Serendiparis

Some days in Paris on our way somewhere, we end up someplace else even more interesting. In fact, it happens a lot, and we've come to think of Paris as akin to the magical land of Serendip. 

Case in point, last Saturday. When we left the apartment bright and early and took the #12 Mètro over to the vicinity of the big convention center (Parc des Expositions) on the south border of Paris, we thought we were just going to do research for a post we intend to run in a few weeks on ghastly development threats to Paris.

But our visit to the fifteenth arrondissement dropped us unexpectedly into Protest Ground Zero, the opening day of the Paris Auto Show, and allowed us a look at Paris police practices and how they differ from what we've experienced in the States.

In the three hours we spent there before other appointments we hung out with hundreds of auto workers frightened at the impending loss of as many as eighteen thousand industrial jobs in an already battered French economy, and watched Greenpeace literally hang out in a cat-and-mouse game with the police.

First, Greenpeace: Members of the organization had come to protest against Volkswagen, which was unveiling the latest edition of its Golf, a diesel model which is even lower in exhaust emissions than the much-loved Toyota Prius.  

Volkswagen's slogan: Das Car. Greenpeace's slogan: Das Problem.

Why das problem? Because Greenpeace felt it was hypocritical of Volkswagen to release low emission vehicles without full support for low emission standards in Germany. At the same time as it is releasing the Golf, Greenpeace complained, Volkswagen "is at the heart of a group of companies lobbying against new laws which we need to cut CO2 emissions, reduce our oil use, and protect places like the Arctic from climate change." 

So Greenpeace picked the Paris Auto Show to make their point in typical, high-profile Greenpeace fashion. They had a cadre of leafleters on the sidewalk, in matching T-shirts with no other identifying labels, so the message was clear and uncluttered.

Then, five stories up on two of the four ziggurat/California Mission-style towers that mark the convention center entrance, two teams of two mountaineers each had ascended to unfurl anti-Volkswagen banners. One banner used the Volkswagen logo as the "o" in C02, and had the slogan "Das Problem." The second banner, in black type on a yellow field, read "Volkswagen Nous Enfume," which translates as "Volkswagen pollutes us," or "Volkswagen we smoke," or "Volkswagen hides its intentions behind a curtain of smoke." Any of these work, French is slippery that way.

One of the unfortunate trends we witnessed in the decade before we moved here was the post-9/11 federalization and militarization of American police forces, and the simultaneous rapid erosion (as reporter Chris Hedges documents) of civil rights and freedom of speech, all in the name of "fighting terrorism," a policy no politician can appear to be against, no matter how broadly the term is stretched. This dismaying non-partisan trend began with the Patriot Act under Bush Two, and has accelerated during the Obama administration.

Local police departments feeding at the Homeland Security trough have bulked up since September 2001 with $34 billion worth of weapons like tanks, drones and heavy assault rifles.

Statue commemorating Free Speech Movement, Berkeley Marina, California

Unlike the free-range demonstrations we joined and even organized in the SF Bay Area and elsewhere in the late '60s, police now corral protesters at events like political conventions into cyclone-fenced faux-"Free Speech Zones" blocks from any delegate's sight, surrounded by armor-clad Robocop imitators.

In the USA, we would have expected the Greenpeace protest to "require" a cordon of armed riot police pushing citizens away from the convention center while the rest of the force figured out a way to bring the Greenpeace climbers down.

Not so the Paris police. Citizens were free to come and go as they pleased, five floors below the climbers and banners, and the police presence was minuscule, mostly watching as if cheering for their side. Their side brought out its mountaineers, who climbed up through the inside of the first tower, talked to the Greenpeace folks for about twenty minutes, then sent a cop rappelling down to grab the banner and toss it below to waiting plainclothesmen, who hustled it off.

 

Then the policemen climbed down and headed for the second tower, leaving the Greenpeace mountaineers hanging by their ropes. Elegant, Apollonian French restraint--no arrests, nothing daring or stupid attempted. We presume that the Greenpeace climbers were arrested later when they came down (three climbers were arrested later indoors after they unfurled two "Nous Enfume" banners from the ceiling during the Volkswagen keynote address), but there was no urgent need to pluck them from their perch.

Interlude: Before we get to tower two, enter the autoworkers. These are tough, tough times in France. Official unemployment has risen to 10.2%, and the psychological barrier of three million unemployed was just crossed. Newly elected President François Hollande had no honeymoon, as reporter Eric Pape describes; his approval rating has dropped into the low forties after barely 100 days in office. Much like President Barack Obama, Hollande is dealing with an inherited mess, but the voters are scared and angry, and the blame is on the incumbent.

The French company Peugeot is close to bankruptcy, and another major employer, Ford, keeps announcing more and more job cuts despite threats from the socialist government to levy heavy financial penalties for doing so.

So the autoworkers unions bused in hundreds of demonstrators who rallied outside the building (and later inside), under the watchful eye of perhaps ten bored-looking motorcycle cops. More free speech, no hassles, thank you. The autoworkers even set off red distress flares, and nobody panicked.

Meanwhile, back at Greenpeace tower two, two other mountaineers (one a woman, in case you're keeping score) unfurled a "Nous Enfume" banner. Then, to bring home the point, she lit a smoke bomb that polluted for at least two minutes. Perhaps it was organic smoke.

It was time to leave to make our other appointments, so we didn't see if the same three mountaineering cops made a similar ascent for that banner, but it looked like one was underway.

Then, serendipitously, just as we were leaving, two celebrities showed up directly under the smoking tower. They were unknown to us, but apparently well-known to a score of mostly teenaged autograph seekers who politely mobbed them in an elegant, understated French way.

 

So, a Paris Play pop quiz. Can any of our French readers (or any other nationality) tell us who these two heartthrobs are? We think he might be a sports star, and she, model or actress or nuclear physicist, or all three. First reader to get it right and post their names in the comments section below wins a Lebanese lunch, on us, at one of our favorite neighborhood hangouts, Comptoir Méditerranée. Serendipity for somebody: start out reading a post, end up with a free lunch.

Healing the Planet

 

This article in The New York Times got me thinking about compassion. Here is an official of the city of Girona, who, with more than a million people starving in Spain, put padlocks on the supermarket trash bins in his city.

“It’s against the dignity of these people to have to look for food in this manner,” said Eduardo Berloso…. Mr. Berloso proposed the measure last month after hearing from social workers and seeing for himself one evening “the humiliating gesture of a mother with children looking around before digging into the bins.” 

Humiliating, perhaps, but better than starving. What he really meant was that it was humiliating for the image of the tourist town of Girona. 

To do him justice, he did arrange for vouchers for licensed pantries and soup kitchens to be passed out where people come to forage for tossed-out food, but he ignored the fact that many of these people are not accustomed to hand-outs and would rather go out at night to comb through trash bins, or to food pantries in neighboring towns to avoid being seen by anyone who knows them. Most of these people would rather have jobs.

But Berloso can't imagine others’ feelings. He can't feel their shame. It is a failure of compassion but also, of understanding. Maybe empathy is a better word, since it seems to imply both compassion and understanding.

My first thought was that there ought to be tests given for compassion, for empathy, before anyone is permitted to run for office. But how would you determine that? What would that test be?

As usual, the minute I got into the shower, an answer came. By listening to people’s stories. By observing their actions. By listening to their stories which will tell you about their actions.

The three questions you’d want to ask are:

1)   How does he or she treat animals?

2)   How does he or she treat other humans?

3)   How does he or she treat others’ spiritual beliefs?

I’m thinking of the approaching presidential election in the U.S.A. Which brings to mind three true stories about the Republican party candidate, Mitt Romney.

He tied his Irish setter dog, Seamus, to the roof of the family car for a 12-hour drive to Canada. Okay, maybe not the actual dog, but a kennel containing the dog. Now, imagine you are Seamus. (Shame-us) On returning home, you too might wander away. 

In prep school, he spearheaded an attack on a gay student, John Lauber, whose bleached-blond hair he didn’t like, wrestled him down, and cut off his hair. Now imagine you are that boy.

One of the bullies involved encountered Lauber years later, and apologized. Lauber said, “It was horrible,” and described how frightened he was during the attack. He never forgot it. He died of cancer, after an apparently peripatetic life--and according to his sister, never stopped bleaching his hair. 

Romney wants to remove the rights of women concerning their own bodies, their own health, their own reproductive decisions, in spite of the fact that a majority of American women do not share the fundamentalist belief that men should control women. Imagine you are the woman who has been raped and is told she cannot have an abortion. Or the man whose wife will die without one. Or the mother whose child desperately needs medical care which she cannot afford--she can’t even afford health insurance.

A spiritual matter? Oh yes it is. The need to control women is seriously disrespectful of their autonomy and comes almost entirely from men (and women) who believe in patriarchal religions or are still living as if they do. If you cannot picture goddesses as well as gods or God, that is your model of ultimate value. Men have divine power; women must be subjected to that power.

Disrespect for animals.

Disrespect for humans.

Disrespect for others’ spiritual beliefs.

Well, that’s simple. Not qualified to hold office.

 ***

 

That Portuguese water dog, Bo, in President Barack Obama’s family seems pretty content to me.

I’ve never heard a story about President Obama’s disrespectful treatment of another human being. Have you?

Obama doesn’t mock spiritual beliefs that are not his own, and is respectful of Christians and Muslims, Hindus and Jews, agnostics and atheists, as far as I know. He doesn’t seem to believe that men should control the destiny of women, including women who believe that abortion is unthinkable. He respects others’ spiritual beliefs.

 

Last week Richard and I were lying in bed watching clouds flow by above our zinc roof, and talking about this and that. He told me about a terrific book he’d just finished, Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven.” He talked about the closeness of fundamentalism and patriarchy that is uncovered in the book.

That’s a subject that interests me, so I said I’d like to read it.

He said he hadn’t recommended the book to me, because he knows how much I hate violence, and it was very violent.

But I read it anyway. It’s the story of a family of fundamentalist brothers who have broken away from the Mormon church, but are shaping their new sect on the Mormon principle of personal divine revelation, and a return to polygamy. The youngest one is married to Brenda, who was a top TV anchorwoman, until—naturally, in a patriarchal marriage—she has to give it up.

But she is educated, smart, warm, fearless, strong and outspoken, the least submissive of all the brothers’ wives. When another of the brothers, Ron, becomes more and more fanatical, crazed, and abusive to his wife, Dianna, she talks with Brenda, who encourages her to divorce, and Dianna summons the courage to leave him. 

Brenda continues to tell the other wives to stand up for their rights and think for themselves. She refuses to obey the demands of the six brothers. What can a man do with a disobedient woman? With absolute conviction in the rightness of their act, which they claim God ordered through a personal revelation, Ron and Dan murder Brenda and the infant daughter of one of their own brothers.

The story of these brothers and other fundamentalist Mormons and how they treated their wives, how they married and raped pubescent girls, and abused and crushed the spirits of the women in their lives was repulsive. These are men who claim they receive direct revelation from God, vision that a woman cannot receive, men who cannot be dissuaded if they hear voices telling them to marry their wives’ daughters from earlier marriages, to murder a wife who dares to question them—it’s the ultimate power trip. Empathy does not exist in their world.

My sleep was disturbed for days. I couldn’t finish the book. But based on what I did read, I’d say it’s the best book on the unholy alliance between fundamentalism and patriarchy I’ve ever read.

I think we’re lost on this planet unless we give animals, women and other marginalized people, and, yes, goddesses, equal power. The planet’s health depends on it.

Sculpture by Louise Bourgeois  

Before I Die...Paris Play #100

 

To celebrate our one-hundredth edition of Paris Play, we've created our third Surrealist Café, our virtual gathering place where readers/friends contribute, and we curate.

Last week, we asked you to fill in the blank: Before I die I want to ______________.

This week, your heartfelt, soul-deep replies; we tried to honor them each with the best illustration that we could create.

Thank you, everyone who played. You make our lives so much richer with your depth, and your willingness to participate in community. When we first arrived in Paris, we worried about isolation from our loved ones. Hah! Not a chance.

May all your dreams come true before you die.

Love,

Kaaren and Richard

Ted Tokio Tanaka

 

Before I die I want to feel comfort to move on to after life.

Porter Scott

Painting by Ku Gao (c) 2012

Before I die, I want to tie the ribbon on my life (or come full circle) by signing all of the paintings of my youth and selecting all of the best photos I’ve taken over the years; thereby leaving my small visual mark on the world as my most satisfying accomplishment!

Gayle

 

Before I die I want to marry someone rich to take care of me.

Anna Waterhouse

  

Before I die I want to see God, preferably in Italy.

Ann Denk

 

Before I die I want to welcome more grandchildren into our family.

Malika Moore

 

Before I die I want to be ready, as in Hamlet's saying, "All is readiness."

Polly Frizzell

 

Before I die I want to see my beloved sisters Kaaren and Jane in the flesh many more times.

Jon Hess

 

Before I die I want to be free to trust in love.

Aline Soules 

 

Before I die, I want to know that I've lived completely.

Suki Edwards

Before I die, I want to explore Scandinavia and New Zealand.

Hope Alvarado

 

Before I die I want to go on an African photo safari.

Sojourner Kincaid Rolle

 

Before I die, I would like to have a poem that I have written acknowledged for its timeless perfection and, as its composer, be recognized in the history of our time as a Poet.

Marguerite Baca

 

Before I die I'd like to develop a green thumb, if that's possible, and grow an abundance of vegetables and herbs to share with friends and loved ones.

Joanne Warfield

 

Before I die, I want to love as I've never loved before with every cell of my being until I turn back into stardust.

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

Street art by Jérôme Mesnager 

Before I die, I want to breathe eternity's air, die before I die in the sweetest sense, and swim in its light.

Larry Colker

Street art by Pole Ka

Before I die, I want to hold my great-grandchild.

Vivian Beban

 

Before I die, I'd just like to host a fantastic party for loved ones and friends, especially those I haven't seen in years, with a live band (my son-in-law Jeff being the leader, of course) and the best caterer money could buy, in a natural setting or a beautiful winery, and I'd want it to go on for a whole day and evening just like in the old movies.

Bayu Laprade

Street art by ME Paris 

Before I die, I want to achieve great joy, success and mastery in a creative realm.

Sab Will

 

Before I die I want to know I made a difference.

Carol Cellucci

 

Before I die I want to stop working and travel.

Craig Fleming

 

Before I die I want to whirl like a dervish on the razor's edge, entranced yet all the while fully awake.

Ebba Brooks

 

Before I die I want to get my novel published.

Kari Denk

 

Before I die, I want to know that my daughter is and will be strong, independent, happy, loyal, charismatic, loving, and an all-around good person.

Bruce Moody

 

Before I die, I want to bring my work before folks on line and clean out my basement so my daughter doesn't have to do it then.

Anonymous

 

Before I die, I want to...document every last piece of urban art in Paris.

John Brunski

 

Before I die, I want to go surfing as much as I did as a kid, or at least as much as my son does now!

Eric Schafer

 

Before I die, I want to have my book published.

Ren Powell

 

Before I die I want to grow very, very old slowly; to pass through my days like an outward-bound trip, seeing the new every moment.

Anne Reese

 

Before I die, I want to walk as I used to, or I want to walk well.

Connie Josefs

Create to create

Before I die, I want to finish and publish my work.

Nancy Zafris

 

Before I die I want to spend an afternoon with the Loch Ness Monster.

Dawna Kemper

Street art by Fred Le Chevalier

Before I die, I want to see a smart, soulful, progressive woman in the White House (as President, not First Lady; we thankfully already have the latter).

Kaaren Kitchell

Before I die I want to bring forth what is in me,
to transpose vision and memory
into literary works of art.

Betty Kitchell

Street art by Sardine Animal

Before I die, I want to do…nothing!  I've done it all!

Surrealist Café Gathering #3: “Before I Die I Want to ______________”

 

“Preparing for death is one of the most empowering things
you can do. Thinking about death clarifies your life.”

                                    —Candy Chang

We are weaving a rich tapestry as we live,
of colors, images and moods.
This week, the black of death,
the turquoise of art,
the red of love and friendship.

I recently saw a Ted Talks video given by performance artist and urban planner, Candy Chang. It is a six-minute meditation on death and what matters in life.  You can watch it here: 

Her voice is low and soulful, full of gravitas. She did a performance piece in New Orleans after a great friend died, a woman who was like a mother to her. She found an abandoned building near where she lives, and put up a giant chalkboard, on which was written many times:

“Before I die I want to __________________,” with a space for people to fill in.

In 24 hours every line on four sides of the building was filled in. One man dressed as a pirate wrote, “I want to be tried for piracy.”

We’d like to celebrate our hundredth post of Paris Play next Saturday by asking you to participate in our third Surrealist Café. Just complete the sentence, “Before I die I want to __________.”

E-mail your completed sentence to us here by midnight, Paris time next Wednesday, September 19, and we will publish your answers on Saturday, September 22, at the Autumn Equinox. You may sign yours, or send it anonymously. But only one sentence, please. Don't post it as a comment to this story; use the mail link here.

The other night at dinner with three visiting friends, we talked of visitations. I told the story of my father’s beautiful death on September 11, 2006. It was beautiful because he fulfilled all his dreams, and was surrounded by people who adore him at the end. He appeared as a hawk the next morning outside my parents’ home, perched in a Palo Verde tree gazing at my mother and three sisters and me.

On September 11 this year, I had the atypical experience of not knowing the date until, after an art opening of the wonderful French journal, Soldes, Richard and I went to dinner with a new friend at an Indian restaurant where you can eat a good meal for five euros. That’s about $6.50. (Thanks, Demian.)

At every table around us were two or three Indian or African men. A French-speaking couple sat at a table near the door, the only other woman in the place. I figured that any Indian man in the neighborhood who was married was probably at home eating a home-cooked meal.

As we scarfed down rice and vegetables (and for the carnivores, lamb), samosas and naan, and brainstormed some new approaches to writing, photography and film, we became aware of a strange repetition of images on the Indian channel on the ceiling-level TV. Osama bin Laden, the twin towers falling, over and over again. I realized at once what day it was.

So many people who died in the falling towers in New York City, and in the United States' retaliatory efforts across the Muslim world since then, did not have a full span of years in which to fulfill their dreams. That is the tragedy.

We wish every one of you 100 years in which to realize your dream.  And tell us, what is that dream?

Finding Your Café

Sometimes you have too many threads in your mind, and you wonder how they’re related—if they’re related—and how to weave them all together.

I’ve been thinking about truth-telling and love.

About friendship.

About what I want to do before I die.

About fiction and non-fiction.

About writing rooms and writing in cafés.

About France and America. Republicans and Democrats.

About health rituals.

About public art and public spaces.

 

I finished a first draft of a short story this week. When I was five years old, I wanted to write a book of stories when I grew up that my sister, Jane, would illustrate. I’ve always loved the dance between story and visual images. 

Richard and I are collaborating now on Paris Play the way I envisioned doing as a child. Stories and photos about daily life in Paris are one approach. Fictional stories about characters are another.

Having a chambre de bonne has helped me go down into depth in writing fiction. And then today, after the uneasiness of revealing the story's weird characters, the joy of Richard’s enthusiastic response and his edits.

For depth, for listening closely to the muse, I find that solitude is best. But for later drafts, the buzz of a café can spark new word associations and sensory details.

I set out to try once more to write—no, to edit—in a café, taking my new lightweight MacBook Air.

I know the cafes that were second homes to Sartre and Beauvoir; where Hemingway wrote; where Hart Crane met his publisher, Harry Crosby; where Marguerite Duras met other writers; where Samuel Beckett mused; where the Surrealists and Dadaists gathered; where Baudelaire and Rimbaud drank; where James Joyce quoted passages from the Bible; where Scotty Fitzgerald got deathly pale on champagne; where Djuna Barnes passed around her work; where Richard Wright entertained Martin Luther King, Jr.; where Gabriel García Márquez dined; where Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Anais Nin fought; where Oscar Wilde quipped; where Proust sipped beer. I’ll take you on a tour of these places if you gather a small group and give me a little notice.

But I wanted a café of my own. Why should I follow in anyone else’s footsteps? Except maybe Chekhov’s, but he didn’t write in Paris. The kind of story that Chekhov wrote is my model. All he really cared about was character. Not scenery (though at his best in “The Lady with the Dog,” his descriptions of the countryside near Yalta in the summer and Moscow in the winter, are heart-stoppingly lovely); not gymnastic language (his simple language gives you all you need to know); not plot (though his stories reveal action emerging from character). X-ray vision about character—that was Chekhov’s genius.

I walked past the Montaigne statue across from the Sorbonne, and rubbed his buckled golden shoe for luck. He smiled down at me with that ironic, good-humored smile.

I had two cafés in mind to try tonight. In passing one, I noticed that there was a spacious area in one corner beckoning me to sit. No one too close. Books behind the red banquette. An open air view onto the sidewalk and a crossroads (because all the artists’ and writers’ favorite cafés are near Métro stations and at carrefours). And I already knew that the waiters there struck just the right balance between being attentive and leaving you alone.

I settled in and sure enough, the waiter quickly brought me gazpacho and toast with olive tapenade, and cider with the tiniest bit of alcohol.

At the nearest table, three British men, filmmakers, apparently, were talking about film and the dementia of one of their parents. They were intensely engaged in conversation, listening as much as they talked about art and life, and hallelujah!, in modulated voices. Perfect.

For two hours I edited the story, looking up occasionally at the sidewalk theater. People sat at small tables chatting, drinking and eating. The art of conversation is still alive in Paris.

I’d found my writing café. The only thing more that was needed to make this a perfect day: a film with Richard at home. Maybe we’d watch Monsieur Hire, based on a Georges Simenon mystery, as our French lesson before we went to sleep.    

As for truth and love, friendship and death… all those other subjects? We can talk about those later.