We choose Palais de Tokyo, a modern art museum near la Tour Eiffel. The museum is a labyrinth of giant rooms containing huge installations by artists from all over the world - multimedia works that mash together sculpture, paint, audio, video, old yellow Volkswagen vans and more.
One such piece, by the Mexican art collective Biquini Wax EPS, holds a life-sized, plasticene orca with primary-colored, pop culture toys spilling out of its entrails and looping footage from Free Willy next to it. It’s evidently a commentary on Mexican politics, but the connection there is so over my head as to be invisible from way down here.
Another room holds a looping video of an orchestra of Bangladeshi harmonium players playing a single note in unison, and yet another - this one deep in the museum’s bowels - sets you smack in the middle of a Manila street scene where men yell from the darkness and you can climb inside the aforementioned Volkswagen van, don headphones and hear voices speaking or music playing (depending upon whether you’re Bennett or Griffin).
We all enjoyed the museum, and each of us spent significant time exiting through the gift shop (Bennett enjoyed one of the lounge chairs there for a bit).
Nous retournons a l’appartement and had some lunch. It was raining, but still I went out to capture the mosaic tile art of Invader, hundreds of which are scattered throughout the city (there’s an app for that).
I made my way across the Seine and onto the Ile Saint-Louis, from which I took this photo of the other side of Notre Dame before heading to the Left Bank to visit the Grand Mosque.
Pam and I visited mosques in Turkey in the early 1990s; this one was modest, paling in architectural comparison to those minareted wonders. Still, I went inside, as it is open for visitors, where, after walking around, I removed my shoes and entered the prayer room to sit and pray.
Men all around sat, lay down, stood up, picked up holy books from a shelf, prostrated themselves… I think it was 5 pm when the call to prayer began. I left then as men streamed in from the streets. I wanted to stay for that, but it felt imposterish. Back down the streets past the Sorbonne and the Cuvier Fountain - a very cool animal-themed fountain at the Rue de Linne; back to the Seine where I spoke to a young artist on the Left Bank, and back across to meet the others for dinner.
Happy Noodles was closed. Everyone was hungry, and we made do with a Lebanese kabob and crepe joint that was merely passable. It was a beautiful evening, and we walked around the Marais district. Rowan stopped in a dress shop and bought a cool, flowy shirt, and the girls and I all got gelato behind the Pompidou. We were served there by a young Frenchman who spoke English with a British, rather than French, accent, having lived in Britain, and turned us onto a new flavor - violet. Pressed from actual violets in Toulouse, it is colorless and colored naturally with beet pigment. It’s amazing. Bennett got an eclair at a nearby patisserie.
Berit and I watched the pigeon man there as an American tourist had her boyfriend film her walking repeatedly back and forth in front of the pigeons - take one, take two, take three - I think she was trying to capture the moment as the pigeons all lifted into the air with her walking in the foreground, her perfect Instagram moment.
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