a little bit country p. I

[This is the first part of something I wrote when I vacationed with Annie and her granddaughters in the northwest of France last month, in a village called Crecy-sous-Ponthieu near the Baie de Somme. I never finished it, but I figure posting the first part will encourage/remind me to write the second...]

Funny how in some ways, everything is, more or less, the same wherever you go. Here I was in la France profond, Deep France, as Annie put it, as if one were talking about the South—eating eggs from chickens next door, heating our water on the stove, the surrounding fields green and expansive and dotted with horses, a rustic église around every corner—and somehow I still managed to find myself in an aisle of the local Shopi™, deciding if I wanted Mentos in fruit or classic. C’est comme ça.

That said, escaping to the French countryside for a week has been cathartic, in ways expected and not so expected. In sum, though, I can say it’s been like someone stuck a cotton swab inside me and cleaned out all the smog, cheap wine, 6a.m. metros, cigarette smoke, canned food [What would you rather have? Fabulous heels or fancy quiche, hm?] and other such less-romantic Parisian residue accumulating inside me for the past couple of months. It’s true—my perpetual and somewhat inexplicable cough and sore throat, never quite a cold, were gone after my first full day of fresh country air. Just what the doctor ordered.


But what’s to replace all that muck some Big Hand came and mopped out of me? Annie’s French home cooking, of course. The dregs of my semi-hedonistic lifestyle [or so I’d like to romanticize…I really hope you know me better than to pass my time in this city boozing and looking fashionable] have been replaced by fresh-caught sole fried in butter and garlic, zucchini and risotto with thick, sweet coquilles St. Jaques, bloody steak with fingerling potatoes fried with carrots and rosemary from the garden, thick slices of pillowy, crusty country loaves with hard, tangy mimolette or creamy, buttery chaussée aux moines. And all of this with butter, butter and more butter. Oh my god. Bread, with butter, then cheese over it. I bet your arteries just narrowed reading that. I don’t even know if I’ve ever spread butter on anything before. Maybe margarine. Maybe. But between my father’s endless, self-depricating neurotic banter at the dinner table at having eaten so much as a sliver of chicken skin, and, well, the fact that I try to eat healthily, butter has been a pariah in my diet. So given all of that, I’m grateful for my when-in-RomeFrance excuse. Because if not now, when?



I’m not kidding when I say this food is fresh. And I don’t mean fresh like you bought this from your yuppie Sunday farmer’s market, and oh-my-god-you-are-so-microbiotic-and-local, because, if you’re from a city like me, I’m sure that whatever you bought spent at least few hours in a truck to get to you. When we bought our seafood at the St. Valery marché, in front of me was the pecheur slicing the coquilles St. Jacques from their moving shells, and behind me was the sea in which they, along with two other kinds of fish we bought, had been minding their own business just a few hours ago. You want fresh and local? We bought our carrots, still covered in dirt, from a farmer with good prices but not many teeth. Hm. Maybe too fresh.

To be continued...

Lucid Dreams

Well. Wednesday night I tried to go see Franz Ferdiand for the second night in a row at the Olympia in Paris. Having been gut-punch exhilirated by the previous night's show [review/blog entry to come], compounded by the fact that last time they toured was three and a half years ago, I made it my mission to see them again. Though eBay served me well (read: ripped me off) in finding a ticket for the Tuesday show, it failed me for Wednesday's. So, mustering up all my courage and non-existant funds, I headed off to face les scalpers parisiens with a mean face and 40 borrowed euro in my pocket. This can't be that hard, right? Back when I was hearty youth, sold-out shows never stopped me--wait long enough and you can bargain down, wait longer and the guards will let you scurry inside to catch the end of a set. Or last-minute tickets open up at the window. Or you can pay off the usher. Or something. These are all part of my arsenal, tried and true.

When I arrived, there was certainely no lack of scalpers to be found. Here's something interesting: if I understood correctly, scalpers hold up signs that say "cherche un billet" which means "looking for a ticket." Nice and ambiguous right? They're not hard to spot, either. In a crowd of shaggy hair and skinny jeans, you can't help but question if the middle-aged west African men and scrawny youth in hip-hop gear really want those tickets for themselves. I'm assuming scalping [tickets] is illegal in Paris, so they walk around asking concertgoers if they are selling tickets. And I think you're supposed to say you're selling if you're interested in buying from the scalper. You with me here? They also have sort of wingmen to ask people if they're looking for a ticket, without the hazard of possessing one to sell. One took a particular interest in me, I think because I was pouting and looking especially adorable and distressed (this won over many scalpers when I was a teen, and I'm glad to see it still holds up at the ripe old age of 21). He was kind enough to try to talk his scalpin' buddies into selling me a ticket for 40 instead of the 60+ they were asking, telling them that I was a real fan and all that. Didn't work, but was very nice of him and seemingly without agenda.

At this point, the opening band had already finished and Franz started, but the scalpz still wouldn't lower their prices. Knowing I had only 40 euro, they wouldn't so much as glance at me. Sorry guys, I thought some money was better than no money but maybe that's one of those "cultural differences." After checking at the window again for extra tickets, I decided it was probably best to wait in the lobby until mid-set and hope the doormen would take mercy. They didn't.

Then, to add insult to injury, Franz frontman Alex "Love of My Life" Kapranos' girlfriend, Eleanor Friedberger (of The Fiery Furnaces), saunters into the concert hall.

Noting her exceptionally late arrival and American English, I'm 99.99% sure it was her. I thought about stopping her to tell her I like her band, but I was too distraut over her presence shattering my fantasies of running off with the lead singer (read: shy).

So I kept waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Other "waiters" began to leave, and at some point we got kicked out of the lobby, so we couldnt even listen to the distant rumble of the songs. But I kept waiting. The ushers started staring at me. I was the last one.

And then I thought, "Aren't I too old for this?" Aren't I too old to be standing around at concerts, sacrificing dinner and dignity just for the off-chance that I might catch 2, 3 songs? When I had already seen them the night before? Then I realized: I don't think I'm ever going to be too old for it. I don't think that I'm ever going to be too old, too mature, too over it, to stop lining up early, to stop paying too much for tickets, to stop waiting just to hear a few songs. The late-night album-dissecting conversations with friends, the mix-tapes, the waiting-for-the-right-moment-to-listen-to-the-new-album -- I don't think I'm going to get too old for it, and I don't want to. I'm still young, yes but I am an adult now, and my ardor for music is no longer a hormone-fueld means of clinging to some adolescent deity.

Myriad people have encouraged me to be a music journalist, and I think I've finally come to that conclusion on my own. When I see reviewers at shows--the older audience members with a pen and edgy glasses--I respect them, I envy them. And more than anything, I can see myself being them. But I've never seriously considered it before, because really, it's just so mastubatory. "Here's what I have to say about someone else's original creative work." Like, who cares, you know? Who is this affecting? My ambitions for my career have always been more noble than that, or so I'd like to think. News and features reporting gives back, it informs people, heck it can even uncover a truth from time to time. I've grown up believing that I want to contribute to something greater than myself--that that's really finding your place. And I still plan on doing that. So how do I reconcile that with music journalism? I've tried news, I've tried features, and they've been great, but nothing really feels as "right" as writing about arts/music/culture. News feels like what I should be doing, but it doesn't answer that "what would your job be if you won the lottery" question. Music journalism does (well, actually, being a music producer does, but, you know). So isn't that what I should be doing?? Not neccessarily when I'm fresh out of grad school, the economy pending, but....in the end? Or do I "settle" for doing what's greater than myself? How do I reconcile my goals and ambitions with what makes me most passionate? Do I jump around between fields? A little concert coverage, a littel congress coverage? Rolling Stone, here I come. As much as their music reporting is in the stinks, they do do excellent political reporting.... Ok. There's hope yet. Anyone wanna help me find the "cool" Rolling Stone? Is it Vice? Adbusters? NPR? Am I selling out? When am I going to know what the "right" choice for my career as a journalist is? Phew. Well. In the meantime, I guess I'll have to accept my fate as a twentysomething cliché, freaking out about my future, headphones in one hand, Herald-Tribune in the other.

reve generale

The french are better at everything, including standing up for themselves. The university of paris, where I was supposed to take half my classes, has been on strike more or less since I got here. Which has been disappointing for obvious reasons, but it's really great to see students and professors sincerely (the french definitely don't do irony) get behind ideals like this. Sarkozy's been rubbing elbows with US a little too much and is trying to lay some capitalist econ reform shit on the education system, and les gens are having none of it. Today some friends and I marched with a bunch of students, who, apparently, and in true collegiate fashion, got lazy after half an hour and crammed all 100+ of us into a few metro cars, chanting all the way, to go to Place de la Republique to join other strikers. I think that kind of sums up Parisian life.

still trying to figure this one out

????

for posterity/shoutout

bassninja352 (10:50:40 PM): [cute girl blah blah she's too young? blah blah girls blah]
paperfaaace (10:51:03 PM): yes
paperfaaace (10:51:08 PM): but that doesnt stop u from flirting
bassninja352 (10:51:28 PM): well, maybe
bassninja352 (10:51:34 PM): right now i'm watching the transformers trailer
bassninja352 (10:51:45 PM): that sequence of thoughts is probably why i'm single

SWEAR TO ME