Idealog - September 2006

Image: Title strip

SOME POSTINGS HAVE BEEN MOVED from this page to alanmachintopics.net - eg Tourist Traces

Image: Mill - L'Hameau de la Reine, Versailles

Paris - The World As Plaything

23.09.06

In 1783, only six years before the start of the French Revolution, work began to build a village for Queen Marie Antoinette.

The Queen had a part of the vast estate at Versailles for her own use: even her husband, Louis XVI, could only enter with her permission. Her main possession there was Le Petit Trianon, a house begun twenty years earlier, where a formal garden with fountain and flower beds gave the Queen her own small world to command. But formal gardens - the 'French' style - were going out of fashion as Rousseau talked about the virtues of 'going back to nature' and the 'English garden' style was becoming popular. Marie Antoinette has such a garden laid out in the mid 1770s. Then she added a theatre in which she and her friends could perform plays - in some she acted the part of a shepherdess.

The Queen loved her little world, which was one of make believe. She could act in her theatre and she could act in this, her corner of the Versailles Estate. Marie Antoinette wanted a world of her own. so it was that in 1783 the architect Richard Mique began to oversee the building of eleven 'village' buildings that he designed in a picturesque style which seem to have blended real traditions with fictions from the royal imagination. A house for the Queen, a mill (pictured here), a farm, a dairy, a barn and others were placed decorously around a lake. The farm has cows, sheep and goats and crops of cereals and fruit. Here, Marie Antoinette could entertain her friends, serve food from 'her' farm - its production owed nothing to her own hand - as well as act as the lady of the village.

It was a life whose days would be numbered. Deeply unpopular with the wider French public, she and her husband, Louis XVI, died under the blade of the guillotine in 1793.

Now, her village, L'Hameau de la Reine has been restored. surviving buildings again appear as they did more than two hundred years ago. Crops, fruit and flowers are growing and animals graze in fields. There is a wonderful sense of the private, safe, fictitious world that the Queen inhabited, cut off from the harsh realities of rural France. The restoration and presentation has been thorough. Hardly any presence can be felt of attendants or curators, so that ordinary visitors are able to enjoy the little world in a way that they never could in the 1780s.

Marie Antoinette's village is one of the earliest - perhaps the earliest - example of an aspect of the world being created to preserve, present and perform a particular way of life for visiting people. It is part museum, part 'living history', now part educational project. At one and the same time it is both real and fake, as it always was. We can understand more of the way of life of the French monarchy when we see it and glimpse into the mind of the royal system that ruled France. It is possible to visualise life in farms and cottages on the eighteenth century while at the same time begin to measure the gap between Marie Antoinette's fantasy and life as it really was, a gap so wide and destructive that it helped bring about a revolution. And we can see an early example of those showcases that included the great museums and world expositions, through the open air museums and theme parks to present day conservation areas and discovery centres, all of which seek to entertain, explore and educate in varying proportions.
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Image: Trinidad Steel Band in Paris

Paris - The Unexpected

22.09.06

The Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Paris Opera ... the big attractions are on the map and always to be found - and enjoyed. A city like Paris has always got hundreds of events under way, big and small. Music and arts are everywhere: painters with their easels reproducing a view, or musicians playing alone or in bands.

At the Arc de Triomphe Du Carroussel a steel band from Trinidad and Tobago entertained with driving rhythms and mellifluous petrol-drums tuned and played almost to sound like brass instruments. Caribbean music alternated with American big band jazz and European romantic tunes. Dancers paced around the edge, banner wavers stepped in procession after them, though the musicians themselves were both a dance troupe and a choir as well.

Travelling is fun when you find famous landmarks, but even better when you meet people from different nationalities and cultures who are able to appreciate each other's traditions. At that moment they become one group enjoying what the world has to offer, with no distances to divide them, just sharing human warmth and expression.
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Image: Cameras at Versailles

Paris - Captured And Kept

19.09.06

On the Grand Tour the rich nobleman could buy a piece of sculpture or a painting in Paris or Rome, or a book of architecture with classical illustrations after Palladio. When George Eastman invented his cheap camera and photo developing service the sales slogan "You push the button and we will do the rest" let everyone capture a scene and take it home. It was as if the traveller had physically removed a view and added it to their personal possessions back home. Now, digital photography lets us take a hundred photos where we used to take a dozen. Video recording adds movement, changing perspectives and soundtracks, as if whole events are being snatched from the scene encountered. Real life is being turned into a permanent, personal record on tape or disc. Sociologists have pointed out that taking photos or film is often the central activity of visiting, even more than studying the view direct, since some travellers want to speed around a destination and leave the studying until they are back at home - boring the pants off the neighbours invted round to see the show.

Taylor, John (1994) A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography, and the Tourist's Imagination, Manchester, Manchester University Press
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Image: Cruise liner leaving Venice

Tourism Needs Transport - Cruising

03.09.06

The cruise liner 'Costa Mediterranea' makes its careful way down the Canale della Giudecca in Venice. Love 'em or loathe 'em, cruise liners are bigger and better and the business is booming. The Freedom of the Seas, launched in April 2006, weighs 160,000 tons and carries 4,375 passengers. Size might matter for many things, but design is also important in providing what the customers want - luxury, entertainment or private space viewing the sea. At the other end of the scale the part-sailing, part engine-powered Wind Star is only 5,300 tons and takes 150 people on something like an old-style clipper ship.

The cruise ship pictured looks like a gross intrusion on Venice's incomparable architecture, but the city only exists because it has always been a maritime hub. In 1574, Henry III of France popped in for dinner and the city's arsenolotti knocked out a complete galley from keel-laying to launching in the time it took him to eat. The huge modern cruise ship terminal is one of the world's busiest. While Venice's population is declining fast the importance of the trade done there is very high. Of course the city's water-borne icon is the gondola, closely followed (and overtaken at speed) by the vaporetto, the motoscafo and the motonave, diesel-powered water buses serving the city and islands of the surrounding lagoon.

Touring by cruising is increasingly popular as the ships become more like little cities, with huge restaurants, theatres, cinemas, swimming pools and shops in addition to the privacy of the cabins and state rooms. The simplicity of seeing the world from the safe world of the ship while all your needs are met is only one attraction. You are more likely to get to know people when you share the space of the ship with them for a week or two. It's likely they share your interests and outlook on life, and there are opportunities for building up friendships. The hawkers, beggars and pickpockets who operate within a ordinary city are not around.

The detractors say it isn't really touring, just staying in a resort that happens to move around a bit. They might say that one bit of open sea is just the same as the next, and the trips ashore, if taken at all, are nearly as insulated from the real world as the ship is. Being loaded onto a coach and taken to some carefully-chosen market place or tourist entertainment is no way to interact with local places and people. Both the ship and the coach are steel cocoons where the textures, sounds and sights of the real world are kept at a safely controlled distance.

On the other hand, as every other traveller has found over the centuries, you've got to start somewhere.
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Image: Grayline tour bus, New York

Tourism Needs Transport - Tour Bus

02.09.06

Whole companies exist whose business is entirely to run tours using buses, open-topped like this Grayline example in New York. In Britain one of the largest is Guide Friday of Stratford-on-Avon, which now has tours running throughout Britain - and also abroad. In the USA, trolleybus tours exist on many of the main tourist cities, using specially adapted vehicles which are not actually trolleybuses picking up electric power from an overhead cable. London has had open-topped tours since the early 1950s when they were introduced by the London Passenger Transport Board.

Having a guide (or a recorded commentary) describe what the passengers are seeing as they make a tour is one of the many ways of interpreting a place to visitors. Guide books and leaflets, visitor- and heritage centres, wayside panels and personal audio commentary devices are some of the main channels of communication. They are often provided by many different bodies and so might duplicate or even contradict each other's messages, but that is a normal feature of the mass media. Tourism officers, city managers and public relations officers who know their jobs use such channels alongside the more obvious TV, radio, newspaper and magazine advertising, holiday brochures or direct mail leaflets. There have been guides for visitors in popular cities since at least the middle ages. Rome, the focal point for the European Grand Tour, had guides even earlier who took people around main attractions such as the catacombs.

The principle of guides leading walks had not only been transferred to buses like those in New York and London, but also onto boats and some railway journeys, where printed guide books were common in the nineteenth century, so having a person do it is a logical extension. As usual, getting the low down on a city - or any other place - from the comfort and security of a bus tour is a popular tourist activity. Good guides can add music, sound effects and plenty of humour to the best tours.

Which leaves just the problem that has always puzzled me. Why are Grayline buses always red?
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Image: Airplane at LAX

Tourism Needs Transport - Airplane

01.09.06

Some people have refused to travel in one of these things because it isn't a proper plane. Proper planes have proper, jet engines, not er - proper-pellers. That's the story. At one time people might have refused to travel in a jet aircraft because it didn't have propellers. The 1950s British Comet airliner had engines set flush into the wings, which meant it didn't seem at first to have engines at all.

There are advantages to the older type of aircraft, noisy though they might be. Prop planes tend to fly lower as they operate shorter, feeder routes and they have a lower operating 'ceiling' being smaller. This means that they often give a better view of the world below, clouds permitting. Like smaller jets they usually board via a walk across the tarmac and a set of steps, so have a better feeling of Real Travel. OK, that might mean getting soaking wet and if you don't care too much for flying you feel a bit less safe away from the cocooning air bridge, but travelling is about experience and its part of knowing what it involves.

If the plane is a high-wing version the view isn't obscured by a great, grey slab outside your window. Why do I always seem to get the seat with a panoramic view of an engine? I think it's true that with lower flying there is less chance of a double-glazed porthole having an annoying patch of water droplets condensed inside. It ruins the view and the photographs. And a lower altitude cuts the haze that does exactly the same.

One of the best developments, notably on Airbus planes, is the video feed from a camera mounted to see forward, just as the crew can see. I always thought that ought to be introduced, and it was. Coming in to an airport the fact that you can see way ahead to a comforting, long, runway is far better than being unable to see anything in front of you. What about providing more by way of sound? Some airlines have given a channel to let you hear pilot-control tower conversations. Others have explained in their seat-back publicity what all those bumps and rumbles are that make you think the floor has just collapsed. Computer-generated maps showing where the aircraft is have been added to most TV entertainment systems - a commentary produced by a GPS-triggered locational device could tell you more about where you are, what is happening, and even what cities you're actually passing by have to offer the traveller. You might be tempted to go there next time, a happier and appreciative flyer.
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