Showing posts with label jardin du luxembourg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jardin du luxembourg. Show all posts

Thursday, October 1, 2009

I know where the wild things are


I can't seem to think at all these days.


What a blessing!


Days lost in meandering through gloriously manicured city streets, iPhone tinkering tunes through my body and I always seem to find myself lead to patches of thick, lush grass where more often than not, I end up next to some magnificent sculpture, fountain or you know, important monument.


It's so peaceful here in the pulsating heart of this magnificent city.


Hours slip-tick by in these sublime parks with their columns of towering trees.


Trees with their branches and foliage squared into uniformed, tapering shapes that look like fresh green icy-poles*.

Icy-poles for giants.


Really, that's what they look like.


If it's hot down here on the ground, imagine how hot it must be up there above the tree line.


Who's to say that horned giants with bulging eyes don't just need a little relief from the heat of the summer sun and a respite from roaring their terrible roars and gnashing their terrible teeth? Maybe these guys are on a summer break from filming. Spike Jonze has been working them hard, I'm sure. For a bit of relief they could just pluck the lime green icy-poles straight from the garden with their massive pudgy fingers poking through the clouds.


Yeah, so... I fell asleep in the park, like a hobo.

I don't think they get many 'hobos' in this park, especially in the summer when the threat of icy-pole picking is at it's fiercest.

I'm so relaxed, i fall asleep in parks now, in the mid afternoon apparently.

With no regard to Maurice Sendak's monsters.

I wake up to find small groups of people munching on baguettes with cheese, playing boules or reading solitarily in the shade.

Must be like not-so-busy coloured ants to my imaginary monsters peering down from above.


It is funny being the outsider. Even now, anonymous in a rectangular parc on the edge of the Jardin de Luxembourg surrounded by icy-pole trees i am the only one who chooses to sit smack, bang in the middle of the grass.

Everyone else is scattered along the edges of the rectangle.

Is it a French formula to collectively and instinctively place themselves in sync with the manicured beauty around them?

Is it an Australian instinct to surround yourself with as much space as possible?


Or is it just an aspect of my insolent personality that in a moment I take in the scene and unconsciously do the exact opposite...


je ne sais pas.


*(icy-poles/iced lollies/ice-blocks)


Friday, September 25, 2009

Paris has Shrunk!



Walking around Paris today i kept getting hit by memories.

Hit directly in the solar plexus like a punch to the gut that winds you.

Painful pleasure.


Sauntering across le pont des arts in full summer sun today, the gilt on the Louvre winking in the sun's rays I get a flash back to a random moment of my heel getting lodged between the planks on the pont des arts walking home from the 5th in the very early hours of the morning.

I remember how cold it was that february morning and that there was not another soul on the bridge.

The memory flickers and I wonder; how many women has this happened to over the years?


It hits again as I walk by little cafe near metro St Paul;

I was meeting the man who was to become my Parisian lover for our first official 'date' and as he saw me emerge from the metro station, he jumped up from his table leaving all his belongings and ran across the road to me and embraced me on the street.

I felt as enamoured as that woman appears to be in the famous 'kiss' photograph by Robert Doisneau.




An anxiety trembles through me as i walk up to BATEAU CONCORDE ATLANTIQUE thinking;

'could love strike twice in the same place five years later?'

<>


Jumping off the metro at St Germain where I once found my guy all 'nino quincampoix' around the photo booth

and my heart started pounding just like Amelie's. Art imitates life and life in turn...


Walking aimlessly through the 6th on my way to Jardin du Luxembourg I'm hit again with the full body, deep cellular memory of a passionate kiss as I pass by the front of the Sorbonne, bien sûr


As I left the apartment this morning, feeling a little melancholy as I stuffed my headphones into my ears and just walked the streets.

Such a great thing to do in Paris.

Even walking the streets with a broken heart in Paris is somehow pleasurable.

I found myself near the Tuileries and remembered colette, a place where I had found some great music in the past.


History repeats as I find a 10 inch record in the small record bin

The 10 inch is a soft rose-pink sleeve, my colour,with large white text

" I was sad

then i bought this record

I still feel sad"