Lovely & Nice

Towards the back end of the 19th century, as the quaint small fishing harbours and coastal villages of southern France (Provence and Côte d'Azur) started morphing into the famed vacational hotspot now known as the French Riviera, Nice already was at its cutting edge: it had metamorphosed into a pretty butterfly, opening up to the pleasures of the sea and spreading its wings towards the future, embracing the Belle Epoque follies and later Années Folles (Roaring Twenties)... Its seaside mystique and splendour stretched beyond WWII, yet with less of its earlier upmarket gusto and panache, but this is a story for another time.

La Réserve, c.1900: a fantasmagorical - surrealist - folly that could have been dreamt up by Magritte!

Nice by name was Nice by nature back then: an almost pristine natural canvas of dramatic proportions, lending its coves and curves to architectural wonder, integrating the natural environment - its masterpiece - with style and elegance. The reworked landscape became imbued with a tangible frond of the exotic: imported Phoenix canariensis palm trees and other floral exotica that would lend themselves beautifully to the Orientalist trend of the times.  

Saint-Nicolas Cathedral, c.1935: testifies of the importance of the Russian community in Nice

La Promenade des Anglais would come to epitomise the renowned coastal seafront with dreams of odysseys to faraway exotic locales. A French Ipanema, a wide, tree-lined, five-mile sweep of a boulevard which was (and still is to this day) a destination point for leisure pursuits, parades and ceremonies, dotted with elegant Winter homes that later doubled as Summer villas, set in landscaped grounds and a seaview to boot.

Excelsior Régina Palace, 1912: fit for Queen Victoria

The properties unashamedly belonged to British and Russian aristocracy (and later the nouveau riche) who - it seemed - altogether led the way in terms of the resort culture before the French had even conceptualised it, at least outside their colonies. Progressively the Winter resort turned into a seaside resort with the construction of residential apartments, and leisure establishments such as luxury hotels (palaces) and casinos celebrating luxe, leisure, insouciance and joie de vivre. 

Nice, Jetée-Promenade, c.1900: an exotica showcase to itself!

In terms of turn-of-the-century architecture, we find a marked influence towards neo-classicism, with oodles of orientalism and a hint of Victoriana: Le Negresco Hotel is a perfect example. Or how about the (now defunct) Orientalist-inspired casino of the Jetée-Promenade? The concept was influenced by the Brighton Palace Pier, while Crystal Palace was the initial inspiration to the project instigator, marquis d'Espouy de Saint-Paul. The casino was designed by British architect James Brunlers. There is no denying that Brits shaped the French Riviera.

Nice, Jetée-Promenade, 1897: the Orient has landed!

La Promenade would be further celebrated with the advent of the automobile era as a G-spot of sorts. Any show-off driver and social climber worth their salt would make a point of showing up and down the Promenade. Success, it was thought, would rub off if only you showed up on the Promenade, unashamedly pretending to be someone you're not for a part of the action while secretly standing in awe of it all.

Nice unfolds from the Mont Boron, 1891

Only a small number of the original villas are still standing on the Promenade today. Some look sorry for themselves, locked in limbo, in need of refurbishment. Land value comes at a premium on the Promenade and it is likely that some of the older properties are locked down in hostile takeovers, expired leases, inheritance issues, tax conundrum or other legal and financial predicaments, ultimately pending a demolition order to make way for yet another high-rise. In the world of real estate emotion hardly has a say, even less so when the matter at stake is located in a sought-after, world-renowned tourist area.

Nice Opera, 1885: all about flamboyance!

Sorry to rub it in but as it stands today the Promenade has lost its lustre. Now it is easy for nostalgia to cloud one's judgement and I recognise that I sometimes allow it to take over my objectivity, yet I approached this particular subject with an open mind and visited the Promenade on at least three separate occasions that I can recall over the last seven years and everytime the lack (loss) of architectural cohesiveness hit me.

Promenade des Anglais and Palais de la Méditerranée, c.1930: cheek to cheek

Clearly building clearance took its toll. Relentless since after WWII, it has left battle scars in the form of an incongruous mish-mash of styles, some of questionable appeal. Cue the gutted Palais de la Méditerranée, whose Art Déco façade was salvaged at the eleventh hour... in order to be incorporated to the Hyatt behemoth. Elsewhere the Promenade is compromised by styleless cheap-looking condos and other bland hotel chains like Le Méridien (which replaced the stylish Hotel Ruhl). These modern structures may unashamedly steal the seaview; they however steal neither the looks nor the spirit of a time where elegance and refinement were the byword.

Avenue de Verdun, c.1920: just off the Promenade

It is understood that Nice City Council wishes for the Promenade to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site contender, and therefore is currently sprucing up its image. Who are they kidding? In this vanity exercise no amount of landscaping or carpark redesign will compensate for the negative architectural impact caused by waves of property clearances that made way for a non-descript, non-cohesive Promenade.

Nice from the Jetée-Promenade, c.1900: a view at your beck and call

The Nice seafront is certainly a tale for the unashamed: bold and beautiful yesterday, bland and brash today. What remains of its bygone golden age, if not found in pockets in-situ, will be appreciated pictorially in the comfort of your home. Prolific and talented French photographer Jean Gilletta (1866-1933) made sure of that by taking thousands of pictures that wrote all to themselves an anthology to Nice, Marseille, the Riviera as a whole, the southern Alps and further afield! He followed the muse and she never left him! His photography froze people, places and time for posterity, immortalised a depiction of Nice that is both haunting and promising, an epoch where all seemed possible...

Motorcar, c.1925: sweet and fancy!

Source: All photography by Jean Gilletta. Take a peek at his impressive collection... and sweet dreams to you! Hey, happy shopper: all the (repro) prints featured are for sale by the way!

'Bateaux dans le Port de Nice', by Tony Minartz (1870-1944)

Further Reading:

• [English edition] La Promenade des Anglais, by Paul Tristan Roux, published by Editions Gilletta (July 2016), 64 pages
• [in French] La Promenade des Anglais, by Nice City Council
• [in French] Le Casino de la Jeté-Promenade, by Jean-Paul Potron, published by Editions Gilletta (October 2014), 176 pages.

I See You Reaping What You Sow

The time machine has whimsical ways to whizz you down tracks unchartered. How about take you down to rural Cambridgeshire, England, in the height of Summer 1938 just in time for the harvest? Put your straw hat on and follow me!

Farm Crops in Britain, illustrated by S.R. Badmin (1955)

In my personal quest for cultural heritage, national identity and the kinder ways to nature, I came across a short documentary (cf. end of post) currently listed on the homepage of Common Ground, a British charity established 33 years ago, and whose founders 'seek imaginative ways to engage people with their local environment.' An interesting mission statement which I am trying to apply here in my own modest way and out there, in the real world. Common Ground's England in Particular on-going campaign describes itself as 'a counterblast against loss and uniformity, and a celebration of just some of the distinctive details that cumulatively make England.' How charming, I'm in!

I was kindly referred to Common Ground by Philip Wilkinson, after I left a comment a couple of weeks ago on his award-winning architectural blog, English Buildings. In his informative blog, Mr. Wilkinson - an advocate of heritage preservation - partakes of anecdotes and photographic evidence of architectural gems from his locale that stand tall and proud as exquisite pieces of British quintessence.

ibid.

Buildings are inanimate objects, yet would it feel out of place to claim that they grace our lives with their presence? Their presence because they exude grace and charm and sobriety - or eccentricity - and other facets of interest that confer the weight, the presence, the personalisation that gets them noticed. They hold memories and figuratively have a soul. This presence you get from those older structures you simply won't get from the new. Such buildings are still part of our landscapes, whether thanks to a heritage preservation act, or the loving care of their owners, or out of sheer lucky fluke! Whatever the circumstance, they each challenge the uniformisation agenda that globalisation is promulgating under its worldwide takeover of our geographical, architectural and cultural landscapes.

The founders of Common Ground refer to national and local particularisms as local distinctiveness, which embraces both material/ physical heritage (architecture, design, infrastructures, materials) and intangible cultural heritage (processes, craftsmanship, techniques, way of life, celebrations, folklore, customs, oral traditions, dialects).

Here in Corsica, I witness first hand how the local distinctiveness in terms of architecture, crafts and design is fragile and endangered to the point of no return. Coveted, despised, uncared for or downright neglected, it falls foul of good intention. It ends up plundered, reinterpreted or altogether destroyed. 

For a ravishing recording of a way of life (on the wane), I invite you to view the English Harvest documentary (brought to us by BFI). It showcases a delightful visual treat of a portrayal of idyllic country life set in bucolic rural Cambridgeshire, and features harvesting and cultivation methods past. A bygone era that was laborious, ordained, organised, well-dressed and prim and proper. A time of rural thrift and hardship nonetheless, with WWII looming on the horizon to crash it all down. Yet this was a time when man and nature were still close, standing in communion and in unison.

Today our farmers have all the chemical warfare under the sun at their disposal, the machinery and the technology, not to mention the long stretches of uniform land for ease of manoeuvring. And yet their lives still teeter on the edge of poverty, crushed by the long working hours to scrap a living, the relentless bank loans that keep them artificially afloat in the moment and the burdensome bureaucracy of rules and regulations, notwithstanding from our non-elected EU Babel Tower over in Brussels.

ibid.

Add to this a malaise that is running deep, exacerbated by unrelenting mass consumerism that operates on low production cost demands and high corporate profits for the multinationals, and life as a farmer slides down an ever-shrinking - almost elusive - bottom line.

The modern farmer's life is short of servitude. The irony of it all is that his family land feeds the world while leaving him and his kids in the lurch, on the thrift side of a good hearty meal, and worked out to an early grave.  The farmer will be crying in his barn - out of sight out of mind - like his cattle taken to slaughter after they gave it all for no or little recognition.

The land still beats to the tune of his elders' heart, but the song is adrift with the mortal whiff of weedkiller and fertilisers, his mortal coil to be. Under this current relentless paradigm, the land is dying and is killing the farmer, when all he wanted was to live off the land he loves.

Europe's Bogus Green Economy Leaves a Trail of Destruction

If you believe that doing the right thing for the environment is to follow governmental advice and feed wood pellets to your pellet stove/ wood-burning stove, you are buying yet another corporate lie they sold you! Screech to a halt right here and ditch the pellets while I spill the beans...

Forest-based biomass is no panacea. Rather it is an ecological disaster disguised as 'sustainable' replacement to fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas) and nuclear energy by our governing puppets. Let me be clear about this: by buying wood pellets, Europeans are contributing to the catastrophic deforestation of Europe, Canada, Brazil and southeastern America, and the utter destruction of (mostly) untouched primeval natural habitats. Besides biofuels are also responsible for Indonesia's vast deforestation, in which case the lowland tropical forests are being eradicated to make way for palm oil monocultures (for bioethanol).

'Struggle Between Heaven and Earth', Mount Rarau, Romania, by Robert U., via National Geographic

Back to the West, not only are mature trees chainsawed en masse in order to produce virgin lumber pellets, but every wildlife component of the woodland is affected too: the undergrowth, flora and fauna, not to mention soil erosion, aquifer and marsh disruptions. Road infrastructures, lumber mills and processing plants effect the landscape further, totally transforming it beyond recognition. And from there onwards is an open-door policy for further looting of natural resources under all its guises and the transformation of natural woodlands into man-made wastelands and monocultures.

"... the benefits of biomass burning for carbon emissions may be bogus, while its consequences for forest ecology are becoming all too evident. The threat to the continent's forests is big and immediate." - Fred Pearce, Up in Flames

To put it simply, woody biomass is Europe's own legalised EU-funded Borneo jungle disaster right on our doorstep - or a few hundreds miles away, depending on where we live. The demand for biomass was engineered by Big Corporate in collusion with governments under the thinly-veiled green revolution nonsense purported by Agenda 21, Al Gore and consorts, in a way that has nothing to do with ecology. It accelerates further the destruction of our planet via lucrative bogus schemes. This is nothing but a big bucks ecological disaster!

Saruman's oeuvre? Enviva facility in Ahoskie, North Carolina (US), supplies Drax power plant (UK)

Prime ancient trees are being felled in places like France's Cévennes, Slovakia's Poloniny National Park, and the Carpathian old-growth forests of Romania all the way to Poland. Likewise across the Atlantic, North Carolina wetland and hardwood forests are reduced to those moulded, compacted sawdust pellets that are then shipped all the way to Europe to produce energy. According to Fred Pearce who conducted research on the wastefulness of biomass, 'Almost half of wood harvested in the EU is now used for energy, while 60 per cent of the renewable energy is generated by biomass burning for electricity and heating. It supplies about five per cent of EU energy needs.' The figures add up to an ecological disaster!

"... this sector [Southeastern US] has been driving the destructuion of wetland forests and conversion of hardwood forests into pine plantations in an area that has already lost most of its unique wetland hardwood forests." - EU Bioenergy

The logged trees are trucked to the plants to be processed: dewatered and pulverised to sawdust - yes to sawdust - then compacted to a paste - yes to a paste - and spewed out into pellets. The process is wasteful, CO2-intensive, and therefore an aggravating factor to climate change. Thus how governments justify biomass as sustainable is beyond me. Wood as renewable energy is another idiosyncrasy because clear-cut old-growth (i.e. the chopping down of secular trees) contradicts the very notion of renewability, itself skewered under a short-term fast-turnaround natural-resource-intensive model that the industry operates under.

Photography by David Marcu (Romania), via Unsplash

This makes UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change and France's Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy (to name just two) farcical by name and by nature since they are indeed, like other fellow EU member states - and in compliance with EU's bonkers legislation on renewable energy - to be held accountable (alongside the EU technocrats) for the destruction of European and Pan-American forests.

"Using forests to produce energy is like pouring gasoline to put out a fire." - Larry Edwards, Greenpeace

Meanwhile resilient yet vulnerable protected ecosystems that have survived to this day are already or soon-to-be getting loggers' attention, and this is bad news. The 8,000-year-old Białowieża Forest stretching down the border between Poland and Belarus is Europe's very last primeval European forest, and home to the European bison and a plethora of remarkable pedunculate oaks - some of which have even been individually named as if they were pets. Yet despite its UNESCO World Heritage protection, the forest is under threat:-

"The property protects a diverse and rich wildlife of which 59 mammal species, over 250 bird, 13 amphibian, 7 reptile and over 12,000 invertebrate species. The iconic symbol of the property is the European Bison: approximately 900 individuals in the whole property which make almost 25% of the total world’s population and over 30% of free-living animals. " - UNESCO 

Don't fall prey to governmental garb, they're the ones promoting the destruction of our woodlands! Do yourself and the Earth a favour: ditch woody biomass and stay away from the catchment area of power plants fuelled by such! Spread the word around and share this article.


Further Resources:

• The Uncontacted vs. The Disconnected by La Baguette Magique relates the losing battle of the Guarani Tribe against Big Corporate in Brazil
• Fuelling a BioMess: Why Burning Trees for Energy Will Harm People, the Climate and Forests , a comprehensive 40-page report by Greenpeace
• Up in Flames - How Biomass Burning Wrecks Europe's Forests, a 16-page case study report by author and journalist Fred Pearce
• Green Invasion by Fred Pearce, via EU Bioenergy
• [Case Study] Slovakia - Up in Flames ibid.
• [Case Study] Gardanne, France - How Biomass Burning Wrecks Europe's Forests, ibid.
• [Case Study] Romania - Up in Flames, ibid.
• [Case Study] DRAX, UK - Up in Flames, ibid.
• Bioenergy and Social Injustice in Southeastern US by Linde Zuidema, ibid.
• Uncovering the Truth: Investigating the Destruction of Precious Wetland Forests by Dogwood Alliance 
• American Companies are Shipping Millions of Trees to Europe, and It's a Renewable Energy Nightmare by ThinkProgress
• Menaces sur la Forêt Française : Quand l'Industrie Biomasse Débarque en France et en Europe, a French documentary (teaser) by Benoît Grimont, via Réseau pour les Alternatives Forestières.

Of the Sack of Assyria and its Insult on Humanity

Since Saddam Hussein's demise, Assyria and Mesopotamia, the very cradle of civilisation (better known nowadays as Irak), have been nothing but crippled by war and death, pillaged away, looted, blown apart, crushed to cinders, and their populations, including the Christian minority, tortured and decimated. The latest instalment in Irak's ongoing tragedy is the ransacking of the Mosul Central Library and the Mosul Museum by the crazed-up ISIS iconoclast cohorts.

For classic Art appreciators like myself, the realisation of this pillage is unbearable! Historians, archaeologists, antiquities department directors, librarians, academics, intellectuals and UNESCO are up in arms too!

#MosulMuseum: Our Director-General requests @UN Security Council meeting to protect heritage http://t.co/9nqedZOlVl pic.twitter.com/QAQiCPg77F
— UNESCO (@UNESCO) February 27, 2015

The Assyrian and other pre-Muslim artefacts and statues got smashed up on cue for the cameras, and 8 to 10,000 rare books and manuscripts were subjected to auto-da-fé. In other words, this wave of destruction was an orchestrated cultural ethnic cleansing with a brutal message of irreverence and intent eradication of civilisation, past, present and future. The defacing and beheading of statues is an echo to the beheading of hostages by ISIS. The LA Times (28/02/2015) adds that "the vandalism's cultural insult strikes deep. The Iraqi people, [Altaweel said,] "are taking the destruction of their cultural heritage - their identity, essentially - just as seriously as the beheadings."

According to UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova, the large-scale destruction of books by ISIS across Iraq's cultural centres - already harked as the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history - "adds to the systematic destruction of heritage and the persecution of minorities that seeks to wipe out the cultural diversity that is the soul of the Iraqi people.”

In this article, I will attempt to demonstrate why and how Art is besieged from the moment it takes form. And also how Art transcends its geographical and cultural origins to become part of humanity's spiritual, artistic and immaterial wealth. Therefore the destruction of ancient Art forms, wherever in the world, should concern us all.

Human-Headed Winged Lion (Lamassu), 883–859 B.C., Neo–Assyrian period, reign of Ashurnasirpal II,
excavated at Nimrud (ancient Kalhu), northern Mesopotamia. Via The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ancient Art promulgates spiritual elevation and educates humanity as a whole. It anchors modern civilisation to its past, roots it for a strong and resilient growth. It confers it direction and a reference point, a meaning, a sense of stability, belonging and progression. It summons respect and other values and symbolises immortality, the transcendence of the past into the present towards the future on a timeline of cultural continuity, evolution and expansion. The sack of Assyria is therefore yet another example of an assault against humanity as a collective.

Man's creation, borne out of a dream, a vision, a hope, a wishful thought, or a representation of reality, is sublimated and enchanted to heights godly of his own making. Art's portrayed sublimation of man and self as a tool, a vehicle, engenders reverence, awe, peace, admiration, adoration even. Yet creation is pitted against man's ability for destruction. Man is creation's best friend and foe. The way I picture this complex yet simple relationship is as a triangle between the Creator (the artist as an artist - or as an envoy of God to earth as luminaries tend to be perceived as), the Creation (the actual objet d'art) and the Creature (the recipient, the public).

Creation is no mere work of art. It is a currency, a pawn, a covet, a symbol, a collateral. The immortality it exudes is at the mercy of its shortcoming of imminent destitution and/ or destruction. In times of economic and political stability, Art prospers. Otherwise it is endangered, looted, smuggled, traded as booty wares, or destroyed. The LA Times (28/02) sums it up nicely: "It [Stone] is meant to express aspirations toward permanence, sometimes vainglorious and sometimes noble. Obliterating a revered stone edifice says - in no uncertain terms - that radical change has arrived."

Human-Headed Winged Bull (Shedu), bas-relief, c.713-716 B.C. Via Wikipedia. 

Let us make an aside for Irak's current situation and rewind 13 years. The Anglo-American interference in Saddam Hussein's governance opened a Pandora's box of oil-fuelled malevolence. It was a prophecy of doom realised, bringing to its knees a modern and progressive nation, and return it to the Dark Ages, with the complicity of religious fanaticism. The culture of chaos is used as a smoke-screen while the country's resources are being redistributed, because it just so happens that world domination is no piped dream, it is an intention that has been pushed through from the moment that man realised that his tribe, his settlement, his kingdom, was not sole and only.

Meanwhile, in a peculiar timely twist with the Mosul tragedy, The Iraq Museum of Baghdad reopened its doors to the public yesterday (28th February) after undergoing extensive rehabilitation under the patronage of UNESCO, following lootings in 2003. The museum brings together a collection of antiquities that testify the rich cultural heritage of this particular region of the world, in terms of Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Islamic cultures.

Our role as a collective is to safeguard our cultural legacy. Yet how can we achieve this unless we treat civilisation with reverence? The way culture is treated is a reflection of a malaise on a grander scale. Meanwhile, aside from witnessing cultural artefacts falling foul to world events, I witness in my daily endeavours fragments of culture from my immediate vicinity falling prey to greed, being wiped off the map under a slab of concrete, just ceasing to be. More often though, I witness fragments of culture chipping away, turning to rubble - not purely as a result of time's wear and tear, but as a helping hand from land developers, unscrupulous antiques dealers, opportunists - with the complicity of general apathy and the selective blind eye syndrome. This happens 'unnoticed', incrementally, insidiously, perniciously, cancerously, like a Chinese torture form... turned to an art form.

The Tigris River, seen from Mosul (1932). AP Photo/ American Colony Photo Dept. via Library of Congress.

Our dumbed-down society models dis-educate our white- and blue-collars on classic art forms, while rampant short-attention deficit disorder has become an excuse, yet suited to our lifestyle on the go. Meanwhile religious extremism goes rampant on the lost and the meek, empowering them with guns as their mode of expression. Intellect is shunned by the media and derided as elitist by politicians. Our consumerist model emphasises fast fashion, fast food, cheap wares, Mickey Mouse degrees and jobs, and worldwide uniformisation of style and taste under the umbrella of a handful of global FMCGs. All of those combined factors are challenging the appreciation and survival of Ancient and Classic Art at large. It is therefore the duty for individuals like myself to warn against such dumbing-down.

Resources:

• As Christians are Massacred in Irak, Laid-back Obama Maintains his Shameful Silence by The Spectator
• ISIL Torches Iraqi History in Mosul by Al Jazeera
• UNESCO Deplores 'Cultural Cleansing' of Irak as Armed Extremists Ransack Mosul Libraries by UN News Centre
• UNESCO Alarmed by News of Mass Destruction of Books in Mosul by UNESCO Office for Irak 
• Director-General Requests UN Security Council Meeting on Destruction of Heritage in Mosul by UNESCO Media Services
• UNESCO Director-General Welcomes the Reopening of the Baghdad Museum by UNESCO Media Services
• The Mosul Museum Video from Islamic State Could Be a Staged Drama by The LA Times
• The Decline of American Culture by Lake Geneva Original RPG Campaign
• A Ajacccio, le Baptistère San Ghjuvà Sera-t-il la Première Décharge Classée ? by Corse Matin (in French) 
  
• These 10 Photos Show the World of Difference Between Iraq's Past and Present by The Huffington Post (The World Post).