Tombs and fleas
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 5:40 pmThe sun shone today! The sky was blue, verily, and clear as a bell. I hung around with Paul Swendsen, artist extraordinaire, who I met at Utopiales. He took me around Montmartre cemetery again - a much more enjoyable experience this time as the weather was so nice. He took some photos of me there. I actually look not bad in some of them, which is a rare thing for me. I’ll post a couple (when I get back to BKK and have my CD drive) just to prove I’m human after all.
More photos from tombland -
Shadow of a cross:
Coloured shadow:
The house of blue light:
Close-up of the window:
Paul (by the grave of the guy who invented the saxophone, & blurry - he was moving, as the living do):
Tombcat:
Then we walked up to one of the Paris fleamarkets. On the way we crossed over this now-disused railway line that encircles the city:
Then we got to the flea market, which is partly out in the street and part indoors. The first outside area along a street was like a flea market anywhere - stalls selling all kinds of old junk, books, clothes new and secondhand, etc. (For readers of The Etched City - there was an old honky-tonk piano amongst all of this.) Then Paul took me inside the art and antiques market, which was amazing. If you want an old ship’s binnacle, a Degas etching, a stuffed lion cheaper than the one near the Palais Royal, a pair of 7-ft tall gilded candelabrae to put on either side of your bed/desk/loo, this is the place to look. There were a handful of etchings by Felicien Rops, an artist I like, but none of these took my fancy. However, we’d been talking about the possible importance of paying attention to synchronicities, and just after telling Paul my complaint about not being able to buy my Venetians, I found a photo of masked and tricorned figures from a production of Don Giovanni, so I bought it. Out the other side was an alley of tacky garden statues, chandeliers and bird cages. I thought of crystal chandeliers hanging outdoors in a garden - down an alley of trees, amongst rhododendrons around a pond, or just in a shady nook, something like this. A chandelier in a garden shed. We didn’t see that, but we did see a fake Renoir in a grungy weapons shop, hanging above the tear gas. (There were also a couple of locked cabinets with small ‘Lalique’ pieces - might have been real, no idea; if they were fake the prices were pretty cheeky.) When we asked what the ‘Renoir’ was doing in those particular surroundings, the woman behind the counter said that as they had to spend their time surrounded by the props of violence and death, the painting helped to lift the mood.
In the evening we had Chinese - you can get dim sum at night here - and went to a pub with Paul’s girlfriend Joelle. We discussed travel, including possible trips to the Moon and Mars. Paul told us that female astronauts wear diapers under their spacesuits. I’d like to go to Mars, but not in a diaper, thank you. Another destination that appealed was Zanzibar. We agreed that just the name ‘Zanzibar’ has a magical sound that makes you want to go there - with or without a diaper, just as you like.
In the evening we wandered around Montmartre and took pictures of Sacre Coeur, which looks like a building on the moon:
I lay on the ground to take this one:
November 28th, 2006 at 8:02 pm
I like your pictures of the Sacré Coeur.
They remind me why I love this big “meringue”, although there is so much blood in its history. Blood of the poor people of Paris, blood of the Sacred Heart of the Lord… A rather strange, white place, splashed with invisible blood.
November 28th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
I dig the train station. It’s like graffiti is the natural state of the city, creeping back in to the abandoned places like preternatural tendrils of bleak. Hee hee.
November 29th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Laurent - with all the meringues in Paris bakeries, I thought it was a wonder there were none in the shape of Sacré Coeur - complete with splashes of raspberry (to make the blood visible…)
Tim - since it goes all the way around, maybe it’s a kind of ringbarking, and now the takeover of Paris by graffiti and weeds will be inevitable.
November 30th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
It’s like graffiti is the natural state of the city, creeping back in to the abandoned places like preternatural tendrils of bleak.
How true that is. Judging from the pictures that get posted to urban decay it really is some sort of natural phenomena, a plant or suchlike that just requires a little neglect and darkness to grow.
November 30th, 2006 at 9:10 pm
More plants should require neglect and darkness. Then more of my houseplants might survive.
Wish I hadn’t forgotten to take my camera to Bucharest. I could have taken some pretty pictures for that urban decay site.
November 30th, 2006 at 9:40 pm
That is my new favorite site ever. EVER!
December 1st, 2006 at 4:13 pm
Heh, glad you like it Tim - you might also like rural ruin.
Kirsten - you too? My undying freak of nature aloe plant is the only one that’s consistantly survived my forgetfulness.
December 1st, 2006 at 4:37 pm
I have an indestructible monstera that I’ve been looking after since I was seven, when it was just one little leaf in a pot. Now it’s an immense feral vine. And we have a plant here in BKK that seems pretty tough. But I have no idea what it’s called. It’s some kind of succulent with a pretty flower. Aloes are succulents, aren’t they? Pretty forgiving species…
Our apartment actually overlooks a ruin. When the Thai economy crashed in the 90s a lot of half-finished new buildings stayed half-finished. Ten years later, they’re still that way - including one huge, ornate tower by the river.
December 3rd, 2006 at 5:36 pm
Man, I can’t imagine still having a plant I had as a child. I managed to kill both a cactus and an aloe in my childhood. But then again, nobody ever bothered to tell me that they generally don’t like to be watered more than once or twice a week…
There are apparently a lot of half-finished buildings in North Korea, too - occasionally pictures show up on urban decay. There’s one fairly famous one that’s rather huge and ornate, as well - for the life of me I can’t remember what it’s called. I think it was intended to be a hotel, though.
December 4th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
Here it is - Ryugyong Hotel. Pyongyang’s answer to Angkor Wat, apparently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel
“A construction crane is perched at the top, and has assumed the role of a permanent fixture.”
December 5th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
Yes, that’s it!
So creepy to think of that big shining thing just sitting there, empty and unused…
December 5th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Maybe they can put Kim Jong-il in it when he’s dead…