An American in Paris
BROOKS, DAVID
An American in Paris My insane French book tour. BY DAVID BROOKS Paris Before I tell you about my French book tour, I want you to know that I did not agree to pose naked in a plexiglass bathtub...
...Instead of sticking me in a nice spot and shooting a few frames, he had me sprinting with him through the packed streets of Paris while he looked for the right momentary combination of light, color, setting, and background crowd...
...He would dash across a boulevard, turn with his lens, and tell me to stride across the traffic: "Go...
...It's in the media-dense suburb of Joinville...
...Early in our conversation, amidst the obligatory 30 minutes spent lampooning the American election, I mentioned that I had voted for George W. Bush...
...it's like going from the NewsHour to a Marx Brothers movie...
...He doesn't say he's a radical or a revolutionary...
...There are illustrations by the omnipresent countercultural cartoonist, R. Crumb...
...Even when they are having sex with others, they only care about their own pleasure, right...
...We weren't allowed to take girls to our rooms in the university...
...There are little ironic toy figurines here and there, yellowing polemical books, a knife that looks like it was once used to slice a baguette a few decades ago, a gun that was buried in the garden just prior to the German invasion in 1870, and all manner of extremely dated furniture from the late sixties...
...Toys become educational toys...
...And Bizot himself is, as he would say, a trip...
...For example, the furniture...
...In other words, in order to rebel against radical chic baby boomers who romanticized Che Guevara, the new French youth movement is embracing radical chic Danielle Mitterrand, who romanticized Comandante Marcos...
...Turn...
...But there is also a clever and even, if you'll pardon the expression, postmodern aspect to the way he's constructed his life and his image...
...I did sit passively while my clothes were ripped off on national television, however...
...There are leaflets about Vietnam and books about North Korea...
...They have a magazine called Technikart, which is full of attacks on self-absorbed sixty-eighters who can't get over their supposedly glorious youths and who denigrate all the subsequent generations for their supposed apathy...
...My Bush vote became the theme of our evening...
...C'est fou...
...If I'd let him take it all off, I could've been the next Jerry Lewisstyle French demigod...
...But amazement was pretty much standard fare in Paris...
...I was doing a French evening talk show—one of those five-intellectuals-around-a-table affairs...
...On November 17, for example, Le Monde ran an essay insisting that the word Bobo was actually coined by a Frenchman, the historian Pierre Hassner, to mean Bolshe-vik-Bonapartistes...
...America is supposed to be a raucous country, but everything about the book tour was more anarchic in France...
...The network Canal Plus did an hour long discussion of the book (without me, fortunately), which was preceded by a promo for an upcoming show about two men who do dances by stretching their foreskins into an incredible variety of shapes...
...A Parisian TV show had me walk through a few boutiques describing the Bobo style while a spike-haired camerawoman waved her camera at my feet, the back of my head, my hands, anything but my face, in her best cinéma-vérité-on-ecstasy manner...
...In America, money and status were the themes of many interviews on my book tour, but in France, sex and philosophy dominated...
...But French television has different rules...
...The ones that wore the masks...
...Both theories are oddly compelling...
...Another magazine decided I didn't look hip enough to grace its pages, so they brought along a bag of designer clothes, all cut to fit a scrawny French male model...
...It looks like it's been sitting there since the days of the student strikes...
...Bizot is 55, and some of his housemates are senior figures in the French media (I met the top news editor at a French TV network and a leading journalist at Nova), but they've kept the faith...
...My resolve to keep my private parts lactose-free is intact...
...It sat there staring at me all night (I learned later the tape made it to his website as streaming video...
...The book is distinctively American...
...Every large French weekly has run a spread on the book, and it's been the subject of culture programs on most of the major radio and TV networks...
...But when you enter the hall, you don't know what to think...
...There are open letters to the baby boomers telling them how pathetic they are...
...But on this trip, I realized that the French are intellectually rigorous, and pay attention only to ideas that are cosmically profound, yet meticulously documented...
...Scattered about are gothic and even romanesque statues of the Virgin and the saints...
...It's crazy...
...We were having lunch at Bubbles, a champagne restaurant designed like an early 1960s airport lounge— The Jetsons come to the rive droite...
...The publisher wanted a better photo of me than the passport-style shot that's on the book...
...Like Baywatch stud David Hasselhoff, the book became more famous abroad than at home...
...Stop...
...I sat there amazed...
...I believe this is why Ernest Hemingway came to Paris in the first place...
...I think I came to this realization while I was being interviewed by a beautiful journalist from a weekly magazine who asked me about 30 minutes worth of questions about how Bobos masturbate...
...One of the more senior members of our group kept trying to explicate some theory of Trotsky's, but Bizot always interrupted him with jokes, and the guy finally moved over to the other side of the table where he could ratiocinate...
...My vote for Bush struck Bizot and his housemates as amazing, bizarre, and utterly original...
...France is just incredibly sex-drenched...
...She used it over and over again, with an air of easy refinement...
...The French are supposed to take ideas so much more seriously than we do, but what I saw was spectacle...
...It's also that I wanted to establish the principle that even after six months of book flogging, there are still some depths to which I won't sink...
...But fortunately she went ahead and answered her own question...
...And then it dawned on me that he was talking about the leader of the rebels in Chiapas, Mexico, the one who staged the fledgling armed revolt a few years ago...
...In this magazine there are interviews with psychologists who dissect the pathetic inability of the sixties radicals to accept adulthood...
...We were tired of being last...
...Lift your head to the light...
...I'll tell you what 1968 was all about in France," Bizot said past midnight...
...When she began this line of inquiry, I was going to confess that in all my researches I had not really collected data on this area...
...He's also extremely rich, the black sheep of the family that owns Rhône-Poulenc...
...they cried...
...The writer on my right—one of the nation's foremost interpreters of Bob Dylan and the Beatles—decided I was too well dressed...
...BY DAVID BROOKS Paris Before I tell you about my French book tour, I want you to know that I did not agree to pose naked in a plexiglass bathtub full of milk...
...He's got one of those full-body laughs that has his torso shaking and his face clenched up in Falstaffian joy...
...I can't even imagine a Restoration Hardware store in Korea...
...In May, I published a book called Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There...
...In Britain, there were a few stories that credited me with the term Bobo (which stands for bourgeois bohemian), including a nice cover story in the New Statesman, "Tony Blair is a Bobo...
...Then he got up and took off my tie and started unbuttoning my shirt...
...He delights in everything, he laughs at everything...
...I could have fought back, but I confess that I didn't quite know what to do...
...There are cover stories everywhere advertising interviews with Abbie Hoffman, Lenny Bruce, Jerry Rubin, and the Black Panthers...
...he says he's a "freak," even while lamenting that the word has lost its once-rich connotations...
...She seemed to know what she was talking about, so I could only assent...
...About a third of the way through, after the third or fourth bottle of Beaujolais, Bizot got out his video camera and propped it on the dinner table directly in front of me so he could record my every gesture and utterance for all posterity...
...it describes stories and personalities that are known only here—or so I thought...
...On my second day I was being interviewed by a charming, vivacious woman from the French Cosmopolitan, and I mentioned that the new elite is based on education, not bloodlines, and that therefore this group has a tendency to turn everything into a form of school...
...It took me a while to realize this...
...In the current issue there's a piece savaging Bizot as a hidebound reactionary...
...So while they were tugging at my chemise, I just kept babbling like an idiot...
...Then when the conversation turned to how modern feminism has made masturbation a liberating power exercise, she began to grow more and more passionate...
...Even in Denmark they were ahead of us...
...Before, I thought that the French had a weakness for facile ideas with too-clever-by-half monikers...
...This struck Bizot and his housemates as amazing, bizarre, and utterly original...
...It's as if somebody'd held an all-night revolutionary meeting in 1972, and nobody had ever bothered to clean up...
...She is on the left hand," he said proudly...
...I just sat there while she went on and on, people all around us in my publisher's office, waiting for the gendarmes to sweep in and arrest us for violating public decency...
...But on the set I just didn't react...
...Bizot admitted that he's something of a relic of a bygone era...
...C'est fou...
...Every few minutes we'd come back to Bush, to my amazing vote, and in particular to Bizot's theory that some of President Bush's old CIA buddies had botched their effort to fix the election...
...Instead, I'm just another American in Paris, unprepared for the rigors of French discourse...
...We were having this conversation in English, and while you might think that a reporter from Cosmopolitan would have a relatively rich vocabulary to describe this act, even in her second language, this woman knew only one phrase, and it was just about the crudest one in the whole repertoire, a term you never hear in mixed company...
...Most of my recent television pun-ditry has been on American political shows, and never once on the set of PBS or CNN have I been sexually harassed...
...Technikart is operated largely by scions of France's most prominent families, and one day a couple of them came to talk to me (also carrying a videocam for their web page...
...And as happened continually during my trip, I was the only one present in a suit and tie (I don't know how Yves St...
...A friend told me about an online encyclopedia of neologisms that contained an entry beginning: "Bobo: a word invented by journalists in London to describe . . . " The most surprising responses came from people in Korea (where the book will appear soon), Japan, Argentina, Brazil, and elsewhere, who insisted that Boboism is A friend told me about an online encyclopedia of neologisms with an entry beginning, "Bobo: a word invented by journalists in London...
...We talked about some of the now largely forgotten heroes of the counterculture: Murray Bookchin, Paul Goodman (Bizot had a great photo of the longtime Commentary contributor cooking vegetables over an open fire at a youth gathering of some kind), and Guy Debord, founder of situa-tionalism...
...David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard...
...Meanwhile, his assistant would scramble along beside me holding a huge reflecting foil to illuminate my face without creating reflections off my glasses...
...When the editor of the French magazine Jalouse proposed this, my publisher and I shook our heads and vetoed the idea...
...He quoted some Susan Sontag theory about how photography is like hunting and explained that amidst the chaos of the chase there comes a spontaneous moment in which the real subject reveals himself...
...On every conceivable surface there are hundreds of 30-year-old alternative magazines, from Berkeley, Greenwich Village, and Paris...
...They only give pleasure to themselves, right...
...It's not only that I minded taking part in an act of shameless plagiarism (maybe you've seen Annie Liebovitz's photo of Whoopie Goldberg in the tub...
...A writer from Lebanon once told me that his country blew up when young fundamentalist men started seeing women in bikinis on the beaches...
...But you may not be surprised to learn that many other British journalists wrote long essays on the concept without burdening their readers with the knowledge that it had been previously described by anyone other than themselves...
...This is the daring new movement...
...C'est fou...
...It's like a country that has managed to keep itself dynamic by means of constant titillation—and of course a deep appreciation of the finest literary masterworks that come from overseas...
...It was like watching a bunch of lifelong hunters suddenly come face to face with a unicorn...
...The revolutionary...
...I stood there in the heat of the kitchen of a fashionable French restaurant, unable to breathe in a black on black outfit half my size, while a photographer waved his digital camera around my face...
...In fact, Bizot bought this house and turned it into a crash pad for counterculturalists...
...There is a movement in French journalism made up of young people who hate the 1960s...
...Comandante Marcos," he continued...
...But then I asked them who their political hero was, and the young man said simply, "Marcos...
...There are now 20 people living in the mansion, some of them grizzled radicals along with their new wives and kids...
...There are posters for the Newport Jazz Festival...
...They were too enchanted to shoot...
...He himself owns a fat avant-garde magazine named Nova, two alternative radio stations (which introduced rap and world music to France), and a television production company...
...Indeed, it was stunning how quickly my interlocutors could jump from the pubic to the metaphysical and back again...
...Meanwhile, hundreds of Parisians were stopping to check if I was someone famous before turning away...
...One night my publishers and I went to dinner at the home of Jean-François Bizot, who wrote a preface for the French edition of the book...
...I looked blankly at him, trying to figure out if he meant Imelda...
...So they hired a photographer who had apparently been inspired by that pulsating photographer in the 1960s movie Blowup...
...In other words, I was sitting in a chi-chi restaurant drinking excellent champagne, nibbling grilled salmon, and listening to a beautiful young woman in a low-cut peasant blouse talk about masturbation...
...rife in their countries...
...While I was talking, he went under the table and took off one of my shoes and put it on the table...
...But there was a surprising foreign response...
...for visual interest, the poster showed a man with his face buried in a woman's private parts (this was not a pornographic magazine, by the way...
...Amidst all the deadly earnest crap about revolution, we forget that there actually was a refreshing fun element to the counterculture, and Bizot embodies that...
...It was hosted by a young woman known around France for her beautiful eyes and her cleavage, both of which are indeed formidable...
...But the most enthusiastic responses have come from France and Germany...
...I left the house in the wee hours, as blissfully confused about Guy Debord as I had been when I'd arrived, but a little better informed about the sixties...
...The tiles under foot are in such disrepair they shift when you step on them...
...Vacations become edifying alumni tours, and so on...
...The next day, while I was sitting with a young woman from the French version of Amazon.com, I learned that there are now brigades of anti-Bizots...
...C'est fou...
...Laurent stays in business...
...I had been told that Bizot, a familiar figure in France, had been the editor of a leading 1960s countercultural magazine, Actuel, and is known as the godfather of the underground...
...In fact, Bizot bought much of it recently over eBay and had it shipped from the States...
...One French monthly I visited was sending out a promotional poster bragging about a 16 percent increase in circulation...
...With a smidgen of prompting, they went off on the sort of savage attack on the 1960s that would set Hilton Kramer's heart aglow...
...Indeed, my book tour has already been profoundly educational in one key respect...
...The intellectual further to my right, a musician who quotes Plato and sells bubblegum rock by telling everybody that it's punk, got out of his chair and came up behind me to help with the disrobing...
...That's crazy...
...I should have known beforehand that something odd was liable to happen, since the music writer had opened his fly and showed me his cool underwear in the make-up room...
...But nothing quite prepared me for his house...
...He'd invite hippies to stay there, and some of them just never left...
...You walk through a large gate and see an immense 19th-century palace of classical design...
...Mitterrand's wife went and met with him...
...They were attacking the New Left from the left...
...She perked up, noting that in France women now take courses to perfect their technique in the particular sex act that is of the Lewinskyan persuasion...
Vol. 6 • November 2000 • No. 11
