Paris Zoo

I'm back in London for the summer, but my full set of 'Paris Zoo' fake animal pictures, as alluded to a couple of posts ago, can be found here or here. Reports of any further sightings welcomed.

I done a poem

Here's a poem I wrote a few months back which has been published on The Literateur.

I guess you could describe it as a cross between The Little Mermaid and My Fair Lady, with some puns thrown in. I'm pleased with it, anyway.

And I also recently reviewed Joanna Kavenna's new novel The Birth of Love for the same folk.

Heart-Expanding

And I regret

how I said to you,

Honey, just open your heart,

when I’ve got trouble

even opening a honey jar.

Joanna Newsom, ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’

There’s a certain tone of voice that is so often borrowed to send up insufferable armchair critics, it’s amazing that there are still real-life armchair critics who use it. A pair of them was sitting behind me at the Joanna Newsom-Roy Harper gig in Paris last night. It was the last date of the tour and an emotional Roy Harper had just bid us a very touching farewell. Now, I don’t think Harper is an extraordinary talent or anything. I enjoyed his set the way I might enjoy watching a beloved uncle playing. His dry, occasionally bewildering patter between songs, peppered with endearing attempts to dredge up his schoolboy French, moved at a glacial, expansive pace that is perhaps only tolerable if you’re used to, and rather fond of, new-age folk relics.

Yes, expansive is the word. Some people expand, others only know how to contract. I present, without further comment, snatches of the conversation behind me (both speakers were British):

“Someone took too many drugs”

“Talk about a rock and roll casualty”

“It’s not the sort of music I’ve got in my collection”

“I’d give him 2/10 for stagecraft”

“I’ll look on Amazon, and if any of his albums is less than £1.50 I’ll buy it”

“It’s the sort of music that’s better live”

“All music is better live”

“Except stuff like Girls Aloud – that’s better off!”

One aspect of my level of French is that, while I can hold a conversation, I tend not to tune into other conversations around me. There are times when I realise what a blessing that is.

Anyway, Joanna. Oh, Joanna.

Some gigs exhilarate through their imperfection: through distortion, recklessness, a sense of being at the edge of control. It’s not often, at least outside the classical world, that a performer will shoot for and achieve perfection.

Three details from last night:

Joanna, while singing and playing the harp, makes small, rhythmic nods of the head to keep time. The way you might do if you were playing a fiendishly difficult two-handed instrument while delivering tongue-twisting, melody-twisting lyrics.

Ryan Francesconi (musical director on the last album) sets his guitar up on a stand, taps it and turns the gain pedal up, building a crescendo of feedback before sharply, on the downbeat, cutting it off.

The band and audience are waiting between songs as Neal Morgan makes small adjustments to the positioning of his drums and percussion instruments. He looks up at the expectant crowd and says mock-defiantly, “What? Art takes time!”

The picture I’m trying to draw is of a group of musicians whose respect for the luminous, angelic– but incredibly disciplined – artist in their midst is such that they won’t put a beat or a note out of place. You could see the concentration on their faces, while Joanna just grinned at how wonderful it all was. And so did we.

Paper beats rock, blossom beats steel, paint beats wall

The Promenade Plantée in Paris’s 12eme arrondissement proclaims a victory for idle beauty over steely efficiency. Once a railway track, and now adorned with trees and trellises, it offers a place to sit, to jog, to woo, to wander at several stories’ remove from the commerce and congestion of the city.

My first encounter with this chemin de vert was through celluloid: it is featured on the walking route of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) in the wonderful 2004 film Before Sunset. Lovers for a night in the Vienna-set Before Sunrise (1995), Jesse and Céline are reunited after nine years of what-if yearning. Jesse is in Paris promoting the novel he wrote about that night; Céline finds him at a reading in the Shakespeare and Co. bookshop, just across the Seine from Notre Dame. He has a brief window of time before his flight home, and they spend it frantically playing conversational catch-up as they stroll in “real time” from the Rive Gauche to a cute café, then along the Promenade Plantée, then onto a tourist boat ride which takes them back towards Notre Dame.

In fact, it’s an impossible route, requiring unwieldy river- and arrondissement-hopping. Not that I tend to bother about this kind of geographical license. I side with the great man who said that “realism is neither achievable nor desirable”; I want films to transport me, credulous and childlike, to their shiny invented worlds without fear of being held accountable to pedantry. But the impossible itinerary of Before Sunset interests me because it’s a film that take as its central theme the tug-of-war between romance and reality. Is the idea of romantic love (the protagonists wonder) just a con? Is there a God, an afterlife, magic in the world? How far have their memories been airbrushed and edited? To what extent does Jesse’s novel fictionalise their night in Vienna? Could their relationship survive outside the enchanted film-set cities of old Europe?

It is the film’s extraordinary emotional honesty that makes me more than usually interested in its mild topographical dishonesty – expedient when shooting in a busy city like Paris, but worth noting nonetheless. The film is both one of the most romantic I’ve ever seen, and one of the most naturalistic in its real-time pace and the artfully artless weave of its dialogue. These contradictions seems apt, though, for Hawke and Delpy’s indulgent conversation is forever going in circles and contradicts itself, working on the commendable principle that in real, lived experience we may feel two opposite ideas to be simultaneously true; that where fictional characters operate according to a cipher-like set of values or traits, real people are a mess of contradictions. Binary oppositions are for computers and fundamentalists; reality is analogue.

On the bright winter day when I first visited the real promenade, the faint absurdity surrounding the benignly Luddite idea of turning a railway track into a municipal garden was compounded by the fact that it wasn’t a chemin leading me to anything in particular. It was a film fan’s indulgent pilgrimage, requiring a metro ride out to Daumesnil on line 8, then a doubling-back on foot through a series of more or less connected walkways and parks: with a high-arching bridge here, and there a garden with a scarecrow and a vegetable patch, the walk seems for all the world to be analogue reality’s fey translation of a Nintendo platform game. At any rate, it had a rather lovely pointlessness to it, the pointlessness that defines both tourism and game-playing, with the accompanying arbitrary and linear objective that is equally necessary to both.

Then the miscellany of greenish spaces gave way to the stretch recognisable from Jesse and Céline’s wanderings, though with the chill air offering a bracing reminder that this was not cinema, and the bright sun showing the plants at their least verdant, and the un-cinematic graffiti and rubbish bins that I don’t recall from the film.

It would be churlish, by the way, to gripe about the ubiquity of graffiti in Paris. So much of it is brilliantly creative and bizarre, infinitely preferable to an expanse of bare brick or concrete. I have become mildly fixated with tracking down and snapping particularly striking examples, filling a wildlife-themed photo album with a safari’s worth of all the zebras, giraffes and unidentifiable chimeras daubed onto walls. It has become a further refinement of the game, a cheerfully arbitrary checklist and focus for my meanderings.

The graffiti serves as a useful shorthand reminder for the complex set of contradictions that define the city, a place marketed to the world as the home of elegance and refinement, but which also cradled a revolution and still regards May 1^st as more sacred than Christmas. The irreverent scrawls on haussmannien walls are an important counterweight to the haute haughtiness. I get the sense that there is a stronger sense of an artistic underground here, certainly than in Britain (is it a coincidence that the phrase faire la manche denotes both busking and begging? It’s certainly possible to read too much into idiom). This despite, or maybe because of, the generous state support for artists (more binary-crumbling): indeed, it’s not always clear whether the street art has been done under cover of dark, or with municipal blessing.

Either way, it can only point to the Parisian tendency to aestheticism, the intolerance of bland functionality and the “digital” mindset. This is arguably the root both of the city’s peaks of beauty and its troughs of snobbery and stubbornness. It extends from the culture of restaurants and cafes to the architectural exile of tower blocks to the banlieue. And it could hardly be better expressed than by the decision to turn a railway track into a space for flowers and flâneurs.

Getting personal

Another week, another top-notch piece up on gnome, if we do say so ourselves.

This time Andrew Naughtie delves into the true meaning of the 'personal' and 'privacy' in the age of full-body scanners and 'sexting', not to mention Beyonce and her video phone.

Chew it over here.

In Jazzwise

A heads-up that if you are skilful enough to locate the jazz section of WH Smith (took me long enough) you should reward yourself by purchasing a copy of this month's Jazzwise. It's the one with Pat Metheny on the cover. My winning Write Stuff review of John Surman's London Jazz Festival appearance is printed on p. 59.

The unedited version is still up on the website.

Introducing gnome

I do apologise for my sporadic blogging lately. I'm sure you've all struggled to locate some core of meaning in your lives in the absence of regular posts to read.

By way of excuse / consolation prize allow me to unveil:

gnome

Ossie Froggatt-Smith & I have been cooking this up for a while, as a space for young people's quality nonfiction writing. Right now there's not much on it - besides an article I wrote about break-up albums (rather Tosh Pit - esque in style), and some handy links. However, it will continue to grow over the coming weeks. We've got some really exciting pieces lined up from some unfairly talented writers.

You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.