Monday, Nov. 21, 2005 REGARDING THE Cités of outer Paris. After a few attempts, a friend and I organized a trip out to Cilchy-sous-Bois. Frieda, a young poet, her friend Sam and I headed out Sunday morning to have a look around. Sam attends university fairly near Clichy and is a tall boy with a great sense of humor who speaks fluent Arabic. I was glad to have him along. The first thing I noticed was the length of the trip. Starting at Gare du Nord, it was about a half-hour ride on the RER, a rail service that takes you out past the inner city and into what everyone outside of France these days calls the "suburbs." Actually, it's the inner city on the outside of the downtown area. Within the city, what everyone normally thinks of as Paris is divided into districts or arrondissments (from the word "around," as they are numbered in a spiral pattern from the inside out). There are 20 of them and though they're pretty diverse, to some extent all feel like Paris. In a few minutes, the train was in another world -- the world that was built to remove the North African immigrants from the city 40 years ago after the Algerian War of Independence, and concentrate them away from the supposedly real Paris. After a while we arrived in a town whose name I forgot, and waited for the 613 bus. Looking around the scenery at the bus stop, the buildings were an odd mix of new-styled and old, with the old ones having those rippled, ceramic-tiled roofs that you think of as being so European. At one point a small group of cops appeared out of nowhere and double-timed it into the train station; then a few minutes later they came back out. Riding along on on the bus, the cityscape reminded me of Germany, which I've seen a lot more of than I have France. Imagine this big bus wiggling through tiny little one-way streets, the buildings, this mix of things that look 200 years old and others that are kind of monolithic modern apartment houses. Nobody on the bus seemed particularly destitute -- everyone had on warm clothes, seemed well kempt and had the usual urban regalia, like MP3 players. Finally, we were in Clichy-sous-Bois. At first it's like a little town, with a (once again) odd mix of an inner-city and slightly in the country feeling. I hadn't eaten breakfast, so we stopped at the only open place we could find besides the sandwich shop or the pizzeria. Threre were no cafés anywhere that I could see; coffee would have been nice. I am on a strict wheat-free diet, so we found an alimentation (general store) which was also a butcher shop, and got some nuts, dried fruit, some gross sliced ham and a bottle of water. Then we sat down on a bench in the middle of one of the Cités, a small one about three stories high that spread out a few hundred feet in every direction. And there, basically, took in the scenery. And what sounds there were. Extremely quiet. Only about two-thirds of the parking spaces were full, which is weird considering how many people lived there, and that it was noon on a Sunday. One would not think that two weeks ago this town was on the front page of every newspaper in the world -- day after day, at that. Sitting there for a while, in the creepy quiet and the cold, I finally said, "The feeling here reminds me of someplace after a really bad environmental disaster." Frieda said, "Well, it is one." We checked a map, Sam and Frieda picked a direction that looked logical, and we wandered off down a road with nearly no traffic. Alongside this road, in the grass, was a scorched hubcap, about the only visible remnant of the riots so far. We made a left turn and passed by a school, made in that supremely boring 1960s architecture, with dingy walls and a letter missing from the school's name. Behind it were some towering structures, about the highest I've ever seen in France. In the far distance were others, set against the gray sky. These were the housing projects that has been described in the press so often. We slipped into the one complex, and walked around a kind of courtyard. Maybe a few thousand people lived in this place, one of many like it. It was about 15 floors high, and composed of several buildings. A total of two kids were playing outside, who looked really mystified by our presence (Frieda has a much better picture of them than I do -- look for it soon). A few people were coming and going, but it was not what you'd think of as alive. Many terraces were piled with junk, others were converted into rooms. These terraces were the only thing that set the place apart from feeling like the inside of a prison complex. Next to this courtyard, about 20 feet below where we were, was a kind of stadium with a track, a soccer pitch and a grandstand for a couple of thousand people. It was absolutely empty. Then near one building, members of a wedding party were gathering. The well-dressed people, waiting for the bride and groom, seemed out of place and subdued. Sam suggested this was a good moment to step inside the building because something unusual was happening and we'd probably be safe. I really did not feel like it, but we went inside a lobby, with its dented and crushed mailboxes hanging on the wall, and beaten down plaster and graffiti everywhere. I found a stairwell next to the elevators and took the picture above, the photo that sums the whole thing up for me. There was no room for idealism in this place, no room for hope or an idea, no mental space for a concept of anything different, or better, or more interesting. The prison has no walls, but it's psychological. It occurred to me it's a miracle that the riots even happened. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_War_of_Independence