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.

The characterization is superb and the expressions, smiles, curses, antics of our players take us on a emotional journey into their lives, pains, and struggles. This is all balanced against a sumptuous treatment of the urban fabric of Paris. Moving from aerial shots from balconies and rooftops, to the catacombs to Versailles, the film finds root in the homes of Pierre and of Paul, an aging professor (Fabrice Luchini) whose father’s death suddenly makes him face a narrowly successful but largely unrealized life. Paris features a wonderfully evocative dream sequence, blending animation and a Second Life sort of effect. A further playful striptease sequence by Binoche to the tune Sway, is a waggish treat.
There are probably one or two character/stories too many, but this barely detracts from the overall experience. One is drawn into Paris, into the lives of the characters and their neighbourhood. The setting is a sumptuous treat, Paris in its splendour but with an unkempt, complex, unresolved side exposed with aplomb. Four and half of five stars.

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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.
The treat for the offbeat traveler though is in the attic. An enormous salon stretches along the right wing of the museum on the fourth level. Although the salon is often not always accessible to the public, when it is, it is well worth the trek up a few flights of stairs. In a dimly lit, attic space you will find scale models of French military fortifications and eighteenth and nineteenth century frontier towns crafted to minute detail. The feeling of the space itself is rather special, but these works of art under glass are something you will not find in such profusion elsewhere.
The model are crafted right down to pedestrians and tiny little canon emplacements on fortifications. They are lit with to appreciate a particular time of day. You will find places such as Le Rochelle, or Mayence (Mainz today). There are exquisitely artistic renditions of Vauban’s cutting edge fortifications utilizing bombardment deflecting glacis or redoubts that capitalise of being able to lend covering fields of fire. Even if you are not fascinated by military engineering, what you will find are true works of art in a stunning third dimension.
Although hardly a side journey, and you are probably in the locale for this in the first place, Napoleon’s tomb is awe inspiring. Resting underneath the soaring dome of the church, in a sunken arena, the red granite catafalque is only at least ten times the normal sarcophagus! The surround includes friezes representing the many civil and social accomplishments attributed to the Empire and to Napoleon. The remains of the King of Rome are also contained here, returned by Hitler during the German occupation of Paris. You will find Jerome and Joseph’s tombs in adjoining spaces along with other notable military heroes and the aforementioned Vauban. The soaring spaces and the very striking lighting make a visit to the Hotel d’Invalides a memorable experience, but you’ll find a special treat waiting in the attic of the museum if your timing is right.

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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. The three storey store can entertain the shopper for an hour or two and also offers a fashionable cafe at which to be seen. The main floor offers cool electronic devices, choice CDs (and LPS), books, jewelry, and all manner of lifestyle accessories. A specialized boutique offers an apothecarial approach and designs custom fragrances for clientèle. Upstairs, the fashion shop has the ambiance of a fine gallery, with outfits and ensembles displayed in situ. There are all manner of sensory pleasures at Colette and its the sort of place where you want to touch, feel, listen, smell, in short a full sensory experience. In an environment of extended creativity, you can lose yourself and if you aren’t careful a wee bit of change. I look forward to a return visit soon.
BTW, the website is as funky as the store. Its stylish Paris.

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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.
The wonderfully rich combination of media is an example of virtual tourism, well-done, without having an live motion video. It would be quite fun to put a camera in the front of one of the fully automated lead cars on Line 14.
This project was submitted as final term project at the University of Kent by Richard Whittaker in 2005. Great job!
On a separate note, a tourist I spied taking advantage of the new rental bike system in Paris had actually taped his video camera into the front basket of the bike and was obviously going to create a great bike’s perspective tour of Paris.

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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.

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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.
The setting is one of calm, coolth and leisure. The Bercy area seems a step removed from Paris proper.
Tangent starts here: I stumbled across it one day when I wondered what the area to the east of Paris was like. I took the metro further in that direction than I had before, planning to walk back towards the centre of town. I got off at ‘Les Ardoines’ metro station in a suburban industrial area (why? i am always trusting in serendipity) that was not quite the pretty picture of the city of light that one might associate with Paris. It was gritty, foreign and certainly authentic. The area clearly was of mixed use with factories interspersed with residential areas and small corner snack bars where locals glanced with some incredulity at someone, clearly a tourist, traipsing through their neighbourhood. Now, such excursions in the past have gotten me within a hair’s width of trouble. But I wandered a bit. The factories were dingy and many seemed abandoned. Perhaps not all as dingy as I might suggest. I found this one quite impressive in fact. I walked for a while and eventually determined that the area was authentic, but not that much more exciting that wandering though a Canadian suburb and certainly not the tourist scene. I hopped back on the metro and backtracked getting off the metro, for whatever reason, at the Bibliotheque Francois Mitterrand (sorry for lack of appropriate accents, still working on this).
The bibliotheque itself is one of the most impressive research libraries I have ever used. I ended up working there more extensively later on, but at first blush, the four narrow modernistic towers emerging from sunken gardens were quite an impressive contrast to the industrial area I had been wandering in. I checked out the library and made plans to get accreditation and come back later. Then I cam across the pub next door. The Frog at the British Library is part of a <a href=http://www.frogpubs.com/” target=“_blank”>chain of english-style pubs in France that offer an assortment of microbrews. In time I became quite fond of the Inseine and the Dark de Triomphe. After being suitably waylaid for lunch at the Frog pub, I strayed across the river and came across Bercy Village. Tangent ends here.
As I mentioned earlier, the village was developed out of the various storage vaults and outbuildings of a wine market. The architecture is of original stone masonry tastefully mixed with new glass and black steel construction. Cobblestone yards ground the village and feature carefully retained signs of the past use such as iron tracks for transporting casks, crates and the such. The stores are definitely upscale, but make for serious browsing. There are restaurants and bars, and in particular a second Frog Pub. In this case, The Frog at Bercy has a lush green patio and the same collection of microbrews as its companion across the river. These fine establishments have most recently begun an innovative programme that allows one to log onto the Frog website and treat someone in Paris to a drink at on of the bars. Cool.
The cinema is one of those large megaplex types run by UCG, but it is carefully hidden at the one extreme of the village and not externally imposing. It allows it to fulfill its function and offer a wide selection of cinematic diversions without detracting from the ambiance of small village of boutiques and shops.
For me the luxury of being able to research at the Francois Mitterrand, and to intersperse this with a trip to the cinema or to the pub made makes for a wonderful existence. Now, if I could find a deal on a condo in the area and an appropriate research position to fund my lifestyle, life would be sweet indeed. Could Bercy Village be situated anywhere else in the world, absolutely. There are probably Bercy Villages all over the world, but that hardly detracts from a thoughtfully crafted urbanspace that offers a wonderful diversion on a fine afternoon.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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