Paris – Commodity Fetishism

Cité-jardins de Champigny-sur-Marne

“In Paris in 1885, a judge declared that for a landlord to be compelled to lay on water in his houses for the use of the tenants was an interference with the liberty of the subject, and held that a water-supply was not an indispensable necessity for maintaining the healthiness of the a dwelling” CatherineContinue reading “Cité-jardins de Champigny-sur-Marne”

Paris Manuscripts

It was as if a scrap of paper was found in the street. One of those anonymous streets that lead through a time-space warp and into a fragment of the city that is both imagined and real. A door opens, tumble through, a dusty corridor, it’s airless and stale, there is someone in the cornerContinue reading “Paris Manuscripts”

The train to Paris, a city of Capital

There’s a crowd of people slowly moving toward platform 7 and the 13.31 train to Paris. I become aware of a young woman and man in close proximity. Why them? There are plenty of other people within a few inches or so. And yet no one bumps another and if they accidently do, they generallyContinue reading “The train to Paris, a city of Capital”

Paris & the Modern Workers

Arriving in Paris Paris appears suddenly; as if the train has travelled through a gate. Before we reached the gate, it was a landscape of rolling hills covered with grass and wheat and cheerful bunches of trees and stand alone farmhouses with whitewash walls and red tile roofs. Out in this countryside we flashed pastContinue reading “Paris & the Modern Workers”

The Impossibilities of Money

Paris rain. It gets everywhere. Even deep under the city in the Line 1 Metro there’s rain. On the umbrellas of those who’ve just got into the carriage. It drips onto the floor. The rain is on people’s shoes and hair. It’s on the bronze silk skirt of the young woman with the black hairContinue reading “The Impossibilities of Money”

Gateways

A Bulgarian shopkeeper who gave me a box to recycle paper, a physiotherapist from Kerala who described the history of the Communist Party there, a Rumanian woman on the street who explained she has always worked and paid her taxes and doesn’t care much for the way some people go on about immigrants, an AfricanContinue reading “Gateways”

As a Tourist, in Paris

Paris is infected with building-itis too. As the train comes through the outer suburbs and into the city itself, lines and lines of tower cranes. Half built luxury apartment blocks, leisure and retail complex investments, gated communities, poor quality cheap builds (and expensive lets) that will quickly become the new slums. The city has concentratedContinue reading “As a Tourist, in Paris”