OFF BALANCE

nan turpin photographs PARIS STREET MARKET MAUBERT

This morning in the market might be the day or it might not.  But it will happen.  Every other day  you reached for your big frisee lettuce or 3-lemon handful, trying to think of the nice salad for dinner but thinking instead of the graffiti on the marchand’s truck behind all the lovely vegetables.  Is there more paint than last Wednesday?  The same?  A little displeasure, a bit of malaise; we’ve  given up covering it up.  We are living with the graffiti; not liking but living with it.   But doesn’t that time come, aware or unaware of it, time comes when you actually like the scribbles, scrawls, painted screams.  Yes, you think you like it.  It makes more to look at, think about.  It gives you night time in the morning, leaping silhouettes leaving steams of color behind them, cities, objects transformed while we sleep and dream of vast lettuce beds.  Yes, you think you like it.  Yes, I’m probably fine with this, yes, I might miss it if it disappeared, this layer of someone else’s signs, meaningless, meaningful, I don’t know what it means but it’s there, it’s part of any city’s atmosphere, another layer to peer through to see where we’re going.

Is this what it’s like then, the precise moment of historical change?

Was You There?

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Chiberian Bicycle

 

What survives in a place officially colder than either pole?  The color yellow on a bicycle stopped by snow in Chicago.  This winter we had two precious days of “polar vortex” during which the proud designation “Chiberia” appeared across the sky for those who participated.  And now ever after, at least for the rest of this winter, there’s just one question that matters and it is “Were you here?”  A simple yes or no answers it, no qualifiers, none of your “I was unexpectedly called out of town, otherwise I would have been here.”  The answer is a simple one and the now coveted “Yes” gets you into the club.  Those most likely to be asked are rolling suitcases, usually from an underground train station.  “Were you here?”  Well…were you?

Getting Lost in Chicago

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Snow vs. skyline

 

But we don’t get lost, not in our own town.  What we get is turned around.  “I got turned around”.  That means something.  It means, I’m from here, I know what I’m doing, I know this place by heart so don’t give me useless directions, don’t look at me that way.  It means “just point me in the right direction.”  That’s a whole other thing then, collegial, complicitous.  It can happen.  Daydream a blink and come to looking at something you never noticed before even though you pass by here every day coming and going.  I’m turned around.  Or start to walk and it’s not that cold then you have to zip up and then the snow’s going again.  That’s a very dense thought, right there, more snow:  will it ice? Who will fall? Change of shoes; change of plans, all in the swiftness of looking up at the sky and then down at the path.  Is it sticking, does it want to stick?  Then when you’re walking with purpose again, did you get turned around?  I got turned around.  Can you point me to Adams Street?  Why certainly, because I’m not turned around, I kept my eye on business the whole time, and I know Adams is close, go north, not far at all, but at this intersection they’ve taken down every street sign, even the solitary street sign someone thought we still had a right to; that one’s down too, how far are we from Adams?  I should’ve been counting off the streets while there were  signs to read; didn’t know there’d be a test.  I’m not turned around, it’s just that, I was just looking at something else.  This is Adams, bluffing, yes, you’re at Adams and she is and across the street and down the block, there’s the picture of the elephant behind which her friends are waiting for her, they’ve already ordered an appetizer for the table, she’ll have a bite of something before she’s got her big coat off.  She got turned around but she’s pointed in the right direction now.  She might’ve mentioned the elephant.

SIZED FOR FUN

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Now is the time to keep it up, through the tundra times, the “polar vortex” times,  the black ice times, all of that, we are who we are we doing what we do but determined enough to get all the help we can.  Here’s to all the fun in all the sizes that we can dig out of the snow and ice!  Here is a picture of our continuing toast to every day a Very Happy New Year!  Happy New Year to you and to us all and please come back tomorrow for a photograph that just might save your life one day!

HIS TICKET OUT

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Here and There

Traces of someone not really here.  His finger traced tis map:  find me, I am here.  I’m here.  Come get me.  When the city’s papered with snow somethings are said and known.   Today we’ll search the crowds for the one who did this and is still here.  When you come back tomorrow we’ll have something entirely different to look at, see you then!

SNOW BIRDS ART BIRDS CHICAGO

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We’ve returned to Chicago for today’s image of the city in winter and one way the season itself makes a text over the town for us to read, before it melts.  Chicago and many other cities are substantially buried in snow this week.  The Art Institute has a pocket exhibit in its Asian wing of Hokusai’s prints of Edo/Tokyo under snow.  Inside the museum Chagall is well represented with paintings and a lush stained glass window set to take the east light from Lake Michigan.  Outside the museum, on Dearborn Street, a six-minute walk away, there’s a large slab of Chagall mosaic in a corporate plaza, mosaic set on all four sides.  It’s slightly off the path but you can see it from the sidewalk and with a 21st century powerful act of the will, pull yourself out of the stream of business, step down to this gallery level and walk around the effervescent streams of line and color the artist tiled onto the slab just for us to remember to look at on a busy day.  It’s here for us and for the unnumbered thousands of pigeons who hunker down near it for shelter and then begin to pick and peck in circles and crazy 8s and then around the entire installation, to follow the imaginings of a man who might have thought like a pigeon wanders or a butterfly flies.   But it’s winter in Chicago, no butterflies today, just pigeons and Chagall.  We have another winter city snow text up our sleeve for tomorrow, come back to see us.

PARIS CARS STOPPED ALL HOURS

nan turpin photograph         Not Even Rush Hour Paris

Here’s the universal text of cities, the lingua franca for them all, at a certain time of day or all day.  In a traffic jam inside or outside the car, you could as well be somewhere else, another city entirely.  This part looks the same.  Here is the great equalizer, where the French Revolution has come to settle:  all ranks equally stuck, limousine and liveried driver or full up bus and union driver, all stuck, all equal.  While we pedestrians transform, we are liquid, beads of mercury spilling around and through this metal, no space too small for us to flow forward.  In this moment how we love them, the cars, yes, this is true, they become something new within the city, a village nested within the city’s paths, troglodytes laid out flat in their dark little caves, all dwellings standing still in the road and we the walkers can squeeze around them and peer inside for once.  Cars & drivers are the city text that means one thing when they move but quite another when they must be still.  Come back tomorrow, all these cars will be gone home and we’ll think about something else.

 

 

ANOTHER LOVE LETTER rue VERNEUIL

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Dear Serge…

Welcome back, always pleased to see you!  We can’t seem to leave Paris in this start to 2014 and we want to continue thinking of the city as text.  Most of our cities are glazed with a layer of graffiti, a coat of confusion over every attempt to create urban order.  We are so accustomed to graffiti it has become nearly another building material to our eyes.  Night painters are sometimes despicable sometimes -grudgingly-admirable, from the quality and boldness or mediocrity of the work they appear to be a very mixed population.  But there’s a place in Paris, one of the truly “good addresses” in the rue Verneuil in the Seventh, where the graffiti seems to come from  common emotions loss, longing, admiration, a never ending bereavement.  The place, not unlike Jim Morrison’s grave in Pere Lachaise Cemeterey, has become a Parisian, and international site of pilgrimage.  It is the little townhouse that Serge Gainsbourg shared with Jane Birkin.  One day it might become a museum and while we wait travelers, whether from down the street or across the world, continue to make it the place they show that some art and some rebellions endure.  Serge Gainsbourg died in 1991, not such a long time ago by “immortal art” standards but to those many who loved his work and by his death felt the great tenderness that strangers might feel for strangers, Serge has been away for infinite time and in his absence a world is made smaller.  This photograph is the wall in front of the house.  The central figure, in a corner in blue pochoir stencil print is Serge at his coolest- heroic.  No matter how many leave their marks the figure has remained undisturbed.   Much graffiti is a literal layer of text over the city now and much of it remains  obscure text that communicates secretly to a very few.  The markings rue Verneuil are city text for a world of comprehension.  More than any great museum the Serge wall gives this comfort that somethings do survive.  We cannot get him out of our heads, Gainsbourg’s music and his tender disdain for a world that loved him when it should not.

FOR MORE SERGE GAINSBOURG:  This Vanity Fair story is as good as anything and it begins with an interview in the rue de Verneuil house that Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin shared.  But look for more links on Serge and his career and listen to his songs on youtube if your discotheque is not already full of his collected works!  His French songs are often infused with the outlaw side of American culture.

<http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/11/gainsbourg200711&gt;

OLD STONE & HOTCAKES IN PARIS

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FOR SALE FOR NOW

As close as we ever come to it, an old story, just look up, the centuries beckon, all those years, all those souls, yours for a song and the song is all the grand operas in the world.  City as text today considers all the real estate windows, all the FOR SALE or FOR RENT signs hanging on all the cities of the world, icing those urban cakes with their butter cream promises of new lives to be lived here, up here, behind this sign.  Give them everything you have or will have, make them believe you are good for it and you can remove this sign, take it to the temple and burn it on the highest altar of possession and ownership now NOT FOR SALE because it’s mine.  Except it’s not except it might be.  This is a story that’s never over.

 

 

ALL HOURS APPETITE = CHEWY TEXT in PARIS

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Hungry Streets Paris

This photograph taken by hands wanting a gushing sandwich in them.  It’s the Ace of Falafel, The King of Falafel is not far.  All good, all big and cheap and to be eaten outside in the street, where you stand, bending over so as not to drip that sauce on your shoes.  Rue des Rosiers is now the rare street where people will stuff their smart phones and cameras into their pockets for some  two-fisted eating.  And isn’t that a bit part of what makes a great city great?  Appetite is unconfined by schedule, appetite serves inspiration, what is the story of this day?   The Parisian, ever the hunter-gatherer, sets out in the city to find the taste to give purpose to the step.  Our cities are:  In Search Of…Paris is overlaid with dozens or thousands of loving accounts  like this: walked 3 kilometers for the perfect eclair, the tenderest flan, just warm from its baking.  Or – unlikely contrast – this deep-fried vegetable sandwich that crossed latitudes and war zones to make it into our welcoming hands, here, just barely across the Seine but already in deepest Paris, the village of rue des Rosiers.

Food is the foremost story in the city as text. Tourist or local, clerk or exec.  We like our town best of all walking through it, chewing something well-chosen, acknowledging with that collegial lift of a brow other Parisians of la bouche, chewing as we celebrate appetite and city.  All of our cities are over-written with food, food and memory and discovery and understanding, streets, people and food.  Today’s the coldest day in Chicago and a few other places too.  They’re saying not to go out, the same thing they say in California when it’s snowing forest fire ash.  “Don’t go out today.”  But some people will be out and they’ll be looking for something to eat.  Come back tomorrow.  It’s supposed to be just about this cold again and they might tell us not to go out again, but we’ve got to eat, n’est-ce pas?  We live where the food lives,  in the city.