mecheeseca

Souci Souris was wearily trekking along on her pilgrimage to a fabled Land of Holy Dairy when one day she looked up and knew she was finally at the Temple of the Golden Wheels of the Sacred Kaas...

leaving her own Land of Blessed Frommage, she had hoped to discover fresh flavours and experience less complicated favours in this other ancient cheese mecca, but soon realized that she needed to go home again to more familiar tastes...

[a birthday homage to G-M T-Rat and his obsessive delight in the unpasteurized camembert that he gets to gnaw on every enlightened day in F-land!]

elefantile love

 the elefantile order of danish draft...

 the elefantile command of teutonic rank...

the olifantile rite of dutch ordinance...

paris mirage

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)]

skullfenestra

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

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...

medieval cache

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

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...

burlybirdman

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...

chauve-souris-femme

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...

niveau-lueur-nébuleux

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]

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]

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]

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... 

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]

barri digne

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...

tour agbar

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]

peace on earth...

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]

au troisième

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.]

enrue-banner

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.]