Tuesday morning Parisian open thread

Last night I went with my friend Serge to the "Dreamland" exhibit at the Pompidou Center, located in the Marais. You'll recall that the Pompidou Center is the inside out glass and tubes building. The exhibit was difficult to describe, I'm really not sure what it was about. But it was really interesting. It went from the World's Fair to Vegas to artists' visions of the future. I think the idea overall was varying visions of the future, or more than the future, visions of an almost whimsical architectural future. It was very cool.



The exhibit was on the top floor of Pompidou, which might be 7 floors high or so, but in Paris seven floors is huge. The city is so low, the buildings are so small, that, like Washington, DC, the seventh floor can be amazing. And at Pompidou it is. All of these photos are from that top floor. I kind of the like the one just above, you'll note the Eiffel Tower peaking over the tube in the middle of the photo.



That would be Serge, above, in one of the people moving tubes. Serge is an interesting guy. An artist by training - he went to the school of the Louvre - he also, for some odd reason, seems to know a lot about everything. From French history to the GATT accords. He's a very typically French, or even European, "intellectual" - a word we don't use much in American English. Just absurdly educated, and strangely so, in terms of the breadth of the education beyond his primary discipline. Being an artist, Serge has an 'artist's card' which gets him, and me, into any museum in France for free. You gotta love this country.



You couldn't ask for better timing. Just as the exhibit closed, at 9pm, the sun set over Paris. There's probably nothing better in Paris than sunset time. Whether on a bridge, or atop a building, or having a nighttime picnic along the Seine or in a park, nothing beats the sunsets in this town.