The End of Everything Part 3:

Hippopotamus

November 24 (Lundi)

7am. It’s raining. There’s thunder.
We’ve been lucky. Everyday has been sunny but today it’s raining.
7.45. The Duomo’s bells are ringing, a cascading, tumbling, joyful sound..
It’s raining more heavily. The weather is closing in. The mountains beyond the airport faint now. Approaching Zurich we fly through a cloud of steam coming from what looks like a nuclear reactor. It’s raining in Paris. People dressed for the cold are darting like a sky full of swallows in out of the traffic of Gare Du Nord. I’m too buggered to take out a camera. We’re hungry. We eat at Hippopotamus.

Simone’s Apartment

Mardi, November 25

Galerie Laurent Strouk – 8 bis, rue Jacques Callot
Exhibition: William Klein Contacts

William Klein’s retreatment of his funky, carnival-esque, genre defining, 1950s street shots, and later work is surprising. He’s made contact prints of some of his most well known pictures and then painted aggressively with bold, thick colour, around and over the images. Why? The young gallery assistant asks if we know his work. He is very important. She tells us that William Klein lives in Paris near the Jardin de Luxembourg. Klein must be 80 I guess. I give the young gallery assistant my website address. I wonder if she will look?

Gallerie Aittoures2 – rue des Beaux Arts

For sale are vintage prints by Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau. There are also photos of the Beatles, Rodin, Cezanne and Marilyn Monroe as a young, unrecognisable brunette.

Galerie Camera Obscura – 268 Boulevarde Raspail
Exhibition: Sarah Moon 12345

Sarah Moon’s smudged, New York Photo Secession styled vamps and prints are evocative but lack the emotional darkness and melancholy of Stieglitz’s fin de siecle Camera Work. Moon pictures an elephant in a frame of deep black. The photograph is very moving. It does look like a 19^th century photo. The elephant is lost in Galerie Camera Obscura.

Foundation H-C-B (Henri Cartier-Bresson) – 2 Impasse Lebois
Exhibition: Henri Cartier-Bresson Walker Evans Photographier L’Amerique 1929 – 1947

Walking to the H-C-B Foundation, we follow the wall of Cimetiere du Montparnasse. When Jean Paul Sartre died; Simone De Beauvoir leased an apartment opposite the cemetery, so as to be near him. There’s the plaque. She lived there. Simone and Jean Paul’s grave is just behind the wall.

Walker Evans’ style is gothic, flat and front on. His photographs of America’s joyless 1930s, pictured places and people, not dissimilar to the Western Australia where I grew up in the 1950s. Some of Walker’s best pictures are in this exhibition. A young Walker Evans travels to Paris to become a writer. Writing doesn’t work out so he stays with photography. If it had not been for the challenge of the work of Walker Evans I don’t think I would have remained a photographer. Wrote Cartier-Bresson. H.C.B.’s American photos are like Walker Evans’ pictures.

 Mercredi, November 26

Galeries nationale du Grand Palais
Exhibition: Emil Nolde 1867 – 1956

With cubes of colour and brushes and boxes of pencils, students make studies of Emil Nolde. I’m aware of Nolde’s work and the importance of the period, but I don’t know his art that well. Nolde’s mid 1890s paintings of fantastic mountain giants would be apt illustrations for the imaginative worlds of children’s books. His early paintings are in the styles of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Lautrec. The beautiful Couple sur la plage (1903), is reminiscent of Seurat. Then from the 1912, Enfant et grand oiseau, the work is the expressionist style for which Nolde is known. The 9 panelled, over 5 metres wide, La Vie du Christ, occupies one room. Nolde used green underpainting for human skin just as the Medieval and early Renaissance painters. A movie is screened in the museum. Joseph Goebbels enters the 1937, Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich. The exhibition purposed to ridicule Modernism. Nolde was forbidden to paint by the Nazis. Friend, Paul Klee said, Nolde was a daemon. The creature floating in the sky of Nolde’s Avant le lever du soleil (Before the sunrise), really is a daemon.

We spend the afternoon amongst Monet’s water lilies and haystacks at Musee Marmottan Monet. Monet’s palette;

silverwhite
cobalt light purple
emerald green
extra fine outremer
rarely vermillion
lots of yellow de cadmium ( light, dark, citron)
outremer jaune citron

Joelle buys a book on Impressionist Berthe Morisot. We enjoy the last of the daylight on Rue Rivoli.

Jeudi, November 27

At Gare de L’Est, waiting for the Nancy train, sitting next to a Holocaust deportation memorial.
11am. breathing out fog.
It’s going to be freezing in the east. It was minus 6 degrees last night.
Feet and fingers are numb.
A café proprietor pours a glass of boiling water over his tiles. Steam rises. He mops briskly.
The temperature is dropping.
Faure’s Requiem takes us into the mists of the East.

The sun, low on the horizon, breaks through and cuts like a laser from one side of the carriage to the other. Sitting opposite, a devoted Joseph, sporting a shaved head, gold earring and three piece light grey business suit, cradles baby Jesus in his arms as if the baby is made of wafer thin porcelain. Mary sleeps. We arrive, Nancy is full of sunshine. A taxi with two chatty drivers, delivers us to Lay St Christophe and Jacqueline’s. Joelle was back last year with Nanou to visit her Mother. I haven’t seen Jacqueline for 3 years.

Vendredi, November 28

 Lay St. Christophe’s winter sun rises behind the southeast corner of the patio window and sets behind the southwest corner of the patio window, never rising high in the sky. When I first arrived in London from Western Australia, the early April, English sun never rose high in the sky. I felt uneasy about that low sun.

Samedi, November 29

Jacqueline has lost a pearl earring. It was Raymonde’s, Guy’s mother.

Caravaggio’s The Annunciation, is in gallery 8, of Nancy’s Musee des Beaux – Arts. Mary’s head is bowed, an angel, face hidden in the dark canvas, points tentatively towards her. The angel wrapped sensually in cloth from the best of shops is Baroque, silent Mary in profile is Gothic. Medieval faith had Mary impregnated by a beam of light. Her solitude fills the room.

Guy was good with a camera

Day 14 November 30 (Dimanche)

At breakfast the pearl earring is found in the sugar bowl.

Benoit and family are arriving soon. We are having Sunday lunch together.

I’m typing this in Guy’s office. Guy was a historian and Jacqueline has slowly been disposing of his books. Now most are gone, with the shelves that aren’t empty, occasioned with left over monographs, nick-knacks and sundry other things. I notice a photo on top of a pile. It’s quirky, the camera has made the young woman pictured an amputee. She has only one arm. Guy was good with a camera. The Cabourdin family album photos, are like editorial pictures from Paris Match. This photo doesn’t have his sense of style, but it intrigues? Joelle had made the photograph of a school friend. I notice an old photomaton picture of Jacqueline. I will ask Benoit to make a scan. What a beautiful portrait of Joelle’s mother!

Benoit, Catherine, Mathieu and Melanie arrive. Lunch is at L’Auberge de Courcelles.

December 1 (Lundi)

I type

December 2 (Mardi)

I type

December 3 (Mercredi)

Catherine arrives to drive us to Nancy railway station. Jacqueline waves goodbye from the kitchen window.

10.28 The train leaves.
10.48 Blobs of snow are scattered like rocks in a field.
The TGV is picking up speed.
I would rather be sitting so that we can see where we are going rather than where we have been.
The TGV is now hurtling along. I’m feeling sick.
Crows in the sky.
Haystacks.
Fields and village rooftops flaked lightly with snow.
All flash past.
I listen to Neil Young’s, Tonight’s the Night.

I’m climbin’ this ladder
My head in the clouds
I hope that it matters
I’m havin’ my doubts
I’m singin’ this borrowed tune
I took from The Rolling Stones
Alone in this empty room
Too wasted to write my own

 I first heard Tonight’s the Night, on a small cassette player that sat on a bedside table in Joelle’s room in Richmond. I don’t recall hearing Borrowed Tune. It’s such a good song, just a harmonica, piano, and that voice.

A black angel rests in a field. His wings are heavy.
A grove of bare trees is skeletal, like veins in a dried leaf.
All green is a field of Christmas trees.
There’s a young deer.
11.47 graffiti – industry – suburbs – Paris – it’s exactly 12.
We lunch at Foodissimo
4.13 Eurostar is leaving.
5.40 We enter the Channel Tunnel.
6.11 We are in England.
6.48 Paris time, Eurostar comes to a halt. I turn off the iPod and The Stones’ Little Red Rooster. We are in London.