French culture is dead, Time magazine’s Don Morrison recently proclaimed. Complacently subsisting off plentiful government subsidies, it has failed to keep up and compete with any of the noise issuing forth from the anglophone world. If France’s capital city is any reflection of the country’s cultural decline, one might be inclined to agree with him — superficially, at least.
The museum-like quality of Paris, which remains a sort of improbable continuation of its late 19th century self, has long been lamented. The City of Light is bathing, perhaps, in too much of a stage-set’s glow, and one could be forgiven for feeling like one was traipsing through a theme park when strolling through the Tuileries in the evening - especially since half the park literally serves as a sort of fairground. It’s telling that the two most controversial building projects in central Paris - the reconstruction of Les Halles, a former marketplace turned mall and train station, and the potential rebuilding of the Tuileries palace, are, respectively, an attempt to snuff out one of the few 20th century intrusions into central Paris, and the attempt to restore a building lost to fire in 1871. The recent installation of a bike-rental system has only added further to Paris’ 19th century flair: never since then have there been so many pedal warriors on the city’s boulevards. All in all, Paris is not only ossifying, but taking active steps to turn back the clock.
Place Vendôme: Sepulchral City
Morrison claims that that hope for French culture lies in the twin engine of neoliberalism and the immigrant ghettoes of French cities’ banlieux: the latter providing new twists on what “French” means, the former allowing France to competitively export itself to the rest of the world. It’s true that these two forces have brought considerable change to Paris, though not, perhaps, in the positive ways Morrison expects. The offices of American law firms have quintupled along the Avenue Georges V, and St-Germain has steeply declined from Bohemian Rhapsody to Banana Republic. This sort of sterility, more than the mere preservation of belle époque facades, has paralyzed Paris.
Music videos and urban issues are not a likely combination. Most videos are daft things intended merely to promote a pop single of dubious musical value. Some are works of art in their own right. Rare, however, is the videoclip — as they are called in Quebec — that has a unique or interesting perspective on public or urban space.
One of these is the video for indie songstress Arianne Moffatt’s song Montréal. The video takes a fairly literal approach to the song’s content — it’s about returning to Montreal from Paris — but what makes it fascinating is the way it plays with the relationship between maps, signs and public transportation. One of the best sequences is when the headlights of an RER train morph into stops on a map of an RER line; the camera follows the line, pulling back to reveal the train’s interior. Also memorable are the scenes from Charles-de-Gaulle airport, the landing in Montreal and the closing shots taken along the Ville-Marie Expressway heading into Montreal, the concrete overpasses of the doomed Turcot Interchange looming overhead.
Another video I like comes courtesy of Lily Allen. It’s an alternate MV for her hit LDN. Although the mise-en-scène is completely straightforward — it’s just Allen riding around London on her bike — it is more effective than the more heavy-handed original. The cheery, colourful visuals are the perfect accompaniment to Allen’s sarcasm… and who doesn’t like looking at some street-level footage of London?
Paris’s 15th probably carries the distinction of being the city’s least loved arrondissement. Though there isn’t much to distinguish it from, say, the 14th arrondissement just to the west, or the 12th crosstown, the 15th languishes in oubli. Tourists eschew it, locals kick it around in jokes, and the most famous attraction anywhere nearby, the Eiffel Tower, is actually about three blocks outside. I once had a tour book that advised its readers to avoid the area altogether.
It’s clear when you enter this arrondissement that you’re still inside Paris; but still, you can’t shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe, you’ve been dropped somewhere else. The famous blue and green street signs are still there, but often the Metro is far away; gone are the hordes of tourists, gone is the whole notion of monumentality, gone are Haussmann’s huge boulevards. Instead, the 15th arrondissement has subtler points of interest: its tucked away little residential streets, its out-of-the-norm commercial throughfares, the contrasts of late 1800s-vintage structures against modernist apartment buildings. Every question Paris has faced in the last 150 years as a city, whether implicitly or explicitly, is there to be seen: functionalism or mixité? Cars or pedestrians? Bulldoze or leave be?
I hadn’t even thought to bring a map with me before setting off for this pocket of town. Generally there’s no use: in Paris, it usually takes no more than five minutes to arrive at a large boulevard, from where it’s usually easy to find either a metro station or a map on the backside of an advertisement. But no less than 15 minutes after stepping off the new Tramway that stretches out along the Boulevards des Maréchaux near the city’s southern border, I found myself entirely lost. Soon after, my state worsened: it began to rain. Then pour. I was saved by the garage entry of a 1960s-vintage compound that faced out toward the entrance to a villa from at least fifty years before, an intimate, tree-lined dead end. It was only too appropriate.
I love demonstrations and rallies. Sometimes I go out of my way to find them. The presence of thousands of people, all singularly motivated, is a fairly rare phenomenon—all the more so when it comes to political thought.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve been following the French election, and it’s not my place to sum it up here. But let’s just say that this election season has approached the levels of polarization and viciousness that Americans, ahem, enjoyed in 2004. When I found out that no less than ten people who I knew were going to a rally for Parti Socialiste candidate Ségolène Royal, I figured that I might as well show up too. So I coerced a friend into coming along and set off for the Stade Charléty down in the 13th arrondissement.
Watching these old advertisements—one from the 1980s for the Paris metro and another from the 1970s for the Montreal metro—leave me with mixed feelings. My initial reaction is to ridicule them for their kitschiness (or kétainerie, as one might say here in Quebec) but, at the same time, I feel a slight pang of regret that public transit agencies can no longer afford to buy television air time, especially not for an entire minute. Wouldn’t the Montreal Transit Corporation benefit from more of a brand identity? Public transit doesn’t need to be anonymous, the public made aware of its services solely by necessity.
Anyway, the strangest thing about the first Paris ad is its ridiculous soundtrack, which consists of a man singing things like “tic tac toc, tata clica clic” and background vocalists replying with “tata clica clac, tata clica clac, tika tika toc.” I have no idea what this is meant to represent, but this kind of gibberish actually seems to go well with the ad, complimenting a fairly striking—but goofy—set of images, linked together by the image of a yellow ticket bisected by a brown magnetic stripe. (Update: a reader with clearer ears than mine reports that “tata clica clic” is actually “t’as le ticket clic,” which makes more sense.) My favourite image is that of a striped Eiffel Tower passing behind the silhouette of a man wearing a beret, which not only evokes two of the biggest Paris stereotypes you can imagine, but also suggests either sex (swallowing a giant yellow penis) or violence (being impaled by a giant yellow dagger).
On the whole, the Paris ad is a bit more sophisticated than its early-1970s counterpart in Montreal, entitled “Il fait beau dans l’métro.” I enjoy it because it is a perfect embodiment of the seventies aesthetic: long hair, big moustaches, and bold primary colours. I also love that the music is based around the three-tone chime emitted by the metro’s brake system when it leaves a station.
Running across the boulevard Saint-Germain, through the Carrefour de l’Odéon, we dashed into the box office and bought our tickets, ducking into the darkened cinema just as the opening credits finished. We sat down in the back row, interrupting a clearly annoyed couple’s face-sucking session, and watched as the first short began: “Montmartre.”
Paris, je t’aime, which we had just handed over our seven euros to see, is a collective film (it’s composed of eighteen segments) directed by a number of big names from around the world, including the Coen Brothers, Gurinder Chadha and Olivier Assayas. Each segment is set in a different part of Paris and deals with, in some way, love. In “Loin du 16ème,” Walter Salles depicts a young Latin American mother who must leave her own child in a suburban daycare in order to care for another in the wealthy sixteenth arrondissement. Sylvain Chomet’s “Tour Eiffel” is an irreverent and off-kilter take on the life of mimes.
Paris, je t’aime is more than just a collection of disparate shorts. Its producers like to call it a “collective film,” since it understands the futility of trying to reduce the Parisian experience into a single story—any attempt to do so will result in an enjoyable but empty Amélie fantasy. Instead, Paris, je t’aime suggests that Paris is a city of vignettes, a collection of dramas that share the same stage. Of course, every city is like this to some extent, but in Paris the effect is exaggerated by geographical compactness. Central Paris is a neat circle just ten kilometres across, ringed by the Périphérique highway; within its boundaries, the city is a treasure chest of humanity.
It’s practically a law of the Earth: the corner bakery will have croissants. The tides will roll in and out, the seasons will change, and the corner bakery will have croissants.
And so it was that on a particular Sunday, my corner bakery did not, actually, have croissants. Or pain au chocolat or much of anything else, except for apple turnovers. And I was not in the mood for apple turnovers. Being out of cereal and bread, if I was going to eat anything that morning, I was going to have to find it first. I would be meeting a friend at the Centre Pompidou, way downtown, at two. Mission: breakfast.
Dmitri, a small man with a Russian accent as thick as the three or four red sweatshirts he was wearing, led me out a door and into a walled-in courtyard. He gestured at four plastic drums, each one about the size of two ATMs back-to-back, each one coloured in a ridiculously peppy shade of recycling-bin green.
“This,” he said, “is where we collect rainwater to use for our toilets.”
I nodded slowly.
This was a new one. In my admittedly short life, I’ve seen quite a few apartments. Exactly zero of them had toilet systems based off vats of rainwater.
Dmitri gestured to somewhere behind me. “Now, if you like, I’ll show you your room,” he said.
I nodded vacantly; my brain was still on the rainwater toilets. The implications of that system started to wash over me. It isn’t that that fact would make a difference when actually using a toilet - but what did it say about Dmitri? Was he some kind of eco-freak? Or just conscientious?
Regardless of which of the two was the case, he was now looking at me rather oddly.
“Your room is behind you,” he said.
I turned quickly; Dmitri led me into the diffusely lit enclosure via a flap of thick translucent plastic. The room, if it could be called that, was small and spare. To the right was a white mattress on what looked like exactly one half of an Ikea bedframe. To the left was a white desk with a depressed old folding chair tucked underneath. A space heater sat dejected in the middle of the room. The ceiling was made of corrugated metal on wooden slats: the kind of construction most often seen in Discovery Channel documentaries about Kenya.
“So this would be your room,” he said. “This is what we like to call the Writers’ Studio.”
Montreal Apartments