An Appreciation (The Left Bank Circa '68)

3 days ago by @freshspotlessyouth

Liner Notes

#postpunk
This is the backing track from my previous song, No Small Consolation. I frequently do this. Why not get extra mileage from the same music? The song is safe for work, but not the liner notes.

This song is based on the collected works of Yves DuBord, a French Platonist and Marxist active in the literary circles of Monparnasse in the 1960s. His best-known aphorism, “Real Art does not stoop to become actual art,” spoke to his belief that Art’s descent into the physical world of things could only debase it. In order to resist the petty bourgeois impulse to produce “mere things” in any of “the guises of the object,” ranging from painting and sculpture to music and film, Dubord spent his days talking about Art while getting prodigiously drunk in the bars, cafés, and bistros of Montparnasse. He could frequently be seen holding forth at Le Select, where he reportedly once told a young Bob Dylan that the true Artist is more likely to be seen "frequenting a whore house than wetting his dick in the vulgar simulacrum of Art from which folk music is made.”

Given his view that the production of objects is “a cheap sleight of hand,” the work of “accountants and children,” DuBord did not commit his thoughts to paper. The aphorisms that come to us today were captured by his disciples – or, possibly, by malicious detractors – on food- and wine-stained napkins, which can be examined at Les Archives Nationales in Paris.

Dubord is probably best remembered for challenging Jean-Paul Sartre to a “biggest dick” contest on the zinc bar of Le Select. According to Napkin #75, which appears to be crusted with béchemel, DuBord taunted Sartre as follows: “I’ve heard that on the continuum running from Being to Nothingness, you tend toward the later.” It is said that Sartre politely declined to place his member on the cold metal next to DuBord’s.

(In case it's not clear, DuBord is a fictional character.)

Lyrics

Well you know I loved your pronouncements
Magisterial
Meaningless
Or profound
You said art doesn’t scrape
It doesn’t bend where it can break
It simply does not deign to take shape

Yes, I loved your pronouncements
And the velvety swoosh of your cape
You’d say, artists are all just accountants
Infants mounting yet another dumb jape

Oh yes, I loved your pronouncements
Which your acolytes scribbled each day
You'd say, real art doesn’t bow
It doesn’t scrape
It doesn’t mold
It doesn’t shape
It doesn’t bend to the charlatan’s gaze

Oh how I loved your pronouncements
You’d say, real art’s no cheap sleight of hand
It’s the murder of god while you're lounging
At the bistro with some cheap wine in hand
And talk

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