I don't speak much French and have only spent a few weeks in the city all told, but the romanticism of Paris sometimes appears inexplicable... no thanks to writ

I don't speak much French and have only spent a few weeks in the city all told, but the romanticism of Paris sometimes appears inexplicable... no thanks to writers like this! I wonder what it was like in the 1960s and 1970s? This week I finally sat down and watched Alphaville[0], a 1965 French science fiction film about a dystopian future in which 1960s computing technology (and period Parisian architecture) spawns an all-knowing, all-controlling artificial intelligence with the cunningly original scheme to supersede humans. It is full of brilliant tidbits, from memoire centrale to "I would like to telecommunicate" [...] "Local or galactic?" and perhaps proto-instagrammery if you squint right. The film is well worth a look if you're in an appropriate mood. Produced in 1965, the 1970s saw the introduction of the Concorde[1] and the construction of seedy G's[2], which now seems such a scathingly retro monument to French brutalist modernism, and yet another layer of Paris... what an interesting city! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle_Airport