Garry Winogrand, Untitled Sailor on Street, 1950; At SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Widely acknowledged as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) captured moments of everyday American life in the postwar era, producing an expansive picture of a nation rich with possibility yet threatening to spin out of control. He did much of his best-known work in New York in the 1960s, becoming a major voice of that tumultuous decade. But he also roamed widely around the United States, from California and Texas to Miami and Chicago. He photographed the rich and powerful and everyday strangers on the street; antiwar protesters and politicians; airports and zoos. In many of these pictures, humor and visual energy are the flip sides of an anxious instability. As photographer and guest curator Leo Rubinfien says, “The hope and buoyancy of middle-class life in postwar America is half of the emotional heart of Winogrand’s work. The other half is a sense of undoing.”

When he died suddenly at age 56, Winogrand left behind thousands of rolls of exposed but undeveloped film and unedited contact sheets — some 250,000 frames in total. Nearly 100 of these pictures have been printed for the first time for this long-awaited retrospective of his work. By presenting such archival discoveries alongside celebrated pictures, Garry Winogrand reframes a career that was, like the artist’s America, both epic and unresolved. This exhibition has been jointly organized by SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Jeu de Paume in Paris, and Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid.

The Fall – Bury! Pts 2 + 4

I’m on, I’m on
All that road is battle, battle plan
I’m from Bury, as in Bourrée
A French composition
On a fluted instrument
I can, I can

I can make strong lands
Rendering, writing off
Of the milk of my elbow
Read folders left-handed CD

And you will suffer all the seasons
On the sides of municipal buildings
And used to stop drafts
In glass fronted art homes

And one day a Spanish king
With a council of bad knaves
Tried to come to Bury

A new way of recording
A chain round the neck
Ding, off he trots
You can’t say anything nowadays
I said if
I’m from Bury

Don’t mess around, pal
I’m wolverine
I’m from Bury
‘A French prince,’ I said

This song means something
Every song means something
Automatic
Swap again
Hit it!

And two kids to go with it

I’m not from Bury
I’m not from Bury, man
I’m not from Bury
I’m not from Bury, man

Is the artistic Mark in fact
Got rid of vermin
Like the grey squirrels
By rooting out
Ben Marshall’s articles
Or user recordings
On his vile manufacturing community

I’m from Bury

Here for the first time and not available in stores at any price is the complete works of Mac vs. PC. Truly inspired work by John Hodgman. A lovely effort and worth another look or two. Adweek posted all 66 ads directed by Phil Morrison of Epoch Films for TBWA Media Arts Lab.

From Adweek April 13, 2011

Steve Jobs could sell. He did it in person, he did it on stage, and he did it on television—in the form of advertising campaigns that were often the envy of the business. Among the most beloved was the long-running “Get a Mac” series with John Hodgman and Justin Long as the bumbling PC and the hip, unflappable Mac—an odd couple who would entertain viewers for years with their quips, barbs, sight gags, and one-liners. In 2010, Adweek declared “Get a Mac” to be the best advertising campaign of the first decade of the new century. Below are all 66 TV spots (plus the long version of 2008′s “Sad Song”) that aired during the campaign’s run, from May 2006 to October 2009

Lambchop performs “I Believe In You” live on the streets of Bastille Saint Antoine. “I Believe In You” was written by Roger Frederick Cook & Samuel Harper Hogin

I don’t believe in superstars
Organic food or foreign cars
I don’t believe the price of gold
The certainty of growing old

That right is right and left is wrong
And north and south can’t get along
And east is east and west is west
And being first is always best

But I believe in love
I believe in babies
I believe in mom and dad
And I believe in you

I don’t believe that heaven waits
For those that only congregate
I like to think of God as love
He’s down below, He’s up above

He’s watching people everywhere
He knows who does and doesn’t care
And I’m an ordinary man
Who sometimes wonders who I am

But I believe in love
I believe in music
I believe in magic
And I believe in you

Well, I know with all my certainty
What’s going on with you and me
Is a good thing and it’s true
And I believe in you

Well, I don’t believe virginity
Is as common as it used to be
In working days and sleeping nights
That black is black and white is white

That Superman and Robin Hood
Are still alive in Hollywood
And gasoline’s in short supply
The rising cost of getting by

I believe in love
I believe in old folks
I believe in children
And I believe in you

Happy April Fools Day! But no foolin’, here’s a roundup of recent Zinzin news and website updates:

New name: pivot (lowercase) is our name for a new social action and general entertainment TV network from Participant Media. Pivot is all about thinking on your feet, adaptation and informed change. The old ways of thinking and relating to the world aren’t working. It’s time to pivot.

Read the pivot Case Study.

New name: Larky is our name for a company and mobile app that keeps track of all your perks and reward program memberships in one place. Larky plays off “lark” — a carefree or spirited adventure, harmless prank, or family of melodious songbirds — in fun, playful, singsong way, and also conjures up a “lucky” feeling.

Read the Larky Case Study.

New name: Gravy is our name for a hyperlocal event listings mobile app. Gravy is the good stuff, the “secret sauce,” a source for discovering all the juicy things going on around you. The brand embodies — and the new name demonstrates — a rich and flavorful experience.

Read the Gravy Case Study.

New CAN entries: We have added new entries to the Compendium of Amazing Names (CAN), with more to come soon. The CAN is where we highlight great company, product and services names, wherever in the world we find them.

Some recent articles:

• Five steps to avoid defining an empty set in your brand positioning
• Brand Mascots 100. No.98: Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works Skunk
• Bowie and Burroughs: systematic derangement
• Who was Arno Schmidt and what is Zettels Traum? Some evidentiary fragments…
• Diogenes, the original punk/Dadaist/Cynic, meets Alvin Lustig
• Escudero Etchebaster Solidad Casals: Style, by Marianne Moore
• Sightings: Bigfoot, Elf and J.D. Salinger

Image: Dave Walker, The Cartoon Blog.

When naming, it is often tempting to create a very well-defined, buttoned-down and thorough brand positioning, rigidly specific down to the smallest detail. Such a positioning stance is often the outgrowth of a process in which competing client factions allow too many cooks into the kitchen and draft an overwhelming number of positioning “requirements” meant to satisfy each of those factions. This is a dangerous practice, as it often leads to the outcome of an empty set being created, as conflicting “rules” cancel each other out and leave a hollow space in which no possible name can exist, as in this example, exaggerated to make a point:

A sure way to spot when this demon rears its ugly head is if you find yourself or members of your team muttering, in reference to the search for the perfect name, “I’ll know it when I see it.” This is the kiss of death for a naming project, because it is highly likely that the impossible outcome of an empty set has been described, or the wrong filters are in place, or both. In such a situation, you could consider every word in the English language (Officially 1,013,913 as of January 1, 2012) as a potential name for your new company or product, plus another million invented or compound names, and still never “know it when you see it,” for the simple reason that no name can satisfy a brand positioning framework that defines an empty set. Such a situation is the cause of most aborted naming attempts.

To transcend the “empty set” conundrum the first thing you need to do is make sure you have no contradictions in the brand positioning. As the example above shows, no name can satisfy the requirements that it be an “invented abstraction with no prior meanings” and simultaneously “evoke our brand positioning, be memorable and help tell our unique story.” Another example of an empty set might be, “available for global trademark and exact match .com domain, be only one syllable, five letters max, easily understood and pronounceable in eastern as well as western languages, and yet be a common word that closely describes our brand position in our industry.” Time to order up a new dictionary, a new language, or a new parallel universe. So the first step toward recovery is to recognize that you have a problem, and make some changes in your approach.

Here are five steps to freeing yourself from the prison of an empty set brand positioning:

1. Resist the urge to box your brand into a corner. Create a cloud of positioning attributes and know your fundamental story, but don’t try to describe every little detail of the positioning and then expect to find a name that will align with all of them. You won’t.
2. Understand that while it’s true that a great name will map to and reinforce your brand positioning, such a name will also have the power to inform your brand positioning. It’s a two-way street: brand positioning leads to a name, but the perfect name also influences the brand positioning moving forward. For example, a very similar brand positioning could have led to the names Yahoo! and Excite, but the brand positioning that came after the names were chosen was necessarily very, very different; in the former, very powerful with great marketing legs for years to come; in the latter, well, a me-too derivative long since out of business.
3. Open your minds. Rather then merely describe your brand positioning with a descriptive or experiential name, like your competitors do, consider creating a highly-memorable evocative name that strongly differentiates your brand from your competition by demonstrating your brand positioning rather than explaining it. The key is to move beyond the literal and into the metaphorical. Think Amazon, Virgin, Twitter, Coach, Caterpillar, Yahoo!, Oracle, Apple. That’s not to say that great invented or experiential names aren’t out there, they’re just few and far between, so you have to work extra hard to identify them.
4. Evaluating names should be more like a Socratic dialog, not an exercise in democracy. Resist the urge to let everyone on your naming team, or your company, vote on the final name. Nobody’s first choice will survive. The “winning” name will be the one that is most people’s third choice, the one nobody loves but everyone can “live with.” Great brands are not created from such a shrug of the shoulders. A vigorous debate is not only beneficial, it is often a requirement for creating a powerful name. And if half the team loves a name and half the team hates it, you’re in a much better place than if you have immediate consensus one way or the other. When you adopt an amazing name, no matter how contentious the process may have been that got you there, the naysayers will eventually come around and embrace it–they always do. It just takes some people longer to understand the power of a truly different and memorable name that might at first be uncomfortable for them.
5. Informed outside council can be beneficial, while uninformed outside opinion can be damaging. In other words, if you are truly stuck in your naming process, you will likely benefit by hiring a naming agency (shameless plug here) to come in with a fresh perspective and get everyone on the team to see name development and brand positioning in a new light. The flip side is taking a short list of names to a focus group or other uninformed outside agent to solicit their opinions about the names. Doing so will almost certainly guarantee that the most unique and powerful names will be killed off, and the weakest, most typical or conformist names will be celebrated. This is especially damning, of course, when you are attempting to position your brand as bold, adventurous, and fiercely independent, as it will lead you to a name that betrays all those fine aspirations.

During your naming project, as you generate –> iterate –> regenerate –> and reiterate the name development process, keep the above points in mind and continue to make sure at every step of the way that you have not defined an empty set. Because if you have, you’ll never find the perfect name, since you wouldn’t know it if you saw it.

Cautionary tale: Krafting a failed name: Mondelez, or how not to do corporate rebranding.

Brand Mascots 100
No.98: Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works Skunk

A wonderful account of the origins of the ‘mysterious and malodorous place deep in the forest’ called the Skunk Works courtesy of Lockheed Martin:

It was the wartime year of 1943 when Kelly Johnson brought together a hand-picked team of Lockheed Aircraft Corporation engineers and manufacturing people to rapidly and secretly complete the XP-80 project. Because the war effort was in full swing there was no space available at the Lockheed facility for Johnson’s effort. Consequently, Johnson’s organization operated out of a rented circus tent next to a manufacturing plant that produced a strong odor, which permeated the tent.

Each member of Johnson’s team was cautioned that design and production of the new XP-80 must be carried out in strict secrecy. No one was to discuss the project outside the small organization, and team members were even warned to be careful how they answered the phones.

A team engineer named Irv Culver was a fan of Al Capp’s newspaper comic strip, “Li’l Abner,” in which there was a running joke about a mysterious and malodorous place deep in the forest called the “Skonk Works.” There, a strong beverage was brewed from skunks, old shoes and other strange ingredients.

One day, Culver’s phone rang and he answered it by saying “Skonk Works, inside man Culver speaking.” Fellow employees quickly adopted the name for their mysterious division of Lockheed. “Skonk Works” became “Skunk Works.” The once informal nickname is now the registered trademark of the company: Skunk Works.

Facade: Fantail Fabrication / Conceited Cowlick And Wilting Empennage Interlocking Assembly Building by The Mansbridge Directive, 2013

David Bowie performing the song, “Blackout,” live in Dallas, 1978.

In 1974, Bowie read Nova Express by William S. Burroughs, met with Burroughs (Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman, Rolling Stone, February 28, 1974), and was influenced by Burrough’s “cut up” writing technique. Here are Bowie’s cut up lyrics for Blackout, which appears on the 1977 album Heroes:

Cut up lyrics for ‘Blackout’ from ‘Heroes’, 1977 © The David Bowie Archive 2012, Image © V&A Images

Blackout
David Bowie

Oh you, you walk on past
Your lips cut a smile on your face
Your scalding face
To the cage, to the cage
She was a beauty in a cage

Too, too high a price
To drink rotting wine from your hands
Your fearful hands
Get me to a doctor’s I’ve been told
Someone’s back in town the chips are down
I just cut and blackout
I’m under Japanese influence
And my honour’s at stake

The weather’s grim, ice on the cages
Me, I’m Robin Hood and I puff on my cigarette
Panthers are steaming, stalking, screaming

If you don’t stay tonight
I will take that plane tonight
I’ve nothing to lose, nothing to gain
I’ll kiss you in the rain
Kiss you in the rain
Kiss you in the rain
In the rain
Get me to the doctor

Get me off the streets (get some protection)
Get me on my feet (get some direction)
Hot air gets me into a blackout
Oh, get me off the streets
Get some protection
Oh get me on my feet (wo wo)

While the streets block off
Getting some skin exposure to the blackout (get some protection)
Get me on my feet (get some direction, wo-ooh!)
Oh get me on my feet
Get me off the streets (get some protection)
Get a second
Get wo wo
Yeah
Get a second ? breath on advice ?
And a second blow
Blackout

David Bowie and William Burroughs, 1974; Photograph by Terry O’Neill; Courtesy of The David Bowie Archive 2012

In an excerpt from Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman, Bowie and Burroughs discuss the importance of dreams in their work:

Burroughs: Do you get any of your ideas from dreams?

Bowie: Frequently.

Burroughs: I get seventy per cent of mine from dreams.

Bowie: There’s a thing that, just as you go to sleep, if you keep your elbows elevated you will never go below the dream stage. And I’ve used that quite a lot and it keeps me dreaming much longer than if I just relaxed.

Burroughs: I dream a great deal, and then because I am a light sleeper, I will wake up and jot down just a few words and they will always bring the whole idea back to me.

Bowie: I keep a tape recorder by the bed and then if anything comes I just say it into the tape recorder. As for my inspiration, I haven’t changed my views much since I was about 12 really, I’ve just got a 12-year-old mentality. When I was in school I had a brother who was into Kerouac and he gave me On The Road to read when I was 12 years old. That’s still a big influence.

The cut up method of writing that Burroughs and Brion Gysin invented in 1959 can perhaps be thought of as conjuring the dream state of any piece of text. Burroughs described the process in The Cut Up Method (1963), and included at the end of his essay a cut up version of what he had just written, which perfectly demonstrates the process and its poetic value:

ALL WRITING IS IN FACT CUT UPS OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR OVERHEARD? WHAT ELSE? ASSUME THAT THE WORST HAS HAPPENED EXPLICIT AND SUBJECT TO STRATEGY IS AT SOME POINT CLASSICAL PROSE. CUTTING AND REARRANGING FACTOR YOUR OPPONENT WILL GAIN INTRODUCES A NEW DIMENSION YOUR STRATEGY. HOW MANY DISCOVERIES SOUND TO KINESTHETIC? WE CAN NOW PRODUCE ACCIDENT TO HIS COLOR OF VOWELS. AND NEW DIMENSION TO FILMS CUT THE SENSES. THE PLACE OF SAND. GAMBLING SCENES ALL TIMES COLORS TASTING SOUNDS SMELL STREETS OF THE WORLD. WHEN YOU CAN HAVE THE BET ALL: “POETRY IS FOR EVERYONE” DOCTOR NEUMAN IN A COLLAGE OF WORDS READ HEARD INTRODUCED THE CUT UP SCISSORS RENDERS THE PROCESS GAME AND MILITARY STRATEGY, VARIATION CLEAR AND ACT ACCORDINGLY. IF YOU POSED ENTIRELY OF REARRANGED CUT DETERMINED BY RANDOM A PAGE OF WRITTEN WORDS NO ADVANTAGE FROM KNOWING INTO WRITER PREDICT THE MOVE. THE CUT VARIATION IMAGES SHIFT SENSE ADVANTAGE IN PROCESSING TO SOUND SIGHT TO SOUND. HAVE BEEN MADE BY ACCIDENT IS WHERE RIMBAUD WAS GOING WITH ORDER THE CUT UPS COULD “SYSTEMATIC DERANGEMENT” OF THE GAMBLING SCENE IN WITH A TEA HALLUCINATION: SEEING AND PLACES. CUT BACK. CUT FORMS. REARRANGE THE WORD AND IMAGE TO OTHER FIELDS THAN WRITING.

The cut variation images shift sense advantage in processing to sound sight to sound. Bowie: “I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision.” No advantage from knowing. “And I will sing, waiting for the gift of sound and vision.” We can now product accident to his color of vowels. “Blue, blue, electric blue / That’s the colour of my room / Where I will live.” Systematic derangement: seeing and places. “Blue, blue.” Cut back.

If you find yourself in London soon, check out the exhibition David Bowie is at the Victoria and Albert Museum (modestly, “The world’s greatest museum of art and design”), 23 March – 11 August 2013:

The V&A has been given unprecedented access to the David Bowie Archive to curate the first international retrospective of the extraordinary career of David Bowie – one of the most pioneering and influential performers of modern times. David Bowie is will explore the creative processes of Bowie as a musical innovator and cultural icon, tracing his shifting style and sustained reinvention across five decades.

The V&A’s Theatre and Performance curators, Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh have selected more than 300 objects that will be brought together for the very first time. They include handwritten lyrics, original costumes, fashion, photography, film, music videos, set designs, Bowie’s own instruments and album artwork.

Garry Winogrand, New York World’s Fair, 1964; gelatin silver print; Collection SFMOMA, Gift of Dr. L. F. Peede, Jr.; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

The big Garry Winogrand retrospective at SFMOMA that we first told you about nearly a year ago is now open! It includes 100 never-before-seen prints from the 250,000 (!) exposed photographs left behind when Winogrand died in 1984:

Garry Winogrand: March 09 – June 02, 2013

Widely acknowledged as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) captured moments of everyday American life in the postwar era, producing an expansive picture of a nation rich with possibility yet threatening to spin out of control. He did much of his best-known work in New York in the 1960s, becoming a major voice of that tumultuous decade. But he also roamed widely around the United States, from California and Texas to Miami and Chicago. He photographed the rich and powerful and everyday strangers on the street; antiwar protesters and politicians; airports and zoos. In many of these pictures, humor and visual energy are the flip sides of an anxious instability. As photographer and guest curator Leo Rubinfien says, “The hope and buoyancy of middle-class life in postwar America is half of the emotional heart of Winogrand’s work. The other half is a sense of undoing.”

When he died suddenly at age 56, Winogrand left behind thousands of rolls of exposed but undeveloped film and unedited contact sheets — some 250,000 frames in total. Nearly 100 of these pictures have been printed for the first time for this long-awaited retrospective of his work. By presenting such archival discoveries alongside celebrated pictures, Garry Winogrand reframes a career that was, like the artist’s America, both epic and unresolved. This exhibition has been jointly organized by SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Jeu de Paume in Paris, and Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid.

Be sure to see it at least once before the show closes on June 2. The whole museum will close on that date as well, as it embarks on a three-year expansion project.

Norah Jones covering the Neil Young song, Tell Me Why (sorry, audio only). Recorded during the 2010 MusiCares Tribute to Neil Young concert in Los Angeles.

Tell Me Why
by Neil Young

Sailing heart-ships
thru broken harbors
Out on the waves in the night
Still the searcher
must ride the dark horse
Racing alone in his fright.
Tell me why, tell me why

Is it hard to make
arrangements with yourself,
When you’re old enough to repay
but young enough to sell?

Tell me lies later,
come and see me
I’ll be around for a while.
I am lonely but you can free me
All in the way that you smile
Tell me why, tell me why

Is it hard to make
arrangements with yourself,
When you’re old enough to repay
but young enough to sell?

Tell me why, tell me why
Tell me why, tell me why

Another beauty from Yugodrom.

What Was I Scared Of?
by Dr. Seuss

Well…

I was walking in the night
And I saw nothing scary.
For I have never been afraid
Of anything. Not very.

Then I was deep within the woods
When, suddenly, I spied them.
I saw a pair of pale green pants
With nobody inside them!

I wasn’t scared. But, yet, I stopped
What could those pants be there for?
What could a pair of pants at night
Be standing in the air for?

And then they moved? Those empty pants!
They kind of started jumping.
And then my heart, I must admit,
It kind of started thumping.

So I got out. I got out fast
As fast as I could go, sir.
I wasn’t scared. But pants like that
I did not care for. No, sir.

After that a week went by.
Then one dark night in Grin-itch
(I had to do an errand there
And fetch some Grin-itch spinach)…

Well, I had fetched the spinach.
I was starting back through town
When those pants raced around a corner
And they almost knocked me down!

I lost my Grin-itch spinach
But I didn’t even care.
I ran for home! Believe me,
I had really had a scare!

Now, bicycles were never made
For pale green pants to ride ‘em,
Especially spooky pale green pants
With nobody inside ‘em!

And the NEXT night, I was fishing
For Doubt-trout on Roover River
When those pants came rowing toward me!
Well, I started in to shiver.

And by now I was SO frightened
That, I’ll tell you, but I hate to….

I screamed and rowed away and lost
my hook and line and bait, too!
I ran and found a Brickle bush
I hid myself away.

I got brickles in my britches
But I stayed there anyway.
I stayed all night. The next night, too
I’d be there still, no doubt,
But I had to do an errand

So, the next night, I went out.
I had to do an errand,
Had to pick a peck of Snide
In a dark and gloomy Snide-field
That was almost nine miles wide.

I said, “I do not fear those pants
With nobody inside them.”
I said, and said, and said those words.
I said them. But I lied them.

Then I reached inside a Snide bush
And the next thing that I knew,
I felt my hand touch someone!
And I’ll bet that you know who.

And there I was! Caught in the Snide!
And in that dreadful place
Those spooky, empty pants and I
were standing face to face!

I yelled for help. I screamed. I shrieked.
I howled. I yowled. I cried,
“OH, SAVE ME FROM THESE PALE
GREEN PANTS WITH NOBODY INSIDE!”

But then a strange thing happened.
Why, those pants began to cry!
Those pants began to tremble.
They were just as scared as I!

I never heard such whimpering
And I began to see
That I was just as strange to them
As they were strange to me!

So…

I put my arm around their waist
And sat right down beside them.
I calmed them down.
Poor empty pants
With nobody inside them.

And now, we meet quite often,
Those empty pants and I,
And we never shake or tremble,
We both smile and we say…”Hi!”

France Gall has one of the best stage names ever. Often dismissed as a mid-1960s “baby pop” singing “doll” of the immortal and twisted Serge Gainsbourg, she was born Isabelle Geneviève Marie Anne Gall on 9 October 1947 in Paris, France, and managed to create (or was given) a galling Gallic name that James Joyce would have been proud to have coined. Gall was (is?) a popular French “yé-yé” singer.

I love France Gall’s song, “Laisse tomber les filles” (“Stop messing around with the girls”), written by Gainsbourg, and the pre-video video of the song above, from 1964 (age 17!), is wonderful, like a time capsule from a vanished world. Possibly the first example of really great terrible lip-synching.

Laisse tomber les filles
by France Gall
Lyrics by Serge Gainsbourg

Learn more about the incomparable France Gall:

• Wikipedia: France Gall
• Wikipedia: Laisse tomber les filles
• YouTube: France Gall
• IMDB: France Gall
• Tumblr tag: France Gall
• France Gall website (in French)
• Wikipedia: Serge Gainsbourg
• The Secret World of Serge Gainsbourg (Vanity Fair, November 2007): “Serge, who had big ears that stuck out and who was considered ugly, often said he wished he had looked like the American movie actor Robert Taylor, but also said, ‘I prefer ugliness to beauty, because ugliness endures.’ He started to smoke and drink at 20, when he went into the army. His sister says his cynical persona was always a defense: ‘When you feel weak, you attack.’ He showed talent as a painter and attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts, but eventually realized he had to earn a living, and said he ‘had fear of the painter’s bohemian life.’ Like his father, he played piano in clubs, then branched out to write songs. He won the 1965 Eurovision contest with a song he wrote for the cutesy pop star France Gall; he then wrote a sexually sly song for her, which she thought was about sucking lollipops. He started to write successful songs for others and then, later, himself. He wrote and directed 4 movies and acted in 29. He became really famous at 40 with the orgasmic ‘Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus,’ then even more so with songs that ranged from lush and romantic melodies to Surrealist poetry to caustic and dark concept albums. He used American words in his songs—’blue jeans,’ ‘flashback,’ ‘jukebox’—and studied the Ford Motor Company catalogue for phrases to use in his song ‘Ford Mustang.’”