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"BONJOUR SUMMER”

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DRAGONS IN PARISIAN ATTIC ROOMS

Dear Croissant,

This Sunday, breakfast is a glass of wine during a medieval siege of our tower. To eat, meat pie (it’s the closest thing to pastry that appears in this serie). Of course, it is poisoned right up to the table; everyone knows that in "Game of Thrones," you win or you die.

The air in Paris feels like it's coming out of an oven, and in the chambres de bonne they are, we are, at 40,6°C. Well, not in mine, at least not for now. I’m lucky; mine is small but it has 3 windows and 2 fireplaces. Destiny brings unexpected gifts; I always wanted to live in a Parisian attic room with an antique fireplace, and now I got not one but two. Cool fireplaces, though, making fires is forbidden.

Despite the heat, I feel like watching "Game of Thrones." Don't they say you fight fire with fire? The original title of the books is "A Song of Ice and Fire," a high fantasy book series by George R.R. Martin, and it strikes me as a completely summery title alongside the story's own setting: a fantasy medieval world where winters and summers last for centuries. Sounds like today's climate change, right?

MY DRAGON FRIEND

Divina, my friend, is catching up on GOT (Game of Thrones), which ended 7 years ago now. The night the final episode aired, I stayed over at Josephine's house, it was her birthday that night, and I watched the last chapter live with her family at 4 in the morning. Disappointment tastes better with coffee, friends, and birthday leftovers. I think I ate cake. Flashing back to those years, from the moment the series premiered, we watched our favorite characters die for 8 years, with waits of up to 2 years for a new season. She, Divina, is lucky; I used to watch every episode as it came out so I wouldn't get spoiled. For her, so much time has passed that spoilers don't even pop up in the feed of any app. I wanted to join her even though I’ve seen all the seasons many times; I love “chismes” (gossip), I love medieval “chismes”. These weeks, they are releasing the third season of "House of the Dragon"; now there you really see plenty of dragons burning things and a family tearing each other apart. I can't wait for the series to end, for 7 years to pass, and for Divina to catch up so we can “chisme” it together. She is really lucky.

MOUSTACHE KNIGHT

So there you have it, I'm in Paris, I live in a tower, I have two fireplaces, and every day I go to work at a medieval library (Forney)—where Nostradamus used to live while reading the horoscope to kings from his bed and making lemon marmalade (this story is 100% real and deserves a whole series of Living For Breakfast), meanwhile, I'm watching dragons burn things down. Anyone would think it's 2026. The illustration of the Dragon made of books is reading alongside Saint George on the roof of the Forney Library, one of my favorite places in Paris and the world. BY THE WAY, tomorrow, Sunday, I am going to see an exhibition of medieval unicorns at the Cluny Museum. I'll tell you all about it soon.

HIGH FANTASY

Picking up on the themes of previous articles about narratives, science fiction, dystopia and utopia, the universe of "Game of Thrones" is a medieval High Fantasy (Spoiler: the Middle Ages weren't like that). The term High Fantasy refers to a subgenre of fantasy that is set in an imaginary world with epic narrative. The term was introduced by Lloyd Alexander in his essay "High Fantasy and Heroic Romance," published in 1971. You know I love finding connections, and High Fantasy was created in the 70s, the same era as Brutalism? Let's talk about that, now indeed, between bites of a croissant.

AN AESTHETIC THAT NEVER WAS

When recreating a period story, the challenge for film art direction is to make it believable. To achieve this, modern codes of makeup, physique, wardrobe, and props are often used. In GOT, which is not a real historical period, the licenses can be broad: in the wardrobe, we see a mix of the medieval era with the Renaissance and contemporary haute couture. The major contribution of this series to our real world was the trend, which still exists, of silver hair and minimalist haute couture patterns worn by Queen Daenerys Targaryen. The story tells the struggle for power within a civilization that regressed from a previous, technologically & magically much more advanced one that created the dragons.

In that world, Dragonstone remains from that previous civilization, a wonderful example of Gothic Brutalist architecture. Brutalism is an aesthetic and, above all, architectural movement from the 1970s that seeks to disrupt the landscape, to be massive, giant, and unnatural, hence the word Brutal. We tend to think that time is linear and that each era is more developed than the last, but this is just the narrative we have created in the West to justify that we are the best right now. Regressions have always existed. By this, I don't mean there were flying cars next to the pyramids and we lost them later, not at all. But in the history of our culture, we have the Middle Ages as a clear example, and it could happen again. Now that you know this, I hope you see this series & narratives differently.

TIME MIGHT NOT BE LINEAR

Another series that deals with this theme of civilizational regression is "The Wheel of Time," based on the book saga of the same name written by Robert Jordan. Here we see a medieval world mixed with India and Middle Eastern cultures, featuring Brutalist futurism in the parts where we visit the past. The title itself explains the plot, and the characters reincarnate throughout the turning wheels of the passage of time.

THE PARIS SKY COVERED IN DRAGONS

I am writing in front of my window at home, my tower; I am very fortunate not to be hot, and even more fortunate to live here for the next 2 months. Dreams do come true; they have their own whimsical timing to reach you, but they come true. When I watch these series, read a book, a comic, or admire a piece of clothing, I always think: "someone made it, someone had the vision before it existed." That's what happens with art, until you visualize it, it doesn't exist. It happens to me constantly; it's not enough to just sit down and draw, you have to sit down and enter a sort of trance-like vision in which you see where the work wants to go, and then, the path appears. It's not enough to just sit down and draw, but it is the necessary beginning. That's why you have to trust the process and the path. I'm going to take a little sip of my coffee.