Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour - happy 129th anniversary!

According to Wikipedia:

When Pierre-Daniel Templier (1905-1987) published the first Satie biography in 1932, Valadon was still living, and the author omitted any direct mention of her relationship with the composer. He simply noted, "Women did not play an important part in Satie's life. As a mature man, he was not known to have had any affairs."

 

However, Templier included a facsimile of the complete Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour! manuscript - its first appearance in print - which by its intimate nature served as a tacit acknowledgement of this youthful liaison. The facsimile was republished in Rollo H. Myers' English-language biography (1948), but as Valadon had died in 1938 Myers felt free to identify her as Satie's one "affaire du coeur" ("affair of the heart").

I take issue with this passage in the Wiki page:

(the score is) accompanied by a drawing of an innocent-looking Valadon Satie subtitled an "Authentic Portrait of Biqui". One need only compare it to Valadon's self-portrait of the same year or her depiction in Toulouse-Lautrec's painting The Hangover (c. 1889) to appreciate the extent of Satie's idealization. The sketch and Satie's bold, angular signature beside it dominate the composition, in which the different elements (music, text, drawing) are carefully arranged on the page for visual effect.

I don't think the cartoony sketch of Valadon on the manuscript of "Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour" is in any way "idealized."

 She looks like a queen from a deck of playing cards, but with a weirdly elongated head and her shoulders and arms hanging far away from her body. This is the Queen of Clubs from a deck from around 1900.

And what an unfair comparison - a cartoony sketch as the idealized version, versus the author's representation of a "non-idealized" version, a profile view of Valadon in a picture called "The Hangover." 

In my play LE CHAT NOIR, Bonjour Biqui Bonjour was written before the Cher Petite Biqui letter, but BBB, based on the date on the manuscript came after. April 2, 1893 was Easter Sunday.

Which is a good time to mention the David Sedaris piece that discusses how the French celebrate Easter. An excerpt:

"Easter is a party for to eat of the lamb," the Italian nanny explained. "One, too, may eat of the chocolate."

"And who brings the chocolate?" the teacher asked.

I knew the word, and so I raised my hand, saying, "The Rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate."

My classmates reacted as though I'd attributed the delivery to the Antichrist. They were mortified.

"A rabbit?" The teacher, assuming I'd used the wrong word, positioned her index fingers on top of her head, wiggling them as though they were ears. "You mean one of these? A rabbit rabbit?"

"Well, sure," I said. "He come in the night when one sleep on a bed. With a hand he have the basket and foods."

The teacher sadly shook her head, as if this explained everything that was wrong with my country. "No, no," she said. "Here in France the chocolate is brought by the big bell that flies in from Rome."

I called for a time-out. "But how do the bell know where you live?"

"Well," she said, "how does a rabbit?"

It was a decent point, but at least a rabbit has eyes. That's a start. Rabbits move from place to place, while most bells can only go back and forth--and they can't even do that on their own power. On top of that, the Easter Bunny has character; he's someone you'd like to meet and shake hands with. A bell has all the personality of a cast-iron skillet. It's like saying that come Christmas, a magic dustpan flies in from the North Pole, led by eight flying cinder blocks. Who wants to stay up all night so they can see a bell? And why fly one in from Rome when they've got more bells than they know what to do with right here in Paris? That's the most implausible aspect of the whole story, as there's no way the bells of France would allow a foreign worker to fly in and take their jobs. That Roman bell would be lucky to get work cleaning up after a French bell's dog--and even then he'd need papers. It just didn't add up.

David Sedaris, the Master

Like many people, I consider David Sedaris to be the master of the humorous essay. I've mentioned him several times over the year on this blog, with great admiration, and his Master Class has inspired me to look at my own essays - which I have been doing on this blog for almost fifteen years now - more seriously.

But he's also the master of Billie Holliday impressions as you can hear in his reading of one of his own pieces, broadcast on NPR's Fresh Air.

Ma timonerie française

Good times in my French class ce soir - one of our exercises was to look at a comic strip about a couple out at a restaurant: there is a problem with the woman's dish - instead of a cooked snail (yummy) there is a live slug (icky!). Our task was to enact our own version of this story.

Our class was divided into three groups and I must say that my group was the best. Our group, two other woman and myself, were not content to merely borrow phrases and concepts from our lesson book, we did some serious improv - I played the man and I opened with "bon anniversarie, je t'aime! And the woman playing ma femme ordered salad from the other woman in our group, who played the waiter. The man (me) ordered three bottles of the Beaujolais and then we saw the slug on the plate de ma femme. "Quel horreur! C'est un scandal! I'm never coming back to this restaurant again!"

And then our waiter offered us a refund.

And scene.

Not bad considering none of us is exactly fluent in French and we had to do free-form dialog all in French. It was loads of fun. Our teacher declared us les trois actrices.

Speaking of speaking French and fun, the titular story in the David Sedaris collection "Me Talk Pretty One Day" is available online. I sent the link to my French teacher and she seemed to like it. Luckily my French teacher isn't a terror like Sedaris's teacher. In fact my French teacher is a heroine. Which is much better for learning French, although not quite as funny. An excerpt from Sedaris:

Over time it became impossible to believe that any of us would ever improve. Fall arrived and it rained every day, meaning we would now be scolded for the water dripping from our coats and umbrellas. It was mid-October when the teacher singled me out, saying, “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” And it struck me that, for the first time since arriving in France, I could understand every word that someone was saying.

Understanding doesn’t mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It’s a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive. The teacher continued her diatribe and I settled back, bathing in the subtle beauty of each new curse and insult.

“You exhaust me with your foolishness and reward my efforts with nothing but pain, do you understand me?"

The world opened up, and it was with great joy that I responded, “I know the thing that you speak exact now. Talk me more, you, plus, please, plus.”

Hejira

I walked through a mile in the snow to buy Hejira, as I mentioned in a prior post. It was a snow day off from school, that's how much snow there was. But I had saved enough for this album and by george I was going to get it and bring it home and listen to it on my crappy lo-fi turntable.

This was in the days before you could just order yourself up anything ever recorded via the mighty internets.

Wikipedia describes the album as folk/rock/jazz and it definitely is an odd could-only-be-Joni synthesis of those traditions.

Apparently David Sedaris was a big fan of Hejira.

Unlike Hissing of Summer Lawns, this CD from the birthday set from the Rev. Bookburn has not been in my possession forever, and in fact this is the first time I've heard the entire album all the way through since... I'm not sure, but one sign that it's been a long time is that Blue Motel Room has a line: "you and I we're like Americans and Russians, we're always keeping score, we're always balancing the power and that can get to be a cold cold war" which was not yet obsolete the last time I listened.

The album reminds me of sadness, probably due to the fact that when I got it I was suffering the post-breakup blues after my relationship with my first real boyfriend.

But also happiness: the first time my daughter ever laughed, I was singing along to Blue Motel Room while changing her diaper in her crib. The part "tell those girls that you have German measles, tell them you got gerrrrrms" really cracked her up.

Neil Young keeps the last remaining CSNY connection going, playing the harmonica on Furry Sings the Blues, a song about blues player Furry Lewis. But the most prominent musician after Mitchel is Jaco Pastorius, before he lost his marbles.

And I didn't know this - Wikipedia claims that Coyote is about an affair that Mitchell had with Sam Shepard. Did that woman ever have relations with anybody who was not famous?

And also, really Sam Shepard? Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith?

After Blue Motel Room, my favorite on this album is Black Crow. The most rocking of all the tunes, although that's a low bar since the other tunes are pretty subdued.

Hejira only received a so-so reception, but the album cover was huge.

These are the people who designed it, apparently.

And obviously the title would be controversial if the album was released today - probably Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris would accuse Joni Mitchell of being a jihadi-coddler.

OMFG Caitlin Moran!

I adore Caitlin Moran and her new book which I just bought and devoured, "How to be a Woman." She is brilliant and so is her book.

But first let me get the bad part out of the way: she uses "balls" to mean courage, and at one point suggests that women need to "grow lady balls."

Well, she's not perfect. But she gets virtually everything else right, perfectly right, and so I will forgive her for it. But only her. Nobody else gets away with it.

And I learned so much British slang, half of which I still don't know what it means. But at least I now know that knickers are underwear and knackers are testicles, but to be knackered doesn't mean that you've been teabagged. It means your are worn out.

There were so many funny bits, but actually it's when she's at her most strident - and she is proud to be strident which is awesome - that she is the most brilliant:

In the 21st century, we don't need to march against zero-size models, risible pornography, lap-dancing clubs and Botox.  We don't need to riot or go on hunger strikes. There's no need to throw ourselves under a horse or even a donkey. We just need to look at it in the eye, squarely, for a minute, and then start laughing at it. We look hot when we laugh. People fancy us when they observe us giving out relaxed, earthy chuckles.


Perhaps they don't fancy us quite as much when we go to bang on the tables with our fists, gurgling "HARGH! HARGH! Yes that IS what it's like! SCREW YOU, patriarchy!" before choking on a mouthful of chips, but still.


I don't know if we can talk about "waves" of feminism any more - by my reckoning, the next wave would be the fifth, and I suspect it's around the fifth wave that you stop referring to individual waves and start to refer, simply, to an incoming tide.

Sublime. And she says gets high heels perfectly right:

"...there are only ten people in the world, tops, who should actually wear high heels. And six of them are drag queens. The rest of us just need to... give up. Surrender. Finally acquiesce to what nature is telling us. We can't walk in them. WE CANNOT WALK IN THE DAMN THINGS. We might just as well be stepping out in anti-gravity boots, or roller skates.

What I always say is that if high heels were so great, men would still be wearing them. And not counting the platform shoes period of the 1970s, they haven't since the days of the 18th century European aristocracy.

Moran applies the "do men do it" test to other things:

It was on the "are boys doing it?" basis that I finally decided I was against women wearing burkas. Yes, the idea is that it protects your modesty and ensures that people regard you as a human being rather than a sex object. Fair enough. But who are you being protected from? Men. And who - so long as you play by the rules and wear the correct clothes is protecting you from the men? Men. And who is it that is just regarding you as a sexual object, instead of another human being, in the first place? Men.

And talking about cosmetic surgery:

...you can tell if some misogynistic societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring: "Are the men doing this, as well?"

If they aren't, chances are you're dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as "some total fucking bullshit."

This is some excellent sociology here:

Most sexism is down to men being accustomed to us being losers. That's what the problem is. We just have bad status. Men are accustomed to us being runners-up, or being disqualified entirely. For men born pre-feminism, this is what they were raised on: second-class citizen mothers; sisters who needed to be married off; female schoolmates going to secretarial school, then becoming housewives. Women who disengaged. Disappeared.


These men are the CEOs of our big companies, the big guys on the stock markets, the advisors to governments. They dictate working hours and maternity leave, economic priorities and social mores. And, of course, they don't feel equality in their bones - sexism runs deep in their generation, along with a liking for boiled puddings, and spanking and golf. Their automatic reaction is to regard women as "other." The entrenched bias against the working, liberated female will only die out when they do.

Yep. But she isn't just a trenchant commentator of social conditions, she's really funny. When she writes about her siblings, in particular, she reminds me very much of David Sedaris:

I was interested in absolutely everything to do with Buck. Just looking at his face was interesting. How he stood, near a door = interesting. The way he held the obviously lightweight and plastic gun as if it were heavy = interesting. The theme song takes on such an unbearable load of yearning and Buck Rogersness  that - 28 years later - I still feel stirred when I hear it.
Obviously these are all some big-assed feelings to be dealing with, and so I did what we always did when an event of some import was going on. I grabbed Caz - then five- and pulled her into an airing cupboard with me. Like the Mitfords used to - except theirs was probably much larger than ours and didn't smell of Bold, mouse droppings and farts.
"Caz" I said, pulling the door as shut as I could and assuming an expression of deep portent. "I have something incredible to tell you."
I pause, staring at her.
"I... am IN LOVE with Buck Rogers. Don't tell Mum. "
Caz nodded.
My burden lifted, I opened the door again and gestured for Caz to leave. I watched her cross the landing and go down the stairs. I heard her opening the front room door.
"Mum. Cate's in love with Buck Rogers," she said.
I learn then, in that moment - as mortification burns across me like hot ash - that love is agony, all crushes should remain secret, and Caz was an untrustworthy, fainthearted son of a bitch.
All these facts stood me in good stead, subsequently. I learned alot in the airing cupboard that day. Just 20 minutes later I was stuffing frozen peas into Caz's pillowcase while whispering, portentously, "And so the war begins."

Although she does often combine humor with incisiveness, as in her description of modern porn:

One thing that the Internet is stocked with, shelf after shelf, clip after clip, and none of them more than six minutes long - the average time it takes for a man to come. This is 21st century heterosexual porn:

Once upon a time a girl with long nails and a really bad outfit sat on a sofa, trying to look sexy but, but actually looking like she'd just remembered a vexing, unpaid parking fine. She might be slightly cross-eyed, due to how tight her bra is. 
A man comes in - a man who walks rather oddly as if he's carrying an invisible garden chair in front of him. This is because he's got a uselessly large penis, which is erect and appears to be scanning the room for the most sexually disinterested thing in it. 
Having rejected the window and the vase, the cock finally homes in on the girl on the sofa.
As she disinterestedly licks her lips, the man leans over and - inexplicably, weighs her left breast in his hand. This appears to be the crossing of some kind of sexual Rubicon because 30 seconds later she's being fucked at an uncomfortable angle, then bummed while looking quite pained.* There's usually a bit of arse-slapping here, or some hair-pulling there - whatever can ring in the variety in a straight-forward two-camera shoot in less than five minutes.
It all ends with him coming all over her face, messily - as if he's haphazardly icing a bun in one of the challenges on Minute to Win It.
The End.

...essentially the Internet vends a porn monoculture... this is the Microsoft Windows screw; crushing every other kind of sex out of the market.

Oh and so much more. Plus, she has epic eyebrows.

Emma Brockes of the NYTimes liked it too - I discovered Caitlin Moran thanks to this review.

Buy her book and read it and love it. And here she is on Youtube - enjoy.



She mentions Andrea Dworkin in this clip - fun fact - I was once related by marriage to Andrea Dworkin. Fairly distantly - her father was a cousin of my ex-husband's father. But still. I met her parents at a family wedding. They were very nice - and seemed quite proud of Andrea.

* If you found the phrase "she's being fucked at an uncomfortable angle, then bummed while looking quite pained" confusing, join the club. That's some of that British slang I was talking about. The author is not being ridiculously redundant here - I mean of course she's going to be bummed if she's  at an uncomfortable angle and pained, right? But no, to "be bummed" apparently means to have anal sex. 

Jet Blue flight attendant and David Sedaris

The story of the flight attendant who went for the escape chute - and which office worker hasn't wished for an office with an escape chute - made me think immediately of the essay by David Sedaris published in last week's New Yorker:

When I asked another flight attendant, this one male, how he dealt with a plane full of belligerent passengers, he said, "Oh, we have our ways. The next time you're flying and it comes time to land, listen closely as we make our final pass down the aisle."

...

We're forever blaming the airline industry for turning us into monsters: it's the fault of the ticket agents, the baggage handlers, the slowpokes at the newsstands and the fast-food restaurants. But what if this is who we truly are, and the airport's just a forum that allows us to be our real selves, not just hateful but gloriously so?...

...It's a depressing thought, and one that proved hard to shake. It was with me when I boarded my flight to Portland and it was still on my mind several hours later, when we were told to put our tray tables away and prepare for landng. Then the flight attendants, garbage bags in hand, glided down the aisle, looking each one of us square in the face and whispering, without discrimination, "Your trash. You're trash. Your family's trash."

And that's why David Sedaris makes a living as a writer.

Why David Sedaris earns a living as a writer...

an excerpt from his piece in this week's New Yorker...

He's at a Costco's with his brother-in-law...

This store didn't have the light bulbs Bob wanted, so we trudged on to the drug section, which proved equally disappointing. Pain relievers were in ten-gallon jars rather than packets, and so I looked around for another gift that a teen-ager might appreciate. I wanted something light and individually wrapped, and settled, finally upon a mess of condoms, which came in a box the size of a cinder block. It was a lot of protection, but not a lot of weight, and I liked that. "All right," I said to Bob. "I think these should do the trick."

Putting them in the cart, I thought nothing of it, but a moment later, walking down the aisle with my fifty-nine-year-old brother-in-law, I started feeling patently, almost titanically gay. Maybe I was imagining things, but it seemed as if people were staring at us - people in families, mostly, led by thrifty and disapproving parents who looked at what we were buying and narrowed their eyes in judgment. You homosexuals their faces seemed to say. Is that all you ever think about?

My brother-in-law is around my height, with thick graying hair, a matching mustache, and squarish wire-rimmed glasses. I'd never imagined him as gay, much less as my boyfriend, but now I couldn't stop. "We've got to get something else in this cart," I told him.

Bob disappeared into the acreage reserved for produce and returned a minute later with a four-pound box of strawberries. This somehow made us look even gayer. "After anal sex, we like shortcake!" read the cartoon bubble now floating over our heads.

"Something else," I said. "We've got to get something else."

Bob, oblivious, looked up at the rafters and thought for a moment. "I guess I could use some olive oil."

"Forget it," I told him, my voice a bark. "Let's just pay up and go. Can we do that, please?"