After Sam Kriss
Imagine a city where everyone wears various shades of black and gray and calls it fashion, where the bars close at 2, and it is called nightlife, and where a 30 m2 studio is the life of luxury and the parks are locked up at sundown lest the citizenry gets the idea that public space is theirs to use. A city whose chief industries are financial services, administration, and cheaply made but very expensive products which are supposed to communicate discretion. A city that hoovers up hordes of mindless, drooling masses from the four corners of the earth and burps out trinkets, postcards, tote bags. Imagine that this city, capital of an illustrious vanished empire, still lived under the banner of an 18th century slogan, in the blandly pompous apartments of a 19th century tyrant, forever hooked on the last salty drops of poetry sliding slowly off the brow of its long expired 20th century poets, all half-decomposed corpses collecting flies and little amulets knicked up with some imbeciles' initials. Would this city be exciting? Could you live here?
It is not fair, you protest. What of the history, the culture? Surely these must count for something? After all, there is so much Great Art. Surely you must see value in museums? The realization hits you before your lips have unpursed: the city is the museum, its wide boulevards the grand sky-lit galleries, its uniform facades the polished display cases, its refined inhabitants the precious little artworks locked away inside. Everything is preserved; everything is arranged. The restaurant menus follow carefully choreographed turns during the appointed windows, and there is a formule de politesse at your disposition for every conceivable situation: Bonne journée, bon après-midi, bon appétit, bonne balade, bonne route, bon voyage, bonne réunion, bon weekend, bonnes vacances, bonne lecture, bonne diffusion, bonne écoute, bonne recherche, bonne sieste, bonne tête de veau (I invent nothing, I swear). Bonne continuation !
Your ear has become adept at sifting for nuggets of real language, actual transmissible ideation and expression, from amid the ambient dross that constitutes the standard local dialect: Fin, c'est pas mal si tu vois ce que je veux dire, mais en gros, fin, c'est juste qu'il y avait... euh... disons, bah, un certain nombre d'enjeux, tu vois, et ben, je me suis quand même posé la question... mais bon, en gros c'était à peu près bon quoi. Mostly your pan comes up empty. You debate whether to try your luck elsewhere, perhaps a bit further from the banks, where there is still a faint rip of current carrying in the unknown from somewhere upstream.
Finally you decide you've had enough of this show, this player piano forever singing the same tired song. You want something alive, sweaty, bleeding and pulsing with the present. You decide you will move to Berlin. Or maybe Barcelona. Or Belgrade: you’ve heard great things about Belgrade. But before you go, you say to yourself, why not indulge in one last ramble, a sentimental goodbye to this sickeningly sentimental city. You laze away the afternoon en terrasse, nibbling pastry, smoking, sipping silty black coffee and watching the pretty people pass.
As the evening descends, you find yourself one last time with the companions who washed up on this strange beach with you, pouring out an apéro to your adieu, sitting by the canal as the last rays of sunlight filter through the trees and splash down on the quais. Now that you’re leaving, you reason, you can concede, only a bit begrudgingly: perhaps it does have its points forts, this dusty old hag of a city. Descending into the metro to speed off to the airport, you even permit yourself a smile.