don't brown-bag your holidays just because the economy is in free-fall, the air is toxic, the oceans are emptying out, the rainforests denuded, and the world's general health rapidly failing, soon to be on life-support if there is still a universal clinic standing...no matter how desperate and dire the straits are, let's hope that there is still love to be made, pâtisseries to be eaten, unmurky water to drink, pockets of adequate air to intake, and most of all, tolerant friends to make it a little more bearable...
R is for...
sometimes when you merge the interior and exterior worlds in a single reflection, the potent and poetic image that emerges can confuse even the staunchest of surrealists...but for me, the muses can float by in a dusting of light particles and even a glint is enough of a sign...
at a vide-grenier in a Neuilly neighbourhood, someone's precious collection of old toy cars is meticulously laid out on a pristine white tablecloth...what courage and sadness he must feel to finally decide that it is time to part with a cherished part of his boyhood, and hoping that their new homes will treat them just as well...
there is so much to guard against these days... priceless jewels on the Avenue Montaigne, Chinese products [edible or not], quick and nimble bicycle thieves, even unscrupulous Swiss bankers!... oh, for the easy days of knowing exactly who and where le gardien was to solve the little problems of a much simpler and smaller world...
at the elegant and recently renovated Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature there was installed the most incongruous piece of "sculpture"...[un objet trouvé by some hunters? and modified by the designer/artist Vincent Dubourg] of the shell of an old car with saplings having grown and wrapped their limbs around it like those of a desirous woman around a mysterious and immobilized man...
a ghostly portrait emerges from the residue glue of a removed poster, not an image born under the image of another, but an image etched onto the detritus of another...nonetheless compelling and arresting as the original...
these ancient rusty transformer boxes are the epitome of primitive, and yet, current continues to flow through them to light up, heat up, power up computers in centuries old rooms where the previous inhabitants could not have possibly imagine the world enabled by the installation of a few boxes and wires and switches...
perched at the end of the brasserie's wide red canopy, this enormous pink bottle seems to taunt passersby with its proudly over-sized presence...
for that elegant parisian who feels the need to break out of their sedate lifestyle every other full moon and head into some serene woodland to unleash hell on poor little defenseless creatures...
the incredible ingenuity with a few hundred plastic cups...just to display one precious pair of shoes
so much of paris is becoming sanitized and americanized these days...it is increasingly rare to chance upon lost in time artisan ateliers such as this one still with its old sign on the door and a long out of date telephone number on it...
along the scenic seine the more privileged homeless occupy prime riverfront real estate in neat and orderly tents with a view of the exclusive ile saint-louis and the grandiose hôtel lambert where voltaire was once taken in and thereby saved from a similar humbler fate...
the prominent outward manifestation of a long-standing and free-spirited primal occupation of prime property, as observed across the way from within a bastion of frenzied juvenile mass-consumeristic and art-apathetic flock...
the creative chaos of scavenged kitsch, the jumbled spontaneity of blindly expressive neophytes at l'ecole de beaux arts...I envy their uninhibited impertinence in these hallowed halls...
the lines scribbled, the names scratched, the backs leaned, the tears stained, the dishes thrown, the pictures hung, the furniture scraped, the beds rattled...against these leftover walls for decades and decades...now exposed to the elements, the curious gaze...another remnant of lives lived, well or otherwise, in this corner of paris...
I no write francais good
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