So Begins a Trés Bell Year

Our neighborhood cathedral turns eight hundred and fifty this year.

Here on the fifth floor, with our windows open, we often listen to the bells of Notre Dame (Our Lady) from four blocks away, and had thought them lovely each time.

But what do we know? 

Not being experts, we didn't know they were out of tune. After all, the last time the ten big bells were "replaced" was during the French Revolution of 1789, when they were destroyed as part of the wave of secular sentiment. Their eventual nineteenth century replacements were four chimes, which everyone except us knew were discordant.

So, to celebrate Our Lady's birthday, the church hierarchy commissioned nine new bronze bells, celebrated this last weekend amid much pomp, incense, music, and ceremony, including an appearance by Paris Archbishop Andre Armand Vingt-Trois.

Many masses were held, at which the gargantuan bells were displayed in the nave of the immense gothic cathedral. Between masses, the devout and the merely curious mingled together, inspecting, touching, and admiring the huge bronze bells, including the six-and-a-half ton bourdon (great bell) bell named for Marie, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth.

Marie will be hoisted to the gothic south tower by herself, and the other eight, Jean-Marie, Maurice, Benoit-Joseph, Steven, Marcel, Denis, Anne-Genevieve and Gabriel, will be mounted in the north tower, joining another bourdon, Emmanuel, which has been there since the seventeenth century. 

The installation is expected to be finished by March 23, when they will ring together for the first time just before Palm Sunday, the beginning of what Christians call Holy Week. Palm Sunday commemorates the arrival of Jesus into Jerusalem, where, in the following week, he was tried, sentenced, put to death on a cross on Good Friday, and then, the story continues, resurrected on Easter, in the manner of previous fertility gods like the Greek Dionysus, the Mesopotamian Tammuz, or the Egyptian Amun.

 

Notre Dame itself stands on ground sacred long before the Christian Era began. The Cathedral sits at what Pulitzer Prize-winning architect Allan Temko called "the organic heart of Paris." And, "the eastern end of the island [Ile de la Cite] has been a repository of idealisms since men first built a tabernacle there of branches and reeds. From the floor of the Seine upward, there must be scores of buried pre-Christian shrines: first the fragile Gallic sanctuaries of wood, and then a whole series of Roman temples in stone. Finally, high on the accumulated mound, so close to the surface that they seem incredibly recent, is a collection of Christian edifices, resting directly behind and all around Notre-Dame." (Temko, Allan, Notre-Dame of Paris.  A Time Incorporated book, New York, 1962, page 11.) 

It's a powerful spot. Witness last Saturday, the day the celebratory masses began, which was blustery, with intermittent hail showers. Not quite cold enough to snow, but definitely some bitter winds. Then, as if to signify that somebody up there liked what was going on in the cathedral, the sun came out just long enough to help send this message to the assembled worshipers at the exact moment the afternoon service began.

Happy New Year!

 

Joyeuses fêtes!

 

 

Open Minds

I was full of inspiration after the evening panel discussion by French, British and American literary magazine editors at Shakespeare and Company Books. I wanted to get home quickly to open my new books (Giovanni’s Room! The Stockholm Octavo! The Tenants of The Hôtel Biron! Londoners! Tin House’s issue on Beauty!). But I was hungry. I took a short detour down one of those twisty golden Paris streets to a little Italian trattoria with phenomenally tasty pizza.

The small black-haired Italian girl behind the counter was talking with the older Italian customer just as if the scene were frozen since the last and only time Richard and I had stopped there.

The Italian man asked where Richard and I lived. Paris, now. And where did you live before? said the girl. Playa del Rey, a beach town in Los Angeles, I said. The Italian girl wanted to know why we’d rather live in Paris. The older man laughed. He knew. He moved to Paris from Bari some thirty years ago.

My pizza was ready. There was a booth at the back, near two women who were belting down red wine.

I opened my book, The Tenants of The Hôtel Biron. It’s a fictional account of the years when the house that is now the Musée Rodin was inhabited by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel, Vaslav Nijinsky, Eric Satie and Jean Cocteau. I know, you want to read it, too, right? I read with special relish because the author, Laura Marello, had passed the manuscript to me about ten years ago when we knew each other in Los Angeles. I’d been knocked out by the story and the writing, felt it was publication-worthy then, and now, ten years later it had found its publisher, Guernica Editions. Do you have any idea how happy it makes me when a writer finally breaks through?

So I’m savoring the pizza, devouring the book, and the two women speaking Spanish behind me are growing boisterous with gaiety. One taps me on the shoulder and asks in French if I have a cigarette.

Non, je suis désolé, je ne fume pas.

She gets up to ask the only other diner, a man who looks like Serge Gainsbourg, for a smoke. He hesitates, gives her one, and she puts it in her mouth as if she’s lighting up.

You know it’s not legal to smoke in restaurants? I ask.

Street art (mask) by Gregos, additional artist unknown

She scurries over to the edge of my booth and leans in and makes a face at me. Then walks outside to smoke.

Her friend behind me says, Forgive her. She doesn’t understand that you have to respect the cultural customs of the country in which you live. She has a problem with depression.

It’s okay, I say. For me it’s just a matter of health. I’m so relieved that France changed its laws about smoking in restaurants.

The woman and I banter in French. She tells me she talks to her friend about her surly attitude.

Street art by PopEye

The smoker returns. She sits down, her back to my back but turns to look at me as I talk with her friend. She is drunk, with a sweetly cow-like expression on her face, melancholy eyes, and a sprinkling of freckles. Like her friend, she has very short hair.

We ask questions of each other. Discover we are from the same continent, only they are from South America.

It’s the continent of the heart, I say.

South America, maybe, says the older woman.

North America too, I say. It’s all one heart.

Then an odd conversation begins. The older woman begins to talk about her friend as if she isn’t there. She is too closed, she says. She stays at home and is depressed. She doesn’t have any confidence in herself.

The younger woman nods, That’s right.

The older woman says, We’re out tonight trying to cheer her up. Getting her out of her apartment. Having a little wine.

There are four empty bottles on the table.

We talk about living in Paris. I notice that the younger woman’s fluency in French, her accent too, is excellent, and ask her about it. She was educated in Paris.

The older woman is originally Basque—we have rebellion in our veins, she says. Her family emigrated to South America before she moved to Paris. She never wants to leave.

The younger woman asks me if I’ve read Stefan Zweig.

No, I say. Is he good?

Very good, she says.

Do you like Proust? I ask.

The two women shake their heads. There are certain moral problems it seems with Proust. (Do they mean that he was gay?)

Street art by PopEye

He was Jewish, wasn’t he? the older woman asks.

Half Jewish, half Catholic, I say. He was raised as a Catholic, but really identified more with his mother who was Jewish.

I can see in their faces that there’s some difficulty in the way they regard this fact.

But you can’t be two religions, says the older woman.

Well, God, gods, spirits—what difference does it make?

They look at each other meaningfully. (Unspoken: a huge difference.)

You are Catholic? I ask.

Anti-Israel/-American street art in the Marais, artist unknown

They both nod as if to say, Exactly. And then the older woman, her lips red with wine, begins to talk about Jews. How grasping they are. How they try to take over the banks.

No, no, no, I say.

How Hitler tried to save his country from the Jews.

Hitler was a monster! I say.

No, he was trying to save his country.

The Jews were not responsible for the wretched state of Germany after World War I, I say. Germany was economically ruined and Hitler offered a scapegoat, someone to blame. He was a failed artist, a maniac.

I suddenly see that a visor-like armor has fallen over their faces. There is no further place to go in conversation with these two. Closed minds. Time to go. I pack up my book bag and say goodbye.

And the Italian man who still stands talking to the girl behind the counter, says, Dites bonjour à votre mari. Say hello to your husband.

Merci. Et bonne nuit à vous.

Buona notte, says the girl with a big smile. California, she sighs.

I walk home thinking about bigotry and hatred. How an atheist Jewish friend of mine used to talk about Catholics, and mock my spirit helpers, who appear to me in the form of gods and goddesses. She is someone I love, but it cost the friendship. No one wants to have to defend his or her own spiritual beliefs, nor should any of us have to.

I think about how a recent online discussion of a well-known Native-American poet’s reading in Tel Aviv elicited a furor on Facebook. There were those who, objecting to Israeli bullying of Palestinians, said, Don’t cross the picket line. There were those who defended Israel at any cost. There were those who sent her love and blessings on her performance there in the role of poet and musician.

I identified, in some way, with all of them.

It’s so obvious. Peace and love are not clichés. They’re the answer. But when you encounter scapegoating and bullying, where do you draw the line?

No One In Paris Owns a White Truck

No one in Paris owns a white truck. Oh, they may drive one off the showroom floor white, but after a very short time (overnight in some neighborhoods) they are no longer trucks, or white, but mobile canvases that promote the work of the coming generation of street artists.

 

For the folks who own the trucks, this is the downside of street art, the point where they would probably say the practice crosses over into vandalism.

Some of these "artists" are simply taggers, in Paris Play's view, low-level wannabes who piss like wolves with magic markers or spray cans simply to mark territory, and leave their scrawls on the fronts of houses, on shop windows, on automobiles and trucks--in short, anywhere, just to say, "I was here." We agree with Tom Finkelpearl, executive director of New York City’s Queens Museum of Art, who says, “I can’t condone vandalism… It’s really upsetting to me that people would need to write their name over and over again in public space. It’s this culture of fame. I really think it’s regrettable that they think that’s the only way to become famous.” 

An article in the latest issue of À Paris, the official magazine the city sends free to local residents, makes a clear distinction between artists and taggers, the latter of whom cost the city €4.5 million ($5.82 million) each year in clean-up fees. À Paris said, "There is no question here of artistic practices on walls or dedicated street art…but those who defile façades and houses." After noting that the city's legal options are limited, the article concludes, "It therefore encourages residents and owners to complain, so that the damage will be treated as a crime and not as a fatality. Le graffiti sauvage is liable to a fine of €3750…up to €7500 for a public building."

A step up from tagging, the lines begin to blur. When enough tags accumulate, the result can be a collective collage that turns into a work of art. One of our favorites is this tiny work above, the locked gate at a long disused railroad tunnel in the 14th arrondissement. 

The graffiti crew "Spank," with their latest work on a "legal" wall on city property

And the next step up from tags as collage are the works of graffiti artists (individuals or "crews") who create larger spraypainted pieces with psychedelic colors and misshapen letters that carry our minds back to the Wes Wilson, Kelly/Mouse, Arab et al Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom posters that burst out of the Haight-Ashbury in that Sixties blaze of cultural and artistic ferment. We'd call those Bay Area-based artists godfathers to the graffiti crew phenomenon of the seventies in Philadelphia, then New York, etc., though the music that inspired those latter rebels was hip-hop, still associated, in many people's minds, with the larger calligraphic pieces that spread around the world, the gradual evolution of tagging into works of graphic art. 

 

(It's not our intent to delve into the arcana of styles, bubble-lettering versus wild style, or how different styles evolved in different ends of the same town, but anyone who'd like to add to our store of knowledge is free to join in the comments section.)

The final step (so far) are the full-scale works of art, with or without calligraphy, that Paris Play has been covering for the last two years, the urbain art movement that is filling galleries, exhibition spaces, and gradually museums around the world, and fetching prices even heftier than the penalties for tagging.

One of the distinctions that artists we've come to know here make is permanence versus impermanence. The organization Le M.U.R., whose exhibition we covered a few weeks ago, now has three billboard sites around the city, but each of those large pieces of billboard art only stays up for two weeks before it is replaced by the work of another artist. Street art, they believe, is ephemeral, ever-changing, which is why we are out at least three days a week documenting with our cameras what we see in the streets. It could literally be gone in a day. 

While street artists work in various media--painting, mosaic, wood blocking, yarn bombing, stencils, multimedia installations--many of the art pieces we photograph, like the popular work of Fred Le Chevalier, Kashink, Norulescorp, Tristan des Limbes, Madame, and others are "sticker art" done on paper, with wheat paste to adhere it to the walls, precisely because it is impermanent. Some artists like seeing their work decay over time; the process of decay is part of the life cycle of the work, and a comment on city living. The replacement of their work with other peoples', which also decays and is replaced by others, makes some street walls pentimento collages.         

But the spray-painted trucks are permanent, looking like rubber-tired versions of circa-1970s New York City subway cars. In some neighborhoods that have street markets a few times a week, where trucks are parked regularly in order to maintain a position on market day, it's an artistic free-for-all--trucks as chum for a school of art sharks. Walk along Boulevard de la Villette or Boulevard de Belleville in the 11th arrondissement (same street, it just changes its name near the Belleville Metro stop) and you'll see a free plein air gallery.

 

However, there may be a bright side we're missing. These could all be commissioned works, from crews like FD and 1984, whose work appears frequently. Perhaps the truck owners have simply hired a local crew to create some coherent, themed mural, rather than succumb to taggers with no taste. If you can't beat 'em, hand 'em your own spray can and stand back.

 If you'd like to see more, we posted our overflow pictures here.