Le plissé Dior, with its elastic bands
A friend of mine, who used to be men’s designer for Lanvin and for Dior has created his own mask with “Le plissé Dior”. He kindly shared his tips with us.Read More
A poem on Paris by Henri Cole
Henri Cole in the Luxembourg gardens
Born in Fukuoka, Japan in 1956, from a French-Armenian mother and an American father, Henri Cole has taught poetry at the University of Ohio, Harvard and Yale. He currently lives in Boston but teaches at Claremont McKenna college in California. He travels to Paris three or four times a year for a fortnight and this is where he likes to write and would be confined if he’d had a flight to travel here. He has kindly offered to all of us a poem, “Paris is my Seroquel“, which will appear in his tenth book “Blizzard” to be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It had originally appeared in ” Poems of Paris” published last year by Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets.Read More
My daily confinement
The chestnut trees are burgeoning and I watch them everyday from my kitchen window
Since the beginning of the week, I have been watching the chestnut trees burgeoning. It is an unequaled pleasure. Prisoners always mention that they loose track of time. This has happened to me of course and I mix days since I have no appointments. I keep a routine of listening to France Culture and France Musique radio stations which have developed clever ways of transmitting without hardly any staff on duty except for the news. Most reporters speak from their homes thanks to electronic devices. I am also obsessed with smells and cleanliness and make a point of walking everyday around the block. And walking up the five floors!Read More
News from around the world
Marc Riboud, “Bal à Beida”, Beijing University, 1957, at Galerie Polka Paris © Marc Riboud
The great advantage of this Pandemic (if any), is that everyone calls each other and speaks out. And the greatest news of the day is the publication on March 23 (yesterday) of Woody Allen’s Memoirs: “Apropos of Nothing”. I remember Woody announcing to me in 1987, that Mia was pregnant. He was stunned at the time because she had supposedly been told by her gynecologist that she could not have children anymore… Anyway, it seems that the truth will at last be heard and this is thanks to Jeannette Seaver, the publisher of Arcade books, which was from 1988 until the death of its founder Dick Seaver in 2008, one of the greatest small publishing houses in New York. I met them very early on, because Jeannette is French and she always had a weakness for our country. Arcade editor Jeannette Seaver said in a statement: “In this strange time, when truth is too often dismissed as ‘fake news,’ we as publishers prefer to give voice to a respected artist, rather than bow to those determined to silence him.”
Richard Seaver made himself a name for publishing Beckett and Ionesco first in the United States in the Merlin quarterly braving the then censorship. He went on to publish Genet, Pinter and Miller at Grove Press. It makes so much sense that Woody Allen should now be published by Jeannette, at a time when Maccarthyism has resumed in the US (as Woody calls the MeToo movement). It seems that “Apropos of Nothing” cannot be ordered in France yet. So if you find a copy, please send it to me… And for the time being I will have to be happy with the page six excerpts sent by my dear friend Charles Kaiser.
A recipe a week: aillade de veau
L’aillade de veau by Agathe Velay in Lot et Garonne
There is no need to write about restaurants at the moment, and yet it is important to keep eating well and to share cooking moments with your dear ones. I know that you love seeing food in these pages, so I will send you an easy recipe every week which you can prepare and feel like you are in deep France. The first one was sent by my niece Marguerite Velay who, instead of traveling to Saint Galen in Switzerland over the week-end, to Paris and Lausanne for her firm Easilys, which gives IT services to restaurants and hotels, is cooking with sister in law Agathe Velay in Lot et Garonne. The family house in Monflanquin, is surrounded by fields, in the area between Bergerac and Villeneuve Sur Lot, north of Agen, the town famous for its prunes. Read More
Agnès b moves East to the Grande Bibliothèque
Agnès b at 78, wearing her famous best selling cardigan
The opening of la fab on place Jean-Michel Basquiat was a festive yet discreet event. Designer Agnès b (the b comes from Christian Bourgois, her first husband), had always wanted to be a museum curator since she studied at Ecole du Louvre, but her successful career was achieved in casual ready to wear. The inventor of the famous cardigan with “pressions”, whose second husband Jean René de Fleurieu developed the distribution in Japan in the 1980’s, has now opened her own art center with a plan to exhibit progressively her 5 000 piece collection in the 700 square meters gallery. The first show ” La hardiesse” (boldness) includes some paintings by Gilbert & George, Jean Michel Basquiat, Pierre Klossowski, ceramics by Johan Creten, photographs by Malick Sidibé… her all time favorites.Read More
Latest pleasures from Paris in these odd times
Kilgarren Castle, Pembrokeshire, 1798-1799, National Trust
Hélène Rodocanachi was the anti heroin of the week. She could not go out and celebrate her 105 th birthday with children (Annick, Josselin and Olivier de Rohan) and stepchildren and was locked up in her retirement home in the Trocadero! This amazing lady lived through two World Wars with her first husband Duc de Rohan, an athlete and 80 m sprinter, who caught polio at a young age. After he died, she married André Rodocanachi, a French diplomat who took her to a posting in Venezuela in her sixties. She still goes to all museum exhibitions and was looking forward to the opening of the Turner show at Musée Jacquemart André, curated by David Blayney Brown which is sadly closed until better times.
A new publishing house and an entertaining novel
Philippine Cruse launches her new publishing house Herodios
To start a new publishing house in 2020 needs guts and this is what Philippine Cruse is proving today. At 42, she already has had a rich life. After an MA in Art history completed in Portland, Oregon, she passed her doctorate in French literature at the Sorbonne and went on to work in a bookstore, Alice, in Paris. In parallel, she organized the Festival “la Rentrée Littéraire” on the beach in Cap Ferret, where writers come to present their books in late August, and worked with the (now) legendary publisher Bernard de Fallois, for eight years. Because she was partly brought up in Lausanne, she has founded her publishing house HERODIOS there, on Lac Léman, and is publishing her first three books this spring. A novel, a memoir and a book on how cooking can save your life. This new adventure is worth watching.Read More