|
a. This theory began with coffee, or more exactly with my friend Harry's sudden obsessions with it.
b. I don't remember when those vapor-locked plastic bags with "Vanilla Royale" - flavored grounds from the grocery store first appeared in the kitchen of his apartment. He had been the kind of guy who didn't know a Yuban from a Folgers. But then, overnight it seemed, he moved in a cloud of peppery-scented Guatemalan beans from Cost Plus. Finally he found Starbucks, where he acquired a "coffee passport" and an appreciation for the subtle roasts of Vienna, the acidity of Ethiopian brews.
He bought a special cappuccino maker shiny as a chrome fender and started serving coffee in white, utilitarian cups with uneven, stone-shaped sugar lumps found at good restaurants on Beverly and in bistros throughout Europe. He started reading things he didn't have to and would say suddenly, unexpectedly, "Let's have a cup of coffee and talk about this idea I have."
c. Then Harry quit his job as a newspaper reporter and started working part-time at Starbucks. He took a class in etching. He would have lunches that lasted for more than a half-hour. He stopped telling people what he did for a living and started telling people what he thought about life.
I liked Harry this way.
d. "Harry's living like Europeans," I told my husband Matt.
"I always thought he had Euro-weenie tendencies," Matt said.
"No dear," I told him, "this has nothing to do with his Morrissey collection."
e. I'm thinking about Paris and the way streets smell like a spice cupboard on some spring days, delicate as a sugar-carved rose on a wedding cake. How, when it rains, the streets turn slick with dog shit, the air sour like infection.
That rainy spring I was walking to class with my roommate, reminiscing to her about America and the particular virtues of pancakes with maple syrup an whipped butter at IHOP. I asked what she wanted to do after we finished our degrees, after she returned to Marseilles.
"Sais pas," she said, and shrugged. "Survive. Isn't that what we all do?"
f. In Europe, you never ask people where they work. Its not an ice-breaker; it's rarely part of the polite repertoire between people who have just been introduced. Instead you ask where someone is from, make some clever reference to current events and talk about food. Why? Well, for starters, unemployment rates in places like Portugal and Ireland stand at about 25 percent. Even in Germany and Sweden, where the unemployment rate is lower, work is just not the first thing out of anyone's mouth.
Then there are those who have jobs but whose work doesn't match their education and experience; what they do for a living has very little to do with who they are. During the day they might work as a telephone operator, a fast-food assistant manager, or a postal clerk, but that is secondary to their status as painter, semi-pro soccer player, inventor of plastic wine-bottle openers (these are true stories.) Work is not something anyone is uptight about or ashamed of, it just doesn't define anything about them.
There are those Europeans who are immensely successful and have exciting careers. But they most often exist on such a historically elevated level from the rest of the population that, even if by some rip in the temporal fabric or the universe you were to meet one at a party, say, or at the grocery store, you, in your average American-ness, would have so little in common it would seem as if you were trying to converse with broken tongues. If they lived here, they would vacation in Connecticut , or live in a white-walled city perched on an Orange County coastline. These are the kind of people who have villages in Southern France named after their families, whose fathers have Cabinet posts - as have eight generations before them - and whose small eyes, you observe, resemble the mean flatness of a too finely bred Dalmatian.
g. But it's that group, the ones with jobs, I've been thinking about, because they resemble the people who exist in my world here.
h. This is not really a "dinner party" in our parents' sense of the word; there's no crystal or china, no flatware with color-coordinated napkins. But my husband has changed his T-shirt and is wearing clean jeans; I have curled my hair and vacuumed, so this rates as a special kind of gathering of the tribe. We have decided to have dinner because no one has money to go out.
Looking around the table, the clatter of voices rushing at each other, I have the feeling that I'm living through a rerun, and I think, yes, this was my life in Paris six years ago.
Ann Marie, Xavier, Lionel, Pascale, Juliet and I would have a bouffe - what the French call a potluck but with better food and bottles of five-franc Beaujolais - because eating and talking were ultimately cheaper and more exciting than going out. We debated the origin of blue jeans (the French always want to take credit for anything cool), the difficulties in translating American TV shows like Miami Vice (which they inappropriately call Deux Flics a Miami, which is "Two Cops in Miami." See the problem here?), the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the ominous undertones of the expression, "New World Order."
Tonight at my house we're talking in the same way. There are new issues, of course (Does gun control make a difference the rate of violent crime? Can Perry Ferrell create any worthwhile music after Jane's Addiction? Who started the "alt.fan.scott baio" user group on the Internet and can they be arrested?). The mood, however, is the same. It is: There is nothing greater or poorer than where we are now. We exist in this moment. This is enough.
I think how strange this is, how when I was in college I never once envisioned a life like this. This would have been a sort of consolation prize. We were all supposed to have careers, our futures were boundless - we were more pragmatic than hippies, more compassionate and more soulful than yuppies. Didn't Time magazine tell us in the mid-eighties that liberal arts majors were a salable commodity? No one mentioned that I would not have the biggest office, would own the same car years after it was paid off, rent for the rest of my life, and be completely, strangely, content with this reality. I have no map for how I got to this point.
i. My apartment in Paris was one room, a small kitchenette, a big bathtub smooth as a tooth. One wall was raw brick, rotting since the Revolution and crumpling onto my bed's worn cotton cover. I had a television and enough money to buy the paper every day.
That apartment had the same kind of beauty as my friend Emily's place in Long Beach. Her second-story flat is almost bare, highlighted with small, unexpected acts of art and a good scent. It is the kind of space that has three decades of paint layered on the wall and a vase of fresh flowers on the table placed with casual grace.
Is a cultural change in values mirrored in aesthetics? Is it that American society has lost the surplus income for china knickknacks and oak-veneer dinette sets and thus lost the appetite? Or is it just that Ikea brought European design to us with a good old Kmart price?
j. Renee wants to know if these values I'm talking about are transitory, if I will feel differently should Matt and I have a kid.
This throws me for a loop because I feel about kids the same way I do about religion, that it's a nice idea but I don't have the discipline to handle it.
k. It could be said that like attracts like and I am drawn to the same types of people wherever I go, or that people in urban centers live similarly all over the world, but I believe there is more to this. We are becoming older as a society; past the exuberance of childhood, the brutish and expansive teenage years, the fecundity of our twenties and are moving into our thirties and forties, where we establish priorities, acknowledge realities. We are coming to the point where western European have been for quite a while.
When I say "European," that is not an exclusion of non-Europeans ways of life. What I mean is as this Western, industrialized nation ages, the quality of middle-class people's lives and their expectations seem to be more on balance with the way Europeans have lived at least since World War II.
l. "You're confused about this European thing," my friend Thea say s. "It's just that you lived in France, and France is like a nation where everybody comes across like an unemployed actor, and now you're here in L.A....see the parallels?"
m. Although it's hard at times to recall, I was once an "up-and-comer" in the small Southwestern town where I was reared. I was going to be an editor at the New York Times when I grew up. And then I grew up.
n. "Your generation is lazy, that's all there is to it," says Hanna, a woodstock- remembering, cause-marching, career-track-this-will-look-good-on-your-resume type of person who I love profoundly but who is sometimes full of shit. "In the fifties everybody worked hard, in the sixties we liberated the social consciousness, and now you guys think you don't have to do anything. European, schmeuropean."
I think I responded: "No, my generation knows that things like middle-management jobs can and should be wiped out with one 486/66 megahertz computer and an Excel spreadsheet; that we compete for jobs with people in Singapore; that ambition doesn't have to be aimed at knowing the right people or choosing the right corporation but at creating something uniquely personal; that professionally we are bumping a ceiling made of people older than thirty-five and younger than sixty who are not even faintly near death or retirement; that we are living through the bloom of a nation at the point where the petals start to fall off."
Or maybe I said, "Yea. Whatever."
o. Strangely, perhaps, this impression of mine is underlined by architecture. By the huge modern curves of the Beverly Center squatting in contrast to everything around it, looking like a shirt-tail relation of the George Pompidou Centre in Paris. By the Third Street Promenade and its rush of people coming at you, same as they do at the Place Saint-Michel. The Sunset Plaza and how those cafes want to seem like they're just a block from the Seine. But UCLA's Sculpture Garden in all its calculated loveliness, maybe not quite as impressive as the Jardin de Luxembourg, but close enough.
Do architects create parallels to life-style? To expectations? Is this a reflection of an aging city, or just uninventive, repetitive design? I'm going to discuss this with my sister-in-law Micki. She went to school for architecture but has since discovered few creative jobs are left in her field. Still, she likes to talk about it.
p. I have a subscription to the Quality Paperback Book Club, which means that once a month I receive books I have forgotten not to order. They sit on the table, sometimes for months, in their cardboard mailing boxes. Today I have opened one and it turns out to be an anthology of American political thought. I open to a page of an essay called "Letters from an American Farmer," written by a man with an impossible long name, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, in 1782. He says America "is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who possess nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no ecclesiastical domination, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe..." And I'm thinking Beverly Hills, Billy Graham, Beatrice and Rockwell International, Watergate, Irangate, Whitewater, Nancy Reagan, Ross Perot, Barry Diller, Barneys Chevron, and Disney, too.
But then, in the last paragraph, there is this: "The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions from involuntary idleness, service dependence, penury and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample sustenance." And it occurs to me that this still works, even if my definition of sustenance is different from Mr. Long-name's.
q. "Did you read that book Generation X?" Jim asks me when I tell him the idea I have.
"Kind of," I said. "I read the first chapter and the last."
"What the fuck was that all about, anyway?" Jim seems irritated. He just started a record label out of his bedroom. He's cooked us Ethiopian food. "Have I missed something here?"
r. "Of course! You're right!" my friend Ann Marie says when I mention this European thing to her. "Americans never used to dress so good."
I am pleased someone agrees with me but, you know, I really was speaking on a more socio-spiritual level.
"Well, I think about this: Aren't teenagers today better dressed? God, we looked like a bunch of geeks when we were in high school. Remember 'new wave'? Blue hair? That was so awful." Ann Marie's on a roll now.
"What's this got to do with my theory?" I am confused.
"Think about it: When was the last time you saw a poorly dressed European?" said Ann Marie, who lived in Paris far longer than I did. "Except in England. England doesn't count."
s. "Not bloody likely" is all Louise says when I tell her this idea. She's been in America a couple of years and seems to dislike almost everyone. This is probably her perpetual state of being and not a product of geography.
"Come on, " I tell her, "isn't there something?" Some conversation? Some place?"
She surprises me with the quickness of her response: "Downtown Pasadena. The other day it reminded me of bloody Oxford Street on Christmas Eve. There were people actually walking in the streets."
t. Hanna tells me she went to dinner with some old work buddies and the first thing the group asked her was, "What are you working on?" Everyone was either at a newspaper with a big circulation or had moved up the masthead at their old publication. "No one asked about my kids," she told me. "It was as if they didn't exist."
I'm thinking about inviting Hanna over for dinner.
u. On the whole it's not bad to live like Europeans live. I believe in three-hour lunches, four week paid vacations, cigarettes after sex, cool museums, arty films, speaking more than one language, wine with dinner, cheap health care, labor unions, and lacy lingerie for sale in the grocery store (like at the UniPrix in Paris), but maybe we haven't come that far.
And if by extension, "going continental" means there is an indelible class structure in America, as there is in Europe, so be it. I do not believe every child has the same chance of becoming president someday, that Town & Country is a place where my picture will ever be, that membership in the Jonathan Club downtown is something to aspire to or that I will or should have a bigger home and more riches than my grandfather.
But that is not to say people have lost the opportunity to discover who they are or to fulfill their own private destiny. They have it now maybe more than ever.
I believe technology will offer me more time to explore the byways and sewers of my mind, that it will afford me more time with people I want to know and be close to. I believe society's most important discoveries are ahead; they have to do with redefining the responsibility of being human and living as a part of the land. It's just that now we are freed of the conventions that propelled a once-youthful nation. It has been reduced to that.
| 
