Église Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, 252 rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Paris.

When I was 15 years old, living with my father (he'd have turned 70 today), we had a strange man as a neighbour. He was my father's distant pal since highschool, a brilliant philosophy student who became odd. When he was young, he was beautiful, smart, driving sport cars and proud to have slept with about 400 girls. A real aryan, blond with blue eyes and also a sex addict. I remember his strange theories: the "blue ones" (blue eyed people) should be sent to America while the "browns" remain in Europe. He even recorded an LP to spread his belief. He divorced because his wife was a beautiful algerian woman, with dark eyes and hair. He was kind of rich and I remember that we could collect in his house, when we were kids and while he was away, big banknotes on the floor, everywhere in his dirty one level house.

Piles of porno novels and magazines were about to collapse from the top of dusty closets. One afternoon, he invited my best friend Stéphane († 1987) and me to share the traditionnal Saint Nicolas hot chocolate and special pastries together, called manala and schnakala. In fact, he wanted us to loose virginity and proposed us to sleep with his 16 years old girl friend, after playing a courte paille (draw lots) game with matches. I won. I knew Pascale from my balcony and watched her naked body lying into the sun, during the summer. She was a beautiful girl, tall, blond haired, her nice face and quirky smile looking so nasty. Jean-Pierre insisted to be present in the room; he wouldn't do anything. I refused categorically. After a long and difficult negociation, he accepted: we could eventually lock the door, with a key that he couldn't find for hours. After this first experience, Pascale soon became my secret sex instructor. For me, there was only one broken match from Saint Nicolas to sex.

"Gates of Heaven" by Errol Morris

My life these days: going to see almost every film by Werner Herzog at the Pompidou center. Each film is a real experience, not only a film. A film has to be an experience. Today, "The Great ecstasy of the sculptor Steiner". The intro of this film, Walter Steiner flying, with Popol Vuh's music, takes me to heaven. It's an orgasm. Sad that this sequence is shortened; in the film, you see Steiner flying above the hundreds of buses, the 50 000 people. Large screen needed; hope you too will enjoy the flight!

He was an important figure in our rock pantheon, even if I wasn't personally into guitar rock, in 1983. He sounded like a real rock'n roll saint. A rock figure who served music rather than a poseur attached to his personal image and profit. A genuine rock'n roll saint and not a rock'n roll hero. There are rock'n roll heroes but these are not the rock'n roll saints. I don't say saint in a secular sense: I talk about religion, my religion. In my religion, rock'n roll saints try to deliver their own truth as raw as they found it. I was aware of that when I was 15, listening to Jeffrey Lee Pierce's anger. This rock'n roll anger sounded almost divine to my ears because it sounded true. Rock has always been depicted by conservative christians as a devilish act. I'd like them to tell me how to express anger and pain in popular music then... God bless Lux Interior and his poisoned (but still alive) widow.

This is the 9th edition of a film festival programmed by Olivier Pierre in Saint-Denis, near Paris. We met him in Marseille, 15 years ago, in a remote cinema called L'Alhambra, 10 kilometers from downtown Marseille. Olivier came by bus without any chance to go back to the city, the last bus being early. When he was in my car, a dark blue Renault 4 TL that was eventually burned out in Marseille, I thought that this guy was a real cinema lover, taking risks for seeing a movie. I'm happy to see that he has become such a wonderful professional; and his festival theme tombe à pic with the Obama election.



We went to see Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's baadasssss song (1971) at the Festival opening. Everybody knows that film, but I missed it so many times. It's brilliance and success launched the blaxploitation. I was surprised to hear Melvin Van Peebles speaking in french and talking about his parisian years, before the movie. Coming back home, I checked the INA archives (french television). There was about 10 entries with Melvin Van Peebles in the sixties. His first appearance on the french TV was in 1964 as a writer! He published 4 books in France, one with illustrations by Roland Topor. He was also collaborating with Hara Kiri, the incredible anarcho-sexy magazine run by Professeur Choron, a magazine that I red as a kid (check the incredible covers here). Before going back to America, Melvin even shot a feature film in France, La Permission ("Story of a 3 days pass", 1967), a love story between a white french girl and a black man. Unfortunately, the actress, Nicole Berger, died right after the shooting in a car accident.

A few words about classical music. What we call classical music was not called classical when the composers were at work. They couldn't have had this following dialogue with friends, in a bar or at a party: "what are you doing now? Oh, I'm composing classical music!". Why? Because the music wasn't classical yet, it was new music, avant-garde music, the composers were searching for new directions. So when did their music start to relate to the classical music definition? And who call their music "classical" first? Remember the chicken and the egg: who came first, the egg or the chicken?

For me who's a believer, I believe that God was the first to call their music classical. Because God created the chicken and the egg all together, as he did with classical music. The real question now is: who was the Adam & Eve of classical music? Could the Adam & Eve of classical music have been German? It's not possible to place the Eden garden of classical music in Germany, for this country is too cold. Paradise is supposed to be in Irak, where you find the original rivers mentioned in the Bible (Tiger and Euphrate). But Irak is probably not the place where classical music started, unless Adam & Eve had a piano. I want to point a finger at this: nothing in the Bible says that Adam & Eve had no piano.