Category: social skills
Remnants
A inspected the blog line graph yesterday and noted that as soon as I started writing about him, my readership plummeted. I suggested that this is because nobody wants to read about a do-gooder humanitarian. We agreed that it would probably be best for the blog if I invented a rockstar named Z with whom I can conduct a steamy affair. I worried for a moment that focusing my energy on recounting the various occasions in which Z has done blow off of my naked body before ravaging me in a public restroom might detract from the main purpose of this blog, namely writing about brunch. But A assures me that rockstars are very good at going to brunch. In fact, A insists that rockstars survive entirely on brunch and appetizers. I didn’t realize how well acclimated I was to the rockstar lifestyle! Yesterday I ate a lovely brunch, a plate of charcuterie for dinner, and a bag of hot wings at 3 a.m. Bring me some leather pants. I’m ready.
* * *
Two nights ago I went to a screening at the Centre Pompidou of Chantal Akerman’s documentary about the German choreographer Pina Bausch, Un jour Pina a demandé, followed by a production Bausch’s 1984 Barbe-Bleue. I’d like to write something semi-articulate about it because it moved me very deeply, but I am coming up against the sense that I lack an adequate vocabulary to speak about dance, or at least this particular type of work. This frustrates me immensely because I feel like I’m dissolving into someone who is moved by everything and has nothing to say about anything. Bausch’s couples in particular dismantled me. This will surely make me sound like a philistine, but I had no idea that such a nuanced version of intersubjectivity could be evoked by dance. Bausch’s work makes shared affect viscerally physical. I kept thinking about this passage in Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender that always makes me weep:
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.
There is a lousy video on youtube of the production of Barbe-Bleue:
Booze or lose: La Belle Hortense
La Belle Hortense
31 rue Vieille du Temple, 75004 Paris
Métro: Hôtel de Ville, St. Paul
One of my oldest friends is spending a month in Paris and oh boy, am I excited to have him here. I haven’t seen A in years because he spends most of his time in war zones working with Médecins Sans Frontières. A million years ago, he and I worked together at an art gallery during a time in our lives when we were both floating (and occasionally flailing) professionally. I was trying to apply to graduate school without the faintest idea about how one would go about doing such a thing. He was trying to figure out what his calling was, cursed as he is by a variety of talents and aptitudes (in addition to being a logistical savant, he is also a talented artist and writer). What that we should all have such problems, yes? He ended up taking the humanitarian route and I don’t want to brag too hard on the guy but let’s just say that he’s kind of a big deal now. He’s also annoyingly modest about his extremely difficult, self-sacrificing, and important work. I’m really proud to know him. Wandering around my neighborhood, we had a couple of shared moments of amazement that somehow we have gone from being the people we were back then to the people we are now, meeting up in Paris. More importantly, after not seeing each other for nearly five years, we immediately fell back into the same banter that we had when we were dewy and just-hatched. Sitting at a bar last night, he said something funny and I felt an overwhelming urge to give him a noogie (I didn’t, but it was hard to curb the impulse). When we went to my bank so I could get some cash, I joked about how I disappointed was that these awful bums that always harass me at my ATM weren’t on duty last night. As I was telling him about how these guys had drunkenly followed me to my laundromat one day and cornered me, A looked defensive and angry, like he would happily punch someone out for giving me a hard time. It made me feel the way I suspect people with older brothers feel all the time. You lucky people with older brothers. Do you just strut around all day in the warm glow of your older brother’s care and protection? No? You should.
We went to this darling bar that I want to tell you about. Maybe I’ll inaugurate a new series of bar reviews today. Yes, it is definitely about time. That’s right, in addition to eating things and going to movies, I also drink a lot! Booze or lose! It rhymes! I suspect that A’s presence in Paris will be especially fruitful for such an endeavor. He arrived with a list of Paris bars that he wanted to try, and, self-sacrificing friend that I am, I begrudgingly agreed to help him in his quest. I’m a giver, really. He said he wouldn’t even mind if I blogged about it. That’s the golden ticket as far as I’m concerned.
Last night I took him to this place that M introduced me to, La Belle Hortense. It’s a wine bar and bookshop in the Marais and man is it cute. It’s got a perfect Parisian zinc bar, dark-wood walls lined with beautiful books, and a back room with seating and an art gallery. In addition to having a large list of set wines, they also have a weekly rotating list of interesting seasonal or small-batch wines that are listed on a chalkboard in the front. Going to La Belle Hortense has been a nice way of exploring some wines that I wouldn’t try otherwise (they did a month of killer rosés when I first arrived in Paris). La Belle Hortense also keeps a steady schedule of author visits, lectures, and readings, available on their website. The crowd is a well-heeled, thirty- to forty-something bunch.
La Belle Hortense is one of the cutest places run by a single corporate conglomerate, Caféine, owned by one Xavier Denamur. Most of the other restaurants and bars on the same block of rue Vieille du Temple as La Belle Hortense are also owned by Caféine, including Les philosophes, Le petit fer à cheval, L’étoile manquante, and La chaise au plafond. Coming from Orange County, the land of homogeneous franchises and chains, I was a little disappointed to discover that what appeared to be a heterogeneous block of fetching restaurants and bars in Paris is actually a well-oiled corporate machine. That said, these places are really well done. Beyond the fact that you get to watch the beautiful bartender from La Belle Hortense scamper across the street to Le petit fer à cheval to pick up your charcuterie plate should you order one at her bar, there is little to suggest that these restaurants are affiliated. While their menus are basically same and they all have overproduced and overindulgently designed bathrooms, they each have a very different overall vibe. La Belle Hortense is certainly my favorite, but the restaurants are certainly worth a visit.
Caféine’s website if you want to poke around, complete with virtual bathroom tours (!):
Better yet, here is the website for Médecins Sans Frontières should you want to donate or read about the organization’s efforts around the world:
He’s pretty easy on the eyes too
One of the most consistently delightful people I know also happens to have a consistently delightful blog. He recently linked here, so if you have arrived here via Loquats and Milk, welcome to my dozen-day old world. I’ve been trying to think of a catch phrase for your visit and am coming up a bit short. “Maybe not Loquats, but LOQUACIOUS!” doesn’t really have the ring to it that I’m looking for. If you arrived here in another manner (coersion, likely), please check out Loquats and Milk (accessible on the sidebar, apparently hyperlinks are outside of my skill set). This guy throws excellent parties, has impeccable politics, and is hands-down the best person ever to watch early Sesame Street videos with at three o’clock in the morning when you are a couple of bottles of wine deep. Most importantly, he agrees with me that punching someone in the face is an excellent rhetorical device. He’s got a great knack for writing about Southern California in all of its strangeness and I suspect you’ll really enjoy his blog. Cheers.
Teenagers
I was reading the New York Times yesterday and there was this piece in the Style section about the growing market of deodorants and body sprays for preteen boys. I groaned when I saw it. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been rather disgusted by the recent spate of ads for Axe body spray. I also spend my working days with the seventeen to twenty-two set, and while they aren’t quite as bad as the high schoolers that I’ve taught in the past, I will say that the sheer density of the Old Spice Red Zone is enough to make anybody wheeze. Actually, Old Spice Red Zone, along with Aqua di Gio, instantly evokes memories of making out in the back of my first serious boyfriend’s silver Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder. Let’s just say that it was a pretty rad car for my high school and that it had a remarkably small backseat. At any rate, the piece in the Times is actually pretty great in that it manages to encapsulate the bizarre combination of total brazenness and utter insecurity that teenagers possess. While I winced at the description of boys spraying on layers of musk in lieu of showering, I was really touched when I read the comment of young man explaining body spray to a teacher who had confiscated his can: “I have to have it, Ms. G., because I don’t have the money to dress the right way. This is all I can afford.” That killed me.
It got me to thinking about these summers I spent in the last few years teaching SAT prep for a private company in Orange County that largely serviced the Korean community. The whole operation was rather shady, run out of non-descript shopping centers with lots of under-the-table cash payments. But the money was good, the prep was minimal, and my student’s mothers often sent me jars of kimchi, so I did it to pay the rent. The kids were quite delightful – sharp and ambitious if vaguely resentful of the bummer of a summer that their parents had signed them up for. While they came from all different high schools, within a week they had already effectively cliqued and hierarchized themselves and it was evident even to the teachers who the cool kids were, who the weird kids were, who the overachievers were, etc. The shopping center in which I taught had a number of fast-food restaurants and coffee places where everyone would eat and hang out before class and during lunch. I enjoyed spying on my students from my table at Starbucks, watching crushes develop and dates get set, watching gossip and fights transpire, and above all watching them scheme about how to ditch class without getting caught. Oh, how opaque they thought they were being and how transparent they were.
The thing that really broke my heart, though, was the few kids that never quite fit in to the busy little social network that formed around summer SAT camp. I came to think of them as the “alone” kids, the ones who brought their lunch and ate alone, whose eyes grazed the classroom uncomfortably, looking for the most inconspicuous place to sit, the ones who waited for their parents to pick them up apart from the raucous groups, alone. I know how they must have felt. There is something about being alone when you are that age that is so devastating. It feels not only that you are alone, but that you are alone because the entire universe has rejected you. I wish that I could say that everybody who spends a lot of time alone growing up ends up surrounded by friends as they get older. I wish that I could have taken every single one of those kids aside and said, “Hey, listen, I know it sucks now, but college is going to be amazing! Your twenties are going to be amazing! Just hang in there, you just haven’t found your crowd yet!” But maybe that isn’t the case for everyone. Maybe some people just end up spending a lot of time alone in their lives, and while high school is especially painful as far as that goes, there isn’t necessarily some brilliant social metamorphosis just around the corner.
I do wish, though, that I could have told them the one thing that I am certain of, namely that the being alone part gets easier. I don’t know exactly when it happened for me, but I do know that one day I stopped feeling so excruciatingly visible when I was alone. It felt okay to be alone, comfortable even. At some point it even became a pleasure. The girl I once was, cowering in the most inconspicuous place possible, is now a person that relishes going to restaurants and movies by myself. I’ve gotten good at it, this being alone, and I think I can reasonably hope that the same will happen for those kids. I think I can also reasonably hope that they will eventually lay off the body spray.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/fashion/31smell.html?ref=fashion
Ready to surrender
I’ve been indulging in a lot of behaviors lately that make me grateful to live alone. If I had a domestic companion, they would have surely notified the Adult Police by now. I’m pretty sure that 27-year-olds are not supposed to pass out in crumb-filled beds at 4 a.m. after watching eight episodes of The Wire while eating Special K Fruits Rouges directly from the box. 27-year-olds should wake up before noon, brush their teeth at least twice a day, and write their dissertation prospectuses in a timely manner. I’ve been doing none of these things. I like the idea of a S.W.A.T. team-style entry into my apartment in which shouts of “Adult Police! Hands in the air!” are met by my bewildered face, illuminated only by the glow of my laptop and with a dehydrated strawberry stuck to my cheek. After reading me my rights I’m dragged, hands in cuffs and wearing the same dirty Bob Marley t-shirt I’ve been rocking for a week, to the re-education center where I am forced to relearn good eating habits and reestablish a sleeping schedule. Graduate school and its attendant ocean of unstructured time can be perilous when there is nobody around to shame you into getting your shit together. It’s times like these when one of you who cares about me needs to turn me in, for my own good, even though you will be likely be wracked with guilt that you had to turn to the authorities instead of keeping it in the family. Or maybe I’ve just been watching too much of The Wire.
It got me to thinking about how exactly people do manage to cohabitate. I’ve lived alone for nearly five years now and I don’t know how I ever managed otherwise. People joke about their “secret single behavior,” but it always is something cute and manageable to do while living with someone, like plucking the odd hair or eating pickles straight out of the jar. I feel like I have an entire secret single way of being. As anyone who has stayed in my company on my turf for more than a few days can attest, I start getting jumpy. My best friend, upon learning that her week-long visit was on the tail end of my mother’s two week trip to Paris, gleefully cackled and said, “Oh man! Three weeks of constant contact! That is going to drive you NUTS!” I can’t even imagine how I could possibly have someone around when I’m one of the manic work-binges that I have to enter ever few months to stay afloat in my ‘career.’ Don’t significant others disapprove of significant lapses in hygiene? Wouldn’t a domestic partner disapprove if all three meals a day consisted of coffee and microwave burritos? How about if the “work” area spread like cancer over the dining room table, couch, living room floor, and bed? Or do people quit doing these things when they are real adults?
Photo courtesy of the bounteous M. Starik
The Bear-Garden 