What price art?

On the way home today, I passed through the Latin Quarter, and walked down some of the streets in the western part of the neighborhood, which are awash in art galleries of all sorts.

The weather was nice and the streets were peaceful (especially since most people are on vacation for either Easter or Passover), and it was a pleasant walk, but I did find myself wondering how art galleries manage to stay in business. The vast majority of galleries sell modern art, since old art is in limited supply and they're not making any more of it, but most modern art is (at least in my opinion) garbage.

Do people really pay €50,000 for a few splashes of paint on a canvas? I guess people like Jackson Pollack answer that question, but it mystifies me. I suppose it depends a lot on who made the splashes.

I think that many people buy or praise modern art because they're afraid that they'll seem uneducated if they don't. They don't actually see anything in the art, but they're worried that maybe others who praise the art are seeing something that they cannot, and they don't want to seem retarded, so they praise the art, too. It's exactly like the emperor's new clothes. I don't worry about seeming uneducated, though. A lot of modern art is garbage, designed to take advantage of people who worry too much about what others think, and I'm not afraid to call it as I see it. And I'm sure not going to pay €50,000 for garbage. If I want modern art, I'll go outside to the dumpster, pull out some garbage, glue it together, and put it on a marble pedestal in my living room. Nobody will know the difference, and everyone will be afraid to confess that they don't understand the “art.”

If I go to the Louvre (which I confess that I hardly ever do), I see art that I can recognize as art. It's still not that impressive—the mere fact that a painting is 500 years old doesn't make it good—but at least it shows some sort of talent. Old art seems to disproportionately portray a lot of generals, politicians, and saints, most of whom are either nude or dressed in bed sheets, but it's still better than modern art.

At the Orsay Museum, which picks up where the Louvre leaves off, and stops just prior to reaching the abyss of modern art, you can see things that are both artistic and recognizable. Some work of the impressionists is very nice, for example. You can recognize what it is, but it's not photo-realistic. It's a nice balance between the abstract and the concrete. I don't salivate over it the way some people do, but I like a lot of it. I still think Van Gogh looks like he was fingerpainting, though. And while Monet is pleasant as well, there are limits to how many depictions of stagnant ponds covered with lilies and scum that I can see before I need a break.

So do I like anything? Yes. Manet's Olympia is a nice painting, simply because it looks exactly like real life. His model, Victorine Meurent, looks a bit impatient and self-conscious. Of course, that's also why people found it scandalous. How dare a painter try to depict reality!
Jean Ingres did the same thing (minus the nudity, generally), and did a very good job as well. I like his paintings. He did a lot of commissioned work, and his portraits look like real people, which I suppose was exactly what his clients wanted.

Picasso got weird over time and I don't generally like his work. However, there's a museum in Paris that contains a lot of his earlier work, before he got weird, and he was a good painter in the early days. Salvador Dali, who has a small museum of his work in Montmartre, was an excellent artist, although his choice of subjects is a bit nightmarish—like Norman Rockwell with malaria.

Anyway … I've only bought one work of visual non-photographic art in my life, and it was an original cel from a Warner Bros. cartoon (Duck Dodgers in the 25½ Century, as I recall). I pawned it years ago out of poverty.

Rue Cler redux

I've put up my latest rue Cler video, a somewhat longer version of the one I put up a few months ago.

As I've said in the past, the rue Cler, a tiny, mostly pedestrian market street in Paris, has nothing really to objectively recommend it, but it is famous because travel author Rick Steves praises it at length in his books on Paris. I'm not sure why he does this. It's easy to get the impression that he has never seen enough of Paris to know just how mundane this particular street is (in comparison to many other market streets in the city). But whatever the reason, thousands of tourists naively flock to the street, either because they think it's a major Paris sight worth visiting (it's not), or because they think the hotels there are something extra-special (they aren't).

My upcoming video on the rue Montorgueil should clearly show just how uninteresting the rue Cler is, although that message will never reach Rick Steves' disciples. I wonder how many people sit in one of the small hotels on the street, look out the window at the shops below, and believe that they're seeing the best of Paris.

Anyway … this little video is the first I've made with background music. I had to license the music, of course, since my conscience allows no other option. (Living in France has hardly made a dent on my conscience, although it has had more influence than I would like.) I use royalty-free music, which is of good quality and affordable, with its one-time licensing structure. I mainly wanted to see if music is better than just ambient noise. The rue Cler is pedestrian and fairly quiet, so this isn't a worst-case test, but it is instructive. I did leave the ambient noise over the music track, to provide a bit more atmosphere.

The density of Americans is so high on the rue Cler at this time of year (April in Paris) that sometimes the only language you hear around you on this street is English. I'm sure it must be a boon to the merchants on the street, although some of them (like La Compagnie des Aspirateurs, which sells a wide selection of vacuum cleaners) manifestly cater specifically to locals. The area of town in which the rue Cler is found is known for its high rents and its high density of retirees and diplomats, and it's not the most animated spot in the city.

Paris in the Spring

The weather during the past few days has been glorious, the kind that makes Paris in the Spring justly famous. Blue skies, fluffy white clouds, a slight breeze, tolerable temperatures (although it was a bit warm in the afternoon yesterday). This is the kind of weather that tourists read about in travel books—and the tourists are definitely here in force now.

I was walking to school this morning, and I saw a group of Americans walking behind me. Since I was very near the infamous rue Cler, I surmised that they were on their way to Rick Steves' favorite Parisian street. Sure enough, as I continued north, they turned towards the rue Cler. Any American in this part of town, walking on that street, is almost surely on his way to or from the rue Cler. The Eiffel Tower is nearby, too, but tourists don't stray far from the major sights, so anyone almost a mile from the tower is probably looking for something else, and that would be the rue Cler around here.

This afternoon, I went past the rue Cler again, mainly to update my little video of the street, since the previous one is generating a surprising number of views on YouTube. I heard almost nothing but English on the street, as all the Americans with their little green books trotted to and fro. If only they knew how lame this street is compared to some of the other market streets in Paris.

Most of the time, the rue Cler is quiet … too quiet, as they say in the movies. The Seventh is a district of retirees and diplomats. It's not a very lively area. Plus, when you do see people on the rue Cler, there are often American. Right now, they are almost all American, since this is high season for tourism, and since Parisians are away on Easter vacation. The businesses are open and there are a few people sitting at the cafés, reading their little Rick Steves books and checking their Blackberry gadgets, but it's still very quiet by Parisian standards. The street continues to serve the locals, of course, but they are hopelessly outnumbered by tourists right now. Any American looking for local color and contact with the French is going to have a hard time of it on the rue Cler, although they may not realize this if they do not venture elsewhere in Paris.

But if that's what people want to see, that's what I'll record on video. I'm tempted to direct the people I see to the rue Montorgueil or someplace like that, but they probably wouldn't be able to find their way to other streets without instructions in the green book.

Yesterday I filmed a bit of Notre-Dame (inside and out, but not up in the towers as I hate to climb little spiral stone stairways) and the surrounding streets. Everyone visits Notre-Dame, of course, but they never visit the side streets, which are charming and very quiet. All you have to do is walk 50 feet from the main tourist path, and you're alone. The streets around Notre-Dame are sometimes about as old as the cathedral itself. There are a couple of interesting restaurants, but not much else in the way of commerce. The headquarters of the motorcycle police brigade is among these streets, but that's not really a tourist attraction.

I'm filming things faster than I'm editing them, so I'm getting further and further behind on my video production. I'll have to try to speed up. With the perfect weather, though, it's hard to resist going outside whenever I'm not working. It relieves stress, a little bit.

More video, shopping galleries, assault, egg salad

I finished editing my brief video showing some of the shopping galleries in Paris. I've also added a Video Gallery to my Web site, showing a few of my videos. I'll add more as time passes. Of course, people could watch my videos by just going to my YouTube channel, but I actually get a lot more traffic on my Web site than I do on my YouTube channel.

This latest video is about shopping galleries, of which there are a great many in Paris. I'm not talking about shopping centers or shopping malls, but galleries, which are straight, narrow little indoor passages or alleys lined with shops. There are other names for them (sometimes they are called arcades, for example), but gallery is the term I usually use. Anyway, they were all the rage almost two hundred years ago, back in the 1800s. Today they've yielded to the large centers and malls, even in France, but Paris nevertheless retains a large number of shopping galleries that are still in business, even if they have a bit less traffic than they did two centuries ago.

I've only shown a handful in my video. The first, the Passage des Panoramas, is a popular gallery in the Opera district. Like most of these galleries, it contains restaurants and odd little shops. Odd in the sense that they are out of the ordinary, not weird. The Passage des Panoramas has stamp shops, for collectors, and some bookshops.

Across the boulevard, the Passage Jouffroy has more bookshops, a candy store, a fabulous little boutique that sells everything you could possibly want for miniatures (like dollhouses), a tiny hotel, and other things. This gallery is also in my video. The extension of this gallery across the street is yet another, smaller gallery, which I also show.

Other galleries in the video are the Passage de Choiseul, which is not doing so well these days, and the charming Galerie Vivienne, which is quiet but seems to be surviving okay.

There are tons of other galleries, but they are scattered all over town, so for now I've just provided a sampler.

I was going to show the Passage des 2 Pavillons, but I was assaulted by a cameraman (I kid you not) in the gallery and nearly fell down the stairs. This imbecile waved his hand in front of me as I stood at the top of the stairs preparing to descend with my camera recording (looking at the viewfinder and thus vulnerable to any surprise), and I nearly lost my balance. He was carrying a camera of his own, and had two people with him, one who looked like a journalist, and one carrying his tripod (probably the sound man). The recklessness of this assault—from a cameraman who should already know the risk, of all people—surpasses my understanding. I've included a picture of him here. Perhaps if he sees himself in this photo, he'll be stupid enough to complain about it, in which case I can identify him to file a criminal complaint of my own. Of course, in his zeal to assault me, he overlooked the fact that my camera was recording and made a record of the whole thing, which I've archived. Perhaps he forgot that you don't need a broadcast camcorder to make a video these days.

Rrrr … where was I? Well, I made some more egg salad. Of course, I never seem to get anything exactly right, so I messed up again. I boiled my eggs, and that went okay—I emptied a dozen eggs into a bowl, poked holes in the yolks, then nuked them for six minutes or so, and broke the resulting mass apart with a fork. Then I added paprika, dill, pepper, and what I thought was mayonnaise. Only it turned out to be Dijon mustard, so I now have the world's hottest egg salad. It would probably bother me if my senses of smell and taste still worked reasonably well; I know it makes my nose tingle.

The mustard jar and its contents looked just like the spiced mayonnaise that I had bought previously. After realizing my mistake, I looked closely at the jar. Sure enough, this one didn't say “Mayonnaise,” but then again, it didn't say anything at all. The word mustard was only written in small letters on the back. I guess mustards don't merit a label in France. I just assumed it was mayonnaise like the other kind I had bought before, since it looked identical. Oh, well. I don't know if I'll be able to finish the egg salad … it's powerful stuff now.

Fortunately, I also have peanut butter and jelly. The jelly isn't Concord grape jelly (Welch's) because that's too difficult and expensive to find and buy here. It's actually strawberry jam. But strawberry jam in France is delicious, so it goes pretty well with the peanut butter. The peanut butter is Skippy, imported from the U.S. Peanut butter is much easier to find in the average French grocery store than grape jelly.

April in Paris

It's April in Paris, and the weather is mostly the way it's supposed to be, except for a heat wave (20° F above normal), but heat waves are becoming the norm these days. Apart from the heat, the sky is blue and sunny, with a slight breeze.

There was some sort of activity outside yesterday making a horrendous racket. There has been construction on my street for what seems like years now, but this was even noisier than usual. It was so loud, in fact, that it was hard for me to hear music inside the house, even with headphones on. I discovered a note today on going outside that said some sort of construction would be done on the 6th that would make a lot of noise. Well, it sure did. I'm used to living with noise, as Paris is a noisy city, but that was ridiculous. Anyway, it's gone now.

Today I went for a walk after class … a long walk. However, I've been on longer walks than this. I must be in poor condition because I had to stop to rest once during the walk, even though I had also stopped to eat a hamburger and fries as well. Careful measurement with Google Maps reveals that I walked 24 kilometers, or about 15 miles. This is well below my record, and normally it should not have affected me, but I felt a bit tired upon arriving home. It was a slow walk, and I was on my feet for about ten hours, so maybe that contributed.

I walked to school, as usual, and then I walked to the Port de l'Arsenal after class, to take some video. From there I walked up the Canal Saint Martin, through the open market (there's an open food market on Thursdays), up along the canal, and finally ended up at the drawbridge just north of the Bassin de la Villette, the artificial 19th century lake through which the canal passes. From there, I walked back home, which literally means walking right across Paris. The nice weather made the time pass quickly. The pollution levels weren't too bad, either, and the air was very clear.

I got some reasonable video, so I'll edit that into something soon. I'm several videos behind in terms of editing, but I'll get it done eventually.

For dinner I had plain white bread with mayonnaise, a favorite (and cheap) snack of mine since childhood. When I was little, it was usually Best Foods mayonnaise, but here in France there are a dozen different kinds of mayonnaise, all of them with more complex tastes than the plain white stuff in the U.S. I picked one that had some sort of spices in it, and it tastes pretty good, as best I can tell (since my sense of smell and taste are both very weak these days).

I had some egg salad, too, which I also made myself a few days ago. I think it probably tastes very good as well, even if I can't really taste or smell it myself.

I still worry about the temperature, though. Today broke a record that had been set in 1896. In fact, the temperature today matched the normal annual high for Paris, which is usually reached in the hottest part of August and amounts to 24° C, or 75° F. If the temperature didn't go past that, that would be fine, but if it's already that hot in April, what will it get up to in August? That's what worries me.

On the way to the Port de l'Arsenal (a small pleasure harbor at the south end of the Canal Saint Martin and the Bastille), I really noticed how clear the air was. Sometimes the pollution becomes so routine that you just assume your eyes aren't what they used to be when everything looks misty. But then a day like this comes along and you realize it wasn't your eyes at all, but just pollution.

I also passed some sort of demonstration by Doctors of the World, an organization that I won't touch with a ten-foot pole. There are two medical NGOs with very similar names, Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) and Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde). The first concentrates specifically on medical assistance to the needy in the Third World, the second concerns itself with politics as well as medicine, which is why I avoid it. Doctors of the World was started by a politician who left Doctors without Borders when the organization refused to take a political interest in its activities. I don't like politics, either, so I only donate to Doctors without Borders.

Watching for the Gestapo, reservoirs, and secret spots

On the way home today, I decided to drift down the rue Lauriston, which descends from the small hill on which the Arc de Triomphe stands down towards the rue Saint Didier. This street has a sinister place in history, because the German Gestapo had its French headquarters here during the Occupation. Unfortunately I couldn't remember the street address as I walked down the street, since I had turned down the street on a whim. I later verified that the evil address was at number 93, where there is a small plaque explaining the unsavory past of the location.

Contrary to Hollywood portrayals, the Gestapo was not a large organization. It got most of its information not from spying on people, but from denunciations provided with enthusiasm by the Germans. This fact is played down a lot because modern-day Germany doesn't like to think about the willingness with which it helped the Gestapo to do its dirty work. The situation was similar in France, where the Gestapo depended a great deal on French informants—of which there were all too many. I've looked at some of the letters sent by ordinary French people to the Gestapo to squeal on their neighbors, and they're pretty disgusting. Of course, not all French people under the Occupation were denouncing their brethren to the Germans … but the Gestapo did receive about five million such letters during the few years of its activity in France. The Gestapo also scraped the very bottom of French society for various species of low-life that it could engage as informants, some of whom entered the history books as famous losers.

But fortunately that is all in the past (I hope). The building where the Gestapo worked is quite innocent today. I wonder if any ghosts inhabit the inside.

Also on this streeet, at one point you walk along a really high stone wall, with no windows or doors of any kind. In Paris, this usually means that the wall encloses one of two things: a prison—of which there is only one, the Santé prison on the Left Bank—or a water reservoir, of which there are several. The one on this street is the reservoir de Passy, which covers almost a city block. If you didn't know there was a reservoir behind the wall, you probably wouldn't guess … after all, the French love high fences. This reservoir is unusual in that it's open on top, whereas the others have a roof over the water. However, it's not open to the public, so you can't just climb up there and look at it. But there are still pictures of it on the Web, just the same (there are pictures of everything on the Web).

Other reservoirs in town include the one at the top of the Montmartre butte and the one next to the Parc Montsouris. Tourists in Montmartre walk right past the reservoir without having any idea that it's there. The one near the Parc Montsouris is also very discreet. Both are covered. The Montsouris reservoir supposedly has the best-tasting water in the city, although all Parisian water is tasty (in the sense that it's very pure and has no taste or smell). I think my apartment is supplied by the Montsouris reservoir, but I'm not sure. If I let the water run from the faucet for a minute or two, it gets very cold and tastes very nice. I have to let it run for a bit because the pipes in the building are still made of lead and I don't trust them.

The discreet presence of these reservoirs emphasizes another thing about Paris (and about other large cities as well): you never know quite what's behind a door or wall in the city. Lots of buildings in the city have interior courtyards accessible only to the buildings' residents, for example. Even my building has a courtyard—although I've never seen it, having never ventured out the back of the building. In fact, I've never been above my own floor in my building. I think it has seven or eight floors, but I'm not even sure.

Anyway … another example of this is the Promenade Plantée on the east side of town. From the ground, it looks like a long building with arcades beneath, in which there are many shops (mostly artsy shops). You might not ever guess that it's actually part of an old elevated railway, even after climbing the stairs to the deck above and walking down it for a while. There are no tracks left, just sidewalks, benches, and gardens. It continues east for miles, from the Bastille to the eastern city limit. All pedestrian and very nice on the upper level, but you wouldn't even know it's there if you didn't look for it.

And then there's another park on the west side, which I won't name because I like to keep sneaky secrets. It's a public park but it's surrounded by buildings, so unless you know exactly where the entrance is, you can't find a way in. Indeed, you won't even know it's there, since it's not visible from outside the park itself. Very discreet. But still open to all. About the only people who know about it are people from the neighborhood.

There are several parks like this in my own neighborhood. One is hidden behind a very high and forbidding wall that looks like something that would surround a military installation. And other is very tiny and hidden among some buildings. Again, they are public, but when you go inside you almost get the feeling that you are trespassing somehow. Many public parks are surrounded by tall, spiky iron fences, which enhances the sensation of trespassing, even though they are open to all.

And there there are shopping galleries. (I'm working on a small video showing a few of these, by the way.) There are modern shopping centers and galleries in Paris, but there are also small ones that are sometimes 200 years old or more. They also have spiky iron gates at the entrances, but in fact they are completely open shopping malls with shops inside. It's just that they were built in the 19th century, when styles were different. Most of them are small and narrow with frosted-glass skylights and quirky little shops inside. They are extremely well hidden. You can walk right past most of them and never notice them. Tourists don't visit them unless their guide books explicitly mention them. I still haven't found even a significant fraction of all the galleries that exist in Paris, but I know many of the more famous ones.

Anyway, I'll post my video of some of these galleries as soon as I've finished with it.

Spatulas, cigarette butts, and hygiene

I went to E. Dehillerin a few days ago, the Parisian Mecca of professional food equipment, and got a spatula. I used to have a big wooden spoon that I used to stir rice, but one day it fell out of the dish rack and behind the refrigerator, where I couldn't get to it without moving the washing machine. So I bought another one at the supermarket, a cheapie. Unfortunately, it started to deteriorate after a while, so a couple of days ago, while I was in the neighborhood, I stopped at this fascinating store and got myself a wooden spatula of very nice quality for €4.97 (about $4,278,991 at the current exchange rate). As (lack of) luck would have it, a day after bringing it home, while it was still in the bag, I banged against the dish rack and the other spoon fell behind the refrigerator, inaccessible. I suppose that one day there will be a small hill of trapped wooden cooking implements piled behind the fridge. But since I had my smooth new spatula, it was okay, and I could still make rice.

Anyway, this store is very cool, apart from the apparent lack of a second fire exit as required by city ordinance (I have a thing about proper fire exits, as my trillions of readers may have noted from previous posts). It has been around for a very long time, and it has just about anything a professional cook or chef de cuisine might want. One occasionally sees chefs shopping while still in uniform, presumably because they've discovered that they need something urgently. The shop is open to all, however, and on the day I went, it was crowded mostly with tourists—and I suppose these were tourists who like to cook.

Since E. Dehillerin caters to the professional, some of the things it carries aren't very practical for home cooking enthusiasts. You can buy stainless steel pots the size of a water heater that can hold soup enough for a hundred of your closest friends, with giant spoons to match. But there are also many things that are useful to anyone, even someone with no cooking skill such as myself (the spatula I bought is an example). Some of the stuff is pretty cool, like silicone muffin molds that will stay flexible even at subfreezing temperatures and remain unaffected by even the hottest oven temperatures. They also have lots of tools that I can't identify, like sharp things, and things with holes and hinges. One of the mystery tools in the latter category turned out to be a garlic press, which I learned after a friend who went with me to the store identified it for me (she was vastly more competent at cooking than I am).

The items they sell are just piled in boxes. There are no fancy displays. You're expected to know what you want when you walk in. If you know what you want, chances are that they have it. The ground floor is crowded with shelves that hold all sorts of implements, like knives and spoons and things, and then the basement features really large items, like the aforementioned stainless gigapot.

The store also sells attractive and expensive items like huge copper pans for cooking fish. They're beautiful to look at, although I don't have a need to cook four-foot fish in my own pseudo-kitchen. They carry high-quality cast-iron stuff like Le Creuset as well. The emphasis is on functionality, though, not on things that look pretty when hanging unused on a hook.

For someone who likes to cook, this store is probably a bit like Disneyland. It has a lot of atmosphere, too, with its creaky wooden stairway down into the basement and all. The staff obviously specializes in dealing with professionals, but they are nice to everyone, and if you know approximately what you want and can describe it, they can often quickly isolate the utensil that you're looking for.

They do have a small selection of cheesy kitchen items, presumably to please the tourists. I think a lot of people come in and look around even though they don't really cook much, and the cute salt shakers and what-not are probably intended for them.

Moving right along … someone pointed out to me not long ago that French people have a tremendous tendency to throw cigarette butts all over the place, and while I was walking around yesterday, I realized that this is true. In front of every building of any size, and in front of bars and restaurants, there are metric tons of cigarette butts littering the ground. This is true even when no other litter is in evidence, which implies that for every piece of paper or candy wrapper that French people toss on the ground, they toss a dozen or so cigarette butts. Given how addicted many French people are to tobacco, plus the fact that they cannot legally smoke indoors, I guess this is understandable. The French are not prone to pick up after themselves, anyway. Fortunately, Paris has an army of street cleaners that struggle to clean up the mess early every morning—otherwise Parisians would be buried in their own garbage in 24 hours.

I was also reminded yesterday of the fact that France still lags a bit in hygiene practices with respect to the rest of Europe. I went to the food court at the Louvre to buy some pizza and a cannolo, and felt very irritated by the fact that there are no restrooms or lavatories there. No way to wash your hands before eating, and no way to wash them after. If you want to wash your hands or use the toilet, you have to go to a different floor and pay money. I guess the idea is to give gastroenteritis as a free gift to as many Louvre visitors as possible.

And, by the way, the prices have skyrocketed at the Louvre since the coming of the Apple Store. The highway-restaurant chain that operates almost all the restaurants in the food court today charges caviar prices for extremely mediocre food. Each slice of dry, hard, old pepperoni pizza was €6. Pizza, a cannolo, and some mineral water came to €16.90, which is almost 90 minutes of salary for me. Maybe I should have just bought a cannolo and nothing else, which was expensive enough. Or I could have gone to the McDonald's there, which sells hamburgers for €1 each.

Paris Noise, and the Marais

Movies set in Paris typically take many liberties with their portrayal of the city, just as they do with any of the other great cities of the world. One of the things that directors remove from any location shot in Paris (and other densely populated cities as well, I presume) is noise.

Paris is a noisy city. It's fabulously photogenic, no doubt about that, and it's a great place to live in a great many ways. But one thing that is almost constantly present in Paris is noise, and almost all of it comes from motor vehicles.

As a longtime resident of Paris, I don't really notice the noise. In fact, the street outside my apartment is noisy practically all the time, except in the wee hours of the morning. When you walk down any major street in Paris, the traffic noise is often so loud that it's hard to hear a person next to you talking, and you both instinctively raise your voices. But when people make movies of Paris, all this noise is stripped out. Skilled foley artists replace the real noise with the kind of sound that people would expect in romantic movies about Paris, and/or they overlay it with music, and of course dialogue.

The difference can be striking. I specifically remember a very poorly edited scene in the old teeny-bopper film La Boum, a very successful French movie set in Paris. In the scene, a man on the street says to the people around him “Moi, je monte!” (“I'm going up!"), meaning that he's going to go up to an apartment where a party is being held. Up to the point where he starts to speak, there's virtually no ambient noise, except for some unrealistic footstep sounds added in post-production. But as he speaks, the original sound recorded during the shot is used for the man's dialog—and you can hear tons of traffic noise in the background. Then, as soon as he closes his mouth, it's silent again, except for the footsteps, courtesy of the foley artists (sound effects editor).

I saw the movie when I was very young, and I had not been to Paris, and the contrast in sound struck me as odd. Today, though, living in Paris, there's nothing surprising about it (although the editing could have been done better). There is a constant, perpetual, eternally irritating noise of traffic just about everywhere in Paris, and it's very hard to escape. You get used to it in person, but when you record something—like the modest videos I've been making the past few days—the noise seems overwhelming in the video. In fact, in videos I've been making, you can often hear the clicking of excess noise on the videos (digital recording makes clicking noises when sounds are too loud, as opposed to the distortions you used to hear on old analog recordings).

What can I do? I'm not sure. I'm rather chary of narrating the videos myself, as I cannot stand the sound of my voice. I can remove the original sound, but then there is only silence. Putting music over it would require paying royalties (YouTube provides a music dubbing service, but it comes with many restrictions). I tend to ignore the noise, as it's familiar and I ignore it in real life, but in some cases the screeching and honking and ear-splitting noise of scooters distracts from the visuals. Sometimes I'm just amazed by the sheer loudness of this noise when I play back videos during editing or viewing.

Anyway … these past few days have been unseasonably warm and very clear and cloudless. The only problem is that this causes pollution alerts, reaching levels of 8 or so (on a scale of 10, with 10 being the worst). Not a good time to go for walks, and yet the weather otherwise beckons, so if one has the time it's hard to resist the temptation to walk around a bit.

I've finished my editing of another short video showing some of the Marais, a very trendy district of Paris known for its shops, restaurants, expensive apartments, and high concentration of homosexual residents, as well as its small but important Jewish quarter, in the rue des Rosiers. Marais means marsh, but the Marais hasn't been marshland for eight hundred years.

I filmed the place des Vosges, a large and beautiful, 400-year-old square that has been very chichi and expensive ever since King Henri IV built it in 1605. On nice days, it's really popular. On nice days, you see how densely populated the city is, because everyone goes outside. I did this video on a Sunday, and the streets were literally shoulder to shoulder with people in much of the Marais (as you can see by watching the video, hint-hint). The rue des Francs Bourgeois, one of the main streets through the district, is just one huge mass of people. Any cars attempting to get through on a day like this will need half an hour or more to travel one mile—they're better off braving the heavy traffic on the major avenues instead.

Inside the Marais is the rue des Rosiers, a street with a large and conservative Jewish population. I like the street because it's filled with places to eat, including L'As du Fallafel, which makes a fabulous vegetarian falafel (a kind of sandwich made from a hollow piece of bread stuffed with veggies) for five euro. There was a huge, huge line in front of the place today, so I gave up on buying a falafel, even though I craved one. Falafel actually refers to the veggie fritters inside the sandwich, but most people use it for the entire sandwich.

That's not the only place that gives one the munchies on this street. Korcarz is a place that has all kinds of meals and deserts. They make a great cheese and lox sandwich, and delicious strudel. Just walking down this street makes me gain weight.

Anyway, I filmed that street, and by then it was getting dark, so I didn't do the rest of the Marais. Someday I'll make a proper film of this district. My videos right now are kind of haphazard; I have a lot of crises demanding my attention and it's hard to concentrate. Walking helps to relieve stress a little.

I'm still annoyed by double vision, especially at a distance. It's perplexing. My eyes move in all directions without a problem, so it doesn't seem like any nerve palsy or anything like that. Sometimes they snap into alignment abruptly, but at other times they stubbornly refuse to align on an object. Just one more thing to worry about. Oddly enough, it doesn't have too many practical effects, apart from a loss of depth perception, but it's just really irritating.

Paris in the spring

Well, spring arrived just after midnight today. The weather on Saturday had been quite chilly, but the weather on Sunday was vastly better, and today was even better. After finishing my morning class I went for a walk.

I filmed a minute or two of the Madeleine and the Opéra Garnier. I just uploaded that to YouTube as-is and released it to the public domain. Maybe someone can use it. Unlike many people who dabble in creative endeavor, I have no delusions of grandeur and I don't see any reason to assert copyright over a simple 90-second clip of traffic in front of a monument. I have to laugh sometimes at people who produce absolute garbage video or photos and then go to great extremes to protect their masterpieces, as if anyone would even want to steal their junk. In my case, there are trillions of people photographing the Madeleine and the Opera, so why in the world would anyone want my footage specifically? At least by giving it away I increase the chance that someone might make use of it; certainly nobody would be prepared to pay for it.

I noticed on Friday night that I was seeing double. That has never happened to me before, so it's a bit worrisome. I did some research and the symptoms resemble divergence insufficiency or paralysis (the latter is more serious than the former). I don't know what's causing it. It's a problem outdoors because things at a distance are doubled, but I don't have any trouble reading the monitor on my computer. It's very strange.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

I ran across a home movie of Montmartre today, filmed in the 1940s; I've embedded it here. I find it interesting because it so closely resembles my own video of the same area, taken just days ago.

“The more things change, the more they remain the same.” That's what the title of this post means, and it's certainly true in the case of these movies. Some of the places shown in the 1940s movie look exactly the same today. I recognize practically all the spots featured in the video. Some stores have changed, but their façades have not, nor has the layout of the tiny streets in Montmartre. People dressed differently (in a more ugly way, I think) back in the 1940s, and Paris looked a lot dirtier and poorer, and buildings were covered in soot (modern city ordinances have eliminated this by requiring regular cleaning). The standard of living was dramatically lower. But most of the basic stuff is the same.

It reminds me of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, in which he describes some of his early life in Paris (with some dramatic license). We don't have goats roaming the street's with their masters to provide fresh goat's milk any more, and buildings today are connected to municipal sewer systems for the most part, rather than cesspools, but most of the fundamental elements are the same. Of course, the cost of living has gone up even faster than the standard of living. But most of the places that Hemingway describes still exist today. Heck, there's a small, nondescript bakery on the rue de Richelieu that celebrated its two-hundredth birthday last year. In my hometown in the U.S., nothing is more than about 130 years old, and practically everything is less than 20 years old, and much of the city looks nothing like it did even ten years ago.