Carte postale de Paris
Jun. 30th, 2007 04:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusFrom top left: o.lamm's computer. Olivier and me at the Palais de Tokyo, where, together with Kumisolo, we saw the Steven Parrino show (posthumous, since this hell rocker died in a motorbike crash a couple of years ago). Not sure if I like the individual works -- too Primal Screamy, too skully -- but the installation was surprisingly elegant as a whole. Later, curator Mathieu Copeland arrived and we chatted in the cafe.
Bottom row: Laila France, aka Samantha Cru, sings "Japanese Especially" and "Wonderhood" at our show at La Fleche D'Or. Kumi sings, amongst other things, "Confiance Absolu", a song she and I co-wrote. Olivier accompanies (his laptop falls to the floor at one point but doesn't seem worse for it). Finally, me in a wig borrowed from Laila, and DJ Kentastic outside Laila's apartment in the 10th arrondissement, near the Canal St Martin.
It was nice to see Abake at the show, and Digiki and Mai Ueda, and Pascale, and Michael Idov, who apologised for writing a bad review of my "Oskar" album (he likes it a lot more now) and promised to review my jokes book for New York magazine.
Paris is dense and intense compared with Berlin. A bit bordelique and aggressive. I get the impression that people here live by charm -- that charm is a matter of life or death here. Also that there are a lot of refined but rather eccentric people here, people who live for culture. And that Paris is a super-concentrated world city in which immigrants quickly learn the importance of a humanist-exoticist charisma, which is the particular, indispensable form of charm that makes them valid in the eyes of the refined, eccentric people. "Love me for my culture," they seem to say to the culture-lovers (singing songs from their home country in the metro for money).
Bottom row: Laila France, aka Samantha Cru, sings "Japanese Especially" and "Wonderhood" at our show at La Fleche D'Or. Kumi sings, amongst other things, "Confiance Absolu", a song she and I co-wrote. Olivier accompanies (his laptop falls to the floor at one point but doesn't seem worse for it). Finally, me in a wig borrowed from Laila, and DJ Kentastic outside Laila's apartment in the 10th arrondissement, near the Canal St Martin.
It was nice to see Abake at the show, and Digiki and Mai Ueda, and Pascale, and Michael Idov, who apologised for writing a bad review of my "Oskar" album (he likes it a lot more now) and promised to review my jokes book for New York magazine.
Paris is dense and intense compared with Berlin. A bit bordelique and aggressive. I get the impression that people here live by charm -- that charm is a matter of life or death here. Also that there are a lot of refined but rather eccentric people here, people who live for culture. And that Paris is a super-concentrated world city in which immigrants quickly learn the importance of a humanist-exoticist charisma, which is the particular, indispensable form of charm that makes them valid in the eyes of the refined, eccentric people. "Love me for my culture," they seem to say to the culture-lovers (singing songs from their home country in the metro for money).
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-30 02:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-30 03:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-30 05:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-30 09:46 am (UTC)I'm glad to know that Idov apologised for the bad review of my favorite part of the Stories of O trilogy.
And that I have the same model synthesizer as Kumisolo.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-30 10:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-30 03:02 pm (UTC)Couldn't agree with you more about Paris; it's "charm as currency" ethic was one of the city's immediately apparent qualities (I'd imagine Tokyo having a touch of this, but a version seen in a parallel universe). Aesthetic matters are a grave, central concern in Paris--more so than clean air and sane traffic patterns, anyway. People make a point of making dramatic entrances into metro cars (I recall an older woman in a red dress, cape and wide-brimmed hat swirling amongst us mortals at one point--to the tunes of a gypsy band playing on their filthy-keyed accordions). I also remember once sighting a craggy, androgynous magnifico in peek-a-boo green harlequin leggings, heels and a renaissance-style plumed hat swanning into a jewelry shop in midday--a nocturnal species anywhere else. A dapper old gentleman in bespoke suits rummaging through garbage cans, a blind man in Notre Dame holding a long, slim whittled stick in each hand like a fork, using them as antennae through the dark church, as if he were a descendant of de Nerval's famed lobster...
Marvelous place, Paris.
do you know any jokes...
Date: 2007-06-30 07:05 pm (UTC)what about a concert where you walked around knocking dozens of plugged in, simultaneously running iPods off of tables, until none of them worked anymore? can you imagine the shock value? i wonder if apple would pay for it?
once my friend and i destroyed his godforsaken dysfunctional laptop with rocks in a bamboo thicket (yabu no naka!) in a park in kanagawa, we could hear families walking around us outside the thicket talking happily, and the sound of the rollercoaster at yomiurirando off in the distance. we were giddy.
anyways, thank you Momus for a greatly entertaining concert, and for giving us a good reason to come into Paris besides chasing stray cats around the Montmartre cemetery. Keep it up with the highland dancing and gitaigo and I'm sure everything will be o.k.!
patrick
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-30 08:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-30 08:28 pm (UTC)(PS: there will be more Momus slash up, so keep an eye out!) *wink wink*