Free Speech

Well amis, Pierrot is here to talk to you today about a subject very close to his heart - free speech. I am not only interested in the subject for its' own sake, but because deep in my heart I believe that if we champion the right to free speech, the right to free steal autos and free love cannot be very far behind. But these fascists are as attached to their Citroens as they are to their housewives and their pathetic excuses for mistesses. But Pierrot wishes to be able to express himself and his ideas any way he feels - including obviously speaking, whether that be walking along a tree branch yelling phrases from Celine or telling the de Gaullistes that they should get their nazi hands out of Algeria. But some in our society believe that there are certain things that we should not be able to say - specifically against a god or religion, because those things are above scepticism. Pierrot laughs in their enfuriated collective face. Clearly they have not been in France long, where making fun of god and the medieval religion of this continent is an ancient custom. Have they not seen the playful farces of Rabelais, from half a millenium ago, targeting the sexual, greedy ways of hypocritical Catholic monks? In school they told of god's omniscience, his omnibenevolence, his omnipotence, his omnipresence. If he is everywhere, all-loving, -knowing, and -powerful would he not have created a universe where only good things are said about him? Why would he care, being so powerful, what puny idiotic mortals say about him, he'll have the last laugh at the gates of St. Peter! I do not believe in a god like such. Being a man of incredible intellect and independence I created my own god, a god of theft and trickery, of fleeting love and destruction, whom I worship through my actions - and my words. You can say whatever you want about him and neither he or I will be upset about it, in fact, we welcome the criticism because we are so sure of our superiority that we are not afraid of any puny words, unlike some fools who burn embassies over cartoons. The only thing I ever did about a cartoon was wrote a very appreciative letter to Mme Herge for her wonderful Tintin adventures! Free speech is essential to our society, which, however much I deny its' basic tenets and wish to destroy its' whole entire paradigm is ideal compared to most of the other societies in this world, where, in addition to speech being punished, stealing autos and having enjoyable sex are also dealt with harshly. If you do not like it, you should leave France, because our tradition of horny monks and dead gods is not going anywhere, not so long as Pierrot is around to restate the rallying cry of the enlightenment, 'ecrasez l'infame'! Friends, shatter these ancient myths, thought ought not to spare feelings! Then, one day, we will all steal each others wives and women and stomp on the religious icons of ages past.

New Art!

One of the finest feelings for the man of taste is to disover a new artist. The indiscriminate can find something to enjoy in any work of art, such insidious relativism is not only corrosive to the true meaning of art, in all its' manifestations, but also to the basis of a constructive (or destructive?) society such as we enjoy in the West. As the saying became known in the early 1990's, art history is dead, with art having gone full circle in the West, from the childish scrawlings on cave walls of our ancient ancestors, through the greatest refinements of Baroque taste, and back down through a time of realism so soon made somewhat obsolete by the perfectible, and manipulable technique of photography. Then, men sought to draw as children, as our ancestors drew and we were back at a sort of square one. Anyone producing such primitivist works in our time is simply wasting theirs, however the example, drawn as validly from Picasso as from the anonymous men at Lascaux, must inform the future direction of art. With all that off of Pierrot's chest, I must admit that I can neither draw, nor paint, nor sculpt, nor perform any arts - save poetry of which I will say more later - but find that I love the arts I cannot do as fully as I disdain the one I am so gifted in. And when I find an artist who can captivate my attention in a new way, who can compel me to put my useless hands to canvas, an obsession is born. Neither am I less than picky, I look over art, whether plastic or otherwise, with the same discerning eye as Napoleon, of whom it is said always brought a full carriage of books with him on all his campaigns and was wont to discard a book onto whatever road of europe his hooves brought le tricolore after only a few artless sentences, or perhaps a misplaced word or poorly developed thought. Please, enjoy the latest of Pierrot's non-physical infatuations (of which there are also many.) On the left, observe Vasily Perov's 1867 painting 'The drowned'. The virginal stillness of the recently deceased reminds me of a model another painter once found on the banks of the Tiber, a prostitute killed for political imposture by Catavaggio's patrons or at least those in their circle, and thrown in the Tiber, where that great artist found in her untouchable corpse the image of the dead mother of Christ. Above her, in the silence of gull wings, floats a mist of souls above the dawning river. And looking over her corpse (I ask, is this Perov, or Caravaggio even), a boatman pulling on his pipe, sits somewhat stoically, and perhaps without thought, though certainly not without a kind of gaunt feeling.

Women

Yes, what you have heard is true - Pierrot is indeed a renowned lover, one who has stolen, and broken, at least as many hearts as autos in his meager years. Women are helpless when faced with his combination of open criminality, striking good looks, acute wardrobe, sparkling conversation and utter disdain for the other men around him, and society as a whole. But things were not always this way for Pierrot, for years, when he was but a struggling student at the Sorbonne, absorbing Duchamp, Rodin and my personal favourite Pieter Jansz Saenredam with equal vigour, living in an abandoned building on the Rive Gauche. Women would not even look twice at his sallow cheeks, nor would he look up from the feet of works such as Rodin's 'The Kiss', and then wondering, upon a viewing of that great masters 'Fugit Amor', what was this thing called love, which could condemn two lovers to an eternity of hell for a moment of transcendence, which was worth the intertwined limbs, only to reach blindly as unseen forces pull the two apart, easily trumping their puny mortal efforts. He would find out soon enough, the way of love, by imitating the great lovers of the screen - Bogart, James Dean, Marlon Brando, he would watch them in the all-night cinemas and learn their cool. Pierrot, having conquered a woman and holding her quivering heart in his masculine hand, lost interest as soon as the victory was complete, he would not call, but instead, looked for his next lover, even in front of her, with no subtlety, just to make the pain that much more awkward and crushing. And Pierrot acted as though his actions weighd not upon his own heart, but they did, and they always will. Perhaps some day, in the distant future, Pierrot will be able to settle down to a nice flat on Rue Michelin with a few little ones to read about El Greco to... sooner will a bullet knock him down in the arms of his last love.