Sorry for the lack of posts — these past few days have been busy and exhausting.  I’ll have something up soon, I promise…..

I’m in Paris right now. Thank Heavens there’s now FREE WIFI in many of the city’s gardens, squares and public institutions. I’m sitting on a parkbench, typing away in regal Place des Vosges right now. FOR FREE.

Did I mention FREE?

I can’t believe it. Move over sliced bread, free outdoor Wifi is now THE greatest human achievement ever.

In other news, Paris has surprisingly few tourists this spring. Last year they were clogging every narrow street and café entrance. These past few days they’ve been surprisingly absent. Must be the low American dollar and the absurdly high Euro, of which I am also suffering.

….

A company of French actors are rehearsing a play in front of me RIGHT NOW. This is fascinating.

I’m leaving for Paris in a few hours. See you on the other side of the pond.

Kinda reminds me of that Rufus Wainwright song, “Leaving For Paris“….“Through the crooked streets behind me…I’m leaving…”

(Taken last year, on an unusually clear January evening from the viewing platform at Trocadéro.)

Since I’m busy packing for my flight tomorrow, I’m shamelessly pulling this entry from my old blog (which no longer exists). Some of you faithful readers of yore may have already read this.

As you can probably deduce from the articles I’ve linked to already, I spend a lot of time browsing the New York Times website. Well, here’s something that was published back in June, announcing the plans to redevelop Les Halles, the gigantic underground mall / above-ground garden / urban planning embarassment / slice of Americana / “what zeh fuck?” plot of land in the middle of Paris.

The location known as Les Halles had been Paris’s central market for over a thousand years. Long known as “the stomach of Paris,” everyday farmers and merchants would arrive there from all over the country and haul tons of crates of food to feed the city masses. In the 1850s, large, green iron-and-glass shelters were built to partially house specialized vendors (you can still find examples of this market architecture in cities like Rennes and Lille). If you wanna see what this gargantuan food market looked like, rent the film A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT (Un Longue Dimanche de Fiançailles), which has a short scene that uses CGI to recreate the old Halles (and Jodie Foster has a cameo to boot).

Anyway, in 1971 this millennium-old market was shut and torn down to make way for….a mall. Actually, it was shut down reportedly due to public health reasons and the market was relocated to the suburbs; but with the dismantling of Les Halles, a gigantic hole was left in the middle of Paris, which was soon filled by a massive American-style shopping mall and transportation hub underground, and a garden and some hideous 1970s architecture above ground. Today, it’s one of Paris’ least attractive neighbourhoods and a real embarassment to the city, although it’s popular with teenagers who flock to the mall and the fast food joints nearby (it’s also popular with drug dealers). Most Parisians, however, tend to avoid Les Halles, despite it being in the centre of the city.

Well, according to the Times, the area is finally getting a makeover. Here is a picture of what Les Halles may look like in a few years.

Writes the Times:

If it really is built, the design by Patrick Berger and Jacques Anziutti, two French architects experienced in working in Paris, anticipates creating new commercial and cultural spaces beneath a vast glass roof, variously described as a canopy, layered leaves or a shell but perhaps most evocative of the undulating movements of a manta ray.

That’s a helluva lot better than the white-disco-greenhouse architecture they have right now. The mall’s still staying — I guess even Paris needs a mall — but at least it will be more open-air, with the promise of terraces and a nicer garden. For me, Les Halles has always been the most confusing, most labyrinthine area of Paris. The descent into four confusing levels of commerce was always distressing because I never knew how I might ever find my way back out, and the garden, with its dizzying zigzag of gardens, offered no respite. The new plan for the area sounds a lot less stress-inducing:

Significantly, rising 36 feet above ground level, the Forum’s canopy — that is the architects’ favoured description — will not compete in height with two older landmarks of the neighborhood, the Church of St. Eustache on the southern edge of the gardens and the 18th-century Commodities Exchange to the west.

Under Mr. Mangin’s proposal, the gardens will have shaded paths in the manner of Barcelona’s Ramblas and offer large lawns where Parisians can play, eat or snooze. And as Mr. Berger imagines his own design, the gardens themselves will slope down toward the edge of the patio, in effect blending with the interior world of the canopy.

What strikes me me is that the current Halles is the most North American district of Paris and has a similar ambiance to the Eaton Centre, which is celebrated as constituting a vibrant area of Toronto. It goes to show you our warped sense of popular aesthetics and urban prosperity. Paris’ prolific (and open gay) mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, calls Les Halles “a soulless, architecturally bombastic concrete jungle.” I wish someone at Toronto’s City Hall would recognize Yonge & Dundas as the same thing, and stop turning it into a miniature Times Square.

Speaking of Brittany, my friend Oz, a teacher candidate, is in Saint-Malo doing his practicum in French.  I thought I’d plug his very well-written blog.

I feel guilty to be going to France, or to be travelling in general, during the world food crisis. It’s not exactly a good time to be burning money on self-indulgent luxuries when basic necessities are increasingly unaffordable. A friend of mine sent me some links to some sober news articles about the food crisis, so as a break from the usual France-related programming, I thought I’d pass one of the articles to you.

A snippet from CBC News: Rice riots and empty silos: Is the world running out of food?

Gold and oil get all the headlines. But when it comes to suddenly soaring prices, they barely hold a candle to the real staples of human existence today — wheat, corn, soybeans and rice.

As the Scotiabank commodity price index reported recently, Canada No. 1 grade wheat jumped to an extraordinary $798 a tonne in February 2008, which is more than three times the $252 a tonne it was averaging over each of the past two crop years.

This is great news, of course, for western farmers who have been squeezed by three decades of mostly declining prices and higher input costs. But the sudden surge in crop prices over the past year is creating social havoc and other, almost revolutionary, changes all over the world.

For the first time in recent memory, there were food riots last year in a host of countries, ranging from Austria and Hungary to Mexico, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Yemen, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan.

Russia and Pakistan introduced food rationing for the first time in decades (and Pakistani troops have been sent out to guard imported wheat). To conserve dwindling stocks, India has banned the export of rice, except for high-end basmati, and other big rice-eating countries, notably the Philippines, are talking of a “rice crisis” and promoting drastic measures to guarantee supply.

[…]

With the stockpiles of wheat, rice and corn as low as they have been since the 1970s — in the case of U.S. wheat, as low as they have been since the Second World War — no one expects prices to ease any time soon. And this is putting an extra burden on the big donor nations such as Canada.

The U.S. has already told the UN it might not be able to meet its past commitment on donated foods, at least in tonnage, because there are no surpluses anymore and delivery and other energy-related costs have gone up so much.

Eating like a North American

Droughts, floods and skyrocketing energy costs have all contributed to the perfect storm that is the higher cost of food. But the real underlying reasons, say food system experts like Friedmann, are the hidden environmental and social costs of transporting specific commodities long distances and the fact that everyone now wants to eat like a North American.

For most of history, Friedmann says, humans existed on a variety of locally grown grains and legumes and a smattering of meat. But today, “meat is the new norm, even in countries like India which used to be almost entirely vegetarian.”

As a sidenote, all my vegetarian friends have been warning me about this exact problem….listen to the vegetarians of the world, people.

There’s a new music video out by Justice (the Paris-based electrofunk duo who bear more than a passing resemblance to Daft Punk). Compared to their previous clips, which were at turns light and witty, this one is shocking and disturbing. A group of teenagers from the banlieue (all Black and Maghreb) go into Paris and wreak havoc on commuters, women and old ladies, tourists and random passers-by, before clashing with the police.

The video is clearly a statement about the disenfranchised urban youth and civil unrest in France, but I’m unsure how to read it. Does the video side with the banlieusards, or does it judge them? And what’s with the visible camera crew? (Vaneska from Bif! Bam! Pow! Zap! says the camera crew represents the importance the media played in the riots of November 2005, simultaneously documenting them but also, by sensationalizing the violence, egging the rioters on).

What do you think of the video? (Warning: disturbing scenes of violence and mayhem.)

It’s difficult to write about the situation in the French banlieues, and I won’t attempt to capture it all in one post. The problem is so large, pervasive and complex that it’s hard to have any solid position on the matter. Sadly, Sarkozy doesn’t seem to have ameliorated the conditions in the banlieue; if anything, he’s made them worse. It’s ironic that of the pillars of his election platform last year was that he’d develop innovative solutions to the unemployment and general disillusionment held in the banlieue (which the middle-class ate up, but not the people who actually live in the banlieue). Since being elected, his idea of an innovative solution is to reassert decade-old social policies that have already been proven to fail, only this time he’s added more cops, more dogs and more camera crews. Call me a pessimist, but it’s only a matter of time before another riot breaks out.

A good movie to watch if you want to learn more about the social unrest that has been plaguing France for decades is Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine. (Oddly enough, Mathieu Kassovitz is perhaps better known as the actor who played Audrey Tautou’s love interest in Amélie). Shot in unforgiving black and white, the film follows one group of disenfranchised youth and their discovery of a gun.

(Thank you to Karen for the video.)

This article was actually published in the New York Times nine months ago, but it’s still quite relevant and reveals the high regard the French government has for its national patrimonie. As well, since I’ll be interning at a museum starting Thursday, I thought it fitting to add this to the blog.

France is considering eliminating museum entrance fees to persuade its citizens to go and take in the art in the state-owned permanent collections. Inspired by the British (who eliminated entrance fees to its national museums in 2001, and saw a 60% increase in visitors to its galleries), France is slowly experimenting with free admission. For years, national museums have offered free admission on the first Sunday of every month, but soon this may be broadened so that there will be more opportunities to see world-class art for nary a penny.

“The aim is clear: how to attract people who never set foot in museums?” she said in an interview with Le Monde. “The question has been asked repeatedly for 30 years. Is free access the best solution? Or is it to have more free visiting hours or more attractive prices for different age groups? All this will be examined.

The NYT published a follow-up article in March about a new experiment the government is conducting, where fourteen museums have offered free admission until the end of June (including the Musée Cluny in Paris). Next Saturday is La Nuit Des Musées, when museums across the country stay open until 1:00am for free.

It’s kinda amazing that French are even contemplating free admission, as it would mean a loss of $250 million in revenue. Would it encourage people who wouldn’t normally go see art to actually step into a museum? Or would it just benefit people who would normally pay anyway (tourists, the middle-class, students, etc.)?

Either way, it says something about the French and the importance they place in bringing art to the masses. Compare this to the recently renovated ROM in Toronto, which has seen skyrocketing prices since the addition of the new Crystal. Admission to the ROM is now $20 Cdn, and the free Friday nights have long been eliminated (although you can still get in sans tarif 45 minutes before closing each night). By contrast, regular admission to the Louvre — the world’s largest museum — is only 9 euros, or about $15 Cdn, and free on Friday nights to people under the age of 26.

Seeing art in France is relatively cheap: did you know that, for only 1 euro, you gain access to the gardens of the Musée Rodin, where all his most famous work stands in open air (including The Thinker)? Or that the City of Paris organizes free expositions at l’Hôtel de Ville? Last year they had a magnificent retrospective of the photography of Robert Doisneau. It’s also worth noting that (*ahem*) entrance to (what will soon be) my museum, the Musée Carnavalet, is free, as are all museums owned by the City of Paris.

In France, the unemployed get into museums for free. I think that says it right there, how the French perceive art and culture not as luxuries, but as essentials for living.

The New York Times has published an interesting article on the crumbling lighthouses of France. France has about 150 historic lighthouses, most of them in Brittany, which has a strong maritime culture. The Bretons are proud of their lighthouses, and most shops in the region sell postcards showcasing the finer ones. Unfortunately, while the lighthouses continue to have functional relevance, they are expensive and difficult to maintain due to continual weathering from the rain and sea, so the French government has been letting them crumble away.

As a touristy sidenote, Brittany — the heel of land jetting out from the northwest of France — is a fascinating and enchanting place. The Bretons have Celtic roots, which bring them culturally closer to the Scots and Irish than the Gallic French (even though the rest of the country has appropriated their crêpes and cider). This is the homeland of the Arthurian legends. Many places in France have strong regional identities, but it’s particularly strong in Brittany, which has its own Breton language, and a rogue separatist movement.

As mentioned, there’s also a strong seafaring heritage, and it was from the shores of Brittany that most ships sailed westward to Canada; in fact, Quebec City was modelled after Saint-Malo, and Canadians can find the grave of Jacques Cartier in Saint-Malo’s cathedral.

(Trivia: although Quebec City is modelled after Saint-Malo, Quebec City’s buildings are actually older, as Saint-Malo was levelled in WWII. It has since been rebuilt exactly as it was before, though if you look closely you can tell it’s all new, as the stone hasn’t been worn by the weather. Only the ramparts are in their original state. Saint-Malo is now a major holiday town for French families.)

Me in Saint-Malo, February 2007.

This Saturday there was an interesting article in The Toronto Star titled “In Praise of the Lost Art of Strolling,” about the human importance of the urban stroll. The article, which surmises that “it was the French who first grasped the cultural significance of walking,” praises Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in the late 19th century for making the city pedestrian-friendly, to which I agree. Paris was made for walking. I can think of no other major city where one can enjoy so many delights in an everyday promenade. The chestnut trees that line the wide boulevards provide shade in the summer for the wandering Parisian, while the sightlines created by the Haussmann aesthetic frame and give prominence to the city’s many monuments, which are usually at the centre of turnabouts or at the end of a major thoroughfare. And because the city has few of what we would consider alleyways, even the smallest details of life — stocks entering the stores, waiters having their cigarette break — must happen in the front, for the world to see. There is reason behind the clichéd advice that the best thing to do in Paris is sit at a café terrace and watch the world go by. My favourite French photographer, Robert Doisneau, who made a career out of capturing snapshots of Parisian life, called the streets of Paris the stage of the greatest spectacle there is to see. It’s no wonder Parisians walk so much; it’s a continuous engagement with beauty and surprise.

I reproduce bits of the Star article below:

The French even devised new words to describe these denizens of the expanding city. They were boulevardiers and flaneurs. The former were sophisticated and worldly, urban and urbane. The flâneur, on the other hand, was the man-about-town, idle but intellectually curious and aware.

“An intoxication comes over the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets,” cultural critic and pioneering urban philosopher Walter Benjamin (1898-1940) wrote later. “The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur, he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him, the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon … newsstands are his libraries and the terraces of cafes are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.”
…
As the French realized 150 years ago, walking – specifically urban walking – is about much more than getting from one place to another. It is a mode of being, a way of relating, of existing in the world. The mere act of going out onto the street opens up a whole set of possibilities that lie at the heart of urban life.

Though the early Modernists were deathly afraid of the chance encounter, human or otherwise, most welcome them. Sad to say, however, the Modernists were hugely influential; their vision of a neat, clean and tidy streamlined world devoid of the messy chaos of the big city lies at the heart of innumerable suburban developments.

“A house is a machine for living in,” Le Corbusier famously declared. By extension, a city should be a machine for many to live in.

But, as usual, the truth is more complex than the theorists would like to admit. And as for convenience, the summum bonum of post-War North America, it has turned out to be anything but.

Congestion for pedestrians, if not drivers, can be a pleasure. It is another word for richness and diversity. Think of the St. Lawrence Market on a Saturday morning. Behind the wheel of a car, isolated, protected and feeling invulnerable, we are forever in a hurry. The rest of the world is reduced to nothing more than a series of obstacles.

On foot, sharing the landscape with countless others, we have no choice but to slow down and enjoy. We become a member of a community, connected and part of something larger.

Not only that, but walking speed allows us to absorb what’s going on around us and react. Looking in a shop window, we can decide whether to stop or not. We have time to engage in the city, not simply move through it.

In fact, among the curses of our age is the tendency to think strictly in terms of destination; convenience consists of reducing any act to its most basic elements and performing them as fast and efficiently as possible – a sidewalk becomes a road becomes a highway becomes an expressway.

The “convenient” life is one spent as if in an airport terminal, waiting to be somewhere else, waiting to arrive. We are on hold, temporarily unavailable, passing time until the destination is achieved.

Walking, on the other hand, has the effect of making every minute important. It slows time down, or at least makes the experience of it more intense. Perhaps that’s why walking has always played such an important role in the life of the city. In every city – well almost every city – there are the places where people go to see and be seen.

It’s a long way from Paris of the 1800s to 21st-century Toronto, which, with Vancouver and Montreal, is one of few Canadian cities that actually have a street life. Try wandering around downtown Calgary or Edmonton after dark when everyone has gone home. It can be an eerie, On the Beach-like experience.

Though we can’t turn back the clock, the only way to ensure urban health is to plan cities with walking in mind. If nothing else, this necessitates a human scale. There’s no better measure of that than walking. Not to say that everyone will walk everywhere, but that we should be able to, it should be an option. No, it must be an option.

At the risk of making sweeping generalizations, the French are passionate about politics. Is there any distinction between politics, philosophy and art? Not in France there isn’t. Just remember Sartre and de Beauvoir, Godard, Victor Hugo and Voltaire.

I have trouble following political discourse in France, because I find it quite theoretical and ideological, at least when compared to Canadian politics. So I must express my appreciation for Arthur Goldhammer’s blog, French Politics. Arthur Goldhammer is a professor of French politics at Harvard University. A respected scholar and translator, in 1996 he was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. His frequently-updated blog examines the daily developments of politics in France and is a pleasure to read. Witty, insightful and gorgeously written, his blog brings clarity to even the muddiest and most abstract ideas floating about in the political discourse. I highly recommend it to anyone with even a cursory interest in French and EU politics.

Hello, and welcome to my blog. (Bonjour, et bienvenue à mon blog.)

I will be using this blog to document my return to Paris, where I will spend this summer doing an internship at a museum. I say “return” because Paris and I have had a longstanding love affair: in 2006-2007 I left Canada to spend a year living in a small town in the Loire Valley, about an hour from the Capital. During this time, I got to know Paris and the many other cities and towns France has to offer, from Marseille to Saint-Malo, Lille to Lyon. Although I worked as a teacher, I was effectively a student, getting an intensive education in French culture, history and politics. Now I’m going back, to get to know Paris more intimately and to enjoy her many offerings. Ernest Hemingway called the experience of Paris a “moveable feast”; in that regard, I am going back for seconds.

I don’t know why, but France – and Paris in particular – has always fascinated me. Maybe it was all those French Immersion classes I took that hooked me in: all those random stories about “Madeleine de Toulouse” and her family vacations in Brittany. Or maybe it’s the attraction of chateaux and champagne. France’s rich history and culture no doubt has something to do with it. But I suspect my francophilia can best be attributed to France’s efforts in making art and culture not just relevant, but essential to modern living. Compared to North America, France’s efforts in supporting l’art et la patrimoine is extraordinary.

It would be a disservice to France, however, to see only its stereotypes: the baguettes and bicycles, lovers on bridges. It’s also a country haunted by its colonial past and uncertain how to handle immigration, a country with many disenfranchised youth and a stagnant economy. I’m interested in these issues too, and I hope to blog about them.

So I hope you enjoy this blog. Unfortunately, you won’t likely find me writing about the many magnificent museums, churches and monuments of Paris. I’ve already visited most of the city’s major and not-so-major sites, and written about them in a previous blog (besides, you can find all that in any travel guide). I’m more interested in daily life in the Capital, discovering all the little nooks and crannies only the locals know about, and fashioning a romantic existence as le jeune étranger (the young foreigner) in Paris. It’s an exciting time to be in France: this month is the 40th anniversary of the pivotal May 1968 movement, Paris has recently re-elected its wildly popular (and openly gay) mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, while the country has given a big thumbs-down in the polls to its president of one-year, Nicolas Sarkozy. There is much life in Paris to write about, so I hope you find this blog interesting.