Paris bulletin 4 2016

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 (21^st 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 18^th 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?