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The Caravaggio effect

Consider two decapitations

Caravaggio and His Legacy, on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until February 10. 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. 323-857-6000; lacma.org In his 20s, in Rome, in the first decade of the ...

Helsingborg, Sweden

Ikea’s hometown is a favorite of royalty, tennis stars, rock stars and foodies.

The city of Helsingborg, Sweden, is a lot more charming and laid back than you would imagine Sweden’s busiest fruit port, the place where Nicorette was invented and still made, and the headquarters for Ikea. ...

Why My Daughter's Middle Name is Vienna

An ode to the city and its opera.

When people find out that my daughter’s middle name is Vienna, the first question is inevitably some variation of, “Oooh, you didn’t name her after that mean chick from the Bachelor, did you??” So, no. ...

St. Petersburg, Russia

Exhaustion from traveling had taken its toll. I craved sleep, but was not comforted by the platform posing as a bed, shaking as the night train made its way south to Moscow. Sightseeing in the ...

Mildly Hallucinated

Disturbing strangeness at the Museum of Photographic Arts.

Day Trip to NYC: Art + Food

There are lots of reasons why you might like to have a handy day-trip plan for NYC. Perhaps you’re sitting bored out of your tree in one of the many cities that supports a super-discount ...

Shoestring Travel: Barcelona

Taking you to European destinations on a dime (6 of 7).

After traveling all around southern Spain this past year, we figured it was finally time to give some love to northern Spain. We started with 3 days in Spain's Catelonian capital, Barcelona. The minute we ...

Paolo's Phoenix: Cosanti, Arizona

A lesson in sustainability.

In Paradise Valley, overlooking the 70,900-acre Agua Fria National Monument, is the Cosanti gallery, studio and home to 93-year-old anti-materialist architect and urban planner Paolo Soleri. It isn’t surprising that this author of six books, ...

L.A. Day Trip: Watts Towers and Eames House

I braved Carmageddon II on a September Saturday and visited L.A. to explore the individual creations of two iconoclastic L.A. visionaries. Located in vastly different sections of L.A., the Watts Towers and Eames House represent ...

Shoestring Travel: Florence

Taking you to European destinations on a dime (4 of 7).

An easy 1.5-hour train ride from Rome got us into Florence midday. After gathering our bearings (and a map), we set off to drop our bags off at our flat before exploring the city. We ...

Moscow's Love Lockdown

There is an old Russian folktale that says that in days gone by, young married couples were locked inside a granary shed for privacy during their wedding night. True or not, it’s a story that ...

Cabot's Miracle: Desert Hot Springs and Pueblo

Two and a half hours north of San Diego.

I’m in love with a dead man. Honestly, if there ever was a Man of Men to pine for, it would be Cabot Yerxa, who died three years after I was born. Not only was ...

The Merry Cemetery in Maramureş, Romania

In the twenty-four years of my life I spent in Romania, I never had the occasion to visit a unique place in Transylvania called the Merry Cemetery. So, about two months ago, I called my ...

Sea Ranch Chapel

Just north of Salt Point State Park, half way between Point Reyes National Seashore and Fort Bragg along the Pacific Coastal Highway, is a place called Sea Ranch. About 300 of the 1,800 uniformly shingle-clad, ...

Eavesdropper

I’ve been listening to the jazz pianist Dave McKenna, who died in 2008. He was a lyrical swing artist with some of Bill Evans’s melancholy, though he wasn’t as inventive as Evans and didn’t have ...