Chenonceau

The Chateau de Chenonceau has massive gardens, and they put new spectacular flower arrangements in twice a week. There's a beautiful series of hunting-scene tapestries. Back to Paris now.



--Wandering Post

Saw Leonardo da Vinci's tomb today at the Chateau d'Amboise. He lived here for the


last three years of his life (until 1512).


--Wandering Post

A Country Weekend

At a restored chateau in Amboise (in the Loire valley)


with my mother. It's lovely here, and warm, and the air is clean. So nice to be out of Paris for a couple of days.


--Wandering Post

OMGPONIES!!!

There's a Russian fairy tale called The Firebird. In it, a prince sees the Firebird, and she blesses him with the gift of animal speech. I seem to have repressed the memory of the Firebird, but animals often talk to me. Amazingly, they all seem to talk along the same lines. They like me, they want to play, to come home with me, etc. I can only infer that I am extremely attractive to many species, including, but not limited to: otters, bunnies, cats, small dogs, large dogs, kangaroos, some kinds of fish, and especially horsies.

Holy Keg

If you're like me, you have many questions about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Among the more practical are these:

1) Where does she get her holy water from?
2) Why does she never carry it with her on patrol? It seems like it would be rather useful; I would fill a Camelbak with it a siphon it onto the undead.
3) Why does she always have only one little bottle in a desk drawer somewhere? Why doesn't she get some kind of reserve water tank?

Well, if Buffy lived in Paris, some of these would be answered. In most churches, there is a veritable keg of holy water somewhere off the nave. The one in the picture is in St-Germain-du-Pres. She could acquire it there anytime she liked just by bringing her Kleen Kanteen and bring it home with her. Also, maybe if she kept it in a tank it would grow algae, and I'm not sure what biological effects that has on blessedness.
However, if it turns out that vampires are real, I'm claiming the licensing rights to the Camelbak products. That baby's all me.

St. Valentine's Day Massacre

Let me tell you about my Friday the 13th. It started out pretty great, as I saw this lovely lady in the window of a chocolatier (Patrick Henri). From the very back, facing the window, her ample rear makes a pretty heart-shape inside a kind of flower made by her skirts. Parisians take their chocolate seriously; while you can see chocolate sculptures in their windows all the time, holidays mean pulling out the big guns. The florists are no joke, either.

I went to class, it was fine. An Egyptian guy in my class showed a couple of us where the good falafel is located. Then I went to dinner with Scottie Christ and some of his friends.
Scott Christ is a friend of Scott Olson, my sister-in-law's brother. My own brother, being sweetly older-brother-like, asked Scott Christ to look in on me, since he lives here in Paris. We had a great dinner at Spoon off the Champs-Elysées and proceeded to a club called Bound.* Champagne flowed, everyone had a good time, and Scott chatted up the ladies (as noted on the right of this photograph*).Now faisons attention, because here's where it gets messy. I left around 1 AM, having made a good faith effort to party all night. In truth, I was exhausted and nauseous, and it turns out that I felt that way for good reason.* I had the nastiest flu I think I've ever had for the next three days. I will not give out details, but it was a dizzy, shivering, aching, vomiting hell. It goes without saying that I felt you had all had abandoned me to die alone in a barbaric land.*
I have emerged today: weak, but alive.


* Yes, I went to an actual club, and no, it was not a dungeon.
* Full disclosure: he did actually pose for this.
* No, I'm not pregnant. Bet you thought that was it, didn't you?
* I'm still a little pissed.

STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!

I went to the Sorbonne today to take my placement test. (I knew already that I was a beginner. The humiliation was not necessary.)
You know that you are really at the Sorbonne when there's a strike. The French mostly invented the concept, and it has a long and constant tradition, especially in Paris, and especially at the Sorbonne.
This one went for at least a mile along the rue St Michel, from the Boulevard de Port Royale to the rue des Ecoles (where the Sorbonne is). The gendarme was present with some serious riot gear in tow (following an incident last week in Strasbourg that turned violent). It was a national strike, protesting budget and job cuts in French universities. The global economic crisis has hit French education from kindergarten to postdoctoral studies, cutting teacher's salaries, jobs, and research funding. Sarkozy's approval rating is down 5% in the last two days and is now at 39%. He ran for office on a platform of economic reform, and he's having a hard time doing anything about it.
There's also the matter of education reform. Professors are governed half by the head of their institutions and half by a council on higher education. New laws, implemented in January, have put the majority of decision-making power in the hands of university presidents, giving them close to monarchial power over their various institutions. Lecturers feel that this gives an unfair advantage to the administration and allows personal feelings on the part of university heads to hold sway. The resulting strike is "unlimited," meaning that it has no designated end date. Some chapters, like the Paris 13th, have been on strike for the past three weeks. Marseilles was not far behind, and now more and more people are joining the strike. Grades from last semester are not being recorded, and about 45% of classes are not being held.
It's just like 1968.

Grave Goods

On Sunday, I went to the Louvre. I know, it's about time. I went with the intention of perusing the Northern Painting wing, in the hopes that I would be able to copy a pose from one of those paintings for my current project. Instead, I played hooky by wandering through the Egyptian antiquities collection. Now, it's strange, in any kind of encyclopedic museum, to see items that really don't belong in that country. The Egyptian collections in most museums are subject to this sense of the bizarre, but in France it's underlaid with outrage at Napoleon's empire-building in North Africa, where he had no right to be.
There's one room where rows of sarcophagi are lined up in two rows of glass cases down the center of the room. It's really freaky to see all these people's coffins laid out for public entertainment. I should say that I support the archeology behind it, and that I think repatriation to Egypt is, at this point in time, fruitless. Nonetheless, I find these rooms really weird and kind of perverse.

Cary Grant

We all know by now that graffiti is art, but when that graffiti involves Cary Grant, it is SUBLIME. That man was pretty.
This is on the right bank side of the Pont d'Arts.

Hotter than a Whore in Church

My "devotion" to the trappings of Catholic ritual are well-documented. I like the chanting, the recital, the candles, the bells, the incense, etc. Love 'em. But today I was walking down the Boulevard St. Germain on my way to go swim at a pool in the east part of the Latin Quarter. I saw a pretty church with a kind of art-deco façade (the façade was, in fact, done in 1934). It's called St. Nicolas du Chardonnet. At the entrance was a sign telling people, in French and English, that this was a holy place and no scanty clothing was allowed. It's the first time I've seen a sign like that here.
When I entered the nave, a small number of people were scattered in the rows of chairs before the altar. I wandered around, looking at paintings and statues, but everyone was surreptitiously looking at me from under their eyelashes. I thought that maybe my boots were loud on the stone, but then I noticed that all the women had their heads covered. The sign didn't say anything about covering your hair, and considering that I would look none too chic with my pink wool scarf (with knitted white roses bulging out from it) tied around my head, I finished my circumambulation. But seriously, PEOPLE WERE STARING. The stares turned into hard, disapproving looks. I left.
So I look up the church online when I get back to my apartment, and it turns out that the church is ILLEGALLY OCCUPIED by the Society of Pious X, and has been since 1977. Churches in France are owned by the state and leased to the Church by the government (a weird arrangement, but when you think of all the revolutions, it's hard to separate what belongs to whom anyway). Typically for this country, the French have ordered them to leave but decided that forcibly removing them would be too disruptive.
The SSPX, as it's known, is a Traditionalist and extremely right-wing organization that holds to Latin Mass and a bunch of crazy anachronisms. Kind of like Opus Dei. But unlike the Opus Dei, the SSPX has no standing with Rome. They were founded by Bishop Lefebvre in 1970 as a seminary, and have since had a long history of contention with the Roman Curia (except for a brief moment of cease-fire negotiated in 1988 by Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI).
Unfortunately, also in 1988, the ageing Lefebvre ordained four priests in his order without papal permission. The Pontifical Council were understandably upset, and they rapidly excommunicated the wrongly-ordained priests.
Two weeks ago, that excommunication was lifted by the Pope. People across Europe are PISSED. The SSPX has denied the Holocaust, condemned the French Revolution as a revolt against a rightly Catholic monarchy, and praised the Vichy government (The Vichy was Unoccupied France's government during WWII. They collaborated with the Nazis to some extent, and several people were later hung as traitors.)
So here we are, in the midst of huge controversy. And I got to participate through my very own Jezebel moment, whoring it up by exposing the back of my head. In my defense, my hair is awesome.

La Vie Bohême

Alright, so here's my living situation. I live in an honest-to-God garret studio apartment. It's just like La Bohême, except without the, you know, poverty. This is my bedroom--it came furnished, but of course I made a few changes. I got new bedding, including some lovely French linen sheets and a beautiful shawl hand-embroidered with feathers to go over the end of the bed. I got the antique kilim rug from a Turkish dealer in St-Germain-du-Pres. For the walls, I got a book of bird illustrations back home for about 10 bucks at Borders, then cut out all the pages and collaged them on the walls. Are you sensing a theme? There are peacock feathers embroidered on the towels, too. A little matchy, but the beauty of it is that I won't have time to get tired of it before I move.That's the Rodolfo Dordoni lamp by the bed, on a cutwork linen cloth bordered with handmade lace. Pretty, huh? I feel less out of place when there are things that I like around me.
This is the kitchen. It's pretty servicable, although I don't have an oven. You can see the door to the bathroom though the curtained doorway--it's also servicable (I have a washing machine, which is something of a coup). I tried making espresso in the stovetop boiler once, and it was a total disaster. I'll let you know if that progresses.

The main attraction, obviously, is the location. This is the view out the front kitchen window: the Petit Pont, Seine, and Notre Dame. It's kind of the middle of the tourist district, so it can be loud. But, hey, pretty!
This is the view out the bedroom window. Down the street, with the gothic arches? That's St Severin. I'm still going there almost every day. I like to sit there and read. It's so beautiful and peaceful. I'm only a few blocks south to the building at the Sorbonne where I'll be taking classes. And the rue de Mouffetard, where all the food shops are, is about eight blocks to the west.
That's about it for my apartment. Indira says hi.