eau d'europe

"...'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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.] 

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]