Moving Pictures

I'm reviewing my notes for the final exam for French Cinema: 1980s - Today.  The idea of our elective classes is to gain a richer understanding of French society. To comprehend the particular character and touchstone elements that make French people and things (so (very)) French.

Of course, you can't just jump right to the '80s; we spend a lot of time on what came before, and how greater social changes shape modern cinema.  Certain themes are timeless, like a children's animation featuring a political dissident crow in a top hat trapped in prison, saved from a pride of savage lions by the music of a blind organ grinder.  Some characters, on the other hand, sprout from a particular era's malaise, like a '70s anti-hero who badgers an underage prostitute into joining him for long drives through ramshackle suburbs, endless and manic grandiose speeches, and one of the most sloppily executed murders ever.  It's not just another crime drama, and the director's bold deviation from, I guess, any sympathetic characters is exemplary of the nihilism of the times.

Probably my favorite film was the 2016 stop-motion "Ma vie de Courgette" ("My Life As Zucchini").  It's the redemptive story of a young orphan learning to process grief and find happiness in the present.  In the first ten minutes, our main character (nicknamed Zucchini by his late alcoholic mother) has nowhere to go but a surprisingly homey and well-run orphanage.  After a tough start, he begins to make friends with the others, including a new cute girl.  Courgette and Camille bond during a weekend ski trip, where he makes a toy boat for her out of his mother's beer can (his most treasured momento).  The kids have a snowball fight, dance to German techno in their chalet, and cleverly expose Camille's would-be legal guardian as a fraud and jerk.  

There's no sugarcoating of the bleak circumstances that led to each kid's orphanhood, but there's a genuine, organic development of kid alliances.  Everyday banalities like cafeteria lunch and being tucked in at night mark the slow but sure passage of time and the innate evolution therein.

We've also studied how the French government subsidizes the film industry and urges people to go to the theater.  They support theaters, or at least projectors, in almost every small town; fund all kinds of discount tickets; and limit movies broadcast on TV.  This might be the most French part of cinema -- reinforcing egality and fraternity by "liberating" people from their couches and incentivizing them to go out and bask in the warm glow of their culture.

a still from "Fantasmagorie," probably the first film animation, 1908 

Garden update: we dug a trench to put up a fence against the rabbits.

I got a rug and a desk, and am searching for just the right milk-crate seat

The lilacs just started!

Pain Complet*

*translation: whole-grain bread

Hey, I came to France a year ago mid-March.  And this is now actually my second-longest romantic relationship.  Oh what crazy things come to pass with relatively stable housing.  (-And with men who speak French.  Is it a coincidence?)

Today we hauled off all the remodeling detritus and declared the work officially done.  I still need to find a desk and chair for my...office? I don't really do any work, so what should I call it?  A friend had a She-Shed, filled with arts and crafts supplies, where we'd decoupage and paint and she'd smoke weed so as not to disturb her adorable son asleep in the house.  Here, I have a sort of siding (white-painted cladding) on the walls, and the car is parked outside the window, conferring a somewhat garage-like feel on the room.  I don't yet know if the vibe of my old Alaska dorm decor will fit this more conventional space (ie: free brochure maps, pastel-shaded pages of adult coloring books, postcards ranging from Beaux-Arts illustrations of the night sky to animals with glitter to Route 66-type kitsch to mediocre food photography).

Most significantly, I have someone encouraging me to write.  Who himself likes to write, and talk about what we read, and how we formulate our ideas and our sentences.  Sitting, biting your nails a little, leafing through the thesaurus, talking to yourself, and looking at how the sunlight changes and moves; trying to both look at something and imagine at the same time, to describe it precisely but also in your own way.  Whether or not it is work, it is good to have a place to work it out.

not pictured: bike path into the woods 

Jean-François's office is the perfect writing shack

Something possessed the previous owners to paint the wall behind the bed midnight blue; we have eliminated all trace of this tomfoolery.

my office is a cluttered blank canvas 

We also spent many hours repainting the BROWN walls and *ceiling* of the bathroom.  Jean-François's godson is a master carpenter and all-around swell guy, and added the window in my office, opened a wall between the bathroom and the separate toilet room just next door, walled over the former toilet room door, built cabinets, and kept us in good humor while everything and everyone was covered in plaster dust.

Heart of Larkness

*Mid-February

Rasping cicadas...the discordant shrieking of a forest-full of birds...I sprawl listlessly, comatose in the heat; it's 85 degrees and 100% humidity at 9am; I am stranded in suburbs with small children...  There is a part of France with with a dark, brutal history: originally a penal colony, French Guiana is where they brought enslaved Africans, dumped and subsequently organized forced labor for thousands of criminals -- or just people they didn't like -- and killed off the native people by design and disease.

Welcome to spring break!  (Mid-winter break?)  One of Jean-François's daughters, along with her husband and two sons, recently began a three-year contract in Cayenne, adjacent to the Amazon rainforest.  And because I will do stupid shit in the name of love (See: letting a guy's yappy dog lick my face; recording a dozen tracks of myself campily singing the word "wasabi;" crossing frozen rivers the condition of whose ice is highly questionable), I bought an expensive plane ticket in order to pretty much be steamed alive.

We alternated several days visiting family with a couple ventures into the semi-wild.  Despite the words "abandon all hope ye who enter here" on loop in my head, we managed several hours of squishing through mud and gnarled roots to see the ruins of prison camps.  That, friends, is the, uh, main tourist attraction.  For you fellow history fans, we slept in an old holding pen within view of the island where Alfred Dreyfus was jailed(!).  To really get that You-Are-There experience, we camped with hammocks, basic provisions, and not enough drinking water.

By far the best part of the trip was the fruit.  Pineapple, melon, mango, guava, rambutan, bananas -- and a green papaya salad/condiment made with garlic, lime juice, and mild pepper.  We bought dried bananas, which were like little sticks of banana-bread-jerky.

It was also the end of Carnaval.  We caught the penultimate parade, a perfect mix of local social clubs and businesses and a few guest appearances by Brazilian marching bands.  A phalanx of all ages beat on oil-barrel-like drums, with lines of sparkly, beplumed dancers.  Sometimes the rhythms of two groups became unwittingly syncopated as the parade slowed and everyone condensed.  This was one of the rare occasions that I awoke from my overheated stupor and moved enthusiastically under the equatorial sun.

We found a wheelbarrow to overturn and weight with rocks to secure our food from monkeys; we made it all the way until after breakfast before having to yell at them, Jean-François pounding his chest like a gorilla

A nighttime jungle walk included snakes, toads, sloths, and the tiniest frog I've ever seen

We went on a boat to look for caimans (alligators, more or less) in the marsh

industrious leaf cutter ants

tropical Dickensian workhouse

(lower-right corner)

Lolling around and reading won out over hiking in the hot mosquitoey rain

Type, Sort, Kind

I am well aware that I have a "type," and what that type entails. As I summed it up to one boyfriend: "I like strong flavors."  Easygoing yet strong-willed, a motley collection of skills and interests, someone equally happy to host a dinner party as to hike all day in the snow and snack on cheese.

And so it was with a sense of familiarity that I watched my partner pick up a reciprocating saw and blithely attempt to carve a hole in the wall.  More specifically, this time it was the chimney, which we discovered has a layer of brick-like material behind the drywall.  Only momentarily daunted, Jean-François then procured a circular saw, stood on the dinner table for better leverage, and proceeded to plume-cloud the combination living-room-dining-room-kitchen with fine, chalk-like red dust -- basically a gritty pollen bomb, with some chunks of plaster here and there.

A lot of people talk about doing stuff, or dream about things that they convince themselves are beyond reach.  And some of us ( 👀 ) compulsively debate pros and cons and get mired in the complexity of options.  I am fascinated (and perplexed) by people who can both humbly admit their inexperience and forge on ahead with...whatever. 

But I also bring valuable things to the table.  Like insisting the electricity is shut off when messing with wiring; the savvy to remove industrial goo with lavish amounts of paint thinner; and knowing when to take off my glasses so details blend together, a little fuzzy like an Impressionist painting, the visual obliquity heightening sensibility.

ready and waiting for the moving van 

This is how Santa gets into the house!

Coming soon: interior window!

on the new route to school

I am also learning to embrace taking the bus to town, watching the dawn light, weirding out the teenagers headed to high school and the few winter tourists by crouching on the ground to take pictures of frosty plants

Chez Nous

Most of the houses here are enclosed by walls.  The island is basically an overgrown sandbar, so for centuries people built low stone barriers to protect their gardens and fruit trees.  The local limestone is not overly abundant; walls of 3-4 feet are sufficient to keep the wind from menacing most vegetables, and the ivory-colored stone reflects the overly robust blaze of the summer sun.

As properties more recently transformed from farmhouses to vacation homes, the walls changed to smoothed concrete and grew taller -- typically 6-8 feet high.  This creates, for me, an unpleasantly contradictory atmosphere: the houses crowd close together, yet are isolated.  There's not much waving-hello-to-your-neighbor or commenting on the flowers because everyone is holed up in their little compound.  (To be fair, everyone is chatty at the markets and cafes, and there's lots of public land and beach.)  The villages feel both hyper-dense and deserted.

Occasionally there's a house with a wire fence, and the effect is almost park like, breathing green and openness and life into the neighborhood.  Even rarer are houses at the village limit, abutting farm fields or forest.  Happily, we found the trifecta: a house at the end of the road, that faces the trees of a bird preserve on one side and fields on the other, with no walls.

After a great deal of paperwork and planning (mostly Jean-François) and packing and fretting (mostly me), we move in this weekend.  I will resist the temptation to immediately begin unpacking the clothes and kitchen things and 37 boxes of books, and instead make a little fire in the little fireplace(!) and clink glasses with my delightful companion.

the coastal trail to La Flotte, our new town

little runny birds who run-run-run in front of the waves

normal activities around the corner from the university

coral?

all the winter the coast can handle 

Hearing Voices

The perfect level of background chatter, in a café or train, is like water flowing in a small creek.  A busy bar or house party full of people pressed together is the crashing calamity of whitewater, a waterfall that drowns out.  A class of recent émigrés stumbling over a dictation pulses and crescendos like a pond of spring peepers, the volume inching upward, punctuated by random monosyllabic yelps.  Chatting with a new acquaintance is as though tuning in and out of reception and static as the weather report warns of rough seas...then foundering on unavoidable rocks.  A thoughtful person with precise enunciation is like sipping a generously poured cocktail.  A word of amorous affection -- an ice cube melting on your tongue.

Sometimes I dream in French, but even in the dream I feel something's not quite right, or I'm just making things up.  Occasionally, a word of French pops into my mind, unbidden, in the omnipresent stream of internal monologue, like, "Ok, now I'll stir the soup; the potatoes are looking bien cuit, so it's almost done."

Then there's the awkwardness of what to do with words like "croissant" and "Paris" when I'm speaking in English: just say them normal, or with a ridiculous accent ("KWA-saw," "pah-REE")?  Or what to do about "librairie" and "collège"?  Say them without the accent and they become "library" instead of the word for bookstore, and "college" as in university, rather than the word for junior high.

The silver lining of my nascent comprehension is that I don't have to overhear banal conversations.  Unconcerned with eavesdropping or unignorable cellphone calls, I can retreat deeply into reading in public, and later resurface with the bewildered thought, "Why is everybody speaking in French?"

end of semester celebratory class lunch

good horizontal lines

barge + Pantheon

Warm November Rain

With the exception of one overnight frost and two furious days of 60+ mph winds, November just kept truckin' along with what I think of as early autumn weather and vibe.  Everyone is in jackets and scarves, but a sunny afternoon easily hits 70F.  Outdoor cafe seating is full, there are still flowers growing, and I just walked by a dude splashing around in the ocean without a wetsuit.

After satisfactorily passing my midterms, I stuck my neck out and went on my first new-friend date.  Catherine is French and lived with her American husband in San Francisco for twenty years.  She arrived speaking no English and remembers well her confusion and fatigue, and thus sympathizes with me.  We met at her studio for lunch and she showed me her current projects including collages and manipulating different kinds of leather to encase objects -- bones, driftwood, rocks.

Every November, La Rochelle hosts an international adventure film festival, a superabundance of independent documentaries about all kinds of outdoor pursuits.  My favorite was about a surf club in Liberia that functions as a community center and local economic engine, and organizes group therapy for former child soldiers.  Q&A with the directors after each film was fun because they're all basically ski bums who channel their drive to seek good powder into a passion for storytelling.

The other amazing thing about November was my reacquaintance with roast chicken.  Here, even the humble bargain legs in styrofoam at the supermarket are perfect: they have not been saturated with saline and are therefore dry; they don't piss a bunch of flavorless liquid into the pan, so you can roast your veggies together with the chicken and get caramelized nuggets of root vegetable.  This almost makes up for the three times and counting I've visited the government office to try to obtain a social security number.

cute by day

sexy by night

in the pink

Wherefore hast thou forsaken me, O Winter?

plant stars

Because I guess we're culture gluttons, or I'm a bit parched after years in the wilderness, we stuffed two days in Paris full of museums, theater, and Lebanese food.  And I got to pet Marta's cute new cat.

cozy theater