Le Téléphone Redux

Cara--Tuesday

Cara remains this week incommunicado in Cuba...and so this post from the past on "ancient" communication abilities seems particularly appropriate. :)

In the early 90's Parisians were getting rid of le télépone comme ça.  France and Europe had jumped to cell technology faster because of their archaic land line system.

Much easier for them to grab on to the 'new' technology. Far faster than we did. I remember thinking how cool and special that was. How advanced.

One time in the Marais, a hairdresser, had come out of the coiffeur salon in Place du Marché Saint Catherine.

This was a warm afternoon, a time to sit in cafés in the square.

He had a cell phone to his ear, gesticulated with a cigarette in his hand during a conversation and sipped an espresso from a cup he'd set on the hood of parked car.

He was poetry in motion involved in a very intense phone call. In the middle of it, he'd gotten a call from another cell phone he had pulled from his pocket. Two cell phones! Was it his mistress? His wife?

He managed all of this; the two phone calls, smoking and sipping from his demitasse in pure acrobatic fashion.

This is Bernard Henri-Levy the rockstar philosopher, not the coiffeur but it reminded me of him and to give you an idea. Also, I remember he wore a white shirt, the buttons undone to almost his navel and gold chains. Marseilleise? Corsican coiffeur? But whatever he managed all this with a certain style, a panache, a je ne sais quo manner that I've never forgotten.

Especially when today on the street all one sees is robot-like behavior with people at that cell phone texting stance which brooks no human contact. In Asia they even have walking lanes

Ah, those were the days when cell phones were part of life, not life.

--Cara