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Friday December 22. Paris.

Happy Solstice! Today is officially the shortest day of the year, in Europe anyway. Sunrise at 8.43 and sunset at 4.55. Paris is behaving like Victoria BC with a very fine drizzle on and off - just enough to put waves in your hair…

In the morning I walked along the Canal de l’Ourcq and the Canal St-Martin, both near where I’m staying in the north end of the city. Napoleon built up this network of 130 km of navigable canals, complete with docks and locks, starting in 1802 in order to provide good quality water to the city and to bring in bread and grain shipments.  After seeing so much of Mussolini’s building and urbanization achievements in Italy, here are more reminders of what strong central authoritarianism can achieve. Not that I find tyrants in the slightest attractive!

Canals surround La Villette, a very modern park with music venues, a theatre, and various other pleasurable amenities. From the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries, this was the main slaughterhouse for all of Paris.  When it closed there were various development projects, which resulted in nothing other than a major financial scandal. Finally in the 1970s the current structures were successfully developed (by a not-so-authoritarian government).

La Villette - the nineteenth century slaughterhouse building now an arts venue.


La Villette - the gorgeous modern home of the Orchestre de Paris


Near my apartment in another repurposed industrial building there is a wonderful centre with theatre and exhibition space, but also lots of free space for dancing or whatever else people want to do. And deck chairs that anyone can just sit on. No need to pay or do anything or be anyone. At least not that I can figure out, although there must be some catch because there weren’t any obviously homeless people there, despite there being a goodly number of them on the streets.

This evening I went back to La Villette and saw a play for children, “Icare » by Guillaume Barbot. The myth of the man who built wax wings to fly up in the heavens, only to have a great tumble when the hot rays of the sun melted the wings, was used to take us into the life and imagination of a five year old learning to find strength in challenges. Beautifully acted with a full house of captivated and responsive children and parents. 

Then there was a lively son et lumière display in the La Villette park based on Salvador Dali’s sculptures. A great echo of one of my visits to a Dalí museum in Siena on last fall’s walk.  Dali’s art leaves me fairly cold - it doesn’t seem to arouse any particular feeling for me, even with the help of a lot of technological magic - although when I look at my photos now, there definitely does seem to be emotion there!




 


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