and now for something completely different

This. Is. Hil. ar. ious.

[And when I say "hilarious," you have to hear me saying "hilAIRious" because some people pronounce it "hilAREious" including my French boyfriend but I don't know what backwoods town he learnt his English in because in New York, people, we say hilAIRious and so that's definitive pronunciation as far as I'm concerned.]

Soit. This is a film short starring my beloved friend from my theatrical youth, Alissa Dean. She's a real life professional actress in LA now; tune in to "Without a Trace" on CBS on Sept 24th to see her guest-star as a methhead/stripper/murder accomplice [insert type-casting joke here]. Knowing Alissa as I do, my educated guess is that this is 85% improvised, but bear in mind folks, she is acting and in reality is sharp as a tack. And please don't be offended by the content.




Raise your hand if you think rollerskating should be an Olympic sport, too!

Social equality at the Paris immigration office

Dead of summer in the hôtel de police, all of us foreigners resembling a bunch of rejects from a Benetton casting call, not a single Pepsi pretty among us; the heat causing some of my fellow sufferers to emit a pungent odor-- some the cumin thickness of sweat, some the dark suggestion of badly irrigated bowels. When I was in elementary school and we learned about Ellis Island, I never thought one day I'd experience the (admittedly tamer) French equivalent.

I meant to occupy myself with some photocopies I'd brought along, but was more interested in looking around the room: A funky Asian couple held hands, a couple of Arabs chattered behind me in what even I could tell was a slang version of their language, a group of Africans sat and laughed good-naturedly together in the back row. In front of me, an Asian girl (the writing on her passport looked Thai) and her French boyfriend. I wondered for the millionth time why you always see white guys with Asian girls but very rarely see the opposite (one notable exception being one of my best girlfriends and her half-Asian boyfriend). They spoke in English and she clutched his arm and her Gucci handbag.

There are at least four babies in the room. They start to play a game of call and answer: one says, insistently,"Maman!" Another one behind me says "Maman!" To the right of me another chimes in: "Ba!" A woman in the front row begins to change her baby's diaper, right then and there, on her lap. I am mesmerized. Do they bring them here for sympathy? Is is a calculated political move, to keep the Sarkozys from kicking them out of the country? Or could they simply not spare a sou for a baby sitter?

What a place. I spot an older Asian woman who also sports a Gucci purse. The discrepancy in accessories is telling: Everyone from a country south of France has brought a child to demonstrate their social right to stay in the country; those from countries to the East and West bring their Guccis and Longchamps encoding a different social right, a right of affiliation.

Me, I have my Moleskine and my photocopies. And yes, a tan Longchamp. Selected especially to affiliate and blend.

"Vingt-sept!" A woman calls my number after having rapidly called out 25 and 26, whose owners are either not present or too slow. I gather up my papers and head toward the window.

"Move, move!" the Africans in the back joke. "I'm movin', I'm movin'!" I joke back.

The woman behind the desk begins to admonish me for being too slow when she spies my number card and interrupts herself. "You're not mauve! You're green!" Caught out like a Nader supporter at a Red State convention: I am sent back to my seat. Apparently there's a color-coded system that I have broken. I mutter and curse in English under my breath.

So much for affiliating and blending.

Fairly soon, I hear something that makes sense (for the first time since arriving at the precinct). "I've been waiting for two hours," a man's voice rose up angrily. "How long are you going to make me wait? I have a child with me!"

Aha, I thought. The kids are here to try to speed up the process!

I am "next" for the next hour. When I finally emerge from the police station, two hours have elapsed. Fair is fair. It doesn't matter if you have a child or a boyfriend with you, whether you smell like shit or Annick Goutal, whether you're white, black, green or mauve: you still have to sweat for two hours in the police station along with all the other immigrants.

Travel tip #389

When visiting a small medieval town, such as Mirepoix in Southwest France, keep in mind that if there’s a market happening Monday morning, you should not park your car in the parking lot they’re using for it on Sunday evening. Not if you want to use your car that Monday morning, say, to go to the larger medieval town of Carcassonne. Because no one, not even the concierge of the fabulous Relais et Chateaux hotel you’re staying in, will be able to help you once a merchant has set up her woven straw bags behind your vehicle, gone off for awhile, and left her spiteful, leathery friend to watch over her stand-- a charming woman who will threaten to call the police on you every time you come within range of the car, alerting everyone in the surrounding area that you are the jackasses who parked your car in the middle of the market.

When this happened to us, this past weekend, rather than fighting with her, we slouched off to see the rest of the stands, feeling terrifically stupid for not thinking ahead, annoyed that our time was being wasted. We tried to make up for the delay by throwing ourselves into the carnivalesque atmosphere of the market. Some matching headgear was purchased, I do verily admit it, as well as half of a watermelon and one of those wood-handled pocket knives that every Frenchman I’ve ever met uses to slice saucisson lors d’un apréro.

market day in Mirepoix

Finally, when the appointed end of the market rolled around, we made our way back to our car, sporting our new matching straw hats (looking incredibly obnoxious I’m sure), toting our melon. Still no sign of the proprietor of the bags, but her friend was there and all riled up, practically hopping from foot to foot in her readiness for a fight.

“Don’t run your car over the bags, don’t even think about it!” she began to taunt us. I turned slowly to look at her. “Do you honestly think we would back over them?” I asked in a derisory voice. “What are you, nuts?”

That’s the thing about French merchants and bureaucrats when they’ve got their fight on: they will always have a comeback for you, and it will be more tauntingly immature than whatever it is you have just said to them. She sniped at us, Nicolas sniped back, we opened our car doors to air it out a bit, she walked around closing them one at a time. I just watched her, mouth agape, shaking my head.

Suffice it to say, the scene ended with our anger mounting, her gap-toothed smile widening, us physically moving the bags out of the way, and their owner magically appearing at that exact moment telling us we weren’t allowed to touch her stuff. Somehow Nicolas managed to back the car out, through the obstacle course of straw bags and French hags, and we sped off to Carcassonne for the day. As we left them behind, I must add that in addition to our hats, we wore matching smirks.

approaching Carcassonne

More pictures here

"Paris, je t'aime"

Let's talk about the film, shall we? I was extremely anxious to see it, as I had a similar idea for a novel I'll write when I finish the current one and the one lined up after it; I emerged from the theater feeling deeply relieved that while more than one person can have a similar idea, the execution really will be totally different. I'm not going to share anymore of my idea now, because I don't want anyone to steal it! (hey, I've already had my blog plagiarized.) But I do want to talk a bit about the film: what was great, what was less great, and what it achieved.

What was great: the mimes.

What was less great: the weird Porte de Choisy sequence.

What it achieved: the fetishization of a red trenchcoat.

Ok, that was easy.

But seriously. What struck me was that the film took up the most mythologized theme in the most mythologized modern city-- love in Paris-- and deconstructed it in a number of different scenes all playing out around the city, featuring different people from different backgrounds experiencing a panoply of different shades of love. The mosaic of the film deconstructed the monolithic idea Western culture has of Paris as the city of love-- nowhere more brilliantly than in the "Tuileries" sequence [what, by the way, is with French men and ass-slapping? not that I'm complaining!] and attempted to give a richer and more quotidian portrait of both the city and the sentiment.

So in a sense, the film worked against the mythology of Paris. But then, if this is the case, why the filler shots of Paris at dawn, Paris at dusk, Paris at night, Paris with fireworks?

I think one possible answer is suggested at the end, when different scenes from the film are tiled over the shot of the Eiffel Tower doing the shimmy-- as if the two visual layers are working in counterpoint, the myriad "realities" laid over the myth-- which is itself a reality which occurs every night on the hour. Until, of course, they turn out the lights on the monuments at two am. That's when the vampires and Frodo come out.

One drawback, I thought, was that although the film was as much about Paris as it was about the individual characters, very few of the sequences actually used the tangible Paris neighborhood they were set in. Some did this brilliantly-- I'm thinking of the Place des Victories scene, with its statue of Louis XV [?] rearing on his charger and the centrality of cowboys to the story, or the bas-relief deer and fawn carved on the statue in the Place des fetes, against which the African man slumps after being stabbed in the street, innocent of any crime, a victim of the forest's predators.

My own project will interact much more with the physicality of the city, and the way one's experience of it constructs, remakes, reshapes one's soul-- profoundly, sure, but also on a very immediate level. The way places change according to our experience of them, and our emotional proximity to them, and the other way round.

"Paris je t'aime" gestured at this, and certainly came close to it in each sequence, but the producers were ultimately content simply to evoke twenty different neighborhoods in a way that would enlighten someone whose knowledge of Paris is limited to the tourist attractions, and to render nostalgic those of us with a more intimate knowledge of the city.

One last note: I think if I were still living in the States, frustrated and longing to move to Paris, seeing this film would have put me over the edge. Good thing I'm already here.

commedia dell'arte in berlin

Nasty Italian coach: (thinks to himself) Hmm, things are not going so well, the score is tied and we're in the second overtime, if we go into penalty kicks, w we have no chance, because Zidane and Barthez are such a winning combination. We have to wrap this up now... Aha! I have it. (Whispers something to Materazzi)

(Materazzi gets close enough to call Zidane a number of expletives, one of which is clearly heard to be "terrorist!")

(Zidane responds with a dramatic head butt)

Materazzi: Aieee! Che cazzo! I die!! (falls to ground, writhing in pain, clutching his knee)

The Narrator, a serveuse de bar wearing a slinky referee's outfit paired with a crazy multicolored clown wig in bleu, blanc et rouge, steps forward, waving a glittery wand.

Narrator: Two households, both alike in dignity (though not in skill)
In fair Berlin, where we lay our scene
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny
Where bad blood makes footballer's hands unclean.
The Italian coach did seeth and did taketh his opportunity
to remove the head from the French body politic
Thus removing all reason from the remaining team
Distracted, dispairing,
lamenting the displacèd Zidane.

Oh, woe is you, most foul Materazzi
And you, Italian coach whose name escapes me
But woe of woes to the Frenchman who
in the throes of passion
cannot keep his hotted head from butting
thus ending a noble career
in the ignominy of a carton rouge.

Exeunt.

attack of the little green bugs

Last night was an odd night on the rue Mouffetard.

Nicolas came home from work around 8:30. Halfway through the door, he demanded, "did you see them? did you see them?"

"Who??" I asked, my voice rising to match his pitch of excitement.

"The bugs! they're all over the place! Look!"

We went to the window, and sure enough, it looked like a shower of golden dust was slowly wafting its way down from the heavens. Here, there, and everywhere-- little specks of light-colored insects giving the optical illusion that they were hanging suspended, when in fact the breeze was shifting them around. They dominated the air space as far as the eye could see in both directions.

I emitted a sound of disgust. "They weren't out when I came home before! Is this some kind of seasonal phenomenon that happens every four years or something, like caterpillars?" Memories flooded in of being a five year-old at Ivy League day camp on Long Island and shrieking my head off every day when I had to step off the bus and out into the forest, where every black line on the ground inched its furry body around, climbed trees, fell from trees into my hair, crawled inside my clothes, squished under my feet. If I'm not mistaken, that infestation was back in the summer of '83.

Nicolas just shook his head. "Dunno. Let's go eat."

We headed over to the nearby Italian place (Nona Ines-- if you're ever in this neighborhood, go there) and, since the heat was starting to break, took a table on the terrasse. I knew it was a mistake as soon as we sat down, but there was no more room outside. The bugs were everywhere. One led a kamikaze mission into my eyeball. I say kamikazi because I killed it, my hand flying up instinctively to protect mysely from the light foreign contact, but it probably didn't want to die. I wiped its carcass on the sheet of paper on the table and inspected it. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just a little green winged creature. Pretty harmless. I felt mean for squashing it.

Over the course of the meal, I began to feel less badly; though the bugs were dissipating, they weren't exactly harmless. The food chain was in full swing: I ate my beef carpaccio, the little green bugs ate me. They began with my shoulder, somewhat bony but dressed with a lovely Acqua di Parma almond-scented oil. My elbows, both of them. Then they got fresh, flying inside my tank top, down my cleavage, and devoured the place where my underwire meets my ribcage.

The cheeky bastards. If they come out again tonight it's war.

When we came home we leaned out the first-floor window, looking down at the passersby. (That's right folks, look your best when you saunter down the rue Mouffetard, because there's a good chance Nicolas and I are above your head making fun of your outfit.) There was a storm moving in, and thunder somewhere far off, but the light was spectacular; it was ten o'clock at night but the light was tinted orange instead of blue. We both pulled out our cameras and snapped away.

qu'est-ce que c'est qu'un trope?

I've had some questions as to what I meant by "troping" in my last entry. Here's what the American Heritage Dictionary says:

Trope:
NOUN:
1. A figure of speech using words in nonliteral ways, such as a metaphor.
2. A word or phrase interpolated as an embellishment in the sung parts of certain medieval liturgies.

ETYMOLOGY:
Latin tropus, from Greek tropos, turn, figure of speech. See trep-.

Basically, a trope is a motif, a theme, an idea, something which gets repeated and re-represented in different contexts. To use it as a verb, "to trope," is to fall into the kind of academic jargon that separates academic criticism from mainstream criticism; very unlikely you'll ever hear Michiko Kakutani use it as a verb, but a Google search of "troping" turned up essays like "Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette and Performance," "Troping History: Modernist Residue in Frederic Jameson's Pastiche and Linda Hutcheon's Parody," and "Troping Toussaint, Reading Revolution."

On Paris Breakfasts, Carol picked up on what a range of seemingly unrelated objects had in common-- color or form-- and brought them into a kind of coherence by creating relationships between them. It's very obvious when she's working with something like cherries, but more subtle when, in this entry for instance, we see the troping of circular metal, industrial but shown always in a soft Paris morning light-- in which there is something almost metallic.

I don't know-- it's something that announces itself to me on a very intuitive level and it can be difficult to get it into (non-jargon) words.

Nothing to see here;

everything to see here.

I'm mid-move and have so much I want to blog about (experiences renting the apartment, the move itself, "Paris je t'aime," Al Gore on The Daily Show) but am too busy/tired to attend to any of those topics. So I encourage you to go see the brilliant happenings at (once more for the slowpokes) Paris Breakfasts-- Carol is doing the kind of troping with forms and colors and calligraphy that makes my heart speed up and wish I could spend more time working with visuals rather than as well as words... what she's doing on her blog these days is sort of the visual equivalent of what I do as a literary critic, looking for the colors, commonalities and contrasts in vocabulary, colors, shading, ideas, representations, articulations, rhythms among one work, several works, one author, several authors. It's feeling the way things work together rather than seeing them, and then trying to get that into words.

Anyway.