The American Way: Tell It Like It Is

"Je te connais, tout ce qui t'intéresse c'est le fric, elle a bien travaillé pour toi mais pas toi pour elle, ta musique ce n'est pas pour nous et il ne faut pas nous en vouloir je regrette mais tu n'aimes pas la France à ce que j'ais compris et vu...

Jo…."

[Translation: "I know you, the only thing that interests you is money, it has worked well for you but not you for it, your music is not for us and I do not blame us but I am sorry you don't love France, that I've understood and seen ...

Jo ...."]

Well, you've got that right, Jo: believe me, if I never hear Billy Paul doing "Your Song" again, or O-Zone's "Dragonstea Din Tei", I'll be one happy man: because they're awful!

And, as these things go (slowly) my own music usually did alright in France. We threw one hell of a shindig in Wissembourg, on New Years, and I had a lot of fun at Murphy's, and - as the photo shows below, when I got to perform I was received just like here in the States.

Given time - and without soul-crushing events like my wife locking me in an old empty bakery for 11 hours straight while she went out and socialized - things could've been great, but, I guess, treating your loved ones like they deserved respect and common courtesy is too much to ask from her. Just ask her latest victims. Oh, wait - you can't - because they're dead!

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, I've been getting some strange missives lately about my ex-wife, Karine Anne Brunck, and how I somehow did something to make her fuck that killer homeopath, Robert Wohlfahrt, when she was away from home for six months on the other side of the world while I was on the phone with her, for up to three hours a day, telling her I loved her and giving her support. (Funny how that happens.) The writers never mention the trouble she's in, as the good "doctor's" accomplice to the murder of two people. (And how does THAT happen? Did they kill the first one and keep quiet?) No, these supposed know-it-alls just keep implying that for some reason, usually having to do with A) how I didn't care enough about money and focused too much on my music, or B) my hunger for money, in the 20 year marriage that broke my heart and caused me to lose my love, my marriage, my liberal idealism, and become somewhat sour and ambivilent about mankind. Make up your minds, people, because it can't be both! There is an actual human being writing from this side of the Atlantic, too, y'know!

They seem to think I'm pining to have the kooky woman back in my life when nothing could be further from the truth. Now that she's been busted, the nightmares are subsiding (there's something about being right that will do that, I guess,...) and why would I want to sleep with someone who could be so cruel, and crazy, as to kill people and then rationalize it away? As a mutual friend of Karine's, here, said to me recently, "How does she rationalize the deaths of two people?"

If you ask me, my biggest failing as a husband was to never investigate where Karine was getting this stuff from. Who told her she had powers? Who told her she could heal? Who was she spreading the details of our life to (as she saw them) for a fee? I know Wohlfahrt tells her these things, but who else? She definitely blew a lot of money on psychics, "channelling", NewAge seminars, and Reiki classes ($500.00 a week!) but every sick person that I know she ever came in contact with is dead.

She claimed she could cure cancer, with her bare hands, but her mother's still dead. She also claimed she could cure AIDS but her friend Scotty died too. I can only guess that Karine never mentions that she used to do meth-amphetamine with him when he had AIDS - with her acting as his caretaker - does she? (I guess that was just part of what she calls "the healing process".) I walked in on that scene one day and yelled, "What the hell are you doing? Don't you know an AIDS patient shouldn't be doing drugs?" but that didn't stop Karine. I don't know if it was because she was French or NewAge but, of course, "Nurse Brunck" knew better - without a lick of medical training.

After she left, and I found her diaries in the closet, I discovered all kinds of things that I only saw ignorant glimpses of before: I learned that when she wasn't at home she spent her time pulling "energy" from between men's legs. (And, Oh, that was gratifying to read.) Or how she had to pull off the road while driving because the dead spoke to her so intensely. A psychic told her, without ever meeting me, that we both had "brain damage" - and let me tell you, boy, was I glad to hear that, too! She spent hundreds of dollars for "energy" vortexes that she'd put under chairs, which look like they cost five dollars to make, being just clumps of wood with copper wire holding "energy crystals" to it. The money I supposedly hunger for, mad capitalist that I am, just flew out the house without her ever saying a word. Oh, and hey, I've got a great "energy" story:

One Christmas we were in Wissembourg, and the Brunck family had invited the unofficial mayor of the village, "Mr. Paul" and his wife to their house for dinner. Karine and I were getting dressed, when she pulls out our suitcase that we carried gifts from America in, and she whips out a bunch of these "energy crystals" and starts wrapping them.

So I'm watching her - remember, at this time I don't know shit about the occult, and have only the mildest passing knowledge of NewAge, meaning I knew there was something called "NewAge" (though I couldn't tell you what is was) and I knew there were "NewAge" stores (but I didn't have a clue why) - and so I asked, "You're going to give Mr. Paul a bunch of rocks for Christmas?" Karine looked at me like I just fell off the turnip truck and said, "Just watch." (She was big on the "just watch" shit, like I was going to see something that made me think she was Merlin.)

So we have a nice dinner and then the time comes for the gifts (I got socks!) and Karine brings out the crystals. Immediately, everyone leaps up from the table and starts oohing and ahhhing, and counting the sides, transfixed by these fucking rocks. The atmosphere of the room changed with their interest, like I was with a coven of witches. Then they started debating what the number of sides meant. "13? What is 13?" "I only count 10." "Ohhh, that one is very strong!" "Yes, yes,.." They were acting like the biggest bunch of loons I'd ever seen in my life.

I left the room to go smoke some of the hash Sabastian gave me and watch bad French entertainment on TV. I loved that shit: people who can't sing, people who can't dance - in America, we just don't get to see what the French enjoy, except for Jerry Lewis, and I found it endlessly fascinating - especially when stoned. Hell, it beat watching people counting the sides of rocks.

Now, I can just imagine the anger that my French readers might have reading that, but what's endlessly amazing to me is that my honest opinion, delivered like that, makes them madder than Karine and Robert Wohlfahrt killing people. Everyone except the families of the dead, of course. They don't seem to matter to anyone. No, what matters is shutting me up, and putting me down, because I've got the nerve to say Karine Brunck is a crazy occultist out loud. That's what really matters - not some silly little thing like her involvement in two people's deaths. Why, those two poor souls just prove that I'm the one who's crazy, and Karine Anne Brunck, and Robert Wohlfahrt are the two greatest metaphysical geniuses of France. Now Karine can talk to her "patients" better than she ever could alive!

Let me tell you something about France,...no - even better - since I'm just an American artist (and thus, worthy of being looked down upon when witnessing crazy shit on French soil) I'm going to let some French artists tell you something about France, by way of The New York Times. I'm going to pull a few quotes from an article on French cinema, and you can decide for yourselves if these French artists know their own people better than I do, or if artists are just more willing to be up-front about the madness around us. Here we go - this is from Michael Kimmelman's column entitled, "In France, It’s Vive Le Cinéma of Denial"::

"Cultural gulfs can sometimes reveal themselves in these small details. France, it turns out, remains, even all these years later, not insignificantly caught up in,...self-flattery and escapist fiction about itself."

"Serious-minded Americans traditionally love to idealize the French,...but,...it’s their own,...unlike those in the United States, who shy away from tackling head-on tough issues like contemporary French politics, scandals and unrest."

"They cite a mix of politics, stylistic habits,...and a collective anxiety about postwar French identity. The problem, you might say, goes back to de Gaulle’s selling the country on the idea that it won World War II, along with the culture of denial that that mindset promoted."

"As Antoine de Baecque, a film historian, put it, 'French,...deals with reality in a certain way,...we like to fracture, distort and romanticize — to see trauma but obliquely, abstractly. In this sense French,...is the opposite of American,...it values style over realism, the small form over the epic.'"

"Mr. de Baecque chalked this approach up to a French “inferiority complex, a feeling that since World War II, France, despite what we like to tell ourselves, is downgraded from the front rank of history, which creates melancholy, a malaise,” he said. “The,...sentimental affairs, they are fictions that remove us from real life,...”

"Abdel Raouf Dafri,...an excitable 44-year-old,...shook his head in disgust,...“...France doesn’t like to look in the mirror except to see itself as the most beautiful nation,...I said look at American,...the French response to that was, ‘Yes, but it’s the U.S.,’ as if there’s no violence here.'”

"'In the United States,' he said, “you,...are intelligent and political and don’t forget the entertainment factor. In France we just want to be intellectual.' He nearly leaped out of his seat saying that last word."

"Ms. [Caroline Benjo] agreed,...'We prefer to euphemize, to think small,...Look at the French,...and you’ll also see they aren’t always the best,...but they’re the ones that fit the expectations of French,...” her colleague, Carole Scotta,...added. 'We’re prisoners of these expectations.'”

"'And yes, we just don’t want to see ourselves as we really are,' she said. 'It took a long time for politicians here to admit France bore responsibility for the years of collaboration during World War II, and still Sarkozy likes to say we were a nation of resistance. The most successful,...in this country reflect our collective projection of France as we wish it to be. We prefer to live in a dream.'"

And dream they will. The French will dream they don't break Jewish storefront windows and they treat Africans and Arabs well. They will dream there were no Nazis that attacked me in Wissembourg and, later, chased me from an ATM elsewhere. They will dream "Doctor" Robert Wohlfahrt is a great man, when he slept with another man's wife during their grieving for her mother who he killed. And they will dream Karine's a nice person who would do the same thing. And, now, Karine and Robert have achieved notoriety - instead of the infamy they deserve - for killing two more while in "love", when it was I who cared for her when she was sick, protected her when she was scared, and offered her true love, and a home, when she claimed she never wanted to live in Wissembourg again because (voicing the Brunck family mantra) the people were so small minded.

I did that for 20 years but, cruelly, some (Karine?) have the nerve to claim that all I wanted was money? Bullshit. Nobody does such things for all those years - and longed to do more for the rest of their lives - merely for money. I wanted my wife to be proud of me, as I was proud of her, and to love me in return. But there's no love, as I know it, in her heart. Otherwise she would tell the truth about her actions and beliefs, exposing them for what they are:

"They are fictions that remove us from real life,...”

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