Bienvenue en France!, or, How I Failed To Post Before Leaving Canadian Soil, or even, How I Failed The Brevity Test Miserably

music|elevator love letter – stars
lit|beloved – toni morrison
film|les bronzés 3

Where to start? Perhaps at the beginning, I find that’s usually best. Though, as you can see, I failed even at that – for all of those that were excited for stories and photos from the past year, I’m sorry. Perhaps another time, when I’m feeling not only nostalgic but desperate to share my nostalgia with the world. In the meantime… FRANCE!

Well, first I must say that my journey was ridiculous as usual and culminated with an epic battle between a Canadian boy and the Parisian Metro. Complete with giant 80L overnight backpack and a Washburn Juggernaut guitar duct taped to a rolling suitcase (yes, I was trying to avoid excess baggage charges), I had to take the Metro into downtown Paris, switch trains, and then take another Metro before I even got to the train station that would take me to Clermont (these are echoes of my first painful journey to St. Andrew’s - why can’t my train ever leave from the AIRPORT?). This dentistesque (as in a trip to the) process culminated when I managed to get my suitcase stuck in the automated doors at the subway exit. As I desperately hauled on my suitcase it became clear that either the suitcase or the metal doors would have to give… it wasn’t a fair fight. A broken suitcase buckle, an awkward sprawl, and many skewed glances later I had triumphed (barely) over the Paris Metro, and had made it onto my SNCF train to Clermont-Ferrand.

If the journey wasn’t easy, at least I’ve been able to settle back into French culture with little more ease. Hélène’s apartment is great, right on Rue de Port, a largely pedestrian road on the edge of the old downtown. It’s exactly like what old French streets look like in Hollywood movies. A lot of my French came back much easier than I’d imagined, given the rust I had trying to talk to Hélène while I was in Calgary, and to boot after testing I was placed in the highest level of French at the University (well, for foreigners anyways)! This means that if I pass (at this point I’m not sure how big of an ‘if’ that is), I would have the equivalent a first year in an arts degree in a French University. Not too shabby considering the miserable state of my French in early October. I’ve also begun an apprenticeship (from Hélène) in the art of French cuisine - as my dad says, that’s the one thing the French know how to do right. I present to you my first coup in French cuisine – a spinach, tomato, and goat’s cheese quiche. And it tasted good too! So no one’s allowed to make fun of my cooking anymore, dammit! Tonight I’m making crêpes… baby steps, always baby steps.

I also managed to get onto the ski hills last weekend in Clermont. They aren’t quite as glorious as Canadian skiing, but they’ll do. However, there’s a possibility I might get to spend a week of my vacation in the French Alps at a condo that Hélène’s ‘rents own, and in that case I’ll be able to justly compare the skiing between continents, so I’ll hold off until then (I really am a lucky bastard… but then I can’t compete with the week muff had… I’m surprised he’s able to walk with a horseshoe so firmly lodged in his colon!). An interesting note: the system of ranking slope difficulty (which I thought was universal) is a wee different, and instead of going easy (green circle), medium (blue square), hard (black diamond), über-hard (double black) like our system does, it goes über-easy (green), easy (blue), medium (red), and difficult (black). A wee difference, but I thought it spoke volumes – at least at that hill anyways.

As for my lenses this week – first off, I finally got around to reading Beloved, a book I’d been meaning to get to for ages but never had the chance before the plane ride. I’ll put it this way – the back of the book has a quote from the L.A. Times that reads “A masterwork…wonderful…I can’t imagine American literature without it!” Personally, I now can’t even imagine all of literature without this book. Easily the most powerful piece I’ve ever read, nothing short of a masterwork of the Western world, and the layers of postcolonial and feminist readings that can be done on it are astounding. Everyone should read this book, and I know some of you read it in high school but perhaps you should give it a second go if you didn’t like it… I know I wouldn’t have had the mind to appreciate this book in Grade 9. Go read it!

Two days before I left Calgary, I was lucky enough to be able to catch (for my third time) the Stars live, and as usual they were just beautiful. This got me back on listening to them constantly (a phase I went through in fourth year, as the Winchesters can attest to), and got me back on my favorite song of theirs, elevator love letter. The lyrics have been rolling around in my head for ages, and what’s so special about this song (and the Stars in general) is its sheer honesty. This song itself is about being too intellectually involved with love, of being stuck where you love more with your head than your heart. The verses echo with an overactive brain – “cause I don’t know how to love” – so that when you get to the chorus it sounds like a beautiful, desperate plea. Imagine the body as a building (as most of western architecture has used the body as an image for the building, this shouldn’t be too difficult) – where would the office be? The head of course. So listen to the chorus lyrics:

“my office glows, all night long”(can’t shut off the brain)

“it’s a nuclear show, and the stars are gone” (stars as natural beauty, natural emotion, being drowned by nuclear lights, something that came from applying the mind to the world,of intellectualizing nature)

“elevator, elevator, take me home”(if an elevator left from the brain, where would it wind up? The heart. Home. Appropriately enough, the album is named Heart. Listen to how Amy Millan sings elevator…)

A song all about trying to change someone’s approach to love from brain to heart. And even more beautifully, the track before Elevator Love Letter on the album is What The Snowman Learned About Love, and the one following is Heart. From learning to heart. An extraordinary accomplishment from an extraordinary band.

And on the bad side of art… I caught Les Bronzés 3 with Hélène yesterday, and would have to say it was one of the shitiest movies I’ve ever seen (but to be fair, I haven’t seen Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo). However, between emphatic apologies for the movie from Hélène, I understand the first two films are cult classics in France, so I’ll be sure to watch them despite the atrocity that was the third. Pretty clearly a money grab, from what I can tell. It’s too bad really, every French film I’d seen to this point (L’Auberge Espanol, Les Poupées Russes, Tanguy) had been fantastic!

Ha, brevity. Who was I kidding?

(Ian, you blowhard!)