Epoisses image from Le Guide des Fromages
In the August 17 LA Times, Jay Handal, chairman of the Greater West Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, comments on the Wilshire bus only lanes approved by the City Council: "You can't take a third of the drivable lanes from people who are already stuck in traffic for 45 minutes. Take a guy who earns a half-million dollars a year. He's going to drive to a parking lot and get on a bus? I don't think so."
2 Days in Paris reveals this banality of Botox Hill Gucci Gangsters as the ugly American's universal revulsion. Julie Delpy's film, plastered with clichés, intended as farce, becomes wretched realism through Adam Goldberg's Jack, a New Yorker who refuses to take the subway.
Yes, they do exist: Upper East Side descendants of Tom Wolfe's Sherman McCoy but also Hell's Kitchen gentrifying professional hipsters who brandish Bush bashing but gushed over Giuliani when he "scrubbed the city" of its poor--and now, with chief scrubber Bratton in L.A., the battle line moves.
Our hero, Delpy's father, the American vision of French rudeness, discreetly scrapes a key into the sides of Citroëns, Peugots, Renaults parked on the sidewalk as he grins in broken English.
Paris has become l'enfer pour la voiture: former one-way high-speed corridors converted to two-way streets, bikes for rent with lanes partout, and concrete barriers allowing buses to race by traffic on schedule.
The political impossibility and necessity of sending L.A. automobilistes to hell begins on Wilshire Boulevard.
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