Every bakery claims to make the best baguette in Paris. This bakery in Montmartre does not care to be in that overcrowded group. It proudly proclaims itself the second best in the region.
The cat at the grocery doesn’t care because cats don’t eat carbs (except in Italy, where cats eat pasta), but he’s very friendly.
Catch Urbandub and other great acts at CinemaJam 2014.
Bamboo, Franco, Pedicab, Itchyworms, Urbandub and other top bands will perform at CinemaJam on Saturday, November 29 at the Greenfields District Central Park in Mandaluyong.
The concert will cap a full day of activities, art installations, and open-air screenings of Now You See Me and Letters to Juliet. The gate opens at 10am.
Tickets to CinemaJam are now available at Ticketworld. Call 891 9999, or go to www.ticketworld.com.ph. Part of the proceeds will go to World Vision.
You and a friend can go to CinemaJam for free by joining our raffle. Just post your name in Comments. The winner gets two tickets to CinemaJam 2014. The Winner will be announced tomorrow.
CinemaJam is a project of Crizal Transitions, which has partnered with Essilor to develop Crizal Transitions Signature lenses, which provide more natural vision and true color perception in a variety of light conditions.
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The winner is Rani Uy. Congratulations! Please email saffron.safin@gmail.com to claim your 2 tickets.
We didn’t do much shopping in Paris, not so much as a T-shirt, but we did stock up on reading matter.
The novels of James Salter are widely available in French translation, and are bestsellers in Paris. Of course: beautiful elegiac prose, lots of sex, several chapters and stories set in Paris.
The Search Warrant, a.k.a. Dora Bruder, was the only Modiano we found in English translation, but with his Nobel win we can expect more English translations in a few months.
We’d been looking for the fiction of Leonard Michaels since we heard one of the Nachman stories in the New Yorker podcast. Nachman, the protagonist, is a mathematician, bit of a loser, fascinating.
The Guest Cat had us at the title.
The Calasso is a social/literary history of Paris in Baudelaire’s day.
We want to read everything by the late Laurie Colwin. This one we read in a day: it’s about overthinkers who face the possibility of happiness and don’t know how to deal with it.
Ali Smith we’ve never read and are curious about.
We inspected the shelves at National Bookstore and were pleased at the new selections:
J.G. Ballard is best known for his memoir of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp Empire of the Sun. It is the least typical of his eerie dystopian tales. The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, Php1305.
This is column fodder: the story of the Igorots who were exhibited in New York in 1905. The American impresario got the idea from the St Louis Exposition of 1904, which showed 1300 tribespeople from the Philippines. The Lost Tribe of Coney Island, Php1095.
The Bone Clocks, one of our favorite books of the year, Php1199 in hardcover.
A short and elegant novel by Ian McEwan, about a female judge who must rule in the case of a teenage Jehovah’s Witness who refuses a blood transfusion that could save his life. In Saturday, McEwan got into his neurosurgeon protagonist’s head so thoroughly we were convinced he could operate; in The Children Act he explains British family law so cogently he could hear cases. Hardcover, Php999.
Gilt-edged like a Bible, The Book of Strange New Things is the latest from the author of The Crimson Petal and the White, and of the short story that became the film Under the Skin. Hardcover, Php1099.
A new collection of short stories from the author of Self-Help and Like Life. Trade, Php629.
Winner of the Booker Prize in 2010. Friends swear it is funny. Trade, Php375.
*Not to be confused with one of the mutants in The X-Men.
No one was free to watch Nightcrawler with us, and we didn’t think it would run for a second week, so we watched it alone. Excellent decision.
Dan Gilroy’s film, shot by the great Robert Elswit, follows a freelance videographer who prowls Los Angeles in the dead of night, shooting footage of urban crime scenes, grisly accidents and high-casualty fires, which he sells to a TV news program. Jake Gyllenhaal, so thin his eyes are popping out of his face, is absolutely compelling as a man in whom the rhetoric of self-help and the motivational industry takes the place of a self. Basically he’s a slithering, bottom-feeding insect in human form. This is what happens when the will to succeed is unhampered by a moral compass.
With Rene Russo as the TV news producer who becomes his enabler, and Riz Ahmed as his hapless “intern”.
Watch it any way you can.
Update: Aha since the new Hunger Games doesn’t open till tomorrow, Nightcrawler has been held over an extra day. Go!
Pedicab will perform at CinemaJam 2014.
You and a friend can watch the movies Now You See Me and Letters to Juliet in the afternoon, and performances by Pedicab, Itchyworms, Urbandub, Bamboo and other bands at night.
Mark the date: Saturday, 29 November, from 10am to the wee hours at the Greenfield District in Mandaluyong.
To join our raffle, just post your names in Comments. The winner will be announced at midnight.
Tickets to CinemaJam are now available at Ticketworld. Call 891 9999, or go to www.ticketworld.com.ph. Part of the proceeds will go to World Vision.
* * * * *
The winner of two tickets to CinemaJam is Lanilyn Besa. Congratulations! Please email saffron.safin@gmail.com to claim your prize.
The next raffle will be held on Friday.
Paris is beautiful and filthy, like a supermodel with a PhD who doesn’t change her underwear. Or a very hot guy genius with skid marks, except that Paris is obviously feminine. Male or female, it goes without saying that they will cheat on you with everything that moves. And you still would, because it’s Paris.
There is the real risk of getting Stendhal Syndrome—overdosing from the sight of so much beauty that you lose consciousness. Try not to succumb outdoors, as you will either land on dog poop or a homeless person. The homeless are mostly Eastern Europeans begging on the streets. There are shelters where they can spend the night as it’s getting very cold, but apparently it’s safer to sleep outdoors. In Montmartre, which is clearly divided into immigrant and bobo (bohemian bourgeois) sections, the residents have expressed solidarity with the newcomers, providing them with hot food and doing their laundry. Periodically the homeless immigrants are rounded up, given 300 euros, and deported. They come back.
Read our column at InterAksyon.com.
Here’s a very abridged translation of Valerie Trierweiler’s tell-all book about her relationship with French President Francois Hollande.
And a report on how Culture Minister Fleur Pellerin couldn’t name any books by Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. Oh the scandal.
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