Van Gogh Museum

Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. My wife Minche and I visited the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It is one of the finest museums dedicated to the work of one artist that I have seen. Approximately 200 of his paintings and a vast collection of letters and some drawings are in the museum. You follow his at once fabulous and tortured life story from beginning to tragic end.

There are a lot of paintings that I saw that I appreciated more than his most famous ones, which are featured in every art history book. The above painting "Landscape at Twilight 1890" is one of the most remarkable and beautiful paintings I have ever seen -- but you really need to see it in person and from about 10 to 20 feet away. It is at a distance that Van Gogh's colorful technique has its greatest impact; standing right in front of the painting doesn't do it.

In addition to the Van Goghs, there is a nice small collection of art from his contemporaries from the end of the 19th and the early 20th centuries.

Van Gogh is a guy who has put Rembrandt and the other high Dutch Renaissance painters in the shade, whose art is at the Rijksmuseum about 300 meters away. A very impressive performance.

Jazz Soprano at Paris

Jessye Norman at the Olympia in Paris June 2012. My wife and I saw jazz soprano Jessye Norman sing the jazz and supper club standards at the great Paris music hall, the Olympia, on a Tuesday night in June on our Paris trip. These were standards from the Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, and other American greats. Plus the Josephine Baker classic, "Deux Amours." (Two Loves). I thought her rendition of the Ellington classic "Stormy Weather" was one of the best I ever heard.

Very memorable to sit in this music auditorium where Edith Piaf gave her last concert and where Mireille Mathieu and other greats gave such magnificent performances. It is to sit and listen to the melody of Paris float by.

Ebook - Monaco, Onassis and Prince Rainier

French Sketches:  Monaco, Onassis, and Prince Rainier

This French Sketch is up and available at Kindle, Kobo, Nook, iPad, Smashwords and other ebook retailers for $.99. This is the third in the series.

In 1950, twenty-seven-year-old Prince Rainier succeeded his grandfather as sovereign prince of the little principality of Monaco on the French Riviera. The city-state’s principal attractions were the renowned casino at Monte Carlo and the beautiful belle époque Hotel de Paris. Unfortunately, the Russian nobility and English aristocrats who had lost fortunes at the casino were long gone. Into these impecunious circumstances sailed international tanker tycoon Aristotle Onassis who bought majority control of SBM, the holding company that owned the casino and hotel.

Onassis had new money and old ideas about how to make Monaco prosperous again. He wanted to cater to a small audience of the very wealthy. In contrast, Prince Rainier wanted to develop a modern and larger market of well-to-do tax exiles, high income people attracted to favorable tax rates and beautiful Riviera weather. A power struggle between the two visions evolved over the next fifteen years until in the mid-1960s Rainier vanquished Onassis with the help of Charles de Gaulle, president of France.

Along the way Rainier married movie star Grace Kelly in the greatest fairytale wedding of the twentieth century. In a more roguish manner, Onassis embarked on high profile affairs with opera diva Maria Callas, Lee Radziwill, and Jackie Kennedy, often using his luxurious yacht Christina O as a floating rendezvous for assignation, a perfect symbol for the lust, greed, and status seeking behind these tabloid romances.

Free ebook code GR83U at Smashwords thru Jul 10

Free Ebook code GR83U good at Smashwords through July 10, 2012 for my book.

"Paris 1935" free ebook code at Smashwords

Purchase "Paris 1935" for free with 100 percent off coupon cod DP87K at Smashwords in any desired ebook format. Code is good through July 10, 2012.

Ad in New York Review of Books

Free ebook "Paris 1935" for 60 days

You can download a free copy of "Paris 1935" from the Smashwords website using coupon code JB45P through April 30. Smashwords offers Kindle, ePub, PDF, HTML, and every other format known to ereaders. Just download to your computer and then UBS the copy to your ereader. Or read it on your computer. Kindle, Sony, Kobo etc all have free PC versions of their ereader software for download. And there are generic ePub readers via Google. You are welcome to share the code or republish it on your blogs, etc.