I came across an interesting bike in the night city. It feels like I captured a little scene—something is clearly happening here. Maybe the stenciled figure left their bike by the pole and went off to a late-night store or a date. Or maybe we’re actually witnessing the aftermath of an accident? If you pay close attention to the world around you, you’ll start to notice all sorts of curious things. It’s useful to see the invisible.
It’s become a tradition: spring for me comes with a French soundtrack. Today it’s Juliette Armanet and her À la folie.
Juliette Armanet - Petite Amie (2017) Album Cover
A beautiful song — a great melody, beautifully sung, incredibly well put together!
Notice how Juliette emphasizes the endings of words. She marks them like punctuation at the end of sentences. It adds clarity, transparency, and creates the right rhythm for this song: a heartbeat, a dance, passion.
What’s interesting is this: the song is about losing control, yet the delivery is meticulous. It sounds like an attempt to hold oneself together through the music, to stay afloat. Like a spell. Like a ritual chant:
Without those crisp endings, everything would fall apart — the words would blur together, losing their shape like hazy memories.
And the words themselves form striking contrasts:
fête / défaite — celebration and defeat
tête-à-tête — intimacy, closeness, but also enclosure
danse / cadence / chance — everything spins and moves, like life or fate
French speech usually flows — soft transitions, fluid connections, as if everything melts into everything else. But here, it’s different: the endings cut through. The rhythm becomes broken, almost sharp — like breath caught at an emotional peak.
The stress on endings feels like a fixation of tension, like a point of no return.
A great example of how form serves content. In a song about mad love, where everything might fall apart at any moment, these precise endings bring ritual order.
At the end of my walk on Yakub Kolas Square, I met a hedgehog. For some reason, it made me so happy! I can’t even put it into words.
He was strolling along the sidewalk. I walked around him so he wouldn’t get scared and run into the road. I stomped my foot — he curled into a ball, breathing, trembling. Then he peeked out and looked around. Even posed a little while I took some photos.
Summer is in full swing. I’m walking around the city, taking photos of things both interesting and not so much. I see a guy standing there in a bright coat, with a unicycle nearby. I walk up to him and say, ‘Hi, I’m Anton! Mind if I take your photo?’ Great shots!
