Archives for category: France

BEFORE THERE WAS INTERNET THERE WAS MINITEL

July 16, 2015 //
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And Forget Paris – Think Lyon

Haresh Shah

minitel

It’s five minutes before six, the closing time for Lyon’s Place Bellecour tourist office. I am standing across the counter from the friendly blonde – petite and pretty. And sweet. This is the third time since three that afternoon that I have returned to her in the remote hope that maybe, just maybe something would have opened up in the meanwhile and I still would be able to find one of the charming French B & B’s in or near the center of the old town. Based on my one and only overnight stay in Lyon years earlier, I stayed at one of its most charming boutique hotels, Hotel Cour des Loges.  I have a reason to believe that the city had to have similar but smaller and reasonably priced jewels tucked away in one of their obscure alleys.

I have arrived in Lyon by train from Avignon, with a back pack and a small carry on bag on wheels. I am doing south of France by train without any fixed timetable or an itinerary. Other than bit of a difficulty in Toulouse, I am lucky to have found nice places to crash at. Not cheap, neither expensive. My budget is between fifty and a hundred Euros a night. Seems like tonight I may have to settle for a four hundred Euro room at Sheraton. I am not looking forward to it. But what were my options? The closest the tourist office could offer me a room is 20 kilometers (about 13 miles) from the center. Certainly not what I want.

‘I am so sorry!’ The blonde says, so sweetly. Instead of being irritated, she is sympathetic. She really wants to help me. I give her my sad little boy look and get a friendly little giggle out of her.

‘I wish I could help you. But there is absolutely nothing available!’

‘Well, thanks so much for trying! I just will have to sleep on a Lyon’s sidewalk tonight!’ I make a poor me face to get another sweet smile out of her. Most reluctantly, I am about to turn around and slap down my credit card at Sheraton. The blonde is about to exit her computer screen. And then both of us hear a soft ping.

‘Wait a minute.’ She stops me in my track and busies herself tapping her keyboard.

‘An apartment has just become available, right across from Ponte Bonaparte. It’s on the sixth floor. No lift, but it has a panoramic view of old Lyon. € 95.- a night. No breakfast.’ She rattles off the screen. With my back pain, I am not too keen on having to climb six stories of stone stairs – but snap!

‘I’ll take it.’

It’s an easy walking distance. I walk across the bridge over Saône, turn right on rue Saint Jean and find # 70. Mrs. Breuihl – a woman in her early to mid-thirties escorts me to the apartment, she even helps me carry my bag. It’s a tri-level penthouse containing of a kitchen, a living room, a loft and a bedroom/bathroom suite. Soon as I enter it, I am in awe of it. I am in the heart of  vieux Lyon. I have managed to return to the city I had fallen in love with fifteen some years earlier, and had promised myself to someday come back to explore it at a leisurely pace.

Patrick Magaud and I had boarded France’s pride and joy, the high speed TGV in Paris that morning and I just had enough time to spare before I flew out to Munich that night. We meet with Bruno Bonnell of Europe Telematique for what I remember to be a simple but an exquisite meal at one of the city’s cozy bistros, Bonâme, now (La Bonâme de Bruno). What I remember the most of that lunch is their most delicious aperitif, a flute of champagne blended with a dash of peach liquor.

Patrick has brought me there to introduce me to Bruno and Christophe Sapet, his partner to talk the possibilities of creating Playboy service on the uniquely French phenomena called Minitel. This is 1989, and much as they try to explain to me the concept of creating a chat line under Playboy banner, goes over my head. From what I understood, Minitel was a crudely made boxy little computer like plastic device provided free of charge to its subscribers by the French Telecom. It wouldn’t be inconceivable to think that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak copied or were inspired by the Minitel for the earlier look of their Apple computers. It contained a small blue screen with blinking text and incorporated in it was a telephone. It is connected to what we now call the contents providers via a telephone line, sort of like earlier dial up connections. Minitel, when it was introduced years earlier, featured electronic yellow pages and the country wide telephone directories.

Over a period of time it mushroomed into a full fledge web like platform. Dialing the number 3615 connected you to today’s equivalent of the browser – an exclusive of the French Telecom. Through which you could access merchants, institutions, French Railroad and the post office and their respective products and services. Soon the porno peddlers jumped on the bandwagon with  a slew of erotic chat lines on which you can flirt with buxom and horny ladies – made up mainly of men and paid by the minutes for the amount of time spent on carousing. Those sites were collectively called Minitel Rose and the most popular of the Roses was Ulla.

Europe Telematique supposedly streamed more respectable sites. The proposal was to create a forum such as Playboy Advisor, which they felt would do well. It would also support the fledgling French edition. Of the time billed, French Telecom got to keep 50% of the revenue. Telematique would staff and create the content and manage the traffic. Of the 50% they got, they would share half of it with us, for allowing them to use the name Playboy. The danger obviously was that it could easily turn into a porn service. NO. Bruno guarantees me. There were already enough of them around. Playboy would be as classy as the magazine.

Though officially launched in 1982, the Minitel screens had beginning to pop up back in the late Seventies, almost twenty years before the World Wide Web made its debut. Unfortunately, the service never made it out of France and Belgium, and a trial run in Ireland before the Internet as we know today came thumping down the road. While I am in Lyon, not even understanding exactly how it all worked, I couldn’t help but feel that something incredible was happening within those little boxes with blinking screens.

After discussing the project back in Chicago, I return to Lyon several months later and visit the physical facilities of Europe Telematique. What I saw was little computers lined up on long rows of desks, occupied by very young men and women staring at the blue screens, the text in progress popping up on the terminal and like in call centers of today, one of the young Turks would get busy responding to them.  Soon there was Playboy chat line.

Now that I sit here and think of it, I feel like sort of a pioneer. Not that I can take credit for the idea or even the intimate knowledge of the process, but for trusting my instinct and the people and taking a chance on what would in not too far of a future become more common than  household phones. It didn’t generate vast amount of revenue for any of us, but there was enough coming in to justify its existence. The site must have been phased out on its own with the advent of Internet in the mid-Nineties. I wonder if anyone else other than me even remembers that there was such a thing as Playboy chatline on the French Minitel.

Minitel lived for more than thirty years until it no longer could compete with or justify its existence against now omnipresent World Wide Web. Yet, just the nostalgia of it had all of France feeling mixed emotions, simultaneously celebrating and mourning of its demise on June 30th 2012 – the day French Telecom pulled the plug and the remaining 800,000 terminals still in service went dark.

For me personally, agreeing to take that Paris-Lyon TGV ride of 400 kilometers (292 miles) to south east of Paris means – if not for Minitel, I would never have thought of going to Lyon. To call Lyon mini-Paris is to take something precious away from this most charming and exuberant of the French cities.

On that evening of the fall of 2008, when I had long forgotten Minitel and Europe Telematique, what has brought me back to Lyon is that certain indescribably magnetic pull and the deep impression left on me by the place. The sun has set and as I step out of rue Saint Jean 70, I find myself in the middle of an incredible bubbling of energy. The old town bustling with the cluster of restaurants, charming Bouchons famous for their down home cuisine Lyonnais. Narrow alleys and the passages featuring small shops and boutiques in animated and lively pedestrian zones.

But before letting myself disappear in the crowd, I take a long walk and marvel at the two parallel rivers flowing through the middle of the city and the strings of the lit up bridges connecting the different districts, all lined up symmetrically, gleaming in the confluence of the calm waters of  Saône and Rhône.

Hungry and tired, I return to the crowded little alleys and small squares of vieux Lyon swarming with the people, the sights and the sounds and all those little bistros and bouchons wafting delicious aromas of their house specialties. The sidewalk tables unfolded and the people squeezed together shoulder to shoulder. There is no chance of me being able to get into one of those exquisite but small and cramped eating establishments. But I do. Thanks to Mrs. Breulih’s recommendation, the kindly maître d’ Dominique at, curiously named Happy Friends Family (now Jérémy Galvan), and yet as provincial French as can be, welcomes and escorts me to a cozy table by the open kitchen, overlooking rest of the crowd. He even speaks English and describes every item on the menu and recommends what I may like. Satiated, I walk around and watch the crowds thinning out – the hubbub silently simmering.

Feeling a bit weary, I slowly climb back six stairs and up to the third level of my apartment. I am about to turn on the light – but wait! What I see through the large window by my bed is breathtaking. I see a huge globe of the dome of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière all lit up like suspended fireworks. I peer out of the window – take in the whole church exquisitely and artfully illuminated. Glowing with the warm hues of yellow and orange, I feel showered in the luminous gold. I know it’s some distance away up on the hill, and it still feels like I could touch it. I undress without moving my eyes from the dome and fling myself on the bed with my gaze fixed on the dome and fall asleep perhaps around the same time as the lights begin to flicker off.

© Haresh Shah 2015

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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On Friday July 31, 2015

100th PLAYBOY STORY

MR. SPEAK

The Quirky Brilliance Of The Head Guru

A light hearted profile of the man who put together Playboy, month after month. Nuts and bolts. Brick by brick. The one and only, Arthur Kretchmer.

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Categories Dictatorship, France, Lyon, Memoire, Minitel, Playboy, Travel

UNDERNEATH HER CLOTHES

November 26, 2014 //
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There Is An Endless Story

Haresh Shah

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One of the first times I met with Patrick Magaud is him walking into the offices of the French editor-in-chief Patrick Eynaud at Euredif headquarters located in a highrise in the thick of Paris’ Quartier Chinois. Accompanying him is not only a stunningly beautiful photo model but also a baby tiger on a leash being lead in by Patrick as if this adorable little cub were his pet dog. Not an unusual sight in the French editorial offices to find a dog snoozing under one of the editor’s desks or cats curled up at their feet. But a tiger? Well, because it’s Patrick.

Patrick is an idea man. The man who is perpetually excited about life. A daring one at that. He is known for pulling off stunts – the kind no one else would even dream of. Like the one he would tell me about over a dinner once we got to know each other better. He tells me about how once he rented a mini van, packed it with his photographic gear, an assistant by his side and a couple of gorgeous females, already unrobed, styled and made up and ready to jump in and out of action and proudly and provocatively pose in the front of the Paris streets and the landmark monuments.  Such as walking in the middle of  Champs–Élysées with Arc de Triumphe in the background, biking topless around Café de Flores with a couple of baguettes sticking out of the career, prancing at the foot of the mighty Eiffel Tower, two of hem flaunting their wares from a Ferris wheel rotating in the Tuileries, jet skiing in the river Seine, frolicking at the curve of the iconic restaurant Fouquet’s.

Patrick and his assistant already poised with their cameras at ready and voila, he would start shooting as the model tries to blend in with the scenery. The traffic coming to standstill, pedestrians breaking their strides doing a double take and the café crowd shaking their heads in amazement. Suddenly, they would hear the shrill screaming of sirens and the twirling blue flashes of the flag lights closing in on them. Everyone would be sucked back inside the gateway van standing in the middle of the street  with its motor running. The doors slammed, tires screeching and they would be on their way before the gendarme catch up with them. Ensconced back in the van, everyone is laughing and feeling mighty smug at the feat they together have pulled off. As the sirens fade, Patrick and his assistant are already unloading the films from their cameras and tucking them away in their gear bags, loading new films.

Their next destination? Père Lachaise Cemetery. The model Nathalie’s naked body is painted black – the color of tarnished bronze. Soon as the van stops, she climbs out and runs to the the grave of the 19th century poet Victor Noir and promptly mounts his life size horizontal  statue with her legs wide apart and her crotch rubbing against his sculpted bulge of shiny copper.  No, she is not just acting ecstatic, but as Patrick would recount later, during the shoot Nathalie really got turned on, leaving behind the residue of her feminine scent on the poor Noir. Over the period of time, the statue has become a symbol of fertility of sorts like that of Shiva’s erect lingam, (Living Dangerously, Playboy, May 1990, also collected in the book Exhibition in Paris) http://www.amazon.com/Exhibition-Paris-Patrick-Magaud/dp/0932733018

And then he takes one of his models – of course au naturell up on a helicopter ride, hovering at low altitude, the whole Paris looking upwards with their necks craned while he is floating aboard a balloon at the parallel height and shooting her sight-seeing.

If not as daring, following the success of Playboy pictorial about The Women of Russia – shot by Alexander Borodulin (Mission: Implausible, Playboy February 1990), while talking about other such pictorials, the photo editor Jeff Cohen  and Patrick utter almost simultaneously – Cuba. The island verboten to us poor Americans. A bit of a problem. But Patrick is not the kind to shy away from them. Through the Cuban counsel in Paris, he works towards acquiring permission to do just that, The Girls of Cuba (Cuba Libre, Playboy March 1991). Equally as adventurous, Jeff finds a way to make it to the island via Mexico – his passport bearing no proof of him swilling Cuba libres under the nose and the protection of the people of Fidel Castro. Considering the political situation and restrictions, they come back home with the images of some tantalizing island beauties – among them, Idolka de Erbiti. Patrick promptly falls in love with her, and does something he has avoided doing so far. Marry Idolka and bring her back to the city of lights.

But when he can, Patrick is not satisfied just shooting glamorous nudes. What turns him on and gets his creative juices flowing are the extreme fantasies and making them come to life in his photography. On that day he has shown up with the beauty and the beast to propose a pictorial with the girl and the tiger cub frolicking. What was there not to agree?

Patrick and I hit of off almost right away and soon he would take me along to show real Paris. It is Patrick who takes me to the Paris off the beaten tracks. For the first time I get a taste of Moroccan and North African food and savor how delicious the humble couscous could be. He takes me to small and inexpensive bistros in the neighborhoods that are far away from the center. Often we would be accompanied by some of his friends and his beautiful models. What he shows me is the different Paris than what I have been exposed to so far, and I am loving it. Those soirées bring us closer and the more I get to know him, more I am amazed at how impish and child like he is. His face wears a continuous mischievousness in that he is amazed at everything that is life. Sometimes I feel that he is living as if every day were the last day of his life.

What I know of Patrick is that strictly speaking he is not your run of the mill French man. He is of Arabic descent. You can see that on his square but angular face. Even his accent is slightly lilting compared to the way others speak French. Could have even come from Algeria, as did the existential philosopher Albert Camus. Living in the moment. Existing to the fullest in the world capital of the existentialism. So we find a lot in common to talk about.

But what we talk about the most are girls. Our experiences with them and the misadventures. Like two adolescents still in awe of the mystery that every woman is. And how we absolutely love and adore them. And we talk about sex. Not your day-to-day variety, but the fantasy of it.

‘You know what turns me on more than even having sex itself?’

‘What?’

‘The thought of it. The imagination. The fantasy.’

And then he tells me of one of his most yearned for fantasies coming true.

We have had a long day. I was shooting multiple models all day long and we’re all tired and also hungry. The group of us is sitting around a large round table at a restaurant. When you’re shooting and busy doing your work, no matter how beautiful they are, how you may have developed a crush on one of them, you can’t just conjure up a fantasy of undressing her, because you have seen her totally naked all day long. But it’s when she is fully dressed and is sitting next to you is when your imagination gets wild. Chantal was her name. She is sitting next to me. My assistant and the crew are busy talking, eating, drinking, laughing and just unwinding from the hard day’s work. There are about eight girls, but the only one on my mind is Chantal. I don’t have to imagine what she looks like underneath her clothes. But I had had a long time fantasy, something I hadn’t tried out so far, but as we have a few glasses of wine and I am liking Chantal more and more, and she seems to like me too. But that’s not unusual for a model to fall for her photographer, at least in the moment. But I am thinking to myself, maybe I can try out with Chantal what I have hesitated doing so far. She notices that there is a momentary lull in our conversation and I have gone quiet, as if lost in deep thoughts.’

‘What are you thinking?’

‘Oh, nothing special. Just thoughts!’

‘Come on, you look quite serious.’

‘Well, I am thinking… never mind, it’s silly.’

‘I want to hear it.’

‘Promise you won’t laugh if I told you!’

‘I promise.’

‘Okay, what I am thinking of is – actually It’s an old fantasy.’ And I stop. I feel her gaze irretrievably fixed on me

‘All right. I hope you don’t freak out with what I am about to ask you.’

‘Come on. Don’t torture me. I am a big girl.’

‘Okay. What I am thinking of is, what I would love you to do is to excuse yourself and go to the bathroom, take your panties off and bring them back to me. I will slip them into my pants pocket and I am the only one around this table who would know that you’re naked underneath your skirt!’

Chantal looks at me, a bit amazed but not exactly shocked.

‘Is that it?’

‘Yeah. Would you do it for me?’

She doesn’t answer, just smirks and after a minute or so, excuses herself and kicks her chair back and I watch her walk over to the bathroom. When she comes back, she discreetly hands her crumpled panties over to me under the table and I tuck them in to my pocket.

‘Haresh, let me tell you, I have never felt as excited and as aroused up until then and since as when I was in the possession of those panties, her sitting next to me and only me and her knowing that she is bare underneath her skirt, and there are all these other girls and my assistant sitting around, and hoards of other diners of the restaurant, nobody else but only I know! You have no idea how incredible turn on it was!!’

And he smiles. And the distant dreamy look he has on his face communicates the rest.

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, December 5, 2014

THE TRADER OF EVERY PORT

Even before the Berlin Wall came down and even before the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the pot of capitalism had began to simmer in many of the former Soviet block countries. Hungary was the first to come out with its own Playboy edition in that November of 1989. Followed by Czechoslovakia a year and a half later. No small thanks to the the vision and the daring of  the independent minded entrepreneurs. Here is the story of one of them.

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Categories France, Friendship, Patrick Magaud, Photographer, Playboy, Profile, Sexual Famtasy

UNLOVED IN THE LANDS OF L’AMORE L’AMOUR

November 13, 2014 //
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Haresh Shah

My Not So Intimate Encounters With Italy And France

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The first time I landed in the land of Ciao Bella and O sole mio, they dumped our baggage on the tarmac next to the aircraft, barely said sorry and told us we would have to carry it to the terminal ourselves – that the ground personnel had just decided to go on a strike. A bit different story when I first arrived at Charles de Gaulle in Paris. I am met at the airport by Gerrit Huig and the editorial assistant Ann Scharffenberger. They talk me into and I unwittingly agree to drive us through the city in our rented little Citroën. Though I had taken lessons in driving a car with manual transmission, this is my first time trying it out without an instructor sitting next to me. I haven’t yet gotten the knack of synchronizing the gears with the accelerator and the breaks. The car would shudder, stall and come to an abrupt stop in the middle of swirling rush hour traffic. Happens several times on the Arc de Triumph round-about. I get furious faces, obscene yelling  that I don’t understand, French version of the finger and then silly mocking giggles from my two passengers. But I somehow manage to survive both welcomes. Not exactly j’taime.  

Now years later, I wonder whether my first flights into Milan and Paris were symbolic of my not so close relationships with the romance lands. I can’t even remember how I was welcomed when I first flew into Rome years later. Quite in contrast to the recent Lufthansa ad proclaiming: Seduced by Paris. Inspired by Rome. And I can see why. What is there not to love about the countries with the history so rich, the languages so sweet and sexy, so languid and full of l’amore and l’amour. And yet, no matter how many trips I would end up taking to the either over the next two decades, they never warmed up to me. Likewise, as natural as I am with learning languages, as hard and long as I have tried to learn the Italian and the French, they both have eluded me.

And so have the people. Beyond the business, people just went home. Of course there were some  dinners and a bit of socializing now and then, but by and far when I think of the huge amount of time I spent in Milan, Paris and Rome, what I remember the most are the evenings when I often found myself sitting in elegant restaurants all by myself, slowly savoring their delicious Euro-Mediterranean cuisine, sipping on their exquisite wines and contemplating life. In Paris, when I finally managed to get Annick Geile, the editor-in-chief of the French edition out to lunch, while we have hardly set down at our outdoor table, she turns her wrist to look at her watch, and as if talking to herself, whispers: my days are divided in segments of twenty minutes. The message was as clear as can be. Though I wondered how many segments I was allotted, I totally ignored her utterance as if I didn’t even hear it.

While I still lived in Munich, I couldn’t wait to return back to my home town every weekend, catching that around eight o’clock flight back. How could you be in one of the three most alluring cities in the world and not want to spend weekends there? Especially if you have to be back first thing Monday morning, and you’re staying in some of the most exclusive hotels and every penny you spend is paid for?

Because, after you have seen all of the historical monuments; passed through Duomo umpteen times, admired the glamour of the Scala, climbed up and down the Spanish Steps, sprawled St. Peter’s Square in Vatican, have been in awe of the Coliseum and have crossed the river Tiber in Rome and paid your tribute to the Notre-Dame, smirked back at Mona Lisa in Louvre, looked down at the breathtaking view of the city of light from the top of the Eiffel Tower and gawked and wished at the shop windows along Champs Elysees and have sat in enough cafes and restaurants all by yourself, you are done with them. For who I am, I can barely begin to relate to the places without meaningful connection to their people.

Not that I didn’t try to connect, but then you learn that like love and friendship, people either click or they don’t. And the sad truth remains, we just didn’t.

Ironically, my most memorable weekend in Italy remains to be the rain drenched and bone cold long Easter weekend I spend with Rainer and Renate (Wörtmann)in their newly acquired Mill House in Tuscany’s Pontremoli. Not Rome, nor Milan.

My memories of Paris are not that dismal. Walking around by yourself in Paris is a different kind of experience. Even with no other human being walking next to you, the city itself accompanies you wherever you choose to walk, especially the left banks of Seine and along the cafes of Boulevard Saint Germain, conjuring up the lives of some of my favorite authors. Françoise Sagan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. And then Earnest Hemingway, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald and Henry Miller.  Just thinking of them you could while away a snifter or two of excellent French Cognac or the cooling tall glasses of Pastis. They all come alive at every step in Paris. But in Rome and Milan? Nah! The only one I could think of is Alberto Moravia and his The Woman of Rome. Probably also because I have had a pleasure of shaking hands with him after a speech by him in the courthouse gardens of the University of Bombay.

In the backdrop of my non-relational acquaintance with Milan and Rome, the two cities I least looked forward returning to, it was then quite amazing for me to hear the following story almost twenty years after my last trip to Italy.

It was two years ago when Jan (Heemskerk) came on a visit to Chicago, we got together with some Playboy old-timers to reminisce the shared déjà vu.  Among them, Arthur Kretchmer, the recently retired editorial director of the US Playboy. As much as I respected the man the super editor, Arthur and I at the very best had mostly perfunctory professional relationship. But Jan and him got along really well and so we meet Arthur at his favorite restaurant The Indian Garden on Chicago’s Devon Avenue – a stretch of which is also named Gandhi Marg. With Arthur, it’s mostly him talking and you listening. And so it was during the lunch. Just his very presence intimidated me, creating an atmosphere of speak only when spoken to. So it were Jan and Arthur conversing with me pushed in the background. But somewhere along the line, I got to interject and now having acquired distance of time, I confessed, I was always intimidated by you.

‘You should have been.’ He answered and even though I would have liked to know precisely why, I left it at that. But then Arthur decides to smooth things over and asks me: Do you remember Mario in Rome?

Of course I do. In Italy, Playboy’s  trajectory included three different publishers. We started out with Rizzoli in Milano. Some years later, the magazine was moved to another legendary Italian publishing family, Mondadori. Or more precisely, to the independent Georgio Mondadori, who had split from his family to go solo. When that relationship didn’t quite work out, the magazine was licensed to Edizioni Lancio SPA, in Rome. Also family owned – albeit much smaller. Lancio specialized in photo novellas that were and probably still are extremely popular all over the world. Curiously, in India, those novellas were distributed by my uncle Jaisukh’s Wilco Publishing Company, which is where I had first started learning the ropes of the publishing, when a teenager.

Lancio proclaimed the re-launch to be Nuova Edizione Italiana. The new Playboy in Italy had a semblance of small editorial team under the mild mannered aging journalist, Alvaro Zerboni, but it was the company’s president Michele Mercurio who wielded the total control over the pages of the magazine. From the very first meeting it became clear to me that Lancio was not the right kind of publishers for our beloved bambino. The years that I was subjected to work with them, we constantly collided over what direction the edition should take. As diplomatic as I would try to be, we never came around to see eye to eye, thus creating a constant tension between Rome and Chicago. Being able to develop any sort of personal rapport never even came into the play.

Even so, I was accorded a certain protocol like status. Always being picked up from the airport and brought back in the company Mercedes Benz sedan by Mario. Picked up from the hotel and whenever needed brought back also in the Benz. Mario barely spoke any English, but I was trying hard to learn the Italian. So other than the editor in chief Alvaro Zerboni, my real human face of Rome was Mario, a very pleasant, ever smiling of the angular round face, very white of the skin and of a stocky built, he played the role that of the executive chauffer, a messenger and a sort of unofficial PR person for his employers. Mario for one, had high curiosity level and the fact that he spoke no English and I spoke only rudimentary Italian never inhibited him from asking me questions and manage somehow to wrangle out answers from me in my odd mélange of Italian, Spanish and English. He was interested in me. He was interested in the mystic of India. He was charming and sweet in the way Italians can be and somehow felt close to me. I liked him and he liked me. But that was the extent of it. The rule was that his schedule was determined by Michele’s executive secretary Christina Schlogel and had to have her command for him to ferry me around, he often took it upon himself to pick me up or bring me to the airport even over the weekends. For which he did get into the trouble with Christina for a couple of times. But he sloughed it off with a hearty laugh.

‘Of course I know Mario,’ I answered Arthur.

‘You know, he really liked you?’

‘Yah, probably he was the only one, other than of course poor Alvaro.’

To that Arthur begins to tell the following story. Which he would repeat a year and a half later in an email before answering my queries for the blog entry Perfectly Unbound.

But even before that, I have a little ‘playboy story’ for you. The 2nd or 3rd time that Patricia and I were in Italy in the early ’90’s — so ’93 (probably 1994) would be my guess — I met Don and Louisa Stuart as well as the Mercurio’s. For a reason I no longer remember, I ended up being driven somewhere in the Lancio Mercedes 300E by their driver.

I spoke a small amount of Italian. He spoke no English. As we rode along, he asked me some questions that I stumbled through. When he figured out that I was with Playboy, the next question he asked was if I knew Haresh Shah.

I said yes. He rattled off a bunch of Italian that I didn’t get, but ended on a partial sentence that I understood to the effect that Haresh Shah was a wonderful man.

I did my best to acknowledge your wonderfulness in Italian when he said, in hesitant English, “When Haresh come… the best food, the best wine, the best girls.” He waved his hand in the air, and didn’t say another word.

Good old Mario. He really did like me:). Who am I to argue with his perception of me? Thanks Mario. True or false, it even impressed Arthur and he remembered to tell it to me almost twenty years later.

© Haresh Shah 2014

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Net Friday, November 21, 2014

THE NAIL THAT STUCK OUT

Deru kui wa utareru, literally means: The nail that sticks out, gets hammered down! This aptly defines the psychology of the group in the Japanese society. To be different is to be hammered down. In the society where individuality has no place, I knowingly decided to commit the ultimate social faux pas, at the risk of alienating my Japanese hosts.

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Categories Culture, Food & Wine, France, Italy, Loneliness, Memoire, Playboy, Profile, Women

MY INTIMATE ENCOUNTER WITH EROTIC OYSTERS

August 29, 2013 //
0

Haresh Shah

How I Came To  Like / No, Love Oysters?

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I have had a long day. Up at 4:30 in the morning, I take a quick shower and get into my Buick and zoom through the Mittlerer Ring and rush to Munich’s Riem International Airport. Catch the first flight to Düsseldorf. Pick up a rental car and race to Essen. Heinz (Nellissen) and I work through the day, do it non-stop  through the lunch and don’t even get around to grab their delicious Fricadel and Brötchen with mustard from the company canteen. I need to leave promptly at five and rush back to the airport and catch the last Paris bound flight. Hungry as I am, I skip the anemic looking cold cuts served onboard. We’re having dinner at La Coupole.

Brasserie La Coupole on boulevard du Montparnasse is a Paris landmark like no other. It is the quintessential symbol of Montparnasse’s history as well as the art of living and socializing in Paris. And is hailed as the temple of art deco. I have never been there before and am very much looking forward to this evening.

I check in at the George V and after a  hurried shower, hail a cab and arrive at Le Coupole at little after nine. There are about eight of Playboy people sitting at sidewalk tables pulled together. Waiting on the tables are ice buckets filled with chilling bottles of Chablis and Sancerre, large platters of shucked oysters placed on the bed of ice, their wet and slimy surfaces shivering and  still pulsating with life surrounded by the wedges of lemon strewn in-between the oyster shells. The tables are littered with little plates and the bread crumbs that continue do drop at every tear of the crust.

This is Playboy Foreign Edition’s second international meeting. Its small and intimate with only four countries onboard. Over the years, it would mushroom into an annual, one most important event that brought together Playboy families from around the world. The French and the German crowd is already there. We’re still waiting for the Italians and the Americans to arrive. While everyone else is wine happy and feasting on the freshest and the most delicious oysters – I am guessing, because I have never tasted an oyster in my entire life.  Just the look of them give me creeps, yikes!! Their slimy slippery wetness looking like devil’s eyes makes me nauseous. And they are still alive!! Couldn’t even imagine actively picking one up, let alone putting one in my mouth and slurping it in, chewing or washing it down with a gulp of wine and really enjoying it, as everyone around the tables seems to be doing.

But I am beyond starving. I am famished and feeling physically weak at lack of sleep and with the day like I have had, I am feeling run down. You can eat only so much bread and drink so much wine on an empty stomach. A hefty piece of steak-au-poire avec pommes would be great. But I can’t just go ahead and order it while we are still waiting for the rest – among them my own bosses – who I understand are just checking into the hotel.  So it probably would be another hour or so before they really make it to the restaurant. In the meanwhile, those present are greedily  slurping down oyster after oyster, tearing off pieces of bread and washing them down with the excellent wine. The consumed bottles are taken away and replaced by more, the ice in the buckets replenished and the large aluminum platters filled with oysters keep sliding in and out of their stands like frisbees. All those live vibrating lumps shoved down the palates in easy gulps.

While I hear my stomach growl, I feel a buzz in my head. I watch people still picking up oysters from the platters, squeezing the lemon wedges over them, picking up the shell, putting it halfway through their mouths and slurp up the meat.

To distract my thoughts from my intensifying hunger, I think of the legend that La Coupole has become. Since it opened its doors just before Christmas in 1927, forty five years before, attended by 2500 guests – 1200 bottles of champagne were popped open. Since then it has become the stomping ground for artists and writers, musicians and singers that include Picasso and Matisse. I imagine Josephine Baker at an inside table dining with Simenon. Jean-Paul Sartre holding court at his table # 149 with Simone de Beauvoir listening adoringly. I am imagining Henry Miller to stride in at any moment and charm a meal and a bottle or two of vintage wine out of some sucker for his sheer brilliance and then walk out with his lady friend hanging on his arm. And I would certainly get up and shake hands with Albert Camus, whose existential novels were all the rage ten years earlier among us young and inspiring writers in India. And wouldn’t it be awesome if Serge Gainsbourg were to walk in with gorgeous Jane Birkin, making his trademark flamboyant entrance, to whose J’taime us disco set danced night after night?

‘Come on, try one. They’re so delicious!’ Prods, I no longer remember who, but one of our French editors who I’ll call Rémy. I am rudely awakened from my reveries and brought back to the reality of my poor growling stomach.

‘I can’t!’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘Because…’

‘Because what? How can you be in France, sitting at La Coupole and not taste our own huiters de Normandie? They are probably harvested this very morning, you know? Normandy yields some of the world’s best oysters.  Hell, we have the best oysters in the world.’ I see Rémy’s face beaming. True French pride. ‘And after a long summer, the oyster season has just began and this year they are particularly incredibly good!’

‘May be so, but I don’t know, just look at them!’

Someone who grew up being a vegetarian in whose family even eggs were considered meat, I have come a long way. Up until I was twenty five, I have never had eaten any meat dishes. During my two and half years in London, I may have ventured in to taste chicken curry a few times and may have managed to swallow a few pieces of meat placed in front of me, just not to offend those kind hearted host families in England and in Holland – where I interned during my summer and winter breaks. But it wasn’t until after I graduated and landed a job with Burda in Offenburg while living with a German family did I begin to eat meat in earnest. Even so, I had hardest time eating any seafood. The most I had managed over the interim four years in the States, was to acquire taste for fried shrimps and broiled lobster tails. Couldn’t deal with any of the fish at all. I did try escargot once. Baked inside their little shells and swimming in the garlic butter.  I was able to swallow half a dozen yucky looking black curled up creatures, only because I nudged them down with the garlic butter soaked piece of bread and with my eyes closed, and a glass of wine at ready. But oysters?

‘I’m looking at them. But they are meant to be eaten, unless you’re looking for pearls,’

‘Pearls?’

‘Yeah. Didn’t you know that the most beautiful pearls are found inside certain types of oysters?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course. But never mind. Just try one. I promise you would like it.’

‘But Rémy!’

‘These are so delicious! And they taste and feel just like, you know?’ Rémy has this knowing look on his face as if I knew what he’s talking about. Realizing that maybe I really didn’t know what he was leading to, he elaborates.

‘Just like, you know? Woman’s sex. How do you call it?’

‘You mean pussy?’

‘Oui alors, exactement!’ 

This conjures up an image of a photograph I had seen some place. Perhaps in an old issue of Playboy even, featuring aphrodisiacs and erotic food as displayed on different parts of the female anatomy. The one with oysters has a close up of a shapely woman’s pelvic region from the waist down to her upper thighs. Arranged like the bird’s nest in a diamond shape is fresh mesclun lettuce, that hides and at the same time enhances her pubic areas by giving them the fall colors,  rusty red on the fringe of wild green leaves, the edges of the leaves simulating the curls of thickly concentrated pubic hair. Three shucked dark shelled oysters are placed at the each corner of the lettuce – raw, moist, succulent, tender and glistening. A tantalizing image even for those of us who shudder at the thought of eating one of those.

I look back at Rémy and smirk, still with I don’t know expression on my face.

‘Come on, try one or two. I’ll help you’ And even before I have time to say anything, Rémy has picked up an oyster from the platter. In his other hand is a little baby fork, with which he expertly and gently dislodges and tugs the oyster out of its shell and is holding it in front of my mouth. Seeing I am still hesitant, he asks me to close my eyes and open my mouth.

It feels on my tongue like a lump of slimy moss. I feel something moving over my tongue on its own and I’m about to throw up. Instead, I swiftly pick up my wine glass and take a big swallow and the first oyster of my life is on its way down crawling through my system. I pick up and break a piece of bread and then wash it down with another gulp of wine. Rémy’s eyes are riveted on me.

‘See, it wasn’t too bad, was it? Let’s try one more time.’ Doesn’t he see the tears rolling down my eyes? Even if he does, he is incorrigible. He yanks out another oyster and down it goes.

‘Now try it yourself!’ Still feeling squeamish, I mimic the ritual of first squeezing the lemon, holding the oyster in my left hand and pulling it out with the little fork and slowly lift the lumpy little slime and catch it between my lips, let it linger on my tongue, feel and taste the freshly squeezed lemon juice, even chew it a little bit, and let it slide down on its own. And I try the another one, and yet another one.

Delicieux.     

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

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Next Friday, September 5, 2013

CORPORATE CASTE SYSTEM

Anyone who has worked for a corporation – big or small – knows all too well that he must deal with peculiarities of an organization. Face the small irritants here and there and find out for himself  that the world hasn’t changed at all, that we must still strive to be the fittest to survive. And most of us do, if with a little sense of humor.

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Categories Food & Wine, France