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Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Erik Satie: Things Seen to the Right and the Left

Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (17 May 1866 – 1 July 1925), who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist. He was the son of a French father and a British mother. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, but was an undistinguished student and obtained no diploma. In the 1880s he worked as a pianist in café-cabaret in Montmartre, Paris, and began composing works, mostly for solo piano, such as his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. He also wrote music for a Rosicrucian sect to which he was briefly attached.

After a spell in which he composed little, Satie entered Paris's second music academy, the Schola Cantorum, as a mature student. His studies there were more successful than those at the Conservatoire. From about 1910 he became the focus of successive groups of young composers attracted by his unconventionality and originality. Among them were the group known as Les Six. A meeting with Jean Cocteau in 1915 led to the creation of the ballet Parade (1917) for Serge Diaghilev, with music by Satie, sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine.

Satie's example guided a new generation of French composers away from post-Wagnerian impressionism towards a sparer, terser style. Among those influenced by him during his lifetime were Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Francis Poulenc, and he is seen as an influence on more recent, minimalist composers such as John Cage and John Adams. His harmony is often characterised by unresolved chords, he sometimes dispensed with bar-lines, as in his Gnossiennes, and his melodies are generally simple and often reflect his love of old church music. He gave some of his later works absurd titles, such as Veritables Preludes flasques (pour un chien) ("True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)", 1912), Croquis et agaceries d'un gros bonhomme en bois ("Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Man", 1913) and Sonatine bureaucratique ("Bureaucratic Sonatina", 1917). Most of his works are brief, and the majority are for solo piano. Exceptions include his "symphonic drama" Socrate (1919) and two late ballets Mercure and Relâche (1924).

Satie never married, and his home for most of his adult life was a single small room, first in Montmartre and, from 1898 to his death, in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris. He adopted various images over the years, including a period in quasi-priestly dress, another in which he always wore identically coloured velvet suits, and is known for his last persona, in neat bourgeois costume, with bowler hat, wing collar, and umbrella. He is believed to only have had one intimate relationship with another person. A passionate four month affair with the painter Suzanne Valadon (who painted Satie's portrait in 1893-94, shown below).

Despite being a musical iconoclast, and encourager of modernism, Satie was uninterested to the point of antipathy about innovations such as the telephone, the gramophone and the radio. He made no recordings, and as far as is known heard only a single radio broadcast (of Milhaud's music) and made only one telephone call. Although his personal appearance was customarily immaculate, his room at Arcueil was in Orledge's word "squalid", and after his death the scores of several important works believed lost were found among the accumulated rubbish. He was incompetent with money. Having depended to a considerable extent on the generosity of friends in his early years, he was little better off when he began to earn a good income from his compositions, as he spent or gave away money as soon as he received it. He liked children, and they liked him, but his relations with adults were seldom straightforward. One of his last collaborators, Picabia, said of him:

"Satie's case is extraordinary. He's a mischievous and cunning old artist. At least, that's how he thinks of himself. Myself, I think the opposite! He's a very susceptible man, arrogant, a real sad child, but one who is sometimes made optimistic by alcohol. But he's a good friend, and I like him a lot."

Throughout his adult life Satie was a heavy drinker, and in 1925 his health collapsed. He was taken to the Hôpital Saint-Joseph in Paris, diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. He died there at 8.00 p.m. on 1 July, at the age of 59. He was buried in the cemetery at Arcueil.


Suzanne Valadon - Portrait d'Erik Satie 1892-93

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Max. Mon Amour / Max My Love (1986)

Peter Jones (Anthony Higgins) a British diplomat in France, suspects his wife Margaret (Charlotte Rampling) of having an affair. He hires a private detective, who reports that Margaret has rented an apartment. It then turns out that her live-in lover is a pet chimpanzee she calls Max. A bizarre love triangle comedy in the surreal style of Buñuel. Directed by Nagisa Oshima (In The Realm Of The Senses, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence), written by Jean-Claude Carrière (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie).

Monday, April 01, 2024

The Sapphire Room

The Sapphire Room from Sean O'Brien on Vimeo.

The famous Les Girls 'All Male Review' in the heart of Sydney's Kings Cross since 1963 was still going strong in the 1990s, headed up by the performer Carlotta. Capitalising on the sudden success of the feature film 'Priscilla, Queen of the Desert' (Stephan Elliott, 1994), Les Girls went on tour, leaving their night club vacant. Sean O'Brien, and his fellow filmmaker colleague Robert Herbert took advantage of the vacant Sunday night spot at Les Girls (2a Roslyn Street Kings Cross) to run their own fun spot.

Tender Trap was for the emerging scene of easy listening, lounge, cocktail, exotica, and incredibly strange music experiencing an enormous international resurgence in the mid 1990s. With the filmic by-line, 'A celebration of cocktail culture at its most sophisticated and savage', O'Brien and Herbert developed a narrative arc to each evening evening – 'First the cocktails and sophisticated conversation, then the live performance, then the wild dancing shall begin'. The sleaze, gangs and drugs of 1990s Kings Cross were left outside the doors of Tender Trap. Soft, pastel lighting, a very vintage sound system, and hand-made stage designs for the cabaret acts all gave Tender Trap the feeling of an oasis in the centre of the Cross, for those who were seeking it. (I attended several events there, including a performance by Japanese ambient noise legend K.K. Null in 1995). 

After running Tender Trap for eight years, in January 2000 the club had its final night, as the historic Les Girls building was shut down for major renovations, becoming yet another inner-city hotel. 

This film by Sean O'Brien is a  portrait of the twilight world of the Sapphire Room, the last of Sydney’s legendary cabaret nightclubs. The film blends candid footage of local “exotic” cabaret artists with a dramatic plot which follows the characters and actions over one eventful night at the club. It features Johannes K. Drinda, the World's Greatest Whistler, who performed his unusual repertoire outside the Sydney Opera House for many years. Filmed on location at the Tender Trap club, in the Les Girls building, during the mid 1990s.

Writer/Director: Sean O'Brien 

Camera: Simon Von Wolkenstein, Tristan Milani, Sean O'Brien 

Editor and sound design: Nick Meyers 

Cast: Rowan Woods, Sauly Saul, Sasha Madaluno, Ali Higson, and a scintillating line-up of Sydney's cabaret stars.