LA en vie

Halloween is coming

And that means....

... dog costumes!

Sarah Palin's Facebook page

Drinking

In France, it is fair to say, I never went to dinner at someone's house without being served wine. But a lot of Californians don't drink. Maybe it's all the driving you have to do here after dinner.

There is a reassuring sameness to a French meal, known to all the French, high or low-- so that any Frenchman feels comfortable in the most exquisite restaurant: first,  nuts or hors-d'oeuvres in the salon with an apéritif , then an appetizer at the table, then the main course, then salad, cheese, dessert; coffee. Then perhaps a little chocolate.

Everything bien arrosé, of course, with wine, whiskey or champagne.

The rules are off in California. So many people don't drink at all or are the designated driver. A lot of young people only touch beer. And instead of having white and red wine on hand, you have to serve several different varieties of soft drink, making sure to have diet Pepsi AND diet Coke!

The fast lunch

"Can you explain about lunchtime?" I asked the dean at the first parents' meeting.

"Well, there's no actual lunch hour, but they can usually grab a bite between classes. And of course everyone has at least one free period a day."

"How long do they have between classes?"

"Ten minutes."

Sarah Palin: Cauchemar ou réalité?

The French won't like her.

That could help her.

*Thanks, Richmond Rambler, for the link!  As pointed out by Deb, the photo is faked. I honestly think it shows her personality, though.

Don't know much about geography

"Wait a minute. Are you saying New Mexico is in America?" said the pretty teenager behind me, of friend of A's who goes to one of the top schools in Los Angeles.

"Well, yes, it is," I said over my shoulder, trying to make her feel better. "A lot of people make that mistake, though. A magazine there even has a feature column where New Mexicans write in their stories about how everyone thinks they're foreigners."

"Wow. Since when is New Mexico part of the U.S.?" the girl said.

I tried successfully not to snap. "For about a hundred years."

"Americans are terrible at geography," said A. "Mom, remember that guy who didn't know London was a city?"

"London is a city?" said the girl. "I thought it was, like, a country."

Daytime television

It seems odd that I am still feeling like an outsider a year and a half after arriving in California, but maybe the truth is, living in another country was just my way of disguising my own sense of being different.

I have a new dentist who has televisions in all his rooms, positioned where you can see them as you lie back in the dental chair. The woman who was working on my teeth had the TV tuned to an animals channel, and I found it relaxing to watch puppies doing tricks and horses being rescued from abusive owners. But then I was moved to a new room where another woman had a celebrity news channel on. The tone of the announcers was urgent and aggressive. This news was important-- that's why the voices come so loud and fast, with images changing every couple of seconds! This news is mean-spirited, cynical and funny! And this news invades real people's privacy and makes them and their families miserable so that someone watching daytime TV is entertained for a few seconds!

"Yeah, it's terrible what they do," said the complacent woman cleaning my teeth. She left the TV on though. I longed for the gadget I carry in my purse, a TV-B-Gone.

What year did public humiliation of other people become entertainment to Americans?

American movies vs French cinema

My children were all laughing when I came home from the Batman movie. They had tricked me into going and  knew I would hate it. I would have walked out after ten minutes, except that I couldn't find my companion-- the movie was still so popular its second weekend that we couldn't sit together. My ears are still ringing.

"Do you realize that almost ten percent of the U.S. population went to see that movie in one week?" D said.

A while ago I put up a Joe Eszterhas quote about the difference between American and French movies.

Why the French can't make movies.

French woman wakes up, talks French, gets out of bed, has breakfast, goes shopping, talks French, comes back, thinks about lunch, visits her mother, talks French, maybe goes for a walk, sees child, talks French, movie ends....

American woman is woken up by gunshot, stripped naked and tied up by masked intruder, manages to untie herself with teeth, goes shopping, meets handsome all-action architect in the checkout line, comes back, thinks about lunch, tracks down masked intruder and tries to blow his head off, misses, runs traumatized to handsome all-action architect and fucks his brains out, discovers by chance while looking through drawer that handsome all-action architect is in fact masked intruder, blows his head off in anger, feels empowered, sees child, child says, "Love you, Mommy," end credits.

Result? Four hundred twenty-five million dollars box office worldwide. And not a word of French spoken.

   --Joe Eszterhas as told to Craig Brown, in Vanity Fair, March 2008

One of the differences is the scale. American movies think big: big explosions, terrorists attacking the country, global disasters. The French think small: adultery, trouble at the office, not getting along with your adult siblings.

Another difference is that in a French movie, the hero or heroine has a family. In the American version, at most he or she will have a 4- to 8-year-old kid (blond, cute, sassy) or a Significant Other-- this is considered their family. Extended families do not exist in an American movie. When was the last time you saw a grown person's mother as an important character in one? Brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, cousins and grandparents might as well not exist.

The differences go back a long time.  Kit Carson and Honoré de Balzac were born only ten years apart, but they might as well have lived on different planets.

The boy who hit his mother

"Mom! Let's go! Mom! Let's GO!"

A ten- or twelve-year-old boy was standing in front of me as I waited in line to buy something. His mother, the same height as he, was in front of me.

The boy was hitting her, hard, with his fist on her bare shoulder, each time he repeated "Let's GO!"

I couldn't help myself. C'est parti tout seul.

"STOP THAT!" I hissed.

The mother didn't look at me. She lowered her head, finished her transaction and hurried off. On the corner I saw her stop and readjust her heavy bags. The two sturdy tall boys with her weren't carrying anything. They were still staring at me.

"I can't believe he was hitting his mother!" I said to the saleswoman. I knew I would find a receptive audience-- she wasn't American.

"They are all like that," the saleswoman said sadly. "I can't say anything to them, but they are all like that."

American strawberries vs gariguettes

My local greengrocers in Paris laughed when I went on and on about how much I had missed French strawberries (and cheese, and poulet rôti, and foie gras, and the French sense of humor). I was so lucky I came back in June, just during the season for the gariguettes from the south of France.

I  returned to Los Angeles and thought I saw some French-style, delicious, non-agro-engineered strawberries at the farmers market the next day. The strawberries were not as huge as the usual bloated, tasteless, watery kind that are almost all you find in the U.S. now. They were marked "organic!" Was there a chance that they were the good sweet strawberries I remember from my childhood?

"I love strawberry season," I said happily, as the merchant put three baskets into my bag.

"Oh, don't worry, I have these all year round," he said.