The cycle of cliched cliches

The core essence of this blog has been, from its inception, the desire to speak to the cultural differences that would strike me in my daily encounters. It was also meant to bust, if not combat, cliches that so often minimise the enrichment inherent to cultural differences. Over time, the number of articles has reduced, because alterity became slowly normality, and it was getting harder to get surprised. That assimilation did not prevent me from being torn by a Franco-British Paradox, and from sometimes being reminded at my core where my roots were. 

Back to the roots.

Every now and then you may be tempted to go back to your origins and to embrace the stereotypes associated to your homeland. Only to toy with them with tongue-in-cheek references, that turns cliches on their head. I have had my eyes for years, 7 years in fact, on talented Scottish rider Danny MacAskill. I have always found that this athlete was capable of bringing a touch of intellectual poesy in his performance. He is in control of the image that his films convey, and there is always more to the jumps and rail slides.

In his latest release, A wee day out, Danny gives us again that perfect twist... He dives into the cliches of a dated country life, with its lot of high tea, scones, hay bales, green pastures, steam trains, stone walls, small crowds and deserted stations. You could almost expect Postman Pat to pop by with his cat and his red van. But the heights of Britishness in this setting is also creating a perfect stage for taking mountain biking to new heights. But rather than dwelling too much on it, how about taking a ride in that delightful Great Britain:




More from Danny MacAskill:

• Way Back Home, a tour of Scotland attractions
• Inspired bicycle, the origins
• Imaginate, an artist toying around
• Epecuen, when a devasted city ruin becomes a playground
• Cascadia, or how a colourful Spanish little village  

Puzzling Chinese

Last journey?

I have written a few times on this blog about one of my favourite French director, Cedric Klapisch. This affinity is not only related to our homonymy, but more importantly to the fact that his films capture a reality that speaks to me. Many of them struck a cord in the past, but I must say that L'Auberge Espanole (Pot Luck) an its sequel The Russian Dolls really hit the bull's eye for me. They are simply generational movies... They brought me back to my own referential scheme, at the right moments of my life. They come with an exquisite sense of short-lived nostalgia, and a reality check on our society values...

The first instalment shares the life of a French student who arrives in Barcelona as part of an Erasmus exchange programme, a few months before entering the exhilarating life of an administrative clerk in the finance ministry. In Spain, he will discover life, its difficulties, its tensions, its passions... In the flat share that accept to host him, he will live with Spanish, Danish, Belgian, English, German... folks who will all help him make sense of that intrinsic mess. He will discover himself and ultimately unleash his contrived passion for writing. A year that will change his life.

The second opus takes us a few years later, when our students have started their adult life and seen some their dreams shelved for a while. Xavier, our hero, is struggling through his Parisian life. He may be writing but not with passion. Until a TV channel ask him to write the sequel of a cheap love story, a dull assignment that ends up getting him back in touch with Wendy, his Barcelona roommate who may reveal being the love of his life.

A mess, a life.

Last week in France, I have heard that my wait for the next episode is now over. Early December, we will hear back from Xavier, in a third (and possibly final) instalment of our hero: Cassel-Tete Chinos (Chinese Puzzle). The plot is a delight....

10 years after his last adventures, we are finding Xavier in NYC. "Cool!" you may say, except that his life, like many of us, is nothing but linear. He lives in NY to be close to his two children who stay at his former wife's, Wendy. He has another child in Europe but is only the surrogate father as he helped another Barcelona friend, Isabelle, who is a lesbian finance analyst and wanted a family. To be able to stay in the US and get a green card, he married a US citizen from the Chinese community, and therefore made China Town his home in the Big Apple. Xavier will discover who he is as a father, a husband, a foreigner... in a word a Man.

Call me a masochist, but that mess is triggering much anticipation for me, to the point that I have reached out to the director himself to hear his plans for the distribution of the film in the UK. And here is his answer:

YES, the film will be released in the UK, but timing to be confirmed... Well, I cannot wait. So let  me leave you with a quote from this inspired director:

Optimism it is also to say that there is sadness and desolation in life. Pretending that everything is happiness, that everything will be fine, that is not optimism, that is stupidity.
Cédric Klapisch (1961-)

Joy of raising a bilingual child

Menage a deux

Now that my son masters his alphabet, or his alphabets I should specify, every occasion is a pretext to get him to spell things out. If he has not fully grasped the concept of syllables, he is pretty good decomposing any word he put his eyes on.

And here comes the fun part... In a language, most of the time one word is associated to one concept, a one-to-one link if you want. But for our little bilingual chap, it is a bit more complicated: for him, a concept or object is connected to... well, two words. One in French. The other in English. And this gives you some awkward conversations that could have featured in Rain Man.
 Who is on first base? Woo.

For instance, last week, the two of us were in the kitchen for dinner when my son glances at the bread box lying on the table, and starts deciphering the word engraved on the wooden box:

"B... R... E...A...D", he spells and then underlines the word and declares with pride the word: "PAIN!" (the French word for bread).
- "No", I reply with a smile, "it is not written PAIN."
- "But mummy said it is written PAIN?!?"
- "Let's read it again together", and I take turn to spell it in a more phonetic way: "B, Rrrrr-Aid... BREAD"

My son looks at me. Puzzled. Almost upset. "Daddy, you JUST said it was not 'bread'!!!!".

It is a promising omen for our upcoming reading nights, but I could not refrain from smiling at the prospect.

But why?

Credit photo: Caro Willis via Flickr

Precision questioning: the joy of parenthood.

As you may know, I am the lucky dad of a 3-year old boy. At that age, after the so-called Terrible 2's, it is supposed to be a delight to raise a child: as he is old enough to interact and understand, but still sufficiently young to avoid demonstrating rebellious attitudes. On paper, the ideal. but what this paper's small prints hide from you is that there is still some maintenance to that presumably well-oiled machine. And the keyword is "why?".

Kids want to make sense of their surroundings, of the words, of the people, of philosophical topics and astronomical phenomenons, of the weather, of the behaviour and social conventions... Each of these items is like an endless Russian doll: you start by answering a first seemingly easy question, and it triggers another one, that will raise another one, and another one... After the twentieth interrogations your rational adult brain is no longer able to get the thread of thoughts that led you to answer "why clouds are white?" whilst the conversation started on "what was a can opener?"!

Along the process, you try your best to provide answers that make sense, and keep you on the glorious altar your child puts you on. You are the source of truth. You are a well of wisdom. You are the equal to Aesop, Plato, Homer, Nietzsche, Kant... At least in their eyes, and you certainly don't want to contradict them (it feels so good). But frankly, sometimes their questioning skills are such that you reach the end of your knowledge, and most likely the end of your patience. And suddenly the answer gets less elaborate: "why is the..." he says, "because it's like that!" you interrupt.

Educational non-sense.

If children ask a ton of questions, my personal burden tallies to two tons... That is the curse of raising a bi-cultural kid. Two cultures, two languages, twice the fun. You not only need to handle the Why's but also the Pourquoi's. He clearly dissociates both cultures, so he naturally wants to make sense of twice more things but, to paraphrase Dr. Zeus' Oh, The Places You'll Go!, "sometimes they won't, because they don't".

Let's take the example of this famous nursery rhyme:

Hey diddle diddle,
The Cat and the fiddle,
The Cow jumped over the moon,
The little Dog laughed to see such fun,
And the Dish ran away with the Spoon

You have to reckon that such a infantine text, beyond the rhetorical rhymes is a gold mine for questioning children. How can a cow jump over the moon? Why is the dish running? Why our do plates do not run? Why a fiddle? Why? Why? WHYYYYY?

As a French, I have been educated with La Fontaine's fables and have learned that there is often a moral to what seems to be a light hearted text. So I looked hard at the text trying to find some sense myself from these lines. And since I could not, I started to check between the lines.

A long time ago, Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales opened my eyes to the hidden Freudian messages interwoven in Grimm's stories. So as my son was half asleep in his bed, I sat behind his bed, put a pipe in my mouth, and started to say "hmm, hmm...". Diddle? An alteration to Dildo, a phallic symbol? Maybe. The cat? Ok, that is the female symbol, that is straight forward. The cow over the moon? A sexist reference to the providing mother, and the happiness of breast-feeding? Well... I was clearly on the wrong path, and was glad that this thought process had only occurred in my brain and not verbalised to the now fast-asleep child. That would have pushed me down the altar for good.

To regain my pride, I looked at other cultural references and even cryptology. To no avail. Were these lines an acrostic, like The Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamond song? No luck. In the end, I resolved myself to conclude that it may just be one of the famous British non-sense. That was not totally fulfilling an outcome, but quite handy. I could indeed blame my host culture for teaching non-sense to generations of future Eton graduates. Because of course on the other side of the Channel, obviously, we are way better. Aren't we?

Absurdity united

My mind is filled with French songs gathered during my own childhood, but frankly my Why-years are so far behind that I have not questioned or even listed to their lyrics for a very long time. But doing so, it revealed that absurdity was a shared value in nursery times:

Maman, les petits bateaux
French lyrics	English translation
Maman, les petits bateaux	Mum, do small boats
Ont-ils des jambes?	Have legs?
Mais oui mon gros beta	Of course, you silly,
S'ils n'en avaient pas,	If they hadn't,
Ils ne marcheraient pas!	They couldn't walk!

Not only is the child almost bullied by his mother, but seriously what does that song mean? Why would a mother assert that boats are legged? Why? Why? I was suddenly regressing to my 3rd year on Earth. And my convictions collapsed.

If our childhood is nothing but nonsense, how are we supposed to build our psyche? Maybe our children are right in questioning us... After all, the French idiom says that the "truth comes out of children's mouth". So from now on, I give my little one an even greater attention when he turns back to me with his interrogations. I am more patient with the real Plato of the household.

The Saturday Shot #23: bon future...

Sometimes as you walk around the streets of life, you are prompted some very interesting, metaphysical questions... This picture was taken on London south bank, and I thought it captured an interesting question. Forty years after Sid Vicious and the rest of the punk movement declared there was no future, are we more positive nowadays?

We are certainly four decades later, so there was some sort of a future, at least a short term one. But the news is currently all about doom and gloom. Collapsing economy, serial killers on the run, global warming, and even the serious threat of a comeback album by Cliff Richards. We are indeed not so far of the late 70s. The petrol may not be the cause of the current turmoil, but finances have taken over... And in this context the British public is adopting a very distant stance towards those who amplified the social and economical tensions on the altar of profit.

I am interested in the fact that the once most rebellious country in Europe, home of the Sex Pistols, is now taking a step back and not joining more actively movements like the Anonymous. It is all the more surprising that London, as one of the leading banking capital in the world, is at the epicenter of the current situation. It is probably easier to rebel yourself against the remote and unknown than against your cousin or next door neighbours. This may explain the success of the resurrected poster "Keep calm and carry on" that is selling fast.

Personally, I am rather of a positive nature. So I think that we have a bon future ahead of us assuming some serious changes in our behaviours, whether social, cultural or consumptions. But unlike the advertising said, if the future is bright, the future is probably not orange:

“A man is not an orange. You can't eat the fruit and throw the peel away” Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

Learn to hear English

You hear me, but do you listen?

School teachers focus on making us learn to speak English... But it is only with a bit more experience and immersion in the local culture that you actually manage to hear English.

Bear with me here, as I am not talking about what is verbally articulated, I in fact mean of what is actually said. There is a significant nuance for a nation that masters the art of understatement and self-deprecation.

The following table for instance has been recently circulated around in my company, probably to help our dearest colleagues in the US translate what really happens in meetings. After all, America and England are two nations divided by a common language...

Enjoy your next meetings with the Brits... Cup of tea anyone?


To read further:

• Language on a life line, David Mitchell's rant about endangered local languages
• The Italian job, a classical on accents and misunderstandings
• A, B, C, Ki , Wi or how to understand the folks from New Zealand

A, B, C, Ki , Wi

Busy B

I have rarely the time to post on my blog those days with a pretty busy work agenda, and a growing little one... The latter is growing fast and is now on the verge to hammer us with extensive questions about everything in life. He is about to speak.

Fortunately for us, his parents, we still have a few more years to go before he becomes fluently eloquent and proficient in Shakespeare's tongue. It is indeed already upsetting for us that our toddler can already correct your English accent whereas he only master a few words.

Evil plan.

I am in fact starting to think that we may want to impair his development, just to protect what is left of our ego. We already started in fact as we signed him up in a nursery with pan-European care-takers so his accent may be influenced by mainland inspirations. Not really succesful. The next step is probably to dial up the obstacle and get him a nanny from New Zealand. I personally love their accent, it makes me laugh as loud as an exploding Rainbow Warrior boat.

To give you a flair of how daunting a task it is to understand the Kiwis, here is a little guide in the form of a ABC... A song that is now becoming a true earworm.