Michele Roohani

Ok people, brace yourselves - this is going to be an image heavy post! I will take you through a couple of days in Paris - the way I like it: hitting the streets early in the morning to catch the blue hour of this great city; Montparnasse is a very busy neighborhood at 8:30 am.

This was my first time witnessing the changing of the ads:

I walked to a favorite café that reminds me of my twenties, La Rotonde.

I don’t like them anymore (remember the whipped cream out of a can?) but nostalgia and Balzac take me to them every year.

the cafés are changing in Paris - here is the old generation Select and the trendy Lotus.

Of course anything that remotely reminds me of Los Angeles while I am in Europe is not welcome so this kind of restaurant/café just makes me wince but the worst offender is Starbucks and its paper cups.

I bought a pariscope from this news stand,

and had a coffee while looking for the hottest exhibition in Paris.

I decided to see Giacometti in Centre Pompidou . “It was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray! ”

What a great show it was - complete with the artist being filmed while painting and sculpting.

His drawings (included some fabulous small notebooks), paintings and sculptures made a large window into the soul of this great creature…

Even though I am not a big fan of the Centre Pompidou, I have to admit that the view is breathtaking…

I visited the Maillol museum a couple of days before this and liked its architecture as much as the collections:

Maillol is very different in his style from Rodin - they were good friends.

The picture bellow shows the plaster versions of the bronze sculptures above.

On a more colorful note, living in Los Angeles, I am deprived of pretty store windows - abundant in New York, Paris and London.

I am ending this post with two images of my loyal laptop that’s getting very old but gets the job done.

Café crème or Petite Arvine, a good post I hope.

I am sitting in this cute café which happens to have wifi! The world is changing and Paris with it.

I’ve been very busy since I am here; three interesting exhibitions in 2 days: Arcimboldo has never been so complete as in this exhibition in the Luxembourg museum.

A way more somber show was Germany, the black years at the Maillol museum. Otto Dix, Beckmann and Grosz were the most impressing but i have to admit that the German propaganda posters with Hitler’s name on them were the most striking/chilling to me.

This one can give you nightmares:

this next one takes me back to all of my dear Professor Ungvari’s battlefields (Somme, etc…)

of course Paris can erase these nightmares with a winter sunshine after the rain.

I wish there was a global new year’s resolution for a more peaceful, greener, bluer, less sanguinary year than 2007 - I like this image I made based on the work of Hunt Rettig - it’s quietly cheerful.

This is my sister showing her affection in the first moments of the new year!

My Alma Mater, USC won the Rose Bowl today (again)

Now on a more sober note:

Putin (the quasi-tsar) really scares me - China scares everybody.