OLD STONE & HOTCAKES IN PARIS

nan turpin photograph
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.

 

 

OLD+NEW=NOW

nan turpin photograph
Go Go Paris

Good to see you again.  Primary Source celebrates the calendar change by a trip around Paris.  As we walk through our cities we want some occasional new but don’t want to lose all the old.  Our question, n’est ce pas, is how can we have all of it, past and present, all around us.  In a place like Chicago, we just tear it down and build something new over the ghost.  In the older places it’s not that simple and not that brutal.  So we go to the old places and watch how it happens.  Four days ’til the year turns New on our calendar.  Let’s go to Paris and think about old years and new years.  So glad you’re along for the trip!  It’s about time.

NIGHT OF CITY, NIGHT OF TIME

nan turpin photographs
Fossil #1, Fossil #2

 

How we love to see our fossils, the big ones reassembled, jaws agape as if to make a joke or bite a head and the greasy brightly lit ones that illuminate the prairie and make the car cars go.  Hard to find these gas stations now in the city.  It takes the right place in the right night to reveal them, bright beacons.  They’re slipping away, not that sudden “mass extinction” of their elders but a slow, contentious disappearance.  Now they’re rare, soon we’ll forget them and then after that we’ll have them in the new wing of a natural history museum, “Look, Daddy, they sold food and water.  And maps.”

More night walking to come so please do come back.  Wear comfortable shoes.