Lost in Lyon

Don’t talk to me about the best-laid plans etc. I just spent 15 hours in Lyon during which all my pre-plans went completely awry— yet this pit stop was astonishingly productive.

As I planned my annual European Art Tour from Weimar, where I have been living monkishly since 1999 (when it was the cultural capital of Europe), researching and writing my book on Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus and his ideal of socially supported housing, I read in Metropolis that a biennial conference on social housing was now under way–in Grenoble, of all places. At the Gare de Lyon in Paris, I bought a ticket to Grenoble.

Alas, the night before my departure, Andrea Mueller, an architect and old pal from California, printed me off the Internet the entire two-week Grenoble program. Absolutely nothing was happening the day of my planned arrival. Aaargh.

No matter: I was also bent on filming the most beautiful airport in the history of aviation: the TVG stop at St. Exupéry International Airport, designed by my absolutely numero uno, Santiago Calatrava. Heh, stuff Grenoble, I thought to myself.

I had a reservation at the Youth Hostel in Lyon. Imagine my puzzlement when the graduate student in architectural management sitting next to me on the TGV told me at the last minute that this TGV didn’t stop in Lyon’s Part Dieu station but went straight on to Grenoble— chaining me for three hours, going and returning, if I didn’t get off the train immediately.

Mon Dieu indeed! But I did get off in time (an Olympic record in fast extraction) to take a 45-minute bus ride to Lyon and a ten-Euro cab ride up the steepest hill since Mount Everest. On my three short previous art museum visits to Lyon, I never looked up. This third city in France (after Paris and Marseilles) is formed at the juncture of two rivers— the Saone and the Rhone—and those adjacent heights attest to their rivers’ expertise at grinding down their own mountains. Such nearly vertical streets are called montes, the youth hostel being on Monte du Chemin Neuf. New Path, indeed! My atrially fibrillated heart flinched at every step up. Little did I realize that my afternoon would be plagued by a plethora of parallel montes, helplessly lost as I became in Old Lyon.

But first the good/bad news. At the hostel front desk I got a valid itinerary for the Museum of Contemporary Art to see a big Keith Haring show. Walk down the hill and turn sharply right at the bottom in search of Line D (blue) to Place Gambetta, where you transfer to Bus 4, heading for Cite International. Smoothly achieved.

(By the way, the Norman Foster-designed subway is worth a trip to Lyon in itself. I felt I was in someone’s front room, not on a gritty old subway.)

Alas, I had forgotten that all museums in France are closed on Mondays. Gulp. I finally tracked down a security guard and he told me to come back at 2 p.m., which led me to a tasty buffet at the nearby Hilton Brasserie. Stuffed, I returned— to be admitted, but reduced to hollering for any old soul as I climbed the six staircases in the museum’s brilliant new Renzo Piano building.

At the top floor I was interrogated by a dashing blonde who turned out to be the director’s assistant, finishing her Ph. D. on early German photography. She gave me a one-woman tour of the Haring show, all the while briefing me on the state of museology in France in general and Lyon in particular. At one point I noted a Gramma caricature. Whoops! It turned out to be Keith’s Andy Warhol, on whom the museum had its last biennial Mega-show. Sorry, Andy. Or do I owe Keith an apology?

I was proud at how my Irish palaver had gained me access. But it was hubris before the fall. I tried to reverse the hostel`s mass trans plan, only to find myself more and more disoriented. Were it not for a solicitous geezer who saw me fumbling at the automat for a new subway ticket, I’d still be a prisoner at the Gare de St. Paul. After interrogating scores of locals to no avail, finally I found a young businessman who knew where my hostel was and pointed me in the ultimate right direction, after two hours of up one monte and down the next parallel one.

Suddenly I found myself in an artists’ quarter: first, a world-class, middle-aged sculptor, one Mme. Aurelie, with the accolades to prove it—and a gallery full of her work, and some of her students’, two of whom were in the middle of a hammer and chisel lesson when I happened in. Then, a few meters farther on, a splendid young furniture designer and his cadre of workers, sawing away on exotic woods. And a jewelry shop whose Calder-like mini-mobiles would warm Sandy’s heart. And on it went, until I was stopped cold by a 16th-Century hotel where the cheapest room was 340 Euros a night (about $520), no breakfast included.

By comparison, my night in the Jeunesse Herberge hostel cost me 12 Euros and a major leg cramp as I tried to climb down from my upper bunk at 4 a.m— to get to the Calatrava airport with enough time to shoot it before my EasyJet flight to Berlin/Schoenefeld and an afternoon at the Martin-Gropius Bau for a sneak preview of new shows on Alexander Rodchenko and Philly’s own Man Ray, aka Emmanuel Rudnitsky. Did I forget to tell you that museums are closed in Germany on Tuesdays?

Luckily, the press lady went for my explanation that I had a conference date in Dessau the next day, when the museum was to hold its press preview on Rodchenko and Man Ray. Although the Bau was closed on this Tuesday (like all Tuesdays) an Argentinian filmmaker and his troupe were there to make a film on art in Berlin, and I was allowed to tag along. Listen, why did God give us Irish our gift of gab if not to supersede rules when necessary?

I haven’t mentioned the sociological glory of the mix of world students at those hostels. It warms my aging (81 and no longer counting!) retired professorial heart to hear them gabble. Nostalgia is geriatric sex! And my shoot at Calatrava’s Lyon-St. Exupéry Airport went swimmingly, beginning with a serendipitous rainbow from one end of the airport to the other.

So don’t fret when your plans dead-end on you. Play by ear!