come and gone

on a day when some happily halloweened americans will actually don masks and costumes of their old presidents, infamous or not, to celebrate the glories of the candy manufacturing industry, I can't imagine that the dignified french would ever consider impersonating their ex-presidents, even ones in their youthful and intellectually elegant heyday, for any occasion...
[these dated posters were found already artistically torn away on a wall in the marais during the may 2007 election...most probably culled from the mementos of some nostalgic politico still hankering for the france of yore]

locatema

from sneaking into courtyards, some of the most interesting are off the rue du faubourg saint antoine...like this imposing phallicentric complex erected in the industrial age to house busy men making many, many useful and good quality [because they are french] things...

shoe hive

the incredible ingenuity with a few hundred plastic cups...just to display one precious pair of shoes

passage josset

so much of paris is becoming sanitized and americanized these days...it is increasingly rare to chance upon lost in time artisan ateliers such as this one still with its old sign on the door and a long out of date telephone number on it...

prelude

O

the source of ALL life, as we know it...today I joined OCEANA , an essential and urgent cause to campaign for the protection and restoration of the world's oceans, which have already suffered irreparable harm and the loss of countless species of marine life.

MMmmm...

mercredi

renardo

snug as a bug is Renardo curled up on a fauteuil at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, an oddly sublime museum dedicated to the "ethical" Hunt [and to Nature, of course!]
...housed in an exquisite 17th century hôtel particulier in the Marais designed by François Mansart.

rat-tat-tat

perhaps the most morbidly popular window display in paris...and a constant remainder to generations of wandering street rodents of their eventual fate at the hands of determined and unabashed exterminators...

l'état herbu

lush grasslands at the musée du quai branly soothe the spirits protecting the primitive artifacts installed within the newest jean nouvel designed museum on the seine...art and artifacts from ancient cultures to remind us that animism creates a more empathetic world...

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...

l'état moussu

a soft bed of moss upon worn stone, beneath which lies a fading body, a dissolving being...persona incognito...
a soft bed of moss upon which the rain falls where tears had evaporated so long ago...and where now only the birds perch ever so briefly...

squatface

the prominent outward manifestation of a long-standing and free-spirited primal occupation of prime property, as observed across the way from within a bastion of frenzied juvenile mass-consumeristic and art-apathetic flock...

beaux arts

the creative chaos of scavenged kitsch, the jumbled spontaneity of blindly expressive neophytes at l'ecole de beaux arts...I envy their uninhibited impertinence in these hallowed halls...

battre les murs

the lines scribbled, the names scratched, the backs leaned, the tears stained, the dishes thrown, the pictures hung, the furniture scraped, the beds rattled...against these leftover walls for decades and decades...now exposed to the elements, the curious gaze...another remnant of lives lived, well or otherwise, in this corner of paris...

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...

baby battalion

a disarray of head-wrapped infantry at a bastille brocante...

madame chinoise

I no write francais good
english also not so good
I come to paris for new life
but life not so good hier
I massage many body all days
some veri harry an smell bad
one man say he like asian put becos they small an no har
but I too old for him
he like yeung with long black har
I go now
put more papier on wall with my phon nombre