paris

Hotels are temporary homes. Filled with portable emotions...alike living and loving on rented beds. Vacation habits are formed overnight. Habits like waking up late them ordering breakfast in bed. A temporary that becomes permanent as long as the temporary lasts. Just like a love that's permanent as long as it's temporary. And on rue Maitre Albert they were temporary lovers.

Views. And points of view. Where you are determines what you see. That morning she had wanted to go to the D'Orsay Museum to see Courbet's Origins. Instead he laid her on the bed and strip't her of her nightgown. The origins are here, he'd said. "La Petite Mort", the orgasm as a small death. That morning they died together over and over again. It's the only way to live, he'd said. And as they died, the window watched.

Currents. Water that flows but within a given direction. That night we decided to go in the same direction. We searched for a Bateaux. At Pont Neuf. Like out of a film noir. Waiting for departure he drank Ricard and smoked one cigarette after another. It rained on the river. Wet on Wet. And near Ile St. Louis, he kissed me on the mouth.

Birthday. Birthdays are made to celebrate. To make you remember that your were born. That you're alive. For her birthday, he'd given her Rodin. Marcottage, the use of finished parts for new arrangements, disassembling one to create another. Hybriding. Like Rodin. He'd taken parts of one life and tried coupling them with parts of another. That day they put together His and Hers to make Theirs.

Still thinking....you can't have profound thiughts if you're talking all day Rodin had said. Silence is necessary and unnecessary. Like that the day of their departure. In the cab past Via Venetro. He was silent and she wondered what he was thinking about. Not knowing, she tried matching his silnece with her own.

Camille. She loved Rodin. Too much. It made her crazy. Mad. And in her madness she became Rodin's eternal slave. For years she posed for his stonecold lovers. And once he'd exhausted the need for her body, Rodin kicked Camille out of his life. Camille spent the last 30 years of her life in an insane asylum. And while there, she made a rosary from pressed bread. Rodin had given her a reason to pray.

Magnets draw and so do little boys. Drawings represent a way of seeing. A drawing is the conceptualization of a material form (and the way I think is reflected in the way I see) Drawings also represent a means of possession. Maybe I can't have what I see but I can draw it and make it mine.

She possessed him. On paper.

Panoramas. The 56th floor of the Montparnasse Tower. Haussman made Paris practical. He invented the boulevards, cleaned up the facades and moved what was ugly and/or unnecessary to the periphery. Side glances. We rode the elevator with a group of Japanese tourists and with a group of Japanese tourists we photographed the view. Up and down. Could they see what we saw?

At the brasserie...Cafe' Montparnasse for lunch. Hamburger steak, fries and beer. The typical brasserie look. Bathrooms that are always downstairs, wicker chairs and round tables. A windowed facade so that you can sit and watch the people go by like the old woman wearing a leopard cap with a stem. Like a fruit waiting to be plucked. She read her newspaper while I read her.

Neighborhoods. Different kinds and in different places. Like clothes. Same function but different styles. That afternoon he took me shopping for a little black dress: LaFayette the huge department store that gives away free maps of the city, Rue D'Alesia full of stock stores suggested by Traveller, and the area of St. Suplice full of shops like Cacharel, Jara Jarmon and Givenchy.

On jumping in and out of moods. The day began with A Bad Mood. But the air smelled of roasting chestnuts and suggested other alternatives. Beaubourg. Steel and glass. The center of contemporary culture closed until 2000 for restoration. Even the bookstore reduced to a leftover flavor like the rusting lips of Niki St. Phalle. The material presence is useless if the spirit's not there.

Merry-go-rounds. Simple pleasures like riding painted horses that go round and round or a morning walk in a foreign city. What makes a man happy is to feel like a child and what makes a woman happy is to feel like a woman. Catherine Deneuve's concept of elegance: a black shirt, a black pullover and a man in love next to you.

Round and round.

Maps. They can tell us where we're going, where we've been but they can't tell us where we want to go. The day after Tour d'Argent, a walk down rue des Rosiers, kosher smells. Instead we ate roastbeef at Bouquet di St. Paul but in compensation great Mexican food at Anahuacalli. Map making...creating new territories is not always geographical.

Pennac. With his literary references such as Melville and Joyce he took the slums and made them pretty. Here Benjamin Malaussene at 7 a.m. rigidly sits above his coffee cup vapors surrounded by his family, a cultural patchwork. Belleville, a thick concentration of multi-ethnicity. A micro that becomes macro like a Michale Jackson song come true.

The bistrot. A French classic (from the Russian word "presto!") like Brassai fotos and playing with darkness...long exposures. Brassai wasn't interested in posing people as much as he was in positioning his camera before them and waiting for them to assume the needed configurations. Looking is about vision (my eyes are waiting for you). Instamatics.

Existential. Like Cafe' de Flore where Sarte and deBeauvoir would sit, smoke, drink Ricard and ask themselves and others why were they there sitting, smoking, drinking and asking. Or the nearby Sorbonne where Husserl had asked: Is it possible to go to the roots of our obviousness and find an experience that's evident and not preconceived--without having the description substitute experience. Obviously not.

Monmartre and Simenon's nighttime Paris. The Maigret that frequented Pigalle looking for crime and criminals, too. Crime--it's all in the mind. Skyrides. He took me up before bringing me down. A piazza full of artists posing for postcards and of souvenir addicted tourists escaping withdrawal. Whores and whoremongers...without Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge has lost its poetry.

Monumental triumphs. The day of departure and sensations that fade away. "Soldes." Even haute couture comes down. Virgin Records and an elite for the masses. La Rive Gauche and Pont de l'Alma where Diana died. Diana. I cried and cried the day she died. Why? Because as a little girl I was told that one day I'd grow up and become a princess.. Luckily it had been a lie.