Isabel Is a girl...

Rabenmütter vs. Casera

2012-01-26T23:01:00.000+01:00

Let the record show that if it weren’t for Penfold pointing out that it’s been over a year since I wrote, I wouldn’t have bothered.

What took me so long?

I suppose it took me quite a few months to get over the physical tiredness and the moral heaviness: that murky, clinging residue of centuries of shame of having your first child alone.

The truth is out now. My son was born. In the past six months, I have been through a spectrum of emotions. When he was just born, I thought I better had get to work quickly. What will everyone think? How will I provide for him? What kind of person am I to not stick him -- like a nameless chicken in an industrial farm -- in a cot in day care like everyone else and tramp off to work?

“He’ll be fine!” Everyone said.

Yet, as he grows and as each milestone approaches and then fades, going back to work pales in comparison to the fascinating spectacle of a human discovering the world.

Then there are the mirrors: how his growing reminds you of yours.

At the time of writing this I am in Lima, where I was born, and more specifically in my grandmother's house. Waiting for lunch to happen (another luxury of being here) I pore over pictures of my childhood. I marvel that I call my son the same thing that I used to call myself: Mousey. Precisely, at age two, in the manner of Madonna or Prince, I renamed myself. My mother was drying me after my bath and I very assertively took the towel from her, draped it over my shoulders as if it were my ermine cape, kept the shower cap on as my crown and announced that I was to be known hereafter as: "Princesa Mousey, Flor de la Lechuga." Most regal.

There are things that I taste that remind me of my childhood: olluco, a tuber that is shredded and then stewed with beef, which I loved, and grenadilla, the insides of which my father called "elephant snot" but which are strained of their numerous snotty seeds and made into the most delicious juice that tastes just what it was like to be 2, and perhaps even before that, but I can't remember.

So, the other day pushing Mousey around the block I grew up on (till age 4 when we went to Ah-mehr-i-kah!) I dropped his organic cotton frog rattle. (His godfather, my brother, gave me the eco-conscious gift). Being rather un-conscious, I didn't notice and a lady called me: "Seño!" a couple of times before I turned around. I asked about this appellation: Are we not bothering to finish the word with a -ra or a rita as the case may be? My cousin's wife replied: "You're lucky. They used to call us Casera." Which literally means housewife, or very literally, housey. Or perhaps homey. I prefer housey. Sounds like a good place for Mousey.

At any rate, I imagine around the time women began to wear jeans more than skirts, a scandal being made by Peruvian women who wanted respect for their burgeoning cottage industries or college degrees or whatever they were scheming about and refusing to be called Casera. Silly that. We've now come full circle and decided that was perhaps a bit too extreme. I believe this women's lib era should hereafter be known as "When we threw baby out with bathwater," because men's response has largely been, go ahead and work but you'll have a hell of a time getting your hallowed Housey-wife status back, at least without lashings of guilt about how you could possibly be so lazy as to only raise your children.

Isn't the education and the nurturing of a human the most important thing there is? At least, if we are all on the same page and we all cherish life. Never mind the sorry fringe of humanity that may does not value life.

How could anyone possibly write a novel when her child is learning to crawl nearby? Never mind a novel. I've had to breastfeed countless times since I've started writing this blog. I started writing a play over a year ago. I just got around to the second act a few weeks ago. It's not impossible, it's just easier once the learning of basic human functions plateaus when they go off to school.

Women in Germany used to be called "Rabenmutter," (raven mothers or bad mothers) for working instead of raising their children. There's nothing wrong with that; most women have to. I suppose if I can stretch it out, I'd like to. Just a little while longer. Till he walks. Or, till he talks. Or, till he can tell me, "Goodbye!" or "Later, Alligator!" as he goes off to school. Every single successful "Rabenmutter" has told me the same thing since Mousey was born: they should have waited to go back to work. You don't have to tell me twice.

The Invisible Other

2011-01-26T14:01:00.000+01:00

"Who wants to be my friend?"

Cries the blogger out of the dark of the web...

This past week was the first time I ever participated in a simluation of labor union vs corporate leaders (read: pigs) negotiation, something I never dreamed of doing and, given my current state of mind, perhaps the last thing I'd like to do at the crack of 9:30 on a Friday morning. This same enlightening exercise came from a Reims business school professor, who also presented us (for nearly all 21 of us for the first time) relationship mapping. He is also clearly fond of reconnaissance work and claimed how very easy it is to become someone's "friend" via facebook even if you don't know them.

Uncannily, during the week preceding all this very sort of testosterone-fueled gumshoe information I was sollicited by the largest number strange people with strange names that I could ever have imagined to become their Facebook Friend. I didn't retain any of these names, but they did remind me of the advent of Viagra-hawking spammers with completely silly made up names, until they decided - clever them - that having normal sounding names would entice people much more to click on their links and have a go at Viagra.

Today, I was also hit up by a young man of the most proposterous name, until I learned that he's Turkish, so perhaps it is his real name, and the only apparent link we have is that he also attended NYU (but much more recently than I), which is in no way unique. He also is fond of showing pictures of himself tan and shirtless, which makes me wonder if that is a direct come-on, or if he's enrolled in a relationship mapping class, and finds this tactic generally successful for connecting to female subjects. He only has two friends to date, so all this seems to point to a questionable character. When someone only has two friends in FB, they're generally close friends.

Needless to say I did not accept his request and quickly checked my 600 other "FB Friends" to make sure I did in fact go to school with them or met them over an extended period of time. If today they are working for MI6 or the FBI or for les reseignements généraux, and want to connect with me for purely selfish purposes (most people use FB for this reason anyway) at least I can say I knew them when.

I feel like all this has to do with unemployment, education, the world economy and Europe and the US vs Everyone Else but it's a bit of an Ariadne's thread. Sunday evening, my friend Melanie said to me that her brilliant INSEAD at Qinghua professor and advisor to every Chinese politician and CEO worth his salt, said (and I paraphrase), that though China does seem like it's ready to take over the world, they have nothing beyond their GDP numbers to match it. I know that. My dear friend doing her MBA knows that. That's why we live in France. France is good living. They may be in debt but they have loads of other very positive things in terms of quality of life for the largest number of people (yes, it is helpful to go utilitarian when comparing QoL). Those who still don't think so, I invite them to move to China for a while.

On the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, there was an American who moved back to India, where his parents had left to give him a "better life" after college because he felt, probably rightly, that India's growth was much more vibrant and that opportunity abounded, unlike in the US. His book on the subject, India Calling, relates his story and how it has to do with this global shift. As Jon Stewart said, "You found the American Dream.. in India."

Reminds me of my own brother moving down to Chile since he feels that there's more to be done there (in terms of CSR) than in the States. I don't think anyone can understand what I'm doing in moldy old Europe at this point. But I lived in China, albeit for school, and in Sri Lanka, albeit for volunteer work, and I lived in Chile, albeit briefly and leaving the country once a month for oxygen. And although many things on a daily basis are easier there, consider how much further one's money can go, it's still not my dream, my white knight promising to pull me out that large pool I and so many others find ourselves in: unemployment.

Which me brings me (aha! the thread comes 'round!) to the WEF in Davos this week. What was the first debate that I saw on their website but "The Future of Employment" hosted by Maria Baritromo and organized by NBC. There was Ariana Huffington, the president of UC Berkeley, the CEO of an Indian Steel company, the token Labor Union guy (there for the emotional response) and one who's name escapes me who was there to represent the corporate prick who seems to think that everything is going well. To his credit, it is a debate and someone has to be the bad guy. And to be fair, during the week in Davos, I'm sure corporate pricks, however well-intentioned, probably outnumber everyone save journalists.

What are they suggesting? Having a more global perspective, yes; changing education, at specific levels in specific countries, yes; lowering wages... no, I don't think that will help the people in developed countries. Focusing more on teaching science and engineering in developed countries, what for, if we can't find any jobs with those degrees? We're not trained to deal with this change. I ask myself what is the point of having been to college. The people educating are also asking these questions because for the coming generations it will only be harder.

It seems that those who've managed to stay afloat are either because the conditions were so bad for so many people until recently that now just seems like a dream come true or those who manage to come up with something new on their own. Ariana Huffington mentioned "We've Got Time to Help" an ingenious coalition of people with the hope of doing something useful with their unemployed time, largely simple acts of solidarity that they organize by state. It's refreshing, and knowing the web, perhaps will blossom into something more consequentiel, or those love-hated three words: a real job.

It seems the only way out of this mess, for us in the "developed world", is to invent your path, since no one before us has managed in a world similar to ours. It also seems that the way to do it is to eliminate the "invisible other" by going towards what is real. Instead of being afraid of developing countries, what is after all, the real threat? Once again, The Invisible Other at its best. Concretely, we have no jobs, so for those of us who believe we can, we must.

And on that note, I will leave the invisible blog-o-sphere to deal with what's real, today, because no one can really see any further.

Windows of Intimacy... that tell us about history

2010-12-18T16:38:00.000+01:00

Perusing back through recent editions of Time Magazine, as they float over to me many weeks after publication from one of my former addresses, I discovered the article by Joel Stein who was being accused of writing far too much in the first person. "You can't spell Time without an 'I' and a 'me'", he claims in the title, and then proceeds to defend himself against many people who call him a culprit of this so-called Age of Individualism by saying that he is merely doing what everyone else on Facebook or reality TV or via their blogs are doing: just talking about themselves.

"It's now expected that writers insert themselves in stories," a psychology professor claims.

My question is, when haven't they? It is the philosophical quandary of the finger pointing to itself. A writer is never entirely objective. (Nor are historians. I thought we'd all agreed on that by now.)

This false objectivity is most obvious in an interview. Interviews, fortunately or unfortunately, generally follow the same format, and the questions or the impressions that the subject gives the writer tend to reveal more about the writer. It becomes much too difficult to grasp the subject away from the prism that the writer placed over him or her. Moreover, since the majority of people one reads about one has never met, one lazily assumes the subject must be quite like that in real life, as reported by a much more real (read: easier to relate to) person: the journalist.

Where is the harm in people's writing about themselves? After all, that's all they talk about, don't they?

Granted there are some people who have no business writing about themselves because their writing style is so poor. Yet, that is why some people tend to get published and others don't. Not that editors don't ever miss a gem here and there, but that is a gripe for another article.

For example, I deeply enjoyed Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love and her Coyote Ugly article, and both are totally subjective and personal. In fact, I don't think I'd be interested in her opinions about the state of the world. Her own microcosm is the state of a world. It just so happens that the world in question includes New York City, journalists, the downtown scene, the NY literary scene and travel that includes "finding oneself." In short, her world, as well as her hopes and fears about her place in society and intimate relationshipsis, is one that coincides with many a cosmopolitan Western woman's.

Distressed I would not find a counterpoint to the claim that we are living the irremediable degradation of writing, I was thrilled to discover in the NYT this morning, an book review published yesterday entitled: "Conversations Across Centuries with the Father of all Bloggers" by Patricia Cohen about a new book by Sarah Bakewell called "How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer." In it, Bakewell claims that Montaigne, with his thoughts meandering through his essays - a term he invented from the French essai - is because of this precise mixture of the intellectual and the personal is the predecessor to all contemporary writers, passing through Pope, Hazlitt and Woolf on the way.

The beauty is not only that he did quite shamelessly write about himself, (claiming that his Essays was the only book in the world of its kind), but he admitted that subject of his writing was merely "vain and worthless." Thus Montaigne provides us with the two specific keys to analyze the quality of an essai, or, in this case, a blog:

1. Beyond its being personal, is the writing intellectual, as in, does it provoke thought? Does it tell us about history, or the period in which the writer lives?

2. Either through humor or other elements of self-reflection, does the writer have a sense of the limits of his own perspective?

And the other quality that brings Montaigne right up to date is the intimate quality that comes off his freestyle prose, which he claims is only an result of his own inadequacy: his ignorance, doubts and uncertainty.

Excessive intimacy is perhaps what Joel Stein is accused of (among other character flaws) but the question is (if one considers his writing style any good) what does his writing tell us about how we live? Perhaps one could argue that it tells us too little? Or that his particular microcosm, like Elizabeth Gilbert's, is much too limited to be of any real or lasting interest? For now, the editors of Time believe it isn't. Perhaps only time will tell which writers will rise and remain afloat above the sea of blog.

Investing in Autism: Lunch with my blackberry

2010-12-11T11:37:00.000+01:00

Only a few weeks' ago, (no, I don't feel any pressure to feverishly update the blog to keep up with this digital world) I had dinner with my dear Franco-Mexican friend and two gringas. Technically speaking, they were not both gringas, but both live in Houston and work at the same venture capital firm; one was of Mexican parents and upbringing but had an appropriately nasal prissy American girl's accent, and the other was a true Texan with the Texan lilt sneaking out at certain words like: "Y'all."

To be precise, I had dinner with my Franco-Mexican friend, two American girls and their blackberrys. A mere lull in conversation sufficed for them to look back at their carefully positioned blackberries (is the plural same as the fruit? I wonder) and tap away to inform those in Texas and beyond. Though I have compassion for people who are slavishly bound to their work via their phones or blackberries, I can't imagine anything could be so pressing. Apparently, the Texan was fixing a mistake that a secretary had made in her absence and the other I think just wanted to seem as if she had something better to do. Who isn't free of being only a text message away at any moment?

On her birthday, my mother and I took out my Franco-Mexican friend for dinner, and my friend spent a great deal of time on her blackberry. I didn't mention it then (I waited a week or two) because perhaps she just wanted to answer the sundry birthday wishes she'd received, but she may also just have been bored, which is possible for some as anxious as she is, the moment she is not involved in a conversation.

So there are the constraints of work (fostered by the idea, or fear, that whenever one leaves, it all goes to pot and the boss blames you) and the anxiety of modern life, but aren't we cultivating these anxieties? Aren't we buying the latest versions of these devices only to exacerbate them? Are we not somehow directly investing in a kind of mass autism?

There are social networks that orchestrate virtual lives that fill voids within people and give them a sense of importance, but that is not the issue. The issue is that those virtual lives take more importance or attention than the living, breathing people around you.

The other flagrant moment of distraction, which I witnessed and which made me incensed, is during class. I feel as if I'm selling all my classmates down the river, as it were, but yesterday I also became guilty of the same. I haven't been in school for seven years until this fall, and, during that time, there has been the birth and expansion of Facebook and proliferation of smartphones. Nearly everyone in my class of 21 students has a smartphone and if they don't, it doesn't bother them (who are on average 24 to my stately 29) to text back and forth throughout lectures.

Yesterday, I was caught in the web of distraction as I was beleaguered by phone messages and emails from my mother, her travel agent, and my brother, ever the diplomat, who thought I was actively avoiding them all. It occurred to none of them that I was in class, and yet, I thought, would that have stopped them?

I felt guilty yet compelled to answer and, as Providence would have it, the bleeding iPhone's battery bled to death five minutes before class finished-- thankfully. One of my pet peeves is the incessant talking (is it a French habit?) during visiting lecturers but the incessant twittering, texting and emailing is less audible but far worse.

To be fair to autistes, they are generally particularly gifted at paying attention and often have excellent memories, so the term isn't synonymous with our current behavior. (Gringa isn't a correct term for American girls either, and yet it is precise. Read the Economist article on the issue of what to call the people from what Caetano Veloso called "the country without a name.") Furthermore, studies show that people with linguistic or behavioral difficulties generally have the root of their inability in their genetic code.

We don't have that luxury. We cannot blame a faulty genetic code on the fact that we're better at creating virtual lives and building real ones. Or, that we depend more on machines than our own minds. Blackberry now offers an application called "Where's my car?" for those afflicted with memory loss specific to being unable to find your car in a vast car park.

People have come to terms with their dependence but they don't seem capable or any case willing to do anything about it. The website Crackberry, which boasts over 2.7 million members, seemed to be the #1 forum for addicted blackberry users. Silly me thought it meant to deal with their addiction but it's really meant to find out about new applications and ask questions like, "Why does blackberry take so long to boot?"

As an owner of an iPhone who will promptly publish the link to this article on her Facebook page, I am no Luddite, but what astounds me is the question of how we will raise a new generation that will not have social ineptitude born of exceptional technological aptitude? The overall effects are not visible, but we need only observe what it has already done to us.

Whatmovie? Whatmovie?

2010-11-12T18:30:00.001+01:00

"You ate sand?" Whatmovie? Whatmovie?

Was part of a conversation I overheard in Buenos Aires in 2006 between two Americans. Finding the answer is a sort of litmus test for Americanism. I don't hold the passport but knew the answer, and when you do know the answer and are among "fellow Americans" you have one of two choices: you either say the line immediately preceding/following it to show your prowess, or just say the name of the movie. If you get this right, you are in and you may be rewarded by continuing on this same sort of guessing game, generally in the same genre of the film originally in question, ad nauseam.

One wonders what need do Americans, who find themselves in a beautiful South American city, have to do the cultural equivalent of dogs sniffing each other's behinds. After all, they knew they were American, they knew each other quite well, they just needed to affirm it. That is culture. The Coen Brothers is culture in America; if you have seem their films, you can even borrow their culture for as long as you can repeat their best lines back to yourself. Therein lies the generosity of American culture - easy to adopt - and its insidious quality - it's so easy, it blurs everything else.

I was deeply amused when one of our professors, who is also the owner of an independent cinéma in la banlieue (the burbs), said he was wondering whether "The Other Guys" (called Very Bad Cops in France) was going to be a film that would stand the test of time or just be swallowed up as one of the many American comedies. What I wanted desperately to share, but then realized that it was most likely an uninteresting point coming from an American, was that Americans don't make films to stand the test of time, and they especially don't make their comedies for this reason.

I don't think Mike Myers or Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell or even Judd Apatow (who the French like to think of an alternative take on American comedy- fat chance) ever stop to worry whether their films will have a lasting effect. What they do want to know is whether their films will be successful in the box office, because and in so doing they affirm their cultural identity. Repeating movie lines for Americans is like dipping your buttery, jammy baguette into your coffee, or arguing for argument's sake for the French. It makes them feel particularly identified with their own kind. American soft power has a deeply unifying quality, republicans and democrats both go to see the same inane comedies and they don't feel like their doing any disservice to their political ideology. A Frenchman makes a light, inane comedy and he's "sold out"-- this is what's know as "l'hypocrésie française." A Frenchman makes a long, dull, intellectual film with an open ending and he is considered a living museum.

American culture seemingly never ends. The French can't seem to get enough of it, and the Americans when they travel to see other Americans, they say: you haven't seen fill-in-the-blank's new show? I know, I've been affronted with this many times. My friend Cristina showing me Will Ferrell doing these rather violent scenes with a little girl named Pearl who's barely learned to speak and doesn't know what she's saying, which produced a sort of Andy Kaufman effect. I didn't laugh, I just felt supremely uncomfortable at what it was like to teach this little girl such horrid language for comedic effect. I couldn't bring myself to laugh. (To be fair, my brother did once come to Paris and very excitedly showed my "Flight of the Conchords" which I did find funny, but I wonder if they count. They're Kiwis.)

I missed the entire phenomenon of 30 Rock. I try to catch it or its best lines on youtube and I never laugh. Same for Entourage. Jeremy Piven is completely un-funny to me. Perhaps his assistant Lloyd is a welcome relief but that's all. That might seem normal for someone who hadn't lived in the States since 2004, but it is astonishing considering my afternoons during childhood were scheduled around a TV program grill that I had made for myself, with each half-hour sitcom that I preferred carefully written into a slot from about 3:30 pm to 7pm, including the Cosby Show, The Fresh Prince, A Different World, Living Single, and later, In Living Color etc. I devoured American culture, from its sitcoms, to stand-up on Comedy Central, to pop and hip hop videos on MTV. I could repeat all of Janet Jackson's moves, entire Jim Carrey films and Dr. Dré's songs and now the punchline seems to be lost on me.

Could it be that American culture is as easy to forget as it is to absorb?

Which is perhaps why they work so hard to export it everywhere to maintain their hold on the popular imagination...?

Sibling rivalry

2010-10-13T13:52:00.004+02:00

Like siblings who alternately envy, bicker, and then embrace, America and France need to cut it out. I can't think of a better phrase than one that my grandmother Malu (aka The Better Half, as mentioned on the June 3, 2010 entry) used to synthesize an entire play with only two characters that we saw together in the West End in the Spring of 1997.

Of course, if I could remember the name of the play, I would have been hired as a copy-editor and I wouldn't be lazily trying to blog my way out of obscurity. All I remember is that the woman began with her hair wet and perfectly timed a dish of pasta while acting seamlessly with her male co-star puttering around and doing nothing to help.

In any case, I only wish I could give you an .mp3 of what my grandmother's delicious accent in English sounds like, but, being temporarily and geographically handicapped, I cannot. The only reference I have is that it sounds like Robin Williams doing Mother Teresa as a hand puppet in the 1992 movie Toys, if that means anything to you.

Anyhow, we, gaggle of grandchildren, were all trying to make something of the play we'd just seen and I, with my mere 15 years, couldn't sum it up, when she said:

"They need each other, but they do not want to need each other."

And that, dear Reader, is exactly how America and France behave towards each other.

The examples are far too many to list but there isn't a plain love-hate relationship the way it is with the British-- you would think Robert Frost's phrase "Good fences make good neighbors" applies beautifully to their particular case since The Channel/La Manche separates them but that doesn't seem to be enough to keep them from invading, whether forcefully in the past or subtly in the present, i.e. English retirees gobbling up Norman, Breton and Aquitaine, I mean, Basque country homes and France's elite going over in hordes to make fat salaries in The City, (see this wiki article and the IHT article it's based on).

No, there is true admiration that comes from the American's slightly beating the French to the punch with the American Revolution and then "liberating" them at the end of WWII. (I'm sure all this can be argued: historians cringeing in your chairs, please be still.) Conversely, the French threw their arms wide open to American soft power with rock'n'roll, coca-cola, and the only subject I can say I know anything about (because if not, we'd all have to say that NYU Film school is a rotten waste of money, and, at that price, it's a bit too painful): Movies.

Actually, this first morsel of information comes from a real history professor who is also the director of my current Masters program (yes, like most people who tire of freelancing and being given the run-around at interviews, I too have gone back to school) at Paris 1, La Sorbonne: a percentage of every movie ticket sold in France, that includes the millions of tickets to see American blockbusters, goes to financing French cinéma. Isn't that clever of them? Especially since the French are one of the largest consumers of American cinema in the world. So why must they criticize?

The simple answer is that it is innately French to argue and criticize, because it is part of their intimate and academic education to be able to structure an argument and to defend a point, also a mark of their rampant individualism but there we get into chicken/egg territory. The French are so deeply critical that they spend most of their time criticizing themselves, a subject which has been tempting me to write a dissertation called "L'Economie de l'Autocritique" (all rights reserved with that title) but I'm letting the fruit ripen, if you will.

A Time Magazine article, "France scores an F in education" from early October even mentioned the phenomenon of self-criticism in a study of children who were asked to read and then rate their performance. The result is absurd but not surprising when you have lived here long enough to recognize the familiar music of the French berating themselves:

"One study, by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, tested the reading abilities of 10-year-olds from 45 countries and then asked the children how well they thought they read. The French kids performed reasonably well in the test, reading about as fluently as most of their peers in Europe. But when asked to judge their own ability, they put themselves near the bottom of the pile, only just above children from Indonesia and South Africa, where illiteracy remains widespread."

More on that later, but for now, how do the Americans return the favor? I suppose that there is no better way to show it than any given day on the ligne 1 metro in Paris, especially when it's warmer and the closer you get to the Louvre station the more American you can hear. I couldn't find a more recent number (once again, not the best copy-editor) but it seems, according to a government run website that:

"En 2006, la France a accueilli 3,150 millions de touristes américains."

So even if Americans find Parisians rude (despite improvements) and slightly nerve-wracked they'll still come over in hordes, and the French, although largely mono-lingual, will still sing in American and play the blues and drink Coke, even if they'll complain about the travesty of the loss of their identity later. From one voice in the dark confines of the web comes the cry: "Come now, US and France: Kiss and make up!" You could at least begin by learning each other's languages...

...and incorporating the ellipsis as a common punctuation in English. It's such fun!

Freunde und Bekannte

2010-09-29T13:25:00.002+02:00

I've been meaning to write about this for a while. It's become nearly a theme of meditation.

There is a problem with English. In fact, there are many problems with English, the 1000-year old bastard of Anglo Saxon German and Norman French, as it evolves recklessly and without a great deal of nuance. In order to get to the point, nuance must suffer and a great many new precise words must be invented while the archaic ones remain on the dusty shelf of language giving English more vocabulary than say, French or Spanish, but often it takes much less words to say something in English than in any pure Romance language. English evolved in order to get more quickly to the point, and in that spirit, so will I.

In this era of social networking, it is surprising that people have taken to the term "friend" so easily. Sort of reminds me of how the term "peng you" was so loosely bandied about when I was learning Chinese in Beijing in 1997, as in the phrase "Meiguo he Zhongguo shi pengyou" (America and China are friends) which seemed more like a euphemism for their particular relationship. Am delighted to discover that the Chinese do manage to differentiate and call an online friend "wang you".

Why didn't our contemporary English inherit the "freunde" versus "bekannte" concept from German? The terms even exist, friend and acquaintance, so why don't we use them? Does acquaintance sound demeaning or offensive? Does friend seem too exclusive? My objection stems from personal use. Many of the people who are my Facebook friends I haven't seen in ages and some of them, (more than I'd like to admit), I have actually never met. Going further into the concentric circles of intimacy, there are people who I see quite often and who I still don't consider my friends. The German definitions of these terms seems to clarify this, at least, as told to me by a German person:

"Bekannte are the people you meet, your colleagues, classmates, online contacts, etc. Freunde are usually only one or two people, generally ones that you grew up with and that have known you all your life. Those are your friends and those don't change."

As for me, the definition is already off limits because almost no one that knew me all my life is still in my life (besides my family but they don't need to make any great effort to do so; Paris is a nice place any time of year). Over the test of time and my life of constant travel, moving and upheaval, I've discovered that many people who I thought were my friends are, in fact, not. A person who was very dear to me (and has now moved on to other worlds) said:

"Your true friends you can count with the fingers on one hand. And you don't even need all five fingers to count them."

I am not putting limits on my feelings but I am slowly removing the poison of flattery and interest that has made me build up my expectations only in order to suffer terribly from them. My friends, they know who they are. The rest, I am happy to be acquainted with.

De l'Amour inconditionnel pour Honoré

2010-08-04T23:06:00.000+02:00

I suppose this is a somewhat voyeuristic, information-saturated age that assumes that one must share one's intimate thoughts without the guarantee of anyone reading them and even if they did, caring.

In spite of this web of assumptions, I profess my unconditional love for Honoré de Balzac, whose biography by Stefan Zweig, another departed soul I am shamelessly smitten with, I am currently reading.

Yesterday, I was speaking to a filmmaker who lives in my street--which is odd in itself, mind you, this is not the 6th, the 9th or the 17th, where most film-y people live; it's simply not cool enough. (Major Tangent: the street Le Sueur has been inhabited by a psychopathic murderer Dr. Petiot, the Gestapo and Wallis and Edward in their orgiastic days. In terms of feng shui, the place is the pits, but the limestone HPs would never tell you that.)

Point being that whilst being chat up by filmmaker and my friend Françoise, who (another Major Tangent) runs the dry cleaners "Le Sueur Pressing" and who I completely adore and literally eat her every word because she is like a character from a Woody Allen film, but she is real and in my life and she is French, and because she does her dry-cleaning with love, gives me a really good deal and gets thank you letters from the Elysée for properly cleaning a silk tie, something beyond me.

Right. So before that tangent we were standing in front of the Auberge St. Jean de Luz, where Françoise is half-in, half-out and smoking and I said to the bedraggled filmmaker,

"You know, you should read about him," reverentially pointing to the volume of Balzac by Zweig, "He had such heavy debts that chased him all his life... that it's completely reassuring."

Which is not quite what I meant to say. So then I said,

"Not because he had debts, but because he kept going no matter what."

And that is not even the half of it. Not only did he have the most beautiful sense of humor, loved the ladies for who they were and what they gave not what they appeared to be, put the most poignant and captive eye on the entire social cross-section of his century, but he did all this tirelessly with an absolutely horrific bourgeoise mother, who was obviously never loved enough (and she never stopped to wonder why), a father who couldn't really care less, a lifelong series of debts and the despondency of not finding true love until the year before he went tits up at 51 due to excess work and coffee.

I love this man and what is wonderful, when you see a beautiful soul that survives not only the material obstacles but the emotional ones: abandonment for years in heartless boarding schools and, the most chilling of all, that little bourgeois family tick where you are made to feel that if you are an artist you will never make it because you are wasting your time and everyone's money, is that the love he sollicites was confirmed by those who had a chance to know him. Many people stated that you could not meet him without loving him. I believe that this sparkle in the eye, that attraction, it's the soul's effort to remain in tact, to simply be, which is so totally astounding that one, who has the sensitivity to sense it, cannot help but be moved. I know Balzac had his enemies and critics (probably just jealous guys) but who had his courage?

Person who angers easily

2010-06-13T22:46:00.000+02:00

For the past two days I have been graced with the presence of my older brother.

Some of you may know him, at least those intimate enough to virtually "follow" me on this blog, so you needn't any introduction but for those who don't, one could sum him up as one who aims to live a life of service, whether in non-profits or other organizations it's generally based on the idea of how one can be of service to others and not how one can be served by others. Very chic, I agree.

In about one month's time, we (family) shall bid him farewell as he goes off to Ladakh, the "land of high passes" a northern province of India, bordering Tibet, I mean Xijang, I mean Tibet to the east and Pakistan to the west. It is one of the most sparsely populated regions in India. The people are of Indo-Aryan and Tibetan descent, and the Indian governement has tried to encourage tourism there for the last 30 years. (The most popular sport is currently ice hockey, as ice nautrally abounds). My brother has signed up to farm sustainably with the good Ladakhi people, which does sound like fun, as most things do when one is not forced to do them every day.

Motivated by the novelty of farming in remote mountain villages where internets and blogs are but a memory (or a days' journey on yak), my brother has already begun to learn the rudiments of the Ladakhi language, aka Western Archaic Tibetan. He, ever so cool the cucumber, shared this wonderful piece of information about the language, that made me believe merited at least one blog entry: there are no swear words.

I, for one, am astonished. When I think of the few languages I know and the multitude of salty and crass things I know how to say (including the panoply of vulgar expressions in Mexican taught to me by my friend Lili) I wonder how an entire language, whether we like to call it archaic or not, can survive without those interjections generally uttered in anger. There is, of course, one exception, and an ironic one at that. The only "bad" word in Ladakhi is: "person who angers easily."

This gave us fodder for laughter for at least several mintues.

"You are just a person who angers easily!" said in anger, of course. Then it becomes an Abbot and Costello routine.

"No, you just said that in anger. You must be a person who angers easily!"

"How dare you call me a person who angers easily! You anger much more easily than I do!"

Dare to compare: "You are not only a person who angers easily, you are the son of a person who angers easily!"

This idea made us laugh so hard I nearly stepped in authentic Parisian dog doo on the sidewalk. And the reason it made us laugh is only because it's true: we are both the children of someone who angers easily and the thought was just too funny for words. I mean, if someone angers easily and you use this Ladakhi insult, it's more an observation than a critique. But isn't that what one hates? To be told the truth about ourselves?

I wonder when they cuss at each other during an ice hockey game what it sounds like...

"I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."

2010-06-03T11:11:00.002+02:00

The above quote is a not only an hommage to Groucho, the grandaddy of American comedy, (and most likely father to Woody Allen, the daddy of American comedy and I'm not sure I want to know who the son or daughter is) but also the best way to describe the sentimental ties of my maternal family.

It's a very strange phenomenon to be constantly criticized and feel somewhat rejected in a club of which you are a lifelong member, e.g. your family. This is more or less the mechanism of sentimentality (to not pronounce the "L" word or what passes for it) that runs in mine. You know you are one of them because you are made to feel you are never quite up to scratch and whatever gripes you have about this club, you cannot forfeit your membership. After all, they had a hand in your genetics and there is no way out of this one. (Not even the cellular fission that occurs during a nuclear holocaust could undo it!)

The members of the club, notably grand-dad and his eldest daughter, have done their very best to make those who were foolish enough to become members of the club by law (read: marriage) feel so very unwelcome that my mother's generation are nearly all divorced. I, on the other hand, do not have this luxury. I cannot divorce my forebears. All I have to console me is humor.

You may ask: "How bad can it be?" (Ask the gay divorcés!) Oh but there are so many examples-- where does one begin?

A couple of days ago, I came across a picture of a wedding that we (members of the maternal family, viz. "The Club") crashed in Maine in August last year. I remember grand-dad furious and hurrying us up to get to the dock to get on the lobster boat to get to the island where this grand house and very luxurious wedding was happening. The deep anxiety was that there would be no place to dock afterwards. This was not true. No one was allowed to dock anyway. This was, for all intents and purposes, an exaggeration to manipulate us into doing what he wants, a common ruse of the patriarch.

We were there horribly early, sticking out like sore thumbs as the guests that no one knew, with a silent train of waiters with heavy trays of hors d'oeuvres lining the walkway. Since we'd made it passed the train with required decorum, indulging in an hors d'oeuvre and cranberry juice hither thither, we'd decided to rest in some of the sundry Adirondack chairs and wait for the masses of the truly invited to arrive.

Grand-dad stuffing face with Goldfish, his Better Half & yours truly (mit chignon).

Grand-dad was incensed. He had wordlessly stuffed his face with the Goldfish crackers that were in large bowls on the bar but we, choosing to sit where everyone could see us, had really crossed the line. He came over to us sitting in this plush makeshift living room in the front garden of the house and spat in Chilean:

"Ustedes son unos rotos!"

Which is Chilean for you are all lower-class turds, or plebes, vulgar guttersnipes, etc. He then stalked off since he apparently didn't want to be associated to "The Club" that he in part, founded. We could not pacify him for the entire evening, at leat until someone had given him enough champagne to distract him and a diversion was created by a very obliging Chilean lady who was an appendage of The Club that evening.

I couldn't care less. I'd been denounced in The Club sundry times and believe that spoiled children should be left to have their tantrums on their own. It is a strange habit to throw stones at those we love, but isn't it all in Groucho's quote? Don't we judge and belittle others because we have no esteem for ourselves?

Design for Living

2010-05-27T17:13:00.002+02:00

In all fairness, Design for Living is the name of a 1932 Noel Coward play about a "three-way" relationship between artists: one woman and two men, not the name of my new musical. (Btw, you must see the film version with a young Gary Cooper, wearing oh-so much make-up and shellacked back hair.)

Until a few months ago, I had blatantly stolen the title for my play about a high fashion boutique all the while thinking I was very clever and original. My play (now called something else) is the fruit of an undercover foray, if you will, in the snobby haute couture and pret-à-porter boutiques of Paris' fashionable avenues. I promise you that of all the workplaces I have ever set foot, nothing could be sillier.

To begin with, I started the lowly task of fondling rich people's money in 2008, the year of "La Crise" (sounds like a new animal in the Chinese zodiac), which meant that the little motivation that exists for working in such thankless places as fashion boutiques (read: commission) was nothing but a recent memory. Still, I was hoping for at least some luscious tidbits of outrageous behavior to feed my imagination whilst I tried to keep the proverbial wolf away from the door. (That was short-lived. The wolf and I are now friends, commiserate about this horrid "flat" world and rampant unemployment, worthless university degrees, etc).

Tidbits were found, outrageous behavior more than witnessed and even more gossip garnered from ever-so willing colleagues such as Gonzague, in the first boutique, and Alfredo (who's name was so excessively long I think he got his jollies saying it) in the second boutique.

The situation in the first boutique was such that the tension was nigh the moment the 'evil one' stepped onto the scene, sort of Devil wears Prada-ish, but being much more amusing and actually human, unlike what's-her-name who edits American Vogue and who is actually some kind of strange genetic experiment planned by MI-5. Sort of a female Voldemort.

Anyhow, the villain in my play is much more fun because she is based on someone who I know and who actually likes me, but I'm not sure why, which puts me in a terribly uncomfortable position. I think she likes me because I come from a wealthy Chilean family. I'm sure it's for none of my own merit.

The second situation was perhaps even more amusing if less tense because it was summertime and therefore very crowded with the entire Arabian peninsula, aggressive, badly dressed Russians and a few Chinese counterfeiters with bad breath. It was very colorful to say the least. And we were meant to keep a straight face while serving all these people and wearing doo-doo brown. Suffice to say, comedies and musicals were the first thing that came to mind.

Unfortunately, I will have to stop here because I don't want to give it ALL away. Anyway, Wolfie's calling me...

Worth vs. Value

2010-05-24T23:15:00.000+02:00

It’s easy to say something is good when it has earned millions. It’s easy to say it’s good when the small group of admirers has burgeoned to a tribe of followers and then into a movement. It’s easy to say it is genius when it has been sold at Christie’s for millions. This usually happens long after the person who toiled to be and to make is dead. Why? Why is it that people have so much trouble saying that an activity or a work is valuable before it has earned any money? I don’t want to discuss whether money is inherently equal to pleasure or genius or excellence because I obviously don’t believe it is, but what is it that keeps us from saying it? I know what it is, and that is what I felt in her as I left her at the Ritz today. I knew, as she was driven away from me and the City of Lights in a black Mercedes, that I was daring to live and that I would never thrive near her. Why? Because she, like so many people, is too afraid to love and encourage something the posterity has not yet lauded and approved [...]

Rue de Merde

2010-04-28T10:50:00.000+02:00

I begin today's weblog (because that is the origin of the hardly poetic word "blog") with a structure that harkens Seinfeld:

"What's with the French and their dogs?"

I've lived in several neigborhoods in Paris, from the very swank to less swank but pretty "bourge" throughout. What is interesting is that the more bourge it is, the older the average age of the population tends to be, and thus combining the privilege of age to the rampant sense of entitlement that money brings, the less people feel obliged to bend over far enough or long enough to clean up the crap left by their beloved domesticated beasts.

So the higher price of the "metre carré" = the more dog shit left on the sidewalk.

Initially, I found this impossibly rude of dog owners to leave shit on the sidewalk for everyone else to step in, but then I suppose that it's natural to be rude when you have money, given that the way human nature is, more money generally means more selfish, not more generous. I've been on the service end enough to know that most people with money behave in a way that is most unbecoming to them and generally makes one feel that it is of no interest to spend any more of one's time to get to know them better.

That was what I thought until I learned that either stepping in shit and/or being shat upon by birds is considered good luck in this country.

If this true, then there is good luck ready to rain upon one at any moment from the height of many a chestnut tree that lines the avenue, or to be stepped in at any moment on any sidewalk. The city pratically abounds in good luck waiting to be had, to be spackled on or drenched in!

I'll never forget the first time I forayed into the green pastures that run along all of Avenue Foch, just off the very swank (this means full of crottes de merde) road I currently squat, because of the desire to feel the earth and not the concrete beneath my feet.

(*Note, Foch is considered one of the chic-est avenues in Paris, but it is also, bizarrely, where many a hooker traipse, waiting to ask gentlemen who pass if they "have the time". The bit of Foch near Porte Dauphine, the entry to the Bois de Boulogne where the transexuals so advertently hawk their flesh, is known as the rendez-vous for échangeistes or couples "who swing." Amusing, to say the least, that this particular area of upscale property is also a hive of sexual traffic.)

But I digress...

The day I wanted to have a stroll on the green, I was stopped by an African gentleman who was in a green jumpsuit raking the leaves, who asked me if I had a dog in that wonderful sing-songy African French accent because actually, people with dogs are not really allowed on the green pastures. I said that I didn't have a dog, that I just wanted to walk on the grass.

"Meh, 'y'a que de la mehde ici!"

Somewhat amused, he wanted to warn me that although it's technically not allowed, there is nothing but crap in this grass.

I kept going for my walk that day and many other days, but he was right: I eventually, for all my cautious effort not to, stepped in a pile of good luck.

(post-script: the original "rue de merde" is featured in Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I, which sneaky blogger.com is not letting my post a screenshot of.)

Dragons

2010-04-22T11:37:00.003+02:00

Last week I spent my time writing thinly veiled propaganda about China for a French multinational. Never could I have imagined that the French would be such suckers for the "China will rule the world" concept. After all, the Chinese have always outnumbered the French and they've always been better at math. Same goes for India. So what are they so afraid of? The dragon wakes but then what? (Afraid the dragon will come steal the croissant from their hands I suppose?)

I spent about half a school year in China lodged with a host family when I was 15 going on 16 and that was long enough to figure out that I will never truly understand the Chinese enough to imitate their modus operandi. I believe in the individual; I'm enough of one to know that I hate blending in and did my best not to, especially at that age. My head was shaved at the time I lived in China. I had the walls of the lobby painted in the derelict government project that was the swank edifice of my host family. I bought the "e-ge-she-du" (eggshell) paint in sea foam green and sky blue. Everyone joined in. Students then took the black paint and made fish and other images in an "under the sea" motif. My favorite was the "big fish eats littler fish eats littlest fish" image, which I am certain disappeared even before I did from China.

I was profoundly attracted to this country with 5000 years of illustrious history, mostly to their scientific advancements (re: stuff I like: ice cream, fireworks, astronomy) and their philosophy and how it applied to the earth: taosim and feng shui. Yet, I was equally repelled by this obsession they have with justifying the most inhuman parts of their ancient and modern history, the way they casually slide over human rights as if it's far below the list when it comes to achievement and industry.

Russians are quite similar. Political correctness put safely aside, I like to explain Russian socio-political behavior as their being "white chinese" because of their particular relationship to human life and liberty. I recently read an article by a Russian professor at the New School New York (perhaps it was Kruschev's great-granddaughter?) claiming that Russia will never advance if they don't manage to admit to the injustice of the past. I think this was re: Medvedev apologizing for something ghastly that happened many decades ago. She seems to say the his particular brand of apologizing is just not going to cut it. She also says that safely from New York.

Long story short, I don't care if China builds more skyscrapers and has more cell phones. Skyscrapers are hideous and even when smattered with solar panels they are totally incongruous to humanity and the planet. Cellphones give headaches which I am allowed to say only because I'm not allowed to say they give tumors but I wouldn't doubt it. Science has not sufficiently advanced on the issue of frequencies and their effect on health and/or sanity and if they have, they won't admit because there's too much money in it. I really don't believe that China will be able to sustain its growth and given that human lives are no object, nothing will stop them except themselves, or their own chaos within. It's happened before.

"O Blush not so!"

2010-03-26T11:31:00.001+01:00

O blush not so! O blush not so!
      Or I shall think you knowing;
And if you smile the blushing while,
      Then maidenheads are going.

There's a blush for want, and a blush for shan't,
      And a blush for having done it;
There's a blush for thought, and a blush for nought,
      And a blush for just begun it.

O sigh not so! O sigh not so!
      For it sounds of Eve's sweet pippin;
By these loosen'd lips you have tasted the pips
      And fought in an amorous nipping.

Will you play once more at nice-cut-core,
      For it only will last our youth out,
And we have the prime of the kissing time,
      We have not one sweet tooth out.

There's a sigh for aye, and a sigh for nay,
      And a sigh for "I can't bear it!"
O what can be done, shall we stay or run?
      O cut the sweet apple and share it!

Indeed, let's cut the sweet apple and share it... such hot stuff, that Keats!

I had to share with you this about blushing: it's my péché mignon to make people blush. It's lovely. It's one of the rare times that one sees true emotion.

I rarely blush but when I do, it's because something that was said was very true and I wanted terribly to hide it but cannot. That is generally the reason that people blush, because of this very struggle.

There is the question of shyness, but shyness is always meant to hide something, isn't it? Some people's skin type makes them blush more than others, or more visibly so and there is even a phobia associated to this called "ereuthophobia". It sounds mad but most phobias sound mad and I believe stem from the same lack of self-esteem or of confidence, but of course are generally very profound and take years to surmount.

What is fascinating about blushing also (and this is my favorite detail): monkeys don't do it.

I love that people love to compare themselves to monkeys, like a certain number of them with typewriters coming up with Shakespeare and such nonsense. Let those who like to compare us to apes know that they could not have come up with Keats!

Professor Frans de Wall at Emory University in Georgia claims that the human capacity to blush is a way of signaling emotion that animals do not possess, not even our famous "cousins", chimpanzees. Blushing is one of the last stumpers of the defenders of evolutionary theory, including Darwin himself who wrestled with the question to no avail.

Dr. Frédéric Saldmann, a nutritionist who writes about health and hygiene, published a book last year about blushing called "Petites Hontes" where he discusses in length all those things about social expectations and how we feel about what others think of us, but with the proposes that it is essential to us to blush in order, not only to express ourselves but to check ourselves. If we've lied or lied in such a way that is flagrant, blushing may catch us before others do.

The way, he suggests, to "get over it" is to be able to laugh at it, since in writing about all the silly things that make us blush, we should be able to see that we all suffer from the fear of what others think, fear of being rejected, and we should be able to take ourselves more lightly.

A mesure of intelligence is being able to laugh at yourself, isn't it? And to laugh about our blushing is no different.

Mon Accent de Merde

2010-03-25T16:39:00.000+01:00

If there is one thing that keeps me steadily chuckling about the French is the language barrier or the language bridge, let's say, depending on who you are. Accents to me are like savory snacks to some: it makes the mouth water and hunger for more.

One of the more amusing bits about the French when speaking English is that they often stop themselves, having hardly uttered a few phrases and say:

"Avec mon accent de merde...!"

It's so very odd that they second-guess themselves so immediately (this does give one a better indication of how incredibly wound-up they can be as a nation) and chastize themselves for throwing the accent of every word on the last syllable and refusing to learn to pronounce "th" without spitting. But then, one wonders, if they are conscious of how un-American or un-English they sound, then why don't they try fixing it?

We anglos or latinos (in any case non-French) have to learn to roll the "r" in the back of the throat and make our lips look like (this is a direct translation from the French) a "chicken's ass" when we pronounce anything with a liquid "u" sound, so why can't they stick their tongue underneath their teeth without spitting in order to avoid saying "zis" or "zat"?

I'm sure they can, and they have.

Note the number of French people who have learned to sing so convincingly in American that one would think they are. In France, there is a show somewhat in the manner of "Ed Sullivan" called "Taratata" which I'm fond of because it's really just a series of musical guests doing a few songs followed by brief interiews done by a rather breathless French/North African with beady eyes.

Interviewing aside, I don't think I have ever heard a song on this show in French, although all the interviews are conducted in French--here is the catch--with French people! How weird is that? Why can't they just sing in their own language? They're hardly known in France and suddenly they're worried about the anglophone world. This may be a gimmick to get signed but it doesn't really concern me since my songs are mostly in English anyway.

The point is that sounding like Maurice Chevalier for French people is totally avoidable. (You will remember his charming accent from his crooning "Sank 'Even for Leetol Gorls!" in 1958 film version of Gigi).

It is avoidable insofar as sounding like Jane Birkin or Katherine Hepburn speaking French is avoidable for me, but requires conscious facial exercise. In general, I'm told (by men, duh!), that I have a "charmant petit accent" but they can't place me, in the manner of Professor Higgins to Eliza. Better off I am this way, I believe, to hide in my hodge-podge of accents, and when I get lazy about "doing the chicken ass" I can just reveal myself as the lazy polyglot I am.

Who cares anyway? It wouldn't have been any fun if he had sung "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" properly.

Xango

2010-03-14T12:35:00.000+01:00

Still wondering where to find that "French freshness" and amid all the hub-bub here of people without papers protesting for the right to work, I say, whyever not?

What would this country do without immigrants?

They'd have no soccer team to being with. They'd have no comedians. They'd have no "jazz manouche" or accordeon music, which we all find so typically French. They have only become so over years of assimilation.

Look at the States. I wonder if it would even be worth living in if they were no black people: they'd have no chance at cleaning out at the Olympics, no first black president, no gospel, no jazz, no blues, no rock, no comedians except for a couple of Canadians...which brings me to my point about Xango.

Forgive the white person's cliché, but in college I spent my time not making film taking classes in African and Caribbean Literature. I stress this because most people (including my largely racist Chilean family) don't know that such a thing exists, or that one can spend years reading and discussing it.

For my taste, it a deeply rich literature because it is so close to music and mythology (these are a few of my favorite things). What I loved was drawing the comparisons from that Yoruban gods such as Xango (pronounced Shango or Chango) to the blues. Xango is the sort of Yoruban Zeus, God of metal and fire, and it is said the he walks with a limp, which makes a particular rhythm, the rhythm, like the trains going from Mississippi to Chicago, which created to blues and, to be even more precise, the boogie woogie.

I was in London last weekend and was again seized by the fact that if London had no immigrants, it would come to a screeching halt. What makes London the vibrant city it is is that it acts as a magnet for people coming from less fortunate countries looking for " a better life" a bit like New York in the beginning of the 20th century. There is quite a buzz in the air thanks to this ambition and excitement but there is also the most ridiculous amount of surveillance cameras and police everywhere. The message: come, poor people, do the thankless work we don't want to do, but we're watching you!

In short, I think the English could loosen up but I think the French could also, to a large extent. You would think their invading North Africa would somehow exempt them from having the favor returned years later. No, no, France. Now it's your turn to be a good host. Or just suck it up and eat your couscous. And listen to the arasbesque infiltrating your pop music, and the djembe in your hip hop...

Renouvelle Vague

2010-03-04T15:55:00.000+01:00

Forgive the slowness. Tuesday, the mac's screen ceased to function. Am now on a PC with a French keyboard...

Here I was wondering where to find the soul of Paris, the one of Boris Vian, Serge Gainsbourg and l'Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. Paris when it be-bopped.

I started reading "l'Ecume des jours" in order to find it. It's a bit non-sensical but he prefaces it with (I paraphrase): the only thing that matters is jazz, or the music of Duke Ellington, and falling in love with pretty girls. Nothing outside of that matters or makes sense and nothing within that makes much sense either. Delighted to discover that Vian had an obsession with Wodehouse. Not delighted to discover that he wrote his best work while living miserably off translations in a chambre de bonne near Place de Clichy. Grim.

I went to see Gainsbourg's house; had to after seeing the movie. One doesn't really get to see the house as much as the dense grafitti all over the front wall which remind one how people are lauded once they're gone and criticized while they're alive. Again, a downfall of celebrity.

I think I finally found its real remains at Shakespeare and Company. (see photo above).

It was like putting your fingers through the ash of yesterday's bonfire. You can tell how great the fire was and the warmth it gave but all that's left is a fine monochrome silt to prove that it was.

What I'd like is a Re-nouvelle Vague.

I'd like another Bardot, please, to make me believe that femininity is appreciated for its own sake and not because it possesses some special talent.

I'd like a Godard who projects himself and does what he wants and doesn't care. An intellectual who wishes he were a cowboy, who becomes transparent through his characters.

I'd like a new Gainsbourg, unattractive but irresistible, full of talent but absurdly shy. Rather like a voyeur.

Furthermore, I'd like all these things because they are irrevocably French and because there was an innocence in all this expression that is no longer.

Last night, I had drinks with a guy who just started his production company & I of course asked him, why is there no longer anything that feels like Nouvelle Vague? Freshness. French freshness.

He said that if there is any freshness it is killed along the way, by all the people who are part of getting a film made. But wasn't that always a potential danger?

Innoncence, Jemenfoutisme, Légèrté...

I wonder where my nose will take me next to find it...

Lightness

2010-03-03T11:40:00.001+01:00

"And to answer that question I had to think myself out of the room, back into the past, before the war indeed, and to set before my eyes the model of another luncheon party held in rooms not very far distant from these; but different. Everything was different. Meanwhile the talk went on among the guests, who were many and young, some of this sex, some of that; it went on swimmingly, it went on agreeably, freely, amusingly. And as it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other. Nothing was changed; nothing was different save only here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it—the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves. Could one set that humming noise to words? Perhaps with the help of the poets one could.. A book lay beside me and, opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson. And here I found Tennyson was singing:

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion–flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate;

The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’;

And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’;

The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’;

And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’

Was that what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war? And the women?

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;

My heart is like an apple tree

Whose. houghs are bent with thick–set fruit,

My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me.

Was that what women hummed at luncheon parties before the war?

*

Yes, to-day I have started the blog with none other than a far too long pull-quote from the Woolf, my literary Mum, because I can, because this is blog-dom and there is not an editor in sight. And mostly because, the music is gone.
There is something so distant about the France that I sometimes look for in the streets, Godard's and Piaf's and Vian's-- where did it go? What is this obsessive anxiety that keeps everyone in this country so petrified, as if there were a permanent stranglehold on them just waiting to tighten its grip?

I've heard this from many people namely who are old enough to remember, so older than 40.

People used to have races along the Champs-Elysées at midnight.

People used to drive at top speed to Lyon for dinner and back.

People used to not have codes on their doors.

People used to not have doors on their inner courtyards.

People used to be able to have a full hot meal for less than 10 euros.

People used to be able to find work more easily.

People used to appreciate more.

I'm not nostalgic. I wasn't there. But there is a certain lightness that I don't find and I don't think it's gone forever but I feel it is an actual war that we must be engaged in to find it again. It's a battle where our arms are laughter, irony and simple questions. It's not about marching in the streets. It's about how we live. How we treat each other.

On Monday, someone threw himself in front of the TGV I was on.

We who know the value of laughter, who have food to eat and shelter from the elements cannot give up this fight. It's almost as if we haven't the right to let ourselves go because we have so much to give.

I believe that ideas create and that thought is the seed of action and indeed the source of everything that we live in this world. If we are depressed, it's because we haven't used our imagination enough, like J.K. Rowling mentioned. Life is a struggle but a struggle for the good.

Any monster can disappear if you can find the ridicule in the image.

Resist!

2010-02-24T11:35:00.003+01:00

Woody Allen's untitled project to be shot in France this summer has been announced.

What can I say but the past 18 hours since I have learned this on European Variety's email I have but fantasized on our potential meeting and the scenes that would play out when his lascivious humor and my flirtatious wit would combine and dance in the air like such Kirov étoiles as one should have never imagined such a pair, and indeed no one hasn't, but Allen has tried, with Mira Sorvino (most successfully I believe) and later with Scarlett Johanssen (more lovely than drôle) to find a younger, sexier female counterpart to his leering old neurotic. (That sentence was long enough for Dickens, modesty aside).

How could I possibly get on this project? Accost Allen in a restaurant? I have already imagined the scenario.

"Excuse me, Mr Allen, did this fall out of your pocket?"

"What are you, rifling around in my pocket? Waiter! Garçon! Get this woman outta here!"

"Honestly, I found it on the ground. I believe it's a note on your hotel paper. You're staying at the Ritz?"

"What do you want?"

"I'm sorry to interrupt you and Madame at lunch, but I--"

"Wanna be in the movies! What's new?"

"Well, you can pick your preposition. In, on, near. Preferably in and in yours. But I will settle for on."

"What can ya do?"

"Anything in front or behind the camera. I've been told I have a behind so lovely that I needn't work for a living, but I've decided to dispose of it to advance in the world of cinema."

[Madame Soon Yi raises eyebrows here].

"You are really rude!"

"But at least I redeem myself by being amusing. Tell me when I can see you and where!"

And at that point, it's either a done deal or the waiter has thrown me out of the Americans in Paris restaurant, e.g. Café Flore or Lipp or some such, and I have retaliated by giving them a dreadful review on www.yelp.fr. Oh, just you wait, Henry Higgins, till I get I paws on Allen for five minutes!

Disclaimer: Anyone who knows or has a relationship to Allen please send me a private email: isabela22@mac.com

Moving on to brushes with fame that actually occured, instead of being concocted in my overly active imagination, I couldn't help thinking yesterday of how to accost Wes Anderson without petrifying him. It seems he already has phobias like fear of flying. Fear of aggressively flirtatious brunettes could be another. So the only real connection I have to him, and this is quite faint, is my Italian Cinema professor From Tisch, Professore Antonio Monda.

Those of you who have seen "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and went to Tisch know why: dressed in a tux, il professore, with his unintelligible accent, opens the film in front a red curtain. I thought this was some kind of joke. After all, I thought, when could Wes possibly have wanted much less needed to sit through first-year film theory class? Then I justified their meeting by wagering that Antonio, mover and handshaker that he is, probably met Wes at MoMA film shindig. Antonio, though, may have become slightly aware of his prestige and never answered my email per his cameo. I still remember him fondly, as I even followed him after first year film theory class to Italian Cinema class, where I was wont to fall asleep immediately as his hilarious accent ended, lights faded and overly intellectual dreary Italian cinema from the 60s began.

I still remember Antonio saying to me, as the lights went out,

"Isabella! Resist!"

Yes, Antonio, I will. And if you have Wes Andersen's contact information, I will also put you in at least one of my films.

I don't suppose anyone ever got anything by not being cheeky. And that is, after all, the wonder of blogging: there is no editor to abridge a word I say! Joy!

Coulisses

2010-02-23T17:01:00.001+01:00

Penfold is complaining, so I figure I should step it up with the blogging.

Today I had a job interview, for which a mass may have been said in St. Mark's in Venice.

It went well, in any case, thanks to all the saints and the angels and good people who devoted their best thoughts to me today.

It shocks me though, to finally link two things that I never did put together: creation and disorder, not as in Shiva and Vishnu, but as in, "what a pigsty this place is!" which is usually in the same breath as "this is where the magic happens."

Allow me introduce to you the word, if you don't already know it: coulisses.

It bascially means backstage.

Why anyone imagines that doing something creative for a living is remotely glamourous is probably because that person's idea of the world has been predominantly formed by People Magazine or Vanity Fair. Yet, I must also be one of those people. Why did I ever think that it would be a red carpet affair to make movies or write columns? I went to Tisch, I worked on Requiem for a Dream and Frida. The only swank places in all that work was the Head of the Department's corner office in Tisch and Julie Taymor's gorgeous loft on Broadway and 18th. Thank you, Lion King for that... and the many generous donors of Tisch, Maurice Kanbar, etc.

In London, I had sundry meetings with people in their swank offices: Michael Grade at the BBC, Sophie Turner-Laing at BSkyB, but these are not arugably places where the magic happens. Neither of these people had a job for me anyway. Sarah Miller, the editor of Condé Nast Traveller in Vogue was perhaps the most astonishing: the meter-high piles of mail that she receives from people who want to be Travel Writers. I sold her a single article and I considered myself lucky to have at least once briefly grasped onto that greasy pole.

In Paris, I met with Jean d'Arthuys (who's dee-lish, if I may say so, and I will, because he will probably never read this) who was the head of M6 at the time and Thierry Desmichelles, who is still the head of he film acquisition and distribution department, SND Films. Not amazing offices but spacious. The ones around it seemed cramped and cluttered, so no change there. In any case, these are the decision makers not the creatives.

The Dior headquarters struck me. The basement of the shop was gloomy as all hell but indeed where many a fine thing was stocked. I didn't get to see the creative part but guessing from the chaos of the designs, and having once seen pictures of Karl Lagerfeld's desk, I'm guessing it was a damn pigsty.

I keep thinking of the Green Room back at boarding school, where I spent so much time, squished on the sofa next to the rest of the chorus waiting for our scenes or the literal backstage which was a wonderful mess of paint cans, brushes, drills, bits of sets, etc. That I loved. So today, when on a tour of this HP (hotel particulier or house for my peeps in the States or non-French speaking world) which is the location of prodeo, an affiliate of Young & Rubicam, I was really touched when I saw the basement of the place, where the editing stations are, and the lady apologized for it's being a basement, especially one that needed a paint job. If only she knew how ugly Gucci is to work in, left shit brown as a theme color from Tom Ford who went off to make movies.

Basements, boxes, cluttered desks... I know what it's about. That's where the magic happens. The nice-looking part is what gets sold.

Make-believe is what people are after. Movies, marketing, press. It's all the same universe. Packaging and selling a dream. Guaranteed that my office does not resemble that dream. But what comes out of it will be.

Yeah, P-fold, that was all for you.

Storytelling Quandary

2010-02-17T17:13:00.000+01:00

In essence, it would seem like a good idea:

Tell a story, but instead of writing it in a book, painting it in a picture or recording it in music, in which you would never have any control over the environment that the listener or observer would be in, you tell it with words, images and music in a large dark room. Because the suspension of disbelief is an essential part of one of humanity's greatest qualities -- imagination -- the spectators feel the emotions of the story so deeply that they become part of what is projected on the wall. [We won't get into multi-media platforms for the moments, TV, internet, cell phones, et al.] The dark, enclosed auditorium puts the spectator in a vulnerable almost fetal state, at the mercy of the "body" that is carrying them along: the writer's, director's and/or producer's mind or story that he wants the public to experience as he did. But even "larger than life."

The marvelous quality of this media form has become so popular that I can only imagine its prevalence compares to the apogees of other art form like painting in the Renaissance era or the novel in 19th century Europe. The competition in the field of filmmaking is similar to the competition between artists of other eras insofar as artists today who may have used any other media to express themselves, use filmmaking almost by default because they feel there is no better way to reach their generation.

If only one could say that this degree of competition has pushed us to mastery of the art form, but it hasn't. Technical aspects of filmmaking have certainly advanced but stories haven't. As Joseph Campbell proved, we all still tell the same kinds of stories in every culture and in every age. A variety of different factors make the story have more of an effect on its audience. Technical innovation draws crowds, but what moves us and why? What is the point of technological advancement if humanity hasn't changed? We will perhaps always find new languages to communicate with but what we communicate does not and perhaps will not change.

The question of why make movies may be addressed (because it's a current art form that has the privilege of being multi-sensorial) but the question remains: what moves us to do so?

If we seem to be moved by the same things that we always then the questions that we should address are the one we've always posed, that which related to human experience. Birth? Death? Love? Is there anything greater than we are on Earth or in the universe? What is the limit of our capacity? Are we alone? Are we all connected?

The stories we tell are an effort to answer these questions, but they never really are answered in a final sense because each new generation poses them. Storytelling is not a simple pastime, nor an exercise in futility. We are compelled to do it and by doing so we hope to fill a void, to bridge a gap, to free something that was caught. Storytelling is an ephemeral act that for a moment, gives us something to grasp onto, hope in an ephemeral world.

Confederates

2010-02-14T18:34:00.000+01:00

Vive la France !

Is something I like to say on a regular basis, usually after some particularly stinky cheese or appreciating some stately piece of sacred architecture in the City of Lights. I also like to say it because Jacques Chirac, who was still Président when I moved here, said it at the end of his speeches and I found it so cute. As if there could be anything more emblematically Gallic then Jacques Chirac's penchant for copious meals with endless pinard and his long career of skirt-chasing, when he wasn't eating. To be fair, he wanted to sound modern, so he would say: "Vive la République! Et Vive la France!"

Today, when in the company of Breton friends in Bretagne I mention this when something they do or say sounds particularly Gallic (which is pretty much everything they do) and all I get is an echo and perhaps a sneer. They don't believe in la France. In fact, I could go so far as to say the mere article that makes them cringe. They do the typical French thing of showing their dissension from the ranks to prove they don't believe in France. (If you've grasped the rampant individuality, you've grasped the French). That they are, d'abord Breton et puis Français !

First Breton and then French!

Allow me to introduce to you the French answer to Confederates. They don't dress up in period costumes to do reenactments to get a "period rush" but Bretons have been part of France for nearly three times as long as Confederates have been part of the Union and they still haven't accepted it. It can be traced back to Anne de Bretagne, although she tried her darndest to keep her duché independent and married two kings of France, an act unprecedented and never to be repeated in history. Bretons still say, when you leave Brittany and go into other regions, "bon voyage en France !" implying that you have just been spending time outside France in "la petite Bretagne" or "little Britain." It makes one think of the how the Irish must feel about the English: they speak the same language, are neighbors and one has been infiltrated by the other for so long that it would be hard to say there isn't a definite mix of blood and culture. The Irish have all the more reason to be resentful because theirs is a whole separate island whereas, Brittany to France, as are the Confederate States to the U.S. quite locked within a greater geo-political mass. Seems like a much tougher fight, but they are still not ready to let that one go. Corsicans, known for vendettas and more recently having produced Letitia Casta (and her little sister Marie-Ange oh la la!), are perhaps more in the situation of the Irish (viz. being on a separate island from their conquerers) without really the organizational capacity to secede as they would like. They seem to continue in a muffled rebellion.
Speaking of the rebellious, I have taken Chabela's grooming advice, as filtered on through Mom and begun using vinegar to rinse my hair, which has made it an entire shade lighter, which brings me to believe that shampoo residue is nasty stuff and also clarifies why when I get my hair cut my hair seems cleaner and lighter than any other day. It's because it is.

Bertie, Ubiquitous Google, Commencement Speeches & Pepe P.'s Orange Shirt

2010-02-12T10:58:00.001+01:00

I can't resist.

I now blog after coffee and fresh squeezed juice and before anything else. Writing in one's pajamas is a rather unemployed thing to do, but the notion is blurred with the image of aristocrats who lived off their rents. See: my hero Betram Wilberforce Wooster playing the banjolele, which he incidentally made famous when the instrument had gone out of vogue but Wodehouse never did: Thank you Jeeves.

(Btw, am delighted to discover that there is an entire appreciation society for Wodehouse in Russia. I wonder if it is quite as brilliant in Russian?)

Moving on to differents oceans of time (that was for you, Jane Anne), but I'm astounded, there is also an entire appreciation society for F.F. Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula based in Germany, of course! called none other than "Oceans of Time". Hilarious! The web's room for fanatics is limitless. It's like a virtual New York City.

Moving on to pressing things, (Ha! I bet there isn't a link for that!) this particular obsession with Google solving all your problems is troubling. I have now been privy, via the Huff Post Ted Talk News & Twitter Page (as if that makes any sense), to a video called "Parisian Love" which is about how googling every possible question you have will help you fall in love and live in Paris, obviously everyone's dream...

The video itself is well-done as it makes a concise point and probably cost peanuts to make, but the message is that thanks to Google, one finds one's soul mate, moves to paris, gets married and has a baby, etc. All sorts of cheap sentimentality & no margin for error, not something Gallic peoples are fond of, and which I find as far from the truth as possible. But whoever said that there was intrinsic truth in advertising? The web is not devoid of people with a sense of humor, luckily, and a spoof has already been created and published.

I couldn't help thinking about the commencement speech of my college, Tisch School of the Arts in 2003, and at the same time, in my effort to stay on the pulse of "what-is-happening" TED published J.K. Rowling's commencement speech at Harvard in 2008. It hasn't been that long, but I do clearly remember elements of Dustin Hoffman's speech, mainly how hard it would be once we went out into the cruel world of showbiz. I do not think that this point was driven home hard enough because of censors, in this case, his teenage daughter.

"Daddy," she said "You're going to depress them!"

To which he replied, "I can't help it. I'm Jewish."

The link with J.K. Rowling's speech is her stressing the importance of failure and how it helps you to strip down to the essential in your life, what you've always really wanted. I highly recommend the the video for her humor and that radiance she has, usually found in people who have followed their dreams and made them come true. She also makes the point of the importance of imagination and of a few good friends. I totally agree with the imagination bit, not, as she says, because it may make you rich, but because it is the way to get out of situations in which you feel stuck, whether it's just your life or the way the world is. Everything begins with imagination. This is true. For it to become, we must think it... and here I am planning my commencement speech. Only joking.

Another person who is not at TED this year but should be is the (forgive the overused epithet) rock star of pension reform, José Piñera, known in certain cirlces as Pepe P. He was also known as part of the Chicago Boys upon graduation from U. Chicago, which I find has such a gangster ring to it, he had to be destined for notoriety. In any case, he's quite a talker and leaves quite an impression on one, so much so that when I lived in Santiago de Chile in 2004, I ran across him at the café on Isidora Goyenechea and some other place and was so excited that I of course waved. No reply. Both times he was wearing an orange polo shirt. I realized this must be a sign. It must be the orange shirt he wears when he doesn't want to say hello.

Not that Pepe P generally forgets the little people, that is what pension reform is about, no? And he reads my blog, I suppose, when he's not too busy, but just to encourage his doing so, I made a shout-out to him today.

Washing mouth out with soap

2010-02-11T18:45:00.003+01:00

Hello Blog, Faithful Followers... I've missed you...

Today is a strange day. The fashion designer Alexander McQueen killed himself, only two years after his muse Isabella Blow killed herself. What is going on? Then one thinks about Versace who was murdered, Saint Laurent who died recently after claiming there was no longer a fashion world for making art and one wonders, people still want to be in this line of business?

Cinema stars are no choir boys either. Polanski is now out of jail, and to celebrate, his wife has released her bubble-gummy, sex-kittenish studio album called "Dingue," which means crazy. I am not critiquing, as I like to get up and sing in clothing that is much too short as she does, but I'm just saying, what a life! Married to the man whose first wife was killed by satanic psychopaths and can't seem to shake off this 30-odd year charge for raping an under-age girl. Grim indeed.

To add to my morosity, Jane Campion is off to the Oscars with her movie Bright Star which means my plans to make a film about Keats is on the back burner till the people who knew this one are too old to remember. You would be surprised to discover how many films based on biographies, novels or historical events have been remade based simply on the fact that the first one was either forgettable or has been forgotten. Despite my future plans botched, I am delighted about what Jane Campion has already done and will do for women in film. Having been the only woman to win the Palme d'Or is no small feat but that doesn't speak very highly of Cannes and its juries, does it? And besides, it was a tie with Farewell My Concubine so I guess that means if you want to win something at Cannes and are a woman, you had better be (gay, j.k.) in front of the camera and ideally pouting like Bardot or making the frozen frowny face of Isabelle Huppert.

On a lighter note, my elders will be happy to learn that I have a numbing sensation around my mouth whilst I drink my herbal tea, which means that I have not properly washed my mug and am inadvertently washing my mouth out with soap. So I am taking this as a sign for the bit about family members being steamrollers. Probably their ghosts spiking my tea.

TTFN!

Foot in Door Turns Blue! and my adventures in accosting the accomplished

2010-02-11T10:30:00.003+01:00

"C'est un métier de pute..." Cinema may be, like most media/art professions, whorish business, but even if the idea of selling yourself in order to live on the freedom of expressing yourself is a global phenomenon, this phrase sounds better in French. I think it's the tight "u" sounds in "pute"... as if you were blowing smoke out of a kiss-shaped mouth...

But I digress...

Today, I did it. I invoked all the help of the heavens and the infinite to muster the courage and tact to accost the man (yes there was really only one I wanted to encounter) who I sought answers from, o, ye-who-hath-made-it, and do so without seeming dreadful, dispersed, overconfident and worst of all, forgettable.

I walked over to Lawrence Bender and asked him for a minute of his time. You see, it's easy when I write it. It's very different when one is standing inches away and the other has done everything you dream of doing and the professional abyss is vast and you wish that his perfect American smile and lovely hair would make you more relaxed but it doesn't-- it's just distracting.

Get to the point, Isabel, what do you want from him? What could he possibly tell you? How can you make yourself slightly less forgettable or distinguish yourself from other tall, foreign-seeming brunettes with courage and fear duelling in their eyes?

You say something completely absurd through clenched teeth like:

"I've had my foot in the door so long it's turning blue."

He did not react to the foot that needed perhaps to be amputated, because the real question was he'd been asked sundry times: How does one get to the next step?

At this point, I wanted to picture him in his dancing days and hoped that the image of his graceful virility would make me act more natural, but I indeed forgot to imagine this because he kept flashing me the smile and I just wanted to figure out what color his eyes are.

He said: "The only answer is not a good answer."

And he said he's discussed the issue on many a panel and Robert Rodriguez hath said--by the way, are you ready, papa, mama, for the real answer?

"You just don't give up."

Et voilà ! You just don't give up. So as pointless as it seems to go into this business, the only ones who make it are the ones who don't give up. So you either die trying, give up, or, by some fluke, make it.

I may already be on my way actually: my foot isn't really blue. I'm exaggerating. I've hardly been around that long. I may have been blatantly lying. I'm not even sure my pinky toe is in the proverbial door. I am a liar of cinematic proportion.

I even name-drop without blinking. Floundering, I mentioned the gentleman Jake Eberts (to see how he would react; he looked straight down at his Blackberry and began scrolling) who told me that there are far too many people who want to be in this business than there is room for...

God, this conversation really has gone nowhere, and I have lost the intermittent blessing of the perfect American smile.

So, ask him for a job! Be cheeky!

"So, Participant isn't opening a Paris office?" Of course, that's a stretch; that's why I said it.

"I haven't heard that," he replied charmingly, now concerned with his phone.

"Oh well, thank you!"

And until we meet again, and heaven decides to pour down perfect American smiles on me...

Snobs

2010-02-10T14:12:00.009+01:00

"A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are."

In his July 2009 TED talk, Alain de Botton's gives this definition of what we use the term snob for today, although the origin is quite different.

The New American Oxford Dictionary under Origin writes:

"(originally dialect in the sense [cobbler]) early senses conveyed a person of lower status or rank, later denoting a person seeking to imitate those of superior social standing or wealth."

I quite like the missing link attitude that the hallowed dictionary writers (where're they may roam) take on for the etymological origin.

"Folk etymology connects the word with Latin sine nobilitate, but the earliest recorded sense has no connection with this."

Jonah Goldberg in the National Review Online writes, among his corrections:

A number of people are positive that I'm wrong about the etymology of the word "snob." They say it comes from the French "sans nobilité," or without nobility. Others say it comes from the Latin "sine nobilitate." My etymological dictionaries say this is wrong, and I'm going with them.

In the original article, he'd written:

Meanwhile, the word "snob" originally meant "shoemaker," and in the 18th century students at Cambridge University turned it into a word to describe the middle-class townies who tried to affect a station they didn't deserve (in effect, the original creators of the word "snob" were in fact terrible snobs in the modern sense). It was William Thackeray who, in his 1848 Book of Snobs, defined the term to mean "someone vulgarly aping his social superiors." In other words, snobs are people who put on airs about who they are and who look down on those they are no different from.

So, cobbler or otherwise, a snob is someone who acts like someone he is not and, as a result, (most likely to protect his true identity), will quickly judge you on your title, appearance, name or more than likely, these days, as Alain de Botton says, your job. This is by no means a new human phenomenon, as humanity judges the way it breathes, but it's certainly a neat term for its behavior.

So in this world of judging-one-by-one's-job, nothing could really be worse than not having a "real one."

I mention this because last week I had coffee with a couple of the aforementioned species. They were in fact two moms with whom I was talking about the terribly difficulty of finding work despite my many credentials and illustrious film school. Curiously, Alain de Botton proposes that the opposite of a snob is "your mother, not necessarily your mother, and certainly not mine, but a mother" so basically someone who knows how wonderful and talented you are and loves you despite your faults and will encourage you to try again, etc. Both of these mothers had suffered their own children's difficulties in finding work, but for me, hardly their biological issue, there was no more than a coffee and dessert, a "send on your CV and we'll-see-what-we-can-do--" to no avail of course. This I have now labelled as the "famous showbiz slide" where one says something to the effect of: "that's not my department, but you'd be perfect for--" and off they send you to someone else who doesn't return your calls or emails.

A friend wrote to me recently, and I paraphrase: "Never forget what you have within and others will notice sooner or later." It's true that along the way I have run into a handful of "mothers", oddly in the shape of my first year English teacher at boarding school, my program director in Beijing, and my first semester (then he retired!) advisor and counselor at film school. These people hardly knew me. I'd barely said a word or made an effort to "put them in my pocket" as the French would say and they were "sold" on the idea of me, as it were. They knew who I was. They were also all men. And there was no funny business.

With my determination to navigate the snobs, and thanks to my biological mother, newly envigorated by the prospect of perhaps meeting Jacques Perrin soon, I sign off today with the hope of finding that benevolent force that unquestionably supports my work in one showbiz person, man or woman.

Inshallah.

Will the real Isabel Eastman please stand up?

2010-02-09T10:23:00.011+01:00

Life in cinema is a bitch, but even so, it's nice to remember that I come from a stock of people who gave a good goddamn about other people and their feelings. You know, steamrollers. These kinds of people make it in cinema. They are known as assholes, but they make it. I'd like to think I inherited their will but not their selfishness. Perhaps the most enticing family character was the one's whose name I stole, at least half of it.

Allow me to introduce to you, the real Isabel Eastman.

She was born in early August, some time at the beginning of the 20th century in Chile. Her birth name was Maria Isabel which is shortened into Chabela when the Maria becomes a "ch" (don't ask why) and a final "a" is added-- perhaps for lyricism. Knowledge of her comes largely from two sources, her eldest son, my grandfather Agustín Edwards Eastman (the 5th, if you're counting the Augustines) and my aunt Dominique Berthet, who is the daughter of Chabela's eldest daughter Sonia. Sonia was impossibly beautiful and briefly married to an unreliable Frenchman, who apparently had no shame but also no shortage of amusing things to say. We'll get to them in another chapter.

Information on Chabela is either dark and unbecoming from the first source, or much more flattering from the second source. Adding a generation does put one in a better light, unless one really was a nasty bugger, one really has to wait till the people one knew are all dead for posterity to be kind to one.

There are other sources but they've only given a memory or two as a sound byte, still worth mentioning here. The third source is Chabela's youngest child, my great-uncle Robin, who remembers his mother not as a horse-whipping, castrating woman but as a "strong personality", if you will. He recalls her driving on roads completely against the traffic and saying things like: "I don't know why, but I'm always right."* Suffice to say this marked him, and most of his life he seemed to be fascinated by this sort of woman, like Leni Riefenstahl, who he met when she was just taking up scuba diving at the age of 90.

(*By the way, we are Chilean but speak English because we insist that we still are to a certain degree.)

The fourth source is Mama, Chabela's granddaughter and Agustín's oldest daughter, commonly known as Isabel Edwards, which of course only makes things more confusing that she decided to call me Isabel as well, only a hair's breadth from calling me Maria Isabel which would have really been chasing Chabela's ghost. Being the sensualist she is, Mama remembers distinctly being a little girl and made to wear a pink dress with tulle, her cousin Dominique, a yellow dress with tulle and her little sister Carolina, a pale blue dress with tulle, which Chabela had brought all the way from Paris (a very long boat ride in those days). Apparently, Chabela had also prepared a large bowl of gelatin with flowers in it, and my mother remembers being fixated by the flowers suspended in this yellow jell-o. Chabela had a talent for making things memorable.

Memorable for my grandfather is perhaps less cheerful. He suffered her injustice deeply. When he was not even 10 years old, he sat next to T.E. Lawrence at dinner with his grandfather, the 3rd Agustín Edwards, who was incredibly kind to him, but when he was 20, his mother still sent him to the nursery to eat his dinner. He got his revenge on the nannies. Dominique says that when he was little, my grandfather invited a nanny that he particularly didn't like to tea in the nursery. She was surprised but accepted. He asked her, "Do you like the tea, nanny?" And she did. When the tea was finished, he opened the lid and pulled out a dead rat. The best teacher of revenge is injustice.

This same very sensitive and ingenious boy went to the movies one day but was horse-whipped for not asking his mother's permission. I asked him about this reaction from his mother. "Don't you think she was crazy?" And here I was surprised by the answer, "She didn't have a great deal of education." Dominique later confirmed this: "She was the wild one of the family. She spent most of her time playing in trees. Her parents didn't want her to meet Agustín (the 4th), but they wanted her sisters to meet him so they kept her in the kitchen during the meal. It turns out that the rather shy Agustín escaped to the kitchen to smoke a cigarette and get away from the gaggle of potential brides. That is when he met the girl who liked to climb trees.

Chabela had a pioneer spirit. She would hike on trails for days, bringing supplies on donkey, and was the first person to build a house on the pristine Lago de Todos los Santos or Lago Esmeralda, as it's also known because of that unbelievable green color it reflects. Legend has it that she was the first Chilean woman to get an airplane pilot's license. My memory of her, since she died right before I was born, was the black and white photo of her in her sixties, riding a motorcycle.

The Edwards were, at the time of the election of Allende, part of the ruling oligarchy, and thus their lives were threatened and they abruptly left Chile. Chabela went off to England and worked at a girls' boarding school. Dominique says that the job she insisted on having, which she took great pleasure out of, was ringing the bell at the end of each session. She apparently made herself beloved by the school girls by holding court in her room and handing out chocolates.

In the late 70s, when the Edwards had returned to Chile for the most part, my father remembers meeting Chabela and remarked that she always spoke fondly of "My Augustine..." who was in fact her long-dead husband, the 4th Agustín. She didn't seem to have anything kind to say about her son, but she was always ready to house and become the the patron of artists and the permanently lost, like the eastern European gentleman of minor aristocracy who was invited to stay and ended up living in her house for years. My absolutely favorite story is the one where Chabela went to the theater to see a ballet and invited the entire corps de ballet to stay at her house.

These are days when people lived on a scale that has long since gone. These are the legends that we all become when time separates our living breath from other people's memories of us. When three dimensions become two, when the life and struggles we lived just become another story.

A Week with Pioneers and Pilgrims

2010-02-07T16:11:00.010+01:00

This may get me in trouble. I hope it does.

The particularity of being born in one country, raised in another and travelling ceaselessly around the world during and since is that one is at home nowhere. Being at home is perhaps not the question, as wherever one goes, a place to sleep is a place to sleep, a bathroom is a bathroom, food is for nourishing you, etc. The problem of not belonging is that the local population cannot seem to identify you as one of them, and worse, you can't seem to reflect the local people's attitudes, fears, hopes or (this last subject will one day be a post unto itself, if not a whole column) sense of humor. This has happened to me with regards to the States living in France. Perhaps because they are so obsessed with each other, it makes for deliciously contentious ground.

The Iraq War was the turning point. Or Bush's second term. Who were all these people voting for him? Apparently, perfectly sensible people petrified of having to pay more taxes. I didn't know any of them. I lived in Williamsburg with three Argentine tango dancers and I went to film school at Tisch. I'm sure New Yorkers can be provincial, as can artists/intellectuals, but the country seemed to be going to the proverbial dogs, with no health plan, bad public schools, throwing money at the military and Brownie doing a heckuva job...

Jump cut to Paris 2010. I've been living here for over three years but haven't been living officially in the States for over six years. (Shh! don't tell the immigrations officer!) I've missed many a media cycle, TV series, the entire flash mob phenomenon, sundry films about men who refuse to mature and their frustrated girlfriends, etc.

I've also lost, and here I'm coming to the point, a great deal of technical know how that I took for granted. The French are not that into technology. They ogle TED talks and become inspired by them but how many of the TED speakers are French? I have been, in short, living without technology. I have not missed it. I have been perfecting my cuisine, much to my grateful friends. I have taken up the guitar, translated books and travelled around the world. In short, deepening cultural but not technical knowledge. This is known as savoir vivre.

How the subject came about, I don't know. I said to my friend Cristina, who I went to boarding school with and who was in town for the Global Zero Summit that she works for, that Americans didn't seem to take offense about being ignorant whereas being called ignorant for the French is a supreme insult. The proof for me is how many American films and TV Series are based merely on the amusement drawn from the oafish and ignorant (e.g. Dumb and Dumber, The Simpsons, Tommy Boy, etc).

"Then why do the French love Jerry Lewis so much?" she countered.

Good point. Perhaps because that's the only one they love as he falls into slapstick, Tati-stlye.

Then she said: "It's assumed that if you're ignorant about something it's because you're too busy getting things done. The pioneer spirit. Figuring out how things work."

Ah! The pioneers! Bless them & their indelible mark on the American psyche!

So there I was all last week in Global Zero's so-called War Room (press room) full of Pioneers Getting Things Done, and no one to be tongue-in-cheek with me because they were all so concerned with performance, outcome, etc. Once victory was announced, all the Pioneers and one half-Englishman all celebrated, because Pioneers do know how to celebrate, especially when they've been true to their Protestant work ethic (see: Pilgrims) and fully exhausted themselves.

I could not help thinking of my godfather, who is American, as described by my grandfather who is Chilean but was born in Paris and spent formative years in England.

"He's the greatest of friends but he is completely ignorant."

[Just for context, in 1970, my grandfather had to leave Chile immediately to go to the States with his wife and children. It was my godfather who put them up and helped them get settled.]

"He said to me when I came to the States: 'You've got a problem.' 'I know,' I told him. 'I have seven problems: my wife and six children.' 'No, your problem is languages. Your hard drive is all filled up with languages. What's the point of knowing how to say asparagus in five different languages?'"

That may have been 1970 and the theory of finite brain capacity may have been disproven but it does reflect that pioneer spirit, the extraordinary pragmatism that may sometimes look like ignorance. On the other hand, these very pioneers have inspired me to blog once again and spend more time on youtube last week than I have in my collective three years in France. My American-ness may have begun to wear off, but I suppose it helps to be doused in it once in a while. However, I will still eat very red meat, cook with butter and teach French people, who are maybe even worse than Americans at foriegn languages, to say asparagus in English.

Things I know and don't say

2010-02-06T18:47:00.002+01:00

I met a man who said the things I know and do not say,

And when he did, he said it in the most beautiful way.

He grew up on a farm. His parents were atheists.

"When I was 12 or 13, I discovered the concept of infinity, and I cried the whole day."

And the next day again, he thought of infinity and cried.

He knew then that there was more to the world than what you can touch and see.

"So I believe that there is a force greater than all of us, but I don't believe in religion, that someone can tell you what to believe."

I believe in infinity. I believe. I believe in what I cannot see today.

I met another man who said the things I know and do not say,

And when he did, he told about how one should pray.

I told him my life is "inshallah", if God is willing, and he replied that "whatever comes" is how he lives, that he doesn't pray.

Then he corrected himself.

"I don't pray for myself, I don't pray for things for myself. I pray for others, so that they can have courage and strength, but that's all. The rest is whatever comes."

Inshallah.

And so I said: if you pray for others and not for yourself, then you have understood.

That is faith. That no event in life is greater than your capacity to deal with it.

Inshallah.

I met two men who said the things I know and do not say,

and when they did, I felt all the more blessed that day.

Global Zero's Seismic Outreach

2010-02-02T23:03:00.005+01:00

Today I was stationed in the Grand Hôtel Intercontinental which is on Rue Scribe, near the Opéra Garnier, editing footage of the student leaders for Global Zero, the NGO for nuclear disarmament. There were many a dignitary and keynote speaker, some of which comprise Global Zero's power playlist of VIPs known as "signatories."

I am constantly fantasizing about casually meeting one or more of the film/media-related vips but can't think how I shall do this since am locked in a room and do not keep their same schedule...?

So then I fantasize about all the stories of people who have done mad things to get attention to their resounding success and thus, their lives pass that pivotal point from whence they never return (generally when they lost a degree of dignity) and they tell you all this suppressing a grin, thanking the waiter for bringing them their cocktail by the poolside.

I am not one of these people. I do not think I shall ever threaten someone's life or throw off my clothes and assume any comprimising position to get myself a job. That said, I do believe whatever the job I am destined for has something to do with fantasizing. If Malcolm Gladwell is correct about this theory of genius, that it takes 10,000 or so hours of doing the same thing to acquire that status -- with the oddly common example of the Beatles and Mozart -- then I would be an expert fantasizer. I wouldn't say a genius fantasizer, because the areté of fantasy is impossible to measure. But I would have to say that of my waking hours, the largest part is spent imagining a future that does not yet exist. This does make me slightly neurotic, I do admit, but you know, there's always living in the now, if I ever want to keep my day job.

First Day on the Blog...

2010-01-31T05:50:00.001+01:00

Why blog?

1). It beats making monologues in my head.

2). 'Cause Amy can do it (http://godiloveparis.blogspot.com/)

3). 'Cause Kitty used to do it (wasn't is called something like "snapping ninja turtle"?)

4). I live in Paris but I still think in English. (Who would appreciate the running monologue if uttered aloud?)

5). It may make me feel slightly less "freelance".

6). Moonie thinks it's a good idea & she's not "freelance." (http://cristinamoon.com/wordpress/)

7). I used to do it.