The Idea of Paris

Paris is a city that universally excites. I don't mean that everyone loves it (all you have to do is stop a Parisian in the street to know this isn't true) but it evokes all kinds of associations and implications from history and literature and contemporary culture. It is a charged city. And while to a large extent these ideas are individual, a projection of what matters to us personally, there seem to be some generally accepted Parisian truths. There's the romance of the architecture and the airiness of the atmosphere and the swaying branches that line boulevards where women in turtlenecks and men in boat necks sip cafe with poodles in their laps. So...not so far from the truth. But definitely not a snapshot.

For me, it's hard to think about the American love affair with Paris without Hemingway. His portraits are what drew me to the city of lights, his blurred and intense version of reality. It was like an oversaturated watercolor sinking slowly beneath the surface of the Seinne. And to be honest, when I first came here in 2011, I don't know whether I enjoyed the present Paris as much as that version: which one was I actually seeing when I chatted both the book stall vendors or regarded water lillies or saw women in perfectly tailored trousers walking their dogs with baguettes under arm. Was I seeing Paris, or was I reading a real time Hemingway synopsis? Who cares?!? Said 2011 Dana.
The land of starving artists and perfect café...it's like the west village on crack, what's not love?

The answer to that question is both simple and complicated. The simple response is that it's not real, that I'm in love with a hologram. The more complicated response follows from there: Paris is a real 21st century city with absurd rents and a growing homeless population and a self imposed need to freeze a moment 150 years old and peddle it as authentic and current. It's an illusion that is safeguarded by laws and popularity: Mr. and Mrs. Johnson from Nebraska didnt come to Paris to see skyscrapers or even art deco, they came to see Paris, the constantly changing city that refuses to change. I'm definitely biased against the Parisian brand of preservation. For any number of modern reasons (efficiency, heating, lighting, safety) and because my reference point for urban life has always been and will always be NY, the world capital of upheaval and renewal, something feels insincere about the Parisian snowglobe.

But, I can't help but love it too. So many people that I know say they feel inspired by Paris. They paint every day even though they've never picked up a brush before; it's never been so easy to write, it comes out of them with a will of its own; by my own observation people even speak more poetically; and if the tourists' cameras mean anything then on any given day there are 3000 budding Ansel Addams in the street. And I feel it too. You feel the effects of the preservation and the aesthetic preoccupation with almost no awareness of what it took to create this magnificent ship in a bottle. How funny that something which is dead, or cryogenicly frozen, can make artists feel so alive.

Maybe that's the secret: frozen but not dead. Paris functions as a blank canvas, a very well crafted, high quality, aesthetically pleasing, perfectly proportioned blank canvas that maybe young post grads don't really deserve, but a blank canvas none the less. And the fun or the magic is that we each bring our own ideas. And by never changing, Paris offerts us opportunities for new cities each time we return. Eaxh time we leave our apartments, as a matter of fact. And it's not just us laypersons that have this experience. Give Monet a brush or hemmingway a pen or Jackie a fitting and, voila, we're in love, not just with the city and our ideas, but with the idea of someone else, the sense that the magic we feel is both personal and universal.