News and thoughts

I've completed my PDF of Nancy photos, and uploaded it to my personal Archive account, under the same title as the blog: Fragments Nancéiens.

I don't think I'll be embarking on any more photo expeditions to Nancy. This work, too, is finished. And so is the period of my life that corresponds to it.

To bring this sequence to a complete close, I'd have to finish Adieu à Nancy. I'll probably do it as I've done with most of my other works: by giving up on going all the way, and publishing an "acceptable" version.

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I really like the Bitsy game engine and am keen to do a little something with it. Nothing complicated or really interactive; just create a few locations, a few sprites, a few atmospheric texts, something meaningless or so cryptic that it seems to be, but poetic.

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I've given up once and for all on the idea of Langh-Hath as interactive fiction; I'm going to try and turn it into a novel. I'll have to force myself to make the time for it. The writing itself won't be a problem, I think, I'll keep it stylistically very simple; the idea is to tell a story, and I don't think I give a damn about literature as an art form. My approach is different, it's one of pure compensation and revenge against reality.

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Following the death of my high school friend Jean-Michel, I put online various rehearsals, demos and live songs from his old band Lisence to Confuse, as well as a little rehearsal from when I used to play with him and Michael, in my cellar on rue Saint-Denis. Nothing immortal or worth re-releasing, obviously, just teenage nonsense, but it's strange to hear it again exactly 30 years later.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eBEY7BSpQ8YGs9L-SCW2ruKGrllFGM_e/view?usp=drive_link

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On Cauldron Music's Archive account, I started uploading my collection of teenage mixtapes, where I'd mix anything and everything – album excerpts, radio shows, drafts or definitive versions of my own tracks...

https://archive.org/details/a-private-collection-of-teenage-mixtapes

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There are so many things in the creative life that are pure WORK, tedious, thankless work that also doesn't pay...

When I think that at one time I was masochistic enough to make myself an Excel spreadsheet to record the dates of my "advertising" posts on Facebook: for such and such an album, about such and such a band, on such and such a day... What a pain.

Generally speaking, assimilating more and more my creative activities – musical in this case – to work, to an obligation, to tedious efforts, to a chore stealing time from my rest... has logically led me lately to be fed up, to want to stop. In the same way that the complexity of Inform + the time it takes to create an I.F + the indifference of the community, have more or less made me stop this hobby, which was no longer a hobby, in terms of pleasure.

The question arises, in fact, and the answers aren't as obvious as all that: what gives me pleasure? What do I enjoy? What activity would bring me fun and relaxation, rather than worry and effort?

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One thing's for sure: I love reading PDFs on Archive.org, whether they're digitized fanzines, esoteric publications, neuro-linguistic programming manuals or anything else that's usually pretty wacky, underground, and whose mysterious charm is accentuated by the slightly primitive feel of PDFs. Publishing such documents seems more exciting to me than having, comparatively speaking, an Instagram account.

In fact, I've closed all my Instagram accounts. I'll upload my photos to Facebook and maybe make myself a public photoblog on occasion. I'll try to get away from social networks as much as possible.

Back in the blessed days of NPO and our underground activities, Delwiche and I wrote texts together, somewhere between short story collection, art manifesto, occultism or role-playing manual... They were unclassifiable objects, with a layout that was both chaotic and meticulous, like this one, which I think is the work of David alone, but which is the quintessence of the kind of UFO I'd like to produce.