L'Escapisme

In Paris, I walked around wearing earphones a lot. Sometimes I would listen to music, sometimes not. Earphones, like sunglasses, build a barrier between you and your surroundings. In a way that is what I like about them, that they cut you off from the world and cut the world off from you.

But really what I like is that they liberate you to observe without interacting. You're engrossed in your own activities, so you are ignored. People have private conversations thinking you cannot hear. People assume you are not staring but rather gazing off into the distance.

I also like sitting by the window in the metro and looking out the window but really looking at the reflection in the window. I learned this from a Robert B. Parker detective novel where Spenser, the main character, whom I liked very much and in part wanted to be, because he could look in the fridge, find only a chicken breast, a half an onion, two leeks, a lemon, a beer, and a wedge of parmesan and whip up a gourmet meal for him and his long-term-monogamous-partner-but-not-wife-in-an-enlightened-way Susan. Also, he's a badass, and the thing about being a badass, is that your necessarily cool. Anyway, Spenser used the window-reflection technique to follow a culprit.

I don't look for culprits. Well maybe I do but not culprits who break the law. Like the white French kid who lived in Paris and thus was almost certainly nor poor (I know, I know, bad Brian, bad! stereotyping like that. Bad liberal, you should know better!). But anyway, he wore a long black trench coat and sunglasses even though it was cloudy and also big black boots. His hair was spiked in a faux-hawk. And he looked angry and depressed and clearly he was not going to let anything or anyone cheer him up or tell him that his life was anything but horrible. What did he have to be angry about? Then again, what didn't he have to be angry about? He was a teenager. Does that mean he gets the right to be angry?

I'm reminded of a story my professor, Romi, told me in Paris. He was pretty eccentric, and I won't bother going through the long story how he ended up in a cafe in the banlieus (the suburbs) of Paris, many of which have heavily immigrant and poor populations. Suffice it to say, it involves a girlfriend, a mental hospital where doctors are treated just like patients, and psychoanalysis.

But anyway, he was in the banlieus and saw this kid with an ipod that was so loud that Romi could hear the song, which was 50 cent, or as Romi said, "fifty cent", instead of "fitty cent" or, for those of us who are tight with him, "fitty". Anyway, Romi, because he's like that, was thinking about how American culture was globalizing, and how these French kids in the "ghettos" of France are listening to gangster rap that idolizes violence and such, and this was right after the whole lets-riot-and-burn-cars thing, so he was being all intellectual and then he noticed that the kid was rewinding the song over and over again, listening to the same verse dozens of times. And Romi was like, what is this kid doing? Not only is he listening to gangster rap, but he's like honing in on this one verse. And what does it mean that he lives in a place where it makes him want to listen to music about hos and beating and shooting people and everything?

And then, he goes up and asks the kid, in French, why he kept listening to the same verse. And the kid, in French, says "I'm trying to understand the lyrics. Do you know what he's saying?"

This kid wasn't glorifying the gangster life, or identifying with the American ghetto. He was just a French kid listening to American music simply because it was American.

I wonder, whether the French kids, not the children of immigrants, who are genuinely suffering, but the kids like the one on the bus in the trench coat and the black boots. Are those kids just trying to be American? Maybe they're not angry at all. Maybe they just know that Americans, or some Americans, dress like that and act like that and America is cool there like Europe is cool here, and they're just missing the whole point, the whole message of the all-black clothing and combat boots look. Just like Hemingway went to Paris and stopped going to the Closeries as soon as they installed an American bar. We're all just trying to be somewhere else.