Sensual Surprise: An Invitation

My friend was late. We both grew up in the Sonoran Desert, and were trying a new Mexican restaurant. I didn’t like the looks of it—on a noisy street, noisy inside, the menu so-so. I called her to suggest we meet at another one several blocks away.

Oh! But she thought our dinner was for next Wednesday.

I had hardly been able to bear to break away from the writing earlier. But I was out in the world now, and hungry. My friend and I caught up on news as I walked towards Shakespeare and Company.

I picked up James Salter’s Burning the Days at the bookstore, and talked with Ben, whose literary taste is book for book the mirror of mine. I also bought Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey.

The second Mexican restaurant had white tablecloths. That usually means slightly too stuffy for my taste, and overpriced.

I opened Daily Rituals and read. The serving of guacamole in a Oaxacan pot was huge, but it was tasteless.

 

There were three people at the table in front of me, a beautiful woman with a high forehead and short hair, her husband whose back was to me, and their male friend. The friend was deconstructing the difference between pleasure and joy. The woman laughed abruptly, an odd laugh, a warm smile, and then the man kept lecturing on and on, and her smile disappeared. This was the Preacher’s table.

A table to the far right was filled with young French women drinking margaritas. More and more margaritas. Their volume rose and rose until they were shrieking with laughter. This was the Drink and Be Riotous table.

Directly to my right was a French couple in their late 30s. She was wearing a dress with cardigan, hair pulled back, reserved. A very thin, boyish man sat across from her. They ate and talked in low voices, discreetly. This was your Married Couple table.

I ate my enchiladas verdes. Is it possible that enchiladas can have too much cheese? These had too much cheese. Almost every writer whose work I love writes six days a week for two or three hours, first thing after breakfast. That works best for me, too.

At his table, the preacher was killing the other two with boredom.

I glanced to my right. The reserved married woman was sitting sideways on her husband’s lap. She'd removed her sweater, revealing a sleeveless, low-cut dress with big polka dots like flamenco dancers wear. Her arms were raised to her prim bun, and she slowly released the rubber band and shook out her hair. As she did so, she wiggled, wriggled—shimmied!—on her husband’s lap. He didn’t seem to mind a bit. This was the table of Sensual Surprise.

Aha! 

Okay, friends.  It’s time again for the Surrealist Café: Sensual Surprise. Send us a paragraph or a poem or a photo or a drawing of absolutely anything sensual—food, love, beauty, dance—that you experience, observe, dream, imagine that takes you by surprise.

Send it to us by noon, Paris time, on Thursday, May 2, and we’ll publish it Saturday, May 4. We've played this game before; this is the fourth worldwide Surrealist Café we’re creating.

Men of the Marais

It’s still cold in Paris (the longest, darkest, coldest winter in 45 years, we heard) so I’m inside at Café les Philosophes, back to the window, computer open, editing a chapter. It’s not my usual haunt, but it's close to where my evening walk led me.

On the wall across the room: the golden labyrinth collage I love. Surrounding the labyrinth, cut-out newsprint, with words in red: “Je pense, je pense,” and “Je t’aime.”

I take a break for some fresh hot delicious vegetable soup.

A Peruvian-looking man with bronze skin and a humble air, passes in front of me bearing a tray of jasmine leis, tiny white flowers woven with miniature red roses.

He offers them to the single British man to my left.

No, says the man.

Non, say the laughing Japanese girls.

Non, say the French couple.

Non, the matronly Dutch women.

He passes between the labyrinth and a table of four men. The one whose face I can see (I’ll call him the lead man, since he’s ordered the wine and suggested dishes to the others) signals to the flower man that he’d like to see a lei.

He puts it under his nose and breathes deeply, passes it to the younger man across from him.

They pass the lei around, drinking in the scent.

The lead man pays for two leis. The man across from him drapes one around the forehead of the man to his right who looks like a young Jack Kerouac, handsome in a red plaid lumberjack shirt, turning him instantly into a fetching Bacchus.

The image is too delightful to lose. The lead man takes out his camera and snaps a photo.

The tenderness between the men, their aesthetic sensitivity, is wonderful to see.

Emotional closeness: it seems easier between women friends, easier between couples than in friendships between (so-called) straight men.

I look at the collage: je pense, je pense that men could learn so much about male-to-male friendship from these men in the Marais.

(And here's a related post, from 2011, on tenderness in boys, and the great mythical friendship of Castor and Pollux.)

Street art (c) 2013 by Kashink

Corps Blanc Dans La Rue: A Night with Mesnager and Mescal

 

Date night! The plan: we’ll walk a half-hour to the Art Jingle gallery in the Marais where Jérôme Mesnager’s show is opening. Richard suggests a dinner afterwards at a favorite Mexican restaurant just half a block away, “even though it’s not Sunday night.”

It happens so often now that it no longer surprises me. I’ll be thinking of something and without a word exchanged, he’s on the same wavelength.

I’d been musing on the odd resonance between France and Arizona. So many friends and acquaintances who grew up in Arizona have ended up living in Paris or southern France, or visit as often as twice a year. Mort, Edith and Don, Amy, Audrey and I and others. Yet Arizona and France seem to have so little in common.

Growing up in Arizona, my family went out for Mexican food every Sunday night. It was a sacrament. Mexican food is childhood in the Sonoran desert to me.

We squeeze into the elevator, Richard sideways with all his camera equipment in a pack on his back.

“You look like a camel,” I say.

He makes a noise exactly like a camel, a talent I wasn’t aware he had. All the way down to the ground floor, he groan-bleats like a camel. I’m laughing imagining our gardien rushing to the elevator door in alarm.

We set out at 5 in a steady rain, laughing at the unlikelihood that we’d be walking half an hour anywhere in the rain if we still lived in L.A. Our only concession to the weather is the choice of a less scenic route across the Pont de Sully and up Blvd. Henri IV to rue de Turenne—it’s faster. 

We are the first to arrive, Richard’s preference so that he can photograph the artwork “without a bunch of people standing in the way.”

A young woman in blonde braids shows me around the gallery, describing each painting, including its colors. As a former art dealer, I’m tickled by this approach. A blue background, you say?

In comes a Frenchman who circles the gallery, then asks me which painting is my favorite.

“Coup de foudre,” I say. We examine a brown canvas on which Mesnager has painted one of his corps blanc, reacting in awe to a small yellow plaque that bears the image of a man struck by lightning--a sign warning of high voltage, which we see often on Paris electrical switching boxes. 

Richard had chosen that image in 1999 as the cover of his second chapbook, a book of love poems, written after we’d both been hit by the coup de foudre of love.

“Buy it!” says the Frenchman.

I’d already checked the price. “We only buy paintings before the artist is famous,” I say.

He corrects my French: “Célèbre,” he says.

“Ah, oui, merci.”

Other people float into the gallery. Everyone seems to be in the lightest of spirits, as if they’ve inhaled the joy of Mesnager’s buoyant dancing figures.

The artist blows in, an ebullient elfin face, faded red jeans, champagne spirit.

Seated at a round table in the corner, on which are a few books of the fifty-two-year-old artist’s work, including his autobiography, I survey the paintings and the people. He takes a seat, and one by one, I watch the gallery-goers come up to him to pay their respects.

Jérôme Mesnager (the "s" is silent) is one of the original modern Paris street artists. He began in 1980, and created his first painted white figure in January 1983 as “a symbol of light, power, and peace.” They have since leapt continents, his work can now be seen on walls around the world. There is even an image of his Corps Blanc climbing up the Great Wall of China. Stories tumble from him, he is entertaining his fans. Men unfurl works of his on paper they’ve had for years, and ask him to sign.

 

Richard, wearing black, is dancing around the room, a corps noir, capturing every image and face.

An odd sort of date, huh? For us, though, these luminous figures perfectly capture our own joy at arriving in Paris two years and two months ago. We found this image on a wall on rue Mouffetard, long before we knew Mesnager or his seminal role in Paris street art, which Richard photographed for our second Paris Play post, “The Bell of Light."

And we’ve used his work in other posts, here, here and here, for example.

The champagne is flowing, the gallery buzzing. Jérôme selects a brush from a can, dips it into a pot of white paint, and approaches the inside gallery window. He lifts his arm and with sure strokes—les bras, les mains, les fesses, les cuisses, pieds, tête, oiseau—transforms ebullient spirits into ecstatic image. People crowd the sidewalk, snapping photos from the outside. I stand behind the easels and watch.

Richard brings me a glass of champagne, and introduces me to Véronique. She is Jérôme’s older sister, and a more protective, loving sister you cannot imagine. In his autobiography, he writes that she was the first appreciator of his art, and that he gave her his very first creation. It’s impossible to go to an important opening by any Paris street artist now, not just her brother’s, and not run into Véronique Mesnager, blessing other artists and supporting the growing community.

Véronique and her brother Jérôme 

Richard has his photographs. We glance at each other: we’re starving! The restaurant is open, and it’s authentic Mexican food, the way it’s made in Mexico City.

We communicate with the waiter in a ridiculous mix of French and English and un poco de español. 

The guacamole is one of the only two we’ve found in Paris that tastes like real guacamole, the chips so fresh they’re fragrant. We sit on a banquette next to the bar, and talk about the dark and the light in our lives and the joy that runs through all of it. The waiter, hair in a pigtail, brings chicken flautas for me, chorizo and potato tacos for Richard, and black beans.

At the same event, Richard has seen the faces, and I’ve heard the stories. We swap impressions. Richard is struck by the fact that Jérôme has such a charming, joyous, elfin face, yet that he is most famous for characters that have no face at all.

And, the waiter interrupts, would we like dessert?

No, but how about a shot of that Scorpion Mescal above the bar?

The waiter, grinning, takes the bottle down, and places it on our table.

“What happens if you eat the scorpion?” I ask. “Isn’t it poisonous?”

“It won’t kill you,” he says. “It’s strange. France won’t allow in tequila with worms in it, but scorpions? No problem.”

“Who orders it, mostly Americans and Mexicans?”

“No, it’s the French who keep coming back and ordering shots, hoping to get the scorpion.”

The level of liquid is low, within inches of the scorpion. Shall we have a shot or two in honor of the Sonoran desert, right here in Paris?

Later at home, wondering if mescal is another name for tequila, I look it up and find: Mezcal is made from the maguey plant, a form of agave plant native to Mexico, whereas tequila is made from the blue agave. The saying in Oaxaca is: “para todo mal, mezcal, y para todo bien también” (“for everything bad, mescal, and for everything good, as well”).  

But this is what slays me: “The maguey was one of the most sacred plants in pre-Hispanic Mexico, and had a privileged position in religious rituals, mythology and the economy. Cooking of the “piña” or heart of the maguey and fermenting its juice was practiced. The origin of this drink has a myth. It is said that a lightning bolt struck an agave plant, cooking and opening it, releasing its juice. For this reason, the liquid is called the “elixir of the gods.”"

A coup de foudre kind of night, everywhere we turn.

Happy Holi-Days

What a delight today was.

How often do you get to find a new way to celebrate a seasonal holiday? Literally, in this case, a Holi day, which celebration coincided this year in Paris with the Christian Easter.

 

Thanks to Nona and Popeye, two Indian photographer friends, we were invited over to the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, a private park that contains dozens of residence halls for students from all over the world, specifically to the dorm building called Maison de l'Inde.

 

The occasion? The annual celebration of Holi, a Hindu holiday also known as the Festival of Color, celebrating the arrival of colorful spring, after the monochromatic months of winter. It also commemorates various events in Hindu mythology, but mostly it's an excuse to forget barriers of caste and class, and to get down and funky. Celebrants throw fluorescent colored powders, like turmeric, and drench each other with colored water. One's eventual resemblance to an Easter egg is purely coincidental.

 

In this case, the revelry and silliness the hundred or so participants engaged in was accompanied by ear-splitting Indian rock music, and the kind of freeform sybaritic dancing that recalled the best days of the old Fillmore Auditorium.

 

If the multinational Paris celebration also looks suspiciously like college spring break, we won't deny it. The colored powders came out at eleven a.m., and the cases of beer came out about eleven-oh-five. We left about three to come home and process photographs and write this post, but the party was just getting started. If you have a Hindu community near you, be sure and make a friend before next year's Festival of Color. And wear old clothes.


 

We hope you'll excuse us now, we have to go shower--and have the cameras cleaned.



 

A Bell Named Marie

Richard was out shooting peacocks in the Bois de Boulogne, while I was home doing some spring cleaning. We are to meet in front of Shakespeare and Company to witness the first ringing of the nine new bells at Notre Dame, to celebrate the eight-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the cathedral.

As I turn from rue Lagrange towards the Seine, I can see thousands of people here for the event. 

There he is! We embrace, then weave between cars and motorcycles across the Quai de Montebello. Richard finds a spot against a wall from which to record the sounds. I want to see if I can get closer, though the crowd is daunting.

I cross the Pont au Double and follow two teenage boys who part the crowd like Moses. We make our way to a low fence which holds us back from a big swath of grass. You must not walk on the grass in Paris. Pelouse au repos hivernal du 15/10 au 15/04. The grass is having its winter rest from October 10 to April 15.

A Spaniard is holding a black-eyed, black-haired child, a girl, to my left. How do I know they’re Spanish? Because the child is chattering in Spanish with a Castilian accent.

The bells begin tentatively. The first sounds are almost delicate. Bright and clear, bringing tears.

I look around me at the crowd and what this means to Catholics around the world. During the French Revolution, all the bells except one were melted down for cannons and coins. Only Emanuel, the biggest, a 13-ton bourdon bell, remained. Four other bells were added in the 1850s, but they were so discordant that Parisians joked they’d made Quasimodo deaf.  But for years they rang every 15 minutes in Paris, ding dang.

I can see both the front of the cathedral and a huge screen on which Archbishop Andre Armand Vingt-Trois is speaking in slow, clear French. It is a pleasure when the rhythm of speech is slow enough for me to capture it all. That is, if the Spanish child, mouth smeared in chocolate, weren’t asking loud questions right next to my left ear. I glance at her, at her father. It’s written on his face: My child is the exception to all rules. From every courtesy such as silence in churches, films, libraries, my child is exempt.

A family of teenagers with a gray-haired woman elbows through the crowd. Everyone glares. The teenagers muscle their way to the low fence, easily vault it and onto the grass. The woman chooses not to follow. She chooses instead to squeeze in next to me between the Spanish child and my ribs. She has no sense of bodily space (which most French people decidedly do) and keeps bumping against me and the couple in front of her.

At last the bells all ring. I watch the close-up images on the screen. They remind me of something. Yes, the great iron skirt of a woman swinging, her legs rigid, her ankles and feet tied together—no, fused. An eternal virgin. The Virgin Mary. Is this bell the biggest of the new ones, Marie? She is the only new bell which will ring in the Gothic south tower, joining Emmanuel. The other bells—Jean-Marie, Maurice, Benoît-Joseph, Etienne, Marcel, Denis, Anne-Geneviève and Gabriel—will sound out in the north tower, high above the Seine.

My mind floods with images from the film I saw the night before: Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen. A German film directed by Margarethe von Trotta in 2009, it stars Barbara Sukowa as the 12th century Christian mystic, Benedictine nun, composer, philosopher, playwright, naturalist, scientist and ecological activist, Hildegard of Bingen. It is a great film, a film of beauty and suffering and gravitas. It is gripping for its dramatization of an historical character of visionary brilliance.

And it illuminates the mythical. Hildegard lived during the middle point of the Piscean era, at the beginning of the twelfth century, half way between the birth of Christ and present time, from 1198 to September 17, 1179.

Pisces, the last sign, of dreams, suffering, compassion, final reckoning. Christ, the fish, Poseidon and Pisces. And its opposite polarity, the Virgin Mary, the spiritual body, Demeter and Virgo. The suffering of the monks and nuns, the celibate marriage to the divine—it is all here in its agony and splendor. At that time in Catholic history, the price for a nun getting pregnant by a monk was banishment or often, suicide. And the price for the monk? Nothing.

And so this metaphor of a bell named Mary, Marie, the holy Virgin.

 

Some around me jostle and eat chocolate. Others film the ceremony on the screen. Others watch, faces uplifted, tears streaming their cheeks. People have come from all around the world to be here for this moment, the first time in over two centuries that the cathedral has had a full complement of bells.

The music ends. One of the artisans of Cornille-Havard (France’s most renowned bell foundry) who made these bells lovingly describes his craft. This is the quality we love most about the French: their exquisite attention to the details of artistic craft.

I make my way through the scattering crowd back across the Pont au Double to meet Richard at his spot along the Seine. There he is! Unfortunately, his video captured mostly the sounds of traffic and talking humans, rather than the new bells. But we were there.

(And here's a link to TV channel BFM, which had better audio than we did.)