[Deepwaters]

So much grace Aliziénne, that the gang of pop hussards at the magazine Technikart who presented Alizée in the role of Madonna, could ask her an essential question. Calculated. Ultra-cunning. What a beautiful operation/mission this was, frankly, for underground artists, to render desirable and respected a singer considered, up to now, by the same underground, ultra-passé. So much more fitting that, through eighties glorification and the sniggering of strictness, the époque is, somehow, ready to consecrate Alizée. Such an “out” singer as she could be, better that a moderately swinging star from day before yesterday become so super-“in.” In the modern manner. An indefinable mixture of nostalgia, ingenuousness, cynicism, enthusiasm, and the capacity to zap.

GEEK AND POKER CHAMPION
<O</O
Whatever. Regarding Alizée, we diverge from the subject. Or rather, we muck about. The cliques are not so self-defiant, or hardly genres, that they mix. Distinguished/common, elite/popular, everyone can be everything. Or seem to be.
<O</O
Consider instead Alizée, like one of the symbols (barely displayed in the media) of youth urged to be great, who, in addition to not being stoned, tells and retells of her modesty and lack of cultivation. And her pleasure also, her talent, and the tricks of guys. The ex-Lolita, did you know, is: super good at video games, a real geek, into golf which she plays with her husband, and above all, poker champion, who already beat “all of Jérémy’s pals.”
<O</O
One imagines her with a smoking Colt revolver, an unrecognized Calamity Jane. Her father was a computer scientist, her mother a businessperson. She has nothing to do with art, everything to do with the “mainstream.” She loves it all so much (her parents, the “mainstream”) she was hardly rebellious, crazy, a free wheel. She laughs: “Maybe when I’m 30. I don’t have anything to fight against. Never have, in fact.” Her standards, she repeats again and again, carry her through the profession. The career. One will say that she speaks of another profession, another career. It is not that common, in this era of apparent facility, to say that one is not afraid of effort. That one is not, naturally, a cool girl.
<O</O
To hold the mode. She adores Chanel, of which she buys a lot, and often, at a boutique on the rue Cambon. Her dream is to assist at a parade signed by Lagerfeld. [??] She will not ask. Too proud for that. Too afraid to guess, and perhaps to be wrong, if her name will cross over the barrier of Coco chic. This is practically her only weakness: her sole concession to snobbery.
<O</O
PROFESSIONAL CONFIDENCE
<O</O
For the rest, she accepts everything. From the school of Mylène, where she studied seriously, learning the secrets of marketing, photography sessions, interviews. Not so easy. “Yes it was, too” she says, to be the girl of the hits, that is. An artist who endures, that’s another thing. “When it’s about the music, the visual, the text, I always think of my public. If it’s too pointed, if I don’t understand it, if it goes to far towards the intellectual side, I say no.” She knows she is obsessed with control, a bit of a pain in the neck, knowing exactly what she wants (and doesn’t). She smiles. “Yes, I don’t let go of affairs.” She interrogates herself, with the same sincerity, on how those who have been given so much already smash themselves, to follow the movement, to be there, to think of everything, to be busy with her life, with her husband, with her daughter (since becoming a mother, she avows herself a feminist – from head to toe).
<O</O
One discovers her, who reveals herself so little, through some tattoos on her so-white body. The cuts of a life already written at length. On her left wrist, in Hebrew, the first name of her husband, and on the same wrist the inscription 2A (the department of South Corsica), and on the inside of her right forearm her daughter drawn in Manga, and on the back a Tinkerbell in pastel. Her guardian angel, she avows, is that Tinkerbell, the girlfriend of Peter Pan, discrete, a little jealous. And despite the years that have passed: eternally young.

Edit:

Originally Posted by Bigdan

The jounalist allude to a french idiom " to have the butter, the money of the butter and the bottom of the cheese seller " ( that's pretty strange after translation )
its mean that you want impossible things, that you can't have the benefits of a situation and the benefits you would have if you had made the opposite choice.... clear?

"to have the butter and the money of the butter" is the traditionnal idiom. " and The bottom of the cheese seller" is a rather vulgar addition...

Thanks, Dan. It sounds like the equivalent English idiom is "you can't have your cake and eat it too," and I've so corrected the translation.

OK, I have to say here: some of this stuff is bullshit. Mainstream? Low-brow? No, it's not. Maybe she does think of herself that way, but if so, she deceives herself. That does not describe either the photos or the music we've seen/heard coming from this new effort so far. It's nuanced, complex, a bit dark and gothic.

Maybe she just means that she doesn't have a highly-educated person's sophisticated perception, but that kind of sophistication can actually be a hindrance to real creativity as easily as a help.