music making for all

Some thoughts on

Divertimento
Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar
starring Lina El Arabi, Oulaya Amamra
France 2022
showing on TV5monde
trailer

I had this film on my films not shown wishlist for a while, and now managed to catch it on TV5 monde. The TV5 blurb only gave first names for the characters and made it look like fiction, so I only found out from the end credits that this is based on real events.

Twin sisters Zahia and Fettouma Ziouani grow up in the 1990s studying music and wanting to become professionals as conductor and cellist, respectively. Coming from an Algerian family in the Parisian social housing suburbs of Seine St. Denis, they face prejudice and open hostility at Paris conservatoires but manage to bridge the cultures, setting up an orchestra called Divertimento among other things.

I love the way the film reflects the single-mindedness of Zahia in particular. There is absolutely nothing in it that isn't related to playing music, either as a help or as a hindrance. Fettouma gets about two seconds of dreaming of quiet conversation with a potential love interest, but Zahia rather counts that as a hindrance too. After that it's music for all and all for the music again.

A musical cliché that the film should have avoided is the young cellist starting her practice with the first movement of the first cello suite. As youtuber Alexis Descharmes has pointed out in his series about cellists in movies many years ago, these bars account for the majority of cinematic cello-playing. Play the Bach suites by all means but there are so many other movements to choose from. I fear the flashmob orchestra performing Ravel's Bolero is also at risk of becoming too widely used, but in defence of this film, it was made before the other recent film that uses it, namely The Marching Band (En fanfare). Which covers a similar subject matter in an interestingly different way.

More interesting music to discover through the film includes Bacchanale by Saint-Saens, which incidentally you can see on YouTube performed by Divertimento, conducted by Zahia Ziouani.

PS Interestingly I had seen each of the two lead actresses separately in their previous films, Lina El Arabi in Les Meilleures, and Oulaya Amambra in Fragile, both dating from 2021. Which is why I had Divertimento on my list.

Update 8.1.2026 I just discovered a TV documentary / interview with Zahia Ziouani from 2016 on YouTube.

colours of time

Some thoughts on

La venue de l'avenir
Cédric Klapisch
France 2025
starring Suzanne Lindon, Cécile de France ...
released in Germany 14.8.2025

I was lucky to catch a subtitled preview of this latest oeuvre by Klapisch in a Düsseldorf cinema this week. The advance info wasn't very clear so I was expecting something family-heavy like Ce qui nous lie (Back to Burgundy). It turned out to be a much broader and more ambitious film that serves an astonishing number of my obsessions including family history,old photos, the handover of visual guide culture from sculpture and painting to photography and film (see the biographies of Renoir father and son), Paris in the Belle Epoque, as well as the music of Pomme (who plays a very cute supporting role that has nothing whatsoever to do with the story).

So the central and ancestral character is Adele (Suzanne Lindon), born in 1873 (which places her in the generation of my great-grandparents, six of whom were born before and two after that year). Her house in rural Normandy hasn't been opened since 1944, but now the local council wants to put up a shopping centre and a massive parking lot in its place, so Adele's 30 or so living descendants are convened to come to an agreement regarding the property. The four family delegates sent to the location discover lots of old photos inside as well as letters and an impressionist painting, so are able to piece together the life story of Adele, which is very cleverly (and very Klapisch-ly) interspersed with the present day lives of the descendants. (There are probably similarities with Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which I need to rewatch some time, to compare and contrast.)

Although I prefer the untranslatable word play of the original title (literally: the arrival of the future, which reflects all that excitement about modernity in the period), the German and English titles (Colours of time / Farben der Zeit) have a justification in referring to the colours, as those are obviously of prime importance in impressionist art, and the flashbacks are remarkably colourful even when they are pegged to monochrome photos.

There is a lot of art in the film, with the Musée d'orsay at Paris, the Musée d'art moderne André Malraux at Le Havre and Monet's garden all playing significant parts.

Official poster design. The red dress serves as a reminder that Paris in 1894 was just as colourful as today's world.

Monet's painting Impression, Soleil levant plays a role in the film.

NB the film was shown at Cannes this year but the Grauniad hasn't reviewed it?! Shocking.

PS: I have been following Klapisch's films on and off ever since Chacun cherche son chat (When the cat's away) was shown at the Phoenix Picturehouse in Oxford, back in 1996 - those were the days when weird little French films still got a UK release! Strangely, I haven't reviewed any of those that I saw since then, so I should at least list them if only to jog my memory:

• 1996 Chacun cherche son chat
• 1996 Un air de famille (I hated that one, and I have avoided the Jaoui/Bacri comedies ever since)
• 2002 L'auberge espagnole (I rewatch this at least once every 10 years when a sequel comes out)
• 2005 Poupees russes (sequel to Auberge espagnole)
• 2008 Paris
• 2011 Ma part du gateau
• 2013 Casse-tetes chinois (Auberge part 3)
• 2017 Ce qui nous lie
• 2025 La venue de l'avenir

Update 21.4.2026 It did actually get a UK release and showed up in the Phoenix Picturehouse Oxford this week, so I went and watched it again. Still love it to bits. Now it also has a review in the Guardian - Peter Bradshaw seems to like it only grudgingly.

elusive memories

Impressions of

Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue
Patrick Modiano

Rummaging around the library I inherited I discovered a few books by the 2014 Nobel laureate for literature Patrick Modiano, including this one both in the French original and in a German translation:

I loved the French title and the German cover art, so went on to read the original. It is very short, with chapters from different perspectives describing the comings and goings of people who remain enchantingly mysterious, plus, it’s Paris shrouded in darkness and a haze of nostalgia, so what’s not to like. I disapproved of the ending though. And I'm wondering if, by not saying much at all about the characters, the author lets me do all the work. I mean I do love his elusive protagonist, Jacqueline, but I realise that I may be projecting my own expectations onto a blank canvas here.

After enjoying the misty mysteries of this one, I also read Du plus loin de l’oubli, which turns out to be very much the same, with some of the characters possibly overlapping (hello again, Jacqueline!), except that now part of the story (?) is moved to London, which somehow put me off a bit. So I guess I know the pattern now, and I don’t have to read the third one I found, which is called Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier.

fragile fates

Some thoughts (with spoilers) on

House of Glass
The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family

Hadley Freeman

4th estate paperback, 2021

I have one or two book projects in my pipeline that are inspired by family history (eg this one), so I am naturally curious about other people’s efforts in this field. Our household has been reading Hadley Freeman’s contributions in the Guardian since forever (in my case since she moved from the fashion desk to become a columnist), which means I already knew some intriguing glimpses of her story, including the fact that her grandmother lived in Paris and never got over having to flee the city in WW2, and this loss of place is also something I can relate to (and Paris too, of course).

House of Glass is the story of this grandmother and her three brothers. The Glass siblings were a Jewish family from a town in today’s Poland. One of the many insane ironies in this story is that the first pogrom in (20th century) Poland happened in their town and saved their lives. This was before the end of WW1, so modern Poland didn’t even exist yet, but it became clear to them that the relative safety they had enjoyed under Habsburg rule was over. Their father came back from the war in poor health, and after he died the siblings and their mother followed in the footsteps of their cousins to move to Paris in the early 1920s, when France was still happy to accommodate Jewish immigrants. Their hometown was near Auschwitz, and among the Jewish families who stayed there, virtually nobody survived the Holocaust. So the statement that a pogrom saved their lives is not even an exaggeration.

When antisemitism and then the Nazis caught up with them in Paris, the four siblings responded in very different ways. One did as he was told by authorities, registered as a Jew, came forward when called up for internment, and ended up being murdered in Auschwitz. The other three did not and miraculously survived. The youngest of the brothers, the fashion designer (later turned art dealer) Alex Maguy tricked the sister into marrying an American, leading her to a life in safety in Long Island. To save his own life, he juggled personal friendships with resistance members and Vichy officials, and cheated death more than once. He even managed to save his 100% un-assimilated mother, which strikes me as the most surprising achievement in a life story that has plenty of others. The oldest of the brothers survived in less eye-catching style, but survive he did.

So, for a Holocaust memoir, this one has a 3/4 happy ending and manages to be uplifting. It uniquely encapsulates the history of the 20th century – the oldest sibling was born in 1901, the last survivor died in 1999 - while also raising issues that are again troubling us today. As it was researched and written after all of the siblings had died, it has plenty of detective work and sleuthing to keep up the suspense. And as a warning to aspiring memoir writers like myself, it is becoming obvious that this kind of investigation requires a lot of hard work (and travel, so I am excused for now, but I have a list of places I need to visit for this purpose).

PS: While reading this, I felt inspired to dig my own tiny bit of Jewish ancestry again, and thinking about it I suspect there may be more that has been swept under the rug.

father and son

some thoughts on

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, mon père
by Jean Renoir
Hachette 1962 / Gallimard 1981
an English translation from 2001 is also available

Back in 2013, the film Renoir was one of the few French movies that still made it to our local independent cinema, and I was lucky to catch it there, and then watched it again when it came out on DVD. It is about the last years in the life of the painter, after the death of his wife, Aline Charigot, in 1915. Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) is stuck in a wheelchair and barely able to move his hands, two of his sons get injured in the war, but he creates some of his most vibrant and life-affirming art.

By the time I started looking at paintings, the impressionists had become mainstream to the point of commercial overload, so I’ve never been a huge fan these works although I don’t mind seeing them every once in a while. The film, however, made me appreciate Renoir a bit more and as a result I picked up a few books about him at various charity shops and antiques fairs, including the memoir by his middle son, the film director Jean Renoir (1894-1979). The idea of the changing of the guard in visual arts, one of the first great film makers writing about one of the last impressionists to remain active in the 20th century, intrigued me so I actually read the book, assisted by the other volumes to look up paintings mentioned and consult timelines.

The biography is based on conversations Jean Renoir had with his father in the last year of his life, as well as with his long-serving model Gabrielle Renard (1878-1959) and other surviving witnesses. As the age gap between father and son is more than half a century, his own recollections only become useful towards the end of the story.

It is organised broadly chronologically, although the author tends to digress on thematic excursions, and covers a staggering range of historical change. From his childhood in the 1840s, Renoir remembered an old man who visited his parents regularly and happily shared memories of how he helped operating the guillotines in the French Revolution. Renoir’s family moved to Paris before it was completely reshaped by Haussmann in the 1850s, he experienced the restored monarchy and as he lived in the Tuileries, he played under the windows of the actual queen. Like some of the other impressionists, he lived and worked in Montmartre when it was still a village with wooden shacks, long before Sacré Coeur was built.

The complete rejection of the impressionists by critics, public and art officialdom in the 1870s is a well-trodden story but always fun to read. Apart from having fun with quoting from the hilarious reviews of the first exhibitions (one of which gave us the word “impressionists” for the artists who had called themselves “les intransigeants” initially), he highlights the occasions when French institutions like the Louvre wouldn’t even take the paintings for free, resulting in many of them winding up in North America. For instance, the painter and collector Gustave Caillebotte died in 1894 leaving his vast collection to the state and installing Renoir to execute his will. Initially the Louvre (as the official repository of the state’s art collection) didn’t want to be bothered with any of it. Three years later, they saw sense and accepted a part of the collection. Not sure if anybody has calculated what the Caillebotte collection would be worth today – I suspect you’d have to be very good in calculating with trillions and such like.

Renoir, who famously identified as a craftsman rather than an artist and considered the word intellectual an insult, comes across as an interestingly complex mixture of old-fashioned and revolutionary, which is part of the force field that keeps this book interesting, even though it isn’t the most organised biography ever written. That and the chance to meet the people you already know from those famous paintings. In another very famous French movie, Amélie, there’s the painter who copies Renoir’s Déjeuner des canotiers (1881) over and over again. Jean Renoir describes the setting and can identify most of the participants, mostly faithful friends of the painter. The woman at the front left, playing with a little dog, is Aline, the author’s mother. When we see these pictures in museums or on countless wall calendars, they are just paintings – but for Jean Renoir and the rest of the family they were life.

Oh, and I'll just have to watch the movie a third time, now I know the family so much better.

x is for ...

All our instruments series, episode 18

... no not for xylophone, we've had that already, and I only have one (not counting silly toy versions). X is for xaphoon, and here's my xaphoon story:

In July 2002, I was heading to Paris for a microbiology conference, via Germany to deposit various kids with various grandparents. At the start of the journey, however, I put my back out moving luggage around on trains, and the extended travels over three days didn't help, so I arrived in Paris not being able to sit. Instead of attending the conference, I spent the first few days dividing my time between walking around (a bit) and lying flat on my back (a lot) on the nice slope along the side of the Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg).

Arriving at my lying down place one day I was puzzled to hear somebody playing a saxophone very loud and clear but not seeing any saxophone. Following my ears while wondering what was wrong with my eyes I found a guy who was selling this new invention, the pocket sax, aka Xaphoon, out of his bag and demonstrating it in the street. Another customer attracted by the sound tried it and also produced a very convincing sax sound from this recorder-size instrument. So I bought one - I think it cost me 25 euros, and nowadays Hobgoblin sells them for £109, so it was a good investment. Although in my hands it doesn't really sound like a saxophone. But then again, in my hands a saxophone doesn't sound like one either.



Looking up the Wikipedia entry, I found out it really was quite a new invention when I bought it. The instrument molded from ABS resin was only made from the spring of 2000. Previously, the inventor, Brian Wittman, had made bamboo xaphoons at his home in Hawaii.

I do like it but never really got the hang of playing it properly. I'm facing two problems, firstly I don't really like the pressure of a reed on my lower lip, which limits each practice session to five minutes, and secondly, while the right hand is straight recorder fingering (German system, so very simple), the left hand fingering is weird. Unlike a recorder, the xaphoon wants four fingers on the left hand put down for G, and lifting fingers off one at a time you then get A Bb (!) and C, and then the thumb comes off before the index finger for D and E. Which is probably to do with the fact that the thumb hole is located at the height where recorders have the first finger hole and vice versa. So very confusing if you're used to recorders.

Anyhow. As I haven't had much practice, this video is really just a demonstration of what the xaphoon sounds like when it is played badly. Enjoy.

climate responses

The upcoming climate conference COP21 at Paris (which I hear will go ahead despite the recent attacks) will reveal whether or not our civilisation can deal with the challenge of man-made climate change. To mark the occasion, I've had a look at how nature suffers from, responds to or copes with climate change. The resulting feature is out now:

How nature copes with climate change

Current Biology Volume 25, Issue 22, pR1057–R1059, 16 November 2015

open access to full text, PDF file.

Paris, place de la republique - own photo from February 2014.

reinventing Paris

review of:

Paris reborn
Stephane Kirkland
St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2013

The city landscape of Paris is instantly recognisable in many photos that don’t contain any landmarks or specific clues. You see the slate-covered mansard roofs, the well-aligned balconies, the wide boulevards, the trees, the street furniture, and you just know it must be Paris.

One important reason why it is so recognisable is that much of it was built within two decades (1852-1870) and to strict design standards keeping the extravagance of architects and developers in check. More than 100,000 houses were built in this time, and half a dozen entirely new transects cut in straight lines across the city. The name most widely associated with this remarkable act of urban development is that of the prefect of the Seine département, Georges-Eugène Haussmann. We like to talk about Haussmannian boulevards, and there is even a boulevard named after him.

Kirkland argues that, while Haussmann was the right person in the right place at the right time to ruthlessly implement the vision of what we now appreciate as the Parisian city landscape, it wasn’t his vision at all. President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who then became emperor Napoléon III by a coup d’état followed by a plebiscite, had drawn the colourful lines on his master plan when Haussmann was still a provincial bureaucrat in Bordeaux, and even before him there had been similar ideas and concepts floating around. It was no secret that Paris at the beginning of the 19th century was in urgent need of renovation. It was the combination of the emperor’s vision and the prefect’s efficiency at getting things done that made this project a reality.

In his very readable account of the origins of one of today’s leading tourist magnets, Kirkland aims to distribute the blame and credit fairly, spelling out the specific contributions of Napoléon III and Haussmann, as well as those of the architects and financiers involved. He also acknowledges the dark sides of the “grands travaux”, from the wholesale destruction of medieval Paris (apart from Notre Dame cathedral, which was lovingly restored) through to the questionable finance deals and the banishment of the working class to the suburbs.

It was partly due the republican critics of these faults that Haussmann, the rather boring bureaucrat, came out of this story with the biggest slice of posthumous fame. Under the empire, the critics couldn’t attack the emperor directly, so they pinned all the blame on Haussmann. He didn’t mind too much, and he added to his immortal fame by publishing three volumes of memoirs when he was underemployed under the third republic. The republic, for all its criticism of the empire, essentially carried on with the project of modernising Paris in the same style, culminating in the world exhibition of 1900, which gave the city the metro and the Eiffel tower.

Cover of the hardback edition. I hear it is now out in paperback.

city

city – a guidebook for the urban age

by PD Smith

Bloomsbury 2012

Call me crazy but I love wandering about in big (European-style) cities. Ideally, they should have a historic core (Mediaeval will do, Roman ruins a bonus!), a big river, a university. Prague, Paris, Cologne, that sort of place is the perfect holiday destination for me.

But what makes cities so attractive, not just for me as a visitor, but for an increasing number of people to move into them, especially into the rapidly growing megacities (with more than 10 million people) of the developing world? Can the cultural history of “the city” be generalised to reveal insights into this form of human cohabitation and cooperation?

PD Smith has attempted this generalisation for cities throughout history and around the world. Like one of my random walks through a city, the book explores many avenues and sights, sometimes via unexpected passageways, and the author invites us to peruse the book in nonlinear fashion. Like the districts of a city, the book has themed section, but within their confines, surprise encounters may happen.

Smith highlights the advantages of a compact, walkable, people-friendly city (I might have mentioned Cologne as an example, where people walk, rollerskate, cycle etc. across the entire North-South extent of the city area on the marvellous river promenade), as opposed to the sprawling, car-friendly city (LA, Brasilia, Milton Keynes). People-friendly cities with adequate public transport and energy-efficient buildings are in fact more environmentally benign on a per-person basis than country lifestyles that heavily depend on driving.

Smith draws on an astonishing treasure trove of sources – including the many volumes that have been written about specific, much-loved cities such as Paris, Venice or New York , and on studies of specific topics like commuting, suburbia, or street art. Faithful readers of his book reviews in the Guardian and elsewhere will recognise some of the information nuggets.

Like any traveller, he always tends to gravitate back home to London, which for a time was the biggest and most powerful city of the world. He concludes the weighty tome with an outlook on the future of the city and with a memento mori, reminding us that all cities will fall to ruins one day.

Highly recommended for anybody who can appreciate cities as more than just the place they commute to.

(amazon.co.uk)

je l'aime a mourir

it's Shakira's birthday today, so in celebration, here's the video of her lovely bilingual rendition of "Je l'aime a mourir" by Francis Cabrel, from the recent DVD Live from Paris:

live from paris - review

The Live from Paris DVD+CD arrived yesterday - ordered from Germany as Sony UK is being hopeless again. In the UK you can only get the DVD this week, the double pack is due to be released next week. And as track 2 says: "Why wait?" Here are my first thoughts on the new release:

This is Shakira’s fourth live DVD, so you may wonder whether she can add something new to the series, but as someone who knows the first three by heart I can reassure you that the new offering is a combination of the reassuringly familiar with the new and inventive.

Very familiar and mostly unchanged are the songs at the hard core of her repertoire from the 90s albums Pies descalzos and Donde estan los ladrones. As far as I can tell, she hasn’t changed a note in her own favourite, Inevitable, since the MTV unplugged concert, and Si te vas, and Ciega sordomuda are similarly steadfast reminders of the good old days.

A lovely new feature is the medley made of A'tini al-Nay (an Arabic song she used to sing as a child), the Metallica cover Nothing else matters, and her own Despedida from the Love in the times of cholera soundtrack. Travel around the world in just a few minutes. Within the same “acoustic” setting is a much-improved version of Gipsy.

Since I saw the show at Paris in December 2010, she added a lovely French song (Je l’aime a mourir by Francis Cabrel) and switched a few more of her announcements to French, which is a nice touch. My only moan about the programme is that none of the collaborators showed up (while Alejandro Sanz and Wyclef Jean did, the last time round).

The DVD with 99 minutes of concert footage and 20 mins “behind the scenes” extras is perfect as always. The CD contains as much of the concert as fits on a single audio CD (big improvement on the 5-track CD from last time!), which means all announcements and a couple of songs (Si te vas, Gordita) were dropped, and the A'tini al-Nay snippet was cut too. The sound editing on the CD is different from the DVD version; there were a couple of places where I think I heard things that weren’t so prominent in the DVD soundtrack.

Her last words on the concert recordings are “a la prochaine” (until the next time), so I’m very much looking forward to the next tour and the 5th DVD. After New York, Rotterdam, Miami, and Paris, maybe we'll hear her "live from Beirut" in four years time, complete with a full-length version of A'tini al-Nay?



(Cover of the DVD+CD pack, which comes in a CD case)
amazon.co.uk

Shakira live from Paris

As I've seen Shakira's Sale el Sol tour only twice, I can't wait to get the DVD, which is out on December 6th, as has just been officially announced. Full details are here. As the title suggests, the show was filmed at the Bercy, Paris, but not during the December 2010 gig that I saw. There were an additional two shows at the Bercy in the summer of 2011 which were used for the DVD.

As the UK distribution is hopeless again (amazon.co.uk offers the DVD for an astronomical price of £ 26.75 and doesn't give a date when it might be available!), I've ordered my copy from amazon.de.



Oh, and there is a new live video out to promote the DVD, it's Antes de las seis from the Sale el Sol album. One of my favourite songs.

le ♥ en plus

a complete dozen eccentric photos from my recent travel to northern France (Paris, Amiens, Lille) is now online at my flickr photostream.

Pleased to see that the region still has the logo with the ♥



though they seem to have lost the slogan, which used to be "le coeur en plus" if I remember correctly, in my childhood days. I did spend a lot of time in that part of the world, you know. But still discovered things I had never seen, like the Les hortillonages area of Amiens, where I took pictures of all those little footbridges (there were about 100, so be grateful I only posted 3!).

parisian memories part 1

a la recherche du temps perdu ... collecting up some memories of various cities I have visited more than once, starting off with

PARIS

1. Just walking through

During the first 20 years of my life, I spent probably more than 10% of my time in northern France, but never got to see much of Paris. By age 20, I had seen all the “big six” gothic cathedrals of the north, except Notre Dame de Paris. Lille, where my aunt used to live, was the biggest city we went to, and even there my parents managed to get lost every time.

I think I once went to Paris as a child accompanying my cousin who had some business to attend there, but can’t remember seeing any of the city’s attractions (my only memory is of a side road with a door where my cousin rang to deliver something, maybe there was a postal strike).

At 17 I went hitchhiking / camping with a gang of 7 along the Atlantic coast, from Saint-Jean-de-Monts (near Nantes) down to Soulac-sur-Mer (near Bordeaux). Love the Atlantic coast, it’s the only place in France where you get a proper ocean with proper waves, the southern part of the coast is a popular destination for surfers. I travelled back alone to stop by at my aunt’s place at Lille. I spent a day hitchhiking back up from Soulac to Nantes, then took the night train from Nantes to Paris (Montparnasse, I guess). With my trademark unwarranted optimism, I assumed I would be able to sleep on the train, but ended up having just enough space to crouch down outside the toilet door, so I arrived in Paris in less than perfect condition at some ridiculous time like 5 am. As I was travelling on an extremely small budget and there wasn’t any particular hurry, I decided to walk across Paris to the Gare du Nord to catch a train to Lille from there.

After all these years I still remember some glimpses I had while walking across the city with 18kg of luggage including a tent on my back (I know this number for certain because I weighed it when I arrived!). It was great fun watching the city wake up and rub the sleep from its collective eyes, market traders setting up their stalls, bin men doing their rounds very early such as not to hold up the traffic too much. So on that occasion I saw more of Paris than in my lifetime before and in quite a few years after, and I enjoyed it greatly. What I also remember of that trip is that on the train to Lille (that being before the times of TGV, it would have taken three hours or so) the conductor had to shake me to wake me up when he wanted to see my ticket. Oh, and just for the heck of it, I walked the 4 km from Lille station to my aunt’s place as well (and, unlike some people I know, I didn’t lose my way).

... a suivre ...

Paris in 3 minutes

The essence of Paris in 3 minutes, as captured in the original video for Kiss Me, which is an hommage to Truffaut's classic Jules et Jim. Looking this up on YouTube, I found to my horror that there has been a more recent movie-tie in video of this song, so the original video was actually hard to find. Thus, in an attempt to save it from oblivion, here goes:

paris by day

This time, we only spent a night and half a day at Paris, so the photo yield is somewhat limited, but here are a few day-time snaps.

We explored the covered-up part of the Canal St Martin down to Bastille place, and discovered this exotic-looking place:



I always check the fountain next to the Beaubourg, with the sculptures by Niki de St Phalle but we were out of luck, as the fountains weren't on:



A new discovery was this DNA-like (?) sculpture in the Tuileries, which stands slightly bent, so I have one photo where the sculpture is straight but the ground is sloping, and this one where the ground is straight but the sculpture threatens to fall over:



Pix from various stops in Germany to follow ...

paris by night

I have lots of photos to sort out from my trip, here's a couple of shots of paris by night to start with:





In case it isn't obvious, the second photo shows a "Vélib'" bike rental station. Each bike dock has a green diode when the bike is there and ready to use (I assume), so at night, when all the bikes are there, the whole row gets this nice green glow reflected in the wire baskets. By day, the bikes get used a lot, one sees them whizzing about everywhere.

I've also just uploaded a new photo to fotocommunity.

people watching

(Third and final part of my Parisian impressions)

Climbing up the Montmartre hill in search of Amélie vistas, all we could actually see was people photographing each other. I wonder how they made the movie, did they have the area cleared by force beforehand ?



Never mind Sacré Coeur, the main attraction at the top was a guy doing tricks with a football while standing on a plinth over the steep descent towards central Paris:



which is of course compelling to watch mainly because you realise that if he drops the ball, he may have to run all the way down to Place Pigalle to get it back. He never did drop it though.

On the way down we saw Picasso's first atelier in Paris, but I haven't got a picture of that. Finishing off by the riverside where we started, here is a view of the beautiful backside of Notre Dame, as seen from upstream:

Canal St. Martin

If anybody wants a tourist-free attraction in Paris, or just a nice spot to relax, I recommend the Canal St. Martin, which runs just northeast of the Gare de l'Est, and mysteriously disappears below ground before it joins the Seine.



On a short stretch of canal, it has an implausible amount of 19th century technology, including high footbridges, locks, and a rotating bridge.

Between Gare de l'Est and the canal there is also a very nice park (whose name I forgot), and in the park-side front of the office building next to the park I spotted this slightly unusual biotope during my stopover in June (en route to Germany):



But by the time I returned to the spot last week, the tree had disappeared and the lifeless order of things had been restored. Also along the canal, this somewhat expressionistic architectural detail:

si par hasard ...

I have just come back from a 3 nights trip to Paris which was quite fantastic. Thanks to my son who has autism and is addicted to walking, I've probably seen more of the city than on my previous visits put together.

We were based at a small hotel near the Porte St. Martin, less than 1km north of the centre Pompidou (Beaubourg) arts centre, which looks like this:



It was regarded as outrageously hyper-modern in the 70s, but I think it has aged quite well and now that time has caught up a bit, it makes a nice landmark, and it has become my main focus point and "living room" when I'm in Paris. during a visit in 2002, I bought a xaphoon (a small instrument that sounds a lot like a saxophone if you can play it well, which I can't) on the square outside the centre, and I was pleased to see that the xaphoon vendor was still there (or maybe a colleague, didn't remember his face).

Walking past the Beaubourg we get to the north bank of the Seine, of course, where the city beach has become a yearly tradition by now, and to the Pont Neuf



which is the costar of a classic movie with Juliette Binoche, Les Amants du Pont Neuf. The film is set during a renovation of the bridge ahead of the 1989 bicentenary of the French revolution, but wasn't finished by the time the bridge reopened, so they had to build a mock bridge somewhere in the south and ended up with the most expensive French movie ever.

Further down, the Pont des arts, a pedestrian bridge which was a new discovery for me (I only knew it from the chanson by Brassens: Si par hasard, 'sus le pont des arts, tu croise le vent ... ). I found out that from this bridge one has the most stunning view ever, of the Ile de la cite upstream, and the Eiffel tower downstream, not to mention the various buildings on the banks facing the bridge.

we also did a guided river cruise, down to the Eiffel tower and back, and learned lots of things from that (I usually avoid such touristy activities, but the things we do for the kids ... )

Away from the Seine, we also explored the Canal St. Martin and Montmartre, about which I'll post separately.