Canic! At the Disco

Each year, on the summer solstice, Paris and most of France becomes what is essentially the world's largest outdoor party for Fête de la Musique.

Bistros, restaurants, cafes and sundry businesses saturate the air with live music, DJs, bands, drummers and cabaret singers and, in the capital at least, the streets are choked with people and the sound bleeds from one electronic turntable set at a bar to the rock band two doors up and again, three doors away, where some troupe of percussion enthusiasts are leaning from apartment windows and hammering the air with gusto.

The music is everywhere in Paris on this day. Everywhere. The whole city is alive in ways I've never seen any city achieve life. Paris is a city almost uniquely developed to cater to the gawking habits of its population where, as the American writer Edmund White noted, the very street is the stage and the Haussmanian apartment buildings provide box seats to the rhythm and scandal of daily life. If you're not watching from a terrasse, you're hanging out the apartment windows and watching. This is never more true than on Fête.

Last year's Fête was on the hottest day of the summer to that point and this year was even hotter, coinciding with une canicule exceptionelle that rivals the heatwave across France in Autumn 2003. It hit 36C on Sunday which, of course, I am somewhat used to on account of being Australian. Let me tell you, however, that a Parisian 36 is closer to a Sydney 45. This is deeply unscientific, though I offer my melting form as some proof.

Things are so bad that the Paris mayor brought forward the first-time opening of a section of the Canal Saint-Martin to swimmers because kids, mostly, were already leaping from the overhead footbridges and into the green-hued depths of the aqueduct commissioned by Napoleon I in 1802. On Sunday afternoon, as the heat began to peak and the music festivities kicked off, the canal was heaving with bodies, slick with sweat and the peculiar film of canal water. Jumping is technically forbidden but the metal barriers blocking the bridges were simply rent by hand or, on one side, completely trampled. Parisians, sufficiently motivated, have never met a walled off space that can keep them out: Versailles, the Tuileries Palace, the Hotel de Ville, the Bastille and, now, the Passerelle Emmanuelle-Riva.

Anthropogenic climate change notwithstanding, there is something frustrating and also beautiful about an entire city striving for comfort. There is a collective ambition, often thwarted, in the manner of class solidarity except in Paris la chaleur makes paupers of everyone because nobody has air-conditioning and the metro is a universal battle.

I was almost tempted to get in the canal myself, in the grip of some meteorological fever, but decided against the notion when it occurred to me that entering the water flecked with dead pigeons and God knows what else might induce in me an actual fever. It was enough to watch everyone else cooling down, as near they could.

By 5.30pm parts of the asphalt were melting on the streets and I had to return home to get ready for fête de la musique under a cloud of threatened cancellations, friends dropping out due to the heat and blanket alcohol bans in the street, mon dieu! I was hungry but cooking was out of the question. So was sitting down to eat because that would have spelled the end for me. I found a boulangerie quiche and then had to walk it through six different musical acts and crowded streets, including some kind of daylight rave outside my apartment door. Here is a still from my guided video tour of the quiche shepherding excursion:

Everyone had water pistols and someone had figured out how to make one of the art nouveau water fountains turn into a mist machine, though only sporadically and truly it was an exercise in false hope. I met up with Ella from the cafe first and we walked around Montmartre. So much for the alcohol ban; absolutely everyone was drinking in the street. We found a very good band playing on a street that fell away to views of Les Invalides. Better still, one of the band members looked suspiciously like Fred Flinstone.

I wish I had something more interesting to say about the rest of the evening – why would any writer even admit to having nothing to say – but the longest day of the year, and the hottest, emptied my brain of all thoughts and my friends and I operated almost as a hive mind, sharing a single neuron so that we could at least find our way between different gigs, parties and other events incapable of being categorised and which may yet be revealed as mirages.

Some of it can be proved, only because I took photos. Like the women who walked past my friend's bar carrying a mock coffin for reasons that remain unclear to me.

Across the road from Bistro Général, at Pantobaguette, the DJ's decks actually began to cook in the sun and had to be placed in the freezer to recover. The beats were fire, almost literally. By the time I'd gone to bed the next morning, at 2am, I had walked and sweat and so copiously for 12 hours that I woke up repeatedly with leg cramps and muscle spasms. There was so much sweat that performing the traditional faire la bise greeting threatened to become dangerous; one might slip right off the cheek of a friend and stumble into oncoming traffic. I once got kissed by a seal at Underwater World on the Sunshine Coast and that was less wet.

My friends Hannah and Christopher met me at Bistro Général where we danced and surveyed the street, watching as people gradually turned into swamp-adjacent bipeds whose every movement was met with the friction of the moisture-laden air.

Sunday night was not even the worst of the heatwave. Despite knowing I would be hungover, and that the forecast was properly fucked, I'd left the work of moving out of my apartment in Montmartre until Monday. Oh sure, I'd been running belongings to a storage unit in Marcadet-Poissonniers for a week in advance – little, easily managed trips – but now I had to cart two suitcases and about 7 different little bags in three journeys through the baking streets of Montmartre to my friend Bart's apartment, some 20 minutes away, and I wanted to die.

You may remember Bart as one of the very first friends I made at the cafe I go to every morning in my local neighbourhood, the one in the band Mandelbro. He offered me his spare room for the five weeks between my lease ending and my two-month return home to Australia and I almost declined because I haven't lived with flatmates – excluding my mother, I suppose – since 2020 and even that was an aberration.

But! Bart is kind. He insisted and, as it happens, lives across the road from what feels like the only cafe in all of Paris that has air-conditioning or, as he put it, 'American levels of air-conditioning'. It closes just as the day reaches its hottest point, and can help none of us through the nights that have not dipped below 27C, but part of the quantitative difference between the way Australia experiences heat and Parisians do is that here there is no way to escape it.

I mean this without embellishment: the heat haunts you here. This particular heatwave is like a never-ending atmospheric trauma, day after day, night after night. There is no reprieve. In France, 40 people drowned in just six days. That figure is now up to 55. Three children were found dead, locked inside cars. My friend Megan Clement noted on her Bluesky account that, on Wednesday morning in Paris, 'a woman collapsed at the social security office from the heat'. She continued:

At childcare centres with reflective recovery blankets taped to their windows, staff are hosing down toddlers in a baking courtyard. Children everywhere as schools are closed. Reports overnight that the temperature inside hospital ICUs reached 30 degrees Celsius.

Wednesday was the hottest day, reaching 41C around 6pm. The hottest day ever recorded in Paris was 41.9C in late July 2019 but this heatwave is unusual in that it is happening so early in Summer and so totally across all of France. On Tuesday, France recorded its hottest day on record at an average day-night temperature of 29.8C and then broke that same record on Wednesday when it hit 30C as an average of totals across 30 different weather stations across the country.

On Thursday Paris reached 40C again. Unable to bring myself to penetrate the suspicious waters of the canal, I met up with some friends at the Bourse du Commerce in the city – people here laugh at me whenever I say I am 'going into town' when I mean I am visiting the part of central Paris a few blocks either side of the Seine – to visit the Claire-obscur exhibition. Although we did see, and enjoy, the paintings of Victor Man and some truly bizarre limb-based model work, the main point of our visit was to stand in Fujiko Nakaya's fog sculpture called Cloud #07156, a mesmerising and very importantly water-based, cooling experience.

In the centre of the cloud you really couldn't see a thing, and people wandered into, emerged or re-emerged in vague shadows and almost pixelated forms. My friend Lil said afterwards: 'Now I understand those characters in books who suddenly get turned around and lost during a thick fog.'

What struck me on the walk from the Marais, where I got my haircut – the barber, a theatrical Frenchman, almost spat when I asked if he would swim in the canal – through the middle of the right bank, past one of the busiest metro stations in the city, was just how quiet the place was. It was 2pm, not even peak heat yet, and it felt like we were alone. About as alone as I've ever felt in broad daylight in this city.

We tried to sit on the shaded concrete benches beside the hulking Saint Eustace church and burnt our arses clean off. Stores everywhere were closing early under exceptionelle circumstances and others put up signs forewarning potential customers that, no, they did not have any fans or portable air-conditioning units in stock. A lucky few moved theirs about through the city like pieces on a chessboard.

I loaned my fan to my new flatmate Bart on Wednesday night because he has a Real Job, barely slept the night before and I felt bad for him. People stopped to be hosed on the street, right on their shoes and their burning feet, their sweating limbs and matted hair.

On Friday afternoon, the Paris police chief announced yet another ban on drinking alcohol in public after noon and sales of all takeaway alcohol after 6pm until Saturday morning with a repeat of these rules on Saturday afternoon and evening. The hospitals in Paris are full and ambulance services are dealing with double the usual number of callouts with four times the rate of cardiac arrest. The annual Paris Pride March, due for Saturday, has been cancelled.

Humanity knows the way out of this. Scientists have for many decades now, namely that we need to end the use of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. In 2014, a French television program broadcast a mock weather forecast for what temperatures might look like on a summer day in the country in the year 2050. The map is almost indistinguishable from the one we saw this week, in 2026.

We were wrong about climate change, but in the wrong direction. Things are worse, faster.

I recall Lil's comment after the exhibit.

We know the way, but we've been turned around in the fog.

Addenda

Claude Money

The national broadcaster in Australia has told staff it has bought access to Anthrophic's AI agent, called Claude, and will use it as the 'enterprise-wide' AI tool in the organisation. There will even be 100 or so 'AI Champions' to help 'train' the rest of Aunty's teams in its use. How will it be used? They don't exactly say, though as Daanyal Saeed writes for Crikey the ABC has helpfully revised its internal AI policy to walk back its commitment to transparency. Now, a staff memo says, the broadcaster will only explain the use of AI 'when it could materially affect their understanding of the content we provide' instead of, you know, all the time.

In any large system, in my experience, the some of the worst 'transparency' approaches are born when a merely a few people get to decide what the public ought to know. So good luck with that!

As an aside, and not to be too insufferable (ha!) I do love it when large workplaces introduce huge technical or software changes that none of the staff want and corporate bosses always, always, appoint some team of champions who are contractually obliged to perform, at best, a lukewarm pantomime of support but who often end up heaving with antagonism and bloated with overwork. I remember when I worked for a certain daily newspaper as it moved from its legacy publishing system Cyber – an old workhorse that measured copy in centimetres and which I'd used since I was a cadet journalist – to a publishing system called Méthode which everyone hated.

There were Méthode champions then, too, including a production editor who hated speaking to literally anyone. Some of them looked like they'd just been appointed as fire wardens approximately three minutes after an actual inferno had engulfed the newsroom. They were not champions in any meaningful sense of the word; they were afraid. They reminded me of non-playable characters in old school video games with limited lines of code and a propensity to stride confidently into a corner, become stuck, and keep walking fruitlessly without ever turning around.

It's funny, because now AI is doing that to us, the humans, instead of the NPCs in a game.

Karlos' Alcatraz

And so it finally happened, the big wigs at Channel Nine have pushed the ejector seat button on Karl Stefanovic who has been swooning over increasingly right-wing political/activist figures on his 'independent' podcast, starting with Pauline Hanson, defending war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith and ending up with a truly embarrassing video in which the two-decade Today Show host puts his arm around convicted criminal, British neo-Nazi Tommy Robinson and later declares that he 'loves' him.

I don't really have much to say about any of this – it's really not all that surprising – except that the video 'Karlos', as his former colleagues called him affectionately, posted to announce he is 'free' is the most paint-by-numbers rightwing character arc available which makes it both very boring and fascinating.

Fascinating in the sense that we get the 1200th template of 'this is about freedom of speech' where the speaker seems to genuinely think they have discovered independence while begging for acceptance with their cold, dead eyes. I don't mean this sound at all exculpatory, but when I watched it there was an air of proper madness about it. All the money you could possibly need etc etc.

Wesh!

One of the cutest things I saw in the past couple of weeks, while watching the France v Senegal match in the World Cup, was the interaction between a new French language and the old traditions.

My friends and me were at a tabac bar next to the Jardin du Luxembourg which had a mostly older clientele, save for a group of what seemed like teenagers or young 20-somethings who were very earnestly watching the game. Their energy was enthusiastic. Outside, two older French men – perhaps in their 50s or 60s – were smoking and drinking beer.

Now, in French youth culture these days the old Algerian Arabic word wesh – in that sense, used as a kind of greeting, or to ask how someone is going – has been appropriated, via the hip-hop scene, then via kids in the banlieue or suburbs of Paris and is now everywhere among Parisian kids. I've heard it sparingly here myself and, in its modern slang, it can mean almost anything. It can mean hello or used as a putdown among friends or simply that something is shocking or cool. I've only ever heard it in passing because, frankly, I am too old and do not know enough French people in general. That said, it's definitely not a word used by most French people.

So, when France wins the Senegal match the young kids at the bar start shouting WESH, WESH! and I notice the two old gentlemen, themselves not accustomed to hearing this slang in the wild, start poking and prodding each other while laughing and repeating, wesh, wesh! with some naked explorer's delight at having borne witness to this moment.

Anyway, I enjoyed the whole thing.

Speaking of Cute

A final thing I wanted to share, because I love the photo so much, is Mum's long adventure with my sister and her grandkids who came to visit for a while in southeast Queensland before they all drove back together over several days to the remote Northern Territory, where my sister and her partner live.

Happy!