continuum...

there is a tree in Paris that is a testament to the tarrying nexus of time, to the soffit spectrum of survival spiralling through hundreds of millions of years...
the end of another year has me thinking of this singular tree, as I had once watched its leaves radiate a glowing yellow before spinning wordlessly down to the ground...
I picked up a few of these gilded leaves so perfectly bifurcated and so strangely primordial, their cell structure interlaced with mysterious knowledge from so long ago when the world had no human eyes, no human touch...
China has since claimed it as her national tree, but I claim it as poetic justice that it may just keep going on long after countries and people have dissolved away like so many new year's resolutions!

"Dieses Baums Blatt, der von Osten
Meinem Garten anvertraut,
Gibt geheimen Sinn zu kosten,
Wie's den Wissenden erbaut."*

[*first verse of "Gingo Biloba" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1815]
[this particular gingko biloba specimen flourishes in the park beside the Petit Palais]

Je vous souhaite de joyeuses fêtes ainsi qu'une belle et sage année 2010!

paris-noel

meilleurs voeux!
...l'amour...la paix...la merveille...

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]

paris-mutuel

it is always hard to say goodbye to a space, an era, an entity that has been so physically encompassing, so emotionally enriching, so gloriously uplifting...but as one volume empties, another fills up, so one must make the leap, the graceful entrechat from the one to the other, to a newly shimmering pas de deux, and to a sparkling fresh territorial gambit...

[in an empty room with muted christmas colours in the Petit Palais, 8e Arr]

au premier

it is easy to imagine delicate things gliding up these wooden stairs to more private tables where the food is neglected and hands are surreptitiously preoccupied with caressing other warmer parts... and no, be they not be palm pilots, sourberries nor vibrating mobiles, but soft and scented, smooth and responsive, and taking a long time to come down those narrow stairs again...

[meandering down the rue du Pont Louis-Philippe towards the silently flowing Seine...]

au deuxième

lurid carminite stairs swirl up a cherry-popsicle space...inflated beach balls float in cartoon suspension...
Dr. Z slides down the tangerine banister into a pristine Miesian world of prize-winning models of architectural wonders while I am sucked like Alice in W-land into this glowering vertical tunnel of erubescent saturation...

[Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, 16e Arr.]

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.]

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.]