welcome to the fun house

In my unofficial status as a café sociologist and streetwalking ethnologist of this complicated and surprising country, I am prone to grand and baseless pronouncements which I feel comfortable stating unequivocally. Such as: every café and brasserie in Paris is decorated in the same fashion: mirrors on every wall. And it is not only in the fancy cafés where very small dogs accompany very old ladies; it is also in the shadier varieties in which very old men play the French LOTO and Euromillions (I have, as of late, been trying to insinuate myself into this specific subculture. The increase of eagerness in my new venture is directly proportional to the decreasing status of my bank account. Next blog? Anyone?). In a society in which direct contact is thought of as untoward and a sign of bad education, the elliptical glancing which the mirror makes possible is a convenient option for the curious café goer.
The café provides that third place as safe haven if astronomical Parisian real-estate has sequestered you into a "studio" or co-habitation. As the favorite Parisian third place, the café is attractive as long as it is tied to its own displacement. The statistical increase of cafés on street intersections and in the vicinities of train stations, bus stops and metro exits promises to provide this sensation of transience where nothing will be stable and no one will hold you accountable. Every signal emitted in a mirror-clad café comes back with the same questioning glance with which it was produced. Everything becomes a mirror image of itself and of something else. Whatever un/conscious anxieties propelled you to this non-place are unexpectedly attenuated by the sheer multiplication of images supplied by the mirrors. Identity and destination can be comfortably lost in such numbers.