Stories du Moment
Heat waves, art installations in Paris, an important exhibition and a change to Michelin Stars.
It’s steamy in Paris. 13* above seasonal norms and already suffocating in my 5th floor apartment. But I promised myself I wouldn’t make that the focus of this month’s newsy round-up, despite the fact it’s all anyone can really talk about. Also, I learned (thanks to Comte de Saint-Germain and reported by Le Parisien) that the official Météo France weather station, which reports reference temperatures for the city, is located in the Parc Montsouris where it is…. Cooler. So temperatures are, in fact, higher in the center of the city. Anyway… onward:
FRENCH ARTIST JR WRAPS UP THE PONT NEUF (YAY OR NAY?)
I have a chat group with a few friends, one of whom is a contemporary art specialist guide. Naturally, when JR’s La Caverne du Pont Neuf came into conversation— it’s been in preparation for the last week— some members of the group conveyed their lukewarm feelings about the installation. I wanted her to weigh in.
For background, the trompe l’oil-loving artist has transformed Paris’s oldest bridge with an inflatable cavernous piece that is meant to pay homage to the work of artist Christo and Jeanne-Claude (who famously “wrapped” Pont Neuf in 1985) and reference the limestone quarries of Paris that were used to build the city and the bridge. “It’s meant to get people to look again at something they perhaps stopped paying attention to. It’s meant to be disruptive, which can evoke good or bad responses! It’s not only being modified to be “beautiful” said Alexandra Weinress of The Seen Paris.
Once fully complete, the public will be able to venture inside of the cave-like structure where a sound component was contributed by ex-Daft Punk artist and musician Thomas Bangalter. Visitors should also be able to meander through with an AR experience designed for mobile devices.
Paris loves a happening (and our leaders will always say they represent a new chance to draw eyeballs to the city that… already draws a zillion eyeballs) so for me, it fits into an artistic spectacle that is less about the merits of the work itself than the spectacular nature of the piece. What do you think?
LE BUS IS BACK
I love the stories from the beginnings of Bus Palladium, the grungy punk rock club born in Pigalle. It’s wholly lost its edge, which some will take issue with, but it is no longer a shell of a place nor a construction zone. It lives anew as an excellent cocktail bar, restaurant, and hotel with a fully refurbished club and concert venue. It fits neatly into a neighborhood which long lost its sleaze. It was bound to happen, sadly.
Even if you’re not interesting in concerts or clubbing (I’m down for the former), the bar is great. Go early/pre-dinner.
Read my full review for Travel & Leisure.
NEW PHOTO EVIDENCE OF THE GREEN TICKET ROUNDUP, PARIS 1941
It never gets easier to see imagery from this time but it is so important that we continue to expose ourselves to it. On May 14, 1941, 3,700 foreign Jewish men were summoned (with a notice (on green paper) by police to the 11th arrondissement for what they believed to be an identity check. Instead, they were held in the Gymnase Japy. It was a trap, one that became among the very first roundups of Jews in France.
We know more about that particular period in 1941 thanks to 98 never-before-seen photographs on display at the Shoah Memorial in Paris. They were taken by a half-Jewish Nazi propagandist photographer named Harry Croner who was deported to a labor camp a few months after taking the photographs, before later being taken prisoner by the Americans.
Lior Lalieu, head of the photo library at the Shoah Memorial, told France Culture that “there were 69 assembly points in Paris, notably the Japy Gymnasium, the largest, because we are in the 11th arrondissement, where the concentration of the foreign Jewish population is the highest in Paris.” As shown in the photographs, women were not arrested and deported (though they would be the following year) but were instrumental in the trap. Women accompanying their husbands were told to prepare a small suitcase of belongings and when they returned, they realized their partners had been arrested. “You can see the shock and despair on their faces, women pleading with the police… You can see the tragedy of this roundup,” says Lalieu.
Read the New York Times piece on the topic by Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Holocaust historian and co-curator of the exhibition.
MICHELIN’S GREEN STAR IS NO MORE
Perhaps it was flawed from the start but the green Michelin star is no more. Hundreds of restaurants around the world rewarded for their environmental efforts—low-waste cooking, preserving biodiversity— will be stripped of their green star by the end of this year as the guide retires the prize after only six years. Instead of working to fix the major shortcomings in the system (most notably that inspectors were not evaluating restaurants’ sustainability initiatives in a meaningful way nor finding ways to assess in regions with different standards; restaurants filled out a questionnaire about their practices), they’re dropping the whole thing at a time when sustainability in food is more necessary than ever. It feels even more like a botched opportunity given that Michelin announced it would, instead, launch a vague editorial platform called “Mindful Voices”, focused on “all those who inspire across the universes of gastronomy, hospitality and vineyards.”
Thanks to journalist and author Nicholas Gill for flagging this was developing before anyone else. Several months ago, he noticed that Michelin was scrubbing the Green Star listings from its website and search function. Michelin firmly denied it at the time.
HOW TO WATCH “SEARCHING FOR FRANCE”
I know, it’s not as straight forward as logging on to Netflix. Not everyone has cable TV. I’ve been fielding this question a lot and I have a bit more information now that viewers have informed me how they were able to watch. If you’re based in the U.S., you’ll have an easier time of it: CNN will keep rebroadcasting it and it’s also available on their CNN Streaming app. It’s not free but you could sign up for one month, watch the whole thing, and cancel :) Apple TV and Amazon Prime appear to have it for purchase, as individual episodes, though if you’re outside the U.S. it will require a VPN. Thank you for watching!
ELSEWHERE
Crisis in Paris schools (The Guardian)
Abort mission, Hollande! (Politico)
ICE comes to Europe ( Phineas Rueckert at (Re)Voir)
Oh good, just what Paris needed: a burger des riches! (Reported by Pomélo).
Searching for Solidarity at the Train Station (The Nation)
On the art of French chocolate (Me! The New Paris podcast)
WHAT YOU MAY HAVE MISSED
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we love to laugh at flanby, who was my neighbor in the 20th arr, and would do the saturday market on the place edith piaf IN A SUIT. but he put in place some things that changed france: he was an anti-corruption crusader (thank him for the HATVP and why we know about rachida dati's ill-gotten gains, for instance); he legalized gay marriage; the COP21 was his... unpopular opinion: i'd be happy to have him back.
Fabulous .
Have recently been reading about Christo and Jean Claude and Running Fence.
It good to see this type of art!