Let Them Eat... Un diner presque parfait (an almost perfect dinner)

The perfect metaphor for France is a reality TV show called Un diner presque parfait. It unites some elements that characterize French life for me—obsession with food, conviviality over food, competition, severe grading, and a slightly cynical expectation of mediocrity. (The grading and competition elements make more sense if you know that I’m a professor at a French university.) The show would be a failure in the US and would never dare air on normal TV but would be relegated to the Food Network or some equally obscure corner of the cable universe. However, it’s acceptable daytime television in France.

The show works like this: the producers pick a city (it’s currently Dijon, where the mustard comes from), and maybe 5 contestants and each one has to prepare a dinner—complete with appetizers, a main dish and a dessert. They each create a menu and distribute it to the others in advance, so that everyone can comment on it to the camera. Each contestant is graded by the others on the quality of the food, the decoration of the table and the general ambiance. Included in the general ambiance is the expectation of after-dinner entertainment. For example, Marie-Antoinette’s rollicking after-dinner entertainment was playing some tunes on her hunting horn. This utterly charmed all her on-screen guests and left me completely baffled. However, even the hunting horn didn’t make up for her undercooked duck. The winner, who is obviously not Marie-Antoinette (French women with that name just don’t seem to win), gets general acknowledgement of his or her superior cooking skills and 1,000 euros.

This show has a lot of faux suspense—like “will Marie-Antoinette’s duck be too dry?” Or “The guests arrive in one hour—will Claire finish her sauce in time?” Or “will the others appreciate an entirely vegetarian dinner?” There are also little interviews with each person—little play-by-play reactions from both the chef for that night and the dining patrons on everything from the pattern of the napkins to the escargot appetizer to the chocolate covered pear and clementine pudding for dessert.

The last time I watched, Claire was in the lead with her entirely vegetarian dinner—which excited me to no end to learn that there is at least one other vegetarian in all of France. I wanted to call Claire up to talk about ways to cook lentils. However, I think someone knocked her out of top position—not Marie-Antoinette with her duck of shame, but Claude the retiree who never finishes all the food on his plate and consequently makes all the other contestants nervous or maybe Xavier, who in a rare confessional moment, told the camera that he’d decided to pretend he knew all about food and lie to everyone all the time and say things like, “I only buy fresh snails and then freeze them myself; I’d never buy frozen ones, quelle horreur.” Because of his arrogance, everyone believes him that he’s a great authority on French cuisine and he always looks very pleased with himself when he tells the camera for the umpteenth time that he just can’t believe that the others are falling for his act of gourmet chef expert foodie.

The average grade so far for our gang of wannabe chefs in Dijon is a 6.8 out of 10 and none of the contestants ever expect to do well—which we know since they are always asked to predict what grade they think the other will give them and they always expect a lower grade then they actually receive. They do, however, tend to grade each other severely as they have all survived the French school system. They give a lot of 5s and 6s since this is la moyenne (the average). Although they tend to be more generous with the decoration grade. Claire the vegetarian draped vines all over her table to highlight the evening’s organic theme and they liked this immensely. Marie-Antoinette had matching china and mystery gift envelopes containing a small shiny piece of paper you used to create a funnel and pour a cocktail. I’m not the greatest interpreter of French culture, but she seems pretty bourgeois, that Marie-Antoinette. Besides her hunting horn and paper cocktails, she also has a white poodle that she brought to Claire’s house for dinner without asking first, which Claire revealed to find slightly horrifying in an exciting play-by-play reaction to the arrival of her guests.

Unfortunately, I somehow missed 3 episodes of my new favorite program—it’s like the new Seinfield where nothing ever happens but everyone always eats… I didn’t see Claude, Xavier and Bertrand’s dinners, however, I caught the end of Real World (of Food) : Dijon this morning and learned that apparently for the first time in Un diner presque parfait history, 2 contestants were tied with the French all-time high score of 7.3 out of 10 and both won 1,000 euros. The winners were dainty-eater Claude and know-it-all Xavier. I hope their episodes will be rebroadcast every hour on the hour so that all of France and I can witness an outstanding 7.3 dinner on the Richter dining scale. The other contestants probably all killed themselves with shame. No, just kidding, they probably just said, “bof” and shrugged. And went to go have something to eat.

En Attendant Godot

Life in France often feels a little like Waiting For Godot. By that, I mean, surreal and uncertain (if you want examples, see every other blog I’ve ever written). I think it’s no accident that Beckett wrote this play in French. The caprices of the French bureaucracy, for example, usually have a Beckettian logic (meaning none at all, really) about them. You also tend to wait in line in Paris all the time—to go to the movies, exit Chatelet, get into any museum, get a table at a restaurant, buy your groceries, etc. The latest in French bureaucratic surrealism: my friend Angela recently went to a bar where they asked patrons to make a deposit if they ordered a certain kind of beer called Kwak because apparently you have to drink it in a special glass that is expensive. Seriously—you purchase beer, but it’s like you’re renting the glass you drink it in and you have to pay a “caution.” This is the same word you use for the deposit you make on your apartment when you move in. You probably also have to wait in line to make your beer glass deposit.

Lately for me in France, there’s this perpetual longing that makes me feel a bit like I’m waiting for an impossible Godot-like miracle, which would be, in my case, a sign that moving to Paris was the right thing to do, that I fit in here, I can make a life and long-term plans here, rather than just going from year to year, and that I have many important and convincing reasons for staying. Maybe it’s restlessness brought on by spring, or the fact that I’m on vacation and so I now have plenty of free time to worry about the future, but lately, I feel like I’m waiting for the future to start. I’m moving in a week, the semester ends 2 weeks after spring vacation, and I’ll have the summer off. I’ll visit my family in the states and I’ll celebrate my 30^th birthday (gulp) in Paris in August, I’ll have the same job at the university next year and hopefully it’ll be easier the second time around. But like the Bruce Springsteen song goes (it’s off his new album, Magic), we’re livin’ in the future and none of this has happened yet.

I’m also waiting for more impossible things that the future might or might not hold—like the perfect job at an NGO so that I can speak French and save the world simultaneously—or for my current job suddenly to become more satisfying, or the discovery of some well-hidden talent that chooses to reveal itself in Paris, like cinematography, writing or oil-painting that would make my life fulfilling and would remove all my doubts about everything, or, finally, the perfect relationship-- which would more or less do that same thing. To some extent everyone lives in the future and hopes for things like these and this is the human condition— just ask Samuel Beckett. But this phenomenon suddenly seems way more intense in a foreign country where you live with more uncertainty in your life than you did back home and you’re culturally more on the periphery (or péripherique) of Parisian life looking for the right exit to get into town, and not in the center of the city where all the museums, theaters and restaurants and clubs are.

There’s this Portishead song that I love (Glorybox off the Dummy album) and it goes: “give me a reason to love you…” and I feel like the lyrics should be: “give me a reason to stay in France.” I want France to convince me to stay forever. I want feel like I belong here. Guess I’ll have to wait for that song to be released. And then they’ll probably want a deposit before you buy the album.

"Le meilleur vrai réseau" or How Weird is French Advertising

It often arrives to me-- ok, I'll recommence and try to sound like a normal human being instead of a franglais-speaker who has a tortured relationship with both the French and English language. Thanks to the horizon-broadening experience of living abroad, I can now no longer start normal-sounding sentences or spell in French or English. But lingusitic confusion pales in comparison to cultural confusion. I usually find myself completely baffled by French advertising. This is due to the simple fact that it is completely baffling.

First of all, the most frequently advertised products on French TV are cheese and perfume. I'm not kidding. I've never seen so many cheese ads since moving here. Dairy products in general are well represented in French marketing. Yogurt, especially and there's this one freakishly weird ad-- I'll try to download it, since otherwise no one would believe me-- for dairy products in general the features little skeletons dancing around a giant cow whose udder explodes and bathes them in a fountain of milk to an aggressive club remix of Stayin' Alive and then one of them jumps on the cow and starts drinking the milk. It was actually kind of disturbing to watch. ads involving miniature skeletons, the BeeGees and cow udders are pretty unusual, you have to admit. This doesn't seem to scream Winning Marketing Formula to me...

I saw this other bizarro ad yesterday for the metro. So this seems odd, since the RATP owns all forms of public transportation in Paris, so they pretty much have a monopoly. Even Velib, the rent-a-bicycle service is affiliated to the RATP, I think. I mean their competition is what, taxis or people who decide to walk? Or not go out at all?

And this ad seems like it advertises a video game at first. You see a digital image of a man-- he has pixels and he comes in and out of focus, and he's walking around outside in the "real world". You see him marvel at the sky above, the heat of the sun on his skin, singing birds, etc. and he looks intently at the real people who pass by. Oh, how he longs to be a real boy, you can almost hear him say. Then you see him go down into the metro-- St. Lazare specifically, because we recognise that weird glass igloo/pyramid thing, and he puts his hand on the escalator railing and marvels at its feel beneath his hand. Then his train comes and the doors open and-- surprise!-- he's face-to-face with his human, flesh-and-blood alter ego. The ad ends here and then gives the tag line, RATP, the best real network. Or the best network that really exists. To explain, the word network in French can mean a transportation network or a communications network, like for wireless internet or your cell phone.

So, I find this a strange ad. It's kind of post-modern in the message, take the metro because it's real, it exists, unlike a computer network or a video game. I described it to my friend Josie, and she thought it was a mistake to stress the realism of the metro. It's true that often the tactile or sensory experience in metro stations is fairly unpleasant. In other words, you generally smell urine and vomit. Why didn't they just say, "the metro: come smell the vomit for yourself," Josie joked. Who knows, maybe this is the next ad campaign for the best real network that actually exists.