Paris Update
Nuit Blanche 2009
WHITE NIGHT This year’s Nuit Blanche (Oct. 3), an all-night contemporary art experience held in various locations around Paris, promises to resolve some of the problems and annoyances of previous ones. Installations will be placed in parks, allowing space for … Read More
MEDIA MANIPULATION
MEDIA MANIPULATION? Former French Prime Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s new novel, La Princesse et le Président (Fallois-XO), about the love affair between a former French prime minister and a princess strongly resembling Lady Di, as the French still call her, … Read More
Catacombs
TEMPLE OF TOURISM DESECRATED The carefully piled skulls and other bones in Paris’s Catacombs, a popular tourism site, were violently attacked by vandals last weekend. The damage is so bad that the recently restored ossuary has been closed until further … Read More
Jazzebre
JAZZ GETAWAY The sunny southern town of Perpignan is the unlikely site of an ambitious jazz festival, Jazzèbre, to be held Oct. 1-25 in a variety of venues, including a moving train and a ruined château. Among the headliners are … Read More
Veilhan at Versailles and Design at Fontainebleau
“Le Carrosse” by Xavier Veilhan in the Cour d’Honneur at Versailles. Photo © Vincent Germond. © Veilhan/Adagp, Paris, 2009. “Confronting” historic sites with contemporary art is all the rage today. Last week, two royal châteaux – Versailles and Fontainebleau – … Read More
La brigade des incivilités
THE PIPI-CACA BRIGADE How very civilized! Some countries may have SWAT teams, but, as The Wall Street Journal recently noted, Paris has its own elite crime-fighting force: the brigade des incivilités. This squad of 88 specially trained plain-clothes law-enforcement officers … Read More
traffic accidents
WATCH YOUR STEP In 2008, 51 people, 29 of them pedestrians, were killed in traffic accidents in Paris, up from 37 in 2007, and 9,528 injured. As of Sept. 10, 29 people had died this year. The leading cause of … Read More
Willy Ronis
GOOD-BYE, WILLY “Humanist” photographer Willy Ronis, famed for his piquant, poignant black-and-white photos, snapped mostly in Paris’s working-class neighborhoods, died this week at the age of 99. When he was only 95, he was in fine form at the opening … Read More
Journées du Patrimoine
EVENT REMINDER Doors that are usually firmly shut to the public will swing open this weekend (Sept. 19-20) for the Journées du Patrimoine. Find out all you need to know on the official Web site. Favorite
TheCherryBlossomGirl
If Marie Antoinette had her own blog, designed by Jean-Luc Godard, it might look something like TheCherryBlossomGirl.com. The site is the creation of Alix Bancourt, a 24-year-old Parisian fashionista who might remind Nouvelle Vague fans of Godard’s muse Anna Karina … Read More