Louvre | Sambandar

Foolishly, we did not sleep on the plane, but watched an old movie, Godfather III. Lots of people got killed and I think the Pope did it. Bullets were sprayed about like holy water. I digress.

Paris 8 We were determined to stay awake until 16:00, so grabbing a boat tour (which was part of our City Pass) seemed like a good plan. Wishful thinking.

As soon as we sat on the boat, I knew I would fall asleep, probably before shoving off. We had fortuitously chosen a vessel soon filled with Chinese tourists. Their method of moving about the boat, with a camera attached to their faces, required using the braille-hip method of getting from starboard to port, which jarred me regularly awake in time to see some of the important sights, like this big stone church.

The view of Paris from the river is fantastic, lined for miles with high stone walls, topped with the façades of countless palaces, chic hotels, imposing apartment buildings, and chubby tourists in garish pants. (The back end of any of these would diminish the effect substantially.)

More bothersome essays about nothing.

It’s big and has lots of art. ‘nough said ’bout that. One has to limit oneself to a few periods and accept that this museum is hard for the curator to master; a visitor has no chance. It spans from antiquity to the the point in time when the Paris art world rejected Impressionism, and if there is anything in it from Impressionism and beyond, I know not of it.

My favorite sculpture, aside of course from all the naked men in marble, is this piece in which the sculptor maded stone transparent:

How one sees through the stone veil to the face below is a mystery, but then all sculpture seems impossible to me. If someone were to write without a backspace key, I’d be shocked. So how to sculpt a hand without loping off a finger is beyond my comprehension—which leaves me to wonder how many male models complained, “Hey Mike, my dick’s bigger than that,” when the artist was careless with his chisel near the upper thigh.

We found a character from the Flemish period who is a spitting image of Matt Damon.

I learned the most from the Egyptian exhibits. For instance, poor pharaohs could buy off-the-rack sarcophagi. And some were equipped with late night reading, but the bandages probably got in the way. Egyptian mothers invented peek-a-boo, and I can now tell me lawyer friends that the original expression was “long arms of the mother-in-law.”