(written 29 July)

The road from Paris to the Cote-d’Azur is called “La Route du Soleil” - the Road of the Sun. This happy name for a highway is further validated by a single sign, “Le Porte du Soleil.” Julien explained this all to me Sunday, as we found a hotel for the night before passing through the door of the sun today. The are “conceptual, not literal”, he said.

Apparently the doors of the sun belong to each vehicle parked on a searing tarmac when holiday traffic turns into a traffic jam. The French call it a “bouchon” - a cork - naturally. Ten kilometers of halted highway must look about the same throughout the West. The cars stop. Five or ten minutes pass without lifting off the brakes, then you pull the handbrake and give your legs a rest. A former lane-jockey next to you opens his door, puts his foot on the runningboard, pops up to survey the queue, and demounts, shaking his head. You cut your engine as soon as he lights a cigarette, and get out.

The car in front of you is driven by someone from your hometown. You compare the same story you just heard on traffic radio. It’s backed 3 km, or 12. Forty minutes, or fifteen. There is an accident. There are casualties. There will be a wreckage on the way. Down the dotted line, would-be vacationers precipitate from their cars. Motorcycles slalom through the doors. Just when you want to call it a picnic and see who’s packing rosettes and a cold rosé, the doors ahead close like a zipper, brakelights flare as the clutch is punched, and the long crawl continues.

Thankfully, our bottleneck was uncorked quickly. Minutes later we passed the “Porte du Soleil”, and soon discovered that is had another analogy, also desiring “portes” in the plural: turnpikes. Again, Julien explained. “Provence has more tolls than anywhere in France.” Why? “Because everyone wants to go there, especially the Dutch and the Germans,” he said, nodding to two caravans. In the homestretch from Paris, through the Bouche du Rhone and into Provence, tollbooths are not the guarantee of uninterrupted turnpike, but more like flaming hoops of consumer extortion. Exit towns on the way congratulate your arrival on the exit ramps with signs, “See you soon on the ESCOTA network!” If they won’t be destinations, at least they can extract a transit tax.

While the municipal beneficence gives us overpass restaurants, inflated gas prices, and smooth pavement every five miles between a chunk of change, at least it delivers us to where we want to be, past the doors of the sun. At half past one, smooth sailing on the hip of a hill, we finally broke through the promise of the parched landscape and found its end: the sea beyond the town of Cassis below, pointed to by the anvil of the stone, above. I have never been much of beach bum, but at this first sight of the Mediterranean coast iI heaved with a sense of grace and respite. “Thalatta! Thalatta!” cried the 10,000 Greeks when they saw the Black Sea from the mountaintop. They knew it was the way home. For me, it presented a different salvation - one ten hours from work and Paris, and a world apart for the next two weeks.

(written Monday, 28 July)

Yesterday we left Paris and today we met the sea. In our time this says nothing - we can cross hemispheres in half a day - but when all you have seen of France has been from the window of low cost flight or even from a TGV, a roadtrip from Île-de-France to les îles de Hyeres, gives a much better sense of scale, and what you’re missing on the way.

Leaving Paris is an annual tradition, and from the end of July to mid-August the roads are packed. One of the most popular is the “Autoroute du Soleil”, which heads southeast from Paris to Lyon on the A6, where it joins the A7 to shoot down the Rhône valley towards Marseilles. It’s one of the oldest, and most highly trafficked, French national roads, and it is infamous for its jams.

While travel on the American Interstate system can be a flavorless cycle of cloverleaves, weigh stations and Flying J truckstops, driving in France provides an excellent taste of the wealth of the countryside, and the embarrasment of riches in land and the history that comes along with it. In the US, the brown and white signs marking points of interest are few and far between. The blue and white ones marking rest stops are of course more common but less exciting. Even these, in France, have a touch of class omitted in the States.

Here, rest stops - what we Americans sometimes laughably refer to as “comfort stations” - are called “Aires de Repos”. The simplest meaning of “aire” is “area”, but I prefer the alternative definition of “aerie” - a raptor’s nest - which is more colorful. Each of these rest stops has a name, some evocative - Aire of the Doe, of the White Dog, of the Great Tower, of the Imperial Woods - but most often they are toponymic. In addition to the standard amenities, many aires have a piece of public art, of 60s, 70s or 80s vintage, presumably to valorize the parking lots, picnic tables, and turkish toilets they accompany. To me this is a typically French flourish for a public project, and it would be interesting to know the history of its conception, and the fate of the many sculptors who contributed works to such a distinguished set of galleries. From Paris to Beaune, aires crop up every 10km or so; from Beaune to Lyon, ever 15km. I’ve read that there are many “phantom aires,” closed indefinitely, whose signs remain on the roadside. I wonder what happens to the abandoned art.

Signs for points of interest, historic or otherwise, provoke an altogether different sense of delight and discovery. In the US, these are generally reserved for battlefields and natural formations, and though a similar pattern is found here, they are far more prevalent, and - thanks to the images on each - far more fun. To be sure, some are just indicative, an arrow and a name for a geographic formation - the Massif of this, the Dentelles of that, the Paysage of your current region. Others give a historic summary - Avignon, Cité des Papes, or Orange, Cité des Princes. My favorites, however, offer a handy, state-endorsed illustration of something you may, or may not, see from the car window. A crennelated tower in the distance, or a sombre chateau just by the roadside, is given a name just as you may ask what it is. It is the chateau of Bourbilly, of course, of of Egouilly. Sometimes the white-on-brown silhouettes come without prevision, and you crane your neck to find the original form over the guard rails, the fields and trees, before passing by.

Being able to identify an unknown countryside as you pass through it animates the six lane trajectory. The merit of this approach to highway travel fell on me about an hour after our depart. No sooner had I asked, “Where are we?”, than a 1.5×2 meter panneau, showing a short-horned cow flicking its tail, announced, “Land of the Charolais.” The brown cows in the fields astride the highway suddenly had a name. I knew nothing better of our longitude and latitude, but I was happy to know that those cows had an appellation, and one I already associatied with quality steak. Not much later we passed a dramatic tableau: a Gaulish soldier, bellowing beneath his moustaches, raised sword above winged helmet against his Roman foe. We were not far from the Battlefield of Alesia, where Vercingetorix made his long last stand against Caesar. Lest we forget.

I appreciate the French approach to signage on an otherwise lifeless part of modern transport infrastructure because, at a moment, it is generous, didactic, efficient and, above all, casual. It is patrinomy writ short, and in its brief indication there it implies not only that “Vous etes ici,” but you are here, and, bien sur, you should know what here means. These “points of interest” signs can pique the imagination of a history buff and illuminate the passage of everyman - and they give everyman an answer to his children’s backseat “Are we there yet?”. “No, we just passed Dijon, seat of the dukes of Burgundy,” or better yet, “No, we are only at the Crocodile Farm - look at that sign and te toi.” I am all for a reductivism that, at 130km/h, may not turn the landscape into an open book, but at least gives it good captions.

It is finally summer. Sure, the solstice has long since passed, but I’ve only just now come to feel that I have turned my cheek to the sun as has the earth. When I was younger summer was defined, the three sticky months of freedom and boredom that fell between two school years. It was a tidy package, bookended by anticipation and a sense of relief. The last day of class was always one of impatient joy, while the first day of the new school year one of bittersweet, but awaited, return to structure and society.

Parents must have a bizarro-world perspective on the school-defined summer, as they have to figure out what to do with their kids until September rolls around again. For childless American post-grads, summer at least remains symbollically bounded by Memorial Day and Labor Day, with the Fourth as its bombastic, official greeting. In France, however, it’s a bit harder to pin down. The long weekends of May make the dregs of spring almost intolerable, as the working nation waits for its collective shutdown in August. Until the last weeks of July, when the mass exodus to the provinces begins, the only words on everyone’s lips are, “I need to be in vacation.”

But vacation is different from summer - vacation is the season’s rationalized format, its sanctioned apotheosis, but hardly its spirit. Summer is not so much a season - demarked by astronomy or meteorology - as the state of mind and the range of activity that the weather affords. It is long weekday evenings that beg to be shared, long weekend afternoons that preclude long nights, or long warm nights spent against the heat of the dog days. And it is finally here.

Last weekend, Mat and I joined a bunch of folks out at the estate of our friend Lucy’s family. Only in summer can you schedule a party from 2 to 8pm. We arrived just as the first flames leapt from the oil-drum grill, which had been tucked in a quiet lawn back behind the 18th century chateau and it’s high garden wall. The rest of the day was spent in textbook activities. We grilled two immense rounds of sausage and steak, drank beer and rosé, kicked around the soccerball and shuttled the badminton cock. Soy made many excellent attempts to catch a marshmallow in his mouth. Tony posed on the riding mower. Cumuli piled above the wheat beyond the treeline. Sitting on the grass became laying, laying became sleeping. Then, up for a couple of dodgeball matches. I don’t think there’s any sport more invigorating than the smiling malice and casual exertion of playground games.

Afterwards, we toured the community potager - a perfect mix of utility and ornament maintained by 20 local families. Tomato vines and dwarf appletrees were heavy with green fruit. Purple cabbages unfurled like monster flowers, while zucchini blossoms puckered, ready for the fryer. Between these and the leafy greens, the swollen pumpkins and tiny berries, roses and pansies throbbed with bees. Lola’s 3-month-old, Simon, slept in Mathilde’s arms as we walked. A duck and a drake rounded up their young in the pond. For all it’s mew and squeal, spring would be hard pressed to produce a more fertile tableau.

We left just shy of 8, taking the rental with Laure and Rachid back through the crush of Porte Maillot. Jo and Damien met us for dinner on the Bassin de la Villette, where we put back a cold Brouilly and digested with a walk along the quai. We were home before 11, the day too full to try for a night, just as the season would have it. Vacation begins on Friday. I am glad to have had some summer before.

Pictures of the afternoon here.

Scott Beale has a post on McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon that makes me misty, and thirsty.

Although the “oldest bar” title is disputed by the Seaport’s Bridge Cafe, among others, that takes little away from the “olde New York” ambience and hoary charm of the place. That it is so emblematic of the brickbat-and-bowery-boy era may be, I suspect, why Joseph Mitchell titled and led his excellent collection of fin-de-siecle Knickerbocker profiles after it.

By night it is often mobbed by tourists and fratty bingers; my advice is to go mid-afternoon during the off season. When I worked across the street, on the occassional Friday I would pop in for a one-and-one and a burger lunch. If you’re only a bit peckish, there’s also the the “cheese and crackers”: a good hunk of aged cheddar, a sleeve of Saltines, and some raw onion, it is a direct descendant of the British “ploughman’s lunch”.

Looking back on my last three posts - each of them an embedded video - I feel, as the last one’s title implies, rather lazy, even a little ashamed.

In addition to the video embeds, I’ve tried two gimmicks to makeup for my negligence of this blog: Ma.gnolia’s daily link posting job (imperfect, but still pretty top) and a Twitter plugin that publishes a daily digest of my (nonexistent) tweets. In the end, both were pointless - not their fault, but mine. Instead of fleshing it out, these tools diluted my blog and confused my intentions, vague as they may be.

The Twitter tool proved useless on two counts. First, I hardly ever use the tool. Second, I found that the digests produced during rare spurts of activity were embarassingly inane and, by nature, always out of context. So much for that.

The Ma.gnolia post job was more problematic. I had chosen Ma.gnolia because it didn’t truncate a bookmark’s description like Del.icio.us does. “Easy,” I thought, “I’ll just translate bookmarking activity into blogging.” I was wrong to confuse the two: there is a difference between simply pointing, and actually commenting. If I am prepared to write at least 100 words on something, shouldn’t I at least commit to giving it its of its own post? Conversely, why pressure myself to write about something I only find fun, or cool, or useful? There are better, faster tools for that.

Last night I reconciled myself to the fact that there is no technological way around the writing process. If I want this site to be a reflection of what I’m thinking or doing, a random video embed or a cronjob is not going to cut it. From here on out, I will only post here when the impulse to share something is compounded by the impulse to say something.

To divide the editorial from the curatorial, I have given in to that wonderful little tool that makes clapping up the tasty bits of the web I find very, very easy: Tumblr. Tumblr is a lightweight blogging platform that has received a good deal of praise recently. Its greatest strengths are its simplicity, ease of use, and it’s bookmarklet, which makes posting quotes, chat, video and photos quick and painless. No need to worry about tags, HTML hotlinks to external content, or attribution - Tumblr takes care of the last two, and doesn’t really care about the first. Click, click, done. Virtual pointing couldn’t be more straightforward.

My tumbleblog can be found at thelayenthusiast.tumblr.com. I will keep - and even maintain - this Wordpress blog for personal riffs. I expect that a handful of things I set aside for Tumblr will interest me enough to treat here, and hope that separating collection and commentary will give me more focus and drive for the latter.

But PES is so on point.

To think that in the US, sexual education is still a matter of debate…

Even so, it’s rather amazing the level of frankness in French anti-AIDS Public Service Announcements. This is but the latest in a randy series. I, well, I’m just glad this kind of thing airs late. But then, I guess that’s the audience they’re targeting. Kudos for the straight-shooting - and the catalog of fetish.

And the pool of tits!

I’ve always wanted a rough-hewn wooden table. Simply joined. Oil finished. Heavy, durable, earthy, something that gets better and better with age and hard wear, like bridle leather.

The Velia table, designed in 2006 by Ulrich Koessl, Tishch and Stuhl Willisau of Lucern, turns this physical romance on its head by encasing a prosciutto-thin slice of treetrunk in glass. It looks like a giant microscope slide.

via International Design Awards

Parskid’s work in paint, print and plush is full of mystery and threat. I really don’t want to get that into it. Just have a look - Forests and Streams and Landscapes of the Forgotten are a good place to start.

An interview with the artist is at CrownDozen.

Uniqlo doesn’t nap when it comes to innovative digital marketing. Their savory-sweet UNIQLOCK invented a new form of commercial art by combining performance, catalog, and clock into a screensaver. Schoolgirls in cashmere dance, make cat’s-cradles, and execute solo secret handshakes with their bodies, each in a bite-sized four-count before the time flashes and another video loads. You can literally while away the hours watching it.

Their latest, UT LOOP!, is a excellent interactive effort. It is a rhythm composer using video samples of various hip young kids making little noises, sometimes words - “dum”, “ti,” “pi”, “uo”, “okasan”, you get the picture. It clean, lovely and fun. The interface design is a typically understated, white-red-black affair, and keeps the focus on the figures in action. There’s plenty of ajax and flash about, and though I would suggest some changes to the “edit” mode, overall its quite usable. Bonus points for the embeddable player.

This little toy/marketing tool is so great because it is in and of the internet. In, because it is necessarilly a web object: it requires interactivity, viral networks, and participation to succeed. Of, because it is an obvious nod to Lasse Gjertsen, a first-wave webvideo star whose edited-webcam beatboxing will be familiar to most YouTube natives. Another happy feedback loop between creatives, commerce, and the crowd.

Jing Quek, a 25-year-old photographer originally from Singapore, has a body of work that is both fun and compelling. His latest work, “SG Idols”, is a series of group portraits - Star Wars cosplayers, pedicab drivers, schoolgirls, martial artists, skaters, ping-pong players, soldiers, bikers, boxers, etc. Computerlove calls it an exercise in “examining the forming of communities, and identities by association,” which I might rephrase as “examining communities and the forming of identities by association.”

When I first glanced over the set, I thought “community by intention” (sports, cosplay), but soon realized that the “community by necessity” (soldiers, students, workers) debunked that approach. The photos are all well composed, the subjects richly lit and purposefully arranged. The more I look at them, however, the more this last point - their arrangement - struck me as unfortunate, an aesthetic liberty that diminishes the potential gravity between the portraits by homogenizing some details.

• @Suchablog Christ, I thought I was up late - is this when you usually post? #
• I should be asleep. Henceforth, no computers in bed - at least until they come out with the "basic pleasure model" #

Sex position dice are plenty boring. This dodecahedral gem, however, combines humor and commentary with, uh, potentially very real use-value for the lonely post-adolescent gamer. All the elements of the conceit work perfectly together. I like to think that this is what you roll when you’ve already lost a RW saving throw for will. To all my old AD&D buddies out there: it was good times, but aren’t we glad it never came to this?

via ffffound

• @Pierre "GFY Code Red" is excellent. I think we need a Roadmap-GFY flowchart. Is on list? Yes - continue. No - GFY! #
• File under - Things I’d Rather Not Know But Cannot Now Unlearn: The Definition of Duck Butter http://tinyurl.com/t7evn #
• @Obstructionist I’ve always thought that, like "synergy", another shit-dicator is using "interface" as a synonym for "talk to" #