Professor Jonathan's Letter From Paris: Shady Satie
Time for you uncivilized dirtbags to culture your sorry asses! That's why I'm proud to introduce Bolus's newest contributor, Professor Jonathan, as your guide to highbrow enlightenment. A native of Chicago, former steamship stowaway, rock journalist, poet, and hippie bon vivant, PJ now resides in Paris where he teaches university English and haunts the cafes of Montparnasse. He'll be dropping in occasionally with free lessons on the finer points of culture -- like today's topic, the surprising link between avant-garde French composers and pole dancing.
Thanks, Jonathan! and remember, "absinthe you, in all the old familiar places..."
-ed.
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The following series of apparently pointless digressions was inspired by a track that randomly popped up on my cheap-ass Chinese iPod clone over a cup of four-buck espresso at one of our favorite (Burge and yours truly) Montparnasse bars, the good old fucked-up Café Select.
Other Montparnasse landmarks like the tonier Closerie des Lilas make a big deal about having had the whole starving-but-later-famous artist and writer crowd as patrons (mainly because back then, the plonk was dirt cheap and the joint well-heated in winter), but the Select's attitude always was and still is basically not to give a shit for anything but the bottom-line: Jesus himself could have been a regular, and the only thing the owners of the Select would have said about The Dude was that he was bad for business: "The fucker was always changing water into wine, so we finally 86'd him...".
That said, I'm going to have to go back nearly one hundred years to give some context to a story that no one here is going to give a rat's ass about anyway. Some of you might be a bit interested in the visuals, but that's your affair: during what must have been a particularly nasty bender, Burge invited me to contribute here, so like it or not, gentle readers, suck it up.
So where were we...ah yes: it's the ass-end of a hot August afternoon in 1919, and a little goateed man in a worn-out dark velvet suit is making his way back on foot to a shabby room in the working-class suburb of Arcueil- some three or four miles outside of Paris and still a lively, attraction-filled place to this very day.
ground past the empty tables in front of another favorite Burge & Prof. Jonathan
watering-hole, the above-mentioned Closerie des Lilas.
But on this particular evening, there's nary a Man Ray, a Hemingway, a Debussy or a Jean Cocteau in sight. August in Paris was for the poor, the friendless and the unconnected: people like our little man. Everyone else had fled the city for cool and leafy retreats at the seaside or in the country.
As the trolly continued up the line, the little man crossed the boulevard and began walking south on Avenue Denfert-Rochereau - almost precisely perpendicular to the spot in the sky from which Man Ray would later suspend the magnificent crimson lips of his former model and lover, Lee Miller in his Surrealist masterpiece, Observatory Time.
And that's practically the end of the story. It's a French story, so there's no happy ending. Anyway, a few years later, the little man would expire from a multitude of health problems - the cumulative effects of neglect and poverty. One notable fact concerning his demise: at the last minute, he was saved from a solitary and anonymous death in a run-down hotel by the intervention of a wealthy patron of the arts, the Viscountess Marie-Laure de Noailles, who had him transfered to a Parisian hospital.
music remained nearly forgotten for decades after, only to be rediscovered in the 1960s - around the time I myself first heard Gymnopedie No. 1, which many consider to be the most perfect composition for piano ever written:
Zzzzzz. Hey, where did everybody go?
I guess the secret of presenting high culture to a bunch of hooch, hooptie and hooter-loving um....gentlemen....such as yourselves is to present it in a more palatable form. Fortunately for the readers of Bolus, another inspired Satie aficionado had the brilliant idea (he really must have had youse guys in mind) of pairing Satie's composition with Kate Moss.... doing a pole dance.
Ah, I sense the interest-level rising, so without any further obfuscation on my part....
And that's the end of my story, dear readers - presuming that anyone is still actually reading this interminable nonsense. And all because of the musical genius of an eccentric creator, perhaps not unlike some of Bolus' own contributors, whose mp3 file (not yours, Satie's) popped up unexpectedly this afternoon. Anyway, what else would you expect from Professor Jonathan? Surely not some obscure but sublime track from Goats Head Soup, n'est-ce pas?
