Paris - A Noon's Alley

There is a path behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame
that exists only on clear cloudless noons.
When the leaves of the horsechesnuts are at its shadiest,
a stream of sunlight is shaped by its hands
and it falls on the sand.

The path quivers in the wind,
disappears under the clouds.
Walk only on this light, and at its end,
you will find a different world than where you began.




So goes the story of the path in my imagination. People often talk about paths under the moonlight, but how about those created by the sunlight? Can it be just romantic, a secret walk in broad daylight?
I think it would make a nice material for a children's book one day, so I made sketch: perhaps the two children are using the momentary path of sunlight to reach another world... or perhaps just another playground.

Paris -Rue Jean de Beauvais

This is is going to be a messy rambling about my visit to Paris from three weeks ago...

So, this is my favorite street in Paris. Actually, it is the type of street that I liked the most out of my wanderings in Europe. It's a small, pedestrian only, slightly sloped cobblestone path, set between flat façade stone buildings, with fine pinnate leafed trees set in symmetrical arrangement. When I first saw it, I felt that I have seen this kind of street before (which turns out to be at Placa de Tossal in Valencia, Spain). From an urban planning vantage point, this is a very efficient street that does multiple things at once: it deals with a steep change in gradation, it provides an environment where people can gather and socialize (at the café), it has space for urban greenery, which in turns gives the street a "cathedral-like" effect (with its sun-bathed leaves), it creates a courtyard for the people living in the building and... it's simply darn pleasant to be in a street like this.

I stood there for a while to sketch, and wondered what is the secret to this intimate street? As a larchie Living this modern and car-invaded cities, I want to make a street like this. A calming street, a kind of street that makes you forget the worries of your daily life, and enjoy the sound of the leaves rustling in the wind. A kind of street that makes your transitory passage feels homey and comfortable precisely because it is an ephemeral experience.

An ideal street, a magical street,
the kind that mostly exist only in children's book.


Speaking of literature... places like this reminds me of the mythical café under the trees that are conjured up by Zeráfiel's poems. If only I can tell him, how haunting his words continues to be.

"What was said I have forgotten already
as the sun falls into the grasp of the tree,
leaving shadows across empty cups of coffee."

Paris - Sketches

Those street people who make pencil/charcoal drawings of your faces in Paris are pretty good. For about 40 euro a piece, you get this realistic, hand drawn + romanticized image of yourself.


The artist usually start drawing by outlining the approximate location of the face, and then start by drawing their eyes.



In the beginning of the sketch, the facial features are pretty generic. You can kinda tell from their finished sketches that they have some preset facial character and shapes that they are used to drawing, which they modify as they go along to suit a particular person.



That half an hour might be too long for some.

Paris - Notes on photography

This picture was taken at a gallery near Montorgrueil, on the way when I was looking for a snail restaurant in this neighborhood. It's accidentally blurry, but somehow I like how it turned out and convey the sense of that place: a warm, classic gallery-way of Paris that contain cultural knick knacks for the unusual shopper. The place contains vintage door handles, Kenyan soapstone works, iron locks, ivory seed keychains, handmade soaps from Marseilles, etc. I found a blue stone bowl for myself. It's nice and quiet here because they're mostly closed (July is the traditional holiday month for the French).

The way red lanterns hang here reminded me of this illustration that I nabbed from the internet, but don't know who to attribute it to:


After the days in Rome, I have switched from a Nikon D40 SLR to a small Sony point and shoot pocket camera... you can say that it is a downgrade, but do you notice the difference? Maybe there is some difference in the field of depths, but other than that, probably not. After using some of my friends more powerful and heavy cameras (D80 and D90 in particular, especially matched with that gorgeous 50mm) it seems that the lesser Nikons are not very expressive at all. And expressive here, is the keyword, because I feel that taking pictures should not be just fact-notetaking or for extended memory storage (what to do with all those travel pictures anyway after you show them back to your friends and family?).

However, digital memory is so cheap, that all the tourists (including me) take so many pictures of everything that we think is worth taking notes of. We have spent so much money getting here, why not take all the pictures we can get?

But taking so many pictures reduce the meaning of each pictures.

I wonder what will happen to this data mountain of thousands and millions of pictures that we produce everyday, everywhere.


All that images,
that information,
that binary codes of 010110,

Is it going to disappear?


Or perhaps a day will come when what we can visually recognize now no longer exists, and somebody is going to mine them in the future to extrapolate what life was like when we took these pictures... like the way they do in the Pale Cocoon movie?

I miss film cameras... oh
how precious were pictures made by films then.

Back from Paris!

And am very thankful to be back in Stockholm because that I don't have to be so apologetic to the French over the fact that I can't speak French anymore! Snobs. This is how it regularly goes for me:

"Pardon Madam, can you help me in English?"

"NOOOOOO" *grumpyface*

(You understand English don't you Madam?)


Other than that, Paris is a BIG city. By that I don't mean aerially big in the way Houston is, but big in a sense that it has such a rich urban design and cultural heritage that the seven days that I have there is not enough to see all of the parks and green walls that I have come here to see, but enough to experience that annoying Frenchness of theirs. In Jeremy's word: "You've got to love and hate the French at the same time. You love them because they stick to their traditions, and you hate them because they stick to their traditions."

Now in summer, there is so much tourists around the Eiffel, Monalisa, Louvre, etc. that the city feels an amusement park, where you get tossed from one famous icon to another famous icon.