Soon after we first arrived in Paris, the "sweet" sounds of my clarinet reverberated through the courtyard as I tried to get back in the habit of practicing daily. To my knowledge, no neighbor ever complained - but I did get lots of invitations to play with people the neighbors knew. Héloise, for instance, connected me with her pharmacist, Catherine, who was looking for a clarinetist with whom she could play through a collection Yiddish folk music. We got together a half-dozen times over the course of the year and ultimately decided to repay Héloise's social networking prowess with an informal concert for her, her kids, and Catherine's parents. It turned out that the concert took place during Dimi's visit, so she attended as well.
As was my habit, I recorded the concert - but unfortunately I botched the recording, such that only one and a half tracks exist. Here they are:
Luckily, Dimi took charge of the Flip Video camera during the concert, and there are lots of clips to give you a better sense of what (and how) we played. Also there's lots of footage of the kids, who were (as always) unbearably adorable, even when they got a little tired of the whole concert thing.
This is just me warming up, but I include it because, at the end, Catherine says either "He is very handsome" or "He is very good." Either way, it's all good.
Mehdi and Nahel watch attentively while Héloise prepares her iPhone for recording. Tilal dances like no one's watching, and Catherine's parents listen respectfully.
A rare, full track. We could have rehearsed more, but that would have taken all the spontaneity out of the concert. After the hesitant beginning, we make it through the whole thing unscathed and rather spiritedly.
I love the way Catherine celebrates at the end of this one.
Dimi got all meta, filming Mehdi filming us.
Nahel gives new meaning to "interpretive lap dance."
More meta filmmaking. An almost complete "track."
Drama! Tilal knocks all my music off the music stand, then cries about it.
After struggling to find the pages I needed to continue, all is resolved and we pick up where we left off.
The kids were getting bored, thus all the ambient noise and the sterner-than-usual looks from Catherine's parents. Dimi also apparently discovered a new camera angle.
The finale of our Yiddish repertoire was a canon without a satisfactory end, but we made do anyway.
Encore! An Irish folk song. I don't know why, but whatever.
The end! (This post is dedicated to Catherine, who's waited way too long to hear herself play, and to my grandfather, who eats this stuff up.)
In France, the act of buying a baguette is highly ritualized, and over 9 months in Paris we had many opportunities to both observe and participate in the experience. Before leaving, we documented our understanding of the process of purchasing bread, and we humbly submit our performance of this important phenomena for your consumption and critique.
Step 1: Be patient.
Step 1 Commentary: With a different boulangerieto be found every 736 ft. (unscientific estimate) on the rue de Belleville, at first we had trouble understanding why anyone would bother waiting in line. We ultimately came to two conclusions: 1) Some boulangeries are better than others, attracting larger crowds. 2) Even at inferior boulangeries, lines form because people don't stagger their visits throughout the day. Which isn't to say that lines only form early in the morning and in the afternoon after work lets out - you'll also find lines at lunchtime, around snacktime, and at pretty much every other time of the day. Come to think of it, despite the large numbers of boulangeries in Paris, maybe the city is just too dense; maybe there are simply too many people per boulangerie to avoid lines. It really makes you respect people who live/d under Communism.
Step 2: Choose wisely
Step 2 Commentary: Economists and psychologists have determined that too much choice can seriously handicap your ability to choose wisely. Boulangeries are perfect examples of this dilemma. If you don't know what you want by the time you get to the register, you risk looking stupid, or worse, not getting anything at all. Remember the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld? Many of those who work at the best-regarded boulangeries seem to share his mania for prompt, polite, and plainly pronounced orders. If you have your choice in mind well in advance, you'll leave the boulangerie a happier person. Of course, this doesn't change the fact that you have to know what things are called in order to choose them. Learning all the names of all the products in the boulangerie requires months and months (at the very least) of embarrassment and faulty orders. Call it a character building exercise, we're pretty sure that's how the boulangères see it.
Step 3: Order. Very carefully.
Step 3 Commentary: So you've waited in line and chosen carefully, but all of your patience and planning could be for naught if you botch the order. Maggie has opted for a tradition nature (tradi nature in street lingo), which is a shorter, skinnier, denser version of the baguette. As she arrives at the moment of truth, she hesitates briefly as she considers the consequences of failure - but then she nails the landing, correctly assigning the feminine gender, smoothly and clearly pronouncing a few difficult "r" syllables, and otherwise exuding confidence so that the boulangère doesn't sense her fear and pounce. Congratulations, Maggie! You did it!
Step 4: Enjoy immediately.
Step 4 Commentary: Normally, you'd think that the boulangerie buying experience ends when you walk out the door, but not so. Approximately 87.34% of boulangerie patrons who buy bread (rather than a pastry) execute one final ritual between the boulangerie and their residence: they consume the end of the baguette or baguette-substitute (such as a tradi nature). We would need to conduct more research to determine whether the majority of people rip off the end with their fingers before eating it, or bite directly, as Louis has chosen to do. Furthermore, the exact logic of this ritual remains unclear. Must the boulangerie patron taste the baguette as a connoisseur tastes wine - to confirm its quality before sharing it with friends and family? Or is it merely a question of the freshness and possible warmth of the baguette presenting an irresistible temptation to the purchaser? One final possibility: having just undergone a stressful experience, the customer translates pent-up fear into aggression, taking out the angst of the boulangerie experience on the unsuspecting baguette. We're happy to entertain other hypotheses as well.
There you have it: a bread-buying boulangerie experience from tepid start to violent finish. Next week on "Paris: The Urban Jungle is a Terrifying Place," we'll bring our award-winning, cutting-edge investigative journalism to bear on one of the greatest dangers of the city: French attempts at American-style fast food. Don't miss it!
One of the highlights of the game last Wednesday (has it really been a week already?) came at the very end, when a French victory was all but assured. Over-enthusiastic fans took it upon themselves to get the celebrations started early - by running onto the field and avoiding security for as long as possible.
This happened twice. In a row.
The more restrained public expressed their excitement in a series of quality "waves," one of which you can hear here, after a chant I couldn't quite make out, and followed by a different wave of unhappy "woooos":
At French sporting events, the wave isn't something people just get up and do when it comes to them - they prepare for it, starting to stamp their feet and make noise when the wave is still a few sections away. I've also seen people put their arms straight out in front and shake them a little while they're waiting for the wave to arrive, and then when it does, the effect of everyone's arms moving in concert is a neat thing to see. (Unfortunately it doesn't really come out in this video, but you do get a sense of the crowd, the game, the security presence, and the use of those fans/noisemakers/banners.)
The game started later than we'd expected, so we stopped in a Quick (France's home-grown fast food chain) for some (un)sustenance. Everything was gross: the high cost of the disgusting food being bought by a surprisingly large (in number, not in physical size) group of people.
Walking to the entrance gate, I was impressed to see these children so brightly attired, and dismayed to realize that the horses the police were riding (I guess for just-in-case crowd control?) were not wearing bags. They won't let Panda in most parks, and they let their horses defecate (chier) over the crowded sidewalks outside the national stadium? Give me a break.
Once inside, we discovered these on our seats:
Folded up, they make the percussive noise you hear amidst everything else here:
The chant you heard goes, "Et ils sont où, et ils sont où, et ils sont où les Autrichiens," which taunts the Austrian fans by asking where their team is (since, with the score at 3-1, they were no longer really in the game).
Everyone not under the awning, it seemed, got flags instead of fans/posters/percussive noise objects:
Wednesday night, my friend Damien and I went to the France-Austria 2010 World Cup Qualifying Match at the Stade de France, just north of the city. In lieu of any long narrative or explanation, I'm just going to post a few batches of video and audio so you can get an idea of what it was like to be at the game.
Outside of the stadium, and Damien
La Marseillaise
"Allez les Bleus," (Go French Soccer Team!) and you'll hear the crowd boo something - except apparently in France they say "wooooo" instead of "boooo." (It's a low "wooo," whereas the high-pitched "woooo" still indicates positive excitement.)
One thing you can't get an idea of is how cold it was! We're in the middle of an early cold snap here, but I hear it's the same at home . . .
At first, I wasn't sure that a video camera would be useful to me. I'm only likely to interview a few people, most of whom will be of peripheral importance to my project. And this is academic research, not a documentary (although now that I think about it, a mockumentary about academic research would be a hit . . . in the academic community only).
But then I had an interesting conversation with a patronage scholar in New York (Sylvia Kahan) that convinced me of the utility of a video camera. If ever I'm granted permission to photograph a larger number of documents (as is possible in a private collection, but unlikely in a public archive), it might make more sense to video the collection so I don't have to pause every time I turn the page to take a picture. As long as the video camera is stable, and as long as I turn the pages appropriately, I could pull screen shots from a video later on. That way I'll waste time outside of the collection, not while I'm there.
With that in mind, let me introduce my new friend: the Flip Video Camcorder. (If you go to that website, beware the loud, corny music and ADD-inspired animation.) I've actually already "reviewed" this camera on my other blog (so dorky!) so I'll just re-embed that video.
In September 2009, Maggie, Louis, and Panda moved to Paris, France. Follow along as we have an amazing adventure. Read the archives for more on how we got here.
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