The French language is under
attack from English, both British and American, as never before, at any rate
judging by what you hear on the radio and see on the internet. This morning I
listened to a current affairs show on France Culture, about ‘le Hollande-bashing’.
I’ve already mentioned in an earlier bulletin how only six months into his
'quinquennat' (5-year term of office), the French seem to have run out of
patience with François Hollande, but ‘le Hollande-bashing’? It’s enough to make
you despair. We’ve got used to ‘le snacking’ and ‘le relooking’ but don’t tell
me French has no useful word of its own for ‘bashing’, or for ‘le deadline’,
another word I’ve heard several times recently
Take a look at the Red Bull
Skylines website and you’ll find plenty more mixing of a hybrid, pidgin English
with French – the scale of it is - like the sports Red Bull promotes - quite
simply époustouflant, which sounds much better in French than mind-blowing does
in English. Red Bull is running a one-day competition at the Grand Palais on 2ndNovember
(sold out months ago – only chance of a last-minute ticket is by entering their
competition).
On the ‘riders’ page (i.e. the
men – no women in evidence here - who ride, and specifically those who ride BMX
bikes and do fancy tricks on them), there’s 22 year-old Harry Main from Great
Britain, who ‘incarne la new school et ne cesse de pousser les
limites du riding.’ Similarly, Drew Beranson, a 23 year-old
Canadian is ‘un rider complet qui assure autant en dirt qu’en park’.
I haven’t clue about the difference between ‘dirt’ and ‘park’ but that’s
because I don’t hang about with BMXers, not because I can’t speak English.
Daniel Sandoval is only 18 and, we are told,‘reserve toujours un trick
plus fou et plus surprenant pour la fin du run.’ Et ainsi de
suite. The event promises to be pretty époustouflant too: 5,000 spectators and
1,950 square metres of ramps and slides and sheer walls, some of them rising to
a height of 7 metres.
Elsewhere in the same building,
let it be said en passant, you can get into this autumn’s biggest art
exhibition: the Edward Hopper retrospective which is on now until the end of
January. It’ll cost you 12 euros, unless you qualify for a reduction, and it’s
open late most evenings.
I don’t know what it cost for a
ticket to the BMX show but it has to be said that in general theatre and opera
tickets don’t come cheap for the big attractions. West Side Story is on all
through the autumn at the Théâtre du Châtelet. That too is more or less sold
out. All you can get are seats with reduced visibility and for those you will
still be paying anywhere between 60 and 80 euros.
The Rake’s Progress is on at the
Opéra Garnier at present (Opéra Garnier which I see from Wikipedia was
marvellously described by a critic when it was first completed as ‘looking like
an over-loaded sideboard’). Tickets for that go from a snippy 50 euros, for
seats which put you much closer to Chagall’s famous painted ceiling than to the
stage, to 190 euros, which is probably more than a lot of families in this area
live on per week.
close to Chagall's ceiling in the Opera Garnier
Prices like that make the
lunchtime concerts I go to at the Louvre, at 7 euros a pop, seem like amazing
value, although when I first settled here you could still do a lunchtime
concert at the Bastille Opéra for nothing, if you had time to queue. Such
generosity is a thing of the past.
Fortunately the theatre-going
public has other options than the Opéra or the big theatres like the Châtelet
or the Odéon. Paris is not just a city that can be proud of its huge numbers of
independent bookshops – more than any other European capital – it also has,
scattered throughout the city, dozens of little and some quite large theatres
producing work across the whole spectrum of the arts and, for the most part,
ticket prices are ‘abordable’. That being so, for the busy, in-work Parisian
it’s likely to be less a question of finding the money for the outing and more
‘un problème’ ...... ‘du time-management’!
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