Cover Story: Paris Versus New York

Courtesy of Charles Berberian for The New Yorker.

The New Yorker's cover story for the May 5th, 2014 issue raised what I found to be a fascinating question : to what extent are the cultures of Paris and New York (and perhaps the cultures of France and the United States as well) fusing, melding, and even standardizing?

Illustrator Charles Berberian, making the point that these cities are in fact merging their trends, lifestyles and energies, deliberately imparts a feeling of uncertainty in his drawings and causes the viewer to wonder which city is really depicted. Take this cover illustration - are we looking at a Williamsburg coffee shop designed in the style of a French café, or is this couple actually reading Le Monde on their iPads overlooking a parisian boulevard?

Thinking back to the taco truck I've seen on Boulevard Raspail and the macaron craze that has swept New York City, it's easy to see Berberian's point. It remains to consider, however, whether this is the start of thriving cultural symbiosis, or rather a dulling and degrading homogenization.

You can find some background on The New Yorker's cover story as well as a slideshow of Berberian's cartoons here. Below is my favorite from the slideshow, as it really illustrates the bleakness of any metropolitan city under the rain. Though despite the uniformity brought by bad weather, the shadows of both New York's water towers and Paris' Haussmannian facades appear distinctly.

Courtesy of Charles Berberian.

No Love Locks campaign wants to ban bridge locks

Did you know that the bridges in Paris are heaving under the weight of locks left on their fences by passing lovers? Neither did I. I also didn't realize that what I thought of as nothing more than a sweet and innocent symbol of young love, sadly rendered quite ironic by the fact that these promises of forever are routinely chopped and discarded, would represent to others (note: they're American) a pressing threat to the city's integrity.

Only a few years ago, I was one of those couples who put a silly lock on the Pont des Arts. In typical teenage-couple-stumbles-through-Paris fashion, my then boyfriend and I had bought an overpriced lock at a neighboring hardware store, forgot to bring a carving utensil and ended up sitting at a nearby café, scraping enough ink out of a pen to mark our initials. To be honest, the emotions most salient to me now are those of hunger, fatigue and cold. But on that winter day a few years ago, we checked something off our silly bucket list and left a temporary mark the Parisian scenery.

I hope couples will have this opportunity for decades to come and that the No Love Locks campaign won't succeed in banning this tradition, thereby making illegal one of the last innocent gestures of young love that I can think of. These locks obviously should not be protected at the expense of Paris' infrastructure, and it would break my heart to see bridges crumble after hundreds of years of history. But why can't the locks be cut more often so that fewer hang on bridges at any given time, for example? It won't really matter to the couples if their lock is gone a few days later, and to be honest it's impossible to find yours in the sea of locks if you only just briefly look away. What matters is that at some point in their lives a couple was together in Paris, and put a lock on a bridge. And I never want to see those memories banned.

For the full article on the No Love Locks campaign, visit The Guardian website.

J'ai un cadeau à faire de chez Zadig & Voltaire

A few summers ago, in France, a song hit the charts hard. I mostly ignored the lyrics the first few times I heard it, but upon paying closer attention I discovered a humorous song aiming a pointedly mocking finger at the young, trendy, elitist Parisian crowd. Basically, the song was Helmut Fritz' (turns out his name was also a joke) list of all the things these kids do that upset him, called "Ca m'énerve."
 
Besides being pissed off by rosé champagne and denied access to clubs, the singer also hates shopping at the incredibly hip Zadig & Voltaire (see post title) because their items always seem to be on permanent backorder.

When I saw their new S/S14 collection, the first thing I thought (ok, second after singing what I remember of the song) was that this backorder reputation is here to stay.

 

Photos via Because I'm Addicted.