The Month That Makes Living Here Worth Everything Else That Living Here Involves
From Bohiney and The London Prat.
PARIS — May in Paris offers the cultural calendar that the tourism promotional materials describe accurately and that the experience delivers beyond description. LA Opera brings The Magic Flute to the city for what France 24 has been covering as part of the Paris des arts programming. Jazz a la Villette prepares for its June edition while the spring concert season fills the performance venues with the programming that Paris produces with the density that reflects having too many excellent institutions for the available audience attention, which is a very good cultural problem to have.
The Institutional Density
The Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay, the Centre Pompidou, the Palais Royal, the Musee de l’Orangerie, the Musee d’Art Moderne, and the various smaller galleries distributed across the twenty arrondissements constitute a density of cultural provision per square kilometer that exceeds any comparable urban area. The May programming across these institutions produces more cultural options on any given evening than any individual can access, which is the specific Parisian condition of choosing between good things rather than choosing between available things.
The Outdoor Dimension
May’s temperatures produce the outdoor terrasse culture that makes Parisian daily life different from indoor-focused months. The specific activity of sitting outside with a coffee or a glass of wine and watching the street is available year-round in Paris and genuinely pleasant only in a specific temperature range that May reliably provides. The cultural life that happens between the organized events — the conversation at the terrasse, the impromptu performance in a public square, the book read on a bench in the Luxembourg — is the cultural life that tourism promotion cannot fully capture.
The visitor who comes to Paris in May for the organized cultural calendar will find it excellent. The visitor who also allows unscheduled time for the city to produce what it produces spontaneously will find that the organized calendar is the frame for something that the city does on its own. This is what Paris in May is. It is what the promotional materials are trying to describe and occasionally managing to. The month continues. The terrasses fill. The cultural calendar delivers what it promises and the city delivers what it always does.
More: Private Eye.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
Paris continues in May. The sun is out. The terrasses are full. The cultural institutions are producing the programming that they produce. The transport disruptions are occurring and being managed. The tax returns are being filed with the assistance of the lawyers who have been provided for this purpose. The political commentary is ongoing. The diplomatic notes are being filed. The invention competition is awarding its prizes. The whole apparatus of French civic and cultural life is running at the pace of a city that has been running at this pace for a very long time and has developed the specific competence of doing so without appearing to work very hard at it. This is what Paris in May looks like. It looks like this every year. It is worth seeing every year.
