BEND, OR.-

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, I am sitting here with a frown stretching the corners of my mouth, realizing that I have an inherent distrust of people, especially women, who shun sugar. Those who know me know my obsession with baked goods. And no, I am not sedentary. I love to workout just as much as I love to eat M&M’s. I am not lonely, fat or “unstable” unless you count my weekly reading of The National Enquirer, my weekly viewing of VH1’s Sober House (Did Shifty really go into cardiac arrest, and who knew Andy Dick was actually a sensitive and thoughtful man?) and my illicit trips to Wal-Mart to buy laundry soap and light bulbs. What I want to know is when sugar became taboo.

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BLOWING ROCK, NC-

Ah packing. Some people seem to do it effortlessly: one sleek rolling suitcase that somehow contains everything they need. A place for everything and everything in its place. I am not one of those people. I like to think that I’m simply of a different era, meant to travel in a time when it was customary to use steamer trunks, but the truth is I just don’t do minimalism well. I do it so poorly, in fact, that I’m still scarred by my experience of lugging two massive, non-rolling suitcases through the Paris metro, in the throes of summer, sweating and staggering as effortlessly chic French breezed past. I got lost, transferred approximately one million times, climbed endless flights of stairs. I distinctly remember thinking: in hell, this is what people would do all day long.

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LONDON, ENGLAND (Gatwick Airport) –

As I was being driven to Schiphol airport today, my driver told me a joke.

What do you call someone who speaks two languages?

Bilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks three languages?

Trilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks one language?

I winced; dreading the punch line.

An American.

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TOMS RIVER, NJ-

I guess it’s a good thing that Nick Belardes and his post got me thinking about the generation I’m part of. I went to art school and for the longest time, ( I was living in New York City) I thought everyone in my class was the last generation to really make a difference, or a statement, guys like Eric White, Chuck Stone, Jill Greenberg (all graduated in front of me), just to name a few, who were all making their mark.  I started going to parties on rooftops, went to Anthony Avildsen’s place and hung out with other movers and shakers, (his father directed Rocky) and ran into Oliver Berkman from time to time, he wrote Kicking and Screaming with Noah Baumbach, and most of the characters in that movie were based on people from our graduating year at college (I went to school with Oliver, not Noah Baumbach, but the guy named Skippy in that movie is directly based on someone in our class, along with everyone else in that movie, Oliver might argue that, but that’s what I heard, and the real Skippy wanted to play the role).  So I thought for some reason that this would all bleed over to me.  Why not? I was there, part of it all, in the City with all this talent. Then I got the call to go to France and teach photography to American students. A year later I came back and realized no one waited for me.  Everyone was off getting their illustrations published in the New York Times Book review; having one man shows, publishing novels, writing more novels, and then Quentin Tarantino hit and I thought I could be a screenwriter.  God, what a disaster, I wrote like a teenager with Tourettes and dyslexia, a funny combination if your walking down the street randomly talking about the world, not so much if you’re trying to write a screenplay.

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COLUMBUS, OH-

My brother was visiting from out of state last week and told me some stories at dinner one night. He recalled one of his former corporate jobs for which he had to attend a workshop headed by a motivational speaker. The attendees were instructed to turn to their neighbors and tell them of a life changing experience they had in less than three minutes.

Perhaps this is why I have never worked in the corporate world.

My brother said his partner told him of the birth of his first child and how it changed his world. I believe my brother mentioned handing out fliers at 3am for Mo Udall back in the 70s. He was at an auto plant in Detroit and he described the shift exiting the plant amidst a huge burst of steam as the gates opened. Of course I was doomed for the next few days, to wonder what occasions have altered my own existence. Anyone who has reached middle age has experienced such dramas, the death of a loved one, falling in love, falling out of love, realizing your own mortality, making your first perfect souffle, house training your pet. It’s different for everyone. For Nabokov, it was it was finding his first rare butterfly in America at the Grand Canyon in 1941 (Nonympha Dorthea). For Vlad it was impaling the town folk. For Popeye it was discovering spinach. And so on.

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA-

Not so long ago, on a rare San Francisco day of surprising warmth and humidity, I was sitting at my nice orderly desk when an email appeared in my nice orderly inbox.

“Ping,” said my Google Notifier.

“Ooo,” said I. “Somebody loves me.”

The Google Notifier said nothing in response and I took it’s silence to mean that it was brimming over, like a fat and happy porcelain Buddha, with benign agreement.

I was right.

Somebody did love me…… and I am grateful.

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LOS ANGELES-

Chardonnay. The wine of bridal showers and bad office parties. White wine. The house white. Buttery tasting. Super-oaky. Hints of vanilla. Gives you a headache. If you’re a guy, and you drink it, you’re sort of a pussy.

Overkill.

Over-served.

And yet: The Chardonnay grape is the most widely-planted grape in the world. It is also America’s best-selling white wine, big and brassy, offering a wide range of flavors, from buttery oak to the crisper, more tart and acidic varieties.

I’m not a huge Chardonnay fan, generally speaking. More specifically: I’m not a huge fan of California Chardonnays. Not all of them, but a lot of them.

Why? Too buttery-tasting. Too rich. Too big. Too woody. Too sweet.

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MIDWEST, USA-

Dear L:

Before I left Madrid this past June, you had sent me a correspondence which had this as its final paragraph:

Please write. Write sometime and tell me things about your crazy country, full of enormous highways, tall cities, weird people, strange drinks (like Dr.Pepper, the most disgusting drink ever made after cicuta, I guess), blonde girls, cute dogs, creepy perfect neighbourhoods [sic], great writers, great musicians, great…and a long etcetera of lights and shadows of that hard to understand country you come from.

That’s quite poetic L, right there at the end with the lights and shadows etceterrata. You must be something of a writer yourself and-being Spanish-you write quite well in English. I know because I try to write in Spanish and it is widely considered to be the final and most difficult faculty to master in any second language.

Tomorrow I return to your country.

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BAKERSFIELD, CA-

The orange truck came speeding south on H Street. My kid Landen, 17, said, “There’s that orange truck. I see it everywhere. It’s following me.” He was half joking, but it’s true. I recognized the orange truck’s driver. He lives with his wife in a little bungalow on Blanche Street, close to St. Francis of Assisi Church.

Sometimes I see the same person everywhere. There’s a disfigured man who seems to haunt me. He passes on a bus, walks past on streets. He once roamed campuses while I attended local colleges. He appears in libraries and grocery stores—even on Internet sites. I’ve seen him for nearly 20 years and have pointed him out. He’s everywhere. (more…)

SAN FRANCISCO-

Hello, my name is Zoë Brock and I am a hopelessly hopeful romantic.

Love and I have a long and sordid relationship. We’re stuck to each other with that cheap, tacky glue that never dries properly and gets hairs and other bits of icky dirt and effluvia stuck in it and ends up looking like a coughed up owl pellet, minus the skeletal bits. It’s horrible, trust me.

Sometimes I feel as if I live my life adhered to the cheap pulpy paper bound between the flowery covers of a Harlequin romance novel.

Sometimes I wonder if some sticky-fingered house-wife isn’t pouring over the sordid details of my love-life, swooning, moaning and gasping at the more elaborately descriptive paragraphs as she takes a break between episodes of ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ and ‘Days of Our Lives’.

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PARIS-

It was a perfect spring Saturday, and the lovely Isabelle and I were enjoying lunch at a sidewalk café in Montparnasse with our friends Jennifer, Christophe and Marianne.

The Pennsylvania primary had been contested a few days before, and my French friends all had questions.

Not so much “Who do you like: Hillary or Barack?”

More along the lines of “Why is your electoral system so messed up?”

Now, I come from Washington, DC, the uber-center of politics in the United States.

I grew up hearing about primaries and caucuses, House sub-committees and Senate filibusters.

I could not escape it. (more…)

PARIS, FR -

“If you are lucky enough to have visited Paris as a not-so-young person, then
wherever you go for the rest of your life, even if it’s Palatka, Florida; Shangba, China; or Flint, Michigan (okay, maybe not Flint), it stays with you, for Paris
is a portable snack — but like the best snack ever: a crepe jambon et fromage on a cold day, for instance.” - JL Stankus

Montmartre

We left the windows open at night so the room was cold in the morning and the cold was good. (more…)

PARIS-

The ad usually states something like “Apartment offered in exchange for services,” a banal phrase that for students and young professionals here in Paris might seem attractive.

After all, lodging anywhere in this city is expensive.

Why not do a little cleaning or errand-running, and receive a free place to stay?

But it turns out that a lot of unscrupulous landlords aren’t looking for someone to mop the floors.

According to recent news reports, young women are being asked to prostitute themselves for a place to stay.

Sadly, women have answered these ads in droves. (more…)

AUVERGNE, FR.—

I am not from a Jell-O family.

We just didn’t develop the custom.

Never once have I uttered any of the following phrases, “I would have made Jell-O, but I didn’t have any mini-marshmallows,” “Can you please pass me the turkey- shaped Jell-O” or “It’s not a party without Jell-O.” (more…)

PARIS-

The Olympic Flame passed me by, and I didn’t even see it.

I was waiting outside Stade Charléty, not far from Paris’ Chinatown section in the 13th.

As the Olympic torch makes its second-ever global tour of the world before the Beijing Games this August, it swooped into Paris on a cold April day.

Already plagued by protests, starting with its lighting ceremony on Mount Olympus a few weeks ago, the Olympic Torch Relay (OTR) ran into continual hassles along its Parisian stretch, which caused organizers to stash the torch in a bus and keep it rolling through the city, the flame sadly reduced to a few licks of fire in specially-designed lanterns.

At Stade Charléty it seemed like the cop to spectator ratio was about 1:1. (more…)

PARIS-

Nicolas Sarkozy has been president of France for nearly a year, and in that time he has gone from enormously popular to a running joke.

Maybe that’s just the nature of politics: elect someone, then rail against him until he’s no longer there to kick around.

Or maybe, just maybe, the election of Nicolas Sarkozy was a huge mistake.

As words like “controversy,” “scandal” and “farce” continue to share sentences with his name, one must look back for a moment and try to understand how the French missed all the warning signs and elected the man.

Never known as a particularly warm and friendly guy, he was looked at pre-election as a break from the stodgy politics of his predecessor Jacques Chirac, a bright mind who would shake up the sagging French economy. (more…)

PARIS-

Three-quarters of the way through Cédric Klapisch’s Paris, a young African man who has already traveled a great distance from his home looks over the choppy sea from the Moroccan side of the Strait of Gibraltar and asks the ferryman who will sneak him into Europe if it’s all worth the trouble.

The ferryman, perhaps just eager for payment, replies that it is definitely worth it.

The young man, who is seen only in snippets during his long journey, carries with him a post card sent by a relative.

The black and white image is that of Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris.

Klapisch, and his mighty ensemble cast, bring that piece of photo paper to vibrant life in a wonderful movie that lives up to the gamble that is its name.

If you’re going to write and direct a film and call it Paris, it had better be worth the trouble. (more…)

PARIS-

It is so hard to talk about Paris.

Not for a lack of things to be said.

That’s easy.

But what makes it hard is being original about it.

How do you frame it?

What can you call the city that’s already been called by every name imaginable?

You try to come up with some never before thought of angle, some new twist on the old city, and how long is it before you realize it just can’t be done?

Even writing what I just wrote has already been written thousands of times.

It’s quite discouraging.

So, there.

Paris, the city of everlasting discouragement. (more…)

PARIS, FRANCE-

I leave humbled.

Humble. It’s a word I never understood as a child. A word I don’t think I ever really understood until very recently. It’s a word, like bitter, that needs to be lived before it can truly be understood. (more…)