December, 2014

Just the words. “L’Isle de la Cite”, the tiny island in the middle of “La Seine”, from where the great city grew.  “Notre Dame”, the grandest cathedral of them all, construction first begun, brick by brick, in 1153. “L’Arc de Triomphe”‘ built for Napoleon’s once cursed, but then celebrated, early 19th century military conquests, retaken from the hated Huns In 1945. “La Tour Eiffel”‘ the elegant, and also once-cursed, steel tower built in 1789 for the World Exhibition in Paris, at the centennial celebration of the French Revolution. “Hotel de Ville”, city hall. “Champs Élysées”, the French answer to New Yawk’s 5th Avenue and LA’s Rodeo Drive for Gucci, Smoochy, and Prada hi-end Euro shopping. “Le Louvre”, the world’s most famous museum. “Le Gare du  Nord”, from where many a literary adventure by train arrived or departed from. “Le Jardin du Luxembourg”, “Les Tuileries”‘ “Le Bois du Bologne”. Do gardens get any more lovely? “Le Palais Royale”, “Le Comedie Francaise”, “Le Pantheon”, “Montmartre”, “Sacre Coeur”, “Le Moulin Rouge”…. The list goes on… and on.

Pareeee… the most elegant, beautiful, and arrogant city in the world. As a young wannabe world citizen, who could not yearn for, and romanticize, Paris? Certainly I did. I remember the first  time I was in her power. 1972. I was 25 years old. A modern dancer in Chicago. I was simultaneously in The Ridiculous Theatre’s Chicago production of “The Whores of Babylon” at the Victory Gardens Theater on Lincoln Avenue, playing a half-naked Samson to 3 Delilahs, two in drag, and… a bad relationship. I gladly fled town on a summer break from my dance company with several other of the “Whores”, and I ended up in a garret above some well-heeled American girls living on the Left Bank. Tres bohemian!

True to form, I suffered. From loneliness. From not being able to speak the language. From immaturity and callow youth. I’d roam the city late at night, walking back and forth over the Pont de Neuf, looking for some…. connection. Some love. Some French girl. My fellow “Whores” seemed far better off. They were older. They were more “experienced” as Jimi Hendirx liked to sing. They were gay. I was not. I was just a horny and  inexperienced artist in the making, suffering my first pangs of Paris. I may have actually hooked up with a saucy French fellow bohemian, but except for a night or two of desperate lovemaking, she did little to reduce my “suffering”. I left Paree bruised and unsatisfied, only to come home to find that my fair-faced German Midwest girlfriend had smartened up and allowed a much nicer guy to move in and take my place.

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The next time I went to this cruel and loveless city was 1979. I was 32 and the hapless leader of  my own clown troupe, the Cumeezi Bozo Ensemble. Somehow, an anonymous Dutch theatrical producer has seen a photo spread on the infamous troupe in the New York Times, and he decided to bring us over to the Casa Nova Festival for 10 days, first in Rotterdam and then all over the Nederlands. We were on TV, in department stores, in baroque 16th century castles, a big hit. I was myself in my “Casa Nova stage” of chasing women, which I did fairly effortlessly all over Holland. Then my Swiss German art dealer friend, Steven, first from Basel, now from Soho in New York, brought us all to Zurich by train. He put us up in his Swiss chalet in Ehrlanbach, and all the while, I dissipated myself with drink and European women. Dutch. German, Swiss. I was single, still horny, romantic, and non-discriminatory.

Still, when I brought the whole clown company of six to perform at the newfangled Centre Pompidou in the center of Paris, I was not a happy man. Once again I was lonely and yearning in Pareee. Plus I was sick as a dog with a nagging cough and flu. Perhaps too much clowning. Or too much casa-noving. We all stayed in the Hotel St. Jacques in some arrondisement I can no longer recall, and once again I roamed the city like a mongrel dog. I looked and hunted, and…  once again, I struck out. Continually. No women. No romance. Just  sharing a dimly-lit room in the St. Jacques with my Woody Allen-like “manager-roommate”, a  neurotically-funny comedian who I mercifully brought to Europe for the first time to put him out him out of his own virginal misery. I don’t know which of us was worse. Probably me. Woody had no expectations, while I, most certainly, had too many. So we just suffered and commiserated together, in sprawlingly cold Pareee, two souls “tres pathetique”, wallowing in our own lonely testosterone.

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Ok, now it’s 1998, 19 years later. I’m supposedly grown up, 51 years old, and I’m not supposed to be suffering from the pangs of youthful lust or romanticism. I’m on the other side of the pond again, this time to premier my documentary film, “The Poet and the Con” at the international Visions du Reel Documentary Film Festival in Nyon, Switzerland. It’s taken me seven years to make my film, and I’m just happy it’s found such a fine film festival. I spend a thrilling and energetic week in Nyon, doing “Q&As” as a “filmmaker”, only to find that my film doesn’t win any awards, a little disappointing. But like I said, I’m happy just to be here. I’m an international artiste, once again appreciated more abroad than I am in my own country. It’s closing night of the festival, awards ceremony time, and a Colombian filmmaker has taken the top prize with her film on the Medellin drug cartel. The festival has flown her back from Paris to Nyon just for tonight.

I’m dancing with every beautiful woman in the room. French. Belgium. Swiss. I’m a good dancer, very free, wild, and expressive for a man, so women usually like to join me for a spin if I ask. I’m also drinking vast quantities of alcohol from the generously festival-hosted bar, collecting business cards, saying thanks to the festival organizers, and… dancing with beautiful European women. There’s the Colombian award winner at the bar. I order her a (free) drink. “Congratulations for winning the top prize.” “Sank you,” she says with the most sexy and adorable French-Colombian accent I’ve ever heard before or since. “I do not speak Eengleesh very well.” “Well, it’s a lot better than my French.” We laugh, drink some more. I tell her about how I’ve romanticized Paris my whole life and how I’ve always been sad, lonely, and “pathetique” there. She smiles broadly and says, “you must come and veeseet me le prochaine temps you come to Paris.” My mind starts leaping as we go out for some fresh air into the cool Lake Geneva night. Before I know it, I am kissing her and my hands are all over her. She is somewhere between shy, shocked, and delighted. She kisses me back. “When weel you come to Paris?” “Well, I’m leaving for Rome in the morning but I will come in a month.”

And I do. And this time… Paris is not a lonely garret. Or an unrequited love affair No, she eez full of love. And passion and play and sex. And I am in love in Pareee! Finalement. My sexy filmmaker amie introduces me to the buoyant Buena Vista Social Club and I introduce her to the early Joni Mitchell. We dance and joke and make love around the clock, and I am a “free man in Paris”. Not the David Geffen Joni wrote about in the late 60s when she was the greatest lady of the canyon, but my own 51 year own free man-poet-artiste in Paris, running around from arrondisement to arrondisement with my own true love who is positively the ideal woman for me. She has studied mime with De Croux; I was a clown. She had cancer; I had cancer. She is a documentary filmmaker; I am a documentary filmmaker.

We leave Paree and travel by car to Berlin via the winding German “Romantistrasse”, Bavaria’s bohemian answer to the “Sound of Music”. We are in love and I invite her to visit me in LA. She does and we drive up Highway 1 via Big Sur to see my parents in Walnut Creek in the East Bay across from San Francisco. On the way we stop at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. She loves Henry Miller. I love Henry Miller. I introduce her to Mom and Dad (who truthfully, have already met far too many of my girlfriends). But they love her too. Mais, of coursement. We drive back south, have our first argument over the Grapevine, but then she meets my international bevy of friends at a little jazz restaurant club in Beverly Hills. And they all love her. Of coursement, she’s perfect.

She goes back to Pareee, and two months later, it’s over. I’ve offered to move from LA to Paree for love and she’s totally freaked out. “Ow weel I take care of you, mon cher? You don’t even speak de language.” “No problem. You don’t have to take care of me. I took three years of Francais in high school. I’ll study and practice. Don’t you want me to come?” Long… month-long… pauses. And then, “No, my conejito. I do not want you to come. I am sorry.”

And sorry she is until… she finds un autre ami, moves in with him, gets pregnant, and has two wonderful children that I could have never given her. And there… she stays… back in Paris… until… after 2 years of sadness and some newly-introduced, cruel and beautiful demons in my eternal nightmares, I go to Bali, where we’ve promised to go together, and there, in front of an ATM machine I meet my future Sumatran wife, who gives me directions to a Kuta Beach mall and then tells me to “follow her”, which… I do… and have been doing ever since….

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The generic sildenafil from india activities, which an individual performs and the environment in which they find themselves. Cashews Cashew nuts make a great snack, something to keep buy cialis pills https://unica-web.com/result2009.htm a guy going when he needs a driver’s license at the earliest. This type of the male impotence remedies is not permanent and only online viagra sales works for some time. Illness or conditions: Men with history of genital infection, mumps, prostatitis and surgery on hernia, undescended testicles or buy cialis pills varicocele can experience problems with fertility. Until now, when 13 years later, she and I (da wife, that is) are in Paris, together, for the first time. It’s Christmas, 2013, and we’re going to spend a week here with my Israeli diplomat friend, Michel, then fast train to Zurich and St. Gallen, Switzerland for a white winter wonderland, before we train to Rotterdam for Christmas week with da wife’s sister and brother-in-law.

All goes like clockwork. It’s been a perfect trip. Sure, full of decisions, ups and downs, but easy. Not like Asia, where everything is hot and a lot of hard work. No, here in Europe, we’re completely taken care of by friends and family. What to eat. Where to go. How to save money. It’s all taken care of. Until after Christmas week, when… I find myself back in Pareeee…. alone…. in my university colleague’s trendy Belleville apartment in the 20th arrondisement, waiting for da wife and in-laws to arrive in 2 days… before da wife and I fly home on Saturday, for yet another semester of the less than exciting same old same old…

But now… what to do? Alone in Pareee… Do I call up my former French miss, now a married French madame and mother of two growing tikes, only to have my finally-settled heart strings plucked and pulled askew once more by this seductive and painful city of love? That would be tres, tres stupide, n’est-ce pas? But… as I sit here, waiting for the docu girl who got away to call, or Facebook or e-mail me back, I already know that it would be far wiser and more humane not to answer any reply. What? I should go running over there, wherever there is in this sprawling city of love and regret, run to Les Halles, or to Montparnasse, or maybe to un petit tete a tete or rendezvous at Le Louvre, or Le Jardin du Luxembourg? What would I expect? “Oh, mon cher, eet is so good to see you encore un fois. I have sought of you everee day zee last sirteen years. I remember ze love we made in ze Romantistrasse. In ze park in communist Leipzig. I remember Paris, and LA, and… eet all, mon conejito. Of coursement! Oh, ow life might have beeeen, mon docu cher!”

Right. This is exactly what she will do. I will wait.

 

In the meantime, I walk around Paris. To L’Isle de la Cite and Notre Dame. To St. German des Pres and La Rive Gauche. To Chatelet and Pigalle and Bastille. And even to the new, so un-Parisian La Defense, with her incongruous Calder and Miro sculptures sitting stolidly amongst the towering legoland skyscrapers of conformity. I walk and I walk, but… something seems different.

At first, I’m not exactly sure what eet is. Because sure, Paris still knocks my socks off… with her boulangeries on every street corner for fresh bread and patisseries. With her patisseries and boucheries. With her centuries-old, architectural lines in every building, bridge, church, monument, museum, and metro stop. Pareee… she still has zee fashion, zee style, zee art nouveau, zee socialized medicine, zee baroque, zee gothic, le croque monsieur… even zee French fry. Mais oui, she has Victor Hugo, Moliere, Rodin, Picasso, Balzac, Brassai, Voltaire and his wide-eyed Candide. She even has Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and now Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”.

So… what exactly eez it zen? What eez zis je ne sais pas zat I am feeling? Zee people…  even dare I say it, zee women… they all look so… ordinarie. So LA. Or so Bali or Bruges or Berlin. Or has zee planet just become so uniformly homogenous in these last decades… that it’s simply impossible for a city to completely keep her unique charm, her allure, her power… in a world which so indifferently interchanges its Starbucks with its McDonalds and Kentucky Frieds. Its Body Shops with its Apple stores and its apps. Its Guccis with its Smoochies, as I said at the top.

But wait une minute. Un moment. Maybe… just maybe… it eez moi who has changed. Not Paree. Just possiblement, it eez me who has grown up a beet since 1972 and 1979, and even dare I say eet, 1998, the dernier time I was en Paris. Of course the Parisians look like New Yorkers. And Londoners. And Angelenos with winter coats. Because young girls are still trying to look like Britney and Miley and whoever the next paparazzi sensation will be. Don’t they know that fashion is just fashion, not style? Conformity is just conformity, not iconoclasm or thinking outside the box?

Of course, skin-tight blue jeans with knee-high, high-heel boots all look the same. Sexy. Trying so hard. The same… because… they are. The same. The world, as Tom Friedman has so clearly said, has become “flat”. Technology and the internet have leveled the playing field of knowledge, opportunity, fashion, communication, and even comparison. America is no longer the post WWII leader it once was. The PC, the laptop, and the i-pad have allowed the rest of the world, even former 2nd and 3rd world countries, to catch up.

So sure, Paris is still Paris. Ancien. Historical. Romantic, stylish, and provincially neighborhoody, all at the same time.  And New York is still New York. Smart. Aggressive. Trendy, powerful, and ethnic, all at once. But people are still… just people, wherever you go. Struggling, battling…. to survive. Working hard… to get rich and succeed. To support their kids, to make ends meet. Whether they have a chic French accent. Or a tough New Yawk one. Whether they have a musical Colombian one or a sing song Swiss one. Or even…. if they have a smiling and inviting Indonesian one.

Fuck me. I’m a 66 year old, lucky to be married, curmudgeonly narcissistic New York Jew.Truth be told, I’m more than lucky to be married to a hot, sexy-looking Indonesian babe… who somehow finds a way to put up with all my shit. My bad breath. My farting in the middle of the night. My litany of aches and pains. My hypochondria. My tight-fisted, worry wort cheapness. Hell, I’ve taken this young Indonesian girl’s youth and made her into my own kind of sweet-speaking Eliza Doolittle. She is my fair lady and I am her ornery old Henry Higgins. Rex Harrison as Pygmailion as Trules in Paris, circa 2014. I just need to shut up, enjoy my memories, and live in the moment. Be here now, right? Appreciate what I have. Contradictions, nightmares, and all….

I continue to walk. Pareeee, she is beautiful, n’est-ce pas?