Tag: gertrude stein

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SABBATH PLUS ONE Cats + Neve Tzedek Tel Aviv

Angels Unaware

“Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land.” Song of Songs 2:12

The boundary lines have fallen in very pleasant places. Really, it’s the ultimate urban oasis full of fluttering sparrows and darting swallows between distant oaks. Resident tycoons occupy swathes of this prized real estate. Between the many mansions flow bougainvillea festooned rose and vine laneways, riots of colour and love amidst herbage and verdure. Acacia and camphire and poinciana and weeping fig trees camouflage gaily painted architecture. “Pink and saffron mallows, and the yellow and white daisies, and the violet and snow of the drooping cyclamen, and the gold of the genista” visualises Henry Van Dyke in Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land (1908). Colette captures horticultural wonder in Chéri, (1920), “Walking along in the shade of the acacia trees, between trellised roses and huge clumps of rhododendrons in full blaze.” And again in Gigi (1944): “Such a beautiful garden … such a beautiful garden.” She romanticises in The Cat (1944), “Above the withered stump draped with climbing plants, a flight of bees over the ivy flowers gave out a solemn cymbal note, the idenitical note of so many summers.” In Save Me the Waltz (1932), Zelda Fitzgerald’s protagonist Alabama cries, “I love little trees, arborvitae and juniper.”

Neve Tzedek was established in 1887, predating the official founding of Tel Aviv by over two decades. “Tz is pronounced as one letter sounding a bit like an ‘S’,” clarifies our driver Yaron Reuveny. “Neve Tzedek is beside the famous Carmel Market which is really trendy with fast food bars. It’s really good to hang out there in the evenings. There’s a good vibe!” Neve Tzedek was the first Jewish quarter to be built outside Jaffa. Fragrant with the perfumed aroma of myrrh and aloes and cassia, coloured by the turquoise of jacaranda and tamarisk and wisteria, Neve Tzedek is for the rich and fabulous and their feline friends (coffee loving techno music mad Israelis set the world record for cats-to-humans ratio). This enclave simply oozes unforced charm: streets named desire. Marco Koskas’ character Juliette in Goodbye Paris, Shalom Tel Aviv (2020) immediately adopts a cat called Jean-Pierre upon settling in Tel Aviv. Henri Cole opines in Orphic Paris (2016), “Cats are cats, briefly put, and their world is the world of cats through and through.” Truman Capote (1948) noticed in Other Voices, Other Rooms that they have “tawny astonished eyes”. No doubt Gertrude Stein would add, “Cats are cats are cats.” Quite so. Cats: the exquisite link in the Great Chain of Being. Colette’s The Cat once more, “The zone of shadow … the zone of shadow.”

“‘In that day each of you will invite your neighbour to sit under your vine and fig tree,’ declares the Lord Almighty.” Zechariah 3:10

(Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv).

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Dumpling Library + St Anne’s Square Belfast

Deep Love

Sunday morning opens with a cacophony of hymns on the drawing room family piano deep in the wild west. Things can only get better, as the Belfast singer D:Ream famously once hoped. Eucharist is just sliding into memory at Belfast Cathedral by the time we glide up to the east coast bright lights. Sunday lunch is just a block away in St Anne’s Square. Dumpling Library is a gourmet rather than literary experience. Gucci clad model Janice Blakley joins us for lunch.

Covering most Oriental bases our waitress confirms, “The Dumpling Library is Asian, Canton, Chinese and Malaysian fusion. Sundays are our busiest day.” A solitary unbusy unhurried diner sitting at an island table is reading Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss under a crimson heart dangling from the ceiling. Fried spinach wontons, Japanese tofu, prawn avocado tempura, salt chilli tofu, sweet potato chips … we’re on a (kimchi) roll at our window table.

Pastiche. Yawn. The most unoriginal cliché. An architectural criticism crime. Every glass building is a Meisian copy you might as well say. Neo Geo is neo Geo is neo Geo which sounds dogmatically Gertrude Steinian and rightly so. An accusation of pastiche – and St Anne’s Square has had more than its unjust desserts – is about as original as claiming somewhere has been “restored to its former glory”. What glory? When? Really? The only glory left is in knickerbocker glory. Jonathan Meades gets it spot on as always in his essay France in the collection Pedro and Ricky Come Again, 2020, “… worldwide scream of accusatory architects: ‘Pastiche!’ The architectural doxa decrees that pastiche is a Very Bad Thing Indeed. The collective convention forgets the history of architecture is the history of pastiche and theft: von Klenze’s Walhalla above the Danube is based on the Parthenon; G G Scott’s St Pancras borrows from Flemish cloth halls; Arras’s great squares are imitations of themselves.”

The brilliant critic rants on in his essay Obituaries in the same collection, “Architecture like poetry is founded in copyism and plagiarism – both vertical, looting the past; and horizontal, stealing from the present. The obscure past, of course, and the geographically distant present.” St Anne’s Square has proved an easy target for lazy uneducated reviewers. Completed in 2010, it is Taggarts Architects’ Portland stone and red brick clad with whimsically oversized foray into late postmodernist neo Georgianism. Giant quoins have form in this quarter: Sir Charles Lanyon’s Northern Bank, Thomas Jackson’s Scottish Amicable Life Building and Corn Exchange Building all belong to the bigger is better school. Funky, not fashionable. The buildings of St Anne’s Square are just tall enough and wide enough to create an intimate public realm with a floorplate gap perfectly framing the chamfered ambulatory of the cathedral and its 2007 stainless steel spirelet. Dumpling Library is one of several ground floor courtyard facing restaurants below apartments. This mixed use development also includes a 168 bedroom Ramada Hotel.

At least St Anne’s Cathedral has never been accused of being pastiche. Ever since Belfast architects Thomas Drew and William Henry Lynn drew up its Romanesque origins in 1868, this building evolved over the next 139 years into something quite unique, slightly hard to place yet paradoxically somehow of its place and time(s). Idiosyncratic, not imitative. “The cathedral is a huge moment,” declares Ireland’s leading neoclassical architect John O’Connell. In another church in another country in another discipline Dr Rowan Williams, Lord Oystermouth, tells us at Westminster Cathedral, “The deepest of the gifts to exchange is love.” We’re loving the new Belfast, especially the next generation murals.

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Musée des Arts Décoratifs Paris + Thierry Mugler

It’s Chemical

Writer Gertrude Stein quipped in the 1920s, “And so life in Paris began and as all roads lead to Paris, all of us are now there.” We’re at the opening of the Thierry Mugler show Couturissime at Musée des Arts Décoratifs (known by all by its acronym MAD). Everyone is here. Dynamic and dramatically lit displays are arranged in acts like an opera, ensembles ranging from sci-fi robotic garbs and aquatic fantasy fauna to even wilder flights of the designer’s imagination. Thierry Mugler’s work, whether overture or finale, is always original, often avant garde, sometimes subversive, never dull. Gertrude Stein also mentioned, “In Paris you have to have a formula.” In the 2020s we have: we’ve got chemistry.