Girl from the Great North

Maine in November

I grew up in the state of Maine. The realest place you know. Or don’t know, because frankly there are far too many people who have never visited Maine. And I pity them. For the Non-Americans reading this blog, there are just tons of states in our country. 50, to be exact (and counting: whatup Middle East?).

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the snow lately, as it has started falling in Paris – fell steadily all day yesterday in fact, and through the night. People are constantly missing opportunities to pity me when the weather drops below zero. YES, I’m from Maine, NO that isn’t a substitute for mittens! And I, too, want to be able to chatter my teeth to the tune of a warmup hug.

The Métro

The Parisians are getting stiffer by the hour, as temperatures drop. We (well, i’m a part-timer) stand on the platform of the métro with our hands in our pockets and necks tucked into our shoulders. But the métro is always a relief – it’s like home base. Walk as fast as you can to the station, and all will be well.

Other places in Paris are decidedly colder.

Angelina, one of my favourite indulgences in the city, and part of a ritual of warm hot chocolate and buttery cakes that I share with my friend Yalie, opened it’s Tuileries-facing doors in 1903…and quite literally hasn’t closed them since. Last Sunday, the smartly dressed hostess approached Yay and myself, informed us that there was an open table, but that we might be chilly. Yay gave me a Southern California Glare and we passed on the table. The foolhardy, unsuspecting couple behind us went for it, and spent their teatime with shaking shoulders, eyeing us and pulling their jackets tighter around them.

Angelina

It was amazing to us that a tea room/restaurant could be so cold. We imagined the numerous restaurants in the States, pumping heat as fast as it went out the doors, just for the comfort of their spoiled clientele.

As a Northerner, I would rather be cold than hot. Heat, I can do nothing about (and if you say Air Conditioning, I say Gross). And the fact is, I usually AM cold. My hands and feet, even in full summer can get quite icy. I’m the one with cold toes in bed. I shop for winter year-round. I got made fun of for wearing stockings in the summer here (ONCE, ok? The morning was chilly) – I had my new woolen winter coat before the last beach days of été.

I’m like a squirrel collecting woolen nuts all year. Or something.

Snow à la Parisienne

And the snow gives me great comfort. When I see it falling, I am all up in my fair isle sweater (today, for example), tea water is coming to a boil, and all that is missing is my dad bundling up to go out into the yard with the snowblower and my mother tending to a fire in the wood stove. Or getting into bed to watch movies with Amelia with nothing but a space heater fighting back against our thin Boston walls.

Snow quiets everything; it just sort of insulates the world, changes all the sounds around us, not to mention the light. As a Girl of the Great North, I feel like I’m being tucked in with the first snowfall, embraced by the clouds, like when your buxom great aunt kisses you, and leaves you all red-cheeked and slightly in pain, but feeling ever-so-Loved.

A Photo Finish

The other night I went to Portland with my parents to see a photography exhibit at the museum. Pictorialists vs. Group f/64.

Portrait of Three Women - Elias Goldensky ca. 1915

Pictorialists: A group of photographers making pictures with a softer edge, based on the notion that photographs should echo the painting and etching styles of the late 1800s, hence the manipulation of photographs both during shooting (filters, lens coating and soft focus), and in the darkroom (hand-scratching negatives and using brushes to blur parts of the image). Some would argue that the subject matter in pictorialist photography is of lesser importance than the style in which it was photographed and printed. Members of this movement were fighting for the acknowledgement of photography as an art form.

Imogen Cunningham

 

 

 

Group f/64: Named after the small aperture setting on a large-format camera that produces the greatest depth of field, this group of seven photographers based in San Francisco formed an opposition to Pictorialist photography. The group’s 1932 manifesto, displayed alongside their work at their first exhibit, states that entry into the group was by invitation only and for those “striving to define photography as an art form by simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods.” Their photographs, due to the often lengthy exposure time that accompanies this particularly small aperture, were often of landscapes, found objects, or otherwise staged by the photographer. Images are extremely sharp and focused, in opposition to the soft edges of Pictorialist images.

My Take: I couldn’t decide which I liked better. I found myself moved by the romantic quality of the Pictorialist images.  I felt dedicated to their construction of their art – the time they took to manipulate their pictures, to achieve that dreamy atmosphere. One can’t help but become part of the photograph: to let the soft edges envelop you and fold you into the image.

That said, the photos I saw from Group f/64 were just as stunning to me and, in their strength and focus, managed to strike gentle Pictorialism from my mind. The depth of field in these images is not as inviting as the Pictorialist touch. These photos feel like a wall: a magnificent, carefully constructed wall. While beautiful, Group f/64′s pictures leave me cold. I have no questions about the photograph. I can see every angle and corner clearly; I know what the photograph is of.

Group f/64′s images dare you to ask, dare you to come up with some kind of criticism, question, any comment. Pictorialist images invite curiosity. I feel Pictorialism, I see the images created by Group f/64.

 

The Baby Ache

 

Elly

 

One of the joys of being at home with my parents for a while is Elly. Elly is three months old, and she is my niece. According to my research, the only other baby this cute was my nephew, and that was eleven years ago, before I knew how to appreciate babies.

In fact, I suspect that my time as a Nounou in Paris had a huge hand in helping me appreciate babies. Those three little girls showed me a new level of patience with the age-challenged. I realised how little they know, how they have absolutely no concept of our reality – of hate, of love, geography, language, mathematical impossibilities, of how little they are in the scheme of things. What a fantastic thing! We write it off as imagination, but I mean – isn’t it easy to create alternate realities when as a child, your own is so loosely held together?

I have also seen firsthand how important adult roles are to children. Your parents (and other adults involved in raising you) give you the world. They show you things that you will consider truth for a good chunk of time, maybe changing your mind when you yourself become an adult, but nevertheless important in sculpting your individual worldview. They are responsible for unrolling the map before your eyes, preparing you for what is to come (and possibly choosing to leave a large chunk of that for you to figure out on your own, if they are what I would deem Good Parents).

When I look at my niece at 3 months, I can’t help but be amazed. She smiles like she already knows everything there is to know. She laughs like she’s heard it all before.  I think it’s easy to forget that children just Don’t Know Yet, especially when they give you those wise looks, or furrow those quizzical brows in your direction. I believe the best example of how much babies perceive of the world is in the way that they sleep. Elly sleeps like there is nothing to worry about, because she doesn’t know about wars and bombs and lust and murder and gluttony.

I never thought I would say that I could see myself as a mother (and trust me, it’s still a LONG way off), but in the last year I have definitely developed a new sensitivity towards children. Part of it is that mid-twenties hormonal peak, where your body starts screaming to be impregnated (fight it off, ladies), that even women who know they do not ever want children can feel. And the other part is what I’ve described above – the way I see children today as never before, as really interesting little baby humans.

Lose the Squeeze

The other week, I met Russell Brand in an elevator. I pushed the ‘Down’ arrow in the hall on my floor, and when the doors opened, he was just standing in there, looking at the panel of buttons, finally exclaiming that this was Not the lobby! No, I agreed, getting into the elevator, and announced that I, too, was on my way to the lobby. Suited up as I was, he asked whether or not I worked at the hotel. I gave him a (very) surprised look and told him that I did not. “Oh,” he said, “Just a girl, right. Just a girl, in an elevator, in a hotel, yeah.”

Then he introduced himself to me, which was very polite and alarmingly ironic. He also introduced me to his very tall, strong-looking friend who, though dressed in plain clothes, would likely have snapped my arm off, had I held on to Russell’s hand for too long.

Down at the front desk, Russell warned the receptionist not to give me the keys I was asking for, saying I was a very suspicious girl he’d just met in the elevator with an aggressive handshake. Here is a recreation of that conversation.

“Aggressive?” I repeated.

“Well, yeah,” Mr. Brand replied. “There are many words that could be used to describe it. The one I’m going with is ‘aggressive.’”

“Wow. Ok, come on. Try again,” I said, sticking my hand out a second time. He took it, we shook.

“Yeah, see?” he said, squeezing my hand back.

“Oh come on, I go for the web-to-web,” I explained, still locked in our pseudo-shake.

“Oh, the web-to-web I like,” agreed Russell. “But it’s the squeeze at the end. You have the aggressive handshake of a beautiful girl trying to overcompensate in a patriarchal society.”

(I believe I stood there slack-jawed at that.)

“Lose the squeeze,” concluded Russell Brand. “You don’t need it.”

Tags: elevator, handshake, nyc, russell brand

What’s Golden

I’m going to reveal my change of design in this blog.

My Tendency is to outline, I think. I help people skim my life in the way that I keep this blog. I did this, then this, then I was here, then I saw this person, they said this, the end. But god, even I don’t care about that shit.

No, what’s important, what’s golden, are the feelings we have as these events are unfolding. It is the way that we react to these things. It is how we interpret them. I think that, in that last post, I forgot to reflect.

And for that, I apologize.

So, rather than going through with my original plan, which included writing a post about New York, then one about being in Boston…I’m going to skip trying to recall every superficial detail and instead write you a post about what is generally happening to me at this moment.

I spent nearly 6 months in Paris, working as a babysitter, a translator, finally finding this opportunity to bring my language skills and madness for travel to the table in a job setting. Having learned how I might do that, I’m on the verge of being a business owner. In fact,  I’m just a few days away from completing the process, and heading off to France for another couple of months to being collaboration.

The work is so interesting – becoming someone’s personal concierge, their secretary, assistant, go-to gal…just for a few days at a time. I like how busy I will be; I like arranging, planning, getting things in motion, traveling, meeting new people, speaking and learning their languages.

I can’t wait to feel like I really own this – I know it will take a little time to get used to the rhythm of the work, the collab with Sté, and then making it my own. I can’t wait to be SMART about this stuff, to have all of the answers when there is a problem, to know instinctively how to handle certain situations.

So here I am, on the brink of this new adventure, paying visits to all the places I’ve known and loved, and feeling how different and similar they feel to me. Feeling like my favourite Zadie Smith quote from White Teeth:

“Social chameleon. And underneath it all, there remained an ever-present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere.”

For me, it isn’t so much the “anger and hurt” as it is a combination of pride and frustration – proud to be the chameleon that I am and to be able to jump on public transportation in any town without some kind of panic attack. Proud to have a confusing enough ethnicity that no one can tell whether I ‘belong’ or not. Proud to be able to speak three languages (and learning two more). And Frustrated because these qualities make it easy for me to be anywhere.  So how can I choose where to stay, where to live, where to put down these roots?

The beauty of having fled Boston earlier this year and doing so successfully, is in the fact that I no longer feel trapped. I know now that I can survive a whole new set of obstacles. I know that if I start to feel restless, all I need to do is pack up and choose a new place.
And it can begin again.

But not yet.

Maine, Part I

Two Lights

In the last three weeks, I have been in two countries and three major cities (and quite a few minor ones, too). I feel like I’m on the edge of something. I’m nearing some fantastic truth, or rounding some sharp corner. I arrived in Boston on the last day of August, where my father met me and brought me to the family homestead in the north. I met my niece for the first time, saw my brother, his girlfriend, and spent a little (though not enough) time with my parents.

Being at home presents new challenges now. I’m accustomed to living in the city. I’m not used to needing a car. I don’t have a car anymore, as the one I left with my mother was totaled in an accident this spring when a spacey old woman pulled out in front of her on the road. So when I go home, the highlight of the day is driving with my father to drop my mother off at the craft store they recently opened, getting coffee, and driving back.

The Store

The craft store is a beautiful place. As my mother repeats and repeats, it is a peaceful place, and when someone comes in, they feel good there. I always believed her on the phone, of course, but she was right. It’s in a little cluster of shops, and all of the store owners know one another and visit one another and chatter together during the day. It gives my mother a chance to be the kind of selectively social person that she is.

The Joys of America

Once back at the house, I sit with the precious new baby while her mother takes a nap, or I might try to nap myself through the incessant noise of motors starting and stalling in the driveway where my brother jokes and smokes cigarettes with his friends. My father comes in from time to time, taking a break from his long hours in the studio to make a quick sandwich or check the computer for new orders.

When I want to go someplace, it depends entirely on the collective family schedule. As independent as I am, this is a situation bound to make me sour. What with my mother working at the store, and my father between the studio, the store, and the Tai Chi classes he instructs. In order to attend the surprise birthday party of an old high school friend that weekend, I had to catch a ride with a kid I hadn’t seen since my high school graduation, and get picked up by my dad the next day.

Two Lights

Once while I was home, though, Dad and I took a fun trip to Portland, where I bought a blue suit (oh, he bought it for me, because although I’m nearly an entrepreneur, I’m very broke). We went to Two Lights, which used to be my Grandma’s (his mum’s) favourite spot. She was a sucker for a fried clam or two. Dad was really disappointed though, because the sea was calm that day, and he’d been psyched about seeing some pre-hurricane waves. But it was beautiful anyway, packed with funny tourists in visors.

Birds on a Wire

My brother has a friend who likes to drive his ATV over and sit. He just sits. He shows up, asks for my brother, and when he learns that my brother is in fact, not there, he sits. He sits and waits at the kitchen table. Or he says something like, “Oh alright, I’m just gonna use the phone real quick,” and grabs it off the receiver, makes a call, says goodbye and goes out the door again.

Busy

Days are passed sprawled across the couch (which doubles as my bed) trying to decide whether to sleep or read or attempting to get some semblance of an internet connection. Lately, I’ve been on a movie marathon – catching up on things I haven’t seen, becoming obsessed with filling my mind with new cultural parameters: Marie Antoinette, New York I Love You, Australia, A Pyromaniac’s Love Story, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It’s a sickness, really.

Entitlement, Revisited: Fighting

"Wailing Wall", Paris

You know, after that whole rant about the crazy French folk, and the things that really annoy me about them, and their unbelievable attitudes, I felt like following up here.

People are always slinging that old “Wonderful country, France…pity about the French” quote around, especially expats, a fact that certainly disturbed me at first. I wanted to ask them what the hell they were doing here, if that’s how they felt about it. The French never really bothered me prior to this visit. And still don’t, to tell the truth. I just have more to say about them now I’ve lived in Paris a while. Actually, I rather love them, generally speaking (a way of speaking which is nearly foreign to me).

The truth is, I rather love people. I am fascinated by them: by what makes them tick, what sets them off. I have just as many observations about the French as I do about Americans and Italians. And in all of my criticism of the French, I can relate to them.

These Parisian folk are famous for their complaining. They seem to really need to do it, just a little, every day, often quite passively. They’ll drag a passerby into their little mental frenzy for about 30 seconds, and set them free. Free to go off and pass that on to the next stranger they encounter.

I love that the French seem to argue for no reason, from an American perspective (because if no one is going to win, what the hell are we doin’?). And, unfortunately for my American friends back home, I think I have picked up this habit.

The other night, Julia and I were at a bar near St Michel, sitting at a terrace table, enjoying a beer. The bouncer came over to us and informed us that he was closing the terrace, but that the bar was still open inside. So, obediently, we stood, and as he walked off with an armload of blackboard signs he’d taken down, lit a final cigarette before going in.

A second later, the man was back, pointing at our beers and telling us in harsh tones that now the terrace was closed, we could no longer drink outside. We moved closer to the entrance of the bar, near where he was trying to fold up our table and chairs. Julia couldn’t understand where he wanted her to move to, and asked. Which is when he lit into us again about having our beers on the terrace when the terrace was closed. Which…is when I got argumentative.

“We are just finishing our cigarettes, and then we’ll head right in,” I said.

“No,” he said. “The terrace is closed. No drinking outside when the terrace is closed. Do you understand?”

I pointed over my shoulder to the table of two behind me, still sitting, enjoying their beers quietly. “What are they doing, then? Why do we have to rush inside, when they’re still at their table?”

“I gave you fair warning,” replied the bouncer. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I told him that I did, snarkily, took a few more futile verbal swings at him, Julia and I had a last few puffs in the doorway, tossed our half-smoked cigarettes, and went inside.

At our new indoor table, Julia and I discussed what had just occurred. She pointed out that it was just that kind of shit that really bugged her. And it occurred to me, then and there, that the exchange I’d just had with that con of a bouncer, was one of the reasons I really like living in France.

Fights with no consequences!

It’s the perfect outlet for the generally non-aggressive. And the French are not aggressive people. Maybe verbally, but really, deep down, no one wants to punch one another, draw blood, claw out eyeballs.

Living in France is like being in group therapy all the time!

I’m angry, I need you to know. I really hate that I missed the bus this morning, let me just fill your ear with that. A lady sat down next to me in the métro today and told me that all of her family was dead except a really mean brother, unfortunately still living. Then she wished me a great day. My favourite Monoprix cashier, a woman from Guyana, can’t even seem to believe that people like the French exist. She tells me how much she loves visiting her family in the U.S., and how everyone here is always just pissed, and rude, and racist.

France vs. USA:

Why I like fighting in France: because no one really wants to fight. Therefore, you get into the ring, slap on a pair of gloves, don’t bother to tie them on tightly, and slap each other’s hands until they fall off on their own. Then you climb out of the ring, put your jacket back on (that you’d placed neatly over the back of some ringside chair) and go home for dinner.

In the States, we do want that fight. Did someone say fight? Did you just insult me? What was that you said under your breath? You wanna repeat that? And wham, jackets hit the ground, your second man ties those gloves on tight for you, pep-talkin’ you the whole time, winding you up (even if it’s only going on inside your own head) and punches will be thrown, not necessarily physically, though that would happen much more quickly than in France. But someone will cross a line. Someone will pull out the dreaded wildcard insult, or someone will call the cops, or someone will threaten to sue someone else. Shit’ll get a little raw.

And you know, that’s an uncomfortable situation. I don’t really  need that. I just want to be vocal about my feelings from time to time, get a little confrontational with someone who provokes me, and go home for dinner.

Vive la France!

Tags: arguing, bars, entitlement, fighting, france, nightlife, paris