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Message |
| Posted By: |
Uncle Tantra |
| Date: |
28-Oct-2003-15:52:11 |
| Subject: |
Mr. Natural Is Alive and Well and Living in France |
Life as an expatriate is interesting. You live in a foreign country, among people whose language, if you are as lazy as I am, you do not speak well enough to express even a fraction of the things that are on your mind. You live among people whose customs are all different from those you grew up with. They eat different foods, have different forms of social interaction, hold different — sometimes *very* different — things sacred than you do. And, as an American living in their country, you try to learn from these people you meet, try to add to the sum of your knowledge and expand your own view of planet Earth to encompass theirs.
But sometimes — I'll be honest — it gets to you.
You find yourself drinking a fine wine while part of you wishes it was a Fat Tire beer from Colorado. You find yourself longing for a big, greasy burger that doesn't cost 15 Euros. You find yourself wishing that you could have a long, serious argument about California politics with someone who has actually lived there, and thus knows that nothing in California is to be taken seriously. You find yourself wishing that someone at the cocktail party other than yourself would get the 'in jokes' about the icons of American culture you pepper your speech with, icons that the other guests don't even recognize as icons.
And so sometimes it's really neat to meet other expatriates and to be reminded, hearing their reasons for living here, what yours were.
Last Sunday my roommate, who I love dearly because she's the one person in Paris I know who gets all my 'in jokes,' returned from an afternoon out with the Daguerrotypes. No, not the photographs, some mutual friends who live on or near the rue Daguerre and who refer to themselves by that name. They had gotten together that afternoon to see an Agnes Varda film made years ago about the *previous* generation of 'Daguerrotypes,' and then had lunch in one of the bistros in the same neighborhood she had recorded on film for posterity.
Telling me about her afternoon, my roommate (who is twenty years younger than I am) said casually, in passing, "And there was a friend of Dimitri's there who I really liked, named Robert." Knowing her, and that she does not 'like' people without some good reason, I enquired further. "He's a friend of Dimitri's. He lives in Languedoc with his wife and daughter, but comes up to Paris every so often because they both love old 20's and 30's music and like to spend the weekend at the marché in Vanves, searching for old 78s. He's an artist...a cartoonist, so he said."
At this point I fell silent, reduced to a state of awe because I realized that my roommate, unknowing because of her youth, had spent the afternoon with one of the icons of *my* youth, without knowing who he was, or that he was one. To her, he was just another nice guy who had decided to spend the rest of his life as an expatriate in France, and had managed to find a way to do so.
To me he was R. Crumb.
We're talkin' the creator of Zap Comix. We're talkin' the creator of the Fritz the Cat comic books and later the film of the same name, the first X-rated cartoon ever to gain wide release in theaters. We are talkin' (and here Uncle Tantra pauses for a moment to genuflect and cross himself, even though he is far from Catholic) the creator of Mr. Natural.
Mr. Natural. Think of it. The ultimate icon of the 60's hippie culture, his white hair and beard flowing in the wind, his body elongated, stretched out to its full, magnificent length while struttin' down the street, the perfect embodiment (and the genesis) of the term truckin'.
Robert Crumb is a weird dude. He was raised by a Marine father and a devout Catholic mother, the middle child in a family full of crazies. One brother killed himself, another kept poor Robert in terror for most of his young life by threatening every night to kill him while he slept. Suffice it to say he did not grow up to be a normal American. He figured out early on that he was not a handsome jock or any of the other things that guys should be in America, and that he was *never* gonna be popular with women or, most likely, get laid at all.
So he made himself a promise of intent. He decided that, since he was already an outcast, he should get *good* at being an outcast. He vowed to become the Most Famous Cartoonist In The World.
It didn't happen overnight. R. Crumb worked for a time for American Greetings, creating cards for birthdays and other holidays. Those of you who have ever in your lives held an issue of Zap Comix in your hands, can you imagine this? It boggles the mind. But he persevered. And eventually he became, in the eyes of many who view the world of comic-book art as a true artform, the Most Famous Cartoonist In The World. And now he lives in France.
Realizing all this, the question "How?" sprang to my lips.
It's not, after all, like even the Most Famous Cartoonist In The World makes enough money to retire in the south of France. So I asked my roommate.
And her answer reminded me of another expatriate American I had run into in Paris some time ago. This one was of the same generation as R. Crumb, and myself. He was a musician and a composer and a producer. You won't know his name, unless you're a Rickie Lee Jones fan. He produced many of her early albums. But then he came to Paris, living on savings and adrenaline and living the Good Life, as he saw it. Until the money ran out. The money always runs out. If you learn nothing of more value in this life, remember that someone once told you this. :-)
When it did, he found himself faced with an awful quandary. He could go 'home,' to America, and instantly drop back into his place in the corporate world of the music industry and make another shitload of money. Or he could stay in Paris, and see what happened. He stayed in Paris. He's still here, decades later.
Again, the question springs to the lips, "How?"
His explanation? "Magic still works here."
I remember the first time I heard this, sitting with another expatriate in an Irish bar in St. Germain des Prés. My eyes filled with tears as I realized the truth of it. So did hers, realizing that I realized the truth of it.
Magic still works here.
If you have a dream, you can dream it to fulfillment here in France because there is still magic here. It hasn't been driven away by fear the way it has been in America. If you have intent, and your intent is strong, the magic *feels* that intent, and *responds* to it. Since I have been here I have met people who arrived in Paris with twenty dollars in their pockets twenty years ago and who are still here, because their intent was strong, and the magic responded to that intent. Rickie Lee's old producer is still here, eking out a meager existence from month to month, but still here because his intent is to be here. And Robert Crumb, who once turned down a rather lucrative contract to do an album cover for the Rolling Stones because he didn't really like their music, is still here because he did instead what he loved to do, and drew cartoons. He traded six notebooks of his original drawings for the house he now shares with his wife and daughter in Languedoc, and the seller probably thought he had the better of the deal.
And thinking about all these things this afternoon in my favorite café, realizing that I have been wasting far too much time lately wondering how on earth I was going to manage to stay here in Paris when the money ran out, I finally relaxed, and finally smiled...and in that moment caught a glimpse of Mr. Natural himself, truckin' down the rue Cler, with a young French babe on his arm. He smiled back, and waved.
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