Uncle Bruce Heimark, January 2, 1926 – November 5, 2012

I cannot think of a week with greater emotional swings of high and low than this past week has been. A death in my family. Rebirth in our country.

My mother’s youngest brother, Bruce Heimark, died on the morning of November 5, just as his family was preparing to call in hospice care.

He was my funniest relative, and rather merciless in his humor, as Norwegian-American Vikings can be.

I remember at the age of 12, walking down our driveway in Paradise Valley, Arizona to get the mail. Maybe I’d just seen a Marilyn Monroe film--I was trying out a sideways hip swivel. I wasn’t aware that Uncle Bruce was behind me, but when I turned to go back to the house, he turned too, and did an expert imitation of my slinky moves. In a man as tall as he, it was hilarious. And mortifying. Not a word about it to me, just a demonstration.

Norwegians from Minnesota are great jokesters, but they also put great store in being genuine, that is, unaffected in behavior and speech. In one minute my uncle had cured me forever of any temptation to be stagey or phony.

(Genuine is such a high compliment coming from my Norwegian relatives that when I brought Richard home for the first time, my mother crooked her finger at me 15 minutes after we’d arrived to say sotto voce in the kitchen. “Don’t let him get away! He’s genuine,” in a tone that others might use about God. (I told her not to worry, he wasn't running.))

I remember going to lunch with Bruce when I was visiting family in Paradise Valley, Arizona, during the period that he and Lee lived there. We talked about the shock of the late ‘60s for my parents, when their three oldest children were busy sampling every new freedom that was in the air.

From his more conservative Minnesota perspective, Bruce said, “I don’t know why they were so surprised. They’d encouraged you kids to be free from the time you were small—in books, music, travel, political perspective, independent thinking—everything.” 

I was startled by his perspective; it had never occurred to me that their encouragement of adventurous living was anything unusual, and at the same time, I knew what he said was true.

Bruce spoke at my father’s memorial eloquently, without notes. And afterwards, during my mother’s long grieving, he called her every week.

 

Then, several years ago, when Richard and I went to AWP, a conference for writers and teachers in Chicago, I remember the winter night of winds so strong we laughed uncontrollably as we were blown like leaves down the street. We were on our way to meet Bruce and Lee, cousin Kris and her husband, Jim, for dinner at The Chicago Firehouse, a yellow brick building that was once a firehouse, and still had the tin ceiling and brass poles.

Bruce had been through a health crisis not long before, and had nearly died. Through intensive care and intense love from his family he’d pulled through. His heart surgery and complications from a hospital-induced infection, meant a slow recovery that had coincided with his daughter Sue’s illness and death.

We had a rollicking good dinner conversation about family and books and our lives, as you always did with Bruce and his family.

That was the last time I saw Bruce. In spite of my mother’s claim that she was done with travel (Ja, sure, Betty, I imagine Bruce saying) she was glad that she'd flown to Chicago with my sister, Ann, then on to Mankato with Bruce and Lee, Kris and Jim, to celebrate my uncle Jack’s ninetieth birthday last January. Showing up, being there, that is everything.

I know that more memories of Bruce will surface in the weeks to come. I’ll remember the timbre of his voice. I’ll remember his sly trickster humor, and how he made everyone laugh.

Monday night, my aunt told me that when Bruce was in the hospital after a stroke last week, the nurse asked him a series of questions.

     What was his middle name?

     “Bruce Douglas,” he said. "And what's yours?"

     "How old are you?"

     "86. How old are you?"

     “Who is the President?”

     “O-BAMA!” he roared.

     "He's a Republican," said my aunt.

     “I gathered,” said the nurse.

When I spoke with Lee on the phone she said she imagined that he was already playing cribbage with his daughter, Sue, and she beat him.

I wonder if he heard the word “hospice” and said to himself, “No thanks, checking out!”

Or maybe it was the prospect of an Obama victory?

That victory was the high of the week—of the year—for Richard and me and most of our family and friends.

But love is larger than political affiliation, and may be the only force strong enough to solve the major problems of our country and the world.

When life draws to a close, our memories of that person seem to be etched in the heavens, and take on the radiance of stars. Bruce’s star is dancing and twinkling with laughter. The secret of his humor? Timing! Right to the very end.

Paris street art by JPM

Scarfing Cupcakes

After about three days of Indian Summer, autumn turned cold again, just in time for Hallowe'en. It's not a big holiday here, but the turn of the Celtic New Year, All Saint's Day, when the veil between the realms of the living and the dead is at its thinnest, is celebrated, and it also marks the beginning of the Christmas decoration season. There's no Thanksgiving here to buffer the time between Toussaint and Nöel.

We did find one place where Hallowe'en flowered (or floured) for an afternoon, at least. It was the third annual Cupcake Camp, a 100% nonprofit charity bake sale with 2000+ cupcakes, most donated by gourmet and boutique bakeries, that were sold to more than 600 attendees. It's held in a community center next to Canal St. Martin, everyone donates their labor and wares (Paris Play donated the official event photographer this year), and all proceeds benefit the Make-a-Wish Foundation in France. This year's Cupcake Camp raised €5500 (about $7000). 

After celebrities in the baking community sampled the wares that were put up for judging, the public was let in, and the rush to buy cupcakes was on.

We were soooooo good that we didn't even sample a milligram of sugar (we're back on the wagon), but we did get a fashion rush. If there's anything that marks a Paris fashionista, it's the scarf, tied, draped, bound or loose. It's a look that Parisians pull off so successfully, they even wear them indoors. If today was any indication, solid colors and patterns are running neck-and-neck for the coming chilly season, but, given that style is so personal, anything still goes.

More photos of scarves and cupcakes here, and here's the Cupcake Camp website (with links to the best cupcake bakers in Paris, for those who indulge).

Venice

 

Ballerina Clown by Jonathan Borofsky, Venice, California

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another."

     -- Anatole France 

One of our greatest fears about moving to Paris was that we’d miss our family and friends too much.

But almost no week goes by when a friend or family member doesn’t visit. And the best part is that we see them while they’re in a state of relaxed enjoyment, giddy from the beauty of this city, even while jet-lagged.

This week, Chris and Alice, friends from Los Angeles were here. He was on his way to Lyons to teach a three-day class in myth and film. She was in the midst of real estate business by phone and computer even while staying in Paris several days.

Downtown Playa del Rey, California

No one is a better source than Alice for what’s happening on the ground in our last hometown. She was once a writer, and brings a writerly sensibility to understanding character and people’s domestic desires and dramas.

When Richard and I taught myth in L.A. and beyond, in discussing the Greek gods and goddesses and their various realms, we’d always emphasize that genius, one’s daemon, is not just a description of artistic originality. Genius can be found in any field. And as we discovered in working with Alice on the huge challenge of selling our house in Playa del Rey at the very bottom of the real estate market, genius can and does shine in real estate brokers, too.

Venice canals

Richard and I each lived several lives (he six years and I four) in Los Angeles before meeting each other. We met in 1994 (the year of the great earthquake) when we lived within several blocks of each other in Venice. For that and other reasons, Venice is my favorite spot in L.A.

It’s where I lived in the ‘70s after crewing on a schooner and crossing the Pacific from Honolulu to Marina del Rey. It’s where the crew hung out with Ken Kesey and his gang of wild women and men.

It’s where I used to go when I’d come to L.A. in the ‘80s as a traveling art dealer.

It’s where I lived when I moved from Santa Fe to Los Angeles in 1990.

It’s where I experienced the Malibu fires in the distance, and the L.A. riots closer at hand in 1992.

After meeting Richard, it’s where we bought a fourplex and lived from 1995 to 2001.

It’s where we became close friends with Jane and Alex Eliot and so many other friends of a lifetime.

Sumo tournament, Venice Beach

It’s Gold’s gym, the beach, the boardwalk and the Rose Café, where we helped run a poetry series in the late ‘90s. It’s where we met most of the poets in L.A. and many from around the country, too.

It’s where we lived when we both went back to Antioch University, L.A., for graduate degrees in writing.

And it’s the place we left in 2001 to buy our dream house in Playa del Rey.

View from our former house, Playa del Rey

Richard and I loved that house, but we discovered that it changed our lives from living in a beach town where you could walk to almost everything, to one where you had to drive to get almost everywhere. And that made a huge difference in our lives.

When we decided finally to move to Paris, the market decided to stop us. The house was on the market, then off, on the market, then off, as home values plummeted and fear reigned. We wondered if we’d ever sell the house. 

Enter Alice.

She began with a stern talk on being realistic about the price. We listened to her, and adjusted it accordingly.

Then came the painful part. Feng shui! She Feng shuied our house, every corner of it, and began to stage it so other people could come in and imagine themselves there.

She began by taking my most precious piece of art, a stylized papier-mâché cross made of antique leather book covers that my sister Jane had made me as an Antioch graduation present, and placed it at the top of the inside stairway. I had my own strong reasons for its placement elsewhere, but Alice was intransigent. Then she took my favorite brilliant-colored Indian rug, a gift from my parents, out from under the dining room table and positioned it in the entrance hall. The first thing you saw on entering the house was a joyful splash of color on the wooden floor and at the top of the stairs.

She added mirrors, pillows, rugs, shifted paintings around—it took all evening. Richard went to sleep nauseated, and I did too. I know a thing or two about creating an inviting home (you would, too, if you had my mother).

But in the morning, I saw what Alice had done. Genius! We had looked for years for the right piece of art for the top of the stairs and Alice saw immediately that we already had it.

It was amazing how, even representing both buyer and seller, she managed to dissolve every single obstacle that came up in the final negotiations with the right buyer. And there were considerable obstacles. At one point, when we’d packed up most of the house and were essentially living out of just the master bedroom and kitchen (boxes were piled high everywhere else), with some of our possessions already on the way to Paris, an inspection revealed that the entire master bedroom oak floor would have to be removed so that two beams holding up the second floor balcony just outside the bedroom could be repaired. (Termite damage.)

Alice got several other contractors’ opinions, and found one who had an ingenious method of ridding the beams of termites without tearing half the house apart.

There were numerous such examples. She kept her cool when Buyer was balking, and calmed us when it looked like we were not going to be able to move to Paris after all.

Now, here in Paris, over salmon and lamb and Côtes du Rhône in our favorite bistro, we learned from Alice and Chris that Venice is booming. Stretch limos prowl Abbott Kinney. Robert Downey, Jr. bought a loft on Abbott Kinney for eight million dollars, I think Alice said.

Rose Avenue, right adjacent to where we used to live on Fifth Avenue, has turned into the next Abbott Kinney, with shops and chichi restaurants.

The movie producer Joel Silver just bought the charming 1939 post office building on Windward Circle with the murals of Venice and Abbott Kinney himself. Last November, Google moved into the Frank Gehry-designed "binocular building" on Main Street, directly across from Richard's old duplex. While we HATE the name, the three-mile strip from Santa Monica to the tip of the Marina del Rey peninsula is home to so many tech start-ups that the industry (and press) has dubbed it Silicon Beach.

Parc Monceau, Paris

It is wonderful to spend time with a couple who love each other and are full of news about so many things that interest us. But that night I lay in bed wondering if we should have sold our fourplex in Venice. Wouldn’t it have been great to have a pied-a-terre there? I mentioned it to Richard at breakfast. He reminded me that we wouldn’t have moved to Paris if we’d kept that place. I know, I know.

One thing has to die for another to be born. And in spite of realizing how deeply American we are, how the U.S. will always be our country, our favorite city in the world is Paris, and we did not make a mistake in moving here.  As Gertrude Stein put it, "America is my country. Paris is my home town."

Here's Looking at You, USA!

Street art by Speedy Graphito

While April in Paris is the customary month for visitors, October is also huge. We like to say that we've had more visitors from L.A. (and elsewhere in the U.S.) in those two months than in the last five years we spent in Los Angeles itself. 

Top question we get asked, after "How can *I* move here?" is, "Do you miss the States?"

How? It's impossible to walk more than a few blocks in Paris and not see some American iconography, or a reminder of that cultural tsunami.

Back in 1982, the incumbent French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, gave an incendiary speech in which he blasted the United States's "cultural imperialism," and advised that other cultures enact protectionist measures against the way the American cultural/consumer juggernaut "grabs consciousness, ways of thinking, ways of living." 

In those days, to cite but one example, the Hollywood machine was squeezing smaller French films out of the marketplace in both countries, a cultural trend that required state intervention, Lang thought.

Interesting concept, but there was no way American culture wasn't going to overwhelm the world like a tsunami. The French Academy tried to ban English words like "weekend," and "hot dog," but what do the French now celebrate on Saturday and Sunday?--"le weekend," when they eat "le hot dog." McDonalds, Starbucks, and KFCs are ubiquitous, and American apparel stores dot the Champs Elysses like chocolate sprinkles on a cappuccino.

The list of American words is endless now, as are the American images, for better or worse, that form a great deal of the street art, and advertising, that we see daily.

So, a portfolio of Americana, as filtered through the French consciousness and reflected back. Then just for fun down below, another Paris Play Pop Quiz.

Street art by GZUP

Street art by Shadee.K

 

Street art by Jef Aerosol, legs by Jerome Mesnager

 

Paris Play Street Art Pop Quiz

Below you will find twenty more American-inspired images from Paris street art.

Look at each of the twenty images, then post a single comment listing the names of the person, character, or American cultural icon you see; i.e., #1 is ____________________, #2 is _______________________, and so on through twenty.

We suggest you enter your answers in your own word processing program, then cut and paste them into the comments section below, which sometimes eats or loses comments entered directly.  

The first five people who get every one right will each get their choice of photograph from any 2012 Paris Play post, e-mailed to them in high-resolution, from which they will be free to make a single print for their own enjoyment.

Leave your e-mail when you leave your guesses, so we can contact you with your prize. We will favor longer than shorter answers (i.e. Michael Keaton as Batman), but these aren't essay questions.

If no one gets them all right, we'll take the answers with the best nineteen of twenty, or eighteen of twenty, etc. You have until midnight, Paris time, October 26 to get your answers in.

Good luck, and thanks for playing.

#1

#2  

#3

#4 

#5

#6

 #7

#8. Street art by Jef Aerosol

#9. Street art by Jef Aerosol 

#10

 #11

#12

#13

#14

#15

#16

#17

#18

#19. Street art by Jef Aerosol

#20. Street art by Gilbert Shelton

Two Men, Two Women, Six Ducks

The Seine meanders through the center of Paris. 

There are two eyes in the middle of the river, the Île de la Cité and the Île St.-Louis. Just look on a map.

Artists tend to gravitate towards the left eye, the intuitive-feeling eye, the eye of dream.

Maybe it wasn’t coincidence that we chose to live within a few blocks of the left eye, the Île St.-Louis.

We often cross the Pont de la Tournelle over the Seine and stop to look at Notre Dame where the river forks around the Île de la Cité, the eye of judgment. Every time you look there are new things to see.

Mid-summer, walking to meet Richard for dinner in the Marais, I saw ahead of me the most startling street person I’ve seen so far in Paris. He had a vast hairy bare belly. Not only was he shirtless, but he was also missing the entire seat of his pants. No problem—it was a hot day. He stood by a trash can and picked out bottles to throw. His face and chest were so red that all the bottles might well have been downed by him. Passersby mostly stayed on the other side of the street, for this was a hairy bum with a hairy bum. Even seen-it-all Parisians kept sneaking peeks at his big furry butt, which at least was covered half an inch down the crack by what seemed to be a pair of cowboy chaps.

I sent him a silent greeting, Bless your hairy bum, oh hairy bum, but kept a comfortable distance.

On the way back from dinner, Richard and I paused on the Quai d’Orléans. It was 9 p.m., still light, the time of year you wish would never end.

Richard leaned over the quai to snap an overhead shot of a group of young people having a picnic.

Below them at the edge of the Seine, I watched six ducks in a row, as if in line at Poilâne Bakery.

Richard showed me the close-up photo in his viewfinder. “Their picnic seems to be mostly chips.”

There was an array of bags open, as well as wine. “Those ducks are smart. They know the picnickers will tire of the chips and toss them snacks.”

“Look!” Richard said, “Someone’s in the water.”

I peered out over the murky Seine and sure enough, a man with his head submerged was struggling back to the quay with choppy strokes.

“That’s one way to get a disease,” said Richard.

We had learned in reading The Secret Life of the Seine, our friend Mort Rosenblum’s book about the history of the Seine, of the dead bodies that are still found in the river. A few Japanese tourists were watching him too.

He seemed to be having trouble lifting himself out of the water onto the steps of the quai. Then, a dripping merman emerged. He was trim, perhaps in his 40s, sun-weathered, with a leaping panther tattooed above his heart. He wore dark blue swim trunks. Up on the quai he pulled a dark blue T-shirt over his head that said “Champion” and something else I couldn’t see, “Barcela?” “Barcelona?”

He glanced up, and seemed to be scanning for any watching females who might be impressed.

Two young women in sundresses and sandals passed speaking American English, their arms around each other’s waists, and stopped at the corner near the bridge. Oblivious to the onlookers, they turned to kiss each other.

“Look how the world has changed,” I said. “American lesbians are perfectly comfortable expressing their love in public.”

“All over the world,” said Richard.

“Maybe the world is becoming a more loving place…?” I wondered aloud.