Paris Werewolves

Invader Museum, 3rd Arrondissement Walking through parts of Paris at times feels like being in an architectural museum. Sometimes you catch glimpses of the city framed through a window, usually when you are supposed to be paying attention to something else. Musée de la Vie Romantique, 9th Arr.   Pavillion de l'Arsenal, 4th Arr. Grand Palais Éphémère, 7th Arr. Église Saint-Eustache, 1st Arr. Palais des Papes, Avignon

Under the tree beneath the famed dome of Galeries Lafayette, 9th Arr. Christmas in France tends towards the traditional. There are carnival rides set up around festive markets, where you can buy gift items and holiday treats such as vin chaud (warm mulled wine) and nougat sliced from huge slabs. The patisseries swap in desserts such as bûche de Noël , which are basically thin, buttercream-frosted cakes, rolled like Hostess Ho-Hos into logs ( bûches ) and decorated with sugar mushrooms, ivy, mistletoe, and other woodland symbiotes. These are not to be confused with Catalonia's tio de Nadal , the Christmas log that Catalan children whack with sticks until it shits out candy and presents--like a scatological piñata, with delicious turds substituting for delicious internal organs. More traditional are galettes de rois , flaky cakes stuffed with a creamy almond paste called frangipane . Named for the three kings from the Gospel of Matthew's nativity story, they are traditionally se...

La Salle des Colonnes, Musée Grévin, 9th Arr. Le Musée Grévin is probably as close as Paris gets to a Pier 39 or Times Square-level cheesy tourist trap. Opened in 1882, it's a wax museum like any other you may have been to. There are some historical figures, current celebrities, and all-time favorite personages. I'm not well-versed on who's currently famous so I can't say whether the likenesses were spot on, but the figures were incredibly lifelike. Maybe it looked like Lady Gaga. Who knows? The dude in the jeep had a DeGaulle-like air about him, especially against a backdrop photo of the Arc de Triomphe. They also throw some curves at you, with figures placed and composed throughout the museum to look like other attendees. I stood for awhile watching a woman sitting on a bench near the entrance reading a museum guide. I was there just long enough that, had she moved, I would have been the creepy one. Grévin is good for what it is--and since it is a bit off-the-beaten p...

The baptism chapel of Église Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, 9th Arr. If you've attended (or participated in) a baptism that welcomes a baby into the Catholic church, you will have noticed that the priest's language explicitly rebukes Satan, asks the child's parents and godparents to do the same, and offers prayers that the child can be freed from original sin. This is in fact a ritual of exorcism. But don't expect the spookshow popularized by William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel The Exorcist , and reinforced by countless derivative (mostly bad) films, books, TV shows, and sham documentaries. No levitating babies with spinning heads or speaking backwards in ancient Aramaic--just a mass celebrated with family and their friends. If you do experience otherwise, I don't need to advise you to contact a young priest and an old priest. You've seen the movies. You know the routine. Even knowing that baptism is a lower-case exorcism, the upper-case Exorcist book and movie casts...

Greetings, kiddies, from the haunted flea market of Sainte-Ouen. To my great joy, I'm part of a generation that was raised on a heavy dose of spooky culture. On TV, old horror movies ran on weekends while reruns of the Munsters, the Addams Family, and Scooby Doo were on every day after school. Titles like "The Witching Hour," "Werewolf by Night," "Swamp Thing," and "Tomb of Dracula" were on the comic book racks at 7-11. "Monster Mash" and "Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House" got regular rotation on my record player. Basically, if you watched, read, or listened to anything targeted at kids back then, any normal day might include imagery of ancient cemeteries, old dark mansions, and crumbling castles. And that's not counting monster-themed toys and games (I know I built the Aurora glow-in-the-dark "Wolf Man" model, and maybe the "Mummy," too) or standard Halloween icons such as bats, witc...

It will take more than perfume to cover the aroma of two weeks of uncollected garbage. Trash collection started Sunday, in slow fits and starts. It's going to be a long hard slog to get things clean again. When the Fragonard Perfume Museum can't catch a breath of fresh air, what hope is there for the rest of the city? L'Eau d'Ordure