LE SUD DE FRANCE

Le Sud de France 6.5: Le Vendage et le Primeur Vin

2011-10-26T08:28:00.000-07:00

The grape harvest and the presentation of the “first” wine.

It has been a year since we arrived in France with our jam-packed suitcases and drugged out wild cat, and we managed to celebrate this anniversary with our whole community. We live in a “vigneron” village where most residents either own a vineyard or work on one. The vines are the main source of income and the very existence of Tourbes depends on them.

At the beginning of October, the vendage, the harvest, began and the roads and vineyards were filled with huge harvesters. Unlike the movie version of a wine harvest, with happy peasants taking days to pick the grapes, these monsters harvest a vineyard in a few hours. The harvested grapes are loaded onto trucks that deliver the tons of fresh grapes to the wineries co-ops where they will be pressed.

However, viniculture has had a particularly tough grind for the last few years. The Languedoc-Roussillon has had a drought with rainfall in some areas down by 80%. Water tables are precariously low; and you need water to make wine and for the mundane tasks of cleaning vats, trucks and other equipment. In the last few years, the drought reduced vineyard production around our village to the point that our cave stopped producing wine and the vignerons elected to merge their operation with that of another co-op.

The arrangement is that while grapes would continue to be pressed at our co-op, the juice would be transported by tanker the dozen kilometers to a cave in the town of Montagnac for fermentation and bottling. The wines would then be sold under their “Montagnac” label.

Once the vendage was over, wineries around the region celebrated by opening their “primeur” wines. Most wineries produce many different wines and the primeur is simply the first drinkable red, white or rosé, from the previous year’s harvest. These openings are part celebration and part marketing event with speeches, food and music.

Although le Sud de France had had an exceptionally hot and long Indian summer, by mid-October, autumn arrived, gray and wet and we ended up walking to the cave in a cold rain. As we neared it we heard music and people singing, and it turned out to be a guy was playing accordion with a bunch of people performing old French songs. Diane and I joined in, although knowing neither the words or the music, the best I could do was to hum and scat along.

After about half an hour of music making, the official program began. The president of the regional winemakers association got up and spoke about how hard it was to market wine, especially with competition from the well know wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy. He spoke of the irony that these famous wines were actually made largely from Languedoc grape juice that those wineries quietly bought from us. Next the mayor spoke, reminding everyone that wine making was the very life of the village. He is a vigneron himself and happily announced that the vendage had gone well. It had been a good harvest and this year they were getting good prices for their grapes. The mayor was followed by the director of the co-op, who spoke about the new wine.

When he finished the vignerons and their wives began to bring out tray after tray of slices of paté, cheeses, hors d’oeuvres and of course, bottle upon bottle of the new wine.

The mayor came over to me, filled our glasses with the new wine and we tasted it together. He sipped and I sipped, we sipped again and then agreed that this “sauvignon nouveau,” as it was called, is a damn fine wine.

The trays of food and the bottles of wine kept coming out. When I looked around me, I realized that this was a rather private gathering of our village. In an atmosphere of “Bonheur,” it seemed that we were reinforcing community bonds as well as celebrating a good harvest. This was a crowd of no nonsense, tough vignerons, who were relieved as people refilled their glasses again and again, visibly enjoying the new wine. Oddly, this means that once again, like so many great Languedoc wines, all of it would be sold locally before it had a chance to reach a larger, worldwide audience.

After a while, one of our friends pulled us aside and led us out of a side door where we found ourselves in front of a fire pit of burning grapevine stems, the glowing embers swirling up in the currents of hot air like fireworks, exploding in the darkness. Sitting over the fire pit was a steel wheelbarrow contraption filled to overflowing with mussels. Several men stood stirring the mussels with long ladles that were also used to scoop up the cooked mussels and pile them onto paper plates. Soaked in olive oil and garlic before barbequing, the hot barbequed mussels were delicious and despite the quantity of hors d’oeuvres everyone had consumed earlier, the wheelbarrow quickly emptied.

We sat eating with a group of friends, mostly Parisian émigrés, on an old stone wall, struggling to balance the plates of hot mussels on our laps. We had no silverware so we ate with our fingers and ended up laughing at ourselves. Here we were a bunch of big city sophisticates, sitting around a blazing campfire, eating mussels with our fingers like children, happy as clams. No one even minded the persistent, cold drizzle anymore.

Le Sud de France 6.4 : Journées Taurines, the Days of Bulls

2011-09-08T08:47:00.000-07:00

The young men stood nervously rocking on the balls of their feet, waiting for the riders and horses. The long allée of plane trees leading into the heart of the village was full of people. New parents pushed strollers, old folks walked slowly with canes and teenagers gossiped ceaselessly on their mobiles. Every one of them passing easily through the tall red, steel barriers that had been erected along the allée. They chatted and laughed in the street, oblivious to the danger the young men next to them were anticipating.

The gardiens are France's cowboys

In the distance, from the direction of the village recycling bins, came the clacking of hooves on hard asphalt. Within seconds, the young men could see the Camargue gardiens and their graceful white horses turning the corner and racing down towards them. The tightly packed horses surrounded something, something dark and foreboding. In a ghostlike blur, they flew passed the young men. Just visible between the horse’s flanks were two black bulls.

After several circuits of the village the bulls are tired and can be caught up with.

The youths took off after them, running as fast as they could. They tried to catch the bulls and a few got close enough to grab an animal’s tail for a few seconds, but most did not. In frustration, some of the young men shouted out at the rapidly disappearing animals.

“When I catch you, you lousy son-of–a-cow, I will turn into a McBurger!”

The young men show their cajones.

“Hola bull, I had your sister for dinner. Nice steaks, she tasted great! I’m waiting for you.”

Then, winded and sweating, the young men stopped and bent over to catch their breaths to the scattered applause of a few friends. For those who touched the bulls’ tails there was visible elation.

Welcome to our village’s “Journées Taurines” or “Days of Bulls.”

We are located in the Herault, halfway between Spain and the cattle ranches of the Camargue. Raising bulls and bullfighting is a tradition in the Languedoc and many cities have arenes (arenas). The larger venues, like Nîmes, Carcassone and Béziers, are part of the “corrida” circuit that the toreros travel each year. While bullfighting may be a controversial sport, with its ardent supporters and equally ardent detractors, the Journées Taurines is not a bullfight at worst it is bull annoyance.

The bull running began Saturday and continued on Sunday. The first year the event was held one of the organizers stepped out in front of a bull and taunted it. The taurine was not impressed and flung the man into the air, a moment immortalized on YouTube.

Thinking of breaking out?

Thereafter crowd control and public safety became a big concern. This year along the Avenue de la Gare, the tree lined road that leads into town, the village workers erected heavy, red steel barriers. About two meters tall, there was enough room between the bars to allow people to pass through them, but not enough space for a large animal. However, there was a glitch in this security arrangement. No one cared that you were supposed to stay behind the bars. People just passed through them and continued on their merry way, as though nothing were going on. The event announcer kept telling people to stay back behind the barriers but no one seemed to pay any attention to him except for the local band, Fanfare Banzai. They wisely sat well back from the barriers and played their music from the terrace of a nearby restaurant.

This old guy threw his hat at the bulls to get them to run faster.

The horses and bulls made a wide circuit down the allée and around through the fields. Each time they came down the Avenue, the crowd stepped aside to make room for them and cheered a little, then just as quickly stepped back out into the street.

As the village photojournalist, I loaded up my professional gear, long lenses and all and covered the “action.” And, there I stood out in the middle of the street, cameras at the ready, ignoring the taunts and the warnings of several British friends who shouted from behind the barriers.

Fanfare Banzai played from the safety of the restaurant.

Even Diane added to the chorus, begging me to come back to safety.

“No,” I said proudly, “I am a photojournalist and my job is to get the photos.”

My sang froid rising, I added, “I’ll be okay because I will stand next to this old lady and her two little granddaughters. Surely, not even an angry bull would harm a child or the photographer standing behind her.”

Then I heard the sounds of the approaching horses and I began to have some misgivings about my plan. Luckily, the little girl looked up at me and smiled.

The horses flew by us and I hurriedly snapped frame after frame. Most of these shots, of course, were photos of the rear ends of horses, young men, and bulls. No, Pulitzer there. Clearly this event would not rise to level of an Ernest Hemingway bullfight, there was not even going to be a broken arm much less a Death in this Afternoon.

After a lot of taunting this taurine chased a kid across the arena.

Then I realized what the village’s little secret was. These bulls were rather young. Imagine if you will as one year old, sweet, and gentle Ferdinand the Bulls, rather than some sort of steamrollers of death. As herd animals they ran, dare I say, happily in the safety of the horses?

Notice how small the bull is.

Moreover, unlike Pamplona where the bulls chase the people, in Tourbes people chase the bulls and try to catch up with them. Sure, these frisky steers could hurt you but you literally have to get in their faces to do it, as that event organizer did in that first running. Cattle are nearsighted, that is why toreros use red capes to get their attention, to get hurt you have to get in their way.

A log day of running bulls draws to a close.

“Gardiens,” the cattle ranchers from the Camargue marshes of the Rhone, operate these bull runnings all around the region. They are in control of the animals and having raised them are aware of each one’s mood and attitude. I’ve written about the gardiens before. These are the French cowboys who at the turn of the 19^th century hosted Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show when they were forced by bad weather to spend a winter camped in the Camargue. The gardiens learned a lot about riding and roping from the cowboys and adopted both American style saddles and clothing.

People without barriers watch the loose bulls.

Although the weekend went well and there were only minor injuries, some question remains about whether or not there will be a Journées Taurines next year. While the bulls were well behaved, the people were not. With dozens of people milling about oblivious to the bulls, horses and men racing by, it was an injury lawyer’s dream and an insurer’s nightmare.

Most people totally ignored the barriers. The bulls, on the other hand, recognizing the danger these people posed, wisely sought shelter with the riders and horses. Facing the horde of reckless moms, wandering children and incautious grannies, that was the smart thing to do. In their hooves, I would have done the same.

Le Sud de France 6.2 : The Dance of the Vignerons, Part 1-The Fête Begins

2011-08-14T07:41:00.000-07:00

Our village is a quiet place surrounded by hectares of hushed vineyards. The only sounds that disturb the peace are from the morning boulangerie traffic, the children playing in the schoolyard and the occasional karaoke night at the café. Two thousand years ago, Tourbes was settled by Romans who built houses and roads, planted olive trees and grapevines and prayed to the god Bacchus.

We moved here in January and over time learned about the various village festivals and in particular the big “fête locale” in late July. At first I thought it would be like a “Renaissance Faire” with villagers dressed as quaint peasants and whole lambs roasting on spits over smoky open fire-pits. These images were quickly dispelled by one of our English friends.

“Actually, mate, it's four nights of show bands with strobe lights playing until two every morning. And here’s the part you’ll like best,” he added with a gleam in his eye. “the show's right under your front windows.”

With these words, our storybook French village of good-natured eccentrics and happy-go-lucky locals turned upside down. At the end of July, we were going to have ringside seats for four nights of Las Vegas, baby.

“Don’t worry, mate,” my pal went on, “this too shall pass.”

July arrived hot and damp. By late in the month, the autoroutes were bumper to bumper with vacationers heading to already crowded, Mediterranean beaches. Several days before the fête, metal barriers sprouted on our streets, closing the village center to traffic and in front of our house, village workers erected a stage. Large white vans slipped silently into town like a caravan of circus elephants and camped around our 13^th century church.

The fête was to begin Friday night and that morning, the vans disgorged an entire amusement park, complete with carousels, bumper cars, games of chance and a stand that sold “Barbe de Pape,” cotton candy. In the center of this newly planted forest of fun, on a high pillar, was our statue of the Virgin Mary, hands raised in supplication to God, and now staring down in wonder at the chaos below. However, I’m sure she was pleased because each night, kids and parents would ride the rides, play the games and enjoy themselves a lot.

In the late afternoon, the women of the “Comité des fêtes” set up huge paella pans on a long table near our front door. They filled them with sausage and chicken, and, humming merrily, crushed huge cloves of garlic into the simmering platters. They were making “macarrronade,” a paella like dish with pasta instead of rice. It would be the base of the village meal, the repas, that kicks off the fête. The Comité is group of hard working volunteers who labor year round to produce events and this was their biggest weekend.

A "fête locale' is a big happening in a small village. Each night the population triples or quadruples with foreign tourists and visitors from nearby villages. They come to drink and dance and drink.

And, let me be frank. There was a lot of drinking at the fête. We are a vigneron village, grape growing and winemaking is our business. Our vignerons produce a superb rosé from cinsault grapes grown in our vineyards. It is a civic duty to drink this rosé, and, of course, to help others enjoy it too. The fête is paid, for in part, through the sale of rosé, beer and pastis. However, in the whole weekend of fête, there was no public drunkenness or fistfights and surprisingly, the peace was kept without a single cop or security guard. Everyone just behaved well and watched out for each other.

Around seven, people drifted into the square. They bought their first drinks, and milled about saying hello to each other. By 8:30, they began to line up at the big paella pans, and the repas commenced. Everyone got a large portion of macarrronade, and in no time at all three hundred people were having dinner on our doorstep.

The stage lights came on at ten and two singers began singing. Several showgirls joined them and soon everyone on stage was dancing and singing energetically.

The Herault makes its money in the summertime and there are dozens of show bands, karaoke singers and DJs working the region. They play endless one-night stands at restaurants and hotels entertaining vacationers. The bands usually consist of a few singers and dancers, and half a dozen musicians. They all play “Nonstop,” that is without a break, intermission, or change of key or tempo for four hours straight.

The opening band for our fête was typical with several large banks of powerful amplifiers and a spider web structure packed with lights. There were even huge klieg lights like the kind normally used against enemy aircraft or to light up the Empire State building. For four hours, the band turned our cozy French town into Studio 54 and consumed more electricity in a night than the entire village in a month.

And what they played was disco. Remember disco? ABBA, the BeeGees, the Village People, mirrored balls, bell-bottom pants, and John Travolta’s white suit? Well, it may be 2011, but show bands play forty year old, American disco.

Worse yet, most of the songs were sung in English, a language that neither the performers nor the audience, understood. It made for some bizarre moments, as when one singer shouted to the crowd, “Shakes you booties” and in bewilderment, people raised their hands and clapped.

On the stage, the singers every song rapidly and at maximum volume. The dancers repeated the few routines they had learned watching MTV, and they had changed costume for every song. The band played nonstop and then abruptly at two, like sleepwalkers awakening from a dream, they stopped, packed up, and moved on.

People began to go home. I envied them going home. We couldn’t go home, we were home, put under some kind of disco house arrest by our own village.

Saturday morning the village workers hosed down the quai and the streets. The mayor and some of the Comité sat at a table eating bread and cheese and drinking rosé before they got up and put on plastic gloves to clean the public bathrooms.

The events for Saturday included a decorated bike and scooter competition and the election of the best “Mamies” or grandmothers in the village. Low keyed and sweet, they felt oddly out of place in our neon Las Vegas.

In the evening, the village filled with several hundred ados, what the French call teenagers. It was Saturday night and the kids needed to get out of their historic, old villages and party.

At ten, the show began. A singer started a song and half a dozen “showgirls” began to dance. I stared in disbelief. I had seen this all before, the night before. It was the same disco show. The ados seemed oblivious to this, they were there to dance and did their version of moshing and, dare I call it, break dancing. Mostly they stood in place, shaking their shoulders, hopping up and down and occasionally lifting one of their own into the air amidst a lot of laughter.

I watched the ados from the café bar with a friend. Shaking his head in amazement he said. “It’s really weird, these kids aren’t pissed.”

Yup, these kids weren’t pissed. They had come for a good time, to dance and have fun. In spite of drinking a good deal of beer and wine, they remained polite and mostly sober.

Around midnight, the tech guys set off “snow” cannons. You couldn’t hear them because of the music, you’d just see them belch little puffs of “snow.” The kids laughed at the snow and at 2 AM, the band stopped and went home.

The ados began to disperse and we walked the few meters to our house. As we were crawling into bed, Diane heard a noise and we went downstairs to investigate. We found a couple of ados sitting on our doorstep. The girl jumped up in embarrassment but her boyfriend looked up at us and said in awkward English, “Excuse us, we meant nothing bad. We were just romancing.”

We smiled at that, the “romancing” on our doorstep and wished them a good night. We closed the door and went upstairs to try to get some sleep.

To Be Continued in Le Sud de France 6.3: The Dance of the Vignerons, Part 2, below, scroll down to read more.

As always, if you enjoy Le Sud de France, pass a link on to your friends and others.

Le Sud de France 6.3 : The Dance of the Vignerons Part 2- All’s Well That Ends

2011-08-14T07:36:00.000-07:00

Early Sunday morning and I have not slept for two days. In some corner of my mind, I'm aware of a distant rumbling that sounds like an army with pipe and drum has invaded the village. I roused myself, put on clothes and went downstairs to see what was going on. Opening the door, I stepped outside and a cloud of white enveloped in me. Through its haze, I could make out crazed figures in red and one that was throwing a bucket of water at me. I tried to avoid the wave, but it was too late, I was left soaked and covered in a wet flour paste.

Welcome to «le tour de ville» a Tourbes village tradition. It’s a group of guys who spend fête Sunday covering themselves and every square millimeter of our pristine town with flour and water while downing lots of beer. Having been thus baptized by the boys, I grabbed my camera and ran off to join the merry making.

Le tour had thoughtfully brought along tractor pulling a decorated flatbed. On it was a bench, cases of beer and an inflatable pool full of cold water. Frolicking through the town, le tour would scoop up surprised villagers and dump them into the pool. When their hapless victim stood up to get out of the water, they were pummeled with flour.

Le tour took many beer breaks that featured wild dancing, and the singing of odd, wordless songs. As they marched along to drum and pipe they left streets shrouded in floury clouds that rose in the air like the smoke from some urban battleground. To my astonishment, villagers whose cars and homes were being “floured,” hung out of their windows laughing and urging le tour on.

Finally, still a bit hung over, I gave up the chase and went home, where Scaramouche our cat, greeted me at the door. He has been seriously unhappy about the fête and its nightly disco bombardment. The thumping basses and screaming singers had driven him into our windowless downstairs bathroom for shelter. Head aching, I felt like joining him there.

Sunday night came when we got to the café, we found the boys of le tour recovering from a hard day of village flouring, by drinking more beer. Some slouched on the bar, a few stood straight up, dead asleep, and a few muddled on, the piper playing random notes, the drummers listlessly banging their drums. Around the quai were glistening trails of slimy wet flour, as though a herd of giant prehistoric snails had passed this way.

Tonight’s band was a “jazz” band but as soon as the show began, I knew their “jazz” was just more disco. The audience was sparse. Earlier, the quai had been full of Loto players but after the games they had drifted away and only few stayed for the show.

The disco was loud and it would have been just another night of soulless warbling and robotic dancing, had it not been for the Michael Jackson imitator.

He came on stage dressed like the 1982 Jackson and sang “Billie Jean.” Through the whole song he held his hat in front of his face and he sang without moving. There were no dancers, no Jackson steps, no moon-walking; he just stood there immobile and flatly sang the lyrics.

I knew then that we had hit bottom.

The show ended at two, there was only one day left.

Monday morning and the end was in sight. The day began as usual, with workers hosing down the streets while the Mayor and Comité cleaned the toilets. Three nights of bands, booze and disrupted sleep had taken its toll. Everyone was walking in a daze, punch drunk and exhausted.

That night, the quai filled, not with visitors, but with townspeople. I concluded that we must have just worn out everyone else in the Herault.

Tonight there would be a lone DJ but I feared it would still turn into another night of disco. But, when the DJ arrived, I knew something was up because he didn’t have a truckload of gear like the others, just a few amps, a mixing board, and some speakers. A lone teenager, helped him set up and then he hunkered down behind the mixing board. Flanked on either side by low banks of black speakers, he stretched across the board checking the sound levels, his fingers racing over the sliders like manic spiders. In the darkness, his face dimly lit by the board’s lights, he looked like a medieval alchemist hovering over vials of bubbling liquids.

The show began and instead of bone rattling, mind-numbing disco, the DJ played a quiet, elegant “corrida,” one of those songs from the bullfights. As it started, some of the older villagers, mostly vignerons, stood up and began making their way to the front of the stage. They escorted their ladies to the dance floor, where they gently wrapped their arms around them and began to glide across the pavement with long stately strides.

Unlike the previous nights, these dancers danced dances of intricate steps and patterns; dances they had learned in their youth. When the corrida ended, the DJ played a foxtrot, then a few tangos and rumbas. Throughout the night, he kept tight control of the music, changing the tempo, altering the mood, weaving spells around the dancers. With his simple light system, he created scampering spots of colors that played across the dancing vignerons.

I was standing to one side of the stage taking pictures, when, I was suddenly pulled into the dance by our beautiful postmistress. She startled me but I quickly fell in step with her. We danced for a few moments and then changed partners. I danced with my wife, Diane, and then with the vignerons’ wives, and then some ados. I danced nonstop, until I finally had to rest.

Tired beyond tired, I thought of those long, dead Romans. Though no one in the village would call this fête a bacchanalia, I’d bet the Romans would have recognized it in spite of the lack of wild dancing and sex.

Beneath it all, this midsummer’s celebration had all the elements of a primeval ritual. Days of dancing, nights without sleep, the consumption of quantities of wine, the morning washing of streets, village leaders cleaning toilets and le tour de ville, like some drunked shamans, interceding with the gods on behalf of the village and purifying it with water and flour. Even the showgirls played a role, as pagan priestesses.

I stood there by the dance floor, thinking these thoughts, wondering if I had gone insane or if I was just plain, stupid drunk.

But, it felt right. Our village of 1700 dog-tired souls was dancing on the very same spot where the Romans had danced two thousand years before. Here, far from Rome, those veterans of Caesars’ Legions celebrated their harvest and worshipped Bacchus, our village was just carrying on that rite.

We are small village yet we an amazing cross section of humanity is here. We are the children of Cathar and Castile, of Albion and Africa, of Australia and the Americas, and our vigneron t-shirts are proudly emblazoned with the words, "we are les enfants de Bacchus,” the children of Bacchus.

Amidst vineyards, heavy with grapes, fragile and imperfect as we are, we shake our booties in the face of life’s madness. The fête, the bacchanalia, is how we reaffirm that we humans are one tough bunch of bastards and together we can get through anything.

We drank our vignerons’ wine, danced madly for days and I think, I hope, we made old Bacchus howl with delight and get up and dance too.

Yeah, you put your left foot in you take your left foot out. That’s what this was all about.

Finally, it all had to end. The DJ played the last song of the night, couples embraced. High over our heads, the first shooting stars of the Perseids began to fall, like silver melting in the night sky. I took Diane’s hand and we stepped out onto the asphalt dance floor. We swayed to the music and there, in front of our house, we danced the dance of the vignerons.

As always, if you enjoy Le Sud de France, pass a link on to your friends and others.

Le Sud de France 6.1: Hot Time, Summer in the Herault

2011-07-25T02:41:00.000-07:00

They’re here!!!

A family heading to the beach.

Summer and the autoroutes of the Herault are teeming with the rattled masses of Europe yearning to get warm. There are daily reports of hundred kilometer long traffic jams as the population of the EU melts southward to Mediterranean beaches. The Herault is overflowing with tourists, up 6% over last year report the tourism people. Sadly, restaurants and local businesses say that sales are down 30-50%. While more people are heading to the Herault, they have less money to spend because of the lingering economic crisis. Many tourists even come with their own food and stay in their camper vans at public campsites near the beach to cut their costs. It's a shame if they just stay at the beaches because there is lot to see and do in the Herault and much of it is inexpensive or free.

The Butte de Leves near the village of Faugeres

The Herault has one of the most remarkable and varied natural environments imaginable. About the size of the American state of Delaware, it has an interior landscape of thousands of square kilometers of vineyards and long, straight rows of vines, framed by rugged mountains to the north and long, sandy, beaches on the Mediterranean to in the south.

The village of Roquebrun sits above the Orb

The Haut-Languedoc Natural Park, in the north of the Herault, is a large mountainous (the “Monts de Espinouse”) area that is a favorite of campers and hikers. It is an expanse of mountain lakes and forests, trails and camping sites, comparable to American national parks like Washington’s Cascades Mountains. One of the many entrance points for visitors to the park is the small village of Roquebrun, a lovely collection of stones houses perched above the Orb River. Down river from Roquebrun, the Orb narrows and becomes a series of rapids that are a favorite challenge for kayakers from all over Europe.

The Cirque de Moureze

The Cirque de Moureze with landscape of strange dolomite rock formations is another natural wonder of the Park. There are a number of hiking trails through the Cirque that range from an easy hour’s walk to a hard, ten-hour trek. Best of all the Cirque is only a few minutes from the bustling town of Clermont l’Herault. Further north, towards the eastern side of the Herault, is the Tarn River Gorge, a spectacular series of canyons and cliffs carved by the river as it flows south to the Mediterranean. The only cost to a visit to these natural wonders is the price of gas.

In the southern Herault is the Herault is the Bassin du Thau, a huge saltwater lake that it is the heart of the area’s mussel and oyster farming industry. The Bassin lies on the Med and has a ten kilometer long sandbar of beaches along its seaside. Unfortunately, by early summer, the sandbar is packed with the camper vans and huge RVs of the European middle class. The line up of hundreds of TV satellite dishes next to the camper vans makes the sandbar look like Cape Canaveral before a shuttle launch.

a dolomite formation

The mussel and oyster farms of the Bassin du Thau

At the western end of the Bassin is Le Cap d’Agde, a resort town that looks a lot like South Beach. As the locals tell it, if you want to experience a good old fashion Roman orgy, nothing matches the antics of the folks of Le Cap d’Agde. From private clubs to “naturalist” beaches it is a playground for the suburban European working class looking for a very good time.

And speaking of the Romans, they settled here over a thousand years ago and left their mark all over the Herault. They introduced wine and olive cultivation to the region and built bridges, roads and villas, much of which survives today. Near the village of St.Thibery, for instance, there is a lovely old Roman bridge spanning the Herault River and further south near the village of Loupian there is a preserved Gallo-Roman villa.

Sand fills the Orb river at Valras-Plage after a storm, turning it yellow.

The Jardin St.Adrien near the town of Servian

Another beach town, one of our favorites, is a far calmer place than Le Cap d’Agde. Valras-Plage is an old-fashioned seaside town with a long sandy beach and a beachside “boardwalk” lined with cafés, restaurants, and beach clothing shops.

The actor Gilles Buonomo performing

Another surprisingly big part of life in the Herault is art and culture. With a total population of less than a million people, it is a surprise that so much music, theatre, and art can be supported here. Montpellier is the capital of the Herault and it is considered by many France’s “third City” after Marseille and Paris. Each year it has a ballet festival, classical music performances, and art exhibitions. The city’s municipal museum is currently showing the photographs of Brassai, one of my personal icons.

About 25 kilometers southwest of Montpellier is another seaside town, one I’ve already written about, called Sète. In July, the town goes water jousting mad as rower powered boats race towards each other carrying jousters with lances, who try to knock each other into the water. For a more serene activity, the museum in Sète is showing the works of Joan Miro this summer, should you need a break from the sportive types.

Calderoni sings in Pezenas

I’ve written about Pézenas, the town we live next door to in pieces like “A Passion for Pézenas” and “Searching for the Moon and Molière.” It is a small town with only about 8500 inhabitants and yet its arts and cultural programs are extraordinary. The town has a small, elegant Molière museum, the Museum de Vulliod-Saint-Germain, which is an old mansion that was donated to the town by its wealthy owners. It has a wonderful performance space with superb acoustics for concerts. In the last few weeks, we attended two concerts there. One was an “a capella” performance of lyric opera songs by an extraordinary soprano named Kamala Calderoni, who I may add is originally from San Francisco, and a second a concert of violin and cello duets by a couple of Irish musicians, The Duo Chagall.

A fete du vin

Summer activates in Herault aren’t just these events but include hundreds of small village fêtes. For example in our little village of only 1500 people we have had since June 1^st ; a “fête du vin,” a poetry and theater fête, a music fête, three wine tastings at the caveau (the wine co-op), a motorcycle and old American car rally, a regional judo championship, a monster car and truck show, a three day village fête (including dinner for the entire village on our street) and an event that involved children pushing young bulls into plastic swimming pools (please, do not ask.)

at the poetry fete

After all of this the village takes a small break and resumes it activity in September with the 3^rd Annual “running of the bulls” through the ancient, narrow streets of our tiny village. It is an event you cannot miss because the bulls run right past your front door.

A little scary yes, but hey, it’s all part of summer in the Herault.

And if you enjoy these posts, please pass them around to your friends, families and the people you don't like so much too.

Le Sud de France 6.0: And then the Indian Cried.

2011-07-08T05:20:00.000-07:00

Maurice, a driver of long haul, refrigerator trucks, was sitting across from me at dinner when he began to tap his fork against his wine glass to get everyone’s attention. Standing up he announced, “Yesterday was my last day of work. As of today I am retired.”

Amidst smiles and laughter, all of us around the long, outdoor table raised our glasses and said, “à votre santé!” When he sat down, I leaned over and asked him, “Maurice, what are you going to do now that you are retired?”

He looked at me, grinned, and said, “Make love.”

My jaw dropped and he looked at me quizzically. Pointing to his crotch he added, “Well, why not, it still works?” Then he hugged his wife who smiled shyly.

Welcome to the South of France, to the Looking Glass world, where, as the comedy group, the Firesign Theater, used to say, “everything you think you know is wrong.”

Retirement for Americans is all about moving from one area of accomplishment and competition to another. Things like playing golf, visiting the grandkids, building a second home or travel become the new goals. Making love? Not so much.

a happy guy

Yet, this is what is at the heart of our experience of moving to France. We are learning to see the world anew and we are discovering that it is possible to be happy.

Happy. What a strange word that is? We didn’t move here to be happy. As adults, we had more rational reasons; things like the cost of living, the quality of the food and the temperate climate. How could we have even told friends and family that we were leaving the United States to be "happy" when we ourselves were unaware of what "happy" is.

Sitting under the evening Midi sky, the breezes from the Med rapidly cooling off the day’s heat, sipping wine and listening to Maurice tell jokes about Andorra and Belgium--that I only half understood--for this small moment all the frustrations and trials of moving and resettling didn’t matter. I was just happy.

Proust wrote « N’allez pas trop vite. » (“don’t go too fast.”) What I think he meant, was that we need to take pleasure in our lives in the moment and not to go so fast to the next thing, that we end up not actually living our lives. That is what we’ve begun to do here. We’ve slowed down and are tasting happy.

Ironically though, in Proustian terms, we've done it, in part, by falling in with a very fast crowd.

in the Looking Glass World

I’m talking about bikers, “Les Motos d’Espoir” or Motorcycles for Hope. An association of motorcycle riders who raise money for kids with special needs. In June, they had a big gathering and some friends invited us to join them there.

Arriving at the rally we once again stepped through the Looking Glass. Suddenly, it was as though we were back in the US of A.
There were American and Confederate flags all over, bandana wearing bikers in Harley-Davidson jackets and tunes like “Oh Diana” and “Folsom Prison Blues” booming over the sound system.

However, we were still in France, the bikers here drank tea and espresso, and had brought along their extremely cute kids--the girls dressed in frilly sundresses, the boys in half shorts--who ran around the grounds laughing and giggling. A very sweet version of biker life.

There was a distinct lack of big beer bellies and, oddly enough, a lack of actual “chopped’ Harleys. “They are too expensive and too noisy for France,” one biker told me.

Motorcycles clubs are an hommage to American culture rather than an anti-establishment movement. This is a lifestyle of “l’amité” centered around a deep love for all things American. Whenever I hear a French person sing an old Elvis song or a long forgotten Broadway show tune, it makes me think that the French may cherish American culture more we Americans do.

Towards late afternoon, several motorcyclists lined up to give spectators rides around the village on their bikes. One of the kids who they were raising funds for was lifted up onto the back seat of a big three wheeler. It was driven by a guy with long hair, lots of tattoos and a German WWII style helmet. When the boy was secure on the bike, the guy turned around and gave him a big "high five". The boy "high five'd" back and I was quick enough to get a photo of the two of them smiling at the gesture.

Now let me fast-forward ahead about two weeks. I’m sitting at our village café with some of the Motos when who drives up but the longhaired guy. Except today he is in full American Indian regalia. We are introduced to each other and start to talk.

l'indien

His name is Jerry but everyone calls him, “l’indien” --the Indian--a nickname he got because he had lived for six years in a teepee, high in the Ardèche mountains, raising horses and living simply off the land like a North American Plains Indian. French TV did a documentary about l’indien and it made him famous, but it didn’t change him. He still wears his handmade Indian clothing; Cheyenne necklaces and bracelets, a loose deer skin leather shirt and a bison horned, fur covered motorcycle helmet.

It is the Looking Glass world again.

Here I am in a tiny French village, wearing my black cowboy hat and drinking Marseilles pastis with a guy --from Belgium--dressed like a Cheyenne Indian, surrounded by leather jacketed motorcyclists. It is a surreal moment, like something out of a Fellini movie or perhaps, an acid trip, yet the whole scene is infused with that odd glow of “happy.”

We live close to the café and after awhile, I excused myself and went home to get an 8x10 print I had made of the “high five” moment. Returning to the café I gave it to l’indien. ‘Pour vous. Avec plaisir” I said. He smiled, and looked at the print of himself and the little boy.

I turned away for a moment and when I looked back, I saw him wiping his eyes. My photo had touched his big heart. The Indian had cried and then, I cried too.

Happy tears I think.

Happy tears.

Please if you enjoy this blog pass it on to your friends and your enemies too................

Le Sud de France 5.9: Searching for The Moon and Molière.

2011-06-17T04:54:00.000-07:00

Martine

Wednesday night, after sundown, with tripod on shoulder, we set out to “chercher la lune.” Tonight there was to be a spectacular total eclipse of the moon and I hoped to get pictures of it. However as we crossed the village square, we ran into a bunch of our friends who were sitting outside the village café finishing their dinners. After ten minutes of kiss-kiss-kiss and many “bon soir,” I explained our mission to them.

Immediately, several looked up into the sky to find the moon. As locals, they felt certain they could show us, we Americans, where their moon was on this special night. But there was no moon to be seen. Everyone looked and looked, and then pondered this mystery. A small boy was even sent off to see if perhaps the moon was hiding behind a building or tree. But he found no moon either, anywhere.

A great deal of conversation followed this strangeness as it was not like the moon to disappear like this on important nights. Our discussion lasted late into the night and despite the talk, there still was no moon to be seen. It turned out, we were told later, that the moon was low in the sky and visible only from the vineyards beyond town.

Setting out to find the moon and ending up discussing its loss instead, is the kind of redirection of intent that often happens in Molière's plays. Which made it a fitting way to end a week of music and theater productions that made up the Molière Festival in Pézenas.

I hadn’t read much Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) before we got to France and I hadn’t understood his importance as one of the major figures in French literature and theater.

the Place Gambetta

We live near the town of Pezenas in the Herault and it just so happened that in the middle of the 17^th century, Molière and his touring company, l’Illustre Théâtre, stayed in here, under the protection and support of the Prince of Conti--Louis XIV’s governor of the Languedoc. Molière famously spent his time performing his works and seducing the noble ladies of the region.

A couple of hundred years later, Pézenas realized the treasure it had in that visit and today the town has a Hôtel Molière, a Brasserie Molière, a Restaurant Molière, the Caveau Molière (with its Vins Molière) and the Molière Festival.

Martine and Sganarelle

That would be a lot of Molière, perhaps too much, if not for the fact that he is a great, funny playwright and his plays are wild combinations of broad slapstick comedy--with real slapsticks--and very complex language. His goal was to undermine received wisdom and opinion and poke fun at the pompous. His plays have aged well and I think still resonate today as powerfully as when he wrote them.

The photos with this post are from Molière’s “The Doctor in Spite of Himself” (le médecin malgré lui) as performed by the maniacs of the Théâtre de l’éventail (the theater of the hand fan) of Orleans. The performance was held outdoors in the Place Gambetta in the heart of Pézenas' historic district of Renaissance era buildings.

looking for a doctor

The play starts with the protagonist, Sganarelle beating his wife Martine, with a slapstick. Two men accost him and berate him for this, but then things are soon stood on their head when Martine objects to the men's presence and tells them to mind their own business. She says that she just might enjoy a beating every once in a while and who are they to interfere?

Then it turns out that the men are on a mission to find a doctor for a rich man who will pay well for one’s services. Martine, seeing a chance to make some money tells them that Sganarelle is a doctor. Sganarelle is the cunning, over-the-top country wiseass, who ultimately gets the best of all the other characters, and it was role Molière always took on for himself.

Sganarelle find a doctor’s costume--a black smock, white ruffle collar and pointed black hat--and goes off to be a doctor. He soon finds that he likes being a doctor, saying at one point, that being a doctor is the best job ever. The main reason is that if the patient lives the doctor is hailed and praised, and if the patient dies, the doctor simply shrugs and says that it is the will of God, in either case the doctor gets paid. Hmm…sounds a lot like modern medical care.

Sganarelle and his patient

the beautiful wet nurse

Later, when he asks a beautiful wet nurse to undress for an “examination,” her husband objects and Sganarelle says to him derisively, “How dare you contradict a doctor’s commands!” Even his lack of any sort of medial knowledge doesn’t stop him. He tells one patient that the heart is on the right side of the body and the liver on the left. When the patient points out that he has it backwards, Sganarelle’s response is the haughty and elegant line, “We have changed all that!” (Nous avons changé tout cela.)

Molière is anti-establishment and sarcastic, making fun of religion, the aristocracy, the peasantry, and anyone else he could squeeze into a play. I like that and I enjoy feeling Molière’s presence around me here in the Midi, in the richness of the language and the way people play with it. He's also alive in the cynical attitude people have towards poseurs and pomposity.

Next year, the Molière Festival will take place again in Pézenas in early June and I have been asked to create an exhibition of the photos in this post--and others from the Festival—for the event. So, despite misplacing the moon, we found Molière; which I think made for a very good week in le Sud de France.

Nous avons changé tout cela!

If you enjoy Le Sud de France, please pass it on to your friends--and your enemies too.....

Le Sud de France 5.8: La Maison and the Art of Creating Happiness with Food

2011-06-09T04:29:00.000-07:00

en francais

The other evening, Diane, and I went out for dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, La Maison, in Tourbes (just outside of Pézenas.) When the first course of the meal arrived, it was another one of Chef Aurélien Houyez’s marvelously delightful concoctions. Starting with a traditional Italian mozzarella and tomato “caprese” salad, he created a dish that had a mozzarella base topped with stewed tomatoes and a ball of sorbet. Sorbet? You bet! A cool and tingly, tomato and basil sorbet at that. From my first bite, my admiration for Houyez’s culinary skill was reaffirmed.

Discovering La Maison has been one of the pleasures of our move to the Herault. It is part of an explosion of high quality restaurants in Languedoc, which has resulted in a shower of Guide Michelin stars raining down on the region. Aurélien’s the owner/director of La Maison Restaurant and he is one of the new breed of young chefs who are redefining and refining the traditional flavors of Mediterranean cooking.

I know a little about food and restaurants because for the last twenty years, I have photographed and reviewed them. From “greasy spoon” joints in the American South to elegant Michelin multi-star restaurants in Paris and Provençe, I’ve experienced a wide range of eateries and learned that the one truth in the business is that there are lots of good cooks out there but only a few good chefs.

It takes years of study and training to become a chef and Houyez had paid his dues in that department. He studied and worked for three years for the world famous, Michelin triple star winning, Alain Ducasse, as well as working at restaurants like Spoon and Le Prince de Galle and Le Devez in Paris and Bar et Boeuf in Monaco.

Later while working in the Herault coastal town of Marseillan, he and his wife Adeline decided to find a restaurant of their own. After a long search, they found a place for sale in the quiet village of Tourbes, some 2 kms south of Pézenas and 20 km from the city of Béziers. The existing restaurant was a renovated vineyard manger’s house that had a living space above the restaurant and five air-conditioned “chamber d’hote” rooms on the top floor.

Aurélien and Adeline on the terrace.

La Maison, had been a typical French “grille” serving a variety of meats barbequed over a large indoor fire pit. The menu featured dishes like entrecôte and frites for the local vineyard workers and laborers. Aurélien and Adeline changed the menu, moving away from the heavy grilled meats, to lighter, more refined dishes retaining a traditional French menu but making it one full of marvelous surprises—as with his take on tomato and mozzarella salad.

They did a lot of work to warm the place up, repainting and redecorating it to warm up the ambiance and create a more welcoming and cozy dining experience. Located close to Pézenas, they realized that they’d have a lot of English speaking guests, so they made a point of printing both French and English menus. They re-opened La Maison in May of 2010 and began the new operation with Aurélien in the kitchen and Adeline managing the front of the house, as both hostess and occasional server.

Aurélien and Adeline’s story is a classic tale of French gastronomy. Some of the greatest names in French gastronomy began their careers with small roadside restaurant in inexpensive villages, far from the high costs of the city. Today, here in Herault, many of our Michelin star restaurants are in tiny villages, dozens of kilometers from big cities like Marseilles, Beziers and Montpellier. Not only are these village locations more affordable for new chefs, it gets them close to fresh, locally sourced ingredients and lots of great local wines. For knowing diners, it means exquisite meals and good wine and at very reasonable prices. At La Maison, for example, a three-course lunch (entrée, main course, and dessert) costs just 13 Euros (18 USD).

The photos below are some examples of the superb dishes that Aurélien

prepares every day.

Cool pea soup, toasted country bread with tomato “jam” and fresh goat cheese.

Tomato and mozzarella salad with tomato and basil sorbet.

Fillet of sea bream with a Noilly Prat sauce, served with a green asparagus risotto. A symphony of flavors that work together with great subtly. Who would have imagined Noilly Prat and asparagus?

Baba with dark rum. In this dish, the baba sits above the rum so it never gets soggy or falls apart.

This dessert, a Chocolate fondant,is a hard shell of chocolate full of hot, extra intense chocolate; the taste goes beyond words..

Crème brulée flavored with caramel tea is flamed at your table. Rather than brutally blowtorching the sugar, the gentle brandy flames do the job right before your eyes.

The philosophy of La Maison is summed up in a quote, from the British writer and historian, Théodore Zeldin. It that appears on their menu.

“Gastronomy is the art of creating happiness with food.”

La Maison does just that.

La Maison is in the village of Tourbes two and a half kilometers South of Pézenas (D39). If you are coming to the restaurant on the A75 take the Roujan/Pézenas (Sud) exit and at the rond point (traffic circle) take the turn marked Valros (D913). The road to Tourbes is a sharp right in about a kilometer. Soon, you’ll find yourself under the arched branches of a plane tree allée, the ‘avenue de la Gare.’ La Maison is on the left (9 avenue de la Gare) about two thirds of the way up the allée.

La Maison is open for lunch Monday through Friday and for dinner Monday through Saturday from 1930 to 2200. It is closed on Sundays.

For reservations and more information, call 04.67.98.86.95 and visit them on Facebook.

Please click on the French version of this post for the complete La Maison menu.

en francais

Le Sud de France 5.7: Kafka’s Radar

2011-05-23T09:33:00.000-07:00

Over the last 30 years, the number of fatalities on the world’s highways has gone down thanks to safer cars and new technologies. But, when there was a recent uptick in the numbers of road deaths in France, the suave and sleek French Prime Minister, François Fillon came up with a plan he said would help to increase highway safety and solve the budget crisis at the same time, well sort of.

Fillon's traffic proposal is simplicity itself and incredulous to any outside observer. The “plan” consists of putting thousands of additional radar units on the country’s roads and then, taking down all the existing radar warning signs and forbidding the use of radar detectors and GPS radar detectors in vehicles. Fillon is an upper class dandy with a huge ego, which makes him the perfect type to be the head of a tone deaf government. He is France’s answer to that very tan John Boehner, America’s Republican Speaker of the House, and it's just the sort of craziness Boehner would love.

In the looking glass world of Kafka's Radar, Fillon wants to slow down traffic by removing some of the very things that slow down traffic. In a country where to begin with there's a lack of actual speed limit signs, the best way to describe this plan is that it is one gigantic, extortion scheme, a"sting" operation, aimed at making money off the nation's drivers--good and bad alike.

To support his insane idea, Fillon maintains that the decades long decrease in highway fatalities is due to radar ticketing. In America, where highway deaths have also decreased, sane people point to studies that show that better auto design (crumple zones and air bags), mandatory seat belt use, lower speed limits and public awareness programs, like "Stay Alive, Drive 55", are the reasons for the decrease.

Robbie the Radar Bandit

France’s radar based highway “safety” system is simply highway robbery carried out by a gang of mechanical bandits that the French populace rightly calls, "le Racket." That's one of the reasons the Prime Minister, pointedly avoids speaking about how very profitable the French radar business is.

What sort of money are we talking about? At just one radar site in the North of France, Robbie the Radar and his pals (who are noted for their errors and malfunctions) produced nearly 170,000 speeding tickets in last year, that’s nearly 500 tickets a day! The fine for these tickets is between $75 and $225 which means that this one location brings in something like 15 million Euros ($21 million) a year—and it’s just one of thousands of radars around the country. Here in the Herault, Robbie's southern brethren earn about $14 million a year.

I speak about this subject from personal experience, because, I got one of these traffic infractions the other day and it was incomprehensible to me how it related to traffic safety. Tickets are mailed to violators and I got mine a mere three months after the date of the infraction. It said that I was speeding somewhere on the Agde-Marseillan road doing 58 in a 50 zone. 58! Zut alors, that’s a hair raising 35 miles per hour somewhere on a road in the middle of nowhere!

I stared at the ticket and realized I couldn’t even remember where exactly I was three months ago, much less that I was “speeding”at 35. I was defenseless to defend myself. The machines had spoken. It was like something out of Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial, where the protagonist, Joseph K, never knows exactly what he is accused of and or how to fight back.

So like most people I went online to pay the 144 euros ($225 USD) fine. That’s where I saw more proof that the radar system is truly a golden goose. The website is very professional looking and it’s in French, as well as perfect English. Excusez-moi? English?

Goodbye Warning Signs

Looks likes someone was expecting a lot of English speaking speeders to be paying tickets here. The site takes your credit card information and proceeds along without a word about traffic safety and it is all very efficient. It is the only government entity in all of France that is actually efficient.

There is opposition to Fillon. One group against the new law told the press that the effect of Kafka’s radar and its draconian fines, to date, has been to produce an estimated 300,000 drivers on France’s roads without valid licenses or car insurance. Working people can’t afford to pay repeated 144 Euro tickets and often lose their licenses. When people have to drive to work, if you take away their licenses they simply go "under the radar" and drive anyway, making the roads even more unsafe.

The new radar law hasn’t been passed yet and there was an outcry against it by some fifty of Fillon’s fellow UMP ministers who, rightly, fear it will cost them votes in next year’s elections (please see Update at the end of this post). But "Le Racket" exists because it makes too much money and dealing with the real causes, high speeds and alcohol abuse, are both costly and politically risky.

Speed is the big issue, The legal speed limit on France’s highways is 130 kilometers per hour, that’s 80 miles per hour or 15-25 miles per hour faster than American highways. With a posted speed limit of 80 mph traffic moves a lot faster than that. Cars pass each other at 85-90 mph (150 kph) and the real speeders are often doing a breathtaking 100 mph (160 kph) or more.

You’d think that someone in the government could make the connection between tiny, little Euro-cars doing a 100 mph and the high death rate?

But talking about lowering the highway speed limit and you feel that you are with a bunch of six year old children. Immediately everyone points to the Germans, who have no highway speed limits on many roads and they say “Nah, nah, I’m not going to slow down if those German don’t have to.” Truth is that most German roads have a top speed of 120kph-10kph slower than France.

Just lowering the speed limit to 110 kph (66mph) would save lives.

Speed kills all by itself but here, as elsewhere, it is aided and abetted by alcohol use. As the economy of France continues to weaken, with more layoffs and factory closings, not surprisingly, there's more alcohol consumed and more high speed auto-suicides.

Radar speed traps don’t do anything about these problems. After all, a dead drunk speeder won't be paying the 144 Euro ticket they get in the mail two or three months after their demise. Stopping them in the act, you might make a few bucks and save a few lives.

France’s gendarmes, to their credit, work very hard at trying to control drunk driving. On weekends there are hundreds of nighttime traffic checkpoints all around the nation. But police are costly and increasing their numbers in the face of tight national budgets is unlikely. And while you always see State Troopers on America’s highways, which for my money is the best speeding deterrent possible as just their presence slows traffic down, you rarely if ever see a gendarme patrolling a French highway. A real way to reduce highway fatalities would be to have more cops to stop speeders before they kill themselves and others.

There is still some small hope that sanity will prevail and this law won’t be passed. But both Fillon and his boss, President Sarkozy, are adamant that it will. They are snarly men who appear to shut out things they don't want to hear, like any opposition. Fillon has gone a little crazy and begun spouting things like “traffic safety is a sacred trust,” "we will stand firm, "and “there can be no debate.” He has personalized the issue to the point that it has become a simple case of "I am right and everyone else is wrong."

Bon chance France!

Update May 25: The headlines of this morning's newspapers screamed, "Victory over the Government." This bizarre because it was actually 80 ministers of the government ruling UMP (many from the Sud de France) as well as the Minister of the Interior who came together and shut down M. Fillon's folly. Radar warning signs will remain up and/or replaced by hundreds of "teaching" signs. Teaching signs are those radar devices that indicate your speed and flash SLOW DOWN if you are over the speed limit.

It doesn't solve any of the real problems of traffic safety but it least it is a step away from an automated totalitarian state and one that at least addresses real world situations.

Le Sud de France 5.6: The Best Pizza in the Herault: Le Vieux Four Pizzeria

2011-05-08T01:06:00.000-07:00

en français

Alain Chastan

Conventional wisdom says that immigrants give up their language and their traditional dress quickly, but never their taste for their native foods and it is true of us as we settle in the South of France. Although working hard on my language skills and buying clothing, like my black Gardien hat, I’m having trouble letting go of some of my American tastes, especially a desire for good pizza. I was raised in New York City on Italian style pizza but in over a decade of travelling through France, from Normandy to Provençe to the Pyrenees, I had rarely found an edible French pizza. Most had crusts like cardboard and toppings like inexpensive tasteless, Emmanthal cheese, instead of real mozzarella.

Moving to France, I had accepted the notion that I was giving up pizza and it was just going to be one of the costs of living here.

Well, there must be a pizza God for he, she, or it, has been good to me and has sent me “le Vieux Four” pizzeria. The name is French for the “old oven” (in Italian it would be the “il forno veccchio”) and it is located just a few miles away in the village of Nézignan l’eveque, just south of Pézenas. It is a real pizzeria with an honest to goodness wood burning stove and a pizza maker par excellence.

Alain Chastan and his wife
Francine are the owners of “le Vieux Four” pizzeria and while Alain tosses the dough and operates the pizza paddle, Francine takes orders and handles the Euros.

Originally, from Paris, they moved to this small village four years ago and Alain gave up a career in business consulting and Francine stopped her work in haute couture fashion design (Chanel - Lee Cooper) to follow their hearts and make pizza. He took a chef’s course in bread and pastry and used his skills in plumbing, electrical and carpentry work to build the shop and remodel their village home above it.

We bring home a “le Vieux Four” pizza about once a week and they have been consistently great. Chastan knows, as do all the best pizza makers, that a great crust is at the heart of a superb pie. It must be carefully prepared, usually the day before, allowed to rest in the fridge, and then given the time to reach room temperature before it is rolled out for baking. Tossing the flattened dough into the air is also essential for a good crust; it further thins the dough and aerates it.

Picking up pizza at “le Vieux Four,” one of my secret pleasures is watching Chastan toss the dough high into the air, just as I remember seeing it done in New York. It’s warm familiarity almost brings a tear to my eye.

Alain and Francine's pizzeria oven is truly a “Vieux Four.” It is a traditional masonry oven, a “Roman” oven, invented by the Romans a couple of thousand years ago. A wood fire burns at one end of the cooking chamber and the smoke vented out a chimney near the flames. Heat is retained by the thick brick or masonry walls and that allows the oven to get very hot (more than 320° C.) Pizza aficionados would say that you can’t make real Italian pizza without a Roman oven. High heat is what insures that the crust crisp on the outside quickly, protecting the crumb (the inner part) from drying out as it cooks more slowly. The result is a slightly puffed up crust with a moist interior.

However, Alain Chasten is a very French pizza maker and his menu at “le Vieux Four” reflects that. Besides “classique” Italian pizzas topped with tomatoes, mozzarella and ingredients like mushrooms, ham, onions, basil, and olives, there is also a whole range of pies, “les speciales,” that astonish my American palate.

Here are just a few examples of some of these adventuresome combinations.

· pizza “chèvre miel” topped with goat cheese and honey

· pizza “fruits de mer” topped with salmon, mussels, shrimp, squid, clams and olives

· pizza “La Becos Figos” topped with fig chutney (a local Nétizgnan product), fois gras, onion confit, arugula and mozzarella.

There are even dessert pizzas on the menu. The “La Bananella” for example is topped with crème fraîche, bananas, hazelnuts, whipped cream, and Nutella (a sweet chocolate and hazelnut jam.)

“Le Vieux Four “is strictly a take-out place although there are a few tables setup outside the front door. Customers can buy a bottle of wine in the shop and eat their pies, hot (very hot) out of the oven at these tables or across the street at a local bar. The pizzas are reasonably priced ranging from 7.50 Euros for a simple Margarita to 12.50 Euros for La Becos Figos. For folks in Nézignan, there’s free delivery by the pizza kart, a decorated dune buggy.

The delivery buggy

Le Vieux Four is hard to miss, it is on Nézignan’s main street, just before the turn into the village center. If you are anywhere near Pezenas you have to try this great pizza, it’s easily worth an hour’s drive and that’s a paltry price to pay for great pizza.

Did I just say great pizza? No, this is not great pizza, this is the best pizza in the Herault. You don’t have to just take my word for it. Last year, with what an objective observer would call “bon courage,” “chutzpah” or just plain nerve, Chasten, who had just opened Le Vieux Four, entered the 2010 national pizza competition. The result was that this pizza newbie, not only ranked as one of the top fifty pizza makers in all of France, he was named the best, the very best pizza maker in the whole of the Herault.

It gives this ex-pat a warm feeling to know that I have the best pizza in the region on my doorstep, less than five minutes away.

Grazie a pizza dio!

(Thank you, Supreme Pizza Being)

Le Vieux Four is open for takeout Tuesday to Sunday (afternoon) from 11H30 to 14H30 and in the evening 17H00 to 22H00.

Order your pizza for pickup at 04.99.41.49.97

If you enjoy le Sud de France, please tell your friends about it.

Le Sud de France 5.5 : The Chateau Abbaye de Cassan.

2011-04-27T08:49:00.000-07:00

Goats

It is Spring in the Herault and the grapes are growing, the goats are kidding and the karaokes are singing. On the bright side of life, Carla Bruni is complaining that Sarko is ruining her "career" but on the downside of things, it was a rainy Easter weekend. We were determined to get out of the house and since it was a dark and stormy day, we had to look for something to do indoors.

Fresh Ginger root at the foire

Turns out that just up the road from us, in a very old chateau, there was a “foire de saveurs et odeurs.” That is French for a “flavors and smells fair” which sounds much tastier to my ears than the American “food fair.” It was held at the Chateau Abbaye de Cassan near the town of Roujan and we decided that it’s just the thing we needed to brighten up a gray day.

Charlemagne

History envelops and embraces you in the Herault and the Chateau-Abbaye is a good example of that. Back in the first to fourth centuries the Languedoc was called “Septimania,” which does not refer to an XXX rated movie “Seven Maniacs,” but rather to veterans of the Roman VIIth Legion who conquered most of this area and settled here. They took possession of the Languedoc from Narbonne to the Rhone. The Chateau site was originally a Gallo-Roman outpost dating from about the 4^th century and then in 805 A.D Charlemagne built a priory on the site. A Romanesque church was added in the 12^th century and in the 18^th century, years before the American revolution, a grand chateau was constructed. For a thousand years, the Abbaye priory was one of the most celebrated church structures in the region and a stopping off place for travelers making the long and arduous pilgrimage to Saint-Jacques de Compestelle in northern Spain.

The Abbaye de Cassan today is a huge estate set amidst vineyards and a working winery. The Chateau has rooms available for meetings, concerts and events like weddings, and there are plans for creating a full scale corporate retreat and conference center that are still several million Euros in the future.

Arriving at the Abbaye, there wasn’t much to see from the parking lot, just an old wall and an sign with an arrow marked “Visitors” that led to a gift shop. Eek, a gift shop before you’ve even seen the place, that's very American. Slipping through the gift shop, avoiding the tourist ware, we ended up in a large tree shaded courtyard and a path to the Chateau.

The outer corridor

So far, this didn’t seem like much but entering the Chateau you suddenly feel as though you have stepped into the unfinished set for a Three Musketeers movie. What we hadn’t realized was that the parking lot and the gift shop were tucked into the backside of the building. Seen from the front the chateau’s a different story. It is a huge building with long, curtained corridors stretching its entire length. Nestled within the corridors are several large rooms that were the living quarters.

The dining room

In the wide corridor that the path led there were a dozen or more stalls selling artisanal food products. This was the heart of the “saveurs and odeurs” and in the middle of the corridor we found the stall of “Roses et Délices.”

Created by a couple from Massac Hautes-Corbières named, Bernard and Marie-Laurence Million (honestly), "Roses et Délices" is a line of handcrafted confits (jellies) and syrups made from flower petals--the petals of thyme, rosemary, mint, violets and roses. These are the most delicately flavored jellies and syrups imaginable. Just a tiny spoonful on a piece of chévre or some ice cream, explodes with the flavor of the flowers. M Million suggested with obvious pride that the rose confit when sprinkled on foie gras or duck breast is simply spectacular. Marie-Laurence added that a few drops of the syrup added white wine makes a heavenly “kir” and mixed with champagne produces the most “royal” of all “royal kirs.” To learn more about the Million’s petal jellies and syrups take a look at their website at www.RosesetDelices.fr.

These handmade chocolate was sold at the foire!

Flower petal jelly and syrup are just one of the incredible culinary treats that keep popping around the Herault. Producing artisanal food in this part of France reminds me of home beer brewers in the States. They are passionate and committed; and only a little crazy.

The Romanesque church

Walking on we came to the crafts fair. It was set-up in the Abbaye’s 12^th century church. As you can see from the photo, with it’s high arched, Romanesque ceiling, it was the most extraordinary venue for a crafts show imaginable.

A 12th century fresco in the abbey

Finally, we got to the table set up with a display of the Chateau’s own wine named fittingly enough, "Chateau-Abbaye de Cassan."

This fortified tower looks like a chess "rook"

The Chateau winery produces several wines that are blends of different grapes, like syrah, Grenache, cabernet. Their least expensive wine is named “Le Jardin des Simples.” This name refers to a medieval herb garden. A more complex wine is called “Le Jardin de Labyrinthe" or the Garden of the Labryinth and above it in price (15 euros) and complexity is “Le Jardin de Songes” or “the Garden of Dreams.” I just love these wines' names, they are a lot classier than “Yellow Tail” or “Two Buck Chuck.”

And then there was a lovely rosé called “La Rosé de Madame de Brimont” which was made entirely of cinsault grapes--one of the most important local grape varieties in the Languedoc.

After tasting the rosé, one of the winemakers pulled us aside to tell us the story behind the wine's name. Madame de Brimont, was the beautiful mistress of the Prince de Conti who was the King's administrator for the l'Herault. His palace was in Pezenas some ten miles away and with a little string pulling he obtained the Chateau for his lover in the middle of the 18th century. Over the years she visited the Chateau and her prince often and, the wine guy went on, it is said that years after her death, Chateau servants would see her ghostly figure playing the piano in the Chateau salon.

At that moment, after rose petal jellies and rosé wine, standing in a haunted castle at a flavors and smells fair, it seemed to me that we could not have found a more perfect way to spend a rainy day in the Sud de France.

If you enjoy Le Sud de France please link it and send it to your friends.

Le Sud de France 5.4 : She Sings Hard for Her Honey.

2011-04-07T04:26:00.000-07:00

Carla at work at her last job.

It has been a good week. The worst of the Japanese reactor leaks has been sealed and in the local Canton elections, the l'Herault stayed firmly on the left, voting for the Parti Socialiste.

However, the best news of the week was the announcement that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s new album will not be issued this year.

Some commentators speculated that Carla’s disk was being held back so it could be released to coincide with the 2012 presidential election. Her husband’s center right party, the L’UMP (the acronym seems quite fitting--lump) didn’t do

Vox Populi

well in the Canton elections, losing seats to the leftist Parti Socialiste (PS) and the far right National Front (FN). Some l’UMPers worry that in 2012, Sarkozy might not even make it into a second round runoff.

This concern explains in part France’s lead in creating a no-fly zone over Libya and sending troops to Ivory Coast. It is a George Bush moment that M Sarkozy wants to exploit, perhaps hoping to win reelection as a “wartime” President. However, as one opposition PS minister put it, Sarko’s domestic policies show that he has an “attitude d’autisme.” He is as politically tone deaf to his people as much as Ghaddifi and the other presidents-for-life he’s trying to oust from power.

The other reason Carla’s album may have been pulled from distribution is, well, Carla. To see what I mean, go to YouTube and search for Carla Bruni singing the Rolling Stones song “You’ve Got the Silver” (or try this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXQy8WoTyVw)

N'est pas Joan Baez

Before you go to YouTube though, why not make this viewing opportunity a fun party for friends? Invite folks over and mix up a big pitcher of “Pineapple TGV.” It’s easy and fun. Just peel a pineapple and cut it into ¾ inch chunks. Put these in a large pitcher with some ice. Next pour a bottle of vodka over the fruit. Serve cold.

The TGV is a great drink, fruity and smooth, that hits the nervous system like the bullet train it’s named after.

Now for the party game I'll call, “Oops. She did it again.” Have everybody sit around your laptop and watch Carla’s video. Each time she goes off key, misses the beat or simply loses her accompanist, take a big swig of TGV. By the end of the three minute and eight second video, no one will remain standing; she’s just that kind of an artist.

If anyone survives “You’ve Got the Silver” move these hardy souls on to her brain damaging version of “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.”

Oh, the irony. If anyone has a right to sing the blues, it certainly must be the daughter of rich Italian parents, who after a career as a highly paid “fashion” model, became France’s First Madame. This girl sings from her heart, wherever it is, and from that imaginary time when nobody knew her and she was down and out.

The Real Deal

Bruni calls herself a “folk singer” although from the photo above, you can see she looks nothing like Joan Baez or Big Mama Thornton. Paris Hilton styles herself as a “rapper” (and a movie star) and both these women are self-deluded rich girls who, thanks to their money and their willingness to remove their clothing, have reached similar heights of celebrity.

This new disk was going to be Bruni’s fourth album--which tells you a lot about the state of French music--and it’s stirred up a lot of bad feelings. The disk contains Mme BS’s version of the beloved “Douce France” by the late Georges Brassens.

Brassens was born here in the Herault in Sete and is held in reverential esteem by the local population. Trying to be a true folk singer, Bruni sings this French tune in her native Italian. The center of the controversy is that Brassens was a leftist who would never have voted for Sarkozy and wrote the song during WWII. It is about the occupation and it is an anti-fascist piece. For those of you too young to remember, fascism is an Italian creation, so you probably shouldn’t sing this song in Italian.

Perhaps, without irony, the Sarkozys think that Carla singing Brassens will be a political masterstroke that will win over the hearts of French voters. However, it is hard to imagine what positive effect Mme BS singing this song badly could have on the campaign.

The Le Pens Performing Political Karaoke

Perhaps what it will do is drive even more voters into the warm, waiting arms of Marine Le Pen of the FN. Marine (soft “a” if you please) is a smiling, twice divorced, blonde who’s trying to re-position the FN as something other than the neo-Fascist, immigrant bashing party of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. To the best of my knowledge, Marine hasn't posed nude like the First Madame, and that alone should get her more votes than Le Petit Prez. Zut alors!

I raise the issue of singing because it’s spring and there’s a lot of singing around our village. Many residents here have "Midi" accents that make spoken French sound almost as though it is being sung. The accent involves lots of rolled r’s and a lot of inflection. A simple word like “merci” becomes “mer SEE,” with the voice rising merrily around the “see.” This Southern accent also adds the syllable “ah” to all sorts of words. My name becomes “Steve-Vah,” baguette, “baguette-TAH,” Pezenas, Pezenas-ZAH and so on.

Music 101

With the warm weather, more people are out and about in the village and you hear them singing a lot. Just the other day, I came around a corner and found a group of moms standing outside the door of our Ecole Danse, softly singing the words to the music their daughters were dancing to inside.

It is this kind of experience that makes me wish that Carla and Nikko would spend some time down here so they can learn how important singing is and how much it holds people together. The Sarkozys might even get to like actual French life (not Parisian) and end up a lot less tone deaf to the needs of the real folk.

Hey! Sarkozys! You're invited to shower at our place.

Note: You can hear some of "Dolce Franca" on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbYErGTB0cA

If you like “Le Sud de France”, please pass it on for your friends to enjoy too.

Le Sud de France 5.3: Home is Where They Break Your Heart.

2011-03-27T01:23:00.000-07:00

Claude Michel is in his seventies, five feet tall and one of the few villagers who wears a jacket and tie when he goes out for a drink at our tiny bar. He is a sharp dressed man. He's also a former mayor of the village and a retired Captain in the French Foreign Legion where he received a Legion of Honor medal for his service in the brutal Algerian war. He came to the village thirty years ago.

He is a man out of another time and another world. When he meets a woman, he bows his head and kisses her hand. I'd never seen this done before and when he kissed my wife’s hand, I was startled. Then I watched him closely as he kissed another woman’s hand, and realized that the way he did made it a lovely gesture.

Today most women don’t expect to have their hands kissed, but Claude Michel’s method is as disarming as it is simple. He takes the woman’s hand, slowly lifts it up, so the woman has a moment to realize what is about to happen, and then he barely touches her hand with his lips. This gesture is an elegant sign of respect rather than of eroticism and most women seem comfortable with it.

Another one of the short men in the village is Liam Gonzales whose family, like half a million others, fled Franco’s Spain in 1939. They were the losers in the Spanish Civil War and they fled across the Pyrenees to seek asylum. Instead of sanctuary, the Vichy government put them in internment camps and then sent to the German ovens. A little over 100,000 avoided that fate by hiding in villages and in the hills. When WWII began many of them fought as part of the Maquis, the Spanish underground. The allies assured the Maquis that after Hitler they’d deal with Franco, but they broke that promise. Liam’s family and thousands of others were left stranded in the South of France. Many settled here in the Herault and I would guess that today about a third of our villagers have Spanish surnames.

Liam’s first name is also the result of another war--the Napoleonic War of the 1800s-- when the British sent Irish troops to Spain as cannon fodder. Rather than face Bonaparte's cannons many deserted into the Pyrenees with Spanish ladies, the results were Spanish kids with names like Liam, Patrick, and Sean.

The other night when we stopped at the bar for a drink, Claude Michel was there and after kissing my wife’s hand, he came over and shook mine vigorously. He held my hand with his right hand and my elbow with his left, which recognized immediately as the old politician’s hand-lock.

I bought him a drink and he told me that he played piano and violin and that we should come over to his place for drinks one evening. I told him I played “American guitar” and he replied, “Ah, tu devr’apprendre à jouer de la guitare française, maintainent!” (Ah, you must learn to play French guitar, now.)

I struggle with my understanding of French but I realized that Claude Michel had just used the familiar “tu” for “you” instead of the formal “vous.” Tu is how family people and friends address each other.

Paul has a guitar like mine

Just then, a big woman who had been talking to Liam, stood up and with a nod to Claude Michel, began to sing. She stood very straight and sang very slowly at first--and very loudly. The song she sang was about a terrible battle that took place near here in 1943 between resistance fighters and the Germans. It recalled the horror of the occupation and that dark night of the soul that the French bear for their collaboration with the Nazis. At this battle, the partisans were defeated, this is a song of loss and sorrow. Nonetheless, it is an uplifting song that urges listeners to carry on, to remember those who died, and to never give up hope.

At its heart, it is an anti-war war song.

As the woman sang the passion in the her voice grew and with each chorus, more people stood up and joined in; soon everyone was on their feet. Claude Michel was standing next to me, his back straight and stiff, his right arm waving in front of him. In the dim glow of the bar, I could that see his eyes were damp. Liam linked arms with him and the two rocked back and forth, and then Claude Michel reached out and took my arm and began rocking me in time to the music.

I stood there singing in French or at least trying to sound like I was singing in French, but I had no idea of the words I was singing. The music and the crowd just carried me along and soon enough I was singing at the top of my lungs.

A strange thought struck me there as I sang. We Americans have no comparable songs of war, songs of remembrance with which to honor Americans who've died in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam. Without songs of sacrifice and remembrance I thought, we numb ourselves to war's madness and that makes it too easy to go war and to do it without feeling a thing.

In our small village bar, the sorrow and the passion of that awful moment in 1943 was alive again. I stood next to Claude Michel and I was sobbing too, not for the partisan’s losses, but I think for my own.

But this was not what I came to France for, I came here to take pretty pictures, eat cheese, and write funny blogs- not to dredge up old memories and open old wounds. Certainly, I didn’t come here to have my heart turned inside out by a bunch of semi-sloshed town folk in some hole-in-the-wall bar in the middle of nowhere.

Later as we left the bar, Liam patted me on the shoulder and tapped his heart with the palm of his hand.

Above us, a bright crescent moon floated in a star-filled sky, lighting our way.

"Yeah,” I thought as we walked off, “home is where they break your heart.”

If you enjoy Le Sud de France, please pass it on to your friends. Thanks

Le Sud de France 5.2: Me and My Magic Black Hat

2011-03-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

N'est pas un chapeau noir!

Sebastian is a big guy like me, six foot tall and a bit on the chunky side. I met him at a party, where he lumbered in wearing a black “gardien” hat and carrying a guitar case. I had been asked to bring my guitar and seeing him, I realized that he was the other musician for the night. So I went up to him, and standing there eye to eye, introduced myself and said “C’est un beau chapeau.” He nodded slightly and said, “D’accord.”

Now I am not a hat guy. Never wore baseball caps or fedoras, certainly wouldn’t be caught "morte" in a beret on a bet. Nevertheless, the Midi spring was upon us and the sun was already bright and hard. Since I don’t like to wear sunglasses--they interfere with my photography-- a hat with a brim had possibilities; and there was something about Sebastian's that caught my fancy.

Cody's Coming!

A while ago, I wrote about Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show getting stranded here in France by a terrible winter storm. They ended up wintering about 60 miles from us in the Camargue, the beautiful, marshy Rhone delta that's full of flaming pink flamingos, big black bulls, and wild white horses. It’s the traditional home of the gardiens—French cattle ranchers--and of French gypsies.

During Bill’s sojourn, the gardiens fell in love with the cowboys--mad, passionate male love. They admired the Americans skills at ropin’, ridin’, and shootin' and soon, they were trying to be just like them. The cowboys, of course, fell hard for the French mademoiselles.

A mademoiselle Gardien with her black hat.

The gardiens’ embrace of all things cowboy is still evident in the Western tack shops of the Camargue, in town like Les Saintes- Maries-de-la-Mer where they sell American riding saddles, cowboy shirts (although made with colorful Provençal fabrics) and gardien hats. Sebastian is from the Camargue--he’s a French-Spaniard—so naturally, he wears a gardien hat modeled on the American cowboy’s Stetson.

Thinking about his hat, I knew that I needed one. Somehow, it just felt right. Unlike a beret, the gardien nicely expresses an American heritage with a French flair. It would make me stand out as an American who living here. C’est parfait!

Lee's the one

I asked Sebastian where I could get a hat locally and he directed me the Pézenas Saturday market where three days later, I stood in front of a stall full of rain caps, deerslayers, fedoras, flat caps, and berets. I spotted the “gardiens” in a in all sorts of sizes and colors and with a variety of decorative bands. I rummaged through the stack looking for a hat, in unknown territory, relying on “bon chance” to find me the right one.

I tried on a few and then picked up one that seemed a little different from the rest. I put it on and it fit as if it had been born on my head. It looked cool and rakish, making me feel a bit edgy, like Lee Van Cleef on his way to a shootout with Clint Eastwood.

I bought the hat and strolled home through the market, little suspecting how the hat was going to change my life.

Later that day, I stopped at a supermarket to get some things for dinner and I entered the store in my black gardien expecting to get a lot of stares. I usually do, as I am taller and bigger than most of the local French folk. However, no one even glanced at me. I walked passed them and they stared right through me. I had become invisible.

At the meat counter, when I asked for a 200-gram slice of dry sausage, the woman at the counter nodded and said, “Une pièce?” “Oui.” I replied. Now, usually when I speak French, people are polite but I can see them wince or cross their eyes at my pronunciation. Sometimes they’ll politely repeat what I said but say it correctly. This time there was no eye crossing and before I knew it, the woman handed me my sausage and I was off.

The Hotel Lacoste

That evening, we went to a gallery opening and I parked in a municipal lot in Pézenas. I went to pay for a time ticket and was about to put money in the machine when a voice behind me rang out, “Monsieur, attendez!”

I turned to see a forty-something brunette in a Mercedes waving her arm at me. In her hand was a piece of paper. It turned out to be her unexpired parking ticket, which she was giving me to use. I took it, she smiled, I smiled and she drove off. Was this luck, I wondered, or the work of the hat?

The opening was in Hótel de Lacoste, one of the oldest buildings in Pézenas and the site of newly discovered ritual baths, once used by Jews during the Renaissance. The gallery itself-- Galerie Anne Cros--is an airy modern space with large windows that overlook a courtyard and gardens.

A black beret--boring

Climbing a long curved stairway, we entered the gallery where were immediately surrounded by a curious crowd. The gallery owner Mme.Cros came over and introduced herself as the gallery's co-owner joined us, vigorously shaking my hand. The two of them chatted us up like long lost relations. When they turned to talk to others, new people came over and struck up conversations. In fact, people came over all evening and several made a point of praising my hat.

Later looking around the gallery I noticed another man wearing a black hat and beyond him a man with a straw hat and beyond him another with a beret. However, no one seemed interested in them. Very curious.

The show was an exhibition of paintings by a French artist, Christine Trouillet. Her work is delightful with a strong use of color and the blending of abstract and representational elements. I really liked her work, as did the other opening attendees.

When Christine got to the gallery, I corralled her for a few photos for this blog. In my fine French black gardien hat, I naturally had the authority to do that.

Christine Trouillet

Moi et mon chapeau noir.

Today my black hat and I are still getting to know each other.

It’s finding its way around my head and practicing it’s grip to prevent flying off in the winds that roar through the Herault.

In fact, while I was adjusting it I walked by our café and Therese the owner waved at me and shouted, “Eh, Steve! Mr.Cool. OK!”

Clearly, the hat makes the man.

Note: If you enjoy Le Sud de France, please pass it on to your friends. Thanks

Le Sud de France 5.1: Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye So Pass the Haggis M.Hallyday.

2011-03-10T03:13:00.000-08:00

Burns Nite

“By the late 1870s the haggis had been hunted to extinction in Scotland, “said the kilted speaker his glass of whiskey raised high in praise of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, “but there is still the occasional haggis spotted in northern Italy where they are called “haggiolli.”

The dinner crowd roared with laughter at this fable.

“Bull” yelled a John Bull in the audience.

Okay, so what are haggis, Scots and the British doing in my blog about Le Sud De France? It’s a long story of an odd week that resembles a trip into Alice’s looking glass.

It began when the village baker decided to celebrate his 39^th birthday and his eleventh year in business by throwing a party in his own honor in the town square--an idea that met with great general approval. He set his “fête” for the coming Sunday and invited a few of us to join him that Saturday evening for a few drinks and a rehearsal of the next day’s karaoke show.

Karaoke in the Herault?

I hate karaoke because it makes people either think they can sing—when they can’t—or simply shames them for trying to sing. Well, that is not quite what karaoke is in France.

Christian and Toons

Keep in mind, the Languedoc is the original land of the troubadours and singing is a natural part of life here. There’s a long tradition of people singing together and like a scene out of an old French movie, at the drop of a hat a group of people will burst out in song. Everyone knows the words and tunes and whether it’s an old folk tune or an Edith Piaf song, it is all about singing together and not who sings better.

Our karaoke was to led by “Christian & Toons” a local couple, who perform karaoke around the region. They do a variety of French songs with a few American and British numbers for the expats. They sing rather well so just watching them perform was a pleasure. The difference though was when they pulled someone out of the audience; it was not to make fun of them but to have a song leader.

The songs this Saturday evening were mostly by George Trent, Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg with a little modern rock thrown in—tunes by the ever-popular Johnny Hallyday whose imminent return to the stage in Montpellier in 2012 has the Languedoc abuzz. Hallyday aside these are those wonderful, passionate French songs, that swell with each refrain, and tug at your heart while lifting your spirits in the face of bitter sweetness of life.

Our village is full of vineyard workers, plumbers, electricians and other laborers who are not your right-of-center Sarkozy supporters. By late in the evening, things got a bit rowdy and songs like Brel’s “Port of Amsterdam” were sung, with special gusto for song lines like “the bourgeois sing like pigs.” It was, to say the least, refreshing.

The next day around 11 in the morning tables were set up in front of the bar the fête started with bottles of the local white wine, whiskey and pastis (anise liquor) set out along side several bowls of potato chips.

I decided to record the event for the town’s “historical record” and just for the fun of it. By noon, the crowd had grown to about fifty people. Bottles of wine were emptied, people chatted and sang, and occasionally a couple danced in the early spring sunshine.

Then one of the neighbors drove up and unloaded a case of white wine and a couple of tubs of oysters he had just gotten from his oyster field fifteen minutes away on the Mediterranean coast. Several townsmen volunteered to shuck the oysters and after trying a few out themselves and began passing out the sparkling wet shells to whoever had their hand out.

Contented sighs followed.

Now even more food began to arrive. One neighbor rolled up with big pots of mussels in cream sauce, the bar owner added big trays of crispy frites--what we mistakenly call “French fries”— and small sausage and tomato sandwiches. More folks arrived and there was more singing. Several vignerons brought cases of their local red wine and these were consumed at a prodigious rate, disappearing almost as soon as they were opened.

At this point, feeling happy and a little silly, I gave the baker a big hug and told him that he was the best baker in the world, perhaps the universe. I declared that his bread the best in all of France. He agreed and we ended up singing with the karaoke machine a tune that I didn’t know and can’t remember. It was a perfect moment.

Later in the afternoon as we were about to leave the party we were approached by a couple of Scots. They had come to the village to play rugby against the locals and they invited up to a Robert Burns Supper on Wednesday. The supper would be complete with haggis. We agreed and crawled home to recover. I remember wondering what this “haggis” thing was. I had a vague memory of it being some kind of sheep gut stuffed with offal.

Monday was quiet and my head cleared rather rapidly. Around mid-morning I drop a disc of photos at the bar and the owner invited us to come to the bar the next night. Christian and Toons had a digital projector and were going to show the fête videos and photographs—including many of mine.

A Scotsman after too many pastis.

Tuesday night rolled around and we went to the bar to watch the videos of people eating, drinking and singing and pretty soon we are all eating, drinking and singing along with the images on the screen. Around some late hour or another we slid home.

Wednesday came and I was seriously partied out and we are still facing the Burns Supper. In a show of unity the local Scots, the Brits and Irish had planned a whiskey and haggis event that would be only six weeks later than the official Supper night of January 24^th.

The important thing that the Scots have smuggled several haggises (haggi??) down from Scotland, I suppose disguised as rugby balls. These were the real thing and so we HAD TO have a Burns Sipper no matter the time of year. Now it is Wednesday night and the formal ritual begins of praising the haggis and Scotland. Soon we are all singing Scottish songs—including some anti-British tunes about a free and independent Scotland. Aye, Scotland forever!

The haggis was hardly awful but rather surprisingly bland, but the straight whiskey sauce sure helped.

And that’s how we found ourselves in the South of France standing up with a bunch of Brits, Scots and Irish, hands and arms crossed and linked together singing “Auld Lang Syne” at the top of our voices celebrating the life of the Scottish poet Robbie Burns.

I had not sung so many songs in the last fifty years as I did in these four days and I came to realize that the best way to get to know a bunch of people is to stand with them and sing together at the top of your lungs.

Note: If you enjoy Le Sud de France, please pass it on to your friends. Thanks

Le Sud De France 5.0: Swallow The Toad

2011-01-29T07:51:00.000-08:00

Nicolas de Chamfort‘s Dictum reads, “(one) must swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.”

I agree and my preference is for the small European toads—the greenish ones with little warts--and I find that one is usually sufficient to get me through the day. It’s one of the reasons I fit into France so well.

A recent survey showed that the French are the most pessimistic people in Europe. That in part accounts for the high price and the regular shortages of toads here in the South.

It was particularly a bad toad day last week (mid-January) for the French who awoke to see a photo of their President, Nicholas Sarkozy, on a calendar published to raise funds for the blind--who luckily can’t see the photos or the calendar. There amidst photos of celebrities like Gérard Depardieu, was a shot of Sarko. He is in profile and wearing dark “blind” person’s glasses and holding a white cane. The irony of a “blind” president was only made worse by the presence of the Carla, Mme S, who is seen standing in front of him and staring at the camera. Her expression is saying nothing less than, “Help I’m a celebrity, get me out of here!”

Montpellier is the center of the Languedoc region and like most big cities a hub of toad use by the population. A few weeks ago the papers were all abuzz about an announcement by the French rocker Johnny Hallyday. He had been ill and was now all better and had picked Montpellier for his triumphant return to performing. It was big news across France because he’s their biggest rock star ever, sort of like Bruce Springsteen and Elvis rolled into one.

What you never heard of Johnny? He was part of the French Invasion that paralleled the British Invasion in the 1960s. The reason that you and the rest of the civilized world hasn’t heard of him is that to Americans and Brits he’s like Frankie Avalon with a mustache or Sonny Bono without Cher. Or to put it another way, a one toad pony.

Serge Gainsbourg on the other hand was a real French rock star whose songs have much in common with Bob Dylan. . His songs spoke of hypocrisy and pain. He knew about both having survived the Holocaust and an affair with Bridgette Bardot. Serge was a three toad a day man and it even that couldn’t keep him alive.

Speaking of toad abuse, I upped my dosage the other week after passing a police “roadblock”. Roadblock is a loose term as the cops were simply standing by the side of the road blocking nothing. They just stood there hands behind their backs, appearing annoyed, like school marms waiting for kids to get back from recess. They were evidently looking for something specific—there’s a lot of drug traffic in the south--but what I really noticed were their uniforms. These Gendarmes are part of the French army and are dressed in what someone in Paris considers Haute Couture. Yet is that any excuse for dressing officers of the law in puffy blue jackets, black boots and matching black tights. Standing at the roundabout they exuded not nonchalance but “Mon dieu, what am I doing here freezing my ass off in these silly tights?”

It gave me a week of nightmares about being chased by little blue triangles with thin black legs.

One of my heroes is the French writer Gustave Flaubert. He hated France and he hated the middle class French the most, “There are gestures, sounds of people’s voices, that I cannot get over, silly remarks that almost give me vertigo…the bourgeois…is for me something unfathomable.”

That’s the voice of a man who knew his toads. Luckily, he died in the 19^th century and didn’t live to see Auchan and Castorama. These are the suppliers of middle class life in France. Castorama is a hardware store that is a lot larger than an American Home Depot and just a little smaller than Rhode Island. It contains everything you need to build a village from scratch. Auchan is a supermarket in the way Superman is a regular guy. You can literally get everything you need there to feed the village and decorate all the houses you’ve built.

Large box stores, like the elephant and whale, like to live in herds. About 12 miles from us several dozen box stores have settled in a "zone industrielle" near Beziers. Last Saturday, we went on safari to hunt through the January sales for things for the house.

As we left home I popped a toad and stuck a spare one in my pocket just in case. A light rain was falling as we drove down the N9, our windshield wipers flapping and dark clouds massing above us. Three miles from the zone we began to see traffic, two miles from Auchan the traffic was crawling. I began to wonder if this was really such a good idea after all.

Arriving at Auchan we joined a caravan line of cars circling through the parking garage. It was a bit like a game of musical chairs. Whenever a car left a space, three or four cars would descend upon it at top speed. The winner was not the one who got to the space first but the one who effective blocked the other cars from it.

It is a game of “chicken” played out in slow motion in a crowded parking lot. While waiting my turn in this gladiatorial arena I watched an ancient, tiny Renault “Twingo” slide between two large Citroens SUVs and a half dozen children and mothers to get into a space. I was stunned by the driver’s daring and his disregard for bystanders. It could have been a very ugly scene except that when the Twingo door opened a cane popped out of the driver’s door followed by a shrunken old guy wearing the very same dark glasses as Sarkozy wore in the calendar for the blind photo.

I pulled the spare toad out of my pocket, tore off its head and swallowed it in a single bite.

Note: If you enjoy Le Sud de France, please pass it on to your friends. Thanks

Le Sud de France 4.9: A Passion For Pézenas

2011-01-15T01:38:00.000-08:00

We are moved again, this time into our own house. As we settle in we decide that since the weather has finally cleared, we'd take a stroll through town and get a better feel for its streets and neighborhoods.

Pézenas is best known for its Renaissance mansions and palaces. The town boasts that the playwright Moliere, who wrote comedies and farces-very fitting for Pézenas--often brought his troupe here to perform and enjoy the city.

The town’s name probably comes from the Latin for fishpond but the town’s exact origin is lost in Roman times or earlier. But the role it’s played in history is not lost. It was an open city, tolerant of different beliefs and lifestyles. Like other parts of the Languedoc it was a city in which Roman Catholics, Cathar Catholics and Jews all lived together as one community.
Then in the early 13^th century the city was conquered by the French army from the North and the Cathars were wiped out.

Walking through the old streets we passed an archway bearing the sign “Le Ghetto” which means that this was the Jewish quarter. It reminded me that several meters below our feet there exists a centuries old system of tunnels that run from the houses to the fields outside the town. One recently discovered tunnel entrance starts a building which was used for Jewish ritual baths. These tunnels were used during WWII by the French Resistance.

Naturally any place that supports freedom of thought requires escape routes to evade whomever the current forces of intolerance are. And there’s always some variety of the thought police ready to clamp down on people for just trying to live their lives.

photos c 2011 steve meltzer photographe

Walking through Pezenas, I found myself taking pride in living in a place where freedom was so highly valued and its one of the reasons I have a passion for the place.

Note: If you enjoy Le Sud de France, please pass it on to your friends. Thanks

Le Sud De France: 4.8: Lipstick on a Pig.

2010-12-26T03:48:00.000-08:00

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Sarah Palin, no slouch when it comes to mauling the language used the phrase “like putting lipstick on a pig”. It’s a rhetorical expression that means making superficial changes or calling something by a positive term to disguise its negative qualities.

Oblivious to irony in all its forms, Ms Palin didn’t notice that in using the term she drew attention to her own lipstick-ed self and her lack of experience. But hey, she quit being Governor of Alaska for “the good of Alaska” and didn’t get that irony of that either. But I’ll give her credit for bringing back the lovely old expression “putting lipstick on a pig.”

For Christmas our present to ourselves was buying a house. As I wrote earlier about house hunting in France, you’ve got to do a lot of work on your own, which we did, and we found our place by ourselves. But we had spent a lot of time going around the French countryside with realtors (estate agents to our British friends), immobiliers in French, and when it comes to putting lipstick on a pig no one is better at it than realtors.

Célèste is a realtor (all the realtor names have been changed for our own protection) from Paris who moved south to live in her husband’s village. She tells us that at first she thought all the villages were very far apart but now she sees they are not. She says this as we roar down a narrow rural road at 100 kilometers. She’s in a hurry to show us a house in a 1000 year old hill town.

We arrived at the village safely and park in front of the mayor’s office and after a short three block walk we stop in front of a small door fitted into a blank wall.

“We’re here!” Célèste says cheerily.

We’d already seen a number of “village homes” by this time and most seemed to have been remodeled by hobbits at the end of the dark ages and occupied over the centuries by the village widow and her son, the village idiot. But even so this place was a surprise.

A Roman foundation

We entered the house and were in a large earthen room with a curved stone arch in one end and a stairway by the opposite wall. Célèste looks at this emptiness and happily says,

“This is the original Roman foundation structure.”

Well, my idea of a Roman structure is perhaps more like the Coliseum or at least the sexy steam baths of a Fellini movie-- but moving on.

We climb the stairs and reach the bathroom and kitchen. I use these terms in a loosely descriptive way. We came upon a space about ten foot square (about 3 meters by 3 meters) with a wall in its middle. The stairs let out on the “bathroom” side of the wall, the “kitchen” on the other

The bathroom had a stone floor with a drain in it and a shower head attached to the wall and a toilet just out of range of the shower spray. Take two steps and you arrive at the kitchen which is the size of a closet equipped with a two burner electric stove, a half refrigerator and a sink. Over the sink is a tank the size of a large bottle of Coca Cola.

I ask Célèste what it is.

The front door of a village house.

“Oh that’s the hot water heater. My granny had one in her apartment in Paris,” she says, “But this one is much newer.”

“Does it heat all the water for the house?” I ask.

“Of course, “she replies, “and it runs on gas. Didn’t you see the tank in the basement? It will run the heater for weeks and when it’s empty you just take the tank to the Tabac in the next village and get another tank.”

Chuck the Chopper was another realtor we went out with. No matter what house he showed us he’d immediately start banging on the walls and saying,

“Knock this one down, and this one, maybe this one too.”

Seems he's never met a wall he liked.

He showed us one house that had last been decorated in the late 1940s. It looked and felt like one of those tenement apartments I remember from New York’s Lower East Side. Kind of like you see in “The Godfather, Part II” but smaller. This place wasn’t so bad though but there was a problem.

After looking around I realized I hadn’t seen the bathroom. So I asked Chuck where it was.

“Through the French door at the end of the hall,” he answered.

This was hopeful. I walked to the door, and opening it, stepped through only to discover that I was outside on a terrace.

From behind me Chuck said, “The showers and the toilet are on the terrace which is quite unique isn’t it.”

The dryer is the outdoors.

Yup, at one end of the five foot long terrace was a toilet and a shower head, open to the sky.

Chuck pointed up towards the sky and taking it in with a sweep of his arm said, “Think of it you can see the stars at night when you take a shower.”

When he saw us grimacing he added, “If you want to, it would be easy to knock down the bedroom wall so you walk right out to the terrace to use the bathroom.”

The next house he showed us had a special feature too. It had a bathtub. Few village houses have bathtubs. The problem was that this bathtub was in the basement in the garage laundry room.

Always upbeat Chuck said, “A lot of privacy for bathing with this setup isn’t there? You can even keep an eye on the laundry as you bath.”

Narrow street are walkers not cars

Jean-Pierre is a native of the Herault and proud to be an immoblier. He also makes it clear that every house he sells is owned by someone he has gone to school with or knows personally, so don’t even try to negotiate prices. Of course, the prices he was quoting us were always too high yet he seemed unperturbed. When I asked him how many houses he had sold in the last year he replied perkily,“None”

But he had one property where the price was negotiable. It was owned by an English “artist and photographer” and he took us to see it.

It was in the middle of a village and entering the doorway we once again found ourselves climbing up ancient spiral stone stairs. After two treacherous flights, the staircase opened into a small dark room.

“This is the salon,” Jean-Pierre said as he began to hunt for light switches. It was a stiflingly tiny space with no windows and a stairway to the next floor on one side of the room and opposite that a bathroom. Entering the salon I noticed that there was something odd about the bathroom wall.

It seemed that the English artist in a “fit” of a creative inspiration had built the bathroom wall out of old plastic Badoit and Evian bottles filled with colored water. There were easily a hundred randomly colored bottles lying on their sides in the holes of some decorative tiles.

Jean-Pierre reached around behind me and flipped on a light switch. When he did this the rows of water filled bottles began to light up, glowing in a thousand subtle colors, lighting up the salon and the bathroom which could be seen clearly through the bottles.

Once all the bottles were lit up Jean-Pierre stepped back and sighed with pleasure.

“Imagine entertaining here and whenever someone uses the toilet, the room lights up with color. That is really something special.”

Yeah and talk about putting lipstick on a pig!

Le Sud de France 4.7: Joyeaux Noel a Tous

2010-12-22T11:19:00.000-08:00

With Christmas bearing down on us and a lot of the world covered in snow I thought that I'd devote this blog to photos of Christmas in the warm and sunny South of France. I'll let them speak for themselves about the Fete Noels held in late December in most of the villages.

At a Deux Chevaux Citroen Gathering


Eating lunch in the Vineyards at a Winery Nete Noel

Celebrations in Beziers, France

Beziers, Fete Noel

Le Sud de France 4.6: A Fistful of Euros

2010-12-09T06:26:00.000-08:00

The Only Good Euro Is A Chocolate One!!!

You know it’s gotten bad when, instead of talking about kitchen remodeling at a party, the conversation begins with, “So how much longer do you think the Euro will last?”

Despite the hope of unifying the nations of Europe after the brutality of World War II the Euro obviously has not. 16 nations use the Euro and they’ve lost the individual flexibility they once had to adjust the value of their money to deal with economic problems. It makes for a lot of bad feelings between these supposedly united countries and the papers and TV are full of reports about the future of the currency.

The Euro became the single currency in 1999. We were in France then and could see that it wasn’t off to a good start. The French had issued new Francs in 1960 to replace old Francs--a revaluation of the currency--and after forty years people had sort of adjusted to it. Prices were still listed in both the old and new Francs and older folks kept cookie jars stuffed with the old bills-- just in case.

What I did see a lot of then was how uncomfortable people were with the new currency. When the Euro came along prices were converted into Euros and rounded off--and always upwards. People saw that price hike and resented it.

Acceptance of the new currency has remained awkward and today after 12 years, prices are still given in both Euros and their equivalent in Francs, and in parts of France you can even use Francs for purchases.

The Euro coinage is also very confusing and at first many old people would just open their purses or extend a handful of coins to a cashier to let them figure out which coins were needed to pay for a purchase. Sadly I still see that happening today.

How in the world did some EU genius in Brussels, or a committee of geniuses, come up with the idea of having eight different coins for their currency? There are 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 Euro cent coins and the one and two Euro coins. And as you can see in the photo below they were cleverly designed to be similar in color and design. And all the coins are small and that makes them clumsy to handle.

By comparison the US gets along with just four coins in everyday use; the penny (one cent), the nickel (five cents), the dime (ten cents) and the quarter dollar (twenty-five cents) and each is a different enough that it is easy to tell them apart. There are also fifty cent pieces and dollar coins but you rarely see or use them.

The eight Euro coins make it hard to quickly make change for a payment and it ends up slowing down cashier lines and such.

My biggest bugaboo is how hard it is to get rid of the damn things. Every time I'd go shopping it seems that the number of coins in my pocket always increased in number and weight.

That's because when you pay for something, cashiers generally try to give you back as many coins as possible. It's like the kid's game of "hot potato." Finally I began to fight back with what I call "the its your change game."

My strategy is to give the cashier the amount of coins first and then the bills. For example, if my purchase is 34.52 Euros, I hand the cashier 52 cents worth of coins, in as many small coins as possible. And then, only after the coins do I hand over the bigger coins like the 1 and 2 Euros. Then I move on to the paper notes.

It takes practice but it works.

Debussy on top, Euro bridges below.

I personally dislike the look of the Euro currency designs. The coins are lackluster and the bills feature really boring images of “bridges.” To me it is an ugly currency that sadly replaced some of the most beautiful paper around; like this French Franc with its portrait of composer Claude Debussy.

While no one knows what will happen with the Euro in the future the feelings towards it aren't good. The responses to the question posed at lunch about how long the Euro will last were pretty negative. A British ex-pilot said, “3 or 4 years” while a Dutch engineer responded dryly, “Hardly that.” Later I saw a TV commentator give it 5 months.

In my case, my response is, 'If it goes, I won't miss it."

Sud de France 4.5: All Dat Jazz

2010-12-03T06:56:00.000-08:00

My relationship with jazz has been a sometime thing. Growing up in New York I’d take the subway home after late night dates and there’d always be some musicians on the trains. Slouched over their bass cases and trombone bags, tapping their feet to the rhythm of the car wheels, they were going back up to Harlem in the wee hours of the morning.

Tired and drained after a gig at some midtown hotel dining room or a club in the Village, their fingers would unconsciously practice a riff on their unreachable fret boards and valves.

These were the anonymous foot soldiers of jazz. Black musicians who loved to play but never made any real money at it. Every once in a while I’d recognize a face (say was that Miles?) but usually they were the sidemen who supported the big “names” and remained in their shadows.

It was the late nineteen sixties and I was learning to play guitar. My heroes were another bunch of black musicians; blues men like Bukka White, Son House and Lighting Hopkins. With the anti-War movement and the rise of folk music, the action in Greenwich Village shifted from the Blue Note to the Café Wha and middle class white kids hauling banjos and washtub basses filled Washington Square pretending to be authentic Appalachians singers.

I stayed in touch with jazz though because my best friend was a jazz enthusiast with a huge collection of vinyl LPs. Pretty regularly I'd get a call to come over and listen to some new record he had just gotten. Or we'd get together and hang out in a tiny Easy Village jazz club. By now I was performing in a folk band made up of college kids and I too was pretending to be a country boy. It didn’t last, there was this war on called Viet Nam and I had to move on leaving the band and New York behind.

1967 rolled in and I found myself in San Francisco in the heat of the "Summer of Love. It wasn’t the sex, drugs and rock and roll thing the media made it out to be. Instead it was a sad, desperate time with lost kids from places like Topeka, St. Louis or Dallas, running away from the stifling world of Middle America hoping to find something; hoping to find anything, really.

Rock was the theme music of those days but jazz held on. Groups like Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band and performers like Leon Redbone were rooted in the jazz of the 1920s and musicians like Charles Lloyd with his big old Afro and color splashed batik shirts brought jazz to a new, “hip,” young audience. Jazz stayed very much alive although undervalued and sidelined.

After a year in San Francisco I headed north and for the next couple of decades I was the photographer for Seattle Center, the city's performing arts facility. I shot hundreds of concerts including the small number of jazz performances that were included in the big Labor Day Bumbershoot Arts Festival.

Usually presented in the Center's smaller venues, it meant that I got to meet and hear artists like Ray Charles, Marian McFarland, Buddy Guy and Etta James, in intimate rooms and halls.

In America today the audience for jazz has been aging while here in France it seems the jazz scene is healthy and the audience is young.

For example, within a few weeks of arriving we were invited to a jazz “house party” in a private house in a nearby, very small village. For 8 Euros you got a glass of wine and some food and then sat down in the living room for an evening of live jazz performed by a local group.

Pezenas is a renaissance age village in the South of France.

Then other day we were having a meeting with the owner of the house we are hoping to buy when out of the blue he turned to me and said, “I do hope you like jazz.”

It turns out that Pézenas, the next town to ours, is a hotbed of music. The town’s old train station has been remodeled into a theater and there's a schedule of all sorts of music and art performances (and lots of jazz) throughout the year.

And for a town of only 7500 people what’s even more surprising is its lively and active music club scene.

Typical of what I mean is this notice I found in the local paper this morning.

Son du Swing

“At Club Butel (Pézenas) at 20:00. 18 December 2010. Le Son du Swing a collective of musicians based in Southern France who share a common passion for ‘jazz manouche’ or ‘Gypsy Jazz’. The line-up of the group is inspired by and celebrates the 'Quintet du Hot club de France'."

The thought of all this jazz so close to my new home is heartwarming. In a way for me, it honors the legacy of those hard working musicians I shared all those late night subways with so long time ago. Men and women whose lives were all about all dat jazz.

And, of course, there's always Django.

Sud de France 4.4: Out to Lunch at Béziers’ Au Soleil Restaurant & Salon de Thé. .

2010-12-01T08:13:00.000-08:00

Au Soleil Restaurant

I define art as something that surprises and delights me and by that standard “Au Soleil” restaurant is a work of art. It is everything a small eatery should be and more. It is an intimate Salon de Thé, at the heart of a city with a dining area decorated with a minimalist sensibility that makes for clean lines and an airy atmosphere.

“Au Soleil” (In the Sun) is one of several restaurants on the square between Béziers’ la Madeleine church and “les Halles,” its large indoor public market.

A Roman statue found in the city.

To me, Béziers is one of the most beautiful cities in France but, like so many places, it is struggling to define its future while simultaneously trying to repair past neglect.

It was settled in Neolithic times, was a Roman town, then a medieval center and then it finally boomed at the end of the 19^th century (only to have its fortunes dimmed in the 20^th.)

But that 19th century heyday left the city with a legacy of beautiful places. One of my personal favorites is the “allée Paul Riquet” a several block long, tree lined promenade, with the city’s municipal theater at one end and a delightful English style formal park, the “Plateau des Poètes,” at the other.

A "Belle Epoque" building in Beziers

The allée itself is surrounded by gorgeous “Belle Époque” buildings replete with lovely terraces and lots of exquisite, intricate ironwork. And it’s just a short walk from Au Soleil, through Béziers’ clothing shop lined streets to the quiet of the allée and the park.

I have photographed and written about food and restaurants for dozens years and I’m pretty jaded about the subject. I’ve been in Michelin star restaurants and in American “Best Places” but for me “Au Soleil” is among my favorites. Simply it is one of the best small restaurants I’ve ever been in.

At “Au Soleil” the whole point is the food. We were in the city on some business the other day and decided to have lunch at the restaurant. After settling into our chairs we ordered tea and one of the day’s special, the “La Terroir” plate. Terroir refers to the special nature of the land and this plate is a celebration of the land and autumn.

Unfortunately when the food arrived I jumped in and started eating, forgetting that I wanted to do some photos first. So please excuse the nibbles I took out of the food in the picture below.

On the plate from left clockwise around you can see a small salad, a duck and potato “parmentier” (which I’ve opened up to reveal the duck), jambon (dried ham) with a red wine confit, a thick autumn vegetable soup (in the glass jar), an onion tart and chicken mousse in pastry (which I cut open too.)

Each of these items was superbly prepared but what really caught my attention was how well their flavors worked together. In my experience the matching of flavors and textures on a plate is one of the hardest tasks for a chef. And as a result I think that you can often judge a chef’s skill by checking out how they've presented the vegetables.

Most chefs take pride in their main preparation but the vegetables are often an afterthought, put on the plate to provide some color or to fill an empty space. This was not the case with my “la terroir” plate. The onion tarte was a treat in itself. Moist and light, the egg and onion mixture was hot and perfectly cooked.

It is not the kind of sensitive and creative care you see every day.

Our lunch cost us about $12 USD each and as I left the restaurant I thought to myself that if “Au Soleil” were in Paris the meal would have easily cost three times as much.

And that’s what is so special about the Herault. It is a region that has been overlooked and bypassed. Undervalued wines and a lack of big name star supporters it lay dormant. But today its the fastest growing region in France, talent and new ideas. With luck in a few years Béziers will become the the Paris or Berlin of Sud de France.

The city hall mural complete with the mayor and the artist.