Oh #TrashyParis, We Still Love You So!
The City of Light's new beauty manifesto, and some fabulous reading reccos.
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Last week, when I heard that Paris had launched a citywide "manifesto for beauty," I thought it might be a program to help people feel gorgeous again after two agonizing COVID years. Maybe Paris is encouraging its citizens to trade in their pandemic sweatpants or offering haircut incentives? It would be the most French recovery plan ever.
Build Back Beautiful!
And let's be honest, it's not so crazy. Better hair can mitigate a lot of angst.
But the virus didn't dent Parisian style. There were no terrible sweatpants. Just look at the street fashion last fall. Standards were maintained! And I should have known that. I lived there for four years in my clunky, chunky, streaky-haired American youth.
However, the city itself seems to be a little worse for wear lately. Mayor Anne Hidalgo introduced the "manifeste pour la beauté de Paris" in the wake of a social media campaign called #saccageParis, loosely translated as "trashy Paris." It refers to the city's overflowing garbage bins and rampant graffiti. The hashtag took off last year as Parisians reposted photos of street debris, barren tree pits, cigarette butts, and of course, men peeing on the street.
#TrashyParis attracted some existential laments for the City of Light—had it ever been such a mess before? Meanwhile, Hidalgo, a socialist and Paris' first woman mayor, pressed on. In addition to deploying sanitation swat teams to address emergency reports of ugliness, she plans to create four "urban forests" and exclude cars from the most congested neighborhoods in the name of climate resilience. And beauty.
Of course, the truth is, Paris was never that clean. (And It was certainly not the spotless cartoon version of the city you see in shows like Netflix's Emily In Paris.)
However, if you are predisposed to love that city, you probably don't remember or care that every time you walk under a bridge by the Seine, the smell of urine is potent enough to knock you into the river. And when I lived there, if you had to wait in line inside a train station, you'd marinate in a cloud of smoke and cigarette butts for long enough to get some sort of lung damage.
In fact, Paris has been smoky and kinda fragrant since Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast. He described how the rue Mouffetard stank and called the nearby The Café des Amateurs a "cesspool." Plus, there were goats in the streets then. Seriously, goats. And yet…
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You can fall out of love with Paris; maybe it feels too crowded and stressful lately. Same for New York. But it takes a minute to undo the hold those cities have on our identity. They move slowly out of your system, like watch gears until one day, you know it's time to say goodbye to all that.
And if you live in New York, one of the world's top three filthy cities, the French outrage about ugly yellow bike lane markers or tree pits without flowers is fascinating, magical even. They expect beauty; they demand it.
Things are different on this side of the Atlantic. For example, if I leave my Brooklyn apartment on a windy day, I am not surprised if I walk directly into a small but intense litter cyclone on the corner of my block. Grit will get in my eyes, but I'm only occasionally outraged. Our reactions are shaped entirely by expectations.
And with COVID absenteeism in the sanitation department, there's a good chance that my garbage bags will sit on the sidewalk in massive heaps for days before they're collected. (Speaking of street trash, rat sightings were up 40% in New York last year because the pandemic disrupted restaurants. One woman told the New York Times that she jingles her keys when she approaches her building to clear the rats from her path.)
So, hey, #TrashyParis, I miss you terribly–even with your labor strikes and your high expectations. And not just because of the rat situation here. Let me just say that if the ugly benches and uncollected garbage start to feel like the beginning of a larger unraveling over there, check out this Instagram video of a crumbling, post-apocalyptic-looking subway wall. Somehow we New Yorkers keep going despite this kind of dysfunction.
And, p.s., that Instagram account, @subwaycreatures, is a head-snapping collection of urban instanity clips that explain why New York is also voted the most exciting city in the world. They are wonder and horror in equal doses. Just one reason that Gotham's most addictive charm might be that residents don't expect to be delighted or shocked, but often are.
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GALLERY
An image from another January. :)
The Worlds Most Beautiful Libraries, by Elisabeth Sladek and Georg Ruppelt, is an unctuous tribute to the temples we build for books, excerpted at Lithub.
The life of Thich Nhat Hanh, and how the world fell for the father of mindfulness.
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle that we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness.
Amanda Gorman and the Art of Being Unfinished, and Imperfect. I wrote this piece a year ago about the U.S. presidential inauguration and what came before. Here’s an excerpt:
“How transformative would it be if we could embrace the idea that unfinished is our natural and permanent state? Is it possible for us to accept that there is no seamless fix for what ails us individually or as a community? Our path, if we’re lucky, is evolution without an end.
We’ll carry with us the scars of this long year, and of all our history. And as someone who’s spent years trying to paper over, distract from or excise a deep scar, I can tell you: even if no one else sees it, you never forget it’s there.”
This image by @asiawerbe was shared by the eyemamaproject which aggregates photography of mothers by mothers.
P.S. 🧡
Some housekeeping: This week’s edition is a little late, for which I apologize.
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Thank you for reading, for your kind notes, and for your support of this wild endeavor. Yours, Susanna
It’s Not Just You by Susanna Schrobsdorff is essays, recommendations, advice, weekly delights, and, most importantly, a community of thousands of readers around the world. Consider supporting it with a paid subscription.
Your article as always lifts up my spirits during these Covid, Sabre rattling Putin, and democracy in decline times. Speaking of trash…now I see discarded Covid masks instead of cigarette butts.
You write so well .