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

Felice Varini

through a frame of massive wood doors,

secluded in elegant courtyards,

beyond porte cochere

under a canopy of lace

we ambled into this gallery, Yvon Lambert,

on a walk with Mireille this morning.

seen these in books but never live.

anamorphic circles

shattering the ellipse

aloft : wedged

Paris Interiors

La Durée the macaron place

Le Dix, a bar on Rue de L'Odeon

m a c a r o n s

I have never eaten a macaron. I’ve seen them before and couldn’t shake the image of psychedelic hamburgers, with movie candy flavors. Would never have gone near one without suggestion.

But I misjudged. Big time.

Each of these confections has its own flavor combination (a fluffy biscuit exterior and a typically darker interior): saffron and pistachio, passionfruit and chocolate, olive oil and vanilla or mandarin, caramel and salted butter. Some are dense interiors, stretchy, others soufflé like, evanescent, not long in the mouth.

Today we did a head to head comparison as Natalie wanted to bring the best back to Toulouse. It was La Durée versus Pierre Hermé. La Durée won with its delicate blues and servers adorned in white aprons. Something between a trippy pharmacy, a jewelry store and a library.

Random Paris

tea at the Hammam

in an unfinished (drawing wise) garden