Drownout France

Scenes and Dreams from September

For the last four weeks, I took a French conversation class that started at 8.30am. The result, no dawdling and necessarily less blogging for all y'all. But on the night of September 28th, I dreamt that I attended a cocktail party and discussed various matters in French. The dream played out in French. I think I can now officially claim to have passed a milestone. Some pictures and commentaries on some of what has passed.

Eiffel Tour. Sept.

They didn't have to put in these flourishes when they built the Eiffel tower. In fact, much of the beaux-arts riffing is the source of this thing's elegance and delicacy. Compare this, for example, to the minimalist austerity of American construction and in particular the most famous grand scale work such as the Verrazano Narrows (only a few heart-breaking feet longer than the immaculate Sydney Harbor bridge at opening) or the Golden Gate bridge.

And Foucault. Sept.

Monge is the 19th C scientist who recorded the quote from Napoleon, roughly "I have followed in the path of Alexander but would rather have followed the steps of Newton." There are names winding all round the first level of the Tour Eiffel, and so too at many great European buildings (rarely seen in the US, but notice the exceptions at libraries such as Low Library at Columbia or even some of the public libraries in SF).

Public spirit. Sept.

Raising money for the flood-damaged regions of the South, a spectacle of dead wine-vines at the Tour. (PS "Le Tour" = a tour; "La Tour" = a tower; hence La Tour Eiffel and Le Tour de France.)

Latest tourist attraction. Sept.

This is where Diana died. Notice Liberty's torch just above, not memorializing Diana ("candle in the wind"?), but rather marking the start of the Avenue de New York, which runs right up to the Trocadero, across from the Tour. Of all the underground highway passes along the Seine, this is one of very few (maybe the only one) that has those columns in the middle. Diana surely passed several other tunnels without such columns. Unlucky at the Avenue de New York.

Antiques. Sept.

The Old World still exists unreconstructed in the passages. This is a curiosity shop off the main drag of Rivoli near the Louvre/Palais Royal.

Kenne-dix! Sept.

The Kennedys spend a lot of time on TV here; a documentary on the life and death of JFK Jr. Recently, Marilyn and JFK, and another one on Jackie O.

Propreté Sept.

This still astonishes me. A state agent taking care of the street below my window.

Moz coming up!

We are all getting excited, aren't we?

Boz's tour diary
David Tseng's noble site

Tonight's concert takes place on the anniversary of James Dean's death.

9m 11s 01f

The film that kicked up the dust at Venice is now in wide release in Paris, the one which invited 11 different directors to present 11 minute 9 second 01 frame shorts about Sept 11.

You've already heard that some of these pieces grate on American viewers, and that's probably because that is how you make "news" out of a heterogenous collection of sensitive, passionate films.

Here's what they were about (I don't remember all the director's name, save a few):

Iran - On the morning of September 11th a schoolteacher out in the dry, bare countryside tries to round up her young students (already working hard at a construction site at 8am) for the day's lesson. She tries to tell them what has happened in the USA, two towers have fallen down. The children find it impossible to imagine, and find themselves distracted by theology. "God does not kill people like that. It could not have been God that did it," one says. Another answers, "Yes he does; it is so he can make new people."

France - A deaf woman has a spat with her lover on the morning before she is to depart him and New York for home. He leaves the house, she sits in her silent world all the morning long, composing her angry goodbye letter. He comes back, covered in soot. He asks, crying, "Didn't you see the television?"

Egypt - The controversial one but cast in a striking classical narrative, where the author/director is visited by the ghost of an American soldier from the Beirut bombing--his muse, on the day he returns shellshocked to Egypt from a project in New York on 9/12.They debate politics, and visit a Palestinian bomber's family and also the ghost of the bomber himself. The soldier talks about his innocence, and the young Lebanese woman he loved. The director counts off the lives lost in American campaigns of the last 50 years, such as civilians killed during the Vietnam War or victims of US puppet regimes during the Cold War. Why shouldn't civilians be targets, he says, if they are the voters in a democracy that support oppression?

Bosnia - The widows of Srebrenica make their protest for justice every 11th, not that anyone cares much about them, especially on this awful September 11th. They march this time not in spite of the events but because of it, to remember their husbands and all the victims.

Burkina-Faso - A kid, living in poverty and with his mother dying, must drop out of school and sell papers to support himself. On the cover of the paper: "$25 million bounty on Bin Laden". He and his chums go chasing foolishly after some guy who looks like Bin Laden; imagine what good they could do with that money, they say.

UK - A victim of the US-orchestrated coup against the democratically elected communist President Allende of Chile in 1973 recalls the horrors. Kissinger greeting Pinochet after his henchman had slaughtered more than 30,000 civilians. Also a September 11th to remember.

Mexico - A sincere film that takes on the shock of the events themselves. Pitch black screen with first the sounds of murmur, chants or perhaps indigenous peoples' prayers; a rising intensity of the sound over a period of minutes, then suddenly flashes of imagery: bodies falling from the towers. Black screen, the sound of thuds, a punctuation of blindingly bright falling bodies. Like the rining telephone on the soundtrack of Kubrick's Apocaplypse Now, the frenzy rises as we hear furious callers into radio shows demanding blood and hear the last words of victims recorded on answering machines.

Israel - A bomb has just exploded on a crowded street and emergency responders swing into action. First a close up a soldier screaming into his radio and defusing a bomb, trying to maintain order. Then a med who arrives and starts directing the chaos. The scene starts filling up with onlookers, a woman on rollerblades, meds, soldiers, everything. Then the reporter shows up, absurd and vain, preening in front of her camera and bringing it live. Jostled around she's trying to get the story, get in the way, and at the same time convince the station to run her feed. They bump her -- bigger news unfolding in New York. At which point she kicks up an absurd meta-narrative stream of historical citations from 9/11s past: Churchill meets Roosevelt, 1944, to divide up fallen Germany...etc. This aspect I found most bizarre and perhaps my French failed me (soundtrack was in Hebrew with French subtitles).

India - Mira Nair zooms in on a Brooklyn muslim family who's son goes missing on 9/11, gets investigated for being a terrorist, and is finally discovered at the site: he must have gone down there to help, and died. A hero, but the racist charge of terrorism stings.

USA - Sean Penn's sentimental piece places a huge, pitiable Ernest Borgnine in a dark, one room hovel talking to the place where his now dead wife used to sleep. Reminded me of Aaronofsky's Requiem for a Dream. On 9/11, the towers come down and at that moment, sunlight finally streams into his dank apartment. The rays magically revive a dead rose plant, and the man in tears finally wakes from his sleepwalk, realizing that his wife is dead and gone.

Japan - A young man returned from WW2 slithers around like a serpent, gone insane from what he had seen in the war. The village is mystified, but the filmmaker flashes back to his moment of cowardice and loss-of-face during the war, and we know that war is always a miserable thing.

--

One comment: the majority of films are critical of something American: not the American response to 9/11 per se. They sympathize with the grief. But what shocks them is massive ignorance of the mourners -- these special people act as if nobody suffers, as if nobody has died, and as if nobody could possibly dislike the Americans for their good and honest works in the world. Excepting the French and Mexican films, that treat the disaster itself as a shocking event, nearly every other film highlights dimensions of world suffering and misery that go essentially un-noticed in America. Some take the further step of accusing American of propagating horrors, like in Chile.

Striking was the US take: intensely sentimental, interior, personal, empty. Critical, in a way, by saying that the disaster was a kind of wake up call. But at the same time ignorant of context, politics, consequences, suffering. And in a way this is true. In America, we have not thought about the attack as having context. There is not larger world of facts -- there is a pain, and the enemy that caused it. So there is no scope for examining how American policy or other world events could turn people against us; it is simply a question of evil.

La Girafe and Enlightenment

A book I will recommend to you is Michael Allin's "Zarafa", the story of how a young female giraffe travelled from the Sudan to delighted reception in Paris as the beautiful African stranger that she was. (Michael Allin also wrote the screenplay for Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon", amazingly enough.)

One gripping theme is the character of Napoleon's brilliant and foolhardy expedition against British interests in India via Egypt (where he proposed to conquer his way to Delhi, take the British Empire's jewel, and thereby defeat his foes without having to contest their sea power). Military history, surely, but also (and quite by accident) the first tentacle of European Enlightenment to set its foot on the backwards Orient.

In one direction, we all know well the story of bold explorers, rationalist ideas from the century of humanism, and American Revolution.

In another direction, we know well the opening shot of European upheavals signaled by the overthrow of the Bourbon kings in France and the ensuing waves that constructed Occidental political modernity over the course of the 19th century.

In a third direction we are familiar, post hoc, with post-colonialist ideas. These days we call Americans imperialists for pushing their politics (and self-interest) on everybody, and that's more or less the problem with all colonialism.

But I, for one, have not much thought about the unfolding of colonialism as an event intertwined with the very flourishing of intellectual movements in Europe itself. To be sure, this is one of the world's great hypocrisies seen in retrospect: as the French were declaring the "Rights of Man" and British having Glorious Revolutions, their troops and navies were enslaving millions of people and not at all to their betterment. India can thank Britain for the railroads, but that's really about it and not worth the cost.

So what did the lumieres think of themselves, as they went off and plundered worlds far off?

De Las Casas, for example, was arguing for a while already that native peoples had souls (since the 16th century). And contemporary arguments to that effect resulted in the abolition of slavery in the First French Republic for example.

What is interesting, however, is to think of Napoleon and his army of 30,000 men accompanied by the 250 greatest savants of the time -- experts in engineering, anthropology, biology, philosophy, languages, and so on. He took an army of scientists with him, to study and give counsel as he conducted his long campaign. He, himself, held the chair of mathematics on their counsel (awarded to him by their vote, and so honored by it that he never missed a meeting). Napoleon said, surveying the Mocattam quarries of the Pyramids, "I found myself a conqueror in Europe like Alexander; it had been more to my liking to march in the footsteps of Newton." While there, the little genius also converted to Islam (for political reasons) and wore a turban.

When the British fleet swooped in and destroyed the French fleet of 400 ships, left waiting for his return, Napoleon was trapped with his army on the wrong side of the Mediterranean. To attend to instability back home, Napoleon ran the British blockade with a few of his closest military and scientific advisors, essentially abandoning his army behind him.

The remaining army of scientists set to work inventing Egyptology. The greatest men of science of the age, all assembled in the exceedingly foreign and strange land of the pharaohs did it all -- collected animals and insects, recorded movements of the Nile, surveyed the feasibility of a canal to the Indian Ocean, investigated the tombs and pyramids, and so on.

Though the army was eventually defeated by the Ottomans and the British, the scientific contingent was not.

Egyptology, the blooming science that followed, was the bold new domain of the day. On their modernizing missions, they were studying the ancient and bizarre lands they encountered with the curiosity they had applied to planets and chemicals.

The adventuring general of the French Republic with his scientists and counselors, exporting the values and methods of Enlightenment-- it is really a charming image of Napoleon.

Our Lady of Angels

They have opened the grand Cathedral in Los Angeles (beating St. John the Divine in NY though they had a 100 year lead, though not beating Rockefeller's Skyscaper Church on Morningside). They did the Getty and soon will come Disney Hall. All in all, a bold statement from our highwaymen cousins.

So what does Paris have to offer, in the urbanism and architecture department?

Bertrand Delanoë is, at the moment, having a "big think" about the fate of automobiles in this fine city. In a few weeks, all downtown will close to them for a day. Symbolic only, but part of a larger pattern.

Here is a list of big sites here in Paris.

First one that is not a piece of architecture but a paradigm of urbanism: Haussman's boulevards, and all the rest. I really must read a book about this man (and about Le Corbusier, I think) since Paris from the ground up is his construction and dedication to Napoleon III. So much of what is lovely is due to this Napoleon, isn't it?

What follows, both the sites and a checklist (courtesy of Great Buildings Online):

Bibliotheque Ste. Genevieve, by Henri Labrouste, at Paris, France, 1843 designed, built 1845 to 1851. - haven't seen it.

Bibliotheque Nationale, by Henri Labrouste, at Paris, France, 1862 to 1868. - called the Richeliu. See previous entries for my thoughts on architecture as theory of mind (the grand domed reading rooms are, essentially, Cartesian minds).

Castel Beranger, by Hector Guimard, at Paris, France, 1890 (circa). - not yet.

Centre Pompidou, by Rogers and Piano, at Paris, France, 1972 to 1976. -- brilliant if you ask me and the building that tells you Paris means business when it comes to rejuvenation, modernism, heterodoxy, and so on.

Eiffel Tower, by Gustave Eiffel, at Paris, France, 1887 to 1889.-- a great looking thing, but consider the very idea of putting up that colossus to shadow over the beautiful 6-story beaux-arts avenues that Haussman had just finished building.

Finnish Pavilion, 1937, by Alvar Aalto, at Paris, France, 1935 to 1937. -- not yet.

Hotel Guimard, by Hector Guimard, at Paris, France, 1912. -- not yet.

Hotel de Beauvais, by Antoine le Pautre, at Paris, France, 1656. -- not yet.

L'Institut du Monde Arabe, by Jean Nouvel, at Paris, France, 1987 to 1988. -- This building, from the outside, will remind you of the World Trade Center. That is, the Arabesque density of abstraction along the surface walls. Apparently there is some ultra-cool solartropic stuff on one of the walls, but I must go see this.

La Grande Arche, by Johann Otto von Spreckelsen, at Paris, France, 1982 to 1990. -- This is, in my opinion, a masterstroke that inaugurates La Defense and its experiment in Skyscaper urbanism just off the western border of Paris. It's a powerful, spare, and historically-resonant itself, though one may not love the mini-city they built around it.

La Sainte-Chapelle, by unknown, at Paris, France, 1238 to 1244. -- This is a rich, petite masterpiece, the private church of the King on the Ile de la Cite.

Le Parisien Offices, by G. P. Chedanne, at Paris, France, 1903. -- not even sure what this is.

Magasin au Bon Marche, by L. A. Boileau and Gustave Eiffel, at Paris, France, 1876. -- Alright, if you must know. But the grocery store in there is amazing! Forget Dean & Deluca or Wholefoods. Seriously, I'm not just doing the ex-pat hamming it up thing.

Maison de Verre, by Bijvoet and Chareau, at Paris, France, 1927 to 1932. -- My friend Frank recommends it highly; privately owned, but I shall visit it.

Maisons Jaoul, by Le Corbusier, at Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris, France, 1954 to 1956. -- Outside Paris. Not gonna see it.

Musee d'Orsay, by Gae Aulenti, at Paris, France, 1980 to 1987. -- Probably the single greatest "renewal" project I have ever seen. The fabulous old train station, scheduled for demolition, re-appropriated into a massive art museum. But it's not a great museum space, like the Guggenheim. There is just too much, too good architecture there to keep concentrated.

Notre Dame Cathedral, by Maurice de Sully, at Paris, France, 1163 to 1250. -- You know it well. Again, though, this building makes me think of those apartment houses on Morningside Drive near Columbia -- haute beaux everything with a few extra statues of gargoyles to boot. Seems crass, but that's why baroque means what it does.

Ozenfant House and Studio, by Le Corbusier, at Paris, France, 1922. -- not yet.

Paris Metro Entrances, by Hector Guimard, at Paris, France, 1899 to 1905. -- You may have heard about the Surrealist obsession with Praying Mantises and how these Metro entrances resemble them. The idea that those guys had anything to do with any public works is shocking. Imagine Pollock designing the US currency or something? Impossible. Well, not in France.

Paris Opera, by Charles Garnier, at Paris, France, 1857 to 1874. -- really overwhelming. Outside of this building is just too much.

Pyramide du Louvre, by I. M. Pei, at Paris, France, 1989. -- Wow is this thing a hit. But the riff on it in the quad in front of Schermerhorn is not nearly as good. Again, see earlier posts.

Rue Franklin Apartments, by Auguste Perret, at Paris, France, 1902 to 1904. -- not yet.

St. Antoine Hospital Kitchen, by Henry Ciriani, at Paris, France, 1983 to 1985. -- not yet.

St. Louis des Invalides, by Jules Hardouin Mansart, at Paris, France, 1676 to 1691. -- Really an impressive thing.

The Louvre, by Pierre Lescot, at Paris, France, 1546 to 1878. -- You know it, it's rad. Really, really big. Really big.

USSR Pavilion at Paris, by Konstantin Melnikov, at Paris, France, 1925. -- not yet.

Weekend house by Corbu, by Le Corbusier, at suburb of Paris, France, 1935. -- outside of Paris.

Parks of Paris

The Luxembourg Gardens have little if anything to do with Luxembourg the country. They feel about the size of Luxembourg, though, which is to say enormous if you consider they are just smack dab in the center of Paris. They are, by turns, the grounds surrounding the French Senate building, a manicured park of flowers and fountains, the premiere destination for mothers with children seeking sandboxes or pony rides or tennis, shaded places to lie in the grass, the home of one of Paris's several copies of the Statue of Liberty, also home to several Rodins, and on and on. For example, Wednesday afternoon, it appears a girls' school chooses to run its girls through the park as part of their occasional exercise regimen.

You can really tell it's France, when you watch the girls running by. Legs covered, no shorts. This seemed bizarre for a warm day. Some even in jeans. While many wore creditably athletic-looking pants, the overall impression was of a team of perfume sales counter girls running from one assignment to another. Figure hugging tops in stripes, tasteful patterns, and sometimes buttoned shirts. Not the usual sporting logos. On the contrary, there was one girl wearing a sweater set.

I remember smallish cotton shorts and t-shirts emblazoned with the school mascot (at my school, a Peglegged Dutchman) designed perhaps to ease the pursuit of escaped students.

The french girls seemed cooperative--none were dodging off into bushes, even though they were put to the humiliation of running through a crowded park full of businessmen, tourists, and little old ladies, at lunchtime.

Hector Was the First of the Gang

Classicists, all

Patroklus was, in fact, the first of the gang to die, to stir Achilles, and to be remembered for just that one dimension of loyalty. Hektor doesn't die till much later, and then he doesn't leave the scene until he has been dragged around the city like an anonymous American soldier in Somalia three thousand years later.

But the double-meaning of "Hector" the gang-banger subtends both epic tragedy and modern marketing. Oye, Moz has got a Mexican fan base in SoCal. The change of location has fueled a rennaissance in Morrissey's material: the sound increasingly American, the content increasingly transposed from the Irish gangsters on Mancunian streets to Bengalis in London and finally to Mexicans in East LA.

In fifteen days: Morrissey at the Olympia in Paris. Worth the airfare all on its own, chums.

Inscrutable: why Moz has yet again skipped the East Coast on a non-album support tour. He is becoming a jam band, in some ways (no albums, "frequent" touring).

Cincinnatus and the Vulgarized Enlightenment

One myth of the new republic came from George Washington's great hero, Cincinnatus, the Roman soldier-statesman who answered the call of patria but longed to return home to his beloved country birthplace. This was a pervasive ideal in early America, witness Jefferson's Monticello or his slave-holding exploits. Can you imagine a modern President literally running a farm? No, but you certainly feel urged to do it from the Founding Fathers and this call to government by the demos (people) is evident in the structure of our early governmental structure. All that changed starting in the middle 20th century, of course, as we mandarinized the profession of governmental function, but the Founder's envisaged system was an elegant and minimalist expression of citizen-statesman. The government did not stay in session year round so men could travel the great distances to their home districts and tend to their personal affairs. Now they do this traveling to press the flesh. But the myth prevails as Jimmy Carter still gets called a peanut farmer, Ronald Reagan passes his catatonia on a Western set, and George Bush junior gets press for vacationing on his hot and miserable desert ranch.

A resilient expression of this founding myth in modern culture is the presidential argot of "crawfishing", "wheedling" and even turns of phrase like recent memory's "when a turtle gets up on a fence post". Everyone knows America is an anti-intellectual society. Be suspicious of anyone more educated than you: they are probably communists.

It is predictable enough that this model of the "hardest working man in politics"--the regular guy, who's not so smart or slick, but from your part of the world, and who just fights for every vote--has made its way elsewhere around the world. Chino pants and the first-name basis have traveled from California companies to the German and British bankers, and with it have come some similar frameworks of values. The Americanization of world culture is the dispensation with formalities and the love good healthy competition. A fair fight above all, best efforts from all sides, no punches pulled and no cheating off your neighbor. But in the end everybody's chums.

America's Empire is more than a cultural dominion, but a real expression of a military and economic wingspan that touches every market and government in the world. This is now a familiar observation, and the parallels with the Pax Romana have been noted, along with the Gallic dissent that seems to grate on their straight-talking outre-Atlantic allies.

When Bush came calling to Paris this summer, an American reporter in the press corps directed a question to Chirac. Bush's reaction was contemptful: how dare someone speak french in front of him? There could not be a better contrast on this occasion than with Chirac. It was only a few weeks later that he avoided an assassin's bullet, riding in a parade, to be delivered minutes later into a live, televised interview with the country's three leading news anchors -- the first since his re-election and one where he faced directly a serious litany of questions on an unfolding political scandal. On this occassion, Chirac was dressed impeccably, like the resident of Faubourg St. Honoré he is, and spoke an oralized prose that assembled words into sentence and sentences into paragraphs and those into whole masses of coherent ideas on issues ranging from Islamicism to poverty to the right-wing and America.

Chirac is known as a slick politician, but the expectation is what's important. French politicians as a class are expected to speak a language of neutral and universal comprehensibility. Rather than identifying an educated french with incomprehensibility, excesses subtility, and nuance, the high french of les hommes politiques is the single comprehensible language appropriate for the body politic. Chirac is not by any means a soldier, farmer or business man (the ex-CEO, the modern American version of the citizen-statesman myth). He is a professional politician, a product of a government-operated group of schools for educating the Administrative Class and a lifetime politician. The political process makes no forced effort to express a distaste for the very business that sustains it.

You would expect this attitude from a culture that takes a principle source of pride its role in originating the very principles of government, liberty, civil society, and sociality that gave rise to the modern liberal democracies around the world. The Marquis de Lafayette was America's first great borrowed Frenchman and the Bourbons supplied money too, later still de Tocqueville would come to reflect on what nation was becoming, but at the founding moments the French influence was even deeper. The enormous influence of the French Enlightenment thinkers, Les Lumieres, is everywhere throughout the birth of the American state and its fundamental liberties. One should be careful not to overstate this -- Locke is the author of "life, liberty and property", the words that were gussied up to open the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence -- but Englightenment project crystallized in France, with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Encyclopedists, and ultimately the political movements and leadership the led to the French Revolution (largely a follow-on of the inspiring American Democracy installed after the American Revolution).

France's post-Revolution arrangements continue to be significant, but it's worth noting that the systematically bureaucratic (bureaucracy is a french word) approach ante-dates the "rationalization" of the system, with the enormous nation-wide system of administrators existing even before Louis XIV. France suffered a disorganized nation-hood since the very beginning, Charlemagne being the first French emperor, but it hardly compares to the domestic disorder that continued in the UK even into the 20th century, and the other very recent European states built in the 19th century. France as a political entity has been around a while, centralizing around the city-state Paris and organizing a massive national governmental momentum.

In the early achievement of centralization, the French achieved the blueprint for the rise of nation-states. In carrying the fire of Enlightenment, the basic doctrines to underlie modern rights and political theory. They can't seem to digest it though. Long after the founding of the basic modernist frameworks of minimal, republican states, the French have become in this century Marxist, then welfare states. The role of the state as instrument of sociality is immense.

Not so in the US. The land that inherited a one-shot endowment of life, liberty, and property is still offerring nothing more than freedom from tyranny. Why should it? But in so doing it has airlocked the founding myths. Not developed there in the first place, they sit in the collective history like inviolable concepts from sacred origins. The French are on their fifth republic. The British have been constantly evolving their mechanisms of state since the Glorious Revolution in 1688. The Europeans, bound up with their heritage, struggle with and against their products. The Americans preach the religion of converts. And like the reflective, deliberative Greeks, the Europeans have fallen out of the path of the enormous economic and military might of the grand Western Empire. The question: will this democratic republic end up like the Roman? And is it better to overgrow and collapse in decay, or is it better to simply fade away? The French seem condemned to the Greek's fate. Maybe America is condemned to Rome's.

Fashion Alert: Greed is Good

Fidelius, that noble knave and faithful scribe, has passed unto me a morsel, most delectable, of news de la mode. Wake up, Gordon Gecko, your wardrobe is back.

It's funny how you just suddenly see patterns out there in the world. I have seen: broad-shouldered, navy-colored suit jackets with wide-spaced gray-pinstripes. Add that to the trenchcoats and you have a full-blown preppy-at-the-office look to rock contra those ratty punks you can't bear to imitate.

Winding Up, Checking Out

Well, world, I'm winding up this blog. I still notice lots of things every day and have lots of things to put up here--but it's getting to be too much. Perhaps I return to this later. But we're officially past the three month tour of duty you were promised. We're staying in Paris a bit longer now, but it's going to be un-narrated.