AU REVOIR, PARIS

I’m posting this with an Oct. 31 date, even though we didn’t leave until Nov. 2, because I want to keep the entire Paris trip in one month “unit” on Blogger for easier access.  Our last two days brought our first real rains of the trip.  We’re pretty lucky that they held off that long.  Even in the wet, Paris is a beautiful place, as in this shot from the balcony of the old Opera House.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  We figured this would mostly be a day of indoor sightseeing, so we headed to the shopping district to check out the huge department stores.  Yikes.  Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue are pikers compared to these salons of swank.  We were particularly stunned by the Galeries Lafayette on Blvd. Haussmann.  A huge ground space, surrounded by opera-like galleries filled with boutiques.  And check out that glass dome!

This place was w-a-a-ay too rich for our blood.  Loni had her brief Sex-In-The-City moment, but I kept a firm grip on her purse.

From the faux opera setting to the real thing, we sloshed through the streets to take in the original opera building, the Palais Garnier.

The Opera National de Paris now divides its performance schedule between the Garnier and the modern (read, ugly) Opera de Paris Bastille, which opened in 1989.  The exterior of the Bastille Opera is so dull and uninspiring that I didn’t even take a picture of it.  We didn’t see its interior, but it couldn’t possibly hold a candle to the incredible opulence excesses of the Garnier.  It was ordered built by Napoleon III, and the design competition was won by the unknown, 35-year-old Charles Garnier.  Including halts for war, empire collapse, etc., it was constructed between 1860 and 1875.  It seats 1900.

The Garnier was the inspiration for Gaston Leroux’s 1911 novel, “The Phantom of the Opera,” partly because of the legend that it was built over an underground lake.  According to the guidebooks, the place boasts perfect acoustics.  However, due to its odd shape, some seats have limited or no visibility!  Hmm.   That might fly for listening to a concert, but not seeing the opera?  Actually, for an operaphobe like myself, that might not be a bad thing, except I’d still have to listen to the stuff.  Anyway, it’s a glorious venue.  The auditorium boasts a  painted ceiling done by Marc Chagall in 1964, much to the dismay of classic architecture purists.  Supposedly, the paintings depict scenes from operas by 14 composers.  All Greek to me.  Below, top right, is an entrance to the stalls; at bottom, Loni is perched on a portion of the grand staircase.

During intermissions, one can promenade along the Grand Foyer, a dazzler that rivals the main hallway at Versailles.

Well, you get the picture.  The place is a jaw dropper at every turn.

The rain wasn’t getting any better, so we decided to head back home, get some dinner, and do our packing.  We were going to have to get up at 4:30 am to get showered, breakfasted, and haul our bags down six flights of stairs to meet our 6:00 private shuttle to the airport.  Charles de Gaulle is at best a 35-40 minute ride in no traffic, and we couldn’t count on that, so we were allowing plenty of time, especially given that all flights were completely booked due to the Air France strike over the last five days.  While Loni manned the stove, I went out for wine and, uh, well, desserts.  Yeah, plural.  C’mon, it was our last night in Paris.

Yes, we DID finish all three, and the bottle.  We set two alarm clocks that night.

Our trip back was uneventful.  The shuttle service showed up only ten minutes late, but I had budgeted for 30, so all was good.  Despite the drizzle, the traffic hadn’t yet backed up, so we got there in plenty of time and were one of the first to check in.  No lines at all, no taking shoes off at security.  It was like travel several decades ago.  We took off through the clouds and bid farewell to our last glimpse of France through the mist.  We mostly cruised above the cloud cover all the way to North America, again watching multiple movies and getting fed two pretty fine meals.  It was pretty bittersweet as we descended into LAX and the California sun.  Good to be home, but missing already “our” pied-a-terre. 

 

How to sum up?  I guess by simply saying it was everything we had hoped for.  It’s pretty rare when reality meets your aspirations.  Taking a whole month to do mostly one city was the right thing for us.  We were always relaxed, and never felt tied to a schedule other than “what shall we do today?”  Even our excursions out of the city didn’t have more than a day or two forethought.  We really endorse the idea of renting a flat with kitchen facilities.  It ended up averaging a little over $50 a day for the apartment, and eating in for breakfasts and about half the dinners really made it affordable.  And the French?  We were out and about every day, and can honestly say we didn’t have a single bad or rude encounter the entire trip.  The anti-America myth is just that.  If it exists at the government level, it doesn’t seem to arise in day-to-day ordinary interactions.  Just try first to speak a little French, no matter how badly.  They will be patient and, eventually, gracefully come back with much better English than your French. 

We had a ball!  Vive la France!

REMAINS OF OUR DAYS

Down to our last couple of days.  We had no more museums to check off, and had seen all the monuments that we could handle, so we decided just to wander around and take in the scenery.  There’s probably no better city anywhere for that.  We went up the hill to the touristy side of Montmartre and stopped by the Place du Tertre (“mound” or “hillock”), where parts of Amelie and Midnight in Paris were filmed, and seemingly home to every street artist in Paris.

Dozens upon dozens of artists milled about trying to induce you to stand still for a portrait, sort of like the caricaturists at Disneyland.  None of them advertised a price;  that, presumably, would be the surprise once the portrait was done.  We kept moving, and went down Rue Lepec and past the Le Moulin de la Galette (“biscuit”).  This was built in 1622 and once was the venue for a cabaret frequented by Van Gogh, Utrillo, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Renoir.  Prior to that it was a flour mill owned by one Debray.  Legend has it that he was strung up on its sails and spun to death after trying to defend Montmartre against invading Cossacks in 1814;  his widow had to collect his scattered remains in a flour sack in order to bury him.  Hmmm. I dunno.  That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.  Anyway, it’s a beautiful spot.

Wandering further down the Butte, we came upon this view of Sacre Coeur which I thought was pretty neat.  It’s odd, but for all the narrow streets and scrunched up traffic, the Parisians don’t do a lot of horn honking.  It’s like everyone is resigned to a creeping pace and just don’t get that frustrated.

As we were on the eve of November, the trees and plants were starting to turn and the color display was pretty nice throughout the city.

We thought the Jardin des Plantes would be a good bet, so we hopped the Metro over to the University area.  This originally was Louis XIII’s “Garden of Medicinal Herbs,” established by two physicians in 1626.  Today, it is the city’s botanical garden, with 2,000 species of plants from all over the world.  It didn’t disappoint.

This was a lovely park to walk through.  I was reminded of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, as there were paths all over, a natural history museum, a small zoo, and an arboretum.  There was a bit of Disneyland here as well, in the form of the animatronics shoe tree. 

There were hundreds of shoes dangling from this thing (more extensive than shown above).  At first, we thought it was the local equivalent of tossing sneakers over power lines.  But when we stood under it, the darn things were talking.  The picture at the right shows the hinged toes of this particular pair;  they flapped up and down as they “spoke.”  There were others that had similar openings and movement.  We don’t have a clue as to what they were saying.  Likewise, we don’t know whether it was for kids or adults.  It would have been right at home in the old Tiki Room at Disneyland.

All that walking builds up an appetite.  Boulangerie to the rescue.  Sadly, eating like this, we’ll never look like the gal to the left.  Ah, who cares?

 

Fortified, we started angling towards the Latin Quarter and passed by the Pantheon.  OK, another monument, but you can hardly avoid them.  Originally commissioned in 1750 by Louis XV as a church, it remained unfinished due to lack of funds until 1789.  Two years later, it was turned into a secular mausoleum for the “grands hommes de l’epogue de la liberte francaise” (great men of the age of French liberty).  Since then, it has entombed Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Zola, Jean Moulin, Braille, and Marie Curie, who is the first woman occupant (reburied there in 1995).  We just looked at it from the outside.

If we had a goal this day, it was to find a couscous restaurant for dinner.  When we were students back in the day, that was the only meal we could afford when we visited Paris.  Back then, Moroccan food was really cheap and filling.  The guidebooks had a number of them listed, but the first two we located (after much walking) were both closed, as in out of business.  So much for 2011 guides.  We sat down on a bench to rest the dogs and to ferret out more options.  Looking across the street, I saw the absolute perfect lineup of shops, all in a row.  The locals of this neighborhood really have it good.  I’d love to pick this whole block up and drop it in Los Angeles.

From the extreme left, a grocery, a fishmonger, a beef butcher, a poultrymonger, a pork butcher, a cheese shop, a wine shop, a bakery, and a café.  Yum.  We continued to wander and stumbled upon perhaps the world’s fanciest fire station.  You’d expect a Rolls Royce pumper to come out of that place.

As it was getting on towards evening, we went back towards the Universite de Paris, figuring that cheap couscous would be found where students hung out.  Finally, on Rue Monge, we found what looked to fill the bill.  Reasonably priced and many varieties of couscous.  It turned out to be a Mom and Son joint, the former running the front and the latter manned the kitchen.  We were the only ones there for quite a while, and only one other table was occupied that evening.  It was only okay.  I think our memories are colored by the fact that we were so happy to get anything to eat as students that we thought it was gourmet at the time.  Frankly, we do couscous at home that is better than what we got, but then Loni is a dynamite cook.  Still, we enjoyed it as our last night on the town. We were planning to eat at the apartment the following night before we were to leave. 

It was odd.  Throughout the dinner service (all done by Mom, a 75-ish woman), Mom said virtually not a word and we felt about as welcome as ants to a picnic.  Then, just when she brought dessert, she asked where we were from.  We told her Los Angeles, and it was like a switch went on.  She started talking about how much she loved movies.  At least, I think that’s what she was saying.  She was speaking rapidly and with an accent I couldn’t fathom.  It turned into a comedy routine with her saying something, looking at us for a response, us laughing and nodding as if we understood, and her then peeling off a gale of laughter before starting in again.  It went on for at least ten minutes.  I was afraid she was going to say something serious and we would follow up with grins and nods, but apparently we pulled it off.  She was a real character.  But I never felt more completely incompetent in speaking French. 

Sigh, a whole month and I still can’t parler worth a darn. 

NAPPY AND THE BIG ASPARAGUS

For all its love of military pomp, France has a pretty sad record when it comes to warfare.  That doesn’t keep the French from aggrandizing the monumental egos of its past, particularly Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle.  Both are immortalized, after a fashion, at Les Invalides.

In 1670, Louis XIV decided to found L’Hotel des Invalides to house the disabled soldiers from his various wars.  Its first residents settled in 1674 in the complex which included barracks, a convent, a hospital, and a workshop.  By the end of the XVIIth century, it housed 4,000.  The chapels were started in 1676.  The architect had a problem.  The king wanted to worship “with” his soldiers, but protocol prohibited him from entering through the same doorway and from praying in the same physical space.  As only the French could do, the architect (Jules Hardouin-Mansart, if you’re interested) designed dual chapels, back to back.  The gold dome you see in the picture above is the roof of the king’s elaborate chapel, with the soldiers’ chapel between it and the front entrance of the complex.

The soldiers’ chapel is quite nice, in an austere, military fashion.  The king’s chapel is on the other side of the far end.  It is not entirely closed off;  there are openings above so that the king could hear the services in the troops’ side.  Neither, of course, could see the other.

As you can imagine, the king’s side was a little more gaudy.  But, he was with them in spirit, right?!

Les Invalides houses the Musee de L’Armee, covering France’s entire military history.  We didn’t get to 75% of it, there was just too much.  I guess the less success you have, the more you trumpet.  Anyway, we did get to the terrific displays of armor and 13th-17th century weapons.  After you admire the nifty upper windows framed in stone armor, you go in the main entrance, pay your fees, and enter into a large courtyard.  The center doorway in white is the entrance into the troops’ chapel, and the king’s dome looms behind.  This courtyard

houses a battery of 60 French classical bronze cannons that are the jewels of the artillery collection.  These date from 1666, and were used in sieges against fortified towns during the wars of Louis XIV.

Designed by the Keller brothers, each of these was adorned with engravings and reliefs and had a name, like this one:

Next stop were the halls devoted to the ancient armor and arms of the 13th-17th centuries.  I don’t know about function, but the French clearly were masters of style.  They even made children’s armor for the royal offspring.  The relief work is from the breastplate of a suit of armor.  As for eaglebeak . . . ???

The hand weapons show the exquisite design art that only the French could pull off.  I loved it, but I suspect they weren’t winning any quick draw competitions with those pistols.

The serious stuff was much more somber, but just as impressive.  This place actually is an armory, and holds hundreds and hundreds of suits of armor in endless displays.  I particularly liked the snake carving wrapping around the cannon.  Couldn’t convince Loni to try the shot-out-of-a-cannon routine with that monster mortar.

Time to move on to the Eglise du Dome, the royal chapel.  At the time it was built (1677-1706), the interior decorations glorified Louis XIV, the monarchy in general, and the French armies.  Under the French Revolution, it became a military pantheon at the instigation of Napoleon, with the installation in 1800-02 of tombs of various military leaders.  Nappy, no doubt, was thinking ahead to his own immortality.  Sure enough, in 1840 King Louis-Philippe I ordered Nappy’s remains to be returned from his final exile on the island of St. Helena, and for a tomb to be erected under the Dome.

The work was completed in 1861.  The king’s chapel is the gold on the left, the dome is above the circle where the people are looking down

onto Nappy’s modest final resting place.  Jumbo the elephant could be interred in that thing.

Around the sarcophagus are twelve “victory” statues symbolizing his military campaigns.  Where’s the one celebrating the Russian campaign, hmmm?  Waterloo?  How about some homage to the hundreds of thousands who died in his vainglorious catastrophes?  Paris is the capital of revisionist history.

Speaking of vanity, Les Invalides also is home to the Historial Charles de Gaulle.  It’s tempting to dismiss de Gaulle as just a vain windbag, but that wouldn’t be just.  Despite his imperious manners, he was a genuine war hero and forward thinker, but suffered at the hands of the idiots who were in charge of the French military.  Back in WWI, de Gaulle fought bravely, was wounded multiple times, captured by the Germans and held in POW camps, attempted escapes five times, and generally acquitted himself with genuine honor.  After the war, he rose to the rank of Colonel, and served on the National Defense Council, but there he stalled, running afoul of the hidebound military elite.  The clowns in charge of the Light Brigade couldn’t hold a candle to this bunch of incompetents.  De Gaulle was an outspoken advocate of building up France’s mobile mechanized warfare – tanks, etc. – so much so that he was nicknamed, after the U.S.’s General Motors, “Colonel Motors.”  He was an early clarion against Hitler’s rise and Germany’s rearmament and France’s inadequate readiness.  All for naught.  He was ridiculed by his superiors, and repeatedly denied promotion.  When WWII broke out, he was made a temporary brigadier general and given command of a tank brigade, with which he won one of the few French victories over German forces.  He became part of the government just before the Maginot line was overrun (as he had warned) and the Germans marched on Paris.  He fled to England and assumed (in all the senses of the word) the role of leader of the Free French forces which, considering France’s total capitulation, weren’t much.  Churchill found him insufferable and Roosevelt didn’t trust him (thought he wanted to become emperor after the war).  He was named President after hostilities ceased, resigned within a year (1946), but came back a decade later and served as President for a dozen years.  The Historial is an homage to his life and career, mostly done through photos and newsreels.  His face is everywhere.

 

When we were in Paris for Bastille Day weekend in 1966, we went to see the grand parade along the Champs Elysees.  They had the usual marching formations, bands, flyovers, etc., but the highlight was Le Grand Charles, riding in an open convertible, acknowledging his adoring public.  Somewhere I have a blurry photo of him zipping by.  Three years later, following riots, strikes, and student protests, he resigned.  He died a year later, in 1970.  A complex guy, to say the least.

Oh, yeah.  The Big Asparagus.  That moniker was hung on him as a youth in school, with his lanky resemblance to that tall stalk.  His detractors used it to the end of his life.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.  That applies in spades to art.  But it’s my blog, so what I say goes!  Paris is filled with museums and some of the most famous works of art in the world.  It’s not all in the Louvre.  The Holy Grail of our art quest on this trip was the Musee d’Orsay, home of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists:  Manet, Degas, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, etc. etc.  So, it was high on our to-do list when we first arrived.  But when we were at Notre Dame, we struck up a conversation with another couple while waiting for the tour.  They told us that the D’Orsay’s collection of Impressionists, etc., was closed as they were just finishing a two-year remodel of the galleries and the art was being moved.  It was scheduled to reopen on October 20th.  That was OK by us, as we had the whole month to play with.  Little did we know . . .

Putting off the D’Orsay, we made for the Pompidou Center, the “Ugly” of our title.  The Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou is the narcissistic monument to the late president’s ego.  Reviled when it opened in 1977, it supposedly is now beloved by Parisians.  It’s the “inside-out” building, where the structural components are exposed.  Sorry.  It’s interesting.  But it’s still U-G-L-Y, and jarringly out of place in this city.

I kept thinking of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” movie when eyeing this monstrosity.  Those Plexiglas tubes house the escalators that you take up to the various levels.  I assume the air scoops are functional, but I dunno.  Of course, old Georges’ puss is plastered two stories high across the front.  Yeah, that is indeed the front that Loni is standing before.  It was really cold this day, so we were glad to get inside (after standing in that line back in the distance).

We went up the tube escalators, stood in lines in the tube walkways, and gazed down on the poor houses across the way that now have to look at the Pompidou for all eternity.  I’d pull the blinds.

The big show at the Centre currently is an exhibition of Edvard Munch (1863-1944), he of “The Scream” fame (which wasn’t part of the show).  Munch is a good pick for the weirdness of the Pompidou setting.  He was one strange character himself.  He clearly had a lot of artistic talent, as shown in the “Night Wanderer” (1923-24):

But the themes he chose to paint about, and his depiction of his subjects as tortured souls, was bizarre.  He was obsessed with death and conflict.  The six below are representative.  From the top left, then clockwise:  “The Sick Child,” “Murder on the Road,” “Burning House,” “The Fight,” “The Uninvited Guests” (note the gun), and “Jealousy.”

I don’t think I’d like to spend much time in his company.  His photo reminded me of Benito Mussolini, and he had a rather severe vision of himself in a few self-portraits.

We saw some other exhibits at the Centre, but weren’t allowed to photograph them.  In one case, that was a blessing.  As only the French can do (think of their veneration for Jerry Lewis), they were celebrating the winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize (whatever that is), a no-talent photographer named Cyprien Gaillard.  We didn’t get it.  He took extremely ordinary (think a Kodak Brownie manned by a junior high school student) photos of mundane scenes and objects.  They were all taken with the camera turned slightly, so that the image appeared in a diamond shape instead of a square.  This is from the internet: 

Big deal.  I guess that diamond look was the “art,” cause it certainly wasn’t the compositions.  Really, this was junk, and part of the “bad” of this post.

The other exhibit actually was pretty neat, and I wish we could have taken some pics.  Google Yayoi Kusama images and see some of her works and installations.  There were some mind-blowing rooms filled with lights, mirrors, or repeating patterns.  Sort of a high-class fun house.  [Note:  I just noticed that you have to hold down the CTRL key when clicking on the link; that’s something new with Blogger.]

When the 20th rolled around, we were ready to beetle off to the D’Orsay.  Not.  We forgot to factor in the French predilection for strikes.  Seems the gallery workers decided that, with the addition of new exhibit space, they needed at least 20 more employees to, ahem, properly serve the public and protect the art.  So, they struck the morning of the reopening, which didn’t take place.  No D’Orsay for us or anyone else.  This went on day after day without any end in sight.  I’m sure there were thousands of really pissed off tourists who didn’t have the luxury of staying longer.  Hey, we only had a week left ourselves!

A companion museum to the D’Orsay is the L’Orangerie, which has a nice collection of stuff we liked, such as:

Picasso was well represented in the regular collection, and it was interesting to see his transition from realism to abstract.

Frankly, I really like Picasso’s early stuff, and can’t stand his later nonsense.

The special exhibition was of Spanish artists of the post-impressionist era from about 1890 to 1920, subtitled “From Zuloaga to Picasso.” Frankly, I know virtually nothing about Spanish artists, so I was curious. Turns out it was some of the best art we saw the whole trip (my subjective opinion, of course). I haven’t the experience or knowledge to provide any analysis, all I can offer is what I liked. This exhibition was off-limits for photography, so I wasn’t able to get shots of the stuff I fancied.  I really enjoyed Joaquin Bastida ‘s work, so internet to the rescue:

Ramon Casas was another favorite.  Many of these Spanish artists came to Paris to soak in the French artists of the period, and their works sometimes are quite similar to more familiar painters, at least in their subjects if not in their styles, like this one, called “Madeleine.”  The look in her eyes is amazing.

Perhaps another genre of my personal art criticism is the “hoax.”  This is the “you gotta be kidding me” category.  Topping the list at L’Orangerie was Monet’s “Water Lilies.”  Two, huge, oval rooms are devoted to this farce.  Here’s the official blurb:

Monet’s veritable artistic testament, these “large decorations” are the culmination of an entire life.  Designed from 1914 until his death (1926), they are inspired by the “water garden” at the artist’s property in Giverny.  The eight panels represented in these two rooms evoke the hours passing from morning in the East to sunset in the West.  Monet represents neither the horizon, nor the top or the bottom.  The elements – water, air, sky, earth – become intertwined in a composition without perspective, where the water lily flowers provide the rhythm.  The painter thus gives “the illusion of an endless whole, of a horizonless and shoreless wave.”

Okayyy.  Now here’s my take:  Monet’s artistic downfall, these paint-by-the-numbers murals are the nadir of an entire life.  The eight panels evoke somnambulism from dawn until dusk.   There’s no beginning or end;  in fact, like Oakland, there’s no there, there.  The elements – monotonous colors, suffocating boredom, numbing repetition, utter lifelessness – become a composition without meaning or interest, where the lily flowers go on ad nauseam.  the painter thus gives the reality of an endless murkiness.

Really.  That this is considered some masterwork is the ultimate in hype.  It looks like my Aunt Evelyn’s wallpaper.  Here are parts of two of the eight (!) panels that cover two rooms. 

After eight days of striking, the D’Orsay workers finally got sufficient assurances that their demands would be addressed, and returned to their jobs.  Finally, with only a few days to go in our trip, we got to see its works.  It’s housed in a former train station.  The French love to recycle buildings, and I’m all for it.

With a couple of rare exceptions, there is virtually no place in the museum that you are allowed to take pictures, so you are spared more shots of stuff that I like.  I must say that the remodeled galleries are as good as all the hyperbole that accompanied the reopening.  No more white walls, they’re all painted in darker hues.  The lighting is incredible.  Somehow, only the painting on display receives light, not the surrounding area.  As a result, those masterpieces seem absolutely to glow and radiate their own light.  It’s really stunning to see.  We both had the “wow” reaction when we walked into the first impressionist room.  Museum curators the world over should take a junket and come see what the D’Orsay has done, it’s that good.

About all we could photograph was where we had lunch.  The D’Orsay occupies a huge building that used to be a train station, thus it is gigantic in its interior space, and has a number of oversized features.  One of these was the station clock, which dominates the space where the lunch café was located.

If you look closely in the lower center of the right photo, you can see Sacre Coeur in the distance atop Montmartre.  I have to say, the food was pretty good in the café, not at all like most museum fare.

To return to the Pompidou, there was another area in which I could photograph, but I didn’t much want to.  There’s art, and then there’s junk that someone declaims is art.  The mystery to me is why anyone believes it.  It’s just bad.

So, with a tip of the hat to Sergio Leone, there you have it:  the good, the bad, and the ugly.