This week, I am again absenting myself – and all filial bonds – to focus on Maria Cattaneo, an 80-year-old woman born in Milan on April 29, 1945, near Piazzale Loreto, where, that very same day, the bullet-riddled corpse of Benito Mussolini, who dismantled democracy through executive fiat and state-sanctioned terror, was hung upside down at an Esso station, and battered to a pulp by a frenzied crowd of civilians and anti-fascist partisans.

Was the crowd wrong? Its violent retribution was raw and spontaneous, a mob’s fury against a tyrant. The battering and mutilation – one woman fired bullets into Mussolini’s body for each of her murdered sons – was a venting of collective trauma after more than twenty years of privation and paramilitary terror. The year before, Mussolini's regime executed 15 partisans at the same Piazzale. Their bodies were left on display for a month. To invert the humiliation, Mussolini was strung up at the exact spot. The Americans took him down after lunch.

Speaking of lunch, Mussolini’s favourite was chopped garlic in olive oil and lemon juice, which he ate from large bowls. He largely abstained from alcohol, though he enjoyed an occasional frappe of strawberry sherbet, Chianti wine, and Angostura bitters. He restricted coffee imports. He drank barley coffee and hibiscus tea imported from the Italian colonies. He viewed cafés as potential hotbeds of dissent. He campaigned against pasta.

But this is not today’s subject. Tomorrow, four generations of the Cattaneo family will gather at Maria’s apartment on Via Bernardino Luini to celebrate the feast day of San Biagio, the patron saint of people with things stuck in their throats.

What sticks in your throat these days? No matter. This is Biagio’s story, set in early 4th-century Armenia, around the time its Kingdom became the world’s first Christian state. One day, Biagio, while being led to prison by a group of heavily armed squadristi, crossed paths with a desperate mother whose five-year-old son, Liam, wearing the Arsacid equivalent of a blue knitted beanie with floppy white bunny ears (a pointed Phrygian cap), was choking to death on a fishbone. Liam’s mother threw herself at Biagio’s manacled feet, imploring his help. Biagio placed his hand, which was also in irons, on Liam’s throat. As he prayed to God, the boy coughed, and the bone instantly shot out of his mouth and into the jugulars of Biagio’s three captors.

Risotto for primo piatto, with Lombardy saffron from the new fields in nearby Como. Cassoeula secondo, maybe with polenta, maybe with an arugula salad. Maria’s brother Carlo long ago drank everything in the cellar, so Aldo, her youngest sister’s son, will bring wine. Franciacorta for the first courses. Soave or Pinot Grigio from Alto Adige for those who don’t drink sparkling wine. She will drink two glasses. A young Valtellina red for the stew. She will drink one glass. She won’t eat the stew – just the thought, the fat, the cabbage, the entrails, the foot, the tail, the ear, the rind, the snout, gives her reflux. Better a small serving of vegetables with love than a fattened calf with hatred. Proverbs. Does she believe in Santo Biagio? Does she believe in miracles? Does she believe in anything? Did she ever? While at university, she wore mini-skirts.

Carlo, her brother, back then, wore his hair long, past his shoulders, and read Gramsci, and listened to Leonard Cohen. Today, he has dandruff, votes Lega and drives a Jeep Avenger. He once worked as a baker in Minneapolis, which, he never tires of telling whoever will listen, means “City of Water”, from the Sioux word mni (“water”) and the Greek word polis (“city”).

Spuma or limonata for the kids. Carafes with water from bottles chilled in the fridge. Her dog-eared sisters, as fearful of contamination as they are of draughts and the evil eye, don’t trust what comes out of the tap.

Once everyone finishes sopping up their plates with the crust of bread, she’ll get up from her great-grandfather’s chair, wave off Aldo, and take down the leftover panettone she put away after Christmas. This is the tradition. For the throat. To ward off colds and flu. Three-quarters eaten. Then, something else, she can’t remember, something about the new Pope and Elon Musk. She feels something tighten, she snaps the elastic band on her wrist, the other women clear the table and set out the dessert plates and the coffee cups and saucers. New glasses, Aldo fills them with Lambrusco. The pace slows. She retakes her seat, scans the room. The light? No one smokes anymore. The conversation is dull-witted and tasteless. Housing prices. Should she toast the panettone? Something else. Something wrong, something out of place. Trump. Meloni. Musk. Bla bla. These people, her family. They deserve this world. She tears off a piece of stale panettone and passes the rest to the idiot on her right, who breaks off a piece and hands the rest to the idiot next to him. Soon, everyone at the table has their piece. All eyes now turn to the priest, who slowly gets to his feet, his face red, his eyes glassy, his hands trembling, chewing as he says, “San Bias el benediss la gola e il nas.” In dialect. Barely a molar left. Still chewing: “O Lord our God, who sent Your Son into the world to bear the burden of our sorrows and infirmities, graciously hear the prayers of Your Church for these Your servants. Grant that, through the intercession of Santo Biagio, they may be freed from every disease of the throat and from all other ills, that they may worthily give praise to Your holy name forever. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

The throat. She wants to go to bed. One of the idiots tells the table that a baker in Taiwan won this year’s panettone competition. Another tells of the old crone, grateful to Biagio for rescuing her pig from a wolf. The next morning, she brought him, in his dark prison cell, two tall candles. Like those she lit this morning for the dead. The idiot priest tells the story of the governor who, unable to make Biagio renounce his faith, beat him with a stick, ripped his flesh with the iron brushes they use to collect wool – Biagio is the patron saint of wool combers – and cut off his head.

At a different table in Paris last week, after raclette, a panettone from Pavé Milano, like the one pictured above, dark chocolate topped with a cocoa glaze and crumble. It was prefaced by a galette des rois from Jacques Genin, almond frangipane with chocolate ganache.

As is custom, to ensure impartiality in the finding of the galette’s fève, the youngest went under the table and called out, one by one, the names of the people seated at the table. Those at the table whose names she didn’t know, she called out by the colour of their socks.

The fève was in my slice of galette. A blue-glazed flower made of goyavier ash, basalt, bagasse and lime. The crown was tossed out with the recycling the next morning. For that night, however, I was king.

After the season’s last galette, the second-to-last panettone. Someone declined a slice. Not a fan, she said. That’s because you’ve only had American panettone, someone else said. She rejected this. New York has the best of everything. Whatever it is, I can get it in New York. You can’t get this, it comes from an artisanal bakery in Milan. I guarantee I can get this in New York. No way. You can probably get a pretty good panettone there, but not this one. Six hours. I could get this in New York in six hours. She looked at her phone. I take that back, seven and a half hours. It would take you that long just to fly it to New York, said someone. You still have to get it to the airport, and then, once in New York, from the airport. I’ll meet the plane at the airport, she said. Or use a helicopter. Where are you going to land a helicopter in New York? Not a problem. You could take a rocketship, someone else said. Several people by now were on their phones, using LLMs to determine if Elon Musk, or someone with Elon Musk’s fortune, could get a Pavé Milano panettone from Milan to New York in seven and a half hours, or, alternatively, make one, and the box it comes in, in New York. It’s just brioche with candied fruit, said someone. Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to make panettone? A suborbital rocketship could do the flight in under three hours, if it leaves the atmosphere. It would cost 30 million dollars. No problem, but how do you land a rocketship in New York? You could drop it by parachute. Or use a drone. Martinez Jaime from the USA won the Traditional category at the 2026 Panettone World Cup Americas Selection, held in New York. Vielma Ammary Coromoto took the Chocolate category for the USA.​Biagio Settepani of Bruno’s Bakery on Staten Island was a finalist in the 2019 Panettone World Championship.​ Last year, Settepani Bakery in Harlem and Brooklyn was a World Championship finalist for its Nutella version, which ships nationwide. At Realmuto Alta Pasticceria in the West Village, Giuseppe Zito, the 2025 award-winning (Federazione Internazionale Pasticceria Gelateria Cioccolato (International Federation of Pastry, Ice Cream, and Chocolate) world champ, makes a special, Sicilian-inspired, pistachio and chocolate panettone.

Cossetta’s in Minneapolis, where Carlo worked, uses a 100+-year-old Italian “madre” sourdough starter and a 56-hour fermentation. It was U.S. Champion (2019, 2021, 2023) and Best in Americas (2025) at Coppa del Mondo del Panettone.

Recently, it has seen significant revenue drops from a fear-driven decline in foot traffic.

Small businesses on south Minneapolis’s Nicollet Avenue, known locally as Eat Street, are serving free food. At Glam Doll Donuts, directly across from the shooting site, staff sheltered protesters and gave away donuts until the shelves were empty. Pho 79/Caravelle, where staff were trapped by ICE, tear gas, and blockades, is providing free meals. “Growing up as an immigrant and Asian immigrant,” the owner tells a CBS Minneapolis reporter in the clip below, “how we care for each other is through food. That’s our love language.”

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“There is next to nothing so big that it can’t be put into a pot,” the older man said. “Provided the pot is big enough to hold it.” With that, he pulled open the door and showed the younger man — Johnny Marx, from Shakey’s — the four machines inside.

“Can you see them?” Johnny Marx nodded. “Do you know what they are?” Johnny Marx shook his head.

“They’re holding tanks. Have we discussed liquids yet?” said the older man. “I haven’t seen your assessment.”

“Sorry?”

“Liquids. Stock, milk, water. As I was telling your partner —”

“My partner?” Johnny Marx did not have a partner.

“The young woman. At the gate. With the —” The older man made a gesture with his arm over his head. “Sarah?”

Susan. A Shakey’s regular. Big hair, nice smile, a boyfriend in Dubai.

“We’re not together,” said Johnny Marx. “She was just there.”

“She still is,” said the older man, looking at his watch. “Well then.” He stepped into a pair of white paper overalls. “You were not considering doing this alone, were you?”

“Doing what?” Johnny Marx had not been considering anything.

“Of course, that said, generally, the already dead do fare much better in these arrangements.”

Johnny Marx puzzled over this last bit. Already dead? Dead what?

“The living tend to slosh,” said the older man, tapping his ear, activating the earbud. “But no worries, there’s always a workaround.” He tapped the earbud again. “Marvin, is there still a young woman at the gate, a Sarah? Susan, yes, yes. Can you send her in, please?” He tapped again and smiled. “That’s that. We’re in luck.”

Susan? “I’m from Shakey’s,” said Johnny Marx. He was beginning to think there was a mix-up.

“Yes, yes,” said the older man. “I saw your form.”

“What form?”

“At intake. You’re not dressed yet, however. Did you shave? Who assessed you? No matter. Did they give you anything?”

“Who?”

Susan arrived, depilated.

“By the way,” said the older man. “We should get the niceties out of the way. My name is David Cartright, and you are Johnny Marx."

Johnny Marx nodded.

“From Shakey’s.”

Johnny Marx nodded.

“And this is Susan Jackson,” said David Cartright. “Or was. Shall we get started? I’ll need skin contact. Unless you still have a chip. Or a card maybe?”

Johnny Marx backed away slowly. Marvin closed the door.

I do not know how to sit correctly. I am equally bad at standing, lying down, and walking. At kneeling, I’m a disaster, squatting too, especially these last three months, as I have tendonitis in the gluteus muscles of my right hip.

One of life’s greatest pleasures, eating, the simplest of actions – food, mouth, chew, swallow – dead wrong, every step. Drinking? A fiasco, just ask my friends and family. Bodily functions functional at best. Sleeping, a total shit show. Breathing? You don’t want to know.

But sitting.

This is all I want to focus on today because my sitting – adopting and then being in a position in which my back is upright but my weight is fully supported by my buttocks – is entirely its own utterly disconcerting thing. Largely because when I occupy a chair I fidget constantly, especially in public. Concerts, plays, readings, I tap my foot and fingers, cross and uncross my legs, make fists, roll my wrists, rub an eye, rub my knees, slap my temples, flex and unflex my nostrils, scrunch my forehead, scratch my scalp, rub my tongue across my teeth, dig a fingernail into the palm of my hand, pull an earlobe, rub my nose, pick my nose, crack my fingers, crack my neck. Crack my jaw.

Sometimes, I do these things because I am bored. Other times, because I am overstimulated. Mostly, however, it is because I find it impossible to sit still for more than five seconds and, because, well, I suppose, if I’m honest, fidgeting feels good.

Not feels good, that’s not right; just feels, period. Physical sensation. Being aware of something happening. Being aware of discomfort, tenseness, tightness, pain. Being aware of myself, examining and experiencing myself.

None of this merits any discussion or thought. It certainly does not deserve seven paragraphs. The Gettysburg Address, after all, was only three.

But then, these days, what does merit seven paragraphs or even a moment’s discussion or thought? More to the point, what’s the difference between my fidgeting and my writing about my fidgeting? Isn’t writing just a way of self-regulating, self-occupying, self-stimulating? Like hand flapping or rocking back and forth, or banging your head against a wall. For me, yes. Writing eases my anxieties. It lets me manage overwhelming sensory input and regulate intense experiences. At its best, it enhances my understanding, encourages positive feelings, and gives me a sense of security.

Too bad I suck at it, too.

2.

I can’t sing, either. But I hum a lot, and I sing a lot, especially when cooking, which I’ll get to in a bit, and, what’s more, for the first time in three Substacked years, I will be providing a recipe – for a most excellent dish of my own invention that I made just this Friday night for ten people – but also (back to my singing) while bicycling, and then just randomly throughout a day, like right now, The Sound of Music, “the hills are alive, and they’re really scary.” I often change the lyrics. For example, if someone says, “I gotta go pee”, I instantly and involuntarily sing – to the tune of Sammy Davis Jr’s “I've Gotta Be Me” –

“I gotta go pee /I just gotta go pee / Daring to try, to do it or die / I gotta go pee.”

Just as often, I repeat things people say to me and then belt them back out like Frank Sinatra. For example, if someone says to me, “I was just about to go to the store”, I will croon back:

I was just about to go to the store,
to get two bottles of whiskey, or maybe even four.

Something like that. Little bits of dither turned into Rat Packed gibberish. Sometimes, the melody is original; other times, like with Sammy above, I borrow from a known song, especially when the words the person utters remind me of a song or, more often than not, a jingle. For example, if I hear “puppy”, I sing “chow, for a full year, till he’s full grown”.

If I hear someone say, “Ready when you are”, I immediately belt out:

and even when you’re not
that’s Betty Crocker Ready-to-Spread 
Fros – ting.

If this elicits a blank look, I continue:

Smooth and spreadable 
and what’s so incredible, 
it’s ready when you are 
and when you’re not.

Every single time, without fail. Is there a term for this? Is it in the DSM-5-TR?

3.

Thailand and Spain started trading directly in 1598, when Thailand was Siam, and the various kingdoms of Spain were under the central authority of Castille. That year, a treaty was signed in the royal court of Ayutthaya between King Chulalongkorn the Great and Francisco de Tello de Guzmán, the eighth Spanish governor of the Philippines.

Among the first recorded trades was a junk-load of rice for a galleon’s worth of Andalusian olive oil, acorn-fed sausages from La Rioja, and hot chillies from Mexico. The Siamese were familiar with chillies – the Portuguese had brought them to the kingdom years before, and they had since become a staple of Thai cuisine, as had a number of other Portuguese agricultural exports: tomatoes, potatoes, corn, lettuce, cabbage, papaya, guava, pineapples, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, cashews, peanuts, and tobacco.

However, the intense spiciness of the Mexican chillies astounded them, as did the quality of the Spanish oil and pork.

The Spanish were less than pleased with the exchange. They considered the Thais’ rice far inferior to their bomba, which, when cooked, absorbs two to three times its volume in liquid, thus taking on more flavour from the stock in which it is cooked. It also expands widthwise, nearly doubling in size, while maintaining, because of its high starch content, a firm yet tender texture without becoming sticky or mushy. However, the bomba plant grows tall (up to 1.5 metres), is sensitive to nutrients, and is prone to fungal diseases, which makes it challenging to cultivate. These factors meant that it was rarely exported. The Spanish, therefore, for whom rice had been a staple since its introduction by the Moors in the 8^th century, had to rely on Asian varieties for its colonies.

Formal diplomatic ties between the two countries were established in 1870. Ever since, their relations have been largely peaceful. Siam, as we know, became Thailand in 1939 and was neutral at the start of WWII, but then Japan invaded and a month later forced Thailand to declare war on the United Kingdom and the United States. Meanwhile, in Spain, reliance on U.S. imports and British diplomatic pressure kept Franco’s regime officially neutral. However, Franco supplied Germany with tungsten for its armoured vehicles, sent troops to fight alongside Germany on the Eastern Front, and allowed German submarines to use Spanish ports. He also provided refuge for thousands of Jews and issued citizenship to Sephardic Jews across occupied Europe, but that’s a story for another occasion because today’s post is about a recent, little-known conflict between Spain and Thailand that took place on the Friday night that I spoke of above, when the two countries’ cuisines collided and fused in my kitchen, resulting in an aberration that will have all proud Spaniards and Thais, should they read what follows, reeling.

THAIELLA

By Christopher Mooney (Thai green curry “sofrito” by Hermon Mehari)

Total Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

Prep Time: 50-60 minutes

Cook Time: 30-40 minutes

YIELD: 10 Servings

EQUIPMENT

Paella pan for 10 people (42-46 cm)

If you want to go smaller, or only have a 4-6 person pan, just divide the proportions appropriately.

INGREDIENTS

THAI “SOFRITO”

Note from Hermon: “I used some of the Moroccan green chiles from the Handsome Man [locals’ name for the greengrocer on rue de Belleville just up from rue Rebevel who looks like a Hong Kong movie star and has the best veg in the neighbourhood (and is open all day Sunday!)] for the rest of the "serranos" in addition to what you had, and the “green Thai chiles” were the green birds’ eyes I picked up at the Chinese store on my street [Superstore on Belleville?]. I left a few of the birds’ eyes with stems and seeds intact.”

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For the sake of transparency, I feel compelled to state that I originally intended to write about how the Trumpled state of things recently got personal – his funding freeze last Wednesday postponed if not killed a three-month-long writing project we were counting on – but then last night at a newly French friend’s fête de nationalité I had a couple of three or four glasses of post-Dry January wine on an empty stomach, which temporarily altered my view of the world to such a degree that, now, here, I find myself writing instead about molluscs – bivalves, to be precise, not snails or slugs or siphon-spitting inkfish like the giant squid or the aggressive Humboldt squid or even the greater blue-ringed octopus, which contains enough neurotoxin to kill 10 adult humans and which, collectively, are believed to have caused 7 to 16 human deaths, though most scholars agree that there have been at least 11, the first being at East Point, Darwin, Australia, in 1954 – the first to be documented, that is – however, that octopus was not correctly identified until 1964, the same year that the Medical Journal of Australia published an article by D.G. Hopkins, M.B., B.S. entitled “Venomous Effects and Treatment of Octopus Bite” about a near-fateful greater blue-ringed octopus biting that reportedly occured at 8.15 p.m. on Christmas Eve in Cowes, a seaside resort in southern Victoria, Australia to a “well-built male schoolteacher, aged 21 years” who remained mentally lucid and conscious throughout his 12-hour paralysis, which he described as proceeding through the following steps, in the order mentioned: (i) a loss of feeling around his mouth; (ii) a loss of sensation in the back of his head and neck; (iii) trouble breathing - he initially felt his tongue was swollen, making it difficult to get enough air; (iv) a feeling of chest immobility; (v) weakness and an inability to move or control his limbs; (vi) after some time, he regained the ability to move his eyes – their movement was the last to be lost and the first to return; (vii) a “burning feeling” on his skin when touched, while all the while hearing everything that was said around him, particularly with regard to his prognosis, including, for example, the devastating statement “it looks as if this chap has had it”.

No envenomating variety, then, from bite nor sting, will be here further addressed, nor, finally, it appears, will there be much addressment of the shelled variety, except to mention in passing, like shallow water over river mud, the three mussel species classified on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's red list as the rarest and most endangered – the thick-skinned mussel (Unio crassus), the river mussel (Ptomida litoralis) and the depressed or compressed anodonta mussel (Pseudanodonta complanata) – which were discovered last month in bonus salus in the Seine, in the murked depths off Ile Saint-Louis, bringing the total number of mussel species in the river to 20 and bivalve species to, it is believed, 47, 5 of which are non-native and therefore invasive, much like the 37 non-native fish species that the Seine is said to contain, which include those humanly introduced from the 13th century till now for:

• zootechnical concerns, as is the case of the common carp, the bighead carp, and the grass carp;

• fish-farming objectives, such as a number of “exotic” surgeons;

• by anglers, as is the case for the pikeperch, the grayling and the European catfish;

• or unintentionally, such as the unwanted eastern mudminnow, stone moroko, ruffe, nase, round goby and tubenose goby.

Instead, for reasons that escape me, I will discuss my hangover. Or at least focus all of my attention on it. But first. Did you know that all octopuses have venom and that, on average, four new non-native species of fish or shellfish are introduced into the Seine every decade, and that this is now accelerating, an immediate outcome of the globalised movement of people and goods coupled with the human alteration of natural habitats, and new fish species have recently reached the Seine basin, and others are now present on the neighbouring Rhine and Maas catchments, and that the Amur sleeper (Perccottus glenii) is in full expanding phase in Eastern and Central Europe and will most certainly also arrive quite soon? More to my point, the once most-common population of the above-mentioned thick-skinned mussel was decimated for pearl buttons in the late 1800s, and the river mussel (Ptomida litoralis), the most abundant freshwater bivalve of Europe until the mid-point of the 20th century, was harvested into imperilment near villages along the Seine for use as pig and chicken feed? And – this is the kicker – like all freshwater mussels, and unlike their marine varieties, thick-shelled river mussels (Unio crassus) have a parasitic stage, during which its larvae, known as glochidia, are released by females in spit packets of about 1,000 each. The larvae in the packets attach to and infect the gills and fins of certain types of fish, mainly minnows and chub, and they stay there till they have developed, at which time they detach and float to the bottom of the river.

My point? In another month or so female thick-shelled river mussels will begin slowly moving along the bottom of the Seine by repeatedly extending their feet out of their shells, anchoring them to the river floor and pushing and pulling them until they reach the river’s edge; and then, with their back ends raised above the waterline, making them easy prey – they will start glochidial spurting for three to six hours, by which I mean they will deliberately and streneously squirt out jets of glochidial-laden water that, by landing in the water a full metre away, will disturb the river's surface and attract fish. The mussel larvae within the jets will then attach themselves to the fish's gills and fins, and slowly transform into adult mussels.

Is not all life like this? Let us think on this, and stop feeling sorry for ourselves, and take ourselves out into the sun, which has been absent since mid-November, and meet our friends for oysters, and wash those oysters down with cold Muscadet. Then, when we return, let us discuss bivalvian pain in the comments, and the 6,000 neurons in a clam versus the 250,000 neurons in an ant, and how plant agriculture kills animals with central nervous systems, and why you should take advantage of my special offer on paid subscriptions. Until then, heed these briny stanzas of Seamus Heaney:

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south of Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

– Seamus Heaney, “Oysters” Field Work, 1979

And this, from a letter René Descartes wrote on 23 November 1646 to the Marquis of Newcastle:

I know full well that animals do many things better than us, but I am not surprised by this because it serves to prove that they act naturally and by mechanisms, just like a clock, which shows the time much better than our judgment teaches us. And without a doubt, when the swallows come in spring, they act like clocks. Everything that bees do is of the same nature, and the order that cranes keep while flying and that monkeys observe while fighting, if it is true that they observe any order, and finally the instinct to bury their dead, is no stranger than that of dogs and cats, who scratch the earth to bury their excrement, even though they almost never bury it: this shows that they do it only by instinct and without thinking. One can only say that, although animals do not perform any action that assures us they think, nonetheless, because the organs of their bodies are not very different from ours, one can conjecture that there is some thought connected to these organs, as we experience in ourselves, although theirs is much less perfect. To this, I have nothing to reply except that if they thought as we do, they would have an immortal soul as well as we do, which is not likely, because there is no reason to believe it of some animals without believing it of all, and there are several too imperfect to believe that of them, such as oysters, sponges, etc.

On second thought, let’s stop here. I am presenting symptoms iii), iv) and vi) from the 1961 Crowes list. It is time to take decisive action. Have a great week. I love you all.

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As Election Day casts its shadow over the world, Thanksgiving, the brightest and most cherished day on the American calendar, stands resplendent on the horizon, a beacon of hope and unity.

We, however, the true “deplorables” – those deprived of the pride and elation that comes with being a citizen of the most influential nation in history – find ourselves, as always, unable to partake in, or even fathom, the profound gratitude that the people of that blessed land hold for the exalted station that is their birthright.

Shackled by the consequences of our lesser birth, our sense of being on the fringes of power and meaning is most keenly felt, and in our collective melancholy – nothing binds people more than being outside the American experience – we turn away from Thanksgiving towards the next guiding light of annual, and, indeed, universal, promise: Christmas.

For believers and non-believers alike, the holiday season, with all of its time-honoured traditions, illuminates a true path of belonging. Yet, after a year fraught with challenges, and faced with the impending uncertainties of Tuesday’s vote and the stressful stretch of days, weeks, months, and, in all likelihood, years and decades ahead, our anxieties persist, compelling us to seek solace in the cherished memories of better times.

For me, this was the autumn and winter of 2015, when, alongside a small but virtuous group of kindred spirits, I created a haven of hope and compassion in my beloved city of Paris.

Giving by Gaving

Driven by a profound sense of ethical responsibility, Giving by Gaving is a unique service wherein those committed to the ethical treatment of animals can, for a weekly fee, engage personally in the months-long gavage and final abbatage of waterfowl – geese for the most part, and a selection of ducks.

As proof of our sincere intentions, part of the proceeds supports animal refuges, houseless shelters, and nursing homes. This has created a legacy of empathy and moral resolve far beyond mere culinary indulgence.

Our boutiques serve as purveyors of our bespoke services and sanctuaries for those who share our sensibilities. Each is outfitted with gilded cages and expansive areas for avian movement. Proper nourishing, dispatching and extrication techniques are imparted. Soothing music is piped in, creating an atmosphere of serene luxury for those who live and expire therein and all who visit.

The liver forgives… and forgets

In the earliest days of our endeavour, we came upon a revelation: the liver's miraculous ability to regenerate had the power to revolutionize foie gras production. We devised methods by which individual ducks and geese could produce fattened livers year after year. Remarkably, even when these livers were partially harvested, they possessed the wondrous capacity to heal themselves, thereby enabling an ongoing and humane cycle of production.

The business flourished remarkably, a testament to our vision of harmonizing tradition with innovation and reverence for life. Soon, other of God's joyous creatures—turkeys, cows and calves, lambs, rabbits, and pigs – wholly submitted themselves to our mission. For them, we pioneered innovative “snout to tail” techniques to gently separate portions while avoiding mortal harm. Aquatic environments were introduced, fish tanks brimming with vibrant life, and a new generation of sushi artisans were trained to prepare each delicacy without causing terminal distress.

Our ethical empire has expanded across the globe

Our innovations have transformed the culinary world, ushering in a new era where nourishment is celebrated, cherished, and esteemed.

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I missed my Sunday appearance in these pixels because last Saturday, as Bastille Day was beginning to grind through its governmentless gears in France and a projectile in Pennsylvania was van-gogh-ing its way through the right-ear gristle of the 45th and 47th president of the Excited Snakes®, I was at the bow of a boat on the west coast of Canada, contemplating, by means of the Photos app on the iPhone 8 in my right hand, the pan in the video below.

It, paellaphiles the world over will recognise, is a paella or paellera. Boaty types—drawn from the elite 32-of-4,000 Hexagoners who bother to click on my carefully curated video links—will recognise the bow as belonging to a self-bailing and unsinkable Boston Whaler, and the surrounding body of water as Barkley Sound, which is part of the traditional and unceded territory of the Huu-ay-aht of the Nuučaan̓ułʔatḥ and named after Charles Barkley—not the basketball player-pundit but the then 28-year-old fur-trading sea captain of Imperial Eagle, who, along with his 17-year-old bride, Frances Barkley—the first European woman to visit what is now British Columbia—explored the sound and named it after himself in 1787, two years almost to the day before the Bastille storming.

Those truly in the know will know the boat in the video’s name, Pesca-Jumba, and of that name’s origins, as revealed by Tom Waits at the press conference announcing his 2008 “Glitter & Doom” tour.

Let’s unpack this further. In 1787, Francisco Goya was 41 and transitioning from a lowly tapestry cartoon painter for royal residences to the newly named Painter to the King. He was by then the top portraitist in Spain. Among his best customers were the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, who built a cottage and studio for him on the grounds of their estate in Andalusia. In 1787-88 alone, his income from paintings they commissioned was 22,000 reales, more than four times his annual salary.

While Valencia is universally acknowledged to be the birthplace of paella—made, traditionally, with rabbit, chicken or duck, snails, various beans, maybe a seasonal artichoke heart y nada más—Andalusia, with its direct access to the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, has been home to the better, lighter, more sunlit-infused and delicious seafood versions since before the Caliphate of Córdoba.

(Argue with this all you want, Nina Caplan, it’s true).

Arab trade introduced the Iberian peninsula to the dish’s essential elements: olive oil, rice, saffron, paprika, lemons—even the orange tree wood used to aromatise the fire on which it was cooked. The fish and shellfish were already abundant, including shrimp and prawns from the Bay of Cádiz.

Goya visited Cádiz many times. In 1793, he convalesced there.

In 1797, newly named Director of Painting at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Goya abruptly left his post and family and moved into a guest cottage on the estate of the 35-year-old, recently widowed María Cayetana de Silva, 13th Duchess of Alba, in Sanlucar in Andalusia.

The following 11 months were among his most prolific. Among the paintings from that period were three self-portraits, portraits of the matador Pedro Romero and the toreador José Romero, Martín Zapater, Don Bernardo de Iriarte and Juan Meléndez Valdés; the parable of the wedding guests, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and the Last Supper for the Oratorio Santa Cueva in Cádiz; Saints Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory; La Maja Desnuda;—

—and six bizarre parlour paintings commissioned by the Osunas.

Meanwhile, in 1791, over on this coast, the Spanish navy sailed the British schooner, North West America, which it captured during the Nootka crisis of 1789 and renamed Santa Saturnina, into Barkley Sound, where Nuu-chah-nulth war parties twice attacked it.

Did the Nuca settlers have paelleras? Probably. Rice, saffron, paprika, olive oil and lemons? Most assuredly. No orange wood, probably, but something the Muslims of Al-Andalus didn’t have: tomatoes, which the conquistadores introduced after the capture of Tenochtitlan by Hernán Cortés in 1521. Sofrito, anyone?

I, on the other hand, what did I have? Tomatoes, yes, but out of a can. Arborio, not bomba or senia rice. (Don’t say anything, Nina). Smoked paprika that had been lying in a tote since before Covid. Frozen peas… A red pepper from California… Quick-made sofrito stepped on with Pico de Gallo salsa from Costco….

Saffron? No, but our Port Desire —

hosts—

—found some…

…along with a couple of kilos of—

—Pandalus platyceros, aka spot prawns, the world’s most delicious shrimp, certainly much better than any Cadizian caridea crustacean—caught a month or two ago by Canadian Coast Guards during rescue training—hauling those traps out of the water prepares them to haul you out one day—and flash frozen.

In Andalucia, the prawns are put in whole, but I needed to make a stock—

—and pretty soon—

—and then—

And that was that.

I won’t burden this with a recipe. There are millions online.

Just don’t stir if you want a properly scorched socarrat. DM me if you want other tips.

Off to the beach. Ta.

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1.

“If the good lord had intended us not to drink, he wouldn’t have invented the Negroni.”

Despite the good doctor’s rebuke I am, at the time of writing, a week in without the weest dram. And better for it, I think, in Cartesian if not Monty Python terms, for if it be true that I think therefore I am, when I drink, am I therefore not? Difficult to follow, I know; I shall do my best to make this comprehensible.

Dr Moyes is not alone. The French President, Manu le-sac-à-vin Macron, who tipples twice daily, shills for the wine lobby, and downs whole Coronas in a single swallow, has also expressed his disapproval.

As has C., who advocates “moderation”. “Just drink less,” she tells me, as if were five years old.

2.

Those who know me, as she does, poor woman, know that there is little less in me, that I am more and more and more. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, I am large, I drain multitudes, yet here you find me born again, a new man, dry, empty, poured out, ready to be fulfilled, refilled, receptive to the world.

Why? Why what? Keats talked about not needing to know everything, about learning to be content with half-knowledge. I am content with less than a quarter.

“After I took LSD,” Paul McCartney, the Beatle, once said, “it opened my eyes. We only use one-tenth of our brain. Just think what we could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part. It would mean a whole new world.”

Ten percent, my eye. I have tapped that hidden part. Tapped it dry. And in so doing I have learned to loathe the smart and seek all solace from the ignorant. Indeed, I now seek to be utterly, blissfully besieged by them. To this end, until last week, I used alcohol. I sat in the dark in my third-floor walk-up and hammered back shots and emptied my brain of all thought, disimpacted my mind of all memory, evacuated my consciousness. I ate poorly, processed foods crowded with sugar and preservatives. I did not bathe. If I had an itch, I would ignore it until it became so unbearable it made me scream. Except for my anus. I scratched there incessantly. I sat on my lawn chair in my cold, cold room, surrounded by my garbage, scratching the perimeter and picking the scabs off my hairless scalp. At nightfall, I stumbled out onto the street and picked fights with men twice my size.

Now, I mirror emptiness. I have rid myself of I.

(Me.)

2.

None of that is true. Very little is, it seems. A quarter of Americans think the FBI instigated Jan. 6. One in five below 30 think the Holocaust is a myth. Seven-tenths of the entire population believe in angels.

Glenn Gould, a teetotaller, had McCartney figured. Mixed down vocal lines lost in a wash of rock, confusing invention with the noise made by breaking rules, etc. Cut away the hype and what is left? “A happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism.”

“If what you want is an extended exercise in how to mangle three chords, then, obviously, the Beatles are for you.”

3.

Is this thing on? FDR had recording devices put into the door of the Oval Office. Truman had one in his desk lamp. Jack Kennedy used a manual Dictabelt system, as did Johnson, who also had his bedroom phone and his ranch phone bugged, and the phones in both of his offices and at Camp David. Plus he put microphones in the Cabinet Room, in the office next to the Oval Office, and in that stuffy little cloakroom outside the Oval Office where he did his dirtiest deals. Nixon — who spent seven months in 1960 reciting his six crises into a dictaphone — first thing, had all of LBJ’s wires ripped out.

His was voice-activated, like this one, but not as sophisticated.

No camera.

4.

A whole new world? The window’s evening stream, an effulgent flow. There is more than glass between me and the feeders and breeders dragging themselves through the streets below, the citizens and sailors, the panhandlers and solicitors, the slack tide effluvia of passers-by.

Sunset yesterday, day six of my abstention, the colour of spinach. Three SUVs. A very shiny bicycle. Espresso coffee. Pins and needles in the extremities. No tumescence to speak of, the leguminous root still mouldering forlorn in the bottom of the crisper compartment. No relief around the back either. The Ex-Lax pills are indeed chewable, yes, as advertised, but what besides rocks isn’t? My father could happily work and swallow his way through pure gristle. A Swiss-French artist once ate a Cessna 172, props, seats and all.

The other assurances — gentle, dependable, overnight? Again, promises, when undelivered, become lies.

What does the name even purport to mean? Ex as in out, denoting removal or release, the inducement of a state, or a former state — ex-husband, ex-convict, ex-president. Lax as in sloppy, slack, slipshod, overindulgent, irresponsible.

No need to muck about. Redemption depends on the tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe — so said Walter Benjamin, ex-lax post facto, but he was never constipated a day in his life.

5.

Again, no, sorry. I am alarmingly regular and have been since my sphincterectomy.

The brain, however, is entirely intact, thank you. Place names, actors’ names, dates of birth, frequently forgotten, but circuitry up to code. Elsewhere, not so sure. The heart no longer fires properly, atrial currents blasted or blocked, hard to say. Sudden stoppages, flutters. Cruising pulse speed well over 130.

The disinformation superhighway is a périphérique, a ring road accessed by off and on rampages. The experience of experience hums up one and down another. Round and round. Nobody goes anywhere, gets anywhere.

Two-sevenths of our brain? One-ninth?

6.

Napoleon had a slug or two of eau de vie before most battles. His second wife, Marie Louise, was a beer drinker. Josephine, his first, adored champagne. He, however, hated bubbles, which made him feel “gazeux” (“gassy”). He drank wine, whatever was on hand, and being Italian, never to excess. He especially liked Gevrey-Chambertin and Fixin, but his real love was coffee, which, again, being Italian, he insisted on making himself.

“If I governed a nation of Jews,” he once said, “I would re-establish the Temple of Solomon.” Bear with me, this is not just another divagation, as will soon be made clear. Failing in his bid to establish a Jewish home state in Palestine, the Emperor sought instead to create a New Jerusalem on French soil. In a letter written from his General Headquarters in Jerusalem on April 20th, 1799, in the year seven of the French Republic, Napoleon shouts from the top of the ga'ahs: “Hasten! Now is the moment, which may not return for thousands of years, to claim the restoration of civic rights among the population of the universe that has been shamefully withheld from you for thousands of years, your political existence as a nation among the nations, and the unlimited natural right to worship Jehovah in accordance with your faith, publicly and most probably forever.”

Napoleon freed the Jewish people from bondage in every nation under his control. He tore down their ghettoes, reopened their synagogues, abolished their discriminatory taxes and gave them their first taste of civic and political equality in almost 2,000 years. He made Judaism the third official religion of France and Italy. He stood firm against strong opposition from anti-Semites like Chateaubriand and the Tsar; and, for the first time in eighteen centuries, reconvened by decree the Grand Sanhedrin, the Supreme Assembly of the Jewish nation.

Metternich-Winneburg, the Austrian consul in Paris, said “All Jews look upon Napoleon as their Messiah.”

Special prayers in his honour were inserted into the siddurs of every synagogue in Europe. All Jews attending prayers in these synagogues would recite this berachot: “They have gathered armies to fight against him and against all those who admire him. They have come to our borders, and our master, the Emperor, the King, is standing with the might of his army to confront them. O God, master of greatness, strength, power and beauty, we implore Thee to stand next to his righteousness; help him, support him with Thy mighty arm: guard him as the apple of Thine eye with an abundance of strength and health. Save him from all evil and tell him ‘I am your salvation.’ Send Thy light and truth, that they may lead him.”1

Napoleon's uncle, Cardinal Fesh, told him, “You seek the end of the world with your Laws giving Jews equality like the Catholics. Do you not know that the Holy Scriptures predict that the end of the world will happen when the Jews are recognized as a nation?”

“Faith,” Napoleon responded, “is beyond the reach of the law. It is the most personal possession of man, and no one has the right to demand an account for it.”

7.

That is true. As is this: in 1802, year ten of the French Republic, Napoleon reversed the abolition of slavery, condemning close to half a million people to a life of bondage for another half-century.

The following year, the revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue defeated Napoleon's army, and the year after that, in 1804, they established the free and independent state of Haiti, the world's first republic founded by former slaves.

In 1825, to compensate its former slaveholders, France levied an indemnity of 150 million francs ($21 billion / €20 billion in today’s money) on Haiti. Haiti finally paid this off in 1947.

Elsewhere in France’s colonial outposts — Martinique, Guyana, Guadeloupe, and La Réunion — slavery continued until 1848.

Meanwhile, in 1835, the British government borrowed £20 million ($25 million USD / €23 million — the equivalent of £17 billion today) to compensate British slave owners. British taxpayers might never have discovered that they had finally repaid the loan in 2015 if it weren’t for this bizarre tweet from the Treasury, which briefly appeared on Twitter before being deleted:

8.

Teddy Roosevelt preferred coffee to alcohol. A Milwaukee saloon keeper shot him in the chest with a .38 calibre revolver in 1912. He was saved by the 50-page speech folded up in his breast pocket. “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose,” he told the stunned crowd. Then he talked for ninety minutes straight.

Ike also drank a lot of coffee. Fifteen to 20 cups a day. And a glass or two of scotch and soda with dinner. He was born a Mennonite but raised Jehovah’s Witness. His family, all but his mother, left the JWs after the final and cataclysmic “great tribulation” of Armageddon failed to transpire in 1914. Still, he hedged his bets and was inaugurated on a Watch Tower bible.

He smoked four packs of Camels a day.

9.

Lobo hambriento no tiene asiento. Do you know this? A hungry wolf doesn’t sit about. I know what I think and why I think it. I know where it comes from and what it means. The world, the so-called world, knows the answers. The world, the so-called world, knows the truth. Drinking made this much easier. Old, sick, forgetful, endlessly drunk, tired all the time — I felt little or no responsibility and said what I pleased. It was a teetering position of dizzying power. Aesop tells the story of the lamb that strays from its flock. One morning it finds itself on the bank of a forest stream. The ever-ravenous Mr Wolf appears upstream, desperate for something to eat. Normally, he would gobble up a tasty morsel like this without a second thought. But this poor little lamb looks so fucking helpless and innocent he feels he has to make some sort of excuse before ripping open its jugular and drinking its blood. “How dare you slop around in my stream stirring up mud!” he snarls. “You will be punished harshly for your impertinence!” “Please, Mr Wolf,” says the lamb. “Don’t be angry. You’re upstream, not downstream. I could not possibly have muddied your drinking water.” “I say it’s muddy, and that you muddied it! Besides, you insulted me last year, told the most vicious lies about my character.” “But I was only born this year.” “Well then it was your no-account brother.” “I have no brothers.” “Then,” growls the wolf, “it was some other verminous member of your villainous tribe. No matter. Enough. I’m not about to let myself be talked out of my breakfast — by my breakfast.” And with no further ado, Mr. Wolf snatched up the poor little lamb, and carried it into the forest.

Moral? Wolves are assholes.

10.

As I talk, I remember all — I remember the Declaration; 
It was read here — the whole army paraded — it was read to us here; 
By his staff surrounded, the General stood in the middle — he held up his 
unsheath’d sword, 
It glitter’d in the sun in full sight of the army. 

Walt Whitman, “The Centenarian’s Story,” from Drum-Taps. The Revolutionary General on the hill, surveying the slaughter, in turn surveyed 100 years later by the poet-historian, witness to another slaughter. Milton played a similar role after Cromwell’s defeat and the death of the Commonwealth, as did Blake after the cataclysmic collapse of the French Revolution, and Pound after the bloodletting of World War One. So too did Robert Lowell in 1946:

There was rebellion, father, when the mock 
French windows slammed and you hove backward, rammed 
Into your heirlooms, screens, a glass-cased clock, 
The highboy quaking to its toes. You damned 
My arm that cast your house upon your head 
And broke the chimney flintlock on your skull.

“Rebellion”, Lord Weary's Castle, 1946.

Now it is my turn.

11.

How can you tell if an alcoholic is lying to you? If his lips are moving. Lowell used to say this. He was a man of letters. A man of drink and demons. A poet. A patriot, and a believer, the last in a long line of flag-waving saps and innocents. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” This was carved on his grandfather’s tombstone. A family of demiurgic vitality — artists, seers and mystics all, troubled visionaries taming horror through words, converting the dross of the personal into golden universals, the numbers of being, the numbering of beings, the deadening of existence.

His classmate’s schoolyard taunt: “Robert Lowell has no soul.”

“I like to write in mania,” he also said, “and revise in depression.” I am modulated to a faster and more constant pitch and therefore lack these luxuries.

12.

A French zookeeper was crushed to death a while back after being rammed by a hippopotamus jealous of his new tractor. The four-ton animal flew into a rage when the 60-year-old keeper went to take it for a walk.

13.

Giraffes have two sets of eyelids. My eyes feel thus veiled, as if a curtain has been drawn across them. A whitish curtain that slides across my field of vision — is it a migraine aura or just another sign of my separation from the rest of the world? Or perhaps I have somehow rehabilitated my nictitating membrane. From the Latin, nictare, to blink, wink, or otherwise signal with the eyes. A whitish or translucent membrane that forms an inner eyelid. It can be drawn across the eye to protect it from dust and keep it moist. A third eyelid, a pliable, sheet-like structure, horizontally drawn and usually translucent — the animal possessing it can see through it when it has been pulled shut. In the case of diving animals — sea lions, beavers, manatees — it is transparent. Mine is more or less transparent, but I know when it has been activated. I don’t activate it. Humans usually have them vestigially — the tiny half-moon fold of tissue on the inside corner of the eye. Useless, meaningless, like goosebumps and hiccups. According to Darwin, these are significantly larger among Africans and Aboriginal Australians. But even theirs are more or less pointless. Only birds actively control them. Nictare. The Romans used it figuratively, to speak of fire, of a fire-like flash. I flash. Or I strive, I make an effort.

14.

eyeless sight, the ability to sense the colors of objects, and sometimes further developed to sense printed matter, through sensitivity of the skin, especially in the fingertips. Also called SKIN VISION. Technical name, DERMALOPTICAL VISION. The term was first used in a more general sense in 1924 in a book entitled Eyeless Sight; a Study of Extra-Retinal Vision and the Paroptic Sense, translated from the French by C.K. Ogden. In the original work, Vision Extra-Retinienne by the French Nobel Prize-winner Jules Romains, there was an account of his research concerning the faculty of seeing without the use of the eyes. When the book was ridiculed by many scientists Romains abandoned his research, but it was taken up again in the 1960s in connection with the field of metapsychology. However, there are much earlier accounts of eyeless sight by Robert Boyle, the English chemist, followed by occasional accounts in the 1800s. In the 1930s there was research in this field in Brazil, and in the late 1950s in Texas and Costa Rica.

— The Second Barnhart Dictionary of New English, 1973 [p 189]

15.

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is just behind the forehead. It is the last area in the brain to develop. Proteins and phospholipids mix together to create mycelial, a thick whitish insulating sheath that forms around nerve fibres. Mycelial helps increase the speed at which the impulses inside are fired down the line. We learned about this in a roundabout manner. Developmental psychology and biology. Alcohol relaxes the dolorific crispations of the membranes. The main effects of trauma to this region are “flat affect, social withdrawal and ineffectiveness, impairment of goal-related behaviours, inattentiveness, poor motivation, and poor insight.” IQ levels drop. Problem-solving skills disappear.

The process begins thus (I’ll have more concrete examples later). Make an error, the word “blue” written in red, a red-coloured club drawn from a pack of cards, a black-coloured ace of hearts, and a quick squirt of blood splashes against the anterior cingulate cortex, a collar of tissue in the brain. Similar events occur when things go missing: phantom pain in a severed limb or a pulled tooth.

16.

Many animals bite their mates during lovemaking. It is thought that the females of certain species require violent stimulus to ovulate. Montaigne, a chronic self-biter (tongue, fingers and fingernails), quoting Plutarch, describes the love bites incurred by Pompey by his lover, Flora. “She never lay with him but that she made him wear the prints of her teeth.”

In New York in 1987, some 8,000 dogs bit humans. That same year, almost 1,500 New Yorkers bit humans, as did roughly 800 cats, 7 ferrets and 3 moonstruck skunks.

17.

This stupid indifference of the present, what are we to make of it? A plow, a field, a cottage, refuge from the taxman, our close ones sheltered from the brigand’s sleaze, this is happiness, yet the tiniest disruption, even just this, a wing flap, the rounding off one point six to two, turning left instead of right, voting or not voting, or not caring, or not eating breakfast, or talking with your mouth full, or not talking at all, sets new wheels in motion, or tips over the cart entirely. Outcomes will diverge yet as predicted the present order is in total disorder, everything up for grabs.

18.

I watched a person shop this morning, an ostensibly sexy blonde with discharging temporal ducts and grim paint insect eyes that darted and flitted up and down the aisles and shelves but never landed, never hooked. You could smell the fuses burning, hear the brain skimming and spiking, gnawing, nagging, worrying at the dendritic knots on the cords, until, suddenly, she spotted it, a power drink or a new-fangled type of cupcake or something, and boom! the lobster-like retinas on their little red sticks wheeled in tandem and locked onto the poor thing, and the fireball shot straight up into the air, and the full naked light of the apocalypse brightened the sky. Want, want, want! O I must have it! O it must be mine!

This apparition, this sexy grim blonde with the beetling eyes, was she not someone’s daughter? Someone’s sister, wife, mother, mistress? Nothing more? Nothing more. Mere words, a compendium of details, a hodgepodge of architectural styles. “A blood clock,” as Richard Mixin’ Nixon used to say. Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? Why must we be fixed in your formulated phrases? The last sun has shone. These are times that dry men’s souls and dip them in the river who loves water. Or some such. A fool sees not the same screed that a wise man sees. Walk the perilous path. Talk the garrulous wrath. Etcetera.

19.

Gentlemen! Generals! There are no more forks in the road or on the table. No exits. No roads less or more. Every direction leads straight here, away from your paltry pasts. Four billion years of shared mutation, seven million years on two feet, and what do you have to show for it? Pop Tarts and personal computers? You still worship animal-headed gods. Your future is unnecessary. Back to the path, the wrath, the road most travelled, the codes unravelled: all kinks otherwise and corners too shaken out like a length of bicycle chain or a beach towel.

It’s a question of role-playing. Seeing oneself as someone else or something else, comparing oneself to those you emulate and admire, or envy and despise; measuring, mirroring, matching, surpassing. Everything else moves forward by internal combustion. Or the current, the wind, is it that? Something naturally occurring, relatively normal, like a fart, like childbirth, like fatherhood, ineluctable, inevitable, embarrassing. The rules of natural right. The invisible hand. Or is it just more sheer stupid blind dumb-ass drunkenness and inertia? Are we thus so thusly formulated, fixed in the phrase, pinned and wiggling on the wall, scrabbling under the pin?

Aesop tells of the fly sitting on the axle of the racing chariot, and saying, “What a dust do I raise.”

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. 

The sun rose dim on us this morning and then disappeared in a black cloud. Normal. Relatively normal, if you have normal expectations, and seek nothing more than the liberty to scuttle towards the next cataclysm, away from the last one. The herd of elephants that trampled the village is going to trample the village again. It is thus the way of the world. What is required is flat, unprocessed. The world is divided into equal portions of pain for all its inhabitants. You are born, you age, you die. The precise details are anecdotal, of no consequence. There have been five mass extinction events so far, caused by volcanoes and meteorites and detonating fireballs, and we are in the throes of the sixth, caused by our own malign indolence. Violence comes from other worlds and happens elsewhere until it comes from us, until we get restless, and then more restless, and the temporin and gin rises to the temporal ducts and the upright and incorruptible strap incendiaries to their bellies and the rest of us watch while the others breed and mix and stir and die.

20.

Can I at least teach you how to coil and snap a beach towel? Grip it in your hand by a corner. Hold it off the ground. Spin your wrist, as if stirring a teaspoon in a cup of coffee, clockwise or counter-clockwise, until its vertical length is rolled to a ballistical point, like the ogival nose cone of a bullet. Now snap-flick your wrist away from your body, towards your prey.

We get old and sick, we die, decay, and disappear. No man nor god can stop this. “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” I know what is meant by this but in my mind’s eye it is still a stirring and a mixing, stirring with a spoon, mixing in the cream and sugar, not tiny spoonfuls of coffee grounds day after day, evenings, mornings, afternoons, beneath the music from a farther room. A coffee spoon? The French use this: une cuillère de café. In English it is a very small spoon, smaller than a teaspoon.

Ogive, too, moreover, is French. Indeed. The intersecting transverse ribs of a cathedral vault. The Gothic arch. An Islamic invention. Is not that something? Muslim intelligence, holding up the Christian ceiling, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

The Turing test. The words above, will they pass?

Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet which reads, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” would not “a spring day” do as well or better?

Shakespeare: It wouldn’t scan.

Interrogator: How about “a winter’s day.” That would scan all right.

Shakespeare: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter’s day.

Thank you for reading. I’ll be better next week. I promise.

PS. It was my birthday a couple of days ago. You missed it.

What mattered more for Manet and Monet,
That Manet had money or Monet had manners?
Mattered to what, pray? Mattered to whom?
To Monet’s manner, or just Manet’s mother?
— T.J. Clark, 2005

Le coeur mène où il va. Despite the half-hearted assurances in last week’s Hexagon, today’s piece will not be about the painters mentioned in the stanza above, about how the former “Manetized and then wanted to de-Monetize” the latter (“après l'avoir manetisé il voudrait bien le démonétiser”), nor about the models Manet-ipulated in Olympia, below.

All that now seems too far away to matter. Over the course of this week, that half of my heart and its counterpart have been forced to turn their attention elsewhere. As I’m sure have yours. Le coeur mène où il va. And the eyes follow. And it’s hard to look away. And how I interpret what I see doesn’t matter. Nor do my opinions. Because there’s nothing I can do about any of it. Which is depressing.

So let’s grab a drink.

Where?

When we first moved here, you could count the city’s worthy watering holes on one finger: Le Rosebud, a bar-américan in Montparnasse. I’m told it changed hands recently but that, except for the controversial addition on certain nights of a DJ (from Baltimore of all places), they haven’t screwed with the winning formula: professional waiters in white jackets and black ties, low light, low jazz, serviceable steaks and tartare, free crackers and olives, great classic cocktails by Titi, the head barman since 1985, and the same stately decor from 1962, the year it opened, by Paul Rebeyrolle, a painter and sculptor lionized by Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault.

Le Rosebud, after Charles Foster Kane’s sled, not Le Flore, after the goddess of flowers and springtime, was the real hangout of Jean-Paul Sartre. And Simone de Beauvoir. And Diego Giacometti. And Samuel Beckett. And Roland Barthes. And Marguerite Duras. Etcetera.

But, alas, it’s too far away. I'm a fanatical devotee of the 15-minute city concept, a big plank in Mayor Hidalgo’s successful 2020 re-election platform and a favourite bugaboo of “Great Reset” conspiracy cranks like UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the comically crackpot Jordan Peterson.

Bike lanes, low-traffic neighbourhoods, incentives for new local bookstores, bakers, butchers, cobblers, cheese shops, greengrocers, key cutters, etcetera — what’s not to like? I’m all in. And the Rosebud, alas, is not in my quarter-hour grid. It’s an hour and 20 minutes from my place on foot. Twenty-seven minutes by bike. Thirty-two minutes by public transport. Forty-three by car (as if you’d ever catch me driving a car in Paris).

Back in the day, when we were footlooser and Paris was a more moveable feast — and there were next to no spots anywhere in town that properly shook or stirred — sure, Le Rosebud. Now, no.

And yes, there was and is Harry’s New York Bar (15 minutes by bike), but it was, and I’m sure still is, an overpriced mecca for unimaginative American tourists. As was and is the Bar Hemingway in the Paris Ritz hotel, except there the tourists were not only dull around the edges but obscenely rich, which, for reasons too numerous and penurious to get into here, has never really been my… thing.

In the early noughties, a well drink at the Hemingway cost, if I recall correctly, 28 euros. My memory is a bit hazy — because of the cocktails, yes, but also because C. and I wrote all the copy for the Ritz’s in-house magazine, so we never had to shell out a sou.

That’s the Hemingway’s Colin Field describing his 400€ Sidecar made with an 1858 cognac to John Rossant, at the time a senior editor at Business Week. And that’s me to Colin’s left, just outside the frame, sipping on a Sidecar.

No that’s not a typo. A €400 sidecar. In 2003. Not sure what they charge today - or if there’s any of that 1858 cognac left — but if the inflation calculator I just popped 400€ into is accurate, that’s €669.11 of today’s money.

For a beverage. In a small glass.

COLIN: “I’ve always wanted to get in the Guinness Book of World Records, and I’ve figured out a way how — the world’s most expensive cocktail.”

Back then, every two months, along with puff about Proust and pastries and expensive watches, the afternoon tea in the Vendôme, the caviar facials in the Ritz spa, and the “signature” dishes in the hotel’s “iconic” Table de L’Espadon restaurant, I wrote a short fly-on-the-wall piece about the Hemingway.

Colin and a customer would have a chat at the bar about one of his many cocktail creations, and I would sit next to them, taking notes while happily slurping down whatever the drink was.

We had at least a couple of Sidecars during this interview with Rossant. Not with the pre-phylloxera cognac, unfortunately, just the regular X.O. stuff from the well, but damn tasty all the same. In fact, so enamoured was I with the drink that immediately after the interview I bought cognac, Cointreau and lemons, raced home, and mixed up a batch or three for C. and me.

I haven’t been able to look at one since. Even putting the word “side” anywhere near the word “car” makes me queasy.

Colin, considered by many the world’s greatest bartender of his epoch, left the Hemingway on May 15th of this year, after 29 years of service. According to the linked NYT article, you can now sample his prowess two nights a week at Maison Proust, a new 5-star hotel in the 3rd. I haven’t been. It looks nice in the photos. It’s only 9 minutes by bike. But the cocktail prices aren’t listed. So.

I haven’t been to the Hemingway in yonks, either. Not because it’s two minutes by bike beyond the cut-off mark (and eight minutes too far by metro), but because C. and I no longer write for the Ritz. (We don’t write the Plaza Athénée’s magazine anymore either, which is why you won’t see me sitting down to Alain Ducasse’s sous-vide chicken there anytime soon.)

I pretty much stick to wine, anyway. If I hanker for a mixed drink, Le Renard Bar, five seconds from my door on foot, does a perfectly excellent pisco sour during happy hour for only eight euros.

Max, at the Cave à Michel, probably my favourite wine bar in the city - and not only because it is only 15 seconds from my place — will pour me a hefty shot of smoky mezcal for €9 any time after 7 pm.

A short stumble uphill to Belleville and Jourdain will put me on a stool in an absurd number of groovy hipster cocktail bars. True, the servers and tenders spout mixology blather, and the phonebook-sized menus are filled with all manner of innovative nonsense, but, generally, what goes in the glasses is pretty good.

And what went in my glass last night in the Cambridge Public House on rue Poitou in the Marais — 11 minutes down the hill by bicycle — was a Boulevardier.

It pleased me. Even at 15€ a glass. And 5€ more for the almonds.

Buy my nuts?

I chose the Boulevardier because the friend I was with, Aaron Peck, a writer from Vancouver, chose it for himself. Aaron has lived in New York, Brussels and now Paris, and, like many travelled sophisticates, he has strong, well-grounded opinions about many subjects. Including cocktails. When in a bar, I don’t follow my heart, I follow his lead.

The Cambridge is a bit of a hoof from his Left Bank apartment, but Aaron’s no lazy-ass WEF International Socialism stooge 15-minuter like me, he’s of the flaneur school, and something of a regular at the Cambridge because, when he first happened upon it, and found the quiet, chummy clubby ambiance to his liking, he requested a Sazerac — the drink he chooses to test a mixologist’s depth of skill — and the barman instantly queried, “Would you like that with cognac or rye?”

Most modern barmen, apparently, don’t know their sazeracs from their ass-sacks. Cambridge’s man, Nicolas Goredesky, though conventionally modern in his sleeve tatts and over-elaborated bewhiskerment, obviously knew his classics.

We’ve been to the Cambridge a few times, usually around 5 pm, when it’s just opened and still chill. It’s a nice mix of British pub and très cosy French speakeasy. Paintings of hounds on the walls, comfy chairs and banquettes, not too-awful music (though once while there we had to endure an entire side of Yes’s Relayer, which I hadn’t heard in probably 40 years, and which I couldn’t help but give all my attention to, body, mind and soul, as my teenage self had tattooed every single fucking lick and phrase deep into my brain stem) and the city’s best sausage rolls.

In the evening, however, it gets busy — judging by my visit there a week ago to sample the cocktails of a Melbourne friend’s nephew, Matt Stirling, one of nine barmen from nine countries invited to the Cambridge’s “Global Series” — a day-long cocktail counterpart to the Rugby World Cup.

Matt’s, made with Monkey Shoulder and god-knows-what-else, were bonzer.

Back to the Boulevardier. As anyone in the booze biz will tell you ad nauseam, it was named after a magazine of that name published by Erskine Gwynne, the “cherub-faced and rumpus-raising nephew of Cornelius Vanderbilt” (Time, Jan 07, 1929). They’ll tell you a bunch of other stuff too — about Harry MacElhone of Harry’s New York Bar and its first appearance in his book and then in that book and then how it’s like a Negroni but with bourbon or rye instead of gin and how it differs from an Old Pal, which is made with dry Vermouth instead of sweet Vermouth, and was named after another Harry’s regular named Bill “Sparrow” Robertson, a sportswriter for the New York Herald.

I’m not going into any of that shit. I’m not even going to give you the recipe. Or tell you what it tastes like — though I will tell what Helen Rosner says it tastes like (the New Yorker, like the New York Times, seems to be obsessed with the Boulevardier; it is featured in both every three years or so) — “it’s heady and deep, a woodsy cloud with a bitter edge, the flavor transforming on the tongue into something spicy and bright.”

Heady, deep, woodsy, cloudy, bitter, spicy, bright. To which you should probably add sweet.

Got it? Good.

Instead, I’m going to talk about poor old Erskine Gwynne and his world — without once using the terms “Lost Generation” or “Les années folles” or the “Roaring 20s”. Because, really, could anything have been more roaringly crazy and lost than the 20-20s?

The Boulevardier was a “Paris smart-chart” patterned after the New Yorker. It lasted a few years and had a circulation of 7,000. Which is twice the circulation of Hexagon. And those 7,000 were also all paying customers, whereas most of mine are… not.

Of course, unlike Hexagon, Boulevardier had serious, big-name writers on its masthead. James Joyce. Thomas Wolfe. Noël Coward. Sinclair Lewis. Ernest Hemingway. John Dos Passos. And at the helm, Erskine, a colourful figure, as was once said of such fellows, “quick with both wit and fists and sporting an invincible smile.”

Erskine wrote a few plays as a student, and like many Americans in Paris of his and every other generation, he was “working on a novel.” According to Time, before starting the magazine, Erskine wrote “pap for gullibles” for the “lurid, gumchewerish Hearst Sunday Magazine” including a series called “The Memoirs of Mrs. Jean Nash, by The Best Dressed and Most Extravagant Woman in the World.”

Except for the photo below, I have been unable to track down the series on Mrs. Nash; but no worthier a subject of memoirs can I imagine. In the 1920s and 1930s she was as famous for her wardrobe (“a woman must have at least four fur coats and two hundred silk stockings”), beauty tips (“champagne is an excellent hair wash”) and skill at the casino tables as she was for her six husbands. Her first marriage was an elopement at 16 in Dobbs Ferry, New York. It was quickly annulled, but not before the birth of her first son, Andrew. Her second marriage was three years later in Milburn, New Jersey, in a motor car, under the light of a streetlamp, and toasted with chocolate ice cream sodas in Newark. The following year (1914) she locked her mother in a closet and refused to let her out until she signed over several pieces of property. A lengthy lawsuit followed, and a divorce, and a third marriage to John Nash, a captain in the British army, whose modest salary was soon consumed by his wife’s hair wash and stockings. Her fourth marriage, in 1925, the year Erskine started writing her memoirs, was to the Egyptian Prince Mohammed Sabit Bey, whom she met in a casino in Cannes, and for whom she became a Moslem. It lasted a month. Shortly after, Sabit was in a Paris jail charged with pawning stolen cash, jewels, and motor cars. Jean was implicated but not arrested, and Sabit was released after a month. A few weeks later she was married to Paul Dubonnet of the aperitif winemaking family. The marriage lasted nearly 21 years — during which Jean’s first son Andrew was tried for murder and acquitted — before ending in divorce in 1948. In 1950 she married Guy Douglas Bridge Puckle, a broker with the London and New York Stock Exchanges and the holder of three British patents: two for systems for attaching daggers, knife blades or short bayonets onto a pistol or revolver; and a third for a Jeff Wall-like light box — a system for illuminating pictures by incorporating concealed lighting into the frame.

Back to Erskine. He was born in Paris in 1898, the son of Erskine Gwynne Sr, who the New York Times described, in his 1896 Wedding Announcement, as the “famous polo player and cross-country rider, expert golf player, possessor of several of the finest horses in America, and general social favorite”. Eight years later, the Cincinnati Times-Star reported that after a “rather strenuous career, having separated from his wife and passing through bankruptcy proceedings” he died suddenly of kidney failure, at 35, on the day of his bankruptcy hearing, leaving behind a widow, three young children and a mountain of debt.

Erskine’s uncle, as mentioned, was William Kissam Vanderbilt II, of the railway fortune. A man of expensive hobbies — motor cars and yachts — he presumably had enough left over to keep his nephews and nieces afloat. How much he gave his Erskine is difficult to say, as, unlike the Vanderbilt generation before him, Erskine worked most of his life. From 1915 to 1917, he reamed high-explosive shells in a French munition factory. He then joined the American Expeditionary Forces under Pershing. After the war, he worked his way around the world on cargo boats, before returning to Paris, in 1922, and somehow landing a job as private secretary of one of the richest men in France, Henri Letellier.

The Letelier family had casinos and hotels in Normandy, but his personal fortune came from oil fields in Mexico, real estate investments throughout Europe and South America, and, principally, publishing: among his holdings was the world’s third largest newspaper, Le Journal.

He was said to have 1,260 suits of clothes in his closets and 11 motor cars, mostly Voisins, in his garages.

In 1926, Henri married Yola Henriquez at a hotel on the French Riviera, where the writer Colette was also staying. Colette was intrigued by the “May-December” couple, especially when she learned that the two elderly women who ran the hotel were former courtisanes and had raised Yola as their own, and trained her, from an early age, in the fine art of bagging a millionaire. From whence:

That same year, on June 14, 1926, Erskine married the socialite Jane Armstrong, who was working in Paris as a model at the fashion house Patou. They honeymooned in Deauville, where Letellier was mayor, staying at the Hotel et Casino de Deauville, which Letellier owned.

According to the NYT, on a later occasion at the same casino, “a riot broke out early in the morning when Charles A. Levine and his aeronautic protegee Miss Mabel Boll encountered Erskine. ‘You the guy that edits the Boulevardier and is responsible for the dirty cracks taken at me?’ snarled Levine.

‘Yes, I’m the guy,’ replied Gwynne calmly. ‘What about it?’

‘Just that,’ shouted Levine, landing his left on the editor's jaw. Society women, millionaires and sportsmen rushed up to separate the pair. When the air cleared, Miss Boll, sparkling with diamonds as usual, took Levine's arm and led him away.”

On another occasion, in another casino, he was physically removed from the premises for decking a waiter who had “said something indecent to a lady”. Then, realizing he had left his best hat inside, he went around the back, shinnied his way up to a high window, crawled through, strolled across the casino room floor, retrieved the hat, and tipped it at the man who had thrown him out.

Last story, before we pack him in: Erskine once saw off a group of friends about to embark on a trip to America. “One parting drink turned into another, and the gathering got so out of control that he later awoke, surprised to find himself still on the ship, which was now steaming west in the middle of the Atlantic.”

The lifestyle seemed to catch up with Erskine in 1929. In May, at 30, he almost died of a heart attack. And lost his job with Henri Letellier.

Henri had several affairs. As did Yola. She was Lord Louis Mountbatten’s mistress from 1932 until his death in 1979. Did she have one with Erskine — the “Vanderbilt Playboy”? Le Nouveau Monde seemed to think so.

The divorce was in 1932, the same year the Boulevardier folded. The following year, while traveling in the US as a representative of a French wine company, the car Erskine was driving in — a Voisin, the favourite of Henri Letellier (or by some reports, a Bentley) — crashed into a parked truck filled with grapefruits and oranges. The driver, his cousin, the third William Kissam Vanderbilt, was killed. Erskine was tried, fined $50, and received a 30-day suspended sentence. He returned to France and lived with his mother on the Riviera.

In 1936, he found a publisher for the novel he had been working on for most of the previous decade. Paris Pandemonium is about an American socialite in Paris “out to torpeodo the town” before returning to marry her fiancé in the States. She meets a playboy named “Joe” who introduces her to the regulars at the Ritz bar, and takes her to peep shows and cocktail parties and a cafe where the men dress as women. He tells her why the ducks are numbered at the Tour d'Argent and why German students have dueling scars.

“Elementary tourisme,” panned the New York Times reviewer. “Paris Pandemonium offers only rudimentary devilishness.”

The book disappeared. As, soon, did Erskine. In 1938, he suffered a stroke, probably as a result of the accident. It left him partially paralyzed. He is mentioned only four more times in the NYT: in 1940, in an article about a $24,000 jewellery heist in the London West End apartment of Josephine, his ex, who was still going by the name of “Mrs. Erskine Gwynne”, and is described in the article as “the wife of a writer for the Paris Herald-Tribune and a close friend of the Duchess of Windsor, who she helped select her trousseau.” In 1941, Josephine married Hugh Molyneux, 7th Earl of Sefton — a life-long friend of the Duke of Windsor (he had been a Lord-in-waiting when Edward reigned in 1936).

The next mention is in 1946, when Erskine’s sister, Alice “Kiki” Preston, 48, a morphine, heroin and cocaine addict known in Paris, New York and Kenyan circles as “the girl with the silver syringe”, “jumped or fell from a bedroom window of her three-room apartment on the fifth floor of the Starhope Hotel, 995 Fifth Avenue. Her body was found in its pajamas in an areaway.”

Kiki was the widow of a bankrupted investment banker, a lover of Rudolph Valentino, and the alleged mother of a child with Prince George, Duke of Kent, fourth son of King George V. Her story is covered in James Fox’s book White Mischief.

The last mention of Erskine, two years later:

Well, hell. Here I was looking for distractions, and hoping to provide some, and suddenly we’re 18 minutes into a boozy ramble knee-deep in desperate lives, with a corpse in pajamas to boot. And in an areaway, whatever that is.

Sorry. To make up for this, here’s yet another Boulevardier recipe, plagiarized directly from somewhere on the Internet. I forget where. Probably the New Yorker or the NYT.

Boulevardier

Ingredients

2 oz. bourbon or rye
1 oz. Campari
1 oz. sweet vermouth, such as Carpano Antica
A strip of lemon or orange zest, for garnish

Instructions

Fill a mixing glass with ice. Pour ingredients over ice and stir together. Strain into a martini glass or coupe, or into a rocks glass with ice. Twist the citrus zest over the drink, then drop it in.

Bottoms up.

Thanks for reading.

No more subscription beg. Instead, follow your heart. Send money here.

Ta.

1.

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. — James Joyce, Ulysses

I think we all agree, when it comes to food, there is delicious, there is “meh”, and there is disgusting. What we don’t agree on, however, is which is which. One person’s marmite, for example, is another person’s durian. Your stinky tofu, my goat’s head taco. Leo Bloom’s fried hencods’ roes, Gwyneth Paltrow’s intravenously injected phosphatidylcholine. My toasted peanut butter, tomato, mayonnaise, hot sauce, and freshly ground black pepper sandwich— your morning glass of Mongolian sheep eyeball juice. And so on.

Then there’s the moral form of disgust. Live monkey brains. Farmed salmon. GMO corn. Foie gras from force-fed geese. Anally ingested ozone (Gwyneth again). Cow. Lamb. Pig. Chicken. Lobster. Carrots.

William: And, ahm: what exactly is a fruitarian?

Keziah: We believe that fruits and vegetables have feelings, so we think cooking is cruel. We only eat things that have already fallen off a tree or bush—that are, in fact, dead already.

William: Oh, all right. Interesting stuff. So, these carrots...

Keziah: Have been murdered, yes.

William: Murdered? Poor carrots. How beastly!1

Full disclosure: I eat or have eaten—more often than not with the above-cited Leopold Bloomian relish (which, btw, is a great name for a condiment)—almost every foodstuff listed so far, from giblets through gizzards past tripes, liver, kidneys, all the way to the poor, murdered carrots at the tail end, which I eat raw. Or roasted. Or pan-fried to perfection in a curry carotte à l’Alain Passard. Be they alive or be they dead, I grind them up to make my bread. Including those I personally rip screaming from their beds by the roots.

The only things on that list I haven’t yet devoured, besides the Gwyneth Paltrow Goop® goop, are the monkey brains and the Mongolian sheep eyeball juice.

I will not be catheterising Gwyneth-recommended fluids into my veins any time soon. Should I find myself at a breakfast buffet in Ulaanbaatar, however, I might try the sheep peeper special. Should there or elsewhere I be offered a monkey’s seat of emotion and self-awareness, alive or dead, I’ll probably pass.

That said, I have eaten more than my fair share of animalic cerebra. Calf, sheep, rabbit, fish, shrimp, prawn, duck, certainly, unaware, no shortage of random bugs’ brains, and probably a few others I’m forgetting.

Like Leo Bloom, tail to snout, inside and out, I’ve noshed on pretty much every masticable bit of conventional table beast there is.

I’m not proud of this. Just stating it as fact. And I accept that my days of indiscriminately consuming many of these meats are numbered. And should be. Cows and their calves, sheep and their lambs, we should not eat be eating these. As species, bovines and ovines should be left off our plates, no longer domesticated, and allowed to achieve their full and final extinction.

Fish, too. Shellfish, three. Pigs, four. Chickens and ducks, five and six. Hell, all of it. The whole nine (barn)yards. Except for the bugs. Which leads to today’s subject. But before we get to it, a word or two from my sphincter sponsor.

2.

First, some science.

You’ve no doubt heard by now about the microbiome, the “community” of microorganisms—fungi, bacteria, viruses, archaea, algae, phages, plasmids, eukaryotes and other protists, specialized metabolites, and toxins—that live and exist together in any given habitat.

In us, by which I mean in the most current and inclusive assignations of us — men, women, children, and every existing anthropoidal-identifying form between and beyond — the term microbiome is used to describe the microbial mix that lives in or on our skin, mammary glands, seminal fluid, uterus, ovarian follicles, lung, saliva, oral mucosa, conjunctiva, biliary tract, and gastrointestinal tract.

Today, we’re going to focus on the one near the end of the pipe of that last one, the GI tract, the alimentary canal of the digestive system leading from our mouths to our butts.

Behold, above, our “theatre of activity”, with most of its proscenium arch obscured by the Greater Omentum, which is not the code of silence of the Sicilian diaspora, nor the nether regions of the Later Roman Empire, but the larger of the two pinafore-like folds of visceral peritoneum surrounding our guts. Known as the epiploon, from the Greek epipleein, meaning to float or sail on, in this case, not Homer’s wine-dark sea, but the gloopy surfaces of our intestines. They’re what you first see when you open the abdominal cavity (Don’t try this at home). The greater one hangs down and extends over the long bulging border of your stomach, passes in front of your small intestines, doubles back and climbs the transverse colon before reaching the backside of your abdominal wall. The lesser omentum, which we’re not interested in here, but which I’ll gross you out with anyway, hangs down from your liver to the lesser curvature (curvatura ventriculi minor) between your cardiac and pyloric orifices, forming your stomach’s right-side border, and housing your hepatic artery proper, common bile duct (as opposed to the uncommon bile duct, which last time I checked was located just inside RFK Jr’s windpipe), portal vein, lymphatics, and hepatic plexus of nerves.

The greater omentum is often harvested, either for medical purposes—to rebuild the thoracic wall, reinforce bioengineered tissues during cardiac regeneration surgery, or provide revascularization of brain tissue after a stroke—or for making sausages, faggots and meatballs.

Okay so far? There will be a test at the end.

3.

Eat shit and die thrive!

Okay, back to the microbiome, and to something that sounds like it’s right up Gwyneth’s “alley”—vaginal seeding.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the microbes and their mates living in our entrails play essential roles in our immunity and development. It is more recently acknowledged that babies not vaginally born, but by caesarean section, don't get the same measure of their mother’s microbial richesse, and are thus more at risk of developing disorders such as asthma and allergies. This is because, at the moment of vaginal launch from the mothership, babies receive a mouthful of vaginal flora—and a shit sandwich—when they pass the perineum, the area around the vulva and anus. Babies have no bacteria in their large intestines when they are born. New-ish studies suggest that feeding C-section infants, who only get microbes from their mother’s skin, a small amount of their mothers’ stool and vaginal fluids, will replenish their gut microbiome. This, it is suggested, will give them access to the unique B. infantis bacteria, and their immune systems a kickstart.

There’s a ton of literature out there on this. So I’m not going to provide any links (as most of you are reluctant to click on links) except this one here.

Vaginal seeding is just the latest in fecal microbiato transplantation (FMT) research. Veterinarians have practiced “transfaunation,” a treatment for ruminating animals in which stomach microorganisms are transferred from healthy donor animals to sick animals, since the 16th century.

Fecal transplantation in humans, also called stool transplant, involves putting healthy donor faeces into a recipient’s colon. It is usually performed by colonoscopy. In the first recorded case of it, however, in China in the 4th century, it was served as a soup. As it was in the second recorded case, 1,200 years later:

The influential 16^th century Chinese physician, herbalist, and acupuncturist, Li Shizhen, used “yellow soup,” “golden syrup,” and other remedies containing fresh, dried, or fermented stool to treat abdominal diseases.—Henning Gerke, “Whats the lowdown on ‘fecal transplantation’?”, Health at Iowa, 2014.

Don’t try this at home, either.

4.

“Rectum? Damn near ate one!”

Do, however, try this:

Sorry. That does not look appetizing. How about this then:

Served with a mustard sauce on a bed of golden fries, with a crusty baguette, a small green salad, and a glass of Beaujolais, Chablis or Champagne. Yum, right? What’s not to like?

Ask Mr Stanley Tucci, actor, TV food dude, and author of Taste: My Life Through Food:

We were driving the next day to go up to Paris to continue promoting the film. And as we were driving up, we stopped at a place for lunch. We're looking at the menu, it was with Meryl (Streep) and her brother and a couple of other people, and we see on the menu, andouillette. I said, ‘Well, what is andouillette?’ And Meryl said, ‘Oh yes, andouillette. Well, I've never had andouillette, have you?’ ‘No, I've never had andouillette.’ ‘Well, I love andouille sausage.’ ‘Me too.’ ‘So I guess it's just like… smaller… because of the ette.’ — “An Unforgettable Meal with Stanley Tucci”

Ok, by “andouille” here Mr Tucci means the most common form of American andouille, the Louisiana Cajun version, which is a rather benign, double-smoked sausage made with pork, garlic, pepper, onions, wine, and seasonings. He doesn’t mean the original French version, a large-bored and odoriferous sausage made of pig (or veal) chitterlings, tripe, (and, often, the animal’s entire GI tract), onions, wine, and seasoning. Nor does he mean the country Cajuns’ version made west of Lafayette, Louisiana from pig intestines seasoned with salt and cayenne pepper, soaked overnight in water and vinegar, rinsed well, stuffed one into another lengthwise, cut and tied into long links with string and hung for a spell in a smokehouse.

Nor does he mean “andouille” as it is used in French argot—to indicate a fool, imbecile or idiot.2

Here, what Mr Tucci is describing that he, Mrs Streep and their Julie and Julia party are sitting down to, is the French andouillette, the pale-grey, dead-penis-like thing cross-sectioned in the photo above, which indeed does literally mean “little andouille”. Except it isn’t so little.

We had our appetizers, and we were, you know, having wine. And they bring out this thing that looked like… a horse cock. I'll say it again, a horse cock. And, and I was like, ‘What the fuck is that?’ And Meryl, I looked at her and she was like, ‘It’s hardly ette’… So, so I, I went and… (mimes putting forkful of andouillette in his mouth, shudders and moans painfully). I mean, it was horrifying. I looked at her and she was doing the same thing, putting it in, and she went, ‘Ooh’. And I was like, ‘Wow. What is that?’ And she said, ‘I don't know’. I said, ‘That's awful’. And she said, ‘Yes, it does have a bit of the barnyard about it.’ —“An Unforgettable Meal with Stanley Tucci”

Okay. But. This is a classic error of sensory perception, first pointed out by Plato in his cave, and reaffirmed by Berkeley, Kant and Hegel. You can’t always trust your senses. Put another way, you have to get past the smell, Stanley, and put on your big-boy bib. If you’re a meat eater, the taste of an andouillette, especially paired with the mustard, frites, salad and Beaujolais, Chablis or Champagne, is incontestably exquisite. Do you not eat stinky cheese? Are you afraid of Camembert? Roquefort? Gorgonzola? Casu marzu? Stinky tofu? Kimchi? Caldo gallego? Boiled eggs? Black pudding? Haggis? White pepper? Durian? Fritti misti? Natto? Natural wine? Gwyneth’s This Tastes Like My Vagina chocolates? Then, well, jeesh, you’re really missing out.

It's basically offal. Wrapped in offal, but it's not like really cooked. It's not, it's just seasoned and cleaned. Maybe it steamed. I don't know. I don't know. They say like, ‘Andouillette, you're such a fool. How could you not, not like andouillette. It's amazing.’ And you're like, ‘It's fucking disgusting!’ . . I think, I think it is the reason Brexit really happened. “An Unforgettable Meal with Stanley Tucci”

Not really cooked?! The pork or veal meat in your andouilllette was raw when it was put in its casing, but it had been thrice washed before that, then, for a day or two, immersed in wine, marc de champagne, Armagnac or cognac, chopped onions, shallots and herbs, mustard, and spices. Then poached for as many as five hours in a court bouillon. Then, I hope, in the restaurant kitchen, it was grilled. Or at least pan-fried. To perfection! Yours was steamed…?! Where the hell was this restaurant?! How did you choose it??! Please, Stanley, next time, don’t be an andouille, give me a call.

Oh, and Brexit. The argument can be made that, yes, 51.89% of the UK population voted to leave the European Union in part because of a sausage. But not the andouillette. The British banger. Going back to the early 1990s, many Brits feared regulatory overreach by Brussels — that higher EU food processing standards would outlaw British sausages which, traditionally (or at least since meat rationing days during WWII) are bulked up with water and filler (breadcrumbs etc., sometimes as much as 90%). Boris and the Brexiters made those fears sizzle.

The higher water content, btw, is why they’re called “bangers”: when the water in them turns to steam, they often explode in the frying pan.

5.

Politics is like andouillette, it has to smell a bit like shit, but not too much. — Edouard Herriot, former French Assembly deputy for Troyes, home of the most reputed andouillette.

Okay, so much more to say, but I’m getting hungry, and I’m on holiday, and the Breton sun is finally out after a solid week of rain and gale-force winds. Let me just end by adding a link (sorry).

The Association Amicale des Amateurs d'Authentic Andouillettes, often called "5A", created in the early 1960s, awards the "AAAAA" diploma (valid for two years) to butchers who produce andouillettes judged by its jury (of 5) to be of the highest quality. This diploma is mainly granted to “Troyes”-type andouillettes but is not reserved for “pure pork”. (In the past, veal andouillettes were more common, and many still use veal exclusively, especially in Auvergne, Cambrésis and Lyonnais-Beaujolais.)

Andouillettes do not have Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status or appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC) certification. The best ones, however, have the AAAAA diploma. Insist on it. Also, the mention that the sausage was hand-assembled: “fabriqué à la main” and/or “tirée à la ficelle”.

This “string” method, probably less common than many articles suggest, involves tying together the ends of meat cut into strips and pulling them through the gut intended to contain them. It requires expertise and availability, and in no case does it allow for profitable mass production (generally a few dozen andouillettes a week, exceptionally a few hundred with a small-trained team, as mechanisation of this process is impossible). It's by opening an andouillette or a large portion of andouillette lengthways that you can check whether it has been pulled "à la ficelle" (or "à la corde", as they say in Vouvray): the layout is tidier, more stretched out, more regular. — Wikipedia (French)

One last thing. Actually, one last greater thing, the Greater Omentum, that apron-like flappy fold around your gutbucket. I’d forgotten I’d written about it at length above, and now I can’t remember why.

I’d like to use it just the same to wrap this up, as it were. The young bovine version, fraise de veau, which we call calf’s caul or ruffle, is a key ingredient of all veal andouillettes. Low in fat, with low lipid content, it is rich in good quality protein, contains essential amino acids, and is an excellent source of vitamins and iron.

And for 15 years, from 2000 to 2015, it was banned in France, because of BSE, aka mad-cow disease.

But that’s a story for another time.

O my fine andouillette.
Surely your cosy skin
Runs a grave peril.
For you, round girl,
I’d smash apart a barrel.
Hisses, bursts and tears,
My Princess of Troyes,
With a streaked black side.
My appetite keeps you
In a mustard tomb
From Maille or Vert-Pré.
-Charles Monselet, "Sonnet to Andouillette", Le Plaisir et l'amour, 1865 

Comments

1. Have I made my “case”? Did you get the “caul”? Is the proof in the poo-ding?

2. Have you ever had an andouillette? Is Mr Tucci right? Is it “fucking disgusting”? Or is he an andouille? Don’t get me wrong. I loved him in Big Night and I love him as an actor. As a food dude, I’m not so sure. In his book, he describes a restaurant in my hometown as one of his favourites in the world. I’ve eaten there. It’s a “meh” at best. “My friend X, the generous genius,” he writes, “his expert use of the sous-vide method of cooking alone, especially twenty years ago when he first opened, sets him apart from so many chefs, as does his ability to integrate Asian flavors and techniques into Italian dishes.” To which my friend, Hanzhou, who I’ve written about here and there, and who is also from my hometown (and is FINALLY opening his own restaurant in Paris!) says, “WTF? This Stanley guy sounds shite.”

3. What foods disgust you? What food gets a “bum” deal?

4. Have you ever looked in Gwyneth Paltrow’s fridge?

5. When people say something “tastes like shit”, how do they know? Unless…

6. What should I write about next week?

Thanks for reading!

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Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris; Japanese: パリ症候群, romanized: Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of extreme disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock. – Wikipedia

When Lei Saito decided to leave her native Tokyo to study art history in Paris, she enrolled at the University of Paris-Nanterre. It was not what she expected. Not even close. She thought she would be attending something like the Sorbonne–

Instead, she got this –

In a 2017 interview Saito described how her “dream” of Paris met the shattering reality of the American-modelled Nanterre campus. “The university contrasted so much with the image I had of the Parisian university - beautiful, historical and welcoming - that I quickly gave up the idea of studying there. However, every morning, I would get up, take the RER and stop at the Nanterre-University stop, before changing platforms to return to Paris. It was probably to ease my conscience. So, instead I spent my days flaneuring around, visiting museums, art galleries and the different districts of the city. One day, while walking around, I came across the École des Beaux-Arts. I immediately wanted to spend my days there.”

The Beaux-Arts fit the bill. Founded in 1648 by Charles Le Brun, housed principally in stately structures built in 1830 by Félix Duban, on rue Bonaparte in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, just across the Seine from the Louvre… Saito applied and was accepted, joining the studio of Annette Messager, thus sidestepping the more dire symptoms of the Paris syndrome, which Wikipedia nicely lays out as: “acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, hostility from others), derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, as well as psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating most notably, but also others, such as vomiting.”

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Instead, Saito focussed on making art – photography, drawings, sculptures, engravings, installations, and, especially, food, reconfigured into what she calls “Cuisine Existentielle”.

Bigger picture: This was in 2004, at one of the many apogees of a cultural moment during which, for the first time since World War II, the city of Paris was reasserting its position as an important art centre. Several factors were at work: the relaxing of France’s auction regulations, which finally allowed foreign (though French-owned) Sotheby’s and Christie’s to open offices in Paris. The local commissaires priseurs of Maison Drouot, for centuries the only public auctioneers allowed to operate in France, were forced to become competitive. Even more so when, in 2002, the Artcurial gallery on the Champs-Élysées was converted into a very successful auction house. In 2006, FIAC, the city’s biggest art fair moved back into the Grand Palais, increased its roster of gallery stands and became a genuine rival of London’s annual Frieze.

Other motors: the explosive growth of the luxury and high-end fashion industries, most of which is Paris-based; the fusion of fashion and art creation and celebrity; and the subsequent collector battle waged between those industries’ two biggest magnates, Bernard Arnault and François Pinault.

The resurgence wasn't just materialistic: it also had intellectual and experiential elements. Dominant among these was the growing cluster and clout of the “relational aesthetics” movement coalescing around the French curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud, who co-founded the giant Paris art “laboratory”, the Palais de Tokyo, in 2000. Bourriaud, and to an even greater, global extent the Swiss art curator, critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, championed French artists like Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, with varying degrees of participation by elsewhere artists like Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Carsten Höller, Jorge Pardo, Gabriel Orozco, Douglas Gordon, Henry Bond, Vanessa Beecroft, and, especially, for the purposes of this post, Rirkrit Tiravanija. 

Especially because, like Saito, Tiravanija, a Thai contemporary artist born in Buenos Aires who works in New York City, Berlin, and Chiangmai, Thailand, often uses food and its preparations in his art installations. Among his best-known works is one of his first, pad thai (1990), at the Paula Allen Gallery in New York, where he left the walls bare and filled the bowls of gallery-goers with his own cooking.

Oft repeated in different forms and flavours, Tiravanija’s installations were the clearest expressions of the relational art concept: bring people together by making art that brings people together. Not the encounter of an audience and an object in a private white cube but of a community and artist-curator catalysts in a public space – interactive, ephemeral, user-friendly, DIY encounters highlighting human relations and social contexts – how we live and act collectively.

It’s a simple enough idea and not new: The Futurists held art banquets, as did the Surrealists. And Fluxus artists like Dieter Roth and Alison Knowles played with their food, as did Daniel Spoerri.

Saito’s recipe, however, is different.

Her work riffs off art and cultural history in unexpected and idiosyncratic ways. Greek mythology, Renaissance paintings, the Marquis de Sade. ‘Decapitated’ pastries dripping raspberry coulis for a Bastille Day party at the Palais de Tokyo. Primordial soup. A black and white landscape created from 30 kg of ash-covered goat cheese, flattened in a few hours by devouring attendees of Nuit Blanche in a secret park in the Marais (where, coincidentally, tomorrow’s Hexagon Paris Wine Walk starts).

But the compositions are not compendiums of puns. They are far richer than the sum of their references. And like the works of relational artists before her, they are transactional in novel ways; they create interactions between people, make them participate in, if not the creation of the works, at least their activation. And destruction.

Where they differ from the relational gang is this: they aspire to be “conceptual” but more than anything, to a more traditional, aesthetic concern – to be “beautiful”. And of course, delish. They are as much about their flavours and textures as they are about their “art”.

From that same interview: “Annette Messager had spoken to me about [Fluxus artist] Robert Filliou. His famous quote ‘Art is what makes life more interesting than art’ has since become a kind of doctrine for me.”

“It reminds me of the Japanese tea ceremony and the concept of "Ichi-go ichi-e", which is to welcome your guests as if it were the last time.”

To get a fuller sense of Saito’s work, have a look at her new book, Cuisine existentielle.

Thank you for reading.

THREE APOLOGIES! First, for the middle finger in the picture above, which many people, including my mother-in-law – especially my mother-in-law! – will find offensive. Sorry, Popo. Second, for this post not being about, despite last week’s Hexagon poll results, “the time a few months back that I had to tell a packed room of angry factory workers why 108 of them were about to lose their jobs.” I was fully prepared to describe this event, but as I was assembling my recollections, a picture formed in my mind of a sheet of paper on a table in a conference room on the main floor of a chain hotel just off an autoroute, and from that sheet the entire scene unfolded like a page in a children’s popup book; and I saw myself among its many complicated plications, standing next to the conference-room table, one of six slack-faced characters lining the wall, the other five businessmen in wrinkled business suits, each flattened to differing degrees by fatigue and stress – it was 7 am – as we listened to a cartoonishly fit, massively tattooed man in full body armour describe how he and his men – a dozen of whom, dressed in riot gear, were lined against the opposite wall – would, in just under two hours, be positioned in offices on the factory’s first and second floors, in bushes around the perimeter, and in black SUVs at the front, back and side entrances.

“If things turn violent,” he said, “and they probably will, as these people are angry, don’t try to engage, just follow us out the door to the extraction point. If the front gate is blocked, we will walk single file, right hands on right shoulders, through the building to the south exit. If that is blocked, we will re-enter and cross the ground floor, exit through the back, cut through a second building, and exit its north end, where cars will be ready to take us back here, or if necessary, directly to the airstrip.”

The room had no windows. It was hidden behind a stand of vending machines in the back corner of the hotel restaurant where, a few minutes earlier, I had eaten a buffet breakfast with four of the slack-faced businessmen. A few minutes before that I had been up in my room looking over my notes, trying to memorise vocabulary, most of it terms I didn’t understand locked within acronyms I had never seen before: RPS (risques psychosociaux); ERP (enterprise resource planning); HCM (human capital management); PLM (product lifecycle management). BE. AOA. FSE. CLC.

I had been told that I would be speaking to the assembled factory workers from a prepared text, but no text was ever prepared. “It will be fine,” one of the suits said. “We’ll keep things simple.”

How, you ask, did I end up in the “A-Team” episode of The Office? Excellent question. “Have you been in situations like this before?” one of the men at breakfast, an Italian in sales, asked. “Or in a war zone?” I explained that when I was a journalist, I mainly covered contemporary art, cinema, food, and fashion, and that the closest I’d been to physical danger was in the standing-room-only media pits of catwalk shows in the 1990s.

It was raining. The dinner the night before had been terrible. The breakfast that morning, worse. I was wearing my most presentable outfit: a camel-coloured wool turtleneck worthy of Steve Jobs; an off-white pair of Levi’s 511s; and a pinstriped suit jacket a friend in costume and wardrobe had given me 15 years before. The jacket’s shoulders were shiny. The turtleneck had two moth holes. The Levi’s had a stain on the left thigh, which, throughout the day, I kept hidden behind a backpack – my son’s, borrowed for the trip.

SRM. KPI. SCM. SKU. CSR. ROI. ROE. ROA. SOL.

I had slept poorly, kept largely conscious through the night by the dawning realisation of the reality slowly moving towards me, which, now, at the moment of the paper on the table in the room, was surging forward at a frightening pace.

“The workers, they’re ready for us,” someone said. “They know what’s coming.” The man who said this had a rough, hoarse voice. The men on the opposite wall cracked their knuckles and fingered their billy clubs.

It was precisely then that someone from HR returned my attention to the piece of paper on the table. “C’est un NDA,” he said. A nondisclosure agreement. An acronym I actually knew. Why do the French call it an NDA instead of an AND – un accord de non divulgation – I asked myself, as I patted my pockets for a pen. The man from HR gave me his. I signed the piece of paper on the table. Which means I won’t be describing anything else that happened in Lisieux, on the thirteenth of October, from this point, or, rather, that point, forward.

This does not mean I will therefore be writing about the roundly rejected second option in last week’s Hexagon poll, my weekend-long wine-research road trip to La Dive Bouteille in Saumur, the world’s largest annual natural wine exposition, and the almost-as-big Greniers Saint Jean Salon des Vins Naturel in Angers.

Only 8% of you expressed interest in going down that road. So not a word then here about carbonic maceration or biodynamics or the more than 200 winemakers we met, the grapes they grow, the glasses they poured, the mouthfuls of white, red, rosé, and orange wines from France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Serbia, Georgia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, England, Denmark, and America that we swirled and spat or, later in the day, gratefully swallowed. Not a word. Except these, from François Rabelais, who, in 1552 or so, just before he retired from the curacy and went to Paris to die, wrote The Fifth and Last Book of the Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Good Pantagruel, which included this poem from whence Saumur’s La Dive Bouteille took its name:

Back to the middle finger, aka digitus impudicus, which, coincidentally, Rabelais, in the second book – The Very Horrific Life of Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel – gives an early description of its usage:

Panurge, without saying a word, raised his hands and made this sign: with his left hand he joined the nail of the index finger to the nail of the thumb, making a loop in the middle; then he squeezed all the fingers of his right hand into his fist, except the index finger, which he thrust repeatedly in and out of the loop composed of the two above-mentioned fingers of the left hand.

This occurs during a scholarly debate argued by means of obscene gestures between Pantagruel’s friend Panurge and the English pedant Thaumaste, who, after Panurge’s digital rebuttal:

with great toil and vexation of spirit, rose up, but in rising let out a great baker's fart, for the bran came after, and pissing withal very strong vinegar, stunk like all the devils in hell. The company began to stop their noses; for he had conskited himself with mere anguish and perplexity. Then lifted he up his right hand, clunching it in such sort that he brought the ends of all his fingers to meet together, and his left hand he laid flat upon his breast. Whereat Panurge drew out his long codpiece with his tuff, and stretched it forth a cubit and a half, holding it in the air with his right hand, and with his left took out his orange, and, casting it up into the air seven times, at the eighth he hid it in the fist of his right hand, holding it steadily up on high, and then began to shake his fair codpiece, showing it to Thaumast. After that, Thaumast began to puff up his two cheeks like a player on a bagpipe, and blew as if he had been to puff up a pig's bladder. Whereupon Panurge put one finger of his left hand in his nockandrow, by some called St. Patrick's hole, and with his mouth sucked in the air, in such a manner as when one eats oysters in the shell, or when we sup up our broth.

“I HAVE, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze.” ― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

The man giving the rigid digit in the picture at the top of this page has appeared in past posts. He is Hanzhou Piao: China-born, Tokyo-raised, a Vancouverite who’s worked in étoilé kitchens across Asia, North America, and Europe, best known for his weekly dumpling deliveries, gargantuesque appetite, and predilection for narcoleptic kips.

His🖕was snapped near the end of shift at his Paris pop-up a few nights ago. A gesture no doubt playfully intended, meant as a joke, but aggressive nonetheless, and I can see how it may offend certain viewers (sorry again, Popo). That said, I find the shot’s date-stamped snappiness deeply satisfying. I especially like its oddly Cezannian proportions and symmetries, the giant egg, the giant finger, the tilted bowl, the weird splattering at the top, the soy sauce in the absolute centre, the movement forward from the ceiling lights and the wall arrow, the plate of grilled onigiri beneath the left elbow, the two, thick-rinded cedrates at the crotch.

In the old world order pictures were said to be worth a thousand words. Nowadays they’re not worth the carbon dioxide – 1,55 grams each – required to post them. This one, however, of HP giving me, you and the world the finger, on a night he also gave us generous portions of puntarelle with caper leaf pistou and trout roe; mushroom chawanmushi; barba di frate with soy, tofu, ginger and bergamot; Japanese-style smashed topinambour salad with hard-boiled egg, cucumber, and katsuobushi; dozens of gyoza; and a beautifully steamed sea bream with ponzu sauce, cébette and coriander, merits a couple of handfuls.

Those above suffice. I want to go somewhere else now. Having been given that initial text as prompt, I will now produce text that continues the prompt through a process of generative pre-training of a language model on a diverse corpus of unlabelled text, followed by discriminative fine-tuning on each specific task.

Words, endless words I've said to serve the moment – now it makes me proud to tell the truth. – Aeschylus

Most talk is bot these days. Words still penned by people gasp and flop about like dying fish on the bottom of a boat. This I think (is) because even human-generated words rarely escape the machines in which they circulate and spawn. This I think (is) because zombie-ant fungus has taken control of my mind. This I think (is) because whole castles have disappeared from my memory, whole cities that I will never visit again, and, like the narrator in The Good Soldier, which I am reading every night for all of three minutes before I drop off, I have forgotten the aspect of many things, but I shall never forget the aspect of that windowless conference room in the Hôtel Mercure Lisieux Normandie, nor the mien of the men lining its walls; les mots cachés dans les acronymes; the billy clubs, the zip ties, the pepper spray; or, on that Wednesday evening in Paris, in an Izakaya on rue Folie-Méricourt, the plates presented; the silky sauces; the good bottles of wine; the good conversations with good friends; the rediscovery of caricatures of those good friends, scratched years before onto the room’s pillars and walls, back when the space was a cave à vin infamous for defying police closures, spilling clientele onto the street, and allegedly bondaging them to hooks screwed into the ceiling.

Have you tried GPT-3.5? I have. Here, however, is a real thought: the manufacture of the laptop I am writing this with required a Ford Ranger pickup worth of dirt to be dug up and mined, and enough litres of water to fill 100 7-seater hot tubs. Just learning this, looking it up, calculating it anew, consumed enough energy to soft boil an egg. And so? And so. Food. Food, good food, still requires minds and hands. Fast food, sure. SpaceX engineers have built a touchless robot that can make a pizza every 45 seconds. But even in today’s rigged and gigged economy, even though I haven’t had a permanent job since 1991, even though I eke out on short-term contracts and freelance work, they can’t force me to deliver it.

Caitlin Corcoran’s photos above were snapped on “Wet My Whistle Wednesday” last week – the first day of Fèvrier mouillè. The restaurant’s regular chef, Sho Miyashita, was off doing a pop-up at a fancy ski resort in Chamonix, so Hanzhou Piao pop-upped in his place. A pop-up because of a pop-up – the restaurant equivalent of Whac-A-Mole.

Used to be only toasters, fly balls, and kids’ books popped up; then it was those little windows of Russian porn that suddenly appeared in upper-right corners of streaming sites. Now it’s everything everywhere all at once. Used to be, too, that we did shit, now shit does us and we happily stick our selfieing faces in it, mugging for our phones like Cheshire cats. These experiences are called Experiences. Sometimes they are Curated. Sometimes they are Extraordinary. Sometimes they’re just stop gaps, because the kitchen can’t find competent staff. Or any staff. And sometimes they’re because the kitchen needs a break. Or because the chefs are playing Whac-A-Chef.

“It started with, ‘How do we remove some of the dreariness of a worker standing at the fryer and frying chip basket after chip basket?’” Chipotle chief technology officer Curt Garner told CNBC earlier this summer. “It allows our crew to spend more time doing culinary tests, serving guests,” he said.

Doing culinary tests, serving guests, and planning pop-ups.

A third of French people say that their work is meaningless. For those under 35 the proportion is one in two. For those working at Chipotle, considerably higher.

In the French private sector, one out of every two workers who hits retirement age is unemployed, unfit or inactive. Last month I hit that age. There is ‘reform’ afoot, and barring precedented cave-ins by the government, that age will be extended by two years, but it won’t be put into effect until 2030.

So I can retire now. Not that I’m in any position to do so. I won’t be eligible for full pension until I’m 75. Even then, I’ll have to supplement it with some other form(s) of income. Which I’m prepared to do. Which I’m doing already.

In more impoverished sectors of the French work force, one in four is dead by 64.

One more thing. Last year, a restaurant opened up the hill that we call the Old People’s Place, because it is run by septuagenarians. With no previous restaurant experience. The food is pretty good. The service is a bit slow. The waiter shuffles from table to table like Tim Conway in The Carol Burnett Show. Look it up millennials, it’s on YouTube.

I mention this because of a paper a reader recently sent me from the Journal of Aging Studies (December 2021), a study of a Chinese reality show, Forget Me Not Café, which “brought together five older people (aged 65 and older) living with dementia to run a pop-up restaurant.”

The study aimed to explore how the reality show cast talk (or write) about dementia in older people…. Four discursive themes were identified, including: age as a risk factor for dementia; early signs and symptoms of dementia in older people; the pressure on the family of people with dementia; and expectations of people living with dementia. The findings of this study show that the views of the reality show cast highlight the capability of older people with dementia to communicate effectively and live with the condition, their personal goals of sustaining a happy, meaningful, and sociable life, and the actions they took to positively influence personal circumstances.

This has got me thinking. Which, at my age, is a good thing. One that I am no longer taking for granted. MOTWYW. Anyhow, my thinking was this: I could work in a restaurant. Something I first did the year Elvis died, in a midway diner at the Pacific National Exhibition, where I made early-morning fry-ups for carnies.

I like cooking. I cook three square most days. I throw two or three dinner parties a week. I’ve cooked professionally in everything from a mining camp to a taco stand. I’ve organised supper clubs. I ran the kitchen of an opera festival for four years. But my last commercial kitchen gig was in the early 1980s. I swore I’d never do it again. Over the years I semi-toyed with the idea of opening a restaurant, but always pulled out before the talk became serious. I like cooking too much to ruin it by turning it into a job. This is what I told myself. Yesterday, however, Hanzhou woke up halfway through our lunch at a middling noodle joint on rue Belleville and said I should work as a private chef. He was doing a lunch today for a fashion designer somewhere. The menu looked interesting. He asked if I wanted to be a server. I said no. I haven’t been a waiter since Lee’s Palace in Toronto in the summer of Chernobyl.

But it, too, got me thinking. He is about to launch his own restaurant. Maybe, a few years down the road, when GPT 10.5 finally pushes me into full-blown obsolescence as a hired hack of the ruling class, I’ll ask HP for a job. Doubtful he’d hire me; he rolls his eyes at my autodidactic kitchen skills. And he’s looking to invest in a machine that makes 600 dumplings an hour.

So that’s probably out. Which leads, finally, to my third apology, for not having posted a Hexagon last Sunday. I wanted to but the wine tasting road trip got in the way, followed by a couple of freelance gigs. Not laying off factory workers this time, editing a this and writing a that. Paying the bills. Pushing back the demon tide of dementia. Keeping the wolf from the door and one doddering, Tim Conway-like step head of GPT.

FYI, GPT, BTW, ICYMI = Generative Pre-trained Transformer. “An autoregressive language model released in 2020 that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.”

FWIW.

The Good Soldier: “You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become. Just as the blacksmith says: 'By hammer and hand all Art doth stand,' just as the baker thinks that all the solar system revolves around his morning delivery of rolls, as the postmaster-general believes that he alone is the preserver of society - and surely, surely, these delusions are necessary to keep us going.”

TL;DR? NVM. TAFN. G2G.

T= talk

T= to

Y= you

L= later

Thx.

And sorry again, Popo.

At a dinner party recently the hostess, a clown, not a “bit of a clown” but a real live professional clown with giant shoes and a red nose and 130 more clowns behind her, not tumbling headfirst out of a tiny car in a circus tent but in an association called Le Rire médecin, which she founded in 1991 and which, last year, organised 90,000 bedside shows for sick kids in 60 paediatric wards in France, and which is soon to be the subject of a major motion picture – shooting starts in April, the script is based on her book, and the director is the César-winning actor Reda Kateb (Engrenages, Un prophète, Zero Dark Thirty, L’Amour flou) – anyway, this good clown, an old friend who I admire immensely, invited C. and I to dinner in Bagnolet the other night – she’s a superb cook – and within minutes of our entering the lovely apartment she shares with her husband, a ceramic artist (I’ll deal with him later), openly and very derisively mocked me, not once but twice, and not playfully, not clownishly, but with genuine sneering, scornful contempt.

For two very good reasons:

1) after presenting her with a bottle of Vin Noé “Gueule d'Amour” Bourgogne Pinot Noir by Jonathan Purcell (named one of the “Ten Natural Wine Fascinations of 2022” by Aaron Ayscough in his essential Substack Not Drinking Poison), I then sheepishly pulled out a second bottle – labelled “Zero” and filled with de-alcoholised “wine” – and told her, knowing full well how she would react, that I would only be drinking from it that evening as I was “doing Dry January”, to which, as expected, she rolled her eyes and said, witheringly, “Jesus H. Harvey, you gonna grow a moustache in November, too?”;

2) after she pulled a perfectly roasted guinea fowl out of the oven, and after a guest then announced he had become a vegan (“Green beans for you, then, mate”), I blurted out that I had just bought a Sage Smart Oven Air Fryer, and she looked at me as if I was wearing a wet turd on the top of my head and said, “Oh Jesus H. Really? An air fryer? We don’t associate with people who have air fryers.”

I fully concur with the sentiments expressed in both 1) and 2).

In my defence, my Dry January is nothing new. I didn’t just jump on the on-the-wagon wagon. I’ve been dry every January since 2018.

Why? Because I really like wine. A lot. I find it infinitely interesting, and, of course, intoxicating, and, breakfast aside, I find it very hard not to have a glass or three while enjoying a good meal. Or even a mediocre meal. But once a year, I need to show myself that I can go without. Not just for a day or two. For a week, and then another, and then two more.

C. is especially disdainful of this “need”. “Why do you have to be so extreme in everything? Just drink less.” A perfectly rational position from a perfectly rational person, who for some reason married a chronically irrational and compulsive tippler already at that time (28 years ago!) rounding the bend(er) of the Jellinek Curve. So maybe not so rational after all.

Have I missed my wine this month? Not really. Do I notice any significant difference between my January self and my other-eleven-month self? Not really. Am I pleased with myself for having done without? Yes. Will I grow a moustache in November? No.

As for 2). The air fryer. Indefensible. Here I am pure dupe, victim of the hype, pushed toward its purchase by the beatific vision of fat-free frites. Which, so far, I am incapable of even coming close to producing. The Sage’s convection oven itself is indeed “smart”, much faster than firing up my giant Aga, and it will dramatically reduce our electricity bill, which quadrupled last month. So I’m happy with that. And I’m still experimenting with the air-frying component, trying different frites recipes (baking soda? Bleh!) and open to all suggestions. If anyone out there has figured out the frites, please let me know.

Ok, all this to say that January is all but done, and to mark its passing, Hexagon is holding its first annual Damp February Wine Tasting (DFWT).

The DFWT on 18 February will showcase European natural wines made with grape varietals that were once – or still are – part of the vignoble of Paris. As discussed in these pages a few months back, the Romans planted grape vines here in the 4th century BCE. By the time of the French Revolution, the entire region contained between 42,000 and 45,000 hectares of vines, making it the biggest wine-producing region in the world.

At various times over the centuries, Pinot Noir, Pinot Beurot, Sémillon, Gamay, Sauvignon Blanc, Savagnin (and its cousin Fromental), Chardonnay, Grenache, Noah and Baco were all grown here.

Our ambitious plan is to track down, using Aaron’s definitive bestseller, The World of Natural Wine, and the unparalleled expertise of Paris Wine Walks, the best European exemplars of wine made from these varietals, be they French, Italian, Portuguese or what have you, and present them to you during a Paris vineyard walk and cave crawl in one of the city’s heritage wine regions.

The wines will be chosen during next weekend’s road trip to La Dive Bouteille in Saumur, the world’s largest annual natural wine exposition, and the almost-as-big Greniers Saint Jean Salon des Vins Naturel in Angers.

Where will the tasting be held? That depends on the number of participants. Response so far has been incredibly enthusiastic – seems there are a lot of people here ready to dampen their spirits. Now I’m opening it up to Hexagon paid subscribers and subscription gifters who live in Paris or the Paris region or are planning to be in Paris that weekend, or are well-pocketed, flexible and foolhardy enough to consider dropping everything, packing a bag, and heading straight over.

How to book? Send me a comment or DM my IG (can’t believe I just wrote that – I can hear Dr Giraffe’s eyes roll all the way from here).

Oh. The ceramics artist. Patrick Loughran, whose clay sculpture/object assemblages combine pretty much every aspect of ceramic expression and tradition – utilitarian, figurative, architectural – with a complex appreciation of the laws of organic and evolutionary biology, geology, botany, and fluid mechanics, and a jazz connoisseur’s deep devotion to improvisation. They are among the most intensely condensed, colourful and surprising artworks I have ever laid eyes on.

See for yourself – that’s one at the top of the page. From 12 March to 24 April his works will be showcased at the CRMCS#3 biennial exhibition of contemporary ceramics at Galerie Zwart Huis in Brussels. In April and May he will be at the Woodman Foundation’s new artist’s residency in Florence. This summer he has a show at Nendo Galerie in Marseille.

Thanks for reading. Hope to see slightly blurred double-vision versions of some of you Saturday, 18 February. And of course next week when our subject will either be: the upcoming Loire Valley wine tour; or the time a few months back that I had to tell a packed room of angry factory workers in Normandy why 108 of them were about to lose their jobs.

I’ll let you choose.

I’ve never been much of a horse person. I find them noble and all that, and I like the smell of their shit – when it’s dry and mixed with stable hay or in a country field, not the fresh wet plops – but they play no significant role in my life. I haven’t been on one since I was twelve. The only time I see them – or think about them – is when I bet on them.

Or at a gilets jaunes street protest.

I’m particularly wary of police horses. This dates to my childhood: when I was five my parents took me to Stanley Park, and while standing outside the Third Beach concession a Canadian Mountie’s horse kicked me in the head. A glancing blow, no doubt permanently damaging but not life-threatening. And entirely my fault: I was in the no-go zone behind the horse’s hind hooves, admiring its backside, nose close, and not offering it any of my creamsicle.

I probably would have kicked me in the head, too.

So, no, not a horse person. On occasion, however, I will eat one. Or rather, small pieces of one. The first of these were just as memorable as anything Proust ever got down him: three tender slices of tongue in a delicious mushroom cream sauce, served to me on the first night of my first European tour – a high-school rugby trip – by the rugby coach’s wife in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Laffitte, in 1977.

I had gone to market with the coach’s wife earlier in the day. Maisons-Laffitte is an affluent community, known as the “cité du cheval” because of its horse breeding and racetrack. It is also, I have just learned, the birthplace of the poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic Jean Cocteau, the actress Emma Watson, and the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

The covered market in the centre of town was unlike anything I’d ever seen, filled with delectables I couldn’t identify – so many dizzying heaps, piles and towers of fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, sausages, cheese, birds, breads and pastries that I was overcome by the same admiration and disbelief that Boris Yeltsin must have felt 12 years later, during his unscheduled 20-minute visit to a Randall's in Texas, when he saw the supermarket’s frozen food section.

Did Madame Entraîneur know in advance that she would be cooking a horse’s tongue that night? No idea. Nor did I know at the time that she was buying a horse’s tongue, even though I’m sure the butcher shop we were in was a boucherie chevaline, with a sign on its facade like the one below.

In my defence I was jet-lagged. And 17. And as yet untouched by the French language, much to le chagrin of Mesdames Graham (Grade 8), Parker (Grade 9) and Labbé (Grade 10).

“Langue,” said Madame Entraîneur during dinner that evening, after I polished off everything on my plate and made a mangled attempt to compliment her cuisine. “Du cheval.”

I had no idea what she was trying to tell me. Something to do with long hair?

“Cheveux?” I said, pulling at a few strands of my hockey mullet.

“Cheval,” she repeated, and her 12-year-old daughter – who like every other member of the family lit up a Gitane cigarette after each of the meal’s four courses – made a very convincing whinnying sound.

Cheval. Horse. Of course. Wow. Weird.

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I was unaware that eating horse was a thing. Which it very much was and is. Not in Anglo Saxon countries, except by mistake or scam. But almost everywhere else.

In France, horse has graced plates since the Revolution. Napoleon, following the example of the Roman legions, fed it to his Grand Army. At Aspern-Essling in 1809, his first personal defeat, he instructed his army surgeon to cook horse bouillon on the breastplates of fallen cuirassiers, season it with gunpowder, and feed it to the wounded.

Horse meat consumption spiked during the siege of Paris in 1870, when the city’s starving citizens ate around 70,000, along with every available rat, cat, dog and all the city zoo animals, including its bears, elephants, and giraffes.

Hippophagy – the practice of eating horse meat – peaked in France around the turn of the century, when there were more than 300 chevalines and 200 horse meat market stalls in Paris. Those numbers have since decreased. In 2005 there were over a 1,000 horse butchers in France. By 2019 there were only 304. The reasons: as elsewhere, concern about health, animal welfare and climate change has resulted in French people, especially young French people, eating less meat.

Overall meat consumption has dropped 12% in the last decade (horse meat consumption goes down each year at a rate of around 12%).

The meat the French still eat is not the same, either. Because, apparently, most French people don’t like to cook, and when they have to they try to do so as quickly as possible. So they use more quick-prep stuff like minced beef and lardon chunks. They’re also less likely to eat game, offal, and horse, because, well, eating game, offal, and horse is weird. Especially horse. Why? Horses are Olympic athletes. They have special relationships with socially advantaged young girls. They don’t work in fields. They race around tracks for enormous amounts of money.

Hence, fewer chevaline butchers, which means higher prices for horse meat - the average price is around 18.50 euros a kilo, making it the second most expensive meat in France, only surpassed by veal. So, even those who like horse meat, are less likely, or able, to eat it.

To counter this trend, France has upped its exportation of live horses for slaughter. Mostly to Italy, some to Spain — the top two consumers of horse meat in Europe — the rest to Japan, the world’s second biggest horse eater, second to China.

The biggest shipper of meat horses is my home country, Canada – Alberta, mostly – which ships off thousands every year. The conditions, by most reports, are “sinister”. Canada also slaughters 25,000 horses each year for meat, which it freezes and ships. Some of the meat stays in Canada – horse meat is still a thing in Quebec – but most goes to Japan and France.

France. This is the weird bit: almost all the horse meat consumed in France is imported; and almost all the horse meat butchered in France is exported. Can anyone out there explain why? I spent a bunch of time recently researching global supply chains for an OECD podcast I hosted, but these sorts of dynamics didn’t come up. Is it price? Is it because French consumers prefer red horse meat, i.e., meat from an adult animal, and not pink foal meat, from horses less than two years of age, which is preferred in Japan? Anyone?

Ok, don’t know about you, but this subject is starting to make me feel a little queasy. No, that’s a lie. I’ve been feeling a little queasy ever since midnight last Monday, when, having slipped out of a side angle of the Hexagon for a three-day "Tutto Banger Niente Filler" tour of Italy, I found myself at a table in a late-night restaurant in Sicily that specialises in horse meat. And that’s why I’m here now, queasily reliving my first French dish and every bit of horse consumed since, and all of it now fodder for this piece.

The trip, a birthday present from two amazing but crazy friends, took us to many of the best restaurants and wine bars in Catania, Palermo, Rome, Bologna and Milan (become a paid subscriber and I’ll send you a list today!). It was a somewhat carbon-heavy indulgence (flight from to Catania, flight from Palermo to Rome) with more aperativos, full-menu-plus-everything-on-the-blackboard meals, and digestivos in three days than any sane person would attempt to consume in… two weeks? A month? A lifetime? In our defence, none of us drives a car, we took trains for the most part, and two of us went on three-day penitential purges immediately after (the third of our party, an absurdly big eater whose prodigious appetite has been described here before (and is profiled here in the Financial Times) just kept chewing and powered through).

At the Catania restaurant, one of nine in the city specialising in horse meat, we came upon our undoing: six of the house’s famous polpette di cavallo. Three semplice, three filled with “Philadelphia&Pistacchio”. All flame-scorched on the outside. All barely warm and raw and gristly on the inside.

Warning: the image below contains graphic content that might shock, offend, upset and disgust.

Whoops, too late, there it is.

Most of the balls and the remnants of the balls not on this plate I palmed into my napkin, slipped into the little envelope the cutlery came in, and left on the street outside for the Catanian cats. I doubt they ate them. If they did, I doubt they survived.

The two bites I took – one of each variety, just to be sure – were easily the least agreeable of my life.

I don’t care if it was my first French dish - my madeleine - or that it has twice as much iron as steak and around the same amount of omega-3 fatty acids as salmon. I don’t care if it’s pink or red, smoked and boiled, wrapped raw in a shiso leaf or cut into steaks and served with perfect frites.

My horse-eating days are done.

Probably.

Hanzhou Piao’s best dish this week was a spicy cod soup cooked on hot stones in a wooden pot at the Quai des Pêcheurs, a Sichuan restaurant on the rue de Clichy. “So, so good,” he told me the next morning during our run. “The broth was incredible. Hot sour chilies and dried chilies with fermented mustard and onions. Lots of fish, lots of vegetables, all cooked at the table behind a bamboo screen that the waiter holds while the broth is poured onto the stones, so you don’t get splattered. Amazing.”

Unfortunately, the photos Hanzhou took made it look like bat sick. So, we’re going instead with his very close second choice, the cep mushroom and scamorza pizza he had a few days before at Le Rigmarole, aka since September and through till some time in February, Pizzamarole. The couple who run it, Robert Compagnon & Jess Yang, had a baby in October and have temporarily given the restaurant over to Dan Pearson, a baker, who, according to Hanzhou, “is making the best pizza in Paris. The dough is all sourdough, it is made every day and slow fermented. The crust is crisp and the right thickness for my taste. A tad heavy on the toppings, but they all have purpose and are tasty.”

Scamorza: according to Wikipedia, the name for this Italian cheese apparently comes from the phrases capa mozza or testa mozzata, both meaning “severed head”. “This would also explain the use of scamorza in regional Italian to mean ‘fool’ or ‘idiot’.”

And now HP tells me he thinks maybe it was just regular mozzarella. Pazzo! Scamorza!

Angle 2

I don’t eat pizza in Paris. For the same reason I don’t eat crepes in Naples, baguettes in New York or blackberries in December. Not because there aren’t perfectly delicious ones available, but because I’m a narrow-minded food snob whose thinking is always inside the box, which is square and flat and filled with the expected things, like pizza, from the accepted places at the appropriate times.

Today at lunch, however, I had a more-than-passable pie at a Neapolitan pizzeria on rue Saint Maur called A Smorfia. It was chosen by my friend, Francesco Geminiani. Francesco is a musician from Verona — yes, yes, Verona, hardly the capital of pizza, but Francesco is exceedingly knowledgeable about food, especially Italian food, and a talented cook, and an even better saxophone player, and he lives across the street from A Smorfia, which is why I went there with him at 12:30 and ordered a Pizza Margherita, the only pizza I will eat (other than a late-night slice of pepperoni in NYC) outside of Naples (where I might, if I’m at, say, L’Antica Pizzeria Da Michele, opt for a Marinara) — because it is right around the corner from the metro we needed to take to Francesco’s 2 o’clock appointment at the Selmer workshop and showroom on rue Marcadet.

Henri Selmer Paris has been making woodwind and brass instruments since 1885. They’re known mainly for their flutes, clarinets, trumpets and, especially, saxophones. Most of the saxophone colossuses played or are playing Selmer sopranos, altos, tenors and baritones: Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Ben Webster, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Wayne Shorter, Sonny Stitt, Eddie Harris, Ornette Coleman, Paul Desmond, Herschel Evans, Zoot Sims, Michael Brecker, Chris Potts, Joshua Redman, Steve Coleman, Melissa Aldana... even Kenny G.

And Francesco Geminiani. For a saxophone player, having an appointment in Selmer’s inner sanctum with Martin Deutsch, Selmer’s saxophone technician and repairer, is like having an audience with the Pope, or going to Mecca and kissing the Black Stone, or to the Temple Mount to — sorry, terrible analogies; let’s just say it’s a big deal. Not an everyday experience. A sign that, as a musician, as a horn player, you have arrived.

Francesco had been invited, as an artist, to have his tenor serviced. A Selmer Mark VI, French-assembled, with butterfly and floral motif engravings right up to the bow. Its serial number is 100XXX, which means it was probably built in 1962, a year after Sonny Rollin’s and Michael Brecker’s, two years before Coleman Hawkins’ last, and three before John Coltrane’s last, the one he bought just before recording A Love Supreme.

Francesco bought his with his father in Lucca 15 years ago, when he was 15. It had been lacquered sometime in the 1980s, but constant playing has blown most of the shine off.

At the workshop, Martin worked on it for just under two hours, conversing quietly with Francesco as he methodically went over every moving part, adjusting keys, changing a resonator, checking the seal of the kangaroo-skin pads on the tone holes.

Five times, he gave it back to Francesco to test in a practice room. Four times, Francesco brought it back for more adjustments. Then it was done. Not perfect, maybe the new resonator that Martin put on a pad gave it a resonating frequency that Francesco might want to have changed, but not before his next break from gigs, which looks like it might not be before February. Unless something else comes up. He’s been busier than ever post-Covid, both as sideman and leader. “Not sure why. Probably because things have opened up again, but I’d like to think it’s because of my playing, which I think is better.” Which I won’t say is true — he’s been my favourite tenor player on the Paris jazz scene (about which I’m preparing a piece for Hexagon) since he first arrived in 2018. But the last time I heard him, at a house concert last Sunday when he sat in for the last two tunes with the alto player Plume (who is playing tonight and tomorrow at the Duc des Lombards with his quartet, featuring the drummer Gregory Hutchinson), it was indeed true that there was something new, not about his sound, which has always been incredible deep and sonorous, but about his collaborative contributions and solos, which I won’t try to describe. “I’m listening in a new way,” he told me on the metro ride to Selmer. “And thinking about all my playing options in my head, before I play, faster and better, and making better choices.”

Before leaving we had a look at some of the display cases, which were filed with a plethora of exotic hornage, including a pickup-and-effects-loaded Varitone tenor from 1967—

— identical to the one Brecker, Stitt and Harris played. The effects control box — tremolo, basic EQ (“bright” and “dark”), simultaneous sub-octaves and echo — was in mint condition, and the horn looked like it had never been played. “It probably hasn’t,” said Martin. “This happens. Someone buys a horn, tries it for three weeks, then puts it in a closet. Sometimes they end up here.”

Francesco said he would send the team tickets to an upcoming concert. He and Martin shook hands. We left.

“That was really good,” said Francesco. Then he shook his head in mild disbelief. “When I was in New York,” — he received a scholarship to the New School in 2011 and lived and played there till December of 2018 — “I had to pay to get my horn fixed. Now that I’m making good money, it’s free.”

I’ll close this with some pictures —

I took some videos of Francesco testing the horn in the practice room, and a bunch of Martin blow-torching keys in the workshop, but they’re all crap. I promise to have much better videos (and photos, audio clips and podcast interviews) for the upcoming piece, which will showcase the links between a dozen or so players from France, New York, Kansas City, Italy and further flung parts of the globe, who have become central nodes of this city’s newly revived, young-audience-attracting, and super-dynamic jazz scene.

Angle 3

Speaking of baguettes, yesterday UNESCO put them on its “intangible heritage of humanity” list, alongside the Aubusson tapestry, perfume-making in Grasse, Alençon needle lace-making, dry stone walling, and Cantu in paghjella, a secular and liturgical oral tradition of Corsica.

Intangible? Surely bread is one of the least intangible objects in our universe. Especially a nice crusty baguette. But it’s not the loaf itself that UNESCO has determined a piece of patrimony worthy of safeguarding. It’s the artisanal savoir-faire involved in its making. Which is why some are unhappy with its appearance on the list: “The inclusion of the baguette in the UNESCO heritage list is an appalling step backwards,” said Steven Kaplan in yesterday’s Le Monde. In the interview, Kaplan, an American (and French bread’s best historian) decried the decision, principally because UNESCO does not make a distinction between "baguettes de tradition" and "baguettes de pain". The first is a relatively new invention, the result of a 1993 government decree that listed the ingredients that can be used in its creation. Or rather, can’t be used— namely, additives that “cheat” on the bread’s taste and texture: “For example, ascorbic acid makes the dough firmer, so vitamin C tablets were used to give the baguette structure! … By highlighting the baguette, without further precision, it distinguishes a savoir-faire rooted in the past. But under this generic term, it also legitimizes the white flour baguette of everyday consumption, which is generally of very mediocre quality. Of the 6 billion baguettes consumed in France each year, there is a gulf between the traditional baguette — golden, crisp, often the result of a long fermentation process — and the white flour baguette — the most widely consumed – which is a paradoxically dull product, lacking in appeal and taste. I understand that the inscription causes jubilation among the French, and why they want to cheer in triumph. But behind it, we must see that it creates terrible confusion between breads that have nothing in common. For me, who has long campaigned for artisanal savoir-faire, this is an appalling regression.”

Meanwhile, bakeries in the Hexagon keep closing at alarming rates, further accelerated of late by the rise in electricity prices. There’s good news too, however: real bread, made with love and levain, is on the rise in France, thanks mainly to a bunch of foreigners.

Angle 4

Where's the beef (from)? This image of highland cows in Moustier-en-Fagne in the north of France is from Camille Labro’s book Fourche & Fourchette (“Pitchfork to Fork”). The caption in the top left corner is a quote by the cows’ breeder, Grégory Delassus: “I know my cows are happy. I can look them in the eye and tell them: you have a beautiful cow's life!”

As I write this, there’s a big pot of beef short ribs simmering on my stove. The aroma, ridiculously good, causes pangs of hunger, but also pangs of guilt. Because of the farted methane, yes, and the wasted water resources, yes, but also because of their provenance. Though I bought them from a reliable butcher, and was told they were French-raised, hormone-free, antibiotic-free, and steroid-free. But were they happy? Could I have looked them in the eye like Grégory, like Grégory’s?

I don’t know. I didn’t ask.

Camille Labro always asks. A long-time food writer for Le Monde, Camille is the goddaughter of farm-to-table pioneer Alice Waters and the director of L’Ecole Comestible (The Edible School), which brings farmers, gardeners, cooks, bakers, and cheesemakers into schoolyards and classrooms around France. I spoke at length with Camille a few months back. You can hear our conversation here.

At least I know the ribs aren’t from any of the Brazilian cows that the four French banks listed below are massively invested in. According to a report released yesterday by 5 NGOs and media outlets, the four banks have put 743 million euros into agribusinesses that are wiping out the Amazon forest. This year, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is at an all-time high, with 9,500 km2 of forest cut down to graze cattle or to plant soya for their fodder. “Between January 2021 and September 2022 alone, BNP Paribas invested nearly EUR 117 million in the activities of several agribusiness giants involved in the deforestation of the Amazon and the Cerrado.” And all four banks have made very public commitments to “no longer finance companies producing or buying beef and soya from land cleared or converted after 2008 in the Amazon.” In the Cerrado, in Brazil, BNP Paribas “encourages its clients not to produce or buy beef and soya from cleared or converted land after 1 January 2020.”

Encourages, but not, as it should, compels. And that’s what the beef is.

Angle 5

Mayotte, France’s 101st and poorest department is in the Indian Ocean and a civil war. Le Monde: “After several days of extreme attacks between gangs, the population of the archipelago barricaded themselves in and the young attackers retreated, facing the RAID [Recherche, Assistance, Intervention, Dissuasion, the anti-terrorist unit of the French National Police] that the government had just sent in as reinforcements…. ‘They're just waiting for the RAID to leave before starting again,’ they say ironically in Kawéni, the district at the centre of the brutality that has shaken the island, the last two weeks having been marked by machete attacks on school buses.”

Backstory. The archipelago didn’t follow neighbouring Comoros into independence in 1974. After a 2009 referendum, the population voted overwhelmingly in favour of department status, which was granted in 2011. It became an “outermost region” of the European Union in 2014. Despite horrendous stats (84% of the population live under the poverty line (€959 per month and per household1; 40% of dwellings are corrugated metal shacks; 29% of households have no running water; and 34% of the inhabitants between the age of 15 and 64 are unemployed), departmentalisation has attracted thousands of migrant, mainly women aged 15 to 34 and their children, from the three Comoros islands, where things are much worse (nominal per capita GDP, for example, is USD 1,349, roughly 1/10th of what it is in Mayotte). In less than a decade, the population has grown from around 290,000 inhabitants to somewhere around 400,000, according to unofficial estimates. It is the youngest in France, with 60% of the population under 25.

Le Figaro: “Despite the difficulties, successive [French] governments have no choice but to hold on to their latest department. It is a question of well understood interests in this very strategic Mozambique Channel. And loyalty to a population that has repeated its desire to be anchored to France in several referendums.”

The problem is, choice or no choice, the latest administration seem to be doing a terrible job of “holding on” to Mayotte. At least in the eyes of its population, which feels abandoned.

African, almost 100% Muslim, and yet in the second round of the presidential elections, Marine Le Pen, candidate of the Rassemblement National (RN, formerly the Front National, the far-right, anti-Islam party in France) came first in Mayotte, winning 59.1% of the votes to Emmanuel Macron’s 40.9% of the votes. In 2017, Macron obtained 57.11% of the votes, ahead of Le Pen with 42.89%.

It’s easy to understand why. Illegal immigration. Insecurity. A population, half of which lives on less than €260 per month, and 10 percent on less than €1 a day. It’s a Petri dish of populism. Or, as Le Pen puts it, “A laboratory of horrors.”

At the end of 2021, Le Pen spent three days on Mayotte. Macron sent a video and a letter in March. And yesterday, Jordan Bardella, the 27-year-old president of the RN since 5 November, announced that he’s heading to Mayotte "in the next few days", and called on the government to "regain control" of the department: "50% of the population is foreign [and] it is often said that Mayotte is the first maternity hospital in France. There are roadblocks in the streets, every day French people are assaulted in the streets. I heard that a school bus was attacked by illegal immigrants with machetes… Mayotte will certainly be our future in metropolitan France if we don't take back control now.”

Meanwhile, predictably, C-News, the Fox of France, is feeding the fear frenzy by reporting (without providing evidence) that “people are being cut up and put in pieces on the roads to scare people. This is happening in France.”

À suivre…

Angle 6

In French, a corbeau is a “raven” but also a “poison-pen letter writer” — a person who anonymously sends threatening or denunciatory letters. The latter usage is common in France, where anonymous denunciations, since at least the Revolution, is a popular pastime2. The term, however, goes back to the Roman god Aesculapius, the god of medicine, whose mother, Coronis, cheated on her lover, Apollo, while she was pregnant. A raven told Apollo about the adultery. Mad with grief and jealousy, Apollo killed Coronis. Then, regretting his impulsiveness, he tried to heal her, but she was already dead. So, all could do was rescue the unborn Aesculapius, which he did by performing the world's first C-section. With his sword.

Since, a raven is considered a harbinger of bad news.

Flash forward to Tulle — the town in the Limousin where former president Francois Hollande first entered the political arena. Between 1917 and 1922, a deluge of anonymous letters denouncing the actions of various people was sent throughout the village. Suspicion set in, an investigation was opened, people committed suicide, careers were destroyed. In 1932, a story about the scandal appeared in the magazine Détective —

Based on the story, Louis Chavance wrote a screenplay, which gathered dust until 1942, when Chavance showed it to Henri-Georges Clouzot and the two men coined the term “corbeau”, a bird of ill omen, as a signature for the anonymous letter writer and for the title of the film, Le Corbeau, which Clouzot made during the Occupation and released in 1943. Since then, the term corbeau has stuck — it is perhaps best known in the context of the decades-long Grégory Affair, which maybe I’ll have a look at one of these days.

Today, however, let’s look at Clouzot's masterpiece. Le Corbeau is set in Saint-Robin, a small provincial town where Doctor Germain (Pierre Fresnay) is accused of performing clandestine abortions in several anonymous letters. He soon finds out that he is not the only one receiving them. Paranoia spreads, tensions rise. Germain sets out to discover the corbeau’s identity.

The Gestapo banned all publicity material about the film because it denounced denunciation and anonymous letters, practices which were encouraged by both Vichy and the Third Reich. It was outright banned after the Liberation because it was financed by a German production company, and because it “showed that the inhabitants of our small towns are nothing but degenerates, ripe for slavery”.
Clouzot was banned from making films until 1947, after petition started by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and signed by filmmakers Jacques Becker, Marcel Carné, Claude Autant-Lara and René Clair came to his and the film’s defence. Le Corbeau was presented at the Venice Film Festival, where it triumphed.

Abortion and denunciation. The scene below, between Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc (with English subtitles) shows the film’s lasting power and pertinence.

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Angle 1: The best restaurant in France?

How do you choose a restaurant? Do you go by decor, ambience, clientele? Far too many authentic-looking and bustling spots rely on frozen mains and powdered sauces. The posted menu? Everybody’s figured out the locavore, farm-to-table bumpf and shtick. The wine list? Only lazy cranks and idiots keep lists that aren’t top heavy in organic, biodynamic, natural, non-interventionist bottles.

So who do you turn to? Crowdsourcing review sites are filled with fakes, sponsored content, astroturfed nonsense. Guidebooks are unreliable—trust me, I’ve written for some of the best known and most trusted.

Online experts? They're usually too far up their own ass to know good from shit. Especially the expats.

Except me, of course. Because I outsource. This week, from Hanzhou Piao, perhaps the most talented cook I’ve ever met, expert at pretty much every major cuisine — French, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Latin American, Italian — and, more pertinent to our purposes here, a gastronome possessed of an oversized appetite of ursine-like voracity rarely seen in members of our species.

Though he never eats breakfast, he sometimes, often, actually—when travelling, or when particularly peckish—eats four sit-down, multi-course meals a day, supplemented with streetfood snacks in between. The reason he is not obese is no doubt mostly genetic, but also because he works hard, and on days off makes 150-170 dozen boxes of handmade dumplings for 36 hours straight, which he then spends most of the next 36 hours delivering around Ile-de-France by bicycle.

As part of my new Six Angles feature, every week Hanzhou is going to tell us about the best dish he ate during the last seven days. Not with a lot of words. He’s a taciturn fellow, and he doesn’t talk with his mouth full. And his mouth is almost always full.

Just the dish. With a photograph. And the address.

Backstory: Hanzhou has worked in some of the most touted and toqued kitchens of Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, New York, Vancouver, Singapore, Osnabrück, Menton, Aix-en-Provence and Los Gatos, California, but he is best known for his Paris dumpling delivery business, which he started during the pandemic and now does most weekends, unless he’s running a pop-up restaurant somewhere. Here’s how it works: on Thursday afternoon he posts his dumpling order form as an Instagram story, which, less than an hour later, he updates thus:

Then he makes them. Then he delivers them. They are by far the best dumplings I’ve ever had.

Anyway, a couple of days ago, Le Doyenné, Sean Kelly and James Henry’s five-month-old restaurant-farm in the Essonne, was named best restaurant in France by Le Fooding. I don’t trust Le Fooding, which sells itself as an edgy alternative to the Michelin Guide but is in fact owned by Michelin. But I do trust Hanzhou, who ate there last weekend.

“You’re not going to find another tasting menu like that anywhere for anywhere near that price. The food, almost all of which comes from the farm, is excellent, and the room, the setting, the kitchen, are amazing. So yes, for the price, 80€, I would say, yes, it is the best restaurant in France. But that price is sure to go up.”

Here are six of the dishes Hanzhou and a group of cognac buyers ate at Le Doyenné. The standout dish for him is the one in the bottom right corner: the marinaded crevettes impériales des marais charentais — imperial, tiger-striped shrimp bred in the Charente-Maritime marshes. The heads were deep-fried, and the ceviche-style shrimp meat wrapped in nasturtium leaves with loads of horseradish.

However, it was not Hanzhou’s best dish of the week. That was this:

A dish at Toyo in Paris with endive, romanesco, bitter melon, cedrat, squash, pepper, artichoke and other vegetables on a bed of anchovies. “Like a bagna càuda. With shaved hazelnuts on top. All cooked well, good quality. The anchovies were great. Balanced. Not salty. Clean.”

There you have it.

Angle 2: Blue signals expansion, red signals contraction.

Among advanced countries, France has been the only country “in the blue” every month this year.

Angle 3: Libération cover of November 15, 1976

The death of Jean Gabin, the shit the president was in because of inflation and the annual Beaujolais Nouveau bash. Back then it was held on November 15. In 1985 the Institut National des Appellations d'Origine (INAO) decided it would be held on the third Thursday of November. Which is today. I’ll be going, after a concert of Hermon Mehari & Alessandro Lanzoni + the Julia Haile Quintet at Le Dynamo, to two of the best wine addresses in Paris: Cave à Michel and the new taqueria pop-up of Chambre Noire.

Angle 4: Clit bait?

The just revealed mascots of the Paris 2024 Olympics are supposed to look like the Phrygian cap worn by Marianne, the national personification of the French Republic, liberty, equality, fraternity and reason, and the Goddess of Liberty.

Mais, uh, non.

Quentin Girard in Libération wrote that having a clitoris as the French Olympic mascot was very good news. Finally, the French population “at last understood what one looks like.” And “from a political point of view, it’s not a bad thing that Paris lets go of its eternal phallic Eiffel Tower…”

Angle 5: Proust at the TGB

On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Marcel Proust's death, the BnF has an exhibition up called MARCEL PROUST: La fabrique de l’œuvre (The making of the work) which they’re calling a “true journey” through the author’s opus, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). The show contains 370 documents - manuscripts, paintings, photographs, objects, costumes - from the Library's Proust collection and other collections. Including this lovely snap of Countess Greffulhe, née Elisabeth de Caraman-Chimay (1860-1952), the queen of Belle Epoque salons and the inspiration for the Duchess Oriane de Guermantes.

The show also displays Proust’s “paperoles’”, accordion-like paper strips on which he wrote earlier drafts of the story, including this one, which is nearly 2m.

On one of these drafts, Proust’s famous madeleine, the aroma of which, in the final version, kicks his memories of childhood into top gear, was a mere morsel of stale bread (pain rassis). In another a piece of toast (pain grillé). And in a third, a dry baby biscuit.

Angle 6: “Blind Spots”

277 cyclists have been killed in Paris this year so far by truck, bus and car drivers.

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“We’re talking about a luxury product, and how lovely it is that vines can evolve, change or whatever. Climate change might bring advantages to certain vineyard regions but they will be far outweighed by the disastrous environmental, social, economic and geopolitical impacts. So, are we sort of fiddling while Rome burns?”

The above question is asked on today’s Hexagon podcast. The person asking it is Geoffrey Finch. The person to whom it is asked is Olivier Humbrecht.

Geoffrey Finch is a champion of natural wine and organic food. He is the host of The Paris Grapevine, the podcast of Paris Wine Walks, and the director of Taste, a non-profit devoted to defending and celebrating good food and wine through tastings, tours, seminars, picnics, dinners and cultural events.

Olivier Humbrecht runs Domaine Zind Humbrecht in Alsace, one of the greatest vineyards in the world. His family has been making wines in Alsace since 1620. He also makes wine in Canada, at Phantom Creek Estates in the Okanagan Valley. He is the first French wine maker with a Master of Wine and the president of Biodyvin, an association of biodynamic wine producers that includes many of the most prestigious vineyards in France.

When winegrowers, like all farmers, talk about the weather, they’re not making small talk.

The conversation took place in late July. It had not rained in Alsace all summer. The grape harvest at Zind-Humbrecht was still at least a month away. Or so Olivier hoped.

Everything is earlier. The one thing which is too early today is bud break, the first stage of the vine cycle, the moment when the buds shoot out and start to produce little green bits. If this happens at the end of April, like it used to 40 or 50 years ago, well, most frost risk is over. You might have some frost damage once every 10, 15 or 20 years. Now bud break is at the end of March or very early April. You have the whole months of April to worry about. In 2022, we had a big frost wave in France, around the sixth or seventh of April, the vines were just about to bud break. And if that cold weather had happened, maybe three or four days later, we probably would've lost a lot of the crop. So, every year, we are literally praying to not have this frost issue.

This year’s wines in Alsace are expected to be very good. The harvest, however, which started, as Olivier had hoped, on August 26, and was well under way throughout the region by September 5th, was among the smallest of the last ten years, especially for Riesling. Heat waves and drought began during flowering, resulting in looser bunches, fewer and smaller berries, and less juice. Gewurztraminer production was especially low. Spring frosts caused losses of up to 40% on certain parcels in the region. Overall, frost and June hail knocked out about 9% of the crop.

By today’s standards, this is considered pretty good. In the past, an “exceptional” year was one where a major climatic disaster occurred. Today, “exceptional” means a year where nothing particularly nasty happened. France hasn’t had one of those for some time.

Hail, frost, heat waves, droughts, thunderstorms, fires, torrential rains, floods, new heat waves, more drought, more fires, more hail—the “weather” has been downright Old Testament nasty this year.

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Grape vines are exceptionally drought-tolerant. Their deep roots can draw water from far below. But intense heat and "water stress" cause the life cycle of the vine to speed up. Then they lose their leaves and stop feeding their grapes. As the maturity of the berries accelerates, winegrowers are forced to harvest early. The grapes generally have lower final weight.

Harvesting dates were brought forward across the country. This is part of a long trend. Since 1974, harvests have moved forward an average of 18 days, from the 29th to the 11th of September.

In the Aude region, home of wines like Cabardès, Corbières, Fitou, Limoux and Minervois and Muscat de Rivesaltes, temperatures exceeded 35 degrees celsius for several weeks and peaked well above 40. Nights were almost as hot. And not a drop of rain fell in four months.

A Muscat vineyard started harvesting its grapes on July 25, a new record for earliness in France.

This is the third time in the last six years that the harvest in the Aude began in late July.

Flooding is even more common.

On August 18th in the Gard, home of Tavel, Lirac, Costières-de-Nîmes, Côtes-du-Rhône, Costières-de-Nîmes, Gard (IGP) et Coteaux-du-Pont-du-Gard, six “normal” months of rain fell in three hours—right in the middle of the harvest.

The French Ministry of Agriculture estimates that this year’s total wine production at between 42.6 and 45.6 million hectoliters - up 13 to 21% compared to last year’s low harvest, which was hit by a disastrous spring frost. And late flooding in the south.

Some regions fared better than others this year. Burgundy vines tolerated the drought well. A “grandiose” 2022 vintage is expected.

The challenge facing winemakers is to find more climate resistant grape varieties. Or more northerly vineyards—perhaps in areas never before considered wine regions. Brittany, Belgium or the south of England for example. But even England was hit with historic +40C temperatures this summer.

Will France still be able to produce wine in the south? Will wines change? Will wine consumption have to change, too?

Olivier provides many answers in the podcast. And he takes Geoffrey’s question above very seriously.

Have a listen. Comment and share. Subscribe.

PS: The earlier harvests have also made it more difficult to recruit pickers, as harvests now fall during summer vacation or in September, when fewer students are available, as the French academic year now takes place in early September instead of October.

So, why not offer your services next year?

If you’re European, go here and type “vendange” into the search box.

For general guides for each wine region, and info on accommodation carpooling and equipment, etcetera, go here.

If you’re not European, write a letter to your favourite winemakers on this list. Or this one.

It is also its best and biggest wine basket, and its principal cheese, milk, fruit, vegetable and meat basket.

The only country in Europe completely self-sufficient in food production, it has more agricultural land (48.2 million acres or 35.5% of the total area) than any other country in the EU, and it grows and breeds 23% of the EU’s agricultural output.

It is also the world’s most “food sustainable” country, best at eliminating food waste, promoting healthy lifestyles, improving soil fertility by rotating crops, cutting back on chemical fertilizers, and aggressively resisting mass-production and intensive farming techniques. It protects traditional ways of farming and is quicker than most at adopting innovative high-tech and eco-friendly farming practices.

But.

It buys more food from its neighbours than it sells to them.

It sells almost as many pesticides to the world as it does cheese.

Two-thirds of its citizens spend less than €3.50 a day on food.

Fast food accounts for more than 50 percent of all out-of-home dining.

Roughly 85 percent of French restaurants serve industrially-prepared foods without disclosing where it comes from.

Five and a half million people in France rely on food aid.

Sixty percent of French farmers are over 60 years old. One in two will retire by 2026. Two-thirds will never be replaced. Two will commit suicide every day.

This week’s Hexagon guest is Camille Labro, long-time food writer for Le Monde, cookbook author, goddaughter of farm-to-table pioneer Alice Waters and director of L’Ecole Comestible (The Edible School), which brings farmers, gardeners, cooks, bakers, cheesemakers and pizza oven builders into schoolyards and classrooms around France free of charge.

Camille is going to save French cookery. And French farms. And French farmers. Listen how.

We hope you enjoy our podcasts. They are free. Please like them and share them and subscribe.

It has served me well on many occasions.

Yesterday, for example.

Seven hours of which were spent at a degustation of German wines hosted by Chambre Noire, Paris’s most exuberant and anarchic champions of natural wines, and the subject of a future Hexagon podcast.

This morning, while researching the subject of this week’s podcast, and nursing what the French call a “mouth of wood”, I made a felicitous discovery: picoler is not a gallicization of “to get pickled”, but comes from Piccolo, which is the name that Parisians once gave to a red grape variety planted in the Paris region, especially in and around the north-western suburb of Argenteuil, after the phylloxera pest wiped out the existing vines.

Those vines – which produced Gamay, Pinot Noir, Fromental, Chasselas and other grapes – had once been abundant.

The Romans were the first to grow grapes in the area, probably around the 4th century BCE. By the 17th and 18th centuries, vines covered roughly 3,000 hectares, making Argenteuil the largest wine-producing commune in France. By the time of the French Revolution, the entire Paris region, which today we call Ile-de-France, had between 42,000 and 45,000 hectares of vines, making it the biggest wine-producing vignoble in France, if not the world.

Before de Maupassant’s day, the wines of Argenteuil were considered quite quaffable. A chronicler in the 13th century went so far as to declare them “worthy of the King of France.”

By the mid-19th century, however, the pursuit of quantity had become more important than quality. The reason: on weekends, Parisians flocked to Argenteuil, and elsewhere west of the city, to get drunk.

Some came to fish, or picnic in the fields, but most came to dance and get picolated onboard guinguette barges on the Seine.

Argenteuil was convenient, only 15 minutes by train from Gare de l’Ouest. The main appeal, however, was the price of the wine. Taverns and cabarets in the suburbs paid no state taxes, meaning wine was a third to a quarter cheaper than it was in Paris.

The guinguettes also had a novel approach to “Happy Hour”: you paid money upfront, and then had 60 minutes to drink yourself into a stupor.

According to the 1750 Dictionnaire de la langue française, the “brand-new” term guinguette “comes from apparently from what is sold in these cabarets: a sour light local green wine, that is called Ginguet, such as found around Paris.”

In Argenteuil, however, the onboard plonk was more likely Piccolo rouge, as what’s in the bottles and glasses in this painting by Renoir (done just downriver in Chatou in 1881) confirms:

Renoir was one of many Impressionist painters jumping on those weekend trains. Monet liked it so much that he moved there, from London, at the end of 1871, first into a houseboat, and then into a posh new house right next to the new Argenteuil rail station—convenient for luring out collectors and getting new works to his art dealer quickly.

In all, Monet lived in Argenteuil for six years, during which he produced some 250 paintings, and was paid frequent visits by the likes of Renoir, Manet, Pissaro, Morisot, Renoir, Caillebotte, Seurat and Sisley.

What attracted the Impressionists to Argenteuil and its environs were the bucolic landscapes, the pretty sailboats on the river, the rollicking cabarets and the rustic charms of small-town life, but also how this was beginning to mix, somewhat darkly, with smoke-belching industrialization.

Monet’s Promenade at Argenteuil is a good example of this. As is Caillebotte’s Factories at Argenteuil.

The vineyards of Argenteuil, like those throughout the Ile de France, were quickly disappearing. As were Argenteuil’s equally famous figs and asparagus, both of which still carry the name “d’Argenteuil”, even though they haven’t grown in the region for more than a century.

Factories, plaster works, gypsum quarries and iron foundries ate up Argenteuil’s surrounding farmland. By the 1860s, the town’s population had doubled. It now had had lacemaking studios, fine crystal and clock-making shops, a gas works and a tannery, several distilleries, a sawmill, a mineral water plant, a chemical works, and a cardboard box manufacturer.

In 1869, a spill at the new rubber factory in the town of Bezons just to the south wiped out all the fish.

And pylloxera wiped out all the vines.

Parisians still flocked to Argenteuil on weekends, especially during the 1870 war (the occupying Prussians, who only drank beer, prohibited wine in the capital).

To fuel the guinguettes and the regattas, Piccolo was planted. With disastrous results.

Piccolo is actually Gamay, a red-skinned grape with white juice that makes wonderful wines around the world, most notably in Beaujolais and the Loire.

However, Gamay, which likes alkaline soils, was not a great match for the terroir of Argenteuil. The wine was acidic, harsh and insipid, borderline inbuvable – undrinkable. The locals called it Cramponne-toi-au-bord-de-la-table – “Hold-on-tight-to-the-edge-of-the-table” and the term piccolo became a pejorative term for bad wine.

By the time I arrived, 30 years ago, that term had been replaced by pinard, aka le gros rouge qui tâche – “the heavy red that stains.” And the once-famous vignoble d’Ile de France was more or less moribund.

But all that is changing, which leads me, finally, to the subject of this week’s podcast, Guillaume d’Angerville, one of Burgundy’s most reputed winemakers, who, with Yannick Alléno and Laurent Berrurier has planted 1.5 hectares of vines 30km outside of Paris.

Guillaume is in conversation with my old friend Geoffrey Finch, the founder of the association Taste and Paris Wine Walks, and the author of the upcoming book, Paris: New Wines, New Wines, and the documentary of the same name, co-directed by the Oscar-winning Laurent Chalet.

This is just the first in a series on the subject. Next week’s podcast, however, is about something happening in another suburb north of Paris, Aubervilliers, which is the new home of France’s most ambitious artist space: POUSH.

Santé!