Cindy Shapiro

I leave in four days. I'm making the mental shift to being in Paris, and focusing hard on the work that I'm supposed to be doing there. Jack was saying last night that this is my time in Paris. That it's all for me. But I respectfully disagree with that notion. "Me time" in my view is time at a spa, or in the bathtub, perhaps getting a manicure, generally hanging out. What I'm about to go do in France is not about luxuriating in the nothingness of being temporarily untethered.

Here is what it's about for me:

It's about fulfilling my role as an artist.

An artist's role, no matter what the medium (dance, painting, sculpture, photography, poetry, composition)

AND regardless of what some of the actual text may be (prose, poetry or lyrics) is to be in

       subtext

conversation with others about the state of being human.

This is an important societal function. 

This is what I aim to fulfill when I'm in Paris working. 

I have three weeks to go until I leave for Paris, and I am having trouble shutting my mind off. That is one of the goals of the exercise: excluding the "cogitate" part of the brain in favor of the "experience" part. Some strange and big changes have occurred to my family and me over the last couple of weeks. They are preoccupying my frontal lobe to no end, torturing me at night, and disenabling good focus on other tasks during the day.

The exercise in psychogeography that I intend to execute upon my arrival in Paris is one in which the person on the drift through the cityscape walks without goal, but remains in an exquisite state of awareness while drinking in the urban experience. This has been done since the days of Charles Baudelaire. The Surrealists did it to uncork unconscious thought and then took to their studios to paint. The Situationists did it to try to decode social hierarchy inherent in the built environment. I'm doing it to try to understand my lifelong fascination with the city of Paris (feels past-life-y) and to then tap into the experience for musical expression.

I worry about my tendency to worry, however... My everyday concerns will certainly accompany my mind and soul as I board a plane and alight in the City of Lights. 

My task is to consciously stop being conscious. 

Paul Gavarni, Le Flâneur, 1842.