Here's Looking at You, USA!
10.20.2012
Street art by Speedy Graphito
While April in Paris is the customary month for visitors, October is also huge. We like to say that we've had more visitors from L.A. (and elsewhere in the U.S.) in those two months than in the last five years we spent in Los Angeles itself.
Top question we get asked, after "How can *I* move here?" is, "Do you miss the States?"
How? It's impossible to walk more than a few blocks in Paris and not see some American iconography, or a reminder of that cultural tsunami.
Back in 1982, the incumbent French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, gave an incendiary speech in which he blasted the United States's "cultural imperialism," and advised that other cultures enact protectionist measures against the way the American cultural/consumer juggernaut "grabs consciousness, ways of thinking, ways of living."
In those days, to cite but one example, the Hollywood machine was squeezing smaller French films out of the marketplace in both countries, a cultural trend that required state intervention, Lang thought.
Interesting concept, but there was no way American culture wasn't going to overwhelm the world like a tsunami. The French Academy tried to ban English words like "weekend," and "hot dog," but what do the French now celebrate on Saturday and Sunday?--"le weekend," when they eat "le hot dog." McDonalds, Starbucks, and KFCs are ubiquitous, and American apparel stores dot the Champs Elysses like chocolate sprinkles on a cappuccino.
The list of American words is endless now, as are the American images, for better or worse, that form a great deal of the street art, and advertising, that we see daily.
So, a portfolio of Americana, as filtered through the French consciousness and reflected back. Then just for fun down below, another Paris Play Pop Quiz.
Street art by GZUP
Street art by Shadee.K
Street art by Jef Aerosol, legs by Jerome Mesnager
Paris Play Street Art Pop Quiz
Below you will find twenty more American-inspired images from Paris street art.
Look at each of the twenty images, then post a single comment listing the names of the person, character, or American cultural icon you see; i.e., #1 is ____________________, #2 is _______________________, and so on through twenty.
We suggest you enter your answers in your own word processing program, then cut and paste them into the comments section below, which sometimes eats or loses comments entered directly.
The first five people who get every one right will each get their choice of photograph from any 2012 Paris Play post, e-mailed to them in high-resolution, from which they will be free to make a single print for their own enjoyment.
Leave your e-mail when you leave your guesses, so we can contact you with your prize. We will favor longer than shorter answers (i.e. Michael Keaton as Batman), but these aren't essay questions.
If no one gets them all right, we'll take the answers with the best nineteen of twenty, or eighteen of twenty, etc. You have until midnight, Paris time, October 26 to get your answers in.
Good luck, and thanks for playing.
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8. Street art by Jef Aerosol
#9. Street art by Jef Aerosol
#10
#11
#12
#13
#14
#15
#16
#17
#18
#19. Street art by Jef Aerosol
#20. Street art by Gilbert Shelton