My first and last Parisian night of hangin so hard that I had to worship at the porcelain alter afterwards was back in 2006, an evening at chez Tannie Stovall. Every Friday night for almost 15 years, Tannie hosts a BYOB (B for “bottle of wine,” not beer) affair strictly for black men—a rare occasion for male bonding that sisters have often tried in vain to crash. Politics, sex, sports: any topic is up for grabs while washing down our hors d’œuvres with pinot noir, sauvignon blanc, merlot and the like.

Tannie Stovall, born in Atlanta, graduated Morehouse at 19 years old, earned a physics Ph.D. by 25, and moved to Paris two years later working as a research assistant at the École Normale Supérieure. It was 1964; he was 27; he knew no French. Tannie helped organize the March on Washington that year before arriving in France, meeting Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, the widowed fam of Richard Wright and others during his decades in the French capital. Tannie even relocated to Nigeria briefly, bought a home in Spain, and has authored novels like Leroy Something That Rhymes.

Cantankerous in the way of your average 73-year-old black man, Tannie and I met minds in his apartment sans spirits last Friday afternoon for a lively convo.

(Note: Tannie’s in no way related to Tyler Stovall, author of the seminal Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Light.)

Tell me about the origin of your Friday nights for black men.

It started at the time of the Million Man March. I learned about the Million Man March about a week before it happened. Here in Paris, I did not know that it was going to take place. If I would’ve known six weeks or maybe a couple of months [earlier], I would have seriously considered going. I was really disappointed that I didn’t. I thought that the cause that was being talked about at that time was very important, and I wanted to somehow or ’nother continue along that line.

So I started giving dinners once a month. These were actually dinners, from soup to nuts. I did this until my wife divorced me. Naturally, she kept the apartment. [laughter] The apartment was very conducive to receiving; I could feed 25, 30 people. Whereas here, I couldn’t do it, so I changed the format and started having sandwiches, but doing it once a week.

When did it begin as a weekly?

Around the year 2000, 2001.

I’d heard Melvin Van Peebles came by once.

No, Melvin Van Peebles, never. He was invited several times. But I can tell you this. A friend of mine that knows him very very well, she told me recently that she talked to him about me and he said he didn’t remember me at all. But actually, I didn’t see him after the 1960s. He left here, I think, before the 1970s. In the sense of the black community that you kind of had that hang out at the Quartier Latin at that time, he never came back there.

Give me a sense of the tight-knit black expat community from back then.

Well, they weren’t tight-knit. Tight-knit perhaps wasn’t the word. But there were many more, I think, African-Americans that were not home types, like I imagine you are, you’re home with your children. But I have to describe Paris a little bit in those days. It was much cheaper than it is now. Someone that received $100 a month from the States could live here, could survive off of it. In fact, one of the most popular travel books was written by somebody named Frommer, I think it was called Europe on 5 Dollars a Day. And really, you could do it in those days. You had lots of people—artists, musicians, writers, adventurers, hippies and whatnot—that came to Europe, and particularly to Paris. I think one of the things was that it was relatively inexpensive.

You always leave Paris for Saint-Tropez half the year. Diddy, Jay-Z and Beyoncé put Saint-Tropez on the map for the hiphop gen, but it’s been the place to be for ages.

Yeah, we usually spend about six months in Saint-Tropez and about six months here. That’s what we do, my partner, wife, girlfriend, whatever you want to call her, and myself. It’s on the ocean. There are some places on the southern coast of France that are very much appreciated by tourists and French people to live: Nice, Monaco, Cannes and Saint-Tropez. Saint-Tropez was very much in vogue maybe 30 years ago. It still is, of course. I think what brought it to the world’s attention was a film, And God Created Woman.

Brigitte Bardot.

With Brigitte Bardot. Brigittte Bardot, she lives right next to Saint-Tropez. You could almost say she lives in Saint-Tropez, but actually she lives in Ramatuelle, which is a town adjoining Saint-Tropez. And there are a lot of wealthy people who come there. It still has a kind of 19th century aura to it. It’s not something that’s built up where you have these tall buildings and balconies that look out over the ocean. It’s not that. It’s still kind of small. There’s long beaches and lots of beach clubs and places like that, some of them kind of exclusive, others less so.

I’ve had French people tell me there are no beaches, and there’s no point in going unless you can get invited to fashionista or celebrity yacht parties.

Anyplace is somewhat more agreeable if you have contacts, if you have somebody that you can meet there. Saint-Tropez is no different from this. I think that perhaps people who go to Saint-Tropez, I think that you have a significant proportion—and I’m not saying majority by any stretch of imagination—but still, a noticeable number who go there with the hope of making relations with prominent, important, wealthy people. I think this is true also for Monaco. People I think go to Monaco, the idea is there are lots of very wealthy people in Monaco and if you go there, who knows, you might be able to make your hand with some of ’em.

I think a lot of people go to Saint-Tropez with this notion, but, oh, I don’t think it’s very important. I think most of the people that actually visit Saint-Tropez don’t even stay a day. They don’t even spend the night there. They come in, they walk around the town, they go out to one of the beach clubs or something like that. Have lunch, spend the day there, and they don’t spend the night. It’s kind of expensive in Saint-Tropez.

I’ve heard. So you’ve met James Baldwin? I went to college with his nephew, Trevor.

Yeah, I knew James Baldwin. I received him also in my home. I saw James Baldwin over a period of years. He was here for a long period.

How’d you meet?

In the street basically, I don’t remember exactly how. But he was very often in the cafés and bars and stuff like that. He was often seen.

[Poet] Ted Joans was in and out of Paris for a very long time, and in fact, he was one of the very first people I met when I arrived. I suppose I’m honored to say that the last place he lived in Paris was here in this apartment. I wasn’t here, I was in Saint-Tropez. And then the time after that, he lived in an apartment that belonged to my wife in the 18th. I’m happy to be able to say that.

You’d met Martin Luther King, Jr.?

I never met MLK.

And Malcolm X?

Yes. And I knew his daughter, he had a daughter that lived here. I remember her very well: Kibby. I don’t know if that was her real name or not. She lived here more than five years, I’m sure.

And the daughters of Richard Wright, Julia and Rachel?

I met Julia when she was a little girl, yeah. She’s still here in Paris someplace. I haven’t seen her or her sister. The last time I actually saw Julia was when she and James Forman came here to speak, and that must’ve been in the 70s or something like that. I think she moved to England for a while. She married a Nigerian I believe, or something like that. I don’t really know the story. I knew her mother, Ellen Wright. Like I say, I knew them pretty much as children.

Richard Wright?

Richard Wright died in ’62, so he was dead when I got here. Chester Himes, one of my great regrets is that I never met him, and I really could have. Just laziness, I suppose. He lived in Spain, and I had a home in Valencia, which is only about 60 kilometers away. All I had to do was drive down and I’m sure he would’ve said, “Hey, how’s it goin’, bro?” I don’t think that was any problem. That’s something that I regret, though I’ve heard lots of things about Chester Himes, and I’m not sure that I would’ve been able to get along with him. [laughter] But I would love to have met him.

Baldwin and I didn’t hit it off particularly well. We were cordial, I think, but I can tell you an incident for example that maybe started it. Somebody that I did know here also, Eldridge Cleaver, he lived here for a while. He wrote a book called Soul on Ice, and in Soul on Ice, he made some very critical remarks about James Baldwin.

I remember. About homosexuality.

That wasn’t the crux of Cleaver’s objection. I think what he said in the book Soul on Ice was that, up until then, the books that he had read of Baldwin’s… In some point in the book, you had a black man who, the highlight of his life was being fucked in the ass by a white man. You remember that?

Yeah, that’s why I said homosexuality.

Yeah, well, but I think the racial part of that might be the most poignant. I asked him about that. And I think that that sort of put a damper on relations between he and I.

What was his response?

He didn’t respond. He said something, but he didn’t respond to that. He started talking about how devious and sneaky Cleaver was, and what a big liar he was, and this type of thing. And finally I told him, The things that you’ve been talking about is not what he accused you of. Plus also, I think there was something else. I was a bit different from, I think, most of the blacks that you had there in the Latin Quarter at that time. I had a regular, steady job, a prestigious job, you might say. And I suppose they considerd me a conservative.

Believe it or not, one of the things that many of them in that area, the blacks of that time, reproached me was that I was very much in favor of Martin Luther King, Jr. I very much approved of what he was trying to do and how he was trying to do it. I think most of the other blacks at that time were more inclined to Malcolm X, towards the Nation of Islam kind of an approach much more; black nationalistic approaches to the problem.

And so I was one of those that they were saying, basically, I’m trying to get solutions to our problems by praying. Which that wasn’t my case at all, I wasn’t particularly religious. But they thought that unless you talked bad… Even some of them were going around talking about the Underground and this sort of thing. And it’s an interesting note, and this is in one of my books, one of ’em, actually maybe two of ’em, one of ’em I didn’t know about at that time, were CIA informants.

I just watched Malcolm X this week again, and was reminded about how the FBI was infiltrating the Nation of Islam, agitating the situation between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X.

“Agitating the situation between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X?” What are you talking about?

John Ali, national security of the Nation of Islam at the time, was identified later as FBI. Malcolm told a reporter Ali was instigating tensions between him and Elijah Muhammad, trying to convince him that Malcolm wasn’t about spreading his word, that he was only in it for himself.

Well, I am sure that Elijah Muhammad had people that were telling him that, whether they were FBI or not. I think that there were people inside the Nation of Islam that would’ve told him that. As I see it, and I did meet Malcolm X on occasion, I met Stokely Carmichael on occasion, I met James Forman on occasion. I helped organize the March on Washington in 1963, etc., so I knew some of these personalities that you’re talking about. I believe, as I understand it, Elijah Muhammad was very upset Malcolm X made his “chickens come home to roost” statement and told him to shut up. And that was the break right there. Malcolm refused, and left.

He was also disillusioned about the children Elijah Muhammad had with the secretaries, I suppose.

Let me say this: that’s a lot of bullshit. Everybody knew he had those children. Everybody knew. I mean, you ask any of those guys they used to have on the street selling the Muhammad Speaks, they all knew about this.

So in your opinion, Malcolm wasn’t disillusioned by him sleeping with the secretaries and it had nothing to do with that.

Yeah. If he didn’t know… Malcolm was a very knowledgable, intelligent man. He knew what was going on. Something like that, and he wouldn’t know about it? To me, it’s unbelievable. Have you ever read Haley’s book, The Autobiography? In the very last chapter of that book, he was very critical of Malcolm X. Have you read the book?

Have I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? Every black man has read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Basically, he was a real black nationalist, and then suddenly he becomes an internationalist. He’s saying white men are the devil, he said it all the time: “White folks are the devil.” And then suddenly he changed his mind, they weren’t the devil anymore. And I did get the impression also that he was in fact trying to establish a movement of his own. I don’t think there’s any question about that.

How did you meet Malcolm X?

Oh, I think the first time was sorta just like that, in Washington. And I met him again in Paris a few times.

There’s a famous story about how he was turned away at the airport and barred entry into Paris. But he’d been here before.

He had been here before. At that point, he had come to make a speech and he was refused entry at Orly Airport. Charles de Gaulle [Airport] didn’t exist at that time. There’s a guy who’s a teacher at Stony Brook college in New York that was handling that at that time, he knows all about these.

I’ve written that Sean “Diddy” Combs should open a Justin’s restaurant here. All the different Parisian soul food restaurants over the years have disappeared. Like Percy’s Place—

I don’t think you would’ve called Percy’s Place a soul food place. I would say it was a little more classier than what you would call soul food. But you’ve had black entrepreneurs here, I mean, lots of ’em. You don’t have very many now. There was a fella named Bill Dawsey that had a restaurant-bar for a few years.

Haynes was there for a very long time, until he died. Then after that, his wife took care of it all. Everybody went to Haynes at one time or another. I saw lots of people in the movie industry there, for example, on occasions. Peter O’Toole and lots of others whose names I don’t remember. And then there was Conway’s, she must’ve been there for 10 years or so.

And way back now, when I first arrived, there was Buttercup’s. I don’t know if she called her restaurant Buttercup’s or not, but there was a long article in Ebony magazine by a fella named [Charles L.] Sanders about Buttercup’s. The title of the article was “Big-hearted Buttercup.” Buttercup was either the wife or the girlfriend or the mistress of Powell.

Adam Clayton Powell?

No, no. The musician.

Oh, Bud Powell.

Bud Powell. And there’s a lot in the article about their relationship. She had a restaurant in Montparnasse, near where the Tour Montparnasse is constructed now. Right there, that was where Buttercup had her restaurant. And there were others also.

Had you been to Bojangles?

Yeah, I went to Bojangles. I was at Bojangles and Buttercup’s and Bill’s place and Haynes.

Who had the best cornbread? Did you enjoy one restaurant over the others?

I’m not into that kind of thing. If it’s edible, it’s good enough for me. There’s Randy’s, of course. Randy [Garrett] had his place [The Rib Joint] for 10 years or so, maybe more than that, I’m not really sure.

There’s one other person who should be mentioned, and that’s Johnny Romero. There was a prize-winning play written about Johnny Romero, it’s called No Place to be Somebody. It ran off-Broadway for years, and in fact, I think it was sort of being renovated a couple of years ago. I don’t know what finally happened to that. But Johnny Romero had a place called Les Nuages. Les Nuages was a bar-nightclub, if you like. But he was one of the most important personalities in the black community in Paris. Google him, I think you’ll find a lot about him. But Les Nuages was very close to the Church of St.-Germain-des-Prés.

Why do you think there are less black American businesses here now?

I don’t think that the crowd of the people that they catered to exists now nearly as much now as it did then. I think that one thing very important was the United States Army. The United States Army was here until about 1968, they were stationed. The NATO headquarters was just down here in Brussels, right outside of Paris. And the fact that you had the US Army here, you had huge amounts of Americans here associated here with the Army. And when the Army left, many of these people trickled away.

Then you had also the business community. American companies at that time, a lot of ’em brought people from the United States to work in their companies in France. And as time went by, I think most of these companies came to think that it’s much cheaper to get somebody in France. You don’t have to pay for them to have a place to stay, you don’t have to pay for their children to go to school, on and on. So I think that quantity of people that were associated with American business enterprises that were stationed here has gone down dramatically.

At one time, you had about 15 African-Americans who worked for American banks here. And I don’t think that you have any now. But I don’t think that it’s just that the African-Americans no longer hold these positions; I think that these positions now are held by French people, because the companies find it cheaper. So that means that the population has gone down. By 1975 or so, the quantity of the black Americans that you saw hanging around in joints like Haynes and certain cafés in the Quartier Latin, they dried up like mad.

You’d never consider living in America again?

I would consider living anyplace. I could move to Spain, where I had a home for about 30 years. I could move back there. I like Spain.

Yeah, but America specifically.

America’s like any other place.

You were born in America. It’s not just like any other place.

The fact that I was born there, I don’t think that—

You have family there still, presumably.

I have lots of family there.

So, that makes it a bit different.

I talk to ’em two or three times a week practically, on the telephone. I don’t feel that I’m that distant. I just left America about a month ago. I was back three times last year to the United States. I don’t know. There’s nothing that attracts me, I’ll put it that way, that makes me want to, let’s say, go live there, no more so than any other place. There’s nothing that makes me want to go live in China, for example. [laughter]

I still consider myself an American, very much so. I’ve been very active in the Democratic Party for years. I gave a maximum amount of money to Obama that was allowed by law when he was running for president. I went to Morehouse College like yourself, I gave them a substantial amount of money also when I went back for my 50th anniversary. So I feel that I am American, put it that way. But where I want to live, that’s something else.

I personally feel that life is in a sense sweeter in France than in the United States. A lot of people do in the world, it’s not just… You know, in Germany, they say, “Happy as a Frenchman in France.” When I see people that I grew up with, and my family also, I think that, well, they work maybe harder than I would like to. That’s one thing. [laughter] I think that for most of ’em, life is more stressful than my life here in France. Maybe my life wouldn’t be stressful in the United States, I don’t know.

But I do know this: that if I went back to Atlanta, I would change a lot of my habits. For example, here, I don’t think about where I’m going. I can wander anyplace, basically. And I wouldn’t do that in Atlanta, especially at night. To me, it’s worse now, because the economic situation is very bad, especially in the black community. People are talking about 20% unemployment among black men, and even higher among young black men. This creates a situation where people become desperate.

My last time in Atlanta, I saw a fight break out at a gas station between some teenage black girls. One was handing her baby off to a friend so she could box.

Something that also turns me off a little bit when I’m there: going to fill the gas tank and there’s the guy behind this thing with the bars and the heavy glass.

To protect them against gunshots, yeah. It’s common.

I rather prefer the situation here. In fact, sometimes some of my relatives have come here; they see things like the open market and say, “I don’t understand. You could just pick up something and not pay! You could just walk out of here without paying!”

I have not gotten over my youth in the United States. You graduated 12 years ago, you say, from Morehouse College?

Almost 20, actually. Class of 1993, 18 years ago.

Eighteen years ago, okay. The situation in 1993 was much better at Morehouse in Atlanta for blacks than it was in ’57 when I graduated. In ’57 when I graduated, black people were oftentimes deliberately treated with disdain. Plus, the social etiquette, if you can call it that, demanded that blacks be obsequious to whites. Even things like yielding space on the sidewalk. Whites were served first if you go into a store. Little things like this which I found annoying. And also, being deprived of a great deal of the cultural life in Atlanta was not something that I appreciated. There were films that came to Atlanta that I never got a chance to see because they never came around to the black theaters. There were a few theaters that had black and white sections, but there were films that came to theaters that only had white sections. And they never came to the black theaters.

I remember one such film, Christopher Columbus. This was about 1955, ’56. It played at the Realto Theater. There’s nothing there but blacks now, but in those days, it was an all-white movie house. And that film never came to the black community theaters. I finally saw that film maybe 30 years later, on Spanish television in Spain. [laughter]

When my coworker showed up to work in leather pants and a Rolling Stones T-shirt, I knew she wouldn’t stick around long, and indeed she didn’t. (Neither did I, for that matter.) Working together last year at a “leisure newswire” that shall remain nameless, Marie-Noelle was an energetic light in the office with bigger fish to fry… thus pretty instantly familiar. She had a friend I just had to meet, she kept saying, who she knew I’d hit it off with. Which is where Raina came in.

On a two-hour lunch break at Fuxia, an Italian spot near the Canal Saint-Martin, Raina Lampkins-Fielder and I broke bread last summer, sipping wine and rapping all about art, Brooklyn and parenthood. A former associate director at the Whitney Museum’s education department—with stints at both the Andy Warhol Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art—Raina had just given birth to twins, and devoured our adult conversation time like a crispy baguette doused in extra-virgin olive oil.

Hope you do too.

We recently connected in the pouring rain at Odette et Aimé café to discuss more about her editorial spot at the new Paris-based, English-language some/things (pronounced “some slash things”) magazine, and other furthermuckin topics of choice.

No one I speak to for the Expat Q has moved here for “political reasons,” like Americans used to once upon a time. Care to speak on that?

We certainly didn’t leave for political reasons at all. It’s not as if I didn’t kind of think about that. But then when you really think about what you do for political reasons, no, you stay and you fight the good fight. That’s what you do. You don’t flee: you stay. Also, if I would’ve left the US for political reasons…France? Is this the place to choose? [laughter] I don’t necessarily think so. Not for some remarkable French, all-embracing, democratic whatever. I mean, this isn’t that place. It’s not the place to go to.

It did have that kind of veneer, but now that is, like, gone. Fully gone. It’s gone so much that you have those parts where you’re like, “Hmm, I’m raising my little kids here?” I’m kinda glad London is close, so they can see some black folks in suits. Black people on television outside of the month of August. In commercials, maybe with, like, natural hair. [laughter] Those forced bangs, very straightened, it’s not working on little black girls’ hair, man. [laughter] Hopefully there’ll be some sort of change, but you don’t even see many black folks here with dredlocks who are not American.

What are your thoughts on blackness in Paris?

It’s really complicated, because my blackness in Paris is not a black French person’s blackness in Paris. I’ve traveled places where it would be physically impossible for me to kind of assimilate in a certain way. But you try to assimilate in some ways. You try to take on the posture of a country. And I realized, maybe because of living here, and also raising children here, that it is important to me to not take on the posture and attributes of this country. Because it is beneficial to me, being of African origin, to be American.

What I feel, and maybe I’m wrong, but this principle of, “Regardless what color you are, what your religion is, you’re French” is really such a fictional thing. It doesn’t manifest itself in a way that is actually egalitarian. What it does is, it excuses them from having a conversation about difference. And the differences that are here should be this amazing intellectual and cultural currency; they completely deny to take advantage of [it].

I realized that the kind of horrible legacy of saying “everyone is French” is that it makes it difficult for someone who is French but doesn’t look like what a French person imagines themselves to look like to have even developed the language through which to express it. Because they have been raised French.

I tend to know many more black folks in Paris who have come from somewhere else. And it’s not like everyone is going towards this black expatriate community. Those things happen, but it’s not like it’s a black American expatriate community. It’s friends from all parts of the world, they’re pan-African, who kind of find themselves together. We realized that we didn’t really have the type of really close relationships with black French women, and it was curious.

There’s another divide even within that kind of “being black in Paris.” I’ve had people say, “Well, it’s obvious you’re American before you open your mouth.” Well, what is that? “It’s the way that you move.” And so that’s going to define you in a certain way to both white people and black people. You know, I don’t choose to necessarily believe everything that somebody tells me. [laughter] Those are some of the thoughts that are out there. I think it is hard to be black in France.

How do you feel about raising your kids here, in terms of their identity?

What’s interesting is not only teaching them about blackness, but also kind of the definition of what that is, and whose blackness it is. Because my context would be kind of an African-American idea of blackness. Part of what is imbedded in that is insuring a kind of Americanness about them as well. And so it makes it a little bit complicated. Plus, my husband’s British. So there’s kind of that Britishy stuff to bring in. And we’re a multicultural family who have children who look like the spectrum of the races.

At the supermarket, an old woman was trying to get some change and she couldn’t find it, so I started to get her some change. She pointed out my babies, and I’m sure she assumed I was the nanny. I could be nothing but the nanny. [laughter] Which I certainly get a lot, particularly when they were much younger, ’cause some people [tend to] not think I’m their mother because of the way that they look. This woman, I could barely understand all that she was saying, but what she had said that I did get was that she was not into my one child because she was darker, and said something to the effect of, not knowing that they were mine anyway, she could kind of accept that the white child was okay.

I know that I’m probably considered American first to a French person than a black person. So that’s quite a difference. There is something about that that’s quite liberating. Not that I ever felt a burden in the States. I’ve never not wanted to be black or to be different. Sometimes I have felt like I needed to be more of something, but I’m okay with who I am, and have been for quite a while. The American thing here trumps everything. You’re just like any other American.

White children in France can play with black dolls. It’s just a doll. It’s a doll first. It’s not a statement that a person is making. Whereas in the States, if it’s a white family and they gave their child a black doll, they’ve had conversations. [laughter] Whereas here, people just do it.

What’s so amazing is that they’re not necessarily helpful to their own folks, who don’t have the flexibility to straddle the lines of being a French person here and being part of a viable international community. A Senegalese community is considered an immigrant. I can’t really speak to certain things, because I know I’ve been given a very different entrée to things.

How did some/things magazine come about?

I’d never done a magazine before at all. And funnily enough, I was at a party and met someone who was doing another magazine called UOVO. She said, “Oh, would you like to do something for this magazine?” What I discovered now that I’ve worked on two magazines is that I work on magazines that call themselves magazines but are in fact books. You know, they function as sort of curated books. So I did a couple of things for UOVO, which is super, and then they disbanded because of this crisis.

But at a launch party for UOVO, I met this woman, Monika Bielskyte, the creative director who actually founded some/things. This is before that was anything. She just started talking to me, and I liked her. She said, “Let’s stay in touch.” I knew she was a photographer, and I liked her spirit. She was unusual. Finding that person in Paris who a) comes up to you—

Is she French?

No, she’s Lithuanian.

There you go.

[laughter] But somebody who comes up to you and says, “You look kind of interesting to me. What’s your story?” That’s her approach. I didn’t really follow up. I had her card, she had my card, she would send me things like, “Look at my work.” I never followed up. And then finally, like two years ago, I looked at her work on her site, and I really liked it. I liked her aesthetic, I like her eye, what she focused on. So I said, “Let’s talk, I’d love to do something.” “I’ve started this magazine, don’t you want to do something, da da da da?” And I’m like, “Well, I have no time.” I just had the twins.

But then she’s like, “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.” So then we started doing this magazine.

The launch party was great; I liked the space too. What’s the point of some/things?

There are three of us who do the content. I oversee all of the contemporary art. And now that we have a creative agency that’s come from the book, I’m the deputy art director. And at the gallery, I’m the deputy art director for the art budget of the gallery.

The whole point of some/things is, we really wanted to create something that was unique, that tells some sort of story—whether we’re dealing with an artist or a fashion designer or politics or what have you—that we’re kind of taking on something that’s, it’s a different view to it. We want to spend the time in interviews, we want to create portraits of people, portraits of ideas. In some ways, the book itself becomes a portrait of who we are, who the team is, as people. Because we don’t say, “a third of it has to be fashion, a third has to be art, a third has to be politics.” Every book starts from something that’s just random, that excites us.

Everything has a primal theme and a title. The last one was called Farewell My Concubine. That was based on the film. Not that we wanted to reënvision that story, or not as if it would be even overtly communicated to the audience. But we liked some of the color palette that came out of the film, a certain type of red. Ideas of transformation. Certain ideas of sexuality, of a changeability. That’s what drove the artists, the personalities, the musicians, all the people that we selected. And it certainly provided the direction for how we would interact with them.

The types of interviews that we had were exhaustive interviews. Some of the people in that issue, they could start their memoirs from the interview that we had with them. [laughter] But it was really getting into the person, portraits of that person. There are many more shots of people’s faces; we really wanted to have the actual portrait of the artist.

I think of it as this tone poem: this idea that you can go from the beginning to the end of this book and that it is literally about a journey. We don’t have any ads, because that would sort of interrupt the flow. It also places it in a time, it assumes something. We’ll draw from anywhere. If there’s someone who did something in 1920 that we think visually works, whatever. It’s quite a personal thing that we hope has sort of visual and intellectual resonance for others.

The issue that we’re working on now, it’s called The Wings of a Locust, dealing with ideas of architecture, ghostly presence, loss, memory, transparency. A color palette that came out of just looking at images of oil spills [laughter] and the way that an oil spill—just a certain type of shimmer, a certain palette that came out of that—wanting to find ways of replicating it.

These are the things that drive the sensibility of it. And the sensibility of the magazine also is a little bit dark. It’s not like this happy dance through these images. It’s a little dark. But we also want it to be revelatory in a way. It’s a little bit vague. But when you see the book, it’s actually quite concrete for the reader.

That’s what some/things is about.

And what’s going on at the some/things secret space?

Well, we had our first exhibition in November. And I’ll let you know: it is hard to do a magazine when our staff is this small. That’s over 320 pages of just pure content, no filler, no ads, while also opening a space that needs to be completely gutted and remade. While also then deciding that we were going to have an exhibition. It’s a bit crazy. We’re also having another exhibition, January 23.

The first exhibition was kind of an extension of the work in issue 3. I think we’ll continue to do that. But then we also want to have other activities that this space can accommodate, whether it’s people who want to do readings, or something that makes sense within what we do.

Our next show in January is going to be looking at fashion, but in the way that we look at fashion. ’Cause I don’t think art is fashion, and I don’t think fashion is necessarily art. I think both of them can be in some ways. But there’s an aspect of me that is a purist for art. I don’t want to put everything into a commercial market. But we do look at fashion in a very particular way.

Even when we did the piece on Yohji Yamamoto, the works that we chose from the archives to show, we wanted it to be something that for me looking at it as somebody coming from the art world, it would work for me. And it can be such a subtle thing. Like the part of the back that is shown that is clothed in some Yohji Yamamoto piece, a slight kind of turn in image can function as a photograph itself, as opposed to something that is a photograph of [the clothes]. We want to have an exhibition that expresses that kind of sensibility.

Let’s talk about your apperances on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service radio show on BBC 6.

He’s a great friend. Our children are extremely good friends. We met through our kids, and we became kind of fast friends ourselves.

I only know Jarvis from bum-rushing Michael Jackson at the ’96 Brit Awards. I don’t know any Pulp songs. Did you know him from the English rock band, Pulp?

Yeah, but you know, I didn’t really recognize him. He and I just totally clicked. It was at a time when I was really new in Paris, and he’d been here a few years. We needed to talk to someone. We would have coffee every single morning, kind of without fail, for a couple of years. We’d talk about life, stupid stuff, we would do the crossword together. He’s the godfather of my girls, so we’re really good friends. That’s the real reason why I’m on the show, if the truth be told. [laughter]

It’s an awesome show. It’s something that’s coming from his mind, the various types of music, the various types of references; politicians or artists or whomever that he’s got coming to interview. I mean, it’s just really fun. It’s almost old-fashioned, where you can go to a radio show and listen to it for two hours and you’re gonna hear music that you never heard before and you’re gonna hear [director] Ken Loach talking about something or… it’s fun.

He often would have readings, and so he asked me to read some stories for the show, which is good fun. It’s something that I enjoy doing. When I put on my more performative voice, it’s something that I can do pretty well.

Will you be on again soon?

The show is on every Sunday. If everyone writes in, I will be a regular. [laughter] He curates each of the shows, so it sort of depends. The last story that I read was for his holiday special, kind of about Christmas and the holidays. The story worked for that show. And the song that came after worked with that story, so it really depends on that.

Was your grad work at the University of Cambridge your only experience living abroad?

I spent a semester abroad in London before, when I was in undergrad. I got into it, and got a lot of friends. It was through the Yale program, and we studied at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. I just really loved being on my own.

And then Derek, my husband, when I was in London—he’s British, so his family lives there—he had gotten a job with Reuters. Well, eventually with Reuters, but he first got a job being editor-in-chief of a Russian business magazine called Kak Dela. It was actually in Russian and English, in St. Petersburg, in Russia. So we went to Russia and I was in England.

You visited?

Often. Then he moved to Moscow to be a producer with Reuters, which was amazing. So I was back and forth between England and Russia. I’d have eight weeks in England and then I’d spend like a month or six weeks in Russia over those two years. He was there full-time, for three years totally.

We moved back to the States, we were in New York… Pittsburgh first, and then New York. He’d lived abroad. He grew up in Hong Kong. When we were in New York, I became this sort of New Yorker. I never thought at all about leaving New York.

Where are you from?

Pennsylvania and Indiana.

You were born in…?

Ohio. I’m totally midwestern. It’s, like, not cool. [laughter] But I think it’s super cool. Who’s from Indiana in Paris now? So it’s kind of interesting. [laughter]

Chester Himes wrote his first detective novel, The Five-Cornered Square, at the Hôtel Rachou (the so-called Beat Hotel where Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs also took up residence); Richard Wright used to live at 14 rue Monsieur-le-Prince and lounge at the nearby Café Tournon, Moleskine journal in hand; James Baldwin scammed Marlon Brando out of enough bread to return to the States once up in the Hôtel des Beaux-Arts, right near the café where me and writer Karen R. Good had drinks a few months back. I don’t just know all this shit. I read it all years ago in Paris Reflections: Walks Through African-American Paris.

I’ve owed author Monique Y. Wells a solid for quite a while now then. It was my pleasure to introduce her to my beloved Queen Ann café and their heavenly soupy hot chocolate last Friday. I’d never before written an Expat Q on someone I hadn’t met personally before, but her Entrée to Black Paris gave me an edge into her aesthetic via Facebook. I won’t be here trampin through Paris forever—I’ve got a foot back in NYC already—but Monique’s been here since 1992, and she’ll likely be here long after I’m gone. Please, get to know her. She’s wise beyond my years.

Tell me the origin story of Discover Paris.

My husband and I created Discover Paris. It was his idea. His name is Tom Reeves. He actually came to Paris with me; we were not married at the time, we got married here. He was unable to find work in his field. He was a civilian, but he worked for the Navy. He was a cost-control analyst. When we moved here, unemployment was like 13%, and he didn’t have the right to work. So he was already way behind the eight-ball. If you’re over 35 here and you need a job, you’re in bad shape. That’s even if you’re French. Looked for work a long time, then decided, “Okay, let’s forget trying to get back into the corporate anything—do something entrepreneurial.”

We took a trip to Italy with a service called Insiders Italy. I don’t know if it exists anymore. But it was the first time we had ever heard of the self-guided itinerary. And we went on this trip, it was fabulous. Eleven days, we did Venice, Florence and Rome. We did nothing that we did not want to do. It was not any of this, “You’re in Florence, go to the Duomo” or whatever.

Later, the woman who put the trip together invited us to her place and we had dinner. She was living in London at that time. We were having a conversation and she said, “You know, I think you guys would be good to do an Insiders France.” And my husband said, “Well, you know, I’ve been thinking about this a long time”—this is new to me. [laughter] “I think we should do an Insiders Paris. France is too big, we don’t know it. And Paris is infinite anyway.” That’s really how it started.

It really was to discover Paris from any and all aspects people wanted to discover it from. My husband is white American, so it wasn’t conceived to do black Paris. That only came a couple of years later. We started out just wanting to do what we had done in Italy: ask people, “What is it that you want to discover in Paris? What do you like? Are you into photography? Are you into food and wine? Are you into history? Are you into architecture?” And we’ll write up an itinerary based on those interests. This was in 1999.

When I moved here, I didn’t even realize there was a black Paris or anything like that. With the exception of Josephine Baker, I didn’t know anything about this. So I learned about it. Eventually, I said, “We’re doing this Discover Paris. Obviously, it will be interesting to include an African-American component in what we’re offering.” So that’s how what we used to call Discover African-American History in Paris Tours began. That was the emphasis for writing Paris Reflections. It was partly a way to promote the fact that we also had expertise—

So the tour came first then?

Yes.

And Discover Paris morphed into Entrée to Black Paris?

Entrée to Black Paris is sort of a rechristening of our Discover African-American History in Paris Tours. We’re rechristening because, one, we want to let people know that there is a contemporary African-American Paris and there is a contemporary black Paris that encompasses so much more than our little part of it. And also, well, I guess those are the two components. One, that it’s more than African-American. And two, it is contemporary as well as historic. So we just thought, in order to promote the fact that we’ve expanded our scope, we wanna give it a new name.

How did you come to collaborate with Paris Reflections co-author, Christiann Anderson?

If I remember correctly, we met through Sisters. [Sisters is] an organization—it actually still exists, but is not functioning anymore—the official name is Sisters: An Association of African-American Women in France. It started a couple of years after I got here. I met a woman named Pamela Grant; she was married to a French man, she had a small child. She was starving for company. She was suffering from culture shock and she needed some Americans, you know, some reinforcements. She would go around and any woman who she saw on the street who she thought might be African-American, she would just walk up to them. She was starved for it. And she eventually founded this organization, and I was on the first board of directors. That’s how I met Christiann.

Christiann’s an artist, a writer and an editor. She was doing all that kind of stuff freelance when I met her. We hit it off and decided to work on this project. Actually, she was the illustrator of my cookbook, which is called Food for the Soul. That was our first book project together, and it was at that time that we were talking about doing something about black Paris. We toyed with the idea of doing a calendar and this and that. I said, “I’ve already done all of these walks. I can just do some abridged versions of them and we can put together a book.” And she would do the illustrations. It was her idea actually to do the book. But the walks are abridged versions of walks that Discover Paris supplies to clients, and the illustrations in the book are hers.

Expat Ricki Stevenson invited me to take her Black Paris Tour this year, and Julia Browne launched her Walking the Spirit Tours in Paris long ago. I know there are a million tours of “white Paris,” so so what? But tell me how you three differ.

Julia had the first tours. Julia was part of Sisters, she did her first two Walking the Spirit tours for Sisters. And that was my sort of eye-opening… “Oh! I’ve been walking by all of these places!” and, “Oh, that’s what happened there.” So Julia is sort of the grandmother if you will, or the pioneer or whatever you want to call it. Ricki came, and Discover Paris was not doing black Paris tours or anything. Discover Paris didn’t exist when Ricki came. She put together her tour. And we actually took her first, we were one of her guinea pigs and went out with her. This was many, many years ago, like 10, 11 years ago. My husband and I went with her. She put together something entirely different than what Julia was doing. Then when we decided to start our tours, we weren’t doing any guided tours at all. Ours were self-guided, so we were not really in competition. Same subject matter perhaps, but the format was different.

So nowadays, Julia isn’t living here anymore. She has someone here doing tours for her. Ricki, of course, is here on the ground doing her stuff. And we—I can’t remember if it was after 9/11 or after the second Gulf War—we stopped getting so many inquiries for self-guided stuff and started getting more for guided walks. So we started our own guided walks. Now all three companies do guided walks.

Still, I think the approach is fairly different. Our walks are always private, as compared to the Black Paris Tours, which are public—you can go on any day of the week. We work a lot more with universities and groups that are coming over. That’s not to say that the other two don’t, but for example, we’ve been working with Syracuse University’s Paris Noir since the inception of that summer program: 2001. My approach has always been with regard to all of Discover Paris’s offerings, tours, activities: we’re very rigorous and almost academic. I don’t want to scare people away with that. Our approach is very personal and personable. But we are not just skimming the surface. We are researching in depth everything that we do. So the information that you get is going to be… profound sounds almost pompous. [laughter] But we’ve dug, really. We’ve spent a lot of time in French libraries as well as ordering books. We’ve got so many stacks of books we could start our own library at this point. So we’re very rigorous.

Tell me about Les Amis de Beauford Delaney, the organization that raised funds for painter Beauford Delaney’s tombstone in France.

I had never met Beauford Delaney, I’ve never met any of his family. I became involved with his story because last summer, I was doing an article on African-American gravesites in and around Paris, and I knew that he was buried somewhere near. I knew he wasn’t in Paris, he was somewhere outside. I contacted a personal friend of his who also couldn’t remember exactly. He contacted some other people who he had visited the tomb with. And he came back with the information, the exact location in the cemetary, etc. And the question, Is Beauford still buried?

The question “Is Beauford still buried?” is relevant because in France, you only have your grave for a limited amount of time. You have to renew your space or else you’re dug up. It depends on the cemetary and it depends on the era. When Beauford was first buired, his grave was for six years. Nobody paid at the six-year mark. Americans don’t know this, and I knew this would be a shocker for people. And so it is very rare to see a grave that will say “in perpetuity.” That’s extremely rare.

Beauford died in 1979. In 2009, that would have been 30 years, nobody had ever paid his renewal. And these friends of his were really afraid that he was gonna be exhumed. So they asked me to go to the cemetary and find out how much it would cost to keep him in the ground. They raised the money and I went out there and I paid it.

Bless you.

They were just so overwhelmed. Because they had wanted to move Beauford back to the United States, but none of them was family, so none of them had the right to touch the body. And I don’t know, all kinds of conniptions, I really don’t know the whole story. They were so relieved that I paid this. They said, “Okay, he’s there. We wanna place a marker on his grave.” By then, this is no longer just a story. Now I’m talking to these people. And so I said, well, I can at least go out there and find out how much it would cost to get a tombstone. I don’t want anything expensive. Beauford was a simple man. He doesn’t need anything expensive, but something that’s gonna last. ’Cause I had seen Henry Ossawa Tanner’s grave and it’s in deplorable shape. And he died in 1937. His grave is in deplorable shape, and he has family here.

I went to a place, one of these funeral parlors, and got an estimate. It was gonna cost several thousand dollars. I said, “Money has to be raised to do this. And in order to raise money, we need an organization.” Because these people had just given me the money to pay for the renewal of the concession. But no one’s gonna be giving me—and I didn’t want the responsibility of collecting thousands of dollars or euros. So I started Les Amis de Beauford Delaney. I started it last November. And we commemorated the tombstone on October 14th of this year. It was fantastic. He’s in Thiais Cemetary, which is south of Paris. He’s in Division 86, and it’s the only new tombstone in there.

Saul Williams once trailed the Atlanta campuses of Morehouse and Spelman, flyers in hand promoting his performances with collegiate hiphop act K.I.N. (peace to CX Kidtronik!), or his starring role in an off-campus play of author Pearle Cleage…always something. Same thing post-graduation—Saul stalking Brooklyn’s Fulton Street casually inviting heads to see him do his thing at the Nuyorican Poets Café (he’s the 1996 Grand Slam champ), or Brooklyn Moon Café, or performing with Greg Tate’s old Medusa Oblongata…doin it. I know, ’cause I was there.

Saul and I met first in college during, yes, “the golden age of hiphop”; he dated a Nikki, I dated an Angie. I met painter Marcia Jones—the eventual mom of Saul’s amazing 14-year-old, Saturn—a year before he arrived in Georgia. We’ve bumped heads at Wetlands’ old $5 Soul Kitchen parties in the late 80s, seen a few shows together (Common, the Beatnuts, Gil Scott-Heron). The latest was Bilal, this past summer at La Bellevilloise in Paris. As of 2009, Saul’s boundless creativity has been erupting in the City of Light.

Speaking of eruptions, Volcanic Sunlight—Saul’s fourth studio album, recorded in Paris—will start bubbling over in spring 2011. I stopped by his penthouse space in the [undisclosed location] arrondissement to talk about the new record, his move here, his directorial début starring as Miles Davis and much more. Poet Aja Monet was hanging out from America, visiting, assisting. And yes, the City of Love’s big enough for the both of us. (Lenny Kravitz, I’m not too sure.) In many ways, we’re each other’s ideal audience; glad to have him around.

This conversation was conducted over Miles Davis’s Get Up with It.

Tell me about your living outside of the US for the first time in high school.

Living outside of the country for the first time happened when I was 16. I lived in Brazil, in the state of Paraná, which is in the south, in a small city called Goioerê. And it was a small town where absolutely no one spoke English. Someone in my host family spoke a little bit, and other exchange students.

They spoke Portuguese?

They spoke Portuguese. And although for the majority of the time I lived there, I lived with a Japanese family who spoke Japanese in the house—the largest conglomeration of Japanese outside of Japan are in Brazil. The father was a Buddhist priest who owned sugar plantations, which creates the alcohol that the cars run on there. So he was essentially oil rich. They had their own plane; it was crazy. There was an intercom system throughout the house with birds living in the walls with microphones there, and speakers in all of the rooms. You could hear the birds in the walls.

Big house.

Big tropical paradise with a greenhouse in the middle of the house between the living and the dining room. Crazy.

The thing is, in Brazil there was no middle class really at the time. And inflation went up 1,000% when I lived there. The money system changed over three times while I was there, as if we went from dollars to some other shit to some other shit.

You were there four months?

I was there for one year. There was so much that I learned from. One, I didn’t go to school while I was there ’cause school was on strike for the first four or five months of my trip. I was there to study, I was there to go to high school, to do 11th grade. But school was on strike, and I ended up learning English and meeting a lot of people before school even started. By the time school started, I was really close with the English teacher at that school. And so I would go occasionally to help her teach her English class.

I tried going to school for like two weeks but it was too much of an interruption. Because it was like, to have an American in their high school was too crazy for them. Even the teachers would stop what they were doing and just stare, or stand in a circle around me and ask questions. So it would be like I’d be holding court with the whole school. Like, “Is it true that Americans are more free?” “What it’s like to get sprayed by a firehose?” [laughter] Just like crazy, crazy questions.

The school was really mixed, actually. It was a poor school. In fact in my city, their high school, they didn’t have school during the day. They only had night school if you were in high school, because you were expected to work in the fields during the day.

Was it a third-eye opening experience living outside American culture for the first time?

I came from New York. And so I wasn’t exposed to any of that shit. Even when they asked me what it was like to be sprayed with a firehose, I was like, “I don’t know, ask my parents.” I had no idea. I was on some Cosby, Different World, Yo! MTV Raps shit. I was 16. I was trying to find out where I could find someone that could cut my high-top fade. [laughter] Drawing high-top fades for barbers like, “Just do it like this. I know it seems strange, but do it like this.” [laughter] Their clippers would be the mouths of clippers, but with scissors attached to it, so it was manual clippers.

I broke my wrists my first month that I was there playing soccer. I thought I was about to do this incredible feat after I had stole the ball, and got slide-tackled from behind, fell back and broke both of my wrists at the same time. My left one was the worst. I had to go to a hospital on a Sunday. The hospital was closed. And so we went to this doctor’s house. He took us to his office, which was across the street, like the YMCA type of place. And I watched them put weights on a pulley system as they had strings attached to my fingertips to try and pop the bone back into place. Like, “Add two more pounds.”

How long did that take to heal?

Six weeks.

So, all of those things, plus the fact that I couldn’t find hiphop on the radio. All of these things added up to the fact that I was in my head and relooking at everything I once knew in a new way. In particular America. And the black experience. Because people in Brazil didn’t really know how to deal with me. They were like, “You’re American: that means you’re rich.” But at that time in Brazil, to be black pretty much meant you were poor. Like here, I see how they treat gypsies here in Paris. You can see a gypsy or someone like a beggar walking into a store and they go sss-sss-ssst. You know, that little sound to like, “shoo, shoo, get out.” I would walk in the store and they would make that sound. I would purposely say in English like, “What? Excuse me?” And they’d be like, “Ohhh! Welcome! Ohhh!”

This is in 1989 in Brazil. I’ve been back, but I couldn’t tell you the difference. I know that things have changed tremendously there.

In Europe, you’ve been taking part in symphony performances composed around your books?

Yeah, there’s two. There was a symphony for ,said the shotgun to the head., there was a symphony for The Dead Emcee Scrolls. They’re both done by Thomas Kessler, a Swiss composer who is about 78, 80. I met him in 2003 when he was commissioned by the Basel Symphony Orchestra in Switzerland to compose a new piece for their orchestra. He was going to record stores telling people that he wanted to do something that was with someone like a hiphop artist but different. And people kept suggesting me. And so he eventually reached out to me. And I was living in L.A. and he flew there.

My father had passed a few months earlier, and this old man showed up at my house who had flown over from Switzerland to talk to me about something I could barely make sense of. And then he was just like, “Just play this CD.” He had sampled my first album, the song “Our Father” where I had sampled my father? He had taken that loop of my dad speaking and composed a whooole orchestra, a whole piece, surrounding that, this 75-year-old man. So my father’s voice comes through the speakers and then all these strings and oboes and brass, and I’m just, “What the fuck is this?” “This is what I do. And I am here because…” [laughter] And I’m like, Whoa!

So we’ve been performing that all over the place. In the past two months, we’ve performed it in Oslo, Norway, with the Royal Philharmonic in Oslo. And then we just performed it last week with the Hamburg Philharmonic in Hamburg, Germany. We’ve also done it with Berlin at the concert house there, with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra; we’ve done it in Basel; we’ve done it in Stuttgart.

Then there’s the other symphony, The Dead Emcee Scrolls, which is written for a string quartet. We’ve recorded that with the Arditti Quartet, which is from London. We’ve performed that I think in Vienna, in Austria, and even at… Was it Duke University or something? We did it at some festival down south as well.

I’ve asked Amiri Baraka, “You critique America so much; why don’t you just leave?” He told me, “It’s my home.” Complaining about the US for years with friends, I’ve felt like an abused lover who keeps bitching and doesn’t leave the relationship. But I moved here mainly for the French woman I eventually married, not politics. What was your motivation?

Like you, I don’t feel like my action moving here was in any way politically based. I moved here after Obama was elected, which to me means it’s kind of an exciting time to be in America. And so there’s a part of me that would even miss what that could feel like. But on the other hand, I’m kinda just riding the wave. Because I do know to value this perspective that’s gained from living abroad, and everything that I learned when I lived in Brazil, and did eventually look at America and myself and the idea of power and all of these things, and influence and culture and new ways… I saw how much that affected me through time as I began to work creatively in writing and doing music and everything. All those influences from Brazil are huge to me, and very much a part of who I am. And thus, I value what comes from living abroad.

An opportunity came for me to move over here just through an old friend who offered me a place right when I was looking for a place in L.A. And it dawned on me that I could do it. I could actually go there and creatively and work-wise as far as what I was working on with an album and all that, I really felt like this could be a great place to do that from. I automatically started imagining this idea of reinvention, which I like that idea. I’m constantly playing around with that idea. It’s been a year and a half, and it’s been a really cool experience in every way.

How has dealing with Sony France for Volcanic Sunlight been different from your major label experience with Amethyst Rock Star?

Let’s just be clear. Just in the idea of a standard contract, because in America, the system was set up with a majority black entertainers, black musicians, and white contractors. These contracts were set up, because of the racism institutionalized and what have you, these contracts were set up to take advantage of the artist. So the standard contract assumes more, hides more, in the US than it does in France, where a standard contract was set up for French men for other French men, where they have this sense of loyalty to each other and this sense of, “I would never try to harm you, I’m an honest man.” And so just in what you get in a standard contract is shit that you’d have to fight the hell out of and would be impossible for you to get in the United States.

So that’s just on the level of standard. Now bring in lawyers and a little bit of expertise and some experience that tells you, “Well, I want even more than that; I want this, that and the other.” So I didn’t get a standard contract. I was able to determine and to declare what type of contract I would take and what type of contract I would like. Because of previous works and all that stuff, and positioning, they were willing to sit and talk with me.

I chose Sony France because when my first album that I did with Rick Rubin came out—I was on Sony before, that’s the first label I signed to—my experience was at its most positive in France. When Sony America at the time 10 years ago heard my album, they said, “That’s not hiphop. We don’t know what to do with it. We’re not sure we wanna put it out,” Sony France heard the same album and was like, “Are you crazy? We’re putting this out now.” And there was a year-and-a-half difference between when my album came out in Europe, started by France, and then in the US. A year and a half time. The US did it a year and a half later, after they saw what was happening in Europe.

All that was sparked by Sony France. Those people that did that then, where everybody else has been fired, those people have just moved up. Those are my friends for the past… Even when I was working albums on different labels, those same people would help out, make calls, do all this stuff, even though I wasn’t on their label anymore. So these are decade-old friends now that I was like, “Ahh, this would be…”

So my experience and the executive office and all that has shifted tremendously. Not only because I’m working with friends—because I’ve been working with friends, when I put stuff through The Fader afterwards, [Fader founders] Jon Cohen and Rob Stone are friends of mine too. And that was also a cool experience for me.

But it also has a lot to do with the kind of album I’ve made. When I moved here, I had all my demos for the album already done. And I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I knew that it was a dance album, that it was a pop album. So I believed that it belonged to the infrastructure that already existed, and it was a matter of how to best do that. When the opportunity came to move here, I also thought, “Wow, I bet you if I did through there…” I started imagining what I could work out, and I was able to work that out exactly.

Erykah Badu talks about being an analog girl in a digital world—

That’s great. I forgot about that. Because I have this phrase on my album: something, “analog spacegirl, digital Pompeii,” something.

How do you balance your roots-shaman style with cyberspace social networking? I know you’re @saulwilliams on Twitter, you’re on Facebook, there’s a Tumblr blog coming. Do you feel you have to unplug periodically?

To me, the Internet is kind of like a club or a party at the mall a lot of times. You can make a library of it, but it needs to be a conscious decision. And I really feel like I have no business interacting with… I don’t hang out at the mall. [laughter] There was a point where I did; I don’t do that anymore. And so like the only reason why I really would want to go out and be seen is if I had something interesting to share. And so that’s pretty much how I interact. Which means I’m not anti. I have accounts at different social interaction networks and I like those accounts. I speak when I feel like I have something to share. And I don’t mean simply something to sell. ’Cause to me that gets on my nerves too, when it’s just, “Yo, buy this!” No, but when I have something to share, then I’m really appreciative of the fact that those networks are set up, because it makes sharing easier.

What’s your social life like here? How do you find the French socially different?

Regardless of what your job is, the workday really stops at a certain time, like six or seven, and then it’s like, “Okay, put that shit away.” It’s time to have a drink, to eat, to sit around and talk and [it’s] like, “You need this just as much as you need to work.” It’s really impressed upon you here, like, “Dude, what are you doing? It’s Saturday. No, come to this museum with me.” It’s impressed upon you a bit more, like, take advantage of the other half of your existance.

Like France’s five weeks of vacation.

Regardless of what you do. Yeah, it’s crazy. Even with school. There’s something like 185 days in the school year in America, and there’s 135 days in the school year here? Which means that [Saul’s 14-year-old daughter] Saturn has so many days off and half days and all of this stuff. She’s in school right now.

My social life is different in those regards. But on the other hand, I’m still pretty much a… You know, Italo Calvino has that book, Hermit in Paris? I’m indoors a lot. I spent the first year here in the studio doing this album. So I was indoors then, and now I’m doing a lot of writing. Either way, I’m indoors quite a bit.

Do you have any favorite haunts here?

Yeah, there are places that I’ve grown to appreciate, some really nice places. I’m not givin em out! I’ll tell em to you! [laughter]

Explain a little more about what brought you here in 2009.

The thing that brought me here was that I was going through a divorce. So I wasn’t just moving in L.A., I was having to find a new place which was gonna be the beginning of my new life. So it was a bit deeper than that. When that opportunity arose—the dude was like, “Yo, you should take my place” and it was the same price as what I was looking for in L.A.—it felt like a miracle. It was like, “Oh my god… Yo, that would make me feel better.”

And why? Primarily, I had been in L.A. for 10 years. And I like L.A., you know, I don’t have any of the bad stuff to say that people wanna say. Like, I’m from New York, I like New York and I like L.A., and I embrace the contradiction. But 10 years is a long time, and I’ve realized that for someone like myself whose life seemed to be fixated somewhere between love and ambition, that I was also finding myself interacting… Actually, I still can’t even call it. But it had something to do with love and ambition. And L.A. is an ambitious town, and this is more like a city of love. And I’ve realized that I needed to kind of feed myself.

I missed city living, but I didn’t really miss living in New York. And so the idea of moving to a city was really exciting to me, and taking the métro, all that. I missed all those things in L.A. Walking! And so when I first got here, that’s what my social life consisted of. Just getting lost, and then getting a bike and getting more lost. That’s what I’ve been doing. Now it’s cold, so now I’m indoors.

A more hard-hitting question: Would you go on the record saying Evian tastes like farts?

[laughter] It does. I’ve realized what that is, it’s the sulfur in the water. I can taste too much sulfur in Evian, and so I’ve never appreciated it.

You’ve said you’re living your life as a poem. We’re in accord on that. I feel like, if you call yourself an artist, then what kind of work of art is your life? When you read the biographies of different artists, to me they read like the lives of famous people…even if they weren’t famous already, you know? Do you have encouraging words for Americans who want to live out loud a little more, or maybe leave their comfort zones in the US?

There’s this, I think it’s an Oscar Wilde quote, and I know I’m gonna misquote it so I’ll paraphrase. He says something like, “If you aren’t living above your means, then you ain’t livin.” [laughter] The decisions I make are not really based on money. They’re based on how I would like to experience and navigate through this life. And I kind of put that and love and honesty first, and trust that everything else will follow.

I lent you Miles: The Autobiography this summer for your Miles Davis project. You’re planning to star as Miles Davis in a film you’re co-directing. Can you speak on it a little bit?

One of the things I’m working on while I’m here is, I’ve connected with an amazing screenwriter named Olivia Basset, and she and I are conceptualizing a film on the love story that was between Juliette Gréco and Miles Davis. So, I came here thinking about that and Miles. There was this wonderful Miles exhibit. I’d met Miles’s son in L.A. before I moved out here, and I spoke to him about all this stuff. Then came out here and met Juliette Gréco, who’s such an amazing French icon for what she represents for the merging of politics and art, poetry and art, poets and philosophers speaking through a muse, of the whole movement of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and her relationship with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Boris Vian and this whole circle. And how Miles and Charlie Parker came on May 8, 1949, and how they met. It’s documented, the concert, their meeting, and the love affair that followed, and the depression that followed with Miles when he went back to the States that led to the first time he ever took heroin. But I’m just focusing on those three weeks in Paris in 1949.

So we’ve been meeting with Miss Gréco and just talking to her and beginning the process of developing her story.

And it’s something you’re gonna direct?

Yeah, Olivia and I together.

In 2006 workers at the Cinémathèque Française were striking again over something or other; I arrived at their closed doors the same moment as a colorful troupe from the new Parisian musical, Looking for Joséphine. French theatre director Jérôme Savary’s homage to Josephine Baker, Looking for Joséphine was set to open at the Opéra-Comique Théatre at the time, and destined to become the biggest hit of Savary’s distinguished career. As it happened, I’d spoken with Baker understudy Carmen Barika through m’man Mark Darkfeather before she hit Paris and I recognized her (from MySpace?) outside the Cinémathèque. We all sat oustide the Brasserie les Spéctacles café talking shit for hours. Which brings us to the star of that particular show, Nicolle Rochelle.

Born Nicole Leach in Livingston, New Jersey, lil’ Nikki decided she’d be entertaining the world at the age of 5. She appeared on The Cosby Show (four times, as two different characters); in the James Earl Jones vehicle, The Vernon Johns Story; off-Broadway in Fame—The Musical; and an episode of Chappelle’s Show as Dave’s ex, among other things. I peeped Looking for Joséphine at the Opéra-Comique before its bigger venues and world tour, and the Brown grad did her thing: a sexy, comical, singing, dancing tour de force worthy of any other rendition of Josephine Baker I’ve ever seen.

Nicolle stayed in Paris after the close of the play in February, and landed fast on her feet as the lead singer of the French band, Ginkgoa. (I just missed them at Le Chat Noir last week, but don’t make the same mistake: they hit NYC in February.) After four eventful years for us both, we had a talkative catch-up at Café Latin during the light snowfall last Friday.

How’d you score the starring role in Looking for Joséphine?

I got this email: “Audition for a Josephine Baker type, to play a girl from New Orleans who then plays Josephine Baker. A little dance, a little singing.” How could that not be my job? And the day before, I had decided, “No more New York theater. I’m gonna move to L.A., I’m gonna work on my album. No more musical theater.” It just drains you and doesn’t pay you, and then you don’t get anywhere, ’cause no one really cares about you if you’re on Broadway. If you’re Rihanna, you could be on Broadway in a second. But if you’re me, you gotta audition for years, and you might get it but Rihanna might come in at the last second, and she’ll get it. [laughter]

When I called them, I was like, “Hi, I’m the new, reborn Josephine so I’d love to audition for you!” And [director] Jérôme Savary’s daughter was looking at the message like, “Who’s this girl, talking about she reborn Josephine? Okay, whatever.” I wore my grandmother’s original dress from the 30s, I wore her jewelry. I had choregraphed a thing, I had been watching her videos all week. I had already been studying her life, already read her biographies and stuff.

You’re singing lead now in a French band, Ginkgoa. How did that come together?

I fell upon this website that had a lot of announcements for musical theater, all these types of things. And I’m looking looking looking. “Ginkgoa: looking for a singer to replace the actual singer that had left. We’re a group that’s been around for three or four years. We’ve done about 60 dates all around Paris.” And they’re from Lyon. [Guitarist Antoine Chatenet] put his name and his number and said to look at MySpace. I click on it: the world of fairies/flirty/classical/bossa nova/jazzy… I’m like, this is me! I gotta be in this group!

I called him and he didn’t pick up. So then I’m walking around the area. Oh, there’s Jazz Manouche on the corner of my old house, I’m gonna go there. So I go there and I’m chillin, and I see this dude in the corner, he’s kinda cute. I go sit at this table and I’m like, “Hi, do you dance swing?” So he was like, “Are you a dancer?” And I said, “Mostly I’m a singer.”

And this was the guy.

“Oh that’s funny, because I’m looking for a singer.” This is the guy! People talk about conjuring? Like, I was almost scared. Because I was literally praying, I had shed some tears even. And my friend cancelled our rendezvous. Like, I would maybe have been at my friend’s house drinking wine. I walked in three bars that I had been in before. I was just staring at him like, “This is so weird. I was just praying on the street to talk to you tonight.” He had never been in that bar before, and I hadn’t been in there in months. I didn’t even live in that area. And then they closed the next day for renovations for three months.

So after that, I auditioned. And at first, he was like, “Your accent may be a little troubling, but either way we’ll work on it if I pick you.” But then he was like, “Of course I’m gonna pick you because you’re the most qualified” [laughter]. But also because eventually he started realizing and thinking, It’s a cool thing you’re American and not just a French girl singing French songs. Because it is chansons Française but it’s like jazzy, a little bossa nova, a little classical, even. All the songs are in French and there’s a very classical aspect to it.

You have solo music in the works too, no?

What I’ve written for myself is a mix of pop, jazzy reggaeton and a little house. ’Cause my favorite genres are reggaeton, house and swing. So those three genres are stuff I’m really looking to combine. I just record ideas on my BlackBerry or my iPod and then I bring them to the studio.

How easy or difficult is it for you to maintain financially as an artist living in Paris?

I stay with a friend now. I pay him a decent rent combined with my storage, because I can’t have everything in his apartment. It ends up being a moderate price rent, which I can make with part-time jobs. But what did end up happening, which was amazing, was Congès Spectacles [the French unemployment fund for artists]. OMG. ’Cause I’ve got enough money to survive for months without doing anything. The thing that ends up being so hard about the artist thing is that my voice is very sensitive. So if I had another job all the time, it might not be able to sing the way I want it to be, which would then end up jeopardizing my projects and getting the funds for that project that I really need. So I decided to not go back to the grind right away and just work on my album, which I been doing. Babysitting. I like to play with kids and work with them.

So you babysit?

Now I’m doing it again. The official company I’m with is Playing English. So I play with her and it’s in English so she can kinda learn English. It’s been kinda difficult right now, because of the pressure of English. She’s young, she’s a shy type, and so she’s a little nervous about speaking English, she doesn’t know it. It’s one of the harder times I’ve had with children, which usually doesn’t happen to me because I’m really good with the kids and I get along. But this girl is a little intimidated by the English so it’s a little more difficult. Sometimes I’m like, Why am I doing this? I just don’t know if I wanna exert this amount of brainpower.

I went into it with my mom right after Joséphine ended, like, “I’m going to Starbucks, I don’t care. I’m gonna make coffee. I love coffee, I’m in love with Starbucks. Nine-to-12 shift, I don’t care.” So then she’s like, “I’ll pay you, don’t do that,” ’cause she was so upset about it.

You really want to stay in Paris then.

I don’t want to live anywhere all year long. I’m really into traveling. I’ll always visit home, or I’ll visit Cuba or I’ll visit Ibiza. But I want my homebase, the first apartment that I own or rent again, to be in Paris. I’m trying to make it. But what my feeling is, is that it’s out there to have. This comes from my mom: anything you want, you can materialize. Kinda like the Ginkgoa thing, which was kinda weird. But, like, if you want it? I could literally probably walk all around here and find a café to sing in tonight that would probably pay me to sing. So you want it, you gotta go out and get it. If I hit the street and look, I could probably get a job. I’m living on my friend’s couch, and it’s fine for me.

After Joséphine ended, I also got sought after to do a film in France. I did a TV movie playing a character like Josephine Baker, La Maison des Rocheville. It was France 2, and it was five episodes of a movie every week. And I sang, I danced, I had my first little love scene ever in my life. I mean, I’m not shy, but the only bad thing is that now it’s on porno sites because that’s what they do. [laughter] I mean, it wasn’t that hard, but there was even an American website, the guy was like, “Thank god for French films! Thank you, France! We got Nicolle naked!” I was like, Damn, okay, my ass in the air. Great. [laughter] I’m not shy, but it’s a little weird.

So, that movie contacted me right when I was ending Joséphine. That gave me income, great. Congès Spectacle happened, that was amazing. So due to all that, it hasn’t been hard for me yet. Just now I started to run out. I have a gig in March to teach swing dancing. Sometimes little events hire me to sing. There’s all these venues. You gotta get on it and call people, or get out. It’s networking, it’s being out there, it’s looking around, it’s believing in it, and it’s great.

I interviewed Paris Soirées hostess Patricia Laplante-Collins weeks ago. She mentioned it was harder to up and roam the world as a woman in her day. The blues is full of men getting on trains and leaving, wandering. Is it easier for women to do that nowadays?

I’m really adventurous. It comes from my father. He’s completely spontaneous and always on an adventure. We were always going to motorcycle rides and exploring new things. So I’m really not nervous about places. Plus I feel like, I lived in New York, I can hang anywhere.

The only thing that actually recently happened to me that I felt… Recently I went to Morocco. And that I could see was one place where, I’ve never experienced that before, the kind of cultural difference where you feel that women aren’t so independent. Even if now it’s like, “it’s modern, you can do what you want.” But the fact that those women are still under legal law to not walk with a man at night that isn’t their husband? They can’t be in a car with a man that isn’t their husband late at night, or maybe ever? There’s certain laws where I’m like, wow, you know? I really don’t like that. It gives me a little agita. And then, only men at cafés! I don’t feel welcome. I don’t feel comfortable walking around.

In Lebanon, the same thing. Those guys, even when I had no décolité or anything, they were just like, “Hey, how you doing? Do you wanna have a coffee? Do you wanna go to my hotel?” I’m like, I’m not a prostitute now because I don’t want to have a coffee. I don’t like the treatment. That’s where I felt not free to travel. When I was in Morocco, I was in Casablanca, and I didn’t really feel like this was a place to walk around even. Like, where are all the women and girls? They’re in the house, and all the men are around. It was the weirdest thing. So that, I didn’t feel comfortable. The cultural difference you have to, I guess, watch out for.

But Paris is so… I read so many books about French culture and a lot of the things I read were about how much women philosophers are revered in Paris. If you ask an American woman, “Who is your idol?” she would never say a woman philosopher. But a lot of French women would be like, “Simone de Beauvoir.” Where we’re never like, “Margaret Mead is my…” [laughter] So it’s very interesting. I like the analytical culture. You can also be in a cabaret with your chest out and it not be like, “Oh, you’re a stripteaser.”

GINKGOA dans le Magazine Espace Francophone sur France 3 from Ginkgoa on Vimeo.

I once wrote, “The Brooklyn Moon Café—the epicenter of a renaissance in spoken-word poetry—was packed wall-to-wall every Friday night during the mid-1990s. The unassuming restaurant and lounge hosted a weekly open mic for poets, some of whom would eventually go on to produce albums, books, and movies: young, gifted and black poets like muMs, Saul Williams, jessica Care moore, Sarah Jones.” It was back in those heady days that I first ran across MC Mike Ladd. Ten years later, we’d go on to have parallel experiences moving to Paris, marrying French wives, and fathering two young kids at nearly the same moments.

Mike was initially signed to Mercury Records by the Smashing Pumpkins. Whenever he crosses paths with De La Soul’s DJ Mase, the pasemaster always showers praise on his old poem, “Ika Bricka My Brain.” The original Afropunk MC, he’s collaborated over the years with an avant-garde roster including Apollo Heights, Saul Williams, U-God, Vijay Iyer, Company Flow and more. Since moving to Paris from NYC in 2004 (same year as me), Mike Ladd has put out three albums, including this year’s Bedford Park.

Way back when, I wrote up something on Mike’s début album, Easy Listening 4 Armaggedon, for the Black Beat fanzine, and met him soon afterwards on Brooklyn’s Fulton Street through my homie Mark Darkfeather. (Mike claims we met even earlier in The Bronx through muMs, and maybe so.) We met again backstage at the Elysée Montmartre in 2005 in our new lives as expats, after he finished rocking the spot as Saul Williams’s opening act. (In fact, it was the first concert of my firstborn son’s life, kicking in Christine’s womb at the time.) I took him for Queen Ann hot chocolate and the rest is history: my first Parisian homeboy by way of The Bronx. Forthwith: MC Mike Ladd.

You’ve said before that you didn’t move here to enrich your experience as a writer or musician. Where would you have moved for that?

I have my fantasy places. Johannesburg, where I’ve never been. Bombay, where I’ve been. Guangzhou, where I’ve never been. But realistic places? Probably Bombay or São Paolo. São Paolo because of the people I worked with there, producers and musicians. I love megacities, and São Paolo’s that: 22 million people. And it has an energy.

One thing that I’ve become sensitive to living here is the continental difference that America has. Not the United States, but the whole continent. Because it’s made of so many kinds of people and so many mixes of those people, generally anything is possible culturally, and things are able to be invented. Yeah, every country has their patterns and their neuroses. But there is a sort of cultural liberty that you just won’t find in places that are older and where those cultures are much more established. São Paolo also has that. It’s got the few things that I actually like about L.A.—but I know I could never live in L.A.?—but then feels kinda like New York.

I haven’t been to Brasil yet at all.

It’s a dope place. I was there this time last year actually, and I did an album’s worth of beats in like two weeks, just blasting them out. And I can’t get that done here. My perspective of Paris is changing a lot. I got this new studio in Saint-Denis, I’ve been out there since May. ’Cause I was up in The Bronx by 199th and Grand Concourse. Not Bronx Bronx but Bronx Science Bronx. Still, I loved The Bronx. It was my favorite neighborhood I ever lived in up there. And so this is like the first time I’ve been in Paris and lived in a vibe that was even remotely close to that.

We both experienced the Brooklyn Renaissance of the 1990s. Where’s that happening here?

When I first moved here, it was happening at Le Triptyque. There’s basically one cat named Alfie Dosu, actually my man from the UK, he pretty much set it off. He was tight with [Nigerian singer] Keziah Jones, and it was really as close as I could get to like a Brooklyn Moon Café-like feel, in that cats would come in, and there’d be these all-night joints. That’s where [Nigerian-German singer] Ayọ got her start, so she would be like the French equivalent to Erykah Badu. We used to rock with Ayọ over there. This other chick, [Nigerian-French singer] Aṣa, got big over that.

When did it end? What happened?

Probably like 2006, 2005. Honestly, it was Wednesday nights. And I think probably that night just ended up being not that economically viable, so it lost its spot. Alfie is trying to start something up. Brooklyn was different in that it was a neighborhood that connected it. But to get to that [Triptyque] vibe, you had to come into town to be there. And that’s a big problem here.

You released three albums since being in Paris. Is your material received differently here?

The reception on both ends is pretty much the same. I would say France, England and the US in general I always get pretty much the same reception. It’s such a cult status and such a small audience that the world is small around it. This time around, the audiences have been super-enthusiastic. Because it’s like the die-hard fans, but sometimes that’s 40 people. And cats are old. There’s a lot of cats out there who love me, there really are, but they’re at home with their kids! They’d really like to be there, but there’s no way in fuckin hell they’re putting their shoes on, and I completely understand, ’cause I’m right there with ’em. [laughter] You can’t get me out of the house unless you’re paying me.

What was the hardest thing about making your transition here?

I guess maybe getting used to the posture of Paris, getting into the attitude. Especially coming from New York, where being open and polite is an important currency, and then coming here where being rude is the currency. I come from Boston, which has that same self-entitled bullshit. Basically, there were just not enough guns on the street to make [Parisians] learn how to behave, to put it in the rawest of terms. [laughter] I have this theory that New York was just as rude and self-centered as here, and then guns came in, and now everybody is like, “You alright? You dropped something.” [laughter] In the 80s it was just like, “Just don’t fuckin shoot me.”

I guess it was a combination of things. I resisted it being my home for a long time. I imagined that I was just in this neighborhood of this greater city that included New York—New York was downtown, obviously—and then London and Paris were also part of that city. And I was like, “This is just my version of Brooklyn over here. This is my Brooklyn Heights, but when I’m really going downtown, I’m gonna go to Manhattan. I’m gonna take the plane, but I’m gonna close my eyes and I’ll be there in a minute.” That was my perspective. Basically, the plane was the 4 train… it’s elevated.

But then reality kicked in two years deep when I had do the paperwork for my son and engage in the bureaucracy. When he started going into institutions—school and stuff like that—then I had to engage in those institutions and face the fact that I really lived here. So it was a gradual process. And really, I don’t think I even came to terms with the fact that, “Oh, I’m here” till really like two years ago. Part of that was helped by being on tour all the time. So I was always going from city to city. Still, this fall I’ve only been in town for, at most, a week and a half, two weeks. It’s in and out, but it’s enough of a break-up that it doesn’t let you really get into the rhythm of the whole city.

What was your resistance against living in Paris? Is it like living in a museum sometimes? I have an ex who lived in Cape Town for years instead of going the cliché Paris route.

I have the same impulse that your friend had, that’s it’s cliché. And also, what made Paris a great place to be 80 years ago—and this is my own jive theory—was this combustion of brand new modes of living, and brand new technologies colliding with very old traditions and ways. If you go down and see the Eiffel Tower, if you at the Bir-Hakeim bridge, if you look at certain architectural moments in the city, you can see how in 1901, people were like, “Damn, this place is like Blade Runner!” It was an incredibly futuristic city. There was a tremendous amount of industry, and a tremendous amount of technology. It was all happening here in a very specific way. And all of that energy was smashing into some very old modes of being in a way that wasn’t happening in New York, even though New York was probably spectacular in its own right at that time. It wasn’t nearly as sculpted in the way that Paris was. At the same time, there was still mayhem; Montmartre was a construction site.

And so things were being broken, demolished to make new things. And then the Europeans blew the fuckin shit out of each other in the First World War, and so then that wiped the slate clean of a whole lot of things, one of them being authority and the logic of authority. Which makes for a great moment—so you get the Surrealists and stuff like that.

And all of that basically over the process of 80 years solidified into more tradition, and sort of went the normal course of things and stagnated. All of Western Europe has stagnated to a certain extent. And, you know, the United States is on its way to stagnating culturally. However, places like São Paolo, like Mumbai, like Guangzhou, like South Africa, have these very old ways of being colliding into brand-new technologies.

And also, new middle classes popping up. That’s some other shit that’s very important. New middle class: not part of the leisure class, but just enough to have some kids that are ready to pop some shit off and the kids who have enough time to pop that shit off. Someone’s gotta be at least slightly privileged, I don’t care if it’s De La Soul or Lou Reed. You got enough time to write a rhyme and not just survive. Now there’s more access to money for black South Africans, so more shit can pop off. So you have the same thing in these other countries. And that activity and that rebirthing, that’s what makes it exciting. It doesn’t matter where it is, it’s just the elements that come together. And they just don’t do that here anymore.

Do you think that avant-garde art is more appreciated here?

In general, yeah. France has a general interest in the avant-garde, or in different things. And there are certain artists who are able to play here more, certainly they can find an audience here. Not everybody. It has to do with what’s in mode. So that’s one side. And that’s something that France also shares with Germany, certain cities of Italy, maybe in Spain. But yeah, there’s definitely like an openness. I’d actually put it a different way. I’d say there’s less of a need for pop music than there is in America or England.

So the avant-garde does get celebrated here, because it was started here and has a right to be celebrated here, and most of that celebration’s healthy. But the import of it is very contrived and self-conscious. Then we have the African fetish thing. As a light-skinned, blue-eyed motherfucker, that really fucks people up. ’Cause they’re always on a constant search for authenticity. My mom’s black; my father was white, and he passed when I was very young. But that’s an interesting thing. Just on the street I confuse motherfuckers. The only people who immediately recognize me [as black] are blacks who are from France or from Paris or from les Antilles; that’s it. Because they also have the same mix as we do. But the Senegalese are like, “C’mon, man. Yeah, right. You’re Spanish, dude.”

But within the general avant-garde audience, and on a very subtle level, it confuses them. ’Cause there’s part of the Parisian avant-garde that’s always like—especially when it comes to black music—it’s a fetish. They want their shit, they want their little fix. And they’re not scared of dark people like Americans are, or were. So someone like me comes along and they’re just plain confused. In some ways, I’m not authentic enough. Which is like, that’s really their problem. It may be my problem monetarily, but at least I can sleep at night. So it’s sort of an appreciation that happens. It’s complicated. And I think it’s been complicated for a very long time. Well, it clearly was. [Author] Petrine Archer-Straw thumbs out how fuckin complicated it was, that’s what her whole book is about, Negrophilia.

Back in the early 00s days of Savoy magazine, I copped an issue featuring “Paris Noir: A Former Expatriate’s Guide,” an article on where to go to unearth black Paris. The opening ’graphs described Studio des Islettes, a jazz music workshop with a secret password requirement, cheap red wine, and a speakeasy vibe. When I later heard of the more well-known Paris Soirées of Atlanta-born hostess Patricia Laplante-Collins, I initially took one for the other.

After five years here, I finally stopped in on a summertime Soirée in 2009 with Moms in town; writer Janet Hustrand lectured about champagne. Moms loved the atmosphere: the free wine, free food (free après the 20€ cover charge), and a blessedly English-speaking crowd after struggling with her French for weeks. I was a featured guest in April myself, reading from French Like Me, selling copies of Scars…

Patricia Laplante-Collins holds her Paris Soirées every Sunday these days, equal parts meet-and-greet and happy hour, with writers, filmmakers, painters, photographers and the like as featured speakers midway through. Known as Paris Connections till 1999 (and the African-American Literary Soirée before that), Paris Soirées is at least 11 years old in its current form. Each weekend, the Sarah Lawrence grad (by way of Spelman College) brings together a multicultural, international group of locals and tourists soaking in a night reminiscent of the famous Paris salons of the 17th century.

With Eve (her trusty black Labrador) attacking fleas underfoot, Patricia and I spoke for a while last Friday at her local fifth arrondissement’s Café du Métro.

How long have you lived in Paris?

Appearances to the contrary—because I look like a young girl [laughter]—I’ve been here for 27 years: August 1, 1983. That’s hard to say, because you always want to give the impression that you’re a young girl, but I’m not.

What made you choose Paris?

Well, I always liked Paris. I had a fascination with it because my Atlanta friend’s older sister went through an exchange program in Paris. She talked about the cafés and the Latin Quarter, and it fascinated me. I said, “Well, one day I’m gonna do that.” I did many other things. I knew it would come, but I didn’t know when. I didn’t think I would stay here forever, I didn’t think I would settle here. I thought I would just pass through.

The first place I ever visited was in Italy, and I liked Italians. They reminded me of African-Americans. I had worked at an advertising agency, and I got fired from my first job. It was so overwhelming—there was something I didn’t succeed at—that I decided I should go out and see the world and try to recover from this, figure out what to do. And it wasn’t easy, because it’s much easier for a man to go out in the world than a woman. So I had a lot of boyfriends, fiancés and all this stuff.

I spent a great amount of time in Italy, between Florence and Rome. I lived in Stockholm, I lived in Rome for a year. I lived a little bit in Berlin, but not much. You can’t keep floating around. I was gonna go to graduate school, and you have to be able to read in French or German—I was gonna do art history. German turned me off so I said, “It has to be French.” And when I took my first French course, it really turned me on. I mean, I memorized all the words right away. I was an A student in French; it inspired me.

So I already had the equivalent of French 1 and 2 under my belt when I got here. The only contact I had was a French guy that I had known for a long time who lived in America, who was moving back to France. And I could already speak French, so that helped a lot. I came and he helped me get all these working papers. I had a student visa, because I was enrolled with the University of Paris as a graduate student. You have the right to have part-time work, and he helped me transform these papers into a green card, full-time papers.

Can you draw the through line from the famous Paris salons of American writer Gertrude Stein to your own Paris Soirées?

Paris was a lot different before the Internet. It was much more simple-life. There weren’t places to go to meet people, and you were stuck with French people all the time. [laughter] It was hard to make friends. Now it’s easy, ’cause there’s Meetup.com and all these kinds of things. These days, everybody wants to meet people, so it’s got a different angle.

In Gertrude Stein’s day it was about just the material; learning about art, for example. And meeting the other expatriates, which is a very limited community. Back then, you came over by boat, and you stayed for a long time. Now, it’s people coming and going constantly. You kinda wanna get some sense of community. And there’s all kinds of people from all origins: from Spain, from South America, from Africa, from Belgium. Everywhere. So it’s a bit different.

I communicate information about culture. People want to meet each other and have a feeling of community, that’s really important. The link is, probably, she was very impassioned about the art of her era. Me, it’s just having this community, this expat community. But expats are different now.

We’re from different generations—

Unfortunately. [laughter]

It seems like there’s a wave of expats here from your generation. Were you ever all close-knit?

I would say about the early 90s, there was a kind of flow or control over it, before all of this coming and going for two or three months and everything started. Like, I’m not into AARO [Association of American Residents Overseas], ’cause I have a French passport and I don’t need them. But the other people were into AARO and Democrats Abroad and things like that. And we all interacted through those organizations. But now it’s much bigger than that, and actually, I never go to these American organizations anymore. Because all of the interesting people are outside of them. Like you. [laughter] You don’t belong to any of them. There’s no reason to go over there.

You had to belong to the American organizations because that’s how you could find Americans. They had the FUSAC [France USA Contacts magazine]; they didn’t have any Meetup or Internet or anything. So the only way you could find the people was at the organizations meeting. Now it’s all over the place with the Internet, you don’t really need these organizations. They have happy hour over here, and “buy your drink” over there, and different stuff all over the place. And actually, it’s better, because you meet such interesting people.

What I notice about the new expatriate is that many of them are not your traditional idea of people who went to Morehouse or to Spelman. They have another, “I’m from Los Angeles, blah blah, and I’d like to stay in Paris three months of the year.” And it’s just different.

I saw Paris Blues at the Forum des Images last week. Diahann Carroll argued with Sidney Poitier in the film over turning his back on his blackness by moving to Paris in 1961. How do you feel your self-identity as a black person changes by living in France?

One of the big problems in America is that, since we had slavery, you had to constantly come up with some justification. So one of the biggest justifications is that, “Well, blacks aren’t the same as whites. They’re less or something. That’s why they can be slaves, because, it’s not like us and everything.” There’s something that lingers through the generations about that, and I wonder when it’s ever gonna play out.

In France, they don’t have to do that, so they can just look at the person. They didn’t have slavery. They were involved in it financially; it was just like a business, like your share of the market or something like that. It’s the slavery thing that’s the difference.

The thing in America that you have to be careful about, no matter who you’re friends with, is that with each person there’s this thing of “I like blacks” or “I don’t like blacks” or “I’m a liberal” or “I’m not a liberal.” It’s some kind of position you have to take. And here, they don’t have to take a position. You’re just a person.

France is not the greatest country in the world, but a person is a person. If you’re an artist, you’re an artist. If you’re a street cleaner, you’re a street cleaner. Each person has a kind of dignity. And this thing about separating the races because one is better isn’t here. That’s not what they’re about. They’re about class, they’re not about race. It’s hard to overcome class. In a way, it’s easier to overcome race than it is to overcome class. That’s the big difference to me, and it hasn’t changed. Barack Obama, through some miracle, got to be president of the United States; I still don’t understand it. [laughter] But a black could never be president of France, because of the class system. There’s nobody who’s up there enough, in this era anyway, to get there.

How long before the first black president of France?

It’s so complicated, because you have to go through the political steps that they have. And I think you can’t get started. I mean, how many black mayors of French cities do you know? So that’s the first step. And then you have to be in the network. How do you get in there? It’s from school, but then you have to be the mayor of something or have some kind of political office. And I don’t see how you get in there. And like, Obama came from outside. He went through the ol’ boys network and everything. He just came from outside and he won, on intelligence. There’s no way to do that here.

Rama Yade [33-year-old French-Senegalese Secretary of State for Sports] couldn’t be president?

She might be a good lay and a good date, but I don’t think… [laughter] And she’s intelligent and everything, it’s not about that. It’s about the network. I think the network has to be really strong.

The first time I ever ran across Bronx-raised author Jake Lamar’s name was in the blurbs section of Touré’s The Portable Promised Land, a quip from Lamar’s 2002 Washington Post review of T.’s story collection. Grad student Vanessa Agard-Jones found me on the old Cafedelasoul.com message board back in January 2006 (remember message boards?), and wanted to hook up an inteview with Lamar and I at the Le Cépage Montmartrois café of his 18th arrondissement hood. Incredibly nice guy, Jake.

That was meeting no.1. Since, I’ve read his 2003 crime novel Rendezvous Eighteenth and seen him lecture a couple times in Paris. From my early days here, I’ve considered him a kind of Ghost of Christmas Future: what my life might be here if I stay for 17 years like he’s done. Most of Jake’s books have been translated into French; he’s an expat French media pundit, often discussing President Obama and racial politics on the télé; and if a modern-day, black-American community in Paris can be said to exist at all, he’s one of the figures at the epicenter. A Harvard grad and former Time writer, 49-year-old Jake Lamar spends most of his time in France teaching and writing thrillers like Ghosts of Saint-Michel and The Last Integrationist.

Welcome to the Furthermuckin Expat Q series, first installment Jake Lamar. Photographer Vincent Germain sat with Jake and I at Le Cépage Montmartrois last week for some atrocious hot chocolate and much better conversation.

You first arrived here in 1993. What’s the major difference between Paris ’93 and Paris 2010?

Like all the big cities, it’s gotten more expensive, more bobo as they say in French: bourgeois bohemian. Things just cost more, places are more posh looking. But at the same time, I think it’s gotten more multicultural. I think people have gotten more a sense of multiculturalism, but that could also be a function of where I live, up here in the 18th. Barbès is up here, the biggest African-Arab neighborhood in Paris. Where I live with my wife near the mairie has been a very mixed area since we’ve been there.

And politically?

Politically, I think since the riots in 2005, the denial is gone. Until then, you would hear French people say all the time, “One day, the banlieue is gonna explode.” Well, the banlieue did explode. And I think since then, people at least have talked more about the questions of integration, racism. I just wrote a piece for the The Root about the protests about [Jean-Paul] Guerlain. Because the head of [perfume giant] Guerlain said, “I started working like a nigger.” But 10 years ago, nobody would’ve jumped on that. That just would’ve passed. But a newscaster, she brought attention to it, she attacked him in the media on France Inter. Two days later, it became a big story. They protested on the Champs-Elysées, they shut down the store. That would not have happened 10 years ago.

You’ve met with many visitors and would-be black expats over the years. What shocks them the most about Paris compared to the Paris they expected to find?

If you’re talking about black tourists, one thing that people always say to me is, they’re surprised by the number of couples and groups of friends that are mixed. New York is a melting pot, but you keep to your own for the most part. It’s much more common in Paris to see interracial couples, to see groups of friends of different backgrounds, even though, I would say, it’s a paradox. Because you don’t see in France black CEOs, you don’t see major black politicians. You don’t have a lot of black people in the media. It’s starting—[news anchor] Audrey Pulvar. It’s just been in the last five, 10 years. So you have that sort of institutional racism here, but people in their day-to-day lives are much more relaxed with each other. In America, you don’t have the same institutional racism, but there’s more of a “stick to your own kind” mentality. And so often, I’ll just meet strangers in a café, African-Americans, and strike up a conversation. And they’ll say, “People aren’t looking at us in the same way here. People aren’t flinching when you get on the elevator.” I hear that a lot, especially from young black men: “Oh, I’ll pass a white woman on the street and she won’t grab her purse.” It’s not the same paranoia, it’s not the same kind of distrust on a daily basis. I mean, it happens, but it’s not like in New York where you’re conscious of this all the time.

The grandes écoles here are equivalent to the Ivy League colleges of America. You don’t find anywhere near the amount of people of color in the grandes écoles as you do at the Harvards and Columbias of the US. Why?

I think it’s a mentality. Harvard in the 1930s, 1940s, there were very few black students, very few minority students. But what happened in America with the Civil Rights Movement is, people made an effort. Harvard and other Ivy League schools said, “Diversity is in the best interests of our society. We’re not gonna remain isolated with Wasps and some lucky Jewish kids from Boston. We’re gonna go and look for qualified minority students.” That has not been the mentality in France. But again, this is something that I think has changed since 2005. Sciences Po, which is the big political science school in the grandes écoles, they’ve started a French version of affirmative action. The professors of Sciences Po will go out to Bondy and other communities and basically teach classes to the students, give them drills to prepare them to take the test to get into Sciences Po. In a French high school, if you want to go to a grand école, there’s a whole year between the end of high school and the beginning of university, and it’s called prépa. You go to an elite high school, you’ll spend a year in prépa, basically being drilled to take the test to get into the grand école. But you have to go to an elite high school for that. What they’re doing in the banlieue now, at least at Sciences Po, is basically giving the kids in the banlieue a prépa to prepare them to take the test to get into Sciences Po. So that’s the French version of affirmative action. They’re hung up on this idea of, “We’re all equal, we’re all French,” so they have a blockage with affirmative action. But this is a way of going out and identifying the most qualified students in the quartiers disfavorisés, the disfavored neighborhoods. So it’s starting. But again, it’s where America was in 1965.

What accounts for the lack of blacks on France’s silver screens? France has no really well known black actors or actresses, and we’re barely on TV despite being at least 8% of the population. What’s up with this invisible man syndrome?

A difference that can never be underestimated between the USA and Europe is that in Europe, you had colonialism, but you had the colonies far away. You had Europeans going to Africa, selling slaves and colonizing African lands. In America, the colonialism was in the territory. They went and got their colony and brought it to the US. So you had a huge presence of black people in America since the 17th century. After the end of slavery, there was hardcore segregation, there were lynchings, there was refusal of the right to vote. But you still had this huge black presence. So black people did for themselves. So you had black universities, you had black doctors, black lawyers, black politicians, black filmmakers: Oscar Micheaux. You had the whole black entertainment industry. It was totally segregated, but it existed for a long time. So by the time you got to the Civil Rights Movement, people were ready to integrate. You had black journalists, you had black actors, etc., ready to integrate.

Here, racial questions were always linked to immigration. So there was not a large black presence in France. I mean, they were here: there was Aimé Césaire, there was Léopold Senghor going back to the 30s. But there was not a sizeable black presence in France until after the war, until the 50s and 60s, until immigration. That started then. So you did not have these networks of people to help each other and to get each other to integrate. The NAACP started back at the turn of the 20th century; CRAN [Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires] started in 2005. That’s because you didn’t have these networks, you didn’t have this infrastructure. People say, “When’s there gonna be a Barack Obama?” It’s gonna be a long time, because you don’t have the infrastructure. Obama didn’t come outta nowhere. He went to Chicago. There was a black political infrastructure in Chicago going back to at least the beginning of the 20th century. So he could step into that, find people who knew the ropes, find people to help him along, and to have him find his constituency. That’s just starting to happen in France because there just wasn’t the presence here.

So it’s the same way with the media. I think I saw my first black newscaster when I was still in the 1960s in America. But there had been black journalists. And because of the entertainment industry, it wasn’t unusual to see black people on screen. Because there wasn’t that infrastructure in France, it is still unusual here. Ebony, Jet, The Amsterdam News, that stuff is just beginning here. And I think that plays out on every level of the society. Every profession, it’s the same problem.

What made you move to Paris, and do you ever think you’ll move back?

My initial inspiration to move to Paris was James Baldwin. I read Go Tell It on the Mountain at 12 or 13, and I was blown away by that book. I asked my teacher, “Who is James Baldwin?” and he said, “He lives in Paris.” And so I thought, that’s really wild. Someone with a background like this lives in Paris. It was very exotic to me. I was just starting to think maybe I’ll be a writer someday, maybe I’ll go to Paris. So when my first book was published, I won a prize, it was just a bunch of money. I knew one person in Paris, I didn’t speak the language, but I shared an apartment with an old friend, and just loved the city right away. And met great people, like Ted Joans, James Emanuel, Hart LeRoy Bibbs. These old writers, they sort of took me under their wing.

Ted Joans is credited with the first recorded use of the word “furthermucker.”

[Laughs] That’s very Ted; he was a great friend. And so I just met great people, and I felt very comfortable here very early on. Eventually learned the language, met my wife, decided to stay. And once my book started to get translated and published in French, my career sorta moved over here too. I mean, I still publish my books in English in the States first, but my presence as a writer is certainly felt more here than in the US. I have no plans to move back, but it’s not because I feel so alienated from the United States. I just feel really grounded here, and I really like it here. And after 17 years, my friendships, all the structure of my life is really here. I would feel like I was starting from scratch to move back to the States, it’s been so long.