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...