Munich: What a city! Beautiful, clean and orderly, and friendly. We both readily chose it over London. The good weather in April definitely worked in its favor as well as ours. On our way here, in a train trip with two long delays and more train changes than we had planned, time passed quite pleasantly…
I remember, as a child, eating dark, sweet,and fragrant cake/pudding so sticky it stuck to my teeth. It was made of rice, the only kind of cake I ever ate until my mother learned to bake. She didn’t make those rice cakes. Generous aunts usually brought them. Or, we bought them from street vendors, and…
It was inevitable—the leap from Duchamp’s readymades (like the infamous urinal) to paintings of readymades. This was exactly what Jasper Johns did in the 1950s. But his interest was in iconographic objects, things that were symbols, that stood for something within a culture. And what icon in American culture could be more famous than the…
‘We’ll always have Paris.“ Remember that famous line from Bogey to Bergman (Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, in case you’re too young to know) in the film classic Casablanca? Done in black and white, it’s vintage Hollywood. A must-see for film lovers. Here’s a short trailer. Paris fascinates Hollywood. Hollywood fascinates Paris, by far the…
Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.Al Capp Purely abstract art has always puzzled me. You know, the type of art in which you cannot see a recognizable object—human or otherwise. Usually, I look at such a painting and wonder if I am supposed to read…
In Paris, amble along, without objective, but merely for the pleasure of watching and observing. Treat yourself to the unexpected.
Sounds We live directly across from L’Eglise Saint Louis. Right next to it is a grade school. We’re constantly reminded of these neighbors by sounds. Sounds that, to some, might be noise but to us signify the daily flow of life on the island. The bells of the church ring a few times a day…
Inside, the apartment is furnished in both vintage and Ikea. A cupboard proclaims its age on numbers carved on its middle door: 1779.
Ah, the freedom of getting vaccinated against covid. I’m looking forward to museum-hopping again. Preferably in Paris, to me, the museum capital of the world. Many visitors to Paris scribble art-viewing into their itinerary. Not as often, though, I think as shopping and eating. But museums are great on a rainy day. Plenty of them…
One of the first things we used to do after settling in a little in Paris was to scope the neighborhood of our rented apartment. Our first objective—to find a bakery that offered baguette de tradition française. Made with a special kind of flour and given a long time to rise, its tangy goodness came…
Budapest has drama. It’s monumental—in a grungy sort of way. But maybe we felt that way when we visited it because the summer weather was so hot and humid that the requisite sightseeing became a miserable chore. Budapest, the confluence of royal and proletarian legacies in a country of only ten million inhabitants, seems to…
Fusion of French and German cultures has been at the core of being a Strasbourgeois. That is what a Strasbourgeois would tell you―the cab drivers, merchants, and museum ‘gardiens,’ for instance. They embrace the idea as the way things naturally are. This blended identity of the Strasbourgeois may defy attempts to resolve the question of…
Artsy Rambler 