Catching Up

My right heel hurts. It sends a charge of pain up whenever it’s pressured the wrong way. I blame the strike, which makes that pain in my heel the last remnant of the strike. If you had taken a jaunt outside of Paris for the duration of the strike, and had not known about its existence at all, it would be difficult to know it had ever happened—no one speaks of it, average man or reporter.

The last day, Thursday, Thanksgiving, my patience had been nearly extinguished. I was taking the Four, the reliable Four, when the garbled voice came in through the intercom. It advised us that because of the crowds at Châtelet, the train would need to take longer between stops. This struck me as highly odd logic (the first time, I assumed I misheard it; after three more times, I realized that I understood the literal meaning perfectly) because the only way to alleviate the number of people would be to either: a) bring more trains along or b) frustrate people so much that they try out other options—which I guess was the actual intent of the policy. But if that’s true, I would venture that this is the only time that a business or service has attempted to purposefully piss its customers off (as opposed to merely not caring what they think: see most French businesses and all airlines, regardless of nationality). Anyway, after four or five stops with this process, the voice added, “take some time to breathe,” which provoked a sarcastic unified laugh from my car (the French are really, really good at those sarcastic, disbelieving laughs).

When we finally reached Châtelet, I saw the quai, and it was not a huge crowd (foule) as had been claimed, at all. It was moderately full, but this was average for the strike thus far. The only sign of something untoward were the RATP personnel lingering behind the crowd, leaning uncomfortably against the curvature of the wall. They, however, were not uniformed security but instead bureaucrats, with their matching navy blue-and-turquoise windbreakers and RATP ties. Then I turned the corner towards the exit and another part of the crowd revealed itself: like at a golf tournament, where the spectators are roped off from affecting the action, so too was the crowd sequestered to half of the stairs, not allowed to move until we exited. But, still, this didn’t strike me as crazy, insane or massive, merely the logical extension of their earlier conducting policy.

That was the sole logic in an irrational system where no one knew what was going on, neither web site nor bureaucrat nor taxi driver nor American nor Frenchman. The Metro system, usually reasonably competent and efficient, was crippled not by the lack of service, but the uncertainty with which we dealt with it: I had no idea which information to trust or how to plan for it. The constant comparison I’ve heard, both in French and in English, is that the strikers held the nation hostage. That has some elements of truth, but it does not capture the situation: instead, the strikers were extorting the country. Like some junior Mafioso demanding protection, they asked, “Oh, well you don’t want to pay? You’ll find it real hard to function without me.” So they did, and the uncertainty that reigned was not the enforced containment of being taken hostage but rather the lack of knowledge of what was going to work and wasn’t going to.

But then the strike ended on Friday and everyone returned to their usual placidity, as if nothing had occurred and their were no inconveniences suffered. It seemed as if coverage was banished from the pages and from the lips of Frenchmen and all was right with the world.

****

Some betook to alternate forms of transportation during the strike. Walking through Parc Montsouris, I saw a woman on a scooter, no unusual thing. But she was not traveling under her own power: a pair of terriers pulled her along, and the wind swept back her hair, and she assumed a regal expression surveying her domain, like a female George Washington crossing the Delaware. Everyone double-taked when they saw it, which is pretty impressive for Paris, considering that most barely pay a care to the most flamboyant of odd phenomena.

*****

Thanksgiving was normal: it was with family and friends. Thanksgiving was tremendously different: it was in Paris.

This meant no snow, no football, nobody driving in from vast distances (or you yourself doing it), no lazily sitting around while others busy themselves with making the meal (I am the most useless at Thanksgiving—I eat and talk), none of all that. Not to say my meal or experience was bad in any way—it was great; I could not have wished for more—but it was just strange, especially since Thanksgiving is, like most holidays, dominated by traditions (Dad’s sweet potatoes, Grandma’s biscuits, Lions and Cowboys).

This has been only my third major holiday away from home (in a row, now that I think about it)—last Christmas, last Fourth of July, and this one—and that each represents a break with tradition is directly related to the march of time. I’ve just turned twenty, and, being a nice round number (although not the big one next year), it’s got me thinking: I’m kind of old. Or something like that. I felt uncomfortable writing that, being old, which is probably the first time I’ve felt that, which is in itself a milestone. Jesus, I’m making it seem like I’m senile and seventy-seven. Let’s move on.

****

I got free champagne for my birthday, from the bar I went to. I note that not just because it was some really cool event or something—it is, because I’m really freaking cheap—but because the business aspect is pretty strange at first thought. As I cradled the thin glass and walked back, I asked myself, well how does this make sense? What if I just lied about it? Is it mere generosity that propels the deed?

No, to the last question—no other business offers free goods (except occasionally restaurants)—so either bars have an excess of altruism or there’s smart business here. I doubt altruism as an explanation in the general populace—it’s a rare thing and I know it when I see it, so that leaves sound business practice.

I discovered the reason when I sat down with my friends: unless you’re the sort of person who [insert tired metaphor for friendless schlub in mother’s basement, with D&D, with computer, etc.], you’re going to bring friends who will buy drinks for themselves, etc., etc. So there’s your reason, and I’m sorry that I am so slow on the uptake.

****

Place de la Bastille is one of those places that American tourists assume is more historical, more antiquated than it actually is. I remember the first time I visited Paris I wanted to go, to see the old prison, only to be informed by my high school French teacher that it is a mere roundabout centering on a monument.

Once you actually reach Place de la Bastille, you realize that not only is it a roundabout, but the central monument, a spire crowned by a golden angel, is dedicated not to the storming of the Bastille of 1789, an epoch-making event, but the creation of the July Monarchy in the Revolution of 1830, a merely important event.

The roundabout is quite large, stretching across several blocks. You get the immediate sense of an artery and not a meeting place. To the eastern part of the place, the Opera Bastille and the quarter itself squat.

The Opera Bastille is all clean antiseptic lines and clear glass. Mitterand intended it to be democratic, egalitarian, for the grand public. I can’t judge whether the interior meets its aim—another casualty of a strike—but the bank of steps certainly does, providing a perfect place to loiter, whether you’re waiting for friends or waiting for eternity, as it appears several beggars do.

A quarter grows out of one of the offshoots of the Place, filled to the brim with bars and restaurants, harkening back to the days when the eastern part of town was the working-class section (well, in terms of the establishments—the prices, however, are distinctly not working-class). Bouncers, invariably dressed in black-on-black-on-black (there appears to be a strict no-color policy, punishable by death—I actually saw a bouncer exchange his lovely scarlet tie for a “abstractly conceptual” black tie at the behest of a boss-figure), lurk in every bar. The restaurants are good and packed. Packs of people drift together, propelled by chemicals and cold. This is the party in Paris.

This is no prison.

****

There was even, incredibly, a bouncer in a fast-food establishment. He filled the door with a indifferently angry expression (plus), but wore actual colors (minus). We tried to avoid him and slip through the space between him and the door frame, but he interposed between us. We wanted crepes and told him so; he told us that we could only eat in the narrow hole-in-the-wall without seats. This was obviously bizarre so we wandered up the street until the girls in our group caught up; we explained what happened; they offered to get the crepes for us. It seemed like a win-win-win(!)—it was definitely one of those rules that are made to be broken.

So after getting the first crepe, the man became very agitated, speaking wildly and gesturing wildly. He yelled about how “the police will find us” then slapped the crepe out of Kelly’s hands, staining the front of Brian’s pants, then went back inside and threw the payment on the ground to join its ill-gotten-gains.

This was a bizarre episode—after all, sure, we were breaking his rules and, yeah, I guess if they weren’t licensed to serve takeout food they could get in trouble (although this seems highly unlikely), but how would the police know that this particular crepe came from this particular anonymous hole in the wall selling kebabs and crepes? I can’t come up with a plausible scenario (unless there were police informants right around the corner or something), but it was strange, suggesting either a serious personal imbalance on the part of the bouncer (I mean, doesn’t he understand that the bouncer’s role is one of those roles where people constantly try to undermine you, like the DMV teller?), or something unexplained and mysterious.

****

Restaurants in Paris are all, upon reflection, very similar.

This seems a strange thing to write as an American because there are so many different American types. I know, the proliferation of the suburban chain like an algal bloom is no thing to celebrate, but nevertheless, that proliferation does not appear to be threatening the diversity of the American restaurant. Of course, there are all the various ethnic permutations in America, which is usually treated with respect—the food can stand on its own—to go along with the various clienteles served and styles cooked. The best American restaurants are cosmopolitan: they mix and match and synthesize different approaches and foods with occasional electric success.

French restaurants, on the other hand, are very similar in a way that represents France in a microcosm. All non-Western European food is basically ‘ethnic’ food, and as such, is kitsched-up to an exponential degree. Think your neighborhood Chinese Restaurant, and multiply it: every aspect of décor is suffused with the influence of the native land to an oppressive extent. There are probably two causes for that. Either, a contempt for non-French foods and styles; or, a sort of hyperearnest striving, where slavishly imitating each individual detail masks the lack of understanding of the whole, like a strong deodorant masks an ugly smell.

If non-ethnic, then a fealty to the old ways reigns. Restaurants have the same styles of cuisine the same way all the housing in Paris has the same styles even though they’re constructed in completely different eras. The effect of this city-wide style is a great compression: I’ve never been to a disastrous French restaurant, but only comparatively rarely to a spectacular French restaurant.

The situation is reversed in the United States. There, awful food infests every corner. It so infects our culture that, heck, I kind of enjoy that greasy stuff (oh who am I kidding? I’d gorge on an In-N’-Out Double-Double right now—although that’s the upper class of the American fast food restaurant). On the other hand, I know of a good number of really good restaurants (and, of course, the Emperor of All Supermarkets, Wegmans’) in Rochester, NY, hardly a famed food mecca like Paris.

*****

In the Centre Pompidou, there is a sign suggesting that “Pictures may offend your sensibility.” This, of course, suggests that the pictures have an emotional effect, an immediacy, a presence that the best art has, the kind of art you’d expect a famous museum in Paris to have. Few of the pictures affected me in that way.

For that matter, few of the pieces of modern art did either. There is a lot of bad modern art, and it comes in two varieties: first, art that says nothing; second, art that says something extremely facile. The first requires no elaboration. As for the second, we’ve all seen modern art that comments on, say, the duplicity of politicians or our media-saturated culture. These points have been made to saturation in an already saturated culture, and I don’t really need another easy collage of various pop art sources to prove it to me, either.

Both types unfortunately suffer from the need to be explained. The reason is incredulity: really? Is that all that’s going on here? I found myself referencing the cards constantly, like a traveler in a foreign land with his phrase book. But the phrase book was useless—“paradoxical dualities” “archetypes of womanhood in Germany”—and other easily-satired language, so the art too was useless. Visual art does not need to be explained; its power explains itself. Words are mere supplements.

Whenever I think of modern art, I think of that MIT joke. The engineers took a tray from the lunchroom, took off the fork, and put it in the gallery, titled, “No Fork.” No one noticed. It goes without saying that if someone tried to sneak in a painting done in the 17th century style into the Louvre, someone would notice. That tells us that the mere difference between much of the modern art we see in the museum and the rest of the found objects is mere confidence, a mere confidence game. “This is Art,” you have to say, and I suppose easily cowed critics and curators take you at your word.

The attack on the bad of modern art is motivated by love of the good. The Centre Pompidou has much that. One of my favorites was a facsimile airplane, a passenger jet, made out of bent wood with fans serving as propellers with sheets billowing out from them. Scissors and metal objects, those confiscated things, stuck out of the airplane as if from a stabbing. To see it was to know the point that the airplane is an immensely fragile thing, beset by a thousand tiny threats, despite its incredible technological grandeur. The best modern art in commenting in our times combines the different media in a genuinely innovative way (because it is necessary to express a point, because it could be done in no other way), rather than a mere display of virtuosity.

****

A related point: when I talk to people who aren’t art connoisseurs (I would count myself among them) about why really modern art leaves them cold, they always say, “What is it about?” Invariably something like pristine all-white canvasses are brought up (which the Centre Pompidou actually had, something I had always assumed was a joke). They like art that’s about something, is always the conclusion.

Why is it always the conclusion?

At this time, fine art has noticed the extreme increasing abstraction of our society. It notices the metaification of politics (note, for example, that the strike was not a mano-a-mano negotiating tactic but rather an appeal to the people, in France, and basically all of US political media) and the just strange weirdness of math and high-level physics and the entire premise of the field of statistics (that essential aspects of groups can be generalized by recourse to numbers rather than some reference to their souls).

Much of this is well and good. You can’t have science without abstract: the whole idea of a general principle is in itself abstract. Nor can economic business management or governmental management take place without abstraction; indeed, it is probably preferable that the bureaucrat Joe Schmo doesn’t care about my specific interests (assuming that he cares about everyone’s, which is a doubtful proposition). In other words, we rule and are ruled by abstraction.

So art has noticed this increasing trend and has responded with those random slashes across canvasses or funny-shaped metal bents and has declared that it is in tune with the zeitgeist. It comments on abstraction with further abstraction, in other words.

But people are tired with abstraction—they get their fill every day, thank you very much, they read their euphemisms in their memos and their papers—and the role of arts and humanities is not the general but the specific. Speaking for myself (and I think this is a general proposition), I have often felt that, throughout high school and college, I have been hustling towards some dimly imagined future with those adult things (the familiar trinity of job-house-marriage), without a sufficient pause to consider what, exactly, would be a good example of a good job, house or marriage.

A part of that burden is on the various arts, whether fine art, novels, movies or TV shows or whatever. Why do you think there are so many devoted Sex and the City fans after all these years? It unabashedly spoke to people’s hopes and aspirations. It did so in a simple, materialistic way, but it made a try of it, which is better than I can say for the random multicolored splotches on a red canvass.