A Dyke A Broad #57
A #Paris Racetrack Adventure at the Bois de Vincennes. #Photos. Plus a five word review of racetrack cuisine.
Hello from Paris!
On Thursday I had an adventure. I managed to find a working Velib’, a city bike, whose only defect was that it squealed like a stuck pig every time I touched my brakes, and wound my way on a forest path to the racetrack in the Bois de Vincennes. For a couple of hours, I had someone else’s life, watching the horses thunder around the tracks, and eavesdropped among the other racegoers tallying up their losses and wins. “I can’t believe that horse is running again. Didn’t we see it on a bill just two weeks ago?”
It was really cold, and after a while, I decided to look for an entry to the enclosed stands a couple levels up that I could see from the concrete bleachers outside. The ground floor was plenty warm, but was like a dingy bus station with neon lights, an overpriced snack bar, and zombies with glazed eyes clutching tickets and staring at the TVs showing races happening elsewhere in France, or just outside.
When I finally found a stairway, I ended up in a fancier room with same TVs, though a door led outside to an enormous empty patio which on one side overlooked a parking lot and the beginning of the forest. The other overlooked the finish line, and had an exterior staircase leading down to the enclosure where winners had their picture taken, panting and snorting after the excitement of the race, and ignoring the humans that posed with them. I don’t think I was supposed to be there. But who cares? I only wished I had a fat cigar like the guy out there in his fancy coat and leather gloves.
The real adventure began when I got cold again, went in and took a stairway to the third floor, wandering around in a giant shuttered restaurant overlooking the course, until the place creeped me out, and I took the nearest staircase to go back down. Big mistake. It was some kind of service stairs and the door leading to the second floor was locked. So was the door to the first. And to the ground floor. Even when the staircase door finally opened up in the basement, there was still no apparent exit.
By then, I may have begun to panic a little. I checked my phone for a cell signal and imagined the humiliation of having to call the cops and say I was trapped somewhere in the bowels of the racetrack. No, I didn’t know where. No, I didn’t go there on purpose. Please don’t arrest me for terrorism, just a rare moment of curiosity.
I scurried down the hall, and threw open door after door. Behind one I discovered the guts of the building with a lot of throbbing pipes and flashing metal boxes. Another led to a shabby office. Finally I saw gleaming doors which seemed to belong to an elevator. I pushed the button to call it, and miraculously it came. One button seemed to promise the ground floor, so I pushed that. And pushed it again. By now the doors had closed. And I had the time to think,“Great. Now I’m trapped in the elevator.” before it finally groaned, and rose a few feet. I held my breath until the doors finally opened, revealing a public area full of other humans who had not lost or found their way. I may have giggled like a madwoman, snorting behind my mask.
No one has ever scampered so quickly from an elevator. I was a little afraid that it would keep me, and drag me back down to… wherever I’d been. The basement? Hades? Limbo? I wish I’d taken a photo—down there in the building’s guts. Or in that endless staircase. Just to prove it wasn’t a dream.
Maybe it was. Pulled up from my subconscious. My childhood. At least for a while my grandparents were seasonal workers at Churchill Downs in Louisville. I remember going with them on a day like Thursday when there were races, but nothing special like the Derby, just modest pots, middling horses, empty stands. The greatest thrill wasn’t the horses, but the fact that my grandmother in her crisp white blouse was in charge of the elevator. She was so important that all the men heading up to the VIP club—fat cigars in their faces—greeted her by name. “This is my granddaughter,” she said, and they treated me like royalty, too. Even that got boring after a while, and I wandered around for a while, ignoring the people and the horses as they did their thing.
At that moment, was I myself, a weird solitary kid who would become a weird solitary girl complete in herself, or was I a member of the mysterious Generation X, a nexus of change, born in a world in which telephones had circular dials, then coming of age with push buttons, which became enormous portable phones, then tiny objects offering not just instantaneous and perpetual video but constant connection to everything simultaneously? All I know is that I am happy when I remember the world in the flesh, and move blurrily through it, welcoming its indifference. & I don’t need your eyes on me to exist.
In Other News
You’re Already Living in the Metaverse
A thought-provoking article from Antonio García Martínez about how the metaverse is re-defining real life, including the traditional role of geography in politics.
Historically, the swirl of culture, media, and moral narratives that frame human life followed the contours of language, religion and tribe, which eventually coalesced into nation-states. That colored shape on the map, labeled ‘France’ or ‘Texas’ or whatever, defined your narrative world given the traffic in books and images still followed the paths of people and commerce. Only those living in the liminal intersection of two cultural worlds—say, someone like me raised in the Anglo/Latin entrepot of Miami—would be forced to constantly navigate entirely different worldviews.
The metaverse decoupled the movement of information from the movement of matter, bits from atoms, which is the real radical change in replacing reality with a virtual version. Now, everyone is a cultural in-betweener, living a somewhat dissociated life between the mental world they’ve constructed with the aid of screens and algorithms, and the physical world that both feeds them and imposes a legal framework. If you look closely, every major debate in the culture war is over which narrative to pluck from the virtual realm and use as a guide for the ‘real’ world that is now downstream of the digital version.
Techies will literally invent an entirely new plane of human existence rather than offering to fix the pressing problems of the ‘meatspace’ world. The problem, once again, is that we’re all willing to follow them there, and make the real world subordinate to the metaverse one.
If you don’t know the writer Wesley Yang, check him out. I was pretty impressed by his collection of essays the Souls of Yellow Folk, but he has an even more ambitious project going on now—trying to figure out the U.S. Especially the American Left.
And last but not least…
Insights from Twitter
and…
That’s it for this time.
Disgruntledly yours,