June 7, 2014
It is no secret among my friends that I look up to le Roi-Soleil as my man-of-choice in all manners that’s good in life. From an early age, I had an obsession with the Sun King, better known as Louis XIV. At the time, I lived in a single apartment on Martel in West Hollywood, that was basically a room with a small kitchen, and even a smaller bathroom. Still, it was my first home away from the family, and I treasured my little spot as if it was my Palace of Versailles. Therefore I decorated the one-room apartment with images of Louis XIV, and even chose furniture that was not a good imitation of furniture from that period. The fact that it looked fake, made the surroundings more endearing to me.
At the time, I was employed in my first job, which was Licorice Pizza, a record store chain in Southern California. I would take a bus to Reseda boulevard, and then another to Sherman Way. At the time, I thought of the bus as my royal transportation. It was a bus with a lot of stinky people, but to me, it was my palace as well. I made sure I sat in the very back, and in the middle of the aisle. I wanted the sense that everyone who enters the bus, must come to me. Of course all of this was an illusion, and part of the time, I knew that. But most of the time, I just forgot that fact and went on with the fantasy. The music I played at the store was usually baroque music of all sorts. My favorite records were recordings by Jacques Champion de Chambonnières, Jean-Baptiste Lully, and François Couperin. The latter was my favorite of them all, and was awarded the credit of being “organist du Roi, ” organist by appointment to Louis XIV. In the era of the Jam and the Sex Pistols, it was very hard at the time to find recordings of Couperin’s music. Nevertheless, I insisted on making a special section of his music in our bins at the time. As far as I can remember we didn’t even have any classical music in stock. And what made it even more sad, was that at the time I could only find one release that was in print at this time. “L’Espagnole, IV. La Piemontoise 1727” released on the Telefunken record label out of Germany. My educated guess is that we were the only store in the San Fernando Valley that carried this recording, and only one copy at that.
Here, I need to be honest with you, I wasn’t that popular with people around me. I kept my world as a very private one, and rarely did I share it with others, or allowed anyone to get close to me. I prefer the artifice of a representation of a life than a real relationship. It reached a peak in my life that I would make love to girls, but only in front of a full-length mirror that was in my apartment. In a sense, I wanted to be in my own movie of my own making. But alas, I have changed since then, and now I have not one single full-length mirror in my “now” humble home.
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