#i have to take a catholic approach. in centering myself i am being vain. no one can see no one caaaaares accidental telepathy isn't reallll

[femmeterypolka]

prof sent the first chapter of all the books we're going to read and guys i think 'paul takes the form on a mortal girl' is going to be this semester's 'killing myself novel'

[trespiratesque]

Day 10

Thursday 4/20

Today I was set to explore the 19th arrondissement. I slept in by accident until 11, though. I admit it's nice not being on a real schedule with consequences for oversleeping so that I can give my body what it needs when it needs it. I left the house a little after noon and took the metro to the Stalingrad stop - not the closest to my ultimate destination, but at the head of a canal I wanted to walk along. It was a sunny, but windy, walk along the canal, with a good amount of others out on their lunch breaks. There were some cafes lining the canal, then some dusty shaded park area took over. There, the cafes moved onto barges - clearly not going anywhere, but barges all the same. None of the ones I passed looked open, but I was at least a little enchanted by the idea. I do intend to take a bateau-mouche at some point, one of the Seine tour boats. But for now, I kept walking. The park provided ping-pong tables where some teenage boys were playing, and further along a couple of kids were practicing juggling - early stages, by the look of it.

A moment here to discuss street art: it is impossible for me to photograph or even take notes on all, or even a fraction, of the public art I see. Some is graffiti, some is clearly installed by the city, some I really can't tell. But it is everywhere, and it is largely high-quality. Paint, chalk, tile, posters, stickers, stencils, sharpie. Plenty of humor, and some thought-provoking questions ("What is your France?" lettered just outside our front door). But whenever you visualize me here, know that if I am outside in public space, I am greeted by new visual art every few steps.  

Today's primary location, though, was more dedicated to the aural arts. The Paris Philharmonic is part of a big complex of performance spaces and exhibition halls in the 19th arrondissement. There is a museum of science and industry, the Paris orchestra hall, and some other venues. But the Philharmonic itself hosts the Musée de la Musique - the Museum of Music. I approached via a large, open court centered on a lovely yellow stone fountain, and followed the signs for the museum. The ticket line was clearly suited for concert ticket sales, and the museum entrance was tucked a little ways back and to the side - clearly not the main attraction in this building, but I found it didn't suffer for all that.

Once I bought my ticket (again something like $8 full price, I will never stop marveling at and highlighting how fucked up it is that museums/zoos in the US charge $25-50 because our government hates science/education/independent learning and won't subsidize them) and found the proper entrance, I was handed a headset with an attached device, about the size of a smartphone but twice as thick. This was my free audioguide. Both it and the woman who taught me to use it spoke English. Strangely, she admonished me to be certain to wear my messenger bag on my side? I was unlikely to bump anything with it unintentionally, but I acquiesced regardless.

The museum is divided roughly by century, starting with the 17th. It is laser-focused for the first three floors on France and its neighbors, then hastily includes the rest of the world close to the end. But for what it is, I was very impressed. The exhibits are primarily historical instruments accompanied by videos and audio clips produced by the museum. Each subsection of a floor is typically headed by an educational or informational audio clip about the instrument, opera, or concept at hand, followed by optional clips of some of the different instruments being played, and 1-3 videos of interviews with historians, the instrument's manufacturing process, or re-creation of an event. For example, the very first exhibit is about Orfeo (Orpheus) by Monteverdi, a very early opera that made a big step toward defining the genre. You are greeted by a layout of artifacts representing what the orchestra that played at Orfeo's premiere might have looked like. There is a small maquette or diorama of what the venue looked like, and a video you can sync up your audioguide with telling you some of the context leading up to that first performance. You can then listen to two or three of the displayed instruments played solo by some savant who knows how to play a clavichord or positive organ correctly. Then, you can hear clips of the opera fully orchestrated and sung, narrated with a summary of the opera's events. This is all contained in about fifteen square feet, with a dozen more lit cases of vain, lovingly-embellished instruments jostling to be the next to absorb your admiration.

There is even more than music and instruments - though these exhibits are arranged by people who REALLY KNOW INSTRUMENTS, and the ornamentation on almost everything has to be seen to be believed. I was delighted to see a few painted representations of Saint Cecilia, my birthday saint in the Catholic tradition (I am definitely not Catholic) and the patron saint of music. She looked holy and weird, as saints so often do, eyes staring into the distance or at the ceiling in a trance. I learned about the birth of musical notation and its transition over hundreds of years, starting with ninth-century monks' squiggles indicating "it goes up here" and "it gets a little wobbly at these words." I listened to every available audio clip and watched every video on the first floor, though not all the way through some of the solo performances. It took me over ninety minutes, and I was so very happy. I bathed myself in beautiful, unfamiliar sounds (because they will play you shit you will never ever hear of anywhere else but that really deserves to be heard). It felt like I was floating through a cave of treasures, each object longing to tell me its secrets. I immediately knew I had made the right decision about where to spend my day. I'm not a musician, nor am I particularly well-educated about music, classical or otherwise. But as a pleasure-seeker, this museum indulged my ears in a way that not many places can, or even try to. All this on the first floor.

I decided to restrict my explorations a little more and just listen to the the educational clips for the most part. The videos still captivated me, though. Fortunately, the museum was rather empty for most of my visit, so I seldom had to jockey for a good viewpoint. It also looked like it would be very accessible to people with restrictions on their physical mobility, except maybe the fourth floor (which was pretty boring anyway, 20th century). The second floor was the 18th century, filled with virginals, guitars, viols and their relations, horns, transverse flutes, tons of other woodwinds. There was a strange item known as a "regale" that sounded a lot like electronica. Later, country instruments came into vogue like the bagpipes, the hurdy-gurdy, and the tambourine. They had many examples of all of these, a line of harps six or seven deep. And again, nothing here was plain or industrial. Everything begs to be looked at. I saw a video of how horns are made by hand, I learned about the economic impact that the guitar's emergence had on some small towns in Germany.

At one point, I heard the blats of a trumpet cut through the sound coming out of my headphones. At the far end of the second-floor hall I was in, a woman was sitting on a small stage addressing an audience. I made my way slowly towards her, not skipping anything that interested me. I'd read that live performances happened in the museum from time to time - perhaps this was one? But no, she was really engaging in conversation and dialogue with the audience members. Sadly, it was all conducted in French, at native speaker speed, so I could only comprehend scraps of it. But I understood that she was comparing the bugle she had to the trumpet she also had. At one point she demonstrated the uses of all the different caps you might see on the bell of a trumpet. Another time, juxtaposing the differing tones of the instruments, she played one out of each side of her mouth. I think she probably sat there for two hours or more, explaining, answering questions, and tending to her audience like a professional performer. One of my fears did come to pass, in that she asked a question of several people around the room, including me; but I speak more than enough French to say that I don't speak French, and she treated me gracefully. And then she played a bit of Blue Moon, and I forgot all about it.

I moved on to the third floor, hearing some Debussy compositions I hadn't heard before, seeing a number of portraits and landscapes. I was getting a bit fatigued by this point, though still feeling in high spirits. There was a bit on Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring, and then later some very cool video footage of Stravinsky conducting The Firebird. As I proceeded into the 20th century, things started to get weird. They had things on display like theremins and an ondes Martenot. Further on there was a theremin that was there to be played by visitors, my first time using one. It's hard to play, like, Twinkle Twinkle on it, because there is no way to stop the tone from emitting. This floor also was a bit harder to navigate, the walkways became thinner and the displays less orderly. But that's thematically in line with what happened to formal music in the twentieth century, I think, and perhaps purposeful as far as the design went.

The fifth and final section was basically the "world music" section, which I found pretty disappointing. There was a selection of items from former French colonies in Africa, a set of large percussive instruments from Thailand, some string instruments from India. I don't have a quibble with the collection itself, but rather with the treatment of this area. There were not a lot of videos or descriptive audio clips explaining the history, evolution, or context of these instruments, likely because the academics at this museum do not study these objects with the same specialization and focus as they do European instruments. Why separate them out and put them at the end, when visitors are likely to be fatigued and walk right by them? Why not array them with other instruments like them, and let visitors compare their sounds again ones Europeans are likely already familiar with? I'm hardly surprised, but was bummed to see white supremacy and xenophobia turn up in an otherwise quality museum and kill a perfectly good enrichment opportunity.

Emerging back into the sunny day around 5pm, I checked in with Beck, who was planning to stay at work a little longer. So I headed for a park I had picked out. But truth be told, I think I'm going to be knocking parks off my to-do list for now. I usually get there and think, great, I'm here, now what. I seem to prefer places where there is more guided activity. I have also typically just taken a walk to get to the park, so it seems silly to then take a second walk in the designated walk location when I could instead spend that foot effort getting to something else of interest. This probably does not apply to things like the Jardin des Plantes or the Tuileries or the like, particularly beautiful gardens, but on my own, I probably won't visit many parks unless they contain something I'm excited about.

Eventually I turned around and headed home to make dinner with Beck - stir-fry and whatever grains I made yesterday. We put endives in it, which was slightly weird because of their bitterness, but it worked out in the end. We heard about the Champs-Elysees shooting late in the day, since we don't watch French news, and let our people know we were okay.