danish dropped diction

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

l'oeil-de-boeuf-gras

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]

[paris-pamplona]

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!

leave ajar

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.]

au deuxième

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.]

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...

art-squeeze

around the side wall of an impeccably polished gallery showcasing soft-edgy and hip-weary contemporary chinese art is the most ferociously raw and haphazardly "collaborative" piece of exterior ooze...
the peeling paint, the almost unassuming tags, the anthropomorphic turd[??], the abstract black and white patches, the grit and the grime - all contribute to a visual palette exuding out of some primeval need to squeeze the ink out of pens, the paint out of brushes, the spray out of cans and make a mark, a gesture, a movement, to inform this bleary-eyed jaded crowded wilderness that is paris contemporary primitive...

[Rue du Poitou]

rest in pieces

I walk through the small busy marché outside the cemetery walls and enter the floating stillness within a garden of perpetual rest...

alone in the bright light of day I am unafraid to approach the neglected tombs of forgotten souls - one now marked by only a broken crucifix and a few fallen twigs - a perfectly untouched nature morte that bespeaks the poetics of death more eloquently than the most ornamented graves...

[Cimetière de Belleville, a small cemetery with one prominent "resident" whom I googled - Léon GAUMONT (1864-1946), an inventor, engineer, industrialist and a pioneer of the motion picture industry]

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!

home on the seine

along the scenic seine the more privileged homeless occupy prime riverfront real estate in neat and orderly tents with a view of the exclusive ile saint-louis and the grandiose hôtel lambert where voltaire was once taken in and thereby saved from a similar humbler fate...

flatface

a stain on a curb, an arrangement of a few pebbles from the inner courtyard of the bibliothèque nationale and a character emerges... until the wetness evaporates and the eyes/nose/lips are all brushed back onto the pile below...