Pics from class trip on Wednesday. Whoohoo.

So this would be a building, somewhat on the older side, with lots of ivy. On the edge of Montmartre, Boulevard Rochechouart. Quite near the hotel were we stayed the first week.

Sacré Couer, from the Bouelvard Rochechouart still.

Very touristy place, yes?

The class took the tram-whatsit-thingamajig up to the top, instead of the stairs.

Paris Invaders mosaic thingy. See here for details. Artsy type thingy, basically.

“Au Bon Vins.” Not sure if the French are much aware of Au Bon Pain, but to me at least this constituted punniness thereupon.

Not much to say about this one. Fun shop front, yes?

Pretty graffiti-style thing!

Again with the ivy.

Nice little variety of architecture maintaining a common tone overall.

I think this might be the only vineyard within the Paris city limits.

If you look carefully you can see the bird on one of the wooden posts. Would have gotten a closer picture, but my camera only zooms in so far.

Tourists photographing the Lapin Agile.

Place de Tertres. Apparently there’s a special organization that regulates artists’ use of this space — a roster every year of a few hundred, half of whom are present on any given day, each with a spot of 1m square. Or so said our student guides. I thought this was a bit excessive — them French and their regulating everything — but it seems that prior to this organization, the place was run by the mafia. Or something like that. At any rate the artists were aggressive towards passersby and so forth.

Now isn’t that a pretty door?

Tree thing in courtyard of restaurant.

Nice little cityscape, very 3-D and all that.

Flags: French, European Union, and Commune of Montmartre.

Church door, Église de St Pierre. Relatively recent — 1940s or so.

Another door of aforesaid church.

Pictures of inside of church, and the lovely decorations of the Place des Abbesses métro station, to be posted tomorrow.

I believe I forgot to mention, a few posts back, that the Ronde Infini des Obtinés ended a few days ago, after 1,007 hours of continuous walking. Or so said the Métro.

Oh, and remember how I mentioned a long while back that a disproportionate number of French panhandly-types have dogs with them? According to the same publication, that’s a deliberate tactic to encourage people to give money, dogs not particularly well cared-for, smuggled into the country, sold under the table for cash, so on. Which wouldn’t entirely surprise me, just because it seems improbable that so many homeless people would all have dogs with them. I’m not up to date on pet-ownership statistics for Paris, but it just seemed like the proportion of panhandlers with dogs was higher than the proportion of people with dogs overall.

In other news, it seems that a large portion of the French prison guards have gone on strike. Here’s a video of them facing off against the CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, riot police) — apparently they don’t let you embed it and I’m too lazy to try to work around that but it’s worth checking out, very dramatic. Like, things-are-on-fire kind of dramatic:

Devant Fleury-Mérogis, des gardiens face aux CRS
LEMONDE.FR | 06.05.09

©

Took a bunch of pictures of yesterday’s tour of Montmartre. Camera ran out of battery. Batteries charging. Pictures up tomorrow or next day. Telegraphic speech end now.

In the meantime, some pictures I didn’t get around to posting yet.

I must have walked past this building a dozen times before I noticed that there appear to be two doors in this wall. Not sure what they are. Maybe very efficient fire escapes?

Have seen this graffiti around a few places. Always on the little bumpy bits of the curb. Thought I might as well post it here for posterity’s edification.

Gratuitous English. Sorta like when you pass a restaurant in New York that advertises “Cucina Italiana” or such. Except, you know, English is for fast food.

Walls, ivy, whoohoo.

Sculpture in the… 17th, I believe. Shiny!

“General Dream.”

Open door.

Buildings of various ages. Lampposts, I’ve noticed, have a way of getting in front of the pretty pictures I want to take. They just plant themselves down right in the middle of my lovely composition. People do that too, sometimes, but at least they move if you wait long enough.

Isn’t this the most adorablest fire station ever? French emergency vehicles in general are very cute. All rounded and chunky like toddler Happy Meal toys.

“Hairdresser: Brazil, Antilles, United States, Africa.” Dunno, just something kinda funny about seeing the US listed with a bunch of other countries that aren’t very US-y. And not sure why all of Africa is up there. I suppose its possible they all have similar hairdressing styles? I wouldn’t know, don’t pay attention to these things. Tend to lump countries together by language, or political systems, or history. Makes sense to put francophone countries together, or parliamentary democracies, or former colonies of a given country, or so on.

Church of some denomination or other, I believe.

Yeah, so sometimes the free-bicycles-on-the-street thing doesn’t work out so well.

The front gate to the dorms. Note the two signs. This is Paris, where you can live in the middle of the block, but on the end of the street.

Last night I saw Paris, je t’aime, an interesting anthology film lent and strongly recommended by a classmate. Well, actually, I saw Pariisi Rakkaudella. Swedish, I believe. Interesting sort of thing, running the gamut from depressing to heartwarming to amusingly ironic to completely surreal. It is admittedly kind of one of those spot-the-famous-person movies (Look! Willem Defoe as a hallucinated cowboy! Hey, the restaurant owner is Gerard Depardieu!), and some of the shorts would be a little gimmicky on their own, but it works pretty well taken all together.

Went to the Musée de la Magie on Sunday. Walked along the Seine from the metro station:

There are these book-sell-y places all along the quais; realized this was a very Parisian thing, felt compelled to photograph.

Here are some of them, closed:

Some hospital or school, I forget, all grève-y with banners and slogans.

Here’s a memorial to French troops in the Korean War:

And murals on a little building thingy:

At the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, I noticed something of a crowd and a band on a stage. I went over to check it out and discovered that it was the “Rond Infinie des Obstinés,” an infinite round, as in a big circle of people walking around slowly without stopping. Since last month. Not always the same people, obviously. This was apparently the brainchild of the St Denis philosophy department. My lit teacher, I know, walked a few shifts.

And there was this cool little sticky-outy bit (I assure you, this is the technical architectural term) on a building on the Rue St-Something-or-Other:

And the Musée de la Magie:


I got there, unknowingly, right in time for the next performance. Nice little theater, though with very tough angles (the audience is on steep bleachers-type things, the stage is in a corner of a small square space). The guide gave us a bit of history beforehand, mentioning that in these underground rooms one could fit Notre Dame. He also referred to WWII as “the last war,” which was interesting. I guess if most of your wars have been fought on your nation’s actual territory, it’s going to make the away games, as it were, seem less intense or real. At any rate, when I hear “the last war,” I think of the first Gulf War, or maybe Vietnam. I had fun noting the anglicisms that have crept into French magician-speak. We heard of “misdirection,” while to my knowledge the mis- prefix isn’t used so much in French. Also, they call close-up magic “du close-up.” Altogether entertaining show, and the museum has a nice collection of antique props, optical illusions, and that masochistic brand of carnival game where one places one’s hand inside a box forbiddingly decorated with some kind of animal’s mouth, and a second later there’s air blown on it or something tickling it or whatever. I tried the one that was freaking people out the most, but it didn’t work on me. I don’t mean that as in “I’m so tough it didn’t startle me,” but as in “I stuck my hands in and nothing happened.” There was also a museum of automatons attached to the museum of magic. A few of them didn’t work, but mostly the automatons dutifully automatized when buttons were pushed. Quite amusing.

Returned to the train by way of some streets I remembered from last time I was in Paris.

A woman making big bubbles along the side of the Centre Pompidou.

Ooh fountain.

Impressive staircase.

Guy juggling on trampoline.

Hey, they’ve got those paint-your-name guys here just like on Canal Street!

Can you spot the Francophone shirt?

Closeups of statues at the base of those stairs:

Last time I was here, we ate a few times at this lovely establishment:

Open 7 out of 7 days. That, my dear French people, is the way to do it.
The place is relatively cheap, relatively good, cafeteria-style stuff. Well, I understand some of my fellow American students went to one and were less than impressed. I disregard this. Flunch is goodness. Case closed.

You can’t really tell so easily with the reflection in the glass, but this music store’s sampling headphones had little potted plants on them. The image of the customer listening to music with a flowerpot on his head was too amusing not to photograph.

Nice little composition, eh?

Gardens.

Old Building.

New Building. I know I take too many pictures of interesting-looking façades, but you have to admit that this one is pretty cool, what with being all cascade-y like, and the juxtaposition with the surrounding buildings and greenery.

Yes, apparently Paris has a Lingerie Street.

That’s it for pictures today. I’m currently in the process of overreacting to my latest grade for Comprehension et Analyse des Textes. 13.5 / 20. Not great. Like a B or so, if I recall. That’s about my average in that class so far, and it looks like the best I could hope for is a B+ ultimately. It’s frustrating, because in the earlier days of the class I thought I was doing well, until we started having to do real analysis. I won’t complain too much about it, because that’ll be annoying, but I felt I ought to mention it as it is going to be a relatively important part of the whole study-abroad experience. It’s not the grade so much that bothers me as the fact that it means I’m never entirely understanding what the professor wants. The problems I have with the class are twofold. First, I’m used to analyzing literature, where you can basically forget about what the author is trying to say so long as you can put together a convincing argument for your preferred interpretation; second, I have to work in French, so I can’t even fall back on style when I’m deficient in substance. I’ve been noticing an insidious competitiveness sliding into my self-evaluation of my performance here, and I’ve concluded that one really must, if at all possible ,refraining from comparing oneself to others. It breeds complacency. You can always find a few people who are doing worse than you, and convince yourself that you’re not doing too badly because so-and-so did worse. If we fixate on being better, we lose sight of being good. I find myself noting that my French is better than that of many American students, which is of course besides the point. That’s a result of the altogether lax standards of most American universities when it comes to teaching foreign languages, which is in itself a result of English’s place as the 21st-century lingua franca. That has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I speak and write French well enough to get done what I need to get done. But it’s very tempting to slide into that mindset. And I shall stop ranting now.

This Thursday was not as all striked-out as previous ones have been. Everybody seems to be taking full advantage of the nice weather, which returned this week after a perfectly sucky Spring Break of rain and cold.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a nice productive use of displaced tables and chairs.

This? Not so much with the productive, though very orderly. Probably put there by Maintenance after being found elsewhere. This is outside my Lit classroom, incidentally.

I was early for lit class and the door was locked. There was a class going on inside, I believe (usually they’re done well before we start; I tend to be early, since I have a 3-4 hour break between Grammar and Lit, so I know these things). While waiting, I decided for whatever reason to take pictures of the campus looking off into the distance. So here you go:

Also another little student-gathering-thingy:

And video of all this because they were also playing music which I felt I ought to capture. Naturally, it got mostly blurred out by the background noise:

And here’s students on a terrace playing hackeysack or Frisbee, I forget which. Naturally whatever they were tossing about went over the edge and one girl had to run down and get it.

I like this window open. Dunno why. Probably because this façade in general.

Here’s a sad little wannabe-barricade:

Went back to Sacré Coeur to get a decent night shot of the view. Of course, since it’s warm out now, there were tons more people than last time I was there at night. I did get a blurry Eiffel Tower, though. And it’s been too long that I went without posting an Eiffel Tower shot.

I was going to take a shot of the view of the dorms at night, from the top of the stairs to the northwest of sacré Couer, which really ought to look rather nice. But then I got distracted by the juxtaposition of the two overflowing trash-bag-can-things at the top of the stairs and the borderline cliché accordion music wafting up. Turns out there was a balding guy sitting halfway down the steps, about, playing the accordion. A half-dozen or so young people, college-age or a bit later, applauded from the balcony of an apartment. The whole thing would have felt a bit trite if it had been in a movie, but being all non-fiction-like it was rather entertaining. I’m always impressed by people playing the accordion. Like all organs, there’s just so many buttons, and you don’t even have your feet to work pedals or anything. Must be intense.

I plan to try to visit the Museum of Magic tomorrow. This is contingent on my getting up early enough to get my laundry done quickly, which is really the priority of the day, especially since last week one of the dryers was broken (I always thought it was a basic rule of laundry-room logistics that you put more dryers than washers, not less, but apparently not). And of course the beginning of the month means paying rent and renewing my Passe Navigo. And somehow I’ve managed to need to go grocery shopping on a Sunday again, which means going to the little Franprix that doesn’t give out bags, which means bringing my backpack… French scheduling-things makes life ever so logistically complicated.

So yesterday, the full shutdown had been un-shut-downed. The chairs were still largely there, just shoved somewhat out of the way to clear room so the doorways could open:

And so people could climb the stairs:

Still, you have to hand it to the students, Tuesday was quite effective in the area of school-shutty-downy-ness.

Spotted this in the entrance hall — it’s a lot easier to notice stuff when it’s not full of students:

3 strikes, you’re out?

Also:

“Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen: Article 35: When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is, for the people and for every part of the people, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.”
My, but don’t they take themselves seriously? It’s always interesting to compare things like revolutions, bills of rights, declarations, constitutions, etc. Seems the French stick rather closely to John Locke’s stuff, what with the explicit rights to property and revolution. For my lit. class (and, to a lesser extent, the MICEFA writing class), I’ve had to do lots of fun research into the Négritude movement of the early-mid 20th century. Why, yes, linking to Wikipedia is what I do when I don’t feel like explaining something at length. My point being, I found some interesting parallels between the American Revolution and the movement in French colonies such as Senegal. Seems both of them had, initially, the idea of remaining part of the colonizing country’s territory, just on more equal footing with the people back in The Good Old Mother Country. Of course, empires being what they are, The Good Old Mother Country tends to have other ideas.

Which is a perfect segue to mentioning that the reason I didn’t post yesterday, even though I kinda-sorta said I would, is that I found myself having more work than I expected writing an analysis on “Départ” by Léopold Senghor (wow, I’m really overdoing the links, aren’t I?). I ended up with 4 pages double-spaced, in what may have even been half-intelligible French. Then I had to prepare for my grammar-class test on the subjunctive. Spent a while going over when to use it, when to use the indicative, etc. Of course, it turned out this morning that the test was simply on knowing the subjunctive forms of various verbs in various contexts; we didn’t actually have to know whether to use subjunctive or indicative. So I managed to be studious and waste time. Multitasking!
[have you noticed how much chattier this blog has gotten since the beginning of the semester? My theory is that as I run out of actual things to say, I start gravitating towards less formal, id est more idiosyncratic and possibly even interesting, ways of saying them. More form, less content].

Anyway, I’d said I had some thought on contact lens solution and graffiti, apparently. Well, this is the graffiti:

“Suicided cops – halfway forgiven?”
This has been up since the beginning of the semester or thereabouts, and it’s so hyperbolic that at first I assumed it was meant ironically. Now I’m not so sure; it’s hyperbole, definitely, but what irks me is now I sort of get the impression that the general sentiment may be genuine. Which is just immature. It seems to me that if you want to be all revolutionary-like, you can have one of two basic attitudes towards those who serve in (to lapse into poli-sci talk) the coercive apparatus of the state. Either you can treat them as essentially instruments of the execution of government policy–people who are just going to do their jobs, who are to be engaged primarily with the goal of forcing changes relatively high up the chain of command; or you can treat them as individuals who are acting of their own free will within a certain set of organizational constraints, who might be appealed to and dealt with on a more basic human-to-human level. Each approach, naturally, has its merits from a strategic point of view. One might also bring in philosophical ideas of individual moral culpability, but — and this would be the important part — such ideas are really only useful when directed to those who are viewed primarily as allies or potential allies. If you view someone solely as an enemy, then it is utterly useless to bring guilt-talk into the equation. The combination of a moral-culpability mindset and an enemies-only mindset is, inevitably, the conclusion that everyone on the opposing side is individually committed to EvilWithACapitalE. This can hardly be considered a productive or accurate mindset. If you’re going to designate broad swathes of people as The Enemy, unless there’s a strong, clear ideological motive behind that status, it’s probably best to acknowledge that that role is their defining characteristic only within the context of the conflict at hand (this would be the attitude of treating cops, soldiers, bureaucrats, etc as people who can be expected to carry out whatever policy is in place). The attitude expressed by this graffiti, essentially, implies that the opponent in a particular conflict is composed entirely of individuals who consciously and maliciously choose Evil. Again, it’s clearly an intentionally provocative bit of hyperbole, but it speaks to a very lazy, self-centered, and thoroughly counterproductive outlook. And that irks me.

And on the same wall we find:

“Cops or hoodlums…”
[well, voyoux doesn’t sound, I believe, nearly as silly and old-fashioned as hoodlums does in English, but I’m not about to spend twenty minutes deciding on the best way to translate this stuff]

“…you have to choose.”
[well, not literally “you have to choose” in the second person; literally, “it is necessary to choose,” I’d say the attitude is something like “pick one or the other.”]
Which is another classic provocation, of course, of the sort really best left to heads of state and nascent Sith lords. Less irksome because, while infantile, it’s such a cliché that it cannot really be taken seriously anymore. Can it? At least not without a lot of supporting arguments. And even then, it’s the sort of phrase to avoid because it generally just serves to rev up one’s supporters and make everyone else’s eyes glaze over.

Oh, and speaking of eyes (I am good on the segues today, aren’t I?), yeah, I actually don’t know what I was going to say about the contact lens solution. Bought a bottle at one of them lovely French pharmacies:

Was struck by how translucent the whole thing is. A much more utilitarian/medical feel than the American packaging. Also, note the little “Think eyegiene” thingy–an English pun on a bottle intended for the French market. Okay.

At the Franprix yesterday, the checker asked me what I was going to do with the stick of marzipan I’d purchased. She seemed somewhat bemused when I said I was going to eat it. Hey, it makes sense to me. Franprix, you see, has these lovely sticks of marzipan in the baking section (pictured below only upon arrival at dorm room):

They’re quite nice to snack on. They also make for lovely fried sandwiches, especially with Nutella.

So my first class at Paris 8 after the break was scheduled for today. Note I don’t say that I had class today; the strike was in effect much more comprehensively than before. I took pictures, of course; not like there was anything else to do. Well, except for the sudoku in the Metro Paris. I pick up a free paper just about every time I’m at the St-Denis campus, and tell myself that I’m going to do the crossword and build my language skills, but then I always give up on it and turn to the sudoku instead. On the bright side, I’m getting better at sudoku… Anyway, pictures were taken, by me, but before I get to them, here’s some utterly random pictures that I took sometime in the past week, and forgot about till I uploaded stuff from my camera today. These were taken in various neighborhoods, don’t remember entirely which are from where:

First the sculptures:

Now the façades:

Now the doorways etc:




I’ve noticed I take a lot of pictures of doorways. But then Paris has a lot of fun ones.

Anyway, about the grève. As usual, there were chairs and tables in the entranceway and all that. This time, however, the students seem to have gotten the idea that there’s a difference between tossing a few chairs about and really blockading a place. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a proper barricade:

and:

I’m quite proud of the French students. They can learn! It finally occurred to someone, apparently, that scattered blocked or mostly-blocked doorways are annoying at most, but that since the entrance lobby only has point connecting in to the rest of the school–the stairs and the doorways shown above–it would be a lot simpler to just completely block those off. Isn’t that clever?

I was tempted to turn around and go back to the dorms right then, but I figured I ought to at least try to get to the classroom. My Tuesday-morning professor, for Comprehension and Analysis of Texts, isn’t as self-righteous as my grammar teacher is about continuing class despite the strike; her attitude is a bit detached, really (it should be noted that none of my professors seem to care much for Sarkozy’s reforms; they just differ on their opinions of the strike). Still, it seemed only polite to do my best to show up; that way, at least, I’d be prepared for grammar class on Thursday, where the professor routinely berates students for claiming the barricades as an excuse for tardiness (in fairness to her, anybody with a modicum of sense should know by now to allow extra time, especially on Thursdays, to navigate the crowds and figure out which spots are blocked and so on). In any case, I remembered the out-of-the-way path some of us MICEFA students had taken exiting Bâtiment A on our registration visit (we weren’t being particularly exploration-minded; we’d simply gotten lost). So I went across the street, and arrived at a gate that was devoid of students, and in the process of being unlocked by some nice custodian-type people. So in I went, through the courtyard pictured below, which I realized I’d never gotten a good picture of from that angle:

There followed forty-five minutes of me doing sudoku, reading the headlines and horoscopes, and cross-hatching/shading the Metro logo (I got a nice plaid thing going with the wireframe globe icon). At the end of which the classroom was still somewhat bereft of studentry:

(the thing on the table on the left-hand edge is my backpack. There was no other sign of life)

So I went on my merry way, snapping pictures. I noted that other doorways were devoid of blockading:

Well, not all. The one below, leading to the bridge over the road, had some halfhearted chair-and-desk stuff going on:

The garden’s coming along nicely too:

And then I got back to the courtyard where I’d come in, and found that the students had apparently discovered that people can actually go in and out through the gates. They had thus amended their deployment accordingly:

There was a guy with keys (the gentleman to the left with the shoulder bag, I believe), but apparently none of them were the right one for the gate. The student on the other side advised him to find a security guard.

I went to go to the cafeteria building across campus, where there’s a gateway to the sidewalk. Well, I believe there is, without a lock that requires a key, just a push-button thingy. But the building was, naturally, closed; I think it opens around 10:30 or 11:00. In the end, I got to the far end of campus (which really isn’t that far), and saw a group of people walking down a driveway and noticed that the gate (pictured below) was slowly closing.

So I dashed for it, which felt very Mission: Impossible until I actually passed through with moments to spare, and instead of closing dramatically behind me and sealing off the campus, the door motion-sensed me and started reopening. Ah well. Noted student presence/barricades along other gates as well:

And here’s a whole great big bunch of people outside the lobby:

And that’s about it. Oh, and this morning the sky was melodramatic outside my window, so I took a picture:

Yes, I take a lot of melodramatic shots of the sky when it’s all gray except for indistinct light in the distance. It’s pretty.

Oh, and here’s a picture of the other side of the stair barricades:

A couple people gave me funny looks when they noticed me on the other side. Didn’t mean to rain on their parade or anything–because really the whole thing was relatively impenetrable and they deserve to be proud of their little strategic-location quality-not-quantity breakthrough–but, you know, it makes a good picture.

Tomorrow, I think, I’ll have some notes on contact-lens solution and a too-long analysis of some graffiti that is either juvenile and earnest or cryptic and ironic.

Again, the title kind of says it all.

For some reason, this is the only Pizza Hut I’ve noticed in Paris–a small one near the MICEFA office. Haven’t actually been there. Somehow I’d expect if there were only a few that they’d be in more touristy areas. The workings of restaurant franchises are truly mysterious things.

Ooh, big building w/ big wall! This was apparently a prison of some sort. Might still be, for all I know, though it would seem odd to have one just in a city like that.

At any rate, it had the following plaque on one wall:

“Enter in the wings of the sports world,” or something to that effect. Not sure what a little mouse journalist has to do with sports, precisely, but it sure is cute, no?

Watch shop in the 13th.

Ooh shiny building.

The Rue Goscinny. On which one can find the Goscinny Bookstore:

Plus a bunch of quotes, mostly from Astérix:

The Rue Marcel Duchamp. This was not marked with Duchamp quotes. Nor did it have a Librairie Duchamp. It was actually somewhat disappointingly nondescript. Ah well.

Title says it all. It’s been, what, a week since my last post? I blame it on Spring Break. This blog is basically homework twice removed, so my blog-about-things brain has kind of shut off in the past week. Now, of course, it’s time to start gearing up for next Tuesday, when classes start. Well, the MICEFA class already started this past Monday, but that one’s fun. In English and all, which just makes things easier. We spend a lot of time commiserating about irritating French things. That’s something else I’ve been missing, largely due no doubt to lack of classes. No nonsensical language quirks of cultural tics presenting themselves to me to be complained about. Which really provided a lot of the wordcount for this thing. So it goes. I’ll make do, then, with some absolutely thrilling pictures chronicling my recent activities:

I got a frozen pizza at Franprix. Somehow I haven’t entirely registered the whole “you need a microwave to properly thaw frozen foods” thing:

Problem solved.

Apparently, I decided it was worth it to photograph this ad for a Tales of the City book:

I guess I was kind of surprised because I always thought of Tales of the City as a very American kind of series. Also, you know, there’s the slight bewilderment at people from a foreign country being interested in something of ours that’s neither politics nor New York. Well, in my more charitable moods, I concede that people may have an interest in LA. But what’s next? Chicago? Florida? Those bits in between the coasts without cities? Staten Island? I guess I’m a bit New-York-centric, but somehow the thought of French people being aware of San Francisco’s existence puzzles and amuses me.

Speaking of things that puzzle and amuse me, another English-language-learning subway ad:

All right, I’ll admit that I always find it weird to associate the Union Flag (fun trivia: while it’s commonly called the “Union Jack,” that name is only properly applied when it’s flown from a ship. Don’t ask where I learned this, because I don’t remember… I think it was a comment on the Society of American Magicians Yahoo list)… where was I? All right, it’s weird to me to associate the British flag with the English language, but I guess it does make sense–unless you’re specifically advertising “Wall Street English,” which most certainly is a non-British variant. Plus, you know, there’s something inherently silly about a guy with a flag on his tongue.

Some great big topiary by the MICEFA office:

Pretty little doorway:

“Hospital of Instruction of the Armies.” I guess this is where they practice making wounded people?

I’ve got more pictures uploaded that I’ll post eventually, but seeing as the sarcastic photograph commentary is currently my only source of bloggerly material, I’m going to continue with the whole rationing thing. More tomorrow, maybe.

And still more pictures from a week ago. I’m getting good at making these last, aren’t I?

The logo-type thingy of Sacha Schwartz, the artist whose workshop we went to see. Also, you know, a door. On which the logo is painted. Which leads to said workshop.

Students in the aforesaid workshop.

Arts! Rather impale-y, really.

More arts!

The artist. Apparently he found the frame in the street, and decided to make a painting for it, and the first thing that came to mind based on the dimensions and style was himself as St. Sebastian.

The piece he was working on at the moment. That would be his wife.

He had a bunch on Aesop’s fables.

Weird disturbing kiddie soldiers.

Building something. Hard to tell in the photo but the joints in the wooden structure have real screws, and the shorts are real fabric. Also a few pictures above, note the real cheese box in the crow’s mouth. Interesting juxtaposition of the real and the highly stylized. The guy was quite pleasantly laid-back and non-pretentious. I had a sort video clip of him talking but don’t seem to have uploaded it. Probably just as well because I think since I was standing rather close to his radio the hip-hop music might have drowned him out a bit on the camera’s mic. At least I recall it being hip-hop. Unfortunately I don’t seem to have taken any pictures of Mr. Schwartz himself, apart from him as St. Sebastian and the non-uploaded video clip. Oh well.

Oh, and isn’t this a clever way of keeping all your tools neatly arranged?

The title, really, says it all. Here are more pictures from the Frigos:

Students in hallway with doorway.

View up the Miraculous Spiral Stairs of Non-Doom.

Handrail of the same.

Door.

Graffiti-esque door.

Shiny Happy Friendly Door.

Wall with students.

Went on a walk a few nights ago, and saw a flatbed truck delivering public toilets for installation. This amused me. I photographed it:

The colors are all off because I didn’t have a surface to rest the camera on to take a proper long-time-exposure night shot, so I had to adjust the product of the auto-setting shot in iPhoto.

Here’s one being installed.

And here’s a random mask-like thing on a wall.

Did I mention that they’re redoing the empty lot outside the Paris 8 cafeteria? It’ll be all pretty and garden-y soon.

And, hey, speaking of gardens-in-progress, here’s one in the 13th, Rues de Grands Moulins.

One of a half-dozen such engraved quotes near the #14 track at the Bibliothèque Mitterrand metro station.

“Stop Massacring English!” The other version of this ad has a stereotypical British bobby, which makes rather more sense; after all, stereotypical Scotsmen such as this fellow probably do a fine job of massacring English themselves.

“At the Sonorous Signal, I Elongate Myself of the Doors.”

“1 Second Lost in Station = Retards on All the Line.”

Full moon over Sanyo building. Looked pretty. Had night-shot on.

The wobbly version.