A squad of men
in white overalls, equipped with ladders and paint brushes, has gone into the
hangar at the back of our yard today. They will be getting the space ready for
Raf Simon’s collections next week, Paris
Fashion Week.
Raf Simons looking nervy in our courtyard
Raf Simons, currently Creative Director at Christian Dior,
has been using the warehouse at the back of our courtyard to promote his own
label, for some years now. Next week you can practically guarantee the lights will
be on all night, the air will be filled with throbbing music and the yard
itself with stick-thin, black-clad, smoking youff. It may not stop the Turkish-owned
food shop on the ground floor continuing to park great sacks of onions and
potatoes in the same open space. That’s the only place they’ve got to unload
their pallets into the shop itself.
The Kube is another high-end venue nearby, specifically right
across the street from my flat, down a little cul de sac, le passage Ruelle,
and discretely hidden behind a high wall. The hotel is a favourite stop-off for
globe-trotting artistes because it combines relative closeness to the airport
with the buzz of the city. It has recently opened an Ice bar, the first in
Paris, I believe (Glasgow already has one...) 20 tonnes of carved ice, lit by LED
multi-coloured lights. You get 25 minutes of chill, during which you are served
cocktails, one of which ‘Finlandia’ is based on a Finnish vodka which the ‘pub’
tells us, is made from the purest ingredients nature can supply, using spring
water flowing from glaciers which lie over 10,000 year-old moraine. A load of
complete and utter bullshit you may (rightly) think, but it does the trick with
the well-heeled lovelies and not-so lovelies looking for something new to
stimulate their jaded palettes.
the ice bar in the Kube, Paris
That’s Shoreditch and la Chapelle for you, (and several other
big-city hot-spots you could point to) – the haves rubbing shoulders with the
have-nots, getting close, but never too close to the real-life grunge, the
cardboard homes, of the streets.
Staying with ice for a moment, Nuit Blanche is about to happen again (on 3rd October). This
year, the central theme will be climate change, looking ahead to the global
meeting due to take place here in December. One exhibit not to miss before it
disappears will be ‘Ice Monument’ by
Zhenchen Liu: an installation of 270 blocks of coloured ice symbolising the
countries of the world, right there, in the heart of the city, on the parvis de
l’Hotel de Ville. The blocks will gradually melt so by the end of the night they
will form an immense lake of multi-coloured water. If there is any chance you
might be in Paris next weekend, that’s one not to miss, but there is more, so
much more, all round the city and this year in the suburbs too.
You are invited to place an ice figure on the steps in the square Aristide Cavaillie-Col and watch it melt. Installation by Nele Azevedo
Then there is the burning question of the diesel engine and
its polluants, a big problem in
France as a whole, but particularly acute in a city like Paris where most car
journeys are short so the diesel emissions are that much higher because the
engine doesn’t get time to warm up (that’s what I’ve understood anyway). What
is the answer? It’s obviously not to institute a day of ‘no cars’ as happened
on Sunday 27th September – much publicised but in this part of town relatively
little heeded. Some much bolder, better funded, initiative is needed to get
people out of their cars and onto the buses, trams and underground. The problem
is not the city-centre dwellers so much as the banlieusards who don’t like being crammed into over-crowded, dirty
trains either at the beginning or the end of their working day. And who can
blame them? Having done a few train journeys like that in the UK this summer –
the London-Brighton run was ghastly, the Lockerbie-Edinburgh scarcely better -
I can sympathise with anyone who decides to burn a little fuel and stay out of
the scrum.
What is the answer? Some grand statement of intent like ‘rediscover
our common humanity’? But how? Watch Human,
the 3-volume portrayal by Yann Arthus Bertrand – free to view on YouTube? Great
movie but it’s hardly going to change the way we live. Watching, anything or
anyone isn’t going to make a jot of difference.
John McDonnell, the new shadow chancellor, had the temerity
to mention Marx in his speech to the Labour Party conference. Perhaps the time
has come to take a fresh look at Sartre too.
