The New York Times

>What Remains

Posted on August 16, 2010. Filed under: Anderbo, Guardian, Marginalia, Mark Benilli, Medeine Tribinevicius, Morgan Meis, N+1 Magazine, Raimonds Staprans, Shirley Smith, The New York Times, The Smart Set, The Walrus, Tony Judt |

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“Still Life with White Box” by Raimonds Staprans

It is August in Paris, and my friend Alexander with usual irony sent me this piece from The New York Times about the very fashionable things to do in Paris this month.  While these items are not on my calender, I am (somewhat) surprised at how the Times can turn even the slow days of summer into a must-do fashion alert.  The pleasure of Paris in August is that there are no lists of things to do.  The city feels extraordinarily empty, with so many stores and cafes shuttered for two or three weeks. On a warm day (which are few), when you wander in places beyond the tourist centers you have the feeling you are in some small town in the countryside or near the sea.  Those who remain in Paris are the tourists, the poor immigrants, those whose jobs keep them in the city, and others, like myself, who enjoy the city in its half desolate state. 

“The Empty Table with a Green Stripe” by Raimonds Staprans
Nostalgia of a different kind is at the heart of an essay by Tony Judt published by the Guardian.  Judt, who recently passed away, writes with photographic precision on the physical and social geography of Putney, preserving it in a moment in the past: “It was urban through and through, though urban in that informal, generous way so characteristic of London: a city that – at least until the disastrous urban “planning” of the 60s – had always grown out rather than up. I’m no longer at home there – the high street today is no better than it ought to be, a featureless replica of every high street in England, from its fast-food outlets to its mobile phone stores. But Putney was my London, and London – even though I really only lived there as a child and left forever when I went up to Cambridge in 1966 – was my city. It isn’t any more. But nostalgia makes a very satisfactory second home.”
What remains as a city decays is a question Mark Benilli at N+1 Magazine considers.  He reports on a dark excursion to an underground strip club run out of a single-family home that symbolizes the state of life and death in Detroit these days: “Detroit’s decades-long collapse—the lack of jobs and city services and adequate policing, its lingering existence as, essentially, a failed state—has left wide-open spaces for all sorts of possibility to flourish. It’s not exactly anarchy, but the place doesn’t operate by the rules of a normal American city.”
“Jars #3” by Raimonds Staprans
In Anderbo, Shirley Smith remembers her childhood growing up in a mortuary and the every day routine of the rituals of death: “It was very important for the bodies to look as natural as possible, as if they were sleeping, since no one really wants dead people to look dead.” 

And Morgan Meis at The Smart Set reports on the tensions between the Flemish and the Walloons and wonders what if Belgium didn’t exist, maybe it shouldn’t, and what would be left if it didn’t? : “It is not surprising that such ideas are strange and confusing to many. The idea, for instance, that the entity called Belgium could simply go away feels, initially, like a loss, a failure. Even for Belgians who don’t feel any great national pride, the loss of their nation is a potential source of trauma. This feeling is heightened by the petty resentments and chauvinism that gets thrown about in the feuds between Flanders and Wallonia.”

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