France has been absorbed in a convoluted scandal starring Liliane Bettencourt (the billionaire heiress of the L’Oreal fortune), her daughter, a gigolo photographer, and now, President Sarkozy.
It started when the heiress’ daughter filed suit against her geriatric mother and complained that the aforementioned gigolo photog, Francois Marie-Banier, was seducing the old lady so that she would [...]

I have always been obsessed by glass houses, and even more so by the people who inhabit them. Robert Rubin is a total pimp and a collector of something even more exciting than fine art … fine architecture.
After Rubin got rich on Wall Street, he was able to pursue his real passion for collecting, and [...]

Yesterday I had a refreshing break from the evil Parisians who seem to despise me and seize any chance they get to be rude to my face. After I had a riff with some xenophobic Frenchmen at lunch, I was strolling past the old-school, pink VW van of a charming pizzeria in the Marais. It [...]

I recently received an expensive camera as a belated birthday gift, and it makes HD-quality videos, so basically, I can shoot my very own vodka advertisements, and other important things like that for Youtube.
But filmmaking is hard. Apparently even Woody Allen, the miniature king of cinema, does not yet have sufficient funding for his next [...]

I was dining at a chic Parisian restaurant when I heard the abrasive, American voice of a drunk girl. I turned my head to find Tara Reid, the D-List celebrity who is famous for partying too much and exposing her naughty bits to the paparazzi. She was in a popular, raunchy teen movie about 100 [...]

I went out for a girl’s night at Bus Palladium, an old-school nightclub in Paris. There was a private party/concert and Johnny Depp was apparently on the premises. My friends and I snuck ourselves in and enjoyed the mediocre, Jim-Morrison-inspired live music and amusing dance scene.
But the real drama took place when we left the [...]

I attended the annual “American University Club Cocktail Party” at the pimped-out Parisian mansion of the US Ambassador’s house. Eager for a romantic prospect to pop up in the form of a dashing young diplomat with a British accent, Italian sartorial sense, Parisian address, and American education, I ended up surrounded by a lot of priggish lawyers [...]

Five masterpieces by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Modigliani, and Léger were stolen from the Museum of Modern Art in Paris last week, estimated at a value of 123 million dollars. The culprit was caught on tape, masked, dangerous, and sneaking through a window. He or she took the time to remove the paintings out of their [...]

In the dead of night on the streets of Rome there is a shop open that is full of junk (gold 1980s fanny packs, pink corsets, ancient basketball posters, styrofoam mannequin heads, American political pins, odd designer handbags, etc. etc.). It’s called “Miss France,” because Maryse Fabre, the 74-year-old French woman who runs it, was [...]

Park Avenue has never seen so much dirty clothing: a new art installation at the Armory involves a five-story crane randomly picking up and releasing garments from a 25-foot-high tower of used clothes. “No Man’s Land” is the work of the famous French artist, Christian Boltanski. I saw the Parisian version, “Personnes,” at the Grand Palais [...]