The Late 20’s, continued. The alone deepens, the money runs out.
Sketchbook – Vol.1 p.2 ch. 5
Lili Boule de Gomme
This was the other song that Jean-Paul Boissard wrote out for me during the Columbus stop-over on his seeing America trip in the ’70s. My attempt at a singable English version did not get as far as with J’ai Mis le Feu, but I still retain a fair sense of the meaning. Maybe someday. The narrator is a young woman who has different identities in the different verses, all having to do with movie idol fueled fantasies. It starts out with her as Lili Boule de Gomme, (Lili Gumball, or Bubble-gum.) “I’m 13 but I look 20.” Then she is Brigitte Boule de Gomme (“I’m 20, but I don’t look it”), then Marylin Boule de Gomme (“I am dead, but I never age”).
Here is one of several videos of a Paul Boissard tribute concert at his home club in Picardy, about 10 years ago. Lili appears at about 16:45. Here it was sung by a young girl, which made it extra poignant. She didn’t really get older as the song went on, though. Then everyone starts singing along at the end. This brings tears to my eyes every time. I used to think I might be the only person in the world that knew this song. Everyone knows this song.
Regarder la vidéo «20 ans dans la lune 1» envoyée par François sur dailymotion.
And here’s a recording of Paul
(lyrics:) Je m’appelle Lili boule de gomme J’ai treize ans mais j’en parais vingt D’ailleurs l’âge ça ne compte pas Au fond des salles de cinéma Je m’appelle Lili boule de gomme J’aime les hommes qui ont des gros bras Des moustaches comme mon papa Et qui m’emmènent au cinéma Quand arrive l’entracte Et qu’ils me payent un esquimau Mes rastacouères rougissent de trac Et je leur dis ces tendres mots Je m’appelle Brigitte boule de gomme J’ai vingt ans mais je les parais pas Du talent comme on n’en fait pas Et je veux faire du cinéma Je m’appelle Brigitte boule de gomme Et je danse souvent les pieds nus Dans la chambre pleine d’inconnus Que je rencontre au cinéma Je suis le monstre de ma voisine Quand je chante avec mes héros Et que je joue la fin du film En leur disant ces tendres mots Je m’appelle Marylin boule de gomme Et je me tourne dans les draps D’une nuit qui ne finit pas A la sortie du cinéma Je m’appelle Marylin boule de gomme Je suis morte mais je ne vieillis pas Dans le film quand je dis aux soldats Je vous en prie n’y allez pas Ils vous tueront tous là-bas Restez encore auprès de moi.
Sketchbook Vol. 1 Part 2 Chapter 11
Sketchbooks V.1 part 2 chapter 3
After the peak of the blizzard, I no longer had any friends I could live with. Rent increased over 300%. The car died. So, I quit my job.
Sketchbooks V.1 (’59-’80), Ch.1: “childhood”
Here I begin the documenting of my hardcover sketchbooks with the first few pages of the first book I was given as a child. There are no dates, but I think it must have been about age 9-10. I think I was generally inhibited by the seriousness of the format, as it only sputters along for a few pages every couple of years. By my early teenage years I was already mostly disrupted and sidelined by feelings of despair and futility. Even though I drew constantly on whatever was in front of me, doing it on purpose raised too many questions of importance and “what are you going to do with that?” Then there’s a final couple pages here as an “adult”, say 16 or 17. The next section will begin a decade later when I found this book and began using it again, deciding I might as well work on these useless skills I had been plagued with all my life since I couldn’t stop thinking about it and everything else had crashed and it was one thing I could just do. I wrote and drew in many volumes fairly steadily for a couple of decades. Then, it all started sputtering again, and a couple more decades later I’m still struggling with long silences.
(Click any image to open gallery w/ slider. Note: in lightbox currently in use, in a computer browser there is a ‘zoom’, but it kind of resembles a ‘close’ button sitting in the upper-right corner. The ‘Close’ button is actually on the lower right.)
Finding and losing an old friend.
Merde. Pour un moment j’ai pense que j’avais trouve mon viel ami de quelques jour, Jean Paul Boissier. Mais, peut etre il est mort.
Back in the mid-70’s I was living in a crumbling Civil War era mansion with a lot of people, so things would occasionally happen in spite of my near autistic state. (I still live in this house in my dreams, trying to reconcile the background knowledge that we were driven out when it was torn down for OSU hospital parking space.)
Somehow, we ended up with a hitch-hiker from France staying with us for awhile. Why he was in Columbus, OH I’m not sure, but he found the right place if you had to be there. Turned out he was a songwriter, and at some point he undertook to teach me a couple of his songs. I still have them as they were written down and annotated in an old notebook, which I have to search through all my old notebooks to find whenever I try to learn them again. Somehow, between his very little English and my even smaller French he explained most of the images to me. Ah, je vois, ce n’est pas une lyric ordinaire. It took some similes and hand gestures, vraiment.
J’ai mis le feu, I set the fire, you know, the fire in the skull, like when you get sick… faiset mes poubelles, you know, garbage, [gestures of digging through something with one’s hands.]
J’ai mis l’feu by PaulBoissard
the other song: Lili Boule de Gomme
I guess that took up most of our indoor time, I don’t think I ever got to teach him one of my songs. Well, I hardly could teach them to myself around then. I don’t remember much else about his visit. Some black hashish rolled with tobacco, some walking in the sunshine in the big field behind the Hospital Cafeteria, some passing the guitar back and forth, some big smiles.
I proclaimed my intention to write an English translation of the songs and he was all for that, then he could be a big hit on two continents. But, he didn’t keep in touch and I didn’t know how to reach him. I always pictured myself going to France one day and looking around and there he would be playing on a street corner. I let the time pass as if shutting my eyes tight enough would leave me where I was with all possibilities still intact. A couple years earlier, I would have just grabbed my backpack and hitched along.
I did end up learning and sometimes performing that one of the two songs, and finally a couple decades later I achieved a singable English version. Well, I guess I’m still working on it. Not quite satisfied. In recent years I looked for him on the internet a few times, with no success. Last night (early this morning) I was laying in bed sleepless again, and a long FaceBook chat in French with another non-French speaker led to my thinking about the song, failing to remember all of either the French or the English version. After a few hours I got up again, opened a beer and put the entire first line of the song into the Google box and there was a video result right at the top of the page. There could be a lot of “mis le feu” songs I supposed, but in the summary I could see the lyrics going on… those same ones that I thought I might be the only one who knew. …le seule solution…” It was a slightly different version, in 4 instead of waltz time, piano instead of guitar… but this is the song. (not really a video, just an audio recording with a picture of a fire to accompany it.) And that led to a whole page of videos of songs by Paul Boissier. (I guess they dropped the “Jean” at some point.) Damn, I thought, the sucker went and became functional in society. This led to finding both a Facebook and MySpace page, and I was excitedly getting ready to write to him when I read in the blurb on one of them something to the effect of (loosely tryanslating and from memory): “Gone too soon, before the inevitable national acclaim. They went on: Paul Boissard a marqué toute une génération de musiciens et poètes picards.”
I also found video and articles about a 20th anniversary celebration in 2007 for a collective cabaret named La Lune des Pirates, after one of Jean Paul’s songs. One of the nights of the anniversary was a Tribute to Paul Boissard. I guess that he had but to personally hand a song to the right person (here and there) to have it cared for and kept alive. No record company or publicity machine required.
I can’t find info on why he may have died. Later, I found on the main page of his DailyMotion site where they say he died some 20 years ago. This may have something to do with why the photos look pretty much like I remember him. But, I guess he made his mark. He lived.
et moi? “Maintenant, je reve sur des cendres… “-
Paul Pages:
http://www.correzitude.fr/GUDI/ILNOUSPROMENESURLAGUITARE.html
http://www.dailymotion.com/PaulBoissard
Listen Here
dream 11/20/16
I think there was a dream within a dream. It seems like I was watching/playing some sort of video game with narrative movie content, or a movie with interactive screen elements. I remember a dialogue and a related clickable room. In the scene a young man and woman were talking, and she was saying she was going to have to miss some recurring event they usually did that involved LP’s and discussion thereof. (history? reviewing? something more complicated involving relationships between disparate LPs in their history or gestalt?) It became clear that the two had once been very close in some way but there had been a rift and then a drift, as the guy was saying “I guess it wouldn’t surprise me it would be easy for you to blow off most of the stupid stuff we do, but LP night?!??” And then there was some screen play in a record store scene, and you could click on the LP’s in the record rack and their image would zoom to an enlargement with cover art and liner notes. there was some object of shuffling through them and trying to find ones of some particular significance based on different criteria and I think match the disparate releases to each other on that esoteric basis. The images of some of the familiar covers stirred deep and powerful emotions within me.
Then I woke up, and was thinking about how important LP’s had always been to me, and how weird and messed up it is that I could never manage to release any; for a second I had a wave of correct thinking, that this was what I should be devoting my time to. Then I remembered that there was money involved, and how that has always been my kryptonite and I get shorted-out whenever it is in the equation. At this point I started getting emotionally wracked, lying there in a dingy motel room with the 1950’s style ceiling fan slowly turning overhead somehow mirroring my spiral into mal-autobio. Suddenly I became aware of how strangely empty the room seemed. I looked again at the door, open to the screen, and the tear in the screen door directly diagonal to the handle. I stood to take better inventory, and it added up to zero. First thing I thought about was my instruments. Okay, the guitar was just an ebay Epiphone; but the specially worn 1917 Gibson mandolin is not replaceable in any sense!
Then I woke up again, this time in a cluttered half-double as has been more often the case. It took some time to explain to myself that I had never been in that motel room, and that I didn’t have to jump up and start dealing with this situation.
dream 11/19/16
awake after 3 hours whiskey and cigarette steeped sleep from yet another disturbing dream ending.
Was out in the country somewhere house-sitting at a big suburban kind of place, and there had been a bunch of people there partying, it was a holiday weekend or something, and we were in the big double-garage with no vehicles in it and I was doing, in the face of all logic and reason, a rendition of “New York, New York”. Kind of a half-ass jam with some video maybe. And, I guess I got wound up about it; going, hey, in spite of everything, let’s do the big ending as a parade with all these people, big video scene. Maybe it will be some sort of ironic triumph to cap my sputtering unseen, unheard, inadequate and incomplete life’s work, come on. But everyone was ready to leave, and went off saying “the moment has passed,” and ridiculing me in various ways.
And I said, “oh yeah, well you know what?” and then I floundered for a strong statement about their attitudes and lives in general and was just stammering and unable to spit out even a simple-minded curse when one of the departing suggested over their shoulder, “fuck you?” “Yeah,” I agreed, “fuck you!”
And then I was alone with my failure once again. (Except three people drove in on their bicycles; I thought maybe to see me but they had promised the absent owners they were going to drop some stuff off. They said they thought they’d find some big jam going on and I was debating whether I should suggest we play some anyway.) then I woke up feeling awful because it all seemed so everyday realistic.
Some recent ballpoint doodles
I searched and searched for tips on turning my longtime ballpoint habit (mostly fueled by sitting at a desk at work and school, and ease of carrying on a bus) legit with an archival ink. Turns out there are some common brands that use inks that conform to certain industry standards, and there are lots of mailing list and blog posts about these issues. But, actually finding the right implements cheap in my locality took a lot of hours (as always.) But, for now I’ve got my answers, even if it did require ordering stuff from China and Japan and Germany, and the most expensive pen has already had the pocket clip break so thanks, Tombow. But, the Tombow refills are more for writing, as they are a smooth flowing liquid ink.
If you want to get that pencil like feel and value range you need an old school funky ballpoint, none of this gel and liquid and glide what-not. Well, Schneider’s got it, and the Schneider Pulse (not the Pulse Pro, which has some kinda smooth glide ink) ended up being the compromise weapon of choice. I got one at a reasonable price, and then a handful more shipped from way out for a very reasonable price. And some extra refills. Now, actually getting my broken hand and mind to usethem up is a whole other issue. Most of these drawings were done after being up all night and then finally having a craving to do what I should have been doing all along after the sun starts coming up and I’ve turned the lights out.
