Frenchy Goes To A French Restaurant!

I always felt there were very few real French restaurants in LA, as they're usually too Californified. Each time I see a French restaurant that offers crabcakes or seared mahi-mahi I know right away it's been Californifusionified and I don't need to go to French restaurant for this, merci bien. Some of them are OK, like Little Next Door or Monsieur Marcel, but nothing to write home about ("Dear Mom, I've been to a French restaurant, they do steak frites for $44! plus tax and tip, they don't know what service compris means!").
But for the past few months there has been growing anticipation about the opening of Anisette, the new venture of Alain Giraud from Bastide fame. Where I've never eaten, but like everyone else I've been waiting for Anisette to open. Mostly because Alain Giraud, being a neighbor, also frequents my beloved Maison du Pain which I see as a sure indication of good taste (see how humble I am?).

Anyway, Sunday last week my houseguest took me there for dinner to my greatest delight. The decor is very Disneyfied, an LA interior decorator version of what a French brasserie looks like (the wallpaper is very un-French for example, but 19th century US, the drawer handles behind the bar are typically American, etc), but it's nevertheless beautiful and also feels comfy despite the very high ceilings. Nice tiled floor, dark wood everywhere, mirrors and balloon-globed chandeliers, dark red booths. The place was packed to the rafters ( at 7.30 PM on a Sunday evening of the 4th of July weekend, during recession times) so we ate at the bar. We had no difficulty finding 2 stools at the end, not too far from the waiters/busboys station.
I sat right in front of the beer tap so I could see they misspelled "Hoegaarden" but I'm probably the only person who notices that type of detail.
Unlike in restaurants back home, you can have the full menu while dining at the bar, and they give you your own fabric (not paper) tablecloth. Classy!

Our waitress/bartender was adorably sweet and trying very hard to recommend her favorite dishes. Also, my favorite LA waiter, Karl, was on hand. Karl is my favorite LA waiter because 1) he's from my hometown, and never in 20 years have I ever met another escapee from there and 2) He left Fraiche to come and work for Alain Giraud "as soon as I knew he was hiring", which shows how well-liked Giraud is among the LA French restaurant and bakery workers.
There were some other French waiters around, and Alain Giraud himself was buzzing around. He's easily recognizable if you are wondering, he's the most French-looking middle-aged gentleman ever, and he wears civvies (hell, he's the boss, he can!) not a chef outfit.

We shared a sweetbreads appetizer that was to die for. They come with a fabulous sauce (I'd surmise butter and veal stock), very tender sliced carrots and extremely fresh petite peas. The sweetbreads themselves were soft but slightly crunchy, very delicate and flavorful all at once. Clearly the best sweetbreads I had in a long, long time, breathtakingly well-prepared and satisfying. The portion is rather small, French-style, as an appetizer should be, but fear not! Gargantuan-stomached reader! The entrees are American -sized, so you won't starve.
The bread was good, though it wasn't a baguette but a combination of pain de campagne and olive bread.

The only deception of the evening came when our lovely waitress came desolately to tell me the Homard Thermidor had run out. Not surprising, since at $28 it's more than reasonably priced for a grilled Maine lobster. She tried very hard to win me over to the cod, but my heart was set on the moules frites, same as my dinner companion.
They came in a huge Staub cast-iron pot designed like a giant mussel, and a nice cornet of very good fries. Those are very good garlicky moules frites, but honestly it's hard to screw up such a simple dish.
Nevertheless they were very tasty and we ate every single one of them, then did the unthinkable in France (bad manners! don't try this in Paris!) we dunked our cornet of French fries in the broth and ate them drenched in an onion, wine, mussel broth, cream and garlic sauce that makes life worth living.

For dessert I got the Foret Noire, not to be confused with what passes for Black Forest Cake in the US. The chocolate cake was light and airy, as was the whipped cream and the chocolate mousse, (it's not supposed to be ganache or buttercream) and the cherries (griottes) were macerated in kirsch, which was also used to moist the cake. Such a perfect execution at Anisette, it made me feel like I was in Alsace.
My friend had the vacherin, which is the Anisette rendition, a Derrida-inspired, deconstructed idea of a vacherin (normally vacherin is made of ice cream encased in a meringue box-like crust with fresh fruit and whipped cream). The ice cream was lavender, very subtle yet intensely flavored, topped with whipped cream, tiny slivers of teardrop-shaped meringue, and strawberries.

For drinks I had a glass of a 2005 Graves (a white Bordeaux) and my friend a Hoegaarden on tap. I finished with an excellent decaf espresso that was neither watery nor tasted like burnt rubber. Excellent, really.
The service was very sweet and attentive, they paid attention to the pace of our eating to replenish our glasses, including the water, to take away the mussel shells, etc. I did have to ask again our waitress for the espresso to come at the same time as my dessert, so she flagged the busboy, but given how packed the place was it's really not a big deal. We never had to wait for long for anything. And as much as I said how adorable our waitress was, and that I was happy to see Karl who recognized me and came by to say hi, the service wasn't the in-your-face type of hovering clueless friendly actor you find so often in LA. Waiters at Anisette are clearly professionals, not people hating their day job, so that was nice.
Another great thing is despite the high ceilings and how very large the restaurant is, it wasn't noisy even though it was totally crowded. It's so rare to find a restaurant in LA (well, Santa Monica) where you can have a decent conversation without having to scream at the top of your lungs.
The one and only thing that was a bit off for me was that I found the food rather salty, but I almost never put any salt when I cook at home (to the point I'm starting to be turned off cheese as it's usually very salty).

No restaurant experience is complete without a visit to the Ladies Room, and the experience at Anisette is cinematic. Not that you feel like you're in an Almodovar movie (the only ones where characters use bathrooms ever) but because upstairs there was a "dame-pipi" (a bathroom attendant) to show you the door. She looked beautifully decayed, with flaming dyed red hair, in tired makeup, out of a 1970s movie, silently gesturing with an ample arm movement toward the stall that was available. It felt...beautiful. This woman could be in a Fassbinder movie, if Fassbinder was still alive.

So all in all, a great experience. Anisette is a brasserie, so the food is solid, extremely good and features very-well executed French classic.s It's not adventurous nor imaginative but plainly excellent. The place to celebrate a Bastille Day breakfast, and if I get my car back from the shop on Monday this is where you'll find me for a morning coffee next week.

Pix: Anisette's doorway, the kitchens, the bathroom floor, the dame-pipi, and a humongous lobster from the raw bar.

Don't Forget The Poll!

At the bottom of the page, our new Summer poll: what LA museum is the coolest? You have 5 more days to vote!
Meanwhile, I'm having car troubles again so I'm not sure whether I'll make it to any opening this weekend. Grumble, grumble...

Bruce Conner RIP - Devo "Mongoloid"

Bruce Conner passed away a couple of days ago. He had a show in LA last Summer at Michael Kohn gallery. In Europe he was mostly known as an experimental filmmaker, and his photos of the San Francisco punk scenes are not very well-known there.
He also made some punk rock videos, including the "Mongoloid" one for Devo. Hopefully if I haven't screwed up with code you should be able to watch it.

Summer Is Here Part Deux

Summertime la la la la la... it's hot outside, we're feeling lazy, the artworld frenzy sucks, and we're hoping that when the recession starts to be fully felt there will be an art market crash, so the serious artists can be finally focused on. In passing, for those of you who have wondered why it hadn't happened yet, remember each time there's a stock market crash or a recession, the art market follows suit one to two years later, when all the investors who bought art start enduring too many losses elsewhere, need liquidity and start to try cashing in their quadruple-time (and many more) flipped masterpieces and go on inundating auction houses with their stock.

Anyway, it's not what you want to think about during Summer dear beloved FBC! readers.
I've decided first of all to come up with another idiotic poll: what LA museum has the best air-conditioning system to take refuge in during heatwaves? If this poll is successful next one would be open to international readers suggestion (FBC! spent the 2003 heatwave in Paris buried inside the Islamic Art department on the bench overlooking a magnificent Persian rug. I recommend it wholeheartedly).

What else do you need to occupy your Summer with? I suggest you reflect on the life and work of Senator Jessie Helms who blessedly left this Earth this weekend to pollute and contaminate Hell with his bigoted rhetoric. I know, we're not supposed to rejoice when people die. But hey, it's Jesse Helms! I suggest you read the vulgar prose recorded for posterity in Congressional Record, Washington DC, 18 May 1989, vol. 135, no. 64 (you cannot find it online). That the one where he refers to Andres Serrano as "a jerk" and "a bird" so if a Senator can address Congress and the President in such choice terms, I guess I can feel entitled to my own free speech and refer to the late Senator as "that old fascist asshole".

What else should you do this Summer? If you're in LA have a meal at Anisette, the new French brasserie that opened in Santa Monica recently. Review to come soon!
You can also read books, such as Artists Estates, Reputations In Trust. It's very instructive, first as a view into many art-historically half-forgotten secondary figures (Ferren, Ossorio for example) and also, for all artists alive, it's full of helpful tips and suggestions about what to do with their works after their passing. The US tax system is pretty horrible for visual artists, far more than it could be for a writer or musician for example, and the book is very good at explaining the pitfalls of trusts versus foundations versus wills versus no planning, depending on the degree of notoriety the artists has achieved. For each artist there's a small bio as well as the bios of the people running their estate.
I'm glad it also help make the record straights concerning artist widows. No they are not all greedy monsters here to deprive the art market, curators, collectors and youngish illuminated romantic artists of their perceived birthright as lovers of the artist works. They are family members who suffered in silence their spouses whims, irascible tempers, infidelity and such like to be subsequently whacked by enormous estate taxes, trying to figure out expensive inventories and catalogues raisonnes to be made while Uncle Sam took all the cash available that could have been used for the task. I don't envy any artist widow's task, let me tell you.

Now if you want some beautiful but less taxing reading, I'd recommend Tove Jansson's The Summer Book. Tove Jansson was the creator of the immortal Moomintroll series, a personal favorite of FBC! The Summer Book isn't a children book, but a delightful piece of poetry in prose where nothing much happen except some subdued, unspoken pain that provides the backbone to a slow ode to passing time. Beautiful.

Then you can trek to Altadena and get a gelato at Bulgarini (try the pistachio flavor) or go to La Maison du Pain on Pico and Ridgeley for a macaron to accompany your espresso. While doing so you can muse on the bizarre pairing of High Energy Construct and Solway Jones and their new gallery opening in Chinatown in September. The announcement for their first group show pairs established blue chip artworks by dead artists (probably some works on paper) with youngish artists for whom it may be their one and only ever proximity with Marcel Duchamp in print. It doesn't sound too promising nor interesting if you ask me. Like drinking hot chocolate while eating Roquefort cheese. It's likely FBC! will be somewhere else on that evening but I'm not even curious to go see that show.

Anyway check this space for more Summer stuff, er, like this Summer?

Summer in LA and Elsewhere!

I hope you had a great 4th of July weekend, dear faithful readers, and that unlike mine it was filled with art.
FBC! got an unexpected out-of-town guest and was therefore away from the computer, so no opportunities for me to write anything and let you know what was going on.

There's a slew of FBC! pals having shows up currently, or upcoming group shows going on. First of all, Roger Dickes who's also the curator of the Glendale College Gallery had a show opening 10 days ago in Eagle Rock. It's called Firmament Avenue and you can find all the details here. He's also in a group show but I don't have the info immediately handy.
Another old FBC! pal, Donald Morgan (see pix) had a sculpture show opening in Portland (Oregon), Hunters and Collectors (remember that band?) at Rocks Box last Saturday. In passing, FBC! says hello! to the vibrant Portland art community and its flagship blog, Portland Art.
Closer to us here in LA Nancy Popp and the lovely LA Art Girls are having an opening at Phantom Galleries on Thursday.

As it is the case every Summer in LA, there are way too many openings coming up during the next couple of months. You see in NYC they (galleries, collectors, curators, parasites, gawkers, Fitzgerald readers) all go up to the Hamptons (where they also open stuff up and have funny art fairs, but let's forget the Hamptons microcosmos one minute, OK?), in London they go abroad, in Paris they go to the country and the galleries in all those places just have some guest-curated Summer group shows, usually kinda mediocre as they are a slapdash juxtaposition of the gallery inventory and the curators' best friends.
So it doesn't feel like work and you don't feel obligated to go to every single bloody opening there is.

In LA, not such chance, so every weekend is spent in between the friendly stuff happening in NELA, the one-step-above shows in Chinatown, the trendy ones in Culver City, WeHo, etc and the blue chip ones on the West Side. The problem is, in LA you have to pollute the planet and drive to see all those things. Sure there are still some Summer group shows, but the practice isn't too widespread. So as an alternative, I suggest you forget going to every single one of them, but just follow FBC!'s selection of ONE to THREE shows every week AT BEST. They come in addition to the aforementioned FBC! pals shows, those one are mandatory.

So this weekend, it's super easy! There's:

1. Group show at Steve Turner curated by the gallery new director, legendary curator Carol Ann Klonarides (in passing the website still sucks). Steve Turner was my second-favorite LA gallery after Susan Vielmetter, so with Carol Ann at the helm it should be even more interesting.
2. The Architecture of John Lautner at the Hammer.
3. The LA Art Girls at Phantom Gallery! Check the website for the location.

Happy Canada Day, and a Boing Boing Cautionary Tale!

Happy Canada Day to my immense Canadian readership (Hi Daniel! Hi Julie! Hi Vish!) and to Jeff Wall who doesn't read me, but he's The Artworld Famous Canadian as well as an immense artist.
I have no idea what Canadians do on their national holidays - eat poutine, pour maple syrup over pancakes, drink Canadian beer, listen to Celine Dion Skinny Puppy, watch Keanu Reeves Pamela Anderson?
I know that some Canadians, even on their national holiday, they fight for free speech, against censorship, want free copyrights and all that, like the resident Canadian at Boing Boing.

[Note to my French readers: Boing Boing is the blog Liberation freely pilfers from when they put weird news on their front page. Shows the level of serious journalism they have at Libe nowadays].

Now the funny thing is there's some kind of internal "unpublishing" going on at Boing Boing over some totally incomprehensible matter (they erased the contributions of someone they don't like, the someone raised a stir, both parties pretend the other knows why/ah no I have no idea what's going on, and all that).

As most internet wars and debates, it's rather funny. Like, you know, being "de-friended" on Facebook or Myspace about something posted on a blog that had nothing to do with the "de-friender" (or is it "the un-friender"?). As far as pettiness goes it's amusing. I think.
Yours truly learned about that Boing Boing story last night by logging on the LAT website (in passing, Zell-decimated LAT, don't you have better news to inform readers about than bloggers wars? Even if it's the most famous blog in the English-speaking hemisphere?).

So far the comments at Boing Boing on the topics clock past 500, and it's only mid-afternoon! Whatever Boing Boing do it's their problem, but I don't think they handled the thing well. It looks like a personal issue, they don't explain exactly what, so everyone is dying to know, and they refuse to explain further by arguing they don't want to embarrass the person in question. It's nice, but since so far they are mostly embarrassing themselves, I think they should offer a bit more info (such as "she did something too unethical in this or that matter and we feel we no longer can endorse/support her work, and yes maybe we made a mistake by deleting her posts about a year ago") and maybe update their post rather than have moderators chime in a few times in the hundred comments posted below their vague explanaition.

So what's the real problem? Not so much the bickering, secrecy and bad handling of the matter. Everyone will have forgotten it in a couple of months anyway. The real problem is that after a certain level of success, it becomes impossible for any enterprise, however friendly and sympathetic it may be, to keep on existing by the same rules (or absence thereof) one previously obeyed in more amateurish times.
Yes, Web 2.0 has deeply upset the news landscape (and much more!), old/traditional media going through a horrid transition in the meantime.
Yes it's cool, everyone with/out credentials like yours truly can now publish and disseminate to the world at large whatever opinions, ideas, erroneous facts, myth, gossip, stories and beliefs they want. Without obeying any of Journalism 101 rules and guidelines, since blogs are initially just personal soapboxes. But you cannot have your cake and it eat, be proud of being a "citizen-journalist" (whatever that means) and disregard safeguards long-established for a reason.
When you do, you end up being the NYT and the Jayson Blair story, not that the NYT didn't recover from it. In their particular case, Boing Boing bloggers mishandled something that looks like a personal matter blown out of context; because they acted like a bunch of amateurish friends having a fight, and forgetting they acted in public while having that fight.

In the end it's not the bottom/the truth of the story that is so important, not whether Boing Boing bloggers were fair or not, honest or not, but how the way they acted made them look . It made them look as opaque, swift and vague as the corporations they routinely critique on their pages, a reminder that now the joyous time is over when Boing Boing was the cool debunker of censorship, valiantly fighting corporate greed it once was (and is still striving to be).
Boing Boing, It's time to grow up*.
Being a big blog with lots of advertisement, tons of readers, and linked everywhere brings in responsibility, I should think, even in dealing with a one-year-after-the-fact, attention-seeking other blogger fact. So get your act together, and even if it hurts like hell, publish a reasonable explanation, with more information and details, about why/how you did what you did, and be classy and elegant about it. Offer Violet Blue a right to respond on your pages.

*I couldn't resist writing this phrase. Try to pronounce it in Darth Vader's voice, you'll understand my bubbly delight!

Your Social Life In Paris!

Hello dear patient FBC! readers!

So I'm finally almost over the jetlag and able to write without too many typos. As many as usual, but less than what I produced last week in the few emails I've sent to my friends (sorry guys).
It's almost July, and the loaded amongst you want to know, what is it that's good in Paris? Where should I direct my post-shopping sore feet and look at decent art

Well, my Frenchy self in fact spent very little time there, stuck that I was with depressing family duties in Normandy. I've done only ONE art thing in Paris, and it was outside Paris proper: I went to see the fabulous Legende show at the Domaine de Chamarande, curated by FBC!'s pal and legendary curator Alexis Vaillant. It's totally worth taking a suburban train and do a 45 minutes ride (on weekends) to that tiny village. I'll review the show soonish and will put up as many pix as Blogger allows with this template.

Meanwhile, there were many good or interesting things to see in Paris, according to what my art friends there told me. I'm starting with the few ones I regret missing. First, the group show l'Argent at Le Plateau. Then the Bridget Riley retrospective at the Musee d'Art Moderne de La Ville de Paris (sorry, cannot link, server doesn't respond!), a show that would have been totally impossible 7 or 8 years ago, and now, thanks to shows such as Beyond Geometry, it's now OK again to like Op Art (a totally discredited movement when I was a student, to the point that we never even mentioned it in class).
Another show I regret missing is the Alain Sechas one at the Bourdelle museum in Paris, where he's exhibiting an animated sculpture you can see on his website (click on the Quicktime icon to watch a movie of the piece). Alain is a friend and one of a handful of French artists I find unfairly under-estimated. He is also showing at Sonsbeek 2008 this Summer, the sculpture festival in the Netherlands were, among others, Robert Smithson and Mike Kelley have created legendary pieces in the past.

In another lesser-known Paris museum, the Musee Maillol, was a show titled "China Gold", a very indecent and apt description, I guess, of the Western rush on the Chinese market, as it seems it is all what Chinese contemporary art is all about if we believe what we can read here and there in the Western art press (check James Elaine's blog on the Hammer site for a different point of view). I would have liked to see that show to de visu understand what this is all about, as there is in fact very little Chinese art to reach ours shores and whatever we're shown has a tendency to be derivative and be massively painting-oriented (and Pop-ish). Which I suspect is only the tip of the iceberg.

Lastly, they were 2 shows I didn't think about whatsoever, if only because they scream "Blue chip! Establishment! Boomers! Born-Again Catholics! Curators hailing from the decadent French aristocracy!" One was Richard Serra at the Grand Palais, where I'm sure his work must look fabulous compared to the much smaller space of BCAM. I used to really like Richard Serra, and I still do, and I think his work totally fits the monumentality of that type of space, but I'm not terribly excited about, hmm, the newness of it. If you follow my meaning. There's even good old Yve-Alain Bois interviewing Serra on the website. How about some youngish writer-curator to do the same?
The second show sounded so unappealing I never, for the life of me, would have even thought about seeing it, it's the Spirituality-Is-The-New-Art-Religion-Confusion at the Pompidou. The banner is atrociously ugly, for one thing. And the subject is the most boring this side of Painting Is Dead But Is Still Alive.
But, according to friends who saw it, some of the works are to die for, even if they are clearly miscast within the concept.

Lastly, I didn't have the opportunity to see the tastefully titled Superdome at the Palais de Tokyo, but according to friends it's just as well, though there's also a Jonathan Monk solo show, whose work I adore. There's also an installation by infamous Christoph Büchel. Crazy the number of Swiss artists showing there since Marc-Olivier Wahler became director there. Did you know it yourself, that Swiss art was the most fabulous in the world?

Neither could I go gallery-hopping so I cannot really tell you what to go see in Paris galleries, but I'd like to signal to your attention the opening of a new gallery, Gaudel de Sampa. The program looks promising. And of course, there's Reena Spaulings at Chantal Crousel


Pix: The entrance to the castle in Chamarande, the inside of the Chapel (it has a very good sound installation), and a view of the Paris sky above the Seine river and the Grand Palais.