Adventure Time: A Tale of Two Cities

[tealin]

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction—every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.

– Sylvia Plath

As I recently visited Paris, I had the opportunity to test this in the interest of SCIENCE. While I had to compromise experimental integrity by watching from a side window rather than a caboose, as the train didn't have a caboose, preliminary results indicate that watching Paris recede from a high-speed train is nowhere near as devastating as watching friends fall in love.

On the other hand, I got some good photos while I was there!



I'd spent the better part of the two weeks prior to the trip in a crash course of French immersion, listening to Radio-Canada* in the hope of boosting comprehension, which actually worked far better than I hoped. Unfortunately everyone there insisted on speaking English. I swear I heard more English in Paris than I do on an average day in London. Just as well, because while I can just about assemble a sentence in my head, as soon as it reaches my mouth it turns into wet newspaper.

*I know, not "real" French, but it did double-duty in keeping up with Canadian news. Anyway it's the the sort of French I should be speaking, genetically, and I have a passionate latent reverse-snobbery about it.

First impression: Mon dieu, c'est si Paris ...



No, seriously, the whole city was like this. Every street corner was crowing 'I am Paris! Hear me roar!' I very quickly understood why it was a capital of fashion: everything was designed, and was just so, and was beautiful; of course this would be the place where the whole of reality could be expected to be art-directed. We have decided that the winter of 2014 will have this colour scheme and these shapes – you there! You are throwing it all off, how dare you? I have always been at odds with the very idea of a fashion industry but here I kind of saw the point, on an artistic rather than commercial level. I also understood why French artists are so infuriatingly good: if you're surrounded by that much conscious attention to beauty from day one, of course you've got a head start on someone from suburban Utah.


I also understood the Impressionists' fascination with light, because wow did it ever do some amazing things.



L'Hôtel des Invalides, under whose great golden statues is an ancient grave ...


... ensuring a certain song got stuck in my head every time we passed.

My first night there, our sidewalk brasserie was neighboured by a group of young people taking turns to stand up and read passages to the group. As if things could get any more French.




Even the greengrocer's was beautiful.


The best part of the Tuilleries, though, was the crow playing with a paper plate (I love crows).


I'm pretty sure this is French for 'truck stop' – but the classiest, most beautiful truck stop in the world.


So much history on one street corner.


Drama!


Dinner #2 was at Le Coupe-Chou in the Latin Quarter, famous for being very old and the purported location of a medieval Sweeney Todd, hence the name – 'cabbage chopper' being a nickname for a razor.

And of course no visit is complete without ...


You never can run from, nor hide what you've done from the eyes ...


The very eyes of Notre-Dame!


... or the hat of Notre-Dame. (This head gear was on a number of statues so it is probably something other than a turn-of-the-century ladies' hat, but that's what it looked like to me, usually inappropriately.)


La Musée d'Orsay, or more rightly, La Musée de Crushing Inadequacy, non?


Le Café d'Orsay, or more rightly, If This Was in LA It Would Be Fake but We're the Real Slim Shady, Yo.


Just in case your attention had drifted, this is France. (It was kind of cute how resolutely it played to type, so often. There didn't need to be an accordion player on the Pont Neuf ... but there was.)


Side trip to Montmartre, the San Francisco of Paris. If you go to Paris and are not museum'd out, the Musée de Montmartre is small but very definitely worth a visit for its fascinating mashup of art and history. There's a stunning panorama of the spring of 1910 which is more like a window than a painting, a whole bunch of Toulouse-Lautrec prints, and one of a few artists I discovered from whom Carter Goodrich is nicking his act:



The music of Erik Satie epitomises the rainy autumn day, for me, and as that is my favourite sort of day I have listened to his music a lot. He lived a few doors down from the building which is now the Musée de Montmartre and was an inveterate walker, so he probably trod these cobblestones many a time.


Still so darn Paris.


Le dernier repas, à la Fontaine de Mars, probably the best meal of the weekend too.

My first visit to London was about the same length of time as this one to Paris, and I hardly count it as a visit now I've got to know the city better, because what can you see of London in two and a half days, especially when one of them is spent entirely within the British Museum? But I felt like I got a lot more out of this trip, in large part because I was visiting an artist who'd lived there for a while and so had the sort of perspective on the city that resonated with mine.

It was unrelentingly beautiful, and unrelentingly Paris, and that I definitely appreciated, but there was something about it that seemed wanting, somehow. It's entirely possible it's just a permutation of my inherent suspicion of beauty as artifice, something ground into me as a goose amongst swans in high school – being immersed in such perfection made me feel a bit of a troll. It's also possible that a lifetime's exposure to British history, literature, and culture makes London's charms easier to unlock and more thick on the ground, and Paris has just as much to offer those who come prepared. But for me, myself, I couldn't help feeling there was something hollow about it, in the same undefinable way as San Francisco – gorgeous, and intellectual, but ... superficial somehow. It made me wonder about the sort of people who fall in love with Paris. Is it just the beauty? There is an awful lot of that to go around, and to Americans especially it's like living in the ideal which some American cities tried for a while to emulate – I got a lot of 'Oh, so this is what they were trying to go for,' walking around. But in the end, while I enjoyed it a lot, I was so happy to get back to London, where the eccentric Victorian façdes and ugly 60s buildings jostle together and make room for people who don't fit the plan. I hadn't realised how affectionate I'd grown towards the muddy mean proletarian Thames, but it's a working river and not Disneyland green, and when I saw it again I wanted to pat it fondly.

So maybe the reason my heart didn't break while watching Paris diminish from the retreating train was because I was heading back to the one I loved, flawed and ugly and falling apart but whose character and soul shone through. There's a comfort for all us trolls.

That's it for the adventures, but here's an amusing epilogue. I couldn't go all the way to France and not load up on the country's most precious export – comic books. If you're lucky enough to find a shop that sells bande-dessinée in the States or Canada, it's usually on one small stand with all the gorgeous covers facing out, for maximum eye-candy value, as you can see in the foreground here:


But as you can see, the shelves just kept going ... and going ...


... and going ...


... and going. (There were easily this many shelves again which I did not photograph.) And what's more, they were all spine-out and shelved by title rather than artist, so it's like they're expecting people to go in and browse for something they want to read, rather than capitalizing on the inferiority complex of New World animation artists! What madness ...?!?

But someday ... someday ...

Comments

[tealin]

Thanks for the tip! I was curious to see more outside of Paris, in other parts of France, and the countryside, so maybe someday ... got a lot to be getting on with in the meantime though.

Please say hi to Sloth for me! ​