Hope? Change? or the Alternative?

I've posted photos of these guys before because you find them all over Paris.  They look like stencils but they're individually painted by Jérôme Mesnager, a graffiti artist who has achieved a relatively high degree of respectability, with gallery shows and private commissions.  He calls the figure "le Corps Blanc"("The White Body") and has several books out detailing the adventures of this ubiquitous image.  The latest is called "Il court toujours - 25 ans du corps blanc" ("He's still running - 25 years of the white body").

The one above says "Draw a democracy for me".  Notice the figures are holding hands; democracy is a joint project.  Next to it is this one:

It says "Together".  The figures seem to be in free fall, but they're still holding hands, joined now by others, and forming a star.

The final one of the series seems to me to indicate what happens if the project fails; we must work together even to escape from the emergency exit.

Mesnager's white bodies, with their vision of possibility, seem to me a lot more hopeful than this other graffiti I saw today.

A slaughtered bull, looking like something out of Picasso's Guernica, hanging as if on the butcher's hook.  A darker vision, but we're in a dark world.  I hope Obama earns that Nobel Prize.

In the Footsteps of Obama

A few years ago we found ourselves traveling through Southeast Asia two weeks behind Bill Clinton. Everywhere we went, from Vietnam to Laos to Cambodia, he had just left, and left behind him an enthusiastic population, eager to show us the photos of themselves posing with the former president. Bill Clinton being who is is, there was no shortage of photo ops.

We now find ourselves in a Paris also recently visited by an American president, but there are many fewer traces of Barack Obama's passing through. Paris is a more sophisticated place, used to the visits of presidents and emperors, and Obama is much less in need of adulation than Clinton. This combination of circumstance has made it barely evident that he was here.

The only notice taken of his dinner at La Fontaine de Mars in the 7th arrondissement is a small framed headline from a provincial French newspaper heralding the fact that Obama had dined at a restaurant owned by a woman from the region. No photos of hands being shaken, no shoulder-to-shoulder smiling, just "Obama a Diné Chez Une Tarbaise". We also dined there the other night, and no one asked to take our picture either. We were treated just like visiting presidents. The Tarbais beans in the cassoulet were great.

Barack was not the only Obama in Paris last summer. Michelle and the girls were also here and had a shopping expedition to Bonpoint, the well-known children's clothing store on rue de Tournon. In need of a dress for a cousin's grand-daughter, we took ourselves off there and loved the store. It's housed in a beautiful airy building, with room after high-ceilinged room of creatively merchandised clothes for besotted grandparents. The best part however is a hard-to-find tea salon/café downstairs, through a window, and into the garden. Don't tell anyone.