Day 6: Bastille Day

Sometimes it's amazing just how much you can say in French using only a couple words. For example, try walking into a café and saying "Un allongé."

Two simple words--un allongé--and yet they say so much. "Excuse me, is there any chance that you could make me instantly happy in the next two minutes, activating all my senses to their absolute zenith of experience while costing me less than a euro?" And the polite response to "un allongé" is "un instant," another wonderful phrase meaning "Yes of course, before you can get the change out of your pocket I will have placed before you a cup of unmatched and yet wholly domestic joy, a glass of water to refresh yourself and cleanse your pallet between sips and a newspaper, of which we have a billion and which you may read for as long as you like absolutely for free." You see? A wonderful economy of language--so much said with so few words.

Anyway, after walking past the musée du quai Branly (see recording #2) I found a tree I particularly liked. I liked it so much because this was the view from one direction:

And this was the view from the other direction:

Yes, I finally made it to the Eiffel Tower and yes, that is a disco ball. In fact, that is the largest disco ball ever made, in honor of July 14th: Bastille Day. I can't say if it's characteristically French or not but I read in the paper that this Bastille Day celebration was meant to focus on dance deliberately, as if people weren't dancing then there was a problem. Alright, said I, I'm excited, throw some dance at me. So I wandered down to the Champs Elysées at around 11 expecting to see people getting their dance on. Instead I say this:

It is now safe to dance

So there's something interesting going on here that I do want to talk about at some point. Bastille Day celebrates French independence, commemorating the storming of the Bastille on July 14th, which brought ammunition to the nascent French Revolution both in the form of actual bullets and angry escaped prisoners. One could argue that a parade demonstrating government control of military force is not just off message but even anti message. Of course, if citizens were encouraged to steal the tanks and drive them across the Jardin de Tuileries it would be another story, but then that that doesn't seem very likely. One could argue that the tanks represent not the martial power of the establishment but rather the accumulated strength of the people who overthrew said establishment, as in Fuck your cake, Marie Antoinette, we've got tanks now. To me that just sounds ridiculous, and I really have to question the reality that in 2012 we still celebrate democratic freedom by driving tanks up and down the street. But maybe that's just me.

In spite of my enthusiasm for dance I did not spend my night reveling my way around the Arc de Triomphe but rather down in the 15eme, hanging out with Yon Vissel, a massively cool individual working in the field of haptics. In case you aren't in the know, haptics is an unbelievably broad umbrella term for any kind of tactile feedback, but usually referring to engineered feedback where such sensation wouldn't usually exist. The lack of haptics, for example, is why some people complain so bitterly about typing on the iPhone. The basic idea behind haptic research is to use vibration, texture and inertia to communicate information. Obviously the applications for digital instruments are massive; just think about how much a musician depends on his sense of touch. Of course, we cna only image just how cool haptics would be in novel contexts like this one.

After a great deal of singing, a great deal of complaining and a great deal of feu d'artifice I finally made my way back to the 4eme. Waiting for me was half a baguette, a round of Camembert and a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. What can one say but Liberté, Égalité, Fraternié.