Evolution of An Octopus (or, Poulpe Fiction)

One of Richard's and my favorite mutual Paris pastimes is walking around and visiting the art gallery in the streets. It changes daily; as artists emerge, old art gets covered by new, or by swaths of paint or whitewash applied by building owners and city crews, or it ages from weather and wear.

Fifteen months ago, walking hand-in-hand in the Marais, after marvelous galettes in our favorite crệperie, we spotted some new work, a spray-painted outline of an octopus, with some vertical lines scrawled to either side to signify motion. Richard photographed it for the street art database he's accumulating, and a few streets farther, we spotted another couple of octopi, these filled in with orange and green paint.

Still nothing to write home about. The octopus outlines were a step above mere tagging--marking ones' initials, the way dogs mark territory--but not particularly brilliant.

We're not big fans of tagging, even if it metamorphoses into huge, swirling, psychedelic-colored initials or names. Those are still a territory-marking syndrome, not yet over the border into art.

What's the difference? Here's a BBC article on pre-Olympics London street art cleanup that applies the "I'll know it when I see it" standard that the U.S. Supreme Court also applies to pornography. In London, as in Paris, the works of certain artists are protected, while city clean-up crews ravage others.

As months went by, the octopus artist graduated to creating creatures with a variety of colors and expressions, on die-cut plywood sheets about two feet square super-glued to the sides of buildings, mostly on the second story (first story in France). But it was hard to know if it was a single artist, or if a meme had begun to spread. One other street artist, who glues life-sized ceramic "death masks" of his face with four different expressions all over Paris, allows people to buy them and paint their own designs and decorations; perhaps these octopi (who were beginning to look more like space aliens) were a collective expression.

Then, a few months ago, we spotted new octopi with a tag, GZUP, and we had a clue to follow. An Internet search revealed that the artist who calls himself GZUP was a suburban army veteran in his mid-thirties who had just returned to the streets after a hiatus since the mid-nineties, according to this interview with a street art blog. His return was prompted by seeing a street art show at the Cartier Foundation, where he realized that what had begun as a step above vandalism had become "democratized."

(While GZUP didn't mention it, gallery street art is also attracting impressive prices from collectors, which might be a tiny, niggling nudge toward more permanent materials. Die-cut plywood is easier to curate and collect than paint-bomb scrawls.)

His influences are "those who make me dream and constantly raise the level, those who innovate. People coming out of the 'Classics' in all fields: Keith Haring, the dribbling of Cristiano Ronaldo, dialogues from movies of Tarantino…Rihanna, Shakira, the Air Max 90, DJ Quik, [and] Nate Dogg (RIP)," while his pseudonym is taken from a particularly raunchy Snoop Dogg song (if that's not oxymoronic), "GZ UP, HOES DOWN."

 

According to the interview, "GZUP does not like octopi, neither in the sea nor on his plate; he just liked that shape when he began drawing." When asked his favorite color, he said, "The green without hesitation. A color that made me vomit when younger." (A mythical note: in Greek myth, the goddess Athena is associated with octopi (among her many totems), and in our personal mythology, her color is green.) Obviously, these pieces of art are evolving beyond mere sea creatures.

For more on GZUP, here's a You Tube video, a second, and his Flickr page.

Companions in Flight

Paris to Chicago

A mother and her young daughter sit in the seats in front of me. The mother sends clear signals to the girl: Don’t bother me. Leave me alone.

The carpet of green and gold covering la belle France.

The sheen on the sheet of sea below.

The girl migrates to an unoccupied center seat to my right to watch the in-flight movie. She is blonde with deep brown eyes, solemn and anxious, perhaps eight years old. When the film is over, the girl turns to her journal, writes a few words, then draws for a few pages. She keeps glancing up to see if her mother might be looking back at her. Throughout the flight, she moves back and forth between her mother’s side and her solitary seat. The mother seems to be awake, but unwilling to give her daughter any sign of warmth or reassurance.

Street Art by Fred le Chevalier

Each time the girl returns to the seat across the aisle from me, she looks dejected. I lean over and say, “I think you’re going to be a writer when you grow up.”

She looks startled. Am I talking to her? Someone has noticed her? She’s really visible? I see by the swift changes of expression on her face that she is shy, is not sure what to say—have I observed her secret, that she fears that she is unloved and unlovable? After a full minute, she says, “An artist. I want to be an artist.”

She shows me photos of her dog, Athena.

Strange synchronicity. I had just been thinking about Athena, the goddess of temperate measure. In the flurry of getting ready to fly out of town, I was reminded once again that my tendency towards expansiveness needs tempering with Athena measure.

Zeus is loose, but Athena is meanuh.

Keeping a home in order? Easy. But keeping papers organized? That’s my challenge. I decide that on returning to Paris, I’ll spend one day a week putting files, papers, writing in order.

Right after this, I walked to the back of the plane where a flight attendant was reading “Stealing Athena.” Now, within the space of fifteen minutes, here is a third reference to Athena. What do you call that? It seems to me more than coincidence, like some sort of indication that something’s trying to get through to you from the realm of the invisible.

The young girl and I talk about her dog and her two cats and her mouse and her chicken.

Before we disembark, I say to her mother, “Your daughter is enchanting.”

She looks surprised. This little pest? her expression seems to say.

Denver to Phoenix

Beside me, two young sisters discuss the play they’ve just seen, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The 15-year-old: “Shakespeare was a playwright who lived in the 1600s.”

The 8-year-old: “I may not know who Shakespeare is, but I’m not dumb!”

The 15-year-old: “I know, you liked Puck best.”

I confirm that the two are sisters, and their ages. I’ve guessed the older’s, but the younger is actually nine years old. They both seem French somehow, the understated style of their clothes. And yes, their family lived in Bordeaux for four years, and now they live in Phoenix.

Phoenix to Denver

The man coming up the aisle is young and muscular, with an open face, and a T-shirt featuring a skull. He sees me lifting my suitcase overhead, and offers to help—gladly accepted—then indicates the middle seat beside me.

We talk about the Colorado fires. He’s hoping to get home in time to get a few hours sleep before a job that begins at dawn.

I ask him about the skull tattoos up and down his arms.

“Oh,” he says, looking embarrassed. “I got those when I was 14. Ran wild for a while. Not much supervision from my family. But I guess I turned out all right. Wife and kids and a house, and I just turned 30.”

As we land in Denver, he turns on his cell phone. His phone plays a recording of demented children’s laughter, echo of his earlier days as a wild child.

Denver to Chicago

He is big-bellied, stocky, with the ruddy face of someone who works outdoors. He looks like a shorter Ernest Hemingway.

I write two letters, to my mother and brother, before asking him what the current U.S. postage is.

44 cents, he says.

I’m glad that I finished the letters first, because this man needs to talk.

“I been cowboyin’ all my life,” he says, and tells me a story about the widow on whose ranch he works. “She’s rich and mean. She pays everyone who works for her minimum wage.”

She questioned his wages once. He told her, “‘I charge you what I charge everyone. Go ahead and hire someone else.’ That shut her up.”

He tells me today has been the worst day of his life. His flight was cancelled and changed four times. “I got up at 6 to get ready for the flight and found my favorite mule, Miss Cassie, dead. We got animals buried all over the property, but I didn’t have time to dig her a grave. By the time I get back, the coyotes and vultures will have picked her clean.”

His eyes brim. “Guy I know said she was the best mule he ever met. She was.”

He doesn’t try to hide his tears. I say, “I think the spirits of everything we’ve ever loved remain.”

He tells me that when they moved into their house, his daughter saw a cowboy sitting on her bed, chewing a wad of tobacco. “We found out he’d died in the house. She’s seen him a bunch of times. Talks with him. He doesn’t cause no trouble, but he used to live there. My daughter’s the only one who can see him.”

I tell him about the ghost of Ronald Colman in our former Playa del Rey house. We felt him on the stairs. He was a benevolent spirit. He and his wife loved each other, and they entertained a lot in the house.

But once when my niece and her boyfriend, Eric, were housesitting, he felt Ronald sit down on the bed in our bedroom. “He was cold, so cold,” he said, “and he tried to drag me West into the sea.”

Chicago to Paris

She has thick brown hair past her waist, large blue eyes, a beautiful face. She’s a wholesome American girl about 16.

She tells me she’s on her way to Kenya on a mission.

“You’re Christian?”

“Baptist,” she says. She’s with a group of young people from her church in Kentucky. They are returning to Nairobi, where they’ll travel to Kenyan villages, bringing wheelchairs and medical and food supplies, as well as the word of Christ.

“When I go into someone’s hut, the families are so full of joy, grateful for what they have. They show us their chairs. They love what they have, they’re proud of their huts and chairs.

“You come back to the U.S., and you feel like a spoiled brat. The only reason I think I need an iPhone is because I see them advertised, and I see my friends with them. If I never saw ads, I would be perfectly happy with what I have.

“We travel with a backpack and six blouses and one skirt for three weeks. My mom had to help me pack. At home, I have closets full of clothes. In Kenya, we have to dress modestly, and wear long skirts.”

We talk about my high school, the uniforms we wore.

“I wish I went to a school where you wear uniforms. Then I wouldn’t spend so much time every morning trying to decide what to wear.

“Do you believe in Christ?” she asks, eyes huge, pupils dilated.

“I believe Christ lived. And so did the Buddha. And many other prophets and sages and divinities.”

She looks uneasy with this response.

“I think Christ had a transformative effect on Western culture,” I add.

She nods. “Do you believe in Heaven and Hell?”

“I believe—no, I’ve experienced—that life doesn’t end with death, that something in the spirits of people we’ve loved survives.”

“And everyone is saved. People confuse the Baptists with the Southern Baptists. We believe that everyone is saved.”

She tells me that she’s trying to get on Kenya time, and that she’ll sleep with her head on a pillow on her food tray.

Minutes after our take off, she is asleep. I decide that I, too, will try to get in synch with Paris time. And for the first time ever, I fall asleep on a plane.

But my flight companion is as jumpy as water on a hot skillet. She flails in her sleep, with elbows, knees and feet knocking me in the knees and arms, until I finally give up on getting any sleep myself.

I watch the soundless drama overhead. It's an American film about the search for a mysterious island, and features a teenager who clearly knows more about everything on earth than his clueless parents.

I open my French novel, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog.” In the same building in Paris live a lonely concierge named Renée who devours literature and chocolate, and a young girl named Paloma who is trying to save her own life by keeping a journal of words and images. And then a Japanese man named Kakuro moves into their building...

The Face of Tomorrow's Army?

Though we love parades, we didn't attend last Saturday's Bastille Day number, which is much more regimented than most in Paris. A crowd of up to a half-million on the Champs Elysses, lots of barricades, heavy crowd control, screaming fighter jets overhead, and no access for interesting photos. Ares triumphant. In sharp contrast to, say, the Dionysian revelry of the Paris Gay Pride parade.




But we did wander, post-parade, over to the Esplanade des Invalides, the huge greensward in front of the gold-domed Les Invalides, which houses the military museum of France, and Napoleon's Tomb. This entire swath of the seventh arrondissement is devoted to France's past and present military glory, and the post-parade exhibits are like a trade show for the public; each branch of the service displays and recruits, from the French Foreign Legion, to the regular army, navy, and marines, to the gendarmerie.

As long-time peace activists who wear our hearts on our sleeves, we won't get into a long anti-war riff.  We just want to note that this was a marketing event, and War has lots of toys and tools on its side that make it look a lot more fun than Peace. There was nothing at Saturday's trade show that would make one think about the consequences of war. The world's literature is replete with heart-choking, compelling anti-war novels, films, articles, etc.--like our friend Chris Abani's horrifying novella of child soldiers, Song for Night. But somehow the message still isn't getting across.

We are Parisians, but we remain Americans.  Our country of origin is the largest arms supplier in the world, our adopted country is fourth.

The U.S.A. spends around twenty percent of its yearly budget on defense, up to half if you figure spending the way the War Resisters League does.

Given the vast sums of money at stake, it's no wonder that War spends a lot of energy looking attractive. Would that Peace had as effective a marketing machine.


 

Dragon

A great green dragon lies to the West, watching over the town. I look up at her ruffled spine, the green and gold of her flanks, and see her dragon breath drifting down from above. It looks like the mist above Chinese mountain peaks.

But no, it’s smoke from the Colorado fires, beyond the Rocky Mountains at the edge of town.

I’m standing outside the Whole Foods Market on Pearl Street in Boulder. What has brought me here, so far from Richard and our Paris home?

Love and health. Health and love.

On July 4, 2012, great news came from physicists at CERN in Geneva about the Higgs boson particle: the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. It is responsible for life on earth, human beings, the stars—everything in the universe, and the forces that work between them. Without this miracle, we would have no weight, would be ricocheting around at the speed of light.

This energy field that physicists have been predicting since 1964 can be seen from other perspectives, too. The perspective of love, for instance. The power of love to transform someone’s health, for instance, my sister, Jane’s.

Here are a few of the elements in Jane’s energy field:

Her daughter, Rachel, helping her to get to medical appointments and being vigilantly protective of her health.

Her daughter, Bayu, flying in from Wellington, New Zealand for a month and planning to return this fall when she has completed her art and design studies.

Her mother and four siblings ready to help in whatever ways we can.

A caring, expert Western medical team.

A brilliant acupuncturist and sage, Dr. Maoshing Ni, prescribing Chinese herbal teas and Eastern healing.

A gifted local acupuncturist.

A friend, Liza, flying in for several days.

Friends in Boulder and beyond.

Friend, Susan, connecting Jane to a healing group who are meditating on her health.

Jane’s own excellent health habits: yoga, walking and eating well.

A town where, for an entire month, I didn’t encounter a single surly or obstructive attitude (although the motorcyclist who honked at me as I fumbled for my ringing phone while driving was entirely justified).

A town that’s so wholesome—5,430 feet high (great for the lungs and heart), with clean air, open protected space, cycling, hiking, mountain climbing, free yoga classes, healthy food, people drunk on endorphins—that it might be the healthiest town in the U. S.

A town where the restaurant food is astonishingly good: the scallops and truffles at Riffs, the paella at the Mediterranean, the chicken salad at Brasserie Ten Ten, the vegetable omelette at Tangerine, the Coquilles St.-Jacques at Arugula, the vegetable tempura and beer at Hapa Sushi Grill, the guacamole and enchiladas Veracruz at Cantina Laredo. I haven’t had a bad meal yet. Even the gourmet cheeseburger at Salt the Bistro I ate with Rachel and Brandon (the first such meal I’ve had in some twenty years, making me feel like a real American again) was delicious.

Jane seems healthier by the day, surrounded as she is by an energy field of healing and love.

All this in a larger context that’s frightening: the fires in Colorado were so extreme this year that half the fire fighters in the nation were brought in to fight them. They have resulted in the loss of 346 homes, 32,000 people evacuated from their homes, and are the most destructive in Colorado history. When I last checked on July 13, they were still not contained.

A map of weather conditions across the U. S. showed an alarming degree of heat, dryness, high winds and out-of-control fires in western states.

We know there is an energy field all around us which affects us and which we affect.

Can we extend this force of love and healing beyond our families and friends, and offer it to the whole planet?

How?

How can we do this?

Say It Loud: I'm Gay and I'm Proud!

As we've said before, Paris Play loves a parade, a parade, a parade.

One of the loudest and most exuberant we've been to so far was today's Gay Pride celebration, which just happens to have passed our corner for hours this afternoon, a block from the Seine.  It's one of the loudest thanks to the never-ending convoy of flatbed trucks with full DJ rigs, playing continuous disco, or tech, or dance music at levels you can hear four blocks away.

And it's one of the most exuberant because, well, just look.  We saw new folks of all types--you provide the label, they were there, many in platform shoes--and some old favorite friends including the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, with whom we used to party in San Francisco (they have a French convent over here), and even, floating above the revelers, an animated hero.  It's safe to say that France's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community was boisterous and proud and fully represented.


No gays on the scaffold

Of course, exuberance was also tempered by the fact that being gay can be a death sentence in many intolerant countries around the world, and that pride is also a matter of asserting ones' rights.

No crowd estimate, but, according to reliable news sources, past parades have drawn as many as 650,000 revelers and spectators.  Since Paris weather turned summery and beautiful only within the last week, any costume was possible, from full drag, to square pants, to no pants.


 

Homo or hetero my children I love them as they are







Human rights are my pride



And why is the princess never a prince?