29 APR 025
Ricordata, Hollywood

Dear Lou,

July 1st, 2019, Le Poisson Rouge, New York City. After your brilliant concert, I gave you my little book of poems, BARB CONCERTO, hardly read by anyone. By the time you sat for autographs, my camera was dead. I had been filming the cornerstone of a peculiar situation, cultivated over more than a decade. As you were singing, unknowingly, playing an implausible yet structural role, aligning reality for the poetic dissection of my soul. Marking our uncanny intersection, the cosmic clock struck the globe.. with a solar eclipse!

As it happens, ECLIPSE (1962) is at the heart of our situation I am starting to divulge. I’ll tell everything to you, yes, Lou.. artfully, of course. Just follow the sparks and ripples of pure poetry, connecting all the implausible dots.. my COGNITIVE COGS.. diligently multi-threading a cerebral creation eclipsed for so long. The poetic obfuscation of the obvious! I know you appreciate a good inversion, silence potentiating noise. And on that note, Antonioni’s masterpiece is the metaphysical home of my feelings, my true orientation, finely tuned anachronism. In his words, even feelings come to a halt during an eclipse – nature pauses. It’s a primordial moment, a benchmark memory. Collective SOLITUDE IN MULTITUDE. Dark matter. So, from hereon, I shall transcend the mundane with the magnitude of the undeniable. My vision of the singular miracle of life.. Granular, spectacular.. REASON AND RHYME.

You see, I’m wielding poetry for a precise continuum, to open a new dimension, a higher resolution of reality; upgrading the whole. To do that, I have been forging my life on THE ANVIL OF MYTHOLOGY, bit by bit. From the moment I got my hands on a handycam, I’ve been recording this evolution for a film that refuses frame and duration. I have been creating its music without pause. Now I simply live the logical progression of myth-making, guided by an active script handed to me by my childself, all-knowing what I was going to end up doing in defence of his soul as a would-be disenchanted adult. This metaphysical situation in motion, which I am pulling you into, is an invention of necessity – for personal and collective sublimation. Ultimately, we are talking about a FILM-MYTH here, a film that is making itself. A live 9D biblio, if you will. Bound to its manifestation, I live its corpus and breathe its enigma.

CORPUS ENIGMA was born out of a simple proposition. Sometime in 2007, after revisiting ECLIPSE to meditate on the chiselled beauty of the MARBLE VOLCANO, Monica Vitti, a sobering fact slapped me in the face at the age of 27. I had never been in sync with love. Or rather, TRANSFORMATIVE LOVE had not been to me — still hasn’t. The definition of this key conceptual yearning distilled into my consciousness from your mother’s entanglement with Serge Gainsbourg in SLOGAN (1969). I saw their big bang. I saw how deeply they were falling in love on camera. The underlying theme and lore is simply this: creative couples make mythological work — they make transformative love for the world. Antonioni & Vitti, Fellini & Masina, Rossellini & Magnani, the list is long. But above all, I am most indebted to my intellectual parents, Jean-Luc and his three Anns: Anna Karina, Anne Wiazemsky and Anne-Marie Mieville.

In 1998, in the final flickers of analogue life, I enrolled in film school at Middlesex. That’s where I finally found and saw PIERROT LE FOU (1965). A detonation like dynamite cleaving mountains. There it was.. the perfect mirror of my character and predicament. The romantic rebel escaping his bourgeois cage, destroyed by an unwitting femme-fatale of almost banale conventions. Like Ferdinand, I saw myself in the golden trail of solitude as an impassioned amalgam of Breton and Godard. I saw the premonition of my leaking parade of ladies — past, present and future — strutting through life, blissfully unaware of the jam I was in at any given time. A yet-to-bloom historic creature in total obscurity, THE PHANTOM BLOKE, caught in the onslaught of dot-com empires carving up a clickbait society incapable of perceiving The Poet. Internet antics, SMOKE AND MIRRORS, versus my meanings and abstractions — smelting my true self and passion for the heartfelt ART OF SENSE.

And now, you and I are at the DANCE OF SUMS. Let’s tally up structural facts, shall we? This letter marks the initiation of a new presentation mechanism of my crippling complexity for the singular focus of a reader, the one I’m addressing through you. Since you are the perfect stranger, I’m equating you to the audience I don’t have, because, you know, the anti-establishment poet that I am is the most censored by the sinking shit of western fascism, spewing its exceptional crap all over our lives with the rotten guts of PIMPERIALISM. Hopefully, my audience will start coming in organic waves, when my profundity becomes digestible through these intimations. That’s why I’m pivoting you to the role of a dynamo in the NARRATIVE ENGINE of CORPUS ENIGMA.

Right now, it’s 05:25 here in Hollywood. There is a gray mist veiling the imminent dawn. Elsewhere, a live genocide is happening, maggots are scheming. As soon as I conclude this letter, I’ll bounce to the canteen and fix myself a cream cheese, tomato and jalapeno spread on rice crispies as an excuse for my olive oil anointment. I feel jubilant, because with this letter I’m ending a looooong period of withholding. Loaded I am.. with 800+ songs at various stages of production. I have a giant platform. NEW VAGUE CITY is an ingenius way to contextualise my art and philosophy. To overcome cultural problems plaguing any defiant creator, I have invented solutions for the kids.. like a narrative record label that can magnify any moment as an aria, as a symphony. With this letter, I can cut the ribbon. The multidimensional spectacle OPERA FOR MUTES may begin.

We shall meet under massive titles like A LION IN DANDELION.. THE WHIRLWIND ODYSSEY.. MY LEADING LADY.. and.. ONEIRIC EMPTINESS.. that’s what I inscribed in the sleeve of the book I gifted you at your concert. You made me sign it, even though I had queued up for your signature on the memo I bought with the very last few bucks to my name. The tour poster of Lou Doillon in America, which is now decisively a relic. Best fistful of dollars I have ever spent. You were supposed to sign it. But what did you do? You ornately inscribed “KiNo” next to your name, turning your poster into an unlikely token for our lopsided collaboration.

I said “Aren’t you gonna give me your signature? You filled up the space, hang on..” I handed you my little journal, my handwriting distracted you. You said it was beautiful and made you ashamed of yours. “Come on, Lou, give us your signature.” So, you took that moment and, to my astonishment, ever so gracefully left the only mark in eternity of permutations that blesses this mythology’s crux: a full heart of acknowledgement.. sought yet unfound.. in the physical realm by the extremely metaphysical MADAMLESS SIR. That’s me, nice to meet you, finally!

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