She was a particular description of woman; he was fortunate to have found her.

Me:  I just can’t believe this guy.  Who behaves like this?

B:  He sounds like that guy on The Hills.

Me:  You watch The Hills?  Actually, I think the question would be better framed as: “You are aware that The Hills exists as a popular cultural phenomenon?  How did Lauren and Heidi manage to puncture through all of the medieval esoterica, Baudelaire translation, and compulsive watching of TED talks?”

B:  Ex-girlfriend.

Me:  Ah.

B:  Anyway, your ex sounds like that one guy on The Hills.  The annoying one.

Me:  Justin-Bobby?  Totally.  I think that’s why I dated him.  God, I live for Justin-Bobby.  If there was a channel that was only that kid going about his day, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, I would quit my whole life to watch it.  I’m not even joking around.

B:  No, not that one.

Me:  Not that show?

B:  No, not that guy on The Hills.  The other one.  The really annoying blond one with the flesh-colored beard.

Me:  Spencer!?

B:  Yeah.  Your ex-boyfriend is like Spencer.

Me:  Wow.  I think that is like the meanest thing you could possibly say about somebody.

B:  I tried.

It is interesting to think of the great blaze of heaven that we winnow down to animal shapes and kitchen tools.

My students informed me today that I am supposed to go on strike tomorrow. None of my supervisors have mentioned this, so it came as a bit of a surprise. I knew that they were threatening another transit strike for tomorrow, but those barely faze me at this point. Transit strikes don’t prevent me from getting to work, they merely make it a longer, harder, more frustrating commute. But now I’m worried that I’ll do battle with all the other annoyed commuters tomorrow, only to arrive on an empty campus.

When I asked them why I should be striking, they responded with the ambiguous explanation of “labor problems.” When I probed further, they settled on “employment issues.” I tried to change tactics and turn it into a discussion about the French proclivity for striking.  But my students didn’t really have much of an opinion about striking. It’s like bad weather, one kid explained. It’s going to happen, there’s nothing you can do about it, and there isn’t any point in getting worked up. It half-occurred to me that they might be fucking with me in hopes that I would cancel my classes and tell the other English-speaking lecturers to do the same. At the same time, I think these students actually like me and might be trying to do me a favor. In these situations I can’t help but feel like the dumb American monkey that has been imported to France to provide these students with “a native speaker.” Unless someone tells me otherwise, I’ll schlep to work tomorrow, bring a book to read in case nobody shows up, and shoot the shit in English with the few errant students who do show up. I think that the last thing is basically what they are paying me to do anyway.

My cluelessness about the mechanisms of French bureaucracy was terrifying when I first moved here. Now I’m just pleasantly amused by the perpetual confusion that surrounds me. The French university system is a bona fide mess, but on the whole I’ve found the individuals that inhabit it to be well-meaning and generous to the hapless American. I will admit that I feel as though I’m playacting as a teacher here. When someone enters my classroom and uncertainly asks if I am the professor, I nod and smile, but it is always tinged with uncertainty. Yes, I am the instructor of record, but no, I don’t know if you can technically register for my class, or where room 407E is, or if the university is on strike tomorrow. But we are reading about shark hunting and learning funny idioms today, not because there is a curriculum that demands we do so, but because it was what I managed to come up with. Join us! English is fun for everyone! It reminds me of a passage in Don Delillo’s Underworld where he is describing the selves that we are at work:

“I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions. Did I do this myself? You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There’s a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it’s not that you are pretending to be someone else. You’re pretending to be exactly who you are. That’s the curious thing.”

* * *

Photo courtesy of the comely M. Starik.

She divined a very tough self-preservative instinct behind the promises, pity, and ten-pound note.

On Friday night I went to a most excellent concert at Café de la Danse, which you should definitely check out if you are a Paris inhabitant. Can I just say how much I appreciate this thing of sitting down at concerts? I’ll confess, despite the fact that I really enjoy live music, I’ve been feeling kind of old and cranky at concerts for the past few years. I get tired of standing around forever waiting for the band to start, only so some guy who is three feet taller than me can suddenly push his way into the tiny pocket of space directly in front of me the minute the band starts playing. He’s usually a nice enough guy, a friendly, corn-fed, rosy-cheeked, baseball-cap guy, and he often turns around and says “oh, can you see?” and I always say “yeah, totally” because I’m terrified of confrontations. When I was sixteen this shit didn’t bother me. I wore high heels and danced until my feet bled and would have happily ignored the tall guy or the smelly guy or the chain of girls that push their way to the front and spill your beer in the process. Because that was all part of the concert-going experience, you know? Now I feel like a cranky old crow when I go to shows. I wear flats and I complain about the cost of drinks at concert venues and I get tired of standing and I end up spending a lot of my time resenting the people around me for various height, hygiene, and personal space infractions. I maxed out last summer when my friends and I attended a huge, two-day, outdoor music festival and it rained nonstop. As I shivered under my six-dollar poncho, drinking a partially spilled ten-dollar beer, the refrain that echoed in my head came not from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Of Montreal, or The Walkmen. The refrain came from my own damn superego, and it went something like:

You’re too damn old for this, oooh.

You’re too damn old for this, oooh.

Who do you think you are, you old loon?

You’re too damn old for this, oooh.

Pretend that this is a Pynchon novel and that you are already familiar with the melody.

At first I thought this sitting down thing was a merely a lovely anomaly when M and I went to see Stars Like Fleas at the Pompidou and everyone just sat and quietly swayed to the music. It seemed so damn civilized and pleasant, completely unlike concert going in the States. But the glorious Bosque Brown / Clare and the Reasons show we attended at Café de la Danse on Friday night confirmed my hopes. As we filed into the theatre, we discovered rows of elevated seating. You could put down your coat and purse! Everyone could see the band! Perhaps as a result of such creature comforts, the people attending the show were in their thirties, and forties, and fifties! Beer and wine were 4 euros! The bathrooms were clean! This is concert going for grownups! France: 1, United States: 0.

And let’s be honest, I’m not going to Fugazi shows anymore. I’m seeing bands that are mainly conducive to swaying and the occasionally foot-tap. Both Bosque Brown and Clare and the Reasons are such bands, in the best possible way. Mara Lee Miller and Clare Muldaur are for my money some of the most talented, idiosyncratic ladies singing today. In the imaginary universe where I am a tastemaker, I would instruct you to immediately fill your iPod immediately with their magic.

The concert was the climax of an evening where I renewed my deep and abiding love of M. I had wavered on whether or not I wanted to go to the show, and she pushed the envelope by texting me from the venue in the early evening and telling me to get my ass over there. We explored the area around rue de Charonne near Bastille before the show. It is essentially hipster paradise with tons of little bars and restaurants and glorious shops full of expensive things you don’t need. She had already cased the joint, so to speak, and found an adorable bar where we could try my newest obsession: Aperol Sodas.

I’ve been a longtime devotee of Campari-based cocktails. It’s such a gorgeous, interesting drink. There is nothing more aesthetically pleasing than a bottle of Campari. The graphic design is perfect. The alcohol itself makes everything look so girly, like a Shirley Temple, but it packs a pretty serious punch, especially in tandem with other hard liquor. I would say that Negronis (equal parts Campari, gin, and sweet vermouth, shaken with ice) are probably my favorite cocktail when I’m not messing around. But Campari also makes for an easy summer drink when paired with grapefruit juice, orange juice, or soda. One of my favorite memories of a summer trip to Vienna is sitting on the banks of Danube at one of those “beach” bars (I love that Europeans drag in a bunch of sand every year to simulate beach-going) with my mother, drinking Campari and orange juice and watching the sun set as our toes squirmed in the cool sand. Campari–along with nautical stripes, red lipstick, and well-made leather sandals–always makes me feel like part of a decaying Italian aristocracy. On Mad Men, Don Draper has a mid-life crisis and runs away to Palm Springs to stay with these itinerant, louche European “artists” in this spectacular mid-century mansion. As they have sex and discuss existentialism by the pool, guess what they are drinking, straight out of the bottle? Campari. Talk about pitch-perfect.

When I discovered last summer that Campari made sodas in adorable, miniature bottles, I nearly died of happiness. I wasn’t quite so jazzed to discover that a four pack of such delight costs ten dollars in Denver. Get with the program, Denver. In Europe, however, Campari soda is cheaper than Coke. I had noticed Aperol next to the Campari, but I thought that Aperol was merely a second-rate Campari knock-off. Uh, no, stupid girl. Actually both liquors are owned by the Campari company. Aperol is a lighter, sweeter herbal elixir with the distinct taste of—wait for it—rhubarb! Rhubarb is probably my favorite thing in the universe. So I’ve been on the hunt for Aperol sodas, which aren’t quite as ubiquitous as Campari sodas. The verdict from Friday night:  amazing. Sweet, effervescent, and the prettiest shade of pinky-orange you can imagine. M and I forecasted many warm evenings to come where we will sit in rue de Charonne cafes and sip Aperol soda and chat about all kinds of fallen-aristocrat topics.

Anyway, if we dwelled in that magical parallel universe where I am a tastemaker, I would tell you to stock up on some Campari or Aperol sodas for the summer. You’ll be the coolest kid on the block (that is, an imaginary block in the imaginary parallel universe where I am a tastemaker). I would also encourage you to start experimenting with Cynar, an artichoke (!) based liquor and the redheaded stepchild of the Campari family. I’ve been desperately wanting to buy a bottle, but I’m apprehensive about what I’ll make with it. I’ve heard that one can make a kind of Cynar-Negroni (substituting Cynar for Campari), but I love the citrusey kick of Campari in a Negroni and am loathe to give it up. So I’m desperately seeking suggestions from the cocktail-savvy reader. I’ll send you a sweet postcard in exchange for viable Cynar cocktail recipes. Or I’ll make you a drink (or three) if you’re a local. I feel like we already have a lot in common if you are experimenting with Cynar and happen to live in Paris.  Are you going to the Rouch/Artaud/Tarahumaras documentaries tomorrow?  Wanna date?

* * *

I haven’t been blogging with nearly the ferocity with which I began. Anyone who knows me can attest to my intensity right of the starting gate followed my lackluster enthusiasm a couple of laps into the race. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Sagittarius, what can I say? I have a list of good excuses, including a head cold, a houseguest, and an amazing documentary film festival that is only two blocks from my house. But excuses (and those individuals who make a habit of making them) suck and the last thing I want to do is abandon this silly little project. I’m so, so grateful that you are still stopping by. There are good things in the works for the month of April. I’m taking Clarence to Berlin and Brussels, so there will be lots of adjective-heavy reviews forthcoming of currywurst stands and steaming bowls of mussels. Stay tuned.

Did I mention how handsome you look today? You’re a knockout. Let’s get a Cynar-based drink. I think we’re totally ready to move to second base.

It’s spring, maybe.

Oh, I have a blog.  That’s right.

I’ve been thinking about posting for the past couple of days, but honestly I’m running low on ideas. Suddenly it’s spring in Paris and all I want to do is sit on a bench in Place des Vosges with the sun on my face, soaking up all the Vitamin D that I’ve missed out on in the past four months of grey gloom.  It’s making me single-minded and boring as hell.

One of the things that bother me the most about my parents is that they incessantly talk about the weather.  My mother is as close to a weather hypochondriac as one can possibly be.  We are always on the verge of “the biggest snowstorm of the year,” “the driest summer in recorded history,” or “a hailstorm with hailstones the size of a baby’s fist” as far as she’s concerned.  She’s especially smug when the weather does match or exceed her fatalistic expectations.  My mother rocks the “I told you so!” like nobody’s business.  On the other hand, my father is more or less a professional snowboarder at this point in his life, so our conversations always begin with a detailed account of the snow conditions at the local ski areas, despite the fact that I live on another continent.  I keep telling him that he should start a blog of snowfall and grooming reports – he could probably make a killing in the Colorado ski community.  Anyway, if you are someone who happens to believe in the magical power of one’s own thoughts to change the world around you (remember, Freud tells us that only savages, children, and the mad believe in such a thing), I suspect that my parents are actually just canceling each other out in their extreme weather augury:

Mother:  “Please, please don’t let it snow six feet tonight!”

Father:  “Please, please let it snow six feet of feather-light power tonight!”

Anyway, this is longwinded way of explaining that I hate how much my parents talk about the weather.  And yet, and yet, and yet I suddenly find myself PHYSICALLY UNABLE to speak of anything except the weather: how grateful I am to see the sun, how lucky we are to be able to leave our windows open for a few hours, and how pleasant it is to see everyone in Paris out and about and enjoying a reprieve from the blistering cold.  Adulthood has been for me a slow, but steady realization that I’m not nearly as different from my parents as I might have hoped, and that it is actually okay.  My parents are pretty awesome.  My mom hopes it doesn’t snow tomorrow because she is probably going to go for a killer hike if the weather holds.  My dad is praying for snow, but that’s because he is the only 65-year old I know that snowboards over a hundred days a year.

I used to think my parent’s near-maniacal obsession with being outside was annoying – why couldn’t we just be sedentary like so many other families I knew?  Why did we have to live in this spectacularly beautiful and entirely inconvenient place?  Why were we always DOING things TOGETHER as a family, like skiing and bicycling and hiking and camping at the beach?  Why did I have to have a father who described the ski area as his own personal church?  HOW WEIRD.  Now that I’m older and see that my parents are happier, healthier, and just generally more terrific to be around than most people their age, I realize that they had the right idea all along.  When in doubt, go outside and move around.

Clarence in Paris: Tokyo Eat

Tokyo Eat at the Palais de Tokyo

13 avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris

Métro: Iéna

Yesterday I went and watched some psychoanalysts fight with each other at the Sorbonne for a few hours. The conference I attended ended with one of the panel members storming off the stage and the other throwing his glasses on the table in frustration. The were fighting over the stakes of a dogmatic reading of one of Lacan’s seminars, which I’m sure to most people would seem like a pretty irrelevant thing to get so bent out of shape about. But this was a niche audience and everyone got really fired up. It was kind of exhausting to witness, though I suppose that my ability to mock an angry French speaker improved immeasurably.

Worn down to a single raw nerve, I met up with my friends afterwards for an evening at the Palais de Tokyo, a museum that I’ve mentioned here before. How to explain the Palais de Tokyo to the uninitiated? It’s a rather enormous, partially unfinished contemporary art museum with no permanent collection. They put on a few large-scale exhibitions a year and have weekly lectures, concerts, film screenings, and other cultural happenings on Thursday nights. On the upside, some of their curatorial work is really sharp and the vastness of the museum space itself allows for certain work to be showcased that might otherwise have difficulty finding adequate museum space. The also have, hand-down, the best Photomaton in Paris (it’s actually nearly impossible to find the black and white kind that make photos in a vertical strip here, Amelie be damned). The downside? Well, sometimes the exhibitions indulge the emptiest trends of contemporary art. The last exhibition at the Palais, Chasing Napoleon, was a good example of the former alternative:  a fascinating group show that hinged upon the idea of the Unabomber as an exemplary escape from the social into a kind of aesthetic isolation. The current exhibition, Pergola, which is supposedly about the haunting of architectural space, is well, let’s just say it’s not that great. It’s the kind of show that makes intelligent people wander around bewildered, musing about how they too can get in to this conceptual art racket and make a killing assembling boxes out of construction-grade plywood. Or maybe that’s just my friends and me.

What’s kind of terrific about the Palais de Tokyo, however, is that even if the art viewing is a total bummer (an entire installation of non-functional pneumatic tubes?  really?!), the bookstore is consistently amusing and the bar and restaurant at the museum are pretty excellent. I’ve told you about the excellent neon lighting at the Tokyo Bar before, but I’ll emphasize again that it is a great place to meet up if you find pinky-orange light to be very flattering (I do). While the service at the bar is comically bad (just order at the bar, because seriously they are never, ever coming to your table), the bartenders are cute guys that certainly provide evidence that my students are wrong to say that there is no such thing as a French hipster.

The restaurant, Tokyo Eat, has a diverse, pseudo-Asian fusion thing going on that provides a nice break from Paris bistro fare. While it’s trendy and kind of expensive (a nine euro milkshake guys?  for that price it better be laced with cocaine), I actually really like eating there. Last night, my friends and I ate the tartare de boeuf au saté et sésame, roquette et frites maison (standard steak tartare/salad/fries with the twist that the tartare was made with a kind of lovely Asian sesame and saté flavor), the pastilla d’agneau aux aubergines et oignons confits et mesclun (a really lovely Moroccan-style lamb pastilla filled with eggplant and onions and served with a heap of salad) and the adorable daurade à la plancha, aubergines confines, et sauce cacahuète (sea bass with roasted eggplant and a peanut sauce). For dessert, we shared the mini macarons d’Hermès, dissident d’Hermé, aux parfums varies (an assortment of macarons served with a “dissident,” which I believe is what they were calling a small piece of lacy caramel).  I’d been eyeing a large display of macaroons in tall milkshake glasses all night, and my friends humored me in ordering one for dessert.  I felt kind of bad when I realized that M doesn’t even really like macarons.  Though how can you dislike macarons?  They are practically the most perfect Parisian foodstuff!  The tourism industry might likely crash to a halt if Ladurée or Fauchon closed their doors!  I’m not going to bore you with a long description of the macaron culture in Paris (there are fifteen other blogs that can do that for you just as well), but I will say that the ones at the Palais de Tokyo are pretty amazing.  While they didn’t have a lemon one (my personal favorite), the assortment of pistachio, rose, vanilla, and passionfruit that they serve is really lovely.  Further proof in my growing pile of evidence that M is actually a Soviet spy.

Details: Lunch and dinner served whenever the museum is open (noon to midnight everyday except Tuesday).  Reservations totally unnecessary.  Dinner service starts at 8 p.m.  A nice alternative to the many overpriced tourist traps in the area (surrounding the Eiffel Tower and the Musée du quai Branly).

Photos via Palais de Tokyo.