The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #61145   Message #982639
Posted By: Malcolm Douglas
13-Jul-03 - 10:08 PM
Thread Name: What makes a traditional song?
Subject: RE: What makes a traditional song?
Cocteau was a funny chap. Have you ever seen any of his drawings? I can quite imagine him seeing a guitar (literally) as a musical bidet. Heather Lloyd's reading is probably right, but I'd be surprised if J.C. didn't have that double meaning well in mind. He had a fine sense of the surreal and the right way of representing it in film (remember Orphée travelling into the Land of the Dead through a mirror?) even if he had the occasional blind spot (the concluding scene of La Belle et la Bête looked more like a gay wish-fulfillment fantasy than the story really justified, but I think he took it absolutely seriously).

As we veterans may be constrained to agree, anyone who quotes that "horse music" business nowadays without a very obvious tongue in cheek, is either a rank beginner, or an idiot. There may be some mileage where the bidet is concerned, perhaps.

"It's all f*** music. Ain't never heard a toilet singing."

No, that can't be right. I'm quite sure that I've heard toilets singing (though only on fairly unusual days) but it was a quite different repertoire.