Same as it ever was

I spent a lot of this August sitting there and looking at that. I did the same thing in August 2008 and August 2007: thank you Susan and Claude!

What I see is an agricultural landscape that France takes care of, and Charolais cows in the afternoon. What I see is the possibility of not destroying everything and not finding new ways to decline. I see from the chair the past, I see the future.

Above I see no Internet. I get none of the hallucinatory "we're on the mend" central banker crapola as in my Google news. I get no CEPR reality in the form of a continuing crunch. But do read this reality (and this). It fits with what I hear from folks like my commercial real estate developer Uncle Russ about enormous debt hangovers, lack of spending power, and other structural issues that will keep the economy from looking like 2006-07 for years to come.

Could we try something else now? Start with the picture.

Is Joe Biden Obama's Dick Cheney?

I really can't think about it after a couple of weeks back in le Morvan - aka The Shire - dodging the the news. I also moved to Lyon and started my new 2-year j0b as the director of two University of California study centers - one here and the other in Grenoble, which is surrounded by the best mountain scenery I've seen in France. My main memory of the first week is spending four hours at Ikea outside of Lyon buying giant boxes, and then four hours turning the boxes into furniture. And then doing it all over again. It was actually fun, and the place looks great.

Here are some shots from the first week back in July:


I'm looking west from the middle of Place Bellecour towards the hill and the cathedral on Fourviere hidden behind it. that's my building, and I have the top floor windows - the three on the right.

Here's the best Ikea living room in history - main credit to Avery:


And here are two shots from yesterday evening looking left out the window in front of the table above (Place Bellecour, la grande roue, and the "crayon"), and then looking right.





I like it here.

You can see 100 or so pictures from the first week at Grenoble EAP on my Facebook page.

Goodbye Paris

It wasn't easy getting back to Santa Barbara from France. The little pieces of the corporate world don't really mesh that well. This is especially true of the pieces that connect to other corporate worlds in other countries. Trying to get Air France to book our bags onto United Airlines for the hop from LAX to Santa Barbara took at least half-an-hour of standing at the counter with this very nice young man who wanted to help. How long would it have taken if he didn't?

The flight was great because so many seats were empty. Coach was always bearable when no one showed up, and you could dump all your crap in the seat next to you. I got a huge amount of research work done because I couldn't check my email to find messages on the UC budget meltdown irritating enough to require a response. It was a nice trip, floating over an increasingly wet-looking polar ice cap - until we landed at LAX.

We had to go from terminal 2 to terminal 7, found a nice supervisor to give us the boarding pass to the United flight that Air France couldn't, got on the little jumper and took off only a half a hour late. It was a beautiful mid-afternoon off the Southern California shore - so much nicer than the city itself which I grew in but do not miss. It was 1 am for me Paris time so I dozed and then woke up to see the Goleta coast below us - trucks crawling on highway 101, the temporarily florescent-green coastal hills, and then El Capitan, and up there Gaviota. Suddenly I realized we'd gone too far north! Everyone was reading or sleeping, and as we drifted along in the sunlight I thought oh, so we've been hijacked. And laughed. And then thought that wouldn't be so bad, doomed to buzz along like this inside of our giant silver bee above the sunny shoreline water and the empty hills.

Then the pilot came on to say that a fog back had rolled in. We couldn't land in Santa Barbara. We had to fly all the way back to Los Angeles, which is what we did. And that meant crossing the whole LA basin, with its dirty pastel circuit-board of streets and one-story houses stretching without end unless here and there interrupted by the large rectangles of industrial buildings. There are plenty of swimming pools but hardly in the whole dry basin a square of grass. We landed back in the coastal fog. We sat on the plane. Two passengers used their cellphones to rent cars or get SB Airbus reservations and they were gone in 60 seconds.

A customer service guy came on, and his charm lasted about the same amount of time. But he did have some good news: the pilot was going to take us back to SB. There was a 95 percent chance that this time we were going to land. On the other hand, he said, if we didn't land he'd fly on to San Francisco and put us on a (6 hour) bus back to SB from there.

I was having my usual dark thoughts about United right then. There was no way they could do anything flexible like land at Santa Maria and put us on a 60 minute bus back to SB. There was no way they could do anything nonpunitive like say let's try a second time and then we'll take you back here for a bus from LA. There was no way they could actually commit themselves and say we'll get in this time, let's go, period. 95 percent sounded like a fake number, and we'd already failed to land when everyone assumed the odds were 100 percent.

So who else got off? Here we are at the counter:

There were two sisters in their 30s whom I'd noticed in the airport bar because of their non-identical matching jeans, boots, tattoos, and walking-around impatience that was equal to ours. One told us she had a friend who worked at the SB airport and the fog had rolled in again. We got up and followed the Blackberry twin. Two Brits sitting next to us got off too; they were doing a documentary for the Discovery channel on brain evolution - obviously had to go a long way to find any evidence for it - had just come from Australia, had discovered United had lost one of their equipment bags, had an 8 am UCSB shoot about the topic, and couldn't still be on the bus from SB having breakfast in Pismo Beach when the time rolled around. Finally, a German woman visiting her uncle came with us too - all the long haul folks, the SB twins having come from some fashion shoot in New York.

I sat in the back of the supershuttle with the twins. We crawled up the westside 405 for an hour or so. Welcome to LA I said to the middle row, British and German, who sooner or later managed to fall asleep. Avery tried every once in a while to get the semi-deaf shuttle driver to agree to stop at the Radisson but he never would. Looks like he's using his disability as an excuse to give us rock-bottom service, I said to the twins. Does he work for United? The one sitting next to me laughed and smacked me. Looking around past Sunset I said it's great to have a whole new audience for the comment I always make after coming back from Europe: in a 100 miles stretch through some of the richest areas in the world, you can't find a single building you'd want to look at. - The Bonaventure, the other twin suggested? - that's downtown, doesn't count! And on we went like that, with stories of war movies, restaurants that opened and closed, and what it was like to grow up in Santa Barbara and have to leave.

It's nice to be back in Santa Barbara, since I don't expect more from it than the mountains and the ocean and my friends. I hope to see them soon. The sun comes in the yellow kitchen in the back of the house, and shines in the breakfast room all day long. I looked around remembering what it was like when we first bought it, and how Mrs. Cavaletto spent most of her time in the breakfast room because of the light. Avery has all our stuff out of the garage and back in the house in two hours or so. I spend the morning getting the old cars going again. Gas price booms has made one of our junkers valuable. Triple A asks me what color is it, I say can't tell any more. Tow truck driver says, now it's a "gas saver," you should hang onto this. On the second day we drove back to LA, to the 24th St theater downtown were Avery gave a talk at our friend David Lloyd's play reading. We were back up here by midnight again. Spring has started - the pear trees have already gone from blossom to leaf. The trick will be to stay happy with the things that really are here.

Sunday in East Berlin

Berlin is in most ways the opposite of Paris. It sprawls. Many of its plazas dwarf human beings. Its streets can take along time to walk across. Its newer apartment blocks go on forever. It feels wide open to a Los Angeles native like me, though Berliners don't really see the LA comparison. Unlike Paris too, half of its central city was destroyed during World War II, and rebuilt by sector and then rebuilt again after the end of the Cold War. There are only bits and pieces of the 19th century here, and not the enormous Hausmannian unity that makes Paris beautiful and yet a little isolated in itself.



Berlin is half-way to everywhere to the East and South - Prague, Budapest, the Ukraine, Bulgaria, Istanbul, Bagdhad. The approach to Berlin is across mile after mile of rails and roads. The new central train station is bigger than a drydock for an aircraft carrier. Across the street from the new station the old Berlin wall lines the Spree River- now the longest collaborative mural project anywhere. On the opposite bank stripped brick factories wait for something with their windows gone. Large parts of town are still under construction, while old power stations and apartment blocks remain shut down, waiting for the next round, which will be as big as the round they're in. On the first day the setting sun shone on a still working station's three steel towers.

Thus it took us a while Sunday morning to get out to Lichetenberg east of the city, on the S-Bahn that goes to Wartenberg. It was too sunny not to take pictures, of metallic Friedrichstrasse, the Spree downtown, the industrial wrecks, the rebuilt village blocks lining empty streets, including the one leading from the station at Noldherplatz, where Ines said the Neonazis were planning their march that would rename, unofficially, some street there after the Berlin police commander who in 1919 ordered the killing of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

These two famous socialists were among many other things founders of the Spartacist League and prominent anti-war and anti-imperialist activists who had called on soldiers and sailors to stop fighting the war and rise up to replace the Kaiser. Luxemburg was a leading marxist intellectual as well, and had written superb, original, and fundamental work on a range of subjects from the role of imperialism in the capital accumulation process to the weakness of reformism to the politics of the mass strike and to major errors committed by the leaders of the Russian Revolution. After the Spartacist League had formed an alliance that became the German Communist Party and supported the January general strike in 1919, the Social Democrats, led by Luxemburg's former student Friedrich Ebert, used the Freikorps to suppress their Left opposition, and in the process had her, Liebknecht and hundreds of others killed. As it happened, we were passing the Nazi march site on our way to visit the Luxemburg memorial on the anniversary of the assassination.

I had pictured a small memorial. There would be a gravesite - greener and more spread out than Jim Morrison's in Pere Lachaise in Paris. There would be a similar number of devotees, maybe up to a hundred since it was an anniversary. But after all this was Berlin.

We got off the train and hopped into a taxi. The driver said the streets were blocked and we hopped out again. We entered the tunnel to cross under the tracks and were swept into a river of people. We emerged on the other side and found hundreds more carrying red flowers. There were a few college-age anarchists and then thousands of middle-aged and elderly people, mostly well-dressed, utterly respectable, all carrying the same red flowers - thousands and thousands of flowers. There was a steady stream of people from grandparents to infants that went on hour after hour. There was the clustering, the solid wall of unmoving people, around the graves and the mounds of flowers. There were food trucks and political tents. They were expecting 80,000.



What is Rosa Luxemburg to them? Martyr to war and to proto-Nazism? A great figure of revo- lutionary thought and action? One of the giants of German political history? Unfor- gotten leader of a continuing revolution?

I have no idea. I don't know whether the members of the procession think she belongs to the future as well as to history. I don't know who they were - reluctant capitalist conscripts from the former East Berlin. Or older people unhappy with the regressions visible in the world, or people honoring part of their national identity. I do know I have never seen such a mountain of red flowers, or such a flow of people carrying flowers while not carrying. Whoever they were, they came for her. They came for the fallen. I think they came for the cause she fell for. If you put a flower on the grave, and you remember, then what you remember isn't actually gone.




We took the S-bahn back west a few stops to Waschauer, got off in the sun and walked over the bridge to another of Berlin's apparently several dozen art zones, this one in Friedrichshain. We ordered lunch in a corner tavern on Revalerstr and toasted various things including the Rosas still to come. Mattias joined us, and we walked through the neighborhood on Koperikusstr toward the east bank of the Spree, past 50s apartment blocks to an abandoned east Berlin power station on Rudersdstr that has become the biggest club in Europe, then rounded the corner where the statue of Rosa Luxemburg in the Michelin guidebook sits in front of the empty Neue Deutchland building, East Berlin's defunct daily, whose building continues to preside.

We were on Pariser Kommune by this point, and we walked in front of the shopping-mall train station Ostbahnhof down to Holzmrkt along the industrial buildings next to the water. One is a glass-cube restaurant. We walked down the side and found a brick patio with chairs facing the sun. There was the Spree, as still as a mirror, as empty as a good beach day after the a-bomb's gone off. Hidden below the patio was a wooden dock where a golden wood vaporetto dinner boat waited to take Mattias and Ines on their friend's birthday cruise. Off they went. I looked back across the water into the sun. Berlin here is Venice - if Venice had built brick factories by the river, let them fall into ruin, and allowed the grass to swallow them. My camera had stopped. The sun hung there. The boat froze on the mirror.

We started everything up again - back to the S-bahn at Jannowitzbruche, Hackesher Markt, and the History museum for the rest of the afternoon. In the exhibit on Portugal I saw a globe by Martin Behaim from the early 1500s. It had a golden-brown Europe and Africa and Asia, and on the other side, in the black sea, no New World. It was an Earth with everything except the Americas. It was another Earth, an alternate Earth, and in this room no two Earths were the same. In the Klaus May exhibit there were the Indians he invented in Bavaria, and the Arabs he connected with heroic utopias. In the long gigantic history of Germany there are the centuries of almost unbroken war, and the amazing murderousness of the leaders. And through all of this time there were always many Germanies.

Actually since 1919 not that much time has passed. On this trip, about my sixth to Berlin, I felt that the hidden side of the world is going to rotate into view.

The Leader of the French World

I grew up in Los Angeles, which has great mountains and beaches but a pretty damn crappy city-scape. To see great trees and amazing buildings and have the feeling of luxurious calm they can give, my friend's dads would occasionally take us to some mogul party in Bel-Air. There you'd see Luxembourg- Gardens style glories of eternal summer, the peaceful abundance of a Fragonard painting , maintained by invisible faires hailing from Oaxaca and Guanajuato.

Manmade L.A. beauty was mostly private. There were a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright houses open to the public, about a half-hour of driving from each other and the La Brea Tar Pits, and the County Art Museum as we then called it. Mostly for aesthetic pleasure we went to Griffith Park Observatory or to the beach. UCLA's Powell library was a nice Moorish-Spanish fantasy, but they didn't like kids.

More generally, the parks were pathetic. The streets were one-story shop fronts built with ten-year write-offs in mind. The later upgrades, driven by Hollywood migrations west towards the ocean to beat the smog, meant that shopping strips got taller and the Gaps looked like a 1980s bank, as did fancy restaurants like Chaya Venice. Picture today's Santa Monica Promenade, morphed from the 3rd st concrete strip. I do like the airplane hanger Broadway Deli but stuff like that doesn't add up to a visible city.

Paris is the contrast. The beauty is public. There's the cafe in the courtyard of the Louvre, rue Mouffetard, the square around the Mairie du 14e, Butee aux Cailles, my own ordinary rue Pascal (pictured above), le Jardin des Plantes, all the cutsy little shopping streets in the 6e that American jam because it's human scale Disney "Main Street" of people face to face next to amazing clothes and perfect courtyards only its real. There are hundreds of places that look great and are there for everybody. I almost feel dumb saying it, it's so simple. Beauty for free. Public beauty. And it's really great.

The leader of the French world, aka Le Jogger, aka President Rupture - he likes private beauty. The weekly magazine Marianne has a story this week elaborating Sarko's obvious love of the rich and famous. The article is on the "Fricocrates" now surrounding and controlling a president who can't help but worship them ("fric" = dough as in money). For some reason, Marianne is about the only major national publication that seems upset by Le J's plutocracy dressed up as vigorous renewal. The magazine isn't radical, but it is independent. This reminds me that the major magazine voice on this subject in the States has been Lewis Lapham, the longtime and recently retired editor of Harpers who hated socialism but not quite as much as he hated fat-cat pseudo-democracy. Independence. Hmm, could be important.

The Marianne article is by Laurent Mauduit, who names lots of the huge money surrounding Sarkozy. Most of them don't mean much outside of France (or inside for that matter) - you've seen Bouygues, as in Martin Bouygues, on one of the Tour de France teams if you watch cycling, and he's a huge mogul in communications among other things. Most of Le J's big names are top 20 in the wealth-o-meter - several billions of euros, which is a lot of dollars as the dollar heads towards the value of the yen.

Some tidbits:

• a Sarkozy insider, Henri Guaino, happily compares Sarkozy's vision to that of the Second Empire, the dictatorship of Napoleon III which Guaino describes as an era of modernization and economic renewal.
  
• Le J is, we must repeat, a drooling dog around big money. Saluting his wealthy friend Stephane Richard in a state building, the Ministry of the Interior Place Beauvau, he said, 'you are rich, you have a beautiful house. . .You have made a fortune. Perhaps at some later point this too will happen to me."
• One critic correctly says, these guys Sarkozy loves, they aren't really the entrepreneurs but the very rich. He actually prefers the inheritors of wealth to the empire-builders.

This last is the crucial point. The wealthy explain their money as the natural reward of value that they have personally created. But le J's wealthy didn't actually create much value.

One could generalize the point to the financial sector in general, which once could say is grossly overpaid for sometimes providing liquidity but mostly taking a huge cut of raising the price of everything. The Second Empire that Guaino praises was also a period of unhinged speculation in real estate and finance that arguably drained money from France's industrial development, which never came close to that of England or Germany. One of the victims of the power of investors over corporations today has been research and development, which companies have cut to the bone to help keep their stock price high.

We're supposed to be innovation economies. But does the Right's leading lights like Le J really support innovation? That's different from inflating asset values and collecting gigantic broker fees.

I can't prove it (yet), but innovation has everything to do with how you feel in a beautiful place that is entirely public.

Walking Beats Blogging

And look where I was walking! That's la Cure, a river dans le Morvan, a big region of rivers, lakes and forests between Burgundy and the Loire, just below Avallon if you have your map out. Avery and I walked for a few hours most days, and took a few long car trips to places that are easier to get to from le Morvan than from Paris. We were staying in our very nice friends Susan and Claude's very nice place in Montarin, near Quarre-les-Tombes - yes, tombs from the Merovingians lie around outside the town church, oddly empty, about 230 km southeast of the capital.

Sleeping beats blogging too. The village was silent, and the big bedroom is upstairs in the old stone house, where the double window faces south west toward the forest, and the breeze came from the forest across the tops of the summer corn and into the window, and then carried on out the others side through the apple trees and the huge spruce and across the white Charolais cows grazing just over Susan and Claude's fence on the north side. The same breeze blew at night, and when the clouds had gone somewhere else I stared out at the black hills and the Milky Way, amazed that I couldn't see a single light. Clearly things exist for themselves. They don't need any of our constant activity. And with that thought I went to sleep, and slept and slept. I slept under the phosphorous stars that Susan had stuck on the ceiling and that glowed half the night over our heads.

One day we drove au haut Morvan, due south, and visited Bibracte, the ruins of an old Gaullish city where Cesar wrote his memoir of the Gaullic wars after his victory at Alesia in 52 BC. It was at the top of a beautiful hill, and we walked up through the forest into a clearing that had once had avenues and fountains as part of a city at the crossroads between northern and southern Europe, and between east and west. Right around there Vercingetorix had been proclaimed the head of the Gaullish coalition that didn't hold together long or well enough to keep the Romans out. We ate lunch looking out over the valley, wandered down the hill into an old leper colony on the way back, and headed east to the city that replaced Bibracte on Mont Bevray, Autun.

We've been to Autun before, and I had to go back because, well, it's a Roman city on the plain and feels southern and Mediterranean to me even though it's not. And also because it has the Saint Lazare cathedral with it's amazing tympanum, done by Giselbertus between 1120 and 1135. Christ is surrounded by the zodiac, but more relevantly the lintel divided humanity into the saved and the damned, and Christ presides over the weighing of souls (which the devil tries to skew), sending much of humanity straight to hell. This is an evil turn in Christian thought. It helps to scare everyone into temporarily good behavior but turn savior into the judge that issues eternal damnation. This is the power of blood, the power of death over life that made Burgundy an intersection between northern Europe and the East, brought back knowledge and progress through the education Byzantium and Araby and other heathens gave the crusaders, and guaranteed death and destruction and centuries of tyranny and darkness. These Middle Ages have of course not yet ended. We had a drink in the courtyard next to the church, and the headed back north through the old Roman gate.

Human nature, you say? Well actually around the same time the maker of the tympanum at Vezelay, the great pilgrimage town just northwest of le Morvan, was telling a whole different story. I really love this place, and we drove there another day from Montarin across the D 36 through luminous forests - so green the air was water you could drink - then across the river and up the hill and we arrived at this. Click on the image so you can see the details. There is no division between good and evil, saved and damned. All of humanity is there, the hunters, archers and fishermen, the artisans, the horsemen, and the Men with Big Ears. To the right and left of Christ sit various apostles, and arching over his head are the Signs but also the saved of every miscellaneous nation East and West - the outcomes of miracles that belong to the overall order represented by the collection of figures themselves. No one is going to Hell here. In the End, All Will Rise.

We took other great day trips - to the Puisaye near the Loire, to le Maconnais in the far south of Burgundy where we saw the remains of Cluny and then drove east to see unbelievable Renaissance perfection of Brou, outside of of Bourg-en-Bresse. I took dozen of pictures there and will post them eventually. It's hard to feel visiting all this medievalism that we have actually progressed. In medicine and transport, yes, but in intellectual and artistic ambition? I don't think so. We have shrunk. As artists and dreamers we are smaller than our ancestors. We go backwards as much as forward. Until our arts catch up, Bruno La Tour will still be right: we never never been modern.

Le Morvan was amazingly empty, and I had the same feeling I mentioned flying over Vienna. France has not cannibalized its land and country. It is not run by real estate promoters. It has preserved the landscape, the ranches and forests, the urban boundaries, the sociability of public life that is separated from nature as such. It has not sprawled. It has standards for itself that we Americans do not, thinking of progress as the sacrifice of our existing quality of life.

My motto: SEE FRANCE. SO UNDESTROYED.

(See Bill Maher's version if you haven't already.)

And then it was great to be back in Paris. France has had crap weather all summer - if you like sun and warmth - and today was the second day of light in about a month. I went out to get balsamic vinegar and ice cream for dinner, and decided to make a trip out of it by going up rue Mouffetard to the Italian products place, where this young shop guy acted like my vinegar purchase was as important as buying a new car. He explained the strengths and weaknesses of each brand, and offering his opinion of the quality-price ratio for all. I really love this about many French retail people - the sheer intellectual effort of their analysis of details possibly relevant to the user's experience. I asked whether I could take the sprayer out of brand number 3, bought it, and left amidst a chorus of "have a good Sunday" while bumping into a gang of smiling tan people back from somewhere like Nice.

Paris is pretty happy today, and if you're in the core areas the government hasn't let go to hell, Satan style, France has a scale designed for interaction of people on foot that has to be created artificially in a monstrously oversized country, prisoner of its gigantism, like the United States. I feel at home here.

A Trip to Vienna

Avery and I went to Vienna to see our friends Richard and Hilal, who actually live this time of year in Istanbul but were teaching in some Alpine village for a week or so. I didn't quite know what to expect. You say "Vienna" I say "Freud." We did trek over there to Freud's old apartment with the other pilgrims, and it was nice to see his cane and interesting to realize he lived and worked in two halves of an apartment that was probably 1500 square feet total, maybe a little more. There was a time when you didn't need size to matter. In our big houses do we drift sideways into something we never see?

Big: Vienna is not. It is small and yet monumental. It has the Hapsburg's palace, the big neo-gothic city hall, giant beautiful St Stephens, loads of pearly baroque. I'm working on how to start making these stories have pictures and will post some later.

Vienna is the little imperial city. It takes about 30 minutes to walk from one side of the ring to the other, so that's maybe 1/3 the diameter of Paris proper, which is itself a perfect miniature compared to shapeless giant London or big and sprawling Berlin. It is a great pedestrian city. It is on the list of tour companies in most countries, and there was as high a percentage of Asian tourists there as in Paris. It has major palaces on narrow streets that no Hausmann ever cleared to create the aristocratic vistas of Paris. There's all sorts of neoclassical beauty and double eagles and unfallen heroes of battle watching everyone from the parapets. And yet its scale is, well, very middle class.

Everyone we met was friendly. Everyone spoke ungrudging English. Everyone was under 30 years old. By that I mean that everyone in the hospitality trades is young, and mostly tall, thin, and gorgeous. They are like Vienna - great to look at, but what exactly are you seeing?

It was balmy until the last day, and some streets had cafes from one side to the other. Everyone was outside. You could get gelato on every corner and Austrian chocolate cake in the middle of every block. On our last night we ate at an Italian restaurant set up outside in the courtyard of an old private "hotel" in the French sense. Vienna is where Germanic culture meets the Mediterranean. It felt closer to Greece and to Byzantium, and the churches had the white and the gold to prove it.

It's true that Vienna was the center of Europe's most multicultural Empire. It covered neighboring Hungary, right down the Danube but a language and culture entirely apart. It covered lots of the Balkans, and at various times Spain, Burgundy, the Netherlands and Flanders. It liked to think it was born in marriage rather than war. It also had mottos like A.E.I.O.U, thought to be Latin for "It is Austria's destiny to command the universe." Vienna puts the imperial dream right across the street from its social reality. In 1919, an empire of 52 million was reduced to a country of 6 million.

The art was amazing. We went to the Expressivism show, and wound up in the Leopold museum later that same day to see the Egon Shiele's. Along the way I discovered Anton Kolig, he of the "Notscher Circle" named after a tiny town in a mountain valley that used to color to complete reconfigure the male nude - desperate but somehow unbreakable. In the basement there was a huge exhibition of Kolo Moser, whom I knew as a kind of ok mythological painter of the Art Nouveau period. Then I discovered he was the William Morris of Austria, only more so - an amazing master of industrial design, founder of the Wiener Werkstatte, viritual inventor of Art Nouveau fusions of art, imagination, practical design, and dream worlds. I love that stuff, and going through the exhibit an hour before we had to catch our plane finally located Austria in history for me - as a fountain of worlds elsewhere.

It reminded me of the motto of the Brucke movement I'd copied down in the Argentina a few hours earlier. "We intend to obtain freedom of action and of life against the well-established older forces. Who ever renders directly and authentically what impels him to create is one of us." The Bridge - to somewhere else, built exactly with that creative force, willing emancipation from the dying order. I'd seen the great Klimt mural at the Secession institute the day before - humanity frail and suffering, humanity defended by the well-armed one, but humanity finally winning only through its desire for happiness.

All these artists worked in the capital city of an oppressive and dying empire. I wondered whether terrible politics actually helps art in some perverse way, which would certainly improve my mood about our own period of terrible politics in an oppressive and dying empire. They too must have felt that at some point everything the rulers say is wrong and foul, and have turned their backs, or really fought in a different way. In each of the paintings, in Klimt, in Shiele, in Moser, one can find in spite of everything a transformed world.

Richard and I talked about politics as we always do, and about the impossibility of the Democrats proposing a candidate that would change anything. Look at Jesse Jackson and other civil rights greats calling a summit a few months ago for one reason only - to meet with media executives to get a racist talk jock fired. They disappeared as quickly as they arrived on 6th avenue to take the elevators upstairs. Do you now have to be completely outside of the system to have any chance of affecting it at all? Assuming you don't get laughed at for thinking there is an outside.

Flying in on the first day, I saw the carefully divided agricultural land along the Danube running right along to the western edge of Vienna. I felt badly for the U.S., having to sprawl over everything and waste it to extract whatever value it can. It really doesn't have to be like that. These artists built another world that stays with the millions of people that visit Vienna's museums year after year, and they did it right down the street from the Hapsburgs as they played masters of the universe.

If you need a good hotel, let me know.

Restless Scarf Day

Today I had lunch with my brother upstairs in a good hole-in-the wall mom-n-pop restaurant in the Galerie Vero Dodat, just off the Palais Royal which was looking mighty good in early spring as we walked through. We talked about about all sorts of things, particularly the upcoming presidential elections here in France, which as Americans we feels we've already lived through. Sarkozy the candidate of security, patriotism, immigration controls, and the deregulation of business; Royale, getting called inexperienced and indecisive and going down in the poles. Sarko is the culture of force brought to France, and of cronyism already here, and of Blairite privatization which means giving businesses slices of government activity thus driving up costs, allowing business to declare government inefficient and taking even more of the action. Maybe Sarkozy can bring HMOs to French healthcare so the French can pay three times what they do now, making them "efficient" like us. Naturally, Brad says, much of the middle class supports Sarkozy.

But what the hell. Things feel less urgent in Paris, which has survived centuries of lying and stealing leaders. The Palais Royal was the original fusion of government and retail, built for Richlieu in the 1630s and combining over time royal apartments and every variety of snobbery and trade. After lunch we walked down rue de Rivoli, the heart of middle-brow commerce, and then I continued on across the amazing Seine on an early spring day that combined an unsteady, chilly north wind with lots of unbroken sun. I passed la Conciergerie with its famous round towers, the heart of the old monarchy and of royal imprisonment and then past le palais de justice, the heart of the law, and on to Notre Dame de Paris. As ye olde Catholic atheist, I visit cathedrals every chance I get, including ones I've visited dozens of times before, like this one, a destination of one of my traditional Paris walks. If you asked me "what is European civilization's single greatest achievement," I would immediately reply, "Notre Dame."

I looked at it today and thought of what Avery says about the ruins at Jumieges. It used to be powerful and evil. Now its power is gone, and it is peaceful. And beautiful, beautiful, beautiful The beauty does mean something. It always gives me hope. The structure, the ornament, the entire world of humanity represented in the figures - all speak of the authority of god, which leads to fixed, rigid, absolute hierarchies on the facade. I like watching the unstoppable mobs of tourists in the parvis in front. They are amazed by it, and excited, at least temporarily harmless and at peace themselves, taking pictures and pointing and deciphering and perhaps they wonder what I always wonder - how did those European barbarians, those superstitious fanatics, those ignorant pretechnological killers, make something as beautiful, as overwhelming as this? How did they do something this right?

They knew many things that we have forgotten. They had labor and craft, and art was central to the ways they honored the universe. They were doing much better at that than we are.

I stared at the central portal as I always do. There are the saints standing on the backs of the servants who twist their necks to look up at them. There are the rows of heads ascending and descending. There are the fake kings looking down, the substitute statues after their forebears were pulled to the ground during the revolution. The destruction of the kings was the beginning of the ruin, and the romanticism, and Hugo's novel that brought people back to the building to look up at it. The end of the kings was the start of the peace.

The revolution left the central portal intact. There is Christ on his throne. Below him an angel conducts the weighing of souls. The saved are directed to heaven. The damned are directed below.

The saved and the damned - this dichotomy is the central mistake of Christianity. This is not Jesus, the great anti-imperial thinker of community-based higher things. This is Christ, whose status as himself divine supposedly ratified church power and what better way to show his power than by damning souls to hell? Really, what worse way? The reflex of damnation - it's nearly been the end of us all.

After weighing the weighing of souls yet again, I walked around to the back, past the pink and the green flowering trees, and the smiling grandfathers having their picture taken, and the boys happily strangling each other on the pavilion. From the heart of the church I walked to the Jardin des Plantes, the heart of old French science, fully repaired, spreading out flat and wide and endlessly in the distance, with the Galerie de zoologie majestic and undisturbable in the distance, wide and high and forming its own horizon. Manet-like tableau sur l'herbe occurred at regular intervals - a teenage girl helping an 8-year-old with her homework under the pink petals, a 4 year old girl in a red coat amiably kicking her way across the crushed granite earth, clumps of shouting schoolkids, businessmen blinking in the sun as they talked on the their phones. I went out the front and walked by the great Mosque, the old heart of Islamic France. I couldn't go home without stopping in at the 5 a Sec on Saint Marcel to see if my regular laundress was there, and thankfully she was. Something else to look forward to.

My scarf took off in the wind about 50 times during the walk. Happy to come back, but equally happy to go.