Nestled underneath the arcades of the Place Des Vosges, I debriefed on my underwhelming impression of Berlin with a couple of true Parisians. The zany stranger seated at the neighboring table overheard my less than complimentary comments about Berlin, and we delved into a discussion of urban gentrification (and the irritating characters who accompany it). [...]

While dining on frogs’ legs at Apicius Restaurant, one of the most elegant and hidden-away culinary delights in Paris, a mysterious man caught my eye. He seemed bored at his table of stuffy, well-coiffed, Chanel-dipped elderly relatives. After an hour of exchanging glances, I made an exit for the ladies’ room — he brushed past [...]

Helmut Newton is a total pimp. He was a seminal fashion photographer in the 1970s. I visited the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin and was spellbound by Newton’s pictures — always erotically charged, slightly deranged, subversive, and sinister in a way that exposed the fallacy of the luxe lifestyle.
His handwritten letters to various fashion editors [...]

Berlin is the new European hotspot for starving artists to commune, collaborate, and get crunk. But there is something so American about the post-Communist commercial build-up that makes Berlin look like Denver, Colorado. I searched high and low for its vibrant, seething underbelly of grittiness and avant-garde art.
Even though I was too tired to engage [...]

Centre Pompidou’s recent exhibition on Surrealism, La Subversion des Images, is a glamorously curated look into the sexy 1920s art world of understanding dreams and rejecting bourgeois rationalism.
The exhibition included a secluded black chamber where viewers could watch a “sexually explicit” film by Man Ray entitled “Cinematic Experiment: Two Women.” Once inside, I witnessed some [...]

When five French bachelors cohabit in a grand Parisian apartment, New Year’s Eve is bound to be a debaucherous affair. I spent my first hours of 2010 in the company of a crowd of horny, sweaty, semi-elegant young Parisians (and a smattering of confused Americans who were passing through town). The dance floor was throbbing, [...]