WARHOL’S TV at Maison Rouge
Today I attended my first official “vernissage presse” - an exhibition preview open only to the press. I signed in my name, disclosed the publication I represented (gogoparis), and received a neat little packet full of useful and illuminating information. Only, I was nervous so my French was even worse than it is when I’m comfortable, so I fumbled and twitched as I tried to describe exactly who I was. I’m awkward and wouldn’t have known how things like this work in my own language, let alone one that I’m in the process of learning. At any rate, awkward as I felt it was exciting and new and I felt very official with my little notebook and my dossier de presse.
And the exhibition was amazing!!! The Maison Rouge opened three exhibitions today, but I was most interested in Warhol TV, which focuses on monsieur Andy’s fascination with and attempts at making television. Apparently, as I learned today, he made a sweet little interview series, featuring stars like Debbie Harry, Divine (see above image), Duran Duran, Courtney Love, Liza Minelli, and Halston. Throughout all the interviews Andy remains random and mumbling (par for the course), but it is fascinating to watch his love affair with the celebrity/jet set crowd.
Though distracted and made shy by the crowds of video cameras and television crews, it was hard for me not to enjoy the elaborate environments the maison rouge created to set the scene for each different screening. Silver-painted walls, a lush reproduction of Warhol’s bedroom, a night club, pew-like benches before a screening of his funeral - the exhibition is truly theatrical.
To top it all off, I afterwards saw a man riding over pont austerlitz on a uniycle.
It runs until May 3rd - for more information go here
My official review will be up on gogoparis.com in a few days.
Some Locks I’ve Known (battling Paris’ closed doors)
In general I’ve been known to have bad luck with locked doors: I’ve twice been locked on the inside of bathrooms. Once, the doorknob had been incorrectly installed by a construction crew who, thankfully, was still on site. It only took 20 minutes to get me out. Another time, at a wedding no less, the door knob fell out of the door leaving me with the option to either chop the door down with a small hatchet-like hair comb or climb out the window in my dress and heels. I chose the latter.
In Paris, the locks are not so faulty as in rural California - it’s just that they’re a bit more subtle. As the exterior doors to nearly all apartments and office buildings lock automatically from the outside and inside, it’s essential to learn the visual language of locks. I have yet to master this art.
To get into the buildings you often need to be buzzed in or know a code ahead of time, just like most american apartments I’ve known. But in Paris, you also need to know how to get out, as they don’t automagically open for you from the exit side. Is there a secret button? A hidden latch? A light-switch-cum-door release?
You can see where this is going: I’ve been trapped inside buildings three times since moving to Paris. Each time I’ve left my pride behind, having had to ask passers-by or make a panicked phone call. Most of the interior door-releases, as the one in my building, are large, conspicuous light-switch wall-panels over which the word “porte” is written. Some, are trickier.
The first time I was trapped inside an apartment was after a dinner party at my friend Lili’s flat. I was rushing out to catch the last metro, but couldn’t intuit how to open the building’s front door. Figuring this was due to that last glass of wine I had downed, I decided that if I couldn’t open the building’s door I probably wasn’t in any shape to be navigating the late trains all the way home to Boulogne. Alas, I woke up early the next morning only to find that the problem persisted into sobriety. Not wanting to wake the rest of the sleeping household, I stood down at the foot of the stairs, examining the door and its neighboring walls, pushing the light switches again and again, hoping that magically, one of them would decide to open the door on its fiftieth attempt. Finally, I gave in, having to knock quietly on the front door of my friend’s flat and admit that I could not open her building’s door. She smiled, luckily, and patiently accompanied me to the foot of the stairs, pushing triumphantly on a small button that also contained a key hole. It was a lock-release camouflaged as mechanically static door engineering. So simple, yet so brilliant. I blushed all the way home.
The next time, it wasn’t a matter of mechanics, but geography. My friend Sam moved into a new flat and I went one evening for tea and brownies. I realized upon arrival, that i had neglected to ask Sam which flat was his - i new which address and which garden and which intercom to buzz up to, but not which flat to knock on once inside. My phone conveniently chose that moment to run out of minutes. Retiring from the garden back to the street in search of a tabac where I could buy more minutes I encountered a problem: how the hell do I open the garden gate? I tried to push the keyhole, having learned my lesson at Lili’s. Nothing. I found a large light switch and pushed. The garden was suddenly illuminated, spotlighting me in my idiocy. I imagined hundreds of French inhabitants smirking down at me from their flats. I began to grope the walls and search the ground - who knows? Maybe there was a magical foot pedal that swung the door open with the slightest touch. Out of desperation I stuck my fingers through the thick vines clinging to the walls of the garden. There it was! A small, textureless button concealing itself behind a layer of greenery, as if it had been waiting all its little life to play this trick on an unsuspecting Marya. After tea Sam accompanied me to the garden gate, ensuring that the little trickster of a lock didn’t have its way with me a second time.
Galleries in Paris can be as tricky to enter as flats are to leave. Most of the time they’re open and at street level with large white doors and forbidding young women glaring at you upon entering - like all galleries. But occasionally, if the gallery is not at street level, it can take an extra shot of cunning to find. I would never describe myself as “cunning.” Nevertheless, I visited one such gallery last week, in order to view a Marina Abramovic exposition. I picked my way through a remote courtyard to find a door with a small plaque listing the gallery’s name and the floor on which it could be found. Then I looked at the door, anxiety flooding my belly. Not again, godammit. I pushed on the door. Nothing happened. I looked for the button marked “porte,” then I looked for a keyhole. All I found was a keypad entreating me to enter an unknown code. Exasperated, I turned to the amused French woman smoking behind me, begging her to show me how to open the damn door. She walked over, the corners of her mouth slightly upturned, and casually pushed a circle. The door popped open. A goddamn circle. The circle was flush with the rest of the door, looked like nothing more than some sort of necessary joint or rivet. There was nothing to indicate that this was the key to the magical portal into art land. On the way out of the exhibit, I encountered the problem once again, pushing the light switches repeatedly, examining the door for mysterious circles. Nothing. Then I noticed the keyhole. Bingo.
Ecstatic Onions on Beautiful Faces
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
Galerie Serge Le Borgne
Until 30 April
Galerie Serge Le Borgne presents a retrospective in stills of famed performance artist Marina Abramovic. Originally from Belgrade, Abramovic has been referred to as “the grandmother of performance art,” having begun her career more than thirty years ago. Perhaps best known for their anti-institutional sentiments, many of her works are incendiary, prompting widespread debate as to their status as “fine art.” The bulk of this exhibition is composed of large and beautifully printed stills taken from Abramovic’s filmed works, dating back to the mid-1970s. Though at turns shocking and lovely, they’re difficult to appreciate removed as they are from their filmic or performative contexts. At the end of the hall-like gallery, however, one such film is looped in its entirety. Titled The Onion, dating from 1996, this film features the artist ecstatically, painfully devouring an onion whole; the sonorous crunching, chewing and slurping nearly drowning out the artist’s careful voiceover. Affective and ambiguous, this work speaks of apathy and unrealized cravings.
Cafe Philo: Pontificating the Futility of Pontification
Last Wednesday, the first Wednesday of the month, I attended the Cafe Philo[sophy] at Cafe de Flore. Based on the French model, which meets near the Bastille, this English-language group gathers to ponder the more important questions in life: for example, which over-priced beverage shall I order? The Cafe de Flore is well-known as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s preferred haunt, but the prices now reflect the cafe’s touristic location and legendary status. So when one attends the Cafe Philo one is compelled to order something like a 9 euro beer. No joke. That’s around 11 US dollars.
I had my share of uselessly philosophical discussions in grad school, so I mostly went to observe and giggle within. This is exactly what I did. Upon sitting down I ordered a hot wine, which was delicious in the cold weather and seemed to offer more booze for the buck. Just as I and my friends settled into a corner booth, sizing up the plump lady who installed herself at the neighboring table, we watched as a thin man with wiry grey hair approach eagerly. Thankfully, he ignored us and, addressing said plump lady, declared, “I am the organizer, this is MY table.” The woman shrunk under the small man’s glare and slithered, if indeed a plump lady can slither, out from behind the table, her eyes shooting around the room desperately as she tried to locate another perch.
The majority of the audience was composed of alternately nervous and pompous grey-haired folks. As I settled in and sipped my wine (the haughty waiter demanded payment on deliver) I tried to locate my favorite characters. I decided the moderator was chief among them. Once he sat in what was formerly the plump lady’s seat he removed from his satchel several disheveled notebooks and texts, stacking them in high, important piles. His receding hairline and receding chin matched in their trembling excitement. Jolting me out of my blissfully unobserved observance, a man leaned over to ask me why I was there. I tried to look at his eyes instead of the forest of curly hair that refused to be concealed by his tightly buttoned polo shirt, replying that I was there mostly out of curiosity. He whispered to me, “A lot of what you observe here will be curious indeed.” I flushed.
The first order of business at the Cafe Philo is to decide a topic. To do this participants slip little surreptitious suggestions, written on folded little paper notes, to the moderator. Then, the moderator reads them all out loud and asks for a show of hands. Some of the suggested questions: “What is the Importance of Art?” “Are we violent?”(to which one man replied “do you want to step outside to talk about it?”) “Is happiness possible without family?” “Are we born equal under the law?” One group of young hecklers (the group in which I was included) submitted the question “Is philosophical contemplation inherently pretentious?” This question made it to the top three. The winning topic involved the following statement: “No matter who you are or what you do you live your life entirely in the confines of your head.” I didn’t vote. I felt a bit like an anthropologist researching an ethnography - I didn’t want to influence the natives’ behavior.
The winning topic was chosen by a man with a curly flat-top and wire-rimmed glasses which only served to make the sparseness of his eyebrows all the more frightening. After a brief explanation of his topic, the discussion began. Passing around a noisy microphone, several people attempted to address the topic, but it seemed to me that nobody really understood what the hell it meant. The moderator sat in his throne smirking, the corners of his mouth turning up just so, until he finally decided that the topic needed revising - responses were not to his liking.
Before finally deciding I could take no more I noticed my new love - a burly French man in a red turtleneck. He sat like a beatnik king from an episode of Happy Days: red cotton turtleneck, slim dark pants, a black wool blazer, and a fake cigarette (the kind you suck on for a nicotine fix when you’re trying to quit). He had an uncontrolled bush of black and grey striped hair that shook and bounced as he confidently expounded on “silopsism” and Sartres. He words unrolled themselves with difficulty, muffled as they were by his thickly carpeted upper lip. I’ve never before seen such a mustache - as uncontrolled and bountiful as the hair on his head. Enamored as I was with this character, wanting to see his apartment, picturing lots of nude paintings and leather-bound books, maybe thick oriental rugs and velvet furniture - the sort of lair Fred Astair rescued Audrey Hepburn from in the movie Funny Face.
But alas my mental exploration of his imaginary cave was interrupted, my friend Lili poked me in the ribs as she pointed to the note she had left on my paper: “I am completely uninspired, let’s go.” As I had long-ago tuned out of the “discussion” and I wanted to get home to tell my husband all about the man in the red turtleneck I agreed.
Though Cafe de Flore is overpriced and the conversation didn’t really seem to go anywhere, nor did it seem to be of any real consequence - I had a great time watching it all unfold. I loved peoples’ nervous attempts to participate, I loved when people got caught in a tangle of their own unintelligible words, I loved when people where equally tangled in the chord of the microphone. And the hot wine was nice, too. I would go again, in the right company. And hopefully, learn more of the beatnik with the fake cigarette.
For more info about the meetups see philosophy.meetup.com/274/
The American Dream
This is the American Dream in Paris: Elvis, scary clowns, cops, the Blues Brothers, and a fluorescent orgy.
A la Sorbonne
Tonight I started my language classes at the Sorbonne. Walking there, on the small street leading to the nondescript building where the class is held, I passed three comic book stores (one with a lovely display of totoros in the window) and one mexican cafe (burritos advertised for 8 euro - but i took note in case i become desperate enough to pay that amount). I thought this boded well, as these are things high on my list of personal loves.
As it turned out, the class is rather traditional, with grades and tests and things that have become rather irrelevant in my life of late. So, it felt strange to be back in such an environment, surrounded by younger 20-somethings eagerly writing away in notebooks. A bit of a flashback. But, as I myself am eager to improve my French I joined right in with the intensive staring at the blackboard and cock-headed listening to the professor. The professor is a small, elderly gentleman with a soft voice. He has white hair and and a red splotchy face and wears his clothes as if it is he, and not they, that have shrunk in the wash. I like him.
Air Raid!
On the first Wednesday of every month, at noon, Paris tests its emergency alert system. A giant air raid siren can be heard throughout the city - terrifying me and (as far as I can tell) all the other residents and visitors. The sound is very WWII and I find myself, each month, suddenly compelled to take cover under the nearest table, desk, or doorway.