Venue Review: La Maroquinerie

Parisnormale's Jayson Harsin writing for I V Y paris

From the vantage point of Pere Lachaise in the 20th, in the closing pages of Balzac’s delicious Pere Goriot, the hero Rastignac looks down into the mudpit of Paris, seething with moneylust threatening to devour the grand monuments and traditions of an overgrown bourg. Refusing to let it tame him, he vows to don his galoshes and wrestle it to submission.

True to its past, the 20th (along with the 18th and 19th, and a few holdouts in the 11th) is now the arrondissement that peers down on the rest of the city and resists its formidable pull toward disneyesque tourism and suffocating plutocracy, the basin below where many of the once wild jazz caves and cabarets are now full of plump track-suited Americans perusing their Lonely Planet’s and Let’s Go’s.

It’s in the 20th/11th neighborhoods that one still finds a host of little no-name jazz and torch singer joints, squeezed into the communards’ corners around the metro stations of Gambetta, Pyrenees, Menilmontant and Alexandre Dumas. These are the same scruffy sidewalks where Edith Piaf was born on a policeman’s cape and commenced her warbling for a few paltry sous, and from whose hills Guy Debord tumbled down to beller from the bowels of The Spectacle. It is also where one finds the most thriving indie rock, pop, folk, electro clubs in the City of Light: Le Nouveau Casino, La Fleche D’Or, La Feline, Le Studio de L’hermitage, the Bellevilloise—and La Maroquinerie.

The Maroquinerie, like the Nouveau Casino, hosts a range of mildly known indie acts signed to labels but not yet able to pack the masses into the venues upwards of the Zenith (an identity that is sometimes strained by the FNAC-ification of advance tickets for some of their shows). Indeed, some of their artists do outgrow their 500-client capacity and move on to play bigger venues, as the sensational Franco-Finnish duo the Do have done recently. Other groups that have or will soon grace their basement stage include a range of artists spanning genres from dub and funk to indie folk. However, the majority of their acts can be classified as indie or experimental rock. An incomplete list of local and international acts includes The Silver Mount Zion, Dub Incorporation, Black Lips, Gore Gore Girls, 65 Days of Static, The Long Blonds, The Bellrays, Flogging Molly, Tokyo Police Club, Band of Horses, and Buck 65.

The Maroquinerie is connected to a Cultural Center and offers an inexpensive bar-restaurant, boasting a charming terrace during the warmer months (try the copious assiette de charcuterie for about 11euros). Like Rastignac it looks down on the city from the promontory of Menilmontant, a skip away from the Parc de Belleville, the art-squat La Miroiterie, Jim Morrison and Rastignac’s Pere Lachaise, and the charmingly orphaned Les Trois Arts bar in all points of the vane. Next door to it is another fine bar-resto concert space, La Bellevilloise, and across the street on the corner of rue de Boyer and rue Menilmontant lies the happening little Café des Sports. Indeed, one could counsel a jolly musical bar crawl from one end of the little street to the other.

The Marock is frequently the host to an ongoing series of important national and local festivals, such as Les Femmes S’en Mêlent, Lo-fi Folk, and Les Inrocks. For those searching for affordable honesty in a global capital struggling to negotiate the lines between tourism, art, and commerce, the La Maroquinerie is an essential resource.

23 Rue de Boyer, 75020
metro: Menilmontant
http://www.myspace.com/lamaroquinerie
http://www.lamaroquinerie.fr/content2/

Comments

[simon]

geez I hope you like Australians! I only ever encountered one American tourist in a restaurant- they wer so LOUD and awful, We actually asked them to be quiet... and then they whinged about the food and service. ruined the atmosphere.

Anyway, in my travels I have always been treated really well by shopkeepers and waiters etc alike :o)

I did go to an Australian pub there- where they sold NO australian beer! :o) ( smile)

[jayson]

Hi simon. Yeah, cheap shot at the stereotypical American tourist. Hyperbole. Cheers.
j

[suzanne]

best concert i have seen there was scotland's finest arab strap when the hefty lead singer did a torch song finale and body surfed the crowd.

[suzanne]

PS: sorry for living in the 6th. it just happened....

[steph]

i don't think tourists (whether their suits are of the track or three-piece variety) are much of a problem.
what is driving much of the life out of paris are the various investment funds / banks that use beautiful haussmanian apartments in central paris as long-term investment vehicles, leaving them empty or using them as offices.

so lay off of the tourists! paris always needs more of them, not only for cultural exchanges but also to fund the "logements sociaux" or other "aides" that allow normal-income people to live intra-muros.

but i appreciate your review of those "salles de concerts" - the Maroq rocks!
a great indie band by the name of wilco also played there a couple years ago.
i'm not a big fan of The Do, though.

anyway, nice article.
i'm off to the used book store to find a copy of Pere Goriot.

ps - suzanne, don't you dare be sorry : the rive-gauche needs more people like you and C!!!

[Parisgirl]

Don't miss Blood Red Shoes on May 8th at the Maroquinerie. I wish I could be there! We have previous commitments. Also, you didn't mention Le Satellit Cafe in the 11th but I really liked the ambiance there for world music. (Oberkampf). Being an American 'tourist' sort of, I can say this, if the Euro/Dollar ratio continues in the same direction - we'll be an endangered species. Maybe those track suits will be come collectors'items. I agree with the previous post - there are other factors at work that have caused the changes in the Paris landscape.

[jayson]

I never claimed that tourism is responsible for changes in the social makeup, values, and cultural practices of people in different Parisian quartiers (any more than Balzac and his man Rastignac claim that in Pere Goriot). Sorry if some got the wrong idea. I have no problem with tourism (except for its ecological impact when practiced in the most reckless ways), though I have no interest in hanging out in tourist-heavy areas. The point still stands that the music I'm describing has not and will not be produced or appreciated in these other "quartiers" (though plenty of other kinds of culture will be produced and consumed there).