Peculiarities | antropologi.info

Adieu again

Published on September 11, 2010 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Distinctions, Peculiarities, Places

The clouds hang low over Oslo Airport. Typical nice autumn weather, the captain called it. The weather is not necessarily so nice in Paris either, so I’ll not jump to any easy comparison…
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But these last weeks, the weather has been very nice in Paris, particularly the evenings and nights. And it was even not too bad when we early, early this morning left the flat and got on our way to the airport. It’s Saturday, and at the bakery (in the upper end of Rue Oberkampf, highly recommended! Their croissants au beurre are the kind that melt in your mouth), there are more noctambules (see this post) than morning birds dropping by. I stand behind a tired young man, leaning over the counter struggling to decide between an orange or apple juice to go with his pastry. The saleswoman keeps her cool and retains all the polite phrases, but she looks a bit apprehensively up at the hooded youth.

Outside, while the bars closed some hours ago, other cafés are opening their doors, putting out chairs and tables at the pavement. Most night wanderers seemed to disappear at dawn, and we get on the bus taking us across the city, Paris is awake. Eager students hop off in the university area, and I see shoppers pull their trolleys along to the street market already burgeoning of flowers, groceries and the rest.

Paris never sleeps, I thought when I went to the bakery in this intermediate zone between nightlife and early morning. Perhaps there are streets in Oslo which gradually transforms like this as well. Oberkampf, where I lived now, can in many respects be compared to Grünerløkka (which is close to where I live in Oslo), but how often does one see old, completely ordinary people sit down on more or less trendy cafés in Grünerløkka? There are plenty of elderly inhabitants in Oberkampf, talking part in the local life, as there are plenty of children going to school there in the morning. I think it is something there, which is more than an easy comparison; this mixing of old and young, of hip and ordinary, of noctambules and parents with pushchairs, that is weaving the distinctive fabric of the Parisian street life, giving it its very particular feel. Which I don’t even have to say that I miss.

In praise of the French bakery

Published on June 22, 2007 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Peculiarities

Perhaps the single best thing of living in France is their local bakery. During an ordinary week, I normally go to four different bakeries – all within 5 minutes walking distance – depending on what I want to eat. Now, I’ve just had what a particular bakery calls a pizza, but what is actually more of a quiche bottom filled well-cooked, sweet and tasty tomatoes, perfect amount of melted mozzarella and loads of basil (but without eggs as in a real quiche). They’ve got it at a quite big, old and prestigious looking bakery one block away from République. For dessert, I’ll have a spectacular green pistachio macron filled with raspberries and raspberry cream. It’s actually even better than it sounds!
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This bakery makes numerous different sandwiches and pies and salads the employees nearby drop by to buy for lunch. Most of them seem to go for a dessert as well.

Another bakery a little closer to my noisy watchtower (aka home) over rue du Faubourg du Temple, has excellent sesame or cereal baguettes. Also they have macrons which taste real pistachio and with this perfect balance between crispy and mellow texture, but these are not filled with pink raspberry cream but a heavier pistachio butter cream, I think.

At the bakery closest to home, I go for my morning croissant beurre, pain bûcheron (lumberjack bread…) and their honey soaked “Tunisian” (according to the baker) almond or pistachio cakes. On Wednesdays, they’re closed and then I go 3 minutes up the road to get an even more buttery croissant, cereal bread and a feuilleté chêvre – butter dough with a large chink of melted goat cheese, tomato sauce and herbes de provence mix on and some kind of vanilla cream cake with loads of strawberries or other red berries on.

Sometimes, French bakeries are all it takes to make life worth living. But of course, there is more to life, and one can almost always find an interesting as well as beautiful spot to eat one’s little wonder-of-everyday-life artisan food. Right now, I’m sitting at a footbridge over the canal, looking at a gang of preadolescent ducks paddling around. Along this particular stretch of the canal, there are still 12 of the tents of the homeless left. They’ve put chairs and tables outside, so it looks like a campsite, of the more rugged type though, with a diverse flora of rugged campers. And more or less intermingled, other lunchers are sitting down with their lunch bags. In the evening and weekends, when the weather is nice, people come here to drink and picnic (there is so much concern about food in this country – “have you eaten?” is the second most common question I get after “how are you?” when I meet up with someone, but that’s another story).

I’ve heard that the number of bakeries in France is falling drastically, along with other small local petits commerçants. However, compared to high streets in Britain and even so more in Norway, the chain stores have still not got monopoly.

Vivre ensemble after school time

Published on March 28, 2007 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Peculiarities, Politics, Spaces

The playground 10 days ago, before spring came for real

Le square français was the second post I wrote on this blog, but as I’ve spent a sunny spring afternoon on one again, I just have to share my enthusiasm once more.
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After school, parents and grandparents in France as well as Norway, pick up their small children. Instead of going straight home, as is normally the case where I come from, many here spend an hour or so at the local playground before they go home to make dinner, several hours after the north European equivalent.

This is a square in Belleville, not so far away from the school where the Chinese grandfather was brutally brought in by the police a couple of days ago, when he came to pick up his two grandchildren after school. As the headmaster was also put in police custody for seven hours for protesting against the arrest, the brutality of Sarkozy’s measures against the sans-papiers has provoked such a widespread political debate that it has reached the election campaign. (For better of for worse…).

This playground in Belleville is the extreme opposite of Sarkozy’s election campaign – which has gone as far as proposing a Ministry for National Identity and Integration… – because here sheer coexistence exists. (A frequent critique I hear of Sarkozy, is that he divides the population, the outright opposite of the sought after vivre ensemble, living together). There is not one skin colour or hair colour missing here in the square – but as we are in Belleville, I hear almost as much Arabic as French amongst the parents, and a Swedish looking father was just saying Yalla! to his two blonde daughters. Judging from parents and children’s dressing – as well as behaviour to some extent – there is a thorough social mix as well.

It pleases me to see this mixed local community, but the phenomenon of coming together like this, of children and parents, on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, just as part of the routine of everyday life, pleases me even more. It’s such a sociable, nice little everyday thing to do… Hanging around for unreasonably long time in whatever place on earth one can find to watching humans interact, is a habit I’ve inherited from my father (biologist, with interest in every aspect of nature). When I tell him about the French square (perhaps as an unconscious attempt to prepare him so he won’t be too surprised if I end up moving to France in order to provide a good growing up environment for my eventual children :) ), he asks me if I think it’s Mediterranean cultural trait. It might very well be, since in Greece and Spain as well, children, youth and grownups come together on public places and spend time side-by-side and together, long past sleeping time for Scandinavian children. But rather than being Mediterranean, I think actually that it’s the climate in Scandinavia making us standing out from most other societies in the world. (I think we can also include the Anglo-Americans to this. A survey I’ve heard cited on the radio here in France several times recently shows that scepticism and even fear of teenagers, based on the lack of contact between teenagers and adults, are far more widespread in Britain that other countries in Europe). And it’s not a Scandinavian exception I’m particularly fond of.

The playground 10 days ago, before spring came for real

Le square français was the second post I wrote on this blog, but as I've spent a sunny spring afternoon on one again, I just have to share my…

Art in the suburbs

Published on February 15, 2007 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Distinctions, Music, literature, arts..., Peculiarities, Places, Spaces

Slameur and musicians in a forum culturel in the suburb

Following the Parisian slam scene immediately led me to the suburbs. During my 9 months long first stay here, I crossed la pheripherique (ring road) only five times (except to go to the airport). Three times in the summer I attended open microphone slam events; two in Saint Denis (by Stade de France which one can se on the way to the airport) and one in Fontenay-sous-Bois (to the south east). Saint Denis is well connected to the metro system, Fontenay-sous-Bois is not, and it was a true galère to get there, according to one I travelled with. (One of our adventures dans la galère, I recounted here in Nouvelle France).
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Before I discovered the slam phenomenon, I went extra muros only twice, both with a friend visiting from Norway. Partly we wanted to have a look at the places where the youth were so angry, partly we went traditional sightseeing. In Saint Denis we dropped by at the famous basilica there where all the French kings have been crowned, and in Val-de-Marne we went to Mac/Val, a contemporary arts museum.

It seems quintessential of for this state, built on the ideal of Enlightenment to the people, to put such avant-garde institutions far into suburbia. It costs (practically) nothing to enter, which is probably a way of encouraging the locals to come to this place. I think they succeeded to some degree. While the exhibition was rather playful, the restaurant was minimalist, in terms both of its interior and the food. Someone told me that the highbrow restaurant was an attempt at encouraging Parisians to take the trip. However, the atmosphere (and prises?) didn’t encourage the locals I observed to feel at home there. (I remember this incident, but I can no loner remember what made me think certain visitors were locals belonging to certain social strata –at the time, I obviously didn’t follow my own note-taking advise and described instead of categorised….)

To get to this museum, one takes a metro line to its final destination (Choisy – Chinatown, in fact, which we discovered also made it a poor target for our angry youth expedition – perhaps the sino-français haven’t yet become second or third generation on the dole?), and then walk or take a bus even further into the (sub)urban sprawl.

The same travelling procedure, I’ve followed several times the last three weeks. First, I take the metro all the way to its terminus, then I go on by feet, bus or tramway – through names of places one remembers from the November ‘05 riots –, until I am at a Place de la Liberation or Place de la Résistance…(I’ll leave these interesting place names, full of national remembrance, for another post), where I find some more or less grandiose cultural centre where all kinds of experimental artistic activities take place. The slam poetry is not at all seen as an experimental activity, but rather to “invite the street in and listen to it”.

In one of these places, Le Blanc-Mesnil, the whole affair appeared slightly absurd to me: Outside the very grandiose Forum culturel there were groups of predominantly black youth dressed hip-hop style inside, well, the percentage of black hip-hop style was not very high.

The Norwegian arts scene is probably one of the least elitist in the world, while the French is probably quite high on the other end of the spectrum. So, while I find a bit bewildering the time and place to perform some rather experimental jazz jam or modern ballet or whatever, the French seem to react if it is completely normal.

Slameur and musicians in a forum culturel in the suburb

Following the Parisian slam scene immediately led me to the suburbs. During my 9 months long first stay here, I crossed la pheripherique (ring road) only five times (except to go…

Theatre: “In our full conscience and honesty”

Published on October 10, 2006 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Music, literature, arts..., Peculiarities

Sunday I went to see a poetry performance at a theatre: AC! En nos âmes et consciences (“In our full conscience/honesty”) – Since the audience don’t participate and perform their own texts, it’s not slam, as the two poet performers explicitly told us yesterday. The distinction between slam sessions (democratic and interactive) and poetry shows is important and stressed by many artists. However, many of the recent newspaper articles on slam don’t seem to get this distinction for some reason. –
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Except from this important point, a lot of the show reminded of slamming: the personal – not intimate, but somehow authentic…–expressions, texts about politics, love, the importance of sharing the spoken word and particularly the enthusiastic and somehow anarchic vibe. I find a strong element of popular resistance in the slam sessions; there is an urge to express oneself, to create a space, to fight back… I don’t know exactly how to describe it in words yet. We discussed yesterday if the play was optimistic, and we concluded I think that it wasn’t (the political situation at the moment is not really optimistic…), but it is however full of willpower and joie de vivre.

A couple of weeks ago I saw theatre play in Norway, at the fringe theatre Black Box: God hates Scandinavia by the group Sons of Norway (English on myspace here). The two plays have nothing in common, except that they were written and preformed by two young people: two young men in Paris, two young women in Oslo (despite the masculine ring of the group name), and that both echoed important aspects of the socio-political atmosphere in the two countries. I had a hard time yesterday trying to explain how two whores in hell discussing various grotesque ways to die could be a metaphor of the feeling one sometimes can get in the petroleum bubble that is my native country. I did not succeed in my explanation; perhaps it’s a question of sentiments not easily verbalised. The same is of course the case with the anarchic and enthusiastic sentiments one can be part of at the better of the slam soirées: I’ll have a hard time putting this atmosphere into words on a piece of paper.

Sunday I went to see a poetry performance at a theatre: AC! En nos âmes et consciences (“In our full conscience/honesty”) – Since the audience don’t participate and perform their own texts, it’s not slam, as the two poet performers…