We stayed a few days at our friends François and Sophie new home in the Drôme region. The landscape is gorgious near St Ferreol Trente Pas, especially in the rainy weather. You feel like being in China. Birds are singing at night. Our bird (his name is Petit Monsieur but you can call him Monsieur) was surprised and couldn't compete with the wild singers.

It was the first time in my life that I clearly understood and saw that many people create personal solutions for a global situation. They grow fruits, vegetables, breed truits, bees, cattle, cook bread for their neighbours, pottery, invent and commercialize processes resulting in soaps, cosmetics, while living far from the hippie style, in the now world. They are not criticizing. They do the revolution with honey. They are not against like so many emasculate revolutionaires from the big cities, they are for. This makes a big difference. They keep and maintain her faith in nature, which is for me, the hello sign of the Verb. 

Yesterday was a strange day, starting in the China mountains, ending in a trendy Parisian club called the Silencio, designed by David Lynch. Asia Argento was launching « Total Entropy », her debut album (NUUN RECORDS) which gathers some of her musical collaborations : Hector Zazou (†), Archigram, Antipop, The Legendary Tiger Man, Munk, Morgan (ex-Bluvertigo), Tim Burgess, Anton Newcombe, Brian Molko… and also me. We played together a little gig on the stage floor, reading the poetry of Apollinaire, my, her poetry (the beautiful lyrics on my song « Ugly Ducklings »). The whole evening was an experience of total entropy. Wikipedia : « Entropy has often been loosely associated with the amount of order, disorder and/or chaos in a thermodynamic system. The traditional qualitative description of entropy is that it refers to changes in the status quo of the system and is a measure of "molecular disorder" and the amount of wasted energy in a dynamical energy transformation from one state or form to another. » Asia is one of my favorite artists, totally devoted to art and a really profound music lover. She's a beautiful woman with an amazing voice, very ambigüous. I'm lucky to have made « Lou étendue » with her and Antonin Gaultier / Digiki, who had his birthday that very (yester)day.

Waiting for the taxi at the Bordeaux train station, I see Anne Wiazemsky. We travel together to the hotel. I tell her that our surnames begin with W and the rest is hard to pronounce. At school, it was convenient since we were at the end of the list and the difficulty of our name distracted the teacher in search of victims. Anne told me that her teachers circumvent the obstacle by giving her nicknames sounding Russian, like miss Poniatowski... It's funny to be sitting next to her, 24 hours after writing a poem against Godard (1). Anne was married with him and I know so little about his work. We are talking about Michel Soutter, a Swiss film director she has knowned and loved. Alain Tanner, the famous Swiss director : she contacted him with Juliet Berto after having seen the sublime Bulle Ogier in "La Salamandre". She is surprised to meet someone with whom she can talk about Soutter. She and Juliet Berto acted in "The Return of Africa" with Tanner (1973) ; they played Swiss post officers. Switzerland, Godard, on which I have written horrors… I have this poem in my bag placed between her and me and don't dare to speak about it. Godard : I tell her that I was stopped by the big name, the brand prevented me from going to the work. She said there is a time when Godard becomes obvious, this moment has perhaps not happened to me. We pass the Noailles café, her Bordeaux reference because her mother's family, the Mauriac, came from here. She told me that the city was once black, because the stone of the region oxidizes quickly. Now, Bordeaux is white washed, too clean for me. The money has ruined the city. We pass a facade that has not bleached its skin and I love this color dirty, which is the genuine character of a city populated by real people, a multitude city. I tell Anne about my film project on the 1871 French-German border, its 4056 stones that meander through the Grand Est of France. I tell her about my Alsatian origins. She evokes her parents meeting in 1945, her mother following the Red Cross in Berlin. Her father, from a Russian family emigrated to France after 1917, was a French officer who could negotiate with the Red Army. He secured the release of many Malgré-Nous, these young people from my region, who had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht and then emprisoned in the Soviet prisoners camps. Anne says : read my book "My Berlin child", I talk about the Malgré-Nous, my parents, their meeting in the destroyed city of Berlin, in Germany, Year Zero. Yes, I'll read it, Anne. Once read, I promise to get into Jean-Luc Godard's work. Perhaps I'm wrong : he never lied to his classmates.

(1) je n'aime pas godard parce qu'à force d'être lui-même godard se manque est dépassé par écrasé par ne laisse pas son génie passer sa maitrise du rayonnement éclat contrôlé calcul de la quantité de lumens imposant la croyance de godard du côté suisse plutôt michel soutter alain tanner claude goretta les films respectivement la pomme charles mort ou vif  jean-luc persécuté godard je le range sur une étagère je l'oublie avec tous les autres qui comme lui déjà à l'école mentaient à leurs petits camarades il disait j'ai ceci j'ai cela alors qu'il n'avait rien du tout

I'm not fond of Latin American music, but the music of Meridian Brothers is not limited by an immutable Latin American style, it is genius the same way Francis Alys is a Mexican genius in the art field. And this world really needs geniuses, they know how to revitalize the withered leaves of this place we live in. I recommand to listen and buy their work. The record label Staubgold is about to release a compilation. Here you can spend some time with Eblis Alvarez and the Meridian Brothers.

Medias, people, all around the world, even me, they all make fun of the new pope, jokes about him, criticizing this man for his supposed passivity during the cruel years in Argentina. A man who spent his life amongst the poor and chose to not live in the bishop mansion he was given in Buenos Aires, to stay humble amongst the humble. Do they know that being a pope is being chosen ? It is not ambition, strategies, petty calculations : it is the only power coming from service ; the only authority which is not coming from man, but from a promise made 2000 years ago. This is why it's still there, stupid.

The new pope fought against social injustice in his country. He was never at a loss for words, saying : « In this city (Buenos Aires), there are many girls who stop playing with dolls to enter the dump of a brothel because they were stolen, sold, betrayed ... In this city, women and girls are kidnapped, and they are subjected to use and abuse of their body; they are destroyed in their dignity. The flesh that Jesus assumed and died for is worth less than the flesh of a pet. A dog is cared for better than these slaves of ours, who are kicked, who are broken. » The new pope « visited both a mosque and an Islamic school in Argentina, visits that Sheik Mohsen Ali, the Director for the Diffusion of Islam, called actions that strengthened the relationship between the Catholic and Islamic communities. ». He deserves our deep respect, both as the descendant of the apostle Peter and for his action in Argentina.

William Wyler's parents were running a shop in Mulhouse. Recalling the beginning of WWI, William said that he regularly spent ‘the night in the cellar until the battle was over’ and then coming out in the morning ‘to see whether we were French or German’. A place where you never know where you are, who you are : this is called fiction. History has been a cinema school for the young Wyler.

Not far from Wyler's parents shop, the café Moll (you see the word over the red & white curtain). During his wealthy business years, my father bought this house. On the first floor, we had rehearsals with my first band. I was playing the bass, a tough instrument for fingers...

An other american figure attached to my city, Gertrude Stein, who spent a few months there (november 1918 - may 1919). She was sent by a NGO (American Found for French Wounded). This is what she says about alsatians in the Autobiography of Alice Toklas : 'We came to know Alsace and the alsatians very well, all kinds of them. They were astonished at the simplicity with which the french army and french soldiers took care of themselves. They had not been accustomed to that in the german army. On the other hand the french soldiers were rather mistrustful of the alsatians who were too anxious to be french and yet were not french. They are not frank, the french soldiers said. And it is quite true. The french whatever else they may be are frank. They are very polite, they are very adroit but sooner or later they always tell you the truth. The alsatians are not adroit, they are not polite and they do not inevitably tell you the truth. Perhaps with renewed contact with the french they will learn these things.'

I'm surprised that Gertrude Stein didn't try to understand the historical circumstances responsible of the Alsatian secrecy.

I shot these images in june 2012.
Reality wrote a fiction for me, thanks for this precious gift.

My brother Julien said that we (he, Florence and I) made 3 different trips in Israël the last year, while traveling together. His travel was political; his best moment happened when we got lost in a Palestinian area in Jerusalem (Al Azariah, village of Lazarus, Martha & Maria), our road being cut by the wall. Florence's one was an artist travel with pen and notebook. Mine was a pilgrimage. I wanted to see what Christ saw and feel the influence between landscape & faith.

The gospels doesn't talk a lot about Nazareth, the city where Christ lived about 30 years: a very steep town where walking is tiring; so what about working as a carpenter/builder B.C. (before cars)? From the top of Nazareth, you see the Mediterranean see on the west; the Horeb and the mounts of Liban on the north; the Jordan desert on the West; on the south you see the mount in range that leads to Jerusalem: a panoramic view that includes the past and the future. There is nothing written about the contrast between the visually rude Nazareth and the incredible softness of lake Kinnereth, where Christ went to make his first disciples and live with them. Christ's debut is a movement from a certain harshness of the landscape to a very subtile and delicate one. It's also there that he meets the disciples after the resurrection: “Meet Me in Galilee”. Not in the desert or in the steep slopes of Nazareth; on the shore of lake Kinnereth, where life is sweet.

The first time I went to the poetry festival in Breszkov back in 1991, we had a very good program that I enjoyed a lot, despite the many language difficulties. Someone drunk in the audience yelled, during Gregori Volodine's reading, that « all poets are wimps & fags ». That evening, poets ended the day in an arm westling contest... 20 years later, I returned to the festival where all the greatest poets of the region were gathered. Everything had changed. Poets did not arm wrestling anymore; the difficulty move up a rung. Volodine was still the best.

Erik Satie was coming back home by walk after playing the piano at Auberge du Clou (30 avenue Trudaine). It was a long walk since he was living in Arcueil in the southern suburbs. Google maps says that Auberge du Clou, Paris to his house (34 Rue Cauchy, Arcueil) is 9,5 km, a 2 hours 3 min walk. If you have time, I recommand this google walk* from his house to Montmartre. Then if you come to Paris, you can do the return in real. Les grands artistes sont de grands marcheurs: Werner Herzog tells his student at the Rogue Film School that if they want to become great filmmakers, they have to make at least a 5000 km walk. The also need to shut down the screen and read, read, read. Erik Satie would be happy today because the horrible scar of the A6B highway next to his house has been covered.

* If you prefer to walk in mother N, I recommand Forêt de l'Avant-Garde in the Lorraine region.

J'ai toujours aimé l'absurde d'objet. La vidéo de cette chanson d'Arne Vinzon en est un bon exemple, avec des ustensiles de jardin (mobilier, outils). Ce qui nous relie aux objets est matière à poésie. Ce musicien jouera le vendredi 12 octobre au palais de Tokyo à Paris. J'aurais aimé l'écouter chanter, mais je serai à Nantes pour présenter mon film sur la poésie.