I’M OUT TO SEA
I’m on Ile de Re this week. Vacation. This place provides the ultimate recharge. The air is so clean it pulverizes you, in the face of its purity you can’t stand conscious, I’m nodding out by 10pm here, my body enveloped in a furious state of inventory and repair. When the sun comes out (IDR is less affected than Paris by the roving grey of Summer 2008, but affected nonetheless) it's like the end of a movie all the time…exaggerated sweetness, a kind of summative beauty, the credits are just about to roll and order has been restored to the cosmos. I ride my bike, rain or shine, into Ste. Marie every afternoon to check my email, taking some wifi that is floating around a little nook near a supermarket. I pass thru the fields (and, this week, thru clouds of flying ants that are all leaving their nests to establish new ones—I’m covered in them when I get to my next destination), thru the illogically bent roads of the village. The fields are busy with rabbits (in about a mile of road shoulder I counted 25 last night), pheasants (as sneaky as they are, these Chinese dragons just can’t look native)…at night I lay on the back patio and watch the rush hour of nesting birds (egrets, herons, seagulls, and tiny perching birds) insects (moths, dragonflies, June bugs) going one way and the night shift (bats, and sometimes, completely silent owls—tho I haven’t seen one this year).
I don’t have net access at home, so I don’t know where my last blog left off. Monday we flew home from Oslo, Aden pretty much screaming the whole flight (she even managed to get her hand stuck in the undercarriage of the seat, and we had both flight attendants on the case!). That night the three of us had dinner with my friend Brian, who is the tour manager for Devendra Banhart. They had a night off in Paris, and he and I caught up (Brian’s from Seattle, and was an assistant on the REM tours). We didn’t have a sitter, and we were pretty burnt from the travel, so we went to bed pretty much after dinner (it was late anyway) and he went to meet up with some of the DB band somewhere in Montmartre.
The next day I spent with Aden in Paris, I decided to stay in Paris and see the DB show at L’Europeen, a lovely small theatre in Pigalle—Dom and I saw An Pierle there, when Dom was hugely pregnant. However, the vibe changed, and not only were we unable to get a sitter, but there may or may not have been some shenanigans in Montmartre that night that may or may not have involved short stays in le clinque, which may or may not have ended right before showtime. We thought it best to stay home, and anyway, we sort of had no choice! In late August, everyone leaves town, and this includes our usual go-to list of babysitters. Le Motel, and 75% of the restaurants and bars in Paris, is closed. In fact, it’s unusual for a band to come thru town and play a show that’s not a festival, but DB is very popular in France, so he can get away with it. The end result was that we sms’d our regrets, and spent the night in with Aden, which in light of recent events in my life, is a very good thing.
Plus, the next morning we weren’t too tired to get on the early train to La Rochelle (from La Rochelle you take a bus, taxi, or private car over the bridge to Ile de Re). Dom was staying in Paris to work, so it was Aden and I on our own for the 3-hour train ride, and we managed to have lots of fun. Mostly, she entertained me, with her drawings; she’s really pretty good and makes super weird little menageries of people and animals, like a 3-year-old Paul Klee.
Since arriving, I’ve been resting at home #2 with Aden, her grandmother, and grandma’s b.f., this our normal retinue on IDR. I’ve been reading the complete Hate comics (published in 2 volumes by Fantagraphics), by my old neighbor and friend in Seattle, Peter Bagge. Haha I’ve been laughing my ass off seeing so many familiar faces, esp. Stinky * really * reminds me of Matt Posie (this is not a good thing, and I hope Matt meets a better end!). I watched Orson Welles’ “F for Fake”, the Criterion DVD of which has some great supplementary material, including “One Man Band”, the documentary/explanation of Orson’s last years, put together by his hot, adoring, Croatian long time companion, Oja Kodar (I’ve already written her name into a song).
I’ve been doing aquagym when the weather sucks (yes, I am in a class with old ladies sometimes but if you actually do the exercises full on it’s really strenuous!)…I get there by bike, and on the first day one of my pedals came off…it’s always like that when you try and get it together. Somebody at the Thalasso spa fixed it for me, they’re good like that. When the weather is nice, like yesterday, we go to the beach, and swim in the freezing cold (talk about life-affirming—swim or die!) Atlantic, which I love to do…Aden is starting to get on the boogie board…she’s so determined…! Dom & I walk around the harbor in St. Martin at night, I have been trying to branch out in ice cream flavors (last night I had cactus flower with ginger). Generally tho I am so healthy—no alcohol, eating only local fish, fruit, and chevre—they make an incredibly good goat cheese on IDR, sometimes sprinkled with pepper and nutmeg (in French noix de muscade, in case you need to use that). Ice cream is my only indulgence, and it’s only when the sun is out and I’ve swum all afternoon anyway. We sit on the beach at night and gaze over the water to Ile d’Oleron, a strip of orange lights with a lighthouse at the seaward end, the moon going into soft focus as the long blade of a cloudy front sweeps across it, a massive glowing radar screen in slow-motion, picking up the signals that the night has ships, but all are in order and circling as directed. Off the shore you can see a massive pile of blocky lights, this is cargo barge that’s stuck on a sandbar offshore a couple of miles, which is simply being cut up and brought in piece by piece.
Yesterday in St. Martin Dom, Aden & I ran into Dom’s former coworker at V2, Anabel—she was making music in the late 90s, I was rather a fan—and her b.f. Daniel D’Arc, who is really a big name in the French music scene. He’s covered with tribal tattoos; one of his arms is basically sleeved in black (D’ark!). IDR has long been the summer hideout for politicos—gov’t helicopters occasionally swoop over, delivering a minister to some interrupting task—but slowly, it’s being discovered by movie stars and musicians—Pitt and Jolie just bought a house on the mainland by La Rochelle…it’s so lovely, so less fucked up and ParisHiltonized than St. Tropez (like, nothing makes a place uncool more quickly than being adopted by P Diddy—talk about your canary for the coal mine of good taste), so tranquil and healing, and so exclusive…you can’t build here, effectively; there are only a handful of hotels, all booked years in advance; and you have to know about the good restaurants tucked away in the woods and coastal brush—no one will tell you. Neither will I, so don’t ask!
Ile de Re highlights:
1) ice cream ‘caramel fleur de sel’ from the Martinier ice cream shop in St. Martin
2) tiny lizards scurrying off the back patio
3) white peaches, exploding with summer’s fecundity
4) exploring tide pools with Aden—showing her the sticky tentacles of anemones, tiny crabs, tiny shrimps, long slinky fish, hermit crabs with bright red antennae, chitons, limpets, ‘bigourneaux’, ‘bulots’, oysters…
5) speaking of which, ‘bulots cuit’. Large whelks, more or less smoked, but just tasting of sea animal; plus fresh oysters from the specialist in La Flotte; whole cooked crabs from les halles in St. Martin. Freshly caught bar, daurade, maigre, sardines…
6) the mixing of the black night sky, and the retreating blue and pink of sunset, with a few scant planets peeking thru…all mixing like the batter for an exotic celestial cake…
7) it’s been too cold and wet this year, and in fact I haven’t seen them for 3 years now, but in the early summer you can see glowworms along the walls; they seem to prefer a grassy spot next to a vertical rise.
8) silence. At night, on the beach, the waves barely lap; the cars have stopped moving, and you can be completely alone; somehow your slice of earth, bordered by the clouds and the sea, and the dunes behind, seems impossibly huge.
9) wearing flip flops everywhere, incl. the most expensive and elegant restaurants (I wear them even with €200 trousers and crisp white shirts with silk ties) and never shaving
10) the shaggy donkeys (picture an equine Chewbacca) ‘en culotte’ (wearing a kind of trousers in gingham). Aden goes for rides on them and sings “j’aime touts les ânes” (“I love all the donkeys”) for 20 minutes afterwards!
11) doing things with Aden.
12) getting away for a bit sans Aden, just Dom & I.
13) Aym’kebono, the house band for the whole island who play “a rencontre de la funk et du Reggae”. They have their own microbus painted in bright rasta colors.
On now to the petit dej
Love
KS
La Noue FRANCE
