Vorhangeschlosser der Liebe

 

a cluster of colour coded metal locks holding on for dear life - throw away the keys into the murky canal conceding eternal love on this very pedestrian of bridges...

lacking a cheap padlock, a red ribbon will do - or even a most unwieldy tire lock device... [as clunky as the german translation for such cluttery lovelocks]

pinkbottleblob

a salacious sea creature...a gigantic squeak toy...a rare and exotic flowerhead...a pretty party-dressed mine...
this vivacious vandal's delight squats benignly on the sidewalk, unperturbed by the passing feral urges to kick at its protuberant presence...
 

swede boy

the tyroboy looks me in the eye
with raised fists and taunting mouth...
the tornout words do not tell me anything - I am guessing they are not gentle...
I pass them by, I turn back - he is still challenging me...
the fledgling alpha round with this freshface minimenace  - the futilefight is on...

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...

antique ghosts

sometimes they hover behind window panes in the darkened chambers of private needs...
sometimes they drift across your field of vision then vaporize into the fading light...
sometimes they loom before you like peripheral gods from the antique mists...
and sometimes they enslave you in their stony embrace and engraved kiss...

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...

rejectamenta

the late fall sunlight slants timidly onto a desolate and shuttered-shut streetscape spotting an unassuming grouping of artless dada-debris tossed out from a nearby galerie d'art...
even such unsculptural outcasts, such non-conceptual decontructivism, such free-form-following-functional-fusion concrete-clutter can still manifest a somewhat compelling synthesism of neocubistic "art brut" coalescence...
[sometimes my ironic art-speak gets the better of me!]

[Rue Pierre Gourdault, 13e Arr.; Monsieur Gourdault [1880-1915] was a french painter who had lived in the vicinity but lost his life in the first world war]

les petites puissances

a rough and ready altar for a pair of pugilistic babies commemorated behind shattered glass and a gilt frame...
a pugnacious display of the early training regime of man-on-man dominion in a dog-eat-dog world...
"rien ne m'est étranger de leur joue à ma joue..."*

[*from "Une autre âme s'avance..." Jules Romains]

[Rue Denoyez, 20e Arr.]

torch-song

le mur est flambé...
a singed serenade...
a flamboyant flash-point...
a flecker flare-up...
a blistering blaze-burn...
a scintillating scorcher...
a grilled grimace...
a concerted combustion...
a pyromanic putsch...
an incisive incendiament...
a contingent conflagration...
an arsonic-laced annointment...

really just another innocuous and inflamed wall somewhere in the glowing heart of pyrexial Paris...

monsieur le vitrier

monsieur le vitrier is from a time when there were no computers to google for a glass repairman or twitter the world to recommend one... he walks the streets with his sheets of glass securely strapped to his back and stops on every block to call out his services...
once we had him come up to repair a cracked windowpane in the stairwell - and we hope that there will be more broken windows to keep him coming back... but we know that one day he will be too weary to traverse the narrow streets of the Marais anymore, and potential glazier apprentices are now too busy texting with their nimble fingers...rather than getting them cut by broken glass!

[Place des Vosges]

fire sale

always a tragic sight, the charred remnants of a fire... these neatly bagged and bundled piles of debris were left for removal on a narrow sidewalk in the Marais - the sad remains of an interior life now reduced to shades of black and sooty ashes...

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...

la belle heure

time has long ago stopped here, like in so many hidden corners of the Marais...
the branches will soon leaf out and obscure this lovely old weathered clock and the hours will be forgotten again in the spring sunshine...

[Rue Beautreillis & Rue des Lions Saint-Paul]]

tagless*

finally, the commercialization of graffiti to advertise for a truck rental company... the unexpected sanctioning of the long-"established" and prolific Miss Tic's work takes the bite out of her more subversive defacement noted for their arresting images of scantily clad and wantonly posed femmes paired up with short provocative phrases playing on words and double meanings... [er, find-her keep-her??]

[*a subcultural footnote on the heel of Adam's "challenging" post on "No Tag"!]

driving into delirium*

like a sleek black panther crouching outside a disheveled garage, this shiny dew encrusted machine was primed to take flight...
I prowled around it a few times absorbing the primal energy of italian engineering and wished that I could drive away into my delirium...

[*"Driving into Delirium" is a song title from Malcolm McLaren's Paris album]

joyeux jolly jolly

don't brown-bag your holidays just because the economy is in free-fall, the air is toxic, the oceans are emptying out, the rainforests denuded, and the world's general health rapidly failing, soon to be on life-support if there is still a universal clinic standing...no matter how desperate and dire the straits are, let's hope that there is still love to be made, pâtisseries to be eaten, unmurky water to drink, pockets of adequate air to intake, and most of all, tolerant friends to make it a little more bearable...
to one and all...enjoy a most exuberant and transcendent season [while we can!] and gently push all those delusions into the new year!
still, make merry and much happiness always...

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.