show at moca on grand ave

By JESSE McKINLEY
NY Times Published: July 3, 2008

BIG SUR, Calif. — Facing a stubborn fire, California officials ordered the evacuation of Big Sur on Wednesday as flames flared on nearby mountaintops and moved steadily toward this coastal retreat.

Firefighters have been attacking a fire near Big Sur for 11 days and had been helped in recent days by fog, moist conditions and lighter winds. Seventeen homes have been lost here — more than half the total destroyed statewide from the first major wildfires of the season — but many residents had been allowed to remain as the fire stayed to the east and south.

But overnight Tuesday the fire unexpectedly intensified, prompting mandatory evacuations of residents on both sides of Highway 1, the scenic coastal byway that runs through the Big Sur valley.

“It’s tough to move out of your home; we understand that,” said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who visited the town with federal emergency officials on Wednesday, “but do it.”

Yellow smoke and ash mixed in the air as a procession of possession-laden cars, trucks and vans streamed north out of town. Horses, goats, cats and dogs were also being trucked out by animal welfare workers, as helicopters ferried back and forth to the ocean, drawing out water to dump on smoldering hillsides east of town.

One of those evacuating was Erica Sanborn, 28, who was living with her husband and their dog in a hotel in Big Sur, having already been forced out of their home, farther south on the coast.

“I’m kind of numb,” said Ms. Sanborn, an emergency room nurse who awoke to an evacuation order after a night shift. “I would never think that Big Sur could burn.”

Statewide, more than 19,000 firefighters and other workers have been fighting fires since June 20, when a line of storms and lightning sparked hundreds of blazes across the northern and central parts of the state. The blaze near Big Sur — known as the Basin Complex — is just one of some 1,100 confirmed fires on federal and state lands in California, according to CalFire, the state fire agency, though exact figures were hard to confirm. Hundreds of others have been contained or put out.

Costs were also rising. State officials have spent more than $50 million on the current fires, according to CalFire. On Tuesday, Mr. Schwarzenegger had ordered around 200 National Guard troops to provide ground support to firefighters.

The major culprit in the blazes is a persistent drought that has made for volatile fire conditions. Steep terrain was also complicating firefighting efforts. Tina Rose, a spokeswoman for the fire operation, said that about 20 miles of Highway 1 along the coast were closed, shutting down access to famous — and currently shuttered — resorts like the Ventana Inn and the Post Ranch.

One local celebrity, the Beach Boys’ guitarist Al Jardine, said he had loaded up a trailer with musical equipment on Monday night, and was hoping to hold out before the evacuation order came.

“It’s depressing,” Mr. Jardine said. “People are walking around like zombies.”

Sad news of a slightly different sort coming out of the Joy Division fold: The BBC reports that the gravestone marking the grave of Ian Curtis, the late frontman for the legendary mope-rockers, has been stolen.

According to the BBC, at some point between Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, thieves removed the stone from its perch at the Macclesfield Cemetery in Curtis’ hometown of Macclesfield, England. Authorities currently have no leads as to the whereabouts of the stone, which bears the inscriptions “Ian Curtis 18 - 5 - 80″ and “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.

found on pitchfork thanks to grant

by Eleanor Beardsley
NPR Morning Edition, July 2, 2008 ·

Chef Dominique Valadier starts each day at 5:30 a.m., just as the fish market opens in the southern French provincial town of Salon de Provence.

On one particular day, he picks up 20 pounds of fresh, live mussels at the market before heading off to Lycee de l’Emperi, the public high school where he is the cook.

At the school, he prepares meals for about 800 students, using all fresh, local ingredients. The introduction of healthy school lunch programs, like this one, is one major reason France has been able to curb childhood obesity rates after two decades on the rise, according to two recent studies.

From Within 30 Miles

The menu on this day at Valadier’s high school: mussels in cream sauce over rice with leeks and stuffed turkey thighs, accompanied by a squash au gratin casserole.

Nothing here is frozen or pre-prepared, Valadier says.

“Voila. This sticker here shows where these mussels came from and when they were harvested,” he says. “This guarantees their freshness.”

Eyes twinkling and knives flashing, Valadier opens up the plump turkey thighs, cutting out the bones.

The flattened turkey filets are wrapped around a stuffing of ground up parsley, garlic, cheese and smoked pork shoulder. The loaves are then tied with twine and baked for three hours at low temperatures to keep in the juices and flavor. When sliced, they will serve hundreds of students, 10 times the number that could have been fed on the plain turkey thighs. Preparation and proximity are the keys to high quality meals at lower prices, says Valadier.

“We try to get our base products — meat, fish, vegetables — within a 30-mile radius, because there are fewer intermediaries and we can negotiate prices and quality with the producer. These turkeys were raised and slaughtered just near here,” Valadier says. “If I have a problem, I’ll ask the producer to come see me, and I can guarantee you things will be a lot better the next time!”

Healthy and Cheap

All around the school kitchen, food is cooking in various pots and pans. Gallons of bechamel, a seasoned white sauce, bubble for the squash casserole. A vat of chickpeas boils for homemade hummus. It is hard to believe this is a public school cafeteria and not a three-star restaurant.

Perhaps what is most impressive about Valadier’s meals is that they cost the students only $3 a day, less than the typical fast food fare served at many French high schools.

Another way Valadier saves money is by getting maximum use out of every ingredient. He never throws anything away. In one corner of the kitchen, he is boiling down the fish heads, flesh and bones from yesterday’s salmon to make a tasty bouillon for today’s mussels.

As lunch hour begins and the students file in, Valadier serves them while answering questions about the meal. He reaches across the counter with a forkful of the squash au gratin to give 17-year-old Valentine Biemence a taste. Biemence says she and her friends have all but quit eating lunch at McDonald’s and have discovered a lot of new dishes.

“It’s all the time different food and very, very good,” Biemence says. “People are really happy, because it’s really hard now to eat well and cheap.”

Investing in the Future

Valadier once worked in the glamorous world of Riviera restaurants. He says he left that life for something more meaningful. Investing in students’ well-being is also an act of citizenship, he explains. If young people learn to eat well early on, they will cost the country’s health care system a lot less in the future.

He has clearly found his calling here, while winning over the students — and teachers. Danielle Viou teaches drama and English at the high school.

“We are very, very lucky because it’s a real project. It’s not just doing the cooking, it’s a whole concept of educating and taking time and enjoying it,” Viou says. “And it’s artistic at the same time.”

npr

at overduin and kite

reference library

Claude Bureau at the Jardin des Plantes, where he was chief gardener for more than two decades. At this vast garden, he took his first baby steps and met his wife. “Women always love gardeners,” said Bureau. “We speak of roses and perfume. We can easily get their attention.”

By ELAINE SCIOLINO
NY Times Published: June 29, 2008

NEXT to the Palais de la Découverte, just off the Champs-Élysées, is a flight-of-fancy sculpture of the 19th-century poet Alfred de Musset daydreaming about his former lovers. As art goes, the expanse of white marble is pretty mediocre, and its sculptor, Alphonse de Moncel, little-remembered. For me, however, it is a crucial marker. To its right is a path with broken stone steps that lead down into one of my favorite places in Paris, a tiny stage-set called Jardin de la Vallée Suisse.

Part of the Champs-Élysées’ gardens, this “Swiss Valley” was built from scratch in the late 19th century by the park designer Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand. It is a lovely illusion, where nothing is quite what it appears at first sight. The rocks that form the pond and waterfall are sculptured from cement; so is the “wooden” footbridge. But the space — 1.7 acres of semitamed wilderness in one of the most urban swaths of Paris — has lured me, over and over again. My only companions are the occasional dog walker and the police woman making her rounds.

On a park bench there, I am enveloped by evergreens, maples, bamboo, lilacs and ivy. There are lemon trees; a Mexican orange; a bush called a wavyleaf silktassel, with drooping flowers, that belongs in an Art Nouveau painting; and another whose leaves smell of caramel in the fall. A 100-year-old weeping beech shades a pond whose waterfall pushes away the noise of the streets above. The pond, fed by the Seine, can turn murky, but the slow-moving carp don’t seem to mind, nor does the otter that surfaces from time to time.

The Swiss Valley is one of the most unusual of Paris’s more than 400 gardens and parks, woods and squares. Much grander showcases include wooded spaces like the Bois de Vincennes on the east of the city and the Bois de Boulogne on the west, and celebrations of symmetry in the heart of Paris like the Tuileries and the Luxembourg.

But I prefer the squares and parks in quiet corners and out-of-the-way neighborhoods. Many are the legacy of former President Jacques Chirac. In the 18 years he served as mayor of Paris, he put his personal stamp on his city by painting its hidden corners green.

“He took some of the pathetic, shabby squares and gardens and transformed and adorned them,” said Claude Bureau, one of the city’s great garden historians who was chief gardener of the Jardin des Plantes for more than two decades. “He appreciated beauty — of women, of nature.”

Paris’s current mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, has taken over the task. In his seven years in the job, he has created 79 acres of what City Hall calls “new green spaces.” Just this month, he transformed the open space in front of City Hall into an “ephemeral garden,” a nearly 31,000-square-foot temporary installation of 6,000 plants and trees, and even a mini-lake.

Intimate, lightly trafficked and often quirky, the small gardens of Paris can be ideal places to rest and to read. The trick is to find them. You can consult “Paris: 100 Jardins Insolites” (“Paris: 100 Unusual Gardens”), a guide by Martine Dumond whose color photos make discovery for the non-French speaker a pleasure, or explore various Web sites like www.paris-walking-tours.com/parisgardens.html. Or you can simply wander on foot, confident that around the next corner there will be something new.

You’ll find spaces for listening to a concert or watching a puppet show (like the Parc de Bagatelle in the 16th Arrondissement); church gardens (like the one enclosing the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Seventh Arrondissement); gardens with vegetable patches (like the Jardin Catherine-Labouré in the Seventh Arrondissement); oriental gardens (like the one at Unesco headquarters in the Seventh Arrondissement that was a gift of the Japanese government). There are gardens with beehives, bird preserves, out-of-fashion roses, chessboards, playgrounds, menageries, panoramic views, even a rain forest and a farm. Green spaces adjoin cemeteries, embassies, movie theaters and hotels.

Even hospitals.

I doubt that most visitors to Notre-Dame Cathedral know that inside the nearby Hôtel-Dieu complex, which is still a working hospital, is a formal garden-courtyard with sculptured 30-year-old boxwoods. The hospital’s gardener replants much of the space every May — with fuchsias, sage, impatiens and Indian roses.

From the top of the flight of steps that cuts across the garden, you can find yourself all alone, looking out through the hospital’s windows to the tourist hordes outside. Every few months, the hospital’s interns choose a different costume for the male statue at the back — at the moment, he is Snow White.

(It was Mr. Bureau who told me that some of the most peaceful gardens belong to hospitals. Gardens help cure patients more quickly, he said).

The Square René Viviani on the Left Bank across from Notre-Dame is another spot that is easy to miss. But this tranquil square features what is said to be the oldest tree in Paris — a false acacia brought to France from Virginia in 1601, and now shored up with concrete posts. Sitting on a park bench in one corner yields one of the best views in Paris — Notre-Dame on the right and St.-Julien-le-Pauvre, a tiny church built in the same era on the left.

And then there are the gardens that are the back or front yards of museums. For instance, at the cafe-garden of the Petit-Palais— with its palm and banana trees and sculptures and mosaic floors lit from below — a half dozen marble tables and metal chairs offer the ideal setting to watch the museum’s stone walls change from buff to tawny yellow as the sun moves.

Inside the museum is a portrait of Alphand (whose park designs include the Bois de Boulogne, the Parc Monceau and the Parc Montsouris, as well as the Vallée Suisse) in a top hat, his pince-nez hanging from his black overcoat.

And then there are country settings like the garden of the Musée de la Vie Romantique, once the home of the 19th-century artist Ary Sheffer, at the end of a narrow path at 16, rue Chaptal in the Ninth Arrondissement. There, you can sit among the poppies, foxglove and roses and sip tea (a cafe opens in the summer) and pretend to be George Sand, who lived nearby, and whose personal effects have been assembled in a reconstructed drawing room inside (even a lock of her hair).

On the other side of town, behind an alley at 100, bis, rue d’Assas in the Sixth Arrondissement, is the garden of the Zadkine Museum, which was once the home and atelier of the 20th-century Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine. The sculpture-filled garden is much the same today as when he worked in wood and granite under its trees. “Come and see my pleasure house, and you’ll understand how much a man’s life can be changed by a pigeon house or by a tree,” he once wrote to a friend.

But gardens are not just museum pieces; they are active, integral parts of neighborhoods. For a bit of entertainment — even drama — on a sleepy weekend afternoon, I sometimes walk over to the Square Blomet in the 15th Arrondissement. It is the headquarters of the Union Bouliste, where games of boules are played with such verve that they continue under spotlights late at night.

The ivy covering the metal walls of the field is so old that the leaves have grown up to six inches wide. At the end of a long park-bench-lined corridor sits a little-known bronze sculpture by Joan Miró, who lived in poverty down the street in the atelier of a fellow Catalan sculptor.

On spring and summer Sundays, there is even more excitement at the Jardin Tino Rossi, a sliver along the Seine that turns into an impromptu dance-a-thon. For more than two decades, the informal group of singers and dancers that has been a fixture at the Rue Mouffetard outdoor Sunday market moves to Tino Rossi, along the Quai St.-Bernard, to party. After a wine-filled picnic, they take over one of the amphitheaters, and to the music of accordion, violin and saxophone, they sing and dance the musette until midnight. The star couple one recent Sunday was an older man, in a white shirt and shoes and Champagne-colored trousers, and his partner, a redhead in white ruffles and red sequined slippers.

For quiet magic, Paris insiders pass the time on the lawn and benches of the Square du Vert-Galant, a pointy-shaped spit of land that reminds me of the deck of a cruise ship. The westernmost tip of the Île de la Cité, it offers the Louvre on the right, the dome of the Institut de France on the left, the river on both sides and straight ahead.

The best way to access it is down two flights of stairs at the equestrian statue of Henri IV on the Pont Neuf. It was there, in the 1991 film “Les Amants du Pont Neuf” (released in the United States as “The Lovers on the Bridge”) that Juliette Binoche, as a homeless artist who is going blind, struggles to paint her companion’s portrait.

Even the city’s large, formal gardens proclaim hidden spaces. The vast Luxembourg Garden can overwhelm with too many joggers, sunbathers, musicians, newspaper readers, pony riders and tulip admirers. But find the 17th-century Fountain of the Medicis, named after Marie de Medicis (Louis XIV’s grandmother), an oasis of calm and shade inspired by the city of Florence and built on her instructions.

I am not much of a gardener, and the Jardin des Plantes in the Fifth Arrondissement, with its greenhouses and odd species and identifying labels, seemed too much like work. Until I met Mr. Bureau. He told me how his mother was a concierge in the neighborhood, and that he took his first baby steps in the vast garden. It was there, in fact, that he met his wife. She was a 17-year-old high school student, he a 21-year-old gardener fresh from military service. It was raining, and he offered her shelter in the gardener’s hut.

“Women always love gardeners,” he said. “We speak of roses and perfume. We can easily get their attention.”

He was readily persuaded to show off its secret corners, the gardens within the garden. After pointing out a Lebanese cedar planted in 1734, he took me up a spiraling stone walkway to a pergola of iron, copper, bronze, lead and even gold that is France’s oldest metal decorative construction.

Then we entered a concrete tunnel beneath the main garden that led to the Jardin Alpin, a craggy, flowering space that houses species from mountainous areas around the world. Deep inside is a valley with a stream and a leafy canopy that only the strongest beams of light can penetrate. “Here,” Mr. Bureau said, “is where lovers come to hide.”

EARLY on a recent morning, I went walking around the 18th Arrondissement with François Jousse, City Hall’s main lighting engineer (and a self-appointed expert on Paris), to explore more of the city’s little-known gardens, ones I had never come across in the six years I have lived in Paris. There, as in other parts of the city, squares and parks were built in a wave of democratization in the 19th century.

Mr. Jousse showed me the Square Carpeaux, where working-class families bring their kids and where table tennis is played on permanent tables. A white statue of a woman whose arm was broken off looks over the space; a pergola sits in the center of the square.

“I love this place for what it represents: an old, authentic Paris neighborhood meeting place,” Mr. Jousse said. “I call it the anti-Luxembourg.”

We stopped by the Parc de la Turlure, a series of discreet spaces that form a sort of garden-apartment — a living room of grass, a corridor with a tilleul (linden) arcade, a “bedroom” that seems to belong to oiled women in bikinis and another for boules-playing. Abutting the Sacré-Coeur Basilica, the park has a small amphitheater that faces a wall of rushing water.

From there, we headed to the wilderness of the Jardin Sauvage St.-Vincent, a 16,000-square-foot space that since 1985 has been designated by the city as a “wild” garden, where insecticides and artificial watering are banned, and some of the most unexpected vegetation in Paris — artemisias, white nettles, wild blackberries — can be found. Unfortunately, it is open only six hours on Saturdays from April through October. Sometimes not even then. It was closed that day.

But that disappointment led to another discovery: a tree- and bird-filled garden at the Musée de Montmartre just around the block at 12, rue Cortot, where Renoir painted “The Garden in the Rue Cortot, Montmartre,” an 1876 work that now hangs in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art. The Montmartre museum itself is in what was once a 17th-century abbey. Its collection includes photographs, posters, paintings and manuscripts documenting Montmartre’s 2,000-year history.

One room, called “Party Time,” is devoted to the laissez-faire mentality of the neighborhood when it was not part of Paris proper. “Outside the walls of the city, wine is cheaper and women are less shy,” reads an information panel. From a window there, you can look down into a working vineyard no bigger than a basketball court, lovingly adorned with hostas, ferns, pansies and primrose. Purple phlox spill over a wall; wisteria drapes over a fence. (Its grapes, harvested every fall, are said to make the most expensive bad wine in the city.)

Mr. Jousse left his favorite for last: les Jardins du Ruisseau, which are not really gardens at all, at least not in the classic sense. They are a series of narrow spaces along a defunct railway track heading east out of Paris where residents have planted flowers, fruit trees, vegetables and herbs in pots.

You can look down into the space — and at its bold graffiti-painted walls. Except for special events or tours organized by City Hall, the metal door leading to a staircase down into the “gardens” is padlocked. But the 300 members of the garden association have keys.

So Mr. Jousse and I stopped by the Rez-de-Chaussée bistro at 65, rue Letort a few blocks away, and the owner, Thierry Cayla, gave us a key. Over lunch at the bistro, we joked that perhaps Mr. Cayla should turn the gardens into a tourist attraction by preparing picnic baskets for visitors.

But then, at 16.90 euros for a three-course meal, you would miss the chance for one of the best bistro bargains in Paris.

WHERE TO FIND THE FLOWERS

The locations and summer hours for some of Paris’s hidden gardens:

Vallée Suisse is in the Garden of the Champs-Élysées, at the junction of the Cours de la Reine, Cours Albert 1er and Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eighth Arrondissement. Open daily 24 hours.

Jardin Tino Rossi, Quai St.-Bernard, Fifth Arrondissement; open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to dusk, and Saturday and Sunday, from 9 a.m. to dusk.

Jardin Catherine-Labouré, 29, rue de Babylone, Seventh Arrondissement; open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.

The Japanese garden at Unesco headquarters, 7, place Fontenoy, Seventh Arrondissement, is open by reservation only; call 33-1-45-68-03-59.

Clos Montmartre, 14-18 rue des Saules, 18th Arrondissement; open only during the grape harvest in September.

Garden of the Hôtel-Dieu, 1, place du Parvis Notre Dame, Fourth Arrondissement; 33-1-42-34-82-34; open daily 24 hours.

Square René Viviani, 2, rue du Fouarre, Fifth Arrondissement; Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Petit-Palais, Avenue Winston Churchill, Eighth Arrondissement; 33-1-53-43-40-00; the garden is open every day except Monday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Musée de la Vie Romantique, Hôtel Scheffer-Renan, 16, rue Chaptal, Ninth Arrondissement; 33-1-55-31-95-67; the garden is open every day except Monday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Musée Zadkine, 100 bis, rue d’Assas, Sixth Arrondissement; 33-1-55-42-77-20. The garden is open daily except Monday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

L’Union Bouliste du 15ème, 43, rue Blomet, 15th Arrondissement; 33-1-45-66-87-21; through Aug. 31, open Monday to Friday from 9:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Jardin des Plantes has several entrances: Rue Auguste Conte, Rue Cuvier, Rue Buffon, Rue Geoffroy-St.-Hilaire or the Place Valhubert. Open daily from 7:30 a.m. to 7:45 p.m.; 33-1-40-79-56-01; www.mnhn.fr.

Square Carpeaux, 23, rue Carpeaux, 18th Arrondissement; open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Parc de la Turlure, Rue de La Bonne or Rue du Chevalier de la Barre, 18th Arrondissement; open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Jardin Sauvage St.-Vincent, Rue St. Vincent, 18th Arrondissement; 33-1-43-28-47-63; open only on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and from 1:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

Les jardins du Ruisseau, next to 110, rue du Ruisseau, 18th Arrondissement; www.lesjardinsduruisseau.org, are not generally open to the public; if one of the members of the association is in, it may be open. You can make an appointment by sending an e-mail message to contact@lesjardinsduruisseau.org.

THE COUNTRY LIFE IN THE CITY

From hidden courtyards to tucked-away garden cafes, Paris offers hundreds of dining spots where the verdant surroundings might make you forget you’re in a city.

WHERE TO EAT

La Maison de l’Amérique Latine (217, boulevard St.-Germain, Seventh Arrondissement; 33-1-49-54-75-10; www.mal217.org) serves classic French cuisine in an elegant “jardin à la Française,” tucked behind two 18th-century mansions. Thirty tables under white parasols overlook two acres of manicured lawn. Expect to spend about 55 euros for dinner without wine, about $87 at $1.58 to the euro.

Les Jardins de Bagatelle (Route de Sèvres, 16th Arrondissement; 33-1-40-67-16-49) offers country dining at the edge of the city. Dinner, which might include melon soup, scallops with leek, and lemon tort, averages around 60 euros, with wine.

Le Chalet des Îles (Lac inférieur du Bois de Boulogne, 16th Arrondissement ; 33-1-42-88-04-69; www.lechaletdesiles.net): picture dinner in an island garden, in the middle of a huge park — only a few miles from the center of Paris. This rustic pink-and-green Second Empire chalet with outdoor terraces is surrounded by a lake and reachable by a minute-long boat ride. For about 50 euros, you can dine on lemon-marinated veal carpaccio with vegetables and mozzarella.

Le Saut du Loup (107, rue de Rivoli, First Arrondissement; 33-1-42-25-49-55; www.lesautduloup.com), inside the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, has an outdoor terrace overlooking the Louvre. Lunch might include gazpacho, steak with polenta and ice cream for around 40 euros.

La Muscade (36, rue de Montpensier, First Arrondissement; 33-1-42-97-51-36; www.muscade-palais-royal.com) has 30 or so tables scattered near the garden of the Palais Royal, with a lovely views of the garden’s row of lime trees. A sandwich costs about 10 euros.

Café Lenôtre (10, avenue des Champs-Élysées; Eighth Arrondissement ; 33-1-42-65-85-10; www.lenotre.fr) offers chic snacking in an elegant green setting. A club sandwich with a salad goes for 14.50 euros.

WHERE TO STAY

At the deluxe Hospes Lancaster (7, rue de Berri, Eighth Arrondissement ; 33-1-40-76-40-76; www.hotel-lancaster.fr), not far from the Arc de Triomphe, ask for a room overlooking the courtyard garden. The garden is small, but with its cork oaks and jasmine-embalmed Japanese purity, this is an exquisite refuge. A standard room costs 490 euros.

Hôtel des Grandes Écoles (75, rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Fifth Arrondissement; 33-1-43 26-79-23; www.hotel-grandes-ecoles.com) is in the Latin Quarter. It comprises three houses surrounding a beautiful flower garden. Doubles are 113 to 138 euros.

— Maia De La Baume

ELAINE SCIOLINO is a correspondent for the Paris bureau of The Times.

20/06/2008 The Telegraph UK

Christopher Bray reviews Everything is Cinema by Richard Brody
# Anne Billson reviews Everything is Cinema

Too many critics who came after him were so convinced by his arguments for the virtues of classical Hollywood that they have never been able to see beyond it. As a result, Godard’s movies have been misunderstood - or, worse, ignored - by the very people whose careers he engendered.

Hence, perhaps, Godard’s near-Oedipal desire to slay the beast that bore him. Shooting the raucously joyful Une Femme est une Femme in 1960, Godard described the picture as a lament for the fact that life wasn’t a Hollywood musical.

A few years later, he was to be found lecturing an increasingly Marxian Paris that “it wouldn’t be bad to ban American cinema for a while. People must become aware that there are other ways to make films.”

Fed up as we all now are with contemporary Hollywood, it is hard not to sympathise. But it is harder still to sympathise with contemporary Godard - a man who in one breath can compare himself to Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, and in another claim to be engaged in work as important as that of any scientist and therefore deserving of public funding.

At times like this, one wants to grab Godard by the lapels and remind him that movies are already publicly funded: make a movie that the public wants to see and the funds will flood in.

He of all people ought to know. For his first 10 years as a director, Godard turned out masterpiece after masterpiece - À Bout de Souffle, Le Mépris, Bande à Part, Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou, Weekend. The cinemas couldn’t print tickets fast enough.

Then, almost overnight, the punters stopped coming. As Brody points out, Godard’s decline set in just as France’s post-war faith in Sartrean commitment and self-determination was giving way to the more formal concerns of Roland Barthes: it wasn’t what you did, it was the way you did it.

Godard being Godard, he went the opposite way, abandoning the high jinks of his early work for the hectoring anti-bourgeois dirges he has served up since the late Sixties.

Even after his return to something like narrative with Sauve qui Peut (la Vie) in the early Eighties, Godard has too often sacrificed the pleasure he takes in the surface of film for the putatively more serious depths of his philosophising.

Preaching only to the converted, he doubtless sees himself as a prophet without honour. And maybe he is, but he is a prophet without profits, too.

All of this might change with the publication of Brody’s monograph. While I shook my fist at Everything is Cinema almost as much as I nodded my head at it, the book has had its desired effect: it has made me want to take another look at what I remain convinced are the aridly programmatic likes of Prénom Carmen (1983) and King Lear (1987).

As critical achievements go, it mightn’t be up there with spotting the genius of Howard Hawks and Orson Welles. But from where I’m going to be sitting, it still looks like a mighty big deal.

By SAM WANG and SANDRA AAMODT
NY Times Published: June 27, 2008

FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls.

Even if they do not understand the neuroscience behind source amnesia, campaign strategists can exploit it to spread misinformation. They know that if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long after it is debunked. In repeating a falsehood, someone may back it up with an opening line like “I think I read somewhere” or even with a reference to a specific source.

In one study, a group of Stanford students was exposed repeatedly to an unsubstantiated claim taken from a Web site that Coca-Cola is an effective paint thinner. Students who read the statement five times were nearly one-third more likely than those who read it only twice to attribute it to Consumer Reports (rather than The National Enquirer, their other choice), giving it a gloss of credibility.

Adding to this innate tendency to mold information we recall is the way our brains fit facts into established mental frameworks. We tend to remember news that accords with our worldview, and discount statements that contradict it.

In another Stanford study, 48 students, half of whom said they favored capital punishment and half of whom said they opposed it, were presented with two pieces of evidence, one supporting and one contradicting the claim that capital punishment deters crime. Both groups were more convinced by the evidence that supported their initial position.

Psychologists have suggested that legends propagate by striking an emotional chord. In the same way, ideas can spread by emotional selection, rather than by their factual merits, encouraging the persistence of falsehoods about Coke — or about a presidential candidate.

Journalists and campaign workers may think they are acting to counter misinformation by pointing out that it is not true. But by repeating a false rumor, they may inadvertently make it stronger. In its concerted effort to “stop the smears,” the Obama campaign may want to keep this in mind. Rather than emphasize that Mr. Obama is not a Muslim, for instance, it may be more effective to stress that he embraced Christianity as a young man.

Consumers of news, for their part, are prone to selectively accept and remember statements that reinforce beliefs they already hold. In a replication of the study of students’ impressions of evidence about the death penalty, researchers found that even when subjects were given a specific instruction to be objective, they were still inclined to reject evidence that disagreed with their beliefs.

In the same study, however, when subjects were asked to imagine their reaction if the evidence had pointed to the opposite conclusion, they were more open-minded to information that contradicted their beliefs. Apparently, it pays for consumers of controversial news to take a moment and consider that the opposite interpretation may be true.

In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court wrote that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Holmes erroneously assumed that ideas are more likely to spread if they are honest. Our brains do not naturally obey this admirable dictum, but by better understanding the mechanisms of memory perhaps we can move closer to Holmes’s ideal.

Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, and Sandra Aamodt, a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, are the authors of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”

Rehersal for Retirement (detail)
English Lime wood, Poplar, 2008