of my favourite spots in London. I know, not very original, but there’s something about the way what looks from afar like an almost impossibly flimsy thread of steel has become such an important link between two of the most iconic sites in the whole city: St Paul’s on the one side, the rejuvenated Tate Modern on the other.

The Tate Modern’s turbine hall is stunning even when it’s empty. Right now it mostly is, save for a crack running the entire length of the floor. It apparently took weeks to install, and it’s interesting to look at up close, but I don’t know. It left me rather cold.

I’m putting in a shot of the same space a year ago. I tell you, whizzing down those slides was one hell of a lot more fun.

Our lives are intertwined with Hong Kong. It’s where I met my wife and where my daugher was born. It’s also where I met Douglas, who began as a colleague and remains a friend. We gravitated to Chinatown, not because we were hungry for barbecue duck or pork, but to re-live in some small way the atmosphere of what to us is so familiar. It also reminds me of Vancouver, because the sights and smells are to be found there too.

Actually, I lie. I would kill for a place in Hamburg to get decent barbecue pork. We bought a box of it and ate it like candy on the way home.

Saved the best for last. I don’t post photos of my wife or daughter, but the swirls of colour on this one somehow work. Happy accident.

© 2008 lettershometoyou
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Memories of Hong Kong on a trip to London

One of the things I used to love about living in Hong Kong took place only about 100 or so metres above it.

Back in the day, the city’s airport used to be a short taxi ride from downtown. The largest planes in the sky would fly west over the waters of Victoria Harbour, turn a half-circle to head east, then descend low through the teeming warren of streets of the Kowloon Peninsula, nearly scraping the six-storey buildings as they screamed past.

On the final approach, after the landing gear had been lowered, the plane would make a quick slicing arc to the right as it passed a beacon, before finally landing on a strip of landfill in the bay. Though there had been fatal accidents over the years, it was a tribute to piloting skills and maybe a bit of sheer dumb luck that in all the time Kai Tak airport was in operation, not one plane landed on top of all those people living just across the road from the start of the runway.

I was sitting in a window seat my first flight into Hong Kong in January, 1994. I’d been told about the landing, that I was in for something spectactular, but I never expected to see what I did. Through the evening darkness, I looked out the window at the buildings slipping past and suddenly in a flash appeared a figure seated at a kitchen table, the glowing blue light from a television set reflected off a pair of glasses like two flickering orbs. It was there and gone in an instant. By the time I tried to see something similar on the next apartment, we were past them and on the way down. I used to love that ride, and on every flight in hoped the winds were right so that would be the approach we’d take.

Why did I think of this on the way into London?

Because once past the motorway wasteland and into the outskirts, sitting on the bus from Stansted airport on the way to Golders Green tube stop I became fascinated with the scenes laid before my window as we drove by. I saw the silhouette of a man wearing a turban, a bedroom plastered with magazine posters, a dining room with an old-fashioned chandelier, a man getting up off the sofa, a shadow creep across a ceiling, curtains ranging from bedsheets to lace.

Whether it was some form of drive-by voyeurism or mere curiosity, I found myself compelled to keep looking, craning my neck to get the shortest of glimpses, somehow trying to peer beyond the mundane to discover something special, discern from that glimpse what sort of life they must live.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Snowdrops and crocuses, heralds of spring

Sometimes you have to get out of town to see what lies ahead.

Snowdrops and crocuses,

Heralds of Spring

Snowdrops and crocuses,

The birds will sing

When all the world is bare,

Springing up here and there,

Blossoms of beauty rare,

Heralds of Spring.

It’ll still take about two or three weeks for them to appear in Hamburg, but in London they’re already out. These were spotted this past Saturday in the park alongside The Mall near Buckingham Palace, their quiet voices of light and colour reminding us that greenery will soon return to carpet the land. I was so thrilled to see them, I stood up, turned around and sang those lines out to my wife, my daughter, and my friend Douglas, whom we were visiting.

They always come back to me every Spring.

If the words sound a bit sing-songy and child-like, they should. In what I now recognise to be merely an early training exercise for that 1970s Village People hit YMCA, Mrs. Fairburn had her Grade One class (spot me if you can) stand by our desks and act out the words as we sang, drooping our arms and hunching forward for the snowdrops, standing on tip-toes and reaching up to the ceiling for the crocuses.

So unexpected to come across them midst the hurried, sometimes frantic bustle of London. But that’s what I like about visiting cities. Not so much the layers of history at the Tower of London, the grandeur of the Tower Bridge or the hulking immensity of the Tate Modern, but the little details you come across and only take notice of because you’re visiting.

© 2008 lettershometoyou