Alain Didot la Recherche du temps perdu
Thoughts During a Patti Smith Film at Mass MoCA
By: Charles Giuliano - Apr 20, 2009
"Merde" Alain Didot exclaimed as we exited the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. We often viewed foreign films together in the 1960s. His bike was gone. In a matter of minutes he stole one and peddled home. It was typical of Alain to act like a Bicycle Thief. My original Raleigh Three Speed was boosted in Harvard Yard several years earlier. Eventually I bought one at the Revere Flea Market and had it overhauled last year at Spokes in Williamstown.
Thoughts of Alain washed over me last week, day dreaming through a meandering, two hour, grainy, black and white, hand held documentary on Patti Smith at Mass MoCA. She talked a lot about death: Her husband and brother, a guy in her band, Robert Mapplethorpe with whom she lived in the Chelsea Hotel. The film recorded her visiting the graves of poets. That made me think of my own pilgrimage to Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris during spring break probably in the 80's.
My artist friend, Raphael Mahdavi, let me stay in his loft in the Marais and Pere Lachaise was just up the street. It was a brisk February morning when I approached a guard and asked directions to the grave of Jim Morrison, the Lizard King, who died in his bathtub of everything.
The guard was rude and abrupt gesturing "La, a droit." I wondered why. But found out soon as I wandered along. There were arrows with the word "Jim" spray painted on tombs. Eventually, I arrived at the graffiti covered niche where Morrison is buried. The cemetery is dense and crowded. His bust had long disappeared and there was just the slab. It was about ten in the morning of a week day as kids were hanging out smoking joints and drinking wine. Someone was playing a guitar. People came and went leaving a flower or a poem perhaps staying to get stoned. I hung out for a couple of hours.
When I started taking pictures, for my first, photo collage show based on that experience "Riders of the Storm" a pimpled faced punk kid angrily stated that I couldn't take pictures because Jim belonged to the youth of the world. In a slurry, stoned manner he said insultingly that I was too old and fat. With my best French I told him to fuck off and that I was at Woodstock when he was still in diapers. The English kid playing the guitar looked at me and said "Wow man, you were at Woodstock."
But Alain was not a poet. It is better to say that he was poetic. He may have written verse just as he made a few paintings. One, which hung in the Cambridge apartment, was a portrait of a tart with an inscription in French "The whore on route to a church." He was fascinated by irony. On the kitchen wall there were tacked up engraved invitations to social functions in Paris which he may or may not have attended.
Alain seemed like a shipwrecked French aristocrat; washed up on the beach of Cambridge. There was a connection to Boston University where Jim Jacobs found him. Jim, then and now, has a knack for finding and befriending interesting people.
In a lot of ways Alain was as close as I ever got to French existentialism. He was a handsome cross between Belmondo in 'Breathless" (again the thief) and Alain Delon. His accent was wonderful and it was fun to trash talk with him in hipster patois. It seemed to intrigue him as it was cool then to be a hipster not like now when it is a lost art.
We were bored that summer as we hung out, smoked dope, always hard to find at that time of year, before the fall harvests. With school not in session most of our friends were away. We cruised Harvard Summer School and followed some girls down the street. One of them called herself Ravi.
She tagged along when Alain and I decided to crash in the dunes of P Town. My short was an Alpha Romeo. I bought it with money earned from my first show. It was a bit of a windfall but like most Italians the sports car refused to work on rainy days. It was small for the three of us but great to be at the beach and out of hot and sweaty Cambridge.
We rose with the sun as the dunes get hot almost immediately. At dawn we visited the Portuguese Bakery and bought a hot loaf of fresh bread to eat on the wharf watching the tide roll in.
That fall everything changed when I moved to New York. Alain was dating Susan and I was hooked up with her best friend Patsy. When he came to town we all got together for some great times.
Alain went back to France or Latin America. I'm not sure which. When next we met in New York for one of our double dates he was rich. He wore a hand tailored suit and demonstrated how you could actually unbutton the cuffs. I had never seen that and always assumed those buttons were just decorative. His mission to New York was to launder money and it was assumed that he would be back.
It was different. I wasn't sure if I really liked Alain as a rich aristocrat. It also reminded me why there are no French hipsters. Other than Edith Piaf and Django Reinhardt there isn't much worth listening to. The French don't got the blues, man. Too much history, culture, poetry, and philosophy. The blues ain't got none of that. The blues just come out the mouth a poor man miserable strummin on the porch. That wasn't Alain.
So the down on his luck aristocrat stealing bicycles was a shuck. He was still Alain but there was a fork in the road that saddened me. I don't like getting taken to fancy restaurants by rich people. More fun to split the check at Chinatown. Or make dinner and invite people over to drink a lot of three for twelve wine. Slam around and have a good time. Play some sides. Groove on Miles and Trane. Funk to Monk. Laugh and argue.
There was no phone in my storefront at 312 East Eleventh Street between A & B in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side. People took cabs to come see me or sent telegrams.
When I opened the door it was Susan in tears. The last time I ever saw her. "Alain is dead" she said. "He drowned in his swimming pool."
Coming out of Patti Smith we chatted with friends who asked what I though of the film. He spoke about seeing her perform years ago at CBGB's in New York. I said that the evening made me think of my long lost friend Alain. God knows why after all these years. I guess the film strangely reminded me of how much I miss him. I never knew Patti Smith but respect her as an artist and poet. She hooked me up again with a friend who may have been a poet. If only.