coffin-couture

from white flat figures in limbo on the urban landscape to a live audience of appreciative young minds, here to learn about the business of ART... and the business of death from the previous incarnation of the space LE CENT QUATRE as the state undertaker...
the display of oddly cool white t-shirts depicting various styles of coffins does not seem to faze these children so full of life and wonder at the creative eccentricities of the world...

angst-alone

on a quiet stretch of the quai des Celestins just a couple of blocks from where I stay I meet a shy and lonely nude man...
he is trapped in a blocked-up doorway of the solitary house overlooking the Seine...cars whizz by with no regard and strollers only give him a quick quizzical glance...
he is reduced to a one-dimensional contorted angular anguished mass, his body language a dramatic rejection of the hurried and disquieted world...

[I know I have been on a run with "white bodies" this past few posts, but it is odd that the more people are disconnected from each other, the more one sees the population of substitute human forms!]

flue up, way up

from drainpipes to chimney flues, the creative efforts of determined [and courageous!] artists appear wherever visible...
even an "established" graffiti artist like MESNAGER managed to find a way to fly/climb/tele-transport up this enormous chimney to place one of his corps blanc...perhaps an exhortation to keep at it until galleries and museums acknowledge your persistance and/or talent for such things and you are finally worth the price of admission...

[Rue de la Villette]

[Jerôme MESNAGER invented l'Homme en blanc way back in 1983 as "un symbole de lumière, de force et de paix" that is so ubiquitous now they are seen the world over...his site has the coolest video of where all his white ghostmen have roamed.]

foreign body

the most basic of figurative depiction enlivened by graphic descriptions in chinese characters and arabic script (?) around its apparently female salient features...
I have no idea what it is signifying, but my first instinct was something health or medical-related...??...any decipherer or decoder out there?

[Thanks to Adam for his colourful post a while ago on Rue Dénoyez, which I wandered onto recently and found this paste-up and other wildly primitive vibes and vignettes... this is also a flow-out to his thing for drainpipe "art"!]

[paris-lorient]

a slight detour to Lorient on the Morbihan coast in Brittany [and a momentary departure from single-image posting!] for this colossal "primitive" discovery...
such primal-sexual manifestation of a sous-marin sliding into its german-built brutalist concrete "bunker" casing is not so easily chanced upon!

the amount of medieval-thick concrete expanses of this complex is so massive and solid that even as it has no longer served its purpose for decades, it is still much too overwhelming to demolish and discard...

and so it sits, this enormous dirty grey mammoth hulk, for little boys and big men [et moi!] to come and gawk and contemplate its brute design, its forceful genesis, its sinister purpose...

now a benign home to "FLORE", the last remaining submarine to hold the fort, so to speak... but forever on dry land!

[Base de sous-marins de Kéroman, 56100 Lorient...beside the new high-design Cité de la Voile Eric Tabarly, dedicated to the legendary breton sailor Eric TABARLY and his extraordinary sailing legacy]

paris-hong kong

the shop of 10,000 things, plastic galore, made in China...
an old chinese man prances by, his long grey moustache pasted in a swirl pattern on both cheeks...
a bowl of cracked boiled eggs and a pile of peanuts in their shells atop a cardboard box on the sidewalk...
french spoken with a chinese accent, chinese spoken with a french accent...
the wafting smell of barbeque chickens and ducks...
I am in Hong Kong, I am in Guangzhou, I am chinese again...

[Rue de Belleville]

paris-dar djerba

just a few blocks over from the Marais and I enter foreign terrain...my senses are inundated by the exotic sights and smells of sunny north Africa...

I am careful where I point my camera as large crowds of men congregate on one side of the boulevard...and on the other quieter side, women sit on the sidewalk begging in between abundant displays of dried fruit and colourful spices...

[Boulevard de Belleville]

from very tiny holes...

...issue the most minute and valiant of green life in the midst of the most busy of cities...
cracked star-burst black pearls of sidewalk aggregate somehow seeded, rain [and spit?]-dampened, germinated and sprouted underfoot on the mostly barren and aptly named Rue de la Perle...
a miniature collaborative art-nature installation that I almost stepped upon!

tower power

like an enormous Escher puzzle, the intricately crafted architectural models of the most progressive tower designs are arranged on a raised curvilinear-edged platform for giant humans to view from above...
the twisted bottle-shaped Escher Tower by the high-powered-design BIG [Bjarke Ingels Group] of Copenhagen emitting its multi-hued light patterns projects as a beacon to another eurocentric rise of a visionary vertical renaissance...

["L'Invention de la Tour Européenne" Pavillon de l'Arsenal, 21, bld Morland 75004 Paris]