Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Top Ten Books of 2013 10. Magritte at the MoMA, The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 9. From the open-air market in Nice, fresh figs, goat cheese, baguette 8. The young astrophysicist in the hotel shower 7. The Seven Samurai 6. Splash Bar closing. Any reference to dancing in my writing is in part a reference to the dance floor at Splash. 5. Your excitement inside Cité radieuse in Marseilles 4. After reading One Hundred Years of Solitude , I saw an old man walk by with his grandson 3. The Talipot Palm flowering for the first and last time before it dies 2. Massage oil  1. The garage mechanic in Tara Bergin’s This Is Yarrow  and his black hands—“everywhere they touch will be evidence of him.”

The train ride from Paris to Nice took more than the promised four-and-a-half hours. The country views were brilliant--open blue skies, ochre rolling fields--and seeing the Mediterranean for the first time as the train hugged the coastline was very special, but next time we will take a plane instead. We left the crowded train station, picked up our apartment keys from a hotel nearby, and walked through the city, rolling our bags behind us. We were struck by how Italian the city looked. The first settlement was founded by the Greeks of Marseilles around 360 BCE. It came under the dominion of Savoy, then France, then Piedmont-Sardinia, and then back to France in 1860. After we had settled into the apartment on Rue de Suede, we took a walk along the famous Bay of Angels, by the Mediterranean. Nice, Bay of Angels The next day, the plan was to hit Coco Beach, some way out of the city, but we found an outdoors market when we walked about Vieille Ville, or Old Town. The Sunday market ...

Chandigarh, India GH and I took advantage of MoMA's early members-only viewing hours and enjoyed the le Corbusier exhibition in relative peace from 9:30 to 10:30. It is an inspiring show that covers his many areas of achievement: architecture, interior design, painting, urban planning, and photography. Radically he advocated demolishing a big area of central Paris in order to make way for workers' high-rises. In Chandigarh, he designed and built India's first post-independence city, with the largest of his Open Hand sculptures. In architecture, he was the first to raise a building above the ground, supporting it on pilotis. He advocated for the use of raw concrete for its versatility and appearance. He designed curves inside rectangular walls. He flattened roofs for gardens, facilities and sculptural forms. After the show, GH wants to see his buildings in France during our coming trip, and so do I.  the church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut, near Ronchamp, France. ...