“il faut que ce feu commence à moi. Ce feu et ces langues, et les cavernes de ma gestation. »
antonin artaud
Inside, the unmade bed, the scattered journals & notebooks like a storm conspiracy, the scented candles filling the air, the wonderful hysteria created by the lovers – my prepared telecaster decorated with a photo by Jay Defeo’s deathrose moaning ground loops as if signaling through the flames against the chrysocolla sky of saint-germain-des-prés – outside, gobsmacking July sky & the electric hum of cicadas in heat, rue de seine/rue de buci & their rowdy summer fauna, their terraces brimming with rosé, the jazz buskers, the aristocrats & tramps, the cadillacs & trotinettes, the Pastavino waitresses in trance & the squiggly tubemen of the apocalypse, the cocaine cowboys, the coronavirus, the chihuahuas, the bobos, the local gallerists & habitues, the climbers & parasites, the working class baldheads over espresso or a demie de Carlsberg, the eccentric ladies over champagne & vintage art books picked from a corner bookshop, the parrot guy, the old sex lady looking like Vali Myers, the beast-like poets talking in dream languages with the distant orion’s belt over endless shots of cognac, the stray flaneurs like hylas abducted by angelic nymphs with almond hair & alabaster skin into the red jukeboxes of Bar du Marché – outside, the sound & the fury of Baudelaire’s verses haunting every street & every hotel room, casting a holy gob of spit on the sidewalk of Le Germain crawling with Parisian playboys & belles de jour (or law students) turned to luxury sexdolls after midnight – outside, the hieroglyphic screams of Pascal the bum pissing off Heaven’s cocktail tables – outside, twilight’s last cries turn to waxing gibbous moon, danse macabre, grotesque ballet, orgy, speed, jazz… Bud Powell’s melancholic symphony on largactil at The Last Hotel
Henrik Aeshna / Eros en Feu – Hôtel La Louisiane, Paris, July 1, 2020
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Note on Bud Powell…
From “Dance Of The Infidels, A Portrait Of Bud Powell”, by Francis Paudras:
“…I (Francis Paudras) knocked at his room [ at the Hôtel La Louisiane]but no one answered. Then I heard a call for help coming from another room. He was locked in. All I could do was to persuade Buttercup to open the door and let me spend some time with him. It was a horrendous spectacle. The squalid little room was strewn with dirty plates, the floor littered with cigarette buds. Seated on the unmade bed, Bud hung his head and avoided my eyes.
Who would have believed that the great Bud Powell could be treated with such contempt, kept prisoner in these ugly surroundings, and that no one around him seemed to care?… »
« Bud had been abused terribly in asylums, where they had forced him to have several courses of damaging electro-shock therapy. His schizophrenia and manic depression had been ‘treated’ with large amounts of Thorazine, a drug considered by many to be virtually a chemical lobotomy. Thorazine and Largactil have debilitating side effects and a lot of his strange behaviour could no doubt be attributed to these, combined with indiscriminating use of shock therapy. » (Excerpts from
The Book Cooks Excerpts from Flying High – A Jazz Life and Beyond by Peter King)
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