White House Chronicle

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Postcards from the Baltic Sea: Part I

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Cruise Shore Excursions: Theater off the Sea

By Linda Gasparello

To take or not to take shore excursions. That is the question for cruisers.

Having cruised on five continents, my answer is to take them. The guides are competent — mostly moonlighting high school teachers and college professors — and often they’re characters.

The first cruise my husband, Llewellyn King, and I took, on the Black, Aegean and Adriatic seas in the early 1990s with the now-defunct Royal Cruise Line, introduced us to shore tour theater.

In Constanta, Romania’s largest and most important port city on the Black Sea, our shore excursion guide was a droll fellow named Mikhail. We visited the city not long after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were tried by a hastily arranged military tribunal that was set up on Dec. 25, 1989, put up against a wall and shot, all within an hour. It was a city still in shock from 24-years of their mismanagement that brought food shortages in a country with dark, rich soil; torture and executions; and, most famously, state neglect of orphans and disabled children.

During our tour of the city, we stopped at a Belle Epoque hotel where, Mikhail told us, “Nazi leaders lodged comfortably in the early years of World War II.” The hotel manager made us feel welcome by setting out trays with tiny fruit tarts and small glasses of tuica (Romanian “white lighting” made from plums) on a large table in a paneled, ground-floor reception room. As we entered the room, the staff, who stood at the opposite end, watched as most of us sampled the tarts and tuica. As the last person in our group walked out of the room, I looked back and saw the staff make a dash for the table, grabbing whatever was left.

We traveled north to the Greco-Roman city of Histria. Mikhail gave us a detailed tour of the city, which was founded by Greeks in the 7th century BC and thrived for seven centuries. He interspersed his commentary about Histria, which became the richest city in Ionia (Asia Minor), with sarcastic comparisons to Romania’s “golden age under the Ceausescus.”

We returned to Constanta on a coastal road. Nearing the city, we saw thick pipes that seemed to stretch for miles along a beach. “That would be a beautiful beach, but the pipes lead to a chemical plant that Mrs. Ceausescu built. She had a doctorate in chemistry, but she did not even graduate from high school. Fancy that!”

Mikhail said Mrs. Ceausescu was nicknamed “Codoi,” referring to her mispronunciation of the chemical compound CO2 ( “C” for carbon, “O” for oxygen, and “doi” which is Romanian for “two”). He added that “codoi” was a word in Romanian, too, meaning “big tail.”

“Her big tail was her nose. She would kill anyone who took her picture in profile,” he said.

“These colors make us happy. They are good for our emotions.” Photo: Linda Gasparello.

For nine days this month, Llewellyn and I cruised the Baltic Sea on the Getaway, a Norwegian Cruise Line megaship. Anna, our guide on a day cruise along the Neva River in St. Petersburg, was a notable shore tour entertainer.

On the bus, as we drove from the cruise ship to the river boat, Anna told us that men in Russia were “as precious as diamonds. So ladies, hold onto your husbands. Do not lose them. And please send us your sons, nephews, brothers, uncles.”

Anna teaches Russian history in a St. Petersburg high school, and she wrangled us as though we were her students on a field trip. She taught us how to say “I love you” in Russian. “Ya lyublui vas. Just say, ‘yellow blue bus.’ We Russians are so emotional.”

The sunny day brought out what Anna called her “Russian emotions.” Pointing to the buildings decorated like wedding cakes along the river, many designed by the 18th-century Italian architects Bartolomeo Rastrelli and Carlo Rossi, she said, “Rastrelli, who built the Winter Palace, which you can see along the embankment, liked pale blues and greens, and Rossi liked pale yellow. These colors make us happy. They are good for our emotions.”

So, too, is vodka. Anna said, “When you have a cold, you drink vodka with lemon. When you have a headache, you drink vodka with pepper. And when you are depressed, you drink vodka.”

But the funny lady was serious about showing us St. Petersburg’s historical sights: no significant edifice on the banks of the Neva or ship moored on it (including the great, gray cruiser Aurora which fired the blank round at 9:45 p.m. on Oct. 25, 1917 that started the Bolshevik Revolution) escaped her commentary.

“Just look at the taste and temperament of Peter the Great. Here is his small, elegant Summer Palace. But across the river, on Vasilyevsky Island, is the Peter and Paul Fortress, which he designed. It was the Bastille of the tsars,” Anna said.

Across from the fortress, she pointed to the Soviet-era KGB (now FSB) headquarters. “That’s the ‘Big House,’ ” she said.

Those of us seated on the upper deck were grateful that Anna was serious about reminding us to duck when we approached one of the many low bridges across the Neva.

“Please keep seated,” she said. “But if you want to be like Catherine the Great and get rid of your husband, have him stand up.”

How emotional, how Russian.

Matroyshkas and Movies: A Souvenir Shop in St. Petersburg

You great, big, beautiful dolls. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

While I prefer to go to souvenir shops of my own volition, I’ve stopped resenting being shanghaied into them on cruise shore excursions. Sometimes, they’re sights that shouldn’t be missed, like the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul: a maze of souvenir shops.

After our Neva River day cruise, we were bussed to a cavernous souvenir store. Norwegian Cruise Line billed it as a “bathroom stop.”

It was just that, for some on our bus. But busloads of tourists, including many on ours, were just raring to hit the mirrored shelves laden with fur hats, amber jewelry, Faberge-style Easter eggs and matroyshka dolls — especially after getting emotional on complimentary cranberry vodka, served at the entrance by young women wearing traditional, red jumper dresses.

Against a wall, near one of the store’s side exit doors, stood colossal Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump matroyshka dolls. As I took a picture of them, I heard one shopper say, “Same size as their egos.”

The store occupies part of what was once a movie theater in St. Petersburg. The theater’s architecture is Stalinist big box. The huge concrete-slab marquee over the entrance advertised four movies or other events. Riveted onto cement columns near the entrance are metal sheets imprinted with scenes of bears frolicking in a forest, peasants threshing wheat, and people going about their business on a wintry day in St. Petersburg. There is one of Russian troops tending their wounded in the Crimean War – a war that stirs up sacred memories, leading to actions even unto this day.

Power Tower

More is more. That was the approach of the two greats, Peter and Catherine, and Empress Elizabeth asked their European architects to take in St. Petersburg.

Lahkta Center. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

The city’s historic center is a feast — a grand bouffe — of Baroque and Neoclassical buildings, including the Admiralty, the Winter Palace, and the Marble Palace. UNESCO designated it a World Heritage site in 1990, noting, “The unique urban landscape of the port and capital city of Saint Petersburg, rising out of the Neva estuary where it meets the Gulf of Finland, was the greatest urban creation of the 18th century.”

The more-is-more approach is operating today with the construction of the Lahkta Center, which includes a twisting glass-and-steel tower that will serve as the headquarters of the state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The project, which was proposed in 2005, has changed its name (as many times as St. Petersburg) and location, due to criticism from preservationists and residents that its 1,515-foot tower — which will be the tallest in Russia — would destroy the city’s horizontal harmony and violate a law prohibiting new buildings higher than 157 feet in the historic center.

In 2010, the project moved to a site northwest of Vasilyevsky Island, overlooking the Gulf of Finland. It is scheduled for completion in 2018.

Designed by the architectural firm RMJM London, the center’s website says “the tower bears more than a passing resemblance to a ship’s mast, while the building that lean against its base represent the hull. This theme continues through the wave-like bearing structures and the overall organic form of the building, both of which symbolize the power of the sea.”

The project already holds a Guinness World Record. Between Feb. 27 and March 1, 2015, it set a new record for largest continuous concrete pour, with 25,667 cubic yards poured over a period of 49 hours.

Some of the Lakhta Center’s remarkable innovations include:

  • It will be the first skyscraper in St. Petersburg to employ an ice formation-control system. To prevent ice accumulations and help maintain good visibility, the glass on the highest floors will be heated; and to prevent ice formation, the tower’s spire will be made of metal gauze.
  • The center’s lighting will be designed to make it bird-safe during migration in the fall and winter months, complying with the World Wide Fund for Nature and FLAP’s (Fatal Light Awareness Program) bird-friendly building program.

This project has Petrine boldness. While it could suit a man who would be a great, Putin, he has yet to weigh in on it.

 

Gallery

Neva River Sights

Street Life

Soviet Movie House / Souvenir Shop

Graffiti

Llewellyn King’s Notebook: Loving the Gulf Stream; Cruising, the Global Culture; Moving Movie Locations

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COPENHAGEN — Whenever I stray from the East Coast of the United States, I’m reminded of the debt we owe to the Gulf Stream. Malibu, Calif. may be thick with Hollywood stars, but the water is damned cold. Always. I can tell you I’ve tried swimming there often and it is, by the standards of New England’s summers, cold. Really, for all the beauty of the West Coast, you have to travel as far south as San Diego to enjoy a dip, which might remind you of the waters of Cape Cod in July.

Lest you didn’t know, that’s why the number of pleasure boats in Seattle is said to be the highest on a per capita basis in the nation. When it’s too cold to get in the water, get on it.

The Gulf Stream divides as it goes north and sends one branch to Africa and one to Europe, known as the Atlantic Drift. There’s some argument about how much the Atlantic Drift affects the climate of Europe. My empirical, unscientific observation is that it’s a big player and Europe and America would both be devastated with climate change if the Gulf Stream were to cease to flow or change course – a possibility with global warming.

It’s because of this great benevolent current, that there are palm trees on coast of Cornwall and Devon in the west of England and there are even palm trees in Ireland and Scotland. In those locations, they are small stunted things, in no way like their robust relatives in Florida. But they’re palm trees. And I’ve inspected some.

About Cruising, the New International Norm

I looked down my proboscis for years when anyone mentioned cruising. I also had harsh things to say about it.

Well, for a decade and a half, I’ve been dining on my words. I took a cruise with my wife, Linda Gasparello, that changed everything back in the early 1990s. We cruised mostly in the Black and Aegean seas — and it was actually the best cruise we’ve ever taken.

It started our cruise contagion; we’ve cruised far and wide ever since. We’ve even journeyed briefly and enjoyably from Boston to Nova Scotia, but nothing equaled that first cruise. The ship wasn’t too big and the crew — mostly Greeks on the catering side of things — were marvelous.

The thing about cruising is the shore stops and tours. That first cruise took us from Athens to Yalta, Odessa, Constantia, Istanbul, Kusadasi, Mykonos, Patras and set us down in Venice. We learned – and this is the thing about cruising — that it’s wonderful because the hotel goes with you and the shore trips are usually well worth taking. That’s the kernel of what it’s about for us; not the food (too much, but good enough), nor the shows (Las Vegas lite), but the floating accommodation and shore excursions.

In 2015, just before Christmas, we cruised around Cape Horn. Amazing. It astounds me that rounding the Horn, where so many mariners perished, can be accomplished in a luxury liner. The shore trips in Argentine and Chilean Patagonia are worth running the credit cards up to the limit to do.

Linda and I have just been at it again. Capriciously, we decided it was time to cruise the Baltic and see the jewel in its crown, St. Petersburg.

For me, it was a third visit and was Linda’s first. I knew it wouldn’t disappoint and it didn’t. If it isn’t on your bucket list, write it down right now. Then go.

If you get there by water, so much the better because the cruise companies deal with the hassles — and traveling in Russia can be a big hassle, from getting a visa to finding a hotel that doesn’t look like it’s an incubator for social diseases.

So many nationalities now cruise that it’s a new universal cultural norm, like pizza and Coca-Cola.

What’s Wrong with England and Australia for Novel Adaptations?

Paula Hawkins’s “The Girl on the Train” was a great read; an original story with an original kind of heroine: she has a drinking problem. Also, it’s set in England and depends on English train commuting habits, not American. But when it was turned into a movie, it was mysteriously set in New York and the English actress, Emily Blunt, was the heroine.

Now there’s a seven-part miniseries made by HBO and starring Sharon Stone and Reece Witherspoon of the splendid Liane Moriarty novel “Big Little Lies.” I haven’t seen it yet, but the thing is Moriarty is Australian and her novels, excellent writer that she is, are set in suburban Australia. One of the considerable joys of reading Moriarty is that you forget that the novels are Australian: The struggles of school playgrounds and other aspects of middle class suburbia are apparently universal.

The makers of the “Big Little Lies” the miniseries, which has gotten rave reviews, chose to relocate it to Monterey, Calif. Why? Maybe they thought a dash of Oz would be too hard for us to understand.

Oddly, Monterey is not typical of America’s suburbs either. Maybe, also, the series producers forgot star Nicole Kidman is an Australian. Confusing.

Llewellyn King on SiriusXM POTUS Channel

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Llewellyn King on SiriusXM, POTUS Channel 124

Listen below for the segment, where Llewellyn discusses his column, “Europeans Feel They Can’t Trust U.S. in the Time of Trump” which can be read on this website, or on HuffPost here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/europeans-feel-they-cant-trust-us-in-the-time-of_us_595f8399e4b0cf3c8e8d57e2

Press the play button below to listen.

Llewellyn King’s Notebook: Sad Story of Beaches; Movie Mystery; Marble

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Photo: A Showery Cay – Naragansett Pier by Alfred Thompson Bricher 1871

I have not yet been to the beach this year and with the arrival of hot weather, a dip is in order. But the fact is the beach is not what it used to be for me. Ever since I started making television programs on the oceans, I have stared out to waves with a different mindset — foreboding tinged with sorrow.

Like most of us I thought of the oceans as the last refuge of untrammeled nature, a place where man’s predations could not defeat nature; the last safe place for the world as it was. Then I started doing television interviews about the state of the oceans and found how wrong I was.

The first interview was with Mark Spalding of The Ocean Foundation; the second with Colin Woodard of The Portland Press Herald; the third with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is my senator; the fourth with University of Rhode Island oceanographer Sunshine Menezes; and the fifth was another detailed discussion of the state of the oceans with Whitehouse in his office on Capitol Hill.

Whitehouse is a passionate advocate for the oceans and an articulate voice for their deplorable condition, due to acidification, infestation with plastic, overfishing, and the relentless rise in temperature and sea level — up there with acidification, and likely in the future to wipe out coastal communities.

It is grim stuff: a horror story of our own making and one which is sometimes lost among other stories of environmental disaster. But this is the one which will get us all in some way.

They say Algernon Charles Swinburne, the 19th-century English poet, would not only write poetry about the ocean, but also would shout his verses into the waves. This summer as we flock to enjoy the beaches in New England and elsewhere, maybe we should shout “sorry” into the sick waves, because they are sick of a disease that can be arrested if we just have the mind to start.

A Movie Mystery: What Gets the Distributors’ Nod?

To me, part of the mystery of the movie business is as much in the distribution as in how particular movies come to be made. I say this because an exceptional film — one of the few of recent releases — has got short shrift from the distributors in Rhode Island. I cannot speak for the rest of New England or the country as a whole.

The movie is “Norman,” starring Richard Gere — and starring is the operative word because he is seldom off-screen. It has all of the ingredients which make a movie great to my mind – and for what it is worth, I once reviewed movies for newspapers. The story is briefly the tale of a somewhat sleazy New York fixer who ingratiates himself with an Israeli politician who rises to become prime minister of Israel. They become durable friends.

The movie, written and directed by Joseph Cedar, an Israeli film director, is taught, dodges sentimentality and yet has flashes of it, and nails the banal cruelty of politics, and the mischief of gatekeepers and the pain of outsidedness. The craft of filmmaking is on display here at its best. Gere is great and the rest of the cast is exceptional. I am sure it will be studied for its technical skill in years to come in film schools.

So why, I ask, was it not on general release in Rhode Island? On Saturday, it only had an 11:30 a.m. showing in one of the malls. My wife Linda and I ended up seeing it at Cable Car Cinema, the venerable but tiny art house in Providence, where it had a number of showings.

Why such limited release? The film was lavishly reviewed in the press, here and abroad. Curious business, movies – a joy when you see a great one where it was meant to be seen, in my view, in a cinema.

Washington’s Marble Lobbies: Cold, Slippery and Awful

Back to Washington last week for another speech and some visits.

Washington’s law firms set the pace for office decoration and two things dominate: marble and glass. One thing is eschewed: anywhere to sit.

Building after building, housing the myriad law firms which are lobbying shops as well, have ridiculously obstructive security with rent-a-cops running little fiefs, and acres of cold, people-rejecting marble.

When you get upstairs, everything that can be glass is glass. One lobbyist makes sure you are escorted at all times because of the number of people who have been hurt walking onto glass walls and doors.

Glass and marble: What does it all mean? What happened to wood and warmth and places to sit in lobbies? Heaven knows, human knees have not been converted to stone and glass.

The Awful Budget and the Ugly Thinking Behind It

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On the face of it, President Donald Trump’s $4.1 trillion budget for 2018 is risible. Its math doesn’t add up; it assumes an unlikely growth rate of 3 percent per year through 2027; and it avoids calculating the tax cut, which has been promised as the largest in history.

It lays siege to research from medicine to high energy physics — future invention is none of the government’s business. It takes calculated aim against environmental science. It also takes an axe to the State Department and American diplomacy, which has been vital to our national interest since the founding of the republic.

But it really warms to its perfidy when it comes to Medicaid and other programs for the poor. It says what some people have whispered for years: The poor are poor because they don’t work, and the sick have charities and emergency rooms.

It is policy based on hearsay, on the reprehensible arguments of the country club soiree and on the folk wisdom of talk radio.

At one level, the budget is an abrogation of responsibility as it says to Congress, “You make this work.” At another, it is a look into the dark hearts of some of those around the president. You have to exempt Trump, partly, because pulling together the budget is not his kind of thing: He wasn’t slaving over the numbers, debating the importance of medical research or the global need for diplomacy. That was done by his surrogates, those who hate what they call the “deep state,” but which might also be called governance.

Broad strokes are Trump’s thing and having authorized them, eager hands have molded what passes for a budget but is in fact a guide to the narrow and deeply prejudiced thinking of the men and women who work in the White House and Mick Mulvaney, the budget director and former congressman from South Carolina.

It is not so much a budget as it is a view into the hearts and minds of the most extreme wing of the conservative persuasion, circa 2017. It is a revelation of ignorance, prejudice and indifference to the humane needs of the United States.

It is the lifting of a caprice that has contained their worst instincts for a long time. Now the hard edge, the granite heart, the cold-steel shoulder to sickness, poverty, incapacity and the resources that might abate their attendant suffering is on full view.

If you don’t see it in the budget, look to the Justice Department and to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is all silvery charm on the outside and whose heartlessness can only be measured degrees below zero. For the first time in a long time, Congress was moving toward meaningful reform of the justice system with an end to mandatory and hideously long sentences. The Sessions view: Better to lock them up and throw away the key — and all the better if you put them in for-profit prisons.

Criminologists hate mandatory sentences, and most congressmen know them to be perverse and to result in punishment that is both cruel and unusual. It frustrates judges. The judges and prosecutors are denied the right to use their wisdom in the sentencing, instead substituting the wisdom of Congress and the attorney general.

The same harshness permeates the Department of Homeland Security with the vicious implementation of deportations of family members who are living good, productive lives in America. No thought is being given to any solution to the illegal immigration problem — at heart a human problem, not a national security or a criminal one. There are other ways short of deportation to recognize both the illegality of the immigrants and to give them the American life they have so desired. A renewable work permit, for example, not citizenship or the heavy knock of the state on the door — dreaded down through all of history.

This is a budget that is not only dangerous but also explicitly callous. It reveals a black heart, a locked mind and an indifference to U.S. needs in years to come. It will be amended in Congress, but its message will linger. It is an ugly message.

 

Image: President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, displays his signed Executive Order for the Establishment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, Thursday, May 11, 2017, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C.  This image is a work of an employee of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.

Signs of Faith: Portuguese Culture Thrives in West Warwick, R.I.

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I live in the Riverpoint section of West Warwick, R.I., which I call “Portugal on the Pawtuxet River.” Riverpoint has a Portuguese American Citizens Club; the Jerry’s supermarket stocks Portuguese food brands, like Gonsalves; and there is a Portuguese bakery, Matos, in nearby Arctic Village – I recommend their three-bite, egg custard tarts, pasteis de nata.

Photo: Linda Gasparello

All around the circle at Riverpoint, but especially as you go up Providence Street to Arctic Village, you’ll see modest houses, each with baroque front yard landscaping: flowering cherry trees shaped like umbrellas, espaliered shrubs and statuary – especially Virgin Mary statues, either brightly painted or stark white.

Most of the Virgin Mary statues are adorned with plantings – often with perennials, like hostas, and sometimes with plastic flowers or small American and Portuguese flags.

In the backyard of a house near the Bradford Soap Works, there is an Our Lady of Grace statue: a Virgin Mary with outstretched arms, standing on the serpent Satan. The blue paint has largely peeled off her robe, but the snake hasn’t lost any of its black paint. It looks lifelike — and like it is headed into the poison ivy that is creeping closer to the statue.

Just off Riverpoint circle, there is a house where another Our Lady of Grace statue stands among well-tended hostas in a tiny plot along the driveway. I call her “Our Lady of the Hostas.”

I have a chit-chat friendship with the Portuguese American woman who lives there. Recently, when she saw me admiring the lush plants, she said, “I think Our Lady is smiling because the Pope has made saints of two Portuguese children.” She was referring to Pope Francis’s canonization of siblings Francisco and Jacinta Marto who, with their cousin Lucia Santos, reported that on March 13, 1917, the Virgin Mary made the first of six appearances to them while they grazed their sheep in Fatima, Portugal.

My favorite religious statue in Riverpoint is on East Main Street. It occupies the entire side yard of a house, where you’d expect to see a picnic table and benches or a circle of lawn chairs.

Actually, it is a tableau of brightly painted statues: a statue of Jesus is flanked by one of St. Anthony holding Baby Jesus and another of the Virgin Mary. Fourteen winged cherubs, hands clasped in prayer, stand at their feet. I can only surmise that the boys are dressed in blue, and the girls are dressed in pink.

Bygones Worth Remembering

My first encounter with the Portuguese wasn’t in Portugal. It was on a train from Paris to Dax in June 1968. I was 13 years old and I was headed to this spa town in southwestern France, whose thermal springs and mud baths have been noted for the cure of rheumatism since Roman times, when it was known as Aquae Tarbellicae. There I was to meet Monsieur and Mme. Albert Barrieu with whose family I would spend a few life-expanding summers.

The afternoon before I was to take the train to Dax, Madame Berri, who owned the suburban Paris agency that paired me with the Barrieus, warned me to get to the Gare d’Austerlitz early. “The trains to the southwest are crowded on Saturdays,” she said, handing me my ticket. It was going to be a long trip, over six hours, and I couldn’t wait to take it.

I was staying at a youth hostel at 11 rue du Fauconnier in the Marais – and 49 years later, the Hotel Fauconnier is one of three youth hostels in Paris. After a week in Paris, I was a Metro master; I knew it was about a 10-minute ride from the St. Paul station to the Gare d’Austerlitz. Even so, I packed my suitcase, showered and slept in my dress that Friday night. As I remember, I wanted to have more time to eat the breakfast the hostel laid out for the always-hungry youth: croissants, bread rolls, butter, apricot jam, and small bowls of coffee with hot milk.

Eating that breakfast turned out to be one of the smarter things I did that day.

I got to the station with a lot of time to spare. When my train was announced, I noticed that people where running down the platform and pushing into the cars, and shouting to each other in a language I couldn’t identify. I had a second-class ticket, and all those people seemed to be headed to second-class cars.

I couldn’t run fast because I was wearing wooden-soled clogs. By the time I climbed into one, all the seats in the compartments were taken – and all were taken in the other second-class cars.

As the train pulled out of the station, I placed my hard-sided, American Tourister suitcase in the aisle of one of the cars, and looked out the window. An unsympathetic conductor took my ticket and told me that I might have to stand a long time because “the train is filled with Portuguese, who are going back home for their national holiday.”

Clogs were the right shoes for standing for hours. I was alternately standing and looking out the window, or sitting on my suitcase looking at the Portuguese family across the aisle in a compartment.

About two hours into the trip, the father pulled down a couple of suitcases from the overhead racks. Out came the bread, the sausage, the cheese, the fruit and the wine.

A girl about my age asked her mother something. Then, through the open compartment door, she asked me in French if I wanted some of their lunch. I thanked her and helped myself to some bread and cheese. It was the first time I had eaten a papa seco – a soft, baby bottom-shaped roll. Poof went my memory of the hostel’s petits pains.

The train arrived in Dax in the late afternoon. I got off and waited for M. and Mme. Barrieu on the platform, as Mme. Berri had told me to do. A blonde woman accompanied by a teenaged girl looked at me for a while. They spoke with each other, shook their heads and walked away. No one was left on the platform but me, so I took a seat – and I was happy to do so.

After a couple of hours, the station manager approached me. “Are you still waiting for someone?” he asked.

I told him that I was supposed to be picked up by Monsieur and Mme. Albert Barrieu who live in Pouillon. “It is a village not far from here. Do you have a telephone number?”

Just as I was reaching into my dress pocket to get it, I saw the blonde woman with the teenager walking toward us.

“Are you Linda?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Mme. Barrieu’s blue eyes filled with tears of relief. “We are so sorry. We saw you, but we thought you were Dutch,” she said.

They were confused by the tag on my American Tourister suitcase, which looked like the flag of the Netherlands, and by my clogs.

 

All photos by Linda Gasparello

Linda Gasparello is the co-host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. Her e-mail is lgasparello@kingpublishing.com.

Llewellyn King’s Notebook: Stars Realign in Boston Radio

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Joe Mathieu, who for the past six years has been a drive-time news anchor, from 5 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., on WBZ NewsRadio 1030 is moving to WGBH’s “Morning Edition” as the anchor, replacing Bob Seay. Seay will concentrate, according to the NPR station, on enterprise reporting. Probably on sleeping in as well. Drive-time hours are brutal.

On a personal note, I’m delighted. I met Joe when he was putting together the very successful POTUS ’08 channel on SiriusXM Radio. While the channel was supposed to run just for the length of the 2008 presidential campaign, it was so popular that it was made permanent.

Originally, the channel took its title from POTUS, an abbreviation for President of the United States (first used in the late 1800s in telegraphic communications). It dropped the year in its title and defined POTUS as “Politics of the United States.”

I’m glad not only to be a regular commentator on POTUS, Channel 124, but also that it airs the audio from my PBS program, “White House Chronicle,” four times weekends.

My presence there is all due to the days when Joe was the impresario of the channel. I’m indebted to him.

But despite the national reach of his Washington commitments, Joe yearned for his native Boston. He told me he began his career in broadcasting at 14 years old. He graduated from Emerson College, renowned for its arts and communications programs.

I’m glad of the new assignment, not because WBZ is anything but an excellent public service in Boston, but because the new venue will provide more room for Joe’s extraordinary talents as a broadcaster, a political analyst and, his special mastery, as an interviewer.

On the downside, Joe won’t get any more sleep: his WGBH anchor slot, beginning in August, starts at 5 a.m. As a longtime newspaperman and broadcaster, I can tell you about those hours: They’re tough.

Applause for a Table and Its Donors – the Show, too

The Arctic Playhouse, the little not-for-profit theater, located on the main street of Arctic Village in West Warwick, R.I., has a table for you.

Well, it is raffling a magnificent dining-room table, matching upholstered chairs, a sideboard and a hutch. Cardi’s, the furniture chain, donated the table to the theater. It is the centerpiece of the set for the theater’s current, lively production of A.R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room.”

The dining-room set is worth $3,500, and the raffle winner will be chosen after the play’s run. One of the table’s leaves will be signed by the cast and the three Cardi brothers. Instant provenance for a serious set of dining-room furniture.

Raffle tickets are just $10 for one ticket, or $25 for three. Tickets can be bought online or in person at the theater until June 3.

Photo: The cast of A.R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room, currently playing at The Arctic Playhouse, credit Linda Gasparello

Amtrak Is an Exemplar of Infrastructure Woes

Amtrak, so important to New England and the operator of the only bit of rail service between Boston and Washington, D.C., which looks something like a train service should, is having problems at New York’s Penn Station. It is not the awful, crowded concourse at the station, but the awful, crowded rails which passengers don’t see.

Commuter trains have derailed and fixes are going to have to be made with equivalent disruptions this summer. There is even a scheme to reroute the New England trains through Grand Central for the duration.

When will we get the message that infrastructure starved of funding and preventative maintenance fails? Looks like the Trump budget will make matters worse. Broken infrastructure is a tax in its own way. Very taxing.

 

Lead photo: Joe Mathieu, credit CBS

Cities, I Know Them by Their Bread

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By Linda Gasparello

I’ve always associated cities with bread. Boston, south of which I was raised, I associate with oatmeal bread. Washington, D.C., where I spent most of my life, I associate with white bread — the Wonder kind.

New York, where I lived for a few years, I associate with seeded rye bread. If you said “New York” to me, I’d think of the malty, sour taste of the rye flour, the slight licorice flavor of the caraway seeds and the fight my teeth would have with the crust. Seeded rye bread is assertive, like New York.

My husband, Llewellyn King, and I have lived in Rhode Island for nearly five years. But I don’t yet associate a bread with Providence. This is curious because the city abounds with artisan and ethnic bread bakeries, especially Italian and Portuguese.

What’s really curious is that restaurants in Providence and around the state don’t routinely bring you bread at some point between sitting down and getting your food.

Restaurants serve bread for a number of reasons. Here are two: Traditionally, serving bread has been a way to welcome guests; and practically, a basket of bread or a small loaf keeps guests happy before the food arrives.

When the poet Omar Khayyam said ecstatically, “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread – and thou,” he was sitting beneath a bough with his beloved, reading a book of verses. Just think, if the 11th-century lovers were alive today, they’d be sitting in a Persian restaurant (alas, there isn’t one in Providence), reading their menus and eating nan-e barbari, a flatbread with pillowy ridges.

I could associate Providence with a flatbread that is ubiquitous in the city: pizza. Providence is a welcoming city. It’s not a stretch to associate pizza with the share-a-slice-with-us welcome that my husband and I have gotten from the city.

It’s Comedy and a Concert Tonight!

Last October, I was introduced to the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra by a friend who sings with the Providence Singers. Under the superb direction of guest conductor Bramwell Tovey, the orchestra and singers performed Mozart’s “Requiem Mass in D Minor” on Oct. 15.

Before stepping onto the podium, Tovey told the bizarre story of how Mozart got a commission from a court intermediary to write a piece commemorating the death of Count Franz von Walsegg’s young wife, Anna, which the pretentious count could pass off as his own. The musical heavyweight died, at 35, while writing the requiem.

Tovey’s lecture came as a surprise to me. Conductors, in my symphonic concert-going experience, never spoke and carried a small stick. My friend told me that the orchestra’s musical director, Larry Rachleff, loved to talk to the audience: It was his schtick.

For 21 seasons, until his retirement from the orchestra on May 6, Rachleff often gave short lectures before he lifted his baton. He is a noted music educator, and currently holds the Walter Chris Hubert Chair at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music in Houston, where he lives with his wife, mezzo soprano Susan Lorette Dunn, and their young son, Sam.

Rachleff is also a skilled standup comedian, as I found out during his farewell concert on May 6.

The performance of the second piece he chose, Joseph Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne,” was delayed to deal with an offstage problem with the soloist’s – his wife Susan – gown. For about 15 minutes, Rachleff summoned all his comedic talents: He told a story about how his family had encountered a naked woman in a lobby of a hotel in Geneva. When someone walked onstage with his score, he joked, “Usually the librarian hands me the score, but tonight she must be otherwise engaged.”

His adoring audience laughed, and they cried when he took his final bow.

Cry Me a River

“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time,” said Leonardo da Vinci.

For nearly a week, if you dipped your hand into the Pawtuxet River at Riverpoint in West Warwick, R.I., you’d touch mounds of filthy foam and pieces of white styrofoam blocks.

From morning till night, I watched this dreck float down the river, collect on the banks and cascade over the dam. I watched pairs of mallard ducks and flocks of geese wading in the smelly suds trapped in the shrubs on both banks. I watched cardinals and other birds, that usually stop for a bite at my neighbor’s porch feeder, pick at the styrofoam icebergs and carry off pieces, presumably to their nests in the wooded banks.

I took pictures and reported this to Anna Cole, a technical staff assistant at the state’s Department of Environmental Management. She dispatched Robert Fritsche, an environmental scientist the department’s Bureau of Environmental Protection, Office of Compliance and Inspection, with impressive speed.

My husband has praised Rhode Island’s beauty in columns in The Providence Journal, on our television program, “White House Chronicle,” and on Rhode Island Public Radio. Now I praise the government for taking the preservation of that beauty seriously.

Above: Pawtuxet River at Riverpoint in West Warwick, R.I., Photos by Linda Gasparello.

Signs of the Times, Modern and Ancient

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I take the train a lot from Providence, R.I. to Washington, D.C. For a long time, it passes through what people would call the most beautiful scenery of the trip: the Connecticut shoreline. And for a short time, it passes through what they would call the most blighted scenery of the trip: the walls along the railroad tracks between North Philadelphia and 30th Street Station.

Katharina Grosse, psycholustro.

But I look forward to the beauty in the blight along that stretch of the trip. I’ve seen some of the most stunning artwork on those walls and buildings along the tracks, one commissioned, like contemporary German artist Katharina Grosse’s “psychylustro” — a warehouse with windows that look as though they were blown out in a blaze of orange and white – but most done by anonymous artists. Whether their frenetic art is benign or malign, I don’t care. It transforms my trip.

I work the graffiti on the walls the way people do the difficult crosswords in London’s Sunday Times. There is meaning, sometimes clear, in the words on the walls. On the walls, I read, “ZeroSmyle,” and I sympathize with the graffitist. Skrew, a loud graffitist, spray-painted a message — maybe for China — on a wall, “Drama, Tibet.”

I think about what master graffitist Banksy said in “Wall and Piece” about these artists, “Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.”

Photo: Linda Gasparello.

One person’s defacement is another’s decoration. I’ve enjoyed grafitti on walls or buildings all over the world. Vienna has some of the most magnificent graffiti. I like to take the hydrofoil between Vienna and Bratislava, Slovakia, so that I can see the museum of temporary art along the Danube walls.

While living and traveling in the Middle East, I’ve seen graffiti galore — and one of the best writs on a trip to the Greco-Roman city of Ephesus in Turkey. Carved on a pillar near the city’s brothel – the “Love House,” as it was called by the ancients – a guide said there is some advice to lovers and other strangers: “One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.” Mercury was the ancient treatment for syphilis.

The ancients were always kissing and telling on prostitutes. “Second only to the master of us all, Clodia has become the most discussed person in Rome. Versus of unbounded obscenity are scribbled about her over the walls and pavements of all the baths and urinals in Rome,” Thornton Wilder wrote in his epistolary novel “The Ides of March.”

Now, back to the future. Donald Trump’s presidency has revived the art of the protest sign and placard, not seen since the nation’s hippie days. Gitta Hasing, who I’ve known since she was a child, participated in January’s Women’s March and last week’s March for Science in Washington. She and her husband are biological scientists.

Neither wind nor rain could keep Gitta, her toddler son and her parents from marching on the Mall. She is a talented photographer and took pictures of protesters and their signs in both marches in the same exacting way she photographed parts of North and Central Florida trees for a book, published by the University of Florida.

If Paris is The City of Light, Washington is The City of Sayings. They are carved on government building walls, museum and monument walls, and plazas. The one that always makes me cry is part of the last verse of Walt Whitman’s Civil War-era poem “The Wound-Dresser,” carved in the granite around the Dupont South Metro entrance:

Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad

Photo: Linda Gasparello.

Two days before the March for Science, as I was sitting on a wall at the Watergate, waiting for Gita’s mother to arrive for a performance of Ballet Across America at the Kennedy Center. I looked up at two signs hanging from a street light near the Embassy of Saudi Arabia. The blue sign read “The Kennedy Center, JFKC: A Centennial Celebration of John F. Kennedy” with his picture – his 100th birthday would have been May 29, 2017. The orange one read, “Courage, Freedom, Justice, Service, Gratitude.”

Trump can’t take those words away from me. They’re carved in my memory and the memories of millions of Americans. And a sign with bold hand lettering, posted on a pillar at Cafe La France in the Providence Amtrak Station, proves that so well:

WE WELCOME

ALL Races

ALL Religions

ALL Countries of Origin

ALL Sexual Orientations

ALL Genders

We Stand With You

You Are Safe Here

 

 

March for Science on the Mall — Photos by Gitta Hasing

The Coptic Crisis: A Story of Benign Neglect by Anwar el-Sadat

Church of St. Barbara, Cairo

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By Linda Gasparello

Forty years ago, I attended Easter Sunday mass at the Church of St. Barbara in Old Cairo, also known as Coptic Cairo, on the east bank of the Nile. I was a graduate student at the American University in Cairo, and this was my first Coptic mass. At it, regrettably, I had a front-row seat to the routine disrespect Coptic Christians suffered in Egypt under President Anwar el-Sadat.

The Church of St. Barbara is a fine example of Coptic architecture with its white plaster walls, marble double-colonnaded nave and timbered roof, carved cedar pews, and rare, gleaming icons. It is one of the most popular in the district, and it quickly filled to capacity.

No sooner had the mass begun, when I heard the sound of firecrackers outside the church. The noise pierced the solemnity of the mass, but the congregation took no notice and prayed on.

During the communion, a man in a suit, accompanied by two other men, marched down the center aisle of the church. The man in the suit was a government official, I was later told. In a symbolic gesture meant to mollify the Copts, who comprised about 10 percent of Egypt’s population, government officials made appearances at churches during Christmas and Easter.

The three men pushed into a pew, sat down and started chatting with each other. The congregation brushed away this disruption of the holiest part of the mass as easily as street flies. A woman sitting behind me muttered, “Ma’alesh.” In Egyptian dialect, she said, “It doesn’t matter.”

The Copts were used to disrespect and, far worse, persecution, which they had suffered since St. Mark founded the Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria around 43 A.D. In fact, the Church of St. Barbara stands on the site of a church dedicated to St. Cyrus and St. John in 684 A.D. that was destroyed during an Arab assault. The story goes that when some Christians from Damanhur, a city about 100 miles northwest of Cairo, including Cyrus and John, confessed to their faith, they were shot with arrows, burned in a furnace, tied to a horse’s tail, dragged through the streets and survived – to be beheaded. One of the church’s chapels contains the remains of St. Cyrus and St. John; another contains relics of St. Barbara, a beauty from the Greek city of Nicomedia, whose pagan father had her tortured before he beheaded her in 306 A.D.

The Copts were being excluded from the “new society” plan that Sadat had highlighted on his trip to Washington, D.C., just a week before Easter. The Egyptian president held his first meeting with President Jimmy Carter on April 3. In his toast at a state dinner on April 4, Sadat said, “Mr. President and dear friends, as you know we are embarking on an ambitious program to rebuild our society along lines which ensure more justice and equal opportunity. We are revitalizing our system with a view to enable it to cope with the immense problems we encounter, old and new. We are determined to build this new society on ideals of faith in human dignity, which we inherited from the ancient Egyptian civilization. This heritage has kept us united together and optimistic in the face of the most difficult of challenges.”

Actually, Sadat’s state was falling apart. It ceded to the religious institutions the provision of education, financial assistance and health services to the public. Sadat, who was a devout Muslim, allowed Islamist groups to flourish in society and on campuses, countering the leftist and Nasserist domination of them. Religion – an emboldened Islamism — was replacing the “Egypt for the Egyptians” nationalism of Nasser as the country’s foundation. There was a rising level of disregard for the Copts, who became increasingly fearful for their future. In 1977, there were clashes between Muslims and Copts in Upper Egypt.

I should have left the Church of St. Barbara with a sense of joy — the mass was beautiful. Instead, I left with one of foreboding: I thought the rise of the Islamists and their disrespect of Copts, condoned by the government, would lead to mass deaths.

And so it did – to Sadat’s death and to hundreds of deaths of Muslims and Copts, including at least 45 in two church bombings by ISIS on Palm Sunday.

 

Photo: August 11, 2012 Church of St. Barbara, Cairo, Nadia Ismail. Used under the Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License