Greetings from Paris!

Greetings from Paris! We have left Venice and are now summering in the south of France. It’s my birthday and we are up in Paris for a few days.

This picture is from the printemps department store and shows just one of the many ghastly ensembles the powers-that-be think we should be wearing!

And yes, that IS really a romper suit with puffy shorts and a big red bow-perfect for every occasion I can think of...

So far I’ve done the usual:
Wander around the city, hopping on a bus when my feet get too sore.
Here are some pix for my rambles…

For the birthday dinner we dined at Sendrens, (www.sendrens.fr) formerly Luca Carton. It is in a beautiful old dining room with carved wood decorations by Majorel: swirling Art Nouveau leaves and light fixtures of nymphs with tangles of hair and come-hither smiles. The place is fairly simply furnished in modern light grey, to offset all of this opulence. One odd note: laser light drawings of flowers on Lucite that glow and change colors periodically. These are poised across from the room’s many mirrors, so they appear multiplied. Trippy and a bit too night-clubby for my taste.

What I ate:
Exquisite.
I started with squash blossoms stuffed with crab, accompanied by a foamy sauce a bit like cappuccino foam, but with butter added.
A had a kind of Asian broth with a large piece of steamed fois gras in the middle. This progressively melted into the soup.
Next:
Pigeon, very strong and gamy, with North African spices, cinnamon and pistachio. This had a version of pastilla with it, a puff pastry round stuffed with the liver and leg meat and spices, honey and nuts. The breast meat was crispy skinned and served on top. The sauce was fairly sweet, which worked beautifully with the iron-rich taste of the meat.
Totally scrumptious.
Last:
I had cheese, not dessert.
A goat cheese plate of small wedges with herbs, and slivers of confit lemon and rose ginger.
We had a beautiful old Terre Brun to drink with the meal. Gorgeous.

That day, in preparation for such a feast, I had climbed up the stairs of the Eiffel tower, as far as they’d let me go!
It was quite cloudy, with poor visibility, but wonderfully fresh and invigorating.
I would have preferred to climb the whole thing- as it was overcast, it was not too hot, and it felt very special to be able to see up inside the structure of the monument.
It was not a claustrophobic-making experience at all, unlike those tiny crammed elevators, jammed with loud tourists. I know about their loudness because they were all up on the second tier, taking snapshots and pushing through the gift shops. The souvenir shops for the Eiffel tower are a bit disappointing; not quite nice enough, or conversely, kitsch enough. I did eye a salt and pepper shaker set that featured the Arc de Triumph for salt and the Tour Eiffel for pepper that I thought had promise, but that was about it…
At the second tier, one could stand in a long and noisy line, pay extra and wait to ride the elevator up to the top. I decided not to ruin a good thing and skip it- no visibility anyway. I’ll wait ‘til a day when I can SEE!

I didn’t feel the results of this exercise immediately-in fact I was exhilarated and ready for more- but the next day my legs ached and groaned.

First thing that morning, though, I had quite a different adventure.

I went to the Grand Palais, (an amazing crystal palace-like steel and glass turn–of-the-century marvel) to see the huge new Anselm Keifer installation. This is part of a new exhibition series called MOMENTA, which invites some very well known artist each year to do a large project in the Palais. I love Keifer’s work, and the bombastic grandiosity of it was well placed in the space. The palais is so huge that anything less would be puny in comparison.
I got there a bit before they opened and was waiting in line to get in, fooling with the literature they gave me, when one of the interns came out and said that there were two free places left (why? Dunno)…
She asked a “quiz question”: who will be the next MOMENTA artist? (A: Richard Serra). The man in front of me answered correctly. As he was alone, and I was alone, he took me as his guest, we swept ahead of the line and were ushered in for free (not such a big deal: 4 euros), and first: VERY big deal.
The space was bathed in morning sunlight over Keifer’s mountainous cement ruins and corrugated steel pavilions. The place was silent. I roamed unobstructed for half of my visit, until the real crowds, school groups, etc. started pouring in, in earnest.
Here are some photos- I took lots, too many, but it was so moving and so photogenic it was hard to stop. Inside the steel pavilions were sculptures, paintings, objects and installation works. All related to memory and loss, most to poetry of some kind.
It has been a long time since I’ve attended an art exhibit so finely in tune with its surroundings, and so carefully nuanced. The art was good, typical Keifer, but the installation was astounding and added poignancy to the work as a whole in a way that left me melancholy and uplifted at the same time.
This was a jaw-dropping start to the day.

In the afternoon, I went to a hair salon, had my hair cut, and then had them style it into elaborate whorls and curls that I will never be able to replicate on my own. It looked smashing and was holding up pretty well as we headed out to dinner…
After leaving the restaurant we headed to a bar on the Seine where a friend of A’s was singing with a pianist. We had fruit-juice “cocktails” with twirly glittery swizzle sticks, and heard a very lovely version of “Let’s Get Lost” before toddling back off to the hotel.
Quite a good b-day, not to be soon forgotten.