I got a message from my friend Dan O'Brien last week, who, it turns out, is also living in Paris right now. (Dan is a fellow Dartmouth '07, one of the first people I met at Dartmouth, actually, and we worked together canvassing rural New Hampshire for Wesley Clark's presidential campaign our freshman fall.) Dan is in Paris doing... well, pretty much exactly what I am, which is to say, nothing in particular. Since graduating, Dan has been living and travelling in Europe, occasionally studying or working, on a Dartmouth "research" grant. He returns to the certain future of Harvard Law School class of 2012 in the fall, but in the meantime, is living in the city of lights and practicing his French. (Incidentally, Dan found out I was in Paris because he clicked on a Facebook ad for Victims for Justice, and saw I was a fan -- I thought that was funny.)
We met up for coffee on Friday and prowled around all afternoon, in the blistering cold, in the Marais, the up-and-coming, and very gay, former slum and former-former residence of the extremely wealthy aristocracy of Paris (I love being in a city where every neighborhood has had centuries of cycling through phases of urban development, from ghetto to chic and back again.) Though I meant to go to the Louvre that night for Free Friday, I was too exhausted from so much walking in the cold and curled up with a book instead. Around ten, Dan invited me to join him and some friends (Dan keeps company, always, with a coterie of alarmingly superhot Swedish girls he met in Italy) for drinks at a wonderfully cheap bar they had found. I hesitated, since it was so late and I was really tired; but eventually I remembered how much I regret not going out more in college, usually with the excuse that I was too tired, and how much more fun and interesting life always is when you say yes to such invitations. So I bundled up and headed out. And had a blast.
At the noisy, crowded, basement-like bar, we pushed our way to the back and found a table, right next to a group of young French college students. We struck up a conversation with them, which turned into an all night discussion of everything political and philosophical, lubricated with super cheap beer and extreme translation errors (Dan and I spoke French, the students English, but the bar was too noisy to hear half of everything said anyway). The self-described anarchistes et athées (anarchists and athiests) debated bitterly with Dan over Sarkozy's domestic policies, made fun of me for wearing a beret and called me a BoBo (Bohemian Bourgeoisie, roughly a Yuppie), and continually referred, with agony, to something called "Le crise!". It took me a while to figure out what this meant -- a political uprising, perhaps, or an oblique reference to the credit crisis? "I live in the douzième, because of le crise!" "I drink shit beer, because of le crise!" "I had to give up smoking, because of le crise!" Eventually I figured out that "the crisis" referred to the fact that, as students, they were poor and forced to be frugal. This, of course, in spite of the fact that all were clearly from wealthy suburban families and attended the prestigious Grand Ecole d'Architecture. Les anarchistes demonstrated such an incredible boredom and dissatisfaction with life around them, a constant desire to mix things up, mostly for their entertainment, that I couldn't help but be reminded, cynically, of Les Miserables, and the history of French revolutions started for no other reason than to give restless students something to do.
Guillaume, Ali, me, Dan
I've started to see that life in Paris, and maybe everywhere, can be divided into three tiers: tourism, mainstream culture, and counter-culture. I'm becoming pretty disillusioned and obnoxiously sanctimonious about tourism, and more and more find visiting places for the sake of visiting them to be really shallow and boring. I'm trying to involve myself more in the sorts of things that the mainstream community does for fun, to get a feel for real life in the city. But increasingly I'm also seeing the underpinnings of counter-culture, the deepest layer of society, that penetrates and influences the development and direction of everything else. This is much more fun.
Thursday night I went to a concert of the French National Orchestra, performing a night of German music by Weber, Mozart and Strauss. As an under-26, arriving just five minutes before the concert began, I was able to score a last-minute center balcony seat for 10 euros. 
It was beautiful and elegant and exactly what I was looking for in a cultural experience (it also gave me an opportunity to wear my new dress!). I happened to be sitting next to Christian, with whom I soon became acquainted, a short, balding Corsican. (Despite the ominous description, Christian is pretty nonthreatening, and claims to have no intentions of marching on Moscow anytime soon). He is an accountant for KPMG, and also, as fate would have it, sits on the board of directors of France Musique, the organization that runs the symphony, opera, ballet, and everything music in the city of Paris. Of course, Christian gets free tickets to every performance in town, and he invited me to come with him on Saturday to an opera performing at the Peniche Theater.
I accepted, and Saturday night headed out to what I expected to be another night of mainstream Parisian culture. Whoa. I was very wrong. If there is such a thing as Underground Opera, this was it. The theater was in fact the interior of an old converted boat, moored off the bank of a canal in the very poor and industrial 10e arrondissement. Inside was a full stage, complete with professional sound and lighting equipment, and fewer than sixty audience seats. The cast of four were all twenty-somethings, performing a "modern opera", with contemporary costumes and a contemporary plot, and colloquial modern French lyrics sung in classical opera style. It was fascinating. The storyline was a thinly veiled allegory for environmental protection, with constant references to nucelar non-proliferation and genetic engineering -- all this, sung in the same style and panache as you might hear Pavarotti! And despite the very counter-culture nature of this opera, the audience seemed to be exactly the same demographic as the audience at the Symphony on Thursday, or any upscale concert: white, elite, bourgeoisie. I was mesmerized by the cultural exposition, the tiny, budget, playhouse-on-a-boat expressing themselves with beautiful music and drama to the city's BoBo elite in an attempt to incite political action by the wealthiest members of society. There was something very odd and extremely fascinating about watching a ragtag group of kids sing passionately of their political message du jour, to the rapt attention of sexagenerians plus with fine jewelery and a vast appreciation for the arts, in whatever form they may take. I was so glad I had the chance to go to this. As a tourist, I know I never would have even known such a place, or culture, existed here.
I've started trying to devote whole days to discovering the neighborhoods of Paris. One thing I have learned is that in order to get to know one of the petits villes, you have to find a way to walk to it, and not just through it. So I try to find a Metro stop that is a little outside of the neighborhood I want to explore, and then walk towards it, so I can see the juxtaposition of the neighboring arrondissements. (After all, could you really understand Turnagain if you didn't spend any time next door in Spenard?) I also found that it's essential to have lunch in a neighborhood in order to get a feel for its unique cultural characteristics. Most good (and by good I mean not touristy, not necessarily expensive) restaurants will take between 2 and 3 hours to serve you during the middle of the day, which gives you the chance to see the comings and goings of a lot of the neighborhood's residents. The dynamics of a restaurant can change a lot between 1:30 and 4:00, so it's totally worth staying to see it.
I spent the whole day Saturday at the very superficially historical and somewhat disappointing Chateau de Versailles. (The audioguide didn't even mention the significance of the Hall of Mirrors in recent history: the parading of Kaiser Wilhelm I in full Prussian garb through the room to the humiliation of the defeated French in 1871; the bitter retaliation of Clemenceau almost fifty years later, forcing the now-humbled Germans to sign a destructively harsh peace agreement in the very same room, that would lead inevitably to the outbreak of another devastating war. The official tourist line seems to be that Versailles was the home of Louis XIV, end of story.) It was, however, a beautiful day (as you can see below), so I enjoyed a picnic in the garden and a long tea break in the town of Versailles during the afternoon.
Disappointed by my day trip, I ventured to discover Montmartre on Sunday. I began by taking mass at Sacre Coeur (even worse than Notre Dame with the tourists and the irreverence; from now on I will go to my local church), and then walked around the main Rue de Clichy to find some museums. The first I came to, La Musée de la Vie Romantique, was extremely prim and extremely boring. If it hadn't been free, I would have really regretted going. Clearly intended to show a "snapshot" of romantic life in Montmartre at the turn of the century, it was a little too fake and a little too drab for me. So my next stop was the Museum of Eroticism -- kind of the opposite of the previous museum, actually. It was really interesting! Some of the exhibits are, well, breathtaking to say the least. What I found most interesting though was how this museum seemed to fill in all the gaps from my previous museum visits. I hadn't really thought of it before, but it does seem odd as you explore centuries, millenia really, of sculptures, paintings and drawings in the mainstream museums, you almost never see depicted the subject that definitely was on the minds of the painters by far most frequently. At the Eroticism museum, they show you where it all went -- a lost world of sexual art, some of it incredibly beautiful, some of it, of course, pretty weird. I highly recommend the visit -- for adults.
But I found the "scandalous" nature of Montmartre to be an annoying façade. It's so deliberately geared towards tourists, to make them think they are bravely traversing a bad neighborhood and give them an opportunity to take pictures in front of an X-rated cabaret, but it's really fake. It's like if Disneyland were to open a new section called "Red Light District." Yes, you can get cajun food in New Orleans Square -- and yes, you can get a lap dance in Montmartre. But it's an overpriced, diluted, tamed version of the original, which spares you the discomfort of consuming something "too spicy."
What I do like about Montmartre, though, is the subtle subversiveness of pricing everything in French Francs. It's a little off the mark, since the idealist revolutionaries of Montmartre were even less supporters of Nationalism than of Pan-Europeanism, but it still strikes at the deliberately contrarian nature of those who have historically taken up residence here.
Walking just outside the main boulevards with their simulated seediness, I found the real Montmartre, unbecomingly squeezed between the overwrought tourist district to the north and the ritzy Grands Boulevards to the south: poor, working class, immigrant populations from former North African colonies, with boarded up restaurants, pipe and carpet shops; thuggish looking ten-year olds congregating around graffitied bus stops; exceedingly dirty, run-down apartment complexes that retain only a shadow of Haussman's original urban intentions. This is where the next revolution will begin. Inspired, or perhaps invented, by the ennui of the restless Parisian anarchistes. For as well as the French know and respect history, they have a hard time not repeating it.
