Mon petit doigt me dit que l'émission Tracks sur Arte (cette nuit à 1H10) va présenter un extrait de mon film sur Jean-Jacques Perrey, parler de lui et de son oeuvre. My little finger tells me that the music program Tracks on Arte will broadcast a piece of my documentary about Jean-Jacques Perrey, tonight. (Visible 7 jours sur le site).

If you miss the program on Arte, you can buy an airplane ticket and fly to the Chicago International Movie & Film festival (CIMM), where it will be screened on 5th march. If you're patient, you can wait a little bit and go to the Sensoria Festival in Sheffield (end of april).

Ceux qui n'ont ni la télévision, ni internet, ni un porte-monnaie ventru, peuvent attendre l'aurore pour aller se promener en forêt. Those who have no television, no internet, no paunchy purse, can wait for the dawn and go for a walk in the forest.

Speaking about tourism, I wanted to remind the ones who are planning to spend the summer holidays in the south of France, of standing away from the lavender fields when it's harvest time. It's not that the many bees are dangerous (they usually don't bite), but some of the harvesters... you don't know what they want, why they are working there... So just move away if you're still having time; you know how fragile (they) are.

If I had to write a tourist guide about Paris, this
is the kind of stuff you could find in it.

This is a photo of Momus during one of the US tour we did together, 10 years ago. Momus, who has decided to stop his incredible Click Opera blog after years of daily posts, red by so many people. A single link about my blog 3 days ago led 500 of his readers to mine. Assuming that only 5% of the readers clicked on that link, it makes an average of 10000 daily readers on Click Opera... With his very special clothes, his many disciples, his generosity, his curiosity, his absence of resentment toward the pharisians who insulted him with mean comments, his very unique parole, Momus is like a prophet. An artist prophet who decided to go on to the next step, without listing his benefits. A real exception, in a time of counting and savings. Happy birthday, my friend! We are the aquariusses, the (poor) water pourers!

"I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you." (John 15-15)

During 5 minutes on 9th january 2010, France encountered bankruptcy. Some France Culture listeners started to take measures, like emptying their bank accounts or selling their shares. My friend Joseph Confavreux announced this terrible fact through a special flash info, at the beginning of his radio program about radio history, which sparked off a lot of reactions from the listeners (150 messages on the forum) and from his employers (France Culture is part of Radio France, the national radio). Inevitably, Joseph was convoked in the radio head office because of his canular. He was scolded, reprimanded, threatened, risking his job instead of being honoured and congratulated. He had to apologize on his émission web page... Bravo, Joseph, for your courage, even if your program was about panic & hoax on the radio (Orson Welles's program was also announced at the beginning as the War of the Worlds).

Today is my birthday. Born in 1966, 7th february, I'm 44. Every 11 years, everyone gets the same numbers: 11 - 22 - 33 - 44 - 55 - 66 - 77 - 88 - 99. When I was 25, I realized that my father turned 52 the same year. 11 years later, I was 36 and he turned 63. When I was 14, he was 41.

14 - 41
25 - 52
36 - 63
47 - 74 (†)

One day, I asked a mathematician about it and he explained this algebric suite to me. But being a-mathematic, I couldn't understand his analysis and bought an ice cream.

This is a numeric birthday for which I received 3 marvelous gifts: 3 extraordinary deaf reviews of my album Goto (written without having listened to it) by Momus, Felix Kubin and Asia Argento. And also a chocolate cake made by Florence.



"I’m just going to assume that you’ve heard of the late, great Gilles Weinzaepflen aka Toog before, and save myself from the impossible duty of trying to explain the phenomenon that was this one-man band born in the city of Mulhouse, set in between the Swiss and French border. But just in case you are completely unfamiliar with Toog, the quick scoop is that since the mid 90’s and until his recent death, this man made some of the strangest techno boogie ever heard. I, myself had the luck to appear in one of his records in 2004, "Lou Etendue", composed and inspired by the birth of my very own daughter, Anna-Lou in 2001. Goto is an even more interesting album. Discovered only recently in the attic of his wife Flor, the CD opens with "Traffic Jam", a 25 minutes guitar/sax acid-rock jam with an eerie, cavernous vibe. The CD follows with outtakes from "Lou Etendue" sessions, which may be the best of all Weinzaepflen’s work, even more atmospheric and ritual-archetypical than the finished record. One wonders if the three instrumentals ( "Alabama gay", "Are visages electric", "La Chambre noire"), are due more to circumstance than to planning, but in the end it doesn’t really matter. The most demented of all is the last song, "L’esprit de l’inventeur", a trendy psych number that starts with a three minute, atonal guitar-keyboard-tambourine freakout before breaking into Dylanesque folk rock (relatively speaking, that is) as Mr. Weinzaepflen warns against drug abuse by using Hans Reichel an example. Kind of comes off like a soundtrack for a psychedelic exploitation movie, which is probably fitting for an album that was exploitative in and on itself."

Asia Argento

And now, I reveal the unveiled mystery of my album "6633" title. It was released in 99 as I was 33, being born in 66. It's all multiples of 33, which is the age of Christ when he was crucified. 66(33) is some sort of anti-satanic number, the 33 of Jesus making the last 6 impossible.

Today I want to give an answer to the many parents who ask me about the future of their children. I have to warn them, especially those who are about to send their progeniture in Stanford. Dear Parents, you are not aware that most of the time, your kids will champ at the bit, doing nothing, absolutely nothing but making red helicopters and smoking pot in their smoky rooms. Do send them rather at the Rogue School, where they could learn, at least, a real métier.

Some people know about my two principal obsessions: 1.) sheperds 2.) animals crossing roads. The last night I received about 3564 emails asking for more Corsican sheperdesses pictures on the Toog blog, which put me in a quandary and led me to a very long insomnia... What is the best for me? For this blog? The first or the second obsession? Eventually, I decided to refuse any influence and made my own decision: animals crossing roads.





For those who haven't seen it yet, I made this rough video for "Traffic jam", one song on my next album. The jam here is caused by all these bloody animals crossing roads anywhere in the world. I shot the end of the video on the road between Truth & Consequences and Chloride (New Mexico), using a sticky pod.

It takes me ages to finish the Tanizaki's book "The Makioka Sisters" (900 pages - 1948) but I must say that I really enjoy this novel, as I enjoyed Kawabata or Haruki Murakami. Nothing really extraordinary happens, except a flooding near Osaka or a typhoon; it's just the regular life of 4 sisters. One is married (Sachi ko); one is proposed husbands (Youki ko); one has moved to Tokyo with her husband and children; one is a rebel (Tae ko). What I find extraordinary is to know from the inside how things used to work in Japanese families, where modernity is slowly crawling (the younger sister Tae ko tries to get rid of tradition). What I like about these writers is their ability to talk about home. Home life becomes the most spectacular spectacle.

(Promo CD back cover)

Here is a Momus review of my next album 'Goto' (8th may on Karaoke Kalk). It's written without having listened to the record, a deaf constraint that I proposed him. Momus is imbattable in that game!

"Toog's GOTO dizzies with quiet inventiveness, and -- with its cunningly topical, tropical African instrumentation and surging, voodoo polyrhythms -- pushes the reset button on the pop song artform just in time for a new decade. Traffic Jam imagines Jacques Tati in the film Samuel Beckett never made with Harmony Korine, Goto is what Oliver Messaien would have sounded like lost in the jungles of Ghana, recording the cries of carnivorous birds even as they tear him and his expensive tape recorder to pieces. La Chambre Noire is an inscrutable poem accompanied only by the whimpering sound the Marquis de Sade makes daily in hell (Toog has found a way to lower a heat-resistant piezo mic into the devil's innermost chamber). L'esprit de l'inventeur, an astonishing tour de force, shoots across France faster than the speed of sound in tight formation with the Red Arrows, the famous ariel acrobatic team, ejecting only at the last possible moment before impact, as only the greatest Indian gurus know how. I can honestly say that I have never heard anything like this record."

MOMUS