In 2007, Rosecrans Baldwin was offered a job with an ad agency in Paris, and he and his wife made the move to France from Brooklyn. In this excerpt from Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down, his new (and very funny) memoir about the experience, he goes on a search for an apartment.
Three weeks later, I returned to Paris to find an apartment. The agency provided me with an HR representative and a real-estate agent to show me around. Extremely generous of them, I thought. We saw eleven apartments in nine hours. The agent was serious about her business. She rarely smiled, driving [...]
"In kissing, some people were ripe, others were not. Whole groups could be off-limits. It definitely wasn't appropriate to kiss your boss, except when it was, though it was correct to kiss your underlings, except when it wasn't. Young men generally didn't kiss other young men, unless they were friends outside work. But older men did, sometimes. You never knew. Also, these kisses were intended not to touch the cheek but to glance it. People kept their eyes locked on the middle distance and seemed, while kissing or being kissed, very bored. Honestly, I had no idea how it worked. September found me frequently biseing inappropriately. Male clients, IT [...]
"On the floor of one cavern, officers discovered an ominous metal container. The object was fat, festooned with wires. The police called in the bomb squad, they evacuated the surface, they asked themselves: What have we found? They had found a couscous maker." —"When I say secret society, you imagine, I don't know, like, in Eyes Wide Shut."
The wonderful Times photographer Bill Cunningham has returned from Paris with an unbelievable slideshow of the world's worst thing: the over-the-knee skank boot. WATCH IN HORROR. And amusement. These boots really are disgusting!
There are conflicting accounts of the incident that IS ROCKING PARIS and MY WORLD right now, in which Dior's John Galliano tussled with a lady with an ugly handbag and her Jewish and/or Asian friend. (Some reports say he said "anti-Semitic things" (though no one will say what!) and other reports say he called them "Asian." Youch, harsh language, I guess?) The police arrived, and he was released this morning. How could ugly people in Paris get in the way of the designer of Dior? I hope they're happy that he's been "suspended" from his job. I smell a plot, as in, there's always someone younger coming [...]
Metro beat, Paris edition: "[W]hat the French call urine sauvage, which translates to 'wild urine,' is the hardest to crack. While France's capital has campaigned with some success to have Parisians pick up after their pets, the city is still struggling with the presence of pipi. Urine is hard to escape in certain parts of the city, be it on the street, in the Metro or in parks."
Read on to learn about the anti-pipi wall, a "jagged surface that splashes urine back onto the unzipped offender."
Twelve years after Ghostface Killah talked about switching up his accent to convince people he was from Paris, pretty much the entire rest of hip-hip seems to be taking his lead. Thanks in part to the luxury travel itineraries flaunted by the likes of Puffy and Jay and Kanye, the City of Lights has become the new rap Mecca. (Where is MC Solaar through all this? He should be ringing up guest appearances.) It's especially striking to see someone like Atlanta's Waka Flocka Flame, whose considerable appeal relies so much on everyday, down-to-earth, streets-of-his-hometown approachability, rapping about splurging at the Louis Viutton store in [...]
Now that the party's over for the monsieurs of France's Parliament, as hushed-up pedophilia, routine sexual assault and general misogyny are suddenly no longer federally protected perks of the job, a vital question emerges: Will the exposure of all this Gallic turpitude make the merest difference to American society’s perpetually raging, and mostly unrequited, crush on Paris? All signs point to non.
Exhibit A: So far, the box office figures for Woody Allen’s shamelessly adoring paean to the City of Lights, Midnight in Paris, look set to make the movie Allen’s most successful yet, and critics are talking about a Best Picture Oscar nomination. Who cares [...]
I used to like volcanoes. What's not to like, I thought, right? Huge mountains that explode and spew fire and hot lava everywhere? Nothing if not totally exciting and fascinating. I enjoyed the volcanoes in Tarzan and King-Kong and Godzilla movies as a child. I did the requisite science project in third grade-papier-mache, rubber tubing, baking soda and vinegar, etc. Fun and educational, I thought. I learned how to play Eddie Van Halen's riff from "Eruption" on guitar and everything. Vesuvius, Etna, Krakatoa, Mount St. Helens, you name it: If it was a volcano, I thought it was pretty darn cool.
