Status Updates From Erik Satie Three Piece Suite

'Satie does what so few actually did: makes everyday life marvellous again.'

'Calling something "playful" as a way of not taking it seriously. The quality of lightness is too often underappreciated. The superficial playfulness of some practitioners of avant-garde art and music barely hides an intransigent, humourless, rhino-sized ego. Too many artists put a premium on difficulty, impenetrability, doom. No such transcendent value is afforded the light, the dizzy, the caressing.'

quincunx as the visual equivalent of a Satie composition

'[Boethius] possessed one of those long-ago minds which recognize no compartments in the love and pursuit of knowledge.'

Roger Shattuck: 'The twentieth century could not wait fifteen years for a round number; it was born, yelling, in 1885.'

'In the century since it first exploded, a lot of scandalous art has inevitably become defanged, installed as part of a safe new canon.'

'At the height of modernism, Satie is already a few steps on from everyone else. As critic and composer Constant Lambert puts it in 1934: "What distinguishes Satie from the other representatives of post-war Parisian mentality is the fact that while they were catching up with the times he had the no doubt gratifying sensation of seeing the times catch up with him."'

You’d have to like Satie, if only because Andre Breton didn’t.

I’ve laughed on every page but this line is an early favorite.