You're probably tired of all the Paris blogs. That's okay, you can skip this one. This is Eric having fun with the pictures he took.
We've got Annabel outside the Louvre, Virgil and Dante checking out the action, and a scene in Notre Dame.
I took lots of pictures of Annabel from the back, looking at things, and they get me every time. I have one of her facing us in virtually the same position, but it's just not the same. It's so much more powerful when she's looking at what we're looking at, and we have the complex experience of seeing what she's seeing and seeing her seeing it. Notice how I switched into the royal "we" there. This is something parents do--we think all those other parents will feel exactly like we feel.
One of the reasons I'm writing this post, even though we've already "done" Paris, is because I've been tinkering with the photos. Every single other post in this blog this year has been unaltered, uncropped, un-anything-ed. But sometimes it's fun to tinker. I messed with stuff in most of these pictures--there's your disclaimer. It doesn't make me a better photographer, but you know what? It's not about how good a photographer I am. Alex and Annabel had fun tinkering with a couple of these with me. There'll be one from Greece later, with Galen, just to show what we could have been doing last fall with all those pictures.
The second one above I took because I love the intersection of literature and painting. Dante doesn't want us to think about him as a voyeur while he's narrating his adventures, but painters inconveniently sometimes represent what we weren't supposed to be thinking about. A great love needs a great storyteller, and a great moral system needs someone to convert those stories into their proper lessons. But all it takes is one painter to come along and mess things up...
I don't even know who this writer is, or why the quotation (which I presume is his) of "let my blood be the last verse" would be preserved in Notre Dame. I just loved the way the stained-glass light reflected off the combination of carving and words.
There are so many things to see in Paris that you have to make some tough decisions. In order for us to see anything in particular, someone had to step up and say "Let's go there." In the case of the Cluny Museum of Medieval Art it was Alex who stepped up, and we were all very grateful to her for making sure that we saw this museum and especially the tapestries. You'll have to check out the more professional images from the Cluny in order to see the fabulous unicorn tapestries. What we have here are some of the statues whose heads were chopped off during the outbreaks of French secularism and populism (those outbreaks displaying some of the best and the worst of the French character) and then, of course, some of the heads. I just love it that they have the statues situated near the heads, separately, without just putting heads back on statues. Maybe they couldn't match them up, maybe these are the leftovers and I didn't even notice the repair jobs elsewhere, but this makes for a vivid history lesson.
The small crucifix is either a relic case or was used for processionals, probably the latter, but I'm not sure since I didn't take notes or include the lower parts in the photo. I am very fond of the style here--it displays everything that appeals to me about medieval art, and even makes me want to learn how to make art myself. Too bad I made it so yellow.
And likewise the three demons in the tapestry below, much yellower than they should be, but you're also getting more detail than emerged in my original shot. I took a bunch of pictures of tapestries with speech bubbles, as I'm thinking a lot about graphic novels at the moment, and I wanted to note their ancient history. Annabel asked me to make sure to take a picture of these demons. Demons are often the best part of any piece of art they're in, and I was happy to oblige.
The bottom is more artwork from the Louvre. When it was my turn to push, I made my pitch for a return visit, since we'd only been able to see so much the first time. The one area I wanted to be sure to see was the Mesopotamian and Babylonian stuff. That's the Code of Hammurabi there on a diorite stele that is said to represent a human finger (but a lot bigger), from roughly 3700 years ago. The Europeans found it around 1900, but it had already been looted from its original owners 3200 years earlier. The Louvre is, of course, the second- or third-largest hoard of stolen goods in the world. They even have a piece of the Parthenon, which our time in Athens qualified us to take personally. Now I can hardly turn around in a place like the Louvre without wondering who took what when and from whom.
The top picture is the kind of image I can't resist photographing, although I'm never pleased with how such photographs come out, because inevitably the power of the image depends on its context--in this case, the size of these walls, the location of this courtyard off a quiet street on the edge of the Place des Voges, and the way the beautiful cold blue air heightened the sense that this vine complex was both dead and alive.
The middle picture is just a closed-up building, the local Communist Party headquarters for the 11th Arrondissement. The graffiti was fine, but what I liked was simply the fact that the communist party is just a normal part of life in France. It's been such a bogeyman in the U.S. for so long. Who will be the next relic of history? Whose lopped-off heads will one day be displayed in the Museum of the Early Digital Age?
And now we have a series from a different kind of museum, or perhaps the museum is a different kind of cemetery. This is the Pere Lachaise again. The top picture is a couple of tombs from a row occupied by former leaders of the Communist Party in France (if I'm faking the French correctly). They have large sections of thematically linked tombs, at least in the newer parts, and one of these was former politicians, and within that CP politicians. Again, I was delighted to find communists treated like regular human beings, even honored for their service to country by being featured in this hallowed ground. Besides the individual tombs there were a LOT of memorials to mass deaths, including several airline disasters. The second picture above is a memorial to members of the International Brigade who died in the Spanish Civil War. Alex has been spending a lot of time in her class talking about that war, so this particular memorial hit home for me. And, again, it honors a bunch of Reds. The bottom picture is just one of more than a dozen memorials to Holocaust victims. These were mostly very grisly. Another thing I was especially aware of during our visit to Paris, no doubt partly because we were living in the Marais, was the Jewish tradition in Paris.
Of course we had to visit some of the celebrity tombs in Pere Lachaise. I found the contrast between these two particularly poignant. We had no trouble locating Oscar Wilde's gaudy memorial; the crowd around it helped, although it made it hard to get this picture without any people in it. Lipstick, flowers, graffiti--I trust he would have approved. His reported last words--"Either this wallpaper goes or I do"--were in a clue in a crossword puzzle I did that morning.
By contrast, we had trouble finding the bottom one, and actually walked by it and had to go back a ways to pick it out. This is Gertrude Stein's tomb. Not the tallish one with the two little plants sitting on it, but the little one on the left. It could hardly be plainer or more severe (not unlike Stein herself), and there were no flowers or other contributions by visitors, except small pebbles on top of the headstone. That's pea gravel on top of the grave. No tourists around, so no problem keeping people out of the picture--her memorial, like her writing, appeals to a select few. The tomb on the left of Stein's (partly in the picture) was bigger (casting that large shadow), older, run-down; and who the heck is buried (or going to be buried) in the blank tomb on the right? This was for me perhaps the most moving moment in our whole morbid tour of the cemetery.
But I don't want to leave you on that sad note. Like I said, the impetus for yet another Paris post was the fun we had tinkering with pictures, so here's another version of Frenchiness Frenchified, in which we have attempted to take the hokey-French level all the way up to 11. Au revoir.
We've got Annabel outside the Louvre, Virgil and Dante checking out the action, and a scene in Notre Dame.
I took lots of pictures of Annabel from the back, looking at things, and they get me every time. I have one of her facing us in virtually the same position, but it's just not the same. It's so much more powerful when she's looking at what we're looking at, and we have the complex experience of seeing what she's seeing and seeing her seeing it. Notice how I switched into the royal "we" there. This is something parents do--we think all those other parents will feel exactly like we feel.
One of the reasons I'm writing this post, even though we've already "done" Paris, is because I've been tinkering with the photos. Every single other post in this blog this year has been unaltered, uncropped, un-anything-ed. But sometimes it's fun to tinker. I messed with stuff in most of these pictures--there's your disclaimer. It doesn't make me a better photographer, but you know what? It's not about how good a photographer I am. Alex and Annabel had fun tinkering with a couple of these with me. There'll be one from Greece later, with Galen, just to show what we could have been doing last fall with all those pictures.
The second one above I took because I love the intersection of literature and painting. Dante doesn't want us to think about him as a voyeur while he's narrating his adventures, but painters inconveniently sometimes represent what we weren't supposed to be thinking about. A great love needs a great storyteller, and a great moral system needs someone to convert those stories into their proper lessons. But all it takes is one painter to come along and mess things up...
I don't even know who this writer is, or why the quotation (which I presume is his) of "let my blood be the last verse" would be preserved in Notre Dame. I just loved the way the stained-glass light reflected off the combination of carving and words.
There are so many things to see in Paris that you have to make some tough decisions. In order for us to see anything in particular, someone had to step up and say "Let's go there." In the case of the Cluny Museum of Medieval Art it was Alex who stepped up, and we were all very grateful to her for making sure that we saw this museum and especially the tapestries. You'll have to check out the more professional images from the Cluny in order to see the fabulous unicorn tapestries. What we have here are some of the statues whose heads were chopped off during the outbreaks of French secularism and populism (those outbreaks displaying some of the best and the worst of the French character) and then, of course, some of the heads. I just love it that they have the statues situated near the heads, separately, without just putting heads back on statues. Maybe they couldn't match them up, maybe these are the leftovers and I didn't even notice the repair jobs elsewhere, but this makes for a vivid history lesson.
The small crucifix is either a relic case or was used for processionals, probably the latter, but I'm not sure since I didn't take notes or include the lower parts in the photo. I am very fond of the style here--it displays everything that appeals to me about medieval art, and even makes me want to learn how to make art myself. Too bad I made it so yellow.
And likewise the three demons in the tapestry below, much yellower than they should be, but you're also getting more detail than emerged in my original shot. I took a bunch of pictures of tapestries with speech bubbles, as I'm thinking a lot about graphic novels at the moment, and I wanted to note their ancient history. Annabel asked me to make sure to take a picture of these demons. Demons are often the best part of any piece of art they're in, and I was happy to oblige.
The bottom is more artwork from the Louvre. When it was my turn to push, I made my pitch for a return visit, since we'd only been able to see so much the first time. The one area I wanted to be sure to see was the Mesopotamian and Babylonian stuff. That's the Code of Hammurabi there on a diorite stele that is said to represent a human finger (but a lot bigger), from roughly 3700 years ago. The Europeans found it around 1900, but it had already been looted from its original owners 3200 years earlier. The Louvre is, of course, the second- or third-largest hoard of stolen goods in the world. They even have a piece of the Parthenon, which our time in Athens qualified us to take personally. Now I can hardly turn around in a place like the Louvre without wondering who took what when and from whom.
The top picture is the kind of image I can't resist photographing, although I'm never pleased with how such photographs come out, because inevitably the power of the image depends on its context--in this case, the size of these walls, the location of this courtyard off a quiet street on the edge of the Place des Voges, and the way the beautiful cold blue air heightened the sense that this vine complex was both dead and alive.
The middle picture is just a closed-up building, the local Communist Party headquarters for the 11th Arrondissement. The graffiti was fine, but what I liked was simply the fact that the communist party is just a normal part of life in France. It's been such a bogeyman in the U.S. for so long. Who will be the next relic of history? Whose lopped-off heads will one day be displayed in the Museum of the Early Digital Age?
And now we have a series from a different kind of museum, or perhaps the museum is a different kind of cemetery. This is the Pere Lachaise again. The top picture is a couple of tombs from a row occupied by former leaders of the Communist Party in France (if I'm faking the French correctly). They have large sections of thematically linked tombs, at least in the newer parts, and one of these was former politicians, and within that CP politicians. Again, I was delighted to find communists treated like regular human beings, even honored for their service to country by being featured in this hallowed ground. Besides the individual tombs there were a LOT of memorials to mass deaths, including several airline disasters. The second picture above is a memorial to members of the International Brigade who died in the Spanish Civil War. Alex has been spending a lot of time in her class talking about that war, so this particular memorial hit home for me. And, again, it honors a bunch of Reds. The bottom picture is just one of more than a dozen memorials to Holocaust victims. These were mostly very grisly. Another thing I was especially aware of during our visit to Paris, no doubt partly because we were living in the Marais, was the Jewish tradition in Paris.
Of course we had to visit some of the celebrity tombs in Pere Lachaise. I found the contrast between these two particularly poignant. We had no trouble locating Oscar Wilde's gaudy memorial; the crowd around it helped, although it made it hard to get this picture without any people in it. Lipstick, flowers, graffiti--I trust he would have approved. His reported last words--"Either this wallpaper goes or I do"--were in a clue in a crossword puzzle I did that morning.
By contrast, we had trouble finding the bottom one, and actually walked by it and had to go back a ways to pick it out. This is Gertrude Stein's tomb. Not the tallish one with the two little plants sitting on it, but the little one on the left. It could hardly be plainer or more severe (not unlike Stein herself), and there were no flowers or other contributions by visitors, except small pebbles on top of the headstone. That's pea gravel on top of the grave. No tourists around, so no problem keeping people out of the picture--her memorial, like her writing, appeals to a select few. The tomb on the left of Stein's (partly in the picture) was bigger (casting that large shadow), older, run-down; and who the heck is buried (or going to be buried) in the blank tomb on the right? This was for me perhaps the most moving moment in our whole morbid tour of the cemetery.
But I don't want to leave you on that sad note. Like I said, the impetus for yet another Paris post was the fun we had tinkering with pictures, so here's another version of Frenchiness Frenchified, in which we have attempted to take the hokey-French level all the way up to 11. Au revoir.
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