Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Faces of Paris

Visiting Paris, it was one of my goals to buy three cd's:
  • 'Presque Rien' by Luc Ferrari;
  • 'Barbara Chante Brassens et Brel' by the eponymous chanteuse; and
  • 'No Longer Human Senses - Et Fugit Interea Fugit Irreparabile Tempus'* by Spektr;
  • and write a post about it called 'Faces of Paris', the post's title being a riff on the notorious 'Faces Of Death' video nasties of the 1980's.

    The nexus of the post would have been Pierre Klossowski's 'Sade - My Neighbour', more specifically the chapter of that book on the Divine Marquis' relation to the French revolution, where Klossowski describes regicide as the killing of God by proxy. The post would have linked the three cd's thematically through:
    • the violent, sadomarxist, even selfdestructive aspect of existentialism, that philosophical movement of which Barbara was one of the figureheads (didn't Sartre write in his preface to Frantz Fanon's 'The Wretched of the Earth' that ".... by their mad fury, (...) by their ever-present desire to kill us, (...) have [the oppressed] become men"?);
    • the violent, regicidal aspect of the may 1968 Paris uprising, where 'Soyons cruels!' was one of the slogans and where De Gaulle was to play the role of sacrificial king; the uprising of which Luc Ferrari's 'Music Promenade' is a music concrete collage of field-recorded sounds; and
    • the sadean aspect of Black Metal, which needs no commentary here. "Les Hordes Noires", cruel deicides par excellence, would have been presented as the heirs of the Sadean regicidal revolutionaries.
    However, as I came down with the flue during the visit to Paris, I only bought Ferrari's cd, so this post will never be written. It is up to you, dear reader, to imagine it's shape from these contours.





    *The title of Spektr's cd is a paraphrase of Virgilius "Fast flies meanwhile the irreparable hour".

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