Poking Around Paris 2023 Page 2
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche
May 29, 2023 Filed Under Curious, Introspection
Today I sat in the restaurant where Amelie was filmed, and listened to music and a series of podcasts about Russia, and then a book about French history.
It was well weird comparing the current and former state of both countries, and asking the question that’s on a lot of minds this year: Can Russia ever change away from fascism and still remain Russia?
One of the people I listened to was Mikhail Shishkin, speaking as a guest on an Intelligence Squared podcast episode, titled “Is Russia Doomed By Its History?” He made a very sobering point: People who live in a fascist state, and do not oppose it, do not see themselves as fascists, and when their state attempts to bring fascism to a neighboring state through subjugation (e.g. war) they see themselves as liberators, rather than conquerors or subjugators. Since fascism is what they know and believe in, inter-state conflicts are not a matter of freedom versus subjugation, but a matter of a big fish eating a smaller fish. It’s kill or be killed in a zero-sum game, because there couldn’t possibly be a form of governance they could switch to that would move them even a little bit out from under the bootheel of the criminals at the top.
In a word, they have been broken.
Want to escape from that restaurant in Amelie? Here’s how.
Besides, if you live in fear of your ruling party, then what better way to distract them from plundering you than encouraging them to plunder someone else?
Just so with the Russian people, over the last 100 years, inside and outside the USSR.
Anyway, I ate two lunches at the cafe, since I’d skipped breakfast and intended to skip dinner: A caesar salad with ham, and a rich avocado toast with salmon on top. As one should on a proper vacation, I ate slowly!
Lots of people came in to take photos of the place, giggle a bit, and then dash right out again. So to be a contrarian, I left without taking a photo of the interior. If it ever came up, I could certainly remember that I’d dined in the restaurant used in the film. I wouldn’t go scrambling for photographic proof of it and no one would ask. What, would they accuse me of being a liar? Maybe when I was 16 years old and boasting in a schoolyard. Not now. At the same time, that photo isn’t something I’d put on my wall or even in a screensaver. Most of my keepsakes are either highly portable digital items, or living things walking around looking after each other.
I followed this train of thought as I rode the bike over to the Cimetière de Montmartre. Alas, it was closed for the day…
Hmm, Montmartre cemetery closes at 6pm. Good to know. I’ll have to come back later…
Rachel Avenue?! Sweeeet
I still remember the time when film was expensive and photographs were prized artifacts from an otherwise obscure and unseen era. That’s so thoroughly not the case now. And now we’re making our way into a realm where photographic evidence is no longer evidence of anything in particular, given that you can ask a computer to bake you an image of yourself doing whatever you can describe, in any place you can name. So what is the point of taking a photo when you do go there?
Maybe now you can start to relax and just be. You can even take the photo retroactively if the need arises.
It seems like a matter of time before we’re all wearing gadgets that take – or gather – photos of us everywhere by default. I’m imagining high-quality cameras all over the place that are not just used for city surveillance by the police, but made available to our phones (or whatever the gadget is), so when we want – if we want – we can just gather up dozens of photos of ourselves taken by these devices and aggregate them. You can imagine a camera on a stick planted in front of every scenic vista, constantly recording. People will embrace the implied total surveillance because of the convenience of sending a “selfie” to their friends and social media without even needing to reach into a pocket.
Roll that forward two or three decades, and we will not be carrying anything around at all, yet still able to gather photos of ourselves afterwards, interact with our personal digital worlds by talking to lampposts (since our voice and face is our password), pay with our fingerprint or our face, access transcripts of everything we’ve said, and so on. People will embrace total surveillance and recording because it will be fun. They’ll get to buy into it. And the old saying, “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” will sound so very reasonable… That’s what they said in the USSR, as they dumped radioactive waste straight into the river…
I loathe this future.
The opportunities for exploitation will be practically infinite, and practically invisible. And as I get up and walk out into the seething crowd of tourists on this street, I’m asking myself a really frightening question:
Okay, I’ve seen it. Now to get out of this crowd…
At what point does a state become so exploitative – and skilled at crushing dissent through social manipulation and surveillance – that the people trapped permanently at the bottom of it have no other choice but to take up arms and start physically smashing the apparatus? Are we heading towards a level of lock-in through technological advancement so high that the ONLY way out is to beat down doors and set fire to mansions? Are we headed for another French Revolution, but on a global scale, with the attendant scale of death and chaos?
Huh. So that’s where it is. No desire to go inside currently, but, good to know.
‘Cause you know, at some point, the food’s going to get too expensive even with fertilizer, and the water is going to get too expensive to clean, and the digital apparatus is going to be tightened and tweaked so that the wealthy keep eating, while the rabble drowns in poison.
A Park To Work In
May 30, 2023 Filed Under Stress
Another few blocks, another bakery!
Quite a view up here.
This is why Red Riding Hood stopped wearing the hood.
Lots of strange ideas here.
Dig that shifty character on the left.
Tag, you’re it! Watch out for the BANDE DE PIGEONS.
This garden is open until 8:30, which is pretty nice. It’s also been claimed by Action Antifasciste!
Do you dig wacky tile art? You better.
Pretty strange technique.
Solidarity with Ukraine!
Pretty nice day in the park.
Some park info.
Did you know that rocks break off and stuff?
Unfortunately it was closed for renovation when I visited.
Time for some pasta and a fruit drink before I zip back down that hill at 9 miles an hour.
An inadequate meal in Paris??
Time to get some coffee and begin the workday.
While heading out of the apartment, I listened to a “Sawbones” podcast episode about Hepatitis C. Disease exposure was on my mind with the pressing crowds of Paris. Of course, for the rest of the day I obsessed over whether everyone I met had Hepatitis C…
Just a few blocks over I found a café that made an “iced mochaccino”. Will it stand up to my absurd mocha rating scale? We shall see! (Spoiler alert: No. It scored a 5 out of 10.)
I ordered tiramisu and it was totally different from what I got in Brussels, but still quite good. Also different from what I got anywhere in America. I should have expected this, really.
After scarfing that down I joined a work meeting with four other people in it, and listened with my earphones while I walked the half mile back to the apartment. A weird new first: Participating in a work meeting while strolling around in Paris with my phone, headphones, and some keys as my only equipment. I’m too old to be a yuppie, so I guess I’m an “uppie”.
Théatre du Caveau de la République has an adorable mascot! Some kind of buck-toothed pixie??
Street pole manifesto.
Back at the apartment I wrote code for several hours, then did some documentation, and then the rest of the day was mine. I set out again for food, choosing to stay on foot for a change instead of using the bicycle.
I randomly chose a restaurant, and sat down at the usual microscopic outdoor table. Dinner was a Caesar salad which was way too dry and some “fresh squeezed’ orange juice that definitely tasted as though it sat around all day. As I finished it, I almost laughed at the thought: “Hey, it’s my first unacceptable meal in Paris! A new milestone has been reached!”
As I dined, and later on as I walked slowly around the city in the evening gloom, I listened to some of “A Distant Mirror“. This was going to be a favorite of mine for the rest of the Paris visit. While contemplating stone walls, canals, and random strangers, I heard about the arrest and torture of the Knights Templar, who were basically yet another pointless aristocracy that ran afoul of the church and were devoured by it. Their head honcho was burned alive right in front of Notre Dame (like so many, many others, especially later when witch trials began.) Earlier in the week I’d passed by the very spot on my bike.
I also heard about the 13th-century expulsion of Jews from France, and how they were scapegoated as “money lenders” specifically by the church, which considered the lending of money “unclean” but was forced to admit it was a necessary part of large-scale commerce, so they mandated that role to Jews to deliberately enflame their status as “unclean”. All dictators need a scapegoat and a war, and the church was no exception. Tale as old as time.
Back at the apartment I went down a completely different digital rabbit hole, reading about old computer games from my adolescence that I’d missed out on because they were distributed only in other countries. I ran into a game called “Princess Maker“. Weird. And weirdly compelling.
It is what it sounds like — sort of. You guide a young lady through her adolescence by setting her work, school, and travel schedule. You don’t control her directly, or even interact with her directly. The majority of the interaction consists of picking menu items. If you get her stats and reputation high enough, she becomes queen of the land. Lesser outcomes include “housewife”, “con artist”, and “wandering wizard”.
There’s a framing device where you – the player – are described as a heroic knight that saved the kingdom from an invasion, and as a reward you asked to start an orphanage. I assume the framing device is there to give male players a more comfortable angle to participate: Consider it practice for being a Dad? (Well, as long as being a Dad consists of picking menu items with a mouse.) It’s the attitude that counts I suppose.
Hey whaddaya know, there’s a PC-98 emulator for MacOS called “DosBox-x“, and some usage directions. An interesting rabbit hole. I felt a bit too lazy to actually play the game, but it got my mind churning about cultural differences again. When I was a boy growing up in California, role models of men spending their time raising children were pretty thin on the ground. You could join the army, fight crime, be a really good dancer or singer, kick ass at some sport, or perhaps be one of those interesting and windswept loner types, but being a Dad? Maybe you could be a “sitcom dad” like Tim Taylor and dispense some life lessons, but it was mixed in with acting like an idiot half the time.
Perhaps this is why I always felt a kinship with Scrooge McDuck, who spent half an hour each weekday living an adventurous life but also taking care of three nephews at the same time.
Travel sends my brain in funny directions…
Still searching for the perfect mocha…
June 1, 2023 Filed Under Curious
I woke up from an unpleasant dream and realized my sleep apnea insert wasn’t placed correctly. The little sleep quality graph on my watch was mostly red lines. Drat!
The first decent mocha I’ve had in Paris. Thankfully not the last!
A work in bronze by a sculptor named Benoît Lucien Hercule. Died in poverty at the age of 65, in 1913.
I pedaled around in search of breakfast snacks and a change of working environment, and found a place about five blocks away that made a very chocolatey mocha and a good eggs Benedict, and seems to tolerate laptops.
When the mocha looks like mud, you know it’s gonna be good.
It was still very crowded and not really a pleasant place to work, but the mocha was encouraging. The barista confessed “Sorry, we don’t know how to do it iced.”
I lingered just long enough to answer a few emails, then went back to the apartment so I could work in peace. Most of the afternoon was spent going over documentation and tweaking the “continuous integration” process for my project.
I have to admit, I didn’t really like the job. The project I inherited was over-designed and far too complicated for the needs of the company. Maintaining it was painful. I wanted to rewrite it in a much more compact form but was never granted the freedom. This kind of work is very exacting and highly abstract, and if you’re not really enthusiastic about the project you’re doing it for, you spent a lot of your work time fighting against your own brain, which is in a state of constant rebellion. (Like Paris.)
Nevertheless I did battle for about five hours, then went on another ride to clear my head.
Don’t walk under the ladder propped in front of the Lucky Bastard Cafe. It’ll just confuse things.
It’s a Latino thing!
During my wanderings I was astonished to find half a 5.25″ floppy diskette on the sidewalk. What in the hell??
What the heck is half an ancient IBM floppy diskette doing in the street?
Navigating Paris After Two Weeks
June 7, 2023 Filed Under Introspection
I came here on a bike loaded for wilderness-level touring. I couldn’t help it, because that’s the load-out I used in Iceland and the bike has been stored in a basement, untouched, since the Iceland tour finished almost two years ago. When I got here – to a rented apartment on Rue de la Fontaine au Roi – I stripped all the bags and gear off the bike and threw them in a closet, and have been going around with nothing but a phone, some Airpods, a house key, and a very sturdy bike lock.
Tried this cafe a second time, but the mocha was no better.
Parisians seem to love the recumbent. Of the thousands of bicycles I’ve seen so far in the city, I haven’t seen a single recumbent, so it gets a lot of commentary. I understand why it would be rare: Paris has turned out to be what I would call an “expert level” place for bicycling, much more so than any other giant city I’ve been to in Europe, and you need to be very good on a recumbent to avoid injury in a place like this. Relatively speaking, Amsterdam, Brussels, Hamburg, Copenhagen, and London are all easier.
Back in the US, I’d say New York is relatively easy, and so is most of Boston and Chicago. In terms of danger I’d say that Paris is not top of the list – downtown LA occupies that spot for me so far – but it’s a strong second place. It’s not fear of deliberate violence I’m talking about, but the risk of accident, from the sheer press of people and the contempt they show for the rules. And it bears repeating: This is Europe. I have yet to experience bicycle touring in, for example, Rio de Janeiro or Bangkok. I’m sure Paris would be way down the list by then.
The weather is perfect, but the air quality is pretty bad. I’ve noticed that smog laws in Paris are treated as suggestions, especially by people on ancient scooters and mopeds. While biking around I’ve encountered entire city blocks that stink of car exhaust to the point of making me feel physically ill.
And I’ve gone to believe that the French take a dim view of laws and government in general, which I suppose is great where personal freedom is involved but is also a barrier to organization and urban planning, even daily logistics:
Will a shop respect its own posted hours? Maybe. Will you get warning when a street is closed for construction? Maybe. Will the bus actually stop where the schedule says? Maybe. Will the postman deliver your package? Maybe. Will there be a bike lane? Maybe. Will it be on the left, right, or middle or the street? Take a wild guess! Will there be a delivery truck parked right on top of it? Maybe. Will the train be on time? Maybe. What platform will it arrive on? Nobody knows until 20 minutes before it’s due to leave, ever, even if that train line has been operating for years, and even then it may be wrong.
Every intersection is a free-for-all hash of bicycles, people, cars, and scooters. Crosswalks are a suggestion. Crosswalk signals are less than a suggestion; they are ignored. On the other hand, people almost never honk their horns regardless of the thickness of the snarl or who is technically at fault, because the response they are most likely to get is, “screw you, this is France.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. What sort of organization would I expect, from a nation whose most truly defining era is still the French Revolution? Where laws, for the vast majority of its history, were used to funnel wealth upwards first – into the laps of clergy and kings – and organize people second? The nation I come from owes an incalculable debt to the same thinkers and activists that drove the French Revolution, and the influence shows, but I get the impression that the French had to swing a lot harder to knock their tyrants off their posts, and that impact is still echoing around in the culture here.
That’s a cerebral place to go, starting from a description of the air and the traffic… No doubt it’s subjective and I’ll have other impressions as the days continue.