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Showing posts with the label France

Flashback: The View From Fox-Amphoux

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As I settle in here on Viale di Trastevere, I'm hoping to catch up on recording the first bit of my trip--the vacation part with my husband, Andre, and, for the first few days, with our friends Howard, Melissa, and Artemis.  We had the great pleasure of staying with them in their home in Fox-Amphoux, a quiet village in Provence.  And I'm not using the word quiet casually.   When we stepped out of the car, in the middle of a little cluster of homes, the first thing I noticed was the profound quiet--a thick, rich quiet like cream poured over everything, in which the loudest sound for miles around were the cries of the swallows that swooped and soared overhead. From up on the roof, the view stretched on for gorgeous miles.  Just ask Artemis. A brief hike in the neighborhood brought us to this chapel, carved into the mountain by a sailor who narrowly escaped a shipwreck: We also wandered and ate in nearby villages, like Aups, where we peeked into a lovely church: And in ...

Backtracking: Day One (Nice, France)

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So now I'm going to backtrack a bit to day one of this summer's big adventure.  Î™n advance of my upcoming study tour in Rome, Andre and I flew into Nice, France, to stay with some dear friends who live part of every year in a village in Provence.  Defying our jet lag, we hiked up to the highest panoramic point of glorious Nice: From there we heard some kind of concert happening on the beach, so we hurried back down to see what we were missing.  Turns out, it was a multi-artist event being filmed for French t.v., hosted by the radio station France Bleu, and open to anyone who cared to stumble in. To my happy surprise, guess who came out on the stage?   If you can't make her out, it's Conchita Wurst, the gorgeous yet fully bearded winner of the 2014 Eurovision competiton--which I watched in real time via the internet, because when I'm not in Europe I'm pretty much wishing I were in Europe.  And though I was rooting for Greece's fantastic Kosa Mostra to win, i...

Anything is an Occasion: An Interview with Photographer Howard Dinin, part two

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Yesterday, I published part one of an interview with photographer Howard Dinin, on the occasion of the publication of his new book of photography, Sitting .  Today, I lead with the photo above, for how it captures the cafe experience--a community of solitary people, each wrapped up in his own thoughts.  Of all the many kinds of sitting, that one in is my personal favorite, so of course I love this photo and envy the people in it.  I also love the dappled sunlight, the cafe's weathered wood and cobblestones, and the way the picture manages to be both warm and cool at once. Now here is part two, for your reading enjoyment: *** AL: When we left off, yesterday, you were telling me about the organizing principle to  Sitting. HD: I’m an adherent of the school of thought that clings to the theory that there’s no such thing as logic.   Logic is backfill.   We know what to do, we know where we’re going to get, and we get ...