Kiss Me Forever

Alexandre shared this music video with me last week, and I've been thinking about it since then. It's called Kiss Me Forever, by Julien Doré. He was raving about the song and video, and when I watched it I understood why. It's pretty catchy, and makes you want to do a silly dance or pump your bike tires and zoom down the street. The video though is the best part - it's a kind of loony mix of spring colors, cold, and said silly dancing. And a bichon frise. The slight silliness, slight Frenchness, and particular style of catchiness all reminded me of M's video for Qui de nous Deux.


JULIEN DORE : KISS ME FOREVER (2011) by artemis181

Most of all, it reminded me of the fact that it's May, and bright pops of color are showing up in store windows, yet New York didn't seem to get the memo – it's been cold and rainy since March. Watching Kiss Me Forever makes me not care as much.

The Teenagers - Made Of

Here's another touch from the recent music past; a Teenagers track that came out a few (to several, woops) months ago, but I only heard it yesterday. It's fantastic, and you can totally hear how they've grown over the past couple of years.

The Teenagers - Made Of by tokyohanna

The sound is fuller than I've heard from them, and it makes me feel simultaneously like I'm flying a plane through a laser-filled tunnel, and feeling like I'm the only person smiling in the middle of a packed dance party. And just because it is very cute, here is a preview video of the track I found on their MySpace page, which makes me smile even more:



I can't wait to hear the rest of this album they're working on and catch them on their next tour. Enjoy!

Diva

About a year ago, Paul told me that I had to see the movie Diva. He got so enthusiastic when describing it that I knew I had to put it in my queue. Well, this was before I re-signed up for Netflix, so I half forgot about it. I finally got around to renting the movie last week, and now I understand why he was so enthusiastic.


IMDB gave a pretty good rundown, so here it is: Two tapes, two Parisian mob killers, one corrupt policeman, an opera fan, a teenage thief, and the coolest philosopher ever filmed. All these characters twist their way through an intricate and stylish French language thriller.

Sound confusing? Well, it was, a tiny bit. But aside from being a good thriller, the imagery is so beautiful. It was my favorite part of the movie. And taking full-size screen shots showed the graininess of the film more (which I didn't notice on my lousy television set); delicious.




I watched a short six-minute interview with director Jean-Jacques Beineix afterward; he said that it felt like he made two movies for the price of one. Apparently when it first came out, critics trashed it saying that he was too grandiose (maybe because scenes include things like a young girl rollerskating around a huge loft that is empty except for a big jigsaw puzzle-in-progress and a claw-footed bathtub; and a police /moped chase through the Paris transit system).


It wasn't only the critics, either: In nearly a year, only 100,000 people in Paris went to go see it. After that, though, some switch went off in people's heads and they went nuts for the movie, closing that year-long run with 1 million views. Wow!! Maybe people all of a sudden got into an artsy mood? Who knows, but that's just awesome. I just can't see that happening today, and Beineix said that it definitely couldn't (mostly because economics wouldn't allow for it).

Now that I'm on the topic of then vs. now, I was flabbergasted when I saw that Diva was released in 1981. The movie is timeless, and I wouldn't have suspected that it was older than me at all (except for the female detective's hair).


I highly recommend Diva, and should probably take Paul's movie advice more often. Go see it! Even if it takes you a year.

Yelle

Last night, Pak, Faris, Ben and I went to the Knitting Factory to see Yelle. Let me start with an order of events to explain why I was so excited.

After I wrote this entry about Para One a few months ago, my friend Dylan Trees (of We are the Hollow Men fame) wrote to one of his French friends, asking for a list of similar bands /artists from France. Within that list that he forwarded onto me was Yelle. I did a YouTube search for her and came across this video:



I could not stop giggling. I saved it in my favorites for future days that might need a lift.

Two or three weeks ago, I read a bulletin post by Calvin Harris (he's the one who produced that Mitchell Brothers video and wrote this insanely danceable song) saying "This is how kids dance in France." The attached video had the same kind of dance moves in it! I instantly showed my friend Alex and asked her about it... she told me that it's called Tektonik and is so popular that kids have dance battles in their school quads and in the middle of the street. She even pulled up a video of 12 year-old boys Tektonik battling.

Well, it turns out that Pak's cousin works for the record label that signed Yelle. When he asked if I was interested, I almost flew out of my seat. A few minutes later, I read this about the show on Flavorpill. I was excited for Kap10Kurt and Lauren Flax as well (Kap10Kurt has been promoted on GBH before, and Lauren Flax's remix of CYOA has been featured on the site also). excited!

We got there after Lauren Flax, which was sad but since she is around a lot I am optimistic about seeing her in the semi near future. Kap10Kurt was great. He made wearing a keyboard around his body look like the most comfortable thing in the world. He ended with Dangerseekers, which is the track of his that I am familiar with.



After 15 or 20 minutes, Yelle came out to a crowd of people pretty much going insane. They were so excited. She was wearing what looked like five of those gold Brooklyn Industries backpacks stitched together into a hoodie.



She had so much energy. Up until the end of her encore, she was bouncing around, playing air guitar, banging on drums and fist pumping. The two guys with her (one on drums, one on a Korg) had just as much energy. Her set reminded me of a combination of Annie's cute pop flare and Uffie's badass attitude.





The show was fantastic, and she had everybody jumping, clapping and snapping the entire time. When she sang A Cause Des Garçons (the song from that Tektonik video up there), I caught a lot of it on video (if you don't want to watch the whole thing, it gets pretty good around 26 seconds):



We got to meet Pak's cousin at the end; she was really sweet and I was thankful to her and Pak that we were able to get into a sold-out show. She looked like a modern-day, French Susan Dey in black Freestyles. What a great combination.





Thank you times infinity to Pak :) That was the best Tuesday night I've had in months and months.

[all images taken from each person's MySpace page and saved to my server to prevent future broken images... Susan Dey and Freestyles images came from here and here, respectively]