This Saturday I made an abortive attempt to visit the Porte de Vanves fleamarket. Coming topside from the Metro, I began looking for the telltale signs of Marchés aux Puces: an outer ring of knockoff hawkers, fake D&G and Diesel belts dangling from their fingers; rows of panel vans behind peripheral markets of cheap shoes, clothes and tools; a general flow of people towards some unseen destination just outside the boulevard Periphique. Saturday I saw none of this as I went up and down boulevard Brune, asking directions and getting vague instructions (“Derriere, derriere, derriere…”) until I found myself on av Marc Sangnier, facing the Lycée Francois Villon, and discovered that the Marché aux Puces – which my Paris Pratique declared was at that very spot – was nowhere to be found.

But…perhaps the map was wrong? Maybe the Marché had migrated since publication? I made my way down rue de porte de Vanves, across the periphique, in a last-ditch reconnaissance.. As I passed over the roaring weekend beltway, something caught my eye: down the resolutely shut-up, empty village streets of Malakoff, I could see a building – obviously a bar – giddily dripping with signs and figures and plaques. It was a happy facade amidst so many shuttered, uncaring or unfriendly ones, and I knew instantly I had to check it out.

As I approached, its decorative frolics warmed me in the brisk greying afternoon. Acorner doorway faced the Periph and Paris. Above it, on either side, were two neon signs proclaiming “Le Timbre Post – Pub & Restaurant.” Two tin Nestle ads stood between them, a plastic Santa Claus below, a perched Guinness toucan above, another neon and the weathered statues of Alsatian couple crowning the ensemble.

The wall to the right had its share of paraphernelia, but the left wall was a commercial bedlam, with painted ceramic jazz clowns posted between the windows and the glowing Fosters, Guinness, Leffe, Alken and Pecheur signs. I hadn’t eaten a thing, but the aspect of this place, so absurdly prosaic on these terse streets, yet so obviously honest and local, exhorted me to test the interior, and take a liquid lunch.

Le Timbre Poste has fourteen beers à la pression, an uncommon virtue in a land whose liver prefers grape to hop. I take a Guinness. It is drawn correctly.It is Saturday at 3:30pm – a dead hour in this suburb and this season. The dining room is empty save one couple in the back .At the front the proprietors, or the staff, eat a late lunch with a couple of friends or family, watching rugby. An old, creasy regular drinks at my elbow on the short zinc. He watches the game wordless, and groans at the hard hits.

Another regular comes in, younger, stouter, balder than the first. He is joined by a black dog, lanky, moustachioed and friendly. The dog trots in to inquire of the kitchen, his owner takes a small wine in a large hand and turns to the rugby. I am accorded no lingering stares nor sidelong glances. As an interloper in a parochial watering hole, and a foriegner at that, an unremarked, anonymous reception is, in my opinion, the most favorable one can hope for. I was content. I nursed my beer and inspected the decor. It confirmed expectation.

To catalog all the “stuff” inside Le Timbre Poste would be a pointless exercise. Here, however, is a representative selection: balsa ocean liners, aluminum plane models, climbing tin monkeys, black and white movie stills, painted ceramic pirates, vintage and repro tin plaques, art nouveau beer and theater posters, cartoon character statuettes, a laughing cow lighted sign,whiskey-brand neon clocks…in short, a liberal collection of commercial schwag and popular bric-a-brac.
Now “stuff”, or rather, “lots of stuff”, is by no means a unique decorative strategy and, like any decorative strategy it has both its virtues and flaws, it better and worse applications, and people whose taste or aesthetics are more or less sympathetic to it. I fall in the former category, having always been a bit of a packrat. But though I am not critical of “lots of stuff”, I am certainly critical within it. I am friendly to bric-a-brac, guarded against kitsch, but rather opposed to camp. The line is very fine and subjective, but I think it is best betrayed by a sense of intention. A campy profusion insinuates subjection; it relies on snide humor, and asks you to surrender to its bad taste. A successful bric-a-brac or kitsch is a more sincere offering; it laughs but does not condescend, it touches a cultural nostalgia, rather than teases it. Personally, I prefer something that asks naively to be enjoyed, to being asked to enjoy something pitifully. This naitvete may be a symptom of false consciousness, and kitsch may be an instrument of capital and a parody of aesthetic consciousness, but I am not a Marxist, and am not so stingy with the simple plastic joys I would permit the public, or myself. But that is a body of questions for another day.

Le Timbre Post is a successful bric-a-brac of kitsch. It is nostalgic, but not exceptionally sentimental or melodramatic. If so much of the early theoretical anxieties about kitsch centered on its danger to art, I think Le Timbre Post would provide a solid rebuttal. It is so without pretension, so incapable of seriousness, so solely occupied with simple visual diversions that the idea of it substituting for any form spiritual or aesthetic catharsis seems absurd. “But it is all ads! All schwag! All images of consumption!” would rail Red academics. And they would be right. But they would be wrong to think, in this day an age, that such images, and such a collection of images, could much more pernicious influence than a pastoral toile de jouy wallpaper. More spectacular, yes, more vulgar and garish, certainly. But dead schwag sells nothing, and a profusion of it does not so much sell the idea of selling, or any true commercial bounty, as it does offer a confection – maybe oversweet – of pop-commerce history, that most educated, contemporary palates should be able to suck on both naïvely, and for its naïveté. Then again, maybe I have just stopped worrying, and learned to love the Bomb.

I finish my beer and dismount from the bar. I pay, thank the hostess, snap a few shots, nod my au revoirs to the rugby-absorbed regulars, and return to the empty Malakoff streets. No fleamarket today, but upon reflection I would say – with perhaps the cheekiness Bush has lended the phrase – “Mission Accomplished”. I had found a corner of the attic of civilization, but one with a cold tap. I had slaked two thirsts.