Paris. L’Épicerie de Bruno

Sure, Paris offers some of the finest dining in the world, but what about finding the ingredients to create your own gastronomic experience? In the small L’Épicerie de Bruno, located on the Rue Tiquetonne, Bruno Jerry offers some of the most exotic herbs and spices in the city.

The former banker has always been a gourmet, unable to find the spices he wanted in Paris, he would bring them back from his world travels as souvenirs.  As the son of old fashioned chemists, and the grandson of grocers, opening an exotic spice shop seemed a logical step. Read the rest of this entry »

Klara Lidén: Always Be Elsewhere

Jeu de Paume, Paris

For Swedish artist Klara Lidén, and perhaps unsurprisingly for an artist who also studied architecture, the spaces that exist behind something else are a preoccupation. Sometimes more literal (her 2008 installation Heating for Crows housed pigeons in the space between the gallery walls and a newly constructed white cube space within the gallery, allowing the sounds and scratching of the birds to permeate the space), sometimes more metaphorical (her 2003 video Paralysed, in which she danced with the abandon of a child on a Stockholm commuter train, created, if only briefly, a space within an existing space to question the often unspoken rules of public behavior), Lidén’s body of work frequently uses the idea of these obscured spaces to expose the conventions on which society, and sometimes art itself, is based.

In a move that somehow recalls Yves Klein’s famous 1958 Paris exhibition The Void, for her new project for Jeu de Paum Lidén has used layers of advertising tarpaulins to fill, and inevitably, block the entrance of the exhibition space. Here Lidén, however, takes a harder stance than Klein. He may have made visitors wait at a blocked entrance, but allowed them later to discover the empty room that existed behind. Lidén allows no such discovery. The contents of this space existing behind something else, and indeed where “elsewhere” is, can only be imagined.

June 29 – September 5, 2010 at Jeu de Paume, 1, place de la Concorde, 75008 Paris

Check out the Hotel des Academies et des Arts in Paris when you need a room – it’s home to Jérôme Mesnager’s  “white bodies”.

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Categories: Paris: Art

Contributing writer: Melissa Frost

Paris. Yves Saint Laurent

“Fashion fades, style is eternal.” – Yves Saint Laurent

Just two years after the death of Yves Saint Laurent the recently renovated Petit Palais is showing a major retrospective of the master of couture’s work.  Saint Laurent is known for revolutionizing women’s wear, including the creation of the safari jacket and the smoking jacket tailored to the feminine form, which he believed to be an essential part of any stylish woman’s wardrobe. Read the rest of this entry »

Paris. Shakespeare and Company Literary Festival

The Paris blogs are abuzz with the upcoming Shakespeare and Company Literary Festival (18-20 June). Shakespeare and Company is the Parisian bookshop opened by American George Whitman in 1951, with the blessing of Sylvia Beach.  Since then, it has reigned supreme as the English language bookstore in Paris.  In 2006 George was awarded the “Officier des Arts et Lettres” medal for his contributions to the arts over the last fifty years.  A number of literary greats have made their way through the bookshop including Allen Ginsburg, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and many many more.

Some have said that the literary festival held by Shakespeare and Company is the only real one of its kind in Paris.  Every year has a theme, and every year thus far has had exceptional reviews.  This year’s theme is “Storytelling and Politics” and explores the role of the imagination in the writer’s depiction, transformation and influence on their environment.  Over the course of 3 days writers will consider politics and responsibility in writing and the role of literature in today’s political and cultural climate.

The event is being held in the René Vivani Park, next to Shakespeare and Company, across from the Notre Dame, and will host readings, discussions, and signings.  You can expect a gathering of some of today’s most progressive and international writers, artists, musicians and actors including Martin Amis, Fatima Bhutto, Zena Edwards, Janine de Giovanni, David Hare, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Emma Larkin, and this is just a drop in the pond.

The programme is packed, and if past years can be used as an example, you’ll want to get there early.

If you’re in Paris for the arts, you’ll want to stay at an address suiting the occasion:  White Line’s Hotel des Academies et des Arts.  There you can curl up with a good book while enjoying tea and Pierre Hermé’s macaroons, or let them organize a trip to a local artists studio.  After all, you are on the creative left bank, and should enjoy all that it has to offer.

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Images Courtesy of The Shakespeare and Company Literary Festival and Matthew Mc Williams.

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Categories: Paris, Culture

Contributing writer: Alicia Reuter

No Ball Games

Something’s going on this June. Oh yeah, that over-talked about World Cup thing.

Not all places are embracing the game because, believe it or not, it’s not everyone’s be all and end all. Life and travel does carry on around World Cup time for those who let it.

Want to escape it? Here’s how.

We’re offering you retreats and hideaways so you don’t have to put up with the bad behaviour, the tantrums, the tears, the injuries or the opinions.  Get on the ball and go and do something else, somewhere else.

The Greulich Hotel is setting the tone with their No-Goal dinners, while these other hotel gems have told us their places will be football free:

Aenea, Worthersee, Austria
Krafft Basel, Basel
Lesic Dimitri, Korcula, Croatia
Inis Meain, Arran Islands, Ireland
Hotel des Academies, Paris
Ca’pisani, Venice
Hotel J, Stockholm
Hotel Skeppsholmen, Stockholm
Town Hall Hotel & Apartments, London

The Greenwich, New York
New Majestic, Singapore
The Retreat, Tanzania

Go somewhere where football fever isn’t being forced fed to you.