We saw her hanging from lamp posts all over Paris—one of those women from a 19th-century Japanese woodcut, her hair pinned up in a two-tiered bun, her kimono adorned with prints of branches bearing buds and flowers. Instead of kneeling over a koto, she held her hands, fingers splayed, over a Minimoog synthesizer.
Gawking at the Meiji Mod Girl whenever we encountered her had its dangers. Paris is being reclaimed from the automobile. Bike paths proliferate. Insurgent cyclists, many whizzing by on electric bikes, wage a two-front war—against cars and against pedestrians.
The Moog playing courtesan had been concocted by the Musée de la Musique. The poster projected a message of global and transhistorical connection: Old meets New, East meets West, Plugged-in meets Unplugged.
The museum’s huge collection of instruments is housed in the Cité de la Musique, home to the Paris Philharmonie—one of those marquee concert halls that have sprung up in major European cities over the last couple of decades as a means of buffing the prestige of capitals and the egos of star architects. Most of these sleek, gleaming structures are expensive and over-designed, the mix of air handling, noise canceling, and acoustic engineering often providing proof that technological progress can serve as an end in itself. The building becomes the performance, the music often of secondary importance, heard better and enjoyed more richly in older venues or even spaces not purpose-built in pursuit of culture-cred.
The museum and concert hall are in the so-called Cité de la Musique in the 19th Arrondissement on the northwest periphery of central Paris.
We planned to walk the hour-and-some there, but we never made it. Our survey of its keyboard holdings will have to wait for another day, or, more likely, another trip.
At the Place de la Republique, we stood in the searing June heat for a long time, taking in the pro-Palestinian graffiti adorning the bronze lion and plinth on which stands the statute of France, personified since the Revolution as Marianne. She was undecorated with pain, at least for now. Bouldering up to her with a spray can in hand looked dangerous, though a siege ladder could do the trick. Marianne holds an olive branch in her right hand and extends it towards the godless heavens. This symbol of peace glinted indifferently above the Gaza outrage scrawled on the stone and bronze below.
From a patch of morning shade along the north side of the square, a group of drummers lofted their decibels of discontent towards the sun.
Temperatures were already in the high 80s. We turned back towards the river. Past the Centre Pompidou, we ducked into the Church of St. Gervais, a block from the Seine. Its organ, one of the oldest in Paris, was presided over by the famed Couperin family for nearly two centuries, their tenure even surviving the Revolution. At this magnificent relic of the ancien régime the organist was playing a transcription of a cross-Channel classic, Purcell’s “Cold Song,” as if to cool themselves and any visitors. But besides the person up on the organ bench gingerly navigating through Purcell’s frigid, shattering dissonances, we were alone in the church.
The tourists were elsewhere. The white façade of the renovated Notre Dame, where many of the Couperins also served as organists, gleamed at us from just across the Seine. From our side of the river we could take in the backside of the cathedral swarming with cranes and scaffolding, almost all of it artfully hidden from the throngs of tourists. When it comes to the sights that drive global tourism, appearances are everything: the background for the selfie-shot was ready for business.
We crossed over to the Île de la Cité on the Pont dArcole. We hadn’t made reservations for Notre Dame, but the massive queue snaking across the square in front appeared to be moving briskly. Reclaimed from the 2019 fire, Notre Dame is a must-see on every tourist’s check-list. They weren’t tarrying inside. Make the long circuit, but make it quickly: down the north aisle running alongside the nave and around the choir, then back up the south aisle and out and towards the next necessary destination.
We milled eastward in the cavernous space that shone like new, maybe even like it did the better part of a millennium ago. Suddenly, an amplified, omnidirectional voice began to hush the vast crowd in a rhythmic cadence: “sssshh — sssshh — ssshh … ssshh — ssshh.” It wasn’t God, though it could have been. An elderly priest in a white cassock had mounted the steps at the edge of the choir and was shushing the flock through a microphone on a stand.
Miraculously, the hubbub died down. Massed attention turned towards the outbreak of religion that somehow seemed unlikely even a church. The priest informed the visitors that a service was about to begin, then sang a Gregorian melody in his rich tenor. Hundreds—maybe thousands—of cellphones were simultaneously raised on arms extended overhead, like Marianna with her olive branch. The handful of parishioners attending the prayer service were outnumbered by the tourists by at least a hundred to one. After a couple of minutes the hubbub had inexorably returned to its previous level. Even rituals devoted to the eternal must deal with everyday realities. The service continued with prayer, song, and shushing—a modern liturgy in the age of mass tourism.
We left the cathedral and walked down the river to the Palais de Tokyo directly across from the Eiffel Tower. Built for the 1937 World’s Fair, the huge building’s stark colonnade and high windows rising from ground level look more Nuremberg-Nazi than French moderne.
The crowds were here too, but almost all of them in the finished wing that was hosting a blockbuster exhibition pairing two ever-marketable names: Matisse and Magritte.
The other wing has the look and feel of a vast warehouse-like space, its big-boxiness that of an Ikea market hall. First, we took in hundreds of Vivian Suter‘s simple, semi-abstract canvases hanging down like beach towels, unframed and unstretched. Down a flight of stairs four huge rooms presented the diverse works of—and influences on—the Vietnamese artist Thao Nguyen Phan: handheld sculptures, videos (on big and small screens) grappling with war and repression; and exquisite, neo-traditionalist paintings done on the pages of a French narrative of colonial Indochina.
A couple hours of this and I was exhausted. I lay down on the edge of a giant Ottoman the size of a large life raft. After a time, my eye wandered to a distant, unassuming doorway leading into the recesses of the basement. I read the black lettering above the portal: RAMMELLZEE: ALPHABETA SIGMA (SIDE A). I’d never heard of Rammellzee (1960-2010) and was out of museum gas, but somehow I rose from the cushion, drawn towards the unknown entrance as if by some strange, invisible force.
Once inside I was suddenly awake and aware as I hadn’t been all day, all day, all week ….
Why had I never heard of this outsized, irrepressible artistic phenomenon, this one-man Gesamtkunstwerker, this Queens-born dental-school dropout, theorist of the Afro-Gothic, the off-world, the intergalactic; this artistic animator of the subway car as surface and mobile messenger of aesthetic truth; this founding figure of Hip-Hop; this Gotham Graffiti Kandinksy of color and line, framed and stretched; this aesthetic evangelist for kids and the aged, his work uncontainable by rectangular boundaries, instead rattling, radiating beyond them in impossibly riotous motion. Past the wall plastered with the pages of Rammellzee’s IONIC TREATISE GOTHIC FUTURISM ASSASSIN KNOWLEDGES OF THE REMANIPULATED SQUARE POINTS ONE TO 720˚” TO 1440˚intermingled with MTA masterpieces, was an army of life-size figures in mind-blowing, body-morphing costumes that make the Black Panther movies look like a Victorian tea party.
Next were giant anti-capitalist sculptures of found objects, long glass cases of spectacular jewelry, and crazy-brilliant toys intended to teach the kids about art through play. Archival footage showed Rammellzee rapping while thumbing and fore-fingering a mini-keyboard; other video captured him working, unmasked, with tubs of toxic paint in the studio he called his Battlestation. The imagination and craft glowed around him like a magnetic field. From moving images of man in action, I turned towards the luminosity of his deep coffin-like paintings in resin., a substance he first learned to manipulate while in dental school, and presented at the Palais de Tokyo for the first time in non-toxic condition thanks to the work of health -and-safety minded Swiss curators.
More than two hours on, I came to the final room, the smallest of the show. The “Last Samurai” stood, rotating menacingly, yet mercifully on his low, circular plinth—an off-world warrior, the artist’s alter ego, landed on earth, but here for how long? Affixed to the wall a few feet away was the last piece in the exhibition—another sculpture rich in careful chaos. At its heart was a keyboard. That Japanese woman seen on posters all around the Paris should let her hair down, change her kimono for some Rammellzzee rig and have a go at this keyboard, this ventriloquist—or perhaps controller center—of the harmony of the spheres, silent for now but ready for some intrepid soul to intone a mind-blowing, eye-frying, ear-boggling hymn to a multi-dimensional future.
Rammellzee needs to land again in New York City! Bring this show home!
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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