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 not a chocolate person – I am not an ice cream person – I am not even a french fries person but I have no resistance when it comes to good pastry with tons of real cream. It’s not the sugar I am after, it’s the fat!

Ah…real whipped cream; the sexier name would be Chantilly…Making it the right way is an art in its way to extinction – even in Europe; I made a scene a couple of years back in la Rotonde, when they served me a café liegeois with cream coming out of a can! I left the café more heartbroken than angry…

Well boys and girls, this post was supposed to be about “fiber to the curb/kerb”, a telecommunication system based on fiber-optic cables, but i found this subject sweeter on a Monday.

Being a wimp with a high cholesterol count and in the absence of real Chantilly, I treat myself to a “hearty” nonfat cafe con leche. “Stressed spelled backwards is desserts. Coincidence? I think not. “

They say that alcohol lubricates the conversation; i would say that coffee or tea do that job way better (you start sober and stay that way). I am coming from a tea (called chai and almost never mixed with milk) drinking country where even babies are given sweet tea beside their mother’s milk, but i can’t be ambivalent towards coffee in all its glorious variations, taken preferably in a Viennese coffeehouse or a French café.

Today’s blogs/internet forums are becoming like the coffeehouses of previous centuries where people got together and exchanged ideas, read, wrote and generally got inspired; to be alone yet surrounded by like minded people. My beloved Stephen Zweig or Gustave Klimt have been ardent patrons of coffeehouses. The slow “coffeehouse death” of 1950′s has been reversed rapidly, of all entities, by Seattle’s Starbucks & other American coffee companies who went on a rampage with their idiotic “grande/venti/tall” shouts! I take mine “chez Peet” (the guru of everyone in gourmet coffee revolution). Too much noise for a small coffee… What’s missing is the true conversation; how can you have one when you are busy slurping your pumpkin spice frappuccino (770 calories)? Ok, so I am not proud of my decaf soy latte neither (they say decaf is the devil’s blend!)

I am very happy that this poster of mine got published. It should hit the sites like allposters.com, art.com, etc…by the end of September.

I feel kind of stressed out about this whole carbon footprint calculations. Just took a quiz with them and i am not proud of the result! I am not much of a carnivore but now i have to worry about that “once in a while” steak. A Carbon Footprint is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide. Reading the Deep Economy, has been revelatory to say the least. I also suggest Bill Mckibben’s article in the NY review of books.

I just listened to the Slate podcast called global swarming and i have to admit that i agree with the idea. On a more cheerful note Alice Waters should cook for all of us…

Brasserie Lipp in Paris remains very popular in spite of overpriced mediocre food being served under its roof; the history that goes with it, makes it a favorite among the average tourists, the jet set crowd and the Parisians themselves.

“It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entr

“It’s so beautifully arranged on the plate

Hondarribia is a jewel of a region in the spanish basque country; I stayed in Parador to be close to Charles Quint, one of my favorite Habsburgs.

i was astonished by the tenacity of these people in regards to their language, Euskara. i am weary/wary of nationalistic sentiments – the idea that you can do better acting independently rather than collectively and that the people who spoke the same language or shared a common ethnicity should fight to build their own nation?states scares the hell out of me. Nazis and Fascists were ultra-nationalists – ETA hardly has anything to do with these two (even though it has plenty to do with other bloody mess) but i am frightened by talks of racial purity and xenophobia. i don’t want to see people, each having their own ethnic flag planted in their backyards; santa monica, california would be a very colorful city…

on the lighter side of the spectrum, spain is the country of tapas and tintos,

and sometimes carajios (an espresso with an added shot of alcohol) while watching your favorite matador at the neighborhood bar.

i like walking in the quartier du Marais even with tourists around! this little bookstore has a funny name.

i love la place des Vosges and this restaurant, Ma Bourgogne, where you can eat the best steak tartar in paris; Th

french are in love with their bread; the bakeries in france smell different from anywhere else in the world – i always thought that the butter is the reason but i am learning that it is actually the flour – heaven must smell like french “p

nothing beats a nightcap at café de flore…