In the studio today

In the studio today

In the studio today

In the studio today

Geneve Journal: Dec 16-18, 2012, the final days

I sat in the Théâtre de Beaulieu in Lausanne, surrounded by 1800 young children and their parents.  In the moments before showtime, the hall was a a din of high pitched chatter.  I extracted details of the kind of attentive parental/ child interactions with some wonder and admiration.  The level of connectedness, dependence and trust embodied in these vignettes was heartening.  More so, even, given that in my mind I was contrasting this total moment of contentedness with my imagining of the blacker reality that parents and children were experiencing that very moment back in the US, in Newtown CT.

This was Sunday, late afternoon.  I had seen a few reports of the shooting online after having returned from Paris the previous day.  Those reports were provisional, details seemed vague, but the casualty count was concrete.  There are countless overlapping privileges the Americans and Swiss enjoy. The most profound of which are the ones we take most for granted, and perhaps think of the least, namely, the very remoteness of the chance that our families and our very own security can be ripped from us in an expression of another's malicious "death drive".  It's a privilege so elemental to our experience that one can assume it to be not  a privilege at all, but a basic tenet of life, until one is reminded of the vast territory of the world which can not lay claim to such luxury, even then such a state is unimaginable for anyone outside of it.  No such possibility could exist in this setting. It seemed unthinkable here, yet here I was thinking it.

The show we were about to see was Sonia Grimm's Christmas spectacular.  I arrived much earlier in the day to meet Sonia and hang around to watch all the behind the scenes action and to catch a full rehearsal.

A view of the set from backstage.

  It made sense to me, in a narrative sense, that seeing her again would happen at the end of my visit, as she was the beginning and object behind the casting of my gaze toward Geneva in the first place. The omega to the alpha, as it were.

Twenty years and effectively no change in her.  Pretty remarkable.  It was a strange, unreal, but not unpleasant reencounter.

Pre-rehearsal instructions.

Sonia's career as a chanteuse des enfants started with the songs she wrote and sang to lull her own children.   Her husband Marco Sorrentino produces her music and her shows.  The entire production is very much a family affair with her parents chipping in in various supporting roles - her father plays Santa every year.  The endeavor has developed into quite an operation, one which has resulted in several albums and produces around 40 performances a year.

Rehearsal

What's extraordinary is that it's not just Sonia on stage; in this case, she was joined by a cast of some 40 children, and her shows in Geneva scheduled for the following weekend would have 50 children on stage.  A core of these children have speaking and solo parts, but all of them sing and dance on stage - and they are adorable and quite good.  Sonia and Marco operate a music school for children where part of the curriculum is concerned with training the kids for these performances.  I was told Sonia's first performance (in a library? I think) included three children and a walking bridge lawn ornament from her parents' yard as the set.  Now there's a full set, expansive and beautifully decorated, and a full crew of folks to get it all running.

Rehearsal

When I arrived, there was a commotion of mothers and children checking in and getting settled.  The family and crew members were just sitting down for a lunch prepared by Sonia's mom, and I joined them.   Given the rush of the day, this was the bulk of the time we had to catch up and during which I met Marco and some of the other folks.

Sonia's sound engineer is a young man named Julian.  I wondered if he was American, or of American descent because his English was completely without accent.  He's actually Swiss, and from Swiss parents, but he attended English schools throughout his childhood.  As the conversation progressed over lunch, Julian asked me if I had a Kickstarter project. I said yes I did. He said he thought I looked familiar, and that he had seen the project online.  He asked if I had reached my funding goal.  I said I had and that that was the reason I was there that day. 

The performance was incredibly entertaining, more so, I think, than I was expecting for a concert for children.  It was sweet for sure, and it was touching to see the kind of rapport that existed between Sonia and the audience - and to hear the responses and singing that was echoing back to the stage from the rapt children in the seats.

There in my center section seat, my 19/20 year old self was being channeled through my viewing of this spectacle/specter.  In some ways what I was seeing on stage was the realization of the romantic conjurings harbored by my younger self.  What else but the most theatrical illustrations of beauty and romance can match the visions projected by youthful ardor.  How apt and poetic - I felt - that I was finding in this theater, on stage, in lovely gowns, under glowing lights and buffeted by a wind machine, an embodiment of the dream I dreamt twenty years before.  I was well aware of the boon this experience could be in the telling of this narrative, but I also considered it a gift to this younger self for whom an unrealized yearning had found a sort of resolution.

The omega joining up with the alpha, indeed.

All of this brings up the relationship between the body and the image, the disembodied image, the images we project into our desired worlds dreaming they meet bodily form, and the illusions we conjure for ourselves and the illusions conjured for us from the stage.  I don't have a position on any of this, but together, these thoughts are additional gifts for me that had been gathered and wrapped through my earlier experiences and conversations on this trip and were opened before me on this day.

Sonia with her fans.

After the performance, I waited to say goodbye until Sonia finished signing autographs and posing for photos with her fans.  This took over an hour.  During lunch, there was talk about the necessity that even as the shows are directed to young children, they must be entertaining for the parents as well.  And there is an awareness of the particular draw that Sonia has for the fathers of her intended audience.  Indeed there were many dads in attendance on this day, and one can imagine that the choice/chore paradigm of attending such a show with the family is made decidedly more pleasant for a father given the headlining attraction is in the form of an attractive Sonia Grimm and not some purple dinosaur or some such furry costumed monstrosity - or Bette Davis in drag.  Indeed there was at least one lucky dad who scored a photo op with her that night who, seemingly to wanting to diminish the thrill he was having (in the presence of his wife and kids), kept repeating "c'est juste pour souvenir, juste pour souvenir", as if to say "Oh, alright, I'all take a picture too.". Actually this guy had a perfect cover as one of his daughters was too shy to be photographed with Sonia, so he took a photo to demonstrate it wasn't so scary (....actually, he posed for more than one photo.)

We had very little time to speak, but I was happy to be able to get such a first hand knowledge of what her work is about.   I must admit that I was a little dismissive of this music for children before seeing the show, but having seen it I can more truly appreciate both the effort and craft she brings to it, and the great effect it has on her audience.  Sonia's working to improve her fluency in Swiss German well enough to tailor her music and performances for those kraut-tongued cantons of Switzerland.  I asked her if she'd consider working in English.   She replied that there are already enough children's entertainers in English, but there's a real dearth of contemporary performers for children in French.  She described two performers she listened to when she was young, one of which is a geriatric woman who dresses as a little girl (I'm conjuring an image of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, ergo my Bette Davis reference above) so there's a definite need she's meeting.

I left the theater being just a little outside of myself.  Somewhere between the me of now and that 19 year old me.  I gave that younger me space on my seat to watch the performance and on the way to the bus stop the two of us worked to reconcile and understand the day we just had.  A little of his melancholy overwhelmed my perception.

I had two bus options for returning to the train station.  I took a different bus from the one on which I arrived, oblivious to the fact that this bus had a different route and stops and I missed my stop - by a long shot.  It took me a little while to make my way back on another bus and miss my stop again (it was an issue of language the second time) but I got off, found a map on the street.....I actually found a map, somewhat soggy, laying in the street, and made my way to the station in the rain.  Lausanne's not that big anyway and I was never that far into being lost. I was thinking more about the fittingness of re-meeting Sonia at the end of this trip.  Although it was meeting her and falling for her that propelled me to Geneva in the first place, actually getting there and being there during those months went well beyond that initial catalyst, becoming something fully independent from it while still being colored by it.  Returning to the US was the last thing I wanted to do on that first visit.  A return was failure.  And at that time, to me, failure looked like this:

Christian In Me I, 1992, oil on masonite, 24"x24"

The taste of those dejected feelings rose, liquified, in my mouth as I mused over the impending close of this adventure.  With the close of any project one  has long worked for and now completed, comes a sense of loss.  Additionally, I was pressed by the question of whether I had even approached what I wanted to achieve during these three weeks.  Would it have even been possible?  By and large, I think I could say that I did;  but how can you be sure?  I had the thought, made the plan, took the trip, and having gotten there, the horizon eluded me at nearly every step.   This all made for a near perfect symmetry of the two trips - although my current swaying was nothing so severe as the previous instance.

I had a very early flight out on Tuesday and it occurred to to me that night returning from Lausanne, that I should look how I'd get to the airport.  I assumed I would go the way I came; bus to train station, train to airport.  But the buses weren't running that early.  Next plan, try to find a shuttle service that wouldn't cost me a bundle.   The process of securing a ride went into the next day.  I knew that I'd have to get up very early morning for my flight.  I was dreading - and fearful that I wouldn't make - the early hour wake up I'd have, so I devised  a plan for my Monday that would entail tying up loose ends, running some errands and making a final tour through town early in the day, then return home for a hefty late afternoon nap, which would fortify me in staying awake through to morning.  I was going to avoid that early wake up by not going to bed at all.

A horizontal jet d'eau.

I spent the morning finishing up a little work and packing up my materials and the work I had made during the trip before heading out to my first stops around Eaux Vives and the bord du lac.

I'm an awful buyer of gifts.  I'm always at a loss when I put some intention behind the purchase of a gift.  In Rome once, I was at such a loss for what to bring back for Angelika.  My friend Angela (with whom I was staying) suggested I buy her a silk scarf.  Perfect suggestion.  Purchasing such a scarf is like selecting an artwork in a gallery which one might imagine buying.  This is an activity I can handle.  The anxiety of finding just the right thing for a gift was suddenly subverted by the more familiar ground of simply making an aesthetic judgment.  So many of the miring variables were neutralized by Angela's suggestion; the parameters were defined,  all I had to do was follow my aesthetic gut - a process about which I feel fairly capable.  Angelika wears scarves, and does so very nicely.  With this plan, I could get something practical, something aesthetic, and something she'd certainly use and which would not be extraneous to her nature.  This was grand grand advice - and the start of a sort of a tradition.
Its been a long time since I had "occasion" to buy Angelika a scarf, and I had nearly forgotten about it as I started to fret on what to bring back for her.  Luckily, I recalled the power of the scarf  not too far into my gifting conundrum.  So one of my Monday objectives was to find her a nice scarf.

A wall near Eaux Vives.

The former site of a squat called the Garage. An instance where fuzzy memory and an erased history lent a feeling of weird disorientation.

I decided that Carouge is where I would find this scarf.  This was perfect too, because I had intended to hit Carouge, a place where I had drunk and wandered on many nights way back when, but hadn't yet had the chance.  Plus, I knew there should be some suitable boutiques in which to source my objective.  Having left the apartment later than intended, I ran into a problem I knew all to well, namely, that all the shops in Carouge are closed for a couple hours at midday.  I was kicking myself for this oversight, but jovially so as I was experiencing something I had often run into on my first trip, particularly whenever I tried to visit Ferney-Voltaire.  So Carouge was a bit of a bust, and being there during the day lacked it's nighttime verve I remember, so after a very short time window shopping with no exciting prospects, I jumped on the tram heading back into the center of Geneva.

The Monument to the Reformation at the Promenade des Bastions.

I descended at the Promenade des Bastions and watched chess players in the waning drizzle and the crows picking over the detritus left behind from the striking of the tents from the Escalade events.  From there I wanted to head back up into the old city for some photo/video ops that had eluded me.  As I crossed the street and started my ascent, my glance was caught by a rain soaked GHI newspaper on the ground pushed up against a railing.  Several pages worth of the upper corner of the paper were turned back revealing an ad for the two Geneva dates of Sonia's Christmas show.  This was a trippy find and it conjured up past magically weird coincidences experienced on my first trip which I'll get into at another time.  This was an artifact worth keeping so I gathered up the soggy rag and luckily I had a spare plastic bag on me so I could deposit it in my shoulder bag without soaking everything else I had with me. 

I took my final turn among the cobbled streets, descending through the Place de la Madelaine where, for the first time, I took notice of a stall selling goods from Afghanistan & Pakistan, including some striking varieties of scarves.  I took time to find a pretty, iridescent woven silk scarf predominantly hued in shimmery and elusive salmon/orange and aqua blue hues.  BOOM!  I don't think a more perfect scarf could have been had in that city at that time.

Above the Bastions.

Feeling proud of my acquisition, I decided to head home to finish up on getting packed and fit in what was looking like an incredibly shrinking nap before I was to meet up with Mathias and Magdalena for dinner.  It was about 1:30 pm when I arrived at the apartment, ate up the rest of the spaghetti I had on hand, worked on a few more drawings and was down for my nap by 3:00 pm (I got a good three hours in.)

A window display of a Matta drawing at Galerie Interart.  A visit to this exhibit of drawings did much for me.

I arrived at Mathias' apartment at 7 with a portfolio of the things I had been working on in order to show him the fruits of my time.  We ended up trading a few pieces.  Mathias is a composer/musician and he's been focusing on video for the past year or so, but he's also created a number of very intriguing and clever small works on paper, two of which I brought home with me.

Our original plan was for another fondu outing, but I was quietly relieved when Magdalena said she wasn't feeling up for fondu, because I wasn't sure how another cheese binge would affect my early travel plans.  We ended up on going to an old school pizza joint purporting to be the first to offer that cuisine in Geneva.  It was a good light fare.

So I did end up sleeping a couple of hours, up by 3 AM to finish cleaning and then wait for my cab.  There were some truly bizarre obstacles and delays on the ride to the airport.  I was getting the sense that even the driver was getting a little nervous.  Halfway through, he told me this was his first day as a cab driver.  I was his very first fare, ever.  He gave me a discount on account of the delays and for being patient.  I gave him a healthy tip and wished him a good remainder of his first day at work. 

In the Geneva Airport.

There were a number of children and pets among those waiting for the TAP flight to Lisbon.  I had the sensation I was waiting for a bus and not an airplane.  As far as I can recall, this leg of the trip was free from any major delays.

In the Lisbon airport.

Toward the end of my sizeable layover in Lisbon, I sat next to a chatty young American woman studying fashion in Paris.  She was heading back to NY for her holiday break.  She was an amalgamation of all those Manhattan-raised prep school girls in tv and movies who, among all there other inheritences is the mandate to take on the world with the full force of their fabulousness.  A generous and authoritative fabulousness that was almost too much to bear.

A fog bank receding in Lisbon.

The upside of my drawn out flight from the US to Europe was the modern entertainment technology on board.  The downside of the flight back was the less modern entertainment technology on board.  Not much to complain about, though.  It's just easy to get spoiled.

The opportunity of this entire trip was one in which I was spoiled by the abundance of time and space at my disposal for this purpose of my own confabulation - and that's not lost on me.  In fact the richness of that time has been made more exquisite in light of the press of the work and task laden schedule I've been blessed with since returning.  I can't seem to get anything done in a timely manner, including this blog post - the last of the diaristic account of my trip which together has taken three months longer to finish posting than I expected.  But such is the unexpected nature of pushing forward - even when one is on a path of return: it took me nearly three hours to get from the Newark airport to Grand Central.

In the studio today

Dead Hare Radio Hour: Show #40 - Crystal Bridges

Another episode of the Dead Hare Radio Hour is out. The subject this time is the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ar.

Frank and Gloria in front of Crystal Bridges.

Roxy Paine's shimmering tree welcomes visitors to the museum.

Carolina Miranda is back on the Dead Hare Radio Hour (she was the program's very first guest) and she and I compare notes from our visits to the museum.  I recorded our conversation at Carolina's apartment in Brooklyn last May (she and her husband, El Celso, have since moved to L.A.)

Crystal Bridges opened in November of 2011.  I made the first of my first visit to the museum - a week after it opened - with my grandparents who live very close by.  You can see them in the photo at the top of this post.  (By chance, I'm releasing this podcast just two days after my grandpa broke his shoulder in two places from in a fall, so I'm a bit concerned for him.)

 Devorah Sperber's take on the Last Supper.

Below are some links relevant to the show.
Carolina's Crystal Bridges photo diary on her blog, c-monster.net includes images of several of the works discussed.
Carolina's most recent radio piece for NPR on the artist Llyn Foulkes.


A recent update on the Walmart bribery scandal in Mexico.

NPR's series on art destinations.

Martin Johnson Heade's exquisite paintings of rain forest orchids, butterflies and humming birds.

Vik Muniz responds to Heade's orchid paintings.

This Washington Examiner story states that the 600,000 Crystal Bridges visitors in the museum's first year is double the expected number.

A Wall Street Journal story on the Mark Rothko painting, No. 234/ No. 234, recently acquired by Crystal Bridges

Inside the Precious Moments Chapel.

More images from my visit to the Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, MO. can be found in this photo album.  This is one crazy joint. A real spectacle that is at once impressive, and a wee creepy.

Finally, this episode  wraps up with a short anecdote from Peter Acheson (Show #30 & #36 ) about an encounter he and his buddy Chris Martin had while hiking in Colorado.

Personal Best

Nighttime Painting 1, 2009, acrylic, gravel, glass beads on canvas 11"x14"

The second of the tangents in my previous post brought to mind an exercise I maintained periodically when I lived alone.  It's very possible that I mentioned it previously on the blog, but who's going to go back and check?
This exercise was a mental one in which I tried to calculate, given my current social circumstances, minus any telltale effects of odor, how long it would take for my body to be discovered after dying.  At one point, I figured that I could be dead about a month before anyone would consider my lack of contact a cause for alarm.  Although, my competitive nature yearned to strive for an ever longer period of time, I felt I should do my best to prevent that eventuality from growing past a month.  I think that I unconsciously omitted the odor factor from the calculation.
Now it could be that I'm simply forgetting this, but it was only after thinking about yesterday's post and the story of my dead invisible neighbor that I connected the progressive experience of tracking a dead man's progress through smell and this mental exercise.  I can't believe that a correlation between the two events would have escaped me, but the sensation of making the connection yesterday was so fresh, so revelatory, it felt like a true discovery. 
Although now, I'm feeling like what I've discovered may be the beginning of the dismemberment of my memories as I get further on in my own years.

Geneve Journal: Dec 14-15,2012, Paris and back

I was a little conflicted about going to Paris.  My objective in going was to meet up with and record a conversation with Magali Aubert who, by the fact that she was assigned to staying at my parents' house while on her month long Summer residency in Colorado in 1991, was the real kickstarter to this entire Geneva-facing part in my life. 
It's almost embarrassing to say I had never been before.  It's an embarrassing embarrassment to harbor, too. Talk about a problem born of privilege.  I really only in Paris to see Magali for the sake of the project, and I didn't want my attention to get diverted from the matter at hand, (never mind that I was spending a lot of time trying to scheme a way to travel from Geneva to Paris to Berlin to Milan to visit friends.) I was afraid of taking away time from being in Geneva, so I decided to make a precision incursion into Paris - arrive Friday afternoon, see a sight (I chose the Palais de Tokyo) or two, then meet up with "turtle girl" then out on the morning train.

Taking the 11:40 train out of Geneve gave me time to work on postcards and a few drawings in the morning. 

Got on the train - past the couple with mega stroller and baggage blocking the main corridor to find that It appeared that I'd be riding solo in a bank of four facing seats.  Awesome.  My buzz was killed by an aging Brit and his husky voiced wife of apparently Eastern Euro origin took who note of my largess and planted themselves in the two seats facing me from across the table.  A bit of a downer, but no biggie.  I retracted my legs and settled in for a more expected density.

Annoyingly, worldliness and self-awareness of this Limey's seemingly sophisticated accent belied the lack of vocal attenuation one might expect from a less couth-sounding voice.  This guys's voice carried.  Loudly.  I noticed it when I first took my seat than the couple was still seated behind me and across the aisle.  Now I was directly facing him.  I braced myself with provisions of seething which might sustain me through the voyage.
He was reading the paper, choosing to recite capsulizations to his wife who muskily replied in sighs and affirmative groans.  His first bit of sharing related to Allen Turing.  His wife seemed uninterested.  I learned quickly that her disinterest was, to him, a cue to continue.

Limey:  "Switzerland replaced Norway as the most expensive county in Europe."
Wifey:  "Hmm."

Next, he informed the car about NASA making a preemptive "told you so" video about the impending end of the world five days hence.

Half an hour later the couple were sent back to their own seats by proper ticket holders boarding the train at Bellegarde, France, regardless, the car was still kept abreast of the results of the Limey's reading.

Limey: "The Italians have no word for leadership.  The Germans have no word for small talk and the Eskimos have no word for war."

Limey:  " There's a costume drama on Sunday night back in England called 'Making of a Woman.'"

Limey:  "It's raining."

Limey:  "I thought we'd go for a walk outside" - this after hearing an announcement about our unplanned stop and accompanying request that no one disembark.



Limey:  "I'll shall return."  On his way to the cafe car. 

After returning from the cafe car he began playing a driving game on his ipad.
Limey:  "I had a chafe."
            "I want to break 400.  My best score is 394."
            "I'm now in the lead."
            "A nosty accident."
            "I've got 50 to beat."
            "I'm ahead."
            "Did you see those 2 police cars ganging up on me?"
            "Getting a hundred on the train is tough."
            "Must be able to do better than that."

Eventually, we arrived in Paris.


I was struck by two things upon arriving in Paris:  #1.  All the black people.   This sudden awareness is more descriptive of the extreme paleness of Geneva than anything else, but after spending almost 3 weeks in that bowl of mild Swiss milk, my eyes needed to adjust to the multi-colored metropolis of Paris.  #2.  The complete dirtiness of the train interior.  This joint was dirty; the archetypical depiction of urban dirt in a movie kind of dirty.   The state of the car I in which I was riding brought to mind something that has dumfounded me before, which is that the seats of several public transportation systems in several European cities are covered in cloth.  This astounds me, and seems like that modicum of urbane comfort represented by cloth upholstered seats must come at dear price.  Coming from the one city (Geneva)to the other (Paris) is a study in contrasts.  The fabric seats on the buses of Geneva seem perfectly natural in that near prisine environment, but I can not imagine an NYC subway that can't be hosed down and dissinfected regularly .....

Tangent #1
On a recent stint @ MOMA, I spent a night with friends in Brooklyn, as I do occasionally.  On my commute to Manhattan the next morning I was presented with an extremely crowded subway, which had one relatively open car.  With my commuting savvy being dulled through inactivity, I readily jumped on this car - and was confronted by a STENCH soooo strong, sooo pervasive and shocking that I was struck dumb.  I was paralyzed for a fraction of a moment, which was long enough to prevent me from exiting the train before the doors closed.   
Alone on one bench near the center of the car was a female figure, bent over.  My mind is dressing her in wintery layers of dingy, dirty pink.  I don't know if I'm imagining the rings of evaporated liquid that marked the floor around her presence, but I see them now.  The two ends of the car were packed by commuters trying to get as far away as possible.  Unbelievably, 3 or 4 people were sitting on the bench opposite from this being, and were still conscious.  Occasionally, pity and empathy for the poor soul/source of offense poked a toe under the thick velvet curtain of disgust that pressed on my field of thoughts, but then I had to take another breath.  It was an odor, thick and granular, the equivalent of walking through a cloud of glitter or a chest high field of thistles and burred grasses, not only are you besieged while in the midst, you must contend with attempts to shake off the material effects of your exposure long after the terrain has cleared.  On the subway that morning, my fear of my being being suffused with the smell for the rest of the day was great and I wasn't going to risk it.  I couldn't (but yet I can) believe my fellow commuters could tolerate this for the 10-30 minute ride that was their immediate future.  I jumped off at the next stop.  This was no mere unpleasant smell.  This was a death rattle of olfactory putridness which brought to boil a sensory memory from ten years previous.

Tangent #2:
Back in late '93 and '94, when I was "surviving" in NY, I took up residence for a time in a flop hotel in Hell's Kitchen, just off 50th St and 8th Ave, I think ( I always forget which Ave, but in any case the joint sat back from the corner that was kitty corner from the Winter Garden Theatre where CATS! was having its eternal run.)  I think I spent 5 weeks in this place and I think I paid $125 a week for my 1st floor room just off the lobby.  For sure this place was a scuzzy joint.  I wonder what the me of now would think if I were to visit the place today (I don't think it exists any longer.)  My room had a window onto a cavernous interior air shaft.  There was a bare bulb for a light on the ceiling.  There was a bed, a side table, a bureau, possibly a small table...but maybe it was just a chair.  I think there was a mini fridge in there.  There was a tv that had sound but no picture.  What my room didn't have for a fair share of my January/February stay was heat.  Those were some miserable nights.  Fully dressed, and then some, under the veil of a sheet called blanket, I left the light and the tv on for what heat they could produce.
Using the bathroom around the corner and down the hall wasn't exactly a picnic.  Except, it was like a picnic if you include the wildlife you'd likely encounter emerging from the room's crevices.  The ultimate memory from the time of my residence here was when one of my invisible neighbors kicked off, alone and unknown in his room.  Coming in late from a night with friends on a Wednesday, I ventured down to the bathroom and took note of the faint but pervasive odor of spoiled milk.  That odor evolved and strengthened in the proceeding days until on Sunday morning when, hearing a commotion in the hall, I peeked through the hole in my door to see a blur of dark blue uniforms passing by.  It was the NYPD.  The manager had discovered the body that morning.  When I left room for work that morning, I was pummeled by the malodorous emanations that flooded the hall after the cops had opened that door 20 feet and a corner from mine.  Among the weakest of the regrets I hold on to is that I didn't ask to view the body.  I think I was aware and fearful that the sticky stink would cling to me and my gear if I lingered too long.  The whole seen got disturbing in the next several days when, even though my neighbor had left the building, esScents had stayed on.  It was this lingering that proved to much for me.
 

So for that, I can not imagine NYC's subways clad in cloth as they are in Paris, and even Berlin.  Our Metro North commuter trains have vinyl upholstery - and those can trip alarms occasionally.  I'm getting the skeeves just thinking of the possibility.  But yes, I did actually take a seat on my journey on the RER A.

While on the RER A I saw a thin young man wearing a red beret.  If it's possible to embody a look which is both dorkie and douchy at the same time, this skinny dude did it.

My destination was the Palais de Tokyo to check out some contemporary art offerings before my meeting with Magali. 

Jerome Hentsch had told me about an exhibit of aboriginal painting that was on view at a museum of anthropology or sociology.  I wish I had taken his suggestion.  My visit to the Palais de tokyo ranks as one of the most disappointing museum experiences I've had.  Individually, there were some worthwhile pieces, like Ryan Gander's Esperlutte and William E Jones' film Is It Really So Strange?, but the overall installation and combination of works was uninspiring, dry, and lifeless.  There was one large installation by Fabrice Hybe amounted to a lot of effort made in creating the sprawling piece with subdivisions of environments through which one passed, including a small structure made entirely of refrigerators with the doors open, and a sort of clothes line gauntlet and some sort of lifesize bio-dump/ compost diorama.  It was a cross between an obstacle course and a Chuck E Cheese playland, but I found it largely devoid of charm.

It really sucked.  The very best part of the whole museum was a series of interventions in the stairwell, not all of which were visible, I think due to work being done.  There was more soulful spirit in the actions in that stairwell than in much of anything else on display.    Major bummer.

The sky was spitting rain and the wind was brutal.  Use of an umbrella was ineffective and hazardous.

I hopped on the metro in the direction of Magali's office in the 3rd Arrondissement and grabbed a beer while waiting for our meeting time.  She hasn't changed in twenty years. 

Standard started out more as a small pamphlet several years ago and has grown into a weighty glossy mag with an eclectic mix of art, culture and fashion, and if you ask Magali, she's guided this development without really knowing how to produce a magazine. She may not know how it's done.  She just does it.  I find it immensely impressive.  Standard is released on a quarterly basis.  The model on the current Spring issue's cover is wearing some wild tin can high heels.  

We drank and ate and drank and recorded a conversation until Magali's English gave out.  She told me the story of the death of her last cat during celebrations immediately after France's World Cup victory in 2000.  I'm haunted by that poor kitten's demise.

A bizarre portrait I made of Magali in 1992.

I picked up on a surrealist nature of Paris.  First of all, there's that sense of visiting a place for the first time, but sensing that you've been there before.  It's an odd familiarity wrought by exposure to place through film and tv, no doubt.  Perhaps its the same with first time visitors to NYC.   While all new, the experience has a lot of "old hat" about it.  Additionally, the scale of the streets in areas  feels wholly unreal, as if everything is slightly a smaller than life size model of itself.  As we walked to her apartment, I felt like I was walking on a back lot in some studio in LA.  

I don't know where we went that night, we passed the site of the Bastille, I know that, but I passed through the warren of Paris city streets in the dark, blind - pre-internet blind - an odd and refreshing geographical blindness that I don't experience much in this age of Google maps.

The next morning Magali walked me to the Gare de Lyon, and I was on my way back to Geneve.  

Mid afternoon I returned to my Genevois home base with the sense of comfort and satisfaction of a homecoming.

Crossing over to l'isle, an Archigraphy.

I worked on a few things then went out to a book launch/ signing for the publisher of an upcoming monograph on Hadrian Dussoix's work.  The vernissage was held at Librairie Archigraphy.  There, I met Hadrian's girlfriend Yoko and occupied much of my time with perusing the artbooks.  After the event the three of us made our way to Livresse, a small lesbian bar/bookstore which serves up Belgian beers.  On the way, I discovered Hadrian's fondness for Root beer, a proclivity we share.

We started to drink.  I drank a lot that night, and had a grandly fun time.  

Some of Hadrian's works at Livresse.

What I can remember of our conversation: some debate on the suitability of artists as parents ( I feel like I had been inserted into a private debate)....and hours worth of other topics I can't recall.  But out of the evening came the seed of a yearlong project for Hadrian and myself, one which is underway (and I trust he is doing his on a daily basis as I am here)  

It's a diaristic, ritualistic project.  we are each creating a "work" every day this year born of an utterance during a smoke break.  More on this later.  Here are a couple pieces I've made in realizing this project:

January 7, 2013

February 1, 2013

There's a wonderful sense of pride of accomplishment one feels when one can find one's drunken way home in a foreign city utilizing long buried sensory memories of the place and gut instinct as the primary navigation tools.

A Genevan street turned Xmas tree lot.

It was a good night, and with it a project of mutual accountability ...

TV tray to the stars.

One of the things that I might have set out as a goal for myself for this project/trip was to lay the groundwork for future works, not just making a retrospective endeavor.  The real gift and uplifting feeling from the trip came from realizing that indeed my interactions and experiences were spawning new works and new possibilities.  That was a thrill that pervaded the drunken night and which has outlasted the hangover.

In the studio today