Clothes of the World

The French take the passive-aggressive approach to disabled people. Neither affirmatively helping them nor actively barring them, they take the middle route: simply getting out of the way.

A blind person picking his way through the subway stop is something to see. Often, of course, the stop is crowded, and the French prefer to be stranded on their own islands, so a blind person is constantly jostling, picking his way around the barriers in his way. Meanwhile, the other French, off on their own islands, don’t seem to realize from the “Pardons” and “Ce n’est pas grave” that there is a situation behind them, don’t make it easier on everyone involved by paying attention and actively making a space for said blind person.

The upshot is that the blind, the deaf and especially the unidentifiably disabled (the mutterers, the deformed, the limpers) do not become members of the menagerie simply on account of their being. No, the French are content to hold up one particular ideal, similar to the one American conservatives hold up for race relations: perfect neutrality.

The French do make accommodations for certain groups on the Metro, however. Every Metro car has a group of four seats near the door with green hearts and a placard above it. The green hearts and placard signal that certain people are to be given priority for the seats: veterans of wars, pregnant women and women with babies. Those who serve or have served the nation, I suppose some French might say (the French love babies; besides the generous subsidies for mothers, it’s no wonder that France have the highest fertility rate in Europe). But the intent here is more to honor than to accommodate, I think—the first sentence was a bit of a misnomer.

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Today we went to the TV studios for our media internship.

What was immediately interesting about the internship was the location. It’s in Zone Two of the Metro line, mysterious because I’d never been in Zone Two thus far. There was a tremendous mental line—I’d expected it to be all modern. That or massive banlieue.

Neither was really true, but the really modern was probably more true. There were more modern-type buildings than in most areas of Paris. Notably, these modern buildings resembled office buildings, a truly odd sight for someone who’s stuck to Zone One and Central Paris for the entire trip thus far. Also, after having watching a bunch of French TV over the past week, I was surprised to see the amount of TV stuff housed in neighboring buildings. Oh! There’s France 5! Etc.

The actual meeting itself went well. It was essentially another orientation, except with audience participation. I surprised myself from my comprehension of what was going on, although our boss is an American, so although her French is excellent, she speaks with American accent, which probably makes it easier for us. Nevertheless, we picked up a few interesting facts:

• So, almost all French TV is public. This manifests itself in a few obvious ways—there are a ton of documents and more high-minded programming, for instance. But the extent of this high-mindedness is this: there is an entire agency devoted to reviewing every single advertisement on French TV. This agency can approve or reject any advertisement on French TV. To give you an example, there is no advertisement for alcohol on French TV, which makes me wonder how the Super Bowl works out over here.
• The high-minded nature of French TV can also be seen in the first shows in France as compared to America. Game shows and vaudeville, of course, were America’s first shows; by contrast, France had a ton of shows about books.
• While American TV has a lot of specialization—committees for script-writing one show and multiple directors and such—French TV tends to be the brainchild of a single auteur. They still take their Nouvelle Vague seriously, I guess.
• French people love the Bourne series. Ask them about recent American movies, and the Bourne series is always like the first thing they think of. This was only the most recent confirmation of this fact.

So, the boss, Roxanne Frias, works on two shows and a radio show, which I’ll probably be going to (but not participating in) tomorrow. Anyway, one of the shows is “Television of the World,” and the other is “Clothes of the World,” which we saw an episode of. With Clothes of the World, the clothes of a country are profiled and connected to its history. The episode that we saw focused on South Africa. So it spent time detailing, for example, the uniforms of housekeepers and of church-goers, and how they connected to South Africa’s apartheid past—apparently, black South Africans had to wear uniforms to church! It covered some other subjects, as well as what clothes male South Africans find cool (suit/blazers and loud shirts), but that topic was most interesting.

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So I was sitting in a crowded Metro car tonight. Here was the scene; it was a real circus of the weird.

In every Metro car near the doors, there’s an open space for standing, ringed by eight fold-down seats. I was in one of the fold-down seats.

To my left sat a typical type tonight: real nice shoes, jeans, khaki-colored blazer, dress shirt, bottle of wine resting on knee, hair slicked. If I had to guess, Friday is date night.

Kiddy-corner to me sat an Asian in a faux-furry black trenchcoat (think pimp jacket from 70’s blaxploitation flicks), shuffling a dirty deck of cards over and over. He wore dark sunglasses, obscuring his presumably tortured eyes. Appeared vaguely crazy.


Sitting across from me was someone wrapped up in the Da Vinci Code. I didn’t think the genius who invented the time machine and traveled into the future would want to read such a bad book, but the geniuses, they’re different than you and I.

Standing up was a fairly large group, but not too large, or else we would have had to stand up. Point of etiquette to anyone considering going to Paris: stand up from your folding seats when the standing area gets too crowded. It’s one of the few ways to earn a dirty look from a Parisian Metro traveler, and I’ve seen some odd behavior, to say the least. Anyway, the standers could be divided into two.

The first group was a family, the father of which won the worst dressed award of the day, just when I was despairing of not giving out the award. Too all appearances, he was dressed in the standard look of Parisian males: jeans, nice shoes (I’ve never seen a city with such a universality of nice shoes, male and female), nice but not too dressy shirt, and blazer. Except, and here was what was atrocious: he apparently slaughtered and skinned a pool table to make his green blazer, for it looked awful.

The second group was a group of Asian businessmen, all conservatively dressed. Unfortunately, and any Stanford University student can tell you this, but Asian business travelers are the most easily stereotyped group, perhaps ever. This group fit the Asian business traveler stereotype to a tee. Were they all dressed in black suits? Yes, yes they were. Was the vast majority dressed in white shirts, except for one daring soul in a blue shirt? Again, yes. Was there one Asian woman accompanying the male group, with a fanny pack? Sadly, yes. Did they all have pocket-sized cameras? Yes. Did they insist on taking a picture at every stop for four straight stops (when I got off, so they might still be at it as I write this), impeding foot traffic? God yes. Did they insist on flashing peace signs in their pictures of one another? Yes, and what is the reason for this? God only knows. I’m sure they are all pleasant wonderful human beings, but could there be some sort of circulating memo that informs them about the prevailing stereotypes of their tourists? Because it’s disturbing that I can travel halfway across the world and encounter the exact same Asian tourists doing the exact same Asian tourist things.

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Pastry/Tart of the Day: Pomme Grille: think a waffle with an apple filling. Good, but nothing unusual, really.

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The man who almost won the worst dressed award: long shorts, a garbage bag of a green shirt, Yankees hat—did someone tell him that the fashion stylings of Kevin Federline were to be imitated?

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Something fun to witness: three kids decided to rollerblade down a hill, circus elephant-fashion, each clutching the one in front of them. They hollered in joy every time a collision seemed imminent; they avoided one.

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I noticed a funeral services home today. It was run by the government. Truly, from cradle to grave.