Bill's Deep Dive into France: Beyond the Ordinary
This painting, I want to talk about the blind people. Before I paint this painting, I have a game with my partner. That game is when I close my eyes and I walk around, I feel like I'm blind. And then when I walk, I'm so scared that I can crash on some things. And walking on the rock, I get hurt.
Hey man, that was a great story. About your student? Yeah. Cel Salon is amazing. She is, she's, she was with us 10 years, she's been with us more than 10 years and now she's one of our teachers. And we got a lot of kids like that who've just been with us a long time and they got so much talent. Yeah.
She sounds, I'm a blessed God, I'm blessed to be involved with these future geniuses. Bill, it's good to see you again. Mark. Mark, how are you? It's been months. It's been great, man. Where have you been? You've been just getting great because I haven't been around to bug you. No, I missed talking to you.
I missed talking to you. It's been a little time you've been over in Sam Reap and with your global travels. One of the things I was thinking about, you know a lot about France, don't you? Harley Vu. I do. I have a few experiences in the phenomenal country, France.
What do you say? We talk a little bit about your experiences in France. I know you've been married to a woman that supposedly for many 29 years and she's French. And I just think it'd be, that's a lot of you exude. She was French. She became American. She loved it so much. She became American, right?
Yes, I know. I know. I know. France is one of the countries I've spent a lot of time in. We used to go there a lot. And then we also had a factory. In the south of France near Toulouse, then when there wasn't a gentleman with a woman's name, Renee, right? Is that a woman's name?
Or is that just a French name? It's just a French name. A lot of French names go. Both ways, let's just say, so what are they like? Leslie? Leslie's what do they call that? Leslie can be a man or a woman. Leslie, those kinds of names. Absolutely. So Renee is one of those Maria. Maria can be a man or a woman.
I don't know what Maria is, but I know about Marion. In France, there's some. Now, what do you want to know about France? What do you want to hear about the food? Do you want to hear about the cities? They have an amazing culture. They're world famous for their wine. What kind of angle do you want to go on this one, Mark?
I'd say I'd like to know a little bit about everything, but I'd like to start it out and Why don't you give me your first impressions of France or, like you had, the first time I went to France, good question, because I was only like 23, 24, and it was before Paris had been cleaned up.
And it was a dirty city. It was a bit run down. We're talking 19. When I was 24, it was 1958. Like the mid 80s. mid 80s and I think they cleaned up the word is they went out and sandblasted all these famous buildings that were just covered with soot and they turned white and beautiful and now you go to Paris and you see all that but this it was before they had done that and it was it seemed to we've been on the seedy side fun I went with my dad and we were on our way to Switzerland where we're gonna start our second factory in the world, Puzo, Switzerland, near Neuchatel.
And my father and I hung out together for three months, buying the first hammer, buying the first saw, buying the first chair in this little factory Puzo, which was in Puzo, which is right next to Neuchatel, which Lake Neuchatel is quite famous for. That's also near Geneva. And this is all the center of the watchmaking industry.
For Switzerland. I won't dig into that, but positronic or the company, the unnamed company that I, the family worked with, started using a lot of the same machines that were used in the watch industry. I found Paris was not impressed. I
thought it was just an old rundown town. That was my first trip to Paris. What year was that? 80s? I think it was 83, 84. 84. Sounds a lot like Times Square back in the day, so see New York in the 80s was run down too. I lived in New York for a while in 86, 87.
And it was like being in a vampire movie, walking the streets at night, steam coming up from below the streets and everybody was in a jacket hunched over, in the corners and, You were, everybody wore a trench coat.
Yeah, that was my first time in France. And then we ended up moving our factory in I think around 1990 or something to Oh, France. Which was south of France, southwest France which is a new, unique part of France. And in essence, all of France has these different regions, which are somewhat unique and why friend, why not friend, why not Germany?
Why not Portugal? We hired our second factory match manager in France or in Switzerland who was a Frenchman. And a lot of the benefits that we thought we were going to get from being in Switzerland didn't actually happen. And when we moved there, it was before the Euro, I believe.
And then when the Euro came on board, it made a lot of sense to be in one of the countries that used the Euro in the European community and became more of a one melded unit and unified and Switzerland stayed outside of that. Swiss I'm, if I'm correct. Still use the Swiss Franc.
Swiss Fra, yeah. Dutch. Hey, they when you, when I think of France, I think of their wine, I think of their food, I think of their architecture, but I also think of their somewhat strained relationship. I don't know. When you ask an American about France or a French person, I don't think there's a warm embrace, from an average person. And I was wondering, do you like France? Do you like the French? Maybe you can tell me why. I think the first few times I went to France I didn't really understand French, and not many people in France spoke English back then. There was one girl who was a foreign exchange student with my parents for a while who I knew a little bit in Paris, but it wasn't until several trips, and I think some of the trips that I took with my ex wife.
I became introduced to and embraced by the warmth of French culture. France, once you get to know it, once you get to know it and once you get to know the French people, is a lot of fun, extremely warm. I've had some of the best times in my life. In France now, and some of the greatest friends of my life have been from France.
So I, I have, I've, I know the positive side of France now and I think it was interesting. I was telling somebody this story yesterday that my ex would say that, bill, you see the way that this French guy is talking to the American. And he's acting like he's completely indifferent.
He's acting blasé. It's a French word. You know what the word... Oh, blasé. Wow. That's boring. He's, nobody's more interesting than me. Everything is blasé. Let's talk about me some more. But... She would point out that, when he's talking to another French person, he's talking the same way.
They treat everybody the same way. They're blasé to everybody. It's just the French style of being, and so once you know that, it's just how their culture has developed. And one of the stories I might be able to tell later, if we talk about France for long, is that scattered around the world, there are a lot of French expats.
Because there are a lot of French people who detest and hate French people. And so they go out of France and they live somewhere around the world and they create their own little French empire. And my ex would say, there's nobody more French than the French people who say they hate the French.
I love that line. Now let me tell you, she first told me that on a trip, we were in Cambodia. Let me try to roll this one off here pretty quick. We're in Cambodia. It's my birthday, a buddy of mine who was quite well healed. He calls up the number one hotel in Siem Reap, Cambodia. And he says hey, bud, my good friend, Mick Jagger, who says he stayed here.
He said, I need to call you when I need to know a good restaurant in Siem Reap. And he says, Oh, wow, you really know Mick? Yeah, Mick's been here. Great guy. Let me tell you, you need to go to the Parisienne Cafe. And so go there and it's by appointment only that they open. So we go to this place, and it's right, you can see Angkor Wat, right there from his front porch, and he opened up his restaurant, this old French guy, maybe 75, and they had two tables in the whole restaurant.
We were like six, we're sitting down, and we eat, and he's. serving river fish and the food was all great and the wine was amazing. And he sat there and he bored us all night because he tried to dominate the conversation all the time, which is a french thing. I don't really have time to hear what you have to say because I've got a lot more interesting things to talk about than you possibly could.
So anyhow, this guy started to say, I had to come to Cambodia. I had to get out of France, because I just hate the French. I gotta get out of there, so we moved to somewhere like Martinique, and then he said Martinique was wonderful at first, but then it became so French. So many French people moved to Martinique.
I had to get out of there. So I came here to Cambodia, which was another colony. And this is wonderful here because, there's very few French here. There, there's actually a lot of French there, but by comparison, there was very little French. And he said he hated the French. And my wife would lean over and say, that's because he's more French than the French.
The people who hate the French the most are. certain French people. They are the most French of all. We're going to talk about one of our students at this time. We're trying to convey to the people watching what it's like to be at the Colors of Cambodia in Cambodia and what the vibe is and what the kids are learning and what the kids look like and what they're working on.
So we're going to show A film clip here of Salone. So one of our great artists, been with us for over 10 years, and now one of our teachers as well. Salone.
She's good, huh? Oh, she's great. Did I send you some of the stuff, some of the brochures we've done and all that? I sent you some stuff from our last show, a newspaper article. Yeah, that's what it was. It was like, you could see some artwork in the background, but it wasn't anything specific. Okay. She sold one of the big pieces that night and she had several, like four pieces of a show.
You thought about approaching some colleges or art programs that You could go to UCLA or some of these places that, even MSU, I know, some people at MSU, that have some, why wouldn't they be interested in funding? In academia, I was thinking why does it have to be private?
Why couldn't it be funded by some of these colleges or, and this whole deal where everybody's trying to be I don't want to say woke or whatever. Bill, when I think of France, I think of. Good food, art, intellect. Why don't you tell me about the food? Cause as you can see, I'm not missing many meals here and probably you will lose a lot of weight if you move to France because the portions they're small, the portions are famously small.
That's true. And you walk everywhere and in America you jump in your car. And in France you're gonna walk more often. I think of French, I think of the bread, obviously the bread. The what? The bread. C So bread, A bread is a, the baguettes, the long baguettes. That is a symbol of France.
Symbol of wine, red wine, baguettes, and the other one, one of the greatest creations in all of France, from France, is la croissant. I was going to say the french fry. Delicate, snail shaped sort of bread, made very... It's light and flaky and very buttery. Flaky. I love, I'm, when I'm in Cambodia, I probably eat French food more than anything else because it's a friendly colony and there's a lot of guys who've gone there and taken on Khmer wives and started French restaurants and some of them are magnifique.
Like I say, the food to me is interesting and exotic. When I think of French food, like you say, pig's cheek, escargot frog legs, quail, escargot is. Yeah, I usually throw salt on the little critters out in my garden, is what I usually throw them. Snails, right? I don't care for snails.
I thought it was a courier company. It could be, as they can pump into the police. Yeah, there you go. Swiss cargo. Yeah. Ha. I'm not, I like la guananui, which is basically frog legs. Americans do have that. And we have a lot of French influence, I think, in Southern cuisine, but probably the most famous food that you'll see anywhere in the world, you can go to a French restaurant, it will be le canard.
What about ratatouille? What about ratatouille?
Ratatouille is a wonderful kind of a casserole, stew, what have you. And it's, I think, pretty much like 12 different vegetables chopped up with a little bit of a spicy covering sauce. Ratatouille my ex made a great ratatouille. They made a movie about ratatouille. Yeah, anyone can do it. I'm like that rat right there.
But no, tell me about the food. So what I think they say when I think of if I was going to go to Europe and I haven't been and I would love to go. I went on a vacation one time to New Orleans, right? And I went on an eating vacation because it sounds interesting, but I love the flavors and stuff.
So if I was going to go to Europe, I would love to go to either Italy or France. Not so much England, but places where in their culture dining is celebrated. I think Spain's very similar to that. And so I think the two most famous would be Italian and French. Yeah. So I think, yeah, Portuguese.
Absolutely. I think they're a big part of their culture, right? And dining and eating food is a big deal, right? Yeah. What they call the joy of V. French life, the to enjoy life, to not many cultures in Europe that I've seen work Friday afternoon, they go to the bar restaurant at lunch on Friday and just miraculously never show up back at work.
What time is dinner in France? Supper, what do you call it in France? I'm going to say it's probably more like eight o'clock, and I mean in Spain it might be nine or ten, and and I don't really quite get that, but sometimes you'll go home from work and nap, and then you'll get up at 8 30, and then you'll go and eat at nine.
And then you go dancing at 1130 and then two. And I've seen that Brazilian life, which is, I think, very similar to Spanish life, but, I've had so many wonderful meals and I continue to have wonderful French meals. Like I said, in Cambodia. If you were going to, they really take their time preparing things in a creative way.
They're very creative and a French restaurant and like some of these Michelin star restaurants. They're continuing to try and explore and invent new combinations of food. It's not just. A fish croissant de manure, I think French people in the audience will cringe, but it's butter on a, like a baked fish, but, the delicate spices they put on there and they'll put it on rice, or they might put it on a special.
Oh gosh, I'm like mashed zucchini or something. I'm not an expert in food, but that is what makes French cuisine fantastic. Of course, you can go to some of the more traditional French restaurants where it's going to be the old, older style with a lot of duck. Steak tartare is quite famous, which is basically minced raw beef.
They're for that. They're in, and they're Phenomenal with seafood. They're just very creative and there's a saying that there's three secrets. I don't know if you've heard this, the three secrets to French cooking. Have you heard of that one? I have never heard of it. So if you know them, the one is butter.
Number two is butter and number three is butter. Those are the three secrets to making a good French dish. I don't think that's a secret. It was to me. Here it is so free and duck. I'm huge. My favorite food is duck. My favorite way of making duck is with curry. But duck is, you know, it's a very rich bowel.
And that's very French. It's an oil. Here's another one that is a nice salad. You go all over the world. And you can find a nice salad is almost a standard in a hotel menu. What is it? In America, you're not going to, you're going to, you're going to find a Caesar salad, but niçoise salad, and the signature is the diced up egg, the boiled egg.
Boiled, sounds foie gras. Mark, foie gras, foie gras? Pate. That would be from the duck too. That's basically they force feed male, male ducks and geese. And the liver gets overloaded and creates this pate, which is basically a liver, foie gras is a liver. It sounds like near our factory in France is where the headquarters for foie gras was.
They got some big people over here in Springfield that I think are force fed. You can probably get some Faris outta these people too. I don't think Pita, is there a big pita controversy over in France? Stumping for what is it? What is that? That chain corral the golden Corral. Yeah.
It's full of vo Trust me, man. It's Moy. Fri O gu is what I'm saying. . Okay. That's a little bit about French food. I'm a big fan. I'm a big fan. I'm a big fan of Well, lemme ask you a question though, because two, two questions. Now, if you were gonna order a meal in France, maybe you can tell me what you would order.
And on that note, when you're talking about ducks. Have you ever enjoyed Peking duck, which is supposed to be fantastic if you really get true Asian Peking duck. I have had Peking duck at famous Peking duck restaurants in Peking, which is actually Beijing. I have. And you know what the main thing I'm going to say is that the delicacy part of Peking duck is the, they remember correctly.
It's. It's the cooked skin of the duck, very crispy. And then the bone marrow soup, or they boil and somehow create a soup out of the duck bone. And of course, they'll have the duck sliced, but it's not considered the best part, at least by what I was told. I'm going to tie one thing into this French, when you talk about French food, I'm going to tie it into what we're talking about, because I think it's when we, when you talk about food, it's not just the dining experience, it's the visual experience too.
You know what I mean? So it's an art, it's artwork to them. I think it's not only you who is a chef that prepares delicious food, but it also stimulates you. visual senses too. So I think that presentation is important. Yeah. The art of the dining experience, I think, is very important.
And like I said, we're trying to talk about art and the children. And painting is one thing, but I think there are other forms of art. Like we say, obviously music, but dining, I think is a very expression of art too, personally. Oh I totally agree with you. And a good point. I think the French.
Really, or were, are the most famous for, and probably the originators of the presentation of the food where let's say you're gonna have a dessert, you're and there'll be a pastry. The French are phenomenal with their pastries, French. Here in Santa Fe, there's some phenomenal French bakeries and you go out and you buy it like a little miniature raspberry pie.
But then, as they're serving it as a dessert, they'll have little drops of chocolate circling around and then little flakes of coconut. If food is that much and everybody's eating all the time, how come they're not... Overweight, 'cause the portions are small. Really? I think that's the biggest thing.
The portions are small and the people are more active. They're walking around. Most of these cities in France, the old downtown area where a lot of the people are, there's hardly room for cars in these very narrow streets. Really? So it's just if they have to park the car, they might have to walk 10, 12 blocks to, and then they'll walk to get their lunch or buy some canard for dinner.
And it's much more of an outdoor walking culture and society. I is everybody like that? The reason I say that is to say, I like to eat as much as I like to do anything else, but I couldn't eat duck every day, duck every day. What I'm saying is, yeah, you'll have duck one day and then it'll be pig's cheek the next day.
And then it's all day. Boil and butter your fast French. What would be a fast French food? If you were just, you're, you got something you don't want I don't know. Something, you just want something to eat. No, I, okay. So what you're gonna have is, are these, you'll take a bag at, this is in my assessment about the most common quick lunch in France.
You'll have a baguette, maybe a foot long, it'll be chopped in the middle, it's sliced in the center, so it's like a sandwich, and there will be cheese, there might be, the French cheese is is fantastic, so let's say there's going to be a brie, then there's going to be a layer of tomatoes, and then some of these like parma, thinly sliced, dry meats all the different sausages, saucisson, layered and that's a typical sandwich.
And there might, one of them might be a tuna salad one of them might be I know what is it? They can't think of the name, it's in Italian, but anyhow, it's the special buffalo cheese. Thanks. Bye. Mozzarella? Mozzarella? No, it's buffalo. Gouda? Yeah, so a sandwich like that would be your fast food lunch in, in, in a typical, we're near our French factory, literally walking distance, you can go get a sandwich like that at several places.
The coffee is different there too, generally, you're going to get the little, there's big, they're big in the expresso, the, a lot of. People were still drinking the little tiny shot glass kind of thing with a holder and espresso. Really? Cappuccino is going to be more out of Italy and lattes.
Lattes, really not a French invention as far as I know, but. What about the charcuterie board? Who vented the charcuterie? Is that a French thing? I don't know. No, but those French sausages, blood sausages. Parma, Taipan, Parma, I think it is out of Italy, but it's phenomenal.
It's you, when you go to the store and you're going to get meat for a sandwich, it's similar, but it's generally a smaller shipe, like large silver dollar types. And then I'm trying to think of that. What's that real salty ham, that real salty Oh no.
That'll come to me here. It'll come, you'll know what I'm talking about. Yeah, no, that's interesting. I'm not a big pork and hams guy. I don't eat a lot of sandwiches. Actually. I'm gonna have to, for me, in a French restaurant like that, and I will eat a lot of quiche. I eat a lot of quiche. That's eggs, right?
It's a pie shaped type thing. They come in different sizes, but a vegetable or a spinach quiche or a spinach and ham quiche. There's some phenomenal French bakeries in RI too. Really? That's it. Fantastic.
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