Rock and Hard Places (30 page)

A briefly tense and interesting but eventually calm and tedious stand-off ensues. Terms are negotiated. Women and children leave the building. Threats are made. The chief cop on the spot is a young plainclothes officer who looks like he cabbed it here straight from a Paris Fashion Week show. He’s immaculately dressed, in a style best thought of as Suavely Thuggish Chic, and looks like an elongated Jean-Claude Van Damme. I try, with the help of French-speaking
Face
photographer Franck, to talk to him, but he regards us as if we were stains on his crisply pressed overcoat and continues listening intently to whatever he’s hearing in his earpiece. In front of the rank of CRS troops, one luxuriantly bearded protestor, dressed as a biblical shepherd and carrying a life-size toy donkey over one shoulder, waltzes back and forth with a ghetto blaster playing “If I Were A Rich Man.” The CRS troops ignore him. When I try to speak to him, he ignores me. Someone else explains that he’s just an itinerant fruitcake who turns up at these things, and nobody really knows what he’s on about.

While we wait around to see what, if anything, is going to happen, activists for other causes wander along, distributing leaflets advertising other demonstrations. People who pass by the besieged building react with benign disinterest, apart from those trying to reach their homes on the sealed-off streets. The CRS refuse entry to a young black man who’s trying to get home with his shopping. A few minutes later, to the amusement of all non-CRS parties on the ground, a frail old white couple try to pass the same way. The embarrassed CRS have no real choice but to let them through, along with the young black man, who pauses to express his opinion of the CRS with a passion that transcends any linguistic barriers.

“He said . . .” says Franck.

I got the idea.

Another woman in a car has her path blocked. She erupts in a
spectacular fury of honking and swearing for some minutes, before handing over her identification card for inspection.

A few hours later, with occupiers and police having apparently decided to bore each other into submission, I follow the directions on one of the leaflets I’ve been given, and end up at Charonne Metro in the early evening. A crowd of terribly angry young people assembles, and the pattern established earlier is repeated: we pour into the station through the exit doors—the Parisian authorities might think about spending less on riot police and more on ticket inspectors—and are given further instructions as we travel. I talk to Germinal, a twenty-five-year-old philosophy student from the Sorbonne, who explains that we are participating in another “manifestation,” this time organised by AC! (Agir Contre le Chomage, or Action Against Unemployment).

“This is similar to May ’68 in spirit,” he tells me, “but it’s more real. This time, it’s about survival.”

His reply when I ask him what he means by that is less concise.

We emerge alongside the silly, inside-out Pompidou Centre, and sprint a few blocks to the side door of a building, which is kicked open and entered with a great deal of joyful shouting. I walk around to the front of the place to see what they’ve stormed, and can’t help but laugh—it’s the hall in which the Green-Socialist-Communist coalition are planning to hold their post-election piss-up. The occupiers hang from the windows a huge banner demanding a fairer shake for the homeless and unemployed. A blizzard of leaflets is tossed over the street, and a couple of doubtless deserving cases from the Greens have their bewildered gazes up at their ransacked party venue rewarded with mercilessly accurate water bombs.

When the CRS arrive, I notice that a lot of them have come from the occupation I was at earlier, which is only fair enough, as so have a lot of the protestors in the building. Inspector Suavely Thuggish is with them again, still in thrall to his earpiece. There’s a bit of a scuffle when the occupiers try to admit film crews and press through the front door. A few enterprising cops pile in with them and remove several demonstrators, who are—no pun intended, really—frogmarched to a waiting paddy wagon. They paste stickers of anti-government slogans to the insides of the van windows as they are driven away.

BACK AT MY hotel, I call Rome to speak Angelo Quattrocchi, the Italian author whose lovely, if somewhat florid, memoir of May ’68,
The Beginning of the End
, is being republished this year as part of the minor boom in situationist nostalgia. Quattrocchi is an excitable sort of indeterminate age (“I refuse to be quantified,” he explains, like a good anarchist) and maintains that 1968 was not an isolated event, but part of a process, and thoroughly, uniquely, French.

“You follow the French revolutions,” he sputters. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité . . . France is aware of what those terms mean, and tries to do something about it. The rest of Europe is becoming more and more inconclusive and consensual, but the French revolution continues.”

France, it’s true, has developed a culture where taking to the streets is not a last resort, but a first response. French governments, in turn, have learnt to fear the streets, and with good reason, as the spectres of many former kings and mayors would attest, if they still had heads to attest with.

“In 1968, we liberated Paris,” Quattrocchi enthuses, “from the banks and the cops—same thing, to me—and we controlled it for fifteen days. To be there, to start a new life without money, was such an exhilarating feeling. People today don’t think. They are told the present is the only possible present. This last generation, patrolled by the media, this cop of the mind, has not had a single original thought.”

Kids today, tch. Before leaving London, I’d met with Tariq Ali, the writer who was banned from several countries for his writings about and involvement in 1968 risings in Britain, Czechoslovakia, Pakistan and America. He is also publishing a book about the momentous year, and also despairs of the generation born since 1968, blaming “television and rave culture.” Nobody so conservative as an old hippy.

Myself, I’m starting to think that maybe the French are just attracted to drama for its own sake. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: as Europe drifts towards a complacent, centre-right consensus, at least the French are still trying, still clinging to the same wilful belief in the perfectibility of human society that drove them to revolt in 1789 and
at regular intervals since. And maybe whatever it is that drives them to bounce bricks off riot police is the same force which has bequeathed us all those exquisitely overwrought films, heroically prima donna footballers and the eternal idea of Paris as a city of possibilities as wide as its boulevards, as grand as its monuments, as provocative as its fist-sized paving stones. We need Paris. We mightn’t be able to live up to living in it, but it’s nice to know it’s there.

IN ANOTHER OVER-DECORATED venue near the Arc de Triomphe, more people gather to fiddle, or at least rap, while Paris burns, or at least while a few of its citizens smoulder with righteous umbrage. I’m at a party in honour of some new record by some new French hip hop group, clutching a glass of watery punch in one hand and a raffle ticket (first prize, tickets to the World Cup final) in the other. The homegrown strain of hip hop is enormous business in France, aided by the 40 percent quota of local product that radio stations must play, and by the fact that the mellifluous cadences of the French language are oddly suited to the genre. Tonight, the extent to which the French have coopted hip hop is obvious: the people in here are wearing the latest American street gear, but there’s only one place in the world where a rap group would furnish a party with vases of fresh flowers and bowls of wax fruit.

MY PATH TO Gare du Nord station on my last day in Paris is blocked by a demonstration. I don’t know what it’s about, and by now I wonder if the demonstrators do themselves. There are people from SUD, AC! and CNT present—one or two of them wave—and though I can’t see the bloke with the donkey, I imagine he’s on his way.

 

 

 

T
HIS TRIP WAS undertaken for
The Independent
, who sent me to Mississippi to cover the first-ever Elvis Presley festival to be held in the King’s birthplace. In 1999. I recall spending quite a lot of the flight to Memphis, and the drive to Mississippi wondering what had, in previous decades, been discussed at the strategy meetings of Tupelo’s Tourist Office. “Well, let’s see. We need think of ways to attract visitors to our otherwise largely unremarkable little town, in and around which, frankly, very little of interest has ever happened. Goshdarn it, but this is tricky. If only the most famous entertainer who ever lived had been born here, or something.”

While writing this introduction, I discovered that Janelle McComb, whom you’ll meet shortly, died in 2005, aged eighty-four. This caused me minor, momentary angst about the disobliging assessment of her poetry that appeared in the original piece. I’ve left it as it was, however, on the grounds that while she seemed nice enough and (as her obituaries properly noted) worked hard and selflessly on worthwhile community projects, her poetry really was dreadful. I also looked up Paul McLeod, the tireless proprietor of Graceland Too. According to any amount of startled, bemused, baffled and/ or somewhat alarmed online reminiscence, he’s still there—and, according to his own MySpace page, ready and willing to give guided tours twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. I have no plans to return.

There were three or four other British-based journalists covering the festival. The sense of humour among collective hackery on the road being what it is, you may rest assured that at no point did anyone tire of asking for directions to the hotel, in anticipation of the reply, “Down at the end of Lonely Street.”

FOR THE OPENING track of his 1985 album
The First Born Is Dead
, the Australian singer Nick Cave and his band, The Bad Seeds, chose to enshrine the Mississippi town of Tupelo in song. It’s a good song, as well, a fine start to a much under-rated record. While the Bad Seeds rumble and clatter with their customary power and menace, like a troop train emerging from fog, Cave appropriates a tone of gothic portent that might have pleased Mississippi’s second-most famous son, William Faulkner: “In a clap-board shack with a roof of tin,” Cave snarls, “Where the rain came down and leaked within/A young mother frozen on a concrete floor/With a bottle and a box and a cradle of straw . . . with a bundle and a box and a cradle of straw.”

It’s not a new idea, recasting Tupelo as a twentieth-century Bethlehem—Greil Marcus, for one, is especially fond of it—but it has rarely been expressed so well. “Tupelo” the song, with its echoes of Delta blues and language of deranged prophecy, paints a vivid picture of Tupelo the place: a storm-lashed huddle of lamp-lit shacks housing an itinerant population of dirt-poor factory workers and sharecroppers; a town too windy for birds to fly, too wet for fish to swim, a place forsaken by a clearly disinterested Almighty until a winter’s night in 1935, when a young woman called Gladys Presley, who lived with her husband Vernon along Old Saltillo Road, gave birth to twin boys.

“Distant thunder rumble,” sings Cave, “Rumble hungry like the beast/The beast it cometh, cometh down/The beast it cometh, Tupelo bound.”

The eldest, Jesse Garon, never drew breath in this world, and was buried in an unmarked grave. His younger sibling by thirty-five minutes, Elvis Aron, did rather better for himself.

“Why the hen won’t lay no egg,” Cave continues, “Cain’t get that
cock to crow/The nag is spooked and crazy/O God help Tupelo! O God help Tupelo!”

Nick Cave, to the best of my knowledge, has never been to Tupelo. His heartfelt prayer remains largely unanswered.

 

THERE ARE THOUSANDS of towns like Tupelo, scattered like carelessly flung wheat across the expanses of the United States. Too small to be cities, too big to be villages (Tupelo claims a population of 30,000), these places subsist on some startling yet strangely dull freak of economics (Tupelo is the second or third largest manufacturer of upholstered furniture in either the world or the United States, or something like that).

Places such as these generally boast a wide, dust-blown and deserted main street, punctuated by the boarded-up fronts of recently-bankrupted family businesses, and are generally orbited by self-contained metropolises of immense shopping malls, owned by the global corporate monoliths that bankrupted the family businesses, and Tupelo does and is. These towns also generally offer, for the amusement and edification of passing tourists, a site of desperately minor historical import—the termite-chewed remains of a fencepost to which J.E.B. Stuart briefly tied his horse, perhaps—or something more up-to-the-minute, like a giant fibreglass prairie dog.