Politics

I AM enjoying Paris, not least because of the ueber-smorgasboard of politics offered here on Radio, on TV, in the papers,  in literary programmes, in cooking-presentations, in fashion-shows...it's politics, politics, politics. Perhaps this has to do with the next elections being less than 3 months away, but I think politics is in the blood of Paris and of France if not the blood of Paris and France.


A political animal myself, I am basking in the multitasking of people who have time on their hands: watching TV, scanning online, listening to radio, arguing with friends,  but it’s only when I go online to Australia that I see a seemingly GIANT battle brewing in the corridors of Canberra for the ALP leadership: "blood on the floor" - "heads rolling" - "drama of Shakespearean proportions" and the recurring worry, voiced by all sides: "what will they think of us over there?  Gasp horror!"

Well my lovelies, a little ditty by that delightful poet, Piet Hein puts it in a one-fits-all-nutshell: 

Denmark seen from a foreign land

looks but like a grain of sand.

Denmark as we Danes conceive it

is so big you won’t believe it.

I have not heard one word nor seen one questionmark  about that huge epic fight in Oz, whereas I will really have to educate myself about Kangaroos and assorted marsupials who are all the go here when I mention "Australia". Neither the name  “Gillard“ nor that of  “Rudd“ excite the Gallic curiosity - so, even if one or both of them should still be there when I return to the Antipodes,  I wont spend my time researching them, since this kind of Canberra product does not seem to have export quality.

 Regarding local politics, the  woman I admire most in this French election campaign is Marine LePen: every bully, every media outlet, every defamer,  every member of the herd, attack her and knee-cap her, yet she stands up to these packs, again and again,  head high, open, strong, unwavering: I would like one like  her for Australia. (And dont believe her accusers when, in desperance de cause, they call her anti-semitic: if I was French, I would vote for her, but if I was Jewish, I would doubly vote for her, she is the only friend Israel and the Jewish people have among the French politicians).

The one I admire least is  Jean Luc Melanchon, an extreme left bully, a Jew-hating trendoit, a faux rebel, loved by the media,  we thankfully dont seem to  have too many of his kind in Australia, yet:

Marianne was in Paris tonight

No, not this Marianne...

...but this one:

She is older -  perhaps even old now, and her figure is  of someone who eats too much for the wrong reasons, but I'm glad she came out this side of her dark tunnel , alive and still surviving. 

Tonight at the Odeon she read 20  Shakespeare sonnets. The theatre was packed, perhaps because the tickets only cost 30 Euros, but I think we all liked her when she waddled onto the scene, endearingly dressed in an ill-fitting trouser suit which, rather than hiding her pudgyness, highlighted it. I also think the Bard would have approved of  her smokey voice-that-has-been-around-the-blocks-a-few-times- interpretation. The one she recited by heart was the one that everyone can quote at least the first  2 lines from (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate...) I found it poignant, how proud, or perhaps rather how relieved she seemed by this. The other 19 sonnets she read from a script, wearing  big reading glasses, and they too were touchingly unflattering.


Vincent Segal  who accompagnied her on the cello was brilllllllliant  and did things with his violoncelle  which reminded me that "if the heart could sing, it would sound like that".


I'm glad I finally saw Marianne Faithfull, even though I  have waited perhaps a little too long and will never see her now in her legendary  young flesh, but there is some tender magic in the fragility of maturity:

Thank you Marianne Faithfull for having reminded me that I once did ride through Paris in a sportscar with the wild wind in my hair… a long time ago though...


Update: April 2014:

A blast from the past:

Miracle of the Internet: The one I once did ride with,  through Paris,  in a sportscar,  with the wild wind in my hair....a long time ago....found me again...just now...and, looking for this post to show him, I found that Maryanne Faithfull as she sang this song at the Odeon a couple of years back, was "deleted because of copy right etc.".... so here is the song...again, in an earlier version:  (Thanks for the memories) ! :)



   




...

Graffiti, broken promises and Fake Furs

And I still like Graffitti, Paris style, they SAY something, like this weather report:

This car was parked in my street last week when the day temperatures rarely got above minus 4 degrees during the day.

 I  dont remember a time that cold in Paris ever. So I ordered a fur coat (FAKE * of course) from an online store which guaranteed delivery within 24 hours - at a pretty substantial additional cost.

3 days later later, getting even colder, I faced the fact that  the guaranteed-delivery-within-24-hours had become nothing more than a broken promise and I went into a Brocante who sold me a fur jacket (FAKE of course). My "combien svp" question was answered with "50 Euro mais je vous la donne pour 30 Euro". 5 minutes later I heard the woman repeat the same words to a client who was holding an art deco lamp.  Never mind, the bargain warmed the cockles of my mercantile heart and the fur jacket warmed the wrapping of my soul.

So now that  I am the owner of a winter coat (which I brought from Oz), a very big Fur jacket (FAKE of course) and an even bigger fur coat (FAKE of course) it will get warmer very soon and I will probably resent all this warmth giving comfort, when I return to Sydney and my checked luggage limit is 20 kgs.


*) While I would never wear a real fur coat  even if I could afford it (some of my best friends are feathery and fury animals), I think whats apparently happening here on public transport  to the people who do  wear real furs is going a little far: I'm told that people  put matches to the fur coats, even if there is a person in it.

I'm baaaaaack in Paris...

...and still love this city of lights, despite some dimmers, political, societal and personal ones. The personal one du moment is a very traditional old cold, collected by throwing all the good advice of "dressing for the season" to the icy vent du nord. Nothing that can't be fixed by a thé au citron avec a hearty dash of whiskey, a few dolipranes (I always think of "dollybrain" when I  pronounce the name of this french panadol )  and an early night.

Sur les toits de Paris ^^^

And Sous le Ciel de Paris, sings Juliette Greco, who was that beautiful before the sillicone era. Jean Paul Sartre said of her: "Gréco a des millions dans la gorge : des millions de poèmes qui ne sont pas encore écrits, dont on écrira quelques-uns..."

Today 85 years old, she is just about to give 3 concerts here  at the Théatre du Chatelet. I could not get any tickets, fully sold out. In Australia the use-by date of females seems to hover around 25 - here they are packing them in long after the 3 score and 10. Okay, she was the Goddess of the Paris Bohème and is a "national treasure" (although I dont think that France has officially such a silly title), but even as Ms Average, one is not as "invisible" in France as one is in Sydney after having "coiffé la  Saint Catherine". (A medieval French tradition has girls who are not married by the age of  25 don the bonnet of St. Catherine).

I'm baaaaack in the land of Oz

Back in Australia, trying to post a picture of my beach, taken from the plane, but it doesn't seem to work!:(

Whoops, it worked - but only after kicking my laptop for 3 hours. Something has changed...perhaps it's me...

A Hierarchy of Victim Hood

I have never seen myself as a victim of anything else but of my own stupidity from time to time. The mantle of Victim hood always seemed quite vulgar to me. Yet, over the past 3 months or so, negotiating my way through Paris with moon boot and on crutches (due to a stress fractured ankle) I have somehow developed a sense of entitlement and when a fit looking young male wouldn’t cede me his seat de priorité in the bus, I made him.

As  he was moving away, I saw him limp and felt deeply ashamed, because by now I can move, albeit slowly, with one crutch. Getting out of that particular bus, I contortioned my face in fake pain and limped much more than I needed too, so that people would think me more entitled to that seat than I really was, I wanted to look like a victim too.  


Caroline Glick wrote about another kind of victim hood and the reporting by the Media of it.
Here she talks about a Hierarchy of victim hood and writes: 
 

"...there is a clear pecking order of victim hood in identity politics:

Anti-American Third World national, religious and ethnic groups are at the top of the victim food chain. They out-victim everyone else.

After them come the Western victims: Racial minorities, women, homosexuals, children and animals.

Israelis, Jews, Americans, white males and rich people are the predetermined perpetrators. No matter how badly they are victimized, brave reporters will go to heroic lengths to ignore, underplay or explain away their suffering…”

Anyway, tomorrow I will throw away my crutches, ignore the seats de priorité in the buses and start taking the metro again, looooooong couloirs, steeeeeeep steps and all.

Minor and Major Poets

A pair of  Black Birds have discovered that the "Bio Muesli with 25% fruits and 4 cereales" I feed them at my window is worth singing for - and how lovely their little songs for their little suppers are !!! Perhaps their song is not quite as Joan-Sutherlandian as that of the nightingale, but give me the "Minor Poet" anytime over the universally acclaimed one:

I. The Minor Poet 

His little trills and chirpings were his best. 

No music like the nightingale's was born 

Within his throat; but he, too, laid his breast 

Upon a thorn.

(Dorothy Parker).

And then, of course, there are the pigeons. They can't sing, and they are as unpopulair in Paris as they are in Sydney, except with the very old, the lonely and the otherwise rejected. And, in Paris at least, they seem to be into "art at the bouquinistes".

 Yet another, perhaps "minor" poet. But, the sounds coming out of his seemingly clumsy instrument were just so lovely, and the walls of the bridge  gave him back an echo so beautiful, that he seemed to delight in playing and playing and playing... and I delighted in listening and listening and listening. He was no busker, and did not want money, he just played for the century old walls, and they rewarded  him (and me)  with their wondefull echo:

Here is a bit of tuba, by a Major Poet of the Music world to give you a little idea of  what I heard that late Paris afternoon under a bridge over the Seine:



Paris is still full of poetry and poets and both are appreciated. Here,  in a bus, right in front of my seat,  a poem by Paul Verlaine:

Photographed badly, because the bus was jumping, and so were we, my camera and I, but also, because I was simply flabbergasted to see a poem where anywhere else in the world they would put an ad for toothpaste/cookbooks/underwear/panadol. If you want to read it, look it up, the title is "Marine". I'm not reproducing it in the fully  readable version here, because I want to give this space to another Major poet and my favorite poem of (nearly) all times:



L'Etranger

par Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

　

Qui aimes-tu le mieux, enigmatique etranger? ton pere, ta mere, ta soeur ton frere?

(whom do like best, enigmatic stranger? your father, your mother, your sister your brother?)

Je n'ai ni pere, ni mere, ni soeur, ni frere.

(I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother)

Tes amis?

(Your friends?)

Vous vous servez la d'une parole dont le sens m'est reste jusqu'alors inconnu..

(You use a word here whose meaning I did not know until now)

Ta patrie?

(Your country?)

J'ignore sous quelle latitude elle est situee.

(I do not know under which latitude it is situated.)

La beaute?

(Beauty?)

Je l'aimerais volontiers, deesse et immortelle.

(I would like her to be Goddess and immortal)

L'or?

(Gold?)

Je le hais comme vous haissez Dieu.

(I hate it as much as you hate God)

Eh! qu'aimes-tu donc, enigmatique etranger?

(Well, what do you like you enigmatic stranger?)

J'aime les nuages... les nuages qui passent... la-bas... au fond... les merveilleux nuages!

(I love the clouds... the clouds that go by... over there... far over there... the magnificent clouds!).

I often think of this poem, when I walk along my beaches back in Australia, with their many magnificent clouds and their even more plentifull silver linings...

　

Is this one, upon whose sculpture I came just accidentally, a Minor or a Major Poet? I dont know (although I have a feeling that I should know). For whoever strew him with those beautiful roses (they were fresh and fragrant), he was certainly a Major Poet.

 

Mihai Eminescu, romantic Romanian poet. 

"Major" in Rumania, "minor", perhaps,  in Sydney, Australia.....?

　

Notre Dame de Paris

One of the weekly highlights of my Paris Winters is the Messe Grégorienne on sundays at 10 am in the Notre Dame de Paris. Identifying myself (if I have to) as a "Catholic Agnostic", I dont go there for the Holy Communion, but mainly for the music and the athmosphere, and the incense. Fantomas once answered the rhetorical question "what did Religion ever bring to humanity" with: "Music! they brought us pretty damn marvellous music!". And WOW, are those  gregorian chants,  delivered during that mass, havenly! (yes I know, "heavenly"...baboom).

I usually try to get a place right opposite of what must be the most photographed church window in the world. When one is asked during meditation classes to "go to a place you love", I usually go there, in my mind, on a sunny late afternoon, when the dustflecks dancing on the rainbow coloured light beams, really are angels dancing on a pin-heads.

This year again, I took a 1000 + 1 pictures of that window, and all turned out badly. So, as they say in TV-cooking:" here is one I prepared earlier for you"  (last year):

Yesterday, I observed a Nun, dressed in yesteryear's habit, who sat down and remained seated, nearly defiantly.  I thought, if anyone had the right of refusal to get up at each shake of the incense burner and down on the knees at each incantation of the Allmighty, it surely is an old nun, who is more or less the wife of Jesus and the daughter-in-law of God, quasi  family. She seemed  tired, and hurting, and rheumatic, and disappointed in life, and fed up.

However, after they did that post-Vatican II thing I loathe, (I do not like commandeered instant mass intimacy) where you shake hands with strangers, she suddenly came to life and stood up, on somewhat shakey stumps, but assertively. I saw her shake the hand of at least 5 or 6 people to my zero.  Perhaps this was the first physical contact she had had in a loooong time.

What would a nun’s life be like…?

I was brought up to consider them as something outer-wordly, and respect, even fear them as such. I had some bad experience with one nun who  frightened me as a child; now I would probably dismiss her needling nastiness with a “she needs to get laid”. Poor things - I don’t think they would even manage to engage in guilt-free masturbation. Apart from having perhaps the odd  secret crush on the visiting priest, the day-to-day earthly aspect of their lives would have to be pretty grey…or vanilla-like at best.. a life of service to a God who might or might not exist (personally I subsribe to Pascal’s wager!) they must have doubts…about Him or even Her…..these sacrificial lambs, females and males.

Outside Notre Dame, on this unseasonally hot Paris  April day (25 degrees at 11 am), the Chestnut Trees were lighting their candles, nearly as I watched and clicked away on my ageing point'n'shoot camera.

A beautiful young lady

Recently I commented on the ugliness of this woman who had said that the Jews had no place in Israel and  should all go back to where they came from: Poland, Germany etc.
　

“Well she is very old” someone said as if that was an excuse for the kind of ugliness that comes from the inside and has nothing to do with chronology. I’m convinced that Helen Thomas was ugly from very early on.

Old age is not an excuse for everything!

Somehow I am sure that really really ugly old people were ugly in their youth, and really beautiful young people will not turn into sour old uglies like that one, despite the French saying:  “l’âge aigrit”.

Recently, as my bus pulled up at Saint Germain-Odéon, an old lady entered whose physical decrepitude was a cruel witness that she was probably on the wrong side of 90 - yet she was beautiful. I could not quite put my finger on it, why would she be so beautiful? She was certainly not the physical manifestation of the Golden Mean and that spunky window of the child bearing period was obviously decades behind her, nor was she gracefully soignée like the typical Neuilly matron, but there was an intangible quality to her breathlessness which came not only from old lungs.

She ignored the seats reserved for the elderly and sat down opposite me. She took out a book which she had obviously just bought, opened it and started reading it, eagerly. I looked closer at the colourful cover of the book, its title: “Chinese for Beginners”.

Chinese for Beginners! At about 90! And there was the reason for her enduring beauty; this lady was certainly on the right side of 90!

"I Stand Tonight With Israel"

Glenn Back: 4.45 minute video

PS: 12.4. 2011 Got an email from Fantomas,  commenting on this u-tube:

"...I have to say if it's only Glen Beck who will stand with Israel then perhaps Israel is better off standing alone...;)"

Touché, my friend, touché! the delivery is a bit on the melodramatic side;), but as they say: the heart (of the message) is in the right place...

Buy Israeli Goods on March 30. 2011

I cannot believe it !!!

In addition to all the anti-Semitic crap à  la "dont buy mandarines from Israel because Jews kill babies and drink their blood"  they even have declared  an extra "dont buy Jewish goods day"  for tomorrow, 30. March, probably  to be sure to be sure to be sure! *rolls eyes*

So I fully agree with this suggestion  which I found on Daphne's Blog 

I will not only follow this invitation, but, here  in France, where this breathtakingly anti-semitic and moronic (if probably effective) boycott is not on yet, I will loudly ask for products from Israel.

So there !!!  Hmmmpffff !!!!





Mona Lisait

Hint Hint Hint ....:  remember your French grammar ;)

Mona Lisait  is the name of a chain of bookshops here which are just lovely and worth patronising!

Why dont I do the predictable thing here and put on that Nat King Cole disk:

Genital Mutilation of Muslim Girls

　

I had a rather disturbing conversation with a female acquaintance of mine. She ticks all the right boxes when it comes to what is politically fashionable now: of the Left, she is fundamenalistically atheist, a card-carrying feminist, her deep-rooted anti-Semitism comes wrapped in the euphemism of “pro-palesteeeenian” and so, of course, she votes for the most public proponents of this socially acceptable bigotry, the Greens.

During this conversation, she blithely told me  "...genital mutilation of girls under Islam is a myth"! When I gasped at that, she conceded that "it might happen...but very rarely..."

Well, that makes it okay then!

When I asked her if she had heard of Ayaan Hirsi Ali she told me “yes, of course, who hasn’t”. And what did she think of her? “Well..that one is very bias!”. I told her that if she had had her clitoris butchered off aged 7 or so, without anaesthetic, held down by her grandmother, she would probably be somewhat bias too!

I have hesitated to become “friends” with that person for a while now; after our latest exchange I will hesitate some more!.

　　

　

PS: Note to self: Must send the following paragraph from Caroline Click  to my acquaintance:

　

“…According to a 1999 report from the World Health Organization, 97 percent of Egyptian women and girls have undergone the barbaric practice of genital mutilation. A 2005 report by the Cairo-based Association for Legal Rights of Women submitted to the UN explained that Egyptian women are constitutionally deprived of their basic rights, including their rights to control their bodies and property. Males who murder their female relatives are often unpunished. When they are tried and convicted for premeditated murder, their sentences average from two to four years in prison….”

This little piggy goes to market...

My right wrist looks a bit like one  that has suffered a 1000+1 unsuccessful suicide attempts; the culprit is my I-should-know-better-but-never-do-character  and this:

I bought it at the markets  for 15 Euros and the seller informed me that the red stones were "resin de corail". Well, whatever it is, half of the red tint is now on my skin. My friend  A.,  in her pragmatic French way simply told me that I should not have paid "un centime de plus que 5 Euro, et encore !!".

Soaking it in vinegar  didn't help, going  back to find the seller didn't help either:  he was  gone, no doubt looking for another goat!

Which brings me to a little warning from the "do-as-I-suggest-not-as-I-do" department:

The many  local Paris markets are an absolute delight of  sounds, colour, scents and temptations, but only buy if you know the seller or else  expect to find that the lovely bananas have died on the short way home, the strawberries (apart from the 3 top ones) have no resemblance to the ones that looked so fresh on the stand, the echalottes are older than you and the potatoes have turned  green faster than a political opportunist.

You see, the market people don't like you to perform "self-service" and they are very very fast at spotting their tourist from afar: s/he is the one that dresses like s/he thinks the French dress.

Tango of the Archangel

My Moon Boot is off and so am I, doing some touristing at loooooong last and even some culturing as one should when in Paris. Just came back from the the opening of a Van Dongen exhibition (don't we say "vernissage" anymore?, the invitation was to the "inauguration de l'exposition..."). I dont know the visual arts very well, so, of course,  I completely fell for what must be  the most showy piece among showy pieces:  the "Tango of the Archangel":

There is something I find enticingly sensual in the juxtaposition of  a nude female body and a fully dressed male figure. I wonder if that is just me, or if that's normal...  ,


And, while speaking of Archangles:  has the question "Was Schindler Archangel or Mephisto? "  ever been answered definately? (Psssssst: personally I found Mephisto always more interesting than his heavenly counterpart).