Catching up on Metz

I'm still behind, but here are some highlights from my trip to Metz this weekend...

First off, Metz is another city whose name is not quite pronounced as it looks. It's "mess" rather than "mets." Just FYI.

Anyway, Metz is in northeastern France, super close to the border with Luxembourg, actually. It's an old military town, population just under 200,000. Quaint and charming but also has a lot of cool stuff to do. It's an old walled city, so there are still vestiges of the ramparts around the outside of the inner city, such as this former entrance:


One of the cooler parts of the city is all of the public parks, such as the Grande Esplanade right downtown:


I thought the sculptures were quite awesome. Metz is also known for its cathedral, as any self-respecting French town should be (haha):

But the real reason for coming to the town was two-fold: to see my friend Antoine and to check out the new regional branch of the Centre Pompidou, which literally only opened last week. Yay!

Pompidou-Metz is just south of the main part of the city, on an old army field of some sort. The landscaping is still a work in progress, but the building itself is awesome. So here is Antoine with the building, my two reasons for going to Metz summed up in one pic:


The way it works is that the gallery space is the three tubes you see, that are kind of skewed one on top of the other. Then there's the draped roof, which is held in place as a wooden netting covered in some sort of plastic material. Here's a view underneath the draping:


Needless to say, it was totally mind blowing. Pompidou is all about modern and contemporary art, so it has a bunch of different stuff. The show was on "masterpieces," apparently because someone made a snippy comment when the project was announced back in 2003 that because this was a regional branch, it wouldn't have any masterpieces. So the curator of Pompidou Metz was like, "hell no, bring it!" So they did a whole show of masterpieces, hahaha. That's vindictiveness at its finest, and I obviously approve whole-heartedly.

Of course, the problem is, what is a masterpiece? The show tried to ask that question, and all in all it was very cool. They did a retrospective of the idea of masterpieces throughout the 20th century, and one of the more amusing installations was this junk shop that was apparently an institution in Nice in the 60s:


That was a winner, as were many of the Picasso and Dali paintings on display. This one, however, not so much:


The damned thing didn't even have a title! Susannah, care to comment on this?

In any case, the bottom floor has a special exhibition space (not in the tubes), and here they did a history of masterpieces, back to the middle ages. And what was really awesome was the ceiling, which was all done in mirrors. This is a shot looking up at the mirrors, which were reflecting the gallery space that was arranged in pods. That's hard to explain, but I was shooting up at mirrors looking down, if that helps.


And here we are just outside the top level tube:


Anyway, the other highlight to Metz is the natural environment, right on the Moselle river:


It's a lovely little town, complete with a nature walk:


Then that night we went to a concert inside a cloister. The weird thing was that one of the bands was from Brooklyn, hahaha. I was sitting there thinking, what are the chances? Here I am, more or less an Astorian, living in Paris, visiting a friend in Metz, and coming across a band from Brooklyn??? It was probably for the best that I was most likely the only one in the audience to understand their banter, as it was utterly stupid, haha. The music was pretty fun though.


The next day Antoine humored me and did a history nerd activity. The short history lesson of the day is that this part of the country was the industrial motor of France for a really long time, starting back in the mid-1800s with the industrialization process. There are a ton of coal mines (Zola's Germinal being perhaps the most famous literary representation of the mines, although that took place a little further north...that of course didn't stop me from thinking about the Maheu family, haha). Unfortunately, the region has been totally devastated by the collapse of industry, so most of the mines and coal refining plants have been shut down. This one, at Uckange, was preserved and turned into a visitor site. So now you can tour this monstrosity:


The most interesting thing is that we were able to have a guided tour, with a guide who actually worked in the plant! He worked there for 15 years, starting at the age of 14. The plant was closed down in 1991, so after that he did a bunch of other factory jobs before getting certified to teach accounting instead. But when it came to how this whole process worked, he certainly knew his stuff. He talked our ears off for an hour and a half, and now I think if I had to go and refine coal, I would know every little detail of how it's done, hahaha. But yeah, the historical interest of the plant was definitely worthwhile, I got a bunch of great pics that I can totally use when I teach French history. Of course, the one downside was that I came home literally COVERED in coal dust, hahaha. My hands were black for hours, despite multiple washings. I finally gave up and took a shower when I came home, after finding coal in my ears, haha. Antoine made a good point, though, in thinking about what it must have been like to breathe and live in that crap all the time, rather than just the few hours we were exposed to it. A definitely sobering thought.

So yeah, there you have it, a highly successful trip!