women’s rights

Art, Food, and Parks in Paris

/ Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

The majority of the August 2019 was spent in the Irelands, but I decided that I wanted to spend a few days in Paris on the way. You can’t really fly direct from the US to Dublin (without forking over a fortune). Connecting flights go through Heathrow or CDG. Any excuse to visit Paris. I know it’s very stereo-typical, but apparently I’m more basic than I want to admit: I love Pumpkin Spice Lattes and Paris is one of my favorite cities on Earth.

Where All Good Food Goes When It Dies

Pardon my mangling of Oscar Wilde’s famous quote, but this was the thought I had the first time I had a meal in France (not actually Paris yet, since I was on a road trip from Prague and my first stop was in Metz: photo album). I have not had any disappointing food experiences in France at all. I have been trying to figure out how to afford to live and work in France doing nearly anything just so I could have daily access to the food. Since I haven’t yet figured that out, I am having to make do with an annual pilgrimage to see my favorite art and food stops.

I was only able to spend a few days in Paris this time around, so it was mostly a food oriented excursion. I wanted to get a full range of food experiences from fine dining to street food. The first dinner was at a beautiful souffle-centric restaurant called Le Souffle which serves a three course menu of entirely souffles. I was a bit apprehensive that it might be textually monotonous, but they serve each course with some sides like salad or croquette, and the main course was a mild cheese souffle with the beef bourguignon in a side dish so you could pour the meat and sauce into the souffle, breaking up the taste and texture. For dessert, I was torn between chocolate and creme brulee… I love both, but the idea of a creme brulee souffle was too intriguing to pass up. My only regret was an inability to finish everything.

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I got to have just “regular” (amazing) French food in a nice neighborhood bistro. I got to have breakfast at my favorite chocolaterie: Angelina’s. This place has arguably the best hot chocolate, and the breakfast pastries were exquisite. I got some “fast food” at Paul’s, and a picnic lunch from the Marche d’Aligre which included this fantastic “blue” cheese. It’s actually a Tomme duBerry a la lavande. It’s a mild, uncooked, pressed cow’s milk cheese that’s colored blue and flavored with lavender and rosemary. With some lemon olives, fresh bread, ripe apricots, and a lemon tart for dessert it was a magical meal in the park.

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I could go on and on about the food in Paris. Many people have. I was going to say I have, but it turns out that for some reason I never actually wrote about my first time in Paris, and when I wrote about the second trip, I wasn’t very food focused because of the extreme heat wave going on at the time ruining my appetite. Perhaps the next time I go, I’ll actually dedicate myself to taking good food photos and notes so I can do a proper foodie write up of all my favorite places.

Let’s Go For a Walk

Since I never actually wrote about my trip in 2015, all the main Paris attractions that I did on the first trip never actually made it into the blog: Eiffel Tower, Père Lachaise cemetery, Sacré-Cœur, the Champs-Élysées with Arc de Triomphe, the Place de la Concorde and the beautiful Tuileries Garden.

If you happen to be in Paris when the weather is nice, these are all wonderful places to go. In 2018, I went on a cycling tour and I have almost no photos and less memory about what we saw because it was 37°C and I didn’t bring enough water. The moral here is, don’t force yourself to see the beautiful outdoor attractions if you aren’t going to be able to enjoy them. There’s plenty of museums and indoor / covered activities like street markets. I made it to the March d’Aligre on this last visit which not only had plenty of wonderful fresh food on offer, but also had a rambling rummage sale of old and lost things.

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I personally think that places like the Eiffel Tower (photo album), the Champs-Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe (photo album), and the Place de la Concorde are all things you could go and see one time for a few minutes and check that off the Paris bucket list. They just aren’t that exciting… Although, it was fun to realize that I’ve now seen the matched set of obelisks that reside in Paris and Luxor respectively. The one in Paris was given to France by Muhammad Ali Pasha, Ruler of Ottoman Egypt in exchange for a French mechanical clock in 1832. It’s twin still stands outside the temple of Luxor.

Notre Dame (photo album) is a place that I would have recommended as a one and done, however, since the fire, I’m not sure this stands true any more. I personally will be interested to see how it looks in a few years. Regardless, unless gothic architecture is your jam, it’s not worth more than a couple hours one time. It is totally worth that, because it’s a very beautiful structure, but it can be very crowded and I think it’s a little overhyped since there are a few hundred (thousand?) churches around Europe that are very very similar. But you’re in Paris, so you might as well.

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The Père Lachaise (photo album) could easily be several days of wandering through a stunning gothic mausoleum laden park taking endless photos of the natural and the macabre. Plus, lots of famous graves like Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. If you’re really into the dead, I think the Catacombs are a great indoor option, although I highly recommend a skip the line ticket because when we went, people were waiting 3+ hours for a tour. Also, while the above ground cemetery is definitely good for repeat meandering visits, I think that the catacombs are a single visit attraction unless you REALLY love bones.

The Sacré-Cœur (photo album) as a church is on my “one and done” list, but as a beautiful part of Paris is on the repeat visit list. The views from the top of the hill are absolutely stunning, and the culture around Sacré-Cœur is fascinating: from the roving “vendors” selling anything and everything on the steps to the famous Place du Tertre where local artist are painting and selling beautiful original works of art direct to the public.

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Last but not least, the Tuileries Garden is a large green space between the Louvre and the Musée de l’Orangerie. It’s a beautiful place to have a stroll any time of year. There’s wide open green spaces, chairs placed freely around the fountains, shady tree lined pathways, little bistros and of course a bit of a fun park at one end with a giant ferris wheel. I love to come here when I need a break between sights to enjoy the day and people watch.

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Paris Art & Feminism

I wrote a broader piece about my experiences in these two museums (d’Orsay & l’Orangerie) from my visit in 2017. In this essay, I’m going to focus on a temporary exhibition in the l’Orangerie about cubism and the unexpected feminist moment I found there.

In case it was never obvious before, I do consider myself a feminist (no I don’t hate men, no I won’t use the term “equalist”, yes I have lots of reasons. This Bustle article sums them up nicely if you want to read more). I’m constantly frustrated by the way in which all the historical artists, musicians, scientists, writers, politicians, philosophers… everything … of any note or record are almost always men. White men. Old. White. Men.

It’s not because old white men are better at these things. It is because the women who did them were suppressed. They were put down in their own lifetimes. Their work was stolen by men who took the credit. Their work was copied by men who took the credit. They were just written out of history. By the men who write history books.

Women are supposed to cook for the family, but only men can be great chefs? Women have historically been expected to spin, weave and sew yet fashion is a man’s business? Art forms that men can’t steal are just demeaned, like embroidery or textile crafting. It’s nice this is finally starting to break down in the 21st century, but we still don’t have enough of a balance in the way we teach and promote artists in mainstream culture. Adding women artists to the public consciousness doesn’t mean removing male artists, and it’s high time we start.

Many of the artists and composers and even authors on my “love it” list are dudes. I’m not going to stop enjoying their work just because I’m adding female artists to my worldview. I don’t know if I would have identified with any female artist growing up simply because I wasn’t ever exposed to any. I don’t think we have room for a limited number of artists in our lives. I think the more art the better. While we’re at it, maybe start adding non-eurocentric art and POC artists too, like Robert S. Duncanson (1821–1872) who was an African-American man who escaped to Canada during the Civil War and taught himself to paint.

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The museums in Paris, in particular the l’Orangerie, have been trying to have more women artists on display. Last time I was there in 2018 it was Helen Frankenthaler. I wasn’t that into her art because I am not a fan of abstract impressionism, but I was really happy to see her in an installation that included Rothko and Pollock. The museum talked a lot about her life and the challenges she faced being a woman in the highly sexist art scene. She was talented, dedicated and prolific yet she’s not discussed when most people talk about this period of art history.

This time, the featured woman artist was much more personally to my liking and I became much more invested in her art and identity. I am only human, and tend to spend more time and energy on the things that personally interest / impact me. If you’ve never seen her work before, then it is my distinct pleasure to introduce you to the art of Marie Laurencin.

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“Marie Laurencin (1883-1956) initially studied porcelain painting, before going on to study drawing at a school in Paris and at the Academie Humbert. She was part of the circle of friends at the Bateau-Lavoir known as the “Picasso gang”, and it was here that she met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire with whom she had a passionate and stormy affair.

Attracted to Fauvism for a time, Marie Laurencin, the “Cubist Muse”, simplified and idealized her forms under their influence. From 1910, she preferred a palette of pastel tones, particularly grays and pinks. She went on to discover the painting of Goya in Spain.

In 1920, she began to paint the willowy, ethereal female figures that she would return to later in paintings with pastel tones, evoking a magical world. She painted portraits of famous Parisian figures, and designed stage sets, for the Ballet Russes in particular. Through this, she became interested in metamorphosis, bringing together two of her favorite themes: young women and animals.”

— Informative sign at l’Orangerie

It’s not that Laurencin or  Frankenthaler have been erased. They have (short) Wikipedia pages and it’s not hard to find their paintings online. Before the internet, however, they were virtually invisible to anyone who was not an art history student. Artists like Pollok and Picasso have had hundreds of books, movies, and t-shirts made about their lives and art. They’re referenced frequently in pop culture and have been made to stand as the premier examples of their art eras.

Picasso was a womanizer, an abuser, a narcissist and highly misogynistic. This isn’t just my opinion. It’s well documented. Yet we treat him and his work as sacrosanct as though it is the ONLY example of cubism in all of history. I’m not suggesting we bury the male artists just because they’re jerks, however I think it’s time we start taking a look around and who else might be worthy of historical preservation and artistic praise.

Honestly looking around the museum that day, there was plenty of Picasso on display. It isn’t that impressive.. OK cubism did all this great stuff for “art” and the advancement of creativity, but he wasn’t the only one. I found his works that day to be coarse and overly focused on women as sexual objects. I’ve had a chance to go back through a photo collection of his body of work and I think that whoever curated that particular display may have been selecting for contrast, and I acknowledge that wasn’t a universal trait. However, that day, it was jumping out at me that he was painting women as breasts with a body and maybe a face attached.

Even though Picasso insisted on referring to her as a Cubist Muse or “Our Lady of Cubism” Laurencin didn’t think of her art as cubist, but rather more impressionist. She’s still classed as a cubist artist to this day because art historians would rather listen to how the men defined her rather than how she defined herself.

Despite all this feminism, Laurencin didn’t paint women for empowerment. She also thought they were beautiful. “Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier,” she once said.

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To me it seemed that she focused on their beauty rather than their ability to please a male gaze/touch. Her paintings reached out and grabbed me despite their pastel colors and watery images. The idea that a women could paint women because they are pretty the way flowers or rainbows are pretty rather than because they stir the passions of men. There have been a few queer male artists in the well documented side of history that painted beautiful women in an absence of sexual desire, but mostly you get people like Raphael who literally made up non-existent sex goddesses to paint out of the most attractive parts of the hundreds of ladies he seduced. Really early photo-shopping of models, I guess?

It isn’t to say that Laurencin didn’t sexualize women at all. Apparently she was known for attending sapphic parties “comprised of lesbian and bisexual women socialized and discussed links between female desire and creative production”. If anything she was likely bi- or asexual since her long term relationship with Guillaume Apollinaire is well documented. However, if she did sexualize women in her paintings, it serves to highlight the extreme difference in what a male and female sexual gaze focuses on.

Regardless of Laurencin’s sexual orientation, the sapphic parties weren’t lesbian orgies. The hostess and participants of those parties were early first wave feminists seeking to own their desire and creative power at a time that most women were expected to stay home and raise a family. For context, the suffragette movement in France was happening at the same time (1909-1945).

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It doesn’t surprise me to learn in retrospect that she was a feminist and (probably) queer. I didn’t really know any of this while I was standing agape in the museum wondering how it was that Picasso had been shoved down my throat my whole life while I had never once seen these ethereal and graceful monuments of feminine self-celebration. All I knew was that they were beautiful and yet strong. They were made by a woman for women (Coco Channel, above, was one of her more famous clients) and that they showed beauty within a wholly feminine framework.

For a longer and more comprehensive story of her life, I recommend this website:

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/laurencin-marie/life-and-legacy/

#GCON2014: All Girls, All Gamers, No Gates

/ Gallivantrix / 3 Comments

IMPORTANT NOTE: I asked every young lady’s permission both before taking any pictures and again in regards to posting the pictures on the internet. Privacy is a very serious matter for Saudis, especially women, so it is really amazing that these ladies have not only put so much effort into creating these amazing costumes, but are willing to let me share them with you. One young lady used her props to cover her face and another asked me to simply edit her face out, which I have done. Please respect them. If one of these pictures is of you, and you need me to take it down, simply message me and I will. I only wish to share your amazing talents and not to cause any issues for you or your family.

When I first learned that there was an all female gaming convention in Saudi, I just about turned inside out. That was less than three weeks before it was set to happen. I was excited for several reasons. One, I’m a girl gamer geek and love cons. Two, any access I can get to culture behind the scenes here is to be jumped at. And three, to put it bluntly, #Gamergate.

I wanted to see how the most oppressive to women country in the world (only place women can’t drive, women can’t travel without men’s permission, can’t work or keep their own money without men’s permission, must be covered in public… I could go on, but you get the idea) treated their gamer ladies while in America (land of the free) trollz are doxing, and threatening to rape and murder anyone with two x chromosomes who dares have an opinion about the games they write or play.

*(I’m including any transgender ladies who feel trolled upon too.)

I’m gonna talk about the con first, so those who want to skip the GG part can safely read on and stop at the break.

It was held Wednesday – Friday, but I was unable to get any days off work, so I flew down Thursday after class and managed to attend Thursday night.

When I arrived the con was absolutely full of young women dressed in all manner of geek clothes and cosplay. There was supposed to be a cosplay competition/show, but unfortunately some mother called the religious police and complained*, so it got cancelled and the night’s events ended early.

*UPDATE: GCON staff have told me that the Hai’a were never called (Ilhamdulilah!) and that the night ended early “due to a problem with several of the devices in the ballroom during the cosplay competition”.

Before we all got booted out, I got to take several pictures, not nearly as many as I would have liked, but I had to be very careful to ask permission and make sure that there was no one in the background. Several ladies were kind enough to grant permission to post here, too, so I hope you enjoy.

In addition to the pictures here, I saw 2 Malificents, more anime characters than I could count, I sat next to a Wednesday Adams who was super happy to be recognized, Pocahontas, a few dozen versions of the Day of the Dead full and half skull faces, witches, Hogwarts and other, zombies, not as many fairies as I’d have thought, one vampire, and many video game characters.

All of the attendees were women, so the cross dressing cosplay was especially impressive. Even though there were no men, the clothing was still fairly modest. It was really nice to see female cosplay done without T&A display being a priority. I really felt like showing off a good and accurate costume was more important than being sexy, which was neat.

The amount of English I heard was really astonishing. I did run into a couple other Americans at the very end of the night, but for the most part I was talking to Saudis, and I feel really ashamed of my school’s program right now, because many of these girls had near native fluency and barely noticeable accents. I had no trouble communicating to anyone, and didn’t even need to use my “ESL” talking style.

I found a red fez and got to have a conversation about the Doctor, she hadn’t started watching Capaldi yet, but we bonded over the universal love and humanity saving qualities of previous regenerations. That big blue box knows no borders.

I complimented so many people both on their costumes and their English, one girl even reached out to me on twitter afterward to say thanks. 😀

The main ballroom was intensely pink… I’m not sure if that was a gender choice or just that Saudi’s like bright colors, but pink*. There were big screen TVs set up with different games around the room, so that attendees could play their favorites or try new ones.

*UPDATE: GCON Staff informs me that pink “was intended to make a bold loud statement when selected for the logo about women breaking into games”. Grl Pwr.

The expo room (?) had a lot of the sponsors doing advertising and showing off games or goods. Not everything was game related. Mrs. Field’s Cookies was there doing a raffle. I didn’t get to see too much of that room because I was hurrying over to the Artists Alley (the only room where photos were allowed). I did see an interesting console version of the old “Operation” game where the goal was to perform surgery, but the girl playing it had decided that a hammer was the way to crack a ribcage…

The Artists Alley was a little combination of dealer’s room, Art room and photo shoot. The tables were full of the works of local geeks and artists. There were beautiful canvas paintings, an interesting display of very surreal needlework. There were some antiques, and several booths with pretty good fan art, often sold on t-shirts, keychains and buttons. I really wanted to be able to buy some things to support these artists, but events decreed otherwise (keep reading).

If you want to support one of them, Nana (the lovely lady who made her own horns in the pictures above) gave me her card, her stuff is pretty cute and she does custom orders! (shameless plug)

Onward!

As they were trying to usher everyone out, there was a major Abaya Disaster. See, when women are secluded from men, they don’t have to wear the black tent, and many of these girls had checked theirs coat check style at the front when they came in.

Because of the rapid and early ending, this meant everyone was suddenly trying to get their abayas all at once, in a small lobby, from like two volunteers… eep. I had mine in my backpack so didn’t have to get into the line/press of bodies and decided to wander back into the main room and see more sights.

As I was staring at the crowds, soaking in the amazing girl geekness around me, a young woman doing an anime cosplay (that I am ashamed to admit I did not recognize: long orange hair in a partial ponytail, white sleeveless top and orange pants with flames at the bottom, plus katana) came up to talk to me. It actually took her a moment to get my attention because I was so dazed by everything going on around me, and had sort of stopped turning to face English by this time because I’d realized they were using it to talk to each other.

When I finally did realize she was talking to me, she invited me to come sit with her and her friends while we all waited for the Abaya Disaster to clear up. She told me she was getting her Master’s in English Literature. We talked for a little while about gamer culture in our countries. She was (as I expected) very surprised to hear about #Gamergate, and told me laughingly that boys in Saudi beg their parents to find them a wife who games. Then we moved on to other things. She shared my total love of global culture, so we bonded over academics for a while and of course I had to ask her what her favorite piece of literature was: The Great Gatsby. She admitted that she had seen the movie first, but that in the end, she liked the book a lot better. Her big take away was the way Gatsby idealized Daisy and their life together without ever recognizing the reality. Pretty sharp lady.

She also told me that the con itself was comprised of many of the smartest most educated girls in that age group (late teens/early 20s) in Riyadh. Can’t say I’m too surprised, nerdy girls are nerdy!

The Abaya disaster got worse. The poor volunteers trying to return the abayas were growing more and more frustrated and began screaming into the microphone at the girls to back up, get organized, wait their turn, etc. Apparently some girl actually passed out because the crowding got too bad.

The screaming into the microphone was making conversation more difficult, so I thought it might be time to wander back to the hotel. But the volunteer who checked me in and told me I could use her wi-fi to summon my car had disappeared (doubtless to help with the Abaya Disaster). I still had no smart phone at this time, waiting on my Iqama, so in order to summon an Uber or similar service, I relied on the tablet and wi-fi. My travel adventures will greatly improve now that I finally have a smartphone of my own.

I found some other girls who were willing to let me tether in to their mobile hot-spot, but couldn’t get strong enough signal to get the app up and running. One volunteer told me it would be really easy to get a taxi, so even though I had such horrible experiences in Jeddah, I figured I’d better try.

Wandering around outside, I hailed a taxi and handed him the Hotel’s business card. This normally works when travelling. Cards have an address and phone number in the local language. But drivers in Saudi don’t actually seem to know where anything is, and expect their passengers to direct them. I don’t live in Riyadh, so even if my Arabic was flawless, I still wouldn’t have been able to tell the driver where to go. Isn’t half the job of a taxi driver to know how to get there? Don’t you have GPS?????

Two failed taxi attempts later, both drivers refusing me (also strange, since all other taxi experiences in Saudi have started by the driver going “ok, no problem” then waiting until we’ve started driving to tell me they don’t know where to go), I went back inside to try once more to find wi-fi. This time with success. I love nice people.

While waiting for the driver, I heard a more native than other English voice and saw a very Caucasian face. I said hi, and she looked up and asked, “American?” When I confirmed, she bounced up to give me a hug. We chatted about our experiences in Saudi and other countries, and what we thougt of the con while we waited for our drivers.

I feel like I could write a whole separate blog post about the driving in Riyadh, even though I’ve done one on Jeddah… Short version, taxis are better but Uber and Careem are worse.

Finally got back to the hotel, but awoke the next day to find that day 3 had been cancelled. I’m not sure if it was the Hai’a, the Abaya Disaster or something else*, but that two hours was all I got to see. I did tell the staff that I’d flown all the way from Tabuk for the event, and they’ve offered to “compensate” me**, but I’m not sure what that means quite yet. I really hope they’re able to get another one running before I leave Saudi next summer, not just for me cause I can game or cosplay pretty much whenever in America, but for the beautiful, talented, intelligent women I met there who have so few outlets for their brains and creativity and deserve so much more.

*UPDATE: GCON Staff informs me “The cancellation of the last day followed the Abaya situation & subsequent events, it was intended to avoid a recurrence of such incidents” and “the team and volunteers were at the venue the last day helping classify and return some personal belongings to their owners”. Good on ya!

**And further, they did generously not only refund my admission cost, but also put a dent in my travel costs, which was very gracious.

And what about #Gamergate? Well, in the lead up to this convention, some friends of mine back in Seattle were posting left, right and sideways about this thing. Felicia Day made her debut into the debate and was promptly doxed, and I was going through some serious soul searching as to whether it was even worth it to mention the word. I only have a handful of followers on this blog, but speaking out against the trolls who are perpetuating the anti-girl hate in the gamer community seems to attract a lot of negative attention on the web.

I actually had a long conversation with one of my girl-gamer friends about how ridiculous it was that I even had to think about whether or not I should be nervous or should avoid posting about a topic so incredibly important.

But the more women outside the US I talked to about it, the more I saw the look of horror and disgust, but only after I explained the situation, because those trolls aren’t actually reaching a global audience. They’re barely reaching outside the gamer community, and everyone I’ve taken the time to educate about the situation reacts exactly the same way. They cannot understand it. There is no part of threatening women and their families, or releasing their personal information for abuse that seems even remotely reasonable or sympathetic to anyone I’ve talked to from outside the US.

And what the girls here go through just for being women is so astonishingly foreign to me and all of my life experiences that I couldn’t even begin to draw a comparison between the subjugation of women in Saudi and the abuse of women in the US. They are both horrible, but its like trying to compare Ebola and VX: horrible but not the same.

The girls I met at GCON love gaming, but the men oppressing them aren’t trying to drive them away from their hobby*, threatening to rape them, or exposing their personal details to the world. They’re trying to keep them from being people, to stop them from wearing the clothes they choose even in private, from sharing the things they love or developing any sense of independent identity.

*UPDATE: GCON Staff did point out that even though #gamergate hasn’t reached Saudi, there was a large amount of blowback from some men here who considered gaming a male only community, but that there was “an overwhelming amount of support” that continues to grow.

The most important thing that the Saudi girls of #GCON2014 have in common with the victims of #Gamergate is the positive men in their lives.  Lots of articles about gender inequality stress the point that it will only be through male led actions that equality will be achieved. Men who don’t respect women aren’t going to listen to us when we say we need more respect, but they might listen to other men, or at least be forced to bend to social pressure if their behavior is condemned by the men around them. In both Saudi and the US, there are men who support women in gaming, encourage us to play, design, develop, cosplay and roleplay to our hearts content. Don’t give up on us guys.