LA VIE PARISIENNE
LA VIE PARISIENNE:
LA VIE PARISIENNE (magazine):
There was considerably more censorship of magazines that admitted their purpose was titillation, but La Vie Parisienne, founded in 1863 and relaunched just before World War I, managed to mix discreet nudes with spicy fiction and humor and still gain widespread acceptance because it was reasonably sophisticated, a quality nearly as respected in France as art.
'La Vie Parisienne' was one of the more famous and well-known of specifically Parisienne magazines. Originally intended as a guide to the privileged social and artistic life in the French capital, it soon evolved into a mildly risqué publication in which illustrations of scantily clad damsels abounded. It was all done in very good taste though it had more than its fair share of detractors. General Pershing for one is said to have personally warned American servicemen against purchasing the magazine - for little good that would have done. 'La Vie Parisienne' was also banned in certain countries such as neighboring Belgium for instance, though in war-time it appeared that such silly regulations were not always adhered to.
The magazine was very popular and spawned a number of pre-war imitators, such as 'Le Sourire', 'Le Rire', 'Le Regiment', 'Fantasio' and others. As a source of erotica, 'la Vie Parisienne' was by far overshadowed by its (foreign) reputation. A reputation that was certainly undeserved, for apart from some slightly revealing drawings of lightly clad ladies or the occasional tastefully executed art-nouveau nude illustration, the magazine was not much more than a high class literary humor magazine. Supposedly infamous for its private advertisements, these small personal ads were seldom much more than classic lonely-hearts or marriage-seeking personals. The French war-time practice of 'Marraines' (Godmothers) 'adopting' soldiers at the front was in the eyes of some cause for potential scandalous behavior. 'La Vie Parinsienne' did indeed carry a disproportionately large number of such requests from lonely soldiers, several pages being regularly devoted to Allied soldiers' search for a French 'Marraine'.
FLANEUR:
Flâneur" is a French word. A flâneur is a detached pedestrian observer of a metropolis, a 'gentleman stroller of city streets', first identified by Charles Baudelaire. The word has no exact equivalent in English. The concept of the flâneur is important in the work of Walter Benjamin, is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity, and has become meaningful in architecture and urban planning.
Around 1850, Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire's phrase, 'a botanist of the sidewalk', an analytical connoisseur of the urban fabric. Because he coined the word about Parisians, the 'flâneur' (the one who strolls) and the 'flânerie' (the stroll) are associated with Paris and the kind of pedestrian environment which accommodates leisurely exploration.The Flâneur is typically well aware of their slow, leisurely behaviour and had been known to exemplify this state of being by walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris.
Walter Benjamin adopted this concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool, and as a lifestyle. From his Marxist standpoint Benjamin describes the flâneur as a product of modern life and the Industrial Revolution, unprecedented in history and definitely of a certain social class, parallel to the advent of the tourist. His flâneur is an uninvolved but highly perceptive bourgeois dilettante. Benjamin became his own prime example, gathering his social and aesthetic observations from long walks through Paris. Even the title of his unfinished Arcades Project comes from his affection for covered shopping streets.
In the context of current architecture and urban planning, designing for flâneurs is one way to approach issues of the psychological aspects of the built environment. Architect Jon Jerde, for instance, designed his Horton Plaza and Universal CityWalk projects around the idea of providing surprises, distractions, and sequences of events for pedestrians.
ABOUT:
More than a million people took the elevator to the top of the Eiffel tower when it was opened at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. The Eiffel Tower, the tallest building in the world at the time, was France's answer to the Crystal Palace of the 1851 Great Exhibition.
Paris is the capital of France. It is a leading global cultural center and is renowned for its defining neo-classical architecture as well as its unrivaled influence in fashion and the arts. Nicknamed "the City of Light" or "Gay Paree" since the 19th century, Paris has a reputation as a "romantic" city.
Since the 1860s to the 1940s, Paris has been a remarkable crucible of creativity. The aesthetic debates of that decade were central to the formal direction modern painting, literature, and music would take. Walter Benjamin called Paris "the capital of the 19th century".
Baron Haussmann's massive renovation of the city created amazing perspectives and broad boulevards, but also replaced poorer neighborhoods and created fast routes to move troops through the city to quell unrest. Yet there was also a second Paris at the limits of Haussmann's city on the hill of Montmartre with her windmills, cabarets and vineyards. Café culture, cabarets, arcades (19th century covered malls), anarchism, the mixing of classes, the radicalization of art and artistic movements caused by the academic salon system, a boisterous willingness to shock… all this made for a stunning vibrancy.
Although briefly challenged during the early 20th century by Weimar Berlin, Paris remained the cultural capital of the western world until WWII. It exercised a magnetic attraction upon several generations of artists and intellectuals, large numbers of whom migrated to the French capital from all over the world.
After World War II, Paris lost its position as cultural capital of the world to New York, which became the focal point of new artistic movements.
Modern art was introduced to America during World War I when a number of the artists in the Montmartre and Montparnasse Quarters of Paris, France fled the War. Francis Picabia (1879–1953), was responsible for bringing Modern Art to New York City.
The word discotheque stands for record library. Discotheques were the first places where recordings were played instead of live bands, they were clandestine nightclubs in Paris during WWII where recordings of American jazz artists were played.
Discotheques originated in occupied Paris during the Second World War. The Nazis banned jazz and closed many of the dance clubs, breaking up jazz groups and driving fans into illicit cellars to listen to recorded music. One of these venues - on the rue Huchette - called itself La Discothèque. Then Paul Pacine opened the Whiskey a Go-Go, where dancers would hit the floor accompanied by records played by disc jockeys on a phonograph. Pacine went on to open other clubs in Europe, while in Paris Chez Régine opened in 1960, catering to the self-styled beautiful people. The upmarket thrills of Régine's enjoyed by the American jet-set in turn inspired New York's Le Club, although it didn't last long, closing soon after a new venue in New York took off in 1961: the Peppermint Lounge.
The inter-war years were another period of consolidated growth for Paris's homosexual subcultures. Though not as spectacularly visible as those of Weimar Berlin, the other major European center of glbtq life of the time, Paris of the 1920s and 1930s offered a range of venues and social pleasures for gay men, lesbians, and their friends.
The French kept jazz alive during the war by listening to New Orleans and swing-era music on records and inventing the discotheque as an underground place to do so. After the war many French fans, who never developed a taste for more progressive jazz, opened clubs around the country featuring New Orleans music. And the Americans returned in force, some to live for a while, others to stay forever.
Perhaps because the French have a knack for maintaining traditions, they still support quite a few jazz clubs that opened forty or fifty years ago. Caveau de la Huchette, at 5 rue de la Huchette, a main street in the Latin Quarter, has survived since 1946, un demi-siècle, or a half-century, as its advertisements boast. Lionel Hampton and Art Blakey played there, and the club still celebrates the fact that it was once the scene of a huge jam session led by Sidney Bechet, a national hero in France. Caveau de la Huchette belongs to Dany Doriz, a vibes player who also owns the Slow Club, at 130 rue de Rivoli. His are the two oldest surviving clubs in the city. Both present blues, swing, and New Orleans music and cater to people who want to dance.
The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was supposedly a brand-new city, equipped with boulevards, cafés, parks, and suburban pleasure grounds--the birthplace of those habits of commerce and leisure that constitute "modern life." Questioning those who view Impressionism solely in terms of artistic technique, T. J. Clark describes the painting of Manet, Degas, Seurat, and others as an attempt to give form to that modernity and seek out its typical representatives--be they bar-maids, boaters, prostitutes, sightseers, or petits bourgeois lunching on the grass. The central question of The Painting of Modern Life is this: did modern painting as it came into being celebrate the consumer-oriented culture of the Paris of Napoleon III, or open it to critical scrutiny? The revised edition of this classic book includes a new preface by the author.
Not surprisingly, The Painting of Modern of Life has been negatively "reviewed" by every major writer (except Greil Marcus) who has devoted more than a paragraph to it. The manner in which The New York Times responded to it may be paradigmatic: it chose to publish two "reviews" of Clark's book, one devoted to Clark's "politics" and one devoted to his "aesthetics," precisely because his book is an attempt to supercede the contradiction between politics and aesthetics. In its "review" of the "politics" of The Painting of Modern Life, the NYT claimed that "ultimately [Clark] remains weighed down by the chains of ideology"; in its "review" of the book's "aesthetics," it claimed that Clark's book is "seriously flawed" in its lack of attention to the Impressionist painters' concern with "light and color." One isn't sure which is the more preposterous: the ridiculous content of the respective "reviews," or their spectacular separation from each other.
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Paris