No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.Muhammad Ali
After much of the day wandering around the area, we ended up at the Arc de Triomphe. The Arc de Triomphe was built – well, started, anyway – by Napoleon Bonaparte to honor the French Army and to celebrate French military victories. It was intended as a grand monument to celebrate the glory of France and its soldiers during the Napoleonic era.
It made me sad. I half expected to be angry, if anything, but this impressive monument just made me sad. France was not bigger or stronger after its love afair with Napoleon, its borders were the same as they had been in 1792, but it had lost about half a million soldiers (estimates vary wildly). That’s about half a million dead people, mostly young men, for nothing. Well, a little man’s ego, I guess, but other than that, nothing.
By way of disclosure and to be fair, over the years, France has added other sections? items? memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with an eternal flame, to the Arc de Triomphe.
But, in the end, the Arc de Triomphe is still a memorial to war, to killing, to death. And today, with Russia and Israel trying to kill as many people as they can, it seems especially gruesome.
It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist’s studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan. Julian Barns
The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success. Jane Jacobs,The Death and Life of Great American Cities
During our short stay in Paris, Michele and I stayed in a small hotel that had been refurbished, sort of near the Arc de Triomphe. It was in a mixed, gentrifying neighborhood. For me, it was the best part of the trip. We took a cab from the train station to the hotel, but just before we got to the hotel, the driver pulled over in what I would call a seedy area and said something in French that meant, I think, “Here is your destination.” It wasn’t, and after some pseudo-conversation which included pointing at various smartphone pages, he said something like “Oh” in French, turned the corner, and drove another three blocks to our hotel.
It was no longer 100°F, but I was still whooped when we first got to Paris. I opted for a day of doing nothing. Michele wandered around the neighborhood in the morning and then returned to the hotel to pick me up for lunch at Restaurant Le Merrill. Restaurant Le Merrill is just a run-of-the-mill French restaurant, which means the lunch was super. Then we spent the afternoon wandering around the area.
As we wandered around this neighborhood, I kept thinking of Jane Jacobs. This neighborhood is exactly what she had promoted. Around the middle of the last century, urban planning became a hot topic, involving the demolition of slums and their replacement with large, planned developments. In the United States, Frank Lloyd Wright designed and promoted Broadacre City, and in France, Le Corbusier designed the Radiant City. Robert Moses, an urban planner in New York, was one of the most powerful advocates of large-scale projects that destroyed vibrant neighborhoods.
As an aside, among other atrocities committed by Moses in the name of civic improvement, the Cross Bronx Expressway displaced nearly 4,000 families, not counting the families impacted by the increased noise, as it cut a seven-mile gash through the Bronx. End aside.
In the United States, at the time, areas considered slums ripe for improvement due to narrow streets and old, often rundown, buildings included North Beach in San Francisco, the North End in Boston, Georgetown in Washington, and Greenwich Village in Manhattan. All four of those areas are now considered highly desirable places to live, partially due to Jane Jacobs. Greenwich Village and its planned destruction by the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway is where Jane Jacobs stopped Robert Moses and changed urban planning forever, well, at least for the past 75 years. At the time, Jacobs was dismissively referred to as a “housewife”; now she is considered one of the most influential people in urban planning in the 20th century. She wrote a book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which basically said that everything Robert Moses said and did was wrong.
Jane Jacobs said that destroying a rundown neighborhood was wrong, a crime. As I recall, she believed that the tuberculosis rate in a neighborhood was a more accurate indicator of a community’s health than the condition of its buildings. She thought neighborhoods were organic, writing, Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.
She was for wide sidewalks, narrow streets, and diversity both in its buildings and inhabitants.
I’m not a religious person. But, when I look at a beautiful cathedral, what brings awe, what induces awe is the idea that architecture, you know, a beautiful cathedral, a beautiful building. Jason Silva
Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.Greta Thunburg.
I’m going in. whispered Michele Stern, while looking at the South Apse of Notre Dame Cathedral, in a voice similar to Luke Skywalker’s as he dropped into the trench of the Death Star on his final run.
First, the plan was to stay at Michele’s parents’ retreat – it actually says retreat on the front door – in Ireland as a home base to travel around the country. Then Susan Rayfeld, one of Michele’s second cousins, invited us to her part of the world, Die, France, for the cousins’ Re-u. Michele wanted to go, and I suggested that, since we were going to be in France anyway, let’s go to Paris to see the renovated Notre Dame. Thinking about it in California, traveling around France in close to 100°F sounded easier than it really was.
First, we took a train to Paris. In both Europe and Japan, fast trains are a primary mode of transportation, and they should be in the US too. They are cheaper, almost infinitely easier to get on, more comfortable to ride, and we can watch the countryside almost silently glide by.
From about the time we got off the plane in Barcelona, Spain, Michele started trying to get us tickets to Notre Dame to no avail. Everybody – and, believe me, contrary to what everybody says, Paris is stuffed with people, mostly tourists in July – wants to see the refurbished Notre Dame. The Authority has implemented a random ticket release program, theoretically making the distribution of tickets fairer. In our case, it didn’t work, and we were never able to get tickets. Rick Visnes had suggested Sainte-Chapelle as a place to see, so on the first day, we wandered down there to see if we could get in.
The line at Sainte-Chapelle was impossibly long, but close to Notre Dame, so we wandered over to Notre Dame to check out that situation. There were two lines: one for people with tickets, moving very slowly, and another for walk-ins, moving at a fast shuffle. We fast shuffled right on in.
When I first saw Notre Dame at the 2018 Re-u, I was unimpressed. By the time I visited Paris, I had already seen many European cathedrals; some, like Notre-Dame de Reims, are bigger and much higher, while others are more distinctive, such as the Orvieto Cathedral or the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Strasbourg. Notre Dame in Paris had a neglected, grubby feeling, especially compared to the Panthéon, which seemed alive, surrounded by new posters celebrating Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor who led the battle to legalise abortion in France and who was the first president of the European Union.
Now, after the post-fire cleanup, the cathedral looks new, bright, and even sassy.
After we shuffled into the cathedral, we continued shuffling down the side Ambulatory, past the Transcept, around the Ambulatory behind the Choir, and then back out, by the obligatory – but not officially named – gift shop. We were packed in like sardines, giving the Ambulatories a feeling of being misnamed. It seemed as if our fellow tourists, those who aquired tickets, were allowed in the Nave, so the whole cathedral was packed. The packed cathedral was both annoying and, with a background of sacred music, alive and sacred.
Leaving Notre Dame, I was reminded that Europe is predominantly Christian and that Christianity is deeply rooted in European culture. Over the last two millennia, the two have coevolved together. From a tourist’s viewpoint, Europe doesn’t seem to have the rabid Christianity that some Protestant sects have in the US, but European culture is deeply rooted in Christianity, and Notre Dame, being a national French institution, is part of that. I’m glad we had a chance to see it in its new glory.
We saw Notre Dame on the Fourth of July and finished the day at a club called New Morning, with an American institution, Jazz. The Jazz Band featured Branford Marsalis on saxophone, Joey Calderazzo on piano, Eric Revis on bass, and Justin Faulkner on drums. They were excellent.
Who are we and what is our place in the world?The definition of human identity and the link between what we term ‘humanity’ and ‘animality is a topic of universal debate. We question the way human beings see the world, form part of it and contribute to its transformation. Our world is one in which the living, human and non-human, interconnect with each other in a variety of ways and form a web of life. The Musée des Confluences
Michele and I are home, safe and sound in our little beddy-by, but my blog is still in France, and I want to keep it that way for a while.
I want to start this post by saying – confessing, really – that when Michele first mentioned she wanted to see the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, I thought it was an art museum, much like the art museums we have been visiting in every city we have been to. It isn’t. As Michele was researching hours and location, she discovered that the museum is billed as a science center and anthropology museum.
When we walked in later than we had planned because of a very nice, late morning breakfasst of oysters – that I augmented with the largest, tastiest, prawn I have eaten since Hong Kong in 2009 – I thought the musée would be a natural history museum similar to my favorite, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, or a science museum like the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. It was like neither, and yet it was kind of both.
But the Musée des Confluences is a museum unlike any I’ve seen before. Every science and natural history museum I’ve visited, and every National Park I’ve been to, presents their information as immutable certainties. This museum doesn’t. This museum presents its information as what we currently think. In my mind, that is a significant difference.
Too many of us think our opinion is the Truth, and we hold these collected Truths as dogma. That attitude makes much of the country distrustful of us coastal elites and our allied experts. The Musée des Confluences presents a more nuanced and softer picture. An information card, for example, states: Human beings use observations and the laws of physics in an attempt to understand the origin and evolution of the universe. The prevailing cosmological model, called the Big Bang, portrays the Universe as a system in expansion that might have begun around 13.8 billion years ago.
The Musée des Confluences is not an art museum, but, starting with the building – in which the actual museum, the display rooms, are on the second floor giving the building a feeling of standing on its tippy toes like an oil derrick, or, as we learned at the museum, a mammoth – the displays are often as much art as information.
The museum building was designed by an Austrian firm, Coop Himmelb(l), an out-of-town architectural firm that I had never heard of (I’ve ranted about out-of-town architects enough, so I’ll just let it go). BTW, the fact that I’ve never heard of Coop Himmelb or their founders should not be taken as a judgment on the firm, just a judgment of my ignorance of current, important, architects and buildings.BTW, the name of the firm, Coop Himmelb, is a pun on blue sky, and the company’s tagline is Himmelblau is not a color but an idea of creating architecture with fantasy, as buoyant and variable as clouds. So they do sound sort of with-it.
The Musée des Confluences is named for the confluence of the Saône and Rhône Rivers. This area has a long and rich human history, and the accumulated detritus from that long history comprises much of the museum’s collection. Confluences also represents the coming together of three major local archaeological collections: the Natural History Museum of Lyon, the Guimet Museum in Lyon, and the Colonial Museum of Lyon, which, in turn, were the result of the confluence of previous collectors, going all the way back to the brothers Gaspard and Balthasar de Monconys who started collecting in the 17th Century.
The combination of these three disparate collections could have easily resulted in a chaotic and disorganized mess, but it didn’t; it resulted in a wonderful and fascinating museum that combined the best of both old-timey museums, as a collection of whatever the original collectors were collecting, and less stuff but more teaching about the stuff. Michele and I stayed, fascinated, until they kicked us out. I wholeheartedly recommend the Musée des Confluences to anyone visiting Lyon.
Before I conclude this post, I would like to make a final, probably unnecessary, comment. The museum has a display of three females, from left to right, Homo floresiensis, Homo sapiens – that’s us – and Homo neanderthalensis that were all inhabitating different parts of our planet at the same time. We are the only ones left and, by most accounts we wiped out the other Hominins (maybe because the Homo floresiensis and Homo neanderthalensis women didn’t modestly cover their breasts, but probably not).
After our drive through the French Alps – I think that’s what the general area is called – our entry into Lyon was through Lyon’s industrial underbelly. It is not the entry I would suggest to an otherwise beautiful city. Lyon is a city Michele and I both wanted to revisit after first seeing it in July of 2018. It is France’s third-largest city, after Paris – which is Europe’s largest city, unless, of course, one wants to count Moscow as European, which I don’t – and Marseille. We arrived late on Sunday, and the two main places we wanted to see – or re-see, in one case – were closed on Monday.
A Temple to Faith
We defaulted to a unique cathedral on a hill overlooking Lyon, the Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière, designed by Marie-Louis Jean Sainte-Marie Perrin. Marie-Louis Jean Sainte-Marie Perrin is a local guy, which is pretty unusual, but very welcome. The Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière is, to my eye, a strange building – its website says that it is a combination of “Byzantine, Gothic, and Romanesque styles – it shouldn’t, but it does seem to work. As an aside, I couldn’t find the Romanesque parts, and I would add Baroque to the list, especially in the interior.End aside.
Under the main cathedral, is a smaller church which I thought was more intimate and appealing.
Near the Basilique Notre-Dame, there is a Roman theater, probably built about 15 BC when Lyon was Lugdunum and Augustus was visiting (or in charge). At that time, Lyon was the capital of Roman Gaul, and the theater held, presumably, about 10,000 screaming fans.
A Temple To Food
We went to Lyon primarily to see the Musée des Confluences, but first we revisited Lyon’s Temple to food, Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse. Lyon self-identifies as “the world capital of gastronomy,” and they are probably right. I liked the food here better than anywhere we have traveled (except, maybe, Tokyo). The city’s history has promoted and continues to promote the exchange of culinary products and cultural influences.. Lyon’s culinary history dates back to when it was a major Roman trading center 25 centuries ago, which has led to its distinctive and influential cuisine. That cuisine was also heavily formed by the influence of the “Mères Lyonnaises” -“female cooks” to us less fluent in Lyonese cooking history – who had their own restaurants especially during the 19th through the early 20th centuries. While it’s hard to believe that women were ever influential in anything, if you read most history books, you can look it up.
We had planned to arrive early, spend a couple of hours at the Food Temple, and then go to the main event, the Musée des Confluences. That, it turns out, is impossible. Here are a couple of, almost random, photos from inside the Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse.
