the empty chair

chair on stage I, originally uploaded by julienpaul.

I have been sitting here for an hour now, on my bed, looking out the window. The day is slowly, oh how very slowly, departing; it is almost ten pm and the clouds are dark blue, pink and white all at once. It will only really be night at around eleven.

The weekend is ending, though it was a beautiful one. Friday night, while having a picnic beside the canal with a few friends, we found out that a new festival was being held throughout the city: "Paris, in words." Poets, authors, singers, musicians, all interpreting texts, mixing and melting words and making them into something new.

So today we managed to chose an event held in the 'Bouffes du Nord", an amazing theatre I have been wanting to visit for a while now. The theatre is frighteningly tall, though rather small, giving a startling intimacy where everyone can see everyone else. It feels like an religious space, elegant in volume though lovably decrepit with age.

Arriving half an hour early, we found our seat and looked out onto the stage; empty except for a chair. An empty chair, though banal in many ways, is such a powerful object. The chairs of the Tuileries and Luxembourg seem have personalities of their own, scattered around the park, while this chair said simply "I will be filled, shortly. I take importance from the person who will be sitting on me."

Finally, the chair was filled and the subsequent show was wonderful. It is so unlike what I would normally go and do, or see, and it was refreshing for something that could have felt rather academic and stale.

europe/australia

europe australia, originally uploaded by julienpaul.

I have always had the impression that the south of Victoria, or perhaps Tasmania, had a similar climate to Normandie, France, and could be found at a similar, though inverted, latitude. The same went for Rome and Sydney. And yet, one day, curious on google maps, I found out that nearly all of Europe has a higher latitude than Australia and that Sydney has a latitude closer to Morocco and Algeria. It certainly explains the weather here.... which is much colder than any point of Australia can offer.

Market day!

marketday, originally uploaded by julienpaul.

It's nearly midday and I have managed to drag myself out of the house to go to the markets just outside. Sun calls and we both find ourself hunting down vegies. We go to the eggman, the potato guy, check out around 10 veggie stores and before we know it we are going veggie mad, spending close to 60 euros between us! Our spoils:

1,5 kilos of soup potatoes, 1 kilo of curry potatoes, two whole fennel roots, 4 bunches of coriander, 1 bunch of basil, 4 stalks of rhubarb, Eggplant, 13 echallot onions, zucchini, 1 kilo of spinach, 4 lemons, capsicum, leek, olives, coriander tapenada, 4 types of cheese, over a kilo of tomatoes bursting with flavour, strawberries, radishes, asparagus, salad, water cress, bread, eggs.

the field of crosses

cross: close up, originally uploaded by julienpaul.

Easter weekend was spent in Marseille(s) with Zen, Hugh and a bunch of Josh's workmates.

Marseille was quite unlike any city I've been to before. It doesn't quite fit the European model I know of (old central town + suburbs), nor a damaged European city (ie Rotterdam), nor a western city (sky scrapers CBD). Tall public housing towers collide into old streets, all sculpted out of the hills and cliffs, jutting into the sea.

An unexpected highlight was an old ammunition storage facility on the Frioul islands. They had been built in ww2 to look like a cemetery from afar. The floor planks have since disappeared (where they made of wood? pre-fabricated concrete that was taken away?) and what is left is a grid of beams and columns with crosses at each peak. Haunting, intriguing.

Of course, we also saw corb..

the silliness factor

ayano, zen + james @ alex's birthday, originally uploaded by julienpaul.

The greatest factor against living in Paris for me is the lack of Karaoke. It single handedly represents the unbalance between silliness and 'reality' that has weighed me down at times and made me want to cry.

Don't get me wrong - there have been some utterly delirious moments here in Paris, usually involving large amounts of wine and running through streets singing. But these moments are not as plentiful, nor as varied as in Australia: the fact that I had friends from different stages in my life, with different interests, meant that I could be called out on any given Friday night to do.. well, whatever. And often it would be silly, fun, and utterly different to my work life.

Paris, on the other hand... its funny how much more exposed you feel when you a) don't have your parents in the same country and b) no one knows you.

You arrive, having difficulties with the language. You have to build up a new version of yourself that can't rely on earlier conquests. When work batters you down you have so little to prop yourself back up with.

Paris is so much stress and so little silliness. It is definitely lacking in anime, karaoke, gigs, and all those little escapes from reality that were more easily available in Sydney.

error!

error!, originally uploaded by julienpaul.

The Rise and fall of my Canon G7 camera:

- January 2007 - Bought 3 weeks before leaving Sydney, early 2007, it lasted 4 days in Japan before deciding to stop working after a rather bad rain storm in Okayama.

- September 2007 - 6 months and many phone calls later, I send it back to Australia to get fixed and they reply: "the camera is working perfectly, it was your charger that wasn't working."

- August 2008 (so only a year of real use), the zoom lever breaks and zooming becomes unreliable.

- September 2008 dirt gets into the lens and ever since various particles enter my photos at random moments.

- November 2008 white bands start to appear on photos and exposure seems to be unreliable.

- January 2009 photos often seem to be purple in the lcd screen but come out ok

- March 2009 photos are now coming out purple, with duplicate copies, strange lines across the image, often overexposed.

What next?

It took 5 years...

le raincy 05, originally uploaded by julienpaul.

...but I finally went to see the Church of Notre Dame du Raincy by Auguste Perret and Gustave Perret. We had studied it in class and, along with the Maison de Verre, it remained an architectural must-see in the Parisian area. It was an early reinforced concrete church and the first to express the concrete as a material in its own right, rather than covering it up or having it imitate masonry.

More photos can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcorners/sets/72157615254238701/