Ma Journée de Patrimoine: Part 2

"Instrument/Monument: A contextual creation in free space, this spectacular 'concert of architecture' was written for and on the campus of the University. Rendez-vous: métro Jusieu."

Thanks, Mairie de Paris, that's very helpful.

So at six o'clock I'm standing in this gray square on the Left Bank, with no sign in sight and no officious-looking people standing anywhere, convinced I had misread something because where was the performance? Was I supposed to walk somewhere? Was there a secret signal I missed? The only indication that I hadn't gloriously messed up was that minute by minute a larger and larger crowd of people were amassing around me, who seemed equally lost and confused. I felt at one with my fellow man as we all milled about in confusion and possibly a little dismay, as the sky began to yawn and little dribbles of rain fell from its mouth. Drip, drip, clang. Drip, bang, drip, wait, what?

Stranger and stranger noises began coming from all around us, clangs and bangs and metallic chinks. A kid standing on the grates of the metro looked down with confusion, thinking that might be part of the performance. Heads craned to find the sources of the cacophony (melody?) and then suddenly from around corners and inside buildings and even, it seemed, from within the crowd itself, they came into sight.

The first figure I was was a man done up in black and white, like a mime in razzle dazzle camouflage, with dark glasses and a blind man's stick banging against the street. Then more: a woman on rollerskates with a bucket of liquid nitrogen pouring behind her like an exhaust tail; a conductor with a stovepipe hat on his head and Mad Hatter glasses. All of them were wearing mics--but it was their bodies, not their voices, whose movements were amplified. They clangingly meandered over to the chainlink barrier of the University center, and then onto and over it, pulling out hooks and carabiners and banging against everything in sight the whole time, the buildings becoming drums and climbing walls together. And then the gate opened and we followed them inside, and that's when things got wild.

Lights! Smoke! Fireworks! Halfway through the show, the courtyard lit up to reveal an alien sculptural garden bathed in neon light, against which the performers proceeded to whack their instruments (sticks, steel brushes, hands) with aplomb.

And then the sky opened up and someone came out of it!

I was also amused to see that post-it note art in office windows is a universal phenomenon: behind the aerial acrobatics you just might be able to make out a Pacman on his lunch break.

Who would've thought Paris would make such a good instrument? Neon lights, hooks and highline wires, percussion, what's not to love? A pretty good start to my Saturday night. It seems like this group has been around for quite a few years, traveling around the world and making noise against whatever large objects they can find. This video gives you a pretty good idea of what the performance was like:



After that, the best way to finish my night? Hopping on the métro to the Champs Elysée and walking in the rain--squish squish in the puddles--to the Grand Palais for an equally bizarre interactive art experience involving balloons and bicycles.

You'll have to forgive the poor image quality on these, as it is difficult to take pictures in a building the size of a warehouse, lit only by large bicycle-powered balloons. Dynamo Fukushima was dedicated to the victims of the nuclear accident in Japan, each pedal pump an act of solidarity recorded on a big screen at the back of the Palais. It was touching to take my seat on a bicycle, joining a circle of a dozen other people, all of us pedaling for the same reason.

Yann Toma, the artist behind the installation, is kind of an odd fellow. In the nineties he decided to buy the name and the rights to the defunct electrical company Ouest Lumière, which then became the inspiration for a series of bizarre installations that seem to take everything you'd associate with an electrical company as thei starting point: light, energy, networks, industrial production, bureaucracy. The book I skimmed about him says that he's President for Life of Ouest Lumière, but I'm pretty sure his salary is derived exclusively from the sale of the little signed lightbulbs available in the giftshop, which start at twenty euros for a light the size of my pinky.

At one point I was the only one left pedaling at my balloon, but I was pleased to find that it was still lighting up quite nicely. I wish I'd brought a book with me so I could read and pedal at the same time, but I'll have to save that for when I rewire the electricity of my own house to a row of bicycles. (Sorry, housemates!)

Ma Journée du Patrimoine: Part 1

My mother always tells me that I have extraordinary luck when it comes to being in the right place at the right time. Really, I think it is more a matter of being in very large cities at any time, because there are always odd festivals going on in vast metropolitan areas. Or, you know, all of Europe.

Two weekends ago was a confluence of many such events: Le Fête de l'Humanité, at which Joan Baez strummed some songs about peace and happiness as though the seventies had never packed their bags; and Les Journées du Patrimoine, a Europe-wide celebration of... itself. Because it is very easy to forget your European heritage, you see, when one is flanked by vaulting Gothic cathedrals and medieval statuary on every corner. It's like that perceptual blindness test with the invisible gorilla sashaying through the room, only the gorilla is Notre Dame and the room is Paris.

Anyway, the grand benefit of this annual event was that lots of normally-closed historical buildings are open to the public (like the Hôtel de Ville, which from the look of the queue outside would play host to all of the public except poor little me) and admission to every museum in the city was free (which it already is for me, leaving me with very little to lord over the tubby tourists this weekend). I would imagine that it is much the same deal in the other participating cities on this fair continent, except I think Podunk, Holland's program of events couldn't be used as a doorstop. It was, ah,  difficult to decide quite where to begin, so I started at the beginning and went with my gut instinct to the oldest restaurant in Paris.

La Petite Chaise has very not-petite prices, inspired perhaps by its neighbors, Yves-Saint Laurent and Laboutin. Even though the tourguide was ill, the waiter was kind enough to point out the significant features of the restaurant, which turn out to be the barred windows on the outside that date it to the 17th century. So the oldest restaurant in Paris is identifiable because it looks like a prison. Apparently, Louis XIV mandated that all wine-selling establishments "protect" their wares in this manner, leaving me to speculate that the good ol' Sun King just didn't want no sun shinin' on him while he made  insidious purchases.

My companion and I then hopped over the Seine to listen to the dulcet tones of an organ concert in the holy halls of L'Eglise de Sainte Eustache.

Of course, we managed to get lost for ten minutes in the feeding frenzy of Les Halles, which only amplified the splendor of emerging triumphant from a massive mall to find myself faced with an enormous Gothic edifice. I always forget how much I love churches until I step inside. The scale is just overwhelming; somehow enclosing that much open space in vaulting stone makes me all the more aware of how much of it there is. The not-so-secret point of churches is to make you feel really small in the face of god's awesome power, but I'm far more inclined to feel really small in the face of several metric tons of limestone, which some very talented humans saw fit to carve into intricate shapes.

This picture should give you some idea of the size of the place. That teensy little keyboard on the right hooked up to those massive pipes and man, it was more deafening than the bass at a Jay Z concert. I feared for anyone with a pacemaker.

So on the right we have your standard organ, and on the left an orgue de barbarie, or ina  less romantic but possibly more politically correct language, a street organ. I, only ever having played a piano with a paltry 88 keys, was completely put to shame by the dexterity of the organist. Just when I got over the sheer number of keys present, I realized how many buttons there were, and then, how many pedals. Every single one of the wooden slats beneath his feet has a tonal function. Luckily I had a conservatory student with me who could point out all of these features, who also snickered at the delicacy with which the organist clapped, so as to imperil his hands the least.

The orgue de barbarie is much, much easier to play, since I think the only requisite is the ability to turn a wheel at a constant rate. The sheet music does it all, since the little gaps in the paper (which reminded me of computer paper from the nineties) determine how the little mechanical keys sound. Here's a sample, recorded on my camera. I didn't record the larger organ because it probably would have blown out the teeny little microphone.

Sufficiently awestruck, I wandered around the Musée Carnavalet for a bit afterwards, but not being much in the mood for a musuem, amused myself instead with my camera. In lieu of riveting facts about medieval Paris, I present to you a funny picture through stained glass.

I like to imagine that the Sun King dressed his gardeners like cabana boys and sat around his garden with a martini, watching them trim the hedges.

Up next: Paris as musical instrumen, and bike-powered balloons

Decisions, Decisions

I ♥ Caféotheque

I wish that the choices for a good cup of coffee in Paris were like my university options: overwhelming and agonizingly difficult to choose between. Sadly, this is not true, as it is weirdly difficult to find a good cup of the stuff in Paris. After living in Portland for so long, I'm used to rolling out of bed and into the campus café, blindly depositing a platter of banana bread and groping around blindly until the kindly barista hands me a steaming mug. After which I feel more human, and can safely unclench my eyelids and appreciatively suck in the smell of my freshly ground caffeinated savior.

It's a little different here. Coffee is more of a social drink, an excuse to lounge about on the sidewalk, scrutinizing flâneurs and having a spittingly loud argument just for the hell of it. The espresso is just an accessory, always à la mode in its miniature cup and saucer with a side of sugar cubes and speculoos cookies (or truffles, or chocolate, or in the scroogiest joints, just a spoon). The beans tend to come from a childhood of abuse: incinerated, prematurely ground, and then cheaply packaged so whatever essence they have left evaporates into the open air. Indeed, it is a sad life for a coffee bean in Paris.

But there's hope! Multiple rays of hope, actually, in the form of real coffeehouses that have sprung up all over the city. I've been to two so far: Caféotheque, picturesquely located on the north bank of the Seine, and Terres de Café, whose boutique in the Marais is smaller than my bedroom but man, I wish my bedroom smelled like that. My barista friend also brings me tidings of two other cafés that he has visited in the meantime, to which my drug-hungry veins will no doubt carry me in good time.

Caféotheque holds a special place in my heart because the handsome barista (who, immediately spotting my American accent, promptly switched into his native New York English) was kind enough to ground the coffee beans I lovingly cradled in my baggage all the way from Portland. He held up the paper bags for me to sniff appreciatively after each one was ground! He gave me the name (moka) for that Italian stovetop contraption that has been eluding me for months! I am smitten.

In the past week, I've already drunk my way through one bag and am well into the second, thanks to a surfeit of university options. It's hard enough for me to decide at Reed, where my choices are mercifully limited to one college, but here? Here I have my pick of a smorgasbord of universities. There are more courses to choose from than there are varieties of French cheese. But after a weekend of suffering--in which I put my knowledge of number theory to good use and mapped out every possible combination of courses--I emerge triumphant. Check it. Out.

1. Histoire de l'histoire de l'art, in the beautiful brick building of the Centre Michelet of the Sorbonne.
2. Semiotics: the text and the image, at Saint-Dennis, the far-flung university of Foucault fame (and possibly also "Ordinary language and literary language: myth or reality?")
3. The situation of the novel in Europe today
4. Contemporary Spanish cinema: the visualisation of memory (with Pietsie Feenstra!!!)
5. The Nouvelle Vague and film theory
6. A history class at the Sorbonne starting with the Cold War.
7. Oh, and a studio class for painting/drawing.

Yippee!

La Panique du Pain

What I love most about living with a French family is the ritual of having dinner together. It's not just the meal itself that I look forward to--I've decided to adopt the French habit of not eating between lunch and late dinner in the hopes that this is the secret behind the slenderness of gallic women--but the ceremony that this entails. Madame will slice tomatoes while I spin-dry leaves of lettuce, coordinating our movements into a kind of parallel dance around the tiny kitchen as the vinaigrette is mixed, the fish arranged. The clink of ceramic against the table cloth, the methodical placement of knife, fork; couteau, fourchette. The pitcher of water. The glasses, facing upside down until we take our place around the table and conversation unfolds like a tumbling waterfall.

This evening we were joined by the boyfriend of la Soeur du Radio, who is visiting for two weeks before her classes begin again. We were halfway through the salad (tomatoes, mozarella, basil) when we realized, all four of us with little puddles of vinaigrette on our plates, that zut alors! there was no bread. And it was eight thirty! And the boulangeries were closed! But Madame looked so sad, without a piece of bread to wipe her plate clean--That's what I like so much about tomato salad, the vinaigrette left aftwards--that la Soeur and her boyfriend jumped up and flew out the door in search of bread.

I couldn't stop smiling because it was so very French, this love for bread, and it was proof positive that I'm really in Paris. And it's true: when they returned, breathless, with the last baguette in the entire arondissement in hand, that the salad was much better with the promise of crunchy baguette afterwards. Madame certainly thought so.

Wikipedia doesn't lie--it really looks like this. Another thing I learned while ripping this picture off the internet just to make you drool? The article on bread is semi-protected. I blame Atkins.

Monsieur arrived halfway through the fish course, gesticulating wildly about the perils he encountered on his bicycle this afternoon. Then, with a mischievous glint in his eye, Monsieur pantomimed slamming his fist on the table and demanded to know the new words I had learned today, which the entire table assisted in enumerating for him (they are, after all, my round-the-clock professors). It's a certainty I've come to expect, like the cheese course (today, goat cheese dipped in olive oil and Lebanese spices) and the fruit (white peaches and matching pale nectarines) and the chocolate (which Monsieur, gasping theatrically at the presence of cacao nibs and an unfamiliar label, insisted I test for poison first).

Every member of the family is always so enthusiastic in their response to my questions about a new word or an unfamiliar phrase; their interest is always genuine. A question about Tati launches a discussion of Rabelais with Madame, during the course of which I learn that pantagruelesque is used as an adjective. The word oie elicits a comparison of the relative merits of foie gras du canard (duck) and d'oie (goose); the explanation of happée from La Soeur's boyfriend includes sound effects and pantomime. It's so much better than looking up a word in the dry pages of a dictionary: now, whenever I see the word happer, I'm going to see La Soeur, laughing, as her boyfriend grabs her while sucking in air like a vacuum.

And then they sat back down and we launched into a comparison of the styles of Barthes and Deleuze. Paris, vraiment, je t'aime.

Rebonjour!

Let's imagine for a moment that I have kept you up to date about my goings-on this summer and haven't fallen off the face of the earth for weeks and sometimes months at a time to indulge my inner terrible person. This would be a world in which you're in on the fact that I left Portland for my hometown of Washington at the end of August. A world in which I told you all about how I spent my only week at home of eating my way through a world of cuisine instead of, say, cleaning the gutters with my ma. Namaste, chic Indian restaurant as svelte as a Bollywood dancer, and holy moley, authentic Cuban black bean soup, and ay chihuahua, Argentinian gelato that is definitely not consumed by Argentinian models, and heeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyy Thai restaurant run by very gay Thai men who probably also run a massage place round the back for the right genre of customers. Oh, and I probably also would have mentioned the build-your-own-Bloody-Mary bar in Philadelphia. (There were pickled eggs!!!) Maybe we can blame the house-infused applewood-smoked-duck-bacon vodka shot(s...?) for the total absence of this lovely, imaginary world from these pages.

And then I absconded to Paris with a suitcase full of coffee beans and a pillbox of salt for a semester abroad.

Cool, now that we're all caught up, shall we begin?

This is Paris:

Wait, no, wrong one--this is Paris!

[from Yvon's Paris, a marvelous collection of photographs taken at the turn of the century by Pierre Yves-Petit]

And the view is almost that great from my house (although there are fewer gargoyles). I'm staying with a charming French family--I really can't say it any better than the introduction my study abroad program gave me: Both Madame and Monsieur are artists; they live in a beautiful 1930s townhouse with a garden. Monsieur is a sculptor, film editor, and director. Madame smokes a little, but only in the garden. They have two daughters, one of whom lives with them in Paris and is studying literature and theatre. It's a lovely house and a lovely area and they are lovely people and I am in love.

I arrived a week earlier than the official start date of my program, in order to better acclimate myself to a life of lounging by the Seine with a glass of wine dangling from my fingers. Once I'd hopped off the plane and onto French soil with success (if that's what you call wandering around Charles de Gaulle for two hours, dragging three suitcases, searching in vain for the little blue shuttle that would take me to the city), I had to prove to myself that I was really, really in Paris. So I walked all the way down to the Seine.

That's about, oh, three miles. No biggie.

I did my literary forebears proud, though, and begged for a job at Shakespeare and Company; I think I looked like a pretty convincing waif given that I'd been on a plane for seven hours. They weren't, hélas, hiring, but that's okay. I can always volunteer. And just ensure that a little tumbleweed happens to blow right off the prairie. It's precarious, you know, having a bookshop right next to the river. Who knows what could happen! Especially if there is wine involved. And in Paris, there is always wine involved.

Look at those booksellers! They are clearly up to no good, and they are right next to the bookstore. Who knows how many tumbleweeds they have tumbled into the Seine. [Yvon again]

Having satisfied my literary duties, I was finally able to take that leisurely stroll down the Seine that all those guidebooks are always promising. I think they knew I was coming, though, because look what was spread out just for me?

I took the métro home, and had my first real French meal with my new French family. We introduced ourselves over a dinner smoked fish and salad, tearing off pieces of fresh bread to sop up the vinaigrette pooling on our plates. The instant I put down my fork, Monsieur hopped up to the kitchen and swooped back into the dining room with a plate of cheese: a log of chêvre, a wedge of comté, and a curious little wooden box of fromage puant (stinky cheese). A scroll of Gothic letters declares it to be l'Ami de Chambertin--the friend of Chambertin. After cracking a joke about how Chambertin must not like hanging out with his friend all that much given his smell, I learned that Chambertin is actually a kind of wine, and also, that Chambertin has great taste in friends. My family now jokingly refers to me as l'amie de l'ami de Chambertin, but I fear that in the intervening days I have left my friend for Monsieur Roquefort. Parce qu'il est plus fort. Mais oui!

After that course, Monsieur pulled out the bowl of fruit, overflowing with grapes with skins so thin the insides seemed to glow, nectarines the color of the setting sun, and dozens of little green plums. Those Reines-Claude plums are like perfect jewels--so soft! so sweet! I swear, all fruit tastes better on this continent. No wonder the wine is so good.

And just when I thought I had died and gone to heaven, Monsieur whipped out the chocolate bar I'd brought them from Maryland and we finished the evening on the sweet notes of cacao, fleur de sel, and cacao nibs.

So, first week in France? This picture pretty much sums up my feelings so far: