Paris to Cuba

“Every time I go to Paris, I get inspired. I start thinking about ways I can embrace the city and absorb its magic…"

"This album, inspired by my appreciation of both styles, came about from the feel-good spirit that both Paris and Cuba share." -- Mario Grigorov


When I saw the email in my inbox, I couldn't believe my luck (and the power of Google searches since the email came right after my post about possibly not going to Cuba!).

My initial thought was Me?

Write a music review? Coherently? Do these people honestly know who they're dealing with here?

What do I know about music? The last time I listened to a conversation about music, I thought that those people were talking about math!

Thankfully, I was assured by a very nice fellow that I didn't need to know anything about writing a music review. I just needed to know how to listen. Like a regular person.

Whew. I know how to listen! That regular person stuff sounds highly overrated though.

When I got the CD (after my trip to Cuba and with the Cuban bands and mojitos still in mind) I settled myself down for a listen (and yes, I managed to listen to it uninterrupted. A feat worthy of Hercules).

I FELL IN LOVE. And I'm not just saying that because a fellow in New York sent me a CD. We are all about honesty and hysterics on this blog. Right? To. A. Fault.

When I finished the album, I turned to Mr C and said: "This is freaking awesome."

Only I said it in French. And I may used some French naughty words "Putain! Ce CD est trop de la balle! C'est top!"

The proof in the pudding is that I caught myself humming the music to myself before falling asleep last night and the night before.

OK. OK. You're saying. So. Um. The music?

Right. The music.

The music is mostly instrumental. Which. Actually. Is something that I really like.

Weirdly.

I blame Nine Inch Nails.

Stop laughing.

I like it when music plays around. When there are stops. And starts. When new instruments come in. When music doesn't just play around with my eardrums, but gets my whole body in the groove. And Oh. My. God. If you can get my heart to lift out of my chest and into my throat?

I am forever lost to your wiley ways.

Do you realise how many times that happened while I was listening to this album? I should be dead by now. That's how many.

Now I can't tell you if the CD I was listening to was a Jazz Cuban fusion or not (because I'm not well read on these things), but I can tell you that it was wonderful. It was perfect. And that I'll be playing it a lot.

Track this baby down. You'll thank me later.

Really.

Here let me help: Paris to Cuba

Go there now.

[Edited to add: For a much more serious commentary, check out Invisible Paris' side of the story. Thanks Jonnifer!]

New Work Monday #26

The Angel of Chartres
Oil on Canvas
50cm x 40cm (approx)

I did this one from a postcard that I found in Chartres Cathedral ages and ages ago. I divied up the canvas and a photocopy of the card into sections and then, with a palette knife (exclusively; I thought I would go mad) I dobbed the paint on.

I didn't draw the image on the canvas and I only used three colours (red, yellow, blue) and white.

Lot's of people who have seen it rather like it. I'm of the opinion that it is sort of grotesque and I can't decide if I'm cool with that or not.

The Name of the Game

During idle conversation between members of the rest of the Cuba group (there were 16 of us), I picked up on a word being said in a conversation that I wasn't a part of that I had heard before but didn't know the meaning of.

Me: "What does morpion mean?"

Emilie, pointing to her crotch: "Nether lice."

Me: "Crabs? Oh."

...

Me: "Wait a minute. Doesn't the French Gaming Commission (Française des Jeux) have a lotto card that's called Morpion?"

Charlotte: "Yup. Because you have to scratch it."

...


I find it hilarious that the French gaming industry would call a scratch lotto card after pubic lice...

And it just occurred to me that I have no idea how the subject of morpions came up in the first place.

I don't think I want to know.

Viva la Revolucion! Or Something

So. You are DYING to know.

Cuba. Deets.

Well...

Cuba is one of those strange countries where you can't tell up from down. Really. Communism is a bit messed up. I'm not saying Free Market Capitalism is better but I saw the nicer areas of Havana... It just doesn't measure up.

And no. Before you go any further, I did not visit Guantanamo. But they probably have the same thing that all the other parts of Cuba has.

Namely toilets that DON'T WORK!

Excuse me for being a princess but when you practically have to do your business in front of everybody (because doors that fit the doorjamb are a hilarious concept in that country) when doing a pit stop in a Bus Station, and then, as the toilets didn't flush AT ALL, it was pretty damn awkward when I had to let that poor woman with the buckets fling water into the toilet to get rid of my waste product.

I'm. Not. Even. Kidding.

When we got off the plane at Charles de Gaulle airport, I visited the loos.

THEY WERE SO BEAUTIFUL THAT I ALMOST CRIED!

Also? Dyson airblades are AWESOME!

Ahem.

I saw many many things in Cuba. Lots of critters:



Also roaming about were horses, chickens, turkeys of every sort and pigs.




Just. walk. away.


HELLO THERE, MY PRETTY!



We found this mygale spider in THE BATHROOM!


Check it out. IT'S DINNER TIME!



A snake eating a lizard. The lizard kept twitching. It was wicked cool.


We drank a lot of these:



Mmmmm..... Mojitos....


Also? Kommunist Kola:



Also exists in Regular Kola and "Fanta".


Some locals:



A hat seller in Trinidad


This old lady in Trinidad invited some of us into her house and told us her life story. Thank goodness we had a Spanish speaker in the group. She made us some kick ass coffee afterwards:




Apparently, this fellow has 7 wives. Funny. He doesn't look suicidal:




As you can see, the scenery in Cuba is breathtaking:



Somewhere near Pinar del Rio.




Trinidad




Somewhere near Santa Ana




Somewhere near Cayo Maria


There are no billboards or any product advertising at all in Cuba. However, there is propaganda all over the place:








"You don't touch The Che":



Che Memorial outside of Santa Clara. Security is slightly manic here.

An Argentinian, I'm still unsure if Che had any business being in Bolivia, the Congo or Cuba for that matter. But whatever: He had his beliefs.

Dude is a "God" now which may have been what he was after all the time...


At the start of the trip, I was amazed at how clean the country is. The streets/highways aren't lined with garbage (like in North Africa) and people regularly, despite the dripping heat, swept their porches and kept things neat.

Then we arrived in Havana. One of the smelliest cities I have ever been to. The heat, the humidity, joined with the conflicting smells of tar, rotting excrement and fruit all gathered together to make walks outside truly nauseating.

However, I suppose this was par for the course in this crazy city.

Check out the Capitole Building:



Look familiar? Apparently modeled after the Capital Building in Washington. Oh.... The irony.

How about this building only three blocks away:



I'm sure it is totally normal to have a tree growing out of the side of a building and that that building be propped up by sticks!

Tenements a little further off:



And squatter quarters with an ocean view:



All and all, an experience that I'm not likely to forget anytime soon. I'm tempted to return, though admittedly, I don't think I'll choose July next time. Whew.



P.S. There are over 400 photos in the above slide show. Word: The night shots are mostly experiments.

New Work Monday #25

Watercolour studies

I can't remember if I've already posted these. No matter. I like them.

New Work Monday #24

Celtic Tree
Watercolour and Ink on Paper

A silly little doodle. I rather like it.

New Work Monday #23

Kiki in the Clouds
Acrylic on Canvas

This painting was done AGES ago. 2004 I believe. My MIL emphatically disagrees that this looks like her grandson. I showed her the photo I was working from and she still disagreed. His nose was wrong. He was about four years old.

No matter. Kilian thinks it looks like himself. It's in his room and he loves the clouds. Brenna wonders when I'll do one of her with hearts.

Haven't the heart to tell her never.

Life is a Hella Crazy

Where to begin?

Is it just me, or does life get crazier as time goes on? I'm talking about all the responsabilities and running around but also, I'm talking about the holy shit, WTF?, "I cannot even believe that this is happening to me" surreal stuff.

The last week has been bizarre, though not as crazy as the distinctly remembered surreal moment when I was in the delivery room having Kilian. There I was, looking at the ceiling and feeling like I was watching a film because this was certainly too weird to be my life. A human being coming out of my lady parts?

ERROR! ERROR! Does. Not. Compute.

Maybe it's the heat. Maybe because my life knows that I have a blog and that fodder is needed.

I DON'T KNOW.

My life started to go haywire last Friday. Kilian was home from his trip to Guédelon (he brought a letter he had written home to us while there that said, in essence, "It took forever to get here") and since the kids were leaving the next day for Corsica with Mr C's parents, I was doing laundry. Suddenly Kilian came rushing up from the laundry room: "Maman, there's an enormous problem downstairs."

The basement? Flooded. Fuck.

Our bathroom, which is in the basement, is a cause of annoyance because after a year it is still not finished. Our enormous and ugly pink bathtub is sitting on bricks over a drain leading outside and since the washing machine hose goes into this drain, I figured that something on the bathroom side had blocked it up.

No.

Then I remembered the enormous storm of the night before and couldn't help but feel a shiver of trepidation...

I went outside and looked into the drain trap. It was full. I found me a bucket and started emptying it and got nowhere. This was looking like a job that I couldn't handle alone and no amount of trying with "ma bite et mon couteau" was going to help (vulgar alert: Figuratively it means doing things with the tools at hand. Literally it means: with my dick and my knife). I didn't have the tools at hand (ha ha!) and so I had to give up.

Saturday I popped the kids down to Lyon, came back to Paris, went to get a haircut and then left for the Depeche Mode concert.

If you follow my twitter or facebook, you'll have seen that a cock up of incredible proportions had taken place on the Paris East public transportation line. NO TRAINS! AT ALL! Thankfully, there was a bus that SORT OF got me to where I was going. That bus went through some of the hotter areas of the Paris burbs (Clichy Sous Bois! Aulnay Sous Bois!) and I saw a lot of humanity that I don't normally see. The hoodlum music added to the aura of weird.

But I got to the concert on time! And then, as per my tweets, you'll have seen that the concert left much to be desired. Phooey. All that work to get there probably added to the deception. I had no trouble getting home. Imagine that.

Sunday without the children clamouring for my attention with tales of woe on how one was trying to kill the other was weird. Mr C was off for a tennis meeting most of the day leaving me home alone to do many little though necessary works about the house and finishing off the shopping for our trip to Cuba.

The haywireness continued when Mr C called me on Monday night to tell me that I needed to take him to the doctor because he had messed up his foot while playing tennis. Six days before a hiking trip in Cuba.

He needed crutches...

...and had a doctor's note saying that he needed to be off that foot for a couple of weeks.

It took most of the evening for my anger to abate. Not anger at him and not even at the universe. Just that pukey feeling of losing control.

Tuesday, word of that plane falling out of the sky made me feel better about the possibility of not going to Cuba. After the Air France flight of June 1, I reminded myself that three's a charm after all.

Which brings us to Tuesday evening. A weird evening that had its ups and downs and when it was at its lowest, I was vacuuming poop off the floor of my basement.

I'm not even kidding. Chunks.

A friend of Mr C's had come over to help us with the backed up water drain with a borrowed plumbing snake. In French, I think it's called a furet (ferret). Anyway.

WE NOW KNOW, after trial and error (mostly error) that in case of a problem, poop can indeed flood the basement from outside because all the pipes join up before becoming the city's problem. Hurrah!

Fecking old house.

ALSO? Wherever you live, GET YE A WATER VACUUM! That thing SAVED MY LIFE. I'm sure I would have died if I had had to wring 2 inches of scuzzy poop juice off the floor, mop cloth by mop cloth.

The funniest part of the evening was when Mr C's friend was down the city's sewer trap for our house, he had managed to get the snake into the hole and then, after pushing it in and turning, all of a sudden, we heard an enormous GLOOP GLOOP GLOOP! Our friend turned around in TERROR, his eyes as big as saucers and if he hadn't been in a hole, he would have totally RAN AWAY into the night. We fell over ourselves laughing as we pulled him out.

Then we broke out the rum.

Fingers crossed that the weird streak is over.