Many European cities have tried to become bike-friendly, and Paris is among the most successful. They have a very popular loaner bike system where thousands of city bikes are parked in hundreds of racks all over town, which locals use for quick little one-way hops. And bike tour companies are quite popular here. I took a tour one afternoon last month and rolled through slices of town I had yet to see. I loved this section: an open art gallery along a stretch of the Seine (just downstream from Notre-Dame) that has become a people zone — especially in the evening, when there’s music, dancing lessons, BBQs, and so on.
If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.
To film Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, we had to get there at 7:30, before the public opening hours. As the crew was downstairs filming the lower section, I realized what a lucky person I was to greet the sun through glorious medieval stained glass. My coffee that morning was the light that bathed me, all alone, in the most exquisite Gothic space ever created. I had to share it.
In my excitement as I videoed this, I flip-flopped one of my tour-guide facts, saying that they “paid more for the chapel than they did for the crown,” when the truth is much more striking: The king actually paid more for what he thought was Jesus’ “crown of thorns” than the entire cost of building this luxurious chapel to house the precious relic.
If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.
In filming the pipe organ bit at Paris’ St. Sulpice Church, we needed to get a bunch of visitors to climb the spiral stairs, “scampering like little sixteenth notes up to the organ loft” for our camera. To get out of the shot, I had to climb higher up. In my travels, spiral staircases are a land of promise. All over Europe, they evoke intimate slices of medieval life and bring me special memories. And many come with a great “Wow, look down there!” effect. Looking down this one, with people’s hands working ever higher, made for a fun view. Here’s a silly video clip that will perhaps resonate with other lovers of Europe’s spiral staircases:
If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.
I hunger for culture that exists with or without tourism. When I’m in Scotland, it seems like the folk music and the kilts and the haggis are there, at least in part, for the tourists. Paris, however, feels like more of a cultural powerhouse. When traveling in Paris, I always feel that tourism is like a bug — it bounces off the windshield, with the city barely noticing. But sometimes Paris leaves its window open…and we can slip on through and really be inside.
One way to get inside, culturally, is to be at the back of St. Sulpice Church between the Masses on Sunday and climb up into the organ loft. It was my dream to return to that loft with our TV camera and enjoy perhaps Europe’s greatest active pipe organist, Daniel Roth, at work.
Here’s a snippet of our script (with a good example of a hardworking transition, as we needed the script to lead us into the Bastille Day section) and a video clip attempting to catch the wonder of being in the loft of St. Sulpice with Daniel Roth:
On Sunday mornings when I’m in Paris, you’ll likely find me here…in St. Sulpice Church, enjoying its magnificent pipe organ — arguably the greatest in Europe.
For organ-lovers, a visit here is a pilgrimage. After Mass, enthusiasts from around the world scamper like sixteenth notes up the spiral stairs into a world of 7,000 pipes.
Before electricity, it took three men, working out on these 18th-century Stairmasters, to fill the bellows, which powered the organ. The current organist, Daniel Roth, carries on the tradition of welcoming guests into the loft to see the organ in action.
As his apprentices pull and push the many stops that engage the symphony of pipes, a commotion of music-lovers crowd around a tower of keyboards and watch the master at work.
St. Sulpice has a rich history, with a line of 12 world-class organists going back over 200 years. Like kings or presidents, the lineage is charted on the wall. And overseeing all this: Johann Sebastian Bach.
This music continues to fill the spiritual sails of St. Sulpice as it has for centuries.
The good life in Paris — music, culture, an appreciation of its rich heritage and fine architecture — is easy to take for granted. But today’s freedoms and a government that seems passionate about its people’s needs didn’t come to France without a struggle. And the pinnacle of that struggle — an epic event that reverberates in the spirit of its people to this day — was the French Revolution.
If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.
We just finished filming two new TV shows on Paris — 12 days of work. I was exhausted when we were done, but — I have to admit — in Paris it’s hard to call it “work.” Rather than hard working, let’s call it hard living.
One of the great perks of TV production is the luxury of being alone with Europe’s greatest art. A few weeks before we came to film, I scouted Paris’ Orangerie Museum and developed a concept of strolling with Monet along the banks of his water lily pond. When I returned with the film crew, we commandeered a wheelchair to use as a “poor man’s dolly” (in good guerilla-budget public television style), allowing us to capture that smooth “stroll along the pond” effect for our viewers — in hi-def!
Here’s a bit of my script for that part of our Paris show, followed by a video of cameraman Karel and producer/wheelchair dolly operator Simon in action:
Like an aging Beethoven, who composed his most dramatic works while losing his hearing, the nearly blind Claude Monet spent his last years painting these symphonies of color on a similarly monumental scale.
We’re looking into his pond — dotted with water lilies, surrounded by foliage, and dappled by the reflections of the sky, clouds, and trees on the surface. Monet mingles the pond’s many elements and lets us sort it out.
The true subject of these works is not the pond itself. It’s the play of the light reflecting off the water. Monet would work on several canvases at the same time — each one catching the light of a particular time of day.
If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.