For the record, let it be stated here and now that my wife is an infinitely much cooler person than I could ever hope to be. She has always been very much in the loop when it comes to matters of pop culture: movies, books, art, fashion and music.
How cool is she? Back in the day, she even worked at the hippest locally owned vinyl store in the city, where she had the inside track on all new domestic and import album, 12 inch, and single releases. As well, her boss was also a local indie promoter, so she met a lot of interesting musicians that passed through town. She had her finger on the pulse, as it were – at least until CDs started outselling LPs, a situation that has since been reversed: If you stick around long enough, nostalgia becomes the next big thing all over again.
Fast forward to just a few weeks ago. At our local library, she found a recent multi-disc DVD series about the life of Pablo Picasso, starring Antonio Banderas. As we sat down to watch it, I jokingly referred to the old song by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers where the lyric goes, “He could walk down the street and girls could not resist his stare / And so, Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.”
It turned out she met Richman once when he played the local campus pub. “He liked my shirt,” she remembered. “And he did calisthenics while he talked.” Anyway, I watched the show for about an hour, but eventually gave up, visual art being one of the many things that I don’t count as one of my strong points.
A couple of days later, she was still watching the series. “Did they get to the part when he moves to New York?” I asked.
She paused the video. “I don’t think he ever lived in New York. Whatever gave you that idea?”
“You know, like in the song – ‘Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole / Not in New York.’”
“I think that just meant New Yorkers liked his art, but I don’t think he ever actually went there, not even to visit or anything.”
“Well,” I dodged, “what about those other lyrics – ‘The girls would turn the color of an avocado / When he would drive down the street in his Eldorado?’”
“I don’t think he drove much, if at all.” She returned to her video, and this is probably why she’s so cool: She can let conversations like this go; as for me, well, I was on a mission.
A quick internet search revealed that Picasso had indeed never been to the U.S., although that didn’t prevent the FBI from keeping a file on him. As for his preferences in automobiles, who knows? Still, I was disappointed; going back to my teen years I had always loved this two-chord throb, and I envisioned Picasso, driving down the streets of New York City in his shiny Cadillac Eldorado convertible, the girls swooning over him as he twirled his signature moustache …
… which turned out to belong to Salvador Dali. Or at least the segment on SCTV where Joe Flaherty (as Dali) gives modern art lessons which includes the use of “two farm fresh eggs” and “black ants.”
Now, I just need to figure out if Bob Ross really did the artwork for Pink Floyd’s Obscured by Happy Little Clouds.
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