randomosity

Last night marked a first visit to the IFI (Irish Film Insti­tute). The IFI, I have gathered and can now con­firm is a won­der­ful

venue for those in the know. They fea­ture a full slate of movies, largely European indie flicks, def­in­itely of eclectic rather than pop­u­lar taste. Last night for example fea­tured: Paris, City of Men, L’Heure d’été and Led­jis.
Last night’s object­ive was to see the rather innoc­u­ously named Paris. Read the movie sum­mary, but went in with little idea about what we were going to see. This 2008 film from Cédric Klapisch earns a very strong must see recom­mend­a­tion! It centres on the flam­boy­ant pro­fes­sional dan­cer Pierre (Romain Duris), who has been dia­gnosed with a ter­minal heart con­di­tion and his sis­ter (Juli­ette Binoche) who sheds work respons­ib­il­it­ies to move in and care for him. Much in the style of his earlier, and superb L’Auberge Espangnole, Klapisch ingeni­ously webs a series of tan­gen­tially inter­lock­ing story lines. He keeps you guess­ing at to when and where the stor­ies will inter­sect, and aside from some rather clumsy fore­shad­ow­ing in one of the tra­gic sequences, he plays his hand well.

Cross-posted to Dub­lin­ica.

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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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One of the most fas­cin­at­ing stores in Paris and well worth a visit is Colette. The loc­a­tion is prime - along rue Saint-Honoré near the Place du Marche Saint-Honoré. Colette car­ries a won­der­fully eclectic invent­ory of things amaz­ing. cater­ing to a diverse cli­entèle from the curi­ous, the tour­ist to the glit­ter­atti, the hand-picked items in store are dis­played cre­at­ively and offer the finest of the trend­i­est.
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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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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.

Always a won­der­ful site for the off­beat images of Rus­sian soci­ety, Eng­lish Rus­sia has a great photo spread of a Ukrain­ian man who built a won­der­fully detailed model of the Eif­fel tower out of matches. What’s more it has a whole net­work of little LED lights to make it all the more true to life. I’d sure love to know more about the pro­cess and the time behind this one.

From Michele comes this very mus­ing cor­res­pond­ence about <a href=“http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6205403.stm” target=_blank”>an Englishwoman’s exper­i­ence in ‘polite’ Parisian society. It provided me with a good chuckle and I hope it does the same for you. I guess I wasn’t hanging around in polite enough circles to have been apprised of or embar­rassed by my beha­viour. Things to be aware of for your next sojourn to the city of light.