The Boots, AKA Charles Darwin
The Bonnet, AKA Friedrich Nietzsche
The Barrister, AKA Martin Heidegger
The Broker, AKA Eric Satie
The Bellman, AKA The White Knight AKA Sir John Tenniel
The observant reader will detect a pattern here: all of the B-Boyz must have been alive during Carroll's lifetime.
If memory serves, Satie enjoyed creating miniscule models of houses shaped out of lead, which he kept in a cabinet in his home. He would periodically advertise these houses in the local newspaper — making no mention of their actual size — and would take great delight in ushering the prospective home-purchaser into his parlor, and there solemnly presenting him with the unexpected lilliputian house. One can imagine Nietzsche's reaction to this — the Gallic humor! the German silence!
Satie's aptly-named piano piece, Vexations, is an ideal soundtrack for la vie snarque, and so here is a full, unabridged performance of it. If only Satie had made this into an opera, it would have saved humanity from the dullard doldrums of everything else.
