Lots going on in Paris for those traveling with girls aged 8 – 11. Exhibitions include the Babar in the toy gallery at the Musee des arts decoratifs. Toys for boys at he Musée de la Poupée, a fun little museum with a wonderful display of dolls through the ages. The doll museum currently has two exhibits on: toys for boys and a joint exhibit with Choco-Story, the chocolate museum:

‘Exquisite Ephemera’ is a temporary exhibit in two parts presented simultaneously at the Musée de la Poupée-Paris and at Choco-Story, the chocolate museum, showing a selection of the best Victorian scraps from the ODIN collection.

These two complementary exhibits show images representing children playing with dolls for the Musée de la Poupée and chocolate trading cards representing children from 1875 to 1915 for the chocolate museum Choco-Story.

A combined ticket for the visit of the 2 exhibits at the Musée de la Poupée-Paris and at the  Musée du chocolat / Choco-Story is available.

The Paris Blog: Paris, France Expat Tips & Resources

Badaude

Le Cimetière des Chiens is in Asnières-sur-Seine, a commune in the suburbs just to the northwest of Paris proper. Don’t despair, it’s really not very far; only a 25-minute métro ride (if that) from central Paris — plenty close for you to pay a quick visit during your Parisian vacation!

While the cemetery is commonly referred to as simply Le Cimetière des Chiens, you’ll see a few places where the longer name of Le Cimetière des Chiens et Autres Animaux Domestiques (the cemetery of dogs and other pets) is given, including an inscription in stone on a monument near the entrance. So the cemetery has welcomed non-canine animals as well for a long time, perhaps since the place first opened in 1899. There are tons of cat graves, as well as some horses, at least one monkey, a sheep, a hen, etc.

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The Paris Blog: Paris, France Expat Tips & Resources

They have a small amusement park at La Bastille at the moment and they have all sorts of attractions. One of them is a giant bubble game on water… And since it’s pretty warm at the moment, there is no risk it gets icy. I would have loved to try, but it’s not allowed for adults. Darn!

ParisDailyPhoto

If someone had asked my granddad where he got the chaps in this photo, he might have replied, “At the gettin’ place.” His speech was rich with colorful phrases. To him, a convincing salesman was someone who “could sell eggs to a chicken,” the relationship between a person’s actions and character best summarized with “Whatever’s in the well comes up in the bucket.” And when dismissing someone unsavory, he preferred the placid “Let ’em peck shit with the crows” to a crass “Fuck them.” So many of his sayings reflected elements of the hardscrabble, rural world that shaped him.

The gettin’ place in this picture is a roadside stand in Apache Junction, Arizona. Largely known nowadays for its scenery and suburbs, back in 1947, Apache Junction was a fringe outpost west of Phoenix with a few cafés and tourist traps along the highway. Signs announced: Postcards! Indian jewelry! Pan for gold! Granddad and his family lived in the nearby town of Florence. He was thirty years old and had three kids, two more on the way. Having arrived in Arizona from Oklahoma the previous year, he cobbled together a living through odd carpentry jobs, repair work, driving a backhoe, and constantly scouted for better work. Soon after this photo was taken, he started building his family a house out of lumber he’d salvaged from a decommissioned WWII army barracks. A few years after that, they moved to Phoenix where he landed a job with Del Webb, then one of the West’s largest construction companies, and gradually worked his way through the ranks, serving as superintendent on numerous housing projects around the state, including the first phase of Sun City Arizona, the country’s first planned-retirement community. But on this day, the family was out for a weekend drive and a meal, enjoying some of their slim disposable income. This roadside stand had a rattlesnake in an aquarium, sold sodas, Mexican jumping beans. My dad was there with his two younger brothers. He was eight years old.

Look at the horse’s eye—the blank mummy stare. Look at its mouth—its dry sunken shape. And my grandfather’s relaxed posture: instead of leaning back in the saddle, straining to hold on, he’s leaning forward, the way you might when reaching across a dinner table to grab another biscuit. It’s a joke. The horse is stuffed. The only muscles flexed on Granddad’s body are the ones at the corner of his mouth that form his mischievous grin. He’s playing a trick that he knows will replay on everyone who sees this photo for years to come. But there’s something deadly serious in the image too, a sense of triumph in his smirk and posture, as if he, even at his young age, knew that no matter how bumpy the ride had been and how rough it was going to get, he could hang on, could keep hold of the reins and not get bucked off.

Thomas Gilbreath grew up poor but never hungry. Born in 1917, he was raised on a farm in southeastern Oklahoma, the second youngest of thirteen children. He and his siblings did the bulk of the farm labor, while his father, James Lee, ran a cabinet-making shop in the town of Boswell. That was the family’s primary income, and the place where Granddad learned woodworking, but they raised cows for milk and beef, grew peanuts, kept a garden, pigs and chickens to trade and eat, and a smokehouse where they stored their meat. The family mules pulled their plows, and they also pulled the family wagon when they went to sell goods at the Saturday market. As a child, Granddad rode one of those mules to his one-room elementary school, unsupervised, and tied it up outside. When he went out courting women as a teenager, he rode a horse. He met his wife Gertrude in their late teens, birthed my father and two more sons in quick succession.

Then, in 1941, Thomas followed that Okie tradition depicted in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and decided to move to California in search of work. The family made it as far as Roswell, New Mexico. While passing through town, my grandfather somehow got a lead on a job at a nearby ranch—probably while chatting with locals at a café—and spent the next six months working as a cowboy. He didn’t know how to lasso, transport, or brand them, and didn’t own chaps or spurs, but he was a quick study.

My father doesn’t remember much about their time on the ranch, but he does recall trying to cross a large desert wash in their big black car. The wash was wide and sandy, and winter rains had filled it with a sprawling but shallow sheet of brown floodwater. Granddad probably thought, “Ah, I can make this.” Then the engine died halfway.

Stranded between dry banks, Granddad stepped out of the car and stood ankle-deep in the stream. “Gurty,” he said, “you take the kids and all stay in the back seat,” then he opened all four doors so the water could rush through the interior rather than wash the car away. Granddad walked up the road to the ranch for help, and returned with a tractor and two cowboys.

When WWII broke out, the family moved back to Boswell. Home felt safe and familiar.

There was a common expression back then: “Write if you find work.” Through a friend, Granddad landed a job at Douglas Aircraft in Tulsa, testing machine guns on B-29s and other bombers, but resources remained tight. During the heart of WWII, nearly everything was rationed: cheese, butter, flour, rubber, metal, meat. In Tulsa, Dad’s family had a dog—no one remembers his name—and every once in a while, the dog would come home with a live chicken in his mouth. “Mind you, you couldn’t get chicken in Tulsa during the war,” my dad says. “White rabbit was all you ate; it’s all they’d sell. So one night I go out in front of our house, and there’s Granddad kneeling down next to this dog, trying to pry his mouth open to get this chicken out. He’s kneeling down and he looks up at me—his eyes really wide, smiling—and says, ‘You know Joe, as soon as this war is over, I’m going to break this dog of this habit.’” If Granddad knew where that dog was getting the chickens, he never admitted to it, but his family enjoyed those dinners. Granddad began drafting the designs for Douglas aircraft; then he was drafted into the Navy. When Gurty and the kids dropped him off at the train station in Hugo, Oklahoma, they were terrified he wouldn’t come back alive. He hadn’t even completed boot camp when the Germans surrendered and war ended, though as Granddad liked to tell it: “They heard I was comin’.”

When he returned in August 1945, Granddad started building a little house for his family, using money he’d earned in the military. His sister Bess visited Boswell for Christmas in 1945 and told Granddad, “You outta come out to Arizona. It never rains. Sun shines every day. All the work you want.” Very few houses had been built during the war, since most raw materials went to planes, tanks, bombs, and munitions. With thousands of soldiers returning from overseas, there was an enormous demand for housing. Granddad knew how to build houses. So he sold the one he was building, and five months later, the family was in Florence, Arizona. Ten years later, Granddad was working for Del Webb, building Sun City, and the family was living the good life in Phoenix.

“Never finished high school,” my dad likes to say of his dad with a snicker. That’s what I see when I look at this photo: not a man impersonating a cowboy, but a cheerful embrace of absurdity, of the way life can turn everything around and upside down on you, as you could do to it. I see the unwavering smirk of someone who knew that you had to be a quick study to survive, to change plans when a better opportunity appeared, and to not be intimidated by all you didn’t know and just put on the cowboy hat when offered it, because sometimes you had to tell people, “Yes, I can do that,” and then learn how to do it before the day’s work began.

Aaron Gilbreath has written for The New York Times, Tin House, The Smart Set, and Gastronomica. His Cincinnati Review essay about Googie architecture, “Dreams of the Atomic Era,” is a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2011.

The Paris Review

Long time no e-mail and say hello Dean!
How are you? Thank you very much for invite me at your concert on October in Tokyo.
I am so happy to see you again at your concert. You looks very fine and almost satisfactory on your life. How long will you stay in Japan/Tokyo? Are you busy in Japan?

About me: I am not fine after the earthquake very much. It was so terribly happen. I have felt so sad and scared for a long time. I become nervous. I have not good sleep, any time crying. And became unable to make music and sing song directly from after the earthquake. I am a little worry about that I wonder I never make music again, some time.
Now I am better than before, but not perfect.
Music is saved me any time. I wish/believe it is so, also this time.

A.

I never made it to Japan with Galaxie 500 in the summer of 1991 because I had quit the band in April, just a few months before we were scheduled to tour there. Unbeknownst to me, the promoter had already put tickets on sale for a Tokyo show. Unbeknownst to him, I had decided I didn’t want to be in my own band anymore.

Twenty years later I am playing these songs again but with a different trio, comprising my wife, Britta, on bass guitar and a drummer, Anthony, from Youngstown. The very same promoter booked two shows for us in Japan. After a four-month postponement on account of the earthquake (the first time I’ve ever seen the act-of-God clause in my contract applied), I finally found myself on an American Airlines flight from JFK to Tokyo. Anthony is growing a beard, starting today. “That way people will think it was a really life-changing trip when I get home,” he says.

I haven’t seen a plane this empty since 1976, and the flight attendants seem pleased that it’s going to be a quiet flight but nervous about rumors that the airline may soon file for bankruptcy.

“They want us to take another pay cut,” says the nice lady serving me my meal. “But we have given back too many times already. We can’t do it again.”

I am reading The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto by Kenji Nakagami and settle in with an erotic tale called “Red Hair”: It is a rainy morning and Kozo’s mysterious new girlfriend insists that they must go back to bed and have more sex. Because who knows how long it will rain like this?

It is raining too when we arrive at the Hotel Excel Shibuya. From our room high up we can see the square where hundreds of people cross in twenty different directions when the lights change.

Our friend Yoriko has arranged tickets for us to see the Yomiuri Giants game tonight. She meets us in the lobby and takes us to the Shibuya subway station, where we pass by the bronze statue of the celebrated faithful dog who, for nine years, came to this station at the same time each day to wait for his deceased master.

The game starts at 6 P.M. so we find ourselves riding the subway during rush hour. We are packed in with hardly any space to move and yet at the next stop twenty more people manage to get on. “Not so bad today,” says Yoriko.

The Tokyo Dome looks rather like the Metrodome in Minneapolis, shabby in the way that indoor stadiums are. One notable difference here: glass-walled smoking booths in the food-court area where you can get a fix between innings.

Yoriko watches every single home game from her front-row seat behind the first-base dugout and is on a wave-hello basis with a few of the Giants’ players. The Giants have a large and very vocal contingent in the bleachers who sing a different song for each Giant who comes to bat. But out in the left-field bleachers their opponents, the Yokohama BayStars, have their own singing fans. It is an awful lot of singing for what Yoriko assures me is a meaningless late-season game. Yokohama go up 5-1 in the seventh inning, and since we are fighting jetlag I suggest to Yoriko that maybe we could beat the traffic out of here, with the Giants being down by four runs and all. Yoriko dismisses this idea with a firm no; she doesn’t leave games early. No one else does either. Her optimism (or more accurately, loyalty) is almost borne out; the Giants fight back to 5-4 on a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth. But then their luck ran out, and we hustled through the rain to the Suidobashi Station and back to Shibuya.

Yoriko takes us on a little wander in search of a late dinner. There’s a small sushi restaurant next door to a sex-toy emporium, but Britta says she doesn’t want to eat sushi right next to the sex shop so we find another.

Baseball games start at 6 P.M.; rock shows start at 7 P.M. I prefer this to taking the stage at 11 P.M. on a Thursday night in Philadelphia. Backstage at the Liquid Room, we are trying to staying awake before the show, eating rice cakes and unusual candy bars and staring at the poster of Kurt and Courtney on the wall, and I wonder whether I should drink a shot of something, as is my habit to loosen up before going onstage, or whether I should drink a cold can of Boss coffee because it feels like seven o’clock in the morning (which it is back home). I decide on a shot of Suntory whisky with a coffee chaser.

From the stage tonight I notice three different people crying as I sing “Blue Thunder,” which is a song about the power-steering action in my old 1975 Dodge Dart and doesn’t quite seem worth crying about, though admittedly it is also a song about being alone behind the wheel, and I wail about driving “so far away,” so maybe that’s what did it.

I recently played this song in São Paulo and young Brazilians sang and smiled and danced; it’s odd that the same song evokes smiles in São Paulo and tears in Tokyo. Of course there can be joy and sadness in a song at the same moment, and when you have been waiting five or ten or twenty years to hear a song live, it can hit you with surprising force.

After the show we chat with my musician friend A., who is all cried out and is now in a giddy, happy mood, and to another fellow who has saved his ticket from the show that never happened in 1991 and says he never imagined he would hear the songs live. He gives me a pack of what he says are rare, discontinued Japanese cigarettes, which is good because I have no idea what kind of cigarettes I should buy here.

The Asagiri Jam Festival takes place each year on a hillside in the shadow of Mount Fuji and sells out before they even announce who is playing. (Except for this year, because apparently the Japanese economy has not recovered from the crisis caused by the quake.)

Everyone here is camping; they come for the festival experience, that feeling of a rock-show community that, frankly, I never quite get myself. We see stylish Japanese hippies, clad like magical elves in wool, tights, shorts, and brightly colored hiking boots. Tents everywhere, a few people passed out sleeping on the grass while the bands play on. The one thing we cannot see is Mount Fuji, which is hidden by the clouds.

They don’t have big headlining rock acts like Coldplay or the Kings of Leon at Asagiri; instead they have Japanese funk by nattily dressed guys called Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro, Afrobeat from Seun Kuti (Fela’s youngest son), and DJ Shadow and DJ Scratchy. Also: dogs, children, frisbees, balloons, and a giant inflatable octopus.

I’m accustomed to playing festival slots either in the middle of the afternoon or at two in the morning, but today we get that prime early evening slot where day turns to night over the course of the hour on stage. It has been thrilling (well, not every night, but tonight certainly) to sing songs that I have barely touched for twenty years, like I too am traveling back through time, singing about girlfriends and automobiles past, and in a loud, high-pitched wail I didn’t know I still possessed.

The Paris Review

Scary? Yes, a little bit… But beautiful too – and typical of winter! I took this photo near le Champs de Mars, by the Eiffel tower, where they have little gardens where dogs are accepted – but only on a leash! – as the sign says.  As you can see the weather is a little cloudy, but still partly sunny; we’ve had the warmest new year’s night since 1883!

ParisDailyPhoto

Pierre Gonnord, Ali, 2006, color photograph, 58 1/3 in. x 49 1/5 in.

Pierre Gonnord, Armando, 2009, color photograph, 65 2/5 in. x 49 1/5 in.

Pierre Gonnord, Basilisa, 2009, color photograph, 65 in. x 49 1/5 in.

Pierre Gonnord, Krystov, 2007, color photograph, 65 in. x 49 1/5 in.

Pierre Gonnord, Konstantina, 2006, color photograph, 65 in. x 49 1/5 in.

Pierre Gonnord, Juan, 2004, color photograph, 58 1/3 in. x 49 1/5 in.

Pierre Gonnord, Senen, 2009, color photograph, 65 in. x 49 1/5 in.

Pierre Gonnord’s photographs are on view at Hasted Kraeutler, in New York, through February 4, 2012.

All images courtesy Pierre Gonnord/Hasted Kraeutler, New York, and Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid.

The Paris Review

I recently found myself in need of an inexpensive suit that didn’t look like I picked it up at a Salvation Army. Like countless other men in the same position, I headed to J. Crew. As I walked over the wide-planked wooden floors of the store, I admired the chain’s décor: there were framed copies of jazz albums issued in the 1950s by Columbia and Blue Note, movie posters from the French New Wave, Japanese fashion magazines, and a case full of leather bracelets, flasks, and knives. While one man took my measurements, I cheerily pointed to a copy of Leonard Cohen’s book Beautiful Losers, which was nestled atop a display of shirts, and quoted the author’s best advice: Cohen “never discusses his mistresses or his tailor.” The man laughed uncomfortably then, looking at the book, admitted he wasn’t actually a tailor (“I just work here on the weekends”), and revealed that the copy of Beautiful Losers, along with the other books scattered around the store, were really just for show.

Long before Abercrombie & Fitch became a fixture in shopping malls across America, it was one of the first places Ernest Hemingway would visit when he came to New York. Fitzgerald and Plimpton favored Brooks Brothers, and Tom Woolf crafted his trademark around New York tailor Vincent Nicolosi’s white suits. Well-dressed writers are far from an anomaly. But recently there’s been a twist in this trend: books are becoming the dressings for brands. Companies like Caulfield Preparatory and Gilded Age are lifting their names (and inspiration) from books. Kate Spade’s “Understated is Overrated” fall campaign takes cues from Nicole Krauss’ latest cover. Rakish boutique Opening Ceremony carries issues of literary magazines like The Believer (as well as the magazine publishing this very piece). Marc Jacobs even commandeered a storefront in the West Village to make room for Bookmarc, a couture bookstore where, besides books, you’ll find the usual checkout impulse buys—sharpies, notebooks, book lights—branded with Marc’s conspicuous logo.

Many would argue that this pattern began with Partners & Spade, headed by Andy Spade and Anthony Sperduti, which early on accessorized their silk and cashmere with a Viking Portable Library. The firm’s literary styling is an important facet of its brand identity: the pair have a six-book deal with HarperCollins. Then, in 2008, when they were contracted to design J. Crew’s first menswear boutique, the Liquor Store, they also partnered with The Strand, a New York literary institution, in a deal that officially established the bookstore as the J. Crew’s source for rare art and music books, and hard-to-find vintage hardcovers by Updike and Roth.

As a result, books are in abundant supply in the menswear world, from Earnest Sewn’s San Francisco location to the Ted Baker in New York’s Meatpacking District. The workwear brand Carhartt is in the middle of a rebranding, one that includes a capsule collection by designer Adam Kimmel, and a slew of stores in well-to-do areas. The shelving inside is reclaimed wood—and what is not covered by merchandise is filled with weathered books. Apartment Number 9, situated in Chicago’s Bucktown, has been labeled a menswear destination by magazines like Esquire and GQ. There you can pair Steven Alan jackets with shirts by Band of Outsiders. There is no shortage of handcrafted pocket squares. But some customers can’t help asking if that copy of Middlesex is for sale. The book is part of a large stack taken from the owner’s personal collection. On an unseasonably warm day in the Windy City, I asked a fellow customer what he thought about books as an object of design in clothing stores. He lifted a red Jack Spade bag that obscured some of the titles and shrugged, “They make me think the store is smart.”

Books have always been a status symbol for some parts of society. Seneca complained about private libraries that were purely for show; kings collected books to display their power and cosmopolitanism; even Jay Gatsby kept “a high Gothic library, paneled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas”—though the pages of his books, uncut, belie the artifice.

But this impulse to collect these books is slightly more complicated; it isn’t just about posturing, but about a certain longing. The rustic, the outdated, the handcrafted and antiquated: these things seem ubiquitous. Cucumbers pickled in mason jars line the shelves at Whole Foods, men are buying bespoke suits styled after bygone eras, and hip kids are throwing Depression-era hobo themed weddings. We’re a generation enthralled by authenticity and craftsmanship. Walter Benjamin wrote that in an era when everything was reproduced, nothing had the aura of originality. Now, most men’s clothing is made en-mass—and we find ourselves missing the hand-stitched. Many of our libraries consist only of e-books—and our old paperbacks seem to posses a one-of-a kind personality.

Freemans Sporting Club in New York, a shop established to “pay tribute to the vanishing art of American handmade goods,” seems to support this idea. They offer a carefully curated library, diverse enough that judicious customers can pick up issues of punk zine “Cometbus” and titles by Henry Roth and David Foster Wallace all at the same time. Les Robinson, Freemans’ self-proclaimed “book enthusiast,” says, “Books have always been a part of the store’s story.” He admits that at first, the books served mainly as decoration, but soon enough, they became as much a part of the tribute to a “vanishing art” as the machinist shirts and Winchester trousers.

My quixotic mission, which started at J. Crew, comes to an end at Amber Doyle’s Against Nature Atelier on the Lower East Side. While Doyle looks over the suit I’m about to buy, I can’t stop myself from wondering aloud whether her store has any particular ties to the literary world.  The decor includes taxidermy animals, an oak desk, leather couches, and Persian rugs, and I have to admit that the shop feels like something out of a novel—the study of a Gogol character, or the clubhouse where wealthy British colonialists spend their time drinking gin in Orwell’s Burmese Days.  Nathaniel Adams, who is working on a book on the history of dandyism, also moonlights at Against Nature as a salesperson. His response to my question is so curt that it feels as if he’s tired of explaining, “It’s named after À rebours,” Adams says with perfect pronunciation, taking my suit to the back workroom to be tailored, “Joris-Karl Huysmans’ nineteenth-century novel.”

Jason Diamond is a writer who lives in New York, and is the editor of Jewcy.com and creator of Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

The Paris Review

We have all long ago agreeed that there are some things from the UK that expats can’t manage without. Or perhaps it was just marmite and mince pies?

So following a week of Christmas and New Year over-eating and festivities and I thought a reminder of what we have to celebrate with in France, and how it compares with its British counterpart, might be a good idea.

Our first competition is between the traditional christmas pudding and the French christmas log – the ‘bûche de Noel’.

In normal circumstances I would give the prize to the Christmas pudding, but since it follows straight after a big meal I am going to have to say the Christmas log is a better choice. Ours was exceptionally delicious. It also looked a bit like a train but that is an optional pleasure! (If truth be told we had Christmas pudding as well, but on Boxing Day instead of Christmas day.)

Second tricky choice – which aperitif to drink. I think port and sherry are the most popular aperitifs in Britain for those who don’t rush straight to the wine box or the gin and tonic, and the choice in France is just as varied – but I can’t think of anything as flavoursome as port and I can’t tolerate pernod type drinks so I’ll give the vote to the Brits.

The more adventurous in France can try an aperitif that is popular in the Christmas markets of northern France – a sort of variant of mulled wine that is made using various fruits or nuts such as raspberies or chestnuts. Ours was called Moretum and made from blackberries. Let’s call it an unusual treat but no replacement for a glass of port!

The next difficult choice is cheese. Both countries make exceptional cheeses so it is easy to come up with a good choice whichever country you live in. Ignoring the hundreds of local specialities our family is even split on whether roquefort and cantal make for a better choice of cheese than stilton and cheddar so we’ll concede a draw between the countries for the cheese trolley.

In the last and final battle for our Christmas festivities we have to turn to Champagne. More or less the same in both countries you might think, so nothing to choose between the two…

…except that the most popular champagne around here this year seems to be one being sold by a leading supermarket chain and costs about eight euros (six pounds) a bottle.

Now I’m no champagne expert but to me it tastes pretty good and at a price like that can you drink it even during a recession. So I give the champagne award to the French.

So there you have it! Both France and Britain can rustle up a perfectly good party celebration – as long as marmite isn’t a key part of your christmas experience.

French Life-expat France