PedestriAnnoyed

Attention porcyclists, steamrollers, and wheelchariots of fire: I made this one just for you Y

Look, I understand.  You're respectively: actively healthy, you have babies who need to see the outside world every day even when you're tired and stressed out, and you need to transport your body even though your legs don't work--- I salute you!

But you're also in charge of a vehicle that's rigid hard, and can hurt human bodies if you bump into one!

Seriously, just because there is no engine in your machine, it doesn't mean you need not be as careful as you'd be were you driving a car or motorcycle!

Yesterday, coming out of a store, about to cross the street, I saw a car coming, so naturally I stopped, since I was not at the pedestrian crossing.  It kindly stopped for me, as Death did for Emily Dickinson, at which point I waved my unemcumbered right hand to paralinguistically thank the humanist on wheels when, suddenly, as if Thor himself had come down from on high.         KAPOW!

"I'm hit, I'm hit!  Human down, human down!"  Ok. I'm being a hyperbolic fiend.  But yes I was hit. It could have been ugly.  The panhandler in front of the shop yelled out "Attention!", so I froze in place. I was almost run over by a Man on WheelSteroids in the Mecca of the Bicycle.  Not Amsterdamage.  In Amsterdam cyclists ride at a normal speed.  Oui, France! Land of the Tour de Force de France. His body hit me.  

Hand on Old & New Testament, the Qu'ran, and any sacred and propane text you want to put under my palm, this monsieur was going faster than the spawn of SpeedyGonzales and the Roadrunner.  And do you know why? Because he is Healthier, and thus Better, than thou -- and than I, ai, ai! But it hurt!  What, what, what makes him think he can go at 40Km/h on a bicycle and take the tiny wee narrow corridor between cars and, well, pedestrians like me, when, I am certain, had he been behind the wheel of a car, he'd never ever do it?

Then, the other month... okay, it was last year, but so what? Last year, I was in Monoprix, buying shampoo, (2 for price of 1, delicious scent, really -- chestnut!) and I'm standing in the kilometric queue when PHLOP!  My right ankle is viciously nicked by a wheelchariot of fire.  It was NOT, i repeat, NOT the disabled person's fault, because her vehicle was being manned by a woman, whom I can only presume to be an absolute relative of the seated lady.  She didn't think it was worth getting too worked up about the fact that now there's an unfashionable dot of blood on my ankle, making me look like I am metamorphosing into a ladybug, which suddenly, just now, makes me think would be uberly cool.  She raised her eyebrows & shoulders, like synchronized water ballerinas, into a Gallic shrug and said, in a soft, almost inaudible, irritatingly nonchalant tone, "désolée."

Yah? *I* am désolée. Me. 

And I am even more days olé when it is a StrollerSteamroller straight out of Rosemary's Baby coming my way, as if channelling a demonic supermarket trolley.  Do ppl become blind when theyre pushing a stroller?  Suddenly, all these women discover a somehow heretofore unknown right to drive a large object on wheels into total strangers in broad daylight!  No swerving, no stopping.  It is Stroller vs Bodies.  I feel like the zombies  videogame heroes must kill. We can guess who wins. This happens all the time in Paris, a city where only infants are adored more than yippie dogs in sweaters being carried around in LouisVuitton bags  the size of a large melon at €1060 a pop per poodle.  This tshirt exists:   Need I elaborate further? (Yah okay it may be cute, cute as long as it isn't steamrolling over you.)

Already these ppl get all manner of provisos for their circumstances, as they should get.  I like to see ppl porcycling instead of driving, and I want to see both wheelchariots and steamrollers get a reserved space on public transportation and other public places.  It is necessary, right, proper, civilized and good! You should get each and every single one of these rights to come and go acknowledged and respected.  

But that does not mean you get to break basic, essential, though sometimes tacit, understandings of savoir vivre and just, well, common decency.  You just don't push your stroller into ppl, ok? You don't.  You have no idea what kind of crazy bastard deranged git lowgrade forehead you may be pushing it into, and next thing you know your baby may be caught in a problematic situation with you.  Ppl with strollers, understand something: you need to think about the infants' safety, not just your own; not just your right to get onto the bus first, to be first in the queue, to be the Monarch on Coronation Day walking down filthy Parisian pavements as if they were the red carpet. A stroller is hardly the Pope-mobile; it can hurt ppl though. But the little human in the stroller can also be harmed.  Think, for chupacabra's sake.

And cyclists.  It is stupidiotic, okay? it is, to think that you can be that healthy and charming and urbane on a cycle going at 40Km/h and not pause to consider you may fall off it and break your stupid head filled with breezy Parisian fumes. Inline skaters, too.  All this applies to you as well.  I don't have eyes at the back of my head so don't creep up on me from behind because I may have to move and now you're flat on the floor like a dragonfly on the windshield of a convertible Jaguar in the Autobahn.  Imbeciles!

Okay, when it comes to wheelchairiots I won't say much. I'll say something to those who push them.  Come on, be civilized!  Your relative gets to ride the bus because people are civilized and demand wheelchairs have a special ramp put on buses, or that the bus be equipped with those up-and-downy thingies that South Central Los Angeles Latino and Black gangsters have under the cars!  We all pay for that, so please, be courteous. Don't assault me.

The person whose chair you're pushing is disabled, but you aren't, so you're game. Why look for trouble?  Why think a wheelchair is less amenable to hurt a human body than a car, a bicycle, or a stroller?  You can damage someone's tendon forever.  Then what? 

Trash, Art, and the Movies

Pauline Kael

I   

        Like those cynical heroes who were idealists before they discovered that the world was more rotten than they had been led to expect, we’re just about all of us displaced persons, “a long way from home.” When we feel defeated, when we imagine we could now perhaps settle for home and what it represents, that home no longer exists. But there are movie houses. In whatever city we find ourselves we can duck into a theatre and see on the screen our familiars—our old “ideals” aging as we are and no longer looking so ideal. Where could we better stoke the fires of our masochism than at rotten movies in gaudy seedy picture palaces in cities that run together, movies and anonymity a common denominator. Movies—a tawdry corrupt art for a tawdry corrupt world—fit the way we feel. The world doesn’t work the way the schoolbooks said it did and we are different from what our parents and teachers expected us to be. Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons. Because we feel low we sink in the boredom, relax in the irresponsibility, and maybe grin for a minute when the gunman lines up three men and kills them with a single bullet, which is no more “real” to us than the nursery-school story of the brave little tailor.

        We don’t have to be told those are photographs of actors impersonating characters. We know, and we often know much more about both the actors and the characters they’re impersonating and about how and why the movie has been made than is consistent with theatrical illusion. Hitchcock teased us by killing off the one marquee-name star early in “Psycho,” a gambit which startled us not just because of the suddenness of the murder or how it was committed but because it broke a box-office convention and so it was a joke played on what audiences have learned to respect. He broke the rules of the movie game and our response demonstrated how aware we are of commercial considerations. When movies are bad (and in the bad parts of good movies) our awareness of the mechanics and our cynicism about the aims and values is peculiarly alienating. The audience talks right back to the phony “outspoken” condescending “The Detective”; there are groans of dejection at “The Legend of Lylah Clare,” with, now and then, a desperate little titter. How well we all know that cheap depression that settles on us when our hopes and expectations are disappointedagain. Alienation is the most common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser’s delight in small favors, we long to be surprised out of it—not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without self-disgust.

        A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.

Harper's, February 1969

*****

Today  went to one of my fav cinema houses in the city, La Pagode, to see a film I'd been looking fwd to, 2 Days in New York, directed by Julie Delpy, also in the lead role alongside Chris Rock.  A whole nine minutes into it I got the feeling that Delpy (who pleased me quite a bit with Before Sunrise and a little less with Before Sunset, then quite a lot with The Countess) seems to have the WoodyAllen syndrome only in reverse.

How I wish I didn't think this!  I like her work!  But wow.  

Woody Allen pleases me most when:

1- He isn't in his films and;

2- The action takes place in Europe.

Delpy tried to emulate Allen by packing her usually fresh, spontaneous French dialogue and stuffing it into a dusty suitcase to be thrown about carelessly upon arrival in the New World, forgetting to pack the most important item for this particular trip: her talent.

Instead of staying in France and doing what she does well well, she invaded Allen's turf (as he did hers?).

Either I am missing subtle parody or the Liberty Delpy has taken to be a Woody in drag makes the Statue Of seem a Lilliputian gift from France.

Here's the trouble:  some people can't be imitated.  Allen's style is so marked that anyone who uses him as an overt inspiration risks simple plagiarism.

To me, Allen is like Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce. A one-person artistic movement.

My Delpyc oracle tells me she will make quite a few phonecalls to Chris Rock in the near future as she realizes any success her film enjoys will be, if not entirely, then greatly, because of him.  His reactions to her ridiculous script which made more than 3 people (i.e. about 43% of the spectators since I went at 4PM...we were 15...um..) leave before the first hour.  I left after 65 minutes exactly, when Delpy's character's father started to tickle Rock's face with a red feather as if the scene depicted characters in an insane asylum.  Even then she'd have failed.  Her asylum is only inane.

The only bits which made me think about giggling a little involved the beginning of her relationship with Rock and language during the family dinner. 

Some of the dialogue was indeed well written and these few moments of bilingual confusion, if extended, could have redeemed the first hour of this caricature, if we exclude the feather scene which made me walk out into the cold rain.

I'm looking forward to her NEXT film, because I know she can do so much better than this.

 Paris, France

Love it.  Friday, or Saturday, I don't know when exactly, I lost my debit card. I agonized about it for ages Sunday morning when I found out I didn't have the card.  I cancelled it, had a shower, worried about how many things could have been bought on the internet by then on my card, got dressed, went out to retrace my steps and hope to find it.  Getting downstairs, I checked my mailbox.  The card was in it.  

Hate it.  Having cancelled the card Sunday morning, I had to go to the bank today to put in a request for a new one.  I get there, the branch is closed.  It closes on Mondays.  

Love it.  France, to everyone's surprise, voted YES for Palestine to join UNESCO today.  Now, this alone makes me love living in this country, especially when everyone and his brother thought France would either abstain or vote NO.  "Be realistic, demand the impossible."  Yes.  Sometimes, someone just has to take a chance and do what seems impossible.   

Hate it.  On the way to the bank, I was walking down one of the poshest avenues in this city, Avenue de Breteuil, when I felt something falling on my right arm.  It was a puddle of spit.  Someone spat out of the window of a building anyone would label as "chic".

The many faces of La Douce France, Marianne

Where's Waldo? And Laura? And Ronaldo? And Oscar? And Fred? And Paula? And Marcia? And João? And Olga? and Regina? And Clara, Fabio, Cleusa, Rodrigo, Gisela, André, Diego, Mariana...

Whenever I think about cities in the world I would like to see, the first one that comes to mind is Moscow.  There are many reasons but the main one is not Lenin's mausoleum, not the Red Square, not even its many beautiful, unusual churches; the single biggest attraction Moscow has to offer me is its Metro/Underground/Subway.  Whatever you want to call it.

I like public transportation. I especially like it when I don't have to get anywhere in a hurry, depending on where I am.  While in São Paulo, when I was alone I chose to take the metro.  It's clean, cheap, and safe.  Yes, safe. Believe it or not, one of the safest places one can be in this city is the metro.  Maybe it's because everyone's in such a hurry to get somewhere no one thinks about committing a crime; and plus which, why would a thief want to steal anything from someone who takes the metro in SP?  Rich ppl take helicopters these days, making it the city with the most heliports in the world. 

So as I was going from the West part of town to the South, to visit my mother, I took the metro, which got me there in exactly 1 hr 35mins, including walking time. With luggage.  Even a helicopter wouldn't have been this fast, if we count how long it'd have taken me to get to the heliport and wait till the pilot faffled about with the million little buttons on the control panel and got permission from whatever tower to take off blahblah etc.  And the price!! No comparison.  The metro is far more efficient than any other means of transportation.  And, according to me, more fun, too.  

One gets to observe so many unusual things, so many ppl, distracted by their mobile phones, or confused about how to get where, adapting to new stations and new lines, reading, listening to music... or, like me, taking photos.

Actually, just this one.  I hadn't been to this station yet or, if I had, it didn't have this "look".  I found it both interesting and perturbing.  It is v odd because there were no ppl in the carriage-- only these... specters, ppl who look like they belong in one of the video games I have seen ... Resident Evil or some such...  floating heads on Plexiglass; not a single human in sight.  How can this be?  It's SP, population 17million.  

Of course it got more and more full as it approached the center of the city.

We joke, us Paulistanos, about what one must do when one's feeling lonely, forgotten, feeling the vastness of the Universe and how disconnected and alone we all are in this world... how there is so little human warmth anymore.

We'll tell you, when you're feeling this way, you must head to Sé station at 6PM.

C'est-Noise-O-Ick Era

Twice a week, the recycling trucks from the city of Paris collect glass from the recycling bin each building has or can have.  There are about twenty such bins which belong to the buildings on either side and across the street from mine.

Twice a week, at 7AM, sometimes still in bed, I can hear the supersonic (or so it seems) truck making its way down my street, starting at the farther end from me and slowly making its way closer and closer, collecting each bin it finds on the pavement, one by excrutiating one.

When the contents of the first bin begin to fall in the hold of the truck, my brain lets out a small shriek which vaguely says "get me as far away from this as possible, now!," so I get up, which-- believe it or not-- doesn't help.  

When the truck is right in front of my building, the noise is so loud and appalling that it becomes almost sublime; then, my brain seems to be saying in a low voice coming out of the haze of a champagne-tobacco pipe: "I believe it's raining Kryptonite."

Constant loud noise is one of the more unpleasant factors one must deal with when living in such a densely populated city.  Neighbours screaming, yippie dogs barking in the flat next door, ppl who still haven't grasped that the point of a telephone is that you don't need to scream to be heard (worse when it's in public transport and the offender is right next to you), drivers who don't understand that honking their horns will not make the aforementioned recycling truck go faster, ppl who are under the impression we all would like nothing better than to share in the pleasure of their milibellian car stereo, etc.

One of my friends claims to have once killed a cockroach by screaming v loudly at it for a quarter of an hour, give or take  (who timed it? I'd love to know).  I didn't think that was possible, because, if I'm honest, I'm not sure cockroaches can hear, or if they have ears, even; but if they do, I now think it is entirely believable.