Jan’s Lavra Talk February 24 2024
February 24th, 2024
January 19th, 2024
December 24th, 2023
Our intention this morning was to stray from the cliche tourism of the Bateau Mouche and ride a City bus at the quai to the end of the line and back as we’d done in London. We walked a new way toward the river and came upon a tiny corner sculpture park centered on a travertine marble box behind which a large red circle was painted on the blank wall of a building.
A sign indicated that the box was used as a base for temporary art installations, this one entitled “Pandora’s Box.” A young woman walked up to the pedestal and pressed a button causing the plastic assemblage to revolve and look like a discharge of steam. Read the rest of this entry »
December 20th, 2023
We traveled to the eastern edge of the Marais to attend “Eternal Mucha,” a show about the life and work of the early 20th designer whose posters are familiar icons of Art Nouveau. A cycling 40-minute slideshow was presented on a huge screen with surround-sound music intended to overwhelm the audience reclining on couch seats in a theatre housed in the modern opera house at the Place Bastille. But after the previous night’s experience in the Sainte Chappelle its effort to create a contemporary spiritual aesthetic experience fell flat.
After a tiring walk across the huge Place de Bastille, the site of the start of the Revolution in 1789, we recharged at a cafe with shots of espresso Read the rest of this entry »
December 18th, 2023
We began the day with the practical task of doing laundry, which, not surprisingly, turned into a memorable adventure. Morning sunshine reflected from the recently cleaned old buildings turned routine urban activities into paintings.
Ancient architectural monuments adorned the way to the laundromat up the block.
Apartment buildings appeared as architectural marvels. Read the rest of this entry »
December 13th, 2023
On a walk around the neighborhood, before our scheduled train departure for Paris, we happened upon a building fronting a large square where booths, stages and grandstands left from previous days’ Pride celebrations were being dismantled. It was the Royal Palace of Amsterdam, originally built as a City Hall in 1655, later converted to a Royal Palace by the conqueror Napoleon’s brother Louis Napoleon in 1806 and eventually appropriated by the Dutch Royal Family who retain control of it today.
We arrived at the grandiose Paris Gare du Nord in the early afternoon Read the rest of this entry »
December 10th, 2023
Next morning was rainy, and we decided to return to the Hermitage complex to explore some of the galleries we’d noticed the day before, none requiring reservations or as crowded the Rijksmuseum. The City Museum provided a graphic history of the town which helped make sense of the technological achievement of reclamation of swamp and seawater that started in the thirteenth century. It provided a system of defensive moats, a transportation grid allowing easy movement of goods and people and access to river and ocean trade routes that led to the 17th century Dutch Golden Age. It also made the city, like Venice, an attraction for tourists.
Rather than glorifying the Dutch cultural heritage, most of the exhibits emphasized the brutality and injustice suffered by the victims of empire and their efforts to survive, witness and protest. Read the rest of this entry »
November 21st, 2023
After breakfast we set out for another major museum, the Hermitage. Located on the bank of the Amstel River, one of the city’s natural major arteries, the morning fog obscured the building’s name and nature, which only partially revealed itself in the course our visit.
Through a basement stairway we entered the old industrial brick compound into a sleek new interior occupied by independent galleries surrounding courtyards and gardens and found the Rembrandt and Contemporaries exhibition visiting from New York. Read the rest of this entry »
November 13th, 2023
Amsterdam is known as a city of museums, containing 75 of varying scope and size. We were interested enough to purchase IAmsterdam cards in advance providing free entry and reservations, remembering the summer’s tourist invasion. Our conservative preference for Rembrandt and other early modern Dutch and Flemish masters led us to the Rijksmuseum during the first morning. It wasn’t surprising to see the rainbow flag displayed over the entrance as it was everywhere else celebrating the upcoming climax of this year’s Pride Week (or month).
The building itself, another late nineteenth century combination of Gothic and Renaissance Revival style, opened onto a grand plaza and park, unlike the other compressed spaces of the city, where only the waterways offered open vistas.
On the way to the Rembrandt galleries, I relished the raunchy canvases celebrating peasant delights in drinking and sex Read the rest of this entry »
November 12th, 2023
August 2 turned out to be a welcome transition day after the intensity of the two previous ones. We had planned to spend it in nearby Metz with a person whom we’d last seen 37 years ago, the best friend of our son in grade 4 while we lived in Claremont CA. After reading a recent autobiography by his mom, we’d connected by email and learned that he’d moved to France and lived on an off-grid organic farm with his wife and two children. We were eager to see each other, but shortly before the planned visit an unfortunate circumstance required its cancellation.
After a slow morning we arrived by train in Metz stayed in the least expensive hotel near the railroad station we could find, and next day continued on getting a taste of local transport by switching trains in Luxemborg and Brussels.
We arrived late in the afternoon at our destination, another vast nineteenth century monument to the railroad, Amsterdam Central Station.
Crossing the bridge over the wide canal crowded with boat traffic that fronted it, we found the hotel that Jan had selected online, a small-scale tribute to the rail transportation system that continued to thrill me. Read the rest of this entry »