Le Dernier Chevalier de Paris?

Although the first morning of summer dawned gray, drizzly and damp, we were nonetheless in a great mood, standing at nine a.m. on a street corner in the 20th arrondissement, the vital, hilly artist’s district called Belleville, waiting for one of our favorite street artists, the gentle knight, Fred Le Chevalier. 

We'd been captivated by Fred's simple but eloquent work since we first arrived in Paris two-and-a-half years ago, and have used it on occasion to illustrate our essays. Small black and white stencils (with red, green or yellow accents) of archetypal males and females, sometimes kings and queens, often pictured with totem animals like owls, cats, foxes, wolves, and hedgehogs, sometimes with a single line of poetic prose to illuminate, but not explain.

The work was clear, detailed and precise, but didn’t look schooled; it had a naïve quality, both in the humans (with their guitar-pick-shaped heads) and animals it depicted and in its style. As we met more and more people in the street art community, we discovered that Fred had detractors, people who felt all street art should primarily be political, who attacked the work’s very simplicity and gentleness, who felt that Fred, although he only began working shortly before we arrived in Paris, was too popular, too soft-edged.

It was an argument we’d heard before in our political lives, like listening to the folks who followed Malcolm dissing the folks who followed Martin, not recognizing that ALL the political activity was part of a continuum, all valid, all necessary, all appealing to its own adherents under a broader umbrella. Street art itself is a radical act, illegal, but a gift to the community.

And Fred’s mythopoetic work, under the nom de rue “Le Chevalier,” was political as well. He was taking a stand for chivalry, for the Arthurian knights, for the troubadours, for the Celtic romantic tradition that was born in France, and still undergirds the best of French relationships. His almond-eyed characters came in all shapes and colors and persuasions—anyone is free to love anyone else in Fred’s universe—reflecting an egalitarian world of large virtues like truth, and love, and marriage equality. “Love,” he captioned one stencil, “is never dirty.”

 

As we followed his career, his stencils grew larger and larger, occupying more and more Paris wall space; there are well over three thousand paste-ups of hundreds of drawings. His output was prodigious, an unfettered orgy of joy in art.

And we began to see Fred’s people on buttons, handbags and T-shirts. A populist artist was emerging. From various articles in the real-world and virtual press, we learned that Fred is from Angouleme, a small town in southwestern France, that he was self-taught (though his father was also an artist), that one of his primary street art influences was the seminal Ernest Pignon Ernest, and that his ambition was to give up his day job and eventually make a living solely from his art.

Part of what moved him was that street art was egalitarian and free. “Putting my drawings on the walls of the city is the only way to share and to talk with all the people.” As he told the Brazilian journalist Fernanda Hinke-Schweichler, “Punk music has the same spirit of being able to express yourself freely without being a musician.”

 

Eventually, we met him, at one of his public paste-ups near a small art gallery in the tenth arrondissement, and saw him again at a second opening (at which he sold everything in under an hour), and at a few small fairs he had organized at which he and other artists and artisans could sell their arts and crafts. We found the forty-something but ageless artist to be as gentle and open as his characters, elfin, large-eyed, long-lashed and guileless. He wore on his sleeve, not his heart, but tattoos of his own characters, done by a friend. This was a man committed to his art and his philosophy, wearing the statement permanently on his own body.

Recently, when he was asked by an important French publisher to do a book (coming out this September), he asked Paris Play if he could use some of our photographs, particularly of his early work. He knew we had been chronicling his work in photographs, and had amassed well over two hundred. He said he had some grab shots he had taken over the years, but knew that ours were high-quality efforts to document the street art scene.

And the work, of course, is ephemeral. He uses stencils precisely because they do decay, and disappear over time. “If people don’t like it on the wall,” he told us, “it’s not as if I paint-bombed; it will wash away in time.”

So, two days before the first day of summer, we spent a delightful hour with Fred drinking Badoit in front of our computer, as he flipped through the photos in Adobe Lightroom, choosing which he wanted for possible inclusion in the book, and telling stories in his melodic voice as he went. “This one is two friends of mine who were getting married…. This one has a skull in it to represent death, but I always see that there is life in death…. I don’t know why this one has a key, but I liked it…. Yes, this is an umbrella, but it could be a UFO.”

 

After he left, leaving us with a small serigraph print of one of his works, we got to work processing the couple of dozen pictures he needed. In the process, we decided to post his drawing of a man on a bench in the rain with a potted mushroom that was also an umbrella and maybe a UFO as our daily photo on Paris Play’s Facebook page. It was particularly pertinent, since Paris had been through three days of thunderstorms, with no end in sight to winter.

 

When Fred saw our Facebook post, he e-mailed us:  Meet me Friday morning in Belleville and I’ll put up some work for you.

Absolutely!

So we went to the appointed street, and at ten minutes after nine, received a text from Fred: Oooops, I mixed up the names of the streets I was going to work on. Can you get to the church of Notre-Dame de la Croix instead?

No problem. A quick ten-minute hike from Belleville to Menilmontant, the other exciting working-class and artists’ district. Taken together, Belleville and Menilmontant are to street art what Montmartre or Montparnasse were to the Paris artists of a hundred years ago. Picasso’s rebel spirit lurks, spray can in hand.     

Finally, we met up in a lull between storms and Fred, his two long extension handles looking like Quixotic lances, led the way to the first wall, at Avenue Jean Aicard, a popular street art spot at the corner of rue Oberkampf. As he pasted up his first work, of two turbaned men, one black, one white, following a candle they carried, much like Diogenes, he was interrupted three times by fans who stopped to ask him questions or praise his work. He graciously took the time to talk to each.

 

The first stencil finished, he moved to another large empty wall across avenue Acaird, the site of countless stencils, paintings, stickers, etc. that had come and gone since street art prehistory, now-missing work that we had photographed over the last two-and-a-half years.

"This one is a surprise for you," Fred said with a shy smile.

As he began unrolling the first panel against the rough plastered wall, using a bristled brush on a telescoping handle, we recognized it immediately; the man on a bench under an umbrella or mushroom that could be a UFO, protecting himself and a small animal from the rain that fell like tears all around them. A giant version of the photo-of-the-day on Paris Play's Facebook page.

As Fred unrolled and pasted his panels (each about 2.5 meters tall), two more passersby stopped to watch intently. Richard continued snapping pictures. 

After a minute, one man, wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap, a brown bomber jacket and dark sneakers approached us, peered up at Fred’s work, and spoke in French. Richard responded with his usual, "Je suis desolée. Je ne parle pas bien Français." (Sorry, I don't speak French very well.)

"Alors," the man responded, "vous êtes un journaliste étranger." (So, you are a foreign journalist.)

"Oui," Richard replied.

The man moved on to Fred, removing a small, thin case from his plaid shirt pocket. He held it open, and Fred gulped.

It is illegal in France to show the face of an undercover officer 

The man then turned to Richard. "Pas de photos pour cinq minutes, s’il vous plait." (Stop shooting for five minutes, please.) “Oui.”

He removed a small notebook from his pocket, and wrote down Fred's answers to his questions. The basics: name, address, age, phone number.

They spoke quietly for less than five minutes, then the man walked off.

Fred looked poleaxed. "Very bad news," he said, with characteristic calm.

The man, he said, happened to be Paris' chief detective in charge of stopping illegal street art. Fred explained that, while the various (20) neighborhood city halls can allow certain artists to work on approved walls in their arrondissements, and the owners of buildings can allow artists' work on their property, the City of Paris has jurisdiction over stopping unpermitted wall art.

After taking Fred's information, and explaining to him that the fine could be anything from 35 to 3,500 euros, he promised he'd be in touch about the present violation. No matter what the fine, however, Fred was now on notice: He would be arrested and/or fined if he posted another stencil within the city limits, that part of Paris within the Périphérique, the freeway that rings the city. 

We remarked at how civil the process had been. A subdued conversation on a street corner. Fred gave his information, but could easily have lied about any of it, since the detective didn't even ask for ID. Fred shrugged. "Why lie?" His chivalrous characters gathered around him. This is a man with a sense of ethics.

 

And this is an artist. He continued putting up the final panels of the stencil. Why leave an unfinished work on the wall? We discussed the fine, and taking up an online collection to help him pay it. He smiled, but raising only one corner of his mouth, gave a Gallic shrug, and continued pasting.

His mobile phone rang within the next ten minutes. It was the detective. Yes, this was an illegal wall posting, the local city hall had confirmed that. The fine would be up to five hundred euros. Yessir. He hung up and continued. “He said they knew my work, and my street name, but now they have my true name, and address.”  

“Not work again in Paris? What will you do?” 

“There are the suburbs. Pantin,” he allowed, sadly.

 

His phone rang again. He ignored the call, and finished the final panel.

He picked up his paste pot, brushes, and rolled-up stencils, and we set off to a nearby café to discuss the calamitous turn the day had taken.

But wait. His phone rang again, and he answered it.

The detective again. The fine was now eight hundred euros, he told Fred, because he had continued pasting after the warning. While the detective was nowhere in sight, Fred was under surveillance. He would not be fined this time, the detective said, if he agreed to take the work back down, but he was still admonished against putting up anything else illegal in Paris. If he did, they would fine him thousands for each piece.

Fred turned back to the wall, which now loomed like the bulwark of a medieval castle. Slowly, he peeled off the last panel, which was still wet, letting it drift to the sidewalk in a crumpled pile. He straightened it out and let it lie.

He continued with the other panels, but since they were drier, he had to rip each one, pulling smaller and smaller pieces from the wall, destroying the man on the bench, the animal he sheltered. He grunted and crumpled the intact panel, shoving it with the other scraps into the nearby city trash bag.

It began to rain.

(Fred let us go on shooting pictures, but later texted, “Please don't publish the pictures where I pulled off my paste-up. I don’t think I could look at them.” His perspective on events is in French on his blog.)

When he was done, we offered again to buy coffee.

“No,” he said. “I think I need to be alone. I will just walk home. I hope you understand.”

He turned, bucket and stencils under his arm, lances held upright, and walked off into the Paris drizzle.

All artwork depicted in this issue is copyright 2013 by Fred Le Chevalier. Text (c) 2013 by Kaaren Kitchell and Paris Play; photographs (c) 2013 by Richard Beban and Paris Play.

Serendiparis

Some days in Paris on our way somewhere, we end up someplace else even more interesting. In fact, it happens a lot, and we've come to think of Paris as akin to the magical land of Serendip. 

Case in point, last Saturday. When we left the apartment bright and early and took the #12 Mètro over to the vicinity of the big convention center (Parc des Expositions) on the south border of Paris, we thought we were just going to do research for a post we intend to run in a few weeks on ghastly development threats to Paris.

But our visit to the fifteenth arrondissement dropped us unexpectedly into Protest Ground Zero, the opening day of the Paris Auto Show, and allowed us a look at Paris police practices and how they differ from what we've experienced in the States.

In the three hours we spent there before other appointments we hung out with hundreds of auto workers frightened at the impending loss of as many as eighteen thousand industrial jobs in an already battered French economy, and watched Greenpeace literally hang out in a cat-and-mouse game with the police.

First, Greenpeace: Members of the organization had come to protest against Volkswagen, which was unveiling the latest edition of its Golf, a diesel model which is even lower in exhaust emissions than the much-loved Toyota Prius.  

Volkswagen's slogan: Das Car. Greenpeace's slogan: Das Problem.

Why das problem? Because Greenpeace felt it was hypocritical of Volkswagen to release low emission vehicles without full support for low emission standards in Germany. At the same time as it is releasing the Golf, Greenpeace complained, Volkswagen "is at the heart of a group of companies lobbying against new laws which we need to cut CO2 emissions, reduce our oil use, and protect places like the Arctic from climate change." 

So Greenpeace picked the Paris Auto Show to make their point in typical, high-profile Greenpeace fashion. They had a cadre of leafleters on the sidewalk, in matching T-shirts with no other identifying labels, so the message was clear and uncluttered.

Then, five stories up on two of the four ziggurat/California Mission-style towers that mark the convention center entrance, two teams of two mountaineers each had ascended to unfurl anti-Volkswagen banners. One banner used the Volkswagen logo as the "o" in C02, and had the slogan "Das Problem." The second banner, in black type on a yellow field, read "Volkswagen Nous Enfume," which translates as "Volkswagen pollutes us," or "Volkswagen we smoke," or "Volkswagen hides its intentions behind a curtain of smoke." Any of these work, French is slippery that way.

One of the unfortunate trends we witnessed in the decade before we moved here was the post-9/11 federalization and militarization of American police forces, and the simultaneous rapid erosion (as reporter Chris Hedges documents) of civil rights and freedom of speech, all in the name of "fighting terrorism," a policy no politician can appear to be against, no matter how broadly the term is stretched. This dismaying non-partisan trend began with the Patriot Act under Bush Two, and has accelerated during the Obama administration.

Local police departments feeding at the Homeland Security trough have bulked up since September 2001 with $34 billion worth of weapons like tanks, drones and heavy assault rifles.

Statue commemorating Free Speech Movement, Berkeley Marina, California

Unlike the free-range demonstrations we joined and even organized in the SF Bay Area and elsewhere in the late '60s, police now corral protesters at events like political conventions into cyclone-fenced faux-"Free Speech Zones" blocks from any delegate's sight, surrounded by armor-clad Robocop imitators.

In the USA, we would have expected the Greenpeace protest to "require" a cordon of armed riot police pushing citizens away from the convention center while the rest of the force figured out a way to bring the Greenpeace climbers down.

Not so the Paris police. Citizens were free to come and go as they pleased, five floors below the climbers and banners, and the police presence was minuscule, mostly watching as if cheering for their side. Their side brought out its mountaineers, who climbed up through the inside of the first tower, talked to the Greenpeace folks for about twenty minutes, then sent a cop rappelling down to grab the banner and toss it below to waiting plainclothesmen, who hustled it off.

 

Then the policemen climbed down and headed for the second tower, leaving the Greenpeace mountaineers hanging by their ropes. Elegant, Apollonian French restraint--no arrests, nothing daring or stupid attempted. We presume that the Greenpeace climbers were arrested later when they came down (three climbers were arrested later indoors after they unfurled two "Nous Enfume" banners from the ceiling during the Volkswagen keynote address), but there was no urgent need to pluck them from their perch.

Interlude: Before we get to tower two, enter the autoworkers. These are tough, tough times in France. Official unemployment has risen to 10.2%, and the psychological barrier of three million unemployed was just crossed. Newly elected President François Hollande had no honeymoon, as reporter Eric Pape describes; his approval rating has dropped into the low forties after barely 100 days in office. Much like President Barack Obama, Hollande is dealing with an inherited mess, but the voters are scared and angry, and the blame is on the incumbent.

The French company Peugeot is close to bankruptcy, and another major employer, Ford, keeps announcing more and more job cuts despite threats from the socialist government to levy heavy financial penalties for doing so.

So the autoworkers unions bused in hundreds of demonstrators who rallied outside the building (and later inside), under the watchful eye of perhaps ten bored-looking motorcycle cops. More free speech, no hassles, thank you. The autoworkers even set off red distress flares, and nobody panicked.

Meanwhile, back at Greenpeace tower two, two other mountaineers (one a woman, in case you're keeping score) unfurled a "Nous Enfume" banner. Then, to bring home the point, she lit a smoke bomb that polluted for at least two minutes. Perhaps it was organic smoke.

It was time to leave to make our other appointments, so we didn't see if the same three mountaineering cops made a similar ascent for that banner, but it looked like one was underway.

Then, serendipitously, just as we were leaving, two celebrities showed up directly under the smoking tower. They were unknown to us, but apparently well-known to a score of mostly teenaged autograph seekers who politely mobbed them in an elegant, understated French way.

 

So, a Paris Play pop quiz. Can any of our French readers (or any other nationality) tell us who these two heartthrobs are? We think he might be a sports star, and she, model or actress or nuclear physicist, or all three. First reader to get it right and post their names in the comments section below wins a Lebanese lunch, on us, at one of our favorite neighborhood hangouts, Comptoir Méditerranée. Serendipity for somebody: start out reading a post, end up with a free lunch.

Rites of Spring

To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak. --Hopi saying

Spring has arrived, fickle and schizoid here in Paris. One day summer, next day winter. Sometimes one minute summer, one minute winter.

And with spring comes hordes of tourists, and the ubiquitous buskers. And photographers to chronicle them; in this case Paris Play's staff photographer trying out a newly refurbished 35mm 1.8 prime lens on the Nikon. 

Good Friday, time to honor the death of the god, who, in the case of the Christian faith, will arise just a few days later to taste the chocolate bunnies. The cycle of death and rebirth, a staple feature of myth and religion, also calls Dionysus, precursor of Christ, to mind.

This Carnaby Street-influenced Dionysus unsheathed his guitar (a later variant of Hermes' lyre) at the plaza in front of Notre Dame and quickly drew a small crowd. They began, as Maenads have since time immemorial, spontaneously dancing, much to his delight.

And they grew wilder.

And wilder.

All this within thirty seconds.

Of course, it is illegal to busk, and to break out in dance, in front of Quasimodo's cathedral. Years ago, when we were young and looked like this, and similarly gathered in Vina del Mar Park, the small downtown square in Sausalito, California, the city fathers had an easy remedy: they closed the park to ANYONE for the next thirty years. A generation. That'll teach those hippies. And their children.

Here in Paris, they don't close the Notre Dame Parvis, but they can stop the dance.

Lest we seem to demonize the officer in question, seconds after giving the busker the bum's rush (he left politely, as did the Maenads), she was back to graciously performing one of her other duties, advising a pair of tourists how to get from point A to point B in this radial and confusing city. Good cop/bad cop all in one package. Another daily Paris Play.