continuum...

there is a tree in Paris that is a testament to the tarrying nexus of time, to the soffit spectrum of survival spiralling through hundreds of millions of years...
the end of another year has me thinking of this singular tree, as I had once watched its leaves radiate a glowing yellow before spinning wordlessly down to the ground...
I picked up a few of these gilded leaves so perfectly bifurcated and so strangely primordial, their cell structure interlaced with mysterious knowledge from so long ago when the world had no human eyes, no human touch...
China has since claimed it as her national tree, but I claim it as poetic justice that it may just keep going on long after countries and people have dissolved away like so many new year's resolutions!

"Dieses Baums Blatt, der von Osten
Meinem Garten anvertraut,
Gibt geheimen Sinn zu kosten,
Wie's den Wissenden erbaut."*

[*first verse of "Gingo Biloba" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1815]
[this particular gingko biloba specimen flourishes in the park beside the Petit Palais]

Je vous souhaite de joyeuses fêtes ainsi qu'une belle et sage année 2010!

paris-noel

meilleurs voeux!
...l'amour...la paix...la merveille...

peace on earth...

goodwill to all men...
"J'étends les bras. Mes mains caressent l'horizon doux et souple..."

"La terre je la vois, la terre je l'entends, la terre est sous mes yeux et vit dans mon oreille.
Rythmique et musicale, elle est encor plus belle!
Ses bleus étages descendent, remontent, prennent un temps.

"Laisse penser tes sens, homme, et tu es ton Dieux."

[french lines excerpted from "La Vision Harmonieuse de la Terre" by Paul FORT, (crowned Prince of Poets by Verlaine), 1872-1960...his famous poem "La Ronde" is about world friendship]

paris-mutuel

it is always hard to say goodbye to a space, an era, an entity that has been so physically encompassing, so emotionally enriching, so gloriously uplifting...but as one volume empties, another fills up, so one must make the leap, the graceful entrechat from the one to the other, to a newly shimmering pas de deux, and to a sparkling fresh territorial gambit...

[in an empty room with muted christmas colours in the Petit Palais, 8e Arr]

au premier

it is easy to imagine delicate things gliding up these wooden stairs to more private tables where the food is neglected and hands are surreptitiously preoccupied with caressing other warmer parts... and no, be they not be palm pilots, sourberries nor vibrating mobiles, but soft and scented, smooth and responsive, and taking a long time to come down those narrow stairs again...

[meandering down the rue du Pont Louis-Philippe towards the silently flowing Seine...]

au deuxième

lurid carminite stairs swirl up a cherry-popsicle space...inflated beach balls float in cartoon suspension...
Dr. Z slides down the tangerine banister into a pristine Miesian world of prize-winning models of architectural wonders while I am sucked like Alice in W-land into this glowering vertical tunnel of erubescent saturation...

[Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, 16e Arr.]

au troisième

drifting through compliant rooms hung with arrested moments in time and place, compelling illusions of captured light and shadows, the ephemeral wisps of hazy played-out lives, I could not climb up the red sphinx steps any further to the smoky trompe-l'oeil, to a ghostly dimension merging what can be seen with what is not really there...as mysterious as the aurora borealis of interior complicity...

[Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, 5/7 rue de Fourcy, 4e Arr.]

la dinde timide

MERCI pour le bonheur din-donner

poor plumped-up turkey pretending to be a voluptuous lamp to avoid being served up as the preeminent plat du jour...
not being the most alluring french delicacy, she is lucky to be in an enlightened city where she can be just a silly goose and not be too enthusiastically devoured in gratuitous gustatorial appreciation...

[somewhere in the merry Marais]

enrue-banner

a narrow and ancient passageway of artisans with signage almost as large as their ateliers' frontage to advertise their really-made-in-france specialities... and a struggling determination to rebuke the products of cheap labour costs from the other side of the world [that have irreversibly and all too quickly infiltrated the high-gloss emporia of euro-consumerism]

[somewhere in the still industrious 12e Arr.]

rejectamenta

the late fall sunlight slants timidly onto a desolate and shuttered-shut streetscape spotting an unassuming grouping of artless dada-debris tossed out from a nearby galerie d'art...
even such unsculptural outcasts, such non-conceptual decontructivism, such free-form-following-functional-fusion concrete-clutter can still manifest a somewhat compelling synthesism of neocubistic "art brut" coalescence...
[sometimes my ironic art-speak gets the better of me!]

[Rue Pierre Gourdault, 13e Arr.; Monsieur Gourdault [1880-1915] was a french painter who had lived in the vicinity but lost his life in the first world war]

l'énigme du propylée

in a shadowless De Chirico meta-architectural dreamscape, the Rotonde de La Villette [19e Arr.] looms stolidly in pseudo-palladian decorum as one of the tollhouses of the Wall of the Farmers General by the Bassin de La Villette...
I ride in slow ambiguous circles around this squat brooding "propyleaum" [Ledoux's term] that had once collected duties from goods entering an 18th century Paris, musing all the while what its 21st century incarnation will be...

"a la fin tu est las de ce monde ancien...
tu en as assez de vivre dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine...
et tu observes au lieu d'écrire ton conte en prose...
et tu recules aussi dans ta vie lentement...
adieu, adieu...soleil cou coupé"*

*selected lines from the long surrealistic "ZONE" by Guillaume Apollinaire [1880-1918], who was much influenced by the enigmatic work of Italian-Greek painter Giorgio De Chirico [1888-1978]

[Place de Stalingrad; Rotonde de La Villette was designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, 1786-87]

baguette divinatoire

I huffed up the stairs to the Notre Dame de la Croix [20e Arr.] and was arrested by a limbless but bulbous trunk -
like some mutant tumourous tree of dark knowledge, or a multi-breasted stalk of divine nurture...
a lumpy breadstick of stale godforsaken crumbs, or a tumescent rod of procreative force majeure...

ufo-ria

a small red primitive spacecraft twirls in place above the sidewalk observing the local denizens come and go from the corner café...
tired, harried humanoids enter and shortly emerge looking revived and slightly more energetic - not quite euphoric, but definitely somewhat more resplendent under floating smoke-ring halos...
tiny aliens decide to hang around longer to absorb planet paris culture, eventually becoming just another curious parispheric objet populaire...

fenestrations

high interior windows reflect a multitude of large exterior windows in this quiet hallway of the Mairie of the 3rd arrondissement...
I sit looking up - patient, contemplative - mesmerized by the muted layered light, a glimpse of the unfluttering bleu-blanc-rouge...
the hushed officialdom of a townhall's weekday routine reduced to echoing footsteps through marbled halls, lowered voices in passing, doors closing firmly to funhouse smoke and mirror bureaucratic orchestrations within...

in/out-up/down

a slightly illusory and mind-bending imagery, to be sure - and no, I was not upside-down to shoot this - but while waiting for the rain to stop, I am lulled by the watery black and white reflections inside the entrance of the Pavillon de l'Arsenal [4e Arr.]...
after viewing such precise and immaculate maquettes of architectural convolutions upstairs, the brain decompresses by looking down and absorbing a scenario that shifts quickly from rational reading to contorted dream-like misapprehensions, all dissolving in a pool of murky dissymmetry...

and the rain comes and goes outside, as always in a novembery paris...

boxed-in

a minuscule cubicle not much larger than the chimney and garlanded by a lush floral smile perches solitary upon the roof...
what could this diminutive protuberance possibly hold - a chair? a cat-box? a kettle?...perhaps a small television set [already so retro sounding!] for which the antenna still stands on guard!

absence du tronc

a soft-focus study in pale greys and stone, the faintest traces of a cross and lettering on the wall...
a creamy ray of light accuses the missing donation box...as if the very spirit of a sacred place has evaporated...
in this large and hollow space of the chapel of the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, reverberating silence drifts along with the revelatory light and I cross paths with the shadows of unquestioning statues...

autoboxes

something about the graphic simplicity and basic lettering and the double language usage of the words in this sign appealed to me [although I have cut out a qualifying word before "BOXES" in this image]...
as if lulled into a semi-surreal auto-suggestion of box-shaped cars or enormous boxes for cars or unenergized objects versus powered machines...
but nothing as mundane as a secured garage to tend to your average automobile...

[Rue de Belleville, 20e Arr.]

les petites puissances

a rough and ready altar for a pair of pugilistic babies commemorated behind shattered glass and a gilt frame...
a pugnacious display of the early training regime of man-on-man dominion in a dog-eat-dog world...
"rien ne m'est étranger de leur joue à ma joue..."*

[*from "Une autre âme s'avance..." Jules Romains]

[Rue Denoyez, 20e Arr.]

rust in peace

I come upon a narrow rusting door, an ambivalent oxidized portal shut tight to a dusty darkened chamber...
what lies within are perhaps a few tangible symbols of a life long faded...or some consecrated offerings to an obnubilated spirit...
what then when the metal wears thin and the neglected vault finally tumbles to the ground?...
the death of a tomb - a double-death unsung in a sepulchral alley, with only heavy rutilant elements of iron still suspended in the dewy corrosive air...

[Cimetière de Belleville, 20e Arr.]

a sign for signs

another old sign flaking off into obscurity...this one for a manufacturer of small plaques and furniture hardware, those exquisite functional and decorative metalwork that one can still find rusty bits and tarnished pieces of in dusty boxes at flea markets, and reproduced for the organized bins in the hardware department of the BHV...

[Rue Amelot near the Bastille, 11e Arr. - and I do believe that is a bullet hole between the A and the R!]

beau comme un camion

the grittiness of the Marché d'Aligre spills out of many forms of transport modes...
a daily olio of stuff tumbles out of vans as primitive as they get on the streets of Paris...some with panels of crudely vibrant graffiti stop for a while at a brocante to disgorge their messy innards onto the ground, then move on again weaving through traffic and flashing their bold images to weary commuters...

torch-song

le mur est flambé...
a singed serenade...
a flamboyant flash-point...
a flecker flare-up...
a blistering blaze-burn...
a scintillating scorcher...
a grilled grimace...
a concerted combustion...
a pyromanic putsch...
an incisive incendiament...
a contingent conflagration...
an arsonic-laced annointment...

really just another innocuous and inflamed wall somewhere in the glowing heart of pyrexial Paris...

scaling the wall

an abstract symbol composed of snake-scales and bark-veins inflicted onto a blank concrete wall conveys serpentine stasis in segmented curves...
a statutory juncture to contemplate the confluence of sinuous biomorphic skin and static architectonic membrane...

[Rue François Miron, 4e Ar.]

les tuiles céladones

missing my building with the celadon skin on rue des Solitaires, I find another off the rue de Belleville...
another céladonique moment, so to speak... but covered in a web of tiny sea-green tiles that also brings back my need for the sea...
the simple pseudo-modernist design with the plain metal tubing railings is nevertheless enlivened by a pair of ornamental flourishes bracketing the entrance canopy...and the mysterious giant silver spider still guarding the balcony above...

solitary man

one quiet Sunday morning many years ago, I biked by this building when it was a soft celadon green colour...
the white shutters were grimy and the naked young man posing intently above the front door could also have used a bath...
with the sticky surrealist ghosts of Aragon and Breton prodding me on, I was silently beckoned towards this solitary entity hovering above the rue des Solitaires as if...
"Life itself has summoned into being this poetic deity which thousands will pass blindly by, but which suddenly becomes palpable and terribly haunting for those who have at last caught a confused glimpse of it."
[Louis Aragon in "Le Paysan de Paris"]

I recently returned to catch another glimpse, and was relieved to find him still in situ, but considerably spiffed up to seduce younger and more excitable paris-feasting eyes...

sans tête

missing more than just his head, this bottom-third statue of Saint Nicolas still drapes the hems of his flowing robe over a corner niche on the Ile Saint-Louis...
carved onto the stone above the street sign and faintly legible is the more ancient former name of the street - Rue de la Femme sans Teste... perhaps sans tête is more appropriate now for the decapitated St. Nic - and much more intriguing than the present name...
[the older street name apparently alluded to another ancient sign depicting a headless woman holding a glass in her hand, meaning what exactly no one has quite deciphered, even with an inscription of "Tout est bon"...]

"a horse did whinny..."*

at the grand portal doors to the barracks of the Garde Républicaine on Boulevard Henri IV hang a pair of enormous lanternes... sometimes when I walk by, the doors are open and I can glimpse one or two horses being exercised around the grounds... sometimes I just hear them whinnying from within, and I hear again this song that I have heard so many times within my own home...

"a horse did whinny in the afternoon - he had no pity for the old buffoon...
a horse did whinny in the pale sunlight - he had no eyes, he had no insight...
a horse did whinny, or so I was told - he had nothing else to befoal...
a horse did whinny and that's a fact - he had nothing at all to give back...
a horse did whinny, but who cares...
a horse did whinny through the air...
a horse did whinny in the middle of the day...
a horse did whinny as if to say...
go away...go away...go away.........go away..."*

[*lyrics from "a horse did whinny" by my son Enzio (copyrighted 2008), as performed by his very cool band "Half-Chinese"]

objet suspendu

it hangs heavy like a giant silvery spider, but staying quite still above the balcony...
it catches my eye as I am photographing the building - I zoom in on this araignée grise and marvel at its elegant design, its mysterious purpose, its decorative placement beneath its thick wiry web... waiting oh so patiently for an unsuspecting prey to come along...
I am still in suspense as to what kind of spider it is...

[really, what is this thing??]

pot-of-iron in repose

like a hollowed out pumpkin "round upon the ground", it reclines "gray and bare" on the step of a neglected tomb...
"it did not give of bird or bush"... its angle of repose betrays a state of rusting dissipation, a dirge to its complete disengagement...
soon it will be removed altogether, perhaps repaired for sale by a wily brocanteur...or discarded into a cauldron of melting iron, sparking embers into the dark, dark night...all the while "[taking] dominion everywhere"*...

[*quoted lines are from Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of a Jar", 1923]

potiron de paris

towards the end of summer all carefully cultivated and even the not-so-well-tended plots are yielding their bountiful harvests...
I am proud to present our firstborn french pumpkin..."Jaune gros de Paris" - all glowing buttery roundness in his full perfection...the promise of "très beau fruit rond, très côtelé, aplati, écorce brun orangé, chair jaune" on the seed package when I chose it at the marché aux fleurs on the Ile de la Cité has been fulfilled!
I could have left him in our jardin potager a little longer to grow larger but he had actually tried to run away and was found hanging precariously on the other side of the back wall [and in fact his brother has sneaked right through the other fence to live secretly in the neighbour's garden where he is getting quite enormous!] but we decided that this is a good size to perform certain culinary experiments on...
he sat happily on display to admiring human eyes for a few days on our dining table... and then it was time...
I reluctantly cut into him, quartered one half, scooped out all his seeds and stringy pulp and baked the pieces flesh up - [the other half I baked flesh down, draining off more pumpkin juice!] - and when the pieces had cooled, I spooned out the mushy yellow flesh, to be used in various recipes...
so far, my simple pumpkin crêpes have been quite delicious, especially with some confiture d'abricots!

lying-fallow

I once wrote about a statue beckoning from a building on this street whose name has always plucked away at my intumescent heart...
the contemplative and reclusive rue des Solitaires echoes a nostalgic no man's land, a romantic retrenchment, a sentimental seclusion...
[I returned recently to find my invincible statue still solitary but the building had been freshly repainted an odd green, not the soft celadon it had once faded so introspectively to...]
I walked on by and passing a barricaded lot, I peeked through a crack and find again a wasteland wilderness, a dejected desert - where a new structure has not yet sprouted up, where a community garden has not been measured out, where squatters have not gamely tented on... and where the inviolate red doors may still open up and lead towards the ever receding barren mysteries of les solitaires pauvres...

lilolila

crumpled-up silver net clouds loom over a rambling open post and beam walkway awkwardly hung with sheets of colour-splotched graffiti like so much drying laundry flapping in the breeze on this little island of green relief...
on a small corner lot on rue de Belleville, an experiment in democratic design within a neighbourhood garden has been implemented by L'association l'îlot-lilas...
based on the theories of artist/architect Yona Friedman, a very loose hanging "museum of graffiti" was installed as a participative project to encourage local residents to effect change in their own environment... redefining their public spaces as they see fit and evolving them according to their needs...
[or devolving into organizational chaos, as some might grumble...!]

[295, rue de Belleville]

stair-stockings

the entry courtyard of the17th century Hôtel de Sully is one I know well as I frequently trespass through to the parc of the Place des Vosges...
one day as I entered through the rue Saint-Antoine doors I was confronted by clunky barricades, spindly scaffolding, and metal stairs sexily clad in a giantess net stocking - all sullying the usually drowsy elegance of this domain overseen by no less than the Four Seasons and the Four Elements...

[designed by Jean Androuet du Cerceau and built between 1624 and 1630 for Mesme Gallet, the Hôtel de Sully was soon acquired by the duc de Sully, Minister of Finances to Henri IV... it is now the Centre des Monuments Nationaux to manage monuments and historic buildings belonging to the state... since 2004, it also houses the state's contemporary photo collection in the Jeu de Paume museum... as well as one of my favourite bookstores with a comprehensive collection of books on Paris...
Hôtel de Sully...62, rue Saint-Antoine]

chain-link-lace

the art of chain-link crochet made manifest by this example at Le 104 imbues plain-jane fencing with a sublime decorative value... transforming a mundane common-place necessity into giant lacy doilies to mysteriously veil the harsh urban landscape or certain neglected gardens...

[Le CentQuatre, 104, rue d'Aubervilliers et 5, rue Curial... I forgot to jot down the artist's name...]

monsieur le vitrier

monsieur le vitrier is from a time when there were no computers to google for a glass repairman or twitter the world to recommend one... he walks the streets with his sheets of glass securely strapped to his back and stops on every block to call out his services...
once we had him come up to repair a cracked windowpane in the stairwell - and we hope that there will be more broken windows to keep him coming back... but we know that one day he will be too weary to traverse the narrow streets of the Marais anymore, and potential glazier apprentices are now too busy texting with their nimble fingers...rather than getting them cut by broken glass!

[Place des Vosges]

monsieur le coq

a grizzly old cock appears in my peripheral vision as I bike along the quai Jemmapes discovering the location of the EXACOMPTA plant for supplying generations of writers and reluctant students with fine notebooks and sturdy paper goods...
he is not the proudest of rooster, what being overweight with a featherless paunch and his bits hanging out unobtrusively... there is a certain quirkiness about him though that sets him apart from some other animal depictions I have come across on parisian walls...
the loud-crowing symbol of the french state somewhat plucked and bloated but still holding his head up high [and with his manhood intact!]...

[thanks to Adam for letting me know the name of the artist - BONOM... there is a flickr photo pool of his work and Adam also wrote a piece a while ago on a church near the Bastille that featured an ammonite fossil by Bonom on the spire]

stick-it-to-me-ters

tiny stickers go on small surfaces to animate these otherwise banal meter boxes...
stickers attract more stickers and proportionately shrunken tags, and soon, voila, a self-contained site of colour and texture and self-expressionistic remains to brighten any meter-reader's day...

[Rue Vieille-du-Temple]

sign-aged

seriously...
is this an inverse invitation to stick them up anyways...
is this an ironic irritant to post some more...
or perhaps just another lovely old sign of a paris past...

[I think I will appropriate this next for my new header "signage"!]

art-squeeze

around the side wall of an impeccably polished gallery showcasing soft-edgy and hip-weary contemporary chinese art is the most ferociously raw and haphazardly "collaborative" piece of exterior ooze...
the peeling paint, the almost unassuming tags, the anthropomorphic turd[??], the abstract black and white patches, the grit and the grime - all contribute to a visual palette exuding out of some primeval need to squeeze the ink out of pens, the paint out of brushes, the spray out of cans and make a mark, a gesture, a movement, to inform this bleary-eyed jaded crowded wilderness that is paris contemporary primitive...

[Rue du Poitou]

brain-freeze

an arresting image in the window of Atelier KAO on rue Commines made me stop in my tracks and study this enormously detailed brain-like painting made from "l'encre dropée sur la toile"...
the organic conglomeration of such a densely writhing and squiggly mass hijacked my eyes into its mesmerizing visual labyrinth, and as I captured it in my camera, the image fused with my own congested greyish matter in a frozen web of inky darkness...

rejointoiement

from messy working garage to pristine art factory, this slimmed down solo citroen by Gabriel Orozco, our part-time neighbour in Paris, has pride of place on an upper level of the Centre Pompidou...
in the end is it just a lovely old french car cut in half and re-served as a clever sculptural counterpoint to over-slick showrooms of over-sleek new models promising yet more roomy joy-rides...
[or looking backwards in my rétroviseur, I may be slightly regretful for the missing middle...]

rejuvenation

she seems so vulnerable and violated - her belly exposed, her mouth opened in a silent cry, her eyes blinded, and thin wires like delicate veins pulled out through various orifices...
I am seldom witness to the mechanics of rejuvenation surgery of older models, and the inner workings of a traditional messy garage with its scattering of strangely shaped tools and instruments and bottles of toxic ooze...
all in the service of beautifying and reinvigorating a once sweet young thing that refuses to stay off the streets...

bleu180

this is an intriguing number on a cobalt blue back door...
not indicating an address, nor a company's name...
a measurement, perhaps?...180 cm high?
a directional key?...180 meters up? 180 steps down...to hell??
180 degrees upside down???
I am still puzzled...
[actually I do know it is advising that the door is 1.8 meters high, but for those who do not calculate in metric, it is an odd number to contemplate...]

[located somewhere south of the Hôpital La Pitié-Salpêtrière and west of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France F.M. in an area where contemporary galleries once had high hopes of thriving...]

red 13

trapped behind 2 bars and glass, I thought a superhero had been captured and incarcerated under this most unpopular of numbers...
upon closer study, he appears to be a proud gladiator or centurion confined in a niche once reserved for a more sanctified figure, [although he does hold a cross to his chest and what seems to be a large black bird lies at his feet!], but now he stands guard within a blood-red wall on a street where nothing much happens...

[anybody knows whom he might represent?]

[13, rue Charles V]

archi-totemic

the "gangplank" balconies jutting out precariously from the upper floors caught my eye as I biked along the other side of the Bassin de la Villette - enough to make me stop to take a picture - and I immediately wanted to go up there and experience the vertigo of being out on those bold protrusions...
the angled verticals of this structure as defined as well by the different colour applications [white and graphite grey on this façade, burnished red on the other side] provide a dynamic visual interest that attempts to reflect the Suprematist ideals of Malevich by which the architectural design's sculptural arrangements must express effecting aesthetic and emotional values...
in other words, height and bulk can be made to look appealing - and even playful to live in...just don't play crazy pirates way up there!

[known as "Totem" and "Tower of Flandres", this building was designed by Pascal Chombart de Lauwe and Jean Lamude of TECTONE in 1996,
27-29, avenue de Flandre et 6, rue du Maroc (19th)]

face-off

on the side wall of a non-descript apartment building friendly faces of various hues and ages loom over me... they may be residents of the neighbourhood, they may be well-known personages [I think I recognize a couple - Piaf? Chevalier?]...
they animate the bland architecture and they make one lift one's gaze from street level to make eye contact with their stacked and larger than life visages...

[portrait mural by Claude Cussinet and Andre Pistun on Rue de Belleville]