RUE DE BUCI, PARIS (to be continued, on RUE DE BUCI 2)

… we live in a surreal/unreal/real time when dream/reality/memory/invented memory melt together in this big dream-catcher of a net inner/outer/inter-net.  Where, having breakfast coffee and idly looking up my own name in the “image” section to check whether something had made its way into this net, this video and others linked with this lady come up.

How… but how in hell does this inter/extra-net get into one’s most intimate memories and whip it out to link it with one’s other facts and fake news on its pages? 

One day, probably within a month of our arrival in France, this splinter group of exchange students from a University of Wisconsin “One Year In Paris” film department master’s programme, had already had a quiet revolution, had broken away from the semiology-accented cursus and had promptly decided to make a film, like the" French New Wave romantics" that we emulated so much at the time. A film, “Ombres de soie”, my hommage/dialogue from an Asian p.o.v. with “India Song” which, even on the 10th almost-consecutive viewing, blew this young proper conservative HK giril fresh off the plane from Montreal off her seat. How to get help for our French/Mandarin voix-off script à la Duras? … but of course, let’s ask for help from the impressive tall lady in her impeccable burgundy ensemble and flaming hair who came into our Reid Hall preparatory language courses dispensing wisdom and mystery surrounding Proust and Duras.

To our great joy, she said yes, and gave us a rdv in her loft on the top-floor of a Rue Buci “antique” building: so deliriously romantic.

As she went through the “text” of this group of starry-eyed 20-something girls from the puritanical other side of the sea (Canada, California, Colorado), on a Sunday morning almost 40 years ago, a man … yes, A MAN … comes out of the woodworks (a bedroom? soooo delicious the thought that these young girls’ brains went wild), apparently going off to walk a dog. Memory goes blinkety-blink, but probably he must’ve been tall, with gruffy hair, maybe a beard? maybe not? obviously has to add a Gaulois cigarette on his fingers in this sketch …

Our flame-haired lady, a crescent-moon of a smile blossoming on the corner of her lips, looks up and says, half-mocking, half-affectionate, anything-but-mundane, and so sinfully French of course to our eyes and ears, “bonjour, Monsieur…”

ruf, ruf, grunted the object of attention, and off he went with the dog.

And here it is, the flaming hair in a video on this very cold medium of a net. Thrown up in an offering while I’m looking for an image of my own name.

Quoi qui en soit, the re-invented memory, sketched and revised and re-sketched throughout the years, is a lovely gift on this windy mid-summer Sunday morning with coffee and work-in-progress and un-opened boxes from a past life …

(originally published on Tumblr  Aug 2, 2017)