"We're not human beings having a spiritual experience. We're spiritual beings having a human experience".

That quote defines me well. I have a bit of an unusual life, always driven by the need to experiment what I want, but with a pretty solid and stable character.

I like to travel the world whenever I can cuz I fell in love with Paris in 2000 and it's like I've been married to this damn city for 19 years. We have our ups and downs, loving the overall feeling that almost anything is possible here, or hating some of her old habits and flaws, but well... When I end up a good night out with the sun rising, having breakfast with people I met a few hours earlier, I remember it's a pretty cool place.

About my life in general :
I spend most of my time doing nothing... I mean, thinking. I try to have deep original thoughts and stuffs. It doesn't work so much. But when it does work, I write those thoughts and try to turn them into folk-rock songs or a novel I've been trying to write for like 30 years. I also organize concerts / events for other artists, songwriting workshops, tours and charity events. But most of the time, you'll just find me drinking wine or playing music in my favorite parisian spots, with people who can share good stories, drinking contests, or some good old stinky cheese.

CURRENT MISSION

Create a European network of help between independent singer/songwriters so if you are one or know any interesting contacts / artists / live music organiziers / cool local independent festivals, please let me know ! i also want to use this network to organize more charity events to raise money for some local NGO who work to make the world a fairer place, so if you know some great actions who need some back up, let me know !

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

My fantasy when I was young was to live one year in every major cities of the world. But I loved Paris instantly and settled here when I was 20, as if I had always belonged here. So I try to travel or tour to major cities as much as I can, not being too much of a regular tourist but just trying to see how people live there and rock (or mess up) their lives.

Paris can be a lot more than a live museum, it's a brillant city full of possibilities and very different kind of people... So if your idea is to spend 3 days walking everywhere from 9 am to 9 pm cuz you want to "see everything", then you'll be too tired to see the real city and people I could show you in the evenings... To me, both parts should be equally important to a guest so I will only host people who want to discover that balance between the city by day and the city by night. But I'm not talking about clubs though, they're usually too poshy and boring for me.

I also organize some CS live music / jam session meetings every tuesdays in Paris and some house concerts with touring independent artists. So if you're a musician and you're swinging by, have some cool music and stories to share with an audience, send me some links !

Interests

Music, writting, travelling, drinking, breakfasts after a long night out... Did I have to mention that again ? Oh, maybe I should talk about my favorite drinks then ? Long island ice tea is number one, but you can also have me with some good white or red wine. Even shitty wine if I don't have a choice. As long as you NEVER offer me beer. NEVEEEEEEEEEEEEER ! (Well, that's not true anymore, I reconciled myself with beer a couple of years ago after a 20 years boycott...)

• concerts
• festivals
• breakfast
• wine
• cheese
• walking
• partying
• traveling
• music
• live music
• hiking
• camping
• history
• languages
• tours
• rock
• feminism
• exploring
• jamming
• humanism
• anti-capitalism
• social entrepreneurship
• music entrepreneurship

Music, Movies, and Books

5 artists : Serge Gainsbourg, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Damien Rice (cuz a rock singer also have feelings you know).

5 movies : One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Apocalypse now, The boat the rocked, Amadeus, Once (yeah, sometimes I'm just a pussy too)

5 writers : Aldous Huxley, Mikhail Boulgakov, Philip K. Dick, Milan Kundera, Mathias Malzieu. (I'm pretty tempted to add Hank Moody ?!)

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Learning how to say cheers in 51 languages. My rule is to add a language to my collection when I can actually drink and cheer with the local who teaches it to me. So that includes a LOT of bar meetings, a few bar fights, tons of crazy stories, some pretty wild ex-girlfriends, one missed plane to Prague (cuz of a wild ex "girlfriend"), a half dozen angry bosses from when I used to have "real jobs" (or weird faces from my employees when I used to be the boss), one missed plane from San Francisco, losing 7 credits cards, 3 IDs and 4 house keys in 6 months, waking up in places I had never seen before, waking up my CS guests while getting back home drunk at 10 am, getting engaged to an italian girl after one discussion, driving from San Francisco to Las Vegas to get married to an australian girl I met a few hours before, spending a week in the middle of Ireland with druids to write songs, spitting out a glass of Slivovice through my nose in front of Glen Hensard (and flirting with Marketa Irglova's sister who was taking care of me for a couple of hours after that), stripping on national television, writting a whole album in one night in Budapest then lose the notepad where I wrote it the week after in Greece... Oh, and I also lost 15 millions euros once. One is partly fake, will you find which one ? (And that's actually the mandatory third question you have to answer when you contact me, to avoid the lazy bastards who don't read profiles :p)

Teach, Learn, Share

Well, I can teach you how to say "cheers" in 51 languages :)
Also a few writing / songwriting tricks and how to overcome a writer's block as I had a big one for a few years.
How to organise gigs / jam sessions / open mics / concerts - house concerts / tours around Europe.
Maybe some singing or guitar, but I'm not very patient when it comes to teaching that.

What I Can Share with Hosts

Wine, stories, music... Sometimes some deep thoughts, but I wouldn't count too much on that.

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Guadeloupe, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macao, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, Hong Kong, United States

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