Beth Arnold

Letter From Paris: In My New Neighborhood

I love this fabulous sculpture--this compelling woman who lives in my new Paris neighborhood.  Does anyone recognize this beauty?  Do you know where she is?

Letter From Paris: France Telecom & Other Dilemmas

I love my new apartment, which is like a little maison in Provence--instead of urban Paris--and I know I'm going to get my neighborhood's groove when I have the chance to dance out in it.  So far, I've been kept steadily busy as the latest recipient of the France Telecom World Champion of Internet Service Screw-Ups. The incompetent utility has somehow rerouted my Internet service from my new apartment back to my old one--and then in a second foul up, canceled the Internet altogether at my new place. 

How does this happen?  Some un-well-meaning employee does it just for spite--or they can't fill out the form?  In the numerous discussions I've had with the utility, I've been totally clear about what I wanted.  They have repeated the order back to me.  I hang up, and the order is mysteriously changed.  Ergo, my Internet is still not working.  I can't watch Apple TV and do other things I actually need to do!  I'm sorry, but I'm addicted to movies.  If I don't watch them, I have painful withdrawal.  (The video above is by the Lumiere Brothers, who were some of the early filmmakers in France.)

Letter From Paris: What The French Don't Understand About Us (And I Don't Either)

Crossposted at HuffingtonPost.com.  Comments not included here.

I am reading Janet Flanner's Paris Journal 1944-55. She is a luminary to some, including me, for the "Letter From Paris" column she wrote (under the name Genêt) for The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until 1975. I aspire to be a variation on her writer-journalist theme in today's media-morphing environment. I would like to give Americans a sense of the larger world--a Parisian world, a European world, a global world--that has exploded from the culture of the last 10 or so years and is zooming forward in time and space through modern conveniences that only grow faster every day.

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I want my fellow Americans to get another point of view--from one of their own--who, in some ways, has a clearer vision because she lives abroad and gets wider media coverage. And whether you want to believe this is true or not, it is. I want Americans to get a sense of how the rest of the world feels about us. Don't tell me this doesn't matter. It does. I want to show Americans how other people in the world live and what they think and why. I want to help grow American consciousness into the scope it once had but now has lost.

The irony is that during this decade of globalization, American culture has grown backwards into a much more insular milieu of fear and prejudice that George W. Bush's reign of terror--not 9/11--created. There is no question that Barack Obama is changing and repairing the perception and reputation of the United States throughout the world, and that he is making the world more friendly to Americans again, but the stark reality is this: He is up against those who still want to make us smaller than we ever were throughout history.

Letter From Paris: On Location

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We moved from our turquoise nest in the 2nd Arrondissement to our sunny perch in the 20th, because our landlords were moving into the darling apartment they'd rented us for the last 5 years and 3 months.  L. couple is always well-dressed if a trifle bizarre and keen on being fashionable.  So once they knew we'd set a moving date, they brought a contractor over to get an eye view of how he could transform the space into their stylish new rooms--and let's be honest--into something a little more comfortable.

Husband and I fled as fast as our feet would carry us to see Gerard Butler in the movie that is called Ultimate Game here and Gamer in the English-speaking world.  Sometimes, I find it totally satisfying to watch extreme violence on a movie screen.  The perils of moving house had put me in such a frame of mind, and I have to say we both felt the film terribly satisfying. I, perhaps, felt more content about how hot Gerard Butler was than husband.  (Ladies and gay friends, I've included his photo here for us.)

After the movie let out, we scooted home and unluckily found the unwanted guests still encamped in our residence.  When we hotfooted it away this time, we treated ourselves to dinner at Olio Pane Vino, an Italian restaurant I'd heard good things about for a year or more. 

Olio Pane Vino

Letter From Paris: Images of Ghost Store La Samaritaine

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The first year or two I lived in Paris, the department store La Samaritaine was still open.  It may not have been the most beautiful or designy emporium in town (though owned by luxury group LVMH), but it was the closest to me, which in everyday parlance meant it was the place I usually frequented when d.s. items were needed chez nous.  La Samaritaine was also located in a prime spot with a lovely view of the Seine by my favorite bridge, the Pont Neuf.  Little things like this matter to one living life in a city or a town.  We learn the short cuts, develop store pals, and sooner or later get dragged down into the ruts we dig ourselves into. 

But before I had time for that, La Samaritaine shut its doors for good one afternoon out of the blue because of serious safety problems.  Hell's bells, as my mother would say.  So I had to cut a new path to Galleries Lafayette, which was an agreeable tad more upscale if a bit further away.

While La Samaritaine was shut, fini, terminated, the windows of said store stayed just as they were on closing day--for what seemed like years.  So every time I walked by, I was looking into ghost windows.  The Day That Paris Stood Still.  Finally, someone realized it was time for the haints to go bye-bye and posters of chic Parisians scenes were installed.

So continuing the theme of Parisian store windows, here are some of ghost store La Samaritaine's.  Pictures provided.  The story is yours to fill in:

Letter From Paris: Moving Day

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It was Moving Day on Thursday in Paris.  From my first 5+ years in the historic center of this French capital of loveliness where history has shined its weighty light, where America's Founding Fathers tread on cobblestone rues, drank champagne and signed treaties--the old country giving aid to birth the new world--to a fresh start in a hot neighborhood (ssh!) that everyone says is the real Paris, the 20th. 

I loved my old neighborhood as you can tell from my podcast on my Home page.  I left kicking and screaming--but am digging the new neighborhood already.  It definitely feels different, maybe more fluid.  What would Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson think of the lives of Americans in Paris these days?  What will I discover here?  For one thing, Philip Starck's new trendy hotel:  Mama Shelter. 

When my children were little babykins, they loved this movie I rented for them over and over.  So did I.  Moving Day propels the action in this family's story just as it has recently in mine:

---Beth Arnold in Paris

Letter From Paris: What To Do in Paris

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People want travelers tips when they come to Paris.  I want tips when I travel, too.  I usually do too much research on the Internet and buy books that sometimes I read cover to cover too early to remember all the stuff I wanted to know once I arrive at my destination (though I just want to say here that that 6 weeks of research paid off for Greece even if it drove me mad).  Or I don't open them at all till I arrive and dutifully carry them everywhere I go.

I'd seen people on Segways in my very own neighborhood and thought, um huh, I'd like to do that.  Heard from a friend who had signed up for a Segway tour in Budapest, not too enthusiastically, with her son who was all for it that it was, in fact, big fun to seg around town as a tourist.  So when husband and I went to Budapest in April, and it was my birthday and he couldn't say no, I booked us. 

Here's the deal: Imagine being a tourist in a group of other tourists who are cheerfully zipping along in a row like you're a baby duck following your mother in the most beautiful pond in the world, and you're quacking and splashing and seeing all the sights around the beautiful pond, and you're not completely exhausted when you go back to the hotel nest.  In fact, you're revved.  After that, I decided I'd really like to have a Segway for my own personal wheeled transportation.

A few months later, when daughter Bret and niece Elizabeth flew in, I booked them on the Segway tour of Paris.  They got a great sense of Paris. Had a blast. Spied cute boys. "Best tour we've ever had," they both said with gusto.

Beth Arnold's What-To-Do-in-Paris Tip 1.:  Sign up for a Segway Tour.

Elizabeth Arnold and Bret Graves on Segways in front of the Grand Palais in Paris

Letter From Paris: What I Miss in Paris (continued)

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I am moving this week.  Does anyone in the world like to move?  I mean the process of moving, not the end effect--which can be nice once you're there and have everything put up and decorated.  For anyone who actually likes the process of moving, sorry, but frankly there's something wrong with you.  Freak.  We're all freaks in some ways, but liking the process of moving is freakish in the S & M category.  Look it up.  It will be under the definition of Moving neuroses, conditions, and symptoms.

There is one thing about moving I like, and that is that I wash and clean everything--including things I'd forgotten I have and may not have been seen or cleaned in years.

I must buy a new bigass refrigerator with bigass freezer for my new apartment, because currently there's only one of those 1/2 jobs that in the United States of America only students would use.  I can't live with 1/2 of a refrigerator.

What Beth Arnold misses from the USA: 2. A refrigerator with icemaker--and I mean a model that one puts his or her glass in the door and the ice, cubed or crushed, comes crashing into your glass and may even spit out on the floor.  Heavenly.

Here's to ice:

Letter From Paris: Josephine Baker Back in Paris (This Time as A Man)

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Crossposted at the HuffPost.com. Comments not included.

If you can get away for a day or so, it might be a good plan to fly to Paris and spend the evening at Josephine Baker's new Casino show. You would have plenty to think about on the return trip, for the revue contains something of everything..."

---Janet Flanner

It was a beautiful bang of an evening with swishy chorus girls covering luminous curvy skin with a parade of splendid costumes, a hilarious magician, tap-dancing black men in top hats and tails, a sultry French singer, Trois Dandy Chanteurs, and a silent-era black-and-white movie short, not to mention the burlesque strip teasers who looked as if they'd stepped out of the 1930's with its glamorous fizz. Modern burlesque diva Dita Von Teese headlined this extraordinary show at the historic Casino de Paris, which opened on September 7th and will be playing until the 17th. Get your tickets here, Madame et Monsieur.

Letter From Paris: Stopping for Gas

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In case you didn't know, though I've blabbed it on every Social Media site possible, as well as this website, husband Jim and I have been looking for a new apartment in Paris.  A wonderful one, of course, and we snagged one.

So yesterday we rented a car to go to Ikea where we have been compelled to find, imagine, and create a closet unit for our new bedroom.  For those who don't know, many apartments in Paris are bare rooms with no closets because the buildings are so old.  And once upon a time people used their rooms for many functions--not like us 21st Century Americans with a room for anything we can think up.  Space is tight in Paris.  Unless a room has been renovated with built-ins, one has to buy closets.

There is nothing to say but:  I like clothes...and shoes and boots...and bags of all kinds...and hats, gloves, lingerie, and scarves.  I would like to have a dressing room as big as my current Blue Salon.  Hmm, what else?  I love to wear costumes to any occasion.  I feel myself in my personal style.  I express myself with it.  I strut my tail feathers with me in my collection of eclectic fashions, many vintage, that take up a truckload of room.