One of my latest endeavours: playing drums for Kick Me Ugly. http://www.myspace.com/kickmeugly Photo by Mr Ugly You can check out the novel on the publisher's website:http://www.manuscrit.com/catalogue/textes/fiche_text e.asp?idOuvrage=5124 Also available from Amazon.fr. My drumkit... don't know, get it where you want... I used to have a piano like that, back in France; alas, it didn't make it to these shores.So, other than writing novels, short stories, fairy tales and scripts for short films, I write my own songs with Firefay, play the drums with Kick Me Ugly, and draw a little bit. My first novel (Le langage de Dieu) was published in France two years ago and my second novel last year (Si tu m'oublies; again, in French).
Vladimir Nabokov, so I could ask him how he managed to write in so many different languages. Well he's dead... People who don't function on one level and can take the piss out of themselves. People who don't use the word 'spiritual' to describe the most mundane things. People who see the world in a way others don't see and try to share their experience through any medium.
I grew up listening to French pop (what can you do…), but there are things to be salvaged there, like Dutronc/Hardy/Gainsbourg/Etienne Daho. Obviously there's also Brel. Wish I'd seen him on stage, the guy was so intensely in pain while performing that it even transpires through a simple video. Another Jacques, Higelin, but only the 70s stuff. A French singer/songwriter that I quite like is Veronique Sanson, at least her early stuff. She was married to Stephen Stills for a while and he arranged/produced one of her albums, Le Maudit. I confess to liking some "world music" stuff: Khaled, Rachid Taha, Cesaria Evora, Lhasa de Sela. Since coming to the UK I've started expanding my knowledge of a different type of music, and lately, I've been listening to early Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett (may he rest in peace), The Byrds, Black Sabbath, Caravan, Soft Machine, Os Mutantes, 13th Floor Elevators, The Ramones, The Who (wish I could understand the drumming on Happy Jack...), The Doors, etc. And then there’s Judee Sill, the hidden gem of late 60s/early 70s Californian country rock. Anything 80s (apart from The Smiths and The Cure) drives me off the wall.
Anything by François Truffaut (just pure class) and Wong-Kar Wai (Chungking Express, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love and 2046). Time of the Gypsies and Arizona Dream by Emir Kusturica. The late 60s/early 70s Claude Sautet films, César et Rosalie in particular (the difficulty of chosing to live according to what you feel rather than what seems proper). Kieslowski, The Double Life of Veronica, as it shows his obsession with the invisible links between people who don't even know each other. Don't know if people would call him a symbolist but that's how I see his work. German 20s and 30s cinema (Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, M). Jean Cocteau: La Belle et la Bête, Orphée. Oh, and two British films, Dead Man's Shoes by Shane Maedows and Me Without You.
No thanks.
Lolita, can't beat that dry, slavic sense of humour and the style, oh god, the style... Let Petit Prince (The Little Prince), The Hunting Gun by Yasushi Inoue, anything by Colette (The Shackle, L'Entrave, in particular) and The World According to Garp by John Irving, all of which I’ve read many times. I'm not a big fan of poetry apart from some French medieval stuff - Ruteboeuf and François Villon - and Rimbaud when I was a teenager (still sounds good now). Federico GarcÃa Lorca's Romancero Gitano is something I also like to go back to from time to time (Silencio de cal y mirto...). I have a special fondness for Anaïs Nin, although I haven't read the whole of her diaries. I like that mixture of salaciousness and innocence, that's quite unique. Some more books that I really like: Italo Calvino's Our Ancestors trilogy; Ismael Kadare's The Palace of Dreams; Huit-Clos by JP Sartre, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. And plenty of French novels (Le Charme Noir by Yann Queffelec; L'Ile aux Trente Cercueils by Maurice Leblanc; Les Ames Grises by Philippe Claudel, among others). In general, I like authors who have a distinctive voice and make use of the language they write in in a creative way that's not systematically following the rules of grammar. Here I'm talking about people like Richard Brautigan or George Pérec. I'd love to write one of those killer first lines one day:"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." (LP Hartley, The Go-Between). "J'ai vécu seul, sans personne à qui parler véritablement jusqu'à une panne il y a six ans dans le désert du Sahara." (I have lived alone, without anyone to really talk to until a breakdown six years ago in the Sahara desert; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince). Alternatively, a final sentence like that of "Lolita": "And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita."
Women artists/writers: Camille Claudel, Colette. Camille by RodinOf course Animal and my cat Milo