Elliptic Blog

Last Day in Paris

Well,

I thought I'd post some photos, but I forgot to bring the camera's battery with me. No big loss since I was not in the mood for photography after all.

I will return to Philadelphia tomorrow and the last day here has the same emotional tones as the hours after the last Morrissey concert I saw in Chicago last month.

Here is a list of a few spots / moments that linger in the mind from the last two weeks:

• The Pause Café on the corner of Rue de Charonne and Rue Keller. A great spot to linger over coffee for hours and then slipping into dinner time as the crowd begins to fill in. It also had a role in the film When The Cat's Away - which I recommend highly. To make matters more interesting, I bumped into the actor who played Djamel in that film: Zinedine Soualem.
• An interesting choice of films shown on French television stations before and after the U.S. elections (such as Johnny Got His Gun and Wag The Dog) and the disbelief over the results of the elections. The general mood over here is that the U.S. population seems to be more religious and moralistic than initially thought and that the European Union now has the clear duty to become a "counterweight" to the U.S. for years to come.
• Paris-St. Germain's miraculous (and undeserved) comeback to win 3-2 over Olympique de Marseilles after being down 0-2.
• The discovery that Café Orbital no longer exists. The discovery of Café du Commerce in the Butte aux Cailles neighborhood offering free WiFi.
• Finished three books during my stay: Saint Morrissey, Wittgenstein's Poker and The Philosopher's Dog.

This trip was dominated, unlike previous ones, by staying put and letting the hours slide by slowly rather than walking all over the place.

In Paris

I have been in Paris since Oct. 29 and will be here until Nov. 13. I'll try to post some photos as soon as I begin taking them and slurping them into the blog via some kind of Internet connection. Right now, I am piggy-backing on someone's open wireless connection from within the apartment I rented at Rue Crillon, near the Marais and Bastille.

Until the photos come in, here are a few of the highlights up to now:

A good plate of roasted meats at the L' A.O.C. restaurant on R. des Fossés St-Bernard in the 5th

Saw "East of Eden" (dir. Elia Kazan) for the first time at the Le Grand Action cinema on R. des Ecoles, also in the 5th. Good thing I saw this since I just finished the book "Saint Morrissey" by Mark Simpson and he discusses Morrissey's obsession with James Dean.

Met an old college friend (whom I had not seen for about 7 years) and his wife, David and P.Y., and we strolled about the Marais. We had wine and cheese at the Petit Fer à Cheval and dinner at Cafe de L'Industrie - the latter in the 11th.

Visited La Défense for the first time in about four trips -- my initial intuitions were correct: not a very compelling place unless you are curious to study large-scale, monumental corporate projects and architecture.

Tonight, I'm planning on seeing Pedro Almodovar's "La Mala Educación" at the L'Entrepot -- a great cinema, culture house, bar/lounge thingy.

Well, that will do for now. I don't know how long I have before the free wifi is pulled from under my feet.

Seattle Album

I have made a selection of photographs from a recent trip to Seattle available as a photo album. You can find it in the right-hand column or here.

Seattle

Just came back from a long weekend in Seattle with Laura. We visited the following neighborhoods:

• Downtown
• Pioneer Square District
• Belltown
• Capitol Hill
• Ballard
• Fremont
• Wallingford
• Lake Union area (Montlake/Eastlake)

The aesthetic appeal of the city involves the transitions between a dense, skyscraper-heavy hub and the lush, watery neighborhoods around it. High-rises and high-density housing blocks concentrate, for the most part, around the Downtown, Belltown and Capitol Hill neighborhoods. Significant portions of the other neighborhoods have higher concentrations of low-elevation homes designed in a "mild" modernist style.

This offers residents a smooth shift between a highly urbanized visual experience and a less hectic and greener experience without having to travel "out" to the suburbanized areas. The greener areas of Seattle do not have the traditional suburban features (i.e., sprawled clusters of homes, roads leading to shopping hubs, reliance on traffic arteries). These neighborhoods are surrounded by northwestern greenery, but homes within them do not have large tracts of empty land isolating them from other homes. Modernist homes and bungalows lie close to each other but their privacy and individuality are conserved by the lushness around them.

Of course, this is an initial impression gathered from a four day visit and selective sampling of the neighborhoods. Other parts of Seattle will not fit this description (e.g., industrial South Seattle and certain spots in Ballard); but I think this description captures the essence of what was appealing about Seattle.

While I was there, Forbes Magazine released a list of the Most Overpriced Places of 2004 and Seattle came in as #1. In a nutshell, their reasoning boils down to the claim that "the cost of living and housing is not proportionate to the job and income growth in the area." A scan of real estate listings revealed that rentals are about 10-20% cheaper than in Philadelphia while the sales market was comparable (perhaps slightly higher). Given that I am mulling over a potential move and that Seattle is a prime candidate, I must admit that I did not sense it as overpriced -- though that may change if I know more about the typical salaries in the area and whether the homes in the removed islands and uber-wealthy regions are outrageously priced.

I shall post a Seattle photo album shortly.

Cafe Orbital

OK, found a decent Internet cafe that allows me to work with and upload photos. It is called Cafe Orbital -- right across from the Jardin de Luxembourg on Rue de Medicis.

I took some photos just to have some in the arsenal in case I bumped into a good Internet cafe. You can find them within the Paris Photo Album.

In Paris...

As some of you know, I will be spending the next 12 days or so in Paris. I plan on posting some notes every other day or so, depending on whether I find convenient Internet access points. If all goes well, I may post photos as well. In fact, I'd prefer photo-dominant posts, but that will depend on whether I can find Internet cafes that let me hook up the Powerbook.

Joe at Petit 4 has given me a small mission: take photos of his competition - sweet delicacies in Parisian patisseries. If anyone else has a special mission for me, let me know.

So far today, I've walked through the Bastille area, Ave. Ledru-Rollin, up to Rue Oberkampf and am currently in an Internet access shop on Rue Menilmontant in Belleville.

| Belleville-Menilmontant | Rue Oberkampf |

Airport Design

When I was younger, a highlight of any trip I took involved getting to know the airports and train stations that were part of the trip. Since I lived in Mexico City, the Benito Juarez International Airport became a significant structure early on.

This airport, and many others at that time, had a clean and spare modernist logic. One huge marble hallway allowed the criss-crossing of passengers on the way to the smooth, curved plastic ticket counters. Despite the fact that waiting would be an important component of the experience, the black leather seats sprinkled throughout the hall seemed to be added for the sake of aesthetics rather than convenience.

I feel nostalgia for these types of airports. Their organization and decor drive one toward one central activity: transit. The lack of regional decor or identity within the edifice made it clear that you had entered a conduit. Once you entered the airport, you were invited to shed the sensory memories of the location you had dwelled in. Now, your senses were being purged in preparation for travel to a new locale -- where new sensory data could bombard you and thrill you with the newness of it all. The architecture and organization invited meditation on what was to come.

Nowadays, airports have succumbed to commercialization. The Philadelphia International Airport, for instance, has constructed a mall in the largest and most congested hall of the airport. This makes it difficult to slip into the dreamy anticipation that precedes travelling. Given that this commercial standardization of airports is a trend, airports are losing their ability to focus travellers' attentions on the process of slipping from one environment to another. My city has plenty of Starbucks and Brookstone outlets -- now, they follow me to the airport, on-flight and to the destination's airport.

I miss those spare modernist airports -- and not because of the current, though fading, modernist revival in design and home decor. The current trend in airport architecture makes it more difficult to purge before shuttling your way across the globe. Of course, there are exceptions -- and I would love to catalog those.

| Philadelphia International Airport 1 |
| Philadelphia International Airport 2 |
| Copenhagen Airport 1 | Copenhagen Airport 2 |
| ID-Cafe Thread on Airports and Airport Signs |