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“The snow had transformed this usually busy street into a vast, empty Impressionist landscape; streetlamps dotted the white sky with yellow pools of light.”—Mark Zero The French Art of Revenge by Mark Zero

“The snow created a holiday of disgruntlement. People gave each other rueful grins as they slipped and slid on the icy sidewalks, everyone secretly happy to share a new reason for complaint.”—Mark Zero The French Art of Revenge by Mark Zero

Evidence of Spring from around my bungalow. The title of the post is from a poem by Kobayashi Issa, altered slightly to fit my foliage: “What a strange thing! to be alive beneath cherry blossoms.��

The whirring rush hour drone of rubber, metal, and asphalt on the 110 Freeway through Los Angeles sounds like a perverse free jazz experiment, complete with weird discordant tones, unexpected modalities, and crunching rhythmic noise that describes velocity better than a speedometer. It’s the quintessential sound of Los Angeles, a revving, manic, jackhammer crag so [...]

When I arrived at the Cathedral of Chartres, after an hour and a half on the train, I looked up and thought, great, another Gothic relic exactly like the thousand others I see every day walking around Paris. But Henry Adams did write a whole book on this cathedral, and he said that you have [...]

I attended Tchaikovsky's ballet "Oneguine," choreographed by John Cranko, on Christmas Eve at the Palais Garnier. The venue, of course, is magnificent, from the florid ornamentations and plush red velvet of its balconies and box seats to the refreshing ceiling mural by Marc Chagall. The acoustics of the hall are superb, and the orchestra of [...]

The Champs Elysees and rue de Rivoli were packed with nervous last-minute shoppers on Christmas Eve, so I avoided the crowds and headed for the back alleys of Village Saint Paul in the Marais, where the atmosphere was calmer and more genial. I had a few last-minute gifts to buy myself before attending Tchaikovsky's ballet [...]

Every winter, the City of Paris sets up an ice skating rink in front of the Hotel de Ville, and you can rent skates all day for a mere 5 euros. Ice skating within a stone's throw of the Seine in that beautiful plaza makes the holiday seem magical, even if they insist on playing [...]

I recently got a new wedding ring (someone else's), by accident, in the Jardin des Tuileries. I was walking along, minding my own business, when a little old woman, tottering toward me, suddenly bent down to the ground and scooped something up. She approached me and said, "Excuse me, sir, you dropped your ring," and she held [...]

It took 18 hours for the City of Paris to set up the Christmas lights on the massive tree in front of Notre Dame. Blue, as we know from the great prophet Saint Elvis Presley, is the color of Christmas.