So the grand event on the telly this AM in Paris was the Dutch royal wedding. There really isn’t a better way to nurse a hangover than amongst Dukes and Earls. And those hats, those wonderful wonderful hats. To be completely unmoved by the gathering of the bluebloods in all their finest frocks is to be truly American I think. How do people really line the streets and wait for hours to watch this nonsense. I mean, Royalty? Come On! Worshipped people should at least sing bad pop songs while falling out of their top. Since I am always culturally sensitive, when I see something in Paris that strikes me as totally ridiculous I try to think of its American counterpart. Just to be equally snarky you know. Academy Awards. How a bunch of overdressed blubbering narcissists get so much airtime is a crime. And then to make matters worse, can you just imagine how many free drinks they are all swiggin in their fancy (free) clothes. Fucking criminal, if you ask me. The Royal Wedding wasn’t nearly as tacky as the Academy Awards, but so empty of irony and self-reflection, that it might even be refreshing in a sick sort of way. There were actually four handmaidens carrying the bride’s train. Handmaidens – I kid you not. (They’re the one’s in the prudish burgundy dresses.) There are people out there who are handmaidens. I can only imagine the raging alcoholism those four are secretly harboring. It’s gotta be worse than mine.
But those hats, those wonderful wonderful hats…
Canceled plans. Feel slightly bad but my feet are happy. Now where did those ideas go?
Beautiful amazing day. Sat in sun and dozed on the steps of the Beaubourg for hours. Later walked a million miles. Became drunk drunk drunk last night. Woke up early. Apartment a mess. Being dragged (draaaaaaged) out tonight. Even though i have ideas. Ideas. Ideas. Ideas. I got big greasy ideas, and owe a bunch of people writing. I want to stay in and write. Rats.
I’ve been sitting here having the hiccups for like hours. Like hooouuuurs! Anyone who’s spent enough time with me to figure out that i’m boring (read: my family, former roommates, and a few other unlucky souls) knows that my hiccups are completely out of this world. They are insanely loud and spine-rattlingly intense. At first it’s just funny cause they are just so damn Loud. After about 20 minutes i feel like i might vomit. After 45 minutes i start praying to any deity i’ve ever heard of in passing to just please make me vomit, please. Any longer than that and i start to wonder why in the hell i was ever born; I begin to contemplate the utter emptiness of human existence. Not only does my stomach feel like a foreign body, but my head is pounding and my already low blood pressure has dropped to the point that my fingers might be little orange-winged butterflies off on ten little adventures of their own choosing.
So you can imagine in what state i’m in at the moment. My digestive system has declared war on me. I will not stand for it, i insist. I instruct the offending organ that it’s either with me or against me. I explain patiently that without me my stomach would be pretty much SOL. No food, no oxygenated blood, and certainly no ultra low rise old navy jeans to make it feel pretty. It responds only with a defiant and deafening contraction. The rest of me winces.
So i pull out my last uber weapon, the blog, in hopes that i can distract the evil menace toward capitulation. Is it working? Well that’s really anyone’s guess. I could tell the blog about my day, my week, or just my last hour of continually deciding and then deciding-not-to go out.
[Karen calls and the two of us blather on and on about being productive in our respective "art" (read: what we do to pass hours upon hours where reruns of Friends are unavailable) in Paris.]
Alright alright – somehow i’ve been convinced that a night of wine in Oberkampf will somehow further everyone’s self-worth. Jeezus! Well the hiccups have certainly retreated in the face of that argument.
Je l’ai trouve! My very favorite cheese. Tomme de Savoie. Ummmmm yummy…
Now all that’s left is the wine.
It is brilliantly sunny and wonderful out today. One thing that has been going exactly right these days is that the mild Paris winter that stood up in bold and all caps on the “Pro” side of my Pro/Con-moving-to-Paris list is panning out. It’s been a just-right winter of 50 F for weeks and weeks now. No hats, no scarves, no gloves – yes! And as i am the first to whine about the chill in my bones, i ought also to be the first to rave about brilliantly blue skies where i can have my sandwich and Orangina on the banks of the Canal St Martin.
But speaking of winter accessories, my quest for new boots has ended in utter failure. Everything i found that i liked (even when i was willing to shell out the euros like it was the nu-economy) was Not Available In My Size. As brilliant Darleen says, if you’re a size 8 shoe and there are sales on, forget it. So instead i want a hat. A big floppy 70s type hat. Maybe like this, but definitely not with that gawd-awful animal print. Or maybe more on the Calamity Jane stylo. Or maybe something just in between. I’m thinking i need to be rockin something fabulous on my head just now. There’s a great store near chez moi, but it’s always closed whenever i go. Even though the hours posted indicate it should be open. That seems to happen a lot here. Also, the post office sends your packages back if you don’t claim it with in 2 weeks. Someone sent me something and it got sent back. I have no idea who or what. Reveal yourself at once!
I spent the morning catching up on my blog-mail, which i adore. Send more. More more more! Even if it you just need to comment on Saran Wrap (TM). Otherwise, rumors abound concerning a considerable reduction in the weight of my office. But i’m going to spend my lunchtime in the winter sunshine and pretend that nothing else matters.
+ * + Happy Birthday Dad + * +
IM – Instant Messenger Yeah i’m thinking about it. It’s been my saving grace, here an ocean (and sometimes more) away from the folks dear to me. It’s a place we can chat about the serious or the mundane, with no phone bills, no immediate sense of concentration. No sense of urgency in the voice on the other end. All modicons and ellipses. It works a lot, and sometimes not at all.
Sometimes you look at the chat window and see it for what it is, a lot of pixels rendered into what you recognize as letters on an expensive device with a bunch of cords coming out from all ends in a display of messiness that means, well, not so much. You know when the window closes, when the hard drive stops spinning, that you get to touch the silence of your little apartment. The thought that whoever saw you through that little window is gone, attending to the needs of his life, makes its way into your own thoughts. And you push that away, and think about the needs of your own life, as if to compensate somehow. As if to compensate for the true true fact that a human presence actually really means something.
Just when you think everything’s going well, something shitty happens. At least that seems to happen to me a fucking lot. Last weekend Paris was treating me really well. It still is i suppose. And i’m going to try and focus on that. In fact i was walking home in a light mist on Saturday night (the trains quit running at 1am here), and i had spent the evening acting silly and speaking a bit of french. The thing about being an outsider is, of course it’s hard, but it’s also really liberating. I can go to parties full of hip young things, and dance like a fool because, well, nobody knows me and most likely never will. I’m totally free to make a complete ass of myself. Which i am now doing with abandon. If i’m going to be an outsider, i’m going to embrace it damnit.
So i’m walking home in this mist, my hair frizzy, still sweaty from the party, thinking i want to see springtime in Paris. And then i get home, and in my mailbox is the acceptance for the cheap french class, which i was convinced i wasn’t going to get into.
Then some shitty news this am. Shitty news on express e-mail delivery from New York. But what the fuck? I’m going to try and apply my new “embrace” technique of dealing with difficulty to this thing too. Shitty things are almost always liberating if you look at them in the right way. So here’s to some more liberation in my life. One can never have enough, right?
So the show was just exactly as ridiculous as i imagined. Remember those sunglasses, Oakley’s i think, that were so super hip a few years ago? Ok Laurent Laurent’s sidekick was wearing regular eyeglasses in that wrap around style. There is something about those glasses that make me cringe for the wearer. They only really work on top of a snowy mountain, or maybe in a boat in the middle of a sun bleached ocean. And they pretty much only work as sunglasses. I cringed again when i saw the banner that Nils and i were supposed to hold. It was tiny. It was exactly the same as the other logo they had scotch taped to the metal fence behind the performance space, totally boring, totally unworthy of a pair of super hip performance artists like myself and Nils. I cringed one last time when a completely shaved Laurent Laurent came running out in nothing but his red bikini briefs.
Do i really need to go into further details? Yes, probably i should. Let me start with the space. The Palais du Tokyo is housed in an amazingly beautiful building. It is basically two separate buildings joined by a courtyard of pillars which open to a lovely view of the Seine. The type of architecture common in Paris in that it constantly reminds you that, yes, you are in the most beautiful city on the face of the earth. One of the buildings is the Museum of Modern Art, which i’ve never been to. The other side is where the newly opened Palais du Tokyo is. When we first walked in, i couldn’t help turning to Nils with some disappointment and saying, “I thought the space was finished.” He took a few minutes to look around, at the sand blasted beams, the exposed wiring, the crumbling bits of plaster everywhere, and said “It’s finished.”
“Noooooo”. I protested. The space was magnificently huge, but in the sort of disrepair that i spent a year trying to wrench my dumbo loft out of.
“It’s supposed to be hip and edgy you know?” Nils said.
“It looks like my nasty loft”, i protested.
“Yeah exactly, like brooklyn loft-like.”
Hmm.. Well at first i thought this was pretty much lamer than lame, but as i think about it further it’s maybe not *so* lame. Thing is, Paris has no history of industry. There aren’t any old factories, or old warehouses. Paris was already a fully built center of life pre-industrial revolution. Unlike places like New York, Chicago, San Fran… So whereas those of us who live in post-industrial cities are used to seeing unfinished factory or warehouse-like spaces in the possession of a group of not-that-clean 20 somethings and maybe a few cats, (“and watch out for those nails sticking out of the wall over there, we haven’t gotten to those yet”); this is a whole new world for Parisians. It’s new, it’s interesting. It’s “Hip and edgy”. Hey before you laugh mockingly, keep in mind that in the States we pay $3.50 for a flat and mediocre espresso, and eat Wonder Bread, willingly. I may be getting a bit of cultural sensitivity in me after all.
The art, however, can not be explained away. It was crap. There was the obligatory “Mounds of Dirt in Middle of Room” art, the “Continuous Video Loop of Someone Doing Something Mundane” art, the “Disturbing Photos of Women Being Raped by Inanimate Objects” art. Blah blah blah. In a word, boring. The performance you ask? From what i caught of it, since i was ahem “performing”, i would say it was also crap. The night was nicely themed i guess. Later on Nils and i got interviewed on French TV, much to my mortification. The guy thrust a microphone in my face, and i think i prayed for death. Luckily this old woman came over and started having a long conversation with Nils about second hand clothes. I stood with a dumb smile on my face, and took care not to make eye contact with anyone who might ask me a question. All in all, in spite of my bitching, it was a pretty fun night. I did manage to have a 25 minute conversation completely in french with Nils’ friend Benedicte, which is a major breakthrough for me.
I also got into that French class starting in Feb – phew!
New Angeles Monthly, June 2008
Weekend America, March 30, 2008
Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2008
Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2008
Nil by Mouth is written by Neille Ilel. Neille is a writer, reporter and user interface specialist in Los Angeles. If you think that's a lot, she's also got a host of meandering sidelines including improv comedy, tennis, cooking, drawing and thinking about learning to play the guitar.
Nil is her given name. It's a long story.
E-mail her here:
nil
@
neille
.com