Cicilie among the Parisians

From the artist squat La Générale in Belleville

…that I went to Paris for the second time, but this time on my own with friends. Perhaps Paris isn’t as eternal as Rome, but it’s far more eternal than London. London must be the capital of fads and fashions and subcultures (last time I was reminded of this was when I saw the film This is England about skinheads in the early 1980s), while Paris is almost the opposite. It might import foreign subcultures like Anglo-American punk and hip-hop (and put its distinct mark on them), but all it can come up with by itself is bohemians, poets, artists and anarchists dating from the 19th century and a whole range of philosophical fads from the 20th. All with their distinct attire and ways of life, of course. And these historical types still somehow live on among almost all age-sets (perhaps not among the youngest, who seem mostly to be into hip-hop). So, we didn’t go to Paris to go to punk concerts and try to find squats. We went there to experience some of this eternal Paris (and of course we found it!) And if we had found the squats, that would have been strange and distinctly Parisian as well, as the most well-known squats in Paris are artist squats, and not the kind of art one finds in squats in Northern Europe, but real avant-garde plastic arts and poetry (slam, for instance) and that kind of stuff.
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I think this is reflected in the Parisian slam poetry as well. The slam scene is not one kind of subculture dominated by people of a certain age who are into a certain poetic style. Instead, all kinds of different people of different styles and ages mix. But this comment on the slam phenomenon is not the reason why I write blog post. Instead, I try to go back in time and explore my relationship to my two favourite cities, Paris and London. How do I see them? And what has shaped this understanding of them? This is not only reveries and reminiscences from my part, although it is that as well. It has also a scientific goal as I try to explore why I chose particular topics and projects.

(and it isn’t forty years since Sergeant Pepper, but forty years since The Beatles split…).

…not today, but this spring, at least. The students were protesting in Tiananmen square, my favourite teacher was soon to give me a poem saying something like “when I was 18 I knew everything…” and I was going to Paris with three friends for three weeks. (And on the radio, they frequently reminded us that it was twenty years ago that Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band was released. 1969 seemed like another world in 1989. I find it hard to believe that the same amount of time had passed between ‘69 and ’89, as between ‘89 and now. For kids today the same is of course the case: “Ha! You didn’t live in the 80ies!” my boy… eh husband was told when he lectured some kids in the library where he works some facts about that decade. For my son, born two days after the election of the first black American president, the1980ies will in an ancient millennium long time passed.)
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I had been to Paris for two days the year before with a language school. Four of us had been allowed to hang around by ourselves, because one of the Swedes had spent a couple of years in Paris with his parents when he was around 5. (His mother, an artist of some kind, actually made a children’s book about him going to an authoritarian and hierarchical French kinder garden.) We went to Jim Morrison’s grave at Père Lachaise, of course (it was 1988), and dined at something which must have been the old existentialist hangout at the left bank, La Coupole.

– Already here in my writing, thus also in my experiences from that city, the hallmark of my relationship with it is present. Paris has always been a bit different for me. I do different things there than I do in other place, because it is different. When I went to London with my mum when I was thirteen, I was crazy about Boy George and English decadent popculture with transvestites, post-punks, drugs, costumes and make-up and discos and parties I could never go to. I looked at the diversity of people in the streets of London with awe and… VÆÆÆ! Enough for today, obviously!