Page 1 of 4
Paris, France
And you were waiting there, swimming through apologies
A safe, familiar place to start, near the end of the Tuileries at the edge of Place de la Concorde, a mid point in such a wonderfully safe, familiar late afternoon walk.
I am not a big fan of the art at the Louvre- it all feels so static, so dead. I am however a big fan of its plaza- complete with its obscenely detailed and scaled palace, a few shiny, contextual glass pyramids and one end of the greatest urban axis on earth. On my fifth visit my only expectation in Paris is this walk- starting at the Palais Royal Metro Station, walking through its Hector Guimard gate and through the Passage Richelieu, then a hard right all the way to the Arc. Along the way are enough gardens and monuments and cafes and life to distract even the most jaded of travelers.
These is not the first slides I sent from Paris, hell they're not even the first slides I sent from Place de la Concorde. Despite that fact, despite the fact that I have stood in these same places for five of the last seven years, I still take pictures as if it is the first time I have seen such sights, as if I somehow expect that I will never see them again.
Nothing special, a typical elevation, trees, buildings, shadows, a river. This is Ille de Saint Louis, the island that's not Ille de Cite, same as it ever was.
The second or third most famous opera house on earth is no longer home to the Paris Opera. It has moved to the generally hated people's opera house at the Carlos Ott building off the Bastille leaving the ornate, elitist Palais Garnier as a hollow tourist attraction that occasionally hosts special, non opera events.
The Palais Garnier is supposedly built atop an underground lake and is home to a fictional, singing phantom. At least ten years ago, maybe fifteen, maybe more, I took my grandmother to see a touring company of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. At the time I remember thinking that the story had real issues- in it a woman falls in love with an antisocial guy who lives in a basement and always wears a mask but then decides she doesn't love him when she sees that the mask covered a small, superficial scar on his cheek- such shallow behavior for such a deeply rich building.
Meanwhile in 1964, Marc Chagall forever changed the opera with the addition of a ceiling mural in the performance hall, a work that feels like it has always been there even though it got there about a hundred years late.
