Art and Music

I ran into Steve B, the Chorus’ PR officer, in the apartments’ foyer this morning and he filled me in on the previous night’s Various Voices Opening Ceremony (that we had missed by going to Moulin Rouge): Apparently it had been over-long and over-dull, so I felt somewhat less guilty at skipping out on it.

After a nap I set off into town to meet John W at the Pompidou Centre and see some modern art. Jeremy F & Thomas H were along on our little cultural outing too. Although the floor that John had been most keen to see (Modern Art 1900-1960) was shut for renovation, we all really enjoyed the more modern stuff in the Post-1960 gallery.

I’ve photoblogged one of the exhibits (here) which involved a darkened room, a video camera behind a sheet of reflective glass and a video projector, allowing you to interact with your own image… although as John pointed out, it is only a smarter version of the fun you can have in front of the shop window at any branch of Dixons selling video cameras.

Other interesting pieces were a series of pendulous nylon sacks (think lots of women’s stockings hanging on a big rotary drier and you are in the right area) with the bottoms filled with different spices and herbs. The whole thing looked very organic, something like a giant jellyfish. It was colourful at the spring-onion shaped base of each tube and had a different aroma from wherever you stood.

There was also a white ‘cave’ room that had its contours outlined in black paint and a photo-collage which seemed to be based on a Madonna concert (It was entitled Madonna I) but was a jumble of lots of images: Stimulating stuff.

We went in search of coffee after that, but the restaurant on the top floor only did meals – and didn’t look too comfortable anyway. While we were up there though, I did get some interesting, almost impressionist, pictures (here) of the Paris skyline by photographing through the rain running down the glass tube through which the escalators travel.

Thomas headed off to meet up with some other friends after that and the rest of us had a coffee across the road now that the rain had abated.

John and I decided to head on to Sainte Chapelle. This is a small chapel which used to be attached to the Merovingian Royal Palace on the Ile de Cité. It is on two floors and so beautifully decorated! Painted throughout, there are also lots of gilded lozenges between the windows and on the capitals which are inset with coloured glass ‘jewels’ and the stained glass windows on the first floor make up virtually the entire structure of three walls. It looked stunning – and must look even better on a sunny day with sunlight coming through the stained glass.

Brett and Rich were due back from EuroDisney not long after that, so John and I headed up to the Boulevard de Rochechouart where the Various Voices performances were taking place. This is in the Montmartre area of Paris and seems to be the heart of the red-light district as, along a particular stretch, we got offered sex every ten yards or so.

We all had tickets to the concert block starting at 8:15 that night, so we were looking for a restaurant that could process us in the hour and a half that we had available to eat. Unfortunately the restaurants proved fairly few and far between – and those that there were, were mostly not open until 7pm at the earliest. Eventually we settled on a not-too-bad looking little bar that claimed to be a restaurant too.

At first we weren’t sure what to expect, but fairly quickly got the impression we had stumbled on a gem: the fairly narrow bar area at the front, led onto a much larger restaurant area behind, presided over by a stern looking but (John assured me) very friendly middle-aged lady. We were the first customers of the evening, but more trickled in as we pondered the menu (with its handwritten additions and deletions), and all of them were French.

The food, when it arrived, was delicious; I had chicken on the bone, pot-roasted in a lemon and mustard sauce and John had scallops. Rich and Brett arrived later than expected, thoroughly soaked and worn out, and decided they had to eat too to revive themselves for the concerts, so they ordered too. In the end, after such good main courses, we decided we should try dessert as well, which was also delicious.

The restaurant, if anyone wants to try it, was La Pomponnette at the junction of Rue des Abbesses and Rue Lepic and it turns out it’s listed in the Rough Guide to Paris that I have on my PDA. (If only I’d thought of that at the time, it would have saved us a lot of pointless trekking around!)

We made it to the second-half of the concert block and got to hear the Canberra chorus, which had been my main aim. By the accounts of the other LGMC guys we met, the first half had been pretty dismal even though it included one choir dressed as chickens, so we felt we’d made the right choice enjoying the restaurant rather than rushing.

After the concert the consensus was to head back to our respective hotels and sleep for as long as possible.