R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 114

Paris - Spain: Summer of 2019: Against Chronos: St. Denis

Paris: The Orangerie

The Musée de l'Orangerie is an art gallery of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings located in the west corner of the Tuileries Gardens next to the Place de la Concorde in Paris. The museum is most famous as the permanent home of eight large  Water Lilies  murals by Claude Monet, and also contains works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Rousseau, Alfred Sisley, Chaim Soutine, Maurice Utrillo, and others.

[Wikipedia]

PARIS - SPAIN: SUMMER 2019: AGAINST CHRONOS: THE ORANGERIE

They were much more liberal with pic-taking in Paris. Flash off, of course. We'd been to most of the "biggies" in Paris, but never the Orangerie. We passed our favorite Jefferson in Paris statue, tripped up the dusty path in the Tuileries, escaped Gollum with his ring, felt compassion for the owner of the pink phone leaning on its PopSocket, entered the oval fish bowls (Infinitiy has two rooms) and swam with the lilies along with everyone else. Wonderful!

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EL GRECO IN TOLEDO: The Burial of Count Orgaz

Paid 3 euros to take a peek. No pics in Spain (unless you sneak). Wish I had it to myself, but that's the modern world. ME x 30 or more. Still it was something I'll never forget. Not to mention the whole old town done up for Corpus Christi. Fantastic!



[From Wikipedia]

PARIS - SPAIN: SUMMER 2019: AGAINST CHRONOS: TOLEDO

Paris - Spain: Summer of 2019: Against Chronos: The Reina Sofia

Downtown LA: Joe's Parking Garage, PHILZ, IHOP, ...

Parked at Joe's because of the flat rate: $6. Old time garage where you keep your lights on and honk every few seconds, so you don't run into anyone coming from the opposite direction. Felt like the least little shaker would've put my car under a ton of bricks. The whole area was a wonderful admix of old and new. Lots of youngsters/hipsters/what-have-sters with a sprinkling of homeless. I had coffee at Philz (smaller and funkier than my Philz), walked around for an hour, stumbled on a hidden park amid the jungle of highrises and concrete, met a couple of friends at IHOP for a "real" breakfast.

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Rereading Virginia's "Dalloway"

ee um fah um so

foo swee too eem oo 

Rereading Christa Wolf: City of Angels: More Clips

City of Angels, I thought, amused. I got my fire-engine-red Geo out of the garage—a test of courage and skill every time, though I tried to make sure that no one could tell by looking—and drove to Twenty-sixth Street again. Brecht’s cube-shaped house, where he had had long discussions with Adorno and Eisler and Laughton and reflected on the insoluble ethical problems of the Galileo play, was now occupied by a man I sometimes saw on his front lawn and who definitely did not know who had lived there before him. How many times would Brecht have left this house to drive downtown? Or to visit the Feuchtwangers at Villa Aurora, high above the Pacific cliffs at Paseo Miramar, which my Geo brought me to as well? Where once, years before, on an unforgettable afternoon, Marta Feuchtwanger had shown you and G. her husband’s library and where there were now contractors in clouds of stone dust busy in the emptied rooms. Where Brecht could discuss political and literary problems, and agree about them, with the “little master” who, with iron discipline, dedicated all his days to his work. While Brecht avoided the other master, Thomas Mann, as much as possible. Had it ever happened in modern Europe that a country’s intellectual elite, almost without exception, had had to flee? Weimar Under the Palms. Where did I hear that term? Oh, an old actor said to me on the green lawn behind the Schoenberg house on North Rockingham Avenue, where we were standing together, each holding a margarita glass, I’m Norman, and he introduced me to his wife, Peggy, who looked straight out of a Chekhov play: white hair pinned up in a hairdo from the turn of the century; long, old-fashioned strings of pearls around her neck; heavily made up with deep purple lipstick; her blouse and dress also typical of that era. Norman, with blue, amphibian eyes and white hair with a precise part, and a rather small face, still unlined, was dressed in a correct suit and tie, even in the heat of this winter day. He didn’t look like an actor, but that changed the moment he started to talk. His voice still carried and he delivered his stories accompanied by well-chosen gestures. He had something he needed to tell me: He had worked with Brecht. He was one of the managers of the theater in Beverly Hills where the second version of Galileo was premiered. He knew stories about the rehearsals with Laughton, not entirely suitable for polite company, that he enthusiastically told me anyway: How Laughton, as Galileo at the dress rehearsal, his hands in the deep pockets of his roomy robe, “was playing with his genitals.” How Brecht then instructed him, Norman, over the phone to make Laughton stop, which he, Norman, refused to do, even when Helene Weigel joined Brecht in making the request. The next day, though, before the performance, a furious Laughton was seen chasing the costume director, who insisted that it wasn’t his fault: The pockets had been removed from Galileo’s robe. And, Norman asked, do you know who was responsible for the costumes? Helene Weigel!

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Hanns Eisler, for example, Norman’s neighbor on the Malibu coast, once had a circulatory collapse and Lou Eisler, worried, called them to come over. Eisler was lying on the ground, Norman said, and I asked him, Hey, what’s wrong? How do you feel? Eisler told me: I feel like a thousand frogs are having sex on my tongue! That man’s life is not in danger, we thought.

 

 

Rereading Christa Wolf: City of Angels: Brecht's Poem

I paged through books in search of relief. I found Brecht’s lines about the city I was living in myself:

Reflecting, so I hear, on hell 

My brother Shelley found it to be a place 

Much like the city of London. I 

Who live not in London but in Los Angeles 

Find, reflecting on hell, that it must be 

Even more like Los Angeles.