How I Spent MSV #5, Special I See Dead People Edition

We did two cemeteries. The first, in Montmartre, we just popped into because we were passing by it.

The decidedly unique characteristic of the Parisian cemeteries is that they are packed to the gills, with ornate tombs seemingly placed willy-nilly beside one another.

There were a number of famous people in Montmartre, but we had no guide to their whereabouts, and this was the only one I found:

Probably the most famous cemetary is Pere Lachaise, abounding with famous folk.

A lot of the famous folks have fresh flowers on their graves, placed by random admirers. In the one below, this guy was no one in particular, but I love how the memorial captures him as if he just keeled over:

If there's a particular practice associated with a grave, like kissing (note the lipstick stains that, apparently, corrode the stone), they'll block it off, or at least try to. This is Oscar Wilde's momument.

Same stone, front and back:

A whole section of the cemetery is devoted to the War and the Holocaust. This photo only hints at the emotional impact.

While there are those who say he's still alive (shopping at the 7-Eleven with Elvis?), here's old Jim, the second most popular musician in the place. It's a pretty nondescript grave, cordoned off, of course.

But even Mr. Mojo Risin can't match Chopin in pomp, flowers and impact.

I stand corrected

Regarding my post on museums, says Claire:

LIES LIES LIES. There are THREE museums in Paris: Orsay, Louvre, and the Pompidou, which I love and I don't care what you think of me.

I have been to the Pompidou. I love that you can look out from the stairs, which are not inside the building, and see a lot of Paris. I'm rather taken by the idea of the machinery of a building being removed from its interior. And, well, they do have a lot of great stuff, although when I was there I unfortunately drifted into the area where it was all just piles of dirt with labels claiming that they were artworks. If one of the goals of art is to make you think, and I believe that it is, then Pompidou is a wild success. I just happen to be a philistine at heart. Even in NY, I go to the Met about ten times to every one visit to MOMA. What can I say?

Here's a video on their site:

http://www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/ressource.action?param.id=FR_R-89fd49e847165bc78d564f6dbeb6777¶m.idSource=FR_E-2ab598d3369ad7a58ead7e6be32ba7b

How I Spent MSV #4

For most tourists, there are two museums in Paris, the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay. The latter is a converted railway station, and is essentially the home to the Impressionists. People visit the Louvre because they feel that they have to; how many people can explain why the Mona Lisa is either important or a great piece of art? On the other hand, people visit the d’Orsay because Impressionist art (and all the other related schools of post-, pre- and anyone generally French and non-literal) has become pretty much the general favorite of just about everybody. The images stick in one’s brain, the painting styles intrigue even non-painters, and in a word, the stuff does at least part of what art is supposed to do, which is connect emotionally to the viewer. If beauty is supposed to be a part of art, and beauty is transcendent, then Impressionism is everybody’s most beautiful and most transcendent.

I’ve talked a lot about art over the years, what it is and how it can be defined. “Caveman,” of course, is the most detailed I’ve gotten, but I’ve thrown out other things over the years as well, often contradicting things I’ve said at other times. So it goes. Art, whatever it is, is always tied into a process of learning. With the passage of time I find not that my tastes change, necessarily, but that I start enjoying more and more stuff that previously had left me cold. Almost all of our major trips, and a lot of our day trips and short jaunts, include visits to art venues of one sort or another. It’s not just something we do because that’s what tourists are supposed to do; often it is the driving force of our trip in the first place. I mean, I strongly want to go back to Madrid, which I thought was a pretty bland city overall, solely because of the Prado and Thyssen museums (and, admittedly, a couple of really good restaurants).

We took a day for the Musée d'Orsay. Because of its contents, it is wildly popular. The main collection on the top floor fills up with people quickly, so if you really want to look at the paintings, you’ve got to be there when the doors open, otherwise you’ll be looking at other people looking at the paintings. Then you walk down the stairs to the decorative arts exhibits on the side, if you happen to be a fan of craftsman, nouveau and deco; they’ve got things you’ve never thought of, like Norwegian Viking-inspired art deco, plus the Viennese Secessionists and so forth. And then down on the first floor are the special exhibits, by which time you’ve probably exhausted your couple of hours of museum attention time, and need a break.

Tied into one’s d’Orsay ticket is admission to the Orangerie on the other side of the Seine, which wasn’t open the last time we were in Paris. After a long morning at the d'Orsay and a nice lunch break, you stroll over there, and you walk into a couple of elliptical rooms maybe a hundred yards long, on which are hung Monet water lily paintings stretching over the entire walls. These are a show stopper. Aside from architecture, there are few absolutely mammoth works of art, period, much less mammoth works of art that hit you in the gut and take your breath away and make believe for a while in humanity’s better nature. The Monets in the Orangerie are one of those magical places. The Sistine Chapel is another, if you want a comparison. You are awed by what one person can do beyond all imagining, a bravado artistic performance few would even attempt, much less at which they would succeed.

I can’t describe the experience of the Orangerie any better than that, and I’m certainly not going to post a picture of the paintings, which would give you no idea of what the experience is like. You simply have to go there. But be prepared. Plenty of people would storm into the room, look around, shrug and move on. Plenty of others were struck dumb and were sitting quietly in the middle just trying to absorb it all. You want to be one of the latter. These paintings are not just a tick on your list, another place you’ve been that you can talk about when you get home. These enormous canvasses, created by perhaps the most beloved painter ever as he was going blind in his old age, speak to something that cannot be articulated.

I obviously still have not recovered from the experience.

Yeah, it's an ad, but...

How I Spent MSV #3

Weather forecasting in Paris seems to be of the persuasion that, if you tell them it might rain, you’ve done your job. Every day the prediction hovered around 30 or 40 percent chance of rain. While once or twice we got sprinkled on, it never really hauled off and hit us with anything worth noticing. For that matter, even in London we only saw real wetness once, and then not for long. On the other hand, the weather was coolish in both places, mostly in the low 60s, which has to be one of the best possible scenarios for extended touring on foot. Very comfortable, in other words.

Still, at the beginning, before we learned that French weather predicting was an oxymoron, we figured that our first full day, where we had planned to explore outdoors down around the Bastille, would be better spent indoors at the Louvre, so we headed there instead. It was a little drizzly when we arrived, so this was probably a good idea. There was a line of about a hundred people, which took no time at all to move into the building; as you can see, at about noon,

the line stretched out of the picture.

Of course, if you’ve never been to the Louvre, you pretty much have to hit the masterpieces like the Mona Lisa, but every tour group in the universe is doing likewise, making masterpiece stalking a decidedly unpleasant experience, unless I guess you’re the first person in the place. Having dispensed with the proverbial bucket list on our first trip some years ago, now we can visit seeking something else. This time we decided on French paintings of the 19th century (pre-Impressionism) and decorative arts, which includes some palace trappings. This is the sort of stuff that takes your breath away but you don’t have to fight the hordes to enjoy it, aside from the inevitable tourist who has to stand a relative in front of everything and take a photo to prove that they were there, and the other inevitable tourist who has to take a photograph of every painting, period, which is akin to whistling Wagner—it just doesn’t capture the essence. Oh, well. The French paintings are decidedly of the so-called academic variety, lots of history and education and moral illumination, the stuff the Impressionists didn't do when their time came along, which is why they couldn't get into the salons (they were refused, and they took great pride in being refusés). As for decorative arts stuff, well, they did have the odd king and/or emperor living here over the years; the Louvre after all is a former palace. Some pix below.

We put in our usual two or so hours, at which point museum overload always sets in, and we headed outdoors, where it had suddenly turned quite nice. We walked around, heading toward the (eastern) bottom of Ile St. Louis, which is the island next to the Ile de la Cite, which is the island with Notre Dame and the hunchback (the name escapes me but the face rings a bell, if you need a joke punch line to help you out here). St. Louis is quite charming, famous perhaps more than anything for Berthillon ice cream, which is proof that human nature is all too human. You can buy this ice cream at the counter at Berthillon, or at any of a number of other counters within a hundred foot radius. Exact same ice cream. Line at Berthillon? Endless. Line at Berthillon outlets? Virtually non-existent. Since we weren’t exactly in the mood for ice cream when we were there, we skipped it, and I felt that we were probably ruining the entire vacation by so doing and missing out on a world-famous treat, but we were nearby a few days later and made up for it then. It really was good.

We didn’t bother going into Notre Dame, which had yet another endless line, but then again, been there, done that, and there are plenty of other things to go into that don’t have endless lines, especially churches. A Catholic country that’s been in existence since the invention of Catholics tends to have a lot of churches worth visiting. Italy is, of course, the same thing. You can church yourself up endlessly, and if you happen to appreciate architecture, art and/or religion, you will be a happy tourist.

The next day we roamed the Bastille area. The prison itself is long gone, aside from a piece of rock here and there. Nearby is the area where the characters do some of their endless noodling in Before Sunset, the Promenade Plantée. It is, essentially, the Parisian High Line, with the distinction of predating the High Line by about 20 years. No one was filming us as we walked, however.

Following that, the next day we day-tripped out to Giverny. It seems pretty necessary to do a pilgrimage Chez Monet if you’re any sort of Impressionism fan, and if you do, you won’t be disappointed. The place really looks like his paintings. Just photographing the ponds, even when they’re overrun by tourists, looks like Monet’s lily paintings.

We had also planned a day trip to Chartres, which we’ve never seen, but the continuing bleak forecasts coupled with a surprise train strike—the French on strike? Quelle surprise arooni as the Frenchie say—put the kibosh on that one. We substituted a walking tour of the Left Bank.

Some selected pix:

The royal quarters in the Louvre:

That black dot in the top left section is a cannonball:

The city is filled with little courtyards:

Who says the French are a little on the ornate side?

The Parisian High Line:

The house at Giverny:

Nymphéas:

Poppies:

How I Spent MSV #2

I ended up traveling, techwise, with only an iPad and a tiny pocket camera. I have to admit, there were times when I wanted to pull an iPhone out of my pocket and figure out A) where the hell I was and B) where the hell the nearest metro station was, but other then that, there was something of an accumulating sense of freedom from not having the phone at hand. My need to read emails as they come in, especially when I’m on vacation, pretty much hovers between nil and not at all. There was the tiniest bit of debate business that needed to be attended to, but I was able to address that in the evenings or mornings when I had the iPad and wifi. The rest of the time, well, people could wait a few minutes. Of course, in addition to GPS duty, the iPhone can double as a camera, but I became quite enamored of the one I bought for the trip, a 16 megapixel Canon with a 5X optical zoom. It was so much better than doing heavyweight Sherpa duty lugging the SLR, which it cannot match in terms of control, balanced against exactly what sort of photos are being taken. If you’re going serious pix, then you need the SLR (or that new mirrorless generation of cameras that I gather remains pretty expensive). But I wasn’t expecting much more than souvenir snapshots. The Canon did the job.

I’ve been posting the full edited pix on Flickr (thanks for the memory, Yahoo: I had abandoned Flickr early on when I reached the limit), and selected shorts on Facebook, if you want to see the results. On Flickr, set 1, set 2, set 3.

On top of that, we used TripIt and TripAdvisor and of course Google Maps, and that was pretty much it for travel software. What else does one need?

We rented an apartment in Montmartre, which is up the hill around Sacre Coeur.

Like a lot of Paris, it’s all tiny streets, many of them going one way, and when we were arriving, our driver found that most of them went the wrong way. The apartment belongs to one of my wife’s colleagues, and they rent it out when they aren’t there. Considering the price of Paris hotels, it was a steal, and it had a fully equipped kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms, and an enormous bathroom with a separate w.c. If you know Europe, you know that the phrase enormous bathroom sounds suspiciously bogus, but it was true. There were actually two showers, one in a stall and one in the tub, plus two sinks, if your whole group found itself so dirty it couldn’t wait and had to wash up as a team. The apartment itself was accessed past, first, a bland street entrance, then a hallway with the concierge’s apartment (like in the movies), then a sunny open courtyard, then into the next building, past the cat and up the stairs. It was absolutely perfect, and with the two bedrooms, perfect for families. And as I said, reasonable, another word you don’t hear much in Paris.

That’s the thing. Paris is the most ridiculously expensive city in the world, I’m sure. Everything is expensive. All the meals, all the shopping, the museums. The metro is reasonable enough, but if you want to go to the bathroom, that too will often cost you a euro or so. An ice cream cone? Okay, Berthillon on Ile St. Louis is allegedly the best ice cream in the world, but it’s about a buck a lick! On the other hand, that reasonable metro is also one of the best in the universe. Trains just keep on coming, they’re seldom overpacked, and if you don’t mind buskers, you’re golden. By the way, buskers nowadays are very twenty-first century, with portable backup systems over which they perform. It’s more like karaoke than street performing. The last time I was in Paris, if a guy was playing the concertina on your metro car, he was playing the concertina. Now he’s playing it with a hundred and one strings behind him, plus the vocal artistry of his cousin from Marseilles who also wants to get into the act. Jeesh. You can’t hear yourself think. Fortunately, you’re in the subway, and what’s there to think about in the subway other than not getting pickpocketed?

After we settled our stuff on the first day, we grabbed our book of walks and headed out to the neighborhood. We moseyed up to the top of the hill and the church, then threaded our way back down through the neighborhood. This is a hell of a crowded tourist area, but they tend to stick to the main thoroughfares, and the minute you hit a side street, you’re on your own. While going up the hill in front of the church is easy enough, there are some straight-on stairs that ascend without a break, and I don’t recommend those. You can also take a funicular, always fun, for the cost of a metro ticket.

Or you can take this trolley pictured at the right, which will carry you around the neighborhood while at the same time making you look like such a total dork that if you are caught doing it no one cool will ever talk to you again.

After stretching our first day as long as we could, having a simple café dinner nearby, we hit the hay. Sunset was about 10:00 every night, meaning it’s just day most of the time during June. Gorgeous. And overall our weather, while cool, was seldom inclement. We lucked out.

Coachean Feed: No more racism, rights of foreigners, women in movies, homophobia and a Wilde treat.

More links of interest to the debate community.

• Thanks to SCOTUS for explaining to us that racism is over. Meanwhile, Six Words: 'Black Babies Cost Less To Adopt'. This is some world we live in.
  
• I've always been disappointed with people who have suggested, around various debate topics, ideas like the one that non-citizens should have the right to vote, because the inherent illogic demonstrates a pretty firm lack of understanding of the meaning of both citizenship and voting. Still, We Need to Protect the Rights of Foreigners, as this short think-starter piece explains.
  
• Casting Call: Hollywood Needs More Women Movies are predominately male, no doubt for all the same reasons as just about every other industry, and this article catalogs the details. But I wonder why, down the street, so to speak, book publishing is predominately female, written by, edited by and read by. Go figure.
  
• A single-slice article, Hollywood's refusal to stand up to Alec Baldwin is shameful does raise the issue that homophobia may have an acceptability, if you will, unlike racism or antisemitism.
  
• Stephen Fry Reads Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Story “The Happy Prince” Well, that would seem to be self-explanatory. 20 minutes or so of pure joy? Fry's reading of Hitchhiker's Guide is spectacular and, of course, he narrates the British audios of the Harry Potter books. And he's Stephen Fry. 'Nuff said.