Erik Satie – Allegro, Valse Ballet, Fantaisie-Valse (1884-5)

This is my first post about the music of Erik Satie (I did a post about the man himself last month), and accordingly is about the earliest Satie pieces available.* I’ll be making an ongoing playlist on Spotify (I was going to anyway; this is just a convenient excuse), so you can go listen to the pieces as I cover them. I don’t know yet if I’m going to go through the entire output, but I’ll do as much as possible.

So, Allegro: the first surviving piece by Erik Satie, written at the ripe old age of eighteen, by which time he had enrolled in, been dismissed from, and re-enrolled as an auditor at the Paris Conservatoire. He was really fucking bored there. The teachers and curriculum were stuffy (as is well-documented by a slightly better-known student by the name of Claude-Achille Debussy), and the faculty disliked Satie because his piano playing wasn’t all that great (famously, according to one professor who obviously had tenure, “worthless”); and Erik, realizing this, didn’t take them very seriously.

However, this latter audit was in a harmony class, so it was just un-boring and non-judgmental enough for Satie to bother writing a full-fledged piano piece, which runs for nine bars and takes under a half a minute to play. But, trifling juvenilia though it is, it’s clearly a Satie piece through and through. It undermines the rampant maximalism of the day, focuses entirely on a single set of figures without developing any of them, and ends on an irreverently abrupt quasi-cadence, as though Satie just walked away. In fact, it resembles nothing more than a slightly shorter and more conventional version of what he would be writing in another twenty-five years or so, with his satirical miniature suites of the 1910’s.

The two waltzes that Satie wrote following this, however, are far more typical of his time and place: you can see the nausea-inducing ballrooms and gowns, with the mercifully limitless champagne in every glass in every hand. You could dance to this without a second thought, and both pieces are accordingly entirely unmemorable.

The one noteworthy aspect of the Fantasie-Valse is a dedication “to my friend, J.P. Contamine de Latour.” This seemingly innocuous gesture would transform quickly into a significant collaboration, beginning with the very next pieces Satie would publish–three little songs of great depth and maturity, all settings of poems by de Latour–and continuing for several years.

 

*There are some string quartet sketches from around this time (curious; it wasn’t as though Satie would ever seriously attempt writing for string quartet again…then again, maybe these sketches are the reason for that), and they apparently haven’t been published, so I can’t bloody well write about them, can I?

 

Sources (I know! I have sources this time! Isn’t that exciting?):

• Mary E. Davis, Erik Satie, Reaktion Books Critical Lives, ISBN 1861893213
• The scores to Valse-Ballet and Fantaisie-Valse are available on IMSLP. Allegro, not having been published until 1972, is on IMSLP but is not public domain in the United States, so be aware of the country in which you currently reside. I know, it’s difficult sometimes, but I believe in you.

super-tiny post – bates motel, season 1 (2013)

Disclaimer: I haven’t seen any of the Psycho films and I’m not entirely aware of its premise, though I probably should be, and I’ll probably see at least the first one after I finish this show.

Alright, I get it, the brat is gonna be a freaking serial killer. Do we seriously need four more seasons that are this brazenly self-evident? Not that I particularly mind it. Taxidermy seems fun.

I also like the acting.

I’m gonna go have some supper now.

Later, folkies. I’ll have another, more substantial, post up by the weekend…about something else.

Nikolai Gogol – The Nose (1836)

I know, right? The guy didn’t even have a hole in his face from where the nose used to be! What kind of moron does this excuse of an author take me for?

I digress. Nikolai Gogol, who died some time after writing this and many other stories, was a master at whatever on earth he was doing with his life. He didn’t let realism get in the way of a damn good satire, and The Nose is one of his most whimsically memorable. Several other artists of the last 181 years seem to agree, what with the profusion of operas, films, and honorary plaques (no, really) this story has inspired. (I’ll be exploring at least one of these adaptations later. And no, it won’t be the plaque, endlessly amusing though it is.)

I think what makes this story so ripe, almost two centuries on, is an absence of concern for realistic issues. Major Kovalyov’s nose just disappears overnight, leaving nothing behind, as though the guy had been born without one. Bone structure? Nerve tissue? Sense of taste? Speech? None of it is affected at all. His only concern is the cosmetic–he doesn’t have a nose, so he can’t show his face in public, and as an upper-class 19th century Russian gentleman on the rise, that simply won’t do. Indeed, his most pressing concern is that he won’t be able to marry the girl he wants to marry.

Yep: The Nose is about almost being cock-blocked. By your own nose. Let the knob jokes commence.

Anyway, Kovalyov’s next most pressing concern is his social standing, and this is where The Nose shines. Kovalyov, having given pursuit to his nose, finds it somehow wearing an officer’s uniform, and discovers that in the space of a few hours it has inexplicably managed to surpass its former bearer in rank. This is my favorite scene in the story because of the sheer potential this nose had. For goodness’ sake; at the rate the nose was climbing ranks, by the next morning it might have conquered a neighboring country, or staged an historic coup and named itself Premier of Russia! The possibilities are endless. What a shame the nose was returned to Kovalyov’s face.* Clearly the man was holding the poor appendage back. Perhaps, though, it’s a mark of Gogol’s ability as a writer that I imagined such a future that he himself did imagine, but deliberately left unexplored. Who knows? (Ha, knows.)

At the end of the day, The Nose is, at surface, a benignly impish sort of story. It is so thoroughly unrealistic that symbolism is the only thing left, and even that is hampered somewhat by the raw improbability of what transpires. Again, I have to invoke Candide as a golden standard (I’ll write about it here soon, I promise)–where Gogol holds back, Voltaire pushes onward. The further I got in The Nose, the more roads I envisioned it sniveling down, maybe as a novella or even a full-length novel.

Then again, perhaps that is its major strength–it sparks the imagination like few other stories can. It is unobtrusive–a pleasant afternoon’s read and then it backs off, but leaves a little seed in one’s brain, and once the seed sprouts, the roads it can take you down can be dangerously subversive.

All of that having been said, Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose measures 2.8 feneons: just the right mix of the unrealistic and its opposite, whatever that is. Despite all my backhanded comments about this story, I really genuinely do love it; if you want to spend some time with a fun story, I strongly recommend you pick The Nose. (There it is! There’s the punchline! Oh my god, that was amazing…)

And with that embarrassingly bad joke, my dear folkies, I’ll leave this post. Until next time, take it easy; by which I mean, don’t lose your head. Heads are much more difficult to reinstate than noses, and the surgery is probably rather expensive.

 

* I debated whether to include this, as it is a spoiler–but hell, it’s still 19th century literature. Of course Kovalyov got his nose back.

Croak no. 1: Stephen King – Carrie (1974)

(Croaks are little mini posts, for when I’m giving a “first impression” or just don’t feel like going too in-depth on the subject. The term “croak” is á propos of nothing. There just happened to be a frog clock on the wall. Don’t overthink it.)

I just finished the audio book of Carrie today. It’s really ridiculous, campy, thought provoking good lit. The narrative device makes sure you know roughly what happened without the details, and then the details, when they finally arrive in the second half, are so much more horrifying than you could possibly imagine.

Of course, this is ’74, so the cultural references are dated and cheesy (both good things here), and the story’s success has made the image of a blood-soaked girl in a prom dress an indelible feature of the modern subconscious, but seriously, this novel is brilliant in its lack of sense. And, of course, the sheer amount of foreshadowing is to die for. For which to die.

(And for those who find Carrie’s mother unbelievable: I live in the Bible Belt. She’s not unrealistic to me.)

Anyway, good stuff, and if you haven’t read it or heard the audio book (narrated by film-Carrie herself, Sissy Spacek), do it. It’s a wonderful experience. Not as absurd as, say, Candide, but wonderful in its way.

1.5 feneons.

Erik Satie (1866-1925)

Since I intend to cover a significant amount of this composer’s work on this blog soon, I perhaps ought to start off with a bit of an explanation/introduction, given that Erik Satie is one of the people I most admire in music, art, and general sensibility. (He would yell at me if I called him a “hero.” Also if he wasn’t fucking dead.)

Erik Satie was born more than a hundred-fifty years ago, putting him in the esteemed company of Beethoven, Bach, and Vlad the Impaler, and he had a penchant for annihilation: one of his earlier works, the four Ogives of 1886, casually erase about four-hundred years of music history, presenting a set of four un-measured Gregorian-style chants in bare octaves, each with three additional chorale-style voicings and absolutely no conventional thematic development. The popular and almost always poorly-played Gymnopédies of 1888 feature drifting 7th and 9th chords that uniformly fail to resolve, at a time when doing so was practically a cardinal sin. The brain-purée known as Vexations is atonal, formally inscrutable, impossible to memorize, and has a little hypothetical note suggesting how the performer would have to prepare in case they wanted to play it 840 times in one sitting (who wouldn’t?). And let’s not forget the later string of “humorist” piano suites and ballets, which were savagely satirical of more or less whatever Satie could get his hands on, in some cases causing riots and even a bit of jail time.

This weirdness wasn’t limited to his compositions, though. He was also a notable writer, penning several bizarre bits of prose including “Memoirs of an Amnesic,” which is full to the brim of blatant falsehoods. He sketched countless tiny self-portraits, each nearly identical, many with a bizarre caption. Also countless are the advert cards he made, which never left his apartment until its exhumation after his death. He had a wardrobe that shifted mercurially throughout his life. He had a very idiosyncratic diet. He owned dozens of umbrellas for no apparent reason, and on his daily walk to Paris he carried a hammer in case he needed to defend himself (eat your heart out, M. Boulez). Oh, and earlier on he also formed a religion of which he was the only member and with which he mostly wasted time writing polemics against heretics (i.e. other musicians who had a better reputation than he).

I could go on. The guy was gloriously off his rocker. He was lucky to live fifty-nine years, but it’s good that he did so he could act as quirky uncle to the emerging Dada movement (of course he did). Anyway, the point here is that Erik Satie is going to show up a lot in this blog. He’s also the first person ever to be measured here, and unsurprisingly measures 5.0 feneons, the highest number currently on the scale.

I was going to write a biographical thing, but I got off track and honestly like this better. You can go read biographies elsewhere. This is the internet, dammit.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2006)

Yes, I’m getting into some anime on this blog. Oh no. How dare I. I’m supposed to be pretentious and condescending, not some weeb. Oh dear.

Haruhi Suzumiya is a bizarro-slice of life show. It starts out with the focal character, Haruhi, expressing a desire to meet supernatural beings: time travelers, espers, and aliens specifically. She then founds a school club to search for these beings and immediately recruits a time traveler, an esper, and an alien. How convenient (except that they never tell her what they are, so only partially convenient). And that’s just the beginning.

One of the major plot points in Haruhi is how she appears to be rather “god-like” by nature, in that her desires immediately seem to come true. She wants to meet supernatural beings, so forms a club to look for them? Three of those beings immediately join, and they just happen to perfectly fill out typical anime character tropes (which Haruhi lampshades to death, naturally). She wants the ditzy attractive girl to fulfill the show’s fanservice quota (to advertise the club, of course, no other reason)? Oh look, there happen to be bunny suits, that later escalates into an entire rack full of fanservice-y costumes. She takes the SOS Brigade on a trip to an island mansion that another Brigade member’s family happens to own, in the hopes that they’ll become trapped in a monsoon and something mysterious happens? They get trapped in a monsoon, the master of the house appears to have been murdered, and stock mystery tropes start piling up accordingly (read: excessively). All the while, the other characters, Itzuki in particular, do whatever it takes to keep Haruhi from becoming bored, because Bad Things will happen if she does.

But it turns out that even Haruhi’s god-like nature is casually explained by the show in a ridiculous fashion: She’s noted in the credits as “Ultra Director.” So of course everything turns out the way she wants, and her boredom causes the end of the world. She’s making the damn show, and is her own self-insert character. She’s committing the Cardinal Sin of fictional works, and doing it so unbelievably shamelessly and blatantly–but she’s a fictional character in the first place, so none of it means anything. The meta aspect of this show is a veritable referential vortex.

The show goes to extreme lengths to emphasize how weird Haruhi is (one might be tempted to say “unnecessarily extreme,” but this show breaks that phrase wide open). The nominal protagonist/narrator/straight guy, Kyon, is normal to the point of being boring. So boring is he, in fact, that he doesn’t even get a real name. He’s just “Kyon” the whole time. Taking into mind that Haruhi’s perspective is what matters in this show, it makes sense: She doesn’t care that much about his name, because he isn’t a time traveler, esper, or alien. He’s just a club member and verbal sparring partner (that she kinda develops a crush on for no apparent reason that she refuses to acknowledge until it becomes tense enough to lead to the mind-bending climactic event of the whole first season). Never mind that he’s narrating the goddamn show, nobody would care what his full name is anyway. He isn’t a character of interest, which somehow by default makes him an interesting character.

When a TV show plays with reality to this extent, and does so this flagrantly, you’d better believe it has a lot of feneage. It’s pretty much a show that has its way with whatever it damn well wants, and as a result, it measures a very solid 3.7 feneons, mostly because 3 and 7 make 10, and that’s a correspondingly solid number.

Until next time, my dear folkies, take it easy; by which I mean, don’t create alternate universes and potentially destroy this one just because it bores you. That’s not a very good habit to make (believe me, I’ve done it once–it’s not all it’s cracked up to be).

An Update

(tl;dr: I’m still alive and working on this blog. But you should read the rest because I make a bunch of deliberately shitty non-jokes.)

Yes, I am still working on this blog. Part of the reason I made it, after all, was because I couldn’t find a website that was fulfilling this extremely vital function. A bigger part of the reason, of course, is because I genuinely like the subject matter, but saying that in a “proper” post would run too close to me being honest with you.

And that sort of bullshit shall not stand here. Hence: this, an “update” post that allows me the shameless self-indulgence that’s so very typical of straightforward honesty.

I am in the process of sorting out several works to review here. I won’t spoil any of them, but there are a few books, a film, a TV series, a piano piece, and an album or two. They’re worth the attention–to me, anyway, and this is my sandbox, so my saying so makes it true. I’m excited to find out exactly how to write about them for this blog, as well. How analytical, jokey, critical, snarky, petty, and praising (I guess) would make the ideal balance for a blog of this sort remains to be seen. Anyway, that’s the self-indulgent update quota reached for now.

I don’t know how to end update posts on a blog, so this is the end of it.

Until next time, my dear folkies: stay hydrated, because if you feel thirsty, that means you’re probably dehydrated, and that’s not good for your health.

 

Deadpool (2016)

This movie has been hyped to all hell since before its release, and has continued to be held up as somewhat of a mascot among more “mature” superhero films, what with its sharp wit, treatment of extremely sensitive subject matter, a female character who is actually autonomous and self-aware, and the “genre-breaking” character of Deadpool himself. The question, a bit over a year later, is whether the movie is as groundbreaking as it seemed a bit over a year before a bit over a year later.

The short answer is “no.”

The long answer is also “no,” but since it’s the long answer, it can’t be that short.

Starting with the good parts: Ryan Reynolds plays the role marvelously (heh, it’s a Marvel fi–never mind). His timing and snark know no bounds. Deadpool also functionally can’t be killed and is basically a living, breathing, chaotic-neutral deconstruction machine who knows this is all fiction. Accordingly, the fight scenes in this film are fascinating, because Deadpool clearly doesn’t give a flying fuck who is maimed or killed, including himself and bystanders, or how much pain he puts his opponents (or himself) through. He shoves a van’s cigarette lighter into a guy’s mouth, flips the van while he’s in it, and saws his own hand off within about ten minutes, just because he can and it’s the most excessive (and effective) solution, and it’s thrilling to see just how nonchalantly he does all of it.

(The opening and closing credits are also rather fun, and the old blind lady is a goddamn hero in her own right.)

That’s where the less-good parts begin. The character Deadpool is partially defined by his knowledge that he is a cartoon character, manifested through his trademark fourth-wall breaks, and the (mercifully) single sixteenth-wall break. But these breaks are rather limited, and act more like witty asides in a stand-up set than anything else–and he refuses to acknowledge just how scripted the entire movie is. With a movie this carefully written, one would think Marvel’s walking lampshader would address that directly. He just doesn’t. That might not seem like a big deal to anyone reading this, but it’s an irresponsibly huge deal to me (yes, as in “I’m being the irresponsible party”). I was so preoccupied by this point the last time I saw Deadpool that I spent the entirety of the film looking for a hint that Deadpool knew that everything was scripted.

Alright, that’s Deadpool’s character. Anything relevant to this blog’s interest anywhere else in the film? No. It’s too polite to Marvel (because god forbid anyone try to rupture their fragile ego), and the film industry in general. Plot-wise, it’s just another Marvel film (opening bit, origin story, Stan Lee cameo, love interest, big showdown at the end, guy gets girl despite changes guy underwent), just with an interesting lead and an entertaining supporting cast. Remember how I put the phrase “genre-breaking” in quotations earlier on? It isn’t genre-breaking. It’s resolutely an anti-hero film that somewhat tamely deconstructs the superhero genre by taking superhero tropes a bit more literally than usual. The only case for it being a “game-changer” is by looking at other big-budget films. Anything lower-budget could run circles around Deadpool with the slightest effort. So shame on me for having standards.

I’m not saying Deadpool is a bad movie; far from it. Despite all my bitching, it was a major breath of fresh air from an often stale corner of the industry and a lot of fun to watch. But in the context of this blog, it doesn’t hold a candle, and therefore measures in at 0.5 feneons (entirely for the title character). Maybe Deadpool 2 will try harder. Time will tell.

Scott Walker – Bish Bosch (2012)

Being that this is a blog about absurd and irreverent art, what better way to kick things off than with my personal favorite from Scott Walker’s latter-day string of masterpieces, 2012’s Bish Bosch? It has everything: bizarre associations, surreal horror/humor, completely unexpected sounds, and through it all Scott’s majestic baritone, here placed at a perilously high register, as though it climbed a flagpole and refused to come down. My dear folkies, welcome to the world of Scott Walker at its most shattered, crazed, and outright hilarious.

Scott Walker’s long career has been detailed elsewhere, so I won’t bore you with yet another telling. Suffice it to say, he’s had an interesting time of it, throughout which he’s been alternately named a recluse, madman, and genius. He appears to be playing all three roles on Bish Bosch. 

Starting from the top: The album opener is titled “‘See You Don’t Bump His Head.'” It kicks things off with a relentless barrage of looped percussion that could only be called “concussive” and persists throughout the track. So much for that title. Then comes the first line, over a disorienting high-pitched tone cluster. “While plucking feathers from a swan-song, Spring might gently press its thumbs against your eyes” is a line worthy of Jarry at his most addled. And that is only the beginning of the record.

Parsing out all the trails of history, etymology, astronomy, more etymology, scatology, and etymology would take more than some measly blog post could handle. But this blog is not about parsing things out. What matters is that this album is, lyrically and tonally anyway, thoroughly out of its mind in sensibility. When Scott operatically croons out trashy put-downs over complete silence, then proceeds to read us history-peppered bathroom stall phone numbers in Roman numerals, scream for another drink from the bar, and evoke a flagpole sitter who presumably climbs so high he winds up frozen in the vacuum of space before, maybe, inexplicably becoming a brown dwarf star…

I digress. This is the highest degree of absurd writing, in that you could research and hash out details until the cows come home (and they won’t), but just listening to it on its own is enormously rewarding and entertaining, even though you may have no idea why. The use of structure and form on this album is expertly crafted to emphasize what happens in the lyrics. (Yes, there is structure and form aplenty throughout Bish Bosch, and anybody who says otherwise is either ignorant or a fucking liar.)

Then there is the album’s closing track, “The Day the ‘Conducator’ Died (An Xmas Song).” The title gives us what we need: Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian Communist dictator who titled himself “Conducător,” was unceremoniously shot by a firing squad after a brutally short trial on Christmas Day. Fine, we know the details, and the song is fairly straightforward. What happens at the end of the track, though, is perhaps the most excessively yet understatedly flippant gesture of the entire record. I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t heard it, and if you have heard it, you know what it is. Let’s just say it’s Scott giving us one last middle finger as he drifts off, cackling, back into the void he inhabits.

As for rating this album, what more needs to be said? Bish Bosch is thoroughly mind-bending, shocking to the point of genuine hilarity, seemingly impenetrable. I’ve been listening to this album for upwards of three years now, and, while it’s far more palatable to me than the first time, it’s just as fresh and wonderful. It’s a timeless record, and currently measures in at 4.8 feneons. (I knocked off the .2 for no reason. It’s alright.)

Until next time, folkies: GTFO!

Introduction (Warning: Pretentious Bullshit Ahead)

Hello. My name is Groofay du Breton, and this is a blog website I have made called Hooked on Fenics.

Hooked on Fenics is a review blog, in which I aim to measure the absurdity or anarchism in a given work–music, film, literature, etc.–in units I’ve taken to calling feneons. The term “feneon” (and by extension “fenics” in the blog’s title) is named for noted Dead French Person Félix Fénéon, who, while alive, had a very keen interest in matters absurd and/or anarchic (I took the liberty of removing the accents in his name so that lazier readers wouldn’t become confused and run away). But more on him later. This is my blog after all, dammit.

First, to define “absurdity” and “anarchy:”

• “Absurd” here means the extent to which a work pays attention to reality and reason; or the extent to which the work exposes the lack of attention to reality and reason in everyday life.
• “Anarchy” here means the extent to which a work eschews reverence toward an authority; whether real or imagined, past or present. If a work is willing to break with preconceived notions, it is potentially anarchic in nature.

The measurement of feneons will generally be on a scale between 0.0 (nothing even remotely out of line) and 5.0 (mind-melting and reality-violating on a massive scale). This blog will not aim to measure the overall quality of a work (although it will inevitably have to be taken into account sooner or later)–therefore, expect to see Dickens and Brahms, for instance, receiving low scores, for, despite the inordinately high quality of their work, they ultimately took the “concrete” too seriously. This is not about concrete. This is giving Michelangelo a block of talc and expecting his results to last five-hundred years. But I digress.

This blog is dedicated to the absurd and the anarchic. Even the “guidelines” I myself have outlined above are almost definitely going to be violently overthrown at some point or another, and it will have been fully deliberate on my part–as that is the third major facet that I will here be considering: deliberateness. Any asshole can flail around aimlessly. It’s assholes flailing around aimlessly with intention that are of interest to me. That distinction might not be clear now, and I don’t care if it ever becomes clearer. It is merely a dimension that I will be considering. Being an asshole, the act of flailing, and aimlessness are all secondary to the absurdity, anarchism, and the deliberateness with which the work in question is carried out.

Now, I believe that I have rambled on for quite long enough here. If you have any questions, I think there’s a comment section or something like that where you can ask it. But be forewarned: If you ask a stupid one, I will not miss my opportunity.

Right. On to the next thing.