Going to Hell

I realize how terrible I am.  A six-day lapse in updates is awful. But how am I to write about adventures if I don’t make time to have them?

The latest update: jazz clubs. I’ve decided/realized that the only way to meet actual real-life French people is in their natural habitat: anywhere outside the seventh arrondissement. So last week, I decided to look up some Parisian jazz clubs with the intention to actually go to one. They all seem to be in the fourth arrondissement, too. How quaint. Jews, gays, ex-pats, AND jazz? You’re the best arrondissement ever! There’s one I’m particularly interested in. It’s called “Le Slow Club.” Apparently, it’s in the basement of a building where they used to store and ripen bananas, and was a favorite hangout of Miles Davis or some other big jazz guy. (I think it was him.) And they have $4 drinks, which is good (even though I really only need about half of a drink of anything, and I’m set for the whole night). I just really, really, really hope they don’t play slow jazz/smooth jazz/elevator music. I might just have to go postal on some Frenchies if that happens. Or go to the blues club in the 14^th. I guess I could always do that.

German cinema has been rather intense these last couple weeks. Last week, we watched “Triumph of the Will,” a Hitler documentary directed by Leni Riefenstahl and produced by the führer himself. Very disturbing to see Hitler portrayed as this really great awesome guy – kissing babies and being greeted on the tarmac like The Beatles. Ugh. Then there was the uber-militaristic aspect of all the meetings they went to, and all the insano-Nazi speeches. It was shot just after Hitler came into power, and before they started their murderous rampage. I guess the film is especially horrifying knowing what all those people -- who are portrayed on screen as demi-gods, saviors, protectors of peace and love -- would end up doing just a little later on. Horrifying. I’d rather watch a marathon of “Saw” and “The Human Centipede” any day. I think.

Yesterday we watched “Young Törless,” one of the first films of the German New Wave in the 1960’s. It was about Törless, a young man in German military school in 1906 who watches idly as two of his fellow classmates physically and psychologically torture another student for stealing. The film was basically a microcosm of what happened during the Nazi reign, and tries to explain how something so horrifying could happen. The film’s conclusion: the combination of human weakness and human psychosis allows anything to be possible. A good film, but definitely not for the weak at heart, or stomach (stabbing/mouse killing/fly torture/etc.).

 My only real adventure for the week -- besides a horrible trip to McDonalds (which was a bit of a letdown – chicken nuggets are really only good to think about) – was a quest for Dracula, by which I mean the book, and not the person. For my German cinema research project, I’m going to do a comparison between Bram Stoker’s Dracula and F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” a silent film based on the novel (yet very different, since they couldn’t get the rights to adapt Dracula). They didn’t have it at the school’s library, so I set out for one of the only used English bookstores in Paris – by which I mean a store that sells used books written in English, not an English bookstore that’s been used like a prostitute and thrown into the back alleys somewhere (if that’s what you thought). I went to Tea and Tattered Pages in the sixth arrondissement. I’d heard of it before somewhere, and it proved very interesting.

The owner is a 60-something lady (American, I think) who sits on a bench behind a tall podium which serves as the front counter. There’s an orange cat that runs around, scratching the exposed beams and sleeping in the two-euro boxes of books. The owner pointed me in the direction of Stoker, and I was immediately followed by her feline companion, and as I stood in between second-hand shelves of second-hand books, it wound its way around my feet and through the shelves and back around my feet, so I bent down to pet it. I’m not sure why, but it was so comforting. I went back to searching, found my book, and continued to look through the store. It was so strange: 99% of the books on the shelves were published before the ‘80’s. I especially love the horrid cover art (like my Dracula).

Nowhere in the book does it say that Dracula has a unibrow, so is it really necessary on the cover? I argue that, since I feel ridiculous reading a book with such a bizarre, cartoonish cover in public, the answer is no. No, the unibrow is not necessary.

I paid, left (with the intention of returning, even if just to peruse), and started walking home. By that time, it was six o’clock and the sun was at the point in the sky where it’s just low enough to shine directly into one’s eyes, and just high enough to be above all the buildings. I took a different route, thinking it would be faster. It wasn’t. At all. Though I did see some strange things.

Strange Thing #1:

I passed by several high schools (lycées) which, at first glance, looked like prisons. I’m pretty sure they may have actually been prisons at one point in time. How fitting.

Strange Thing #2:

While walking, I looked at all the street signs I passed because a) I didn’t really know where I was, b) I wanted to know where I was in case I was there again, and c) sometimes there are really strange names for some of the streets – and I think I found the strangest one: L’Impasse de Bébé Jésus. The Impasse of Baby Jesus. The first thing I thought: My god, it’s Mary’s vagina.

And that is why I’m going to hell.

At least I’m taking a class about it… I’ll know who my roommates will be.