14m² in Montmartre

Aix-en-Provence

2005-06-28T17:07:00.000+02:00

Five days in Aix, paid for by Columbia University. Not bad. My friends Raf, Paulina and Catherine are staying with me in a "maison indépendante" with a pool and a beautiful terrace on which we eat dinner while admiring the view of the city and Mont Saint-Victoire (the mountain Cézanne has so many times depicted). The only thing is that it's REALLY hot. So that's why I've been getting up at 7 am to sit out on the terrace with my bowl of tea, tartines, fruit and bifidus yogurt for breakfast. Raf tried it at 9 and it was simply too hot.

Yesterday we all went down to Cassis, a Mediterranean beach town between Marseille and Toulon. The coastline there is famous for the "calanques", which are basically fjords (except these were carved out by the water from the melting glaciers rather than the glaciers themselves). After hiking to one of the calanques near Cassis we then had a picnic, swam and sunbathed. It was lovely.

But the worst is this woman who planned the trip. I'm now convinced she's either insane or criminally incompetent (I'm not even sure she's a professional trip planner--I just think she knows people here) I could already tell that there was something not right about her when she kept telling us that the Aix's Cours Mirabeau was just like the Champs-Elysées in Paris because "it's where everything happens." Right. Just like in Paris... Then her restaurant listings were for tourist traps that weren't even for student budgets. Finally, her plans for an extensive hike in the middle of the day to the famous Mont Saint-Victoire has drawn puzzled reactions from everyone I've talked to in the area. First of all everyone has said "do it in the late afternoon or early morning"--whereas she has us planned to do a picnic on the summit. Then there's the wisdom of doing this in the summer months where the visibility is reduced by the heat-induced haze (it's supposed to be a spectacular view where you can see the Mediterranean). I'm skipping out and heading back to Marseille tomorrow.

Today we had a fascinating tour with this aging guide from the tourist office. I really came to understand why this region of France has been synonymous with such backwardsness.

First there's the Revolution, which the tour guide kept referring to in the context of "unfortunately that was destroyed at the time of...". Indeed, the revolution here was much more against the priviledge of the church which payed no taxes rather than against the royalty which payed relatively few taxes but employed a majority of the local population.

And so it's not terribly surprising that the staunchest supporters of the provençal identity (and particularly the language) were also collaborators with the Vichy regime (Brazillac, Maurras). In fact, at the market today I was stunned to see a table with several apologist works for the horrendous Charles Maurras, including one entitled "Maurras in his time." It also doesn't take mental gymnastics to understand how this could become a stronghold for Jean-Marie Le Pen. (although, there are a lot of other demographic factors including the high number of French refugees from Algeria...)

Alas, I'm in a horrible internet café, whose modernity rivals that of the ones I visited in Romania so I need to go. Can't wait to show you all the pictures. I also owe you pictures of the Fête de la musique (which I tried to upload before my vacation but was prevented from doing so for reasons beyond my control). I've got a full plate. :)

No straights allowed

2005-06-24T00:55:00.000+02:00

Everyone has seen the New York Times article this week about how hard it's become in New York to tell straight men apart from gay men now that it's become socially acceptable, and even desirable, for all men to look good. Indeed, New York is quite the place for a mixing of the genders. You have lesbian saleswomen telling straight ladies how to get clitoral and g-spot stimulation from all sorts of sex toys (when a butch saleswoman openly talked about what she and her partner preferred in terms of stimulation to a hetero female friend of mine in the market for a vibrator, I about cried at the beauty of the cross-pollenation of sexual experience). Then there's the time I went barhopping for a straight friend of mine's birthday and our mixed group ended up in a gay bar because the music was good for dancing.

It's reassuring to me because growing up my neighborhood was always very gay friendly. My parents moved to Silverlake when it was THE gay neighborhood in LA. I guess my parents are pioneers like that. We always had gay neighbors, some of whom have become longtime family friends, and I don't even think I had to ask my parents about why Angela and Cristina slept in the same bed. I just knew. Hell, when my parents and I went to a really rare easter service at the church they were married in, it didn't even seem that strange that the church had lots of gay couples and a huge AIDS memorial inside.I think the only time I ever remember getting anxious around gays was when my parents and I went to a street fair in Hollywood which happened to be a sort of really low-key gay pride event (not the hyped-up West Hollywood parade). But I was at that awkward time in my own sexual development where I wasn't sure of why I liked boys but felt like I was still supposed to like girls (this of course isn't my parents' doing, because, after all, it is a hetero-normative society). I remember saying something really homophobic at junior high once, just to try to deflect attention from my own awkwardness--all of this goes to show how much homophobia is really a manifestation of one's own insecurity. I'm lucky to have parents so secure in themselves.

When I go back to LA I realize what a paradise my hipster, bohemian neighborhood really is. Though gentrification is slowly creeping in, rent control has helped keep the minority population from being entirely forced out. I remember growing up how my favorite treat was going to the panaderia to buy big round cookies with sprinkles, and while the bakery is gone, there's still the lady that walks up and down the street selling "TAA-MAAAAAAAAAAA-LES". But it's also the incredible integration of queerness into the hip scene that is Sunset Junction (the part of Sunset Boulevard I live off of). The Sunset Junction Street Fair is a two-day celebration along six blocks of this major thoroughfare uniting hipster music lovers, immigrant families, gay men in leather, drag queens, the bland-by-comparison left-wing upper-middle-class families who live in the surrounding hills, etc. etc. etc. This is blue-state America at its best and I've gone since I was in a stroller. Then there's my all-time favorite bar a five minute walk from home that's the best hetero-friendly gay bar you could ask for: a rejection of the vapid West Hollywood bars with their Chelsea-boy clones (the ones who travel to New York and have only seen 8th Avenue...) with strong, cheap drinks, a jukebox with everything from Aretha Franklin to Franz Ferdinand, and effigies of George Bush and Dick Cheney strung from the ceiling with a noose around their necks!

So I guess this background of queer acceptance (and racial and class diversity), and I haven't even mentioned high school, I came from and was so happy to see in New York, where the gay ghetto is becoming so undesirable that the even the five minutes late NY Times picked up that "Chelsea-boy" isn't a particularly fattering description. Only the most out of it people are going to ask me if I've met any pretty girls. Gay bars are obviously indispensable (because it makes it a lot easier to flirt with men when you know they're at least interested in men) but it's also incredibly liberating to know that you can go on a date with another guy to a "straight bar" and nobody's going to throw stones at you--or care at all. Queers don't have to huddle in the West Village as they once did to hide from the homophobic Staten Island teenagers who'd drive across two bridges just to beat up on fags.

Not to paint a hugely rosey picture of gay life in New York. I mean, there is still homophobia anywhere. And the hostility towards gay rights from disadvantaged minority communities who wrongly see homosexuality as a white upper-middle class phenomeon (a number of studies have pointed out that gay marriage would be of greatest benefit to female same-sex couples of color who raise children...) is still considerable. (This again needs to be tempered with the anecdote from my days working at PS 151 of the Puerto Rican third grader who intervened when a classmate was shocked by a rumor that a male movie heartthrob liked "boys" by saying "my aunt is a lesbian and it's normal. She is really nice." She said this while looking at me, as a way of communicating that she knew I was gay and supported that.) And then there was the time two drunken men punched me on the street (in Chelsea, coincidentally) at 4 AM using anti-gay epithets. There's also the time that I was told "not to be so queeny" when complaining to a store manager: in one of those argument scenes, an astonished crowd gathered as I told the manager to go fuck himself and threw my shopping basket full of merchandise at him before walking out. And then there's Wall Street, Manhattan's last great bastion of homophobia. But the bright news there is that most of those people live in the suburbs (all the more reason for them to pay a commuter tax!) and that a lot of the big financial firms are themselves leaving New York (yes, I know the Empire State Development Corporation is having a fit about this).

But all in all, gay bars are now in virtually every neighborhood from Park Slope to the Upper West Side and things have gotten so good that even straight men no longer feel that their masculinity is threatened if they get mistaken for a gay man.

So all of this lenghty background (symptomatic of how much I miss the Big Apple) goes to explain why I've gotten in two arguments in two days with gay men complaining about straight people in "their" places. Tonight one person was bitching about "too many straight people" at the Follivores. This person went so far as to complain that whenever you get jostled on the crowded dance floor, it's always a straight person.

That comment was as revealing (and idiotic) as somebody saying that "black people commit all the crime". The person tried to explain to me that the Follivores were ruined by so many straight girls. I tried to explain to him that his attitude was reflective of the entire "gay ghetto" attitude that is pervasive here and that it was actually this kind of "brassage" is what helps lead to greater social acceptance. I've met interesting men in gay and straight bars where the proportion of heteros was anywhere between 5 percent and 60 percent. But alas, the person in question was insistent that only gay men should be in gay bars. (I guess sex clubs is where I would have to agree with him: nobody wants a whole bunch of straight women and men hanging around a gay bathhouse--and why would they want to be there?)

But it really reflects the general immaturity of Paris' gay community. It's very much a "Marais or nothing" mentality which is about as stunting as you can get. I can't tell you how many people I've heard go on and on about how stupid straight men are, or about how they practically run the other way when they see one. It's really pathetic. And then I could also cite how the gay men on the French Queer Eye try to make every man, regardless of his own individual tastes or sensibilities, into a gay ghetto queen. The conformism and small-mindedness of the gay community is a huge turn-off.

At the same time I do understand that gay acceptance in Paris is still hit or miss (and let's not forget the rest of France...) and that this country's Latin culture is still behind Northern Europe (or Manhattan) when it comes to the way that gender is thought of.

This weekend is gay pride in Paris. Which I'll be missing since Columbia's sending me to Aix-en-Provence (what were they thinking?!). It's actually the gay pride issue of the Village Voice that made me think about this: in New York the parade is becoming a little passé, difficult to identify with for more and more gay men who have a hard time understanding the importance of such a display.

Paris is still very much in its "we're here, we're Queer" stage.

Oh so busy...

2005-06-16T18:25:00.000+02:00

So I haven't put anything up for a while because I've been oh so busy. I had all sorts of things to say about the new government, about Sarkozy's return to the ministry of the interior, about the EU's general disarray but had so little time to put them down in HTML that by the time I actually could get around to doing it, my observations had already been picked up by others on the op-ed pages. Sigh.

My thesis is coming along. I presented my project on Monday. I'll have to post some relevant snippet sometime so you can all see what it's about. I mean, I've told you it's about the evening news as a cultural icon. But it's not as stupid as it sounds. One of these days...

Coming up: next week we have the "Fête de la musique", ringing in the first day of summer. Then there's my trip to Aix-en-Provence. In between all of this I need to write another chapter. (I've gotten one down, so I guess I'm 20 percent done...)

Below are some funny little anecdotes...

2005-06-16T18:21:00.000+02:00

Earlier this week M6 had their "France le grand test" (click on the link to take it), a show where they quiz people on their "culture générale". In the studio they had a celebrity panel (from a famous singer to a former news anchor to Casimir), as well as different teams: mayors, police trainees, chefs, people with the last name "Martin", etc. etc. Well what was even more surprising than the police trainees all getting through the literature section with almost no errors was how well I actually did. I got something like 70 out of 80 questions right. I flunked the question about the minimal fine for a traffic violation (somehow, so too did the police trainees...) but got all the current events, history, and literature ones correct. I actually did about on par with Bruno Masure, the former TV news presenter. It's just another sign of how the stork mistakenly dropped me in Los Angeles. On a cultural note, I've never seen so many "general culture" tests in my life. A friend of mine actually dumped his boyfriend after he failed one such test miserably (okay, it wasn't JUST because of that, but his lack of general culture was indicative of what was wrong in the relationship). I guess my success in this department is just one more thing to put in the personal ad.

2005-06-16T18:10:00.000+02:00

Enter the Espadrille. They're the hot new look in Paris this summer (for men and women). And the best part is that you can buy them at the junk store for 4 euros. A friend of mine told me that I looked like his grandmother wearing them. I told him that he needed to get out of the 17th [arrondissement] and then maybe he'd see them more. I was even more mean when I told the friend in question who recently came to Paris from Lyon and still has not visibly mastered the metro, that he was too provincial. Ouch. I've taken now to telling people from other major cities that they're from sticksville and stomp away in my stylish espadrilles.

2005-06-16T17:51:00.000+02:00

For some inexplicable reason my TV now gets all the cable channels. That includes "M�lody" which has all the old music shows from the 1960s and 1970s. Pictured is the karaoke that they broadcast on Saturday nights (I took this during the English-language ending of the Julien Clerc hit "Laissez entrer le soleil"). When it's not karaoke time, the channel is a trove of some of the most hysterical musical variety shows from the 1960s and 1970s along with French music videos from the past. Like the Joe Dassin "America" special (I've decided that when stunned people ask me why I speak French, I'll just tell them I was Dassin in a past life--he was an American who loved France, spoke impeccable French, and wrote really, really bad songs). The America special was horrendous in that kitchy 1970s Lawrence Welk meets the Sonny and Cher variety hour way (minus the bubbles). But it was their take on the American revolution that was quite a historical stretch: they had dancers dressed up as British troops, American troops (let by Joe Dassin as General Washington), French troops and Indians. The last tree all ganged up on the Brits who had to leave, their tail between their legs. Then Joe Dassin (Gen. Washingotn) thanked General Lafayette saying that "if he didn't exist..." (a cheesy segue into his love song "Si tu n'existais pas"). There was also the terrible sketch about Joe Dassin buying Manhattan from the Indians (who speak French like Africans on a Banania ad...) where they weave in eye-winking references to the famous song "Le Port d'Amsterdam" and, then government minister, Simone Veil. I'm about to drop everything on my current thesis and start a new project on this channel. I'm secretly hoping that my cable will get cut or something so I'll actually get work done.

2005-06-16T17:35:00.000+02:00

Pointy hats are also quite the rage this season.

Overheard

2005-06-05T19:09:00.000+02:00

At a café at on the Butte aux cailles, an English couple speaks in French to some acquaintances that pass by.

After their friends leave, the couple starts back in English:

"I think they're a multi-racial couple. She's French but he speaks with an English accent."

Just when you thought the gulf between the French and English couldn't get any bigger...

And then there's my second gem of the day which wasn't exactly overheard, but whatever, it was one of those moments where a crazy person brought back all the fun times in New York with a menopausal woman in a small elevator demanding I feel her forehead or the mentally handicapped man who spoke loudly to me about his rectal exam on the 6 train.

Standing on the rue de Chevreuse at 12:30 PM, I'm watching the pigeons pick at dirt on the pavement and this old lady comes up to me and mumbles something.

I ask her to speak a little more loudly. Little old ladies walking around Montparnasse on Sundays are usually asking for things like the time or directions.

"Do the pigeons talk to you?" she asks earnestly.

"Uh... no," I reply. "Well, not recently," I added, not wanting to make her feel too crazy.

Then she turns to walk away. "They're not very talkative today."

And as she makes her way around the crosswalk, passing by a flock of pigeons, she meows loudly.

Cue the circus music.

Fighting the good fight?

2005-06-04T20:11:00.000+02:00

Blame the f***ing formatting problems on Blogger. The lack of proofreading is my fault.

US reactions to the EU referendum are more or less disappointing. You see middle-of-the-road and conservative pundits basically parroting British newspapers (because, as most Americans are incapable of reading any European newspapers, they have to rely on the viewpoint of one of the EU’s most europhobic countries…) and progressives chanting that the people’s revolution has come to fruition. A “great” article in the Nation by John Nichols proclaims that French voters ended corporate domination. Another “splendid” example was Diana Johnstone of Counterpunch which couldn’t have displayed a greater lack of understanding of French domestic politics (she thought Laurent Fabius, a horrendously unpopular politician both within and outside of his own party, would wrest the Socialist party away from François Hollande.)

Their enthusiasm could barely be contained that French voters said no to “globalization”.

My fellow US progressives, let me give you an analogy that maybe you’ll be able to understand. The allegedly progressive “no” movement (I’ll get back to that in a minute) is about as responsible as voting for Nader in 2004. Because, regardless of whether people like it or not, the EU has generally been a force for progressive ideas (especially from an American point of view). The Constitution, which wasn’t perfect, but which ensured strong protections to maintain a high standard of living and human rights, was the next logical step. So it took a free trade zone and ensured necessary social protections.

American progressives, I understand, are very leery when it comes to free trade. And clearly Nafta and the propsed Cafta are chief examples of where this has gone wrong because clearly maquiladoras only polluted Mexico and didn’t make anyone rich except for factory owners. On the other hand, we can point to the EU’s economic integration—which is far more comprehensive—and see the miracles it has done for once poor countries like Spain and Ireland. And then there’s the independent free-trade zone for South America, Mercosur, being proposed by center-left governments who want to help insulate themselves from American hegemony. A competitive market isn’t necessarily either anathema to social progress, either: Nordic countries are high-tax, welfare states with stringent environmental standards that are among the most business-friendly.

Basically, it depends on how we want to define progressive. Do we want to say that getting rid of a free-market economy is the definition of progress? How progressive was the command economy of the former communist block where people had to run all over town for toilet paper? Or do we want to define our form of progress as an economy that ensures a high standard of living, environmental protections, social coverage (health care, etc.), and all the other good stuff.

The Anglo-Saxon “progressive” does not automatically equal “extreme left.” I’m not advocating an irrational communist-phobia à la McCarthy, but on the other hand you can find plenty of people in Europe that Americans might qualify as progressives who recoil at the idea of communism. I consider myself a “progressive” in the American sense in that I believe that government has a role in regulating business, in promoting fairer taxes, providing public services, in ending discrimination, in promoting a better world. In France I’d be a Socialist party voter (that’s the “center left” not to be confused with the left-centerism of Tony Blair’s Labour party).

What I’m trying to explain here is that American progressives need to be a lot less quick to jump on European far-left bandwagons before they understand the terrain. While, yes, your chances of voting no were higher, the poorer you were, some American columnists wrote as if this were some victory in a class war (the little people rising up!). If you want to still subscribe to Marxist reductivism, well, just skip ahead a few paragraphs.

But the real reasons for so many people voting no were a general sense of economic insecurity and a total lack of understanding of European construction. I can’t blame voters for not having a clue about how Europe works because that’s what the political parties should have been doing for twenty years now. And I sympathize with people who have seen their buying power shrink and worry about a deterioration of their quality of life. Both the willingness to blame bad news on Brussels and the persistent 10 percent unemployment rate of the past twenty years are inexcusable failures of the political establishment—both right and left.

Unfortunately, the far left (including, sadly, the altermondialiste group Attac, which has been a force for good, but has now decided to get itself involved in divisive politics—apparently in an effort to enter the political realm itself) took advantage of this ignorance and told people they’d be able to save Europe if they voted no. In a cheap political move, they actually played on people’s ignorance by feeding them fear. People were convinced that if they voted yes, Europe would be taken over by the Thatcherites, that abortion would be illegal, that all of the public services would have to be privatized, that France would be able to renegotiate the treaty.

It’s actually the now dead treaty that would have saved us from that.

The columnists also, perhaps unwittingly, gave their okay to some of the most blatant xenophobia we’ve seen since… Jean-Marie Le Pen. From Portugal to Poland, everyone said workers were going to flood France and take away jobs from those who actually belong here. Aside from the fact France, has critical shortages of labor in nursing and in the hospitality sector (the fact that none of the ten percent of France’s unemployed are able to fill the gap shows a major problem with way this country retrains workers…), the European constitution expressly states that any worker in a job has to work for at least the minimum wage in their new country. Of course the media has found examples of foreign workers at lower wage standards than are illegal… working in the city hall of one mayor that was a “no” supporter. The mythical polish plumber has become the black welfare queen of 21^st Century Europe : a scapegoat, an easily consumable icon of the “other” upon which we can all fix our fears and hate. For the extreme-left, a movement that says it wants to bring all peoples together, this is nothing short of shameful. This is the campaign US progressive writers are backing.

And then the ignorance of some writers has gone so far as to give a stamp of approval to the unconscionable. Diana Johnstone tells her readers that as for right-wing national sovereignty arguments, “there is nothing really so dreadful about that.” Except for the fact that national sovereignty arguments are perceived by most people (on the right and the left) as the slippery slope to the far right. National sovereignty is a code-word for nationalism. Like compassionate conservatism, there’s nothing wrong with it in principle, until you see what that actually means. Marine Le Pen, one of those not-so-dreadful sovereignty people couldn’t help but blather on about the “great French people” (which everyone understands to exclude racial minorities). Philippe de Villiers, another one of those not-so-dreadful sovereignty people, cited in his victory speech the writer Charles Maurras. If the name doesn’t ring a bell (it sends shivers up French backs), he was a fascist-sympathiser and Nazi collaborator. Even the extreme left no folks wouldn’t touch “national sovereignty” with a ten foot pole.

American progressives, so taken with France, took everything that the extreme left and Le Monde Diplomatique here said at face value, without bothering to notice that, for example, Italian communists were saying the exact opposite. I think there’s a value in far left figures like Arlette Laguiller and Le Monde Diplo, but I’m not a dogmatic follower of either.

The left in the US is horribly divided. But I think if it were able to think critically about its own values, and evaluate their own dogma in the big picture, we might not see the type of infighting that plagues progressive institutions like Pacifica radio.

In any case, we’ve now seen that the EU’s seams are all coming undone thanks to the French no. Take a look at the headlines from European papers for the past two days ranging from the end of the ratification process to the end of the Eurozone.

So now the poorer countries of Eastern Europe are joining with Britain to try to scrap plans to limit the work week to 48 hours (where people can opt out of the clause, but who really is in a position to freely “opt out” when their job is at stake. It’s also a plan that makes poor economic sense since the country with the longest average workday, England, is the least productive in Europe, and the country with the shortest, France, is the most productive. But I digress.). Now that France has lost its stature, it’s in for a tough battle. The far-left “nonistes” insisted the world would revolve around France. And, well, it doesn’t.

Now there’s no common vision, and everyone’s getting very antsy about whether or not the EU, with all of its flaws, is going to survive. The fact is European construction is a necessary step for a continent which, let’s not forget, just fifty years ago was the scene of Nazi death camps and lost generations. European integration is also the hope that even more recent tragedies like the Balkans don’t unfold again. France and Germany, which between 1870 and 1940 managed to get into three wars, now share things as mundane as television channels and as lofty as a common vision for Europe and the world.

And now the backbone of the French left, the Socialist party, is in another round of hand-wringing and backstabbing. There’s at least one thing the Democrats and the French socialists have in common. But the far-left is never going to get any power unless it’s in an alliance with the Socialists, who are now in disarray over the referendum. Hint: Presidential elections are in less than two years.

We’re just beginning to see the very un-progressive fallout of the vote less than a week ago.

"Tarés" Une nouvelle oeuvre littéraire de Jordan Davis style Nouveau Roman/épouvante

2005-05-30T22:29:00.000+02:00

Après avoir dormi pour je ne savais pas combien de temps, j'ai allumé mon téléviseur hier soir. Sur la 2, par hasard.

Une voix (à qui elle appartenait, je ne saurais te dire car j'avais refermé les yeux, espérant faire une sorte de grasse matinée... à 22h40) parlait de séisme politique. C'est peut-être une bonne nouvelle pour la gauche, me disais-je.

J'ai vu Marie-George Buffet et Arlette Laguiller. Elles parlaient d'un grand mouvement popuaire. C'est peut-être ce grand soir qu'on attendait, me disais-je.

Le peuple a dit à Jacques Chirac et à Jean-Pierre Raffarin, non au liberalisme, disait Henri Emmanuelli. Ah bon? C'est peut-être 2007, parce qu'après tout, j'avais oublié de mettre mon réveil..., me disais-je, toujours somnolant.

Peu importe, j'étais ravi. J'ai fait un petit rêve de la gauche installé à l'Elysée ! On n'a qu'à attendre les législatives dans quelques semaines et puis...

Et puis, j'ai vu Philippe De Villiers. Il débordait de joie, citait Charles Maurras, louait le grand peuple français. Mais c'est pas possible, me disais-je. Où étais-je ?

Et puis je me suis enfin réveillé en sursaut.

Fais chier ! C'est le référendum !

"Economie sociale de marché hautement compétitive..." C'est carrément horripilant ! Ah mais attends, ça continue, "...qui tend au plein-emploi et au progrès social."

Mais heureusement qu'on a voté pour une meilleure Europe ! Quoi, c'est le traité de Nice qui fait toujours loi ? Mais c'est pas possible ! Si les Français ont voté non...

En tout cas, l'Europe devra renégocier. La France-Allemangne, le moteur européen, ça résoudra tout. C'est qui cette Angela Merkel qui va gagner là-bas ?

Mince ! Peu importe, on aura une constitution sociale si on travaille avec la gauche européenne. Non ! Comment ça ? Tous les partis de gauche parlementaire ont donné leur soutien au Traité ? Impossible. Et les syndicats ? Eux aussi ? Merde.

Mais qui était contre ce Traité au fond ? Les Tories brittaniques ? Ah bon ? Les nationalistes danois ? Euh... Les néo-conservateurs américains ? Ouf.

Eh bien, quoi qu'il en soit, c'est la démocratie. Après tout, les Français ont lu la question "Approuvez-vous le projet de loi qui autorise la ratification du traité établissant une Constitution pour l'Europe ?" et ont répondu, "Non, nous n'approvons pas le projet de loi...". Non ! Tu rigoles ! Ils voulaient sanctionner le gouvernement ?

QUELS TARES AURAIENT POUSSE LES FRANCAIS A FAIRE CA?

Depressing headlines

2005-05-28T22:01:00.000+02:00

Jordan's about to lose his faith in demoracy.

I've voted in two presidential elections to have my candidate lose. My votes against a recall of Governor Gray Davis and for Cruz Bustamante, the semi-official democratic successor both failed as well. Then there were the New York and Los Angeles municipal elections. (The bright spot was Antonio Villaraigosa winning the recent LA mayoral elections--which got a surprising amount of coverage in the daily papers and warranted him a placement in the "people on the move up" list in the weekly magazine Nouvel Observateur.)

And then there's the terrible, terrible, terrible EU Constitutional treaty referendum here, where the vote of my heart, about which I'm very very passionate because I'd hate to see France shoot itself in the foot as it looks like it's going to, is also about to lose.

Belgium had it right. The Socialists in Belgium said that an up or down referendum on a document so complex would be a huge mistake. I barely made it through my reading of the treaty and I'm a journalist who is enthralled with politics. For the Gala and France Soir set, I shudder to imagine how many of them got through the first part.

And then there's the absolute insanity of the "no" campaigners. If you read French, you've gotten the drift of my sentiment from my posting at a moment when I just couldn't bring myelf to write in English. I sympathize with those who want a "social Europe", but the no campaign is more a symptom of the country's identity crisis than it is a real desire to change the world.

My favorite delusion of the no camp is that Europe revolves around France. They insist that if they/we vote no, then all of Europe will have to listen up to what they/we have to say. Well, I hate to tell them but the voting goes on in the other countries regardless of what happens in France, and it looks like 20 of the 25 will approve the constitution. Then what happens? Well, in 2006 there will be negociations with the leaders of the EU-25.

Who on earth is going to listen to France, the country that was behind this major step forward for European integration? The other 20 countries who voted for the treaty widely perceived to have been tailored to France's every whim? Or the other countries who rejected the treaty? Let's take a look at who those countries would potentially be. We have Great Britain, and we all know how queasy they feel about European integration as it is. They want less Europe, not more. Then we have Poland, which is more or less along the same lines as that country across the English channel so enthralled with the EU they've refused Schengen, the Euro and then demand that they get a rebate on their dues (imagine what would happen to the Blue states in the US if they demanded that they get a rebate for the money the send to Washington that gets poured into the Red states).

But the real tragedy of this whole thing is what a great treaty this is. Everyone else in Europe on the left loves it (from political parties to unions). It's a treaty that combines the advantages of a market economy with an orientation towards social well-being. It's not at all a treaty of no-holds-barred capitalism and everyone else in Europe knows it. Except for the people in France who want to vote no. That's why Thatcherite conservatives hate it. That's why the real economic liberals in Europe hate it.

The incredible advantage of this new EU constitution is that it takes the existing treaties that govern everyone's economic life and fixes the orientation of all of Brussels' policies in a direction that would keep in mind social protections (which can still be publicly run--there's no forced privatization as some erroneous no militants claim). This Constitutional treaty makes sure economic prosperity doesn't get frittered away by the wealthiest 1 percent, this treaty helps ensure that the wealth is spread and that the European social model is preserved (because if we look at the US, the world's largest economy, we also see that it has the highest child poverty rate for the industrialized world, etc. etc. Telling somebody without health care that they can thank their lucky stars to live in the richest country on Earth is cold comfort...) Governments on the left and governments on the right will govern as they see fit, but these baseline parameters make sure that certain basic human and social rights won't get the short shrift. For folks on the left in the United States, this is an unattainable dream.

The "non" folks act as if the constitutional treaty created "free trade" within the EU-zone. "Libre échange" has been at the heart of EU economic policy from the very beginning. And it's a model that clearly works. Let's take a look at Spain, an economically backwards country that was under a fascist dictatorship until the mid-1970s. In the mid-1940s its economic profile was more or less like that of Mexico. Madrid is light years ahead of Tijuana. Then there's Ireland, a country so synonymous with poverty that hardship was an integral part of national identity. The Irish now have among the highest per-capita incomes in the world. And

So basically if we reject the constitution we have two choices. The Soviet model which was an obvious failure, and is completely inadapted to a global economy. Or we have the current treaties which will still be in effect if the current referendum process is a flop. The European left globally dislikes the current treaties because they could open the door for ultra-liberal commissioners in Brussels to tear away at social protections. And yet, the French no folks (I'm speaking about the ones of the left, not the neo-facho types on the right) tell us that voting no will be some sort of social advancement. (Is the French Communist party on the take from Margaret Thatcher?!)

Maybe they're on the take from Margaret Thatcher, doing ultra-consertives' bidding. Maybe they have a Jeanne d'Arc complex: they think God chose them to be the oracles for the doom and desctruction that nobody else sees. (à tous mes lecteurs français: l'ironie des nonistes de gauche qui se prennent pour Jeanne d'Arc, j'ai fait exprès...)

The sad part is that most who are voting no are just upset about a lot of the failures of the current government and the current head of state. Which makes you wonder why on earth a prime minister with low-20 percent approval ratings and a president who is barely more credible even bother opening their mouths in favor of this? It's left-wing voters who are severely divided, and believe me, they're not going to take their cue from the fat man or the crook (that's Raffarin and Chirac, respectively)

And then the politicians on the "no" side are so obviously trying to position themselves for the 2007 presidential run. Laurent Fabius, the grating number 2 of the Socialist party best remembered for a 1980's televised debate in which he indignantly reminded Jacques Chirac that he was "talking to he Prime Minister of France", is the worst example of this. In 1992 he was for the yes to the Maastricht referendum which put in place the common monetary policy and affirmed the principles of a free-market economy, and ridiculed the no campaign's contention that a French rejection of the treaty would bring the other 14 countries around to the hexagonal point of view.

But no, he's decided to align himself with the camp that tells everyone that the Constitution will make abortion illegal (the part of the treaty that lists the fundamental rights of those living in the EU--we can't call them citizens--includes the right to "life" which is a beachhead against any regressive country trying to institute the death penalty. Fifty years of European jurisprudence has made it clear that an "embryo" is not a person, and the very woman who fought to legalize abortion in France, Simone Veil, has been one of the biggest champions of the Constitution because, as a Holocaust survivor, she understands that an integrated Europe is a peaceful one. It was just fifty years ago that Europeans were killing each other, just fifty years ago that Germany's "undesirables" were slaughtered by the millions. The EU has brought France and Germany together in a way that would have been unthinkable at the end of World War 2). The same camp that also tells people that cheap workers are going to flood into France from Portugal or Poland (this constitutional treaty explicitly requires that those Portugese masons or Polish plumbers in France be paid at the same rate as French workers. Furthermore, the scare tactic of floods of poor Europeans flooding wealthy countries is the kind of xenophobia one would normally associate with the right. And let's be clear that these fears never materialized following the last two enlargments). It's basically a campaign of fear that preys on the insecurities of many French people who see that their economic model from the Trente Glorieuses has broken down, leading to employment averaging 10 percent for the past twenty years. It preys on the fears that France will be manipulated by anglo-saxon capitalism, when in fact those very capitalists hate this treaty.

It's a fear-based campaign of the worst kind. Rather than secure France's future as a leader within Europe, it's going to create a pitiful, isolated dinghy of sixty-million adrift in a globalized, free-trade economy, trying to sail alongside muscluar craft like China, India, the US. The EU constitution makes sure France doesn't drown in their wake. It brings France onto an economic battleship manned by all of its neighbors, united in a common political project, a ship upon which a high-standard of living for all is the credo.

Europe is France's future. I hope my beloved France discovers this before it's too late.

"Consultative Selling Associate"

2005-05-28T21:40:00.000+02:00

That subject line is my future.

As I've begun to weigh my future career options in the US, sending a resume here and there, I got this wonderful gem of a job offer in my inbox, courtesy of FastWeb (the scholarship website I guess I signed up with when I was a freshman at NYU).

They're hiring at Sears in Glendale, California! And they need "consultative selling associates".

Look for me at "Brand Central, Fine Jewelry, Footwear and/or Home Improvement" where I will be "handling all customer issues that may arise on the sales floor."

I'm not sure why they can't say "sales" intead of the more awkward "selling". But who cares, it sounds a lot better than "department store salesman".

And then again, that "consultative" part sounds like such corporatespeak that it makes it a resume builder. Maybe when I'm tweaking my resume, as nearly everyone does, I'll just use "consultant" as my job title. After all, in the etymological universe, "consutant" and "consulatative" are next-door neighbors. It's basically the same thing.

As a consultant for a Fortune 500 company, they would bring me on board to give my opinions on how they should reorganize their managerial structure. As a consultative sales associate at Sears, customers will bring me on board to tell them which kind of cubic zirconia looks the least fake, whether a given fridge is available in mustard yellow or if those sandals are available in a size nine.

The Fortune 500 company and the Sears customer would both ask questions and I'd give them answers. It's as simple as that.

Un apppel à ceux qui PEUVENT voter le 29

2005-05-25T12:26:00.000+02:00

Et si l’Eurovision présageait notre avenir ? Samedi soir, on a vu ce fameux moteur franco-allemand en panne : des tubes trop nuls, des chanteuses trop oubliables. On se demandait pourquoi les Français n’étaient pas sorti une vieille paysanne munie de tambour dans sa chaise à bascule comme l’ont fait les Moldaves ! La France-Allemagne, dépassé par « la nouvelle Europe », occupait le bas du classement, résultat honteux pour ces grandes puissances de l’Europe.

Au lendemain de la débâcle télévisée on a vu les signes d’une déconfiture de ce partenariat aussi politique que stratégique : le SPD, parti social-démocrate de Gerhard Schröder, lourdement sanctionné dans son fief principal. Cette défaite rend l’Allemagne d’autant plus ingouvernable puisque le Bundesrat, représentant les Landes, est majoritairement à droite, et le Bundestag, à gauche. Schröder appelle à de nouvelles élections, un scrutin dont la droite, la CDU, risque de l’emporter. Premier coup dur pour la France-Allemagne : ce parti s’est violemment opposé à l’axe franco-allemand sur la question de l’Irak, une politique commune qui a eu l’effet de souder davantage la relation des nations des deux côtés du Rhin. Difficile d’imaginer Chirac et Stoiber, la main dans la main comme Mitterrand et Kohl.

Mais il ne faut pas non plus oublier le spectre du non français. Ce projet constitutionnel, que nos voisins perçoivent comme conforme aux caprices du coq (protection des services publics, le maintien de l’exception culturelle, etc. etc.), risque d’être rejeté par les mêmes électeurs auxquels le traité est censé avoir plu ! Le 30 mai, si le non emporte la veille, quel sera le poids de la France ? Après tout, cette confiance dans le plan B qu’ont les militants du non, c’est un peu croire que l’Europe tourne autour de la France. Si 25 amis décident après maintes discussions d’aller voir Star Wars, que vont-ils dire à celui qui, soudain, change d’avis, prônant La maison de cire ? Fin de la concorde : certains disent que dans ce cas, ils verront Boudu, d’autres Le septième jour. Les Britanniques et les pays de l’Est demanderont une constitution sans le social, les Nordiques une constitution plus sociale. Et qui sera là pour méditer une solution ? Pas la France : même si le débat porte sur tout sauf la Constitution elle-même, les Français auront, en votant non, donné leur aval à la constitution Attac, qui, à vrai dire, n’est que de la contestation sans projet. Et quant à cette Allemagne qui vire à droite, sans doute se rapprochera-t-elle de la vision d’Outre-manche, qui en Hexagone fait épouvantail.

Si l’Allemagne choisit la droite, les Français n’y peuvent rien. Mais le 29 mai, si ! Dire non à l’Europe, comme le veut l’axe souveraino-facho-gauchiste ce dimanche, c’est isoler la France dans son nombrilisme. S’embarrasser à l’Eurovision, c’est une chose. Mais plomber la construction européenne…

Eurovision

2005-05-22T05:40:00.000+02:00

For those of you who aren't familiar with this pan-European tradition, it's like American Idol where, in theory, each country finds their best singer and then sends them to compete in a televised concert where viewers vote by telephone and points are awarded by each country to their top favorites.

As usual, France did piss poorly.

What is really stunning was how the founding countries of Eurovision couldn't get their act together. Along with France, Germany, the UK and Spain finished at the bottom of the pack. Part of this is because real stars in France wouldn't be caught dead on Eurovision so really pathetic people get sent with really terrible, terrible songs that you forget immediately (as was the case tonight).

What were the memorable performances? Well, the one I have pictured is my favorite: Moldova. Europe's most impoverished country (when you've beat out Albania...) known for its exports of mail-order brides and prostitutes and its imports of stolen cars had quite the novel approach: throw on a rock band and then have an old peasant lady with a drum. I immediately had flashbacks to my vacation in Romania, as you can well imagine. Then there was Malta, which offered up by far the best singer of the evening: a plus-sized mezzo with wonderful stage presence. I hoped she would win, but she ended up in second. The winning performance came from Greece and proved that tits and ass are still in style.

But just how Greece got elected at the top was a lesson in just how disunited Europe really is. As a function of the telephone results, the top six vote-getters receive from 1 to 12 points each (12 going for singer who received the most votes from a given country, etc.). It wasn't really shocking when ethnically Greek Cyprus voted for, well, Greece. Not to mention all of its neighbors, including Turkey which also, in a show of the thaw between the two rivals, gave 12 points to its Hellenic rivals (maybe Eurovision can be integrated into EU diplomacy). Then there were all the Scandinavian countries who voted for one another, not to mention the Baltic states and Belarus banding together to give each other their top votes. Alas, France did get a sizeable number of points from Andorra. But this tiny principality of the Pyrenees mountains wedged between Spain and France was probably keenly aware of just how easily it could be invaded (the French head of state is partly in control of the country anyhow for seven centuries now). It would be hard to imagine in a similar pageant in the US people in Oregon voting for a singer from Idaho just because she's the "girl next door".

Ukraine hosted the show, so it was their night. An alternative rock band, with dancers in symbolic chains, sang the anthem of the Orange Revolution, and even the Norwegian group wore orange scarves in honor of the recent events. Then between the sets, a video showing off the host country is supposed to run. This is where Ukraine blew it big time. In many ways, the aerial views of belching smokestacks and industrial infrastructure only reconfirmed our worst stereotypes. Then there was footage of the people: a miner covered in soot, random people in the street showing off gold-capped front teeth. When it came to showing how cosmopolitan the country allegedly is (they're still wrangling with loosening the draconian visa requirements that make entry into the former Soviet republics a pain), they choose to show a fashion show. Unfortunately, this parade of high-end dresses seemed to be devoid of attendees. The few cut- aways they did have for this edited montage were of a man yawning and another sleeping. Somebody must have had a really good sense of humor.

But the lesson of tonight's Eurovision was really that Western Europeans, that EU-15 enclave of prosperity, can't count out places like Romania or Moldova. Hell, they've got grannies in rocking chairs who rock out.

++Note: I am extremely busy and will be unlikely to update the blog as often as you'd like, nor will the quality of the entries (already sagging badly) be getting better anytime soon. :( Just a fair warning among friends.

Who am I? American? French? Swiss? Belgian?

2005-05-13T00:42:00.000+02:00

So I've talked a lot about the Swiss and the Belgians and tonight I became one. At least in the eyes of someone else.

At dinner with some people I hadn't seen for a while, and see only from time to time for small chit-chat, the conversation necessarily took a political turn where I got to discuss the ailing Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin who had to be hospitalized (perhaps for a psychosomatic illness linked to recent numbers showing he only had the support of a quarter of the French population) and who would be succeeding him after the referendum (if anyone), as well as that famous May 29th vote on the Constitutional Treaty for the EU.

Then I mentioned "well, if I could vote..."

The person next to me then dropped the bombshell: "What, are you Swiss?" No. "Are you Belgian?" (ugh, could you imagine?!) No. If I wasn't French, I had to be from one of those "nonante" counting countries, then. Like a Canadian, so easily camouflaged in the United States, that pass for American.

It's quite an honor to be seen as French, especially in a country where people won't hesitate to correct your pronunciation or grammar. Especially where people who have lived here all their lives and have already become French citizens are still "foreigners." And I have to say, I enjoy and cherish this linguistic flexibility: as I party trick sometimes I switch between my real French, my real English, and then French-accented, grammatically-incorrect English, as well as American-accented, grammatically-incorrect French. But the long explanations about why I speak French the way I do never seem to satisfy anyone since I never grew up here, didn't even start learning French until I was 14 and don't have French parents.

Tonight wasn't the first time I had been mistaken for French, and not even the first time some one has, in their puzzlement, asked me what seemed to them the logical question that would explain it all : Are you Belgian? (which each time has been asked with a degree of apprehension because, well, it's not exactly a nice thing to ask somebody. It would be like if you asked someone in the US if they were from Mississippi: them's fightin' words.)

But what made tonight special was that at the end of a political conversation, I was still passing for French. If I hadn't said anything about not being able to participate in the vote on the 29th, he'd have thought I was going to the ballot box just like him. It also made me realize that the passion I had expressed in my conversations was also quite real. As I decried the stupidity of the Pentecôte fiasco I felt as if I was one with that 70 percent of the population that hated Raffarin and his consistently regressive policies--when I see that rotund figure with the hunched back and smooshed-in nose I feel an almost visceral anger welling up deep within me. When commented (obviously ironically) that France had had enough of women at Matignon after the disaster of Edith Cresson (1), I started to slip in to the "we."

I slip into it a lot now when talking about French politics, actually. My steady media diet (reading Le Monde and Libé every day, listening to France Inter and France Culture in the mornings, and devouring Nouvel Obs each week) has changed my perception of reality. I get annoyed when Jacques Chirac overpronounces a word (il est calomnieux). I was for a month in a sort of anguish about whether I'd vote yes or no on the 29th. I read the constitution(al treaty), tons of magazine articles and finally made my decision, like a good, educated citoyen. I got so wrapped up in this affair that I had actually forgotten that I'm not really allowed to vote. I was convinced that I had to make my decision like everyone else, it was my duty. Call me delusional.

Indeed, I've managed to construct a whole childhood I never had. My feelings for Chantal Goya have been described by several as almost nostalgic, and in a really bizarre way they are. And then there's my membership in Club Dorothée on TF1. Oh, and Sunday nights with Maguy. Sort of like my early memories of Dan Rather and his sweaters from my real childhood in the US, watching old newscasts and old commercials from the 1980s as part of my thesis might even begin to make me think I was inspired to go into journalism because of my fascination with Christine Ockrent--or better yet Henri Sannier, or Bernard Rapp! It's not that I actually have an emotional attachment to these things (well, okay I did almost cry when I saw Chantal Goya), or that I really think this was my childhood. But at the same time being able to take part in reminiscence of these kinds of trivial things is what fuses together any culture.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has written extensively about narrative identity: that is to say I am what I tell myself I am. (Indeed Ricoeur argues that one can not define onself from an internal perspective, the task requires exteriority. So either you let others define you (I am French because everyone says I am--or at least thinks it) or you create your own narrative (I am French because I speak French, watched Club Dorothée and am going to vote in the EU elections). Indeed, our identity is performative, it has to be in order to be substantial. I have simplified and actually terribly distorted Ricoeur's philosophy for my terribly mundane rhetorical purposes, I am aware (I'm dreading the day my philosophy professor should actually read this). But seeing oneself as another person (that's the title of one of his books: "Soi-même comme un autre") is very much what has happened to me in my adopted language: I have assessed my own narrative and decided that it is so implausible that I could have ended up here speaking French like this that I actually on some subconscious level have constructed this parallel identity that is so much more easily explainable.

Increasingly, to see myself from the outside, I only need to change my language.

I became convinced that my choice of language somehow implied a choice of self when I broke up with Etienne (it was very amical and we're actually better friends than we were boyfriends). In English, I was able to logically, and somewhat coldly, analyze the entire affair with great detachment, like a journalist reporting on something that has happened, and say it was all for the best. But it was in French that I had all of my second thoughts and nostalgia came flooding back. The "French" self had experienced the event, the entire relationship: the language dripped with emotion. My saddest moments that next day would come when I was just reflecting on it all--you guessed it, in French.

It's all a very strange, almost alienating place that I'm in these days (that is to say the American Jordan is beawildered, while the French Jordan feels right at home). My written English has become so stylistically clunky and riddled with egregious errors that I barely recognize this prose as actually emanating from me (I reread an article I had written for the New York Blade last year--you'd think it was ghost-written!). At the same time I find myself eerily comfortable in a language and a culture that, not being recognized in any official way as being French, I simply don't have any real claim to. Basically, I don't have a French passport so I can't be French. This utterly rational fact is then seemingly contradicted by my lived experience.

It's enough to make you want to rise up against the silly structures we call nation-states that place such ridiculous boundaries to me making a life here: if I had a fake marriage and got a French passport would I really be any more or less French in my lived experience?

(Je ne papillonne pas d'une langue à l'autre à la légère. Pourtant, on arrive à un stade de ma réflexion qui, me semble-t-il, fait appel au génie de la langue française...)

Comment un Français se fabrique-t-il ? De quoi se constitue-t-il substantivement ? (C'est une réflexion d'autant plus pertinente que le très corrompu Charles Pasqua a réformé le code de la nationalité...) A l'époque, on (ah oui, ce mérveilleux "on" qui rend tous mes discours sur les Français si ambigus) disait qu'une simple adhésion aux valeurs de la République suffisait...

Hélas, je suis lucide (je n'en ai pas l'air, je le sais !) : je ne suis pas français de droit. En plus je suis bel et bien amerloque : mon lieu de naissance, la nationalité de mes parents en constituent les pièces de conviction. En même temps mon passeport américain évoque une haine profonde. Il n'est pas question d'anti-américainisme; je vois dans ce petit carnet bleu l'objet qui m'enfermera à jamais dans un carcan outre-atlantique. Justement, il y a quelque chose d'injuste dans le fait qu'on est étiqueté pour la vie selon sa naissance : cela ne correspond plus à notre société moderne, voire post-moderne. L'émission des passeports, le droit de cité relève d'une configuration hétéronome de la société ("je suis le fils de..., qui était le fils de...," et ainsi de suite). Or le monde contemporain déborde d'exemples prouvant que cela ne correspond plus à la réalité vécue.

En suis-je, moi aussi, la preuve?

Peut-être cette sensation de flou est-elle la traduction de cette contradiction ?

Dans l'identité narrative, l'interprétation de son propre récit est articulé sur la narration: en donnant un sens universel à son propre récit, on peut enfin retrouver son identité. La mienne serait-elle donc victime (que ce mot me paraisse un peu violent!) du décalage entre les structures politiques qui régissent le monde et la réalité sociale ?

1) Michèle Alliot-Marie, the defense minister, is widely rumored to be on the short list to replace Raffarin, should Chirac ever decide to put an end to France's nearly three years of misery. Edith Cresson was France's first female Prime Minister, appointed by François Mitterrand. Sadly, she is more remembered for being an unmitigated disaster. She ended her less than one-year reign in 1992 with an approval rating in the low-20s. Cresson was then sent off into the sunset with a post as an EU Commissioner in 1995, only to become mired in a corruption scandal that subsequently brought down the entire EU Commission in 1999. One could say that Cresson shot herself in the foot a number of times (I guess, my use of this expression might be a little insensitive because Pierre Beregovoy, the PM who followed her, ended his mandate by shooting himself in the head, or at least that's what the official story was. But hey, bullets were flying all over back in those days!), like when this socialist prime minister went on television and ranted and raved about immigrants, or referred to Japanese people as "ant-like" workers, not so nicely insisted that a quarter of English men are gay, or arranged for her dentist to get on the EU payroll. But there was also a significant institutional machisme that Cresson, like so many female French politicians who have until quite recently been greeted in Parliament with slurs and sexual propositions so graphic that I have to say are unthinkable in the United States, came up against.

French Crowd Control

2005-04-29T23:29:00.000+02:00

"Je laisse descendre, je monte, je m'arrête au signal sonore. Et je garde le rythme."
"I let them off, I get on, I stop when I hear the beep. I keep the rhythm."

For the better part of a month, the RATP has been spending heaven knows how much money on their pavlovian advertising campaign to help passengers like you and me ride the subway correctly. It was bad enough that they plastered stations and subway cars with that stupid dancing couple that "keeps the rhythm". Then they started running announcements over the PA system to promote the "rhythm" that will keep the metro running on time. Conductors were sent to stations to hand out leaflets and spread the new transit gospel: let the others off, get on, stop when the you hear the beep.

This effort is coming to a close this month. Mercifully. There's something about the whole use of the first person in the campaign that really rubs me the wrong way (but then again "je" gets used in all sorts of ways that might be surprising for English speakers, like the coffee machine that says "I'm out of change"). This also comes on the heels of the rollout of the yellow "stay off the tracks" signs that they put along the platform edges. Frankly, a suicidal person isn't going to give a rat's ass--and those little yellow placards are of little comfort to the unfortunate soul who was pushed by a crazy person. It seems to me that signs are the equivalent of the airline safety demonstrations that show you how to buckle your seat belt: they're for people who probably aren't allowed in public unaccompanied.

One could say that little bit of crowd control is in order. After all, if you ask, say, Belgians or Swiss people what they think of their big next-door neighbor, one of the more interesting stereotypes you'll hear is that French people are utterly incapable of forming a line.

Indeed, when trying to get on my flight to Rome, the Air France agents called another flight to board simultaneously at the same departure gate. And unlike the US where they call you by row numbers, Air France just tells you they've opened the door and lets everyone swarm around the gate agent.

I thought I was good at handling crowds--after all I regularly weave my way through the slow-walking hordes that clog the corridors of the Paris metro. And though I can pass for French in any number of situations, a recent situation (the midterm exam for my political philosophy class) involving the movement of a significant number of people that blew my cover. The classroom is usually tight on space, but on a test day when everyone shows up, space is obviously at an even greater premium. Knowing this I arrived early, and waited behind ten other people for the preceding class to finish. Finally that class ended, and as they tried to come out, we tried to pour in to get a seat. As the two classes crossed, everything became a blur: I could no longer distinguish who was packing up from the last class and who was unpacking for mine. Every time I made a dash for an empty seat, I got outfoxed. Within ninety seconds all the seats had been taken, and like the pitiful loser of a game of musical chairs, I was left standing as the professor handed out the exams. I got take my test sitting at his desk--that is to say, facing the entire class.

Having grown up in the land of desks o'plenty, I wasn't used to the competitive French system, where you're not only up against your fellow students to gain entrance to a university--but you're competing with them just to get a table on which you'll write your exam!

When I talked to Etienne a while ago about my observation that one of the world's greatest civilizations was utterly incapable of forming a single line at an ATM, his response was that French people aren't easily contained. Ah, yes, the familiar line about the Revolutionary tradition. But I have to say, here it does seem kind of true.

Against this backdrop of chaos and social unrest, it's apparent that French people are much more like cats than sheep. But the RATP refuses to admit this reality.

Robert Frost spoke of the road not taken, the Paris métro has its hallways not permitted. The designers wanted it to run like a well-oiled machine so passengers walking in one direction are directed into one tunnel, and passengers walking another direction are often sent through an alternate route. So often you'll see two hallways side by side, winding the same path through the underground labyrinth that characterizes so many stations, but one is has a "passage interdit" sign hanging above it. The RATP wants to make sure that passengers don't bump into one another, and theoretically, can walk more quickly because everyone is going in the same direction. But experienced riders know that it's sometimes the verboten corridors that are quicker; they head down what has been deemed by the RATP gods as the "wrong" staircase--even though it connects the same two platforms as one deemed "correct" by the powers that be.

So this new "je garde le rythme" campaign is just another salvo in the unspoken war between passengers and the RATP, a microdrama that reflects that eternal democratic struggle between citizens and the state, between "the people" and "the system".

But this war seems to create a sort of solidarity--a term invoked quite a bit by the P.M., Jean-Pierre Raffarin, in his bid to suppress the Pentecost holiday and have everyone work for free to fund care for the aged while cutting inheritance and corporate taxes (talk about the Grinch that stole la Pentecôte!). If we really want a return to social harmony, I think everyone should be forced to ride the subway: sometimes I'm almost moved to tears by the solidarity shown when passengers band together to block the closing doors of the subway car to allow their potentially stranded brethren to hop on.

Like workers fighting against the profit-driven capitalist machine so callous to the suffering of the little people, riders engage in a common struggle against the capricious subway gods who callously slam the doors, leaving at the station those too feeble to run fast enough--all in the name of running on time! Nobody rider wants to see their poor fellow passenger left behind in the station: but for the grace of God...

I'm becoming an RATP revolutionary.

I'm encouraging all Paris transit riders to fight against the dogmatic, "garde le rythme" brainwashing. Let's take to the passages interdits, throw open the subway turnstiles, and band together to fight transit oppression!

Rage, rage, against the closing of the doors!

The Vatican: A great place to send a letter

2005-04-25T23:30:00.000+02:00

After the lengthy coverage of life and death in the Vatican that played out on television worldwide, I decided I should see the world's smallest independent state for myself now that I'm actually in Rome.

So after a quick visit to the Trevi fountain (yes, we threw the coin over our left shoulder...) we hopped on a packed bus across the Tiber. I should add that this is an Italian national holiday so by the time we got there, it seemed like half of Italy had the same idea we did. St. Peter's Square was so crowded, I felt like I'd gone back three weeks in time--to the death watch.

In fact the crowds were so intense you'd have thought everyone was there for John Paul II's rise from the dead. Needless to say, it was impossible to find where the lines even began to get into St. Peter's. So I didn't get to see the wonder that is the world's largest basilica (twice the size of Notre Dame in Paris!), let alone the Sistene Chapel.

But I did see the post office. The Vatican has its very own postal service and I decided it was only fitting that my hilariously campy Pope Benedict postcards should have a postmark from the Holy Zee. Afterwards I went to the newsstand for a copy of Le Monde .

On the cover: "The French Friends of Benedict XVI"

Roma!!

2005-04-24T02:57:00.000+02:00

What a pleasure to get to Rome! If you’re wondering why I’m here, my parents are on vacation and rented an apartment for a week. We’re staying in the Monti, a charming residential neighborhood near the Forum and the Coliseum, but hardly a camera toting tourist in sight—mostly young Italians.

All I can say so far is that the food has surpassed my expectations and made me really depressed to go back to my relatively low standard of living in France. My first night here, we went to a neighborhood trattoria for dinner (try finding a cheap neighborhood bistro in Paris!! no, I don't consider twenty-five euros to be "cheap"). For six euros each of us had a plate of superb pasta (this is par for the course, by the way). Not only was the pasta (and wine and salad) delicious, but the place had atmosphere—starting with the owners themselves, a married couple in their late fifties (by all outward appearances). From the neck up, she looked very classy: nice make up, tactful gold earrings, a very attractive haircut. But then you noticed the full picture: a white apron and these strange slippers that she trudged around in (trudge being the operative word for how this otherwise vibrant-looking woman seemed to shuffle around this restaurant). Her husband walked around in a white apron and white shirt, both of which seemed to have been used as a shield against many a splattering sauce. Their management philosophy can be resumed in one word: arbitrary. They allowed us to be seated (rather late), but turned away a couple who came five minutes after us (telling them in Italian that it was too late, while pointing vigorously at their watch). So then it was all the more surprising that they then sat a couple who came in fifteen minutes later with no qualms whatsoever. When it came to ordering, the grease-splattered waiter/owner asked us immediately what pasta we wanted (without getting a chance to order a secundi, or the meat dish); we just assumed because it was kind of late they were only serving pasta. But then the couple who was seated fifteen minutes after was told they could only have a secundi… Nevertheless, I found all of this unpredictability as charming as I did when I was visiting Bulgaria (I already had that country on my mind because Rome’s Mussolini-era train stations I passed through on the airport train reminded me so much of Sofia). But I was even more smitten when we ran into the owner (this time in a clean shirt, minus the apron) this morning [hence, the morning after our dinner] walking to the neighborhood market and exchanged buongiorno’s…

Today was our day for ruins, which, well look pretty much like every photo I’ve seen of them. I could spend time telling you what the Coliseum and the Forum look like, but you could also read about them in a tour book (and maybe even buy a book like the one my mother haggled down to twelve euros that shows what the ruins looked like before they were, well, ruins—it’s really astonishing). I know you’re really just here for my particular (being, in this case, a euphemism for self-centered and inane) vision of things…

After letting my parents rest in the apartment, I headed out to go shopping for two things: vintage clothes and risotto (not the plain kind, the kind with the flavor packet—look I don’t have time to make things from scratch. I’ve found two different brands of the latter that I’ve been told you can find in Italy—I can find them in France too, but I have no intention of making a special trip to the Auchan at the Porte de Bagnolet everytime I want risotto…) I didn’t find the risotto I was looking for, and I did find some good vintage clothes stores. However, I was running out of time because, well, I was waiting for Silvio. Berlusconi. Europe’s pariah himself.

Let me explain. Walking near the Piazza Venezio, I saw TV cameras and a huge crowd waiting around the entry way to a courtyard guarded by carabinieri (Italian police that you routinely see racing through the city escorting various dignitaries—today I counted twelve such caravans!!). I asked what everyone was waiting for and was told that Silvio “my right-wing coalition just lost virtually every race in the regional elections” (ça me dit quelque chose…) Berlusconi was to make an appearance. I thought that might be worth a good snap shot and would make a good story for my faithful readers; it’s like spotting the Queen of England when she leaves Buckingham Palace—except the HRH doesn’t call German politicians nazis while presiding over the EU.

Anyhow, fifteen minutes elapse, but the TV cameras are still ready and waiting, the guard with the machine gun is still there so I know it’s just a matter of time. Another half hour goes by and now we see in the courtyard that people are stirring. Then a car pulls far into the courtyard and we see, from a fair distance, that unmistakably slimy hairdo (here’s one point on which Berlusconi and Chirac have a lot in common…). And he gets in the car. The car comes towards us. The car approaches us. The TV reporters have their microphones out. All the bystanders start squeezing in to get a shot with their digital cameras. The news crews are excited to finally be doing something other than waiting around and killing time by getting b-roll they’ll never use of the crowd.

And to the cheers of some Italian Berlusconi fans, the car drives right past us, and disappears off into the distance with the sirens of the carabinieri blaring. Everyone disperses immediately.

I had waited an hour to take a photo of a black Audi with tinted windows. The whole thing was reminiscent of that Simpson’s episode where everyone joins a cult and fawns over the passing of “the leader”’s sedan. Talk about a letdown (for the sane). I mean, I know Berlusconi runs all the TV networks so those poor news crews are probably used to devoting all of their time to documenting the daily calendar of the man with the power (a la Putin). But the fact that people had waited for an hour to look at and take pictures of the car of Europe’s pariah—and seem visibly happy to have seen only his means of conveyance--was astonishing to me.

Almost as shocking as how bad Benedetto XVI (Benoit, Benedict, etc.) looks. Of course all the tourist shops have hundreds of postcard images of the late Pope John Paul II (including one unintentionally funny photo of J.P. II towering over St. Peter’s like King Kong menacing Manhattan). When faced with a choice between photos of the skiing, walking, and talking John-Paul II or later ones of the ailing pontiff who slouched over and incomprehensible, publishers obviously opted for the former (you don’t make postcards of LA on smoggy days, now do you?). I guess Ratzinger’s election is a nightmare for the postcard and poster makers (and posters all over the city—remember he’s this city’s arch-bishop as well): what do you do when the new pope is already 78 and in visibly bad health?

I should go because I want to make it to Benny’s first mass tomorrow.

I wrote a good part of this at 1AM while sitting at a cafe on a moonlit piazza replete with a burbling fountain (I’m leaving out the drinking a Peroni part because, well, Italy’s beer is first-rate let-down). With the mellifluous sounds of Italian flowing over me, I’m kind of wondering how I can go back.

How do you go back to a country where you can’t afford to eat out? To a life where your version of pasta is the buttered store-brand variety sprinkled with emmental cheese?

Is Rome making me just a little disenchanted with Paris?

The BNF

2005-04-20T03:03:00.000+02:00

Walking from the subway...

As I've mentioned before, I'm now working quite a bit at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (François Mitterrand), more commonly referred to as the BNF. It's in a corner of the 13th arrondissement that was more or less forgotten until this grand projet came around and it was pretty much the only place to put it.

There's something about the entire environment that strikes me as unsettling and almost apoocalyptic. The landscape offers lots of examples of man conquering nature: chained trees, caged bushes, smokestacks on the horizon belching out smoke. Then nature gets its revenge as a mere drizzle makes all of the exterior pedestrian areas dangerously (and humorously) slippery. The newly-built surrounding neighborhood also evokes a certain unease with its incongruity and, dare I say it, insincerity.

Using my relatively inexpensive digital camera, I tried to capture some of what drives me absolutely crazy about this neighborhood, while at the same time giving you an interesting photo tour. Click on the photo and then from there you can access all the photos in my photo set about the BNF.

I hope you enjoy.

Catching up...

2005-04-18T18:40:00.000+02:00

It's been a little bit of a crazy week. It might shock many of you, but I actually have work to do and spent a good part of the last ten days in a hole. I had papers, presentations and an exam in my political philosophy course.

This last class is really interesting and has really broadened my interests: I never in my life thought I'd go to a philosophy book store and get excited over the thought of reading Habermas or Arendt. The class is specifically about "Multiculturalism", a more-or-less North American philosophical debate about how to reconcile the abstraction of liberalism with the recognition of individual/communautarian identities. I actually was at dinner last night and had a conversation with somebody about whether or not modernity was in decline. I've become one of those stereoypical French people who sit in cafés discussing philosophy.

I guess the long and short of it is that I feel much more intellectually engaged when I'm here. Kind of on a whim, I attended a colloquium at Reid Hall this past Saturday reflecting on museums and their relationship with art. The discussions about the upcoming Quai Branly museum, dedicated to "les arts premiers", basically a euphemism for "primitive African art" were fascinating: In classifying as "art" the objects of daily life or religious ceremonies that are going to be on display, are curators trying to (once again) impose western standards of esthetics on a set of cultures with far different considerations? Should these objects, obtained through all sorts of colonial conquests, be put on display in the decontextualizing setting of a museum? I could go on and on. There was also the discussion about the authenticity of "the original" in the art world, which made me reflect on my visit to a municipal art gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria where an exposition on Bulgarian painters was composed entirely of reproductions (reprinted on the sort of material that you'd make a sign or an awning from) but whose bizarrely insistant labels read "Oil on canvas". And then a discussion of the blurring lines between art and commerce, where one panelist spoke about the Prada store in New York, where clothes are displayed with the same reverence as one displays, say, the Mona Lisa. This led me to ponder what we can then glean from The Museum of Modern Art in New York being financed in part by Moma stores that sell items whose industrial design is supposed to elevate their status to art.

Basically, I have to say that these are reflections I'm not sure I'd ever make in the United States. I'm not saying I'm particularly profound or that I've raised any questions that are terribly original. But, at the very least, my awareness of these issues is heightened. I just hope that going back to the world of journalism won't dumb me back down.

2005-04-18T18:39:00.000+02:00

It's funny how some people just pop back into your life. I was walking home from a café last weekend in the early evening, and all of a sudden heard my name being called. It was my old high school friend Brigid (right). She was at the end of her ten day vacation in Paris with her friend Jessica (left). It was apparently one heck of a vacation: she met an absolutely charming guy (with whom we all went to dinner and drinks) and talk of the big "M" has surfaced. I actually met her wonderfully charming friend for dinner last night (he pays for everything...) and one week after Brigid's departure he's planning on heading to San Francisco this week. Sigh...

2005-04-18T18:38:00.000+02:00

And another thing to catch you up on... here's Etienne. He and I have been dating for a few months now. We were on the subway and bored so we took this. We're so hip--we then took a walk to look at the architecture in the 20th arrondissement (which ranges from the old and the quaint to the monstrous to the surprisingly intentive). Sadly, I was feeling less and less well as the day went on (I now have a cold) that I neglected to take photos as the day went on. So I'll just be narcissistic and show you the photos of us on the subway.

2005-04-18T18:37:00.000+02:00

My turn.

2005-04-18T18:36:00.000+02:00

My turn again.

2005-04-18T18:35:00.000+02:00

Okay, fine. One last one of Etienne.

Historical debate on the men's room wall on the reseracher's level at the national library

2005-04-12T17:13:00.000+02:00

"Let's defend ourselves against the invaders" "Like in 1939, asshole, you held on for two weeks" "And during the debacle all you had left were Senegalese workers on the front."

Another I told you so...

2005-04-07T01:12:00.000+02:00

BBC NEWS | Europe | Yes camp worries French press

It's taken the French media establishment this long come to the consensus that there is something seriously wrong with the "Yes" campaign for the EU constitutional treaty?!

I think this was obvious from the very beginning. (go back through my archives...) :)

Signs of the times (in photos)

2005-04-06T20:33:00.000+02:00

The "doors are open" and you can have this young, strapping Mormon missionary show you around their gallery of paintings of Jesus in North America (that's what the Book of Mormon's all about). They've placed it on a busy pedestrian street... in the Marais. I wonder how many times this poor missionary must get picked up on a daily basis (by men, folks--this street is lined with gay bars and stylish clothing stores and restaurants). On another note, the Church of Latter-Day Saints is doing a wonderful public service by digitizing the municipal archives across France. The hitch: they get to keep a copy in a huge underground bunker in Utah. Really, really creepy.

2005-04-06T20:14:00.000+02:00

Anti-EU Constitution posters covered by "Oui" posters that have been ripped up. Today's Le Monde features an article criticizing the really poor campaign for the yes. I have my own criticisms. First of all the only place I've seen at Socialist Party poster (the left-wing party in favor of the treaty) is in the windows of their own offices. Secondly, the UMP (party of Nicolas Sarkozy, Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin--who now has a spectatular 29 percent approval rating) needs to stop putting its pro-Constitution posters up in "popular" neighborhoods. I saw one in the 20th arrondissment and about fell over (imagine GOP campaign posters in the Berkeley): they're going to scare more "prolos" into voting no, than convince anyone. I mean, not to steal a line from the Guignols, but who ever saw a poor person vote for the UMP--let alone take their advice on how they should vote on a referendum?!

2005-04-06T20:09:00.000+02:00

The top four books at this bookstore: Angels and Demons (Dan Brown), Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown), followed by two books about controversy over whether or not Dan Brown is actually a good writer. Sigh. Number seven and eight on the list are by French authors.

2005-04-05T00:06:00.000+02:00

Really blue sky. Bois de Vincennes. Sunday April 4, 2005. 3:55 PM.

The Pope's Death and the Remote Control

2005-04-02T22:36:00.000+02:00

Last night (Friday), the highly ritualistic evening newscasts completely broke their format, medical experts thought it was a matter of hours, and as the news that everyone was waiting for didn't happen immediately, both channels went back to regular programming. At the newsstand this morning, the tabloids with their full page "adieu" photos seemed desperate to announce the news that just wouldn't come. It was clear that the hours were numbered, and the retrospectives poured fourth. They were obituaries except for that one critical detail: he wasn't dead yet. But it was clear John Paul II had gone to bed for the last time. John Paul II refused any active intervention. It was a matter of time. So, gingerly at first, news anchors and newspaper editors began to speculate about who would replace the man who, despite the impatient cameras trained on those two illuminated windows, kept hanging on.

But finally this evening the announcement came forth. In the form of an e-mail. This was the modern Vatican, a pope who was at home aboard a 747.

The news cycle, suspended in a living tableau of mourners packing Catholic churches worldwide, could go forward.

I turned on TF1, France's major private channel and, save for a bold graphic announcing "Le Pape est mort", it was hard to tell what had changed. The pilgrims from near and far who had come to St. Peter's Square were praying, saying Hail Mary's ("je vous salue marie"). Polish believers lit candles in Krakow.

The mourning of the dead pontiff looked identical to the mourning of the not-quite-dead pontiff.

But this death wasn't a shock. We'd been preparing for days. Mourners talking to TV reporters in the last few days had already been using the past tense in reference to the pontiff.

I left the stark crowd to go next door, on the teleivison dial.

Public-owned France 2 was an epileptic orgy of confetti and thumping beats. The channel was hosting was hosting it's much-hyped, star-studded AIDS telethon. It came at a really bad time: how can you tactfully cut short a televised AIDS benefit concert? How do you preempt a charity event aimed ending a disease that has taken millions of lives to report on the death of just a single person who's apparently much more important?

TF1--or rather their all-news-channel--was on the story. It was the éloge of the man who helped end the cold war, improved interfaith relations, reached out to a generation of youth, forgave a man who tried to kill him, spoke out for human rights and the poor, trotted the globe.

Watching the French coverage, you forgot that while the Père-Saint sparred with the White House over the Iraq War and the death penalty, Bush and John Paul II got along when it came to things like opposing abortion and promoting abstinence-only sex education. You didn't hear about the Pope going to impoverished countries with out-of-control population growth while warning against birth control. And, unlike the BBC's remarkably balanced coverage, you didn't hear clips from the Pope in Africa where he denounced unholy condoms despite the emerging threat of AIDS. So while French people may not go to mass and while the country officially booted the Church out of its public affairs a century ago, the country is still "la fille aînée de l'Eglise," the church's eldest daughter.

Flipping between the the two main channels was almost surreal. People on "la une" mourned a man who railed against unholy prophylactics. Entertainers on "la deux" urged viewers to have safe sex.

An hour after the pope's death, glitzy show was still grooving along. The host told us Michel Delpeche and Myrtille were going to sing "Pour un flirt avec toi"...oh and then the show would be coming to an early close for a special "consacré à la mort du souverain pontiff."

In an utterly incongruous moment, the audience applauded. It was presumably a clumsy reaction to the first part of the host's announcement, but then again at an AIDS benefit, it's unlikely anyone forgot the Pope's unfavorable stances.

But no time to reflect on this awkward moment as musicians played the opening strains of that corny 1960s yé-yé hit. At the end of the song, the host looked stressed and disappointed as she reminded viewers that they really had to go but that the goal of 3 million Euros hadn't been reached yet. Please call the 110 with your pledge, she asked. She said she knew that they had to go, but she begged people to keep the operators busy. Remember just 40 euros can buy medicine for a child dying of Aids for a week, she implored.

Finally, master control cut to a papal montage that had probably been in the freezer for months. And the pretty anchor, whose blue eyes eerily matched the blue background in the studio, announced the big event anyone with a remote control had known for over an hour--and had been waiting for for days.

At least Americans are good at something...

2005-04-01T15:11:00.000+02:00

Americans are no longer overweight, Mc Donald's eating Bush voters. Now were "experts in anti-aging techniques," according to an ad from Lancôme on the front page of the April 1st edition of Le Monde. The ad continues: "In the United States, people rush to the dermatologist for a [botox] injection or chemical peel on their lunchbreak." Just like French people rush home and have sex with their spouse on their lunch break.

Patricia J. Williams, version française

2005-03-31T11:35:00.000+02:00

"Who the heck is Patricia J. Williams?" you might ask.

You can currently holding forth in her weekly Nation magazine column, Diary of a Mad Law Professor. Her legal background only enhances the particularly acute and original observations she makes about the news of the moment and cultural trends.

She's also one of my favorite writers. I'm such a fan, in fact, that I wrote a commentary about her oeuvre my freshman year, discussing the idea of "pornographic displacement" as an underlying tenet of her analyses. It was such a pleasure to write that paper (one of the rare times I've had a paper that wrote itself) that it got selected for the writing department's annual "Mercer Street" booklet that they force all the incoming freshmen to buy. So basically, I've read all of her books (which are so surprisingly witty that they practically read themselves!) and am a huge fan.

I was all the more excited to get a note in my e-mail box that she was coming to Columbia's Reid Hall to discuss her upcoming anthology about new perspectives on feminism from American philosophers. I've wanted to meet her, to tell her just how much I enjoy, not only her social commentary, but her writing. In a moment of utter fantasy, I once thought that I'd take a Nation magazine cruise where you hang out and attend seminars with the publication's various columnists while sailing the Caribbean.

But back to reality: she was coming to Paris!!

I was so excited to her what insights she'd have, and to hear her witty yet elegant, clear yet sophisticated writerly style take vocal form. But, contrary to what had been written on the e-mail, she'd decided in the interim that she wanted to speak in French--after spending a sleepless night on a plane from New York and after not having spoken French in twenty years, she said.

I hate to say this about my favorite writer on earth, whose thinking I find to be incredibly rich and original, but she should have stuck to English. Her rich nuanced thinking, vieweing the whole Sciavo melodrama through the lens of racial stereotypes, radical Christian notions of "innocence" and the evangelical's grab for power at the federal level, was completely obscured by the constant interventions to help find the correct translations of expressions, and basic vocabulary. Not only was the flow of her explanation totally interrupted, but the fact that it was obvious that she was trying to translate word-to-word her entire presentation from English to French, gave you the impression that she was trying to sculpt something fine like the Venus De Milo with a hatchet. Furthermore, there were all sorts of necessary detours to explain concepts of American federalism or cultural references like Bob Jones University (these explanations became interminable because it was difficult for the bilingual folks with either first language to find comprehensible French translations for so many American-specific terms or names of laws like "The Texas Futile Care Act"--a title whose meaning wasn't even readily apparent to native English speakers in the room). The language barrier in this case was truly insurmountable.

The French-speaking side of me struggled to decode her thinking through a mass of grammatical and diction (meaning word choice) train wrecks. The English-speaking side of me longed to hear that familiar Patrica J. Williams whose cogent, well-written analyses marry so well with her wry, ironic anecdotal observations.

Neither side came out very satisfied.

At least I got to tell her I liked her work (in English).

Paris in the sun

2005-03-31T11:17:00.000+02:00

As I've mentioned in a previous post, the past couple weeks were a real break-out in terms of weather.

It was great weather for photos.

Even though the skies have now clouded over and is a little more seasonable, here are some of the snapshots I got of that golden time. (more to follow once the sun comes back out!)

2005-03-31T11:16:00.000+02:00

The courtyard at the Sorbonne in the afternoon sun. What you don't see is that in warm weather, the classrooms are like saunas.

2005-03-31T11:12:00.000+02:00

The square in front of Saint-Sulpice--the church of Da Vinci Code fame. If you look closely, you can see the awe-struck Dan Brown fans in front of the cathedral, dog-eared copies of the best-seller in hand.

Le Staten Island

2005-03-28T06:14:00.000+02:00

Staten Island isn't part of New York.

That's the verdict of a call-in contest I just heard on France Inter radio this morning. To win a Sex and the City DVD set, you had to call in and name at least three of the five boroughs of New York.

So the caller named "les cinq districts de New-York": le Manhattan, le Brooklyn, le Bronx, le Queens et le Staten Island.

"So close" the host said to her.

Where did she go wrong?

There's no Staten Island, the host told her. The fifth borough is Richmond, he continued. The animateur, who was clearly in over his head, conceded that maybe this Richmond place was on Staten Island, but Staten Island wasn't a borough.

Even New Yorkers will forget that far away place is part of the same city. "S.I.," as it can be abbreviated, is more like New Jersey with New York license plates. They vote Republican (the City Council's Republican caucus is simply another name for the Staten Island delegation), they have their own expressway and they shop at the mall. People flocking to the Big Apple have moved to places like the Bronx, Hoboken and Jersey City for cheap apartments. But that borough across New York Harbor, accessible by only a four dollar bus or the ferry of death, isn't on any apartment-hunter's radar.

And let's not forget that even Staten Island wanted out, back when it tried to secede in the 1970s.

But to make it clear, that once bucolic trash-heap (it's now overbuilt and the landfill's closed) is still one of the five boroughs.

To clear up the whole mysterious "Richmond" business, Staten Island goes by another name (that almost nobody uses): Richmond County. Just as one could hypothetically start referring to Brooklyn as Kings County. You'd be technically right, but even people who live there might not have a clue as to what you're talking about.

Alas, if the host had actually watched Sex and the City he'd have known that the second season starts with Carrie and company heading to...you guessed it...that magical Isle of Staten.

They certainly never called it Richmond.

Another Unintentionally Hysterical Website...

2005-03-26T01:00:00.000+01:00

This gem is brought to you by the "Objective: Christian Ministries." The punctuation in their title makes absolutely no sense. But then neither does the rest of the site.

OBJECTIVE: Mall Mission: "Catchy slogans help to grab the short attention of the consumption-addled unsaved, be sure to employ them on all your handouts and especially when first approaching a potential ex-consumer. The more cryptic or unusual sounding, the better, since it will cause the person to be curious as to what you are talking about. Some good examples are:

* 'Jesus will save you more than 50%... He'll save you 100%!'
* 'Salvation is one size fits all!'
* 'Why go to a Gap when you can come to Agape?'"

Under the subtitle "Malls of the Damned" they explain that Satan has infiltrated suburban shopping centers. Well, considering how vapid the fashions there are, they may have a point. But then you read on. Some proof: "Cinnabon-Sounds like 'Sin Upon'". They also have tips if you want to go and save the consumtion-addled (who are part of a Secularist conspiracy!) like handing out pamphlets that will "really make an impact on the unsaved." If somebody came up to me with a pamphlet that said "Attention Hell Mart Shoppers..." it would make an impact all right...

The rest of their site is a hoot. They have Creation Scientists (can we get anymore oxymoronic?) who go on Dinosaur hunts in Africa (because, they say, Dinosaurs still exist!). They also have Creation Science Fairs (kids put rocks and water in a sealed jar and pray to God that nothing will happen and, well, after three weeks nothing has happened so they've clearly disproved evolution). Their "4 Kidz" page has all sorts of patronizing ways to get kids to be judgmental about other religions.

I couldn't make this up if I tried.

"Ouais, m'enfin...euh...non" ("Yes, well, uh, no")

2005-03-25T21:06:00.000+01:00

"The yes needs the no to beat the no."

That was beleagured Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin trying to give his spin on a troubling erosion in support for the EU constitution. This "raffarinade" was, in fact, his concluding remark in a speech before European center-right activists earlier this week. That somebody who speaks ssuch a pitiful attempt at English that it provided quite a bit of fodder for the Guignols this week. (1) The Jacques Chirac puppet just kept playing a tape recording of it, explaining that he keeps Raffarin around for laughs (heaven knows it's not for his success among the voters!). This gem is truly icon material and I have the feeling we'll be hearing the "yes needs the no to beat the no" remix hitting the dance clubs this weekend.

So it's all the more shocking that with support for a "yes" this coming May 29th falling below 50 percent in three new polls this week, a Prime Minister with favorable ratings in the basement would declare himself the head of the campaign to explain the European constitution to voters. History has shown that French people are somewhat apprehensive about the EU: the 1992 referendum on the Maastricht Treaty passed with just 52 percent. (2) And this campaign is shaping up to be quite difficult with even a major party like the Socialists bitterly divided on the issue of the constitution. Not to mention the risk that French voters might try to lash out at the government by voting no for the referendum--just as voters sactioned the government in last year's regional elections. So we can understand why opponents of the constitution are probably just a little pleased that such an unpopular Prime Minister wants to associate himself so closely with the "yes" vote.

It's time for the "yes" folks to get it together--especially those on the left. The far-left and even currents of center-left voters insist that a no vote on the constitution would force a renegociation resulting in a more "social" constitution. This opinion must be a side effect of a collective amnesia: they've forgotten what a painful process it was to get this constitution drafted. Let's face it, sitting back down at the table to renegociate with the other 24 countries, the bulk of which are led by right-wing governments at the moment, is going to be even more agonizing--and I think they'll like the result even less. The current constitution doesn't explicitly get involved in social affairs because that's an issue of national soveriegnty. Everywhere else in Europe the left understands that the current constitution is a good deal (guaranteeing things like the right to strike) and goes beyond political ideologies and sets a framework for an EU that can function much better at 25 members. So why the French exception?

It's another bizarre tendancy that's a symptom of the greater social schizophrenia known as the "crise d'identité". I've written before about France's identity crisis, but basically the angst over what France and its universal model will become, which drove voters to the political extremes in the 2002 presidential elections, has cast a pessimistic pall over any debate related to national soveriengty and cultural identity. It helps drive the widespread concerns about an erosion in social and workplace protections, so signs that the EU might threaten them become fodder for the country's political extremes. The debate over the Bolkestein directive, a European Commission rule that would liberalize the services industry, was a case in point. Bolkestein, in the eyes of critics, would have opened the doors to, say, Latvian workers coming to France and working for Latvian companies under Latvian regulations, thus setting up a system where countries with high pay standards and consumer protections would be penalized. This nightmare scenario of "dumping" was echoed by politicians everywhere. (3)

The voracity of those claims aside (see the footnote), opponents of the constitution used the "Frankenstein directive" as ammunition for their claims that the EU was too liberal and as a reason for a "non" this May. The absurdity of this is that the directive has nothing to do with the proposed constitution, and was likely to be amended anyhow. (4) If the argument got traction it's simply because of a major fear that the French standard of living is on the decline (a fear largely fed by the gloomy economic situation under the current government) and will be threatened in the future by distant forces it doesn't understand and can't control (either the US or Brussels).

Alas, if there's one thing that advocates for a "yes" can do, it's educate voters about the constitution. It's doing a really pitiful job of it now. For example, the Socialist party held a star-studded luncheon with celebrities who support the EU Constitution. A vast majority of voters say they don't know enough about the referendum and the best the PS can do is invite TV cameras to watch famous people eat lunch? The leader of the Belgian PS (parti socialiste) didn't mince his words in an interview with Le Monde when he said how flummoxed he was by the utter incompetence of his French counterparts (sous-entendu the increasingly ineffective leader of the party, François Hollande) when it came to explaining the constitution. The lack of actual explanation by the parties means that media coverage of the constitution right now mostly focuses on the political dynamics of the campaign, but rarely on the specifics of what the campaign is actually about. The government is sending out copies of the constitution in mid-May but I have a hard time believing people are going to be able to get through that brutally dull read (let alone understand it) in the two remaining weeks until the elections. The parties have got to get aggressive about saying what's at stake, and the media (I'm not going to let them off the hook) has to do the same.

But maybe the remix of the Raffarin "the yes needs the no..." will drive hordes of clubgoers to the polls this May and my worries will be unfounded.

(1) The Guignols de l'Info is a daily satire show every day at 19h55 that makes fun of the (mostly political) news of the day, using puppets. If you have your own puppet that means you're officially famous here.

(2) Maastricht was a major treaty that, among other things, put in place the framework for the common currency.

(3) Alas, the actual text was far more complicated than that, and while the "country of origin" rule was objectionable, it's not even clear it it could have actually been put into place.

(4) The directive, like any other directive, hadn't yet been modified by two different representative bodies, and was likely to be reformed given opposition from other countries. It has in fact been effectively buried this week after a meeting of European leaders--a normal part of EU governance.

Bon anniversaire, cher papa

2005-03-23T23:47:00.000+01:00

Today is my dad's birthday. It was also quite recently (literally a couple of days ago) that I discovered he had a blog.

You can read his opinions and thoughts as a passionate political progressive on his blog (dennisdavis.blogspot.com)

Happy Birthday!

French you won't learn in a textbook

2005-03-23T21:43:00.000+01:00

Well, French lessons via the internet are pretty much useless. But here I can at least share with you the physical expressions that are an important part of daily conversations. If you watch the daily interactions here they can be surprisingly animated. And this is where you understand that France is at heart a Latin country: people here can say an entire sentence with their hands.

Let's take a walk.

2005-03-23T21:39:00.000+01:00

First we get to "quelle barbe!" (lit. "What a beard" but it really means "what a bore!")

2005-03-23T21:38:00.000+01:00

"Mon oeil!" (lit. "my eye" but has the same meaning as "my ass, I don't believe you")

2005-03-23T21:34:00.000+01:00

"Ché pas" ("I dunno know")

2005-03-23T21:32:00.000+01:00

"Let's get a drink at the bar"

2005-03-23T21:31:00.000+01:00

And finally we get to one of my favorites (which may very well follow the last gesture): "J'ai un verre dans le nez" (lit "I have a drink in the nose" or "I've had one too many"). It can also depending on the context be used to express the inebriated state of the object of any conversation.

Hope you enjoyed our little walk. :)

Who signed off on this catastrophe?

2005-03-18T19:47:00.000+01:00

I usually write about France, but when I saw this photo of the new Charles and Camilla stamp I knew I had to say something.

Usually when one is going to make a stamp, one looks for flattering depictions of their subject. Especially when it's supposed to commemorate something like a marriage. Even if the two aren't exactly photogenic, there's no reason to use a photo so unflattering (eyes closed and slack-jawed) you'd think it was ripped straight off the cover of a tabloid with the headline "The Hussy Gets Her Man."

Thank goodness France doesn't have a monarchy. They just have presidents who stay in office for fourteen years at a time.

A Paris-Province double take

2005-03-17T22:30:00.000+01:00

French culture is fixated on Paris. Centuries of centralizing tendencies have made the City of Light THE place to go for anything in France. It has the best schools, the best museums, the best cultural life. The centralization (yes there has been a degree of decentralisation, but let's face it, you're not going to undo in a few decades what has taken centuries to put in place) is most evident in politics where politicians all "really" live, even if their district is somewhere far, far away. Even if you live in a large city like Lyon or Marseilles, you're still, well, provincial. Indeed, Paris is to French politics what Mount Olympus was to the Ancient Greeks.

It all ties in with the expression "monter à Paris", literally "go up to Paris": in the French imaginaire, the capital is a city of "somebodies." It's where all the opportunities are. It's a place to make your career. It's a place for ambitious people. If I read one more 19th Century French novel about a young man moving to Paris to "make it,"I'll puke.

Knowing all of this you can understand why I was absolutely floored when I was out for drinks and heard people talking about how good gay clubs and bars were in places like Lille or Poitiers (gasp!). I was even more shocked to hear this conversation repeated several times among different groups of people in other settings.

I've discovered the next big thing. Saturday night plans are going to now include heading to the Gare de Lyon and hopping on the TGV (France's bullet train--gosh I need footnotes, these parenthetical explanations really break up the rhythm of my text). Parisians are now going to become the "bridge and tunnelers" of every French city from Lille to Bordeaux. (I mean, you have to go somewhere to escape the drunken hordes of English people that now have easy access to France thanks a strong pound and the Eurostar).

The difference between parisian and provincial nightlife is that here there's a snobbish, cold feel. When you go to province, on the other hand, you get to be the star for the night. Plus the drinks are cheap.

But I suspect that it also has to do with the fact that you get to feel like a superior Parigot. Whereas the aristocrats once had the principal of honor to which they clung so furiously because it was a mark of their superior essence, nowadays having a "75" on your license plate seems to hold the same status. (Like the cachet of the coveted 212 landlines in New York). And even if you're in bar that's really pathetic, you at least get the fun of pitying the poor "ploucs" who don't know any better.

Granted, there are the provinciaux who hate the stuck-up, self-satisfied Franciliens (people from Ile-de-France, the Paris region) who talk too loud on their cell phones. But maybe they're just jealous...

Anyhow, I'll be trying out this new fad first hand when I go out for a night on the (provincial) town this Saturday. I'll be piling into a car with four other people and heading an hour away to Rouen, a city in Normandy--la Haute-Normandie, for those of who who know the official regions. If it seems close, remember that this is a small country. Even if it's a one hour drive, the mental distance is much, much further.

I guess it's not the first time I've I can think of that such a small distance meant such a major the first time I left Manhattan for New Jersey (on the PATH subway no less, which is like the MTA New York City Subway in a strange, alternate dimension: it even has its own smell). But then again, it'll be a cold day in hell before you ever see hordes of bleary-eyed New York revelers pouring out of the PATH on a Sunday morning, home from a wild night on the town in Newark. It'll be an even colder day before they'll actually fess up to it.

What do you have in YOUR walls?

2005-03-17T10:07:00.000+01:00

Asbestos, amiante, is about to become France’s worst nightmare.

France's drama with the DDT of building materials continues as the Journal de Dimanche (a paper I used to hate but have warmed up to, considering they actually broke two stories this week and that their features don't have the stilted, formatted feel of those written for Le Monde) revealed that the monstruous Montparnasse Tower may have to be evacuated because it's packed with the stuff. For those of you who have been to Paris, the edifice in question is the horrendous skyscraper that rises above the 14th arrondissement, sticking out like a, well, 59-story skyscraper. It's actually Europe's tallest building--a small consolation for having to live under the damn thing's shadow.

France didn't get around to actually banning asbestos until 1997 (humanity has collectively known since the 1950s that the stuff caused cancer, and since the beginning of the 20th century that it might be bad for you). It's probably everywhere. Large buildings were supposed to be inspected for the material by the end of 2003, but that date came and went without any real tallies of the number of buildings affected. A couple of government ministries (Health and Education) are just now beginning to do an inventory.

The tip of the iceberg has already been bad enough. The asbestos removal at the monstrous Paris University Jussieu campus was promised to take just a few years in 1998 and has now become a symbol of massive incompetence. In 2002, just 2.5 percent of the site had been cleaned, and the end of the work still isn't in sight three years later. Then we have the asbestos widows, whose sad vigil in the equally sad rust-belt city of Dunkerque resurfaces in the news every so often. They've been demanding a criminal trial to look into the links between the asbestos lobby and the state as part of an investigation into their husbands' deaths. Finally, just yesterday Libération revealed that workers at a Paris hospital were exhibiting symptoms consistent with asbestos exposure. (I wanted to also mention the evacuation of the headquarters of TSR, the French-language Swiss broadcaster. But the Swiss aren't French, as you're probably aware. They're more like France's slow-speaking, odd-counting cousins)

The désamiantage (asbestos removal) crews are going to make a fortune. And of course, as the Jussieu chantier has proven, our children's children may still be working on the construction site. Perhaps this is exactly the kind of grand projet needed to stem the now 10 percent unemployment rate.

Enfin...

2005-03-16T23:59:00.000+01:00

The host for this site had major problems for the past two days and I was unable to update the blog.

But this entry comes awfully late because I've been swamped with work.

Alas, my blog has been neglected so here are (in brief) the things that crossed my mind to write about, but didn't get around to addressing.

1) Editorial Fixations. The Los Angeles Times, a paper that has gotten much better in the past five years and now seems to be taking very bizarre turns, decided to dedicate its entire March 12th Editorial page to French news, in a series of editorials entitled "French Hall of Shame." It gave its analysis (weeks late) of the Gaymard apartment scandal. It also bemoaned the lack of French cooperation on Iraq and chimed in on France's geopolitics and then chimed in on the debate about how French A Very Long Engagement actually was in light of its American financing. (I would link to these, but they require a registration. They'll be up for free for a few more days, at least) First of all, it's almost flattering that the LA Times would be so fixated on France. In fact, the commentaries were far less incendiary and at least more thoughtful than the New York Post-inspired "French Hall of Shame" subheader. But when the word "Gallic" gets used over and over, I start to roll my eyes because it's inevitably a sign that people are invoking the stupid word meaning "typically French" as an almost patronizing reference to those backwards cheese eaters.

LA Times readers' vision of France isn't exactly helped by its travel columnist who has taken a year to live here. She insists that she's living a really ordinary life--in Paris' very expensive 7th Arrondissement. Alas, what constitutes a cheap restaurant for her (and she's living in dollars!) doesn't exactly coincide with my own definition. Nor did her admission that she really doesn't speak or understand French score any points. Plus, everyone who she seems to interact with all exist in some Bon Marche grocery shopping bubble. When I read her column it makes me wonder if we live in the same country. She just said in her last column that she was thinking of staying in Paris for another year. Twelve more months of really naive observations of French life. I can't wait.

2) "Hygiène de vie" I was reproached by a French friend for not having a good "hygiène de vie" when I wanted to buy a candy bar from a vending machine on the subway platform (I was really hungry). This concept of "hygiène de vie" refers to "living well." Included in this concept is eating at fixed times, which is why restaurants in Paris are empty at 8 and packed by 9 PM. This principle of "hygiène de vie" is why snacking is taboo (French people would die if they saw the snack aisle of an American supermarket): it's not part of living well. Living well is eating decent, regular meals (even if its just soup at home) made from often simple, whole ingredients. Ask a French person why they're thin and this is the type of explanation you'll get (I was going to take a swipe at Susan Spano again, because she tried to address this subject as well...). Hygiène de vie also helps explain the restaurant crisis surrounding Euro Disney's opening. The restaurants weren't designed to handle the mad 1 PM lunch rush, because the designers had expected French people to be like Americans on vacation and eat lunch in a flexible window between 11 and 4. Alas, the idea of hygiène de vie isn't necessarily an upper-class affair. But it's worth noting that, French youth are becoming a lot more like American youth, that is to say impulse buying a candy bar when waiting for the subway--and getting fatter because of it.

3) Les Misérables of the Fifth Republic. After Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin callously told protestors they should have a “positive attitude” (quoting a really bad pop song—I was actually shocked he was at all familiar with any popular culture), maybe he was trying to prime them for the terrible economic news of late, France’s now 10 percent unemployment rate.

It’s a bad time for the folks in power. After nearly three years in Matignon, the economic policy is in tatters (of course, those rosy budget predictions Sarkozy made so he could look good before he skipped out, won’t ever be blamed). Then there’s the referendum on the EU constitution this coming May that is exerting even more pressure on the government: if people are that unhappy with the state of affairs they just might vote “no” (just as they threw the right out of power in all but one region a year ago) to the constitution to send a message. Already we’re seeing that the support for the Constitution erodes with every passing poll.

And so unions and every other group that feels its been broadsided by the right (high school students, researchers, to name a few) see a golden opportunity to put pressure on the government. When 600,000 people ended up in the streets last Thursday, the government finally conceded that it would hold talks about public-sector salaries. It even asked the group representing private-sector business to renegotiate a wage increase to try to take off some of the political heat (the Medef, as it’s called, flatly refused).

Members of the government, including the prime minister, have tried to preach that the street won’t govern (although anybody who has any basic knowledge of French history knows that massive protests are perhaps the only effective way of getting things done here). But at the same time they’re panicked.

Everyone feels like they’re worse off in spite of the government’s ineffective efforts to curb prices at the supermarket and especially because of things like the reductions in estate taxes (sound familiar, American readers?). The general malaise is only stoked by the fact record corporate profits have evaporated in investor’s pockets, as opposed to being reinvested and thus creating jobs. People feel like things are seriously on the wrong track, and they feel as if their social guarantees are threatened (if not by the current government, than by Europe).

The government’s backed into a corner and the unions have the backing of two-thirds of the population (the same proportion that backed the truly paralyzing, month-long strike in 1995).

“Do you hear the people sing?…”

4) Le printemps! The best part of this first warm, spring like day that we've had this year is that I got to see the collective confusion over what type of apparel was appropriate. Despite the mild weather in the mid 60s, I saw a shocking number of people who wouldn't even take off their scarves, let alone unbutton their coats. I was wearing a sweater and a jean jacket and I was roasting. I was even more shocked to see people laying on the grass (on one of the few lawns designated for this purpose) in the Luxembourg Gardens wearing their coats and scarves. It was almost surreal (and I forgot to take my camera!). Regardless of whether or not they were needed, the coats seemed to come out almost automatically once everyone came back from vacation in September. I'm trying to figure out what the obvious cue will be for people to put their winter accessories back into the closet. I'm thinking it must be when the calendar turns to April.

Granted, there were plenty of people who actually did shed whatever inappropriate outer garments they were wearing at the beginning of the day. But the coats and scarves while laying out to sunbathe on an unexpectedly warm day was something I've only seen here. I mean, in New York that first golden day after a miserable winter (which here wasn't as miserable as people would make you believe) is a day of lots of exposed flesh in the public parks. While I like to avoid blanket depictions, a country where people can simultaneously bake in the sun and stubbornly cling to the idea it's cold because the calendar says its winter deserves a thorough sociologist to document the trend, and then perhaps a good therapist

A Quick Rectification...

2005-03-07T18:12:00.000+01:00

Libération : Juppé, nommé au Québec, contre-attaque

Well it looks as if, despite the horrible scandal it has caused in Quebec, Alain Juppé is setting off for the province's Ecole nationale d'administration publique. The article in today's edition of Libération drops the news that he's just been accepted--in spite of the controversy.

I had said that his demand had been rejected because of the polemic, as it appeared it had been. Oops.

The Salon de l'Agriculture

2005-03-07T00:11:00.000+01:00

Hungry cows. Sleepy farmhands.

Some people I know refer to it as the invasion of the “ploucs,” (hicks) but most refer to it (non-derogatorily) as the Salon de l’Agriculture.

This year 650,000 visitors (down from 700,000 last year—they blamed the snow!) came for the usual assortment of prize-winning livestock and regional foods. I missed it when I was here in 2003 and kicked myself for two years. It was a lot of fun: although considering my vacation, I almost felt kind of jaded. But it was a good cultural experience nonetheless in that you get to see an entirely different side of the country (both in terms of the people visiting and the exhibits themselves!).

If you think this sort of country fair in a city like Paris is strange, I can partially explain that it reflects this country’s centralizing tendencies.

But it goes further than that. Whether or not French people actually live as farmers (and a minuscule percentage do), those numbers hide the utter fixation this country has of late with traditional portrayals of itself.

Take product packaging or advertising—cultural objects in that they reflect the supposed tastes of consumers. For store-brand cheeses, there are always advertisements featuring an old man leading his herd of goats down a grassy slope or something equally bucolic. Even the packaging is sometimes designed to evoke “simpler” tastes or include fake traditional elements (like plastic straw under pieces of St. Marcellin cheese, for example). Even if people know full well that their Président Camembert came from a factory, there’s still the desire to think that it was handcrafted by some “plouc” in some “Trifouillis-les-oies” (the imaginary town name used to evoke “the sticks”) in some remote department like the Corrèze. The “Happy Cows” adverstisement for California cheese is almost startling in comparison in that the cows are given all the credit!

You have to remember that France was a rural, agrarian country much later than many of its neighbors. It’s not really until after World War II that a majority of the country lived in “urban” areas (I was just informed that it’s actually a fairly low bar in terms of town population to meet the criteria of “urban”—news that I’m going to have to investigate). In other words you don’t have to go back too many generations for most people to find their peasant past.

While few actually want to be a farmer themselves, protecting and paying homage to this “authentic” way of life is a political necessity. The President (a former Agricultural Minister himself) and the Prime Minister both visited the Salon this year—as they do every year. But France’s commitment to “its farmers” goes far beyond that. The country’s relationship with the rest of Europe is shaped by it. Every country in the EU has its own pet policy, but France’s refusal to review agricultural subsidies until the recent enlargement was farcical: while agriculture represented two percent of the 15 countries’ combined economy, the EU was shelling out nearly fifty percent of its budget to farmers. When expansion meant large agricultural countries like Poland were going to join the EU, the debate over how to divide up the Common Agricultural Policy pie became so bitter Franco-Polish relations were quite strained (to make matters worse, in the midst of this debate came the “New Europe” diplomatic bombshell). And the actual portion of that money that has gone that family farmer people want to imagine crafting supermarket cheese with his ruddy hands is irrelevant in this. TV reports showing the plight of family farmers who didn’t know how they’d survive without subsidies (a little-known fact is that New Zealand got rid of ag subsidies in the 1970s with great success—something fair trade advocates haven’t done the best job of pointing out) preached to the choir; clear majorities consistently show support for the agricultural sector.

If the French attachment to the terroir seems sentimental, it partially is. But there are serious political movements who are basing their ideology on the protection of this endangered way of life. The left has the iconic José Bové. The right has it’s Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Traditions party (hunters being such a powerful lobby in France that the country pays enormous fines to Brussels for not respecting the apparently unpopular hunting season mandated by the European Commission!) France’s identity crisis (a result of going from a major colonial power to suffering massive losses in two World Wars to becoming one of twenty five under the EU flag in less than century) has many feeling around for a new identity. While France is the country of Minitel, three major car manufacturers, Carte Bleue, fantastic ATM-style video rental machines, the Ariane rocket, and the Millau viaduct, the almost endemic pessimism among many here seems to encourage this bizarre attempt to ground French identity firmly in the terroir—an escape into another dimension from the ultra-competitive 21^st century.

From taking pride in its rich literary, artistic and even political history, some in France want to invest its identity capital in that man and his goats.

Photos (Finally)

2005-03-06T23:39:00.000+01:00

Okay, you can finally see a selection of the hundreds of photos I took while in Eastern Europe, hosted by Yahoo Photos.

Here's the link.

Enjoy.

Does the Boston Globe read my blog too? :)

2005-03-03T22:00:00.000+01:00

For Some Central Europeans, US Losing Luster

Not to toot my own horn again (I'm still reeling from the fact I beat the New York Times) but this article that just came out in the Boston Globe (and reposted on Commondreams.org) expores many of the same issues I already brought up about the evolving view of Central and Eastern Europeans towards the US and Western Europe--particularly the wanton rejection of visa applications!

Ha!

France Digs Out...

2005-03-03T13:27:00.000+01:00

…from under a whopping two inches of snow. And two inches is a generous estimate.

I woke up on Wednesday morning with the radio blaring warnings that it was snowing. But unlike last week (I wasn’t here but was told that the two inches of snow wreaked havoc), the announcer said, crews in Paris were out salting down the sidewalks. When I opened my shutters, the only snow to be found was a thin layer tenuously clinging to the tin roof of the trash shed in the courtyard. I stepped out to pick up a loaf of bread and found equally thin and generally pitiful-looking patches of snow on the sidewalk.

Frankly, I was kind of hoping that I’d get to see some real snow. Yes, there were some anorexic accumulations that just barely hid the dirt pathways and grass of the Luxembourg Gardens for example (which is pictured above). But I wanted more than a pitiful patina barely accumulating on metal and grassy surfaces. I longed to hear snow crunch under my feet. I yearned to see the rooftops and trees of Paris with a charming white coat. Alas, the closest I got to any of these scenes were the tacky flocked Christmas trees that were everywhere during the holiday season.

Turn on the TV and it’s wall-to-wall alerts from Météo France, closed highways (where you can see maybe an inch coating the roadway), closed runways (the stunning one-inch of snow overwhelmed Orly airport, a spokesman explained, because the white stuff was heavy and wet). Also a direct consequence of the snow: school busses are cancelled in many departments, leaving students stranded at home. In a café this morning, I overheard a woman on the phone saying she perfectly understood that her friend was running late because of the snow (she was referring to the pitiful patches of slush). Parisians are so blasé when it comes to the typically rainy weather that many don’t bother with umbrellas, but when it comes to snowy weather, get out the rain slickers!

It's amazing to think that the hearty Quebecers are actually related to this nation that goes apoplectic over a smidgen of neige (unless it's on their ski slopes!).

Back to Paris

2005-03-03T12:02:00.000+01:00

I'm now back to the country where taking public transportation doesn't require detective skills and where the sidewalks are remarkably solid. I took it for granted in Paris that I knew the RATP controllers weren't going to try to scam me. I also took for granted how comparatively well-kept even the grottiest neighborhoods are here.

Nevertheless, I had a rude reminder I was back in Paris when all of the automated ticket machines at the airport for the RER were broken (remember how in an earlier post I expressed my incomprehension at how the ATMs at the airport are inexplicably out of money almost every time I arrive). This meant I missed the non-stop train and had to take a train that stopped at every station between the airport and Paris. Now I shouldn't complain. The RER is luxury compared to the rattling, soot-covered bus with garish curtains and seat covers I took in Maramures.

But then again, in Maramures I also knew I would never have seen teenagers from the beleagured (a word that gets used quite frequently on this blog) department colloquially referred to as the "neuf-trois" openly lighting up joints.

I should say two more words about Budapest. My last day there was nice but I was disappointed I couldn't go to the baths (the famous attractions that everyone, tourists and Hungarians alike visit) because Monday isn't ever the "men's" day. The one men's-only mineral bath was closed for renovation. I could've gone swimming in the pool, but it seemed like a pretty weak consolation prize, considering the mid-teens windchills had made me yearn for a soak in the hot springs. I did though hit some of the used CD and vintage clothes stores of the neighborhood my hostel was in.

I also managed to visit another new shopping mall built on the Moskva Tér (Moscow Square)--another Eastern European mall that makes you feel like you're in the US except for the fact that the ceilings are all too low, the public walkways too narrow, and nary a chain store in sight. The developers of course had the gall to then build a monument to the 1956 uprising right next to the entrance (the 1956 uprising almost meant Hungary's exit from the iron curtain, but then Soviet tanks came back to "fix" the situation). I'm not sure that the protestors were fighting for shopping malls that few people in Hungary can afford to shop in.

But if Taco Bell can use Cuban revolutionaries' songs in their TV spots, I guess anything's possible.

Bercy Blues

2005-02-27T16:45:00.000+01:00

I'm on vacation, and not in France. But the news there is too important for me not to chip in my two cents.

Buying Le Monde today I was quite surprised to see that Thierry Breton was now the new Economic Minister of France. After all, he had turned down the post a few months ago. Breton, for those of you who aren't as familiar with him, is a world-famous science-fiction writer, and is also a business whiz with a knack for turning around failing businesses.

Breton will now be the eighth head honcho Bercy has seen in ten years. In fact, while France has known only two presidents since 1981, it has had more prime ministers and government reshuffles than I even care to count. Of course, Chirac protege Herve Gaymard's tenure was cut short because of an abosolute inadeptness when it came to expressing himself.

The last one's tenure was cut short because of a "foot-in-mouth syndrome." If you haven't read about this elsewhere, French government ministers get their apartments paid for by the state, if there is not already an "official" apartment waiting for them--it's a benefit that most other European ministers couldn't even dream of. Gaymard, with his wife and ten children, were living in a 14,000 euro-a-month apartment in one of Paris' most expensive neighborhoods--at taxpayer's expense. 14,000 euros per month is roughly his entire monthly salary! It looked bad for a government minister who was telling his fellow citizens that they'd have to tighten their belts and accept reductions in certain benefits while at the same time living in a palatial abode paid for out of the state's coffers. So he left the apartment, and it appeared that he might just survive the scandal. Then he put his foot in his mouth trying to play his all-too-familiar "I'm a simple man from Savoie with a peasant grandfather and a cobbler father" routine during an interview with Paris Match. In actuality, he owned apartments all over France--one of which in Paris he rented out--and owned so many assets he had to pay wealth taxes! This was too much and he had to leave.

The news of the enormous 600 square meter apartment was the talk of France when it came out. The whole affair was so gripping that one French person who saw me earlier today in a cafe with Le Monde (and the Thierry Breton news on the front page) wanted me to recap him on what had happened since he'd been on vacation! This also comes against the backdrop of other scandalous real-estate deals that have tainted the right (including, my favorite, Alain Juppe--who, it was also revealed in the same Canard Enchaine that unleashed the whole Gaymard apartment affair, will not be heading to Quebec to teach public administration during his "political exclusion" because the school who had originally hired him got such bad press for hiring somebody who had been weeks before indicted on corruption charges to teach future bureaucrats!!! I wrote about Alain Juppe, also in a previous post).

Anyhow, political commentators have all mentioned that this is a major coup for Sarkozy, Chirac's rival, who was Gaymard's predecessor before leaving to run the UMP party. The Financial Times even lamented Sarkozy's departure because he was allegedly good at the job, and good at pushing slash-and-burn "reforms" that the FT, from its liberal pulpit, thinks are needed.

Alas, the real legacy of Sarkozy at Bercy is far less rosy. Indeed, the Economic Ministry seems to be a "convenient" post for people to occupy. It's quite high-profile, and so when Sarkozy promised to fight for French peoples' buying power and draft a budget that would meet strict EU stability rules, he got lots of political mileage. But when you're only in a job for one year, it's really easy to do a half-assed job and skip out. His budget relied on wildly-optomistic growth projections which seem even more implausible now that the official unemployment rate has hit 10 percent once again! But even the FT fell victim to his propaganda.

And now we have Thierry Breton's move to Bercy--which seems to be the inverse of Sarko's move. I can't help but he's skipping out on France Telecom, where he was the CEO until now, because of clouds on France Telecom's horizon. When he took the helm, it was awash in debt. Now, it's making money--a success that nobody disputes is Breton's. But the ship is headed for rough waters, facing problems now that its monopoly on the landline business is challenged cable-internet hybrid companies offering phone service at far more advantageous prices (there are all sorts of other future problems France Telecom faces, but there's not point in getting into them here).

Nicholas Sarkozy used Bercy as a place to earn some quick credentials as an economic reformer with little regard for the long-term consequences (and we're talking one or two years down the road) of his policies, and Breton will likely use the same job to jump ship and protect his own reputation (although people from outside government circles often have a tough time making it in the government, so it'll be interesting to see if Breton's still at Bercy a year from now).

The musical chairs of French government, the cynicism with which politicians act, the largesse of the benefits for government ministers. My new friends in Eastern Europe all mentioned the corruption of their government and so perhaps the French can finally find a common bond with their friends in the East!

And ode to Budapest

2005-02-27T16:00:00.000+01:00

As my trip is winding down, I guess it's a good thing that this is my last destination. I'm tired of sightseeing, tired of having to visit museums, churches, etc. Here I feel very little pressure since I've already seen most of what I've wanted to visit. Today has been very leisurely. I've basically sat in cafes (there are so many here, and you can get the full range of coffee drinks for one or two euros!) reading the paper (I was so happy to find Le Monde at the newsstand) and reading some books I have for my classes this week. This morning I went to the supermarket and bought some pastries and yogurt for breakfast--which I ate at the hostel with two of the umpteen billion Swiss visitors. They're not all visiting here together, either. Even more strange is that all but one are native francophones (the Swiss German population is far larger than the that of the Romands). When I was at the supermarket one of them, I was delighted to hear her express her delight that the yogurt here cost only "septante-cinq forints" (75 forints, for the record, is about twenty five cents. But that's besides the point. French people--and me--will say "soixante-quinze" or sixty-fifteen. I wrote about the astonishing fact that the world's fifth or sixth largest economy has such a bassackwards way of counting in an earlier post).

Anyhow, later I'm meeting with my friend who's pregnant and due in just a few weeks. Sadly the gift I carefully wrapped for her looks just ratty after sitting in my backpack for nine days. Alas, I think the baby clothes are adorable, and they look very French. After all, her baby will be born in EU-era Hungary. It's all about European integration these days.

If I was saying that I felt completely at home here, I have to say that I did make one major blunder at the ATM machine last night (I hadn't even had anything to drink yet). I mistakenly withdrew 40,000 Forints (which didn't seem like that much money to me after being in Romania where the exchange rate is 36,000 lei to one euro!) and when I took the money out of the machine realized I had asked for the equivalent of 160 euros!!! So much for my mental math skills. Worry not, I'm not going to live high on the hog. I'll just have to transfer the bulk of that back to Euros and know that the money I lose on that transaction is the price I have to pay for my incopetence. I withdrew the entire average monthly salary for a Romanian in one fell swoop.

Currency confusion aside, it's funny how a city I've visited once and where I don't speak the language can almost feel like home. I don't even leave with a map since I know the lay of Central Budapest, the subway lines, the important tram lines. It's fun to just meander the streets: you see old stores still hanging on from the communist era with their dingy window displays of shoe trees or smoke hoods (the things you put over your stove that has the fan in it) under signs straight out of another era. On the other hand you see the new stores, coffee shops (perhaps it's the Hapsburg influence, but there are hundreds and hundreds of places to get really, really good coffee), bars, etc. Budapest is an "eastern" city that has less of a nouveau-riche vibe (although you can find it if you look) and more of a young-and-hip vibe.

In fact, there are lots of alternative rock bands here in Budapest. You see the posters all over the place. My favorite bar here is "Kultiplex," run by Tilos Radio, a former pirate radio station under the Communist era that now has a license and is the only real independent radio voice on the dial dominated by cheesy europop and the heavy-handed state radio. Spread out over several floors, walls covered with all graffiti slogans, rock band posters, and stencilled images that would make Andy Warhol proud, you can see rock bands play, listen to DJs spin (not my favorite kind of music) and even catch screenings of independent "subversive" movies like Super Size Me. It's a visit with the Magyar hipsters and punk rockers. I discovered it last time I was here (and met Hungarians I've still kept in touch with!) and it was kind of nice to see it hadn't changed a bit. The same goes for another bar I'm a huge fan of, Chachacha, which is located in one of Budapest's numerous underground pedestrian passages, beastly places that are all concrete and fluorescent lighting. The bar takes up two storefronts and on weekend nights the dancing, drinking crowd (a very mixed one, with hipsters to regular folks who just don't want to pay to go to a dance club) spills out into the otherwise deserted, communist-era tunnel. Like Kultiplex, Chachacha is also a symbol of resistance, transforming the vestiges of a grayer past into a hip, post-modern identity.

Transylvania to Budapest

2005-02-26T15:50:00.000+01:00

Since I last wrote, I explored Cluj-Napoca, a city of about 300,000 in the northern part of Transylvania. I walked around the open-air market downtown where you could buy live chickens, freshly-laid eggs, all sorts of cheeses, vegetables (the carrots were all misshapen and had dirt on them so you knew they were at least natural), fruits, toilet paper by the roll (it has a surprisingly important place on many vendors tables, but then again I think many Romanians are scarred by the past when toilet paper, like many consumer items, was nearly impossible to get), cheap Chinese-made radios, hair clips, socks, shoes, etc. Walking among the chaos (the closest you can probably get to a Bazaar this side of Turkey), it dawned on me that all of what I had seen in the past few days might no longer be there in ten years.

I mean, the European Union will change a lot of that. Romania's government is certainly going all out to show that it wants to be officially European. Both in Romania and Bulgaria, all of the public buildings fly the EU flag, which struck me a strange considering they haven't been accepted yet (if I put a French flag outside my house would I then be French?). In fact, while Romania is proud to claim that blue flag with yellow stars as its own, its own membership is being put on hold (much like my train that made an excruciating 45 -minute stop in Eastern Hungary for no apparent reason). Whether its sooner or later, the animal market in Maramures, the dairy vendors in their dark, low, corrugated ceiling building setting their cheeses on top of their dirty blue refrigerators, the chickens outside the supermarket (also seen in Cluj) will likely fall victim to EU regulations. So too will the pear brandy that the peasants make in a local still and put in used glass bottles. Indeed, some of these fascinatingly "primitive" aspects of life (remnants of both peasant and Communist pasts) will vanish because they'll be outlawed.

As much as I'd like to keep Eastern Europe in a display case so that I can marvel at its anachronisms and "backwardsness," I can't imagine actually living in their day-to-day life today. Just take the financial standpoint. When in a museum gift shop with one of my Romanian contacts, we saw a historial dress for 7,000,000 lei--about 200 euros. The woman gasped and said that was her monthly salary. The average salary is even less (about 150). Going to supermarkets, I was astonished to find that the prices for many things weren't that much cheaper than they are in France. Gas is about the same price (four euros a gallon). If I were on American unemployment and living in Romania I would be almost upper-middle-class.

Even though it sounds cliche, I have to say that everyone I talked with just yearns for the day when they can be like "the West" (I heard people still use the expression). My contacts seemed to be envious of their friends in Western Europe who didn't have to worry about things like bribing doctors or whether or not they could afford to drive to work. They just wanted the kind of lifestyle that we take for granted. I feel a little guilty as I realize that in Romania I spent in one week as much as my new friend made in a month.

Hungary now seems comparatively wealthy and "western" after spending over a week in Europe's far reaches. I remember my last visit to Budapest was like an exotic trip behind the Iron Curtain: the Soviet-built subway, the aging streetcars, the handfulls of aging Ladas, the block housing. It pales in comparison to Romania and Bulgaria when it comes to obvious examples of "the past." On my arrival into the train station, even though the train cars were filthy and the entire Nyugati station covered in the same sooty dinginess, after stepping onto the street, I felt like I was in Western Europe. It's a very cosmopolitan city that already feels very "integrated". An illustration of this is the ease with which I can find foreign newspapers here.

The last time I was here it was a week before the EU referendum, and I attended some of the lavish street parties the government paid for to whip-up pro-EU sentiment (the referndum passed by a huge margin, but then again not that many people actually voted). Now on my return my Hungary passport stamp bears the EU logo. The friends I made here were excited to become "European" finally. They were hoping for a better life (Hungary is already starting out a comparatively more affluent country than Romania or Bulgaria) and although it will take several decades for the country's standard of living to match that of France or Germany, on the street here in Budapest it feels like they're well on their way.

Lost in time

2005-02-24T22:54:00.000+01:00

I was going to remark that I'm typing this on a first-generation Pentium Computer running Windows 95. But after what I saw for the past two days, this painfully outdated internet cafe seems downright cutting edge.

My stay with Ioana in the town of Botiza was simply the cotinuation of what I saw at the animal market. To get there I took a rickety bus (with big flowy curtains and seats that came straight out of a school bus but covered with a fabric even La-Z-Boy would reject) from Sighet. Inside, all the women (even the little girls) had traditional scarves on their heads and all them men had those strange hats I mentioned to you. When I got off the bus in Botiza, it looked like a Currier and Ives image with snow falling on the traditional wooden homes and church, all of which were tucked into the surrounding foothills that hug a rushing stream.

Botiza is far from dead. Unlike France where small towns are more like open-air retirement homes, the villages of Maramures still have lots of children, and logically, people making children. You have the whole gamut: young people who leave the village to go to high school or college in neighboring cities, people well into adulthood who live a balance between the traditional ways and modern life, and old people who still live as if a century of progress hadn't even happened yet.

The most incredible example of this last group is an old woman living in a traditional wooden house with a dirt floor and no electricity! When Ioana took me there (I had fallen a number of times on the ice because of these terribly unsuitable shoes I bought in Bucharest and my back was sore) the old woman was combing through wool that had just been shaved off a sheep (the next step would be to make the thread by hand). Surrounded by the traditional rugs that women in the town make, the old lady was wearing her equally traditional peasant garb, especially noticeable are the footwear, a combination of heavy white wool stockings and black leather moccasin-like shoes with big laces that are wound around the calf. She ran her rough hands across my back and told me that it wasn't anything serious; I just needed a massage. So I hiked up my shirt and she rubbed some cream into my back and ten minutes later I was just fine. Her home was the most "primitive" but I visited several homes that only had woodburning stoves!

We also visited friends of Ioana in the neighboring village who were musicians. They already had their guitar and violin out and were playing traditional songs when we arrived (they didn't know we were coming, it wasn't a set-up, like you might think). As per the local custom, they served us shots of the homemade pear brandy and then we were serenaded with local songs to which everyone (except for me) knew the words.

As I said, Romania's a strange mix of the old and the new, so as we all stamped our feet to the strains of this centuries-old music, a color TV tuned to the twenty four hour news channel silently beamed images of world summits and local car accidents into this otherwise timeless scene. Ioana is a quintessentially modern, independent woman: she earns her own living as a teacher in the local elementary school, drives a car, is on the village city council, etc. But she lives down the road from the two-room home she grew up in (where she showed me the wooden bench that folded out into a bed for four!) where her elderly parents still weave rugs, tend to chickens and horses, and cook on a wood-burning stove. Ioana also surprised me when she told me that if her daugher Anca (who is my age and is studying to be a physical therapist) found a fiance, it would still be expected for the parents of said fiance, to come and arrange the marriage!

I guess I have just enough time to list a few more things I probably won't forget about Botiza:

1) The amazing hospitality. Ioana and her daugher Anca made me huge meals that were absolutely delicious. Everyone we visited was so kind and wanted to share something with "the American student from France" (as I was introduced). I was proudly shown rugs in peoples' homes, baby sheep and piglets in stables. A man who ran a local still (the palinka) showed me how his flour mill worked. A couple of farmers who were getting ready to roast a pig (the pig was outside and had just been slaughtered--judging by the freshly-cut hole in the throat and the red snow--and they were singing the outer flesh of the pig, which is apparently the first step in getting the pig ready) cut off the ear, a special treat, for me to taste. I couldn't say no.

2) The closeness to the earth. Everything was fresh: milk came from local cows, eggs from local chickens (If Bucharest has its packs of stray dogs, Botiza has its chickens). Water came from a spring in the mountains above the town. At the harvest, Ioana goes into a canning frenzy. She preserves vegetables and fruits to last her all year long (I had the tastiest plum preserves...).

3) The neighborliness. Ioana's sister in law came by with a bucket of milk. Someone else made us soup for the first course of lunch. The neighbors of Ioana's parents were getting in their ancient Dacia (Romanian car) as we were leaving and insisted we hop in for a ride down the road. Everyone knows each other and everyone we saw in the street said hello and waved. This weekend, the entire village will dress in their traditional wear and attend mass (as they always do--they're very religious) and a wedding. In fact, lots of women in town were already preparing the feast!

4) The religiousness. Lots of the wooden churches in the Izei Valley have been declared UNESCO world heritage sites because of their paintings depicting biblical stories. Orthodox Christianity is deeply ingrained in their consciousness: every home, even every classroom I visited had a religious icon. Some people even greeted us with "May Jesus be praised" instead of "hello."

I think I've run out of things at the moment. But the photos are amazing. You can see that I'm not making this stuff up. The scenery is also exquisite: stacks of hay dot the snowy hillsides rising behind the wooden homes. Also the sounds of the town are unique: a chorus of roosters (like barking dogs, one rooster crows, setting off a cacophony of nighbors wanting to chip in their two cents), the clop-clop of horses dragging sleds and carts, pigs squealing, etc. etc.

I'm in my last Romanian city however, Cluj-Napoca. Cluj is significantly more modern, and it's hard to think that just four hours on a bus could bring me forward nearly a century in time.

Maramures: Words can't begin to describe...

2005-02-23T11:32:00.000+01:00

So much to talk about.

First the crazy and slow train ride (400 km in ten and a half hours). The people in my compartment were all very nice and were excited to speak English with me. They first thought I was French because I have an Air France tag on my bag and because when I couldn't find my ticket, I started muttering in French "oh! fais chier! mais ou est-ce que j'aurais pu foutu ce truc?" So when the conductor came to check my tickets they explained to him that I was French and needed extra time to find my tickets, but that they had seen me get on with the ticket. The conductors came back later and were excited to practice their French--stopping me in the hallways to ask me questions about France. Because I couldn't sleep (let alone bear sitting quietly) in 35 degree (Celsius) heat--especially because my seat was over the heater that couldn't be controlled, I snuck out and found an empty compartment. I thought that at midnight, I'd get to have the compartment to myself (oh yeah, there were sleeping cars--but you had to get on in Bucurest to sleep in one!). At one of the many stops this train made at 3AM, some man with huge plastic bags came in and plopped himself down in my compartment. He was getting off two hours later (yes, the only train he could get to his destination was in the middle of the night). He too was happy to practice his French and complained to me about how hard it was to get a visa to travel anywhere.

It made me realize just how lucky I was to be able to travel to his country and so many others without having to go through the hassle of getting a visa. The poor man told me about how he'd applied a number of times to visit his brother in the US but that he'd been refused each time, and that he knew lots of other people who were in the same boat. It's really sad that in a country where so many people look to the US, the fortress mentality of the INS causes such disappointment--and I might even say a hint of disenchantment.

In anycase, it was an illuminating conversation (all between 3 and 5 in the morning as we travelled past haystacks and sleepy train stations where people were, despite the late hour, out to greet loved ones who were arriving.

If I left the hellish train station of Brasov last night, I arrived in a beautfiul place this morning. The town of Sighet, in Maramures is so far north in fact that my phone is actually roaming on a Ukranian mobile phone operator's network (I got a message on my phone ten minutes before we arrived in Sighet saying "welcome to Ukraine!")

On board the train I could already see men in the traditional hats that kind of look like shriners caps but made of curly wool. I was met by an extremely warm friend of Anca's, Ioana, who drove me to her boyfriend's apartment for Breakfast (Alan is a middle-aged American working for the Peace Corps. He has a thick southern drawl and uses lots of folksy expressions. IT was about hte last thing I was expecting to run into here in this very hard to get to place!). Of course, we got stuck in the snow so I had to push the aging Peugeot out of a snowy rut. There's a first time for everything. Alan's apartment is across from a lumber mill and Ioana explained to me that the pipe leading across the street into his building was actually for hot water (she says Alan's lucky to have it!): the former owner of the saw mill lived in that building and was sick of not having hot water, so the story goes, so he built his own pipeline to transport it from the mill across the street to his building. Welcome to Romania.

Anyhow, Ioana lives in a town about sixty km away from here called Botiza, where I'll get to spend the night. This region's little towns are a place where you can see the traditional ways of life coexisting with the new. I mean, you see people driving horse-drawn carts next to BMWs that are speeding along the road. You even see some older people wearing traditional costumes "in the city" (Sighet's a little burg of 30,000). On Sundays, she says, it's very common for people to dress up in traditional costumes to go to church. When we were at the village museum, an open air reconstitution of a traditional village, it was like going back into her childhood (she can't be more than fifty years old!): she had a true peasant upbringing in a two-room wooden house with the traditional high-sloping roofs. She says in her town some old people still live in the traditional homes (without electricity and with dirt floors). Ioana, a completely modern person who teaches in the one-room school house and has travelled quite a bit, still shears sheep for wool, makes the yarn by hand and weaves things. I'll be there this evening and can't wait to see all of this.

It's incredible how the peasant ways still are visible here--it's one of the last places in Europe where you can actually see people doing things normally reserved for museums in real life. We also visited the animal market on the outskirts of Sighet where peansants (in traditional jackets and hats for the men, and scarves for the women) bring their pigs, cows, horses and you name it to trade and sell. You'll see them bring their animals in either on run-down trucks or horse-drawn carts. Then they barter and talk business over a shot of the local alcohol (you can get it at the store, but anyone here will tell you that the best kind is homemade!!!). Then you can watch them load the animals onto their trucks and carts and head home. It's another world, far from Archer Daniels Midland, far from even small family farms. It's subsistence agriculture: you drive by homes with handfulls of sheep, chickens and pigs in the backyard. To see such authentic premodernity anyplace in Europe is absolutely amazing and I feel privileged to see this before everything changes with the younger generations.

On an unrelated topic, I'm also visiting the former home of Elie Wiesel (whose book Night recounts his deportation to the Nazi death camps) and a former Communist-era prison where political prisoners were starved to death. It's a little off the peasant "theme" but I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you about this. I also visited the Ethnographic museum where I was probably the only visitor for days to see the peasant artifacts. It was so cold you could see your breath, and the museum's attendant had to go upstairs ahead of me to turn on the lights. But I'm not complaining, because I'd be annoyed if I were in a swarm of tourists. I feel like I've had a rare privilege. I think a foreign visitor must have been equally rare since the museum's attendant asked if he could take a picture of me (which he said he'd send to me via e-mail). It's a strange request, but this is Romania.

Okay, I must go. The aging 386 computer in this internet cafe is going to take forever to upload this. I also wish I had more time to put this all in a little more cohesive form. Alas, you'll have to bear with me.

In anycase, literary critics might be able to say that the scatteredn nature of my prose only reflects the contraditctions and controlled chaos of modern Romania.

Dispatch from the Brasov Train Station

2005-02-22T19:08:00.000+01:00

As I just wrote a few hours ago, you expect lots of little surprises when you travel in Eastern Europe, or at least things that are just creepy. I thought this was a perfect slice of life moment (and the best part is there's a really bizarre 1970's lounge internet cafe hidden behind these huge doors).

So I had to come here at least an hour before my train in order to buy a ticket. I originally wanted to buy it in town as the people in the station advised me to do, but the CFR (Romanian railways) "office" was in the CFR building which was more like an office building (but it was where the lady at the train station this afternoon told me to go because you can only buy tickets at the train station about an hour in advance). I pressed the buzzer a number of times and nobody responded (on Tuesday at 3 PM).

Anyhow, thank goodness I bought first class (about fifteen euros) because contrary to what the horrendously complicated CFR (Romanian Train Company) website said, there are no sleeper cars from here to Maramures. The process for the woman to get me my ticket here at the station was hilarious and kind of typical of what you see here. She seemed annoyed I had even asked to buy a ticket because then she had to call someone (presumably Bucharest, where the train originated and where they have computers in the train station!) to then write in her big book marked "Sighetu Marametei" (the destination) the numbers of the seats that were available. Then she hand wrote me my ticket. I paid with my carte bleue, and we had to go to a different window where there was the lone credit card machine.

So with more than an hour to kill, I waited. The Brasov train station is a sad, sad sight. You see people with their belongings packed into grocery bags. There are all sorts of haggard-looking people hanging around, waiting for a train I doubt will ever come. The station is very institutional in a 1960's sort of way, with the layers of grime that have accumulated since then. Knowing I'll be sitting upright for the night, I decided to go get a beer at the bar (also an excellent opportunity to see something interesting). Indeed. Very interesting.

It's a fluorescent-lit room with white lawn tables and lawn chairs (or folding chairs, if you're lucky). There are some filthy curtains over the windows and fake plants that have been collecting dust for ten years. You just see a sea of ruddy looking men and women nursing their cigarettes and their beers (they're all room temperature). A couple were trying their luck on the slot machines in the corner. It was a really sad sight, and I recognized some girl in the bar from this morning (she shouted "hello, hello" to me when I first arrived in Brasov) but this time she was visibly drunk, and making kissy faces at me, trying to pick me up in Romanian.

I'm sure she hoped I'd be her ticket out of here. Thank goodness mine is for a train leaving in just a few minutes.

Day 5: Brasov, Romania

2005-02-22T16:06:00.000+01:00

I guess the best way to describe Brasov is that, well, it's easier on the eyes than Bucharest.

The orginal walled city was built by the Saxons, so it has a distinctively German look to it. It's very pretty (in the center, at least) and is comparatively well kept up. It has a big Gothic cathedral on the main square, and outside the walls (where the non-Germans had to live) you see an entirely different (and eqully charming) town. You'll just have to wait for me to put up the photos (I have to figure out how and where) because my architectural vocabulary is very limited.

Arriving at the Brasov train station, however, you'd have no idea a much better place awaited you. From the second I stepped off the train (sans hat, because, after all, it's well above freezing and whatever snow is left is melting) I was accosted by aggressive taxi drivers. Then there was the poor man from the "tourist bureau" whose presence I just ignored and with whom I was very short (I mean, if he really was from the hostel counter in the train station, they should know better than to send people to accost backpackers who are all quite aware of the fact that people who approach you in Eastern European train station--or the baggage claim at Kennedy, for that matter--are no good). I finally fought my way out to the bus stop and the ticket window to buy a ticket (yes a cab would cost me a euro, but why not take the bus for 25 cents like everyone else? It's not like I'm going to run into the dishonest Bulgarian controller again!) where another cab driver came up to me and tried to play "mr. nice guy" explaining the prices of the bus to me (that were clearly posted). I was so sick of this whole charade that I told him a "thank you" in that tone of voice where the person knows they're not appreciated. He walked away telling me to "suck his ass" (in English--my Romanian isn't nearly good enough to have understood that!).

I got ont the packed bus for three stops, only to realize that in my desire to get out of that hellhole, I had forgotten to drop off my huge backpack at the left luggage office!

Perhaps the moral of the story is that maybe I should be nicer to these poor people who are trying to make a living. But with the stories I have heard from people (Romanian and others...) about all the ways you can get scammed here (especially in train stations), I guess I have my defenses up super high. Back to the train station, there were some nice people. One crossed my path when I tried to cross a busy street on my way back to the train station and nearly got flattened (To be fair, pedestrian crossings here are almost never maked, half the time there isn't a pedestrian light, so I just try to run as fast as I can). This hunched-over Roma ("gypsy" is such an ugly word) woman put of her arm to stop me and then grabbed my green scarf with her bony hand and pointed to it and then to the crossing light on the far side of the itnersection (I was shocked she could see that far--I certainly didn't see it). I guess now half of the people at the train station think I'm a royal ass, and the other half think I never played "red light, green light."

Funnily enough, I wasn't nearly as alarmed by this old "gypsy" lady carrying dirty shopping bags full of heaven-knows-what, than I was by the men in cheap cologne and leather jackets offering me cheap rides into town. If you look at sites like "virtual tourist," where you get tips from people who live there, under the "Dangers and Annoyances" section "gypsies" feature prominently. It reflects the deep-seeded racisim toward that beleagured people. After reading enought of these warnings, I was convinced that I'd see be enveloped by a swarm beggar children who'd rifle through all my coat pockets snatching the clothes off my back. I mean, you have to keep your wits about you here (Then again, you have to do the same thing on the Paris Metro.), but I'm rethinking the wisdom of considering everyone a threat.

As for why on earth I'd be in Eastern Europe, especially in countries that are so off the beaten track (the question has been asked a number of times), I guess Ruxandra put her finger on it when she was criticizing Romania a few days ago while we were looking for an elusive bus stop. She said that she doesn't feel "safe" here in the same way that she feels safe in France or Germany where everything's well marked and where things don't change every other day. I mean, in Bucharest, sometimes it's hard to figure out where the busses stop, and the routes and schedules for the Maxi Taxis (private mini busses that do intra and inter-city transportation) are rarely if ever posted.

But I think it's that sense of the unexpected that makes visiting here a little adventurous. You never know what's going to happen. My favorite anecdote about visiting Slovakia is discovering that my hotel was a converted communist housing block. But much more in staid, stable Western Europe you run across things that are just the opposite. You may want an espresso and find a newly opened cafe "cafe" that's hidden in an alley and smells like lysol. Or you might see two dogs in their pre-mating ritual in downtown Sofia (I forgot to mention that one). Or you might see laundry hanging out the second-story window of the train station. Or you might, on the other hand, you might discover entire countries without the tourist masses and without tacky souvenir shops. You might find yourself (as I did earlier today) all alone in some incredibly picturesque settings like snow-covered monasteries. You might also make new friends and come back to visit them again and again.

I'm off for the next two days to Maramures--a region that travel guides like to describe as the "heart of Romania" where "peasant life" still continues (I've already seen horse-drawn carts from the train coming to Brasov). The Romanian lady in the cabin next to me on the train to Bucharest simply sighed and said "you're so lucky" when I told her I would be visiting some villages there with someone who lives there (another friend of Anca's). I've heard so much about thier legendary hospitality, so I have to agree with her, I think I'm quite lucky.

I'll write when I get to an internet cafe next.

Bucharest, Romania (Day 4)

2005-02-21T21:40:00.000+01:00

First I have to thank everyone for the effusive outpouring on the comments page. Sitting here in this basement internet cafe, paying a euro an hour, I can well afford to take my time to read them. There are a large number of internet cafes here, so access to the net really isn't a problem.

Finding a postcard, on the other hand, is. I had specific requests from several people for postcards and wanted to send them from Bulgaria or Romania (truly "off the beaten track" places). I guess that is a good thing about being in a country without a huge tourist economy: you don't have stores trying to pawn tacky Bucharest snow globes off on you. I am sort of lying, because I actually did see some postcards. It was at this shopping mall (they'd converted the old main department store into a really strange shopping center) and when I asked the lady how much they cost, she said "50,000" which is like a a euro fifty each! The images they used for the postcards were kind of limited (granted a postcard photographer here might have a tough time...): either the enormous Ceaucescu-era "House of the People" or the towering Hotel Intercontinental (from which western journalists watched Romanian tanks run over a thousand protestors during the 1989 uprising).

As for the House of the People, it's Bucharest's most famous landmark. I was first stunned by it when I saw that it was the world's second largest building. I said "that's where I want to go." It's enormous. And monstrous. Huge swaths of the city were buldozed to make this government seat and the accompanying "grand avenues" lined with monotonous apartment blocks that form kilometers-long walls. Ruxandra, my guide, lives in one of those. They're fairly recent (dating from the 1980s, when Ceaucescu embarked on his disfigurement of the city) and were supposed to be a sign of the grandeur of the city. Those huge avenues look like North Korea.

Behind these blocks, though, you can see what wasn't razed. I mean, you step off the main boulevard and through one of the ground-level passages in the continuous "wall" and you're in the old Bucharest that wasn't destroyed, but is simply decaying. I visited a monastery that was moved 600 meters from its old location (lots of other churches just got the wrecking ball) to a new one where it is locked in on two sides by "the wall." I walked around these poor neighborhoods, where more mud inexplicably covered the pavement, and where vacant lots became huge trash heaps, next to remarkable buildings that looked like a squatter's camp if they were occupied (plenty more seemed to be abandoned). I wish I had taken more photos, but I felt it was insulting to the poor souls walking around those parts to see a "rich" foreigner taking pictures of their misery.

From the front of the "wall," you feel like you're in some bizarre totalitarian universe. From the back, a poor third world country. But Ceaucescu's regime was all about appearances (everyone had to look happy, handlers specifically picked "good looking" children to be seen with him on television--the ones who were born "less than perfect" were taken away to slowly die of neglect in the infamous orphanages). I guess, he thought that his grand boulevards made Romania look like a modern country, when at the same time people had to run all over town to find toilet paper. At the Piata Unirii, one of the rare puncutations in this continuous line of imposing apartments, huge signs with corporate logos occupy every free inch of the rooftops of Ceaucescu's creations. I guess it's the perfect metaphor for Romania today.

The art exhibition was interesting today. It featured Romanian artists who had gone to Tours to paint. A councilwoman from that city spoke in painfully slow French, in the manner of the French head of state. This ceremonial behavior befitted the reverence with which people spoke of her presence: yesterday when I was invited to the opening by a friend of Ruxandra's, she proudly told me "French city councilmembers" would be there. The councilmember spoke of the "reservoir" of goodwill that Romanians had in France and of the impact of exhibition of these same paintings in Tours. I guess it looked good for the TV cameras (yes, news crews had come out for this "historic" event). But Ruxandra would have none of this. She saw through it all and was absolutely right. After all, she pointed out, nobody in Tours (or anywhere else in France) cares about some minor Romanian artists. I was particularly struck by the "reservoir" comment. More people in France are frightenend of Romania that have any special place in their heart for this beleagured country. Yes, there is a cultural bond between the two countries--Romania has been turned towards France in the past (and in many ways, still is--you'll see touches of French influence, including the surprising number of people who speak French) but with a few notable exceptions (Brancusi, Ionesco) it has rarely been a recpirocal affair. In fact today if you ask French people about what they associate with Romania they'll rattle off a host of unflattering things (Romanian pickpocket children on Line 1 of the Paris Metro, Romanian women who get conned into doing sex work around the Periph, French call centers and technical jobs that are exported there, etc.) before they'll mention the two countries' "rich cultural bond." And even today, young people in Romania are more likely to wear a Yankees hat than a Paris-St. Germain jersey. (Some conservative commentators say Western Europe lost influence in Donald Rumsfeld's "New Europe" because of its policy of "appeasement" towards the communist regimes. That explanation is too simple: they fail to note the astonishing fact that Romania in 1975 was given favored-nation trading status by the US!)

Talking to Ruxandra over a delicious dinner in an eerily empty restaurant tonight was a window into a life I couldn't even begin to imagine. She had recently been allowed to see her "securitate" file. It was replate with photocopies of the mail she had received from friends in "the west," reports from co-workers and friends about her activities and her connections "to the outside," and internal memos explaining that her requests for a passport had to be denied because she was a flight risk. But her own memories about the time are quite mixed. She says it was paradoxically a good time for intellectuals: word spread like wildfire about good books that had been published(ones that had passed government censors) leading to lines at the bookstores, friends would get together to talk about books. Now, she says, it's just too easy for everyone to turn on the television and most people are too preoccupied trying to make money.

I guess I'm getting so into all of this I'm becoming Romanian myself. I bought Romanian shoes today because the boots I had bought (having been warned of the mountains of snow covering everything--snow that had since melted by the time I got here) were hurting my shins and ankles so badly I was limping. The shoes are really cheaply-made, but I wasn't going to shell out 2,000,000 lei (roughly 60 euros) for a comparable pair to those I could get in France (for about the same price) since I have plenty of shoes and just need some to get me through these next few days. They're not too bad, though. I also got stopped today on my way out of the monastery I told you about by a woman who started speaking to me in Romanian (she wanted to know if there were any stray dogs hanging around in the courtyard because, she said, they scare her. Heaven knows she must be in permanent fear when she walks down the streets!). Finally, I felt truly Romanian when in the shopping mall today buying my shoes and I actually recognized a Romanian pop hit I had heard twice yesterday and sang along.

I walked all the way home humming that song wearing my newly bought shoes, stopping to buy a candy bar just so I could say "multumesc." I think this country is growing on me.

Day 3: Bucharest, Romania

2005-02-20T20:00:00.000+01:00

So I arrived in Bucharest this morning after a surprisingly comfortable overnight train ride. I was alone in my really retro Cold War-era Bulgarian sleeping car. The car itself was something: everything was written in German, Russian and Bulgarian, the wannabe oriental carpeting, (unattached to the floor beneath so that it bunched up against the wall) was worn through and looked as if it hadn't been cleaned since the fall of the wall. To top off this nostalgia for eras past, my train's final destination was, you guessed it, Moscow (suddenly my fur hat didn't seem so unusual). I was just happy to get to train station last night. Navigating the train station would be easy, I thought, since the signs were all in Bulgarian and French...but alas, their weird system of roman numerals and regular numbers was almost too complex for me.

But the biggest test was getting there. I was on the tram, pleased with my visit to Bulgaria. All of a sudden, five people suddenly pulled out controller vests from their handbags and started checking tickets (I guess they use the element of surprise). I had punched my tickets (one for my bag, one for me) and I handed mine over to the controller. She looked at it and punched it again. I thought she was being nice because I had punched it on the wrong side. Then some fellow passengers started yelling at her in Bulgarian. Pointing at me and shaking their head at the controller. That's when she and the other controllers forced me off the tram, at which point they continued to yell at me in Bulgarian while waving my tickets at me. Finally some lady on the sidewalk who spoke English came over and offered to help. It turned out that the controller was accusing me of punching my ticket twice. She was the one who punched the ticket the second time--obviously the Bulgarians on board the tramway were aware of this scam and tried to stick up for me. Basically, I was forced to pay a five leva fine--a whopping 2.50 euros. Whatever, that was probably as much as that stupid controller with the moustached and badly dyed hair would make in day so I just laughed at her as I paid the fine (I didn't want to give them the pleasure of thinking they'd inconvenienced me).

But corruption seems to be the norm here. I can't imagine how either of these countries made the EU criteria for 2007 (well okay, Romania's application is on shaky ground). I just had dinner at a Romanian apartment (I know I jumped ahead of the chronology here) where a woman who just had a baby told me about how she had to stash cash under the pillow to had to the nurses when she was in the hospital after having her baby so that she wouldn't be neglected. She said payments to doctors were optional, but if you didn't pay, you never knew what might happen. I don't know what's worse: not having health insurance in the US, or having free health care in Romania but not being sure of whether or not you'll get decent care if you don't pony up cold, hard cash (preferably in US dollars or in Euros).

So now onto why I was talking with Romanian people. Anca Bratu, the wonderful woman who, with her extremely kind husband Charles, accompanied us to Belgium in October, met with me and gave me all sorts of contacts for every city I'm visiting in Romania (she used to live here, and without going into the personal details of her life here, left in the 80s). Her friend Ruxandra, a curator at the National Art Museum, met me this morning and took me walking all over the city, taking me inside museums, showing me favorite places for strolls, exporing all sorts of random corners. I saw lots of Romanian art (the cultural links with France are remarkable) and got ready for my visit to rural Maramures with a visit to the Romanian Peasant Museum. She then took me to her home for dinner with her daughter and son-in-law and their four-month-old daughter. They gave me all sorts of wonderful insights into life in Romania (the bribes; the fact that people love TV now because before the televisions were black and white and only about an hour of programming was scheduled each day; how the transfer to a capitalist economy has changed everyone's social habits) and showed me the legendary Romanian hospitality.

As for Bucharest, it's a city of contrasts. On the walk from the train station to the center of the city, I got to see a number of packs of stray dogs--even had one chase me. (I was told later that the problem is a lot less bad than it was a few years ago, before Bucharest's mayor rounded them up and put them to sleep. Brigitte Bardot and animal rights activists threw a fit, but the mayor, Ruxandra tells me, asked them how many dogs they wanted to take to have run around their cities...) You see really beautiful 19th century homes that are falling apart, and communist apartment towers that are equally decrepit. The ministry of economic development has some stray dogs camped out on the crumbling front steps. There's mud everywhere. Then you walk down long, wide avenues surrounded on each side by parks or houses that aren't quite big enough to match the scale of the huge avenues. Then there are these enormous traffic circles--one with a replica of the Arc de Triomphe. Bucharest residents tell me it's like Paris, and I can see what they mean, but Bucharest's buildings are on a much smaller, often single-family home, scale--not quite matching the grand scale of the avenues. The wealthiest neighborhoods are a beautiful collection of 19th and 20th century single family homes of various architectural influences. Others are dilapidated, but have so much promise that I can see that they'll be snapped up once Western European investors aren't too afraid of investing here. The neighborhoods that survived Ceaucescu's horrendous 1980's-era bulldozing blitz are truly an open-air architectural classroom, showing off so many different styles.

Lots of grand old mansions owned by wealthy families (and then confiscated by the Communists) serve new purposes. Some are museums (there are a number of surprisingly good ones). Others are casinos (There are so many here you'd think you were in Las Vegas). My guide explains that lots of them are probably just used for money laundering. But she got the staff at one to give us a tour (saying you're showing an American around Bucharest opens up lots of doors). It was this stupendous late 19th-century neo-classical home, magnificently restored and furnished with slot machines and craps tables. It was so gaudy: the women ran around in skirts that barely covered their asses, serving shrimp cocktail to nouveau riche Romanian men whose wealth (like every fortune in a Balzac novel) is likely less-than-legal (at best). This, and the aggressive corporate logos that are on every building (a Mc Donalds ad is draped across the side of the new university library)is the face of capitalism to Romanians, most of whom have little other than color TVs to show for their alleged transition to a market economy (that is in many ways no less corrupt and unfair than before). No wonder there's such ambivalence to the current state of affairs by many who lived through the brutal Ceaucescu regime.

I have so much to say, and I'm afraid these blogs entries are becoming monotonous and uninteresting. So if you like them, send me a comment. That way I'll know to continue. :)

Tomorrow, I'm headed for another day of exploring Bucharest (sans guide). In the evening, though, I've been invited to a vernissage, an art gallery opening, that I'll be attending with some French city council members.

Sofia (COФИЯ), Bulgaria, Day 2

2005-02-19T16:17:00.000+01:00

If I hear another American oldies classic or 80s dance hit, I'm going to become homicidal. American music is everywhere. EVERYWHERE. While eating lunch today, I couldn't help but sing along to the blaring recordings of "Oh Donna" (was it Richie Vallens?), "What a Wonderful World" (Louis Armstrong), "Can't Stop Loving You" (Ray Charles), and more Donna Summer hits than I care to remember. Does the music here have to be so loud?

My lunch was, itself, quite funny. I was all alone in this restaurant that's near a lot of the embassies. I went to "33 Chairs" because they had a menu in English. I hate to be like that, but when you're faced with a menu written entirely in cyrillic (злбюйъл фзьишгеифаи is just me typing gibberish on a Bulgarian keyboard, but you get the picture) you don't even have a sense of what are drinks and what are actual food. It was a nice lunch, if really expensive for here (16 leva, or 8 euros--the 2-to-1 fixed exchange rate makes life here for european travellers, I'm paying out of my French bank account so I'm technically one of them).

The restaurant was a trip. It was trying to be elegant (because, afterall it was near a bunch of embassies), with fancy schmanzy tablecloths, waiters in tuxedos, a wine list, and a menu bound in a big leather book that had the restaurant's country-club-like logo on an embossed metal plaque. But at the same time those American hits I told you about were blaring over the restaurant's sound system. When I arrived and was seated for ten minutes, I was told in very broken English by the owner that the waiter was in the bathroom. Then the he continued (thinking I hadn't understood) "twa-let, twa-let" with a slight squatting motion. There were paper napkins in spite of cloth everything else (which turned out to be a good thing because while trying to get the meat off my skewers, the entire plate jerked, throwing food everywhere. I just wrapped the food that had fallen on the floor in paper napkins, and because I was so embarassed, I hid them in my bag and thew them away outside). Then there was a flat-screen television placed in the corner with closed captioned Mexican soap operas--I kid you not, they were all produced by TV Azteca! It gave me an excellent opportunity to consider the ramifications of social inequality in Mexico (they were showing these skinny Mexican women of european descent doing some Shakira-meets-the-Mickey Mouse Club dance while some overweight indigenous-looking girl aggressively threw flowers at them) while eating delicious Bulgarian food.

It was a far cry from last night where I was so tired and frustrated with not understanding what was going on that I ended up at, I'm so embarassed to say, KFC. I could at least understand the menu, and the cashier ended up speaking excellent English. I guess I had a dour look on my face (I mean, I was really pissed at myself) because the cashier in excellent English made this really sweet face and said "I'm so sorry you're waiting, I promise your sandwich will be here really quickly." She must think Americans are really impatient. I had to explain to her that I wasn't upset about waiting thirty seconds for my sandwich. It was a more local experience than I had expected considering it was all Bulgarian families in there. Clearly everybody was there to get some American-style food (how depressing) and there was even a picture of Lower Manhattan on the wall (which they doctered by chopping off the tops of the World Trade Center towers to make them blend in with the skyline--but people who have seen the New York skyline enough weren't fooled).

I then hit an underground rock club, and bought impossibly cheap beer. It was kind of interesting. I went to my weird hostel (which I don't have the time to explain here) and slept well.

Today I saw a slightly less affluent section of town where I saw the open-air market. It was where the non bourgeois Sofians go to get their groceries. Everything was sold there, from dry goods to vegetables to fish to meat, to counterfeit jeans (I wondered why so many Bulgarians on my plane had such unflattering-looking Diesel jeans) to ceramic pots (which I was really tempted to buy because they were beautiful and cheap--but I'd have to schlep them around for the next eight days and then take them back to the US in August) to bras, brooms, used-looking plumbing supplies, broken-down Chinese knock-off radios, etc. etc. It was quite a sight. The dry goods and meats and dairy products were sold (like so many other things here) through a window. Where as Japan is a vending-machine economy, such automization would put people out of work. Here, you'll see little windows crammed with goods (some specialize in beauty products, others in basic groceries like pasta and boullion cubes, others in candy, others in liquor and cigarettes, etc. etc.) and you make your entire transaction through a window about eight inches square. It's like buying your groceries from a bank teller.

Today brought me to far less affluent areas of Sofia (the bourgeois neighborhood my hostel is in would be drab by Western European standards) which were really depressing. There's lots of feral dogs, lots of buildings that are falling apart. Lots of mud-covered Ladas. All of it in that sooty-brown or other related muted tones that define this city. I wish I could show you the photos now.

Alas, I'm off to Bucharest in two hours (I bought a first class sleeper because I've heard such horror stories about the second class couchettes from thieving beggar children to bed bugs. The lady at the hysterically bureaucratic ticket office about fell off her chair when I accepted to buy the ticket after she told me it was 70 leva--35 euros.). It's a city that, from what I've been told, is depressing in both a "North Korean grand avenues" kind of way and the regular "falling apart like Sofia" way.

I can't wait.

Sofia, Bulgaria: Day 1

2005-02-18T17:25:00.000+01:00

So when you land here and you walk down the stairs from your airplane (there are no jetways at the tiny airport whatsoever) you discover "Sofia" written in cyrillic on the roof of the airport. Then when you get inside to go through passport control, there are prominently displayed signs reminding passengers that there are to be no cash exchanges at the checkpoint (if you get their drift).

Welcome to the capital of Bulgaria where the limited color pallete runs from the bright yellow paving stones of a number of the main streets (literally, a yellow brick road) to the golden domes of the famous Alexander Nevesti cathedral, to the muddy browns of everything from the abandoned mines to soot-covered factories you see on final approach, to the indistiguishable neutral tones of decaying apartment blocks. The highlights are the yellow cabs, many still are the old Soviet-era Ladas, which, too, are invariably covered with some sort of soot and mud mixture.

You run across lots of strange things here, things that are just jarring. On the walk to the cathedral, lots of men with missing teeth have this Soviet-era nostalgia fleamarket that runs right up next to the gold-painted Orthodox relgious icons. I bought one of those fur hats that you think of when you say Russia. It set me back ten euros (which was more than half of my daily budget--remember, this is a poor country and things here are really cheap: The cab from the airport was four euros, I can get a full restaurant dinner for about the same).

I have to say that I look good with a big mass of fur covering my head (I forgot to bring hair gel, so it's a good thing!). The man said it was "nutria," which is like a giant rat that runs around the Louisiana bayou. They appartently have them in Southeastern Europe, too. (you learn something every day). They had lots of old soviet memorobilia--I'm going to buy an old street sign, I think. They also, jarringly, had lots of old Nazi stuff too. Remember that Bulgaria was actually an ally of Hitler's. Whether or not any of this stuff is actually real is another matter.

Then there were the paintings. I wanted so desperately to take a picture, but it was too embarassing because I was the only person there and the vendors probably would have been pissed. So they have the wooden Jesus icons up the ying yang because, well, we're right next to Bulgaria's main tourist attraction, a cathedral (google it online to see what it looks like, I can't post my photos until I'm back in France). Then it takes a turn for the bizarre. You have poor imitations of Picasso paintings next to glossy paintings of topless minotaur women in overtly lesbian positions to painted versions of photos of famous celebrities. As for the stars, there were two: Bruce Willis and Jon Benet Ramsey! Next to the latter's portrait was the artist's muse (or rather the image that he/she basically just copied): that iconic photo of Jon Benet that made so many magazine covers at the time, and made us all feel just a little bit dirty.

I was so close to buying the painting of the latter because, well, it just doesn't get any more bizarre than that: I'm visitign a Donald Rumsfeld "New Europe" ally where an icon of American depravity hangs across a narrow path from hundreds of painted Jesus' reaching out their arms.

Other funny things, when coming in from the airport on my four euro cab ride (I paid more than that just to take public transit to the airport in Paris this morning!) I got very excited because I was able to decipher not only the temperature for tomorrow but that they were then doing a lengthy news item about Bill Cosby (I'm assuming it has to do with sexual assault--I'll be looking for his portrait). But oh geeze, reading anything here is just really difficult. I mean, you see и and you think "N" but you should be thinking "I". Then you have to try to train yourself to see letters like "Щ" оr "г" оr "ф" or "ъ" or "д" and know sound is associated with that letter. Thank goodness I'm leaving tomorrow for Bucharest where, mercifully, the local language is a Romance one and written (at least since the 19th Century) with our regular roman alphabet.

But despite the language barrier, I love this place.

Valentine's Day...for the 7-to-11-year-old set

2005-02-14T23:39:00.000+01:00

A magazine for those aged 7-11 (it's not that I'm low functioning, it's that I babysit) published a collection of letters to the editor and requests for love advice in its V-Day issue.

This particular letter cracked me up:

Cher Astrapi,
Je suis amoureux! Aujourd'hui j'avais rendez-vous avec mon amoureuse, mais j'ai dû annuler. Heureusement, hier soir, j'avais préparé une jolie rose pour elle, et quand je lui ai donné, elle m'a presque fait un bisou sur la joue... Elle s'est retenue, mais elle m'a mis la main autour de l'épaule!
Pierre-Adrien, 9 ans

Dear Astrapi (the name of the magazine),
I'm in love! Today I had a date with my love, but I had to cancel. Fortunately, last night, I had prepared a pretty rose for her, and when I gave it to her, she almost kissed me on the cheek... She restrained herself, but she put her arm around my shoulder!
Pierre-Adrien, 9 ans

Absolutely adorable. May the excitement of your Valentine's Day be just as pure.

A note from the editor...

2005-02-13T23:05:00.000+01:00

...that is to say, me.

Please accept my apologies for the obvious and embarassing typographical errors which surfaced over the course of this blog (mistakes which have been rectified as soon as I've seen them). My claims to speak English fluently are hindered by accidents such as "it's" instead of "its" or subjet-verb disagreements so violent it's like the noun and verb have declared war on one another.

If anyone wants to replace me as editor of this site, I'm accepting resumés as we speak. It's really hard to catch some of your own mistakes (especially because my eyes glaze over after looking at the comptuer screen long enough). I need someone with an eagle-eye for cut-and-paste train wrecks and various spelling and grammatical screw-ups.

The pay sucks (but if you want, I can call it an internship and we can try to get you academic credit). The hours also suck: you're basically at my beck and call and I write most of my articles in the wee small hours of the morning (Paris time, which in New York or Los Angeles can be quite a normal hour).

Any takers?

A quick update from the Follivores...

2005-02-13T04:16:00.000+01:00

Remember what I told you a few entries back about the Dallas theme song experiment?

Well, tonight the DJ at Follvores proved my point. From the first measure, you could hear the "wooo" as everyone recognized the song. Then they all started singing along as they danced. Yes, to the Dallas theme song.

It's one of a precious few TV theme songs I've ever heard there. Usually there's the one from Capitaine Flam (which just happens to be the ringer on my cell phone). It's kind of popular with the gays since, well, in the TV cartoon he's quite the looker and the theme song goes "pour sauver tous les hommes..." Just a little ambiguous. The other TV theme song that's commonly heard is the one from Maguy, France's only hit sitcom that was (fun fact) based on the US series Maude. It doesn't take much to understand that gay icons in France (and probably anywhere else in the west) are either women with tragic ends or strong women who emasculate their husbands (the singer Dalida being the former, Maguy being the latter).

As for why Dallas would be chosen to be played? Obviously J.R. isn't exactly a gay icon. It just shows the gravity of the show as a cultural reference.

See, I told you so.

If you too would like to do your own Follivores night...I'll be more than happy to give you some tips on music to download (I'll take no responsibility for whether or not you pay for your them...)

Fast times for lycéens...

2005-02-12T01:31:00.000+01:00

Graffiti on the exterior of the Ecole des Mines on the Boulevard St. Michel, left over from a student protest. "Fillon" referrs to François Fillon, the current Education Minister.

Let me summarize the main points of this article right off the bat:

French youth have this week gone from hurling eggs and flour at one another to derailing a much-trumpted reform plan
I discovered that I have much more in common with the Raffarin government than I thought.

You might think that this entry is going to be like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, but just enjoy it: you'll see how it all comes together.

Reid Hall, Columbia's lovely little complex in the Montparnasse district, is where I take a couple of my classes. After leaving one class on Tuesday morning, I was shocked by the inordinate number of broken eggs on the street. I mean, you see a lot of things on the street here: urine, used condoms, dog and other less-identifiable kinds of droppings. But when you count half a dozen eggs on the sidewalk, you kind of start to wonder what's going on.

Reid Hall is also surrounded by lycées and collèges (kind of like an expanded junior high). Last Tuesday was Mardi Gras.

I had never heard of the tradition of students throwing eggs and flour at each other the day before Ash Wednesday.

So needless to say, the normally quiet, upmarket rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in the 6th became a war zone when the kids came out of school. Eggs flew like missiles. The entire pavement was white with flour. Kids, wearing their sticky mess as battle scars, were running into the local supermarkets coming out with armfulls of "ammunition." I wanted to get my brand- new camera out to share the moment with you all. So I stopped in front of a café that seemed to be on the fringe of the street battle in order to rummage through my bag.

Puis j'en ai pris deux dans la gueule.

That means I, an innocent bystander, got hit. I was kind of pissed: I had just dry cleaned that coat. To make a long story short, I had to take refuge in a bakery, feeling like an old curmudgeon as I grumbled indignantly about those damned egg-throwing kids being France's future.

Fast forward to Thursday. Leaving Reid Hall to go to the bank on the Boulevard Montparnasse, I ran into more high school kids in the streets. They were protesting the proposed changes (if I used the word "reform" that would imply that the changes were for the better) to the "Bac," France's famously rigorous high school exit exam. In short, the high school students felt the reform plan would lead to a watering down of the curriculum and would aggravate the differences between well-reputed lycées and those in more difficult neighborhoods.

Well this time it was the government's turn to get egg on their face. (now you're seeing how it's coming together)

The Prime Minister announced on the radio this morning that the plan would be put on hold. Sources at Matignon and the Education Ministry made it clear to the press througout the day that the "reforms" were dead.

Everytime since the 1980s that conservative governments have tried to change the Bac or other educational institutions, they get students in the street. In fact, this is Fillon's second time backing down because of the wrath of the streets: he faced similar protests when he offered a reform plan for the country's universities in the 1990s. If you ever hear that France has a revolutionary political tradition, well, this is the proof.

If it's Mardi Gras, or if you dare touch the country's educational institutions, watch out for flying eggs.

Almost New York...

2005-02-12T01:09:00.000+01:00

I just happened to be walking by the rue des Archives in the 4th, and heard the sound of firecrackers. It was some completely random, unofficial Chinese New Year celebration. It was kind of puzzled about why there would be such a parade there. It's a street lined with gay bars just a hop skip and a jump from Orthodox men in black hats and Kosher eateries. Chinese New Year with the gays and the Jews. Enjoy the other photos.

2005-02-12T01:08:00.001+01:00

2005-02-12T01:08:00.000+01:00

You can run but you can't hide...

2005-02-11T23:59:00.000+01:00

Like its beloved Astérix, the fictional comic book caracter who is the last Gaulois to hold out against the Roman conquerors, France was the last major market in Europe to hold out against the assault of green-aproned Baristas wielding Caramel Macchiatos. Historians will trace latest Fall of France to the opening of Starbucks on the Avenue de l'Opéra last year.

I was disappointed. But I don't go over there much, so I wasn't heartbroken. Then they opened near Columbia University's Reid Hall on the Boulevard Montparnasse. I just said I would avoid walking down that block. They opened one near the movie theater in the dungeon-like shopping mall at Les Halles (pron. lay-all, not lay-zall, as many are tempted to do). I just stopped going to see movies there.

They got me finally when they opened their newest one (pictured above) next to the Centre Pompidou (that big building in the background) in late December. It must have been some sort of twisted Christmas present. Now to walk to the Marais from the Châtelet-Les Halles metro station, I'm forced to walk the McDonalds-KFC-Starbucks gauntlet. I get to watch Americas in their tourist best talk loudly as they walk out of the Starbucks with their Chai Lattés.

At least French people have the sense not to order their coffees to go.

France and the TV Time Warp

2005-02-08T06:15:00.000+01:00

Seen in the Paris metro today: an advertisement for a play clearly in the same tradition as Corneille and Molière.

Mildly retarded detective Columbo, long banished to rerun purgatory on obscure UHF and cable stations in the United States, is still on the tube in France. And people like him, still. I've even listened to a show on public radio dissecting the character and the dramatic structure of the show. I thought I was hallucinating.

Another example of the "TV Time Warp": go to the US and ask anyone the Dallas theme song. Chances are it'll take people a while to come up with the tune, let alone the words. Try that experiment here, where you can still catch episodes on TF1. Within no time, you and your French friends will be singing along: "Dah-lahs ! ton univers impitoyable. Dah-lahs ! glorifie la loi du plus fort!..."

I actually did this experiment with French friends visiting New York. In a bar. People looked at us like we were crazy.

Strangely enough, it was one of those times when I felt totally French.

"...furnished with nothing but a mattress."

2005-02-08T05:52:00.000+01:00

The thing I like about reporting is that you can do a lot of things you might not do every day. I've chased the then-beleagured-Governor Gray Davis down an alley way. I've gone to a bathhouse.

Never in my life did I think that I'd actually end up getting an award for the latter.

Apparently the jury of the AP Television and Radio awards (for California and Nevada) had other ideas: they awarded the 2005 award for "Best Serious Feature" to the story I did for KPCC about LA County's proposed regulations for bathhouses (click on the link and you'll hear the story in Real Player).

Just think: one day last July, Los Angelenos woke up, took showers, drove to work or went about whatever their morning routine is while listening to me say things like "condoms and lubricant," "men walking around eyeing each other with towels around their waists," "Owner Peter Sykes says he rents out eighty-six rooms furnished with nothing but a mattress," and my absolute favorite, "A few men leave their doors open as they lounge naked...inviting passersby to pay them a visit."

The power to invade people's morning routines with such homoerotic imagery is truly reward enough.

Taking stock...

2005-02-06T02:03:00.000+01:00

I think this is a good time for a bilan of my stay in France: a fairly uncomprehensive and totally subjective tally of the various things I've done and learned here on my second time around.

1) I had my first pineapple and Canadian bacon pizza. That kind of pizza makes me think of King of the Hill ("Let's get home before the pineapple gets hot and the pepperoni gets cold"). I thought I'd eat a lot of things in France, but not something I could more easily picture myself consuming at a barbecue from hell in some godforesaken "Red State." It was disheartening to see how many Pizza Hut restaurants there are in France (and elsewhere in Europe--even in Slovakia, the country I typically evoke to bring to mind images of backwardsness). It was even more disheartening to discover that I knew French people who ate there.

2) I've had to relearn to count. I've long gotten over traditional difficulties for English speakers (pronunciation of nasal vowels, the subjunctive) but one of the last things that was a pain in the ass was numbers in the 70s or 90s. That's because in France, to say seventy, you actually say sixty-ten. Eighty is "quatre-vingts" (four-twenties) and ninety is "quatre-vingt-dix" (four-twenty-ten). Yes, this is the world's fifth largest economy and they actually count like that. But the worst part is that France used to use the very convenient "septante" for seventy and "nonante" for ninety (which makes for normal, easy counting). Then for some bizarre reason around the 14th century they began to switch to sixty-ten and four-twenty-ten respectively. Alas, you have a respite from the madness if you go to places like Belgium or Switzerland where they use septante and nonante. (Belgium in particular is made fun of by many French as if it were some parasitic, retarded half-brother. But I have to say that the Belgians have it over their much more populous neighbor when it comes to counting). The even better part is that in Switzerland instead of "quatre-vingts," they'll use an even more logical formula: "huitante" (contrary to popular belief from outside Switzerland, "octante" is long dead. See this excellent linguistic webpage--in French--for even more details about counting in Francophone countries). The point of all of this is that when people used to give me phone numbers and they'd say 75 ("sixty-fifteen" in France) my thumb would automatically be on the 6...and then I'd get flustered and have to do the math for a second. I'm proud to say that I'm more or less over that nightmare and I have no problems taking down such annoying telephone numbers.

3) I have learned the lyrics to songs I would otherwise be ashamed to know. French pop music has grown on me--even the worst of it ("Allô ? allô ? Monsieur l'ordinateur. Dites-moi, dites-moi, où est passé mon coeur ? "). But then again, it's made me feel very much at home when the radio comes on and I can sing along (remember that radio stations here have quotas for the amount of French and European music they have to play). It's also opened the doors to me enjoying (and this is a truly embarassing admission) Star Academy--which is kind of like American Idol. Star Ac, though, is an extremely profitable enterprise for the French music industry because the contestants all sing rehashes of fairly well known French hits. I even got so excited that I paid 75 cents to send at text message to vote for my favorite contestant. Yes, I became one of those people.

2005-02-04T17:49:00.000+01:00

A beautiful day in the neighborhood. The windmill at the top of the hill is the famous Moulin de la Galette (as featured in the Renoir painting of the same name)

Well, I mean, there are nine others...

2005-02-01T14:24:00.000+01:00

Yahoo! News - First Amendment No Big Deal, Students Say

This is one of those stories that should speak for itself. This is also a story that has nothing to do with France, but considering the reprocussions for everyone, and considering the type of country the US would become without the First Amendment, But I'm going to add my two cents.

For readers who aren't American, you can be forgiven for not understanding my title or what the First Amendment is. It's one of the first ten constitutional amendments collectively referred to as "The Bill of Rights." The first guarantees freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom of speech. Essentially the First Amendment is the safeguard against the country looking like, oh I don't know, Tienanmen Square in 1989.

"Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes "too far" in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories."

Good luck America.

France's EU Debate: A primer and a warning

2005-02-01T03:54:00.000+01:00

Another note from the European politics department.

As the Le Monde article L'Europe sème la confusion dans toutes les familles politiques today tells us all, the seperate questions of the referendum on the EU Constitution and Turkey's potential membership in the group are making strange bedfellows in French political circles. You have people who are opposed to both, those who are for both and those who are opposed to one but not the other. In the most interesting way I can, let me recount for you these four groups (Le Monde published quite the graphic showing these various combinations, except for a major typo that labeled Mr. "I'm fighting for middle class values" François Bayrou as a member of the UMP party, rather than the centrist-rightish, and generally indecisive and middling UDF party--of which he is the head.).

The easiest people to categorize are the people who are against both the adhésion of Turkey and the EU Constitution: they're crazy. First we have Laurent Fabius, who spearheaded the movement within the Socialist party to oppose Constitution--he lost that bid when a majority of party members said they would support it. Fabius was PM in the mid 1980s and delivered the famously haughty line "You're speaking to the Prime Minister of France" to Jacques Chirac during a televised debate. He's desperate to find his moment in the sun once again and it appears that he thinks playing to the most reactionary, nationalistic sentiments is his path to glory. He's joined by Mr. Nationalistic Glory himself Mr. Philippe De Villiers whose bizarre posters that his political formation has put up seem to place him just a few centimeters down the political spectrum from a man who needs no introduction, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The only really cohesive group is the no to the Constitution, yes to Turkey cabal. This unique niche is pretty much all extreme-left leaders who want Turkey to share in the wealth, but think that the EU Constitution is a liberal one (liberal in economic terms, which for my American readers actually means things like privatizing social security and unfettered free trade). They think more social protections should be added to the EU constitution. (Fabius has also tried to jump on this "The Constitution is too liberal" bandwagon as well, thus trying to making his disdainful self into a man of the true Left. He's betrayed however by the fact he's simultaneously throwing a xenophobic fit over some Turkish invasion.)

Then we have the no to Turkey, yes to the Constitution group. They're kind of all over the place, but one name non-French readers here will probably recognize is Nicolas Sarkozy (somebody about whom I could write pages and pages on). They seem terrified that the Turks, unbeatable during the Crusades, will mount some sort of jihad and hijack Europe. But they like the Constitution--because they think it fits their respective political agendas be they right or left.

The yes to both group has only one man on the right, that being Jacques Chirac. Most of the Socialists are also in this camp. They think that Turkey deserves its place at the European table, and that the Constitution is just dandy.

And now let me fill you in on the (even more) peculiar things about this debate:

First, France seems to be the only major country on the continent where these two, unrelated debates (Turkey and the Constitution) have merged. It's largely because of the tension within the UMP over Jacques Chirac's lonely stand about Turkey, a position that's made even more tenuous with UMP president Sarkozy's defiant stands to the contrary. This is aided by the fact that the ever loopy, former aristo French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (who has fashioned himself as the granddaddy of the EU Constitution--he headed the committe to draft it, and as some sort of French literary hero by cajoling the members of the Académie Française into inducting him sous la coupole, in spite of the mediocrity of his writing) tried to, in 2003, get language about Europe springing forth from Christian roots into the EU constitution in a move to head off Turkish membership. First of all, the Turkish cultural roots of countries like Hungary or Bulgaria were never disqualifiers for their EU membership negociations. Furthermore, the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, when he drafted the constitution after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, virtually copied the French vision of laïcité (secularism--although this common translation doesn't actually evoke the true meaning). Turkey and France are both exceptional in this regard, being the only two countries in Europe (or, Europe and Asia--depending on your political conception of the geography) that have this particularity. Nevertheless, certain nightmare visions of Turkey (they're Muslim extremists, they're too poor and will cost too much when they join, they violate human rights all the time) and a lack of political unity on the EU Constitution have made fertile ground for demagogic opponents to say that a vote against the Constitution will stave off the Turkish invasion.

The other strange thing about the debate over the Constitution is that nobody's read it. Granted, my own anecdotal evidence seems to show most Europeans don't understand the EU in its current form. But in European countries where a referendum vote is required for ratification (France's referendum date isn't decided yet, but Chirac promised it would be "before the summer"), a recent poll showed only ten percent of citizens felt that they actually had a good understanding of the document. It's very lengthy and not terribly interesting reading (I haven't even read it yet--I bought it, but believe me, there's much more interesting reading material that only facilitates my procrastination). I understand the arguments against (it'll reduce national sovereignty, it'll weaken social protections) and the arguments for (it's the final step in the "great European project," it will guarantee certain social protections, it is the framework for a workable Europe that's too unwieldly). I'm sympathetic to both sides and honestly know that, deep down, I have to read this damn thing. And I'm not even allowed to vote.

Maybe it's displaced anxiety that makes me get so worked up over this issue.

When I think of people voting for things they can't even begin to comprehend, instead relying on political slogans to inform their choice, I get nervous. I have flashbacks and think of the idiot circus known as the California Recall. Republican petition gatherers got Golden State residents hysterical over the pathetic Gray Davis and the state's woes that weren't really his fault. Alas, if voters understood the basic mechanics of state government they'd have by extension understood that the budget was never on time largely because they'd voted to require a super-majority vote for tax hikes. They'd also have understood that Prop. 13 was draining the public coffers of what is, in terms of the size of its economy, a very wealthy state (it's economy is about on par with that of France, but it has half the number of people!). But they voted for Arnold Schwarzenneger because they thought he'd do what even Ronald Reagan couldn't do when he was governor: stave off a tax hike in spite of a massive budget hole. So yes, the governor (shudder) has kept this promise (although he's certainly broken many others--like taking money from special interests). And how has he done it? By issuing lots of bonds (he makes Reagan look like a paragon of fiscal stability!). So now the state is getting deeper and deeper into debt, the budget problems haven't been solved at all and public services are in for a date with the ax murderer.

In short, Californians keep digging themselves into a hole, proving how dangerous democracy can be when in the hands of people who don't understand the very system they think they're going to change.

I thought Europeans were smarter than that.

"Sex movie mix-up shocks couple"

2005-01-30T01:47:00.000+01:00

This BBC News item raises a few questions. In short a "devout Baptist" couple in England bought The Pajama Game DVD at a supermarket only to find that the CD was some Italian porn flick.

The best part is how the wife says that when they just saw breasts flopping around and everyone speaking in Italian, they knew it wasn't a Doris Day film.

Alas, in spite of their revolt, they apparently apparently so found the movie so riveting that they couldn't take their eyes off it:

"It was a pretty raunchy, explicit film, it certainly pulled no punches," Mr Leigh-Browne said.

"My wife and I were very shocked but we watched it until the end because we couldn't believe what we were seeing.

"The film became progressively more graphic, there was no plot to it, it was just sex."

The next day they went to the store and complained about the mix-up.

Fair enough--the product was clearly defective. But I'm sure it was for the shock and anguish that they watched the porn flick all the way to the end.

A Week of Remembrance: France and the Holocaust

2005-01-27T16:50:00.000+01:00

As I'm writing this, I'm watching the haunting ceremonies at Birkenau with its infamous railroad tracks aflame amidst the cold, dark and snowy Polish winter. The event is currently broadcast live on the two main French television channels, and it is clear that this 60th anniversary is a national event. The newspapers have had mainly haulocaust related headlines for the past week and a number of graphic documentaries and films about the Holocaust have been broadcast in prime time. And a new monument that opened in the 4th--the location of Paris' traditional Jewish district--which is now the second such monument to the Deportees in the city now lists the names of every victim, and the camp in which he died. Although I sometimes feel I've become calloused to suffering, images broadcast from the new monument were chilling: old men and women pointing to a group of eight or ten people, all with their last name, and living as the only survivors from their family.

France is actually one of the few European countries to face up to Nazi collaboration--Jacques Chirac publicly recognized ten years agothe official role in the deporation of the Jews. Nevertheless it is shameful that it took fifty years to face up to the deportations that killed 75,000--a third of the Jewish population in France. One of the most haunting things you'll run across in Paris now are plaques on many elementary schools listing the children who were deported. Former classmates still talk of the trauma of watching soldiers entering their classrooms to take away Jewish children.

One of those living with that horrible past is Simone Veil, one of France's most famous female politicians. She and her sister survived Auschwitz, and she would become the Health Minister during the 1970s. As such Veil is the public face of another milestone in French history, the legalization of abortion (debated in parliament from 1974-1975, when it was finally approved). Indeed, the Vichy regime deported Jews, and killed women who provided abortions (the Claude Chabrol film Une affaire de femmes, "History of Women" is the English title, vividly recounts this horrifying era) and in a way this very strong woman has outlived and triumphed over the hallmarks of that dark time. Listening to her recount the experience of the death camps, I'm not sure I would have been strong enough to survive, let alone continue with life after such a dehumanizing experience.

If the ceremony is touching, the commentary by one survivor who was in the television studio was sobering. To paraphrase, he said that it was perhaps nice that all these world leaders were there, and maybe thinking about how horrible the Holocaust was, what have they really understood from it? How can certain world leaders (he mentioned Putin, Cheney) pretend to commemorate the Holocaust, when they themselves are responsible for the death and suffering of the innocent?

Indeed.

Webpages that are unintentionally hysterical #1

2005-01-24T04:32:00.000+01:00

Belarus' "The National State Teleradiocomany"

Since I'll be looking for a job somewhere in the broadcast world, I'm thinking I should send my TV anchoring resume tape to the Belorussians. I mean, how often do you get to work a TV star like Elena Bormotova--a woman whose personal biography (click on the link and you'll see it for yourself) includes this utterly mystifying passage:

She was the second and most petted child in a family. Though her elder brother nursed her through all childhood, Elena is an independent person.

Now that Condoleeza Rice has named Belarus as one of her "outposts..." I've decided that I should include it on my travel wish-list. Right up there with Albania and Moldova (the latter you have undoubtedly heard about if you live here because they seem to be connected with every sort of prostitution and mafia ring).

Snow flakes falling on picket lines

2005-01-23T04:15:00.000+01:00

This is going to be one of those meandering posts that doesn't have a very well-established central theme. You've been warned.

As I type this at 4 AM, we've just seen the first snow flakes of the Paris winter. We might even get a dusting of snow (and it might even stick) tomorrow. Everyone will get excited. I mean, people have been wearing scarves and coats since September, not because it was particularly cold, but because the summer was, in everyone's mind, over (on a sunny day in the end of September, they actually sent a news crew to the Mediterranean coast to talk to people who couldn't get over how warm it was for late September--you'd think it was so out of the ordinary!). At the same time as the sky spits out a few snow flakes here, I see that the Eastern Seabord of the US is seeing far, far more...piling up in feet, as opposed to fractions of a centimeter like in Paris.

I was surprised to see how much snow was on the ground for the Inaugural. My friends were surprised to see how much praying accompanied the ceremonies. They think it's normal for there to be lots of snow in Washington (they don't understand that DC shuts down in an inch of snow) and I think it's normal for a President to bow his head and prayed. (I'd prefer it if they didn't--all the documentary evidence shows the framers of the Constitution believed in a secular public realm--but am not thrown by it.) Having French politicians gather at a mass for François Mitterand's funeral was really pushing it here. In the US, politicians go to churches for photo ops.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to recognize that this "little blog that could" brought to you the issue of Chirac's lifetime immunity far sooner than the Johnny-come-lately New York Times editorial page--which waited for over a week (long after the story was already stale) to write their thoughts on the matter (the NYT coverage on France is usually about on par with their WMD coverage). What is the time difference is between France and the Times newsroom (I wrote about the it over a week ago when the news came out) anyways? In any case, I'd like to think that some Times staffer happened to run across my blog and decided they should get moving. So pat on the back for Jordan.

Maybe the Times will run a story in February about the strikes we had last week. All sorts of groups that have their various problems with the current government (hell, only 30 percent approve of the Prime Minister. Point of clarification--because even venerable news organizations will get this wrong--Jacques Chirac is the head of state, but not the head of government. You thus can't talk about the Chirac government--unless you're talking about the time he was Prime Minister from 1993-1995). Postal employees are pissed about the closures of post offices in small towns around the country. Public employees, including teachers, are concerned about the fact they haven't had a pay raise in a while, and the government has at the same time reduced inheritance taxes, etc. etc. General practitioners are concerned about a provision in the health care reforms that they say would allow patients to skip them altogether and name a specialist directly as their main doctor. So doctors closed their cabinets, the Louvre was closed (employees are also pissed about the new ticket prices and the refusal to give foreign art students free entry, from which they benefitted up until last year), trains across France were stuck in their stations, teachers didn't show up for classes. (My friend who works for the Seine-St. Denis department was told not to even bother showing up-Le 93 is a Communist-run department and they asked him on the first day not to wear ties to work. It's not business casual, it's proletarian-chic.) The mobilisation in cities across France was upwards of 250-350 thousand (depending on who's doing the counting) on the big strike day midweek and even the unions were surprised at how well their action worked. After the unions failed to stop the really unpopular pension reform in May 2003, despite continued public sympathy for their actions (65 percent), they've had a hard time getting it together and convincing people it's worth it to strike.

The comparisons to May 2003--the last mobilization that really paralyzed France (garbage in Marseille piled up for weeks in the insufferable provençal heat, the Paris Metro would be halted one day and sporadically running another, tourists couldn't get into any of the national museums)--were every where. Although I have to say that there isn't much of a sense of any major impasse, unlike two years ago. The employees salaries have already been negociated, and other specific issues have been brewing fof a while. Granted, the teachers in 2003 rose up against the bad-haircut, "intellectual" Education Minister, staging burnings of the book he'd written and distributed to every instructor, and this year they're against a curriculum reform plan and a lack of funding (some complaints are universal). The one thing the unions want to do is finish the job that they left undone in May 2003, and get rid of Raffarin. Even though the PM has skated by this long with solidly 30 percent approval ratings, Chirac's concerned people might try to turn the referendum on the EU Constitution (which Chirac promised would be before the summer during his traditional New Year's speech--a tradition I finally had the chance to watch live) into a referendum on all the government policies since 2002, which don't have overwhelming public approval.

And maybe this is the part where I seem self-centered, but this time the strikes weren't terribly disruptive to my life as they were in 2003. Then, the metro was disrupted for days on end, the public newscasts were hilariously bare bones, some public radio stations weren't even broadcasting, and I even had unions doing marches through my neighborhood. When the grand-messe (the great masse) 20 heures newscast is disrupted, that's when you really feel like something big is going on in the country. Kind of like when you don't have the internet for a while, having your life disrupted by the strikes can be kind of a fun adventure (that's how lots of people look at it here).

I did reach my limit once. I've now gotten off the plane twice to find that the people refilling the ATMs (and only the ones at the airport) were on strike and so there was not a single place to get cash. This happened again in September, but couldn't be attributed to a strike. I like to chalk the frustration and grumbling I exhibited up to the fact that I'd spent between eight to eleven hours on a plane and was tired and that, quite frankly, I hadn't gotten back into the French rhythm of life which is so often punctuated by things not working because, well, people aren't working.

Zamfir and French Public Television

2005-01-17T23:58:00.000+01:00

My friend Rotem now works for a television production company here and so I was invited to go to a taping for a new television show called "Toute la musique qu'ils aiment," a very high-brow classical music show that is going to be broadcast around midnight on one of the French public channels.

I accepted.

Then I realized I was going to be there for three consecutive tapings.

The host, Alain Duault (doo-OH) is trying to market the show as making classical music accessible to everyone...alas, it's not. Sometimes it was accessible for everyone, but during one show they went off talking about romanticism and all sorts of less-well-known composers. At the same time, there is a segment of the population that will enjoy this type of programming, and if I hadn't been so tired I'd probably have appreciated the show's intellectual caliber a little more.

The third show brought on a film music composer who's apparently well known here (I've already forgotten his name, but Le dîner des cons, The Dinner Game, is one of his most recent films that had some success in the US). He had two musicians on playing my absolute favorite instruments (I kid): the accordion and the pan flute. They talked about the wonders of the pan flute, and even mentioned (and spent thirty seconds talking about...) ZAMFIR!

Remember, that guy who was selling his pan flute CDs through direct mail? His commercials ran on television (a lot). I used to think it his Songs of Romance CD ads were a joke. They had him in soft focus, swaying with passion as he tooted out pan flute melodies of "Wind Beneath My Wings" and "Love Me Tender" that I was convinced were being marketed to the lobotomized and/or the heavily medicated.

But Zamfir has legions of fans: classical pan flute connoisseurs and Romanians. Zamfir, being Romanian, is apparently a huge celebrity there. Go figure.

I see this as just another sign I've made the right choice for my February vacation plans.

New Year's in Photos...

2005-01-15T02:42:00.000+01:00

Here are the illustrations to accompany my description of New Year's. Jennifer was so good to put the entirety of her Paris photos on Shutterfly--and I stole some from her. If you're so inclined to see the entirety of the New Year's photos, you can hit her gallery (Page 3 is where New Year's starts, although she has a lot of great Paris photos...).

Let's all thank her!

2005-01-15T02:41:00.000+01:00

Okay, these are the three visitors (from L to R): Jennifer, Sharyn and Joanna. Now you know what they look like.

2005-01-15T02:40:00.003+01:00

Up on the top of Montmartre with our Champagne! This isn't the first time the world has seen Joanna and I sitting next to one another. We've known each other since the anchor desk of NYU Tonight (this video clip is hysterical...but you need Real Player to view it).

2005-01-15T02:40:00.002+01:00

Here we are with our incomprehensible Russian friend.

2005-01-15T02:40:00.001+01:00

These shoes get less and less white the more I wear them.

2005-01-15T02:40:00.000+01:00

Here's the lobster, coming out of his plastic wrapping. Just the way nature intended.

2005-01-15T02:38:00.000+01:00

"Linda" (or is it "Lenny"--we named the lobsters) almost looks like she's relaxing in a jacuzzi. In a way, I guess death is a form of relaxation and a pot of boiling water a kind of jacuzzi.

2005-01-15T02:37:00.000+01:00

I meantioned my excellent carving skills, right?

Culture notes

2005-01-15T01:47:00.000+01:00

I know I've been leaning a lot on the French politics lately. Most of you don't care. Most of you probably want insights into what it's like living in France. Well here is a compilation of little things...

My last New Year's entry didn't really do the holiday justice. In France this is the time when you send out your cards. Essentially, you start the New Year renewing your interpersonal relationships, which I kind of a nice way to see things. This also means for the month of January you compulsively wish people a Happy New Year. I was at my bi-weekly Igloo gathering (the social association I've been a member of since I first was in France) a week or so ago and said hello to someone, as one normally does. This person then got miffed and said "we haven't seen each other since the New Year." Embarassed, I did an exaggerated forehead slap and said "Ah oui! T'as raison! Bon, ben...meilleurs voeux." (Ah yes! You're right! Well, uh...best wishes). Yes, people actually say that, it's not just something you read in a card.

Not long after New Years (the Holiday lights are still up in my neighborhood) you'll start seeing these flat, round cakes about hte same color and texture as the outisde of a croissant. They're everywhere. It's of course, the Galette des Rois, to celebrate la fête des Rois (Three Kings' Day)--which is really on the 6th, but again, the holiday gets stretched out for a few weeks. The cake is traditionally filled with a delicious almond paste (but believe me, after umpteen slices of galette, you kind of don't want to see it for another year). When you buy your cake, make sure you pick up the paper crown that goes with it. The cake has a fève (litterally a fava bean) baked into it--although today's fèves are actually porcelain figurines. If your slice holds the fève, you get to wear the crown (If it seems dumb, remember that many French people think the same thing about going house to house for candy in the middle of the night). I never did get to wear the paper crown...

On a "boys night" with Raf (we're the only two "boys" in the Columbia program) we decided last night to go the Comédie Française (did you think I was going to go to some rowdy American bar to watch NFL Football via satellite and eat onion rings?) and see what we thought was going to be a Thomas Bernhard play (Place des héros). As students, we showed up at the box office a half hour before curtain and got great tickets for just 12 euros each (first balcony, front row). Once we took our seats, the number of children in the audience should've tipped me off that something was up. After all, Thomas Bernhard's works aren't exactly light fare. Five minutes to curtain, Raf and i look at the program and see "Fables de la Fontaine." We thought it must be an ad for another play that's in rotation at the Comédie Française. Then we look at our tickets. "Fables de la Fontaine." Somehow we managed to get tickets for a production we had no intention of seeing.

The re-enactment of the Fables was not a children's play, by any stretch of the imagination. The 17th Century Fables are studied by every little French student sometime during Collège or at Lycée. They're a universal cultural reference: just say "The Crow and the Fox" to a group of French people and chances are half of them memorized that very fable as a wee one. I once found myself in a café with a pretty mixed group of French people one would never caracterize as being a "literary circle," and my actor friend Rotem (who I helped move...if you read a couple entries back) got everyone reciting some of the more famous ones.

Written in verse by La Fontaine, the Fables are exquisite. The production that Raf and I saw brought an astonishing complexity and poignancy to these seemingly dry and simplistic stories. It was quite an unexpected pleasure.

Liberté, Egalité, Immunité

2005-01-14T23:45:00.000+01:00

Actualit�, IMMUNIT�, Une nouvelle piste pour prot�ger Chirac

Should your French fall short, the above article explains that people close to Jacques Chirac, "l'Escroc" who faced off against "le Facho" in 2002, are reportedly now figuring out ways to get himself immunity for life--including a constitutional amendment that would make ex-Presidents "Senators for life."

Remember that Chirac managed for get himself immunity from prosecution for the various sordid dealings during his reign as Paris' mayor for the length of time he's at the Elysée (France's equivalent of the White House). Well, 2007's not looking too good for Chirac. He's getting slowly but surely pushed out of his very own party by upstart ex-minister and current UMP party President Nicolas Sarkozy (a man so omnipresent in the media that several professors I've had have actually--and quite mistakenly--referred to him on several different occasions as the former Prime Minister!) is packing the party with his own supporters the same way Chirac un-Gaullized this very same party (then the RPR) in the mid 1970s in order to give himself a political space. Sarkozy has made a point to oppose Chirac on virtually every important political issue and the new party adherents have come to the UMP for that very reason. It's gotten so bad that ten "Chirac" ministers in the current government are now out on a mission to "explain" the government's policies to the militants (you might wonder why the Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin, the head of government, is absent in this whole exercise. With 30 percent approval ratings, he hasn't been fired because a government reshuffle would mean having to potentially cede ground to Sarko-backers within the party. He exercises no visible command over "his" ministers, and at this point nobody takes him seriously.).

This whole idea smacks of something you'd see in Italy, or corrupt parts of the developing world. But for France, a country with its universal mission, this is horrendously embarassing. Welcome to Chirac's world.

French politician sighting #1

2005-01-06T18:24:00.000+01:00

While walking with my token Canadian friends, Raf and Paulina, we saw...get ready...Lionel Jospin!

I don't usually get worked up about celebrities (okay, maybe some French celebrities), but French politicians...

Lionel Jospin is the Socialist Party candidate who lost to Chirac in 2002 by not even making it to the second round run-offs (remember, it was Jean-Marie Le Pen who was beaten handily). Jospin said he was retiring from political life, to be a simple party activist in his neighborhood "PS" section. Alas, he keeps talking to the press, playing this coy "am I still in politics or am I not" game. You may remember from an earlier post that I mentioned some blame his "poor speech" for making him seen "unpresidential."

I was bursting with questions to ask him (poor speaker or not) as we passed one another on the rue Saint-Placide right down the street from the 7th arrondissement's Bon Marché (which is paradoxically a very expensive department store--for those whose French is rusty, "bon marché," litterally "good market," is an idiomatic expression meaning "cheap").

Among them (many flipplant):

1) Are you going to shit or get off the pot? (run in 2007 or not)

2) What was going through your mind when you announced your retirement from political life in your concession speech in 2002? Did it earn you the sympathy you thought you'd be able to turn into momentum for what seems like an otherwise improbable 2007 run?

3) You still intervene in a number of political debates, many in the Socialist Party still look to you as a guide (God knows why?!)... Are you still "retired"?

4) Assuming you are really in retirement, do you spend your days writing the speeches you deliver at your local party section?

5) Does it embarass you that, even though you claim to be a party militant like any other, that you always get the first opportunity to speak at your local section meetings and go way over the time limits accorded to others?

6) Do you plan on taking speech lessons anytime soon? People look for a good speaker in their presidents here... (this is a backhanded way to see if he'll go back on his standard coy lines about 2007)

7) Why, as a man on the left, are you so afraid of gay marriage? You came out against it recently. [yes, I'm quite aware that the post-communist left, unlike American progressives, has had a hard time handling homosexuality] Does it bother you that one of the few people in the PS that people actually like (Paris' fantastic mayor Bertrand Delanoe) is gay? Does it bother you that French people like a gay man more than you? Are you secretly terrified that Bertrand Delanoe might try to marry you?

8) When people say you remind them of a school teacher, do you take it as a compliment? You have heard that everybody thinks that, right?

9) We both apparently live in the 18th arrondissement. Your party section is in a notoriously poor corner of the 18th (the Goutte d'Or). Do you actually live there? Do you ever take walks around that neighborhood? What do you think?

10) God Damn It Lionel! Are you running or not?

"Put it in H": Eastward Bound!

2005-01-05T10:28:00.000+01:00

I bought my airline tickets to go to Eastern Europe next month. I was slightly disappointed with Opodo.fr because they'd been advertising a ticket that would have allowed me to spend five hours in London (enough time to run to Ithe Tate British for the Whistler/Monet exhibit--via the ultra-fast Heathrow Express) and then find out when I try to buy the ticket that even though their reservation search engine posted the itinerary at a price that beat the Air France non-stops, the itinerary is mysteriously unavailable. Well, I'll now be flying into Sofia, Bulgaria and working my way through Romania up to Budapest, Hungary before returning to Paris. Sadly, there will be no trip to the Tate since I'll now be flying non-stop on Air France.

Of course I'll have to lay off the alcohol on this particular Air France flight since I'll be arriving in a country where I don't speak any of the local language (unlike Spain) and where the alphabet is in Cyrillic. I can't help but think of the Simpsons when Homer goes to this Crazy Vaklev's used car lot (this is the Mr. Plow episode I'm talking about) and as he tries to test drive this minuscule car, he can't figure out the gears because the dashboard is in, well, Cyrillic ("Put it in H!" the salesman cries as he's pushing from behind.)

Sofia is of course like many "Eastern European" cities (I put it in quotes because people in Poland or Czech Republic--where Prague is actually west of the "western" European capital of Vienna--often prefer the less-stigmatized term "Central Europe") in that reminders of the communist era are particularly evident in the city infrastructure. For example, every "eastern" capital's subway system built post-WWII is modeled after the Moscow subway. And Sofia, like Moscow, is into "centralized" heating. This is not to be confused with central heating, in which you have a boiler in your basement. In Sofia, the city takes care of your heating, it's a utility. Giant underground boilers pipe in heat to every building in the city. This I actually grabbed from the Sofia municipal website (which is one of the few I've seen in Eastern Europe that functions correctly and, even better, has all the content in English as well): "The Central Heating System of Sofia is one of the biggest in Eastern Europe. In spite of the limited operational safety, the system supplies 900 000 citizens and about 5900 companies, including almost all the industrial enterprises using vapours." The "limited operational safety" part was quite an eye-grabber, I must admit.

The Sofia transit website (СТОЛИЧНА КОМПАНИЯ ЗА ГРАДСКИ ТРАНСПОРТ СОФИЯ ЕООД--if you don't read Bulgarian it means the Public transport Company Sofia, Ltd.)
is actually a paragon of transparency compared to many US transit authorities. The site's "news" page includes the laws regarding heating on public transport (I learned that it's required when the air temperature drops below 3°C!) and something about a new electronic fare collection thing that they're trying to implement: "THE SERVICE KNOWN AS “AUTOMATED SYSTEM OF CHARGING THE PASSENGERS IN THE PUBLIC TRANSPORT IN SOFIA ON THE PRINCIPLE OF CONTACT-FREE SMART CARS" HAS BEEN RENDERED SINCE 6 SEPTEMBER 2001." "Automated system of charging the passengers in the public transport in Sofia on the principle of contact-free smart cards" isn't exactly catchy, but maybe it's one of those things that just doesn't translate well...once I learn to read Cyrillic (and then learn Bulgarian) I'll tell you.

Moving à la française...

2005-01-03T18:10:00.000+01:00

I know that I have good friends in France now that I was asked to help two of them move. Helping somebody move is tantamount, in my book, to driving somebody to the airport, so I was quite flattered.

My friend Rotem and his boyfriend Arnaud had been living in an apartment barely bigger than mine as they searched for a new one. The apartment search in Paris can take up to a year (I know one couple that has been searching for nine months now) and they were lucky to find one in less than three.

Rotem borrowed a moving van from his brother, which turned out to be a rotted out Citroen with graffiti on the side. The battery was dead, and Frédéric (a mutual friend) had to jump start the van everytime we drove between the old and new apartments. The best part of all of this was having to ride in the back of this death wagon (you could see the road through the gap between the floor boards and the sliding door). Sitting in the back of this camion, crammed between a piece of furniture and Arnaud, watching Rotem close the rear door on us, I quipped "Bon...on va jouer à Sangatte. Toi, tu serais le passeur. Moi, je serais le clandestin." (in a tone of kids playing cops and robbers, I said, "Okay, let's play a game called Sangatte [the notorious camp for undocumented immigrants who were caught being smuggled through the Chunnel]. You'll be the smuggler, and I'll be the...") I never said the joke was in good taste, but I revel in being able to make witty remarks in French using topical references. These are the fruits of being a French news junkie for so long.

Their new aparment is wonderful. You walk out the front door and see the Eiffel Tower, and they have MULTIPLE ROOMS! (gasp!). This is something most of you take for granted. For me, I was so excited to see a living space where the kitchen wasn't in the living room, and where the bathroom had a sink and room to do jumping jacks. It made me so sad to get back to my tiny studio. I mean, this is the kind of apartment I need: when people come over for dinner, they won't see that their lobster is coming out of plastic packaging marked "Picard' on it.