houston's menil

In a residential neighborhood of wood frame houses and gnarled oaks stands the Menil Foundation. After leaving World War II France for Houston, comforts of the oil industry afforded John and Dominique de Menil to champion the arts nurturing a collection from the 1940’s to 70’s that would become their gift to the city. The museum opened in the 1987 was to be a place to contemplate art and cycle installations where “…works would appear, disappear, and reappear like actors on a stage. Each time they would be seen with a fresh eye,” because, Dominique de Menil said, “Habit blunts vision.”


Entering the museum I gravitate toward right wing dedicated to the Surrealists. More than a handful of Magritte’s canvases hang alongside works from Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Man Ray. Even a still life personage arranged by Archimboldo is tucked away in a room of Surrealist paraphernalia like taxidermy birds and Katchina dolls. Inspired by the unity of opposites curio mingles with natural history.

 Outside the museum at dusk a camp of bats was circling on the February night I found myself there.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret – Book Review

Like so many other child protagonists who find themselves orphaned (James from James and the Giant Peach, the Baudelaire children in An Unfortunate Series of Events) Hugo has been entrusted to a cold extended family member. From his uncle he learns the art of winding the clocks encrusted in the walls of the Paris Gare de l’Ouest train station (where the Montparnasse tower now stands). When his caretaker fails to return to their bird’s nest hovel in the station, Hugo begins to tend to the winding. He hopes that nobody will notice anything has changed preferring the life he knows to the possibility of being uprooted again.

In the mean time he is determined to repair an automaton that he was able to salvage from the debris of the museum fire, the very machine his father was working on the night of his death. Hugo believes that the robot, poised with pen in hand, when mended will deliver a posthumous message from his father. Throughout the years he has filled the pages of his journal with notes and diagrams, observations and knowledge passed down from father to son, which he puts to practice working on the reparations.

Resorting to petty thievery he keeps himself fed on croissants swiped from the station café and pockets mechanical toys to amass the parts he needs to restore the automaton. Caught red handed, the shopkeeper seizes his journal and forces Hugo to repay his debt by tending the toyshop. From here the story unfolds as the shopkeeper’s niece Isabella becomes his friend and accomplice.

Palais Royal

Les Journees du Patrimoine arrive soon after the back to school rush of la rentree. Come mid September secret gardens are opened and the public is invited to peek behind doors that remain closed the other 363 days of the year. As if a genie has granted an open sesame in Paris, many of the majestic old estates, hotels particuliers, and public buildings like the Palais Royal invite the public within to share in the patrimonial richness.

The lavish state rooms of the Palais Royal which once upon a time was the residence of Louis XIV now serve as constitutional and cultural office space. I relished details Bonaparte left behind like golden fingerprints and Henri Martin’s oil painting Agriculture, Commerce, Industry, Intellectual Work that the four walls of the General Assembly room wear.


To choose wisely which line you’ll stand in come the weekend of the 17th-18th of September visit the Jounees du Patrimoine site to consider your options. Here is what’s on offer in Paris.

Inside the Palais de l'Elysee - Chez Sarkozy
  
A glimpse into President Nicholas Sarkozy and his model/musician/wife Carla Bruni’s home.

Inside the Palais d l’Elysee on les Jounees du Patrimoine the line snaked through gilded sitting rooms with french doors onto the sprawling green presidential lawn, and never ending stretches of table offered places for phantom dignitaries in the state room. Inside the salle des fetes the table was set with the Republique Francaise monogram china and goblets. Cranberry velvet curtains, tapistry patterned carpet and heaping sprays of roses or sunflowers rounded out the royal atmosphere.

pompidou dreamlands

Edvard Munch – The Anti-Scream

Munch was an artist inspired by literature and poetry but drawn to macabre moments of illness and death. The women wear ghoulish expressions, looking out from dark recesses of eyes where circles traced and retraced wear deep into the paper.  

He painted alfresco amid the fjords and hills, mirror-like reflections in bodies of water later replaced with violent brushstrokes and buildings like cages when alcohol became his muse. Layer upon layer of each painting was a beginning from which coats were removed attributing a superimposed quality is to his work.

The Pinacotheque, caddy corner from the Madeline, is exhibiting Edward Munch’s oil paintings and wood gravure prints until July 18th.

They Dance

I haven’t stopped since last Friday when Femi Kuti and the Positive Force performed in St Germain en Laye. For a week I’ve been dancing around my living room to the jazzy Afro beat. When a concert really sinks in by the end everyone is moving together, driven by the force of the music. And the waves that pulsed through the crowd are summoned even now as I listen.

When the Positive Force took the stage at the cozy black-box venue of La Clef they started slow letting the audience warm up with them. People are reserved in France, at restaurants they speak in whispers to avoid disturbing surrounding tables so it goes without saying they don’t dance much. Instead, when the music really speaks to them heads bob or feet are tapped to keep the time, however, they refrain from engaging shoulders or rears for fear of looking ridiculous.

The horn, guitar and keyboard players dressed in matching pastel polyester resembled a 70’s Caribbean band while the three ample-figured women singing back-up were clothed in tribal skirts of fringe, black of skin peeking out from sashes of bead and faces painted in dots and lines. Slowly led into the rhythm by their undulations to even the jazziest of birdsong the crowd was enticed to move.



When he laid down his horn and sung a sermon unfolded, of presidents with too much power, of the riches of Africa, of happiness. And why weren’t we happy in France, he wanted to know, always on strike. When the power was taken away from the kings we shouldn’t have stopped in our country because those same men still prevail in Africa today. “I want you to do something for me. I want you to do something for yourself. You better ask yourself why the richest continent get the poorest of the people,” he sang. “Al-la-la-la-la,” the call and the response.



I revelled in it all. Sometimes, in moments under wide blue of sky listening to the music of tree branch waverings I declare nature my church, but it was the music that spoke to me that night. He raised his voice and kept time with a hand that pumped fast as a piston. The climax of the night before the lights went down Beng, Beng, Beng. “She said love me, don’t stop. Don’t move too slow.” And we didn’t danced to a frenzy.