Paris, picture postcard

The charming Parisian street corner cafe. Endlessly imitated and replicated. By New Yorkers who want their very own croissants and macaroons in the Upper East Side. By Tokyo trendoids, who mix guileless admiration and an equally naive disregard for context by lovingly and uncannily recreating, cracked-mosaic tile by cracked-mosaic tile, a hyper-authentic cafe in anally accurate detail that overlooks an artificial concrete-filled and zelkova-lined canal. The Parisian cafe is an inexhaustible fund of kitsch. The sad truth about it nowadays, however, is that the endless plundering of this particular icon of modern culture has led to, by natural selection and the continuous refinement of key ingredients (good coffee, bustle of human traffic, social space, privacy in public), a triumph for its conscientious students who have far outstripped the original. Weaned on the modern franchised equivalents, the visitor to Paris in search of centers of cafe culture is likely to be disappointed. The dull gleam of those iconic sidewalk tables and the dowdy wicker chairs in green and yellow weave could do with some freshening up. The service is a little too curt, the waiters too surly, the peeling paint pushing the limits of charm and tending towards a queasy sense of decay. And, hey, when was the last time they scrubbed down those smudgy window panes?

The truth is, not only is the search-and-rescue of these authentic cafe specimens often a fruitless and stubborn quest, but also evidence of unthinking worship of a pretty outdated archetype - one that means little except when consumed in situ . More progressive cafes in cities that like them that way are souped-up hyper-cafes, social spaces enhanced with wondrous organic set lunches on the menu, free WiFi, design and architecture mags, fair-trade sustainable-labor low-calorie caffeine-free wheatgrass-boosted beverages for a demanding audience. They are your lifestyle nodes, connectivity platforms, environmental rights watchdogs, ambient music retreats.

What Paris cafes (in Paris) offer you is rather feeble in comparison - the rights to a fraying aesthetic integrity that rings increasingly hollow (Paris invented style, but no longer has the patent on it), the distant consolations of history and myth, a romance that requires the absolute complicity of the devoted Francophile for the experience to hold together...What Paris offers you additionally however is the freedom from images. By which I mean not postcard museum-city images but rather the pop metropolis imagery of the postmodern sort that makes our cafes look like Scandinavian furniture showrooms, or contemporary art galleries, or fashion boutiques, those kinds of mixed-use multi-functional spaces of conscientious design. Paris, especially when understood in the context of the other three that make up the Big Four, represents anti-design, or at least a resistance to re-design. This isn't to say that Pop hasn't made any headway in Paris, of course, but for the most part historical context and faithfulness to itself and its past weighs too heavy in the balance for much re-engineering of this city's image of itself to take place. To look at Paris is not to look for aesthetic aspiration or innovation, but rather for aesthetic independence. Paris gives you the master copy from which a million copies emerged, and one feels uneasy when confronted by this; unelaborated, unenhanced, referencing nothing but itself. You might not be used to the relative simplicity of this primitive order of signification; here is a hermetic, non-hybrid city of self-completion and pedigree. Paris, the lone modernist pitstop in an inter-urban network of cross-reference?