Lawrence Osborne

The chapter "Rain Men" from American Normal

It was 9o’clock at night by the time I got to LaGuardia to meet Jerry Newport.It was winter,the airport looked tired and half-deserted,the dense gloom of the low corridors and escalators touched by a scent of snow.By Terminal C,the retail outlets were even grimmer than they are by day,and exhausted Mexican staff were closing up the Sunglass Hut with elaborate rings of keys that made them look like guards in some desultory tropical jail.I went to the Wendy’s and sat down under its undulating strawberry neons.Jerry Newport had not told me where exactly to meet him,merely that his fiancée would be arriving at Gate 4 from Houston and that I was to meet them both there. But what did Jerry Newport look like? And what did the fiancée of Jerry Newport look like? Jerry Newport was as much a mystery as his fiancée,and I may add that it was a further mystery to me why Jerry Newport had insisted that we meet inside LaGuardia airport at 9o’clock at night. But he hadinsisted, saying with admirable certitude,“I’m afraid I can only be interviewed in an airport.Sorry.”

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Captured in Amber

One doesn't ordinarily think of an evening at Alain Ducasse at Essex House winding down to a trolley filled with humble rums. André Campeyre, Ducasse's slightly unnerving sommelier, who knows everything in liquor's vast domain, wheels his rums out like a man about to spring a surprise. And indeed he is. You've probably already guessed that these aren't the usual Captain Morgan's nor even the doughty Pusser's that for 230 years was the official daily drink of the British Royal Navy. No: These aren't limpid rotguts you mix with Coke or toss into daiquiris. Campeyre has assembled something like a who's-who of rum's queenly aristocrats. "They are," he says, "the least known, the most mysterious of liquors."

Rum

Bacchus Rising

There is a scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian in which the hapless messiah, played by Graham Chapman, hawks ancient Roman snack food in Jerusalem's Colosseum. His tray is filled with ocelot spleens, jaguar earlobes, and wolf-nipple chips, and we think to ourselves that Roman food was probably just as gruesome. But what about Roman wine? They apparently liked to cut it with seawater and honey. How disgusting was it? We will never know, because no one will ever be able to reproduce exactly the combination of varietals, viticulture, and climate that prevailed in Roman Europe 2,000 years ago. As with ocelot spleens, we will have to guess.

Pompei Wine

"Paris Dreambook" Noted with Pleasure, New York Times 1992

Speculating on how archeologists in the future may explain the Paris subway system, Lawrence Osborne reminds us that time can turn even mundane objects into mysteries. This is from "Paris Dreambook: An Unconventional Guide to the Splendor and Squalor of the City" (Vintage, paper). The Metro is above all a system of names, names which are a thousand times more secretive than the places they supposedly denote. Filles du Calvaire, Bel-Air, Crimee, Danube, Pyramides. . . . The Metro names will be remembered in the future as a schoolchild's mnemonic for the ancient history of Europe or as a crazy hieroglyphic inscription. . . . It will be concluded, of course, that the Metro was an idea, a religious idea, perhaps, or a pan-humanitarian one, but never a public transport system. . . . The Metro was an idea in the mind of 20th-century man and the astrological map around which his archaic spirituality revolved. In it he tried to express his yearnings for unity and harmony in the face of the chaos of his history, and if people wished to drive around in trains along the configurations appointed by this divine map of reality that only shows how deeply the people of this age felt their pan-humanistic rituals. Across the Ocean of Time.

From Jeanne Storck :

Fantastic, often breathless prose journey through a Paris that never makes the guidebooks. Osborne takes up where Aragon left off, bringing the Paris Peasant into the 90's. The author, from his apartment at 37, rue André Antoine in a seedier corner of Montmartre, sets out on explorations of the city. He invents a story for the old woman upstairs who collaborated with the Germans, explores the sex industry of the rue Saint Denis, follows the tags of Parisian graffitti artists, luxuriates in Paris' Turkish baths, attends an opening in an artist's studio near the Canal de l'Ourcq, meditates on the strange poetry in the names of Paris métro stops, visits the once Communist stronghold of the town of Ivry-sur-Seine, and all of this written in a style that is rich, often comic, resembling at times the more delirious passages of Céline.

And Ginger Danto, in Enertainment Weekly :

Lawrence Osborne's hyperbolic ode to the City of Light reads something like the transcript of a nightmare, complete with the kind of cryptic, macabre images that surface so readily in the subconscious. In his noble effort to avoid the cliches of expatriate narrative, Osborne presents Paris as a kind of European annex to the East Village. We navigate this urban demimonde via the author's overflowing prose, which reads as if it were inspired by the steady ingestion of gritty, bar- counter coffee from his favored section of Clichy. Indeed, except for portentous chapter headings, Osborne's writing flows like the opaque waters of the Seine, filled with all the grimy debris of daily life that both residents and tourists prefer not to acknowledge.

Library Journal :

Readers expecting the standard tourist cliches about the City of Light will be disappointed in this unusual travel guide. Using the literary device of an imaginary peasant, Osborne, explores a surreal, nightmarish Paris that few tourists ever encounter. In a sequence of dream-like essays, he offers his impressions of the city's bleak industrial suburbs, the red-light districts of Clichy and Saint-Denis, the exotic yet seedy Metro, and the Turkish baths hidden throughout the metropolis. This is not the Paris of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysees but the Paris of prostitutes, graffiti artists, African and Arab immigrants, and decrepit French collaborators who still dream of their Nazi lovers. Like Jean-Luc Godard's films, this book is both fascinating and irritating. An acquired taste for sophisticated readers, this is recommended for larger travel collections.

Stalin's Antibiotics, from the New York Times Magazine

In a barely heated ward for newborns on the top floor of the Georgian Republic Children's Hospital, Tamila Gogitidze carefully opens a glass ampul filled with amber liquid. The hospital, in the Degomi suburb of Georgia's decaying capital city, Tbilisi, is a spartan affair: its radiators are ramshackle, the electricity intermittent and the raw concrete heavy on the eyes. A few American posters of babies cavorting in cabbages seem direly out of place. The liquid trapped inside the ampul, meanwhile, can be identified from a box on the floor.

Phages

FBI Body Farm, Tennessee, from the New York Times Magazine

The nameless teenage Mexican immigrant killed in a drug skirmish could hardly have imagined that this would be his final resting place. His knees are drawn up into the fetal position; his body appears almost mummified, the skin a leathery brown merging with the fall leaves underneath. The sloped woods around him hum with cicadas. All is deathly peace in this hillside spot. A few feet away, a leg lies perfectly camouflaged in the brush, given away only by crimson strips of flesh still clinging to it. Under a row of trees nearby, a woman lies on her back, half rotted away, her arms outstretched in a frozen gesture and her hair lying in a molted mat around her skull.

The Body Farm

Robert Brasillach

Robert Brasillach, the brilliant and pugnacious pro-fascist French novelist and critic, was shot by firing squad on Feb. 9, 1945, on the direct orders of Gen. Charles de Gaulle himself. The James Dean of French fascism, as historian Alice Kaplan calls Brasillach in her lucid and gripping new book "The Collaborator," met a dismal fate that was shared by countless other collaborationists. But Brasillach's death was different.

Brasillach

Cicero

The opening sequence of Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" shows Rome from the air as if seen from a passing helicopter. The city is made to look like Manhattan, a forest of towers and canyon streets. The subliminal message is clear enough: If Rome was the Manhattan of the ancients, then we naturally enough are the Romans of today. Americans have always modeled themselves on the Romans. And the Romans -- pragmatic, ruthless, patriotic, engineering-obsessed -- certainly look like the Americans of antiquity, a comparison made only the more alluring by what we perceive to be their pathological violence, their taste for lurid spectacle and their imperial overreach.

Cicero

Excerpt from "The Naked Tourist" in American GQ

In the lobby of Thailand’s most august hotel, the house string quartet had just struck up “The Blue Danube.” The high notes were a half-tone out of tune, and nobody was dancing, but the lobby still brimmed with the fever mood of Hedonopolis, the world’s pleasure capital. I slumped in one of the lobby chairs and watched the Japanese-executive groups and the farang businessmen with their Bangkok girls flirting to the sound of “The Blue Danube” under huge bell-like lanterns. The Oriental has something maniacal about it—circular fountains of unreal flowers, ornamental elephants, ubiquitous mirrors. Here is the apex of the nation’s tourist sector, the nub of it all.

Dental Dam

Che? from the New York Observer

Long declared to be mere footnotes to history, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara are riding high in the American media. The Cuban Revolution, it seems, is everywhere once again, and cold, hard historical judgment is harder and harder to find. HBO may have pulled Oliver Stone's fawning documentary Comandante after Mr. Castro, in April, sentenced 78 dissident Cuban writers to the gulag for 28 years, then executed three Cubans who hijacked a ferry, but the scheduling decision doesn't appear to be a sudden spasm of political conscience. Those events, HBO said, merely mean that Comandante "has become incomplete" and would have to be updated. If viewers get impatient waiting for Mr. Stone to work in the new material, another biography of Castro is currently being produced for the PBS American Experience series.

Che Guevara