and the beat goes on

It may be late Saturday afternoon at the Grande Ecole, but it’s a hive of activity, with the students busy serving snacks and being friendly. Two young guys in red student association tee shirts play a spirited game of ping pong with a pair of guys in snappy blazers, white shirts and ties. The hopeful applicants straight out of gruelling preparatory schools from around France dress to the nines for their interviews. Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean is blaring from the lounge.

The snacks, the funny graffiti and the ping pong suggest a devil-may-care situation, but in reality there is more to it. After all, we’ve taken part in the French entrance juries this year, conducting interviews, passing judgement as the French faculty representatives do, and we got a glimpse into the pressures on French prep school students. Quite frankly, they’re put through the wringer.

Another Jackson song, Beat It, comes to mind, along with a job we had in the 80’s helping to produce a daily children’s radio show. We had a top ten of songs that the children, aged 6 – 12, requested each week. For months they called in Beat It, Beat It, over and over, driven by the urgency of the beat, and the message in the words:

Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right

Just beat it beat it beat it.

Over the last two days, millions of people worldwide have been focusing on the demise of the manchild. It was a man who broke the color barrier into the White House, but it was a strange enchanted boy who first broke the color barrier on MTV. The boy is dead. Long live the boy. And he sure could dance.

Back in our office, we hit the New York Times front page online, which zips us through to You Tube – the best of Michael dancing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKBLxh3u0tM

5.7 million views and counting

And the video of Beat It? 25 million and counting.

Technology and Desire

We finally spilled a glass of wine all over our computer keyboard. Ah!  time to buy a new one. Why did we wait so long? The new one has such springy keys, so responsive to our  touch, so smooth yet yielding like fine small squares of dense, toothsome chocolate.

We hover by the screen these days. Because our age old dream – that of a bus filled with all the people we’ve loved and lost throughout our long life heading straight for heaven – is back! Yes - 75 Friends and counting.

First - we stopped off at the technology store on our way home to join the friends. We became excited by the thousand flat screens, the sleaker computer speakers, the toys to flatter our own darling ipod, the little waffle iron that could. And – don’t tell now! - we sneaked so slyly into the Mac section, more than ready to cheat on our PC. And please tell us - how much will it really cost us to get an iphone, do you reckon? We’ll pay.

Technology will save us... technology will bury us...The medium is the…what? Never you  mind.

 

Easy come, easy go

Just when we thought things were going OK, there were taxes to pay. The salary amount certainly has been adjusted for the cost of living, and then some, but we know we  enjoyed it more when we had to lay all our money out on the table, green, blue, pink and yellow.

 The time we were sent to prison did not help matters. Once would have been hard, but three times in a row made us really feel like everything in life was against us. We’re not even clear as to what it was for. We had duly paid the luxury tax, although we had no luxuries at the time. Once released (we had a card), we managed to acquire some property – but that got traded away very quickly to Clément, who had mercilessly built hotels before anyone else was even out of the starting gate.

To be honest, those new hotels are plastic, not as nice as those we remember in the days of the top hat and cigar. They fall over more easily than the small wooden ones. Plus, the bank itself is plastic, too. The money ebbs and flows through a plastic card shoved into a machine, singing its little electronic melody as the cash is siphoned away. Easy come, easy go, we said. We also said, we are sure that money should not be represented by plastic. This is one thing that we have learned.

In the end, we managed to own the Place de la Concorde and  the Eiffel Tower just for a turn or two. But then we landed on Clément’s hotel on Notre Dame. Hasn’t anyone explained to him that the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre, and the Gare du Nord aren’t for sale? That you can’t build a hotel on Notre Dame? Paris will never be sold off piecemeal, like Boardwalk, Marvin Gardens or Park Place, right? Aren’t we right about that one thing?

The mirror with a memory*

 

 

We think often of the proverbial grain of sand that slips into the oyster and creates the pearl – (simulated or otherwise)  and that grain of sand is  often  an image. Here on the Shadowblog, it is (nearly always) an image we’ve captured ourselves. Thus the one you see taken while on vacation in the Jura region of France.

We hearby re-direct you to a not-to-be missed meditation by Erroll Morris and expert guests on images from the Bush presidency. Enjoy: 

http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall/?hp

 *Olivier Wendell Holmes, describing the art of photography in its infancy.

WHAT IS THIS A SIGN OF?

It started with the guitar strings, then moved on to the dish towels.

First, we broke a string on our new learner’s guitar.  So on the way home, we took a long detour through the later afternoon fog to the town next door to stop off at the music store – a local institution -  where the patient young musician had spent an encouraging hour helping us pick out the guitar.

Pulling up in front – the store was a shell of its former self.  No more music store in that town.

And then the dish towels. Our Canadian friend, she with the clean, attractive kitchen, was having a birthday. She’s got great style, our friend, but she’s not fussy, and she doesn’t like a lot of money being spent for her gift. Not in these times. But she had made an unrelated, off-hand remark the other day, “I need some new dish towels.”

We knew just the place - a store in the shopping center next door to the office – a kitchen store – beautiful linens.

 You guessed it – walking towards it, in the glow of holiday lights, that corner appeared unusually dark. Gone. Almost overnight, like thieves in the you-know-what.

 Our mind darted off into a dream…of the large boutique on the edge of the Wazemmes outdoor market – a two-story galaxy of household  French wonders – from heaps of plain white porcelain in every shape and size to six different kinds of corkscrews to forks for eating various delicacies to straws for sipping cocktails to rows upon rows of correct pots and pans to the sublimely fantastical upstairs, to the latest Gien dinnerware and Wedgewood  teapots. A local institution for sure.

But a dream bien sûr…it was boarded up and gone more than a year ago.

 We did find the towels. In one of those new boutiques that could have been in any city in the world, having popped up like a mushroom after the rain. The towels were flashy, and surprisingly cheap. As were the paper napkins, the wicker what-nots, and the pans with flash. 

The best things in life are…

You heard it, we heard it – the horrid roar of that huge bubble bursting – but now that it's done,  listen! In the distance could that be the gentle and subtle sound of a tiny sigh…of…? 

The dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound – have these lost their authority as definitive yardsticks of value? What is one to do?

 Meanwhile -  allow us to propose NEW units for measuring profit...en profiter. We present -  inestimable countables.

Roast chestnuts.
Lights. En rose.
A rose.
A bulb forced in winter.
Swans on the wing.
The cork that popped.
The look he gave me.
The punchline that  paid off.

 The day after tomorrow,
(that certain number
of minutes longer
in daylight terms
than the day before).

And in the way of all contradictory truths – we’ve got a good feeling about this 2009.

Meet us on the bridge. At sunset.

 

The Engineer's Creed

For two straight weeks in the  New York times,  Thomas Friedman http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/opinion/10friedman.html has surveyed his flat world, seized on the American automotive industry, and pronounced it a dinosaur. Rather than bailing out the carmakers, he says, we have to “let nature take its course.”

It’s hard to dispute the truth of it, when you focus on the bottom line. We think such predictions are, in fact, no brainers – along with the dinosaur metaphor. After all, what has a both tiny head and a huge body that makes it eventually  incapable of  outrunning the competition? Bean counters take note.

We are a daughter of Detroit – dad was a career engineer for Chysler. We lost him in 1992 – therefore he's not around to see the sad state of affairs today. Retirement didn’t really suit him. He loved his job. He was a battery expert, and worked on the starter system. The teenaged us  remembers once banging through the screen door one summer, after clumsily failing to start the car. Dad was sitting reading the paper. “That darn starter, “ we whined. Without missing a beat or putting down the paper, Dad shot back, completely serious, “We’re working on it.” 

Today we’re a prof, and some of our students are young engineers. They are very competitive. They understand a lesson when it takes the form of a game, with a prize. And when they ask us for the prize, we always say, “it’s the engineer’s favorite prize, the thing that drives every engineer at his or her heart.” Money, they guess? Sex? Chocolate? “No, “ we say, “it’s the satisfaction of a job well done!” They grudgingly agree. 

We have not doubt that Detroit is still filled with men and women who value their work above all else. And what of them. Are they the “Detroit” vilified in the papers? When nature takes it’s course, what of the human cost? The people clinging desparately to the tail, wishing the head would wake up?

Sooner or later, that’s most of us.