Delicious Night by Baudelaire In A Box

Dubbed “an act of extravagant artistic idiosyncrasy” by the Chicago Reader, Baudelaire in a Box is a cantastoria cycle based on the work of Charles Baudelaire. Over the course of eleven years (culminating in 2017, the sesquicentennial of Baudelaire’s death), the project will adapt each poem from Fleurs du mal as a unique cantastoria, pairing each musical adapation with “crankies” designed and illustrated by Dave Buchen. Baudelaire in a Box has been performed in Illinois, New York, Connecticut, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, and Wisconsin, by a growing group of musical collaborators.

Charles Baudelaire was a real teenager’s poet - obsessed with the idea of death, unrequited lust, physical pleasure, exotic distant lands, alienation, and relentless narcissism. But also impatiently curious, both sensitive to and simultaneously jaded by the hypocrisy around him, eager to shock convention and to make art that captured the immediacy of the world. He was both a punk and a poseur. He celebrated the slums of Paris, smoked opium, gave what little money he had to prostitutes and died young at 36 from syphilis, drink and hard living. But he also sponged off of his aristocratic mother his entire life, dressed as a dandy, and was a terrific snob who despised democracy and its assumption of the essential goodness of humanity. Baudelaire was perhaps the first artist to realize that one of the fruits of the new industrial, urbanized culture (he was the first to use the term “modernité”!) was the possibility to extend adolescence deep into adulthood. And he lived his teenage dreams to the fullest.

It is no wonder that Dave Buchen chose Baudelaire as a poet to illustrate - the pictures practically draw themselves. His imagery is so rich, so hyperbolic, so over the top. “Swarming maggots” and “perfumes as cool as the flesh of children” and “My spirit resembles the tower which crumbles under the tireless blows of the battering ram.” The previous episodes of Baudelaire In A Box that I have seen were in a folksy vein with acoustic instrumentation. But I guess because my teenage years were in the 80’s, when I read Baudelaire I hear Lou Reed, The Cure, Iron Maiden, Suicide and other touchstones of adolescent angst. I see David Lynch films circa “Eraserhead”, fog and Klieg lit synth pop music videos, urban grime and glamour. In short - a Goth paradise. I am hoping that there is an interesting tension between the proto-Goth of Charles Baudelaire writing in the 1840’s and a new interpretation based on the retro-Goth of the 1980’s. But at the very least it’s an excuse to finally bring a fog machine into the Old Town School!

--Bobby Conn, September 2015