More seriously than the previous one, here is a new music video called "Goto", with the beautiful voice of David Fenech. Some people know that "Goto" is also the title for my possible 5th album, which is an anagram of Toog. This video is part of a 70 minutes film. It was shot in the USA: Texas (Big Bend), New Mexico (White Sands), Arizona, Nevada, Utah (Great Salt Lake), California.

TOOG /// GOTO /// KARAOKE KALK (2010/06)

01. Traffic Jam
02. Où va la vie (with Fashion Flesh)
03. Goto (with David Fenech)
04. Ébréché
05. I love you (with Fashion Flesh)
06. Alabama gay
07. Are visages electric? (with Fashion Flesh)
08. My house
09. La chambre noire
10. L'esprit de l'inventeur (with Michel Gondry)

"Cher Saddam" (Dear Saddam) is the demo of an unfinished song written after the death of Saddam Hussein (december 2006). The song is about the relationship (friendship) between the former prime minister / French president Jacques Chirac and Saddam Hussein (Chirac / Irak: interesting rime) during the 70's. The last images on the video are from the dictator Jean Bedel Bokassa (Centrafrique), an other good friend of France during the seventies.

Here is an approximative translation of the song:

DEAR SADDAM

Dear Saddam, I'm sorry
You've been judged as a tyran
I'll remain President

Dear Saddam, I'm saddened
You, my only friend from Irak
Let me tell you bon voyage de Jacques Chirac

Dear Saddam, I've been the long-term
Dictators's confidant
Their delusions of grandeur's janitor

Chorus
Saddam's descended from Saladin
What a muddle for historians
Sowing death in Babylone
Like the king Nabuchodonosor

Dear Saddam, I remember one summer
It was in the Baux-de-Provence
You told me how you love France

Dear Saddam, when I unveiled to you
Our most nuclear secrets
It wasn't for making war

Dear Saddam, when I delivered to you
Our most bloody weapons
It wasn't either to make war

Chorus
Saddam's descended from Saladin
What a muddle for historians

Dear Saddam, why haven't you preferred
Exile by me
Like Bokassa

Dear Saddam, you my shaggy buddy
Before losing the lutte (fight)
You could have shaved your occiput

Dear Saddam, I'm saddened
You, my only friend from Irak
Let me tell you bon voyage de Jacques Chirac

Je croyais avoir perdu l'essentiel de mon intérêt pour le Japon. Les Japonais que j'aimais sont tous retournés dans leur pays d'origine et ne donnent plus de nouvelles. Pour beaucoup de jeunes Japonais, la France est un pays où il est possible de s'enivrer (d'art, de culture, de liberté). Le retour au Japon sonne comme la fin d'un rêve, la liberté et l'imagination souveraines des Français étant sans doute contraires aux lois de la vie nippones. La France n'existe plus que dans les souvenirs; il faut oublier ces amours pour être à même de mieux servir le Japon. Et puis je suis retombé sur un de mes poèmes dans lequel je parle du sabi japonais:



SABI

...............................

la poésie ne craint pas le sabi
la patine des choses
en japonais

Le sabi (la patine des choses, l'imperfection), est un élément essentiel de l'esthétique japonaise. C'est un critère sans doute très ancien. Quelqu'un (merci Wilfried) m'a prêté récemment L'Eloge de l'ombre de Tanizaki Junichiro, petit essai publié en 1933 sur l'essence du beau japonais. J'ai découvert avec Tanizaki la beauté de l'ombre dans la maison japonaise traditionnelle, l'obscurité qui libère des forces poétiques immenses (deviner plutôt que voir), galvanise l'imaginaire des habitants.




C'est en lisant ce livre que je me suis souvenu que fondamentalement, j'aimais le Japon.

Guy Bourdin's pictures are so good. This kind of analysis is the future, maybe the present of criticism. They blend together erotism, absurdity, the absurdity of erotism, the erotism of absurdity (I changed small details on 4 images, and the 5th one remains the same). Guy Bourdin was very important in my childhood because of the Zoom photo magazines my mother bought. As a young man, Guy Bourdin had a connection with Man Ray. As a young man, I had a connection with Ray Ban. Ceci explique cela.

...............................................................................

The little dog was very lost searching for his master near place de la République. He looked rock'n roll with his died hair, with a shy sight. Due to an urgent need, he went straight to the CRSand started to shit near their shoes. Rock'n roll dogs have rules. They hate uniforms and the young buddy was already on the right tracks. Congratulations!

When we flew to the Cork Film Festival, I noticed these two signs (near the bathroom...) at the Charles de Gaulle airport. I suppose that spaces like this do exist in every big airport. The interesting thing is that the french syntagm "Espace prière" (prayer room) is translated: "Meditation Area". However, the differences between prayer and meditation are numerous. Prayer is an act of addressing (God) for the purpose of worship or petition, while meditation is a process that leads to a state of consciousness (google search). Prayer is an act whereas meditation is a state; meditation being the first and necessary step (state) for prayer (act). Prayer is active while meditation is passive. Prayer involves two spiritual receptacles: the transmitter and the receiver, while meditation is not an adress to (God). I add that I may be totally wrong making these statements.



The second red sign offers a variation of the first one: the "Meditation Area" has become a "Multi-Faith Prayer Area". I don't think that there were 2 different spaces in the airport, one for meditation and one for multi-faith, so I assume that the meditation area has been absorbed by the multi-faith area on the second sign, which is closer to the door. Also interesting is the position of the body sign: the human representation sits on his knees, his arms have disappeared, while prayer and meditation both involve arms. It is strange to have chosen the legs bended as the body sign for prayer/meditation.



Three more photos from Asian airports (Hong Kong, Kyoto and Taiwan), where you can see that Asians do keep their arms when they are praying, while occidentaux lose them.

My first encounter with dry stone huts was in the seventies, when my parents bought an old donkey house near Uzès, remodelled as a vacation house by a belgian gay model turned into a carpenter. Since I was getting bored up there, I used to ride my minivélo with my little brother on the back, and we were laughing on the many small roads, visiting garbage dumps, breakers yards, pine tree forests with red soil. I could see up and there the dry stone huts, which I liked very much, but they were often filled with dirty rubbish. My obsessions about sheperds having tremendously increased the last months, here are some beautiful dry stone huts and houses. They have different names, depending on the region they are: borie, capitelle.





Here you can see the dry stone huts of the Skellig Michael island in Irlande. We were close to this place the last week. It is supposed to be a very old monastery from the early centuries, but specialists say that it's impossible these constructions without any cement remain in the blowing wind and incessant rain. Werner Herzog shot the last sequence of Herz & Glass (1976) there. Early irish monks were travellers. They founded many monasteries in Europe. Saint Arbogast, the first bishop of Strasbourg, was irish, like Saint Colomban.

The Corona Cork Film Festival was a great experience for me, probably the first time I really felt like a "film director". There was a real public, at least 150 people showed up to the screening of Prélude au sommeil. The film was introduced by the festival director, Mick Hannigan, in his cinema Kino on Washington street. The organizers were all charming people and we had one day off taking a drive to the beautiful sceneries of the Ireland south-west. We also enjoyed the city of Cork, its marvelous market, where Flo bought an excellent smoked salmon. We saw many films and some exhibitions and performances. On saturday morning, I went to a lecture about the new Canon 5 D and 7 D digital cameras, which are being used by film makers such as Monte Hellman. Our last night on saturday, we went to see Samson and Delilah by Warwick Thornton. Here you can see a movie about these few days with Florence, shot with my mini DV.

We love Guy Maddin. Yesterday we saw his first movie, the excellent THE DEAD FATHER (1985), in which one father who's dead while being not totally dead, keeps making incursions in his house... After Werner Herzog, Beaubourg is proposing a full retrospective of the Winnipeg's hero. His films really need to be watched on a large screen. I experienced watching CAREFUL on the computer screen and gave up, thinking this is shit.



At Beaubourg, I went to see it again by mistake; it was obvious that this film is unbelievable, a masterpiece, much more interesting for me than the TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL. Guy Maddin came to Paris for introducing MY WINNIPEG, an artistic documentary about his sleepwalking town. He talked about his dog Spanky and showed us before a short about him. Maddin almost cried because Spanky died shortly after that film in which he keeps running all the time. Then he said in a smile, that he probably killed him, because he wasn't a young dog anymore.