Desperately Seeking Paris
If you have but one day in Paris, I'd recommend you take yourself over to the Pantheon, a magnificent Neoclassical building with soaring Corinthian columns and a stunning underground crypt. Here is where the great and good of France are nobly enshrined. Luminaries such as Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola.
Read MoreAt this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition, Picasso Sculpture, at the Museum of Modern Art through February 7, 2016, the viewer is treated to wonderful insights into the artist’s work. It's an epic showing of 140 pieces, arranged chronologically, with the sculptures occupying the museum’s entire fourth floor. What becomes clear as you walk from gallery to gallery is that sculpting was an integral, if spasmodic, part of Picasso'slife. In 1902, at the age of twenty and still living in Barcelona, he created a clay model known as Seated Woman. Five years on, Picasso would have a mind-altering moment when he visited the collection of African and Oceanic sculptures at the Musée du Trocadero in Paris. That visit, which came at the suggestion of the great painter André Derain, stimulated the young Picasso to try his hand at wood carving.
Read MoreHello Everybody: Hope your Thanksgiving Day left you with a heart full of gratitude for the wonderful hours spent with family and friends. I know mine did.
What follows, is another clip from the cutting room floor. An incident that happened the day I went back to Ryer Avenue searching for my roots, or, more specifically, searching for what had been my first home, what social scientists call the "uber" place. When I left you lastweek, I had found myself on the block, with no one around. Here goes!
Read MoreAs many of you know, She Writes Press will publish Veronica’s Grave: A Daughter’s Memoir May 9, 2016. What you may not know is that in order to ready the original 140,000-word manuscript for publication, it had to be cut down to size. A process leaving thousands of words lying on the cutting room floor. Why so? As explained by my brilliant editor, Elizabeth Kracht of Kimberley Cameron & Associates in San Francisco, no one would buy such a lengthy memoir from a debut author—not even a beautifully written literary memoir that touches the heart, not even a book that could make a difference in the world of grieving children.
Read MoreWhen the Whitney Museum of American Art came into view, it, quite literally, took my breath away. Designed by the world-famous architect Renzo Piano, the museum -- all steel and glass, all light and air-- is a beauty. With its welcoming plaza andterraces extending from the fifth and sixth floors over the High Line, the Whitney climbs and soars above a lively neighborhood scene on Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking district. What a welcome change for what's widely-regarded to be an unsurpassed collection of modern and contemporary art. And what a fitting tribute.
Read MoreFrom summer into fall, throngs of visitors have found their way through the front doors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, drawn in part by the arrival ofthe sumptuous exhibition: Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends. Consisting of approximately 90 works on paper and canvas, the exhibition was primarily a joint venture between the Met and the National Portrait Gallery of London, with other works drawn from smaller museums and private collections. Of course, for anyone like myself, desperately seeking Paris, the question arises: Wasn’t John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) an American artist? You could say so, but it’s complicated.
Read MoreHave I told you about the perils of blogging? Since Labor Day, I've been sending you a post each week, not knowing that they were not being delivered by the mailing service. If blogging sounds simple, trust me, it's not. In the meantime, my apologies. Essentially, subscribers were notgetting Sunday morning updates via email. Yet those who are friends on Facebook could read the posts there. What a mess, what a muddle. But now, hoping against hope that this snafu is behind me, let me belatedly say welcome back! Sorry its taken this long. Here's the first one that you missed.
Read MoreBonjour, Paris! The city sleeps late on Sunday in the Marais. This disinclination to rise and shine offers a visitor a rare chance to wander the deserted streets without doing much more than tracking shadows edging down the sides of the buildings.
Read MoreIf you have but one day to spend in New York, do what Pope Francis did and visit the 9/11 Memorial Plaza and Museum. Situated in what may well be the hippest, most dynamic, part of town, the neighborhood surrounding the memorial is now home to 64,000 residents, including many families. Before the year 2000, a mere 22,900 residents called this Wall Street—Battery Park area home.
Read MoreWherever I turned last week, from You Tube to the Wall Street Journal, there was talk ofediting your life, your home, your wardrobe -- talk of Les Classiques. The siren song of Less is Best floated in the air. Along with suggestions that when adding items to your wardrobe, to choose pieces that not only make you feel good and are comfortable, but are stylish and will stand the test of time. In other words, traditional pieces--Les Classiques.
Read MoreA highlight of a trip to Paris last summer was a visit to the Musée Picasso. Having been undergoing years of renovation, modernization andexpansion, the museum reopened October 25, 2014. Recreating museums and giving them a whole new life is something the French do exceedingly well; indeed, they do it without compare. Turning up an hour before the opening time—Not until eleven, monsieur? —gave me an excuse to linger over coffee at a small café, Le Saint Gervais, down the block from the museum, at the corner of rue Vieille du Temple. Taking a sidewalk table, I did little more than sit 'n' sip, if keeping an eye on a couple catching the morning rays in a secluded park across the street. All of which made for a quintessentially Parisian moment for this flaneuse/bloggeuse.
Read MoreThe opening of a site-specific exhibit by the French artist, Pierre Huyghe, on the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a harbinger of spring. I couldn't wait to see it. This is the third installation in a series of works commissioned by the museum, allof which are meant toexplore the relationship of the rooftop to its environs -- that is, to Central Park and to the city.
Read MoreFrédéric Tcheng’s terrific documentary, 'Dior and I,' tracks the eight-week lead up to Raf Simon’s debut collection for Dior in 2012. By way of confession, I have no particular interest in haute couture, nor have I ever hungered after a frock I saw paraded on a runway. But I am a huge fan of fashion documentaries, an interest that goes back twenty years to 'Unzipped,’ a glimpse at the 1994 fall collection—the Eskimo look was much in vogue—by the designer Isaac Mizrahi. The film was hilarious, a revelation; I was hooked. After that came 'The September Issue' (2009) a documentary about the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour, and her team of editors who rule the world of high fashion. All of which meant I could hardly wait to see ‘Dior and I,' which opened the Tribeca Film Festival April 17th.
Read MoreStopping to check out a restaurant under construction, I meet the charming Alexandra Pollet, the owner of Monte Carlo who, having spent many years in the hospitality industry in France, was brought to New York ten years ago by the Waldorf-Astoria to be the food and beverage director at the legendary 'Bull and Bear Steakhouse.' The same 'Bull and Bear' that in the early part of the twentieth century had been the after-the-close club of the titans of Wall Street. The same that in the 60s had been the cafe of choice for the liquid lunches of the 'Mad Men' of nearby Madison Avenue.
Read More‘An American in Paris', a big-hearted exuberant musical with gorgeous music, dance-drunk choreography and outstanding performances, has raised the bar for excellence on Broadway. I was swept away. Following a highly successful forty-day run—a sellout—in Paris at the Chatelet Theater, it arrived a few weeks ago at the Palace Theater on Broadway.
Read MoreAt first sighting, Cherche Midi—aqua blue awnings, antiqued wood paneling reminiscent of Paris, and a menu bounded by a simple glass box—looks so much a part of the neighborhood that you would think it had been there for years. Which is not the case. Indeed, at the corner of East Houston and Bowery, the restaurant is an upstart on the Lower East Side, having opened its doors in June 2014. Speaking of doors, do not be put off by the plain-vanilla metal front door, so utterly plain my companion, mistaking it for a service entrance, suggested we walk around the corner to find the front door. Don't do that.
Read MoreLast week, on a day with China-blue skies and temperatures in the upper 60s, I headed for the Frick Museum to see the exhibition: “Coypel’s Don Quixote Tapestries: Illustrating a Spanish novel in Eighteenth- Century France.”
Read MoreHello Everyone! As most of you know, I'm in the final stages of revising a memoir, readying it for publication. Only last week I read that the medical establishment has identified a new malady affecting writers: Revision Brain Syndrome. I've got it bad!
Over the past year, I've also learned from my brilliant editor, Elizabeth K. Kracht at Kimberley Cameron and Associates Literary Agency, that there are segments in every manuscript that need to be refined, segments that need to be amplified, and segments, no matter how wonderful, that need to be ditched.
But rather than hit DELETE on one of those pieces, I thought I'd share it with you, as it has to do with a remarkable person, Barbra Streisand, at a breakthrough moment in her career. A moment I was privileged to witness.
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The opening of the Richard Taittinger Gallery on Tuesday, March 3rd was propitious, or so I thought, coming as it did the same week as the opening of the 17th Annual Armory Show. Hosted at Piers 92 and 94 on the ice-bound Hudson River, the Armory show attracted more than 200 top-flight galleries from around the world. With so many important works of art from the 20th and 21st centuries on display, thousands turned out despite the bitter cold, the snow and ice.
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