Oh! Christmas Tree?

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People have been asking if I took photos of our Christmas Tree. First of all, Laurie and I have never had a traditional Christmas tree. The closest we ever got to a traditional tree was a tiny, live, pre-decorated tree we got from a fundraiser. Otherwise, we normally decorate a houseplant, indoor tree (ficus or norfolk pine) or more recently our large bonsai ficus. This year we got as far as lighting candles, although there is one gold ornament laying at the base of our gnarly, bonsai ficus from last year (last photo).  Laurie did a lot of cooking, so the candles reflecting in the stockpots and mixing bowl made nice decorations.

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Christo Style Construction

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When I saw the old Audio Express building that is being remodeled into some kind of restaurant all wrapped up in plastic, I thought of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who are well known for wrapping islands, trees, rivers and creating other large wrapped environmental installations. We heard Christo speak many years ago when we were art students. I don’t remember much of what his talk was on, but I’ve always been impressed with his work. The construction workers created a nice piece of art, wrapping the building out of necessity to keep the fresh plaster from freezing. They didn’t understand what I saw in the plastic wrapped building that was worth photographing.

On the other side of the parking lot, the strings of red chiles and surroundings had a “wrapped” look of their own through my telephoto lens.

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Permanent Vacation

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Café Giuseppe has had a sign on the door for the past five weeks telling its customers that they are on vacation for a week. Turns our their week off has turned into a permanent vacation, and Café Giuseppe will not reopen according to its owners. I don’t know if it was malicious vandals or an irate customer who broke the window yesterday.

Lars the Red

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I gave Laurie a gift card to get her hair colored and styled for her birthday. Since she’s studying Old Norse, her inner Viking pushed her into going for the lighter red in her hair, so now my beautiful wife is a Viking redhead.  Like Gorm in the Icelandic Sagas, I might not be considered the wisest among men, but we were both wise enough to marry beautiful women.  His wife, Thyri, was considered Denmark’s Adornment. My wife, Laurie, I consider my Crown Jewel of Corrales.

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France Day 30 Last Day In Paris

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We spent our last day in Paris getting ready to leave — checking in for the flight, cleaning the apartment, preparing food and packing. We went out for a walk in the Tuileries got our last look at the Louvre in the late afternoon sunlight, and I took random photos in the Tuileries and on the street walking back to the apartment. We are leaving for the airport at 6:30 this morning.

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France Day 20 The Louvre

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If you want to see a nice, close-up view of the Mona Lisa, look her up on-line or in an art book, because you can’t get a good look at her at the Louvre.

The Louvre has a current exhibit of a large-scale series of installations, encounters, theater performances and public activities by Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933, Biella). The exhibit is titled Year 1: Earthly Paradise, and it marks “the transition into the new era of human, social, and cultural metamorphosis that was celebrated all over the world… The exhibition embodies three different time frames: the past, in the context of a retrospective; the present seen in the mirror works reflecting the visitors; and the future in a great obelisk topped with a triple loop, a symbol of this ongoing revolution. Thus the sign of the “third paradise” adorns the pyramid… Spirituality, figuration, the breaking down of boundaries between the arts, social solidarity, and the merging of life and art: these are the themes permeating the thinking of Michelangelo Pistoletto…”

Every other photo in this set of photos is a photo of a Pistoletto installation. Most of these are from the mirror installations, but there were video installations where we were live in the video along with all the recorded video. One installation was neon in different languages in the medieval part of the Louvre and the last installation we saw was a room of mirrors. I also included a shot of Laurie in the tiny elevator in our building as it fit well with Pistoletto’s idea of past and present.

If you haven’t figured out that the Louvre is crowded, it is. It’s very difficult to get a photo of a painting without visitors in it, except for occasional breaks in the crowd and photographing ceilings. So I just view the crowd as part of the art experience.

We went to Handel’s opera Guilio Caesare last night. The orchestra used instruments from the period, which blended particularly well with the voices; the sets were monumental; the performers were fantastic. We were in a box seat slightly to the right of center stage on the first mezzanine level with 5 other people. The theater was packed. We arrived 40 minutes early, which allowed me to get some photos of the interior of the theater with my iPhone (last photo).

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Must Ask You To Leave

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I had to meet a guy at a call center, and while I was waiting I noticed the Sandias reflecting on the building were nicely cubist, so I snapped a photo. I waited almost 10 minutes after I took the photo for the person I was meeting to show up. Soon after he came out, a security guard came walking up from the other direction and when he got up to where we were standing, he told me “Photographing the building is not allowed. I must ask you to leave!”  The person I was meeting with said “Oh! Really? I didn’t know that!” I left right after that, but I find these supposed “no photographing buildings” policies to be very strange — when I looked up the address on Google maps, there was a nice, extremely clear satellite image of the building, and “street view” images of the building. When I got home, I looked up Google Images using the address and found a lot of photographs of the building that were taken on the property, as well. Despite what the guard told me, photographing the building is very much allowed, because there are images of it all over the Internet.

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Oh My! It’s May!

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Here it is May 1st, which means there’s only ten days felt before we leave for France. In the meantime, we have finals to study for, backup watering systems to finish, salsa dance on Friday and work.  The kitties were lying around reflecting this afternoon as was a band’s tour bus that I moved my car for so it could take my usual parking spot this afternoon.

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