February 23: Musée d’Histoire de la Médecine (Museum of the History of Medicine)

The historical collections of Paris’ main medical school are well displayed in a large room, showing a selective but informative (in French only) history of medicine, mainly focused on the development of various surgical instruments… but that’s not really why we’re here, is it?

No way. We’re here to:

• Marvel at misguided medical experimentation: an enormous painting of a goat to woman blood transfer!
• Giggle at quack remedies: elaborate 18^th century glass and leather machines for transmitting soothing “electrical fluid” to patients!
• Make friends clutch their sensitive bits and groan: guys – linger with your lady friends near the 17^th century gynecological instruments and ponder the huge and suspiciously pointy speculum! Gals – get revenge by reading aloud the signage in the extensive section on kidney stones, dwelling on concepts such as “urethra,” “inflexible metal tubes,” “the operation lasted 47 minutes,” and “no anesthesia”!
• Say “WTF!!!”: a decorative table top made out of dried blood, slices of liver, and human ears to give the surface a lovely three-dimensional effect!*

So: a little educational, a little gross. What could be better? Especially if the curator is there – he looks like Igor’s slightly classier, city-living cousin, seems to have a tendency to refuse attempts to pay the (nominal) entry fee, and will, if you let him, talk your ear off about the collections. But beware – you know where that ear will end up…

*Seriously – not kidding. It also incorporates a foot. It’s a clear front-runner for my list of the most bizarre objects in Paris.

February 17: Recommendation Roundup

It’s day 48, and I’ve visited 42 museums or exhibitions (including a couple I haven’t yet written up). Here’s a summary of my recommendations, in reverse chronological order:

As Essential as a Baguette

• Musée d’Orsay (“make time for people-watching, a.k.a. ‘Paris’ Funniest Tourist Meldowns’”)
• Louvre (“what seemed like every tourist in Paris, mostly wandering helplessly or running around with small infants screaming “Where baby changing room?!?” at museum guards”)
• Centre Pompidou (“I and a bunch of other jet-setting twenty-somethings are all on our computers, although I hope that no one else is googling ‘Paris apartment how to turn on water’”)

As Much to be Avoided as Leftover Snails

• Institut du Monde Arabe (“This place is chock-a-block with little sh*ts, and is such an informational desert that I started humming the theme song from A Fistful of Dollars”)
• Musée Cognacq-Jay (“erotic genre scene paintings, which include what seem to be white slave and maid-on-mistress action”)
• L’Adresse: Musée de la Poste (“Are you the Rain Man? If so, you’ll love this museum”)
• Musée des Arts Décoratifs (“I’m pretty sure that this museum is like an abusive relationship")
• Maison de Balzac (“a big splotch of disappointment on my day”)
• Musée de la Contrefaçon (“organized by a manufacturers’ association which wants you to pay a couple of Euro for the privilege of walking through an infomercial about the evils of counterfeiting”)
• Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (“how can “upholstered in python-skin” seem so good in concept and yet be so lame in execution?”)
• Le Cabinet d’histoire du Jardin des Plantes (“On the plus side, it’s only about five rooms, and the exhibitions seems to rotate frequently, if you like your tedium contained and varied”)

Like Foie Gras: You’re in Paris, So You Should Give it a Try

• Musée de la Franc-Maconnerie (“it was like Christmas and my birthday rolled up into one perfectly-sized collection of assorted weirdass”)
• Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (“balls-out decorative gilded mishmash”)
• Musée National Eugène Delacroix (“all of his female saints seem to be experiencing an ecstasy only partially spiritual”)
• Musée de l’Assistance Publique et Hôpitaux de Paris (“It’s totally worth going to this museum just to see the reactions of your friends – no one I’ve told so far has been able to resist laughing at the spectacular nerdiness of a trip to what is basically a Museum of Medicare”)
• Palais du Tokyo (“there were some cushions set up with a sign announcing story-time for 3 year olds next to a replica of the Unabomber’s cabin, but I wasn’t around for long enough to hear what sort of fairy tales those were”)
• Musée Guimet (“don’t be scared away by the probability that you’ll be the only person in the building who doesn’t possess a CD of whale sounds set to soft jazz”)
• Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature (“Just forget the Louvre – proceed directly here from the airport”)

Kinda like Tripe: Good if That’s Your Thing

• Museum of the Order of the Liberation (“Imagine digging through old trunks in the attic with your grandparents while they reminisce – if your grandparents were members of the French Resistance…”)
• “Paris Inondé 1910” (“What happens to polar bears when the zoo floods?”)
• Le Laboratoire (“neuroreceptors, the anthropology of space, and set theory which magically produce an algorithm which is to be translated into a building by a spider-like robot excreting bio-concrete”)
• Musée National du Moyen Age (“if you’re only going to like one set of tapestries, this is it (says me, who usually gets the dry heaves at the idea of looking at tapestries)”)
• Musée de Montmartre (“it needs a combination of Molly Ringwald and Thomas Hoving to clean up the flaking paint, throw away the cheesy/creepy mannequins, and whip up some better signage”)
• Musée de la Monnaie (“a perfect place to send your visiting parents for a morning while you run errands (aka, sleep off a hangover)”)
• Maison Européenne de la Photographie (“big caveat, the guy who showed me the most attention did have a goatee”)
• Musée de la Mode et du Textile (“well-organized signage in French and English, which I’m sure would have been very informative if I hadn’t spent the entire time thinking ‘pretty pretty WANT’”)
• Musée Jacquemart-André (“just to give you insight into the mysterious mind of an art historian, here’s what’s going on when we spent hours joyfully screaming at each other in a collector’s house museum: it’s like going on Maury to argue about paternity tests”)
• Musée Marmottan-Monet (“don’t be fooled into giving up your coat – I myself have vowed that the Marmottan-Monet Museum is the last time my fingers will turn into little ice-lumps.”)
• Musée Dapper (“one could describe the exhibition as 150 randomly-selected objects worn by dudes from several centuries ago to the present over a large portion of the globe’s landmass”)
• Maison de Victor Hugo (“the sheer enthusiasm shown by the French nation for their favorite literary lion – it’s like when a cute little kid insists on explaining how their Pokemon cards work (“and then, he moved to the Chanel Islands – bam! and then, Les Misérables was like level up!”)
• Grande Galerie de l’Evolution (“profound thought: giraffes are TALL”)
• Musée Carnavalet (“the third floor is a must-see if you start to feel all tingly at the thought of seeing the makeup kit Marie Antoinette used in prison”)
• Petit Palais (“if the security guards have time and inclination enough to make cute little jokes, you can be sure that the museum is delightfully obscure enough that their lives aren’t poisoned by tourists asking ‘is THIS where the Da Vinci code thing was?’”)

February 16: Musée de l’Ordre de la Liberation (Museum of the Order of the Liberation)

Sure, this museum (in a wing of the Invalides) has some problems. Too much of the exhibition design is amateur-hour-central – e.g., much of the signage is the love child of a laser-printer and a laminating machine. Too much historical knowledge is expected of the visitor – e.g., rooms dedicated to particular military units (which isn’t really helpful to, say, me, whose knowledge of historical events gets really sketchy after the fall of the Roman Empire). But that said… boy, this place is cool. It focuses on individuals and their stories, told with photographs and personal belongings. Imagine digging through old trunks in the attic with your grandparents while they reminisce – if your grandparents were members of the French Resistance who parachuted in to sabotage trains in Vichy France, were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and then made it back to Paris to celebrate liberation with homemade flags.

February 16: Musée des Plans-reliefs (Museum of Relief Maps)

Talk about hyper-specialization: this is a museum (really, just a couple of large rooms in the attic of the Invalides) dedicated solely to a collection of scale models of French fortresses, made mostly in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Think really obsessive model train landscapes, only minus the trains. Actually, think model trains in a submarine – the models loom out of almost complete darkness, with place names shining in neon green, and so the general visual atmosphere is similar to the climatic scenes in Das Boot. “Mildly interesting” is about the best review I can give.

February 16: Musée de l’Armée (Museum of the Army)

In the Hôtel des Invalides (a former military rest-home established by Napoleon) there are two churches and at least four museums. It’s like all of the Smithsonian Museums squished into one building – so much museological shock and awe that, after walking from one end of the complex to the other, I stopped off at the cafeteria before I even bought my admission ticket. It was clearly no day to skip breakfast.

The main attractions are Napoleon’s tomb, in one of the churches, and the Musée de l’Armée. The museum is surprisingly well-organized and accessible for a place which seems to hold multiple examples of every single armament and uniform every touched by a member of the French military. Thankfully, the museum is clearly broken up into areas by time period, so you can chose whether you want to gawk at knights or at tanks. Also, the display pays a lot of attention to army life in general, not just gory battles, so you don’t have to be a jarhead to enjoy yourself (although, speaking of enjoying yourself, a significant percentage of my fellow visitors were members of various armed forces, so it’s a good hunting ground if you’re into men or women in uniform). Be sure to check out the basement’s high-tech exhibition area dedicated to panting, throbbing adulation of Charles de Gaulle, which falls all over itself trying to make his legacy palatable to both the left and the right.

February 11: Musée Maillol (Maillol Museum)

This place is just like the Guggenheim: ladies who lunch and hip youngsters looking at a teeny bit of permanent collections and a couple floors worth of special exhibition. And so, like the Guggenheim, whether it’s worth a visit is almost wholly dependent on whether the exhibition is good or not. I’ll report back if the next exhibition here is bad, but I think that they can be trusted to rustle up interesting, if not especially challenging art. The current exhibition is called “C’est la Vie! Vanities from Caravaggio to Damien Hirst,” but you can refer to it as “Skulls, Skulls, and More Skulls!” since the inclusion criterion seems to have been “is there a skull in this work of art? if yes, put in the exhibition; if no, please add a skull and try again.” (Also, if the painting which is labeled as by Caravaggio is actually by Caravaggio, I will eat a skull).

February 11: Musée de la Franc-Maconnerie (Museum of French Freemasonry)

Breaking news, dear readers! Today the Museum of French Freemasonry reopened after a long and thorough renovation. And it looks amazing – all sleek brushed steel and pinpoint lights, as if Lex Luthor opened a museum of the history of evil scientists.

And as for the contents – it was like Christmas and my birthday rolled up into one perfectly-sized collection of assorted weirdass: gold embroidered ritual Masonic aprons worn by members of the Bonaparte family! Not-overly-skillfully-rendered paintings of 18^th c. Masonic initiations (dudes in perukes playing with skulls)! Did I mention ritual aprons!!!

Plus… I think that I actually learned things. Yes, that’s right – all I was expecting was to gawk at the regalia of semi-secret, quasi-religious, basically-a-drinking-club Masonry – but, turns out that the museum does a good job laying out the social history of the organization: its introduction into France, various prosecutions, its political alignments, etc. Above all, my world changed a little with my realization that, in France, the Masons are on the left: they started out not a fan of the monarchy and lately were big backers of the legalization of abortion. Coming from my understanding of American Masonry (as an activity of your Republican grandfather), this was like hearing that Walt Disney founded the ACLU.

Worth a half-hour if you like conspiracy theories or the wackier side of the Enlightenment.

February 10: “Paris Inondé 1910” (“Flooded Paris 1910”)

What happens to polar bears when the zoo floods? In the case of the 1910 flood of Paris, when the Seine rose more than 8 meters, they were left to fend for themselves. But don’t worry – they survived their stay in a more-watery-than-usual enclosure, as did all the other zoo animals except two antelopes and a giraffe (who died of pneumonia). The flood caused only one human death, despite making large areas of Paris look like Venice, and so the reaction of the majority of Parisians seems to have been “Flood holiday - wheeeee!” One letter on display in this exhibition, put on by the city government, says that a flooded Paris is such a marvelous sight that it’s a pity that God arranges for it only once every 100 years.

The signage is very much in French, but if you’re interested in the first urban natural disaster captured by the full panoply of modern news technology – film reels, amateur photographs, comic commemorative postcards – you can look at the pictures on their website or check out a new book by Jeffrey H. Jackson, Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910.

And yes – I have nothing critical or especially funny to say about an exhibition about an old flood. I just liked it, ok? Get off my back already.

February 7: Musée d’Orsay (Orsay Museum)

Of course you should visit the Musée d’Orsay. It has an amazing collection of 19^th century art, laid out in a way that allows you to see the evolution of modern art – just start here and you’ll understand what a change this was. And then you can go look at Van Gogh, Gauguin, Daumier, get into a Monet vs. Manet aesthetic throw-down, whatever.

But… prepare yourself. If it’s a required stop for you, remember that it’s a required stop for everyone else, too. And the Orsay is not designed for crowds. There are narrow hallways and small rooms which can cause the crowd to behave like a slo-mo mosh pit. There are enough multi-level platforms and staircases to make your feet hurt just looking at them. And the arrangement requires you to backtrack to fit all of the rooms, leading to much tourist anxiety about missing something.

Crowds plus layout problems does result in some spectacular tourist misbehavior: I saw many people fondling statues, two people having a snack in the galleries, one girl applying hairspray, and one older American quiet-shouting at his wife “why don’t YOU hold the map for once!” as he shoved the museum plan into her hands and stormed off.

Some general tips: Don’t go on a Tuesday, when the Louvre is closed – you’ll have to wade through the overflow. Don’t try to look at every single work, or you’ll be exhausted by the time you get to the upper floors. And do make time for people-watching, a.k.a. “Paris’ Funniest Tourist Meldowns.”

February 6: Exhibition: An Orient of Consumption

Lemme fill this in when I revisit to write down the actual name of the exhibition – Google FAIL!

February 7: Le Laboratoire (The Laboratory) (it’s an architecture gallery)

I love how pretentiously ridiculous contemporary architecture can be: whip together every popular science idea of the past five years, add some questionable new building material or technique, and voila! you have a model of a building that no one (including you) believes will/can ever be built. In this architecture gallery’s current exhibition, “An Architecture of the Humours” (until April 26, 2010), it’s neuroreceptors, the anthropology of space, and set theory which magically produce an algorithm which is to be translated into a building by a spider-like robot excreting bio-concrete. At least, I think that’s what is supposed to happen – the whole thing was so confusing that they assign you a personal guide when you come in the door, who explains the architectural idea at play. Afterwards there’s a library/media space where you can go and read all the books which inspired the project, including lots of science fiction (of course).

February 7: Musée National du Moyen Age (National Museum of the Middle Ages)

I’m having a bit of a crisis of identity here. When I first visited Paris, as a 19 year old, I was just thrilled to bits with the Museum of the Middle Ages. I sketched, I hung out in the courtyard, I told everyone that it was my favorite museum… and now I can’t figure out why. Sure, the setting is interesting – the Hôtel Cluny, a 16^th century castle (basically) with ancient Roman baths in the basement. Sure, the art is cool – a nice assortment of different types of medieval objects, from stained glass to armor, with the high point being the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries - if you’re only going to like one set of tapestries, this is it (says me, who usually gets the dry heaves at the idea of looking at tapestries). It’s just that I can’t quite figure out why I was doodling “Mrs. Hôtel Cluny” on my sketchpad and thinking about where we would go on our honeymoon (the English countryside – duh – so the unicorn could visit its family). Maybe it’s just that I’m no longer 19 – sigh.

February 6: Museum Tip of the Day: How to Avoid Me Wanting to Kill You

I love Italian Renaissance art, and Italian Renaissance art is full of representations of the martyrdoms of Catholic saints. Thus, I have a rich mental repertoire of ways to imagine you dying when I see you touching art in museums: flaying, red hot pinchers, strategically placed arrows followed by beheading, etc.

Look – I’m no angel. Once I touched the cheek of an ancient Roman bust (I was 16, it was Utah, so…). Thus, I can assure you that statues feel like any other piece of stone. If you’re curious, touch the walls or touch the floor, but keep your filthy, destructive paws off of the statuary.

So – look with your eyes, not your hands, or else know that I am imagining your eyes of a platter.

February 4: Musée de Montmartre

You know how in ‘80’s movies, there’s always the girl who starts the movie unpopular but, thanks to new clothes/ makeover/ taking off her glasses, ends up as a hot babe? The Montmartre Museum is like that, pre-makeover. It’s got a lot of potential – the original sign from the Lapin Agile, Toulouse-Lautrec posters, a zinc bar hidden from the Germans’ metal-collecting campaigns – but it needs a combination of Molly Ringwald and Thomas Hoving to clean up the flaking paint, throw away the cheesy/creepy mannequins, and whip up some better signage with a bit more context and a lot fewer English errors. As it is, it’s not worth the 8 euro unless you are really, really obsessed with la vie boheme (in which case you’re probably backpacking around Europe and wouldn’t pay 8 euro for anything).

February 1: Institut du Monde Arabe

One reason to visit a museum is to see visually-compelling things, whether they’re beautiful or just strange. But even museums well-stocked with fascinating things have cases, walls, even entire rooms full of what I’m going to call “little sh*ts” – fragmentary figurines, a heap of pottery shards, manuscripts without pictures in a language you don’t understand – visually boring things that you walk past without pausing. Now, I played at a semi-pro level in the little sh*ts game for several years, so I know that even little sh*ts can be fascinating, but only if you’re given enough information about them. Give me a pottery shard, and I’ll give you a history of trade routes, eating habits, funerary ritual, and so on and so on until you have to distract me (hint: say something like “is it happy hour yet?”).

But for little sh*ts to be even remotely interesting, there has to be interesting information available, and that is just not the case in the Institute of the Arab World. This place is chock-a-block with little sh*ts, and is such an informational desert that I started humming the theme song from A Fistful of Dollars. Case after case of manuscripts labeled only with their name in Arabic, fragments of architectural decoration without any indication of what type of building they came from, little pieces of fabrics – from clothes? furnishings? Who knows?

I didn’t go to the special exhibition, so I’ll update if all of the museum’s visually compelling works are hiding in there… but until then, go to the Louvre if you want to see more than the little sh*ts of the Arab world.

January 31: Musée du Quai Branly

I’m a big fan of this museum for the following reasons:

• the architecture: it’s modern, it’s set in a garden landscape which sprouts giant glow-sticks at night, it’s swirly, it has organic, earthy forms which only very occasionally make me feel like I’m in the fake caves of the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ride at Disneyland.
• the history: in a bid for cultural immortality, Jacques Chirac ordered the creation of this museum by, basically, emptying out several other older museums. Take that, Musee de l’Homme!
• the collections: so… to break the possibly bad news: it’s an ethnological museum. We’re talking masks, ceremonial robes, shadow puppets, etc. from Oceania, Africa, Asia, South America, Australia, and wherever else French colonies and colonial collecting practices roamed in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. But wait, keep reading! Even if you’re not interested in non-Western cultures, I think you’ll be seduced by:
• the presentation: the museum devotes equal efforts to making the objects look good and making them revelatory of their cultures. This kind of arrangement is sadly rare, and the reason it’s so valuable is that it makes the museum worth multiple visits. You can go a couple of times just to look at the beautiful things, floating in dramatic darkness in minimalist glass cases which bring the works into pleasing juxtapositions as your viewpoint changes. But then you can return to read the texts and watch the hours of video and learn about the objects’ uses in their home culture.