Bumper sticker seen this morning:
If I must die, let it be
DEATH BY CHOCOLATE
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Today, northern Vermont:
España, te echo de menos.
rws 2:57 PM [+]
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Saturday, August 26, 2006 Bumper sticker seen this morning: If I must die, let it be DEATH BY CHOCOLATE ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Today, northern Vermont: España, te echo de menos. rws 2:57 PM [+] |
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Friday, August 25, 2006 [continued from previous entry] Talk continued, along with waves of sensory input from the overall scene -- the light from the lowering sun flickering through sheer white curtains made restless by the breeze, the ongoing sidewalk promenade of passing local folk, noise and motion from restaurant activity. At some point, the sun slipped down behind trees and the main course showed up, a lamb thali platter settling onto the table before me. They'd asked for our spiciness preference when they took the order, I'd said medium. After the first course, I was ready for further culinary partying, and dug into rice/curry to find... they'd ignored my preference and given me zero spiciness, the dish tasting like something I could pick up in any decent 1950's stateside cafeteria. Not bad, but a let-down after the kick in the butt of the initial plate. T. attempted a remedy, calling for spicy sauces. They brought the customary Indian restaurant table-top combo (one hot, one sweet, one weird) -- it helped a teeny bit, but couldn't completely compensate for the curry's total lack of heat. Ah, well. One out of two plates ain't bad, and the first was world class. We stepped back outside as dusk was settling in, decided a cup of caffeine would hit the spot. T. aimed the car toward a neighborhood he liked, we found parking on a side street, across from a small park, a white Greek-style building shining softly in the fading light, couples on benches talking quietly. T. was sure this neighborhood -- more chic than his, more moneyed -- would be worth wading into, with interesting people and, in particular, beautiful women. (Hey, we're hetero -- so sue us.) And god knows, the scene on the main drag was active, each side of the street sporting restaurants, cafés, other shops, the sidewalks crowded with people walking, the aprons in front of businesses filled with crowded tables, the air humming with laughter and conversation. We found a promising shop, ordered, planted ourselves at a table outside for further blathering, armed with cups of brew (mine started off with a rough edge, mellowed as I worked my way through it). The sidewalk show didn't disappoint, happy folks strolled past in abundance -- a bit more upscale than in T.'s neighborhood, though not, thought I, any more eye-catching. (Except for one tall, slender, dark-haired woman in a slinky black number, standing by a car a short way down the block. Damn.) Er, where was I? And during all this -- during all the cruising around, all the chow hoovering, all the liquid sipping -- the conversation seemed to concern itself more and more with writing, authors, that kind of thing, T. really hopped up on Chandler, Hemingway, screenwriting, and a novel T. himself had just finished. A novel written very much in a Chandler/Hemingway mode -- each chapter a self-contained scene, each scene moving necessarily to the following scene, each one thrusting the story forward. Clean, vivid. Muscular, even, in its way. And somewhere in all the blabber, T. referred to Chandler as the greatest American writer. Something I appreciate about T.: he's right out there with who he is. His likes and dislikes are clearly expressed -- he loves the things he loves and makes no secret of it. And when he's focused on something, his gaze is unwavering, he stays with it. I love Chandler. I've been through his novels and short stories a bunch of times. I appreciate other authors who work in the same vivid, austere style, whether I'm a major fan of what they produce or not. If that style of writing has come to represent the best of American scribbling to T., that's all right by me. At its best, in the hands of good writers, it can produce stories along the lines of Hills Like White Elephants and novels like The Long Goodbye. Big-time material. And it produces passionate, hyper-earnest monologues from T., a brand of talk that's worth the price of admission. And that evening talk he did. Which suited the circumstances, me working on about two hours' sleep, the batteries starting to run low. (It sometimes happens that shuteye doesn't come easy for me the night before a trip. The night before this trip had been one of those sometimes.) Every now and then, T. would pause to apologize for the ongoing torrent of verbiage, I'd wave a hand in sincere dispensation. He finally seemed to believe me, carrying on in guilt-free fashion from that point. I'd planned on hopping the Metro back downtown, T. pooh-poohed that, driving me back to my squat for the night like a true mensch. I opened the door to my penthouse cubbyhole as the beat-up bedside clock read 10 o'clock, turned on a light, drifted to the window to the admire the view of this fine city's nighttime version. The only sounds: vague, generalized traffic noise and a mild breeze, the combo working together to produce a gentle kind of white noise. I lay down on the bed with a book, gradually drifted off as life in the city carried quietly on outside. All that night I drifted in and out of sleep, the soundtrack of nighttime Montreal sifting through the open windows, quietly constant. The dark bulk of a large office building loomed off to the northwest, its upper form delineated by a simple, continuous line of deep blue neon light. At some point, the sky began the shift from black to blue, sunlight creeping across urban landscape. Intense, orange light at one point, the kind that made the city shine in a mighty photogenic way. I thought about dragging my carcass out of bed, fumbling my camera out of its case, taking some shots. Then I came to my senses and drifted back off to sleep. Breakfast was to begin at 9 a.m. I planned to be stumbling in the door of the B&B at the stroke of the hour so that I could sit myself down and have a leisurely meal. All of which meant, of course, that I'd need to be awake, packed, showered (etc.) and out the door of my penthouse cubbyhole around 8:55. Got up at eight, the city coming to life outside, the day shaping up to be beautiful. Was ready to go by 8:30, turned on the TV, skipped around the stations to kill time. Found more French than English-language channels, and one station broadcasting in Italian. (Go figure.) Stepped out the door at 8:55 and into an empty elevator, by the time it reached the lobby empty had become crowded. Dragged my bags along sidewalks nicely cool in the morning shadows (passing one building where two French-speaking males sat blabbing, one slim and gray-haired, one hefty, older and dark-haired -- both sitting in the same spot they'd sat the two times I'd passed the day before, raising the question of whether they'd passed the night there). [to be continued] ~~~~~~~~~~~~ T-shirt seen in Montpelier today: FORCED TO BLEED España, te echo de menos. rws 4:46 PM [+] |
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Wednesday, August 09, 2006 [continued from previous entry] I stepped back out into summer sunshine thinking about card games, found myself remembering two games in particular that I'd been affiliated with, both long gone, both based in Cambridge, Mass., during the years I called that part of the world home. First: a monthly game organized and hosted by G., my best buddy, one I became part of during the year and a half he and I shared the top floor of a 3-family building in West Cambridge, a stone's throw from Fresh Pond. One attended mostly by local theater folk (logical given G. worked as a director, me as an actor -- and when I say I worked as an actor, I mean I actually at times lined up paying gigs, situations that thrilled the bejesus out of me despite the pay being less than world-class), including some affiliated with the more respectable, prestigious corners of that world, and one no longer working in that world, having shifted into television (the local Faux affiliate, working as an anchor in the local Faux News broadcast, probably making more $$$ than the rest of us put together). A game I think had a fairly long history before I happened along, G. and I the most constant attendees during my tenure. Low stakes -- nickels, dimes, quarters. Which suited me just fine. The point, mostly, was a good time, though if one attendee kicked ass in a serious way on any particular night, gloating of a loud, exaggerated kind was accepted. Stacks and stacks of low-stakes chips provided the same glee as mounds of chips representing big bucks would, with the added benefit that each player's stake was $5.00, guaranteeing no one would leave the table in dire economic straits. The game didn't feature much in the way of serious alcohol intake (though every now and then someone would show up armed with a bottle of hard stuff and fill a shot glass from it a few times). Ditto re: cigars. Plenty of junk food and conversation, though. Fun. After a year, year and a half, G. began shifting his life to N.Y.C., attempting to get more serious about his directing career (and, I think, his life in general). The game became less regular, finally vanishing altogether when G. made the shift to the Apple as a full-time thing. Or at least vanishing in relation to me, G. having been my link. He disappeared and the rest of them disappeared, taking the game with them. And me -- finding myself with no roommate, a quiet flat, no card game -- I got another game going. With several guys I'd known for several years. Friends, not acquaintances. A group of anywhere from four to seven that began gathering once a month, each month at a different attendee's squat. [continued in following entry] España, te echo de menos. rws 7:07 PM [+] |
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Monday, August 07, 2006 Friday, at the gym: walking into the locker room, post sweaty exertions, I stumbled through a conversation in progress. Two gents talking about a poker game. (The gents: Andy, a blind, balding, 50ish fella, maybe 5'6" tall, with some accumulated weight he's gradually working off; and a taller, older guy, balding in the way that leaves a ring of hair around the cranium, graying hair in his case, bushy, angling out so that it looks like his head has grown a pair of goofy wings.) They chatted, I eavesdropped, until Andy mentioned the name Mamet and I realized they were discussing a legendary poker game, an event that took place on a more or less weekly basis for many years, based in this section of Vermont and counting among the regulars one of the pre-eminent living American playwrights, David Mamet. I butted into the conversation to ask if that was actually what they were going on about, Andy confirmed, smiling -- me also smiling, pleased to find myself hearing a first-hand report on that bit of local lore. Andy briefly described the life arc of the game: a relatively low-stakes gig founded and attended by friends, joined by Mamet at some point -- the playwright first experienced, Andy affectionately noted, as an arrogant kid from Goddard College ("Which made us love beating him.") -- after which the game developed legs, evolving into a happening of almost mythical stature: the premier all-night Vermont card game, featuring food, booze, cigar-smoking. As Andy described it, "We'd start gearing up for it during the day, get together in the evening, play all night -- well into the next morning -- and need the next day to recover. It ate up two days of every week." At some point, he said, a crop of new guys joined the game. "Sharks," he elaborated, the smile on his face becoming rueful, "playing for high stakes, and they began cleaning us out on a regular basis." The game took on a whole different character, the fun began bleeding away for the original members, the event began a long drift toward its eventual demise. I asked if William H. Macy, a Mamet cohort of long duration, ever took part. A negative headshake from Andy. "But," he said, "there were a couple of times when Mamet was filming and we joined him on location for a game. Some big name actors sat in." He didn't specify who, I didn't ask. [continued in next entry] España, te echo de menos. rws 5:44 PM [+] |
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Saturday, August 05, 2006 Bragging? Wishful thinking? Seinfeldian message left on sidewalk -- Montpelier, VT.  España, te echo de menos. rws 4:36 PM [+] |
