I don’t have much time this week; I’m nipple-deep in spring cleaning. I won’t sleep until this apartment shines like the top of the Chrysler Building.

As with everything I do – from cleaning, to cooking, to not doing math homework, to faking my way through a treatment of complicated parapneumonic effusion and pleural empyema by video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery – I do it with music.

Here then, are some of my favorite things to hear when I’m wielding a Swiffer or yanking my Toilet Duck:

While I was polishing my silver bullet collection, I couldn't help but notice that my fellow Amoeblogger, Billyjam, posted an interview with me, which you can read by pressing the word "perambulator" in this sentence. It's really too kind. My only complaint is that he neglected to include the scratch 'n' sniff portions.

Now then, back to cleaning. When I'm done, you're all invited to my house for pickles and chainsaws. It's not really an "activity" per se, just two things I have way too many of.

My cat is driving me crazy.

So anyway, about French pop music. A lot of you hipsters know and love Edith Piaf and Serge Gainsbourg and, though technically not French - we’ll not poils fendus – Josephine Baker. But the newness of discovery is spoilt when you realize that all your hipster friends have the same “obscure” French records you do and are just as prepared to profess their love of them over Jack & Cokes at whatever red-wallpapered hole-in-the-wall bar y’all frequent.

You want an upper hand. You want to show your dear, dear friends you’re a little better than them. And you want to sleep with one of them, but they don’t know it and you can’t tell them because, for one, it would wreak havoc with a couple of your friendships, and two, in your heart of hearts you know that they would never really love you back. Not really.

My cat seems to think that everything in this house is a scratching post except his scratching post.

So anyway, about French pop music. I’m no expert, but I’ve been around, and can offer a few new voices to enjoy that, though well-known in France, aren’t quite as obvious a choice stateside.

A particularly glamorous option, and one that lends itself well to barroom conversation (i.e.: showing off) is that blonde bombshell, Suzy Solidor.

She opened a Parisian nightclub in the early 1930’s, Boite de Nuit, which became all the rage. She held the [questionably factual] title of “most painted woman in the world”, with portraits being realized by some dude named Picasso, and the most famous by Tamara de Lempicka...


See? You knew the painting, but you assumed the woman in it was just another cabaret-cruising, syphillus-spreading harlot that took a break from swilling back absinthe to get her portrait painted, when in reality she was a successful businesswoman and popular chanteuse.