A Paris Neighborhood Close-Up: Place des Abbesses

Welcome to Paris Play's first slideshow post.

While I was traveling last week, tracing my mother's ancestral roots in Norway (more on that to come), Richard was in a five-day photography workshop presented here in Paris by Magnum Photos and its legendary photographer Patrick Zachmann.

One fruit of Richard's labors, a six-minute-and-thirty-second slide show, which you can watch by clicking the link below.

In Richard's words:

Patrick Zachmann’s assignment for me: to discover one small piece of Paris for four days, with one camera (Nikon D7000) and one lens (10-24 zoom).

I chose Place des Abbesses, in a working‐class but gentrifying neighborhood on the slope of Montmartre, with its own chaos‐causing tourist attraction, the Je t'aime wall; its resident homeless population; a slew of buskers; and its cafés and shops to service all.

Please click to enjoy our Place des Abbesses slideshow.

No Surf, But Great View

 

 

Yes, it's that time of year. During the dog days of summer, when Paris is practically empty anyway, and a surprising number of Parisians are off at their country homes, those of us who are left get to sun ourselves on a one-kilometer-long Right Bank beach smack in the center of Paris for four weeks, from today through August 18.

The city closes the Voie Georges Pompidou on the Seine at water level to vehicle traffic, trucks in tons of biscuit-colored beach sand, and erects beach umbrellas and chaise longues. It provides foosball games (called "baby foot" over here) and refreshment stands, and small pavilions for tai chi lessons and dancing. There's street art, too, in the form of commissioned (and impromptu) sand sculptures. We all hum "Surfin' U.S.A" and "Help Me, Rhonda" as we loll about in our jams and bikinis (huarache sandals, too).

This is the twelfth year of the Paris Plage program, and, even when it rains, it's a popular family outing. There is a satellite plage at Porte de la Villette in the 19th arrondissement, but the main stage is definitely in the shadow of Hotel de Ville. 

Happy Bastille Day, Serge!

Artwork (c) 2013 Anthony Lemer

As French fighter jets buzzing the Bastille Day parade on the Champs Elysses thundered over Paris, Paris Play chose instead to cover a labor of love, the redo of the Serge Gainsbourg "permission wall" in the otherwise street-art-averse Saint-Germain-dés-Prés quartier.

The famous wall, at the front of the influential French pop musician's former residence (he died in 1991) was a pilgrimage site for fans from all over the world to leave painted and written tributes, but also had become, in recent years, a mess of unrelated tags and random graffiti.

Street artist/photographer Roswitha Guillemin shows Gainsbourg estate representatives photos of the old artwork on the wall. 

So the estate (now controlled by his daughter, actress-singer Charlotte Gainsbourg) wiped the slate clean.

Artwork (c) 2013 Anthony Lemer

After being approached by street artist Anthony Lemer with a tribute concept--Gainsbourg's face in black-and-white surrounded by his song titles and lyrics and other slogans in various colors--the estate agreed to paint over the wall of graffiti and let Lemer have at it. The artist was not paid; he did it as a labor of love, and completed it Bastille Day morning, using a photograph of Gainsbourg as a model for his careful, subtle spray can work.

Artwork (c) 2103 Anthony Lemer

Gainsbourg (Google him if you're unfamiliar) was a fascinating artist, whose work from the fifties through the eighties encompassed a variety of styles, from pop, jazz, disco and reggae to electronic and funk, and he was considered an influence by artists like Arcade Fire, Air, Beck, Belinda Carlisle, and Jarvis Cocker. The son of immigrant Russian Jews who fled to France in 1917, he was profoundly shaped by the Nazi Occupation (he was forced to wear a star of David during WWII), a theme later incorporated into his work. 

He was also a renown "bad boy" whose lyrics were full of wit, puns and sometimes not-even-oblique references to sex. Eleven years before John and Yoko put her orgasms on their album "Double Fantasy," Gainsbourg recorded "Je t'aime... moi non plus" with his lover (later mother of Charlotte), the English actress Jane Birkin. He later recorded a duet, "Lemon Incest," with a fifteen-year-old Charlotte. But, like the seminal writer, Jack Kerouac, Gainsbourg's last years were a descent into public drunkenness and crankiness, too often caught on video.

A fan wearing what he said was an original T-shirt from Gainsbourg's last gig gets a photo with the artist. Artwork (c) 2013 Anthony Lemer.

However, the thousands of fans who trek to his wall each year, most less adept at art than Anthony Lemer, don't care about his last years, only about his profound legacy that seems to keep growing. French President François Mitterrand said, "He was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire... He elevated the song to the level of art."

The estate hopes this fresh start will bring a wall of elevated art with it, but, as one street artist in attendance said, "Good luck. This is a free wall, and people will do what they will."

Part of the wall before the white coats of paint.  

Adieu to the Lion

 

 

He is old and tired. His right leg drags behind him. His bony skeleton shows pink through the white fur. It is hard for him to jump on the bed or onto a chair beside us.

In May and June, I traveled for a month in the USA, and coming home, wept on seeing our little lion so weak, so sick. You can see it in his eyes, his fur, his slow movement. He has a tumor, inoperable because of his age, and we grind six medications a day into his food. He is 19.

Street art by Miss-Tic (c) 2013 

Richard and I lie on the living room floor, and sing to him. We bring his small statue of Bastet out of her basket, and she blesses him. Marley’s voice is a peep now instead of a roar.

Macho cat, King of the Block, calm, afraid of nothing, no one, resourceful (he adopted us after interviewing everyone on the block), confident, outspoken. He was Richard’s muse and mine, he gave us equal time. He was the familiar of our writing group for six or seven years.

He was seriously pissed at us twice, and both involved moves. Once when we moved from Venice, California a few miles to Playa del Rey. There were so many feral cats in the neighborhood, and he came home beaten up and bitten (and turned into a Cone-head for a few months) that we had to keep him indoors after his years of roaming Venice. (How would you feel? Exactly.) But he did have a sunny inner courtyard all his own in the center of our Spanish-style house.

And then on moving to Paris, because he was ONE pound over the weight limit and so could not ride with us upfront, he was banished into cargo limbo for the plane trip. He hissed at us like a cobra when we picked him up in the fret section of Charles de Gaulle airport. Fret? We did. And later learned it meant freight.  He wouldn’t look at us the whole taxi ride into town.

And then he became a Parisian chat. He learned to modulate his voice, not to be yelling all the time like an American. To trim down. (A friend, Frederic Tuten, tells us that when he lived in Paris, someone told him the only serious crime here is being fat).

Marley learned to be a flâneur. He disguised himself as a fur scarf, and strolled around Paris on Richard’s shoulders, as cool and leisurely as any Parisian cat.

Street art (c) 2013 by C215

In all essential ways, though, he did not change on moving to Paris. He still loved being as close to us as he could get. Either one of us would do, but both of us? Purr-fect.

He was still psychic. When friends Mort and Jeannette were last here, visiting from their houseboat, he sensed Jeannette’s grief at losing their sailor chat, Miranda. In a room full of a dozen people, he stayed close to her, wove around her ankles, comforting her, and who knows, maybe even speaking to Miranda’s spirit. 

Street art (c) 2013 by Fred Le Chevalier

He approved of physical vigor. One morning just a few weeks ago while waiting for my tea water to simmer, I was inventing Hindu ballet moves. Marley nudged my calf and purred. This is more like it, he said. All that sitting around putting marks on paper. Stretch those limbs! Let’s dance!

Today I found him splayed like a frog on the tile near his litter box. I picked him up and placed him on his throne, a big pillow on the floor near the open window he used to jump out of to sun himself on the fifth-floor ledge.

I called to see how late our vet would be there on a Saturday. Till 3:30. I showered. Tried to reach Richard, who was out photographing a parade.

Marley was having trouble breathing. I kept checking as I dressed. He was panting. I lay beside him, talked to him. Tried to give him water. He couldn’t drink. I ran back to the bedroom to grab my purse. Checked again.

Marley was still.

Deeper than words, silence. And tears.

Vide-Grenier (Garage Sale)

If, as the French Christian mystic and philosopher Simone Weil said, "absolute attention is prayer," think of all the objects we have prayed over, by bringing our attention to them at the moment we chose them, and the attention we paid them when we held them dear.

And now those individual prayers rise in chorus at the annual neighborhood garage sale in our tiny public square, Place Contrescarpe, and the narrow streets that run downhill from it. It's a smorgasbord of the things we once held dear, or even sacred.

We sellers wish their numinosity might spark in someone else's heart; or we simply wish, on a more mundane level, that we can extract a stray euro from a once-loved, now-unwanted object. It may seem heretical to conflate mundane consumer goods with the sacred, but there are those who say that capitalism has elevated the cult of consumerism to the status of a religion. 

Wherever you stand on that argument, we invite you to witness our neighbors, with some of their now-desacralized objects, their discarded prayers, and imagine each booth a shrine.