Paris bulletin 9 2013

This time last year I wrote a bulletin about the church organs of Paris. There’s something about the month of December, the dark nights and the cold air – possibly even the advent of Christmas, although there’s little enough left of the ‘holy’ in the Christmases we celebrate now – that leads me back to churches, to their dim interiors, makes me want to fill my nose with the scents of incense and candle wax.

It’s the bells of Notre Dame I’m thinking of just now. These past seven weeks I’ve been hearing them every Wednesday evening as I come up from the RER metro and make my way across the parvis de Notre Dame and over to Shakespeare & Co, the bookshop in whose upstairs library a weekly writing workshop has been taking place.

First the great bell, Emmanuel the ‘bourdon’ bell, rings out a few seconds ahead of the rest and then the pealing begins and although the traffic noise is not drowned out, the bells rise above it, melodic and formidably insistent in the night air.

                                            

                                                      Emmanuel

Last week I was early for my class so, instead of just crossing the bridge I went round to the church entrance and seeing it was still open, went inside. Mass was being sung but few enough of the visitors were there to hear it. Perhaps thirty or so were standing with the priest, the rest were like me, tip-toeing about, unengaged in the central purpose of the building although probably not completely indifferent to the atmosphere of prayer and calm.

You can’t explore inside any of the Russian or Greek Orthodox churches as those tourists were exploring Notre Dame. The churches are locked except during the hours of formal worship. I know because I’ve tried them. Like mosques, they are spaces apart, sacred ground for their fidèles. I love the open accessibility of the Catholic churches but I also admire the insistence on the ‘awe-fulness’ of the divine that is implied by those shut doors with their notices in Greek, Aramaic or Russian that make no concessions to casual passers-by.

The first phase of the new Institut des Cultures d’Islam was completed a couple of weeks ago and the great and the good of Paris came to celebrate the opening of the new building on the rue Doudeauville. It is a splendid space on three floors, with a hamman in the basement which will open in January. I and several hundred others were lined up outside on the afternoon of Thursday 28 November, expecting to get in since we’d been invited. The main door is on the rue Stephenson. Within minutes the queue was overflowing onto the narrow street, blocking the traffic. The noise of angry drivers thumping their car horns rapidly became as deafening as it was pointless.

It was raining slightly and in the close-pressed crowd tempers began to rise. We waited and waited while the security men kept pushing us back. Tempers rose higher. An old man on my right leaning on a stick began berating a young woman with a child who was trying to wriggle her way forward to the front. Other people, just as hemmed in and uncomfortable, began cursing him for his intolerance. Considering the occasion, it was a bad beginning.

Then - quite how it happened I’m still not sure - all of a sudden I and 7 others were pulled forward and told we could go in, not to hear the speeches (which I didn’t care about anyway since they’d no doubt be as predictable as such speeches always are on these occasions) but to go straight upstairs to the first and second floors.

Thus it is that I can report that the first floor is wholly taken up by ‘la salle de prière’. A man was handing out elasticated blue plastic bags at the entrance so that people didn’t have to remove their shoes. What was there to see? A carpeted empty room, some lights hanging low, the mihrab in the corner and diagonally across the space, a curtain behind which the women worship – about one third of the whole area.  Nothing remarkable you might think, except that the fact that it is there at all is quite remarkable. The cultural centre has been funded by the Mairie de Paris so in theory there should be no religious activity within the building - the law of 1905 prohibits the state from funding buildings which will be used for religious purposes.  It has required money from la Grande Mosquée de Paris plus some careful manoeuvring on the part of Daniel Vaillant (mayor of the 18^th arrondissement) and Delanoe’s team in the town hall, to bring the secular and the holy together under one roof.

Interesting and challenging times we live in – perhaps no more so than any other time but noisier and more invasive in every way than they used to be. We may not want ‘les rituels du culte’ but truly we do need the silence of churches.

Paris bulletin 7 2013

There can be few nicer walks in the centre of Paris than the one that takes you along the right bank of the Seine, opposite the île St Louis. If you do it in the morning, say before 11 o’clock, you’ll probably have the pavements and walkways entirely to yourself - just the occasional old lady with her toutou and a sac à caca at the ready–these days Parisians are much better at cleaning up after their dogs.

The Seine on an autumn morning is a greenish-grey with oily highlights. What combination of paints, you might wonder, would convey that colour, that aqueous energy? The steady swirl of water is chopped up from time to time by bateaux mouches and small craft driven by men in uniform. The trees on both sides are a blend of gold and green. The air is soft, the colours are soft, even the smells are soft. It is good to be out.

I’ve started the day by visiting the exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville. It’s showing the artwork of over 160 ‘mentally ill and psychotic’ individuals. The exhibition’s title is l’Art Excentrique, a reference not so much to eccentricity in the way it’s normally understood but to the fact that, no matter how good these paintings, drawings, ceramics are, no matter how exuberant, original and strong, they are ‘ex-centre’ – i.e. they are outside the exclusive sphere of ‘art by real artists’. If you’re in Paris before the 9^th November this is one not to miss.

I’ve not come down at the Seine just for art and autumn colours. I’m also hoping to get some information from Batostar (‘we run the only electrically-powered leisure craft on the Seine’), about a boat booking but their office is shut so I retrace my steps and cross the river at the pont d’Arcole.  The bridge is jammed with tourists listening to the Buddy D band. Beyond it the hôpital Hôtel Dieu rears up, festooned with banners: ‘NON A LA FERMETURE DES URGENCES’ and similar messages. The senior management of AP-HP (Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris), is forging ahead with its plans to change how emergency healthcare services are delivered in central Paris. There have been sit-ins and petitions of course, but the beds are being emptied regardless. The man on the reception desk in the hospital tells me there are rumours that the building – a magnificent piece of 19^th century architecture with a vast inner courtyard, fine flower beds and colonnades which, by the way, anyone can visit – has already been eyed covetously by ‘some rich Qataris’. True or not, that’s what people believe these days.

                                                    
                                                            inner courtyard Hotel Dieu

A day or two ago I went  to see Agelastos Petra, la Pierre Triste, a film made by Filippos Koutsaftis who spent 12 years documenting the changes in the town of Eleusis  and recording the reminiscences of some of its older inhabitants. Eleusis used to be known for the Eleusisian Mysteries, dating back thousands of years. It was where Demeter, mother of Persephone, bade farewell to her daughter each year, Persephone’s descent into Hades coinciding with the onset of the dark, cold months of the year. Beneath the town lies layer upon layer of ancient history – graves, walls, whole streets, urns containing the bones of unidentified men and women, babies and soldiers. The bulldozers are indifferent to all that. They thrust through the earth, break apart walls built more than two thousand years ago, fill in wells that have watered orchards and olive groves for countless generations, smash sarcophagi that have lain quietly for centuries. The ancient ruins of Eleusis are being crushed and reburied, to make space for the god oil and its derivatives. Over the town hangs a pall of refinery smoke and dust and the sunsets are blood-red and lowering.

I know what is happening in Eleusis isn’t like what will happen at the Hôtel Dieu. No-one’s going to demolish the hospital any more than they’re going to demolish the église de Notre Dame. But there are other ways of destroying the past and if the Hôtel Dieu hospital does close it will be the first time since 652 that there is nothing of its kind in this part of Paris. A hospital is not a sacred space like a church, even though more lives have been saved by the people working in it than were ever saved by the intervention of the Virgin Mary in her cathedral across the way. What’s at issue here is not a dispute about the need for change in medical care but the suspicion that behind this change, as behind the raging diggers of Eleusis, is that other great god of the 21^st century: private profit, Mammon – call it what you like.

But there is a possibility of something better. L’exception française isn’t an empty figure. I think of how the city facilitated the change in use of the building at 104 rue d’Aubervilliers in my quartier, turning the HQ of the municipal pompes funèbres into one of the most exciting, effervescing art centres Paris has ever had. What they must do, I think as I make my way to the no. 38 bus, is turn all or part of the building into a ‘musée de la science médicale’. There it would be, right in the heart of tourist Paris, an ever-changing testimony to France’s role in the development of that science and a fitting counterpoint to another kind of tradition embodied in the great church only yards from its door.

Paris bulletin 8 2013

At 3.30 on a bright afternoon with a chill wind keeping the clouds at bay, I set off for the Penguin wool shop near the métro Louis Blanc, to buy some more pink wool for the blanket I’m knitting for the Wool Against Weapons campaign (www.woolagainstweapons.co.uk – please join in if you can knit; if you’re sympathetic but not a knitter, pass the address onto someone who is).

The students have just poured out of the lycée Colbert on the rue Château Landon, filling the pavement. More than half of them are pulling out cigarette packets and lighting up. I cross over instead of trying to push through the crowd and nearly fall over two girls crouched down between a couple of parked cars. One of them is keeping a look-out while the other rolls a spliff. The girl on watch looks at me anxiously as I get by them but the one making the spliff doesn’t give me a glance. Her head’s bowed over the cigarette, protecting the whole lot from being blown into the gutter in a sudden gust of wind. I’d love to ask them what’s the difference, in their eyes, between smoking a joint and nipping into a cafe for a large glass of wine between classes. I can guess one possible answer (less rude than some) – the one’s ‘cool’ (a favourite French word at present), the other’s not. 

Half an hour later I’ve got some wool from the fin de série basket and I head on towards the canal. The big thing along the bassin de la Villette at present is tightrope walking. People string the elastic lines between the trees, high or low, depending how good they are, and up they go, some of them doing all sorts  of crazy jumps and turns, others taking a few wobbly steps then tipping off.

There are tightrope-walkers today but also, something new: a crowd has gathered to watch  a man and a woman spray painting a more than life size image of a geisha onto a huge sheet of cling-film. They’ve stretched yards of it between two trees, the plastic overlapping and wrapped tight so that it forms a single taut sheet about six feet high by ten feet long.

The bassin du canal has become more and more of a playground since I first started coming here. There are the old men sitting astride the benches and playing dominoes and chess. There are the pétanque players - woman as well as men these days - the joggers, the dog-walkers, the flâneurs, the picnickers, the fishermen, the frisbee throwers, the table tennis players, the children on their trottinettes and bikes. And alongside all this land-based activity, the moored barges with their cafes up on the decks and inside, music, dance, theatre and exhibitions. You can go to a mini-opera on one side of the canal and learn to tango on the other. More tends to happen on the quai de Seine side, but the quai de Loire has the children’s play area which is always busy, the canoes for hire at the end by the pont basculant and halfway along one of the biggest, best-stocked organic supermarkets in Paris, Canal Bio, part of the Coopbio network (www.canal-bio.net).

Both quais have their cinemas. Coming from the Quai de Seine side you can walk round over the canal St Martin bridge to the Quai de Loire or, if you’re there in the evening, chug across to your movie in the little tug that plies between the two.

I doubt if many of the thousands who use the canal for play and exercise are aware of the work the canal does for Paris as a whole. The city needs 380,000 cubic metres each day for cleaning the sewers, gutters, and parks. The Canal de l'Ourcq provides about half of that – every single day – another instance of us all benefitting from the work of 19^th century planners and engineers.

Even nearer to home than the canal is another, very recent, piece of visionary urban planning: the refurbished Halle Pajol with its eco-friendly youth hostel. With 330 beds and 103 bedrooms the Yves Robert auberge de jeunesse is the biggest youth hostel in Paris and certainly the most attractive/comfortable. If you’re planning a low-budget séjour in Paris this is the place to be. The hostel is pretty much state-of-the-art environmentally speaking – the roof of the halle Pajol is entirely covered in solar panels which, along with a heat pump and various other environmental innovations which I won’t bother you with, provide all the building needs in the way of hot water and heat.

 

The complex also boasts a good cafe with live music most weekends, a big library where kids can play video games for free if they have a Paris library card, a gym and a college. Soon there’ll be a boulangerie and more shops. It’s another great place to hang out and it’s à deux pas de chez moi. .

9.30 the same evening. I’m on my way back from a raja yoga class. The metro’s packed. Barbès station is shut, by order of the police. The World Cup qualifiers are on. France needs a 3-goal win against the Ukraine (and gets it) to go through but the only game that matters round here is the Algeria- Burkina Faso one.  By the time I get out of the train we know Algeria’s done it and, let me tell you, ça bouge dans le quartier! The street is going wild: horns klaxonning like the last trump, cars belting along with young men balanced precariously out of windows waving Algerian flags, motos the same. There’s nothing to beat a win at footie to brighten the faces of young men with no work and little prospect of any.

 

Paris bulletin 6 2013

To go to a conference or a concert in Louvre of an evening is to add something special to the event itself: coming out afterwards into the empty, half-dark space beneath the glass and metal pyramid, the night sky in patches above your head. Only you and a trickle of concert-goers, drifting like leaves across the polished floor. So you go, sedately up the escalator, past the gardiens, the guard dogs lying at their feet, and out onto the concourse where the water spills endlessly from flat surfaces back underground.

Both evenings I did that since I came back a week ago, a trumpet was echoing round the archway that takes you to the rue de Rivoli, a solitary busker making the stones ring out.  Not the ‘Paris by night’ of the Moulin Rouge or Folies Bergères, something more elusive and dreamlike altogether.

The occasion for these evening sorties was the festival des Ecrivains du Monde, an event hosted by the University of Columbia and taking place in a number of venues throughout the city, including la maison de la Poésie, the Théâtre des Abbesses, the BNF and the garden of the musée Jacquemart-André. The idea of spreading things around the city was a good one although it did limit how many sessions you could get to in the space of an afternoon. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing – eating more simply and savouring one’s food by chewing slowly makes for a healthier digestion.

You could really have a cultural crise de foie any week in Paris, so rich is the table laid before you, and so inviting. As fast as one festival passes by the next one is upon us. Now it’s the Festival d’Automne which goes right through to the end of December, is an annual event and encompasses all the arts, particularly what’s new and ground-breaking wherever it was conceived.

Here’s an apercu of what’s on offer – just three out of over forty of the performances/installations in the first half of the autumn:

Hope Hippo at the musée national de l’Histoire Naturelle, from 13 September – 11 November. One for the children as well as the grown-ups, the hippo is the main image on the Festival d’Automne official website (www.festival-automne.com).

Sphincterography – missed this one unfortunately, (finished this weekend). Steve Cohen, a South African artist of Lithuanian origin, looking at issues of ‘displacement’ – topical enough for the tumultuous times we live in. There are other South African offerings in the pipeline.

Eternity Dress: Olivier Saillard and Tilda Swinton at the cole des Beaux Arts on rue Bonaparte, from 20 – 24 November, (Saillard is the director of the Palais Galliéra). Here is what the blurb says about this event , en un anglais qui ne reproduit en rien l’élégance de son sujet:

“Opposing the profusion of fashion collections, Eternity Dress follows the design of one dress – made on Tilda Swinton’s body –, from the measuring up to the creation of the pattern, from the cut to the sewing together. Inspired by a 1950s method found in the museum’s collections, the dress resonates with the history of fashion and initiates an archeology (sic) of the craft.”

And before I draw a line on all these richesses, I must mention one of the main events of the autumn which has nothing to do with the Festival itself but everything to do with Paris’s history: the reopening of the musée Galliéra which has been shut for refurbishment for over a year. Saillard has chosen to mark the reopening with an exhibition of seventy of the creations of the couturier Azzedine Alaïa, there and in the salle Matisse du Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Whether you’re a fashionista or not, this is one to put in the diary.

                                                      

               
                                                      
                                                          

It’s worth mentioning another key event coming up in the not too distant future: the élections municipales in March 2014, which will also include the election of a new mayor for Paris, since Bertrand Delanoë won’t be standing for a third term. For the first time the position of mayor will be contested by two women:  Anne Hidalgo, age 54, Delanoë’s depute on the Left, and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, age 40, who has something of a reputation as a ‘blue ecologist, on the Right. Hidalgo of Spanish descent, Kosciusko-Morizet of Polish.

One of the key challenges facing whichever of these two women gets in will be the question of Paris’s growing population of homeless people. It is estimated that the number of homeless in France has almost doubled in the last decade – and shows no sign of dropping any time soon. We need some of the creative people I mentioned earlier to bring the question to the forefront of everyone’s minds. Cultural evenings at the Louvre, haute couture and hippos are all very well if you’ve got a home to go back to, and food in the cupboard.

Paris bulletin 5 2013

It’s taken me a little while to come back from the limpid, lapping waters of the Aegean Sea to the hot and dusty pavements of northern Paris, but I’m here now, although only for a few more days, having a mainly Scottish summer in prospect. 

Paris is sweltering but the trees along the streets are glossier and thicker-leaved than they ordinarily are by this time, perhaps because of the wet, cold spring which held on tenaciously well into June.

I remember writing in July last year about the onset of the sales and the sense of endings and anticipation as people had their summer parties and got ready to set off to country and seaside for the holidays. The signs are up again, ‘SOLDES’ everywhere, and today it’s Vigilance Rouge on the roads out of Paris. I think of the thousands of bored children cooped up in cars, with the ‘clime’ (air con), going full blast: frayed tempers in the front seats and arguments in the back, no matter what technological aids there are to keep everyone occupied. Better perhaps, to wait a day or two and drive on emptier roads, or even stick around for longer and enjoy July in Paris as it empties out and settles again.

Many families in the quartier I live in will stay here the whole holiday, the kids in ‘centres’ (childcare) - name tags hanging round small necks at the sandpits and swings - their parents carrying on with the jobs they do every other month of the year. Lucky for 18^thand 19^th arrondissements families, the canal de l’Ourcq and le parc de la Villette are close by and will once again be turning themselves into one of the Paris Plages sites, between mid-July and mid-August. From 9 am. until midnight, 7 jours sur 7, there’ll be every kind of sporting activity, all of them free, plus of course sand, sun-umbrellas, deck chairs, buvettes and all sorts of entertainments.

In the meantime life goes on much as it always does. Mangoes in the Indian shops, nectarines, pêches blanches and jaunes, luscious black cherries and sweet melons in the market and in the Turkish and Arab shops down the main street piles of dates, prefiguring the start of Ramadan on Tuesday, a tough month this year because of the length of the daylight hours.

I’m on my way back from Louis Blanc when I see the demo, outside the Bouffes du Nord, one of the great theatres of this theatre-rich city. I’d noticed the banners earlier in the week, hanging out of windows high above the theatre: NON A LA SALLE DE SHOOT. I cross over and get a leaflet and I learn that plans are well-advanced to open a ‘une salle de consommation à moindre risque’, more usually known as a ‘salle de shoot’, (roughly speaking a needle exchange and safe drug centre) at 39 boulevard de la Chapelle This will be run by an association (voluntary organisation),not by the city itself and will have no direct link with the nearby hôpital Lariboisière. The leaflet is being distributed by ‘le collectif apolitique des habitants quartiers la Chapelle’.

I discover in my researches later that the proposed salle is to be run along lines very similar to those used with considerable success by Quai 9 in Geneva where a needle exchange and safe injection centre has been in operation for over a decade. I also note that it’s taken a very long time for the residents of that area of Geneva to come to terms with having the centre on their doorstep. In Geneva the drug-users now do a regular daily patrol to collect used syringes and other kinds of drug-related rubbish. Given how many drug-users hang about the gare du Nord and the nuisance they can be, a safe-use centre seems like a sensible solution to me but I can understand the anxieties of residents who feel the quartier already has more than its fair share of social problems and misfits.

The shopkeepers on the rue de la Goutte d’Or have taken their protests to the mairie. Matters came to a head one early morning recently when two of them found themselves unable to get into their shops to open up for business. The homeless encampment under the arcade that I’ve written of several times, had grown so big that the metal shutters were inaccessible behind mattresses full of sleeping bodies. The police had to be called. The mattresses were removed. Not the men though.

There is considerable dissent among the commerçants and the associations in that small area : the commerçants protesting the degradation of the environment and the potential health risks while  the associations insist on providing the men with food parcels, bedding and chairs. Faced with an outright rebellion by their shop-keeping tenants (all the property on the street is owned by the city) the mairie has promised to dismantle the camp ‘permanently’ by mid-July.

If you’re beginning to think the 18th is a hotbed of social unrest, peopled mainly by the socially excluded, let me reassure you. It strains at times under the weight of so many different needs but it remains one of the liveliest, most developing parts of Paris not least in its commitment to ‘community engagement’ and the imaginative use of public spaces.

This year the park-keepers in the jardin d’Eole fenced off a large area of that garden and sowed it with wild flower and grass seed. The pessimists said that it would be no time at all before the fence was trampled down, the flowers picked by kids and the grass squashed by daytime sleepers. Not a bit of it. There’s not a single break in the fence and the grass is awash with cornflowers, marigolds, poppies, daisies and clover. A joy to behold.

 

                                       Hollyhocks and bulrushes in the jardin d'Eole

 

Paris bulletin 4 2013

Put all the trees that line the streets and boulevards of Paris together in one space and they’d make a sizeable wood. This is what’s going through my mind as I walk down the avenue du Président Wilson, marvelling at the great chestnuts that line it. The blossoms, pink and white, are dropping gently onto the pavement all about me. The ancient copper beech outside the Palais de Chaillot is sitting in the midst of a carpet of thick grass and daisies. It’s a riot of untamed growth after the blown-and-mown uniformity of Californian gardens, and a wonderful antidote to the winter boots, the blacks and greys that Parisians have for the most part yet to shed.

After 5 weeks in the heat and bright colours of southern California what else strikes me on my walks through Paris? Besides the sheer numbers of people wherever you go - and the gabble of different languages - it’s the monumental buildings of course, so different from the low-slung, fragile houses of southern California where ‘remodelling’ means what it says: a whole-scale tearing down and rebuilding, unthinkable in the stone- and brick-built houses we are used to in Europe.

Paris is all tall windows, wrought-iron balconies and high portes cochères, the latter occasionally giving you a glimpse into a quiet inner courtyard. I’ve not heard anyone call these private multiple-occupancy buildings ‘gated communities’, but that’s what they are – sort of - mini gated communities. Most of them no longer have a concièrge in the ground floor loge but all of them have secure door codes, often on inner as well as outer doors. And they are socially-stratified too. Segregation by social standing and income is not perhaps so overt or so complete as in the US, but it goes on and not only on the avenues and boulevards where the haute bourgeoisie have their lairs.

I’ve come to Trocadéro to see if there remains any evidence of the clashes that pitted Paris St Germain football supporters, ‘les ultras’, against les forces de l’ordre last week. Nothing. No broken windows or burnt-out cars. It’s business as usual with hordes of tourists snapping at the Tour Eiffel and souvenir-sellers touting their postcards and scarves.

There’s a Keith Haring exhibition on at the musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris but the museum is shut. No explanation, just a notice pinned to the vast iron door: “dimanche le 19 mai, le musée est fermé”. A statement of fact but hardly an explanation. Monday is a holiday, perhaps that’s why. Below the terrasse of the musée the ornamental pond is glowing a phosphorescent green under a leaden sky.

I wander on, along the Seine. More chestnut trees, more lush grass, lots of house-boats lining the right bank of the river, lots of activity round the bateaux mouches departure point. Not much going on around the Flame of Liberty. Where once you could find piles of bouquets and mementoes to Diana, now only a few photo-copied pictures and a bunch of dead roses.

After years of letting the car rule the banks of the Seine the Mairie de Paris is finally reclaiming the space for people. There are floating gardens on the left bank, due to be open before the summer’s end and lengthy new stretches on both sides where the car can no longer go, set aside for sport, walking and picnicking (see www.lesberges.paris.fr)

By the time I reach the Tuilleries the leaden sky is right overhead and the rain is beginning to fall. I stop for a moment to look at de Kooning’s marvellous bronze, the Standing Figure.

 

Standing Figure, with crows

 

I hear someone call it a ‘blob’ but that’s the last thing it is. A fabulously plastic, immensely strong work. Even if it was the only sculpture in the garden it would make it worth the visit. But of course it’s not. There are older gods and heroes all over the place, down the central avenue and in among the trees. I stop for a moment at one of my favourites, poor old Cain, the fratricide, up on his plinth, head buried in his hands forever.

 

Cain, with pigeon

 

 

Cain, without pigeon

Place du Palais Royal. A quick look round the Festival de la Diversité – smoked hams, saucisson and cognac alongside Indian shirts, African pottery... The rain is falling faster. I dive into the metro and make my wet way home.

Paris bulletin 3 2013

I’d say that most visitors to Paris, especially those who come back again and again - and they must be counted in the hundreds of thousands - have ‘their Paris’. It’s that kind of city. Reconnecting with ‘your Paris’ may mean sitting on a particular cafe terrasse with a cafe crème or a coup de rouge in front of you, revisiting the street where you stayed as a student, buying a bag of dark red cherries at the marché and eating them on a bench in the Luxembourg, walking from X to Y like you did last year, and the year before that, seeing what’s new, what’s not.

The Paris most visitors know and love probably lies somewhere within a notional ‘centre’ of the city, more often in the low-number arrondissements than in the high ones like the 18^th, 19^th or 20^th, although Belleville and the Buttes Chaumont have their afficionados and some of Montmartre is in the 18^th. And now that the 19^th arrondissement has added the 104 to its attractions - surely the liveliest, most boundary-stretching arts centre in the whole city – parts of the north are perhaps beginning to feel a little less ‘beyond the pale’ than they used to.

Have you thought though, about exploring the 17^th and that part of the 17^th which is en plein développement? Clichy-Batignolles is a quartier to watch, and to visit. It has one of the newest and most imaginatively laid-out parks in Paris, the Parc Clichy-Batignolles Martin Luther-King, once an industrial site, now 5 hectares of greenery, wild life and water – and 5 more to be planted and landscaped by 2017.

                                               

                   

The area was originally destined to be used as the Olympic Village, before Paris lost out to London for the 2012 Games. I don’t suppose anyone would talk about the legacy of not getting the Games, but that’s what this park is, and a very fine legacy too, with skate ramps, sports and play areas as well as quiet green spaces, used by thousands of families from all over the city. It’s easy to find. Catch the metro line 13 going north and get off at Brochant.

The quartier Clichy-Batignolles is transforming itself in other ways. Building has already begun on what was a huge railway marshalling yard. 3,400 new homes will be created (50% of them ‘logements sociaux’), and a vast amount of new office space, including the new Palais de Justice.

The waste generated by all these new residents/workers will be managed by Propreté de Paris (the municipal cleansing department) and a private partner, using a state-of-the-art rubbish and recycling system. I’m talking about ‘la collecte pneumatique’. It involves sucking the rubbish down underground tubes which vomit it out into wagons stationed at the gare St Lazare. From there it is taken by train to the recycling depots so reducing both pollution and congestion on the roads.

By no stretch of the imagination can Paris be described as a role model for sustainable development – yet. There are many northern European cities using pneumatic collection and even more revolutionary, eco-friendly ways of managing domestic and industrial rubbish. But Paris is gradually waking up to the need to get greener: the velib bikes, the electric cars which are proving so popular, the separate recycling and non-recycling bins on every street corner and the relentless campaigning by the Mairie to get the streets cleaner and quieter.

It’s a shame though, that this capital, many of whose citizens have kept their links with the countryside, is proving so slow to embrace composting or greening the city at the humble, domestic level. It would be so easy for people just to grow more stuff, more flowers, herbs and shrubs, on their window ledges and in their courtyards. And think of the increase in bird and insect life that would bring...

I’ll round off this bulletin back at one of the traditional centres of Paris cultural life however, specifically at the centre Pompidou. I have never been able to muster much enthusiasm for Salvador Dali but I am evidently in the minority. The exhibition of his work that has been showing for the past few months at the Centre Pompidou is opening round the clock this weekend – vingt-quatre heures sur vingt-quatre – to try to meet the demand. It closes on 25^th March. When I was last at the Beaubourg, to take a look at the Eileen Gray exhibition, the queue for Dali stretched all the way along the 5^th-floor corridor and people who’d managed to get that far were being told they still had a couple of hours to wait before they’d be inside, in the temple itself.

Soit dit en passant that the Eileen Gray exhibition is well worth a visit  - a little video of her talking in her posh English accent (Anglo-Irish aristo, lived in Paris most of  her adult life), about her introduction to lacquer work and her collaboration with Sugawara-san. A pleasure to watch.