Les Élucubrations de Monsieur Smartypants

Somewhat Larger Insufferable Distractions - Part I

2008-12-24T02:11:00.037+01:00

Mes fatigués, mes pauvres, mes masses recroquevillées:

I know it’s been forever since I’ve been in touch with anyone, and though I’ve no long-term excuses, my short-term one is my increasingly bad mood brought on by recent and ongoing dealings with the infamous French bureaucracy. If the weather had been warmer last week I’d have probably found this latest phase of my Parisian Experiment highly entertaining. With the Bone-Chill Index in the mid-popsicles, however, the irrational inefficiency of Parisian fonctionnaires has kept me in a near-constant state of irritation, no matter how many times I chant to myself a much-recommended mantra about not taking these only-in-France experiences personally.

During my last visit to the States in November a man at the French Consulate in Washington was kind enough to grant me a “compétences et talents” visa, something they give to people they gamble might make some societal contribution of mutual benefit to France and the visa holders’ home countries. As with all long-stay visas, this one requires a visit to the local Prefecture of Police to obtain a residency permit —a carte de séjour—within two months of arrival, and as anyone who’s ever spent more than a few weeks here on anything but a tourist basis will tell you, the Prefecture offers a glimpse of the French bureaucracy at its Frenchiest bureaucracissitude.

I’ve read enough advice in memoirs of the Hapless France-based Expat variety to have considered myself equipped to avoid most pitfalls that form the basis of the genre, and of course that’s just the problem. I made the silly assumption that if I just read all instructions carefully and asked the right questions before starting the process, I would very simply become the first person in the history of French immigration law to get his carte de séjour with no delay and without a trip (or two, or three) to the pharmacy to buy headache remedies or tranquilizers. It even occurred to me (ever-so briefly) that, were I not such a lazy and undisciplined writer, the slim volume I would pen to describe the astounding simplicity and lack of effort by which I obtained my carte de séjour would stand out from others on the shelf, and in fact give way to a whole new literary genre: the Hapful France-based Expat Memoir.

I suppose it goes without saying after such ham-handed foreshadowing that things have not worked out quite as I imagined. As I’ve discovered, every story ever told about the endless French bureaucratic demands for trivial pieces of paper to be generated and copied and stamped and stapled and shuttled from one office to another so that they can be filed away, never to be looked at again, has been true. And the best way to experience it firsthand is to visit the Prefecture of Police. The volume of frivolous paperwork they generate would be jaw-dropping all by itself; what makes it truly hideous is that every request that a carte de séjour granter makes ensures that the petitioner will waste the maximum amount of his own time with no certainty whatsoever that the latest errand to find the most remote and rarely open office or the least accessible information will ultimately satisfy the ravenous appetites of the ever-masticating maws of French government filing cabinets—or, after finally satisfying one demand, that another will not have materialized while you were waiting in line on the other side of town to satisfy the previous one.

The Prefecture’s Web site indicates that as a resident of the 4th arrondissement I should report to the Prefecture on the Ile de la Cité, a 15-minute walk from my apartment. When I arrived, the receptionist there asked which arrondissement I lived in and then handed me a piece of paper with the address across town in the 17th arrondissement where residents of the 4th are to report (unlike residents of the 11th, who are instructed to report to the 14th), but not before making an appointment by telephone. The number being busy for three days, I went to the 17th where I took a number and waited my turn to ask if it was possible to make an appointment in person (or simply conduct the business at hand without an appointment) but was told that an appointment wasn't necessary because the type of visa I was issued required that I report to the Prefecture on the Ile de la Cité (the very office where the receptionist told me to report to the 17th). That office, I was told, doesn’t require appointments.

The secret, I was now eligible to be let in on by the Prefecture’s agent in the 17th, is not to ask the receptionist in the 4th where to report but to breeze past her and go straight to an upstairs office where, I find out only when I arrive, they issue not only cartes de séjour for holders of my type of visa, but also the definitive list of documents one should have known to gather before appearing there. This list, which is somewhat different from a similar list on their Web site and from the Washington Consulate (sources that someone who wasn't French might trust to be reliable for information needed before an appearance at the Prefecture), requests a birth certificate that must contain information one doesn’t find on American birth certificates. The woman who reviews the list with me so I can be certain I'm not imagining a reason for my frustration tells me the birth certificate also must be translated into French by an approved translator whom I can choose from another list that I must obtain by going to reception at the Palais de Justice, a few blocks away. When I show the woman that I have my birth certificate with me (as well as all other required documents) but it shows only my name and date and place of birth, but not any of the other information it’s expected to contain, and I ask her what exactly I should ask to have translated to meet the requirements, she shrugs and says she has no idea, even though I know—and she knows, and she knows I know—that she’s processed thousands of these applications in the past and therefore could easily tell me exactly what I need to do, which logically would be nothing, because: a) none of the information is vaguely relevant or useful; b) no one will ever look at any of these papers; c) in all likelihood no one would know where to look if they did ever need it; and d) no one cares.

The woman tells me that peut-être—perhaps—I could tell the missing information to one of the approved translators I hunt down off the list from the Palais de Justice, who could then write out it out in an affidavit, which I could then take to the American embassy to have notarized. (Surprisingly, the U.S. embassy does indeed provide notary services. They require an appointment, according to their Web site, the day of which I should arrive before the doors open and wait in line outside. From there I would be escorted through a number of security checks and take a number to wait to be called at some point before their close of business, although it is not clear—in fact seems unlikely—that the notary service the embassy provides is actually the service that the Prefecture needs or will accept.)

It is the woman’s word “peut-être” that I think of later while reading the nightmarish appointment procedure on the embassy’s Web site that makes me scrap that particular adventure, and now I am taking a break before I wade once again into the Prefecture’s murky waters.

À vos tours lors de vos numéros sont appelés,

###

This story continues. Soon. I promise.

They Swat Flies, Don't They?

2008-07-14T13:58:00.027+02:00

Mes petites punaises:

As if the Bush administration hasn’t given Europeans enough American criminal behavior to complain about, the U.S. recently heaped yet another affront on this poor continent—in the form of The Fly, an insufferable new opera based on David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of the 1958 classic schlock horror movie.

Perhaps my bad reaction stems partly from having recently seen the video of a 2005 Live from Lincoln Center presentation of Leonard Bernstein's Candide, and The Fly therefore suffers by such on-the-heels operatic comparison. (I can say now with all honesty, "I know Bernstein’s Candide, and Fly, sir, you are no Bernstein’s Candide.") It's not that simple, though. The real problem here is that no one, though heaven knows how many umpteen opportunities must certainly have arisen, thought to suggest that an opera based on The Fly is just, well, wrong.

Think about celebrated past musical stage adaptations: Man of La Mancha was based on the work of Cervantes; Kiss Me Kate and West Side Story drew from Shakespeare; Fiddler on the Roof from the tales of Sholem Aleichem; and the inspiration for Bernstein's Candide was, of course, the master satire by the great Voltaire. And though Victor Hugo and T.S. Eliot surely turn in their graves over the abominations of Les Miz and Cats, even those travesties of the stage were given a starting chance based on the quality of their source material. But to base an opera on a Vincent Price B-movie? Or rather, a remake of a Vincent Price B-movie!? You don’t have to know more about The Fly than that to know that even throwing in a leggy Ann Miller to hoof a steamy version of Cole Porter's "It’s Too Darn Hot" — or raising Maria Callas from the dead to sing "L'altra notte in fondo al mare" — wouldn’t convince a homosexual theater major on a good hair day that this idea had legs. There’s just no other way to state it: This mosca ain’t Tosca.

The Fly’s music by Howard Shore (best known as the award-winning composer for such high-brow box-office boffo as The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King), never belies its Hollywood roots. The film-length opera is one long Hobbit adventure score, without an aria to be heard. And lacking any melodic verse, the players simply belt out a rambling dialog in operatic sing-song. You really haven't suffered in a theater seat until you’ve endured the repetitive sprechgesang of lines like "All hail the new flesh! The new flesh has arrived!" and an adolescent chorus chanting an explanation of how the lead character (whose hailed new flesh transforms him into half-annoying-human/half-annoying-insect) is learning to compensate for the leprous melting away of his fingers by sucking up his food and vomiting it back up as an unpleasant liquid—which, come to think of it, is exactly what I wanted to do with the pre-theater croque monsieur I’d consumed (in the traditional chewing-and-swallowing human way) for lunch.

Cronenberg designed the set, which with its high-tech "teleportation pods" (by which the story's hero mistakenly commingles his DNA with a housefly) and its grim grayness successfully confers upon the theatergoer’s emotions the director’s distinctive, depressive cinematic mood, and the 1950s-style costumes (by Cronenberg’s sister Denise) encourage the imagination to drift back in time and yearn even more for Eisenhower-era musical theater, a reverie broken only momentarily by the brief frontal nudity of the story’s protagonist after he sheds said threads to leap in and out of the set's genetically destructive machinery. (Thank God lead tenor roles requiring nudity weren't offered back when Pavarotti was looking for work between snacks!)

Among the program credits' big names is Placido Domingo's, as The Fly's musical director, although the sight of the crown of the famous tenor’s head poking up from the orchestra pit as he conducted provided a less-thrilling brush with celebrity than my chance collision a few weeks ago with Anthony Bourdain (or maybe just his doppelganger) when I took a short-cut through an alley and tripped over the chain-smoking chef as he sat enjoying a cigarette amidst the fetid dumpsters behind a schmancy Champs Elysées restaurant. If Domingo's intention was to drown out the voices of the cast by sheer volume, he succeeded; I don't follow celebrity gossip enough to know if Domingo is known as a temperamental sort of fellow, but supertitles projected above the players in English along with their French translation lead me to imagine that the show's director found it easier to order up the English supertitles than to risk a temper tantrum by suggesting that the conductor tone the musicians down a notch so that the words the performers wailed could be discerned.

I know this curmudgeonly review is a break from the subject matter of my usual intolerant rants, but I offer it up as a warning to anyone looking for diversions when The Fly makes its U.S. debut in Los Angeles come September. If you don’t heed my advice and save yourself the cost of a ticket, I will have no sympathy when you cry, in the immortal, squeaky (and ultimately fruitless) last words from the original 1958 movie version, "Help me! Heeeeelp meeeeeee!"

Jusqu'à ce que la grosse dame chante,

###

News from NeoBoHo

2008-06-16T15:29:00.023+02:00

Mes chers dissipateurs touristiques,

Unlike the subway systems of Paris, San Francisco, and other cities with digital displays that inform riders of the number of minutes until the next train’s arrival, Prague’s metro system tells only how many minutes have passed since the last train left. In other words, when Prague trains are running late, the Czech people can ask not how long they must suffer, but how long they’ve been suffering. This is a sad metaphor to inflict on the people of Bohemia as a constant reminder that the answer (regarding their history, if not their efficient metro system) is “a really, really long time.”

The most recent suffering, so it appears, is the result of the Czech Republic’s switch to a market economy after the end of Communist rule. Capitalism has brought the country an astounding number of KFC outlets, McDonalds, and gambling casinos, along with every other Western store brand you can think of; tourist shops are awash with Russian nesting dolls in Harry Potter, George Bush, Osama Bin Laden, and American football-player motifs; and the streets of Prague’s historic center are clogged with so many foreign visitors that it’s hard to find a seat in which to suck down a six-dollar espresso at one of the city’s many Kafka-themed cafes. Today’s invaders, waging their assault with tourist dollars, pounds, and euros, cannot be beaten back across the Charles Bridge with stones and swords as were Prague’s aggressors of yore.

Of course it’s too easy to poke fun at the over-the-top tackiness of any city’s touristic pandering—such is the stuff that has kept the worldwide market for refrigerator magnets and commemorative floaty-pens afloat for decades now—but Prague seems somewhat more damaged by the phenomenon, more over-the-top, and a bit sadder than other cities.

There’s no doubt that Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders offer Czech gastronomes a lighter, healthier alternative to traditional Bohemian cuisine, and I’m not suggesting in any way that the yoke of Sovietism provided a more desirable or beneficial economic paradigm, but wander a few streets out of the well-kept and upscale historic center and Prague’s outer neighborhoods still exude a certain Soviet je ne sais quois, with some soul-deadening architecture and a shabby, unkempt air that’s often downright depressing. Graffiti cover vast surfaces of concrete, and weeds grow from cracked sidewalks. Save for the lovely, lush gardens surrounding Prague Castle, the city’s parks have gone to seed and untrimmed trees and shrubs force Sunday strollers to duck or push branches away to navigate their broken footpaths.

High above the Vltava River across from Prague’s former Jewish ghetto of Josevof, skateboarders and graffitists have taken over the area around a giant metronome (designed by either David Černý or Vratislav Novák, depending on whom you ask) that replaced the colossal Stalin monument which once dominated Prague’s skyline before its destruction by Leonid Brezhnev, who in a fit of post-Stalinist spin control ordered it razed in 1962. (The massive Stalin monument, which could be seen from nearly everywhere in Prague, took 5½ years to complete and its sculptor, Otakar Švec, dodged attending its unveiling by doing himself in three weeks before the ceremony. His was a relatively simple way of getting out of having to look at the damned thing; it required 800 kilos of dynamite to finally remove it from the sight of Prague's citizenry.)

By contrast, Josevof itself offers a fabulous combination of Jewish-persecution tourism and upscale shopping amid spectacular—and spectacularly maintained—architecture wonders. Visitors whose attention wanes in the long queues outside Josevof’s many synagogues and those which snake slowly through the ancient Jewish cemetery can load up their credit cards at Gucci, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Cartier between having their emotions jolted by the displays of artwork by doomed children at Terezin or having their hearts broken at the Holocaust memorial that honors the hundreds of thousands of Czech Jews who perished during World War II.

The Museum of Communism in the Nove Mesto district, which wryly promotes its address as “upstairs from McDonalds and next to the casino,” despite its relatively shabby and haphazard displays gives visitors a rather good history of the rise and fall of Czech Communism, most effectively through historic video footage and recreations of the classrooms, shops, and police interrogation rooms of yesteryear. It’s also a good place to find out the background of various historical landmarks, like the apartment building my friend Joanne and I stayed in on Wenceslas Square where Vaclav Havel announced the end of the Soviet era in a 1989 speech from the second-floor balcony and which now houses a well-stocked Marks & Spencer store for the well-heeled former Communist (or anyone with a few thousand extra Czech korunas burning a hole in his pocket).

For those who find the medieval charms of Prague’s oldest buildings not charmingly old enough, there’s good news come dinnertime: Doba Kamenná (Stone Age) is a caveman-themed restaurant in a basement in Nove Mesto where a young shirtless host wearing an animal-fur loincloth and face paint and dragging his knuckles on the floor leads you lumbering, apeman-style, to your table where he cheerily explains the ordering policy in a me-Tarzan-you-Jane vernacular: “You pick food from extensive menu; you pick drinks; you write food/drink choices on paper and pound fists on table, attract cavewaitperson’s attention.” (OK, that’s not verbatim, but close enough.) I was not aware of this, but apparently man learned to snap his fingers and whistle to get his waiter’s attention sometime after the Neolithic era. He demonstrates the proper use of Stone-Age #2 pencils and a promising fist-pounding technique and then lumbers off to greet and instruct new customers.

The restaurant is dark, furnished with roughly hewn furniture and decorated with animal hides, bones, antlers, and enormous tusks that are hung in rough sisal netting, the effect remarkably reminiscent of the fishing nets entangled with lobster traps and buoys that New England seafood restaurants commonly use to add a seaside ambiance.

The price of dinner includes a floor show whose story line loosely concerns a caveman named Toro and is acted out by a few of the waitstaff who grunt out the script in Czech (which to someone like me who knows not a word of Czech sounds surprisingly Paleolithic when spoken by a guy with his tongue tucked between his lower lip and teeth), although it is hard to hear much of anything over the din of frantic drumming by the three or four secondary players whose bit parts have no dialogue.

The menu, to simplify the ordering process, assigns IKEA-style nonsense names to all the dishes: Grilled tenderloin of pork in cream-pepper sauce served with mixed vegetables is “Býk,” Rib-steak with sautéed snow peas and roasted eggplant is “Pán," etc. Red wine, white wine, and beer are “Toro’s blood,” “Toro’s sweat,” and” Toro’s pee,” respectively; “non-alcoholic Toro’s pee” is available for Stone-Aged 12-steppers. (Mojitos are “mojitos.”)

A woman scantily coutured in simulated mammoth and Nikes brings plates of Býk and Pán and mojitos in rough clay cups, but no silverware because, of course, forks and knives would not be epoch-appropriate. The cocktails have plastic bendy straws. Every detail of the Stone-Aged theme has been attended to; a primitive roll of paper towels substitutes for the more-civilized man’s napkin.

Napkins bad. Food? Food good. Yum! Individually wrapped toothpicks, good! Take Visa? Good! But what does one tip in a place like this? European restaurant-goers aren’t as generous as American ones and, in France at least, over-tipping is seen as vulgar. Is it possible to be vulgar in a place like this? On the other hand, what is vulgarity in a city that sells “Czech me out!” tee shirts and Silvio Berlusconi nesting dolls and advertises Day-Glo performances of Cats under black-lights and abbreviated versions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni staged with opera-belting marionettes?

Back to anni domini and above ground, there is much of Prague to see nestled midst the Kurt Cobain and Che Guevara tee shirt vendors and street artists selling Angelina Jolie and George Clooney caricatures. Most of the attention to Prague’s historic architecture is paid to the more-ornate churches, municipal buildings, and apartments, but as spectacular are early 20th-century Cubist structures. The cubist movement in Czech architecture and furniture design borrowed from the style best-known through the paintings of Picasso, de-structuring familiar or expected forms into flat and angled facets. Amid Prague’s plethora of uber-fancy iron and stonework, the Cubist buildings don’t beg for attention, but to stop and admire them is one of the unexpected pleasures of Prague sightseeing, and a museum dedicated to the Cubist movement is housed in one of the city’s finest examples, the House of the Black Madonna, and inside the delightful building three large galleries tell the story and display examples of the most influential Czech practitioners of Cubist art, architecture, and design.

Another hidden treasure awaits the inquisitive visitor willing to search and repeatedly ask locals for clues to the whereabouts of the tomb of Tycho Brahe. The 16th-century Danish astronomer was buried in one of the interior support pillars of Prague’s old Tyn church after his untimely and rather bizarre demise in 1601. As the story goes, Brahe did not wish to offend Petr Vok, the aristocrat at whose home he was dining, by excusing himself to the little boy’s room before Vok had finished his chow. Apparently Vok was a really slow eater, and poor Brahe’s bladder burst before an opportune time between dessert and coffee arose for him to make a crotch-clutching beeline for the loo. (Talk about suffering! Oh, the humanity!) Brahe was a well-recognized man-about-Prague in his day, easily spotted by his false nose made of gold and silver. The sniffer his mom gave him was lost in Rostok before his arrival in Prague, sliced off with a sword by a man with whom he was dueling for the love or honor of a woman. (I’m unsure which, although knowing how polite-to-the-point-of-bursting Brahe could be, I’d like to assume he was defending the latter.) The relief carved in marble of Tycho Brahe’s likeness is a dead giveaway of who’s interred there, with his prosthetic proboscis clearly scribed in the stone. Had the carver who completed the tombstone not been such a stickler for detail, it would be easy to mistake an adjacent tomb for that of Brahe, as the bug-eyed expression on the face carved upon it seems to be of someone else in serious need of a whiz. Anyone who knows the sad tale of the noseless man’s passing from not pissing would be forgiven, by me at least, for any confusion.

Bons voyages,

###

More Dead History

2008-05-15T16:12:00.049+02:00

Mes semblables de Dieu,

One of the wonders of Paris is that when not stepping in dog turds one is forever stepping back in history, and yesterday I stumbled into the Cimetière de Picpus, site of the mass graves of 1,306 final victims of the Terror. Picpus is just a short tumbril ride from the Place du Trône Renversé (or “overturned throne,” its name itself later beheaded to be simply the Place du Trône), where the guillotine was moved in the summer of 1794 after shopkeepers near its more stylish and central location in the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde) began to complain that the stench from the blood-soaked cobblestones was driving away customers.

(I suspect this may well have marked the beginning of the now-annual tradition of nearly all Parisians to flee the city during the hottest summer months, and perhaps even of their disinclination to pick up after their dogs. Maybe they originally hoped that the perfume of pervasive poop might mask that of baking blood, and when that failed—their canine poopers of choice being so small and the guillotine so busy—they fled to the seashore until cooler weather returned.)

But I digress. Parisians did grow tired of the daily carnage downtown, and moving the Big Blade to the Place du Trône allowed the Committee of Public Safety to continue a steady separation of corps and têtes, including the aforementioned 1,306 whose 2,612 parts were carted down the street and dumped in a couple of big holes at Picpus during the brief period from 14 June to 17 July—a mere ten days before the public got truly cranky, turned against the Committee, and sent its leader Robespierre to the scaffold himself.

You enter the grounds of the cemetery through a courtyard across the street from a Renault repair shop. Inside, a man takes three euros, opens a locked gate, and sends you wandering through a pretty little park to look through another locked gate at two big patches of gravel and grass with explanatory plaques. Picpus is really two cemeteries, one containing two mass graves of the decapitated, and then a rather sad little graveyard of the decapitateds' relations who died later from mostly bladeless causes. (I couldn’t help picturing them all interred wearing tee shirts silkscreened with the words “I’m with headless” and a little arrow pointing in the direction of the mass pit.) This area contains a few notable corpses whose heads were intact upon burial; the Noailles are buried here (the Comtesse of Noailles was to Marie Antoinette sort of what Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers was to Joan Fontaine's character in Rebecca), as is the Marquis de Lafayette, who we all know and love as the French guy who lent his military expertise to help out our own revolution and now has a park named for him across from the White House where our own grouchy citizens gather to complain.

When I arrived at Picpus, the caretaker was very chatty, and after determining my nationality he asked, "So, tell me: Why do you speak English?"

"Huh?"

He repeated the question. "Why do you Americans speak English?"

"I don't think I understand what you’re asking me," I told him.

"It's the language of your oppressors! Why would you want to speak that? Didn't you fight to free yourself from the British? It makes no sense that you'd go through all that trouble, and then continue to speak their language!"

"Um..." I hesitated, not really sure if he was joking. "Well we were British for a long time. What would you have us speak? What do they speak in France's former colonies, like those in Africa?"

He grinned broadly. "Well they speak French, of course! But French is the language of freedom! English, well, ha, that's the language of slavery!!"

"Well, I suppose our Navajo might agree with half of that," I told him.

He laughed, shook my hand, welcomed me, and handed me two little pamphlets. One contained information about the cemetery and its history and the other was a small tract titled The Sixteen Blessed Carmelites of Compiègne. Before unlocking the inner gate and showing me how to let myself out at the end of my visit, he pointed to the entrance of the adjacent church and told me not to miss checking that out too. “It has the most important Virgin Mary in France,” he told me. “Very important, even if you’re not a Christian. It’s been recognized by a number of Popes, including Pope Pius X and that last one, the Polish one.”

Inside the cemetery, I read through the little tract he’d handed me. It tells the story of the Carmelites of Compiègne, a knot of nuns who since their order’s foundation in 1641 have been "doing good" by remaining silent, poor, and prayerful. In June of 1794, 16 of them were arrested, condemned to death (according to the tract, “for their fidelity to the religious life and for their great devotion to the Sacred Heart”), beheaded on July 17, and tossed with the others into the Picpus pit.

“What happiness to die for one’s God!” one was reported to have cried out from the scaffold. “May we be the last ones to die.”

As proof of the power of the sisters’ prayers, the tract tells that “just ten days later, ended the torment that for two years had shed upon France’s son’s (and daughters).” Say what? Granted, this little chapel with its "most important Virgin" is nowhere on the Magnificence Scale compared to Venice's
Santa Maria della Salute, but c'mon! Stop already with the adoration of Holy Virgins who seem to be everywhere blessing—with little or no success—the bejeezus out of people who are doomed! If she had been a real, live, breathing human being, no doubt she'd be vilified instead of venerated, and she'd be marched to the scaffold lickety-split. And I thought the deaths of Nixon and Reagan brought on amnesiac, rosy-hued posthumous saint status! Heh.

The tract then provides a prayer (which I will spare you) “for obtaining graces through the intercession of the Blessed Carmelites of Compiègne” and an address where anyone who has received graces and healings through such intercessions should immediately send notification of same, so that beatification procedures can be started, tout de suite.

Despite the multi-Pope appeal that Picpus presents, and an entertaining painting hanging in the church that depicts the martyred nuns silently, poorly, and devotedly praying beside the guillotine under the watchful (if ultimately no-count) eye of the Blessed Virgin, I must admit that more graveside fun was to be had on the other side of town, at the Cimetière des Chiens in Asnières.

If any of you were wondering where little French doggies go after they’ve taken their last supper at their favorite Parisian brasserie, it is here in this pet cemetery on the banks of the Seine. The sentiments engraved on their headstones are no less sappy and sentimental than those at the Pet’s Rest outside San Francisco, and they’ve been engraving sappy and sentimental doggerel and best wishes on headstones here considerably longer—since the late 1800s, in fact. Here too lie rabbits and cats and something that I think was a monkey (though possibly some breed of canine that was stylish for a mercifully brief time in the 1960s) and whose tombstone is adorned with her likeness, posed in what must have been her favorite gingham dress.

As I strolled past the many tombs of long-deceased Fifis and Mouchettes, I nearly stumbled over a woman who, looking quite fetching with a miniature French bulldog under her arm, sat weeping over the grave of another dog, now departed. I did not wish to disturb her by asking if the deceased was her current dog’s mother or if perhaps it was of a breed that no longer matched her shoes and I’d solved the mystery of what happened to all of Paris's no-longer-fashionable Jack Russell terriers. Whether the former or the latter, her grief over the dog-loss seemed genuine and bottomless, and if I’d been to Picpus first, I might have provided her with the words of prayer she could use to obtain the graces and intercession of the 16 headless, martyred virgins of Compiègne, but as it was I just left her and Fifi II to continue unassisted with their own miracle-free grieving process.

À bientôt au paradis,

###

Fureur Antionette

2008-04-17T15:20:00.029+02:00

Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
Les aristocrates à la lanterne!
Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
Les aristocrates on les pendra!
Si on n’ les pend pas
On les rompra
Si on n’ les rompt pas
On les brûlera.
Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira

Ah! It'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine
Aristocrats at the lantern
Ah! It'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine
The aristocrats, we'll hang them!
If we don't hang them
We'll break them
If we don't break them
We'll burn them
Ah! It'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine
— "Ça Ira," popular tune of Revolutionary France

"Nevermind."
— Gilda Radner as Emily Litella on Saturday Night Live

Citoyennes et Citoyens,

For those of you who didn't get the memo, the French recently had a change of heart regarding their past grumpiness that resulted in the separation of Marie Antoinette’s head from the rest of her package. Just as we Americans are easily distracted from truths and are encouraged what to think about political figures by trivialities hammered into us by the media and special interests, so too were the French during the reign of Louis XVI. When the incredibly unhappy populace, starved for liberté, égalité, fraternité, and (perhaps most importantly) food, were worked up into a revolutionary lather by round-the-clock pamphleteers who placed much of the blame for their troubles on Louis’s high-living and seemingly uncaring bride, they cheered on their bloodthirsty leadership to hack first and ask questions later—sometimes two centuries later.

Two-hundred and some years after the executioner's celebrated slam dunk of Her Majesty’s noggin, a well-researched and well-reasoned biography of Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser and (more effectively) the 2006 Sofia Coppola film that used Fraser’s work as its basis, has convinced the French people of their poor public judgment back then and transformed modern opinion from "mad at" the woman to "simply mad about" her. The only bit of restraint I’ve been able to discern among all the gaga is their failure to honor her as they honor Mona Lisa, by manufacturing day-glo flip-flops bearing her image. Such footwear is one of the very few items of commemorative memorabilia not available in the gift shop of the Grand Palais, where people this month are paying ten euros a head and lining up for hours, sometimes in pouring rain, to suck in all-things Marie-Antoinette at the current smash-hit expo there that chronicles her life.

I haven’t had the chance to run a poll since I attended, but I may be the only person in Paris who’s disappointed by this oversight and a couple of others. Certainly there is an embarrassment of other riches from which the chotchke-starved Marie Antoinette-o-phile can choose, including Marie Antoinette needlecraft pillows in assorted sizes; Marie Antoinette gowns for four-year olds; Marie Antoinette parasols; Marie Antoinette ballpoint pens; Marie Antoinette Post-It note pads; Marie Antoinette CDs and DVDs; dozens of Marie Antoinette book titles; replicas of Marie Antoinette’s Versailles dinnerware; and umpteen styles of Marie Antoinette postcards. But Marie Antoinette zories? Zilch.

I entered the shop excited about the prospect of finding a postcard of my favorite item in the exhibition, but was terribly disappointed that whoever ordered supplies for the show—likely the same old fart who didn’t think a proper nod of apology for mistakenly chopping off a woman’s head should include printing her picture on a pair of made-in-Taiwan plastic sandals—neglected to make a postcard using the illustration from the frontispiece of a small volume of slanderous 18-century filth on display called Fureurs Utérines (Uterine Madness), a racy little inking that depicts the queen with her skirt pulled up high to reveal the most precious royal jewel. In a silent financial protest (which I understand probably went unnoticed by the cashiers processing the long line of customers whose arms were piled high with merchandise) I bought rien de la reine. Nothing.

The small volume is tucked away in a tiny case in the exhibit's final room, which focusses on anti-Marie Antoinette mudslinging, and would have been easy to miss save for the fact that the room has surprising little else in it despite reports that Revolutionary propagandists were prolific and relentless in such pursuits. According to Fraser and other historians, print shops in France worked round the clock churning out anti-monarchist matter, much of which characterized Marie Antoinette as a woman with an uncontrollable carnal appetite who denied herself little in her attempts to satisfy it, bedding both men and woman, and even her own son.

Overall, the show is disappointing in its lack of new information for anyone with a passing familiarity with French Revolutionary history, and with the exception of side-by-side portraits by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun it's rather uninteresting. Le Brun might be considered the mother of modern Photoshop journalism, the genre that brought us a blacker O.J. Simpson on the cover of Time Magazine. To present a more innocent image of the increasingly unpopular queen, Le Brun was asked in 1786 to re-paint a portrait she’d done three years earlier, but this time losing the jewelry and haute couture. Using royal portraits for spin control was hardly new, especially for the Court of Versailles (another famous portrait, commissioned after the disastrous “Affair of the Necklace” from which Marie Antoinette’s public image never really recovered despite her complete innocence in the matter, shows her as the doting and relatively simple mother, more concerned with family values than sucking peasants dry to pay for sparkly neckwear), but this pair of paintings is interesting in that the artist actually re-painted the exact same portrait, changing only the queen’s clothing and accouterments. It’s a treat to view the two together, and fortunate that the original wasn’t destroyed. (Keeping it around strikes me much like leaving the original jpeg image on your hard drive so investigators can retrieve it to prove your questionable journalistic ethics.)

While overall the show’s a disappointment, it is morbidly fascinating to me to witness this hubbub over the old girl, and to refresh and expand my understanding of those times while reflecting on them in a modern context. A comparison of those days to these doesn’t reveal any newfound reluctance by people to react rashly, with one exception—and granted, its a huge exception: Today there’s no guillotine sitting in the Place de la Concorde, lopping the heads off of everyone who suddenly finds herself (or himself) on the wrong side of public opinion.

When I arrived here in September, public approval for French president Sarkozy was enormous, but in a few short months plummeted after a combination of political and social blunders to the point that now it’s hard to find anyone in Paris with a good word to say about him. Some of it’s superficial, concerning general distaste for his recent marriage to Italian supermodel/pop star Carla Bruni, some of it is policy related (which confuses me, since none of the dreadful things he’s said or done politically should surprise anyone who was paying attention before the election), and some of it has to do with a complicated sense of what it means to the French to be French and their general horror over Sarko’s low-brow cultural tastes. At the height of the Terror in 1794, any one of these things would have gotten him dragged to the scaffold after a speedy trial with a predetermined guilty verdict.

I don’t think Sarkozy will be much remembered in 200 years, or at least not remembered or studied by French schoolchildren the way the last monarchs of France are remembered, or the Girondins, or the Jacobins, or any the those who went from being ahead to losing their heads during the Terror. I do think that Carla Bruni is very, very fortunate that the French aren't as quick to behead as they were back then, even if they are as fickle. As a foreign-born, wealthy, and highly visible wife of a French leader and the subject of much negative public sentiment and a lot of negative media hype in a country facing severe problems with unemployment and rising prices, her story sounds quite a lot like Marie Antoinette's. If the French still dispatched the objects of their scorn the way they did back then, there’d be a very good chance that one day thousands of people would be lined up at the Grand Palais to view an apologetic retrospective of her life and to buy whatever the 23rd-century equivalent will be of Carla Bruni Post-It notes and ballpoint pens (and perhaps some cheap made-in-USA flip flops), disappointed that there are no postcards of the more entertaining fureurs being hyped by today’s media.

Ça ira...

###

ADDED NOTE (22 APRIL): These nifty lollipops from Archie McPhee aren't sold by the unimaginative vendeurs at the gift shop of the Grand Palais, either.

Further Adventures in Live Performance

2008-04-12T14:10:00.055+02:00

Bougeurs et trembleurs,

I haven't suffered an overdose of creative self-expression like last night's since I went to art school in the early 1970s. (And if any of you say you recall my having said I miss the experience of art school in the early 1970s, either you're hallucinating or you're a liar.)

Gwen told me she'd be performing at the same theater near the Place des Fêtes that Sandra's baby has been known to frequent, and though I felt improperly attired, not having yet had the chance to locate a tee-shirt that said, "Je ne fumerai pas dans le bac à sable si vous n'amenez pas votre enfant au théâtre" (I won't smoke in the sandbox if you don't bring your child to the theater), I was delighted to go. Gwen is an extraordinary performer—a jazz singer whose talents I've been loathe to write about before because I can't come up with a description to do her justice. Whether singing a familiar jazz standard or an obscure gospel hymn, she's astonishing on stage, with an incredible vocal range and an infectious energy. She's absolutely electric, vibrating from within even when still, yet evincing a center of calm when at her most frenetic. And she can get very frenetic.

Her appearance last night was no disappointment, a ten-minute improvisation with her dance instructor, Elsa, and the drummer from Sandra and Julien's last performance. Gwen entered the theater imitating a freight train, hissing steam. Then, crying "All aboard!" she launched into an old Peter Yarrow/Paul Stuckey number styled after a negro spiritual, in a solemn a cappella moaning…

This train…
done carried my mother…
well, this train…

Gwen took long pauses between the lines, as if she was waiting for the words to find their way from deep inside her and bubble up to the surface…

This train…
done carried my mother…
well, this train …

With Gwen center stage, Elsa appeared from the side and approached her as if pulled, physically, by the sound of Gwen's voice.

This train, done carried my mother
my mother, my father, my sister and my brother
this train, done carried my mother, well this train…

Her tempo quickened and she and Elsa faced each other. While Gwen sang, Elsa danced as if she were a marionette whose strings were being jerked by the rhythm of Gwen's words, and then the drummer started in and Gwen and Elsa just went wild as if possessed, and the initial plaintiveness of the spiritual dissolved into a joyous, crazy, raucous frenzy.

When they finished, the audience went nuts applauding, and well they should have, because it was just stupendous. It was wildly creative and simultaneously funny and moving, a combination I don't understand how one arranges or choreographs for, but from witnessing it in Gwen's previous engagements and in Sandra and Julien's dance that Elsa had conceived and directed, I know isn't accidental.

But Gwen and Elsa's performance was the last of the evening, and Gwen shouted her initial "All aboard!" after 10:30 p.m.—long after the train that I wished done carry me—home—had left the station. Because aside from this spectacular finale and the act that immediately preceded my friends’—two shirtless, contortionist break dancers who whirled themselves into pretzels accompanied by a young man who recited the articles and advertisements from a tabloid newspaper in a beat-box, forward-and-back turntable-scratching style—the rest of the program was at best lackluster and was at worst right out of Alfred University circa 1974, had all Alfred's ceramic arts majors taken up modern dance. The motley assortment of entertainment began at the very un-artfully early hour of 6:45 p.m., and performances took place in various corners of the multi-room theater building over the next four hours.

First up were two middle-aged men with shaved heads, wearing jock straps over nylon track pants, who to space-age techno music danced the roles of space explorers in a wayward rocketship. This was represented by a seven-foot cube of steel tubing, its walls formed by a criss-crossing of bungee cords in which were entangled a couple of dozen G.I. Joe dolls in various military get-ups, adventurer costumes, and cowboy suits. The two space cowboys swam in slo-mo through their simulated weightless environment, making emergency announcements in futuristic-computer voices and picking up random G.I. Joes and waving them back and forth while making whhzzzzhh-ing sounds (which, as all boys know, indicates that your G.I. Joe flies really, really fast).

Some time after I exhausted all hope of finding answers to the question "What the fuck??" that was begged by this spectacle, the music segued into something less techno-sci-fi and more techno-gay-dance-club, and the pair donned boxing gloves and head guards, thus transforming their bungee-and-steel space station into a bungee-and-steel sparring ring in which they first did a little pole dancing like the girls down at the Badda-bing do, and then re-created the slow-motion fight scenes from Raging Bull, but without the sweat and blood, the crisp black-and-white cinematography, or any of the drama Scorcese offered attendees of the film version.

After they had sparred for a few minutes, and their last right-left right-left jab-jab ended in a sexually ambivalent embrace, the pair stepped apart and in an apt metaphor for the artistic masturbation their performance embodied, they each reached down into their jockstraps. But rather than stroking their cocks they instead pulled dental protectors from their crotch protectors and inserted them (in their mouths) for some final bit of symbolism that in all honesty escaped me. A more literal interpretation might be that they feared violence by their patience-stretched audience. I have no idea. (And to be truthful, their audience was far more generous than I am being, enthusiastic in their appreciation of all the evening's performers. I admit that only I was the crab.)

A long intermission followed, during which attendees had a choice of listening to an “intervention musicale à l’harmonica” (which is exactly what it sounds like) or stepping outside to smoke with a couple of other artists on the program, two young men who had hung a large canvas on a wall in the courtyard and were covering it with spray paint. The burning cigarettes dangling from their lips and from those of the theatergoers as the small outdoor space filled with volatile paint fumes added some otherwise-lacking suspense to the evening.

Upon my return to the auditorium, two solo dancers wordlessly challenged me to endure them until Gwen’s promised appearance. The first did a dance I can only describe as an interpretion of the hypothetical existence of an unlucky love child borne of Anna Pavlova and Marcel Marceau, in which said offspring inherits the dancing talents of his father and the miming talents of his mother. (If this was indeed the motivation for this dance, it was sheer brilliance.) The second, by a woman who was a much more gifted dancer, but who occasionally reminded me of the character in the Jules Pfeiffer cartoons who was always offering up a dance to some modern-day neurosis or political situation, was simply way too long.

One more intermission to inhale paint fumes and risk self-immolation with a much needed nicotine fix, and then a drawn out performance piece (I won't call it dance) in which a woman wearing nothing but a 20 x 40-foot satin tarpaulin that completely covered the stage ever-so-slowly rose from the floor where she lay as the audience filed in to take their seats, reciting a long list of first names of people who may or may not have known, know, or will know each other, winding the enormous fabric around her all the while, and I was inspired to choreograph my own performance, “A Dance to the Stay-at-Home Parisian.”

And tonight, I am doing just that. (Not developing a dance, but staying home.) And that’s my latest news from here, where the daylight already lasts late into the evening, the weather is warming up, the public gardens are a-riot with blooming flowers, and Spring has greatly improved the mood of the average Parisian.

Profitez des beaux jours,

###

Little Insufferable Distractions

2008-03-17T02:58:00.066+01:00

Participants et participantes,

Last Friday evening, my friend Gwen and I attended a dance recital in Belleville in which two of her friends, Sandra and Julien, were performing. I'd met Sandra and Julien on numerous prior occasions, and I've also been to the studio near République where they and Gwen study with a woman named Elsa, a well-known figure in the world of modern dance and choreographer of Friday's piece. Elsa had saved us two of her block of reserved seats for the sold-out event at the small theater, and Gwen and I sat in the second row, just behind and a few places to the left of a man with a small child.

Sandra and Julien's dance, "Les Amants," was the second of five in the evening's program. When the lights came up, Julien appeared stage right crouched in a frozen pose with his back to Sandra who, to the quiet rhythm from a drummer at the back of the stage, approached him cautiously from stage left. It was a slow, suspenseful advance expressing both curiosity and hunger, and nothing in Julien's posture or facial expression revealed how he would receive her as the distance between them finally closed. Would her stalking be foiled in some way? Would it be violent? Tender? The subtle, rhythmic drumming continued, building ever so slowly ... the predator/lover closing in on her prey/lover ... and ... the infant on the man's lap started babbling!

Oh! My! God! I was so enraged!

I tried to ignore the kid and regain the lost sense of suspense, but the infantile "ba ba bleh bleh" continued as Sandra arrived within two feet of Julien and with a dramatic flourish and thunderous boom of drums, Julien leaped from his crouch, spun 180 degrees, and was caught in Sandra's tight embrace with his legs firmly wrapped around her waist, his cheek to her shoulder, his eyes closed.

Silence.

Sandra stood absolutely still with Julien locked to her upper body. Their stillness was as suspenseful as Sandra's approach had been. Where was this going? Was this to segue into something violent? Tender? Julien's eyes remained closed, content … his legs and arms held tight around her, one hand cupping the back of her head … the drumming started up again as they … "ba ba bleh bleh bibbebeb!"

What the fuck was this guy thinking bringing this kid in here? What the fuck were the theater people thinking letting this guy in here with a kid?

The dance between the lovers continued, magnificent. Dramatic and exciting, it wove a marvelous path through sweet and savage emotions with its earthy, almost tribal drumming and the dancers' sensual, expressive movements. The kid quieted down about a third of the way through, but he was waving his hands in the air and fidgeting through the remainder of the piece, and the distraction caused by him—and by my rage at him—from the one dance in five I specifically came to see made me completely crazy.

Many of you may recall that years ago, before my earnest attempts to learn the French language, I had arrived for the very first time in Paris knowing only one French phrase—the unusual and rarely useful words one would use to tell someone that her children were insufferable. After two weeks, I returned to San Francisco greatly disappointed that I never found just the right circumstance to say, "Madame, vos enfants sont insupportable!" This memory returned to me as I tried to watch my friends on stage while in the corner of my eye a two-year old squirmed, his chubby fingers searching his daddy's pockets for who knows what.

After all these years, finally, an enfant insupportable! I had just been to another event the previous evening, a performance by Gwen in a gallery in my neighborhood, at which I'd had had a long conversation with someone entirely in French. I was ready for this. I was so ready!

After Sandra, Julien, and the percussionist left the stage and the applause for them ended, I leaned over and tapped the guy on the shoulder. Understanding that I really couldn't blame the child for the insufferable sins of the father, I adapted my dusted-off admonition:

"Monsieur," I said to him, "vous devriez emmener votre enfant à l'extérieur. (You should take your child outside.) C'est une distraction insupportable!"

And he replied, "Avez-vous un problème?!" (Do you have a problem?)

And I said "Oui! J'ai un GRAND problème!" (I don't know how to say, "You bet your ass I have a problem," but I plan to learn it soon.)

And then the guy had the audacity to tell me, "SORTEZ!" (Leave!)

Man, was he pissed off! I was expecting someone else nearby to support me—or rather I was expecting the entire audience in this small theater to rally behind me—but no one did, and then he turned again to face the stage and I sat back in my seat, and we were both fuming. And then, just before the next dance started, the guy got up and left the theater with his kid.

Good riddance.

And that's when Gwen leaned over to me and said, "That was Sandra's husband. That was their baby."

Cough.

So, as I said, that was Friday. Tonight I went to meet Gwen again and took Alex, my former San Francisco neighbor who's here for the week, to a small jazz club where a trumpet player whom Gwen had worked with was appearing. When we arrived, we descended some stairs to a tiny basement performance space where a trio was making the kind of atonal, arrhythmic jazz that even under ideal conditions isn't my favorite type of music. The trumpeter was there doing a kind of wheezy thing on his horn, and there was another guy sitting pigeon-toed in a chair and leaning so far over his electric guitar that his long hair fell forward to give the audience the impression that the Addams' cousin Itt had taken up jazz guitar. As he slowly scraped macabre, dissonant sounds out of the strings with an under-rosined violin bow, he and the trumpeter tapped their feet at unrelated tempos (maybe "tempos" isn't an accurate word, but I would call it tapping … I think) and the drummer—well, the drummer was doing something else altogether.

I think this kind of jazz was better before Paris's smoking ban took effect, when little rooms like this quickly became too dense with smoke to let patrons see too much foolish detail, or perhaps I just need to take up heroin to properly appreciate this particular musical genre, but it really wasn't what I had expected or hoped to endure. I didn't want to make an immediate beeline for the door, and Gwen hadn't yet arrived, so I gestured to Alex that he take the one available seat while I stood against the wall and watched for a few minutes from behind a row of chairs, and that's when I noticed that seated in them were a woman and her small child, about the same age as Sandra's kid. The child was sucking quietly on a bottle, and the mother had a whole passel of baby-pacifying paraphernalia on her lap.

I made a quick inference from her definitely-NOT-a-smack-whore appearance that the mother wasn't there in search of Paris's quintessential smokin' jazz-club scene—and because she, her baby, and the drummer were the only three Asians in the room I guessed that they were all related. The reason for the umbrage Sandra's husband took at my invitation for him to step outside two nights earlier was suddenly apparent, too: It seems I still had more French vocabulary to learn, and performance du jazz and représentation de la danse are actually Parisian slang terms for "baby night." (I'm just sending out a little warning to any of my readers who dream of coming to Paris, taking up heroin, and playing sweet jazz in a smoky club with other cool daddy-o's: Those days are over, man, and the term "daddy-o" has a completely different meaning now.)

Fortunately, I had no urge to ask this parent to remove her child from the joint. If anything, I would have welcomed some dulcet-voiced babbling during this show. And if the baby had piped up, likely no one would have thought a "ba ba bleh bleh" in b-flat (or even some outright caterwauling) hadn't been arranged as part of the evening's presentation.

I did, however, practice great restraint in not exclaiming, "Madame, vos musiciens sont insupportable!"

A 'toot' à l'heure.

###

Angelo/Diavolo

2008-01-28T23:56:00.005+01:00

.
"The cathedral … says something to the people of this village which it cannot say to me; but it is important to understand that this cathedral says something to me which it cannot say to them. Perhaps they are struck by the power of the spires, the glory of the windows; but they have known God, after all, longer than I have known him, and in a different way, and I am terrified by the slippery bottomless well to be found in the crypt, down which heretics were hurled to death, and by the obscene, inescapable gargoyles jutting out of the stone and seeming to say that God and the devil can never be divorced. But I must accept the status that myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth."
— James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village," 1953, Notes of a Native Son

"I read everything I could get my hands on—except the Bible…"
— James Baldwin, autobiographical notes, Notes of a Native Son

"I love to eat and drink … and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh."
— ibid

Convito in Casa di Levi, 1573, Paolo Caliari, Il Veronese (1528-1588)
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
Click here for larger (but still horribly lacking) view.

Ciao, belli ragazzi!

It would be near impossible to select one of the countless astounding paintings one sees by wandering into any of Venice's dozens of churches and museums and declare it a favorite, but one that ranks way up on my list would be Veronese's Feast in the House of Levi—for its story as well as the wonders of the painting itself.

Veronese's ambitious effort was originally intended to illustrate that seder-of-all-seders, the Last Supper, but his imagination and sense of humor got the best of him and the final product landed him before a tribunal of the Inquisition, accused of heresy for his inclusion of superfluous characters not normally associated—in appearance or behavior—with more orthodox depictions of Christ's oft-represented final repast. He was spared being spit-roasted for his crime, but rather than compromise his artistic vision by making changes to satisfy his detractors, he simple renamed the painting so that future charges of heathenhood would be avoided. Apparently, heresy ain't heresy unless your rendering of drunks, dwarves, dogs, and idiots gamboling around every Christian's favorite Lord and Savior as he sups his last is actually called "The Last Supper." By playing with semantics Veronese avoided future run-ins with the religiously crazed (to whose obsession the whole of Venice is a monument), and saved his thrilling masterpiece for heathens like Yours Truly to enjoy for centuries to come.

One can't say that heretical artists don't run into trouble today. But it's probably hard for youngfolk to imagine in this era of the Piss Christ (whose creator, Andres Serrano, didn't receive as much as a yanked fingernail or public flogging for his artistic transgression) that it hasn't been too many centuries since including a midget in a painting of Jesus could get you dragged before a tribunal whose members would've loved nothing better than to nail you to a cross—or worse.

Being somewhat of a heretic myself, I was able to use my short time in Venice to seriously enrage a devout Catholic with whom I was traveling. Things started out just fine, and ended amicably, too, although only after I apologized for offending her religious sensibilities and not, I noted to myself, because any apologies were offered for bruises made to my own tender sensibilities. (I took early umbrage to find certain areas of all churches off-limits to anyone not entering to pray, and it wasn't until the third or fourth stop that I realized I could just pull up my scarf to conceal my un-Christian proboscis, sneak to a pew and fake piety, thereby getting a gander at a few extra, exquisite Carpaccios and Tiepolos.) But there was a moment when I apparently went too far in poking fun at Venice's dazzling display of Catholic excess.

B—, an Argentinian friend of someone I know from l'Alliance Française, is one of those people who would irritate the hell out of me if she were not so entertaining. I hadn't met her until the day before she, my schoolmate Aurie, and I left for our Venetian adventure. B— speaks about as much French as I do, maybe a bit more, but rather than slowing down her discourse by explaining her way around words she doesn't know in French by using French words she does, she simply substitutes their Spanish, Italian, or English equivalents—whichever ones come to mind first. She's also a fearless and intrepid traveler who starts up conversations with anyone and everyone, and we rarely entered a restaurant or boarded a vaporetto without B— starting some animated and enjoyable conversation with those around us.

Now that I'm no longer in language classes and I have to make a pointed effort to find ways to practice my French in Paris, this was a welcome opportunity to really exercise my foreign language skills. Unfortunately, I had forgotten nearly all the Italian I once knew, and it seemed that for every Italian word I recalled I would forget two words of French or English, and trying to keep up with B—'s rapid-fire Francoitalispanglish had me talking like her in no time, so at times I had no idea what was going to come out of my mouth when I spoke. (I do believe that in trying to find out whether it was faster to walk or take the water bus to Venice's main square, I asked, "Si je quisiera andare to la piazza San Marco, è celui-ci le vaporetto justo, or est-ce que c'est piu bene pour y caminar à pieds?" I don't think my Argentinian accent was half bad, either.)

Anyway, I don't know when it was that I started to annoy B— by interrupting her multilingual socializing with my running heretical commentary. I don't believe it was when I pointed out the attendant in St. Mark's Basilica who was removing all but one of the recently lit candles from a votive rack, leaving the last as a shill to encourage the next throng of tourists to buy a moment of God's listening time. I'm sure it wasn't when I wondered aloud why a relief of the Madonna and Child on the Basilica's wall had an 18th-century rifle attached to it.

It could have been when I picked up the receiver on the device that in one's choice of languages gives the story of the Pala d'Oro, described as "the most precious and refined expression of Byzantine genius … , understood as the raising of man towards God" but which struck me as just the most vulgar expression of Christian obsession, painstakingly created from enough gold and precious gems to have probably ended poverty and starvation among the Church's followers at the time. The listening device looks much like a pay phone, and I asked B— if I might use it to have a word with God. At the center of the enormous Pala sits Jesus holding what the recording claims is the Good Book, its text replaced with precious jewels. B— did not smile when I told her that I wished to ask the Lord if it was really a Bible, and not a copy of an appraisal book that Jesus was using to tot up the value of his loot.

It's not that I was trying to be rude or anything. I was just attempting to add a little levity amid an impressive display of excess whose beauty shouldn't really be gawked at without at least a weensy nod to its darker side—the arrogance, oppression and bloodshed it represents despite its inarguable splendor and artistry.

Perhaps what tipped B— over the edge is when I told her the story of finding an atheist bride for my single and nonbelieving brother by writing my future sister-in-law—who didn't know me from Adam— a persuasive letter of proposal. (Anyone reading this who knows me is familiar with the tale of Michael and Julia.) Rather than finding my story warm and adorable, she was visibly shaken by it and one didn't need to speak four languages to know that her polyglottal muttering conveyed sheer dismay. I admit that I was a bit taken aback by her reaction because she is the first person ever, even counting people who have assured me that a place in hell awaits me, who didn't find the story worthy of a smile and a hearty congratulations. I couldn't quite understand what she found so unsavory about Michael and Julia's impending nuptials, but she did mention Satan himself. "Allons!" I cajoled her. "Come now, you don't really believe Satan had a hand in it! Why would you assume it was work of the devil when the two of them seem happy and obviously meant for each other? I can't see how it had much to do with anyone but the earthly parties involved."

"C'est pas possible!" She shook her head, sad as could be. I had just ruined her otherwise lovely pizza lunch. I didn't want to keep digging, but at this point I was beginning to take some offense myself. We had just left Santa Maria della Salute, the magnificent baroque church built to give thanks to the Virgin Mary for ending the plague that in 1630 brought the deaths of more than a third of the city's population. The church is so grand, so splendida magnifique bellissima, that I hadn't been able to resist asking what seemed such obvious questions: What more astounding place might the Venetians have built had more people been "saved?" Why didn't they build it sooner to make it worth the Virgin's while to put in an earlier appearance? Rather than thanking the old girl for saving two-thirds of their population, why didn't they build something condemning her and honoring the third she and Mr. Big let perish? Of course, to the faithful these questions aren't considered, nor are they considered valid. God, Jesus, the Madonna—they're responsible only for the good stuff, and only they do good stuff.

"So, what if instead of giving myself the credit for putting my brother and Julia together, I said it was God guiding my hand when I wrote Julia the proposal? Then would you like the story better?"

"Oui. Ça serait mieux." That would be better. Peace was restored. Until we were wandering through the Gallerie dell'Accademia and I told her that all the gay Catholic men I know (as well as a few gay non-Catholics) give St. Sebastian—always depicted with his oh-so-brief yet coyly placed loincloth, handsome features, and arrow-pierced flesh, and frequently enjoying some form of bondage—full credit for helping them discover the pleasures of their own flesh when they were teens.

Now that I think back on B—'s berserk-ish reaction, that's probably when I crossed the line from what devout Catholics might be able to shrug off as good-natured kidding to the kind of talk that makes them keep a safe distance for fear that when God strikes me dead their faith might not suffice in protecting them from flying debris.

There's certainly more to tell of Venice, as the above conflict was neither so awful as to diminish our good cheer at being there, nor upsetting enough to anyone on high that Venice sank any further into the sea than it would have had I not asked where Bellini got his magic mushrooms that inspired his Madonna with Red Cherubim; or not noted the irony in the fact that in the gift shop of the basilica whose religious leaders once threatened unconventional artists with death and eternal damnation one can now buy keychains made from rosary beads and bearing the logo of the local gambling casino; or not guffawed loudly at the sign in St. Mark's that read "SILENCE! OUT OF RESPECT FOR THIS SACRED PLACE, IT IS FORBIDDEN TO GIVE EXPLANATIONS INSIDE THE BASILICA."

I have a slew of new favorite painters whose names I'd never heard before (notably Bernardo Strozzi and Giuseppi Angeli), and I am now firmly of the Veronese-beats-Tintoretto-anyday school of thought. (B— says that the lack of detail in Tintoretto's larger-scale canvases compared to other Venetian painters of the day is insignificant because they're all meant to be seen from afar, and they're just as powerful despite their lack of fuss. They don't need no steenking detail; "their force comes from God," she explained. Cough.

This weekend also marked the beginning of Carnevale. I think I may be the last person among my circle of friends and family to finally get to Venice, and I confess to a bit of trepidation beforehand at the idea of arriving for what I pictured as drunken throngs à la New Orleans at Mardi Gras or Halloween in San Francisco's Castro district in a city that might be just too overrun with tourists for my tastes, but I was dead wrong. Of course the place is rife with tourists (of which I am one) and the businesses that cater to them, but it is (as if I am not the last to say it) magnificent. And mysterious, quirky, comfortable—at night sometimes sorta creepy. I loved everything about the place.

I do suspect that one of the city's problems in keeping its head above water is the sheer weight of the chotchkes for sale on Venice's streets and store shelves. Along with the genuine-but-costly Venetian-made glass, lace, and costumery, the Taiwanese goods that are imported to feed visitors' rapacious appetite for more-affordable souvenirs must double the weight of this city made of stone. But their affordability and availability also allowed everyone to join in the spirit of Carnevale, and there were very few people in the street who didn't at least wear a small mask or hat, if not all-out, wildly over-the-top costumes. (On B—'s suggestion my mask was two-tone: Half white to represent my angelic side, and half red to represent il diavolo.) The party got off to a rocky and sad start after two workers were killed in a construction accident and the city called off all celebration on Saturday out of respect and mourning. (Imagine canceling New Years in Times Square or Mardi Gras in New Orleans to honor the memory of two American workers!) The streets were nearly deserted on Saturday evening and then filled with sober-but-nutty revelers the following morning. (Good coffee instead of alcohol fuels a completely different, less sinister-feeling celebration than similar-type gatherings in the States.) San Francisco's Halloween crowds would die of envy to see such a spectacle.

Back in Paris I am trying to shake my new Argentinian accent and recover my lost French vocabulary. I have yet to see what reversals have been dealt my already frustratingly slow progress with la langue française.

a dopo…

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At least they don't call small "Tall"…

2007-12-23T15:03:00.000+01:00

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Drogués et Droguées :

I swore I would never (ever!) set foot in a Starbucks in Paris because, well, why would anyone? If you've seen one Starbucks you've seen all Starbucks, so why would anyone come here and go there when throughout Paris there are unique French cafes offering wonderful coffee, flaky croissants, and people-watching opportunities that can keep any voyeur occupied for hours?

Okay, so forget that I said anyone. That's probably just caffeine-fueled hyperbole. I suppose, because Starbucks is an espace non-fumeur, that if you're a crabby nonsmoker who likes to use ridiculously complicated commercial jargon to order a drink (like un double crème-brulée latté moyen avec supplèment de mousse de lait s'il vous plait, or as they say in Starbunglish, "a double tall crème brulée–flavored latte with extra foam, please") and drink it from a paper cup rather than risk the possibility of a wisp from someone's cigarette ruining your day, I can understand that. But then I'd also recommend that you place your order in another country and avoid France and its smokers altogether.

My friend and neighbor Alexis frequents the Starbucks on the rue des Archives, around the corner from my apartment. I found this out after we had already become acquainted and began to rely on each other for the kind of mutual support Americans sometimes require after a brush with one of the rare Parisians who, despite their tiny numbers, are obnoxious enough to perpetuate the erroneous but widely held belief that all French people are astoundingly rude. If I had known she frequented Starbucks, Lex and I might not be friends, and I would be running home after my occasional cultural collisions to climb under the bed and do my impression of a frightened fetus.

Instead, I will call her on my way home from an especially harrowing attempt to buy stamps or what seemed like a death-defying triumph in a cheese shop to see what she's up to, and now and then she will tell me she's at Starbucks, and suggest since I'm nearby I should drop in and join her. But when I arrive and see her through the window I have to bang on the glass and pantomime that she should come out because I will not be seen in there. I don't even like banging on Starbucks's window and making the universal sign for "you should be ashamed of yourself; finish that immediately and meet me across the street at a real cafe or I'm going home," because it lets people on the street know that I associate with someone who's a Starbucks customer. This is completely unacceptable, and I have had a number of stern discussions with Lex to try to explain to her about friendships and boundaries and mutual respect, although I sometimes get the feeling during these heart-to-hearts that she is not giving the topic the serious attention that it deserves.

That said, there is the problem of the U.S. dollar's fall from grace and value, and the resulting fiscal strain it adds to asking professionals to prepare all the coffee I drink in a day. Before I sold my house and ended the financial woes that made it difficult for me to buy a cup of coffee anywhere in San Francisco, I justified the extravagant purchase of a home espresso machine by calculating that it could pay for itself rather quickly if I considered that every cappuccino I prepared myself represented about three dollars I was saving by not wandering down to the corner cafe to buy it ready-made. My financial situation at the time being especially dire, I decided it was would be irresponsible not to have at least three double homemade cappuccinos per day and thereby pay for the machine within only a couple of weeks of its purchase. I tried to explain this stroke of economic genius to friends at the time, but was greeted with confused expressions, and in retrospect I wonder if perhaps I was twitching too much and speaking a little too quickly at the time to make the logic of my accounting sufficiently clear to them.

Europe's 220-volt electrical system rendered it pointless to bring the American machine with me, so I've been using the stovetop coffee maker that came with my apartment when I brew my own coffee at home. Unfortunately, freshly roasted beans like they use in most Paris cafes haven't been so easy to find, and after my arrival in September I was buying unsatisfying, packaged ground coffee at the supermarket. While not as cheap as the freshly roasted stuff I used to buy in San Francisco, it was a relative bargain—prices for a 250g package (about a half a pound) run between 2€50 and 4€ ($3.25 and $6)—but it wasn't good enough to warrant buying a new 220-volt espresso machine. Even if I employed my previously effective coffee economics to pay for the device, I knew the supermarket coffee wasn't worthy. I might add what a shame this really was to discover, because despite the strength of the euro against my own currency, the fact that I have been unable to order coffee in any of the neighborhood joints without also requesting a croissant or pain au chocolat means that by making my coffee at home and accounting for the additional savings on pastries I would not be eating, I might have offset the currently abysmal exchange rate as well as accelerating the pay-off of the espresso machine.

Desperate to meet my need for thrift with a more satisfying drink, but unable to locate a source of beans, I finally broke down and did the unthinkable. I wrapped my scarf high around my neck and chin and pulled my hat down low and donned dark glasses and I dashed as quickly as I could into Starbucks to buy a bag of freshly ground espresso (5€ for 250g) and, well ... it was fucking delicious. But before you start with the gloating, please note that I am not about to concede for a second that I'm a Starbucks whore. This was just a desperate measure to see me through a week or maybe two, an experiment while I dug a bit further to find an alternative coffee-bean source, and I didn't actually buy a coffee drink—just the ground beans—and to take my mind off the dirtiness I felt about the transaction I tucked my purchase deep inside my knapsack and stopped to have a quick coffee in three or four cafes in my neighborhood on the way home.

My friend Arlyn, visiting from California and made instantly aware of this dilemma, did a bit of research while I was busy in school and was good enough to jot down the address of a place within walking distance of my house that advertised the sale of freshly roasted beans. When the level of coffee in the Starbucks bag became dangerously low, I strolled down to the address Arlyn had left me and walked into a lovely little shop whose two young owners, standing by an enormous, fragrantly churning roasting machine, greeted me excitedly.

"Bonjour," I responded to their cheery bonjours, and I told them I would like to buy some coffee, and without the slightest wince at my accent or derisive snickering over my verb mis-conjugations, they described all my choices and asked me my preferences, and together we decided which of their beans was best for me. It was then that I noticed that the prices marked on all the bins of beans, which I thought were costs per kilo, were actually the cost for 250g, and each quarter-kilo of the coffee we had just determined would suit my tastes was 9€95, or just insignificantly under $30 per pound.

Because these young men were so earnest, and I was their only customer, and they were so friendly, and also because I don't know how to blurt out "Are you fucking shitting me??" in French, I decided to take 250g of the stuff, and after they gave me five cents in change for the last ten-euro note I had in my wallet I took one of their little brochures and instead of just wishing them good evening said, "Until next time!" and I went straight home (past nine cafes without stopping) to see what these magic beans were all about. Amazing. Simply amazing. These guys are selling coffee that tastes exactly like the cheap stuff from my local supermarket.

Yesterday, as these "gourmet" beans dwindled towards the bottom of their bag, I called another friend to hear a familiar voice. Audrey lives in Florida and orders raw coffee online to roast in her counter-top roaster. You may get the impression from what you've read so far that I am somewhat obsessive about coffee, but not really. This quest simply comes from being in a city where there just doesn't seem to be any reason one should have to drink bad coffee, and my idea of "obsessive" (at least on the subject of coffee) is to buy unroasted beans and roast them yourself each morning before you've had a chance to first have a cup of coffee. I told Audrey my predicament, and she advised me to order up beans from her supplier in the States, and then she said, "Now I know what to get you for Christmas!"

"You are not sending me coffee, Aud," I told her. "Are you insane? Shipping will cost more than the coffee, and there's really good coffee here. I just have to find it. Do. Not. Send. Me. Coffee." I was sorry I even mentioned it to her.

Today, my thirty-dollar beans ran out and I slinked back into Starbucks to buy another bag of espresso roast from a sullen teenager who has the same I-don't-want-to-work-here expression on her face as many American Starbucks employees and an attitude that as she matures will prove valuable in upholding common French stereotypes. Feeling a little defeated, I returned to my apartment, made myself a cup, and spent some time online looking for a coffee source that was less damaging to my sense of self. A search turned up the place in my neighborhood, and a few others doing online-only business in France with prices that range from reasonable to outrageous, and shipping charges that make the reasonable prices outrageous and the outrageous prices whatever the superlative of outrageous is, although one place does waive shipping charges on orders of 140€ ($210) or more.

I also found a purveyor of unroasted coffee for about three times what Audrey's U.S. supplier charges, and before I came to my senses I checked out the cost of roasters, and then the cost of grinders (which would become necessary if I were to begin a pre-morning-coffee coffee-roasting ritual), and before I even did the euro-to-dollar conversion to see what all those beans and gadgets and a new 220-volt espresso machine would cost, I realized I would be an old man or dead from a caffeine overdose long before a thirty-double-tall-extra-foam-cafe-lattes-per-day habit made the slightest dent in paying off all those purchases.

This is only temporary. I will find where people buy good coffee here, I know. But in the meantime, please, if you see me occasionally in Starbucks, note that I am just buying a small bag of beans—nothing more—and don't say hi or do anything else that might draw attention to my presence there.

À votre santé...

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Haute Crotture and Other Excretions

2007-12-10T15:06:00.002+01:00

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Diane et Blonde, chiennes de la meute de Louis XIV (Detaille de Diane) 1702, par Alexandre-François Desportes (1661-1743), La Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris.

Detail of Diane from Diane and Blonde, bitches from Louis XIV's pack o' dogs by Alexandre-François Desportes

Renifleurs et Renifleuses:

Even the most nimble and alert French fashion slave, gingerly stepping over the ubiquitous turds of Paris's oh-so-hip-at-the-moment miniature French bulldogs, has yet to make the connection between the "Merde!" she shouts when she inevitably missteps and ruins her expensive shoes and the "Merde!" her neighbors shout after stepping in her miniature bulldog's unretrieved crottes.

Until madame makes that connection, there is little hope for France's oh-so-hip-at-the-moment, miniature-bulldog President to dramatically reduce the public payroll as he's promised; if President Sarkozy doesn't sustain the enormous number of vigilant Propreté de Paris employees who scrub the streets here, the city's lovely cobblestones could disappear beneath the muck faster than a Parisian dog owner can squeal, "Quel bon chien! Qui est le petit bon chien de maman? C'est toi! Oui, c'est toi! "

Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, added an item to the city's official "To Do" list in October regarding his own new pet pee-ve. Following a particularly revelrous evening of beer drinking on the occasion of this year's rugby World Cup championships, a larger proportion than usual of the city's male population was relieving itself against the grand Hôtel de Ville (city hall) just as hizzonner was arriving for work. Reeking with displeasure, Delanoë announced his intention to modify the ingrained urination behavior of Parisians, a great many of whom simply unzip and let loose wherever they're standing, whenever nature calls. (The most interesting example of this I have witnessed personally was during rush hour in the Châtelet Metro station when a man in a business suit stepped to the side of the crowded and bustling connector passageway between the 1 and 4 lines, undid the fly of his well-pressed trousers, and peed in the company of his fellow commuters.)

The mayor thought he'd had the problem zipped up in February 2006, when he abolished usage fees for the city's 200-plus public toilets—in the following 12-months the flow of patrons to the toilets increased by over 650%—but he's realized a strong message is needed, too. This he plans to deliver directly to the offenders using newfangled undulating walls that spray urine back on the urinators, a concept described by the walls' architect as l'arroseur arrosé ("the sprinkler, sprinkled").

Time will tell if the mayor's sprinkler-sprinkling campaign will succeed, but I stand behind him. On my particular street in the Marais district—a short residential block adjacent to some popular watering holes and therefore convenient for full-bladdered bar patrons who prefer its seventeeth-century charms to the bars' less-picturesque twentieth-century plumbing facilities—the stench can become pretty awful on warm days between disinfections.

A number of friends have asked me the origins of my street's name—the rue des Guillemites. Through cursory inquiries, I've determined that the Guillemites were an order of seventeeth-century monks named for St. Guillaume de Malavalle, a figure from the twelfth century who was excommunicated for reasons no longer known. What happened to the monks is also a mystery, although my guess is that Guillaume's tonsured little acolytes were driven from my neighborhood for incessant and incorrigible public urination. I can just imagine that a Marais homeowner in the up-and-coming new quartier, worried that local clergymen with self-control issues threatened his property values, said, "Enough!" and put his foot down (looking for a clean spot first, of course). I admit that my research has turned up nothing to back up this historical hypothesis, but it would even explain Guillaume's excommunication. God surely wouldn't tolerate such behavior in heaven, and for eternity, ferchrissakes.

I also believe that the name of Guillaume’s hometown, Malavalle, might mean a) "foul-smelling valley" or b) "to no avail," inspired either by a) the odor of its streets or b) the futility of attempts by its mayor to curb the urinary transgressions of its citizens, but I can find nothing to prove this theory, either. The only assumption I can make about the dearth of historical evidence regarding the circumstances of his excommunication, or to corroborate my suspicions about the disappearance of his followers, is that Guillaume's brother, Jeb de Malavalle, must have successfully purged Vatican files regarding these matters, as a favor to their mother.

My neighborhood is filled with ancient streets that have interesting histories, both documented and imagined by me as a way of occupying my mind as I scrape my shoes each evening on the curb outside my home. The nearby rue des Blancs Manteaux was so named for the white coats worn by nuns who resided there, an order that I tell myself was made up of former cleaning ladies whom God (before the falling out with St. G.) called to serve the Guillemite monks by scrubbing their odiferous deposits from the city's ancient metro stations and government buildings. I even suspect the better-known Carmelite nuns were originally Blancs Manteaux girls who left the Marais along with their Guillemite brothers, and got their name from the stubborn caramel-colored stains left on the hems of their previously white frocks by the dog feces through which they were dragged on a daily basis.

Paris has been the birthplace of some stranger fashion milestones, and judging from the number of oh-so-hip miniature bulldogs here today—and their resulting countless crottes—I don't think my particular revisionist history seems so far-fetched.

À la prochaine fois...

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"Yes nobody does."

2007-11-29T23:58:00.003+01:00

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"...nobody nobody wants to learn either by their own or anybody else’s experience, nobody does, no they say they do but no nobody does, nobody does. Yes nobody does." —Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (1945).

Citoyens du monde,

Earlier this month I headed to Normandy with some friends, to drink Calvados and reflect on Americans who arrived in France before me, in 1944, by boat, with guns. Bracing against a stiff, cold breeze we strolled along Omaha Beach (now not just an historic landmark, but also a summer resort with beach condos and hot-dog stands) and through the scarred landscape and decaying gun emplacements at Pointe du Hoc. In this setting, it is impossible for even the most jaded among us (moi, par exemple) to remain unmoved, imagining the horror that occurred there, its terrible human cost, and how horribly, frighteningly different the entire world would be right now had the allied invasion not occurred or had its outcome been different.

A new visitors center at the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer provides an impressive homage to our heroes through film footage, audio reminiscences, photos, and exhibits. But it's the cemetery itself, with its austere and perfectly aligned grave markers overlooking the coast, that weakens the knees. If we hadn't the foresight to spend a part of the previous day buying Kleenex and a small hip flask filled with the region's famed and potent apple brandy, I would surely have been a streak-faced, blubbering fool. Well-equipped as we were, wiping and swigging as inconspicuously and respectfully as possible, I was able to keep my cheeks dry. Nevertheless the tears did sting my eyes as much as the brandy stung the enormous lump in my throat.

Since World War II, American soldiers who've died in battle have always, if found, been sent home for burial. Nearly 10,000 American war dead are buried at Colleville-sur-Mer (of over 93,000 WWII casualties buried on foreign soil). It's important, and heartbreakingly poignant especially now, to note that the families whose sons, husbands, and fathers died in France in the 1940s felt that French soil was the rightful place for their interment. It's hard to imagine an emotional connection so strong between Americans and the countries in which we are fighting today, supposedly for the same lofty goals of liberation and protection; would we allow our children to be buried so far from home because we felt that their blood in that soil bound us to the place and its people by common dreams, common suffering, common victories, and common advancements?

Surveying the Norman landscape, this revelation was not only heart-wrenching, it was also—considered in a modern context—infuriating. The detachment we feel from contemporary warfare diminishes the understanding we should have of it. And the cynicism of our leaders and their unclear and dishonest rationale for our current conflicts belittles the sacrifice of American and allied troops who die fighting on our behalf, and it blurs the lines between good and evil that seem in retrospect were so simple and clearly defined back then, in the 1940s, in France.

While wandering and wiping and swigging and pondering and fuming, another thought popped into my head unexpectedly and truly unnerved me: Standing over one of the thousands of white crosses, upon which someone had recently rubbed some wet sand to make the engraved inscription legible, I was overcome by an irrepressible indignation at everyone who hasn't been completely gracious to me since my arrival. Yes, I admit it, and I am completely shocked and somewhat upset with myself about this. It was the exact sentiment I always disdained in the most obnoxious Americans who came back from their Parisian vacations and spouted idiotic drivel like, "We saved their froggy asses in World War II, and they can't even speak English when you ask where the Mona Lisa is in the goddamned Louvre!" It just welled up from nowhere and I stiffened with rage thinking of my bank teller who looks at me as if I am a cross between a martian and a hillbilly, and remembering the waiter at a cafe near the Pantheon seven weeks ago who wouldn't serve me coffee but wouldn't explain why, and recalling the three women behind the counter at the BHV department store who laughed at my mispronunciation of the item I was asking them to help me locate.

I don't even know who this person was who was having these angry thoughts; it certainly wasn't a me I recognized. But for a short time, standing in the American cemetery in Normandy, it didn't matter that the French weren't being anti-American when on the very few occasions they were rude or brusque. (I'd call it more "anti–Not Them.") It mattered that they weren't going out of their way to be nice to me.

That sentiment has passed, however, and now that I'm back in Paris I'm back to seeing the French as just another group of strange people with their own passel of idiosyncrasies—some charming, some not—and I'm back to believing that it's the foreigners like me who need to adapt to France, and not the other way around. And when I reflect on my short time here, I really have to insist that contrary to the image the media promotes of the angry, anti-American Frenchman railing 24/7 against all things Etats Uniques, I don't receive a daily earful of anti-American sentiments here.

It could be that my poor skills of observation prevent me from noticing beer cans being lobbed at me from the windows of passing Peugeots, or perhaps my self-absorption makes me deaf to any jeering by my fellow Metro riders. And maybe it's just that my French isn't good enough yet to detect the anti-American undertones in every cheery bonjour and bonne soirée that shopkeepers and cafe workers throw my way. But I doubt it.

In addition to the general friendliness and incredible patience most French have for we Yanks' abysmal language skills, it's difficult not to notice the crowds of Parisians queued up for Happy Meals and ordering venti no-foam soy-milk cappuccinos. And it's impossible to guess the number—no doubt huge—of French citoyens in American Apparel and Gap clothing who at any one moment are scraping dog shit off their popular Converse high-tops.

Last week, a fellow non-Frenchmen adjusted the chip on his shoulder to a more comfortable position to accuse his perceived persecutors of hypocrisy: "If the French hate Americans," he whined, "they should damn well stop buying all our stuff!" (I agree that such a boycott would be an excellent idea if anti-Americanism were as rampant as he charges, but I was not about to suggest it last night to the Frenchman in front of me in the supermarket who, when he overheard me tell the cashier that I'd forgotten my wallet and had to run home to get more money, stopped bagging his groceries to give me the euro I needed to complete my purchase.)

Of course there must be some anti-American sentiment here; it can't all be fabricated by the media to drum up some good-old American chest-beating jingoism. I'll just repeat that I've not experienced it. I've been here long enough to get some pretty crappy treatment in restaurants and to be driven nearly mad by indifferent French bureaucrats; and unlike the experience of American GIs following France's liberation in 1944, throngs of thrilled Frenchmen don't come running when they see me to kiss my cheek and load me down with flowers, so I'm willing to ease up a bit on my age-old insistence that the French are a universally huggy-snuggly bunch. But stay tuned to these pages to see if I ever report that their occasional lapses in warmth and civility are directed at me just because I'm American. I promise to let you know if an example occurs.

À plus tard ...

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Le weekend est arrivé (et pas un moment trop bientôt)

2007-09-28T19:49:00.000+02:00

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Beaus parleurs et belles parleuses,

I have completed my first week at l'Alliance Française, in a 12-week intensive course by which I hope to increase my foreign-language blathering potential to nearly 65% of my English-language blathering proficiency. Those of you who know me must realize, with some degree of sympathy if not outright pity, how difficult it is for me to run my mouth off as usual with a vocabulary limited to words that when strung together form grammatically incorrect and badly pronounced phrases that can only help me find toilets and request pastries. One might better describe what I do here as "limping" or "stumbling" my mouth off. (OK, granted: It would be disingenuous of me to maintain that asking for bathrooms and food is all that I'm capable of; my need for a local bank account and renter's insurance has given me a large French vocabulary for matters of finance and fidelity. So go ahead, ask me anything you want to know en français about toilet locations, pastries, and the French Building Federation's Actuarial Reference Index.)

I just returned home and proceeded to diddle away a good number of minutes trying to come up with a less-than-pathetic joke along the lines of how "my first week just flew by and boy are my arms tired," but in fact it didn't fly by at all, and my whole being is tired.

Knowing my own limitations regarding pre-noon punctuality, I had registered for the afternoon program at l'Alliance, but my first week had to be the mornings, which has meant getting caffeined and croissanted bright and early and wedged into a Metro car at rush hour to arrive on time. I figured just the novelty of it all (and knowing its impermanence) would make it an easy routine, but I hadn't expected the all-body-cell exhaustion that comes from an immersion in a foreign language. Until it starts to flow naturally and one's comprehension improves, the energy it takes to be constantly, hastily calculating the meaning of everything said or heard makes it imaginable that mental exhaustion could actually be fatal. By only the third morning I stumbled towards the Metro a half-hour late for class and struggled to decide between a) having a much-needed café crème and b) not having one and therefore not needing to remember how to ask for one.

I was back on schedule Wednesday, but today it seems incredible that I've only been in school for one week. The first day seems to me to have been months ago now, and I've found myself stumbling during mundane interactions in shops and on the street.

Yesterday, for example, I went to the bank to deposit my rent into the landlord's account. I made a mistake filling out the deposit slip and after tearing it up I looked around for a wastebasket and found none, but on the front of all the lobby's little podia with the slips and pen stands were flap-doored slots. One of these seemed like the logical place to toss one's garbage, but when I pushed open the flap there really wasn't much more than a quarter-inch space to stuff my little scraps, and in trying I lost my hold on most of them, and they fell to the floor in a little confetti-like flurry. Juggling a knapsack and my checkbook and reading glasses and the corrected deposit slip made it hard to pick up my mess, and after transferring all that I was carrying to one hand I tried to pick up the torn paper scraps from the lobby floor with the other, but they were more than one handful; each time I would gather a respectable amount of scraps off the floor, I dropped half those I was already holding.

I decided to clean up in stages, and started to feed the tidbits of paper into the little slot, and then I noticed the little symbol of an envelope next to the slot's flap and realized that this was not a garbage receptacle at all, but a place to leave deposits if you didn't need a teller's services, and just as I realized that this was the reason the slot was so narrow, I looked up and saw that the line for the teller had grown and I was now being stared at through the hostilely squinting eyes of seven or eight bank customers.

Now this would be embarrassing enough if I did this at a bank branch in San Francisco, but my mortification was amplified by the fact that I suddenly lost all memory of every French word I had ever learned in my life. It wasn't just that I couldn't make a self-deprecating joke, or say "Oh la, ceci n'est pas la poubelle! Voyez-vous où on met des poubelles là?" -- I couldn't say anything. And when I realized that, I then realized I couldn't remember how to speak English, either. And then I had to stand in line with all these glaring people wondering what French words they were thinking of me and gather my thoughts (and recover my French) so I could explain to the teller that I wanted to deposit money into an account that was not my own.

I did not physically black out, but an hour later in the safety of my living room I looked in my wallet to find a receipt that confirmed that I indeed had conducted the business at hand. I honestly have no recollection of the transaction.

So now it's le weekend and Sunday is market day on Blvd. Richard Lenoir near Place de la Bastille. I went there last week but realized that despite the abundance and variety of all the merchants' appealing offerings, I would need considerably better French and a lesson in market banter, etiquette, and procedure to be able to shop there. Fortuitously, much of this week's course at l'Alliance used marketing savoir-faire as the basis for the language lessons being taught.

I have learned how one negotiates for foodstuffs from Paris's dizzying array of épiceries, boulangeries, poissoneries, pâtisseries, fromageries, charcuteries, confiseries, and boucheries; the communication of desired ripeness and readiness for consumption; to specify the target date of its edibility; and the terminology of its packaging, its measurements, and its level of piquance. I have learned (although forgotten) the difference between the batters for savory and sweet crèpes in Brittany and how because crèpes here use the same batter for both, one would be a fool to eat a crèpe in Paris and believe he had really eaten a crèpe; and I've learned the myriad ways that French merchants can tell you they don't have exactly what you want but might recommend something you don't know you want but that you actually want more than what you asked for.

I've yet to put this potentially powerful knowledge to work, and I am still not sure I am up to it after my first day's outing to the marché des fruits et légumes near my apartment -- a traumatizing experience that nearly resulted in my death from dehydration due to over-perspiring and a prolonged case of Bare Larder Syndrome after making a hasty retreat from the store with but three items (in the wrong quantity) from my substantially longer list of intended purchases.

It was one of the many greengrocers in Paris where one doesn't choose one's own produce, but rather tells the proprietor his or her choices (wielding the above-mentioned powers of description) and leaves the actual selection to the professional. Personally, I found negotiating for my insurance policy easier, and since that fateful day I have been stopping for vegetables in the safe haven of the grocer who lets his customers make their own decidedly unprofessional selections and bring them to the register for payment.

Perhaps when next you hear from me I will have earned the right to report to you on the joys of not just eating in France, not just cooking in France, but actually describing a food item and taking home a very close approximation of what I believed I was requesting. I make no promises, but I believe after a bit of rest, I might be able summon up enough French to say, "Comme Dieu est mon témoin, je n'aurai plus jamais le ventre creux!"

Mais je la considérerai demain. (Après tout, demain est un autre jour...)

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Day 8: The Louvre

2007-09-20T17:16:00.000+02:00

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Voyeurs et voyeuses,

Pour vous, un nouveau video:

Need I say more? I think not.

Oh, the humanity!!

OK, so that's not completely fair. Or at least not to the Louvre, even if it does seem to sum up what a lot of the people who come to the museum think is its only attraction. The thing is, you have to pass by many great works -- it's a hefty enough walk to work off two pains au chocolat and half a baguette well-slathered with a nicely ripened raw-milk Coulommiers -- and any dozens of incredible paintings along the way could make you forget that the Louvre even has the Mona Lisa.

Perhaps your eye would be caught by Salviate's "L'Incrédulité de St. Thomas" (detail, above) in which the famed doubter holds out his hands in a gesture that states to the painting's other characters in no uncertain terms, "Talk to the stigmata!"

Two paintings of the diminutive David (by Bartolomeo Manfredi and Guido Reni) catch the young lad at candid moments following his triumph over Mr. Big. These two paintings will surprise anyone who, without imagination to match that of Italian Renaissance painters, never considered Goliath's slayer such a pretty boy, in one portrait decked out with a frippy plume in his capello and an "ain't I the cock of the walk" air about him. To all you fans of St. Sebastian back in San Francisco, I think you should change heroes. This kid's got the looks and the attitude, along with being the underdog who came out a winner. And St. Subby was way too busy bleeding from his arrow wounds to give sufficient thought to his haberdashery. He probably didn't even know not to wear a white hat feather after labor day.

This was in no way meant to be an art lecture, and to describe my four hours in an art museum would require me to bore you to certain death -- not my intention when I began this entry. Suffice it to say that there is time and space to ponder and/or admire nearly anything in the Louvre except for the Mona Lisa, which is protected from proper viewing and contemplation by a roped partition, protective plexiglass, and crowds, crowds, crowds, crowds, crowds. The feeling one gets entering the room where Ms. Mona hangs is similar to a common sentiment when taking a seat in the upper tier of an 80,000-person sports arena to see a popular rock group along with 79,999 other fans, all of whom are shrieking so loudly you can't hear the music; it's great to say you saw them live, but if you had really wanted to enjoy the music you could have stayed home and popped their CD in the stereo. You can go to the Louvre and say you saw the Mona Lisa, too, but if you want to really look at her, you'll see more detail and have more time to enjoy it if you open a high-quality art book.

À demain (ou après)...

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A Cheap French Tart Offers Comfort and Joy

2007-09-19T22:53:00.005+02:00

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Above: Tarte Tatin a la Tomate. Recipe (with caveats) available in the Comments section for this post.

Gourmets et Gourmettes,

I held off as long as I could (not wanting to make it a habit what with rising prices and the falling dollar), but a morning anxiety attack that made it extremely difficult to turn off a voice in my head that kept screaming, "What the fuck were you thinking, moving to France?!" had me running around the corner to Les Philosophes to have a slice of their tarte tatin à la tomate to calm myself down.

And it worked, or it did for as long as it took to savor the tart and finish off the small carafe of vin rouge I had ordered to keep the voice occupied. I figured that if it was well fed and perhaps a little drunk it would fall asleep, or at least slur its words a bit so its message to me would be as hard for me to understand as French; I could then just shrug my shoulders and tell it "Je ne comprends pas," or a new phrase I have been practicing, "Si vous me parlez comme si je fusse un imbécile, très clair et lentement, peut-être que je vous comprendrais mieux." I don't even know if that's really how one asks to be spoken to as an idiot, but my hope (in this case at least) was that the voice would become as impatient with me as a Parisian shopkeeper and turn its attentions to another customer with better communication skills.

Everyone I know in the States has heard me go on at length about Les Philosophes' tomato tart. It's the first thing I ever ate in France, years ago, and it remains one of the great food sensations on earth. Many of you have visited Paris and on my recommendation have gone to Les Philosophes and ordered it and agreed with my assessment of it, and some of you with pitifully little self control have returned more than once during short Parisian vacations to eat more than your human share of it. (I will not name you on such public pages; you know who you are.)

I don't know if sensations of pleasure are dealt with by the same parts of the brain as pain, but sort of like a mother who when birthing her second baby may comment that had she remembered her first labor little Bobby would be an only child, I honestly didn't remember how good this tart was. If I had, I would have had it many more times than I have, and when I arrived last Tuesday I would have had the taxi drop me right in front of a curbside table and shouted out my order to the waiter before I'd even pulled my bags from the car.

I have tried to make the tart at home with little success, even after getting the recipe from Les Philosophes' Web site. It's an incredibly time-consuming and idiotic procedure that involves blanching, peeling, and seeding an absurd number of tomatoes, endangering anyone who comes into your kitchen by searing them (the tomatoes) with a caramel of hot oil and sugar, and then draining the result for longer than it takes to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles and back.

The recipe had disappeared from the site shortly after I discovered it there (I assumed following advice from counsel), but this morning when I went online to see if I needed to sell any of my plasma to afford to lunch there, I noticed that Les Philosophes' Web site is completely redesigned and that the recipe has been re-posted. The price is higher yet affordable (9€ for a generous slice, including some nice greens in a simple vinaigrette), but more interesting to me is that L.P.'s food is not the first thing they've posted amongst their Web site's offerings. In a higher-priority position is a link to "Les Toilettes" and an invitation to "Come visit the philosophers' toilets!" with a photo-gallery tour of their spiffy restroom. (One is almost tempted to recommend it to Republican congressmen as a venue for practicing their toe-tapping techniques, save for the fact that it would be a shame to get the place dirty.)

Also before the food is mentioned, the site offers a roster of the people who work there. After spending hours blanching tomatoes in an attempt to replicate just one of their tarts, I often wondered how on earth Les Philosophes could offer a house specialty that to prepare would require 20 or 30 times the number of tomatoes to be plunged daily into scalding water, and today I noticed in their staff listing that three people there hold the title of plongeur. Before I looked up the word to find that a plongeur is actually a dishwasher, I was thinking I had solved the tomato-blanching mystery. The "philosophers' toilets" are way too swank to make one think they'd require so many of the other possible type of plongeur. Now that my French vocabulary has increased by one more word, I am back to Square One, with no idea how the tarts are produced.

When my French improves and I no longer need to be spoken to as if I were an idiot, I am determined to get to the bottom of this.

Bon appétit...

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NOTE: Here is the link to Les Philosophes. The link offers Web pages for a number of restaurants. L.P.'s is accessed through the logo fftp:// at the top of the page.

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8 comments:

Paul Karasik said...: Smarty,

I still don't have much of an idea of what this tarte IS. At least take a discreet photo, s'il vous plait.

-p.; Wednesday, 19 September, 2007
Smartypants said...: You mean I should go back there with a camera and order it again?

Oh, all right, since you insist.; Wednesday, 19 September, 2007
Regine Aubergine said...: Yes, pictures please. Also a copy of the recipe. We have had tons of tomatoes and Van has been blanching away to peel the skins and make various salsas. Though tomatoe season is almost done, another recipe would be great. I can't seem to find it on the link that you provided. Enjoy!

Kerry; Wednesday, 19 September, 2007
Shyamala said...: I like how the recipe starts, with a touch of resignation: Faites bouillir une grande quantite d'eau...; Wednesday, 19 September, 2007
Smartypants said...: I will post the recipe and its translation, but ONLY with with the agreement that you will send me an affadvit within 24 hours of your reading this, and before any preheating of any ovens or fairing of any eau to bouille, worded as follows:

"I, the undersigned, understand that if I undertake to attempt this feat at home I do so at my own risk and the risk of any hapless tomatoes unfortunate enough to have fallen into my shopping cart and hence sacrificed in the process.

Lu et apprové, X_____________________________

That agreed, you need to know that a) I have tried this three times without success, and b) even knowing what this looks and tastes like the recipe makes no sense, especially the thing about the sauce at the end. If I were a paranoid person, I'd dare to say the whole recipe is a cruel joke by a disturbed and secretive chef.

That said, allons-y:

20 tomates fraîches
1/2 botte de sauge
1/2 botte de basilic
1/2 botte de romarin
500g de sucre
1/4 litre de huile d'olive
pâte brisée

Faites bouillir une grande quantité d'eau. En même temps effectuez une incision sur le sommet des tomates et ôtez-y les opercules.

Ebouillantez les tomates et rafraîchissez-les afin de les monder(enlever la peau). Coupez-les en deux et laissez-les égoutter.

Réalisez un caramel avec le sucre et l'huile d'olive, ensuite incorporez-y les tomates et les herbes ciselées.

Laissez réduire au four à 180° pendant 30 minutes, puis mettez le tout dans un endroit frais et réservez 12h pour un égouttage complet.

Tassez les tomates dans un moule à génoise beurré et couvrir le tout avec la pâte brisée piquée à la sauge.

Mettez au four pendant 20 minutes à 180°. Laissez refroidir puis démoulez en retournant.

Servez avec le jus d'égouttage comme sauce d'accompagnement.

TRANSLATION (and I'm sure some French-talking Smartypantalon will be quick to correct my errors):

20 fresh tomatoes
1/2 a bunch of sage
1/2 a bunch of basil
1/2 a bunch of rosemary
500g of sugar
1/4 liter of olive oil
Pie pastry dough

Bring a large quantity of water to a boil. Meanwhile make an incision on the top of the tomatoes and remove the stem caps.

Blanch the tomatoes in the boiling water, then cold water, and remove the skins. Cut them in half and let them drain.

Create a caramel with the sugar and olive oil, then add to it the tomatoes and chopped herbs.

Let the mixture reduce in a 350° oven for 30 minutes, then put it the whole thing in a cool place and let drain completely for 12 hours.

Pack the tomatoes into a buttered cake pan and cover with the pastry dough pricked with sage.

Bake for 20 minutes at 350°. Let cool, and then invert the pan to unmold it.

Serve with the drained juice as a sauce to accompany it.; Wednesday, 19 September, 2007
Anonymous said...: Oh Joel, how I love to read what you write and I even hear it in your voice!! You always make me laugh.
Lisa and I will attempt the tart and get back to you.
Love
Jenn; Thursday, 20 September, 2007
Smartypants said...: Voilà! A photo has been added to the blog entry, as requested.; Monday, 24 September, 2007
slippery said...: Drool!!!; Monday, 24 September, 2007

Dans les Pas de Mme. Sévigné

2007-09-16T19:35:00.000+02:00

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Bonnes Mesdames et Bons Messieurs,

I know I've been remiss in not reporting sooner, but it's been hard to fit in any writing what with settling in and all, so now I thought I'd post a little visual of my new neighborhood and apartment as well as a bit of news. The new version of iMovie is infuriating to work with (and I'm a crappy photographer) so forgive me for the quality; I simply lost patience with the entire endeavor.

As a note of explanation, this weekend the French are having what are called Les Journées Européenes du Patrimoine, ("European Heritage Days," sort of), during which hundreds of historical and cultural sites throughout France that are not normally open to the public or usually charge admission -- more than 700 venues in Paris alone -- shirk their fees or cloaks of privacy and admit the masses to view their glory. My neighborhood, Le Marais, is one of the oldest quartiers, having escaped Baron Haussmann's wrecking balls during the 19th century and Le Corbusier's ambitions of the 20th, so there are many of these historic sites within a few steps of where I live.

This video shows the following:

On the rue Vieilles-du-Temple, one block over from my apartment, is the magnificent Hôtel Amelot de Bisseuil, built in the late 1650s and perhaps most noted for having been the residence of Pierre Beaumarchais who wrote "The Marriage of Figaro" on which Mozart based his opera. Its original owner, Jean-Baptiste Amelot de Bisseuil, was a bit sun-obsessed, and there are images everywhere in the mansion's carvings and worn frescoes reflecting his solar passions. (You will note a couple of the surviving sundials of wrought iron protruding from the walls that cast shadows against the painted time scales.)

The Journées du Patrimoine's tours of the Hôtel led visitors through the two courtyards from its front entrance on rue Vieilles-du-Temple and out the back door on the next street over, the rue des Guillemites where I live. Just to give you some idea of where I live you will see in the video the bright red door of the Hôtel Amelot's rear exitway, after which the camera turns around to show my house, built during the same period of the 17th century. (It's the one with the blue-green door to the right of the graffito of an A that's been spray-painted in the more contemporary style. I've marked my dining room window to try to give you all an idea of how it all fits together. I hope it's at least vaguely successful.)

The rest of the video gives a complete tour of my swanky Marais apartment (which I did not tidy up before filming, sorry) with its two courtyard views, then some random photos and clips from my meanderings yesterday in the 'hood, along the rue des Rosiers and, lastly, into the Musée Carnavalet, the former home of Mme. Marie de Rabutin-Chantal la Marquise de Sévigné, best know for her prolific, humorous letters to her daughter. I read that at some point she discovered her missives were being copied and published, so she began to compose them accordingly, knowing they would reach a larger audience. You might say Mme. Sévigné was well ahead of her time, or as I now like to think of her, La Mère du Blog.

Et voilà, le video:

Le Marais is, of course, a spectacular neighborhood and as you can see from my modest A/V effort, my apartment is incredibly bright, airy, and comfortable. But as I suspected when I rented it from afar, sight unseen, there are drawbacks to living here. Its inherent picturesque-ness makes this area a major tourist draw, and that combined with it being Paris's primary gay neighborhood make it an extremely expensive place for normal day-to-day activities. The horrifying result of attracting so many TWo-Income-No-Kid tourists is that a simple petit dejeuner of coffee, croissant, and orange juice can cost as much as €13.00 (US$18.00 at today's exchange rate). I have found breakfast available for as low as €8.00 (US$11.00), but that is hardly a bargain, especially if one aspires to become a regular at the nearest caffeine emporium. Shopping is similarly fiscally excruciating, and until the weather turns nasty there is also a preponderance of drunken street revelry each night by tourists and locals alike who come to absorb the $8 beers and $10 cocktails served in Le Marais's numerous watering holes.

The place has quieted down considerably since I arrived last Tuesday, however. My Eurostar train car from London was filled with Scotsmen in skirts and plumed tam-o-shanters and those dead animal thingies they wear over the crotches of their kilts, en route to invade Paris on the occasion of the World Cup rugby finals. As the train emerged from the Chunnel and roared across the Norman landscape famed (among other things) for previous foreign occupations and invasions, one Scot produced a large boom box from among his satchels of haggis and whiskey and suddenly the coach was filled with the sack-of-angry-cats-like screeching of bagpipe music. I was too horrified (and I admit a bit intimidated) to ask them to spare Humanity such an affront, and fortunately the speed with which one can now travel by rail brought us to Paris before I had to break a window and leap to my death and the certain release it would provide me from such aural misery.

The Scots disembarked and marched single file down the platform of the Gare du Nord, chanting auld Scots battle hymns on their way to find a bar to "tak a guid bucket." And many a guid bucket they tuk, filling the streets of Paris with their drunken wailing for the next two days. There wasn't a quartier in the city spared their presence, and their alcohol intake and volume increased exponentially when the Scottish team won their match and overtook the French in the race for the Cup.

You could sense the entire city of Paris -- not just the people, but each and every cafe and cobblestone -- heave a collective sigh of relief when these people finally abandoned France and hauled their drunken kilt-covered feather-tammed rugby-fan asses back to Britain, but although I too was glad to be rid of them I confess that there was one nice thing about their presence here: It may be the only time since we squandered our good will with the French people that Americans, by contrast, seemed quiet, polite, and well-educated.

I don't mean for my first dispatch from France to be so filled with complaint. It really is great to be here, although I realized yesterday that I've been playing an unhealthy sort of game with myself to make the experience most comfortable: When it suits me I pretend I am on vacation (this excuses my spending a fortune for breakfast instead of preparing it at home, and I don't miss my friends as much as I would if I admitted to myself I won't see you all for a very long time), but when it suits me better I pretend I am a permanent resident -- a more relaxing way to bide my time; believing my stay here is unlimited, I don't feel rushed to see the sights all at once or fuss with choices about how I might spend my day.

And then, of course, there's the always entertaining and often embarrassing experience of living in a place where my language skills are horribly wanting. As I've mentioned, the Marais is Paris's gay neighborhood. (As I described it to a friend the other day it is exactly like San Francisco's Castro district if the Castro were clean, cobblestoned, and French. In other words, it is nothing at all like the Castro except for the preponderance of gay bars and bookstores.) On my first night here, having spoken no French in nearly a year save for telling my taxi driver from Gare du Nord the address of my apartment, I was approached by a young man who I believed was trying to sell me an exercise video. It took me quite an embarrassingly long time to realize that he didn't say "Tae-Bo," but "tu es beau," but by the time I figured it out, he was well on his way down the street and I felt I would look REALLY foolish to all the people sitting in the cafe I was standing in front of to shout down the street with my bad French accent, «JE TE COMPRENDS MAINTENANT! MERCI BEAUCOUP, MONSIEUR!!»

When I first came up with this crazy scheme to attempt to live abroad I worried that such a big move, all alone, is much harder when one is 50 than 20, but what I didn't realize is that I don't embarrass as easily in middle age as I did when I was younger -- an unanticipated upside. I've had foreign language brain farts like the one above when I was younger that haunted me for years and still make perspiration bead on my brow when I recall them, but in this case I just found it extremely amusing. So much so that I would find myself laughing out loud to myself whenever I recalled it. The following night I went to a jazz club down the street and I remembered the t'es beau incident just as I happened to be looking at the singer, Gwen Sampé, who was at the bar prior to her performance. (An astounding performance, by the way, and way too hard to describe in a rambling train-of-thought blog entry such as this. I will attempt that at a later date.) When I let out an involuntary, Tourette's-like laugh at myself, it started a conversation with her that continued with her and some of her friends after the show, and now just in the past two days that new friendship has led to my meeting a number of additional people who provide the potential for a new social circle -- something I didn't expect would be so quick to occur.

More news as it develops. I am off to rustle up a pear tart from the patisserie down the street, an addiction to which I knew from past visits I was in danger of succumbing and which, I am ashamed to say, may require professional help to kick. I will let you know if it becomes a problem in need of intervention.

À t'à l'heure

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On Mumps and Pules

2006-04-27T20:20:00.000+02:00

IT'S TIME ONCE AGAIN to pack -- this time for a three-week jaunt to Massachusetts, New York, and then France for a drive-it-yourself, drain-your-own-locks, uncork-your-own-bottle barge trip in Burgundy with my friends Julian, Barbara, Rita, Neville, and Elise. More on that, of course, as it unfolds.

During my last trip with this group -- to Tuscany -- Elise, Rita, and I wandered into Siena so Elise could grab a fix for the shoe-shopping-obsessed monkey on her back. Strolling through the city's winding, cobbled streets, we stopped to look in a shop window that displayed more than a few pairs of shoes where the design of the right and left were identical except that one was backless and the other not, and I commented that that was a fascinating fashion that I had never seen before. The two of them looked at me with that expression women reserve only for men when discussing fashion that says clearly but without the actual words, "you are such a moron," and informed me that they were only for display and one was called a pump and the other was a mule, and of course they were not the same pair, but just for display to show that the design was available in both styles.

But then we passed another store with more identically designed shoes in mixed backed/back-less pairs, and I told them that I thought perhaps for once it was the gentler sex (gentler on the surface, actually, and at times quite vicious just below it) that was lacking in shoe style, and that indeed the latest thing was to wear one shoe with a back and one without. Perhaps some Tuscan cobbler-genius, likely a man, had come up with this, and these new pairs of shoes were quite de rigueur. Perhaps they had a name that transcended the mule or the pump. Perhaps they were called "pules" or "mumps."

Rita, the stylish and worldly Type A-personality chairman of a highly respected multinational management consulting firm, dismissed the idea with an I-am-the-chairman-of-a-highly-respected-multinational-
management-consulting-firm-and-you-are-a-clueless-idiot wave of her hand. I think her exact words were, "Pfft." Elise piped in to say it would be impossible to walk in a pair of shoes like that because you would have to clench the toes in one foot (to which I sensibly replied that men have been designing cruel and impossible-to-wear women's footwear for centuries and that was certainly no argument for why these displays were not offering a new and fabulous way for women to look good while at the same time submitting to their societal subjugation by men).

At the third window with yet another enticingly displayed array of mumps, I felt more emboldened, and I told Rita that I was surprised such a stylish and worldly woman as herself was unaware of this new trend. What fashion magazines does she read on all these plane trips she complains about having to take, or does she just read the emergency cards in the seat backs? I told her that just because she never saw a woman wearing pules, it didn't mean that if she walked down Fifth Avenue wearing a pair on her next trip to New York, that in a year the city would not be filled with women shuffling down the streets with the toes of one foot clenched in the backless halves of their mismatched shoes.

Obviously, I struck a nerve because Rita, undoubtedly insecure about the possibility that the world of high-level international megacorporation machinations in which she was immersed had made her oblivious to the popular culture that was evolving around her, began to doubt herself, and by the fourth mump-filled window we came to, I think she was actually envisioning herself limping chic-ly down the Champs d'Elysees, clenching the toes on one foot. It was this store that Elise decided to enter to try on an ordinary pair of shoes, and Rita and I followed her in. As Elise absorbed herself in her purchasing experience, I finally convinced Rita of her narrowmindedness and lack of imagination, but told her, "if you don't believe me, just ask that salesman."

So Rita walked up to the man, and very politely, if just a tad uncharacteristically lacking in confidence, asked, "Excuse me, Signore, but perhaps you can tell me: Are these shoes two different pairs, or is this the way one is supposed to wear them, with the pump on one foot and the mule on the other?"

The salesman stared at her for a moment with that look that Europeans reserve only for Americans that says clearly but without the actual words, "you are such a moron," and told her "of course they are not the same pair, Signorina" -- I suspect this "Signorina" business was a bit of condescension on his part, especially the way he italicized it -- "but just for display to show that the design is available in both styles."

I think I started to cry, I was laughing so hard, and after Rita was a safe enough distance from the store to stop blushing, she thought it was pretty funny, too. But I was forced to buy her two gelati at the next caffe to keep her from killing me.

To get Rita excited about this next adventure, I have told her that in June all mismatched pairs of shoes go on sale in Burgundian chausseuries, and I have promised to go with her and stand outside while she steps inside and asks self-abashing questions of the sales clerks. (Hey, I need material to keep my readers amused, and I can use all the help I can get.)

Watch this space.

Mexico, 1965

2006-04-14T08:40:00.000+02:00

NONE OF THE SUBJECTS of this Elliott Erwitt photo is related to me, although a couple could be. For instance, the man and woman central to the image could very well be my parents. The casual wave of the woman's hand in stating an absolute truth might easily be my mother's as it withers away a strong conviction held by my father about whatever it is he points to.

The pair is standing in a gallery of desiccated bodies in Guanajuato, Mexico, where my parents once stood, too, with my brother and me. They were about this age when my father quit his job and they cleaned out their savings, hauled us from school, and we began our South-of-the-Border adventure.

I never understood all the reasons for our trip. I remember hearing it was a lifelong dream of my mother's, but I don't know why my father was interested. Until his recent retirement and discovery of online stock trading, my father had way too many Great-Depression scars to comfortably pick up and leave for a foreign country with no financial plan to speak of.

On the spring evening in 1965 preceding our departure, the house was a panic of last-minute preparations. Friends of my parents would drop in to offer assistance, but as was usual in our house their visits degenerated into a lot of talk and cigarette smoke and their presence did little to push forward the process of packing. One of their more resourceful friends, Hugh, made himself useful whipping up some popcorn and martinis and turning on the television, so while the rest of the house flitted about with preparations for our future, Hugh and I settled in to watch an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

The evening's tale was set in a small Mexican pueblo, where a poor family schemed to retrieve the mummified remains of their Papa who'd been cruelly disinterred after the rent on his tomb fell into arrears.

The dead man's widow and son attempt to get his body back from the drunken and demented cemetery keeper, first using reason and innocent pleading and then, when those methods fail, by acting the pranksters so the caretaker mistakes the son's ventriloquism for the voice of God emanating from the mummy's leather lips. My recollection of the story's end is hazy, but the caretaker either sees the error of his grave-digging ways or he dies, and the lovely widow and adorable son get a new living room lampshade they call Papi, making their poverty just a little easier to accept.

This was all great entertainment for Hugh, who had a healthy pitcher of Tanqueray under his belt. I, however, was convinced that I was going to die on this Mexico journey and my mummified body would be dug up and used by a madman to display macramé in a cemetery gift shop. My parents were merely annoyed at Hugh for leaving me sleepless and screaming the night before they were to begin a multi-thousand mile road trip. They finally calmed my tears enough to get a modicum of sleep, but only after lying to me, telling me it was only a fiction, as with all television the figment of an imaginative Hollywood psychopath and having no basis in reality. Understanding that things like this did not actually occur in real life allowed me to sleep most nights until, a few weeks later, we arrived in Guanajuato.

It turns out people who write for television are not nearly so imaginative as desperate-for-rest parents of eight-year-olds might lead one to believe. In fact, the Hitchcock writer in this case added nothing of his own in describing what turned out to be the Guanajuato way of life. Situated in rugged terrain about 200 miles northwest of Mexico City, Guanajuato is perhaps most famous for the fact that its climate and soil tend to mummify its cemetery's residents. Add to that a land shortage that requires constant disinterment to make room for new dead, and horrific Hitchcockian teleplays practically write themselves.

The morning after our arrival we drove straight to the cemetery and, following the guidebook's instructions, paid the more-sane-and-sober-than-I-expected caretaker a peso to let us into the museum. He did so by opening a creaky hatch in the ground to reveal a spiral iron staircase leading to a subterranean hallway. Turning left brought us to the display in the photo; in the other direction lay a dark passage with a dirt floor down which we walked until it became too dark to see anything at all. Being unfamiliar with the ways of Mexican museum display, we assumed that if there was something of interest farther down it would be labeled and lit, so we turned around and resurfaced in the cemetery. There, vendors were hawking mangoes and grilled corn and little skeleton dolls and postcards of the mummies. For these cards, a photographer had dressed the bodies up in tuxedos and gowns and arranged them in various poses so the cards he sold looked like displays for a child's doll store, save for the fact that all these "dolls" had gaping black eye sockets, slack, silent-screaming jaws with gray, leathery skin, and gnarled tufts of filthy old hair. Some of the postcards showed the entire length of the museum's hallway from the mummy display to end of the tunnel into which we had ventured, so we could now see where we had been headed: At the end of the darkened passage are the vestiges of former Guanajuateños whose remains didn't merit exhibition. Display-quality mummies are found only every several years, and the rest of those evicted end up in the dark tunnel in a massive mountain of skin, hair and bones. Looking at these postcards, it became obvious that had my family proceeded just a step or two farther, we would have instigated our own burial under the museum's entire collection of unpresentable inventory–possibly giving some unimaginative Hollywood hack all he would need to sell his first teleplay to Hitchcock.

So what were Erwitt's couple discussing in their photo? Were they my parents, maybe they'd have been marveling at Mexico's lenient child abuse laws that didn't include psychological torture among their criminal definitions. Or perhaps, inspired by all the shriveled figures about them, they were considering the withered state of their own troubled relationship and discussing their impending separation. The possibilities are endless. I do know that with the passage of time, the hysterical fears that gruesome death can strike in an eight-year old subside and my memories now are mostly of a pleasurable and unusual childhood. Perceptions and fear may have changed over time for the couple in the photo, too. They certainly have for my parents, now divorced, who these days consider decidedly more mortifying than eternity in a Guanajuato museum display the possibility of running into each other unexpectedly at the mall.

Election Protection, Part II

2004-11-10T07:23:00.002+01:00

To Mr. And Mrs. America and All the Ships at Sea:

South Florida is a place of incredible natural beauty. If you can ignore the fact that its coast of broad white-sand beaches is shadowed by an endless row of high-rise hotels and condominiums, or that rampant development has encroached on the Everglades without restraint until quite recently, threatening the delicate balance of its diverse ecology, or that the strident partisan efforts of its election officials proceed unimpeded to disenfranchise as many minority, poor, and Democratic voters as possible, it's quite a lovely place. Perhaps most impressive are the region's wide open skies with the kind of clouds we don't have here in California—the ones in which with a little imagination one can see all sorts of billowy representations of familiar things. Look! A dancing hippo! There! A pair of amorous kangaroos! Aaah, over there! Dick Cheney securing a no-bid government contract for Halliburton!

But Elizabeth and I were not in South Florida to find graft and corruption in the clouds. No, we were part of an army of 20,000 volunteers who nationwide were determined to re-enfranchise the disenfranchised—to educate voters of their legal rights in choosing who in government might best screw them over and to make sure those who wished to exercise their rights were able to do so. We were there to save America.

Three hundred or so of the Election Protection Coalition's army was in Broward County along with us. Most were plain-old concerned citizens like me; some were attorneys, like Elizabeth, who were willing to roll up their sleeves as needed for the cause of Democracy; and then there were those others in the legal profession—the ones described in the punch line of those jokes that start, "What do you call a lawyer who...?"

(To be fair, even the attorneys who believed that their law degrees bestowed priority in the line to use the copier, or who had little fits when they felt they weren't being treated with a greater degree of reverence than the other volunteers, were there for the same reason we were. But sometimes even those with the best intentions can be just so damn irritating.)

Elizabeth and I were among the earliest-arriving election protectors, and so had become internal coordinators of the operation, assisting the coalition's field director to organize and assign poll watchers and figure out ways to improve upon the organizers' systems, which were not always capable of handling the enormous number of eager re-enfranchisers. Of course, we were not the only ones to be helping in this manner, but if you ask Elizabeth (who would be the first to admit she has a hyperactive control-freak gland), she might say we (or at least she) were among the most competent—able to take the bull by the horns and get things accomplished. This caused a little friction when a contender for the control freak crown, a young Columbia graduate, began to annoy Elizabeth no end with his own loud barking of orders to whomever might pay him any notice. I found that to keep the poor boy occupied and out of strangling distance of Elizabeth, it was helpful to direct his way any volunteer who repeatedly asked an impossible-to-answer question.

Whenever someone would say, "I signed up to be a roving attorney, but I don't have my own transportation. Where can I find a car and driver?" I would point across the room and say, "I am so sorry, but I don't have the authority to help with that. But you see that guy over there, the one with the earring who is making that woman group all the chairs by color? He is the one in charge of those things and he can get you set up with everything you need. "

This may sound cruel and somehow not in the spirit of the Cause. But it kept him out of our hair so that we could get more-effective volunteers where they needed to go with the information and assistance they required.

A control room full of legal experts downstairs from us intercepted calls from the precincts and either talked poll watchers through the legal muck to assist voters, or dispatched roving attorneys to the hot spots where watchers needed their clout to resolve disputes with election officials. Additional lawyers would prove more helpful stationed at the polls, but for some such duty was beneath them. "I'm a lawyer and I took the day off from work to help here," one lawyer told Elizabeth. "I'm not just a poll-watcher!"

"Well I came all the way from San Francisco," said Elizabeth, "and where you are really needed is at this precinct. We have enough attorneys downstairs and roaming the precincts."

The attorney remained petulant until Elizabeth came up with a brilliant idea: "I'll tell you what," she told the woman. "I might be able to assign you as a Precinct Attorney. We are in dire need of Precinct Attorneys, assigned to specific polling places, who can resolve problems on the spot without having to call in or wait for a mobile attorney to arrive."

This new title for exactly the same assignment she had been previously offered pleased the woman, and she gladly ran off to do her part. And thus, the Precinct Attorney was born, and shortly Elizabeth was dispatching happy attorneys to polling places all over the county.

I was not as successful in similar situations. Because I was not a lawyer, lawyers weren't able to accept my answers to anything unless I told them what they wanted to hear; to avoid the inefficient requirement that two people provide unwelcome news to every attorney, I just directed them elsewhere and helped the littler folk.

One woman came back to headquarters with three friends because they weren't needed at their assigned precinct, and she demanded I immediately re-assign them to a place where they would be most effective. "Well at the moment, we're covered," I told her, "but that woman on the phone is in the process of contacting precincts to determine who is needed where, and if you have a seat, we'll probably have another assignment for you shortly."

"I came all the way from New York," shouted the woman, "and I sure as hell didn't come all this way just to sit around doing nothing!"

"I understand completely," I told her. "We all came from very far away. I'll tell you what. It's 3:15. There's a press conference scheduled for four o'clock that I bet you'll find very interesting. By then, not only will we have a better idea of where to send you, but voters will be getting out of work and traffic at the polls will be considerably heavier."

She turned to her friends who were waiting a few feet behind her. "He says there's nothing for us to do," she told them. Ten minutes later, when I needed five additional volunteers to send out to the field, they were nowhere to be found.

Elizabeth's first Precinct Attorney, however, got to see some real action making her day off from work much more worthwhile. Shortly after her arrival at her assigned precinct an elderly veteran emerged from the polling place and started threatening people in line with his cane. Unable to control the man, or get election officials to protect those still waiting to cast their ballots, the attorney needed to call the sheriff to come and haul him away. But while this was exciting, it was hardly the stuff that illustrates the corruption and incompetence that runs rampant through Florida's election system.

The day Elizabeth and I arrived in Florida, a photographer was violently arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after photographing voters waiting in line outside the elections office in nearby Palm Beach County. Election Protection's general counsel filed suit against the county's Election Supervisor, Theresa LePore (of the infamous butterfly ballot), for imposing the rules that not only landed the photographer in jail, but prohibited any volunteers from distributing information to citizens waiting in lines to vote. Outrageously, a judge the following day found for LePore, who had determined that nonpartisan volunteers could not distribute educational literature outside the polls. Further, it was established that a 50-foot zone around the precinct inside of which the volunteers were not allowed was to be measured not from the door of the precinct, but from the last person in line—in essence making it illegal to approach voters in LePore's district for any reason, even to inform them of their basic voting rights.

One might have expected Florida officials to be on their best behavior following the national spotlight shone on their performance in the last presidential election, but individual precinct workers took it upon themselves to carry on in the spirit of 2000.

In Broward, one of our volunteers called in to say that the precinct captain where she was posted had determined that all voters had to vote in alphabetical order. I am not sure how this was to be implemented, but Elizabeth, whose last name begins with Z, was especially miffed at this particular idiocy.

At another precinct, picture IDs were being demanded from all voters, in direct contradiction to Florida law. And in at least two precincts, voter identification cards had typos indicating one precinct number on the front and another on the reverse. Even though there is no requirement that voters bring these cards to the polls, those who did were bounced back and forth between the two precincts by poll workers who were more interested in preventing them from voting than in looking up their correct polling place. Those voters who were aware that the card was unnecessary simply failed to show them and were able to vote (barring other issues) without impediment. Interestingly, the early voting system set up in Florida in hopes of providing a smoother election process permitted voters to show up at any one of 14 sites around Broward county. For the days leading up to November 2, any registered voter could appear to cast a ballot wherever he or she pleased, but on election day one of the most common ways to disenfranchise a voter was to turn him away from a poll because it might not be the precinct to which he'd been assigned.

Elizabeth and I went to a nearby precinct where an attorney was trying to assist another voter. The man had registered to vote online and was sent a form that required his signature. When he brought the form to the polls, however, he was told that he was not registered, because the signed form was due back at election headquarters before October 5th, even though the voter received the form just a few days prior to the election.

There were also numerous reports of polling places that simply didn't open, or didn't open at the address to which voters in those precincts were directed. At least one Election Protection volunteer found out where voters in those districts should report and went to the closed polls to post instructions with the correct addresses, something election officials certainly should have done.

On the Friday prior to the election, it was divulged that 58,000 absentee ballots had never been delivered to Broward County voters. Election officials blamed the post office for misplacing them and U.S. postal officials insisted no ballots had ever been received from the county. It was announced that replacement ballots would be sent by overnight mail for arrival Saturday morning (not a lot of help to absentee voters), but by 5:00 PM Saturday a substantial number had still not gone out.

Wednesday afternoon, on the way to the airport for our flight home, I looked up and could swear one of the clouds looked just like a Broward County election official feeding unmailed absentee ballots into a paper shredder, but then the wind changed and it was hard to see much up there but a just bunch of pretty clouds in a blue sky.

I just hope that was a portent of better things to come.

Election Protection, Part I

2004-11-08T07:01:00.002+01:00

My Fellow Americans,

There's reason why many Broward County voters can't find their correct polling places: Broward County officials are not quite sure of the locations themselves. My friend Elizabeth and I, along with another Election Protection Coalition volunteer who also brought a laptop computer, spent from 2:00PM until 3:00AM Sunday printing out precinct maps and Mapquest directions to help fellow volunteers locate their assigned polling places and on-call lawyers, when summoned, to rush to the aid of disenfranchisees-to-be.

Unfortunately, Broward's official county precinct maps make little sense, and printed ones don't quite jibe with the ones posted on the Board of Elections' Web site. Many voting places lie outside the boundaries of the precincts they serve, and it's common to find that a polling place's address doesn't exist because the name of its street has been changed or is commonly known by other names.

What's more, Broward streets are designated by SE, SW, NE, or NW quadrants, and every numbered Street can have a cousin surnamed Avenue, Terrace, Court, Way, or Boulevard (or a combination of such designations) with the same number, and all can be repeated again and again in the county's multitude of towns with homophonic names like Lauderdale, Lauderhill, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, and Lauderdale Lakes. In other words, it's a wonder people here can even find their own bathrooms, let alone a polling place they may visit only rarely. As visitors from the other coast, our eyes glazed at trying to find a route from the corner of NW 42nd Street and NW 32nd Street in Fort Lauderdale to the corner of SE 12th Terrace and SE State Route 7 (née SE 40th Ave) in Little Lord Fauntlerdale. There are hundreds of these Broward precincts (of which ElectionProtection.org monitored only 70), but they're identified by a nonsequential combination of numbers and letters that (unlike, say, the neat clockwise spiral of Paris's arrondisements) are scattered willy nilly around the vast county: Precincts 53X and 26T, for example, both adjoin Precinct 91Q, which completely surrounds 66X, a tiny precinct I believe may be inhabited by just one elderly couple, although no one has seen them since last Thursday, because they have been wandering aimlessly, searching without success for their polling place in Precinct 53R.

Making sense of these political boundaries was our role on our first really long day of working to preserve Democracy. Our first day was considerably less intellectually straining, and in the first 30 hours or so after arriving we had made only one short excursion to distribute copies of the Voters Bill of Rights in a likely-to-be-intimidated neighborhood. Beyond that, and before the earnest task of identifying polling places got underway, we had the less altruistic task of identifying proper eating places. On the first night it was a place in North Miami, where Elizabeth's childhood friend Eric plays piano while his young boyfriend belts out Andrew Lloyd-Webber hits to a clientele half made up of gay men and half of older ladies with big hair, lots of make-up and jewelry, and loud New York Jewish accents. Outside the door to the parking lot, at a table set up for ostracized smokers, I was offered a light of my cigarette and shortly was involved in conversation with some of the local electorate.

One of the smokers' friends had just gotten into her car to go home and was maneuvering her huge Cadillac to clear the adjacent cars so she could exit the small lot, and one of the women at our table shouted to her, "Sadie! What a truck! Whaddya drive that fucking thing faw?" turning immediately to me and placing her long nails spread eagle to her breast and stage-whispering "pardon my language dear," and then turning again to the others at the table and asking "Whudduz she drive that thing faw?

The others shrugged a silent-but-Yiddishe "who knows?" Sadie's car passed us with just her poufed hair showing above the steering wheel. Its muffler rattled noisily, and the lady next to me screamed out, "Sadie, oy honey, when'r'you getting a new car? Who can hee-rahself think withat noise?!."

After Sadie's Caddy drifted out of the lot a man at the table leaned forward to her friends and asked, "So are all you girls Jewish?" explaining, "I've noticed that you Jewish people take your families and friends so much more seriously than my family does. I think I may convert."

"You know," said the woman across from him, "John Kerry has a Jewish brother. Yes, he met a nice Jewish girl, They fell in love. He converted. They got married. End of story."

This was discussed with approving clucks for a bit along with a short speculation on whether Kerry, with his neo-Judaic brother, would be good for the Jews.

"Well you know what JFK said," said the gentile who had originally broached the subject of Jewishness. "He said he wasn't going to be 'the Catholic President.'"

"He doesn't look so good lately," said the woman next to me.

"The woman who had profaned Sadie's car looked at her quizzically. "Who? Kennedy?!"

"No! Clinton!."

"Oy good, although I bet you're right; Kennedy probably doesn't look too good lately."

The discussion then turned to me, and they asked where I was from and what I was doing here, and I told them about Election Protection, and that I was volunteering to help get people to the polls and make sure their rights were protected, and with much bobbing of heads they all told about the shame they had for what was going on in Florida, including their distrust for the new voting machines. One of them defended the machines, telling me she'd had no problem when she went for early voting. "Everyone was very nice to me, and very efficient," she told me. "It went flawlessly."

I asked if she trusted that her vote was going to be counted accurately and she didn't show too much concern, but the others all started telling me how there was no way to tell what subterfuge was possible. ("I mean look who we have as governor, the putz!" said one woman who then asked gleefully if I had heard about the guy who the day before had tried to run Katherine Harris down with his car.) Another woman told me that when her friend had gone to her poll the machine to which she'd been assigned had malfunctioned. When she pressed Kerry's name, the woman told me, it registered Bush. With a poll worker helping she tried again and got the same result a number of times before figuring out that she had to press directly on Kerry's spot to vote for him, though anywhere near cast a vote for Bush. There's no way to know whether this secondhand (or even third or fourth hand) story is true, but the woman was convinced that pressing anywhere on the screen except a spot as small as the tip of her fingernail would work to indicate her choice for President, which she demonstrated by holding out to me her own long, painted nail. (On the flight home to San Francisco, another Election Protection volunteer we met said that this complaint was repeated in Dade County where he had been working.)

"She got them to move her to a new booth," the woman told me, "but wouldn't you know, they didn't shut down the booth? They just led the next person right up to it!'

The woman next to me leaned toward me in a conspiratorial whisper. "You know what really bothers me?" she asked. "The ballots here are in three languages!"

I told her that in San Francisco ours had even more, and she scowled. I said, "I think the idea is that if you are going to do something as important as elect your representatives in government, you should probably know what you're voting for."

"Well do you think our families were given Yiddish ballots when they first went to vote?" she asked, scanning my face to detect some goyishe blood in my family tree.

"I know they didn't," I told her, "but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have. I think this is a case where two wrongs wouldn't make a right."

"Ach," she replied. "Do you know that you need to speak Spanish here just to get a job? If I needed a job—and thank God I don't—I couldn't get one! Everyone speaks Spanish. It's co-may-tah this and co-may-tah that wherever you go!"

"You have a wonderful Cuban accent," I told her—and she did, dropping syllables and consonants like a true habanera.

At our hotel's tiki bar, the manager bought us a round of drinks in reparations for some initial confusion about our reservations. When I had called a month earlier to book the rooms and asked about the special rate Election Protection had negotiated with her chain, she seemed confused. "What is this election protection?" she had asked me. "Is that something with Democrats?" I had explained that we were non-partisan, that we were only coming to make sure everyone eligible was able to cast a vote. "Well then. OK," she told me, and knocked $20 off the price of the rooms and gave us an upgrade. When we arrived, she had forgotten about it.

While comping our drinks, she asked whom we were voting for. "I'm voting for the next president of the United States," Elizabeth told her. "Who are you voting for?"

"I can't vote," she told us, "I'm Filipino. But my daughter is voting for Kerry. She's too independent to listen to my advice."

------------------
Click here for Election Day, Part II.

Souvenir Hunting for the Curio[u]s

2004-01-27T06:05:00.000+01:00

THERESE AND I BOUNCED THROUGH HYENA-SIZED POTHOLES in our rented Suzuki Sierra on a dirt road clearly marked on the map as one of Kenya's best. It was our second venture from our Nairobi base, this time to Masai Mara National Park, the northern, Kenyan extension of Tanzania's famed Serengeti. We had returned to Nairobi to fortify our supply of insect repellent and rent a new tent, and to attempt to cool some of the rancor that had erupted between us during the previous week's camping safari in Amboseli, in the shadow of Kilimanjaro.

Therese, despite her vast wanderings, is one of those travelers who create inflexible itineraries that to the hour spell out where one should be and what one should do. While I consider part of the joy of travel the 45 minutes it takes to check out of a Third-World hotel while the desk clerk writes down in triplicate the serial numbers from every dollar bill I pay with, and then repeats the task in two more ledgers, and then disappears for a period to get a manager's approval, and then asks me to sign the receipt, and then takes my receipt to the manager to certify that my signature matches that on my passport, Therese explodes at such inefficiency. She sees it as an impediment to travel rather than as travel itself, and it throws off the entire rhythm of her vacation. Even after three weeks in Kenya, it was common for Therese to say to me, "Wait right here. I'm just going to run across the street for a sec to buy toothpaste." A big fight would then ensue when I would tell her that there's no such thing as "a sec" on the entire African continent and hadn't she learned that when it took four hours to rent the car that had been reserved and paid for in advance, or when the wait for our lunch check earlier resulted in her having to cancel plans for visiting two museums and a dress shop she had listed on her day's schedule.

My utter enjoyment of the trip's distractions only served to make her a more irritable companion, and I think that's why she reveled in my discomfort when we arrived at our first campsite at Amboseli. Her small two-person tent was obviously designed for two persons more intimate than we were, and certainly for two people of Therese's diminutive stature, not mine. Her fleshier construction allowed her to sleep without a pad on rocks and zebra turds more comfortably than bony me, and I finally abandoned our rip-stop nylon prison to sleep in the car. That's when I discovered that the Avon Skin So Soft that everyone had sworn was the best insect repellent in the world was of no use in darkest Africa, and I spent most of the night chain smoking, slapping myself against blood-sucking, six-legged, winged predators and listening to the contented snoring emanating from Therese's tent.

Equipped with a new tent of my own, a thick foam pad, and a half-gallon of 100% Deet from a Nairobi camping supply store, we set off on the second leg of our road journey.

Throughout Kenya's countryside, locals appeal to tourists' rapacious desire for native tchochkes by setting up "curios shops." Every kilometer or so on primary roads signs reading "Curios!" or "Sale on Curios!" or "Authentic African Curios!" beckon tourists into little shops that sell bauxite chess sets or wooden salad servers with giraffes and rhinos carved in their handles. After a stop at one such souvenir stand, I surveyed the sea of curios and tried to picture a typical evening in a thatched Maasai family hut, a father and son in their traditional warrior drapery and beads, playing chess as the mother served them up a Cobb salad with her zebra fork and spoon.

As we tooled along the highway into Maasailand we spotted another roadside sign, this one telling of a Maasai village, authentic in every way, with an arrow pointing toward a spot five kilometers off the beaten path. Anticipating new adventure, I adjusted my perky safari hat to a rakish tilt, threw our little Suzuki into low four-wheel drive, and set off into the bush in search of African culture.

As promised by the sign, there was the village. Over the mud wall, we could see the thatched roofs of the small grass huts of the Maasai who lived there. We parked in one of the ample spaces reserved for tour buses in the vast parking lot and walked up to the gate in the wall where a sign listed visiting hours and the admission prices for adults, children, and seniors.

Before we could get back in the car a man appeared at the gate and beckoned us in. "No thank you," I told him, "we just stopped by to look, but we're leaving now."

The man looked perplexed, and thinking he didn't understand my English, I made a little walking motion with two fingers and, pointing to the car, pantomimed driving with my hands on an imaginary steering wheel and then pointed again, off in the direction of Masai Mara.

"Don't you want to come in and look around?" he asked me in perfect English.

"Not really," I told him.

"I don't understand," he said. "Why did you come here?"

"I expected something different," I explained, and Therese and I hopped back in the car. The man followed us, and as he approached the Suzuki, a group of 10 or 12 villagers followed him out of the gate with trinkets and fabric and postcards and salad servers and gathered around the open windows.

The man continued with his incredulous interrogation. "I don't understand. Why did you come here if you don't wish to come in? Why are you leaving? This makes no sense."

Yet again, I explained that we were just exploring, that we didn't wish to stay, that we were going right away, but again he asked us our reason for coming there.

"We were just curious," Therese told the man, and before the last syllable of the word passed her lips the error in her choice of vocabulary was obvious to both of us. Two dozen arms thrust enthusiastically through the windows dripping with beads and waving bauxite rooks and knights.

"CURIOS! CURIOS!" shouted the crowd. "CURIOS!" Some of the merchant villagers transferred their wares to one hand and with the other grabbed our shirts and held their goods to our faces, screaming "CURIOS!" like a threat.

I slipped the car into reverse and slowly released the clutch, creeping carefully out of the car park. Therese rolled up the windows to keep the anxious retailers at bay, and with a false smile on her face, waved a sporting little goodbye from behind the glass. Despite her attempts to look unfazed, however, I knew: This was just another example to her of why one should never stray from one's well-thought-through itinerary.

Scuffle in Maasailand

2004-01-27T05:15:00.000+01:00

THERESE HAS PARKED in the middle of a dusty, deserted Kenyan road and perspires, perplexed, over one of our baffling maps. Seasoned adventure travelers, Therese and I rejected an organized safari and rented a car of our own, a rusty little four-wheel drive Suzuki, for our first visit to Africa.

I am sitting on the tailgate repairing a window in the car's rear cargo hold when two young Maasai girls materialize from the empty landscape and greet me with a gracious Swahili hello. "Jambo!" they shout.

"Jambo!" I call out to them, and they respond with winning smiles. They speak to me fast in Swahili and I apologize for my inability to understand them. "Pole pole," I say, and wave my hands palms down at the ground, indicating that they should slow down. It is nearly the only Swahili that I know aside from my jambo hello, and it's pretty much useless; they chatter on at me, beaming and gesturing and giggling like hyper young girls in any culture. There is nothing in their cheeriness to prepare me for what will follow.

We had been flying down a straight dirt highway raised above vast, flat fields sparsely dotted with acacia trees, the sky and savanna endless before us. Therese had been taking a rare turn behind the wheel, her fear of right-hand-drive, Third-World motoring relieved by the complete absence of other vehicles on the road. Our car rattled noisily and small stones and craters sent it hopping on its springs, the shock absorbers having long ago surrendered to Africa's highways. Therese sped giddily along a washboard stretch, and after a few minutes the latch of one rear vent wing snapped, making the glass smack loudly and repeatedly against its frame.

"Pitcha!" one of the girls now yells, striking a pose, and the other squeals with delight and does her own vamp. "Pitcha! Pitcha!" They giggle more, but I don't have my camera handy so I shake my head no. Using some spare bootlaces from my pack, I've settled on a series of knots that I think will hold our broken window and I return to the front passenger seat where I sit with the door open. The girls follow after me and I concur with Therese about their cuteness as we admire their lovely smiles. "Pitcha!" the first one insists again.

Every five seconds, it is said, someone in Maasailand has their picture taken, and in an attempt to fend off exploitation of the locals' famous photogeneity, guidebooks admonish tourists not to capture the Maasai on film without first negotiating a price. Someone in Nairobi told me that if you don't settle on a proper remuneration before you capture a Maasai on film, he may charge whatever he likes. Far from protecting the native culture, however, this arrangement has corrupted it in unusual ways. There is an expectation now by many natives that you will want to take their photo, and the only non-Swahili words many of them know are phrases used to negotiate their modeling fees.

Earlier in the day a young Maasai warrior had stood regally with his traditional spear and greeted us at a roadside restaurant where Therese and I had stopped for refreshment. At first sight, the Maasai people appeared just as I'd imagined from the National Geographics and TV documentaries of my childhood. They stand tall and proud, draped in colorful fabrics and beads. Heavy, gleaming clusters of golden rings hang from their ears, stretching their pierced lobes low towards their shoulders. Up close, I noticed on our roadside warrior's feet the familiar swoosh of a Nike logo and I was struck by how clean and white his new shoes were despite the red mud that surrounded us.

With a broad grin he gestured to our cameras. "Pitcha?!" he asked, but Therese and I declined, not wanting to bid for the privilege of a snapshot.

Now I am faced with a similar situation with these charming children. Therese's Nikon hangs around her neck and I hold it up to the girls without removing its large black lens cap. Pointing to myself and then them and then the camera, I ask slowly in English, "You want me, to take your picture, with this camera?"

They laugh and nod. "Hundre-dolla!" the first girl tells me.

"Oh, I don't think so," I snort, laughing at her joke.

But it is no joke, and our friendship is over. Her expression becomes dark and both girls' smiles vanish. Suddenly it dawns on me that by holding up Therese's camera I have given the impression that I've used it. These girls know that tourists must pay to take their photo, but they are too young or have been too isolated to understand how the camera works. Now they believe I am robbing them of their rightful fee—a fee that they have named and should be theirs for the asking.

"Start the engine," I whisper to Therese, "and let's go now." I look around nervously for others from the girls' unseen village, maybe a group of warriors in super-fast Nikes with their spears extended.

Therese, not sharing my sudden unease, is guffawing over my social blunder as I start to pull my door shut. The first girl grabs the frame of the door's open window with both hands and I fear that closing it will break her small fingers. Both girls' smiles are ancient history and now they scream Swahili curses at me, fire in their eyes.

I try to pry the girl's fingers from the window frame but as I release one hand's grip she grasps again with the other.

"Drive, Therese! Now!" I'm shouting, and Therese grinds the transmission, lurches forward a bit, and quickly stalls. She restarts and proceeds more smoothly this time, but now the second child has handed a large acacia limb to her friend who starts to wale on me through the open door. Both girls are screaming for their money.

Therese decides that she will laugh at me later when we get safely away, and she accelerates. While the two jog beside the car flinging epithets, I worry that the girl with the stick won't let loose her grip until we are dragging her along in the dirt, so I pry at her fingers once more. This time I succeed because her other hand is busy with the business of whomping on me with her makeshift club.

Therese steps more heavily on the gas and we roar away. I turn and look back as the girls' shaking fists and hollered invectives fade away in our swirling wake of pebbles and dust. We are flying again across the wide-open landscape, making our getaway, another adventure—perhaps another blow to my traveler's ego, if not my person—just a few rutted kilometers down the road.

A Sidecar Named Desire, Please, and Make It a Double

2003-06-20T03:14:00.000+02:00

MY FRIEND N (not her real name) doesn't understand drinking attitudes outside Louisiana, and she can work herself into a snit on the topic. Her first alcohol-related altercation came less than a week after her move from New Orleans to San Francisco, and the memory still rankles her.

"I was walking down Market Street with my highball," N recalls indignantly, "and this cop coming in the other direction turned on his siren and lights, pulled a U-turn across six lanes of traffic, and screamed up behind me on the sidewalk. He hopped out of his car and said, 'Lady, what the hell do you think you're doing?' and I said, 'Whadda you think you're doing?'

"He said, 'You're drinking on the damn street!' and I said 'You're driving on the fucking SIDEWALK!'"

For those who have never been to New Orleans, N's exasperation might seem naive, but I understand. We San Franciscans tend to quaff our beverages more as background to our debates of the merits of eight-dollar "signature" martinis, or so we can rhapsodize about the butteriness of the latest Sonoma Chardonnay. In New Orleans, I discovered, they just drink.

When you order a cocktail in New Orleans, it comes in one of those big plastic geaux cups that you can carry from bar to bar, eliminating the awkward few empty-handed minutes other cities inflict on you to give your liver a short rest between snorts. When I visited New Orleans, I'd often wake in my hotel unsure of how I'd gotten there. I would check myself for fresh abdominal scars, recalling those stories one hears about people waking in a tub of ice with a note thanking them for their involuntary kidney donation. (I knew I needn't worry about the loss of my liver; after only a night or two in the Big Easy, one's liver can't be worth much on the black organ market.)

While the alcoholic habits of the city are not unregulated—they have a few common-sense ordinances like the one banning the sale of bottled beer in second-floor saloons with balconies over the street—there is a mind-your-own-business attitude about liquor that can seem peculiar to Americans raised outside the South.

When I marveled to a friend from Baton Rouge about seeing a parking attendant hand car keys to a customer who was—literally—falling-down drunk, he explained how Louisianans don't cotton to California-style liability laws. "If y'all are gonna take a drink," my friend informed me, "y'all're gonna hafta take responsibility for yourself."

"The problem is no one outside Louisiana learns how to drink properly when they're young," explained N when I returned to San Francisco. "When I was growing up, the drinking age was 18 unless your momma said it was OK and then they just served you, no questions asked. When I was 14, my momma put two glasses on the table, filled them with bourbon, and said, 'N honey, I'm gonna teach you what it feels like to get drunk, because I don't want the same thing happening to you as happened to your two sisters. I don't want you losing your virginity just 'cause you can't handle your liquor.'"

I asked if it worked. "It sure did!" she told me.

"So how did you lose your virginity?"

"Drugs."

N told me of the time she was driving home really slowly, trying to keep her car between the lines on the Louisiana highway she was navigating. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw a patrol car so she pulled off at the next exit and weaved her way home through side streets, all the time looking back to find the cop dogging her every turn. Finally, she arrived in front of her house and staggered from her car. When the patrolman pulled up beside her, she realized it was a guy she went to high school with.

"How ya doin', Bob?" she asked him.

"Not too bad, N," he told her. "Just wanted to make sure you got home okay."

After a long residency in the politically correct West, I'm learning to appreciate my Southern friends' refreshing attitudes about refreshments. There was a time when I would beat myself up recalling some of my aprés-martini adventures, but now I take a bit of the money and energy I might spend on therapy and use it for purchasing aspirin and Post-It notes and leave myself reminders to take two tablets with a lot of water before going to bed.

This past Wednesday, for instance, I understand I had an excellent time at a fundraiser at which they served some mighty fine manhattans. Thursday morning, when the organization called unexpectedly to arrange delivery of the living room furniture for which I had bid highest in the silent auction, I was fortunate enough to have the credit available on my Visa. More intriguing, though, was an e-mail message from someone named Scott who expressed his thrill at my having invited him to a party at my home and how nice it was to meet me. He signed the note, "I can't wait until we see each other again. xoxo Scott."

I dashed off a reply stating oh no, the pleasure was all mine, and that I looked forward to seeing him again, too. And then I called all my friends to ask if any of them had an idea who this new boyfriend might be.

But hey, look: Although my memory sometimes falters, my liver is still functioning damn well and most mornings I wake up in my own bed. While the identity of my new lover Scott for now remains a mystery, my visit to New Orleans and my Louisiana friends have given me a whole new outlook on excess. With my newfound perspective, I can gather with my pals at my favorite watering hole several times a week without the guilt that surrounded it in the past. Next time the bartender pockets the tip and says "See you tomorrow, Joel," I won't need to run off and take one of those "Are You an Alcoholic" quizzes. I'll just take comfort in the knowledge that San Francisco's social outcasts can always find acceptance as mentors to the youths of Louisiana.

Paris Nonsense, Part VI

2002-09-15T06:41:00.000+02:00

A tout le monde,

Rhonda and I stumbled today upon a startlingly extensive show honoring Yves Montand in the grand old Hotel de Ville (city hall). It covers every aspect of the entertainer's life, from his film and singing career, to his antiviolence politics, to his identity as a Frenchman—part historic exhibit, part moving adulation.

At one point, two very small Frenchwomen in their sixties entered a darkened room where I sat on crowded, carpeted bleachers facing a screen that showed clips of Montand's many TV appearances in France and abroad. "Mesdames," I called in a whisper and motioned to them that I would stand so they could reach empty seats behind me. They thanked me excitedly, and clutching each other's arms they climbed up to take their places in the audience.

The two women sat very close to each other and one of them sang along with all her favorite Montand tunes as the other held her wrists still on her knees and conducted each song by moving only her tiny index fingers. When other people in the room spoke, the ladies shushed them with annoyance and then returned to singing and conducting, commenting to each other with an occasional soft poke in the ribs. When Montand sang a sad song, they pulled out handkerchiefs and dabbed at their eyes, and when he did a comic dance they chuckled over his irresistible charm.

The rest of the audience was rapt, and nearly all stayed through the entire 20-minute video loop, but the two old friends were the only ones who reacted with laughter and tears, or for that matter any emotion at all. The French reaction to performance is very hard to read, as we noticed in two live performances this week. The first was in an oppressively hot, 10 by 10-foot underground piano bar where a young performer sang a repertoire of polyglottal patter songs while his audience sat stoically, puffing on their cigarettes. The singer sweated profusely, and it was hard to tell if it was due to the steamy heat or the utter nonreaction of his listeners who were squeezed so tightly he most likely could feel their smoky breath on his face.

The night before last night, we attended a performance of an experimental tap-dance, accordion, saxophone, percussion group, and with the exception of the mother of one of the tappers, saw the same blasé faces in the audience. But while their expressions indicated utter indifference, their enthusiastic applause at the end of each piece evinced an entirely different sentiment.

Despite a noticeable absence of scarves, this was a very stylish audience. The women had the lithe figures you see on nearly all French women—a near-anorexic slimness that would lead one to believe the French don't have nearly the number of cheeses that de Gaulle insisted made them so ungovernable, and everyone held their Gauloises either between their thumbs and index fingers, or all the way down where their index and middles met so they could clasp their hands tightly to their faces when they inhaled.

While finding seats among the red velvet couches and chairs, Rhonda and I began chatting with the dancer's sister and their Anne Bancroft–lookalike mother, an excessively chic woman with hair that matched her mascara, who wore a modified bowler tilted over her brow like Joel Grey in Cabaret.

When the club's atmosphere became sufficiently unbreatheable with cigarette smoke so that it had the quintessential Parisian jazz-club atmosphere, the troupe made their entrance down the center aisle. The tap dancers scraped and clacked their way to the stage as the musicians barked at their knees with baritone sax blasts and arrhythmic, dissonant accordion riffs.

As the only Americans in the room, Rhonda and I were able to express our delight with the performance in a way that no Frenchman, save the tap dancer's mother, seemed capable. She was terribly pleased at our obvious appreciation, and beamed at us after each tapping flurry her daughter made across the stage. When the show ended, she conveyed to us in a combination of rapid-fire French, the waving of her unfiltered Gitane, and a puffing pantomime of her hours-long labor, that she knew her daughter had talent even when she was in the womb.

*****

Waiting in line to ascend the Eiffel tower this, our last evening in France, a young child escaped from his mother and taking a large swig from his water bottle spat it on Rhonda's feet. No one came to rescue us from him or him from Rhonda, and then we saw his mother, surrounded by her six children who all seemed to be about six months apart and whose discipline she long ago obviously abandoned. As the children terrorized our group of fellow tourists, I dreaded sharing the claustrophobic elevator ride to the top, but then a thought occurred to me that brightened the situation; I finally had the opportunity to use the only French phrase I knew when I arrived. As I turned to the mother to tell her, "Madame, vos enfants sont insupportables!" she made her first move to control one of them—in Greek. My last chance for meaningful French communication was dashed, and it was time to return to our apartment and pack for the airport.

Final Day Statistics:
Cheeses tasted: 29
Cheeses awaiting our return: 217

Paris Nonsense, Part V

2002-09-13T06:36:00.000+02:00

Mesdames et Messieurs:

The water wasn't running when we woke this morning in our new apartment near Beauborg. Yes, a small disaster, but it has set the scene for some unexpected adventures, and the apartment is so charming, despite its location on the umpteenth floor, that we don't really mind. Parisians call the top floor the toutou etage but one might accurately describe this place as being on the toutoutoutouTOU etage. Rhonda and I are unsure if our lack of alertness is from not having had a shower since yesterday morning or if it's oxygen deprivation from the altitude of our new digs.

When the water pooped out, I earned the role of waterboy, a figure from 18th-century Paris that we learned about at the sewer museum. When the city first started providing Parisians with potable water from large neighborhood fountains, people who had the financial wherewithal not to wait in line paid one of 20,000 waterboys to fetch a pail for them. Those boys with little patience and even fewer scruples simply dipped their buckets into the Seine and delivered to their clients a healthy serving of cholera soup. When I climbed the stairs this morning with a five-liter bottle of Evian from the corner market, Rhonda eyed me suspiciously and took a distrustful sniff before using her ration to brush her teeth.

Still unshowered by late afternoon, we began to feel a tad sticky and stinky from a combination of sweat, pastry and crepe drippings, red wine, and some particularly odiferous cheese, and I was worried that we might be a bit too ripe to attend a theater performance for which Rhonda had purchased tickets. Even if Parisians did live up to their reputations for being bath-averse (and they do not), we were ready to give them a true run for their money, but that turned out to be a moot issue.

We entered the small Left Bank theater off an alley and descended a long flight of stairs into...a converted sewer! A tall, round tunnel blocked off from the main system by a stone wall at one end, it had an olfactory je ne sais quoi that in no uncertain terms explained the space's history. The performance was of an original play tied loosely together by Cole Porter and Noel Coward songs. When the female lead introduced "Night and Day" with the familiar lyrics, "Like the drip drip drip of the raindrops when the summer shower's through," I checked under my feet for hypersensitive rat hordes to see if I should make for safety through one of the two remaining manhole shafts above our heads.

More distracting was the long scarf worn by the female star. She tossed it around her neck repeatedly and at one point relinquished it to her male co-star who I was sure was going to hold it to his nose to filter the fetid air. The rest of the audience didn't share our point of reference that made the scarf prop so funny, but Rhonda and I had a hard time controlling our laughter, and managed to remain silent only by the fear that if we gave in to a guffaw, we would have to aspire a huge gasp of the theater's ambience.

Day Ten Statistics:
Cheeses tasted: 26
Cheeses to go: 220*

*Note to all you sticklers: I have been sent numerous suggestions that this figure is wrong, in both current and historic French cheese terms. For the record, my version of the Columbia World of Quotations cites deGaulle as asking how one can govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese, and I have handy no 21st century reference for how ungovernable, based on available cheeses, the people of France have become. I stand by my current statistics.
Paris Nonsense continues...

Paris Nonsense, Part IV

2002-09-12T06:30:00.000+02:00

Liseurs et liseuses:

You may find it hard to believe, but the French are nothing if not practical, especially when it comes to museum design. The Paris sewer museum has a display showing the history of the sewer system that is built over a steel-grate floor, beneath which rush the turds of two million Parisians. Where else do you know a people to have devised a display that allows museum-goers sickened by the stench of an exhibit to vomit right where they stand and have it end up, no muss no fuss, exactly where it should? One of the other Americans who attended the museum with us spent almost her entire time underground with the sleeve of her sweater held unstylishly across her nose (I must admit to doing the same a bit after my mouth became dry from breathing through it), and it occurred to me that a nice touch would be if they had officials standing by with some especially ripe cheeses to wave under noses and revive visitors who fainted from the sewers' aroma.

Before we left the U.S., Rhonda had confessed a bit of insecurity concerning her wardrobe, having heard that Parisian women all dressed so chic. Amy (mentioned earlier) had thrown out a helpful suggestion, having recently returned from Paris with a suitcase full of scarves. "Just tell Rhonda to bring some scarves." Amy told me. "In Paris, it's all about scarves." I passed this advice on to Rhonda despite the fact that I have never seen her wear a scarf, could not imagine her wearing a scarf, and in fact, don't think she has ever even owned a scarf. Rhonda, as expected, scoffed at the scarves, but after about 15 minutes in the Paris sewers, watching everyone grasping at any available fabric to cover their faces, she did sheepishly admit to me, "Well, I guess Amy was right. It is all about scarves."

A delightful young German woman who is spending the month leading groups gagging and retching through these subterranean tunnels loaded us down with all sorts of fun facts, like that rats can sense a coming flash flood of effluence faster than humans, so if you see a bunch of rats running through the sewer, you should run too. Rats are smart, too, she told us. The sewermen used to use a quick poison to control the rat population, but some of the more wily rats pointed out to their friends the ominous brevity between snacktime and death, so they decided to stand around in groups and watch while one rodent ate the bonbons. If the sated rodent dropped dead, none of his pals would partake. Now the sewermen use slower-acting stuff, presuming that these furry little guys may be smart, but that hunger and patience have their limits.

*****

Yesterday, I called a friend of my mother's, Jacqueline, to introduce myself and invite her on Saturday when Rhonda and I plan to rent a car and drive off to Maison Picasiette, a house in Chartres whose owner completely covered it, inside and out including the furniture, in ornate mosaics. It is possible to believe that, because he seemed to have tiled everything on his property except his wife, that the vast amounts of broken crockery he used was produced by his wife throwing dishes at him in a perpetual state of rage. While at first enthusiastic about this junket, Jacqueline then hesitated. "Umm, there's just one thing I have to warn you about" she told me. "This is kind of personal." I thought she was going to tell me she had some form of disability that would require me to carry her to the car, or empty her colostomy bag, and I asked her the problem. "Well, I just want you to know that if I have to, I can hold off for a while but ... I'm a smoker."

When she found out that Rhonda and I smoked, too, her relief was palpable and her excitement about seeing Maison Picasiette returned. "Thank God!" she told me. "You know I have some of that gum, but I don't really like it. I just keep it around for when friends visit from the States and get so upset." All the pharmacies here have huge posters in their windows advertising Nicorette gum and standing in front of them you will invariably find one or more Parisians puffing away. The posters all have photos of sexy young people billowing smoke from their mouths and nostrils with no text of explanation save for the gum's brand name. Now I understand that Nicorette may never make it here as a cessation aid, but is catching on big time as another way for the French to cope with the insufferable American tourist.

Day Nine Statistics:
Cheeses tasted: 22
Cheeses to go: 224
Paris Nonsense continues...

Paris Nonsense, Part III

2002-09-11T06:20:00.000+02:00

Mes petits moineaux...

Forgive me if the following seems choppy or distracted. We only yesterday found the boulangerie with the very best croissants in our neighborhood--why we didn't try it earlier I am not sure, as its name in English means "Everything with Butter"--and just at this moment I am eating my first almond croissant from there. My fingers are a little sticky and a fairly intense endorphin rush is limiting my vocabulary.

After nearly a week here, I thought it might be time to regale you with tales of the wild Parisian nightlife. How I wish I could tell you that my nights have been as full as my days, but aside from a conversation in a bar last evening with an older gentleman who wanted to have a discussion about politics, specifically concerning my President Kennedy and his President deGaulle (I believe he had had a couple of drinks before I arrived), there hasn't been much to report. His English was worse than my French, but through his whiskey slur I was able to understand the man to compliment my accent when out of my mouth from I know not where I told him in perfect French that it was late and that I needed to go home right away.

Rhonda and I were a wee delayed earlier in the evening on our way to a concert of Bach partitas, because Rhonda was in the bathroom sharpening her elbows so she could poke me should I start snoring during the performance. We had planned to pass an easy day and simply find a relaxing place to sit and read and eat some more cheese, but in our search for the perfect site at which to vegetate, we ended up wandering as much as usual, and whenever we sat down in a cafe, we would realize how close we were to yet another thing we had talked about seeing and we ended up, yet again, hithering here and yonning there. It turns out to be a Parisian routine that is hard to break.

The day before, for instance, we sallied forth to the flea market at Montreuil, where despite its vastness we found nothing to buy except for a much needed umbrella, and when we consulted our maps we realized how close we were to Pere Lachaise cemetery and traipsed in the rain through a back entrance to visit the famous dead folk there.

The list of Pere Lachaise's tenants is, of course, legendary. Here lie Moliere, Corot, Chopin, Balzac, Jim Morrison--all the historical heavyweights. Alice B. Toklas is buried subordinately behind Gertrude Stein, queerly evocative of elderly husbands in Miami who walk 10 paces back from their wives, carrying their purses, and Oscar Wilde's tomb is covered with lipstick from his mourners' kisses. (The men who visit Oscar, one can only suppose, wear considerably more lipstick than the women who visit Gert and Alice.)

A life-sized bronze of Victor Noir, a journalist murdered by a cousin of Napoleon III at the virile age of 22, lies sprawled across his grave, his top hat tossed aside and filled by a recent admirer with fresh red roses. Monsieur Noir lies in an eternal state of sexual arousal, even in death, and his tomb has become the destination of many a barren Frenchwoman who come to rub his penis to restore their fertility. Judging from the shine on Victor's bronze crotch, there is a lot of moaning of "O Lourdes, O Lourdes!" when no one is looking.

Speaking of penises, we found ourselves later in the evening on rue St. Denis, where a friend of another friend of Rhonda's owns a sex shop. Rhonda had been told it would be nice if while she was in Paris she stopped in and said hello, so we strolled up the neon-lit cobblestones until we found the place, but Rhonda couldn't remember the name of her friend's friend and while she stood and pondered it, the automatic double doors whooshed open and shut a number of times, expelling elderly men who zipped up their flies as they exited. Witnessing this, instead of remembering the owner's name Rhonda promptly forgot her own friend's name and imagined the scenario of walking into the place and in broken Introductory French trying to explain that someone whose name escaped her had asked her to say hello to someone else whose name was written down on a piece of paper that she had left at home, and that was the end of that adventure.

But I get ahead of myself. Rhonda and I spent nearly the entire stroll from our apartment to the Bach recital near Notre Dame in a verbal pissing contest about who was more exhausted by all our meanderings. Apparently I won, because she chose to warn me a dozen times that she would hurt me badly if I should chance to slumber. I understood her concern when we entered Sainte Chapelle, an intimate and lulling little chapel despite its wraparound stained glass windows that soar 30 feet above the congregants. The acoustics were such that the slightest cough or turning of a program page would seriously interfere with the soloist's performance (a violinist with a name very similar to one of the cheeses we tasted on Day One). I was able to stay awake by searching for images of little boys with priests in the hundreds of stained glass panes that depicted every scene in the Bible, and was glad I did, because near the end of the third movement of the first partita, Rhonda chose to add to it a sonorous, if slightly dissonant, bass line rumble, and I had to elbow her awake, ending her impromptu duet with a staccato grunt.

Day Eight statistics:
Cheeses tasted: 20
Cheeses to go: 226*

*Note: Due to an unfortunate calculation error, Day Five statistics included an overstatement of the number of remaining cheeses. Please accept my apologies.
Paris Nonsense continues...

Paris Nonsense, Part II

2002-09-09T06:12:00.000+02:00

Mes petits choux:

Just as Rhonda and I wrapped up the remains of cheeses 15 and 17 (we had already finished off number 16, a lovely, creamy goat with a spicy finish and a name utterly unpronounceable by Americans), the sky burst, driving all the loll-abouts in the Luxembourg Gardens to shelter under the trees and pavilions. The gendarmes who had begun their closing-time sweep of the park by blowing shrill whistles and doing that French wavy thing with their hands were good-natured enough to wait for the rain to let up a bit before driving the 50 or 60 refugees who had gathered under a large awning out the iron gates onto the rue Gay-Lussac.

This was our first day not to be slaves to our museum and monument passes. After sampling our first few cheeses, Rhonda and I had bought the passes, good for three days at a bazillion museums and monuments throughout Paris. Being on a bit of a budget, Rhonda figured that to use them to best economic advantage, one had to visit 3.24 sites per day, and we studied the approved list and picked our favorites.

My friend Amy in San Francisco has an arrangement with her girlfriend Laura who hates to shop, that after every three stops Amy insists they make to ogle shoes or scarves, Laura gets to pick a bar in which to have a cocktail. Rhonda and I planned to adapt this idea to sightseeing and determined that we would just substitute museum-going for shopping and cafes (or bars) for bars.

Fresh in the morning with a pastry and coffee in our bellies this plan seemed quite clever (I believe that Rhonda and I gave each other congratulatory if uncharacteristic slaps on each other's backs for our smarts), but even wearing the most comfortable shoes and visiting the most delightful museums, we exhausted ourselves in no time, and realized that the scheme would work better in reverse. By noon of our first day we determined that for every three coffees (or cocktails) we imbibed, we would treat ourselves to a stop at one museum or monument.

Still attempting to squeeze our money's worth from our museum passes we wore ourselves out, reluctantly forgoing one earned citron pressé (or pastis) in order to stop in a pharmacy to purchase matching pairs of Air-Pillo insoles. Part of me believes the three-day pass is designed to make the Paris visitor feel he is not accomplishing enough, to fill the tourist with doubts about his adequacies. Now that our passes have expired, we can enjoy the delights Paris offers at a more leisurely pace and without pressure or self-loathing.

This is not to say we did not linger over our favorite Renoirs and Degases or newly discovered Picassos, and enjoy them immensely. It is just that when we dragged ourselves through the Pantheon to pay our respects to Zola and Malraux and all the others who gave their lives for France and were entombed in the basement, we did so with a newfound respect for their wisdom in finding such a grand place to rest and take a load off their tired and aching feet.

Today's cheese-fest in the Luxembourg Gardens was a wonderful unwind, with a baguette and some fruit that we had managed to purchase with some difficulty in the markets on Rue Mouffetard. Each time I presented my selections to the fruit seller, he would yell at me harshly and wave away my money, handing my choice to another shopper and taking his or her money. On the third attempt, he inexplicably took my euros, wrapped up my purchase and barked his au revoir. I will never know what really transpired, and after slathering cheese number 15 on my baguette, I really didn't care. Later this evening in the Marais, back at Les Philosophes so that Rhonda could feed her tart-a-la-tomate monkey, the last pain of the memory completely faded when a man picked up the sweater that had dropped on the sidewalk from the back of my chair and instead of just handing it to me, draped it stylishly across my shoulders.

Day five statistics:
Cheeses tasted: 17
Cheeses to go: 239
Paris Nonsense continues...

Paris Nonsense, Part I

2002-09-06T06:05:00.000+02:00

Mes amis,

Rhonda and I arrived in Paris yesterday and promptly planted ourselves at an outdoor table around the corner from our rented apartment where we feasted on the most exquisite tomato tart and stared at passersby. We read in one of our guidebooks about the acceptability in Parisian culture to stare—according to the author a popular way for one woman using public transport to study and adopt fashion sensibilities from another but now employed by anyone with a hint of curiosity about his fellow man. The book encourages Paris visitors to go native and stare freely, and Rhonda and I have been practicing in earnest. This being my first-ever trip to Paris and because of my shy nature, I started small by staring first at children, who by the way speak excellent French here and even look French. I cannot say for sure this is due to their attire and attribute it more to their attitude. Children here seem to master at a very tender age as much the unique Parisian comportment as the accent.

Speaking of children, I have yet to find any insufferable ones here. Those of you who heard me express pre-trip concerns that although I could remember very little practical French I had learned how to tell parents that their children were unbearable, will be either relieved or disappointed that I have had no opportunity to have the phrase "vos enfants sont insupportables" roll off my tongue to anyone. From Rhonda's own repertoire of seemingly unimportant French phrases, however, I have been able to steal one and use it appropriately when—after staring at a picturesque Frenchman or distracted by a pear tart in the window of a patisserie—I had reason to shout, "Mon Dieu! J'ai marché dans une crotte!" indicating to those around me that my shoes needed cleaning and that Paris's pooper-scooper laws could use a bit better enforcement (especially, I might suggest, in the Jewish quarter near the corner of rue de Rosiers and rue des Hospitalieres St. Gervais).

Day Two Statistics:
Cheeses tasted, 4
Cheeses to go, 242
Paris Nonsense continues...