On Suze and Other Soft Spots
This post comes with a soundtrack of sorts. Get yourself connected to a pair of decent speakers or headphones. And if you have a Spotify account, log in and refresh so that you can play the embedded tracks.
Let’s begin with Piero Umiliani's “Pelle di Luna.”
We’ve entered the world of what DJs and crate-diggers call “library” music—tracks designed to form a background or atmosphere, generally for TV, film, and radio, but also occasionally for more experimental art and architectural projects. The somewhat ad hoc and ephemeral nature of much of this music—its being employed for an extrinsic use and a particular moment—lends it a desirable quality for collectors and selectors: hearing it, one can catch the drift of a distinct time, a distinct style, moods and modes, forms of life.
Maestro Umiliani is representative of a specific subset of library music at that, Italian dramatic library music, and further exemplary of what is considered by many to be its golden age, the 1960s through the 1980s. In this, he shares the illustrious company of such other composers as Nino Rota, Armando Trovajoli, Piero Piccioni, Alessandro Alessandroni, Bruno Nicolai, and Ennio Morricone (to recall only the most renowned). The catalogue is accordingly expansive, replete with scores ranging from award-winning films, to avant-garde cinema, to low-budget thrillers and soft-core porn.
Here’s an instance of the genre’s intersections with the Mondo Exotica sounds associated with Les Baxter, Martin Denny, and Arthur Lyman—Piccioni's “Bora Bora.”
And here’s a theme by Morricone that I simply find hauntingly beautiful.
Why begin with this sonic subgenre in a post supposedly devoted to an apéritif amaro? The answer to that question will take time to unfold (and, I’m afraid, likely retain an inextricable esotericism at its core). It’s not just for the deep Italian roots of amaro, or for my sense of some affinity between these particular tunes and tastes. Suze, after all, is French. (Or Swiss. It’s a minor controversy.)
Really, there’s no way I can articulate what Suze and Italian library music have to do with one another without reference to myself. Yet that peculiar relation is the point of this post.
The previous post on clairin, taste, and language culminated in a vision of gustatory aesthetics as fundamentally communicable. Taste in that essay was a matter of sensitivity to meaning, attentiveness to truth—not far afield, in other words, from taste in the sense of “having taste” (or tact), having good taste qua having good judgment, judgment of what is good or what is beautiful. Judgments of taste enfold a call for others’ assent. Holding such judgments, one cannot intelligibly say that something is good or beautiful to me. To call something good or beautiful is to make a claim on, or to, our shared sensibility (though we may find that that communal sense or sense of communion rests on nothing more or less than our capacity and will to keep on communicating).
I could very well speak of Suze and Italian library music in just this register. But when it comes to my love of these things, I am more interested in exploring taste in the sense of “one’s tastes”—one’s tastes qua one’s preferences or predilections. Again, my aim here is not to oppose these different meanings of taste or to assert that one use of the word is more legitimate than the other. It’s rather to inquire into what it means, what it’s like, to have one’s tastes in the latter sense of having a propensity or penchant—to inquire into how one’s tastes give voice or form to one’s life or one’s style (and how one’s life and one’s style mutually absorb and express one another).
Amaro and vermouth often have gentian root as a bittering agent, but not all amari are gentian liqueurs like Suze, Avèze, and Salers. The latter contain substantially more gentian root—specifically the root of the yellow gentian native to the mountains of Central and Southern Europe.
Here I could easily start tumbling down the rabbit hole of gentian’s history and that of bitters and amaro writ large. Instead I’ll simply direct you to Brad Thomas Parsons’ fine books on those topics, as well as this tidy video of Suze's manufacturing process from the producer.
Bracingly bitter, yet balanced with a base of honey, wildflower, and citrus, Suze is like sipping the wind as it whips up a country road on a cold spring morning. It’s become a staple on modern backbars, making its way into a multitude of drinks, most famously the White Negroni. I've yet to encounter a well-mixed cocktail containing Suze that I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed. It’s refreshing with soda. It’s restorative with tonic. Still, I enjoy it most on its own, poured in a double rocks glass over a large clear cube and garnished with a grapefruit twist. And if Alessandroni's L'Ora Del Cocktail happens to be playing in the background while I savor it, all the better.
This music, this flavor—I just really fucking like it. What’s that about? Whence this inordinate fondness? Again, I could exhaust my powers of vivid description, seeking to draw you into my experience of these phenomena, but something in me just doesn't feel the need—not with an insouciant refrain of “De gustibus non est disputandum,” nor an adolescent insistence that “You wouldn't understand,” but something more in the spirit of serenity before one’s finitude, or an awe before the crossing of finitude and transcendence—before the simple fact of my having a life, being a self. There is an order of my living subjectivity at which loving Suze and Italian library music is simply what I do—what it’s like being me. How marvelous that it should be so! Plenty of others, no doubt, love Suze and Italian library music, many perhaps even to the same degree or in a similar manner. That doesn’t make the reality any less striking. Each of us stands to be moved by the wonder of one’s mysterious joys in such minute particulars as these—by the sense that, somehow, along these most fragile and mundane of enjoyments, there runs a path to knowing who one is.
After all, it’s not as though one’s inclinations—one's “soft spots”—are wholly unfathomable or emerge from nowhere. One catches glimpses of their anamnestic pathways just as they slip into the abyss of one’s implicit or unconscious memory: the smell of the New Jersey Pinelands on summer nights, the thrill of sucking on raw lemon slices, timbres and melodies from Sunday Mass...those choral voices…
those circle progressions1 (an instance heard below starting at 00:23 / -01:47)...
My peculiar affections for such things as Suze and Ennio Morricone have to be, I feel, somehow in contact with these formative experiences. Nevertheless, I have to hold the emphases on unconscious and implicit as I speak of memory here. It isn’t straightforwardly the case that I relish amaro and Italian library music because they remind me of childhood. They don’t particularly. At any rate, inasmuch as they might, my delight in them is not one of nostalgia—neither for my childhood, nor for a time before my childhood.2 And yet, my delectation does seem to involve a kind of recognition. So just what is it that is being recognized?
Perhaps there are tracks to be followed in the phrase “soft spot.” To say one has a soft spot for someone or something is to suggest a kind of receptivity or defenselessness—a disinclination or inability to refuse that someone or something. To have a soft spot is to be unguarded, disarmed. Just so, it is a site at which we open ourselves to touch. And one’s capacity to touch and be touched—originary affectivity or flesh, as the phenomenologist Michel Henry names it—is the site at which (one’s) life reveals itself (as self). Henry is pertinent here for the rigor with which he distinguishes the appearing of the world, our “intentional consciousness”3 of what “stands outside” consciousness (ek-stasy), and the appearing of appearing itself, Life’s appearing, our non- or pre-intentional pathos, the self-experience which precedes and founds all experience of the world. Our soft spots, in the clarity of this distinction, illuminate a special mode of appearance: yes, we experience them in the world’s exteriority, through the “outside itself” of intentionality, but the particular joy we take in them places us in closer con-tact with life’s radical auto-affection. (The same would hold even as our soft spots, as vulnerabilities, stand to bring us particular sufferings, joy and suffering being the “fundamental tonalities” of our flesh's inescapable passibility. Hence the sense of our soft spots as being incorrigible—as unalterable as our bonds to our bodies.) Soft spots, in this light, almost take on the quality of what in Irish myth are called “thin places”—liminal or threshold spaces in which the veil between heaven and earth, this world and the next, becomes porous and translucent. Although, here we are not speaking of any space outside of oneself. A soft spot rather marks an experience of the world in which one “feels oneself” more intimately.4 What we recognize in these passions, then, is Life experiencing itself within us.
So let us end with recognition, in Umiliani's “Ricordandoti.”
Prosit.
Variations on the vi-ii-V-I chord progression are called circle progressions for their foundation in the circle of fifths (also known as the circle of fourths; compare its movement clockwise vs. counter-clockwise). As a basis for harmonic theory, the circle of fifths reached its full blossom during the Baroque period. Accordingly, the most luminous examples of its use are to be found in Bach. Yet in light of the sonic atmosphere of this post, let me direct you instead to Michel Legrand's “Les Moulins de Mon Coeur,” adapted as “The Windmills of Your Mind” by Alan and Marilyn Bergman for the title theme of The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968. (After all, it’s not every song that can consummately reflect the symbolism of its lyrics at the level of its music theory!) The most famous recording, sung by Noel Harrison, is alas, academy award notwithstanding, not the finest.
Legrand’s own performance is by far the more evocative.
I for one am most partial to Dorothy Ashby’s cover.
See Mike Senior’s admirable breakdown of why the song just works on The Mix Review.
It has to be said, nostalgia for a former time (lived through or not) is part of the allure for both Suze and Italian library music. Suze’s full product name is Suze Saveur d’Autrefois—literally, “flavor of another time.” Suze, Campari, Chartreuse, Fernet—these are venerable recipes, rooted in medical and pharmacological traditions. (The curative properties of these liquids, while still widely touted, could frankly use a bit of modern scientific corroboration, yet few would deny their efficacy as digestive aids.) Additionally, these aperitivi and digestivi tend to be associated with older drinkers, partly as a social phenomenon, but also, one would think, for the fact that aged palates are less sensitive to bitter compounds. Turning to library music, listeners are no doubt drawn to it insofar as the instrumentation, arrangements, and recording techniques can characterize a period or culture of music. Again, to hear these pieces is to hear how film, television, and radio sounded at a particular time and place—in this case, Italy in the 1960s-1980s. Pretty irresistable stuff for anyone who fancies oneself as “retro,” or perhaps as a kind of charming curmudgeon. If I said that I was entirely above that sort of thing, I’d be lying. Even so, I do not believe that I adore Amaro Braulio and Bruno Nicolai because somewhere along the way I, so to speak, convinced myself to, seeing such things as befitting a kind of persona I wished to cultivate.
Intentionality in phenomenology is a term of art that is to be distinguished from intention in the sense of one’s aim or purpose in acting. Intentionality describes the fundamental directedness or “aboutness” of consciousness—its character as consciousness-of.
But again, do not lose sight of Henry’s distinction between the two modes of phenomenality at issue here. In the appearing or revelation of one’s life, one is not merely sensing one’s own body as a sensed body (or even as a sensing body, for that matter): “Life reveals in such a way that what it reveals never takes place outside it—since it is never anything external to it, other, or different, but precisely itself. So that the revelation of life is a self-revelation, the originary and pure ‘experiencing undergoing itself’ [s’éprouver soi-même] in which what feels and what is felt are one and the same. But this is possible only because the phenomenological mode of revelation in which life consists is a pathos, an embrace without distance and without regard to a suffering and an enjoyment whose phenomenological material is indeed pure affectivity, a pure impressionality, the radically immanent self-affection that is nothing other than our flesh” (Michel Henry, trans. Karl Hefty, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 120).