Images of summer 2010

July 2010: a cocktail of trips with friends

Let's have a look!

+ Flower power party

For this event I borrowed my mother dress (my favourite shop!), a lagon blue Tara Jarmon two-pieces dress. I remember spending hours looking at it without the courage to try it on; with my aspirin-tablet-skin-color I must avoid these fantasies but with one week of complete cooking in the South of France it was perfect!

+ Ibiza for 24 hours (again)

There is something special about Ibiza, as soon as you touch the ground (After one hour of total fear as I am a plane-phobic and an even more jet-plane-phobic combined with a strong claustrophobia) you entered in another dimension. Somewhere between the hippie era and the seventies. People are relaxed, often drunk and social links interweave as spiderwebs as you toast your glass with a total stranger. We went to La Leche party at the Amnesia Club, slept at the Ocean drive hotel (just to remind I am David Lynch first fan) and spent the day at the Blue Marlin Beach before taking our plane where I had the nicest discussion ever with a german pilot who explained me eveything I need to know about 'these strange noises in the rear-end'

+ St Tropez

As I was writing my thesis during the summer, I avoided St Tropez from the to-do list but at the last minute I changed my mind and packed my stuff. This changing mind was helped by a text message from my german ex-boyfriend who was at St Tropez for the weekend. The weekend was great, Caves du Rois on saturday night and Nikki Beach the next day where I, as I did last year, customized the Nikki Beach shirts for my friends. My german thing was totally disappointing. It is strange how you can transform a standard tasteless guy into a zouper (as german likes to say) man-to-have with only memories. Eurk!

Oh God!! I really look like a superficial slut, I will try to be a better girl in my next article helped with family weekends, and working hours that constituted the august days I have been through...

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Yesterday night I had to leave early my class of Sex, Violence and politics- while very interesting-  to run to the theater to see the most famous piece of Samuel Beckett : Waiting for Godot. Considered as the most prominent work in the Theatre of the Absurd movement I never had the chance to see a representation. And I quickly realized how lucky I was - once again- to see it in London with amazing actors such as Ian Mc Kellen. Oh god!! that's how you distinguish a good performer everytime he plays a role in the Lord of Rings, in X-men or Estragon in Beckett's he is his character, his spectrum of representations is so large that he is never assigned to one kind of character. 

 

Synopsis: Waiting for Godot is a two acts piece and tells the history of Estragon and Vladimir waiting for someone named Godot. To occupy themselves, they eat, sleep, converse, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide.Their waiting is interrupted by the passing through of Pozzo and his heavily-laden slave Lucky. At the end of the act , a boy arrives, purporting to be a messenger sent from Godot, to advise the pair that he will not be coming that evening but surely tomorrow. During Vladimir's interrogation of the boy, he asks if he came the day before, making it apparent that the two men have been waiting for an indefinite period and will likely continue to wait ad infinitum. After the boy departs, they decide to leave but make no attempt to do so, an action repeated in Act II.

Throughout Waiting for Godot, Beckett introduces religious, philosophical, classical and biographical references. The play is a mix of comedy and pathos which I found the most interesting feature of the piece. People in the audience had strange attitudes especially when came the time to laugh, sometimes they just laugh when I woud never think about it. While watching the piece you are torn between laughable scenes and dramatic ones. For example when Estragon and Vladimir think about suicide at the end of Act II by hanging themeselves on the tree (only piece of the deco) but have no rope, Estragon undoes his belt and looses his pants. The only people I sw laughing felt quickly guilty to do so. I had this impression that everyone was waiting for a signal to express their emotions.

Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until the 4th avril.

Aliénor.

Brighton ruby clouds

I was in Brighton this saturday for the second time since I live in London( it's only at one hour by train) and I have to tell that this city has an inexplicable charm. I was with Nina and her cousin, two angelic swedish beauties, that probably have bewitched Apollo and forced him to wake up his erratic sun.

Thus, a beautiful day with creamy clouds and big blue sky windows under which we strolled all day long.

After taking a breath on the beach face to sea (I haven't seen it since 1month and a half what a releif!!)that looked like silver films we entered in the old town. What is amazing there is that it can look like all those murky sea side stations, empty by the winter but, on contrary, we find an authentic atmosphere very popular and bohemian.

From one lane (name of the streets) to another we can hear an handsome twenty years old singer with a magical voice, teenagers with their own personal styles (very cultivated in Brighton), little shops of vynils,candies, lomography, books, secret markets at the end of small blind alley and above all fabulous vintage shops. 

In London vintage shops or antiques markets are often very expensive and sometimes a little bit fake as they present stands or product that come directly from India or Taïwan, in Brighton you don't have any doubts about it and you can buy a trendy 60's coat (as my friend Nina did) for almost nothing.

If one day I have enough money to buy secondary houses everywhere, I will invest in a tiny colour house on the top of Brighton's hill which I will furnish with antiques Bazaaar and not even one same object.

Aliénor.

Andrew Wyeth : the floating dream

Day Dream (1980)

Otherworld (2002)

Wind from the Sea (1943)

Christina's World (1948)

Andrew Wyeth is an american painter.

Wyeth’s style and subject-matter changed little throughout his career: he mostly painted farms, rural landscapes of the deepest villages of the world most powerful nation. 

Travelling very little, he spent his life almost entirely in the Maine and Pennsylvania regions of the USA. Althought he is very popular in the USA, he is not really represented in European museums. But even for us, that have been raised with the little house on the prairie or Dr Queen Medecine woman, these accessible paintings evoke some mythical rural dreamed past, striking a powerful chod in the collective pysche. 

I like painters that are interested in recatching the past, Wyeth was (he died last year) a contemporary but seems to have painted this scene a century ago. I don't want to make any stupid reference but sometimes in his way of presenting human body in a contorted nature he reminds me Caspar David Friedrich.

Frau am Fenste (1822)

There also something poetic in the fact that the people, the farms, the field he have chosen to paint are always the same through his life, the process is very slow. Sometimes he choose not to represent human figures but just traces or represent them turning their backs to the viewer.

To see Wyeth's work : Moma Museum New-York and Philadephia Museum of Art's have the two biggest collections.

Aliénor.

As One at The Royal Ballet : Who said going to the Opera was boring???

Leaving in London since september and using the tube in my almost everyday-run to-the-university, I was kind of attract with the sexy visuals -I recognize few times later- of the Royal Opera house. I am not used to go to the opera, although the concept is really classy and trendy I decided then to see what it was all about.

Few informations taken before going there As one is the latest work of The Royal Ballet's young choregrapher Jonathan Watkins. It is a 30-minute piece that had its premiere on 19 February 2010 just two days after my birthday and what a gift!!!

As one has a specific narrative outline that anchors the action in the contemporary urban landscape. One scene takes place in a domestic kitchen. Another in a sitting room as a dysfunctional couple drearily watches television, arguing over the remote control.

Another is an urban 'dance off' with a pairs of trainers thrown up onto telephone wires

The choregrapher says that he was inspired by watching a bloc of flats from the outside, witnessing so many people inhabiting in separate places, side by side, without connections.

The action is divided into five 'slices of life' representing typical urban living patterns : from the sociable to the isolated.

Obviously that lise-en-scène clearly reminded me the video I made last year, and what is funny is that I used the same explanation to describe my inspiration and it's perhaps why I was so emotionally touched.

Covent Garden, London WC2E9

19 february - 4 march 2010

Aliénor.

Welcome to my BazAar.

+ Contemporary artists + exhibitions+ poetry + photography + trips + peacock feathers + ...and other gross stuff will be available on my articles.

   Aliénor.