Wednesday August 21 - Friday August 23
Dear Becky,
Despite funding, I will write you anyway. We are supposed to do things anyway, right?
F, A's husband, has given me a few french lessons: the first time we drank wine, the second time dirty martinis, the third time I had a beer while he drank water. I didn't have any change left, so he paid for it. The other times were at their house in Belleville.
This third lesson, A was bar-tending at a small bar, Poisson Bleu (not a typical cafe: smaller and more bar-like with cheap beer 2,50 euros each, patronage mixd in age and gender, those living right around the corner) in the 20th arrondissement; it was a Friday but quiet. F went there when he was finished working. I met M at her apartment beforehand, which is where I'm writing from now.
[Soft sun and a cool breeze coming through the windows. The windows, which are large, face the courtyard, there's a tall tree, I'm on the sixth floor, close to it's top, it's a small studio with a creaking floor. There is a record player and lots of books and cds (I listened to curtis mayfield last night) and one of those efficient little european washing machines.]
F didn't stay at the bar long - I was late in meeting him, and he wanted to sleep.
[Like me, he is not always in the mood to be sociable. A, 22 when she met him, thought this was just because he was alone and thought she could change this by turning them into a 'we'. He does things with her I only do when alone (stay up all night watching movies and/or drinking).]
Off the bat, he handed me a Flaubert book: Trois Contes, so we read a few lines and conjugated "-er" verbs. After he left, I rummaged to see if I had change for a second beer, and spoke with A.
A's apartment is by the Republique Metro stop, a 6th floor walk-up, a tiny studio with a lofted area for the bed and nice light although no window in the bathroom. There is a pull-out ikea love-seat across from her desk. She spent the past two months fixing it up. As a result, she only spent a few nights sleeping there before I arrived. The tub was speckled with paint, the electric stove-top in the kitchenette had just been installed, the tiles still needed grout, the sink didn't yet have running water. We had dinner that night with F at their old place in Belleville. We picked up various cheeses and tomatoes cured in oil from the grocery store. Earlier he bought 3 bottles of wine. We got bread from the only open Boulangerie (everything is closed in August), and A made quiche. The wine was nice. In the ensuing days, A and I quarreled a number of times.
I read Paris Trance: my sister's husband sent me a copy. And A gave me Portrait of a Lady to read: when I started, it all seemed familiar and I realized I'd seen the film with Nicole Kidman.
Maybe I will save on postage: these will be letters written in text-edit saved to my computer and sent do you as pdfs.
love,
Jane
August 23rd
Dear Becky,
I have been running by the park near M's house.
A wants to make a film: she's talked about not being able to write: she mostly writes lists and feels too self-conscious for prose.
Two nights ago, she brought me to a bar on the canal close to her house: we got the cheapest drinks: Rum Punch (sugar and mint and rum, no ice). It took me a full half hour to finish it. It would make one's teeth go brown.
Love,
Jane
August 24
She was taught how to cook by her mother. She makes delicious quiche. She uses cream and butter liberally. She is not afraid of frozen bags of asparagus and cans of peas. We were at the store eyeing the salmon and so she got it and was fairly sure it was raw but it was actually cured so we had pan-fried cured salmon and overcooked rice. Part of the cooking, I think, is related to a lack of control over certain variables, right now, her uncertainty about money. One's sense of self becomes muddied/confused because those things you thought you might have for certain you don't have and you feel you must rely on other people - strangers even - for help. So then: the
things you have ownership over (like skills) become warped/affected.
On my way home, there was a kid passed out in the street: his body was long, elegant, young, tanned. His friends laughed and slapped his face from side to side. His foot was propped on a curb and the rest of him on cobblestones.
August 25th
Dear Becky,
I am having my fourth lesson with F this evening before dinner. I'm not paying him anything. I should buy him liquor. I bought a book of grammar exercises and a book of communication exercises (how to buy bread).
Love,
Jane
Wednesday August 28th, 2am
Dear Becky,
I met Madame Cabrera in Le Marais today - at 38 Rue de Sevigne. The Carnavalet Museum is across the street. The buildings are gray and ornate. We spoke with one another in broken English/Spanish/French/Italian. She showed me how to open the courtyard door. The light in the stairwell was broken. She showed me how to open the apartment, showed me the day-bed and the closets and where the sheets are. She pointed out the window and said "Rue." She pointed to the radio, "la musique." She showed me how to power-up the fridge, where the cloth napkins are, where the bathroom light is.
[instructions from L:
DO NOT SIT on LEATHER CHAIR or TWO SMALL CHAIRS, unless you weigh under 110lbs.
Yellow day bed: for an overnight guest, sheets, duvet and pillow are in LL Beane bags in far right closet. Put MATTRESS PAD first, then fitted sheet.
If you eat on the square table, COVER with brown plastic tablecloth (in LR closet).
There is a large folding table inside the hanging closet, behind the coats.]
In 2011, we had thanksgiving with An and his Brazilian girlfriend at the C____ Club. She spoke about her son: at 18, a champion body-builder, he sustained himself on chicken breasts. She was pretty - in the way women of that generation sometimes are: how they take it upon themselves to be the female counterparts to the men they're with: they can make a nice meal, get caviar, the right kind of wine (I think I get my picture of this from a woman in Saul Bellow's Herzog). She inhabited her body; one was very aware of her lipstick. His ex-wife is plainer, more intellectual, has filled out with age, has investments and business engagements.
Love,
Jane
Thursday August 29
Dear Becky,
I missed a call from Aude. She and her sister were au pairs to my sister, brother, and I for two summers when we were children. Her mother painted a watercolor of my parents' house upstate from a picture the sisters brought her. Aude has children of her own now. I remember her bathing me: I had a mole on my leg. I'd never thought of it before - or for that matter felt self-conscious about my body. I thought I was perfect.
When I moved out of A's, I didn't know how I would manage to stay here so many months without knowing anyone. I wrote An, Ph, M, Ka, E: my attachment to each negligible.
Aude lives in the south of France.
An is part of Sarkozy's party: I don't know enough about politics - I'm ashamed of how apolitical I am. It all slips through: moments of intense feeling and then general haze. I don't know L's politics but judging by the books on her shelves she's probably more nuanced. The Brazilian woman is a good cook: has an interest in food, pleasure.
I'm sitting in L's living room on the yellow daybed. It, like everything else, is quite old: upholstered with yellow embossed fabric. The fabric has a floral pattern. This afternoon someone rang the intercom: I picked it up and a man said "l'escalier": he was here to repair the light in the stairwell. Tall, normal looking, a bit of a paunch, clipped graying hair, t-shirt, jeans, impatient. He kept saying shit and slut. The windows open to a view of the Carnavalet Museum. I can't touch anything, be anywhere.
A was ill today. Last night, we shared a bottle of wine. She strips down to her underwear, and as she hangs languorously upon the furniture, I give her insights into her life. I left my wallet at her apartment and upon arriving this morning found her quite ill. She was once again draped across the furniture, but her pallor was pale. She ran herself a shallow tub and lay there and vomited bile. The same thing happened nine months ago she said and she'd fainted. I sat with her by the tub but didn't know what to do. I thought of Degas and Bonnard. Later, she asked me to bring her medicine. F took her to the doctor.
In-between getting my wallet and returning with medicine, I had a croissant and coffee and read part of Anne Truitt's Turn.
11 February, Monte San Savino
"I must be my own continuity. I have to keep on spinning it out of myself, in my life and in my work. Sleep spun it out for me last night, and gave me, like a friendly husband, understanding this morning."
My old boss sent me 3 Anne Truitt books while I was in New York. I met her for lunch at an Italian place next to __. We both got vegetable soups and little plates of food. I spoke more than she did, and she ate more quickly than me. She doesn't understand people like Paul Thek. After that show at the Whitney, she asked me to explain what was good about him, but I couldn't. She likes to be able to comprehend things. It's always easier if you know people – have the context of familiarity. Everyone's uncomfortable with someone who's a little down-and-out. She plays lots of tennis. It's true - we've got double-standards about everything. When she was young she wore short skirts. She was probably invited to dinners at Helen Frankenthaler's: people who are solidly good but also wealthy and a little straight-laced. Drawing outside the lines in a way that's still easily digestible.
Truitt, too, is tasteful like Helen Frankenthaler or Robert Motherwell or Ellsworth Kelly. Maybe she's got a little bit of Joan Mitchell: but she's also got Mrs. Dalloway. Always putting flowers out. I don't want to delimit what they've done: and I hate melodrama (I'll never really be able to like Egon Schiele or Paul McCarthy) but I feel I can't compete with all this rigid acceptability…
Why the hell am I writing about this?
I woke up from a nap at 6pm: I felt the light changing and flickering from bright to dark as it passed through the open window and onto my face: the air passing through with the light: and sound, too - people's voices - the increase in dialogue that occurs at the end of the day when people finish their work and enter the street.
Love,
Jane
Friday August 30th
Dear Becky,
I went to the Louvre this morning. It was my third visit. I wandered into a room with two Canaletto paintings; I first looked at them two years ago: I paid attention to the way he drew lines (like nonsense handwriting) on-top of fields of color to depict waves in the canal. This time I noticed the color of the paint, its shininess, the way the figures are little gestural caricatures: everything has the ease of shorthand -- very little relationship to observed life - a depiction of shade in order to create the illusion of space and sunlight. It's masterful and formulaic. The thought isn't existing in the application. Then I revisited the Poussin. I noticed the foreground and the background: that the mythic tale is taking place in the foreground and then there is sky above and the deep recession of buildings or landscape: the story takes place within a larger whole.
You have to be in the Poussin room for a while before your eyes adjust to his palette. He moves you around with color (cobalt and red and green). Everything’s painted on dark ground. Once you've been there awhile, they become luminous and details emerge. He has his shorthand moments like Canaletto - everyone's feet look the same - and his babies are awful - but there's a refinement (contemplation) that Canaletto lacks.
Cezanne wrote a letter to Emile Bernard saying (only) "I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you." (from the truth in painting/ derrida).
Love,
Jane
Tuesday September 3rd
Dear Becky,
I am happy to be detached from whatever I have written and send it off to you.
On Sunday, I went to see the Simon Hantaî show at the Pompidou. About half-way through, huge windows looked out onto the rooftops below: the contrast between the paintings and the windows was stunning and more interesting than the paintings themselves. After this, there was a video: older men elegantly lay on their sides with heads propped on hands to comfortably watch the screen. Hantai's children played the flute.
Yesterday, I went to the Louvre again and finally went to the grand hall containing all the Davids. The rape of the sabine women. And Delacroix and Gericault: the raft of the medusa. I looked at them up close and far apart. The people were giants (the size of their feet): facing the atrocities of the elements, of sickness, of war. The Delacroixs were the best: their lack of frontal linearity. And that huge coronation painting. Every so often boyfriends took pictures of their girlfriends posing in front: the girlfriends smile, twork their hips, make cute faces. On the ceiling, artists' names and dates are in ovals like they're royalty.
Later I bought cheese from the cheese-counter at Monoprix and bread from a boulangerie and a head of pungent lettuce from a vegetable stand.
The sky at 8:15pm was the same gray-white as the buildings: with just a tiny tint of blue. About an hour later, it was deep teal, the clouds salmon from the sun.
Love,
Jane
September 6
Dear Becky,
I have been listening to Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 14 in F. Sharp Major: allegretto adagio allegretto.
My cup is sitting on the faux-marble folding table L's son got for the apartment so that he would have a place to work. Everything else is an heirloom: it is odd to be surrounded by things, to continually visually confront things and feel like you're only getting half the story because you don't know its history and even if I did I wouldn't be able to retain it.
Something about Hantai's aestheticism towards the end had a profundity: he is transparent about his point of transfixion with Matisse.
There are a number of things I've never known how to do:
pack well for a trip
keep my clothes folded
be efficient
talk politics
be Mrs. Dalloway (get flowers)
& no matter where I am, I want to escape.
I came across a photograph I took of a Paul Thek: a red hand drawn on a piece of notebook paper outlined in blue ballpoint. At the top a note in all-caps: "NEITZSCHE (sic) CAUGHT BEATING A DEAD HORSE RED HANDED." At the bottom, inside the hand, just where the wrist is beginning, where the red ends, "I LOVE YOU." and outside the hand, an x.
I'm reading Anne Truitt's Turn again:
"I took to examining grasses and trees and buildings and fences, and to my imagination. The fact of solitude combined with these new interests to form within me a tacit decision to rely on myself, and myself alone. A spot of pain remained: a hot feeling in my chest out of which the fierceness I could not express without the danger of losing all affection added defiance to my independence."
Yesterday at the Louvre, I passed through all the tapestry halls: Les Métamorphoses d'Ovide according to Battista Dossi: people's bodies turning, in a straight line into trees: the arms sprouting ordered leaves, their heads sprouting branches (like the straight line of that Monet painting of the trees and their reflection in the water). Their faces and chests remain open: and modestly, their lower-torsos are covered in leaves, climbing up their legs, from the ground. Each body has a different type of leaf assigned to it. The branches spreading from their heads and arms are balletically interwoven. Each of them face a different way: as if to make us aware they are alive within the context of the frame, their torsos turning: and like a further addition to the choreography if each smallest moment. There can't be accidents/mistakes in tapestries. I passed Poussin's Adam and Eve: Eve is kneeling by Adam, grabbing his arm and calmly pointing to the apples in the tree behind them. Her skin is dark, green, like the leaves all around. Her hand points straight up-word out of her head. Adam has rosier cheeks and a pliable expression. It is as if she's just roused him from his resting in the grass, and he, happy for the company, listens to her discovery of the fruit with eagerness. I know I am looking at Poussin because of T.J. Clark. I hadn't thought I would feel as I do: that I love the paintings, but the people also look like comic-book characters: his particular way of painting feet and hands and noses. A comic God hovers in the clouds. It's the way he's organized space that is so impressive.
Love,
Jane
Letter#10b (unsent)
(of De Chirico) These are smaller than you think: deep shadows: like spaghetti westerns.
Today: Henry James, Kenneth Anger (film from the 40's - have to look this up: Puce: a woman wearing a sequined dress - walking grey-hounds at the end - with two songs playing (what songs? the songs were perfect: this something set to music) and the Dufy's and then seeing (after the fauvists) the later work: how strong a contrast.. how old-fashioned the paintings seem: why so horribly old-fashioned? I don't wish to be old-fashioned like this: living a hermit's life [that was the song: the life of the hermit: high on ecstasy all by one's self] and then after that seeing the Yves Klein and the AR Pencks and the Baselitz: and being aware, also, that this European history (and looking at the abex people in the states) was what they were making things off-of: how do I deal with this?
I hadn't known (or maybe forgot) Guston was born in Russia.
The statues in front of the modern art museum have lips painted red by someone like graffiti. And then beyond the water, and up the stairs (the stairs almost invisible), you could see the umbrellas above the tables and people drinking their coffee. I drank an espresso before going in. I hadn't expected to see all the Dufys, with natural light cascading across them, and the Robert Delauneys, he even put his name in a pretty color: they are huge: like backdrops. What happened between 1940 and 1960?
Sept. 13
Dear Becky,
(now) the european combination washer-dryer is spinning. I've lain a blanket on L's yellow couch. I asked whether I could stay at her place through the 17th and told her I'd give her a drawing in exchange. She accepted this: but I still feel I'm abusing her generosity by becoming 'comfortable' here: the sink is no longer as pure a white as it was 10 days ago.
Yesterday and the day before I read a little bit of Agamben: which made me want to understand his context. I am still trying to understand my own context although maybe this is a waste of time.
This is how Agamben came up: looking for references to Poussin on my computer, two things:
1.David Joselit writing about Jutta Koether: "Inspired by T.J. Clark's extended reading of Poussin in The Sight of Death (2006), Koether develops a gesture that is deeply ambivalent: equally composed of self-assertion and interpretation, her stokes are depleted of expressive urgency by marking the elapsed time between Poussin's 1651 and her 2009." [I came across this after reading The Sight of Death myself: she makes me think of New York - of Columbia - as far away from LA as it gets. But at least she thinks.]
2. Agamben's The Man without Content [a riff on Musil's The Man without Qualities] (the first line of the Translator's note reads "With the exception of the Greek and French sources, Agamben quotes in Italian, frequently his own." I was impressed by this - that he takes it upon himself to produce the vernacular.
[Radical Thought in Italy, copyright 1996, "The Italian political condition has approached what Frederic Jameson has identified as a defining aspect of U.S. Left culture in recent years, that is, the condition of theorizing without movements."]
In Frenhofer and His Double, Agamben writes, "The painter Frenhofer, in Balzac The Unknown Masterpiece, is the perfect type of the Terrorist. Frenhofer has attempted for ten years to create on his canvas something that would not be just a work of art, albeit that of a genius; like Pygmalian, he has erased art with art to make out of his Swimmer not an assemblage of signs and colors but the living reality of his thought and his imagination. He tells his two visitors, 'My painting [ma peinture] is not a painting, but a feeling, a passion! Born in my studio, it [elle] must remain here as a virgin and not leave if not covered.' And later: 'You are in front of a woman, and you are looking for a picture. There is such depth on this canvas, its air is so true, that you can't distinguish it from the air that surrounds us. Where is art? Lost, vanished!' But in this quest for absolute meaning, Frenhofer has succeeded only in obscuring his idea and erasing from the canvas any human form, disfiguring it into 'a chaos of colors,tones, hesitating nuances, a kind of shapeless fog.' In front of this absurd wall of paint, the young Poussin's cry -- 'but sooner or later he will have to realize that there is nothing on his canvas!'-- sounds like an alarm responding to the threat that the Terror starts posing for Western art."
[Of course this interested me because I'd not made a connection between Balzac's fictive Poussin, and my (Koether's) Poussin -- if the name Balzac has chosen here is anything more than coincidental]
Earlier, "The Terrorist is a misologist, and does not recognize in the drop of water that remains on his fingertips the sea in which he thought he had immersed himself; the Rhetorician looks to the words and appears to distrust thought."
I've continued reading, now -- am not in the place to deconstruct what I'm reading: aside from perhaps a fear in my mind that is arising as a result of my pleasure in coincidences: as if I wish my life were a novel..
I'm now staying at 38 Rue de Sevigne. Now, on page 13 of the Agamben, I read: [and this must be the same Sevigne!] "If the man of taste thinks about himself for a moment, he must notice not only that he has become indifferent to the work of art, but that the more his taste is purified, the more his soul is spontaneously attracted by everything that good taste cannot but condemn, as though good taste carried within itself a tendency to pervert itself into its opposite. The first recognition of this feature... is found in two surprising letters of Madame de Sevigne's, dated July 5 and 12, 1671. [Poussin died in 1665] Speaking of the novels of intrigue, which were just starting to become popular with a restricted audience, this perfect woman of taste wonders how to explain the attraction she feels for such second-rate works: '... La Calprenede's style is wretched in a thousand places; long-winded periods, ugly words; I feel all this... I know, then, how detestable [La Calprende's] style of writing is, yet I continue to get caught in it like a limed bird: the beauty of the sentiments, the violence of the passions, the greatness of the events, and the miraculous success of their redoubtable swords, I get carried away by all this like a little girl..."
Is this why I like Delacroix's swords and horses? And why I like James Bond movies? : how deceptively simple men and women's relationships are in these contexts... how i wanted to be a bond girl at age 5...
Who is one supposed to read now? (after Agamben): or is it Agamben we're supposed to read? The book on radical Italian thought writes of Italy (Italy's recent political history) as being like a laboratory or microcosm. ['In a way, Berlusconi combines the political entrepreneurship of a Ross Perot with the media entrepreneurship of a Ted Turner.']
The washer is still going -- smoke from cigarettes has come through the windows. I like the rain here. Tomorrow, I'll move the folding table to the window so I can glance at the gray slate roof across the way and the gray of the sky (lighter in tone).
love,
Jane
Letter #12 unsent
I was thinking of what could stand up to the Yves Klein portrait [ethereal blue]: the Ingres definitely could.
I've also been dividing the paintings up into strange categories: things, like the Corots, that are photographic before photography: the purpose in this..
vs. the theatrical paintings: all these categories I've read about finally, now that I'm nailing them into my head with visual repetitions, becoming clear to me. The theatrical ones are for the most part terrible -- I haven't even always looked at who they are by. I like Rubens -- I like being told a story: but some of them seem the precursors of Walt Disney and bad movies: not good/bad movies (there are those, too: I took a picture of a painting that was grouped with all the Ingres that reminded me of one of Picabia's nudes today), but simply horrible cheesy pandering to the masses/ pleasant movies that have absolutely nothing to do with life. Like bad Russian painting: painting for the state: not Tolstoy peasants, but fabulously dressed people who don't look like people - fake faces - acting out some drama: the drama might be a replaying of a myth, but the cheeks of the people are too rosy, there's too much softness to it all: you're being told not to think but let life be pleasant.
I think Cezanne must have liked Corot - and Matisse too (esp. since Matisse loved Cezanne). I mean - I understand why Picasso chose some of his themes (centaurs, women at baths), and I understand why Courbet painted people seated in a forest eating lunch.
You are given the dates, but there are no materials listed the way we must list our materials.
Sunday Sept. 15
Dear Becky,
At 5:30, I had my mustache threaded by an Indian woman in the 18th. She had maternal efficiency: pushing her body up against my chair while she worked. The place was purple, cheap, had the vibe of a low-budget foot-massage parlor or nail-salon. They draped fabric in the window to make the interior more discrete. This is the first I've done this: and I felt deeply angry, being there: how unromantic, how gross. Different kinds of women walked in, for their ten minutes of upkeep, each with a slightly different shade of skin. On my ride home, I looked at everyone's eyebrows, everyone's skin, the details in each face.
Now, before I sleep, I am looking at the painting across the daybed: of a woman, it must be a relative of L's, her hair gathered in a green clip, a light pink to her cheek (blush) and more bits of pink on her lips, a rose at her breast. She's wearing a strapless dress and her coat (which really looks more like a sheet) has fallen, exposing her shoulders. She looks to the right, leaving her neck long.
L has a copy of Adam Gopniks' Paris to the Moon by the daybed -- I read half of it and couldn't bring myself to continue. There was some comfort in it. Has he experienced no adversity, though, beyond his mother throwing out his idiosyncratic childhood toys? His open-air-market experiences are with Alice Waters.
I read part of Flaubert's Three Tales. I finished Portrait of a Lady: I think I prefer Edith Wharton to Henry James: Isabelle Archer seems too much the idealized product of a male mind.
Love,
Jane
September 17th
Dear Becky,
I'm staying in L's until the 25th or 26th. I had asked her who the portrait across the bed was, and she wrote:
'The painting is of my grandmother, done by a fashionable portraitist of the early 19th century. She was from a very wealthy Viennese family, and married into French aristocracy. She was considered a great beauty and was certainly a woman about town. Unfortunately the family lost all their money after WW1, and had to sell lands and palaces. So there is little left of those grand old days.'
She must mean 20th century.
I met M for a coffee yesterday at 11:30am at a low-key cafe in Belleville across from a bakery. Both places had red awnings. M is tall with wavy dark brown hair to her shoulders. She has a slightly olive (warm) complexion. She was wearing pink pants and white/navy oxford shoes and a black-and-white checkered coat. She was writing emails on her phone and had finished her coffee already. We spoke briefly and then I went inside to order. She was brusque. She left for the US today so she met me before continuing on with her trips to the pharmacy, the dry-cleaner's etc.
Like some hold-over from my threading experience, I found myself examining her face. It was fresh and clean like a baby's: her eyebrows thin (her aesthetic influences are apparent in her appearance: theatricality, the occult, mysticism). The Indian neighborhood with all the cheap threading shops is close to Belleville.
The faucets in the bathroom were broken.
Later on, I looked at statues at the Louvre. I sat on a bench. There was an Islamic woman to my left, with her daughter: they'd come to pass the afternoon. Her daughter kept running out into the floor, on the marble. Her mother tried to admonish her, but found her too charming to be angry.
Love,
Jane
Sept. 18th, 2013
morning
Dear Becky,
I drank two espresso yesterday, so woke early again: I looked at the clouds out the window: and realized that Matisse doesn't really paint clouds.
I've started to re-open my idea of going to look at the waterlilies every day so I think I'll start tomorrow: if I can suffer going to the tuilleries/L'Orangerie this often.
I was so happy to get your letter. There's something about looking at the date and reading that makes time/geography conflate. I love the paintings [yellow]. I had a drink with a girl Cl last night. She says she often references painting in her writing. Apparently Whistler was very specific about the installations for his paintings, would specify how he wanted moldings and door-frames to be. I might be misremembering, but Cl fixated on a letter he wrote with the word 'yellow' repeated. The movement between a color being a color and a color being a description. And of course they (your paintings) made me laugh.
I'm touched you've been carrying the letters around with you. Funny. Nice. I've been thinking about the letters a lot - that its a relief to have a place for thoughts to go.
A group of students always gathers across the street in the morning. Their voices come through the window. The window is thick, so when it's closed, you can't hear them. I'm watching the light change: wax and wane, as the clouds shift. The sky, now, is pale cool blue: with the ever-present electricity of luminosity.
Love,
Jane
Sept. 18th
late morning
Dear Becky,
I wrote the following in the very early morning (1am-2am)
When I got home, when I looked in the mirror, my lips were stained from wine: like when a kid drinks grape-juice, and above one's lip, there are purple marks left from the rim of the class. I was embarrassed. I drink more than I used to: the little bit of whiskey before going to social gatherings. Not much: but with the knowledge that my maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother were both closet alcoholics. I can see how this could slowly turn into someone's (or my) reality. In the case of my paternal grandfather, it was a combination of social-anxiety, extreme shyness, and an overly large ego. In the case of my paternal grandmother, it was loneliness.
Love,
Jane
I wrote a letter that afternoon, also, in which I outlined my financial trouble followed by various implausible solutions: like a cry for help to a party hardly fit to respond. Having heard nothing back, I plowed forward unawares, continuing to write, cognizant that I had created an uncouth breach/break with whatever social contract existed between us.
September 21, 2013
Dear Becky,
There is a man upstairs from L's who continually walks back-and-forth: I hear the floor-boards creaking now, as I write, and have heard them, upon waking, at 4am.
Last night I had a late dinner with T at the place she's staying.
At the market, she bought soaps, flowers to perfume her apartment, cheeses to eat.
Flowers are nice depending on who is buying them and the manner in which they put them out.
Flaubert:
"The doe, as light in colour as a dead leaf, was cropping the grass, while the dappled fawn, without impeding her movements, pulled at her dugs."
"La biche, blonde comme les feuilles mortes, broutait le gazon; et le faon tacheté, sans l'interrompre dans sa marche, lui tétait la mamelle."
She put the brussel sprouts in the microwave and started to stir-fry fennel. She put frozen pellets of mashed potato in a pot. She poured me a small glass of wine from a half-bottle.
We had met at the Braque show a few hours earlier. I waited on a bench outside the Grande Palais next to the Presse stand while a woman behind me smoked.
Braque's fauvist work seems simple and overly bright beside his cubist work, and the cubist work seems overly fussy next to the strips of cardboard and newspaper in his collages. After this, the drastic nature of the shifts from one thing to another lost their urgency and I found some of the shifts embarrassing. His choices slowly began to show a disregard for taste: his paint-application, shifts in texture, isolated moments of texture, color-choices, layering, became comic - grotesque. At the very end were two pale pencil drawings by Giacometti of Braque on his deathbed, his profile only, supine.
In pictures of him as a fauvist, he was thick limbed, and as an old man, he was thin. I forget about all this sometimes, but he'd been in the army.
T put on Glenn Gould. The apartment was attic-like, up many fights of stairs, at the end of a long dark hall. Upon entering, to the right, past scatterings of shoes, lay a mattress. Straight ahead, beyond an open doorway, a neat desk pressed against the wall, and if you walked toward it, you saw the living-space on the left: low-lying cushions and carpets, a delicate lamp, exotic books.
I tried to speak of Derrida but my ego got in the way. In the Braque show, each piece of note was familiar as if she'd seen it before. When I asked what she saw when looking at a cubist violin, she said she plays violin.
Love,
Jane
Sept. 24-5th
Dear Becky,
I've been sick: and with the isolation that comes from this, my thoughts have flitted to unhappy territory.
I read my second Henry James book: The American: and now, having read these two, have a fuller sense of him. I take back comparing him to Edith Wharton as I had before; apparently they wrote one another. The American made me think of Brideshead Revisited: Christopher Newman compared to Rex Motram.
".. he was evidently not a man to whom fatigue was familiar; long, lean, and muscular, he suggested the sort of vigour that is commonly known as 'toughness.' … and in truth he had often sat up all night over a bristling bundle of accounts, and heard the cock crow without a yawn. But Raphael and Titian and Rubens were a new kind of arithmetic, and they had inspired our friend, for the first time in his life, with a vague self-mistrust." (5)
I've now realized that James loves the thickness and inevitability of plot. The characters are caricatures more than people. Isabelle from Portrait of a Lady and Madame de Cintre here both construct their own cages in spite of the supplications of the men who wish to, by marriage, set them free.
I didn't expect The Americans to take the turn it did - and not knowing whether you've read it, don't wish to describe it in full detail. The description of Newman's physique (down to his mustache) at the outset set a good tone for the rest. James is able to construct the meeting of two minds or attitudes at a total impasse/ lack of communal understanding. Once I was 2/3 through, I began to turn pages without hardly reading.
A few nights ago, we had dinner at O's house. O is half-Korean half-French; his father has painted water-droplets his whole life. O is a photographer and musician and going through a divorce. He lives at his father's atelier. He's 37 although appears younger. He has the nervous energy and shaky fingers of someone who drinks too much coffee as a mask for anxiety.
Earlier, I met with Cl at the Musee Antoinne Bourdelle. Rodin was his master, and in turn was Giacometti's master, but he, sandwiched between the two, isn't as good. There was a pleasant antiquarianism and surrealism to the museum. The garden, Cl pointed out, was overgrown. The most interesting room contained a very large horse and rider somewhat incongruously placed on a platform well above our heads. It was surrounded by other overly large figures (incongruous, again, for being inside) that seemed uncomfortably idealized (magical single-toned neoraphaelites and ozymandias). I, because of my cold, was blowing my nose the whole time. We eventually went to find something to drink, and then, after we'd sat at a cafe, while Cl waited for a coke zero, which she said is more fun to drink here, I abruptly left.
A and I arrived for dinner very late, almost 10pm. A couple was there: the girl, german, wore a short sequined skirt and had smudged makeup. Later we gathered at the make-shift table. O had covered it with a red tablecloth. He served us scallion pancakes and bibimbop and soup. After dinner, we drank crystal clear plum liquor the German girl's father distills himself. We sat at the table until 2am although I no longer remember the content of the stories: neither what I spoke of or what they did. I went to the bathroom and remember taking note of a Joseph Beuys book there so I could bring it up later if I ran out of things to say.
Love,
Jane
Sept. 25
Dear Becky,
Tomorrow starts the 40th anniversary of Robert Smithson's death.
Before I left for Paris, I spent a few nights at my parents' in upstate New York. I shared a room with my brother when we were children. I have a number of old photo-albums I always look through and extracted some of the photos to bring with me here. There is one of my sister, brother, and I sitting together on the gray-painted wood deck of the tennis club. We were warm from the sun, soft (hardly formed), damp from the pool. Behind us are different sets of legs. The closest legs are a man's. You can tell by the faded pink of his very short trunks that he's a wasp. His quadriceps have slight muscular distinction like he goes running or plays squash.
My body curls into my sister's. My knees rest on her thigh, her harm harshly grasps my shoulder. Her toes curl under from a slight chill. There's a gap between her front teeth. Her hair (bright yellow) deflects the sun.
The church bell (St. Paul) is ringing 6pm.
Love,
Jane
Sept. 30
Dear Becky,
Before I left L's, I copied the following books from her shelf:
Michael Chricton Airframe
The Moore's Last Sight - Rushdie
James Joyces Ulysses
Toni Morrison Beloved
Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman
Structuralism
Pale Fire
I washed the towels int he combination washer-dryer, fluffed the pillows, and stripped the bed.
There's a bar called Aux Folies on rue Belleville: it's always packed. Edith Piaf sang there. The beer is cheap. The bathroom floor is wet. The wobbly tables are sticky from spilled wine. Everything's red.
On Friday, I went with A to hear her friends play music. She fought with F earlier over laundry: she's been doing laundry at his house. The washing cycle takes an hour-and-a-half in these small washers, so do do both cycles and hang the clothes to dry, she'd have to be there over three hours. She doesn't have time for this, so in order to do her laundry there, he has to hang it up. He said something that first night over dinner about how homeless people do their laundry in the laundromats, so you might get a disease; this happened to a friend of his.
I hadn't seen him for some time: he stopped giving me lessons: did I write about this? It was about my lack of generosity. I wrote him a message apologizing for any confusion between him and I on Sept. 3rd. How ridiculous this probably seems. A brings up the lessons as an example of how I don't understand how people relate to one another. I, while I see her point, think the problem lies elsewhere. At the concert, F hardly said hello: a little not of the head. You could see the distant heart-strings at work between him and A. She said it's gotten to the point that when he calls, she holds the phone away from her ear. She introduced me to Florian (one of the musicians). He's tall (his height is imposing). His beard stands off his cheeks. A (as I do) loves Fellini and 8 1/2; she told me they'd been discussing this and Florian finds it too perfect to enjoy. [A few years ago, I heard Yvonne Rainer say it was like eating bonbon after bonbon]. But, Florian has the vestiges and authentic theatricality of a street-performer. His haphazard attire is not orchestrated but simply how he inhabits his body. His front teeth are large and crooked. He bent to kiss A on the cheek. The concert took place in a circus where at other times there are acrobats and horses. After it was over, we mingled outside. F fumbled with his beer so I put out my hand to hold his cup, and he willingly accepted this for a moment, before deciding her preferred to fumble on his own: coat, cigarette, lighter, cup. I left.
On Saturday, I went to a reading at Castillo/Corales. One of the readers was Lisa Robertson, and the other Lytle Shaw. He's an editor at Cabinet. I enjoyed what they both read: that there's a space carved out where art and literature meet. The reading took two hours. Afterwards, a few of us went to Aux Folies. There was a dinner at a Chinese restaurant but we branched off. The boys thought N and I were much younger than we are: one was 22, about to start a masters in French lit. The other, 25, was working on a masters or phd on psychology in Paris. He's from Tennessee but spent the first 9 years of his life in Mexico; his parents were evangelical missionaries. I admired the tight curls of his hair. Lisa Robertson read a piece from her book Soft Architecture on blackberry bushes. It was published in Cabinet in 2002.
Yesterday evening, I took a long run in the park. It was raining. The droplets of water disturbed the lake. When I was through, I sat on a bench under a tree and looked out over the water and at the textures of different trees. The only place in LA with park benches is MacArthur Park.
Tonight I'm getting a drink with a friend of __'s: we're to meet at 9pm. She lives at 46 Ave. Simon Bolivar, while M's place is the inverse (64).
Love,
Jane
Wednesday October 2, 2013
Dear Becky,
Yesterday, a woman in coral played with a kid in the park. She was pretending to be the police, her thumb and pinky forming a phone, adopting a stern expression. It wasn't just a coral dress but a fully monochromatic outfit. As if to use this as a beginning, today I noticed red.
I followed a man and woman into a boulangerie: he wore red pants and a red blazer. She had blond curly hair. She ordered the pastries. As I walked through the metro, there was another man in red: more disheveled. And a woman with red shoes, pants, shirt, lipstick in the line at the Musee D'Orsay. I made some offhand judgment about how people wear colors that mach their surroundings.
At the Musee D'Orsay, I paid most attention to a Monet on the 5th floor: it was packed with people. Each moment in the painting had a different temporal register: the peaches on the table vs. the pitcher vs. the child to the left in blue-shade vs. the women walking past.
I noticed more than I ever had before the woman in Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe looking out of the painting: interrupting the space between the painting and me.
As I looked at his painting of Berthe Morisot, a fat woman with a twinkle in her eye (the only color I associate with her, both her body and her clothing, is tan: not tan from a sunset but the plain tan of raw leather) said to me I looked like her. She looked at the painting again and back to me and said "Yes, in the eyes." I had been thinking how he (Courbet) hadn't outlined them - each little part only made sense when added up to the whole. Of course I really look nothing like her, we just have similar coloring.
If you look her up on "wikipedia," the Manet painting is the main picture, superseding her own paintings below it.
I decided to offset Monet/Manet with Baselitz at Thaddeus Ropac, and so took the metro to Panting, on the far outskirts of the city. The space was opened last October; I think the first show was Anselm Kiefer. The gallery used to be a factory and looked like a giant barn. They put skylights everywhere. The paintings were dark - so it took a moment to adjust to the contrast between the bright white of the walls and the dark of the paintings. I thought maybe if I stayed in the space long enough, my eyes would adjust to them the same way they'd adjusted to the Poussins at the Louvre, but this didn't happen. The paintings were huge, and there were also thick
wooden sculptures painted black. In the press release, he wrote about remembering three beautiful women standing together, in a village, and how beautiful they were, and how details become foggy with time, and there's some parallel between his hacking away at the wood and memory. I couldn't take the press release seriously.
On my way back to the metro, I noticed the red around a pigeon's eye. There was a red plastic bin floating in the canal. Someone had parked a shiny red motorcycle under the overhang. All the people looked drab and tired.
I noticed cobalt in one of the Baselitzs. Writing about color in the Monets would take too long.
Oct. 3
It's like a drug, really, to keep writing.
I started reading an essay by Michael Taussig about anthropologists keeping notebooks - the exhaustive nature of keeping a diary - about the meaning we attribute to random jottings after time has passed: like a window into the moment the jotting was made.
Love,
Jane
Oct 4, 2013
Dear Becky,
I sat with Monet for twenty minutes today. On my way, I stopped and looked at the flowers and thought of how my mother is an ideal woman: she tends a garden. She knows the names of different plant-species. She says, sometimes, "I have my little life. I have my garden.": as if she hasn't demanded much: she's made this much for herself - enough that she has a garden that, in the summer, she can tend, while wearing a straw hat.
Yesterday I looked at the Monets around 5pm; today it was around 4, and overcast. I thought I'd be bored: and I was partly. I started to look at the people. But there's something about moving past and knowing you are entering a space of looking that makes it newly enticing to be there. That you can totally abandon yourself to it. So I sat for a while (the seating area is given such prominence, and upon entering, you have the sense you're in a modern chapel). I sat in the far room, and then moved to the near room, and soon something happened to my eyes: the colors changed in
tone: they seemed warmer, more intensely varied, densely physical. If from a distance the paintings look like wallpaper, you eventually notice they are richly layered, and around the edges the canvas is bare.
Why should I become excited by this? And what happened after? All I can think of is Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell.
Oct. 5
I'm tutoring a 12-year-old girl (her native language is Spanish) English tomorrow.
Love,
Jane
Tuesday Oct. 8th
Dear Becky,
On both Saturday and Sunday I went to Amandine's house to tutor her in English. Her mother is from Peru. She's studying at a bi-lingual school; half her classes are in English. I did not prepare for the lessons, being given so little money. We did some of her science together, but I don't know the properties of lava, the layers of the earth, how to explain that once the world was covered in great oceans and fossils of fish found deep beneath the earth are a record of this. Halfway through the lesson her grandmother (Ruth) made tea. I had Anis and Amandine had Manzanilla. They put honey in the tea. Amandine's mother is also named Ruth, so to distinguish, they call her Tutty (like tutti in Italian): she is everything.
The apartment is small and crowded. There is a mirrored door that separates the table and kitchen from the rest of the apartment. It's on the 7th floor and windows look over to the church across the street. They're Catholic. It's unclear whether their objects are specifically chosen or picked up in second-hand stores. There is a persian elephant.
Monday:
L'Orangerie again: discomfort with the fact that Monet designed his garden. The inside of the museum feels like the inside of a bose speaker.
Love,
Jane
Oct. 9 (unsent)
Monet felt his paintings could act as a way to relax and ease one’s mind as one would in nature if “nature” wasn’t so readily available. After learning this, I realized I had felt something akin to this while looking at them. My responses were typical: the metaphorical joining of water and sky.
Tuesday Oct. 10
Gray light is coming in from the window to my left.
Oct. 13
Dear Becky,
I read a few passages from Anne Truitt's book yesterday and each one made me cry: I was on my way to L'Orangerie, but she wrote about Rembrandt, so I decided to go to the Louvre instead: so that I, too, could look at Rembrandt, but unable to follow a clear path even within the building itself, I found myself walking slowly passed the Ingres on the 2nd floor: looking at the way he painted hands. And the Ingres on the third floor, too: there's a portrait of a man who's fat hand looks concave: the ring he wears on his finger pushes the flesh down to his knuckle. I looked at the Corots again too, and the Poussins: their work makes it seem as though they have calm and steady minds. The late Corots have moments of physicality that hint towards later Monets. Or maybe by this time Monet was influencing him.
The passages I read:
1974
2 September
"The stark fact of financial insecurity is once again stage center. Confronted by it in the summer of 1973, I circled the territory of my competence…
"I then came to the decision to ride out the jeopardy of art with as much courage and faith as I could. Turning it over once again now in my mind, I reach the same decision but with a change in attitude. Last year I did not have enough faith to trust myself to the course of events without a certain anxious steering toward success. Not for the glory of it, heaven knows, but for the sheer earning of money for the children and myself. I feel differently this year. I have set my sails without a preconceived course. It is a change to have sails to set."
3 September
"Last winter, during the course of preparation for the retrospectives, I found myself on the crest of an unspeakable loneliness. Stopped, I told my children that I would like a day to myself and went to the National Gallery. I arrived just before the doors opened and waited on the steps leading up from the Mall, sitting patiently as in a doctor's waiting room. Admitted, I went straight to the Rembrandt self-portrait, painted when he was fifty-three, my age. He looked straight out at me, and I looked straight at him."
I've enclosed Helene Cixous' The Last Painting or the Portrait of God.
Love,
Jane
Oct. 14, 2013
Dear Becky,
I tutored Amandine for the third and last time today. When I arrived, they weren't expecting me. Ruth has dyed blond hair, wears eye-makeup. She asked if I would like tea and brought me an ipad to occupy myself while I waited. She opened and closed the mirrored door leading to the rest of the apartment quietly. Amandine's grandfather is ill, so quiet caution pervades the atmosphere. It is cramped, stifling. Ruth then made Amandine tea. She brought sugar to the table in a glass jar. Nothing is particularly clean or dirty: but the pressure in the air is palpable. I noticed Amandine's mother wears a brace around her midsection, the same as construction workers in New York.
Geology bores Amandine. While we glanced over her work, she realized she understood what 'metamorphosis' means because it is the same in French. That rocks might be made of interlocking particles and thus lack porousness eluded her. She played with her spoon, filling it with the hot liquid from her cup and balancing it on the ridge of the cup to let the liquid cool. She lit a cinnamon candle. She pressed pepper from the pepper-grinder into her hand. When finished with her tea, she ripped open the tea-bag and smelled the leaves. When we got to a description of slate (which metamorphs from shale) we looked out the window to the slate roof of the church across the way.
The tablecloth (thick plastic) has a zebra pattern.
The tea-cups are clear thick glass.
The door has a number of intricate locks.
Amandine's father is tall, thin, brusque, a day's growth of beard, jeans. He works for the ministry of cultural affairs, but I only knew this from her mother. He paid me 15 euros for 90 minutes. When I left, her next tutor had come: to teach her math. She also has a tutor for Chinese. Her vocabulary is large; she likes using a calligraphy pen; her grammar is awful.
The air is chilly now.
I haven't been using conditioner in my hair.
People, around 7, are always at the bars drinking stella.
I had a glass of wine at 3pm. They brought olives.
Asian prostitutes line the walk on Bd de la Villette. I've passed the same women countless times. Occasionally I've seen men approach them.
There's an organic grocery right before I turn the corner to walk uphill and a bar and pho place.
Last night I wrote Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev a letter:
Dear Prof. Christov-Bakargiev,
I had the pleasure of seeing you give a talk at UCLA (where I received my MFA) a few years ago, in the lead-up to dOCUMENTA (13).
I have been looking at the catalogue (1/3); I loved Taussig's writing on field-notebooks.
A question formed in my mind relating to the reading list "Propaedeutics to Fundamental Research." I found it be exciting and very prescient to see these texts (all forms of text) begin in the 7th century and asymptotically accelerate into the present. I became curious as to the system by which texts were chosen: including the repetition of certain authors (which could only happen at later dates, when the time-line shifts from century to year). I come late to everything, and recently discovered Hélène Cixous' writing. Curiosity lead me to see whether I would find her name among those listed, and of course I didn't. I'm not sure why I expected to see it there - I've still read hardly more than "The Last Painting or the Portrait of God." What made it onto the list and why (and who is it a reading list/ canon for)?
All my best,
(and thanks for reading)
Jane
______________
janeparshall.com
love,
Jane
Oct. 19th
Dear Becky,
Last night, I met L for dinner. She asked whether I'd like to go to an art deco place so I met her at La Coupole on Montparnasse. The interior is bright and cavernous, with lots of tourists. She said she'd gone there in her twenties: everyone would be dressed to show-off under the restaurant's lights: that was the point, that it'd never be dim. I've never interacted with her before, aside from seeing her, with my mother, at yoga. We were both wearing black turtlenecks. She had a cold and
when I arrived was pouring herself tea and pressing a lemon into it to release its juice. We both ordered the sole which she said they cook differently in Paris: she's never been able to find it this way elsewhere. They bring the fish, fried in butter, and then de-bone it for you. When the bill came it was for 120euros. She said she was embarrassed I'd gotten her a replacement cutting-board (I'd burned hers by putting a very hot pot on it). She told me that when she was thinking about what
school to send her children in New York, one school they visited had only geometric art on the walls (that kids made in classes): she asked why this was and they responded "you either have creativity or you don't." I don't know her job and I didn't pry. We talked about high-speed trains. She said (without actually telling me what her work was/is) that in the '80s she visited China a few times. Her husband owns a business in Boston. Amtrak is worse than European rail companies. How long is the train ride to Berlin? eight hours. Too full for coffee and desert.
I visited L'Orangerie for the last time in the early afternoon and thought, while sitting there, my head feeling thick, that I keep myself in a perpetual state of purgatory.
love,
Jane
Oct. 20th, 2013
Dear Becky,
I'm cleaning M's apartment and packing. It's about 6:30 in the morning. I leave for my train in an hour and a half. Yesterday, I walked past the Luxembourg gardens at dusk: they were locked, closed, so I looked at the statues in fading light.
--
A girl diagonally across from me is wearing a shirt that reads "Pi Phi ----> Pepperdine." The boy next to her helped me find a place for my bag.
I rode the bus to the station.
It was raining: the early morning sky, through the rain, was a mixture of cobalt and ultramarine.
--
L mentioned Howard Cushing to me as an example of the eventual "artist" who springs up in a wealthy family: after years of accruing money in America, then a member of the family inverts and decides to travel to Europe to become cultured (trained in painting) like Isabelle Archer.
Love,
Jane
Nov. 5
Dear Becky,
I have a compilation of messages written to you in the past days:
Monday Oct. 28th
The picture of the naked woman on the studio door, here, reads "Richard Prince 3rd Place." There is something familiar everywhere. The floor is deep green.
The past few nights, before going to bed, I've recorded myself reading "the Last Painting or the Portrait of God."
At the Berlinische Galerie, there's a painting by Salomé, with the other Neue Wilde paintings, of waterlilies and swimmers.
The following came up associatively and in what I've been reading:
Flaubert's Herodias
Salome (in the bible)
Oscar Wilde
Lou-Andre Salome
Salome's waterlilies (vs. Monet's): lifestyle painting.
Oct. 30
I'm packing to leave Berlin. My train is at 06.36. It will be my last night lying in this bed: it's easy enough to acclimatize to a place, although the bed smells of cigarettes. I found a stray hair. There are two comforters to keep out the cold. When I turn out the light, the windows cast pale geometric shapes on the wall above (geometric boxes of light).
I survived off espresso macchiatos, cake, and beer. There's a place that sells baklava by weight across the street. I made bad ink drawings: between Motherwell and neo-expressionism: rows of paper on the floor. I forewent control.
7am Diagonally across from me, a young man, tall, in dress-pants with a black leather satchel on the seat beside him, eats a small packaged muffin. He was careful to open it so as not to spill crumbs and sits forward, awkwardly, for his height, so that the crumbs will fall into the package while he eats.
Later, on the second train, a young couple sat across from me. They had four sandwiches between them, all exactly the same, yet shared them with one another: he taking a bite of hers, giving her the cucumber from his: so that despite their sameness, they wished to share each thing between them. She wore an oxford shirt, blue-and-white striped, and had put little modest lines above her eyes - like in the '60s - like Ana Karina would. They both were reading horrible traveling books: hers was incredibly thick, although she'd gotten most of the way through, and when a part made her laugh, she nudged him so he could read over her eyes: and you got the sense that he loved reading over or through her : the distinct pleasure of glancing at the neat bun on her head, or the ring of faux-fur on the hood of her wool coat. She took all this in stride: smiling in sweet owner-ship, acknowledgment of these her tastes: without turning her taste saccharine. I suppose I observed her more than him: he wasn't as interesting. When he stood, when we finally arrived, I saw his black jeans were tight around his thighs and his shirt was tucked in. They were dressed as if they both work at the same non-descript company - they could be travel-agents. Her bookmark said "Dior" on it.
Oct. 32, CDG airport, 10am
Having spent the final night with A - French thai for dinner (we split fish). The airport carpet is red. The coffee is acrid.
Yesterday:
Read a series of articles in the "arts" section of the NYtimes over breakfast with my father.
MIA had a concert: "MIA opened her set with helicopter sounds and a snippet from an interview with Edward J. Snowden... leading into 'The World,' a song from her free 2011 mixtape, 'Vicki Leekz."
There was a news-update about the works (Matisse, Picasso, Beckman etc) Cornelius Gurlitt had been sitting on for years - confiscated by the Nazis - discovered in his home in Munich in 2011.
There was an article about Knoedler selling fakes produced by Anthony Massaccio and that they hardly made efforts to detect whether works were authentic.
Love,
Jane