autobush

at the elegant and recently renovated Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature there was installed the most incongruous piece of "sculpture"...[un objet trouvé by some hunters? and modified by the designer/artist Vincent Dubourg] of the shell of an old car with saplings having grown and wrapped their limbs around it like those of a desirous woman around a mysterious and immobilized man...
[displayed in the Salon des Oiseaux, it is a telling indication of the state of woodlands being used as dumping grounds...humans soiling the natural environment with their rejectamenta]

transfiguration

a ghostly portrait emerges from the residue glue of a removed poster, not an image born under the image of another, but an image etched onto the detritus of another...nonetheless compelling and arresting as the original...

transformers

these ancient rusty transformer boxes are the epitome of primitive, and yet, current continues to flow through them to light up, heat up, power up computers in centuries old rooms where the previous inhabitants could not have possibly imagine the world enabled by the installation of a few boxes and wires and switches...

la grosse bouteille

perched at the end of the brasserie's wide red canopy, this enormous pink bottle seems to taunt passersby with its proudly over-sized presence...
will it tip over in a gust of wind and perhaps hit some poor sod on the head?
will amateur snipers take potshots at it for target practice?
will it confuse alcoholics in a drunken haze that they have finally taken one drink too many and hallucinating giant pink bottles will now be a constant fact of life??

bushrag

for that elegant parisian who feels the need to break out of their sedate lifestyle every other full moon and head into some serene woodland to unleash hell on poor little defenseless creatures...
I am curious though to see the moss and desert version of this bizarrely over the top 3-D camouflage suit...
[and why are they selling these in the heart of Paris??]
*make love, art, music, and more love, but definitely no more war*

abstract door

there must be a million pictures of the doors of paris, many imposing and solid with elegantly carved ornamentation, some painted in bright sheens and decorated with ornate hardware, others are weathered and neglected but the worn patina just adds to the charm...still others are whimsically nondescript...
this one in a courtyard belongs to the abstract minimalist painting category with its worked surface of old paint, grime, scrapes and patches that a dedicated artist would spend hours to achieve, finally punctuating it with a rusty bar and cross-piece for that pseudo-religiose effect...

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...