The Frogmarch

"I've got to pull up my stakes and roll, man." --Jean-Jacques Libris de Kerouac

Monday, March 08, 2010

A Sunny Weekend, For Once



Not this weekend that just ended, but the one before (and the one that produced the Circus People pictures). I actually had to find my sunglasses, deep in a drawer where they'd lain untouched since January.

In the course of my every-other-weekend trip to Chinatown to stock up on necessities-- kim chi, bean sprouts, sriracha sauce, pho ga, hoisin sauce-- I stopped at the terraces on the banks of the Rhone near La Guillotiere to sip a cold Kirin Ichiban and watch the skaters and BMXers dropping in, catching air, grinding rails. I utterly failed to time the camera shutter accurately enough to catch someone in midair; oh well.

But while I was watching, a blind man [tall black guy, foreground, plaid shirt] walked up to the edge of the bowl, listening carefully to the skate wheels roaring back and forth in the bowls, and traced the lip of the bowl pensively with his cane for a few moments before turning away.

Wonder what he was thinking.

3 Comments:

  • At 11:10 PM, Anonymous majordad said…

    "kim chi, bean sprouts, sriracha sauce, pho ga, hoisin sauce" ... that stretches the definition of China Town quite a bit.

    As for your musing on the blind man's impression, I'm reminded of the chestnut poem about the blind men and the elephant.

    In this case, much of what was going on in the pits was "taking air" and generally soundless, and therefore out of his experiential range. However, I expect that explaining it to him verbally would fall far short of adequacy.

     
  • At 3:02 PM, Blogger Frogmarch said…

    Yeah, I call it Chinatown just because "Chinatown" (in English) is what it's called here, when it's referred to at all (or sometimes "le quartier asiatique pres de La Guillotiere"). In truth it's more Little Saigon than anything else, though there are Chinese and Japanese establishments there, and V found it easier to communicate in Mandarin than in French.

     
  • At 7:57 PM, Anonymous majordad said…

    Curious... as you know my Mandarin is also better than my French.

     

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