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It may be a cliché, and a song by Vernon Duke. But this time of year, there are few better places to be, anywhere on the planet.

Poni Hoax are a band from Paris. They sing in English, and have been playing since 2001, but I don’t think they’ve yet quite crossed the watery divide between French indie acclaim and anglo-saxon stardom.  Navigating between the austerity of Kraftwerk and the masculine emotion of The Doors, there’s something about their electro-disco style that suits these grey times.

In addition, as befits a consciously stylish band from the city of Gainsbourg and Godard, their video clips are top notch piece of film-making. Antibodies features a naked chick and a bubble in an airport:

And The Paper Bride features a man, a swimming pool and a dance:

Returning from a rather pleasant informal brunch yesterday, in the 19th arrondissement, a companion and I were entering the métro on rue de Belleville, heading towards Chatelet. I made the quite unconscious remark that we were “going back into Paris“. Which is a ridiculous statement, because we had never left Paris.

This is one of the paradoxes of a city like Paris: when you live near the centre, a journey of 20 minutes to the 19th arrondissment can feel like you’re heading into the countryside. Every part of town, despite being readily accessible by métro, feels distinct and somehow independent from every other district. Living and working here means that you might traverse several of these parallel universes every day.

As I’ve noted before on this blog, Paris is geographically a very small city,  you can walk the length and breadth of the city in around 4 hours. But unless you’re a taxi driver, most Paris residents have never visited the whole of their city.

As a relatively new arrival, I probably know less about Paris than most. But after 18 months, my Paris consists of a number distinct brightly-lit zones centred on metro stations and friends’ apartments,  some fuzzy grey bits in between, and some completely dark areas, which remain utterly unexplored and unknowable.

As most guidebooks will tell you, Paris revolves around neighbourhoods -  quartiers – of which there are an infinite number, because everyone will have a different sense of their own little neighbourhood.  My amateur definition of a quartier is a part of Paris within which you know where all the boulangeries are located: just in case your favourite one is closed, another has run out of baguettes tradition, and your third choice has a queue 20 metres long outside the door.

By this definition,  my own quartier stretches along the Left Bank from the Musée d’Orsay in the west to the far end of rue de Buci in the east, and as far south as Boulevard St Germain. South of Boulevard St Germain is also familiar territory, but I wouldn’t know where to buy bread: so it’s not my quartier.

Similarly, there are other parts of Paris I’ve come to know quite well: the eastern section of the 10th arrondissement, from Place de la République to the Canal St Martin; the streets of the Marais around métro St Paul and Place des Vosges;  rue Clerc in the western part of the 7th;  and a few avenues north of Etoile, heading towards Parc Monceau.  In these parts of town, I know where to find shops and certain cafés.

Additionally, I can also get myself to Fnac Montparnasse to buy bandes dessinées and find my way to Leroy-Merlin at Beaubourg to buy screwdrivers, lightbulbs and glue. But this hardly counts as an encyclopaedic knowledge of the city.

Place de Clichy and most of the 17th arrondissement, the métro 3bis, the towers of les Olympiades in the 13th… all these parts of Paris – only 20 minutes from my front door – remain as mysterious to me as Moscow or Seoul.

This sense of compartmentalisation is reflected in the way the city is administered – surely, only the French could take a small city of 2 million people, and divide it among 20 separate mayors . One mayor for each arrondissement.  Of course there is a SuperMayor of all of Paris, (our friend Plastic Bertrand), but I wonder whether the arrondissement system – created in the rationalist afterglow of revolution in 1795 – remains truly effective today.

Certainly the arrondissements emphasise the sense of separation between different parts of the city, each with its own “typical” resident profile. The 7th, (where I happen to live), is derided as being bourgeois, expensive, full of government ministries and overall, rather boring.  If you have Chinese or Vietnamese ancestry, the stereotype dictates that you must live in the 13th. The 11th is the place to be if you’re a young bobo media entrepreneur. For African groceries, head to the 10th around Gare du Nord and the parts of the 18th around Tati. And the 4th is where you hang out if you’re, well,  gay or Jewish.

Somehow all of these little districts fuse together – with varying degrees of success – to create a conglomerate whole which is a city called “Paris”. Figuring out how it all works (or doesn’t) is one of my constant fascinations.

I feel a little sorry for the tourists who jet in for a week of plastic Eiffel Towers, photos on the parvis du Notre Dame, and takeaway portraits sketched by the artists on Place du Tertre. I’m sure they all have a wonderful time, and tick all their boxes, but they haven’t really seen much. If anything, the problem about Paris is that there’s too much to see, and nobody can agree on what it is that you’re supposed to see, or why it looks that particular way.

Please excuse me, I’ve got to leave now. It’s Sunday, and I’m going to visit Paris  for the afternoon.

France 3′s continuing little World War Two epic Un Village Français has just reached the end of its third season, with double episodes playing on Sunday nights over the festive break. This ongoing TV series, planned to run over 5 years, is an attempt to tell the story of everyday life in Vichy France. I for one, am rather enjoying it.

The series takes place in Villeneuve, a fictional town in Vichy-controlled territory in the Jura. The town, which is a subprefecture and certain larger than the “village” indicated in the title, is populated by a vast ensemble cast of men, women and children who are coping with war, occupation and a new totalitarian government as best they can.

The writers seem to emphasise verisimilitude and human interest, rather than strict historical accuracy: the active viewer forum on the France 3  website is stuffed with trainspotters pointing out errors in chronology, military equipment or administrative arcana. However,  if sometimes the scenarios spiral towards melodrama, the performances are solid.

Robin Renucci (right) plays Dr Daniel Larcher

Robin Renucci is magnificent as Dr Larcher, the town’s doctor and mayor, balancing his family and medical practice with demands of local politics under the Vichy regime. The belgian actor Patrick Descamps, noted in France for his other appearances as a TV detective, plays the increasingly disillusioned and alcoholic Inspector De Kervern, who must hold down a desk job in the town’s police station, while harbouring a Jewish woman in his apartment.

Occasionally the series seems rather didactic – for instance, one episode entitled Par amour concentrated largely on the intimate relationships developing between French women and the German troops stationed in the town.

In addition, each episode ends with a 5 minute historical “featurette” including interviews with French people who lived through the Vichy era, reflecting on their own experiences during wartime: here the show seems to take some inspiration from Spielberg-produced historical dramas such as HBO’s Band of Brothers.

Marie Kremer as Lucienne Borderie, Villeneuve’s primary school teacher

All things considered, Un village français is a worthy, well-made drama that makes up for its lack of Hollywood budget with its ambition: to recount the subtleties of an entire chapter in French history, told from the perspectives of the citizens of one provincial town. It’s certainly one of the best things on French TV.

After three seasons, the ensemble of characters is well-established, and the intrigues can only grow more complex as the war progresses.  By the end of Season Three, we have only reached October 1941. There are still 3 years of occupation to go.   I hope that funding for the show continues, so we can live with Villeneuve through to liberation.

Gustave Larcher: (Maxim Driesen, centre) nephew of the mayor and son of a communist terrorist

I missed the big snowfall midweek, but we had a sprinkling last Saturday. I took some photos while out doing Christmas errands…

Pont des Arts

Pont du Carrousel

Ile de la Cité

If anyone asks me why a foreigner should learn French, I think I’ve found the definitive answer. “You must learn French so you can enjoy De cape de crocs“.  I must thank klari for the revelation, since she lent me the first 8 volumes of this masterpiece….

Don Lope de Villalobos y Sangrin and Armand Raynal de Maupertuis: at your service

This series of bandes dessinées, (the title of which translates roughly as “Capes and Fangs”), recount the adventures of two swashbuckling gentlemen of fortune, a Spanish wolf and French fox, who (along with a rabbit), chase treasure, fortune and beautiful princesses from Renaissance Venice to the ends of the Earth… and beyond.

Along the way, they meet pirates, Turkish galley captains, sultry Spanish maidens, murderous armies of mimes, a mad German scientist, the King of the Moon, a dastardly conquistador, roaming herds of bagpipes, horrible sea monsters… oh, and did I mention beautiful princesses?

If you think you’ve read some of the storyline before, you probably have, and the intertextuality of the adventure is one of its joys: mixing Alexandre Dumas with Jules Verne and Cyrano de Bergerac, the stories leap from one famous theme to the next, and back again, sprinkled with swordfights, sea battles, high-speed chases, and all threaded together by Alain Ayroles’ writing, swinging between silly wordplay (Posez ce lapin!) and the language of Molière.

The quality of the storyline (and particularly Jean-Luc Masbou’s art) may mean that one day De cape et de crocs is translated into English, but the transition will be difficult. For one thing, much of the dialogue (and duels) is rendered in alexandrins, the meter of much poetry of the French Renaissance. The only way to truly enjoy these passages is to read them aloud:

Dix gens de ta farine en deux vers je terrasse! Sens-tu sous mes soufflets ton rictus qui s’éfface?

Fasseyant va le foc de ton discours fumeux, quand sur la mer des mots voile au vent je me meus!*

Anthea Bell may have done a fairly good job with transferring the humour of Astérix into English, but good luck to the translator given the job of turning all this into witty, rhyming couplets!

As a mere anglo-saxon, there are probably many hundreds of jokes and references I don’t “get”, but even for a semi-literate foreigner, De cape et de crocs demonstrates once again what a powerful and inventive form the bande dessinée can be.

CARNE Y SANGRE !
MAUPERTUIS OSE ET RIT !

*Tome 7, p. 5

Today I visited the Palais de Tokyo for the first time. My visit didn’t convince me that contemporary art isn’t just a series of confidence tricks played on a gullible public. Somebody needs to spend some time explaining it all to me.

Palais de Tokyo (1937): Architecture, graffiti,  pond, dead leaves, rain on pavement, glass box on roof

Unfinished Tidying of Chairs, Or Possibly Art (2010): chair, chair, chair (folding), chair

Jeans Filled with Concrete in a Circle and a Sign on the Wall (2010): Jeans, concrete, sign, wall

It’s fair to say that France doesn’t have a international broadcast news service of the stature or popularity of the BBC World Service… and France’s international TV service in English, France24, (a pet project of Jacques Chirac instituted in the last days of his presidency) is worthy but rather under-resourced, and frankly looks and sounds like a struggling local cable news from Minnesota.

However, one of the small pleasures of living in Paris is tuning in to Radio France Internationale (RFI) on 89.0 FM. For news in the morning, I find it a much better source for a roundup of international news than the local news stations. Like the World Service, RFI is jointly funded by the state broadcaster and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and most of the time, seems to maintain its editorial independence.

France Inter, France Info and the private stations RTL and Europe1 are often thoughtful and interesting. But they are dominated by big-name media stars and an interminable analysis of domestic French politics that often leaves me longing for something that isn’t Eric Woerth’s latest scandal, more speculation on the imminent cabinet reshuffle, or wall-to-wall coverage of French sailors in the Route du Rhum.

By contrast, RFI seems refreshingly free of big-name media stars, and is just as likely to spend 15 minutes examining the US mid-term elections as it is to interview a foreign relations expert on Burma, or cut to live to a reporter in Ouagadougou to talk about their recent International Festival of Contemporary Theatre.

The Maison de Radio France, by the Seine in the 16th arrondissement

RFI broadcasts in 19 different languages overseas, but its French service is unapologetically focused on sub-Saharan africa, where it enjoys the largest audience of any Francophone radio station in the world – between 30 and 45 million listeners. Listening to RFI opens up a continent of politics that is rarely discussed in English language meda: for example RFI’s coverage of the recent elections in Guinea and Ivory Coast was fascinating.

Among Parisian listeners, the station caters largely to an audience in the suburbs. While France Inter often sounds like the 6th arrondissement arguing with the 7th arrondissement, RFI’s focuses on events happening in the often unloved swathes of le 93 and le 94:  film festivals in Montreuil, schools in crisis in Aulnay-sous-Bois, or the plight of the homeless in Chelles. It makes for fascinating listening, and provides a very different image of the city than one gets from most of the French mainstream press.

Today I visited Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a town on the western outskirts of Paris, at the end of the RER A.

St-Germain-en-Laye was the site of a royal palace, and was the birthplace of Louis XIV (the building where the birth took place is now a restaurant).  James II of England washed up here after he was exiled for being Catholic, and the town was also the birthplace of Claude Débussy.

But alongside all this history, the royal terrace in the palace grounds offers a wonderful view of the Paris region, which today stretched out under bright sunshine, skyscrapers on the horizon with the Eiffel Tower and Sacré Coeur standing proudly to either side.

The royal vineyards have recently been replanted in pinot noir, and offer an interesting foreground for a view of the France’s main business hub at La Défense – a horrible place to work in, but quite attractive when seen from a safe distance at the weekend.

The forest at Saint-Germain-en-Laye is the former royal hunting ground for the palace. Today it no longer gives much of an impression of wilderness, criss-crossed as it is by railway lines and roads, but neverthless offers a large and welcome green space on the edge of Paris, turning orange and brown as the season advances.

Coming home tonight from a concert of Senegalese sacred music (a last minute proposition by Klari, merci encore une fois!) at the Cité de la Musique, I encountered a large crowd blocking boulevard Saint Germain, outside Les Deux Magots. There were police and ambulances, flashing lights and plenty of angry motorists sounding their horns.

Uh oh, I thought, the lycéens are back on the street and the 6th arrondissement is going to be cut off for the rest of the evening… however the truth was soon revealed, as a squadron of police motorcycles set off down the boulevard, stopping traffic and letting the crowd of hundreds zoom off down one of Paris’ most elegant streets… on rollerblades.

This is one of the reasons I love this city. Earlier in the week, the region was paralysed through lack of petrol and there was rioting in some of the suburbs. And yet tonight, a hundred police turned out so that Parisians could rollerblade through central Paris…