The prized possession and the Chagall Museum

 

Of all the things we have so far obtained in our move to France, none is more awesome than our residents' museum pass. Good at 11 museums in the city, one need merely prove permanent residency in the city and, voila, a special photo pass, like ours, created for us on the spot at the Beaux Arts museum, is issued. It is good for three years! So naturally the first museum we went to after acquiring it, just a few days later, was one of the only ones that doesn't take part in that system. We went to the Chagall Museum.

It is handy to have ten or more museums to walk to, and the Chagall Museum is a cracker!

The Chagall was built in the early seventies to host a collection of biblical paintings Chagall donated to the city. Chagall lived nearby in St. Paul De Vence, but was fond of this city because, well, why wouldn't he be? He was still alive when the museum opened, and he attended the ceremonies.

Chagall was, to quote Nicholas Cage's character's assessment of him in Moonstruck, "A very great artist."

And you can see that in a second with these paintings.

These are big, intense, rich paintings he donated, full of color, complexity, mastery, and interest.

Our walk there was a delight too, along a street with a very excellent bakery on it that I bought a bit too much from on the way home during Christmas Eve. You cross under the train tracks and then climb into a more residential neighborhood ending with the kind of thing that always steals my heart, a dedicated walking path that makes its way to just around the corner from the museum.

Because it was Christmas Eve they were closing an hour early, and in the mysterious French way they had closed off about half the museum, possibly to make it easier to empty? We even had to wait a bit until there was capacity room for us. On the plus side they didn't charge anyone anything, including us! A savings of 16 Euros is nothing to sneeze at, but because I have come down with a cold I did anyway.

I love the little front yard garden cafe here too. We managed to slip in just before closing for coffees. We drank them peacefully as they played pop folk music from around the time the museum was built. We immediately started imagining coming here all the time.

I took some pictures. I put myself in them as a sort of "I go to the Chagall Museum and disappear into the paintings." I worked all day on them, decided they were a disaster, then decided they were pretty good after all.

Here I am in the museum:

And then here I am as I inappropriately made myself at home in the paintings:

Visiting the market

 

Yesterday, in a Christmas post, so to speak, I bemoaned our tendency to constantly bring home too much food from the market and from all the delightfully appealing little stores all around us in this city. But, fairly speaking, I did want to make sure I had plenty of food on hand as things closed down for Christmas. I sort of assumed everything would close down for Christmas in some big way, maybe because in the little town of Theoule Sur Mer, where we started out, places closed down for Christmas pretty much at the start of November, and are only slated to open sometime, allegedly, in January.

This, where we live now, however, is a big, modern city, and it only seems to be closing down maybe an hour or two early on Christmas Eve day, which the signs seem very apologetic about, and then for Christmas Day itself, which hardly seems some fantastic hardship. I've got too much food here anyway. Hopefully I'll have worked my way through it by the time you read this.

Another problem at the market is our tendency to launch into buying too early. I think we get excited by something we see and just start throwing stuff in baskets. But the Liberation Market has like 80 sellers. It might be worthwhile to walk around and get the lay of the land and formulate a plan. I've yet to learn to master fully the kind of greedy indulgence France brings out in me. "It'll all be here tomorrow." I need to tell myself.

 Eventually I'll believe that.

Yesterday's post naturally led to a few pictures of me hamming it for the camera (well, fake me, in a real place), but the truth is I spent hours on making pictures of me in the markets that I still wanted to show you, so thank god there's always a tomorrow here on clerkmanifesto too...

Shopping

 

Joyeaux Noel!

But we're not going to talk about that except to say: I love Christmas, but not Christmas. 

Hmm, I guess a tiny bit of talking is required.

I love Christmas Season, but Christmas itself is sort of the death of Christmas for me. It's not a day I do anything with, so it's kind of sad. It's just a big sad day where everything is closed and now it's no longer Christmas... it's Winter.

On the other hand, Winter is pretty nice here, 60 degrees F, a bit rainy, we'll see how it goes. Plus a lot of Christmas stuff seems to carry on a bit after the big day here. I don't know how I feel about that. But anyway, what with it being Christmas and all, and everything closed, I can talk instead today about...

Shopping. Food shopping.

We shop most days.

And I think that is not often enough. Because too frequently we seem to be lugging super heavy bags home through the streets of our Belle Epoque City. Can't we ever just get one thing, like a baguette? Or let's just add an eggplant? Or look, there's a nice bottle of prosecco? And don't we need toilet paper?

Maybe we can never shop enough to not be lugging home too much. Or maybe we're still stocking up a new place and a new way of life and we'll learn it all eventually. My life seasoned me to buy a weeks worth of potatoes on my weekly drive to the grocery store chore of a shopping trip. Learning to get a single potato because I am planning on eating a potato is a whole new skill! For instance, at the giant street market today I bought three potatoes. I didn't even need a potato! But they were super cheap and looked great. But they weigh a lot! And one potato really would have done for me, along with the extremely pretty spinach, the petite pois (shell peas), the pomegranite, the eggplant, the delicious little oranges from right around here, and a couple more lemons. Too much! And then off to the laterie (just a cheese shop I like) where in additon to a goat cheese, old gouda, and some roquefort, I simply had to get a liter of their lovely milk for my coffee.

What the hell?

I've got to figure this out. We had so much damned stuff we had to drop it off at home!

Before going out to the boulanger for more.

Me in the city just before Christmas

 

I have, as you have recently seen, been working on a new iteration of myself to put into pictures to reflect the recent, slightly more personal accounts of me in France. I made a fair struggle of aging myself properly and thinning my hair to the appropriate level, but the tool we call AI is very much a creature of the Internet, and as such, pulls from a flattering view of the world. That is, it does up until the sudden point that it becomes rather brutal and ugly. AI, like the Internet itself, doesn't exactly do "realism". It does worse than real, and prettier than real, and hopes you'll do the mixing to real in your own brain.

Good luck with that, world.

Ooops, drifted into a lecture there.

Anyway, here I am around town, looking just a bit better than I probably do, but hopefully close enough to be recognizable. The town is as I photographed for the most part, so the realism of it is wholly on me. 

Belle Epoque City

 

We live in The Belle Epoque City. 

The Belle Epoque City, my new city, is but a single city, and yet the very expression of an entire era!

Or so I've decided.

A dear friend of mine, Matthew, now dead for already an alarming amount of time (do people simply die and then stay dead forever? WTF), was my original introduction to the Belle Epoque. He was my first friend in art school, supremely talented, and posessed of a rich, florid aesthetic taste. And one of his main points of reference was the Belle Epoque. He had many other aesthetic points of reference, and I came to my own understanding of most of them, the Baroque, Rococo, Neo Classicism, as I studied and advanced my career into the world famous genius you see before you, but the Belle Epoque is the most important, and the last of them to click into place.

To be more specific, it clicked into place sometime yesterday, having taken just a smidge under 40 years to do so.

This is because The Belle Epoque is an invention and fabrication, named and made after its era was over, and perhaps with too much material to cover, it also suffered horribly from an immediate, glossy nostalgia. So even as it was named it was already lying about itself.

Which might cause one to think the whole "Belle Epoque" thing is useless.

But, strangely, no. 

Because despite all that, here it is, in my city, exactly the very definition of the thing. References to the Belle Epoque usually center on the bolder, grander city of Paris, but the Belle Epoque in Paris is a mere historical layer among dozens. It is swallowed up in Paris. Here it is the whole expression of the city, its heart and soul. It is in the old world cafes, the ornate and fanciful architecture, and in every of a million paintings by some of the best artists over 50 years all lionizing the place. It is in its famous buildings and dreams of beauty, the belle epoque! It is in the food and old candy shops, in the vibrant street life, in the grand old stores, and in the flood of tourism that, in strange contrast to other cities full of complaint about such things, curiously built this city. This isn't a city ruined or lessened by tourism. It is a city built by tourism!

Which is weird.

And, well, a bit Belle Epoque.

At this point you might want to know "What is The Belle Epoque then?"

Wikipedia doesn't know. I mean, their answer is basically: Late (very late) 1800's to WWI. A time of industrialization, stability, quality of life improvements for a new (not all that big) middle class, technological invention, and economic growth, but read between the lines a little and the answer is "We don't really know".

But I know! 

I know now. And I wish I could tell my friend Matthew. And I wish I could tell you. But I think you might have to come here. Cause you sort of have to see it to get it. And you'd probably get it right away.

But if not we could walk around and I could say "See all that building ornamentation." and "Let's have a coffee here at this cafe with a hundred fancy tables." and "Taste this pastry." and "That corner tower on that building" and "Note these colors, the pinks and oranges and brilliant umbers." and "See all these posters?" and "Check out all that marble" and  "Have a spritz, note the glassware." and before long you'd totally get it.

Or you'd feel nauseous and want to go home.