Les secrets de la Ville de Lumiere

What I really wanted to do was crawl up out of the abandoned railroad tracks after 12 hours in the catas, hail the nearest cab, and say “To the Louvre!” Unfortunately, I was so dirty that no cab would stop for me, so I had to take the subway instead.

This was probably the best idea I had in Paris. There were two juxtapositions that made this an almost surreal experience. The first is that during the entire time in the catas, the foremost thing on my mind was “don’t get lost.” We were always stopping to check the map and make sure that we knew where we were. When I got to the Louvre, I didn’t even glance at a map. After 12 hours of pinpoint navigation, I wanted to just get lost and see what I ran into.

The second was the fact that in one day (and in the same clothes - although I did take off the helmet and galoshes), I could see the absolute best of what two vastly different cultural worlds had to offer. In order to truly get to know a city, you have to try and obtain the broadest experience possible. We had a great opportunity to see a side of Paris few got to see, and I was determined to make the most of it. But I also wanted to spend some time seeing the highbrow side of Paris - the side everybody gets to see. Both kinds of excursions had equal importance in my mind - to me they were flip sides of the same coin. The big difference was just that one was easier than the other.

I spent a couple hours wandering the Louvre. The building is itself is so amazing it’s almost worth the price of admission alone. But the art wasn’t bad also. My personal favorite was a mural on one of the ceilings showing the fall of Icarus. I also ran into the Mona Lisa. I had seen the Mona Lisa before on a previous short trip to Paris. All I can say is, I understand the hype. It’s probably one of my personal five favorite paintings in the world.

Another museum, the Musee D’Orsay, has another of my favorites - Summary Judgment Under the Moorish Kings of Granada, by Henri Regnault. This painting you really have to see in person. An image, or even a print, really doesn’t do it justice. When you view the original, it’s absolutely haunting how you can see the silent communication taking place between the eyes of the executioner and the eyes of the just-decapitated. The Musee D’Orsay is a great visit in its own right. It’s smaller than the Louvre, and you can see everything in one visit without getting tired of it. It’s also in a great venue - an old train station on the left bank of the Seine.

I also made time to visit the Picasso Museum (not as good as the one in Barcelona), and the Rodin Museum (not as good as the one in Philadelphia). If you’re a penny pincher, the best thing to do is to skip the actual Rodin museum and just pay the one Euro to visit the garden. The garden has pretty much all the famous stuff: the Thinker, the Burghers of Calais, Balzac, and the Gates of Hell, foremost among them. If you don’t want to shlep all the way to France, the MoMA has a cast of Balzac, the Met has a cast of the Burghers of Calais, and the aforementioned Rodin Museum in Philadelphia has casts of both the Thinker and the Gates of Hell - although the Paris cast of the Gates of Hell is in much better repair than the Philadelphia cast. The plaster original, restored in 1917 and used for the three original casts (Paris, Philadelphia, and Toyko) is the Musee D’Orsay. I really wanted to visit the Musee National d’Arte Moderne also, but when you’ve only got two weeks and you’re spending days at a time underground, there’s only so many museums you end up having time for.

Later on when we spent the weekend in Amsterdam, I also visited their two famous art museums: the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum (which has perhaps the most annoyingly designed website ever). The Rijksmuseum was undergoing restoration, so only a small selection was on exhibit - including this painting.

There’s only a handful of works of art - be they paintings, sculptures, songs, movies, stories, or anything else you could conceivably call “art” - that will provoke a genuine emotional reaction from me. For some reason, a reason I can’t really figure out, that painting made me cry. And as admirable and impressive as the art in both the catacombs and the Louvre were, this was the only thing I saw that really made me feel something. And isn’t that what art - no matter what kind and where you might find it - is supposed to do?

Unless otherwise noted, all pictures are copyright of my friend, travel partner, and fellow guerilla urbanist Steve Duncan. Steve is a wonderful photographer, and specializes in underground and urban photography. Prints are available - visit his website at http://www.undercity.org

One of the most interesting and rewarding experiences of visiting publicly inaccessible places is coming across amazing artwork that you never would have expected. In New York, the most famous of these “Underground Art Galleries” is probably the Amtrak Tunnel on the West Side of Manhattan. Throughout the 2 1/2 mile long tunnel, huge murals and elaborate graffiti pieces are painted on the walls. The most famous of these is probably an interpretation of Goya’s 3rd of May by Freedom and Smith that’s about 10×15 feet. In fact, this tunnel is sometimes called the “Freedom Tunnel” after the artist Freedom, who painted about a dozen or so murals down there. It’s actually not very difficult to get to, but only about a few dozen people visit it every year. And although the murals would definitely be worth seeing even if they happened to be painted along a busy street, I’d be lying if I said this exclusivity isn’t one of its appeals.

There’s a few other interesting things you come across while perusing the underground of New York (the most famous of which are probably pages of REVS‘ journal), but in comparison to the stuff we found in the Paris underground, it’s an entirely different ballgame. Just for starters, subway graffiti is way more elaborate - somewhat due to a different mentality over in Europe (by both the painters and the authorities), but I think mostly because the trains stop running for a few hours late at night, while in New York you’ve got to dodge trains 24-7. And when you get to the catas, things get just ridiculous.

After hitting the bones on our first trip, Steve and I headed off to some of the most visited rooms - rooms where artists had spent countless hours painting and sculpting for an audience of pretty much themselves, friends, and whatever other random people happened along. A lot of the murals (especially the ones we saw later in the German Bunker), were by a group called “The Rats.” Other than the castle, the room it was in contained sculptures of four different gargoyle heads (well, not technically gargoyles), and we came across various other carvings during our trips in. As far as the painting went, most of it was in larger rooms rather than tunnels - two of which were La Plage (which translates to “The Beach - check out the floor), and the Egyptian Chamber.

The tunnels themselves were interesting. They were either generally spotless, or completely covered in tags. I thought it was cool that people got to enjoy the freedom to paint and write graffiti to their hearts content, yet some of the tunnels were left to be enjoyed in their natural state. We left our mark also - Miru painted her rat she does a few times (which was kind of neat when we ran into it later), and on another short trip with Rosie and friends, Krisprolls threw up a few tags and a piece, and another guy did some work on a sculpture that had been started by somebody else.

It’s not just the catas that the cataphiles graffiti though - for instance, there’s also this seven-story high writing on the scaffolding of the Tour St. Jacques. F.C. stands for “Frotte, Connard!” Rosie told us this translates out to something like “erase, assholes!” It’s a challenge to the anti-graffiti crowd to try and erase their stuff. In addition, I’m pretty sure there’s one of those double-entendres that a non-local just isn’t going to understand in there also: “Frotte” is also a slang term for having sex. Translate the rest of the writing on the tower, and you’ll see this theory probably has some merit.

Still, as rude as that might be, it should be noted that the Tower itself was untouched - again, a nice balance of expression and respect. We also saw “FC” a lot in the catas - like in this entirely blue room. That piece of paper you see below the “FC” is a tract: usually just a piece of paper (might have a story, cartoon, party invitation, who knows) that people leave in the catas. You’re supposed to take it and leave another. A similar idea is actually trying to catch on in New York.

It was a great trip. Steve and I crawled out the same hole we went in about 12 hours earlier. There was only one place to go next: La Louvre!