Juliette Gréco R.I.P.

 

Juliette Gréco, an icon from the beginning to the end. St Germain des Prés beauty and a great song artist. A dramatic life with intense romances (Miles Davis) and a close friend and perhaps even muse to Boris Vian. I love her. -Tosh Berman.

"Diary of A Foreigner in Paris" by Curzio Malaparte (NYRB)

This journal/diary is worth the reading for the purpose of Curzio Malaparte's habit of howling with the dogs in the middle of the night.  Malaparte had the talent to be in the right place with the correct people.  For one, he's a remarkable prose stylist.  And two, his observations of people around him are descriptive like a fine meal.  His comment on Camus is of great interest.  Camus had a dislike for Malaparte, what I suspect is due that he was once (or still?) a Fascist. Malaparte is sort of a Tom Ripley character who switches sides like one changes their overcoat.  His very nature and position in culture are one of a big question, but also such a fascinating character. 

September 7, 2018

Jet-lag.  In Paris. I’m happy.   The flight on Air France was nice but very long.  10 hours in a small seat.  Due to Lun*na’s need to sit on the aisle, I have to sit in the middle.  When eating, I’m always concerned about keeping my arms away from my neighbors - whoever has the window seat, and of course Lun*na.  Also, the fact that I’m left-handed makes the eating in that particular seat even more difficult for me.  I wanted to read more, but my politeness won’t allow me the pleasure because I feel putting a light on; also it’s facing my direction is too bright for the person next to me who is trying to sleep.  Which brings up another issue is that I can never fall asleep on a plane. It’s impossible.  So basically I’m in this weird meditative state, and I’m just trying to focus on ‘nothing.’

The trip went smoothly.  I met Anna who works with Frank in the gallery (Galerie Frank Elbaz, 66 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris), and she took care of the little details for us.  The place we’re staying at is in an ancient building, and on the 5th floor.  There is an elevator, but it’s small.  Lun*na and I can barely fit together, and she’s tiny.   As the elevator goes up, one can see the staircase, which is creepy looking, and the building itself doesn’t seem that great in shape.  The place itself is small, with a bedroom, a living room with a kitchen attached to that room, and a tiny bathroom with a shower.  

As you can gather Lun*na is already sound asleep at 3:17, and I sort of doubt she will wake up in a couple of hours. Meanwhile, I will go back to the gallery to see Sophie, oh and I did walk with Anna back to the gallery.  The Wallace show looks excellent.  Frank walked me back to our place, and here I’m working on my journal. 

It’s interesting to note that the apartment has books both French and in English.  What’s particular is that they every novel by Bret Easton Ellis.  Not sure if its the taste of the owner, or some renter left it here for guests.  There is also a large volume of Genet’s works as well.  You can tell the owner’s personality by his or her book collection.   Which I may want to secure the lock before going to sleep tonight!

Around the corner from us is the Paris Circus.  They have a building where they do nightly shows, and on top of that, there is a Clown Bar, which is where the clowns hang out.  I need to go there as soon as possible.   I have to imagine that the clowns go there as soon as their performance is over.  They probably keep some of their make-up on or at the very least their red ball noises.  

Later that afternoon, where I desperately tried to stay awake, we went back to the gallery to meet up with the wonderful gallery crew, as well as Sophie who curated the Wallace show.   With Sophie and gang, we went over the pieces and prepared for tomorrow night's talk and issues regarding the exhibition.  As we walked back, we both discovered that we wanted dinner.  

A few years ago I had lunch with Frank at an Italian restaurant Fulvio, (4, rue de Poitou, 75003 Paris) which was excellent. I found the place by hunger instinct, and it's not far where we are staying.  When we came in around 7PM they were still setting up for the evening.  They officially open at 7:30, but they weren't too fussy about us getting their early.  Most Parisians have dinner around 8:30 and up, so being an early diner is a good excuse to get a table almost anywhere.  As a starter, we had artichoke salad which was unusual for us.  The artichoke itself was the heart and not the leaves, and it had a firm texture.  The dressing was simple and served with loose lettuce leaves that soaked up the sauce as well as adding an exciting context with the firm artichoke.  I ordered Salmon penne, with vodka sauce, something I had many times, but what was unusual for me, is that the salmon was prepared and cooked differently in the plate.  It's a combination of creamy and robust, and it was delicious.  Also, the portions are enormous.   I think two people with a reasonable hunger can share both the starter and main dish easily. 

As we ate a Japanese couple sat next to us, and we started to have a chat, which is something I never do in a restaurant at home or anywhere else.  He's an artist who is having his first show in Paris, and he often paints his wife (his partner-in-crime, and his date for dinner), and he showed some of his work on his phone.  His name is Madsaki.  What he told us is that his current paintings in the exhibition were all aerosol paint on canvas as well as acrylic. For this show, his work is based on classic French iconic images or figures.  Jacques Tati, Godard imagery, Cléo from 5 to 7,"  Delacroix, and so forth.  For me, he and his work hit my cultural interest in one setting.  A Japanese contemporary artist, whose current paintings, is focusing on French pop culture and art.  The paintings were intriguing, and I'm for sure going to check out his show at Perrotin Gallery (76 rue de Turenne 75003 Paris).  The show is up until September 22. 

As we got back from dinner, we went shopping for soap, shampoo, and of course wine.  The first thing I did when I came into this apartment was to make sure that the premise has a proper wine opener.   I also forgot that most hotels and apartment buildings are utterly dark after the sun goes down.  To save electricity one has to turn the lights on as they wander through the hallways.  The tricky thing is to find the light switch in the hall in complete darknes

"The Other Paris" by Luc Sante (FSG)

ISBN: 978-0-374-29932-3 FSG

The Other Paris" by Luc Sante (FSG)

Of all the cities in the world, Paris has a mythical hold on me. I don't know why? Los Angeles and Tokyo are my two other favorite cities, but somehow Paris has captured my imagination, and this book by Luc Sante, pretty much describes my imaginary Paris as a factual place. I have been there at least six times in my life, and yet, it never disappoints, just gives me a thrill whenever I'm confined in Paris. Sante's "The Other Paris" pretty much describes my fascination, as there is only my imagination that is the French city, and then there is "real" Paris.

Sante uncovers a Paris that is exposed in certain works of literature, such as "Fantomas" and the film works by Louis Feuillade. This is Paris history as if it was written by The Situationists International and the Surrealists. Crime, vice, a little bit of decadence here and there - it is what I imagine being in Paris, and therefore, clearly is. 

The book often reads and looks like a school textbook, and one wonder if "The Other Paris" will serve that role in a classroom. It should be. As well as being, without a doubt, one of the great books in English on the great city of my imagination and therefore known as Paris. I also realize by reading this book that Paris always had a great deal of street violence with respect to murders and bombs. What happened a few months ago in the city of light, is common, when compared to the Paris of the 19th century.

Beautifully illustrated throughout the book with images collected by Sante, so unlike other "history" or "travel" books, this seems to be a very personal work.  And that I think is one of the key aspects of this work, is making a public space or city into a personal landscape.    Luc Sante did this and he did it remarkably well.   A classic book.  

- Tosh Berman

"The Factory of Facts" by Luc Sante (Memoir/Cultural History)

ISBN: 0-679-42410-5 Pantheon Books

The Factory Facts by Luc Sante

One of the most unique memoirs I've ever read, but then again, Luc Sante is one idiosyncratic and special writer.   "The Factory of Facts" deal with Sante's childhood in his native country Belgium as well as New Jersey, his adopted home with his family.  The beauty of the book is that Sante writes about culture as the foreground to his life.  Although our lives are quite different, we are almost the exact age.   Both of us were born in 1954, and I recognize his cultural posts throughout the book.  Whatever it's a candy company that doesn't exist anymore, or a TV show/Film - I understand the importance of items that surround one's life. 

More of a collection of essays than a running narrative, Luc Sante came from a hardcore working class world, where I believe he's the only one who went on to college.  A brilliant observer of things around him, he is also sensitive to the fact that he is one from two cultures - Belgium and the United States.  Both are complex and multi-cultural locations as well.  One chapter he discusses what it is like to live in America and think/talk in French.   A lot of people think of translation as something easy as a Google app, but the fact the thinking is different, which conveys the 'fact' that language is a big part of our make-up.  Signage in a department store can be something obscure and totally odd, because it doesn't really make sense in a French context.  

"The Factory of Facts" is cultural history more than a straight ahead memoir, but the surroundings can tell a great narrative, when it is placed behind an individual.  I have to imagine writers will find this book fascinating.  I, who know very little of Belgium and its culture (only TinTin I'm afraid) I learn a lot through the eyes and mind of Sante.  As a writer myself, I'm consistently reminded how important my surroundings and things are to me.  Especially as a writer, and this is a great book that is suitable for those who want to write and those who do the job. 

- Tosh Berman

FFS (Franz Ferdinand and Sparks) live in Paris (26.06.2015)

As anyone who knows me, I'm a hardcore Sparks' fan.  Recently they teamed up with Franz Ferdinand to make an album (it's excellent) and are now touring the world.  Here is a recent concert done in Paris, France. 

June 27, 2014

June 27, 2014

 I like American pop culture, but I much rather wait and get my American culture through the eyes of the French.  Being an American, I feel I’m too close to my subject matter, and with the French being obsessed with my culture, I can understand it much better.   Rock n’ roll never made sense to me, till I started to listen to French rock n’ roll, because I feel that they are more in-tuned to the culture than I'm.  I can only reflect who I am through someone else’s eyes.  I’m always shocked to see a photograph of myself, compared to my image in a mirror.  It is almost as if there are two separate people.  The thing is I am not sure the reflection on the mirror is truly me, or the image captured by a photographer is the true me.   The confusion is something I can’t separate from my physical existence and how other’s see me.  Oddly enough, I don’t own that many photographs of me.  Due to family fame, all my images are in hardcover books that cost around $60 a pop.  If one chooses to do so, they can go into a bookstore and purchase images of me, that I don’t own, yet I become part of someone else’s life.

The first French rock n’ roll record, in 1956, is by Magali Noël, who was also an actress who appeared in many films by Fellini.  Boris Vian wrote and performed the song with her called “Fais-moi mai, Johnny” (Hurt Me Johnny).  The song was prohibited from French radio due to the sadomasochistic lyrics. I really never understood the appeal of rock, till I heard this song.  Around the same time Noël released a 10” vinyl album called “Rock n’ Roll.” There has been a running joke in America that France can’t properly “rock, ” but alas, that is so untrue, because the French totally understand what the “rock” is.  Americans only know the rock by instinct, like animals hunting food, it can smell the sex oozing out of the vinyl grooves.  The French understood that the music came from American black culture, and therefore virtually have an academic approach to the music and its artists. It is understood that the French always pick up what’s great about America, through their knowledge of a culture’s music.  Would classic jazz survive without the support of the French aesthetic?   But again, like people owning my image, the French can’t really own Jazz, but they can adopt it, and re-formed it into another image of sorts.  Josephine Baker, the great entertainer, became a huge star in Paris, and transformed herself into an image of an American, but in actuality more French than American.

All my life I pretty much wanted to live in Paris, because I felt that being an American in France would give me more of a self-image, that I totally lack, as I sit here in Silver Lake.  Nevertheless, I’m deeply attracted to American iconic figures like Doc Pomus, who wrote songs with Mort Shuman, who ironically enough became a huge singing star in France, and introduced the songs of Jacques Brel to the English speaking world.  Also sadly, Shuman passed away the same year Pomus died.   It is like that they traveled in a circle together and ended up in the same place at the end of that circle.   Creative people embrace their territories, like cats pissing to map out their areas of interest.  One time I wanted to send my urine to the corner of St. Michel and Saint Germain, thinking that I could own or at the very least have a presence on that corner.  But that is very much an illusion, and like a cloud I sort of float over these areas of interest, but I’m just a tourist here as well.

June 7, 2014

June 7, 2014

It is no secret among my friends that I look up to le Roi-Soleil as my man-of-choice in all manners that’s good in life.  From an early age, I had an obsession with the Sun King, better known as Louis XIV.  At the time, I lived in a single apartment on Martel in West Hollywood, that was basically a room with a small kitchen, and even a smaller bathroom. Still, it was my first home away from the family, and I treasured my little spot as if it was my Palace of Versailles.  Therefore I decorated the one-room apartment with images of Louis XIV, and even chose furniture that was not a good imitation of furniture from that period.  The fact that it looked fake, made the surroundings more endearing to me. 

At the time, I was employed in my first job, which was Licorice Pizza, a record store chain in Southern California.  I would take a bus to Reseda boulevard, and then another to Sherman Way.  At the time, I thought of the bus as my royal transportation.  It was a bus with a lot of stinky people, but to me, it was my palace as well.  I made sure I sat in the very back, and in the middle of the aisle.  I wanted the sense that everyone who enters the bus, must come to me.  Of course all of this was an illusion, and part of the time, I knew that.  But most of the time, I just forgot that fact and went on with the fantasy.  The music I played at the store was usually baroque music of all sorts.  My favorite records were recordings by Jacques Champion de Chambonnières, Jean-Baptiste Lully, and François Couperin.  The latter was my favorite of them all, and was awarded the credit of being “organist du Roi, ” organist by appointment to Louis XIV.  In the era of the Jam and the Sex Pistols, it was very hard at the time to find recordings of Couperin’s music.  Nevertheless, I insisted on making a special section of his music in our bins at the time.  As far as I can remember we didn’t even have any classical music in stock.  And what made it even more sad, was that at the time I could only find one release that was in print at this time.  “L’Espagnole, IV. La Piemontoise 1727” released on the Telefunken record label out of Germany.   My educated guess is that we were the only store in the San Fernando Valley that carried this recording, and only one copy at that.

Here, I need to be honest with you, I wasn’t that popular with people around me.  I kept my world as a very private one, and rarely did I share it with others, or allowed anyone to get close to me.  I prefer the artifice of a representation of a life than a real relationship.  It reached a peak in my life that I would make love to girls, but only in front of a full-length mirror that was in my apartment.  In a sense, I wanted to be in my own movie of my own making.  But alas, I have changed since then, and now I have not one single full-length mirror in my “now” humble home. 

June 5, 2014

June 5, 2014

There are numerous happy moments in my life, but the biggest moment is when I purchased the Jacques Demy DVD box-set in Paris.  There are countless symbolic images one can get to remind one self that they were located in Paris, for instance a little plastic Effel Tower key chain, but that would have been useless due to the fact I loathe keys of all sorts.  Alas, the Demy box-set for me, is Paris in a nutshell.  The fact that it has the ultimate Los Angeles film, “The Model Shop, ” in this set, is just an additional plus, because even though Los Angeles is technically an American city, I think it’s the most French of all American cities.  In fact, I’m sort of shocked that Southern California did not become the property of France. It would go well with Nice and the whole lie Midi vibe that is out there already.

Obviously, Demy doesn’t represent a ‘real’ Paris, but the Paris that is in my head, and that is the only Paris I’m interested in.   I often look at the album cover of Michel Legrand’s “I love Paris” and just marvel at the chubby middle-aged man carrying a huge squash over his shoulder, while smoking a tiny cigarette, which I presume is in the Les Halles Market district.   That, as a market doesn’t exist anymore, but, the image lives on.  I often dream with a Legrand musical score in the background.  Last night I had the oddest dream where I’m in a Goya painting, or that is my impression at the very least.  I was running down a slight incline into a room that was brilliantly white.  There were people there, but they were covered in sheets, and I had a whip as I ran into the room and started whipping in a frenzy everything around me.  The one thing I noticed was that there was no blood, because you think I would have caused an open wound where the blood would soak through the white sheet.   Throughout this attack, I could clearly hear a Legrand recording on a turntable that was positioned in the room.

I woke up breathing heavily after the attack in the dream.  I wasn’t that puzzled about my rampage, but more curious about the Legrand soundtrack - was it even music by him?  Yet, it was obviously a piece of music by Legrand.  I got out of bed, in pitch darkness and ran to my record collection.  I took out all the Legrand recording I have, and played each one to hopefully recognize the piece that was in the dream.  It was at this point I realized that it was music from Jacques Demy’s “The Donkey Skin.”  To be specific the title of the song is “Advice of the Lilac Fairy,” which is a beauty by Legrand and Demy (who wrote the lyrics), and an odd choice for my dream sequence where I whip people hiding behind white sheets.

One of the key attractions for me with respect to Demy’s work, is that he has characters that run through all of his films that reappears in each film.   So watching all of Demy’s films, one is stuck in a world made up by the filmmaker, and the only reference, for instance his seaport town of Nantes, as if it was a Hollywood musical from the 1950s is very much a self-contained environment, which I find pleasing.  To take a landscape and make it your own, whatever it is Paris or Silverlake is something that I admire greatly.  It is a world where even external oxygen is not allowed in, I can only smell the scents, the sights, the touch that is very much the aesthetic of Jacques Demy.   The truth is I loathe a world that is not Demy.  My dream last night is in a sense a battle between what I thought was threatening (people under sheets) agains the beauty of Legrand, and therefore Jacques Demy.

Victoire Scott - Une Fleur Dans Le Coeur

Reading the book "Yé-Yé Girls of 60's French Pop Music" by Jean-Emmanuel Deluxe and he comes up with some obscure artists from the era of the Yé-Yé.  Victorire Scott is even obscure in her country!  Yet, a very interesting record.

SUN OF A BEACH + Performance Lun*na Menoh Headshirt

A video/footage put together by French curator/artist Denis Brun on the exhibition he put together in his studio in Marseille called  "Sun Of A Beach."  The artists in the exhibition:


Kisito Assangni (Londres)
Laurette Atrux-Tallau (Bruxelles)
Vassili Balatsos (Athènes)
Loïc Beillet le Béhérec (Marseille)
Nathalie Bujold (Montréal)
Victor Cartagena (San Francisco)
Marc Chevalier (Nice)
Daniel Clapp (Miami)
Ghislaine Dantan (Athènes)
Charles Gouvernet (Marseille)
Caroline Hanny (Marseille)
Jay Reto (Los Angeles)
Julien Levy (Marseille)
Patrick Lombe (Marseille)
Rolly Love Hate Love (Yogyakarta)
Lun*na Mennoh (Los Angeles)
Mourad Messoubeur (Marseille)
Ingrid Mourreau-Kelleman (New-York)
Thomas Negrevergne (Monaco)
Stephen Paul (New-York / Fréjus)
Didier Petit (Marseille)
Philippe Turc (Marseille)
Agnes Roux (Monaco)
Thierry Rouyer (Fréjus)
Sylvain Sorgato (Paris)
Gauthier Tassart (Paris)
Fred Vaësen (Paris)
Thomas Zoritchak (Paris)

The last three or four minutes of the video is a performance with Lun*na Menoh's mask.

"Sun Of A Beach" Group Show featuring Lun*na Menoh

Visit Lun*na Menoh's "Shirt Mask" at this exhibition Sun Of A Beach  curated by Denis Brun.  Who knows, they may allow you to wear Lun*na's shirt mask.

Lun*na Menoh's "Shirt Mask"

I wrote a blog or small essay on Lun*na Menoh's new artwork "The Shirt Mask."  It will be exhibited in Marseille, France and curated by the artist Denis Brun.

Read it here:  http://blog.lunnaworld.com/2013/09/lunna-menohs-shirt-mask/