Non-spoiler alert: At the end of The Da Vinci Code, detective Robert Langdon meets the Mona Lisa who has been transformed into a fembot with very large shoulder pads. Just kidding! That's Victoria Beckham posing for a fashion shoot outside the Louvre in Paris this week, just like one of those statues who move for coins.
We hear she's doing the shoot for Gilles Bensimon, the fashion photographer, Elle creative director, and sometimes America's Next Top Model judge — we remember only because Tyra butchers the pronunciation of his name every time.
If you're more into viewing non-plastic works of art, check out the Louvre's fall exhibit inside. It's called Masterpieces of Islamic Art and the critics are raving.
Just got back from a dirty weekend in the countryside. Not with that prissy English boyfriend of mine, who dumped me after I called him prissy in the last Embedded piece. With my new French Fry.
I'd like to call him my new French hotpants, like my trendy friend Viia from Fashion Magazine but unfortunately I can't. He was wearing Y-Fronts.
I was trying to find a good quote to start this piece off, but couldn't find one that was tacky enough.
In vino veritas? Well, there's some truth in that.
"Get drunk and stay drunk forever." That's Baudelaire, the 1960s poet, and his fatherly advice to budding poets. Not so poetic, really.
So how about some philosophy? Fernand Desnoyer, the French philosopher, says "This is our night! Drink is the real pleasure! There's nothing after! Nothing except to drink again! While we wait for the dawn to rise!" Hmmmm, very philosophical.
In half of Europe, and many states and cities in the US, smoking in public places is illegal. In most bars and cafes in Paris, on the other hand, it is still obligatory. Refusing a proferred cigarette is like refusing a slice of birthday cake on the grounds that cake makes you fat.
Asking some hottie of the opposite sex for a light is a precursor to wild and extravagant sex in the toilets. Well, it usually works for me. And I've never visited a prostitute, but I'm told it's standard practice for the girls to offer the customer a post-shag fag in the hope of a bigger tip.
We sure were looking forward to the Blind Melon MIDI that would inevitably wind up on Elysair's homepage, but it turns out Elysair's homepage is no more. In fact, the company itself is no more; the airline formerly known as Elysair has been re-branded as L'Avion, and its new website isn't nearly as vintage. The English version, to which you're re-directed from the old Elysair.com, isn't finished yet, but the French one is.
Do any of y'all speak French? We don't, but from what we can gather from the French-language site, special promotional prices for the launch will start at €1000 r/t. There aren't any good pictures of the seating up on the appropriate section yet, but based on a quick Google translation, we're guessing that with a 140-degree recline, seats will be more MAXjet than Eos. Also according to the Google translation, the seats' color scheme will lend itself to "sobriety and the appeasing." You can get sober and appeased between Paris and Newark starting on December 27.
Paris needs another big monument. Having the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre's pyramid and la Grande Arche (need we go on) is simply not enough. Enter the new skyscraper in the La Defense district, whose design was recently chosen from ten proposals.
This new building will look taller than the Eiffel Tower (in fact it's 24 meters shorter, but that's counting the Eiffel's antennas) and will feature a few odd curves and twists to make it stand out from the average skyscraper. Architect Thom Mayne describes it like this:
There's a fluidity, a sensuousness, a softness to the form as it reaches to the sky
Sounds good enough to eat. It's also striving to be environmentally sound (thumbs up to that), with its own wind farm on top to heat and cool it for almost half the year, and a "movable double skin" to insulate cleverly against heat from sunlight. You won't be able to see the finished product until 2012, but we know you'll be waiting for it.
It seems that Euro Disney in Paris is putting recent sex scandals behind them and moving full steam ahead to celebrating their fifteenth birthday. What's more, they're stretching the birthday celebration out to a full 363 days, with special offers and entertainment running from today until November 8 next year: that's one heck of a birthday party, and kind of cheating on the marketing side, we think.
During the birthday fun, Crush's Coaster (courtesy of Finding Nemo) and Cars Race Rally attractions will open up, and Extra Magic Hours will allow visitors staying in the on-site hotels to get access to some parts of Disneyland for an extra two hours. And the final and tackiest addition will be Candlelabration (it doesn't really flow off our tongues, but maybe for the French it will) with birthday singing, dancing and candles to celebrate the big 1-5 in front of Cinderella's castle. Just wait to see what catastrophes await us for Disneyland Paris's 20th birthday in just under five years.
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by egw
