Pics from the Louvre

Try to smile she is always saying.  It sounds like a good idea.

The MurMonster didn't feel well, so I took her home and came back to the Louvre.

Arcimboldo's The Four Seasons-  It is like surrealism (which I enjoy) but pre-enlightenment.  

Liberty, one of the best ideas in human history, but as with most projects, execution is the key.

I wonder if the Louvre is where Apple got the idea for the entrance to their NYC Store Entrance 

Gabrielle d'Estrées

Corot's Velleda  (it reminds me of the Lady of Shallot which was the one print I owned for the longst time)

What does it say about you if the most interesting thing you saw at the Louvre was a spiral staircase.  And not even THE Spiral Stair Case 

The statue of this guy is 3000 years old, but to me it still communicates that modern human expression of "hey man wanna buy some weed?".  He just looks like he wants to sell you a blunt.  I don't know if it is the smile or the eyes or the choice of headwear.  

Venus de Milo.  Ain't got arms, but she is still hot.

A bit disappointed with Paris

Well we made it to Paris, our last city hoping stop before we park in southern Spain for a while.  I think Murray takes Paris to represent the highest level of sophistication so she has been nervous and prepping me on table manners and generally how to avoid looking like a rube.  It seems ironic that I need to be working on etiquette to be around Parisians who are famed for being rude.  But sometimes you learn to just take orders.

I was a bit disappointed.  I had been prepared, by a number of people, a handful of them from France, for rude treatment.  However, the waiter at dinner tonight was quite helpful.  He wasn't obsequious but was attentive and pleasantly made use of his OK English to help us out.

The guy who met us at our AirBnB rental was also very friendly, Murray would add cute.

Some of the folks on the street were a bit pushy, compared to other places we have been, but so far the Paris adventure has been good.

You have to really like someone to get in this 24"x30" elevator with them.  Murray and I aren't hugging we are back to back against the walls.

The MurMonster soaking up the ambiance of our Paris apartment for the week.

The book and music collection in the place looks much like Murray's own (with a different language emphasis of course). This somehow reinforces we are in the right place.

Cabaret -What really happened n Berlin II

I went to a Berlin cabaret show.  I tried to go to one that was more of a variety show, but it was sold out.  So we went to another show.  I saw reviews of the Kleine NachtRevue NSFW.  Some said it was seedy, some said it was a great throwback, some that the dancing sucked, some that it was great, that the dancers were old, that the dancers were hot, that it was tasteful, distasteful.   But what they all agreed on was the inclusion of full frontal.  It has been a negative goal of mine for some time to never go to a strip club.  But we were in Berlin, the fatherland of burlesque.

I was surprised that there were a few more women than men in the audience.  The woman next to me, was from Switzerland, attending with her boyfriend, said they had seen cabaret in Switzerland but it didn’t show quite as much skin.  The show she saw was more about the removal of clothes but they always stopped before the Full Monty.

At this show, they didn't really do much in the way of strip tease.  There were dances to tease using transparent scarves.  But primarily the costumes didn't change much from start to end.  It was more a modern dance show, which I actually like.

There were three female dancers, perhaps aged 47, 37, and 27 and one guy about 50.  The routines switched up between them.  Some were about lights, some about sparkles, mermaid themes, and traditional French cabaret themes.

It was interesting to watch the comfort level of each with being exposed on stage in front of people.  Perhaps this was due to my own monitoring of my internal comfort level in watching.  The oldest woman seemed to be a bit of an exhibitionist.  Aside from the waning of skin elasticity we all suffer, she looked great.   She did a few feats of dance that required some skill, like holding a pose on one foot and slowly doing a smooth 360 rotation on that one foot.  

The thirty-something woman seemed the least comfortable in the more lightweight costumes.  This showed primarily in her countenance and eyes; her physical grace was excellent.  Her eyes were large and slightly bulging.  But later it made me wonder if her facial expressions were intentional as she put her eyes to good use at times.  I am used to the facial expressions of the MurMonster which usually give away everything she is feeling even when she would prefer not to share.  For this reason the MurMonster does not play high stakes poker.

In a solo piece the big-eyed, thirty-something dancer dressed in a sort of alien lion costume, her eye and face movements were as much a part of the dance as the leg and torso movements.  Her eyes popped open and moved for affectation.  It did make you wonder what kind of crazy thing might happen next.

The twenty-something dancer had minimal professional dancing talent.  But she was young and perky, so I guess it doesn’t matter.

The guy reminded me of a French Mime even when he wasn’t dressed in traditional French costumes.  Perhaps it was the face makeup, or perhaps there is a classic Gaulic facial topography: flat cheek bones, and a triangular chin with a concave nose bridge terminating in a slightly large and rounded nostrils.

He was an excellent dancer short of when he attempted tap.  It was fun to watch him dance with the forty-something woman in their tango routine.  The MurMonster said she felt cheated in the end since his costumes weren’t as revealing.  She also didn’t like the shadow box routine which depicted a faux beheading in some 1001 Arabian Nights story we couldn’t understand.  I have to admit that part was a bit creepy.  Perhaps that is the role of art, to make you feel something, even if my take home emotion for the evening was the heebie jeebies.

Don't go up to the 6th floor -What really happened in Berlin I

It took me a while to edit this down to something suitable for a general audience. Some may yet take umbrage at my presentation.  So I invoke the immortal words of Frank Zappa, “This work may not be suitable for children or Republicans”. 

Occasionally curiosity gets the better of me -especially if the MurMonster is egging me on.  And now I can now never un-see what has been seen.  I decided to go up to the sixth floor at the Axel Hotel in Berlin around 11pm.  There they have a hot tub, fitness area, sauna, and a rooftop bar. 

I made a plan to catch a glimpse of the action without taking my bathing suit up there and hanging out in the hot tub myself.  I would go up there, walk in, and look around as though I were looking for someone.  That wouldn’t leave me much time to see what was going on, but at least I would not look like a party crasher if there was indeed a party going on.

When I opened the door on the long room, what I saw was the back of a fat, pasty, white guy sitting on one of the lounge chairs.  How to describe him?  I guess plumbers crack only pertains to people wearing pants.  He had his hands on something in front of him and my fertile imagination filled in.  I headed away towards the fitness end of the sauna/fitness/hot-tub room and washed my hands.  Washing my hands always makes me feel cleaner. 

When I came back I could see Mr. Pasty a bit better. He was sitting there in front of the sauna fortunately his hands were just on a laptop.  I saw a guy in a bathrobe about to get into the hot tub.  The hot tub was at the very end of the long narrow fitness room, past the sauna, and up a few steps and out an exterior door.  The hot tub hung in mid air outside the hotel with a tiny deck around it.  As someone who regulary gets flak for wearing a speedo, I was curious if Mr. Bathrobe would go the speedo route. The hotel advertised their hot tub with picture of some buff looking guys in speedos.  Perhaps he would go au naturel, or, would be a subscriber to the MurMonster code of modesty and wear knee length board shorts and a long sleeve shirt.  With my plan of appearing like I was in search of someone I couldn’t wait around to find out. 

So I headed up to the rooftop bar to see what was going on there.  The short answer- absolutely nothing.  Apparently the after 11 crowd at the Axel is smart enough to know to come in out of the cold and head for the sauna or hot tub.  However, the view was spectacular, so, I spent a few minutes looking out over the city trying to identify buildings I had passed in my meanderings around Berlin.  I breathed in the cool humid air of Berlin in November, and then headed back inside.  I figured I would try once more with the “poke my head in to look for something” approach of checking out the hot tub and sauna scene.

By the time I walked back out, Mr. Bathrobe was already in the hot tub.  He was not wearing a long sleeve shirt.  Perhaps it was for the best I would never know what kind of fashion statement he had going on under the bubbles.    But what I can not un-see is the guy who then walked out of the sauna.  He was probably a bit younger than myself with a month’s worth of facial hair going.  He obviously had a gym habit.  But the less obvious thing was the one that made him, technically, not naked –the tension band he was wearing.  Well, I was curious about the scene. 

Advertisement/Warning for the 6th Floor Hot Tub Scene in Elevator

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The most expensive way

In Munich I looked at the live music calendar, since music doesn't tax my limited language skills, and picked a couple of winners.  I thought about seeing Morbid Angel the first night and Warlock the second night, but, I figured I needed to move on from my heavy metal childhood.  So I went through the listings and picked Y'akoto and The Dead Brothers.

Now I could pick a night a week to find live music in Denver Boulder, and go myself, and discover new music this way at home for a lot less money.  But I don't.  I should!  This is probably the most expensive way to discover new artists, but it is certainly fun.

Y'akoto lives in Hamburg but her family is from Ghana.  Her songs were all in English.  Perhaps that made her more accessible than other West Africans I have heard, but the West African sound has been slowly growing on me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5N-hB0Eu6A

For The Dead Brothers show, I actually got Murray to go.  We both had a great time.  It was sort of old time, scary, vaudeville music.  The percussion was just one huge kettle drum.  The guy playing mouth harp added a really cool element.  It is hard to explain the magic in the show these guys put on.  But the speakers went out during one song, and they just kept going.  The balance of the acoustic instruments without a trap kit, just worked.  It also allowed them to take their sousaphone and tambourine and banjo into the audience and play in the middle of the crowd.  I always wanted to do the Bill and Opus thing for real and play sousaphone or baritone in a rock band.  The lead guy is a real character, great story teller too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrV-mBLv17Q

Tuba and Accordion, rocking out with the fiddle player.  It isn't heavy metal, but it is some weighty brass.  Some tunes had tuba and sousaphone.  Now that is some craziness.

Ten year old boy held hostage

I don't let my inner 10 year old boy out for fun often enough.  But he did laugh at getting one fahrt on the wiener train. 

Pics from Budapest