Bois de Boulogne, lunchtime, May 2004

Photo of the day time.

I love this image. Lunchtime meets springtime. And it's Paris. Ahhh.

The bottle of Faugères seems to be looking lovingly at the baguette. You can see it reflected in the glass. And the baguette, with its wide-open wrapper, is ready to embrace the wine. The woodland grove that surrounds these two must be happy to host them.

And so was my stomach. This was the day we decided to the track down the odd three-angled Parisian intersection that was the setting of Kylie Minogue's Michel Gondry-directed "Come Into My World" and I had gotten very hungry. It took a while but we did correctly deduce the exact site of the video shoot using maps, key landmarks from the video, and eyewitness reports from helpful local metermaids. Michel had long since abandoned the corner, where he filmed a multiplying Kylie walking in circles around the Point-du-Jour neighbourhood, which is not too far from the giant Bois de Boulogne parkland west of the city. The loaf of bread in the photograph is from the boulangerie featured in the music video; we picked up the wine further down the road. (The intersection today has almost none of the shops shown in the amazing video, just the bakery and a lot of boarded-up storefronts -- though I now realize we practically walked by this French Wine Museum on the way.) We came, we saw, we came into his world, and then we drank and ate sandwiches. And it was good.

A whole year later, I would actually stumble upon the real live Michel Gondry, in the flesh. We were in New York, not Paris. The funny thing is that the Soho restaurant we were in would be called Bread and the drinks spread across my table and his, which was cozily adjacent to mine, would be wine.

But I digress. Outside right now it's 33 degrees below with the wind blowing so never mind the whole story and just breathe in this picture.