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May 18, 2019  

 

Dream in which I am stopped at my workshop by two policemen. It has nothing to do with it, said my mother, appearing in the room and pointing me to the two policemen with a gesture of her arm on my shoulder. But I am kindly invited to follow them (my mother too). They change their attitude, then, outside, on the sidewalk, make us surround other police officers, separate us and me. Someone is searching me. Go up there, the young man said curtly to me, who had been kind just before up there in the workshop. He pushes me unceremoniously into the back seat of a car where someone is already at the wheel, a woman. Hello, I say to her, by reflex (she answers me), and in this reflex, which surprises me myself, I glimpse for a fraction of a second my life as a painter up there, these decades of painting whose destiny is suddenly sealed, there, inside this car, the distressing result, in short, jumps out at me. [Uncertain continuation] ... A place where my mother and I meet. The atmosphere of this reunion, however, in this office, does not lend itself to the slightest ambiguity, because there are quite a few gathered there, a judge (small, affable), the two of us, our two lawyers, the clerk, and a policeman in front of the door. We can expect a glass of water if we ask for a drink, and the clerk will get it somewhere in the establishment, brown tap water ...  

March 6, 2019  

 

"The Wedding at Cana". A wedding feast where all are dressed as in the sixteenth century, gathered in a Venetian decor ("palazzo"), gathered around an impenetrable Christ and as if absent from this sumptuous joy, this demonstration of elegance. Véronèse would have wanted to show the compromise of the Church with the century, and thereby to agree with the Protestants. Veronese would have drawn her inspiration from the thought of Calvin. That is. Well, I am a little "defrocked" Calvinist, personally ... but if it is true that we Protestants have aroused such plastic force, I may have to reconsider my position. Though.  

January 8, 2019  

 

Idea for a painting: in the foreground a young boy hides an explosive charge in a saucepan filled with veal blanquette, while behind him we can guess the scene of a theater where the performance of a play takes place during which a man disguised as a turner dervish is thrown onto a cheese stall (I shouldn't jot down my ideas, they never come to fruition). 

One morning last week, I was going to enter the Franprix, when suddenly I had in front of me, in the middle of the sidewalk, among the pedestrians who often clutter the entrance to the store, a man in his forties who distributed political leaflets of an edge which does not interest me. I slowed down because he was handing this leaflet to me too. But at the last moment I told him no thank you I don't smoke. Tomorrow Thursday, he retorted me so curtly, you will steal a dressing gown, you! Absorbed in my thoughts, I believed in some kind of saying, in some ironic formula of thanks. I continued to do what I had to do. I then returned home, thinking of the pretty pretty fancy of this party, tomorrow Thursday you will steal a dressing gown, you! that I could readily appropriate, that was my style, and ending up estimating more or less confusedly its divinatory nature. But the next day I did not steal any dressing gown.  

 

September 22, 2018  

 

Researchers have just discovered an unpublished text by Claude Lévi-Strauss, in which we discover a well-argued and definitive study on the differences between the idea of a coat and that of a jacket, a study that had been carried out by numerous works in clothing sciences. since the beginning of the twentieth century. This study links the two figures of the coat and the jacket as two non-furry figures sharing the same meaning: the non-furry as opposed to the furry. But Claude Lévi-Strauss adds a third figure: that of leniency. By describing the coat and the jacket as notions foreign to mansuétude, that is to say haunted by this otherness which overflows them, he sheds light on the fascination exerted by these non-furry figures by placing them in a position external to them. the very idea of non-poilade or poilade, from which they come to challenge and worry her. The alliance of these three figures marks, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the entry into the domain of knowledge of three historical processes constituting modernity and its rationality through the inclusive exclusion of figures that define its necessary other: the tar.

 

July 13, 2018  

 

Dream: I am in the dark, on a one-story landing. I look for a door, which I finally make out despite the darkness. A dark door, green in color. It is imperceptibly cut out near the ironwork of an elevator shaft, the cabin of which is waiting there, upstairs. I can see a silhouette watching me, motionless, silent: Johannes Vermeer. I'm about to open the elevator door for him when someone comes up behind me, suddenly pulls me away from the car and says, "Stay out of this stuff." The cabin then leaves the landing to rise up the floors. Bending down, I see it disappearing towards a very bright area, from which faint echoes come to me.  

 

June 29, 2018

 

About my painting the English speak of reminiscence of Edward Hopper (I prefer outcrop, Hopper is a rocky outcrop on my right arm), and of a curious undercurrent cerebral, unknowingly referring to my tendency to dismiss the subject. revolving around cricket, a secret phobia which I have long explained to Doctor B. (adolescence traumatized by a language stay in Sussex). Yes, the London gallery which exhibited my painting had confusedly perceived something, but they did not know the exact tenor of this undercurrent linked to my adolescence (never therefore of cricket ground in my painting), and I intend to keep the mystery, give free rein to the imagination: a fear in Frémond of being locked in a pancake with sugar? (never either pancake in my painting).

 

May 18, 2018

 

Variant of a recurring dream. I am in a flea market. I have just bought the original score of the Passion according to Saint Matthew, but autographed by Jean-Paul Sartre, "which makes it so rare" the seller tells me. I also buy an old linen shorts that this time belonged to Jean-Paul Sartre. A man then approaches me, introduces himself as "director of the Sartre Institute", thanks me for my generosity and tears the score from me. I watch him walk away. A great sadness seizes me. The man comes back and wants to take the old shorts as well. I am going to take the score back from him, but he then pretends to be Jean-Paul Sartre, which takes me by surprise. And I wake up.

 

March 2, 2018

 

I am driving an American car from the sixties, which I am told is about twelve meters in length and five in width. Beside me is a man whom, in this dream, I have known since my youth although he seems to be only about twenty years old. He tells me that he has published about ten books on the "theme of the tire and the enormous". He advises me to drive slowly. I shake this sedan, apparently eleven tons, with its treacherous softness and unfortunately quite treacherous braking too, hey, indeed, be careful, hey ho. The man orders me to stop there right away on the roadside. This is crazy, he said to me, no but did you see where you are riding? (in the middle of the road, yes, with a tendency to the left, why is it forbidden?). He gets back behind the wheel, nervous, showering me with deliberately hurtful statements about my inability to deal with the tire and the huge myself, which leaves me quite indifferent. And when I intentionally open my door in motion, it violently collides with an obstacle placed on the side of the road, causing a thunderstorm and lightning in the driver's seat, an atmospheric phenomenon that I observe as from the space, completely protected from this danger.

 

Feb. 9, 2018

Gustav Klimt is standing at the back of a large dining room and wants to show me something, but I cannot reach him [...]. I finally follow him to the end of another room with bare walls, without being able to approach him. I was nineteen, he declares, pointing in the distance (as at the bottom of a landscape) to what he calls a child self-portrait, which I mentally distinguish, my eyes closed, a work painted in gouache. , of a great awkwardness, composed of hideous colors. To give the change I smile, air connoisseur, appreciate the rendering of the skin, the shadows, the reflections, the silky appearance of the hair.

 

December 1, 2017

 

What was this dream of last night, so special? I was trying to put the pieces together this morning, walking in the Woods. I ended up sitting on a bench. And I lingered my gaze on the dark surface of the pond, on the wake of a duck, which caught the white light of the sky and vibrated slowly as it widened, noted that this wake resembled that of a crossing boat. a mountain lake, which I would have observed from a height. It was then that I noticed the snatches of this dream, a dream a priori devoid of any connection with the present moment, a dream during which a person locked me in a dirty laundry basket. As I later walked through the undergrowth, I was trying to understand why I had associated this dream with the wake of this duck, to make a connection between the laundry basket and the animal. I remembered this: I was not alone in this laundry basket, but in the company of a boy of my age, unknown, and wearing a checked blazer (the detail still obscured things).  

 

November 6, 2017  

 

Dream of this night. I bring a man a blank sheet of paper on which I have written the word ideal, a sheet that he examines with great attention, in silence ... Then he says that it is interesting, that he also sees there something other than a word, maybe a form located at the edge of thought ... I don't see what he means but I answer that thank you that touches me a lot, that I try to escape my compulsive attitudes in terms of words, that the idea of the ideal word pleases me, that thus I break a little with my "bottom" ... that I perhaps found a way to formulate my thought differently, well that this word I like it, that it's obvious ... "Yes, he continues, it's obvious ..." And he tells me that my painting revolves around this word, that I must not resign myself to "giving up" this word, that the abandonment of the ideal is a bourgeois concept, that resignation is bourgeois ... He holds out his right hand above his desk, as if to say goodbye to me. I squeeze it to him. And we remain silent for a long time. Then, staring at me, he ends up murmuring, solemnly, as if pronouncing a divinatory word: "You will never resign yourself in love". And I leave the place (a pine forest) on a large carpet which lifts up.

 

October 2017

 

In 828, in order to compete with Rome and its patron saint Saint Peter, the Doge of Venice sought a new protector for his republic to replace Saint Theodore, whose Trotskyist aspirations were some rumors mentioned. Who to choose? The evangelist Saint-Marc? ... oh yes, you have a good idea, yes, he had come to evangelize the region in the 1st century. Two Venetian merchants are therefore responsible for going to steal the sacred relics of this evangelist in a chapel in the small fishing port of Bucoles near Alexandria in Egypt, where he had suffered martyrdom (aspirin did not exist). St. Mark's Basilica was then specially built to house these relics to which the Catholic Church lent divine powers at the time (people nonetheless). Mark thus becomes the powerful Patron Saint of Venice, with his lion as a symbol. Here is. But hey, when we visit we find it all the same very crowded with the Orient, we have nothing against, it's superb, we nevertheless recognize that Proust is right, it's crowded ... Notre-Dame de Paris is rather less crowded, right? ... yes if, ah yes!

 

June 19, 2017

 

I was in the dark, I was looking for a door, which I ended up distinguishing despite the darkness, a green door, a dark green. It stood out very close to the ironwork of an elevator shaft. The device was waiting there. I guessed someone inside, watching me, motionless, in silence. A woman in whom I seemed to recognize my mother ... a mother. A woman stuck in the elevator because of a breakdown. I woke up feeling guilty at the pity that this poor woman supposed to be my mother inspired in me. I couldn't do anything for her. My feeling in this dream: I wanted another mother, whom no one would approach, whom I would have for myself alone, a mother of the woods, my brain would develop in the open air, like the trees, turned towards the light of the sun, she would drag me everywhere with her, dig niches with her hands, a mother destined for my purification, whom I would find in the evening away in nature, who would wait for me, would drown my being in hers, so I would no longer be me, but a certain consciousness that DH Lawrence calls blood-consciousness, the consciousness of blood, only vertebrate ... She would be my mother, coming from the depths of time, not a mother that time would have invented by chance, but that he would have carried up to this point. The purest essence of my mother ... Fine. But according to doctor B. this dream does not speak of her, or of any mother, he speaks of me, it is I who am in the elevator, stuck between four walls, and always according to him it is still probably an echo of the incident of last week between Miromesnil and Saint-Augustin when the crowded train was stopped in the tunnel for forty minutes and the girl glued to me was listening to David Guetta on the headphones, jiggling.  

 

May 10, 2017  

 

Writing about the ridiculous red ocher isn't the best way to inspire publishers. I believe that all my life I will have the ambition of this book, which I will never write - I can say it now. Five volumes, or thirty-two volumes, come on, on the ridiculous red ocher, yes, why not fantasize this idea endlessly, like all Madeira browns and other mignonette greens, the ridiculous colors that I will banish for eternity, the mineral purples and grays of Payne, my god. Do we all, we painters, do a sort of balance sheet of our palettes? And what should I say about this Helios red and this geranium lacquer, ouch ouch ouch, now that I have learned the only thing that matters: this old polo shirt that passes, I feel it passes, disappears, I the sense at the level of the elbows which let see the skin in silence, without saying anything, and I almost have the impression of seeing childhood very close to me, like a friend whom I find by chance.

 

April 4, 2017

 

Idea of a title for a painting: Leo Tolstoy brutalized by majorettes in a small Siberian station, a title that has been considered many times, never used, because of subjects generally too far from the idea, such as a terrace scene in the South or a interior of brewery in Montparnasse. Manteaux et Jardins, my other recurring idea, could on the other hand be suitable for any type of subject, but the word mantle poses a sound problem for me, having said it too often at one time in my life. It remains of course I really want to take a ride in the bumper car, unfortunately my painting never represents a female character. So I have to be a philosopher, content myself for the moment with less demanding titles such as Faut se le faire, or Edgar Poe under a bridge table.  

 

January 6, 2017  

 

Last night, I dreamed of the sea, a calm sea, on the shore. The wind blows from the hills behind me. There is something reassuring about the barely perceptible whispering of the waves, like the regular noise of the street or the slowly darkening landscape. The sea is deep blue now. Off, she sheep. It gives me a feeling of freshness. It reminds me of my summers on the Giens peninsula, the days of the mistral. This wind, from here (the place is not identified), coming from the hills, has on the sea and on me effects similar to those which have been familiar to me.

 

December 1, 2016

 

From my old notebook: "Dream in which I put on a coat, then another, and yet another ... fourteen coats in all." I am happy to have found this note, which bears a similarity to a very recent dream that I did not write down and of which I still have this fragment: my mother gives me for Christmas shorts that belonged to Franz Kafka, which I put on, then another that I also put on ... fourteen shorts. Strangely, my painting never echoes these dreams, so much the better in a way. The shorts are also not very present in Western painting.

 

September 12, 2016

 

Maurice Ravel composed the five pieces of Mirrors after going in 1905 to the bathroom department of the Bricorama store in Boulogne-Billancourt. In his Autobiographical Sketch, he wrote in 1928: “Miroirs is a collection of pieces for the piano marking a considerable change in my development which has disconcerted people who until then have been accustomed to seeing me frequent the BHV [...] Miroirs authorized my critics to count this collection among the works that participate in the so-called impressionist movement. I do not contradict it, if we mean to speak by analogy. A rather fleeting analogy, moreover, since Impressionism does not seem to have any connection with the Bricorama store. This word mirror, in any case, should not suggest in me the desire to assert a subjectivist theory on the bathroom. "

 

May 4, 2016

 

At the beginning of this dream, I experience an inexplicable feeling of guilt. I approach a bay window. This berry is there, I touch it. The instant my hands brush against it, it breaks. Then I smell the air outside, I hear the faint noise of the city, I see a half-shaded avenue below. A man is at my side, small, who looks exactly like Maurice Ravel. He is calm, speaks profusely in a monotonous tone. From this point of view I confusedly remember that according to him I broke this window to give a reason for my guilt, that I should not on the other hand worry because it is a question of benign guilt. I think that this guilt is benign, therefore, and that this diagnosis would otherwise have been unacceptable formulated by anyone other than Maurice Ravel.

 

March 30, 2016

I don't like this type of painting, I apologize to its many admirers around the world. The completeness of these images is grotesque, and beta all that oozing meaning: no, these artists, we do not take you for fools, we understand that you understand the world, well done. You are very intelligent. You are probably the artists in the world who have understood men the best, no one doubts it, you have read Shakespeare, listened to Stravinsky, loved Warhol and Hockney, hated evil dictators, etc ... Hats off! All this for us to summarize afterwards, it's a bit of a waste, isn't it?  

 

March 18, 2016

 

Dream: I am aboard the liner United States which, as in reality, is abandoned in the port of Philadelphia. Everything is run down. But I was told that there was still a captain, and that it was Duke Ellington. At the beginning of the dream, I am in what at the time was the large dining room for the first classes. I think of Duke Ellington. I can feel him far away from me, on another bridge, or even in the city of Philadelphia, maybe playing in a theater. I look for him in the direction of a rusty passageway over there at the end of the great hall. I am in tears. What upsets me is to have seen this ship often at the time of its splendor in the port of Le Havre, without ever being on board. Now that I'm here, it's all over, dilapidated, rusty. There is a smell of cooking, of pastry, as if life was going to resume on this mythical liner [uncertain continuation ...] Duke Ellington is there, accompanied by a double bass player and a drummer. He sits in front of a broken upright piano and tries to get some sounds out, to no avail. When he turns to me, his face expresses disappointment at not being able to comfort me. He then grabs the double bass and performs Mood Indigo on the E string, the lowest ... When I wake up, I am still shaking with emotion.  

 

Jan. 9, 2016  

 

Rue Vieille-du-Temple, a large, very bright gallery. I stop for a moment in front of each painting, oil works of a difficult approach, whose titles consist of a word, Emergence for example, several paintings that can bear the same title, then followed by a number, thus Arche I, II, III, etc ..., up to XII. Ombre IV presents a plain background in the middle of which the artist has summarily painted, in black, a tiny human silhouette. This background, I realize after a while, is made up of areas of changing aspects depending on the location of the gaze (shiny, matt), and I have fun moving in front of the painting, looking among the reflections for drawings cleverly concealed by the artist, none of which, unfortunately, despite my good will, evokes the slightest recognizable form. There's just this annoying little human figure, too heavy a burden on it. A man approaches me, moreover, looking serious: Can I give you some information? (People all the same.)  

 

November 22, 2015 

In this dream, I walk along rue Mazarine with Gertrude Stein. She says "pouet". I suggest that he come to my place. Too much fatigue, no, she wants to go home. We hail a taxi on Boulevard Saint-Germain, to press us against each other (Alice Toklas is driving). We repeat "pouet" together. It is late, we slide on deserted arteries, in a vehicle where there is so little noise that we converse in low voices and we are silent at red lights. As we pass between the Luxembourg Gardens and the facades of the Lycée Montaigne, she says that a confused attraction also guides her thoughts towards the word "disheveled". I watch the gates scroll, through which we can guess dark places. She says "bounty", she moves a little against me and she adds "errol garner", I pass my hands on the sleeves of her jacket, her face exudes an image of feverish and monastic Spain, she appears almost beautiful. divine, the feeling surrounds you that it can only be accessed by chance. When the taxi stops rue Delambre she declares that pouet, I answer that pouet too, she smiles tenderly then she hands me a book and I have to go out, she opens her window, asks me to say something more, I say "larmor ", she adds" boo "... When the rear lights of the taxi vanish in Odessa Street, I remain seated on the hall steps for a while, for a long time. It seems to me that I must be feeling something, but what? maybe something's going to happen, no, my thoughts are calm.  

 

September 12, 2015  

 

The pavilion overlooks the city and the estuary, it is surrounded by a large garden planted with century-old maritime pines. It was built in the sixties at the bottom of what used to be a larger garden, a park. The park of a mansion where I spent my childhood and which is now divided into apartments. The bay windows of this pavilion open onto the sky, the sea and the city. The blinding estuary is dotted with small gray spots. I observe the panorama in search of the cloud and the corresponding shadow. A cloud is approaching over the port, over the city. The shadow buries us like a large sheet. Then we are between two shadows. Another, deeper, follows in the distance on the estuary. It grabs us. We lose the limits, it embraces at the same time Honfleur, Deauville, the open sea. The sea is dark green. I pick myself up a bit. I look into the distance.  

 

July 24, 2015  

 

Simone de Beauvoir is turned towards the inside of the room, me towards the outside. I watch her without her knowing (she hits me below the chin). She turns to the outside. We talk in a low voice (among other things about clothes, her own clothes, she doesn't like red), we linger against this window, one close to the other, for a moment more ... [uncertain continuation and resumption of the dream after waking up.] As we walk silently along the corridor of an apartment towards the exit door, whose two dark colored leaves stand out at the back, I stop in front of one of the paintings hanging there, a watercolor, framed under glass (a series of spots on a coarse-grained paper), to the strangeness of which, in an impulse which surprises me myself, I say to be sensitive. She is surprised that I never told her about it. Sartre made me pick up this one several times, she said, pointing to another watercolor above a sideboard. I think it's also an abstract painting, me, this watercolor. She must undeceive me, stares at me, explains to me that it represents a crowd of Tunisian fishermen busy trapping tuna in a net, but that she sees a Phoenician parade. And you? she asks me. She rummages through her secretary's things, for this purpose has slipped behind the counter, under which she completely disappears. Me? A fight, I see a fight, finally.  

 

May 30, 2015  

 

I'm trying not to bother you too much here with this problem that I have already told you about, dear readers, but one of my former psychotherapists has continued to remind me every month for two years with text messages to which I tirelessly answer by explaining to him that his methods no longer suit me, that banging on piles of cardboard boxes with a construction shovel has never made me progress in any way, but it's stronger than him, he offers me and puts me back the same techniques, such as that which consists in howling onomatopoeias such as badaboum, vlan, chtong, bang and so on, but also atchoum, miam-miam or toc-toc ... And for two years, therefore, I have always come up against the question of knowing what to answer him, without hurting him. I think that all these therapies have reached a limit that we will one day have to have the courage to admit, and too bad if we have to live with our disorders, mine are ultimately not very disabling (compulsive purchases of taps) compared to those from which entire populations suffer, crowding together in summer on ramblers to go to the Islands. So no, and first let's eat healthier, tomorrow I'll tackle the chewing gum with braised endives, without sugar.  

 

April 14, 2015  

 

I am still experimenting with new solutions to improve the quality of my sleep. A small brochure recently thrown in my mailbox recommended the purchase of a kit made up of about thirty elements, among others a turtleneck pajamas, hold the pajamas interesting! and delivered within two days, still effective after a thousand washes, color of your choice, I chose an anthracite gray with fine vertical stripes. First try, with only the pajama jacket: no results, it was to be expected, no big deal, good. Second try, and this time I put on several items, including wicker pants and golf shoes: fast falling asleep but waking up just as quickly after about three minutes of a sleep enamelled with dreams during which I am under the wild silk. with Astrud Gilberto singing Desafinado sitting on my stomach. Impossible to go back to sleep. I take off the golf shoes, as well as the macfarlane and the bowler hat supposed to "put me on low frequency", an acute episode of hypothermia and sweating ensues. Third test with only the navy blue double-breasted blazer on me: feeling that someone is trying to make me laugh under all kinds of pretexts, choppy night ... In short, no. There is one last solution, but it is to knead a fake latex pancake overnight (people do).  

 

February 21, 2015  

 

The man was Claude Lévi-Strauss. He too, from the earth, he had put on his hands while playing in the garden. Okay, he said, is there Marseille soap somewhere? Yes, yes, up there in the bathroom, in a closet. We were going up. With my knee, I pushed open the bathroom door, turned on the light bulb in the sink with my elbow, and, with my hands suspended in front of me, remained on the doorstep, while he looked around the room. room, raves about the network of cracks that ran through the enamel of the washbasin, the bathtub and the bidet, on the faucets of yesteryear, on the tub without formwork (everything he had dreamed of at one time, less now ). As for the bidet, which I had decorated with black stripes, it resembled a zebra [end of the dream, if I except a short scene which a posteriori seemed to prolong it, during which I straddled a zebra for cross my parents' room in the middle of the night].

 

January 03, 2015  

 

Inter-Age University in the large amphitheater of the Sorbonne. Around me, only people of my parents' generation. All the first part of the dream consists of an intervention by the professor still hidden behind a large curtain, we hear him draw up an endless list of all the objects that can serve as a projectile during a demonstration, especially at the time of dispersion. His assistant brings said items to the platform as he moves through his list. Standing ovation when he finally appears and places a block on the desk. But what surprises most are not the fire extinguishers, the bar chairs, the security gates or the bumpers of cars, no, it is a charred carcass of Volkswagen, brought by six scoundrels. In his explanation, the professor specifies the authenticity of the vestige and specifies that the car was thrown in flames on the police from the roof of a building in rue Gay Lussac in 1968. Explosion of laughter when he s' sits behind the wheel of the carcass and says: "I understand you".  

 

December 3, 2014  

 

Successive dreams at the end of the night, like a sequence repeated several times with tiny nuances. I'm sitting in the subway and my seatmate, a stranger, asks me if I like John Lennon, to which I answer yes in Jealous Guy for example, he never lets anything of his judgment filter out on my answer, himself. content to utter confused sentences concerning Erroll Garner, before getting up and still going out to Chaussée-d'Antin. When I wake up definitively, I type Erroll Garner on my phone: no link to John Lennon, and no more to Erroll Garner by typing John Lennon, good. The two men have never met, too bad, ah! Lennon's unclassifiable voice and Erroll's quirky hands, it would have had a good face (but Yoko would not have agreed, no three-way bed-in).  

 

November 5, 2014  

 

From inside a huge place I look at an urban landscape that resembles that of my paintings. A man named Albert is at my side. He wears a magnificent ensemble from Rohmer (Eric Rohmer is a couturier in this dream), he takes me among people, introduces me, asks my opinion on them, points out to me celebrities that I do not know. Everyone wears clothes made, I am told, by the inhabitants of a valley in Nepal. And there are complaints here and there, which dismays this Albert. Then, in a hurry, he strives to return the joy, appearing for this purpose in showy outfits, unwinding in all directions gigantic rolls of a reddish material comparable once on the ground to ash, shouting in its path. : "Get out of the way!" ... Fun fair bumper cars crisscross this vast place. On board one of them I think I recognize Eric Rohmer. Robert whispers: "He makes bath towels too" ...  

 

October 15, 2014  

 

Dream of that night: The floor is rotten, General de Gaulle said, and no one paid the slightest attention to what he said afterwards about the contents of this laundry room, not even me, who noted however, because I was in right next to him, his filthy state, at least his clothes, and it couldn't be better inside. On the off chance that I asked him if there was not a boat here in which we could have him and I take a tour of the lake, suspecting I do not know why the answer, which indeed was not long in coming. not. General de Gaulle, then, moved a little away from me, a piece of wood in his hand, and I saw him walk along a flower bed of dahlias, drag his feet on the gravel path, knock on the flowers from time to time. a blow with a stick which tore off a few petals from them. I have things to do, he said from afar.  

 

September 17, 2014  

 

At the start of this dream, Erroll Garner is sitting on the edge of a bed, me standing by the window. We should remove all that, he said, pointing to pictures stuck to the walls. He observes one of the corners of the room, above the head of the bed, where among other images hangs a clown painted by Buffet. He says he's hesitating anyway, it's funny. Then he climbs up on the bed, takes out the four pins, rolls up the poster, keeps it rolled using a rubber band found in a plastic box filled with rubber bands of all colors. From the window we judge the effect produced by the disappearance of this clown, we come to identify what deserves or not to stay on these walls. There are Mao, a few Che, one or two Chevrolet Corvettes, Rimbauds on the ceiling, Jimmy Pages here and there, two or three little Chiracs to the right of the door, a Sardou ... I say that the Jimmy Pages me I like that. We are silent, we sit on the floor, leaning against the window. He plays with one of the fingers of his right hand, the ring finger, which he lifts and lets go, gets it to snap on the canvas of his pants ...  

 

Aug 3, 2014  

 

Variant of a recurring dream. I am on the sidewalk of an indeterminate street, facing a stranger, a street vendor, "of all kinds of articles" he tells me. He questions me in the form of short questions, which relate to fields so disparate that from one to the other I cannot concentrate (the field of music seems to dominate, especially the piano). I can feel it: my answers have no consistency, which is what I'm not worried about (I conclude that he is having a sales experience). It is arched behind a cart that looks a bit like a grand piano to me, a large cover occupies the entire length, which I could open. It seems to me stuck between this kind of piano and a wall. The top of the instrument is at eye level. I'm listening to it. I have a hunch that, given his awkward position, his voice will weaken, and die off. He ends up being silent. I then opened the lid and discovered inside a pile of damaged objects, among which a lot of mini piano stools linked together by a string and bearing a label indicating Having belonged to Erroll Garner. When I walk away, I am very sad to think that this stranger was perhaps Erroll Garner himself, reduced after his death to this street activity.  

 

July 13, 2014

My life as an artist painter includes many rituals, and I do not believe I am an exception among artists, a corporation very affected by this evil, some masters like Picabia went so far as to change their jackets every hour, quarter to hour. I am ritualized, that is to say, let's say that I am too ritualized, and even outside the workshop. Well. It's true that the habit of hitting my sneakers three times on the edge of the tub before putting them on is ridiculous, so I am thinking of only hitting them three times on even days and for example only once on odd days, for a change ... And my pajamas, which I could rub with ham on Tuesdays every other week, rather than with bacon always on Wednesdays ... This awareness does me a lot of good, go find out why.  

 

June 13, 2014  

 

Maurice Ravel looks at the beach. On the left, out of view, we have Nijinsky, seated at the piano, who with a distracted right hand deciphers one of the movements of Daphnis and Chloe, stops for a moment, takes several bars back and says: "On this sentence -I would see two big throws and a drop in the flour, no? " - Excellent, said Ravel, staring at the horizon, yes perfect, yes, oh yes the flour, I would not have thought of it "... Maurice's mother, Maria Deluarte, enters the room, approaches of her son, in Spanish whispers to her: "Leaky, the omelette?" ... The three then leave the room with slow, somewhat theatrical steps. Silence. It is 1:02 pm.  

 

June 5, 2014  

 

Idea for a painting: in the foreground a young boy hides an explosive charge in a saucepan filled with veal blanquette, while behind him we can guess the scene of a theater where the performance of a play takes place during which a man disguised as a turner dervish is thrown onto a cheese stall (I shouldn't jot down my ideas, they never come to fruition).  

 

May 17, 2014  

 

I like the word brush, but life forces me to use others, for example pants, which have no interest, or box, which people do not resist and which I personally try to use less often possible, which must be included for example in a sentence like: but sir, this is an iron box (there are people to whom it is necessary to say it, not always convenient) ... The approximate word, it, occurs in all circumstances (as a vibraphonist, which is not an easy word), but I never had to use it.  

 

April 23, 2014 

One day in July, at the Louvre, I put my nose up to this little painting by Vermeer, La Dentellière, and I felt the painting. Behind me, someone was indignant: why does he do that? Why did I smell this painting? I didn't know, in this case it didn't smell anything, but I still smell the things, the food, the pages of the books, the clean laundry. The person (a lady in her sixties, sweating, more or less American and who knew a little of the French language) seemed to understand, but with Vermeer's painting she did not understand. I explained that I could guess a lot of things that way, and it made her smile as I sniffed the inside of her purse. Bursting out laughing and with a strong accent she said in French: how old? I answered thirty-nine of course. And with mine? asked an ironic man in his sixties too, with a strong accent and swimming too (probably the husband of this lady), handing me, hilariously, an infamous, open little satchel. I hesitated: eighty-nine, eighty-nine. The man laughed, frozen in his sweat. Short. The smell of a painting is like childhood, it evaporates over time. I looked out of one of the museum's tall south windows, open towards the Seine. On the opposite banks, passers-by hurried in the direction of the shade of the trees.  

 

March 9, 2014  

 

This evening, this sentence in the subway, in Trocadéro: "I saw that in Campania in the gardens of the palace of Caserta", pronounced by a fat blonde woman who was speaking at random, her features dilated with pleasure, surrounded by many friends who had just boarded the wagon with her. She sank down onto an empty bench, as if in shock at her own words. She whispered a brief word into her neighbor's ear that no one could hear. A friend of the group then made a reflection concerning the palace of Caserta, which gave rise to other more or less audible reflections, and an exchange seemed to be organized little by little around this palace, which many knew. Then someone said: "Doudou speaks to you!". A man told a joke (with the Spanish accent - the character was Picasso as a child). We were laughing. A hubbub ensued about the jealousy that Picasso aroused. What followed was lost in an explosion of laughter provoked by a tall, thin guy who looked like Boris Vian: he punctuated his jokes with gestures and grimaces which expressed well what had to be understood (muffled laughter here and there), he spoke with a little foreign accent, opened his shirt, showed off his belly, sometimes let go of a consideration of a higher level, whistles of admiration, applause, he played the false immodesty, relaunched the applause. Good. They got off at La Muette and the car fell back into its torpor.  

 

Feb. 19, 2014  

 

From an old notebook: "Dream of a scooter saddle I can't fit under, for that I have to take off a coat, then another, and yet another ... fourteen coats in all . " I am satisfied to have found this note, which bears a similarity to a very recent dream that I did not write down and of which I still have this fragment: I buy a large suitcase, when I open it I discover shorts having belonged to Johann Sebastian Bach, which I put on, then another that I also put on ... fourteen shorts (dreams all the same).  

 

January 12, 2014  

 

Dream: I'm participating as a guest on a TV show, at least that's the feeling I have, but there is no camera, no technician, no particular setting, the place is like an amphitheater and there are hundreds of us standing there for what the person standing on the platform calls a "live." This person is a man at the start of the dream, then a woman ... Large loudspeakers broadcast questions, to which participants take turns answering. As I feel my turn coming I realize with relief that the only answer given by the people around me is: I don't know. It never takes the morale of the person on the platform, who comes and goes explaining things that I don't remember now. When finally a question is addressed to me, I answer that I do not know, faces turn in my direction, people are smiling at me from all sides [uncertain continuation] ... I am among a group of people on the ground floor. from the floor of the establishment, we walk at a rapid pace towards a room where the hearing results will be announced, everyone is dressed in shorts and light shirts ... As we arrive on a beach, I recognize my mother by my side, who takes my hand, gently ... She is in her twenties. She said to me: "Do you smell that smell of boxwood?" ... and I experience a terrible feeling of emotional loss, which wakes me with a start.  

 

December 16, 2013  

Today I sent this photo by mms to doctor K. He examined it very carefully, he replied by text message a few minutes later ... Then he wrote that it was was interesting, that besides he saw there something other than painting, perhaps a form located at the borders of the thought ... Well, I did not see what he meant but I answered that thank you that touched me a lot, that I was simply looking to find the music of the 60s, that I liked this cover of the Stones, that I thus better remembered the troubles of my adolescence ... that I had perhaps found a way to formulate my thought differently, well that this cover pleased me what, that it was obvious ... "Yes, he continued, it is obvious" ... He then sent me an mms the representative disguised as Mickey Mouse. And we stayed a long time without correspondence. Three hours later he ended up writing: "... that will be one hundred and sixty euros". And I would turn off my phone (people all the same)  

 

October 10, 2013  

 

In this endless dream interspersed with semi-awakenings, my drawing teacher is the person I love the most in the world, he himself adores me, pampers me, performs for me magnificent charcoal works, which I take with me at home with great pleasure. But he left the establishment for another located in Paris. I feel abandoned. I then erase it from my memory, I do not want anyone to say his name. And now I refuse to work with charcoal. Towards the end of this dream, crossing the gardens of the Trocadéro, I see an elderly lady installed with her drawing board, tracing in charcoal on a small sheet a few thin, clumsy and obsolete contours of the Eiffel Tower, a spectacle that brings me back to life. remembers the memory of this professor and relieves me of a great secret weight, I who since the time made this abandonment of the past solely responsible for my repugnance for charcoal. In front of this lady, it seems to me that at the time I had not understood the ridiculousness of this technique, nor its unhappy fate.  

 

September 4, 2013  

 

I stand still in the middle of the garden surrounding Carl Gustav Jung's house in Zurich. Around me, a reception. The guests come and go in this garden, in the house and up to the upper floors. No one notices a detail: Carl Gustav Jung's bedroom is lit up. The spectacle is second to none. But when I later try to break into the house, I have to present a suitcase that I don't have to some sort of security guard. Where to get it? I question evasive people who instill in me a terrible anguish. All have this famous suitcase (I discovered it at this time). [...] I am now inside the house, in a room similar to my current Parisian studio, this time in the company of the famous psychiatrist. He is my father. I am delivered from this anguish, relieved not to have seemed it any more need of the suitcase, suitcase of which I listen to this father reveal to me the essence so essential a moment before. His words are unfortunately spoken in a foreign language. My attention then turns to his gestures, large gestures wanting to represent the flight of a bird ... There follows a gradual awakening, during which my consciousness reports an element absent from the dream: the suitcase contained seagulls. And I feel the absurd desire to join this dream for confirmation.  

 

June 30, 2013  

 

Watch out for tripadvisor.com. On the advice of some comments posted on this site, I just spent a short week in New York to try the Parker Méridien rooms, indeed very quiet, at least mine (located on the 39th floor facing Central Park). Good. But the staff at this hotel did not provide me with any satisfactory explanation for the loss of much of my luggage, arguing a so-called aesthetic requirement of the establishment, you speak, and breakfast came up to you by very strict gentlemen dressed in wicker shorts. I would therefore rather recommend the St Regis, a stone's throw away, where the staff, closer to your concerns, kindly took care of the delivery of my luggage (finally found) to the room, the suitcases of course but also my Ford V8 or my taxi bumpers, and made no remark about my engine hoods, my electric cables, my wheels and my chairs crammed into the bathroom ... But breakfast is not Up to the room until 4 p.m., versus 7 p.m. at the Parker Méridien (10 p.m. at the Hilton, but they refuse to wear socks in the beds).  

 

June 22, 2013  

 

Dream: A large shed. A sort of senior staff climbed onto a platform, read a rule article and sprayed maple syrup on his face before absorbing a slice of apple pie. "Oh the other hey" then chanted the audience. With a whistle he then introduced into this hangar a small procession made up of other senior executives pushing a bed on casters on which was stretched a "top frame", the latter straightened up and in a weak voice. stated that she had been lying in this bed for thirty years, thirty years without eating or drinking anything other than leftover cold ratatouille. New whistle from the top executive: the audience this time giggled in chorus, at length, punctuating this hubbub with loud "oh the other hey". Several other demonstrations followed, during which, in particular, senior executives roughly disguised as monkeys simulated levitation perched on a kind of tinkered forklift, each time the assistance chuckling in chorus, repeating the same "oh the other hey". At the exit, everyone received a leaflet announcing the return at fifty hours and followed a distribution of small grape flanks that belonged to Jacques Anquetil, that everyone refused by saying "oh the other hey".  

 

June 14, 2013  

 

In my dream last night, a man sitting beside me in a subway car holds in his hand a rubber mallet which he suddenly strikes violently on the chiseled brass top of the coffee table in front of him, then he declares to be free to hit what he wants when he wants. Another man across the way nods, says with a little surprised and delighted air that it's good to have fully satisfied his need to hit the table top and make that deafening noise, but that without the speech that has preceded (in the dream I do not understand what he is referring to) he would not have felt the urge to let off steam, that he was thus dependent rather than free ... The first man then leaves the wagon at the next station and singing Stardust ... and now the purple dust of twilight time steals across the meadows of my heart ... amazes myself to remember those lyrics and sing right.  

 

June 2, 2013  

 

I was thinking of a Picasso green, a slightly bluish green, a little dirty, and simultaneously I was thinking of Maurice Ravel's Rapsodie Espagnole, I don't know why. Trouble, therefore, at the moment listening to this work; it gives rise to an imaginary Andalusia; Ravel's Hispanicism is more dreamed of than scientific, is closer to Carmen than to Sorcerer Love. I love these haunting four-note first bars of the overture (Prélude à la Nuit), it sounds so Spanish, yet we find them in Qui tollis and Agnus Dei of Liszt's Hungarian Mass of the Coronation, but in this Rapsodie, repetition and orchestration give it an Andalusian color. It is therefore now associated with this Picasso green; this music is green.  

 

May 26, 2013  

 

Dream of the night: Mom wears loose clothes that hide her body. Very long black hair. We leave the house. We walk in an almost automatic way, as if towards a determined destination. The sunny facades of rue Félix-Faure light up our faces [...] We stopped in front of a specialized food store. She looks at the kinds of pastries displayed in the window. I follow her inside, keeping myself a little behind. And I watch him without his knowledge. Everything is long and dark about her, her jacket, her hair, the strap of her laptop bag. When she turns to me to come out, holding a box overflowing with things in her hand, she smiles. The fine features of his face contrast with the rest of the body, undoubtedly coated. But there is a harmony, which I cannot explain. We walk along Avenue Foch to the sea. We share the contents of the box, chocolates, fries, sausages, fruit pastes, country ham. Further on, on the North dike, she sits on the still wet parapet. I walk away to throw the empty box in a trash can. From a distance, I still watch her. Who is she, after all? I could leave her there, go. I stay, and it all hangs perhaps by a thread, by a taste of chocolate and ham in my mouth. I sit down next to him and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of the waves against the dike, thinking of the atmosphere of the black and white cinema of the fifties, of scenes from the Quatre Cents Coups, of this Paris with black facades.  

 

May 16, 2013  

 

From an old notebook (1992): Dream of a scooter saddle under which I cannot fit an individual, for that he must take off a coat, then another, and yet another ... fourteen coats in all. I'm glad to have found this note, which bears a similarity (crowding) to a dream noted last month: I am offered a suitcase full of seagulls, which I cannot hear (even when I press my ear against the suitcase). ), they suddenly fly away as soon as I open. And last night I dreamed that I was offered for my birthday a suitcase from which emanated a sound atmosphere of marine type, birds, surf, but when I opened it I discovered an old shorts that had belonged to Franz Kafka ( dreams all the same).  

 

May 8, 2013  

In my mess in the studio I found a notebook with which I had filled only a few pages when I was a teenager. I saw in this notebook a certain sadness, not a sadness transcribed in the present tense, but another, absent from the notebook and which I remember today. My brain restores this sadness, let's say it delivers an image of it to itself. I threw away this notebook. Then I worked. But I burst into tears. My gesture was not in question. I cried because I heard a dismal voice, a call for sadness that emanated from this notebook. I'm not sad, I'm just afraid of this call. There was on the cover page of this notebook this strange sentence: "The Lord is your keeper, the Lord is your shadow on your right hand." I must have found it somewhere, maybe in the Bible. I quite like this poetry, a little mysterious, that we arrange as we want. There is a whole mystery in my shadow: why is it on the right and not behind, not on the left? I don't regret throwing this notebook away. He came from far away, he returned there. A point in the blue of the horizon, that the fri  

 

April 26, 2013  

 

Dream: I am in Venice, in the Chapel of the Rosary of the Basilica of San Zanipolo, sitting under a painting by Veronese, "The Adoration of the Shepherds". I chuckle stupidly, and the nature of this giggles has a great and mysterious importance in the pleasure I take in it. I leave the basilica. A volcano crater opens in the middle of the square. No one is afraid. Someone says it is an oracle. Some witnesses to the scene are equipped with a kind of smartphone which decipher the oracles, so you have to approach them to understand what is being said. But the crowd is such that I cannot get close enough. The faces are serious, a gravity that does not affect me at all, which appears to me on the contrary like the thing that, confusedly, I had thought a moment before, in the basilica, to explain the nature of my giggles ...  

 

April 18, 2013  

 

We are about thirty people crammed into a huge basket, our balloon flies over a mountain range which I am told is the Himalayas, no one speaks, the silence is absolute, we are in search of timeless communion and uneducated truths. Sometimes someone chants a Buddhist prayer ... [uncertain continuation, perhaps brief awakening] ... We are four or five in this basket, very religious, preoccupied with reincarnation, everyone laments at the idea of disappear one day, never to exist again, to sink body and soul into silent eternity, to have to leave everything forever, and even, my neighbor tells me, "to be able to acquire nothing during our life that we can at least to take with". Only the idea of eternal sweetness of life animates us. So we mumble litanies while nodding our heads, we unwind rosaries and bobbins of wool, we fiddle with the tsampa, we make porridge in salted tea with yach butter (disgusting), there is an infernal smell of butter . I finally throw myself into the void, I fly over rooftops for a moment and land in the eastern part of Parc Monceau, in front of the gates of avenue Velasquez, which I cross. I try to enter the Cernuschi museum but a man blocks my way because of the smell of butter that I wear on me. I wake up swimming. 

March 29, 2013

 

I stand motionless on a roof terrace in New York, observing a motionless man too, in whom I think I recognize Maurice Ravel. He is quite far from me. In the first part of the dream, silhouettes crowd around my immediate perimeter, a clamor and loud noises are heard lower down in the half-light of the street, large objects (perhaps cars) fall into the water, shouts. Maurice Ravel, yes. With folded hands, I look at him, regretting that I am not by his side, but it is like this: I am not allowed to change places. I send him absurd little signs (judged as such at the time) ... Later, I am against him, so close  

 

March 27, 2013  

 

Piet Mondrian. This perpendicular painting interests me little, freezes me, uncompromising. Piet Mondrian will fall out with another painter, a friend who shares his visions, will fall out because the other introduces the diagonal in his painting, no but oh! Good, but Mondrian himself interests me because he was born into a pure and hard Calvinist family, and he ogled for a moment elsewhere, to finally drive the rigorous, ascetic nail of his origins perpendicular. Like Piet I will probably not escape my Calvinist education, at least not tonight, we'll see that tomorrow. Anyway there are diagonals in my painting.  

 

March 15, 2013  

 

I am in a winter garden with a stranger, he is dressed to the nines, I would like to know his identity, nothing attests to the smallest answer, and I feel unable to ask any question. There is a set of rattan seats buried under the vegetation. Outside, the branches of a cedar graze the exterior of the glass walls. We sit on either side of a coffee table, put our cups side by side on the edge of the board, make sure not to disturb the cards of a game of crappie in progress, carry on a conversation started at the inside the house, made up of generalities that we put together haphazardly, which initially saddens me, and ends up arousing in me a feeling of familiarity. We each grab a magazine from the pile on the floor next to the table, and finally shut up. When I wake up, it's 3:44 am. I feel infinitely good, I write down this dream and immediately go back to sleep. Just before my alarm clock rings at 8:30 am, I dream again of this same winter garden, exactly the same, but without the presence of the unknown, nor in me the simple awareness of him, and invaded by an immense and incomprehensible grief. Still in a half-sleep after the alarm clock rings, and thinking about this last dream (before rereading my notes concerning the first, then completely forgotten), I do not explain this sorrow. When I reread the notes from the first dream, I understand that, perhaps, I was missing the unknown in the second, without my realizing it.  

 

March 7, 2013  

 

I am on board an old liner. Everything is dilapidated, abandoned, deserted. I am told that there are still passengers. At the beginning of the dream, I am in what at the time was the large dining room for the first classes. What overwhelms me, to tears, is to have seen this ship often at the time of its splendor in the port of Le Havre, without ever being on board. Now that I'm here, it's all over, empty, rusty. [uncertain continuation ...] A woman is in front of me (she pretends to be my mother but has the features of Erroll Garner, the hair smooth, plated, slicked back). We are on an outside deck of the liner. She is accompanied by a double bass player and a drummer, herself seated at a broken upright piano, from which she tries to release sounds, in vain. His face expresses disappointment at not being able to comfort me. She then grabs the double bass and performs Mood Indigo on the E string ... When I wake up, I am still shaking with emotion.  

 

March 1st, 2013  

 

Today I fell asleep at Dr. K.'s, on the couch, and I had this dream: I am facing Stalin. He questions me in the form of short questions, which relate to areas so disparate that from one to the other I cannot concentrate. I can feel it: my answers have no consistency, which I am not worried about (I conclude that he is having an experiment). It is arched behind a piece of furniture that looks like a chest of drawers to me, large drawers occupy the entire width, which I could open. Stalin seems to me stuck between this chest of drawers and a wall. The top of the cabinet is at eye level. I'm listening to it. I have a hunch that, given his awkward position, his voice will weaken, and die off. He ends up being silent. And I wake up. I then told this dream to Doctor K., who for his part noted down the words I said during my sleep, more or less intelligible gibberish, he said to me, strewn with technical terms specific to the world of aeronautics. . Is that so.  

 

February 22, 2013  

 

Dream of that night: I am sitting in an all-white auditorium in Paris, rue de la Chaussée d'Antin, a hall adjoining another, larger hall, in which a play by Jean-Paul Sartre is being performed. In my room nothing happens. I get up, with the intention of going to see the play by Jean-Paul Sartre. But I walk along endless corridors, discovering a space made up entirely of boxes and cluttered backstage. It seems to me that I spent my childhood here. I remember a happy childhood, strewn with manifestations that others did not hear, as if I was being addressed from afar under the ground of this place: songs which took on different meanings from day to day. I remember that a coat belonging to Jean-Paul Sartre was once hung in one of these boxes, a phosphorescent coat bearing the inscription "Le Havre". I find the lodge, but the coat is no longer there. I walk over to the window, wave at a man hanging laundry outside (it turns out he's hanging padlock keys on a clothesline). Since he cannot see me, I activate a sort of foghorn which produces a sound whose echoes reverberate endlessly, as in the mountains. I am leaning. And I fall. Jean-Paul Sartre welcomes me downstairs, wearing Ferragamo ballet flats, which we spend hours admiring while walking together along Boulevard Haussmann.  

 

February 6, 2013  

 

I hear on the radio the first bars of a concerto by Arcangelo Corelli, number eight in G minor (fatto per la notte di Natale, for Christmas night). What I see: the sky of Paris resembles the skies of the Normandy coasts, the clouds spin towards the south, loaded with swell, with loneliness. The window is open, the cold wind circulates in the workshop, mixing the scent of coffee with the scent of turpentine that preceded them. Oh oh oh! I said to the person who interrupts the music to announce the time it takes to get from the Porte d'Auteuil to the Porte de Bercy, fifty-two minutes, no, but no kidding, we have to stop with this nonsense (people all the same).  

 

January 31, 2013  

 

Sky low in Paris, yesterday, very weak light, around 4 pm it clears up while I am lying on my relaxed armchair, unable until then to choose a title for my canvas, I hesitate between "Bishop in diving gear" and "Solange aux hortensias". I come out of my torpor, rush to the large bookstore, in search of an idea for a title: purchase of a lot of thirty copies of the Brothers Karamazov where I discover the staging of a sibling in the throes of the desire to kill the father, huge disappointment therefore, I give up the books in a neighborhood real estate agency. I will later opt for The Death of Sardanapalus, always preferable to titles like André Gide dans son bain or Fausse moped.  

 

January 23, 2013  

 

Score for these very first weeks of the New Year at the workshop: 12/20. Mixed satisfaction especially because of a dark blue T-shirt that I had not worn for years and whose effects I rediscovered too late. Result: a painful sensation throughout the sessions of last week, painful execution of a painting representing André Gide disguised as a Swiss Guard and hitting a young Tunisian with a leg of lamb. On Friday I swapped this T-shirt for a tweed jacket, scratched my canvas and tried to paint another subject, without conviction: a still life with a frozen monkey. Good. This week, normal sessions in a plaid blouse. On the phone, Martine tried to reassure me by telling me about pajamas from Agnès B. which would produce interesting effects. To have.  

 

January 12, 2013  

 

Recurring dream. I walk on a beach in the summer wearing a coat. A man pretending to be Maurice Ravel walks towards me, reproaches me for not being in a bathing suit, then tries to put applesauce in my ears. In last night's version of this dream, this behavior bothers me but does not surprise me. And when the man walks away, like the previous times I say: "You are not Maurice Ravel". But this time he turns around: I recognize my father.  

 

January 10, 2013

This portrait of a mother and child, in pastel, is hung in a museum, and in this dream it is about a famous woman who, I am told in the audio guide, was my mother "at a certain time". I had to fight to cut through the crowd gathered there, a crowd kept at a distance from the painting behind a cordon of guards. I am alone in the middle of this crowd, and I do not understand the reasons for such a rush, because this painting is signed by a stranger, it is the voice of the audio guide who specifies it and who insists on this detail. . Mom, who accompanied me earlier to this museum, I feel her far away, in another wing of the building, or even outside, in the wind. I look for it in the direction of the painting, from which I await an answer. But it is not the same table at  

 

January 4, 2013  

Before others have the same idea as him, Maurice Ravel walks onto the balcony, settles down next to his mother, Marie Delouart. They look through the pine forest at the sky in the direction where the sun is about to disappear, the French Alps on the other side of the lake, the pink spot of Mont-Blanc. Then he observes his mother, the gesture of his fingers shaking the ashes of her cigarette, the position of her hand, quiet. He brings his lips to her shoulder, kisses her, (she closes her eyes), tells her we're really good, there, eh. Yes, she replies. She ended up turning to him, saying that she would drink something and lay her forearm on Maurice's head. This gesture arouses in him the impression of rediscovering something already experienced (for example in early childhood): a person must have placed a forearm on his head, or a leg, and perhaps uttered a word that s 'is then printed on the memory of this gesture. Today he has lost that person, lost that word. All that remains is the gesture, which despite everything is only a supposed memory.  

 

December 29, 2012  

 

I find that the Flore is not what it used to be, the overwhelming comparison with the panache of the post-war years has undermined the morale of the owner, who little by little has let the quality of the myth fall into disrepair, it's lamentable, and the literary world surely has a part of the responsibility in this sad picture, too many images in the books, Sartre is dead, the writers are now surfing, in the video, investing in Dubai or start plastic surgery, they no longer have the same priorities. At Les Deux Magots, the waiters work on roller blades, organize bets and speed dating evenings, actors pour buckets of bechamel sauce on passers-by on Boulevard Saint-Germain, shoot hidden cameras, a tax-free zone and a fast food service are offered. indoors. Even at Lipp's opposite, we let go.  

 

December 21, 2012  

 

Dreams of that night, located on the Esplanade du Trocadéro. Two dreams. In the first, I am sitting at the top of the steps leading down to the fountains. A person accompanies me, a woman, whom I do not identify, I feel her behind me, a few meters away, herself accompanied and receiving confidences concerning the areas to which I am sensitive. I hear talk without quite understanding. It's mom, I recognize her voice. In the second dream, it is an esplanade supposed to be that of the Trocadero, from which it differs in that it looks like the quay of a port, not at all like an esplanade, but I feel on this esplanade from the Trocadero. The buildings that surround it in reality are here very far away, barely visible. Since her death, Mum has lived in one of these buildings, made up of two bodies separated by the esplanade, identical, in an arc. I am told that it looks a lot like the Palais de Chaillot. The esplanade overlooks something beautiful. I like to be there. A heavy wrought iron lantern is suspended from a cable several kilometers long which connects the two parts of the palace. She is slowly swaying in the wind. When mom approaches me, in a soft voice she asks me to smile. I smile, closing my eyes. She says: "With open eyes" [...] We compare the color of our clothes.  

 

December 15, 2012  

 

I saw Dr. B. three times in a week and yet I do not feel any particular effect, at least none of those supposed to be produced by this kind of treatment. Three times Doctor B. remained silent in his armchair, sticking from time to time to a few reflections devoid of any relation to the content of the session, relaunching me for example on old questions such as knowing what explains the absence of a moped in my painting, and why my characters are never motorized, questions to which in this case I have no answer, he knows it. This morning, as I was emptying tubes of toothpaste in a saucepan in front of him, he abruptly repeated to me that there was no frozen monkey on my webs either ... His sentence remained in suspense and we have of course burst out laughing, as usual, but I did not know exactly what he had in mind, moreover the pan being too small I could not empty the fifty tubes, j must have squeezed the last ones over the trash can in his office, which made us laugh again. This afternoon I took the metro to Pasteur, like that, to take a walk. I like this gray Paris in the rain.  

 

December 7, 2012  

 

I found this note in a notebook that I filled out at the age of twenty-two: "The habit of relying on mum's prayers is perhaps absurd. One should not think that it is incumbent on the only prayer has the mission of satisfying you, because it is only human if I may say so, at least it is not divine. Do you have to pray yourself? To pray is to admit your fate and, in a way, to immerse yourself in it more. the idea that the cases where prayer is in vain and not when it works are manifest. Mum will die, and forever stop praying, only then will I know if prayer is working. " Fuck what you can be stupid and bombastic at twenty-two!  

 

November 29, 2012  

 

I am in my dining room, in Paris (the dream reproduces the room exactly). I walk around the table with a man who claims to be Stan Getz, but I don't believe him. I hear notes played on the tenor saxophone, then distinctly the title But beautiful, as if a musician were in the room. We take a kind of tunnel that goes under the table and enter a recess (located at the location of the fireplace), where the musician seems to be. I am overwhelmed by the quality of this music. The man from earlier is no longer there. I touch a soft, mud-like material. Someone is there and tells me they have a secret. I then let myself slide without shame in this hot material, looking for this person with my hands, I do not find him strictly speaking. It turns out that our flesh and this mud merge into an equal consistency, that parts of our bodies are everywhere at the same time [more uncertain ...] I am told that the man earlier was well and truly Stan Getz.  

 

November 21, 2012  

 

I walk along the endless platform of Gambetta station on line 3 (in the dream, this station belonged to my family). I enter a house whose entrance is located far away, at the other end of the quay, a house made up entirely of rooms. I remember having lived there a worried, troubled childhood even, strewn with demonstrations that others did not hear, as if one addressed to me from afar under the earth's crust: rumblings which took on different meanings according to each other. frequencies. I also remember that an original score by Maurice Ravel was once hung in one of these rooms, a score composed of phosphorescent signs and bearing at the bottom right the inscription "For Denis". I find the room, but the score is no longer there.  

 

November 6, 2012  

 

Earlier in Notre-Dame, Bach, Toccata and fugue in D minor BWV 538, called Dorian so as not to confuse it with the other, the BWV 565, much better known. Wonderful, there is no other word, and the constant hubbub of the cathedral (people from all over the world come and go everywhere, take pictures ...) gives the music a somewhat special dimension, a mixture of sacred and not sacred at all, personally I find my account there, without knowing exactly why, yes, people trigger big flashes in your face, talk to you behind your back, we are immersed in a huge bath of History, grandiose things of all kinds and other bullshit of today, it is basically what we are looking for in these circumstances, that especially the world continues to revolve around us, good if it was about 'listen to Daphnis and Chloe, I'm not saying, but this Toccata and fugue ...  

 

October 28, 2012  

My works in water on paper are now a few years old. I used acrylic ink for some, watercolor for others. In general, water-based painting is quite restrictive, in my eyes at least: even if the results obtained can sometimes seem satisfactory, we confusedly keep the feeling of having been dominated by water. Here, my birthplace on the heights of Le Havre. I first took a picture one summer morning and remembered the winters of the fifties in Siberia. We were going down this rue Félix-Faure on a sledge. I wonder where this watercolor hangs today. And how are the people looking at her.  

 

October 2, 2012  

 

Doctor B. will never say to me: "The hardest thing in my office is to have to constantly curb the nonsense that goes through my head, to have to contain, to play psychiatrist, and this comedy forces me to go to bed at night. nine o'clock in the evening, invades my mind, I could speak of a ridiculous farce, I see myself in Sempé's drawings, entangled in the clichés of psychoanalysis. To each patient corresponds a particular universe in which it is necessary to enter, to which it is necessary to stick immediately, this passage is madness. About ten patients a day, over eight hours. If I only listened to one, even for eight hours, that would be a piece of cake. A long eight-hour session, with breaks to eat and stretch your legs. The GP sees more people every day, but has no such problem. The patient only gives him his body, and going from a boil to a coryza is all the same less ... The body is an object ... Even though I always have my patient's file under my nose, it I happen to make mistakes in the first names of the husband, the children, the cousins or the grandmother, to invert the dates. I happened to be taken back because at the previous session I forgot to note that the mother had dipped her son's head in a basin of water at the age of five, and not when I was five. 'age fifteen as I thought. This is why the psychiatrist speaks so little. The goal is not to be silent, no, it is not to make mistakes. It's comedy: seeming to know. Don't listen to my evil spirit, Denis, I think I have a little layer of grime, you know, and I should be a little careful talking to you. " (but no but no).  

 

September 25, 2012  

A blue 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado. I daydreamed a little inside. There was a pleasant smell there, not quite an old smell, but something that had to do with the past, as in those Romanesque churches that one visits in the summer to find freshness, and a mysterious tranquility. I dropped onto the bench. There was a book in the glove compartment, of which I read a few pages in a low voice: the description of a rainy day and a wedding in an old Norman abbey surrounded by a wood. And when I was driving later on the waterfront, towards Juan, my thoughts were full of this damp wood. I stopped along the pine forest, in the shade. It was noon. No one around the pool. No noise. I was on this huge bench, stretched out my full length. The solitude of this place filled me with old dreams. I adjusted the rearview mirror so that I could see the sky without twisting. In this shadow, I could make out the black tops of the trees, their backs to me. They had made each other long braids while I was riding.  

 

September 18, 2012  

 

A very short manuscript (one sentence) attributed to Anaïs Nin has just been sold for 91,000 dollars: "Vostre verge elle es belle, name of a pipe, cute, I want her". Christie's justifies its decision to put on sale this sublime text written by the novelist for the two Nobel Prize winners, by describing it as one of the most beautiful prose in the world. In a crowded room, more than a hundred manuscripts of all origins are also on sale, including one attributed to Anaïs Nin's father (sold for $ 82 with the seller's commission). That of Anaïs Nin, lot 63, was disputed between bidders on the phone, on the internet, behind the scenes and in the room. The winner is behind the scenes where, at the start of the dream, I find myself. This winner, a small man with glasses, is immediately protected from journalists by the handling staff. "He bid on behalf of a Balinese dancer," a spokesperson for Christie's told reporters. Just before waking up, I leave Christie's and I walk on the sidewalk of avenue Matignon in the company of a person that I believe to be Anaïs Nin, she tries to confuse me by circling around me. I realize that it is his father. He walks away over there, waves me a little farewell ...  

 

August 24, 2012  

 

I take part as a guest in a television or radio show, at least that's the impression I have: but no camera, no microphone, no technician, no particular decor, the place is like an amphitheater, and there are hundreds of us standing there for what the person standing on the platform calls a "live." This person is a man in white at the start of the dream, then the same man in yellow ... Large loudspeakers broadcast the very low sound of this man's voice, which echoes questions which the participants must take turns answering. role. As I feel my turn coming I realize with relief that the only answer formulated by the people around me is: I don't know. When finally a question is addressed to me I answer that I do not know, the faces then turn in my direction and one smiles at me from all sides [uncertain continuation] ... I am among a group of people on the ground floor of the establishment, we walk at a rapid pace towards a room where the audience results of the show will be announced, everyone is dressed in shorts and light shirts ... As we are we arrive in this room, the announcement of excellent results triggers an immense and joyful scramble, in the middle of which I end up finding myself pressed against my older brother (I had not seen him until then), who, holding on to the Using a tape measure, try to measure the exact distance between my right eye and my left knee, then introduce WD-40 silicone-free penetrating oil into my left ear (alarm clock).  

 

Aug 2, 2012  

 

Soon fifteen days that I hang out in the plush corridors of my hotel, that I look for the exit to go at least to the beach, it seems that it is magnificent, water at twenty-nine degrees, the people crossed also talk to me about 'a swimming pool somewhere surrounded by a lush palm grove, well, and it seems that Florida is a region that is worth it, soaking up the sun, its golf courses, its marinas, its typical housing estates, its amusement parks ... Every now and then I sit down on the sofas to read some Fitzgerald news, and it won't be long before I tackle the spa's price list, which I was apparently very close to last night before succumbing to fatigue and to fall asleep on the floor ($ 840 to have my stomach rubbed with ketchup).  

 

July 10, 2012  

 

Today I brought to Doctor B a drawing of Gandhi on the trumpet, which he examined very carefully, in silence ... Then he said that it was interesting, that in addition he saw there something other than art, perhaps a form located at the borders of the thought ... Well, I did not see what he meant but I answered that thank you that touched me a lot, that I was trying to escape my compulsive attitudes towards subjects, that the idea of Gandhi on the trumpet appealed to me, that thus I broke a little with my "background" ... that I had perhaps found a way to formulate my thought differently, well that Gandhi on the trumpet pleased me what, that it was obvious ... "Yes, he continued, it is obvious ..." And he held out his right hand to me above his office, as if to say goodbye to me. I squeezed it. And we were silent for a long time. So, staring at me, he ended up whispering: "Well, that will be one hundred and sixty euros". And I left the office in tears.  

 

June 30, 2012  

 

Emil Cioran had brought a complete Mickey Mouse disguise, of which I only put on the mask, he spoke to me by tapping me on the top of my head with a small rubber mallet, his voice white, the tone monotonous, probably not right. he soon told me that my eyelids were heavy, that I was going to fall asleep at his signal ... no, I was on the contrary wide awake, and while I could have expected from him to a skeptical and acerbic speech, the content was on the contrary close to an inner infantile appeal, and I slipped into a state of delicious abandonment ... He suddenly told me to put on the entire disguise, it was a Order, I got up, then shouting we hit each other with cushions ... A small bell then rang, indicating the end of this session. And I left the writer's apartment covered with feathers because one of the cushions had exploded (dreams all the same).  

 

June 25, 2012  

 

Good week overall (12/20), except Sunday: while strutting in the Russian church on rue Daru I stumbled on the edge of a small platform, one of the yogurts always present in my inner pockets exploded, and in the evening I soaked my chicken sandwich in maple syrup (terrible).  

 

May 31, 2012  

 

An art gallery now occupies the ground floor and the first floor of the building where I lived in a small two-room apartment on this first floor as a student. The porch has not changed, to the right. I push open the door between the two windows, walk towards a spiral staircase, go up. Up there, three large green armchairs surround a table in the center of the exhibition hall. I sit down to think. All the partitions have been knocked down. It is difficult for me now to situate myself in my little two-room apartment of the past. I am on the site of one of these partitions, between my bedroom and the bathroom where I took endless hot showers. You want something ? a man asks me. He comes from below, no doubt saw me go up, joins me, is standing in front of me. I question him. No, he replies, he did not know the floor divided into two small apartments, no, when he bought, this first floor was the apartment of a Chilean businessman, who himself , he believes, had bought it from a couple of restaurateurs, and, as we speak, I get up, turn around: my big green armchair is actually on the spot where my dressing room occupied, and no, like I first believed it, straddling the partition that separated my bedroom from the bathroom, my error being explained as follows: I had not taken into account the space taken by the toilets, which have now been removed. Do you have a toilet? The man indicates to me a door at the back of the room, which I quickly open to take a look and close immediately (a toilet indeed). Thank you, I tell him, going back down the spiral staircase. Once outside on the sidewalk, turning around, noting that he is watching me perplexed from inside his gallery, I give him a small smile (no, but who is this con? Could we read in his house).  

 

May 22, 2012  

 

An airy place, a warm light spread everywhere, except the area where my father is standing, who is waiting by a glass door, holding a construction shovel in his hand. I slowly back away without taking my eyes off him, two or three more steps, and I'll soon be seated safely inside what appears to be a phone booth, which I can't see right now. A sufficient distance separates me now from him, I sit down on a parapet, in the absence of this telephone booth which remains nowhere to be found. And then everything becomes cloudy: as through a misty window I see him advancing towards me, he is suddenly so close that I have to raise my eyes to look at him, his face appears to me like a mass of modeled earth towering over me . I get up horrified: he is lying on the ground. I feel guilty. Terror seizes me. What happened next would seem like another dream if it weren't for this detail: I remember a murder during which I was guided by a feeling of solemnity, by a mind that understood me (contradiction with the terror felt in front of the body lying on the ground, terror which explains a half awakening). In the farthest distance that my gaze now carries, it is a pine forest that I meet, where I see myself once running in the company of my father, in a happy, distant past, a carpet of pine needles stretches as far as the eye can see. , I feel to tears the nostalgia for the time when I lived in this pine forest with him. I remember that together we waited for the night, lying on still warm sand, in silence, that when the first stars arrived we felt the sun, the sea, the wind present on us, that it manifested itself at his place. by unusual coloring of the skin and the appearance of shiny particles.  

 

May 15, 2012  

 

Doctor B. came and went in the corridor at the pleasure of two patients, their conversation reached me in snatches, a fairly great calm reigned in the office. One of the two patients came to sit with me in the waiting room: black hair, remained close to adolescence, provided with a general harmony a little soft, an expression both ceremonial and lost . "There is no dried toad," he told me almost immediately. Good. I then noticed a detail to which I had not immediately given importance: he held a small wooden mallet in his left hand. He got up, pushed open a door, I followed him, he was walking in the half-light, groping, striking the mallet around him. I froze. I was surrounded by recognizable shapes shone by the stream of light released from the back by the half-open door. The others were chatting there. We stood thus in the dark, motionless, silent. A long moment passed and then he said, "Notice, I like chocolate." He laughed, and I heard a long series of mallet hits on a metal object. We were very close to each other now, touching each other. But after one last round of mallet blows he said goodbye to me and left, I heard him running away, banging everywhere, it seemed to me that the noise would never end. Probably one could understand this man. I, who only suffers from a mild disorder of sharing Jimi Hendrix videos on Facebook, couldn't (people though).  

 

April 29, 2012  

 

Sergei Vassilievich Rachmaninoff's Etude-Tableau number five opus thirty-nine is my favorite, I said straight away to Doctor B., which for once leaves him unmoved. Pedestrians, he told me. Because today we are installed, not as usual in his office, but on the terrace of a brasserie in the rue du Vieux-Colombier. I am therefore content to comment on the flow of pedestrians on the sidewalk. He listens to me in silence, a flute of champagne in front of him, it's extremely exotic. He finally orders a mille-feuilles and I will have to pay the bill, it seems that this type of session is widespread in large American cities, that it is practiced in large restaurants at four hundred dollars for two, I I'm not there yet, thirty-eight euros anyway and I only drink one coffee (but we stay together for almost an hour). Detail: as I take it upon myself to pass judgment on the somewhat dreary atmosphere which reigns at the two tables which are on the edge of the terrace between us and the sidewalk, he immediately interrupts me in an icy tone: "The pedestrians only".  

 

April 22, 2012  

 

Of all the characters of Antiquity, Diogenes is the most absent from my painting, sorry to him, then. Palpable absence, however. Haunting absence, shit!  

 

April 3, 2012  

 

It was an evening in my childhood, summer, on the beach. At some distance from me (I could not understand what he was saying to himself), a man addressed my mother a few words, handing her an object. I moved a little closer. She was shaking her head. With both hands, she even made a sign of refusal, added that no, really, thank you, she was leaving the table, before turning in my direction and asking if I wanted a donut, me. No, thank you, same. The man (he had a brown, hairy patch on his forehead) took me aside and oddly explained what these donuts were called, listed the ingredients. Sometimes the dates are badly pitted, you have to be careful, he told me (I was wondering if this plate was soft or hard). His conversation, then, seemed never to dry up when he undertook a monologue: he had known my mother's grandfather, with whom he had distinguished himself before independence (what independence?) As an advisor. He had taken part in the command of the French forces which remained there, was wounded in an enemy attack, and, after the evacuation of the base, he and his wife had returned to France, then returned to settle here for years. late, retired (I didn't understand anything anymore). The poor thing has left us, he said to me and, pointing to the elderly lady who was accompanying him, he confessed to me that he had remarried (what bothered me, deep down, was the question of to know why my mother cowardly abandoned me to talk to others there).  

 

March 27, 2012  

 

Dream. Although having the exact appearance of Duke Ellington, the man who enters my studio introduces himself under the name of the Duke of Lautréamont, and advances as if he had already been in this workshop, as if there had his habits. I show him canvases, some, not all, which he examines without speaking, running my right hand through his hair. I notice that he is carrying a small piano on his back, like a backpack. I wonder if he is talking about me to the musicians in his orchestra, I think so, a stealthy phrase mixed in with the conversation, a phrase none have heard. But maybe this idea of coming to my studio was advised to him by Johnny Hodges a quarter of an hour before, maybe he gave in to a sudden impulse from his saxophonist, it's very possible. After all I don't know anything about him, he's a stranger. I realize that I have never seen him standing, as I can see him just now, from a distance. In my memory, either he is sitting at his piano, or he precedes me in the dark, a meter away, and walking fast. I approach the wall, and stand next to him. I am so close to him that our shoulders brush against each other. I approach again, until obtaining a frank contact between us, between our shoulders. He does nothing to prevent it. He stares at me. And if I asked him to play the piano, yes, all of a sudden. Maybe he came for that. He must want to. Yes, that's it, he came to play me Solitude, a burning desire anime. But no, he walks towards the half-light at the end of the studio and sits down on a chair, there, alone. I hear him talking to himself. The sentences come to me in snatches. Then he is silent. Later, he pushes a cellar door (which does not exist in reality). I'm. The half-light and the smell of this junk attracted him. He sits on the arm of an old club chair which is losing its feathers. The back door lets in a trickle of light, which makes the shapes around us shine. "Our last concert surprised me, Denis, I wanted to tell you ... this riff in A minor, all this nostalgia ... I said to myself that you are forcing your nature. You were forcing her, weren't you? He checks his watch. He opens his little piano (like a bag), takes out a bottle of old cognac and, with his fingertips, places a few drops on the top of my right hand. And I wake up with the unprecedented impression that this dream has spanned several nights since my childhood.  

 

March 22, 2012  

 

Basically, I think my recipe for marshmallows stuffed with anchovy is a dead end, maybe I will have to give up the game, I don't know ... Replace the anchovy with country ham? no, I don't believe it ... I am aware of what is at stake, and I think back to my chimpanzees flambéed with armagnac, or my frogs crushed in chocolate, what successes! But I'm still hopeful, and I'm not giving up my bacon cookies anyway.  

 

March 12, 2012  

 

Several similar dreams last night. I come in like an intruder and no one takes care of me. There is a large reception hall made up of two wings, one of which is plunged into a chiaroscuro which makes one think of a church. People are talking under their breaths, standing. Ladies in black dresses and white aprons circulate between them with trays, we weave our way through a maze of inlaid furniture, sofas, medallion armchairs, we tread on huge old rugs, we breathe the odors of wax and fire. 'grass. A sort of enormous piece of furniture surrounded by vegetation is placed in the center of a room like a bandstand, it looks like a public garden: volutes of large palms are held there by nylon threads in pleasant positions. eye. I arrive in this room, I look for solitary places, I am going to sit apart on deep armchairs. The rustling of trees in a park is heard through the half-open windows. At the beginning of these moments I feel good, but I quickly have the impression of breaking a protocol. To realize, finally, that everyone in these rooms is each seated in an individual bumper car with the Apple brand on the front cover. They circulate slowly, without colliding. So the shepherdess I'm sitting on turns out to be a bumper car, too. But Fleury Michon brand.  

 

February 28, 2012  

 

In this dream, I break into Doctor B.'s office and search his office. The two drawers on the right are equipped with filing cabinets. I discovered the files, of unequal thickness, suspended in alphabetical order, the names clearly written on the edges. I find mine at the bottom of the top drawer. It is the thinnest file. I open it in front of me, on the desk. Only three numbered sheets, covered with scattered, muddled, nervous notes, most of them very brief, which I read to the end. No allusion to any therapy. These words and bits of sentences relate only to my physical appearance: my clothes, the complexion of my face, the condition of my shoes, my hands, the cleanliness of my hair ... I open another file, very thick: Lise Pontaux, forty-two years old, married, three children, domiciled at 87 rue Saint-Dominique, etc. However, the start of the treatment only dates back to less than two months, but this file includes about sixty numbered sheets, dozens of photos, newspaper clippings, a large pocket filled with postcards from the Biarritz region, several reproductions. from Rembrandt's Night Watch, and red chalk drawings of the face of the same girl. I consult other files. Here again, all of them have many and varied elements, which are always added to the same loose sheets on which Doctor B. records his notes. These files, I count them: one hundred and thirty-seven. I close the two drawers and put the key away in a round box of La Vosgienne candies.  

 

February 4, 2012  

 

Dream. I am with a man named Montieux in front of an old fresco, probably from the 16th century. An elderly man joins us and tells this Montieux that I am a painter. Where do you work ? the elderly man asks me, heading to another place in this undefined space. I follow suit, gratifying him with a smile. He ends up asking me if I am in Paris, to which I answer yes. It seems to satisfy him. We enter his studio, a room with a very high ceiling, crowded with a lot of things of all kinds, where I find Montieux (whom I thought I had left behind), seated in the company of several people he seems to know and to whom I am introduced. The painter that I am attracts questions (to which I give evasive answers). What do you see there? asks me a man, who points to a painting signed Matisse whose style has nothing to do with the real Matisse (in the dream it does not matter). Mimosa, Montieux breathes me, putting his hand on my shoulder. Mimosa, I repeat to this man. Ah good ? he tells me. You, what did you see? I ask him, but he hasn't seen much yet judging by the expression on his face (which then comes alive). He declares to see a character with a mustache. Ah not at all, I conclude, and I go out onto a balcony, from which you can see a few meters below the rails of a funicular, and below the beach of Mimosas, at least that's what it is. 'they whisper in my ear ...  

 

Jan. 7, 2012  

 

Earlier in the Woods, a woman gets out of her car with something in her arms, a small beige dog of the young mastiff type which, seeing me, jumps to the ground, barks and I can already see myself in the emergency room. Ambroise Paré hospital. Jason, Jason, Jason, says the woman, motionless (she addresses the animal, which drools on my legs, phew). Come here, come here, she said finally. She walks over to me, picks up the animal with a wave of her arm, legs bent, tells him in English that next time it will be bad for him, and, still in English, to me, that she is terribly sorry. . Never mind, I say to use my little school English, thinking you fucking piss off shit.  

 

Saturday, December 31, 2011

 

In this dream, I stole a toiletry bag from Galeries Lafayette. A judge ushered me into an office and explained to me how the reconstruction was going to take place. He got no response when he asked me to admit the facts. I was seated between two gentlemen in the back of a car and we drove slowly to the store on Boulevard Haussmann. 

There was a crowd, to whom the police cordon ordered them to calm down, and the judge walked towards the entrance of the store, opened it with a key which the clerk held out to him, made people enter a to one, staring at them, then ordered the door to be closed immediately on the crowd, which we continued to hear. He made me remove the handcuffs and surround me with two policemen. 

Do you still deny the facts? he called out to me. I answered yes, with a nod of my head. He called to him a very young policeman in uniform, informed him of the task which was going to fall to him: to carry out in my place the gestures which the witnesses would indicate to him. Another policeman was busy around a fake plastic toiletry bag with stylized shapes, he placed it on a counter at the end of which I stood, while each witness in turn stood in a place that the clerk noted. It seemed to me to last a century. 

Ladies and gentlemen please, exclaimed the judge. He announced the first witness: M. Saint-Gray, there, standing beside him, whose shoulder he held. There was a meeting between the two of them first, then, on the instructions of Mr. Saint-Gray, the young policeman in charge of carrying out the gestures in my place went to stand about twenty yards away. Go ahead, said the judge to him, and the young policeman leapt up with great strides, popped up a revolver in his hand (DIY polystyrene), rushed for the toilet bag, grabbed it by sticking the gun on it and left with it. she on the sidewalk, where he finally stopped, turned in our direction, had to lean down to see us about twenty yards away in the semi-darkness of the store. Mr. Saint-Gray, calmly (he had returned without waiting for his place around the counter), said no, from his seat he had not been able to see what had happened outside on the sidewalk, that it had been too fast.

Well, concludes the judge, and he turns  

 

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

 

Visit of an apartment, today, like that for nothing, passing for a possible buyer. We got in, this gentleman from the agency clean on him and me. In the living room, I approached the television, the remote control in my hand, turned it on, changed the channel, tried them all. These people did not have Canal Plus. Do they watch TV a lot? I asked. I don't know, he said, though interested in what I was watching (bullshit). Then I had crossed the reception room, the dining room, and was now trying to see through the hatch what was in the kitchen. I walked around, entered (the other followed me), examined the room with a single glance, stared for a moment at the two sinks and the stainless steel bench, pointed out that everything was very clean. Nothing was lying around, no, no bowl, no cutlery, no crumbs (the housekeeper must have spent the morning here and the people eating outside), only a plate thawed on three mushroom pies, already obviously soft, that I touched , they were soft, yes (people all the same).  

 

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

 

In this dream, Harpo Marx lit a cigarette, let himself fall back, inhaled a puff with a vague gaze, released the smoke without blowing it, very sybarite, seemed to think about what he was going to say, his head on one hand , did not say anything in the end, closed my eyes as I passed the back of my hand, my arm, over his skull, which slipped over his hair, causing a harp sound (he had now turned around and wanted me to massage him back there). I placed myself astride the top of her thighs. I rubbed his back there, following the directions he was moaning trying to send me with his face partly buried in the pillow, his cigarette in my hand (not there, he said, not there, not there. the). Ouch, he cried. But a harp music emanated from him, of which I did not feel the author ...  

 

Thursday, November 24, 2011

 

I once again stopped taking my magnesium, for a week, probably unconsciously to check its effectiveness again, and the result is that indeed without this molecule I'm just good to walk in the woods, I do not fix it, each his specialties, I am decidedly not autonomous in terms of magnesium, I still think I am, but no, and I am not, moreover, not in pajamas either, I have to regularly restock me, you have to be humble on these issues.  

 

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

 

I'm writing, I tell him. From a napkin on my knees I extract a manuscript, of which I hand her the first two pages, which she grabs, leaning towards me. These pages, she seems to show some interest in them, finally raises her eyes and looks at me, like a sadness flush around her mouth, but maybe it is an appearance. As she walks away, then, in the room, goes to the windows, leans against one of them, and looks at me, I close my towel and get up, put on a cap. I precede her on a staircase. It's snowing again, I said, reaching the bottom. Through a window, in fact, we see it together mom and I, side by side, flakes descend so slowly in the stillness of the air that they never seem to have reached the ground. Yes, she said. She contracts her shoulders, embraces the torso with her two arms. She has very beautiful hair [... suite uncertain, awakening swimming].  

 

Thursday, November 10, 2011

 

Today I brought to Doctor B. a canvas on which I had pasted a photo of him. He examined it with great attention, in silence ... Then he said that it was interesting, that moreover he saw there something other than painting, perhaps a form situated at the borders of thought. ... Well, I didn't see what he meant, but I replied that thank you that touched me a lot, that I was trying to escape my compulsive attitudes in matters of subjects, that the idea of this portrait liked, that in this way I broke a little with my painting ... that I had perhaps found a way to formulate my thought differently, well that this portrait pleased me what, that it was obvious ... "Yes, he continued, it's obvious ... "He held out his right hand to me above his desk, as if to say goodbye to me. I squeezed it. And we were silent for a long time. So, staring at me, he ended up whispering: "... And that will be a hundred and sixty euros" (people all the same).  

 

Saturday, October 8, 2011

 

This morning, I bought faucets in a small hardware store on Avenue Mozart, about 40kg, immediately abandoned on the sidewalk in front of the store. This obsessive-compulsive disorder is, I am told, exceptional among artists, especially widespread in sport, tennis in particular, and in air transport. I have read that Roger Federer would devote a third of his income to the purchase of various valves (about four thousand tons per year), that in the sixties certain hostesses of American companies which have now disappeared went so far as to squander the three quarters of their salary. The artists, no, are apparently not affected by this kind of disturbance, at least not those that I know. I would be an exception, but no study to my knowledge has been done on this subject (to be deepened anyway).  

 

Sunday, October 2, 2011

 

Doubtless to be closer to me, Doctor B. often speaks to me about colors, proceeds by analogy to color, and that tenses me up, I dare not tell him. But on Friday he said to me: Suppose a person is made of four colors, suppose we respond intensely to a color in them, the timbre of their voice or the expression of their gaze, we will continue to respond to that color. particular rather than an entire personality palette, we have a continuous response to fragments ... Good. It is nice to use this we, I guess it is for me. The point is that only analysis will explore my automatic responses and modify my reduced circuit, reveal its mechanical character, open all the circuits to include a total vision of the other, open me completely to new impressions, to a total receptivity. I still have a hell of a lot of goodwill, shit, don't I?

 

Monday, September 26, 2011

 

During my early childhood, an incident destroyed my self-confidence. My nanny was the person I loved the most in the world, she adored me, pampered me, made Paris-Brest béchamel cheese all the time, which I ate with great pleasure. But she left home to get married. I then erased her from my memory, I didn't want her name to be mentioned. And now I refused to eat béchamel. Recently, at the beginning of September, while crossing the Trocadéro gardens, I saw a lady give a Paris-Brest to a little boy, a spectacle which reminded me of all the circumstances of the incident, filled me with joy. and relieved me of a great secret weight. However, Doctor B. today blames this abandonment of the past responsible for my repugnance for bechamel.  

 

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

 

Parpaillot. It's funny how this word suddenly emerges, it's maybe twenty years since I said or wrote it, it's another life, I left these words of my education, of my childhood, and suddenly it resurfaces. It's strange. Parpaillot comes from the Occitan word parpailhol which means butterfly: the white clothes of the Calvinists were somewhat reminiscent of butterflies. These first colonies of Calvinists lived in the south of France, their little white silhouettes that frolic in the countryside evoked butterflies to the locals (people all the same).  

 

Sunday, September 11, 2011

 

Total idleness today. Rain over Paris. Finally, I turn off the television to read a collection of speeches by Vincent Auriol. I love the one pronounced on February 22, 1951 in front of the local elected officials of Finistère on the occasion of Mardi- Gras.  

 

Tuesday July 5, 2011

 

Extract from Journal du outside by Annie Ernaux: "At the Leclerc hypermarket, in the middle of shopping, I hear Travel. I wonder if my emotion, my pleasure, this anxiety that the song is ending, have something in common with the violent impression made on me by books like The Beautiful Summer of Pavese, or Sanctuary. record three, five, ten times in a row, waiting for something that never happened). There is more release in a book, escape, resolution of desire. the lyrics count very little, only the melody, so I understood nothing of the Platters, the Beatles). No places, no scenes, no people, nothing but yourself and your desire. Yet it is this brutality and this poverty which allow me, perhaps, to make flow a whole period of my life and the girl that I was on hearing, thirty years later, I'm just another dancing partner. Whereas the richness and the beauty of the Beautiful summer, of the Search for lost time, reread twice, never give me back my life. "  

 

Saturday May 28, 2011

Dream: Mom and I are walking on a beach, dressed in coats. A man pretending to be Maurice Ravel walks towards us and tries to put mashed potatoes in our ears. When the man walks away, mom says: "You are not Maurice Ravel". So we enter the water fully dressed. The first bars of the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun echo in the distance, some flute notes ... [uncertain continuation]. She and I observe her yellow and orange sandals resting on the sand of the beach. We know that if the man had been Maurice Ravel he would not have tried to convince us with mashed potatoes. This certainty fills us with a deep feeling of respect for Maurice Ravel.

 

Friday, May 6, 2011

 

In order not to accumulate too much fatigue during the periods leading up to the summer vacation, I eliminate certain activities, I sort of make dead ends, which I try to dose judiciously, a delicate task which I accomplished with more or less happiness in the past. For example, stopping work during the four months before going on vacation was excessive and led me to cancel the vacation for lack of money. No, this year, in anticipation of my vacation in August, I simply refused to eat lobster claws since the beginning of April, and to buy my metro tickets from the vending machines. And for ten days I have not waxed my shoes.  

 

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

 

I could not vote for a candidate who would have a big mustache, who knows why ... No more than I could vote for a candidate who would often refer to the idea of "coat" ... As for the one who does not would not know how to pronounce the name "Vaughan" and who would iron only the front of his shirts, then there, even less, it is clear! 

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Monday, April 11, 2011

 

Why these two sequences, these two halves? I do not have a satisfactory answer, yet I will have to find one and answer the question I will inevitably be asked. Of course, I can always claim to have wanted to represent Maurice Ravel torn between his desire to remain himself and that of living in New York and becoming rich like Gershwin. No, it hasn't even crossed my mind. On the other hand, I could state an idea of eternity, or more exactly an infinite present, no ... well yes, but the character wants to sip a whiskey, he will have to go to the kitchen to get ice cubes. , a drink, there is still a bit of contingency, and as long as on the way he crosses his mother (whom he has been hosting for three weeks), it will still end in palaver, no ... So, why these two sequences? I don't know, sir (people all the same).  

 

Sunday April 3, 2011

 

Dream: I am sitting in front of Patrick Modiano. Figures crowd around us, and loud noises are heard, which I do not identify. With folded hands, I look at him, regretting that I was not sitting next to him, but it is like this: I am not allowed to change places. I send him absurd little signs (judged as such in the dream). Later I am against him, so close that our heads are touching. But he gets up and tries to knock out a man with a frozen monkey he is holding by the tail, without success, landing his punches on a green plant whose leaves are flying around the room. He asks me: "Do you want to try?"  

 

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

 

Since I stopped seeing my addictologist I bought sixty-two copies of the Journal de Kafka in thirty-seven different bookstores, and a whole old rascal having, I was told, belonged to André Gide, in which there was among other things an electronic keyboard and recent kangaroo briefs, too bad (once I had found letters signed Jacques Anquetil in a lot supposed to have belonged to Eugene O'Neill).  

 

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

 

When I left the workshop last night, my phone informed me of the arrival of a text message, which I hastened to read: sock laundry. Hidden number. It's still great to receive stuff like that, name of a pipe! I sat down on a boulevard bench to finish the chapter of my book, an old edition of one of Modiano's early novels, then, as I observed the small screen of my phone lit on this message, I thought to myself that these two words perhaps had a meaning I wasn't thinking of, a second meaning, that I had to find ... Sock pressing? I finally went into the laundry which is downstairs from my house to ask the lady what she thought about it, not much apparently, no, no socks in the name of Frémond (people anyway).  

 

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

 

Do you take portraits? asked the artist (it was his opening). He pointed to two portraits hanging there, one of which represented his mother, and told me that it was his son who had done that, that blood was pretty, right? Portraits, no, I don't, I replied. You should, he said, taking his wife as a witness. She argued that their eldest son, therefore, he made portraits of them, he had a lot of talent as a portrait painter, he earned his living thanks to that as a student in Zurich. Follow me, the artist told me (he wanted to show me one thing), and I followed him, followed him to the end of a second room with walls covered with tiny heavily framed paintings, which he, his wife and I watched. I was nineteen, he said, pointing to a child's portrait, a pastel. To change my mind, I approached it, looking knowledgeable, appreciated the rendering of the skin, the shadows, the reflections, the silky aspect of the hair, even stepped back, a smile on my lips (that must have been for him). to please), went so far as to observe the model itself, admittedly a little aged, but where the child had not yet completely evaporated, there remained something in the look, a softness, and a way to lower your eyelids while smiling at you.  

 

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

 

On the Prelude and Fugue BWV 541, Bach, too, drew inspiration from the blues after a stay in Chicago. And he just added a few chords, I think that's clear. Joy of life and jubilation.  

 

Friday, February 12, 2011

 

I found myself the other night sitting on a bench in the Ranelagh Gardens. Two policemen stood motionless a little further on, at the edge of the road. It was dark. One of them came to sit beside me on the bench: black hair, clean, remained close to adolescence, provided with a general harmony a little soft, an expression both ceremonial and lost . "There is no dried toad," he told me almost immediately. Good. I then noticed a detail to which I had not immediately given importance: he held a small wooden mallet in his left hand. He got up, walked around the bench, punching around him with a mallet. The other was talking on a walkie-talkie over there. A long moment went by and then my young policeman said, "Notice, I like chocolate." He laughed, and I heard a long series of mallet hits in my back on a metal object. Then he said goodbye to me and he left, I saw him running away, typing everywhere, it seemed to me that the noise would never end. Probably one could understand this man. Me, I could not (people all the same).  

 

Monday, February 7, 2011

I wanted to title this painting Death of Sardanapalus, but after information I realized that the title was already taken by Eugène Delacroix for a large painting today hanging in the Louvre and illustrating the legend of this Assyrian king who, besieged by the insurgents, will have his wives and horses slaughtered before killing himself. So I chose to call mine Silent serenade, simply, since it had nothing to do with this legend anyway.  

 

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

 

My new Sony television obviously does not have a main switch, it is impossible for the moment to turn it off completely, there is always a small light on ... I'm not an idiot, I'll find ... Well, I can not find, but I will find. 

Monday, January 17, 2011

 

My sms treatment with Doctor K. (started last September) was losing its essence lately, losing volume, the spaces between our sms were stretching. Nothing since Christmas. Today I went to his office. The housekeeper tells me that the doctor is stuck in the bathroom, that she is waiting for the locksmith, but that if I wish I can speak to him through the door. So he and I talk like that, each on one side of that door. He told me that he wrote a book on Fidel Castro's taste for the Agnès B. brand, that he developed there a very innovative thesis according to which Freud, if he had lived in our time, would also have been very successful. interested in this brand. After twenty minutes on this subject, I end up slipping away, convinced that Doctor K. is not stuck, that he wants to make me pay something (people all the same).  

 

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

 

Nothing is supported, the subject is never where we think it is, it is wobbly and awkward in appearance, we come to doubt that it could have been thought of. Bonnard was incredibly subtle.  

 

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

 

Opening oysters is a messy and messy activity, at least if you want to do it quickly, because obviously opening an oyster a day does not pose any problem of mess, it is a matter of thirty seconds including storage. Opening two hundred and fifty requires the use of a collection of tea towels or mops, large dishes or salad bowls to receive the open oysters, containers for waste, protective gloves, spare aprons, various instruments. .. in short, heavy logistics which explains why a New Year's Eve is not a party like the others ... Personally I prefer the first of May, I find it more pleasant to parade in groups in the street while waving funny banners without risking injuring his hand and wearing a ridiculous bandage for weeks.  

 

Friday, December 17, 2010

 

This afternoon I emptied tubes of toothpaste in a saucepan, which was too small, alas, I could not empty the fifty tubes, I had to squeeze the last over the trash.  

 

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

 

I just spent three hours at Galeries Lafayette. In spite of the terrible weather conditions I went there on foot, equipped with inappropriate clothes, among others a small opossum bolero (real sconse doubled) of the most beautiful effect, of which I especially regretted the sleeveless cut. Not being in the end very patient by nature, I actually wandered around, preferring the surroundings of the store, open spaces without witnesses, sticking to prospecting (appliances, hardware ...) A guy in red m 'proposed a photoshoot. Nice. I was happy to come home.  

 

Friday, November 26, 2010

 

New method of speed reading: every other word. Let’s try on the first lines of Proust: "I went to bed for a long time good. Sometimes I hardly candle my eyes if I didn't have to say: fall asleep. One hour there it is time to seek sleep; ma; I not in of the on that came to read, these had a particular; me that myself whose work: church, quartet, rivalry François and Charles ". Good. We understand more or less what we read, and we go twice as fast. Perfect. I tried with one word out of three: we still understand the general meaning. On the other hand, with only one word in four we no longer understand anything. But we're going very quickly.  

 

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

 

Business seminar the other night, to which I was discreetly invited. I had brought my foghorn, which I used in the middle of a silence (device operated under my chair with my feet, in the half-light). Stupor. I then pretended to look like everyone around me for the origin of this indescribable nuisance. On stage, the chairman and chief executive officer would stop and scan the room, then end up resuming his story over the hubbub, which itself was slowly fading away (people anyway).  

 

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

In this autumn light I remain motionless for a moment in front of the monument of the executed, reciting aloud the names of the guys who were killed there on August 16, 1944 just a few days before the Liberation, it must have been sunny and warm. , we were surely wearing short-sleeved shirts and then hop, a bullet in the chest and it's over ... we are twenty years old, we die like that, we will never again laze on dream islands for weeks, will swim more in the clear waters, will circumnavigate the lagoon on a moped screaming idiots, will sigh more on the edges of the Grand Canyon, will enjoy not being languishing in the liquid manure, will no longer haunt the suites of the Hotel Pierre , dine more in panoramic bars by the piano, sip more Porter and Gershwin until dawn before returning to their completely ethereal apartments just able to kiss the elevator attendant and line up two quotes from Proust, stomp more Central Park snow, so upera more with clowns, will see more scooter crashes at the Metropolitan Opera ...  

 

Sunday, November 14, 2010

 

I hear the version of "The very thought of you" sung by Nat King Cole who, leaning towards me, sings in playback (the lip synchronization is absolutely perfect) ... He makes great silent gestures. 

Monday, November 8, 2010

 

I wonder what distinguishes the word "hope" from the word "hope", and it seems to me that the word "hope" contains the idea of "confidence". For example in the sentence "I hope that the Nobel Prize will be awarded to me" it is only a question of hope, while in the sentence "I hope that the Nobel Prize will not be awarded to me" it is about 'hope.  

 

Thursday, October 21, 2010

 

Great moment earlier at the fnac: purchase of thirty copies of "Twenty love poems and a desperate song" by Pablo Neruda. Marvellous. Good. If, as I had intended, I had first gone to Ralph Lauren to buy thirty tweed jackets, it would have been too much emotion concentrated in one day. Anyway, I had dragged myself to bed this morning and, the time to walk in the Woods for an hour, to shower, to have lunch and to go to the dry cleaners, it was already past 5 o'clock. (Do not say anything to doctor K.)  

 

Monday, October 4, 2010

 

Stan Getz moves me, that's how his playing reaches me deeply, that's why I bought myself a set of thirty tenor saxophones yesterday afternoon, which I put next to my plan of work, affectionately ...  

 

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

 

Chabrol, Godard, Truffaut, three brothers from their youth that history will separate. The former will get lost in Bible stories, the latter will become a glory of commercial cinema, the latter will end up in porn. At the outset, the same aspiration for revolution, the same need to kill the father and flee Hollywood dead ends. Three men united and torn by their passions and their inner demons. Three men who, according to their own genius and their deep nature, will seek an alternative to the classic "story". But these will be the great biographies of Jesus for Chabrol, the Sissi and the Angélique for Godard and the symphony of sex for Truffaut. A very nice mess.  

 

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

 

First meeting of a new type today with doctor K. The work is done by text message. Resumption of therapy from the beginning. This morning, therefore, he and I had a long text exchange during which he told me to discover something interesting about me, without revealing the exact content, simply explaining to me that what 'he would have observed from my direct contact would have been one thing, but it would have been one thing to no longer hear a slip, a word you stumble over, all this underground prosody, this punctuation in counterpoint (hoarseness, change of tone, voice muffled or not, crossing involuntary legs) is another, quite different, freed from appearing, or "parlêtre" as Lacan said, cleared of many risky theories ... Good. This morning's session harassed me personally but gave me a certain well-being, and I suspect that Doctor K. must have perceived certain scents from his home ... I am thinking, among other things, of a small episode of our exchange at the end of which, after going out to smoke on his terrace, he wrote a long tirade on my pleasure, the pleasure of words. We then took turns writing litanies of words on themes that he imposed (media, sex, architecture, clothing), a game in which I took a curious pleasure for nearly two hours, to end anarchically with words such as box, bike, jam, etc ... (people all the same).  

 

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

 

Get up 3:44 p.m. It's good to hang out in bed. Quick breakfast (raspberry omelet), then a long walk in the Woods, rereading my cooking recipes. Basically, I think my recipe for marshmallows stuffed with anchovy is a dead end, maybe I will have to give up the game, I don't know ... Replace the anchovy with country ham? I don't believe it ... I am aware of what is at stake, and I think back to my chimpanzees flambéed with Armagnac, or my frogs crushed in chocolate, what successes! But I'm still hopeful, and I'm not giving up my bacon cookies anyway. Ah name of a pipe, this November exhibition puts excruciating pressure on me, and the "hussar meringue" dessert theme does not inspire me, I prefer the beef cheek. I should have taken advantage of my vacation in Greece to jot down ideas, I only have the Sarlat-style potatoes, they do that really well there.  

 

Friday July 30, 2010

 

I still wonder why the music of John Coltrane leaves me completely cold when a single note of Stan Getz overwhelms me. And besides that surely has no relation with my preference for the words starting with the letter "G", like "gorgonzola" for example, or even "georgette", a little less connoted.  

 

Thursday July 22, 2010

 

I have been registered on Facebook for more than a year now and I realize that there is definitely no group that interests me, if, at the limit the group of those who like the word "coat", but it only has 7 members, so not great, and then hey, what do we do once we are registered in a group? ... nothing, there we are, that's all, notice it's already huge. I hesitate. There is the group of those who never use the word "dereliction" (237 members), the group of those who think that the word "chantal" is old-fashioned (3407 members), the group of those who chuckle while pronouncing the words "I drop my panties" (75291 members), the group of those who would have liked to know Albert Camus as a child on a beach in Algiers and become his friend (1082 members) ... Here, I am going to create this group: the group of those who believe that Camus never used the word "chantal".  

 

Wednesday July 6, 2010

 

I have not always been a painter, not always wanted to be. The poorly focused, dreamy, playful child read Rilke's prose poetry, interrupted history lessons to declare that war would never be an Olympic discipline, that Josephine de Beauharnais had chimpanzees blazing with armagnac. A whimsical pupil, therefore, with unexpected interventions. Subjective boy. I would lead a brilliant career as a sentimentalist, perhaps I would hesitate for a while before resolving myself, I would lean towards the music hall, painting ...  

 

Thursday July 1, 2010

 

Continuation of my experiments intended to improve the quality of my sleep. This time, a small brochure found at my pharmacist recommended the purchase of a kit consisting of harlequin pants, a Prince of Wales jacket, walking shoes and a small latex Sartre, like interesting the Sartre! and delivered within two days. First test, with only the Prince of Wales jacket: no results, it was to be expected, no big deal, good. Second try, and this time I put on the full outfit: falling asleep quickly but waking up just as quickly after about three minutes of sleep punctuated by painful dreams, impossible to fall asleep again, I take off the walking shoes supposed to "put me in" low frequency ", then follows an acute episode of hypothermia and sweating. Third test this Saturday (with only the harlequin pants on me): feeling that someone is trying to make me laugh under all kinds of pretexts, choppy night ... In short, no. There would be another solution, but it consists in sleeping naked and kneading the little Sartre in latex all night (people all the same).  

 

Friday, June 18, 2010

Today at the workshop I stupidly opened my door to a salesman who wanted to give me potassium bicarbonate, and possibly a shipment of mallets or a lot of wooden toys. He concluded on "gravel". I replied that a priori that did not interest me, and I added that in any case I did not need gravel. He then insisted on the gravel. I said "oh yes gravel, why not, it's gravel". He seemed taken aback. I was then in my bathroom to clean my hands with gasoline, he followed me, I said "why exactly did you come?" Silence. "So uh ..." he said finally, but he didn't continue, and I said that on the other hand I was interested in some brushes ... He told me he could me have doormats for cheap. I said yes blah, no, thank you. He walked up to me, insisting: "Doormats". Yes, I continued, I don't know, you have to see. I went to soap my hands in the kitchen, and it was thanks to this moment that he silently slipped away. He did not take the elevator, I heard his footsteps going down the stairs (people anyway).  

 

Tuesday, June 14, 2010

 

I remember that one evening of my childhood mom stood in silence next to my bed on the chair that she always approached at the time of prayer, and she asked me a question: "Would you like that I buy you a fake stainless steel gabardine? " It's strange how my memory carried these words rather than others. This question still intrigues me today, and if I remember it, it is doubtless because it had already intrigued me that evening. Did I answer it? May be. A small yes or a small no from a child who listens to his mother. I would like to know. And what she herself said about it. A question that intrigues a child is a deeper question than others.  

 

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

 

Mom was reading Psalm Seventy. For the last verse his voice grew white: "Blessed be God, who has not rejected my prayer, and who has not withdrawn his goodness from me". I was silent, I noted on the contrary the complete rejection of the prayers: I had just had my solex stolen. And one of the previous verses said that if we had conceived iniquity in our heart God would not have answered us. So ... did mom see an answer in the loss of my solex? No, I was confident, it all came from the fact that a detail escaped me. She told me that faith should not feed on the joys of the answer, and I was lost in its reasoning, I felt that it could, faith, feed on the joys of the answer, I told her without insisting, so as not to offend her. She added drawers to her thought. I never managed to think about these subjects. When we found my solex, without the wheels and without the engine, I cried, she told me that we had to compare faith to a vessel, the wider and deeper this vessel would be, the more riches would be attracted in us by prayer, by prayer we gave to God the sword which he would use to fight and triumph in our place, we had to hoist our designs towards his and not wait the other way around. Good, but I always lost the thread of these explanations, even if confusedly I knew that I had not prayed enough to also find the wheels and the engine.  

 

Thursday, May 6, 2010

"He was born in Saint-Armel 2 rue du gros oak. He is quite like the others during his apprenticeship years but becomes a loved one in the world and for that must make a psychiatrist!" It is with this sentence that begins the wikipedia file devoted to Claude Debussy, authentic! it's mind-boggling, spelling mistakes, weird phrases, etc ... Who are the editors of these files? undoubtedly not people with the height, that one wants to scold, to punish, to slam ... I also had to deal with one of these merry idiots about my own and modest file, tried to make him understand that I am no longer a cartoonist and that it would be necessary to use the present indicative to indicate that I am a painter, nothing wanted to know this idiot. I went to see Claude Debussy at the Passy cemetery. First tell him how much "La Plus Que Lente" upsets me when I look at the Paris sky some evenings, then whisper extracts from his Wikipedia file to him, hear him shut up, breathe the humid air of this spring. .  

 

Monday, April 19, 2010

In the middle photo I hear Claude Debussy more clearly than in the others, where parasitic sounds and rumblings also intervene, as if someone were addressing me from afar under the earth's crust. On the middle one, no, only "The slowest one", and Martine says mmhmm with her head resting on my shoulder.  

 

Wednesday March 31, 2010

 

Sometimes I have to draw on my reserves to work, well done, I am always proud of myself in these cases, yes proud, because no one forces a painter to anything, he is alone in the face of the immensity of his freedom to do nothing, how many succumb.  

 

Tuesday 23 March 2010

 

Why these two sequences, these two halves? I do not have a satisfactory answer, yet I will have to find one and answer the question I will inevitably be asked. Of course, I can always claim to have wanted to represent Maurice Ravel torn between his desire to remain himself and that of living in New York and becoming rich like Gershwin. No, it hasn't even crossed my mind. On the other hand, I could state an idea of eternity, or more exactly an infinite present, no ... well yes, but the character wants to sip a whiskey, he will have to go to the kitchen to get ice cubes. , a drink, there is still a bit of contingency, and as long as on the way he crosses his mother (whom he has been hosting for three weeks), it will still end in palaver, no ... So, why these two sequences? I don't know, sir (people all the same).  

 

Wednesday March 17, 2010

 

An employee of the Elysee Palace in his forties tried to commit suicide by locking himself in a gigantic pancake, burning himself slightly. The secretary general of the presidency said: "The man first made a pancake about five meters in diameter and then threatened to lock himself in it, and in front of the indifference of the witnesses then sat down in the middle of the crepe before flaming it in Armagnac and folding the edges over him, he burned his hands and forearms, he was mastered by his colleagues without anyone else being burned " . Since the beginning of the year ten employees of the Elysee have committed suicide. According to a special adviser to the president, the man was transported by firefighters to the emergency room of the Georges Pompidou hospital. He had been on sick leave for several days. During January, the secretary general intervened with the president to defend the employee in conflict with a colleague. "We mismanaged this internal crisis, which weakened our employee", explained the secretary general, who added: "If this gentleman returned to the Elysee Palace on Monday, it was to extend his work stoppage ". "He was released from the emergency room but is still hospitalized," said the president himself, adding that in agreement with the family he did not wish to comment further on the incident. (People all the same.)  

 

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

 

Doctor K is registered on Facebook and asked me to be added to his list of friends, good, slight surprise I admit ... For three days I have therefore on Facebook, on the tiny chat window , long conversations with him during which he tells me to discover something interesting about me, without revealing the exact content, simply explaining to me that what he observes in his office in front of me is one thing. , but that, on Facebook, not hearing a slip, a word I stumble over, all this underground prosody, this counterpoint punctuation (hoarseness, change of tone, muffled voice or not, involuntary crossing of legs) is another. , very different, freed from appearing, or "parlêtre" as Lacan said, cleared of many risky theories ... These moments spent with him in front of my computer screen give me a rather particular well-being, it is true , and I suspect that he must perceive some ef from his home. fluves ... I am thinking, among other things, of a small episode of our exchange last night at the end of which, after having published on his wall a series of words such as wagon or tank, he wrote a long tirade on the pleasure of words, we then have in turn written litanies of unrelated words, a game in which we took great pleasure until late at night, to end with words such as suppository, mantle ...  

 

Monday, March 1, 2010

 

Today first real session with doctor K. He installed me in front of his computer and asked me to "do things for an hour", so I printed about eighty pages of various subjects gleaned from the internet (notably about Porsche), then I ordered one thousand two hundred and sixty copies of a Henry Ford biography on thirty-seven different sites, searched for pictures of scooters, peanuts in maple syrup, and most importantly bought on the site of the Puces de Saint-Ouen a whole old stuff that belonged to Alain Prost, but I noticed when I received the order ten minutes later that there was, among other things, a harpsichord and stuffed kangaroos. Doctor K. then asked me what I intended to do with this therapy, what to answer him? ... I expect a lot, first to introduce cars in my painting, to motorize my characters, well, he me. slapped and then we sang "Route nationale 7" in two voices and I fell asleep. When I woke up I had this idea for a painting (variant of an idea already noted): a character on a scooter tries to put coats under his saddle ...  

 

Thursday, February 25, 2010

 

Yesterday afternoon, puppet in Luxembourg, a very fit Gnafron, fucking the idiot, while philosophizing on the cynicism of the Chinese authorities, he put on at least three bottles of Beaujolais, fraternizing with the Dalai Lama and Barack Obama, the voice more and more hoarse, uttering insults at the address of the Chinese president, the gendarme would of course arrive, try to silence him, fight ... Finally, several spectators stood up, insulted the puppeteer through the decor , others took him to task, brawl again (people all the same) ...  

 

Tuesday, February 16, 2010 

It is now three weeks since I stopped seeing Doctor B. Today, preliminary session with Doctor K. His office is more opulent, thick carpet, double padded door of his office, a fairly large room including a window. opens onto an avenue lined with young lime trees (8th arrondissement). Book shelves. Before sitting down in front of him I chose a book at random and read a passage at random: description of a Scandinavian landscape. On the cover page, above a date and a signature, someone had written: "From me". Doctor K. stood up, walked to the window, stood there, his back to me, his arms folded. He was wearing a yellow velvet suit with floral patterns, I had plenty of time to detail it before getting up in my turn, approaching and realizing that it was not about floral patterns, but of horses. Ah these are horses, I said, and pointed to the velvet in the direction of the shoulder. We spoke in low voices (among other things about clothes, his clothes, he doesn't like red). This preliminary interview ended thus, he seemed satisfied and I left. I remember very well the equivalent of this meeting with Doctor B., two years ago now: he had not said a word, I had to feed a monologue for twenty minutes (whose content m 'escapes today), only to hear him say this word: Works.  

 

Sunday February 7, 2010

 

One hour spent Friday afternoon with Martine in a room in the Louvre, she and I had fun changing the greeting announcement of our cellphone voicemail, or more exactly recording that of the other, so that on mine we can now hear his voice: "Denis is currently blocked in the bathroom, leave a message, he will call you back as soon as he is unblocked". It's crazy how much fun this all can be. Well, for my part, I recorded the same feminine text for her, after several attempts at different styles ... In this room you had to see ourselves laughing until tears for this bullshit, my god ... and the result is not clear. 'is not made to wait: one of Martine's collaborators coming across this announcement left an unusually cold message, which Martine immediately tried to repair, too late, the other was already on the answering machine, forcing Martine in turn to leave a message, but hey ... Decision was taken by her to record her own announcement, and to replace "bathroom" by "garage", in her opinion less subject to interpretation (I was a little bit of her opinion).

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