Drownout France

Notes From the USA

Things are rarely simple and blogging your sojourns isn't either. I'm out of France, back in NY, and that should be that. Yet the possibility of spending a few more months there has returned. Maybe I'll spark up this blog again sometime.

Until then, though, this travelogue is done. Hope you've enjoyed it. There are lots of nice archived entries organized sensibly here on the left of the page.

It's funny because I think I lost perspective towards the end. When you show up, everything jumps out at you. By the end, there is nothing funny about the way Chirac conducts himself on television at all. I'm having that feeling of bouleversement here in NY -- seeing the Café Charbon near Stanton Street, that was something to talk about. The Café Charbon in Oberkampf, well that's just typically Parisian, yawn.

Goodbye blog. I'll see you at Drownout News.

The Long Summer

That's it. I leave tomorrow at 8.45 am for NY. If I'm back next year, c'est la vie. Mais, si non, il était un très beau séjour.

Last Licks, of Paris

At Claireobscure.com you can find pictures from my latest explorations in Paris.

I quite like some of them.

One is a hazy aerial shot where I label for your interest the major sites in our neighborhood.

Others could make good desktop backgrounds. Everybody wins!

Five Things I Will Miss in NY

Business magazines and media in France are just backwards when compared to the US/British equivalents. The ridiculous cover design approach of this BusinessWeek-equivalent is proof enough.



Sneaker variety is just huge. The idea that efficient, concentrated capital diminishes variety just *has* to be true. Everybody knows more Sbux = less fun. The question is, how to demonstrate it decisively.



Here is the daily cup of café grande that I make in my house in a crazy metal boilerpot.



A priori deduction will get you nowhere, as brilliantly as the Metro and arrondissements organize the city. So, like in LA, every Parisian travels with a map in reach.



Supermarket pain au chocolat. This philosopher is just a machine for turning pain au chocolat into theory.

Our Old Street

Making a Living

A view I've espoused repeatedly is that I'd gladly live in Paris if there was only something to do here. I mean, when the dot-com era money runs out, you need to get a job, right?

So my friend Ralph is an artist, in a city where the profession "artist" apparently is good enough to score the daughters of comfortable (aisé) Jewish doctors' families.

The striking fact I realized lately is that absolutely none of his clients are French. They are all Londoner or New Yorker financiers. What does that tell you?

One thing it might say is that it's always more glamorous to be an overseas/cross-Channel artiste when marketing your portraiture services. (Hear that Williamsburgites?) But I think he other thing it says is that there is a reason the French are parodied as being so bored.

Les Manifs, Les Gréves, Le Peuple!

Sunday in the 5th, we crossed paths with some major street closures. It was the rally against reductions in the education budget. Rallies in NY are few and pointless, and those in Washington I've only seen on TV. Those always seem so grassroots. Handmade signs etc.

This one was more like a parade. They troops of marchers, all ages, were organized into what seemed to be schools, unions, parents, students, regions, and other natural groupings. Each group had a flag -- a beautiful logo professionally printed fluttering from a heavy wooden rod. It all looked brand new, and bands of 50 or 70 people would be marching, all holding up identical flags. The FCPE site, a parents union; isn't it so pro looking?

Often, they marched behind specially fitted out vans or cars with speakers attached and banners plastered along the sides. There would sometimes be a man leading a chant at the head of the group.

For good measure, people had some nice hand-painted signs. They said stuff like "Civil society needs education funds". Yahoo News coverage.

Apparently, the government (center-right, PM is Raffarin) wants to cut about 25,000 non-teacher jobs nationwide in 2003 (aids and administrators).

Earlier in the weekend, I saw a debate program (set in a restaurant) on the subject of the recent strikes by the truckers and their confrères. Some guys were saying "it's outrageous that they would close the roads. The roads are not theirs!". And the other guys were just talking right past it "I admire those who have the courage to strike. They have the right to strike. In a disagreement about pay, quite simply, they have the right. And if the roads are closed, as their employers why the pay was not settled!" You wouldn't hear that latter opinion in the US, but the former is fairly common since at least the 1880s Pullman strikes in Chicago.

Collectible Jules Verne

Less Liberal Education

At drinks one night, a US-educated PhD told me about the strange hiring attitude at the CNRS. If a guy took a year off to go mountain climbing, in France it shows "he is not serious". Black mark.

This came to mind as our long-winded American expatriate landlord came by last night (and broke the toilet). His scooter had been stolen and recovered recently, apparently by the North African (maghreb, or more appropriately beur) punks who hang out in his street.

Ah, kids today. When he was a kid growing up in Iowa, he was working in a factory by 17. But America gave him a second shot. He enrolled in community college, went to university, became an architect, and has built a happy life in Europe (with two apartments in the Marais!).

In France, if you don't make yourself something by the time you're 15, you're done. No backdoor entrance to the top universities here. Same in England (A-levels?) and lots of Europe. You just wouldn't be "serious".

This can't be good for the society -- people can be late bloomers. Should they be wasted?

But I understand its origin. When everything is free (government funded), how can you make people pay for what they get? With discipline, of course. So there are fewer exemptions for the late-bloomers with cash enough to make a go. (I think the late-bloomers in the US don't get exemptions if they're simply poor and out of luck. But you don't have to be rich to enroll in community college.)

French Sporting

We went for dinner last night and our French friends showed up a bit late. They were glued to the TV, watching the French team battle the Russians in the Davis Cup.

The Davis Cup?

They said they came reluctantly, and that a friend had missed her train to Lyon in order to watch the end of the match.

Tennis is moderately significant in the US, but surely not the main event. Nor is it in France: there are three overlapping football leagues to watch, cycling, Olympic-style events for winter, etc. Rugby, even. This woman told us she only follows tennis and rugby. Weird for a woman, but if an American said she followed soccer and football it would be no knockout.

My diagnosis: it has to do with nationalism.

Le Marché aux Puces

At the end of line 4 to the northern end of Paris is the town of St. Ouen and the largest flea market in Europe.

It's perpetually running and a major destination for US antique dealers, gay couples, or late-middle-aged hetero couples.

You can find literally everything from Louis XIV furniture to 1960s butterfly hair clips, from US colonial woodwork to Henley-boat bookshelves, Napoleonic military uniforms (or lingerie), or early radios.

It's on the must-see in Paris list, though utterly peripheral to the center-city's many splendors. When you go, make sure to ignore all the stalls of ridiculous African knicknacks, sneakers and cell phone accessories. Head for the big covered buildings like Marché Dauphin on the other side of the highway from where you come out of the Metro.