letterlitter

sometimes words just drop away and lie in a confused jumble on the lower consonant level...

then contritely whisper back a spare constellation of bareback alphabets...

puffluff

the old  michelinman huffs and puffs along to fill up on air that is almost free...
in copenhagen, 1 krone buys you nothing else...

dutchinese

my half dutch/half chinese world transposed to an amsterdam chinatown where all the made in china bicycles feel at home but may not park themselves here...

marais nostalgie

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

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]

BAR

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...

[paris-zaragoza]

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...

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...

futbol demigods

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...]

sur le dos

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]

autoboxes

something about the graphic simplicity and basic lettering and the double language usage of the words in this sign appealed to me [although I have cut out a qualifying word before "BOXES" in this image]...
as if lulled into a semi-surreal auto-suggestion of box-shaped cars or enormous boxes for cars or unenergized objects versus powered machines...
but nothing as mundane as a secured garage to tend to your average automobile...

[Rue de Belleville, 20e Arr.]

a sign for signs

another old sign flaking off into obscurity...this one for a manufacturer of small plaques and furniture hardware, those exquisite functional and decorative metalwork that one can still find rusty bits and tarnished pieces of in dusty boxes at flea markets, and reproduced for the organized bins in the hardware department of the BHV...

[Rue Amelot near the Bastille, 11e Arr. - and I do believe that is a bullet hole between the A and the R!]

sign-aged

seriously...
is this an inverse invitation to stick them up anyways...
is this an ironic irritant to post some more...
or perhaps just another lovely old sign of a paris past...

[I think I will appropriate this next for my new header "signage"!]

paris-dar djerba

just a few blocks over from the Marais and I enter foreign terrain...my senses are inundated by the exotic sights and smells of sunny north Africa...

I am careful where I point my camera as large crowds of men congregate on one side of the boulevard...and on the other quieter side, women sit on the sidewalk begging in between abundant displays of dried fruit and colourful spices...

[Boulevard de Belleville]

si belle

along the cool and shady arcades of the Place des Vosges, and amongst the newer boutiques and older restaurants, there are pockets still of neglect - desert islands of avoidance - where the homeless curl up for the night and leave their meagre belongings in the day...
I stop before a door struggling to stay relevant, even as it has fallen into disuse years ago, but now reclaimed as a "belle-ile", above which the word is almost exuberant in its curved pink lettering...

projet ooks

we read this exasperated question posted on the wall inside this space where many brilliant and original ooks are offered for sale...
"pourquoi fatiguer ton esprit d'éternels projets qui te dépassent?"
and happily skipped off down the street, relieved to put off another scintillating ooky project indefinitely...

[Librairie Florence Loewy, 9, rue de Thorigny]

gibus off

the music has drifted and tidal-waved out from under this phallic top-hat for decades now... the crowning of so many musicians who left their soul-baring jetsam in Pa-reee...
do the blue/red, green/blue square lights still flash for the fallacious flotsam or just for the anointed ones dancing on the current?

[18, rue du Faubourg du Temple]

re-tabulation

the most immutable and durable of signboards - inscribed in marble, framed in stone - can still succumb to the ravages of age and weather... and yet, this fading but solid evidence of a once flourishing enterprise remains in place as a memorial tablet, a relique to the thousands of objets once fabricated here for the deserving populace...

revelation

the whimsical energy of lives lived within escapes in abstract squiggles from the revamping of a centuries old edifice...
uncovering the upper portion of an ancient faded sign, if only one can decipher its mysterious provenance...

la garantie

as if...