Pete, the Awesome Battle Bear

I've had a little stuffed bear for 21 years named Pete. It's actually Pete, the Awesome Battle Bear, but that's rather a silly story and kind of long to type out, so let's just go with Pete, shall we? He's my security blanket, and I take him with me wherever I travel, because he never lets the car breakdown or the plane crash. :)

When I brought him with me to Paris in 2003, my friend Marie-Pierre had the wonderful idea of taking pictures of him in front of Paris landmarks. She probably would have thought twice of the suggestion if she'd known how fully I throw myself into such things, but suggest it she did, and I've had great fun taking pictures of Pete everywhere from dinner at Le Procope to the battlements of the medieval fortress city of Carcassonne. Let's just say Pete is a very well-travelled bear.

When we don't travel, every so often I take a picture of him anyway, watching the sun set or stopping to smell the roses. He even has a weblog, on Diaryland, where he actually has fans. After a round of photographs on Friday, I started thinking maybe I should do a book about Pete. When someone who reads his weblog suggested it today, that sort of cemented the idea for me. Call it serendipity, fortuosity, or just plain old coincidence, I'm a big fan of signs, so I'm taking this as one and putting a book together of Pete's adventures here in Paris. To that end, he has a new, booky blog at http://battlebear.blogspot.com. I hope you'll stop by and say hi. He's a good little bear. :)

A bientot,
Jenie

What's the Buzz?

Pretty, pretty bee. :)

Les fleurs sont tres belles

Spent the day on Friday at Denfert-Rechereau, taking flower pictures in the little park there. Unfortunately, my exposure was bad, so most images are not good. Oh well; guess I have to go back. Bummer, ay? :)

Trying to figure out whether or not I can stay until mid-November.

Jenie

Talking Craft

I had tea today with a fellow jewelry artist here in Paris (and wow, what a great sentence that is to be able to say) and had a great time just talking craft. She's really far more the artist than I am. I just string stuff. She really makes gorgeous stuff I envy. We sat in the garden of an 18th or 19th century townhouse and sipped tea under the trees in a perfectly lovely, charming setting. It really doesn't get any nicer than that, I have to say. I took some pictures of the garden, and I think I finally figured out this blogger image thing and how to get around it, so I'll update this post with links and images later, but for now, I'm fighting off a bug that's determined to kick my butt, so I have to get to bed.

Peace,
Jenie

Photography

I like to take pictures of odd things or at odd angles. I don't know why. I'm just fascinated by it. I blame National Geographic World.

For those of you who don't know or don't remember, National Geographic used to put out a magazine for kids, called NG World*. My gramma was a big one for the learning, so she got us a subscription to this for several years running when I was a kid (and my mom continued it from there). In the back of every issue, there were these close up photographs of stuff, and you were supposed to guess what it was a picture of. It was my favorite part of every issue.

Clearly, it deeply affected my appreciation of photography during my formative years.

I went to Palais Garnier today, because the sun spent most of the day hiding behind clouds, so it wasn't a good Pere Lachaise day. I missed the tour, so as a result, I found myself kicking around the Opera house with no plan and not a lot to see.

Except, apparently, the floor grates. Which I subsequently spent the next 2.5 hours photographing. I shot over 100 images of the brass grates over the heating ducts in the floor of the Paris Opera house.

Because apparently, I am easily fascinated.

What Is It? indeed.








* National Geographic World, btw, once featured a 12 year old Ally Sheedy, who had just written a book for kids about Queen Elizabeth called "She Was Nice to Mice." I still remember that all these years later and can see the picture of little Ally in my head. That's how I first "met" Ally Sheedy; imagine my surprise to see her in War Games years later. :)

Notre Dame

I spent yesterday wandering around Notre Dame, shooting the cathedral and surrounding areas. Here I am, cleverly disguised as a tourist. Don't you envy me the sly and daring use of a floppy hat and glasses to amp up my dorkiness? I'm a darer.



I'm not happy with how most of my shots came out, actually. Here's one of the best. For some reason, that's a hard building to capture. It's so huge that either the building looks crooked or the horizon does when you try to fit it in the viewfinder. Also, the sun was horrible and I had trouble seeing the LCD screen. So several times, I just guessed. Which you can tell. Also, I was trying to keep the millions of tourists out of my photos, which is really hard, because you wait forever for a clear shot, and just as you finally get one, someone walks literally right in front of you just as you squeeze the shutter. Like, right in front of you. Two feet in front of you. I know they're tourists, but HELLO. I'm right here, with a camera up against my face. Walk behind me or give me a second, for crying out loud. Paris is not the place to go if you lack patience or don't like people.



I went into this little medieval neighborhood next to Notre Dame which Baron Hausmann managed not to bulldoze in his zeal for widening the streets and creating space in Paris. The streets there are just about wide enough for a small car. I don't think my 1990 Honda Civic would fit. It's funny watching drivers try to get their car around the corners. The house on the right side of this photo is where Heloise and Abelard carried out their ill-fated affair. It's grey in real life and located at 10, rue Chanoinesse.



This is Notre Dame from quai de la Tournelle, shot over the Pont au Double. This is one of my few shots that came out well. Too bad you can't really see Notre Dame...



I had one more image, of the rear of the cathedral, but Blogger must have like a 4 image limit per day, because it keeps cutting me off from using the image function, even just to link to more. It's frustrating, but if you want to see Notre Dame from behind, talk to freaking Blogger. My emails go totally unanswered except for form letters that assume I didn't read the FAQ and don't address my problem.

Au revoir,
Jenie

Lalique

I went to the Musee de la Mode et du Textiles today, mainly to look at the jewelry exhibit. It's a very small museum and only a fraction of it's some 70,000 pieces of jewelry are ever out at one time. Which might be a good thing, because frankly, I think it would have been unbelievably overwhelming to have more than 2 tiny rooms of the stuff.

The first room was the best. It held jewelry from the 18th to 20th centuries, with a few pieces from the 16th, if I remember correctly. And wow, was most of it gorgeous. But the best, most elaborate, stuff was the early century stuff and the Lalique. I'd only ever seen pictures of Lalique anything in the past. It's extremely valuable and collectible, and almost all of it is in private collections or owned by museums who don't allow it to be photographed. But I've seen the odd photograph in books and gone wow, that's elaborate stuff.

Honey, you have no idea what elaborate is. And you won't, until you see the art nouveau jewelry Lalique designed. And no photograph in the world will ever do any of it justice. It's just beautiful. It's fluid and vibrant, and so creative, you just can't talke it all in. It's really just awesome, awesome stuff. Gold, enamel, glass, colored gems, you name it. Lalique was also the first guy to really use color in fine jewelry. You have him to thank for the popularity of vibrant colors in fine jewelry, pretty much. The image below doesn't do his work justice and is of a much simpler piece than I'm taking about, but you can see how he used color and get an idea of his style. It was awesome. :)

Pere Lachaise

Despite my preferral not to, I signed up for a Photobucket account so I can post images here (stupid Blogger). I started work on the book today. Here are some of the images I shot at Pere Lachaise.



I fell in love with this piece of tombstone. Shot probably 40 images of it, in color and b&w. It was on the pedestal of another monument, leaning against the back. I don't know where it belonged, as there were no broken headstones anywhere in the vicinity to match it to. I love that it was just leaning there, by itself, with ivy growing nearby. Next year, the ivy will have curled around it.



I loved this ornate metal cross. The three in a diagonal row just look neat.



I was mostly taking general pictures of the cemetery, down roads, across graves, that kind of thing. One tomb door was standing wide open, and there were two little prayer benches inside which were obviously once very expensive. Now they're ruined, so I was curious as to how long it had been since the crypt had been utilized, and stepped inside to have a look, as the last interment date was behind the door. It was 1932 or 33, which explains the sad disrepair of the benches. It's a horrible shame. They were once quite elaborate and upholstered in some kind of heavy black fabric that looked like velvet jacquard. Vandals often use Pere Lachaise for rituals, and they have a habit of abusing tombs to do so. Someone left the doors to this one open after breaking in, so the birds have roosted and the weather has destroyed the benches. That alone is bad enough, but on top of it, this once beautiful ceiling has also been destroyed.

It's a tragedy, really. It was obvious a lot of money had gone into it. Interestingly, that's Marie-Antoinette's monogram in the center, the M and A intertwined. The name on the tomb is Nortier, and ther first interment was in 1881, somewhat late for the Revolution, but perhaps the Nortiers were descended from Maire-Antoinette's line...or were merely still loyal to the aristocracy 100 years later.

Unfortunately, blogger seems to have crummed out on me again, so I'll have to post this image later.

Jenie