Illinois Entertainer June 2017 | Page 54

Continued from page 26 the way he felt when Prince and Bowie died unexpectedly in 2016. Or, as Thomas Wolfe once wisely put it: You can't go home again. Mars cites the late American artist Cy Twombly – whose retrospective he recently caught in New York – as the perfect example of an artist who managed to maintain his naïve childlike wonder- ment throughout his long, productive life, reflected in his primitive but alluring scrib- bles. “I have two kids, and when you look at their drawings when they’re really young, these drawings are really peculiar,” Mars notes. “But then every kid’s drawing looks good – they have these imperfections that make them very intriguing. And if you ask an adult to draw like a kid, they can’t do it. But I’m sure that there will always be an appreciation for new things that have never been done before, or artists just seek- ing new territories.” Besides Candide and The Stranger, Mars has certain other literary efforts that keep him firmly grounded. He loves re-reading the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, because they never hit him the same way twice – he always picks up on a new, otherwise unfa- miliar aspect. For non-fiction, he swears by Legs McNeil’s punk-era breakdown Please Kill Me, and he adores the long career of novelist Romain Gary, for great books like Your Ticket is No Longer Valid as well as the fact that he was the only person to win France’s Pulitzer-equivalent Prix Goncourt twice, as himself and under his pseudo- nym, Emile Ajar. “Every single one of his works has so much depth, whether it con- nected with my parents’ generation or it foresees the future, through the fact that he was once a resistance fighter,” he says. Ah, yes. The Resistance. In France, photo by Emma Le Doyen You can’t force yourself. But somehow, Cy Twombly kept this – he managed the best of both worlds, managed to turn this kid’s scribbling style into something that carries all the weight of what it means to be an adult.” The album cover, in fact – a graffiti- scrawled heart – is an absentminded doo- dle the man made while talking on his cell- phone, a perfectly-formed idea that he believes would not have occurred to him anywhere outside his unguarded subcon- scious. Carpe diem. Seize that artistic inspiration when and where you can. And it can materialize just about any- where. Phoenix opened its current tour – which actually features Italian-designed merchandise vending machines, another crazy concept the group had – in Antwerp, Belgium, where the local language was a