Coup de cœur means “a delightful special thing you’ll fall in love with” or “personal favorite” as I’ve mentioned elsewhere and I’m using the term half-ironically because the French use it so much. They’re crazy about it. You can’t go five minutes in France without seeing it, at least in print; I think not really in everyday speech. But these really are some of my coups de cœur.
Subway poster for exhibition “Baudelaire: Melancholic Modernity”
At corner convenience stores you can buy liver in pieces and as pâté (they had duck and pork); terrine (similar to pâté,) duck confit (cooked in a lot of fat and salt which naturally preserves it), and salsify (a root vegetable that was common in the US in colonial times but has largely disappeared. I’ve heard it doesn’t have much flavor and requires a lot of peeling so I don’t think you’re missing much.)
A few discoveries in the byways of the Louvre
Costume designs from pageants for Louis XIV. The museum has 1,644 different ones.
When I took piano lessons I played a piece by Debussy called Danseuses de Delphes (Delphic Dancers). I knew his inspiration was ancient Greek statues and how he imagined ritual dancers at the sacred site of Delphi but what I learned just now is that one sculpture in particular had inspired him and this is it.
Ivory model of a worksshop. For scale it’s maybe a foot and half wide.
There was something of a rhinoceros fad in the 1600s when a couple of them went on tour around Europe.
Assyrian winged bull (with five legs)
“I Louvre You!”; sweatshirt with Mona Lisa face (inside hood) and hands
Mobilier National – the federal antique furniture repository
The Mobilier National (“national furnishings”) is the storehouse for the thousands of pieces of priceless antique furniture and tapestries that they use for decorating the highest-level government offices and embassies, and occasionally they put on exhibitions. This one showed furnishings from three of Napoleon’s palaces that were torn down long ago and their contents stored in the Mobilier National. The engraving shows Napoleon at the theater “sleeping, waking up, and looking around to see if anyone saw him.”
The Centre Pompidou is going to be closed for several years for renovations so I thought I’d better take some standard pics in case I never get back. Plus the spectacular lockers in the coat room which have clear doors to prevent terrorism and light up green if they’re available and red when taken.
Saul Steinberg at Centre Pompidou – just don’t call him “the one who did that New Yorker cover with the funny map of the U.S.”
This was a big solo retrospective. Although he’ll forever be associated with covers for the New Yorker magazine, especially the immortal “View of the World from 9th Avenue” from 1976, he had a diverse, prolific and richly imaginative career filled with a unique combination of unforced, childlike playfulness, thoughtful insight, dry wit, surrealist absurdity, and goofy humor. He was much more than “the guy who did that funny map”.
Had to toss in a couple more standard tourist pictures… the Louvre, Tuileries gardens, Place de la Concorde…
