Cinéphiles look away now

I knew never going to see new films at the cinema would pay off eventually.

UGC is showing the 25 best films of 2009 at €3 each this week. Last night I went to 'Le Concert' at Bercy.
It's one of those films that would fit into the New Yorker Cartoon Lounge's bit on 'Confusion at the Cinema':

Homme A: "Tu vas voir le concert ce soir?"
Homme B: "Mais quel concert?"
Homme A: "Non, je veux dire 'Le Concert,' tu y vas?"
Homme B: "Je sais pas, un concert de quoi?"
Homme C: "Et où sont 'Max et les maximonstres'?"

Ok, the last bit doesn't translate at all.

See it. I loved it. During the opening credits, I realised with an inward groan that this film was going to make me miss playing in an orchestra. It also made me want to speak Russian, and go to the Théâtre du Châtelet, and drink an entire bottle of vodka when I realised none of the above were going to happen.

The plot revolves around classical music, but it's not un film intello, it's something anybody can watch and love and feel that they want to participate in. Without wanting to give spoilers, I drew an analogy between the orchestra and the soloist in the beginning of the final scene, and the audience and the film itself. (See, another point in favour of 'Le Concert': it brings out beautifully everyone's inner ridiculous pretentiousness, but that's okay, once in a while.)

When You Say The Year, Now You Start With 'Twenty'

I'm back in Paris for deux mille dix. (I said I would incorporate French eventually.)

Almost everyone here is mad for the soldes, every shop is offering 10%, 20%, 40% off, and I am assured they will get even more extreme before it's all over. In my experience January sales involve crushing around in busy hot shops taking your coat on and off to try on optimistically a) the top with the great floral pattern that turns out to be four sizes too big and b) the perfect versatile pencil skirt that ends up being four sizes too small. Still, sales are all about optimism, so I went to Printemps, the huge department store, on Thursday to check them out. I was just like Dougal in the lingerie department. Burberry swimsuits swam in front of my eyes and blaring music assaulted me from every direction. Heavily-made up fifty-year-old ladies in killer heels verbally abused the concession staff in Spanish, Russian and Japanese, and the staff then took their frustrations out on the queue for the changing rooms by verbally abusing them in French.

I eventually found the loos and had to hand over €1 to an air hostess holding a spray can, who escorted me to my cubicle. The waiting males outside were slapping each others' shoulders and squeezing out tears of mirth at the six different colours of toilet paper on display, and the various potions and lotions available in this highly superior urination station. I have never seen men outside a toilet less bored. I left.

Reading List:

Favourite Christmas book goes to 'Faces of Humph: Cariacatures and Memories' by Humphrey Lyttelton, which got me through that interminable stretch of Christmas Day between the Queen's Speech and the trifle and salmon sandwiches.

Score: Take Five stars (it's a jazz book. Sorry.)

'The Cleft' by Doris Lessing

This great woman (born 1919) is still alive and writing, despite having written a perfect novel ('The Golden Notebook') in 1962. I can say that of no other author. She won a Nobel in 2007 for 'The Cleft,' clearly because it was too late to give her one in 1962. Anyway, it's a fable about the origin of the sexes, in which a tribe of women who live by an enormous vagina-shaped rock slowly discover and are discovered by a new male gender. I know what you're thinking, so I'd like to quote her on feminism:

"What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion."

– Doris Lessing, The New York Times, 25 July 1982

She's one of the good guys.
Score: Three Nobel Prizes (probably more if by anyone else, but I'm comparing it to a perfect novel)

'Runaway' by Alice Munro

A lot of people make a big fat fuss about Alice Munro. This collection of short stories could be titled by short story cliché: "Is She Or Isn't She Adopted," "Is She Or Isn't She Psychic," "She Married The Wrong Brother," "He Had A Twin All Along," "She Went Funny-Religious," "Who Knew He Was Going To Jump In Front Of That Ole Train," etc. I did enjoy reading this. There was some great writing in it. But I couldn't escape the nagging feeling that all the characters were either Alice Munro or unfair caricatures of people who didn't like Alice Munro. Also, I'm sick of reading about generic wild environments e.g. coastline, islands, forests, etc.

Score: Three stars

'Oracle Night' by Paul Auster

Paul Auster is the one married to Siri Hustvedt, you know, the one I said wrote about "intellectuals in New York coping with the past, having dinner parties with each other" well, guess what, this is about a novelist in New York, I'm sure there is a dinner party involved, or at least some picking up of supper from a specialist deli. It's one of those books where the title of the book is also the title of the protagonist's book, which we are allowed to glimpse extracts of. (Like 'The Golden Notebook,' in fact.) Actually, beh, er, in this case it's the title of a book within the protagonist's work-in-progress. It's three-deep, clever, but Paul knows it, and Siri does too, and I bet they're in their New York loft right now eating very expensive delicatessen supper and talking about how clever they are.

Score: Four stars, it was damn good really, despite my resentment.

'Everyman' by Philip Roth

I can't believe I've never read any Auster or Roth. One would be understandable, neither is inexcusable. I loved this. This is about 'The Life and Death of a Male Body,' as the protagonist would call it, as he says from inside the book, if he'd ever been a writer. The most similar thing I've read recently was DeLillo's 'The Body Artist,' because they don't just address Death in an expansive, philosophical sense: I felt they both really try hard to understand the physical nature of a human body, its potential, its limitations, and how these fit with who we are inside it. I finished this feeling like I'd made friends with an author. You know. Next time you see them on a shelf you'll give an affectionate smile, they'll take precedence over other shiny books you haven't read. You give them a room and a key, then they start to put out tendrils in your mind and link with other experiences you've had, people you've known, books or films or pictures you're drawn to.

Score: Five stars, I'm feeling generous.

I'm having a New World literature phase, because at first, after reading so much classic old English waffle, Margaret Atwood sounds like Don DeLillo sounds like Alice Munro, but the more I read, the more these voices disassociate from each other and speak out separately. It's like when you read 'Trainspotting' and at first you think, 'oh, balls, it's all in Scottish,' then by the end you know the accents so well they have personalities of their own; characters, almost.

I'm being slightly facetious to make up for my shocking ignorance in having done a literature degree yet read virtually no modern American literature.

I am fulfilling my own prophecy in finding it an endless struggle to go to stuff and have time to write about going to stuff. It may be one or the other. A while ago I went to see La Clique at Bobino for €10 (standing, lounging, perching or otherwise squashing up tickets, rather than actual seats, but still.) It made me want to keep a pocketful of silver stars on me at all times and toss a shower of them in the air whenever I do anything remotely impressive. It's in London over Christmas, so if you're looking for presents of the 'doing not having' variety, I can thoroughly recommend it. My favourite act:


Reading List

Midnight Express, by Billy Hayes
The story of a young American hippie's 5-year stay in a Turkish prison for possession of hash, and his subsequent escape. Translated into French so simple even I can understand it. Quite heart-warming in a way, I think there's a movie too.
Score: Two stars

The Body Artist, by Don DeLillo
Stark. A grieving woman tells stories with her body by forcing it under the most perfect control, and an idiot man can only speak in the words of others. Gets under your skin. Full of images that stick, and half-conscious repetition. One to read again when I have more life experience.

Score: Three stars.

The Sorrows of an American, by Siri Hustvedt

Paul Auster's Norwegian wife writes wryly and wittily about intellectuals in New York coping with the past, having dinner parties with each other, etc. It's the kind of book where someone would find a lost childhood toy in an attic and talk about it for an entire chapter, including flashbacks. Protagonist has a respected and lucrative yet, importantly, not soulless profession: in this case psychiatry.

Score: Four and a half stars, lose half a one for being the famous novelist wife of a famous novelist. Pah.

My Balls On Your Pas Encore Payé

The chocolate event at Galeries Lafayette was magic. (That was Thursday 12th.) Their Christmas decorations are up, making the entire outside look like a huge Russian palace of some variety, at least until you get close enough to see the animated teddy bears in the windows. Maison du Chocolat were giving out tiny cups of heavenly melted chocolate – happiness in a vessel – and Dalloyau were making chocolate rings in moulds brushed with edible metallic paint and handing them out as soon as they were dry. Too beautiful to eat. Pierre Hermé (of Maracons fame) was signing his new book. He looks exactly as you would imagine, i.e. like he's fond of chocolate macaroons.

I'm tempted to make a massive generalisation about French people and chocolate, or the French and self-indulgence, or the Parisian obsession with appearance, but it's been done so often, and besides, no-one does Paris-based generalisations better than Olivier Magny, so I'm just going to give up with those and encourage you to read his fabulous (and accurate) blog instead of this one.

On Sunday I went to my second Parisian salon: Papilles en Fête. There I got talking to (and sampled the wares of) a rabbity fellow promoting terrine du lapin, pointy-nosed wine vendors, fat-fingered butchers selling pork cured fifty ways, and the inventor of the Foie Gras Strawberry, a lump of goose liver pâté painted with a jammy red exterior and topped with a real strawberry stalk. (Get them while you can...) And then I did something which means I will never integrate into this society. I came across the snail stall, where a quiet man with slightly bulgy eyes was putting foil trays into a microwave. The smell of garlic butter was fabulous. I glanced over his propaganda, showing the snails in their natural habitat, pictures of him with snails, explanations of potential predators of snails, etc. Then he stuck a shell under my nose, nestled in a paper napkin, with a cocktail stick poking out, the other end attached to the innards of said mollusc. I stared at it. With one swift motion I flicked it into my mouth and chewed. I told myself I'd eaten them before, as a child, on holiday in rural France, and loved them. By this point all the butter had gone and I was left with pure snail. I reminded myself I was daring, cosmopolitan; a try-anything-once, pleasure-seeking citizen of the world. Then I went behind the honey stall and spat it back into the shell. This was a huge mistake, as I could then see what it looked like.



Thursday was Beaujolais Nouveau day. At lunch in the school cantine all the teachers were complaining because normally one gets Beaujolais on the third Thursday of November (it's Beaujolais day, duh) but there wasn't any.

Apparently it's like when a Harry Potter book comes out, people hang around at midnight for the first taste. I thought they were taking the piss, but after school I went to my supermarket and they wheeled a massive trolley of pink and red bottles out: "Ahh, c'est le beaujolais? Oui oui c'est aujourd'hui, ça coute combien par bouteille? Un euro quatre-vingt? Pas possible! Deux quatorze? Ahh, beh, tant mieux quand même, je prends trois." €2.14 each. They're saying it's a good year, the Beaujolais is fine, the crise (credit crunch) is lifting, the cows are getting fatter. (Wine is what single-handedly keeps French farmers busy. Not subsidies.)

After a refreshing verre of Beaujolais Nouveau, I went to a 'concept' soirée called My Balls On Your, the idea being to show contempt for any noun you like in the illustrated format.

I have a bunch of stickers. Look forward to seeing where that is going.

I'm not completely frivolous. I m'inscrired at the library on Friday (free, Paris-wide access to up to 40 materials of my choice for 3 weeks) to give me something to read. If I were in need of a certain text or edition I'd be screwed, but as I'm just browsing for pleasure and random enlightenment it's fine. Also on Friday, I re-discovered Culture Rapide off rue de Belleville (between métros Belleville and Jourdain I think), a very cool café-bar with reasonably-priced coffees, snackage and booze, plus a weekly programme of events from free buffets to poetry slams.

...and we're back to frivolous: today found me in St Germain, then at Bistrot des Artistes on rue des Anglais (excellent) for a rum-and-coco milkshake. A lovely French girl had tickets to Grizzly Bear tonight at La Cigale in Montmartre, but couldn't go and couldn't sell them, and as it started in an hour, she gave them to us with a plea to "just go and enjoy it, I would rather someone used them!" Bought tickets with (now ex-) boyfriend? Unwanted birthday present? Sudden allergy to sweat and or beer? I don't care, they were great, and if I ever see her there again I will thank her more enthusiastically than I did this time (basically just a nod and a smile for the €25 face-value of the ticket).

Oh, and an addition to my post on French marketing: how could I forget sex. Sex sells anything that isn't sold using anything else, i.e. virtually everything.

Reading List
'Gomorrah' by Roberto Saviano: The author is a journalist from the region who risked his life to write this passionate and unflinching exposé of the Naples mafia. Heart-poundingly dangerous.
Score: Five, and no jokes (too serious).

'The Satanic Verses' by Salman Rushdie: a few magical moments, and some great prose infused with Rushdie's idiosyncratic wordplay; the rest of the book is worth it if you're a fan, but if you're not, it can all get a bit Bend It Like Beckham.
Score: three stars, zero fatwas.

Kids, homesickness, dreams about the Daily Mail.

I’m finding teaching tiring, but full of delight.

I had nine classes on Thursday, an entire day’s worth of teaching. If each class has 25 pupils that’s already over 200 little faces. All the Thibalts, Thulis, Blanches, Audes, Octaves and Cesars blend into one another very quickly, with their clean hair and Ralph Lauren polo shirts. (Counting myself lucky compared to others with kids who throw chairs, have mullets, walk out etc.) Mainly I did basic vocabulary, introductions, pronunciation etc, unless I was compelled to fill more time in which case I pulled out my Bonfire Night stuff and pitched it to the class’s level. My CM2’s were very keen on burning effigies, and a division soon emerged between the ones who wanted to burn Sarko and those who were eager to see Chirac go up in flames. Just as I was idly beginning to wonder whether I was getting myself sacked, à la that woman with the teddy bear called Mohammed, the teacher stepped in with a well-timed ‘on s’arrête là!’

I was asked in the staff room if I was training to become a teacher, and when I said no and explained my circumstances, I was told, “Don’t teach. Don’t do it. If you teach, you can’t do anything else, that’s what they think. They look at your CV and if it says you are a teacher they think you aren’t capable of doing anything else.” This is more true in France than England, I think, but still. A warning.
I am over the one-month hump now and beginning to settle in properly at last. There is a point almost exactly a month after you arrive in a different country when it ceases to be the longest holiday you’ve ever had and the cold hard reality starts to sink in. I think everyone’s been struggling a little. Lately, I’ve been missing: fireworks and the fairground on the Downs, jacket potatoes, real mugs of tea, Bristol accents, the arrival of winter Starbucks specials, pumpkin-carving, the Times 2 crossword and a cappuccino, Neighbours, the new term’s library books, Paperchase, lemsip, and whatever my mum does to washing which makes it smell better than I can ever hope to achieve. A pint that doesn’t cost €5 and a soft fresh loaf of bread that doesn’t go stale within eight hours. I’m glad I didn’t go home for Toussaint, though, as if I had, I’d have to acclimatize again when I came back, whereas now I’ve almost let go of my irrational England nostalgia.

Yesterday, I saw two very fashionable young men collide in the street. One was carrying a trombone, and the other was clutching a huge grey furry cat. There was a slight struggle, during which I almost expected them to swap. Classic Paris moments which I wouldn’t give up for anything.

I’ll finish with a dream I had this week, even though, as Adrian Mole’s mother says, “there’s only one thing more boring than listening to other people’s dreams, and that’s listening to other people’s problems.” It is too good not to though.
I was having a casual conversation with someone, it went like this:

Me: “Look, have you seen this article in the Mail today, it says the technology to make human resurrection a reality could be a little as 40 years away. They’ve done it on mice.”
Friend: “Really? No, I haven’t.”
Me: “There’s a poll: which five people would Daily Mail readers most like to bring back from the dead?”
Friend: “Princess Diana?”
Me: “Bingo, top spot. Well done. Any more?”
Friend: “Um, no, Jade Goody?”
Me: “No! Wrong! You seriously can’t get the other four?”

…at which point I became so frustrated I woke myself up, and couldn’t sleep again until I had guessed the others: Elvis, Winston Churchill, Henry VIII, and someone like Scott of the Antarctic. I later did some online research to see if I had correctly guessed the imaginary poll and found I had forgotten Bobby Moore.

What's happening this week:

France joins in the celebrations on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. 7pm Mon 9th Nov, Place de la Concorde Be aware of chaotic traffic circulation and probably delays and manifs galore.

Chocolate event at Galeries Lafayette. Free tasting, demonstrations, decadence etc. 5pm-9pm Thurs 12th Nov, Galeries Lafayette

Know God by all means, but not in my classroom

I cut half of this post out because I didn't agree with it anymore, or find it necessary to make sense of the following anecdote. It's my blog, I can do that.

Meanwhile, in the real world, I observed a class of French 8 and 9-year-olds today while they were learning about the rise of Christianity in France. It was an amazing lesson; history, religious studies, economics, citizenship and maths all in one. I took some badly-written notes, which, translated and edited for clarity and length only, I'm going to post. I was so touched by their enthusiasm and their humanity and, I don't know, it seems relevant. Maybe if all those twittering god-no-godders today had been in this class when they were nine, they wouldn't be making such a big deal out of it now.

Teacher: Ok, look at the map of Europe and the timelines. Look at the numbers. Who can tell me something about the different numbers of Christians in France in 400AD and 500AD?

Kids: [after some amusing comments] There are more! Loads more!

T: Yes, well done! So why do we think this might be?

Kid: Miss, did they see it on TV? *laughing*

T: [laughs] No, they didn't have TV. First, think about how people used to move things around back when there were no TVs or cars or aeroplanes.

Kid: Did they use a postman?

T: No, they didn't have postmen either. But you're right, in a way. It was someone who travelled. Who would have moved around a lot, a long long time ago, before postmen?

Ks: Everybody! Nobles! Train drivers! Important people! [...they continue guessing.]

Ace Kid: Miss I heard that some people from France used to go all the way to China to fetch the rice. They would travel and travel and they would come back from China with rice all the way back to France, and they would carry things and bring messages and things.

T: Yes. Exactly right! Well done. So look on your map and see how people travelled all the way from the East, through the Middle East, and towards Europe. The caravans from Asia brought spices and all sorts of other things, and they helped to spread ideas about Christianity as on the way the travelling people preached. So this was the diffusion of Christianity, facilitated by commerce. Also at this time Rome was taken over by people who 'officialised' Christianity and made it the one proper religion of the Empire, so old Roman culture was outlawed and everybody was told to change, even in France.

Kids: Everyone?! Waoh etc. Why? Why did it take over?

T: There have always been people who believed - sorry, who believe - in things. People like to believe in things, children. Life is sometimes very hard and it's reassuring to believe in something. The people of the caravans were sometimes travelling for weeks and months at a time, it was very uncomfortable and dangerous back then. So you see why it was good to think somebody was looking after them. We are very lucky in France because we have the "liberté de culture," we have the freedom to make a religious choice (because it is a choice), and part of this liberté is that my religious freedom stops where another person's starts. [makes arm gestures] I can believe whatever I want, and so can they, but to each other we have to be - what do we have to be, children?

Kids: Respectful!

T: Yes, we have to respect other people's religious beliefs. Otherwise you get religious wars between two kinds of believers that can cause enormous deaths. What do you think? Would you kill the person sitting next to you because you were a different religion? Would it make you feel better to kill your neighbour?

Kids: [all look round, start laughing] Mais non! Because I like him.

Ace Kid: Good, because otherwise I wouldn't have any friends!

T: Yes, good. Shh. [waits for them to be quiet, then speaks slowly and clearly.] But the problem is that in some countries, though, things aren't like that. People who believe something often don't understand why others don't believe exactly like they do. C'est illogique mais ça existe. It's unbelievable to the people who are fighting these wars that they could be wrong. They're convinced it's right, but is it really?

Kids: Nooooooooon!

T: Non. Non. [She looks very serious.] Il faut lutter contre ça. [We must struggle against that.]


Now, without going into France's shady past in that area, or the race riots of the banlieux, or the fact that I'm in a great school in a chic suburb where the teacher has time and resources and energy to actually teach, unlike many – and above all, without getting onto the no-god-know-god seesaw – I think that's a pretty positive start to a nine-year-old's religious education.

Salon "Bio," a.k.a. let's make lambs into shoes.

Continuing on my current theme of massive unfounded generalisations about France and French people, I missed the moment when Parisians turned, en masse, to the side of organic food and became obsessed with all things "Bio." I think it happened around 2004. Though I wasn't here then, I imagine that if I was, one minute we'd all have been sitting around dipping our steak frites in beurre and watching the red blood run down our faces, then there'd be a barely audible click, and within a few seconds we'd be asking one another where you can buy five-grain rusks and explaining how important it is for one's forme, santé, enfants etc to "manger bio."

This weekend the better-off sort of Parisian woman (pregnant, 30, serene, wearing expensive knitwear) is at the Salon Bio at Parc de la Villette with her serene knitwear-clad mummy, elbowing past the students to get to the free organic pesto dips. I know, because I went yesterday. 'Salons' are another Parisian thing I had no experience of, and my landlady gave me some free tickets, so I went out of curiosity. What goes on at a 'salon'? Traditionally, it was a reception room, and the word in English came to mean a literary, musical, or other intellectual kind of soirée, hosted to promote The Arts by some aspiring lady, accompanied by tea and delicacies and a string quartet. That's the mental image I have, anyway.

In Paris 2009 it seems to mean an exhibition hall, a show, and these exist for everything under the sun, last month: salon du mariage, salon immobilier, salon du chocolat. At the Salon Bio we tasted breads, jams, spreads, cookies, cider, all produced organically and at phenomenal prices. There was also an array of beautiful, gaspingly-expensive baby clothes, bags, hats, hemp stuff, you know. Fabulous deals on apple crisps, €8.50 a bag or €15 for two. Bizarre gadgets to oxygenate the air, de-chlorify water, relieve stress. Criminally costly cookware for steaming your food, vibrating anti-cellulite massage chairs to shake out whatever change was left in your pockets. Point made, I think. It was pricey.

The interesting, generalization-worthy part was this: the focus was on well-being and personal health, rather than on the planet, as it would have been in England. I didn't go in the Greenpeace tent, but elsewhere there were remarkably few stalls proclaiming their low environmental impact and green credentials. All the adverts were based on the fact that products contained some rare ingredient (loved the horse milk soap), were super-low-allergy, were re-invigorating or some shit. And in the midst of this "bio" produce, supposedly so healthy and hippyish, there was a stall selling sheepskin rugs, leather bags, and these delightful cosy slippers made from lambswool, that looked a bit like sheep. It was the final proof that, as I had suspected, Parisians were just here because it is deeply fashionable. There are certain must-have cereals, darling. Then they are going home in their cars to their fur coats and unethically farmed meat.

We did try an absolutely beautiful spicy fruit bread-cake hybrid, which reminded me that October half-term (23rd) is Christmas pudding week. I have a dreadful feeling that I will masochistically treat this as a challenge and try and make one here. This is only because the horrible memories have faded from Christmas 2007 when I made three in Bristol and gave one to my French exchange student friend as a present which she then ate the same day. One we ate at Fake Christmas Dinner and I can't remember what happened to the other one.