adieu monsieur charles

sitting all alone on the cold hard floor, the dusty and tarnished Monsieur C had been glaring out of this closed up shop for years... I walked by him almost everyday when in Paris and always wished that I could take him home to join my very handsome Monsieur A...

sure enough he disappeared one day and I am missing a bronze ghost, a specter in metal who was once a living entity prominent enough to be immortalized, and now spirited away to a gracious home, or more congested storage, or on the road from brocante to brocante...

[Rue Charles V, 4e Arr.] 

banana livres

across from the quartet of glaringly obvious open glass books that is the sleekly contemporary Bibliothèque Nationale de France to the glory of a certain french president, there is a messy little storefront office with a wilting banana plant shoved against the grimy window...

a stunted unloved exotic with no hope of ever fruiting any bananas but still bearing witness to all those millions of books turning ever so slowly to mush in the unrelenting sunlight, books that nobody in this freely downloadable world has the time to leaf through their precious parched pages anymore...

PAiX!

rigid rows of little chimneys pots...

grimy patches of weathered cream walls...

forlorn traces of a demolished building...

haphazard wood braces against crumbling bricks...

squiggly green lines bloom on worn plaster...

a small heartfelt exhortation of PAiX! from on high...

visual word balm on raw structural wound from my primitive paris... 

à biseau

 a tiny keyhole into a brick wall - a misplaced escutcheon perhaps - and yet so daintily feathered and ornamented...

to fool naive and desperate birds that there may be a home for them beyond the pretty trimmings, or really just a whimsical installation as an overtly salacious supersedure...

bons chiens

I am pulling open my spring green door to Paris again...
plucky paris where my heart still roams like a pack of wild but well-fed pups...
[j'ai du chien encore!]

heart of glass

 a smashed window in a dark alley was hastily taped up with black ducttape...and yet someone took the time to form a heart-shaped outline...

when I look at my out of focus walk-by shot of this shattered window, the blurry image vibrates a strange and intriguing sense of artful tension - wholeheartedness out of destruction, a symbol of love out of a gesture of anger [or accident!], abstract painting out of non-creative intentions...

cara puerta

 

 something about a face on a door, the long knocker for a nose, the mail slot as slightly parted lips, and those strangely glowing hand-painted eyes looking back so quizzically...

I don't know who lurks behind this door-face, but I confronted it with a bright flash from my camera and it did not even blink...I could have banged on its nose or put my eyes to its mouth but it might have spat up a sharp retort...or worse, the whole face could have been flung open to reveal a much more animated and angry one!

modernisme metalico

 

in Barcelona, in Paris, and in other cities, I am always drawn to overwrought ironwork, decorative and functional, imperially elegant and wildly anachronistic, from the sanctioned designs of master metalsmiths and from the florid imagination of one improbably eccentric architect...

Gaudi, whose astonishing swirly creations elevate a city's architectural heritage to a giddy plenitude of art nouveau flourishes, entwined metallic strands into such fanciful flights, they seem alive and in vigorous flux...

[Palau Guell, Carrer Nou de la Rambla, 3-5, Barcelona]