rest in pieces

I walk through the small busy marché outside the cemetery walls and enter the floating stillness within a garden of perpetual rest...

alone in the bright light of day I am unafraid to approach the neglected tombs of forgotten souls - one now marked by only a broken crucifix and a few fallen twigs - a perfectly untouched nature morte that bespeaks the poetics of death more eloquently than the most ornamented graves...

[Cimetière de Belleville, a small cemetery with one prominent "resident" whom I googled - Léon GAUMONT (1864-1946), an inventor, engineer, industrialist and a pioneer of the motion picture industry]

coffin-couture

from white flat figures in limbo on the urban landscape to a live audience of appreciative young minds, here to learn about the business of ART... and the business of death from the previous incarnation of the space LE CENT QUATRE as the state undertaker...
the display of oddly cool white t-shirts depicting various styles of coffins does not seem to faze these children so full of life and wonder at the creative eccentricities of the world...

angst-alone

on a quiet stretch of the quai des Celestins just a couple of blocks from where I stay I meet a shy and lonely nude man...
he is trapped in a blocked-up doorway of the solitary house overlooking the Seine...cars whizz by with no regard and strollers only give him a quick quizzical glance...
he is reduced to a one-dimensional contorted angular anguished mass, his body language a dramatic rejection of the hurried and disquieted world...

[I know I have been on a run with "white bodies" this past few posts, but it is odd that the more people are disconnected from each other, the more one sees the population of substitute human forms!]

flue up, way up

from drainpipes to chimney flues, the creative efforts of determined [and courageous!] artists appear wherever visible...
even an "established" graffiti artist like MESNAGER managed to find a way to fly/climb/tele-transport up this enormous chimney to place one of his corps blanc...perhaps an exhortation to keep at it until galleries and museums acknowledge your persistance and/or talent for such things and you are finally worth the price of admission...

[Rue de la Villette]

[Jerôme MESNAGER invented l'Homme en blanc way back in 1983 as "un symbole de lumière, de force et de paix" that is so ubiquitous now they are seen the world over...his site has the coolest video of where all his white ghostmen have roamed.]

foreign body

the most basic of figurative depiction enlivened by graphic descriptions in chinese characters and arabic script (?) around its apparently female salient features...
I have no idea what it is signifying, but my first instinct was something health or medical-related...??...any decipherer or decoder out there?

[Thanks to Adam for his colourful post a while ago on Rue Dénoyez, which I wandered onto recently and found this paste-up and other wildly primitive vibes and vignettes... this is also a flow-out to his thing for drainpipe "art"!]

[paris-lorient]

a slight detour to Lorient on the Morbihan coast in Brittany [and a momentary departure from single-image posting!] for this colossal "primitive" discovery...
such primal-sexual manifestation of a sous-marin sliding into its german-built brutalist concrete "bunker" casing is not so easily chanced upon!

the amount of medieval-thick concrete expanses of this complex is so massive and solid that even as it has no longer served its purpose for decades, it is still much too overwhelming to demolish and discard...

and so it sits, this enormous dirty grey mammoth hulk, for little boys and big men [et moi!] to come and gawk and contemplate its brute design, its forceful genesis, its sinister purpose...

now a benign home to "FLORE", the last remaining submarine to hold the fort, so to speak... but forever on dry land!

[Base de sous-marins de Kéroman, 56100 Lorient...beside the new high-design Cité de la Voile Eric Tabarly, dedicated to the legendary breton sailor Eric TABARLY and his extraordinary sailing legacy]

paris-hong kong

the shop of 10,000 things, plastic galore, made in China...
an old chinese man prances by, his long grey moustache pasted in a swirl pattern on both cheeks...
a bowl of cracked boiled eggs and a pile of peanuts in their shells atop a cardboard box on the sidewalk...
french spoken with a chinese accent, chinese spoken with a french accent...
the wafting smell of barbeque chickens and ducks...
I am in Hong Kong, I am in Guangzhou, I am chinese again...

[Rue de Belleville]

paris-dar djerba

just a few blocks over from the Marais and I enter foreign terrain...my senses are inundated by the exotic sights and smells of sunny north Africa...

I am careful where I point my camera as large crowds of men congregate on one side of the boulevard...and on the other quieter side, women sit on the sidewalk begging in between abundant displays of dried fruit and colourful spices...

[Boulevard de Belleville]

from very tiny holes...

...issue the most minute and valiant of green life in the midst of the most busy of cities...
cracked star-burst black pearls of sidewalk aggregate somehow seeded, rain [and spit?]-dampened, germinated and sprouted underfoot on the mostly barren and aptly named Rue de la Perle...
a miniature collaborative art-nature installation that I almost stepped upon!

tower power

like an enormous Escher puzzle, the intricately crafted architectural models of the most progressive tower designs are arranged on a raised curvilinear-edged platform for giant humans to view from above...
the twisted bottle-shaped Escher Tower by the high-powered-design BIG [Bjarke Ingels Group] of Copenhagen emitting its multi-hued light patterns projects as a beacon to another eurocentric rise of a visionary vertical renaissance...

["L'Invention de la Tour Européenne" Pavillon de l'Arsenal, 21, bld Morland 75004 Paris]

twin graces

they dance in place to the undulating rhythm of the street, to the shadow-dappled flow of the canal...

holding up each a perforated star-flower, sliding into hiding for the day and reappearing again when the metallic darkness falls...

[Quai de Jemmapes, near the Hotel du Nord]

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...

wile dreams

tangled dreams unravel and float through the watery light of the Canal Saint-Martin...
on a soft pink wall across from the still knotted up Hotel du Nord, a reminder medallion of the power of dreams and the always irresistible whim to weave them back together again one by one...

[Quai de Jemmapes, 75010 Paris]

un garage d'automobiles

reminded by a post on garages on Invisible Paris, I find this in a portfolio of students' work from the architecture department of l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1928-29 that I had chanced upon at a brocante...
such progressive vision of bright-eyed students 80 years ago now when the car was still a precious novelty and deserved to be housed in glorified edifices that are mostly looked upon as eyesores today...

mini-macabre

dozens of pairs of little legs and headless torsos dangle from the ceiling of a darkened doll repair shop... a whimsical version of la petite danse macabre swaying in the stillness of the night, while the pretty detached heads look on from below...

tête ou tête

the unexpected finds at Porte-de-Vanves are inexhaustible...drawing the hardcore seekers back every weekend for more thrills of unearthing abandoned heads or legs or surrealistic contemplations in soft covers...

[I read this today... "The disembowelled horses in the arena of heads." [from 'La Bonne Heure' by Tristan Tzara]...and I am relieved of my imagination in the realm of the real...]

dispossessed

the abject poignancy of some sad tattered objects scattered on the grimy sidewalk...just a few now homeless and cast out among the millions of others in this the mother of all flea markets, all waiting to be loved again...

[I see a picture on a crowded wall, music drifting out from a smoky room, wine to make merry again...and high upon a shelf, the mystery of a small wooden box...]

[St-Ouen]

flayed

a grisly substratum discovery through the window of a chic antique store on Rue du Bac...
I went inside to flip through the organs and asked for the price... a reasonable 300 euros, but the only wall space I have left is in my dining room and a lesson in horse anatomy for my dinner guests!

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]]