Meaning of Life.scm

TUESDAY – June 30
• Saw I Mostri and satirically anti-learned about 50s-era italian misogny. Slow in most bits, but sharply brilliant in others.

• Showed Heidi around a bit more. Margaret took her shoe shopping while I wandered all up and down the Rue Rivoli not finding other things.

• Another Jules-Verne find : both From the Earth to the Moon and Five Weeks in a Balloon from a little used bookstand by the Seine. Now I’ve got to collect all the Vernes in this series, as they’ve got the handsome engravings reproduced inside. Also, I die for the bad 60s covers.
[I picked up 500 Millions of the Begum during our first week. Read through it and marked all the new vocabulary to look up as part of my culture course.]

WEDNESDAY – July 01
• Freak, it’s July already? Making this time count…

• Profiting from the National Cinema Festival (all tickets are only €3 until Friday) to go visit various moviehouses we haven’t yet seen. For the next two weeks after that, the specifically Parisian film festival will bring lots of cool events, appearances, and some discounts, too. Johnny Depp is here. I’ll let you know if he rings us up.

THURSDAY – July 02
• The more work I do to try in applying myself to academic and productiony documentary stuff – planning, mapping, juggling and balancing resources, depending so much on timing – and the more that I procrastinate doing those things by polaying Starcraft, the more I realize that life is like a big game of Starcraft because of the very same aspects I just cited. Then I get thinking about whether it’s logical that I use Starcraft to put off the planning, resourcing, etc. and my brain breaks with embarrassed fatigue.

• Went to La Pagode cinema to see a French film called Le Hérisson. I misread both the Pariscope magazine (see “Tools” section of About Us” page) and the personalized festival grid Margot made for me and learned too late that it wasn’t showing. We decided to give Woody Allen just one more chance and saw Whatever Works there, as we wanted to see something in such a unique building (a rich entrepreneur constructed an actual asian pagoda to impress his wife, then allowed it to be converted into a cinema after she left him).

As for Woody… oh, gosh. We walked out. Not only were we just too danged bored by his worn-out screenplay technique, wherein all the characters function as merely puppets for what are obviously the same two or three facets of his personality, but the old-man-protagonist-getting-involved-with-some-impossibly-clever-hot-young-girl-next-door pattern is really beginning to creep us out. The self-indulgence, conscientious or not, is barely ironic, and it doesn’t go far enough to be an edifying farce. It’s just uncomfortable and kinda yicky. It’s like I’ve fallen asleep and slipped into one of his godless, perverted dreams. [Don't get me wrong, though, I love the man and revere the early-to-mid work of his which I've seen.]

• Split-up after movie ditchal. Margot went home to get some headache medicine and we said we’d meet up at the Bazaar Hôtel de Ville to shop for an air mattress for when her mum comes over. I sneakily went by Poilâne to get her her favorite – a chausson aux pommes. My sneaking took forever, as I misread the map. Spent a long, supersweaty afternoon hoofing it around before finally meeting her.

• Bought a fan. Needed it to live.

• BHV’s the best departmentstoreish place I’ve seen, where you can get basic stuff and home repair whatnot for normal prices, rather than the premiums you pay in special shops. Funny how dealing with different plugs/sockets and so forth reveals little ethnocentricities in people like myself. I never really contemplated how things like power plugs worked, so I assumed they’d be the same all over the world – universal principle wouild mean some sort of universal design.

• Ran around, metroing and hustling and still missed the Jean-Pierre Mocky film I wanted to catch at the Brady. Oh well, have to Brady another day.

• Watched the Maria Bamford show and revered it.
The pugs !!! I drew one in my journal :

FRIDAY – July 03
• Got up “early” (9 AM) for second interview with M. Schpoliansky. Learned a bunch about interviewing skills. Hit some great points, and also witnessed a couple of my questions sort of making things awkward. Still, did excellently for time and I think I walked away with some good stuff to share with people. In any case, I learned loads about both the industrial and artistic situations on which he commentated and about how to do interviews with “strangers”.

• Congratulated ourselves for getting some good work and had a picnic in the shade on the grassy sidepark of the Avenue Foch, just a few blocks west of the Arc de Triomphe.

• Les Vacances de M. Hulot at the Lincoln. I’ve already reported on this.

• Played Poohsticks on the Seine. Little video coming soon.

• Sunbathed on the Champ de Mars lawn with the Eiffel Tower looming right over us. Margot slept and I sketched the tower. Sounds so summer-afternoon-in-Paris-y, doesn’t it just?

As it’s her first summer with a wedding band on her finger, Margaret noted “I’ve got a ring tan.” I replied “I’ve got a silverback gorilla.”

• I messed up our métroing and missed the film we were counting on as well as the Plan B film. Plan C, however, worked out famously well. Playtime by Jacques Tati at the Champo, a cinema eternally devoted to the irector himself (thus perhaps THE place to see catch Tati films!). As we hopped in line, a young woman ran up and gave us a ticket she couldn’t use. Fortuitous as heck.

• Then, as we left, the evening clouds were lit up with marvelous puceness and fuschia-ry. Got a couple of photos of which I think quite highly.

• Exhausting myself trying to locate and follow leads for documentary work. Also updated my cinescape map :
BLUE = still unvisited
ORANGEY = 1/2 visited (not really explored inside or made contact)
RED = thoroughly visited (contacts, screenings attended)

It feel SOO good to feel the pennies merely trickle away with every minute I spend wandering about, rather gush away as they do when you’re on holiday someplace. When one spends thousands for travel and lodging only to spend a few days in a place like Paris, that means that it averages out to dollars a minute – which puts quite a pressure on a person trying to navigate with a map or whatever. We’ve invested a lot of money, it’s true, but spending 3 or 4 months makes the average so much more reasonable – the money trickling through my head isn’t so loud and I can actually focus and enjoy.

** Oh yeah… On Wednesday, this floating down onto our heads from an apartment window, accompanied by lots of happy children’s giggling :

(Guess I won !!!)

~ by John and Margaret FORBYN on 5 July 2009.