Too much to do!

Well it's been a busy few days! Sunday night was one of the coolest evenings I've ever had in France; I went to the Concert for Haiti out at the Zénith, a medium-sized concert hall on the outskirts of Paris. Here's a picture of the hall:
We got there on the late end, so we didn't have seats. Instead we were standing in the middle, which was actually MUCH cooler. Much more tiring, as we were on our feet for over 3 hours, but we were waaaaaay closer to the action, haha. Here I am with Jason, Basia and Paolo:
And then with Annalina and Iva:


It was very similar to the American version, with all sorts of top French pop stars getting in on the action. The highlight for me was very clearly Diam's, who I would say is like the Pink of France. Kind of an "in your face" rapper, who has some really incredible songs about contemporary France. There's one song that's absolutely amazing to use in the classroom, called Ma France à moi (My vision of France), in which she goes off against Le Pen and the far right. All very well done. Anyway, you can imagine what sort of shock it was when, last fall, she suddenly started wearing a headscarf:


Particularly because she's not of Muslim origin. She's actually half French, half Cypriot. She was raised here and converted to Islam a few years ago. Then she started wearing a headscarf, and the country was in a tizzy for a good few weeks. It was fascinating. She's as spunky as ever, though, and it was great to see her.

Other acts included Bryan's favorite, Rose:

I'm not a huge fan of Rose, I find her music a little slow. But on that night she sang one of my favorite French pop songs from the 90s, Alain Souchon's Foule Sentimentale. It's also kind of lame (haha), but what can I say, it's catchy. So she scored some points in my book with that choice.

Another of my favorites is DePalmas, who is actually pretty cute in real life. This picture does absolutely no justice to that, I know!


Anyway, so that was Sunday. The energy was really great, and I think they raised a good amount of money. I was also rather impressed by some of the programming, in that they presented work by Haitian authors and read a bit of Dany Lafferiere's excellent interview in Le Monde. This is why I love France at times...good to have the lit front and center sometimes! The Minister of Culture (Frederic Mitterrand, nephew of the late great François) even tried to speak Creole, which was pathetic but well intentioned!

Needless to say, I was fairly wrecked on Monday due to my late night. But it was worth every ounce of subsequent suffering. I couldn't take time to rest on Monday, however, because I had a big interview to prep: Rachid Djaïdani, the centerpiece author of chapter 4. I spent Monday reading through the press archives of book reviews on his work, and perhaps the funniest part was that I found a reference to a TV show he did in which he brought his dopey little French moped over to the States and traveled around Texas. Apparently for the hell of it. Since I was at the audiovisual archives I decided I might as well check it out, and it was hilarious. Kind of like a less malicious Borat, in the sense that he wasn't trying to make people look stupid. Instead it was just good natured--he walked into some random bar in the middle of nowhere asking to see cowboys, for example. The guys in there were like, "oh, ok, hop in the pickup truck, we'll take you to see the cowboys!" So they did. In another scene he went to a car dealership pretending to want to buy a big hog of a pickup and went through the motions with the outlandish dealer, who was clearly well aware of what he was caricaturing. In any case, it was just rather amusing to see the random French Arab guy bumbling along on his moped in the middle of Texas, hahaha.

So the big interview was yesterday, which was equally awesome. We met up in the 11th at this amazing Moroccan café, where he clearly knew everyone. He was back in the kitchen greeting everyone, and I got the royal treatment purely for being a Friend of Rachid. Except that I had just met him, haha. But no matter, he's clearly friends with everyone. And he was super helpful, so I got all sorts of great material for my chapter. Yay!

After all that excitement, I'm now trying to get organized to head to Berlin tomorrow!!! Kari and I are VERY excited, we're going to see everything. We're probably going to lose some limbs to frostbite as well, as the forecast is BITTER COLD. Like highs in the teens every day. ohhhhh. Needless to say, most of my luggage is made up of multiple pairs of long underwear, haha. I sure hope they have those things you can put in your shoes to warm your toes up!

I am actually getting work done here!

I realized it's been a while since I wrote about my real work, since I'm not being paid to sit around and play all the time, hahaha. Well, my work is pretty cool sometimes, so it can feel like I'm getting paid to rock out :-)

Anyway, right now I'm laying the groundwork to start writing my next two chapters. I've finished most of the background reading I need to do for chapters 4 and 5 and have pretty much finished the research for 4. The best part has been the interviews/meetings I've been able to do/attend. Last Friday I went out to the banlieue to the home of one of the original activists in the genre I'm working on. She was more on the social end, but she did form a theater troupe in the early 1980s to get the word out. She's awesome to talk to--has the same energy as the insane interview I did last fall, but with a much more positive outlook on life. She didn't get as involved in politics so she seems to have come out of it with more of her idealism intact. She was super friendly and talked for FOUR hours! haha. I went with a few other masters' students who are participating in my research group, so we all asked her questions (side note, I realize it's useful in its own way, but I sometimes find sociologists tiring...they were asking such specific questions that weren't all that interesting in and of themselves, although I realize it's to build a bigger picture regarding what was going on. But man it got tedious at times, hahaha. This is why I'm not a sociologist, I am much more interested in the bigger ideas and her own analysis of what was going on, even if that makes me a heretic in sociology circles).

Then last Saturday I went to another banlieue to visit an after-school program that empowers youth from these areas through filmmaking. I had met one of the directors of this organization back in New York and we've stayed in touch (and met up in Paris before), but this was the first time I had the chance to go out there to see their actual site. A former student of mine who is writing her honors thesis on this organization came along too, which was awesome. We had a great time, met a few of the kids and another one of the directors, then we went to lunch in Belleville (one of the most ethnically diverse parts of the city). That's where I discovered my durian in the grocery story (haha). In any case, perhaps the funniest part of that meeting was when they asked us what we missed the most about the States when we're in France, and without missing a beat we came up with the exact same answer: portable coffee. They thought it was hilarious (and lame) that we would walk around with our cup of coffee, but we launched into a tirade about how it's not really about Americans being so obsessed with saving time, etc. It's much more about having a beverage, as an experience, and we want to appreciate it for a longer time and thus carry it with us. They said it was because American coffee sucked, we fought back and said no, it wasn't about the coffee, just the ability to be able to carry it around. hahaha. It was awesome, having a philosophical discussion on coffee consumption. Of course, I've had this conversation multiple times here and they still don't believe me that portable coffee is worth having.

That said, though, considering how many Starbucks branches there are now, an obvious observation must be made: SOMEONE'S going there, and it's not just tourists. I've seen them in places where tourists don't bother to go, so it's just like McDonald's. They can whine and complain all they want, but it's clearly filling some sort of demand. That said, I still won't go to one here. I just wish they'd come up with an (affordable) French equivalent. Because I'm not spending 6 euros ($9!) on a coffee at Starbucks here, haha.

Next Tuesday I have another interview, this time with the author who is anchoring my chapter 4, named Rachid Djaïdani. Yesssss. He seems very cool and nice on the phone, and very willing to chat. So I'm definitely looking forward to that. The goal is to have all the remaining research for Chap. 4 done before I leave for Berlin next Thursday, then I can write the chapter the following week :-)

Quick! Someone better tell Sarko integration is working!

So on Saturday I had a meeting in the banlieues followed by lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant in Belleville (more on all that in a second). After lunch, however, was when things got interesting. There was an international grocery store near the entrance to the subway, so I decided to go in and have a look around.

And that's when I found something I've been wanting to try for years, ever since I read an article about them in the NY Times: a durian. More info available here. I had seen them in my local grocery store in Astoria but was scared off by a fundamental problem: they reek. The article that originally piqued my interest was in fact all about the smell of the durian fruit, which apparently tastes waaaaaay better than it smells. But there's a movement underway in the Philippines to use genetic engineering to remove the smell, and there's a huge debate going on about whether a durian is still a durian if it doesn't smell like ass.

Anyway, here in the frozen foods aisle was a dessert made with sticky rice, coconut milk, and durian. And dairy-free! Yes!

So I smugly went up to the cash register to buy my durian dessert, and this is where things took a turn for the hilarious. The cashier was very clearly of Asian origin, and because his French was near-native, I'm going to guess he was Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Laotian. He took one look at my selection and was like, "oh yum, durian!" To which I was like, "yes, I've never had it and I've been curious." He told me how great they were, so I said I was particularly curious ever since I read this article, and I told him about the genetic engineering movement. He was totally HORRIFIED. This was clearly a personal offense on the durian fruit, and he was like, "but no! durian is like a fine cheese! you cannot appreciate it without the smell!" At which point he went on a long comparison of the finer nuances of the durian smell and how it lines up with nuances in the smells of cheeses. He kept everyone else in line waiting while he went through a point by point comparison and went on about how you really need to appreciate the durian in the same way as you would a fine cheese, first through the smell and then by the taste.

Which is why I now say, to anyone who thinks immigrants aren't becoming French: bullshit. Just go ask the random cashier in Belleville about the durian fruit, and you'll see, doesn't get any more French than that!

Sadly, after all that, I'm not a huge fan of the durian. Maybe I still need to try a fresh one. The dessert was fine, but the fruit...not so much. It does indeed reek and it does indeed taste better than that, but it still wasn't doing it for me. But I didn't really care, after the performance I got at the grocery store!!!

And the award for coolest friend in high places goes to...

...well, the answer is probably obvious: Junette. Since I really have only one friend in a high place, haha. But even if I had others, it would still be Junette, because she is awesome.

Junette's gallery, which has branches in NYC and Paris, represents Christian Boltanski, who was selected to be this year's "monumenta" installation in the Grand Palais. More info is available here, or the short version is that there's this really awesome building in Paris (called the Grand Palais, obviously), that serves as a temporary exhibition space. Sometimes it's more traditional art, sometimes it's performances. The last time I was there was in summer 2008 when a Canadian dance troupe was performing and I was pulled up on stage to freak dance with the group (haha). Needless to say, my associations with this building tend to be that noteworthy things happen here! Anyway, it's a huge open space, kind of like a ginormous greenhouse. The concept of this "monumenta" program is therefore that a prominent contemporary artist can do anything with the space. Last year's monumenta artist was Richard Serra, which must have been awesome too.

Anyway, because Junette's gallery represents Boltanski, she was able to snag 4 passes to the opening of the show for me. Yes!!!

So I invited Niamh, Ben, and Amanda to tag along. Fortunately I watched a brief interview with the artist on the above site (the interview is in French) and I noted the following exchange:

Interviewer: What do you want visitors to notice when they enter the building?
Boltanski: I want them to notice that it's cold. I asked that the heat not be turned on.

Ohhhhh. Needless to say I was glad to be warned, since the building is already pretty drafty. We therefore bundled up in our long underwear and extra socks, particularly since Paris is in a cold snap and it was in like the teens that night.

The show is called "Personnes," which is double-entendre in French that can both mean "people" and "no one." So it was apparently a meditation on identity and the fleeting nature of life, etc. This title did in fact make more sense to us when we saw just what the exhibit was. And yeah, we sure knew right away how French this exhibit would be...meditations on the emptiness of the human condition? Who invented that if not the French? HAHAHAHA. The only thing that could have made it this more French would have been to have a cafe with Sartre and de Beauvoir sitting there for hours whining about everything and nothing.

Anyway, so you walk into the exhibit and first you see a row of numbered boxes that kind of look like safety depost boxes in a bank. But you have no idea what's inside or what they're supposed to be. Then you get around the boxes and THIS is what you see:


It's a little hard to explain, but what you see there is a HUGE pile of clothes. Those are people standing next to it, just to give an idea of scale. Then there's this big claw that comes down and grabs a bunch of clothes and goes straight up, like in this pic:


Then when the claw reaches the top, it drops the clothes, which land back on the pile. Then the claw comes back down and grabs more and the process repeats over and over. Here are two more shots of this thing from other angles:


We agreed that it reminded us in a twisted way of those arcade things where you control the claw and are always trying to get a cool prize but it never works and either you end up with nothing or with something crappy. Considering how repetitive it is, it's kind of surprising how captivating it is, haha. But we stood there for a really long time, more or less entranced by the motion of the claw going up and down. It shifts slightly to take clothes from different places on the top, I guess to maintain the balance of the pyramid. So yeah, there's clearly some advanced engineering going on here, to keep it in the right form.

We debated whether the pyramid was totally full of clothes or whether there was something underneath covered in clothes, but we figured it was probably all clothes, haha.

Anyway, the rest of the space was filled by these square units of old clothes:


It was hard to get a decent picture because of the lights, but the squares were maybe 10 feet by 10 feet, and it was mostly old jackets laying open. We all agreed that it reminded of us a Holocaust memorial, particularly given that the clothes appeared to date from around the 40s anyway. It also kind of reminded me of the AIDS quilt, for no other reason than the geometry of it. I remember seeing portions of the AIDS quilt back in the day, how it travels in square segments. This is kind of the same idea. And as you can see, you can walk among the segments. That was a specific goal of the installation, that visitors are inside the work. Boltanski didn't want people passively standing in front of it, he wanted us in it.

Plus the use of clothes seemed really fitting. After all, these clothes had seen a lot of life, had gone many places. But now they were out of circulation, fixed in a specific spot. So you could sort of understand the play on words of the title of the exhibit, since they were both representative of the people who wore them and also generic to the point of not really meaning anything anymore.

Behind the big mound of clothes there is a staircase that served as a viewing platform, which you can sort of see in this pic:


So here are two more pics of the show, taken from this back staircase:



Another cool part of the show is that he wants it to be completely dismantled afterwards, which I guess won't be too hard since the clothes can go right back into circulation. So they go back to the "everyone" part of the title, after representing the "no one" in the show, I suppose.

Anyway, to close, I thought I'd quote the artist directly, from the program guide (my translation), since you can't get any more French than this:

"This installation is conceived to produce a powerful feeling of oppression. It's about having a hard experience and I'm convinced that visitors will feel a sens of relief when they leave."

I must say, we were a bit relieved to leave, mostly due to the cold. We couldn't feel our toes, and my fingernails were purple for at least an hour or two afterward. I'm not kidding! On the other hand, I suppose it's a sign of how captivating the show was that we put up with the cold for so long!!!

More hassles with the bank

Wow it's been a while. I made it back to Paris on Friday afternoon with no hassle at all. I guess the gods of air travel decided that I had paid my dues on the way over, since I ended up spending in total 8 hours at CDG, from the moment I got off the train at the airport to the moment the plane took off. That beats my previous record, set in April 2006, when I spent 7 hours in Raleigh, haha. I think # 3 on that list of Airports Kathryn Has Spent Too Much Time is a 6-hour delay at O'Hare, then Raleigh comes back at #4 with a 5-hour delay. Then I think Philly is #5, when I spent more time waiting for a flight to Detroit than it actually took to fly there. Oh, and back to a few weeks ago, I think if you tally it all up door to door from my dorm here to home in Collegeville, I was traveling for 19 hours. So after all that, I was relieved to have a smooth flight back!

The first order of business was to go pick up my new ATM card at the bank! Woohoo! And, beyond that, I even had two other important things: 1) the PIN so I can use the card, and 2) a paycheck from a project I've been working on with my one committee member here in France. Yessssss. And the paycheck was nearly double what I was expecting, which is ALWAYS good news! Word.

So I was feeling pretty smug about all of my banking success, until I opened a letter I had received from my insurance company here in France (the ENS makes us take out insurance on our rooms). I had to go through all sorts of hassle to write them a check in December...and it turns out that I was in such a hurry that I sent them the wrong thing. I wasn't paying close enough attention to what I was doing and I sent them one of these special deposit tickets that come in our checkbooks here. I think I mentioned the complicated procedure that is required to deposit checks here...part of that involves using this special slip that comes in the checkbooks and looks reasonably similar to checks. And being the ignorant (or absent-minded?) foreigner that I am, I wasn't paying close enough attention and sent them the wrong thing. Granted they have slightly different formats in terms of where you write stuff, but because I'm still pretty unfamiliar with both systems, it didn't strike me as out of the ordinary since I don't really know what I'm doing in either case. Writing a check or depositing one...it's all Greek to me when you get right down to it, haha. So yeah, I was a dumbass and sent them a deposit slip rather than a real check, and it took me THREE DAYS to figure it out. I got the thing back in the mail and didn't get why they had sent it back. I pondered it for a few days (thinking that perhaps they had wanted a cashier's check, but I checked with friends who said that no, their checks were accepted just fine...). Then today I was going to call and ask, and just as I was about to pick up the phone I figured it out, haha. So at least I didn't make an idiot of myself even further by calling!!!

So there you have it...now I have my ATM card and PIN, I've deposited my paycheck, AND I've written a new check to my insurance company!

Now about that dissertation I'm supposed to be writing...