Jeu de Balle, a true
gem of Brussels, makes me feel like I am living in a magical, (Tim Burton meets
Michel Gondry)
dream-like, cabinet of curiosities for the last 7 years. It has enabled me
to build my nest away from home and is now threatened to be turned into an
underground parking lot.
Les Marolles is undoubtedly
one of the most charming neighbourhoods of Brussels, and at the very heart of
it you find Jeu de Balle, where an antique flea market takes place EVERY
MORNING! Around the square you can find one of the best tattoo parlours
in Europe, La
Boucherie Moderne, my local, the Chaff,
which is ideal for apres flea market lunch, apero Toto every Monday and unexpectedly
great gigs and dj sets, Pin Pon, a wine bar-restaurant that is housed in an old
fire station (the bread is amazing and do try the fillet tartar) as well as
several typical Belgian bars such as Le
Marseillais.
It's scary to think that modern urban planning
has made such a disastrous change fathomable in order to accommodate the ever-increasing
number of cars in a city where pretty much everything is walking
distance. Whilst trying to figure out how I can do my part to prevent
this madness I also started thinking about one of my recurrent themes, how
to build a home...
"There are times when I enjoy the
weightlessness of traveling and wish to own nothing and afternoons when I want
to claim every farmhouse I drive by as my own, especially those with porches
and dormers, those spaces so elegantly negotiating inside and out, as though
building itself could direct and support an ideal life, the life we dream of
when we look at houses...
Admiring houses from the outside is often about
imagining entering them, living in them, having a calmer, more harmonious,
deeper life. Buildings become theaters and fortresses for private life and
inward thought, and buying and decorating is so much easier than living or
thinking according to those ideals. Thus the dream of a house can be the
eternally postponed preliminary step to taking up the lives we wish we were
living. Houses are cluttered with wishes, the invisible furniture on which we
keep bruising our shins."
The Cinematic Orchestra - To build a home
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