Umbrellas

There are many reasons, I think, to feel a belated affection for the composer Erik Satie - but perhaps the most endearing of them revolves around his passion for umbrellas.  He regularly left dozens of them, all open, scattered around his apartment; he spoke of them as flowers, and when he died nearly a hundred of them were found: a veritable garden. Once, when he realized that he had left an umbrella at a cafe, he supposedly hurried to that establishment, muttering, Oh, how worried my umbrella must be to have lost me! Sure, Satie's music can be ravishing - but has anyone, really, ever enjoyed umbrellas as him?

Well, maybe: above, one of the may set pieces involving umbrellas produced in recent weeks by Cleo. Already a master of repetitive music, a genre championed by Satie (and still occasionally perpetuated in our car, through successive playings of Milkshake), she can also act, like Satie, in a minimalist or Dadaist vein. (Her abbreviated, three-line, nonsensical knock-knock jokes might qualify as both). And yet she is closest to Satie, in spirit, in her love of the common umbrella as a basic element of interior decoration. Today, she saw them as protection against monsters, rather than as flowers, but the end result seems to be about the same: a living room awash with color, if not rain.

Keep on, girl. The past is a fog, into which we occasionally see with partial clarity, and through which we can perceive tiny shards of color. You make the present feel equally mysterious - and even more colorful.