Call for papers – Intoxication

ULIP Postgraduate Conference Summer 2013, June 28th, 2013

Throughout literary history writers have consistently been drawn to intoxication. They have used their work to ponder the temptation of intoxicants, and the altered states of perception they produce. Writers have also regularly intoxicated themselves to aid the creative process, or to escape the pressure of artistic creation and the monotony of humdrum reality.

The intoxicant of choice can take many forms. It can be legal highs: cigarettes, strong coffee and alcohol favoured by the café-frequenting auteur. It can be ‘recreational’: cannabis and so-called club drugs such as ecstasy and ketamine. It can also be more radical, pushing the writer towards the edges of both legality and experience: heroin, crack and cocaine.

Intoxication can also take a more mundane form: prescribed medication and, in particular, antidepressants. It need not involve drugs at all: adherents report that asceticism and religious fanaticism can create equivalent states of intoxication. The very act of writing itself has also been posited as exhilarating or intoxicating. In turn, the process of reading has been celebrated for its capacity to produce a similar effect.

French writing, and French writers, have been particularly fascinated by intoxication, and have frequently been intoxicated. In the nineteenth century, Rimbaud called for a ‘dérèglement de tous les sens’, Baudelaire, Gaultier and Flaubert were attendees at the Club des Hashischins, whilst the shadow of Thomas de Quincey’s opium eating has loomed large over the French creative imagination. In modern and contemporary writing, Henri Michaux and Claro have explored LSD, whilst Frédéric Beigbeder published his Nouvelles sous ecstasy. Alcohol has also had a strong grip: Debord, Houellebecq and Duras all drank heavily. Paris itself has been a frequent port of call for foreign writers seeking intoxication: Miller, Burroughs and Hemmingway all famously indulged decadently in the French capital.

This one-day conference at the University of London Institute in Paris will consider the relationship of intoxication to writing produced both in French and in France. It invites proposals for twenty-minute research papers in English or French from postgraduate and early career researchers as well as proposals for interventions around the theme from writers working outside the university community.

Themes for exploration could include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

-       Ecstasy, raves and writing

-       Uppers and downers

-       Cigarettes and alcohol

-       Writing and rock

-       Hangovers and comedowns

-       Parisian expatriate intoxication

-       Writing and hedonism

-       Alternative intoxications

Proposals (maximum 300 words), together with a short biography indicating your academic background and research interests or short CV, should be submitted via e-mail to eugene.brennan@ulip.lon.ac.uk by April 5th 2013. Please include your name, academic affiliation (where appropriate), and contact details.

This conference is organised by the ULIP Postgraduate Society: Russell Williams, Eugene Brennan, Katie Tidmarsh and Alastair Hemmens.

 

Django Unchained (dir: Quentin Tarantino, 2013)

In some ways, a new Tarantino film is a very much like a pair of Clarks, a Vauxhall car or a bottle of seven quid wine from Sainsbury’s. Reassuringly, you know pretty much in advance what you’re going to get.  Unlike the desert boots, the Corsa or the Rioja, though, you can generally count on a Tarantino films to show enough sparks of cinematic magic to make the whole affair live long in the memory.

Django Unchained certainly looks like it fulfils most of the expectations that a cinema-going public weaned on Tarantino’s earlier work will have. It follows heist-movie Reservoir Dogs (1992), martial arts revenge film Kill Bill (2003-4) and war romp Inglorious Basterds (2009), by again paying fond tribute to an unfashionable genre. This time, Tarantino has remade a western, but with a twist: picking on Carbucci’s Django and Francisci’s Hercules Unchained to inspire a story of a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) wreaking revenge on the white men who dominate nineteenth-century American society and have hold of his wife.

Tarantino’s treatment has lent the film a reliable whiff of provocation: its subject, liberal use of the n-word and its par-for-the-course bloody violence, have already sparked debate with Spike Lee kicking off online and Krishnan Guru-Murthy rising to the bait too easily on British TV. Of course, we’ve seen controversy with Tarantino before. The ‘is it too violent?’ question  being a particularly limp one.

Like Tarantino’s previous films, Django Unchained provides both a platform for stars from the past we thought were long forgotten (think John Travolta in Pulp Fiction or Pam Grier in Jackie Brown) or shows us stars we though we knew in radically different ways (Uma Thurman as sword-bearing ninja or Robert De Niro as a weed-smoking small-time crook). Here Django casts, Titanic whimperer Leonardo DiCaprio as a menacingly evil plantation owner whilst the iconic cool Samuel L. Jackson loses the Kangol and is cast as Stephen, his simpering right-hand-man.

We can also generally expect a Tarantino’s film to feature a somewhat toe-curlingly embarrassing cameo from the man himself (check) and for the films to be slightly over-long and rather clumsily put together at the final edit. Kind of clunky. That’s OK though, because the music will be good and there is enough going on to keep our attention. The bloated-yet-compelling Pulp Fiction being a case in point.

Django Unchained has most of this. It is most effective when it comes to character. Christophe Waltz gives a notable turn as dentist-turned Bounty Hunter who frees Django from his irons and kicks off the movie’s plot. A performance not as memorable, however, as his as a particularly sinister Nazi ‘jew hunter’ Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds. It is Jackson, who is almost unrecognisable from his previous Tarantino roles and, in particular, DiCaprio who steal the show. The latter, as Calvin Candie is alternately charming and brutal, echoing, in fact, Waltz’s role in Basterds.

You can normally count on tense set pieces to be the highest points of Tarantino movies. These are scenes that stay in the memory long after you’ve forgotten the rest of the film. Reservoir Dog’s ear surgery to a Stealers Wheel soundtrack set the mark. This was followed by Pulp Fiction’s adrenaline shot through the heart and Jackson’s fire and brimstone hitman speech. Even the woeful second half of Death Proof doesn’t seem quite so bad when you remember Vanessa Ferlito’s lapdance. A highlight of Basterds was, equally, a set piece, set in a Munich beer cellar where an Allied undercover agent infiltrates some heavy duty Nazi drinking. This is, however, where Django Unchained lets us down. The film has its fair share of good moments, most of them stating DiCaprio and Jackson, but nothing approaching the sheer heart-thumping tension of his earlier works.

Yes, there is excitement, yes there is violence. Yes, it looks great – I particularly liked the flashbacks, themselves shot on pseudo vintage film. Django Unchained is a good movie, but mediocre Tarantino: Tarantino restrained. Maybe describing it as the movie equivalent of a warm Pinot Grigiot or a Vauxhall Astra is doing the director a disservice, but Tarantino is here on, what is for him, uncharacteristically comfy territory.

Killing Them Softly (Dir: Andrew Dominik, 2012)

Killing Them Softly, a film set in a nameless urban American wasteland and directed by a Kiwi is a resolutely French piece of noir filmmaking.

Let me explain. Andrew ‘Chopper’ Dominik’s latest movie, which tells of score-settling, amongst small-time mobsters, is a movie about contemporary economic politics every inch as much as it is a story of revenge. The plot follows the aftermath of the audacious yet ill-advised hold-up of a backroom gambling operation. The world is one where everybody, from the rookie crooks and the shady poker players to the Brad Pitt’s ‘sensitive’ hitman – who can’t bear to see his victims suffering so he kills them from a distance, hence the Roberta Flack-referencing of the film’s title – are explicitly caught up treading water amidst burgeoning global financial gloom.

Killing Them Softly is set against the background of the initial waves of the 2008 global economic crisis and the associated financial pledges from aspirant presidents Bush and Obama, both promising to lead the US to financial security. All its characters are at the sharp end of the economic wedge, all of them trying to stay afloat. The candidates’ promises are mediated through distant television reports, highlighting the cynical remove from the sober realities if contemporary American life.

In such a way, Dominik’s film stands up as a dark satire on capitalism’s inability to bring any lasting benefits to the society it dominates. Pitt’s killer, driven exclusively by the market, stands as a contemporary shadow of the heroine of French writer Jean-Patrick Manchette’s novel Fatale (1977) where the hired assassin is cast as the distilled product of capitalist spirit. Whilst Killing Them Softly, itself based on a detective novel, George V. Higgins’ Cogan’s Trade (1974) shares Manchette’s critical imperative, the film also shares his bleak pessimism.

Whilst the story is reasonably compelling and the satire interesting from the context of a Hollywood product, the film is most successful at the level of character. The fantastically-named Scoot McNairy brings a Buscemi-esque twitchiness to unsteady criminal Frankie, whilst Ray Liotta provides a pitch perfect cameo as the doomed wiseguy Markie Trattman. Perhaps most impressive, however, is Pitt’s hitman, Cogan. In a restrained, mature performance, Pitt all but buries memories of his over-the-top Inglorious Basterds buffoonery around these parts. Killing Them Softly is an all-too-rare piece of filmmaking – a movie that is concurrently both entertaining and has a relatively palatable message. Shame Pitt went and ruined it all with that fucking horrible Chanel ad, then, innit?

New publication: Autour de l’extrême littéraire

I’m very pleased to announce the publication of my first book, edited in collaboration with Alastair Hemmens. Full details are below. The book can be bought direct from the publishers here or via Amazon here.

“The extreme is an essential aspect of contemporary experience. Thrill-seekers spend the weekend in the search of the adrenaline rush of “extreme sports”. In the political arena, the world has begun to rediscover the split between the “extreme” left and the “extreme” right. Through 24-hour rolling news, images of violence, torture and war are televised unremittingly into the living room; while the Internet places hardcore pornography, snuff film and cannibalism within easy reach of anyone with a personal computer or a smartphone. The “extreme” has even become a quality companies seek to associate with the most banal of commodities such as ice cream and hair gel. These different manifestations of extremity suggest a contradictory, even paradoxical, relationship with the “extreme”.

The contributors to this book explore how writing in French, from the Middle Ages to the present day, has interrogated extremity. Taken together, these essays demonstrate that the quality of the extreme can be applied to a great number of texts for different reasons and from myriad perspectives. Moreover, the extreme is revealed as a quality both distinct from, and in tension with, the crossing of boundaries associated with transgression. It is a movement towards and away from a centre of radiation that escapes cultural norms without necessarily reinforcing them. This sensation of rushing and wandering outside the boundaries of what is considered safe and normal provides the extreme with its adrenaline-charged response of excitement or horror.

The analyses contained in this volume consider a number of manifestations of the “extrême littéraire”. The ambiguities of gender in medieval romance are explored in the context of the Arthurian court. The 19th century is examined through the prose poems of Baudelaire and the littérature sauvage of the Zutistes. The difficulties of writing the trauma of war and genocide in the 20th century are discussed through the work of Jorges Semprún and Agota Kristof. The contemporary extreme in French literature is examined in the autofiction of Christine Angot, the work of Annie Ernaux and Catherine Millet, the controversial novels of Michel Houellebecq, and the worldwide influence of the Marquis de Sade on writers today such as Bret Easton Ellis and Elfriede Jelinek.

Whilst the “extrême littéraire” may have a wide variety of expressions in French literature, it is always outside, beyond and far from the centre of our everyday experience. It shocks us, excites us and horrifies us, often all at once. This book seeks to provide an insight into how and why the extreme has fascinated, and continues to fascinate, the French literary imagination”.

Amour (dir. Michael Haneke, 2012)

Describing the work of Michel Houellebecq, English writer Julian Barnes said that his novels ‘hunt big game, while others settle for shooting rabbits’. The same could be said of the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. His films frequently pursue the ‘big game’ or tackle the major, uncomfortable truths of our society. Funny Games (1997), for example, deals with violence and its representation. Caché (2005) considers, amongst other things, the legacy of French colonialism in Algeria. Code Inconnu (2000) explores barriers within society whilst his last film Le Ruban blanc (2009) questions the nature of evil. In a similar way to Houellebecq, however, Haneke’s work is more concerned with probing, provoking and asking questions than he is with providing answers. Whilst both may hunt ‘big game’, accuracy of their aim is always open for debate. Indeed, attempts to ‘read’ Haneke’s films for a message, lesson or standpoint frequently leave viewers frustrated and the director (perhaps correctly) labelled with the epithet ‘pessimist’.

Amour is no different from Haneke’s previous films in that it also deals with a big issue. Perhaps the biggest It explores the relationship between the octogenarian married couple Anne and Georges (played by Emmanuelle Riva  and Jean-Louis Trintignant) in the light of the former’s physical deterioration. Anne’s death is inevitable within the film; the opening scene sees her dead, decaying on her bed surrounded by flowers in a locked room. Haneke is interested less in how she died, however, than in how her relationship with Georges – from where the ‘amour’ of the title comes – survives her physical decay.

Riva and Tritignant’s performances bring the film to life and give it an emotional range that moves it beyond the morbid. Riva’s performance is particularly striking as an older actress rehearsing the inevitable sufferings and frustrations that old age brings. Tritignant’s role as Georges is also particularly poignant as he tenderly displays his determination to care for her at home, despite the protestations of Eva (Isabelle Huppert). Georges is determined not to renege on Anne’s wish, after an early visit and a botched operation, to never again return to hospital. It is Georges’ commitment to Anne’s wish that produces the compelling double-bind at the heart of the film, delicately captured by Tritignant and Haneke; he proves his love for her by taking care of her at home, despite having the resources to have her relocated in a retirement home, but is himself physically limited in terms of how much assistance he can provide.

The sense of space created in Amour is also crucial to the film’s success. Aside from an early visit to a classical concert, the film takes place entirely in Georges and Anne’s bourgeois Parisian apartment. Indeed, the couple appear to exist in a symbiotic relationship with it; on returning from the concert, they discover an attempted break-in, a symbolic suggestion, perhaps, of the suffering to follow. Equally, the discoloured wallpaper at Anne’s bedside seems also to suggest decay and deterioration. Anne and Georges are happy together, alone in their flat; when the front door is breached and external figures enter the flat – Eva, the ex-pupil Alexandre, an inconsiderate carer and even an unruly pigeon – they cause frustration, upset or annoyance through a reminder of Anne’s state of decay.

Like Haneke’s previous films, the ending is ambiguous. It is unclear what roles Anne and Georges will themselves play together or separately as the film draws to a close. Amour does, however, leave the audience with more hope than any of Haneke’s other films. The apartment does not, as in Haneke’s Le Septième continent (1988) – his story of a suicidal family, become oppressive or claustrophobic. A notable shot late in the film is telling: the camera lingers on each of the couple’s landscape paintings, each presenting an idyllic scene. This, combined with Georges imagination, suggested by flashbacks to a happier life and a healthier Anne, suggest, if not a happy ending, a (slightly) more optimistic Haneke.

Kenneth Anger, galérie du jour, Paris 4ème

There are few figures in the art world more enigmatic or more paradoxical than Kenneth Anger. Whilst he is regularly championed by high-profile figures such as Martin Scorsese for his “poetic” filmmaking and the influence of his work pervades contemporary culture: it can be traced within music videos and the aesthetic of David Lynch, Anger himself has, for the most part remained on the fringes of artistic production. Unlike Lynch, for example, Anger has largely shunned the commercial for the avant-garde, the Hollywood payday for his often beautiful, just as often deeply unsettling film.

Hollywood Babylon, copyright held by Agnès B/galérie du jour/Kenneth Anger

At the same time, however, Anger has at least embraced an idea of Hollywood rather than mainstream film itself; his two volumes of Hollywood Babylon have established him, somewhat bizarrely, as an authority on the sordid underbelly of its golden age. A third volume, dealing with salacious contemporary gossip is, according to Anger too controversial to release in litigious times. Whilst Anger’s work has been anthologised by the BFI and he has exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, he has never fully embraced canonical canonisation spending his time playing sporadic gigs with his noise music project and being focus of a substantial amount of celebrity myth-making himself – inspired by the self-proclaimed “Great Beast” Aleister Crowley and a frequenter of Satanic circles with a reported penchant for placing curses on those who have fallen out of his favour.

Perhaps surprisingly, or maybe inevitably given the all-recuperating nature of the contemporary spectacle, Kenneth Anger has recently interested the fashion world: he directed a short film/advert for Italian fashion brand Missoni in 2010 and has recently fallen under the patronage of French fashion designer and aspirant cultural polymath Agnès B, collaborating on t-shirt designs and exhibiting at her Parisian galérie du jour with this present show.

This show showcases both extremes of Anger’s aesthetic. Much of the show is given over to artefacts from his vast private collection of the relics of a lost Hollywood: film-posters and faded black-and-white photographs and newspaper clippings of forgotten matinée idols, all bathed in the neon glow of a light sculpture which bears the “Hollywood Babylon” slogan and immediately greets the gallery-goer. This pole of Anger’s art is supported by his short Puce Moment (1949), itself an homage to what the filmmaker has described as the “goddesses of the silent screen”.

For me, however, whilst the mythology surrounding figures such as Bette Davis, Errol Flynn and Billie Dove is clearly important for Anger’s aesthetic, it is the darker, more dangerous elements of his work that represents the true interest in Anger’s work – the gay Anger explored in the blackly humorous eroticism of Scorpio Rising (1964) and the satanic Anger in the sinister bad acid trip of Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) (with a Moog soundtrack by Mick Jagger and cameo performances by Anton Szandor La Vey and pre-Manson murder Bobby Beausoleil, and the complex cosmic mythology of Lucifer Rising (1981) (staring a wasted-looking Marianne Faithfull). The true Anger is the dangerous one.

Thankfully, visitors to this show get a chance to glimpse this Anger with a loop of 1954’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, inspired by Crowley’s poetry and starring erotic diarist AnaÏs Nin, through a series of bizarrely colourful and poetic juxtapositions, which acts as a ritual, both for the onscreen character and, one suspects, which has the power to contaminate the viewer.

Whilst commercial partnerships with sponsors such as Agnès B clearly provide both exposure and a platform for the artist’s work, Anger doesn’t, or perhaps, shouldn’t sit comfortably within the context of the fashion world. At its best, is work is complex ans has the power to be deeply emotionally affective for the viewer – precisely capacities the fashion world doesn’t have. Hopefully this isn’t the sign of things to come. By his very nature, Anger’s work resembles that of French writer, mystic and pornographer Georges Bataille: it resists mainstream recuperation and any attempt to sanitise and whitewash it risks reforming it beyond recognition. Whilst we can appreciate that Agnès B has given us the opportunity to reconnect with Anger’s work, he is too interesting, and too important, to be confined to the catwalk.

The Kenneth Anger collection at the galérie du jour,  44 rue quincampoix, Paris, runs until November 3, 2012

La Route du Rock, Fort du Saint-Père, Saint-Malo, 10-12 August, 2012

I lost interest in music festivals standing in rain watching icons-turned-trout-fishermen The Who languidly going through the motions at Glastonbury in 2007. My passion for big-scale rock events had already started to wane a couple of years earlier when people started calling it ‘Glasto’, and it started to attract a crowd that seemed hired en bloc from Wimbledon or Twickenham. Later that year I was lucky enough to be involved with the much-missed Dream Machine festival, a handful of friendly like-minded sorts putting on their own event in a remote village hall, which I thought had proved the final nail in the coffin. Add to that an instinctive gag reflex when the names ‘Reading’, ‘Leeds’ or ‘V’ are mentioned and a curmudgeonly nature, together with a dislike of Bestival’s forced-fun ‘vibe’ and you get the general idea.

Dominique A – Gainsbourgian. In a good way.

La Route du Rock, a smaller, cooler and far more intelligent French festival has proved me wrong, the music festival need not be dead or restricted to stag dos and battered six-formers. Now in its 22^nd year, La Route du Rock, is run, not by a global corporation, but by a network of music fans from the Brittany region, where the event takes place. There is no big-scale sponsorship and the bands they select are selected, not for their flavour-of-the-month status, but for their musical credibility. The organisers have a musical sensibility that veers towards the Anglophone and is tinged with 1980s and 1990s revivalism.

The Soft Moon – Just an aesthetic?

The festival is massively smaller that British enormo-fests, this year’s attendance was recorded at 13,000 which, according to reports was an official disappointment. From the perspective of a miserable festival-goer like myself it meant impressive elbow, camping and cat-swinging room. I’m certainly getting older, but the success of La Route du Rock is also brought about by slightly different cultural attitudes towards boozing. You’d be wrong to suggest that the French don’t enthusiastically enjoy a massive piss-up, but the festival doesn’t boast the intimidating international-day-in-Cardiff-city centre atmosphere of the V festival. The fact that the security staff won’t let you take your own booze into the arena and the bars bewilderingly don’t take cash and you have to spend an eternity queuing to exchange cash for literal ‘beer tokens’ also contributes to the general atmosphere of sobriety around the place. People, on the whole, are there for the music. The staff are as well, many of them are volunteers who have exchanged their time for a free ticket to the event. This crowd takes things seriously.

The location also contributes. Le Fort du Saint-Père is about five kilometres south of Saint-Malo itself. The countryside setting presumably means that noise level restrictions and complaints from local residents are less of an issue, meaning that bands can take to the stage later; things kick off at around 6pm per day and go on until past 3am. During the day, festival-goers are bussed into the anciently-pretty coastal town of Saint-Malo where they are invited to lounge on one of the town’s beaches, requisitioned for the duration by the Route du Rock team. The brave souls can take a tip in the Channel whilst the suave, debonair types a cut above the proles can coolly sip rosé in the shade and nod post-ironically to the bands and DJs. [NB: This is Brittany. It often rains a lot. A beach is only fun in the sunshine. 2012’s festival was the first in a long while to be mud-free, I was lucky. When you go you’ll probably get trench foot].

Spiritualized at the Route du Rock 2012 – Beautiful and Brutal

And, of course, there were bands as well, all of them playing sets between 45 minutes and an hour on the one main event stage. No long Skynyrd-style wig-outs here. Friday’s highlights included Dominique A, something of an unknown quantity for many in the crowd, a purveyor of French traditional chanson in the land of Rock was the first highpoint of the weekend. Playing is recent album Vers les lueurs in its entirety he was unconventional, frequently Gainsbourgian in his orchestrations and phrasing. The mighty Spritualized were the main draw of the evening, their mixture of deconstructed rock and drone rock catching many of the crowd off-guard with the former before bludgeoning them into submission with the former, set closer Take Me To The Other Side particularly brutal. The much-anticipated set from The Soft Moon was, however, a damp squib; for all of their dark-wave-metal sound and sexy-synth noises backed up by a light show to match the haircuts, they seemed lacking in anything approaching a memorable song. No surprise, then that the crowds seem to thin-out long before the end. You need more than an aesthetic to make good music, chaps.

The XX – Dull

Saturday’s bill was more hit and miss. The dour XX were the biggest anti-climax of the weekend. The world has been raving about their new album of pretty if downbeat music and this was the first opportunity to hear some of the tracks; something a lot of people were getting steamed up about. The band took to the stage beneath a giant, clear, Perspex X – transparent, lightweight and hollow, the perfect metaphor. Mark Lanegan, who followed the XX on stage didn’t quite do enough to rescue the evening; as static on stage as his predecessors, he gruffly ran through a few tracks we’ve heard on his albums.

Veronica Falls at the Route du Rock 2012 – Joyful

Thankfully, there were some things happening earlier in the afternoon for us to get excited about. London-based Veronica Falls got things going in the blazing sunlight with their bright 1990s- indie-pop. Think Kenicke, think theaudience, think The Bluetones. The excellently energetic Savages too looked back too to music’s bygone past, slightly further back to Siouxsie and the Banshees, whilst Jana Hunter’s atmospheric Lower Dens brought a gentler shoegaze drone to the proceedings. Right before the XX bored everyone senseless.

Chromatics at the Route du Rock – Everything the XX should have been

Sunday evening saw the definite-article slaughtered by Chromatics who were, frankly, everything the XX should have been: contemporary, dance-infused and, for the most part, up-for-it-and-fun-to-watch, although their perplexing decision to finish their set with two downbeat cover versions (Neil Young’s Into the Black and Kate Bush’s Running up that Hill) lost their set a little momentum towards the end. The night was ruled by the magisterial Mazzy Star who played in the near-darkness, killing the video screens and the static David Roback and Hope Sandoval inducing intimacy throughout the field. I may or may not have told the people behind me to be quiet at one point in their set. Next up were The Walkmen who captured the right blend of big stage grandeur and avant-garde sing-alongs (even if I can’t get the fact that they sound disturbingly like The Killers out of my head); they genuinely seemed to be enjoying themselves as well. Much more more than Hope, at least.

Mazzy Star at the Route du Rock 2012 – intimate

In fact it was The Walkmen’s comments after the gig (after slagging off the ‘crappy’ festival’s they’d been playing recently) that pretty well sum up La Route du Rock’s difference as a festival: “It isn’t a festival like Reading where everyone just drinks and doesn’t pay any attention to the music”. Whilst I may be a miserable sod, it would be a shame if the ever creeping sponsorship bandwagon reaches Saint Malo. Musical credibility, cheap champagne and oysters or a corporate deal with Carling? Aux armes!`

Selected live performances from the 2012 edition of La Route du Rock are being streamed live online for a limited time here. Go see. 

All photography rights reserved by Russell Williams.

La Route du Rock 2012