We may be in the End Times after all. The
rain seems to suggest so. I see no sign of any ark-building however, although
plenty of sodden tents. Round the corner from my flat something like four hundred
migrants are camped on the same patch of land they used last year by the jardin
d’Eole.
I took my own advice to heart after my last
bulletin. I’m cultivating what passes for a garden in a tarmac-covered backyard,
in tubs of course, all flowers except for one tub: radishes. I thinned them out yesterday and they are beginning
to swell although I doubt they’ll have much zing about them if the sun doesn’t
shine soon.
Before the skies opened and the rivers
began to fill I went over to Truffaut, Paris’s biggest inner city garden
centre, and ‘animalerie’. The place was heaving with Parisians intent like me
on filling their window boxes and creating des balcons fleuris.
‘On a du solieil au balcon jusqu’à 14 heures.
Qu’est-ce que vous me conseillez?’
The Panthéon a fortnight ago - blue skie, hot sun and flowering chestnuts.
Since then the men outside the Luxembourg and the Louvre have swapped their bottles of
water at 1 euro for umbrellas at 5 and they’ve been doing excellent business.
To get to Truffaut you can walk alongside
the Seine from the Gare d’Austerlitz metro station, or from the quai de la Gare
(Gare de Lyon across the other side of the bridge). It’s a part of Paris I come
to very rarely since I don’t use the bibilothèque François Mittérand or the
Cité de la Mode et du Design, the building you see from the tip of the Ile de
la Cité, its green carapace conjuring the image of a slumbering croc at the
edge of the Seine. I’ve had some nice al fresco lunches up aloft in the café on
wooden deck there. Lots going on, day and night, if you’re over that way.
Stay on the Left Bank (and there’s nothing
to entice you to the Right at this point) and you can do a walk back towards the Institut du Monde Arabe
that takes you through the sculpture park, a succession of installations and
objects competing with too much fussy vegetation and constrained by the
limitations of the corridor-like space.
The Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA), is as
usual hosting a range of exhibitions: ‘I
AM WITH THEM - un manifeste
photographique pour les réfugiés’,
‘Les jardins d’Orient’, ‘Des Trésors à porter’ – (see more on these
at www.imarabe.org) and holding some
excellent one-off performances and debates.
Jack Lang, the current president of the
IMA, is that rare animal, a French politician one can still feel uncomplicated
admiration for. While Minister of Culture he was responsible for creating the
Fête de la Musique (21st June every year), also for the law that
enforces a minimum sale price for books, thereby protecting writers, publishers
and independent bookshops. (Lang’s Law is the reason you don’t find stacks of
cut-price paperbacks in French supermarkets).
I heard him speak on the radio the other
day, a contribution which was in marked contrast to the dominant discourse at
present which is all about les casseurs
and the on-going social action against la Loi el Khomri, industrial action at
ports and refineries threatening to put the nation’s supplies of petrol at
risk. Etc, etc. There was Jack Lang talking with such energy and optimism about
the development of civil society in the north African states, it was like a
breath of fresh air.
Here in the 18th arrondissement
we have our own more modest ICI, l’Institut des Cultures d’Islam (www.institut-cultures-islam) : Abu
Sadiya and friends playing on 9 June at 20.00 hours, and a ‘taking stock’
exhibition on Tunisia 5 years after the revolution, to mention only some of
what is on offer.
There’s more yet - this year’s Monumenta in
the Grand Palais: Huang Yong Ping’s ‘Empire’, Chung Hyun’s Standing Men in the
gardens of the Palais Royal,
 |
| Standing Men - Palais Royal |
The Albert Marquet retrospective at the Musée d’art
moderne de la ville de Paris and the Paula Modersohn-Becker in the same
building.
And of course, Paul Klee at the Pompidou:
l’ironie à l’oeuvre, until September.
I finish typing this list of delights and
curiosities and make myself a cup of coffee. The clouds are still massed but the
rain has stopped. There’s no rainbow, no dove, just three very damp, bedraggled
pigeons on the flat roof opposite, one of them minus a leg.
A wet, one-legged pigeon – what more apposite
symbol could there be of the times we live in?
