The French phrase “Bof, c’est normal” - “bof” is an untranslatable French verbal shrug - fascinated me, so, at The Paris Metro, I wrote about the French reluctance to be shocked by any human antics, all waved away as “normal.” A short story called “A Slit Skirt” about a vagrant exploring the underside of Paris found its way into print but is probably best forgotten. Theft may be a tribute, just as cultural difference may be a stimulant. “I have stolen many things from your cinema,” Anderson told the Paris audience at the premiere. They were guides to unimagined possibility, so different in pacing and theme and structure from much of Hollywood. France was liberating, just as the movies of Godard, Renoir, Truffaut and Varda clearly were for Anderson. I discovered that, despite appearances, I was born an outsider. The magazine was a popular success that might have benefited from Howitzer’s attention to expense accounts. Heck, Parisians, whatever their sophistication, needed tough, raw American journalism to see their city and culture anew. At The Paris Metro, we all thought we were living a charmed life, however straitened our individual circumstances might be. The whiff of garlic, sauvignon blanc and Gauloises was still strong on the early-morning subway and there was still a horse butcher on every other block. I explored the redevelopment of the Les Halles wholesale food market - then a gaping hole in the center of the city - and wrote about a suburban warehouse disco that was drawing a chic crowd all the way from St. The tone was more Village Voice than The French Dispatch, and it was a thrilling way to start in journalism. I arrived in Paris in 1975, just as The French Dispatch was ending its life, and later began work for a fortnightly American magazine called The Paris Metro, whose brief but passionate life extended from 1976 to 1978. can facilitate artistic reinvention and afford the space to dream.
It evokes how French sensuality and style and beauty and surly realism - so completely distinct from can-do American optimism and the functional drabness of Main Street U.S.A. Rather, Anderson’s nostalgia-laced film is about an old subject: the American writer in Paris.
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