Mystery Tramp Diet

Étant donées, photographed by Marcel Duchamp in his studio at 210 West 14^th Street, New York City 



          "I knew Duchamp casually, beginning in the early 1940s. in New York City, in the French Surrealist milieu. Later in the decade, we used to meet when I was working on vexing questions that arose while I was editing my Dada anthology.  We met once or twice at the dusty New York studio he had for years (on West Fourteenth Street, I think), but more often at a little downstairs Italian restaurant, where he invariably ordered a small plate of plain spaghetti with a pat of butter and grated Parmesan cheese over it, a small glass of red wine, and expresso afterward.  In those days his lunch must have cost seventy-five cents or less." 


        -- Robert Motherwell

Marcel Duchamp in his studio at 210 West 14^th Street, New York City


"There is no solution because there is no problem." -- Marcel Duchamp

 

NOTE:  For some reason (I’ll expand on this sometime; it’s been a perilous week), Robert Motherwell’s recollection of Marcel Duchamp’s frugal, but still appealing (almost luxurious) sounding daily lunch reprinted above came to mind today.  

I think I was wondering about simplicity, balance and relaxed discipline.  Researching a source for the quote I found (not entirely unexpectedly) that it stuck in other peoples’ minds also.   I would have loved to include a photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s 14^th Street Italian luncheon spot, but have no idea what it was called; it certainly no longer exists.  

Neither, sadly, does Larré’s, pictured above, which operated on West 56^th Street, between 5^th and 6^th Avenues at least through the 1970s.  My mother and my aunt first introduced me to it when I was in college.  It was a simple, quite inexpensive but traditional French restaurant that I later learned was a frequent haunt of the French Surrealist group (many of whom relocated to Manhattan after fleeing Paris) during World War II.  

Never fashionable and plainer even than Le Veau d’Or, probably the plainest, least pretentious of the genuine French restaurants that still survive in Manhattan (there aren’t many), it most certainly felt like a home away from home for these artists, and walking along 56^th Street my head is always filled with visions of André Breton lecturing someone or other about something and Yves Tanguy enjoying a quiet lunch with Kay Sage.  Marcel Duchamp was also an habitué, as I would be today if time and tide in Manhattan weren’t so severe on everything.  This is climate change I’m willing to acknowledge.

Julien Torma

I am also that shadow which follows me and which I flee.

        Shadow of a shadow, dancing on the ramshackle walls of chance, to the point of preceding me during those moments when the heat on my back dissolves me in the sight of that frenzied caricature which frightens me too much for me to laugh to my heart’s content.

Dream.  In a telephone booth in Les Halles.  I’m waiting for a call from who knows whom and who knows where.  A tinkling bell, comparable to those altar boys.  I lift the receiver.  At the end of the line, amidst the fizzling sound of a Bickford fuse (at the same time, the idea of an enormous impending danger), I catch the miniscule sound of a kiss imprinted on fingertips.  

 

Dream.  A woman of about thirty, brunette, wearing a blood-red suit, is about to pass me on the pavement of a violently sunlit street.  Deserted.   I wish to turn back, or at least to cross the street.  But, as it happens, I want to see what’s going to happen.  Suddenly, at the moment she draws level with me, she throws herself upon me, very nimbly, and kisses me on the right side of my throat.  A disagreeable sensation I can’t describe.  For the sake of saying something, I say: “I could really do with a drink.”

Dream.  A labyrinth of dark corridors spiraling downwards.  Intestinal landscape.  Impression that I’m going to go on walking like this for eternity.  How to get out?  We carry on downwards (I say we because there’s an absolute crowd thronging in these corridors, but in reality, all the time it’s me).  Luxuriously comfortable cinemas as well as immense urinal-cathedrals, feebly illuminated by neon open off these sinuosities.  The ground underfoot gives the impression of walking on a raft of dropsical bellies.  A whiff of sea breeze reaches me at the precise moment I realize I am in a penal colony, condemned to forced labor for life.

        Lighting up the night only makes it more obvious.

        Living is a kind of hide-and-seek.  In seeking out ideas, men, and oneself, one reckons to have a pretext for not getting lost or, at all events, in the masked ball in which we are carried along, to find one’s clothes again in the cloakroom.

        It’s not the light that’s attracting me, but the darkness that’s driving me on.

  

NOTE:

Julien Torma (April 6, 1902 – February 17, 1933) was a French writer, playwright and poet who was part of the Dadaist movement. He was born in Cambrai, France, and died in Tyrol.

        A friend of Max Jacob and Robert Desnos, he was near the surrealist group without adhering to surrealism. He felt himself nearer to Alfred Jarry's 'pataphysics than André Breton's surrealism. Most of his writings were posthumously revealed by the French College of 'Pataphysique.

        Julien Torma disappeared in the mounts of Tyrol at the age of 30. He possibly committed suicide.

         Due to his elusive behaviour and the impossibility to check his life facts, it has been suggested many times that Julien Torma's existence may be entirely fictional.  His purported birthday, April 6, is marked as "the birthday of pataphysics" in the "pataphysics calendar". Nevertheless, some believe that a real writer eager to create confusion authored the first four publications and Porte battantes.

       Anyway, would the person be real, Torma has to be a pen name: according to the French institute for statistics INSEE, since 1891, only three Torma births have been recorded in France, all of them between 1941 and 1965 in the South-West.


Julien Torma texts excerpted from:  Four Dada Suicides. London, Atlas Press, 1995. 

Link:  Torma 2 (Is This Real? Who Wrote This?)
Link:  Torma 3 (Torma ! Torma!! Torma !!!)

Beauty Will Be Convulsive: Leonora Carrington: (4.6.17 -- 5.25.05)

Leonora Carrington, Self-Portrait, 1937-38, Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

  

Leonora Carrington, Self-Portrait, 1938, Photograph

"I didn't have time to be anyone's muse... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist." --Leonora Carrington, 1983

"Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all"  -- Andre Breton, 1928 


Reader Note:  Those interested in Leonora Carrington may enjoy This.
Also This.
And  This.
Images ENLARGE.

I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby (Charlie Louvin: July 7, 1927 – January 26, 2011)

 

Last night, my dear, the rain was falling,
I went to bed so sad and blue.
Then I had a dream of you.

I dreamed I was strolling in the evening,
Underneath the harvest moon.
I was thinking about you.

And then you met me in the moonlight,
The stars were shining in your eyes.
But Another was there too.

I don't believe you've met my baby --
You looked at him, you looked at me.
I wondered who you were talking to?

I shook the hand of your stranger,
But I was shaking more inside.
I was still wondering who?

Your arm was resting on his shoulder,
You smiled at him, he smiled at you.
His eyes were filled with Victory!

He said "My sister wants to marry",
And then my heart was filled with ease.
I knew that you would marry me.

        I was wondering all last night what one could possibly say about the passing of Charlie Louvin?  I'm still lost in that process.  

 

        The first Louvin Brothers song I ever heard was The Byrds' performance of The Christian Life on their 1968 Sweetheart Of The Rodeo album.  The group's vocal and instrumental mastery aside (it is a great  track on an astonishing record), most of the Byrds' Vietnam-era audience undoubtedly felt a sort of sarcastic, spoof-y aspect to the performance. But, as great art will do, the meaning of the whole sunk in, unforgettably, later.

 

        I really broke through on the Louvins when I first heard I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby, the surrealist "dream song", whose lyrics are inscribed above, performed by Peter Blegvad (accompanied by his own brother Kristoffer) on his album Downtime.  Read the lyrics, listen to the performance, there's nothing more to say.  The Blegvads were brave to essay it, and the song fits perfectly with Peter's original art and perspective, but it is very, very difficult to "cover" perfection.

        Wondering how to respond to Charlie's death, I thought -- do I dedicate something to When I Stop Dreaming, River Of Jordan, We're Just Rehearsing, Broadminded -- something else?  No, for me it's this one, always.

        I listen to the Louvin Brothers every day of my life.  I won't rehearse their importance, their influence (i.e., the things that never could have been if they hadn't been who they were, been there first and blazed the path).  

        The only thing I can say is "thank you" to Charlie and Ira.    Let others read and recount the story of your lives and your penetrating, sometimes shocking, always uplifting art.  Let us all play your records forever and ever.

        You will always remain shiny, diamond-bright and diamond-hard, and eternally young. 

        Masters.

Charlie Louvin photographed in the Grand Ol' Opry parking lot 2010 by Jamie Jemes Medina (borrowed from Andrew McLenon's Facebook page).