Finally! Almost the weekend!

I hate weekends.

That’s when I usually have to do the most work. But Friday, as you probably know by now, has the Triple Boons in the evening. Pizza, a bourbon (or whiskey, in the case of tonight) and the ice cream. I’ll probably finish up some web design projects, then watch a Danish noir about a grim smoking mopey grizzled cop who’s Haunted by his Past. Pretty sure he’s estranged from his wife, too.

 

FRIDAY TABS

Let’s go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, and see what we learn. (Spoiler: lots.)

This piece on Jean Cocteau had an unintentionally amusing line:

Cocteau suffered other ills, just as crushing in their way as poverty. Arnaud writes of his ‘fevers, hay fever, stomach cramps, facial tics, skin diseases, sciatica and crippling jaundice’, and that is only part of the sad story. Although he hid his homosexuality from his mother for many years, he might well have found the Paris of the 1920s a fairly agreeable place to be gay, had it not been for the Surrealists

Perhaps this is supposed to be obvious to the cultured reader, but it sounds like the Surrealists were always sneaking in on his assignations and draping melted clocks over the headboard of the bed.

The truth:

who, at the behest of their dictator, André Breton, persecuted him viciously for two decades. They heckled and threw stones at the premieres of his plays, they phoned his nervous mother to tell her he had just died in a car crash, and one of the gang, Robert Desnos, attempted to kill him. Part of their hatred was aesthetic – they thought him a reactionary trifler and plagiarist of other artists’ visions – but Arnaud’s account makes it clear that the real motive was Breton’s pathological hatred of gay men, especially the ‘sissy’ kind

Fargin’ Breton.

As for Desnos, a poem:

Far from me and even farther yet from being unaware of me and still unaware.
Far from me because you undoubtedly do not love me or, what amounts to the
same thing, that I doubt you do.
Far from me because you consciously ignore my passionate desires.
Far from me because you are cruel.
If you only knew.


I’m sure it’s better in French.

Two interesting facts from his Wikipedia bio:

His career in radio began in 1932 with a show dedicated to Fantômas

Ah, Fantomas, the French sensation. The bad guy, the master crook. Do other cultures have characters like this? Usually they’re the foil to the national hero, the Moriarity to Holmes, the Octopus to the Spirit.

He is totally ruthless, gives no mercy, and is loyal to none, not even his own children. He is a master of disguise, always appearing under an assumed identity, often that of a person whom he has murdered. Fantômas makes use of bizarre and improbable techniques in his crimes, such as plague-infested rats, giant snakes, and rooms that fill with sand.

Who was the French master detective? Wikipedia has nine names, and one of them is “Inspector Clouseau.” One is Dupin, who was created by Poe. Inspector Magritte was written by a Belgian. One of the names is Javert, who doesn’t really fit the bill of Master Hero Detective. Monsieur Lecoq seems to be the only Holmsian character.

Why such a dearth? No detecting tradition? Seems odd, when you consider one of Lecoq’s real-life forebears:

Eugène François Vidocq (English pronunciation: /viˈdɔ:k/), July 24, 1775 – May 11, 1857, was a French criminal and criminalist whose life story inspired several writers, including Victor Hugo, Edgar Allan Poe, and Honoré de Balzac. The former criminal became the founder and first director of the crime-detection Sûreté Nationale as well as the head of the first known private detective agency, Vidocq is considered to be the father of modern criminology and of the French police department. He is also regarded as the first private detective.

He was the inspiration for Javert AND Jean Valjean.

Anyway: this line in the Wikipedia also caught my eye:

Desnos fell in love with Yvonne George, a singer whose obsessed fans made his love impossible.

I don’t know what that means. We go to her page:

In 1924, well known in Parisian intellectual circles as a charming singer, George became the subject of a passionate love affair with the French poet Robert Desnos, who wrote her numerous poems including the famous J'ai tant rêvé de toi (I have dreamed so much about you). Desnos initiated her into taking opium.

The book being reviewed is more straight-forward, and sums up the times and the mileu with perfection:

His unrestrained passion was no match for her Sapphism. At that time she was the mistress of Violette Murat, the opium-fiend princess whom Radiguet had loved, and who come be found smoking in an abandoned submarine in Marseilles.

Desnos died in the camps, although after liberation. Got typhoid.

Her work may be the only thing that crowd did that stood the test of time. Besides Cocteau, that is.


The wraps came off today:

You may wince and say that's a regrettably suburban thing, isn't it? And I'd say yes - except you have to see it in context. It's just one piece.

I'd show you something of the Opus project, but it was too damned cold to walk down to the end of the Mall this week.

 

 

 

Back to music cues for "The Little Things in Life," Peg Lynch's last continuously running sitcom. The cues run from substandard 60s cues to cringingly 70s, and I'm surprised at how few there were. I think I'm already repeating what I previously played. In fact I know I'm already repeating the fact that I think I'm repeating myself, but on we go: this is the sound of narrative radio in its strange last gasp.

This might be the biggest wah-wah-wah-waaaaah in the library:

     

BECAUSE IT'S A JOKE

     

And in the same week, perhaps the same show, something with full orchestra . . .

     

. . . and a Fifties feel.

     

From the 40s, something familiar to old radio fans - but not contemporary drinkers.

     

Biggest brand of the day

     

. . . and gone now.

 

 

The opening bars make me think I'm 11 again at some "youth" gathering at the Y, and they're playing the music the big kids like. Because they're With-It and in tune with This Troubled World.

Wikipedia: "The Pozo-Seco Singers were an American folk music band that experienced moderate commercial success during the 1960s."

   
 

The album hit the top 100! Or, if you wish, the top 81.

   

Wikipedia, again: "Inspired by an oil field term denoting a dry well (Taylor's then-boyfriend was a geologist), they called themselves the 'Pozo-Seco Singers.'"

A self-fufilling prophecy, they might have thought. But "Time," their biggest hit, made it all the way to #47.

Long week? Not here: flew past. See on Monday, when things around here start to get . . . Christmasy.

 

 

 
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