Operation: Disque Drop

Petit Papa Noel

2008-12-25T22:36:00.000-08:00

Spending the day at my mom's, listening to all the old albums that we do every year as we open presents and make Christmas dinner, I was suddenly reminded of a French carol that I've always loved, ever since I was a child: Petit Papa Noel, as sung by the West German 70's supergroup Boney M (who are best known here in North America for their singles Rasputin and Rivers of Babylon).

I've spent much of my holiday completely preoccupied with it, thinking about how awesome it would be if Alizée recorded a version of her own...which then quickly spun off into my imagining what other cuts might appear on a hypothetical Christmas album. Les Anges Dans Nos Campagnes? Check. Mon Beau Sapin? Check. Alizée covering Madonna's cover of Eartha Kitt's Santa Baby? Oh, yes please.

Is it too early to tell Santa what I want for next Christmas? And does anybody have an email for someone at Jive/Epic? Because I think I may be onto something here...

OK, just so you don't go away thinking this post was completely bereft of any actual Alizée content, here's an awesome Christmas video by Matrix5060. Watch it quick, though, because who knows how long it'll be up before he takes it down forever?

I hope you all had a wonderful day with your families, and that everybody got what they wanted this year and more, regardless of what holiday you happened to be celebrating. Best wishes to you all in the year to come.

'Twas the Drop Before Christmas...

2008-12-20T18:23:00.000-08:00

Should anybody be concerned that I’ve completely given up on Op Drop in the midst of all this navel-gazing about how well the blog is (or isn’t) working, never fear: I’ve just spent most of the afternoon and evening turning the Toronto Eaton Centre into a virtual minefield of Alizée DVDs. (But y'know, the good kind...where accidentally encountering one leads one to the delightful discovery of a beautiful and talented chanteuse, and not to one being blown to smithereens.)

Though the wall-to-wall crowds of holiday shoppers made it difficult to carry off in the stealthy manner to which I’ve become accustomed, the response seemed quite promising. None of the discs I dropped today appeared to stick around for very long, with several of them actually being picked up within seconds of my having dropped them. It’s nice to think I may have just given several dozen strangers the gift of a new favorite song artist this Christmas!

(Incidentally, if you happen to be one of those several dozen strangers, and you’re dropping by to see what this whole Op Drop thing is all about, welcome! Please feel free to have a look around, check out some links to learn more about Op Drop and Alizée. And don’t forget to say hi in the comments or the ShoutBox!)

I have another smallish drop planned for Wednesday, in which I plan to scatter discs behind me like a trail of breadcrumbs (albeit sexy French ones), as I make my way back to my mom’s place for Christmas Eve. And then potentially another on New Year’s Eve a week later, depending on where I wind up this year.

And then it’ll be time for Op Drop to settle down for a long winter’s nap—or a least a short one—as I finally set aside some downtime to retool the blog into whatever it’s going to become, incorporate some improvements into the disque itself (which I’ve put off for months now), and possibly embark on another Alizée-related project that I’ve been considering for awhile.

So no worries, folks. The end of Op Drop isn’t on the horizon just yet. If anything, it’s just getting started. Stay tuned!

Dear Texans...

2008-12-18T21:07:00.000-08:00

Yet another oddly appropriate image created by Ruroshen from the Alizée
America forums. I fear I am going to have to start paying him royalties, soon.

In my continuing quest to understand just what the heck is going on with the Op Drop blog, and how I can best take advantage of it with an eye towards promoting Alizée, I took a quick look tonight at what Google Analytics had to say about the blog's traffic since last Saturday.

Of the visitors I've had since then, nearly a full third of you are coming from Texas. Visitors from the Lone Star state outnumber visitors from all of Europe by nearly four to one. And while it still boggles my mind that I actually get visitors from Europe, I still find this awfully curious. Is there a secret underground Alizée fan movement happening in Texas that I should be aware of? Because if you guys need some support in running an Op Drop or two down there, I am so here for you!

Seriously though...if one of you kind Texan folks could write me and clue me in, I'd be awfully obliged. Because it's a Scooby-Doo mystery to me right now as to what's bringing you all here.

Californians, I'm looking at you, too.

On a somewhat related note, want to hear my favorite Google search string through which someone has stumbled onto Op Drop so far?

"Does Alizée have any sisters?"

Whoever it was spent quite a bit of time on the blog, too. Hilarious. I hope they found what they were looking for!

Op Drop: A New Hope

2008-12-13T09:33:00.000-08:00

This is a very dry post. Here is a cool picture of Alizée to help get you
through it. (Courtesy of Ruroshen from the Alizée America forums.)

It’s been almost a month since I last posted here, and I should probably explain why. While it’s partially due to real life just getting in the way—November and December are just about the busiest time of year in my line of work—it’s mainly because I wanted to test a theory I had.

The theory is that Operation: Disque Drop isn’t working…or at least, isn’t working as intended. And it’s pretty well been proven correct.

See, thanks to Google Analytics, I’ve been tracking the blog’s visitor stats for a little less than two months. In that time, I’ve done two major Op Drops—the one I split between York University and the Toronto Eaton Centre, and another along and around the route of the Toronto Santa Claus Parade, my single largest one-day drop to date—as well as a few minor ones here and there, mainly at other malls and holiday events around the city. And while the blog’s traffic is fairly steady, getting anywhere from five to twenty visitors a day, regardless of whether I post or not…the problem is that very precious few of them are actually from Toronto.

In fact, over the past month, of the 246 people who visited, only 12 came from Canada…and of those, not even half are from the Greater Toronto Area. And most of those are showing up during a lull between drops.

So where are the majority of the blog’s visitors coming from? The United States, oddly enough. Most of my views by far are coming from Texas, Florida, Minnesota and California, with a few visitors here and there from Illinois, New York and New Jersey. I also see a decent amount of traffic from Germany, Poland and France (but not from Corsica, sadly), and a bit from Belgium, Spain and Mexico. Even folks from Uganda and Tunisia have stumbled across Op Drop!

Now, while I’ve deliberately chosen to run Op Drops at locations around the city that could be considered tourist attractions, it’s a pretty good bet that not all of these people were vacationing in Toronto last month, found a disc and followed it here. Most of them appear to have either found it via Google, or followed a link from aw’s Alizée blog or the YouTube video I posted back in September. (Almost a full third of you, though, are coming to the site directly from your bookmarks, or typing the URL into the browser, which surprises me.)

All this suggests to me four things:

1) The people that are finding Op Drop disques aren’t visiting the blog.
2) The people that are visiting the blog aren’t doing it because they found a disque.
3) Dropping disques or not appears to have no impact on the number of visitors.
4) …but, oddly, whether I post or not doesn’t appear to have an impact, either.

This is a bit of a Scooby-Doo mystery to me, and to be honest, I’m not sure what to do with it. I am pretty sure that the focus of the blog is going to change somewhat, though…and, in fact, may stop being a blog altogether.

More to come as I think this through. Stay tuned.

Welcome, Santa Claus Parade visitors!

2008-11-16T11:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome and bienvenue, visitors from the Toronto Santa Claus Parade! Thanks for joining us here at Operation: Disque Drop, a one-man (so far) grassroots fan effort to spread awareness of Alizée and grow her fanbase here in North America. If you or someone you know found a DVD in an inconspicuous place somewhere on or around the parade route, and that disc led you here, thank you for proving that this crazy idea might actually work!

I hope you enjoy your first exposure to the wonder that is Alizée. If you haven’t already, I invite you to explore your disque and open your mind to some new music. I think you might have just found your new favorite artist! Then, in either the Shoutbox to the left or in the comment section of the blog below, let us know how and where in the convention you found it, what you thought of it, and what you're going to do with it next!

If you’d like to learn more about Alizée, and interact with other North American fans on the web, the absolute best places to start are Alizée America, Alizée Forum and Lillytown USA. All three communities are filled with fun and friendly fans who absolutely love welcoming new converts, and would be more than happy to answer any questions you may have. Links to other Alizée sites on the intertubes, including her official MySpace, Facebook and YouTube pages, can be found in the upper left-hand margin of this page.

If you’re curious about Operation: Disque Drop (or ‘Op Drop’ for short) and what it’s all about, you can either check out the archives down at the bottom-left of the page, or start here at the first post and work your way forwards. If you have any questions that I haven’t answered exhaustively in the blog—I know, I know, I tend to run off at the mouth, a lil’—please feel free to again either leave a comment, or shoot me an e-mail at disquedrop@gmail.com.

Thanks again for visiting. I hope you enjoy your stay!

Alizée - Mademoiselle Juliette

2008-11-10T18:24:00.000-08:00

Mademoiselle Juliette is the second of fourteen clips that appear on the DVD of Alizée videos and performances I’ve been distributing through Operation: Disque Drop.

Although it comes second on the Op Drop disque, Mademoiselle Juliette actually marks a number of ‘firsts’ in Alizée’s career: it was the premiere single from Alizée’s third studio album Psychédélices, released just over a year ago, and the first her fans had heard of her since she almost completely disappeared from the public eye nearly four years earlier. It was also the first track she released on her new record label, RCA Records. But perhaps most significantly, Mademoiselle Juliette was the first single in Alizée’s career to be released without the guidance of her former mentors Mylene Farmer and Laurent Boutannat.

To paraphrase the blurb on Lili’s official website, all Lolitas have to grow up eventually.

Produced and composed by Alizée’s husband Jérémy Chatelain, with lyrics by Jean Fauque, Mademoiselle Juliette casts Alizée as Juliet Capulet in Shakespeare’s drama Romeo & Juliet, portraying her as a girl who’d much rather party and have a good time than concern herself with the ongoing feud between the Montague and Capulet houses of fair Verona. The video shows her being led away, unconcerned, from her fateful balcony rendezvous with Romeo by a mysterious masked woman in black, through a decadent masquerade in a medieval castle…one attended only by beautiful young women. As Lili and the ladies lounge, party and dance the night away, poor Romeo is left cooling his heels on the balcony all by his lonesome, waiting for Juliet to come back…seemingly forever.

Once again, we turn to the fine people of Alizée America for an English translation of the lyrics, as well as a discussion of their meaning.

Despite being quite the departure in style and substance from Alizée’s previous hits, Mademoiselle Juliette was a modest success in France and parts of Europe, debuting in thirteenth place on the French singles download chart, and at number 22 on the France Top 100 Singles chart. In Mexico, it reached 49th in the Mexico Top 100 singles chart, while the video captured the top spot on the MTVLA show Los 10+ Pedidos. It was also featured at number 138 in a countdown of the 150 most important videos of the channel’s first fifteen years.

The reason why Mademoiselle Juliette comes second on the Op Drop disque, despite being the first single off Psychédélices, is simple: though I do enjoy both the song and the video, and Alizée both sounds and looks terrific throughout, I genuinely don’t like it as much as Fifty-Sixty. The latter just has more bounce, an oomph to it that MJ is lacking. Despite being a song about a young girl who’d rather party than get caught up in pointless drama (as opposed to one about a model led to the heights of fame who then slides into obscurity), Juliette simply feels heavy and almost stern next to the outwardly playful and melodic Fifty-Sixty. Apparently, partying in the face of tragedy is serious bidness.

Forgive the armchair quarterbacking, but if it had been up to me, I would have reversed the release order of the two…which I guess I kind of have, at least as far introducing new fans to them via Op Drop is concerned. (Actually, all things being equal, if it had been up to me, I would have released Lilly Town ahead of both of them, as it’s easily the catchiest track on Psychédélices…but that’s neither here nor there.)

One interesting thing to note about Mademoiselle Juliette is the similarity the video bears to a pair of other clips that were released later this year: Don’t Speak French by Girls Aloud, and I Kissed A Girl by Katy Perry. Don’t just take my word for it, either: check out the post “Trend Setting Alizée” on aw’s Alizée blog, and let him drop some science on you.

Coincidence? You be the judge.

Alizée - Fifty-Sixty

2008-11-09T10:49:00.000-08:00

Fifty-Sixty is the clip that leads off the DVD of Alizée videos and performances I’ve been distributing through Operation: Disque Drop.

The second single to be released from Alizée’s third studio album Psychédélices, Fifty-Sixty tells the story of a young model under the guidance of Andy Warhol at the height of his influence in the 1960’s, who foolishly believes Andy’s pronouncement that she is the most beautiful model of all. Inspiration for the song has been attributed to the real-life stories of Edie Sedgwick and Nico (who is also referenced by name in the lyrics), both of whom were protégés of Warhol. The music for Fifty-Sixty was composed by Alizée’s husband, Jérémy Chatelain, who also contributed to the lyrics written by Jean Fauque.

You can find a translation of the lyrics as well as an in-depth discussion of the song’s meaning here, courtesy of the good folks on the Alizée America forums.

Fifty-Sixty was the obvious choice to kick off the disque, and not only because it’s Alizée’s most recent video. I also think it’s a fair embodiment of who Alizée is as an artist, and serves as a great appetizer for the banquet to come: catchy, poppy, and breezy on the surface, which belies the depth of the melancholy tale told by the lyrics, of a model brought to the height of fame only to slide into obscurity. The video itself is fun and adorable, heavily influenced by both American pop art and Japanese animé in turn. And she looks absolutely gorgeous throughout—what more could one ask for?

The video featured on the disque is the actually only first of three that were produced as part of Fifty-Sixty’s promotion. Two more were produced for remixes of the single—a slower, more melancholy version by David Rubato, and a techno reimagining by Rolf Honey. You can see the entire trilogy on Wisteria Song’s Psychédéclips website, or on Alizée’s official MySpace page, where you can also find the awesome Nellson remix and acappella versions of the song.

Though Fifty-Sixty hasn’t enjoyed even the moderate success of Mademoiselle Juliette in France, due in large part to a botched release and general lack of promotion, it has charted in Mexico and even achieved the number one spot on MTV Latinoamerica. It also spent much of the spring and summer battling it out with Gregory LeMarchel’s Restons Amis for the top spot on Radio Atlantis’ weekly Hit Parade countdown. The recent rumors of Alizée’s move from RCA Records to Jive/Epic have included hints of renewed promotion for the single under her new management, so perhaps we’ll see a resurgence of interest sometime in the near(ish) future.

Finally, it’s worth noting that several fans have interpreted the lyrics of Fifty-Sixty as a possible metaphor for Alizée’s own rapid rise to stardom at a young age, as well as her relationship with her former mentors, Mylene Farmer and Laurent Boutonnat, with whom she parted ways prior to the production of Psychédélices. Though it’s purely fan speculation—which Jean Fauque has apparently gone on record as denying—there’s certainly a number of interesting parallels which could be drawn.

Anatomy of an Op Drop III: School Daze

2008-10-27T17:45:00.000-07:00

This is the last of three posts taking us through the process of last Thursday's Op Drop, from beginning to end. In the first post of the series, I talked about the Design phase--specifically, in the case of this drop, the design of several promotional stickers I've started putting up in my travels, in addition to dropping disques. In the second post, I wrote about the Build phase, and how I'm oddly entertained by the process of burning, labelling and packaging disques in preparation for an Op Drop.

Now onto the third and final phase...

Phase III: Drop

The drop phase of any operation is naturally the most exciting, especially when I’m operating in a new venue like I was last Thursday. Disque dropping isn’t just a matter of laying an Alizée DVD down on every available surface, all willy-nilly. There’s a very subtle science to it…at least the way I do it, anyway.

I’ve talked a little bit before about the ‘rules’ I’ve set for myself where a successful drop is concerned:

I should probably explain that—I mean, who cares if a half-dozen of my fellow comic geeks notice me dropping it, right? One of them might even be motivated to pick it up out of curiousity. The only explanation I can give is that it violates my personal “rules” of disque dropping as I’ve come to think of it. Discovering one in a random public place is meant to be kind of magical and mysterious…like coming down the stairs on Christmas morning and finding presents in the empty stocking you put up the night before. Getting caught in the act of a drop…I always feel like it robs it of its mystique, somehow…like Batman fighting crime in broad daylight, or something. There’s also the fact that I’m painfully shy around strangers—particularly cosplaying cuties in extremely abbreviated outfits—which makes having to explain a bungled drop somewhat akin to slow torture, but that’s neither here nor there.

It’s not just enough not to be noticed, though. While it’d be easy to pick an out-of-the-way spot away from crowds where I could drop a disque without being seen, the chances of that disque actually being picked up in the near future are slim to none. The trick is to balance the desire to perform an inconspicuous drop against the need to drop the disque where it will be noticed. It can be a tricky business, especially when running ops in very public places like the Eaton Centre or the ACC…or in the brand-new venue that I chose today.

After my random encounter with a Alizée-curious college student two weekends ago, it struck me that I’d overlooked possibly the best potential drop sites that the city had to offer—its colleges and universities, all of them full to bursting with young people with ostensibly open minds eager for new experiences, and all of them keen to get in on the ground floor of the ‘next big thing’ before their friends do. With this in mind, I did my best to disguise myself as a college student, packed up my disques and stickers, and trekked out to my first target of opportunity…my alma mater, York University.

It was weird being back on campus after so long away, to say the least. I’d chosen York first reasoning that, as the school with which I was most familiar, it’d be the one I’d be most comfortable in. Boy, was I wrong. A lot’s changed at York since I left there (mumblemumble) years ago…and I’d forgotten what a pain it was to find my way around even when I was a student there.

Fortunately, my main targets—the Student Centre, the libraries, and the main lecture halls—were all still where I’d left them, more or less, and were just as crowded as I remembered. Unfortunately, they were also a lot smaller than I’d remembered…which, if I were a better writer, I’d be able to parlay into some kind of deep and insightful metaphor for growth or life experience, or something.

It took me less than two hours to distribute just over half my payload. As drop opportunities (or “dropportunities”, as I’ve taken to calling them...clever, no?) went, though, I’d more or less saturated the main buildings, and not enough time had passed for many disques to be picked up yet. (I’ve learned from experience that it can sometimes take up to three or four hours, even in a very crowded venue, for somebody to take the bait.) I’d either have be outright blatant about it, self-imposed rules be damned—dropping disques in plain sight on occupied desks and tables in the library and cafeteria, which seemed a little gauche—or try my luck at some of the outlying buildings.

I opted for the latter, reminding myself in the process one of the things I’d hated most about going to York—much of the campus seems to act like a wind tunnel, making walking from one remote building to another in the fall and winter an absolute bitch—but didn’t perform more than a couple more drops, given how empty these buildings seemed by comparison. I retraced my steps back to the main buildings, shivering all the way, replaced the few disques that had been picked up in the interim, then headed out with about fifteen disques left in my bag.

Eager to lose the rest of them—as well as the stickers, which I’d completely forgotten about while I was at York—I zipped down to the Eaton Centre, which as become my go-to target of choice, lately. Being a Thursday afternoon, the mall was only moderately busy compared to the weekend, so it took a few circuits…but by five o’clock, my bag was empty of disques, and every bank of payphones in the mall had at least one of the new Alizée stickers adorning them. I headed back home, leaving a trail of stickers in my wake on the city’s transit system, until I finally slapped up the last one on the inside of the bus shelter on the corner of my street.

Forty stickers and forty disques dropped, all told. Added to the sixty disques I'd dropped the previous weekend, I've met my self-imposed quota of a hundred disques dropped for the month. Not bad for a lone Alizée evangelist! And from what I can tell from the few stickers I've been able to check on since, the majority of them seem to be holding up pretty well. It'll be interesting to see what kind of impact they have on the blog's stats in the days and weeks to come.

Anatomy of an Op Drop II: A Different Definition of 'Fun'

2008-10-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

This is the second of three posts taking us through the process of last Thursday's Op Drop, from beginning to end. In the first post of the series, I talked about the Design phase--specifically, in the case of this drop, the design of several promotional stickers I've started putting up in my travels, in addition to dropping disques.

Phase II: Build

Building up a stockpile of disques prior to a drop is probably the most tedious part of the process, but I still find it strangely enjoyable, in the same way I really dug the crafting professions when I played EverQuest or World of Warcraft. It’s oddly satisfying for me to take a pile of components or raw materials, process them so they’re usable, and then assemble them into a stack of finished products that are more than the sum of their parts. It’s not quite the same high I get from the design phase, and it doesn’t carry the visceral thrill of a successful drop, but I still dig it enough to keep me from getting bored, at least so far.

I’ve streamlined the process quite a bit over the past few months, which has thankfully cut down on the time and effort I have to put into the build phase. (The message on the first ten Mark I disques I dropped, for example, was printed by hand on each and every one of the sleeves…which, you can imagine, took awhile.) It’s pretty well a one-man assembly line, with me running from one station to another as required. The PC I have set up in my living room handles burning the DVDs, while the one I have set up in the bedroom prints the labels and stickers. The coffee table between them serves as the assembly area, where—in between running from one computer to the other as they finish their tasks—I’ll slap the labels onto the DVDs and clamshell cases, and stack the completed disques. Assuming that both PCs cooperate (and I remember to set a fresh disc burning once I’ve removed a completed one, which I don’t always do), I’m usually good for about ten to twelve disques an hour…which means that a drop like Thursday’s can take upwards of three or four hours’ worth of preparation to pull off.

I usually have something playing in the background to keep my mind occupied while I’m in build phase. To get me in the mood, I generally either start out listening to one of Alizée’s albums, or I’ll put on one of the Lili DVDs in my collection—En Concert, my own copy of the Op Drop disque (yes, I kept one for myself!), or another disc I’ve put together of interviews and television appearances, like Fun TV or Stars à Domicile. If these can’t inspire you to do your damnedest for Alizée, you’re either clinically dead, or may in fact be an android and/or cyborg that’s incapable of feeling human emotion.

Between me and my kid brother—who I coerced into helping when he dropped by my place unexpectedly on Wednesday night, when I was deep into Build mode—we managed to get forty disques and forty promo stickers made up before he'd finally had enough, and we called it a night. Though he's decidedly not an Alizée fan, and has actually kind of frowned on the amount of time, money and effort I've sunk into Op Drop so far, even he was impressed by the pile of completed disques we'd amassed on my coffee table.

"All that work, and tomorrow you're just going to leave them all in random places for strangers to pick up," he said, pulling on his jacket as he prepared to head out.

"That's the plan, yeah."

He shook his head at me. "There has to be a better way to do what you're trying to do."

"There probably is," I admitted, "but until I figure out what that is, this is manageable for one person. At least I'm doing something. And besides, it's fun."

He cocked an eyebrow at me as he opened the door to my apartment.

"Dude, your definintion of fun," he said as he stepped out into the hall, "is way different from mine."

Dramatic Interlude: Two evangelists meet on a train...

2008-10-25T16:05:00.000-07:00

For your consideration, a dramatic re-enactment of an incident that took place during my morning commute today, with apologies to Jehovah's Witnesses everywhere:

A pair of smartly-if conservatively-dressed JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES step onto a subway train, each holding a stack of pamphlets. As the doors close behind them and the train begins to move, they split from each other, each heading for a different end of the car. The younger of the two, an attractive young lady, approaches DISQUE, a twenty-something male on his way to work. Disque glances up as she approaches, and removes his headphones. A pair of TEENAGERS sitting across the aisle from Disque watch their exchange with interest.

D: Hi, can I help you?
JW: Hello there. Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior?
D: No. Have you accepted Alizée Jacotey as yours?
JW: I’m…sorry, who?
D: Alizée Jacotey. She’s a singer from France. Here, this is her.
(D pulls a sticker out of his pocket and hands it to JW.)
JW: (smiles) She’s very pretty.
D: She has an incredible voice, too. Would you like to hear one of her songs?
JW: No, that’s OK, I—
D: You really don’t know what you’re missing. Here, let me play ‘Ella Elle L’a’ for you. It’s practically gospel, you’ll dig it.
JW: I don’t think…listen, have you ever given any thought to your soul—
D: You want soul? I’ve got a blues remix of one of her songs on here, too.
JW: No, listen…
(JW tries to hand back the sticker, along with one of her pamphlets)
D: Oh no, you keep that. I’ve got plenty. You see the URL on there? I’ve got a blog, you oughta check it out.
JW: O…kay.
(Uncomfortable beat as JW draws the pamphlet back to her.)
JW: Would…you be interested in learning more about Jesus?
D: Would you be interested in learning more about Alizée? I have a free DVD I could give you, here—
(Disque pulls his backpack into his lap, unzips it, and begins digging through it.)
JW: Ah…no, that’s OK. I, uh, think this is our stop…
(The train exits the tunnel into a subway station. JW signals her companion, and turns towards the door.)
D: Nono, here!
(D jumps up and thrusts a DVD at JW, who looks at it like it’s carrying the bubonic plague.)
D: You should play this at your next meeting or revival, or whatever! Your friends will really get into it. It might seem a little suggestive at points, but overall—
JW: I’m sorry, I have to go.
(JW hurries over to her companion, and hustles him out the door onto the subway platform. D calls after her as the doors close behind them.)
D: MAKE SURE YOU VISIT THE WEBSITE!
(D shrugs, and sits back down as the train begins to start back down the tunnel, watching as JW and her companion have a very animated discussion on the platform. One of the teenagers leans forward, laughing.)
T: Dude, that was awesome!
D: Thanks. Either of you want a free DVD?

And scene...

Anatomy of an Op Drop, Part I

2008-10-23T21:05:00.000-07:00

My kid brother surprised me by dropping by Casa Disque Drop last night while I was right in the middle of building up my stockpile in preparation for today’s Op Drop at an undisclosed location. Though he’s been hip to the whole Op Drop thing for awhile, having discovered a previous cache of disques a couple months ago whilst rooting around for something to eat, he’s always dismissed it as ‘that part-time job you pay to do, for that French chick who isn’t even aware you’re doing it’…which, to be honest, is a pretty fair assessment.

Surprisingly, though, as he watched me carry out the one-man assembly line of burning, labeling and assembling disques, he showed a genuine interest—almost fascination—with the amount of time and effort that goes into an Op Drop, even before I actually drop the first disque. I managed to corral him into helping—and, by extension, into watching En Concert, which was playing while we worked—and as he labeled one disque after another, it occurred to me that I haven’t really said much about the preparation phases of a successful drop, and often gloss over it in favor of talking about the event of the drop itself. As my kid brother learned last night, though, that’s really only a third of the story.

So here’s the first of three posts, taking us through today’s drop from start to finish. He seemed to find the behind-the-scenes stuff interesting, so maybe you will too. And even if you don’t…enh, at least I got a couple of days’ content out of it.

Phase I: Design

I haven’t fiddled with the design much since the Mark IV DVDs debuted, either in terms of content or the look of the disque and it’s packaging. In the earliest days of Op Drop, though, the disques were constantly evolving. It’s partly due to me never being truly satisfied—even the Mark IV’s, which are vastly superior to earlier iterations of the disque, could stand to be improved on—but mostly because it’s the part of the process I think I enjoy most. I like using my brain (and my rudimentary PhotoShop skills) to figure things out, overcome obstacles and learn new ways to do things in order to improve the end result. It’s easily the most time-consuming part—which is why I haven’t gotten around to designing a Mark V yet—and it usually involved a great deal of trial and error (along with a fair amount of creative use of naughty words), but the hours honestly fly by when I’m in design mode. If not for my poor grasp of mathematics and complete ignorance of physics, I think I probably would have been happiest being an engineer of some sort. Ah well…in another life, maybe.

Eager to get back to the drawing board, but lacking the necessary time and energy to commit to building a Mark V from the ground up, for this drop I decided instead to design a series of stickers I could slap up on public telephones, bus shelters and subway stations in my travels to and from the drop location. I had tons of raw materials on hand: the sticker sheet I use to print the round labels for the disc face and the back of the case also include cut-outs for two 1 ¾ ” x 4 ¾” stickers, and I’ve been stockpiling them for just such an occasion. I whipped up about ten different designs, but the two I settled on for the purposes of this drop were these:

Pretty spiffy, huh?

The URL type on the vertical sticker is a little small, granted, but as I was mainly sticking these next to windows on subways and busses (extremely close to the rider’s face) and on bus shelters (which allows for the reader to get reeeeeal close), I figured I could get away with it. Any larger, and I would have had to shrink the image to accommodate it…but it’s such a striking, iconic visual that I wanted to keep it as large as I could. After all, as aw will tell you, people looooooove that Tinkerbell tattoo…

Though it’s simpler in design, and not quite as iconic, I think the horizontal sticker might actually be more effective in its own way. The type’s bigger for one thing, and the image (while smaller) features Alizée at her most fetching, doing that thing she does—I think it drives home the point pretty clearly that she’s a singer, and a pretty fabulous-looking one at that. These were mainly used on public phones, paper towel dispensers in restrooms, and on signage at subway stations.

The stickers have proven to be the perfect size for my purpose. The only problem is that the adhesive on them isn’t really meant for what I’m doing—the stickers are relatively easy to peel off with a minimal amount of effort. Still, even if they only stay up for a day or two, they’ll have done their thing. It’ll be interesting to see how many remain when I swing back to check on them.

Mélodie du Vent...

2008-10-19T20:52:00.000-07:00

Dropped yet another 20 Alizée DVDs today, most of them in and around the main entrance of the Air Canada Centre a few hours prior to Madonna's second sold-old concert there. If, by chance, you happen to be one of Madge's fans who discovered a disc and followed it here, I'd love to hear what you thought, either in the comments below or in the ShoutMix box to the left. I'd be especially interested to hear a hardcore Madonna fan's impression of Alizée's covers of La Isla Bonita and Hung Up--I tend to think they're fairly awesome, but I'm a little biased, after all...

Overall, that makes sixty disques total for the weekend, with a career total that's approaching almost 400. Given that I started in July--and didn't really get serious about it until about mid-August--that works out to around 100 discs a month. Not bad for one guy working alone on a shoestring budget, huh? I'm also seriously considering following LTNY's lead and branching out into other promotional materials, as well--mainly stickers that I could slap up on subways, lampposts, telephone booths and construction sites (of which there are several in downtown T-dot, what with condominums going up like weeds down there).

I also have another drop planned for this Thursday, inspired by my encounter with a Lili-curious college student on his way back to school last Thanksgiving weekend. This could prove to be the most daring Op Drop to date, so stay tuned for a tale of action, intrigue and suspense!

In the meantime, speaking of LTNY, check out this awesome YouTube clip posted by Jordy of Alizée Forum, in tribute to Ben and his crew of hard-workin' New York City boys, which incorporates footage from their glorious two-day assault on the Lili-heathens in Times Square:

Alizée, Zack & Cody, Madonna, and me

2008-10-18T19:36:00.000-07:00

It turns out that the bus ride from Montreal to Toronto I took earlier this week as I returned from my Alizée-cation may have been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allowed for a random encounter with (and apparent conversion of) a Lili-curious college kid on the bus helped me to rediscover my sense of purpose…but on the other, it also exposed me to the kind of high-quality germs and contagions that only eight hours trapped in a big metal tube with over a hundred strangers can provide.

I got back on Monday evening, and went to bed with a little tickle in the back of my throat. By the time I got up for work seven hours later, it felt like my entire respiratory system had been buffed with heavy-grit sandpaper, with all the shavings left to sit in my lungs. Like an idiot, not wanting to be “that guy” who calls in sick the first day back from a long weekend, I decided to tough it out and go into work, regardless. Fortunately, someone far wiser than me had the good sense to send my sick ass home by two, before I infected the entire floor with whatever brand of typhoid I’d brought back from Montreal with me.

I wound up being out until Friday, on doctor’s orders, turning what was already a four-day work-week into a day-and-a-half work-week. Ostensibly, I was supposed to spend my sick days recuperating, pointedly avoiding the operation of heavy machinery and/or other activities that require intense concentration or a high degree of mental alertness, at least according to the labels on the horse-tranquilizer pills my doctor prescribed. But daytime TV, quite frankly, blows…and even the most dedicated of Lili-fans can only watch Stars à Domicile and 1H avec Alizée so many times in a couple of days before he begins to get antsy.

…which is how I suddenly wound up with a stockpile of about 40 Mark IV DVDs by Saturday morning (where previously I’d had none) accompanied by a pretty intense sensation of cabin fever. Though I’d originally planned the next Op Drop to occur on a weekday (for reasons that will become evident when I reveal where it takes place), and I wasn’t yet in 100% top disque-dropping form, I nevertheless threw the whole lot in a bag, and hopped the subway bound for the Eaton Center. After all, what is illness to the body of a knight errant? What matter wounds? For each time he falls, he shall rise again, and woe to the wicked!

*cough* Sorry, Man of La Mancha moment. Won’t happen again.

It went well, if a little more slowly than my previous expeditions to TEC. Some dude from The Suite Life of Zack & Cody was holding court on the main floor for most of the day, signing autographs for what looked to be a bajillion starry-eyed tween-aged girls, who were lined up from here to Terra Haute, messing with traffic patterns and forcing me to detour around them several times. Security was naturally also a lot more prevalent than normal as a result, and by the time I made my third circuit around the floor, I was quite plainly on their radar, eliciting more than a few raised eyebrows and pointed stares from security guards and concerned parents alike. Though I’d only managed to successfully drop about half my payload, I reckoned it best to cut my losses and get the hell out of Dodge, lest I inadvertently wind up on To Catch A Predator, or something.

Instead, I hopped back on the subway, intending to go a little farther south, and hit up some of the more heavily trafficked stations downtown—both the Argos and the Toronto FC were playing the last home games of their respective seasons today, so I knew the stations closest to the Rogers Centre and BMO Field would get pretty busy once the games let out. On a whim, I also decided to check out what was going on at the Air Canada Center, seeing as how it’s virtually right next door to Union Station…if the Leafs were playing tonight, it might be worthwhile dropping a few disques in and around the ACC as well.

Well, it turned out the Leafs weren’t playing at the ACC tonight…but Madonna was.

Holy. Crap. Only if Tinkerbell herself had suddenly appeared before me to whack me upside the head with her magic wand would I have considered it more of a good omen. I’ve written here before about the Alizée-Madonna connection, and how much of an inspiration Madge has been and continues to be to Lili. So how cool would it be to turn a few Madonna fans onto Alizée? (Answer: it would be hawsome.)

It was still a few hours before the concert, but already it was pretty busy…and the dudes who were looking out for the Zack & Cody dude had nothin’ on the security guys at the ACC. Still, I managed to unload all the disques I had left—sadly, only eight—in some fairly prime locations in and around the entrance of the ACC (which was as far as I could go without a ticket). Though it was less than ten disques total, I still came away feeling like it was biggest drop I’d done to date.

And the best news? Madonna’s there again tomorrow night, for a second sold-out show. And Op Drop is definitely going back, this time armed with more disques.

Stay tuned…

An Alizée Thanksgiving Miracle (or: How Op Drop Got Its Groove Back)

2008-10-14T18:14:00.000-07:00

I think she'd look cute in Claymation, actually

(Blogger's Note: I honestly feel like I ought to be starting this post out like a letter to Penthouse Forum--Dear Op Drop, I never would have believed something like this could really happen, until it happened to me--because the story I'm about to relate just seems a little too sacchrine and conveniently-timed to be true, like something out of one of those old Rankin-Bass holiday specials. All it needs is a little blonde elf who longs to be a dentist. If I was reading it myself instead of writing it, I'd be tempted to doubt its authenticity...and I honestly wouldn't blame you if you did...but I promise you it really did happen this way, more or less. Sometimes, life just imitates art made with stop-motion puppets, I guess...)

So, on the spur of the moment, I decided to go visit my sister in Montreal for the Thanksgiving long weekend. The reasons for this were threefold:

a) She moved to Montreal from Toronto almost a year ago, and I was the only one of her close family and friends who hadn’t been out to see her, as yet.

b) I hadn’t been to Montreal since I was about 13 years old, and even then it was only for a few hours, en route to Quebec City.

c) She doesn’t have an internet connection at home, and seriously bummed and confused by the events of last week, I needed a serious break from all the Alizée drama of last week. An Alizée-cation, if you will.

All-in-all, it was actually a pretty cool weekend. I got to see the sights, practice mon francais a little (leveling it up from Feeble to Awful in the process), eat too much, dance too much, and drink juuuuust enough. Not a bad way to spend three days.

Though I’d intended for it to be a completely Alizée-free weekend—even going so far as to create an Lili-free playlist on my iPod for the bus ride over—naturally this didn’t work out as planned. Being in a predominantly francophone city made it awfully difficult not to think about everybody’s favorite Corsican, especially when my sister asked how on Earth my French had gotten so good, all of the sudden, when I’d shown almost no interest in it in school. (“Good” being a relative term here, of course—I still can’t conjugate irregular verbs worth a damn, and verb tenses are completely beyond me.) By the end of my first afternoon there, I was surreptitiously checking out every music store we went into on Rue St. Catherine (the main shopping drag downtown) to see if I could find some of Lili’s albums, and maybe “position” them a little better for greater visibility.

It turned out to be for naught—I’ve had better luck finding Lili’s albums in the wild in Toronto, sad as that is to say—but all the same, so much for the Alizée-cation. By the time we got ready to go out that night, I was all excited to request a song or two from Psychédélices (even going so far as to bring my iPod along in case the DJ didn’t have the album handy), only to discover that none of the clubs we went to were actively playing francophone music. I begin to see why she doesn’t have any fans in Montreal—all they apparently play out there is American Top 40. Arrgh.

As we headed back to my sister’s place, I began inwardly cursing the fact that I hadn’t brought any disques with me to slip the DJs and show them what they were missing…and the thought made me give my head a shake. I’d decided to be done with all that, at least for awhile…hadn’t I?

As it turned out, I actually had brought a few disques with me, albeit unintentionally: repacking my bag for the trip home this morning, I discovered three ‘undropped’ disques hiding in the bottom…probably ‘reclaimed’ disques from the Fan Expo op that I’d tucked into the wrong compartment. As I got into the taxi, I idly wondered if I should try dropping them at the bus terminal, but came to my senses and remembered that would be a pretty good way to get myself arrested on suspected terrorism charges in this day and age. (I did leave one hidden in my sister’s DVD collection, though more because I think it’ll freak her out than out of any genuine belief that it’ll convert her into a Lili-fan.)

Completely giving up on whole Lili-embargo thing, I listened to En Concert and Psychédélices on repeat on the bus ride home as I played Iron Man on my PSP, until my iPod’s battery finally gave up somewhere around Guelph. Tiring of the game (which is sadly only so-so) and needing some tunage to get me through the last four hours of the trip, I checked out what I had loaded on the PSP’s memory card, and was pleasantly surprised to find the rip of the En Concert DVD still there from my very first op drop back in July. I settled back into my seat to watch that, instead…only to notice, about an hour in, that the kid in the seat behind me—dressed in skater-punk-chic—was occasionally leaning forward to watch over my shoulder.

Clearly embarrassed that I’d caught him, he stammered out an excuse that he hadn’t known PSPs could play movies, and was now thinking of getting one for his regular trips back and forth between home and school. We struck up a converstation as I showed him some of the features and explained how you could rip DVDs and FLV files to the PSP to watch on the go, as well as mp3s. He asked if he could test-drive it, so I let him borrow it for the rest of the trip home. He fooled around with the game for maybe ten minutes or so at most (like I said…only so-so), and asked if I had Madden or NBA Street (which I do not) before finally switching over to En Concert.

“Hey!” he said, about two minues in. “She’s singing in French?”

“Yeah…” I said somewhat hesitantly. “She’s done some stuff in English—a few of the mp3s on there are English versions, but’s it’s mainly French, yeah.”

He blinked, then shrugged. “Cool.”

And with that, he sat back and watched the whole thing, with his eyes glued to the screen from beginning to end. And although I made a point of trying not to study him like a tagged water buffalo in the wild on Animal Planet, I did manage to catch him bobbing his head in time to the music, and even snickering at points. Once En Concert was done, he leaned forward to nudge my shoulder.

“You got any more videos?” he asked.

“Not on the PSP, no.”

“Oh,” he said disappointedly as he handed it back over. “Thanks, man.”

“No problem,” I said. “Here, have this.”

“What’s this?”

“It’s a DVD I made,” I explained, as I handed him one of the Mark IV disques I had left over. “More videos. Like, an hour’s worth.”

“Oh, cool,” he said as he took it from me, then flipped it over to read the label on the back, and frowned. “You hand these out? Do you work for her, or something?”

“Kind of,” I shrugged. “Not really. It’s just a thing I do…that some of her fans are doing to make her more well-known over here…grow the fanbase a bit, y’know?”

“Oh, so she’s not Canadian? I thought she was from Quebec or something…with you coming from Montreal and everything…”

“Nono, French…like, from France. Well, Corsica actu—”

“Oh, that sucks,” he cut me off with a sigh, and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe he was hoping I could set them up, or something. “Well, I can show it to some friends…”

“That’d be awesome. Do any of them play WoW?”

He frowned again. “Yeah, I think so. Why?”

“Show them the fourth one first. It’ll blow their minds, if they haven’t seen it already.”

“Cool,” he said again, then tucked the disque into his backpack. “Thanks.”

We pulled into the bus terminal in Toronto about fifteen minutes later, so we really didn’t get a chance to talk again except to nod our good-byes. Stupidly, I never thought to ask his name, or give him mine, and I completely neglected to point out the website address…but it’s all over the labels and the title screens of the DVD, so hopefully he’ll drop by at some point, and let me know what he and his friends thought.

And that’s the story about how, thanks to a random encounter on a bus on Thanksgiving Day, Op Drop managed to get its groove back.

All it needs is a snowman voiced by Burl Ives, and I think it'll be ready for prime time.

Where do we go from here?

2008-10-09T19:51:00.000-07:00

I had a long and fairly verbose post worked up about the continuing fallout of yesterday’s announcement, and how the last twenty-four hours have affected Alizée’s international community of fans. Halfway through, I realized I was just regurgitating things that had already been better-said by others elsewhere, and trying to frame them with a completely unnecessary rundown of the events that led us here…which, if you’re an Alizée fan reading this, you’re probably already well aware of.

To sum up in as few words as possible, then: things are, unsurprisingly, pretty much a mess. Fans are turning on Alizée. Fans are turning on each other. Baseless speculation over the true reason behind the postponement is running rampant. Whatever small amount of momentum we may have built up here in North America appears to have been dashed, at least for now, as a number of previously-stalwart fans have been left questioning why they’re investing so much, when they’re getting so little in return. Cooler heads are attempting to prevail here and there, counseling calm and patience until we receive some kind of explanation from Alizée herself…but twenty-four hours later, she remains silent on the subject, while posts even remotely critical of the decision continue to disappear from her official MySpace…which is only serving to feed the cycle of anger and recrimination.

In short, it ain’t pretty.

In light of all this, I’ve spent a good portion of the day wondering about the future of Operation: Disque Drop. I’ve been going back and forth all day on whether or not I ought to hang it up, or at least suspend it for the time being. Not out of malice or anger towards Alizée, mind you…far from it…but just because now is clearly not the right time to be trying to lure new North American fans into fold, not with the community in the state it’s in at the moment. Though the quixotic in me is howling that, now more than ever, it’s important to stand up and be counted…that times like these are what make ordinary men into heroes, just because they staunchly refuse to give up in the face of adversity and find a way to persevere …I can’t deny the fact that the problems we’re facing aren’t going to be solved by throwing more fans at them.

(Or maybe…are they? If low ticket sales are truly the culprit behind the sudden rescheduling…maybe? I dunno…there’s so much that’s not clear, right now.)

I still want to help Alizée to succeed in some way, very much so. I’m just not convinced that putting CDs or DVDs into the hands of random strangers is the best way to do it, right now…and I’m at a complete loss as to what else I can do.

I heard the news today, oh boy...

2008-10-08T19:05:00.000-07:00

'Nuff Said...

So yesterday’s post was kicked off with an allusion to the old Chinese proverb ‘May you live in interesting times’. More of an actual curse than a blessing, it’s essentially ancient wisdom’s equivalent to the more contemporary ‘Go to hell!’, with the clear implication being that ‘uninteresting times’ are bound to be far more peaceful and life-enriching.

Continuing in that vein, it’s certainly an interesting time to be an Alizée fan…and probably even more interesting to be Alizée, herself. I haven’t been around very long, myself, but from what I’ve seen of the dizzying highs and disparaging lows of the last year, it must make the four years of near-total radio silence that preceded it seem positively tranquil by comparison.

Hell, just the last month alone has been an emotional roller coaster, as we:

lurched from rumors of Alizée switching labels and being assigned new management by Sony BMG

launched ourselves into a dizzying spin of voting and promotion for her nomination at Los Premios MTV 2008

threw our arms in the air with abandon (and a little trepidation) as information began to surface about Alizée’s work on her forthcoming jazz album…wait, jazz album?

were plummeted back to earth as the story about the jazz album proved to be false, or at least incorrect, inasmuch as it referred to an altogether different—and quite male, thank you—Alizé, entirely

began to pick up steam again as more award nominations were announced, and the date for her highly-anticipated concert at Le Grand Rex on October 23rd—Alizée’s first concert in France in almost five years—grew ever closer

trembled a little as apparent glitches on Le Grand Rex's website gave way to rumors that the aforementioned concert was actually in danger of being canceled or postponed until the spring due to low ticket sales

soldiered on in the face of uncertainty, operating on the assumption that no official word on the subject could only be good news, and busied ourselves making plans, whether we were going or not

were dropped into free-fall as word began to trickle out little by little that tickets were no longer up for sale, and that the concert was actually being postponed due to a scheduling conflict with an appearance with an upcoming awards show in Mexico

left our stomachs behind as the news was confirmed, with retailers offering ticket refunds to those who wouldn’t be able to attend the rescheduled date of March 28…a mere three weeks before the initial scheduled date of October 23rd; and

finally hit the ground with a resounding thud, as the date for the upcoming show was changed—quietly, and without fanfare or explanation—on Alizée’s official MySpace page.

In short, Space Mountain ain’t got nothin’ on being an Alizée fan right now.

I’m not one of those directly affected by the decision to postpone—though I might have been, if a lengthy and unexpected bout of unemployment in July and August hadn’t precluded it, and might still be if the stars align for me between now and the end of March—so I don’t really feel like I have the right to sit in judgement of it, or the logic behind it, either way. Instead, I’ve watched quietly from the sidelines as word got around, and other fans began to react.

Some have reacted with disgust, anger and bitter disappointment, claiming that Lili and her minders have gone too far this time in their disregard for her fans—particularly those still on the hook for international flights and expensive accommodation arrangements—with a few going so far as claiming to have washed their hands of her for good. Others, though equally disappointed, have responded mainly with worry and concern, both for the well being of Alizée herself and that of her career, and are vowing to hang tough with her and remain true fans through the hard times. And at least one fan, whose opinion I’ve come to respect, has effectively shrugged and written the whole thing off as ‘Alizée being Alizée’…

Two points everyone seems to agree on, though: first, that an awards ceremony seems like a pretty flimsy excuse to hang the postponement on, leading to speculation of another, possibly more sinister reason behind it; and second, that they’d really, really like to hear something by way of an explanation from Lili herself.

Perfectly valid and understandable reactions, all. Can’t come down against any of them, really, especially when I kind of tend to agree with all of them at the same time…but then, I said I wasn’t going to pass judgement.

Two things about today really did bum me out, though, more than anything else...

The first was reading a heartfelt post from Jenny (aka HR087) on Alizée’s MySpace expressing her heartbreak and confusion over the decision, yet reaffirming her undying support for Lili no matter what…and then coming back a few hours later for an update, and seeing that poor Jenny’s post had been deleted, along with several similar posts from other fans expressing their frustration. Now, I don’t know Jenny personally, but from the posts she’s made on MySpace and Alizée-Forum, it’s clear to me that she’s a) the sweetest, most enthusiastic Alizée fan that German engineering has to offer, and b) has been eagerly anticipating the concert for the past several months. (Her MySpace avatar is a picture of her gleefully displaying her tickets, for crimminy’s sake!) Seeing her post deleted like it never happened, in what I can only assume was an attempt at damage control…ugh. Just ugh. So very disdainful of her feelings—and the feelings of the other fans whose posts were expunged, of course, but hers in particular—that it breaks the heart.

And then there was this post on the Alizée America forums from Snatcher42, he of Operation: LTNY whom first inspired me to begin this mad crusade of mine, in emulation and support of his own:

Regardless it's a terrible excuse, none are right on the 23rd. I'm sure low ticket sales are the real reason. Can't say how sick it makes me feel. I'm speechless, and really don't feel like spending more energy on her. I'll always be around, but with news like this...

It's just not worth going out of one's way to promote or do Alizée things anymore when we get so little in return. I won't point fingers, it doesn't matter who's at fault, that's just how it is. I'm out $1500 on this trip, but worse still is the wasted time and effort.

Man…when words like this come from the keyboard of a fan as dedicated as Snatcher, it heralds interesting times, indeed. Let's hope that Alizée proves to be up to weathering them.

(OK, that went on a lot longer than I intended…but I guess I had a lot more to say on the subject than I thought. If you feel similarly moved to say a little bit yourself—especially if you’re one of those who’s been shut out from expressing yourself via Alizée’s MySpace—please feel free to comment below. All viewpoints are welcome here—angry, supportive, neutral, whatever—so please don’t hold back. Just try not to belittle somebody else’s, alright? Let's keep it friendly.)

Alizée, Petula Clark, and the Impossible Dream

2008-10-07T18:16:00.000-07:00

Well, that was certainly an interesting week…in the Chinese proverbial sense of the word…

My apologies for having been so suddenly absent, Op Drop fans, but real life caught up with me in a big way in the first week of October, leaving precious little time for blogging, disque-dropping, and even less vital activities such as sleeping and eating. Not only have things started to ramp up at the brand-new job, but my cousin’s wedding caused a truly impressive number of distant relations from abroad to descend on the city like good-natured locusts. Life since the wedding has been a non-stop whirlwind of busy workdays and even busier weeknights spent entertaining strange visitors from afar.

Finally, though, the last of them has been bundled off to the airport—and are probably somewhere over the prairies even as I write this—and life can finally get back to what passes for normal around Casa Disque Drop. A few days too late, sadly…the unexpected abundance of family gatherings completely put the kibosh on my plans for another massive Op Drop at this year’s Nuit Blanche citywide art festival, as I simply had no time to prepare. But on the bright side, playing tour guide for a week opened my eyes to a few more potential targets for future ops that I’d previously overlooked.

I also made the unexpected discovery that I’m actually carrying on a family tradition of sorts, as it came up in conversation that my oldest uncle headed up the Toronto chapter of the Petula Clark fan club in his late teens and early twenties. Though my mom and aunts brought it up at the wedding simply to embarrass him in front of his wife (who was naturally unawares), I cornered him at the bar a couple hours later, and began peppering him with questions about it. How had they operated? How many members did he have? What kind of promotion did they do? Did they actively try to convert non-fans, and if so, how did they overcome the cultural and language barriers?

“You do know that Petula Clark sang in English, right?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah…but, hypothetically speaking, how would you have overcome them?”

“You’re strangely interested in this,” he observed, bemused. “Are you a Petula Clark fan?”

“Nonono,” I stammered. I looked back over each of my shoulders, then leaned forward conspiratorially. “I’m, um…well, I’ve been doing this thing…”

And that was how I took him into my confidence, revealed my secret identity, and proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes telling my fifty-seven year-old uncle all about Alizée and Operation: Disque Drop. He was pretty obviously amused by the idea, but surprisingly impressed as well. And when I was done explaining myself, he said something that really struck me.

“What you’re doing is quite literally quixotic, in the truest sense of the word. You’re tilting at even bigger windmills than I did…at least Petula already had a hit single and a following, here.”

I must have had a strange look on my face, because he paused and frowned. “Sorry, do you not know what ‘quixotic’ means?”

Boy, did I. Don Quixote has always been a personal hero of mine, moreso even than Batman or Iron Man, who up until now have been the patron saints of Op Drop. Like them, Don Quixote was just an ordinary man—and an old man, at that—who nevertheless took it upon himself to don a suit of armor and begin a one-man crusade against an apathetic populace, like one of the chivalric knights of old. And in his case, it was all done in the name of an unattainable beauty, the Lady Dulcinea del Toboso.

I’d never drawn the comparison before, but you have to admit, it kinda fits.

My uncle made me promise to burn a disque for him before he left. I handed it to him right before he got on the plane, and he promised to watch it on his laptop on the flight back to Vancouver. Somewhere over the prairies, I suspect he’s being converted into a Lili-fan even as I write this…which would be cool, as he’s somebody who really “gets it”, y’know?

It’s not the hundred disques I was hoping to get dropped at Nuit Blanche, but I think I’ll chalk one up in the ‘win’ column all the same.

Take that, Petula Clark!

Reminder: Alizée America MTVLA Vote-athon - Sunday Sept. 28 @ 10 AM EST!

2008-09-26T10:10:00.000-07:00

This is just a reminder to all and sundry that Ruroshen from the Alizée America forums is hosting an all-day MTVLA voting marathon community chat this Sunday, September 28, starting at 10 AM eastern time, and going as late as people are interested.

From Ruro's post over at AAm:

OK folks, the Alizée America MTVLA Vote-athon has officially been scheduled to begin at 10 AM EST on Sunday, September 28, 2008. Please join us as we support, amuse, entertain, console and generally try to keep each other sane throughout a day-long marathon of Lili-voting madness. Chat and interact with fellow Alizée fans from across America and (hopefully) around the world as we spend the day voting en masse to push Alizée to victory.

You can find the Vote-athon’s page on TalkShoe here:

http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/tscmd/tc/27639

—from here you’ll be able to join the community call once it goes live on Sunday morning. Before you can join, you’ll first need to sign up on TalkShoe, and download the TalkShoe Live client. Registering is free, downloading the software is free, and joining the call is free as long as use the ShoePhone VOIP that’s built into TalkShoe Live. (You can also call in via phone or Skype, but this will cost you money, so try not to do that.)

Click here to watch a few short videos explaining how TalkShoe works:

http://www.talkshoe.com/se/help/videoDemos.html

I recommend that you have a headset and mic handy if you’re planning to join in on the voice call…but even if you don’t (or if you’re just shy), you can still participate via text chat, or just lurk and listen in as you vote right along with us.
(The more people who participate in the voice call, though, the more fun this will be!)

I’ve deliberately set the call to “public” so that anybody can join, so please don’t hesitate to invite others to join us. Alizée fans old and new from any site, forum, nation and walk of life are welcome and encouraged to join in the madness. Please just be aware that the primary language of the call will naturally be English, and that we’re going to try to keep the profanity down to a PG level. (I really don’t need any emails for angry mothers in Guatemala, thank you.) Don’t let that scare you off, though—we’re a friendly bunch, and I guarantee that you speak English far better than most of us speak your language.

Also, please note that although the default length of the call is 120 mins, we’re actually able to go as long as we want. Everyone but me will be able to drop-in and drop-out at will—I’m the host, so I have to stick around for the duration—which means you can come and go whenever you please. Come and hang out as often as you like, for as long or as little as you can.
So please drop in even if you can only stay for a few minutes—every vote for Lili counts, and those of us running the marathon will appreciate the infusion of fresh blood!

And I think that’s everything…! Please let me know if you guys have any questions or concerns, and I’ll do my best to address them as quickly as possible! Thanks, and hope to see you on Sunday!

I'm sadly not able to be there--my cousin clearly has his priorities messed up and has elected to get married that day, instead--but it sounds like a good time for a good cause. Even if you can only swing by for a little while, I'd recommend you check it out! How often do you get to geek out about Alizée with real, live people and help her out at the same time?

Man, I wish I could be there. Stupid cousin...

Meet the Candidates, Part II

2008-09-26T08:44:00.000-07:00

There's just five days left to vote for Alizée at Los Premios MTV 2008 (the Latin American MTV awards) , and ensure she takes home the trophy for 'Mejor Artista Nuevo Internacional' (Best New International Artist). Remember, you have to vote in all the categories (not just Alizée's) in order for your vote to count.

Not sure who else to vote for? Op Drop can help. Check out this second post in a series which shares a little of my own voting strategy (such as it is), with more outtakes from my promotional YouTube video.

Op Drop recommends...

Although she's competing against Alizée in 'Mejor Artista Nuevo Internacional' (boo!), the gorgeous Miss Perry is also nominated in the category of 'Cancion Del Ano' (Song of the Year), which I frankly think she deserves. Perry's unbelievably catchy and controversial song I Kissed A Girl took the world by storm this summer, to the point where you couldn't get away from it if you tried.

And then there's the small matter of the video, which is quite frankly--and you'll forgive the blogger a moment of maleness here--undeniably hawt. (The fact that it kinda sorta plays like a more risqué version of the Mademoiselle Juliette video to me only accentuates its hawtness.)

Ahem...uh, moving on...

Yes, because it's MTV, they actually have a category for 'Mejor Musica de un Videojuego' (Best Music of a Video Game). I haven't played the majority of the games in this category, including Rock Band--I know, I know, blasphemy--but I was pretty obsessed with Guitar Hero III for several months back at the beginning of the year. Though I'm not sure which one Alizée would prefer to play, I do know which one I'd prefer to see her play:

You just know she's gonna six-star Through The Fire and the Flames, here...assuming the guitar doesn't melt first. Yum.

Er, let's continue, shall we?

Seriously. How do you not vote for someone who has the audacity to go through life with Doctor Krapula as their stage name? He's nominated in the category 'Mejor Artista Central' (Best Artist Central). Fortunately, his music is not only much better than his name would have you believe, it actually kinda rocks. Check out his videos for BAM and El Pibe de mi Barrio to see for yourself.

More recommendations to come tomorrow. For now, I have a strange compulsion to dust off Guitar Hero III...and maybe watch En Concert again...

I can't imagine why.

Meet the Candidates, Part I

2008-09-25T09:10:00.000-07:00

Only six days remain before the voting closes for Los Premios MTV 2008, the Latin American version of the MTV awards...less than a week in which to help Alizée triumph over the likes of Katy Perry and the eeeeeevil Jonas Brothers, and be crowned as 'Mejor Artista Nuevo Internacional' (Best New International Artist).

Regular readers may recall--because I've only mentioned in every single post since--that I created the above YouTube video to promote Alizée at the MTVLA awards, and to explain in plain English exactly how one could go about voting for her. The key is not to just vote for Alizée, but to vote in all the categories in order for your vote to count. The problem is, not only is this kind of a pain in the butt, but most of the other categories are filled with artists who are unknown to North Americans like myself.

Who to vote for, then? Once again, folks, Operation: Disque Drop is here for you. Allow me to drop some science on you, and share a little of my own voting strategy with the following outtakes from the aforementioned YouTube video.

Op Drop Recommends...

OK, not so obscure and kind of a gimmie, but I thought we'd warm up with a really easy one first, and work our way down to the really hard ones. Nominated in the categories 'Mejor Artista Pop Internacional' (Best International Pop Artist) and 'Mejor Ringtone Musical' (Best Musical Ringtone...seriously, there's an award for this?), Madonna is arguably the most recognizable nominee to most North American voters. (Unless, of course, you're a twelve year-old girl with a crush on Joe Jonas.)

Though personally I'm not a big fan of her later stuff, Madonna has served as a major influence on Alizée and her music since the age of five. Lili has done covers of both La Isla Bonita and Hung Up (both of which appear on the Op Drop disque), and samples Music in the 'new' version of Moi...Lolita that she performs on the Psychédélices tour. And as aw has speculated on his blog, she may even have drawn inspiration from Madonna's video for Deeper and Deeper in creating the song Fifty Sixy. There's no questioning the fact that Alizée would vote for Madonna herself...so, since Alizée is kind of the point of all this, we vote for Madonna.

I mean, screw Tokio Hotel anyway, right?

Next up...

A little more obscure, at least to North Americans, but also a nominee with an Alizée connection...for me, anyway. See, I stumbled across the video for Belanova's single 1, 2, 3, Go! in a post they'd made on Alizée's offical MySpace page a couple of months ago (back when embedding videos on her page was still allowed), and absolutely fell in love with it. Bouncy and fun, with an awesome bassline, it's one of the few non-Alizée tracks to see heavy rotation on my iPod in recent months. And the video is cute.

Nominated in the categories 'Artista Del Ano' (Artist of the Year), 'Group O Duo' (Group or Duo), 'Mejor Artista Pop' (Best Pop Artist), 'Video Del Ano' (Video of the Year), and kinda/sorta in 'Mejor Fan Club' (Best Fan Club), Belanova is one of the few nominees I can genuinely say I'm voting for on merit...as you'll see when we get further down the list, here.

For example...

Seriously. That's a pretty kick-ass hat, man.

Actually, since I began voting in this thing, I have bothered to do a little research into the artists I've been voting for (often with the flimsiest of excuses), and I've discovered that Café Tacvba is one I can genuinely get behind...if only because their video for Eres perfectly captures what it was like to be me at twelve years old. I guess some experiences are universal. Café Tacvba is nominated in a bunch of the same categories as Belanova, but is my choice for 'Mejor Artista Alternativo' (Best Alternative Artist).

More recommendations tomorrow. Until then, get out there and rock the vote for Alizée!

Dateline: Lilly Town

2008-09-23T11:53:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update on a few things as I run out the door to work. A little dry, perhaps, but I find if you read it in the style of one of those old-timey black & white newsreels they used to show before movies back in the day, it's infinitely more entertaining. Enjoy!

Snatcher42 (aka Ben from Operation LTNY) graciously shows Op Drop a little love in his super-sized Lili News segment on the tenth episode of the Alizée America Podcast, which dropped on Monday. Ciara and Ben's show is always a fun and informative listen for Alizée fans, and I'd heartily recommend it even if it wasn't out there pimpin' for me. They're up to double digits now, people! Ow!

Meanwhile Op Drop’s YouTube promotional video, ‘Vote for Alizée in Los Premios MTV 2008’, is racking up a decent number of views—the version on my account has reached 611, while the mirror that Ruroshen graciously posted has netted 459. That’s 1070 views in total in less than a week, which hopefully translates into a decent number of votes for Alizée...and with less than a week to go before the polls close, every vote counts! Big thanks to Alizée fan HRO87, who embedded it in a post in the English section of the multi-lingual Alizée Forum, where it's been racking up a fair number of views. Thanks for helping to spread the word, HR087. Hopefully it gets folks over there pumped up to vote.

And speaking of Ruroshen and the MTVLA awards, he’s going to be hosting a day-long Alizée Vote-athon voice chat over at TalkShoe this Sunday, September 28, starting at 10 am Eastern Time, and going as late as people are interested. Essentially, it’ll be place for fans to drop in and hang out with each other as they spend the day voting Lili up at Los Premios MTV 2008. It sounds like fun, and I’d totally be there myself if it wasn’t for a) my oppressive fear of awkward social situations, and b) the fact that I have to attend my cousin’s wedding on Sunday (which is not going to be good time—see a). You can learn more about it in Ruro’s post about the event at the Alizée America forums.

Finally, just a quick reminder that MySpace singing sensation Yelle’s American tour, ‘C’est Amerique!’, starts in just a few days, with the first American date being October 7 in Dallas, Texas. These shows provide a great opportunity to promote Alizée in the United States…and if you’re interested, Op Drop is willing to supply the disques you need to do it! We already have one remote operative scheduled to make a drop at an upcoming show, but the more we have, the better! Check out Yelle’s MySpace for the show nearest you, then drop me a line if you’d like to get in on the action!

In which I break my arm patting myself on the back...

2008-09-22T09:50:00.000-07:00

I’ve always felt that one of my strengths in this little quest of mine to spread awareness of Alizée to North America—and indeed, in life in general—is my ability to be honest in my evaluation of how well things are working, and my commitment to go back to the drawing board to fix things when necessary. It can be frustrating sometimes when I realize I have made a misstep, but I can honestly say that continually evaluating, refining and upgrading the Op Drop disque has actually been one of the most fun parts of the experience, for me.

As a result, the Mark IV disques I dropped this past weekend are a vastly superior, more professional product to the Mark I’s, much more likely to be picked up, explored, and convert Lili-heathens into outright Alizée fans. But even the Mark IV’s aren’t perfect—I’ve been inexplicably having a persistent labeling issue with these ones that I wasn’t with the Mark II’s and III’s, which I think is going to force a slight redesign of the face label, and one of the videos on the disque didn’t come through the transition from FLV to VOB looking as good as I’d like. I can definitely see a Mark V disque on the horizon.

The thing is, because I’m so open about the process—which is kind of the point of the blog—and free with sharing frustration or self-criticism, I get the feeling some of you are getting the impression that I’m down on myself or getting discouraged. And while I genuinely appreciate all the words of encouragement left in the comments, let me assure you that this isn’t the case. Though I may come across as glass-half-empty sometimes, that’s honestly just me working out loud (as it were), looking for opportunities to do things better. Please don’t mistake it for pessimism.

By my count, I’ve dropped just a shade under 300 disques so far. That's not too shabby for one guy working on a shoe-string budget. People are beginning to notice. And we’re still in the early stages, yet—I have plans for yet another massive Op Drop at the upcoming Nuit Blanche event in early October that ought to make the Fan Expo operation look like a training exercise.

Though there’s been bumps along the way, I honestly couldn’t be happier with or prouder of the way Op Drop has progressed so far. Overall, I think it’s been a success. Hopefully Alizée would agree.

NoobTube

2008-09-21T16:49:00.000-07:00

So the promotional video I posted on YouTube to encourage fans and casual viewers alike to vote for Alizée in Los Premios MTV 2008 (and explain in plain English how they might go about doing it) has surpassed 500 views so far, while the mirror that Ruroshen hosted for me on his account has garnered a little over 200. While that’s not bad considering how little exposure it’s had, I’ve decided against producing alternate versions for La Isla Bonita and other Alizée videos as I’d originally planned. Given that it took me the better part of three days to cut the first one together, and there’s apparently only a little more than a week left to vote, the return on investment just isn’t high enough.

The whole point of the exercise, you see, was to post them as Video Responses to the most highly-trafficked Alizée clips on YouTube—not a bad strategy, given the incredible number views some of those videos rack up in a single day. Unfortunately, what I didn’t realize is that a) the newness of my account, which I created just under a week ago specifically to do this, would apparently prevent me from posting video responses, and b) that the owner of the video you’re responding to has to approve it before it’ll even show up as a response on their page.

Ruroshen was kind enough to solve the first problem for me by offering to mirror the video on his account, which he’s had for awhile…but unfortunately we’ve both been stymied by the fact that the dude who posted the video we’re trying to respond to hasn’t logged on in about a week. By the time he does log on, the window for voting could very likely have already closed…if he even chooses to approve the response in the first place.

Argh. While I get the rationale behind it—clearly everyone should have the right to veto the type of content that appears on their page in relation to their own work—it’s frustrating, nonetheless.

Oh well, so much for viral marketing. At least it’s been well-received by the few who have seen it. Big thanks to Ruroshen for hosting the mirror and posting it over at Alizée America, and to AC Mix for doing the same over at Lilly Town USA (and saying some very kind words about it, besides). You’re both gentlemen and scholars, good sirs. It’s greatly appreciated.

Priorities

2008-09-21T16:28:00.000-07:00

Had a lot of trouble sleeping last night. After a little over an hour of tossing and turning, I decided to get up and at least put my insomnia to good use by stockpiling another payload of Mark IV disques, seeing as how Friday’s mission at The Eaton Center had depleted my reserves. Dusting off my trusty old multi-CD player—I tend to listen to music mostly via iTunes these days, unless my computer’s doing something memory-intensive like burning a bunch of DVDs—I popped in my Alizée collection (including my newly-acquired copy of Gourmandises), set it on repeat, and set to work.

By the time I realized I was yawning along (phonetically, of course) to Moi…Loita for the fourth time, it was five in the morning, and I had a stack of forty freshly-burned, labeled and packaged disques in front of me.

Oops. Time flies when you’re mindlessly working a one-man assembly line while singing in poorly-enunciated French, as the old saying goes.

Despite not dropping off to sleep until almost five-thirty, I still forced myself to drag my sleepy ass out of bed at ten, lest my sleep-schedule be FUBAR’ed for the work-week ahead. Groggily stumbling out into the living room, I bumped the corner of the coffee table and knocked over the stack of disques. As I stooped over to pick them up, I contemplated the day ahead, and tried to determine how best to spend it. I could either a) be responsible and do the week’s grocery shopping and laundry before vacuuming the living room and attacking the pile of dishes in the sink…

... or b) blow all that off, take my forty disques back down to TEC, and run another Op Drop.

Six hours later, the dishes are still in the sink and the clothes are still in the hamper…but a little over three-dozen disques are now in the hands of some potential Lili-converts, including one lady who looked old enough to be my grandmother, yet seemed pleased as punch to find her disque on a bench as she sat down. Am I now responsible for converting Alizée’s first septagenarian fan in North America? Could be!

All in all, I’d call that a Sunday well-spent, wouldn't you?

Back to Basiques

2008-09-19T23:50:00.000-07:00

Why's it called 'Operation: Disque Drop' again...?

Given how little I’ve written about it in the past few weeks, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Operation: Disque Drop had maybe lost sight of its core purpose, in that there’s apparently been precious little disque-droppage going on. Heck, the last time I even mentioned undertaking an Op Drop was back on August 28, when I summed up the last of my efforts at Fan Expo, almost three weeks ago.

Since then, it seems like I’ve written about practically everything but! I’ve been distracted, after all, by the rumors of Alizée changing record labels within Sony BMG (and hopefully getting a better promotional team behind her in the process). And then there was the hoopla surrounding Alizée’s nomination for an award at Los Premios MTV 2008 (and my ongoing efforts on YouTube to encourage fans and casual viewers alike to vote for her), which consumed me for the better part of this week.

So when is Op Drop going to get back to the business of actually dropping disques, you ask? Well, I’m happy to announce that, after two weeks spent upgrading, refining and stockpiling the reserves, the first of the Mark IV DVDs have made their way out the door, and hopefully into the hands of several enthusiastic Lili-converts. A grand total of thirty disques were unleashed Friday afternoon upon an unsuspecting public in and around the Toronto Eaton Center, downtown T-dot’s most highly-trafficked shopping center, and a popular destination for locals and tourists alike.

Though not as major an undertaking as the three-day assault on Fan Expo, in its own way, the concentrated burst appeared to be even more successful—I managed to unload all thirty disques in about half the time it took me to drop the same amount at the convention, with some disques being picked up mere seconds after I’d dropped them. I felt a little bit more exposed—in a mall that crowded, it’s nigh-impossible to pull off a discreet drop completely unnoticed—but while I raised a few eyebrows, nobody actually stopped me this time to try and return a disque. In fact, the curiousity translated into at least a few immediate pickups.

Also—bonus!—in the course of the afternoon, I discovered that the major chain music store across the street not only has a robust international music section on their third floor, but that they actually carry Alizée’s albums! Not Psychédélices, sadly, but they did have both Gourmandises and Mes Courants Electriques in stock. (Granted, it was only one copy of each, but that’s still two more Alizée albums than I’ve seen anywhere else!) I happily snapped up Gourmandises, at a relatively reasonable price, finally filling the only gap in my collection (if you don’t count Tout Alizée, which I don’t, but that’s a subject for another post). Bonus objective, achieved!

All-told, a very good day. I will definitely be making TEC a regular stop on the Op Drop tour, especially as the Christmas shopping season approaches.

Meanwhile, another payload of Mark IV disques is currently winging their way to an undisclosed location via international airmail, en route to Op Drop’s very first remote operative, for use in their mission to infiltrate one of Yelle’s upcoming North American tour appearances. More on this to come as the date of the operation approaches…

Want to get in on the action? You, too, can become a remote operative for Op Drop in your city and get in on the ground floor of Alizée’s North American revolution. Whether you’d like to infiltrate one of Yelle’s concerts (or that of another artist whose fans you think would be receptive), or you’d just like a hand getting set up to do smaller promotional things in your home town, Op Drop is here for you! Drop me a line either here in the comments or via email, and we’ll see what we can do about getting you started in promoting Alizée where you live!

Rocking the Vote for Alizée, YouTube-style!

2008-09-17T00:21:00.000-07:00

My name is Disque, and I approve this message

If you'd told me a year ago that I'd spend every spare moment of three days working on a guerilla marketing video for a French recording artist nominated for an MTV Latin America video award, I would have looked at you like you had lobsters crawling out of your ears.

And yet, here we are. It's funny how life works, huh?

I literally just uploaded it to YouTube, so I don't think it's propagated through to the 'Most Recent Videos' listing, or shown up yet as a video response to that tactical nuke video I keep linking...so please consider this a sneak preview of the promotional video I made for Alizée with my own widdle hands:

A couple notes on the making-of...the director's commentary, if you will:

This is my first ever YouTube video, and only the third I've edited with Windows Movie Maker. It turned out alright, all things considered. It's not perfect, and it took me about three times longer than it should have, but I learned a lot while putting it together. The next one will be better.

Though it's a far cry better than the dual VCRs and jog-shuttle editing board I used in AV Club back in high school, Windows Movie Maker is a little skimpy on options, and is a bit of a bitch to work with besides. If anyone knows of a cheap-as-free alternative that's more robust, or at least a little more user-friendly (i.e. less prone to crashing repeatedly), I'd appreciate it if you dropped me a line.

My original plan was to use J'en Ai Marre! as the backing music, but lip-syncing it with the clips plucked randomly from throughout the original video proved to be too cumbersome, and not lip-syncing it just looked weird.

Plan B for the music was to use David Bowie's Heroes, a song I've always loved which I thought was oddly appropriate, especially given the ongoing superhero metaphor running through Op Drop. Unfortunately, there's about thirty gazillion versions of it out there, all of them different, and most of them over six minutes in length. I tried a few, but they also proved to be difficult to work with as far as syncing things up went. I finally just gave in and went with the Wallflowers' cover from the Godzilla soundtrack, instead. It's an inferior version, I know, but at least it's studio-quality and easy to sync to.

I have plans to do a version of this for La Isla Bonita too (the next most-watched Alizée video on YouTube), and possibly versions for Ella, Elle L'a, Mademoiselle Juliette and Fifty Sixty as well. We'll see--there's not a whole lot of time left before the voting ends. If anyone has suggestions on how I could improve upon this first effort, I'd be more than happy to entertain them.

Anyway, if you're reading this, if you could please take a moment to visit the video's page on YouTube to comment on it and vote it up, I'd really appreciate it. And if you'd like to spread it far and wide on any fan sites, Facebook pages, MySpace profiles or blogs you happen to frequent and/or operate...well, that would be totally cool, too.

And, of course, don't forget to vote!

Rocking the vote for Alizée, Latino-style

2008-09-13T00:06:00.000-07:00

Lilly Town catches election fever! (Well, sorta...)

While it’s unlikely that anybody who actually visits Op Drop on a semi-regular basis isn’t already aware of this—it’s been posted on her official MySpace, and all the fansites I lurk on are all a-tizzy about it—it still bears mentioning: our girl Alizée has been nominated for an MTVLA award, and she needs our help to win it!

While it may seem odd for someone with eight years and five million albums sold under her belt to be nominated as a ‘new’ artist, that’s nevertheless the category Alizée has been nominated in—‘Mejor Artista Nuevo Internacional’—alongside the Jonas Brothers (ugh!), Katy Perry (yum!), Paramore and Tokio Hotel. That’s some pretty stiff competition right there, so Lili needs all the help she can get!

On the bright side, there appears to be no limit to the number of times you can vote…but on the down side, in order for your vote to count, you need to vote in every single MTVLA category, not just the one in which Alizée’s been nominated. Not only is this a major pain in the tuchas, but it appears to be a point that many of Alizée’s supporters who followed the link from her MySpace (myself included) have initially overlooked, resulting in a whole whack of votes not being counted in the first few days of the contest.

Just so you’re clear on how it works, then, here’s an excerpt of a post from AC Mix at Lilly Town USA, which gives the 411 on exactly how to rock the vote:

so here is what we need to do.................

1- the link: http://www.mtvla.com/premios/ click on where it says Mexico or any other place... its just to know where the votes are coming from... but there is no USA.. so i guess mexico is best that will take you directly to the MTVLA awards home page...

2- click on where it says "Nominados" http://www.mtvla.com/premios/nominad...questid=390870 that will take you straight to all the categories...

3- in the list on the left. click on where it says "Mejor Artista Nuevo Internacional"... http://www.mtvla.com/premios/nominad..._Internacional it will take you to Alizée's category and she will be on on top left.

4- click on "Votar" http://www.mtvla.com/premios/votacio..._Internacional you should first see a cone like shape in the middle of all the categories. then automatically, it should take you to her category... alizee again top left hand corner...

5- click on "Votar" again... and it will take you out to another category so you can continue your voting.....

This step is extremely crucial, you MUST CONTINUE YOUR VOTING SO YOUR VOTE COUNTS... IF YOU DONT VOTE IN ALL THE CATEGORIES YOU VOTE WILL NOT COUNT..

i know its a pain in the but to vote for people you dont know and categories you dont care for... but it is a requirement... ill repeat!!!

IN ORDER FOR YOUR VOTE TO BE COUNTED, YOU NEED TO VOTE IN ALL THE CATEGORIES FIRST.

Lets all do it for Alizée so we can see her happy so then.. we can vote as many times as we want... as long as we go trough all the categories..

so then 6- click again on "Nominados" http://www.mtvla.com/premios/nominad...questid=398484 and it will take you back to the list of actegories and repeat steps 3-5 as many times possible please...

Meanwhile, over at Alizée America, friend of Op Drop NarutoSoul drops a little more science and lends some inspiration:

I did the math, and if you devote all of your attention to the voting, you should be able to get 20 votes for every hour spent voting. If that sounds crazy and difficult, try this: Listen to a Lili CD. As long as that CD is playing, spend the time voting. ONLY vote, do nothing else. Promote Lili while you listen, and help repay her for some of the joy she's brought into all of our lives!

While I hardly needed an excuse to kick back and while away a couple hours this weekend listening to Psychédélices and En Concert again (my personal two favorites of Alizée’s albums), this sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.

Vote early and vote often, kids. Let’s help Alizée take this one by a landslide.

"Hey, you! Yeah you, with the mouse! Why haven't you voted yet?!"

A mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan Alizée blog....

2008-09-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

Great Scott!

OK, so I’m not so much the Alizée Batman this week…more like Alizée Clark Kent, what with the chasing down of news stories, and all. Fortunately for all of us, however, my ongoing investigation of Alizée’s rumored changing of record labels, from RCA Records to Jive/Epic, is unlikely to lead to me having to save Metropolis from Lex Luthor’s evil death ray…

While there still appears to be no official word on the subject, it sounds like I may have jumped the gun in assuming a move to Jive/Epic could increase our chances of seeing Alizée cross over to North America. Snatcher42 (from Operation LTNY) explains below, in this post excerpted from Alizée America, which expands on his earlier post from Sunday:

A few points of clarification and commentary:

-I don't know if RCA is shutting down worldwide or only in France, but it's probably just the later.

-Aside from the management team change, this
shouldn't really effect Alizée overseas in places like Mexico or potentially the United States, since there she's always just been with "Sony BMG", no sub-label.

- While this will hopefully be good for Alizée in the end, I Personally find it a bit hard to be so happy over what amounts to news of restructuring and layoffs. Some may say they deserve it, but as others have mentioned this could actually be an explanation for the lack of promotion. Apparently their fate has been in question for some time. It wouldn't make sense to be promoting a lot when you think you might close shop in a few months.

-The good news is that Lili will be back soon with new stuff!

Good news, indeed. At the very least, we’ll hopefully see the renewed promotion for Fifty Sixty that was rumored to be happening on Sunday, as well as the release of a third single from Psychédélices. Personally, I’m holding out for Lilly Town—it’s catchy, poppy and fun, and has the potential to make for a really trippy music video. I’d also love to see a revival of the Psychédéclips website, particularly the Lilly Town TV section, which would go a long way towards providing real, meaningful fan interaction, and really drive home just how truly international Lili’s fan base is.

More on this story as it develops, gang. Let’s just hope I don’t have to fight a giant spider in the third act...

Image courtesy of Operation LTNY

In other news…

Production of the new Mark IV Op Drop disques continues apace. It’s slow-going, what with the me-having-a-day-job getting in the way, but the first batch is just about done and ready to be shipped out the door…to Op Drop’s very first remote operative!

That’s right, folks—one brave soul has stepped forward to take up the challenge of performing an Operation: Disque Drop at one of Yelle’s shows on her upcoming North American tour. Remember, Op Drop is committed to supplying disques free of charge to anybody who’s interested in ‘infiltrating’ one of these shows on Lili’s behalf…so if you’re an Alizée fan who’d like to get in on the underground guerilla marketing movement for zero dollars, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line!

Op Drop breaking news: Is Alizée moving from RCA Records to Jive/Epic?

2008-09-07T21:39:00.000-07:00

Unsubstantiated Rumors: The Best Kind

Noticed this in a fan post Sunday morning on Alizée’s official MySpace page:

coucou ma belle,
c'est vrai??

Fini le label RCA ! Alizée va prochainement changer d'équipe (Toujours sous Sony) !

Une fois ce changement d'équipe effectué, la promo reprendra. FIFTY SIXTY aura donc sa promotion, et d'autres singles suivront.

Qu’est-ce que c’est? I dropped French like a bad habit in Grade 10—a decision that twenty-plus me now profoundly regrets—so my understanding of the above is incomplete at best…but ‘Fini le label RCA!’ doesn’t leave much to interpretation. Ruh-roh, Raggy!

Fortunately, for those of us who don’t speak fluent French, Snatcher42 (of Operation LTNY fame) drops some science over in the forums at Alizée America. Turns out this was originally part of a post was originally made by a gentleman by the name of julien over at AFC. Snatcher’s rough English translation of julien's post, and some analysis, appears below:

End of the RCA label! Alizée will soon change teams (Still under Sony)!

Once this team change is made, promotion will resume. FIFTY SIXTY will have it's promotion, and other singles will follow.

In October, Alizée will be in Madame Figaro for a special Gainsbourg issue. Several artists participated. Each artist took a picture and said a word.

Next Saturday, there will be an interview with Jean Fauque (And Alizée?) on the new program "Access private."

The Concert Tickets sell very well! (I wanted to add in the euphoria)

------

Basically, it sounds like she's getting new management that wants to re-launch promotion (hopefully better this time), first with Fifty Sixty and then with other singles. It's like a fresh start for the album! Edit, more info from Nidalizee: It's not just Alizée that's leaving RCA, the whole label is shutting down! The artists are being moved to other branches within Sony. Alizée is going to JIVE EPIC.

Hmm. Rumor or fact? It remains to be seen, as I’ve so far been unable to independently confirm that RCA is indeed being shut down. But if it does prove true…while Sony BMG’s shuttering of RCA Records—a label with a long and storied history behind it—makes for some pretty distressing commentary on the state of today’s music industry, could this potentially be a positive development for Team Alizée?

Almost as long as I’ve been an Alizée fan (which is admittedly not long, only since the end of last year) I’ve been reading complaints that RCA’s promotion for Psychédélices has been fairly lackluster, to the point of being virtually non-existant of late, and the time it’s taken for things to actually happen has bordered on ‘interminable’. For example, Alizée’s official site (the design and maintenance of which I can only assume falls under the purview of the label, RCA) hasn’t been updated since sometime in April…and though it’s certainly very pretty to look at and heavy on the bling, it’s sorely lacking in actual content.

And while there was a decent amount of promotion for the release of Mademoiselle Juliette as the album’s first single in December (despite the single having been originally released at the end of September), there’s been comparatively little for its second single, Fifty Sixty, which debuted in February. The beginnings of a viral marketing campaign looked to be underway with the unveiling of the Psychédéclips website in May, which features not one but two official remixes of the song alongside the original. But a major component of the site—Lilly Town TV, which is apparently intended to feature fan-created content (a la YouTube)—is still “Coming Soon” four months later. (This is an absolute shame, as I can think of at least a few fan-made remixes that could really rock the casbah, and one in particular that's so good, it positively transcends the source material.)

Jive/Epic, meanwhile, is another subsidiary label of Sony BMG, which publishes a stable of enormously successful American music stars such as Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Jordin Sparks and Micheal Jackson, as well as internationally (if not domestically) renowned artists like Lemar, Indochine, and Amel Bent. Will they have more on the ball than RCA Records did? Is there a greater chance of Alizée crossing over to America with Jive/Epic?

The rumor of increased/renewed promotion for Fifty Sixty gives me hope as far as the former is concerned. And as far as the second goes…check out these excerpts from the Wikipedia entry of another French Jive/Epic artist, Julien Doré:

Julien Doré, born July 7, 1982, in Alès (Gard), is a French singer, winner of the 5th season of the television show Nouvelle Star, aired on the French Television M6 channel.

His most memorable performances and revelations were while singing "Moi... Lolita" from "Alizée" and "...Baby One More Time" from "Britney Spears", Dance music songs, in acoustics.

Les Limites [the first single from Julien’s first studio album, Ersatz] is to be released June 16, 2008 worldwide. It was released March 31, 2008 in France. On Perez Hilton's celebrity gossip blog, the music video made its world premiere.

A worldwide release, for a French artist, with a video premiere on Perez Hilton’s blog. This is the kind of North American exposure that Alizée fans over here have been dreaming about for years! (Although, we could probably do without the naked guy with the banjo...) Granted, Les Limites hasn’t exactly set the US music charts on fire…but I’d be willing to bet that he didn’t already have an established fan base here who were not only entrenched, but were already actively evangelizing for him without any guidance or co-operation from Jive/Epic.

Alizée, on the other hand, does have that going for her, in spades. We’re already dropping disques, handing out fliers, infiltrating other artists' concerts, and spreading the signal. Imagine the possibilities if her label was on the same page…or if, dare I suggest it, they were working with us?

Attention Jive/Epic folks: if you’re reading this, we’d love to talk to you.

More on this story as it develops, folks...stay tuned!

The hardest-working Canadian in show business!

2008-09-05T05:36:00.000-07:00

I yet live!

My apologies for the lack of updates this week, folks. Though I was between jobs when I first began this mad crusade of mine, I’ve since become gainfully employed. On the bright side, this means I no longer have to make the unenviable choice of either funding Operation: Disque Drop or eating this month. The downside is, of course, less time in which to actually devote to the many responsibilities of Op Drop, only one of which is coming up with new blog content.

It’s a vicious cycle, I tells ya.

This doesn’t mean I’ve completely abandoned my post, however—I am, after all, the hardest working Canadian in show business. (Thanks, aw!) Most of my free time this week has been devoted to finalizing the contents of the Mark IV disques I teased on Tuesday. The biggest upgrade to hit Op Drop yet, the Mark IV’s are DVDs, playable in most set-top DVD players, which negates the whole ‘will this obviously home-made disque give my computer a virus?’ drawback of the earlier CD-ROMs. Hopefully, the convenience and perceived safety of a DVD will entice more of the people who discover a dropped disque to actually play the thing!

Size matters not? Pfft, whatever!

The Mark IV’s also have one other pretty big edge over the previous iterations: they’re freakin’ huge! While a CD-R holds about 750 mb of data, a DVD-R can hold up to 4.6 gb worth! This translates into the ability for Op Drop to pack more Alizée into its ‘Alizée Fan Start Kits’. Much more Alizée—whereas the Mark I and II disques contained only five measly little AVI videos, the Mark IV now contains over an hour of fan-favorite music videos, television appearances, and live performances.

(The mp3s and desktop wallpapers from the previous disques are still there, but the end user is still going to have to pop the disque into their PC to find them, relegating them more to ‘bonus content’ rather than being the main attraction.)

It’s a veritable Alizée cornucopia, a collection of the videos that a large portion of Lili’s existing fanbase attribute to making them fans in the first place…playable not just in a little browser window on YouTube, but full-screen on virtually any TV and DVD player. If this doesn’t convert me some Lili-heathens, I don’t know what will.

More to come on the selections that made it onto the disque, and my rationale for choosing them later…and, as promised earlier, a few ideas on where the Mark IV’s will make their first appearance. For now, it’s time for Op Drop to rush off to its day job…

What can I say? A hard-workin' Canadian's work is never done.

Coming Attractions

2008-09-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

I need a vacation from my vacation!

OK, now that was a long weekend...and I mean that in every sense of the word.

On the bright side, after much cursing and gnashing of teeth, the upgrades to the Batcomputer are finally done, and the design and prep work for the next batch of 'Alizée Fan Starter Kit' disques is just about complete. On the not-so-bright side, all of the above hasn't exactly left me with a whole lot of time to do much of anything else...including coming up with content for today's blog post.

So here, instead, is a sneak preview at the contents of the brand-spankin' new Mark IV disques, which ought to be ready for dropping before the end of the week:

Not too shabby, huh? I'm really excited about these--the Mark IV is easily the best, and most professional-looking iteration of the Op Drop disque to date. And now that most of the up-front donkey work is out of the way, they're surprisingly not much more expensive or time-consuming to produce than the Mark II's were.

More on the Mark IV's tomorrow, along with an idea where and when they might first start being dropped. Because, from the look of things, they'll be done just in time...

Alizée and Yelle: Two great tastes that taste great together!

2008-08-30T07:05:00.000-07:00

Image courtesy of Operation LTNY

More info after the jump. (Get it?)

Just a quick reminder that Operation: Disque Drop is still looking for remote operatives to "infiltrate" the upcoming North American tour of French MySpace singing sensation Yelle. If you're a fan interested in promoting Alizée in the United States (or Vancouver, BC), this is a great way to get involved for zero dollars--I'll ship you the disques you need to do the job, free of charge, if you'll provide the manpower and the legwork to get it done!

I've only been recently exposed to Yelle, myself--having just learned of her when NarutoSoul first posed the infiltration idea this week--but from what I've heard of the music on her MySpace, going to see Yelle would be worth it just for the experience of seeing Yelle. It's very fun, poppy and catchy. I'd definitely be hitting up one of the shows myself if they were playing in my town, but unfortunately it sounds like they were already here earlier this year before I knew of them. Even if you're not interested in pimping Alizée and Op Drop--which makes me a sad panda, indeed--I'd still recommend checking them out if you're a fan of Alizée, or French pop in general.

Also, if you're a New York-area Alizée fan, and you're going to be free on October 14th, Operation LTNY would really like to hear from you.

United States of Alizée

2008-08-29T16:25:00.000-07:00

"Some days, you just can't get rid of a bomb..."

Sorry for the lack of update this morning, folks. Operation: Disque Drop is experiencing some technical difficulties as I monkey with the Batcomputer to perform what I expected to be a fairly painless upgrade. It's proven to be more of a hassle than I expected--which is very much in keeping with virtually everything I've done in connection to Op Drop--but it ought to pay off handsomely when it's done. Watch this space early next week to find out exactly how! (Or, if you're really impatient, you might be able to find a little hint--OK, a big hint, actually--in the comments section of this post, here...)

So in lieu of any content that's actually related to Op Drop in some fashion, please accept the following Alizée factoid, which ought to be of interest to North American fans.

Did You Know...?

...that the USA is on the verge of overtaking Alizée's native France as her second-largest fanbase? It's true, at least according to the Google map on her official site. The United States currently weighs in with 220 fans, while France boasts 221. All it would take to tip the scales is for two peeps with a US zip code to access her "secret page" and key in their info to put themselves on the map!

Have no idea what I'm talking about? Didn't know that Alizée's official site even had a secret page? Brother, where have you been?!

Here, let's get Sir Wood from Alizée America to drop some science on you:

Step-by-Step How-To Join Alizée's fans on Google Map: (aka: the "Bonus" page)

1) Go to her official site, http://www.alizee-officiel.com/
2) Left click the big "X" with "Close" next to it.
(Note: This is not the [x] for your browser window.)
3) Tinkerbell should apprear.
4) Left click on an empty space and draw a geometric figure, ie: triangle (only triangle, square or 5-point star allowed).

Drawing tip: You left click to start and stop the line drawing, when you complete the figure a small blinking green dot will show that you've connected the all the lines to form the needed figure. (In vector terms, go "Tip to Tail.")

5) You will then be directed to the Bonus menu.
6) Left click the pink bubble, "Join Alizée's fans - Google Map".
7) Enter your pseudo/online name and e-mail address, then left click "Localize yourself on the map".
8) A new screen pops-up with Google map.
9) Select your country (from the drop down menu), enter your street address, and zip code.
10) Left click "Find out" and move the pointer to a closer location to your address if it's not correct.
11) Once you've completed moving the pointer, left click on "Confirm"

Voila, you're done and you can just bookmark this URL to go directly to the Alizée's fans - Google Map: http://www.alizee-officiel.com/googl...php?version=en

Thanks, Wood! (Can I call you 'Wood'?) Anyway, just an additional heads up from me: I don't know what's up with it, but the map is kinda FUBAR at the moment, with portions of it blanking out or not showing up for some reason. Don't let that stop you--adding yourself to the map will still produce a little stickpin for you, and add you to the total number of fans in your country, even if your stickpin isn't stuck to anything but a blank grey square.

I only mention all this because I heard a rumour once that Americans really like to win at stuff...and right now, you guys are sitting in a distant third. (Mexico is soundly kicking everybody's ass with a hefty 388 fans.) So what are you waiting for?! Get out there and represent!

(And uh...hey, Canadians? We have just 19 Alizée fans, total. Nineteen! That's just pathetic, you hosers! Turkey is pointing and laughing at us! So go sign up already, eh?)

UPDATE, 12:40 AM EST:

The USA has now successfully surpassed France, 225 fans to 221. Well done, guys! Mexico is still holding strong at 389...but toppling them can be done! Let all the American fans you meet to put themselves on this page, on every Lili forum and YouTube video you frequent! (Let them know there's some sweet desktop wallpapers in it for them on the bonus page, too!)

Meanwhile, Canada is...still at just 19. C'mon guys, you're makin' us look like jerks, here...

Op Drop at Fan Expo: Dia 3

2008-08-28T07:30:00.000-07:00

Are we there yet?

Friday’s Op Drop at Fan Expo had surpassed all expectations, despite it being the shortest day. Saturday’s performance had been underwhelming, in spite of it being the longest and best-attended day of the convention by far. This had all run exactly counter to what I’d predicted—it was like I’d somehow wound up in Alizée Bizarro World. Given that Sunday historically fell somewhere between the two, both in terms of length and attendance, I wasn’t sure what to expect anymore. All bets were off at this point.

The only two things I knew with certainty were a) that I had only to drop a little over 20 disques in order to reach my goal of 100, and call it a day, and b) I was so exhausted that I desperately couldn’t wait for it over and done with, so I could call it a day. And looking around at my nerd and geek brethren, I could tell I wasn’t alone. Even the ubiquitous cosplaying teenagers were beginning to look a little haggard and rough around the edges. The con fatigue had definitely set in. There’s only so much unrelenting nerdery (and nonstop advertising) a body can take, after all.

You can see where this might have created a bit of an obstacle for Op Drop. Though there was still a relatively steady (if thin) trickle of Expo virgins heading in from the registration tables, the vast majority of the attendees were tired, two-day veterans who weren’t in the mood to pick up or look at anything, anymore. Discarded posters, fliers, postcards and promotional materials of all kinds littered the con floor, and every available surface. And this was the environment that I was trying to drop twenty more disques into. It wasn’t exactly a winning strategy.

Still, I set about doing what I could, clearing obvious piles of garbage off chairs, tables and payphones and replacing them with freshly-dropped disques. This earned me quite a few thankful—if puzzled—looks from the maintenance staff, and at least one stern talking-to from a security guard (who had apparently noticed me on and off all weekend—whoops—and assumed I was trashing my competition’s advertising in favour of my own).

It was kind of a dicey moment, especially when I admitted that I didn’t have a vendor’s pass and hadn’t been authorized to distribute promotional materials by the convention’s promoter…but after I showed him one of the disques, and he read the message on the back, he surprisingly gave me the thumbs-up to carry on, as long as I continued not to harass anybody or interfere with the paid advertising. He even went so far as to give me his name in case I got stopped again, so his colleagues could check that I’d cleared it with him. I just wish I could remember it so I could thank him here—he was very cool about the whole thing, much more than he had to be, or than I had any right to expect. Couldn’t convince him to keep the disque and give it a try, but at least he smiled and wished me luck as he handed it back.

(I sincerely doubt he’s reading this, or even remembers that the exchange took place, but just in case he is—thanks for being Commissioner Gordon to my Batman, sir. You rock.)

Emboldened by my new quasi-almost-official endorsement, but still desperately needing to unload almost twenty disques, I immediately set about pushing the boundaries of it. Though I’d stayed away from the registration area so far, heavily patrolled as it was by security guards and convention volunteers alike, I was beginning to sense that appealing to the Expo virgins right as they walked in the door might be my only hope. Fortunately, with the influx of newcomers being much more manageable compared to the endless sea of humanity that had been fighting to get through the doors on Saturday, the registration staff had been pared down to just two volunteers. Even more fortunately, they appeared to be much more interested in flirting with each other than in anything I might be doing, making it very easy for me place an Alizée disque or two next to each pile of registration forms.

The next several hours passed slowly as—bored and broke—I paced up and down the convention’s three floors, checking on the status of the disques I’d dropped, replacing the precious few that had been picked up, and recovering and re-distributing those that had gone hours without seeing any interest. I cursed when I returned to find one disque sitting bare on a payphone, after hours of not being touched, having been stripped of its cheap vinyl clamshell case and discarded. (Oddly enough, though, after deciding to leave the bare disque there and see what happened, I returned an hour later to see that it, too, had been picked up.)

The disques in the registration area seemed to be moving better than the others—and the two volunteers had progressed to a full-contact tickle war—so I gradually began moving all of them up there…until finally, at about five thirty, a half hour before the convention was set to close, I did one last circuit of the show floor, and discovered that there wasn’t a single one of my disques left to be found.

I’d actually done it. 100 disques dropped in three days. Picked up by one hundred people who (hopefully) took it home and let it infect them with Alizée-fever. It seems like such a paltry amount—less than 1% of the over 50,000 people who reportedly attended the show—but it was surprisingly hard work.

Was it worthwhile? Will Alizée-fever take hold? Will it spread? Could this be the humble beginning of a Lili-demic? Only time will tell…

(Well, time and you. If you’re one of those 100 people who picked up a disque at Fan Expo, please do speak up…either in the ShoutBox to the left or the comments below, or email me at disquedrop@gmail.com. Let us know where you found it, what you thought of it, and what you’re planning to do with it next.)

Vive La Resistance (d'Alizée)!

2008-08-27T21:01:00.000-07:00

Hey, Amigo!

You may remember, back on Monday, when I called out any Alizée fans who might be following Op Drop's progress from the west coast:

P.S. A Message to West Coast Alizée Fans:
Last weekend, Operation LTNY:
300 Cards
40 CDs
15 Posters
3 People
2 Days
This weekend, Operation: Disque Drop:
100 CDs
1 Dude
3 Days
You West Coast folks have some catching up to do.
I’m just sayin’…

Well, it looks like I just might have to eat those words, as it appears not everybody on the Left Coast has been content to sit back and wax their surfboards while us Easties do all the work. Check out this post from Amigo! over a the Alizée America forums:

Well New York City isn't the only town getting a dose of Alizée (Better late than never eh?)

It is finally time to hit the west coast of the US

I already begun the campaign the previous weekend by placing several business cards (see image below) In many places throughout the heart of the city (e.g the union square area, market st. area, which include the virgin megastore and various restaurants) This was for the most part, a trial run to scope out even more areas to promote Lili. This coming weekend I will be hitting the heart of the city once again and expanding to different neighborhoods throughout the city. (and this time take at least one... picture... )

Here are the items I will be dropping and handing out...

* Business cards on the left (Front and back)

* The CD's : Track listing...
1. Par Les Paupières
2. Lilly Town
3. Mon Taxi Driver
4. La Isla Bonita
5. Mademoiselle Juliette
6. Fifty Sixty
7. Mademoiselle Juliette (Push Up Plump DJ's Remix)

I wanted to concentrate on Psychédélices rather then mix songs from all the albums. And all tracks are only about a min and a half except for the remix which is about two and a half min.

* The Posters on the right (Some of which are printed on Sticker Paper to prevent easy removal )

And yes... I am planning to "infiltrate" Yelle's concert in SF on october 31st to bring some of their fans on over to our side

Yes, it will take a lot more work, but in the long run if I at least get some new fans here, it'll be worth it.

Pretty cool, huh? It's awesome to see somebody taking the LTNY model and running with it in their home city. I'll be watching LTSF closely and reporting on its progress here. Hopefully others are inspired by Amigo's example and take up the charge elsewhere!

And speaking of taking a model and running with it, it looks like Lefty12357 (who produces most of the music heard in the most recent episodes of the Alizée America Podcast) has undertaken a few Op Drops of his own, in the wilds of Minnesota!

I've been using the disc drop method in my area. So far I've dropped about a dozen CDs in the last 2 weeks. I just copied Snatcher's design and track layout. I hope to keep it up at a steady pace.

Man, I can't tell you how excited this makes me. It's not just a one-man operation anymore, or two guys working seperately but in parallel in different cities. Granted, there's still only four of us...but I guarantee you that this is only the beginning.

Remember, if you want to get involved, it's not hard to do. It won't even cost you anything! Operation: Disque Drop is looking for remote operatives to perform Op Drops in and around the venues for Yelle's upcoming North American tour. Check out Yelle's MySpace for dates and venues near you, then either drop me a comment or shoot me an email to let me know you're interested. I'll supply the disques, and even ship them free of charge, if you'll supply the manpower and the legwork!

Op Drop at Fan Expo: Dia 2

2008-08-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

Hail to the Geek!

Though Friday’s Op Drop had surpassed even my wildest expectations, I still had a lot of work ahead of me: I was only roughly a third of the way to my goal of dropping 100 Alizée music samplers and ‘Fan Starter Kits’ before the weekend was out. It was a daunting task, but given how smoothly Friday had gone—with every one of the over thirty disques I’d dropped apparently having been picked up, some just minutes after I’d dropped them—I figured Saturday would be a cakewalk, given that it was traditionally the busiest day of the three.

What I didn’t realize is that this would be both a blessing, and a curse. While it meant more people to whom I could potentially introduce Alizée, it also meant more people, period. A lot more people…people who would get in my way, congregate around (then refuse to walk away from) prime drop locations, “helpfully” hand back to me the disque I’d “accidentally” left behind, catch me in the act and force me into an awkward conversation explaining exactly what I was doing, and generally make it harder to disque drop in the smoothly clandestine manner to which I’d become accustomed.

The sheer crush of humanity—a larger portion of whom were now dressed in bulky and outlandish costumes in preparation for that night’s masquerade—caused traffic patterns to shift wildly, rendering some of Friday’s best drop locations useless and inaccessible. It also brought increased vigilance both from security and from the retailers in the dealer room—more than once, I’d drop a disque on what I’d thought was an unattended table or display, only to have it a volunteer I hadn’t seen hand it right back to me. (Or, in the case of one memorable exchange, actually throw it at my head.) As the day wore, and the building continued to fill up, it became harder and harder to even find an inch of empty space on which make a drop…and then, once found, to manage it without being completely frackking obvious.

Father Christmas vs. The Daylight Detective

(I should probably explain that—I mean, who cares if a half-dozen of my fellow comic geeks notice me dropping it, right? One of them might even be motivated to pick it up out of curiousity. The only explanation I can give is that it violates my personal “rules” of disque dropping as I’ve come to think of it. Discovering one in a random public place is meant to be kind of magical and mysterious…like coming down the stairs on Christmas morning and finding presents in the empty stocking you put up the night before. Getting caught in the act of a drop…I always feel like it robs it of its mystique, somehow…like Batman fighting crime in broad daylight, or something. There’s also the fact that I’m painfully shy around strangers—particularly cosplaying cuties in extremely abbreviated outfits—which makes having to explain a bungled drop somewhat akin to slow torture, but that’s neither here nor there.)

In short, as far as drops went, the day proceeded slowly. Despite my being there nearly twice as long, by the time the doors were set to close on Saturday, I’d barely managed to match the all-time record high I’d set on Friday. And for the first time in my career, I was actually forced to make a few humiliating recoveries, as disques I’d dropped first thing in the morning at what had been prime drop locations the night before had remained there the entire day without so much as being touched. At the end of the day, I actually did better in just five hours on Friday than I had in nine hours on Saturday.

Still, thirty-plus drops in a day was nothing to sneeze at, and I was still on pace to meet my goal of dropping a hundred. All it would take was a little over 20 drops on Sunday, and I’d be golden. Surely I’d be able to drop twenty lousy disques in seven hours, especially given that the hall wouldn’t be nearly as packed as it had been on Saturday, right?

Right?

Op Drop and Alizée shine the Batsignal!

2008-08-26T19:33:00.000-07:00

An exciting franchise opportunity from Op Drop...

Over at the Lilly Town USA and Alizée America forums, NarutoSoul (mastermind behind LTUSA's birthday serenade to Alizée) has come up with yet another brilliant idea, this time to promote Lili here in North America:

"The French artist Yelle has a US tour coming up this fall. These shows are a great opportunity for the US fans to get more people interested in Alizée. Wear something Lili-related, drop Alizée materials, have fun! The tour's success would also be something to show Sony/BMG that promoting a French artist in the US is a viable business venture.

Yelle's Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/iloveyelle

See if she'll be performing near you!"

This is indeed a golden opportunity for us to spread the Lili-love to folks who might not be aware of her, but who'd definitely be open to the idea of getting to know her better. Here's the rub though: given the locations and the timing of the shows nearest me, it doesn't look likely that Operation: Disque Drop is going to be able to capitalize on it...which really, really sucks.

So this is where you come in, folks--if you're an Alizée fan who'd be interested in being a remote operative for Op Drop at one of these shows, please leave me a comment here on the blog, or email me at disquedrop@gmail.com. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to distribute as many disques as possible in and around your venue, in the method of your choosing. I'll supply the disques you need to do the job, and ship them to you absolutely free of charge, if you can supply the manpower and legwork to get it done.

So, what do you say? Do you have what it takes to be an Alizée Batman? Think about it and let me know.

(P.S.: If you're in the New York area, and considering hitting up the show on October 14th, I'd suggest you contact Ben at Operation LTNY instead, as it sounds like he's already hatching a plan, even as I write this.)

Op Drop at Fan Expo: Dia 1

2008-08-26T06:30:00.000-07:00

Holy Cosplaying Cuties, Batm--er, Alizée!

Friday, as indicated by the post I made that day, was kind of a mad panic as I rushed to get the last of that day’s disques burned and labeled before heading out to Fan Expo—40 disques altogether. The stressful state of mind wasn’t at all helped by the fact that I’d decided to change gears at absolutely the last minute, and make half of them the new Mark III ‘music only’ CDs, which necessitated a slight redesign of the labels.

Mark III Back

Mark III Front

As you can see, proofreading was not my strong suit that morning. Nor was it for the rest of the weekend…I only noticed the rather glaring typo in the track listing as I pulled up the image just now. Argh.

I was also feeling surprisingly nervous as I made my way down to the convention, much as I had the night I made my first few drops. Though I’d since gotten pretty good at dropping them inconspicuously, without feeling like I stuck out like a sore thumb, it had always been in relatively small quantities, spread out over large areas. And at that point, my career total of drops had been in the high teens. Dropping a hundred disques over the course of three days in a relatively confined and crowded space was daunting to say the least. Surely, sooner or later, somebody was bound to catch me in the act and start asking questions…and I really, really didn’t want to have to explain to anybody—particularly security—why I wasn’t a terrorist, or something.

Fortunately, I needn’t have worried. Despite all the years I’d been coming to Fan Expo, there were two things I’d overlooked about it: first, that it’s almost impossible to look conspicuous in a roomful of cosplaying teenagers in full Stormtrooper armor or barely-there anime outfits as they strike poses, stage mock-lightsaber battles and play spin-the-Pocky with each other. Second, that if there’s one thing these people understand more than anything, it’s what being a rabid fan of a semi-obscure foreign celebrity is all about! Though I failed my stealth check more than once over the course of the weekend, almost without exception, my stammered and embarrassed explanation invited polite—and in at least a few cases, genuine—interest.

Though Friday was the shortest of the three days, running from 4pm to 9pm in the evening, it was also by far my best day in terms of drops and pickups. After casing out favorable drop points on the show’s three floors—pay phones, food court tables, unmanned booth tables and unguarded displays, and what few precious empty seats were scattered around the hall—I settled on a route that would let me drop disques as efficiently and inconspicuously as possible, while still letting me see everything I wanted to see.

The first circuit, which must have taken me the better part of three hours—mainly because I kept getting distracted by one thing or another—saw me drop about half of the 40 disques I’d brought with me. And as I began my next lap, I was excited to see that virtually every single disque I’d dropped had disappeared, and the few that hadn’t at least looked like they’d been picked up and given a look-over. Encouraged—and foolishly believing this meant the rest of the weekend was going to be a snap—I decided to pace myself and take it easy, breaking off from my mission for long stretches to shop, look around, and attend a few panels.

I’d be kicking myself to that come Sunday. I’m almost certain that if I’d really pushed it, I could have exhausted the supply of disques I’d brought with me, and then some. If I had to do it over again—and who knows, in a year’s time, I just might be—I think I’d aim to drop at least half, if not two-thirds of the weekend’s total payload on that first night, while everybody’s still excited to be there, and before they’re sick to death of having a flier, a promo comic or some other piece of marketing thrust into their hands every thirty seconds. (Lord knows I certainly wasn’t interested in picking up anything else come Sunday afternoon…but we’ll get there.)

I wound up dropping just over thirty disques that first night, right on target to reach 100 drops by Sunday evening, and more than doubling my career total. And it had been so easy, too—I hadn’t been spotted once, and as far as I could tell, every disque I’d dropped had been picked up. I was practically giddy with excitement over how well it was working. As I called it a night and headed for the subway home, I briefly considered dropping my few remaining disques along the way, as had been my standard M.O. up until that point.

“Nah,” I said to myself. “Why waste them? You’ve got the whole weekend ahead of you, and tomorrow’s going to be even easier than tonight was!”

Uh huh. Little did I know what the rest of the weekend had in store…

Success! (Well, kinda...)

2008-08-24T22:10:00.000-07:00

"...and boy, are my arms tired! Wocka wocka!"

I just got back home from FanExpo. After three days there, I am possibly more exhausted than I have been in my entire life leading up to this moment. So this is going to be a very short post…for real, this time. I’m happy to report, however, that Op Drop’s mission at Nerd Prom was an unqualified success: despite some difficulties encountered on Sunday, 100 disques were successfully dropped over the course of the weekend.

Go me!!

Of course, what remains to be seen is whether any of these disques manages to successfully convert themselves a Lili-heathen. Sadly, I didn’t receive any responses over the course of the convention, neither here on the blog, nor on any of the other sites that the readme file points to, which was a little disheartening. But then, I didn’t become an Alizée fan overnight, either…it was probably about two weeks after seeing that first ‘sexy fish dance’ video before I made the effort to track down who the pretty French girl in it actually was. All I can do is trust that I’ve planted the seed, and hope that the contents of the disques I’ve dropped will sustain it until it blossoms into full-blown Lili-fandom.

Speaking of the ‘sexy fish dance’ video, I want you to take a look at this outfit:

Wearing this, Alizée would have fit right in at this convention. She may have even been severely overdressed. Booth Babes and cosplaying teenaged cuties alike, I bless you from the bottom of my heart. You gave me the wherewithal to keep going, even when I was at my weariest. (Cosplaying dudes too, actually—not that I swing that way, but there were some seriously wicked-awesome costumes going on at this thing. Next year I am definitely bringing a camera!)

A full report of the experience is to come, probably doled out in multiple parts over the next week, but for now I am going to bed. In lieu, please accept this video summary of LTNY’s successful assault on Times Square last weekend:

P.S. A Message to West Coast Alizée Fans:

Last weekend, Operation LTNY:

300 Cards
40 CDs
15 Posters
3 People
2 Days

This weekend, Operation: Disque Drop:

100 CDs
1 Dude
3 Days

You West Coast folks have some catching up to do.

I’m just sayin’…

Found an Alizée disque at FanExpo? Welcome!

2008-08-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

Welcome and bienvenue, visitors from FanExpo! Thanks for joining us here at Operation: Disque Drop, a one-man (so far) grassroots fan effort to spread awareness of Alizée and grow her fanbase here in North America. If you or someone you know found a CD in an inconspicuous place somewhere in the convention, and that disc led you here, thank you for proving that this crazy idea might actually work!

I hope you enjoy your first exposure to the wonder that is Alizée. If you haven’t already, I invite you to explore your disque and open your mind to some new music. I think you might have just found your new favorite artist!

Then, in either the Shoutbox to the left or in the comment section of the blog below, let us know how and where in the convention you found it, what you thought of it, and what you're going to do with it next! (Also, if you could mention which version of the disque you received—music-only, or music-plus-videos, that would be cool, too.)

If you’d like to learn more about Alizée, and interact with other North American fans on the web, the absolute best places to start are Alizée America and Lillytown USA. Both communities are filled with fun and friendly fans who absolutely love welcoming new converts, and would be more than happy to answer any questions you may have. Links to other Alizée sites on the intertubes, including her official MySpace, Facebook and YouTube pages, can be found in the upper left-hand margin of this page.

If you’re curious about Operation: Disque Drop (or ‘Op Drop’ for short) and what it’s all about, you can either check out the archives down at the bottom-left of the page, or start here at the first post and work your way forwards. (Don’t worry, it won’t take long—I’ve only been at it for a couple of weeks.) If you have any questions that I haven’t answered exhaustively in the blog—I know, I know, I tend to run off at the mouth, a lil’—please feel free to again either leave a comment, or shoot me an e-mail at disquedrop@gmail.com. I’ll be checking both the blog and my e-mail periodically throughout the weekend, so keep an eye out for a reply sooner rather than later!

Thanks again for visiting. I hope you enjoy your stay!

Mutation of a Disque? (Snikt!)

2008-08-22T07:30:00.000-07:00

The blind, searing panic before the storm

This is gonna be a quick post—I still have a ton of work to do before heading to FanExpo this afternoon, to begin Op Drop’s biggest operation yet: the dropping of 100 disques over the course of three days and 270, 000 square feet, in the midst of over 50,000 comic, sci-fi, anime and gaming fans. Hopefully, I’ll be able to convert at least a few of these people into Lili fans, as well…

(I think the Stormtrooper is a pretty good candidate. They're joiners, y'know...)

Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice...

Anyway, earlier this week, Ben from Operation LTNY, dropped by to leave a comment on Tuesday’s post, and made a point I’ve actually been struggling with since the very earliest stages of Op Drop:

“Hi there, Ben from LTNY here. I really like what you're doing! But I can think of one problem. At least speaking for myself, I'd never put a strange found disc inside my computer. Despite saying no viruses or spyware, how can know? It's like having unprotected sex. That's one reason LTNY has stuck to audio CDs. Those either just play or don't, they won't break your stereo.”

Hmm...I’ve talked before about my rationale for making the Op Drop disques “Alizée Fan Starter Kits” (containing mp3s, AVI clips and a few desktop wallpaper images) as opposed to just a straight-ahead music-only CD. With mp3 players being so prevalent now, and viral videos like ‘J’en Ai Marre!’ appearing to play a pretty big part in winning over so many of the existing North American fans—on top of the whole ‘language barrier’ issue posed by the fact that Alizée sings almost exclusively in French—it just seemed like a no-brainer to go the multimedia route. As I’ve said before, you don’t go to war and leave your most effective weapons at home!

Also, looking at it from a logical standpoint…while I’m certainly no hacker, I tend to think that propagating a computer virus via random CDs dropped in public places, masquerading as fan promotion for a semi-obscure French pop singer would be awfully inefficient, mais non? Isn’t your average hacker a lot smarter and more resourceful than that? And, um, also prone to not wanting to leave the house?

I know, I know…who am I to talk? I’m spending my weekend at Nerd Prom, after all.)

But while it appears that logic and reason are on my side in this, the fact remains that we’re living in a pretty illogical and unreasonable age right now, in a culture that’s sadly wracked with paranoia and suspicion. I could go on at length about the root causes for it, and the disastrous effect they’ll still be having on our society a generation or two from now, but it wouldn’t change anything. As things stand right now, it only seems to be common sense to somebody like Ben—who, from my limited dealings with him, I gather to be a very rational and intelligent individual—to err on the side of caution, and not put an Op Drop disque in his computer and explore its contents.

…which is kind of counterproductive, given that the whole aim of Op Drop is to get rational and intelligent individuals to do exactly that, and discover Alizée in the process.

You see my dilemma.

This was one of the big reasons behind the push to upgrade the disques from the sad, obviously home-made Mark I Prototypes to the slicker and more polished Mark II’s—not only will a more professional-looking disque naturally be more attractive, but hopefully a recipient will be more willing to take a chance on trusting it if it doesn’t look like it was made by the Unabomber.

As an experiment, though, I’m also going to take a page from LTNY’s playbook, and change gears a little bit: of the 100 disques that I plan to distribute at FanExpo this weekend, 40 of them are going to be brand-new Mark III ‘music only’ disques, playable in a standard CD player. They’ll feature the exact same track list as the Mark II’s, but be stripped of the videos and wallpapers, and have different packaging that invites the listener to learn more about Alizée here at Op Drop. We’ll see which of the two disques garners the greater response this weekend, and adjust our future direction accordingly.

OK, so that wasn’t short at all! And I’m still horribly behind, blargh!

Anyway, stay tuned to Op Drop all weekend for updates from FanExpo. Remember, if you’re an Alizée fan in the Toronto area for the weekend, and you’d like to lend a hand, drop me a note either here in the comments below, in the ShoutBox to the left, or email me at disquedrop@gmail.com!

Lights out in Lilly Town

2008-08-21T21:13:00.000-07:00

A quick hit 'n' run post as I make my final rounds on the interwebs before turning in for the night:

• Simultaneously the funniest and (literally) sweetest Alizée birthday tribute I've seen all day, RadioactiveMan over at Alizée America has continued what appears to be an annual tradition of baking Lili a birthday cake. Though he claims this year's cake isn't as impressive as last year's, I think it turned out pretty damned impressive. Check it out for yourself here.

• Speaking of AAm, Ciara and the Alizée America Podcast have returned after a short hiatus. This episode has a special focus on the promotion of Lili in North America, with both Snatcher42 (aka Ben from Operation LTNY) and Ciara touching on it in seperate segments. Op Drop isn't mentioned specifically by name--given the lead time of the podcast (and the extreme lead time of this episode in particular), it's likely we weren't up and running until it was already in post-production--but the lovely Miss C says she'll likely be coming back to the topic on a regular basis... so in a future episode maybe? Let's hope!

• Finally, today's post on the Alizée blog from aw is a funny and interesting look at the effect Lili has on her fans, and the crazy lengths we'll go to for her (like, say, baking cakes for her, producing podcasts about her, and promoting her out-of-pocket on a continent half a world away). And I don't just mention this because he's very kindly pimping for Op Drop not just in his post, but all over his site. Well OK, not just because if it...really. (Thanks, aw! I appreciate it!)

And we're out! Only one more sleep 'til Nerd Prom! (Ugh, still so much to do...)

Birthday-girl Alizée and Op Drop: Partying it up, nerd-style!

2008-08-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

Go Lili...it's your birthday...go Lili...it's your birthday!

Before we get started today, let’s take a minute and join the rest of Lili-fandom--particularly NarutoSoul and all his conspirators at Lillytown USA-- in wishing our girl Alizée a very emphatic (if slightly off-key) ‘Joyeux Anniversarie!'

It was twenty-four years ago today that Corsica’s gift to the world first saw daylight, and she’s been spreading magic (and pixie dust) in her wake every day since. Happy birthday, Lili! I hope you get everything you wish for this year, and more!

(If you'd like to take a moment to send Alizée your own heartfelt wishes, here's some handy links to her official MySpace and Facebook pages!)

So how is Op Drop going to be celebrating Alizée’s birthday weekend, you ask? That’s easy—we’re goin’ to a party. A very big party…for nerds…

That’s right, kids—Operation: Disque Drop is gonna be geeking it up in full effect for three days at FanExpo, Canada’s largest annual comic/sci-fi/anime/gaming/horror convention, and the third-largest show of its kind in North America (a.k.a. Nerd Prom), and I could not be more excited if I tried! We’re gonna be rubbin’ elbows, pressin’ flesh and gettin’ down with everyone from TNG’s Data, Smallville’s Lex Luthor and B-Star G’s Admiral Odama, to the pimp of the LoTR trilogy himself, Sean Motherlovin’ Astin. (And lest you think it’s all just a big sausage party, Kristy Swanson, Gabrielle from Xena, and Kara from the last season of Smallville are also gonna be there…)

You know who I’m the most jazzed about, though? The Fonz, baby. Ayyyyyy!

Tonight we're gonna party like it's Nineteen-Nerdy-Nine!

As much as this sounds like nothing more than a non-stop, fun-filled geek orgy, though, it’s going to be a working weekend for Op Drop. With over 50,000 fans in attendance, most of them (let’s be honest) single eighteen-to-forty-year-old males, FanExpo presents possibly the single greatest opportunity all summer to spread awareness of Alizée to as many members of our target demographic as possible!

And that’s why I’ve set a rather daunting task for myself, as a birthday present to Alizée, to take on the single biggest Operation: Disque Drop to date: to drop no less than one hundred of the newly upgraded Mark II ‘Alizée Fan Starter Kit’ disques over the course of the convention. Sure, it sounds like a lot, but with 270,000 square feet to cover over three days, I ought to be able to manage. Heck, I think I’ll barely scratch the surface!

Which isn’t to say that I couldn’t use some help! If you’re an Alizée fan who’s planning to be in the Toronto area for FanExpo this weekend, and you’d like to get in on the Op Drop action, I’d love to hear from you! Drop me a line either here in the comments (or in the ShoutBox to the left), or e-mail me at disquedrop@gmail.com, and we’ll set something up! C’mon out and help me show our fellow geeks, nerds and dorks some Lili-love!

Oy, look at the time…I’ve got about forty more disques to press before Friday. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about a possible shift in strategy for Op Drop, brought on by a comment from none other than the man and the legend himself, Ben from Operation: LTNY. Tune in then, Op Drop fans…same Lili time, same Lili channel!

Evolution of a Disque, Part III

2008-08-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

Previously, on Operation: Disque Drop…

Allow me to explain…no wait, there is too much. Allow me to sum up. In case you’re just joining us here at Op Drop, here’s a quick bullet-point list of what we’ve covered so far…

When we last left our hero (me), I was on my way home from my most daring Op Drop yet, having dropped two disques in plain site in the middle of a busy tourist attraction, with my civilian companions completely unawares. Awash with pride and excitement, I logged onto the forums at Alizée America, where my first disques had directed my intended Alizée converts, certain that at least one of the ten had succeeded in their mission.

Yeah, well…I suppose it’s nice to have dreams. Not only did I not return to enthusiastic posts from brand-new converts, overflowing with gratitude for my part in exposing them to their favorite new artist…but in my disappointment, I also stumbled across an image that hit me like a sucker-punch to the gut, and drove all that pride and excitement right outta me…and replaced it with a sense of jealous humiliation that burned worse than a bad case of genital herpes. (Er…or so I imagine.)

Amateur Night In Dixie

Now before I show you what that image was, let me remind you exactly what I mean when I say that the Mark I disques were ‘rather unspectacular-looking’:

So, yeah…even at the time, I was aware of how cheaply homemade they looked. There was a reason for that: they were cheap and homemade, clumsily fashioned from a bunch of old CDs and paper envelopes that I happened to have lying around the house. But I told myself that was part of their charm…that the sheer ‘Look! I Made This For You!’ quality of them underlined the fact that it was the product of a genuine grassroots fan effort—a product of love, dammit!—and not of some soulless corporate promotional machine.

That argument started to ring a little hollow, even to me, after I saw this:

This is an image of the American sampler CDs that Ben and his crew from Operation LTNY were handing out in Times Square last weekend…which Ben burned, labeled and packaged himself, much as I had with the initial ten Op Drop disques.

Except, y’know…his looked good. Polished. Professional. Mine looked like they’d slapped together by a troupe of retarded girl scouts on a three-day tequila bender. No wonder they weren’t getting a response. Charmingly amateurish or no, I had to ask myself: if I found one of my own disques sitting on a bench in a subway station, would I be motivated to pick it up, take it home, and stick it in my computer? The honest answer: oh, hells no!

Clearly, it was time to go back to the drawing board…

Mark II: Building a Better Mousetrap (On the Cheap)

The problem was, I had limited resources with which to do it. Unlike Op Drop’s patron saints, Batman and Iron Man, I was not a billionaire captain of industry by day, blessed with a vast fortune and a state-of-the-art R&D facilities with which to equip my one-man crusade.

No, I was an unemployed writer faced with the uncomfortable choice of either making rent or eating for the month. The first ten disques had been made for exactly zero dollars, which was about all I could afford. Spending a small fortune on upgrading to semi-professional-looking disques that I was then going to hand out for free was not in the cards.

Or was it? While I might not have Bruce Wayne’s and Tony Stark’s billions or engineering genius, I do have the edge on both of them in at least one way: I live around the corner from a pretty kick-ass Dollar Store…and you’d be amazed at what you can find in a pretty kick-ass Dollar Store.

To wit:

HP Music CD-R 40X/700 MB – 3/$1.00

Either CD-R’s have really lost their cachet with the introduction of DVD-R’s in recent years, or these fell off the back of a truck somewhere, wink-wink. Either way, I scooped up two carousels of 50 (which in hindsight is an odd way to sell them, seeing as how 100 isn’t divisible by 3, but whatever) and didn’t look back. The only drawback to them was that, since they didn’t come with jewel cases or envelopes, I’d have to find a cheap way to package them myself. Fortunately for me, right across the aisle from them was these:

VINYL CD-R CLAMSHELL CASES – 10/$1.00

Admittedly kind of cheap-looking, but they snapped closed and stayed closed surprisingly well, held the CDs snug and still, and were translucent enough that you’d be able to see the disque’s face through them. Dressed up with some decent-looking labels on the front of the disque and the back of the case itself, they might just do OK. And speaking of labels…

SELECTUM BLANK CD/DVD ADHESIVE LABELS – 20 LABELS/$1.00

Again, cheap-looking at first blush—the labels are kinda thin, and are consequently a real bitch to work with—but the adhesive on them is surprisingly strong, holding strong even after being heated up by a spin in my computer’s CD drive. It took some trial and error with Photoshop and my inkjet to get them aligned right, but for five cents a label, it was worth the headache. And in the end, the labels came out looking pretty swanky.

Factoring in the cost of ink—thankfully, I had a few cartridges still on hand—I’d estimate my total outlay to be somewhere between 50 and 60 cents per disque. Not exactly the zero dollars it cost me to make the first ten…but given how much better they were going to look, I was pretty satisfied. And I guarantee you that Bruce Wayne spends at least double that on a freakin’ batarang…

Was it worth it, though? Well, take a look at how they turned out, and you be the judge:

Yeah, yeah, I know…the front of that disque looks awfully familiar. What can I say? It’s the perfect image! And imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, y’know…

Outfitted now with a much more polished, professional-looking disque, I set about mass-producing them, on an order tenfold of my initial salvo. But where to drop them that they’d have the greatest impact? The answer showed up in my Thunderbird Inbox just a few days ago…and suddenly I find myself faced with Op Drop’s biggest operation yet…

But more on this—you guessed it—tomorrow…same Lili time, same Lili channel.

Interlude: Mission Improbable

2008-08-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

Previously, on Operation: Disque Drop...

Well, I think we discovered why yesterday’s special guest imaginary bold headline reader didn’t show: he was too busy elsewhere leaving an extra-special early birthday present for Alizée. So much for wondering if he’s a closeted Lili fan…

Anyway, in case you’re just joining us, here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve covered so far on Op Drop:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it…

Despite how shoddily home-made the Mark I disques looked, it still took me the better part of an afternoon to burn all ten and get their packaging ready for dropping. Yeah, yeah, I know…they certainly didn’t look like much work went into them, but that personalized message was handwritten on the back of every single one! Believe it or not, I actually felt a flush of pride as I put the finishing touches on the last one…along with a flush of excitement. Like I said yesterday, I felt like Tony Stark completing his first crude suit of armor…and now that it was done, it was time to use it for that which it was built.

For him, that meant taking it out for a spin to put down the terrorist scum who’d kidnapped him and stolen his weapons. For me, it meant dropping me some disques, and converting me some Lili-heathens.

I stared at the pile of completed disques before me, wondering where and how I was going to do the deed, when suddenly the phone rang: a good friend, inviting me to dinner and drinks…at one of the many pubs near her apartment…right on the busiest subway line in the city…on a Friday night. And just like that, the die was cast. Operation: Disque Drop had its first mission.

Objective: To inconspicuously drop ten (10) disques in full public view along the [street name redacted to guarantee security of operative] subway line, to be discovered by unsuspecting Lili-heathens.

Assets: Aforementioned disques; nondescript laptop bag to aid in the carrying and distribution of said disques; fully-charged Sony PSP loaded with DVD rip of Alizée En Concert and the full complement of Alizée’s studio albums and remixes; transit pass.

Obstacles: Suspicious transit security agents; overachieving transit sanitation workers; drunken, rowdy, overly-curious (and, in one memorable case, motion-sick) teenagers and/or college students; “helpful” senior citizens who insist on letting you know that you “dropped something”, then chasing after you with it when you try to ignore them; lack of co-ordination caused by likely intoxication for return trip home.

Notes: Drunken teenagers/college students potentially useful as diversion against transit security/senior citizens. Inadvertently dropping disques in path of overzealous transit sanitation workers may result in irrecoverable loss of assets. Interchange between [redacted] line and [redacted] line is most highly-trafficked stop, and thus best target of opportunity. Wear comfortable shoes you don’t mind getting puke on. Several people will look at you funny.

Suggested Playlist: JBG, Mon Maquis, C’est Trop Tard, Gourmandises (live versions); J’en Ai Marre (Soft Skin Club Mix); J’ai Pas Vignt Ans! (Benny Benassi remix); A Contre-Courant (Steve Helpstrip Club Mix); Fifty Sixty (Lefty Remix); Mademoiselle Juliette, Lilly Town, Decollage (studio album versions).

Missed it by that much...!

I didn’t manage to successfully drop all ten disques that first night. As you can probably guess from the above, nervous and inexperienced in the realm of disque dropping, I suffered a few setbacks in my first fumbling attempts. I only managed one successful drop en route to the pub—a disque that I surreptitiously slid between my butt and my seat on the subway (the better to avoid the gazes of drunk kids and curious seniors) and sat on until the last possible moment, before jumping up and leaving it behind as I burst through the closing subway doors at my stop, almost getting caught between them in the process.

Alizée Batman, I was not. Not even close. Even Adam West would have been stealthier than I.

The way back in the early hours of the next morning was easier. Surrounded more by obliviously drunk kids than curious seniors (and bolstered with liquid courage, myself), I managed to double my career total of dropped disques on the return trip. That’s right: two whole successful drops—one on the train again (a little more casually, this time), and another on a bench at the crowded interchange platform. It would have been three, if it hadn’t been for that overzealous sanitation worker who picked up the last disque I dropped at my destination. (Although, who knows? Maybe he kept it, and he’s an Alizée fan now…)

Three successful drops, with the only casualties being one disque MIA, my poor ruined shoes, and my dignity. (See above, re: almost caught in subway doors.) I hadn’t achieved even fifty percent of my target for the night, but it didn’t matter; in the rush of inebriated pride I felt as I walked home from the station, I was more than happy to call the night a success.

My campaign had begin. A little shakily, true…but even Iron Man’s first foray into the fight against terrorism hadn’t gone entirely according to plan. Even if those first drops didn’t amount to anything—and to date, they still haven’t—at least I took action, and started building momentum. Every journey begins with a single step, even if it’s in vomit-covered shoes.

Over the next week and a half, with six disques left and my intial self-consciousness gradually becoming a thing of the past, I embarked on two more operations. The first saw me surreptitiously drop four disques downtown in the most highly-trafficked mall in the city’s core. (Once again, a “helpful” senior tried to chase after me with one, but when I told her with a wink that I’d meant to leave it behind, she smiled and seemed to understand.) And my third operation was an even greater success, as I managed to drop two disques right in plain sight, on either end of a major tourist attraction, completely unbeknownst to my unsuspecting civilian companions…and actually got to witness one of them being picked up, by a guy who seemed genuinely interested! (Never heard from him either way, but that’s neither here nor there…)

The Mark I’s had all been distributed (more or less). My mission was well underway. Feeling pretty good about myself, I headed back home and logged on to the forums at Alizée America (where those first disques had directed their recipients to learn more about Lili), certain in the knowledge that at least one of the ten had succeeded in winning over a brand-new Alizée convert.

Uh-huh. Didn't happen. Instead, I was treated to an image which took the wind right out of my sails, and almost literally made my heart sink to the soles of my feet.

(Wow, now how's that for a cliffhanger ending, huh kids? See you tomorrow...same Lili time, same Lili channel!)

Evolution of a Disque, Part II

2008-08-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

Previously, on Operation: Disque Drop...

Welcome back, Op Drop fans. No imaginary celebrity reader of bold headlines today, I’m afraid. I did have a rather impressive speaker lined up, but unfortunately he had to cancel due to time constraints—apparently a good three dozen other bloggers are scheduled to put words in his mouth today, and he just didn’t have the time to fit us in. (See what I did there? That was my rather lame attempt at timely political humor…and it’ll never happen again, promise.) It’s a shame too, since he and Alizée apparently have a goal in common: making the French language known in the United States. (Could he secretly be a closet fan, perhaps? Hmm…)

So anyway, here’s what we’ve covered so far on Operation: Disque Drop:

My videos! Let me show you them!

One more thing before we move onto new business—in referring to my last post while I was writing up this one, I realized that I neglected to actually link to the videos I included on the disc the way I’d intended. I’ve since gone back and edited the post to fix it, but in case you can’t be bothered to click on either of the links to it that I’ve already provided for you (slacker!), here they are again:

FIFTY SIXTY (Music Video)
MADEMOISELLE JULIETTE (Music Video)
J’AI PAS VINGT ANS! (Music Video)
LA ISLA BONITA (TV Performance)
J’EN AI MARRE! (TV Performance, and tactical nuke of Lili fandom)

Again, let me know in the comments what you think of the selection, whether you agree or think I’m totally off my nut. As the title of the post suggests, this is a project that’s constantly evolving, so if somebody makes a pretty compelling case for an alternate video or performance, there’s a decent chance it’ll show up in a future iteration of the disque.

So that’s the contents of the disque out of the way. Now that we know what’s on it, let’s take a look at the disque itself.

Mark I: So cheap, they’re practically free! (And boy, does it show.)

Once I got (stole) the intial idea for Op Drop, I immediately rushed into action. Like Tony Stark designing his Iron Man armor, for my first crude attempt I made do with whatever crude materials I had available on hand. In his case, it was a cache of state-of-the-art weapons stolen from his company by the terrorists who were holding him hostage. In mine, it was a package of 10 CD-Rs and a box of paper sleeves I had lying around the house, left over from a time before iPods and DVD burners, when dinosaurs walked the earth.

Both of our first attempts were functional, but lacking a certain aesthetic. They got the job done, but they sure weren’t pretty…

Actually, I’m not altogether sure mine even got the job done. Because I didn’t have this blog set up yet, the first ten disques I dropped pointed whoever found them to Alizée America, and asked them to post on the forums to tell the story about how their disque found them. At the time, I thought it’d be really cool and mysterious, both for the disques’ recipients and the forum regulars at AAm

Uh-huh. It’s been about a month since I dropped the first of those disques (more about which in a future post, later this week), and about two weeks since I dropped the last one. Nobody yet has ever posted on Aam to say they found one. Given how crude and homemade they looked, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if –as Euphoria suggested in the comments last Thursday—if they just wound up being thrown out or smashed…just like Tony’s Mark I armor after he escaped from those terrorists.

Clearly, for both of us, an upgrade was in order…

But more on that tomorrow. See you then, folks...same Lili time, same Lili channel!

Evolution of a Disque, Part I

2008-08-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

Previously, on Desperate Housewi—uh, Operation: Disque Drop…

Welcome back to Op Drop. Today’s imaginary reader of bold headlines is Marcia Cross, better known as Bree Van de Kamp from Desperate Housewives. Although I’m not a big fan of the show, Alizée is (at least according to aw’s informative and hilarious Alizée blog), and Bree is apparently her favorite character…so, voila. Personally, I preferred Marcia’s turn as Dr. Kimberly Shaw, the mentally unbalanced redheaded hottie on Melrose Place. Mmm…mentally unbalanced redheaded hottie…

Anyway, to business: the whole recap thing at the beginning of each post is getting kind of long and tedious, so we’re just gonna reduce it to bullet points this time around…

There’s that wasn’t so painful now, was it?

So what's on these discs you're dropping?

Geez, Marcia…do you have to sound so hostile when you ask that? Why are you glaring at me? What? No, I did not sleep with Micheal…!

So I sorta answered this question last time, in very broad terms—a variety of mp3’s from all four of Alizée’s albums, 5 avi’s of music videos and television performances, and a few desktop wallpapers, to make up kind of an ‘Alizée Fan Starter Kit’. But then I got distracted by the discussion of intellectual property law and the possibility of getting my pants sued off, and forgot to mention which songs and videos I actually used.

So, here they are:

The songs:

LILLY TOWN (Psychédélices)
MOI...LOLITA (Gourmandises)
GOURMANDISES (Alizée En Concert)
J.B.G. (Alizée En Concert)
J'EN AI MARRE! (Mes Courants Electriques)
I'M NOT TWENTY! (Mes Courants Electriques)
A CONTRE-COURANT (Mes Courants Electriques)
L'ALIZE (Alizée En Concert)
MADEMOISELLE JULIETTE (Psychédélices)
FIFTY SIXTY (Psychédélices)
MON TAXI DRIVER (Psychédélices)
DECOLLAGE (Psychédélices)
HUNG UP (Generation Disco)
LA ISLA BONITA (Psychédélices, Mexican Tour Edition)

The videos:

FIFTY SIXTY (Music Video)
MADEMOISELLE JULIETTE (Music Video)
J’AI PAS VINGT ANS! (Music Video)
LA ISLA BONITA (TV Performance)
J’EN AI MARRE! (TV Performance, and tactical nuke of Lili fandom)

The track selection is deliberately weighted more towards the latest album than the older ones, in an effort to make it more reflective of the artist Alizée is today. Although her debut single Moi…Lolita is unquestionably the biggest hit of her career, using Lilly Town as the introductory track was a no-brainer. Not only does it literally start out with a welcome to the listener, it’s easily the catchiest cut off Psychédelices and packed with awesome references that North American fans are likely to grok, even if they don’t understand the language. (“Wait…did she just take a shot at Paris Hilton?!”)

Most of the favorites from the album Gourmandises are represented by live tracks from En Concert instead, mainly just because I prefer how the concert versions sound compared to the studio versions. Though I’ve read more than a few complaints about the quality of her voice in En Concert, I tend to think that Lili actually sounds pretty frakkin’ awesome live. I’ll take enthusiasm and energy over pitch-perfect studio sterility any day of the week.

It’s also probably going to be controversial that I elected to include ‘I’m Not Twenty!’ instead of the superior French version ‘J’ai Pas Vingt Ans!’ My rationale is simply that I really wanted to get a third English song in there, and ‘I’m Not Twenty!’ is less of a bastardization than ‘I’m Fed Up!’, and more fun than ‘Youpidoo’ or ‘Amelie’. I tried to make up for it by throwing the French version of the JPVA music video.

Video selection was far easier: Fifty Sixty and Melle Juliette are her most recent, so they were no brainers; Alizée is at her most radiant in the video for JPVA (and you just can’t beat those shots of her going to town on the drums); La Isla Bonita is easily the hottest English-language performance she’s ever given; and, as I’ve stated often, this performance of JEAM has served Lili fandom well as our weapon of mass devotion. (Over nine million YouTube views can’t be wrong.)

Agree? Disagree? Think I’m completely off my nut? Let me know in the comments below. One of the great things about this project is its ability to grow and evolve over time, so if you think there’s a great track or awesome performance I’ve neglected (or I’ve included one on here that you absolutely can’t stand), go ahead and make your case, and we’ll see what happens!

More to come on the evolution of the disc next time, I think, as Marcia has just donned a short blonde wig and headed out to the garage, muttering something about ‘setting that bitch Jane up to take the fall’. I should probably see about putting a stop to that…

See you on Monday, Op Drop fans…same Lili-time, same Lili channel!

If a tree falls in the forest...

2008-08-15T15:36:00.000-07:00

Well, huh. With little-to-no effort at all on my part--I haven't even pimped Op Drop at Alizée America or Lilly Town USA yet--it appears that word is already starting to spread about Operation: Disque Drop.

First, Op Drop showed up in this morning's Google Alert that I have set up for news and blog posts pertaining to Alizée, which was pretty cool to see. Google Alerts are actually a pretty handy way of keeping track of news stories, sports teams, celebrities, etc. You can set one up for pretty much anything you're interested in here.

Meanwhile, aw kindly gives a shout-out to Op Drop today on his awesome (and often very funny) Alizée blog, after following a link I dropped in a comment there yesterday, and being momentarily confused by the similarity of our page layouts. (Blogger only gives you so many templates to work with, folks, and this is honestly the best one.)

Finally, over on the forum for the previously-mentioned Alizée America, Ruroshen pimped Op Drop in this thread, in which the community is discussing various ways to promote Alizée in the United States. (It's also where I first learned about Operation: LTNY a few weeks ago...yes Snatcher, as Ruroshen says, I am indeed a fan.) Ruroshen also has a hilariously geek-tastic sig going on that I have to share:

Thanks for the mentions, guys! I appreciate it!

Speaking of Operation: LTNY, their first official meet and greet is tomorrow afternoon in front of the Times Square Virgin Megastore, where they're going to be handing out sampler CDs, business cards, fliers, and generally bringing some Lili love to the mean streets of New York. If you're a fan in the New York area and want to get involved, you can find more information here. Best of luck to Ben and everybody else from LTNY in converting the Lili heathens!

More tomorrow...same Lili time, same Lili channel!

An Unconvenient Truth

2008-08-15T11:00:00.000-07:00

Previously, on CBC’s The Hour with George Stom—dang, I mean on Operation: Disque Drop…

Welcome back! Today’s imaginary headline reader is George Stromboulopoulos, and dear God, is that a tough last name to spell. George is a former MuchMusic veejay who now hosts a current affairs program aimed at Gen-X’ers called ‘The Hour’ on CBC. I really don’t like him all that much—he was actually kind of a dick to a good friend of mine at a rock festival here a couple years back—but given that I sorta stole the idea for Operation: Disque Drop from his show, I figure it’s only appropriate to give the man his due.

So in my first post here at Op Drop, I gave you guys the skinny on who Alizée is, kinda/sorta filled in the blanks about who I am, and explained—with the power of Lili-fandom’s tactical nuke on my side—why I’m a fan of Alizée’s, despite living half a world away and speaking an entirely different language.

In my second post, I talked a bit about why I started Op Drop—to spread awareness of Alizée in North America, and grow her fanbase here to the point where it’d be viable for her to release an album or book some tour dates here. Then I dropped some history on you, to explain why I’m convinced this isn’t just a fool’s errand.

And in my last post, my longwinded butt finally got around to explaining what I’m actually doing with Op Drop to achieve this lofty goal: burning CDs of Alizée’s music, and “dropping” them in random public places throughout the city for strangers to find—and, hopefully, enjoy—along with information on how to learn more about her, and get involved in her North American fan community. Hence the name, Operation: Disque Drop.

So what’s actually on these discs you’re dropping?

Screw you, imaginary George Stromboulopoulos! I mean, not because you asked the question—that was actually a decent read, bravo—but because I’ve always wanted to say that to your face. What kind of jerk shoves a seventeen year-old girl out of his way at a concert, then scowls at her when she falls over like it was her fault? Your kind of jerk, apparently. And this is why you, imaginary George Stromboulopoulos, are a butthole.

Since you asked, though, allow me to quote directly from the readmefirst.txt file that appears on the disc in question:

WHAT'S ON THE CD?
----------------------

A) Tracks culled from all four of Alizée's albums, plus 2 bonus covers of the Madonna songs "Hung Up" and "La Isla Bonita". It plays best in iTunes, but anything that plays mp3's will do. You can find a track listing at the very bottom of this Readme file.

B) 5 AVI files, including 3 music videos and 2 television performances. We're pretty confident these will win you over.

C) Three desktop wallpapers for your computer from her most recent album, Psychédélices.

D) The Readme file you're reading right now!

So it’s not just music? There’s videos and other stuff on there, too?

Yes, imaginary butthole George Stromboulopoulos, there’s videos and other stuff on there too. Rather than just slap together the 21^st century equivalent of a mix tape, I decided to go the whole ten yards and create a full-on “Alizée Fan Starter Kit”, instead. The reasons for this are pretty simple, and I think they make a lot of sense.

1) It appears hardly anybody actually listens to CDs anymore, at least as far as my target demographic goes. Virtually everybody I know under the age of 50 who bothers with music on the go has an iPod or some kind of mp3 player, even in their cars. And at home, most of them will listen to an iTunes playlist through their PC, rather than pop a disc in the stereo. The last five CDs I actually bought were immediately ripped to iTunes on my computer, then put back in their cases and forgotten about, and comparing notes with friends, it seems to be a pretty common occurance. Given all this, and the available space on the disc, it seemed silly to limit it to just music.

2) From my experience, most fans tend to get hooked on Alizée’s videos and performances first, and find their way towards appreciating her voice and her music second. That’s how it worked for me, and for countless other fans I’ve gotten to know—we came for the shimmy and the smile, then stayed for the talent and the soul behind them. So including some of these into a person’s first exposure to Alizée seemed like a no-brainer, to me. You don’t go to war and leave your best weapons at home…

Are these short sample tracks we’re talking about, here? Or the full versions of the songs? Isn’t this whole thing in violation of copyright law?

A-yep. That it is, butthole George, and thank you for pointing that out. Man, you really are a dick, aren't you?

OK, so let’s get the uncomfortable stuff out of the way: though I’m distributing these discs free of charge, strictly for promotional purposes, for no profit whatsoever (and, in fact, produce them as an out-of-pocket expense), make no claim to ownership of any the material and attribute copyright to all the appropriate parties—all of which I make very clear both in the readme file and on the face of the CD itself—I am still technically violating copyright.

I’m doing so with the best of intentions, mind you, to make more people here aware of Alizée. And I don’t think I’m taking food out of anybody’s mouth in the process—as I said in a previous post, one of the problems with being a North American Alizée fan is that her work is simply not commercially available over here. (Her latest album, Psychédelicés, isn’t even available for download in the American iTunes store.) I’m not distributing a full album, but a sampling of songs from all her albums, many of which are already freely available on the internet, from official sites. And I do make a point of suggesting—again, in the readme file—that the best way a new fan can help Alizée’s cause here is to vote with their wallet, and show the money-people behind her that she does have fans here, who are willing to pay for her music (at a premium, no less)!

At the end of the day, though, I decided to go with full versions of the songs rather than short samples—in for a penny, in for a pound, right? Because, let’s be honest, we’re talking about promoting a French singer to North Americans. Thirty-second samples ain’t gonna cut it.

(Oh, this would probably be a really good time to point out that Operation: Disque Drop is in no way affiliated with, sponsored or endorsed by Wisteria Song, RCA Records, Sony BMG, Polydor Records, Universal Music Group, or Requium Publishing. So yeah…we mean well. Really. Honest. Please don’t sue.)

Anyway, I think that about wraps it up for this entry. I’m gonna go find the nearest intellectual property attorney and give them a big, warm bear hug. If you feel like doing me a solid, I’d appreciate it if you’d do the same. Let’s keep ‘em all feeling warm and fuzzy and non-litigious, you dig?

See y’all back here tomorrow…same Lili time, same Lili channel.

(P.S. - Seriously, please don’t sue.)

Batman Begins?

2008-08-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

Previously, on Battlestar Galac—damn, I mean on Operation: Disque Drop…

Whoops, sorry. The voice I’m hearing read the bold headlines in my head today belongs to Grace Park, who plays Boomer on Battlestar Galactica. While it’s practically gospel in geek circles that Six, the sexy Cylon, is the hottest woman on this or any other planet, it’s Boomer who really gets my motor running. Rowr.

Anyway, to business: in our first post here on Op Drop, we established who Alizée is, and kinda/sorta established who I am. In the post that followed, we established the goal of Operation: Disque Drop—to spread awareness of Alizee in North America, and grow her fanbase to the point where it’d be viable for her to release an album or do a tour here—and reviewed some history which I believe proves this goal to be achievable. At the end of both posts, I dangled the question of what Operation: Disque Drop actually is and what it does in front of you like a proverbial carrot, and then rather rudely didn’t answer it.

OK...so what is Operation: Disque Drop, then?!

I’m glad you asked that question, Grace. Like I said in my last post, Operation: Disque Drop is a one-man (so far) grassroots fan effort designed to spread awareness of Alizée in North America.

One of the problems with being an Alizée fan in North America (aside from the obvious language barrier) is that, while our numbers are growing all the time, we’re still relatively few and far between. Online, we’ve managed to band together into a couple of fairly active communities—namely Alizée America and Lillytown USA—but when it comes to acting locally to spread the signal, a fair majority of us are own our own.

So what can one man do? Plenty, as Ben of Operation LTNY is concerned! Almost immediately after learning of Alizée’s apparent desire to “make the French language known in the United States”, he started putting copies of this poster (which he prints himself) up around New York City.

Not satisfied with just that, he began recruiting like-minded Lilimaniacs via Facebook, and set about printing up business cards (which he’s also started leaving behind on subways) and pressing sampler CDs. And this Saturday, August 16, the members of LTNY will be having their very first meet-and-greet in front of the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, to hand out all of the above to passerby on the streets of New York.

Not bad for one guy, huh? Ben’s efforts really impressed me, if only for the chutzpah and sheer determination behind them. There’s been a lot of talk in the fan forums about organizing an underground effort to gain Alizée some much-needed exposure in the States, but so far, most of it’s amounted to little more than posting cute graphics on her MySpace page that beg her to come to the States. Ben, on the other hand, is actually out there doing something to drive awareness and grow her fanbase, so that it might someday actually make sense for Lili to come to the States.

It was inspiring. I wanted to help…especially since, as I said in my first post, I’m currently between jobs and have all kinds of time on my hands. I just had to figure out how. And this is where the whim to start up Operation: Disque Drop came from…

OK...so what is Operation: Disque Drop, then?!

Patience, Grace! We’re getting there, we’re getting there…

One of the other problems with being an Alizée fan in North America is that finding her albums here can be a real pain inna butt. I was incredibly lucky to find a copy of Psychédélices at a little French bookstore downtown a couple of weeks after it came out—they had only one copy, and they haven’t restocked it since. The only other time I’ve seen one of her albums was when I randomly came across a lone copy of Mes Courants Electriques… in the tiny World Music section of one of the major chain stores a few months later. I snapped it up immediately, even though I couldn’t afford the outrageous ‘import’ markup, and had already bought the album on iTunes. You see an Alizée album in the wild? You grab that sucker, no questions asked! Again, it hasn’t been restocked since.

(Pretty sad, huh? Two whole discs, spotted several months apart, in the whole city. And this is in a large city that’s considered to be one of the most multicultural in the world, in a country where French is one of the official languages. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be an Alizée fan in Branson, Missouri or Des Moines, Iowa. You’d probably be SOL.)

Undaunted, and still lacking physical copies of both Gourmandises and En Concert, I turned to the interwebs, hoping to find maybe another hole-in-the-wall French bookstore, and plugged ‘alizée french music CD [insert city name here]’ into Google. And that’s how I stumbled across this:

Operation Disc Drop - How it Works
There's nothing more satisfying than sharing the joy of music. Disc Drop is your chance to turn a total stranger on to the tunes that changed your life. Who knows? Maybe you'll change some-one else's life while you're at it.

STEP 1: Make a mixed CD of your favourite tunes. Somewhere on the disc write: "DISC DROP - cbc.ca/thehour" Be sure to include a track-listing so people can track down more music by the artists on your disc.

STEP 2: Drop off your disc in a random public place.

STEP 3: Go to the "I Dropped a Disc - What Now", click on the comments, and write down where you dropped off your disc and the track-listing. Check back later to find out who picked it up, and where it's heading next.

A lightbulb went on over my head. This was a genius idea. It wasn’t a particularly new idea—as far back as the 70’s, kids were ‘dropping’ mix tapes in bus shelters and phone booths in an effort to spread the word about the underground punk scene—but it was still genius. This was something I could do, something I could manage on my own, that still had the potential of making a difference.

In short, this was an idea I could steal!

I would become an Alizée ninja…nay, an Alizée Batman…striking stealthily from the shadows to wage a one-man crusade against an indifferent city…by getting her music into the hands of one stranger at a time.

OK...so what is Operation: Disque Drop, then?!

Geez, Grace…weren’t you paying attention? OK, let me break it down for you…

Operation: Disque Drop is a one-man (so far) grassroots fan effort designed to spread awareness of Alizée in North America, by dropping mixed CDs of her music in random public places for strangers to find—and, hopefully, enjoy—along with information about how the recipient can learn more about her and get involved in the North American fan community.

Not bad, huh? Of course, there was still the small matter of choosing a track list, actually burning the CDs, deciding how to package the thing, and figure out how to do all this with next-to-zero dollars (because, Alizée Batman or no, independent billionaire-about-town Bruce Wayne, I am not)…

But I think all that can wait for the next installment. Tune in tomorrow, Op Drop fans! Same Lili-time, same Lili-channel!

Past Prologue

2008-08-13T14:00:00.000-07:00

Previously, on Buffy the Vampire Slay--I mean, on Operation: Disque Drop...

Sorry, that's what I get for imagining that Anthony Stewart Head is narrating the headlines for my blog. Anyway, in the blog's maiden voyage, we established who Alizée is (with the help of some rather blatant eye-candy), we established who I am (kinda/sorta, in broad general terms), and then ended on a cliffhanger, with the answer to a world-shatteringly important question left dangling. Namely...

OK, so what is Operation: Disque Drop, then?

Thanks, Tony. Take five.

Operation: Disque Drop is a one-man (so far) grassroots fan effort to spread awareness of Alizée to North America, with an eye towards bolstering her fan base here, and gaining her some much-needed exposure to the media and the public at large. The ultimate goal is making it feasible and economically viable for Alizée and her record label to expand their focus and include North America in future plans for album releases and tour plans.

And then maybe I'll get to see her perform live, or have the ability to buy one of her albums without paying an arm and a leg to import it. Because, yes, at the end of the day, it's all about me.

In all seriousness, though: Alizée is an amazing talent, and I believe North America is poorer for not having been exposed to her. Like I said in my last post, I think she's exactly the breath of fresh air that our music industry needs. She could be huge here, if only more people knew about her. It worked for her in Mexico, after all...

Mexico? What happened to Alizée in Mexico?

Well, Alizée is a pretty big deal in Latin America, Tony...

Despite being from France--her most recent album has actually charted higher in Mexico than it has in Europe, and her cover of Madonna's La Isla Bonita (an English-language bonus track exclusive to the Mexican edition of Psychédélices) has become a top-ten hit on the Mexican airplay charts. Her success there is apparently thanks mainly to the grassroots, underground efforts of devoted fans, who worked to get the singles from her second album played in clubs and on the radio, and gained her the exposure she needed with the media and the public to become a household word. As a result, her current concert tour has included five shows in Mexico...compared to only one scheduled so far in France!

Operation: Disque Drop (and other co-ordinated fan efforts. like Lilly Town New York in Manhattan) is aiming to duplicate that kind of success here in North America. It's an uphill battle, certainly--Alizée's fanbase here is still relatively small and spread out compared to Mexico--and we know it won't happen overnight. The campaign is still in its earliest stages. But we're growing daily, and we're determined. It can happen here!

Wait...but she's French, right? Alizée sings in French...?

Yes Tony, she sings in French. Not exclusively--four tracks from her second album, Mes Courants Electriques..., were recorded in both French and English (with mixed results), and she's done a variety of English covers for various performances--but primarily, yes she sings in French. Of course, so did Celine Dion at the outset of her career, and I hear she's done sort of OK for herself...

Would Alizée necessarily have to cross over into English in order to be successful here? Maybe, maybe not...after all, 99 Luftballoons hit #2 on the Billboard chart back in the day, despite originally being in German...

OK...but does Alizée even want to come here?

Now, that's a very insightful question, Tony. And until very recently, the global Alizée fan community would have replied with a resounding 'hell, no!', since every indication was that she not only had zero intention or desire to break into North America, but she actually kind of enjoyed her anonymity here.

But then came this shining ray of hope for American Lilimaniacs everywhere, in the middle of this interview at the end of May:

-¿Después de visitar América latina que te gustaría hacer?
¿Por qué no hacer conocer el idioma francés en los Estados Unidos?

...which, translated into English, reads...

-After visiting Latin America, what would you like to do?
Why not make the French language known in the United States?

So, it appears that she's changed her mind on that score...or at least, that she and her (new) record label are open to the idea of it, if it can be proven to be worth their while to make it happen. This is where grassroots fan efforts like Operation: Disque Drop come in.

OK...so what is Operation: Disque Drop, then?!

Heh. I guess I never did get around to actually explaining it, did I? Unfortunately, it appears that we're out of space for today's blog....so tune in tomorrow--

What? You're kidding, right?

--for the exciting conclusion, the answer to the question of what Operation: Disque Drop actually is! Same Lili time, same Lili channel!

In the beginning...

2008-08-12T18:50:00.000-07:00

You want to know the one great thing about unemployment? You have all kinds of time on your hands, without necessarily having a lot to do with it. So when a whim strikes you, a crazy notion if you will, there really isn't a whole lot impeding you from following it. You've got the whole day free anyway, so why not?

And that's why I've spent a good portion of the last month working to promote Alizée here in my home city in North America.

Who is Alizée?

Actually, if you're reading this, it's probably a good bet that you already know who Alizée is, either because you followed a link on either Alizée America or Lillytown USA after I pimped my blog there, it showed up in your Google alert, or you found it via the readme file you found on a CD that you randomly picked up in a public place. (More on this last bit to come.)

In the interest of making sure everybody's up to speed, though, allow me to crib this short blurb from the front page of Alizée America, and share my favorite image of her of the moment:

Alizée is a French singer from Ajaccio, Corsica. She debuted in 2000 with the album Gourmandises. It went on to become a hit throughout Europe and the rest of the world. It was followed up with a studio album in 2003, Mes Courants Électriques, and a live album — Alizée En Concert — in 2004. Alizée has sold more than five million albums. She has taken part in various stage shows and live performances throughout Europe, Mexico, and Russia. She has also starred in a Japanese television commercial.

After a four year hiatus, a time spent out of the media limelight, Alizée returned in December 2007 with a new album, Psychédélices. The album, which features 11 tracks, was released on December 3, 2007 under the RCA Records label. The album includes collaborations with Bertrand Burgalat, Daniel Darc, Oxmo Puccino, Jérémy Châtelain, Michel-Yves Kochmann, and Jean Fauque.

Thank you, Alizée America. That saved me a lot of typing. Allow me to add one final piece of the puzzle that may snap things into focus for some of the uninitiated folks out there who are still scratching their heads:

Ah, now I see some looks of recognition out there (among other things)! Yes, it's true: Alizée is that girl. The girl from the video above that has nine million views on YouTube. The girl they based the female Night Elf dance on from World of Warcraft. Or at least, she was--this is from a few years ago, before the four-year break mentioned above. Alizée has matured quite a bit as an artist since then, has changed record labels and broken away from the people who put her in this outfit, which I personally happen to think is for the best....buuuuuuut, as far as converting Lili-heathens goes, this performance does happen to serve as somewhat of the equivalent of a tactical nuke, so c'est la. Bet you're interested now, huh?

Anyway, if you'd like to learn more about Alizée, there's a whole list of links above on the left of the page that you can check out. Or you could just watch that YouTube video a couple more times. That's fine--either way, I'll be here when you get back.

Who am I?

You wouldn't think that's a difficult question to answer, but...heh, funny story...

OK, for reasons that will become evident in the next post, when I finally get around to explaining to you what we're doing here, I can't really tell you who I am, since it could technically get me into a bit of hot water. While I'm conducting Operation: Disque Drop with nothing but the best of intentions for Alizée and the people behind her, overzealous intellectual property lawyers scare the bejeezus out of me. So in the interest of not getting my pants sued off, please just call me 'Disque', and leave it at that.

Who I am in general terms, then: I'm a twenty-plus white male living in a major metropolitan city on the east coast of North America. No, not that one. Not that one either. Or that one. OK, maybe that last one. I've been an Alizée fan for almost a year now, having discovered her through--yeah, you guessed it--the WoW dance videos on YouTube. Lucky for me, this was roughly about the same time that promotion started for her latest album, and the fan community was positively exploding with excitement over her return. I really couldn't have picked a better time to be exposed to her.

Although I was initially taken in by Alizée's looks--I've always had a thing for tiny brunettes with shoulder-length hair, huge dark eyes, and smiles that could light up a small city--I was quickly won over by her voice, her music, and her humble 'down to earth' persona. Unlike some divas and pop-tarts from this side of the Atlantic that I could think of, Alizée has kept her head on straight, has maintained her family and her privacy as her top priorities, and is actively working to break with her 'Lolita' image to forge a new path as a mature artist in her own right, on her own terms. And, on top of all that, she appears to be a very sweet and genuine person, besides.

So yeah, I kind of dig her. I think more people would if they knew about her. What's more, I think she's exactly the breath of fresh air we need here in North America--somebody who can show the celebutantes and reality show stars of our sorry culture what real class, poise, and talent are all about. And that's why I started Operation: Disque Drop...

OK, so what's Operation: Disque Drop, then?

And here is where I leave you, the reader, wanting more...because that's kind of a long story, and this post has gotten too long already. Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion, same Lili time, same Lili channel...