We stayed a few days at our friends François and Sophie new home in the Drôme region. The landscape is gorgious near St Ferreol Trente Pas, especially in the rainy weather. You feel like being in China. Birds are singing at night. Our bird (his name is Petit Monsieur but you can call him Monsieur) was surprised and couldn't compete with the wild singers.

It was the first time in my life that I clearly understood and saw that many people create personal solutions for a global situation. They grow fruits, vegetables, breed truits, bees, cattle, cook bread for their neighbours, pottery, invent and commercialize processes resulting in soaps, cosmetics, while living far from the hippie style, in the now world. They are not criticizing. They do the revolution with honey. They are not against like so many emasculate revolutionaires from the big cities, they are for. This makes a big difference. They keep and maintain her faith in nature, which is for me, the hello sign of the Verb. 

Yesterday was a strange day, starting in the China mountains, ending in a trendy Parisian club called the Silencio, designed by David Lynch. Asia Argento was launching « Total Entropy », her debut album (NUUN RECORDS) which gathers some of her musical collaborations : Hector Zazou (†), Archigram, Antipop, The Legendary Tiger Man, Munk, Morgan (ex-Bluvertigo), Tim Burgess, Anton Newcombe, Brian Molko… and also me. We played together a little gig on the stage floor, reading the poetry of Apollinaire, my, her poetry (the beautiful lyrics on my song « Ugly Ducklings »). The whole evening was an experience of total entropy. Wikipedia : « Entropy has often been loosely associated with the amount of order, disorder and/or chaos in a thermodynamic system. The traditional qualitative description of entropy is that it refers to changes in the status quo of the system and is a measure of "molecular disorder" and the amount of wasted energy in a dynamical energy transformation from one state or form to another. » Asia is one of my favorite artists, totally devoted to art and a really profound music lover. She's a beautiful woman with an amazing voice, very ambigüous. I'm lucky to have made « Lou étendue » with her and Antonin Gaultier / Digiki, who had his birthday that very (yester)day.

William Wyler's parents were running a shop in Mulhouse. Recalling the beginning of WWI, William said that he regularly spent ‘the night in the cellar until the battle was over’ and then coming out in the morning ‘to see whether we were French or German’. A place where you never know where you are, who you are : this is called fiction. History has been a cinema school for the young Wyler.

Not far from Wyler's parents shop, the café Moll (you see the word over the red & white curtain). During his wealthy business years, my father bought this house. On the first floor, we had rehearsals with my first band. I was playing the bass, a tough instrument for fingers...

An other american figure attached to my city, Gertrude Stein, who spent a few months there (november 1918 - may 1919). She was sent by a NGO (American Found for French Wounded). This is what she says about alsatians in the Autobiography of Alice Toklas : 'We came to know Alsace and the alsatians very well, all kinds of them. They were astonished at the simplicity with which the french army and french soldiers took care of themselves. They had not been accustomed to that in the german army. On the other hand the french soldiers were rather mistrustful of the alsatians who were too anxious to be french and yet were not french. They are not frank, the french soldiers said. And it is quite true. The french whatever else they may be are frank. They are very polite, they are very adroit but sooner or later they always tell you the truth. The alsatians are not adroit, they are not polite and they do not inevitably tell you the truth. Perhaps with renewed contact with the french they will learn these things.'

I'm surprised that Gertrude Stein didn't try to understand the historical circumstances responsible of the Alsatian secrecy.

I'm not fond of Latin American music, but the music of Meridian Brothers is not limited by an immutable Latin American style, it is genius the same way Francis Alys is a Mexican genius in the art field. And this world really needs geniuses, they know how to revitalize the withered leaves of this place we live in. I recommand to listen and buy their work. The record label Staubgold is about to release a compilation. Here you can spend some time with Eblis Alvarez and the Meridian Brothers.

Shot in 2006, edited 2006-2012, this travel in America with Flo is 59 minutes long, so be sure to have a comfortable car, a cat for your hands, your favorite tea next to you. What can I say? One man died, the one I interviewed in Truth or Consequences. One artist has become a curator, while staying an artist too and a born again poet. The cake artist has vanished under the bats bridge in Austin. The Enola Gay hangar doesn't look like this anymore: it has been renovated and we were happy to see it before. This visit wasn't planned in our journey, I didn't know anything about that incredible place. I just wanted to see the Salt Flats in Wendover, they made me dream when I was a kid, seeing the super high speed cars in the Mickey comics. But that day, it was flooded.. The area in San Diego must be inhabited now. The rain has stopped, hailstones & Bush ended. Prada is still in the middle of nowhere in Texas; Momus is still the best unreliable tour guide you can find. Enjoy!

My brother Julien said that we (he, Florence and I) made 3 different trips in Israël the last year, while traveling together. His travel was political; his best moment happened when we got lost in a Palestinian area in Jerusalem (Al Azariah, village of Lazarus, Martha & Maria), our road being cut by the wall. Florence's one was an artist travel with pen and notebook. Mine was a pilgrimage. I wanted to see what Christ saw and feel the influence between landscape & faith.

The gospels doesn't talk a lot about Nazareth, the city where Christ lived about 30 years: a very steep town where walking is tiring; so what about working as a carpenter/builder B.C. (before cars)? From the top of Nazareth, you see the Mediterranean see on the west; the Horeb and the mounts of Liban on the north; the Jordan desert on the West; on the south you see the mount in range that leads to Jerusalem: a panoramic view that includes the past and the future. There is nothing written about the contrast between the visually rude Nazareth and the incredible softness of lake Kinnereth, where Christ went to make his first disciples and live with them. Christ's debut is a movement from a certain harshness of the landscape to a very subtile and delicate one. It's also there that he meets the disciples after the resurrection: “Meet Me in Galilee”. Not in the desert or in the steep slopes of Nazareth; on the shore of lake Kinnereth, where life is sweet.

Erik Satie was coming back home by walk after playing the piano at Auberge du Clou (30 avenue Trudaine). It was a long walk since he was living in Arcueil in the southern suburbs. Google maps says that Auberge du Clou, Paris to his house (34 Rue Cauchy, Arcueil) is 9,5 km, a 2 hours 3 min walk. If you have time, I recommand this google walk* from his house to Montmartre. Then if you come to Paris, you can do the return in real. Les grands artistes sont de grands marcheurs: Werner Herzog tells his student at the Rogue Film School that if they want to become great filmmakers, they have to make at least a 5000 km walk. The also need to shut down the screen and read, read, read. Erik Satie would be happy today because the horrible scar of the A6B highway next to his house has been covered.

* If you prefer to walk in mother N, I recommand Forêt de l'Avant-Garde in the Lorraine region.

Toog is a discographic musician. I had a limited serie of records that I'd love to release during my life. When I started releasing music in 1999, I already had this serie ready. It works with titles. The last one of the serie is a piano record without singing. I would love to release this album the next year. I will ask Valérie Archeno, who shot me as she was doing a personal photographic work in front of Gare du Nord with anonymous passers-by, as I was waiting for my record label's manager there, to give us the cover image.

Le Corbusier was having a global and generous proposal for improving people's life in the big cities. People: this is the problem. He doesn't belong himself to the people, to the masses. He's imagining new living ways for the people, he's constructing for them, without being one of them. He's the only man who's keeping his self alive in this massive self disparition. This is why Flo, while admiring Le Corbusier as I do (La Chapelle de Ronchamp is absolutely gorgeous), shouted in his Firminy stadium a beautiful and unpremedited « Les gens sont des cons! ». This is what we really are for all the architects who invented people's housing for a desindividuation era. The masses are grouped in colossal buildings. Privileged people are not grouped: they keep the self. The poors lose the self but they get the green, the view and the sun in return. Emile Aillaud in France, had the same objectives. He made incredible buildings, but many of these ideal creations « for the people » have become nightmares.   

Firminy is close to Saint-Etienne and Saint-Etienne is not far from Lyon. When you drive south from Paris, Lyon is the city after which you feel like approaching the south. After Lyon, you turn right and go to Saint-Etienne, not the band, the city. Continue straight on and you arrive in Firminy. Firminy? This is the biggest Le Corbusier spot in Europe. With our guests, the designers Hervé Dixneuf and Grégory Blain, who run together Atelier BL119 and co-run the exhibition center Greenhouse with Emmanuel Louisgrand, we visited Le Corbusier's stadium in Firminy, Le Corbusier's church, Le Corbusier's art centre, Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation, Le Corbusier's swimming pool. Our favorite was the never completed and very influential Le Corbusier's pizzeria.