la dinde timide

MERCI pour le bonheur din-donner

poor plumped-up turkey pretending to be a voluptuous lamp to avoid being served up as the preeminent plat du jour...
not being the most alluring french delicacy, she is lucky to be in an enlightened city where she can be just a silly goose and not be too enthusiastically devoured in gratuitous gustatorial appreciation...

[somewhere in the merry Marais]

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.]

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]

l'énigme du propylée

in a shadowless De Chirico meta-architectural dreamscape, the Rotonde de La Villette [19e Arr.] looms stolidly in pseudo-palladian decorum as one of the tollhouses of the Wall of the Farmers General by the Bassin de La Villette...
I ride in slow ambiguous circles around this squat brooding "propyleaum" [Ledoux's term] that had once collected duties from goods entering an 18th century Paris, musing all the while what its 21st century incarnation will be...

"a la fin tu est las de ce monde ancien...
tu en as assez de vivre dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine...
et tu observes au lieu d'écrire ton conte en prose...
et tu recules aussi dans ta vie lentement...
adieu, adieu...soleil cou coupé"*

*selected lines from the long surrealistic "ZONE" by Guillaume Apollinaire [1880-1918], who was much influenced by the enigmatic work of Italian-Greek painter Giorgio De Chirico [1888-1978]

[Place de Stalingrad; Rotonde de La Villette was designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, 1786-87]

baguette divinatoire

I huffed up the stairs to the Notre Dame de la Croix [20e Arr.] and was arrested by a limbless but bulbous trunk -
like some mutant tumourous tree of dark knowledge, or a multi-breasted stalk of divine nurture...
a lumpy breadstick of stale godforsaken crumbs, or a tumescent rod of procreative force majeure...

ufo-ria

a small red primitive spacecraft twirls in place above the sidewalk observing the local denizens come and go from the corner café...
tired, harried humanoids enter and shortly emerge looking revived and slightly more energetic - not quite euphoric, but definitely somewhat more resplendent under floating smoke-ring halos...
tiny aliens decide to hang around longer to absorb planet paris culture, eventually becoming just another curious parispheric objet populaire...

fenestrations

high interior windows reflect a multitude of large exterior windows in this quiet hallway of the Mairie of the 3rd arrondissement...
I sit looking up - patient, contemplative - mesmerized by the muted layered light, a glimpse of the unfluttering bleu-blanc-rouge...
the hushed officialdom of a townhall's weekday routine reduced to echoing footsteps through marbled halls, lowered voices in passing, doors closing firmly to funhouse smoke and mirror bureaucratic orchestrations within...

in/out-up/down

a slightly illusory and mind-bending imagery, to be sure - and no, I was not upside-down to shoot this - but while waiting for the rain to stop, I am lulled by the watery black and white reflections inside the entrance of the Pavillon de l'Arsenal [4e Arr.]...
after viewing such precise and immaculate maquettes of architectural convolutions upstairs, the brain decompresses by looking down and absorbing a scenario that shifts quickly from rational reading to contorted dream-like misapprehensions, all dissolving in a pool of murky dissymmetry...

and the rain comes and goes outside, as always in a novembery paris...

boxed-in

a minuscule cubicle not much larger than the chimney and garlanded by a lush floral smile perches solitary upon the roof...
what could this diminutive protuberance possibly hold - a chair? a cat-box? a kettle?...perhaps a small television set [already so retro sounding!] for which the antenna still stands on guard!

absence du tronc

a soft-focus study in pale greys and stone, the faintest traces of a cross and lettering on the wall...
a creamy ray of light accuses the missing donation box...as if the very spirit of a sacred place has evaporated...
in this large and hollow space of the chapel of the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, reverberating silence drifts along with the revelatory light and I cross paths with the shadows of unquestioning statues...

autoboxes

something about the graphic simplicity and basic lettering and the double language usage of the words in this sign appealed to me [although I have cut out a qualifying word before "BOXES" in this image]...
as if lulled into a semi-surreal auto-suggestion of box-shaped cars or enormous boxes for cars or unenergized objects versus powered machines...
but nothing as mundane as a secured garage to tend to your average automobile...

[Rue de Belleville, 20e Arr.]

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.]

rust in peace

I come upon a narrow rusting door, an ambivalent oxidized portal shut tight to a dusty darkened chamber...
what lies within are perhaps a few tangible symbols of a life long faded...or some consecrated offerings to an obnubilated spirit...
what then when the metal wears thin and the neglected vault finally tumbles to the ground?...
the death of a tomb - a double-death unsung in a sepulchral alley, with only heavy rutilant elements of iron still suspended in the dewy corrosive air...

[Cimetière de Belleville, 20e Arr.]

a sign for signs

another old sign flaking off into obscurity...this one for a manufacturer of small plaques and furniture hardware, those exquisite functional and decorative metalwork that one can still find rusty bits and tarnished pieces of in dusty boxes at flea markets, and reproduced for the organized bins in the hardware department of the BHV...

[Rue Amelot near the Bastille, 11e Arr. - and I do believe that is a bullet hole between the A and the R!]

beau comme un camion

the grittiness of the Marché d'Aligre spills out of many forms of transport modes...
a daily olio of stuff tumbles out of vans as primitive as they get on the streets of Paris...some with panels of crudely vibrant graffiti stop for a while at a brocante to disgorge their messy innards onto the ground, then move on again weaving through traffic and flashing their bold images to weary commuters...

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...

scaling the wall

an abstract symbol composed of snake-scales and bark-veins inflicted onto a blank concrete wall conveys serpentine stasis in segmented curves...
a statutory juncture to contemplate the confluence of sinuous biomorphic skin and static architectonic membrane...

[Rue François Miron, 4e Ar.]

les tuiles céladones

missing my building with the celadon skin on rue des Solitaires, I find another off the rue de Belleville...
another céladonique moment, so to speak... but covered in a web of tiny sea-green tiles that also brings back my need for the sea...
the simple pseudo-modernist design with the plain metal tubing railings is nevertheless enlivened by a pair of ornamental flourishes bracketing the entrance canopy...and the mysterious giant silver spider still guarding the balcony above...

solitary man

one quiet Sunday morning many years ago, I biked by this building when it was a soft celadon green colour...
the white shutters were grimy and the naked young man posing intently above the front door could also have used a bath...
with the sticky surrealist ghosts of Aragon and Breton prodding me on, I was silently beckoned towards this solitary entity hovering above the rue des Solitaires as if...
"Life itself has summoned into being this poetic deity which thousands will pass blindly by, but which suddenly becomes palpable and terribly haunting for those who have at last caught a confused glimpse of it."
[Louis Aragon in "Le Paysan de Paris"]

I recently returned to catch another glimpse, and was relieved to find him still in situ, but considerably spiffed up to seduce younger and more excitable paris-feasting eyes...

sans tête

missing more than just his head, this bottom-third statue of Saint Nicolas still drapes the hems of his flowing robe over a corner niche on the Ile Saint-Louis...
carved onto the stone above the street sign and faintly legible is the more ancient former name of the street - Rue de la Femme sans Teste... perhaps sans tête is more appropriate now for the decapitated St. Nic - and much more intriguing than the present name...
[the older street name apparently alluded to another ancient sign depicting a headless woman holding a glass in her hand, meaning what exactly no one has quite deciphered, even with an inscription of "Tout est bon"...]