Six degrees of hexagonality
#2 Sax, loaves and video, along with cows, soup, civil war (in France!), and poison-pen letters
Angle 1
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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The Macron government say they have, over the last 5 years, reduced this figure to 77%.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20757873#metadata_info_tab_contents; https://www.cairn.info/revue-vingtieme-siecle-revue-d-histoire-2007-4-page-137.htm; https://www.histoire-politique.fr/index.php?numero=1&rub=comptes-rendus&item=402;