Creepers abounded at the Saint-Tropez club, Les Caves du Roy, where dancing on my own proved to be a challenging experience.
Gauche Things for a [random] guy to do [to a girl] in a club:
1. Offering her Red Bull + something else, as she dances alone on an elevated platform.
2. Jumping up onto the [...]

The famous film director Roman Polanski was recently arrested in Zurich for a rape case that he has been fleeing since 1977, when he lured a 13-year-old girl into Jack Nicholson’s house under the guise of a photo shoot, serving her champagne and Quaaludes.
The topics of pedophilia, celebrity, film, and sexual assault, stir up a [...]

Walking home through the semi-deserted streets of Montmartre, past the tourist trap of Sacré Coeur, I was aggressed by a drunk man. He left his posse of equally inebriated midnight creepers, came up very close to me and said repeatedly: “Comme tu es belle, comme tu es belle.” I refused to make eye contact or [...]

David Lynch designed the new windows at the famous French department store, Galeries Lafayette. “Machines, Abstraction and Women” is the theme of his ‘artistic’ installation, but it resembled a circus-inspired fun house targeted to mock the pretentious adult viewers who think that railroad tracks running through a model of a woman’s body make for a [...]

During a weekend in Saint-Tropez I learned a new pejorative/womanizing term: the French word for ‘gold-digger’: les effeuilleuses (“feuille” referring to paper, as in money). The stereotypical “effeuilleuse” is a tall Russian ‘model’ sporting a diamanté-encrusted Blackberry and/or iPod with a monthly calling plan that is paid for by a man named Asadel (Arabic for [...]

Just as I was thinking all about tiny Smart Cars in France and large SUVs in the states, I met a couple of typically American men at an Italian restaurant in Paris. They were admiring a Smart Car in the street and proclaiming vague statements of delight like, “The more I stay here, the more [...]

Moving can be a terrifying thing. But when you are young enough, and have yet to accumulate an obscene amount of knickknacks, furnishings, and miscellaneous kitchen appliances, moving can be exciting. My friend has a little country house just a stone’s throw outside of Paris, and, like so many people with country houses, he only [...]

There was a girl at a discotheque in Paris who looked like a combination of a young Nicole Kidman and Evan Rachel Wood in the gritty-girly-teen-angst film, Thirteen. She was wearing a violet skintight bandeau dress and dancing provocatively, semi-suspended from the system of netting above the dance floor. This 17-year-old (though she could have [...]

In French the word for friend, “un ami (m.)/une amie (f.)” is used to refer to the people in your life with whom you genuinely want to spend time. But there is another word for friend—”un copain (m.)/une copine (f.)”—used to describe that slew of acquaintances with whom you are ‘friendly.’ Maybe you’ll kiss cheeks [...]