5. (Big) Dogs Barking – I’m not talking about high-pitched yelps here but about the deep, rolling barks that signify something big, ie something that shouldn’t live in a city, ie something you must presume is out for fast-walking food.

4. Cars Honking/Sirens/Car Alarms – Especially late at night; sirens work on your nerves in a slower, more insidious way, whereby after the sixth or seventh flash-and-wail passing you by, the nice, quiet terrace you’re sitting at starts to feel like a potential mob hangout.

3. Glass Breaking – You don’t immediately want to turn around, but what could it be?

2. Someone Shouting/Screaming/Wailing – Depending on whether it’s a man or a woman, different responses course through the brain. If it’s a woman the impulse to turn and “help” struggles with the one to run and watch from a distance. If it’s a man, the desire to see if the unintelligible scream is targeted at anyone or anything (you?) is usually offset by the desire to run, hide and watch from a distance.

1. Detonations – These can take various forms, depending on their origin. Anecdote: One night in late June we went to Espace B, which is lodged in an otherwise pretty thoroughly residential bit of the 19e by La Villette. Sitting at the one terrace visible in the area, salves of semi-regular but invariably loud bangs made us jump collectively throughout the evening. Origin unknown – we couldn’t even guess a direction. After a while everyone sort of laughed it off, but the walk home was wary. A few days later, ambling up rue Belliard with my mom on a late afternoon, we passed a large group of recently-released middle-schoolers right by the Moskowa public housing complex. Again, loud detonations – closer by this time – made our hearts hit the roof of our mouths. A few quick steps further I realized: firecrackers. July 14 was only a week away.

Jam City – “Hyatt Park Nights pt. 1″ (Classical Curves, Night Slugs 2012)

A year and a half ago, I went out on an evening walk to become acquainted with my new neighborhood. From my building I went uphill, presumably, taking left and right turns at random (following “psychogeographic” precepts I’d started reading about at the time); I picked directions based on inexplicable elements, “impressions,” that drew me one way instead of the other. I had no aim other than to be carried, and to discover.

At some point, my eye was caught by a sliver in the dense housing tapestry on Rue Montcalm or Rue Marcadet (I don’t remember which side I approached the passage from). It was such a slim opening that I initially mistook it for an optical illusion straight out of a Harry Potter film (you know when block-houses stretch apart to reveal an extra half-address? “Order of the Phoenix”? No?). When I confirmed that the walls holding up the entrance to Passage des Cloÿs were in fact solidly planted, I went in.

I was amazed at how pretty and quaint the place looked. This was before I’d stumbled upon any of the other passages and impasses (like Impasse Sainte-Henriette, Impasse du Talus, or Villa des Tulipes) that pepper parts of the 18e, hidden and remote, even though they are planted squarely (and buried deeply) within the urban fabric.

Hidden, remote and buried is the perfect description for Passage des Cloÿs, which forms a dip and seems to be pushing back surrounding construction with a magical force-field. As a place, it felt like a secret. One I was thrilled to possess and excited to share. And so I resolved to start a blog in which I would seek out, and expose, such unnatural remnants of a previous urban order.

The impulse to uncover secrets, to be the one to hold them and to  divulge them, is a driving force of urban leisure: on an evening out, who doesn’t want to be the one with the “original,” alternative, fully surprising (and thus exclusive, in its own way) plan? The “hole-in-the-wall” revelation, the quirky dive? Guidebooks and journalists make a living off of such knowledge (I should know). For the social researcher, the hunt for urban secrets appears less frivolous but participates in a quest for power, well considered by Michel de Certeau, for which the pinnacle is the map, an elevation above the city from which one can know it and read it as a complete text (a reading ability which, one assumes, isn’t given to “regular” pedestrians and city-dwellers).

So it must have been for me when I launched OSOS, wanting to pursue knowledge in all these different directions at once (combining leisure and science). Inevitably the blog failed at this enterprise, but I learned a lot along the way.

It began when, after that evening walk, I couldn’t find Passage des Cloÿs again. Driven by impressions and direct, immediate response to urban environment, I hadn’t registered my path, and couldn’t replicate it (I do have a terrible, terrible sense of direction). I failed also to take in the most basic of information, i.e. street names, so even the ultimate tool for city-reading – Google Maps – was useless.

It wasn’t until a year and a half later that I happened upon Passage des Cloÿs again, while I was taking photos on Rue Marcadet. What I have learned, in all that time, is that knowledge, in the city, is too multitudinous to be sought in anything but a fragmentary manner; whatever you try, however systematic your research, some part of what you want to know will retreat to the unreachable dark corner where science’s (map-making, urban planning, data-gathering), arts’ (music, photography, literature) and individuality’s (experience, feeling, appropriation) respective reaches invariably fall short.

And thank god for that. Because isn’t that a huge part of why we live in cities? For secrets that continue to elude us? So that we can still be surprised by depths we’d never suspected underneath the dense canvas of our daily lives – the dream of an alleyway, the demography of a neighborhood, the history and present of a building?

Sun Araw, The Congos & M. Geddes Gengras – “Jungle” (FRKWYS vol. 9: Icon Give Thanks, RNVG Intl. 2012)

It then dips just above the Mairie, in a sort of confused mixtures of styles and perspectives that’s not without its cubist fun, and reads like a bite-sized illustration of Parisian housing renewal policies in their successive objectives and major drawbacks.

It rises to bourgeois glory for a short bit as it tangentially follows rue Lamarck – buildings heavily ornate and grand in their cut-stone facade.

Most amazing, in my mind, is the way it ends, amidst stunning clusters of 100-y-o social housing (from what I’ve gathered, at least a few of them were built by religious/philanthropic organizations), towering over what seems like 8 or 9 stories and impeccable in their colored brick exterior.

Then you reach Guy-Môquet, and then, you’re in a different district, looking west into the setting sun.

As one commenter recently put it, the days are getting shorter but the walks keep getting longer.

The ‘Quintet’ (Dizzie Gillespie, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Bud Powell & Charlie Parker) - “Hot House” (Jazz at Massey Hall, Debut Records 1953/1989)

I learned a lot on the Boulevard. No big, overarching life lesson, but small useful observations, like the meaning of an urban border: clear and bold and seemingly solid (mapping income data or whatever other social indicator for the district will time and again produce some relatively clear-cut distinction following the street’s northwest-to-southwest diagonal), at least on first encounter, but also peppered with passages, wide (Marcadet-Poissonniers, Porte de Clignancourt) and narrow, over the river of traffic. Architectural bridges, too: I can’t even begin to illustrate the diversity of construction along Ornano, which ranges from one quite incongruous extreme to the other (ie, small, almost windowless floors above smelly food joints, vs. towering Haussmannian courts like the Villa Ornano, seen below).

Anyway, Ornano is where I realized that every street in the 18e carries its own divisions, more or less strongly accentuated – but always there for the blurring. Of course, crossing the road to reach a side you’d never walked before, for lack of anything drawing you there, isn’t everything. Neither is pushing an unknown shop door or raising your eyes to contemplate the different lifestyles answering each other from opposing balconies; none of these things bridge the gaps that are rooted in much stronger material realities. But they’re something like a premise, even a prerequisite, and in any case they are far from given.

It’s iffy to celebrate urban diversity, “weirdness” and boundary-blurring when you’re from my social background. But beyond the romance, and underneath inequalities that desperately need to be reduced, I’d argue that weirdness, daily reiterated in the urban environment, is a necessity (not an end in itself, but definitely a necessity). Without it, without the constant reminder that reality is in fact fluid, unsettled, permanently overwritten by different people with an equal right to the map – a right to scream at a wall or look at you funny (which is not to legitimize the sexual harassment that often lurks behind strange looks, for girls) or stink -, without those things, the bridges from foreign and familiar rot and one day disappear, in the flow of headlights.

Shackleton – “Test Tubes” (from The Drawbar Organ EPs, Woe to the Septic Heart 2012; seriously one of the most shiningly weird releases of the summer, perfect for sundown walks, complete with propulsive ambiance, unnerving crackles, seemingly random organ lines and ominous voice samples. But also oddly airy and a perfect receptacle for all outside sounds. Up there with Can albums as one of the best outdoor-listening long-players.)

It’s a bit before 10 pm, and you’re waiting for him. (Or her.) Better yet, you’re still on your way, walking the last couple of climbing blocks to wherever it is s/he’s taking you out, for your third (or fourth?) date. Somewhere up on rue Custine.

No one wants to be early, so your pace states you’ve got nowhere to be — haven’t for weeks, if ever. In your mind — your mind, say, after two carefully dosed Screwdrivers and half a joint — you review those past dates, his/her smile, the neck movements that made you secretly decide you’d like to see him/her without a shirt on; possibly, even, your thoughts get a little steamy with the memories of what you may have already put out (if you’re heading for more, chances are it was at least OK).

There’s nothing around to distract you: the streets are basically empty. Everyone has flown or driven down to somewhere they hoped would feel “disconnected.” The few unlucky ones, like you, who haven’t been able to leave, are somewhere else, breaking the fast down by Simplon or pretending to enjoy the music by La Rotonde at Stalingrad. Even the sun’s stopped being distracting: it’s been around for a full two days now, and by late evening the glare and heat are gone, leaving only a smooth, airy golden crust over all things. The point is, it’s just you, the pavement, the buildings, and your mental wanderings.

It feels nice. Like, really nice. There’s something sensual in the way you walk the street, alone. In the way you own the space around you, its closed shops and shutters, its lush overhanging canopy. Everything looks so beautiful and odd and grand in the summer evening light, the way Parisian buildings make you think they’re ageless remnants of some superior civilization, that to experience it for yourself, by yourself, carries the thrill of possibilities about to reveal themselves; at the same time, it feels so easy, so natural, that the city might’ve been built just for you, for this feeling and revelation.

The more you think about it, the more intense it gets, to the point where when you do cross paths with an unsmiling couple, you’re basically shuddering at the erotic charges traveling through the sidewalks. Do they know just what you’re potentially, magnanimously sharing with them? Do they know what you know – that the city is in fact pure pleasure – or is that a secret you can keep for yourself?

A block down from wherever you were going, you decide to keep the secret. Why divide and expose this pleasure, when it’s already so powerful at your fingertips, under your soles and in the air around the back of your neck? Who needs a distracting fourth or fifth date, when the city is there, permanently at your disposal, its colors changing as we speak through your open window?

Cooly G may seem like she’s singing about relationships to come and to forget. But listening to her on rue Custine, the way her voice trails lazily over loops and synth-lines that appear content simply to echo each other and bask in their own sun-soaked resonance, you can’t mistake Playin Me‘s pleasures for anything other than solitary. They’re not private or anything: confident and honest, their sensuality is actually heightened by the fact that it’s on full display. But it’s not voyeuristic either, since it couldn’t care less about whether anyone is watching.

Cooly G’s is a world of public experiences, like walking the street on a late-July evening, that just happen to turn into private pleasures, so intense as to become self-sufficient. It’s gorgeous, and smooth, and extremely empowering. In a slightly different register, Playin Me could be a clubby, super-stoned, album-length version of Tweet’s “Oops (Oh My)”:  like those moments after masturbation, when climax falls back into full relaxation, when you ask yourself if you actually need anyone else to experience the full beauty, comfort and power of your own body.

Ordener pretty much crosses the 18e west (where it dives into rue Championnet) to east (where it jump-cuts to rue Riquet), and so, as the main vector to anywhere in the top half of the district, it’s probably the street I’ve most often walked, after my own. Like most arteries in the 18e it’s very mixed, both architecturally, socially and commercially. Pretentious 8-stories in beige stone stand next to pay-by-the-week hotels, whose residents idle late into the night in front of two-bit bars or groceries. Longtime petit-bourgeois residents walk past hipster families probably thinking that this, at least, is a positive (if incomprehensible) change to the neighborhood.

There’s Jules Joffrin, which tries to be a (white, middle-class) center of gravity for the area – what with rue du Poteau’s old-school market-street nearby, the Mairie, even a carrousel. But it forgets that, a few yards to the east, the crossroads with boulevards Ornano and Barbès far outweighs it – in terms of motorized transit, but also of metro stops, small shops, diverse cultural markers, and sheer number of people standing around on the sidewalks at all (ALL) hours of the night (check Ordener east, one of the first OSOS posts).

Like two hearts to a Siamese city.

Betty Harris – “There’s a Break in the Road” (1969)