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As usual it was great to be back in Paris, albeit only for a short visit. We managed to get out to see Brunhild and Junya in Montreil, where Junya excelled himself as usual with his cooking. For me the star of the show was jellyfish, though the Japanese lemon chicken that went with it was pretty tasty too. Here’s a picture, jellyfish on top. One can’t help remembering the lines from William Burroughs in The Soft Machine, ‘You win something like jellyfish, Meester!’ Back in 1962, my flatmates Hoppy, Peter Wollen and John Howe would read aloud from the book, and at that line everyone would collapse with laughter. Possibly the big bowl of pot in the middle of the table had something to do with it.
We went to dinner with Philippe and Valerie, friends of Steve and Catherine. I was delighted to see several Ettore Sottsass pieces in the main room, that usually indicates like-minded people. I’d not met them before so it was disconcerting to find that Valerie knew the name of my son’s girlfriend. Of course she had been reading this blog. One always forgets. She is a brilliant cook but I wasn’t prepared for the sheer quantity of delicious French food. A huge array of plates appeared, enough for a full scale tapas meal but that wasn’t even the hors d’oeuvres. It was the amuse-bouche that comes before you even reach the table. Fabulous.
Catherine, Steve and I travelled by train down to Catllar in the Pyrenees and the very next day found us at a beach café in Canet. Here is Catherine enjoying a tentacle.
We drove two hours up to Ken Weaver and Maxine’s place and stopped off en route at St. Guilhem-les-désert, a beautiful medieval village in l’Herault built around the Abbey of Gellone. It once had a magnificent cloister, but it was sold off to the Americans. I am more familiar with it than with the church as it now forms a major part of The Cloisters Museum, part of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City where it is on display next to half of the cloisters from St. Michel de Cuxa, near Prades. The second half of the Cuxa cloister was only stopped from travelling to New York after it was already packed for shipping. I was a frequent visitor to The Cloisters museum during the years I lived in New York.
Steve Shepherd is the executive producer on a documentary film about Tuli Kupferberg, the American poet, pacifist and percussionist. He was the co-founder of the Fugs with Ed Sanders and arrangements had been made for a film crew to interview Ken Weaver, drummer with the Fugs and composer of ‘I Couldn’t Get High’, one of their most popular numbers. I stayed with Ken and Maxine (I first stayed with him in the Lower East of New York in the summer of 1967 and well remember us leaning on his fire escape watching a knife fight on the street below. Everything was just as I thought it would be.)
I filmed an interview with him and ate with them while Catherine and Steve, Dave and Francois, stayed in a B&B. My bedroom was in the old part of the building – 13th century. The next day Dave interviewed Ken and they got some more good footage. That evening we went to a party at an American academic’s house in a local town that was having its firework display a day early. I did an interview for Chuck Smith’s film about the Fugs a few months back, and now another for a film about Tuli. I look forward to the film, which is being narrated by Thurston Moore. Here’s my medieval bedroom; Francois, Maxine, Steve, Ken and Dave; and finally Maxine, Ken, Me and Steve.
Our next trip was to see Salvador Dali’s house in Cadaqués., the most eastern point in Spain. He had a special window built on his bedroom so that he would be the first person in Spain to see the sunrise but uncontrolled development to the north has now deprived him of that privilege. After we found somewhere for the car – very difficult in summer – we walked up to the church. I had been to Cadaqués several times before, staying with Suzy and Ian MacKenzie and Ian, who was a Bond Street art dealer, told me that Richard Hamilton had built a studio there in order to be near Marcel Duchamp, who also had a place there. Ian said the studio leaned against the church. For some reason he and I never went to see it and sadly he’s no longer with us. Well, there’s only one building that could be described as that and though there is no plaque or notice of any sort, I assume that the studio we saw was Hamilton’s.
Next we went in search of Bar Melitón, Marcel Duchamp’s favourite café, at Placa del Passeig, at the northern end of the Paseo, overlooking the beach. At 5:00pm exactly he would arrive, having walked the few blocks round the harbour from the top floor apartment on Placa Port d’Alguer where he and Teenie lived. He would enter the small café and turn to the right where even now the wall is covered with pictures and photographs, mostly by local artists, He would seat himself at his usual table – which was kept reserved for him – and light a cigar. At around 5:30 his chosen chess opponent would arrive, a wooden chess set would be brought, and the business of the day began. Now a bronze plaque commemorates the place he sat, and the wall is full of Duchamp memorabilia, but very discreetly presented. People queuing to use the toilettes, which are right next to the table, barely give the wall a glance though someone came in from an outside table and took photographs while we were there. The tapas, by the way, are very good there. An uneventful, purely residential yard around the corner from the café has been re-named Placa Marcel Duchamp.
The door in his last work, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage, (1966), came from a fisherman’s storage shed just along the front. The work is now in Philadelphia. You have to peer in through a pair of keyholes, one for each eye, to see a naked recumbent woman made from parchment holding a gas lamp with a waterfall in the background. It took him twenty years – on and off – to create this assemblage and there is a manual of instructions on how to assemble it. Here’s the door. And what you see through the peep hole.
It’s a 20 minute walk up over the ridge from the bar to Port Lligat and the Dali house. Visits are timed at 10 minute intervals and you can book ahead. Though there is a guide, they deliver a brief speech in Spanish followed by English then they stand aside to let you explore each room before moving to the next.
The house began as a row of fishermen’s cottages that Dali and Gala gradually bought up and knocked into one, extremely complicated set of interlocking rooms surrounded by a walled garden, a long penis-and-balls shaped pool and a large area of terracing overlooking the Mediterranean. Each room has many items of interest: I love the stuffed swans above the bookcases, and the strange shapes and juxtapositions caused by the different levels of the rooms and their connecting stairs. I had been there three or four times before but long ago. I always liked his studio, which has a long slot in the floor by the wall to enable particularly large canvases to be raised up or lowered into the slot to enable different parts of the painting to be worked on at eye level. Or from his chair – see the photograph. Nothing seemed to have changed in the house. There were a few small objects, rocks, shells, that he had wrapped in silver paper that were shining and new when I first saw them that are now wrapped in what looks like lead, as the silver foil has begun to decompose, otherwise everything seemed to be exactly the same as when I first visited.
A few days later, after Catherine and Steve had returned to Paris, I looked up Dali in my library. I found a large illustrated guide to the house and, tucked inside, was a five page, fully illustrated article by Rosemary, called ‘The Dream House’ published in The Guardian Weekend, on April 24, 1999. It had been 25 years since I was last there – I thought it was about 12 – and I had forgotten that Rosemary was writing about it. I am constantly encountering examples of Rosemary’s work and almost every time it comes as a shock, particularly if I was there with her when she wrote it. Dali’s house is so much more interesting than his museum in Figueres and I would highly recommend it, even though I don’t like his work.
We didn’t really fancy the 30 minute schlep back to the centre of Cadaqués so Catherine called a cab. We were expecting a normal car, but instead a beach buggy arrived with a very cheerful Jack-the-Lad driver called Diego who seemed to know every beach-bartender and pretty girl we passed, who all smiled and returned his wave. (Eco Car: +34.972.258.592). We forgot to take a picture but there are some online.
Back in Catllar, Catherine once again practiced her scorched earth skills on the garden and pushed back the invading hordes of bamboo. Then they were off, leaving quite a gap as they are really good friends. I miss their company already.
