Pattaya [english]

Weekend in the Vosges. I have always loved the typical gîtes, not necessarily old but typical of this region, with their slate walls, their panelling, the ancestral household appliances, and that inevitable smell of old wood, dampness, earth, smoke, which is my own madeleine, since childhood.

The chalet had a really strange feel to it; I was immediately fascinated by the room where I was installed. It was bathed in red light, because of the curtain stuck to the window, and with the rotting wallpaper, with this wall with a giant picture of palm trees and a tropical beach, with the old plywood furniture, the mirror, the child's bed... it all looked like a lovely nightmare setting.

 
 

Note from 23 August 2019:

These photos (which I did not retouch: the mood was really that one) were so bizarre that I had used them for a kind of hoax, about ten years ago, claiming (under one of the false names I usually use) that they had been taken in New York or Pattaya, I don't remember.

The idea was not to lie for the sake of lying, but because I came to consider, at that time, by contemplating and admitting the perfect banality of my life and my very person, that they were obstacles to the success of my creations. So, around 2009, I began to evolve not only under several pseudonyms, but by inventing the fictional life and work of the characters to whom I attributed my own work. This was for me a writer's job as well as a musician's and a visual artist's (photographer's, in this case) and this multimedia and fictional aspect was incredibly inspiring and consoling; since my life was pointless, I was going to invent others.

All of this also convinced me that a work needs to be accompanied by a whole story, a storytelling as we say specifically these days, to be truly memorable. In other words, the storytelling (if there is one) around a work is an integral part of the work, whether we like it or not.

This is true whether the storytelling is authentic (Norwegian Black Metal albums from the 90's take on a different dimension when you know the career of some of its members as arsonists or murderers) or totally fictitious, like JT LeRoy's famous Book of Jeremiah, who totally invented a life for himself and was only recently unmasked. Some have even built this idea into the body of their work: nothing would have stopped Danielewski from simply publishing the Navidson Record as a fantasy novel. But by adding a second layer of fiction (since The House of Leaves is the story of the discovery of and commentary on a talking manuscript of the Navidson Record - itself a fictional film, a hoax invented by the author of the said manuscript) he gives his work an infinitely greater scope.