Street music in France

I walked by a lot of street music in London and France when I was there this summer, but only took the time to briefly film it three times. Here is the short (44-second) video I made of three very different performances.

The first band, Radio Kamerger, seems to have been on a Russian TV show equivalent of The X Factor. And there they were, playing on the street in the Latin Quarter of Paris.

Somewhat feminist musings at the Musee d'Orsay

The Musee d'Orsay has been one of my favorite museums since I first saw it in 1991, on my first trip to Paris.

What's not to like about a museum that has entire sections/rooms devoted to Van Gogh, Monet, Manet and Degas? Housed in the former Gare d'Orsay train station, a Beaux-Arts structure completed in 1900, the building, with its massive, gold-embellished clocks and elegant arched glass ceiling, calls to mind the setting for The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Every trip I've taken to Paris since has included a delightful trip to the Musee. But visiting the Musee alongside a teenage girl this summer was a different experience. Sure, she liked its evocation of Hugo, the Impressionist rooms, the Degas sculptures. But after walking through multiple rooms, she asked, "Where are the women artists?"

Each room had been filled with paintings and sculptures of luscious women, prim women, naked women. But we had seen one lonely artwork by a woman--Mary Cassett, among the Impressionists.

After that, the rest of our afternoon tour became a bitter hunt for female artists. We rushed from artwork to artwork, examining the placards for any hint of a female name, but we never found another woman's art there.*

If you google "female artists at the Musee d'Orsay," the hits on the first page include the museum's own pages for The Modern Woman. Drawings by Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Other Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay and Splendour and Misery. Pictures of Prostitution, 1850-1910. In other words, women interpreted by men.

What were women doing while all these men had been sculpting, painting, creating? Tending to children? Devoting themselves to maintaining their own beauty? Posing for male artists? Or, perhaps, making art that would never be housed in the Musee d'Orsay.


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* I discovered after I returned home that the museum does house a few other female artists, including Berthe Morisot and Cecilia Beaux--but the number of artworks by women is pretty paltry compared to the hundreds by men. (I am counting 12 total among these three women). And to find them, I had to use Wikipedia and go through a list of major artists at the Musee. Otherwise, the Musee's website led me to paintings and art about women rather than by women.


All photographs by Beth Blevins. Copyright 2016.

The Seine seen from one of the clocks at the Musee d'Orsay.

While reading Cheryl Strayed's Wild...

1.
I am listening to Wild on audiobook in my car. Like the people in those Audible ads, I am immersed in the book. I may appear to be driving, but I'm hiking hot stretches of the Pacific Coast Trail or rounding an icy bend balancing the weight of my pack. I push on to the next goal post by pushing my foot on the accelerator, driving further in an hour than what Cheryl Strayed walked in a day. I'm only running errands, yet I emerge from my car feeling I've accomplished something akin to a hero's journey.

2.
As I drive and listen, I contemplate the question: why did Strayed keep hiking after her toenails fell off? After her pack bruised and skinned her? After she nearly died of heat exhaustion and thirst? Most people would have quit when the first toenail turned black or after the first encounter with a rattlesnake.

But the answer is in every line of the book. She didn't quit because she had nothing else. No home, no other destination, no one needing her to be somewhere particular. Just desperate determination, and the trail ahead.

Maybe it's desperate determination that separates good artists/singers/actors who acquiesce to careers that pay the bills and push their art to the side, and those who  continue to create because they must. Without desperation, a lot of art wouldn't be made or made visible.

3.
Her hike isn't entirely a fantasy for me because I, too, have hiked in California mountain and desert. I, too, have stuck out my thumb and gotten rides along quiet roads and busy highways there. At one time in my life, almost all of my possessions could fit into an external-frame Kelty backpack. I had no ambition but to see new things and talk to people in different towns. I wanted the world to be my education.

4.
It's funny typing this, on a Mac computer, in my house in Maryland. Now all my possessions would fill a large moving truck or two. The Kelty backpack is long gone, traded for money or gas to someone in a town left behind. Just as Cheryl Strayed eventually got off the trail, I, too, moved on to my life. After an off-and-on relationship with college, I finished my degree at about the time I quit hitchhiking and long-distance hiking. Now I rarely see the wilderness and hike only on well-worn trails.

It is without much nostalgia that I think back to being young and hiking in the heat of the Mojave Desert, or camping on high, snowy ridges in Southern California. I don't want to be that unrooted young woman again, yet I'm enjoying being reminded of her/me as I listen to Wild.

5.
Perhaps every life is a hero's journey, getting from there to here, and we don't recognize it as such. Even ambling we can reach our destination or create it as we go along.