Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'What's so special about it?'
I told him. He refused to believe it. No such picture had ever been painted, and if it had been painted it
wouldn't be hanging in a public gallery. But he came. And the thing is, I couldn't for the life of me find it. Katz
was convinced it was just a cruel joke, designed to waste his time and deprive him of the last two ounces of
his Coke, and he spent the rest of the day in a tetchy frame of mind.
Katz was in a tetchy frame of mind throughout most of our stay in Paris. He was convinced everything
was out to get him. On the morning of our second day, we were strolling down the Champs-Elys￩es when a
bird shit on his head. 'Did you know a bird's shit on your head?' I asked a block or two later.
Instinctively Katz put a hand to his head, looked at it in horror - he was always something of a sissy
where excrement was concerned; I once saw him running through Greenwood Park in Des Moines like the
figure in Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' just because he had inadvertently probed some dog shit with the tip
of his finger - and with only a mumbled 'Wait here' walked with ramrod stiffness in the direction of our hotel.
When he reappeared twenty minutes later he smelled overpoweringly of Brut aftershave and his hair was
plastered down like a third-rate Spanish gigolo's, but he appeared to have regained his composure. 'I'm
ready now,' he announced.
Almost immediately another bird shit on his head. Only this time it
really
shit. I don't want to get too
graphic, in case you're snacking or anything, but if you can imagine a pot of yoghurt upended onto his scalp,
I think you'll get the picture. 'Gosh, Steve, that was one sick bird,' I observed helpfully.
Katz was literally speechless. Without a word he turned and walked stiffly back to the hotel, ignoring the
turning heads of passers-by. He was gone for nearly an hour. When at last he returned, he was wearing a
windcheater with the hood up. 'Just don't say a word,' he warned me and strode past. He never really
warmed to Paris after that.
With the Louvre packed I went instead to the new - new to me, at any rate - Mus￩e d'Orsay, on the Left
Bank opposite the Tuileries. When I had last passed it, sixteen years before, it had been a derelict hulk, the
shell of the old Gare d'Orsay, but some person of vision had decided to restore the old station as a museum
and it is simply wonderful, both as a building and as a collection of pictures. I spent two happy hours there,
and afterwards checked out the situation at the Louvre - still hopelessly crowded - and instead went to the
Pompidou Centre, which I was determined to try to like, but I couldn't. Everything about it seemed wrong.
For one thing it was a bit weathered and faded, like a child's toy that has been left out over winter, which
surprised me because it is only a dozen years old and the government had just spent ﾣ40 million
refurbishing it, but I guess that's what you get when you build with plastic. And it seemed much too
overbearing a structure for its cramped neighbourhood. It would be an altogether different building in a park.
But what I really dislike about buildings like the Pompidou Centre, and Paris is choking on them, is that
they are just showing off. Here's Richard Rogers saying to the world, 'Look, I put all the pipes on the
outside.
Am I cute enough to kiss?' I could excuse that if some consideration were given to function. No one
seems to have thought what the Pompidou Centre should do - that it should be a gathering place, a haven,
because inside it's just crowded and confusing. It has none of the sense of space and light and majestic
calm of the Mus￩e d'Orsay. It's like a department store on the first day of a big sale. There's hardly any
place to sit and no focal point - no big clock or anything - at which to meet someone. It has no heart.
Outside it's no better. The main plaza on the Rue St-Martin is in the shade during the best part of the
day and is built on a slope, so it's dark and the rain never dries and again there's no place to sit. If they had
made the slope into a kind of amphitheatre, people could sit on the steps, but now if you sit down you feel
as if you are going to slide to the bottom.
I have nothing against novelty in buildings - I am quite taken with the glass pyramid at the Louvre and
those buildings at La D￩fense that have the huge holes in the middle - but I just hate the way architects and
city planners and everyone else responsible for urban life seems to have lost sight of what cities are for.
They are for people. That seems obvious enough, but for half a century we have been building cities that are
for almost anything else: for cars, for businesses, for developers, for people with money and bold visions
who refuse to see cities from ground level, as places in which people must live and function and get around.
Why should I have to walk through a damp tunnel and negotiate two sets of stairs to get across a busy
street? Why should cars be given priority over me? How can we be so rich and so stupid at the same time?
