lettre d'un étranger

paris by andrea laliberte

i bought a poster not entirely unlike the one above. drifting through the store, debating other impulse purchases, i was stopped by a woman. her children lived in paris and she used to spend holidays ever year with them. she spoke, at length, about the sights and sounds of paris and before i left, she was kind enough to give me a list of her france recommendations. her list follows, written, more or less, in her words...

these periodicals come out once a week, i believe on wednesday:

1) pariscope

2) l'officiel des spectacles

you must pick them up as they will tell you what all the current exhibits and shows are and how to buy tickets and find the theatre/museum.

here are some sights both in and around the city that you must see if you get the chance. some are rather obvious, but still capture the soul of paris:
1) chateau de chambord
2) louvre
3) versailles
4) giveny
5) museo d'orsay
6) tomb of napoleon
7) arc de triomphe

o la la! i don't think one trip will be enough.

belated bastille day

(photo belongs to the free-lance star)

apparently fredericksburg, virginia--a self-titled "itty-bitty city" not far from me--has a sister city in france: frejus. this, of course, called for a bastille day celebration. while the city did not shoot off fireworks, it did have a band from frejus play. the celebration actually continues into the weekend, and walking around the city last night, i was captivated by the french flags still flying everywhere.

being ever-inquisitive, i had to learn more about frejus. located on the cote d'azur, the small commune has some interesting attractions: nearby lie a beach resort, a deadly dam, and mary magdalen's head.

frejus shops
(photo from francethisway)

a quoi ça sert l'amour?

sans amour dans la vie, sans ses joies, ses chagrins, on a vécu pour rien?

another edith piaf song! she sang this one with her second husband, theo sarapo. in french or english, a quoi ça sert l'amour is a true examination of why we allow ourselves to get torn to bits by love... because without it, nothing is quite so grand, quite so worth living for...

défaite française

...mais victoire américaine!

let us turn off our fantastical minds for a moment and spend a day with reality.

the world's eyes might be focused on the world cup in south africa, but other sporting events don't just cease. today, wimbledon history was made after american john isner defeated france's nicolas mahut. what's so amazing about that? well, the time it took for that victory to occur.

for those who don't know much about tennis, it is necessary to skim over the meanings of games, sets, and matches. a match (the winner) is determined by which player won the most sets. the player who wins the best out of 3 or 5 sets (depending on the level on competition) wins the match. isner won the first set. mahut won the second and third. isner picked up the fourth. so it all came down to a final set. and this is where things got interesting.

a set in tennis is composed of games. one player serves the ball; the next player will serve the ball in the next game. points are seemingly sporadic as your score increases thus: love, 15, 30, 40. to win a game, a player need to score one point beyond 40. however, a player also needs to score two more points than their opponent. if the score stands 40-30 (the server's score always goes first), and the server makes the next point, the game is over. if the score is "40 all" (both players have 40), and the server scores, the score is referred to as "ad in" (advantage for the server). only after scoring a point beyond "ad in," can the server be declared the winner of a game.

likewise, players need to win two more games than their opponent to win a set. if you win six games and your opponent has won none, congratulations, you've won the set. if your opponent has won five games, however, you need to win seven to win the set, so you have two up on your opponent. in wimbledon (and many other tennis events) if the score is 6-6, the players just play one more game as a tie-breaker. this is true for all the sets except the last one. the winning player in the last set must always have two more games up on the opponent. this is what caused the wimbledon record. isner beat mahut, to be sure, but it took him 138 games--over 11 hours of playing time--to do so.

the final score for the match (with isner's points first) reads: 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68

70-68. and as the guardian wrote, "that is not a typo."

american john isner (far left) with french nicolas mahut (far right)

as they are told that play must be suspended

until the following day because of bad light.

the score stood at 59-59.

photo by the guardian

mémoire du piaf

piaf, taken from the bluegrass special

édith piaf: a brief melody

the places of piaf: a brief history

• paris: in 1915, piaf was born as édith giovanna gassion to a mother who was a café singer and a father who was a street acrobat.
• normandy: where she lived with her paternal grandmother who ran a brothel.
• lisieux: piaf had impaired eyesight until she was seven due to keratitis, an inflammation of the cornea. one of the possible causes of this condition is herpes. regained her eyesight after a pilgrimage to sainte thérèse's home in lisieux.
• paris: where first sang in public at age 14, performing with her father's acrobatic troupe.
• paris: fell in love at age 16 with a delivery boy and had a girl, marcelle. the child lived until she was two years old.
• paris: her next boyfriend was a pimp who took her money in exchange for not making her act as a prostitute.
• paris: in 1935, louis leplée, owner of the paris club le gerny, convinced her to sing at his club. since she was so small (4'8") and nervous, he nicknamed her piaf, or little sparrow. within a year, she had multiple records produced.
  
  
  
  
  le gerny's*
  
  
• paris: in 1936, leplée was murdered. piaf was questioned, accused of being an accessory to murder, but then acquitted. she set on a mission to revamp her identity, which included changing her name to édith piaf.
• worldwide: over the course of her career, she had many lovers and met with great success, starring in movies and having her voice in high demand.
• new york city: she was not very popular in the states until a prominent critic gave her a great review; she went on to perform at carnegie hall twice.
• france/us: in 1945, she sang la vie en rose. it was given a grammy hall of fame award in 1998.
• plascassier or paris: in 1963, at 47, piaf died of liver cancer. she is buried in pére lachaise cemetery in paris, next to her only child. also in paris, a two-room museum, the musée édith piaf, is devoted to her legacy.
  

*credit: Christina Fisher

sunday's records: all the things you are

charlie parker once said that this old jazz standard's lyrics were his favorite. here in a smoky parlor, serge gainsbourg's fingers croon "you are the breathless hush of evening that trembles on the brink of a lovely song".

and hopefully coming soon to a theater near you is gainsbourg, je t'aime ... moi non plus, very loosely based on director joann sfar's graphic novel. it takes a dreamlike approach to gainsbourg's life, told through immersive performances, animation, and yes, puppets.

(serge and jane in the throes of love as drawn by joann sfar)

l'amour du chocolat

beynac-et-cazenac (from wikipedia commons)

i saw the movie chocolat years ago and found johnny depp to be simply delightful in it. but reading the novel by the same name, i became completely enamored with the stubborn, proud roux. i was not prepared for the ending, which left me less fulfilled and more wistful than anything else. art imitating life, i suppose.

i loved the idea of visiting lansquenet-sous-tannes, the city in which the book takes place. but as it is completely fictional, i found it necessary to dig a little deeper. the film was shot in a variety of locations. the river and indoor scenes were all filmed in england, but since france is our destination, we shall overlook this fact. the remaining portions of the film were apparently shot in flavigny-sur-ozerain (in burgundy) and in beynac-et-cazenac (see above).

flavigny-sur-ozerain is (was?) home to a benedictine abbey in the 700s. in the 800s, after france experienced viking raids, st. regina's (a martyr who wouldn't renounce her faith to marry her betrothed) remains found their way there. pilgrims came to visit the remains and a town developed around the abbey. less than 350 people (the size of my graduating high school class) live in flavigny year round. today they are, appropriately enough (considering our book), known for the little pastilles they sell around the world.

beynac-et-cazenac is slightly larger with just over 500 residents. i don't know much about the area save that the communes of beynac and cazenac combined to form this commune (just a municipality in the government). but the château de beynac is a well-preserved castle there. it is the highest building in the picture above. in 1962, lucien grosso bought and restored the château. since then, quite a number of films such as les visiteurs, ever after, jeanne d'arc (not to mention chocolat using the village below!) have been filmed there.

since travel is our aim, i located these cities on a map. since i don't know the exact route we hope to take, i'm crossing my fingers that we can at least fit one of these into our travels! on to the next book, count of monte cristo!

chansons de paris

amateur travelers we are, but amateur dreamers we are not. the excitement of france looms over me, like a tempting mirage, toying with my emotions in my daily life. to travel, to cast off this monotony if only for a brief moment in time. and to prepare, even though our trip is nearly a year away, i find myself trying to soak up as much of france as possible.

two movies seen of late are highly recommended: paris, je t'aime and les choristes, which i have admittedly seen half a dozen times now. from the latter, i present jean-baptiste maunier singing a short melody. i would tell you what he is singing, but i throw my hands up at my inability to speak or understand french. i simply appreciate and find that i have a much greater love for singers who convey emotion beyond language than those who rely so fully on words. a simple search of les choristes in youtube pulls up a great many more songs both from the movie and the concerts that came about as the public rallied for more.

so tonight belongs to maunier, but i'll be back with edith piaf and other lovely voices to sate the romantic soul.

breathless

this week, new york's film forum will be playing a restored print of jean-luc godard's breathless.

jean seberg plays patricia, first seen wandering the champs-élsyées, selling copies of the new york herald tribune. there, patricia revists a romance with a handsome ne'er-do-well. he, a small-time gangster, and she, a free-spirited american student, are briefly, beautifully suspended in the space of patricia's apartment. but this is the movies and when the police come a-knocking, things go awry. love or hate patricia's choices, she still stirs admiration for her swagger and cool.

this begs the question: what lessons can a couple of americans in paris glean from patricia?

striped shirts, fedoras, and dark eyeliner are timeless.

keep your trysts with gangsters short and sweet.

and never underestimate chance meetings.

je m'appelle ...

we're three amateur travellers, on a mission to map the curious spaces where reality and fiction intersect. our first destination is france.

en route, we'll devour books, movies, and songs from, inspired by, and/or set in france. after planning our route, we'll trek through the fictional geography that we studied. naturally, along the way we'll try (however ridiculously) to recreate some of our favorite heart-wrenching scenes and tecnhnicolor moments.

and so we begin!

(from the top: 1. the umbrellas of cherbourg 2 & 10.) the young girls of rochefort 3.) pierrot le fou 4.) charade 5.) amelie 6.) breathless 7.) lola 8.) paris je t'aime 9.) how to steal a million 11.) an education 12.) jules and jim)