Don’t call it a comeback

About a year ago I was invited to join a Facebook group to help plan my ten-year high school reunion.

Cue wave of nausea.

In the movies, people always say “Ten years! How can it possibly have been ten years!”  I don’t exactly feel that way.  I mean, I definitely feel a decade away from high school.  I’ve lived in a lot of different places. I’ve met scores of interesting people and made some excellent friends and dated so many guys it’s mildly ridiculous.  I’ve gotten myself good and unemployably educated. Basically, I’ve been busy and I feel like I have something to show for the past decade.  I don’t feel some cliché like “But my life isn’t nearly where I thought it would be in ten years!” In fact, if you sat my seventeen-year-old self down and told her what she would be doing today, she would probably be pleased as punch.

So I don’t know exactly what undergirded the denial that resulted in a swift click of the “decline” button on Facebook.  I didn’t know why, but I knew that I didn’t want to be part of that noise.  Not one bit.  I managed to blissfully ignore the whole event, until the well-meaning individuals responsible for organizing the group concluded that I must have declined in error. I received three more invitations to the group, each of which I swiftly rejected.  The last time I was invited, however, I made the decidedly creepy decision to poke around the group.  I was flabbergasted to discover that nearly two hundred people from my graduating class had coagulated and were eagerly discussing banquet venues and family picnics.

The whole experience threw me.  I didn’t recognize a lot of the names, until it slowly occurred to me as I scrolled through the photos that many of the women had changed their names when they got married.  And a lot of them are married.  Many of these women’s profile pictures are professionally-shot family portraits in which children—and I mean full-fledged, walking and talking, personality-possessing children, not just recently acquired babies—frolic in matching outfits and fake snowscapes.  Some of the people I went to high school with own houses.  Houses with furniture, some of which has been scotch-guarded, and not because of all the tequila-drinking that is going on.  Many of these people would be horrified by the fact that my largest financial investments are in books about psychoanalysis and French handbags. These are not people who go to the grocery store and walk out with only a bottle of Maker’s Mark, a jar of cornichons, and pre-prepared tiramisu cups to show for it. These are not people who have to ask their parents to go to Costco with them when they need new tires.  These people have their own Costco cards.

There is no lure more putrid than internet voyeurism.  How on earth did people go about nosing about in other people’s business before this generation?  Gossip at the country store?  Letters delivered by pack mules? Must have been nice.  Now, a startling amount of information is available to anyone with an internet connection and fingers and the desire to know.  Know what I’m not entirely sure.  All I know is that I have spent too many late nights, damp with the sweet sweat of stalkerdom, combing Google for insight into the lives of people who have absolutely no relation to my current situation whatsoever. I suspect I’m not alone in doing this.  I certainly hope I’m not alone in doing this.

But in a funny way, doesn’t all this information kind of obviate the need for high school reunions in the first place?  Aren’t high school reunions all about seeing what became of the people who consumed those highly fraught, emotionally charged years of your life?  It isn’t really about getting back in touch – if you’d wanted to stay in touch, you would have.  Especially with Facebook – it isn’t really like anyone loses track of anything unless they want to.  I’m “friends” with most of the people I would be curious about. If I really wanted to get in touch with someone, a banquet hall with mini quiches certainly isn’t where I would want to do it.  It seems to me that high school reunions are about showing off and showing up and showing yourself that the choices you’ve made for yourself in the past decade were the right ones, or at least not as bad as they could have been.  High school reunions aren’t really about other people, they are about giving an account of oneself to oneself.  Right?

The upsetting part is that I wasn’t feeling bad about not being married, not having kids, not owning a home, or having to ask my dad if I can borrow his Costco card when I need new tires.  It isn’t like I haven’t had the chance to have these things.  A few years ago I found myself in a position where I could have been settled with someone and on my way to the lawyer husband/2.5 kids/Orange County mega-mortgage/Costco-card equation in no time.  I bolted, quickly and unceremoniously. I might as well have been looking down the barrel of a gun.  When I found out I got this job in Paris, I found myself immeasurably glad not to have a husband or baby who might change my decision-making process.  I felt positively liberated when I sold all of my Ikea furniture, packed my books into boxes in my mom’s garage, and moved to Europe for an indeterminate length of time.

So why are some pictures of other peoples’ lives leaving me unsettled?  I don’t know any more about their situation than they do about mine.  I have no idea what it would have been like if I had settled down with a guy I knew when I was nineteen, if we had kids together, if we had a mortgage and a tube of toothpaste together.  I would say that from my perspective now that I would resent him, and resent those kids, and resent that mortgage and the fact that he might squeeze that tube from the middle and not the bottom. But maybe I had that husband, those kids, that toothpaste and that mortgage, I wouldn’t resent not having scads of time to myself to read novels or go to museums or learn about Italian cinema. Maybe if I had those other things I wouldn’t care less about having a preposterously expensive purse or the time to attend Zizek’s lecture. I don’t know, and I can’t know.  I guess it’s the not knowing that makes me somewhat melancholy. And unfortunately you can’t Google that sort of thing.

Photo courtesy of the unflappable M. Starik, whose photostream you should visit.

Clarence in Paris: Le Hangar

Le Hangar

12 Impasse Berthaud, 75003 Paris

Métro:  Rambuteau

I live on the border of Beaubourg and le Marais, but more often than not I find myself heading east into le Marais when it is time to go out to dinner.  Why?  Because the whole area around the Centre Pompidou is glutted with overpriced tourist traps. So I was skeptical when I heard rave reviews of Le Hangar, which is tucked just off of rue Beaubourg on the dead-end Impasse Berthaud.  Getting there is a rather strange experience.  You turn immediately from the hoards around Beaubourg onto the deserted Impasse Berthaud, a street that houses little besides Le Hangar and a mildly terrifying-looking doll museum. But despite my reservations about the location, I did hear enough good things about Le Hangar that I decided to take my best friend there during her visit to Paris for the New Year.  It ended up being a perfect night, probably the best one we had during her visit.  Some places don’t even warrant being dressed up in all my fancy adjectives.  I just really, genuinely love Le Hangar.

The décor is neither faddish nor overdone, just clean and simple.  The place is family-run and everyone is extremely friendly.  They bring a small crock of a olive tapenade and toasts while you look over the menu, which is probably not fussy enough to actually qualify as an “amuse bouche,” but it’s nice.  The menu is handwritten and filled with pasted-in additions and subtractions that reflect the season.  When my best friend M visited, we shared an entrée of tender escargot in a black truffle cream sauce.  I had the evening’s special for my main course: a sweet and creamy langoustine risotto.  M had the exquisite escalopes de fois gras, which are essentially fried slices of foie gras served on a bed of olive-oil whipped potatoes and drizzled with duck fat.  When it arrived, she declared that there would be no way she could possibly finish all that liver.  After she took a bite, however, I could barely get in there for a taste.  For dessert, we split the chocolate soufflé, which is served with a spicy cinnamon gelato.  Everything was perfectly executed, right down to the lovely assortment of petits fours that accompanied our coffee.

When A and I returned to Le Hangar last Friday, we shared an entrée of salmon tartare with olive oil and fresh basil.  I thought it was light and subtle.  He said it was “fishy.” I objected and said that I thought it was delicious.  He agreed.  Apparently A doesn’t think that “fishy” is a bad thing.  I guess adjectives are subjective.  His main course of filet de boeuf aux morilles, however, was objectively amazing.  Though I suspect Charlie Chaplin’s shoe would be delicious if you covered it in a morel mushroom cream sauce, Le Hangar expertly handled A’s saignant steak.  For me, the parmentier de confit de canard.  Duck confit is leg meat that has been cured in salt and then poached in its own fat.  Parmentiers are a kind of pseudo-Shepard’s pie made with a variety of meats.  Le Hangar’s potatoes were luscious and smooth, with a nice flavor of nutmeg and cinnamon that offset the fattiness of the duck. It was my first parmentier in France and I’m glad I saved myself for Le Hangar.

Details: So delightful I’m reticent to tell the internets about it for fear that it will get too popular.  Fortunately only six people read this blog and I’d take them to dinner here if they were ever in Paris.  Le Hangar takes reservations, but I haven’t needed them so far (it helps to arrive before nine on the weekends as the place will fill up).  The whole shebang for two (entrée and plat, shared dessert, and a sick bottle of wine) will probably set you back about 100 euro.  Be prepared to be wished a genuine “bonne soirée” by the entire restaurant two or three times when you depart.  Totally charming.  Can’t imagine why you’d eat anywhere else in Beaubourg.

Photo via google.fr

Booze or lose: l’Expérimental Cocktail Club

l’Expérimental Cocktail Club

37 rue St.-Sauveur, 75002 Paris

Métro:  Sentier

Paris has been decidedly slow to embrace the cocktail-frenzy that has overtaken many other cities.  As far as I can tell, people are still far more likely to drink wine and beer when they are out for the evening. To be honest, I’ve got mixed feelings about elaborate mixed drinks, despite their ubiquity in places like Los Angeles, New York, and Berlin. A big part of this stems from my genuine mortification at the idea of spending more than ten bucks on a single drink.  I’m also not a huge fan of super-sweet drinks, and I often find that designer cocktails tend towards the sugary side of things.

Nevertheless, I started researching cocktail bars in Paris when S began bemoaning the dearth of such places to me recently.  He tried to take his girlfriend out for a Manhattan before the opera and ended up having an overpriced and disappointing experience.  Some poking around on the internets yielded a lot of chatter about l’Expérimental Cocktail Club.  The New York Times Style section, which I read compulsively despite regularly thinking I would be better off just smacking my face into the wall, love love loves this place, so a few of us decided to check it out last night.  It does feel much more like a New York bar than a Paris one.  There’s only a small plaque on the outside of the building to let you know you are in the right place and you have to go through a heavy velvet curtain and past a no-fucking-around doorman to get in.  We didn’t have any problem on that front, though there was quite the line at the door when we left after midnight.

L’Expérimental is an intimate space, with probably only the capacity to serve about fifty people.  It was packed to the gills last night, and we found ourselves awkwardly propped against a piano that was doubling as a DJ booth.  We just missed snagging one of the large black leather couches, what with our being properly socialized and recognizing that it is in bad taste to sit down before you order your drinks and all.  Goddamn Yuppies.  The décor is really lovely with rough wood beams on the ceiling and old brickwork juxtaposed with Sander Mulder’s gorgeous Therese plexiglass chandeliers and a long zinc bar.  The music was pretty standard fare for as supposedly cutting-edge as this place tries to be.  Are we sure that Lykke Li should still be in heavy rotation at a bar that Quentin Tarantino supposedly frequents?  I’m not so sure…

The cocktail menu is very complicated and a highly curated affair.  The internets tell me that it is the work of “master mixologist” Xavir Padovani, who shills for Hendrick’s Gin and Monkey Shoulder scotch, both of which play a starring role at l’Experimental (no complains from me on that one).  A and I arrived early and our first round consisted of the “Experience #1” (Ketel One vodka, Elderfower cordial, lemongrass, lemon juice and fresh basil) for him and the “Ivresse Brune” (Cognac, ginger cordial, lemon zest, and schmancy ginger beer) for me.  His was revelatory, mine was warm.  Can I say that I don’t entirely understand the French resistance to ice? It seems to me that anything sparkly and sweet like a ginger beer-based drink should be served icy cold.  I understand the desire not to dilute the drink, but isn’t that why these places make those giant ice cubes?  And why oh why do I see people drinking warm diet Cokes everywhere in this town?  At any rate, my drink consisted of a tall glass of syrupy booze and lemon rind served alongside a warm bottle of ginger beer.  While I guess the Cognac and cordial were indeed shaken with ice, when I added the ginger beer the whole thing ended up lukewarm, sticky, and pretty blah. Oh, and there was too much ginger beer for the glass, so then I had this awkward double-fisted thing going on with the treacly bottle.  H liked it, however, so maybe I’m just being a jerk.  Her first drink was some kind of terrifying concoction of tequila and nutmeg and cream.  After sampling it I concluded that it was too smart for me.  There seemed to be a collective acknowledgement that A’s “Experience #1” was the cocktail of the hour, and everyone had one of those for their second round, except S, who was finally able to get the proper Manhattan he had been jonesing for.

Details: This is a 15-euro-a-cocktail place and the crowd dresses and acts accordingly.  I wasn’t wearing heels, but I wished I had been.  I agree with the Style section (and every other internet reviewer) that the “Experience #1” is the drink to order.  It’s not my scene per se, but it’s exactly as well-executed as you would expect from the hype and made for a delightful evening out with excellent people.

Photo via qype.fr

Clarence in Paris: La Grande Epicerie

La Grande Epicerie

38 Rue de Sèvres, 75007 Paris

http://www.lagrandeepicerie.fr

Métro: Sèvres-Babylone, Vaneau

Yesterday A and I met at the Musée Maillol to take in their much-hyped show “C’est la vie:  Vanités de Caravage à Damien Hirst.” The Maillol is a beautiful space and the exhibition showcases a rather spectacular roster of artists, all of whom are engaging the memento mori in their works.  It’s a great idea for an exhibition, but A and I both agreed that the way that it was handled at the Maillol was far too literal.  My understanding of vanitas (again, Art History 101 talking here) was that it meant emptiness, and that art in the vanitas style symbolically represented the ephemerality or transience of human life through a variety of symbols, including timepieces, rotting fruit, smoke, musical instruments, and skulls.  The Maillol collapsed this larger concept into a single trope and exhibited only works that contained skulls.  The result was uncomfortably gimmicky.  I feel like a first-class snob saying that an exhibition that contained exquisite works by Caravaggio, Zurbaran, Basquiat, Ernst, and Braque was underwhelming.  But I wish that the curators hadn’t taken the skull-as-memento-mori-par-excellence so seriously and had instead put together an exhibition that allowed for a more nuanced take on the human contemplation of mortality.  Instead, the show felt like a visit to an Alexander McQueen boutique (an entirely inappropriate reference to make this week, but there you go).  There were a few unexpected knockouts, including two small sculptures, one ceramic and one bronze, by the British brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman.  I’d only ever heard of their work in sensationalist articles about the how contemporary art is the decline of Western morality, but in person the craftsmanship of their pieces is really staggering.  Also worth the price of admission are three large cases of jewelry from the Venetian jewelers Les Codognato.  Drawn from private collections–including those of the duchess of Windsor, Lucchino Visconti, and Elton John–this is the skull jewelry that all other skull jewelry aspires to be. We spent a good long time gaping.

We left the museum and decided that the best way to combat our own being-towards-death was to eat something ridiculous. Despite knowing Paris much better than I do, A had surprisingly never visited La Grande Epicerie, the food market of the veritable Parisian shopping institution Le Bon Marché.  If you don’t know this already, my friends, La Grande Epicerie is the mother of all gourmet grocery stores.  Yes, you can perhaps get greater diversity of international food items at one of the biggest Whole Foods.  Yes, you can perhaps get certain artisanal products of a comparable quality at the Dean and Deluca store in SoHo.  But seriously, I challenge you to tell me another store in the world where you can get the kind of cheese, foie gras, charcuterie, candies, pastries, vegetables, fish, meat, and wine under the same roof that you can at La Grande Epicerie.  I get physically discombobulated from excitement when I enter this store.  I lose the ability to speak.  La Grande Epicerie is a thing of beauty and it is at the top of the list of things I would recommend anyone do if they find themselves in Paris.

A was the best possible companion to have in this shopping adventure.  After an initial investigatory lap of the store, we got to work purchasing a truffle-infused foie gras, paper-thin slices of San Daniele prosciutto and aged Milano salami, five gorgeous cheeses (Tomme de Savoie, Roquefort Papillon, Brillat-Savarin brie, Morbier, and Parmigiano-Reggiano), a cold seafood salad of squid, mussels, and crab meat with roasted peppers, octopus with green olives and giant capers, semi-sechées tomatoes, a sublime pesto, spicy Moroccan olives, a big bag of super-sweet clementines, and two traditional baguettes.  For wine, we picked out a lovely Sancerre and an even lovelier Gigondas.  Oh, and two perfect tartes aux citrons for dessert.

While La Grande Epicerie is very expensive, I was actually quite surprised at the reasonable cost of our cheeses and charcuterie.  You will save a lot of money if you order at the counters rather than picking up the pre-packaged cheeses and pre-sliced charcuterie.  You will also get the delightful experience of watching how they handle the food.  I’ve had revelatory experiences in the past at the foie gras counter, where they are generous with the samples and the advice.  Last night, we marveled at the way the guy at the Italian section of the charcuterie area handled the prosciutto and salami, executing perfectly transparent slices and expertly layering them with plastic so that they wouldn’t stick together, as if to say “This isn’t a lump of reconstituted deli meat, it’s San Daniele prosciutto!”  When A went into typical-French-grocery-store mode and attempted to help the checkout guy with bagging our groceries, he was quickly reprimanded.  There is a science to bagging all of this beautiful food properly and we were not to disrespect that process with some foolish stab at efficiency.  It would be nice if everything in life were treated as gracefully as the food is handled at La Grande Epicerie.

We returned to my apartment, giddy with anticipation.  We tried to set things up as nicely as we could for photographs before commencing the feast.  That A restrained himself from full-out hedonism for the sake of documentation on this here blargh gets him some serious bonus points.  You might just say that he is the San Daniele of friends.

Details: Um, go?! Open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. An excellent place to pick up all the fixings for a picnic in the Jardin du Luxembourg, which is only a short walk away. I guess they also have a private lot for your chauffeured Mercedes. Ours was in the shop, so we took the métro instead.

What the hell do they know anyway

(Vampire Weekend comes on my iTunes Genius mix)

Me:  Did you know these guys have the number one album in America right now?

A:  (lip curled in visible contempt) Who?

Me:  Vampire Weekend.

A:  What do they do?

Me:  Uh, I dunno.  I guess they are these snarky East Coast / Ivy League boys that have a kind of laid-back, Afro-pop thing going on.

A:  What do they sing about?

Me:  I don’t know.  Being privileged.  How they don’t give a fuck about the Oxford comma.  Guys that wear keffiyahs that don’t care about Palestine.

A:  I’m so sick of 22 year old boys singing…about…

Me:  Their lives?

A:  Totally.