Buried Treasure In Your Face
(When not publishing elsewhere, my home base is continentalriffs.substack.com Most of my pieces are there. They range from daily life in Paris, single images, to arguments and debates. This one is there, behind the paywall, but here’s a taste… I invite you to say hello, take a look around, there’s plenty there to read.)
Je ne cherche pas, je trouve — Pablo Picasso
Lounging on the street is a forgotten art. I remember the movie set where my instructions were to hang around the corner and watch the world go by — like it was second nature to just stand there and observe, the director instructed. Eventually he came up with things for me to do like chasing ladies down the street but I preferred watching. It required more acting skill. Up against the wall of a supermarket at the edge of Belleville, I realized I had company, a clan of Asian men passing a late winter afternoon getting a bit of sun and an eyeful of the world. Emigrants, the whole lot of us and we tend to have time on our hands. I listened in.
You recognize the image above even if you’ve never seen it before. That is to say, you’ve been in a hurry and have passed the thing which caught the corner of your eye. Or maybe not. Maybe you’re a better person than me, and are preparing for your next important engagement. Paris is not the old Paris anymore, it’s sped up like everywhere else in the world. Let’s run with that : with globalization, neoliberalism, the penetration of tech into our daily lives, we all live in a kind of unending anxiety, in which a certain floating strata of society now BELIEVES. They believe the great machine will deliver a new, FASTER HAPPINESS and they live their lives accordingly. Do you follow ? And while they have time for their phones, for Instagram and Facebook, they have no time for books. That’s the theory Anna and I came up earlier in the afternoon : the floating world over our heads. How wide or deep they are, we can’t say from down below. They may only be an illusion, after all, a sort of carnival ride that spins people in the air at high speed while circulating endlessly and making a lot of noise. They follow, they want to follow and be told what button to press. Their phones do their thinking for them. This is a society I can never join. My immigrant status protects me.
Somewhere on Continental Riffs you can find a piece about the discreet book warrens that abound in the city. Not bookstores but the little nests on the side streets and intersections, at métro stops, where people leave books to share, secret sharings with persons unknown. And so the other night, after seeing Anna, I went to Attilio’s on rue Gaité, where he runs a theatre that the city government has its eyes on. You know what that means. The good things are always under threat, always about to disappear. That’s the way it goes. The current admin wishes he would gently go away of his own accord and he refuses. Commedia dell’arte is not part of the new regime’s vision of a virtuous ecological Paris where they pour concrete on the trees and no one has opinions about anything. Attilio has returned the attention by writing a satirical play roasting the mayor.
The Comedie in palmier days, before the city started tearing it apart…
So I found Attilio and he was his usual genial, nervous self. A busy man, although there was no else but us in the theatre. He was inspecting his royaume, dusting here and there, making sure everything was just so, nothing out of place. The theatre is still there, for now. I made a date for Saturday night. Walking back up crowded Gaité with its theatre, restos and pornshops, I passed the suitcase again but still didn’t stop. I was on my way for a swim at Porte d’Orleans and wanted to get in before the whole south of Paris dives in for evening laps.
It was only later, on my way back down Gaité again, with the early evening crowds gone, that the trunk got to me. This time I didn’t resist.
It had the proper certification, indicating that the resident had registered the load for pick-up. But what was in it ? Broken kitchen appliances ? Sweat-soaked shirts ? Underwear, fetish gear ? One can always dream. Alongside, a coffee machine was turned on its side and there was some other junk in the shadows. Inside ? Could be anything. No Parisian’s amour propre is wounded by a bit of shifting through rags.
Originally published at https://continentalriffs.substack.com on November 4, 2022.
