Happy Tuesday 2020, in which every day feels like a week, and every week feels like a year!
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You can even suggest things for me to write about since I’ve gotten more comfortable going out on a limb. I’ll actually let you hold the saw.
Giri Haji and Democracy
I might as well admit it. I hate the holidays and I’m doing everything I can to distract myself. Luckily we found Giri Haji on Netflix, an eight episode series about Japanese gangsters and cops, and British gangsters and cops, and of course, family, with a few queers thrown in. It has the perfect name for the season, Duty / Shame.
It was like a mix of Reservoir Dogs meets Thelma and Louise or something. Because there was tons of showy violence, and a thousand plot twists, with the most surprising of all being when the bitter wife, stereotypical mother-in-law, and glam girlfriend got an adventure of their own in which we finally saw them as human.
I really liked the ambivalent, not particularly happy ending, in which nobody got their just desserts. Perhaps because it was hard to tell who deserved what. When one character said something milquetoasty about people who aren’t bad, really, but just do bad things, another asked if there was actually a difference. For my two cents, the answer is, No. If you’re facing a firing squad it doesn’t really matter if it’s Pinochet’s or Castro’s, Hitler’s or Stalin’s. When you’re dead, you’re dead, no matter who shot you or why. And everybody always does have a good reason to load up their guns and fire.
Which is why I’ve spent years harping on the fragile, and cautious, sausage grinder of democracy, defended this week by the U.S. Supreme Court in a decision against the Republican’s last-ditch effort to essentially declare all Democratic voters ineligible and un-American. A somewhat pyrrhic victory, though, considering that 126 Republican members of Congress and more than a dozen Republican state attorneys general were happy to sign on in support of the treacherous attempt. Senator Murphy gave an excellent speech about why this should have Americans shaking in their boots, though it won’t.
While Americans always like to talk about freedom, I think we’ve never actually been too excited about democracy on either side of the aisle. Partly because of our puritanical streak which means we boil everything down to good and evil. Not just different points of view. And we are always vigilant for heretics because they re-enforce the idea of our own goodness, something Americans are desperate to believe they have a lock on. Even when, as in progressive circles, we often arrogantly (and inaccurately) proclaim ourselves as having the worst country of all.
At any rate, I ran across this really interesting and relevant piece on censorship, What You Can’t Say, that somebody somewhere shared this week, but was written in 2004 when George W. Bush was in the last year of his first term, and Americans were largely ignoring his illegal renditions and assorted wars, and the Woke were already in the hunt. Maybe this paragraph is the most salient: “To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power.…I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.”
The writer mentions, too, that the taboos are often a smokescreen for something else. Money, power…
From the good news department…
Argentina's lower house just passed a bill to make abortion legal—an important development for women, dykes included, even if we’re less likely to need one. Why? Because anything that acknowledges females should have bodily autonomy is good for those of us permanently on strike against male supremacy and the enforced heterosexuality that it requires. Unlike a similar bill passed by the lower house in 2018, this one is backed by the new President, Alberto Fernández, and is expected to pass the senate and become law. That would make Argentina just the fourth country in über-Catholic Latin America in which women have won the right to abortion.
In more personal news… I’m extra pleased to announce I finally have a tiny plastic card in my possession that means I’m a legal resident in France for the next nine years. The visa was originally for ten years, but the thing was approved on October 29, 2019, and I’ve been waiting through an assortment of delays caused by strikes, and violent demos, not to mention last year’s holidays, which were immediately followed by the pandemic, meaning I’ve had more than 13 months of great anxiety with the clock ticking away, because what can go wrong often does for immigrants. Thankfully, that’s finally at an end. Exhale with me. Shoooooeeeeey. If I cross the border, they’ll let me back in. And it’ll be harder to toss me out.
Maybe the best thing, though, was my decision to trek the 5.6 kilometers to the Paris Préfecture to pick it up. The walk took over an hour, but brought me through a big chunk of the city right to its beating heart, just around the corner from the Saint Chapelle which you may have seen if you’ve ever visited. I felt like a tourist myself. Gaping at the glittering Seine and its bridges. The barges along the side. The seagulls shrieking. All the giant monumental buildings like the Hôtel de Ville. I’d almost forgotten I lived in Paris.
I’m not kidding. The view from my window of an apartment block is pure Nowheresville, Republic of Anywhereatallia. We could live in Cincinnati or London. Or Newark.
Our only entertainment for the last nine months (which has not engendered anything worth handing out cigars for) has been leaving this apartment with its tidy, generic sheet-rocked walks and global appliance brands and walking two blocks to the track and running around it a few times like I did growing up in Louisville, Kentucky as a solitary teenage girl who had to speed up on the way home what with the creepy men in cars circling the suburban streets.
But no, it turns out I’m still in Paris. And it took me almost two hours to get home from the Préfecture because I was… happy. And I kept stopping to take pictures.
I also took note of what changed. Like the name of our old local, the Comptoir Voltaire which is apparently called The Ogres, now, and has rebranded itself as a kind of relaxed chic place, with expensive cocktails, and tapas and big chunks of meat from the artisanal butcher next store, with fancy prices to match that no one is paying right now, because we’re still in semi-lockdown.
Somebody even removed the sign that was attached to the grill around the tree in front reminding people the old Comptoir Voltaire was one of the places attacked by Islamic State terrorists in November 2015 at the same time as the Bataclan concert hall, but with less carnage. Something went wrong with the guy’s exploding vest and only he died. Which is as it should be. I wondered if the name Ogres was a reference to that, or Daniel Pennac’s book, Au bonheur des ogres, which is about a series of evil little men blowing themselves up in a department store. The first episode at Christmas.
Our latest café is actually an enormous pine in Square Fleury that we stood under on Saturday afternoon with a friend fresh from the provinces to belatedly toast the U.S. election, and my carte de séjour, and vaccines which work and should be in the reach of nearly everyone by late spring. Sure, it was raining a little, and democracy everywhere is still under attack, but sometimes you just have to celebrate incremental good news. Not to mention the actual presence of another fresh-faced human we haven’t seen in the flesh for months. So we did. We celebrated. With champagne.
A bonus lezzie link, Lesbian French couple who fought Nazis with their art slowly gain recognition, about my idols, the fabulous (and brave) artist pair, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, AKA Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.
And in case you were wondering what that thing was in the back of my fridge, no, it wasn’t jam. It was the last few preserved lemons of a batch that I made ages ago and had nearly forgotten. They’re really easy to make, all you need are some organic lemons, a bunch of big-grained salt, a nice jar you’ve boiled clean, and time. Three or four weeks will do it.
Preserved Lemons
What you do is give ‘em a wash, cut the nib ends off, slice the lemons longways nearly into quarters, but leaving the ends attached. Then you stuff it with salt, mush your salt-stuffed lemon into your nice clean jar, and cover that with salt, too, repeating until the jar is full of smushed lemon and juice and salt. You want the whole thing to be crammed full, so don’t hesitate to take a partial lemon, squeeze it in the jar, then shove in what’s left. Or even just add a little water if it’s a matter of a few tablespoons.
For the first few days leave it out at room temp, give it a quick shake, then open the lid to let out any fermenting gasses you might get. After three or four days of that, stick it into the fridge and forget about it for another couple of weeks. Or as long as you can stand waiting.
You find preserved lemon in recipes for tagines. I use it where I’d use lemon juice like in vinaigrettes, but also to replace capers in pasta, or in a tuna salad with olives. You just pull out a quarter or so, remove the gooey flesh bits so you just have the peel, and then mince it up. It’s intensely lemony, and of course, salty.
A strand or two is also nice, if I may say so, with gin. Which I’m sadly out of.
Suddenly disgruntled again, but still yours,