a blind flaneur

[Source: Wikimedia Commons]
Osip Mandelstam never wrote this poem down. Only a handful of his most trusted friends ever heard it. One of them betrayed him. After his arrest in the fall of 1934, his interrogator at the Lubiyanka Prison in Moscow confronted him with this hand-written copy.
The Stalin Epigram
We live, but we do not feel […]

Amedeo Modigliani. Anna Akhmatova. c. 1911. Pencil on paper. Apartment-Museum of Anna Akhmatova. St. Petersburg, Russia. [Source: Olga’s Gallery]
From Poem without a Hero
Paris is in dark mist
And probably again Modigliani
Imperceptibly follows me.
He has a sad virtue
To bring disorder even to my dreams
And be the reason of my many misfortunes.
Anna Akhmatova
[Source: Olga’s Gallery]

Set 1: My Heart Belongs to Daddy
Sophie Milman has a smoldering torch-singer voice that could singe the heart of the world-weariest lounge lizard. Born in Russia, raised in Israel, Milman calls Toronto home now. I heard her first on NPR, part of a media blitz promoting her second album, Make Someone Happy. The promotion […]

Lee Miller, Surrealist muse, photographed by Man Ray, Paris ca. 1930 [Source: NYT]
Janine Di Giovanni encapsulates the Surrealist stretch of Miller’s life in a New York Times T magazine feature:
Born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1907, Miller fled her conventional life — and a rather odd father who took photographs of her naked — to model […]

British Vogue photographer Lee Miller smiles in combat fatigues in Alsace 1944. It was said that no soldier could resist a photographer with a fashion model’s striking beauty. The photo was taken by her friend and colleague, Life magazine’s David E. Scherman. [Source: NYT]

Lee Miller sneaks a bath in Hitler’s apartment after the fall of […]

[Photo by cormac70]

[Photo source: NYT]

L’Amour Has Little to Do With l’État - NYT 102207
THE French — on the right and on the left — have embraced the news that President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Cécilia, have divorced with a surprising amount of sang-froid and a collective shrug.
It’s partly that the French no longer treat marriage […]

[Photo by novella78]

I remember seductive summer days in the Musée Rodin when the windows were thrown open and soft,rose-scented breezes caressed the marble and bronze. Where else but Paris would a museum open its windows to the world?

Auguste Rodin. L’Illusion soeur d’Icare. 1895. Musée Rodin, Paris. [Photo by Dave Rytell]
This sculpture beguiled me when I saw it at the Musée Rodin. I so much wanted to touch her wing. It was marble but it looked like a living thing. It had the delicacy of feathers, the muscularity of pulsing blood, the […]

[Photo by wallyg]
I heard these guys almost every afternoon as I crossed Place de la Contrascarppe, the heart of our Paris neighborhood. One time they were playing “On Green Dolphin Street” and I imagined one street  in New York while walking down another in Paris.