Thanks for supporting the US Postal Service; ou L’insupportable bureaucratie française; or Interwebz 2.0

[Find yourself!]

A handful of cards and pictures are arranged my wall in an almost random, overlapping pattern so as to use the least amount tacks as possible (I only have one hundred, you know). Forming an ever-growing mass of vertical and horizontal rectangles, it is slightly oval, overall. Under all this, on my desk, there sits a tiny golden box of matches, a drinking glass clinging to a decaying harvest of mid-Fall's last wildflowers, pages of notes on geometric area formulas or strategies for essay responses and an owl made of wax, whose fate as of right now is not yet determined--he may yet suffer a beautifully slow death which, with the help of combustion, emanates from the nature his very being, something that flows straight through his core! (Get it? Candle-related humor: a genre of slow burners whose hilarity only waxes with time!) Needless to say, I love all the mail. The cards, letters and postcards have been a saving grace for me in terms of feeling connected with faraway friends and family.

Someday in the distant future, though, I may have to take down the beautiful collage that is the proof of my friends' and family's support of the failing US Postal Service and reassemble it on the wall of my new room, in my newly renovated apartment in Building E of la Cité Scolaire Brocéliande, where I can enjoy the pleasures of unbridled internet access. However this day, my friends, is far from being near as there are still holes in the ceiling of this elusive Building E apartment, since renovation work at the school is everything but fast (e.g. loud, long-lasting, a large physical presence, very glassy, not-too-impressive, etc.), and because this collage is just too damn fabulous to see the destruction of its present form.

Translation: I won't be getting internet of my own any time soon here in Guer—clearly not until after the New Year, if that's even a reasonable estimate after the latest discussion with a supportive, but not really catalytic M. le Proviseur (headmaster). All is lost, Skype users.

And so, we need a change in perspective (lest I go crazy). Let us rather believe, friends and family, that one day in the middle of this ever-approaching foggy and rainy Breton winter, the clouds will weaken their miserly hold on the sky’s coveted daytime hours, and the sun, in his not-quite-pale-enough-yellow-to-be-considered-eggshell yellow track suit, will peak out his head and reveal to us Language Assistants the splendor of a standard of living in which one can find outlandish and often humorous stories of fictional encounters with Bill Murray at the tip of one’s fingers. That day will be a glorious day, friends. And full of pictures of kittens.

So keep up the postcards, the letters and stamps, and I will keep up with the replies. I have regular email access five days a week, so feel free to use that if you feel disconnected from good ol’ me in the meantime.

Until then, with love and international postage,

Adam

A not so American Thanksgiving: Lyon

I spent this past Thanksgiving weekend in the wonderful city of Lyon, France’s third largest city, but second largest cultural center. Known for its gastronomic prowess, for its racial diversity and racial tension and its two parallel rivers, whose confluence sits on the city’s southwest corner, Lyon is also the current home of two of my best friends from college, Robert and Alexis. I arrived in Lyon on Friday at noon and spent the long weekend there, leaving by 5pm on Monday and returning to Guer in time for work on Tuesday morning. Another friend, Meghan, from the 2009-10 Evergreen program “Dark Romantics” (through which I traveled to France that Spring, with Robert and Alexis), came down from Paris to join us for the festivities.

The not-so-American Thanksgiving feast occurred on Friday evening, and consisted of a roasted chicken for the others, mashed potatoes, a lentils-greens-tortellini-etc. thing I made, a jar of wonderful Ocean’s Spray Cranberry Smooth Sauce which Robbie found at an English grocery, pumpkin pie and many bottles of wine to go around. Two friends of Robbie and Alexis from the Alliance française, a Columbian gal and an Argentinean guy, (both amazingly nice and interesting people) joined us for the meal, making for a cozily crowded evening in the cute little apartment on the first floor of a building whose goddamn front door opens with a 5-inch long skeleton key, notshittingyouitisthatcute. With a proper giving-thanks ritual performed by each person before the meal, with much wine consumed, and with a heated debate about OccupyWallSt. in English (whoops!) somewhere in between, all can fairly say it was a successful evening.

On Saturday, us four Americans slept off our food comas (sleeping off a coma, say whaaaaaat?) and then spent the entire afternoon (I’m talking four or five hours) at La Sucrière, a converted former sugar factory located at the confluence of Lyon’s two rivers, and now home to one of four sites making up the city’s Biennale d’Art Contemporain, a (you guessed it) biennial festival of contemporary art. In short, it was incredible. Containing paintings, three-dimensional pieces of many media, short films and performance pieces, the factory’s three stories made for a perfect venue. As evidence of the building’s former life, even the spiral metal supply chutes, cutting vertically through all three floors in tight, aging corkscrews, seemed an appropriate part of atmosphere. There, among many, many other pieces, we saw a staging of possibly the shortest play ever written (I’m talking ten seconds), Samuel Beckett’s Breath, as well as an amazing modern choreography/theater piece, set to occasional classical music performed by a live string quartet, in a cave-like artificial pond-fountain installation.

Later that evening, after aperitifs with a neighbor, we went out on the town. Drinking in the delights of early winter until the early morning hours, we walked the wintry streets back to the apartment, arms linked six across. The next day and a half was spent less busily, over many small cups of coffee: Robbie cut my hair, he and I arranged a guitar and two-voice version of the opening track off our album EVES (it’s a capella on the record), we said goodbye to Meghan on Sunday afternoon, we made vin chaud (a mulled wine concoction sold by bars and street venders throughout France during the winter months), and I somehow acquired 18 hours of brand new, never-before-heard music. After making plans to celebrate New Years Eve together, I said goodbye to my two fellow Americans and found myself back in Guer, back to work in the high school. And somehow, it’s already been a week since I was in Lyon. Funny how that works.

Speaking of holiday plans, I’m definitely looking forward to my brother coming to visit for ten days over the holidays—it’s his first time in France, wooooooo! He arrives the same day that I take the GRE in Paris (bon courage); we will spend Christmas in England with a friend from camp, Cheryl, and then travel throughout Europe or France, before he leaves just short of the New Year. In addition, for one week at the end January, my two roommates and I will be chaperones for a 6^th grade snow trip to the French Alps, and plans for serious travel are a-brewing for this coming spring with both Robbie and another best friend Everett, who will be studying abroad in southern Germany.

And now, some self-directed words of encouragement:

Dear Adam, study harder for the GRE, you asshole. It’s in three weeks!

Fancy hats and well-worn shoes,

Adam

P.S.

Petites aventures, romanticism, more updates to come

Hello. Sorry for the lack of updates, I’m not as good at this as I had hoped.

C’est parti:

Red wine in a white glass jar and a sandwich of gouda and camembert on a day old baguette: I am enjoying what zhey kowl een fraynch un pique-nique. Pleasantly surprised at having found myself here, I squint at the waning sun's reflection on an all but stagnant stream or pond or creek just outside Guer proper. These days the sun seems to start yawning, yearning for sleep, at about 3pm even if it knows its day is not done for another three hours. Among a scattering of small, lobed oak leaves, brown and dry, I stretch out on the large mossy stepping stones that allow one to cross this still body of water, and I listen as the birds declare their living presence. Every few minutes a slight breeze tricks me into believing that the stream is flowing, though, audibly, the rustle of the leaves above betrays the stillness of the water below. Clad in the Standard Adam Fleischmann Biking Gear® of UnderArmor compression shorts under black cut off jeans and a hat with a flipped up brim, I have somehow found a small stint of real forest, probably no bigger than 3 sq. km. I was led here on this unseasonably warm Saturday by a waking and biking path that continues for about 26km all together, cut in half by the village of Guer. The forest trail that split off from that path and led me here to my stepping stones and my still creek and my lunch, continues up and to the west, spluttering to a sudden halt at the Chappelle St. Etienne, a tenth century church and priory settled in between farms, the smell of cows and the distant sound of a hunter's missed attempt with a shotgun.

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It is little solitary adventures like this which have for now kept me content with living in middle of the countryside and which keep at bay that melancholy, digital yearning for a city, where there's actually shit to do. But perhaps I wouldn't feel any urge to write something like this if I lived in a place with so much external stimulation. Or maybe, instead, my inspiration for writing and my tendency to romanticize would take shape in descriptions of visits to art galleries, small, intimate concerts or late dinners out with new friends. (More of just that in the next post about my visit to Lyon, promise.)

However, I am convinced it is this tendency to romanticize, this romanticization itself, which makes any narrative portrayal of oneself--be it a diary entry, travel writing, memoir or blog thingy--interesting and readable; and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I've long recognized as an essential ingredient to any first person, semi-nonfiction piece of writing, some small notion of romanticization and, also, something else--what, pride? vanity? arrogance? or just self confidence? Got it: a romantic self-awareness matched with enough of a mastery of the elements of written English (thank you, GRE) to mask that self-consciousness and turn it into something universal, or unique or believable. I guess it’s an essential part of the medium, what makes it more than a list of things accomplished. And, boy-o-gee-golly, how I can’t stand the idea of cataloguing the quotidian.

Further, though, I’ve also noticed that by writing about (romanticizing?) elements of my everyday life here in France, I’m able to cement them in my memory and better appreciate them in hindsight. However, the moments in which I am most fully absorbed make the best content for writing. It’s like some perverted combination of Baudelaire’s desire to step back and view himself from a subjective distance and Zen Buddhism’s objective to literally always live in the moment. Or perhaps, more simply, a content little act of recognition for the awesomeness that is now, when now is happening.

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So, after having admitted to my recognition of the vanity and romanticization (or something) involved in this type of writing (and while we’re at it, the larger tendency of Americans to romanticize Europe in general), I'm going to (try to) continue this blog thingy, free of any onerous morals.

Sorry for the lack of updates, my small readership.
All of the above is probably just some reticent expression of latent guilt involving my hate of tourism. Or something about Freud or something.

À la prochaine (bientôt, je vous avoue),

Adam

Happy Fall from Guer

Fall has settled in here at the edge of the Forêt Brocéliande. And I am definitely feeling it's presence. I came across this stint of yellow trees the other day when I was running. I came back the next day, to photograph it, and it had lost some of its vigor in the previous night's storm. Still pretty awesome though. With my initial reactions, the day before:

**Click the image for the actual photo--formatting is messed up on the blog.

it was as if 12,000 yellow canaries stood in a line and simultaneously exploded to create a singular yellow tunnel on a forest path, slightly downhill. it was as if spring had broke in a forest buried under 10 meters of snow, and as the ice began to melt, the forest filled her lungs with hot yellow air and blew a tunnel through the trees. it was as if she changed her mind, the forest; her favorite color became not green, but yellow. wet yellow. and then it was gone.

Also, I made an Autumn playlist. I really like it.

Going to Rennes tomorrow to see The Cat Empire, getting to Lyon for Thanksgiving-ish and Robbie/Alexis is coming together and I'm kicking ass in MMA class. Life's not so bad, eh?

Love,
Adam

First Post from France 2011

For this first attempt, I’ve collected fragments from notebooks, letters, emails and postcards to friends and family, which, I think I can say, sum up my first month living in France (I hope I’m not breaking anyone’s trust in my sincerity by cutting up what I wrote to you and pushing it on the internet, friends. I still meant it for you.)

I don’t know if it was lack of sleep, dehydration, or the dry, recycled air of the plane’s cabin stealing its way into my lungs, but in a state of half-asleep reverie that night I missed you so hard I ached. It wasn’t until an hour before landing at CDG, when the civil war drums of “Perth,” the opening track off Bon Iver’s recent s/t, seemed to announce the arrival of morning in Paris, that it hit me what sort of journey I had hastily begun earlier that day; and it wasn’t until track three that I realized all would be okay.

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I work about twelve hours a week here. The rest of my week is generally spent trying to find time and motivation to study for the GRE, doing errands (which always takes a while without a car), trying to catch up on the happenings of the real world (which is tedious with limited internet access), and preparing for my classes. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have an MMA course at the military school next door—I really lucked out with the chances of that happening. My hours are often spread throughout a day, with a gap of one to three hours between classes, or sometimes I only have classes in the morning, so working just a few hours often takes up half a day or an entire day.

The school itself, in response to Catholic resistance and a need for a school for the children of military officers, was built out here in the boonies in the 1970s, the era of the renowned “Modern” style of architecture (ring a bell, Greeners?). Following suit, all the buildings are drab, concrete rectangles of scholastic seriousness. Joy!

I work with high school age people from the French equivalent of Freshman/Sophomores to post-Baccalaureate, kind of community college-ish, but more job-oriented, students of 18 to 22—my age. I have only half the class each week, for 55-minutes, so my work is in two-week cycles. It’s an interesting mix of levels of English ability and various levels of self-consciousness in using their spoken English, with the younger students often more willing to speak than the kids closer to my age!

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Outside of what I've been doing: how I've been. I miss people, connectivity: feeling connected with people’s lives. There are days when I'm fed up with the tedious little details of working and living at a (French?) high school, and would like to vent to a friend, in English on Skype, but can't. There are times when I tell myself I should drink less, and spend my money on honest things, and other times when all I want is a strong drink. There are feelings that I’ve felt before and there are those that are new, and not always pleasant smelling. Yet, too, there are moments, frozen, when I can but stand, slack jawed, staring at a piece of stone, at how tangible, how old it is, and how important it must have been for people so long ago to have moved something so large. There are nights when I lie awake in bed, starting at a bare light bulb, feeling isolated deep in the geography of a foreign land, and there are nights when I drink from 0.39€ half-liter cans of German lager, playing cards with the roommates and I laugh and laugh and laugh.

My roommate Jimmy is thirty years old but this is really his first incidence of spending any time away from home, and he misses Piura, Peru, he tells me, like I miss burritos, Streets to Ride, your smells and crinkled brows.

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Send me letters and postcards, friends. Draw me pictures. They will paper my walls, and I will stand, slack jawed, staring at pieces of paper, at how tangible, how real they are, and how important they must have been for people so far away to have sent them here.

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P.S.

Cinema

Whereas most of the movies I watch are 80s action hits or quirky 90s comedies on VHS; disregarding the fact that I find myself using space on my hard drive to store weird artsy and/or French films that I specifically scour the interwebs for before forgetting about them and finally watching them 3 months later; not to mention that I rarely, rarely go out to see them in the theaters, I really like the feature-length film as an art form. And sometimes, randomly, I get stoked on film.

Here is a review of the film HANNA from BadassDigest. It's from the director Joe Wright, who did Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, but as BadassDigest cites,

With Hanna, as good an action movie as anyone has made in the last ten years, Wright proves that he’s not going to be stuck in some sort of artsy-fartsy, vaguely chick film box.

Which is funny because Hanna is kind of artsy-fartsy and more than vaguely a chick film, but it’s one that kicks so much ass, is so exciting and thrilling and awesome, that many folks might simply miss the fact that Wright didn’t just make a really good action film, he made a really good film, with resonant themes about growing up and characters who are defined beyond their ability to kill with their bare hands.

It's got a sort of Princess Mononoke vibe to it, crossed with The Bourne Identity and the Chemical Bros are doing the soundtrack. Anyway, here's the trailer:

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Sidenote:

Saorise (pronounced "sear sha"!) is probably the prettiest name I have heard in forever. Those Irish. And their pretty names.


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Also, disregarding all previous statements, I will always dote on Natalie Portman and thus two weeks ago I finally say Black Swan (as I'm the last person ever to have not seen this film) and soon I will be seeing Your Highness.

This movie strikes home for me in many ways, including, but limited to: my penchant for quests and comedies about said quests (see: Princess Bride), magic, R-rated comedies, Natalie Portman (see above), the mannerisms and voice (and apparently the quill--he wrote this movie!) of the lovely and always hilarious Danny McBride, and lastly, slow motion action shots.

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"The individual has collapsed, and language with him."

"People are scandalized, as they ought to be.

The apparent frivolity of 'Friday' is only its most cunning aspect, a bubble-gum Trojan horse containing a radical text throwing itself against the gears of a death-bound society. And in Ms. Black’s voice we hear the full cry of a revolutionary age, Benghazi echoing across Orange County, the ancient wail of all who have ever wanted more."

So Rebecca Black's "Friday" has gone viral and all that shit.
But instead criticizing Ark Music Factory and all its evilness, I'd like to post this amazing article by The Awl's Dana Vachon, entitled "Arms So Freezy: Rebecca Black's 'Friday' As a Radical Text."

"She offers the camera a hostage's smile, forced, false. Her smoky eyes suggest chaos witnessed: tear gas, rock missiles and gasoline flames. They paint her as a refugee of a teen culture whose capacity for real subversion was bludgeoned away somewhere between the atrocities of Kent State and those of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the start of a creeping zombification that would see youthful dissent packaged and sold alongside Pez and Doritos.

'Look and listen deeply,' she challenges. An onanistic recursion, at once Siren and Cassandra, she heralds a new chapter in the Homeric tradition. With a slight grin, she calls out to us: 'I sing of the death of the individual, the dire plight of free will and the awful barricades daily built inside the minds of all who endure what lately passes for American life. And here I shall tell you of what I have done in order to feel alive again.'"

----------->Here it is in all its glory.
I haven't laughed so much at an essay since "A Modest Proposal."

Grammarless and hungry.
Adam

Everyone has an inner Zef

I've had a huge cultural-context/intellectual/aesthetic boner for Die Antwoord for a while now, but only recently started digging beyond Max Normal.TV level research.
I've been reading a lot articles from last February, right when they got big across the interwebs. I like to think all this is more interesting to think about a year later. Retrospection.



"But it's a big old prank, right? It's not realllllllll!"

Gangsta skillz and next level beats aside, you can call Ninja and Die Antwoord a hugely successful prank on unsuspecting music and culture nerds worldwide, Ali G style, as NY Magazine so eloquently eludes: "Because Ninja has performed under different personae, it was then assumed Die Antwoord was an elaborate prank; if that's the case, we salute his commitment to a strangely enticing character."

But I think it's more than that.



Context is a key word in all discussion I've encountered about Die Antwoord, accusatory, acclamatory or apathetic. One the reasons I like them so much is that Die Antwoord is a big ironic smile in the face of the ignorant West (also, they're fucking weird). Their exoticism and huge non-verbal cultural statements work so well because we don't know shit about modern South African culture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Djj9aNHwj4 @ 0:15

From Waddy Jones' wikipedia article: "Die Antwoord appears to some to be a presentation of entertainment personas rather than that of intrinsic and authentic cultural identities." Fuck that. Every performer has an "entertainment persona." If meat-dress-wearing Lady Gaga is an authentic cultural identity, then so is Die Antwoord. "Life as art, art as life." These people know what's up and are more committed to that notion than Nietzsche, Warhol or Germanotta ever was.



In the end, an article by Richard Poplak in Canada's The Walrus Magazine (and it's brilliant follow up) pretty much sums it all up about Die Antwoord, race issue and all: "By moving to the [Cape Town] flats and buying wholesale into local gangsta culture, Waddy is reframing South Africanism anew. While Afrikaans punks positioned themselves in opposition to the ultra-conservative, Calvanist ethos of die volk, what Die Antwoord are doing is not an act of rejection, but an act of embracing."

"All that remains is to widen the context," he says.

Die Antwoord is huge. They are like Gorillaz in real life. They are live action Seffrican Ninja Turtles. They are exported-hip hop Otherness fucked into Lady Gaga and made into a lifestyle. This is real, and you've never seen zef so fresh.

Full flex,
Adam

The "to come"

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rechercher:

RRRRRRROOOOOOOOMMMMMMME

« inspirés et joyeux et vifs comme des jeunes loups en quête de proie »

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Robin Williams' 1990s,

Adam

It's all just pictures of dead rabbits.

myx·o·ma·to·sis

 

[mik-suh-muh-toh-sis]

–noun

1.

Pathology .

a.

a condition characterized by the presence of manymyxomas.

b.

myxomatous degeneration.

2.

Veterinary Pathology . a highly infectious viral disease of

rabbits, artificially introduced into Great Britain and

Australia to reduce the rabbit population.

Origin: 1925–30; < Neo-Latin myxomat- (stem of myxoma; see myx-, -oma) +

I've always loved this word.

It's all just pictures of dead rabbits.

Flockalyptic,

Adam

source

Meaning is differential, not referential.

And he sings and he walks and in swirl of liquid song he loses himself in the rain:

Last week I found a really cool set of portraits of Australian criminals from the 1920s. Not exactly the standard mugshot, but very factual nonetheless. Incredibly fascinating. And the quality of the prints is amazing. Large format--gotta love the grain.
(from this book)

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French-Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold (b. 1942) on a bicycle:


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"L'or et rose" by Polish painter Andrzej Malinowski (b. 1947). It seems that after a career in advertisement, Malinowski found his creative outlet in painting and moved to Paris. From what I can gather it seems he paints almost exclusively red-haired nudes. A hyperrealist, almost, someone described his style as owing as much to the pre-Raphaelites as to art nouveau :

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Apt; felicitous; befitting: from the International Space Station's Coupole observatory, Egypt's Nile Delta. Shit is going down right now in those brightest areas. (Salma El-Tarzi, an activist in Tahrir Square: "This is not a revolution made by the parties. The parties have been there for 30 years and they've done nothing. This is the people's revolution.")




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Lastly, I've done it, guys. I've found the greatest image on the internet. Here it is. You're welcome. I can't believe I did it:



Apollonian,
Adam

I'm doin' this.

A list of things I currently like:

• Sending postcards internationally and across the country
  
• The cymbal at the 1:01 mark of the song "Infinity" by The xx and at 0:27-8 of "O Children" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
  
• This 98-word piece by Canadian writer Sean Michaels: Two people exchange messages with birds. They leave them, nested, on welcome-mats. One day, a sparrow - this means Hello. The next day, a bluejay - this means Yes. They continue like this, cardinal & stork & toucan & swan, until one day the pair have almost run out of birds. What Shall We Do Now? one asks, in the form of a pheasant. The other replies with a letter, a printed page, typewritten, which details every aspect of their exchange, spells out, literally, every impulse and intention, every subtext. And this is the end of their correspondence.
• Trying to figure out the national origins of anthropologist Johannes Fabian (I think it's Germany, but I know that besides German he also speaks English, French, Swahili and maybe also Dutch since he's out of the University of Amsterdam)
• A playlist I made on 1/21/11
• "ivory and fever"
  
• This New York Times photo gallery of 500 year-old Incan children (in mummy form) found in the Andes as a result of melting glacers via climate change
  
• "This just reeks of spirit world shenanigans."
• Pretending I have a handle on what I'm doing with my life/masters writing sample

And now, nine photos of Astronaut Cats:










Baby Jesus Bless,
Adam