randomosity

About a year ago I adopted the French Republican Calendar for my personal journalling. Why? Really for no other reason than to be different. It offered me the opportunity to learn the Republican Calendar through practise (a word-a-day sort of arrangement). The upheaval of the switch to a new system in France in 1795, caused confusion, was not widely adopted and in the end was discontinued by Napoleon during the Empire. This was not before such references such as the Coup of 18 Brumaire and lobster Thermidor forever embedded the poeticisme of the calendaring system in our historical memory.

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From the realm of ‘too far fetched’ to be believed comes word that members of the UX, a shadowy underground organisation, have been cleared of charges in their daring, but clandestine operation to restore an antique clock at the Patheon in Paris. According to UrbanResources, the UnterGunther is “Swiss-French urban explorers team whose activity is to restore the invisible parts of the heritage in total clandestinity.” This latest caper involved a year long process to secretly repair a huge clock in the Pantheon which had fallen into disrepair. Not only did they carry out this task undetected over the space of a year, they built a lounge within the dome of the Pantheon, wired into electrical circuits and even installed a networked computer, all under the unsuspecting nose of Pantheon staff. When the UnterGunther cell finished their restoration, they made the decision to reveal their work to ensure the clock received ongoing care. The Guardian has a story in English on their acquittal.
The group were charged with tampering with a lock (their sometime means of ingress and egress) and the head of security for the Pantheon took retirement. Despite the fact that the group has demonstrated the clock to have been fully restored, the staff at the Pantheon have, for undisclosed reasons, chosen not to wind or cause the clock to operate. Apparently the group is already at work on their next operation. Encroyable!

Speaking with Matt Leighninger this morning I was reminded of one of my best tips for those looking for offbeat sights in Paris - the military models at the Musée de l’Armée. The museum is a treasure. A grande promenade stretching from the Seine leads up to the building. The courtyards are filled with captured and antique canons…hundreds of them. The canons are often works of the craftsmen’s art. Inside the museum are amazing collections of all things military stretching from earliest times to the present. There are guided tours, expositions and of course Napoleon’s Tomb adjoins the museum proper in L’Eglise du dôme. The museum is enormous and can easily occupy the better part of a day for the day.
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It’s always amusing and often telling to compare where we are now to where we thought we’d be. Whether through sci-fi novels, advertisements for the house of the future, or in this case prints from an exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (bnf), facets of the futurethink can provide a particularly prismatic view of past preoccupations. Paleo-Future Blog has a nice collection of images of life in the year 2000 from the BnF. Natalie has weighed in on how prescient these illustrations actually are.
One thing that springs to my attention is the sense that the future was going to free us from contact with the ground. Flight seems to make so much more possible.
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Having just returned from one of my favourite cities in the world, I was fascinated to find a Paris Metro Virtual Experience. This media-rich site offers wonderful history of the Paris Metro and the opportunity to take a virtual tour with static images and rel-time soundtrack along a number of lines. Additionally, the author of the site has completed station by station architectural mosaics of particular lines. If you have ever had the opportunity to travel on the metro (arguably one of the most efficiently run systems in the world) this site may bring back some memories.
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I attended a great talk by Steven Bednarski of St. Jerome’s University today. His CV lists UQAM, York, Toronto as places of experience. His framing question today: How does a social historian make use of a research database?
Bednarski explains that he was trained in the French school and considers himself a storyteller by practise. The leads to a valuable reminder for me: the quantitative historian makes good use of his tools and may carry out exquisite analysis of datasets through many means (statistical, spatial, SNA, etc) but what this allows him to do is construct the model and then use narrative to illustrate it through anecdotal evidence.
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The Gardens at the Palais Royal are distinctly different from those at the Luxembourg. A grand urban courtyard, the Palais Royal have been a public garden from immediately prior to the Revolution. The Palais Royal was owned by the Duc d’Orleans, an aristocrat who sought popular appeal. As today, the courtyard was surrounded by cloistered shops and atelier and served as a meeting spot for the ‘common folk’.
Today, the garden itself is green and large and a wonderful spot to sit and read and be amongst a milieu.

Entry to the garden is through the palais itself and the contrast from the bustling street to the south could not be more extreme. You emerge from the concrete jungle into a lush garden with a bordering walking paths and a fountain in the centre that creates two separate private areas. Chairs are provided and one can easily while away the hours engrossed in a fine book.
At the south end of the garden is a rather discordant sculpture featuring black and white cylinders that have risen to varying heights out of the patio itself. Impressive, artistic, tasteful?? hard to say. Definitely unique.
What is particularly nice about this garden is the oasis that it provides amongst the hustle and bustle of the surrounding streets. Its a defined area and you are very conscious of the surroundings. But the lushness of the gardens themselves allow you to easily escape in appropriate diversion.

There’s a neat spot, a little off the beaten track, in Paris that I have some fond memories of. It’s an oasis, small in scale and slow in pace. It’s not the sort of place that you find in the tourist directories and its not enveloped by the legend of Paris vacationeering. Bercy Village is a trendy upscale redevelopment project in the 12th which features little shops, a cinema, bars and restaurants, situated within and without of a old wine market. Metro 14 - Cour St-Emilion lands you right in the village.
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I have long wanted to jot down some thoughts about some of my favourite places in Paris. Meaning to eventually present these as an appropriately georeferenced set with appropriate navigation, for now I thought I would add them as simply blog entries. When I thought about where to start, it took me all of a second to ecide to begin with one of my absolutely favourite spots: The Luxembourg Gardens.

There are a plethora of wonderful gardens in Paris, but the Luxembourg is a favourite for a variety of great reasons:

• Convenient
• Adjacent
• Sustantial
• Gorgeous
• Clean
• Safe

The gardens and the Palais de Luxembourg date the seventeenth century and the construction of the palace and surroundings for Marie de Medici. The garden is surrounded by a wall and the garden/park itself is intersected by pedestrian avenues or crushed stone. It is centred on a fountain/large grassy area (I can’t remember which guise it is in right now). There are polite city forests and wonderful statuary surrounding the main promenades.

What I like most particularly about the gardens are the wonderful seats. They can be dragged to any place one desires and come in three flavours. There are the standard upright, like a standard chair type (really great in combination with others for your feet), slightly reclined ones and the best: full reclined spacious metal lounges that are not unlike a Parisian version of an Adirondack deck chair. Getting to the garden early enough means you get your pick of both chair and spot and you can find a wonderfully sheltered spot close to the wall around the central water, and spend the day reading, writing and simply taking in the ambiance of this very special environment.
The central ‘plaza’ area always had this wonderful, huge wading pool in which children rented little sailing boats and pushed them about. Just a really nice ‘park’ kind of thing to do. However, if I am to believe Google Maps (after the Katrina thing I am ever so slightly skeptical), it looks as though this area has been filled in and is just a grassy area now. Maybe its a seasonal, annual thing…I sure hope that is the case.
The area around the Luxembourg also makes it superbly situated. In the Latin Quarter, near the Sorbonne and the Pantheon, it is also near the entrance to the Catacombs (about them in a further entry). There are all sort of wonderful eating opportunities in the area, many of which re great takeaway food that you can return to the park with. I really like this little Japanese yakatori place, a three minute walk from my seat in the park.
On a more somber note, the wall to the northeast is the site where Marshall Michel Ney (the Bravest of the Brave) was executed in 1815 for his part in Napoleon’s return to power. This tragedy is not without its controversy, both due to the circumstances of Ney’s court martial as well as the persistent rumours that he was able to escape to the United States following Napoleon’s second abdication and lived out his days as a rural school master.
The Luxembourg Gardens are easily accessed, both by foot walking south from the Seine having crossed the Pont Neuf, or via the Luxembourg Metro station which deposits you right at the northeast gate of the park.

French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin has unveiled a quite fascinating theory of pyramid construction. Apparently based on a decade of investigation, he is able to proposed a series of concepts proposing that internal construction ramps allowed for the efficient and remarkable construction of the Pyramid of Cheops. Additionally he demonstrates the most efficient means by which the pyramidium was raised along with the pyramid itself and the construction of the King’s chamber at the heart of the pyramid.

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