Bread Love

Might there be a message in my

recent bread encounters?

First they wont let go of each other, then

the end slices get together.

Imagine the holes, not as shot through, but forming.

drawing white

that Huron River's twisted my iphone values

store-bought effects cling to lines of sight

Some are fueled by challenge, reaching for the seemingly impossible.

You'll never be able to make that, lad.

And the mighty scores.

Me, I am the opposite. Moving only when praised, I require inordinate amounts.

But when a comparison strokes my chord, I feel launched.

There is something to say after all.

A sketch for a noticer to call out.

Look here, see that?

So, thanks for your email just now.

1200 Pomona Road

old drawings of same beautiful view

nothing like home

even if you missed fall

leaves give way to vistas

and all is possible

Full Circle

Back to Little Gransden again today where we found

Blue, the sweetest working dog, inexplicably thinner.

Blood tests arriving shortly.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

He sat on my lap, gingerly, not so strong as before,

then put his long neck and thick head on my shoulder.

I almost burst into tears.

Cambridge

Weeping willows are big yellow brushes now,

still hovering above the Cam;

punts rest mostly empty

in the misty fall turning winter.

I can understand people in the streets again.

Lines

First the Gare du Nord for a ticket change, then

the falafel place at the end of Rue des Ecouffes.

All set to depart Paris tomorrow on the Eurostar across the chunnel.

Auvoir, it's been swell.

Beyond all expectation.

Galeries Lafayette

They got their trippy Christmas stuff up before Halloween hit.

Rue des Ecouffes

view each way from #8

Biking along the Seine

the most photographed spot in Paris, point of the island

Sunday Seine

Skateboarding in the tunnel where Diana crashed.

And for all practical purposes, died.

Well it may not be that tunnel after all.

Looks familiar, but we were unsure.

What does happen is the highway next to the Seine is given over to pedestrians.

It changes speed every Sunday.

This afternoon I biked and the girls skated, long board.

I pulled on a couple of occasions, up the long or steep hills.

A thrilling way to fly through Paris.

We did it again tonight;

walls pull in closer, from a bicycle.

You can take in big public spaces.

Circle the squares of the Louvre.

Jeu de Paume

scanned Kertesz photograph

When I hit the Polaroid section of the André Kertész exhibition, I had to step back and look away. The emotional density peaks here, grief manifest in tiny little squares. Tears at least blur and soften the searing sorrow that permeates photographs of colored figurines leaning into one another against varying backgrounds. Kertesz loved his Elizabeth, lived with her for sixty years, lost her to death, then found her again in the form of a tiny glass figurine. He took her around and made more photographs, seeking resurrection perhaps. In a show that builds literally (early images the size of negatives gradually give way to larger prints) and conceptually (complexity of topic, expansion of means), you find yourself getting more roped in as the rooms keep coming, each one filled with more rawness than the next. His work is marked by very different phases – photography as seeing, as a business, and then again as a narrative art.

walking home last night

Origins of my weekly ritual

Tastes, or maybe just particular foods, evoke home for me. Pimento cheese and barbeque means North Carolina in general; peanuts, peeled apples and honey my grandfather, pound cake my grandmother, creamed mints and cheese sticks are Elkin. It goes on.

Yesterday, however, here in Paris, I went home in the 11^th arrondisement where the bakery, L’Autre Boulange, sits at 43 rue Montreuill. It is the place where an NC State professor of Philosophy spent a sabbatical learning about true sourdough bread maybe twenty years ago. From him I got the starter I use weekly in making bread. Unsure of the details of its real origin, this is as close to seeing its birthplace as I might get. In my battered French, I managed to make it clear that I knew David, and that I baked with the levain imported from their bakery. Peggy, the daughter of the couple David studied under, nodded. It’s been over fifteen years, I said, conscious that my measure hardly registered next to their generations.

The place itself equates tools with decorations, blends handcrafted breads into backgrounds of rubble walls, and stripes its whitewash with extra long bannetons (the linen lined baskets where breads do their final rise). You could almost smell the passage of time in the decades of crust.

Does this mean I can call Paris a home?

Ecole des Beaux-Arts

Traveling inspires an urge to correspond that sometimes precipitates a profound sense of connection or at least prying into realms not normally unearthed. Though, as I mentioned much earlier in this trip, I lament the advent of technology in certain ways, the hyper present wifi that enables immediate communication (I couldn’t live without it now – don’t get me wrong), this heightened level of exchange characterizes an email I got from my father a few days ago regarding the conception of my birth.

Go to the Rue Des Beaux Arts and see if the Hotel de Nice is still there. That is where my parents lived while my father was studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the spoils for winning the Paris Prize. And apparently this is the place where the idea of me was born. I knew to a certain degree as architects owe our existences to the Ecole, but this took on an entirely new meaning. In honor of my new knowledge we held a macaron contest in one of its courtyards.

from the bateau with the iphoneau

Cruising the Seine

Mashing it up on the Bateau Mouches

slow boat fast draw

another manif in the streets of Paris

the elusive Justice herself

M O B B E D M O N E T

but still managed to get down a few iphone notes

Saint Gervais

ten minute views on iphone