Luxe calme et volupte

Is my next stop Paris? I didn't want to see it on this trip with such limited time- would rather spend a week or longer there, especially in Kiki's Montparnasse!

Because it's spring and I'm feeling romantic, here are some things that clutter my brain that have to do with France...Pink Martini's "Sympathique." I put some of the translation below because the video is cuter when you know it.



My room is a cage
The sun streams through the window,
the bellhops are at my door
like those little soldiers
who want to take me away.

I don't want to work,
I don't want to lunch
I only want to forget him
and then I smoke.

Long ago I knew the smell of love,
a million roses didn't smell as sweet.
Now a single flower in my way makes me sick.

I am not proud of this life
that wants to kill me.
It's magnificent to be sympatico
but I have never known this.

And my favorite part of my favorite poem, Baudelaire's L'invitation au voyage:

Vois sur ces canaux
Dormir ces vaisseaux
Dont l'humeur est vagabonde;
C'est pour assouvir
Ton moindre désir
Qu'ils viennent du bout du monde.
— Les soleils couchants
Revêtent les champs,
Les canaux, la ville entière,
D'hyacinthe et d'or;
Le monde s'endort
Dans une chaude lumière.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

See, down the canals,
the sleeping vessels,
Those nomads, their white sails furled:
Now, to accomplish
your every wish,
They come from the ends of the world.
The deep sunsets
surround the west,
The canals, the city, entire,
with blueviolet and gold;
And the Earth grows cold
In an incandescent fire.

There, everything’s order and beauty,
calm, voluptuousness and luxury.

The highly-underrated (IMHO) Stars album Nightsongs opens with a woman reciting this from "Les soleils," which is where I first heard it. Thank heaven for Google...sometimes I dream of/dread a Google brain chip (assuming our brains will someday be able to be online or otherwise wired)...It seems insidious and lazy, but I really don't think it'd be much different than being able to call up information at your fingertips on a screen as we do now. And as much as I use it, I still get information from actual humans and books. While ethically tricky, I would probably be most concerned that people turn it off while playing Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit. I also wish that the Babel Fish were real. Ok, I'm being a nerd. Back to work.