Paris Journal V: The Shop on Main Street

On the Boulevard de Sébastopol in the second arrondissement of Paris is a shop window that displays unclothed mannequins de vitrine. When you think about it, it’s a shop window for people who are shopping for their shop windows. Here you can find mannequins that have plainly come out of the closet—outspokenly gay mannequins dressed up in cowboy hats or construction helmets like the Village People, and also mannequins of women who you can never have, bold Parisian women with perfect breasts whose nipples point indifferently at the longeur they have inspired. These are not like the mannequins you find in New York or Chicago or even in Vienna or London. They are very French, to the extent that they exude the delight in sexuality and in appearance that characterizes life along all the great streets of Paris—St. Michel, St. Germain, Raspail, Montparnasse, and Montorgueil (a small thoroughfare emerging at the heart of one of Paris’s most trafficked neighborhoods). A store window has to be populated by mannequins that customers can relate to. Otherwise, they won’t buy the merchandise. Though these mannequins are silent, they radiate the self-possession and almost jingoistic confidence that characterizes the French. These mannequins wear French culture on their non-existent sleeves.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Many secrets were kept from Thierry Guetta when he was growing up as the youngest child in a large French family. One of them was that his mother was dying. His obsession with film derived from his need to record so as not to miss anything. The only problem was that he knew nothing about making a film, so that when he started gaining a reputation among famous and infamous street artists for all the footage he was shooting, the result, something called Live Remote Control, was simply random footage of an almost aleatory nature, shot by what the legendary street artist Banksy describes as “someone with mental problems who happened to own a camera.” Recording the creations of these Houdinis of the art world (Shepherd Fairey, who made headlines over the appropriation of Obama’s image for the famous Hope poster, also makes a cameo), who materialize and disappear in the blink of an eye, was essential due to the evanescent nature of their creations. “Because I never made a film before and didn’t know how to stop, I kept on,” Guetta says. Exit Through the Gift Shop is not the film that Guetta made about Banksy, but instead records the history of Guetta’s obsession with the video camera and his eventual transformation into a street artist and phenomenon in his own right, named MBA, Mister Brain Wash. Banksy encourages Mister Brain Wash, while making his own film out of Guetta’s raw footage. Of Guetta’s artistic output, Banksy says during the film, “I used to encourage everyone to make art. I don’t do it so much anymore.”  

Taking a Leak

Fifty years ago, if you said, “I want to be gay,” it would have meant that you aspired to a state of happiness. Today, if someone tells you they want to be gay, it means that they are coming out of the closet. Now, the expression “I want to take a leak” is being threatened by the exigencies of modern electronic warfare carried out by digital-age mercenaries. If someone tells you they want to take a leak or informs you that something is leaking, it has nothing to do with fluids emanating from the bladder or from a pipe, it has to do with classified information being uncovered and released to an older generation of news outlets. Everyone has been wondering about the fate of objective reportage, and whether the gathering of new information will become the province of amateur bloggers who have no real experience in employing reliable sources to report stories. Though there may be some reason for consternation about the latest evolution of reporting (particularly with regard to privacy issues), the fears of amateurism may be put to rest. Where you had Woodward and Bernstein covering the Watergate scandal, now you have sophisticated hackers capable of making their way into highly classified governmental systems that an older generation of journalists didn’t even dare speculate about. As Hamlet says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” First came the reporting about a US Army helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq, and now comes the WikiLeak about what is really occurring in Afghanistan. “The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year,” the Times reported (“View is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan,” NYT, 7/25/10). The information, while not surprising, is striking in its detail, but more important, this is one of the clear-cut times when history is transformative in terms of information-gathering. Everyone has been wondering what is going to happen to newspapers, and which ones will start to charge for their online editions. Balderdash—for good or bad WikiLeaks is the new journalism, with transparency (a word that has also been bandied about by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg) as the lingua franca and moral high ground of both political and journalistic life. Here is how the unfolding of the current front-page story is described in the print edition of the Times piece:  “The documents—some 92,000 individual reports in all—were made available to The Times and the European news organizations by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to exposing secrets of all kinds…”

Paris Journal IV: Silence is Golden

The Musée Carnavalet in the Marais section of Paris is the Museum of the City of Paris, which is housed in the former residence of the great letter-writer Madame de Sevigny. One of the permanent exhibits is the room Marcel Proust occupied. “C’est dans son modeste lit du laine qu’il composa la plus grande partie de A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.” It was in his modest wool bed that he composed the great part of The Remembrance of Things Past, reads the inscription on the wall outside the installation. The room was covered in cork at the suggestion of his friend, the Comtesse de Noailles, to ensure silence. The same décor existed in the three residences Proust occupied after the death of his parents: 102 Boulevard Haussman (1902-1919), 8 bis rue Laurent-Pichat (l919), and 44 rue Hamelin (1919-22). With its antique desk, its chest, its tiny upholstered chair, Proust’s digs resemble the small but elegant respites in the expensive boutique hotels that are ubiquitous in Paris these days. Its embroidered couch recalls Freud’s study. Proust’s cane remains, and on the wall is a picture of Proust’s father Adrian, a doctor who wore pince-nez. One floor up in the Carnavalet is a floor devoted to the French Revolution, which contains a framed copy of the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen. The first article reads: “Le but de la société est le bonheur commun.” The aim of society is the happiness of everyone—a dictum that has apparently eluded the hardened creatures who still lurk in the doorways of the infamous rue St. Denis only a few blocks away.

Paris Journal III: Horlogerie

Photo by Hallie Cohen

If you walk down the Boulevard Raspail to the tiny rue du Cherche-Midi, you will come to a bronze plaque outside a narrow storefront: Horlogerie Arvaud. The left side of the window reads Restauration de Pendules Anciens, and on the right Reparations Bijouterie Horlogerie. There are period candelabras surrounded by clocks in glass, under which is the  inscriptions Experts Pres la cour D’Appel, which is simply an elegant way of saying that the watch store does estimates. In the  window is also a scene—a dog and a dog house surrounded by rabbits—into which is nestled a gold pocket watch. Here is a world of objects, alarms clocks and a decorative time keepers, which have eluded the digital age. In Manhattan and several other large cities, there are still old fashioned typewriter stores which service Royals and Olympias and provide typewriter ribbons for the small band of luddites who have managed to avoid the world of computers. The tiny shop on the ancient Paris street similarly caters to a dwindling population who maintain ancient time pieces in timeless Left Bank apartments which have outlived wars and invasions, the Jacobins, the expulsion of Napoleon’s army from Russia, the occupation of Paris by the Nazis, whose headquarters were at the Lutetia down the street from this little piece of the past, and the succession of Republics that make France what it is today.

Paris Journal II: En Avion

The screen reads Kennebunkport, Lawrence, Fall River, Gulf of Maine. A toy plane follows a red line across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris, Nice, Algiers, the Celtic Sea, the Bay of Biscay. It is 1:26 New York time and 7:26 in Paris. Over three thousand miles have been traveled, translating to over 5,000 Kilometers. The plane heading into the sun is suddenly filled with blinding light. This is the miracle that we all take for granted. Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus is the symbolic son of Icarus, who flew too high, but is the triumph of air travel a form of hubris for which nature intermittently rises up in vengeance, in the form of  mechanical failures and terrorist incidents that humble the awesome mechanical birds? During the Pleistocene era, huge pterodactyls filled the sky. Are jets the distant relatives of these prehistoric creatures, who fell victim to the asteroid that created the  ice age out of which the early forms of man, Homo habilis and Australopithecus, would eventually rise? For all the modernity of the contraption and the way it’s taken its place in the repertoire of modern consciousness (remember the innocence of St Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince?), there is something frighteningly primitive about the way these flocks of man’s invention fill the skies. The screen in the cabin is a cartoon of defiance against the laws of gravity. Will modernity someday face the equivalent of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, now trying crimes against humanity? If it is true that laws of nature are made to be broken—and time will tell the extent to which our carbon footprint has been formed by fuel consuming conveniences like air travel—who will answer for these crimes and what will the sentence finally be?  

Paris Journal I: Airport Lounge

These days, when someone is looking for an airport, it usually just means they want to activate their Wi-Fi connection. One of the few refuges at real airports are the lounges that can be enjoyed by holding certain kinds of credit cards or upgrading to a business class ticket. A good lounge is far from the madding crowd, and frequently offers comforting snacks. For instance, the Alitalia lounge in Milan is noted for its seemingly infinite supply of nuts. The Lufthansa lounge at Kennedy didn’t have that many nuts a few years ago, but it served a rotating buffet of hot hors d’oeuvres. Open Skies and Jet Air share a lounge at Newark that is totally devoid of nuts, but potato chip friendly. There are bags of Lay's, both the classic and barbecue variety, along with a large bowl of far more substantive chips that look like they’ve been freshly cooked. The modern lounge of today, with all its ready amenities, including Wi-Fi, poses the question of why it’s actually necessary to go anywhere. If one goes to the Louvre, one is likely to be checking one’s Blackberry for emails. In today’s well equipped lounge, one can easily visit the Louvre or the Tate online, and have a far more intimate connection with the art than one might have navigating the crowds at some blockbuster, multi-media Picasso exhibit. Perhaps lounges should become destination points, since they provide the illusion of travel without the inevitable disappointments that transpire upon arrival at an actual destination. Remember Arthur Hailey’s Airport, and the Burt Lancaster movie it inspired?