Paris Werewolves

St. Paul's Chapel, Lower Manhattan I was delighted by how much my photo of St. Paul's Chapel in Lower Manhattan reminded me of one of my favorite Halloween albums from my horror-haunted childhood , "Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House." Chilling AND Thrilling, what a bargain! They don't really do Halloween in France. You'd think they would, given the Celtic influence of Bretagne (i.e., Brittany, or Breizh in the Celtic-Breton language) which at one time or another spread to (or originated in) Marseille and Iberia.  But they don't. I'm sure at least one doctoral candidate in folklore has written a thesis on why not. One obvious answer is that spooky Halloween as Americans know and celebrate it has only the barest origins in the Celtic Samhain harvest festivals. Like the springtime Germanic Walpurgisnacht , Samhain is most known today as the night of the year when celebrants believed that the boundaries between the natural and supernatural wo...

  Pointe du Grouin, Cancale, Bretagne Björn Gottschall hauls a six-octave piano out to different points along coastal Bretagne, playing for his own inspiration, but also for people strolling along the rocky cliffs overlooking La Manche. Ordinarily, my feeling is that art installations set against nature are a bit absurd. How is a stack of flat rocks or sticks arranged as a teepee ever going to compete what time and geologic processes perfected over thousands or millions of years? The accompanist--and the competition. But because it's ephemeral, music can work as an exception, provided that the musician has both talent and good taste. Gottschall seemed to have both, and his playing style complemented the surroundings rather drawing attention to himself. Nature itself also provides an exception in France, since except for a few areas where the land and sea meet in high, inaccessible cliffs, there seems to be little of it. There is no outdoor place I've yet found where you can fe...

  "Piracy is not over," Saint-Malo, Bretagne. Note that not-Mickey's shorts represent the flag of Saint-Malo. Towns in coastal Bretagne take a certain amount of civic pride in their historical corsaires --privateers given license by the government to raid ships and coastal settlements of enemy nations. Unlike pirates (the French are always quick to point out), corsaires ' conduct was regulated by the laws of the admiralty, and all booty was transferred to the crown, minus a piece of the action for the privateers. It must have been a great comfort to English and Spanish seafarers to know that they were attacked, boarded and robbed by honest mercenaries rather than common criminals. French corsaires  first got their license to steal from Louis XIV, but were given charters by every monarchy and republic until the practice was abolished in 1856 with the Treaty of Paris that ended the Crimean War. Saint-Malo produced one of the France's most celebrated corsaires , Robe...

  Plage de Rochebonne, Saint-Malo, Bretagne We took a side trip to Bretagne (Brittany), partly to escape a late summer heat wave that descended on Paris, and partly to get back to an ocean for awhile. Before Paris, we'd never lived inland and even though we didn't go the beach everyday in San Francisco, there's something satisfying just in knowing that it's right there in a pinch. By contrast, in Santa Monica and Marina del Rey, every commute to work (for me) and every dog walk took you to at least the edge of the sand. The beaches in coastal Bretagne were uniformly well-ordered and beautifully managed, inspiring at least one ephemeral work of fine art. To our surprise, Breton beaches actually had people going in the water in bathing suits! This was a jarring sight, considering our lifelong experience of icy northern California beaches that require wetsuits for any duration of watersports, and where braving the waves in only trunks or bikinis is only done on a dare, and...

  Place Salvador Allende, 7th Arr. The Mairie de Paris (city hall) placed wreaths outside the Chilean embassy to commemorate 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Salvador Allende during the U.S.-backed coup of September 11 , 1973. There are memorials and commemorations all over France for people who died in war or through acts of political violence--fitting, for a place whose history was one of pretty much continuous warfare until the end of the Algerian war in 1962. In Paris and in some smaller places, just about every parish and mairie has a large, prominent war memorial, many that list the names of local residents or parishioners who died at war. A partial list of the war deceased of the parish of Sainte-Clotilde, 7th, Arr., which also honors parishioners killed in WWII.  This personalization of the dead seems to have started in WWI, and occurs less consistently for casualties of WWII and later wars such as Indochina or Algeria. And except for fallen militar...

A witch in the burl, Claremont Hotel, Berkeley Pareidolia  is a phenomenon where your brain discerns meaningful patterns among random or ambiguous stimuli. It's why you recognize two parallel dots above an upward curving line as a smiley face--in fact, seeing human faces where none occur is the most common example of pareidolia. It's why a witch rides with you in one of the elevators at Berkeley's Claremont Hotel. And why some people insist that ancient civilizations built mountain-sized faces on Mars. I would argue that a lot of representative art depends on pareidolia to communicate meanings in forms in non-realistic ways. Though they are not realistic, we recognize animals and humans in cave paintings made 30,000 years ago at Lascaux and Chauvet because the artists intended to represent animals and humans. There is also the playful use of pareidolia in forms such as green men, where faces emerge from arrangements of plants. But often times, you just don't know if you...

Engraved portrait by Vhils, Hôpital Necker-Enfants malades, 15th Arr. We took a walk through the nearby 15th Arr. to have a look at "Tower," a mural Keith Haring painted in 1987 for the Hôpital Necker-Enfants malades. It's a modern children's hospital now, but founded on the site of a convent in 1778 by Suzanne Necker, a noted pre-Revolution saloniste and the wife of Louis XVI's finance minister. The bonus find was a pair of engraved portraits by Portuguese artist Vhils running up the sides of the the hospital's historic buildings on Rue de Sèvres. Other than their date of installation in 2014, there's not a lot of information available about these works. The 15th Arr. has surprised us a few times with great street art, including one  colossal mural on the side of an office for child protective services  and another that looked like the Partridge Family bus crashed into the side of an apartment building. In the center there appears to be a cross between ...