A couple of years ago after being a researcher on a documentary in Berlin and before heading to the Edinburgh festival, late summer days were spent in a cramped bohemian apartment a stones throw away from Père Lachaise hosted by some anthropology students. In balmy summer evenings, they would take us to off the beaten track night panorama`s looking across multiple arrondissements, whilst playing chess and drinking Bordeaux. Other evenings were spent discovering Jazz bars. One night Marianne Faithfull sat behind us chatting about her latest script before we listened to to a phenomenally powerful, yet intimate set from Brian Blade and his fellowship band. Curious to explore 1920`s Paris (before I´d seen Woody Allen`s Midnight in Paris) I asked my father, an avid Joyce reader to give me some tips. To my delight, it was delivered tout de suit and in true Joycean style. Exploring the works of interdisciplinary artist Tony Clarke, that modernist amble through Paris suddenly seems real once more....let his line take you for a walk and enjoy the dynamic with Tony Clarke's work that just fit so well.
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| Engravings Tony Clark |
The
route through Paris is very simple: you go round and round the
Péripherique until your head it simply swirls and then all daze head
straight for the James Joyce pub.
Whatever
you do, don’t use a sat nav to head for Shakespeare & Co as it’s
not where it is, or rather, where it sat. Instead, turn left at the
Sylvia Beach, go through the Ezra Pound and straight on to the Heming
Way. You’ll find yourself at Les Deux Magots (pronounce Ma! Go!) which
is two wormholes in disguise. Wriggle out of paying l’addition there
(unless in haste you left bank with lots of common cents), subtract
service (attacks you first thought of when you were nose-high to a
gracehoper) and e-merge with the whirled-whiled web at the point where
the goggle map is short-sited. You’ll recognize the spot by the key
doorsay dourman who won’t let in the Scots terriere, saying out dimmed
Spot, and by the great Dane who suffers these licks and a rose of
outrageous fortune and, by all pausing, hounds them.
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| Tony Clark |
Then you’ll know
you’re in the Monet, although Manet others dispute this over déjeuner
sur herbe (don’t let the grassy knoll fool your eye am a camera
lookalike just because you’ve said goodbye to Berlin, wondered through
the Esher Wood (where leaf is a cab oreille – listen to the sound of
follyage as you taxi along life’s runaway and come out the other inside
smelling of rosses (their bark is better than bight), for after all
arroser is much ado about nothing more than odour vie) or possibly
you’re closed by the gendarmes of Looks-on-bored. This might be just as
you like it, when arose by any other gnome smells a sweet, especially on
the rude ravioli (next to the Boulevard Marks & Spencer, also known
as Common Scent Michelle). Don’t forget to wear your let-in quarter hat
where the Latin quartermaster (he’s an aquaholic!) stirs, war within if
not without you can collect your provisions by e-male (there is no text
outside, unfortunately, unless you put Descartes before Dehors, as
Monsieur Jacques Derriére was fond of texting out of his voluminous
derrida) in time (don’t lose it, Marcel!) for your bon voyeurge to
Edenburger land (it used to be Edam Cheeseburgerland but no-one goes
Dutch these days, even though it’s bad for your wealth).
I hope that’s éclair, and if it isn’t then the online chat (that’s French for Poussin boots, or
possibly re-boots: see Farcébook for regular frenchfried phrases and
mangetout downdates, all virtually stuffed courtesy of a celebrity
Michelin chef who’s who à la carte is so much easier on the eyes than
that of choux-off Gogglemonde) must have consumed la
cream de la crème (it’s a reversible phrase, like the tram of a dream)
along with the shock au là, which is another way of saying there’s no
there there (calm down, dear, it’s only the jam’s joys, and that’s all
too easily freudened).
Bon
appétit, as the chef of the McDonald’s clam (phone Ma Bell, that’s
Michelle in the soup!) used to say as he tried his Danish on Prince’s
Way before it was ex-Humed (read sceptically in his Treat Teas Off
Humean Nurture how at the end of awake he foils the pastry cook and
takes a leaf he feuilles out of her pastyface book when he sees her
salad daze) to make way for a Traumline.
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| Tony Clark |
Couch, Ma!
The rest is silence.
For now.
Cheers!
I. White
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