Culture Notes: Monet, Murder & Identity

Sometimes one comes upon the most enjoyable books or movies by happenstance and other times it’s on the recommendation of a friend.

While I was in Philadelphia at the Barnes Foundation, I picked up a novel about Claude Monet called, Claude & Camille by Stephanie Cowell. Published in 2010, it’s a fascinating portrait of Monet’s early life with his wife Camille and the close friendships between him and Renoir, Pissarro, and particularly Frederic Bazille. These Impressionists (only dubbed so later on) worked against tradition and, hence, their works were unpopular and frequently did not sell.

Monet and Camille lived hand-to-mouth while he refused to take on any kind of normal job and she periodically worked to provide some limited funds. They regularly depended upon the kindness of friends, most often Bazille whose family had money. Add in Camille’s unstable temperament and Claude’s frequent absences and you have lives fraught with tension and distance. Success was slow in coming.

Cowell’s novel is historically based, but with a novelist’s license she has elaborated on the relationship between Camille and the other artists. Cowell also captures, some might say lovingly, the process of putting paint to canvas and creating color and light. One knows precisely which paintings they are without her ever giving the reader their titles.

A friend gave me a copy of a mystery she and a colleague co-authored. Set in Bethlehem, founded in 1741 and now a charming city in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, The Body in the Vat: Tales from the Tannery by Charlene Donchez Mowers and Carol A. Reifinger is light fare, short and fun. It will appeal to anyone who knows the city (lots of familiar venues from the Colonial Industrial Quarter to the Moravian Book Shop) and to others curious to learn more about Bethlehem’s Moravian heritage.  Proceeds are being shared with Historic Bethlehem Museums & Sites and the 275th Anniversary Committee of Moravians in Bethlehem.

Another friend recommended that we see Phoenix and we were not disappointed. This is a seriously good, serious German film about identity and betrayal and the heart. Getting out of the concentration camp after the war, damaged physically and emotionally, Nelly needs reconstructive surgery on her face. Although pressured to have a new look, she asks to look like she did before. After surgery, she sets out to find her husband who does not recognize her. Practicing with him to become herself, she embarks on a journey that is both disturbing and poignant. Who are we really? What is it that marks our unique identity? And why do we continue to trust in the face of betrayal? Dark and haunting, this is a film that lingers long after the last credit has rolled.

Header photo:  Monet’s Springtime (1872) from Google art project.jpg

West Village Rambles: Food for Body & Mind

Since our arrival in Manhattan a week ago, we have spent considerable time with our delightful granddaughter, but we’ve also been walking and exploring, making a bit of the West Village our own. And walk we do—one day we did two long walks for a grand total of 25,000 steps. A new record!

For us, much of life revolves around food and, consequently, we are sampling cheese and deli items from Murray’s Cheese and Gourmet Garage, braving the bustle that is Eataly, and dining at restaurants new to us.

Some recent standouts of cuisine are the following:

Via Carota. This casual Italian place draws from all regions of Italy, has a comfortable vibe and at night is very lively. We had lunch here our first day—a yummy lemon risotto and a  plate of gnocchi with a piquant gorgonzola sauce—and liked it so much we returned that night for dinner. This meal, we shared some grilled artichokes (slightly and appropriately charred) and also grilled chicken with a lemon vinaigrette. All with some good white wine by the glass. Just perfect!

www.thenewpotato.com
Via Carota (www.thenewpotato.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gloo. This is a new French bistro, only  open a month or so, on Carmine Street and hasn’t really been discovered. We were its first Open Table reservation. The owner is from France and has several restaurants there, but this is his first U.S. venture. The space is small with a quiet ambiance.  I loved the upside down tomato tart to start (very pretty, looking somewhat like stacked red grapefruit sections) followed by a very satisfying boneless chicken breast in a cream sauce with small mushrooms served alongside mashed potatoes. Hard not to savor this comfort food!

Casa. A Brazilian eatery on Bedford Street, Casa has a small bar, about a dozen tables, and a mullioned window wall. Our entrees were excellent—fish fillet with lemon caper sauce and a slightly spicy, herby tomato stew of chicken and shrimp —both served with rice. My only advice, if you’re over fifty, go early! There are only hard surfaces and the noise level after 7:30 made conversation hopeless.

Casa (www.pinterest.com)
Casa (www.pinterest.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Culture Notes

On Thursday, we were at one of the first performances of Therese Raquin, a play based on Emile Zola’s novel of the same name ,and starring Keira Knightley. (The preview the night before had been cancelled due to Knightley having suffered a minor injury.) The set was minimal and the staging stark, but very effective given the themes of passion and guilt. Knightley as Therese was excellent as the seemingly meek and docile wife who later exhibits extreme passion and emotion. The supporting cast was also very good, especially Matt Ryan as her lover, Laurent, and Judith Light as her mother-in-law.

I really enjoyed Lily Tomlin in “Grace and Frankie” and today seeing her in Grandma, I thought she was fabulous. Playing Elle, a grieving, unemployed academic who is angry at most everyone and everything and demonstrates it, Tomlin takes on the challenge of helping her pregnant granddaughter Sage (played by the radiant Julia Garner) when she unexpectedly shows up. The film is an odyssey of visits to Elle’s past lives—old friends and acquaintances and old loves—that culminates in some touchingly funny and poignant scenes between grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter. (I loved seeing the career-driven daughter on her treadmill desk.) Each of these women is strong in her own way. Not a perfect film, but one with sharpness, wit, and heart. Rated R, partly for the strong language.

 

Cover image: www.everettpotter.com

 

On the Road: Onward to Bethlehem

Recently, we spent several days in Potsdam, NY, at Clarkson University, my husband’s alma mater, where the president and his wife warmly welcomed us.  The fall foliage colors are late in arriving this year and most of the trees were green and yellow with just a few dabs of red beginning to appear. I strolled a path along the Raquette River at the edge of the campus and spotted a red maple leaf on the ground, about the only one I saw. The river was calm and serene.  Farther on, the path skirts the lovely and historic Bayside Cemetery with its impressive red sandstone gate.

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Since then, we have re-connected with family in Albany—first, second and third cousins and some one or twice-removed (love that terminology!)—and dined and visited with former colleagues and friends at Lehigh University in Bethlehem. We had not been on the Lehigh campus for eight years and it was a pleasure to see how lovely it still is (but, oh, the hills, I had forgotten the steep grade). We kept running into people we knew so got a tour the new science building, walked through the Asa Packer Dining Room in the University Center, and of course, re-visited Linderman Library.

Source: www.pinterest.com
Source: www.pinterest.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently, Architectural Digest included Linderman as one of the 12 most stunning libraries in the world!  I had the privilege of being involved in this renovation project and now, this library is the place on campus to study and to be seen. It even has a café—a source of controversy for some students when it was being planned! Hard to believe given today’s café scene.

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While in Bethlehem, we also visited the ArtsQuest complex located in Southside Bethlehem at the Bethlehem Steel plant which shut down completely in 1995 and sat untouched for almost twenty years. The complex includes:  SteelStacks, a performance venue, the Banana Factory, an arts center offering classes and exhibits, a Sands casino, and the headquarters of the local PBS station.  The highlight for us was the Hoover-Mason Trestle, Bethlehem’s answer to New York’s High Line.

2015-09-30 22.23.542015-09-30 22.22.34This trestle walkway, on the site of an elevated track used for moving raw materials, takes you along side the blast furnaces and sheds where the steel was produced. These are massive structures and being able to walk closer to them gave me a better sense of the immensity of the operation and the dangers involved in the work. Information panels line the walkway and tell the story of the immigrants who labored here, the women who took over during WWII, and the steelmaking process itself. It was fascinating!  What an effective transformation of these hulking edifices into an educational and fun attraction.   The trestle only opened a few months ago so many of our friends haven’t yet visited.2015-09-30 22.28.062015-09-30 22.24.53 copy2015-09-30 22.55.052015-10-01 10.54.52

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Booknote: Dance & Detectives

 

Since I’m traveling, my reading gets a bit neglected, but here are two recent book recommendations I’m happy to share.

Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead. Shipstead is the author of Seating Arrangements and this is her second novel. It takes the reader into the somewhat cloistered world of ballet. The main character is Joan, who had a short-lived career as a ballerina and then left when she realized she wasn’t good enough. She marries and raises a son. Her compatriot Sandy with whom Joan has a somewhat ambivalent relationship, makes a career as a dancer. Added to this mix is a Russian dancer whom Joan helped to defect. Stir in some other complex relationships—that of Joan with her husband and son and that of Joan and Sandy with the defected dancer and you have lots of interplay. I liked this book the farther along I got and had figured out the “surprise” revelation.

To Dwell in Darkness by Deborah Crombie. This latest mystery is one of Crombie’s best in my opinion. Very up-to-the-minute with its themes of environmental activism and potential terrorist threats, it brings together British detectives Gemma Jones and Duncan Kincaid and several of their colleagues from earlier books to solve two crimes. When a protest in the busy St. Pancras train station results in an unexpected death, there are questions of suicide, murder, an unintended victim, and multiple threads to unravel. What I especially like about Crombie’s mysteries is that even the secondary characters (the other detectives, for example, and Jones and Kincaid’s children) are well fleshed out and you get a portrayal of the daily life of these people when they are not tracking down or interviewing a suspect.