These are scary times and as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t bring myself into making a light post about the beauties of the old world…

eiffel tower paris michele roohani

I watched the debates in awe, witnessed the bickering over the financial bailout with disbelief and then Paul Newman died and I had the Paris Blues… Watch this magnificent trailer of Newman and Sidney Poitier in Paris of the 60’s.

paul newman dies michele roohani

Did anybody looked cooler than this guy? Beautiful man with a more beautiful heart. Smoking killed him.

Paris remains splendid in spite of all the bad news I have been getting from home—a walk through Place des Vosges at night washed away some of that.

place des vosges at night stop sign michele roohani

The infernal crowds finally went home and left Isle Saint Louis in peace:

brasserie isle saint louis michele roohani

The best remedy— albeit temporary —for the blues is a visit to the Patisserie. Just looking at them can send you to the hospital…

dalloyau strawberry cakes michele roohani

I am not a chocolate or a strawberry person but I would kill for a Religieuse Café!

dalloyau religieuse cafe chocolate michele roohani

Window watching is a pleasure in this “walking city”,

red chandelier michele roohani

Nobody has the money to buy any of these overpriced un-necessities anymore.

prada avenue montaigne prada bag michele roohani

United States is trying to absolve itself from its sins and Europe will follow…

prada shoes michele roohani

This one reminds me of the “poustines” we were wearing as kids back home:

window fur coat with dogs michele roohani

Beautiful Mansard roofs are breathtaking:

mansard rooftops paris michele roohani

but not enough to make me forget this:

drilling sarah palin

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe. Einstein

You would think Prague is all about Kafka, Mucha and Dvorak but it’s really about these dolls - the Babooshka dolls are everywhere in Praha:

michele roohani babooshka dolls Matryoshka prague

I would like to share my last trip to this beautiful city with you. I stayed in this fabulous hotel where everything but the view to the river was red (my favorite color)

michele roohani prague red steps

these exquisite chandeliers are the pride and joy of the Czech Republic.

michele roohani prague crystal chandelier bohemia

 

this is the view from my room:

michele roohani prague room with a view

and this one

michele roohani prague room with a view sunny

Just look at Frank Gehry’s edifice in the middle of these gorgeous buildings set on the shore of a shallow branch of the Vltava river - these tiny pictures are really not doing it justice.

First the sun was shining,

michele roohani prague gehry building Vltava river

 then it was raining like hell,

michele roohani prague under rain Vltava river

and then this amazing double rainbow; talking about a room with a view…

double rainbow michele roohani prague

Prague is a city of posters,

michele roohani prague posters communism museum

and the capital of caryatids! Paris will never get close to these gorgeous men and women.

michele roohani caryatides prague honey colored

these two weren’t talking to each other:

michele roohani caryatids prague bank

but these two were - for an eternity.

michele roohani caryatids prague balcony

I woke up at 6 in the morning and took the tramway to Charles bridge - the only time in the day that it’s a bit quiet. Cities are majestic in the morning blue hour.

michele roohani charles bridge prague early morning

The astronomical  clock is the main tourist attraction.

astronomical clock prague michele roohani early morning sun

Speaking of Kafka, he’s omnipresent:

michele roohani prague cafe franz kafka moody

and here and everywhere…

michele roohani prague franz kafka mucha

Beautiful  city/people/pastries/absinthe (I brought some mean ones back to L.A.)

All and all, the Czech republic has shown gargantuan progress in a few years since the fall of communism - if only it stayed as inexpensive as the first time I visited…

“A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us” Franz Kafka

A Persian in Venice

June 2nd, 2008

My smile got bigger and bigger as I continued listening to Professor Riccardo Zipoli talking about Iran in his near perfect Persian; but then I got a bit frustrated remembering that in spite of speaking three languages myself, I have to applaud every non-Persian who can say 4 words in my mother tongue! Listen to him talk here to see what I mean by Zipoli’s flawless Persian.

zipoli kohguilouyeh

These two pictures are from the Professor’s huge archive. He has a soft spot for the rural landscape/people of Iran.

zipoli tchador

Born near Florence, teaching in Venice, reciting Sohrab Sepehri better than most of the natives has endeared Zipoli to Persians. I particularly like his Tree series. You can find more of his pictures on his site.

zipoli tak-derakht

Looking at these images made me nostalgic so I went to look for some pictures from my last trip to Iran about 14 years ago. Here is one of my favorites from the Shah’s Mosque in Isfahan, a marvel of Safavid art. I still remember my awe in front of all these magnificent architectural wonders.

michele roohani turquoise mosque

“If you come to visit me
Come gently and slowly lest the fragile china
Of my solitude cracks”
به سراغ من اگر مي‌آييد،
نرم و آهسته بياييد، مبادا كه ترك بردارد
چيني نازك تنهايي من
“Si vous venez m’y chercher,
Venez-vous-en donc lentement et doucement
De crainte que ne se raye
La porcelaine de ma solitude.” Sohrab Sepehri

And for all of you people who are still looking for a Persian in Venice, I am sharing this picture I took some years ago.

michele roohani venice gondolas

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.

montparnasse early morning 1

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

montparnasse advertising

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

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.

balzac rodin rotonde

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

select montparnasse

cafe lotus montparnasse

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.

starbucks in paris

I bought a pariscope from this news stand,

news stand montparnasse

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

pariscope montparnasse

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!

giacometti man

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

giacometti hands

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

giacometti square man

giacometti woman

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

paris roof eiffel

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

maillol stairs

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

maillol bronze

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

maillol plaster

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

fornasertti paris

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

mac cafe paris

tulips mac shokoufeh

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.

cafe du metro michele roohani paris

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.

michele roohani arcimboldo luxembourg

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.

michele roohani german war poster 11

This one can give you nightmares:

michele roohani war poster german

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

michele roohani somme

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

michele roohani pont des arts

“Leaf peeping” in L.A.

October 16th, 2007

It rained today in Los Angeles and I pretended that the fall was here, that there is actually a change of weather, that time doesn’t pass me by in a bigger hurry in the absence of seasons in southern California. Going through the four seasons makes you realize that you are aging with the rest of the Earth, but not where I live…

fall, autumn, leaves, change, season, foliage

We are surrounded here by evergreens and we rarely use our gloves/umbrellas/fireplaces; every time that I see a sycamore or a Japanese maple tree losing quietly its leaves, I am transported back to my childhood in Tehran where the year was divided into its four glorious versions. Summers were hot and dry, winters cold and white, etc…

fall, autumn, leaves, foliage, bike, europe, river

The autumn leaves was adapted from the beautiful poem by Prévert. Both Juliette Gréco and Yves Montand had this song in their repertory.

momijigari japanese maple fall foliage red autumn leaves

I still remember the spectacular color shows of New England falls; It’s quite amazing how the green leaves turn to brilliant shades of yellow, orange, and red - a never ending spectacle.

japanese, maple, fall, autumn, foliage, leaves, red, closeup

Momijigari (leaf peeping in the U.S.) is the japanese traditional pastime of viewing the changing colors of the autumn foliage when it snows yellow and red.

Bilbao, revisited

September 28th, 2007

Looking back at some of my pictures from Spain, I found this one taken at the Bilbao Guggenheim museum at dusk.

bilbao, gugenheim, museum, travel, spain, europe, colors

“An art book is a museum without walls.” Andre Malraux

Mozart and Starbucks

September 21st, 2007

I just found this fabulous picture of Roland Schlager that i scanned some years ago - i love the absurdity of it - Starbucks has never looked this good.

starbucks, vienna, mozart, coffee, cafe

 

Too much noise for an espresso

September 21st, 2007

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.

espresso_cafe_creme_coffee_book_nightcap

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!)

cafe_metro_paris_coffee_cream

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.


Lady in Green

September 16th, 2007

I’ve always loved these ladies! I have fun playing with their images. They’ve been called torchères (torchieres), lampposts and some pretty banal names but I think that they deserve to be called by a “grander” name like “the green Lucinas” (Lucina: she who brings children into the light). I’ve photographed them several times (they are the best models, they never move). Their color changes from bronze green to dark jade passing by some moss and celadon.

opera_garnier_statue_lamppost_bronze

The Paris opera house is not hosting any operas; it is now mainly used for ballet performances. Carrier-Belleuse, an old friend of Charles Garnier, the architect of this great theater, contributed the elaborate torcheres that hold the candelabra illuminating the grand staircase and the lampposts outside the opera house.

opera_lamppost_garnier_paris_statue_grafitti

“Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings. Robert Burns

torchiere_opera_garnier_music_lamppost