J'Adore Paris

After the appalling and tragic events at the time of writing this article I would like to take the opportunity to express my love for Paris and its inhabitants. It is a romantic love and thus not at all rational in any shape or form. But I don’t care. As an artist who utilises the pen, the paintbrush* and performance I instinctively feel a connection with that city. One could almost argue that there are three Parises. One is the actual concrete city changing day by day, another is the Paris of the imagination (formed by stories and reports of the place) and a third could be the Paris of the memory (which is itself, a form of imagination). The great film director Ernest Lubitsch once said that between Paris, France and Paris, Hollywood he preferred the latter. I’m going to have my cake and eat it and take them both.

As one who spent a lot of time in school and college libraries I learnt that Paris was a place of pilgrimage for artists. That it was a Bohemia. (As an aside, strange it sounds but I have never seen Woody Allen’s time travelling picture ‘Midnight in Paris’. Not yet, anyway) Of course the reality of living like a Bohemian is that one struggles living hand to mouth in circumstances that the most ardent masochist would probably find too much. However there is something appealing about a city where artists can truly feel at home and be appreciated.

I have been to Paris a few times and have been to most of the tourist attractions from The Louvre to the Moulin Rouge. At this moment I’d like to write a little about Shakespeare and Company. Accompanied with the love of my life I made a daily pilgrimage to the late George Whitman’s bookshop from a cheap and dusty grotty hotel with walls so thin you could hear the sound of rage, weeping and screwing. I had read Jeremy Mercer’s ‘Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs’ and harboured romantic thoughts about sleeping amongst those books. Sometimes I still do. On our first visit to the place we sat outside shivering as we listened to an in store lecture about the love lives of the poets via a small outdoor public address system. When I did get to walk through the door the following day I was struck by how intimate it was. In my mind the book I had read made Shakespeare and Company seem big and spacious. I loved it, mind and I always will. It was important to me to make daily visits and one future day it would be a place of solace and comfort to me when (artistically and romantically speaking) things didn’t go to plan.

Across the length and breadth of Britain there are ukulele clubs bursting at the seams. I’m in one of them and last year we all went to Paris. I was looking forward to it. We’d be playing in a café, a bistro and on a park bandstand. As well as playing as a group we’d also be showcasing our best singers. I rationalised that I was not going to be one of them (whether it be due to my voice or that my song was a Frank Zappa number about Elvis Presley and you needed to understand English to enjoy it) so I spent a good while looking up possible open mic spots that I might be able to squeeze in. However I accepted that I was not going to sing solo (as a matter of fact there were a few good singers in the club that never got to stand behind the microphone) and was looking forward to losing myself in the collective.

But my rationalising was a way of placing a blanket over my true feelings. I was going to Paris not as a tourist but as an artist and art is a form of communication and I wanted to communicate to the city that means a lot to me and (I suspect) other artists. The fact that I spent a lot of time looking up places for open mic spots should have been an indication. As soon as we began to play I felt my heart rapidly descend into my stomach. I realised the truth there and then but I knew I could not show it so I attempted to smile and it felt physically painful. I just wanted to weep on the stage.

 It sounds like I had a terrible time but I also enjoyed myself and at moments felt endorphins of happiness. Camille Paglia wrote how cats can feel two emotions at once in ‘Sexual Personae’ and looking back I might argue that’s what I was going through. Talk about embracing your feminine side. Prior to the show we all mingled with a Parisian ukulele club and it was nice to speak with such good humoured and friendly people. At the end of the evening my beau and I went back with our ukuleles to our comparatively nicer hotel to sleep before the club’s next performance at a bandstand. It was there that my true feelings were becoming stronger so we both decided that as we had a free evening then open mic was on the cards.

In the pouring rain we went to an Irish themed pub and made our way down to the cellar, an empty cellar. A cellar in a pub in Paris on the night of a World Cup match. Not surprising it was empty. I sighed and said to my other half. “C’est La vie.” We would wait for an hour and then make our way back. And then a fat hairy angel came down the stairs with a bouzouki. We talked, played, sang (well I attempted to) and improvised solos together. Nobody else turned up but as I walked back to the Metro feeling lighter than air my significant other said she could see me come alive again. In any case I can always make a return trip to Paris and perform at more populated open mic spots. An artist friend of mine spoke of how somebody told her that the two saddest words in the English language are “too late”. Well it’s not going to be “too late” for me. Besides, I had a fun time with my pals.

Prior to the mini-tour I kind of over planned things; planning to see this, that and t’other. When we arrived it was obvious as the trunk on an Elephant that not everything could be done. However I definitely wanted to pay a return visit to Pere Lachaise cemetery (only five minutes from our hotel) and visit the graves of the artists that I missed first time such as Marcel Proust and Georges Melies. It was the last day and I had a map with me that I printed off prior to travelling. As soon as we stepped inside a man ran a bell. The cemetery was closing. I knew I had to return to Shakespeare and Company. Even if it had closed for the evening, just standing outside it was enough. It wasn’t closed and it did provide me with solace and comfort to me. I hold no bitterness about not standing behind the microphone. Certainly not a sense of entitlement. If I want to sing to the folk of Paris then I can do it myself. There’s plenty of time to make a return visit and if I do succeed I have to be prepared that they might find me bloody awful and throw all sorts of rotten things at me. But J’adore Paris and I would like to add myself amongst the growing many who say

JE SUIS CHARLIE

*The visual aspect of my work can be seen at http://arfclint.wix.com/clintonmorgan