'Walking with Vermeer' depicts a walk through 17th and 18th century Delft. A number of movies, based upon original master drawings, show the area in Delft which Vermeer painted in his famous 'The View of Delft.'
After reading Arthur Rimbaud's poetry a few summers ago, naturally the next step is the work of Paul Verlaine. It's hard for history to get over a love affair. Heloise and Abelard are still trying to live down their fling.
"Lovers' Chat" Paul Verlaine
In the drear park, beneath a chill, bleak sky,
Two shapes, two silhouettes come passing by.
Lifeless their eyes, formless their lips; and they
Speak low, and muffled are the words they say.
In the drear park, beneath a chill, bleak sky,
Two phantom figures talk of days gone by.
"Do you remember how our souls would ache
With bliss?" "Why ask? What difference does it make?"
"Do I still haunt your dreams, like long ago?
Does my mere name still make your heart pound?" "No."
"Oh, for those wondrous days, the ecstacy,
Kiss upon kiss, pressed lips to lips!" "Maybe"
"How high our hopes, how blue the sky, outspread!
Dark now the sky, and, humbled, hope has fled!"
Treading the weeds, they talked the time away,
And night alone heard what they had to say.
"In the Style of Paul Verlaine" Paul Verlaine
It’s the moonlight's fault if I put on
My night-mask; Saturn's fault, too, it is—
Pouring from that gloomy urn of his—
And those moons' too: moons, moons, on and on...
Songs without words, that together sound
Cool, discordant chords, eager to smart
This insipid, dull, lackluster heart,
O the chill, the shudder in their sound!
No, it's not as if you've not made up
With the one who vexed you: unconcerned,
I forgive my childhood, now returned,
Face still pert, though rather much made up.
I forgive that lie I lived—ah me!—
For the well-worn pleasure, tedious,
Droll, with which my leisure, ponderous,
Not without its pains, injected me.
My favorite line is from the poem "Yes, despite your cruel excess..." and has already been incorporated in the title line above:
Preppy Punks: "Sometimes the parents are there to remind them what the school rules are," he said. "Like: 'This is fine. You can take the chains off when you go to class.' ''
Apparently, the Sex and the City finale went something like this (so I hear--I haven't seen it yet): Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha are seen exiting a yellow cab and running up to Carrie. They all look into a massive sunken pit where Manhattan (and Staten Island, for good measure) used to be.
Charlotte: "I guess we're not going shopping tomorrow."
Miranda: "We destroyed SoHo? I fought on the wrong side!"
Samanatha "Who will remember to tell the stories of Bergdorf Goodman, of brunch...?"
Charlotte: "Carrie, we have to find them--all the new shopaholics and trophy wives!"
Miranda: "Yeah, Carrie, what are we going to do next?"
Camera zooms in on Carrie with slight smile on her face. She realizes she is set free from Manhattan and that her maxed out credit cards are at the bottom of the pit as well.
[...]
No, sorry, that was the Buffy the Vampire Slayer finale.
Booking the tickets to fly to Paris for Bri and myself was easy enough. The Air France phone lady was very French, but that comes with the territory. When spelling out the reservation code, she used a word like 'ecru' for the the letter E and all the H's from my name disappeared. Booking the hotel is not as easy. The deals from YourStayParis.com on apartment renting are very reasonable. This Marais-area apartment seemed perfect. However, a little research found NotYourstay.com, a site detailing extensive bait and switches from the company. If something has a just as strong an anti-something, they obviously cancel each other out.
My favorite function of my iPod is setting songs to random function and listening to whatever comes up next in the order. It's like listening to a radio, except no one is going to put on Celine Dion when you least expect it. (That's a cruel and mean trick of radio programmers--and worse yet when you hum the song later). The next logical step is for an iPod randomizer that is based on the listener's mood. Quiet chamber pop is fine for morning commutes when you are barely awake anyway, but the randomizer function chooses horribly inappropriate songs at other times. When I was on my hands and knees and scrubbing the bathroom floor on Saturday morning, Lesley Gore's "It's My Party" comes on. A little Saint Etienne or Kenickie or anything with more energy would have been better. Remember the other half of the line from Lesley's song is "and I'll cry if I want to": definitely not chore music.
While I gladly let myself get carried away for Christmas, Valentine's Day feels much more hyped for greeting card companies to sell something between the beginning of the year and Easter. At the pharmacy on Friday afternoon, a long line of normal-looking people stood down the aisle, each with some sort of stuffed bear with a heart on it or cheap waxy chocolate in their hands. I, for one, did not see any cupids or rainbows at all over the weekend.
Brian did hand-roll chocolate truffles for a special dessert. They were delicious, but I have been finding chocolate fingerprints all over the kitchen.
On Wednesday night I arrived at orchestra rehearsal late. The group was already in the midst of going through Tchaikovsky's String Serenade (in C Major, Op. 48). My double bass had been unpacked and tuned. The music had already been placed on my stand--it had my own pencil markings from the last time I played it with the group. If I recall correctly, back in high school each of the three orchestra groups I was playing with chose the piece so I had about six months of playing it straight. But now it has been a few years. Getting back into a piece is different than picking up a bike again or getting behind the wheel of a car. The fingers remember that run of eighth notes, that grand pause, and that cue, but the notes being produced don't necessarily sound right.
The problem was that my G-string (no jokes, please) seemed horribly out of tune. Every time I played on it was just wrong sounding. I tapped the seams of my bass in case any had opened but none had. So you grin and bear it, and hope no one notices. Especially those cello players--they always want to pin wrong notes on the bass section. After the rehearsal I played some passages alone and the notes all sounded fine. I'm going to blame the young bass player next to me. He sat down a lot during the rehearsal which is a sure sign he's a bad egg. And I hear he is the ringleader of a fencing club. Yes, it was definitely him.
Natalie has now started a blog, Vanitas Personae, to tackle "popular culture, politics and personality disorders". Big topics to cover. Life, death, and the origin of the species must be saved for an appendix.
It's not funny and I shouldn't be laughing. However, between being literally thrown to the lions and the cockle-picking incident, I'm snickering and it's wrong. I'm so sorry.
On Monday morning I took a tour of one of my prospective institutes of higher learning. Two things stick out in my mind from the tour:
1) A crucifix was hanging in every classroom. Later I remembered the the school is affiliated with a private religious parent university. And this parent school will not officially recognize a gay-oriented group. However, on the group posting board there was a sign for that type of group at the division I was touring. But there was no information below it.
2) In the classroom I sat in a sound like an old man suddenly taking a deep breath occurred every two or three minutes. The easiest explanation is ghosts. Ghosts that snore.
Newark's idea of downtown urban renewal is building covered, elevated walkways from the train station to the office buildings so commuters never actually have to go outside.
Todd Hayne's next film "tentatively titled I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan, is an impressionistic account of the man. Haynes says the drama will 'draw from [Dylan's] life but will refract who he is into a cluster of characters played by different actors.' Though the film hasn't yet been cast, at least one of those Dylans will be played by a woman. Somehow, this project has the musician's blessing".
Walky Talky: Time Travel: "I've always been a twentieth century boy, but such a late arrival on the scene. Is it a specific malaise of our era to be always keenly aware of what you've missed? It sometimes seems that every important event took place before I was there to witness it. Seemed. But not any more."
Guidelines for photographing cats (according to the New York Institute of Photography):
1. All cats are beautiful by nature, even the ugly ones.
2. Watch the subject's movements carefully and anticipate the next movement.
3. Simplify the picture by eliminating the unnecessary and retaining the necessary.
Replace "cat" with just about any other subject in the world and the guidelines still apply. Balanchine apparently wished his dancers would move as gracefully as his cats. Alice the cat would have been thrown out of his studio--she misses half her jumps.
In an effort to save money on a holiday to Paris, I was considering buying a bottle of red wine, dimming the lights in the apartment, and putting on the greatest hits of Edith Piaf. Somehow that doesn't seem quite right. Mind travel is certainly improving these days, but the authentic still has that certain something. Brian and I haven't been on a holiday since early 2001 that did not involve parents, siblings, or nephews at some point. And while those parties have their merits, its not the same. The one good deal on airfare and hotel puts us up by Gare du Nord, and I'd rather be closer to the river. That would be like going to Manhattan and forgetting to look at the East River. No, that is a bad comparison.
Priorities in Paris:
1) Visit the grave of Francois Truffaut.
2) Make some amends.
Imagine your life as a series of stories. The only common thread being the names of the characters and a similar scar or a turn of phrase. Rearrange, reorganize, and reenact... same inevitable end. Dale Peck's first novel, Martin And John, is thin but powerful. The quotes seem slight when extracted, but not in their proper place in the novel:
You can have your dreams, he'd said in the kitchen, of how life should be and what your ideal lover should look like and how your fist time should go, but he knew--and I do too, now--that you'll never get it, or never be able to hold on to it if you do. Not in this life, he'd told me: only when you're dead.
"No," I'd told him, "it's not the old days anymore." "Don't act like a little boy," he said. "There never were any old days. There's no difference between then and now."
Peck has earned quite a reputation recently for pushing down the pillars of contemporaryliterature. Nothing wrong with that since renowned often need a knock on the chin.
