Running for Your Life: Marseille Mood

Making notes on board the high speed train to Paris, after six days in Marseille:

Three hours and twenty minutes, the perfect length for a video music composer, with the digital camera attached to the train outside, directed so that the sky takes up two-thirds of the frame. Because there is so much to love about the changing skies; Marseille, brilliant hot sun, cloudless blue sky, the lovers kissing on the platform at Avignon, the light as it plays on the plains, all the way to the outskirts of Paris, where the chill shows on the timeless fields, the clouds fill the sky with a near-London muscularity. Composers, complete your grant applications, file to Je t’aime, Paris …

Don’t miss the visit to MuCEM, only open for two years, a blink of an eye of Marseille’s mad history, and enter for free the wonder of its façade, the promenade within that encircles the massive cube space, ascending in an ever-so-gradual way, the late-afternoon light on the harbor water, how many times reflected in the space, outside, inside and all – at one time, I will show the photo story I took of MM’s slow walk ahead of me into the narrows of darkness. She is all white, a perfect contrast in the shadows of this extraordinary space.

The Vieux Port may have been redeveloped on the backs of mega-millions, but dashes of life – the skinny boy with the sunken chest plays at showing he can be like his friends, the boys he views as his betters – feel unchanged. (His betters are running and leap-frogging from harborside into the sea, choosing a place where dangerous-looking breakwater rocks are directly below, and where they are guaranteed of gathering a crowd to watch, because who can resist a daredevil show?) A cute, athletic girl has screwed up her courage – perhaps to leap the breakwater rocks for the first time; her jump does have that hope-against-hope arc to it – and she makes it, and in her first action afterward, she is flailing her arms, coaxing the boy with the sunken chest to try. He seems as determined as ever and to our horror he dashes up to the edge. Then stops. There are so many false tries. And each time he doesn’t do it.

Destinies are shaped during moments like this. For close to an hour we watch the boy, until he finally gives up, and sits at the harbor’s edge, his skinny legs dangling far above the inviting waves.

Next: Running for Your Life: Easy Does It