La cage d’orée (Ruben Alves – France) 90 minutes
France’s Portuguese community – one million strong – is one of the country’s most unassuming success stories of integration. Most arrived in the post-war years, fleeing the underdeveloped economy, and often repression, of Salazar's Estado Novo, and made a number of trades their own, notably construction, painting and decorating and, most of all, the position of concierge, the superintendant of Parisian residential buildings. Facing less severe discrimination than Arab or African immigrants, the Franco-Portuguese have done well. Unlike other European immigrant groups in France though, such as the Spanish, the Poles and the Italians, the Portuguese have remained steadfastly connected to the old country. Many second-generation Portuguese are bilingual and will always choose the Selecçao over France, were the two to meet in a major football match (as they often do). Ruben Alves’ comedy La cage d’orée is a long-overdue portrayal of a community that has until now been largely ignored by French cinema.
The Ribeiro family live in the concierge lodge of a bourgeois building in Paris’ wealthy 16th arrondissement; mother Maria (Rita Blanco) takes care of the residents’ every need while José (Joaquim de Almeida) is a construction-site foreman. Son Carlos (Jean-Pierre Martins) is still at school while Paula (Barbara Cabrita) has started seeing the son of her father’s boss. José one day learns he has inherited a vineyard in the Douro valley from a long-estranged brother on condition that he go live there to oversee it. When word gets out that the Ribeiros are planning to leave, the building’s residents and José’s boss snap into action to prevent it by whatever means necessary.
La cage d’orée (the gilded cage) is a pretty unsophisticated comedy and is loaded to the point of cliche with all the familiar trappings of Portuguese life – the virgin of Fatima, pastéis de nata, fado (with Amália Rodrigues to the fore, of course), bacalhau à bras, the music of Rodrigo Leão (who contributed the soundtrack, much of it recycled), Port, Super Bock, and so on. The sporting idol of the Franco-Portuguese, PSG’s record scorer Pauleta even makes a goofy guest appearance. The central conceit is a bit flawed as, though it might be funny to a French audience, from the point of view of a neutral observer trying to prevent an immigrant from returning home has a touch of cruelty to it that sits uncomfortably with gentle comedy.
Nonetheless Alves’ film has some surprisingly sharp insights into the immigrant experience, particularly the tension between the yearning for the homeland and the commitments of life in the new country. It also movingly throws into relief the inferiority complex of the Portuguese vis-à-vis their French hosts (never mind that Portuguese culture and society are every bit as rich as those of France). It’s none too complicated and has the air of TV comedy about it but La cage d’orée is a pleasant portrait of a quietly proud immigrant community and it is nice to see the stone-faced Joaquim de Almeida get a go at comedy, being far more used to playing minor Latino tough guys in Hollywood movies.
Showing posts with label Paris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paris. Show all posts
Friday, May 31, 2013
Thursday, April 18, 2013
La Maison de la radio – Nicolas Philibert
La Maison de la radio (Nicolas Philibert – France/Japan) 103 minutes
The French love their radio. Polls of French people consistently report greater levels of trust in radio news than print or TV; knowledgeable French football fans prefer radio to television commentary for games; telling people you work in radio generally elicits a warmth that few other media positions can generate; politicians are far more likely to appear in studio on a morning radio-news broadcast than on TV. And the French love no radio more than their public-service broadcaster, Radio France. The national broadcaster is revered by both left and right, in a way the BBC used to be in Britain. There is no Daily Mail-style campaign questioning the amount of money allotted to Radio France – it is more or less untouchable.
The reason for this love lies in the company’s roots. Founded in 1946, Radio France was a Gaullist operation from the off. And, in France, radio is inextricably linked with the General, whose Radio Londres broadcasts from the BBC kept the cause of French freedom alive throughout the Occupation. Radio France has its own splendid headquarters, la maison de la radio – the doyen of French broadcasting, in the 16th arrondissement by the Seine. Henri Bernard’s vast sinuous curtain-walled edifice was one of the glories of the trentes glorieuses, a building so iconic it has been incorporated into the station’s logo. Nicolas Philibert’s new documentary is an observational portrait of several months in the building among the 4300 employees of the company’s seven stations.
Like Frederick Wiseman, who has recently completed a number of fly-on-the-wall documentaries of Paris institutions, Philibert does not employ voice-over or captions; unlike Wiseman, Philibert dispenses with interviews too. It gives his film a more free-flowing air though it also means it lacks the depth of Wiseman’s films and non-French audiences might wish for greater context to help them understand what’s going on (even I missed a few references that clearly resonated greater with the audience I watched the film with).
The film takes place throughout the course of 2011; we hear snippets about the Japanese tsunami, the Arab Spring, the election violence in Ivory Coast, the Strauss-Kahn trial in New York. Guests file in and out of the studios, some of them famous – Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco – others less so. We see young journalists being trained, sound engineers at work, reporters making preparations to go out into the field, the station’s famed orchestra and choir recording. We get the chance to eavesdrop on morning editorial conferences that are replete with wry humour: ‘We have to get a sociologist, that’s very Radio France’, ‘a left-wing sociologist, to be precise.’ We even catch a glimpse of such ordinary departments as the cafeteria and the garage, where the fleet of Radio France outdoor broadcast vehicles is tuned.
Philibert’s film has a neutral tone even though it is clearly sympathetic. Detractors might say it is far too complaisant and offers a slice of French society as utopian as that in Philibert’s earlier schoolhouse film To Be and to Have (which I found more grating than most people did). If it is gentle and admiring though, it lavishes its admiration for the people working for the company rather than the institution itself. In this respect, it is much less annoyingly eulogistic than the recent New York Times love-in Page One. La Maison de la radio will probably be best appreciated by French people and francophiles but anyone with an interest in the eternally resilient medium of radio will surely be interested.
The French love their radio. Polls of French people consistently report greater levels of trust in radio news than print or TV; knowledgeable French football fans prefer radio to television commentary for games; telling people you work in radio generally elicits a warmth that few other media positions can generate; politicians are far more likely to appear in studio on a morning radio-news broadcast than on TV. And the French love no radio more than their public-service broadcaster, Radio France. The national broadcaster is revered by both left and right, in a way the BBC used to be in Britain. There is no Daily Mail-style campaign questioning the amount of money allotted to Radio France – it is more or less untouchable.
The reason for this love lies in the company’s roots. Founded in 1946, Radio France was a Gaullist operation from the off. And, in France, radio is inextricably linked with the General, whose Radio Londres broadcasts from the BBC kept the cause of French freedom alive throughout the Occupation. Radio France has its own splendid headquarters, la maison de la radio – the doyen of French broadcasting, in the 16th arrondissement by the Seine. Henri Bernard’s vast sinuous curtain-walled edifice was one of the glories of the trentes glorieuses, a building so iconic it has been incorporated into the station’s logo. Nicolas Philibert’s new documentary is an observational portrait of several months in the building among the 4300 employees of the company’s seven stations.
Like Frederick Wiseman, who has recently completed a number of fly-on-the-wall documentaries of Paris institutions, Philibert does not employ voice-over or captions; unlike Wiseman, Philibert dispenses with interviews too. It gives his film a more free-flowing air though it also means it lacks the depth of Wiseman’s films and non-French audiences might wish for greater context to help them understand what’s going on (even I missed a few references that clearly resonated greater with the audience I watched the film with).
The film takes place throughout the course of 2011; we hear snippets about the Japanese tsunami, the Arab Spring, the election violence in Ivory Coast, the Strauss-Kahn trial in New York. Guests file in and out of the studios, some of them famous – Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco – others less so. We see young journalists being trained, sound engineers at work, reporters making preparations to go out into the field, the station’s famed orchestra and choir recording. We get the chance to eavesdrop on morning editorial conferences that are replete with wry humour: ‘We have to get a sociologist, that’s very Radio France’, ‘a left-wing sociologist, to be precise.’ We even catch a glimpse of such ordinary departments as the cafeteria and the garage, where the fleet of Radio France outdoor broadcast vehicles is tuned.
Philibert’s film has a neutral tone even though it is clearly sympathetic. Detractors might say it is far too complaisant and offers a slice of French society as utopian as that in Philibert’s earlier schoolhouse film To Be and to Have (which I found more grating than most people did). If it is gentle and admiring though, it lavishes its admiration for the people working for the company rather than the institution itself. In this respect, it is much less annoyingly eulogistic than the recent New York Times love-in Page One. La Maison de la radio will probably be best appreciated by French people and francophiles but anyone with an interest in the eternally resilient medium of radio will surely be interested.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Three French films
Macaroni & Cheese (Les Coquillettes) (Sophie Letourneur — France) 75 minutes
Under the Rainbow (Au Bout du conte) (Agnès Jaoui — France) 112 minutes
Un p’tit gars de Ménilmontant (Alain Minier — France) 88 minutes
Faced with the prospect of wading through the booze-filled August nights at the Locarno film festival in 2011 when presenting her short film Le Marin masqué, Sophie Letourneur decided to shoot a film about wading through the booze-filled nights at the very same festival. The director and her friends and collaborators Camille Genaud and Carole Le Page play versions of themselves, as do several other minor figures in the French film industry, who treat Locarno — a poor man’s Cannes — as a prime excuse to get their rocks off. It sounds like it ought to be terribly self-indulgent but Les coquillettes (the title comes from the French for elbow macaroni) is shot through with enough droll self-deprecation to interest the casual viewer. All three take on roles of varying humiliation — Letourneur is obsessed with French pretty-boy actor Louis Garrel and is more interested in tracking him down and hooking up with him than in showcasing her own film; Camille drunkenly pursues a stuffed-shirt of a hipster film critic, while Carole vocally bemoans her own not getting laid in over a year, and is determined to break her duck with a minor Italian actor.
The tale is recounted by the trio some time later, with inevitable differences, after helping Sophie move into a new flat, as they eat the eponymous coquillettes. It is a film that wears itself very lightly but it nonetheless never seems inconsequential; it is also sharply-scripted with some very funny gags, and has the good taste to be amiably brief. The female leads are all likeable — attractive in a girl-you-know-type way — especially Genaud, whose daffy social resilience is as charming as it is touching. The repartee among the three of them is as good as the dialogue in the second part of Quentin Tarantino’s Deathproof (a splendid piece of writing Tarantino himself did not get due credit for). It is impressive how Letourneur and all involved managed to put together a film amid all the brouhaha of a summer film festival. The organisers of Locarno were sufficiently impressed to invite them back to screen it in 2012. Let’s hope the ladies managed to let their hair down a little more this time.
Au bout du conte, Agnès Jaoui’s fourth film as director held a particular interest for me as my local café was commandeered last spring for one afternoon to double up as a little bistro during its filming. La Pétanque was renamed ‘La Licorne’ (‘The Unicorn’); the fictional title reflects the fairytale references that litter the film, and which is hinted at in its punning French title. Agathe Bonitzer plays Laura, the young daughter of a millionaire businessman who falls for an impoverished young music student, Sandro, a tryst supposedly predicted by a clairvoyant she has been seeing. Sandro’s distant father Pierre (Jaoui’s regular co-writer and former partner Jean-Pierre Bacri), in the meantime, has just buried his own father, a death he admits has left him barely moved. However, a fortune teller at the funeral reminds him that the date of his death that she had predicted four decades earlier is fast approaching, sending this misanthropic driving instructor into an unlikely existential tizzy.
Laura’s aunt Marianne (Jaoui), an actor-cum-drama-teacher is just recovering from a failed marriage while her ten-year-old daughter takes refuge in the Bible (a joke that would be particularly outré for the film’s intended lefty secular audience). Meanwhile, her neighbour Maxim Wolf (Benjamin Biolay), a sinister-looking music impresario, is taking a healthy interest in Sandro’s first symphony and a rather less healthy one in Laura. Like Jaoui and Bacri’s previous films, Au bout du conte is light but well-crafted, overcoming the obligatory dramatic obstacles on the way before resolving itself in typically Shakespearean comedy fashion.
Jaoui and Bacri, who began collaborating on stage plays in the late 1980s, before graduating to writing screenplays for Alain Resnais and Cédric Klapisch, produce films that are unabashedly middle-brow but unpretentious, the sort of works that English-speakers tend to call ‘very French’ (it must be said though that what qualifies as middle-brow in France often occupies a place a few rungs higher when it travels to an Anglophone country). They are rarely very challenging but they are entertaining and the presence of Bacri alone is worth the price of admission. He plays more or less the same character in every role he is cast — in films by other writers and directors too — a neurotic, crabby, bilious middle-aged French petit-bourgeois. He can send ripples of laughter through a French audience with just the moaning advance of a complaint; half his on-screen dialogue consists of shrugs, sighs and perpetually incredulous rolling eyes. He is very much the sort of French man whom it is vastly more entertaining to observe at a distance than tolerate in social situations. And he provides a bracingly cranky counterpoint to films, like this one, that err a little too closely on the side of complaisance much of the time.
Also filmed in my neighbourhood is Un p'tit gars de Ménilmontant, a crime drama directed by local boy, Alain Minier, whose first feature it is. It is a strange sensation to see onscreen many of the locations you have walked past only moments earlier on the way to your local cinema, and even weirder to see the vacant lot behind your building appear during a scene in which someone gets offed.
There is plenty of local colour in this film, in which former bank-robber Jo (cop turned actor/director Olivier Marchal) returns to his neighbourhood, the titular Ménilmontant (an old working-class part of eastern Paris) after 15 years in prison, only to find it a changed place. Young thugs who were in nappies when he went inside now rule the roost and he discovers that his ex-partner and the 14-year-old son he has never met are now living in a comfortable upwardly-mobile set-up with a mild-mannered schoolteacher. The gentrification of the area is further embodied by his old partner-in-crime Makhlouf (Franco-Algerian comedian Smaïn), who has gone straight and now runs a neighbourhood bistro. Jo enlists his help to change a large sum of old francs he had stashed before going into prison into euros but a gang of gypsies whose cousins he has killed are out for revenge.
It is just as well I live in Ménilmontant because there is precious little in this film to interest anyone who doesn’t know the locale. The film never strays beyond the most tired of clichés — the taciturn recidivist, the hooker with a heart of gold, a son whose effeteness must perforce be hammered home by having him do ballet. It is also littered with some bizarre editing and some very annoying stylistic tics, such as a shot, repeated three times, of different characters turning to the camera and pointing a gun the moment they get their hands on one. Ménilmontant may not be quite the picturesque neighbourhood it was when photographed by Willy Ronis — the old tenements were torn down in the 1960s to make way for high-rise social housing — but its hills, escarpments and dimly-lit staircases are still charmingly atmospheric. Minier does his best to capture them with his gently-lit Scope photography but he can never quite shake off his directing-for-TV sensibility. Ménilmontant’s streets are not quite so mean as they appear in Minier’s film but, to someone who walks down them on a daily basis, they could definitely be a lot more cinematic than this.
Under the Rainbow (Au Bout du conte) (Agnès Jaoui — France) 112 minutes
Un p’tit gars de Ménilmontant (Alain Minier — France) 88 minutes
Faced with the prospect of wading through the booze-filled August nights at the Locarno film festival in 2011 when presenting her short film Le Marin masqué, Sophie Letourneur decided to shoot a film about wading through the booze-filled nights at the very same festival. The director and her friends and collaborators Camille Genaud and Carole Le Page play versions of themselves, as do several other minor figures in the French film industry, who treat Locarno — a poor man’s Cannes — as a prime excuse to get their rocks off. It sounds like it ought to be terribly self-indulgent but Les coquillettes (the title comes from the French for elbow macaroni) is shot through with enough droll self-deprecation to interest the casual viewer. All three take on roles of varying humiliation — Letourneur is obsessed with French pretty-boy actor Louis Garrel and is more interested in tracking him down and hooking up with him than in showcasing her own film; Camille drunkenly pursues a stuffed-shirt of a hipster film critic, while Carole vocally bemoans her own not getting laid in over a year, and is determined to break her duck with a minor Italian actor.
The tale is recounted by the trio some time later, with inevitable differences, after helping Sophie move into a new flat, as they eat the eponymous coquillettes. It is a film that wears itself very lightly but it nonetheless never seems inconsequential; it is also sharply-scripted with some very funny gags, and has the good taste to be amiably brief. The female leads are all likeable — attractive in a girl-you-know-type way — especially Genaud, whose daffy social resilience is as charming as it is touching. The repartee among the three of them is as good as the dialogue in the second part of Quentin Tarantino’s Deathproof (a splendid piece of writing Tarantino himself did not get due credit for). It is impressive how Letourneur and all involved managed to put together a film amid all the brouhaha of a summer film festival. The organisers of Locarno were sufficiently impressed to invite them back to screen it in 2012. Let’s hope the ladies managed to let their hair down a little more this time.
Au bout du conte, Agnès Jaoui’s fourth film as director held a particular interest for me as my local café was commandeered last spring for one afternoon to double up as a little bistro during its filming. La Pétanque was renamed ‘La Licorne’ (‘The Unicorn’); the fictional title reflects the fairytale references that litter the film, and which is hinted at in its punning French title. Agathe Bonitzer plays Laura, the young daughter of a millionaire businessman who falls for an impoverished young music student, Sandro, a tryst supposedly predicted by a clairvoyant she has been seeing. Sandro’s distant father Pierre (Jaoui’s regular co-writer and former partner Jean-Pierre Bacri), in the meantime, has just buried his own father, a death he admits has left him barely moved. However, a fortune teller at the funeral reminds him that the date of his death that she had predicted four decades earlier is fast approaching, sending this misanthropic driving instructor into an unlikely existential tizzy.
Laura’s aunt Marianne (Jaoui), an actor-cum-drama-teacher is just recovering from a failed marriage while her ten-year-old daughter takes refuge in the Bible (a joke that would be particularly outré for the film’s intended lefty secular audience). Meanwhile, her neighbour Maxim Wolf (Benjamin Biolay), a sinister-looking music impresario, is taking a healthy interest in Sandro’s first symphony and a rather less healthy one in Laura. Like Jaoui and Bacri’s previous films, Au bout du conte is light but well-crafted, overcoming the obligatory dramatic obstacles on the way before resolving itself in typically Shakespearean comedy fashion.
Jaoui and Bacri, who began collaborating on stage plays in the late 1980s, before graduating to writing screenplays for Alain Resnais and Cédric Klapisch, produce films that are unabashedly middle-brow but unpretentious, the sort of works that English-speakers tend to call ‘very French’ (it must be said though that what qualifies as middle-brow in France often occupies a place a few rungs higher when it travels to an Anglophone country). They are rarely very challenging but they are entertaining and the presence of Bacri alone is worth the price of admission. He plays more or less the same character in every role he is cast — in films by other writers and directors too — a neurotic, crabby, bilious middle-aged French petit-bourgeois. He can send ripples of laughter through a French audience with just the moaning advance of a complaint; half his on-screen dialogue consists of shrugs, sighs and perpetually incredulous rolling eyes. He is very much the sort of French man whom it is vastly more entertaining to observe at a distance than tolerate in social situations. And he provides a bracingly cranky counterpoint to films, like this one, that err a little too closely on the side of complaisance much of the time.
Also filmed in my neighbourhood is Un p'tit gars de Ménilmontant, a crime drama directed by local boy, Alain Minier, whose first feature it is. It is a strange sensation to see onscreen many of the locations you have walked past only moments earlier on the way to your local cinema, and even weirder to see the vacant lot behind your building appear during a scene in which someone gets offed.
There is plenty of local colour in this film, in which former bank-robber Jo (cop turned actor/director Olivier Marchal) returns to his neighbourhood, the titular Ménilmontant (an old working-class part of eastern Paris) after 15 years in prison, only to find it a changed place. Young thugs who were in nappies when he went inside now rule the roost and he discovers that his ex-partner and the 14-year-old son he has never met are now living in a comfortable upwardly-mobile set-up with a mild-mannered schoolteacher. The gentrification of the area is further embodied by his old partner-in-crime Makhlouf (Franco-Algerian comedian Smaïn), who has gone straight and now runs a neighbourhood bistro. Jo enlists his help to change a large sum of old francs he had stashed before going into prison into euros but a gang of gypsies whose cousins he has killed are out for revenge.
It is just as well I live in Ménilmontant because there is precious little in this film to interest anyone who doesn’t know the locale. The film never strays beyond the most tired of clichés — the taciturn recidivist, the hooker with a heart of gold, a son whose effeteness must perforce be hammered home by having him do ballet. It is also littered with some bizarre editing and some very annoying stylistic tics, such as a shot, repeated three times, of different characters turning to the camera and pointing a gun the moment they get their hands on one. Ménilmontant may not be quite the picturesque neighbourhood it was when photographed by Willy Ronis — the old tenements were torn down in the 1960s to make way for high-rise social housing — but its hills, escarpments and dimly-lit staircases are still charmingly atmospheric. Minier does his best to capture them with his gently-lit Scope photography but he can never quite shake off his directing-for-TV sensibility. Ménilmontant’s streets are not quite so mean as they appear in Minier’s film but, to someone who walks down them on a daily basis, they could definitely be a lot more cinematic than this.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
A French Paradox
Following on the controversy over the Toronto International Film Festival's showcasing Tel-Aviv a couple of months back, the roadshow moves on to Paris. Le Forum des Halles, the excellent municipal-run cinemathèque in the Les Halles shopping centre is hosting 'Tel-Aviv : le paradoxe', a season of films set and filmed in the Israeli city, which celebrates its centenary this year. The season, which started yesterday and runs until the 25th of November, contains a far wider range of films than were shown in Toronto, both contemporary and from the past, such as Ephraim Kishon's Arvinka (1967) and Avi Nesher's Dizengoff 99 (1979). Unlike Toronto it also looks likely to be a more self-critical look at the city (the title alone suggests that) with prominent leftist filmmakers Eytan Fox, Amos Gitaï and Ronit Elkabetz among others appearing as guests, a series of debates on Tel-Aviv's bubble-like status as a tolerant liberal haven strangely free of an Arab population, and there's even place for Hany Abu-Assad's Oscar-winning Palestinian film Paradise Now, which tells of two Palestinians' attempt at a suicide bombing in the city.
But not everyone's happy. There's nothing like the brouhaha that followed John Greyson's protest at Toronto, but prominent pro-Palestinian activist Michèle Sibony (who, for what it matters, is herself Jewish) has written a letter to the cinema directors decrying the decision to showcase Tel-Aviv only ten months after the murderous Gaza invasion. Her letter goes a bit like this:
Even for those of us sympathetic to the Palestinian cause it's a drearily familiar tread through the verbiage of official letter-writing. Not that Michèle Sibony isn't entitled to her stance but it is curious that the season has failed to stimulate much protest beyond this, and Paris is certainly not lacking militants for the Palestinian cause. Is it the Parisian cinephilia that allows one to dissassociate unpleasant acts and behaviour from enjoyment of good films, or do most people see the season as being far from a whitewash of Tel-Aviv? I suspect it might be the latter. As for myself, I'll be staying away, less out of conviction, than simply due to the fact I have seen most of the contemporary films showing, including Raphaël Nadjari's excellent Avanim, Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz's To Take a Wife and Fox's Walk on Water. I have films to watch elsewhere, not to mention fences to tend to before sitting on.
But not everyone's happy. There's nothing like the brouhaha that followed John Greyson's protest at Toronto, but prominent pro-Palestinian activist Michèle Sibony (who, for what it matters, is herself Jewish) has written a letter to the cinema directors decrying the decision to showcase Tel-Aviv only ten months after the murderous Gaza invasion. Her letter goes a bit like this:
"You have entitled your homage "Tel-Aviv - the paradox, wishing, no doubt to suggest an ambivalence or a certain ambiguity. Tel-Aviv is not a paradox, it is rather proof: a 'Capital of Segregation and Apartheid'. Constructed on the expulsion and destruction of Palestinian villages, it has completely rid itself of any Palestinian presence since the so-called 'Oslo peace process'. The bubble, as it likes to call it, is a city as white as Cape Town was during the Apartheid years."
Even for those of us sympathetic to the Palestinian cause it's a drearily familiar tread through the verbiage of official letter-writing. Not that Michèle Sibony isn't entitled to her stance but it is curious that the season has failed to stimulate much protest beyond this, and Paris is certainly not lacking militants for the Palestinian cause. Is it the Parisian cinephilia that allows one to dissassociate unpleasant acts and behaviour from enjoyment of good films, or do most people see the season as being far from a whitewash of Tel-Aviv? I suspect it might be the latter. As for myself, I'll be staying away, less out of conviction, than simply due to the fact I have seen most of the contemporary films showing, including Raphaël Nadjari's excellent Avanim, Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz's To Take a Wife and Fox's Walk on Water. I have films to watch elsewhere, not to mention fences to tend to before sitting on.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Chapeau #2
Another good break for friends of mine this week. My friends Chris, Alex and Dave opened the doors of their bar/restaurant Chair de Poule* in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. It's a small but charming place that intends to serve food at the bistro end of nouvelle cuisine (food's still a few weeks off) and knowing Chris' pedigree as a farm-to-plate type of chef, having worked in several countries, the food will be nothing short of top class. The place is located on the corner of rue St-Maur and rue des Trois Bornes, in an area with no shortage of lively bars, cafés and restaurants for a good night all round. There's a website too under construction. You'll be hearing more of this in the months to come.
Chair de Poule, 141, rue St-Maur, 75011 Paris. Métro Parmentier/Goncourt Tel: 01.43.38.89.06
View Larger Map
*The name means literally 'chicken flesh' in French, but idiomatically, it's closer to 'goose flesh'.
Chair de Poule, 141, rue St-Maur, 75011 Paris. Métro Parmentier/Goncourt Tel: 01.43.38.89.06
View Larger Map
*The name means literally 'chicken flesh' in French, but idiomatically, it's closer to 'goose flesh'.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Let it Fly
A matter of principle prevents me from going to see David Cronenberg's first opera production, an adaptation of his own film The Fly, by Howard Shore, writer of the film's original score and Cronenberg's usual collaborator. I have to say I am tempted, as I was by other Parisian opera productions by celebrated filmmakers in the past couple of years, such as Michael Haneke's Don Giovanni and Emir Kusturica's The Time of the Gypsies, and Cronenberg is one of the greatest directors of his generation and probably the greatest English-speaking director alive. Apart from a few years of muddled films in the 1990s, Cronenberg has been consistenly brilliant in his examination of contemporary man's grappling with all-consuming technology, sexual obsession and violence. His films eschew the self-aggrandizing bluster of others such as Martin Scorsese and Brian de Palma, who never pass up an opportunity to remind audiences how revolutionary each new film supposedly is (and in the case of each of these, that is never the case). Cronenberg's modesty is reflected in his refusal to take himself too seriously and in his ability to treat of high art and popular culture with equal ease.
So why will I not go and see The Fly at Théâtre du Chatelet? It's not short on star-studded talent, as well as the score by Shore, there is a libretto by David Henry Hwang, whose play M. Butterfly provided the basis for Cronenberg's own 1994 film of the same name; the musical director is none other than Placido Domingo and the set design is by the great Dante Ferreti. My reason for staying away is that it's only Cronenberg that would get me into an opera house in the first place and I feel that going along would be imposture of the highest order. I know very little about opera, I can't say I understand it very well and I'm not even that curious in the broadest sense. I always get irritated when theatre folk tackle cinema because it seems to them to be an obvious step across because it involves human actors like their own métier. Unfortunately the vast majority of theatrical practitioners bring nothing of worth to film, grossly misunderstanding - and underestimating - the medium, being hidebound by their own art form, which, while it is a noble one, has little in common with a fluid and heavily mnemonic one as film is. Of course there have been some excellent filmmakers to have come from theatre, but for every Bergman, Welles or Fassbinder there are ten Anthony Minghellas, Kenneth Branaghs or Martin McDonaghs. I wish Cronenberg the best of luck in his new departure, and I hope that operagoers will be able to enjoy it without irritation (though the review of the show in today's Libération is not too complimentary) but this is a chapter in his career that I will respectfully sit out.
So why will I not go and see The Fly at Théâtre du Chatelet? It's not short on star-studded talent, as well as the score by Shore, there is a libretto by David Henry Hwang, whose play M. Butterfly provided the basis for Cronenberg's own 1994 film of the same name; the musical director is none other than Placido Domingo and the set design is by the great Dante Ferreti. My reason for staying away is that it's only Cronenberg that would get me into an opera house in the first place and I feel that going along would be imposture of the highest order. I know very little about opera, I can't say I understand it very well and I'm not even that curious in the broadest sense. I always get irritated when theatre folk tackle cinema because it seems to them to be an obvious step across because it involves human actors like their own métier. Unfortunately the vast majority of theatrical practitioners bring nothing of worth to film, grossly misunderstanding - and underestimating - the medium, being hidebound by their own art form, which, while it is a noble one, has little in common with a fluid and heavily mnemonic one as film is. Of course there have been some excellent filmmakers to have come from theatre, but for every Bergman, Welles or Fassbinder there are ten Anthony Minghellas, Kenneth Branaghs or Martin McDonaghs. I wish Cronenberg the best of luck in his new departure, and I hope that operagoers will be able to enjoy it without irritation (though the review of the show in today's Libération is not too complimentary) but this is a chapter in his career that I will respectfully sit out.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Footballing schadenfreude Part 1
Paris is a city that is close to my heart but I have never been able to reconcile it to something that is equally close to my most vital of organs: football. Paris just isn't a football town. Though it has hosted two World Cup finals, two European Championship finals and five Champions' Cup finals (as well as being the birthplace of all three tournaments) there is no buzz around the city associated with the game. It is not London, Manchester, Liverpool, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Rome, much less more heaving cauldrons of fandom such as São Paolo, Buenos Aires, Istanbul or Cairo.
The city's main team is Paris Saint-Germain, who have a flimsy pedigree, having being founded only in 1970. I have never warmed to PSG, partly because of that prefabricated heritage, partly because of the flagrant bias shown the club in the French media and also because of the indulgent attitude the club has towards its notorious racist hooligan element, the Boulogne Boys. Since media heir and friend of Nicolas Sarkozy, Arnaud Lagardère tired of having Racing Club de France as a plaything, Paris has been without a second club in the top flight. US Créteil-Lusitanos, a suburban club with roots in the Portuguese immigrant community, narrowly missed out on promotion to Ligue 1 a couple of years back but they have since dropped down to the third division where they play derby matches against Paris FC, who are themselves a splinter from PSG. Now, PSG are in serious danger of dropping to the second division for the first time since 1974. With two games to go they are in the relegation zone level on points with Toulouse, who they drew 1-1 with last Saturday.
I would not be lying if I said that PSG's relegation would fill me with pleasure but my own preferred French team, the once mighty St-Etienne may have benefited from a fortuitous cup final pairing of PSG and the dominant Lyon, St-Etienne's bitter local rivals. Because PSG have already carried off the League Cup in a final remembered more for the notorious banner unfurled by the Boulogne Boys and Lyon look likely to wrap up their seventh title in a row, an extra UEFA Cup place will be open to the fifth-placed team, which is at the moment, les verts from the Massif Central. This would mean that ASSE (to give them their full abbreviation) would play European football for the first time since 1982, the year of their last title and also the year that a certain Michel Platini embarked for Turin and five successful years with Juventus. Given that my own reasons for supporting St-Etienne are wrapped up in nostalgia - they were defeated in the 1976 Champions' Cup final by Bayern Munich, stymied by Hampden Park's famous square goalposts, which deflected a Jacques Santini effort away from danger, this would be pleasing symmetry. While St-Etienne, after years of financial turmoil and numerous relegations, are nowhere close to emulating their glory years, which saw them win a record ten league titles, the team, still one of the best-supported in France, and having, along with Marseille and Lens, the best fans, it would be thrilling to see them back in the big time. First they have to face PSG in the penultimate game at the Parc de Princes on Saturday. To see ASSE reach Europe again while PSG go down would please me greatly.
Here's the best of the action from that night in Hampden:
The city's main team is Paris Saint-Germain, who have a flimsy pedigree, having being founded only in 1970. I have never warmed to PSG, partly because of that prefabricated heritage, partly because of the flagrant bias shown the club in the French media and also because of the indulgent attitude the club has towards its notorious racist hooligan element, the Boulogne Boys. Since media heir and friend of Nicolas Sarkozy, Arnaud Lagardère tired of having Racing Club de France as a plaything, Paris has been without a second club in the top flight. US Créteil-Lusitanos, a suburban club with roots in the Portuguese immigrant community, narrowly missed out on promotion to Ligue 1 a couple of years back but they have since dropped down to the third division where they play derby matches against Paris FC, who are themselves a splinter from PSG. Now, PSG are in serious danger of dropping to the second division for the first time since 1974. With two games to go they are in the relegation zone level on points with Toulouse, who they drew 1-1 with last Saturday.
I would not be lying if I said that PSG's relegation would fill me with pleasure but my own preferred French team, the once mighty St-Etienne may have benefited from a fortuitous cup final pairing of PSG and the dominant Lyon, St-Etienne's bitter local rivals. Because PSG have already carried off the League Cup in a final remembered more for the notorious banner unfurled by the Boulogne Boys and Lyon look likely to wrap up their seventh title in a row, an extra UEFA Cup place will be open to the fifth-placed team, which is at the moment, les verts from the Massif Central. This would mean that ASSE (to give them their full abbreviation) would play European football for the first time since 1982, the year of their last title and also the year that a certain Michel Platini embarked for Turin and five successful years with Juventus. Given that my own reasons for supporting St-Etienne are wrapped up in nostalgia - they were defeated in the 1976 Champions' Cup final by Bayern Munich, stymied by Hampden Park's famous square goalposts, which deflected a Jacques Santini effort away from danger, this would be pleasing symmetry. While St-Etienne, after years of financial turmoil and numerous relegations, are nowhere close to emulating their glory years, which saw them win a record ten league titles, the team, still one of the best-supported in France, and having, along with Marseille and Lens, the best fans, it would be thrilling to see them back in the big time. First they have to face PSG in the penultimate game at the Parc de Princes on Saturday. To see ASSE reach Europe again while PSG go down would please me greatly.
Here's the best of the action from that night in Hampden:
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
The Perfect Vehicle for Racism?
Charles de Gaulle famously attributed his surviving an attempt on his life to the design of his armoured Citroën DS. Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen is another French poltician who gets around in a heavily-protected motor and now it's yours to bid for on eBay. The FN is a bit hard for cash at the moment and the sale of Le Pen's 1991 Armoured Peugeot 605 follows on the auctioning of the fascists' headquarters in leafy St-Cloud, just west of Paris. The FN is moving to Nanterre, which as well as being home to ethnic minorities that wouldn't be too attuned to the party's 'message', is also a little bit rougher so perhaps Le Pen might need to beef up on security with an updated model.
The car in question has passed an MOT test as recently as the 4th of July last year, is blue (naturellement), equipped with air conditioning, central locking, anti-lock braking, automatic transmission (curious, that), CD car stereo, and despite its daily use by its very active owner, is reportedly in excellent condition. The bidding currently stands at €18,050, to close on Monday evening next, and the seller considers the car to be a collector's item. 'No timewasters', is also helpfully added.
On a not really related point, here is the latest video from Parisian electro duo Justice, which features a gang of French suburban youth (all of them black) going on a rampage, terrorising and attacking passers-by, police and security guards alike. It has been ignored by French TV, which is not surprisingly nervous of the accusations of racism. It has been racking up the hits on YouTube since; a friend of mine, who directs music videos herself, thinks it's racist and a perfect recruitment video for the FN but I think it's simply provocative, not to mention exploitative. (For those that don't know, the members of Justice, Gaspard Augé and
Xavier de Rosnay, are both white and from rather well-heeled backgrounds.) But the video is hardly any more racist than if they used a gang of marauding white football hooligans. Of course there is an inescapable racial angle and the video will goad a lot of viewers to apply their own prejudices when watching it. If you think that mindless violence is representative of black suburban youth that's what you will think when you watch this; many others won't however. But the fact that the young thugs wear hoodies with the very-recognisable Justice crucifix logo, and they attack a microphone boom operator at one point, and the title of the song is 'Stress' suggests a self-reflexive jokiness; that of course will madden and offend some folk even more. But there you are. Interestingly, the director is Romain Gavras, the 26-year-old son of Costa-Gavras, the lefty Franco-Greek director of such films as Z, Missing and Betrayed.
The car in question has passed an MOT test as recently as the 4th of July last year, is blue (naturellement), equipped with air conditioning, central locking, anti-lock braking, automatic transmission (curious, that), CD car stereo, and despite its daily use by its very active owner, is reportedly in excellent condition. The bidding currently stands at €18,050, to close on Monday evening next, and the seller considers the car to be a collector's item. 'No timewasters', is also helpfully added.
On a not really related point, here is the latest video from Parisian electro duo Justice, which features a gang of French suburban youth (all of them black) going on a rampage, terrorising and attacking passers-by, police and security guards alike. It has been ignored by French TV, which is not surprisingly nervous of the accusations of racism. It has been racking up the hits on YouTube since; a friend of mine, who directs music videos herself, thinks it's racist and a perfect recruitment video for the FN but I think it's simply provocative, not to mention exploitative. (For those that don't know, the members of Justice, Gaspard Augé and
Xavier de Rosnay, are both white and from rather well-heeled backgrounds.) But the video is hardly any more racist than if they used a gang of marauding white football hooligans. Of course there is an inescapable racial angle and the video will goad a lot of viewers to apply their own prejudices when watching it. If you think that mindless violence is representative of black suburban youth that's what you will think when you watch this; many others won't however. But the fact that the young thugs wear hoodies with the very-recognisable Justice crucifix logo, and they attack a microphone boom operator at one point, and the title of the song is 'Stress' suggests a self-reflexive jokiness; that of course will madden and offend some folk even more. But there you are. Interestingly, the director is Romain Gavras, the 26-year-old son of Costa-Gavras, the lefty Franco-Greek director of such films as Z, Missing and Betrayed.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
May 68
A plug for myself here; I am currently to be seen occupying the Essay of the Month slot at my other online home Irish Left Review where I give my views on the legacy of May 1968. It's a long one, one must be warned...
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Yous and Whose Army?
The most visible sports fans around Paris at the moment have little to do with the rugby; the Tartan Army are in town, for the European Championship qualifier at the Parc des Princes tomorrow night. Always a pleasure to encounter, I'm hoping they have better fortune than their last visit to Paris five years back when they were thumped 5-0 at the Stade de France. I had a drink outside Stolly's earlier with a bunch of lads from Musselburgh, the home town of John White, the midfield star of Tottenham's double-winning season of 1961-62, who was killed by lightning while golfing two years later, though to be honest, only the gentlemen of a certain age knew of White. The guys were a mix of Hearts and Hibs fans and one of the things that is most remarkable about the Scottish fans is the relative absence of both Celtic and Rangers fans among them, which considering the sectarianism of certain fans of those clubs carry about with them is no bad thing.
Despite having the prospect of a ticket for the game being waved in my direction I have patriotically (or is that quixotically?) decided to instead watch Ireland's make-or-break clash with the Czechs in Prague. We would all like to have gone into this game without the burden of having to win but, in spite of Ireland's pitiful away record, I think the Czechs are vulnerable. They are missing the suspended Jan Koller and have not been the same fluid unit since the retirement of Pavel Nedved and Karl Poborskẏ (in fact in last year's World Cup horror show against Ghana, it was Nedved and Peter Čech that seemed to be only Czech players in the land of the living). Of course a midfield with Tomáš Rosickẏ is not to be sniffed at and even in the event of a repeat performance of their match in San Marino on Saturday - where they reportedly rivalled even Ireland's muckery - Stan's boys will surely be on hand to help them back into the game. I'm getting alarmed in advance.
Despite having the prospect of a ticket for the game being waved in my direction I have patriotically (or is that quixotically?) decided to instead watch Ireland's make-or-break clash with the Czechs in Prague. We would all like to have gone into this game without the burden of having to win but, in spite of Ireland's pitiful away record, I think the Czechs are vulnerable. They are missing the suspended Jan Koller and have not been the same fluid unit since the retirement of Pavel Nedved and Karl Poborskẏ (in fact in last year's World Cup horror show against Ghana, it was Nedved and Peter Čech that seemed to be only Czech players in the land of the living). Of course a midfield with Tomáš Rosickẏ is not to be sniffed at and even in the event of a repeat performance of their match in San Marino on Saturday - where they reportedly rivalled even Ireland's muckery - Stan's boys will surely be on hand to help them back into the game. I'm getting alarmed in advance.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Recent Films
There is something uncomfortable, as a thirtysomething male, about going to see a film about the sexual awakening of pubescent girls, but there are times when the subject matter is handled in a way to rid oneself of any feeling of loucheness, such as Lukas Moodysson's Fucking Åmal, Catherine Hardwicke's Thirteen, and now, Naissance des pieuvres, the debut film by the 28-year-old filmmaker Céline Sciamma. The film treats of the infatuation of one shy teenage girl with her much more confident and sexually-precocious friend, who is the star of the local synchronised-swimming team, and also the pained efforts of another friend to sleep with a boy who appears to be toying with her affections. The subject-matter is banal enough but the treatment of it and the impressive formal compositions make Sciamma a filmmaker to look out for. Hopefully she will tackle bigger stories as she progresses as one of the biggest flaws of French cinema these days is its lack of ambition. Naissance des pieuvres (the title literally translates as 'Birth of the octopuses' but its meaning is more figurative, 'pieuvre' being also the French expression for being 'clingy') is a good film but limited by its scope, which is perfectly acceptable for a first-time director. What is particularly interesting about the film is the cinematic update it provides for the Parisian suburb of Cergy-Pontoise, a new town built in the the 1970s and which featured in Éric Rohmer's L'ami de mon amie, back in 1987.
From Bosnia comes a beautiful gem of a film called Armin, which tells the tale of a provincial Bosnian teenager who travels to Zagreb with his father to audition for a German film about the Bosnian war. He is initially told that he is too old for the part but his father persists in badgering the filmmakers into giving him a go for another role. The film is a heartbreaking observation of both parental pride and the familiar adolescent embarrassment at one's progenitors. Overall the film is remarkable for its choice of a low-key visual register and for the strength of the acting; best of all is the father, played by Emir Hadzihafisbegovic, who is a Slavic cross between Homer Simpson and Saul Bellow's Herzog, his solicitousness both pathetic and moving. The final ten minutes provides a surprisingly defiant stance against the cinema of humanitarian exploitation. Armin is a modest film but a fine one that deserves an audience.
I also saw two films by established French film directors with patchy track records. La fille coupée en deux, the latest film by Claude Chabrol has a great title but, apart from a sprightly sense of irony, failed to interest me too much in its tale of a tug-of-love over weathergirl Ludivine Sagnier between celebrated novelist François Berléand and indsustrial heir . Benoît Magimel. As ever Chabrol's examination of the French bourgeoisie is grimly funny but the story is much too banal to set it apart from the bulk of his less interesting work. Much worse was Boarding Gate, the third film in English by former Cahiers du cinéma hack Olivier Assayas. Assayas has turned out a number of interesting films over the past twenty years even if he does have an annoying tendency to emotional shorthand and a recently-acquired taste for irritatingly-kinetic editing. His better films are all in French however, and his latest is his third in a row in English, after Demonlover and Clean, and it forms, with them, a trilogy of supreme silliness, in which Assayas grossly misjudges international social phenomena such as porn, people-trafficking, rock music and, now, the domain of shady business deals. Michael Madsen is an international financier who has recently split up with Asia Argento (a woman who specialises in bad films these days), who has 'femme fatale' all but tattooed in block capitals across her forehead. The film proceeds at a snail's pace despite Assayas' sophomore peppering of the script with risqué drug and sex references and he also seems unaware of one of the elementary rules of story-telling: don't use dialogue to explicate what both characters already know. After two lengthy scenes of Madsen and Argento filling in backstory in a clunky way for the audience I got up from my seat and left. French critics - most of whom are friends of Assayas see his latest films as masterpieces - while English-language critics (who have a greater understanding of the language of those films) think otherwise. This ought to be sufficient encouragement to him to confine his future film activity to French.
Another director who turns out mostly turkeys these days is Wim Wenders. Over the last ten years or so the horrors bearing his imprint have included such dunderheaded films as Until the End of the World, The End of Violence and The Million-Dollar Hotel, the last of which prompted me to apply my 'Bono-as-cultural-virus-theory' to Wenders, as his association with God's Man on Earth has had a similarly baleful effect to the experiences of Salman Rushdie and Louis Lebrocquy. There was a time however when Wenders was making only good films; that time was the 1970s and the early 1980s. Seven of those films have been rereleased in Paris recently and I chose to watch once again what is probably his greatest ever film, the 1975 road movie Kings of the Road. Its English title is less evocative than the German one Im Lauf der Zeit, which is 'As Time Goes By', taken straight out of Casablanca. Nothing happens in the film, as it follows an itinerant projector-repairman, played by Rudiger Vögler around the border between West and East Germany, along with the straggler he picks up, a recently-divorced Hanns Zischler. The film is beautifully shot in black and white by Robby Muller and its observations are disarmingly candid, we see the actors piss, masturbate and, at one time, Vögler takes a graphically-real shit. It is a sober and moving meditation on loneliness and longing, which probably meant that it was not the best film to watch while experiencing a lonesome hangover harvested over four days' partying. But it was, once again a pleasure to watch, and the information given in the opening sequence that the film was filmed in July and August 1975 had an extra resonance - just when Sligo were winning what was to be their last Connacht title for 32 years and shortly before I was born. Go watch this film and everything Wenders did until Wings of Desire.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Are You en Seine?
Seanachie's most recent absence can be explained by his presence at Rock en Seine, Paris' 'premium rock festival', as David Brent might describe it. It's been going four years now and has finally branched out into a three-day project. And though not the world's most prestigious rock festival, it has its definite advantages. Located in the St-Cloud national park, it is right beside a major city (hence, along with Budapest's Sziget, probably the only such festival) and, if you don't fancy camping, you can take Metros 9 or 10 all the way home. Apart from the luxury of being able to sleep in one's own bed, an extra attraction for the Parisian resident is the wonderful atmosphere engendered by the festival, which fits almost seamlessly into the publicly-spirited enterprises of the Cinéma en pleine air at La Villette and the live Jazz performances at Parc de Vincennes. For someone who grew up going to Irish rock festivals that always seemed hostage to chancers and scumbags, the camaraderie of Rock en Seine is a novelty. An added bonus is the proliferation of bars so no queuing for half an hour to buy a maximum of two beers, as is the case in Ireland, and neither are there cops wasting taxpayers' money checking on what people are smoking. Needless to say, there are no resultant public order problems. To top things off, after six weeks of miserable rain, the sun mercifully shone.
The festival is organised by the regional government of Île de France, the region that encircles the capital, and they put up about 20% of the €3.5 million budget. According to a report in yesterday's Libération, for the fifth year, the festival has once again made an undisclosed loss, in spite of attracting a record 65,000 people. UMP member of parliament Yves Jégo tried to score political points against the Socialist President of Île de France by claiming that the ticket prices were prohibitively expensive. Even UMP Minister for Culture Christine Albanel (who attended Les Rita Mitsouko's set on Saturday) dismissed Jégo's newly-found compassion for the little man, noting that the prices (ranging from €42 for one day to €99 for three days) are reasonable when compared with one-off concerts in Paris. I remember paying £60 back in 1992 for a two-day ticket at Féile; with inflation accounted for, Rock en Seine presents very good value for money.
The biggest draw on the first night was The Arcade Fire, whom I missed on their pre-world-fame appearance two years ago. Though the band have little discernible stage charisma they nonetheless provided an impressive set, with thirteen members on stage, a great light show, and they also brought along a hurdy-gurdy. It's always good to see a hurdy-gurdy. More explosive and arguably more entertaining were The Hives, who are, as my friend Nick noted, like four milkmen fronted by Mick Jagger. When they first came on the scene six years ago, I thought that they would never last, that their admittedly amusing concept masked musical shortcomings but their subsequent albums have been surprisingly fresh and only the hardest-bitten of cynics could have failed to smile at their hilarious set at Rock en Seine. Because of work I missed MIA, The Shins and Dinosaur Jr, the latter two of whom were reportedly great while I heard mixed views about MIA.
The highlight of the weekend went unnoticed by most on Saturday as it took place on the smallest of the festival's three stages. It was 22-year-old Scot Calvin Harris, who has been remixing Kylie Minogue, CSS and Groove Armada and who now has his own LCD-esque six-piece group that provided the weekend's hardest-working bassist and most of the best dancing. As with James Murphy's combo the lyrics are sharp and funny, particularly in the recent single 'Acceptable in the Eighties'. CSS played also and were a big improvement on the last time I saw them - at the Elysée Montmartre in April, when they seemed jaded and going through the motions. This time they provided the perfect festival atmosphere with their girly rock trappings - balloons onstage, streamers and party poppers and bubble kits distributed to the audience. Their forty-minute set was much too brief even if they did surprise us by going out in an impressive hail of feedback.
Speaking of feedback, later in the evening saw the return of the Jesus and Mary Chain. The band are blessed with the greatest moniker in rock history - a name that fascinated me as a nine-year-old with its outrageous blasphemy - and their sound towers over even their own music. The Mary Chain sound is as much a fabric as anything else, and though their music became repetitive after 'Automatic', their third, 1989 album, there was enough material to fill an excellent set. Jim Reid still looks like a sadistic Liam Brady - you wonder how he ever managed to bed Hope Sandoval - and their music still sounds like the Beach Boys reflected in a Glasgow puddle - perfect in other words. Cold War Kids had the thankless task of replacing Amy Winehouse and did tolerably well, while Israeli techno-popstars Terry Poison and French legends Les Rita Mitsouko provided good cheer at the other end of the festival site. Quite why California dirge rockers Tool were called upon to headline Saturday night is beyond me but their light show at least was worth looking at for about fifteen minutes.
Sunday had less of interest for Seanachie and the first band he bothered watching was Kings of Leon, who, despite not being natural showmen, provided a tight set of tunes that showcased well their masterly musical and lyrical virtuosity. My favourite line of the weekend is that one from 'Milk': 'She'll loan you her toothbrush/She'll bartend your party', which is so good that it's really too dangerous to use around most of the women I know. Just Jack also provide a fine line in wordsmithery, though their production is sometimes a little too polished. Live, however, they were unexpectedly sunny and got a large crowd dancing with something that was in short supply all weekend: real basslines. Due to my relative proximity to the main stage I suffered Faithless' utterly inane public-school techno for a couple of hours and then moved closer to catch a glimpse of Björk.
I think it's fair to say that Björk is the anti-Bono; someone who is just so faultlessly cool and admirable it is impossible to take offence at her sometimes quite difficult music. Which is why it pains me so much to admit that I just don't really like the music. Why, I don't know, as, by the looks of those gathered around me, many others do, and my own tastes can sometimes stretch to the realm of the recondite. Like the last time I saw her - back at Féile 94 - I resolved to enjoy the show at least and it didn't disappoint. Backed by an all-female brass orchestra heavily caparisoned with runic banners - which are surely the result of spending far too much time around Matthew Barney - and with programming by former LFO maestro Mark Bell, the wee Icelander toyed with the crowd for a first half of sombre numbers before upping the tempo. Though the audience seemed to be appreciative, there was no indulging them, which is a measure of how confident and challenging an artist Björk is. Shame I could only tap my feet and nod, really.
The festival is organised by the regional government of Île de France, the region that encircles the capital, and they put up about 20% of the €3.5 million budget. According to a report in yesterday's Libération, for the fifth year, the festival has once again made an undisclosed loss, in spite of attracting a record 65,000 people. UMP member of parliament Yves Jégo tried to score political points against the Socialist President of Île de France by claiming that the ticket prices were prohibitively expensive. Even UMP Minister for Culture Christine Albanel (who attended Les Rita Mitsouko's set on Saturday) dismissed Jégo's newly-found compassion for the little man, noting that the prices (ranging from €42 for one day to €99 for three days) are reasonable when compared with one-off concerts in Paris. I remember paying £60 back in 1992 for a two-day ticket at Féile; with inflation accounted for, Rock en Seine presents very good value for money.
The biggest draw on the first night was The Arcade Fire, whom I missed on their pre-world-fame appearance two years ago. Though the band have little discernible stage charisma they nonetheless provided an impressive set, with thirteen members on stage, a great light show, and they also brought along a hurdy-gurdy. It's always good to see a hurdy-gurdy. More explosive and arguably more entertaining were The Hives, who are, as my friend Nick noted, like four milkmen fronted by Mick Jagger. When they first came on the scene six years ago, I thought that they would never last, that their admittedly amusing concept masked musical shortcomings but their subsequent albums have been surprisingly fresh and only the hardest-bitten of cynics could have failed to smile at their hilarious set at Rock en Seine. Because of work I missed MIA, The Shins and Dinosaur Jr, the latter two of whom were reportedly great while I heard mixed views about MIA.
The highlight of the weekend went unnoticed by most on Saturday as it took place on the smallest of the festival's three stages. It was 22-year-old Scot Calvin Harris, who has been remixing Kylie Minogue, CSS and Groove Armada and who now has his own LCD-esque six-piece group that provided the weekend's hardest-working bassist and most of the best dancing. As with James Murphy's combo the lyrics are sharp and funny, particularly in the recent single 'Acceptable in the Eighties'. CSS played also and were a big improvement on the last time I saw them - at the Elysée Montmartre in April, when they seemed jaded and going through the motions. This time they provided the perfect festival atmosphere with their girly rock trappings - balloons onstage, streamers and party poppers and bubble kits distributed to the audience. Their forty-minute set was much too brief even if they did surprise us by going out in an impressive hail of feedback.
Speaking of feedback, later in the evening saw the return of the Jesus and Mary Chain. The band are blessed with the greatest moniker in rock history - a name that fascinated me as a nine-year-old with its outrageous blasphemy - and their sound towers over even their own music. The Mary Chain sound is as much a fabric as anything else, and though their music became repetitive after 'Automatic', their third, 1989 album, there was enough material to fill an excellent set. Jim Reid still looks like a sadistic Liam Brady - you wonder how he ever managed to bed Hope Sandoval - and their music still sounds like the Beach Boys reflected in a Glasgow puddle - perfect in other words. Cold War Kids had the thankless task of replacing Amy Winehouse and did tolerably well, while Israeli techno-popstars Terry Poison and French legends Les Rita Mitsouko provided good cheer at the other end of the festival site. Quite why California dirge rockers Tool were called upon to headline Saturday night is beyond me but their light show at least was worth looking at for about fifteen minutes.
Sunday had less of interest for Seanachie and the first band he bothered watching was Kings of Leon, who, despite not being natural showmen, provided a tight set of tunes that showcased well their masterly musical and lyrical virtuosity. My favourite line of the weekend is that one from 'Milk': 'She'll loan you her toothbrush/She'll bartend your party', which is so good that it's really too dangerous to use around most of the women I know. Just Jack also provide a fine line in wordsmithery, though their production is sometimes a little too polished. Live, however, they were unexpectedly sunny and got a large crowd dancing with something that was in short supply all weekend: real basslines. Due to my relative proximity to the main stage I suffered Faithless' utterly inane public-school techno for a couple of hours and then moved closer to catch a glimpse of Björk.
I think it's fair to say that Björk is the anti-Bono; someone who is just so faultlessly cool and admirable it is impossible to take offence at her sometimes quite difficult music. Which is why it pains me so much to admit that I just don't really like the music. Why, I don't know, as, by the looks of those gathered around me, many others do, and my own tastes can sometimes stretch to the realm of the recondite. Like the last time I saw her - back at Féile 94 - I resolved to enjoy the show at least and it didn't disappoint. Backed by an all-female brass orchestra heavily caparisoned with runic banners - which are surely the result of spending far too much time around Matthew Barney - and with programming by former LFO maestro Mark Bell, the wee Icelander toyed with the crowd for a first half of sombre numbers before upping the tempo. Though the audience seemed to be appreciative, there was no indulging them, which is a measure of how confident and challenging an artist Björk is. Shame I could only tap my feet and nod, really.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
The Distasteful Experience of Being Exposed to an mp3some
An Irish friend of mine returned from a trip to New York late last year disgusted with a sight he saw in a fashionable bar in Williamsburg: a DJ working exclusively off mp3s on their laptop. Now in Paris it seems that every second 'DJ' is packing nothing heavier than a MacBook when they go out mixing; it took many years for mixing with CDs to get even remotely respectable - and even now it is usually accepted only as a bit of back-up for a well-stocked bag of vinyl - but mixing with equipment that scarcely justifies any of the traditional demands of DJing is alarmingly widespread.
In the Bottle Shop the other night this development reached its nadir when not one but three people turned up with a MacBook each to 'collaborate'. So, gathered around the mixing decks - which may have begun their inexorable slide towards ultimate redundancy, were three youngsters with computers, pretending that they were Richie Hawtin. Of course the music was much the same as played by any other DJ in the Bottle Shop - meaning it was a decent enough selection, if hardly too imaginative - but most of the other DJs do have the quirky habit of bringing old-fashioned black discs with a wee hole in the middle.
I know that I will be accused of being snobbish here but I don't think it is too much to ask that folks with what they take to be a fantastic collection of audio files to confine their broadcasting of them to their homesteads. I listen to mostly mp3s these days (though I still buy CDs), mainly because the cramped quarters of Parisian apartments have discouraged me from bringing my not-exactly-immense collection of vinyl over from Dublin, but I wouldn't dream of turning up to a bar with my laptop to offer to 'spin some tunes'. Not least because I could do it with a few carefully-chosen playlists stocked on my iPod, which has twice the hard-drive space as my old G4. But if a DJ flicks through their iPod to pick the music people will not be too impressed. Some people imagine though that plonking their computer down on a bar table makes them look like Orbital or Paul Oakenfold, while all the time 'programming' tracks by The Strokes and Franz Ferdinand. When one realises that one or more DJs are getting paid to play songs using equipment and applications that are already used by the bar to play music at other times of the day, well, that's just cheating. You may as well just sit in the corner, with your Nano hooked up to the PA and shuffle away.
The cheating is more acute still when the effort of putting together a vinyl collection is considered. Most DJing occupies, in my opinion, a place a few rungs below real creative activities but there is still a venerable craft exercised by many DJs as well a strong sense of curiosity and adventure. Good DJs travel hundreds of miles to get hold of that track that they could never find on vinyl (though they might already own it on CD or mp3), they reinvest huge amounts of their DJing pay into their collection, they haul back-breakingly heavy bags from bar to bar to club and they are forever on the look out for new or obscure tracks that might set them apart from their peers. And the best DJs never take themselves too serious. They are part of a music culture that owning 12,000 music files on a hard drive will never qualify you to enter. Now it appears that they might be on the way out because some geek with a shiny iBook wants to play the same tunes they hear on MTV2 in a vain effort to get laid. I'm quite serene about the effect of the file-sharing phenomenon - the music industry had had it coming to them for years, and it has allowed bands to reach new markets that they would never before have had access to - but this is one consequence that is certainly deleterious. A real involvement in music is much further than a click away.
In the Bottle Shop the other night this development reached its nadir when not one but three people turned up with a MacBook each to 'collaborate'. So, gathered around the mixing decks - which may have begun their inexorable slide towards ultimate redundancy, were three youngsters with computers, pretending that they were Richie Hawtin. Of course the music was much the same as played by any other DJ in the Bottle Shop - meaning it was a decent enough selection, if hardly too imaginative - but most of the other DJs do have the quirky habit of bringing old-fashioned black discs with a wee hole in the middle.
I know that I will be accused of being snobbish here but I don't think it is too much to ask that folks with what they take to be a fantastic collection of audio files to confine their broadcasting of them to their homesteads. I listen to mostly mp3s these days (though I still buy CDs), mainly because the cramped quarters of Parisian apartments have discouraged me from bringing my not-exactly-immense collection of vinyl over from Dublin, but I wouldn't dream of turning up to a bar with my laptop to offer to 'spin some tunes'. Not least because I could do it with a few carefully-chosen playlists stocked on my iPod, which has twice the hard-drive space as my old G4. But if a DJ flicks through their iPod to pick the music people will not be too impressed. Some people imagine though that plonking their computer down on a bar table makes them look like Orbital or Paul Oakenfold, while all the time 'programming' tracks by The Strokes and Franz Ferdinand. When one realises that one or more DJs are getting paid to play songs using equipment and applications that are already used by the bar to play music at other times of the day, well, that's just cheating. You may as well just sit in the corner, with your Nano hooked up to the PA and shuffle away.
The cheating is more acute still when the effort of putting together a vinyl collection is considered. Most DJing occupies, in my opinion, a place a few rungs below real creative activities but there is still a venerable craft exercised by many DJs as well a strong sense of curiosity and adventure. Good DJs travel hundreds of miles to get hold of that track that they could never find on vinyl (though they might already own it on CD or mp3), they reinvest huge amounts of their DJing pay into their collection, they haul back-breakingly heavy bags from bar to bar to club and they are forever on the look out for new or obscure tracks that might set them apart from their peers. And the best DJs never take themselves too serious. They are part of a music culture that owning 12,000 music files on a hard drive will never qualify you to enter. Now it appears that they might be on the way out because some geek with a shiny iBook wants to play the same tunes they hear on MTV2 in a vain effort to get laid. I'm quite serene about the effect of the file-sharing phenomenon - the music industry had had it coming to them for years, and it has allowed bands to reach new markets that they would never before have had access to - but this is one consequence that is certainly deleterious. A real involvement in music is much further than a click away.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Start of Cycle
I am usually late getting into most things, and I have been meaning to try out the Velib, which was set in train a few weeks ago but I wasn't, erm, libre in order to do so. As it turned out, being a bit late for a trek over to the 6th arrondissement to watch the Sligo-Cork All-Ireland quarter-final on Saturday (with, alas, disappointing results) I was forced to take one for a less leisurely spin than I had intended. Leisure has been the priority of most people that have been taking the bikes so far, and it has been obvious that many of them are not used to riding a bike through the city. But, it being summer, the Parisian traffic is not too heavy and the real litmus test will arrive in September when people will start using the bikes as an alternative to the Metro to get to and from work.
The bikes are not terribly attractive, being built with durability in mind and though they do seem at first to be excessively safety-conscious, you can pick up a fair speed on them. The only problem is parking; as with a four-wheeled vehicle, spaces are at a premium, or at least they were at St-Germain-des-Prés when I arrived over there. At €29 per year for a subscription, with the first half-hour's travel each day free, the deal is not too bad for those that plan to use it regularly, though one would imagine that the city's more enthusiastic cyclists will be unwilling to trade their own steeds in for the Velib, and I plan to repair my own bike once the weather starts getting a bit more constant. The Velib bikes do, of course, have the attractive potential of serving as late-night crosstown transport when taxis are thin on the ground, but a restaurateur I know was recently informed by the police superintendent of the 4th arrondissement that the Velibs are going to be targeted for spot checks in case drunken revellers decide to cycle home, which can result in two points on one's driver's license, as happened to a Frenchman I know earlier this year.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Les possibilités illimitées
I wrote last month of my chagrin regarding MK2's withdrawal from the fantastic Carte Le Pass scheme operated in collaboration with Gaumont and Pathé. I was worried about having to choose between MK2's new subscription offer and Le Pass, which continues to offer access to a number of independent cinemas in Paris, including two close to my home.
Now that MK2 have announced their new package, to be operational from September, I have no hesitation in choosing my camp. It will be with them, who have returned Pathé's shafting of them in taking their tenancy at Beaugrenelle by hopping into bed with the big boys of European multiplexes UGC, which will surely make Pathé regret their Machiavellian move, which probably seemed a good idea at the time. The new Carte Illimitée is valid at fifty cinemas in Paris, including all the UGC cinemas, all the MK2 outlets and all the independent cinemas, and more, that were covered by the Carte Le Pass. It also works for UGCs around France and in Belgium, Italy and Spain, should one happen to be travelling. All for €19.80 per month. There is, of course a downside to such an agglomoration though the French government stepped in (as French governments are oft wont to do) a few years back and instructed the big chains to open the scheme up to small, independent cinemas, who are reimbursed €4.90 for each ticket bought using the subscription cards.
MK2 also announced recently that they will be opening another multiplex in the 19th arrondissement - the north-east of Paris. Their last three multiplexes at Quai de la Seine, across the canal at Quay de la Loire, and beside the Bibliothèque Nationale, are the greatest of their kind I've ever seen anywhere. The new one should be great too. Now all one asks is that they open up their great new Video on Demand web service to Mac users; if you want to fight Internet piracy, give us the movies, I'll gladly pay!
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
The Suicides at Peugeot-Citroën
I stopped into Café Divan on rue de la Roquette this morning on the way to work, as I often do when I don't start too early. The only paper free was the local tabloid Le Parisien, which wasn't so bad as it is entertaining enough, an intellectual cut or two above its English-language counterparts and possessed of a charmingly innocent editorial voice. Many French people I know despise it but others find it a welcome change from the ideologically driven 'serious' press and an Australian friend of mine is of the opinion that reading it regularly will allow one to quickly understand Paris.
Today's issue had a number of interesting stories, such as Socialist Party veteran, and former Culture secretary calling for the position of Prime Minister to be abolished, weighing firmly in with the Présidentialiste tendencies of Nicolas Sarkozy. Newly-appointed Keeper of the Seals (or Minister for Justice, as other countries would have it), the French-Moroccan Rachida Dati, has also had to endure the story of her junkie brother's latest brush with the law, having been convicted at the Lyon assizes for drug-dealing.
The cover story was the most arresting however (as Le Parisien operates a subscription-only web service, I will refer to Libé for a link); the PSA Peugeot-Citroën factory plant in Mulhouse (in the east of France) yesterday experienced its fifth employee suicide since February, in addition to one at another of its plants. A retired plant-worker, since turned writer, told Le Parisien that the culture of internal competitiveness generated by management in the past twenty years has destroyed staff morale and generated a poisonous atmosphere among the workers. The implementation of a bonus system among the workers has been mainly blamed and has resulted in a breakdown in worker solidarity and an every-man-for-himself mentality. The pressure has also been too much for some.
There will be those free marketeers, particularly from English-speaking countries, that will smile cynically at this predicament of the French working-classes, seeing it as yet further proof of the laziness of the French worker, cosseted as it is in the 35-hour working week and a costly social-welfare safety net. But French productivity remains among the highest in the world (20% higher than the UK) , so questions as to the diligence and industriousness of French workers can be easily dismissed. When people are ending their own lives in such dramatic fashion there are serious questions to be asked. The French culture of working to live rather than living to work may have a certain role to play in stunting economic growth but it would be stupid to imagine that this has turned its workers into pampered softies unable for the pressures of the modern world.
These issues were addressed last year in the documentary on work-related illnesses Ils ne mouraient pas tous mas tous étaient frappé, which I have not seen, but now seems all the more urgent. Later on today Libé reported that a 48-year-old female employee of the nuclear energy group Areva defenestrated herself; there are more alarming stories included in both of those articles.
Today's issue had a number of interesting stories, such as Socialist Party veteran, and former Culture secretary calling for the position of Prime Minister to be abolished, weighing firmly in with the Présidentialiste tendencies of Nicolas Sarkozy. Newly-appointed Keeper of the Seals (or Minister for Justice, as other countries would have it), the French-Moroccan Rachida Dati, has also had to endure the story of her junkie brother's latest brush with the law, having been convicted at the Lyon assizes for drug-dealing.
The cover story was the most arresting however (as Le Parisien operates a subscription-only web service, I will refer to Libé for a link); the PSA Peugeot-Citroën factory plant in Mulhouse (in the east of France) yesterday experienced its fifth employee suicide since February, in addition to one at another of its plants. A retired plant-worker, since turned writer, told Le Parisien that the culture of internal competitiveness generated by management in the past twenty years has destroyed staff morale and generated a poisonous atmosphere among the workers. The implementation of a bonus system among the workers has been mainly blamed and has resulted in a breakdown in worker solidarity and an every-man-for-himself mentality. The pressure has also been too much for some.
There will be those free marketeers, particularly from English-speaking countries, that will smile cynically at this predicament of the French working-classes, seeing it as yet further proof of the laziness of the French worker, cosseted as it is in the 35-hour working week and a costly social-welfare safety net. But French productivity remains among the highest in the world (20% higher than the UK) , so questions as to the diligence and industriousness of French workers can be easily dismissed. When people are ending their own lives in such dramatic fashion there are serious questions to be asked. The French culture of working to live rather than living to work may have a certain role to play in stunting economic growth but it would be stupid to imagine that this has turned its workers into pampered softies unable for the pressures of the modern world.
These issues were addressed last year in the documentary on work-related illnesses Ils ne mouraient pas tous mas tous étaient frappé, which I have not seen, but now seems all the more urgent. Later on today Libé reported that a 48-year-old female employee of the nuclear energy group Areva defenestrated herself; there are more alarming stories included in both of those articles.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Not In Time for the Gypsies
I had planned to post on Emir Kusturica's opera production of his own film The Time of the Gypsies (in which he himself stars with his group The No-Smoking Orchestra), which finishes today at the Opéra Bastille and, having been sold out for the last week, was playing a Bastille Day matinée, which was free of charge. So I arrive two hours before the curtain, hopeful of grabbing a place; my naïvete was misplaced however as the queue had already begun to snake long out of sight up rue de Lyon. My guess was that there were already 1,000 people in line, which suggests that there would not be room for them all. I wasn't sure of the capacity of the theatre but I wasn't going to wait two hours to find out. By way of consolation, the film is running at Le Champo, so I think I'll give it another look this week.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Apple Lossless
A couple of months back I listed a number of items I have lost over the years, many of them things I have since managed well enough without, the loss of which having occasioned only a temporary frustration. The weekend just passed almost added my iPod to the list, as at the double birthday party of two friends in a bar near Porte de la Villette on Friday night, I returned to pick it up from where a friend was mixing only to find that it had disappeared. Being among friends I didn't suspect it stolen and the presence of a similar apparatus, with a similar cover suggested that it might have been taken by accident. It had in fact been mistakenly given by my friend to a friend of the owner of the other iPod in question. After about twelve hours' worrying and resignation to its loss, its whereabouts were located and I collected it off a personable Mexican filmmaker called Juan on Sunday evening.
There are few things I carry about that I worry about losing - my laptop is obviously one, whenever I have it out and about, as is my wallet, for equally obvious reasons; another is my notebook (or notebooks) and I generally have good luck with them when I do lose them, my mobile phone is another, more to avoid the hassle and expense of replacing it, and since I bought it last November, my iPod is another. These are the only things that I keep on my person whenever I go out, entrusting them to nobody, and when people lose phones and mp3-players that they have left in jackets or bags lying in corners of bars I don't have a huge amount of sympathy. Nor did I have much sympathy for myself after my rare lapse of vigilance the other night. Which makes me feel guilty that I should attach such importance to such a clearly unimportant thing. It is truly dispiriting to evaluate loss in terms of consumer goods, and the fact that it has come back to a stupidly piggish consumer (as I am wont to see myself) induces a sort of consumer's remorse at this level of effeteness that I have allowed myself to attain. I soon got over my angst by putting Icky Thump on the retrieved toy, as well as Richard Hawley's 'Cole Corner', which I have dallied far too long over getting hold of. Thanks once again, Tim.
There are few things I carry about that I worry about losing - my laptop is obviously one, whenever I have it out and about, as is my wallet, for equally obvious reasons; another is my notebook (or notebooks) and I generally have good luck with them when I do lose them, my mobile phone is another, more to avoid the hassle and expense of replacing it, and since I bought it last November, my iPod is another. These are the only things that I keep on my person whenever I go out, entrusting them to nobody, and when people lose phones and mp3-players that they have left in jackets or bags lying in corners of bars I don't have a huge amount of sympathy. Nor did I have much sympathy for myself after my rare lapse of vigilance the other night. Which makes me feel guilty that I should attach such importance to such a clearly unimportant thing. It is truly dispiriting to evaluate loss in terms of consumer goods, and the fact that it has come back to a stupidly piggish consumer (as I am wont to see myself) induces a sort of consumer's remorse at this level of effeteness that I have allowed myself to attain. I soon got over my angst by putting Icky Thump on the retrieved toy, as well as Richard Hawley's 'Cole Corner', which I have dallied far too long over getting hold of. Thanks once again, Tim.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Supporting Rolê
I've been neglecting the blog again, partly because of being overworked, partly because I've been writing other stuff and partly because I enjoy taking a break from it every so often. At the weekend I went to see Bonde do Rolê play a free gig at Parc André Citroën, which, given that it cost me absolutely nothing, was probably the most rewarding gig I've ever been at, not least because we got to have a very drunken natter with them afterwards. The music, by the by, was great too, as their debut album, 'Bonde do Rolê with Lasers' is.
I also saw a superb French documentary about American political opinion entitled Kings of the World, filmed in the month before the 2004 presidential elections. It is refreshingly lacking in lazy European preconceptions about Americans and it benefits from having an amazing cast of ordinary Joes and Joannas to interview, the pick of whom are a witty, Union-supporting cocktail waitress from Reno, Nevada; a boorish, cantankerous Bush-supporting beef rancher also from Nevada; a cross-dressing performance artist from Salt Lake City, and a multi-racial liberal family from San Francisco, whose dinner party even manages to sound interesting. Filmed on what I can only imagine was a shoestring, it is a gripping piece of incisive reportage that is a fitting successor to those great French studies of American society conducted by Tocqueville, Derrida, Baudrillard and Louis Malle.
Here's the video for Bonde do Rolê's 'Office Boy' for diversion:
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Wi-fi Wi-fi Everywhere and a Drop to Drink
Paris, from next month, will be the first 'digital city' in Europe with the establishment by the municipality of wi-fi access points at 262 locations across the city, divided evenly between municipal buildings such as public libraries and parks and gardens (with the exception of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg gardens, which do not come under the city's auspices). The points are accessible during opening hours, though Parvis de Hôtel de Ville (in front of the City Hall) and the Champs de Mars (in front of the Eiffel Tower) will have 24-hour access for those foolhardy enough to carry their laptops about in the early hours of the morning.
The initiative will cost €2.9 million to implement, with an annual running cost of €540,000, which media-savvy Mayor Bertrand Delanoë will no doubt fund quite easily from advertising. Paris is already endowed with a large number of bars and cafés offering excellent free wi-fi access for the price of a coffee. From now on it will be possible to be online almost ad infinitum. Which is a bit bothersome for me, considering how much time I tend to waste on the Internet; when I need to get some writing done I usually decamp to a public place where the temptation of clicking on my web browser is not a potential distraction. Now there may be few such places left. Still, wi-fi users in Dublin will be envious at this indulging of Parisian surfers, especially considering the extortionate rates charged almost everywhere for wi-fi there. If it's any consolation, the Dublinesque weather that Paris has been subjected to recently - with rain every day for the past three weeks - will ensure that I won't be sitting on a park bench blogging too soon.
The initiative will cost €2.9 million to implement, with an annual running cost of €540,000, which media-savvy Mayor Bertrand Delanoë will no doubt fund quite easily from advertising. Paris is already endowed with a large number of bars and cafés offering excellent free wi-fi access for the price of a coffee. From now on it will be possible to be online almost ad infinitum. Which is a bit bothersome for me, considering how much time I tend to waste on the Internet; when I need to get some writing done I usually decamp to a public place where the temptation of clicking on my web browser is not a potential distraction. Now there may be few such places left. Still, wi-fi users in Dublin will be envious at this indulging of Parisian surfers, especially considering the extortionate rates charged almost everywhere for wi-fi there. If it's any consolation, the Dublinesque weather that Paris has been subjected to recently - with rain every day for the past three weeks - will ensure that I won't be sitting on a park bench blogging too soon.
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