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.