Reactions

One more thing...I just found out that I can add "reactions" buttons at the bottom of posts, so I expect people to be voting here! Since I can't get people to comment, maybe I can at least get you to click a button, haha. And I can create any buttons I want, so let me know if there are others I should add!

Tractors!

Ah how I love good weather in Paris. For many reasons, obviously, but one of the highlights is that it's the return of strike season. Well, this is France, so it's always strike season, but there seem to be significantly more when the weather is nice. Wonder why that might be :-)

Today thus proved to be a winner on all fronts: we are having BRILLIANT weather (66 and bright sun, absolutely perfect). And...grain producers are pissed off. Which meant one thing: they were coming to Paris to protest, WITH THEIR TRACTORS! Yes.

Now, this being the country that perfected the strike, they don't mess around. 10,000 people were expected to participate, and there were about 1,300 tractors. Hahahahaha. Miles and miles of tractors, making a big loop through eastern Paris. Obviously I had to go investigate.

Before I move into the pics, I should explain what the problem is: they are protesting the restructuring of the European Common Agricultural Policy, which has HUGELY favored French farmers. French farmers made out extremely well on the Maastricht Treaty and have benefited from important subsidies. That's all being shuffled around now, so they're understandably worried. Apparently revenues went down 30% two years ago and then an additional 50% last year. So yes, clearly a bad situation.

Anyway, I decided to go check out the tractor parade over by Bastille. As I was walking over, I came upon the sign of a good "manif," as the French would call it. Because the French invented revolutions, they also invented revolution control, namely the riot police. haha. The CRS is no joke. The entire Blvd. Bourdon was lined with CRS trucks:

It didn't seem all that necessary, actually, as everyone was in an extremely good mood. The tractors were honking, bystanders were cheering. Everyone was taking pictures because, well, how often do you see a tractor tooling down the street in Paris, let alone 1300 of them? haha. Here they are in their full glory, at Bastille:

I was so taken with them that I decided to follow them on their route, so I started walking up Beaumarchais:


This is one of my favorite pictures of the day, since you can see the Bastille column all the way at the end (a memorial to, what else, the Glorious Three-Day Revolution of 1830):

As you can see, some of the tractors were all done up:

That one is sort of a play on words, hard to explain. Literally it says "no country without the countrymen," with countrymen being farmers, etc. "Pays" is also homeland, so it's a fairly strong word. Le Pen could have a field day with it if he wanted to (and of course he does play on these types of fears, he has said France should get out of Europe).

Anyway, all good manifs in Paris hit the Place de la République, for obvious symbolic reasons (reaffirming the patriotism of the strikers, who claim to be faithful to the "true" values of the French Republic).


And that's where I peeled off, since they were looping back toward their starting point. But man was it hilarious. More pics are available here.

On that note, I should probably get some work done today, since I was way too busy chasing tractors all afternoon...hahahaha.

Kathryn and the Asparagus

Well, I sure wasn't planning on posting two blog entries today, nor was I thinking I'd post entirely about asparagus, haha. I guess I had sort of forgotten how striking white asparagus can be if you're not used to it (it's pretty much all they have here in Europe). Anyway, since it is asparagus season everywhere now, the white asparagus is out in full force here, and today I splurged and bought some from my local market. My favorite apple man had fresh asparagus, so I figured why not. Of course, it's sold by the kilo, so here is the PILE I ended up with:


I thought the story would end there, when I posted the above picture on facebook as a joke. But then the response I got was rather noteworthy. As you can see, I'm going to be cooking and eating asparagus ALL WEEK. When my aunt told me she googled it because she didn't believe it existed (haha), I figured it was time for another blog post.

Anyway, we found some recipes online that said you absolutely have to peel it, so I selected my two stalks for dinner tonight and got to work:


From there I set out to boil it but quickly realized I had a problem: the damned stalks were so big they didn't even fit in my pot, haha:


So I chopped them up and all was well. I boiled the stalks for about 10 minutes and then sauteed them in a lemon butter for another 10. I was originally going to have gnocchi for dinner but then changed my mind when I picked up the voluminous pile of asparagus, since that seemed rather overwhelming. So I switched it up and went with a soy patty. Here's the end result:


The verdict is: delicious but still a bit stringy. Perhaps I didn't peel them enough? I suppose we will know more tomorrow, since obviously I'm going to have to keep doing this all week to use up my kilo of asparagus, haha. In any case, I already knew this, but I think white asparagus is better than the green. I like the green, but the white is milder and sweeter. One website characterized it as "nutty," and I can definitely see that. It's really, really good, and even better when someone who actually knows how to make it prepares it for me, hahahaha. But by the end of the week I will have figured it out, I promise!

More on theater

So before I move on and talk about more recent stuff, I realized that there were a few other theater things I did that deserved mention.

The first is what I've been calling the "burqa ballet" (although it wasn't really a ballet). The story behind this one is that I met the choreographer/dancer in my seminar on immgrants and spectacle. This is the seminar that is pretty interesting but is actually nothing like what I thought it would be (haha). I thought it was going to be about immigration debates as a form of spectacle (ie, how the debates are staged in the public sphere). It's actually nothing like that, it's about immigrants who choose to devote their careers to performance. Oh well, that's a cool topic too! And close enough to my diss topic that it's worth my time.

Anyway, the choreographer/dancer is a French woman of Tunisian descent, who has made her entire career in dance. She came from a fairly elite family, her father was a diplomat if I remember correctly. She never had any experience with the veil and in fact avoided identity politics entirely in her dancing career, but then recently she got the idea to choreograph a whole performance based on the burqa. In order to get the feel of how the burqa works, she went and bought one and wore it for a week. She told a funny story, which is that her partner is another dancer (white French), and she didn't tell him she was going to buy it. When he came home that night she greeted him at the door totally covered in it and apparently gave him quite a heart attack, haha. Anyway, I was intrigued by the prospect of this show, on multiple levels. And the poster announcement for it looked pretty awesome:


The subtitle says "What happens to a free body when it disappears under the veil?" (and I'm going to come back to this in a second)

Unfortunately, the show was pretty terrible. There were a few things wrong with it. The most basic problem was that it was a series of micro-dances that did not seem to fit together all that logically. So it was kind of hard to figure out what the point was. There wasn't a "fil conducteur" as the French would say (which is hard to translate, I guess I'd say like a "guiding principle" or something). Some parts were indeed cool, and as you can tell from the picture, the use of lighting and shadows was admittedly awesome. There were some cool parts that were backlit, for example, and you could see the outline of the body within the fabric.

But then the other problem, to me, seemed to be the ending, in which the dancer rips off the burqa and puts on tight hoochie jeans and a sexy red shirt and sings a whole jazzy song as if in a cabaret show. This scene came right after one in which the veiled woman was stuck folding a huge pile of sheets, so there was a transition from imprisoned veiled woman locked in the house to unveiled liberated woman baring her soul in the public sphere. Talk about Manichean.

I was hoping for a bit more nuance, but this is where I probably should have known better, based on the subtitle of the poster. Not only does it imply that the burqa is erasing the body, it's pretty clear from the start that it's a fairly negative connotation. And then you have to consider the word choice, "voile," which is really just a headscarf. Back in 2004 when all those insane debates were going on about the headscarves in schools, some people started attacking it as if it were the burqa, blah blah blah. There was a whole mixing of labels, basically to make the headscarf seem super dangerous and a sign of Muslim fundamentalism. All of that is of course crap, but the strategy worked. Now it's appearing even on announcements for the dance performance. So yeah, I probably should have paid more attention to that headline when I was all excited to see the show, haha. Then I would have had more of an inkling of what I was getting myself into.

So that was a failure. But then later that week Kari and I went to see the Philip Glass opera adaptation of Kafka's In the Penal Colony. I was pretty excited in general because the Penal Colony is my favorite Kafka story (yes, I like it better than even the Metamorphosis, that might make me a heretic, but it's true), but I was also concerned since, well, it's Philip Glass. The potential for some weird ass shit was pretty high, I think, particularly when you combine two twisted geniuses like Kafka and Glass. Fortunately, however, my fears were unfounded and the opera was BRILLIANT. Kari and I were totally blown away. The staging was fantastic (quite intense, of course), the libretto was rich and powerful, and the music was perfect. Melodic enough not to be jarring, but also well calibrated to the words. All in all, a VERY cool show.

So all that to say that apparently we're on a win one-lose one streak right now, haha. Every other performance has turned out to be good. And since the last thing I saw was that godawful horse show, hopefully that means that the next one will be good, haha. We're hoping to get into this one show based on a Stefan Zweig story, but it closes this week. When I was reading in one of my favorite parks today I ended up chatting with a woman who is hard core into theater (runs her own theater school and was a big actor/producer) and she told me it was excellent. So I figured that was a good endorsement!

Je me suis sauvée...littéralement

So last night I think I truly understood the importance of the double-entendre in the French phrase "je me sauve," which the French use as a colloquial form of saying that you're heading out/splitting/whatever. It's not vulgar or anything, just fairly informal. And of course literally it means "I'm saving myself."

Last night had all the trappings of being awesome. I had a ticket to the new Bartabas show, Darshan. The deal with Bartabas is that he's this dude who's obsessed with horses and he created a specific type of performance called "théâtre équestre" (equestrian theater). What the hell is théâtre équestre, you ask? Well, just what it sounds like...theater centered around horses, haha. He runs a theater troupe called Zingaro, and it's a whole team of actors/horse trainers. I saw another show he did back in 2006, at the Avignon theater festival. That show was called Battuta, and it was nothing short of awesome. It was in this big circular theater outside town (obviously, if you're traveling with tons of horses, you need room, haha). Seating was done in a circle, and the show took place in the middle. The horses would run around the inner circle while the actors did all sorts of crazy stunts. We're talking impressive circus acrobatics here--jumps and flips and even doing dances on the horses' backs while the horses are galloping at breakneck speeds. All while telling a story (admittedly a not too complicated one, since half the spectacle was the acrobatics). But Battuta did indeed have a storyline involving a gypsy caravan. It was particularly awesome because it had all sorts of fun gypsy music. The whole thing was just super uptempo and lively. Perhaps not the highest form of theater, but it sure was impressive.

Anyway, with all that in mind, you can imagine my excitement at finally getting a ticket to see their new show, this time in their home base at the Fort d'Aubervilliers, just outside Paris. I bought this ticket back in January, that's how booked they are! So I've been waiting for four years to see the next Zingaro production, and once it finally arrived I had to wait four months to get a ticket, haha.

So I got to the fort yesterday and was optimistic that the awesomeness would continue. The entrance is a restaurant, kind of like that other show I went to a few months ago (the théâtre du soleil). There were all sorts of really cool decorations on the wall from previous performances, and the whole place was like a shrine to horses. Very powerful and also majestic and beautiful. So far so good.

They took us in groups to our seats, and in an interesting twist, the seating was in the center, with the show happening in a circle around us. The seating looked like a giant cone with like ten rows of seats, if that makes sense. Again, so far so good, that was clearly rather cool.

Then the show began. And that's about when I started wanting to die of boredom. The pacing was painfully slow, and the most disappointing part of all is that most of it was behind these sheer curtains ringing the space. There were some cool parts with shadows, but for the most part it was just excruciatingly boring. Also brings new meaning to the phrase "being bored to tears." I wanted to die. You didn't even get to see many horses, they didn't come out much at all. It was waaaaay different from the last show, where the horses were so clearly the stars of the show. This time around it was supposed to be a form of visual art, I would guess, but it was repetitive and just plain boring.

The other thing that bothered me was the orientalism of the show. The title, Darshan, comes from Sanskrit, and the whole thing involved all sorts of stereotyped images of the silk route--all the orientalized images of central asia, etc. Nomadism and general solitude, the force of nature in the desert, you name it, they used it. Hell, there was even a whole part with chopsticks, as if they hadn't hit you over the head hard enough with the stereotypes already. They also projected images on the sheets, all sorts of "native" designs depicting exile and wandering, etc. In short, it was the Quai Branly museum turned into a horse show. "Let's go gape at the noble savages and impose our Western gaze on something by defining it according to our own terms!"

Since I had a lot of time to think during this show (since god knows I couldn't stare at the same images going round and round and round), I realized that perhaps this troupe likes their stereotypes, since the last show was pretty chock full of gypsy stereotypes too. Caravans, particular music, etc. From there, that led me to ponder the fact that it didn't bother me at the time. And why. Was it because I was less nuanced of a spectator four years ago? Perhaps, but I'm not convinced. And that's when I started to wonder if perhaps it's gypsy culture itself, that we're all so wrapped up in the stereotypes already that it didn't even hit me. Or maybe it was because that show was just plain fun. In any event, all I cared about at the end of this show was getting the hell out. I thus "me sauver"-ed, both literally and figuratively. I split and saved myself, all at once.

Unfortunately, everyone else in the audience appears to have felt the same way. I'm not sure I've ever been to a show before where the applause died down BEFORE the actors ever came out! haha. People had to start clapping again politely when the actors came out, since I suppose we all figured it would be rude not to. But when have you ever seen that? Then everyone on the train ride home was dissing it to. Sounded like it was a room full of people bored to tears, just like me.

Today I decided that perhaps it was time to check the reviews of the show, and sure enough, I apparently had it coming. They're all awful, haha. My favorite was perhaps one that appeared in Le Monde and was entitled Voyage au bout de l'ennui. Of which I approved mainly because of the play on words in the title, which says it all. There's a fabulous book by Celine called Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the end of the night), and with a very basic word substitution, the title sounds the same but l'ennui = boredom. So yeah, it was right there, plain as day, in Le Monde, that this show was a Journey to the end of boredom. hahahahahaha. Indeed it was.

Anyway, I originally started this entry with the plan of writing about a few other performances I've seen recently (most notably a burqa ballet and the Philip Glass opera based on In the Penal Colony). But I've rambled enough for now, I think, and maybe I'll save those for next time, haha.

Keeping busy

Well, yet again it's been a while. But I suppose I had it coming: I only had two major presentations this semester, and of course they would be within 6 days of each other and on opposite sides of the Atlantic. How could it possibly be any other way?

Last Wednesday I hit the road (well, the air, I suppose) for Montreal, for the Northeast MLA conference. Long way to go for a conference, I know, but it had two advantages:

1) Important people in my field (good networking)
2) Montreal. Vacation time!

For better or for worse, I did significantly more of #2 than #1, haha. On Thursday I went up to the Plateau, a neighborhood of boutiques and cafes. Besides buying myself a fun new dress, I also got a kick out of what Starbucks has had to do to make peace with the Francophones of Quebec:



Yes! So if you're Francophone you read the first two words, if you're anglophone you read the last two. Starbucks doesn't even do that in France, here it's just the regular old "Starbucks Coffee" sign like anywhere else in the States. That sure wouldn't fly with the linguistic policies of French Canada, hahahaha. Love it! And for the record, I didn't actually *go* to a Starbucks. The indie cafe scene is WAY too good for that. But I did appreciate the sign, haha.

Other highlights of Canadian French include what they call convenience stores:


Which quite literally means "the one who bails you out." The French use it for car mechanics, but the French Canadians apparently use it for small grocery stores too!

And then the ever-important (and perfectly literally translated) milkshake:


My other main activity, when I wasn't walking down the street, was being a cafe bum. Unfortunately I spent way more time doing this than I would have liked (thank goodness Montreal has a fabulous cafe scene) because my piece of shit knee is being true to form and giving me a lot of trouble. It got to the point that walking around was hurting my hip, probably because I was compensating somehow. So I decided I better not mess around with that and sat around in cafes instead. I spent so much time in cafes, in fact, that I decided to run my own little competition.

The overall winner was a place called L'équitasse, which does all fair trade and makes a KILLER maple latte:


And best presentation went to Cafe U, for the latte in the fancy glass:


Obviously had to pay extra for the fruit salad, haha. The coffee tasted slightly burned so the latte wasn't the best, but how can you not love the glass?

Anyway, I returned from Montreal on Monday and then had a big presentation for my research group in the sociology of culture yesterday (2 hours). That went super well, in fact, and I think the professor who organizes it may have given me the key I was missing to make the rest of the diss fall into place. Yes! So now I'm going out drinking with Kari to celebrate.

And to see the new adaptation of Kafka's In the Penal Colony, done as an opera by Philip Glass. Oh yes, you read that right: weird-ass short story + weird-ass composer = one hell of a weird opera, I'm sure. We'll see if my math is right in a few hours!

Wow it's been a long time. Lots going on, in many domains. The best being all the travel, first a long weekend in far western Brittany, then three days in La Rochelle/Oradour. Unfortunately, the one constant in these two trips was crappy weather...pictures are up here and as you'll see, it was cold and rainy in both spots. But I think the second trip can be summed up with the following picture, haha:


This was some random "pirate's booty" candy store in La Rochelle, which featured KEGS of all different kinds of candy. Needless to say, we did some significant damage there (to the wallet and to the waistline). But how could we not yield to temptation after getting our picture with a pirate?

Our other destination, Oradour, was significantly less cheerful. The story behind the town is that on June 10, 1944, the retreating Nazis killed 642 members of the town (including 400 women and children who had sought refuge in a church--the Nazis firebombed the church and locked them in). Yeah. What is interesting but also rather morbid is that the town has been kept entirely as is, since that day. So it's a town-sized historical monument to the barbarity of war, and you can get a feel for what a good portion of France looked like in 1944-45.

My take on the existence of the city is ambivalent. On the one hand, it's super important to remember what happened and also to pass along such lessons to future generations. It's a stark reminder of the brutality of war and it's easy to understand why a country that suffered so much during the 20th century would be hesitant to join 21st century war campaigns. When you see places like Oradour, it's clear why the French didn't want to join Bush in Iraq. Same goes for the Germans, anyone who has experienced international war as a "home game" would think twice.

On the other hand, it's also a very carefully calibrated message about who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. It falls smack into the French Resistance myth, according to which everyone deep down was a resistor and only a handful actually collaborated. The nuances of Petainism were fairly thoroughly glossed over--and of course there was little mention of the fact that Petain himself was responsible for a good portion of the collaborationist policies. They did note that he himself coined the term (collaboration) but didn't go into just what the significance of that was. That all got lost in devastating lists of who was tortured and killed. Again, useful memories, but the framing leaves a lot of questions unasked.

There was also no mention whatsoever of recent scholarship on the war that calls for a third term, which Philippe Burin (a Swiss historian) calls "accommodation," according to which most people basically just did whatever they had to do to get by. They weren't actively collaborating nor were they resisting, they just did what they had to do to put food on the table. This idea doesn't fit into the narrative that the monument is seeking to tell, so it is evacuated entirely. Even the monument itself is called the "ville martyre" (Martyred city), which pretty clearly sets up a certain kind of discourse. Even the street signs miles away give directions to the "ville martyre," that's how thoroughly inscribed the town is in a specific kind of memory.

But to be less negative, the fact remains that the monument is a real place and real people suffered. And the generational gap isn't so huge yet, I'm sure most people living in that area still know someone who knew someone who lost a relative, or something like that. Probably nowhere near 6 degrees of separation, more like 2 or 3 at the most. The wound has got to still be open, there's no real way it couldn't be. So in the end it links up to current debates about what to do in places like Rwanda or South Africa or the Balkans--what kinds of trials and what kinds of truth and reconciliation committees there should be. Which is still an ongoing debate, and no one really has any answer. If anything, WWII is a worthwhile subject of study precisely for this reason, in terms of how to move on. I would have appreciated more of a discussion of this side of things regarding the monument, but I also would guess that that's asking too much, too soon. If nothing else, it's certainly thought-provoking and worthwhile to visit.