February 08, 2002
5. Modern Paris
Paris isn't entirely street after street of beautiful buildings, like the one you might find in a Louvre-a-ramaTM (brought to you in SkrabaVisionTM). Click here to start the Louvre-a-ramaTM, and click the Louvre-a-ramaTM to turn it off.
Please take note that the Louvre-a-rama is a full 360 degrees. Unlike cheap imitations, the Louvre-a-ramaTM is guaranteed to be 100% Louvre. This week's Louvre-a-ramaTM is much more polished, using twice as many original photos as the last one. And the one edit that is really obvious actually appears smoother in the high-resolution version.
Because I didn't get a chance to put any pictures in last weeks travel log, I am including them today (and sometimes hidden behind links). For example, I mentioned two particular buildings, with a somewhat less-than-historic character: Centre Georges Pompidou (Borg) and Les Halles (Molemen).
The Centre Georges Pompidou is a national museum of modern art. It has largely been constructed with the plumbing, ventilation, stairs, escalators, elevators and probably some purely decorative pipes outside the building. In many respects, the overstated brightly industrial exterior brings the beauty of the rest of the city into sharper focus. On the other hand, it is probably a point of French national pride that the two architects were British and Italian.
The Centre opened in the late seventies, and apparently the cheerfully awful exterior holds incredibly beautiful fine art, both contemporary and history. Matisse, Kandinsky, Picasso, Klein, Pollock, Closky, Gordon, Ruff, Dubuffet, Cheebly and Frambussenachtor are all represented. Behind the Centre is a large square where one can see buskers and caricature artists.
I've had a request to put my portrait on line. I'm afraid it's going to have to wait for another week. However, this weekend, I was walking behind the Centre Georges Pompidou (like last week), and an artist came up to chat with me. It was the same artist who was intrigued by my glasses and nose last week, and subsequently made off with my two euros. This week, he happened to be intrigued by my nose and glasses, and wanted to draw me for his collection. When I told him that I had already intrigued him last week, he denied that it could have happened. It must have been a different artist, a different Centre Georges Pompidou.
Beside the Centre, there's a clever and funny fountain that proves modern can be charming.
I should probably vindicate Napoléon, whom I previously implicated as dabbling with the mole-men at the centre of the earth, through Les Halles. In fact, when I checked my facts, Les Halles were established as a covered market nearly 700 years previously by Philippe-August, the same monarch that started work on the Louvre. However, Napoléon's nephew Louis-Napoléon was involved in constructing large iron market stalls on the site, but that was after his famous landslide election that somehow led back into imperial authoritarianism. (He also had most of Paris rebuilt under the infamous Baron Haussman, but we'll have to get into that later).
To make a long story into a six layer deep crowded mega-mall requires that you tear down the covered market that existed in that location for nearly a millenium, and put in a FNAC (pronounced 'fnac', this is the dominant audio-visual-electronics-books-and-tickets chain) and a flunch (pronounced 'flunch'). And to ensure that this molehill keeps buzzing, half the metro and high speed suburban trains should connect there.
I found the Hotel de Ville close to Les Halles. I know that Robespierre plotted in this building, and that it served as the center of government for the Commune in the late nineteenth century. Although the building is interesting by itself, it overlooks Place de Grève, which is where protestants were burned, nobility guillotined, and hotel workers protested poor working conditions (the French word for strike comes from this location). Since guillotines have mostly gone out of fashion, the square is now occasionally converted into a skating rink, which hopefully brings a few more giggles than burning heretics.
I'm just going to stick some extra pictures here at the end, as an apology for missing last week. They include the other Arc de Triomphe du Caroussel, a peek inside the Louvre, booksellers along the Seine, a train in the metro, the metro platform, and the Paris Opera from the roof of a mall.
