The Magic Man

Walking up Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud in Paris’s 10th arrondissement in mid-October, I saw a man who was working in the doorframe of Ô Lieu de, a tapas, pizza and beer joint I’ve passed many a night. The restaurant’s front windows are tall and wide, and the man was trim and spry in black, wide-wale corduroy overalls with spots of white or grey paint.

Gregory Sévin, the man in the door, looked like a magic-worker, an elastic figure-eight, standing on a stepladder and leaning into his work. 

Sévin designs and decorates the interiors of restaurants across France. Inside Lieu de, repurposed flat sticks of wood adorned the street-level bar. Cement slabs spiralled around a tree trunk, forming a staircase. 

It led to a low-ceilinged lounge with slanted boughs of wood attached to two walls, and a larger, windowless back room with primitive-style wooden furniture and a painting of a female Axl Rose sucking on a lollipop. 

The artist also showed me the first-floor bathroom, which he designed to resemble a cave with curvy stone walls and paintings of beasts.  

Sévin told me he’s also worked on a restaurant called Chope-Moi in Pigalle and a place called Talkie Molkky not far from the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Sévin’s doing something at the Gare du Nord; he’s done something in the northwest French city of Lille, and in the Mediterranean town of Saint-Tropez.

He had his materials on the first floor of Lieu de, and American classic rock was playing from speakers that were probably connected to his laptop. 

“I don’t look for work,” the artist told me. “I look to amuse myself.”

Little thoughts in the Little Alps

On my 43rd birthday, my cousin Victor took me for a walk in Les Alpilles, the “little Alps” in the south of France near Avignon. He suggested going for 40 minutes, but we stayed out for about two and a half hours, in our sneakers and everyday clothes, walking up rocky paths around these natural sculptures that looked like they came straight from a dentist’s dreams.

I first saw some of these beauties to the right of a trail we took up a hill. They looked imposing and quite high above us. They did not look approachable, or I guess the word is, surmountable to me. 

But they were. Victor changed our late-morning plans for a rendezvous with family, and we walked through the woods and then toward these two cavities (hey, if it’s the right word, it’s the right word) in the rock.

At some point, I realized that we were far up above the path we had taken into the hills. We were up where I thought we couldn’t be. And I also realized that the way we had gotten there was by putting one foot in front of the other. Ours were not pretty strides: Victor wasn’t swimming regularly like he used to, and my occasional morning runs hadn’t gotten me into good hiking shape. But we still found energy in continued motion.

It seemed like basic self-help material, but I wanted to say it anyway: We humans can do amazing things just by continuing to move toward our goals. Victor agreed, and said that a lot of people don’t. I like to write, and it occurred to me that working on a manuscript, or even a good blog post, is a lot harder, or at least more mysterious, than walking up a steep but defined path. What they have in common is you have to keep going. 

Gift of Gabba Gabba Hey!

According to his Instagram page, @alifeinstories, Isaiah Pittman is a librarian, a cinephile, and a badger. His reviews of books, movies, and CDs, which appear on his page and on various shelves at the New York Public Library’s Inwood branch, are indeed claw-sharp and furry-warm.

The three that caught my eye were about Paula Hawkins’s novel, The Girl on the Train; Kristin Roupenian’s short-story collection, You Know You Want This; and Robert Brockaway’s novel, The Unnoticeables. In the last one, check out the way Pittman’s hyphenated and modified adjectives build authority and sass.

Then there’s the perfect brevity of this review, rolling forward on greasy adverb-adjective-noun combinations.

There are plenty of highlights in this one—including the evenhanded opening qualification—but the third sentence takes the donut.

True to his word, Pittman describes plenty of movies, too, like the Ramones-inspired Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and Sidney Lumet’s Network, and some albums, such as Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power and Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures.

Pittman explained that he commonly keeps the red and white card when a library user borrows one of his picks.

“I have a stack of them now as thick as a telephone book,” he wrote via Instagram.

When a user returns a title, Pittman finds its review and rejoins it to the book or box. His handwritten cards beautify the branch like bicolored petals of thought.

If you can’t visit the garden, @alifeinstories collects all of Pittman’s work. You may never want for a source of book, film, or record recommendations again.

Wrappin' on Nagle Avenue

Fabrics for sale on Nagle Avenue, near Inwood, NYC

She's So High 'n' Robert Bly

In high school, I wasn’t a fan of Blur. But I was excited when Leisure, their debut album, and Bandwagonesque, an early Teenage Fanclub record, were promoted as signs that young U.K. pop bands were ready for the consideration of stateside listeners. Leisure’s cover portrayed a cute, smiling swimmer in a bathing cap and lipstick, an Amélie à la piscine, and Bandwagonesque’s depicted a bright yellow money sack over a reddish pink background. I had heard the shoegaze/baggy pair of singles, “She’s So High” and “There’s No Other Way,” from Leisure, and the tunes, the art, and the ads moved me to bring both CDs to my friend Elliot’s birthday party. But our friend Doug, way hipper than us, said something disparaging about the albums (or maybe the publicity), and that dampened things for me.

In college, Doug was listening to Blur’s second record, Modern Life Is Rubbish, and the clean, spiky sound of that and the band’s next two LPs filled my dorm rooms for years. On Parklife, I liked the pogo-friendly story of “Tracy Jacks,” a bureaucrat who loses it in the face of his particular kind of no future, and I loved The Great Escape, Parklife’s more robust follow-up. Songs like the supercharged “Bank Holiday” and the sensual “Girls and Boys” made it seem like Blur were participating in the culture they were critiquing, but calling their record The Great Escape showed the band understood that culture perfectly.

Blur’s next, eponymous album was full of buzzy guitars and less British-oriented themes, and the cover art wasn’t cute at all: it was an appropriately blurry photo of a nurse wheeling a stretcher. One rock critic who saw them live mentioned the vigor of “Song 2,” a distorted burst of sound that might have been Blur’s answer to the Ramones. When I saw the band play the Orpheum Theater in Boston, I noticed the crowd’s joy when they played their early singles, “She’s So High” especially, which filled the room like a wave.

About 15 years after that show, I had the unbelievable luck of living across the street from Academy Records in Brooklyn. Sometimes the staff would prop open the doors, and the album on the store’s stereo would be audible in the street. One day, I heard a boyish voice and some thick electric guitar, and saw a copy of Leisure sitting on the now-playing shelf behind the register. I wondered how much they were asking for it.

I wanted the record for “She’s So High,” a song I had come to appreciate more with time. It’s just a massive, radiant mount of gazey rock with a message that everyone can understand: She’s so unattainable. I want her. And that’s it, or so I thought until I remembered some lines by the English poet William Blake that the American poet Robert Bly included in Iron John, his book about masculinity in literature and ritual. Blake’s verse depicts a male infant’s surrender to parental dominance, which ends with the baby clinging unhappily to his mother.  

Struggling in my father’s hands,

Striving against my swaddling bands,

Bound and weary I thought best

To sulk upon my mother’s breast.

And here are the lyrics to “She’s So High,” which Blur’s lead singer Damon Albarn alternately intones, sings, and semi-wails:

I see her face

Everyday

I see her face

It doesn’t help me

She’s so high

I want to crawl all over her

I think of her

Everyday

I think of her

It doesn’t help me

She’s so high

I want to crawl all over her

She doesn’t help me

She’s so high

I want to crawl all over her

As a teenager, it was easy to imagine that the song was about a beautiful schoolmate in the hall. But Blake’s image of the unhappy baby, and what I’ve read about the unmet needs of children in Getting the Love You Want, a self-help book by the psychologist Harville Hendrix, has lately made me wonder. Because the first person we wanted to “crawl all over” was mum, someone whose face we saw, and who we thought about in infancy, all the time.

Albarn repeats “She doesn’t help me” as “She’s So High” nears its final chorus, and he could easily have had a cute, pop-loving peer in mind. But you never know. The song works as a longing for and protest against a mother or a crush. Either way, it’s a powerful expression of immaturity that’s stood the test of time.

Central Park (just Central Park)

I did not know Central Park was so beautiful. Especially on a 90-plus-degree day, when the heat and brightness seem to overexpose patches of the world like 35-millimeter film. The large rocks are like the backs of dinosaurs buried in the earth. The foliage is ample, and the waterway that I saw, still and green, looks primeval. And of course there are people: so many people enjoying themselves. I remember how well cars and CDs went together; let me tell you, colored t-shirts on humans amidst huge rocks, green hills, paved paths, and occasional kiosks, comfort stations, and playgrounds are just as good a fit. I’ve lived in New York for most of the past 13 years, but I’ve rarely just come and spent time here.

I realize that the park’s splendor is not a news item. But for me, it was a revelation. If you pack a lunch and a book, or visit the Strand’s open-air store near 60th Street and 5th Avenue if you forget one, you’ll have everything you need. There’s plenty of shade, and the hills are comfortable to lie on.

Browsing at the Strand three days ago, I found a copy of Sex at Dawn, which a fellow temp recommended three summers ago. I opened it, read a little about the sexual customs of the Mosuo, a people in China, and thought this is the book for me. The preface is extraordinary: it describes how one of the authors confronted a charging monkey in Malaysia by baring his teeth, extending his arms, crouching his legs, and screaming. The monkey backed off, and the author learned that he was a primate, too. I felt human while reading about it on a hillside in the park.

At some point, I thought about how for so many years I could not get past the allure of McCarren Park when I lived in Greenpoint. Discovering Central Park now is probably due to the fact that I’m fully employed as a teacher and on summer break. I’m more confident now than I was then, when I thought a lot about dreams and desires, didn’t act on them enough, and couldn’t bring myself to make the crushing and regenerative compromises that come with adulthood. I’ve also signed up for a daily French class at the Alliance Française, also on 60th Street, that finishes at 1 every day. Monday was the first class, and it felt so right. 

Oh yeah: I even heard the chorus of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” a song that always makes me picture a scene in Central Park, in my head when I walked down the steps into the subway at Columbus Circle. Sure, I then remembered that the next line is “you’re going to reap just what you sow,” but so far, summer is a good harvest.