In Safe Hands

Two days ago I visited the Musée d’Orsay.

This place is absolutely humbling. Within hang some of the most famous paintings and sculptures ever known to mankind.

The list is incredible. Here’s a brief—brief—sampling:

* Camille Pissarro — White Frost
* Édouard Manet — Olympia, The Balcony, Berthe Morisot With a Bouquet of Violets, The Luncheon on the Grass
* Edgar Degas — The Parade, also known as Race Horses in front of the Tribunes, The Bellelli Family, The Tub, Portrait of Edouard Manet, At the Stock Exchange, L’Absinthe
* Paul Cézanne — Apples and Oranges
* Claude Monet — The Saint-Lazare Station, The Rue Montorgueil in Paris, Harmony in Blue (Cathedral series)
* Pierre-Auguste Renoir — Bal au moulin de la Galette, Montmartre
* Vincent Van Gogh — Self Portrait,The Church at Auvers, Starry Night Over the Rhone
* James McNeill Whistler — Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist's Mother, also known as Whistler's Mother

I walked the halls in sheer astonishment, seeing the very paintings that were in my artbooks at fine arts school, subjects of my art history classes, probably unseen only by a third of this planet, right there in front of my face. I literally gaped in awe.

I mean, Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass”? Renoir’s “Bal au moulin de la Galette, Montmartre”? Could anyone—anyone—put a price on these paintings? Two hundred million? Five hundred million? A billion?

I was even more astonished, therefore by the fact that they were literally right in front of my very face! Inches away! “Ah,” you say, “inches away through the protective glass barrier.”

No. No barrier. In fact hardly any barrier at all—just an ankle-high black wire about four feet from the wall. I could have stepped over it and in two seconds be feeling the texture of, say, Van Gogh’s “Self-portait.”

This painting alone must be worth over a hundred million dollars. A hundred million dollars.

Okay, there were men with machine guns stationed at every door, or at least beefy security guards with guns in each room.

Try university grads. That’s right, as I type, a university grad is protecting Whistler’s Mother. One in each room, to be sure, but these kids couldn’t guard a Starbuck’s.

But then it hit me in a flash: I knew why this was the case. They had expert reproducers paint from the real painting and have the real ones all locked safely away in a vault in the basement.

That, my friends, is all I can figure.

Maybe I should have stroked Vincent’s face, because he's turning in his grave.

New project

Status: relationship

Experiment: glasses of scotch consumed + 7 days in a row + not enough sushi + rapidly losing weight (preliminary clinical weight loss assessment: satisfactory/good)

=

?

Results to be announced.

Soundtrack of my life?

Since Offramp, Pat Metheny has been pretty steady in being the dude I turn to in the wee hours.

Sorry, Frank.

On another note: I will be spending my 50th (that's so silly as a benchmark--it's the New 70) with my beloved in France. Nope, turning 50 on William Blake's birthday in the company of someone infinitely more beautiful can't be all that bad.

Ear Candy

As a former musician and composer (well, I still compose this and that but don’t play in any pro capacity any more) and furthermore being a recording engineer of sorts, it really struck me tonight just how important the engineering is.

The stereo “spread” . . . well, can I even mention it, being so out of touch these days? Because there’s 5.2 Surround Sound and even 7.0 Surround Sound. That involves seven speakers. I hail from a generation that worshipped quadrophonia and slightly before, eight-track players...

To me it’s always been stereo and headphones. Listening to the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” on my very nice Sony headphones yesterday was an exercise in horror. Even the stereo mix sounds like a pack of wolves — even though the music was fantastic. Goes always to the Beethoven+synthesizer+digital tape deck argument. How much better would they have done it if they’d had the technology . . . I contrasted it with Sgt. Pepper's and was blown away at the technological prowess, literally within a year of the Beach Boys' album, between the two. Sounds like the Beach Boys' crew were a bunch of rubes who'd had too many mint juleps.

But there are some people that seem to delight in producing the best possible stereo mix — literally a Smörgåsbord for your ears. For the iPod generation, this really should matter. This means that the vocals aren’t drowned by the horns or the drums are too loud, or everything is echoey . . . yes, minor concerns, but put yourself on headphones at volume 10 and your brain will quickly jump to hear the music mixed the finest way possible.

And if you know me you’ll know that the benchmark for all this is Steely Dan. And Donald Fagen’s “Morph the Cat” is just an incredible illustration of the finest audio production that can be provided for us poor audiophiles without a $45,000 Bang & Olufsen setup. It sounds like he’s personally in my head, and oh, he decided to bring along a few musicians, and could I maybe serve some St. Emilion for the dudes?

Oh, almost forgot. Yeah, I’m back in Montreal