Sisyphean marmalade

I have to play the tuft, the lump, the clump (katamari in Japanese). I've got to put together a pile of rubbish. Make a crappy bundle. I asked to play this moronic game — Beautiful Katamari — my supervisor found this thing rather repetitive and moderately innovative. I asked to play this game because, if we put aside the feeble narrative excuse (I cite Wikipedia (but all this takes place in a rerun manner of the Mama's and Papa's, a hippy song for the introduction (?)) : "In the beginning of the game, the King of All Cosmos, as well as the Queen and their son are playing tennis. To showcase his power, he wants to drive really hard. Nevertheless, the drive is so hard that the ball flies towards space and leads to the formation of a black hole that absorbs the planets, animals, etc. In extremis, the King then decides to ask his son to make his Katamari - a kind of big sticky ball - roll on Earth to reconstruct the planets by making bigger and bigger balls to block the black hole and reconstruct the planets.") if we put aside the feeble narrative excuse, this entire game consists in one unique action: accumulate. A frenzied compulsion, well, very 2011 darling.

Remember, before, I did contemporary art installations, there was no messing around, I'd put it all over and regularly I'd go to Super-U or LIDL or Leclerc or in Chinese bazaars and I'd buy the whole stock of toilet paper or the whole stock of aluminum foil or all the toothpaste tubes or all the staples; or I'd buy all the socks and all the balloons, or I'd take all the birthday candles, all the big boxes of matches, all the flour and all the four-color pens; or I'd go to the local store and I'd buy all the suction pads, or all the pizzas, or I'd fill five shopping trolleys with Apericubes, I'd empty the floor cloths department in one go, I'd take two hundred reams of white paper, I'd take a pallet of pink folders, or three hundred kilos of hay for chinchillas, or all the blue buckets, or all the pans that were larger than twenty centimeters, or all the bouncy balls, or all the broom handles, or all the green ashtrays or all the boxes of thumbtacks or all the 120-millimeter nails or all the doormats with floral patterns. Generally, the store manager would tear out his hair while rubbing his hands. Well anyway, this game where we have to create planets by accumulating tons and tons of crap, I like it. This is the world in which I live. Primitive Accumulation. The poet has already well expressed himself about it.

For me, this is Beautiful Katamari: a crappy man makes crappy planets. And it all starts in a child's room. I push my sticky ball and accumulate pencils, mints, small cakes, milk cartons, bowling pins, teddy bears, and my first ball is 25 centimeters large and it's my father — the King who created the black hole with his tennis ball — who measures it, the ball, for me at the end of the level. He says like: "Not bad, but you've still got to work". Anyways I'm not listening to him and I'll never listen to his speeches (long and pretentious and always disdainful), I'll click ten times on start to get directly to what really excites me, accumulate and accumulate some more, make my ball grow by pushing it anyhow through rooms, gardens, villages, cities, worlds and city-world (the city-world, now there's a really crappy planet). I gather a teapot, a knife, a cat, a mouse, a toaster, a guitar, a flute, a battery, a bottle of champagne, roses, a teddy bear, a spider, a box of cereals, bananas, a lollipop, a lipstick, a cactus, three strawberry cakes, a flower pot and my father measures the ball: 59 centimeters. The First Glug Mercury star, that's how he called my sweet second star.

Soundtrack is Japanese pedo-pop, as sordid as it is perky. The whole environment is rainbow-colored. Besides, I'm a Prince but in real life, I look like a little booger. I cluster a tiger, a biro, a glue stick, a balloon, a snail, a pan, a katana, a Japanese student that has been humiliated by his sports teacher, a shopping trolley, a child, a flask, a mat, a girl dressed in a kimono, a rabbit, a bulldog, a fan, noodles, a croque-monsieur, a bottle of ketchup, a parchment, a mini-bullock-cart, a thermos, an antenna, a photo camera, a microscope, a jerry can, a pylon — and my ball is two meters and twelve centimeters large, it's this King-my-father who measures it, sitting at his place: that is to say, a part-metaphor worthy of the DDASS (the regional social services department): that is, on a cloud floating in space. And off we go again, ever greater targets, three meters, five, ten, 25; I collect a milk-shake, a newspaper, a briefcase, a pig, a backpack, mosquito spray, a bowl of rice, a fence, an elephant-shaped watering can, a pot of mayonnaise, some nuggets, a strawberry parfait, a postbox, a robot, a no-entry sign, a remote-controlled car; it reminds me of a song by Nino Ferrer for Annie Cordy.

've arrived to a point where I knock down an entire city. I'm really a catastrophe. People scream when I pass. I've been playing for at least two hours and I can't stop. Next to me, there is a small Chinese kid of twelve who'd like to play Guitar Hero but I don't want to give him my place and he's annoying me with his comments like: oh ! you've caught an orangutan. In front of me, a guy is checking the skate park he seems to have made for the next exhibition of la Gaité Lyrique on skateboarding, that the wooden skate park slides well, and I federate a cake with melon filling, a bundle of greeting cards, a radio cassette player, a hard hat, a medical book, some French fries, a relaxing nice guy, a bathtub, a parachute, a harp, a table, a parasol, a tree, a guy who is canoeing, ten children, a giant Russian doll, a Haussmann lamp, a human tower, a house, a large bear, a big bench, a samurai armor and my direction say to me, Gwyneth, let the little Chinese boy take your place, he is younger than you, stop your bullshit, but I tear entire cities, countries down, and my father the King measures my ball and I scream to my direction: I'M BLOCKING THE BLACK HOLES MY FATHER MADE and they go, they let me play until I'm sick of it, until I say to myself: I am an adult, I am an adult, I am an adult, I am an adult, and I give my place to the little Chinese boy who prefers to play Guitar Hero and I go outside and I'm at Châtelet and I coagulate a swingers club, a vigil of Beaubourg, a shawarma, two kinds of second-hand clothes' store, a 4-euro hazelnut, a bitch with a beard, eight sunglasses, a juggler, three pairs of Nike shoes, a caramel sundae, six Noctambus, two fags in Lonsdale T-shirts, eight hundred belly button piercings, a hamburger-shaped cushion, a designer coffee table, a group of Japanese women, a rotating hip-hop dancer, fifty riot squad cars​​, seven hundred cops dressed in civilian clothes, a whore with big tits, a TV presenter and his brown Muji bag, a hundred surveillance cameras, a sculpture by Tinguely, eight hundred iPhones, thirty brushed metal microwave ovens, three thousand bouncers, two go-go dancers and their leather underpants, all the passing Vélib', a cultural attaché of the town hall of Paris, two lofts and three hundred feet of moldings, eight plasma screens, about twenty orange neon lights, a Greek restaurant, three cobblestones, a score of old books, forty cash registers, a packet of Marlboro, a straw and its Mojito, the whole Leroy-Merlin store, the whole Fnac (National Purchasing Federation of Managers) store, all of HM and all the Diesel stores and then I walk into a tunnel and I take my RER (Regional Express Network) line D to go back home.

© Illustration de Vincent Caut