Chocolate Work

 

I told you I think that the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was celebrated big time here, but I haven't mentioned that it was also celebrated in an art form that has become very popular recently.  Chocolate.

Patrick Roger is the Rembrandt of this genre.  Everything you see in the picture above is chocolate.  The spray cans.  The wall.  The graffiti.  This is the window of his rue de Rennes boutique.

  

In the boutique on Boulevard St-Germain, he varied the theme with a Simpsonian twist. (Forgive the glare off the glass, please.)

 

While Roger is the master, the lesser lights are not to be ignored.  In this small shop on rue Pas de Mule in the Marais, nothing is what it seems.  This isn't really a pot of stuffed cabbage, is it, now?

Nor is this a pot of venison stew.

Quail stuffed with figs on the menu tonight?  Good luck.

And if you think this corkscrew will open your bottle you'll be thirsty a lot longer.

A nice little chevre to go with that wine?  Be careful opening that knife.

For those of you who might be planning to repaint your bedroom, some nice choices in blue, don't you agree?

These chocolatiers are playing games with us.  Hard to say who's winning.  But nobody's losing.

The Berlin Wall in Paris

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and it was celebrated in Paris by a concert and light show in the Place de la Concorde.  It was a glorious cold night and the walk along the riverside to the Place was wonderful.  When we got there we spent some time trying to maneuver into a good standing spot, but wound up in the middle of the crowd, since every direction we tried was blocked by police barriers.  It felt as if they were expecting another world-class revolution.

Invited guests apparently had seats near enough to both the musicians and the buildings to have gotten good photos, but the rest of us had to stand in a crowd several hundred meters away and I'm afraid these are the best I could do.  I swear everyone in Paris over six feet in height appeared last night, just to block the view.  

An elaborate and constantly shifting video was projected onto the facades of the Hotel Crillon and Naval Ministry.  It included news photos of the time, pictures of people celebrating, symbols of the fall of Communist rule in other Eastern European countries, graffiti from the Wall, and ended with a tribute to the European Union, with maps and flags.

  

The short concert began with a video of Mstislav Rostropovitch playing at Checkpoint Charlie in 1989 and continued with 27 European musicians playing in the Place, perched on stones meant to represent the fallen wall.  I think a chorus was also singing, although I didn't see them and it might have been recorded.

 

 

There were fewer spectators than I would have expected.  It was apparently shown on television, so maybe the cold night discouraged personal participation, but my impression is that it wasn't very widely advertised.  No one to whom I mentioned it this weekend had heard about it.  I wonder why?