Get Your Kicks . . .

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Just wanted to slip a post in here while I had a minute, to put in a short piece of free advertising for Stickup Artist's truly excellent blog, Living In the Wild West. She's been doing a photo series about the old Route 66, of which some remnants still remain out in California. She has a special way with a camera, I would encourage anyone to go take a look through alot of her past posts, for there is some fabulous work hiding there in her back pages. Like in the Dylan song... My Back Pages.
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So while out walking around in Paris the other day, I couldn't help but think of Stickup Artist when I saw this café not far from the Bastille . . .
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I'm thinking that years and years ago, cars like this one may have gone up and down Route 66 . . .
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Auto Reflections . . .

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Many males of our species are particularly wild about automobiles as children. And then as they get older, they become even further obsessed with them. The opposite is happening with me. The older I get, the less interested in cars I've become. They are sources of headaches. Accidents. Pollution. What is happening in the Gulf of Mexico today might not be, were it not for our love affair with automobiles. As a race, we just can't get enough. Just turn a blind eye to the downside of it all. The mountains of used tires, which sometimes catch on fire.
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But despite my ambivalent, but mostly negative, feelings about automobiles in general, I can still admire a work of art as a work of art. Once in a while the curving lines of a particularly fine body can succeed in capturing my attention. For a second or two. Before I remember the oil. I stumbled on this showroom window in Paris the other day, and snapped a picture. For the lines in it. It was only afterwards that I realized there were reflections in it too. So, can any of you car enthusiasts out there name the maker of these, these, these temptresses ? And given there are some reflections in it, this is a fine time to link in to James' wonderful weekend reflections series . . .
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The same photo after a little acid bath to clean it up a bit . . .
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The End of a TV . . .

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By special request, a photo of our cat Amande who was peering in the window in wonder at the bottles I'd emptied in a short afternoon of blogging . . .
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Now, although this blog is certainly not a blog about football, or soccer as it is known in some countries, and in general I'm fairly well disgusted with all the hundreds of millions of dollars and massive hullaballoo around this thing known as the WC going on at present, aptly initialed, I couldn't help but wonder if there are perhaps quite a few television sets looking like this one being put out on sidewalks here in France this week for the trash collectors, after having been murdered in fits of rage by their passionate football fan owners, after the French team was sent home in disgrace from South Africa. What a sad circus . . .
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And if refresshments are needed while pondering the fate of that television above, perhaps there's still a cold bottle of cola in this cooler ?
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In Memory, From A Distant War . . .

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Monday a week ago, I set out at long last to fulfil a request for photographs made quite some time ago by a friend of a friend in the US, who had informed me that he had a great uncle who had died in France during World War One from and illness contracted there, and as he was in the Canadian Army at the time, he was buried in a Commonwealth War Cemetery near the town of Etaples. I had said I might be able to go look for the grave, and had received the name of the great uncle in question, Horace McLaughlin, and a reference as to the location of the grave in the cemetery, LXVIII F68.
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It was a good thing he had been able to provide the reference information, because the cemetery in question turned out to be the largest Commonwealth War Cemetery in France, with over 12000 graves. Etaples is on the northern coast of France, across the English Channel from Hastings, adjacent to the town of le Touquet Paris Plage.
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The location of the Horace McLaughlin's grave is marked by the red dot here, the numerous rows of faint white lines are gravestones. The bright white structure at right center is the memorial near the entrance to the cemetery :
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The entrance just off the road . . .
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Just to the left of the entrance off the road is this engraving. Can you spot an error in the roman numerals here, knowing the cemetery was used both in WWI and WWII ?
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The grave I was looking for is in the upper right here . . .
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A sign near the entrance . . .
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The grounds were carefully manicured by a team of groundskeepers . . .

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The water of the Touquet inlet is visible just beyond the trees at the edge of the cemetery . . .

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The grave I was looking for, may he rest in peace . . .

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It seemed as though the stones went on forever . . .

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From an earlier war than the one featured in Steven Spielberg's film, another Private Ryan, who could not be saved . . .

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A red rose for the King's Own . . .

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Wirwignes : A Decorated Church . . .

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Just a couple of weeks ago Henk van Es, in Holland, who has created an excellent blog about outsider art sites around Europe, did a post about a church in northern France in the village of Wirwignes which had been intricately decorated by the parish priest, Paul-André Lecoutre from 1867 through his death in 1906. Henk's post about the church is here.
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As with many of the sites that Henk researches and writes about, I was considerably intrigued and desired to see the real thing, to find out what such a site might look like today. Checking the map, I realized that Wirwignes is just to the east of Boulogne-sur-Mer on the coast of the English Channel. As I had another mission I'd been meaning to accomplish in that immediate vicinity for some time, I realized that with a day trip two birds could be killed with one stone, if you will pardon that violent expression. The other mission was to find the grave of the ancestor of a friend in the WWI military cemetery at Etaples, which is just south of Boulogne.
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So I set out with a picnic lunch, and after visiting the military cemetery in Etaples, was in Wirwignes by mid-afternoon. The church was locked up tight, but a very nice lady in the town hall was willing to provide the key in return for my identity card. So I had the church all to myself that afternoon, and was able to discover first hand what had interested Henk enough to inspire his post about it. It was darker than I expected inside the church, and I was not properly equipped with tripod and external flash, so I had to make do with what little natural light there was, and the built in flash unit, which is a bit harsh and unforgiving at times. Hopefully the following photos will provide at least a small idea of what Father Lecoutre accomplished.
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Many thanks to you Henk, if you had not written about this unusual site, I probably would never have gone there.
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This first was on a wall in the village near the church, a type of sign one doesn't see many of in France any more, showing the two neighboring villages to Wirwignes and their distance.
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The exterior of the church, they obviously have a creative gardener even today . . .
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Apparently external chapels were added along the sides of the church by Father Lecoutre to accomodate his artwork . . .

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The WWI memorial outside the church, invoking God to protect France . . .

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Inside . . .
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There were some signs of wear and tear in places . . .
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A mosaic in the floor near the altar . . .
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Together . . .

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A couple of you kind readers mentioned in comments on the post just below this one that you would be curious to see the larger work of sculpture from which the clasped hands were shown in detail. Ask and you shall receive . . .
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The cemetery in question where you could see this work, in the stone, were you so inclined is in le Touquet-Paris-Plage, which is roughly a two hour drive north of Paris, past Amiens, on the coast south of Boulogne-sur-Mer.
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Connections . . .

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Over the past months I've been realizing to an ever greater extent that blogging is about making connections. Connections of all sorts. Yesterday I was out all day, from dawn to dusk as it were, first seeking out the WWI gravesite of the great uncle of a friend back in the USA, and from there going on to visit a curiously decorated church which had been the subject of a post on another blog seen recently. Both of which places shall be the subject of postings here shortly.
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While out on that dual mission, hazard took me on several side detours, as I hate just driving through places, but prefer to get out and walk and look. Open to going up side streets just to see what is there. On one of those detours, I came across this pair of hands . . . a pair of hands which had connected. I couldn't help but think of the hand posted on the Floating Bridge of Dreams a day or two ago, which you can see here . . .
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Signs of Life . . .

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On the same afternoon as the flowers were photographed in the below post, several small villages were also visited out in the countryside. I love to go look around churchyards and take in the architectural details of the older churches, which often go back several hundred years or more in this part of the world.
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On the walls of the church shown in this first photo however, I noticed some examples of graffiti carved in the stone, which is not something I've seen alot of in the past on other churches, but then maybe I just hadn't been looking closely enough in the right places.
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The thought that someone stood here over 200 years ago scraping away at these stones just sort of washed me out into the sea of silent wonder. We came from that distant past, and we too will fade into a future we can barely imagine. Will the traces we leave last as long, and age so gracefully ? This blog could disappear with the click of a mouse or the failure of a memory unit somewhere. But it would be hard to carve these pages on a stone. Will any of us be remembered 200 years from now ?
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I so wanted to open this ancient door, I shook it, but it was locked and bolted. I knocked, but no one answered, no one came. Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door ?
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This first is a little hard to read, but the dates are clear with 1731, 1739, and 1771
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Antoine Sangnie, fils de Flourent, 1754 (son of Flourent)
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1759, someone took some pains to cross this one out, but fortunately did not succeed in effacing these beautifully crafted numbers . . . A true artist carved this, the curves in that number nine are seductively graceful . . .
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For some unfathomable reason, someone decided to carve "1799" in reverse, I can assure you, it is not that the photo is reversed. And I could not help but think of the line in the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song Cathedral, where there is a line which says, "And I'm standing on the grave of a soldier who died in 1799 . . ."
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1913, did anyone have an inkling of the catastrophes to come the following year ?
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1914, but was it carved before or after the start of the Great War ?
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A single, stark, enigmatic word all by itself on the expanse of stone wall, conjuring up images of dreadful suffering, contagion, panic, paralyzing fear . . . Who carved this word ? And why ?
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Walking through Beauvais, a shadow figure watching passersby . . .
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Machine à Traire : Milking Machine, of the Diabolo brand name . . . a diabolic milking machine ! Best to stand well away from it before turning it on . . .
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