One more blue moon

Hey, sorry this website was down for a few days. A little credit card difficulty, quickly cleared up once I realized what the problem was and found the right phone number.

The truly cold weather, which usually comes right around Thanksgiving, has arrived a week late. The days are still warm enough when there's sun, but the nights are damp and very chilly. Out in the suburbs it freezes on nights when it's not raining.

I had cause again this week to meditate on the crucifixion "King of the Jews" scene. A column in Sojourners magazine put it this way: Christ on the cross is both a king in glory and the Lamb of God. Then on Tuesday, a NYT review of a book called "Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God" contained the fascinating thesis that Christ sacrifice was not for the sins of mankind, but for God to atone for God changing the rules on the chosen people. Michiko Kakutani writes:

(Author Jack) Miles ... suggests that God's mutation in the New Testament from lion to lamb, from nationalistic warrior to universal bringer of eternal life was a response to historical circumstances: namely the first-century slaughter of the Jews of Palestine, which "was large enough to be comparable in its impact to the 20th-century slaughter of the Jews of Europe," and which raised radical questions about God's power and good will.

Since Israel was conquered by Assyria and Babylonia, God had promised that he "would restore Israel to its former glory," but centuries have passed, and "instead of the predicted kingdom of God, there has come the kingdom of the Romans, and its oppressiveness dwarfs that of all previous oppressors." It had become increasingly clear, Mr. Miles writes, that God was "simply too weak" or "was for some other, still more mysterious reason no longer willing to impose his will on history."

But, he adds, "instead of baldly declaring that he is unable to defeat his enemies, God may declare that he has no enemies, that he now refuses to recognize any distinction between friend and foe. He may announce that he now loves all people indiscriminately, as the sun shines equally everywhere, and then urge — as the law of a new broadened covenant — that his creatures extend to one another the same infinite tolerance of wrongdoing that henceforth he will extend, individually and collectively, to all of them."

Because God knew "that genocide against his chosen people was imminent and that he would do nothing to prevent it," Mr. Miles contends, he had to show first "that he himself is willing to pay the price this change will exact of them and, second, that this defeat presages another kind of victory": before the miracle of resurrection, he must "first suffer a physical horror equivalent to the horror that impends for his chosen people."

Wow! That's something to chew over.

Today a local public radio show called The California Report carried a story about National Novel Writing Month. Apparently they challenge all these people to sit down and whack out a 50,000-word novel between Nov. 1 and 30. Today's the last day, so I missed it. Most of the people who participate are, of course, unpublished writers. There aren't any prizes; they just get the satisfaction of having finished a novel, of whatever quality. I agree there's a lot to be said for finishing something without worrying about whether or not it's perfect. They make light of the prospect of rewriting or, perhaps, burying the month's work under a bush. It all makes me feel like a real wimp, with my 20,000 words gathered over the course of three years and my fear of starting Part 2.

 
Still waiting

As usual, visiting Christine -- who is not only an ex-lover but a painter and former collaborator, back when we were both performance artists and choreographers -- gave me cause to do some thinking about my career as a writer. And I also had cause to consider it the week before, when I sat down with my friend Anna. Christine's 47, I'm 45, Anna's 25, but we're all dealing with issues of where we're going with our careers as artists, writers or whatever. We're just in different places.

With Anna, I can legitimately give a perspective based on where I've been. When I was 25, I was creating wildly on one hand, and filled with doubt on the other. Because I had a full-time day job (I always have) instead of trying to support myself through my artwork, I wondered if I was just a dilletante who would never turn out to be a serious artist. Now that I've managed to publish a magazine for four years, followed by two full-length books of short stories, that concern is lessened. I've got a track record I can look back on, even as I look forward and wonder when I'll get to the next plateau. Anna, on the other hand, is right there. She does lots and lots of journaling and has started a putative novel and wonders whether she's "serious." I tell her I've been there, try to reassure her.

Christine has always been more self-assured than me; her artistic vision has never failed her. She may go off on tangents, but she has faith they're where she needs to go. Since moving from San Francisco to the desert five years ago and stopping performing, she's taken up writing and painting. Curiously, the Twentynine Palms area is full of second-career artists. Debora Iyall, the singer of the great 80s new wave band Romeo Void, lives a couple of miles away and is also a painter. The desert is a hell of a great place to be a painter -- all that light.

So Christine and I went hiking and had a long talk about where our art was going. It's like nourishment to me, to talk to another serious artist -- and someone who takes my work more seriously, sometimes, than I manage to -- about the creative process, what we're making now, our doubts, our techniques, our ways of keeping faith in ourselves and our visions. I spent the rest of the trip -- through Death Valley, out to Las Vegas, and through the rain the next day from Barstow to Bakersfield -- thinking about spending more time working on my novel. Then I thought, "The problem is not finding more time, the problem is wasting less time on unproductive crap -- watching TV and so forth." Even this website is a distraction, although it's good for me to have a place to post things publicly.

On Sunday, after I got back to San Francisco, I went over to my friend Bob's house to help him move some stuff. Afterward we were sitting and drinking beer with a few other helpers, and Bob told them I was a pornographer. "Oh yeah?" one woman said, "talk about the issues!" I was game, but I asked her which issues in particular she had in mind. She struck me as straight and kind of political and I wasn't sure where to start. But she didn't really give me any place to start, so I didn't talk about any issues. (The individual pages I posted on this website for Too Beautiful and How I Adore You do have discussions on the "issues," as do the afterwords for both books.)

 
Desert trip

Our family Thanksgiving kind of fell apart this year. It was supposed to be at Cris's sister's house, and Cris and I had an inkling to go down to the desert instead. What ended up happening was that I went down to the desert alone, by car.

It was a road trip I'd wanted to take for a long time, but I did it in a very disorganized way. I took ten pair of underwear for a week, but forgot to pack any pants, so I had to wear the same pair all week. I forgot all kinds of stuff, including the power cord for my laptop. Then when I fired it up on the battery, I found I didn't even have the story I intended to work on. So I got nothing done this week, writing-wise.

What I did was drive down to my ex-lover's house. Christine lives near Twentynine Palms in the middle of nowhere -- specifically in the middle of Wonder Valley. We went hiking a little bit, I read a lot, and on Thanksgiving there was a dust storm. Or it might be exaggerating a wee bit to call it a dust storm, but anyway there was a lot of wind and blowing dust and sand, and visibility about a quarter mile. At the last minute we went over to a friend's, Perry's, for Thanksgiving chicken. Perry is this Wonder Fag from San Francisco who has followed Christine down to the desert -- they met 40 years ago in kindergarten in Monterrey Park, Calif. -- and now has his own place. He is a decorating fiend, and supposedly his cabin is now under consideration by Nest magazine for all the chachkas he has stuffed in there and the general wonderous atmosphere.

The next day I left the area and drove north across a few hundred miles of desert to Death Valley. It was a great drive through the Mojave Desert National Park and a lot of very minor roads -- I didn't see a billboard the whole time. But when I got to Death Valley, there was no place to stay. So I drove another couple hundred miles to Las Vegas and stayed in a TraveLodge under an underpass. It was actually surprisingly clean and comfortable for the price, $55. That's the West Sahara TraveLodge in Las Vegas.

I went to a sushi restaurant on West Sahara and a salesman sat down next to me at the sushi bar. He was some kind of regular who kept trying to engage the sushi chef in conversation. Atrocious overweight twentysomething salesman. He said, "I hate holidays, man. I can't make any money, and there's nothing to do." He also told about some ridiculous scheme he had to rip off one of his own employees by financing a car for him, and then charging the guy interest. "I'm gonna make about $2000 on the deal," he boasted. "Hey, I figure, he charges me for his labor, so I'm gonna charge him for my money. If he worked for free then I could do him a favor."

The next day I drove through a desert rain to Bakersfield, and today, home up through the lower Central Valley and the Salinas Valley. Highway 33 rocks!

Back to work tomorrow. I totally missed out on Christ the King services today, so there's not much to say about that. Actually I said most of it on the 20th from the desert. This is the last week of the church year, and Advent starts next Sunday.

 
Pilate the Bitter Queen

November, starting with all the All Saints stuff around Nov. 1, more or less leads up to the last Sunday of the month. The readings all talk about death, the next world, and the coming Kingdom of God. Readings from the old testament that talk about the first coming of the Messiah are juxtaposed with readings from the New Testament that talk about the second coming of Christ. The readings from the daily and Sunday offices these days are suitably apocalyptic -- apocalyptic because they always are at the end of the year, and suitably so because of the war and all. In the old testament, the readings are from Malachi, talking about how Israel will be destroyed. And the gospel for next Sunday is actually a crucifixion scene, telling how Jesus was crucified with a placard that Pilate had put up -- JESUS, KING OF THE JEWS. So the last Sunday of the church year is designated "Christ the King Sunday."

This is why I've always liked Pontius Pilate. A hapless functionary who has apparently been promoted to his level of incompetence, he finds himself smack in the middle of a great historical moment -- a little like George Bush fils. The Jewish authorities have brought Jesus to him, accusing Jesus of breaking their laws and asking that he be executed. Several times, Pilate dismisses them, saying he has no jurisdiction in such matters -- and no interest in them, either, obviously. But they finally convince him that Jesus is a threat to public security, so he goes along with the execution idea.

Though Pilate has failed his greatest test, knuckling under when he might have resisted the attempts to manipulate him, he manages a few dramatic gestures. He tries to engage Jesus in a philosophical debate, getting off a great line -- "What is truth?" He publicly, and literally, washes his hands of the affair to show the crucifixion is not his idea. Finally, in a gesture of scathing sarcasm designed to irritate the local authorities who had manipulated him, he has the placard made up and posted on the cross. Gratifyingly pissed off, the local panjandrums go to him and say, "Don't have it say 'King of the Jews,' rather 'He claimed he was King of the Jews.'"

"What I have written, I have written," Pilate harrumphs, and no doubt with a great sense of relief, withdraws from the spotlight. (It's not the last we hear of him, though. After the resurrection, he cooperates in a cover-up, in which the guards of the now-empty tomb are paid to go along, about how Jesus' body was actually stolen by his disciples rather than risen from the dead.) I appreciate these gestures, hollow though they appear to a believer from the perspective of centuries later. They ring with anger and heavy irony. They're the bitchy last words of a defeated drag queen who has been put down in public for the last time.

But anyway -- about the apocalyptic nature of November and the festival of "Christ the King" (or, as my gender-inclusive church has it, "Christ the Ruler"). It all has to do with the double-think nature of this time of year. In Advent (December), we sort of play-act looking forward to Christ's first coming. The month before, we actually look forward to Christ's second coming. Seems like it's in reverse order, but in fact Advent comes first in the church's calendar. We begin the church year looking forward to the first coming; we end the church year looking forward to the second.

This leads to a bit of whiplash come the first Sunday of Advent (which is the fourth Sunday before Christmas, 3 December this year). We all get down with the second coming and the end of the world. Then it's like the CD starts over again and we're back to the beginning. After Christmas, the secular events of New year's Eve and New Year's Day don't officially figure in things, although many churches do have services to commemorate these dates. On the evening of Dec. 31, 1999 especially, my congregation and many others had special services as a way of participating in what seemed, at the time, like momentous events. All the shit that was foretold for "Y2K" -- power blackouts, war, terrorist attacks, plague scares -- didn't happen then; it's happening now. But what's 18 months when you're talking about millennia?

That's why I say the apocalyptic readings are suitable for this time. The events of Sep. 11 and following may not be the end of the world, but they help set the mood. I won't cite all the biblical passages that can be matched up to current events -- war, plagues and all. That's always seemed beside the point, just as Halloween, to any adult, is beside the point. Of course we're all going to be skeletons and ghosts some day -- any adult over 40 feels that in his or her own bones. We don't need to dress up to remind us, because our friends have started to keel over. Kris Kovick, a terrific dame who founded the dyke spoken-word scene in San Francisco, and whose drawings appeared in my magazine Frighten the Horses and many, many other queer publications in the 1980s and 90s, died last month after an eight-year battle with breast cancer. Her memorial on Sunday was packed with "generations of baby dykes," as my friend Sara put it, whom Kris had encouraged to become writers and artists. Her influence will be felt in their work for many years. She becomes one of the saints.

 
The Writing Life

V. S. Naipaul, who has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was quoted in today's New York Times:

"I've had a fantasy," he said, one that was fulfilled twice, when he was writing "Guerrillas" (1975) and "A Bend in the River" (1979), "A fantasy of beginning a book in the autmn and writing through the winter, day after day, day after day." He smiles at the thought. "For me," he said, "that means pure pleasure."

Yes! How wonderful to be able to concentrate on nothing but your work through the dark morning and the short day, the book growing in secret like winter wheat. Come the beginning of Daylight Savings Time, it's finished. Spend the summer editing it and wrangling with the publisher. Then spend the early fall taking time off, resting, getting ideas, until it's time to do the next one.

Not that many people can do one a year, though. So perhaps you write a book only every two winters. Even then, it would be wonderful.

I have a novel I've started, stopped, picked up again, laid aside, taken up again. Right now the last time I had any time to work on it was the spring of 2001. I finally finished "part 1" and am waiting for some more free time to start part 2. I've been working on the book this way, on and off, for two or three years. I guess it'll get finished someday.

My friend Katia and I are having opposite experiences. While I am enjoying being a published author, I haven't been able to finish my novel yet. Katia, on the other hand, has just finished a novel she's been working on for four years, and now is working to get an agent. Publishing my collections of erotica came easy to me. I didn't have an agent; it just sort of happened, which is the way I prefer things to happen. But my novel will need an agent, like hers.

I need to devote that kind of time to my novel, and all my writing -- writing more and more until it becomes your life, writing day after day.

Turning to November

The day after we returned to San Francisco, the first storm of the year rolled in. It rained half the night and into the morning, let up for lunch, came down hard around 1:30, then departed. That was nice. Winter is truly here.

(We don't have much of a fall. We have summer through September, then we have a short Indian Summer, and then after an interim it starts raining. The interim, during which it gets a little darker and colder, is what passes for fall. Go up to Marin County, to the town of Ross -- a fine back-door access to Mount Tam -- if you want to see pretty leaves; otherwise, blink and you miss autumn.)

While it seems I'm fascinated with the weather, it's really the seasons I'm interested in. The heaven of an early June day when everything is blooming and all the flora is fawning; the cold spectacular clarity which usually occurs on January 1; the livewire excitement of the first evenings after daylight savings time starts and it's still light at 7:00; or in this case, the first heavy rain of winter, pouring from the skies as if in relief.

These seasonal signs, and other signs of change that mark the border between one state and another, or one time and another, are what excite me. The road from the interstate to our family's house in Illinois, back in the 60s, passed a Holiday Inn, back when Holiday Inns had those huge green signs with the big stars on top. The enormous sign, towering over the state highway, represented much more to me than a hotel. It was the whole adult world of freedom, of having your own car and enough money to travel the country and check into any motel you wanted.

But what I really wanted was to be driving by at the exact dusky moment when the sign sprang to life. It would be the moment between the dreary day and the exciting, neon-lit night, the moment when lights meant something.

No wonder I turned out queer.

So the first storm of the winter is one of my favorite moments. It means things are turning toward all the ending moments of the year, toward the holidays of lights. It's the moment when the lights start to come on.

 
 
 
Paris Wrap-up

Some thoughts, 48 hours after returning from a week-plus vacation in Paris:

Standing on stone      We spent much time in museums and churches, and by the end of the day, our middle-aged legs were wrecked. We finally figured this was because of the ubiquitous stone and/or marble flooring (not to mention all the stone or cobblestone plazas) found in these places. Even stone is not as bad as marble, which was especially hell on the ligaments and tendons around the knees and ankles -- anything that cushions the weight of your body as it moves. We went through a bottle of ibuprofen in less than a week.

Let's skip dinner      There are hundreds and hundreds of brasseries and cafes, and they all have pretty much the same menu, full of thick sauces, fatty meats and greasy fried things. After three days of this, and also due to the energy-sapping marble, we found ourselves skipping dinner and crashing in the hotel room after 5:00. When we did venture out to dinner, we found that kitchens don't even open until 7:00 p.m., and we were often the first ones in the place to order.

The best meal we had was at the restuarant at the Musee d'Orsay, where the lunch menu included a positively light dish of white fish with almost no sauce. We could have tried harder to find alternative places to eat, but by the time we were hungry, we had only the energy to find the nearest joint. The disadvantage to the standard brasserie menu, its predictability, is also its advantage: we knew what we would find.

The friendly French      The stereotype of snooty French waiters seems to be a thing of the past. We went into cafes and brasseries in a variety of locations, from the touristy to the obscure. In some cases they even supplied us with English-language menus (even when we didn't ask for them, which says something about our French abilities). When we limped along in French while ordering, the waiters and waitresses were invariably amiable and good-humored about bailing us out without embarrassing us. In some cases they corrected our usage, but in a very diplomatic way. The staff of our hotel was similarly friendly and helpful.

I don't know if this turnaround from the classic French haughtiness is because of some campaign to stamp out surliness -- I hear there have been some -- or, possibly, they're simply being nicer to Americans in the wake of Sep. 11. (In his radio essay on the Parisian reaction to the events of Sep. 11, David Sedaris recounted several instances of French people uncharacteristically reaching out to him in sympathy. See this link; Sedaris' piece is "Act Four" of the Sep. 21 program of "This American Life.") Whatever the reason, we were relieved not to have to deal with anyone's surly attitude. People in San Francsico are surly enough.

What is it with the smoking?      One habit the French haven't changed is their incessant smoking. I know their reputation and I was prepared to tolerate it as much as possible, and for the first several days, we weren't inundated too much. But then one evening we had dinner at a brasserie on the Place de la Republique, and two young men near us smoked Marlboros throughout the second half of our meal. What ventilation there was in the place (it being late fall, all the windows were closed) made the smoke drift right past our table. Kind of made it hard to enjoy the dessert.

I don't have any hope that they'll change their habits, but can we say a word about ventilation, please? In America, even smoking areas are well-ventilated so that the smokers do not have to stew in their own juice; in France, everybody does. Even in the airport, where there was smoking only at one (the only) coffee bar, smoke filled the whole area because there was no ventilation to draw it off. This, coupled with a seemingly delight in overheating interiors (stores, airport terminals, museums -- they were all too warm), makes for a sometimes oppressive environment.

Miscellaneous advice

1. At the Metro ticket window, order "un carnet," a little pile of ten Metro tickets. Saves money and time, and also motivates you to take the Metro instead of walking someplace. You'll walk enough, believe me.
2. Except for summer, the Metro is packed at rush hour, so try to avoid it 4:30-6:00 p.m.
3. If you must walk from the Musee d'Orsay to the Eiffel Tower, as we did, take the left (south) bank of the river. If you've just spent several hours in the museum, walking the right bank will exhaust you. As it did us.
4. Traveller's checks are for the birds. Just use your ATM card as you would in the U.S. No ATM fees, and a better exchange rate than at any currency exchange office.
5. Surrender to jet lag. Naps are good.

 
Waiting for Sunrise

It's Sunday evening and we're back from Paris. The 12-hour flight took off at noon and got in at 3:00 pm the same day. But since I never stopped being jetlagged the whole time I was in Paris, I can't really complain. Here's hoping I'll get a decent night's sleep tonight. I really loved being in Paris, but the whole sleep/jetlag problem was a real problem. No matter what time I went to bed, I would always wake up at 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. and have an energy crash at 4:00 p.m. So I'm really looking forward to a good night's sleep in my own bed.

During the hours between waking, say at 5:00 a.m., and Cris waking up at 8;30 or 9:00, I had a number of things I could do. My first urge was to get up and walk around -- what else am I in Paris for? But it doesn't even get light at this time of year until 7:00 or so, and it was cold and drizzly and actually rather depressing to walk the dark streets of the Marais for two hours. So I tended to lie in bed, trying to go back to sleep and never succeeding. Finally I would give up and get dressed and go out. I would walk to the nearby Place de la Republique (and sorry for leaving out the diacritical marks, I'm just too tired to worry about it) and buy an IHT, that lifeline of the expatriate. Then I'd go to a nearby cafe and have a café
au lait and a croissant.

What could be better, you may ask? To sit in Paris and watch the dawn break over the Place de la Republique, reading the paper, eating crossaints, etc.? Well, it would have been a tad more enjoyable without all the jet lag. But who else but the jet lagged would be up at that hour in the first place.

On the 12-hour flight home, it finally occurred to me that what I saw as an annoyance -- this business of waking before dawn and not being able to go back to sleep -- was actually a huge opportunity to pray and meditate like a monk. And I would have, too, if only it would have been possible to heat the room a little and have a little light. But the dankness and darkness of the room was oppressive, no matter how much like a monk's cell it really was. That's the problem with two-star hotels. So it was off to the cafe.

 
from Paris, 2

Saturday now in Paris -- we go home tomorrow. We never made it to the Musee Picasso or the Beaubourg. When we got to the former, it was closed, and on the way to the latter, we came across the Jewish Museum and spent the day there instead. This is our last day, and we're about to go up to Sacre Coeur, so I doubt we'll ever see the Beaubourg.

My naked ass has actually been exhibited at the Beaubourg. In the early 80s, I was one of several San Francisco bohemians who acted as models in a project by a photographer named Joe Gantz. His book "If It's Done Right It Is" had done well and he had a grant to do another book of his photographs -- typically nude surrealistic tableaux. He would gather eight or ten of us and haul us into some (closed to the public) public location such as the Stanford Art Gallery. There we would strip off our clothes and engage in weird tableaux of his design. In the one I remember best, several nude women stood on pedestals while four or five pairs of naked men, me among them, wrestled on the floor beneath them.

A year after these sessions ended, a friend of mine went to Paris and visited the Centre Pompidieu. "That looks like Mark's ass," she later told me she said to herself. "Hey, wait a minute, that is Mark's ass."

Unfortunately I never saw the book of these photos, if indeed it ever came out. If anybody knows Joe Gantz the photographer, I'd like to get one.

It's cold and sunny in Paris today. The rain has finally ended and it's a perfect day for our last day. Tomorrow I'll get back to the Advent themes of waiting, anticipation, and looking forward.

 
from Paris

I'm writing from the "Web Bar" near the hotel. This is a great block -- it has trees, a bar, a web cafe, two decent restaurants at the other end, and it's only a five-minute stoll from a major plaza with about 6 subway lines. Our hotel is cheap and comfortable and speaks English at those times when one is too tired or jet lagged to think of any French.

Sightseeing sightseeing, walking walking walking. At first it was hazy sun, then the last couple days it's been breezy and overcast and a little rainy. Everything going well. The best moment so far has been early yesterday evening, walking across a bridge over the Seine in the last rays of the sunset, everything so beautiful and Cris happy.

This morning I passed an older man with a crutch who was merrily singing "Camptown Races," in French, while crossing the street. Today, Musee Picasso and the Beaubourg.

 
Prescription for poverty

Every week I go to three different events where I have the opportuntity to meditate on scripture. On Monday it's the Canterbury Way group at Grace Cathedral; on Tuesday it's the Taize group at St. Gregory's; and on Wednesday it's lectio divina at my own church. This week, at all three meetings, the reading was the Beatitudes as they appear in Luke 6.

In this account of Jesus's famous speech, Jesus follows the blessings ("Blessed are the poor," etc.) with curses: "Woe to you who are rich now; you shall be poor. Woe to you who are full now; you shall be hungry." The reader is forced to come down on one side or the other. Am I someone presently poor who longs for the coming of God's reign, or am I rich, and need to cover my ass PDQ?

Listening to the blessings and curses Wednesday night, I was reminded of how I felt when I was a child. I was bullied and ostracized, like most young queers, even before I knew what queer was. Back then, I was definitely a candidate for the "Blessed are the poor" side of things.

Now, 35 years later, I'm an affluent, middle class, middle-aged white man. I own a house, make a preposterously large salary, and can afford to take my partner to Paris for her birthday. (We leave tomorrow.) By any measure, I'm rich, and as Jesus said, I have received my consolation.

What to do? The third part of the reading (verses 27-31) contains a solution to the dilemma. Without taking a breath, Jesus announces a series of actions that at first seem unrelated to the previous paragraphs.

But I say to you that hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from him who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.
Give to every one who begs from you; and of him who takes away your goods do not ask them again. And as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.

At first, I didn't understand how these are related to the blessings and curses. Then I realized that these statements are addressed directly to me, the rich man. Rich? Woe to you -- unless you can figure out a way to become poor again.

That's what this is -- a prescription for poverty. Too rich? Become poor. In San Francisco, if you "give to everyone who begs from you," you'll be poor pretty soon, all right. I dunno if I'm ready to do that. Maybe when we get back from Paris.