Lunch time

It's lunch time here in Santa Maria, and being hungry (and without lunch) I thought I might share a few pictures on the theme of Parisian food. Anyone who has only experienced American supermarkets will find the process of shopping in Paris to be quite an eye opener. In the states we tend to hide where our food came from (at least until there's a salmonella recall). Our steak comes wrapped and packaged and looking in no way bovine. Good luck even identifying what's in our hotdogs. In France you know what you're getting. The first picture is a bit blurry, but it presents a rabbit (lapin) opened up, with it's liver, heart and kidney presented on its ribs. The second picture shows a series of chicken (poulet) hanging from the shop window, adorned by their lovely red feathers, looking nothing like the frozen bag of chicken wings we got from Costco for Superbowl Sunday. I love escargot, but I've got to admit that it's easy to pretend that they are nothing more than little spongy garlic butter foodstuffs, until you're faced with the dish of shells or, better yet, the wonderful storefront for L'escargot Montogueil, the best known Parisian escargot restaurant. I love not only the giant golden snail, but also the smaller ones climbing across the store front sign, looking for all the world like the ones crawling through my back yard garden. The last picture is of a disappearing French tradition, the horse butcher. I don't know if I could eat horse, knowing how smart they are and how each has his own personality, and I've read that the market for horse meat is shrinking in Paris, as well. The few remaining places where you can buy horse meat, though, don't try to hide what they do. There's a certain honesty in French cuisine that I admire, although it requires pushing beyond my own cultural predilections. 

Iconography

Well, once again we've survived Superbowl Sunday, an event that has less to do with football than with the buying and selling of the American identity. More people watch the game for the advertisements than for the football game itself. In a twist, this year the game was exciting, while the advertisements were an almost universal disappointment. I'm not sure if it's because business didn't know how to respond to the current economic crisis or if ad agencies are just at their creative nadir, but very few of the commercials yesterday seemed to resonate with me. This is surprising in that in this last year we saw one of the most successful ad campaigns ever. Shepard Fairey's "Yes We Can" poster for Obama instaneously turned the candidate into a recognizable brand. More so than "I Like Ike" or any other political poster in memory, the poster became the iconographic marketing tool that stuck in the American and world's mind. The poster was all over Paris this Christmas, including the one that I include above which, I think, includes President Sarkosy's image and asks for fair wages and better work conditions. Sorry for the quality of the picture. I saw it in a work site and had to quickly navigate into an area where I wasn't supposed to be to get the picture. This led me to thinking about iconography in general, and the way that cities become branded in our imagination. Is there a city more defined by its icons than Paris? From the various monuments (Eiffel Tower, Sacre Coeur, Arc de Triomphe) to the sweeping Haussmann era Boulevards and the slightly yellow stone facades that glow in the late afternoons, the patisseries, cafes and street markets, Hector Guimard's art nouveau Metro stations, all create a visually unique fingerprint for the city. One couldn't recreate and brand a city like this from scratch, and recent attempts like Orlando, Florida or Dubai, to me have always seemed inorganic (and slighty apocalyptic). I think if you dropped me anywhere in Paris, within three blocks I'd know what city I was in. In America, perhaps the same could be claimed for San Francisco and maybe Manhattan, but I'm not sure if anywhere else is quite as instantaneously recognizable. Perhaps that's a function of our country's youth; it took Paris (and London, Rome, Tokyo and other great world cities) a millennia to evolve into what they've become. The last image I'm including today is a true Franco-American icon--the Statue of Liberty. When Frédéric Bartholdi made the statue for America, he kept a smaller one behind. It now sits just south of the Eiffel Tower, in the middle of the Seine, across from Radio France, a reminder of how the histories of our two countries remain interconnected, although we don't always like to admit it.