Drownout France

Neighborhood Fencing Scrimmage

Neighborhood Fencing Scrimmage

Swordplay in the Marais. 16 Juin.

In just about the only neighborhood open for business on Sunday, the town sporting hall put on a forum for a bit of local sport.

Rational Gardens

Rational Gardens

Jardin de Palais Royale. 15 Juin.

Every garden I've seen so far in Paris is a mix of meticulously maintained, rationally planned, supremely streamlined rows of trees, bushes, art, benches and gravel paths.

No big lawns, the quintessentially American representation of nature.

And of course nothing to suggest the ur-Gardens of English heritage: the winding, walking, controlled wildness.

Clear of crotte des chiens (dog ____) and set up for people to stroll. Apparently it's the little dogs themselves that are meant to bring a taste of wild nature into the lives of les Parisiennes.

Le Sport

Le Sport

Motorcycle racing. 15 Juin.

They like a different type of sport here. Goes without saying that baseball and such are not on the menu. Football, a bit of rugby. Pas de cricket (that's the English). Cycling. Also, interesting motorsport: Formula 1, motorcycles, offroad "rally" races.

In Monte Carlo, they still had all the "Monte Carlo Grand Prix" stuff up all around. A huge, prominent Marlboro sign in front of the casino.

Around Paris, though, there is not much sport to be seen (not just lack of runners). Partly, this is because there are no green fields to do it on. A fair number of rollerbladers, some cyclists, and a very very few runners. Didn't see any spontaneous stickball matches in the street.

The car racing on TV is more curvy and challenging generally than the 0-track stuff they do at the Daytona 500 and such. That rally stuff they were showing is rad: wheels flying off cars and stuff.

Unusually Colorful Frenchman

Unusually Colorful Frenchman

Illustration of L'Homme. 14 Juin.

Browsing at a discount art book shop, I decided to take some pictures. (When the vendeuse asked me to respect the rights of the ecrivant, I had to stop.)

But I captured this gripping illustration of the human anatomy. Look at his beautifully waxed moustache, pointed beard, aristocratic eyes and expression, carefully kept hair. He is an ideal human specimen. Reminds me of Descartes (without the hat that Renee usually seems to be wearing).

A close-up of this anatomically correct Frenchman. (I think it's evident at this point that, for this blog, I'm not going to be doing any "click on the thumbnail" stuff en generale. I'm just going to stick pics on here at a decent resolution. I mean, the page will take some time to load, but that's why I've written all this interesting commentary for you to read.)

The Smile of a Dissected Man. 14 Juin.

Also, here we see the skeleton of a philosopher (homme de pensees, generalment). This photo from Diderot and Dalambert's Encylopedie (marked down to 7 euros).

Hamlet, on the inside. 14 Juin.

A Gray City Peopled With Whites

A Gray City Peopled With Whites

Typical stuff. 13 Juin.

The famous photographers of Paris--think Robert Doisenaeu--are photographers of light, motion, black and whites of the great monumental architectures of Paris set behind moving Parisians and their interests. The gray city: an observation by an American (New-Yorkaise) photographer, William Klein. Il y a une exposition de se travaille au Paris maintenant.

Hardly an undeserved reputation that, for Paris. Consider Place J. du Bellay just here by our apartment. It's an impressive square, with a large beaux-arts fountain at the center. It's a sort of Washington Square park for our Parisian East Village.

Le Louvre

Le Louvre

Pei's pyramid. 13 Juin.

You may have seen Pei's work at Columbia, close to home uptown in New York. He did the addition behind Avery that cuts some light into that quadrangle between Avery, Schermerhorn, St. Paul's Chapel, and all that.

Essentially the same idea at the Louvre. The glass pyramid is actually a giant skylight to the huge new lobby they built below. Same deal at Avery, where they've got this cafe/study area down there. I mean, did they pay the guy for this?

Centre Georges Pompidou

Centre Georges Pompidou
Here's where I'm all set up now. It's the first two floors of the well-touristed modern art museum in Paris (which is just the top two floors, well, at the very top is a restaurant called Georges which is tres chic).

Click on these for detail on the library. 14 Juin.

So it's modern and ultrahip yet enormous and comfortably provided with essential resources. There's a nice cafe where all the kids eat snacks and step out onto the outer balconies for smokes (and to look at each other).

It's mostly teenage kids that use the place. I can't quite tell precisely what age. They could easily be college-aged and I wouldn't be able to tell them from pre-teens. They are, of course, the problem, since they like to giggle.

Weirdly, the library doesn't open at all until 12 noon. Strikes me as a bit late, but hey it works for them.

Paris, at 6.5 miles per hour

Paris, at 6.5 miles per hour
Ran my first run on Wednesday night, around 7.30pm. Ran out the door, down Rue Sebastopol, turned right at Rue de Rivoli (near the Hotel de Ville), cut past Chatelet down to Pont Neuf, ran along the Seine past the Louvre, Tuilleries, Musee D'Orsay, to Concorde where Napoleon put the Obelisk he retreived from Egypt, then returned along the Left Bank. About 3 miles.

Pas du frenchmen! It must be illegal or something. At the height of the evening, nobody out there. Actually two guys along the whole route. Both looked very surprised to see me as I sailed past them.

The air's not very clean, actually. You don't notice it walking around. All those little mopeds and little cars may be fuel efficient but they're not very clean. Maybe it was rush hour. I'll try one of these mornings around 8.30am. There's literally nobody out there at 8.30am. The frenchman also likes to sleep in.

The Problem of Dog Shit

The Problem of Dog Shit

Clean park. 11 Juin.

There are two great social problems in Paris: dog shit on the streets, and public urination by humans. (Public urination by dogs also exists, but is not really considered a "problem".)

As an explanation for this I was told that the Parisians expect the government to clean up the dog shit for them.

Here, illustrated, you see a pristine park where in fact the government does clean up the dog shit for them. And on busy streets, men ride around on lawn-mower-like machines that literally sweep up all the trash and filth on the streets. But merde is not part of the government's domain of responsibility.

Sadly, the riding-street-sweepers have no effect on the residue of urination.

They can ride this too. 14 Juin.

Let me just add a third problem: the city's sewers are very old and so not very deep. Sometimes you can smell them on the ground. Add to this that the Metro is very old and so also rather shallow (just below the sewers I'm told). And so, there is the problem of the sewer smells in the Metro's extensive network of correspondance tunnels.

Get this though: not much public urination in those tunnels. In fact, the Frenchman would rather piss on the open street peopled with children and old ladies (I have seen this) than in the dank, remote reaches of the underground.

By this measure, les tramps New-Yorkaise are far more shy. They don't mind pissing on subway platforms at all, but you'll never see them or even drunk fratboys from NYU pissing in front of you, in mid-afternoon, on a ("smart") car (yes, I have seen this too).

At the French Supermarket

At the French Supermarket

Yoga milk. 12 Juin.

Only now is Wal-Mart making waves in the US by joining the economy-priced businesses of medium-sized goods retailing and the groceries. Marks & Spencer's in the UK has been doing this for a long time; go into any store on a busy street, pass their clothes and cosmetics, and you will find a huge supermarket in the basement (or somewhere). Sort of the way New York City drug stores sell just about everything from toys to detergent to glasses to beer to computer printers to candles to candy to shampoo and prescriptions.

Following on some previous comments, I decided to investigate the supermarket more closely.

Monoprix, as the name suggests is a low-price place and I decided to look at the grocery there in detail. I could have gone to Au Bon Marche and wowed you further.

Several interesting facts about the French grocery:
- the Frenchman likes a semi-prepared meal as much as any Yankee. Food is available at all stages of preparation, from raw pasta to fresh stuffed shells to reheat-me to eat-me-here's-a-fork.
- the Frenchman is not a twentysomething postcollege bachelor. That is, frozen pizzas, jars of pasta sauce, crates of beer, chips (corn or potato), sliced white bread and peanut butter, nor any of the staples of such existence are in comparable abundance here as in the US. In certain heavily male districts (the Albertson's on El Camino in Mountain View), the store bulges with bachelor food: huge aisles with 1000s of frozen pizzas, palettes of diet sodas. Not so here.
- the Frenchman loves small packages. Everything is small. You don't economy-size it.
- the Frenchman eats things soon. Things don't seem to be stored. Indeed, very few things are frozen at all. Even the fish are in the refrigerated section, stored in the way the US market would store milk or cheese.
- the Frenchman likes to go to many shops. The butcher is elsewhere, as are the drugstore items, as are, for that matter, motor oil, chainsaws, and automatic weapons.
- Enormous selection and variety. It's not just a difference in taste (e.g. few pizzas, instead...1000s of quiches). There are very many things, represented with small selections of each (except the friggin' yogurts).

What explains this? There could simply be structural reasons for some of it:
- small apartments = smaller package, shorter storage time
- cultural bias against storing food very long.
- cultural disinterest in 'super size', but interest in fresh or "natural"
- more hetergeneous citizenry hails from more european backgrounds, therefore demanding more variety (?)
- no cars, people need to walk home with what they buy (same in NY though)
- smaller scale, less economized production, marketing, and distribution dynamics. It's easier to sell one kind of thing with small variations, hence the US system pushes through beef, pizza, and potato chips at huge volumes (ignoring salmon eggs, carrot mousse, and pesto sauces).

See it and believe. Gallery of pictures from my trip to Monoprix.

Mitterand's Monument

Mitterand's Monument

Bibliotheque National de France. 10 Juin.

Checking out places to study, I decided to have a look at the BNF, last stop on the 14 line. Immense! Couldn't even get in. But literally the image of Borges's endless library with all the books in logical space. So utterly overwhelming and imposing that I simply can't imagine what's it's like when there are people there. It was closed when I was there. I'll go back and see if it livens up at all.

Just to paint the picture a bit. The camera couldn't really capture the scene. There are 4, 22-story towers like the ones you see. But the books aren't in the towers. They're all beneath your feet, underground in the 4-story deep bedrock of the overall structure. You see it there, surrounding the trees. The trees are at the center of the annulus, themselves planted in the gravewell at the center. A forest in the middle of an immense library of books, bookended at the corners by towers of pure glass. Everything in grids: the ground itself, the walls of the buildings, the fencings around the bushes, the compound itself.

Franco-anglophonic Television

Franco-anglophonic Television

Paul Auster, speaking in Brooklyn to "Double Je". 10 Juin.

The French relationship with English ain't simple. On the one hand you have this man, Paul Auster, and others like him: the francophones of New York. The Swiss-French program "Double Je" spent two hours taxicabbing around New York City to interview these people: Annette Insdorf of Columbia's film department, Gary Tinterow of the Met's painting department, and so on. "What do you love about New York? What do you miss about living in France?"

As amply demonstrated by things like "le weekend" and the street-level excitement about Spider-man, it would be foolish to imagine the French as rejecting American/"anglophone" culture wholesale.

Love-hate isn't quite the right way to think of it either. The attitude doesn't oscillate between appreciating then suddenly disliking precisely certain features of the confrontation with America. Rather, if the snobbish and hurried New Yorker reminds the French of Parisiennes, it is the utter corporate and commercial domination of all New York's great streets that is loathsome. So it's complex. Puritanical, oversimplifying (Bush's "cowboys and indians"), arrogant, gluttonous, and so on are the bad things.

And all the cultural oppression happens in English.

Literally half the movies on the movie channels at a given moment are Hollywood dubs. There aren't quite as many primetime TV shows, but during the day they run a number of US programs (they seem to like Pacific Blue). The cultural products consumed are to a great extent American and British.

Expat HQ. 10 Juin.

But that's really not true of the telephone company, or the food in the grocery, or cars. Or books. It's isn't merely the overpowering American economy that shoves US-exports down French throats. Something else explains the excess of American TV shows.

It must be that they like the stuff.

St Denis, endlessly fascinating

St Denis, endlessly fascinating

You can't miss us. We're just up the steps from Club 111. 12 Juin.

See for yourself how things have changed in the yellow pages: Les Pauges Jaunes, 111 Rue St Denis. Our own Club 111 is new since their photographer was here.

The NBA on...Canal+

The NBA on...Canal+

Broadcast of Lakers-Nets 1-3. 12 Juin.

It's mid-afternoon on Wednesday, three games of the 2002 Finals are in the books, and here on French broadcast TV they're running the first coverage of the series. They're 'fast-forwarding' through the games. Showing 5-10 minute chunks of the quarters of each of the games. The running commentary is as if it were live, so it's not a news program format. The play commentator seems to be a French guy, but the color commentary is from a guy with this ridiculous American-accent. And he says stuff like "Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa!!! Wa-wa-wa-!!" to punctuate the dunks.

On the one hand it's amazing that they're showing it at all. On the other, I'm not sure I can venture an understanding of the format chosen. C'est bizarre!

Latitudes

Latitudes
Little did you know, when selecting cities for summering that New York City is at only 40 degrees latitude, while San Francisco is at 37, Paris at 48 and London at 51. It makes a big difference, as June days in New York only stretch till 9pm while we're presently enjoying days till nearly 10 here at 48.

Little Everything

Little Everything
Everything in Paris is smaller. There are only 2 million people; the metro trains on many lines are half the length of NY subway; the buildings are a maximum of 7 stories in central Paris and around 15 stories further out; the cars are tiny; the supermarkets are full of tiny tomatos sauce jars and tiny bags of chips. No economy size anything.

The Apartment

The Apartment

Some pics of the place. 09 Juin.

It's the attic, so the roof slants (can't see it in the pictures) but that also means we have a skylight.

Rue St Denis

Rue St Denis

La rue et the view (of a corner of Pompidou). 09 Juin.

Here's what I mean by a blend of sex shops and East Village streetwear hockers. It's not exactly Amsterdam. Cliquez-vous the images for close-ups. (Still working on a good way to indicate which images are links.)

You can see that St Denis is literally a 2 minute walk from the Centre George Pompidou, a really amazing and massive public place. There's an excellent museum of modern art on the top floor, but the building itself is a significant architectural etoile in the firmament of Parisian buildings. Not just that but it has a tremendous public library inside, theater space for public performances, a post office, an excellent design store (Printemps Design; I must say that it is more advanced than the MoMA Design Store), among other things. More on that later, but the nearby tourist mecca explains why St Denis is East Village-Old Times Square-and-also-New-Times-Square. A number of the restaurants are big, efficient touristy caricatures of European cuisine (such as Pizza Pino across from the Diesel store).

The street culture buts right up against this. Last Friday night we found ourselves slicing through a crowd that was half african dancing and half milling. A big homemade sign proclaimed (roughly) a "spontaneous happening of the citizens of the street". People were giving out free food, preaching political views, and dancing to music.

Les Fetes along the Seine

Speaking of spontaneous happenings: Thursday night on the Seine is something to see. Strung across every bridge and along every nook of the pedestrian-friendly banks were dozens of picnics, soirees, and river-gazing couples. The Parisians gather en masse on the river during the warm evenings of summer and drink wine, eat food, play music (lots of tramps hanging out playing guitars and flutes and such), etc. The map of Paris doesn't have a big "central" park; but it has the Seine, which is fantastically beautiful and substantially preserved for use by the citizens (i.e. no Robert Moses-style West Side Highway/FDR drive to rob them of the riverbanks).

1er Arrondissment

1er Arrondissment
The apartment we rented is in the 1st, which puts it right in the center of Paris. We're just a few minutes walk from the Seine, the Louvre, the Palais Royal, the Opera, the Marais, the Beaubourg, Pont Neuf, several Diesel shops and so on.

From the living room. 04 Juin.

'Hood tuff. 06 Juin.

Our little pocket of the 1st is a bit downtrodden, next to an unsuccessful redesign of the old marketplace called Les Halles. It's a cross between the East Village and the old 42nd St in New York. Lots of streetwear and music shops, as well as red light video shops. The street itself, Rue St Denis, is infamous in Paris for its prostitutes and such. So far we haven't noticed too much of that (though I saw some guy selling pills the other morning; I'll try to get him on film later).

Le Foot

Le Foot

Rooting against the Germans. 02 Juin.

The World Cup is gripping the nation. When France lost the opening match to Senegal last week, the evening news spent 20 minutes reporting the local reactions of football fans from a dozen French regions and from Senegal: pictures of blue France fans and of dancing Senegalis.

At the Hotel de Ville in the center of Paris, in the big square (where they have ice skating in winter), there is an enormous TV screen showing all the matches. During the second match, against Uruguay, the square was packed like Times Square on New Year's Eve. Every sidewalk restuarant or sandwich bar had a television tuned to the match with a half dozen guys standing around watching. Bars were packed. Many shops were closed for the 90 minutes from 1.30pm to 3pm, while the guy inside went next door to the furniture shop and watched with the furniture shopkeeper on the television inside the showroom cabinet. Back at the apartment on the 5th floor, with the windows open, you could hear every run on goal as people cheered in the streets.

Zidane hasn't played the first two matches due to injury, like Achilles sulking at the opening of the Iliad. The hero of Le Mondial 1998, of the European championship in 2000, and of his league team's championship in 2002, the doctors have cleared him to return against Denmark. The French must win by 2 goals if they are to clear to the Round of 16. A stage of high drama for the returning hero. Can he deliver?

La côte d'azure

La côte d'azure

A Valbonne et Monte Carlo. 01-03 Juin.

Valbonne, presque la borde de Cannes en Provence (au sud de France), etait incroyable!

Click on the little pictures to full appreciate the place, and to see the Casino at Monte Carlo (astonishingly constructed entirely on the side of a mountain).

A massively effective respite after the very demanding journey: overnight flight into Charles De Gaulle, transportation mysteries, heavy luggage (full of philosophy books), and a long train ride on the TGV to Cannes.

A little badminton, tennis, swimming, and sunning. Some conversations with toads. C'est spectaculaire!

Wireless Up

Wireless Up

Scenes from the new rig-up. 07 June.

The cable box is really slow; takes 10 seconds to boot! But the cable modem (avec MAC fixée) is the usual. 385kbps.

[Cliquez] We're online.

[Cliquez] We're online.
After two weeks utterly without contact, the Noos cable guys came by today and set us up. Cable modem and 150+ channels of digital cable for ~$30/month. Try beating that in the US.

Now to set up the rest of this rig: wireless router, cisco voip phone box, etc. If it works, then I'll be back. Otherwise, it's back down the street to EasyInternet Cafe to use the web at 1 euro/23 minutes.

Liberación

Liberación
Today we completed the move-out. Low sticker price turned out to be roughly comparable to any other mover's rates.

Pack a jacket?
No, ma'am! Paris weather in summer is 65-75F throughout. Compare that to the misery in New York.

La premiere post

La premiere post
Welcome to the Drownout France blog!

This entry is just to hold a space. Once we get settled in one place, there will be updates:
- fresh, insightful content about...France!
- better design for this page
- and pictures.