An American in Paris

We’re making lots of friends in Paris.  Since we’ve arrived, I can’t stop singing songs from Les Miserables around our flat.  The neighbors enjoy my singing voice very much.  Madam Hollande, the woman next door, complimented my voice this morning in the hallway.  She made full eye contact and said “votre voix est mauvais.”  I’m not accustomed to accepting praise, least of all being called magnificent, so I blushed a bit and thanked her politely.  She held my gaze with such intense tenacity that I think she was trying to seduce me, notwithstanding my marital status.  I’ve heard that French women are often agreeable to les affaires.

The attractive young woman at the boulangerie on the way the lycee where the children are enrolled is similarly attracted to me.  It must be that an American man in Paris is so exotic that I bring to mind the romantic days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  Or perhaps the days when dashing American men in uniform performed public service on the streets of Pigalle.  Yesterday morning, I ordered two sandwiches and a drink (doux sandwich avec un poisson).  She was so impressed that my French had advanced so much this past week that she looked startled at first.  She quickly regained her composure however, smiled and offered to add cheese to my sandwich for free, “vous avez le cervau d’un sandwich au fromage”.  Pretty soon I suspect we’ll be on a first name basis.

So far, all the shopping we’ve done has been for Quimby.  She thinks I should do some shopping for myself and has suggested that I should try some pink trousers with a green neckerchief for a classic French look.   I’m worried that if I’m out late at night by myself photographing under bridges and in dark alleyways, I may be misunderstood (if you know what I mean).  She says that if I find myself mistaken, I should simply yell, “J’aime les hommes”, which means, “I am a man.”  Indeed.  I love the way she takes care of me when we’re in France.

The French people are extremely gracious as well.  Last night at dinner, they seated us in a special room in the basement.  They said it was their cave, which translates to “the place where they store wine”.  It was a bit stuffy and smelled slightly of damp newspaper but fortunately all of the other couples in the cave were either American or English so we had a fantastic time.  Serendipitously, we all ordered the chicken.  The waitress very helpfully explained that their chicken was putain, which is a young poulet, or chicken.  She found us to be very funny, so we left her a large tip.

Anyway, all is well here.  Some find the French people to be tres difficile, but I disagree.  As long as you try to speak French to them slowly and in a clear voice, they are actually quite nice.  Bon soir.

Paris - A Time Lapse Film

It's been awhile since I've made a video but I'm getting back into it thanks to an upgrade of Final Cut courtesy of my Oaktree peeps.  Over the last week, I've been haunting the streets after the kids are in bed.  I'm still getting the hang of this new program (it's a major overhaul from the prior version of Final Cut) but I figured it was time to render some of the footage into a movie.  So here it is, my first experiment with time lapse video and a new editing program!

Paris - A Timelapse Movie from Brian Beck on Vimeo.

Skeletons

It turns out Paris is full of skeletons.  Deep underground all over the city, in the tunnels and quarries that supplied the limestone to build monuments such as Notre Dame, there are six million skeletons stacked in orderly piles, rows of tibias to the front, skulls on top.  According to the helpful signage at the entrance to the catacombs, Louis XVI ordered all the cemeteries cleared to deal with public health "risks."  In keeping with modern sensibilities, that is quite the understatement.  By the late 1700s, there were so many people buried in Parisian graveyards, that the level of the graveyards was 10 feet or more above ground level.  What's more, the burial "mounds" were spilling through adjacent structures (nothing like having the wall of your bedroom give way and a fresh corpse come rolling in).  Shallow graves were easy targets for grave scavengers (human and animal) and putrid runoff water was spreading disease.  For a person living in 1775, risks (and I mean serious ones) were constant.  Let's be frank, this wasn't a public health risk, this was a public health crisis.  Surely people had better things to do than to move six million bodies to tunnels under the city.  Apparently, it was that bad.  Oh, and recovering all of that prime real estate, not too shabby either.

I heard a story on NPR a while back about homelessness. The story made reference to the fact that the cops refer to the strung out worst-of-the-worst as "skeletons." A few weeks ago we took the Gold Line from Pasadena to Boyle Heights to go to one of our favorite restaurants, La Serenata de Garibaldi. On the trip back, a guy got on (actually more like fell on) the train in South Pasadena with an open bottle of tequila sloshing in his pocket. He was swearing about spilling it on his shirt (it looked like he'd taken a bath in it) and shouting at everyone who looked in his direction. Fortunately we only had one stop to go, and so when we got out, I took the opportunity to explain to Parker what was happening. I remembered the story about the skeletons and it seemed like a good vehicle to explain what had just taken place in a way a 5 year old could understand.  So I explained that the guy on the train was scary because he was a skeleton, he was killing himself with alcohol and would probably be dead soon.  He acted that way because he was partly dead.  Seemed like he got it.

We went looking for a restaurant yesterday and while we were waiting for our iPhone to load a map of the neighborhood, we were accosted by a very drunk guy on the street. We circled the kids in between us while the guy staggered around, alternately muttering incoherently in French and slurring "Bir Hakiem," the name of a nearby Metro stop. This went on for a minute or so and then he suddenly lunged at Parker shouting the French version of what I can only imagine was "boo."  Parker is pretty sensitive to scary stuff (the Cars ride at Disneyland scared him to death) so it had the desired effect.  I often carry a tripod around, a 10 pound Manfrotto that's heavy enough to support a pretty sizable camera.  Back in the film days, I used it for a Pentax 67II, which was the Sherman Tank of medium format gear and it did the job admirably.  I'm more than aware that when I go out shooting late at night, I'm by myself, often in places no normal person would go, and I've often imagined how I would get myself out of a situation that I didn't want to be in.  I'm not stupid about it.  I try to be very aware of my surroundings and almost never wear headphones.  I've skipped some shots too over the years because there were some lurkers that just didn't seem right.  But if it came to that, my tripod is the perfect defensive weapon--folded up, it's like a cricket bat.  So for the first time, I instinctively I picked it up and got ready to put it use.  Fortunately the guy backed off, and we made our escape, but as soon as we got away the kids wanted to know what the hell just happened.  We went through the whole skeleton discussion again and this time it seemed to make a more meaningful impression.  Skeletons are scary, you avoid them, you don't look at them and you don't talk to them, you just keep moving.  And yet, for the rest of the afternoon, they pointed to every sketchy person and asked, "Daddy, is THAT a skeleton?"  It's nothing like the L.A. homeless issue, but if you start looking, you'll find you're stepping over them here too.  The difference is that the six million of them you don't see are actually dead. 

The Paris Catacombs contain 6 million skeletons, arranged in neat piles.  On the public tour, you only see a very small fraction.  My recommendation is to purchase tickets in advance online or come in the late afternoon when it's less crowded.

Night

I can't help but stay up late.  My wife says I'm fortunate to be one of those people who can operate on very little sleep.  Maybe, but I don't think I have any special skill for it.  Rather, I think it's that I need the time to decompress more than I need the sleep.  It's a trade off I consciously make.  I'd like to get 8 hours of sleep and get all my stuff done AND have time to work on my little pet projects, but something's gotta give.  For the past few years, the night is when I would retire to my garage, put some Johnny Cash on quietly, and wrench. I've restored two cars in the hours between 9pm and midnight, or sometimes when I'm in the zone, 1 or 2am.  It's quiet and it gives me a much needed chance to reflect on my day, work out some of the mental kinks, and generally put things into perspective. I like to think I've had some of my best ideas in the quiet hours of the evening, when everyone else it seems is watching TV, shopping or reading Buzzfeed (or sleeping). 

I thought I might relinquish my territorial claim to the night once I recaptured the day. We'll see what happens after the kids are in school and I have a large expanse of the daytime to myself, but I don't think so. There's something special about it. If you can suffer your way through being tired, you can live a whole second lifetime in the night.  And it can be magical.

Turn and Face the Strange...

Paris is changing.  I noticed the same thing when I moved to London in 2007.  London was more or less culturally homogenous when I first visited in 1998.  It was relatively unusual to hear a foreign language spoken on the streets except for the occasional and obvious tourist.  Ten years later, the number of foreign languages that could be heard on a short walk through the West End was staggering.  These days you can hear everything from Russian to Polish, Farsi to Lithuanian, and everything in between.  There are those who argue otherwise, but I think it's overall a net positive.  It brings a certain energy.

Paris is moving in the same direction.  I took my camera to the Trocadero last night to shoot some time-lapse video and for the next few hours I was blown away.  The Eiffel Tower is said to be among the, if not THE, most visited tourist attractions in the world.  On this particular Saturday night in July, there were, just by my rough guess, somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 people spread out from the Trocadero to Ecole Militaire and the crowd was more what I would have expected at the Tower of Babylon.  Most were surely tourists but here's something that was also surprising: it was almost midnight and the atmosphere was more house party than casual photo-op.

The crowd was splayed out on blankets, hanging over balustrades and bridges and packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the plaza underneath the structure.  The wind, what little there was, pushed the smell of alcohol and sweat across the lawn.  Selfie-sticks, the newest manifestation of instant narcissism, waved over the sea of humanity like a battle flag in support of congratulatory self-aggrandizement.  North-African micro-entrepreneurs hawked light-up replicas of the Tower and slung blue and purple LED-lit glide copters high up into the heart of the monument to guilded-age engineering, while their younger brethren, some not more than ten years old, chased through the crowd to recover them before the they could be carried away by the drunken revelers.  A rag-tag army of others heaved hardware-store buckets of ice laden with Heinekens and, for those wishing to commemorate the evening with more aristocratic libations, bottles of champagne.  Emerald dots from laser pointers painted the details of the iron that nameless tourists wished to highlight for their fellow sightseers.  This wasn't just a tourist attraction, it was a makeshift World's Fair.  

To be honest, it was refreshing.  The Eiffel Tower was constructed for the 1889 World's Fair and this seemed a more fitting celebration of its provenance than the well-heeled visitors experience at the overpriced restaurant Jules Verne 115 meters above the fray.  Can you imagine a scene like this in front of the Washington Monument or at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.  I can't, and having been ushered unceremoniously from the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower by the National Police shortly after 9/11 for the unspeakable crime of taking a photo with a tripod, I for one think it's fantastic.  The French seem to understand their future better than we Americans understand the responsibility we owe to our past.  This is what freedom looks like.  It's messy, it's risky and it smells like an armpit, but it's a beautiful sight to behold.  Turn and face the strange, ch ch changes...

It's Quiet...

No more emails.  Overnight, the barrage of questions, requests, directives, FYIs and spam has gone quiet.  The electronic version of the Battle of the Somme just up and stopped.  Just like that.  Of course I wanted it to stop, but now that it has, it's weird.  Good weird, but still weird.  And pretty awesome.  

Tomorrow is the first day out in Paris. :)