This Is Normal
This is normal
Recently, while listening to the very nicely eclectic radio station named FIP, I discovered the song ‘C’est normal’ (‘This is normal’) by Brigitte Fontaine and Areski Belkacem, from 1973. Listen: [YouTube/Spotify/Deezer]
The song consists of a dialogue between two characters in an apartment, recorded over some simplistic, innocent music. The apartment is bit by bit revealed to be on fire, and the duo on their way to death. It is first a very amusing piece of exchange, with an absurd contrast between how disastrous the events are and how laid-back the characters stay, featuring lengthy descriptions of how the catastrophe unfolds, describing in four minutes something that would happen far quicker.
The character played by Areski is a jaded man, somewhat condescending, who can’t see things going another way and takes a great care of explaining, borderline mansplaining, why what is happening is entirely ‘normal’ or, said differently, ‘fine’. Brigitte plays the only lucid person in the room, truly realising the disaster but not seeing how to escape it, not entirely believing it and therefore seeking reassurance by asking many questions.
‘Areski?’ ‘What do you want again?’ ‘Don’t you feel like we’re somehow falling down?’ ‘Listen, try to understand, it’s simple.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Do you remember the combustion?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And the building being burned down by the fire?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, it means that all under us, the walls and the floors have disappeared in flames. So we aren’t supported by anything any more.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Now, something that isn’t supported by anything falls down. That’s what we call gravity. This is normal!’
After listening to it several times, I found it echoing the talks about ‘normalisation’ that have been taking place these last months. In that way, it resembles greatly to the notorious comic strip ‘This is fine’ by @kcgreenn (freely adapted as the header image of this post).
Although I have no idea if the allegory was intended when Fontaine and Areski wrote the song, I now think of the ‘la la la la la’ tune they keep doing as a sort of vocal version of the ‘This is fine’ meme, something you can hum when things are clearly not fine.
I’ll end this with a nice cover of the song, recorded last year by the great Yolande Moreau and François Morel, both very finely fit to the roles – for the latter I can’t help but picturing him as the scientific he also voices in ‘Tu mourras moins bête’. You can listen to this new version right there: [Spotify/Deezer]
More Posts from Nclm and Others
A zine about Kentucky Route Zero
Hi! I’m starting a zine about Kentucky Route Zero! There are so many interesting aspects in this game (and surrounding works), that I thought it’d be great to have a little printed publication about it. To fill the pages of the first issue, I’m looking for:
Text pieces (Articles, fan fictions, analysis, commentaries, etc. Anything you’d like to write about it.)
Visual pieces (Fan art, etc. Anything printable you want to draw or create about it.)
If you have anything else in mind, for instance hybrid pieces with both text and pictures, they’re welcome too :)
You can read the full call for contributions with more details here.
Send your piece(s) to zerozine@reply.cat before the 5th of August. Include a title for your piece and the name you want to be credited with. Looking forward to see what you come up with!
Des nouvelles choses sur http://dessins.probablement.net ! Et des anciennes. Et une nouvelle présentation.
New things on http://dessins.probablement.net! And old ones. And a new theme.
This week I got a very nice stapler. It has two specialities. The first one is binding booklets (as opposed to stapling a pile of pages that won’t get folded together). The second one is a surprise :) I’m looking forward to using it for the Kentucky Route Zero-themed fanzine.
There’re two weeks left for contributing to that one by the way! (here I am pretending writing about staplers while this was a reminder post all along)
If you have a textual or visual idea about the game and would like to get it stapled together with other like-minded pieces, I’d love to have it in the publication.
More details in the full call for contributions here.
The address for sending pieces (and in the meantime if you’d like, ideas about pieces) is zerozine@reply.cat and the deadline the 5th of August. And if you have something that may not be finished at that exact date, we might find a way to arrange it anyway, tell me about it :)
No ramblings about office supplies this time, just a simple last reminder :) On Sunday, I’m closing the call for entries for the Kentucky Route Zero fanzine!
If you feel like writing or drawing a little something during the week-end and are in a KRZ mood, that’s a thing you can do.
The full call for contributions is here, and my e-mail is zerozine@reply.cat.
Note that I can have a bit of flexibility about the deadline, especially for visual pieces. If you sense that you need a couple weeks more, just write to me before Sunday (August 5) about what you would like to do, so I can plan accordingly!
Thank you :)
“High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.” — Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Illustration of one of my favourite scenes in the first Dirk Gently novel.
Now available as prints, T-shirts, and towels!
I really like reading the Adventure Time storyboards that Fred Seibert and then @kingofooo have been putting online on Scribd. I would love to see some sort of book with all of them one day! It’s a great way to rediscover the series from a different perspective.
In the meantime, since they were all posted in no specific order and with the production numbers instead of the final numbering, I made a list of all the ones I could find: https://adventuretime.wikia.com/wiki/Storyboards/List
Almost two thirds of the series have been uploaded so far! I hope the rest will follow. The list is meant to be comprehensive, but I might have missed some :)
We’re just past midway through the call for contributions window for the fanzine project about Kentucky Route Zero, so I thought I could post a reminder :) We already have very nice pieces, and there’s room for more!
If you have ideas for text pieces or visual pieces about the game that you’d like to develop in the next few weeks, they could be printed in the zine!
More details in the full call for contributions here.
Send your piece(s) to zerozine@reply.cat before the 5th of August.
Looking forward to see your entries!
