Psst!

Wanna buy a restaurant in Paris?

It’s next door to our apartment.

Hardwood floors, exposed brick walls, seats around thirty.

Its been empty for four years. On the market for two.

I think the owner wants around 500,000 euros for it.

The owner, by the way, is a dick. In 2014, he converted the communal courtyard behind the restaurant into a pizza oven and ran a smoke and odour extraction duct up to the roof — right past the bedroom windows of the apartments on the five floors above. Without telling anyone. Or applying for a building permit. We — the apartment building’s copropriétaires — sued him, successfully, but the amount awarded didn’t come close to covering a decade's worth of legal costs. Now we’re out of pocket thousands of euros. And he’s resuing us.

But enough about that. Let’s go over the week. Briefly. Paris has been heatwaving like crazy. It’s too hot to write and too hot to read. And we’ve had a full house for two weeks straight, all the kids back and more besides, including 16 New Yorker friends of our son. On Friday, he invited them and a few hundred more over for a party, which filled the main floor and spilled out across the street, blocking traffic. And no one seemed to mind.

Ben Nason, Looooong Dog, 2025

No cops, no fines, not even any complaints, except the two below added to the sign T. put up on the main door of the building:

The music apparently didn’t end at 2 am “at the latest” as promised. Not sure when it did, C. and I snuck away around 2:30 to sleep in the quiet apartment of friends around the corner. And why, as the other writer asked, we didn’t wait till Saturday night – the Fête de la Musique – is beyond me, too.

The fête de la musique was as always wildly loud and fun — and, for some reason, overrun by well dressed and drugged Brits — but it was not the week’s musical highlight for the Mooney family. That was Wednesday, when some twenty of us — immediate family and stalwart friends — unintentionally marked General de Gaulle’s 1940 appel du 18 Juin broadcast from London — heard at at the time by only a smattering of shortwave radio enthusiasts in France but since celebrated as the founding moment of the French Resistance — by gathering in the heatwave-blasted main hall of the Cité de la Musique to hear C. cack for twenty solid minutes into a bass clarinet.

Cack, however, she did not. Not even once. Nor too terribly did any other members of her orchestra, which is composed of amateurs with scarcely two years of playing experience. I wrote about the orchestra a few weeks back:

This was their first and last performance. There were almost a thousand other people in the audience. The full program is here, and a recording of the concert will be posted here sometime soon.

It was moving and magical, and marvelously musical. Sure, there were a a few loose squawks, but for the most part, everything was played admirably well. The Rameau piece was almost perfect. The excerpt from Olivier Calmel’s Children of the Sun was heartstopping. The French horn player, having made his way successfully through the difficult D-Major solo in the Dvořák, a feat he apparently did not achieve in the rehearsal the night before, grinned and laughed.

The conductor, Bianca Maretti, is my new hero.

After, we drank beer on the grass. At some point, we stripped down to our undies and jumped in the canal.

All for now. Off to an apero. Thanks for being here. See you next week. Love you all to pieces.