On the plane ride to New York yesterday, I watched the second half of last year’s somewhat badly received cinematic biography of Cole Porter, "De-Lovely." Kevin Kline is reason enough to sit through a film, no matter how bad (cf. "Princess Caraboo"), and I have an musical theatre nerd that sometimes needs to be placated with some show tunes, so I watched it. I didn’t get to see Porter’s "Anything Goes" period before I "tuned" in, but still, since I came home I’ve been singing the title song:
The world has gone mad today
and good’s bad today
and black’s white today
and day’s night today
and most guys today
that women prize today
are just silly gigolos!
Porter’s song reflects on the gin saturated excesses of the Jazz Age ("in olden days a glimpse of stocking/ was looked on as something shocking but now god knows/ Anything Goes!"), but fast forward, oh, seventy years, and the song takes on crazy dark nuances. The world has indeed gone mad. But I’m nowhere near articulate enough to put into words just how mad it’s gone. And I’ve been feeling this way since the election.
Everyone I know has their own little diatribe about the election results, should you ask their opinion. Everyone except me. I don’t have a single thing to say about the state of global affairs. For the first time in a really long time, I’m dumbstruck.
My friends, however, are amazingly eloquent. Take Kaitlin’s blog. Kaitlin, who was just accepted to Columbia Law (roar, lion, roar!) regularly reminds me how important it is to take an active interest in politics– not just the theoretical kind of pseudo-socialist jargon I throw out from time to time, but a practical, hands-on engagement with the political system on a local as well as a national level.
Then there’s Carrie, who manages to stay up on the doings and sayings of people like Rumsfeld and the ACLU while still teaching and taking a full load of coursework. That is, she does all the stuff I do as well as the stuff I claim to be too busy to do.
I have many other friends whose knowledge and political engagement I respect but they don’t have blogs… so mom, dad, emily, matt, helena, pam, michelle, amy… why don’t you start your own?
I just wish I could wrap my head around what’s going on. My french boyfriend is going to Portland for three months, beginning in January, and he is actually concerned that he’s going to be surrounded by a bunch of fat christian evangelists. Now, this is a very smart, well-read and well-informed Frenchman. He ought to know better, right? But that’s the image of America that the French media reifies– we’re overweight and we’re all religious to the point of psychosis. All I could say in defense of my country was that no, in portland he’d be surrounded by a bunch of atheist hippies whose weight I couldn’t account for.
So I’m working on the problem of getting over being dumbfounded by our president, the conservative mindset that’s taken over the States, the non-critical thinkers who seem to be in charge of everything, the politically correct bias of so-called "critical thinkers" that results in an unbounded anti-semitism of the left, a french mindset that tries to homogenize all cultures in order to minimize conflict, the plummetting value of the dollar against the euro, and the fact that I ate pig fat the other night thinking it was incredibly tender onion shavings.
Monthly Archives: December 2004
waiter, there’s a fetus in my egg
Last night: way too much Canadian cider at the Moosehead Tavern.
This morning: j’ai la guele de bois [literally, "woodface"]. To combat hangovers, I have always found that nothing helps replace those amino acids like a scrambled egg.
I cracked open and egg and instantly found my counter covered in blood and the most curious-looking creature in a sac remained behind in the shell.
How nasty is that? I’m so disgusted I can’t even bring myself to clean up the mess. And I can’t help thinking that this is an omen of ill portent.
angel
What’s a pretty girl like you doing in an apartment like this?
Hello, and welcome to my troglodytic lifestyle. Step right in, mind the wastebin positioned so precariously close to the door. It’s freezing in here, so make sure you’re wearing a couple of layers. It’s Thursday morning and I’ve been transcribing notes from notebook to iBook all morning. I just opened the shades on my window to reveal an enormous shower curtain hanging from the laundry line outside. My neighbors have a sense a humor: the New York City subway map is replicated on their shower curtain.
Normally I leave the shades down. This is partly because I don’t get any sunlight, so there’s no reason to. Then there’s the fact that my window looks onto my neighbor’s window, so there are various questions of privacy involved. Also, the shades offer some measure of insulation, so it’s a ocuple of degrees cooler in here with them up.
Still, I have them up right now, because I’m going a little insane in this tiny little apartment with no source of natural light. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I’ve been debating moving. I don’t care that I’m only here til the summer– that’s still six more months in hell. Forget entertaining– forget having my boyfriend over in comfort, or what it will be like when my dog moves in with me– this place isn’t even big enough for me. I can’t move around without bumping into something. I get tired and depressed here. Worst of all, it’s extremely difficult to get any writing done, because the desk is so high and the chair so low. typing becomes a chore. I mistype letters because the keyboard is not at a normal height for touch-typing.
Why haven’t I moved, then, you ask? because the rent is cheap (500 euros, electricity, water, and cable included). Because it’s reasonably clean. Because I have a real bed, instead of something called a clic-clac (a fold-out sofa bed). Because I’m right in the middle of Paris and can walk anywhere. And most of all, because it would be a bitch to find anything better.
See, for example, this guy’s trials and tribulations. He has captured the essence of the frustration of apartment-hunting in Paris. Luckily, being a savvy New Yorker I bypassed some of the mistakes that he made (handing over a credit card to a real estate agent before you’ve even seen an apartment? hel-LO?) but I completely empathize with him otherwise. I also seem to have another thing working in my favor: my gender. landlords in paris, male or female, prefer to show apartments to young american girls with sweet voices. then, when I show up to see the apartment, the landlord is usually accomodating when they see I’m, well– blond.
So I’m not completely despondent. I ought to be able to find someplace better. And when I come back from Christmas vacation, that’s number one on my list of priorities. The only problem is the dog. As well-known as Parisians are for having yappy little dogs, you’d think I wouldn’t encounter any difficulty getting a place for me and my yappy little dog, right? wrong. but that’s a post for another day.
Monday morning
Ten-fifteen a.m. sitting bleary-eyed in front of my computer… the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet and I haven’t quite finished my yogurt. I’ve been firing off emails left and right; the brain is working but the body hasn’t quite caught up. The phone rings. I look at it, surprised (no one except my landlady calls me on my landline). "Hello?"
"Excusez-moi, est-ce que je pourrais parler a M. Thomas [last name mumbled]?"
"Desolee mais vous vous trompez de numero."
I am shocked that I have managed to come up with the correct response to a wrong number in French without thinking. So shocked that I forget to answer when he apologizes. I just sort of sit there dumbly and then realize all I have to say is "d’accord" and hang up. Which I do.
If only all my exchanges in French could go that well. They’re getting progressively better, of course, but I have a meeting with my research director on thursday and I’m panicking at the prospect– not so much at the idea of expressing myself– because I’ve gotten better at that– but at having to decipher his responses to my ideas. Last time we met it didn’t go as well; I understood generally what he was saying but the nuances of why he was throwing my ideas out the window and suggesting different more conventional ones were lost on me. Truth be told that was the end of September. One would hope my comprehension has improved since then.
I’m going to New York again a week from today for Christmas and New Year’s. I’m excited to see my family and the doggies but something about the season always makes me restless. ("Two parents wrapping/ One sister chatting/ One maltese barking/And a bichon peeing on the rug!") I’m looking forward to doing some research at the NYPL and to possibly going to MLA but still can’t seem to work up the requisite holiday cheer. I’m not a humbug– quite the opposite– just kind of blasé.
Happy Channoukah
Part of the tagline for this blog is “judeophilic,” but I realize I haven’t consecrated much space to that idea here. That’s sort of reflective of where I am with regard to Judaism right now… I seem to be going through some sort of phase where all the assumptions I held so dear and the opinions I thought were so well-reasoned have suddenly been called into question. This extends primarily to my level of observation and no less importantly to the standards I apply in dating. Suffice it to say, my observation of the laws of kashrut, for example, has fallen short of my ideal here in Europe; and my standards for dating, while they are as strict as ever in terms of intellect and character, they have recently relaxed to allow me to include Gentiles in my dating pool. This is, I might add, a major lifetime First.
In all likelihood, because my parents are not of the same religion, they were never concerned with the religion of my boyfriends. I have a lot of jewish friends who had it drilled into their head that they had to eventually end up with a nice Jewish boy– and so they’ve spent the last ten years rebelling against that, dating exclusively non-Jews. Perhaps out of a subconscious desire to concretize my jewish identity, I exclusively dated Jewish guys from age sixteen to twenty-six. There were a couple of half-Jews there– half is better than not at all.
But now I’m in France, where nice Jewish boys are a little more difficult to come by. And so I’ve been having adventures in the land of Shaygitz. I’m not sure how long it will last, this dating outside the tribe, but for now I feel “open-minded” and slightly rebellious.
But just being a Jew in general is a little challenging here. For example, the other day, I went to the Marais in search of a box of Latke mix. I wanted to make latkes for my Frog. I went to five different epiceries– nobody had the mix. I got several pieces of advice on how to make them from scratch, but I was in a hurry and didn’t have time to pare potatoes. After an hour of this futility, I stopped in a kosher patisserie and bought the only special hannukah dish I could find: “Beignets de Channoukah.” Hannukah doughnuts. Can you believe it? They were actually really good, even if they were totally bizarre.
Then last night, at an extremely culturally diverse gathering for a friend’s birthday (we’re talking an uruguayan, a chilean, a mexican, several venezuelans, 3 germans, a canadian, and an american–me), I recounted a story of how my Hannukah candles had spazzed out on me earlier in the evening. I realized my German friend Angela was looking at me in that kind of vague way, as if to say I appreciate your story but I don’t really know what you’re talking about. Finally, she asked “I’m sorry, but what is Hannukah?”
“Hannukah is/The Festival of Lights,” I sang, and started to explain the Adam Sandler Hannukah songs. When I finished the list of “all the people who are Jewish /Just like you and me,” angela was still staring at me. “No really, what is this holiday?”
So I went into exaggerated Hebrew school teacher mode and then realized I didn’t really know the specifics myself. I always assumed that the first time I would need to teach someone what Hannukah was, it would be my children, and I would have studied up on it beforehand. So I bluffed, and let them know I was bluffing. “Well,” I began, “a long long time ago somewhere in the desert, the jews had to flee wherever they were living because someone didn’t like them,” I said, all of a sudden acutely aware that I was talking to two germans. “They, uh, were holed up in a cave somewhere and only had enough oil to light the place up for eight nights.” Andreas, the Uruguayan, interrupted and said something about people coming after the Jews—he said it pointedly—and then the other german girl, not angela, visibly winced, and said “like the germans.” It was a really interesting moment—I didn’t know if she was really wincing or if it was put on for my benefit. I changed the subject really quickly.
So! that’s enough discourse on judeophilia/judeophobia for one day. Next time: more of the banal chronicles of an American in Paris.
Tell me a story
Well, I don’t have a narrative to share today but petite anglaise sure does! It’s riveting, autobiographical stuff.
As for my own autobiography– I spent the afternoon with a French friend, Elsa, taking tea in her adorable multicolored apartment. She refused to speak English with me– not so much out of an altruistic desire to help my French so much as a reluctance to summon the energy to speak English. It was immensely helpful to have a girl-to-girl gossip session in French– it allowed me to tap into the French persona that’s closest to who I really am. That is to say– the other times I speak in French are in public situations (restaurants, stores, cabs, the bank, etc.), with my research advisor, and with my French petit ami. While I’m certainly myself in this last situation, I haven’t yet opened up to him the way I can to Elsa, who I’ve known much longer. And besides– female friends are different than boyfriends!
The craziest story I heard all day came from him. Saturday night he went out with his friends and got completely wasted. So wasted that they put him in a cab because he couldn’t get himself home. Except what they didn’t know what that he had no cash on him. He woke up yesterday afternoon, massively hung over, to find his phone gone and in its place a note from his cab driver informing him that he owed him twenty euros and he was keeping his phone as collateral.
He had to go all the way to northern Paris tonight to pick it up. And he has no recollection of being dropped off by the cabdriver. How alarming! A true cautionary tale.
“Back in Paris
…and ain’t it grand/Let the good times roll!”
[I'll buy anyone who can name the song I just quoted and tell me what word I replaced with "Paris"]
Today was the perfect “back in Paris” kind of day. Since I do get asked fairly frequently what I do here all day long, I’ll give you the sweet and lowdown.
Slept in this morning. Had brunch at Le Pain Quotidien on Rue des Archives (incidentally, LPQ is one of my favorite brunch spots in NYC, alors plus ca change…). My french escort (call him G) and I were companionably seated next to another franco-american couple; we spoke in french; they in english (we felt superior). After brunch we stopped in an exhibit of Himalayan furniture being held next door in some sort of gorgeous medieval cloister with an interior courtyard. The furniture was to die for– carved entirely of wood, a sign on the wall informed us that the goal of the artisans was to turn each piece of wood back into a tree; to bring it back to life, so to speak. There were bureaux and doorways, bowls and very low chairs with seats about four inches off of the ground. A woman in a fur chapeau a la russie watched serenely over the contents of the room; we left only when we began to shiver from the cold.
Next stop: the Champs-Elysees, to see about a rugby shirt, a gift for G’s friend. This marked the continuation of my bizarre odyssey into the land of french sporting goods, which began a few weeks ago when I tentatively ventured into Go Sport in search of a yoga mat. It was hot enough for a Bikram class, yet they carried nothing “om-worthy.” Today, I was taken to the official PSG (Paris Saint Germain) store, which looked just like the Yankees clubhouse in midtown manhattan, except swtich the baseball motif for soccer gear. No rugby shirts to be had, though I was tempted to buy a Brazil soccer jersey for no one in particular and for no other reason than it looked really cool. G, being a Marseille fan, was having epileptic fits at the sight of so much PSG red and blue; we cleared out tout de suite. The referee type working the door suggested we try Decathelon on Avenue Wagram to find said rugby shirt.
Trying to escape the crowds on the C-E, we wandered northwest, got lost, and made our way back to the C-E to try again. We stopped along the way at the recently re-opened Publicis drugstore. Originally founded in 1958, the drugstore was given a shiny new makeover which turned the facade into a distinctive futuristic foil to the nearby Arc de Triomphe. The drugstore has historically been open til late in the evening, allowing Parisians to get a bite to eat, buy a newspaper, or pick up a pharmeceutical product long after the other stores had closed. True to its origins, you can still buy those things quite late at Publicis, only now while you’re at it you can pick up gourmet olive oil, Kiehl’s moisturizer, Von Dutch bags, and an iPod. Cool.
We finally made it to Decathelon, which is the Parisian equivalent of Paragon Sporting Goods, without the charm of the Union Square location. They had exactly one rugby shirt in stock and it was not the right size; we were informed that they did not expect to receive any more rugby shirt shipments until possibly January. It’s times like this when I’m reminded that France is a deeply Socialist country. That’s cool in terms of the healthcare and stuff, but man, it’s the Christmas season– these things should be in stock! Don’t they care that it’s the biggest shopping season of the year? Apparently not. Then again, the biggest shopping moments in Paris, from what I’ve observed, take place at les soldes– the huge blowout sales– in january and july.
Mission unaccomplished. Crossing the Champs-Elysees on our way to the metro, I persuaded G. to look down the avenue as it stretched away from the Arc and down toward the Tuileries, lined with trees, strung with Christmas lights. The setting sun streaked the sky with pink and the falling evening filled the street with mist. In typical American-in-Paris fashion, I waxed rhapsodic, trying to get him to see what an amazing place he had grown up in. “C’est normale,” he shrugged. I guess I’m equally blase about New York. As our line 6 train crossed the Seine and passed by The Tower, he pretended not to know me as I pointed out the window, purposely trying to embarrass him. “Mais il ne s’agit pas de tourisme,” I explained to him. “C’est juste que je suis amoureuse de Paris.”
and today, as I leave
and today, as I leave New York to head back (home?) to Paris, Rilke:
Who has twisted us around like this, so that
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Just as, upon
the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops, lingers–,
so we live here, forever taking leave.
–From “The Duino Elegies” (Eighth Elegy), trans. Stephen Mitchell