Solar Skeletons consists of French duo TZII and RIPIT, who brought their musical talents together in January 2006 to create “a conceptual band with no limit of genre nor process.” Their music fused Industrial Minimalism with Blues, and a dash of psychedelia.
They sell their wares with a mix of tongue-in-cheek and sci-fi babble:
The Dead Sons of the Sun are roaming the Earth, choosing the musical weapon to convince the so-called human intelligence to fight if they can’t love each other. After conquering Mars and Pluto, they chose the East Coast of the USA to land and start their crusade. Their Head Quarters is now established in Brussels. They will blind the audience with raw rays of unseen light, and preach through distorted music clichés. The absurdity of human beings needs to be shown by pointing its most obvious form: religion, drugs, love etc… After being reprogrammed, humans will be able to save their planet.
Best stick to the tunes, guys, which are hypnotic, addictive and exceedingly tasty.
Princess Hijab is a graffiti artist who daubs hijabs and burkas on advertising posters in the Paris Metro, as today’s Guardian reports:
Princess (Hijab)winds through the corridors of Havre-Caumartin sizing up the advertising posters lining the walls. She has agreed to meet as she scours stations for targets for her next “niqab intervention”. In Spandex tights, shorts and a hoodie, with a long black wig totally obscuring her face, one thing is clear; the twentysomething doesn’t wear the niqab that has become her own signature. She won’t say if she’s a Muslim. In fact, it’s more than likely that Princess Hijab isn’t even a woman. There’s a low note in her laughter, a slight broadness to her shoulders. But the androgynous figure in black won’t confirm a gender. “The real identity behind Princess Hijab is of no importance,” says the husky voice behind the wig. “The imagined self has taken the foreground, and anyway it’s an artistic choice.”
“I started doing this when I was 17,” she says (I’ll stick to “she” as the character is female, even if the person behind it is perhaps not).
“I’d been working on veils, making Spandex outfits that enveloped bodies, more classic art than fashion. And I’d been drawing veiled women on skate-boards and other graphic pieces, when I felt I wanted to confront the outside world. I’d read Naomi Klein’s No Logo and it inspired me to risk intervening in public places, targeting advertising.”
The Princess’s first graffiti veil was in 2006, the “niqabisation” of the album poster of France’s most famous female rapper, Diam’s, who by strange coincidence has now converted to Islam herself. “It’s intriguing because she’s now wearing the veil,” the Princess muses. Intially she graffitied men, women and children and then would stand around to gauge the public’s response; now she does hit-and-runs. “I don’t care about people’s reactions. I can see this makes people feel awkward and ill at ease, I can understand that, you’re on your way home after a tough day and suddenly you’re confronted with this.”
James Chance and The Contortions performing “Almost Black’’ at La Maroguinerie, Paris, February 2010. James has still got those funky white boy moves. This was one stop on a short European tour.
“In Europe James performs with James Chance & Les Contorsions, French musicians who have been his backing band since 2006.”
My mother is French and in my early teens I lived in Cannes and Paris. I developed a love for French rock and rollers - Sylvie Vartan, France Gall, Johnny Hallyday and, above all others, Francoise Hardy.
I had a Philips portable battery operated record player upon which I would play Hardy’s 45s non-stop, taking the player with me wherever I went like a prehistoric Walkman. I couldn’t be without her. She was my first teenage crush.
I’d sit on the beach at Cannes, smoking Gauloise cigarettes (which got me high) and listen to Tous les garçons et les filles and Le premier bonheur du jour for hours. It was just me and Francoise on the Riviera watching the thin line separating the blue Mediterranean from the perfect blue sky.
I had yet to discover The Beatles. American rock, with the exception of Chuck Berry, didn’t interest me. Francoise was my pop culture goddess. Nothing else mattered. Nothing. Well, actually, there was one record that I would allow to share the turntable with Francoise: The Lonely Surfer by Jack Nitzsche, a song with an almost Zen melancholy about it, spinning off into the void.
The year of my romance with Francoise and Gauloise and melancholic surfers was 1963. It was September and Hardy was scheduled to play in Cannes. My mother had bought me a ticket. For weeks I could think of nothing else but seeing my goddess perform. On the day of the show, I was dressed to impress in my pegged pants, loafers and turtle neck. I was ready for love. We ascended the steep marble steps of the concert hall and arrived at the ticket booth to be greeted by my worse nightmare…the show had been canceled! I was heartbroken. My mother and I walked back to our apartment building in total silence. I was beyond myself with disappointment. I felt as though I had been stood up on my first date. I felt shunned, abandoned. I suddenly understood the electric yearning in the twang of Nitzche’s lonely guitars. I was the solitary surfer, crashing against waves of youthful despair. Oh, Francoise, why, why?
I carried the torch for my Gallic lover until the following month when the trivialities of young love were washed away on November 22, the day Kennedy was assasinated. Things changed after that. Innocence was gone. I discovered Bob Dylan and soon The Stones, The Beatles and the rest. Eventually I moved back to the States and Francoise Hardy became a fading memory. It wasn’t until a couple of decades later that my crush was revived and I found myself buying every vinyl record I cound find of hers. And to this day, Francoise is my eternal teenybopper flame, the beatnik princess of my dreams.
Here are three clips of Francoise (one she sings in Italian). Two have not been readily available on the internet, the other has been seen my millions. I present them to you in all their pristine glory.
Over a year ago, Bournemouth University student Jack Chute released this truly impressive short film chronicling the hard lives of Sudanese, Afghani, Palestinian and other immigrants stuck in the French port city of Calais. On a clear day, these guys can see England, a country with far more lenient visa regulations than those of France. In short, they see their futures.
Located directly across the English Channel from the White Cliffs of Dover, Calais has been a historical touch-point between France and England since ancient times. It was bounced back and forth between the two countries from the 14th through 19th centuries, and served as a crucial decoy to Hitler while the Allies invaded Normandy.
In a stroke of pure Euro genius, France’s Pied La Biche art collective have produced Refait, a complete re-enactment of the 15-minute penalty phase of the 1982 World Cup semifinals between France and Germany in the setting of Villeurbane, just northeast of Lyon.
By mapping the grinding tension of an extended penalty across the wide spaces and casual attitude of a small industrial town, Pied provide an irreverent yet plaintive—and somewhat hypnotizing—perspective on the frailty of human achievement. Horst Hrubesch’s winning shot never seemed so enduring.
The Guardian reports on a beloved French tortoise named “Kiki,” who apparently amused the French public to no end with his priapic, Gainsbourg-esque antics. Kiki, in addition to being one of the world’s horniest animals, was also one of its oldest. Canonize that mofo! >Via the Guardian:
France was in mourning today for one of its oldest and best-loved lotharios, a giant tortoise named Kiki, who died at the age of 146.
Oh dear lord. Mushroom gangs? And not even for Special mushrooms? What are they, like roving Tom Bombadil guys with curly mustaches that make French-guy noises and steal your Portobellos at night?
It is a great French autumnal tradition that furnishes an essential ingredient in some of the nation?
