Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Yesterday was the most beautiful day of 2011.  It was sunny and warm and perfect.

In celebration of that weather and in invitation of its continued presence in my life, here is a list I compiled with a friend on good places to while away an afternoon in Paris.

Camila and Maria's Afternoons Outside Par Excellence :
(in no particular order)

La Fontaine des Amoureux in the jardin de Luxembourg.

Parc Monceau - no one minds if you sit on the grass.

Parc des Buttes Chaumonts.

Canal Saint-Martin.

Place des Vosges.

The Right Bank.  By that I mean the north bank of the river, especially between Pont de la Concorde and Pont Sully.

Sacré Coeur and its little park.

Parc Floral de Paris in the Bois de Vincennes.

Champs de Mars.

Square in front of the Centre Pompidou.  Watch some street performers and people blowing enormous bubbles.

Partners in crime : Camila & Maria

Enjoy soaking in sun-drenched days and starlit nights outside!

Making daisy chains,
Maria and Camila

P.S. Yes, I know the title of this post only makes sense in Cajun French.  Je m'en fiche!

Le Train Bleu

I dropped a friend off at the Gare de Lyon on Wednesday, and while we were waiting for his train we went up to the beautiful restaurant, Le Train Bleu, to have a drink.  The restaurant has not changed since the train station was built for the Exhibition of 1900.  The great hall is covered in Belle Epoque paintings; the banquettes are in rich dark wood and leather; gold leaf is used liberally.  It's like stepping back into a more genteel time.

Sipping my limonade,
Maria

P.S. Thanks for the rec, Mom!

The Writing On the Wall

Across the board, French graffiti artists perform on a much higher level than their American counterparts.  One of my favorite hot spots of street art in Paris is near my university on the Passage des Patriarches.  I once overheard a mother teaching her young daughter the names of colors with the help of the swirlingly colorful wall.

Street-smart(ish),
Maria

An afternoon drive

This film, C'était un rendez-vous, was filmed in one take by attaching the camera to the front of a car.  The route, as far as I can tell, would take about 25-30 minutes if you were making good time.  Claude Lelouch does it in under 10.  When you gotta be somewhere, you gotta be somewhere.



Vroom vroom baby,
Maria

Chez Michou

This week I saw the last gasps of a well known drag show cabaret, Michou. Why do I say we saw its "last gasps"?  Because most of the drag queens and clientele are over fifty, at the very very least.  One gentleman in the front has his picture in the dictionary under "grandfather."  It's funny that I can't imagine my grandparent's generation setting foot in a drag show in the United States, but here in France they're the target audience!

Michou himself.  He kissed my hand when we arrived at the club.

Chez Michou was next door to the hotel where a couple of friends of mine were staying in Montmartre, and too intrigued to not do it, we rang the bell outside and were let into a bygone world of dim, red lighting, mirror covered walls and glitter lipstick.  It was campy, ridiculous and fun.  Oh to have seen it in its heyday!

Trying to figure out glitter lipstick,
Maria

Good ol' olfactory

My day through smells:

This morning when I put on my gloves they smelled like the cinnamon I used to doctor my vin chaud last night.

Walking to the metro I passed a woman who smelled like my first French teacher, Madame.

Bread was baking at the boulangerie I went to for lunch - the kind that makes you sure the crust will melt in your mouth before you taste it.

Grass growing in the field by my house from which I can see les Invalides.

The metro.  I won't describe that in detail.

A stolen squirt of a perfume with a red label from an Artisan Parfumeur display.

The pithy orange I peeled this afternoon.

A yellow-spraying flower called mimosa in French is my new favorite.  I always stop to smell it at flower shops.  It smells sweet.

The siren song of rotisserie chicken slowly turning in its heater on the sidewalk outside the traiteur called out to me at snack time.

Chlorine from the swimming pool.  It smells the same in every language.

My apartment smells like my host mother's smooth cigarette smoke again, because she's back from vacation.

Now I smell like my lavender-honey soap and being tucked warmly into bed.

Hoping for lavender-honey scented dreams,
Maria

Salon d'Agriculture

This weekend, I went to the biggest farm in the world.  At least, my host family told me that's what it was.  In fact, it's only the largest French agricultural convention, but I'll take what I can get.  The entire exhibition complex/village of Porte de Versailles was jam packed with all kinds of livestock, regional products, and food from around the world.

The whole thing was vaguely disorienting.  I felt like it was the lovechild of the Houston Rodeo and the Texas State Fair, except everyone was French and not all of the food came on a stick.

I am shocked by my own ability to imitate this technicolor cow.

Highlights included : pigs the size of ponies, a side of fried bananas with lunch, an unnecessary purchase of a jacket that smells like a farm, a kitty commune made of fish tanks, tshirts with horses on them, samples of Italian olives and a moon bounce shaped like a fruit basket.

I never knew there were that many kinds of sheep,
Maria

BAM MAM!

The MAM is the Musée d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, and the MAM is awesome.  Both the collection and the traveling exhibits were very cool.

There were lots of things I'd never seen or heard of before:  An artist who makes images appear out of layer upon layer of gloppy, random-looking dollops of paint.  An owl motif running through one exhibit.  An installation that looked like a giant Popsicle-stick house made with rowing oars and bowling balls.

Delphine Coindet, Cosmos

A dark room with a black box in which tiny pin holes light up like orbiting constellations.  A whole section with works from a school called SMS (Shit Must Stop) that included, ironically, Paul Steiner's "Johns in Art Galeries," a series of index cards describing toilets that includes "small, but definitely has atmosphere. EAST HAMPTON"

Steiner, Johns in Art Galeries

(image taken from Washington University in St. Louis' Kemper Art Museum) 

In the basement there is a very strange video installation by Turkish artist Inci Eviner.  Tiny images of dogs, playing cards, cancan-ing legs, belly dancers, buildings, fires, stacks of people, people wearing gray jogging suits and blue plastic dog-cones, doing repetitive actions play over and over to music made of the sounds of whistling, the cheering of a crowd, dogs barking, clapping, and a guitar playing.

Inci Eviner, Broken Manifestos

Looking for a museum off the tourist-beaten path?  Try this one.

Amusée par Art Moderne,
Maria

Ashes to Ashes

This is the story of the Catacombs of Paris:

The remains in the Catacombs come from another time, when bodies were still burried in Paris and the living brushed shoulders with the dead.  Eventually, the cemetaries were overflowing and the Parisians wanted to purge the city of this insalubrious excess, so the old quarries on the edge of the city became the catacombs.

There is an aura of dark romanticism surrounding the catacombs - like a gothic novel full of madness, buried family secrets, and bloody deeds done by moonlight.  The catacombs encourage this attitude with a macabre theatricality.  A sign over the entrance to the ossuary reads "ARRETE : C'EST ICI L'EMPIRE DE LA MORT." (Stop! Here lies the empire of death)

The walls are lined with femurs and tibias tightly packed, broken in half by rows of jawless skulls, illuminated and thrown into shadow in equal measure by the wall sconces.  This carefully arranged display is interffupted by plaques bearing quotation on shuffling off this mortal coil, etc :

Ils furent ce que nous sommes

Poussière, jouet de vent ;

Fragiles commes des hommes,

Faibles comme le néant !

Lamartine

And though regularly cleaned, the corners hold the dusty traces of a second death - one of bones - and the promise of what we will one day become.

Dust to Dust,
Maria

P.S. It's hard to take good pictures in caves when using flash is verboten...

Royale with Cheese

I cannot tell you the last time I did this, but a while ago I went to McDonald's (called "MacDo" here in France) with my host sister.  I got a quarter-pounder.  It was called a Royale Deluxe.

I just couldn't resist drawing this parallel:



See 1:00 for the pertinent part.  Excuse the language - that's Quentin Tarantino, not me.

My meal was happy,
Maria

Back to School

This week second semester classes began at the Sorbonne, so I am once again a full-time student. 

Here's what my time inside the classroom is going to look like:

Littérature:
Littérature du XIX-XXe siècle : Ecrire la ville
Littérature du XXe siècle : Ecrire la guerre

Histoire:
Histoire de Paris à travers ses monuments

Théâtre:
Genre et forme dramatique à l'épreuve de la scène

Art:
Atelier de dessin : modèle vivant et nature morte

So far I think my coup de coeur (favorite) is going to be Histoire de Paris because we take a field trip each week.  We've been to the Basilique de Saint Denis, Sainte Chapelle, Notre Dame, the Chateau de Vincennes and the Musée Cluny so far.  I'm also pretty psyched about taking art for the first time in about a decade!

Academically,
Maria

Mystery Men

I went to see a play at the Théâtre de Chaillôt last night and, arriving early, went to sit on the terrace next to the theatre that looks over the Eiffel Tower.  I ran across two enormous puppets that looked like they were made out of white bird's nests and illuminated with Christmas lights.  Teams of German puppeteers were manipulating the enormous men - making them play leap frog, do Michael Jackson impersonations, and take forced perspective photos with the Eiffel Tower - for one of their crew members who was filming the whole thing.  It was unexpected and fantastical and a little bit marvelous.

The play I saw was a one-man marionette show about a marionettiste. 
My life is so meta,
Maria

L'Orangerie

One of my favorite cures for the blues, or the grays, or even the angry reds is a trip to the Musée de l'Orangerie.  It might be my favorite place in Paris, and by extension, the world.  The museum holds lots of good art by artists that I like a lot, but the only reason I go is for the Nymphéas.

Monet's Nymphéas, or Waterlilies, live on the ground floor of the museum.  Natural light filters down to them through the old greenhouse's glass roof.  The eight paintings are hung in two ovular rooms that together make an infinity sign.  Somehow the space itself becomes liquid and refreshing; it makes me want to be alone and quiet.  It is beauty, distilled.

In front of my favorite panel.

Floating,
Maria

Find your light

In the Middle Ages, light was considered a manifestation of God's presence on earth.  So in churches, the meeting ground of God and man, God was present in the light that shone through the stained glass windows.

I've been thinking about the importance of light a lot lately.  When it's absent in the winter in Paris, the whole city is gray, and I am gray too. But when the sky is blue and the sun is out, the whole world feels newly minted, as though every moment is a sort of dawn, with the reawakening of my spirit just on the horizon.

I don't care whether it's God or just weather; when the winter sun shines, my heart does not feel weary.
Maria

In Over Our Heads : Drowning in Tea

We love tea rooms, Mom and I.  She was in Paris for six days ; we went to five tea rooms for a pause gourmande.  (This phrase might be translated as "gourmet snack" or even "indulgent snack.")  Though we both like tea, it has to be said that we really know nothing about it.  At a couple of these salons de thé we received booklets, which might as well have been written in Greek, of literally hundreds of choices in tea.  We learned a little about it, but what we really learned about is those elusive hybrids, tea rooms, themselves.  Here is a little guide to the ones we frequented:

 Mariage frères*
Carrousel du Louvre (1er)
30, rue du Bourg-Tibourg (4e)
13, rue des Grands-Augustins (6e)
260 Faubourg Saint-Honoré (8e)
Mariage freres is famous for its tea.  Even their simplest brews are delicious - Earl Gray, English Breakfast, bring it on!  I had a Proustian-madeleine moment when I took a sip of Mom's Earl Gray.  A French friend of mine brewed me a cup about two years ago, and I had never forgotten the taste.  Tasting it again made me feel like I had found a lost friend.  The gourmande part of this pause gourmande wasn't as good as the tea.  If you need help choosing from the overwhelming list, the well groomed waiters, dressed in all white suits, are more than happy to lend a hand.

À Priori Thé
35 Galerie Vivienne (2e) 
Ding ding ding!  We have a winner for cleverest tea shop name!  The phrase "a priori" is a cornerstone of the French intelligentsia's lingo; you can't make it through a week in university, or I would guess a week in many work places, without hearing it.  (The phrase is exactly the same in English - thanks Latin!) The "Priori Thé" makes a homophone with "priorité," which means "priority."  A little pricey, but incredibly delicious for lunch as well as a pause gourmande.  Reservations are not a bad idea since this restaurant is cute as a button and about the same size as one. 

L'heure Gourmande
22 Passage Dauphine (6e)
The drink of all chocolate drinks is the chocolat à l'ancienne. (I know, not a tea.)  I think that solid chocolate is melted and poured into ambrosia to make it.  It's thick as mud (almost) and as filling as dinner (almost).  And it's great at L'heure Gourmande.  Tucked away in the Passage Dauphine, this little shop sports an impressive collection of novelty tea pots including a head of lettuce, a cat in a dress, an elephant, an owl, a toad - basically the entire cast of Mother Goose.  These are pleasingly at odds with the slightly Asian, buddha-centric decor of the rest of the salon. 

 
Ladurée
21, rue Bonaparte (6e)
16, rue Royale (8e)
75, avenue des Champs Elysées (8e)
64, boulevard Haussmann  (9e)
Ladurée is most famous for its macarons, but it also boasts nice little tea rooms.  In the sixth arrondissement, the salon is done in light teal and 1920s chinoiserie.  It is full of hidey-holes with low slung leather camp chairs and warm, low light.  Mom was convinced that it was an established trysting ground.  Go for the tea, stay for the people watching.

Foucher
134, rue du Bac (7e) 
The smell of chocolate hits you the moment you open the door of Foucher, the chocolate store with a salon de thé.  The family has been in the chocolate business for over 200 years, and boy have they figured it out.  This was not my top pick in terms of ambiance, but it was far and away the winner in terms of the "gourmande" part of the pause gourmande.  Mom and I had the cake of the day, a rich, airy chocolate situation, and it was pretty out of this world.  Also a great place to shop for gifts made of chocolate. 

Indulging,
Maria
* Asterisk denotes top choice, though it was a close race.

Lute-a-toot-toot!

I think Terpsichore played the lyre, but my advice to would-be muses is to pick up the lute.  I saw the most interesting lutenist, Jozef van Wissem, give a concert at Shakespeare and Co. this afternoon.

Jozef, a dutch man with longish un-brushed hair who hunches over his instrument as he plays, is a magician of sound and creation.  He has done a lot of work with medieval lute compositions, playing them backward and rearranging them and creating entirely new pieces.  His compositions have  beautiful, evocative names like, "The Hearts of the Sons Are Returned to Their Fathers," "Dew Drops Fall Like Tears," and "Love is a Religion."

I was still sitting in the room, writing, as he was packing up after his session, and wanting to say something before he left, I accidentally and embarassingly effervesced all over him.  I told him his music was iridescent.  What word was I looking for?  Even I cannot say, but what I kind of meant is that there is a colorfulness and translucence to his music.  Or then perhaps the music made me think of those words, themselves - iridescent, translucent - and not of what they mean. 

I cannot say that I have an informed appreciation for lute music, or even that I liked everything Jozef played.  However, there were glimmering moments of great beauty that I couldn't help but feel in the secretly musical parts of my soul.

"The soul has arrived at understanding of her nothingness"

A disclaimer : I only call Mr. van Wissem "Jozef" because that is how he introduced himself to me.  He also told me to follow my dreams!

Trying to follow that good advice,
Maria

Now That's What I Call "Movie Magic"

La Pagode, one of the coolest movie theatres in Paris, was built in 1895 by the then owner of Bon Marché, M. Morin.  M. Morin reconstructed this real pagoda in his back yard to reconquer his wife, who loved all things chinois.  Unfortunately for M. Morin, his wife left him for his business partner the year la Pagode was completed.  Fortunately for us, La Pagode was opened to the public as a movie theatre in the 1930s and is still in operation today.

Walking into la Pagode feels a little like going through the wardrobe.  There is a beautiful, lush oriental garden outside with lion statues, winding little paths, and lights that throw leafy shadows against the abstractly mosaicked walls.  They show lots of artsy films and foreign films in this red-carpeted, two room cinema.  You can buy sparkling water and ice cream cones at concessions.

Unfortunately, the people watching was better than the movie I saw : a woman with bouffant hair, kitten heels, and a full length red coat; the ticket-tearer in a yellow print skirt, a purple turtle-neck, and a sparkly black cardigan; another woman wearing a coat with plum colored fur at the neck and wrists. 

Bisous,
Maria

La Comédie-Française

 

Title: La Comédie-Française, aka Le Théâtre-Français or La maison de Molière
Location : Place Colette, Paris 1^er
Theatres : La Salle Richelieu, le Vieux-Colombier, le Studio-Théâtre
Motto : Simul et singulis

The Comédie-Française is the national theatre of France.  It plays the "repertoire," that is to say all the French classics. The goal is to keep alive France's rich theatrical heritage and to bring it to the French people. 


The main theatre, the Salle Richelieu, is an enormous, beautiful salle a l'italienne that has been located in the Palais-Royal since 1799.  There is a lot of gold and red velvet involved ; according to a teacher who worked at the comedie-francaise, the chandelier is practically a historical landmark in and of itself.

I'm always in the nose-bleed section...

Sometimes called "La maison de Moliere," this theatre was where the great French playwright played before aristocrats and royalty.  He died there, too, during a not so imaginary turn in "La Malade imaginaire."  The green chair in which he died is displayed at la Comedie.  The color green, considered a harbinger of bad luck, is now rarely used on French stages.

La Comedie-Francaise is made up of sociétaires and pensionaires, all of whom are technically government officials.  It is run by an administrateur général who is elected by his or her peers ; the sociétaires also vote to determine who moves into the company, who stays, and who get kicked out.  All the actors must come from the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique, which takes about thirty pupils per year.  They are the best of the best, and watching them is a class in acting unto itself :

Les femmes savantes

Andromaque

La grande magie

Standing in line for 5€ last minute tickets,

Maria

P.S. Stole all these pictures.  Thanks internet!

Happy Hanukkah!

You may or may not know this about me, but in a previous life I was Jewish.  So last night I celebrated the Festival of Lights by meandering over to the Marais (the Jewish quarter/gayborhood of Paris) to poke around a little. 

I went to Chez Marianne for sweets - they have the whole schmeer.  All of the bakeries in the Marais are mushuggah good.  I don't think what I got was actually Jewish, but it's the thought that count's right?

Chez Marianne

Is baklava Jewish?  Maybe a little?  'Cause that's what I had.  I also got dattes fourrés à la pâte d'amande.  I don't know how to translate that other than "Almond-Date Cookies," but they are scrumptious.  They're Moroccan pastries that come in rose and pistachio flavor, and I can eat about one before I've reached my sugar quota for the week.

The French spell it "Hanoucca" - weird right?
Maria

P.S. Paris is a blizzard.