Eagle vs Shark

I enjoyed watching Eagle vs Shark a few days ago. It's a kiwi rom com featuring Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords), with a quirky, offbeat feel to it, in many ways comparable to Napoleon Dynamite : it has nunchucks, weird animal drawings, and strange dialogue.
The soundtrack is great, most of the tracks are by New Zealand indie band the Phoenix Foundation.

If you want to check it out, you'll find the link at the bottom of this post, but hurry! Movies uploaded to Youtube usually don't last long these days.

Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton

Last week I finished a book I had started to read months ago, but never had time to finish because of coursework : Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton. Published in 1848, the novel had a lot of influence in its day, as it highlighted the plight of ordinary working people in Manchester in the 1840s. Being both a literature lover, a history enthusiast and a socialist, I had high expectations. And I wasn't disappointed.

I'm not going to say much about the plotline because I don't want to spoil the story for anyone. But the novel centres on two working class families and the struggles they go through everyday : hunger, disease, death of loved ones, appalling living and working conditions...

Elizabeth Gaskell was by no means a socialist so I wasn't expecting to find any socialist critique of capitalism in her novel. But she was a social reformer. Although she didn't want to see the end of the capitalist system, she was genuinely concerned about the plight of the less fortunate, and she set out to let England know about the terrible living conditions of the working people in Manchester. In fact, she exposed herself to a lot of criticism from the people who frequented her milieu, who were often mill owners and "masters", of the class which she berated in her novel for not being attentive to the workers' needs.

But the most important theme in the novel is arguably the theme of reconciliation. Gaskell was a Unitarian Universalist, in fact married to a Unitarian preacher, and she strongly believed in human goodness. Many have criticised her for this, but I don't think she meant it in a naïve way. She does seem to have believed in evil. But in an age when most people believed the working class to be a horde of brutish, degenerate and evil animals (remember that this was the age of phrenology and misapplied Darwinism), Gaskell was really eager to show that these people were in fact human beings, just like their masters, and she actually tried to explain why they sometimes resorted to violence. If the characters she created (both working people and "masters") are almost always redeemed from their propensity for evil, and ultimately become reconciled to their fellow human beings and to God, I don't think it's because of any naïveté on her part, but rather because she believed that it was really possible for people to change, and hoped to see it come true.

Parisienne Walkways

L was off work for three days last week, so on Wednesday we took our bikes and rode down the old tow-path by the canal, until we reached the end of the city. We continued a little until we found a small dirt track which we cycled down. Then we put down an old towel on the long, wild grass by a sunflower field and enjoyed a picknick under the burny midday sun. We later found a few trees and enjoyed the cool shade.
It wasn't exactly the open countryside — there was a village and a rather busy road not too far away — but it was good enough. When we looked to the North, all we could see was fields, woods and tiny little villages. It was nice to be away from the urban landscape, and, even if only for a few hours, be immersed in a more pastoral setting.

The following day we went to Paris. I don't have any pictures or film because we chose not to take our camera this time. It can be fun "documenting" trips but it can also be a hassle — I usally have more craic when I'm camera-free.
We started by visiting the Panthéon, which is right in the middle of the Latin Quarter, beside the Sorbonne university. Originally built as a church, the Panthéon is an impressive edifice which, since the revolution, has basically served as a temple to the French nation-state. All the "great men" of France are buried there. It's not the kind of thing I'm usually into, but it is a must-see. Also some of my favourite authors are buried there : Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. There are also the tombs of Voltaire, Rousseau, Jean Moulin (a famous French resistant), Victor Schoelcher (France's William Wilberforce), Louis Braille (the guy who invented the alphabet for blind people) and a host of other supposedly "great men" (most of whom I'd never even heard of, to be perfectly honest). Significantly, there is only one woman buried in the whole Panthéon : Marie Curie. It speaks loads about the place of women in society, even in a modern secular liberal democracy, where men and women are supposed to share equal rights... *sigh*

On a lighter note, I was almost entombed in the Panthéon myself . I went to the toilets, which are underground, and after hearing the door bang behind me, I realised that there was no knob on my side of the door. I had to phone L several times (you're supposed to turn your phone off in the place) before she answered. Eventually she set me free. Otherwise I might still be entombed in the Panthéon, alongside Voltaire and Zola.

After that, we strolled round the Latin Quarter and found an old 2,000 year old Roman arena which was dug up at the end of the 19th century. There were very few people around, it was incredibly quiet, which is really bizarre when you're right in the middle of Paris. It was as if we had been taken back in time for a few minutes.
Our tummies were rumbling by then and we went looking for a vegetarian restaurant that I'd read about on wikitravel.org, but it was nowhere to be found. Several of the joints in the area seem to have closed down, and it wouldn't surprise me if the vegetarian restaurant was one of the first to go, seeing that less that 1% of French people are vegetarians, and that they're basically seen as eccentric radicals, possibly even traitors to French-ness for refusing to eat meat, the base/staple of all French cuisine. (Thankfully we are tolerated — we're just a couple of eccentric foreigners, after all...) So we settled for an Indian restaurant which served great meat-free dishes. There was a menu at only 10€, which was great value, as the food was realy good, the quantities reasonable, and the restaurant was rather classy. Even the kama sutra picture hanging on the wall was rather tastefully drawn.

In the afternoon, we went to the "Musée du quai Branly". Now this is a museum which drew quite a lot of controversy when it opened in 2006. It's a tribal art museum , with artefacts from Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas. It was originally called "Musée des arts premiers" (lit "Museum of First Arts", a euphemism for primitive art), which understandably caused uproar from some circles. Thankfully the term was dropped.
It's the biggest museum of its kind in Europe, and it's incredible to see all these objects and works of art from all around the world. What is really good is that they are treated as art, on the same level as the paintings you'd see in the Louvre. I expected the museum to be very patronising and condescending and... well, French, but it wasn't at all. What impressed me the most was the Americas section. It was the most colourful section in the museum. There was everything from headdresses to clay pots, from robes to combs... The other sections were great as well, of course. The African ceremonial masks and the Melanesian decorated skulls were fascinating (albeit in a freaky kind of way). My only disappointment was that the Asian section was rather small. There was very little from Nepal or India. But if you're ever in Paris, you should definitely check out this museum... it's really worth the visit!

In the evening we met a friend of L's who used to live in Marseilles, and who is currently an intern working for a famous French newspaper (L'Express). And it was that evening that I lost my Starbucks virginity. Yup, until then I'd been Starbucks free. Mostly because coffee makes me sick, but also because I'm not ready to pay to 5€ for a hot drink. So I took a kind of raspberry milkshake, which was way too sweet for me. American-style sweet. I know a lot of people get their kicks from Starbucks, but it didn't do anything to me. Maybe it's just because I'm coffiephobe.

Well, that was the end of our day.
And the end of this post, seeing that it's so long that it's getting out of hand.

The Sound of Place

Découvrez Neil Young!

You've probably noticed how smells and odours can bring back memories of people, places and events that were sometimes long forgotten. For example, the smell of certain types of manure always reminds me of Ireland, because that was always the first thing I smelt coming out from the aeroplane once it had landed in Belfast International airport. Or the smell of rice boiling in milk brings me back to when my late grandmother would serve me steaming hot rice pudding in a tiny bowl with a blue flower pattern when I was a child.

Well, lately, listening to music has had more or less the same effect on me. It didn't bring memories back to me, but it made images of places pop up in my mind. For example, listening to Nick Drake's third and last album, Pink Moon, brought to my mind the picture of hilly woodlands under a dark starry sky, with the slender trees bending in the wind, and the top of a church steeple somewhere in the distance behind one of the taller hills. Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon painted a Provençal landscape in my mind's eye, with its blue mountains, proud poplars, lavender fields circling a quiet little market town waking up to the soft morning sunlight. My favourite Neil Young album, On the Beach, reminds me not of the coast or the sand, but of the open sea ; the ocean, dark but not agitated, failing to reflect the pallid sun ; the impression of loneliness, sadness, but not despair. It's probably no wonder, because the album itself is rather melancholic and bleak.
You might be wondering what I've smoked. But that's what music does. It sings to parts of us which are beyond our intellectual reach, beyond our conscience.

France's Last Taboo

Violence is a terrible thing, and anyone that knows me will know that it is probably the thing that I abhor the most. There is worse, though : domestic violence (aka spouse abuse). As if dehumanising one's neighbour and oneself by giving in to violence wasn't bad enough, some people act in this way towards the very person they are supposed to love and care for : their partner or spouse.
Amnesty International campaigned to make more people aware of this in France last year, and it doesn't seem to have worked. This morning, while logging on to Yahoo to check my email, I noticed that this issue was making the headlines of Yahoo News France.

According to the article, a French governmental body which measures the country's crime rate (the OND) found that in 2007, spousal abuse had increased by over 30%. That year, 410,000 women reported having been abused in some way by their partner or ex-partner. This represents 2% of France's female population. Apparently 20% of cases of spousal abuse go unreported — and unpunished!
There also cases where men are the victims of spousal abuse : 0.7% of the male population in 2005 and 2006.

But the issue of domestic violence is terrible not only in itself, but also because of the fact that it such a taboo in France. Speak to anyone in France, and they will deny that it is a problem. At most they will say that it is something which only happens in Muslim or working class families (which isn't true, by the way. It happens in white and middle class families as well).

There is a fair chance that you personally know a woman who has been abused by her partner or ex-partner, but that you know nothing of it. It's very hard to know if the victim doesn't speak out : very often, the victim will keep it a secret for fear of reprisal or because she loves her partner nonetheless.

I know someone who told me that she was attacked several times by her boyfriend. She didn't seem alarmed by the fact, and when I suggested that she should break up with him or call the police if it happened again, she said she couldn't do it, because she loved him.
I'm not one to underestimate the strength of love. Love is patient ; love heals. But it's no excuse for keeping quiet about mindless (or premeditated!) acts of violence, especially when it happens within a couple — the relationship which is designed to be one of the only safe, trusting and nurturing havens on earth.

The taboo must be broken.

Bicycles

Découvrez Queen!

I'm just back in from a bicycle ride. Very refreshing! L and I each bought a city bike last week. So far, we've been used to going everywhere either with the bus or on foot. Now we can go to places that are not at a walkable distance and where buses don't go. We'd been hoping to get bikes for a long time now, and with the sales on and the summer here it was the best time to do it!
Here are a few reasons why using a bicycle is cool.

• It's fun!
• It's much healthier than taking the car or the bus. If like me you're not really into running/jogging, or team sports, cycling is a good alternative to keep you active and on the go.
  
• It's handy for groceries... I attached a basket to the front of my bike, which already attract a few strange looks. It's not considered a typically "masculine" thing to do in France, but people should get over it. In the Netherlands and Flanders, it's the norm!
• It's cheap! No need to pay the bus fare as often, and it's (literaly) costs nothing compared to all the money you have to put into a car... no petrol, no insurance, no MOT test...
  
• Last (and most importantly), it's eco-friendly. There's no CO² coming out of a bicycle! There are so many people over here that take the car just to drive a few hundred metres down to the bakery for their baguette. Worse, in our cities we have lots of SUVs and 4x4s roaring down our streets, driven by upper middle class mothers with fake tans and sunglasses driving their model kids to the local Conservatoire (the notoriously snobbish French music school). Maybe they are scared of leaving their enclaved suburban homes or snazzy city-centre dwellings for the urban jungle of ordinary people, and feel protected behind the wheel of their safari-style vehicles? I think those cars should be prohibited or severely restricted in urban areas. If you aren't a farmer or a forester, frankly, you don't need one, so give it up!