Brigitte, Monteverdi, Nessie and me.

Tuesday, October 12th 2o1o


Human Beings are tough little creatures, they are.

Of course, they look shabby, because they're easily bruised and torn and their hair gets messy if they don't take care of it.
They endure pain if they break, they endure pain when they mend, they would not even notice the difference if they did not, from time to time, encounter Joy.
Joy is the rare treat they're given to make them forget about that pain but again: joy is not that easy to handle, even if you're lucky enough to get loads of it. As long as you've met its nemesis in sadness or deception you're bound to admit it.
After all, when you're shaken by a bad piece of news, you're not far from the state your in after a joyfull announcement: you're shaken anyway.

Being well is the no-feel's-land inbetween, the temperature your skin does not even notice, the straight line running through the sinusoidal wave of ups and downs that you could even mistake for the main pattern if you look at it from a distance. But if you summarize the lot, Humans spend more time exhausting themselves with abnormally strong good and bad feelings than being simply, quietly 'well'. They spend more time trotting on the elbows than resting at the middle-junction.

And the amazing bit is that they survive! Tough they are, indeed!


All this long and odd incipit comes to highlight that we are all here today, me writing it, you reading it, because of this incredible ability to survive and, more important, because we've all been able to use it well and manage so far.

I hope you will accept my congratulations for this remarkable achievement. Hurray!



I have the unpleasant feeling though, that i've deserted these pages for ages and the truth is: i have indeed. Breaking a routine, even once, even for a short time, is as bad as deserting. This is why i intend to apologize for not having been 'just well', nor at least 'well enough' to be able to keep 'joy' and 'pain' on perfect balance and give the illusion of this straight line mentioned earlier.
My apology will therefore take the shape of Nessie: the bridges-like figure of a giant sea-monster, emerging triumphantly from the gleaming surface of a Scottish Loch. The upper part of the sinusoidal close-up on the well-being line. The joyfull part!



I'm afraid this will not include the visit of the Museum i had intended to see on the Second of October, because Bad Luck has forbidden me to put a foot in it on opening hours so far! The plan was to take Axelle and Erwann along to visit Gustave Moreau and to have dinner afterwards before meeting a couple of friends in the middle of Paris, in order to enjoy the multiple and drinkable advantages of a Nuit Blanche in Paris. It didn't go as planned at all, because we found ourselves getting lost on the way to the museum: it sounds very exciting here, you could picture us lost in the urban jurassic-jungle surrounded by unfriendly dino-cars and ptero-bikes, but we just got the address wrong and arrived when they were closing the doors! We ended up visiting an odd church-mise-en-abyme, and stopped for a Coke, a Grog and a Lemon Juice, followed by a Curry in a Thai restaurant and even more Grogs...



I wanted to go back to Gustave the next day, but i was ill, and then on Monday but didn't find the courage, then on Tuesday but it was closed, then Wedne...well, you got the idea...

Never mind: i've done and seen much, much better (easy to compare when i actually do not even know what Gustave Moreau's Museum is worth, but allow me the enthusiasm)! Let's put aside the private part of the 'joy' revolving aroud a fixed point now somewhere in the north and focus on the Parisian fat crumbles of excitingness taking us up to the 8th of the month, the day of the first Concert of the Musical Season!

My favourite seat in my favourite little church. It could have been enough to make my evening, had the concert been of poor quality.



But no such luck for my inner feel-o-meter which eventually exploded when the ten united voices of the Medieval Music Ensemble Discantus led by Brigitte Lesne produced, a cappella, the purest interpretation of the works of Gilles de Binchois i had ever heard.



But would all this pleasure have had a third of its impact had i not been invited by a Mary-Poppinsomaniac new friend to go, the following day, to the rehearsal of some Monteverdi she was directing?

Would it have had half of the impact had i not been asked to take a part in the adventure?

Would it have had a tenth of the impact had i not spent all the week-end focusing on this musical project whilst getting so many kind and affectionate messages on my mobile?

Probably not.



I then do hope you enjoyed the company of Nessie, because you can easily imagine how relieving it can be to count on such a highly arched friend, such a higly pitched joy that it can make you forget that the whole Nessie, especially because of its deeply immerged bits, can be a monter as well, and could be that monster mostly and in the same time, if the water-line was not there to make it look friendly and mysterious...


I'd love to use Nessie as a bridge. And i promise you'll know everything about Gustave Moreau some day.

She said Himmelweg

- Do you think it's too late for you to book a ticket for Himmelweg?

That was the question Sophie asked me in a chat we had last Friday night that set all the wheels in motion for the making of this post.
It was her way to tell me where I should go this past Saturday 2 of October. It would also provide the material to feed the entry of The Bridge this week. I proposed a total of 4 places I could go as you may know for my comment in Sophie's Rambling post in order to match the 4 she herself handed out to me so I could pick where she in turn should go.

Himmelweg is a German word (as I found out because my German is limited to less than 20 words) that stands for “Way to Heaven” in English. It was how they named the play I went to see at Repertorio Español.

                                                                    
Strange thing though because Repertorio Español specializes only in performances in Spanish from authors of Spain or Latin America. It turned out that the author of Himmelweg is a Spaniard whose work was translated into English and have had such a big success in their performances around the world and the United States that Repertorio decided not to take risks and to present it there anyway in their English version.

A very small and cozy place is Repertorio Español. You can almost touch the actors and feel their breath as they move around you or on the platform. That makes really special the special effects, the lights, the voices you hear with great clarity and the sounds, but remarkably the sound of “the train”. Oh!, you can’t get a more intimate atmosphere: they, the performers, stare and shout at you as if you were part of the play and you feel like you’re not a spectator but you’re in the middle of everything, trembling and shaking with them; becoming part of what’s going on the stage...

And maybe because of all that, the characteristics of the theater, or perhaps because of the quality of the actors and actresses or just because the play was so powerful and touching two days after watching it has not been enough time to process all the angles, the ideas and the thoughts the performance had generated in myself.

Because the play easily transforms itself in a sort of Chinese box with various levels or layers of interpretations and meanings. It’s theater in the theater what I saw.
The piece takes place in the woods or what remains of those woods -Autumn leaves scattered on the floor, like ghosts recreating what once was a fake city built by the German people during the Nazi era in order to deceive the observers about the real treatment received by the Jews in the concentrations camps.

Deceiving it’s an art and the tricky part is that you need the collaboration of the people you’d ultimately harm. The weapons, the tactics are different, much more sophisticated but equally effective. They need the Jews in order to succeed with their plot, to make their story credible. Teaching them how to do it was not sufficient but rehearsing, practicing until they could master the lie and can get away with it. The Pandora Box, a theater class: words mean nothing without the appropriate gestures.

That’s the scenario where everything plays out and all the paradoxes and contradictions of existence arise: With the players today that were just simply reminders, a glimpse of all the afflictions the real actors of the past must have endured, those who played with their lives a real drama of survival both as individuals or as part of a group.
Was it good or bad to help trying to save themselves? In the end it didn’t matter. They’d ended up the same way and we in the distant future for a moment could just live their present, being witnesses and sufferers of their sufferings and struggles for unintentionally attracting the intolerance and the hatred of other people who didn't like them.

The Way to Heaven is the reenactment, the recreation of the suffering of all human beings.
I must say: it was really painful, almost unbearable. That little actress, that little girl like another Anna Frank, her enchanting chant is still inside my head!

                                                          
Somehow and for more than a couple of days I'm not longer myself but a reflexion of all the pain they suffered as if I were/was one of them...

Un Bon Rhume

The title translates as 'a good cold'.
In what way a cold could be any 'good'?!

If you are wondering, i suggest you take a closer look to it from my (maybe biased) point of view.

A cold is mostly unpleasant, denying it would be foolish: running nose, watering eyes, headaches, constant drowsiness, noisy sneezing, all this would really take all the fun from the cold, if it were not compensated by: The GROG!

If you don't know what a Grog is (which i highly doubt, at least from my side of The Bridge, Frenchies are known to be alcoholics), wikipedia has a nice article on the topic.

Yesterday afternoon, Axelle and i met in a place i will not name yet (for i will write a long, long post about it some day), planning to have a hot chocolate and a little chat. We were not in the mood for hot chocolates though, and had a tea and a banana syrup instead (careful: not mixed! one drink each: i would not like to try such a mixture!). After a while, as we were both complaining about our health (Frenchies love doing that too) and translating some Purcell, the wonderful idea hit us 'ooh, i'd fancy a good hot Grog, what do you think?'

Two Grogs for the Ladies.
After having emptied half of a bottle of honey over the steaming rum and lemon, we said cheers in a very Piratish way and brought the mugs to our mouths.




I immediately stared at Axelle half expecting to see her covered in scales, as i thought that maybe the Grog was not a Grog at all, but rather some potion brewed to turn people into dragons or salamanders, and i can tell she was looking at me in the exact same way.
There was some more Piratish after that, as we were both swearing like old sea dogs, but at least our eyes were no longer watering because of a nasty virus.


Un Bon Rhume? Definitely. Grogs are worth getting your nose red for. And i just realised how the french word for Rum (Rhum) and rhume (cold) looked extraordinarily alike!

Rambling

Last Week-End, i was free.

Free!

Oh that's a bad omen for me!

I'll share the reminiscing bit with you...

College and High-School: unexpected free time in my timetable -> i'd fall ill straight away, not matter how exciting the improvised shopping session with a few classmates would sound.

University: day of freedom because of a strike -> headache.

Holidays: conjunctivitis

Free from any sort of moral or physical obligation: i fall ill, ill, ill!

And last week-end, guess what?

Fernando said 'free', i decided it could apply to the whole week-end and thought i'd be writing my post on Sunday, sipping a tea somewhere after having visited an exhibition or a museum, walking peacefully hands in my pockets as any free woman would have.

Sunday morning, 9.3o, i wake up, as any free woman, but -> Sore throat, running nose, weak from head-ache to toe-ache and just one single desire: watch each and every Harry Potter movie with chocolate and sweets and maybe a pencil and a sketchbook.

And basically, that's all i did as it was impossible for me to keep my eyes on a too bright screen for too long -lucky that the Harry Potter movies are quite dark and the matt paper of my sketchbook does not reflect ligth, or i'd have had to bury my head in my pillow and wait for Death to come and take me with Her.
I've been able to draw a few more pages for my other blog, empty mug upon mug of hot tea, but that was it.



Ever since Sunday, it has been a daily struggle to pull myself to write something here when i perfectly know i have nothing to say (unless you'd find some interest in knowing that i'm wearing pink and fluffy Tinker Bell socks at home to keep my feet warm, which i highly doubt (and NO, you won't get any picture of them)).

Anyway, as thinking was not totally painful nor exhausting, i've then had some time to start thinking about a few places wich i'd never visited and/or would find interesting to see (again). I suggested last week to Fernando that we could each come up with a list of a few places and ask our co-blogger to pick for us the one we would have to go to.

Here is my list:

Musée des Arts Décoratifs
(new collections and exhibitions i haven't seen yet)

Musée Gustave Moreau
(i feel highly ashamed to say that i've never been there in five whole years)

Mémorial de la Shoah
(i haven't visited the bookshop yet and would be extremely interested to)

Palais de la Découverte
(can i hide behind my hankerchief as i mumble 'never been there' ?)

No matter where you'll send me my dear Friend, i'll make sure i have dinner in a nice and quiet place afterwards so that i can write a long and detailed summary of what i've seen.



And while you choose, i'll have a spoon full of sugar (it helps the medicine go down, they say...)

Music: the other bridge

New York, Saturday, September 25, 2010.

It's laissez-faire Saturday, which means we, Sophie and I, can do whatever we want. We're on our own. But doing whatever we want still means we are going to do something. And this is good. Like doing a post or maybe two: one today, because Fernando, who is me, feels like it, and another one perhaps another day.

It was good that we decided it this way because today I feel like garbage or maybe it is not good because when we feel bad we get better if we have to do something in spite of our crappy feelings.

Headache, backache; the question I ask to myself: is the head where it's supposed to be? I don't know.

Temperature changes up/down/up in the recent days plus some poor/bad habits that can't be discarded could have been the triggers behind feeling like trash. It's in days like this that you need to be well armed against all those thoughts and questions that come to your mind about the purpose of life.

Immediately the dichotomy between body and mind comes to your mind and you can't help but feeling hostage inside your own body.

It's true, in moments like this you realize you can't escape from those ties. Your wellbeing, all, depend on how well you feel about yourself and things get a little contradictory here because a Doctor told Daniel (my dear brother), when things are fine with us we are not suppose to feel our bodies: we're not supposed to feel anything.

In fact, by the moment you feel something, some things in you are not good. Good Gracious!

A big part of being prepared or well armed for when you feel trashy is knowing what to do under the circumstances: like getting yourself a break, buying some stuff that should alleviate your physical pains and for the other pains -soul/existential-, music could be the perfect balm who'd alleviate all ills.... And here I should tell you a secret. Shh! Music, but not any music,  the good one, is the sole responsible for the connection, the bridge that today exists between Sophie and Me.

And for that I'm very grateful...

And the best way for me to show the gratitude to her and to the music is sharing both in the bridge but not like we usually do in Facebook. Today with no surprise I (gods willing) will be helped by planes and mailmen from two countries who'd carry the big task to bring pleasure to the ears of my nice co-blogger on the other side of the Atlantic.

However, not to be a bad guy I won't leave my dear Sophie nor our readers totally in the dark. Let me show you a little bit of  what she's supposed to receive..., here Hilary Hahn and below the introduction to Alondra de la Parra and her Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas (sorry for the quality of the video) ... I like to please too, so, enjoy!