While I search for my blogging voice here is Pierre's fully formed one!
Happy New Year to all
... we hope that you have not fallen off the cliff ... while we here are
not in the process of being taxed 75% of our non-existent income
... politics of revenge are just campaign promises, taken seriously by actors looking for an excuse to become Russian citizens ...
Life in France has been a most interesting and revealing experience
... everything that I imagined has not really happened in the way that I
thought it might and all else that has happened has been a surprise and a revelation.
What does that mean? Well what I like to say when
debating the age old questions of why, what and where ... it means: You
can never become what you were. I love the past, have reveled in it
and also often day dream about the future ... but really it
all happens right now
and that acknowledgement is a tough discipline to work within. So Here I
am, unable to deny my life and time in America while trying to live up
to my French ancestry ... what a pain in the butt it can be, altering the context of my life of the past 50 years.
Onto more real and dionysian pursuits ... obviously this is the
place for such activities, especially if you come here as a tourist,
without a care, a spending budget, looking to fulfill whatever
fantasies about a place one might have ... oddly enough very few harbor
any kind of fantasies about Bretagne, longing instead for the more tried and true destinations of the "south of France".
Just a few
words of advice ... France, as The #1 tourist destination in the
world, is overrun most of the time with people wearing baseball caps
and clam diggers, you know those shorts cut off at a spot between knee
and ankle, awful things and tack on those knobby plastic athletic sandals and a smug attitude and you've got the
world's population flocking to all the sights associated with Picasso or
Van Gogh, or closer to home ... Paul Gauguin and Pont
Aven. I guess they are touching base with a "first world" set of
cultural markers which makes those involved feel at one with the globalized culture ... a hybridized version of the
California look ... although I must say, I have not seen any Silverlake
style hipsters anywhere, very few tattoos of any kind, and very few running shoes, except on people actually running!
Happily there is very little of the "hip" pursuit here, rather more the
"stylish" one, which transcends generations ... although the "kids" look
like they've just stepped out some American High School year book.
What I also like about what I see about me is the fact that I do not
live in a "youth Ghetto". In the streets, at the movies, by the ocean, out at dinner at night, I see every generation represented ... how refreshing ...
but I guess that was a result of living in the hippest neighborhood in
the universe ... and that is so 1992 , n'est ce pas?
By
comparison to LA, the weather here is cold and damp, although the skies
are beautiful and dramatic, night and day ... the stars glimmer bright
and the moon when full shines through the skeletal branches of the forest a few steps
from here ... toss in a few owls, some bats, frogs underfoot and a fox
at a distance and you've got a pretty good idea of the mood (at least at night) here ... then you rush into the house, watch Downton
Abbey and life goes on as one might expect except it is really another world.
My work seems to have hit its stride ... painting and drawing and taking photos of night monsters in the forest ... normal as could be. Wendy is in a holding pattern for now -- cooking knitting learning french making necklaces reading, as she says "being an artist's wife" ... and has the luxury and time to do so ... she is off to NYC next week to see her family and I will be staying here, kind of "Heathcliff like" , lord of the manor and the moors surrounding, well not quite, but you get the fantasy.
There is so much more to talk about but that would become an endless one-sided conversation who knows how long this period might last, but for now things have turned out quite well ... just different.
You can take a peek at some random images I have posted of Pierre's work in an album I have loaded there on the left side of the blog, right after the space to add your email address to be updated when we make new posts, more often in 2013 ; ) Xxx
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