02:45 The Morning of the Day

I was the king of Paris back then. King of a people that had threatened to “make lace out of Marie Antoinette’s entrails.” King of a place that no longer needed a king and that did not even know I was their king. To paraphrase King Louis XVI as he was about to be guillotined, “I die innocent.” And we all know that death and sex are intimately intertwined and that the French phrase for orgasm, “le petit mort” means the little death. Every time you or you ejaculate, you have a small heart attack, you die a little innocent death – to live a less innocent larger life. That was about the extent of my philosophy back then, in the period leading up to the first Gulf War. To paraphrase Rousseau, “I am born free, and everywhere I am in relationships.”

But no, I mean, that doesn’t sound right either. Not relationships but liaisons. I’m not in my right mind just now and I probably wasn’t back then. In keeping with the psychological theme of kings, I was skirting the corridors of paranoia. If relationships were spotlights then what I was seeing was flickers and flares, phosphenes and sparkles. Lack of sleep, lost bearings, lunging at ghosts, or something like that, intense hatred of American government, deep suspicion of French government, deeper doubt about the ability of ranting to change anything especially to the already converted.

The terrible toll of over-indulgence plus the intense emotional involvement we had with the world around us left us full of odd moments, rich in imprecision and ambiguity. Hallucinations of emotion melting into concrete. Missed and misperceived opportunities with various members of the opposite sex. Still refusing to give up that idealistic fusion of sex and revolution, peace and understanding, which in the 60s saw pornographer Al Goldstein [Screw] allied with the Yippies.

And you don’t need to tell me; I know all about the phenomenon surrounding the mystification of synchronicity. Especially in a new strange city. You meet a woman who used to also live in the East Village or in Flint, Michigan and also listened to Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” so much that she also thought it had been written specifically for her, or her father has the first name as yours and/or also used Old Spice all his life or you and we both squeeze avocados in the same manner or read books naked or save our nail clippings –  you do that too?! – or despise the same politicians or hate the same things you see in Paris like loud Americans yelling even louder in the hope of being understood or Canadian backpackers with their smug little Canadian flags sewn on their backpacks or guys reading Henry Miller in the sun in front of Shakespeare and Co., blue-stained couplets scrawled across their wrists, or desire the same kind of society or love the same kind of Citroà«n [deux chevaux] or always order the same drink in a café or also think Tom Cruise and Nirvana overrated or both of you “always” go to the Luxembourg Gardens to do the same thing – watch the kids launch their sailboats. The best is, of course, to spot someone in the Tuilleries reading the exact same book as you. You’re already halfway in the door of her chambre de bon. In a foreign place as an ex-pat or refugee or exile you seek out these little twigs of commonality to hopefully stoke a big fire in your shared ventricle. Synchronicity as a bold spiritual argument for starting an intimate relation. Happens all the time. 

I also know all about the gang [in our case a group of artists who write sentences or present visual work in a way that baffles ordinary minds] mentality, which is just co-dependency wrapped in funkier clothes and more attitude. You know the story:  One needy post-post-beat pseudo-hoodlum poet feeds one under-esteemed multi-media artist a nice meal of self-mythification – we’re being unfairly ignored because we are telling the truths society does not want to hear [and wearing clothes that no one wants to see?] –  and in no time you’re running around leading a movement that is so important [because it includes you] and so revolutionary no one has ever heard of it or the various yous attached to it. Your obscurity is, of course, only more evidence of your genius and indispensability. This is ineluctable truth be it NY or London or Barcelona or Paris or Amsterdam or Zurich or Oslo or Cleveland or Rio or Meknes.

Fact is fiction and fiction is fact; you know the old trick. There was indeed something special about the 1988–1991 period in Paris and not just because we were there. It was special because we were on our own; there was no 1920s to mythologize us, no 1945 to liberate us, no 1968 to ennoble our every gesture, no 1970 to justify our pacifism, no 1980 to give us false hope. That we all met there in Paris is, of course, coincidence but that we are still all good friends is testament to something else, something that needs to be said NOW because when we said it then, nobody was listening.

The strange luxury that the writers of the Lost Generation seemed to take utterly for granted – as if all the attention paid to their every word was the most natural thing – was something totally alien to us. They had access privileges to the zeitgeist. That access had been boarded up, barricaded, surrounded with razor wire  and surveillance cameras and tossed far, far away into another universe out of our reach by the time the late 1980s were upon us. And so, because the International Herald Tribune [to name just one] ignored our treatises, our posters for events of questionable value, our letters to the editor, and because no one turned to us, and even ignored us ignoring them, we turned to ourselves and we took to the airwaves, the turntables, the video cameras, zines, cameras, tape recorders, the bottle and met people on our own and as ourselves face to face – no hype, no pre-publicity, no red carpets, no album covers, no glossy spreads, no make-up, no résumé, no attitude, no reputation. This might not seem so out of the ordinary but when you read the matter of fact accounts of how other, more renowned artists and writers passed through Paris or lived there or consumed it you realized we were onto something much different. Edmund White’s accounts stick out in my mind: He seemed to always be taken places, handed drinks, and conjugal partners, surrounded by admiring literati, fawning dignitaries, fans, sycophants, assistants – that kind of garrulous and aloof style of presumptuous privilege: “As I was saying to Jack Lang in the Palais du Tokyo, Juliette Greco should sing here, when who should enter in a classic Coco Chanel but Madame Greco herself with Jean-Paul Gautier and MC Solaar…”  

We met French artists and musicians, boulangers, housepainters, and scoundrels but also French women [who were writers and artists or nothing in particular yet], but also American women [who more than other foreigners felt they were in direct competition with French women and thus seemed to operate from a permanent snipe], Canadian women, German women, Dutch women, Japanese women, Singaporean women, Italian women, Swiss women, African women, and more women. Every party meant another snippet of paper ripped from the corner of a menu or a Telé-rama and a phone number jotted down. All this despite [or maybe, because] we really were down and out in Paris and we tried our damnedest to get someone to validate our oath of poverty [the dignity of which goes back to 12^th century monks and, well yea, ok, to Jesus, himself] in the name of adventure and art but the zeitgeist – as I already noted – had shifted so far to the [religious] right that [there is irony here] righteous poverty no longer existed; gone were all those alternative and mainstream articles you used to read in magazines about Ghandi, the Berrigans, visual artists [after Van Gogh!], the Beats, post-Beats, jazz musicians who sacrificed comfort for their muses. These were replaced by long self-serving profiles of the new captains of business, the media moguls, sports heroes, established artists and their homes, musicians and their wheels, writers and their exotic get-aways. They, the Yuppies [who proved their very membership by complaining about others they perceived to be even more virile specimens of the race] had managed a total victory and could now gift wrap the premise that those who play the game of capitalism will be justly rewarded. Others need not apply. Their world was a world that did not exist – for 99.99% of the world’s people alive at that moment, except in their dreams. Yes, their most significant victory was that they had won the battle for our dreams and could now tell us what was worth dreaming about. This, however, did not deter us.

The awkward aspect of all this is that we were quickly branded as angry, paranoid, jealous, and, worse – obviously not talented enough to be duly rewarded. Conversations headed that way would rile Frank Lengel to a venomous sputter. Raising his fist, standing up, hitting the table with his thighs, knocking over glasses of wine, as he declared his solidarity with the working AND non-working classes, “DON’T YOU EVER LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.”

Those who bothered [who didn’t want to be bothered any more] told us we were in the wrong place, speaking the wrong language at the wrong time, writing about the wrong things in the wrong style. Or maybe not. Maybe that was just our paranoia or their lack of vision. But keep in mind the old adage that paranoia is the first respite of the under-esteemed. What better way to think more of yourself than to imagine or KNOW you are the target of what may involve international players with a budget. What that plot might involve had something – we and the cheap vin du table figured – to do with international cultural perceptions of alternative lifestyles and how the US Government may have been trying not only to regulate the international world of recreational drug use but also do surveillance on its citizens and their contacts. Never mind trying to instill the virtues of abstinence and the willingness to work for substandard wages. This is mere surmise although recent documents make much of this foregone conclusion. But I wasn’t alone in my assessments. But this is getting way ahead of myself.

So when I declared in the Marais’s rowdy Pik Clops bar: “We are embarking on a historical journey from which we will never return.” No one took it too seriously because to take anything too seriously meant exposing yourself to the mockery that the fortuitous makes of all this sobriety and earnestness. Always bet on both black and red. And they were right to be suspicious and cautious because here we are indeed today returning to the scene of the crime. Not dead not gone.

But people will ask: What did Paris give you? It gave us a dare to live up to, provided the scenery and backdrop that is still perfectly attuned [despite the astute rantings by Debord to the contrary] and arranged to the off-the-map wanderings and predilections of a somnambulist. Paris offers its arterial landscape as perfect mindscape for perambulation: write-wander-dream [not in that order]. It is no accident that the tactic of taking back our dreams from the urban planner, called simply dérive, was invented here. This is what we did: the unconscious gathering of data, experience, and imaginings as part of everyday life; to be unconsciously conscious and/or vice versa in reinvesting our lives with the very adventure that consumer society would like to sell back to us.

We lived a life unencumbered by any presumption of importance [other than the fact that we thought we should and could matter] and that gave us the luxury of living a life that the harried and hurried could only dream of: a child-like innocent pursuit of pleasure and adventure as a valid goal in life. Sounds like Paris as playground for a bunch of Trustafarians doesn’t it? Well, we weren’t, I can assure you of that. We worked and worried about money, scrimped and begged and borrowed, thanked the generosity of others, ran out on bills, stole fruit [THEFT IS OWNERSHIP was one of our beloved grafittis], recycled and walked and biked – and managed to thrive in this survival.

Some who passed through Paris were, of course, so wealthy that their transparent denials of wealth [not bathing, dramatically conscientious holes in jeans, their vituperative declarations of independence from the clutches of daddy, their enthusiastic embrace of all the most obvious details of bohemia, their loudly proclaiming their chambre de bon as a total degueulasse dive] only made their sense of guilt [thank whatever for the Judeo-Christian heritage!] feel very guilty and thus they ended up reworking and refashioning their stories, which usually entailed buying us even more drinks and only made them pull up their café stools even closer to our plots and stories. And whatever their stories of dealing with the oppressions of their wealth, we were willing to hang out as long as they hung with some earnestness and input and francs. After all, everyone and especially ex-pats want to belong to something even if it was just something to casually mention on a couple of postcards sent back home.

 This influx of temporary residents remained a steady stream – some stayed 2 weeks, others a season or a year. You realized their big words about the world, about Paris and art were really small words aimed at the claustrophobic world of their parents, which was fine, valid, and genuine in its own way, if you could see their Paris not as a landscape but as a shrink’s couch instead. Then we were OK. And some of them were VERY OK. Others were con-artists down to the very phone numbers on their very phony business cards.

Some of us would eventually disappear aesthetically, morally, mysteriously or physically. Some would go home to Los Angeles or Hamburg. Some would die, some would join the world of careers after having had their exotic Hemingway-meets-Animal-House rites of passage for a few months in which to act out and purge all their silly idealisms. High ideals and crazy dreams evaporating before our very eyes as their Eurail passes expired and their sublets were re-rented and a few records, guidebooks, and some bent silverware were divided up among the remaining. They attended their farewell nights all too plastered to get too morose and willing to relativize everything and all those compromising work routines you’d fought so hard to convince us you were against and unsuited for.

Others would die of sex or its absence, one or two would die of obscurity and neglect. And at least one would die the way we usually think of dying – corporeally. Shrivel up and die. Well, she did. That this all happened in the circles that I passed through and passed out in was probably coincidence but nonetheless…