au ciel

soaring above the Cimetière de Belleville is a prominent pair of multi-legged water towers, installed like some colossal launching pads for shooting the myriad souls to the heavens... or as totemic-treillage tomb markers for twin-tympanic titans...

"Madame rêve d'artifices

des formes oblongues

et de totems qui la punissent...

d'un amour qui la flingue

d'une fusée qui l'épingle

au ciel

au ciel...

on est loin des amours de loin...

Madame rêve au ciel..."*

[*selected verses from "Madame rêve" by Alain BASHUNG, 1991 BARCLAY]

big-hornes

sometimes one walks by a shop window and just know that the display has been unchanged since 1962 or even 1957...this window caught my attention because I happen to have one of those hefty double-beak anvils [les bigornes] weighing down my house, and long retired from its original purpose but now serving as an occasional unwieldy door-stopper...

[that baby turtle really needs to be rescued from this rigidly arid and uninhabitable iron forest!]

rubber brand

bouncing [sorry...couldn't help myself!] down Rue des Tournelles [4e Arr.], I stretched to catch this almost faded away sign for these premises that once produced rubbery things... rebounding me back to the memory that my grandfather had owned a rubber plantation, making me a descendant of elasticity - which explains my constant street-rubbernecking and the blog-coagulation of all my visual feasting...

la petite lacune

an elegant door with gilded frames and a lovely sheen of pale patina - an aging door in a place of great pomp [I won't reveal where, but perhaps some can guess...] and yet, on one side of it there appears a chipped cavity, a gaping gash, a misaimed bullet hole?...

I am riveted by this detrital damage, this ambivalent affront to stately circumstance, a polemic pockmark that is conspicuously festering and inviting an investigative prod...

demi-chinois

 the integration of the chinese in a western culture usually lacks full traction...they remain insular and contained behind real and perceived screens - even if they dare to breed outside their race, the offspring is more often labeled half-chinese...

for those who don't read chinese, where are the french signs?

[Rue Etienne Dolet, 20e Arr.]