On Paris 2024, part III
It usually feels like Paris belongs to me in the summer. Friends who live here go to the seaside, and most of the tourists, afraid of the heath, have finished their tours by early July. In August, the city sleeps. It won't be like that now. But still. When friends send me reels of chaos in Paris, I tell them it is nowhere to be seen. And if it will be too much, we can take the metro three stops up to Belleville, where nobody cares. Or to the Parc Monceau. There is a big tent there, something will happen sometime, but not on this Sunday. We’re all huddled together on a big blanket, a mix of people I might not have known if it had not been for the school my daughter went to when we lived here. My Israeli friend and I talk about the war, she says it is as if there are no adults in charge. It is hell on both sides, she says. But the real hell is in Gaza, I watch the reel of the Palestinian cook making food for all the children, looking into the camera as he stirs the huge pan, throwing flour into it, never breaking eye contact with us watching. Please stay alive.
As we walk home we notice there’s a free concert at the Hotel de Ville, but as we don't know the bands and it had been a long day, we decide to listen from our open windows. The air is still, with the music and the heat it is impossible to sleep. People who want to go home argue with the guards below. They don't agree that they have to take the long way round the barricades. ‘JO hasn't even started yet,’ one man shouts. ‘Why this extreme security, it's like the lockdowns all over again!’ He’s furious.
A heavy rain falls and the next day we finally get some wind. The chaos in the government here continues, Biden will not run again in the US, and on the news a reporter says Camera instead of Kamala. How this will end is anyone's guess, it feels like everything is in free fall. A new race has begun, there’s no time to breathe.
We take the RER R to see the Château de Fontainebleau. It is huge and we can walk through it almost alone, people must have thought it was closed on Mondays. I laugh at the size of Queen Anne d'Autriche's room, which all the homeless, sans domicile fixe, could have enjoyed. The French expression fixe is interesting for a non-French speaker, it seems to me as if they are to fix it very soon, that they are just without house at the moment, when the reality is so much worse.
We find a bench in the shade and watch the families rowing in the small pond. It looks like hard work and I’m happy that I did not suggest this. I scroll through my phone, waiting to see if there are any tickets for breakdance, the one new genre we both really want to see. I check the activities and make a note of what will be free. Swimming is possible. And we could maybe take our blankets to the Seine on Friday to watch the opening ceremony.
A photographer I know has made a project on the construction workers of an Olympic site, staging photographs of them performing with various objects related to sport. The portrait series is a nod to the 1936 ‘People's Olympic Games’ in Barcelona, planned as a protest against the Berlin Games that year, which were under Nazi control. Some of the photographs will be shown in Saint Denis from Friday, where Snoop Doog is somehow involved in the final torch relay. Things are getting closer now.
These texts relating to Paris 2024 are a work in progress.