Beth Arnold

Letter From Paris: David Byrne Burns Down the Olympia

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David Byrne burned down the house at the Olympia Hall on Wednesday night. No warm-up band--just him and his troupe of singers, dancers, and musicians, who performed a fantastical set of Byrne and Brian Eno songs from their new album Byrne is touring, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. No smoke and mirrors for Byrne. The show was a happening--a rock modern dance--the choreography young, loose, and urban, a David Byrne Appalachian Spring. The singers danced and played music, and the dancers sang and played all across the stage, including through Byrne's legs and over his head. Byrne and his company blew the audience away, and the French, who may be adorable but don't really know how to boogie or have any soul moves, were up out of their seats shaking their booties throughout the entire concert.

The Sale of The Century Is The End of The Saint Laurent Era (or Part of What I Did in Northern California)

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I'm back from San Francisco and northern California where I went to celebrate daughter Blair's birthday.  Blair is an angel God sent down to enrich the earth with her big spirit and to make me a more generous person--oh, and to remind me of all the things I could've and should've let her do growing up--that I don't even remember saying no to now much less why I did.  When she occasionally and good naturedly points out these memory chits, I marvel at my parental idiocy. 

More about that later, but we took the spectacular yet nerve-wracking trip up Highway 1 to Sea Ranch Lodge.  The picture?  Think cows in clouds--and enormous bluffs ripping down to the Pacific Ocean as far as you can see.  Big waves crashing against bigger boulders.  Some of nature's eye candy.

While in San Fran, I headed over to my home away from home--Apple SF--and finally put together what I'd started there in December (and didn't have time to finish before this), my first Letter From Paris podcast.  Check it out: some of my footage of Christie's "Sale of The Century," the preview of Yves Saint Laurent-Pierre Berge Collection. Art Deco in this clip.  The Suspension Satellite chandelier is Irish designer Eileen Gray's, whose Dragons chair fetched a world record almost $30 million in the sale.

Gotta say, I have great people involved with the Letter From Paris podcast.  And Apple deserves big kudos all the way around-- especially Apple pro Chris Rebuck who is my trainer and Motion Man, Linda Berland who has moved the earth for me in her store, and Bryan Shawley who has just taken her magic scheduling place.  Direct from Paris, talented composer Robert Alpert is my Music Man.  Working with him to find the sound of the LFP theme was a real pleasure.  The process of his musical ear creating what I described fell exactly in place.  Last but not least, my girls have great ideas and interesting opinions.  They're always on my team.

                                                                                 ---Beth Arnold

Letter From Paris: Heads Up, China

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This column first appeared on HuffingtonPost.com.  Comments not included here.

So it looks like Pierre Bergé will get to keep his stunning Chinese bronze fountainheads after all. I refer to the rat and rabbit heads that turned into the show stealers of Bergé's and Yves Saint Laurent's breathtaking collection of art, furniture, and objects that Christie's auctioned off in Paris last week. Ironically, it was the fact that the heads were "stolen" that caused the Chinese government and nationals to protest that the pieces should be returned to China free of charge. Nobody disputes the fact that they were looted from the summer palace outside Beijing in 1860, but that was then and this is now. A century and a half has passed, and the heads have been bought and sold several times. The general rule of thumb is that after 100 years these kinds of claims are irrelevant in international courts, and a Paris administrative court ruled against a Chinese cultural defense group that tried to stop the sale -- and ordered the group to pay €1000 to both Christie's and Pierre Bergé. Chinese nationals pitched a fit.