paris primitif

pinkbottleblob

2012-01-27T10:26:00.000-08:00

a salacious sea creature...a gigantic squeak toy...a rare and exotic flowerhead...a pretty party-dressed mine...
this vivacious vandal's delight squats benignly on the sidewalk, unperturbed by the passing feral urges to kick at its protuberant presence...

BIGness

2012-01-20T13:32:00.000-08:00

a roomful of BIG [Bjarke Ingels Group] hyper-innovative projects on exhibit was a sumptuous architectural feast...
the immaculate maquette for the sleek-peaked WEST 57th apartment building in New York soaring aerodynamically towards the ceiling - this sharp-edgy pyramidal superstructure soon to grace the Hudson riverfront...

[part of the Frontiers of Architecture series of exhibits at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark]

swede boy

2012-01-12T13:41:00.000-08:00

the tyroboy looks me in the eye
with raised fists and taunting mouth...
the tornout words do not tell me anything - I am guessing they are not gentle...
I pass them by, I turn back - he is still challenging me...
the fledgling alpha round with this freshface minimenace - the futilefight is on...

paris mirage

2011-12-30T10:04:00.000-08:00

the sentimental skies of a paris spring beckon - pierced with antique crosses, the tall iron maid, the tricolour pride...

the years dwindle, the moss darkens on stones forgotten, the metal corrodes, and the flag frays - and yet...

"dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé

deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.

-te souviens-tu de notre extase ancienne?

-pourquoi voulez-vous donc qu'il m'en souvienne?

-qu'il était beau le ciel, et grand, l'espoir!..."

[selected lines from "Colloque Sentimentale" by Paul VERLAINE (1844-96)]

on skeppsholmen...

2011-12-16T20:49:00.000-08:00

they march no more down these halls - the young swedes of a naval order...
outside, the dark trees shield the statues low and the tall ships...
they see a light on - the light that casts shadowlinks in a tight room...
a hollow box, a fulfilled sack - the season's ending in a corner...
the solstice is rounding up, the days lengthening -
and so begins the music again...

[at the Hotel Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden]

swede abstraction

2011-12-10T17:45:00.000-08:00

the detrital conflation of peeling paint and sprayed symbols, of pasted notices and torn images, of flaking glue and dried spit - presents an accumulative reading as complex as an archaeological dig, a vertical congregation of visual strife as dissonant as a Twombly passage...

["Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings" at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm from October 8 to January 15, 2012]

thinktanker

2011-12-01T21:38:00.000-08:00

jag tanker att...jag tanker...tror jag.../lois

think...thinking...thoughts...
he paid a penny for her thoughts...
she was thinking of someone else...

blindcouplebluff

2011-11-27T11:16:00.000-08:00

"...their most secret thoughts meet as when two colours meet and flow into each other on the wet paper of a schoolboy's painting..."

[excerpted from 'The Couple' by Tomas Transtromer, the Swedish poet awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature - finally! - (from 'The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations' by Robert Bly, 2004)]

[on a divider wall outside of Goteborg, Sweden]

metal-liturgy

2011-11-14T16:04:00.000-08:00

the french artist Francois Morellet's inter-locking stick metal "Sphere" [1962] floats in one corner - a primitive steel hive model for a futuristic orbiting space habitat...

the german artist Gunther Uecker's "White Field" [1983] of swirling nails maps the galaxies in a square studded universe - where man can orbit only on the minutest speck of iron dust...

[both pieces are exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Danmark]

pre-occupy any space...

2011-11-05T09:08:00.000-07:00

from the cozy compactness of a single city bench in copenhagen...

to the barren brushland beside looming suprarchitecture in barcelona...

manifest the urgent need to stake out one's piece of ground, if not one's peace of mind...

danish dropped diction

2011-10-30T11:42:00.000-07:00

strips of danish lie dejectedly abandoned on a busy pathway...spilling from their frame, the words escape to the incomprehension of foreign interest...

marais nostalgie

2011-07-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

Le Marais was my little piece of Paris for years and the Village Saint-Paul was just a cobblestone throw from where my nest had perched...
this was before the Marais was "discovered" and the onslaught of tourists began...this was when the small antique shops had dusty shelves and napping proprietors...this was when the boulangeries did not offer up doughnuts and muffins...this was when I fell deeply in love with a mise-en-scène that does not exist anymore...
the bell of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis may still toll on the hour, but the unseen bird in the garden of the Marquise de Brinvilliers is no longer heard singing in the cool evening air...

l'île exotique

2011-07-07T10:30:00.000-07:00

over 400 years ago, La Guyanne was a far-flung colonial outpost sweltering in the fetid tropical heat and fought over by the sea-faring european powers of the time...

from the island capital of Cayenne to the island heart of Paris, the Marquis de Soumont spent months upon high seas to sail safely home again, never to know of the spaceships that could now launch him almost to the moon in a day...

[Hotel Rolland on Quai d'Orleans, Ile Saint-Louis]

[Guiana Space Centre, established by Charles de Gaulle in French Guiana]

les trucs jaunes

2011-06-11T11:47:00.000-07:00

yellow is not a colour I would ever wear nor paint my house in, even if it has always been designated the happy colour...

yellow is the colour of many sublime things - bright flower petals, juicy lemons, melodious birds, fragrant spices - and with any sort of enlightening, may it no longer be an attribution to the most populous race on this earth...

skullfenestra

2011-06-05T12:50:00.000-07:00

within the anatomy of a Gaudi vivarium, no artifice is too minor to address in symbolic narrative...
the skull-shaped windows rise up through the aqua-tiled spine towards the surface light from their watery depths...

coucou

2011-05-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

peeking up her wide iron skirt, through delicate layers of gray metallic lace...
her long graceful neck held high, soaring above all that we strive for -
not realizing that in the end we can't take it with us...

la cuc

2011-05-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

the anthropomorphization of a feisty and tenacious insect is championed in this boisterous bar...where in any language, a cockroach is still un cafard is still a creature that will survive to the end of time...

for the love of books and blooms

2011-04-28T12:09:00.000-07:00

el dia de la rosa...y por amor...
a little belated for wishing all a lovely Sant Jordi day [April 23rd] dedicated to St. George the patron saint of Catalonia - and a combo St. Valentine's and Mother's Day...roses for mothers, wives and girlfriends and books in return to fathers, husbands and boyfriends...
el dia del llibre is also in remembrance of Cervantes who died on this day in 1616...

medieval cache

2011-04-11T15:41:00.000-07:00

the follies of youth are somewhat contained in this hostel sanctum of the Marais... they come and they go, storing their little green bottles on the corner ledge - beyond the reach of the unrefreshed, all so thirsting to be anointed with a dash of spring ...

antique light

2011-03-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

one spring day a celestial beam found its way into the dome of Saint-Paul Saint-Louis...
ethereal faces lifted towards the nostalgic light where the spirits of kings and cardinals converge...
Madame de Sévigné silently slipped into her chair, a dark veil hiding her delicate face...
she prayed for her forebears and her progeny and for her charmed ascendancy in the Marais...

antique ghosts

2011-03-16T13:29:00.000-07:00

sometimes they hover behind window panes in the darkened chambers of private needs...
sometimes they drift across your field of vision then vaporize into the fading light...
sometimes they loom before you like peripheral gods from the antique mists...
and sometimes they enslave you in their stony embrace and engraved kiss...

of kings and lost lizards

2011-03-09T14:39:00.000-08:00

a short distance away from the extreme sculptural opulence of the Pont Alexandre III, a golden salamander bask alone in the sunshine...
in search of the king who had once held it in such high regard to symbolize the mandate of his reign "nutrisco et extinguo"*...

[*"nourish the good and extinguish the bad" - vive la France!]

of kings and old clochards

2011-03-04T09:21:00.000-08:00

strung out along the Pont-Neuf like so many pulled teeth dangling on a chain, these grotesque pearls grimace and glare at the sanitized masses...
they finally found the head of the gallant Henri IV, embalmed and unjuggled, who once crossed over this bridge of vice beaming the glories of France...

gardien d'escalier

2011-02-21T13:47:00.000-08:00

the mythical herder contemplates the rise of a steep climb while his baby pan watches for the lost flock...
I descend the winding stone steps and confront their trespass upon my modernist reverie...

[cozying up to greek gods in the Rue de Turenne neighbourhood, 3e Arr]

yellowbricksfloat

2011-02-07T09:38:00.000-08:00

"My glass crushes a puddle of yellow beer against the marble table top, a bubble floating in it."*

[*from Nausea by Jean-Paul SARTRE, 1964]

...and below, the seine floats on wordlessly, ever reaching for the great big sea...

[merci, Peter, for reminding me the name of the artist of this "shadow man" pochoir - NEMO has been leaving his mark around Paris since the early 1980's and has long been established as an officially sanctioned street artist]

bawlingbaldhead

2011-01-31T20:34:00.000-08:00

I shout for more...

I holler and I roar...

I yell in pain...

I cry in vain...

only to reverberate against the intimate wall...

doubledeergirls

2011-01-23T14:44:00.000-08:00

large peartears of cherry drop from the honeyhalo...
the tieredtree sprouts from crossed twintrunks...
a pair of bambigirls reach for each other, eyes closed...
and stroke the grittymouth of the blankeyed stump...

burlybirdman

2011-01-17T17:42:00.000-08:00

the buff and muscular adjutant scrunches up in a rude finger pose atop a roof, oblivious to the open orifice through his hip...

rainbow rods spray out on another wall further down the block - delicate veined wings mocking this flightless big-beaked manhawk...

parfois l'oiseau arrive vite...*

2011-01-01T11:46:00.000-08:00

"attendre s'il le faut pendant des années

la vitesse ou la lenteur de l'arrivée de l'oiseau

n'ayant aucun rapport

avec la réussite du tableau...

...alors vous arrachez tout doucement

une des plumes de l'oiseau

et vous écrivez votre nom dans un coin du tableau."*

[*selected lines excerpted from 'Pour faire le Portrait d'un oiseau' by Jacques PREVERT, Selections from 'PAROLES', 1965]

BONNE ANNEE A TOUS!

[chirps the sweet little bird from the Jardin du Luxembourg]

l'aigle catalan

2010-12-21T08:33:00.000-08:00

crowned l'aliga barcelona, this gegant dances to a solemn chant...
on a wintry sunday morning he appears in the plaça sant jaume...
with his noble wings unfurled, he glides through the flocks gathered
where the flightless aristocracy hides behind drab and tattered feathers...

les faucons-prisonniers

2010-12-15T17:12:00.000-08:00

they peregrinate no more, these regal birds of prey...
encased in a glass cage, their feathered forms are unruffled...
their sharp eyes unseeing, yet their heads are held high...
while tiny hearts still beat in flight over some dusty skies...

chauve-souris-femme

2010-12-06T10:33:00.000-08:00

darkly over the Ile-Saint-Louis flits a winged creature of the night...
by day she folds up her black cloak and retreats behind heavy doors...
the late tolling from the belfries of Notre Dame soon put her to flight...
swooping low along the river in search of love and other bites...

AERO

2010-11-25T07:52:00.000-08:00

partial reveal...obvious reverse...interior mysterious...

specific nomenclature...remnant onomatopoeia...rearranged alphabetics...

AEROspheric EROtomania ROdomontade Or not...

ORFE

2010-11-18T10:23:00.000-08:00

stain my walls with your pigmented disgorfement,
squirt and dribble your colourful orfeburst
all over my hard-edged sand-boxed sprawl...
some will get it cleaned right off,
but some will always get orfe on it...

[HORFE bombs french and british capitals in loud and blinding erorfetions]

BAR

2010-11-14T10:51:00.000-08:00

BAR none but for one or two...

no holds BARred but do hold on a while...

please do not disBAR but just go behind them...

that BAR is sinister but only for those bastards...

and the BARtender is really not so tender after all...

SL

2010-11-10T09:32:00.000-08:00

the most Royal of Monograms carved into solid Wood

on a Colossal Door that has defeated all Weather...

the Fallen Best have glided by horizontally -

for the Saint of all Louis to clasp in Perpetuity,

as tightly as the S-hroud wrapped around the L-amented...

[sliding reverently past the doors of Saint Louis des Invalides]

BG

2010-11-04T07:45:00.000-07:00

a spray of roses pierced the iron door,

inherent and finite;

the curly initials stained by the rain...

a life annulled, her soul congealed -

remnants of hair, teeth, bones

sealed in the cold stone closet...

while dust storms gather elsewhere...

[mysterious nonentities at the Cimetière du Père Lachaise]

l'oeil-de-boeuf-gras

2010-10-27T08:37:00.000-07:00

il a le compas dans l'oeil... mais cela n'est pas de sa compétence...

[turning away from the exquisite trappings of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs]

champchambre

2010-10-22T10:28:00.000-07:00

c'est là qu'il est dans son élément... il veut faire un chassé-croisé...

[the interior pursuit of a solitary nature at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature]

prophypousses

2010-10-17T13:19:00.000-07:00

la hauteur de ses conceptions... être logé aux quartre vents...

[spouting soft phallic-sprouts on the lawn of the Palais Royal]

noblessaqueuse

2010-10-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

les gueules de lion rugissent le sang royal...il fait rubis sur l'ongle...

[dampened by the font of diluted aristocracy at the Place des Vosges]

multiplexapiary

2010-10-07T10:06:00.000-07:00

babeelonienne ruche d'abeilles... paroles mielleuses s'envolent...

[the most coddled bees live in the Jardin du Luxembourg producing much coveted honey for the connoisseur few...]

vestibule-vaporeux

2010-09-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

the ghosts of the risible staircase float in the drolling haze...

rising above the impudence and converting the scintillations

to daze and obfuscate...

[steaming in obscurum on the Rue du Bac, Paris 75007]

niveau-lueur-nébuleux

2010-09-26T15:04:00.000-07:00

a flattened moon hovers over the dry industrial artland...

a maleficent eye unwinking, unthinking, purely jinxing luminance...

upon...

"angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night..." *

[*line from "HOWL" by Allen GINSBERG, 1926-1997]

[unspinning lunadisc in the Palais de Tokyo, 13, avenue du Président Wilson, 75016 Paris]

entours-trône-estompé

2010-09-21T10:15:00.000-07:00

a baconesque pop-pope perches on the punk-pink throne...

what fetish entozoon soon emerges to empyrean calculations,

to slither under the silky chasubles of phlegmatic apparitions...

[alone with Napoleon's tiny chemise de nuit in the Musée Galliera, 10, Avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie, 75016 Paris]

béate-boîte-brumeuse

2010-09-14T09:40:00.000-07:00

Safe in its Glazed Chamber-

Untouched by Mourning-

And untouched by the Moon-

Lies the meek relic of the Insurrection-

Pillow of Satin - and Roof of Stone!*

the Shadow darkly unmoved,
hangs upon its golden Spot;

the Blessed Blood steeps
in slowly relinquished layers...
curing to soft rapturous Rot!

[*a re-versing of the first stanza of "216", with apologies to Emily DICKINSON, 1830-1886]

[suspended in the Hôpital La Pitié-Salpêtrière, 75013 Paris]

frigos-flûtes-floues

2010-09-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

dark dark flowed the freeze fluid...cold colder coldest no more...

art artful in frost free fridges...conducive conduit art-erial core...

[Les Frigos, 19, rue des Frigos, 75013 Paris]

la verte perpétuelle

2010-08-31T12:53:00.000-07:00

pitted stones sweat blooming mossss...

sleek marble salted by crystal tearsss...

the buried bones split hairs lossss...

a speckled twig falls on your fearsss...

"et vous qui dormez! autre granit et vieilles roses

qui passez et disparaissez dans un bain pur

sans faiblesse comme sans distance

hautes hautes terres étranger azur

pesez sur elle qui n'est plus

dans le temps ni sein ni spasmes ni larmes

qui s'est retournée sous la terre

vers l'autre plus cendreux soleil."*

[*verse from "La Femme et la Terre" by Pierre-Jean JOUVE, 1887-1976]

l'éminence verte

2010-08-28T12:48:00.000-07:00

a jagged thread of sun stitches together furtive shadows below...

the voluminous gowns above enlace in a symmetrical row...

a light wind sways their regal skirts, and l'air varié intersperses...

softly the courtyard of the palais royal, still undulating eminences...

l'implication verte

2010-08-19T13:39:00.000-07:00

in the seafoam greenness of this fugitive corner...

in the darkened carapace of this mantled courtyard...

agile immortals are engaged in mythic play...

boldly implicit in the undercurrent of simulacre...

l'involucre vert

2010-08-16T10:28:00.000-07:00

a whirling man-boy...breaking out of his pod...shaded by notre dame...

paris is his husk...

"this plant would like to grow and yet be embryo; increase, and yet escape the doom of taking shape; be vaguely vast, and climb to the tip end of time with all of space to fill, like boundless Igdrasil that has the stars for fruit."*

[*3rd verse from "Seed Leaves" by Richard WILBUR, 1921-]

l'embrouillement vert

2010-08-09T12:41:00.000-07:00

even in death, she is close...

married to his brother, but after his own heart...

painter to painter, talent on talent...

M pour M...

she brushes aside, then lightly upon...

her green eyes darkened in repose,

her white dress splayed,

a wilting camellia on a velvet web...

[a summer's day at the intimate Cimetière de Passy]

l'endurcissement vert

2010-08-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

a stone veil...
a verdigris frost...
a slotted regard...
a faraway heart...
quelque chose demeure un peu sur la montagne...*

[*line from "Beauté des femmes, leur faiblesse..." by Paul VERLAINE, 1844-96]

la porte bleu

2010-07-26T14:02:00.000-07:00

whenever I had entered into my private paris, it was through large blue portal doors - a blue of a hue almost too intense for this city of muted colours...

I would have preferred shiny lacquered black, softly reflective pearl gray, a dark rich green, that deep burgundy red or even plain polished wood to this bright voracious blue...

until one day when I came upon this slim and elegantly ornamented panel shied away in an impasse behind Rue Saint Antoine that glowed the same cobalt blue, I then realized how much vivacity has coloured my inner world here in this the most perspicacious town of them all...

l'ardeur rouge

2010-07-19T08:59:00.000-07:00

somewhere in paris a shiny red camper van encapsulates the inflamed fervour of a neighbouring nation... the full flush victory of la furia roja charges in all directions - a bullish taunting toro for the enervated les bleus faibles...

[paris-madrid]

2010-06-30T12:31:00.000-07:00

the spanish boys dance their nimble steps with the ball in the winds of the Cape of Good Hope...a bravura honed by centuries of natural prowess with a bull under the brilliant sun...
in Madrid we had been witness to the finesse and the flair manifest as instinctive as flurried fingers on a guitar, a goaded Goya with his brush, the lyrical vehemence of Garcia Lorca...all passion play as tarred and bloodied as the darkest rose...

[paris-donostia]

2010-06-25T10:27:00.000-07:00

a concerned or challenging portuguese query on a basque beach - tattooed on a silken skin of sand, the sea a silvery sheet flowing up the atlantic throatline to the darkening tête de france...

where ignominious anti-heroes have returned to choke in a cloud of noxious blue smoke...

[paris-pamplona]

2010-06-15T11:20:00.000-07:00

el sol may also rise here, los toros may frolic ferociously on the streets, los peregrinos may avoid such excitable streets, but in Pamplona there are also dangerous stone balls carefully secured with steel bars to a solid wood casing in a hidden alleyway...

perhaps on their secret journey to Afrique du Sud for the fleet-footed spanish armada to conquer all!

[paris-zaragoza]

2010-06-10T08:34:00.000-07:00

the cockroaches encroach in this dark alley, following a mythical sailor not far from the salty sea...

but Corto Maltes dances no more - his mother's gypsy blood having curdled with his father's english gore - and we slash a fateline through Zaragoza before dawn to follow the Ebro to a lost continent of mute stones and secret roses...

eau d'europe

2010-05-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

"...'tis some cold, black pool, where in the scented dusk..."* oozes an oily dirge...

"j'ai vu le soleil bas taché d'horreurs mystiques illuminant de longs figements violets...

...mêlant aux fleurs des yeux de panthères à peaux d'hommes!

j'ai vu fermenter les marais, énormes nasses où pourrit dans les joncs tout un Léviathan!
...eschouages hideux au fond des golfes bruns...

moi qui trouais le ciel rougeoyant comme un mur qui porte, confiture exquise aux bons poètes, des lichens de soleil et des morves d'azur..."*

"si je désire une eau d'Europe, c'est la flache noire et froide où vers le crépuscule embaumé un enfant accroupi, plein de tristesses, lâche un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai."*

[*selected lines and verses from "Le Bateau Ivre" by Arthur RIMBAUD, 1854-91]

[alone in a small secret chamber in the Marais, softly scented by Eau d'Europe and the breath of two frenchmen...]

le coffre d'or

2010-05-26T12:44:00.000-07:00

a gilded chest distends from that hallowed hall to primitivism on the silvered tongue-river seine...divination primeval in-viscus entombed within, while divining rod of iron inviscous pierces the primal skies above...

were all this gathering of indigenous vestiges an invocation to self-preservation or a mere ablation of vengeful velleities...

[Musée du Quai Branly by Jean NOUVEL, 2006]

mater-adora

2010-05-21T09:41:00.000-07:00

behind a pane of textured glass she stands in pale wooden folds with her babe in arms gently shielded by a leafy branch... bathed by a watery light the carved hardness exudes a serene innocuity, a fixated imperturbability, the monocarpous mamaternal eternal...

la calotte d'or

2010-05-17T11:57:00.000-07:00

to encase a favoured companion dog skull in golden formulation, to display as mnemonic ritualist object upon an antique desk, to revere tender the noblest animalistic spirit, to crown such meagre ancient bones in such propitiatory resplendence...

"...l'incertitude de mourir et le fer de l'amour dans la plaie d'un sourire...la plus lointaine étoile du plus humble des chiens..."*

[*selected lines from "Lanterne magique de Picasso" by Jacques PREVERT]

[Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature]

sans-travail

2010-05-11T11:54:00.000-07:00

in a more primitive pariscene, this small but hefty 2F saucer once dotted one of countless café tables... but it has been unemployed for a long while now - with the franc a lost currency, many cafés a faded memory, and paris-paradise a fouled foreign investment museumville...

[I have this petit plat in my possession now [found at a brocante], but no knowledge of what its home was like - if anyone out there knew of the establishment and the meaning of the word "NOUBLANCHE", please do let me know*...I will also be posting it on my parigigi antiques site to find a new home for it ]

*Thank you to Peter for letting me know that Rue de Paradis was a street of china and faience manufacturers, so the name and address of the stamp under the dish were for the maker.

sans-patrouille

2010-05-07T08:40:00.000-07:00

only in my primitive parisphere does the alligatoress crawl up a wall trailing her numbered eggs...forever in search of her lost home-swamp in le marais d'art...

[Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou]

sans-chambre

2010-05-03T11:20:00.000-07:00

the pretty wallpaper square still clings onto an exposed interior wall after the building has been demolished...a nominal memory patch from someone's intimate life once lived in this missing room, now a revealed personal artifact, a meagre anthropic mural, an exiguous floriated fragment for all to view...

au ciel

2010-04-26T10:11:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-20T08:31:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-14T10:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-07T08:49:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-03T19:02:00.000-07:00

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.]

adieu monsieur charles

2010-03-30T07:18:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-03-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-17T10:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-11T14:35:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-08T13:24:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-04T19:42:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-01T10:00:00.000-08:00

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]

barri digne

2010-02-25T18:34:00.000-08:00

every so often around the Ciutat Vella I am distracted by fluttering black and white banners that dangle off balcony railings and window boxes demanding for the right to a dignified neighbourhood with double exclamation marks...

it is a sidewalk-crack-roots protest to bring attention to the deteriorating state of buildings and streets in some quarters that have missed the seductive grasp of gentrification and must now swallow their pride to hang out their really dirty laundry...

barcelona primitivo

2010-02-22T10:37:00.000-08:00

doggy love...robot compatible...sign of the times?

even our pets have embraced machines intimately...are we to take heed of the oddness of animal behavior as a premonition of the earth-quaking seduction of artificial intelligence tapping into the power of LOVE??

[the graffiti in Barcelona rock!]

mies barcelona*

2010-02-19T10:13:00.000-08:00

it was a pilgrimage to be sure to a structural icon that expanded the repertoire of the modern movement in architecture to the multi-level versions that now tower and dwarf us the world over...
and this singular low-slung and hyper-precise pavilion representing Germany in the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition would endow the rigorous and romulian Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with almost god-like status to all the young architects who have marched on ever since...

[the Barcelona chair was a little tattered with an errant thread trailing out of its tufted stitching - I was tempted to tuck it back into the seam!
and if one stares long enough at the marble walls, monstrous and alien creatures will emerge in hallucinagenic flashes!]

[the Pavello Mies van der Rohe was faithfully reconstructed on its original site in the Parc de Montjuic and opened to the public in 1986, the original having been dismantled after the exhibition]

*more images of this pavilion are posted on my ZYGOSPHERE

futbol demigods

2010-02-17T09:19:00.000-08:00

on a hilly neighbourhood above Barcelona, we come upon a school football field where the young local soccer stars aspire to divinate their quick-footwork and power-kicks...
the three tiled plaques mounted on an entrance wall to the field commemorate the long veneration of their all-encompassing national sport at the most elemental level...

[this was the closest I got to touching the catalonian futbol gods on the streets of Barcelona...]

tour agbar

2010-02-12T15:07:00.001-08:00

from medieval quarters, we ride through wide boulevards to the Plaça de les Glories Catalanes where rises Barcelona's sexiest landmark, on par with the Tour Eiffel in glorifying a city skyline...
this 21st century tower, designed by a french architect no less, soars like a supersonic jetnose into the heavens and sparking chromatic beacons into the nightsky...ever beckoning to the old iron lady not so far away...

[Torre Agbar, by Jean Nouvel with b720 Arquitectos, 2005]

sur le dos

2010-02-09T08:36:00.000-08:00

our flight was delayed for hours because the air traffic controllers at CDG were on strike/at rest and KLM couldn't get permission to fly over french air space...
when we finally flew over Paris, a blanket patch of fairy lights, and landed in Barcelona, we felt like we had made the journey by horseback for days over the snowy Pyrenees and crossing devout pilgrims' paths...
we enter the Barri Gotic, darker and more cloaked atmospheric than the Marais, and found this signage welcoming weary horsepowered wanderers...

[Plaça de Sant Josep Oriol, Barri Gotic]

back from barcelona*

2010-02-05T16:00:00.000-08:00

barcelona could be the new paris for me as I have fallen hard for its sensuous insouciance, its cool unconcern for critical couthness, its autonomous axis of catalonian charisma...
all such curvaceous and naturalistic gaudian phantasmagoria swerves into my spatial consciousness floating through some divine streaming light god-fish chamber...and this was only the hallway to the laundry room!

[Casa Batllo, Antoni Gaudi, 1904-06, Barcelona]

*if I may piggy-back barcelona primitivo onto paris primitif for a little while...

leave ajar

2010-01-09T14:22:00.000-08:00

I am stepping out on Paris for a little while and opening an enigmatic spanish red door to Barcelona...
so postings here will have to wait until I am back from my catalonian adventures, hopefully with some wildly tantalizing and freshly plucked images from a city that is stirring up a frothy zarzuela of lightness and zest!

[a door on rue du Pont Louis-Philippe, 4e Arr.]

continuum...

2009-12-31T16:44:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-23T20:18:00.000-08:00

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

peace on earth...

2009-12-20T19:29:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-14T09:28:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-10T09:44:00.001-08:00

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

2009-12-07T08:04:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-01T08:46:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-26T07:42:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-23T09:26:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-19T12:03:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-16T10:13:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-12T09:50:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-09T16:25:00.000-08:00

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...