Alphonse Allais

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I was avid to visit the town of Honfleur, up on the damp coast of Normandy, when Partner and I visited France in 2012, because one of my favorite composers - Erik Satie - was born there. (I should note that, to paraphrase Lily Tomlin, Satie left Honfleur as soon as he realized where he was.)

Honfleur is a dour little fishing port with boggy streets and old sad-looking houses. Satie's childhood home has been converted into a very neato little museum, good enough to be featured by Rick Steves on his excellent European travel TV show, but once you've seen the museum - as Partner and I quickly realized - you've seen the shank of the town, and the best thing you can do is bid Honfleur a modest au revoir.

Except that one little detail caught my attention: a life-sized plastic cow in the visitor center, with a bande dessinee painted on the side. (Two Rick Steves-type comments: Normandy is a farm region, so the cow motif is everywhere, and Partner begs me to remind everyone that the restroom in the Honfleur visitor center was the most toxically horrible he ever came across in Europe.) Anyway, the comic strip on the side of the cow depicted Erik Satie and Honfleur's other favorite son, humorist Alphonse Allais, grabbing one another's chin and singing a little children's song. Then one slaps the other on the cheek, very hard (I have no idea if this is part of the children's song or not) and runs away, leaving the other in tears. I was so baffled by this that I don't even remember which one does the slapping and which one runs away.

This led me to Alphonse Allais, whose "oeuvres anthumes" I purchased on an appropriately soggy day in Paris about a week later. (“Anthumes” is meant to be a cute parallel to “posthumes,” meaning “posthumous” – see, I bought the stuff he published while he was still alive, get it?) It turns out that Allais was an essayist / journalist / humorist in a way that no longer really much exists. (If you can imagine the New York Times's Gail Collins without the politics, or "CBS Sunday Morning"'s Bill Geist without the peripatetic folksiness, you've almost got it.) Allais created characters and situations and wrote about them for a page or two. Generally there's a punch line. If the characters or the situations amused Allais, he revisited them.

He was, in a word, a feuilletonist.

Do they exist in American literature? Did they ever? Most assuredly. It was a late 19th / early 20th-century thing to be and do. Mencken was a feuilletonist, as were Don Marquis and H. Allen Smith and Harry Golden. See? You haven't been reading those guys recently, have you? But it's not because they're not entertaining or that they don't write well; it's only that the style has fallen out of fashion.

Allais had the famous dry Norman sense of humor, the "pince-sans-rire" ("pinch without laughing" - basically, "tell a joke all the way to the punch line, but tell it so seriously and drily that no one is sure if you're joking or not." Isn't French neat to be able to put all of that in three words?) Satie used pince-sans-rire all the time in his music, writing pieces of fantaisiste music with titles like "Dried Embryos," and ending them with long strings of Beethovian tonic-dominant-tonic chords.

Allais needs to be translated for a modern American readership.

Now who could do something like that?

Hmm.

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For Sunday: Erik Satie's Fourth Nocturne

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I have a liking for the music of Erik Satie. When Partner and I were in France last October, we visited Satie's childhood home in Honfleur, and one of his residences in the Montmartre district of Paris. He’s one of my favorite composers. He was a complex personality: he could be disagreeable and angry, and was a determined loner for much of his life, making and losing friends (among them Claude Debussy).

He wrote this small piece, his Fourth Nocturne, during the last years of his life. Rollo Myers, who wrote the first English-language biography of Satie, says of this nocturne: “Is there not something Chopinesque about the flowing arpeggios in the left hand which provide, as it were, so reassuring a support for the bare consecutive fifths which outline the melody above?”

Enjoy.

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Calvados

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One of my favorite composers, Erik Satie, was born in Honfleur, a little seaside town in Basse-Normandie. Normans love their seafood, and their apples. From the apples, they make a liqueur called Calvados. Here is some information on Calvados:

 

 

 

 

In Normandy, locals rely on apple brandy as a digestive. Le trou Normand, or the Norman break, is a fiery shot of Calvados right in the middle of the meal. It hits hard and fast, yet is inexplicably effective as a palate-cleanser and appetite stimulant. It’s yet to be determined whether it has as successful an astringent property on one’s palate as it has on one’s wits – but either way, it works.

 

 

 

 

We saw bottles of shockingly expensive Calvados everywhere we went in Normandy. Finally I bought a nice bottle in the duty-free shop at De Gaulle Airport, just as we were leaving the country, for a maidenly sixteen euro.

 

 

 

At a recent gathering of Partner’s family, we opened the bottle and shared the experience.

 

 

 

A few loved it. Partner’s sister Pearl took a tiny sip and poured the rest of her shot into my glass. Partner’s three nephews appeared to enjoy it very much.

 

 

 

As did I.

 

 

 

It’s fiery, but smooth.  It’s not the same as grappa (the Italian apple liqueur) at all. Grappa is thick and hot. Calvados is fierce, but sophisticated.

 

 

 

And, if you close your eyes as you drink it, you can see the apple orchards of Normandy.

 

 

 

Look for it in your local liquor store.

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Montmartre

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Our very first day in Paris – though we were both still deathly weary from the plane flight – we went, on foot, up into Montmartre.

 

 

 

(This seemed appropriate to me, since my favorite composer, Erik Satie, used to walk back and forth between le Chat Noir (the Montmartre bar in which he worked as a cabaret pianist) and his home in Arcueil (south of Paris) every day. He drank his way from bar to bar on both trips, and he carried a hammer in his pocket, just in case he was attacked on the way.)

 

 

 

So we climbed Montmartre. It was a brilliantly sunny early-autumn day. Partner knew the way, as he’d visited it several times on Google Earth, and he amazed me; he knew exactly which streets to take.

 

 

 

We ended up in front of Satie’s house on the Rue Cortot:

 

 

 

 

Next door is the Musee de Montmartre. It is a huge rambling old house, in which Renoir worked, and Suzanne Valadon and Maurice Utrillo lived, and Aristide Bruant, and many others.

 

 

 

It is beautiful. All of Paris is laid out at your feet. Look:

 

 

Partly we were still dazed and jet-lagged. But partly also we were wandering in an earthly paradise. If I didn’t have a photographic record of it, I’d swear it was a dream.

 

 

 

Two of my friends in Tunis used to call me “Hajj” as a joke; it’s the title of respect given to a man who’s visited the Holy Sites in Mecca.

 

 

 

Well, I’ve earned the title, because Montmartre is my Holy Land.

 

 

 

But don’t call me Hajj.

 

 

 

Call me Monsieur Hajj.

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Les Maisons Satie, in Honfleur

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Erik Satie, one of my favorite composers, was born in Honfleur, on the coast of Normandy, in 1866. His birthplace has been transformed into a –

 

 

 

A what?

 

 

 

Not really a museum. Not really a performance space.

 

 

 

A happening.

 

 

 

Satie was an oddball: a medievalist, a surrealist, an independent. He wrote his odd little pieces of music while working as a cabaret pianist. He wrote pieces called “Dessicated Embryos” and “Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear” and “Next-to-Last Thoughts.” He was probably at least a little mentally ill. He died of acute cirrhosis (too much bourbon and absinthe) in 1925.

 

 

 

The good people of Honfleur have transformed his place of birth into a kind of performance / representation of Satie’s music. In one of the first rooms, you encounter a six-foot-tall pear, slowly flapping gigantic albatross wings. There’s a room of shadow puppets and cutouts. There is – outrageously, unexpectedly – a carousel, which you are invited to ride. I mounted one of the bizarre-looking bicycle-creatures and began to pedal, and the mechanism activated itself, and a cabaret piece of Satie’s – “Le Picadilly” – began to play, and the carousel opened up, brandishing peculiar hybrid musical instruments: shoe-trumpets, umbrella-trombones. An inscription on the wall says (in part): “It won’t hurt you to be ridiculous. And remember: Satie is watching you.”

 

 

 

Then there’s the white room: white walls, white benches, and a white player piano. The piano, eerily, plays one Satie score after another:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, you enter a small movie theater. You’re greeted by Satie himself – a voice from an empty armchair. He narrates a film showing scenes from some of his late ballets – “Parade,” “Mercure,” “Relache.” I knew the music to all three, but I’d never seen the dancing; it was beautiful and odd and otherworldly. Picasso designed the costumes and sets for “Parade,” and it shows: the circus managers who open each scene wear bizarre cubist outfits that look completely alien.

 

 

 

I was idiotically happy through the whole museum.

 

 

 

Here’s a video that gives you a nice impression of the place, through the eyes of an excited child:

 

 

 

 

 

 

My dears, do yourselves the favor of a lifetime, and visit Normandy. Sample the cheese and the fish. See the churches, and the villages.

 

 

 

And visit the house of Monsieur Satie in Honfleur, and ride the carousel.

 

 

 

It won’t hurt you to be ridiculous once in a while.

 

 

 

And remember: Satie is watching you.

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Sunday blog: Erik Satie's "Premier nocturne"

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I've been a Satie fan since 1971, when I discovered a strange gatefold album of his music in a department store in Vancouver, Washington. The album's performers (who called themselves the “Camarata Contemporary Chamber Group”) took Satie's piano music and arranged it for Moog synthesizer, harpsichord, guitar, plaintive woodwinds, and a whispery string ensemble. It wasn't the way Satie originally wrote it, but I didn't know that. All I knew was that I'd never heard anything like it before.

 

 

I now own three complete sets of Satie's complete works by different performers. His Nocturnes, which he wrote during the last few years of his life, are among my favorite pieces of music. Rollo Myers says of them: “The style is chastened, simplified, uncompromising in its rejection of any sensuous appeal, but the music is strangely impressive in its bleakness and almost inhuman detachment.”

 

 

It is also, when performed sympathetically, music of great tenderness.

 

 

Here, from the LP I bought in 1971, is the Camarata arrangement of the First Nocturne.

 

  
Download now or listen on posterous

14_Trois_Nocturnes_Le_Premier.mp3 (5504 KB)

 

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Age, I do defy thee

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Partner and I were in a fragrance boutique the other day (some stereotypes are true, once in a while).  The manager gave us some free samples, in molecule-sized packets.  This was one of those places that slaps a French name on everything, so I got a little giggle out of the following label: CONCENTRE JEUNESSE / YOUTH CONCENTRATE.  Like Wednesday Addams, who thought that Girl Scout cookies were made from Girl Scouts, I wondered idly how many youths had given their lives for this little dab of concentrate.

I tried the stuff, by the way, and it was very nice.  But it did not make me young again.

Getting old is a tricky business.  I was a jerky awkward young man, and I wanted desperately to be older, so that people would respect me.  Now – well, ahem, I’m still waiting for the respect.  I have rapidly degenerated into a stick figure with a big bulbous head and wispy gray hair.  If I wore overalls with suspenders, I would look exactly like one of my paternal uncles.

Adding insult to injury, I work on a college campus.  The students never age; they leave when they hit 21 or so, and a new supply arrives every year.  This means that I find myself getting older and older, right in the middle of a group of people who never get older at all.  About a month ago, I was walking across campus and ran into a former coworker, a woman about my own age.  We were having a lively little chat about the old days, but then I noticed the students on the sidewalk looking at us funny, and suddenly I had a vision of the way the students saw us: a skinny old man with a high shrill voice, talking to a fat old woman with a deep scratchy voice.

Eek!

I have also become acquainted with the aches and pains of age.  I am reminded constantly that I’m Not As Young As I Used To Be.  I was talking to a coworker about a vacant position in our department and found myself saying “This would be ideal for someone young and energetic,” and as soon as I said it, the words turned to ashes in my mouth.  That young energetic person ain’t me.

And not to be morbid, but I probably don’t have more than another fifty or sixty years in me before my batteries run out entirely.

A friend of mine theorized a long time ago that we stop aging emotionally at a certain age, and stay that way for life.  I think it’s absolutely true.  Partner, for example, is about eight years old inside: beginning to feel grown up, but still vulnerable.  I, on the other hand, stopped aging emotionally at five: easily distracted, easily amused, easily hurt. 

Now, all you young nymphs and shepherds, think of how it feels for that five-year-old to look into the mirror and see Abe Vigoda looking back.

And do you know why it hurts?  Because life is so much fun.  There are still so many things I want to do.  The idea that I’m running out of carnival tickets is a bad nasty thing.

I started in French, so I’ll end in French.  This is Erik Satie:

“Quand j’etais jeune, on me disait: Vous verrez quand vous aurez cinquante ans.  J’ai cinquante ans.  Je n’ai rien vu!”

“When I was young, people told me: Just wait until you’re fifty years old, and you’ll see.  Well, I’m fifty years old, and I haven’t seen a thing!”

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Sunday blog: Erik Satie, by Jean Cocteau

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The above (the original of which hangs in our living room) is an engraving of Erik Satie by the French author / artist / provocateur Jean Cocteau. Cocteau dashed it off from life around 1915, liked it, and reproduced it many times during his lifetime; it made him a lot of money.

Here is the provenance of my copy:

• It was one of a number of engravings in a portfolio given by Cocteau to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich in the 1950s.
• Upon Shostakovich's death, it went to his daughter Galina.
• Upon Galina's death, it went to her widower,
• who sold it to a dealer,
• who sold it to me.
  
  

Satie (who died in 1925) was a well-known crackpot. If he knew I had this engraving hanging on my wall, he'd probably be furious that Cocteau made so much money off his image. On the other hand, he might get a kick out of it.

Cocteau (who died in 1963) would be delighted that his work was still being admired, though he'd probably find my living room too bourgeois. Given that he was a capitalist to the teeth, he'd also want to know how much I paid for his work.

Shostakovich (who died in 1975) would probably just shrug. I imagine him saying: “Oh, was that mine? Yes, I think I remember. Oh, well. I'm glad it didn't get thrown away, anyway.”

I'm glad too.

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