Misery is less painful under the sun

I went to Greece last year, for my quarterly southwards migration in search of warmer climates. It was a beautiful and bright journey. The light, the islands scattered here and there like pebbles along which we drifted – it was like a dream. I actually suspect Greece of not being- to me it is a collective delirium, a mirage for wandering souls.

Over there, life seems meant to be lived. Food is simple and good, vegetables are sun-kissed and the wine is light and fruity. People sit outdoors and enjoy the warmth of spring, but they do it with a nonchalance characteristic of the affluent, not like us, who cling to a single ray of light with avid and desperate claws. Life over there seems in tune with nature, regulated by rituals that have been approved and ratified by thousands of years of intuitive practice. Everything is as it should be, under the white light.

During my short stay there (fleeting memories of long gone days), I got terribly sick. But boy did I choose my spot with discernment: I opted for the lush and racy Naxos on the shores of which Theseus abandoned Ariadne. The moment I set foot in this heavenly harbour, I was struck down by fever.

Because the sun was beating down on my head, because I was determined to wear my nymph-like dress, because a confusingly cool breeze started to blow, because I am a vain little soul with a sickly constitution, because I’m worth it.

But I went down with dignity- instead of the common shores,
I decided to collapse in the charming suite of the equally charming Hotel Zevgoli,
concealed in the maze of the old city.

A room with a view and a balcony.

For three days, I was escorted to the terrace; fruits, flowers and books were brought to me.
Tarzan went hunting for our Greek yogurt and I endured my fate under the sun...

The very Austrian Empress of Convalescent Islands.

At the time, I was reading “Dinner with Persephone”, an entertaining (though annoyingly learned) travel book written by the American Patricia Storace, recollecting her stay in Greece ten years ago. She had visited Naxos as well and, like me, had suffered the same symptoms on leaving the island.
This hilarious excerpt exposes a key element of the Greek Soul (and of the whole Mediterranean Basin, if you ask me):

I am back on schedule, after a bout of flu – or of nothing, according to the Greek diagnosis. I had cancelled a dinner since I was sick, and the hostess asked me, “What are your symptoms?” Coughing, body ache, sore throat, clogged nasal passages, fever. “How many degrees?” she said. A hundred and one, I answered. “and what is normal on a Fahrenheit thermometer?” Ninety-eight-point-six, I said, feeling too feverish for all this medical inquiry. “Oh, then you don’t have fever,” she said. “Don’t I?” I said weakly. “No”, she said, “fever would be much higher, a hundred four, or a hundred five.” So I learned that in order to qualify as Greek fever, you must in fact be dying, your brain cells on the point of being comfortably medium rare. In fact, I’m not entirely sure there is such a thing as illness in Greece. Illness is what has killed someone. Life is suffering, illness is death.

* I have to give back to Racine what belongs to Racine:
“Ariadne, my sister! Wounded by what passion
Did you die on the shore, where you were abandoned?” (Phaedra, I, 3, v. 253-254)

The Millais Exhibition- A Wordly Event

‘O moses what a precious lot
Of beautiful red hair they’ve got!

How much their upper lips do pout!
How very much their chins stick out!

Du Maurier, Punch Magazine

I went there doe-eyed and batting my lashes. Tate Britain, 11h30 on a Thursday. I thought I was outsmarting the nation: I was avoiding the weekend, the crowd, the Tourists, the Brats, the Moaners, the Enraptured, the Enthusiasts, the Retired and the Inevitables who inevitably dwell on their grandmother’s antiques while gazing at old canvasses.

Well, dear reader, you’ll be happy to know my craftiness was rewarded.

They were ALL there.

Later on, I read in a very respectable publication that liking the Preraphaelites is quintessentially un-cool. It would’ve been nice to be informed beforehand.
BEFORE I was caught between socked-sandals, wheelchairs on the loose and a throng of lewd 50 year-olds.

…

But I’ll tell you one thing: we sure love our Millais, my bunch of misfits and I.

And we’ve got lots of fantastic things to say about him.

Cherry Ripe 1879

Ophelia 1851-2

The Proscribed Royalist 1651, 1853

The Blind Girl 1854-6

After the in-depth study of the first declaration in the Preraphaelite Doctrine (ie To have genuine ideas to express), let us turn to the analysis of the second founding precept of the Brotherhood:

To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express (these ideas).

(aka the Theory of Utter and Irrevocable Stagnation)


Millais’ flora is very minute. I suspect him, that relentless boy, of looking up every single leaf, the tiniest of thorns and the most insignificant stem. And I truly believe that in his mirthful kingdom of shrub lovers, branches and twigs gathered around Ophelia and gave Millais a manly pat on the back saying: that’s some mighty fine looking landscape, Milly. Mighty fine indeed...

There definitely is something fungus-friendly about this swamp. Landscape.

Hearts are Trumps: Portraits of Elizabeth, Diana, and Mary,
Daughters of Walter Armstrong, Esq. 1872

(A decor that looks as natural as an outdoor scene on the Young and the Restless)

I wonder where he got that heaviness, this undying love of the inert.

An overexcited crowd turned towards these still (compact, stuffy, stifling) pictures. The contrast between these two equally dense extremes - the sandaled mass and the dreamy-eyed flowery girls- made me want to throw myself in the Thames.

I eventually opted for a burger. The best burger in town.

Because Art, my dear friends, may feed one’s soul, but it doesn’t do squat for one’s empty stomach.

(And to end this comprehensive overview of the Millais exhibition, I must confess I behaved badly with regard to the third Preraphaelite rule:

To sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art.


Forgive-me Brother for I was really tired.)

Looking for Morpheus. A Moral Tale

There are insomniacs, who can’t fight it, and those who, having aged against their will, start waking up earlier and earlier. Those who work night-shifts. Certain artists, too, who find it better to create when the world around them is asleep, and the heavy-winged moths, who prefer life in the dark. And there I sit, with bulging eyes, silly and lonely, staring at my screen.

I am not suffering, I am not creating. Nor am I having a wild night.

I sleep too much. Too early, all the time, too long, every day. With all this rest in store, I can't sleep tonight. My mind is saying yes, my body is saying no. He doesn’t give a dime -this fanatic- he is awake. And my pavlovian mind is drooling over slumber. So I wander around like a tormented soul, and I dream of sleeping.

I never should have drunk that darn coke.

Aesthetic Shock

The roaring tube. I was stuck between a Viking and an ornamental twit, staring blankly at the floor trying hard to listen to my Ipod. All of a sudden, right between the Twisted Sisters and Nick Drake, I saw a beautiful face - a brooding melancholy young man, with a chiselled chin, broad shoulders and dreamy eyes- the epitome of manliness, right there, reading, in front of me. I transferred my gaze and stared blankly at him.
Bond Street Station. He got up.

Swoon, Swoon…
Murder.

Strapped in hermetically sealed trousers, his legs looked like a transplant from an emaciated elf. Two ridiculous twiglettes beneath a gigantic torso, lanky limbs vacuumed into oblivion by skinny jeans that censored everything on their way.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present to you The Bumless Wonder!

His low-cut denim hung down a missing butt (which I would like to report), along spindly legs and all the way down to…a pair of pink converses.He got up and chirped away in Spanish, followed by a friend who looked like he had just fled the Merry Kingdom of Hobgoblins.

As if girls wearing skinny-jeans weren’t bad enough, with the raging competition between the Sausage Patty Society and the Distressed Matchstick Club. But men! And Spanish ones, to top it all! This experience has turned me into a magnanimous soul. To the British male fashion victims who roam all over the capital in their skinnies: You will survive the grotesque of these trousers.

After all, you almost invented Rock.

Tell No One (2006

Guillaume Canet’s second movie is trying, from beginning to end. Francois Cluzet is absolutely brilliant in the role of a feverish and haggard widower, trying to cope with his wife’s brutal death. Eight years after her murder, he receives an anonymous email: a live video of his wife standing in the middle of a crowd, in broad daylight.

Cluzet is transcended by his character’s grief - every inch of his body is tense, as if standing on the edge of a cliff. His struggle to find the truth about his wife’s unsolved disappearance is literally a matter of life or death. So it is both the thriller and the love story that have Cluzet run around like a mad man. And boy does he do it well.

The script is dense in the thriller mode, but also very emotional and verging on the sinister. Distressing themes (a serial killer, a paedophile, and numerous torture scenes) make it painful all around. Only the ideal love that was sketched at the beginning (the memory of which haunts the hero throughout the film) saves it from utter blackness.

The movie has its lengths, some shortcuts and a handful of awkward moments, including Canet’s use of soundtrack. I could feel his satisfaction at having found these beautifully expressive songs that suit the reclusive hero’s state of mind so well. But he uses them as chanted subtitles, translating Cluzet’s thoughts in a not so subtle way. The music takes over the narrative, but is too linear an application to succeed at being lyrical.

There also are some clichés in the depiction of the love story (puppy love turned into an adult and enchanted relationship). It is embodied through flashbacks by two children. Their pre-adolescent courtship frames the movie, giving it a fairy tale feel. It makes the macabre twist all the more horrific. A subliminal beat seems to hammer all along that this pure and naive love did not deserve such an agonizing end. With its paedophilia background, the whole thing becomes a moral tale on lost innocence. This is more irritating -and unsettling- than moving. A subtle allusion to their childhood would have been sufficient: the couple portrayed in the opening scenes (adult, luminous, sensual) does not need the past to legitimate their present. This corniness diminishes the scope of the human tragedy, turning it into a slightly oppressive fable.

This movie is not a bad one. In fact, it’s a movie I tried really hard to love. But there is an uneasy ‘je ne sais quoi’ in the process of combining two genres into one movie, as if love story and thriller had met on a road and walked side by side, without so much as exchanging a glance. Only Cluzet binds these two in his beautiful performance. A certain stiffness in the direction and the overpowering sense of a paradise lost gave me a chill, despite the patent good will of the young director and his gifted cast.

The rain in Spain.

I was feeling kind of sulky at the thought of spending my summer in London, but they told me: "aah, don’t worry, summer in London is really pleasant." I am a gullible creature. I believed them.

We had this whole media frenzy about balmy floral buddings and the global melting of polar bears. A walking-talking circus because of two and a half miserable sunny hours in April.

But today, August is approaching with big soggy steps, the quacks have fled to warmer countries for their seasonal migration, leaving their Chemistry Kits behind- today, 27 July 2007, I am still waiting for summer.

Aquatic London is not a bestseller, it’s a vintage joke.

Give me my money back!



*Hagel's Holiday by Magritte

The other side of the Channel

The first time I went to the movies in London, I queued amongst a noisy horde of extravagantly dressed Vikings, suffered through 25 long minutes of advertisements, was warned against Ssssilent tthhhiefssss by a mesmerising on-screen snake and ended up 15 euros poorer.

Let me tell you one thing: going to the movies up here in the Northern territories is not a piece of cake - it’s an ordeal for both your wallet and your soul.

I admit I might have been partly to blame for the debacle, for I scheduled my first time on the very first week of the Lord of the Ring’s release. I decidedly selected a cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue, I deliberately went to the 8 pm screening, and no one forced me to set my oh-so-unconventional-mind on a Saturday night.

There I was, an idealistic bean among giants, with my overpriced tickets and overrated idea of a night out, and the sky falling on my head.

You can imagine my surprise when, after 10 minutes of self-intended motivational speaking, I saw the sky get back on its feet, gather its blue train with dignity, and glue itself up on the ceiling in a cubist attempt.

In a few months’ time, I lost ALL of my Parisian reflexes. No more sheltered viewings in the afternoons or religious silence during the screening. I bid farewell to the small independent theatres of the Quartier Latin, to small independent movies from all around the world, to Iran, Korea and Argentina… But what I lost in sophistication, I gained in buoyancy.

Oh the primitive and greasy joy of pop corn!

The childlike excitement before a silly blockbuster!

London has turned me into -the Parisian I once was is turning in her grave- an unfussy audience!