In full view of our assigned classroom in the ISEP is a high school (I think), specifically their outdoors playground. And because I’m in class, and they, the French students, are not, it’s impossible not to watch them screwing around and project myself screwing around myself.
To a dilettante daydreamer and eye-drifter, the activities of these high school children would appear similar to an American’s, so much so that it is uninteresting. They play sports, rugby and soccer, but the structure is the same: boys randomly switching between a pick-up game and shooting around, with girls hanging around the fringes, talking in groups and occasionally deigning to glance at the games; then a bell rings and everyone files off desultorily. But these are casual observations. For one, the games are far more intense than their American equivalents. The boys who don’t play often ring the court and scream, shout, and holler. The intensity of the watchers feeds the intensity of the players. In a rugby game, I saw a kid get thrown to the ground in a move I’d previously only seen on televised wrestling. But that, you might say, is a vicious game. Au contraire. Anyone who thinks soccer is a soft, nonphysical game should probably watch these kids play the game. They play the type of game that basketball television commentators would call “scrappy”—they use their elbows as vicious weapons, they lean their weight into their adversaries, they run as if they’re in a game of chicken. To top it off, many of them are wearing clothes straight from a J. Crew catalogue. Meanwhile the conversations of the girls are much more animated than I remember high school conversations being, and more so than the general elevation of animation in France. The French, they take their leisure seriously.
The recklessness and intensity of the youth of French is not limited to this high school. After buying some food to go today, I sat down in a church courtyard with a children’s playground. This is quite common, incidentally. No one treats churches as churches; instead they’re concrete parks, really. Back to the playground. It resembled American playgrounds in all respects. But the kids were far more exuberant and reckless. One kid flung himself into a sandbox for the duration of my meal, maybe twenty minutes or so. He was covered in those granules of sand. None of the mothers seemed to find their children’s activities unusual or particularly dangerous. They just sat on their park benches and smoked.
But it’s not just at play that the French kids have an unusual amount of recklessness and energy. Adult French are very reserved in their day-to-day public interactions. It doesn’t look like the youth are as much, from an anecdote I’m about to relate:
This happened before I was actually eating. In fact, it happened at the sandwicherie from which I ordered my meal. I approached the stand because I wanted to see the prices: they vary so greatly from stand to stand that it is always worth checking. There were seats outside, made from green metal. Very Parisian-looking. Like most sandwicherie seats, they were mostly empty—people always order take-out because it’s usually dramatically cheaper. There was one exception.
He was a black man. His clothing was unremarkable in of themselves--sport jacket, slacks, nice shoes, red glasses—but something in the way he wore them indicated that this was a strange character. Maybe it was how loose they were, or maybe it was that they were worn just slightly wrong. But you’d only get a feeling from the clothes; the explicit reason for his strangeness was the fact that he was smoking both a cigarette and a blunt. He did not smell like pot, but he certainly talked like it. I could tell by the tone; his words weren’t comprehensible to me.
There were a group of kids talking to him. They were having a conversation, or at least it appeared that he thought so. I could tell by the expression. The kids were not. Some turned their head to giggle from time to time. This was a long time observing it too; they were very slow about ordering, very slow about paying, and the service was very slow, but because the kids were. The poor lady was incredibly harried; she was relieved when I eventually ordered quickly. But I am getting off-topic.
Anyway, at a certain point in the conversation, he began touching people’s hair. But not just any hair. Only curly hair. His hair was pretty straight for a black guy, so it looked about the same as most of the hair he was touching. Of course, my hair is pretty curly too. So at some point he touched mine, very briefly—he only grazed the top, where he had really lingered over the other kids’ hair. For whatever reason I guess curly hair was on the agenda. Thanks to acting classes (“little face!”) during the seminar, I was able to deliver a “Don’t fuck with me” expression on cue. Which he took seriously, at least in my case. The kids had been looking at me expectantly while this occurred. They seemed to be saying, “What a crazy guy, huh?”
Yeah, exactly. But he would’ve just been ignored by an adult.
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Yesterday I talked about the incredible unity of French architecture and Parisian city planning. This is true. It’s certainly the result of conscious planning. But, as is the case with any policy, there are downsides to the policy.
The downside is an especially vivid divide that grows in any landmark city, the divide between the “Tourist” City and the “Living” City. A place like New York or San Francisco or New Orleans (before Katrina) or Paris is in actuality two cities: there’s the city for the tourists and the rich, and then the city where people actually live. In Paris, it’s not even within the city proper, it’s out in the banlieue, the suburbs which so resemble a series of projects. But Paris hasn’t simply pushed out its poor people, it’s also pushed out a lot of the other modern accoutrements of a city. So IKEA is way on the outskirts; so are the majority of the auto dealerships (the ones that are, are very dilapidated).
The consequence for this is that has you walk through an exceptionally safe and pleasant city—I walked home at 2:30 AM last weekend, and it felt just like Stanford—you forget that there’s a whole other city, one with noise and calamity.
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One of the distinctive features about Paris’ exile of the big box stores to the outskirts is the survival of the small business. Everything seems like it’s a small, neighborhood business. And furthermore, it’s not homogenized small business. A lot of American diners, for example, are nominally small businesses but might as well be a part of a chain. On the other hand, a religeuse from one patisserie might be dramatically different in terms of ingredients and presentation from another religeuse from another patisserie.
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Worst fashion choice of day: (tie)
I’m not sure what your obsession is with black-and-white, madam, but it has to stop. Actually, that’s not where the problem lies. The color scheme is basic and classic. No, it’s the fact that you had checkered black-and-white pants, with white pinstripes within the black checkers, combined with your bumble-bee black-and-white striped hairband, combined with your black jacket, white vest and white shirt that makes your fashion choice very odd indeed. However, you’re not the only one.
You’re joined by Glitter Girl. Madam, I will humbly suggest that combining sequins, a rhinestone necklace, and boots with red shiny plastic appended to the sides, is not the best choice.
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I watched French TV because I’m going to do this media internship through Stanford, thinking that I would see shocking differences between French TV and American TV, enough to make hay over. No, not really: there’s one big one and a parade of smaller ones.
THE BIG ONE: there appear to be no advertisements. I did not see commercials after watching for an hour, albeit on two different channels. Maybe they show them at the end of the show? Or maybe the only channels I saw don’t have advertisements?
OTHER: I watched a documentary; all experts were simply presented by their job and name: “Linguist,” or “Archaeologist.” I feel like in an American documentary, it would have been, “Harvard Professor of Linguistic Studies.” There are other differences, but nothing really interesting.
What’s the same is interesting. We have such a common visual vocabulary that often I was able to tell what was happening in the story—they’re going to make a breakthrough in the case, that’s the villain, etc.—simply by looking at what they were showing me. And that’s interesting.
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