Summer’s here, and the time is right…
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: france
I got me some years,
And souvenirs
And I can remember the smell
Of roses in the garden.
I used to love them flowers, man.
But they ain’t there no more.
I had some friends,
Some broke and some mend
We drank some good wine
But no wine’s very good if you drink too much
Why are you crying?
Is it because it’s a French song?
French songs are either sad,
Or about fucking.
But even the ones about fucking are sad.
Some people were never children
But we were, weren’t we?
Life’s easier for children.
Life’s easier for adults.
It’s the remembering that’s the trouble.
Before there were churches on the island, it was sacred. Whoever the French equivalent of Druids were would take tiny wooden boats out to the sweet potato-shaped piece of land in the middle of the Seine, eat some mushrooms, take off their paleoberets, dance around a little bit. Build a fire, get into some sex magick. Get up the next morning and head home.
Before there were churches, the island was martial. What was the river but a moat? Stock the larder and drop a well and build some walls and burn the bridges behind you. Boom: fortress. Vercingetorix and the Gauls hid out there when the Romans marched into town, and then the Romans did the same when the Huns rode in. Even the legions, with their cataphracts and war dogs, kept their heads down when the Huns raped the horizon. Make sure you sacrifice enough chickens in the Temple of Apollo.
Christ came. He does that. The sun-god was replaced by God’s son.
The city is now Paris, but not yet the City of Lights because the kind of lights the nickname refers to had not been invented. Rich, though. Trade comes up and down the Seine, and overland from Germany to Spain. World-class city needs a world-class cathedral. First shovel was turned in 1163, and construction never quite ended. Every hundred years or so, a new piece would get slapped on or replaced or wedged in.
You will believe a buttress can fly.
Kings and queens got crowned there. Napoleon crowned himself. Christ–you remember Christ; it’s a story about Christ–left his crown here, or so the stories go. Tied Jacques de Molay to a stake and torched his blasphemous ass right outside the front door. The Huguenots trashed the place; 200 years later, so did the Revolutionaries; 200 years after that was the Communards’ turn. There could be no other location for De Gaulle’s funeral, could there? Non. C’est imposible.
And it housed the poor, occasionally, so babies were born there; and it sheltered the sick, sometimes, so beggars and whores died there. Nine centuries worth of priests’ favorite spots to hide from the bishop so they could nap or goof off; nine centuries of mothers hushing their children during Mass. There were dice games, and hand-jobs. There is no building so esteemed that humans will not shoot crap and tug each other off in it. We do that.
A spark. They’re doing reconstruction. (They were. Not anymore.) A blown fuse, a hot connection, something like that. An ignition point. No one’s fault. An act of God. He so often chooses fire as His medium.
Ave Maria, gratia plena,
Dominus tecum, Virgo serena.Ave cujus conceptio,
solemni plena gaudio,
celestia, terrestria,
nova replet letitia.Ave cujus nativitas,
nostra fuit solemnitas,
ut lucifer lux oriens
verum solem preveniens.Ave pia humilitas,
sine viro fecunditas,
cuius annunciatio
nostra fuit salvatio.Ave vera virginitas,
immaculata castitas,
cuius purificatio
nostra fuit purgatio.Ave preclara omnibus
angelicis virtutibus,
cujus fuit assumptio
nostra glorificatio.O Mater Dei,
memento mei.
Who won the French election?
Guy named Macron who’s married to his mother.
This Macron fellow have a first name?
I’m sure. Francois? Jacques? Serge?
Just say that you don’t know.
I don’t, and I don’t feel bad about my ignorance. If anything, I now know way more about French politics than I want to or should.
Why do you even know the infinitesimal amount that you know?
Same reason the rest of the world does: his opponent.
Who was?
Imagine if Donald Trump could grab his own pussy.
You mean, like, if he were thinner and could actually access his own genitals?
No, if he were a lady.
I am now thinking of Donald Trump in a flowery sundress and big church hat.
…
Motherfucker.
This is not a good mental image.
No, not at all.
IT WON’T LEAVE MY MIND’S EYE!
Oh, calm down. Let’s get through this and then we can enjoy some pornography.
Ooh, porn. Okay, tell me about this lady.
Marine Le Pen.
Is that French for something?
Lester Maddox.
Language is fascinating. Tell me more about Mme. Le Pen.
Her party is called the National Front.
And I now know all I need to know.
Right? The conversation can pretty much end there.
I’ll bet a lot of people won’t accept that, and demand actual evidence of her shittiness.
Shitty people will, and then they’ll never listen to your answers. She’s Trump, she’s Nigel Farage. Exact same bullshit: nationalism, isolationism, racism. All the -isms. Le Pen’s a little different in that she’s presentable and well-spoken. Bernard-Henri Levy calls her a fascist with a human face.
BHL said that?
He did.
I don’t like that guy, either.
He blows.
Is there anyone acceptable in that whole country?
Jean Reno.
Good call, yes.
Only good part of the 90’s Godzilla.
Okay, so France was given the choice of their own Trump and said “Non!” Great. What’s the name of the guy they elected, again?
Macron.
And he is a…
Man.
More information, please.
He was born in France, married his high school teacher, got fitted for some suits, and now he’s the president of France.
Really?
Of course. You don’t think he’d wear an off-the-rack suit, do you?
The teacher thing.
Yeah.
Wow. The French.
The French.
But what does he believe in? Is he a socialist? France loves those.
Not so much right now. You know how the United States needs a little bit more socialism?
Sure.
France might need juuuuust a skooch less. There’s a proper amount of socialism that a country needs. Too little and people die without healthcare, too much and it’s impossible to get anything done. The guy Macron’s replacing, Hollande, is a socialist. Old-school pinko.
Is he retiring?
Kind of. In the sense that everyone hates him. He was at around 5% approval ratings when he decided to retire.
Five? Jesus. Cosby’s at ten.
And the socialist got creamed in the primary election.
Oh, France has a system of primaries like ours?
Please don’t wish our political system on other countries. It’s rude.
True.
France does not have primaries. They had a primary election with five (six? six?) people, and the top two go on to a run-off.
That must take forever.
A month. The whole process was completed in a month.
…
What’s wrong with us?
So much.
We still haven’t gotten to Macron’s positions.
He had one position. “I am not a crazy, hateful idiot who wants to drive the train off the cliff.” French voters responded to that message, and due to Macron’s lack of political background and the brevity of the campaign, his opponents were unable to get anything truly terrible to stick.
Did they try?
Would you believe that all of his e-mails were hacked and dumped right before election day?
That’s so weird!
Right!? Coincidental!
Totally!
!
!
Vikileaks released all of them.
I thought it was Wikileaks.
In the original Russian, it’s Vikileaks.
Did it work?
Obviously not. Also, French media can’t report on the election for a certain amount of time before it happens, so the dump may have come too late to do anything even if it was going to.
Can’t report on the election? How does that work?
It’s a law.
That’s the most unconstitutional thing I’ve ever heard.
Gonna just pretend you didn’t say that, chief.
So, did the good guys win?
Way too early to tell. Probably not, but you never know.
Did the bad guys lose?
Yes.
…
I’ll take it.
Me, too.
Fun fact: the Dead’s impromptu show is nowhere near the most impressive Rock Nerd trivia about the Château d’Hérouville. The Boys went to Europe twice before the famous ’72 tour, both times to play only one show because it took the Grateful Dead a while to learn about scalable economics. (That was actually a theme before Cutler taught them how to make money touring: they would play a week in New York, and then fly to Hawaii, and then back to California, and then one night in Texas. It’s like the schedule was decided upon by stoned hippies voting on stuff.)
Both trips were to play at hippie festivals: the European kids had heard about the Be-Ins and Woodstock, and they wanted a piece of the California dream. The first one was 5/24/70 in Newcastle.
“Hey, Jer.”
“Yeah, Bob?’
“We’re bringing dope to Newcastle.”
“Good one, Bob.”
It was cold and muddy, but Elvis Costello was there and the band played as well as they could with their stiff little fingers.
In 1971, the Dead flew back to perform at another festival, this time in France at a place called Auvers-sur-Oise. But it rained, and so the show was cancelled. As usual, the band had found a benefactor to keep them in the lifestyle they’d grown accustomed to: Michael Magne was a French film composer–he did the score for Barbarella–and he hosted the Dead’s whole party at the Château d’Hérouville.
He had the space. The main house was built in 1740 and had 30 rooms in two wings. Chopin used to live there. Van Gogh painted it.
Look:
And now it was occupied by a bored horde of hairy Americans, one of whom kept walking up to viscounts and asking them how to say “Please punch me in the dick,” in French, and when they told him they would get punched in the dick. If you don’t give the Grateful Dead something to do, then they’ll amuse themselves through destruction; they’re like border collies with arrest records.
Well, why don’t we do the show right here?
Precarious had to be talked into leaving America, but he didn’t let his reluctance affect his skills.
The Dead kicked ass that night. It was loose and groovy and people got wild and real with each other. (Obviously, the punch was spiked and–as in all of these stories–the cops wound up taking off their clothes and dancing.) You can listen to it.
Hell, you can watch it:
(I suspect the film crew was there to shoot the festival and got invited to the party.)
You might say, “TotD, what could be cooler than an impromptu Dead show that somehow became one of the handful of performances captured on video?”
And I would say, “GODDAMMIT, DON’T HELP ME. I CAN DO IT ALL BY MYSELF.”
And you would be like, “Whatever, asshole.”
And I would buy you flowers, but the wrong kind and you would make a face, and then I would beat you with the bouquet of flowers, which is an on-the-nose metaphor but it’ll do.
After the Dead played the Château d’Hérouville, Michael Magne converted it into a studio for rock and rolling types, and all sorts of silly-looking people came by to record albums.
How about Bowie?
He recorded most of Pin-Ups there, which was the covers album and is not the reason people were so sad when he died.
Or the Pink Floyd Sound, maaaaaan?
Hey, look: it’s Roger Waters! And David Gilmour! And another guy! Maybe he’s Pink? (They recorded Obscured by Clouds at the Château.)
And Iggy and T. Rex and the MC5 and Joan Armatrading and Cat Stevens and Bad Company and Elton John. This was the Honky Château, and Elton also recorded Goodby, Yellow Brick Road here.
He looked like this:
Yellow Brick Road sold 30 million copies, and it’s nearly perfect: sloppy and bulging and fizzing over like a proper double album, but it’s still not the coolest thing about the Château.
The Bee-Gees recorded this and How Deep is Your Love at the Château, and now that Van Gogh doodle doesn’t seem so impressive, does it?
Hey, Garcia. Whatcha doing?
“Is whatever this is even about us any more?”
In spirit.
“Sure, man.”
Precarious set up those speakers?
“That’s the configuration he arrived at.”
What was the prototype?
“The wine glass was on the bottom.”
Figured.
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