I’m living a fantasy that I’ve had probably since I first came to Paris when I was fifteen years old. I’m renting an apartment on the Left Bank for the next six weeks, taking language class to learn (finally) to be fluent in French, and absorb as much of this culture as possible. Brad and I flew over together overnight, landing on what is the first "real" spring day according to our taxi driver. The apartment is utterly magnificent; a far cry from the youth hostel days. I have an outside terrace with a view of the Eiffel Tower, the Musee d’Orsay, and all of the gray slate mansard roofs of Paris. The unfortunate part of the view means that we’re 110 steps up a narrow, twisting several flights of stairs. I’ve been up and down 5 times so far today, and we haven’t gone out for dinner yet. I’ve been told tales of an elevator that goes to the third floor but then necessitates a long walk around 3 sides of the building to get to our front door. I’ll adapt to the stairs. It’s good for me. It’s good for me. We’re struggling mightily to stay awake until local bedtime so that we quickly conquer jet lag. After our apartment orientation we went out and strolled along Blvd. St. Germain in search of food before returning to a known site: the Hotel Montelambert where we stayed 2 years ago with the Feld family for a September birthday celebration for Brad’s mom, located basically across the street from the apartment. Today we both had artichoke terrine as a starter and Brad had a small portion of an incredibly rich pasta dish and I had a composed red snapper with mirepoix (diced vegetables) on a puff pastry. Espresso and cafe au laits all around. Caffeine is your friend after a red-eye flight. Great food. French cuisine is not all about the sauces anymore, but is incorporating the vintner’s concept of terroir, or locally grown and seasonal offerings. After lunch we returned to the apartment and did our usual make ourselves at home routine, which for Brad means putting everything away in a tidy fashion and for me means letting my suitcases explode all over every possible surface until I figure out the best home for everything. I think it’s a way of marking territory. We found our local grocery store (tiny, but great fresh produce), bought electrical outlet adapters, managed not to go into several chocolate stores selling beautiful Easter eggs, and bought a pair of shoes. No, not for me — for Brad. There is a Paul Smith store nearby which sells very edgy Converse-type sneakers. Brad had bought a pair of low tops while we were in L.A. about a month ago and this store had high tops with very cool patterns. Shoe purchase score: Brad 1, Amy 0. We’ll see how long that lasts.. The clerk at Paul Smith was a Brit who recommended a language school down the block where he had taken classes, so we walked down and met the director of the school and I’m scheduled to take a placement test tomorrow morning at 11. It feels great to take things as they come. We went to the Seine for our afternoon exercise (anything to stay away from the siren song of the bed) and rediscovered the great paths along the river at water level, below the streets full of cars and people. The views of the architecture from the river are everything a Parisian scene could be. We’re heading to another known destination for dinner: Yo Sushi at 8, rue de Berri. So happy to be here, and grateful to have the opportunity to fulfill a dream I’ve had for a long time.
New York, New York
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
I took my almost 16-year old niece, Morgan, to Manhattan last week for her first visit to the Big Apple. I love the city, and love sharing it with friends and family. We ran ourselves ragged, mostly seeing art and braving the cold. The highs were only in the 20’s and the wind was relentless, but we’re both originally from Alaska and won’t let a little thing like cold stop us. Morgan attends an alternative high school in Boulder, The Watershed School, which is based on experiential learning and expeditions to different environments. Her dean of students created a project assignment for Morgan centering on art, New York as a melting pot and as a destination for artists. And we managed to find time to do some shopping, too!
Thursday morning we went to The Whitney to see a retrospective of 50 years of works on paper by the artist Cy Twombly. I’m always interested in an artist’s work over time, especially recurring motifs. Twombly’s work has used a consistent visual vocabulary of text or writing or representations of writing. His large chalkboard paintings of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s are the most explicit “writing” but many of his works contain words. His work has also been inspired by Greek and Roman mythology for a long time. I loved this show. The Whitney’s collection also includes some wonderful 20th century art.
I wanted to go to the Whitney before going to the Metroplitan Museum of Art, since I know that I can spend entire days there. The Met has so much to see; but I find myself returning to their Impressionist and 20th century galleries, which is where my real interests lie. It was great to see Morgan seeing Van Gogh, Monet, Cezanne, etc etc etc. She noted how from far away the Monet haystacks look soft and smooth, but when you stand right next to the canvas it’s messy and thickly painted. We went to the Costume Institute show of Wild: Fashion Untamed, which shows different uses of animal motifs in fashion. It was both beautiful and repulsive to see all the fur and feathers on display. Much easier to enjoy the Temple of Dendur.
We went back to our hotel for a quick change and then to dinner at Picholine, which is perfectly located for Lincoln Center events. Wonderful flash seared white tuna appetizer for me and warm lobster salad for Morgan. Rich food. We went to an all-Balanchine performance of the New York City Ballet. Agon and Apollo, the first and last pieces of the program, were wonderful, with the outrageous extension and rapid footwork that typifies Balanchine’s choreography. The middle piece, Orpheus, was a story ballet with costumes by Noguchi; and it was too strange for both of us. Morgan’s assessment was that several of the costumes looked like they had puppy tails sewn on them. Neither of us liked this piece. Morgan noted that virtually every member of the audience was old and was Caucasian, which I fear signals the future demise of ballet. But it’s certainly alive and beautiful and being danced right now.
Friday morning we went to the new MoMA. As we walked from our hotel on Lexington toward the MoMA I could see a long line already formed in the cold. I wasn’t sure I had the fortitude to wait to get in; but the tickets I had purchased in advance from their website allowed us to immediately enter the museum without any wait at all. Praise to the internet!
The new building feels to me much like the old building, with large white-walled galleries and several dead ends that force you to walk back through the art you’ve already looked at. I’m not sure how much museums should be about architecture versus being about places to see art; so I think the new building works well as an enormous glorified gallery. The audio tour which I reserved for Morgan was full of the usual pretentious art critic language. Why can’t they just tell you about Malevich’s life and work and historical context in plain English? By the time we were going through the upper floors the museum started to get crowded, but our timely entry gave us a leisurely art viewing and discussing experience. It’s great to have the MoMA opened again.
We spent Friday afternoon with a childhood friend of mine from Alaska who is now a successful visual artist in New York. Theresa Chong, who is represented by Danese Gallery, grew up in Fairbanks and played cello in school orchestra and youth symphony and the Fairbanks Symphony with me. We reconnected last spring after drifting apart after our college years. It’s a special experience to go gallery hopping with an artist. We hit many of the Chelsea galleries: Gagosian, Matthew Marks, Cheim and Read, and about 15 others. Morgan was a really good sport to keep looking at art and listen to Theresa and I talk about it. We went back to Theresa’s studio to look at her current work, and then went to dinner at Meet Restaurant on Gansevort Street, which is possibly the loudest restaurant I’ve ever been to. It’s interesting to see formerly marginal neighborhoods get swallowed up by the gentrification/gallerification of downtown. After dinner Theresa and her husband, Brian, gave us a ride through Times Square so Morgan could see the lights.
Saturday we wandered through SoHo and did some shopping at stores that don’t exist in Colorado, and then came home. It’s great to spend time there, and remember why we moved away from the big city (Boston) to live in a place where our golden retrievers run free and we can’t see another house from our house and the pace is livable. But New York is one of my very favorite places to visit – and I look forward to my next trip with Morgan.
Cold
Wednesday, January 5, 2005
When I started the Rover this morning, the little digital outside temperature readout displayed -2 degrees. That seems cold. Feels cold. It’s unusually cold for Boulder and the Front Range foothills, where the average high temperature in January is 46 degrees and the average low is 19 degrees. I had my gloves on and my head covered and it still felt cold. I remember waiting for the school bus in Fairbanks wearing no hat, even in temperatures colder than 30 below zero. It’s very important to be cool in high school and not mess up the fluffy hair that takes such attention and energy to create. I guess I’ve outgrown the need to be cool. I think I’ve accepted that I never was cool, never will be cool, and that it really isn’t worth caring about. I’d rather be warm.
Monday Mornings
01/03/05
Every day you must say to yourself, “Today I am going to begin.”
(Jean Pierre de Caussade SJ)
Monday morning, first writing/working day of the new year. I’m at my Spruce Street writing office, having abandoned my chaotic home office with its piles of unopened mail and unpacked suitcases in favor of the serenity of my writing space and at least a glimmer of the chance to get some writing done. I like Monday mornings and new years and the possibility of changing habits and patterns for the better. Hope springs eternal and all that. I think of new beginnings and New Year’s resolutions as a particularly American impulse, but I don’t actually know whether other countries have this broad notion of the clean slate. I somehow think that dates like January 1st have magical starting powers.
Brad forwarded an email to me from Jeff Nolan, a VC blogger, who apparently cares about numerical dates also.
http://sapventures.typepad.com/main/2005/01/prime_number_da.html
Jeff writes:
“Today is 1-3-05, all prime numbers. What does that mean? Absolutely nothing, but I thought about it in the shower this morning and wanted to share.”
I’m going to give writing a blog another try. I had a brief impulse last summer that disappeared into long days spent reading in Alaska. I didn’t work on my novel or do email or much of anything that I didn’t want to do. Just being, I think that’s called. Or maybe it’s called laziness. I did read an enormous amount, which was restorative and a little wild. It turns out that my answer to the “what if I won the lottery” question is that I would read incessantly. My desires aren’t radical or rebellious; they’re to return to the bookworm days of my childhood when I had to be called multiple times from my bedroom to set the table for dinner. I read a bunch of junk; but I also read deliberately from a pile of first novels and from Indian novels by Indian authors. I was tired of only seeing India through the lens of a media showing it as a good place to outsource jobs. I had some inkling that there was more going on there. After reading maybe ten of these books, I think that much of the literature is concerned primarily with domestic issues: who marries whom? A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth is the biggest and best example of this. A Suitable Boy is the longest book I’ve ever read – not metaphorically, but literally. 1474 pages in a small font and narrow margins. An enormous, sprawling story of four families in early 1950’s post-colonial India, centered around a Hindu woman and a Muslim man. I have a pile of un-read Indian novels, too; which keep my other piles of books company. I’ve made peace with the reality that even if I read all day every day I still won’t have time to read everything that I’d like to. I think one of the attractions to me for the blog is that it will remember for me how much I do read, and connect me with other readers.
Happy New Year and to new beginnings..
First Thought, Best Thought
I’m a blog novice. I’ve read a few, but never written anything until just now. As a writer, the thing I struggle with is Fear in many of its (probably infinite) guises. When I look closely, all of my other struggles in life are actually all about fear: fear of criticism, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of getting in trouble, fear of people saying mean things to me. These fears slow my writing progress as they move into my writing studio and bring along friends (Distraction, Procrastination, Obligation) and set up large encampments where other fears can breed. I’m hoping that the spontaneous nature of blogs will diminish the presence of these fears and reduce the illusory importance of the written word. After all, it’s only writing.
Jerry Colonna’s blog, in particular, has inspired me to be brave about just putting it out there. I don’t know Jerry very well, but feel that I know him better after I read what he writes. One of my biggest writing guides, Natalie Goldberg, says in one of her books that all readers really want is to know the writer better, and while I quibble with that (which is my skeptical nature), when I read Jerry’s blog I admire his courage and his ability to create a sense of intimacy through his writing. In addition, I share his interest with Buddhist thought and action, and that commonality probably helps me feel connected to him. Thanks, Jerry.
And really, thanks to Brad, my funny husband, for guiding me through the blog setup process, which entailed downloading a newer version of Windows and other ugly computer stuff and patiently sitting near to me while I clicked on things that he told me not to click on. He’s a good guy.
And how do you end your first blog post? I guess I’m figuring it out as I go along, which is only what all of us are doing, all the time.
Thoughts In Random Patterns 