Paris Scratch: not quite poems, not quite journal entries, meta-factual snapshots of everyday Paris life

I spent years wandering the haunted streets of NYC & Paris both bulging with ghosts & memory, rich in phenomenological detail, encounters & coincidence & the enticing scent of decay, where the old ignites the new. This sensory wealth tends to overpower the individual residents & in order to survive you eventually end up ignoring it all. One day you wake up & wonder why you’re even living here; you must either put up or shut up; either reinvent your relation to your surroundings or get a divorce. & rather than do the easy thing—taking snapshots—I decided to record what my 5 senses registered by scribbling down a “snapshot” per day for a year while wandering, engaging in dérives—the walking & writing producing countless notepads with barely legible scribbles. Thus the Unloaded Camera Snapshots series began as an exercise to document the “snapshots” of 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. Think of it this way: Brassai & Doisneau meet Cartiér-Bresson in a Montmartre cafe &, over Pastis, decide to smash their cameras & triumphantly take up pens instead. Jean Luc Godard once said: “there is just a moment when things cease to be a mere spectacle, a moment when a man is lost and when he shows that he is lost.” The companion book NY SIN PHONEY IN FACE FLAT MINOR documents New York using the same tactics, and is also available from Sensitive Skin Books (November, 2016). The Unloaded Camera Snapshots commenced as an exercise to document the “snapshots” of everyday life & was inspired at the time by photographer-friends Foto Sifichi, Bradlay Weiss & Wendy *****. These eidetic, epigrammatic, not-quite prose poems, not-quite journal entries, meta-factual attempts to re-pollinate existence with the fecund, oft-neglected details of the everyday, la vie quotidienne. See it as one’s 3rd eye functioning as an ultra-sensitive macro lens. Think of it this way: Brassai & Doisneau meet Cartiér-Bresson in a Montmartre cafe &, over Pastis, decide to smash their cameras & triumphantly take up pens instead.