Travelogue: Paris
Written and recorded in Paris, Ile de France, August and September 2010.
A Long Hello
Horsefeathers
Simple Yet
When We Are Dreaming
Pluck
From the Balcony
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Travelogue: “A Long Hello”
A month ago, I flew to Paris with a toothbrush, some clothes, a guitar, a laptop, and a microphone. No camera – I’m using the Martin to record this subjective reality. I have one more month in the city — we’ll see how it develops. Here is the first of the Paris travelogue songs:
A Long Hello:
5 August 2010
Paris. 19:15.
How is Paris so sexy? The women dress like women and the men dress like men. Not men as boys, women as men; men as men, women as women. Sex remains suspended, ever plausible. A most popular plot line.
It seems everyone here attempts to be dignified. And by the attempt one is dignified.
They have something to protect here. We do as well when we try to protect it. This is a resoundingly conservative city, but it’s less in defense of a fantasy and more of an objective aesthetic. Please remove your fly nature from their ointment. Is our American superpower to gamble and destroy, in wide-eyed faith? She says the French are rebels as she slightly sidesteps the zebra path. This is a city of the future that arrived long ago. Cutting-edge? We are primordial, unresolved.
First playing guitar on a bench, I felt myself avoiding chords & tones that might rattle the boulevard. Fewer of our angular Seattle accidentals; sounds that enjoy themselves rather than penetrate. I’ve had to write around the cityscape.
This is a city with a solid routine, a peaceful drama. One could live a full life as a Parisian. This is a club, a collective dream which becomes lucid as one learns the French.
Everyone’s worldview (not just here) is narcissistic. What am I, as it pertains to them? They lighten up when they see the guitar case — I’m here to beautify.
Notre Dame sketch:
2 August 2010
It is not a criticism of New York City to say that I’ve never been able to stay here for longer than 36 hours without experiencing an overload. Tonight, I dined at a wine bar with a brilliant if fragile ex whom I unnecessarily harmed three years ago. It was wonderful to simply connect with her, as two decent individuals. On the subway to my poet cousin’s, where I’m staying for the night, I was overcome with a grim feeling that all relationships might end as this one now has: cordially.
I don’t think it was just the two glasses of wine. I began thinking of a nightmare and a horrible daydream that I had as a kid – and how it is a near certainty that no one I know had such dreams. In the recurring nightmare (my only recurring nightmare), I would “wake” to find myself lost in the dark, oily gears of an infinite mechanical chasm. I can’t emphasize enough the pure realization my child self had of the unlimited depth of this iron catastrophe. I was lodged somewhere in the middle of an endless expanses (which opened as a three-foot-wide hole amid grass at the top), and my dream-self could never die. Fortunately, I could wake.
The horrible daydream, which also recurred, was that time itself had reached an inflection point and had begun reversing. This singular moment, say, while cleaning the table after dinner, would effectively be the end of all time. The universe would contract instead of expand. Instead of dinner continuing into board games, everyone would begin moving and thinking in reverse, going through their entire lives as already lived. Once, when my shi-tzu emitted to near-identical barks back-to-back, I felt a pang that reality had begun reversing itself, that the space between her parks had been the inflection point. I was no more than ten years old. Did you have those particular dreams?
Those were my thoughts as I took a seat on the J-train thirty minutes ago. Futility, isolation, and exceptionalism. Then, a young hispanic couple entered the train, a stroller pushed by the 16-ish mother. The father looked uncertain but devoted, wiry and feminine in a yellow t-shirt. The mother sat down directly across from me. She peered into the stroller and reached for her nearly newborn baby. It healthily writhed. Most everyone in the car knew what was coming and averted their eyed, as she began to breast-feed her child, the father standing alongside.
While I didn’t see this scene directly, I found it overwhelmingly beautiful and touching. I’ve never seen such intimacy in New York. This solidarity in the face of our depressed future completely washed over my self-remorse, and I understood that connection is always possible for the willing.
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