Hi there. The stalkerishest among you will have noted that this space used to be blank—prolongedly so, in fact. There are several reasons why I deferred from filling out this profile. Among them a proclivity towards procrastination, certainly, but also a deep-seated aversion to anything that might resemble (self-)promotion. (Trouble is, in this context, this last statement seems like a quasi-logical impossibility as it entails its own self-neutralizing irony-fraught counter-reality ["I am the king of self-effacement, y'all! Put that in your pipe and feed your cancer with it!"] Right? Right.)

Let's not be immoderate, though: these proclivities and aversions, deep-seated as they might be, are nevertheless totally surmountable. Ergo this profile now being filled out. Girls and flowers and trees everywhere let out a gleeful cry.

True to my habits, I've already wasted valuable (?) non-ink discussing matters of the meta without even coming close to the heart of the matter. Oh well. So, anyway, I'm a Noble Noodle, reluctantly wearing both the hats of profiler and profilee pour les besoins de la cause. Hi. I'm nuts. In a really nice and non-threatening way.

Trying to craft out for myself some sort of path that's reasonably in sync with the most imperious of my impulses. (Real helpful, uh?)

Selling out in new and unexpected ways.

Fighting the man.

Remaining open to the possibility of exaltation.

Introspecting.

Meandering.

That I tend to smile and laugh rather easily? Who knows...

I do have Lists-with-a-capital-L for this kind of stuff, but copy-pasting them here seems like taking the easy way out, so... I'll just ramble on and mention some things I've been into recently.

Books: I've recently finished the sixth volume of "À la recherche du temps perdu".

Getting into David Foster Wallace: I've begun to read "Infinite Jest"; hoping this will not go down the way of Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow", which I had to leave aside two-thirds into it... I'm optimistic, though: so far, this is *a breeze* compared to the punishing experience that reading "Gravity's Rainbow" was.

Movies: a while ago, I came up with this "Holy Trinity" thing which I had decided would be my stock answer to the question of what movies transcendentally tickled my fancy. (The question of the imperious need of having such a "stock answer" at hand remains open to [bewildered] inquiry.) After lengthy & laborious deliberations, I concluded that the Holy Trinity would consist of "Sunset Boulevard", "Persona" and "Blow-Up". Sunset Boulevard was the "sleeper" of the bunch: it sort of snuck its way in at the last minute. I'm sure you can appreciate the trepidation of it all, the whole process. I'm not sure what titles I would come up with today were I to repeat this silly exercise.

Of recentish movies, one I really liked was James Gray's "Two Lovers". Love the tone of his movies, the unabashed lyricism, the risk-taking.

Olivier Assayas has reconciled me with contemporary French cinema. OK, not really, that's over the top. (That is, the implication about my dissatisfaction with the state of French cinema is what's over the top, not my positive sentiments about Assayas.) The final sequence of "Summer Hours" is one of the most wonderful moments of cinema I've experienced in quite some time.

Music: for some reason, I got into the habit of blasting out some Mahler whenever I undertake some relatively lengthy cooking. It works out nicely. You should try it.

Got into the "Merriweather Post Pavilion" bandwagon really late (had it on the iPod but never got around to listen to it)... and am, amazingly enough, still not sick of the album. Which is great because I'm condemned at the moment to listen to my iPod in alphabetical sequence... and of course the playlist resets to zero—or rather, "A"—every time I recharge the iPod... andso........ my point is: thanks for adopting a name that places you early on in the alphabet, Animal Collective!

I recently stumbled upon this extraordinary recording of a Rachmaninoff prelude (by Sofronitsky [aka my Personal Piano God]):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szfgQEdv6CE

What the heck, while I'm at it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XWniVUrq1s

(Aren't these clips awesome?)

Food: I don't have much to say here. I like food. I like meat. I like the simple decadence (I mean, as measured up against "healthy eating" trends or something) of traditional French cuisine.

In no particular order: my laptop, cinema, music, good coffee, people, long showers (where else am I supposed to come up with good ideas / do some quality introspection?).

The politics and policy of health care reform in the Youèsseové.

The UNDENIABLE fact that the so-called "random" playback function on iPods is actually not random at all; rather, it is driven by an ultra-sophisticated military-grade algorithm that meshes tracks and artists together in thoroughly relevant yet subtly unexpected ways.

How to go about communicating with earnest (or just plain old regular) sincerity in an age that seems suffused with irony, competition and guardedness. (God... "in an age", really...? Makes me sound like Whiny 'Get off my lawn, punks!' McGrumble.) Not that I am "against irony" or that I don't myself contribute to this big mess of a gestalt that is Teh Pomo through my engagement in the most acute forms of (self-)obfuscation, but, you know, it shouldn't be so illegal to let it show through that you care, is what I'm saying. Possibly.

The aesthetic loss we as a society have suffered when those analogue flip-flappety-flap clocks disappeared from metro platforms.

Unaware/indifferent to the fact that it's a "typical friday night".

The above should be cringeworthy enough, shouldn't it?

You're nice and you have an inkling that I too might be.