There's no pool at home

but it's still nice to be here. Hello, Basel. I'm back from Aix, my visiting friends are on their way to Paris, and I've got two weeks of completely unscheduled time to faff away. Thought it might be nice to faff some pictures up onto the interwebs. After debating the virtues of chronology, I've decided to throw order out the window and go for a random selection.

Starting here with a little video I took of some of the trees in the park behind the Grand Saint-Jean in Aix. Though you can mostly hear the sound of the camera's inner workings, the trees made a particular sound, I'm sure you can imagine it, of all their leaves clattering together in the whooshing wind. You could hear it during the performance sometimes. Oh yeah, the performances! I haven't forgotten, since the music is still in my head nearly constantly, but it's growing fainter. There's a video online where you can watch the whole opera, and see my bass scroll in silhouette against the bright stage a few times. It's only an hour and a half, maybe you could watch it on a lazy evening indoors? It'll be online til sometime in early October. 100 days from the original performance, July 17. And, here's the link.

Since the last blog post, I saw that Shostakovitch opera, The Nose, it was crazy and interesting - Shostakovitch was 22 when he wrote it, and it's clearly his work, and also loud and difficult. There aren't so many moments of rest in the production, and the sets, designed in part by Wm Kentridge, reflected the action. Sometimes a wall, tall as the entire stage, would move forward or back, would open up with doors or windows in which the action would happen, would disappear. I brought with me the libretto on an iphone and followed it for the whole performance, which really helped; otherwise the constant stream of conversational and theatrical Russian (why aren't there repeats and da capo arias, like in Baroque opera??), clarified by French supertitles, would have pretty much left me in the dark.

An orchestra from Lyon was down there in the pit. They did a good job. I saw one other performance during the festival, a dramatic staging of my favorite book, Austerlitz, by WG Sebald. It was all in French with no supertitles, but having anticipated that I read the book again before going to see it. The staging was simple, there was only one actor, and he half acted, half spoke text directly from the book. In the back of the stage was a contemporary music group, Ensemble Ictus, based in Belgium, made up of clarinet, prepared piano, flute, trombone, viola and cello. They were playing music composed for the production, and it was mostly a succession of rhythmic chords in clusters. The whole production exuded anxiety. There is anxiety in the book, it's essentially the story of a man discovering his identity and uncovering the fate of his parents, both of whom were forced to leave their homes during the war and ultimately perished in concentration camps, but the book is so much more than that story: it's a meditation on architecture, moths, libraries, human nature. Discovery and wonder. The production did have a spare and architecturally evocative set, and it used images from the book and images from the director, who had followed the same path of the protagonist in the book, and taken his own photographs; these were all well done. But for anyone who hadn't read the book and didn't speak French, I think it was mostly an opportunity to space out and think about things. Way to hang in there, Andrew. Props to Andrew also for his zen-like patience during the several performances of Acis & Galatea for which we couldn't get him a ticket, spent sitting backstage while singers darted in and out and the music was piped in on tinny speakers.

We did do some things aside from opera performances while Andrew was in Aix, of course. There was plenty of obligatory eating of beautiful farmer's market food and poolside relaxing,

and we also took advantage of my one day off to rent a car and drive all around the area. We looked at the sea from the top of a cliff, while lunching on goat cheese spread on fruit bread and sweet ripe apricots and nectarines. We drove north in the direction of Gap and looked at a river, and an abandoned chapel. We wandered around the "ancient" part of a town in Provence in which every charming old building, including something that looked like a castle and the city hall, had been converted into residential units, either by adding a block of mailboxes outside or by building a mismatched structure (apartments, a corner store, nothing classy or matching) directly into the side of the hill or the old brick. There were TV antennae attached to the battlements of an ancient stone tower, and xmas lights strung around the oldest chapel in the city. We kept walking around thinking, oh, here, maybe now we've found the historical center! and instead of Good King René's castle, we'd find laundry strung between houses and deserted streets. Weird. I'm hoping my understanding of the situation there will change or develop though I'm not sure how I'd add more information to my confusingly incomplete picture. Wait and see, I guess.

Lest it seem I only swam in the pool while 30 km from the Southern coast of France, here are a couple shots from a delightful day spent with my housemates and one of the singers on an island called Frioul, a short ferry ride away from Marseille, swimming and floating in the clear, salty water.

Oh, good weather, aren't you grand. (Just looked up and out the window at the pokey, puffy gray things in the sky out there.) Summer continues anyway. I spent the last three days with friends in town from NYC, we climbed an Alp (more on that later), and in about two weeks I'll travel to Venice to do 11 days of printmaking. Summers are nice, it's great to have a job with a distinct season. Will this change? Let's hope not.