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Went to 5 museums this weekend: Musée du Luxembourg, Palais de Toyko, Grand Palais, Petit Palais & Musée Jacquemart-André. My feet hurt.
It was a weekend of successful quests... I found Xenophon's Anabasis in English. The funny part of the story is that I found it at Shakespeare & Co., this bookstore I used to hang out at pretty much every day the last time I was in Paris. I was dead broke at that time, and they didn't seem to mind my spending like 8 hours a day there, reading. That is, until the incident. I had a lot of time on my hands at that point and was reading voraciously. Consequently, I was buying and selling a lot of books. One day, I brought some books to sell... the workers frog-marched me upstairs and accused me of shop-lifting. They were convinced that the books I was trying to sell them had been stolen from them in the first place. Now, Shakespeare & Co. isn't a typical bookstore. Its very old and famous. It embraces its history of supporting struggling young writers by letting them sleep and eat there in exchange for helping maintain the store. Consequently, there were always a bunch of writers (in my mind, poseurs) around the place. Well, they ALL marched me upstairs that day into a tiny room and locked the door. They then proceeded to hold a vigilante tribunal. The old man who ran the place sat at a desk and kept repeating their accusations, while he went through the books. He was looking for a smoking gun, some proof that I had stolen the books. Meanwhile, these 6-7 expat-wannabes were doing a VERY convincing job of looking physically menacing. These guys were from the Hemingway "macho" school of expatriate-ism. I mean, these guys were INTO this scene. I doubt they left anyone to man the register - everyone wanted a piece of this beatdown. Finally, anti-climactically, they decided to let me go. I've thought about that experience often since... that's probably the closest I'll ever be to a lynch mob or real vigilantism (not that close, clearly). They were completely convinced I was guilty, but something held them back... I wonder what they would have done had they found the "evidence" they were looking for. I don't think it would have involved the police. Anyhow, it felt strange to go back to that bookstore 8 years later. This nice young fellow with a British accent played lovely jazz - I sat and read Xenophon and thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere.
I just got home and found out that the people I'm meeting for a drink tonight want to meet at a place 5 yards from that bookstore.
Friday morning, I walked around the 14th Arrondissement, checking it out for some old friends who are moving to Paris right after I leave. I love that neighborhood, I wish I was living there instead. Its kind of bourgeois, but its a food-lover's paradise. It seems livable and affordable.
Sometimes you just start dicking around with photoshop for no reason. Sources: jorge just (sorry), Company Record Sleeves.
Blog link: Joaquin, the man who inspired this blog. flickr (highlight: his master of self-portraiture), live journal (highlight: "So I guess the upshot is that I have to remember to stay insouciant.").
Song of the day: Santogold - L.E.S. Artistes. Lead single off of much-buzzed hipster album is pretty nice. Rap meets new wave. I am the one millionth person to blog this.
