Les bons tons

Quel week-end magnifique!

Manu

Well, that was interesting. Mathilde and I got free tickets to see Manu Chao last night at the Paramount. And we had great seats. First balcony, third row. Had it not been for the writhing woman in row one of the balcony, who for some reason felt she needed to stand up and dance, though she looked more like she was writhing in agony or had to pee, I would have had an unobstructed view all night. Luckily, she could not keep up with Manu and sat down every so often and then permanently. She was a really bad dancer, with no sense of rhythm at all. It was actually kind of hilarious.

But the real thrills were down below, in the mosh pit. Call me old, old-fashioned, no fun, whatever. But a mosh pit--what a stupendously horrible idea. Lip-service crowd control for a bunch of stoners pushing and shoving one another in random fashion, interspersed with random people being lifted off the ground and used as human projectiles. It doesn't look like fun at all. (Je sais que la maman de Mathilde lit ce blog, donc: Pas de panique! Mathilde et moi étions très sages, assises et loin de la mêlée.) It just looks like a bunch of vaguely unhappy, usually overweight, slightly awkward, mostly male humans with free-floating anger issues that they need to work out. Ick. Just ick.

Manu was pretty amazing. Quite energetic, especially considering he was born in 1961 and thus is a mere five years younger than me. In fact, he has more energy than a five year-old on speed. There are lots of influences in his music, from years of wandering around the world, from being born in Paris to Spanish parents and having a musical father with (I think) some Cuban roots. Manu is also un chanteur engagé, which is always a nice plus. Anyway, you can read all about him on the Internet if you are interested in knowing more about Manu Chao (and his original band, long since disbanded, Mano Negra). I am sure one of the influences on Manu Chao is the French rock group Les Negresses Vertes. Check them out. And Manu has produced for Amadou and Mariam, a truly amazing duo. Check them out too. Yeah, world music.

Unrelated: I found this on the Internet. It is by my dear friend Pierre Vella. You can see his name (and that of the late Cathleen Vella, his lovely wife and my dear friend) and address on the postcard he illustrated and sent to a friend.

Touche pas à mon cirque!

When I lived in the 18th (Rue Camille Tahan, near Place de Clichy), there was a vacant lot on Avenue de Clichy (on the right side facing north, which is important because the left side of Avenue de Clichy is in the 17th and the right side is in the 18th, two arrondissements that are totally different, one populaire, the other not) that one day spawned a circus. It was winter; it was a cirque d'hiver. Just a small affair -- a tent, a caravan and a bunch of tziganes (gypsies). When I was a kid, I wanted to run away and join a circus. Maybe most kids entertain this fantasy; I'm not sure many almost do it, as I did. I made a plan with my friend from across the street, which included throwing a pebble against her window in the middle of the night. I got as far as the front door of my house before I really saw clearly that this plan of ours would end badly. I touched the door knob but couldn't turn it; I went back to bed and gave up my circus fantasy.

I used to walk by the little circus on Avenue de Clichy every day. Sometimes I would see the tziganes sitting around and smoking or practicing their routines. I wanted to join them; I wanted to run away and join the circus.

The French government has recently decided to get tough on its tzigane population. The pretext is that with Roumania and other Eastern European countries joining the European Union, France is being overrun by these "gens du voyage". A little legislative history is in order: until 2000, the Loi Besson dated May 31, 1990 required cities with more than 5,000 inhabitants to set aside a patch of land for nomads. In 2000, another law was passed (Loi n°2000-614 du 5 juillet 2000) to deal with complex cases (cities with just under 5,000 inhabitants, for example). In 2003, another law (la loi sur la sécurité intérieure) placed further restrictions on the rights of these gens du voyage to occupy these encampments. In 2005, France's legislators decided to make them pay residency taxes (property taxes).

So what's happening now and getting everybody up in arms is really just part of a process that was set in motion years ago. The problematizing of itinerant people did not begin yesterday; in fact, it goes back way further than the law passed in 1991.

Back to the Cirque parisien Romanès: it winters in Paris and performs across Europe the rest of the year. It even represented France at the Shanghai World's Fair. Now Eric Besson, France's Ministre du Travail, has caused a stir for revoking the work permits of a couple of its musicians. Alexandre Romanès, the colorful and eloquent head of the Cirque, claims there is a link between the way his musicians are being treated and the government's larger crusade against gypsies and their encampments. The current winter home of the Cirque Romanès is on another street I used to live on, Rue de Courcelles (actually, the address is 42-44 Boulevard de Reims in the 17th; I was further down on Rue de Courcelles and my apartment was in the 8th arrondissement). I was listening to one of my daily podcasts (Pascale Clark's Comme on nous parle) when suddenly I heard the familiar voice of Alexandre Romanès. The France Inter program was initially aired on September 27. Romanès announced that a soirée de soutien au cirque would be held on October 4 and that he hoped his troupe would be able to perform as planned starting on November 6. Vive le cirque! Vive le Cirque Romanès! If you live in Paris, please go and see these talented people perform. Think of it as a nice way to flip the bird at Nico and all the pretty people who apparently want to rid the landscape of gypsies. Where is first lady Carla Bruni, l'artiste, when we most need her to go to bat for her fellow artistes?

Good news, horrible news

I was driving up to Hiawatha for a walk with Neko before dark, feeling happy and cheery because damn it the sun was out! I turned on the radio just in time to hear a weather forecast for the month of October that was awesome. It called for fog overnight and in the early morning, burning off around 11 am and giving way to sunshine and temperatures in the mid-60's. That's what I call an Indian Summer, folks! I couldn't believe it and even now wonder if I really heard this at all. My euphoria was short-lived, though, because the next item up on the radio was the event now referred to as the Rutgers Suicide. One of the saddest stories I have ever heard.

RIP Tyler Clementi.

Talk Talk

In Seattle, we had a fantastic last summer day yesterday. It was the perfect date for my friend Susi's annual Oktoberfest party, which features great German beer and food (pretzels and sausages and potato salad and german chocolate cookies and other light fare) and Susi in a dirndl looking pretty durn cute.





Today, fall is here. Just in time for the rain and gray skies, my friend Dahli sent me a link to TED (click on title), which bills itself as bringing riveting ideas by remarkable people to the world. Behind the cool website, where you can find talks by topic or by date or by most emailed and most blogged, is a "small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading." TED, which has been around since 1984, started out as two conferences a year devoted to Technology, Entertainment and Design. TED still does the two conferences -- one in Long Beach and one in Palm Springs each spring -- but has added a third in venerable Oxford UK each summer. The great thing is that the website brings these talks in podcast format to the world. I just watched Annie Lennox give a talk about AIDS. And, though I hate to admit it, I watched a few minutes of Elizabeth Gilbert on writing and genius. I actually find her oddly engaging; I just wish I could say that I loved her planetary mega-best selling tsunami of a book better. I guess someone had to write THAT BOOK and she is a better writer than most who would have been tempted to do so.

Anyway, enjoy TED. And if you are a Seattleite, think about supporting Town Hall this fall and winter. Turn off the damn television and get out. Go downtown and pay as little as 5 bucks to hear some pretty good talkers who come to town to talk. They are generally hawking a book they have just published, but many are really interesting people and good speakers. You can also go to Benaroya for the SAL (Seattle Arts and Lectures) series, which brought Jonathan Franzen to Seattle and is bringing TR Reid on October 5 to talk about health care. In 2011 -- this is exciting! -- the writer Richard Ford is coming. And so is Joyce Carol Oates.

Coming up at Town Hall this week: Deborah Fallows, about learning Chinese; Nancy Pearl, in a talk about travel books called Book Lust To Go; and most exciting, Mary Catherine Bateson, the cultural anthropologist, giving a talk called Aging With Purpose.

I am ready to accept that summer is over and that I live in Seattle, where the rainy season can be pretty depressing and very long if you just stay at home and watch television. I bought myself a pair of incredible rain boots in Paris last summer. They weighed a ton and I was afraid I would be unable to get them in my suitcase. But they made it back to Seattle with me, leaving me with no good reason not to go outside when it's raining. Remember Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin? It was said of Christopher Robin that he didn't much care what the weather did, as long as he was out in it. My boots are like his wellies, and I thought of him as I walked through mud puddles in Lincoln Park this morning. Is there anything more fun than walking through mud puddles with wellies on?

In fact, Milne wrote a poem called Happiness, which simply goes like this:

Happiness

John had
Great Big
Waterproof
Boots on;
John had a
Great Big
Waterproof
Hat;
John had a
Great Big
Waterproof
Mackintosh –
And that
(Said John)
Is
That.

Overheard at the Social Security Office

Who?
A very fat old man wearing a proud to be a veteran t-shirt.

Where?
At the Burien Social Security Office.

When?
This morning.

The situation: Fat old man comes in to see someone about a letter but does not have his social security card with him. He complains, quite loudly in an otherwise silent room, about benefits having been cut off without warning. He explains in a loud voice that the last time this happened it fucked up everything, especially his mortgage and utility payments. Says his wife works full-time running a shop and can NEVER come to the Social Security office to deal with this issue herself, after being told that the recipient of the letter needed to come in person. In reply to an inaudible question from the increasingly exasperated teller, the man booms out:

"Cleopatra is my wife!"

Who invented proud parent of college student decals for cars and why?

So in my yoga class this morning, we were asked to come up with a resolve. This is a sentence that expresses an intention or a wish. For some reason, that line from the zen hot dog stand joke popped into my head, so my resolve was "Make me one with everything". I'm not sure I want to be one with everything, though, or even what it means. The punchline of the second zen hot dog stand joke is "Change comes from within". I'll let you ponder that one.

In the meantime, and although I am supposed to be feeling one with everything, I have been thinking about one of my new pet peeves ever since I saw a big ole SUV with a decal in the back window that read "Parent of a Dartmouth Student". I had never noticed this cultural phenomenon before, and since I saw the Dartmouth sticker it seems I can't escape these proud parents. My other car is a Mercedes.

Why do I find this phenomenon so irritating? After all, what's wrong with parental pride in offspring? Nothing, except that it is so overdone here in America that you just want to scream sometimes! You would think that all we produce here are Einsteins, Picassos, Curies and Galileos. It costs a lot of money to send kids to colleges these days; in some ways, the display of these decals is a way of telling the world you can afford the 60,000 dollars a year it takes to attend Harvard or Yale, and that your kid (probably after graduating from 23,000 dollar a year Lakeside) got in! Woo hoo! Whatever, right?

I would like to know when these stickers started popping up, so if anyone can enlighten me on that I would appreciate it. They sure didn't exist when I was going to college -- or maybe my parents just weren't into that. I suppose they could have had regular decals, and theirs would have been pretty impressive: Harvard, Occidental, Mount Holyoke, University of Washington, WSU. Except for the last one, cough cough. But I don't recall such decals on my parents' cars; and I certainly would have found it an irritating expression of superiority with no legitimate basis.

This leads me to a related pet peeve, known as résumé embellishment or lying about your education and/or career. The funniest recent example I saw is a local Seattle journalist who tried to shave twenty years off her life by indicating she had gotten her journalism degree in the 90's instead of the 70's. She tried to pass it off as a typo, but no one was fooled. A typo involves one letter or number, not multiple ones.

But consider the true story of Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who:

...became well known for urging stressed-out students competing for elite colleges to calm down and stop trying to be perfect. Yesterday she admitted that she had fabricated her own educational credentials, and resigned after nearly three decades at M.I.T. Officials of the institute said she did not have even an undergraduate degree.

“I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to M.I.T. 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my résumé when I applied for my current job or at any time since,” Ms. Jones said in a statement posted on the institute’s Web site. “I am deeply sorry for this and for disappointing so many in the M.I.T. community and beyond who supported me, believed in me, and who have given me extraordinary opportunities.”

Ms. Jones said that she would not make any other public comment “at this personally difficult time” and that she hoped her privacy would be respected.

Ms. Jones, 55, originally from Albany, had on various occasions represented herself as having degrees from three upstate New York institutions: Albany Medical College, Union College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In fact, she had no degrees from any of those places, or anywhere else, M.I.T. officials said.

A spokesman for Rensselaer said Ms. Jones had not graduated there, though she did attend as a part-time nonmatriculated student during the 1974-75 school year. The other colleges said they had no record of her.

Source: NY Times, April 27, 2007

It took a lot of guts for Ms. Jones to come clean, I think. Especially in a culture where some folks judge others on the basis of the decal in the window of their SUV. Man, that's just so messed up.

Franzen Live

Jonathan Franzen was in Seattle last night to kick off the SAL author series and promote his latest novel, Freedom. Seattle has the reputation of being a book-loving city, and Franzen was recently touted on the cover of Time Magazine as perhaps America's only living great novelist or some such hyperbole, so it wasn't surprising to see a nearly full house.

I always like to people spy at events like this - I try and come up with words that capture the crowd as a whole. This one was pretty gray, pretty dowdy on the whole, with an inordinate number of large groups of elderly women. I think it was a book club outing for many. I heard a woman behind me refuse a single one of six empty seats to someone (festival type seating, except for the big benefactors) and then realized she was saving it for her five book club mates. As an aside, I don't think that's right when it's festival seating and the crowd is near capacity. Unfortunately, at least one of the people in the book club was either hard of hearing or hard of listening. Repeatedly, she loudly asked the person sitting next to her what Jonathan Franzen had just said. In the row directly in front of me, a woman (who was with a man) worked on a quilt during the entire presentation. I don't know why, but this seems unacceptable in a way that discreetly knitting would not be. I wonder how she managed to get the quilt past security. She dropped her scissors a couple of times, as well as her thread. I don't think she was listening to the presentation at all.

The crowd started showing its love the second Franzen walked on stage. They laughed when he stopped to remove his coat. I'm not sure why that was funny, but apparently it was. They wanted to show how appreciative they were that he - a man who had made the cover of Time - had decided to grace little old Seattle with a visit.

He read his remarks, which didn't bother me in the least, though Walt was a bit disappointed. I thought he gave serious consideration to the 4 questions he had decided to answer, including the question of influence and of the autobiographical factor. I wasn't surprised to learn that he admires Kafka and I wasn't surprised to hear that he doesn't admire Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. I thought it was kind of brave of him to say this aloud, especially about Virginia Woolf. She is revered by feminists, after all. But her novels are nearly unreadable, I'm sorry to report. Her essays and journals are much more interesting to read.

I came across Franzen several years ago, when I was living in Paris and had a subscription to the New Yorker, a Christmas present from my mother. My mother would always give me checks that cost more to cash than they were worth, until I finally begged her to stop. So she got me a subscription. I read a Franzen short story (or was it an article) about his mother's illness and his father's dementia. It was intensely moving and grimly comic. I was hooked. I bought The Corrections, his massive novel about family life in the 90's, and devoured it. Then I forgot about him, until Time put him on the cover with that hyperbolic headline.

He has written a new novel, Freedom, and it is getting heavy promotion for a serious work of fiction. I think I'll check it out. Click on the title above for a link to the NY Times review of Freedom.


Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Tom Wolfe, and Gore Vidal

Back to the Island

The weather was better on Whidbey Island last weekend than it was in Seattle, apparently. We enjoyed the cool nights and mostly sunny days, and didn't feel too bummed out on Monday, when left the Island in the pouring rain.

I am really tempted to post photos of identifiable individuals gesture dancing to Leon Russell singing Back to the Island, an annual Labor Day Weekend ritual. But I know better:

A year's worth of reading, recommended by the Super Librarian

I've always thought that back-to-school, post-Labor Day was the natural beginning of the year. La Rentrée littéraire is a French tradition that honors this vérité.

Earlier this summer, everyone's favorite librarian Nancy Pearl (author of Book Lust)offered up a list of lesser-known books that should be on everyone's to read list. It's always humbling and challenging to come across a list of books that sound like they are worth reading and not see one familiar name or title! Click on the title here for a look at the Lusty Librarian's List.

Right now, I'm reading Le dernier mort de Mitterand by Raphaëlle Bacqué. It begins with the suicide of François de Grossouvre, a member of François Mitterand's political entourage, in 1994. He was not the only Mitterand proche to end his life: who can forget the sad story of Pierre Bérégovoy (and his outraged widow, who clearly blamed Mitterand for the death of her husband)? But his suicide was kept more in the shadows for a long time. Bacqué does a great job of telling the story of a friendship that had all the markings of a love affair and that became as worn and frazzled as the power wielded by the enigmatic, mysterious François Mitterand. Details about Mitterand's double life are recounted here too, since Grossouvre was instrumental in attending to its details: Anne Pingeot, Mitterand's mistress, the mother of his daughter Mazarine, hidden away for so many years and then thrust into the public eye when Mitterand died.

Best shoes! Ever!

I don't like object worship, fetishism for possessions or the tendency to turn compulsive shopping into a noble pursuit. But I do like well-crafted things, especially shoes. Good craftsmanship is not enough, however. And being beautiful is not enough in a shoe. A shoe has to be more than tolerable or comfortable to wear. It has to be heavenly to walk in. I walk a lot; I enjoy the feeling of walking and like to be conscious of what my feet are feeling when I walk.

This may be why I have never been a fan of super high heels. They are uncomfortable to walk in. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar. Women wear high heels because they think this will attract men. Wearing high heels is a desperate act. At least in my opinion. So there.

The rant above is just a lead-in for the photo of my new shoes. They are made by CYDWOQ (see video). They have a slight negative heel, but any resemblance with "earth shoes" ends there. Remember earth shoes? My dentist and I were laughing about them today -- both of us are old enough to have worn them and dumb enough to have bought an original pair. Man, the pain! The tendonitis! And what ugly suckers they were!

Compare earth shoes





with my CYDWOQs:

New tenant, new lamp, broken dryer

I decided yesterday was about time to get ready for Mathilde, who will be living in our mother-in-law apartment for several months as she does an internship at Alliance française. Mathilde is 22 and from Perpignan, France. I started my clean-up with a load of laundry and immediately broke the dryer. I didn't do anything special to break it; it just started making a really strange noise, like someone had dumped about 15 dollars worth of quarters inside. In fact, this was my first thought: that a pocket (not mine, mind you) containing an extraordinary amount of change had not been emptied before the article of clothing it was attached to was thrown in the washing machine. That would have been great, in retrospect. No such luck. So the next thing I did was take out two items with zippers, in the vain hope that the noise was coming from some innocent metallic object and not some vital inner mechanism. In the meantime, I should add, I had put a very expensive, very loved pair of trousers in the wash on the "delicate" hand wash setting. I was petrified they would shrink or lose their exquisite shape. I took the extra precaution of reducing the number of rotations on the spin cycle. I got so distraught over the impending dryer disaster (Month of August! Repair guy on vacation! Intern coming from France in a week!) that I wasn't really paying attention to the wash cycle in progress. When the washer stopped I tried the door but it wouldn't open. Thinking the cycle was done, I turned the setting to "off" and then waited a minute before opening the door. When I did, a ton of water came spilling out onto the floor. Water, water everywhere! That's right, the reason the door would not open was that the cycle was still in progress you idiot! I was so dumbfounded and distracted by the dryer problem that I just held my trousers in my hand and looked on as the water continued to spill onto the floor and my shoes.
The important thing is that my trousers look fine -- they have their same basic shape and color. They were pretty water logged, though, since the spin cycle had not been completed. So I wrung them out as delicately as possible, which is actually impossible, and now they are hanging to dry for the next three days....

After I hung them up, I did the most sensible thing I could do: I decided to put off the apartment clean-up for a day and took the wet clothes from the broken dryer up to the coin-op laundromat. Neko and I went for a walk while they were drying, and we happened to go by Click! Design That Fits, a really great little shop in West Seattle owned by a couple that makes beautiful jewelry (Smersch, check 'em out). My favorite lamp in the universe, which I have wanted to buy ever since I first saw it there at least two years ago, was beaming at me from within. It was on sale. Finally! So I bought the last one in stock and ordered another. The lamp is so beautiful. I was an avid lamp collector when I lived in France. I love lamps, beautiful lamps. What makes a lamp beautiful? It's a mystery. The shade on this one is called "hot dog". Ain't that cool?
It looks great by the side of the bed.





Today I got throught the big clean-up, which included taking scary things out of the refrigerator and freezer. Caroline left some food items behind, thinking they would get eaten. I could not tell what any of them were. I also sent a couple of huge spiders packing. I vacuumed the whole place. Now it looks really cozy, don't you think?

Have a nice day!

I can see clearly now

I finally got a new pair of glasses. I love them. They're kind of ugly betty type glasses, with frames designed by one of France's emerging talents in the field. I got them at Eyes on Fremont. This is one of my favorite small businesses in Seattle: hip and knowledgeable salespeople, all of whom are wearing groovy glasses with a smile; a wonderful but not overwhelming selection; terrific after-sales service; consistently high quality product, selected with an EYE for aesthetics. Sure, you'll pay less at Costco or Sears, as my ophthamologist said; but you won't find the same groovy frames or get a pair of glasses crafted with the same care.

It's amazing how the world lights up and comes into focus when you have a pair of glasses adapted to your eyesight. What I love most about this latest pair is the coverage they offer. I took my oldest pair of glasses in with me because I had broken them while they served as a replacement for the lost pair (boo hoo on that; they were great designer frames by YSL that I bought just two years ago from another great small business in Paris). They're about 25 years old and I got them at one of the Lissac outlets in Paris. Here's a historical detour for anyone interested in the history of eyewear:

Histoire
Georges Lissac crée son premier magasin, rue Dauphine avec deux de ses frères, à Paris, en 1919. Le premier « mégastore optique » ouvre,rue de Rivoli en 1938. Cette succursale devient le siège social de la SARL Frères Lissac créée en 1931. Ce magasin demeure aujourd’hui encore le plus grand magasin optique d’Europe.
Précurseur en matière de communication dans l’histoire de l’optique, Georges Lissac lance, en 1932 la première campagne publicitaire de l’histoire de l’optique avec le slogan : « Des lunettes toujours parfaites à prix honnêtes ».
Précurseur, Georges Lissac propose un examen gratuit de la vue quand, à l’époque, la majeure partie des consommateurs choisit ses verres en les essayant.

Anyway, when the guy at Eyes on Fremont saw me old frames, he went nuts. Wow, he said, those are really back in style right now. I had figured this out myself given the number of hipsters who have commented on them in the past two months of so. He suggested I have them made into prescription sunglasses.

The world looks clear now and Puget Sound was like glass last night, so we went for a little pre-dinner kayak ride We put in (that's what the pros say) at Salty's and went out to inspect the seal raft. No seals last night! But the air was so clear; there was no haze at all. Every line and detail, every nuance of color in the downtown skyline stood out like an image in a viewfinder. Okay, maybe that was because of my new glasses, whatever. We went down to Jack Block Park to see if the seals were hanging out there. They weren't, but we had fun photographing barge 255. Then we headed back toward Salty's and popped open our beers offshore. I'm not a beer drinker, but there is something so satisfying about sitting in a kayak and drinking a beer while gazing alternately at the revelers on the deck at Salty's and the Seattle skyline.

Tuesday music

Piers Faccini

Birthday Month (July 10-August 10) Winds Down

This deserves a pause for a nice long Ohm.....

This action-packed month has included unexpected travel to foreign lands and a spontaneous hike along the Dosewallops River. Most importantly, it began with my birthday gift to myself: 20 yoga classes at 8 Limbs in West Seattle.




One evening while in Paris I was rushing along my usual back-street routes to get somewhere when I came upon this group of yoga practitioners, finishing their class en plein air.

I stopped to take a couple of pictures. The location is Place des Pères, which is just in front of the stunning and secretive Basilique Notre-Dame des Victoires, which lies hidden behind the flashier and more famous tourist magnet known as Place des Victoires.




The last time I hiked the Dosewallops I was on my way to climb Mt. Anderson. That was about 35 years ago...

Proust au musée des lettres et manuscrits à Paris

Le bonheur est au 222 boulevard St-Germain jusqu'à fin août.
Dépêchez-vous!

Time flies

As we biked along the Sammamish River Trail yesterday, I was thinking about how amazing it really is - when you think about it - that it is possible to fly 5,004 miles (Paris - Seattle via the great northern route) in just ten hours. Last Sunday, just a week ago, I was trudging through the Buttes des Chaumont park with my cellphone in hand, trying to find the exact location of the birthday party for Hanna, who just turned two. Noel and I finally managed to bump into eachother, though it seemed to be due more to random luck than technology and reconnoitering skills.

I stopped to snap this photo on the way:




Here she is, the birthday girl:

Le Basilic

I hope to get to the story behind these photos soon. But work is calling and jet lag is slowing me down.

My friend Monique sold her apartment in Paris last year after accepting a generous severance package from her employer and deciding to trade the stress of being a high-powered executive for one of France's largest corporations for the stress of meeting a payroll and running a restaurant. It seems to be working for her! And I worked for her too, for a couple of days last week.

Cathleen Vella

Unfortunately, I learned this morning that Facebook is a very effective way to communicate bad news as well as good. My dear friend Cathleen Vella of Paris, France passed away just now. I got a facebook message from a mutual friend, Tizzy, informing me that Cathleen was dying and had just a few hours to live. I was frantically scouring facebook, looking for a way to get more information without bothering Cathleen's husband Pierre or her son Pascal. I noticed that Cathleen's status was "on line", which I found odd. We had exchanged messages a couple of weeks ago -- when are you coming to Paris, she asked. Soon, I replied. Not soon enough I am sorry to say.

Then, just now in fact, Pascal sent a message to all of Cathleen's facebook friends, announcing her death.

You will be missed, Cathleen Flaherty Vella. Your good humor and love of life never failed you, despite being tested over and over again. I was practically in despair yesterday because both of my computers were not working due to a software glitch. Sometimes we lose perspective about what really matters, and adjustments are in order.

Cathleen, how brave you were to get on my sailboat!

En grève contre BP

J'ai décidé d'arrêter de m'occuper de ce blog et d'écrire sur les fait divers tant que BP n'aura pas réussi à régler ce petit "pépin" qui fout la merde au niveau planétaire. Fuck you, BP, et vous les autres pratiquants du capitalisme sauvage et ravageur. Le capitalisme, j'ai entendu dire un jour à la radio, il n'a jamais était si moribond ni si agressif. Mais oui, c'est ça le drame.

La bonne nouvelle (voir article du Monde) à mi-teinte est que le cours de bourse du titre BP est tombé au plus bas! 36 centimes d'euro par action seulement... youpee! Mais derrière les chiffres il a (hélàs) des hommes, et parmi ceux-ci les actionnaires individuels de BP, sans parler des fonds de pension qui paient les retraites de beaucoup de gens modestes avec les rendements de leurs investissements dans les marchés des capitaux... quel merdier cette marée noire, quel merdier le capitalisme sauvage.

Et moi et moi et moi dans tout ça? Je fais grève!

SIFF 2010 - Mon Palmarès à Moi

I've seen four films in the SIFF line-up so far. One I've already indicated; the three others are Amer (Franco-Belge), Le père de mes enfants (Belgian) and, last night, Farsan, a delightful Swedish comedy. Farson would never make the Cannes line-up, simply because Cannes seems to have something against comedies. We went with a friend and the three of us laughed our heads off at all the delightful silliness. At the same time, Farsan has its genuinely touching moments. The guy who plays Aziz makes the film. He's a lovable but totally invasive parent who hasn't really moved on from his wife's death and who as a result is making things hard on his son and the son's wife. They are secretly adopting a child while she pretends to be pregnant. The film is in Swedish and was filmed in one of those lovely, sleepy towns that dot the Swedish landscape. Watching it, you long to move to Sweden and work in a bicycle repair shop for peanuts. Seeing Sweden as I remember it made the film special for me; my two movie companions had never been to Sweden and thoroughly enjoyed the movie anyway. One of them wanted to move there, right away.
Amer and Le père de mes enfants are more sober films. The French don't do Swedish comedies. They do comedies, but that's another matter. Both of these films are Belgian productions; both are in French. In the case of Amer, filmed in the south of France (near Eze, it looks like), the language is not that important because there is not much dialogue. The film is a hommage to the Italian giallo style of the 60s. I saw it with my friend D. Her first words when the lights went up were "that was the worst movie I have ever seen". I'm not so sure. There was something compelling about the way it was filmed. Three key moments in the life of one person - as a girl, an adolescent and a young woman. A giallo is a half thriller, half slasher film. This was more slasher than thriller, though the explicit violence came only in the final sequence. If you watch the film as reality, it doesn't work. But as the developing fantasy life of the main character viewed from inside her head, it works much better. The music is creepy and funny at the same time: Sergio Leone meets Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. The camera work and colors reminded me of a cross between David Lynch and Bunuel. On a visual and auditive level, the film works. That's the only way to see it.



Le père de mes enfants was filmed in and around Paris, except for a brief sequence in Italy. Paris was the character in the movie I most wanted to watch. Based on a true story, the film is both warm and sad. It mostly works, though at times it seemed about to veer off topic. The three daughters of the over-extended film producer are wonderful and relaxed. In the case of both Farsan and Le père de mes enfants, the lighting and actors are natural. Such a refreshing contrast with Hollywood big productions! The sixty-year-olds in Farsan look their age and it is wonderful to see. The actors in Le père de mes enfants are not overly-made-up or facelifted. Everyone just looks like a person. Vive le cinéma!

Le bonheur est sur les Champs (Elysées)

Anyone who has spent any time on the Champs-Elysées (la plus belle avenue du monde) will love this transformation.

Mom and me

After losing my expensive and really beautiful prescription sunglasses on Christmas Day, I have now lost the expensive and really beautiful Yves Saint Laurent glasses I bought in Paris two summers ago. The sunglasses are gone forever, having been accidently thrown out. Okay, they were inside a bag. As for the more recently lost pair, they are somewhere in my house. I just can't find them. So I have taken to wearing old glasses. The pair I was wearing last night is about 20 years old. I only wore them when I went to movies (I never drove when I lived in France and didn't even own a car). They are really hilarious. I actually love wearing them because it makes me feel like a secretary in a 60's sitcom. The photo was taken by my sister Carolyn; the occasion was the wedding reception of my cousin Suzi's daughter Tina; the place was the Rainier Golf and Country Club.

The copy and paste mentality

When I taught at the super-selective HEC (Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales), a French grande école that trains many of France's future business elites and captains of industry, I often had my students keeps a journal in English so they would get writing practice. I told them they could write on any subject whatsoever, but sometimes suggested topics for open-ended essays.

I would collect the journals a couple of times during the term and read/grade them. To my surprise, one student had copied text from Time magazine word for word, passing it off as his own reflections about the problem of immigration in France (a topic I had given). I did not read Time magazine regularly, but just happened to have read this very article. I immediately recognized the words, not to mention the vast improvement in this student's written English. From upper intermediate to publishable in one fell swoop!

When I confronted the student, he denied having copied the text. So I showed him the original. He did not seem too embarrassed and eventually explained to me that he needed a good grade in my class to get an internship his dad had arranged for him in New York the following summer. The end justified the means, in his mind at least.

This happened in the mid-80's, before the ubiquity of the Internet. Today, it is so easy to copy and paste and the amount of material available for the taking is so vast that plagiarism has become a major problem. Le Monde has published an interesting article on the subject (this post's title links to it). Apparently, plagiarism detection software has been developed and a string of more than six identical words with an existing published document gets picked up and flagged.

This paragraph caught my attention:

Mais pour Hélène Maurel-Indart, si le plagiat prend de l'ampleur, ce n'est pas seulement à cause d'Internet. "Bien sûr, avec les ordinateurs, il y a la banalisation du geste copier-coller." Un clic suffit, plus besoin de recopier manuellement des pages d'ouvrage. "Mais il y a également l'augmentation du nombre d'entrées en master, avec des étudiants qui ne sont pas toujours capables de valoriser leurs informations."

But for Hélène Maurel-Indart, the Internet is not the only reason plagiarism is becoming more widespread. "Obviously, with computers copy-and-paste has become a banal gesture." It just takes one click; manually recopying the pages of the work is no longer necessary. "But there are also more students pursuing master's degrees, and some of them are not always able to valorize their information."

That is the crux of the problem, I think. With the Internet, one quickly realizes that one's thoughts on a given work or author or movement or moment in history or sociological phenomenon or whatever have probably been expressed by someone else already. Blissful ignorance of one's precursors is no longer an option. The challenge lies in acknowledging them and building on what they have already written. But what if what they have already written tallies with what you think? Just agreeing is so lame. Just going out and finding the words of others who agree or disagree is easy. The world of scholarship has not yet figured out how to deal with the copy-and-paste mindset. Judging from my experience at the University of Washington, higher education functions pretty much the same way it did 30 years ago. The anxiety of influence may have intensified, that's all.

Ten pounds lighter, ten years younger

They say the right haircut can make a gal look younger and lighter. It sure did the trick for Neko, who has just come back from the groomer. She'll thank me for it this summer.

Before


After

Just a really nice song

L'inconnu du métro

Merci à Philippe Colin et sa cellule de dégrisement sur France Inter, que j'écoute en différé grâce au podcast, de m'avoir fait découvrir l'incomparable Marie Dinkle et son blog, l'inconnu du métro. Le concept est très simple, comme le style d'écriture de Marie. Avec son ton juste et léger, elle nous montre qu'on peut aimer autrui sans passer pour quelqu'un de candide.

A propos de l’inconnu du métro
Vous vous demandez qui est cet inconnu assis en face de vous qui regarde par la fenêtre. Chaque fois que vous tentez de regarder dans sa direction vous croisez son regard. Gêné vous baissez les yeux. On ne dévisage pas les gens. Il se demande la même chose. Pourtant vous ne le reverrez jamais. C’est l’inconnu du métro.

Marie repère puis aborde l'inconnu du jour, mène sa petite enquête auprès de sa proie consentante, prend une photo de cette dernière et met le tout sur son blog (il suffit de cliquer sur le titre pour le visiter). Par example, ici c'est Mauricette. Pour connaître son histoire, et celle de tant d'autres inconnus, suivez le lien et consultez sur place. A déguster sans modération.



Il paraît que le blog sera bientôt traduit en anglais. Personnellement, je ne vois pas l'intérêt mais why not?

En tout cas, continuez Marie Dinkle. On vous aime beaucoup!

My career in advertising

The pay is pretty good.
I created the tagline for the Sanctuary advertising that will be visible with every film shown at this year's Seattle International Film Festival. It was the best ten minutes I ever spent. My friend D is one of the SIFF sponsors this year and, as a result, in addition to the free advertising, we get free passes. These are cool things you wear around your neck, and they get you in for free to any film you want to see, any time.

The festival starts in about two weeks, but there are press screenings going on now and we get to go to those too. Today I actually went to a movie at noon! It was a French film, Les Beaux Gosses. Bizarrely, the title was translated as French Kissers. Most unfortunate. Not a great film, but not bad either.

A cross between a tranche de vie and a series of vignettes.

No time to blog!

The best part? As I was leaving Pacific Place, I noticed that Anne Taylor was having a sale on dresses, so I walked in to have a look. Ten minutes later, I walked out with two for the price of one. I am not a shopper; I get no pleasure out of agonizing and lingering. These dresses are perfect; one will be just right for my cousin's daughter's wedding in three weeks. I just need to find the right shoes. Clementine will have them.

If you go to SIFF, look for my masterpiece.

Sanctuary: a unique place for life's special events.

It is just right with the artwork, which I can't post here for some reason. Go to SIFF and you'll see it.