Rue Rude

You can't watch that video! or, DRM stupidity

Seriously? Once again, the video I want to watch is not available in my country. Which, when you are an expat, is actually a misnomer. 

I learned about the heinous Digital Rights Management blockage the hard way, buying movies in the USA I wanted to watch in France. (Obviously, this was back in the Stone Age.) After a long day, we sat down to watch the first much-anticipated movie. No matter what I tried, it wouldn't work. Cue sadness and frustration. Then fury. A friend who works in the TV business in LA explained that this is to prevent "abuse." What abuse? I bought it fair and square, I said. Yes, but you are supposed to buy it in France, he said. It isn't AVAILABLE in France, I said. Hard cases make bad law, he said. 

Do I care at all about Digital Rights Management? Nope. There are ways around 'most everything. Screw them.

Cheeseburgers in Paris: chic not cheap

Went out for dinner tonight to a nice place in the 16th arrondissement and was surprised to see that since the last time I was there, they have added cheeseburgers to the menu. They are now officially fashionable in Paris. But not cheap. That's $33 a cheeseburger.

Le Grand Paris

It's fun to look at this old map of Paris, which I took a picture of at a map dealers, and see that Paris was once much smaller than it is now. Everything between the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne is Paris now. 

The project of Le Grand Paris was launched under French president Sarkozy, who is now fairly unpopular  (although what French politician isn't, these days?!). The idea was to make Paris bigger, more of a match for sprawling London and big Berlin. However, the idea of giving up their power didn't appeal to the local governments around Paris, and except for expanding the metro, Le Grand Paris seems to be mostly on hold for now. 

Picasso Museum to reopen in October... & I have a bridge to sell you

I took this picture of the Picasso Museum, one of the jewels of Paris's Marais, in March 2008. The Museum is in the Hôtel Salé, one of the private palaces built in the days when the Marais was the most fashionable part of the city, before the royal court moved to the Louvre and then on to Versailles. As you can see, there was already work going on to renovate it. The museum closed for "30 months" of renovation in August 2009, under the leadership of Picasso scholar and family friend Anne Baldassari, and with a budget of about €26 million. So we all looked forward to seeing the museum reopen, radiant, in 2011. It's actually a fantastic museum, showing off Picasso's amazing ability to create art out of anything, and is guaranteed to cure you of any lingering idea that Picasso "couldn't draw," as my father used to say. (Pablo was 14 when he painted this.) 

In 2011, as it turned out, the work had not yet started. The director blamed health, safety, historical preservation and fire regulations. In May, 2011, the reopening was said to be for May 2012. In fact, the renovation did not even start until September 2011, but the museum was still supposed to reopen in 2012. In November, 2011, the director said the museum would reopen on May Day, 2013. That was the first time I noticed something wrong. Several curators had already quit unexpectedly. To understand the impact of this, you need to realize how hard it would be to get a coveted government job at such a place, and what it would take for them to want to leave.

The year 2012 went on without the Picasso museum. Meanwhile, the artworks were touring the world, visiting 13 countries for 20 special exhibitions; but Parisians didn't get to see them, as Baldassari turned down requests from the Pompidou Centre and the Musée d'Orsay. She was raising a lot of money with the traveling Picassos, and eventually the tours brought in €31 million to the museum's coffers. Which was a good thing, because the renovation was now seriously over budget and behind schedule. I noticed that the museum's chief executive under Baldassari had quit with five of his staff, all refusing to be interviewed.

2013 arrived, but the May Day reopening did not. In March, the museum delayed the reopening until "around the end of 2013." In May, when the museum had already been closed almost four years, the reopening was pushed back until "early 2014." In July, the new chief executive quit after less than a year. In October, the reopening was postponed again until June of 2014. In November 2013, the opening was said to be for sometime in 2014. In March 2014 the project had overrun by a spectacular three years, the budget had exploded by €22m, and the opening was planned for July 2014.

By now, the French government was starting to be embarrassed. How long could one of the nation's major museums stay closed with no apparent end date? Rumors of high-handedness and "chaos" were filtering out. In early 2014, the government commissioned a poll of the staff, which showed a "toxic" atmosphere. Workplace inspectors reported that workers were being put at risk. 

When word of this inspection was published in the UK Guardian in May 2014, Picasso's son Claude rushed to the defense of Baldassari. He issued a statement saying only the President of France had the right to remove her. His spokesman added that one person "cannot solve the museum’s problems magically, like waving a wand."

This defense of Baldassari galvanized the museum's staff of 45. More than half of them immediately signed a statement accusing Baldassari of "a management style marked by favoritism, conflict, mercurial decision making and a lack of communication." The story was turning into what French daily newspaper Le Figaro called a "sinister sitcom."

On 13 May, to few people's surprise at this point, the French minister of culture fired Baldassari "as of autumn 2014." According to an official statement, the dismissal was for mismanagement and the "deep suffering" of her staff. "An internal affairs report described her as 'incapable of working with her staff', maintaining a permanent state of confusion and 'behaving as if the museum was her own thing'." The work environment was "gravely deteriorating." In just four years the museum has seen four administrators. The latest to resign, in January, were the public works director, the services director and the curator for paintings." Baldassari threatened legal proceedings and said she was the victim of a "witch hunt" and "sexism." An interim head was appointed and the museum was now set to be open in September 2014 after costing €52 million. On 3 June 2014 , the head of the very successful new Metz Pompidou Center, Laurent Le Bon, was named to replace Baldassari. The total budget for the renovation was now up to €70 million. 

When Laurent Le Bon inspected the museum, he was startled by its condition. He immediately put a halt to the scheduled return of some paintings by late June. "Work was still going on in the whole museum—the office building did not even have a roof. 'The security system is not working yet. The air-conditioning will take months to stabilise, and there is not even a storage room ready where I could put the works,' Le Bon told The Art Newspaper. Nor is there a specific exhibition gallery planned in the new museum, which cost €52m—75% more than initially forecast. There is only one door for the public entrance and the cafeteria will probably not be able to take more than 20 customers. The museum is expecting one million visitors during the year after it reopens."

Currently, the museum is scheduled to open for limited viewing by the public during the Journées de Patrimoine, 21-22 September. From the looks of it at the moment, very few people will be allowed in at that time. The museum is now supposed to reopen by October 25, Picasso's birthday. Good luck with that, Monsieur Le Bon!

Update: The museum opened as scheduled. Impressive. 

Blog awards and Rude

A nice surprise today in my email. Rue Rude received an award I had never even heard of, for "Best Ten Websites for Expats in France"-- a finalist. I was happy to see that The Paris Blog, an "overblog" of Paris blogs, came first. Laurie Pike does a great job of curating interesting and unusual posts about Paris. And whenever she chooses one from Rue Rude, the views go up!

When you've been blogging for a while, like me (Rue Rude is almost to its 11th year!), you have to make many decisions about where you want to go with it. For example, I have received enough commercial offers to have made quite a bit of money from them, but it would be at the price of lining my sidebars with ads. I just haven't been ready to do that. Yet there are numbers of bloggers who make a living with their blogs; sometimes I look at them and think twice.

Some of my friends and family know that I have a blog, including my children (one of them discovered it while googling "Eurotrash" years ago). But most people I know, especially in France, still don't have any inkling, and I blog under a pseudonym for various reasons, one or two of them important. I don't go to bloggers' meetups and have probably missed out on a lot of promotion; but that does give me the freedom to write what I want. Is it worth it? I don't know....

I've also never entered any blog contests; so when something arrives out of the blue to say that someone is actually reading Rue Rude, it feels very nice.

Thank you!

Off on holiday like the rest of France

Hope you are having a nice summer!

Beginning of World War I, a hundred years ago

Americans don't really pay much attention to World War I. We came in late to the war and lost few men compared to the other countries. But World War I was a great tragedy for Europe, and put an end to an optimistic era of belief in the unstoppable progress of civilization. European colonies saw their imperialist rulers tear themselves to pieces in the stupidest war in history, and knew they did not need to submit to this rule any longer. Germany and France and England lost a generation of young men. The English became pacifists. The French (most of World War I was fought in France) lost the will to fight for a generation. And the Germans, poor and suffering after the war like everyone else, but punished for starting it by crushing reparations in the Versailles treaty, began to accumulate resentments that culminated in Hitler and World War II. Here's a photo which someone realized included Hitler, celebrating the German declaration of war in Munich, in 1914: 

August in Paris: vacation time

Today is one of the busiest traveling days of the year in France. 

World War I: general mobilization in France, 1 August 2014

One hundred years ago today, France calls up all its young men. In the next four years, ten percent of the population of France died in World War One.

Paris > USA: sticker shock

There isn't a good dry cleaner near me in Paris since the nice fat French people retired and a couple of sour North Africans took over. Most of the North Africans around here are nice, but this couple is so sour-looking that even though they are always perfectly polite, they radiate ill feeling. 

Dry cleaners in France are called teintureries (or sometimes nettoyage à sec), and their prices are high; you also are lucky to get your clothes back less than a week later.

I was in the Midwest last week attending a conference and sent my jacket to be cleaned by the hotel. I expected it to be expensive and take days. Instead it was back that evening and cost $8.95. God bless America!