Badaude

Paris Plague

Did I mistype that?

OK, I meant, Paris Palge. If you don't already know about it, it's a beach-based installation that occurs along the banks of the Seine every July and August. Sometimes, as I walk along the Right Bank, I look down from the traffic-choked Quais onto the top of people's heads. There are crowds of them down there at all times of day. What are they doing? So far this year, I haven't gone down there to find out.

But, late one August night, I have to get back from Rivoli to somewhere near Bastille. I could take the steaming, sweating metro, or I could walk along the lamplit Quai de Voltaire, dodging the cars that stream by in a neon blur. Or I could go down to Paris Plage and walk.

On a night like this, with outdoors as hot as a room with closed windows, and the city's heat trapped under its greenhouse-gas roof, shutting out the stars, there's no competition.

So I make my way down one of the staircases that lead down to the Quais of the Seine.

People are still dressed for day although it's 10.30pm, in short sleeved shirts and shorts. In the centre of the city, they really are dressed for the beach. But their faces are greenish in the lamplight, eerily underlit by reflections from the river. The effect is kind of, Tour-group of the Living Dead.

They are milling backwards and forwards in both directions. Which stream should I follow? I join the thick flow of the constant foule* wandering toward the the Ile Saint-Louis. I wonder whether I'm going to come across a happening of some sort: some music, a reading or an art installation. I don't. Maybe I've chosen the wrong time of night. I walk for ten minutes; longer. For half an hour, but it's like a gigantic, aimless passagiata.

I start to watch for patterns in the crowd; trying to make sense of what's going on. I notice a group of Asian teenage boys, dodging between the plagistes with a Galleries Lafayette trolley full of bottled water. One of them detatches from the trolley and opens a little electrician's door at the base of a cast-iron lamp post. He takes out a half-empty bottle; a packet of pills. What are they?

I look back at the crowd. They haven't noticed him. They're looking out for something else, hopefully, expectantly.

There's nothing actually happening.

I remember last year's Paris Plage when I spent one sweltering afternoon at Bassin de la Villette. Like tonight, it was crowded. I missed the baby dragon monster; I missed the Guinguette*. I walked up and down the Bassin, through crowds of Parisians who, always seeming to know better, walked always in the opposite direction. 

Back to night, 2008. All the watching I've been doing has changed the nature of what I'm seeing. There's a feeling of tension. Of expectation. Perhaps it's mine.

As a woman on my own in a crowd, I'm used to feeling like this. Like most women, I've been trained to look out for a bag-snatch, an assault; an indecent proposal; an incident of some kind. What's going to happen? I look at other walkers, their cameras dangling casually from their shoulders, rucksacks gaping open and feel smug. I'm armoured in my jacket (albeit light cotton) my purse slung across my body. If there's an easy target, it's not me. But I am the only lone female walker I can see. And where am I expecting the incident to come from? Are the crowd the threat or the mark?

I'm unprepared when it happens. A middle-aged, thin, ratty-looking guy with a guitar over his shoulder grabs me by the arm. What does he want? He pulls me towards him.

In a few seconds which seem like forever, the following thoughts go through my head:

He looks scruffy. Also arty.

I don't want to be prejudiced toward scruffy people I don't want him to think that I'm prejudiced toward scruffy people. Or artists (maybe he's part of the entertainment and I should actually be extra-nice to him). I smile.

A bit. Frozenly. He might, after all, be a purse-snatcher or a serial rapist.

After all, he grabbed my arm. That's a bit inappropriate, huh? It lends weight to the purse-snatcher theory. But he looks a bit Latin. Maybe grabbing is ok if you're Latin. Maybe he's just being tactile. I don't want to be uptight. And I don't want to be prejudiced against Latins.

I turn toward him. The effect of the smile and the not-smile is somewhat grotesque.

He asks, politely,"Tu veux m'accompanier au..?"

OK. So he wants a date. It always comes from the unexpected angle. When you're expecting an iron bar, a feather can topple you.

I start to reply. But how do you gently reject a man you just assumed was trying to rob you?

Furthermore, I have forgotten that, when I'm flustered, I can no longer speak French. Instead, I make a kind of face which expresses relief, gratitude, polite regret and friendly interest. It's not really one face but several different faces fighting for self-expression over the same set of features.

He get's the point. I'm a tourist. I don't understand. He claps me on the shoulder:"A demain! A la meme heure, hein?"

And I'm left, still floundering in his wake, as the vedette* sails off into the night to find a more likely copain*.

Click on the illustration to see it bigger; click again to enlarge it further.

*foule - crowd
*guignette - informal traditional ball
*vedette - small boat; also star, celebrity
*copain - friend/boyfriend/girlfriend (I've always found this one a bit ambiguous)

To buy a new hat...

I'm a toddler. Two year olds are usually noted for their unreasonable and intractable behaviour as well as their temper tantrums.

Yes, I've been running Badaude for exactly two years today. I'll be celebrating but probably - after last weekend - with lemonade.

Looking back over the last two years, most, but not all of my posts have been about Paris.

Lauren of Maitresse, asked me, 'Why Paris?', in the context of this rather silly article in the Wall Street Journal.

Here's my reply to her (also posted on her website):

OK - so I'm British and I don't think I am part of the very special Franco-American love affair. However, read this passage from the script of the Bogart/Bacall movie, 'To Have and to Have Not' (imagine I'm Bacall - it's a nice thought...):

Official (reading passport): "Browning, Marie. American. Age? How long have you been in Fort de France?"
LB: "I arrived by plane this afternoon."
Official: "Residence?"
LB: "Hotel Marquis."
Official: "Where do you come from?"
LB: "Trinidad. Port of Spain."
Official: "And before that,from where, mademoiselle? From home, perhaps?"
LB: "No. From Brazil, Rio."
Official:"Alone?"
LB: "Yes."
Official: "Why did you get off here?"
LB: "To buy a new hat."
Official: "Why?"
LB: "To buy a new... hat. Read the label. Maybe you'll believe me then."

I'm not really talking about high fashion - and nor was Maitresse's namesake. I think I'm agreeing with James Baldwin (see the Washington Post article) who said he wasn't travelling to Paris, but leaving New York. I bought a new hat. It was as good a hat as any. I found it fitted well. And it happened to be pretty, too...

The knack of being invited

"I have a vernissage* at the Palais de Tokyo tonight." Mélusine pauses to examine me for a moment. "I think it will be fun. Why don't you come?"

I don't know Mélusine. I met her for the first time today. She's a curator and owner of an art gallery  I wandered into this morning, near the mysterious hotel. I meet her there again in the evening before taking a taxi to the Palais.

Next door to the gallery is a boules pitche. Old men play while old women with immaculate red lipstick sit and watch. Mélusine goes over to one, to several of them; she embraces them, talks for a while. She turns to me. "They're - I don't know how to say it in English. Voyous. Do you know that word? You know, the guys, the real men of the neighborhood?"

"Do you mean like local guys, like Cockneys? In London they have Cockneys, like Titi Parisien?"

"No, I mean they're voyous. Men, guys. You know, they're always boasting about that they've been in prison. Like, 'I've been in prison for ten years; Yeah and I have for twelve.' ."

"Oh, voyous."

I realise I've heard the word before in a 1950s movie. Now, here they are at the end of their stretch, enjoying their retirement, playing boules peacefully in the sun.

Mélusine insists we take a taxi. In Paris, I don't take taxis. I walk or take the metro. While I watch the buildings peel by unfamiliarly from my low bucket seat, Mélusine takes calls on her mobile. How much French does she think I understand? We've been talking in English. I hear her say,

"Yes, I'm on my way... I know. She's not very attractive. Is it because she dresses so badly?" I wonder whether she's talking about me.

Mélusine wears black. A black jacket, which she does not remove; black t-shirt; black twisted rope necklace. She also wears perfume. Lots of it. Poison by Christian Dior, she says. It's so thick it forms a barrier between us. On anyone else it might have been oppressive, but on Mélusine, it's part of her allure. I've always loathed strong perfume, especially in cars where it makes me carsick.However if, as Diana Vreeland said, 'Pink is the navy blue of India' but it doesn't necessarily work everywhere ( just as certain shades of orange-red, I've noticed, look dull in the grey light of London), maybe overpowering scent also only makes sense in its heady city of origin. 

"You know," says Mélusine, "I have to do an interview at the Palais. I do an emission about the arts. For la télé. Do you know that arts show, with the chairs? But I'm so tired." She leans back into her leatherette seat. "I just got back from the Maldives last night."

We pull up on the wrong side of the multi-laned avenue du Président Wilson and jaywalk to the Palais, dodging the rush hour traffic.

...

The Palais de Tokyo is artfully distressed. It's walls, inside and out, are peeling, greyish concrete. When a building looks as hubristically Fascistic as this (the enormous winged typewriter was built, optimistically, in 1937), the only thing to do with it is to make a romantic, post-industrial ruin of it.

The exhibition inside is inspired by the Superdome stadium in Atlanta which was used as a disaster centre for the poorest and most resourceless victims of Hurricane Katrina in the US. When we arrive, the main exhibit, inspired by the stadium after its occupation, is still being prepared; curators carfully distributing crumpled Macdonalds wrappers, empty plastic water bottles and other human waste to their pre-appointed places on the artist's floor-grid. The preview-goers form temporary alliances and hang about in groups, waiting for the opening, leaving their own debris of tickets, magazines, and waterbottles. Here we are, the survivors, the stragglers, waiting for our handouts of free champagne.

What do art girls look like this year? The art girls in Paris are all wearing sarouel this summer. And weird shoes. Art girls all over the world wear weird shoes...

Mélusine, who is wearing terrifyingly high black patent platforms with dagger heels, meets an artist friend. He shows me pictures of his work on his blackberry: a car and an uprooted tree turning slowly in the white cube of a gallery. "They're beautiful, huh?"

"I have to meet with les télé people." says Mélusine. "I have a ticket for you. Go in. Have a look around. We can get together later."

I wander in past the works on time, by Jonathan Monk which I like more and more, as I take more time to look. They include a two part exhibit - possibly the most conspicuously luxurious in the World - as you have to travel to Tokyo to see the other half in order to appreciate the whole piece.

I walk past the machine that fires beer bottles at 600km per hour, making everyone jump, and laugh, dissolving the gallery atmosphere. I circle the stuffed elephant balanced on its trunk, examining it's beautifully detailed trunk-hairs; and the group of ceramic Darth Vader heads, which hum like Mongolian throat singers.

But the biggest queue is up the central stairwell is a sign to the free champagne bar. I follow the crowd. The bouncer at the foot of the staircase tears my ticket and sternly indicates the sign, 'Toute sortie est definitive' (no re-entry).

I look up at the beautiful people standing around the balcony about my head, and see something else. On the artfully peeling concrete walls, an enormously enlarged, cheerily wholesome woman in late middle age beams from a huge posters showing cartons of her new flavours - mint tea, Irish coffee and lychee. Yes, the exhibition is sponsored by Mamie's Yogurt.

...

After as much free champagne and yoghurt as I can stand, I catch sight of my friend Vic, a fashion writer, on my way out. I didn't spot him in the exhibition, despite his gleaming peroxide hair and the tightly-buttoned waistcoat worn over his freshly-waxed bare chest which curves in two unnaturally tan sculpted mounds like the breast of a roast chicken.

 I ask him.

"Did you eat the yogurt?"

"Yes. The violette is divine. It goes so well with the champagne. Are you here alone?"

"I'm with Mélusine."

"Who's she?"

"I don't know her. I just met her today. She owns an art gallery. She just asked me here."

"And you're going home already?"

"I promised to be at another vernissage in the Marais. A smaller one. Photographs. A friend is organising it."

He looks at me with a newfound respect.

"You," he says, "have the knack of being invited."

...

Click on the illustration to see it bigger. Click again to resize.

*vernissage - (n.) A private showing held before the opening of an art exhibition. [French, from vernis, varnish, from Old French]. There also is a comparable ceremonial ending of art exhibitions, called finissage. Bigger art exhibitions also may have such an event at half time of the exhibition (midissage).

The secret garden

I'm staying in one of the most luxurious hotels in Paris. It's a long story.

I can only say that this hotel is sooo luxurious that it's impossible to describe without swearing a lot to express dismay/emphasis.

"It's ****ing big! It's sooo ****y luxurious! It must be soooo ****ing expensive!"

"****!"

It's not necessarily a hotel you would have heard of. It's hidden in an unexpectedly leafy corner of Paris, down an enchanted alley. Almost no-one knows it's there - except those who can pay. Needless to say, I'm not paying.

My bedroom is bigger than my apartment. The bathroom actually has a bath. I lie in it's white enormity like a specimen on a marble slab, looking up at the black slate tiles. This is the first bath I have taken in Paris. I can hardly believe it. I want to take photographs. I want to invite my friends.

The bed is six feet across. I have to lie down on it to check. It is wider than I am tall.

A gilt serpent, hand-stencilled by a well-known graphic designer, snakes across the walls. There are buttons on the wall next to the its eyes. I push them and, leaning toward the head of the snake, I hear a faint hiss. I stroke the surface of the wall which is, perhaps unitentionally, scaly with the texture of crackled laquer.

I go down to the lobby and find the hotel manager taking calls from one of the three squares of tastefully mismatched modernist and Louis XV gilt chairs.

There's a fat man sitting across several of the far chairs in the rear formation. I don't know whether he's a guest or someone somehow associated in some other way with the hotel. He looks pugnacious; balding with a small, square beard. He could be a catering supplier or a movie director. He's wearing a loud, striped shirt and a leather jacket. It could be from the local street market or a version exquisitely aged by stylists from the Avenue Montaigne. He looks as though he could be very rich. Rich enough not to care.

He takes some phone calls. Is he rich? Like many rich people, he seems mildly but constantly irritated.

The manager is also nervy and edgy. She has none of the self-satisfaction of proprietors of cheap restaurants or flyblown pensions. They know what they are selling. Their menus are out on the pavement; their tariff is displayed in the window for the hotel-guest on a budget to tot up. If the customer doesn't like it, it's his fault. He knew what he was getting.

"No," she says, "There aren't many boutique hotels in Paris; any small hotels. Well, there have always been small hotels, cheap hotels - and that is good too. But the boutique hotel is just not a French concept."

She pauses:

"We didn't want to be like the big hotels in Paris. We have only seven suites. In the space, we could have had fifteen. Big hotels are sometimes a bit... impersonal. We wanted to do something more personal. We want the guests to feel at home...  But not like in a guesthouse. It is not somebody's home. We want ghosts" (she switches to this pronunciation) "to be left alone if they want - or to have conversations with other ghosts if they want to too."

She shows me the garden.

"The designer did not want flowers. Flowers are a little... vulgar. We want the garden to be like the hotel. There are lots of places which are secret, where you can be private. That's why we don't have a name on the door. You have to find the hotel. It's like a secret."

She breaks off, still not sure on which side of her "private" fence she wants to come down.

While speaking, she looks into the air beside me - not at me. The phone rings inside the hotel. She leaps up. She has been waiting for another ghost to call on her attention. 

On the terrace is a group of girls from a fashion magazine, shooting a model against the lush bamboo wall.  They hang expensive dresses on the expensive doorframes. We have to duck under them to get back inside. They sit at a garden table in a mess of coloured pots of eye shadow, discarded hats and shoes. Like me they are dressed informally: jeans, converse trainers, army surplus jackets. They are familiar with luxury; intimately connected with it. They promote it, sell it, but they do not necessarily participate in it.

I find myself longing for the cheap trashiness of Paris, elsewhere. I know that, outside, there are streets where they sell I heart Paris t-shirts. I need to go out and have a coffee in a cafe in Montmartre from which I can watch tour groups with big butts searching endlessly for the Butte.

I go back into the lobby. I notice a notice inside the front door. The designer chairs in the lobby are only temporary. They are for sale. As is the art on the walls.

As I dawdle to flick through the telephone-directory-thick architectural magazines, the rich, fat man take delivery of a Japanese takeaway. He returns to his table in the corner and unpacks two large trays of gleaming pink sushi, three of glutinous, transparent rice, two closed brown paper bags and a cardboard takeaway box. He has everything he could wish for, everything he could imagine, and more. In the privacy of the secret hotel, he arranges his trays on the low table before him and, bending uncomfortably at the waist, he takes his chopsticks and begins to eat through them, one by one, with dogged, unpleasured stolidity.

Dogwalking in Neuilly...

I have a block on Neuilly. Can't spell it. Can't pronounce it.

I meet a friend for lunch at La Palette. I say

"I'm going to apartment-and-dog-sit for a friend in Nelly."

"Ou?"

"In Nelly"

"Quoi?" (I can't hear you).

"Nelly. You know. That place on the edge of town. The place where Sarkozy junior was going to stand for election.

I copy out my new address and my friend says,

"You've spelt it wrong: it has a i."

"Like this? Neil-y?"

"No. With a u too."

"OK, Nu-illy.Like New-ly? "

 "Like this: Neuilly And you pronounce it New-yee."

"Noy-ee."

"New-yee."

"OK."

Sunday part II; What Paris is mostly for...

In Anita Loos', Gentlemen prefer Blondes, the sincerest gold digger in the world, Lorelei Lee, remarks to her companion, Dorothy 'Shopping seems to be what Paris is mostly for'. It's true that Paris seems a very different place when you can't buy it.

It's two weeks after the shock revelation that an obscure employee of the Societe Generale (too junior even to be called a trader) lost nearly 5 billion euros of the banks assets by creating a series of false accounts. Some people will be thinking twice about shopping, even in the dernière démarque of the soldes.

I'm walking across Paris from Place Blanche to Saint Germain.

It's Sunday afternoon and the fashionable rue des Martyrs is all closed up. With it's designer storefronts hidden until the start of the working week, the street looks more part of the surrounding area than usual.

With nothing to distract at street level, my glance turns upwards. At the corner, half-way down, the top storey windows of a building are crowded with outsize carnival masks.

I continue down the grandes boulevardes, past Printemps and Galleries Laffayette all shut up. There are small groups of tourists milling around hopeful that something might open. They are dressed for shopping - smartly in black, with sunglasses. There is the odd fur coat. They go right up to the windows of the big stores to check that they are really closed (in London, in New York, they'd be open). They walk up and down in front of the abandoned Opera just in case they are mistaken.

In fact there is one shop open. The sort of small shop you find sqeezed between international chain stores on the main streets of any big city It sells cut-price pashminas, cheap souvenirs and wheeled luggage. The neon-paper discount signs in the narrow windows are always bigger than any display of goods. As nothing else is open, the hopeful tourists are actually going in there. They'll maybe actually come away with a plastic vanity case or a commemorative scarf featuring the Eiffel Tower. On any other day, they wouldn't even notice this place on their way to Charvet or Hermes but today, even on Sunday, they need to shop, and this is the only shop available.

The Place Vendome is the most glorious shopping arcade of them all. It's closed and empty, the meticulously clean shop windows flashing with gold light. In the centre by the Vendome column, there's a black hire-car with a photographer and a couple in wedding clothes. The photographer's assistant runs over to straighten her dress. They embrace. They smile into the cold wind. But something's not as it seems. It starts with her hair. It's too bouffant, too fashionable, too exciting for a real wedding. I wonder, is she embracing him sincerely enough - or does she look too thrilled, too much in love. He looks unconcerned, but maybe that's standard for men. Then I remember. Getting married is another thing you generally can't do in France on a Sunday. This isn't a wedding. It's a photo shoot.

Down by the river, there's a man in a red bandana selling roasted chestnuts from a homemade oven; a shopping trolley caging a brazier made from a large cooking-oil tin (huile fritable)  with an inverted dustbin lid balanced on top. His cooked chestnuts resemble an ariel battle-plan, ranked in three divisions. He moves his batallions with a long rake, like a movie-general deploying his troops: the raw occupy the hot centre; the just-cooked, he pushes to the right, and the well-cooked, he moves towards the outer edges of the lid.

Happy, new...

...laid-back new year.

The French have a tradition of sending Cartes de Voeux, or New Year Cards, during January, which is certainly helpful if you haven't got round to getting everything out by Christmas.

This year, Bonapart Consulting  and Ivy Paris commissioned me to create this card from one of my illustrations.

Just before the New Year turns February, I still have time to send you all my best wishes for 2008...

xbadaude