Futility Now

On Tuesday we made our final journey to Gare de Lyon to get from Toulouse (which is where our backup plans put us once we got off the plane) to Bezier, so my mom could pick us up without any more miserable complaining than was absolutely necessary. Before setting out we checked out of our rooms at Hotel des Arts Bastille, leaving our bags behind the counter until we could claim our berths at Hotel Le Petit Prince (yes, really.)

Once the train business was settled (hopefully for good), we proceeded to the Musée d’Orsay for some good old-fashioned modernity. Because everyone loves the impressionists, the place was packed. While our passes had allowed us to skip the line at The Louvre entirely, the d’Orsay attracts a similarly forearmed crowd, so we had to sit in line for something like half an hour. Well, I guess our vacation needed a unifying theme.

As the sort of prickly modernist who loves Stockhausen and Soviet monumentalism it’s hard for me to take the collection at the d’Orsay very seriously. I mean, it’s great to have a starting point that is so obviously wonderful that even the most abject cretins enjoy it, but obviously I crave a bit more nuance than Courbet or Monet is going to provide me (although the turkeys are still as charming as ever), and longtime readers of Joaquin’s internet presence will know that I will spit on your shoes if you fail to loathe colonialist pedophile jagoff (and mediocre painter) Paul Gaugin. Nevertheless we kept our heads up and managed to find some charming pieces by painters who are wonderful despite being loved by everyone and their god-damned mom.

Being fatigued by so much popular art we sought out French pretense-boutique Collette and ate at its incredibly popular basement restaurant. The food was very good, but the people next to us were consumer-level fashion types and talked about outrageous crap at top volume, and the store as a whole was filled with faux innovation at prices that were supposed to justify themselves. To summarize, Collette is the Long Island vineyard of the fashion world.

After that we headed to our rain check at the Musée Arts Decoratif, or whatever, which is basically three floors of chairs with some assorted desks and other bullshit thrown in. Hazel thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, so maybe she can give you a better sense of what was going on there. Here she is sitting in an incredibly modern chair.

Then we managed to stumble back to our old hotel and drag our bags around the corner to our new hotel. Here’s a picture of the new hotel.

We just sort of schlubbed around that night. We’d earned it.

After stumbling out of the Louvre we tried to go to Musée des Arts décoratifs, but it was closed, because there is nothing the French love so much as being closed. We instead wandered into The Tuileries Garden and had some sort of frozen melon beverage that made Gray’s Papaya look like some kind of fancy juice bar. Thus invigorated we staggered to Musée de l’Orangerie where we looked at a bunch of paintings of a frog pond.

Downstairs from its most famous exhibit, l’Orangerie contains the collection of a man who was more or less the French Donald Trump of the turn of the century (the last turn of the century, not this most recent one which is really only a mid-80s rehash anyways.) It was very charming, except when it served to remind us by comparison of how degraded out times are.

In the evening we tried to go out in the Marais, but we went down the wrong Rue .* Temple, and couldn’t find the place we wanted, and were disappointed in the substitute we tried out. Instead we went to a bar immediately outside our metro stop and had a grand time. Because it was our last evening in the first hotel, I pointed my camera wistfully out of the window.

We experienced a really amazing sun-shower on your way to Apizza Scholls last night. While I do like this photo, it does a pretty poor job of capturing how dramatic everything was. There were a lot of clouds and gradations in the area that the picture shows as just being really bright.

Once inside Apizza Scholls we were astounded at how few people had ordered the truffle oil pizza. Even in Portland, most people are total fucking savages.

Hazel shaved her head. You can see coverage from the local paper (and a photo) here.

Whit Stillman is slowly getting it together to make another film. I am so excited about this. Apparently it’s not a comedy as such, but the article mentions some of the dialog someone trying out for a role is reading and it’s. . . well, let’s just call it “pretty recognizable.”

So far I’ve been spending my summer in the studio (which keeps getting referred to as “the dungeon,” since it is in the basement — I don’t like the connotations of that reference, though, so I’m thinking about giving “the underworld” a shot) rather than on impressive home improvement projects. I did break down and get some decent curtains for the living room this week, though they currently hang unhemmed, bottom 18″ pooling dramatically on the floor. Yoshi thinks this is a brilliant idea.

The yard, however, would brook no such negligence.  A very wet spring (yes, even for Portland) meant we’d avoided being outside much at all, but once the heat & sun did arrive, our plants seemed to think it might be their only chance to grow — ever.  So they did.  Luckily, “the mum” (as jmags calls her) came up for a visit and provided the guidance and confidence we needed to really tear some things out. As you can see.

All this brute labor convinced us we deserved some sitting-around-in-bars time. When I managed to look away from this suave fella I found some captivating color palettes.

tomato red, pale warmish grey, milky chartreuse, black

goldenrod, slate grey, caramel brown, more tomato red

caramel smoky brown, shadowed orange, black and brick

And I’ve been holding on to colors from an image that I couldn’t catch on film because I happened to be driving when I saw it: stormy slate grey (sky), emerald green (painted side of brick building), ivory and black (striped power cable overhead crossing them both).  I wonder if I’m being drawn to color groups just because of the really marvelous light we’ve had in Portland lately, or if it’s because my own work is so achromatic that I’m working with a vitamin deficiency?