Chapter 4 - Belle Paris

music|white collar boy - belle & sebastian
lit|da vinci code - dan brown
film|C.R.A.Z.Y.

Alright, this'll be a fairly short one as I have my first exam tomorrow, and we honestly didn't do too much besides recover and wander Paris. But there're still things to tell, such as for me to rant against the da vinci code (though it would seem almost every major movie critic has beat me to it, check metacritic, some of the reviews near the bottom end are actually pretty funny ).

It was my birthday (May 3rd - don't worry if you forgot it or didn't know it... my bro's got two years of forgetting it under his belt and I still love him, somehow) when we arrived in Paris, with the original intent of staying only for a couple nights. But then Helene suprised me with my birthday gift... two tickets to see Belle & Sebastian live on May 5th! What a great girl, the funny thing is she really hadn't heard much of them (and of course my iPod was crashed but I couldn't show her) but did know I liked them, and was able to easily remember the name since it's also the name of a very famous children's cartoon in France (from what I'm reading it was a Nickelodeon cartoon, but I'll be damned if I ever saw it... but French TV is typically a decade or so behind America anyways). As for my birthday night, we spent it on Montmartre, looking out in the gorgeous weather on the Parisian landscape. Unfortunately, all the photos turned out miserably, but take my word that it was truly spectacular.

As for the concert two nights later it was great. Get your hands on their new album, The Life Pursuit, it's definitely worth a spin, got a bit of a new pornographers vibe. The song of the night was white collar boy, which I had played ad nausea at the appartment while my iPod was still in working order, so much so that Helene was convinced that it'd been a hit in France since she'd heard it so many times. I seem to recall Muff dubing me the King of the 10 track playlist. Or maybe it was Jeffy. Peu importe.

The rest of the time? Well, I got to revisit the Pantheon since my last visit two years ago had been an extremely hurried one. This is the fairly modern church where you'll find Foucault's pendulum (showing us the world really does turn) haning from the cupola, as well as the tombs of many a great Frenchmen, including Mon. Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola etc., (Zola, Hugo, and Dumas, the great writers, were tomb roomies) and a great view from the roof. A couple pics, one of the great Voltaire's tomb (he's the only one that got a neat statue) and of me frolicing amongst the pillars.

Helene and I were really bushed, so we stopped in this cool little cafe run by the Mosque it was attatched too, absolutely serene little garden where you sat and enjoyed some arab tea. It was glorious.

The rest of the time we just explored Paris by foot, and chilled out at Helene's sister's place, and had coffees and beers with a bunch of Helene's friends scattered through Paris. It was while chilling out that I finally, after years of resisting, read The Da Vinci Code. Why had I resisted? My point was that I'd read that type of novel a hundred times before, that it wouldn't challenge me nor make me think, and I would be nothing more than a consumer of pop trash left at the end with an empty feeling of having nothing interesting to think about. Why did I cave? Because this belief came into direct conflict with another of my beliefs - the book is always better than the movie, I like to read the book first, and the movie had Audrey Tatou (who, as an adopted Frenchmen I'm not allowed to dislike), Tom Hanks and Ian McKellan. So I sucked it up and read the bloody thing one afternoon. First of all, let me get any praise I had out of the way. The plot wasn't bad, got me caught up anyways, and of course I was a fan of the symbology detailing. But the writing was the equivalent of being struck over the head with a blunt hammer repetitively, so much so that it jarred me several times from the flow of the book. And in the end, I was greeted by that empty feeling of having absolutely nothing intellectual to chew on, and I felt unbelievably unsatisfied. Though Muff does make a good point in that it does give a good shot to the Catholic Church, but as Philippe Solers (French writer, married to Julia Kristeva, I recently triumphed through his book le secret for my 20th Century Literature course) points out, it's now in fact become far more revolutionary and countercultural to be Catholic (in France anyways, and I think judging by the success of the book, you could say the same in America).

That was essentially our trip, we came back to Clermont absolutely haggered and wound up sleeping our faces off for at least a couple days before classes started up again... and now I'm within a week of leaving Clermont! I'm hoping I might do a day as a photographer in Clermont for the blog, I also was up on the Puy de Dome last weekend and hiked around, it was fantastic. But as for now, my plans sit this way: a week and a half with Helene in the Tours region (her hometown) as well as on the coast at St. Palais (during which time the 'rents'll be visiting me in France), and afterwards I've also booked a week in southern England, near Exeter, to visit my buddy Olly, who I haven't seen since my exchange. From there? Well, I'll post more when I know more.

All the best.

P.S. - A quick film recommendation, a great film called C.R.A.Z.Y. came out here in France, it's a Quebecois film and is increidbly well done (and I was proud to discover all the Quebecois words I learned in Canada and had thought useless in France were suddenly useful again, Tabernac! Did you know that they had subtitles for the French audience for 40% of the film?)... but I'm starting to get the impression (as shameful as it is) that it's easier to see a French Canadian film in France than in anglophone Canada. That's something that needs to be changed...