"But where’s your heart?"
~My Chemical Romance

Sometimes I feel like such an academic cliché because I spend rainy February mornings sitting in spacious classrooms discussing such metaphysical and crucial questions as "what is Art?" and when that is solved, we move on to "what is art?" and argue the difference between modern and Modern or modernism as noun and Modernism as movement, or even just modern vs. contemporary...
Because when you live in a European capital and spend time doing things like that for a whole year... well, there really is no word for it but cliché– intelligent, perhaps, but nevertheless, the breeding ground for people who wear bad shoes and cheap dresses and stand around sipping red wine at someone’s gallery opening. Much though I enjoy these classes and even these types of discussions, I am not ready to devote my life to being a bespectacled art historian in bad need of defrizzing serum and a good pair of Manolo Blahniks.
But then I walk outside and see the butcher across the street with whole pigs hanging in the window, and suddenly I realize that I am in no danger at all.
Here,
B
P.S. I will say, though, that the last time I walked past Les Invalides (the mostly-gilded building used as a military fortress under the early Louis’, and later Napoleon’s burial place), I found myself looking up at it and thinking (even while singing along to some superfluous punk song) "Wow, check out how they used the Doric columns on the bottom and then moved to Ionic on the middle levels and Corinthian at the top, just like at the Coliseé in Rome. Wait a minute, Coliseé Coliseé, what is that in English? Oh, duh– Colusseum. Anyway, they are totally copying the Classical Roman architecture with this one... OH MY GOSH AM I JUST SITTING HERE THINKING ABOUT THE PILLARS OF LES INVALIDES INSTEAD OF JUST ENJOYING IT FOR BEING A BUILDING MADE PRIMARILY OF GOLD? I AM SUCH A NERD! I should probably never tell anyone about this..."