Berlin 2

Here are some pictures from our first days, with commentary.

The outside of a shopping mall (yes, that's snow):

We went to the Hamburger Bahnhof, a vast contemporary art museum created out of an old train station

Some things I saw:

Part of a retrospective by the artist Martin Honert, whose work centers on meticulously crafted versions of his childhood memories.
A dormitory bed:

A realization of the book by Erich Kastner, "The Flying Classroom:

I saw this from the museum window;  is it art or industrial detritus?

Outsider art by George Widener:

A very long gallery, with very clear signage:

The roof of the new Berlin main station:

The new Potsdamer Platz:

I don't know what the purple pipes are for...
Edit:  Now I do.  They are used to drain the water from construction sites, as Berlin is built on a swamp, and this is the most cost-effective way to do it.   And why not pink?

The Sony Center at the new Potsdamer Platz

A bit of an old facade, entombed:

But nearby, there are old buildings still to be restored...

Berlin!

We are now in Berlin, where it is still winter.   There is snow on the ground.   Dinner:  roast pork, cabbage, potatoes, beer.   We are not in Paris any more.

We last visited Berlin in 1997, in the summer time.  It is different in the winter; the openness and plentiful trees are not significant in the winter.  I am struck by how spread out Berlin is; even with all the construction since we were last here, there are plenty of seemingly abandoned lots and empty spaces.   It can take a long time, via walking or Ubahn, to get from one place to another.  Berlin is more like New York in some ways; a mosaic of a city, with pockets of old (and reconstructed) buildings in between blocks of dreary postwar constructions.  It's not a city for strolling in the same way Paris is.
But there is an extraordinary amount to see here, both of cultural and historic interest.  I remember our first visit, a few years after the Wall fell, when we took a bus that went from the west, through the Brandenburg Gate and the site of the Wall and into the older Eastern section, when all the images of history were suddenly real.  Seeing the empty space where Potsdamer Platz was, situated between the two Berlin's was a reminder of all the Berlin had been through;  now it is all rebuilt; and the empty space is mostly gone.  So I don't feel that same weight of history that I once felt.   But we have plenty to see; new museums, memorials, and even a brand new train station.

Messiaen, part 2

Yesterday we went to hear an organ concert at the Eglise de Trinité.  The program was a single work by Messiaen, "Le Livre du Sacrement", his last work for organ.  Though the announcement said the concert was an hour long, what we heard was the complete work, which last 2 hours and 15 minutes.  What made this concert very special was that this was the church and organ where Messiaen was the organist for some 60 years, and that the organ had been renovated and improved according to his specifications, and that he had composed the work with this organ in mind.  And furthermore, the organist, Jon Gillock, was his student.   The concert was extraordinary; the sound of the organ was astonishingly varied and the thundering climaxes were truly awesome in the true sense of the word.  I was totally focused the entire time.  There were moments when it seemed that every stop and every note was being employed; creating 2001 Ligeti-like sounds.  This contrasting with other moments of extreme delicacy (bird songs, of course).  And many sonorities I didn't know you could get from an organ.  The effect of reverberation in the church was amazing; a thundering chord would echo and reverberate for three or four seconds across the church.   It was an event which you could never experience in a recording;  a truly memorable Easter Sunday in Paris!

The church:

I also went to see an exhibit at the Cité de la Musique on Cinema and Music.  It was mostly didactic in nature.  Since I have taught a course in film music many times, there was not much for me to learn.   I did enjoy seeing many original manuscripts of film scores that I know and love.   On the whole, it was extremely well presented, and the film excerpts shown were ones that I would have chosen myself .

The original score for "Breathless"

 Next to the Cité de la Musique, I saw the construction site of the future Philharmonie de Paris, a Jean Nouvel designed concert hall for Paris.   It will be finished sometime this century, but definitely before a concert hall is ever built in Vancouver.

The Battle of the Louvre

When you are in Paris, you have to go to the Louvre.  So I gathered my courage, because the crowds can be enormous.  So off I went.  (Vera was working on her paper for the conference, and stayed in our hotel room.)   After fighting my way through the security lines, past a shopping mall with a Starbucks and an Apple store, I arrived at the very long lines to buy tickets.  When I finally got in, I had the idea to visit the new Islamic collection installation; but I couldn't find it on the map, so I decided, when in doubt, go find the Vermeers.  But the Dutch and Flemish collections were closed on Thursdays; so somehow I ended up in Napoleon III's apartments, where the excess of glitter and gold could put the Russian Czars to shame:

Underneath a chandelier:

I ended up wandering through endless rooms of excessive numbers of French paintings.

At least I went through a room with a ceiling painted by Braque:

(I must be looking up to avoid looking at the paintings...)


Finally, I got to the Islamic collection, which is housed in a new area created in a courtyard, which looks like this from above:

Under the roof:

The collection proved to be very interesting; no pictures of important people...   I was especially intrigued by these doors, made out of a kind of mosaic of different kinds of wood.  The were done in Egypt in the 14th century:

Later edit: Today, in the paper, it was announced that the Louvre had been shut down for a day, because the people working there were being harassed by the large number of pickpockets who buy their ticket to the Louvre, go in, and do their pickpocketing, and get mad if someone interferes.  

Later, I took the metro to the Marais, and ended up in my favorite Metro station.

I saw a show at a gallery of works by a Chinese artist, who does some kind of photo montages that create a merger between traditional landscape paintings and modern Chinese cities:

Finally, we had dinner with some Romanian friends in an impossibly overdecorated turn of the century restaurant, Brasserie Julien, in the 10th ar.

La Defense, Parc St. Cloud

Yesterday I went to both La Defense and Parc St. Cloud; two examples of French constructions on the grand scale.  La Defense, a forest of skyscrapers on the western edge of Paris, was conceived as a place where there could be high-rise buildings outside of the center of Paris.  It is mostly drab and ugly, but the Grande Arche building, constructed in a direct line connecting to the Arc de Triumphe, is a mesmerizing construction

There are also some very odd things around like this truly large finger, about 100 feet high

From there I took a tram to the Parc St. Cloud.  This park was one of the favorite subjects of the photographer Atget, who created many memorable photographs of the park in the 1920's.
The park was designed by LeNotre on a grand geometric scale; the chateau that went with it was destroyed in the Franco-Prussian war in 1871.  The park features both long vistas and a number of statues; the statues being frequently in a state of decay.

Vistas and cone-shaped trees:

Before I did all this, I went to the Museé Cernuschi to see an exhibit of art from Shanghai in the period 1840-1920, when artists in Shanghai were confronted by the impact of modern trends in Western Art.  There were a number of fascinating, almost quasi-abstract painted works.   I don't know very much about Chinese art, but even I could see the extent to which the artists were overturning age-old rules of how something should be depicted.  The museum itself is in a beautiful mansion in Paris's 8th Ar., an area I read about in Edmund de Waal's fascinating book, "The Hare with the Amber Eyes", a story about, among other things, a rise and decline of the very wealthy Ephrussi family, who started out in Odessa, and established themselves in both Vienna and Paris in the 1870's.

While I was walking in this area, I heard a car horn honk, and two people in a car started waving at me frantically, as if they were happy to see someone they knew very well.   I had no idea who they were, and I tried to convey this to them, but they continued in their enthusiasm.   Do I have a double in Paris?

Paris

We are now in Paris.   Vera is giving a paper at a narrativity conference, and I am wandering the streets.    The last time we were here, I felt the oddness of being a tourist in Paris, after having lived here as a resident for a longer stretch in the past.   I wanted to just go about my daily life in Paris, rather that rush off to see how many museums I could cram into one day.  This time, it is also very different coming to Paris from New York, rather than the bucolic splendor of Vancouver.   I have been enjoying the historic aspect of New York, enjoying old buildings built in the early 20th century.   Today I stopped in the church of Saint-Étienne-du Mont, which marks the spot where St. Genevieve was buried in the 5th century.  So Paris is really old!  So walking around Paris, you see not only the predominant 19th century Haussmanian style, but here and there many older buildings and remnants.   I also saw a bit of a 12th century wall which I have have never seen before.  It is a pleasure to wander.  I walked from our hotel near the Jardins du Luxembourg all the way to the Marais, and onwards.
Last night after we arrived, we had dinner with our friends Pam and Maya at a fantastic restaurant in the  11th Ar. called Au Passage.    Nondescript from the outside, it was adventurous but unpretentious French food at its finest.  (I had to trust them on the relatively uncooked pork...)
I have always found it hard to take pictures in Paris, which is perhaps the world's most photographed city.  Does anyone really need to take a picture of Notre Dame?   Of clochards on the banks of the Seine?   But I took some anyway this time....

I have always been amused by the French tradition of sculpting trees in geometrical shapes:

Reading in the ivy...(the temperature in Paris is about 40 degrees F.)

This elegantly dressed guy was selling paintings:

And I always love colorful construction stuff:

Speaking of color, I have no idea why this church door is purple...

You wanted Notre Dame?

New York Architecture

When I tell people that we live in Vancouver, the usual response involves saying something about Vancouver being a beautiful city.   Which is not exactly true; Vancouver is a city with mostly bland, mediocre architecture, located in an extremely beautiful environment, with beaches, mountains and water.      People also say that Paris is a beautiful city;  what they are talking about is the grand vistas and famous architectural landmarks such as Notre Dame, as well as the stylistic unity of the majority of the buildings.   I have never heard anyone say "New York, what a beautiful city!"    I actually think, by some measures, New York is a beautiful city.  In terms of streetscapes and architectural variety, New York is remarkably varied and beautiful, but in a heterogenous way.  Pockets of extraordinary architecture mix with areas of ugly, modern glass and concrete boxes.  And the ubiquitous Manhattan grid somehow makes everything seem utilitarian; grand vistas of the grid?  Maybe.    And there is all the noise and constant human activity. But if you walk around almost any area of New York, you can find all kinds of beautiful and interesting architecture, with an astonishing variety of influences and styles.

Evidence:

The facade of the Metro Theater on Broadway near us (under renovation):

Some townhouses and buildings near us:

More...

The brickwork on this building is of a technique called "diapering"

Adventures in Dog Transportation

As our time in NY wraps up, it was time to send Maggie back to Vancouver.  This turned out to be an exhausting enterprise.  I thought she would go back the way she came, via Cathay Pacific, a direct flight.   I spent many hours on email and phone with them.  They wanted a certified letter from a vet specifying that Maggie was not a snub-nosed terrier, even before I could make a booking.  When I finally made the booking, they told me that the fee would be over $600, more than twice what we paid to get her here, and that they would need to be paid in cash...   Something is very suspicious there; a major corporation like Cathay Pacific does not normally require cash.   For Google searches, here is the phrase "Cathay Pacific Ripoff".  ( I have noticed that after a few days, whatever I put in this blog will show up on a google search..)

So we went with United, which meant that I had to take Maggie to Newark airport at 4:30 AM, and that she had to take two planes.  So there I am, walking Maggie on Broadway at 4 AM, for her pre-flight exercise.   Then the car service driver was somehow out of it; he took a completely roundabout way to get to the Lincoln Tunnel, and almost got lost when there was a detour in the Meadowlands.  If I hadn't pointed out the correct direction to him, we might still be somewhere in Secaucus.  When your driver is using GPS to get you from New York to Newark Airport, you know you are in trouble.
So after Maggie was finally settled,  I took the bus back to Manhattan, landing on 42nd Street at 6:30 AM.  (Unfortunately, the antique bus lacked a suspension; a bone-rattling journey.)  That's something I have never seen before, Times Square just before sunrise.  I don't plan on seeing it again.

The adventures were not over, yet.   Maggie was flying to Denver, and then was to be put on a flight from Denver to Vancouver.  The flight from Denver to Vancouver was 3 and a half hours late leaving; we had no idea how she spent the total of almost 6 and a half hours in Denver.   Then we called to confirm her arrival details, and the people in Vancouver told us there was no dog on the plane; we called the tracking center, and they had no clue as to where she was.  Panic time!   Eventually, things got sorted out, and it turns out she was on the plane.   Ada and Andrew finally retrieved her, she seemed in fine shape, and we were all relieved!

Maggie, back at home after 18 hours on the road...

The Artful Recluse

I went to see an exhibit at the Asia Society called "The Artful Recluse".  The subject was Chines art in the mid 17th century, after the fall of the Ming Dynasty and the invasion by the "barbarian" Manchus.   Artists retreated from the chaos of regime change to the countryside, and concentrated on landscapes and otherworldly thoughts.  

What intrigued me most in the exhibit were the scroll paintings; more precisely, images painted on very long rolled up pieces of scroll paper.  You can't actually look at these in a single focus; you need to actually move your eye to see the whole thing.  (Though actually, the whole thing is not usually visible; usually only about 10 feet or so is shown at the most.)   Needless to say, you can't easily find an image that would fit on your computer screen.  The scenes themselves are impossible in some ways; like a widescreen panorama that makes sense from moment to moment, but represents something which could not possibly exist in reality.   (Like the long panning shot at the beginning of Peter Greenaway's film of the Tempest.)   No pictures to be found...

Eliogabalo

Last night we went to see a production of the opera "Eliogabalo", an opera composed in the mid 17th century by Cavalli.  The production had a novelty component; it was being presented in a very small Lower East Side nightclub/burlesque theater/strip club called "The Box", where the shows normally start at 1 AM.  Having seen opera productions with scenes updated to be set in a strip club, we were now going to see an opera in an actual strip club.  The problem was that the only tickets available were either in seats at tables for $175, or standing room for $50.  We went for the standing room, assuming that we would manage somehow.  The problem was that the standing room was at the bar, which was mostly separate from the room where the opera was, with only a partial view of the stage, and the only sound was through some poor quality speakers!   Not to mention the sound of drinks being mixed, etc.  Needless to say this was worthless, and after about 15 minutes we decided to leave.   The opera and its staging received good reviews in the Times, and would have been interesting from the seats.   We talked to the producer, though, and he was extremely apologetic; he promptly refunded our money, and offered us free tickets to their next production.   So it was a major disappointment, but kudos to the producer for being so quick to make amends.


Note the musicians hidden in the back...