Unexpected Pleasures

You can walk out into the world thinking you know what pleasures await you, and have no idea of the treasure in store.

I knew the dinner would be excellent.

I knew that editing a story would be satisfying.

But I'm startled by the acute pleasure of being out in the cold sharp night air after several weeks mostly indoors with the flu. The world is so… solid, so real! Feathers! Flowers! Carytids! The moon! 

The pleasure of crossing a narrow street at the crosswalk, three men talking and blocking my path, the one on the bicycle looking up with great sweetness, "Oh, pardon!" and backing up his bike to let me pass.

The sweetness of men! It moves me even more than their strength. That Celtic douceur that comes from centuries of the troubadour tradition of courtesy (and perhaps from centuries of its opposite, savage wars on one's own soil).

The pleasure of remembering that I have several books to pick up at Shakespeare and Company. I'm carrying a book bag with my laptop and printed-out stories.  Do I want the extra weight? Sure. Better than swinging by too late after they've closed.

I detour, pick up the books. The bookseller with whom I'd been exchanging messages says, "Oh, it's you. I know your face, but didn't know your name."

"Same with me. You have the slightest accent. What is it?"

"I'm French."

"But your English is perfect."

"I lived in the States for a while."

Out into the blue-black cold. The face of Notre Dame across the river makes me think of Rosamond Larmour Loomis. The cathedral reminds me of those four years of boarding school, of memorizing hymns, the strict regimen of classes, study hall, every hour mapped out.

Rosamond was the headmistress of the school. She died last week at the age of 102, several weeks after her boyfriend Henry.

I remember two conversations with her, one when I was 14, and had been called into her office with Miss Moran, the sadistic assistant headmistress. I’ve already mentioned this once on Paris Play, but it made a deep impression on me, hinted at my future. Miss Larmour sternly addressed a most unfortunate incident involving naked girls in high heels and pearls stampeding down the dorm singing an aria from La Traviata. She said, "We thought you were a leader when you arrived, but this is not what we had in mind."

And later at a school reunion, she was no longer the strict head of the school, but relaxed, warm, ageless. We discovered that we'd both been married for the first time later in life, at the same age, though years apart.

Rosamond died the way I would like to die, quickly, quickly, well past the age of 100, with my beloved and friends nearby. I imagine her on her journey, sailing into the mystery.

It is crowded at my writing café. But maybe, maybe that man is not sitting at my table.

The waiter asks.

No, he's just spread out his packages there from the adjacent table where he's talking with a woman. He graciously makes room for me.

I order salmon and scalloped potatoes, the way my mother used to make them.

I open my new James Salter novel, Light Years, and begin to read. Oh. my. god. Oh! Oh! This is music. I cannot help it, I begin to annotate the page with a pencil, making scansion marks above the words as if the lines were a prose poem.

The rhythm of his sentences, the sculptural quality. The weather, the sensory richness.

I know these characters, their lives rich with art, books, friendship, family, storytelling, animals, weather, beauty. (And later, carelessness, sad choices.)

The dinner arrives. The waiter says, “If you finish that book tonight, I’ll give you a free dessert.”

The couple next to me laugh. It's a joke Parisian waiters make only when it’s clear that you’ve just started a book.

The meal is fantastic.

The man at the next table gets up to use the bathroom. The woman strikes up a conversation with me. She lives for literature. She lives in a small town near Brittany. 

The man returns. He runs a poetry and fiction reading series near us in Paris.

She invites Richard and me to visit her in her small village. She offers to drive us around.

He invites us to come to his poetry series next weekend.

They have just met in the Jardin du Luxembourg.  We all exchange cards.

I am flooded with richness.

When they leave I order a glass of cider. The mild alcohol content won't interfere with my editing.

Oh yes it does. I'd forgotten the lingering effect of the flu, am instantly tipsy. Now, how to balance that out? A coffee would keep me up all night. But a hot chocolate wouldn't. That delicate balancing act we do with food, drink and energy.

The hot chocolate warms and awakens me. I edit the story with the music of Salter's sentences ringing in my ears.

Ruminating on Ruminating

So we've been feeling a little pressure.

Self-imposed deadlines, but still, they should be honored. We had a Paris Play due today, but we'd also had an apartment full of flu.

But more importantly, we've been thinking about what to write and how to put it, and that takes time, too.

The world looks too often only at the final results, and ignores the fact that the incubation process, the rumination stage of creativity, is probably the longest and deepest stage. As artists, we do go into the creative trance, and we love to talk about "the flow" when we're in it, but that romanticizes those later stages, to the detriment of the rumination.

So, to regain perspective, and to test our post-flu stamina, we popped into the Metro and popped out at the 50th Annual Salon International de l'Agriculture, the Paris Agriculture Fair, specifically to visit some of our favorite animals, the ruminants--cows, sheep, goats--cud-chewers all.

We also found probably a hundred-and-fifty-thousand Parisians (the four-day fair drew six-hundred-and-fifty-thousand people last year), wall-to-wall with their children and their strollers, since it was Sunday, and the last day of the fair, and because the French are still quite deeply connected to agriculture. Have we mentioned they are foodies? And where does food come from? Voila!

More than 1.1 million people work in agriculture in France, about six percent of the population. France is second only to the U.S as the world's largest agricultural exporter, and is the Eurozone's breadbasket, its top cereals producer.

There were various livestock pavilions, with lots of pigs, and even dogs and cats in abundance (the latter were non-food items). Horses were segregated in their own pavilion, which probably happens all the time, but it made us think of the recent Eurozone scandal involving the lack of horseflesh segregation, an embarrassing glitch in the system. Not that people don't want to eat horse meat here, they just want it labeled. (And, no small favor, the French don't stupidly append the suffix "-gate" to every scandal here, so we haven't had to sit through news reports about Horsemeat-gate.)

There were vast halls full of wine, the 365 different varieties of cheese that DeGaulle famously noted, sausages enough to string to la lune and back, Breton dancers, Basque horsemen, Provence donkeys--and everybody was eating something, since samples were abundant.

And the ruminants? In stalls or paddocks, standing around or lying down, calmly tolerating the massive number of humans uniformly ignoring the massive number of "please don't touch the animals" signs, they had their usual message for us: Hey, chill out. Remember that rumination precedes the fever-heat of productivity. All in good time. All in good time.

As we headed back to the Metro, reminded again of the order of things, we came across the usual demonstration. At the Auto Show, it was Greenpeace; today, it was the good folks from L124, an animal rights organization dedicated to the welfare of farm animals here in France. The name comes from rural law 124, which states (in our rough translation): "Every animal is a sentient being and must be placed by the owner in a manner consistent with the biological requirements of the species."

We don't do the "eat-me-or-don't-eat-me" debate with animals, since we know they return the favor with pleasure when given the chance, but we respect our friends of all stripes who respect animals, and we welcome their nuanced debate. We're just glad that our ruminant advisers were in town, and we were allowed their counsel.

And as a grace note, our Berkeley food critic friend John Harris told us about a fine documentary by the director Judith Lit featuring the family farmers of the Périgord region of southwest France, a rural community faced with the economic and cultural changes that have come in the world's shift to agribusiness. John saw it, and raved, at the last Mill Valley Film Festival.

Bonne Année du Serpent, tout le monde!

Paris ushered in the Year of the Serpent Sunday, which was fine with us, because it was the occasion for a parade. As we keep saying, we love a parade. We probably go to six a year here, even if we don't report on all of our outings.

Things are looking up; the Year of the Serpent should be a far better year for the worldwide economy. Our favorite savant, Dr. Maoshing Ni of the Tao of Wellness in Santa Monica, a 36th generation acupuncturist, offers his take on the new year on his website.

 

Parisians from all different communities love their parades. It gives them an excuse to get out, in any weather, and watch their neighbors perform, and to watch their neighbors watch each other. This is a prime people-watching city.

Ethnic parades here are not at all exclusive. There's always at least one Brazilian drumming and dancing contingent in every défilé, and the Colombians are party animals, too.

Brazilian drummer

Colombian dancer

And, of course parades bring out the best children's faces.

Young dancer surprised by the monkey trickster god, Hanuman

If you've come this far and are disappointed that we covered a parade in black and white, here's last year's Dragon parade, in color. Kansas, meet Oz.

The Youngest Established Permanent Floating Art Museum in Paris

All art in this post is at Le Bloc. Artwork (c) 2013 by the artists.

The clock is ticking on one of Paris' newest contemporary art museums.

No, not the big clock on the face of Musée D'Orsay, the former train station turned high art Mecca in Paris' trés chic, Seine-hugging seventh arrondissement.

The museum to which we're referring is Le Bloc, waaaay out in the non-trendy nineteenth, accessible by a tiny Metro spur line, and the clock is the administrative clock that began ticking Wednesday, when the museum's founders received a summons asking them to leave the seven-story, 7,000 square meter former office building they've occupied since early November.

Okay, Le Bloc is not technically a museum, it's a squat, and the artists/organizers are following a grand tradition of artists that goes back at least as far as Pablo Picasso's Montmartre Bateau-Lavoirs--find a rent-free accommodation for your studio/living space, and use your money for your art and food.

Squatting is simple. Find an empty building (the Le Bloc folks Googled to find theirs), move in, invite friends, and stay for 48 hours, after which, according to French law, you cannot be forcibly evicted. The owner must then take you to Paris Administrative Court and get a ruling against you, an administrative process that could take months, stretching into years. In France, it's illegal to evict anyone in the winter.

Before the legal hammer falls, start working to prove that you're an improvement over having an empty building in the neighborhood. This means providing public spaces for social services, community events, artists' studios, or affordable housing to satisfy an overwhelming demand in an expensive city of 2.5 million people where up to eight percent of residences are nonetheless vacant at any one time.

It's a long shot (and people squat for different reasons, not just because they're artists), but some of the more famous artists' buildings in Paris, like the 200-occupant Les Frigos, and 59 rue du Rivoli, which houses thirty artists amid the posh neighborhood clothing stores, are examples of successful conversions from squats to legal spots. The City of Paris paid $12.5 million dollars in 2006 to buy and refurbish 59 Rivoli, for example, and reopened it in 2009. Artists can pay as little as one euro a day rent.

More squats disappear than get embraced by the city, but artists are born to play the odds; it's hard to imagine a more insecure profession. Pile on squatting, which often means living with no hot water, heat, light, and other amenities, and this life looks like a game for the young, with supple bones and thick pelts. Most of the squatters we know are young, or at least under forty.

Le Bloc is seven stories tall, with four additional floors underground, and incorporates an old parking garage. On February 9, we were given a guided tour of all eleven floors, save for the roof, because the person entrusted with that key was elsewhere. Each of the aboveground floors has at least a dozen small offices/studios that are now all occupied by about 180 working artists, and common rooms that are decorated spaces.

Our guide, who is one of the squat organizers, told us he prefers working artists who will be in their offices daily, rather than offering space to more established artists who might only show up once a week or so. While art is often a solitary undertaking, artists are also asked to participate in community, and help run the place.

The four underground floors, and the circular ramps and old parking spaces, are a new contemporary art museum, a venue close in spirit to Nathan Detroit's underground craps parlor ("Guys and Dolls," of course). Amid dozens of old tipped-over metal bookcases, with the contents of cardboard boxes--paper forms from the health office that was the former tenant--strewn about, and in rooms with standing water a few inches deep, art is flourishing on the walls. Various artists and crews are creating murals and tags that may never survive past this present temporary occupation, but the symphony of color and spray art technique is worth the visit while it's there.

How to get in? Luckily, Le Bloc is having its first-ever open house today (Saturday, 16 February) from 2 'til 11 p.m.

We shot many more pictures than can adorn a Paris Play post, so if you'd like to see the rest, eighty-two in total, pop over here to Facebook.

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.