cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
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Le Institut du Monde Arabe is another extraordinary museum in Paris, starting with the gorgeous building by super-hot architect Jean Nouvel.
The collection is small-ish but beautifully and eccentrically displayed.
Contemporary stuff (“Zikr” by Etel Adnan, below) mixed in with antiquity.
Commissioned work by Rodolphe Hammadi, including “Capitaine Achab”:
And the building is curious and quirky and geometric.
The elevators have Egyptian figures stencilled on them.
BULLYING
[LinkedIn founder Reid] Hoffman persuaded his father to send him first to a private school in Berkeley, and then to the Putney School, a progressive boarding school in Vermont, which another classmate was planning to attend… Once he got there, his relationship with his friend from Berkeley turned sour and another student started a bullying campaign against him. He compared it to the organized cruelty in “Lord of the Flies,” saying, “Little harassments, the techniques of trying to demonstrate power and dominance—that was my first experience of betrayal.” Hoffman used game logic to solve the problem: “The way you deal with bullies is you change their economic equation. Make it more expensive for them to hassle you.” He went to the chief bully, and said that if he continued to hassle him, “ ‘I will break everything you own.’ He stopped.”
–Nicholas Lemann, “The Network Man” in The New Yorker
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It turned out to be a day of pilgrimages to shops and eateries we’d heard about, such as the cafe next door to the famous bakery Poilane.
The comic book district in the Latin Quarter.
Inside and outside the justifiably legendary bookstore Shakespeare and Company.
The notorious “love locks” along the Pont de l’Archevêché, adjacent to Nortre Dame on the Ile de Cite.
We’d heard about Ace of Falafel as THE Middle Eastern fast-food destination in Le Marais, the equivalent to the Halal Guys stand at 53rd and Sixth Avenue that perennially has lines down the block, while nearly identical vendors nearby stand idle. But it was Shabbat, and As de Falafel was closed, so Bruno and Alex took us to the (less observant) Jewish deli across the street for a delicious bagel with three toppings.
The much-beloved tea emporium Mariage Freres, where I went the same kind of crazy that American college students experience at hash cafes in Amsterdam.
Then there was Coton Doux, a store exclusively sells shirts in riotously patterned designs. We each bought four.
After days of rain and clouds, the sun finally came out and suddenly the buildings along the river didn’t look quite so drab.
For dinner, Willi’s Wine Bar — chic, high-end, tasty food and wine, full of American tourists like us whose friends recommended the joint.
And then a walk home through deserted streets past a gay sauna and a sex club.
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The Musee D’Orsay lived up to its reputation as one of the great art institutions in the world — beautifully designed, architecturally magnificent, fantastic collection, meticulously curated and viewer-friendly — starting with the plaza out front and the statuary depicting the earth’s continents as female deities.
Inside you’ve got all the French greats: Cezanne, Renoir, Rodin.
Jean Delville’s phenomenal School of Plato, which looks like Jesus conducting a Body Electric workshop at a radical faerie gathering:
The most succinct description I’ve encountered of art nouveau:
And numerous discoveries, like this large and startling portrait of Sarah Bernhardt by Georges Clairin:
François Garas’s Temple of Thought (dedicated to Beethoven):
Osman Hamdy Bey’s Old Man at the Tomb of the Infants:
Ernest Barrias’s The Alligator Hunters (aka The Nubians):
I’m so literal-minded that I took this poster to mean, besides “no eating” and “no flash photos” and “no smoking,” to mean “don’t point”:
Andy gently pointed out that it probably means “Don’t touch.”
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When our MisterBNB reservation was cancelled the day before we arrived, we scrambled to find a hotel room at the last minute and landed at the lovely Residence Des Arts on the Left Bank, just a block from the Seine.
A famous arty little enclave (which could probably be said for every neighborhood in Paris) — art cinema next door, hotel down the street where many Beat poets had stayed.
Downside: noisy Irish pub right outside our window.
Mostly rainy day but we walked around, acclimated ourselves, and met our friend Bruno for dinner at a favorite restaurant in his neighborhood, Le Marais.
another eye opens 
