The London Report

Contents

• Introduction
• IMF leader accused of sexual attack: Dominique Strauss-Kahn is charged in New York
• It’s a bird! It’s a helicopter! It’s a military operation!: A bird/helicopter sighting over East London
• On the trail of DSK: Our man in Paris crosses the city with his son asking: Now what?
• The dadaist: One little boy, several Da-das, including Grover and a Rubik’s Cube
• The remake: A Londoner makes an enemy of a La Savoir DVD

Welcome to The London Report’s Paris issue. Prompted by the news of allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn and other reasons, this issue expands from a strict London-based focus to also include the capital of France. But don’t worry, this issue is delivered with the same narrow focus and combination of fact and fiction as our previous issues (available here and here).

As always, this issue is arranged in the approximate running order of a classic weekly news magazine, and a much greater reliance on hastily drawn sketches than Time, Newsweek and The New Yorker ever were.

Still, I hope you enjoy the issue. Thank you for reading.

IMF leader accused of sexual attack

LONDON — Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was removed from an Air France plane at Kennedy International Airport in New York yesterday afternoon. He faced charges in connection with the sexual attack of a chambermaid at a hotel in Manhattan.

Strauss-Kahn was formally arrested at 2:15 a.m. Sunday, said a spokesman for the New York Police Department, “on charges of criminal sexual act, attempted rape, and an unlawful imprisonment in connection with a sexual assault on a 32-year-old chambermaid in the luxury suite of a Midtown Manhattan hotel yesterday.”

A reporter in London said, “Wow,” upon hearing the news as it was reported on BBC News’ Breakfast programme. The reporter was kicking a football in the kitchen with his eighteen-month-old son, and he mused to his son that learning this news would be an iconic moment of the reporter’s lifetime. (The reporter had a similar reaction upon learning of Osama Bin Laden’s death.)

The New York Times, Le Monde and BBC News provide additional coverage of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

A reporter for The London Report will travel to Paris this week to provide additional coverage of the allegations against Strauss-Kahn and the French people’s reactions.

A sketch of the Sofitel Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, site of the alleged attack.

It’s a bird! It’s a helicopter! It’s a military operation!

LONDON — Military exercises were performed this evening at the Finsbury Barracks in East London.

The army units, helicopters, parachutists and soldiers on horses were part of the Honourable Artillery Company’s annual ‘Open evening’ event.

In related news, a helicopter en route to the military exercises flew over a reporter’s flat in East London. The reporter, who happened to have the doors to his garden open, walked outside with his eighteen-month-old son and looked in the sky at the helicopter.

His son (who has subsequently dubbed multiple people and objects as his father) pointed to the helicopter and said, ‘Bird!’

The boy’s guess of the helicopter being an MH-6 Little Bird helicopter was better than the reporter’s had no idea what kind of helicopter was flying over (although he has since learned that was a Chinook).

On the trail of DSK

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In our earlier story about allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, we promised to send a reporter to Paris to investigate the story. The idea was that reporter would speak to a wide range of Parisians about Strauss-Kahn and gauge people’s responses to the Strauss-Kahn scandal.

Unfortunately, instead of speaking French to the Parisians—a language our reporter said he ‘thought he knew how to speak but realised that he didn’t’—the language barrier encouraged him to deploy his ‘super-perception skills’. Decide for yourself whether his technique is credible.

In any case, instead of the traditionally reported story we promised, we offer the following story. For up-to-date news about the Strauss-Kahn case, please read The New York Times, Le Monde and BBC News.]

On the train ride from London to Paris, the allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or DSK, were front and centre on people’s minds. I could see it on their anguished faces. When the Frenchman in the seat in front of me turned and scowled, I knew that it wasn’t a consequence of my son’s bawling — he dislikes train travel — no, I knew that he was upset that the leader of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had disappointed his country.

‘This is a no-crying car’, the man said. ‘I’m trying to work’.

‘I understand that you’re disappointed in Dominique Strauss-Kahn’, I said. ‘But don’t take out your frustration on my son. He’s a baby. Of course he’s going to cry.’

The man nodded and mumbled ‘DSK, DSK’ as he turned and sat in his seat. From my view of trying to see what he was up to while peering between a small crack between the seats, he was staring at a Word document beaming from his laptop’s screen but he wasn’t able to concentrate. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a candidate to topple French president Nicolas Sarkozy in the country’s next election, seemed to be everywhere. If one listened closely to churning train’s clackity-clack-clack-clack-clack, its sounds seem to say Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-clack-clack.

I was on my way to the city to report on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, how it was affecting the French people, and the beautiful buildings, restaurants and bakeries of Paris. My wife and son were with me. Just because I was trying to investigate a country’s response to the allegations against of one of its leaders’ sexual activities, well, that didn’t mean it couldn’t be a fun family excursion, too.

A man and woman stood at a table in the train’s cafe car. In his 50s, the man sported a charcoal suit and a pale blue shirt without a tie. Like his colleague, who was in her 30s, he drank a coffee and spoke as the train rocked slightly to and fro as we rolled towards Paris.

‘DSK is just being a powerful man’, the man said in his thick French accent. (I was relieved to hear him speak English. I am unable to speak French, although I can do a decent impression of someone speaking English with a French accent.) ‘This sort of thing, it shouldn’t be reported in the newspapers’.

‘I’m reporting for a news magazine’, I told the man, which was kind of true, as I tried to draw a sketch of him. ‘Not a newspaper’.

‘Things are going to change in France’, said the man’s colleague, dressed in a black skirt, charcoal shirt and black jacket as she stood beside the man. ‘Dirty old men won’t be able to get away with this sort of behaviour any more’.

We arrived in the middle of the afternoon on a flawless day, sunny and a hint of coolness to the air. At our hotel, the concierge said that I was the first person to ask him about DSK all day. ‘He’s an embarrassment’, the concierge said. ‘If he checked in here, I’d tell him to stay away from the staff’.

In our room, I switched on the telly and caught regular coverage of the DSK scandal. Strauss-Kahn was being arraigned in New York. My wife and I decided to stroll to a nearby grocery store with our son.

We passed a newspaper stand in which several magazines featured Dominique Strauss-Kahn on the covers. As I mentioned before, I don’t speak French so I didn’t read any of the magazines but I wasn’t there to listen to other magazines’ or a television show’s opinions of DSK — I was there to get all of the real opinions I could gather and to do some sight-seeing.

At the grocery spoke, my wife and I were the only ones who spoke no French, so I didn’t ask their opinions about DSK but we did get a good bottle of wine, and I looked deeply into the eyes of several French people. I was able to peer so deeply that I saw thoughts running through their minds—I knew that DSK was on their minds and that my staring was weirding them out.

We spent the rest of the day looking for signs of DSK and visiting the catacombs, a place full of Parisian history but strangely lacking in signs of the accused managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

When we returned to the hotel, I switched on the telly. Coverage of DSK was top news. They were talking about something related to his case and showed some footage of him walking into a New York courtroom. I couldn’t understand many words other than ‘Bon jour’, ‘DSK’ and, in a non-DSK story, ‘le Google’.

The following day my wife had to work so my son and I decided to walk across Paris in search of people’s responses to DSK. We began our trip at a bakery near the subway stop near our hotel. There seem to be bakeries every couple of blocks in the heart of Paris.

We stopped for some sustenance that we’d need for our walk and DSK-related discussions with the locals. As I was waiting to pay for a pain au chocolat and a small loaf of bread, another customer came in and the sales clerk walked from behind the counter to hand the other customer a cake (I assume that the customer had ordered the cake, because he didn’t seem surprised when the cake was handed to him).

Just as I was about to ask the men about DSK, my son, who was walking near me, seized his opportunity to dash past the sales clerk and back behind the counter, much to the delight of a woman working behind the counter and another customer.

After the sales clerk picked up my son, who had run a good fifteen feet away from the entrance to the behind-the-counter area, a woman in her 40s and a younger woman behind the counter had a good laugh at Orson’s gumption. They said several sweet-sounding things in French to Orson and the sales clerk gave Orson a little baked treat. Throughout their exchange, I kept trying to interject, ‘It’s clear that you think my son is adorable but what do you think of DSK? Is this a seismic shift in French politics? Has this shaken your sense of French identity?’ But the chance never arose, so we left with an Adieu! and our pastries.

Afterwards, my son and I rode the subway to a station just beyond Porte de Pantin. That placed us just outside Paris’s northeastern border. From there, we began our walk across the city in search of knowledge about DSK.

After stopping at a playground on our way to Montramarte and realising that the other parents there were much more interested in playing with their kids than talking about DSK, I got my son out of his buggy and he had a blast playing — by himself, mostly, but sometimes he jabbered with other kids and at pigeons loitering near the park. From there, my son slept in his buggy as we walked to Montramarte for lunch.

‘What do you think of Dominique Strauss-Kahn?’ I asked my waiter.

‘Who cares?’ he said.

‘Strauss-Kahn was the head of the IMF and had a chance of unseating Sarkozy as the French president’, I said. ‘Isn’t it a big deal when someone like that, well, is accused of a sexual attack and jailed? Not to mention the chambermaid whose life this has upended’.

‘Yeah, it’s a big deal’, the waiter said. ‘But what can you do about it?’

His sense of French identity didn’t seem to be too ratteled by the allegations against DSK.

After lunch, we walked to the gardens just outside of the The Basilica of Sacré-Cœur. There, my son woke up and had lunch. We then walked south to the Tuilleries Gardens, where we had fun kicking his football to others enjoying the flawless afternoon in the park. Most people seemed to enjoy kicking the ball back to my son. He also made a lot of temporary friends by waving hello, and I learned a awful lot about French people’s attitudes by staring deeply into people’s eyes. What I learned was that everyone cared about DSK in different amounts. Some people, all they thought about was DSK, while this one guy thought about DSK just 40 percent of the time and the rest of the time about people with the intitals RKF and LKE. My mind-peering technique makes me think that the French enjoy calling people by initials.

From the gardens, we walked to the grounds surrounding the Eiffel Tower. Again, my son waved and kicked his football to people on the grounds, making friends much more easily than I could if I simply walked up to them and stared deeply into their eyes, all the while scribbling furiously in my notebook.

We headed south and finally left the Paris city limits through the Porte de Versailles. Throughout the day, we saw many of the sights of Paris. In addition to the places we visited, we also saw (sometimes from about 1,000 metres away) Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre.

As we rode the subway back to our hotel, I looked deeply into the eyes of my son. He didn’t seem to care at all about DSK, which was refreshing.

The Dadaist

My son has started pointing to me and saying the word ‘Dada’. I like to think he knows I’m his, well, dada.

He hasn’t quite closed the book on other possible dadas, though. Over the past week he has said ‘Dada’ when pointing to Grover from Sesame Street; a Rubik’s Cube; a door; a department store piano; a faceless, much-better-dressed-than-I-ever-am mannequin; a 15cm-tall statue of Martin Luther King Jr on a shelf by his bed; and a singing monkey toy.

He knows who I am, though. On a weekday evening, his mother brings him home from day care, and my son walks from the entryway, looking for me in the kitchen. When he spots me he runs to me with his arms stretched wide for a hug.

He’s also figuring out that things in his environment have names. He can point and name his mother (‘Mama’), a light, a car, a shoe, the sky, a bird, a dog, a wall and, most recently, a button. He points to his belly button and says ‘button’. He also points to a clock, stairs, windows, glasses, and notebooks and says ‘button’.

The remake

When she woke, Veronica found herself in a room in which the only way out was through a small window on the roof.

She wasn’t sure how she arrived in that room, because after stacking a few pieces of furniture atop one another, she climbed out of the roof window and stepped into the bright Saturday morning. She descended the two-story building’s fire escape, made her way to Gare du Nord station, boarded a train that took her back to London, where she told her friends about the incident and carried out her daily activities as best she could. That night, her friend Iris kept Veronica company by sleeping in her living room. Together, they double-checked the locks on Veronica’s doors, ensured that all windows were sealed tight.

‘Do you feel safe?’ Iris asked.

Veronica said that she did, and retreated to her room. She fell asleep and the next morning, Sunday morning, woke, alone, in that same room in Paris in which the only way out was through a small window on the ceiling.

After stacking furniture, she pulled her mobile from her purse. She rang Iris, thinking that maybe she, too, had been dispatched to Paris. Then again, maybe she had been sent somewhere else, like maybe Hamburg. She wasn’t sure.

Iris was sleeping when the call reached her.

‘I’m here again’, Veronica said.

The women spoke and after clarifying that Veronica was fine — she had since climbed through the window, descended the building and was on her way to the train station — they set about figuring out what was going happening.

‘Something must be messing with you’, Iris said. ‘Maybe you have a vortex or wormhole or pneumatic tube connecting your bedroom and that room in Paris. I’m going to go have a look’.

Iris walked into Veronica’s bedroom, which had a dresser, bed, curtains, a window (still closed tight from last night), a TV and a DVD player. She looked under the bed and in the closet. She checked under the blanket on Veronica’s bed.

‘I don’t see a vortex’, Iris reported. ‘Then again, I don’t really know what one looks like’. She pressed eject on the DVD player and inside was a disc that contained the film Va Savoir.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t complain’, Veronica said. ‘I’m basically getting a free, one-way trip to Paris each night. But I don’t understand why I keep winding up in that room’.

‘Have you developed any enemies over the past two weeks?’ Iris asked. ‘Anyone who would want you out of London and settled in Paris? If so, let me know because I’d like to make an enemy of that person, too’.

‘The only person I can think of being rude to was the woman who came into the volunteer office looking for help on her tax forms’, Veronica said. ‘I told her that we were closing at 5.30 and she looked disappointed. I felt bad because I realised later that we were open until 6.00’.

‘Well, if she’s having trouble filling out tax forms I’d be amazed if she figured out a way to get you, undisturbed and undetected, to Paris two nights in a row’.

Veronica agreed that Iris was right. As she stood outside a bakery, she said, ‘The only negative feelings I’ve had lately have concerned Va Savoir. The box of the movie said it was a comedy and I just didn’t find it funny. I didn’t laugh once over the first half of the movie so I stopped watching it. I was disappointed in it’.

‘That’s rare for you’.

‘Well, whenever I start watching a movie, I figure that someone went to a lot of work to write it, and all those actors had to memorise lines, then the editor had to splice together all of the scenes, then the people at the factory who . That’s a lot of effort. The least I could do is watch what they’ve made but there was something about Va Savoir that bored me to the core’.

Iris picked up the DVD’s box, which was propped beside Veronica’s TV. 

‘The cover of the DVD is a photograph of a woman opening a rooftop window’, Iris said. She described the photo to Veronica, and it was a perfect match for the rooftop on to which she walked.

‘So perhaps we’ve solved part of your problem’, Iris said. ‘The DVD is sending you to Paris’.

‘I didn’t make enemies with a person — I made enemies with a film?’ Veronica said.

‘Well, lots of times people say that they don’t like films. Maybe this time a film decided it doesn’t like a person and wanted to mess with you’.

‘Or, maybe it’s sending me to that scene in the film because that’s when I stopped watching. It’s telling me, “Here, I’ll set you here, at this point in the movie. I challenge you to make up a better ending”’.

‘That’s the only possible explanation’, Iris said, holding the DVD in her hand. It didn’t look any more or less confrontational than any other DVD she’d seen. ‘It doesn’t seem hell-bent on revenge, it’s just challenging you to conclude the movie in a way that you find more satisfying. Then again, you’re also in Paris—I’d just spend the day doing whatever you want’.

To be continued… .