The Black Box

I’ve heard it said by some cool Australian visitors to our neck of the woods that Tel Aviv is one of the best-kept secrets on the map. I tend to agree. In my opinion right up there with Tel Aviv on that count is another Mediterranean port city, Marseille.
I’ve visited there often enough, nearly every summer over the last 15 years. My in laws live there so our family vacation there is almost a yearly ritual and I kind of tag along most summers.
Putting it that way is really quite misrepresenting the situation, oddly enough, even though they are my in laws. In some ways I get spoilt more than anyone else.
Take for example the Friday arvo lunches my father in law treats me to, hobnobbing with his friends and acquaintances in fancy restaurants and establishments in and around Marseille. And we’re not talking counter lunches either me hearties.
This here is one of my favourites.
The Black Box looks just like that, a black box. The décor is basic, even amateurish. They’ve hung used, formerly white t-shirts, all covered in nicknames written in black felt pen in immaculately crisp feminine script all along the black walls. When I say formerly white I mean beige going on yellow. These t-shirts are not something they’d have used in a Persil ad. They’re from the too hard basket. I notice that on one of the old t-shirts is an unoriginal looking caricature of a Bazza McKenzie looking fella with a corked hat and the letters VB written on the chest of his Chesty Bond Singlet. And looking further around this oblong cubicle of a place I notice that western end of is all window, 180 degrees of it, overlooking the port of Marseille.
At first the guard at the barrier didn’t let my father in law’s car pass through but once Pierre wound down the window and the guard recognised him we were allowed to roll on in. And why not? My father in law ran his business in this the second largest port of Europe for the best part of 4 decades. We park along the quayside and take a quick glance at the dry docks. The water level is low and something pongs of salt and fish. My father in law points out for my benefit, the lock system, for flooding the dry docks when the boats are done being repaired. He explains to me that these docks are just for private yachts and a good mate of his, the boat builder proprietor of this repair outfit, has made a damn good business out of it. When you’re hanging around my father in law it seems that every successful person in the city is a good friend of his, or else a disapproved of character of ill repute. It tends to make one feel a bit inadequate. I guess that’s the way it is when you’re just another bloke holding down a decent job and making an honest living, when you’re visiting the big smoke.
My father in law went on to explain that things are quiet in the dry docks for summer so there is just one solitary boat in repair. We look over to our left at a monster of a boat, blindingly white, a deckhand polishing the varnished wood railings, and she’s sporting a bloody great radar which would do NASA proud. In winter, Pierre explains, its different and these docks are so lively that there’s actually a queue of yachts waiting to be repaired.
Inside the Black Box Jean-Jacque and Joe and Patrick were already sitting round a table. A bottle of rosé had already been opened. We greeted each other in Gaelic fashion, this time not with 2 kisses but with 4. I played along and followed suit. Patrick leaves us and returns with a large casserole and in it some cold meat loaf looking concoction. Fois gras I reckon, but its actually terrine. It goes well with the rosé. Then a pile of grilled sardines turns up. The Marseilles’ favorite. I’m never sure if this sort of spread is an entrée or main course. I mean if I ask and it turns out to be a brunch I’m going to look like a right bloody ingrate aren’t I, and inerudite to boot.
A few more diners roll in; washed up with the tide, clothes kind of faded, hair dishevelled, they could almost be labourers off a building site. But this is no lunch bar, not when you’ve got to get passed a uniformed security guard to get your car onto the dock. This establishment is not so much a restaurant as a canteen of sorts, catering basically to the well-connected salty dog and/or their patrons. This is boaties’ territory, much like a yacht club on the river or on the harbour back in Oz, the play pit of the well to do in their leisure, come active sportswear phase.
Well back at the table, I follow the conversation as best I can and it’s not all that easy. Getting sloshed isn’t going to help my communication skills any, not when I’m already disadvantaged, so I try and go easy on the wine, not withstanding the lulls in my conversation. Instead I ask Joe, a lawyer I’ve met a couple of times, how the book he was writing is going. Jean-Jacque sitting on my left is a high-powered fellow on the local political scene and his family is what you’d call “old money”. Its what the French mean when they use the word bourgeois. He has plenty to say about his and French interests in Africa and the mid east and holidaying in the Caribbean and inheritances in Corsica. It’s all a bit heady for me. I smile and nod politely keeping an eye on everyone else for cues. Patrick our host and patron of the Black Box brings us our main course, the same for everyone. Modesty prevents me from spilling the beans about what it was exactly, but one attacks it with a nutcracker. Being a bit of a novice with nutcrackers I kept an eye on everyone else to follow their example. And I admit I’m all at sea when it comes to dinning etiquette with anything beyond finger food. Luckily for me this delicacy is fundamentally eaten with ones fingers, so as long as I managed to kept my clothes clean, I’d be doing all right.
Patrick’s wife drops by our table from time to time to gossip. She’s professionally coquettish, though she’s the wrong side of 30. She’s brown, garrulous and round as a long retired Cajun queen. She brushes a strand of her lank black hair behind an ear and points to the mega yacht in the docks and explains that it belongs to an Australian, someone Jewish from Morocco she thinks. I almost chuckle, figuring that this is in fact the yacht mentioned in some long forgotten news item about selling off Bank Leumi, upon which Frank Lowy entertained Ehud Olmert. I wonder if her apparent affinity for Jews is linked to origins in the Magreb. She could easily pass for some long lost aunt of Zahava Ben, and how typically Sephardi of her to mix up a Moroccan Jew with a Hungarian. (Not that in my opinion a Hungarian Jew would be any less likely to wonder if Bill Lawry isn’t one of theirs.) So I memorised the yacht’s name, Ilona, a mental footnote, in order to look it up later on the net.
And this is some of what I dug up. The Ilona is considered a mega yacht, being more than 23 metres, and personally I’ve never understood which dimension it is that they measure with respect to boats. It is owned by Frank Lowy, founder of the Westfield conglomerate, who is usually touted as the second richest person in Australia, and as the 172nd in the world (the Forbes' Richest List). He supposedly bought the yacht, which steers like a boat, for $110 million (AU), and which weighs in as the 43rd biggest luxury yacht in the world. The 242-foot (73.69 metres) Ilona IV boasts 18 guest beds, a gym, a massage room, a 14-seat cinema, and 13 crew cabins and a retractable helipad! Thunderbirds are go!
Lowy’s biography, wealth and influence can stir up a great deal of admiration or disapproval. Here’s a snippet from the Sydney Morning Herald from 17 December 2006: “Last week TV mogul Reg Grundy's $90 million blue and white floating palace Boadicea moored among Royal Australian Navy ships at Garden Island. The quiz show king's boat was at the mooring normally favoured by Australia's second-richest man, Frank Lowy, for his $110-million, 18-guestroom Ilona IV.”
Probably Lowy’s best known edifice is the Westfield Shopping Centre carved out of, dominating and infiltrating Bondi Junction in Sydney. Amongst his other achievments Lowy, has been instrumental in restructuring Football Federation Australia (soccer) and hiring Guus Hidink for the 2006 FIFA World Cup.
On the other hand I also came across at least one blogger who has an axe to grind, berating Lowy for being a Zionist and amongst other things for having fought in the Golani commandos, in what he considers to have been Israel’s so called “War of Independence”. And he thinks that Frank Lowy’s military record is all the more contemptible and condemning because these days Golani Brigade serves on the West Bank. Of course the blogger doesn’t give Lowy any consideration nor cut him any slack for being a holocaust survivor. What’s more in light of the above, Lowy’s business acumen coupled with “seditious” claims that he worked in investment banking in London, New York and Los Angeles, and that he is a board member of the Reserve Bank of Australia, and that he is a founding member of the International Advisory Council of the prestigious Brookings Institution in Washington, and that in 2001 he was the associate international chairman of the Israel Democracy Institute, and in 2003 he set up the Lowy Institute for International Policy, an international policy think tank devoted to foreign affairs, are all tainted in a negative and conspiratorial light. Confronted with all this stuff, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Oh, it was only later on that I learned that the lingering remains of our Black Box hostess’s exotic charms, are in fact rooted in her mixed heritage, of Chinese and Philippine origins. So it goes without saying that my guess pertaining to the yacht, was a lot better than was the case with respect to her, my suspected outcast from a certain clan in Be’er Sheva.