The Louvre may be my Tiffany’s, but the Pompidou is my coffee. Whenever I need a slight jolt, a little kick in the pants, I run off to the Pompidou and wander. The beauty of living in a city where there is just so much art is that you can treat it like your own private collection, picking what to see and not being bothered with everything. So, privileged with the Pantagruel of hangovers, I dressed up chic and went to the Pompidou.

Usually, I hunt out the Matisses, the Rothkos, and then just whatevers, but today I was floored. Floored with seconds of entering the gallery. There was simply this stunning painting and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. It was Untitled XX by Willem de Kooning. De Kooning is maligned in art history for his brutal and some say misogynistic depictions of women. I really don’t care. This painting is raw, powerful, the type of image that halts you with its magnificence, its boldness, it sheer play on colour, composition, all pointing to a rare rare gift in pure image making. This has nothing to do with irony, or wit, or borrowed power. This painting is its own source of power. This is why painting exists in the first place. Because it is something unbreakable into words. It is an essential knowing.

Nina Berman’s series on Gulf War veterans is not that aesthetically striking at first glance. The style is reminiscent of any number of editorial photographers. The exception, though, is this photo, a studio portrait of a young newlywed couple. His face was burned off and reconstructed from bits of plastic and skin, with holes for eyes and nose. I have to say this is probably one of the most striking photos I have seen in a long time, one that is both horrifying, oddly funny, and deeply sad. Not for the faint of heart.

The endless trailers and adverts finally end, the room temporarily brightens before sinking once again into darkness. A twinkling light tune, not unreminiscent of some synth-dominated European soundtrack from the 70s, plays as we see a man in an open jeep bumping down the road. The man is dressed in an army uniform and the light is at a constant angle on his face despite the clouds behind. He rides down this road for a good long moment, the camera holding on him from the waist up. Suddenly, an unusual combination of wind and bump combine to pull off his toupee. He turns around quickly and the jeep flips over.

This is the beginning of SteaK, a marvelous film by Quentin Dupieux, also known as Mr. Oizo. It stars two well-known french comics, Eric & Ramzy, and is set largely in the future. Well, 2016 to be precise. In this new world people drink milk like vodka, smoking and beards gets you beaten up, everyone has some kind of plastic surgery, and instead of saying hello, you say “bottine.” (mini-boot)

Those familiar with Eric & Ramzy’s work, looking for cheap gags which modern French cinema embarassingly reveals itself to be desperately prolific, will be surprised. Surprised, shocked, and horrified. In fact, I counted no less than five people who left the theatre and the critics on allocine.fr leave no doubt. The film is a horrorshow for the “bof”s from the banlieue, the usual fodder of Eric & Ramzy’s previous work. It’s satirical edge, it’s strange beauty and it’s terrifyingly empty message could only be incomprehensible and thus repulsive to them. It is in a way understandable. The mockery is aimed partially in their direction. (more…)

This is just a little taster of my forthcoming dissection of the French Presidential Election posters but has anyone  else noticed the uncanny ressemblance of Ségolène Royal’s main election poster to Barbara Kruger’s artwork? Methinks this is no coincidence.

Last night was bloody and sore and violent, like a battlefield before people invented spears and swords. And, in the haze, a sanguine haze coloured by too much alcohol and self-recrimination, something was hatched, an Athena full-born who demanded the splitting of my head. I’m getting carried away. The anger in me seems like my Janus flip side to the lightness that has occupied my self and soul when the shades are drawn.

This afternoon someone sent me a great poem by a poet who I was not at all aware of: Osip Mandel’stam. How delicious he is! Here is for joy’s sake, from my hands:

For joy’s sake, from my hands,
take some honey and some sun,
as Persephone’s bees told us.

Not to be freed, the unmoored boat.
Not to be heard, fur-booted shadows.
Not to be silenced, life’s dark terrors.

Now we only have kisses,
dry and bristling like bees,
that die when they leave the hive.

Rustling in clear glades of night,
in the dense forests of Taygetos,
time feeds them; honeysuckle; mint.

For joy’s sake take my strange gift,
this simple thread of dead, dried bees,
turned honey in the sun.

What a treat to have discovered all this dark turning treacly words that stamp their love with so much authority. And who was the sender? A tall Russian boy with a penchant for playing football badly that I met while on a photo shoot. He was reading Kleist and made fun of my Bill Bryson book, which naturally led to some interesting verbal parrying while waiting for the photographer to tell us how to pose. Models. I was surprised, really, to find out that I wasn’t the only model around with a serious literary bent. I guess, hell, it is Paris.

Finally, in other news, they are carrying the Superbowl on French National TV again this year. I had no idea that the Colts were up against the Bears. I had idea the Bears were back to being good. Anyone remember the Refridgerator? Anyone remember the Chicago Bears Superbowl Shuffle? 

I didn’t say that. Yves Klein did.

In the continuing series of my mind over matter essays, I present to you the fabulously neo-Dadaist Yves Klein. Right now having his own retrospective at the Pompidou, Klein is famous for his the International Klein Blue, for throwing ingots of gold into the river, and using naked women as paint brushes.

I’ve been a fan of Klein for years, he’s cited as one of my heroes on *horror* myspace, after first being baffled by this photograph early on. Saut dans le Vide is an image of the artist apparently in mid jump.

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I ran into special breed last night only native to contemporary art/entertainment circles: human beings who are incredibly adept at talking about themselves and their work without breaking for breath. It’s like a special kind of terrestrial apnea, the face gets redder and redder, the eyes eventually getting a delusional blaze. Oh, if I had known what I know now I never would have asked him what he does. But, in the running series of “facts that prove Mensa will revoke my status soon,” I’ve already been burned by this situation many times.

For example, once I got stuck with a girl, on the TGV, who spent a good portion of thirty minutes talking about all her future exhibitions. She was getting more and more excited about her greatness with each dying breath, while I started wishing for a cardboard cutout of myself, or Jar Jar Binks, to stick in my place. (more…)

Grand Magasin is a great performance art troupe helmed by François Hiffler and Pascale Murtin. They combine lyrical absurdist reflections on daily life mixed with dance and gestures and manipulations of objects. Last night, at the Menagerie de Verre, they presented their latest piece, Ma Vie. With just a table and two chairs, a small sound console, three yellow balls of varying size and slideshow, they choreographed random statements from their life to make a kind of visual poem about memory and racontage. The text was something like this:

In 1967 I lost my keys in the sand. In 1973 I closed the door. In 1997 I opened an oyster. In 2000 I looked at a magazine in a dentist’s office. In 2004 I was stuck in a small elevator…

Each took turns announcing these statements, sometimes working with the objects as props, sometimes contradicting each other or mimicking each other. The accumulation of daily facts, mundane observations, and the distortion and contradiciton of these facts and observations made a remarkable piece that spoke about the random daily process of memory and the constant process of editing and rewriting what we choose to remember. Life, when it’s written down as an accumulation of events that we don’t necessarily control, becomes a lyrical absurdist poem.

Then, after I went with my Texan buddy to the Hard Rock Cafe to do Thanksgiving, which we did by headbanging to Metallica and drooling over John Frusciante, though I have to say the HRC makes the WORST Margarita in modern history.