Noël Godin
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Noël Godin (born Liège, September 13, 1945) is a Belgian writer, critic, actor and notorious cream pie flinger or ‘entarteur’. Godin gained global attention in 1998 when his group ambushed Microsoft CEO Bill Gates in Brussels, pelting the software magnate with pies.
Godin claims his goal has long been to ‘entarte’ as many people like Gates as possible - people he feels are particularly self-important and lacking a sense of humor. Godin told the New York Times he chooses “to function in the service of the capitalist status quo, without really using his intelligence or his imagination.” He says his sworn enemies are "authority, depressing laws, the return of the moral order, nuclear power, any form of political power."
Since 1969, when Godin planted a cream pie on the face of the French novelist Marguerite Duras, he has creampied dozens more, including choreographer Maurice Bejart, France's best-known television anchorman Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, ambitious French politician Nicolas Sarkozy and film maker Jean-Luc Godard.
A regular target is French philosopher, socialite and writer Bernard-Henri Lévy. Levy, married to the actress Arielle Dombasle, is known to wear white shirts unbuttoned almost to his navel and to hold forth on political issues with intense gravitas. After one attack, in 1994, an enraged Levy was filmed standing over Godin snarling "Get up, or I'll kick your head in”.
Godin, who uses the pseudonym ‘Georges Le Gloupier’ has also inspired an unknown number of followers around the world, who now regularly provide him with details about the whereabouts of various important potential targets. It took 32 people to conduct the Bill Gates operation. His followers take care to look as ridiculous as possible as they throw their tarts, smiling broadly, spouting anti-pretentious poetry and repeating "gloup, gloup, gloup."
Godin insists his group is non-violent and is careful to use only what he calls a "tarte classique," filled with whipped cream and perhaps a little chocolate in soft sponge cake. He says his humor can be traced back through Jerry Lewis, Wile E. Coyote, the Marx Brothers and yippies like Abbie Hoffman.
Godin has appeared in many films directed by his friend Jan Bucquoy and producer Francis De Smet including the acclaimed La Vie Sexuelle des Belges 1950-78, Camping Cosmos playing the Belgian writer Pierre Mertens, Opus IV: La Jouissances Des Hystériques, Tart or Vivant, Tarte ou Vivant and Les Vacances de Noël.
Godin is inspired (for instances in his Anthologie de la subversion carabinée (1989)) by the works of the Utopian philosophers Tommaso Campanella (Civitas Solis) and Charles Fourier (La Phalange, Le Phalanstère). His ideal society is one where there is no struggle for power or money and where everybody can live in a state of perfect happiness.
Noël Godin is also known as a filmcritic (Godin par Godin, ed. Yellow now-Côté cinéma, 2001) and he wrote for the catholic review Les amis du cinéma.