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04/18/2006: "satie -> mondrian -> eno -> food"
I've been thinking far too much about this music-food thing. On Saturday night, I woke up with a start. There was a missing link in my Eno-Mondrian food connection, I realized, and that missing link was Erik Satie, the modern father of ambient music! How could I have forgotten about Satie and his tortured relationship with food? Yes, we all remember the Gymnopédies--so beautiful, yes--but Satie was a class-A crackpot. I mean, this was a guy who started his own church after quitting the Rosicrucians ("L'Eglise Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur"!) For a long time Satie subsisted on only white food (fitting, then, that one of his later works was titled Menus for Childish Purposes), which matched his equally weird penchant for wearing grey velvet suits almost constantly. White food and Satie's music makes intuitive sense to me somehow; there's this snowy sense of purity and a solemn, crystalline radiance to his music. Satie's most famous work is so tidy and elegant, too--there's this pearlescent plastic quality to it that's sort of Apple Computer in a way. But have you ever listened to Satie and wondered, well, this is all very nice, very pretty, but there's something sort of evil lurking beneath this music? Something deeply weird along with that refined sense of melancholy? So back to Satie's tormented dealings with food--he "never spoke while eating for fear of strangling himself." Even his famous explanation of "furniture music," the original foundations of ambient music as we know it, was framed in the context of dinner:
You know, there's a need to create furniture music; that is to say, music that would be a part of the surrounding noises and that would take them into account. I see it as melodious, as masking the clatter of knives and forks without drowning it completely, without imposing itself. It would spare them the usual banalities.
You could set up a whole Mondrian-Satie psychological continuum of eating in the context of Brian Eno's influences, though I'd say that Eno's attitudes toward food probably run more in line with another huge influence of his, the late Fela Kuti. I found this reminiscence by a Nigerian writer on his experiences at Fela's club the Shrine: "I also recall with great fondness, the savory piquancy of the excellent Jollof rice and stewed fried meat sold outside of the Shrine. I recall nights during my University of Lagos years when we visited the Shrine area just for the food."
But back to Satie's grim culinary universe. "My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coconuts, chicken cooked in white water, moldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin)," he wrote in his Memoirs of an Amnesiac. Not sure about the amnesia, but Satie probably had at least three personality disorders that could be identified if I had a copy of the DSM-IV handy. This odd French site I found, which celebrates "Satie-inspired desserts" in a sort of proud French Amelie-ized version of the man (including a section titled "Satie and the Joy of Eating," which would make you think the guy was munching happily on pear galettes while frolicking down the picturesque streets of Montmartre), offers more choice tidbits: "For me, eating is naturally a duty--a pleasant, festive duty--and I really want to perform this duty with exactitude and due attention," wrote Satie. "My appetite is good and I eat for myself, without selfishness or the urge to wolf things down. In other words, 'My posture is better at a table than on horseback'--even though I ride rather well." Err.
"Exactitude and due attention" reminds me of Mondrian's strict attitude toward food, which I talked about in the post below with reference to Eno. Now Satie was French, of course, and Mondrian was Dutch, but it was in Paris that Mondrian had his massive mind-melting paradigm shift leading to the development of his signature rigid "Neoplastic" style. Interestingly, though, it was only after moving to Britain that Mondrian fully developed and refined his truly freaky eating habits! Which brings us back to Eno...
