The unusual exhibition “Drawing Machines” at the Musée des Arts et Métiers interprets its title in a variety of ways in an effort “to portray the timeless magic of drawing.” There are machines designed to help artists draw. There are … Read More
My wife Nancy used to be close friends with an American woman who had lived in Paris in the late 1940s and early ’50s. One day they were talking about what the city was like back then, and the older … Read More
Visitors to “Tenue Correcte Exigée: Quand le Vêtement Fait Scandale” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs are greeted with insults in many languages splashed like graffiti on the walls: “What’s that you’re wearing? A sack?” “Fashion faux pas!” “Don’t you … Read More
Written in script on the menu of Sense Eat, an Italian vegetarian restaurant near Odéon, is a quote from Albert Einstein: “It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, … Read More
For my most recent birthday, a friend gave me a bottle of a Pauillac grand cru classé from 1986. If you don’t have a friend like that, you should get one. It’s not the kind of wine that I drink … Read More
It only lasted a couple of years, but the fortnightly newspaper The Paris Metro (1976-78) left its mark on Paris’s expatriate community and spawned many talented writers, editors, photographers and graphic artists who went on to leave their own mark … Read More
THIS RESTAURANT CLOSED ON NOVEMBER 8, 2019. Opening a quality restaurant in a train station is a fantastic idea. Three-star chef Éric Frechon has already done it with great elegance at Lazare in the Gare Saint Lazare, and now another … Read More
As though we didn’t have enough problems in Paris already, what with facing a cold snap, eyeing a presidential election in May and stomaching a surge in the rat population, now we have wolves roaming the streets. Or at least … Read More
Seeing the exhibition “The Spirit of the Bauhaus” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs is the next best thing to going to the famous school itself, which would, of course, be impossible, since it was shut down in 1933 after Ludwig Mies van der Rohe refused to submit to Nazi conditions, which included the dismissal of one of its professors, Wassily Kandinsky, considered a “degenerate artist.”
Yasmina Reza is best known as a playwright, with worldwide successes such as Art (1994), currently enjoying a second run on the West End London stage (a rare distinction for a living French writer), and God of Carnage (2006), which was staged both in London and on Broadway, and was made into the film Carnage by Roman Polanski in 2011. In France, however, Reza also maintains a distinguished reputation as a novelist. Her latest offering, her eighth novel, Babylone, recently won the coveted Renaudot literary prize.
