Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Paris

Episode Date: March 7, 2016

Luc Sante takes us on a tour of “The Other Paris” Benoît Peeters shows us Paris of 22nd century and your host learns why there is so much Brooklyn in the 10th arrondissement image by Celeste Lai

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Paris. The area of Paris I'm most familiar with is the 10th arrondissement. This is where a bunch of my wife's family lives. The 10th is a total scene. It's where all of the hip restaurants are, all of the fancy bars, and it's also a maddening place to people watch because everyone is beautiful and perfectly dressed, and when they catch you staring at them, they just look back at you with pity.

But what's really stood out for me as I've walked around the 10th over the past few years is this flowering of something that's a mix of Park Slope, Bushwick, and Williamsburg. There's even now a chain of burger joints called Bedford Avenue Burgers. According to my friend Lola Cris, this Brooklynization of the 10th all starts with one guy, a guy named Bob. Ten years ago, as I was walking down a street called Rue des Vinaigriers, which is very close to the Canal Saint-Martin in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. I saw that bar-café called Bob's Juiced Bar. It really looked like something not Parisian at all. could only speak English with the waiters and only buy like muffins and bagels. And the guy was from Brooklyn originally.

This was the really first Brooklyn-like place in my arrondissement, in my quartier. It all began from that point. You know what is funny is that in Bob's place at the beginning, there were like four waiters. It's a very, very, very tiny place. And now one has opened the fish and chips 100 meters away. And then another guy has opened another bar 100 meters away. And I think it's like something I would call like a disease, a Brooklyn disease.

So how, okay, if this disease is ripping through your neighborhood, how do people who've never been to Brooklyn make sense of it? Like, how would you explain to me, explain to me what makes the new Paris Brooklyn? It's something much more fancy, much, much more classy and chic. And it's really, really not cheap at all. It's very expensive. I think if you take, example coffee you know in france or in italy i think in europe we are used to pay a cafe you know something like between one and two euros which is a lot already but now with that new fake Brooklyn trend, with our Brooklyn disease,

coffee costs at least four euros. And it looks much more good and nice. And you make some little drawings and flowers and things on the mousse. And I don't recognize my cafe anymore. Okay. So a couple of months ago, And I don't recognize my café anymore. hasn't changed either. It's still Paris. But as I was getting ready to put the episode into the TOE podcast feed, terrorists attacked Paris and everything changed. This is how it all went down. One of the things I have to do when I put the show out is write up a little description. This is what I came up with. Luxant takes us on a tour of the other Paris. Benoit Peter shows us Paris of the 22nd century. And your host discovers why there

is so much Brooklyn in the 10th arrondissement. Now, I'm a terrible speller, so I googled arrondissement to get the correct spelling. And the first thing that comes up are reports of a shooting at a bar in the 10th. This is a bar where many of my wife's friends and family go. And it's a few blocks from Bob's Juice Bar. So yeah, that's how I learned about the attacks On Friday, November 13th And for the next few hours I, like many, was sucked into the horror and the madness I spent the entire night on my phone

Just scrolling endlessly through Twitter and news sites Mathilde was on her phone all night too Checking on friends and loved ones. It was months before I was even able to open the Paris folder on my desktop. But when I did, the first thing I did was call Lola back. Well, you know, I live right in the place where all happened, like the Carillon, the first bar which was attacked is 500 meters away from my home. So I received a text like two minutes after the beginning of the attack saying, where are you and what are you doing? Go inside.

Because all my friends knew that it's really the place where I used to go out and hang out with my friends. And so I was aware at the moment when it began, which was completely crazy because I was away at the countryside. I was in a castle very far away from Paris, surrounded by trees and nature. Oh, man. Yeah. With your phone.

So you must have been just like the rest of the world, like just pushing, you know, refresh on your phone and calling people. Absolutely. I did that the whole night and sending SMS to everyone and receiving messages from all around the world. And it was quite, quite bizarre. And nobody was really hurt. Nobody of my friends, which is a miracle. But a friend, a very good friend of mine was in the Carillon because she's studying medicine

and she is a doctor in the hospital, which is around the corner, the Hospital Saint-Louis. And she was there partying with some doctor friends and they attended the attack. They were at the back of the bar and then they tried to save people that were already dead. Well, you know, that's kind of a strange beginning of being a doctor, you know, like it was a war scene, nothing else than that. I know there are so many unanswered questions,

but I'm wondering for you, like, why you think they picked your district? Like, why the 10th? Because we represent the youth of Paris, the youth and hope and energy of Paris. Even if everyone says we're a lost generation, which is true, I do think so. When that happened, it was like, I thought, my God, it happens as if I was not aware of anything politically or geopolitically. It's like, it was so striking that I thought, my God, I should have felt it. I should have known that something like that could happen.

But we didn't even think of it. I really think those attacks also showed that we are very narcissistic and stupid politically, and that we have no idea what's happening and that we don't want to be interested in that. This probably sounds awful, but when you put it that way, I feel like we're back to talking about the Paris with the Brooklyn disease. Do you think there's an overlap with what the terrorists targeted and what you hate about your arrondissement? Well, I think that arrondissement, you know how to spell it now? Yes. Well, it's being gentrified and it's becoming more and more rich, but it's still

so full of mixed people and cultures. And I think they knew what they were doing. I think they were very, very clever. They choose that area and they choose us. They choose to target us because we are the business of asking specific questions The flaneur is not a reporter. Reporters are in the business of asking specific questions to which they require specific answers. In a recent episode of the show,

I quoted from writer Luc Sainz's definition of the Parisian flaneur. We recently met up, and I got him to read the passage for me. The flaneur must be alive to the entire prospect, to the ephemeral and perishable, as well as to the immemorial, to things that ordinarily lie beneath notice, to minute changes and gradual shifts of fashion, to things that just disappear one day without anyone paying attention, to prevailing winds and countercurrents, to everything that is too subjective for professionals to credit. The flaneur must possess a sixth sense, possibly even a seventh and an eighth, must have an intuitive sus for things about to occur without warning and things that are suddenly absent and things that are silently waving goodbye. The flaneur must be able to read the entire text of the streets, including its footnotes, interleavings, and marginal commentary. The flaneur must comprehend the city holistically, must understand it as a living being,

on the order of, though infinitely more complex than, those mushroom colonies that may cover hundreds of square miles while remaining a single entity, and must constantly risk over-identifying with his or her subject. Luc Sainz's Low Life is one of the greatest books ever written about New York. Now he's turned his attention to Paris. In his new book, The Other Paris, the Flaneurs are tour guides, and their routes are both cartography and biography. Luc told me about a few of the flaneurs who helped him map out his alternative history of Paris. Well, my favorite one, absolutely without any competition,

is Alexandre Privat d'Anglomont, who was born in Guadeloupe. His mother was black and his father was unknown. His mother was wealthy and sent him to Paris to be educated. But then the family ran out of money and he had to make his own living as a freelance writer. And he, until he died young, I think 47 or something like that, from tuberculosis, he basically spent his nights and days walking. He had a furnished room somewhere, but he seemingly was on the go all the time. One of his friends. He was just unstoppably garrulous, talked to every single person. He was fascinated by all the jobs that people had for themselves, all the people who were

maggot farmers or collected lemon zest from limonadier stalls. And he just covered every little detail like this as if he knew this was going to be read at some point by people to whom this might as well be taking place on Mars. And he was, at the same time, he was held in high esteem by Balzac, Baudelaire, all the great writers. But he also, you know, he felt himself protected because his legend was strong enough so that I love the fact that one time he was set upon by thieves and he said, but I'm Privat. No one knows how Privat's mugging story actually ends. But in this other Paris, the criminals do hold the flaneurs and the artists and the writers in very high esteem. Some of them even saw their own paths as artistic callings. There's this whole genealogy, there's a whole lineage of these French criminals who might as well be undertaking art projects, you know.

Their criminal lives seem to have a meaning that's not just about like crime for sustenance or form in popular culture, movies, comic books. But some of them, like Lesniers, made smaller marks. He was a schmuck, but he was a poetic schmuck. He was a nihilist. He's one of the first existentialists. You know, what am I living for? I'm just going to end up having my head chopped off, so I might as well do evil. Let's pick evil.

I walked around Paris with Luke's book on my phone, but the Google map of Paris doesn't line up with Luke's. Vast swaths of the Paris that once belonged to the flaneurs, petty criminals, and starving artists, no longer exists. All of it was paved over by Hausmann in the 19th century. Hausmann hated the poor, and he wanted to eradicate as best as possible all the places where the poor lived. He destroyed completely at least four or five neighborhoods.

Not a trace remains. Haussmann may have succeeded in physically destroying the Bohemian sections of the city, but the Parisian myth of Bohemia is wrecking ball proof. And for Luc Sainte, it was the writer Henri Mugard who laid the foundation for this powerful idea. Mugard was this kind of hapless character. He had purpura, which gave him a macabre complexion,

and his eyes watered perpetually. And he was kind of a second- or third-rate writer, really, for these fly-by-night journals of the 1840s and 50s. But he stumbled on something enduring, this idea of the poor but noble Bohemians suffering for their art. That very phrase comes straight out of Mirger himself. Mirger did not invent Bohemia. Bohemia was already going on. Furthermore, there were several Bohemias because the term bohème came from what the French called the Roma, the gypsies, because they were believed to come from Bohemia,

which, in fact, they didn't. But for centuries, the term bohème meant living a life without rules. Henri Mujar's fictional bohemians were based on real Parisians, though, a group of students that came together in the city in the early 19th century. Now, you have to remember that at this period, the official aesthetic was neoclassical. This was the cult of reason established in the revolution. And you think of the paintings of Jacques-Louis David. It's all about colonnades and the oath of the Horatii and all this kind of stuff. So to counter this, as a reaction against this neoclassicism, they start becoming medieval. They take on medieval names.

They wear medieval clothes. They cut their hair in medieval styles, they speak in some kind of affected medievalese, they carry around swords, and then they start imitating the modern Greeks, the Turks, the groundheads, the cavaliers, and then they go beyond imitating specific models. They're either about lethargy and looking kind of wan and pale and perplexed all the time, or being all about youth and modernity and dancing all night. And this is really the birth of Bohemia, which is, you know, yes, there's the life without rules, and yes, there's the artistic component, but this aspect of being what they used to call in the 1960s the life artist, extending your creativity into the conduct of your daily life. This is what these bohemians from 1817, 1818, that's what they brought in. I've yet to discover where the Parisian bohemian life artists of today hang out.

Perhaps they're all gone. For Luke, this is a strong possibility, because almost all of the infrastructure, both physical and mental, that made their lives possible has disappeared. There was this kind of permanent bohemia of people who wrote for newspapers, wrote for magazines, who had these little kind of arts-connected jobs that didn't pay much, and they lived in furnished rooms, they lived in shop de bon, and they lived minimally, but they got by. And this was something that still existed in my youth,

whereas now it's polarized. I mean, you have to make a lot of money just still existed in my youth, whereas now it's polarized. I mean, you have to make a lot of money just to live in the city, period. Really, I mean, we're getting to a point where you have to make a lot of money just to live. Paris, City of the Future, shows up in the background numerous times in the internationally award-winning series of graphic novels The Obscure Cities from the duo Benoit Peters and Francois Scoiton. But now the two have created a new series, one wholly dedicated to Paris. This is a story of Karine. She is living in the middle of the 22nd century and she is living in a special colony far away from from

from the earth and she was born there she never visited France or any other country she always lived far away but she had some books and newspapers and old images of Paris, and she dreams always about Paris. That's Benoit Peters. He's the writer of Rivois Paris. It's a sci-fi story, but it's also an attempt to deal with the mythical, timeless essence of Paris itself. We mix medieval aspects, Renaissance aspects, 17th century, 19th century, and so on. So a real city belongs not only to our time, but to many times. When we are in the city, we don't feel it because we feel the unity. We find normal to have a metro station very near a cathedral. But in fact, it's strange. It's already some type of historical science fiction.

But well, since Karine's tale is set in the 22nd century, perhaps it's more correct to say that this is a work of futuristic historical science fiction. All the computer and internet communications were broken with us, so only some pieces of paper, very old things, survived for her. And it's not a real library. It's only some hazardous pictures, some related to Jules Verne, some related to Robida, a famous artist of the end of 19th century, some of real architects like Le Corbusier or Auguste Perret, but sometimes the drawings were never built. So she mixes all these elements with some real parts of Paris, the covered street, the passage,

and also the Eiffel Tower or some specific buildings, and in her head, this is Paris. I know that sounds confusing, but yeah, the Paris Karine dreams about is both real and imaginary. For example, in 1863, Jules Verne wrote a book called Paris in the 20th Century, in which he imagined these crazy giant skyscrapers. In Karim's Paris, these skyscrapers exist, as do many of the inventions drawn by the

artist Robida in his 1890 book The Electric Life. Some are very funny and some are very close to reality. For example, he had some intuition of something like Skype, visual communication by distance, and also the way the news could be shown inside the city on giant circular screens. He used a lot of flying machines above the city, above Notre Dame Cathedral and so on. And this is one of the elements that our character, Corinne, likes a lot. But Corinne isn't just dreaming about this Paris.

She can actually visit and interact with the place, all thanks to some sci-fi drug that she drinks on the spaceship. Because she's able to really enter the images and to be in those fantastic images as if it was real. And so she has some confused ideas about what Paris really is, middle of the 22nd century. And the people on the spaceship, well, they have some ideas about Karine. Some people tell her that she's something like a drug addict,

but she said, no, I'm an utopia maniac. I live in utopia. The socio-political order of Karine's space colony life is techno-dystopian gray, so the addictive power of her Parisian fantasies are easy to understand. Perhaps this is the idea of Paris, a utopia where beauty and freedom reign supreme. For Benoit Peters, this is certainly the pull that Paris has for many of us.

For many people in America or in Japan, people, or even in some small cities in France, people dream about these cities. They construct an image, some type of utopia in a way. Maybe a city is always some type of utopia, not only because there are parts of the past that were destroyed, some parts of the projects that were never built, this is an aspect, but also because we don't have a full vision of a city. And so you always, I think, build for yourself a fantasy. Of course, once Karine makes it to the real Paris,

she's super bummed out. There's tons of tourists. It just doesn't hold up to the Paris she visited on the spaceship. Perhaps she over-identified with her ideal city. I think we can forgive her for that, though. But her arrival is just the beginning of the story. In the next installment of Revoir Paris, Karine will be forced to reconcile utopia with reality. What will be the confrontation between this imaginary vision, this confused and complex vision with the reality. How will she live the shock of the real? You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Paris. This episode was produced by myself with help from Celeste Lai, and it featured Benoit Peters,

Luc Sante, and Lola Cris. Luc's book is called The Other Paris. I can't recommend it enough. Revoir Paris is still only in French, but many of the Obscure Cities books are in English, and they also feature the amazing drawings of Francoise Scoitin. One of my personal favorites is The Tower. The music in this episode is a mix of Pascal Cumlaude and Jan Tiersen with a few other tracks thrown in as well. You can find all that info on the SoundCloud file. I know many of you out there in listener land do

like the music we use on the show. Most of the artists have tunes that you can own and listen without me talking over. You can find all of that info at toe.prx.org. Special thanks to Mathilde Biot as always and to Julie Shapiro and everyone at Radiotopia HQ.

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