Mark Zero's Blog, page 3
November 25, 2011
Beginning of the Christmas Season
As Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the Christmas season in the US, the week that coincides with Thanksgiving in France also marks the beginning of the celebration. On a walk to the Gibert Jeune bookstore at Place St Michel, I encountered this lovely light display hanging over rue St Paul. Follow this link to a [...]
November 3, 2011
A Walk to Luxembourg Gardens to see the “Cezanne & Paris” Exhibit
Today, I took the afternoon off from whatever it was I thought I was doing and walked over to the Luxembourg Gardens, to see an exhibit of Cezanne’s paintings, specifically those paintings he made of subjects in and around Paris. The exhibit covered most of his career, but more about that later (here’s a link [...]
A Walk to Luxembourg Gardens to see the "Cezanne & Paris" Exhibit
Today, I took the afternoon off from whatever it was I thought I was doing and walked over to the Luxembourg Gardens, to see an exhibit of Cezanne's paintings, specifically those paintings he made of subjects in and around Paris. The exhibit covered most of his career, but more about that later (here's a link [...]
October 31, 2011
No Money, Please, We're a Bank
After passing through a gauntlet of sliding glass bulletproof security doors, code-locked elevators, and skeptical personnel at Crédit Agricole yesterday, I had a lovely meeting with a woman I'll call Manon, to establish a French bank account. Manon's rather plain, bare office came as a surprise, considering the formidable infrastructure guarding it. In fact, all [...]
Bedtime Stories for Adults
This video is from a nightly television series called Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), in which beautiful women and handsome men read classics of French literature as bedtime stories for insomniacs. This episode features actress Louise Pasteau reading from a collection of love letters exchanged by playwright [...]
October 28, 2011
No Money, Please, We’re a Bank
After passing through a gauntlet of sliding glass bulletproof security doors, code-locked elevators, and skeptical personnel at Crédit Agricole yesterday, I had a lovely meeting with a woman I’ll call Manon, to establish a French bank account. Manon’s rather plain, bare office came as a surprise, considering the formidable infrastructure guarding it. In fact, all [...]
October 27, 2011
Making Poetry on the Way
It's my first day back in Paris after nearly two years away, and I still feel like a rag doll after the long trip, so for now I will simply affirm the truth of the rather common observation that a bad Parisian croissant is still a good croissant. Apropos of which: My friend Melissa dropped [...]
October 26, 2011
The Forgotten Peninsula: Baja California
This is an old motorcycle travel feature I wrote for CC Motorcycle NewsMagazine in the late 1990s—I just came across it again and thought I would share it with you: Baja California, Mexico, a thousand-mile desert peninsula pointing southeast from California like a withered finger, boasts a political past as rich and strange as its [...]
September 23, 2010
Ukulele Lou's Last Act: A Story of the Circus
Ukulele Lou sits in the sawdust and straw behind Clown Alley, head in hands, greasy blond hair cascading around his face. He stares at the bear dung clinging to his black leather boots. Beside him, squatting on a wooden bucket, Jimmy the Microphone devours cold Buffalo wings from the paper carton between his feet. The [...:]
August 11, 2010
Herman Melville vs. the Melville Family viz. the Whale
At the site Melville's Marginalia Online, which chronicles the books known to have been read or owned by Herman Melville and all of his family members, a search reveals that Herman owned and marked up at least a dozen books on whales and whaling. None of his family members was known to have owned or [...:]
