Dead French Men + Women Part 2: Père Lachaise

These are the last photos I had left to post from before my camera got stolen. More in about three weeks!

Nicole! Don't know how that got so washed out.

Benjamin Constant, author of Adolphe

Moliere 

Ingres

Colette

With the great Baron Haussmann

Dantan 

Gericault, yes that is a bronze of The Raft of the Medusa 

Note: Yes, I did visit Jim Morrison's grave, I just don't find it to be as life-changing an experience as some. 

Note number two: this was also only visit number one out of either two or three. Imagine the largest cemetery you can, and double it. That's probably Père Lachaise. 

And you have a happy Valentine's day!

Well I have returned in one piece from my little foray to Madrid, Espana, however not all of my stuff has. As some of you have heard, I, SAT (stupid american tourist) as I shall henceforth be known, had my purse, containing everything I had with me of any importance, excluding my passport, stolen from a coffee shop. Luckily, since I had my passport I was able to return to the land of croissants, steak frîtes, coffee, and vin--are you noticing a trend here? Sidenote:I was not terribly enamored of the food in Spain, where your bacon comes complete with bones still attached.  I believe if the dead animal on your plate can be identified as anything but breast, leg, rib, steak or thigh, this excludes seafood, then it should probably be avoided. The words eye, snout, tongue, ear, and hoof are definitely to be scorned at all costs. I am very happy to be back safe and sound, with, thanks to insurance, a new camera and ipod to arrive, along with my parents in a few short weeks. 

After several hours of alternate anger and blubbering following this unfortunate incident, we are talking major I want my mommy moments here, I started to, very gradually, accept what had happened. What I was unable to accept however, was the loss of my pride. I felt I had lost my status as a "smart traveler." I am always careful on the metro, keep my key in my pocket when in Paris, make sure my bag is zipped, somehow it never occurred to me that my entire bag could be taken! Inconceivable! As inconceivable as a boat following in the night through eel-infested waters if you will (that's how you know I've lost it, I start making obscure Princess Bride references in my blog postings). So when someone slipped in, and quite easily I would imagine, made off with my bag, I thought someone was playing a joke on me for about thirty seconds. 

I felt as though every person relayed this story to, my friend Natasha would be the other half of this we, while feeling awful for me, secretly felt as though this was completely my fault. And while part of me agrees, I should have paid more attention, my bag should never have left my line of vision, I also feel as though this could happen to anyone. I was not Ricky waving Lucy's fur coat at what I believed to be my friend dressed as a burglar, only to find out the next morning it was not, in fact, Fred Mertz. I did not hold my bag high and and yell "take this! Make my day!" We all have moments where we let our guard down. And while there are plenty of people this would not have happened to, I'm willing to bet there are more to whom it would have. 

I had mostly gotten over this feeling of self hatred until a friend told me as I was of course not mugged, and clearly not pick-pocketed, I was just owned, pwned as he put it (link courtesy Matt Milner, and wikipedia). Most of us are not used to being that careful. In the States we all go into restaurants, cafes, etc, leave our stuff at a table to go order, go to the bathroom, etc, thinking nothing could happen. Especially for those of us that live on college campuses, we rarely worry about our stuff unless a visible computer, ipod or something else electronic is on the line. So that is why I say, all of you: watch out, you never know when the gypsies are coming to get you! 

And to the woman at bank of america who told me to have a great valentines day after she cancelled my stolen bank card, I say this: you with your little southern accent and naivté, you're next. 

The Serge Gainsbourg cover in the Jacques Brel t-shirt

Okkervil River, La Maroquinerie, Paris, February 8th

The opener was a band called Coming Soon, who all seem to be French, but sing in English. Overall really not great, except for the drummer/ukelele player/vocalist Bear Creek. Who is twelve, but looks about eight. WHO, I have just discovered is in the project Antsy Pants with Kimya Dawson, and they are on the Juno soundtrack. We all said someday we'll see something from that kid, and apparently we already have.


How to explain the phenomenon of Will Sheff? One audience member (Nicole), was noted as saying, "he's at once repulsive and incredibly attractive, it's impossible but true." It seemed as though, as the night went on, the audience became more and more charmed by his performance, so that by the time he took the stage for an encore wearing a Jacques Brel t-shirt, and proceeded to play an acoustic cover of a Serge Gainsbourg song, every person in attendance was ready to go home with him.

Setlist (I have Nicole to thank for this)

Le Centre Pompidou

Musée National de l'Art Moderne

 

Artist Martial Rayesse

Xavier Veilhan, Le Rhinocéros

Jean Dubuffet's Jardin d'hiver

Hey Russians and other amusing tidbits

60 kids took a trip to Provence. Looked at medieval buildings, sat on a bus, ate, talked about tattoos, made new friends, and discovered coiffures avec trois chats qui sont perdus dans la forêt. 

When we walked up these stairs we came upon a group of women creeping around doing some sort of performance art. 

Une creche tellement bizarre

French Children Running Wild

I stopped at the local Monoprix on the way home from orientation today and had reason to wonder why every teenage boy in France was buying armfuls of eggs. They were all accompanied by giggling french girls, chic even at 13 and 14 in their black coats and boots. I assumed the school age children of France simply decided they all wanted omelets for their after school snacks today.  Walking back to my apartment with my groceries, I was almost knocked onto the sidewalk by a herd of French boys all running and screaming to escape a seemingly invisible attacker. When I turned the corner an even larger mass of teenagers had flooded the street all shouting and yelling, some running through the middle of the street pursuing others. It is now, that I notice the aforementioned egg cartons.   How was I to know, this being my first Mardi Gras in France, that on this day children all come cascading out of school laden with eggs and flour sacks in order to throw them around the streets. Like our many halloween traditions that have never made it to France, we in the States have never adopted this practice, at least not in a literal sense.  After a little bit of research, I discovered that not only do we eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday/Fat Tuesday/Mardi Gras because they are a fat filled food that represent our final feast before fasting during lent begins, but also because in many places eggs are the food most often "given up" for Lent. So to get rid of all leftover eggs, you mix them with flour, yielding the classic crêpe. Therefore the children all go out in the street and throw eggs to symbolize the 40 days people used to go without eating any eggs at all.  So as I walked home through the Parisian cobblestone streets stew with runny yellow yolks mixed with the leftover rain collected between the stones, the smell of my least favorite food wafting up at me, I realized a place where even the food fights are symbolic really must be the place for me. 

I'm probably way behind the times...

http://songerize.com/

Dead French Men + Women: Cimitière Montparnasse

Samuel Beckett

Marguerite Duras

Henri Langlois, creator of the Cinémathèque Francaise

Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

Jean-Pierre Rampal (a necessary stop for a flute player)

Serge Gainsbourg

Charles Baudelaire

Le Mort joyeux

Dans une terre grasse et pleine d'escargots
Je veux creuser moi-même une fosse profonde,
Où je puisse à loisir étaler mes vieux os
Et dormir dans l'oubli comme un requin dans l'onde.

Je hais les testaments et je hais les tombeaux;
Plutôt que d'implorer une larme du monde,
Vivant, j'aimerais mieux inviter les corbeaux
À saigner tous les bouts de ma carcasse immonde.

Ô vers! noirs compagnons sans oreille et sans yeux,
Voyez venir à vous un mort libre et joyeux;
Philosophes viveurs, fils de la pourriture,

À travers ma ruine allez donc sans remords,
Et dites-moi s'il est encor quelque torture
Pour ce vieux corps sans âme et mort parmi les morts!

— Charles Baudelaire dans Les fleurs du mal

As we walked, we talked and talked about politics, about movies, and about why the French could never come close to producing a good rock band

Some fun at L'Opéra with Sarah...

Cliche

LES HALLES

NOTRE DAME

MUSÉE D'ORSAY

CHAMPS ELYSÉE

J'écris ces pages comme on rédige un constant ou un curriculum vitae, à titre documentaire et sans doute pour en finir avec une vie qui n'était pas la mienne. Il ne s'agit que d'une simple pellicule des faits et gestes. Je n'ai rien à confesser ni à élucider et je n'éprouve aucun goût pour l'introspection et les examens de conscience. Au contraire, plus les choses demeuraient obscures et mystérieuses, plus je leur portais de l'intérêt. Et même, j'essayais de trouver du mystère à ce qui n'en avait aucun.
--Un pedigree par Patrick Modiano

also: Andrew Bird, Soldier On EP