Woo hoo! I'm finally legal!

Yes indeed, dear readers, you will be happy to know that I am no longer residing illegally in the République. Why just this morning, after months of haggling, and begging strangers for help, and seriously considering ripping the visa out of my passport, I had my medical visit. Now those of you who haven't attempted to gain residency in this fair country, may not know that before you get any piece of paper (or plastic now - they've upgraded since my last one), you have to be certified "in good health" by a doctor at the prefecture. It's kind of a zoo here in Paris. When I did it in Chambéry, you had to go to one building for the chest x-ray (really fun, especially when you have to sit in a cold room half naked with a bunch of strangers) and then walk all the way across town to see the doctor, and then a few weeks later you get summoned by the prefecture to pick up the paper. Here in Paris, it's all done in one place, in something like assembly-line fashion. They call out your name, you do the eye test, height, weight. Then you go sit back down until they call you again, when you go into one of the closets hidden behind doors number 1,2, and 3, and you sit there naked from the waist up until they come and get you. Then you put your clothes back on and go sit down again, until the doctor calls your name, and takes you into the office where she looks at your chest x-ray and asks a few questions. They're clearly still very concerned about consumption here in Europa, but I luckily do not have consumption and so will not die a 19th century romantic death (although I probably shouldn't say that as I may now die of cholera and CBAM will have to burn me on a funeral pyre on a beach in Italy like Keats).

The best thing about the whole day, aside from getting the residency permit, is that you also get to keep your chest x-ray! The last time I gave it to A. who turned it into an art piece with the help of a machine the he invented to resemble the light box that doctors use to look at your x-rays. It is currently in a prominent place in our living room in Harlem. It's nice to have two, though, because I can compare the deterioration of my spinal curvature. I'm kind of afraid that I will turn into the Hunchback pretty soon though - it's not so pretty.

But to throw you off on this very cold stupid Valentine's Day, I will post some pictures of the Chinese New Year parade, which I viewed from the balcony of my friend Katie's apartment last Sunday. Katie throws a mean Chinese New Year party, complete with the most amazing cocktail (sparkling wine, ginger, star anise) and guacamole! She kept wandering around with the wine bottle refilling my drink so I must have had about 10. I'm pretty sure that Monday morning I had the worst hangover of my life. But it really made the parade more fun. Of course, she also lives in the area known as Chinatown (although they're almost all Vietnamese) so there were lots of amazing Chinese firecrackers that probably destroyed all the cars parked on the street as well as our eardrums.

This is a picture of the apartment across the street that started the firecracker madness. They were having a wicked party, and as you can see by the pile of destroyed firecrackers on the ground, enjoyed the explosives immensely!


Here are some pictures of the parade, including the float from Thailand that was apparently vandalized by jokers who turned it into the "Inde" (India) float.





Happy New Year of the Rat to you all!

CORRECTION: The funeral pyre on the beach in Italy was in fact for Shelley and not Keats. I'm always getting my romantic poets' biographies mixed up!

Was it Mardi Gras, Super Tuesday, or just my brain playing tricks on me...

I haven't been getting a ton of sleep lately, and I cannot figure out why this is. The unfortunate thing is that it makes my already foggy brain even less able to process information and speak (especially in French). Yesterday was one of the groggiest days I have had in a long time, not helped by the weather which was constantly shifting from thunderstorms, to foggy mist, to partly cloudy, etc. But I finally managed to get out of the house and was heading to the library to read about 'the crisis of modernism' in the Catholic church in France (of course I think modernism is awesome so I was unaware that it nearly brought down the Catholic church and that the number of books on the papal index skyrocketed in the 1920s and 30s). But anyway, I'm thinking about modernism and head down the stairs and out of my building when the madness starts. Here is a list of the strange things that I saw between the three minutes I left my apartment to the time I descended into the metro station:

1. There was a policewoman giving out parking tickets on the small street in front of my apartment, which is not an unusual occurrence. However she was sobbing quite hysterically as she was writing them out. I went over and asked her if she was okay and she waved me away and said "ça va"

2. When I walked a few more steps down the street toward the rue St. Antoine (a major street in Paris), there were two men on horseback wearing long black capes and some sort of helmet with feathers. Now not only is this a busy street, it's also one of the streets with the worst traffic and pollution in Paris. I followed them for a block, but then they turned off onto another side street. I have never even seen a horse in Paris, much less a pair of them in costume in the middle of town!

3. I was walking toward the metro station when I saw a man sitting on a bench near the public toilet with his large rolling sac (the kind everyone here uses for groceries). But instead of bread or leeks sticking out of it, it was a naked leg of a female mannequin, with the foot in the air, and on the toes, there was nail polish. It was like the leg lamp from A Christmas Story but much creepier. The man looked about 80 years old and was staring into space, so who knows where it came from or why it was there!

4. Finally about 10 feet further I was walking down the stairs into the metro station when a guy in full football uniform, including pads and a helmet, came up out of the Subway, pushing people out of the way. I know the Superbowl just happened, but people in France couldn't care less about that type of football. They only like the kind you actually play with your feet.

I don't know if there is any rational explanation for this spectacle. I am not even really sure if it was reality. If only I had brought my camera with me yesterday!

The day just kind of deteriorated from there, and in the afternoon I had to visit the archive of the aid organization I'm researching to talk to the old ladies there who run the archives about when I could get into the 'real' archive to look at the other part of their holdings (to update: when I arrived in France, I found out they had just moved 60% of their archives to the contemporary archive in Nanterre). As I mentioned before, I could barely speak English yesterday much less French, but when I arrived, they took me into the conference room and asked that I give several staff members an explanation of the American electoral system and what Super Tuesday meant. In the first place, I don't think I even know how the American electoral system works. Fortunately A. had given me a crash course in the caucus system a few weeks ago when I expressed disbelief that the presidential primary in Iowa seemed to be conducted in a ritual akin to "Red Rover". But this did not equip me to explain it well in French, especially since I don't know how you translate words and phrases like "caucus", "electoral college" or "hanging chads" into French. It was kind of a disaster. I think everyone was more confused than before, including me, and I'm pretty sure that in my confusion, all knowledge of French grammar or the accent flew out of my brain. This is, of course, the same group of people who thought it was hilarious when I mixed up the words for fog and scratch paper and told them that there was fog stuck in the printer!

This has heightened my resolve never to talk about current politics ever again, or at least until I understand what's going on.

Beirut

I really like Anthony Bourdain. He's a pretty hard-drinking, dirty-mouthed, ex-junkie of a chef, but I enjoy his sarcasm, and his book Kitchen Confidential was one of the only books I allowed myself to read for 'pleasure' during my exam year, justifying it by that fact that it was 'non-fiction'. It also made me much more aware of what I was eating, and the fact that one should never really eat brunch in a restaurant in NYC (where else do the week's leftovers go?). One of the greatest joys that cable tv awarded us that one year we could afford it in NJ was that we could watch his travel show No Reservations on the Travel Channel. In this show, he travels to pretty exotic places and tries the food culture there in a somewhat ironic anthropological way. He tries things so disgusting that I nearly gag when I even hear him describe them - better him than me! He did an excellent show on New Jersey (which is where he's from) that was very amusing and included a scene when he goes to a restaurant or bakery or something with celeb chef Mario Batali, who is then swarmed with fans while Bourdain sits off in the corner watching. Batali, as you NJ peeps may or may not know, was first employed at our beloved Stuff Yer Face before he hit it big and became the most arrogant chef on the early Food Network (at least I thought so at the time, although I would pay lots of money for him and Sara Moulton to come back to the Food Network and replace stupid Rachael Ray and Sandra Lee - although it is fun to use the word 'tablescape' in a sentence and watch A. lose his mind).

Anyway. A. bought me the best gift ever this week when he sent me Season 2 of No Reservations, downloadable from iTunes. I had particularly been waiting to see the episode that they shot in Beirut in the summer of 2006 during that surreal war with Israel. Bourdain himself says in the beginning monologue that this wasn't any sort of journalistic or objective view of the events, but just a documentary about the experience that he and his film crew had. While most of the fighting was going on, they were barricaded in a cushy hotel on the top of a hill, watching the city be destroyed while lounging next to the pool (the balcony provided the best view of what was happening). Of course they were watched over carefully by the US embassy there, and eventually evacuated by the marines onto a boat in the Mediterranean, while the city exploded behind them. It was clearly an outsider's perspective, but the really amazing thing about it was that they arrived and started filming the day before the capture of the Israeli soldiers that seemed to have been the catalyst for these events. He is at first wandering around town with a local guide, who is clearly proud of Beirut and its cosmopolitan character. They talked a lot about how the city had rebuilt itself and how the Lebanese were extremely proud of it. The food looked amazing and it really seemed like someplace where things were turning around and life was getting back to normal after the civil war. But it was in the middle of this whole discussion that, on camera, you see how it all unravels. His guide looks embarrassed and distressed that American cameras are filming the kids in cars celebrating the capture of the soldiers. And later that night he goes to a bar and meets up with another Lebanese man who wrote the Time Out guide to Beirut and the most amazing parts of the show are the moments when you see the worry and resignation in the faces of these men as they start to realize what is going to happen to their city and country in the coming days.

I study war a lot, but mainly either in a European or colonial context, but I don't think I have ever seen something like this, where everything good and happy in people's lives is destroyed in a matter of minutes. But it seems like this is the way war is now, and I think it's really tragic that Americans don't really see that. I don't know if it's some sort of censorship, or more a sense of apathy and a concern for ratings. Or maybe Americans just don't want to know. I remember watching the news as a kid during the first Gulf War and watching reporters for CNN standing in front of huge explosions and fighting. I can't remember watching any footage of Rwanda, or even now seeing much of what's happening in Kenya. Why does it take a sarcastic American chef on a little travel show that not that many people watch, and who isn't anywhere near the center of the action, to see what it might be like? I know it's really dangerous for journalists embedded in Iraq and I am still really fascinated by their experiences and trials, but I feel like the war in Iraq right now is so far removed from people's consciousness that it barely exists. I saw a headline this morning in the NYT about bombs going off in Baghdad, which jolted me because I'd sort of forgotten about it while I've been sort of wallowing in self-pity in Paris for the past few weeks. I know at the beginning of this war, there were lots of journalists wandering around, but mostly sitting inside their press headquarters in Qatar. And I know there are lots of new documentaries about the war coming out, but I get the feeling that very few of them will ever make it to theaters or television in most of the United States.

The past year or two I've been finding it really hard to live my life without feeling horribly guilty about the sort of privileges I have and the peaceful existence I live, even as we grad students sink deeper into poverty and debt. The more I read about Africa or the situation of refugees and the failure of international organizations and humanitarian NGOs, the more frustrated I feel about everything. I guess it's in a way what ends up pushing me forward in my work, because I feel a huge burden to expose these things to Americans who have no clue, or even to find the causes for these tragedies. I still don't feel like it's enough though. And I don't know what else I can do about it. I am really... I don't think happy is the right word, but pleased perhaps, that something simple like No Reservations can reveal something about the world and the difficulties of world politics that never comes through the news.

I have a friend (and fellow FB grantee) here in Paris who is doing a really interesting art history dissertation on the changing way that war was represented artistically in France throughout the first half of the 19th century, starting with paintings from the Napeolonic wars, and ending with photography in the Crimean War (sorry Katie if I'm not representing your work accurately!). Her argument is about the way these pieces were viewed and the concept of 'truth value' that emerged at this time in war representation. Photography certainly made a huge difference in Europeans' conceptions of war experience, and I know that the television cameras in Vietnam probably did something similar for Americans. But it seems like now we're all so oversaturated with inane nonsense on tv and even on the news that nothing is real anymore. Does anyone else feel this way or am I just overanalyzing everything again?