We went to see Yann Tiersen in New York yesterday night.

Nine hours of bus for a major disappointment. The concert was very, very, very bad. Apparently Tiersen, a master of moody, intimate and subtly minimalistic acoustic melodies, decided to go electric and more rock'n'roll, or whatever passes for rock these days. I understand that artists want to reinvent themselves and are bored with always playing the same things, but please do not do that during a tour in a faraway country where, obviously, people will see you for the first time, and essentially want to hear what you are famous for.

I'm not even against being loud and electric. I love the Ramones for example, and other punk bands. What I don't like is when people forget about melody.

With the exception of his "Sur le Fil" amazingly wild violin solo and maybe one song with a Gretsch-looking semi-acoustic guitar, the concert, for me, was a disaster. The female singer could not be heard at all, all subtlety was lost in the sound of saturated guitars. Most of the songs were made into a simple crescendo, ending very loud in a guitar strumming frenzy that I thought even high-school bands didn't do anymore, and then stopping abruptly. I love Yann Tiersen music because it's all about melody, not volume. Also, having all six musicians sing at the same time obviously destroys the intimate side of songs and lyrics (which I couldn't hear anyway).

A contrarian point of view was brought in by Miss C., who was not thrilled but nevertheless liked the concert. The difference is that she saw Tiersen in concert three times before in France, doing his typical acoustic style, and it was the first time she saw him with an electric guitar in hands. So, for her, the loud and dirty rock'n'roll style was something new. But I wonder if she can be objective : she is from Brittany, and yesterday night there were some people screaming "Vive la Bretagne !" during the set, and even a black and white flag from the region right in from of the stage.

That is genuinely funny to hear that sort of franco-french babble in New York City, of course. But anyway, the Languedoc flag is much more beautiful.

Other points of view with pictures here, here, and here.

Tonight, the United States of America finally enters the twenty-first century. It may become again this great country it once was, a country that inspires dreams and hope for a better future, not fear, hate and war.

Today I vote with my t-shirt.

Pendant quelque temps, les souvenirs se découpent avec une netteté minérale sur l'horizon plus ou moins flou de la mémoire générale. La douleur aigüe due a la séparation proche et au deuil de certains rêves aident a maintenir cette précision. Parce que l'on approche le vrai sens des deux mots "plus jamais", on fait un effort conscient pour se souvenir, comme si on serrait de toutes nos forces notre mémoire pour l'empêcher de s'éloigner. On peut se rappeler de détails extrêmement fins et presque impossibles a vraiment décrire avec des mots, de gestes anecdotiques hier encore, et qui soudainement prennent une charge émotionnelle énorme. Une manière de bouger ses doigts, un coin de bouche juste avant que le sourire n'apparaisse, une façon spéciale et curieuse de prononcer un mot particulier, les gestes avec lesquels elle laçait ses chaussures au matin, des phrases entières extraites de conversations à deux.

Avec le temps et la disparition physique des traces de l'autre, la mémoire s'émousse doucement. On égare des photos, on casse les verres achetés ensemble, on découvre seul des musiques nouvelles. On rencontre d'autres personnes, peut-être, un jour. L'oubli dépose sa chape nuageuse sur notre passé. Au détour d'une conversation, on se demande si tel ou tel voyage commun avait été fait en juin ou en septembre. Comment s'appelait ce livre qu'elle aimait tant. Le son de sa voix. Le cerveau humain est une belle machine biologique, l'érosion continuelle des souvenirs trop saillants est sans doute un simple mécanisme de survie. Les images s'estompent progressivement, les visages deviennent flous quand on essaie de s'en souvenir. Les quelques photos conservées sont trop figées, trop usées, trop regardées, ce ne sont plus des vraies personnes qu'elles représentent, mais des icônes, des statues qui ne signifient plus rien. Malgré nos efforts, des pans entiers de nos relations passées disparaissent. Jour apres jour. On n'y peut rien. Ces moments magiques qui semblaient si précieux, si inoubliables, se fractionnent lentement en minuscules fragments de plus en plus opaques. Comme de vulgaires morceaux de plastique qui se tordent et fondent dans l'oubli. De notre passé ne restent plus que de vagues fantômes imprécis.

Et un jour on se demande : "C'était quoi, son prénom, déjà ?".

Je déteste le mois de février.

Los placeres y dulzores
de esta vida trabajada
que tenemos,

no son sino corredores,
y la muerte, la celada
en que caemos.

No mirando a nuestro daño,
corremos a rienda suelta
sin parar;

desque vemos el engaño
y queremos dar la vuelta,
no hay lugar.

Jorge Manrique
"Coplas por la muerte de su padre"
XVth century

Wow. A long time I don't write anything here. Maybe at last I find it more interesting to live my life, instead of writing about it.

I saw The Last Town Chorus yesterday night, at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge. It's a band from Brooklyn. The singer plays a lap steel guitar, a curious instrument that can produce strange, moody, dreamy sounds, and suddenly switch to a powerful melodic riff. She has a wonderful voice as well. Maybe it was the beer, but at one point I felt that these metallic slide guitar progressions, with a bit of reverberation, reminded me of the underwater recording of whales. A distorted sound that deeply resonates inside. That is maybe why some people wrote that her music has "an aquatic feeling".

The song "Oregon" from her first album can almost bring me to tears. I think it was the first song I ever heard from the band a few years ago, and it made quite an impression. The cover of Bowie's "Modern Love" is also a nice way to discover The Last Town Chorus. Go buy her two albums now. It's a unique sound and you won't regret it. You can follow the links here.

Plus, she is very nice, and I had the pleasure to talk for a minute with her after the show. And she even wrote a few funny french words on my CD.

Somehow I would love to see the video artists from La Blogotheque and their amazing Takeaway Shows do something with The Last Town Chorus. The video clip of Sufjan Stevens doing a cover of a beautiful Innocence Mission song, on some windy roof, will never cease to amaze me.

Le couple de collègues coréens qui me servent de voisins de laboratoire est en train de s'engueuler copieusement face à un congélateur. Ils sont pourtant très calmes, habituellement. Ils sortent un tube d'ADN, se lancent à tour de rôle deux ou trois invectives dont je ne comprends pas un mot mais qui sonnent de manière très curieuse, comme une bande-son montée à l'envers puis accélérée, reposent le tube, en sortent un autre, continuent de se disputer pour une raison inconnue. Je ne comprends rien. Généralement ils parlent en anglais entre eux. Ce bruit de fond m'empêche de me concentrer.

Aujourd'hui, j'arrête de fumer. D'un coup. Après quinze ans à un paquet par jour. J'ai décidé ça en un quart de seconde, il y a quelques semaines, sur un coup de tête, comme d'habitude, pour accompagner quelqu'un qui fait la même chose. Les gens importants vous font prendre des décisions importantes. Il n'y a pas besoin de réfléchir longtemps.

J'ai fumé ma dernière cigarette hier soir, à quatre heures du matin. Je me suis obligé à quasiment finir mon paquet acheté à peine quelques heures plus tôt. Clope sur clope avant d'aller me coucher, jusqu'a la nausée et l'envie de vomir. Ca fait six heures que je n'ai pas fumé. Je suis déjà un peu nerveux.

J'ai dormi à peine deux heures. Je regardais dans l'obscurité l'économiseur d'écran hypnotique de mon ordinateur posé à côté de mon lit et, d'une façon un peu stupide, j'attendais avec angoisse que mon corps m'annonce les premiers signes du manque. Qui ne sont évidemment pas venus, étant donné toutes les cigarettes que je m'étais envoyé quelques minutes avant. Il s'est alors passé une chose un peu étrange. La simple peur de ressentir physiquement l'absence de nicotine a ramené à la surface des plaies enterrées et quasiment oubliées, quand j'ai manqué d'autres choses. Des gens dont je savais que je ne les reverrais plus jamais. Des espoirs envolés, des rêves brisés, des avenirs qui n'ont jamais existé, des histoires d'amour terminées. Une onde de tristesse m'a traversé comme un petit tsunami mental. Et puis je me suis endormi.

En me levant après cette courte nuit sans rêve, curieusement, j'étais en pleine forme. Comme nettoyé intérieurement. J'ai collé sur ma peau mon premier patch de nicotine. En espérant que cette camisole pharmaceutique, cette béquille chimique aidera ma volonté déficiente et mon absence totale d'auto-discipline, et repoussera les marées noires surgies de ma mémoire.

Faire croire que je suis fort. L'histoire de ma vie, en somme.

Playing around with new design, rounded corners and no more HTML tables. I am modern, but ten years late. Trying to remove always more from every page. Simplicity is the key to happiness. As Antoine de St-Exupery wrote :

The script for rounded corners does not seem to work with Safari. Crap. Fixed. Also the colors don't match. The javascript for rounded corners is blocked by IE7. That's bad. I need something without javascript. I always hated javascript anyway. Other small problem : the footer is not under the text in the archives, but only in Firefox. Gniiiii. Web design is for masochists. It was so damn simple in 1995.

Project 1 (same design, different CSS and no Javascript): Random archive - Main.

Project 2 (new design, same CSS than above): Random archive - Main.

Don't forget to check with Safari. Yes, I'm writing to myself.

Now testing my own uber-crappy PHP nano-CMS (Content Managing Posting System - at least now I have a RSS link). Using a CMS programmed by others is too mainstream, c'mon man, even if there are plenty of good open source ones, and I love free software (free as in free speech) and people who develop them. Incidently, I believe 2007 will be the year I finaly switch to a completely free system. Enough with all the restrictions, enough being judged as a criminal just because you want to make things work or help people, enough with the gigabytes of cracked stolen illegally downloaded useless software. Anyway. Even lame geeks like me code their own stuff. Although PHP is really very easy to learn. In only a few hours everybody can produce working code completely unoptimized, messy, copy-pasted from everywhere, and full of security holes. Yet, the speed of the learning curve is quite amazing. But next time I will do it in Assembler, or Cobol, just for the sake of it. It's curious how technique is always an excellent diversion when you don't feel like writing real content. I mean text. I mean substance. Or at least something that looks a bit like it. It's like spending a lot of time making a nice decorated wooden box from scratch when you have nothing to put inside. It's like learning how to blow a colored glass bottle when you're tired of drinking wine. Lately, my average is around one post every three months. Maybe even less. Getting tired of all this shit. Too many very talented people around writing three mind-blowing texts a day on their blogs. Reading them is a pleasure, but then you realize that your own writing stinks like sick cockroach poo on a rainy day. It's depressing.

All right, I needed some filling paragraph to check how it looks on the main page. I'm even getting tired of the "Lorem ipsum" typical filler text. Now I guess I wrote enough.

When a charity website becomes a pure work of digital abstract art, so completely detached from the reality of the genocide currently happening there, that it induces an almost embarrassing shift in perception. No pictures to provoke pity and tears, nothing. You have to do the research yourself. Only 400.000 numbers to represent the dead. Choose your own and light them. A beautiful zen design in black and white that I can only love. Frankly, this is the most beautiful website I ever saw. And some cool geek had a little fun while doing some goodwill :