bart plantenga
From Paris Scratch
The Unloaded Camera Snapshots [Paris Scratch & NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor] began as an exercise in documenting everyday life. These eidetic, epigrammatic, not-quite prose poems, not-quite journal entries, served as meta-factual attempts to re-pollinate existence with the fecund, oft-neglected details of the everyday, la vie quotidienne – “snapshots” of everyday life. Think of it this way: Brassai meets Doisneau in a Montmartre cafe &, over Pastis, decide to smash their cameras & triumphantly take up pens instead.
- Giddiness de la Neige [Giddiness of the Snow]
The first snow has performed its magic: the city is silent as if everyone is tiptoeing in cute boots & the cabs are all riding on marshmallow tires. Les enfants are all out throwing snowballs, falling headfirst & giddy into the deeper piles, emerging with snowy heads & smiles they will never again replicate in their lives. WE is not cold; she’s from Canada & they know snow like Americans know cars & the French know food. She knows for a fact that this winter exuberance, this full-moon-like lunacy, is due to negative ions in the bloodstream, which accelerate the pumping of oxygen through our bodies “& this is what makes us feel high.” “Like swooning.” “Yea, only colder.” “This process takes place during storms, winter snow storms & thunder storms in summer.” “But it’s more than just some increase in negative ions. It’s also the sheer, pure whiteness of the snow that maybe reminds an ancient part of our brains of heaven or a state of grace or something.” The kids try to pack the powdery snow into snowballs but their hands grow colder & colder until they suddenly notice but maintain their giddiness, nonetheless, no doubt because pain & pleasure reside side by side.
- Une Sunset Strip en Plus Feu d’Artifice [A Sunset Strip of Many Fireworks]
At the holiday arcade, strung along the muddy esplanade of Boulevard Rochechouart, the slender artistes de striptease dart in lace & patches of odd-colored fake fur, hastily & haphazardly, not quite covering significantly mythologized sections of skin, the subject of long-distance dreams, from 1 cabaret to another, jumping impressionist puddles full of dark slush & grieving neon &, if you have the right eye, snatches of hurried skin that resemble an old frivolous porn super-8. They dash in & out to do quick stints at some or all of the 12 remaining cut-rate Life Show cabarets—Tokyo Permanent, Paris-NY, Le Pigal, TemptationKissLove, New Sex—where men must act as unmoved as possible to not crumble.
- Sous le Ciel de Sous Vêtements [Under the Sky of Underwear]
The laundry, damp & laden with 3 storms in 3 days, had begun to look weary on the sagging line. Never to be reclaimed from the elements to ever be white enough to be worn again by their owners. Lingerie as drab & inaccessible & gone as the mud looks like cement, like the worn hands of the washer woman who had once been something in her own village, under the late winter skies of northern France, of Lorraine between Verdun & Charleville—I still have a photocopy of a photocopy of a photo of me standing next to Rimbaud’s gravestone—where topographical character is defined mostly by weather, which sits heavy on the wheat fields & brows of the people & each clay-heavy clod of turned earth smells of necessary decay. & with each dangling article, each chaussette, each piece of sous vêtement with its own history of holes & nuance serving as a word in a secret sentence that doesn’t quite work—except maybe if there’s a Gamay involved—hanging there like a held breath of a …
- Long-Distance Identité
In the November-February period you try to stave off loneliness with stiff drink, supple words leading a sentence down a sans issue to utter cinematic onanism & warm cafés drenched in yellow light like a Van Gogh painting or something. & I call GP again from my favorite obscure phone booth on rue des Blancs Manteaux, the one that keeps weather out, like 1 of those old recording booths they had on the boardwalk where you could record a message to your lover & it would issue a vinyl record in a few minutes. We imagine elaborate maps & describe how I will find my way to her Venice. “I dream of me on my knees kissing you.” She says some streets in Venice are so quiet & off the beaten track that we could do it at high noon under a balcony. There would be no way not to. “If you ever find your COURAGE to come visit me.” & here I stand—debating whether to save or jeter the phone card as souvenir—in the middle of the rue Rambuteau-rue du Temple intersection, staring at a huge graffiti: WHO AM I POLE VAULT HAHA.
- Candlelight Diner avec Maman
The man was 60 so his maman must have been 80-something & they’re dining out together in the Moulin de la Galette on rue Lepic. They’re both having vin rouge &, contrary to conventional wisdom, fish: cabillaud aux couteaux gratinés & grosses gambas, a full 3-course meal that will last for hours as he listens intently as she speaks calmly, deliberately as if at this age you have to think of the word like a step you take & then think about pronouncing it & then actually pronouncing it. He has lots of patience—& wine. They’re all alone in the restaurant. It was a Tuesday in February.
- Amitié Along the Way
KR actually reads my words & likes what he reads, but not always. He rolls his own cigarette, a strategy smokers use to gain contemplation time—where a nonsmoker may make a rash decision, a smoker has these pacing mechanisms built into his routine. His eyes take photos, he assesses them in the silent space that smokers carve out for themselves—when they are rolling, lighting or actually smoking, they’re, like meditators, left alone. He eventually says what it is he likes or dislikes about the words I’ve taken the time to type with a glimmer of genius & anxiety shaking up that genius like 1 of those snowflake display globe things: you shake them & then watch it snow in there & in your dreams. Whenever we do anything together, eat some frites, walk home, pick up a sound system, you name it, by the time we go from here to there we come up with a game, a strategy for doing something with our mundane down time & convert it into the thing that can be called the source of evocation. It is then that I embrace KR & know it is this day, riding the Metro, focusing on eyebrows or shoe styles or metro ads or empty food & drink packaging left behind on Metro benches … I realize then & there, that we’ll always be friends.
