One of the many names people use to describe Paris is the City of Light. According to the website Culture Trip, there are more than 296 illuminated sites in Paris, “if you count everything from hotels and churches, statues and fountains, national buildings and monuments, and out of 37 major bridges in Paris, an impressive 33 of them are illuminated to full glory each sunset.”
Lights along the Seine (ABB)
While many assume the name comes from recent illuminations, such as the Eiffel Tower, the name goes back to Louis XIV, the Sun King, and his attempts to make Paris a safer city through the addition of streetlights.
Whatever the origin, the city now comes to life every night. On our recent trip, we’ve taken to the streets a few nights to capture scenes of the City of Light.
Subway entrance near our Parisian apartment (DJB)
One of the city’s 33 illuminated bridges (ABB)
The first two evenings we were in Paris, the city was flooded with football (soccer) fans for the Championship League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid. An Irish Pub at the end of our block became one of many unofficial headquarters for the fans of Liverpool, and we could hear them singing and cheering late into the evening.
Liverpool fans invade Rue Saint Andre-des-Arts (DJB)
Candice rests in our Parisian home as day turns to night (DJB)
An illuminated clock from the old train station that now holds the Museum d’Orsay (DJB)
Museum d’Orsay detail (CHB)
Street art along the Seine (CHB)
A tour boat full of revelers and sightseers along the Seine (CHB)
What’s a night life in Paris without the opera? Andrew chose Rossini’s The Barber of Seville for his adventure in the city, and we thoroughly enjoyed the delightful, slapstick of Count Almaviva, Rosina, Bertha, and Figaro.
Candice and Andrew at the Opéra National de Paris for Rossini’s Le Barbier de Seville (DJB)
Figaro’s curtain call (DJB)
The ultimate prize in any night tour of the City of Light is the illuminated Eiffel Tower. We walked along the river for some 45 minutes one evening, catching glimpses along the way until we turned the corner and caught the full view.
Eiffel Tower at night (ABB)
A magnificent memory.
More to come…
DJB
For additional posts in this series of photographs of Paris, click here for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
An early morning wakeup on Thursday (following a night at the opera…but that will come later), then rides on three trains including an hour on yet another wonderful European train system, and we found ourselves at impressionist painter Claude Monet’s gardens and home in Giverny.
Claire, Andrew, and Candice take in the French countryside outside Paris (DJB)
Claude Monet’s gardens at Giverny are like his paintings — brightly colored patches that are messy but balanced. Flowers were his brushstrokes, a bit untamed and slapdash, but part of a carefully composed design. Monet spent his last (and most creative) years cultivating his garden and his art at Giverny, the spiritual home of Impressionism (1883-1926).
Rick Steeves “Paris”
The flowers that greeted us upon our arrival at Monet’s gardens (DJB)
All four of us were mesmerized by the beauty of the gardens and landscapes. We took hundreds of pictures, many of which include other people because there were a great many visitors on group tours and school field trips during our day at the site. One could find isolated spots however, for moments of quiet reflection.
Enjoy this sampling, and — as always — the family photos are at the end of the post (but there are some good ones, if I do say so myself!)
The colors were vibrant (DJB)Monet’s garden (DJB)Along the garden path (DJB)
The water garden is one of the most recognizable subjects in painting, and a visit shows why.
Water garden (ABB)Water lilies in the garden (DJB)Detail of water lilies (DJB)Andrew takes in the famous water garden boats (DJB)Water garden detail (CCB)Views through the gardens to see the pond (CCB)
Monet’s home is only mildly interesting, but there were features we all chose to capture, including the kitchen, dining room, and studio.
Facade of Claude Monet’s house (CHB)Monet’s studio (DJB)Dining room…for 8 children…at the Monet house (CCB)The Monet kitchen (CCB)View of the gardens from the house (CHB)The porch (DJB)
Finally, with so many luscious backdrops, the urge to take family photos in this setting is irresistible. Here’s a look at the Browns, set amidst Claude Monet’s beautiful gardens at Giverny.
Andrew in Monet’s gardens (CHB)Claire along the garden path (ABB)Candice on the bridge at the water garden (DJB)Candice and DJB in the gardens of Giverny (CHB)
One day after reviewing a new book on wealth inequality, we visited Versailles…ground zero for the inequality that led to the French revolution! Ah well, c’est la vie! (And by the way, you have to scroll all the way to the end before you run into the obligatory family shot!)
Panorama of the main facade of Versailles (DJB)
We’ll capture our day at Versailles in this second post of the ongoing series You cannot take a bad picture in Paris. (Click here for Part 1.)
As you can see in the panorama, we choose wisely as to crowds (not insane, as was the case with the Louvre) and weather (picture perfect, pun intended.)
Versailles detail (CHB)
Chapel, with organ and ceiling (DJB)
Like every other visitor, we were entranced with the Hall of Mirrors — the most famous room in Paris. But the crowds — seen in the picture below — weren’t bad. Compared to a 2016 visit to the Sistine Chapel, we felt practically alone in this magnificent venue!
Walking into the Hall of Mirrors, with hundreds of our new-found friends (DJB)
Hall of Mirrors detail (DJB)
A focus on the chandeliers and ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors (DJB)
In the gallery of war paintings (DJB)
A nice view looking outside from inside the chateau…which makes for a nice segue to the gardens (CHB)
Of course, the gardens of Versailles are at least half the reason for visiting, and our cameras caught multiple views that we wanted to capture for our memory banks.
Claire and I were talking this morning about how we approach photography. She’s the artist, always looking for the angle to make the picture more interesting. I’m more the documentarian, looking to capture the scene in its totality. There’s no better example than our two versions of the same scene:
Here’s my panoramic view of the vista into eternity. BTW, I love the little child’s playful gesture in the lower left. (DJB)
And Claire’s take on the same scene (CHB)
One of more than 300 fountains still in existence at Versailles (DJB)
View across the garden fields to a temple (DJB)
We ended our day at Versailles at the Queen’s Hamlet, a remarkable landscape to find in the Parisian suburbs, to say the least!
Structure and lake at the Queen’s Hamlet (DJB)
Detail from the Queen’s Hamlet (DJB)
Another house in the Queen’s Hamlet (DJB)
All in all, it was a lovely day. As we were trying to get a family selfie in the Hall of Mirrors near the end of the house tour, a very kind fellow tourist offered to take a shot for us. It turned out rather nicely, I would say.
Family portrait taken in the Hall of Mirrors by an anonymous and helpful fellow traveler who took pity on my attempts to get a group selfie.
As for more photographic reporting from our trip to Paris, I’m sure there will be, as I say, more to come…
It wasn’t something I’d planned, but the juxtaposition of reading a book on the historical and current effects of wealth inequality while traveling through Glasgow, the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, the Fjords of Norway, and then Paris has provided an interesting backdrop for contemplating our current and future status as a nation.
The National Trust Tours portion of our trip was not of the ADC (*) variety by any stretch of the imagination. While we did have a visit to one castle and one cathedral, they were not the highlights of the wonders we saw. We were able to perceive, however, how three different countries and multiple cultures have addressed their own issues of inequality through the years.
The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That is Entrenching Inequality and Warping our Culture (2021) is a wide-ranging survey and urgent call to action by philosopher and historian Matthew Stewart. Most of us assume we are not “rich” because we are not billionaires, asserts Stewart. This allows us to fall into the 99% and scapegoat the Jeff Bezos, Elon Musks, and Peter Thiels of the world. (Note: Those three deserve a great deal of scorn, but that’s for another book.) Stewart reframes the issue, noting that the really wealthy make up 0.1% of the population. When you examine the top ten percent to find the people who control more than half of the country’s wealth, it is those other 9.9% — who look a great deal like many of us and our friends — who are doing so many things to entrench inequality in our system.
There’s a great little vignette in the book that is quite telling. Lizzie Magie, a feminist and part-time game designer, invented a board game she called The Landlord’s Game. One could play it by buying properties, creating monopolies and charging rents to others. But Magie included a second way of playing that was intended to illustrate the ideas of the progressive economist Henry George. “When players acquired a monopoly, they had to pay money into a common fund, so that individual success enriched everyone. The game ended when the poorest player doubled his or her original stake.”
Parker Brothers bought the game from Magie for a small sum of money and did not pay her royalties. Thus, they had a monopoly on the game that became known to millions as Monopoly. The company went on to earn millions of dollars from the game, a male engineer claimed credit for the feminist inventor’s idea, and the ugly capitalist form of the game replaced the pro-social variant.
Magie spent the end of her life working part-time in a government office. As one reviewer noted,
For any aspiring novelist trying to capture the layered hypocrisies and cruelties of American life, this historical episode is enough to inspire despair. It would be hard to invent a more perfect encapsulation of predatory corporate behavior, masculine arrogance, and cultural amnesia about the true sources of wealth and the urgent need for a system that distributes it more fairly.
Entrance into the 9.9% begins at about $1.2 million in assets and extends to those with about $20 million in assets, although Stewart notes that the figure will no doubt climb by the time the book is published. All of a sudden, we’re looking in the mirror, facing a necessary reassessment. And what does Stewart see that is causing such outrageous inequality in America today? We are increasingly dominated by monopolies (Google, anyone?); we totally misunderstand how wealth originates; we fight to reward those who become wealthy as a result of the work of others; we totally misunderstand our existing tax system; and we create fictions to support our inequality.
Stewart takes chapters to examine the behavior and beliefs of the 9.9 percent in a specific domain such as fitness, merit, housing, parenting, gender, education, real estate, race, and more. Many of them are stand-alone brilliant. Barely a page passed in this book where I didn’t underline something for further reflection, and often the entire two-page spread looks like my ink pen went crazy.
There are many suggestions and conclusions in this work which are worthy of mention…but that would make this review too long. Here’s one that will have to sit in for others:
Liberal democracy is misunderstood if it is represented, as it often is today, merely as a device for tabulating the opinions of a population. Liberal democracy does not in fact take its start from the assumption that human beings are largely self-sufficient rational actors in need of some minor assistance in maximizing their pre-existing preferences. On the contrary, its most basic assumptions are that humans left to their own devices are generally unreasonable.
The point of the separation of powers, the checks and balances, the inherently public character of deliberation and legislation, the election of representatives, the guaranteed rights, especially of expression, and all the other mechanisms of a functioning liberal democracy is to ensure as much as possible that the understanding on which public action takes place is accountable to reason. Properly conceived, liberal democracy is a truth machine. Its most fundamental premise is that every step in the direction of reason is also a step in the direction of justice (emphasis added).
As I mentioned, this trip provided an interesting backdrop for considering Stewart’s thesis. During the Norwegian portion of our visit, the local guides were quick to point out ways in which the country’s focus was on the common good. Yes, taxes were high, but the benefit was to a healthier, more productive, better educated, happier country.
Chandelier in Napoleon III’s apartment in the Louvre in Paris
View of one of the rooms in Napoleon III’s apartment in the Louvre
Stewart’s final chapter begins in 1785 with Thomas Jefferson in France, contemplating the playgrounds of the aristocracy. While doing so, he fell into conversation with a minimum wage peasant woman, and she told him of the brutal circumstances of her life. He came back to his apartment and wrote to his friend and political ally James Madison about the need for a progressive tax system in America — on property, on inheritance — to refrain the takeover by the oligarchs that he saw in France. Jefferson wasn’t the only founding father to advocate for what today is attacked as socialism. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Adam Smith (the founding father of modern economics), and Thomas Paine all had similar proposals.
The sad fact of the matter is that every country in the history of the world that allows the rich to build up massive wealth and extreme inequality crashes and burns to various extents. Rome, England, France, and more come to mind. Stewart rightly worries that America is on the same path. And yet the answers are fairly clear and well known.
American history considered in its broadest sweep makes abundantly clear that collective action through a democratically elected government has been and must remain an indispensable tool in advancing the cause of equal justice. The idea that the market or civil society, left to their own devices, will organize a fair tax code, break up monopolies, ensure universal access to health and education is and always has been fatuous. It is usually the mantra of those who rely on the hidden powers of government to sustain their own privilege.
And those who rely on those hidden powers and false tales most often look like us: the 9.9 percent. To reach the place where our awareness is clear that our happiness depends on understanding our actual relations with other people and our place in nature, we only have to “lose our illusions.”
Highly recommended.
More to come…
DJB
*Another Damn Castle and/or Cathedral tour (take your pick)
Image of the Eileen Donan Caste in Isle of Skye, Scotland, by DJB
It took less than an hour in the beautiful City of Light for Claire — our official family photographer — to observe that “you cannot take a bad picture in Paris.” Two days in, I fully agree.
Here are a range of photos, with little or no description and in no particular order, from our first few days in the city where the family has gathered to celebrate a birthday and an anniversary. As I’m fond of saying, more to come.
An iconic Paris shot (CHB)
A Paris Cafe (CHB)
Saint Severin Church interior (DJB)
The first of what promises to be several fromage plates (CHB)
Pere-Lachaise Cemetery (ABB)
The well-loved tomb of French singer-songwriter Alain Baschung (DJB)
Andrew and Claire share a first Parisian lunch at Le Christine (DJB)One of our luncheon courses at Le Christine (DJB)Waiting in line to enter Shakespeare and Company…I always find the independent bookstores (DJB)Rue St. Andre-of-the-Arts…our home away from home during this time in Paris (DJB)
Chandelier in the apartment of Napoleon III in the Louvre (DJB)
A city where you turn a corner…and there’s Notre Dame (DJB)…
…or you turn a corner and there’s Andrew in the neighborhood arcade — Passage cour du Commerce Saint-Andre (CHB)
A tired but happy group celebrating Candice’s birthday (Credit: Our wonderful French waitress at KGB)
Over a delightful meal with Fran Flett Hollinrake — historian, storyteller, tour guide, writer, and the manager of St. Magnus Cathedral for the Orkney Islands Council — I asked for her recommendation of a book to read about this remote, windswept, northern outpost of Scotland. She didn’t hesitate.
“Anything by George Mackay Brown will do,” she replied. In a wonderful independent bookstore on our next stop in the Shetland Islands, I bought two volumes and immediately dived in to one of his early works.
Magnus, the second novel of George Mackay Brown, the acclaimed Orkney writer, was published in 1973 (and republished by Polygon in 2019). It is the fictional account of the real-life murder of Earl Magnus of Orkney who “walked calmly, knowingly and completely unarmed to a terrible death at the hands of his cousin Hakon Paulson.” Told through the eyes of several peasants, most notably the farmer Mans and his wife Hild, as well as the tinker Jock and his blind wife Mary, it is both atmospheric in capturing the spirit of the islands, and descriptive in recounting the hardships and terror of life in the 12th century.
George Mackay Brown (1921 – 1996) was one of the greatest Scottish writers of the twentieth century. A prolific poet, admired by such fellow poets as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, he was also an accomplished novelist, dramatist and a master of the short story. Bar a brief period in Edinburgh … Mackay Brown spent most of his life in Orkney, and his work is saturated with references to his native islands.
Seamus Heaney once remarked that George Mackay Brown passed everything “through the eye of the needle of Orkney.” That is true in Magnus, where Brown takes off on a dream flight in the midst of the description of the killing of the 12th century martyr to meditate on the murder of famed German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the hands of the Nazis near the end of World War II. He returns with a short tale of Jock and Mary three years after the murder, where Jock prays over the recently buried bones of Magnus and a miracle follows.
I finished the book after we left Scotland for Norway, but I was certainly called back to that haunting landscape, in part because of Mackay Brown’s use of language and images. In fact, lines from Hamnavoe, his most famous poem, speak to why he is so effective and evocative.
In the fire of images Gladly I put my hand.
In reading Mackay Brown, I recalled our day in Orkney with National Trust Tours and the visit to the majestic St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall.
St. Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall
Known as the “Light in the North”, the cathedral was founded in 1137 by the Viking, Earl Rognvald, in honor of his martyred uncle. Built of red and yellow standstone, this internationally recognized site has a striking and unique appearance.
The worshipping community over the centuries has been part of the Roman Catholic Church, the Norwegian Church, the Scottish Episcopal Church, and the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian). The worshipping community thus inherits an ecumenical tradition.
View towards the altar
I mentioned to Fran that in my research for the trip, I found stories that suggested that the residents of the Orkney Islands were both resilient and pragmatic souls. She suggested that was true and told a short story as an illustration. St. Magnus Cathedral had weathered the Reformation physically and in spirit. The same clergy who just weeks before were Roman Catholic priests simply became Scottish Presbyterian ministers following the change. Same team, different uniforms.
The stories we tell give us a sense of why particular places matter. Stories connect people to a certain place in a certain time, yet they add to the continuum of a community’s narrative. Stories don’t have to reveal something new. Often, they are more about tapping into our memories, our values, and our deepest longings, and so they resurrect what is very old, and very wise, and very precious.
People and places are intertwined. It is why, when discussing their communities, so many people focus on the stories attached to places and less on the intricate architectural details of the buildings.
Consider the stories surrounding Skara Brae. If a landmark’s essential feature is not its design, but the place it holds in our memory, then the stories of this Neolithic village are ones for all humanity. Stories place Skara Brae in the larger context of human history — predating the pyramids in Egypt and Stonehenge in England.
We learn from places like Skara Brae that life doesn’t stand still. Ritual ― trying to make sense of the changing world around us ― is part of who we are. Resiliency is an important part of our make-up as humans, but so is adaptability. Skara Brae was abandoned around 2500 ― but we are unsure why. Even those places that no longer exist as living communities still have lessons to teach us and imbed stories into our collective consciousness.
Historian David McCullough likes to remind us that history shows that we have been through difficult times before. Yet in face of difficult times “we have an all-important, inexhaustible source of strength. And that source of strength is our story, our history, who we are, how we got to be where we are, and all we have been through, what we have achieved.”
Ring of Brodgar
Sometimes, stories in Orkney are enigmatic, like the stone henge of the Ring of Brodgar. We visited the ring — part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site, a series of important domestic and ritual monuments built 5000 years ago in the Orkney Islands — with master archaeologist Nick Card.
It was a magical day, one that provided images and stories of Orkney that will remain for a lifetime.
This was one unforgettable week in America. If ever we needed comfort, understanding, and direction from power greater than ourselves, this was that week.
How have we arrived at a place where 90% of Americans want to protect our children from gun violence, and yet those who are supposed to represent us in government are unable, or unwilling, to do so?
This is a central problem not just for the issue of gun control, but for our democracy itself.
How indeed have we arrived at a place where one political party, representing a shrinking minority of our fellow citizens, acts as if it has the right to dictate through force, if necessary, how the rest of us will live…or not live, as the case may be.
Today, we arrived at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris, seeking answers. Interim Dean Timothy Safford gave an emotion-filled sermon full of question, doubt, love, and grace. One of his questions, like that of Dr. Richardson, was how one group of politicians could make the argument on today’s talk shows to suggest that it was constitutional — indeed normal and essential for our way of life — for someone to be able to legally buy an assault rifle and 300 rounds of ammunition before they are legally old enough to buy a beer.
The altar at the American Cathedral in Paris, with the Memorial Day wreath from the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day
In the cover note to the congregation, Dean Safford wrote:
Is your heart broken? Mine certainly is.
In our opening prayer, we petition God “not to leave us comfortless.” Yes, God, please comfort me, but more importantly, please comfort (if it even possible) every mother and father who lost a child to needless, avoidable violence in Uvalde, Texas.
On this the second anniversary of the senseless and brutal murder of George Floyd, comfort all who experience the daily pain and violence of racism and exclusion. In the horror of Uvalde, we must not forget the evil unleashed in Buffalo, New York, where 10 died to racist violence.
On American Memorial Day, comfort us as we honor those who have died in heroic service while we also grapple with the pain that so many are dying in Ukraine because humanity cannot save itself from ourselves.
Maybe my prayer is, “God, do not abandon us to our foolishness and fallenness.
I am weary and I am sad. But I still come to pray, to hope, to praise, to glimpse glory. I know that you will be here with me to hold me up when I want to sit down, to face me forward when I want to turn away, and lift me up when I fall.
Dean Safford noted that we are in the ten-day period in the church year between the Ascension and Pentecost. In church language, Jesus has “left the planet” and the “Comforter” has not yet arrived. The French translation for the plea “not to leave us comfortless” is not to leave us inconsolable.
It is easy this week to feel inconsolable when contemplating our future as a country and as a people. But no matter how we find the strength, we must stand up, we must face forward.
We simply cannot keep turning away.
The view in the American Cathedral in Paris as one heads out into the world.
May you find the strength to keep working.
More to come…
DJB
Another in the series of Observations from… (in this case, Paris).
Yes, life is just as strange as folk music tunes; you never know whether they unfold in a major or minor key.
These lines from a letter Norwegian composer, pianist, and conductor Edvard Grieg wrote to a friend, begin a short biography that I read after visiting Grieg’s home in Bergan, Norway earlier this week.
Edvard Grieg: His life and music is a 2002 work written by Erling Dahl, Jr. and published by the Edvard Grieg Museum — Troldhaugen. It was an excellent short intro for those — like me — who may have heard a number of Grieg’s compositions through the years but do not know much about the life, influences, and work of Norway’s most famous composer.
Grieg’s grandparents were involved with the Bergen Symphony Orchestra and his mother was a piano tutor who taught her son to play in this most international of Norway’s cities. The violinist Ole Bull “discovered” the young Grieg’s musical talent and convinced his parents to let the young man attend the conservatory of music in Leipzig, Germany. Grieg, never a committed student, hated the experience but clearly learned important elements of harmony and found his calling. The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók later said that “Grieg was the first to cast off the yoke of Germany.”
There is much packed into this short biography: Grieg’s marriage to his cousin and fellow musician Nina Hagerup; his bouts with depression; his friendships and connections with Liszt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, and many more. I was most fascinated by Grieg’s connections to, and love of, Norwegian folk music which flowered in an especially creative period in the mid-1870s, when he lived in western Norway. The “synthesis of life experienced, the artistic endeavor and the power of the Norwegian landscape and folk music is expressed in the profundity of these exalted and highly personal, heartfelt compositions.”
The beauty and power of the Norwegian landscape as seen from the Flam Railway
Edvard Grieg died rather early in 1907 after suffering most of his life from a childhood bout with tuberculosis. Piano Concerto in A Minor (Opus 16) is his most famous work, and everyone knows those stirring opening chords.
It was a treat to visit the home that he and Nina bought and named Troldhaugen (or the Troll Hill) outside Bergen. The composer’s cottage overlooks a beautiful lake and would be a magical place to write for any creative individual. The house museum is rather old-fashioned in its presentation, but one still gains the essence of the place and its relationship to the life of Edvard and Nina Grieg.
Interior of Edvard Grieg’s Composer’s CottageThe Edvard Grieg HomeThe house recently reopened to visitors, so the presentation was no doubt influenced by the need for social distancing in a small space.
Dahl ends his work with an assessment of Grieg’s life and music.
His preference for the smaller musical forms has, for example, led to their describing him as a miniaturist — a drawing room composer. Such an assessment merely shows a failure to realize that greatness can manifest itself in simple and small forms.
Grieg himself said that he was not in the same class as Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, but, like Thalberg, he noted that “His province is the smaller forms, but in this he is great.”
Enjoy the famous In the Hall of the Mountain King from “Peer Gynt” with photos taken around the house and grounds.
More to come (from my recent adventures in travel)…
As I was leaving to visit some of the world’s most treasured landscapes and one of our most beloved cities, I returned to a work I reread every few years for refreshment and inspiration.
Bedside Essays for Lovers (of Cities) (2012) is architect Daniel Solomon‘s call to arms for all of us — architects, planners, politicians, developers, citizens — to understand and care for our cities. In this short collection, Solomon is focused on what makes cities vibrant. What makes cities livable. What makes cities sustainable. What makes for a great city where we would all want to live.
Cities are complex places with innumerable moving parts. The need to find solutions that work in cities is made more urgent by factors such as climate change, justice, and inequality. And there are many voices in the mix. “Like the fifteenth-century’s great voyages of discovery,” Solomon writes, “the twenty-first century’s path to sustainability is a highly competitive sport.”
But Solomon has important things to say. To support sustainability in urban areas, we need to pay more attention to nurturing what Solomon calls “continuous cities.”
While for many cities growth is inevitable, the form that growth takes is not. There are three main ways in which cities can grow, each profoundly different from the others: (1) Cities can sprawl and decentralize; (2) cities can erase themselves and build anew; or (3) cities can regenerate themselves more densely within their own structure.
Daniel Solomon
Forms one and two are lumped together, in Solomon’s description as the Ruptured City, while the third form of growth constitutes the Continuous City. The latter is “the old champion with victories in all the great cities of the world large and small.” There “streets are lined and shaped by city blocks. The blocks in the continuous city are known as perimeter blocks because buildings usually face streets all the way around.” Then Solomon turns to the challenger, “still battling hard despite a record of all defeats and no victories.” The Ruptured City is “where streets and buildings each go their own way without a nod, and blocks, where they exist at all, are freestanding slabs of building. This is the grandchild of the city laid out in ninety-five dogmatic prescriptions in 1943 by Le Corbusier in The Athens Charter.”
In continuous cities, Solomon points out, there is always change.
The continuous city is not a static thing. It changes all the time because that is what living organisms do. But change in the continuous city is evolution, not upheaval; the living honor the dead and make sure that the unborn get to know them. New buildings, new institutions, new technologies in the continuous city don’t rip apart the old and wreck it. They accommodate, they act with respect, and they add vibrant new chapters to history without eradicating it.
Altar at San Carlo
I’ve written about Solomon’s book before, most especially when discussing San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (Saint Charles at the Four Fountains) in Rome. This design — a masterpiece of architect Francesco Borramini — is both “extraordinary and complex.” Working with a very difficult site and needing to include a number of elements to complete the architectural program, Borramini came up with a design that works and thrills at the same time.
Dome of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane
To give you a sense of Solomon’s style and perspective, I’ll leave you with this paragraph about Borramini’s masterpiece.
Never have the ordinary and the extraordinary been reconciled with more sublime elegance than at San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Its interior is nothing less than a three-dimensional cosmological map depicting in its intricate geometries and its filtration of light the relationship of heaven and earth. But the sanctuary of San Carlo sits on an unremarkable street corner on the consistent street frontage of via Quirinale, leading to the magnificence of Palazzo Quirinale and Piazza Quirinale a couple of blocks up the street. Mediating between the glories of the interior and the important but subservient role of the exterior is a subtly undulating wall, true to the demands of both inside and out. In this most complex of mediations, Borromini leaves the enduring lesson of how to be both a humble city builder and an architect of thundering power.
Lovers of cities should read Daniel Solomon.
More to come…
DJB
As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent articles, blog posts, or books that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.
Glasgow image by Pirkko Seitsenpiste from Pixabay.
I came late to an appreciation for the British singer-songwriter Richard Thompson, and I’ve never been sure why it took me so long. His 1991 song 1952 Vincent Black Lightning is so well-crafted that it stands among the best story songs of all time. I’ve heard it — and loved it — for years. And he’s considered one of the best, and most influential rock guitar players of all time. But sometimes I suspect that your mind is elsewhere in your formative years when a musician is making their initial mark on the world, and he or she just slips past your consciousness. We’re lucky, as I have been in recent years, to discover true genius that has been there all along. Richard Thompson is that person for me.
There are unforgettable lines, as when he talks of his band, Fairport Convention, deepening their love of British folk music. “We were starting to connect to a lineage that was ancient, pagan and alive with the dreams of the dead.” There are thoughtful passages about working through tragedy, such as with the 1969 crash of their van which killed Thompson’s girlfriend and the band’s drummer. There are throwaway bits of humor, such as Thompson’s note that when both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones sent flowers to the hospital after that crash, “it impressed the nurses.”
And there are laugh-out-loud stories, such the one of sitting in a coffee shop in the Detroit airport and hearing the men in the next booth cursing about the “hippies” under their breath. Thompson carefully looks around and is shocked to see that it is county music star Buck Owens and his band the Buckaroos. As Thompson and his mates get up to leave, Thompson — who had one of his albums — goes back and shocks Owens by complimenting him on his most recent record and asking for his autograph. Then he recognizes the good work of the guitar player and the pedal steel player, calling them by their names, and he has them in the palm of his hands. He notes that he lost the signatures somewhere soon afterwards, “but that really wasn’t the point.”
My favorite of these vignettes of life on the road is when the band — living in a dump of a house named “The Angel” — went to see the local vicar and offered to do a concert to support the church’s organ restoration fund as a way of pacifying the locals who were concerned about a bunch of dirty hippies showing up in their rural community. All went well, and a couple of days later a policeman knocked on the door. Thompson, whose father was a policeman, describes band members frantically hiding drugs under the table when the superintendent of police said, “Stand easy, lads. … I’m here on unofficial business.”
It turns out the local police were impressed with the concert for the church organ fund and wanted to know if the band would do something similar for the police orphan fund.
This did not seem like an offer you turned down, just as you would probably not turn down the offer to play at Al Capone’s wedding. These were people you did not want to piss off, so we readily agreed. If we could do organs, we could do orphans.”
The concert was a huge hit, and when the superintendent came by the next morning to thank them for the significant lift to the orphan’s fund, he asked if there was anything they needed. “Well — we could use a dishwasher.” Later that afternoon a brand-new dishwasher showed up, and the band also noticed that there were no more parking tickets!
This is a wonderful read, full of details about life in London in the 60s, rock stars, and the writing life. Midway through Thompson leaves the band, works some as a session guitarist for hire, and goes on the road as a duo with his wife.
But the singer who really changed the course of his life and helped put the stamp on English folk-rock music was Sandy Denny, heard here with Fairport from the Unhalfbricking album with her Who Knows Where the Time Goes? Thompson plays lovely guitar on this classic.
“Genesis Hall” was an abandoned hotel in London’s Drury Lane, originally the Bell Hotel. It had been occupied by hippie squatters. The London police had evicted the squatters, and eventually caused the building to be razed. Thompson’s father was a member of the London police force at the time, and the lyrics — which Thompson wrote — refer to the incident.
Thompson writes about how much Fairport Convention was influenced by The Band, and especially their album Music from Big Pink. Upon hearing that album, Fairport realized that they needed to stop trying to mimic American roots music and focus instead on their British roots…leading to their move toward creating English folk rock. There is a terrific all-star version of the song online put together by Elvis Costello that features Band founder Levon Helm along with Nick Lowe, Ray Lamontaigne, Allen Toussaunt and Richard Thompson. It is magical.
One of the loveliest of Thompson’s tunes came from the time when he and Linda were singing as a duo. Dimming of the Day is simply sublime, with Linda’s haunting vocals and their exquisite harmony. It is an unforgettable piece, and their original is better than almost every single one of the many covers. (Bonnie Raitt and Alison Krauss both have wonderful versions that are beautiful interpretations.) The tune Dargai which follows is Richard’s take of a J. Scott Skinner fiddle piece of the same name.
I also enjoy this lovely version of Thompson’s 1994 tune Beeswing with Richard and Northumbrian concertina player Alistair Anderson at Alistair’s ‘Diamond Dazzler’ 60th Birthday celebration concert at The Sage Gateshead, in 2008.
In the Financial Times, writer David Honigmann conjurs up memories of Beeswing by writing of this wonderful tune, and what it has meant to him and other musicians.
In the summer of love, the song’s narrator comes to Dundee and falls in love with a laundry worker, as “fine as a bee’s wing”. They go on the road, busking and fruit picking and tinkering. He wants to settle down and have a family; she refuses. “As long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay.” After a drunken quarrel she leaves. Now he hears only rumours of her, sleeping rough; once marrying but finding “even a gypsy caravan was too much settling down”. Free-spiritedness shades into solipsism. And yet he remains obsessed.
Thompson’s writing skills are amazing here, with the equisite line, “And maybe that’s just the price you pay for the chains you refuse.”
Thompson, who is still going strong in his 70s, has a wonderfully playful side, which comes through in his memoir and in this cover of the Britney Spears pop hit Oops I Did It Again. And I haven’t really mentioned that he’s one of the top guitarists in rock music. You can hear that here. Stay with it all the way to the end!
And finally, one of the best versions I’ve heard of Thompson performing his classic 1952 Vincent Black Lightening came in 2012 at the Americana Music Awards at the Grand Old Opry House in Nashville.
“Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme.” One of the all-time great lyrics.
Thank you, Richard Thompson, for finding your voice and sharing it with us for so many years.
Enjoy!
More to come…
DJB
Image: Richard Thompson (credit: RichardThompson-music.com)
MORE TO COME... 