Visual Arts closes down

One of the the weird things about growing older is seeing places you love vanish. The candy store where you bought baseball cards, the movie theater where you saw your first movies.Now another such place closes down: Visual Arts Bookstore in Condado.

I remember the first time I saw the store, it had a small sign outside. I walked in out of pure curiosity and inmediately loved the place.It was full of books about movies and had movie magazines I had never heard about. It was unlike any bookstore in Puerto Rico.

Soon word got around about this wonderful little store with all the books you could not find anywhere else. And there was also this talk about how Dominique, the owner, used to work in high finance but gave it up to create the store. It's something all of us who work for others, simply dream about.

Thanks to Dominique's store I learned about all kinds of movies, from Italian horror flicks to Oriental movies. When he had Viva Video there I was able to rent Chabrol, Truffaut and Orson Welles movies. I was also able to discover great magazines such as Video Watchdog and others.

But, that's the past. Visual Arts is closing down. There's a Liquidation sale. I will go there and buy a few books at a low price. But it will be a sad day nevertheless. A small of oasis of art and culture amidst the cheesiness of Condado is gone forever. Damn.