Tuesday 11 November 2014

Paris bulletin 8 2014


Le onze novembre, a bright, clear day. I picture all those hundreds of uniformed men and women milling around Westminster, and the old men in wheelchairs, the gnarled old men their chests heavy with medals, their legs useless. Saluted and saluting.
Living where I do in Paris, I have no sense of how the remembrance of ‘the Great War’ - the war that was supposed to end all wars but only set the scene for all the others since - is marked officially. I’d have to go down to the Champs Elysees, not far as the crow flies, but as I feel today, a world away.
Until the end of this month there is an exhibition of Great War photographs at the Gare de l’Est - portraits of the last living poilus (squaddies), images of landscapes and objects, taken by Didier Pazery. It’s both inside the station itself and on the railings outside that station which, more than any other Parisian station was the bridging point between the fronts to the north and east and ‘back home’.

Among the photos is one of an old Senegalese man. He’s standing outside his home, a tin- roofed hut with grass walls.
Abdoulaye N'Diaye outside his home
 
There is text alongside each of the photos. Here is an extract from what his says:
Abdoulaye N’Diaye, born 1894, conscripted into the French Army in 1914. Wounded in Belgium but continued to serve in both the Dardanelles and the Somme.
“I was woken at dawn. “Soukoundou, the son of your uncle has been forced to join the French army. I didn’t hesitate. The next day before sunrise I saddled my horse and I went to find Soukoundou. I got him released in exchange for signing up myself. My uncle and his family had always been very good to me. I was strong and fit.
“When we got to Thiaroye, near Dakar they put us into uniform and then we were taken by boat to Morocco where we carried out a number of missions. One day they told us that we were to go to the white man’s country (le pays des blancs) where a war had broken out. I never saw a white man, until I was in my teens.
“The white man’s country was deserted. The Germans had blown up a bridge so we had to cut our way through the undergrowth like we would do in the bush. That’s when I found the body of a woman. She was dead but her little baby was still at her breast. The horror of that sight has stayed with me to this day. It was my first corpse but I saw many more after that.
“France forgot us once we weren’t needed any more. France had promised that we would be recognised, that our efforts would be rewarded, our losses would be recompensed, but she didn’t keep her promise for years after and when she did, the pension we were paid was very small.”
At the end of last month I went to see ‘Of Men and  War’ (directed by Laurent Becue-Renard), in le cinema du Pantheon at the top rue Victor Cousin in the Quartier Latin.
                                                               
 It’s a little over two hours long and documents a series of therapeutic sessions with a group of American veterans (from Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam), and some interviews with their partners/families. Mostly you’re with these angry, depressed, incoherent men. Big strong men, sheltering behind dark glasses, talking, shouting, weeping, cursing the horrors that they can’t dislodge from their minds – the dismembered comrades, the eviscerated babies, the body parts to bag up, the explosion that rips apart the armoured car ahead of yours ...

The Sarajevo wind
leafs through newspapers
that are glued by blood to the street;
I pass with a loaf of bread under my arm.

The river carries the corpse of a woman.
As I run across the bridge
with my canisters of water,
I notice her wristwatch still in place.

Someone lobs a child’s shoe
into the furnace. Family photographs spill
from the back of a garbage truck;
they carry inscriptions:
Love from... love from... love...

There’s no way of describing these things,
not really. Each night I wake
and stand by the window to watch my neighbour
who stands by the window to watch the dark.
Goran Simić  
(English translation David Harseni)

.. if in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest,
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Dulce et Decorum, final verse
Wilfred Owen

Tuesday 16 September 2014

Paris bulletin 7 2014


This September bulletin brings a new contributor to the site: Pamela Shandel.
In her own words, Pamela is  a “portrait, events, art, nature, and everything else photographer.  Her photos have been published in magazines and books and on book covers. She has had photo shows.  Her shooting style has been published in a lively history of Las Vegas.  She belongs in different ways  to New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Paris.”
Welcome, Pamela and more about her in the next bulletin
It’s not a bad idea, after a long absence, to start with what is close at hand, familiar. So I’ve been just round the corner, to the esplanade Natalie Sarraute, the newest playground of the young families in this part of the 18th arrondissement. The esplanade is where the eco-friendly youth hostel I’ve mentioned in a previous bulletin, is located, and the Vaclav Havel public library. It is also where we now have Bob’s Bake Shop selling diner kind of food and ‘artisanal coffee and cold-pressed organic juice’. The Bake Shop is right next door to a self-proclaimed ‘concept store’ selling ‘streetwear’, although for the life of me, I can’t see what kind of street those sort of clothes belong in. Not one I’ve ever been on but then I don’t know what a concept store is either, any more than I really know what ‘artisanal coffee’ is.
 
 
What is much more remarkable about the esplanade Natalie Sarraute than the kinds of shops and eateries that have opened up, is the speed with which it has been colonised by its local families. In the space of a few, mostly sunny months, the outdoor serving area of les Petites Gouttes café has spread across the esplanade like an algae bloom over clear water. At present there are more tables outside than in, although doubtless as the evenings get cooler that will change again. It isn’t cheap by local standards (14 euros for a burger and frites) but there’s lots of space for children with trottinettes and skate-boards. In the way it’s used it has become another striking example of the merging together of private and public space/life that is such a feature of big cities nowadays.
A little further afield now. I was in Allen’s Market (33 rue du Chateau d’Eau , one of the Joe Allen group, the original at 326 W 46th St, New York City), at the end of the week. A wedding party had taken over the mezzanine and the staff were kept busy filling glasses and popping corks. That gave me time to study the condiments and bottles on the bar, among which, one from the Groovy Food Company, ‘premium agave nectar low GI organic sweetener from the finest blue webber agarve plant. Helps you kick your ‘bad sugar’ cravings’. GI = glycemic index in case you didn’t know (I didn’t).
US culture has fascinated and seduced Parisians for far longer than I’ve been coming to Paris or living here. There are various well-established American-style cafes, a few of them actually calling themselves ‘diners’ and one of the oldest of them, Harry’s New York bar, off the avenue de l’Opera, with a strongly nostalgic pre-WW2 feel to it. There are Subway outlets all over the city and even a couple of Californian-style food trucks doing the rounds: le Camion qui fume and Cantine California.  None of these sets out to break new culinary ground, except perhaps in the matter of low GI sweeteners. They give their clients what their clients expect from a US take-away: burgers, ribs, tacos, cornbread, cheesecake, cupcakes and brownies (scarcely a lettuce leaf in sight).

 
The all-American sandwich  (image Pamela Shandel)
 
What’s new - to me at least - is the trend in French cafés towards providing those kinds of food, quite often ‘instead of’ rather than ‘as well as’, a native French alternative, for example, an assiette de crudités or a croque monsieur. The American star may be setting in the west but the taste for barbecued beef slathered in ketchup and mayo is still as strong as ever.
So finally, back to l’esplanade Nathalie Sarraute where employees of the still publicly-owned Eau de Paris were out in force last Saturday, to convince the 18th arrondissement of the health benefits and ecological bon sens of drinking water straight from the tap. You might think we all know that by now, like we all know about that terrifying mass of microscopic plastic particles, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, swirling round in the North Pacific Ocean, being ingested by animals and birds, killing them and their off-spring in vast numbers. Apparently not.  Parisians are still responsible for in excess of 500 kilos of déchets per person per year, two-thirds of it made up of plastic bottles and other packaging.
The Big Climate March is about to happen in New York (21st September) and in other cities around the world. Time’s running out for all of us. Assez de paroles – il faut passer à l’acte!

 

Monday 8 September 2014

Paris Bulletin 6 2014



To start the next round of bulletins, a few photos taken on a warm September Sunday in my neighbourhood. Température: 25 degres, ciel doucement voilé, ambiance de détente, trottinettes à go-go, jeux de boules, de quilles, pique-niques au bord du canal. Le pré fleuri du jardin d’éole étend ses couleurs.

I keep the windows wide open all night and the full moon rides high.









Thursday 3 July 2014

Paris bulletin 5 2014


Long hot days in Paris. The Ramadan moon is a sliver in the night sky. Every day brings an end-of year party, concert, spectacle, boum, marking summer endings before autumnal new beginnings.
23rd June, Shakespeare & Co bookshop hosts the jury of the Man Booker International Prize 2015. The event takes place on the pavement outside the shop. While we find seats on stools, chairs and along the low wall the other side of the pavement, various men fuss about with recording equipment and mikes. The BBC will broadcast the discussion at some future date. A passing busker entertains the crowd but doesn’t get much for his efforts.

The judging line-up is impressive: Nadeem Aslan, novelist,  Elleke Boehmer, Oxford professor and author, Edwin Frank, New York-based publisher and poet, Wen-Chin Ouyang, SOAS professor, and, chairing this event and the judging itself, academic and author, Marina Warner. The theme is ‘Writing Home Elsewhere’. The discussion is thoughtful and wide-ranging.

Afterwards we get the usual thimble of red wine and then Anna and I take ourselves off to café Panis, where we’ve spent many a happy, noisy evening. Anna Pook has run the writing workshops at Shakespeare & Co for the past five years but she will be leaving Paris later this summer, to begin an MA in Creative Writing at UEA. Another ending, another beginning. Bon courage, Anna! Write that novel!

Later still we walk across to Notre Dame, me to go back up to la Chapelle, Anna to go in the opposite direction. There are one or two tourists about but really we have the parvis and the floodlit facade to ourselves. So we stop, we tip our heads back and we look – properly for once – at those three extraordinary portals – the Last Judgement in the centre, flanked on the right by the portal of Saint Anne and on the left by the Portal of the Virgin, the whole Christian story chiselled out in stone, much of it unchanged since the 13th century.  Street art in the medieval era.
Modern street art is everywhere in Paris. Very little of it is done in stone so it won't last fifty years, let alone seven centuries. In my part of Paris it appears in the most unlikely places – on vans and hoardings as well as on bare walls. The fact that it’s ephemeral - likely to be washed off or painted over - is of no consequence for the artists. They’ll be back to do it again there, or somewhere else. Their cartoons and scribblings capture the fluidity of the city, its lawless energy, its tribal boundaries.

 

Where tagging’s concerned it’s the ‘I’ that matters, not the ‘You’. The young men who do it – it’s mostly young men – mark their territory like young tomcats:  ‘I was here. I did this. I changed this space.’
You may think that tagging is another kind of urban blight- to quote from one anti-tagging website: “Street art says, ‘Have you thought about this?’; Tagging says, ‘I tag therefore I exist”. Or you may feel that it’s a relatively harmless form of self-expression for those who have no other way of making their mark on the city. Or some variant of  that. Whatever your opinion, you can’t deny tagging takes nerve and hard work. It must be bad enough crawling about in the half-dark of the metro tunnels with a can of spray paint, but what about the elaborate 3-D designs, the personal logos on the side of buildings, in places that look inaccessible to anything without wings? There’s a trail of giant lettering along the top of a sheer wall fifty feet above the train lines out of the Gare de l’Est. I can’t imagine when or how they were done but whoever it was must have used ropes, maybe a platform too. You take the risk and if you get down safe, think how you feel, seeing your tag up there out of reach, like a defiant shout across the rooftops!  


 

Saturday 21 June 2014

Paris bulletin 4 2014


It’s not what you expect in Paris in the first week of June: rain like an Indian monsoon, pedestrians scuttling along under open umbrellas as if they had stepped straight out of a Hiroshige painting. That’s what we had the first full day I was back. Temps pourri, et froid en plus. But that was Tuesday and today, Friday 6 June, the 70th anniversary of the D-Day Landings in Normandy, the sky is a perfect blue and it is HOT. Perhaps we are finally going to have some proper summer weather.
On Day One of being back I had to go down to the Forum des Halles, the biggest shopping mall of central Paris. It’s never an enjoyable outing. I wander round and round this horrible subterranean maze like a lost soul, - comme une âme en peine might describe it more accurately . I seem to lose all sense of direction once I’m inside and I wonder sometimes if it’s me, or if others are similarly bamboozled by the signage. It’s particularly disorienting at present because of the immense travaux going on in the superstructure and the complete redoing of the garden areas. Paris is always a bit of a building site, in this neighbourhood especially.  They are still demolishing old slum property, turning what were cramped living quarters into more spacious dwellings for the great mass of the unhoused and poorly house. In the process, of course, displacing quite a number of people because of the reduction in the total amount of living space available in the quartier.

 
 
After six weeks in the peace and quiet of south-west Scotland it takes me a day or so to adjust to the rhythm and routine of city life. I get myself up to the market to replenish the larder. Lunch is Bleu des Causses cheese, Camembert, salad and pain aux 6 céréales – there’s a huge variety of bread made in boulangeries these days - dark cherries and a nectarine to finish. I begin chopping up the cheese-rind after my lunch then remember I have no bird table to put it on, and certainly no robins and woodpeckers to eat it.
I am absorbed every time I step out into the street by the flood of multi-coloured, struggling humanity: the men standing guard over their little pile of sunglasses, socks and belts laid out for sale on sheets of cardboard on the pavement, (they have to be ready to scarper in an instant if the flics appear. If they’re aren’t quick enough they’ll lose the lot and end up in the local cop shop), the Roma mothers pushing their buggies with one hand and holding out a begging bowl with the other, the various derelicts slumped asleep, dog in tow. The street’s a jumble as well as a jungle. It can be disturbing too, but it is very alive with all those people jinking about to make enough to see them through the day. If Scotland does vote for independence in September perhaps it will import some of them and add them to its home-grown cohorts of the poor and unemployed. It would be good for them and for Scotland, although very unsettling: as challenging as any question of shared currency, NATO/European membership, or where to park those nuclear white elephants that are currently slumbering out their last days in the Holy Loch.
Thinking about our wild-life at Burn House led me to investigate what the website of the Mairie de Paris has to say about ‘le recyclage’ and specifically about composting in the city. After all, seeing how much fresh fruit and veg is sold, every household must generate stacks of good organic rubbish. As you might expect, the website’s got something for everyone, from how to dispose of your old fridge, to the latest attempt by the Mairie to get composting established in the thousands of Parisian immeubles.  There’s quite a push to increase the numbers of households doing ‘lambricompostage’ - composting of organic waste by the use of red worms. That has the virtue of being more apartment-friendly than the traditional ‘wait while it all rots down’ method.
It’s not all worms and struggle here in Paris. The sun is shining brighter than ever as I come to the end of this bulletin. Despite the rumblings of discontent and the real possibility of strikes by les intermittents de spectacle (the people who are employed intermittently in the arts and entertainment industry), there seem to be more festivals than ever, more exhibitions and events, all clamouring for one’s time and attention. This evening for me, it will be Emmanuelle Riva in Duras’ Savannah Bay at the Theatre de l’Atelier in Montmartre. Riva, born 1927 won both the BAFTA and the César Awards for her role in Michael Haneke's Amour in 2012. If you haven’t seen that yet, I suggest you do. It is one of the most moving depictions of love I have ever seen.

 

Paris bulletin 3 2014


Having successfully brought The Twisted Yarn out,

I’ve been toying with the idea of doing something with the bulletins of previous years - they go back to January 2008. That has meant re-reading them and what I’ve found is that whatever else they deal with, the weather and the seasons are constants. There’s scarcely a bulletin that doesn’t make reference to either or both, to spring especially.
Well, here we are again. Spring. It has come in a rush, sap spiralling up the veins of trees and along the leaf paths, buds rushing into blossom and falling as fast. Grassy spaces in public parks, which are supposed to be ‘au repos’ until mid-April, have been looking like scenes for a modern-day déjeuner sur l’herbe, so crowded have they been with picnickers and slumbering forms.
 
 
In the middle of this meteorological largesse we have had LA POLLUTION. So much pollution that for several days a week or so ago, la Mairie de Paris decreed that all public transport, all vélibres and autos libres too, should be free. And then because the traffic density was still too high, they briefly instituted des jours alternés for private cars: even number plates one day, odds the next, at which point one of the big motoring organisations reported a 30% drop in traffic on the périphérique (the motorway which encircles Paris).
There are those who see in this sudden concern for the quality of air breathed by Parisians nothing more than political gesturing and it is true that a couple of days of such restrictions on car usage does nothing for the long-term problem which is already bad and liable to get worse.
I am not going to take space here to say how this plays out in the current round of élections municipales, which had their first stage this weekend and which show the Front National making some sizeable gains in various large towns but the Ecologistes also performing better than expected. France is no different from most other countries in trying to square the environmental circle – have increased growth, continue to drive, travel, eat, buy the same as usual or maybe just slightly more ‘responsibly’ while hoping that the world won’t get too much hotter, wetter and wilder than it has so far.
If you take a look at the report published recently by a team headed by Safa Motesharri at the University of Maryland, and well-covered in all the major UK broadsheets, you might be forgiven for thinking that western civilisation is already doomed to collapse, as a consequence of which we might just as well go right on and party till the bitter end. Because, judging from what we are told, the end will indeed be bitter.

But we are not going to do that are we? We won’t because humans are resourceful, inventive and ultimately more concerned for each other than the dominant rhetoric of today suggests. We have children and grandchildren and we do not want them to inherit a wasteland of our making.
So I like to think, but with some difficulty when for example, I’m in a bus stuck in traffic outside the Gare du Nord and I have more time than I might like to observe the antics and tensions in that heaving crowd, or when I’m on a pavement full of litter, cigarette butts, empty bottles and cans. The Mairie regularly runs poster campaigns about litter, reminding people that the cleaning squads cannot do the impossible and that there is a rubbish bin within 30 feet of you anywhere in Paris. Hard to believe by the end of a warm weekend if you’re in one of the many tourist hot-spots where there’s been lots of outdoor eating and drinking going on.
On Saturday evening I went to the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Pompidou. It was marked as ‘affluence moyenne’, rising to ‘forte’ on their website. In the event there was no queue at all.
It is a huge exhibition – over 500 works – and I felt my senses a bit dulled by the end. I found the early photographs when he was closely involved with the Surréalistes the most interesting – and fresh. Cartier-Bresson died aged 96 in 2004, but he more or less stopped taking pictures in the 1970s. He began to draw again and particularly to draw himself, so there are several pen and pencil self-portraits in the very last part of the exhibition, as though as he aged he was less concerned with the world around him and more interested finally in turning the lens of his own eye back on himself.

                                                    

There has been a flurry of comment this morning about the emergence of a new kind of ‘selfie’, taken by mostly young people in the voting booth: ‘le selfisoloir’. At the risk of boring you with a lengthy piece of secondary reporting, here is what Xavier de la Porte had to say about this phenomenon:
L’isoloir est conçu par la logique républicaine comme le lieu où le citoyen, dans la solitude du vote, est censé rejoindre l’universel de l’intérêt général. C’est donc, théoriquement, un lieu de l’oubli de soi, un moment où le moi particulier laisse place au citoyen de la République. Et là tout à coup, avec ces photos, ce sont des individus qui apparaissent avec leur tête en gros plan, leurs nez grossi par l’angle…. Ces photos incarnent la citoyenneté dans ce lieu où la citoyenneté est censée ne plus avoir de corps… « Exhibitionnisme » disent certains. Oui, c’est vrai, j’ajouterai même qu’il y a un côté coquin dans tout ça…
         Certains ont vu là un signe ultime de dépolitisation, un effet de désacralisation de l’acte de voter …Eh bien moi, ce sacrilège, je le trouve intéressant. Parce qu’il dit une vérité de ce qu’est le vote. Le vote n’est pas l’acte politique par excellence. Réfléchir, lire, donner son avis (sur un blog, dans un réseau social), discuter avec ses parents, ses voisins, essayer de les convaincre, militer, manifester, passer du temps dans une association, et parfois même ne pas voter, sont des actes politiques aussi forts, voire plus engageants, qu’aller glisser un bulletin dans une urne. Et, d’une certaine manière, toutes ces photos d’isoloir ramènent le vote à ce qu’il est : un acte minimal et profane. « Eh oui, disent ces photos, voter ça n’est que ça... La politique c’est aussi tout ce qui se passe avant et après. La politique, c’est plus grand que ça. »  Et j’avoue que ça m’a ragaillardi.

In summary what de la Porte says,  is that rather than throwing our hands up in horror at the impiety - the bare-faced cheek - of taking a picture of yourself in the booth, le selfisoloir strips the vote of its unjustified symbolic importance. Voting turns out to be just one small act among many  other possible  - necessary even – political acts  (informing oneself, debating, joining a voluntary organisation, getting out on a demo etc etc). Politics, he says, is about what you do before you go into that booth and after you come out.

Which brings us neatly enough back to the litter, the traffic and even to Cartier-Bresson’s self-portraits.

 

Paris bulletin 2 2014


As I have said in earlier bulletins, it is quite possible for anyone who’s  reasonably fit to walk all the way  from the 18th arrondissement in the north of Paris to the far end of the 6th in less than a couple of hours, even allowing for the slow pace of the Parisian flâneur. On the second day of March, a mild afternoon with a real promise of spring in the air, that was the walk I took.
I’d set out thinking I would go and see the recently opened exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson which is on at the Pompidou – (from now till July, open every day, except Tuesdays, until 23.00 hours).  One look at the queue and I saw I’d be standing about for hours before I got in. So I listened for a bit to the young woman who plays the didgeridoo on the parvis and then set off again, across the rue de Rivoli and over the brimming Seine onto the île de la Cité, whose riverside walkways were half-submerged by the relentless grey-brown flow. France has been wet too, although not as wet as southern England.

It was Sunday so the marché aux fleurs on the place Louis Lépine was shut but the marché aux oiseaux was in full chirrup, birds of every hue and size fluttering about in their tiny cages, some of the plumage so bright I wondered if they’d been dipped in dye like they do flowers these days, turning them horrible electric blues and greens as if the colours they come in are no longer vivid enough. They weren’t the only oddities. There was one cage containing a freakish rabbit with a face and ears like a cat but hopping about as a rabbit would do.
From there I make my way up the boulevard St Michel, and into rue Champollion – more queues, this time outside the cinemas in that little street. Out onto the place de la Sorbonne where I see that the hotel I occasionally used, way back in the 70s when working on the Collins-Robert dictionary, has risen from modest 2-star to 4-star. The boulevard is very different too, from what it was in those days. Apart from Joseph Gibert, it’s mainly cheap and not so cheap clothing and phone shops. Still, if you get away from the boulevard itself you can still find plenty of curiosities in this quartier, plenty  to conjure up ‘le vieux Paris’. You can side-step the main street by going through the garden at the side of the musée de Cluny and out into place Paul Painlevé. The garden is laid out à la médiévale, in chequered beds and has information panels in French and English explaining the religious, alimentary, medicinal purpose and significance of the flowers, vegetables and herbs being grown.
 
I’m about to head back down the rue St Jacques from the rue Soufflot but I see the dome of the Panthéon is encased in a carapace of scaffolding, wrapped around with bandages. Evidently this monument to France’s great men is being given a face-lift.
The Panthéon is one of a number of public buildings I’ve never set foot inside, perhaps partly because of what it proclaims in capitals over the main door – ‘aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante’. With the sole exception of Marie Curie, no Frenchwoman has been judged worthy of a place in there.  There was the beginnings of a debate in 2008 when various woman’s names were displayed on banners outside – Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, George Sand among them – but there has been nothing since and no-one seems much exercised by the fact, which is disconcerting - not to say disappointing if you think such honours matter - in a country which has égalité as one of its core republican values.
Anyway, as you might expect on a Parisian Sunday at the end of the half-term holiday, what’s going on outside the building is much more interesting than any number of caskets of the illustrious dead inside. The place du Panthéon is alive with flapping yellow and blue flags. A very large crowd of Ukrainians has gathered to protest at what is happening in Kiev and the Crimea. There’s lots of chanting, lots of speeches and cheering and a rousing performance of Ukraine’s national anthem. I look around, wondering which of the faces is the face of a spy, the face even of an agent provocateur. In the light of Putin’s response there must be some of that going on.
 
A little later, I’m heading homewards on the no. 38 bus when I see that the Palais de Justice is also decked out in blue and yellow. But it’s no Ukrainian flag this time. A gigantic ad for Apple’s latest gadget is stretched right across the whole of the Seine side of the building and in small print at the bottom:  ‘This advert is helping to finance the restoration of this building’.
So there you have it - the Panthéon and what it stands for is history, the building itself an empty hulk, a pile of stones holding a few old bones. The technocratic age has given us French politicians and bureaucrats in thrall to Big Money, indifferent to the image of an IPhone looming huge and ugly over the Seine in the heart of the city, apparently unconcerned about the use of private finance to help restore the fabric of the courts of justice, and, perhaps most chillingly, apparently incapable of understanding that explaining why it’s there doesn’t ‘make it right’.

 

Paris bulletin 1 2014


When I am out and about in the streets of Paris around lunchtime, I can’t help but wonder just how many pigs – let alone chickens, bullocks and turkeys – are eaten here every day. You only have to look at the piles of ham and gruyère baguettes, the tempting terrines of pâté in the traiteur shop windows, the heaps of jambon fumé and charcuterie, to realise that this city must get through hundreds of herds of swine every working day of the week.
So that leads me to wonder where exactly are all these poor beasts being cut down, eviscerated and bled, before being turned into sausages, hams and pâtés? By no means all of them in Paris. Those with a ‘produit du terroir’ label on them will have gone under the cosh somewhere else in France and arrived in the city already altered beyond all recognition from the four-legged beasts they were.
Once upon a time livestock killed inside the Paris boundaries would have met their end in the grand abattoir of la Villette but that has long since shed its gory image, ‘relooked’ itself as a temple of culture and modernity. Maybe I think, the abattoirs have been pushed even further out to the periphery of the city: ‘out of sight, out of mind’, until you sink your teeth into one of those delicious, well-filled baguettes that Paris still does better than most other capitals.
It turns out that this is not quite the case. The 18th and 19th arrondissements do indeed have more than their fair share: four in all, but some of the others are in what are usually thought of as the more bourgeois arrondissements: the 8th for example (99 rue du Faubourg St Honoré), the 11th (91 rue de la Roquette) and the 6th (31 avenue du Maine).
The French have always been a nation of carnivores and it’s rare to find people gripped by the kind of sentimentality about the animal world that is so common in the UK. Still, reading about the methods employed by these abattoirs to do away with ‘les porcins’, to strip them of their bristles (in what are called échaudoirs, which as the name suggests, are vats full of hot water. 62 degs C is required – hotter than that and the skin tears, colder and the bristles stay in) and render them ‘fit for human consumption’, you really do wonder how any of us continue to eat meat at all. And that’s before you tangle with the horrors of slit throats and the slow bleeding to death required by the Islamic and Orthodox Jewish methods of slaughter.
Paris is like all capital cities these days – you want any kind of food from any part of the globe, any plant or creature of the natural (or unnatural) world, and you can find it. Being conservative as well as carnivorous however, it’s taking a while for the ordinary French man and woman to make the leap to insect-eating. New York may have its retail outlets selling locusts, crickets and meal worms by the kilo for immediate human consumption but there isn’t yet an equivalent in Paris. What the city does have – within walking distance of my own flat – is a restaurant which specialises in entomophagy, the fancy word for eating insects. If you decide to give it a try you’ll need to leave aside your ‘I’m OK with fish if it doesn’t look like fish’ wimpishness – these insects arrive at your table complete with feelers, eyes and brittle – oh so brittle! – legs. They sit proudly atop your lettuce leaves and your slice of foie gras as if they are about to pounce.
                                              
               
                                             

The name of the restaurant is ‘le Festin Nu’, the French title of William Burroughs’ cult novel ‘Naked Lunch’, published for the first time in Paris in 1959, and famous for its experimental, hallucinatory style (he wrote it while doing every kind of known drug at the time), and its scatological content. Eat there and you will be eating in ‘l’enfant terrible’ of the restaurant world – at least that’s what I assume the name is supposed to convey. (10 rue de la Fontaine du But, Paris 18ème).
Generally speaking we are a long way yet in France from the extraordinary fetishization of food that UK viewers suffer (or enjoy) almost nightly on British television but, leaving the insects to one side, there are worrying signs that France is beginning to follow a similar trend.
Le snacking, le lunch, le fast food – they’ve become familiar concepts to the ordinary punter. They were joined a little while back, for the higher end of the eating public by le Fooding, a movement with its own widely-read publication which, in the words of one of its proponents (or do I mean prophets?), aims to
“liberate cuisine from the traditional codes and conventions that confine it and give contemporary eaters a true taste of the times. Through opening this “freer channel in the gastronomic universe” le Fooding emphasizes “the appetite for novelty and quality, rejection of boredom, love of fun, the ordinary, the sincere....”
A true taste of the times? If you ask a few of the people I see rummaging in the bins round here, one or two of the woman queuing up for free groceries from the relais du coeur on the rue du Département, they’d probably tell you that the taste of the times for their families is two-day old bread, last week’s mince and past-their-sell-by-date yoghurts.