Paris Calling

Class In An Hour

In about 40 minutes I teach my first class. There's about 6 teenagers sitting outside my room, ambling the afternoon away waiting for class. This is quite the bizarre moment. I'm engaging all the spirits!

The mental exhaustion from this is pretty much complete. I'm the only staff member who speaks French so I'm the one who has to cajole the bureaucracy along as well as lead the writing. And I live amongst the kids. Man.

But its creative. I couldn't sleep last night because I suddenly flashed on an approach for today in the classroom. All the kids, keep saying, "Writing? Ewwww." so I hope this approach works. Only spirit knows.

Night Swimming

Just took a midnight dip in a pool on this campus in a town above Nice. We had to climb over a fence. We being the faculty of this month long theater program. Tomorrow, the kids show up. It's going to be serious stuff, but all of us instructors are fun as hell, which is the best. Serious people with light spirits. I want the kids to enjoy this.

Southern Bound

I'm outta here. Tonight is my last night in the 15th arrondisssement. I'm off to the south of France to teach a class for July then it looks like I've found a place in the 20th overlooking Pére Lachaise.

This week has been magical, a lot of things dovetailing beautifully, so far beyond any reasonable expectation. And a complete question mark over what awaits me down south or when I get back. But there's such a deep sense that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be and for that I'm truly blessed.

Onward.

Sunset Park

If you've ever landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport and looked out the window, you'll remember that it's quite rural: wheat fields, cow pastures, and small clumps of forest here and there.

Sunday I rode my bike there from Paris with two friends. We rode out of the city along the Canal de L'Ourq, which b-lines north from the city, then zigzagged our way around the airport through villages and Fedex centers, with Boeings and Airbuses landing every two minutes overhead.

Our destination was a country house. Well, Brideshead in France, really. A gorgeous manse on the top of a hill overlooking a lake and forest: pure majesty. Played tennis. Idled on the lawn. Watched the sun fall like a Turner painting.

But took the RER back, an RER that stopped at Sarcelles on its way to the city center. And there, all of immigrant Paris pushed its way on the train, pulling me down --appropriately-- from a Henry James fantasy.

Through The Looking Glass

As a kid I'd be driving with my family on a country highway and we'd pass a house and barn that sat across an unkempt pasture. What if, as a sort of game, life plucked me from this passing car and dropped me over there to start from scratch?

The feeling this week has been akin to that memory. That I did it: got out of the car, ran back up the highway, and walked across the field to that house and barn, bearing down on a whole other thing.

Taps

Chirac's approval rating is at 28 percent. 28 percent!!! Tony Blair celebrates this fact by basically telling Chirac to go fuck himself whenever it occurs to him. And boy can he ever. A president with that kind of approval rating is a spectral presence. On Sunday, it was painful to watch Chirac at the airport hovering around Florence and her family; an awkward ghost at the wrong address.

Blair probably loves it, or at least his Iagos must. After two long years of enduring Chirac waxing on Iraq, time to stick it to him. The Common Agricultural Policy is one of Chirac's holy grails and Blair called it ridiculous this week. The UK gets a rebate every year from Europe and Blair said there isn't a hope in hell they'll pass it up, even with the UK booming.

It's that kind of stuff. Then Blair goes to Washington and gets some African love from Bush. And Chirac loves Africa! Accordingly, at least according to the paper this morning, Chirac is in a depression.

And back home, nemesis Nicholas Sarkozy piles it on. "Sarko" wonders aloud to a room of reporters what it even means to be a "Chiracien" today? A month ago, half of the ruling party would have identified themselves openly with the president. Not anymore --- and never again most likely.

Florence In Paris

Florence Aubenas is a real storyteller. She's a tale weaver in the purest sense; so much so that yesterday, her press conference was magic. She told her story --performed it really-- but with such authenticity, such focus on channeling that experience as best she could, that you sat helpless in front of the TV, laughing, then crying, then mouth hanging wide open.

It was as if all of France was sitting around a campfire hearing a ghost story or a legend from a storyteller who genuinely wanted you to find the buried clue on how the world really worked, but couldn't or wouldn't just give it away.

I sat there not wanting it to end, wanting her to tell more, fantasizing about buying ten copies of her book (if there was one), or passing her on a café terrace and finding the nerve to walk back and pay her bill, only to thank her, really, for existing.

It's uncanny. She's in a hole for five months and when she comes back, we're the consoled.

Allons Enfants... To Neverland!

My sublet has fancy cable so if I feel like it, I can pretend to be staying up late in NYC when I'm actually staying up late in Paris. What do I mean? Jay Leno, Conan, and breaking news on CNN.

Last night I turned on the tube when the MJ verdict was minutes away. So I watched. It was fun hanging with Wolf Blitzer, Robert Shapiro of the OJ case, but especially Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker who I once saw at Last Exit, the bar on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.

But what made the countdown so memorable was that when the verdict made it to the people outside the courthouse, all of CNN's crowd-shots had a fanatic Frenchman waving a majestic bleu-blanc-rouge right there front and center ("l'étandard est levé!!".) I think the flag had "All of France loves you Michael" written in gold letters across it.

Now as you can well imagine, the French media basically frame this story as "those crazy Americans." In fact, on the lunchtime news just now, a reporter ended his report by saying, "faced with believing a child or a star, this American jury chose the star." Slanderously simplistic and, you guessed it, all done without CNN's crowd shot!

UPDATE: A nightly news did show the guy, even interviewd him for a soundbite.

Lady Di

According to Le Monde, the French ambassador to Iraq asked Florence Aubenas whether the media campaign in France had any affect on her captivity and release. Her answer?

"Les ravisseurs m'ont dit que j'étais aussi célèbre que Lady Di en France", a plaisanté Florence Aubenas.

"My captors said that in France I was as famous as Lady Di," she joked.

The media campaign used the slogan that she went there for us and that she'll come home thanks to us and the campaign did not lie.

Libre!

On January 5th, Florence Aubenas, a senior reporter for Liberation, the newspaper I read every morning, was kidnapped off the streets of Baghdad. Her abduction first made the front page of the paper on January 8th, the day I arrived to Paris.

Yesterday, she landed safely back in France, greeted off a government jet by Jacques Chirac. Her ordeal lasted 158 days.

The French are extremely good at certain things and now handling a hostage crisis has to be added to the list. From the day I arrived, the whole journalistic community (led by Liberation) never let up in their support of Florence. At every opportunity the Great Media Wheel just begged to move on, to bury the Florence story until her eventual (and magical) release, but it never happened. Her name and that of her fixer, Hussein Hanoun, appended every TV report from Irak. Newspapers published their faces everyday.

And there were artistic events, fairs, candlelight vigils, and displayed portraits all over France to keep the support alive. I took part in a rollerblade skate (the one that takes place every Friday night) where the many thousands of participants were provided with Florence and Hussein t-shirts.

So with all that mobilization, all that build-up, millions of people, like myself, spontaneously cried on hearing the news yesterday. I met some ex-pats at a café in the 10th and got to tell them and everyone stopped their conversations mid-sentence, shocked then ecstatic. It was the buzz of Paris. And a few hundred meters away, at Place de la Republique (near the Liberation headquarters), the big portraits of the now former hostages were taken down to a jubilant crowd of hundreds. And it turned into a street party. DJ's came out to spin.