Monet in the Morning

Those of you who know me know that, in my world, there are few things worth getting up early for. One of them is Monet.

The Grand Palais is hosting an absolutely epic exhibit of Monet's work from 1840 to 1926 between now and January 24. The excellently curated exposition is great not only because it follows almost his entire career, but also because so much of his work plays with subtle variations of light. Thus Haystacks (Midday) is much more interesting when you can compare it with Haystacks at the End of Summer, Morning Effect. Since the former hangs in Australia while the other is in the Musée d'Orsay most of the time, this is a rare opportunity!

Now I just have to get over to l'Orangerie and the Musée Marmottan!

I love Paris (even) when it drizzles...

The rain in Paris inspires a wide range of emotions in people. In creative types, this leads to very diverse outputs. Voilà some of my favorite crappy weather pieces:



I love Ella.

Black Stone Lying on a White Stone

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,
on some day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris--and I don't step aside--
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.

It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down
these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on
wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself
with all the road ahead of me, alone.

César Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him
although he never does anything to them;
they beat him hard with a stick and hard also

with a rope. These are the witnesses:
the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,
the solitude, and the rain, and the roads. . .

-César Vallejo

My American Boy

So, a certain someone came to Paris for three days last week and reminded just how wonderful he is.

Because he likes contemporary art, and my knowledge stops short at 1900, I was scrambling to find the right museums to show off, but we made it to the Centre Pompidou (Parisians call it Beaubourg) and the less well-known but equally awesome Jeu de Paume.

The Centre Pompidou is having a very extensive, very intense feminist art exhibit. This stuff is no joke. There's a lot of blood, a lot of nudity, and a couple signs warning that the content of one room in particular "might hurt some viewers' feelings." The Boy didn't even roll his eyes once. What a great guy :)

Even better was that going to see the permanent collection at 5:30 on a Friday, it was free for under 26 year-olds. The museum also houses a library and a very swank restaurant, George, which a friend who went on a date there tells me is delicious and extremely expensive.

Jeu de paume is the old way of saying "tennis" in French. The museum is located in the Tuileries, the gardens of the Louvre, where the royal tennis courts used to be. After wandering through some painfully avant-garde exhibits ("Walking into this small white room affects the dimensions of another white room in Prague" and a 15 minute video of a shack surrounded by trees) and a three story retrospective of one photographer who must have lived to be at least 100, we came to the "Vidéothèque éphémère". It's an exhibit of short videos featuring everything from a made-up conspiracy theory about the Spice Girls, ALF and Princess Diana living in Chile to a silent montage of birds swarming at dawn to Willie Nelson. Definitely one of the most entertaining exhibits I've been to here. Again, under 25's get a reduced tarif of 5.50 euros here.

The Boy is nothing if not a man who knows what he likes, and one of the things he likes is fondue. So after our museum ventures, we warmed up with a big steamy pot of cheese on rue Mouffetard, a low-key little street chock full of bars and little bistros in the 5e arrondissement. A very successful weekend.

L'Avare à la Comedie Française

(I started this post a few weeks ago but never put it up. Sorry, Momma.)

Last weekend Educo took a group of us to La Comedie Française, which is housed in the Palais Royal, a smaller complex across the street from the Louvre. It's where Louis XIV grew up and later where Molière put on most of his plays. For that reason, the house troupe continues to specialize in Molière.

L'Avare tells a story about a miser who manages to ruin the love lives of his two children in the space of about five minutes. The lovers then spend the rest of the play scheming to get their father to change his mind. They fail, but, like most (all?) Molière plays, there's a happy ending anyway -- call it Louis ex machina.

Educo gave us all copies of the play to read our first week in France but not many people got through it. It wasn't a problem though because swooning translates pretty well.

Le Palais Garnier: Home of l'Opèra National

(Photo stolen from the Internet)

So Educo took us on a field trip last week! The tour guide was very interesting and told us a lot about how Garnier (the architect) created a new style- Napoleon III- and hid references to himself everywhere, but since they say a picture is worth a thousand words, here are some:


The grand staircase
This was the place to see and be seen before the show, during intermission, and after. If you weren't sneaking off for some romancing with one of the ballerinas, that is.
(Sorry about the low quality, my camera had a nervous breakdown over the romantic lighting.)

There are stills from old productions on the walls:



The theater itself is gorgeous, and huge! Notice all the curtains- it seems no one ever actually watched the shows until a Russian director came in and banned closing them, talking, and sexy time with the dancers during performances.


A mural on the ceiling of the theater by Marc Chagall. He made it a gift to France, charging only the cost of production. Thematically, it deals with classic subjects similar to the mural on the grand staircase- the glory of Paris, Swan Lake, etc - but in a more modern style. Of course, it was widely disliked when it was first unveiled. It certainly is happy to look at though, and less oppressive than the gold-leaf-red-velvet-and-six-kinds-of-marble look everywhere else.