Have any of you read David McCullough’s The Greater Journey about the Americans who traveled to Paris from about 1830 to 1900. Most went to study painting or medicine, but the ideas they got there went much further, eg, from Samuel Morse’s paintings in the Louvre to his telegraph, Morse code and trans-Atlantic cable. The world is better off for our cultural appropriation.
Another reminder of just how stupid members of the American media (and their admirers) are:
Chris Cillizza posted a tweet about how ANGRY he was that unvaccinated people are threatening the life of his 9-year-old child, who is too young to get vaccinated.
According to the CDC, COVID-19 has killed 643,858 Americans so far. Just 412 have been 17-years-old or younger. For comparison, the CDC says 636 children 12 and younger died in auto accidents in 2018.
Mike
Little did they know what was coming for them in Germany.
Today’s Americans have no idea what China has in store for us. Covid-19 was just the beginning.
I miss elegance so much. Our modern barbarism in dress, habits, architecture, and art is soul-crushing.
Ann,
Me too. It is amazing what kids spend on ugly clothes today. I remember when we wore hats to church-one set of matching clothes.
Did you catch the name of the first cafe shown in the video, “Cafe de la Paix.”
Cafe of Peace.
13 years later they were once again at war.
Who would have predicted in 1926 that Europe (and the USA) – once again- would have been engulfed in another massive war.
You just never know.
JohnTyler:
My guess is that is was located on the Rue de la Paix, a famous shopping boulevard in Paris. Looking up the history of the street at Wiki, I see that it was named in 1814 in honor of the Bourbon Restoration.
Both Cafe’s are still in existence.
Le Dôme Café (French pronunciation: ?[l? dom]) or Café du Dôme is a restaurant in Montparnasse, Paris. From the beginning of the 1900s, it was renowned as an intellectual gathering place. It was widely known as “the Anglo-American café.”
Opening in 1898, it was the first such café in Montparnasse. It “created and disseminated gossip, and provided message exchanges and an ‘over the table’ market that dealt in artistic and literary futures.”[1] It was frequented by the famous (and soon to be famous) painters, sculptors, writers, poets, models, art connoisseurs and dealers. Le Dôme later became the gathering place of the American literary colony and became a focal point for artists residing in Paris’s Left Bank.
A poor artist used to be able to get a Saucisse de Toulouse and a plate of mashed potatoes for $1. Today, it is a top fish restaurant (the Michelin Guide once gave it one 1/3 stars star), with a comfortably old-fashioned decor.[2] The food writer Patricia Wells said, “I could dine at Le Dôme once a week, feasting on platters of briny oysters and their incomparable sole meunière.”[3]
I’m concerned that lately I’m living too much in the past. Most of the entertainment I consume these days was produced no more recently than 10 years ago, and much of it is far older. It’s sort of like comfort food. I much prefer content that was made before the world went insane over stuff produced recently. And at the age of 47 I still feel pretty young and don’t think of myself as a bitter curmudgen.
SHIREHOME:
There was a Le Dome in LA, co-founded by Elton John according to this:
It closed in 2007. However, Warren Zevon captured it in perhaps the most cynical song written about Hollywood.
____________________________________
All the worms and the gnomes are having lunch at Le Dome
They’re all living off the fat of the land
Everbody’s trynna be a friend of mine
Even a dog can shake hands
Keith Carradine plays a painter, who is son of an art forger, who is coaxed into forging Impressionist masterpieces by dealer, Genevieve Bujold. Meanwhile he is in love with Linda Fiorentino, who is involved with the dangerous John Lone. Wallace Shawn is Carradine’s amusing side-kick. Kevin J. O’Connor provides a wonderful parody of Ernest Hemingway.
The soundtrack is by Mark Isham and is the only soundtrack album I listen to regularly.
Nonapod:
Well, you’re not alone. There are teenagers who write (on YouTube) that they only listen to “old-time” music or “classic” music, by which they mean the 70s and 80s and even the 50s and 60s of the last century, long before they were born.
Speaking of living in the past this is great video on ‘Closer To Home’ by Grand Funk Railroad’. I love this song.
huxley: The Harlem Hellfighters regimental band may not be quite 1920s postwar Paris, but it was the toast of France from the time the 15th New York National Guard Regiment landed in early 1918 as part of the AEF. The band was led by James Reese Europe, the best-known black bandleader in the United States at that time. In February and March 1918, Europe and his military band traveled over 2,000 miles across France, performing for British, French, and American military audiences as well as French civilians. Here is a short (8 minutes) video about Europe and his regimental band, including their rendition of La Marseillaise in such an unusual rhythm that the French didn’t recognize it at first. If you like 1920s jazz, you’ll enjoy this video:
What are a bunch of Afghan children worth when Joe is getting some bad publicity.
@huxley, I used to have a CD of Mark Isham’s soundtrack for The Moderns but lost it somewhere along the line. Where did you come by yours? I have been looking for it ever since.
I bought my CD of “The Moderns” at a used shop in San Francisco.
Looks like it’s out of print. Used copies can be found at Amazon starting at $20. It’s not even available on Amazon Music, which I thought had everything except the Beatles.
Best of luck. I used to play it at parties because it was unobtrusive, unfamiliar and moody.
huxley —
“The Moderns” is one of my favorite movies. When I saw the cafe in the OP video, I instantly thought of the scene where the two American girls point at Hemingway and ask “is that F. Scott Fitzgerald?”
Spent many a happy hour in Café de Flore. In Tokyo! They had a magnificent location toward the Aoyama end of Omotesando- (a proper tree-lined shopping boulevard) well-set up for sedentary sybaritic lower-case flâneurs to watch flâneuring Flâneurs passing by. All the wait staff had been rotated through the real Parisian Deal and spoke to each other and the kitchen (and many of the gilded Aoyama Housewife clientele) in French. Served the best hot chocolate I’ve ever enjoyed. There was a Japanese guy would show up dressed as Proust to read his newspapers on Sunday afternoons… Sadly never spotted him going at the Madeleines and Tea.
Again… located on the edge of an area (Shoto) full of very wealthy and very cultivated Japanese housewives with days to while away.
There’s a certain type of Old Money Japanese that’s More French than the French. They’d never be caught dead with an LV Monogram bag where the leather trimmings hadn’t aged into a rich caramel and the whole thing had just the right sagginess. One gets the feeling… just a hint of a feeling, mind you… that they are a little disappointed in the actual French.
Episode 1024 of You Don’t Have to Live Like That.
A boring little trip under the sea on a bullet train:
Forget the stuff about appropriateness of High Speed Rail and just focus on everything not being filthy, the aural environment being designed to be soothing, the lack of loitering Diversity and the general maintenance of standards.
Oh… and the assumption that foreigners will need to accommodate themselves to local conditions. I don’t see that ticket printed in Spanish, Tamil, Swahili, English, etc.
It’s mega infrastructure which will probably never repay its construction costs. But it’s real. The money didn’t all go to fund riots or to rig elections or to subsidize Bezos’s Flying Phallus. It makes the lives of ordinary people better. Employs Flyover Japanese.
Obviously it’s just all Oriental Bees Buzzing Harmoniously in their Hive. Nothing to see here 🙂
The streamlining of these trains has evolved a lot over the decades. Look nothing like the early bullet trains. Apparently the long elongated nose design reduces shock when entering tunnels at insanely high speeds. Also some features to help with blasting snow out of the way in winter. The amount of snow they get up there is nuts.
Bryan Lovely:
I’m met others who love “The Moderns” too.
It got good numbers from critics and audience on Rotten Tomatoes. However, it did poorly at the box office and never became a cult film. I guess 1988 was past the expat Paris sell-by date.
The Hemingway scenes were all great comic touches.
Although Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” (2011) did well.
The main character played by Owen Wilson is visiting Paris with his fiance. Somehow he blunders into a way to time travel back to Paris in the 20s and meets that crowd. On later nights he manages to continue his visits. In between there is plenty of hate for Republicans.
It’s a gentle, humorous film for liberal audiences and no doubt reminded them of the Woody’s salad days. As I recall it’s based on an old comic piece he wrote for the New Yorker and was published in one of his early collections.
Brylcreem: A little dab’ll do ya.
Have any of you read David McCullough’s The Greater Journey about the Americans who traveled to Paris from about 1830 to 1900. Most went to study painting or medicine, but the ideas they got there went much further, eg, from Samuel Morse’s paintings in the Louvre to his telegraph, Morse code and trans-Atlantic cable. The world is better off for our cultural appropriation.
Another reminder of just how stupid members of the American media (and their admirers) are:
Chris Cillizza posted a tweet about how ANGRY he was that unvaccinated people are threatening the life of his 9-year-old child, who is too young to get vaccinated.
https://twitter.com/ChrisCillizza/status/1436026602736001030
According to the CDC, COVID-19 has killed 643,858 Americans so far. Just 412 have been 17-years-old or younger. For comparison, the CDC says 636 children 12 and younger died in auto accidents in 2018.
Mike
Little did they know what was coming for them in Germany.
Today’s Americans have no idea what China has in store for us. Covid-19 was just the beginning.
I miss elegance so much. Our modern barbarism in dress, habits, architecture, and art is soul-crushing.
Ann,
Me too. It is amazing what kids spend on ugly clothes today. I remember when we wore hats to church-one set of matching clothes.
Did you catch the name of the first cafe shown in the video, “Cafe de la Paix.”
Cafe of Peace.
13 years later they were once again at war.
Who would have predicted in 1926 that Europe (and the USA) – once again- would have been engulfed in another massive war.
You just never know.
JohnTyler:
My guess is that is was located on the Rue de la Paix, a famous shopping boulevard in Paris. Looking up the history of the street at Wiki, I see that it was named in 1814 in honor of the Bourbon Restoration.
Both Cafe’s are still in existence.
Le Dôme Café (French pronunciation: ?[l? dom]) or Café du Dôme is a restaurant in Montparnasse, Paris. From the beginning of the 1900s, it was renowned as an intellectual gathering place. It was widely known as “the Anglo-American café.”
Opening in 1898, it was the first such café in Montparnasse. It “created and disseminated gossip, and provided message exchanges and an ‘over the table’ market that dealt in artistic and literary futures.”[1] It was frequented by the famous (and soon to be famous) painters, sculptors, writers, poets, models, art connoisseurs and dealers. Le Dôme later became the gathering place of the American literary colony and became a focal point for artists residing in Paris’s Left Bank.
A poor artist used to be able to get a Saucisse de Toulouse and a plate of mashed potatoes for $1. Today, it is a top fish restaurant (the Michelin Guide once gave it one 1/3 stars star), with a comfortably old-fashioned decor.[2] The food writer Patricia Wells said, “I could dine at Le Dôme once a week, feasting on platters of briny oysters and their incomparable sole meunière.”[3]
I’m concerned that lately I’m living too much in the past. Most of the entertainment I consume these days was produced no more recently than 10 years ago, and much of it is far older. It’s sort of like comfort food. I much prefer content that was made before the world went insane over stuff produced recently. And at the age of 47 I still feel pretty young and don’t think of myself as a bitter curmudgen.
SHIREHOME:
There was a Le Dome in LA, co-founded by Elton John according to this:
https://rockandrollroadmap.com/places/restaurants-and-bars/los-angeles-area-restaurants-and-bars/le-dome-co-founded-by-elton-john/
It closed in 2007. However, Warren Zevon captured it in perhaps the most cynical song written about Hollywood.
____________________________________
All the worms and the gnomes are having lunch at Le Dome
They’re all living off the fat of the land
Everbody’s trynna be a friend of mine
Even a dog can shake hands
–Warren Zevon, “Even A Dog Can Shake Hands”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-XpFFaJlOs
I am fascinated with the 20s Paris scene. My favorite film of that world is, hands-down, Alan Rudolph’s largely forgotten “The Moderns.”
–“The Moderns 1988 Trailer HD | Keith Carradine | Linda Fiorentino”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeAA89cqyHg
Keith Carradine plays a painter, who is son of an art forger, who is coaxed into forging Impressionist masterpieces by dealer, Genevieve Bujold. Meanwhile he is in love with Linda Fiorentino, who is involved with the dangerous John Lone. Wallace Shawn is Carradine’s amusing side-kick. Kevin J. O’Connor provides a wonderful parody of Ernest Hemingway.
The soundtrack is by Mark Isham and is the only soundtrack album I listen to regularly.
Nonapod:
Well, you’re not alone. There are teenagers who write (on YouTube) that they only listen to “old-time” music or “classic” music, by which they mean the 70s and 80s and even the 50s and 60s of the last century, long before they were born.
Speaking of living in the past this is great video on ‘Closer To Home’ by Grand Funk Railroad’. I love this song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwWo2zon_D8
huxley: The Harlem Hellfighters regimental band may not be quite 1920s postwar Paris, but it was the toast of France from the time the 15th New York National Guard Regiment landed in early 1918 as part of the AEF. The band was led by James Reese Europe, the best-known black bandleader in the United States at that time. In February and March 1918, Europe and his military band traveled over 2,000 miles across France, performing for British, French, and American military audiences as well as French civilians. Here is a short (8 minutes) video about Europe and his regimental band, including their rendition of La Marseillaise in such an unusual rhythm that the French didn’t recognize it at first. If you like 1920s jazz, you’ll enjoy this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC9m3Xie3uk&ab_channel=luisillahermosa
Boys and girls, alike, in a socially favorable juxtaposition of the sexes.
The Crystals: Then He Kissed Me 1963
This is incredible. That drone strike in Afghanistan was a complete disaster. Who greenlit this? From the New York Times by the way.
https://twitter.com/ckoettl/status/1436423693178220546
What are a bunch of Afghan children worth when Joe is getting some bad publicity.
@huxley, I used to have a CD of Mark Isham’s soundtrack for The Moderns but lost it somewhere along the line. Where did you come by yours? I have been looking for it ever since.
New Magazine with free PDF download:
https://asylummagazine.ca/
One of the articles is by Conrad Black. So y’all can feel safe about it 😛
Oh… and you might enjoy this recent Tucker Carlson interview:
https://youtu.be/zsGbRNmu4NQ
MollyG:
I bought my CD of “The Moderns” at a used shop in San Francisco.
Looks like it’s out of print. Used copies can be found at Amazon starting at $20. It’s not even available on Amazon Music, which I thought had everything except the Beatles.
Best of luck. I used to play it at parties because it was unobtrusive, unfamiliar and moody.
huxley —
“The Moderns” is one of my favorite movies. When I saw the cafe in the OP video, I instantly thought of the scene where the two American girls point at Hemingway and ask “is that F. Scott Fitzgerald?”
Spent many a happy hour in Café de Flore. In Tokyo! They had a magnificent location toward the Aoyama end of Omotesando- (a proper tree-lined shopping boulevard) well-set up for sedentary sybaritic lower-case flâneurs to watch flâneuring Flâneurs passing by. All the wait staff had been rotated through the real Parisian Deal and spoke to each other and the kitchen (and many of the gilded Aoyama Housewife clientele) in French. Served the best hot chocolate I’ve ever enjoyed. There was a Japanese guy would show up dressed as Proust to read his newspapers on Sunday afternoons… Sadly never spotted him going at the Madeleines and Tea.
Alas, all gone now in a re-development.
Les Deux Magots still has a Tokyo Branch:
http://www.lesdeuxmagots.fr/en/international.html
Again… located on the edge of an area (Shoto) full of very wealthy and very cultivated Japanese housewives with days to while away.
There’s a certain type of Old Money Japanese that’s More French than the French. They’d never be caught dead with an LV Monogram bag where the leather trimmings hadn’t aged into a rich caramel and the whole thing had just the right sagginess. One gets the feeling… just a hint of a feeling, mind you… that they are a little disappointed in the actual French.
Episode 1024 of You Don’t Have to Live Like That.
A boring little trip under the sea on a bullet train:
https://youtu.be/mkcdXPSXv4k
Forget the stuff about appropriateness of High Speed Rail and just focus on everything not being filthy, the aural environment being designed to be soothing, the lack of loitering Diversity and the general maintenance of standards.
Oh… and the assumption that foreigners will need to accommodate themselves to local conditions. I don’t see that ticket printed in Spanish, Tamil, Swahili, English, etc.
It’s mega infrastructure which will probably never repay its construction costs. But it’s real. The money didn’t all go to fund riots or to rig elections or to subsidize Bezos’s Flying Phallus. It makes the lives of ordinary people better. Employs Flyover Japanese.
Obviously it’s just all Oriental Bees Buzzing Harmoniously in their Hive. Nothing to see here 🙂
The streamlining of these trains has evolved a lot over the decades. Look nothing like the early bullet trains. Apparently the long elongated nose design reduces shock when entering tunnels at insanely high speeds. Also some features to help with blasting snow out of the way in winter. The amount of snow they get up there is nuts.
Bryan Lovely:
I’m met others who love “The Moderns” too.
It got good numbers from critics and audience on Rotten Tomatoes. However, it did poorly at the box office and never became a cult film. I guess 1988 was past the expat Paris sell-by date.
The Hemingway scenes were all great comic touches.
Although Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” (2011) did well.
The main character played by Owen Wilson is visiting Paris with his fiance. Somehow he blunders into a way to time travel back to Paris in the 20s and meets that crowd. On later nights he manages to continue his visits. In between there is plenty of hate for Republicans.
It’s a gentle, humorous film for liberal audiences and no doubt reminded them of the Woody’s salad days. As I recall it’s based on an old comic piece he wrote for the New Yorker and was published in one of his early collections.
Here’s Woody’s piece as a stand-up routine:
[13] Lost Generation — Woody Allen, Standup Comic: 1964-1968
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z85zt_EUySg
Still funny, though I suspect the literary references go over younger heads.
It may not be as elegant as the 1920s diners, but it’s very French.
https://notthebee.com/article/people-in-france-are-protesting-vaccine-passports-by-picnicking-outside-restaurants-that-require-them
Too crazy not to share.
https://notthebee.com/article/the-national-archives-put-a-harmful-language-warning-on-the-site-that-hosts-the-constitution-declaration-and-other-historical-records