Paris, latin quarter, June 2009.
A small, peach-shaped fist crashing into the keys of an old, chipped piano. This is how the story begins: Clang clang clang.
Valentina is sitting at the old upright Steinway. Eyes closed and humming along with the imaginary melodies, dancing with her mind like children, as the hands they react violently and inept, at what ever violence is felt in not-knowing the right chords, and all of that.
She is wearing nothing but a cigarette in her sharp soft mouth, and I am sleeping, or was just, as the morning sun is striking the catapulted dots of dust and ash that fly and escape the piano's cold vibrating wood and the tin, cold ashtray.
On the floor is a collection of poems - half of them handwritten, half ripped from anthologies, with underlined passages and enthusiastic, blue ink - a wine bottle, red and drained to its syrupy, ash-laden botton - books, paper back Millers and Doestoevskies - and scattered remains of the violence and fucking, love making, from nights before: a pair of scissors, bloodied from when the police came and nearly arrested us both, used condoms and rappers, three packs of cigarettes, Marlboro Gold.
Here I am, here, here I am, clang, her tiny fruit shaped hands proclaim, hands which I know smell like cigarettes and perfume and semen and her pussy; and I rub my head and block out the sun, and I can smell her on my hands too: "Good morning, Bella, good evening," cigarettes and her sex. And my throat is sore, so I stay silent waiting for a response, which I will not receive.
And she is whistling an opera, and laughing like a child in between, whistle and laugh, rage and laughter and whistling. The neighbours will soon start up, it is Sunday.
I take some easy first exploratory steps, and the wood floor feels cold against my feet. The sunlight fills the room after I draw wide the heavy tweed curtains, which had hung half closed, and now that I am at the window I light a cigarette and run my fingers along my chest and yawning I examine the street below. Two ladies are sitting with a lap dog each and they are smoking, sitting at a table of the cafe, on the patio stones.
Over to the piano, as I walk Valentina is still barking, but I see her now and she is lit like gold, and her breasts glow softly and she is exactly, exactly beautiful; "Do you have to do this?" I ask, not thinking, sitting next to her on the wooden bench. I rest a hand on her shoulder but she puffs and with rage she smacks my hand away.
"Fuck you, you pig." And her blue eyes seem grey and are wide with rage. And she plays louder, and smacks down each fist in long extended stone webs, burstingly. And the neighbours have now started shouting something from above, but it is muffled and impossible to understand. And outside the dogs start to bark.
Suddenly she halts completely. She now just rests there, head over her own breasts, hands perched on keys, ready to strike, but calm and gentle, like ten lionesses, her fingers.
Just as I am about to start to play the piano myself, I think better of it and stand up, putting on my jeans. "I am making coffee, do you want some?"
"No. Yes. I will need more cigarettes."
"And you want me to get them?"
She says yes.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
tic
The last thing I wrote about had something to do with a piano teacher and a little girl, the same little girl in Paris who I saw catching sparrows with tiny shoe-lace nooses.
The piano teacher falls in love - sort of - with his little student, mainly because she is a genius on the keys, delicate and sad and inpiring. But also, it should be said, because he is despicable and lonely, and although very handsome, he is aged, widowed and peniless.
The affair begins with a postcard he sends to her ( a post card I really found in a garage sale up in Montmartre). He is always calling her 'his little friend' and with each lesson they have he falls madder and madder in love - wreslting all night with images of her perfect piano playing, her hands on the keys, etc and so on.
One day she kisses him on the cheek just as her mother picks her up from the lesson.
And then I was thinking of pretty much ending the story right there.
(However there's a chance that somethign entriely differnet would happen - ill explain in a second - but it's a little fantastical and I don't much know what kind of stuff I would rather be writing: little empty vignettes, saying nothing really; or obvious little stories saying something, but not much.
He would, after the little kiss, stay up all night feverishly writing a beautiful beautiful piece. He would play mad and marvelously. And since he used to be a prodigy himself, it would be as if he were young again, and life was good again, and all the right music, it just comes to him, and through him, like a sieve of light - no a sieve for light. Playing piano like how he used to - before years and marriage and death and life drained him and his talent of potential or success.
Anyway, he stays up all night and the next day, he keeps on playing the piano. He just can't stop. He goes all through the weekend, day and night. Only pausing to scribble some notes, have a cigarette, or a coffee. Complete mania - but really really genius, extravagant mania.
The little girl comes back the next week for her lesson; and he is no longer - he discovers, with only slight surprise - at all inspired or touched by her presence. In fact, he can't even stand to listen to her play anymore. Before the lesson is over, she is kicked out,, crying and even admiting she adores him, begging for him to not be so cruel, but the piano teacher - unwashed, unshaven, but crazy happy - - sits down to continue with his work.
A few hours later, as the sun is setting, outside on the street two neighbours talk between eachother. They have been out on their front lawns, maybe watering the garden, or washing their cars or something, and they start to chat. They can hear him playing, the sweet and sad and wonderful melodies coming through the windows, and they say just how beautiful it all sounds.
***
This is more the kind of thing I want to be doing here . I cringe that I made a promise to end a stupid wornout travel blog in a four-parter, and I am only halfway done.
I am drinking scotch and recently I thought of an old friend and some older, deader, poet friends (who(m?) I never met).
The next two parts will come soon to the conclusion. But I can tell you right now they are entirely fictional.
There's the two weeks I will spend living in a Paris hotel with a girl I met in a hostel. I can't see that being too interestign or beautiful, however, I just really want to try out a scene or two and see how that goes. (I will probably throw in a few scenes from Buenos Aires too. There was a few things - again that never really happenned - that I've been dying to tell you all about.
And the final part is going to be a gigantic explosion of fireworks and will be limited by words but not by emotion or vision. It's going to mean absolutely nothing to me, except for the fact that it's all over and time to find a new place to get really excited about. By place I mean this website stuff. I've told a few of my friends how important it is to me to write online; otherwise I can't write at all anymore. I think perhaps if I got a typewriter . . .
that's enough for now.
this wasn't anything.
The piano teacher falls in love - sort of - with his little student, mainly because she is a genius on the keys, delicate and sad and inpiring. But also, it should be said, because he is despicable and lonely, and although very handsome, he is aged, widowed and peniless.
The affair begins with a postcard he sends to her ( a post card I really found in a garage sale up in Montmartre). He is always calling her 'his little friend' and with each lesson they have he falls madder and madder in love - wreslting all night with images of her perfect piano playing, her hands on the keys, etc and so on.
One day she kisses him on the cheek just as her mother picks her up from the lesson.
And then I was thinking of pretty much ending the story right there.
(However there's a chance that somethign entriely differnet would happen - ill explain in a second - but it's a little fantastical and I don't much know what kind of stuff I would rather be writing: little empty vignettes, saying nothing really; or obvious little stories saying something, but not much.
He would, after the little kiss, stay up all night feverishly writing a beautiful beautiful piece. He would play mad and marvelously. And since he used to be a prodigy himself, it would be as if he were young again, and life was good again, and all the right music, it just comes to him, and through him, like a sieve of light - no a sieve for light. Playing piano like how he used to - before years and marriage and death and life drained him and his talent of potential or success.
Anyway, he stays up all night and the next day, he keeps on playing the piano. He just can't stop. He goes all through the weekend, day and night. Only pausing to scribble some notes, have a cigarette, or a coffee. Complete mania - but really really genius, extravagant mania.
The little girl comes back the next week for her lesson; and he is no longer - he discovers, with only slight surprise - at all inspired or touched by her presence. In fact, he can't even stand to listen to her play anymore. Before the lesson is over, she is kicked out,, crying and even admiting she adores him, begging for him to not be so cruel, but the piano teacher - unwashed, unshaven, but crazy happy - - sits down to continue with his work.
A few hours later, as the sun is setting, outside on the street two neighbours talk between eachother. They have been out on their front lawns, maybe watering the garden, or washing their cars or something, and they start to chat. They can hear him playing, the sweet and sad and wonderful melodies coming through the windows, and they say just how beautiful it all sounds.
***
This is more the kind of thing I want to be doing here . I cringe that I made a promise to end a stupid wornout travel blog in a four-parter, and I am only halfway done.
I am drinking scotch and recently I thought of an old friend and some older, deader, poet friends (who(m?) I never met).
The next two parts will come soon to the conclusion. But I can tell you right now they are entirely fictional.
There's the two weeks I will spend living in a Paris hotel with a girl I met in a hostel. I can't see that being too interestign or beautiful, however, I just really want to try out a scene or two and see how that goes. (I will probably throw in a few scenes from Buenos Aires too. There was a few things - again that never really happenned - that I've been dying to tell you all about.
And the final part is going to be a gigantic explosion of fireworks and will be limited by words but not by emotion or vision. It's going to mean absolutely nothing to me, except for the fact that it's all over and time to find a new place to get really excited about. By place I mean this website stuff. I've told a few of my friends how important it is to me to write online; otherwise I can't write at all anymore. I think perhaps if I got a typewriter . . .
that's enough for now.
this wasn't anything.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Part Two: how I became a kid pushing his own stroller
. . . and so, there I was, in Helsinki, surrounded by five, maybe six, beautiful, blonde Finnish girls."
At a backyard party in Toronto, with about 30 local hipsters, and fresh off a plane from Paris, I am speaking to an exgirlfriend, telling her this story.
"Uh uh," she says, smoking with arms crossed, one hand extended to her lips, her eyes scanning everywhere, in flits.
"I mean really fucking beautiful," I say, I go on. "Can't really even believe it, you know. Oh! And they are all, like, 18! 18 years old, anyway ..."
"Right... um hmm, figures," she jokes, briefly making eye contact, discerning, scrunchy eyes, understanding and emmitting a sense of history, there.
"And so ... well I was with them because there was no fucking way I was going to spend my last night in Helsinki smoking and drinking gin and tonics, you know, just watching these people in these horrible clubs, so I went up to a few girls and we started talking. Next thing I know there's five of them, and it's one of the girls' birthday's, and before you know it I'm acting like I know this one Finnish MTV host, and since I speak English, I go up to him and we start to talk, and I like become an immediate hero..."
"Right, amazing, umm, do you want one of these?" Handing me a cigarette; three or four noisy people around us, and just as many conversations.
"And we are all having an amazing time now. And we're walking towards this kareoke club which they all know, and really want to go to, and then all of a sudden a guy comes down the street, racing down this cobble stone-paved hill, and I don't see it, but you hear a big like thump, and then a smack. And there's a crowd of people around him. . . "
She's not really listening.
"... and so when I get closer, we see he's laying there in the pavement, and not moving, and there's this line of blood coming from his head, trickling down through the cobble stone street. And he is fucking dead."
"What! He dies?"
"Yeah he dies... for a while he kind of opened his yes I guess, but then he just fucking faded, and people were freaking out, calling the cops, and everything."
"That is so awful. This is an awful awful story."
"It was horrible. It was horrible but wait," she doesn't seem to want to hear more. "There's somethign so beautiful about to happen . . . it seemed like minutes later, but his girlfriend comes riding up from behind, and she just jumps off her bike and lets it go riding away down the street, and she gets down in the street, getting his blood all over her, and she just weeps and holds his head in her hands."
"That is awful awful, I don't like this story."
"Wait wait wait. It get's better."
***
After we left the crowd, it was about 11 p.m. and the sun was casting a weird grey-blue haze, like cloudy daytime, across the city. We have already forgotten about the dead man, mostly, and we are drinking and shouting and making jokes in the mostly empty streets.
We arrive at the kareoke bar and it is fantastic. I don't remember all the names, but something like Annie, Neah, Kay, sort of simple and pseudo-biblical I guess. A very kind man is pleased to meet me at the bar and we talk about Toronto for a little bit. He's shy and dressed all in black, and sweaty, and going bald already, although I would say he's just only 24. I buy him a beer and shake his hand and wish him a nice night. He's fantasticaly excited and hugs me and buys me a shot before I leave the bar to join my lady friends.
The joy and laughter we experience, I mostly just watching, after we all sit down and the performances start. . . it's like I'm at the centre of that giant spinning thing the poets talk about, a giant spinning wheel or world (or whirl), where people are laughing and the "bolts they coming loose;" it's that phenomenal sense of rebellion in the face of chaos, the little but divine thing it is to be happy in such a world, falling apart for ever.
This foggy vision I have, of the whole room spinning, there's a clown on the stage, barely singing to the Finnish rock song, and his friends are watching and cheering; and the birthday girl (Julia?), she has black hair - the only one - and black eyes, and a truly cherubic but electric glow, like bacchus baby angels, drinking, and all our feet tangled together in some astounding, joyous knot.
On the dance floor there's this one model-looking short-skirt girl. Tall, beautiful, and dancing with her ugly girl friend. I'm not sure exactly, I know I wasn't trying any pick up lines, but all of a sudden she is yelling at me, and telling me to "just fucking go! Just go."
I decide to stick around, since I'm insulted she would think that I was beign some creep, when really I was just trying to have a good time, and dance a bit, to ride this feeling of joy I had. But she's insistent, and obviously getting very upset with me.
"Look, your not that hot," I say to her, trying to imply my non-interest.
"Yes I am, you fuckign asshole. Fuck. Just leave!"
I tell her I plan on using the dancefloor, too, and indicate with a circle motion around me the area I plan on staying, but she doesn't relent, and finally (I was wonderign what was taking so long), her male friend, or boyfriend - a thin, but wiry, finn - comes up to me: look, I better just fucking leave right now, no problems, or else there's going to be fuckign serious problems.
I tell him to fuck him self and he, with one fast, hulk-like swing, punches me in the gut. As I'm stepping back a bit, wondering in some confusion what to do, my little bald friend materializes from behind, like some guardian gargoyle. He has flung him self on my attackers back, biting his neck, I can see the blood drip from his teeth, as he wails and scratches on the guy's kidneys with his fists. The brute falls to the floor, and my balding friend is now kicking his face in, looking up at me and smiling, through a giant, bloody grin.
***
I can't remember her name. She was one of the five Finns and she walked me nearly all the way home. The sun by this time was out in full, but it was four a.m., and we were both very drunk. I left her when we got to the dock yard, deciding not to kiss her goodnight, and walked away without looking back.
I looked with affection at all the tall ships, quietly rocking, and all the rusted old ice breakers, as I walked along the catwalk of the old city marina, headed back to spend my last night on the sail boat.
This sail boat was supposed to take me through the Baltic - we know. But I am walking and wondering and wondering. And the ships are so slowly rocking and it is all so peaceful and wonderful wonderful. In my pocket is a ferry ticket and the next day I was supposed to board a ship and head to Tallinn, and then to Riga.
Suddenly it strikes me I have no interest in going to either of these places. It strikes me like a church bell breaking the quiet of an early morning.
All of a sudden I am sure that there's one place I should go to. It is like a million tiny bells now, ringing inside of me, I am so excited, for this is the place I have meant to go to all along, and isn't so wonderful that I didn't even really plan on going there, that it was all some huge accident, all some quiet drunk walk home from a Helsinki kareoke bar? And the man who died. . . Isn't Paris, well, isn't that the best way to go ... not planning it ... and so in the rapture and laughter of a death and a kareoke bar, I called the airport and made a reservation for the next flight.
I stayed up for the next few hours, and hung around the dock yards to watch my ferry leave for Tallinn. I lifted my hat, since I was wearing an old beaten up traveler's hat, and saluted my ferry as it left me behind at the dock. And after some coffee and some jam pastries near the fish markets, I stumbled onto a plane, and left.
At a backyard party in Toronto, with about 30 local hipsters, and fresh off a plane from Paris, I am speaking to an exgirlfriend, telling her this story.
"Uh uh," she says, smoking with arms crossed, one hand extended to her lips, her eyes scanning everywhere, in flits.
"I mean really fucking beautiful," I say, I go on. "Can't really even believe it, you know. Oh! And they are all, like, 18! 18 years old, anyway ..."
"Right... um hmm, figures," she jokes, briefly making eye contact, discerning, scrunchy eyes, understanding and emmitting a sense of history, there.
"And so ... well I was with them because there was no fucking way I was going to spend my last night in Helsinki smoking and drinking gin and tonics, you know, just watching these people in these horrible clubs, so I went up to a few girls and we started talking. Next thing I know there's five of them, and it's one of the girls' birthday's, and before you know it I'm acting like I know this one Finnish MTV host, and since I speak English, I go up to him and we start to talk, and I like become an immediate hero..."
"Right, amazing, umm, do you want one of these?" Handing me a cigarette; three or four noisy people around us, and just as many conversations.
"And we are all having an amazing time now. And we're walking towards this kareoke club which they all know, and really want to go to, and then all of a sudden a guy comes down the street, racing down this cobble stone-paved hill, and I don't see it, but you hear a big like thump, and then a smack. And there's a crowd of people around him. . . "
She's not really listening.
"... and so when I get closer, we see he's laying there in the pavement, and not moving, and there's this line of blood coming from his head, trickling down through the cobble stone street. And he is fucking dead."
"What! He dies?"
"Yeah he dies... for a while he kind of opened his yes I guess, but then he just fucking faded, and people were freaking out, calling the cops, and everything."
"That is so awful. This is an awful awful story."
"It was horrible. It was horrible but wait," she doesn't seem to want to hear more. "There's somethign so beautiful about to happen . . . it seemed like minutes later, but his girlfriend comes riding up from behind, and she just jumps off her bike and lets it go riding away down the street, and she gets down in the street, getting his blood all over her, and she just weeps and holds his head in her hands."
"That is awful awful, I don't like this story."
"Wait wait wait. It get's better."
***
After we left the crowd, it was about 11 p.m. and the sun was casting a weird grey-blue haze, like cloudy daytime, across the city. We have already forgotten about the dead man, mostly, and we are drinking and shouting and making jokes in the mostly empty streets.
We arrive at the kareoke bar and it is fantastic. I don't remember all the names, but something like Annie, Neah, Kay, sort of simple and pseudo-biblical I guess. A very kind man is pleased to meet me at the bar and we talk about Toronto for a little bit. He's shy and dressed all in black, and sweaty, and going bald already, although I would say he's just only 24. I buy him a beer and shake his hand and wish him a nice night. He's fantasticaly excited and hugs me and buys me a shot before I leave the bar to join my lady friends.
The joy and laughter we experience, I mostly just watching, after we all sit down and the performances start. . . it's like I'm at the centre of that giant spinning thing the poets talk about, a giant spinning wheel or world (or whirl), where people are laughing and the "bolts they coming loose;" it's that phenomenal sense of rebellion in the face of chaos, the little but divine thing it is to be happy in such a world, falling apart for ever.
This foggy vision I have, of the whole room spinning, there's a clown on the stage, barely singing to the Finnish rock song, and his friends are watching and cheering; and the birthday girl (Julia?), she has black hair - the only one - and black eyes, and a truly cherubic but electric glow, like bacchus baby angels, drinking, and all our feet tangled together in some astounding, joyous knot.
On the dance floor there's this one model-looking short-skirt girl. Tall, beautiful, and dancing with her ugly girl friend. I'm not sure exactly, I know I wasn't trying any pick up lines, but all of a sudden she is yelling at me, and telling me to "just fucking go! Just go."
I decide to stick around, since I'm insulted she would think that I was beign some creep, when really I was just trying to have a good time, and dance a bit, to ride this feeling of joy I had. But she's insistent, and obviously getting very upset with me.
"Look, your not that hot," I say to her, trying to imply my non-interest.
"Yes I am, you fuckign asshole. Fuck. Just leave!"
I tell her I plan on using the dancefloor, too, and indicate with a circle motion around me the area I plan on staying, but she doesn't relent, and finally (I was wonderign what was taking so long), her male friend, or boyfriend - a thin, but wiry, finn - comes up to me: look, I better just fucking leave right now, no problems, or else there's going to be fuckign serious problems.
I tell him to fuck him self and he, with one fast, hulk-like swing, punches me in the gut. As I'm stepping back a bit, wondering in some confusion what to do, my little bald friend materializes from behind, like some guardian gargoyle. He has flung him self on my attackers back, biting his neck, I can see the blood drip from his teeth, as he wails and scratches on the guy's kidneys with his fists. The brute falls to the floor, and my balding friend is now kicking his face in, looking up at me and smiling, through a giant, bloody grin.
***
I can't remember her name. She was one of the five Finns and she walked me nearly all the way home. The sun by this time was out in full, but it was four a.m., and we were both very drunk. I left her when we got to the dock yard, deciding not to kiss her goodnight, and walked away without looking back.
I looked with affection at all the tall ships, quietly rocking, and all the rusted old ice breakers, as I walked along the catwalk of the old city marina, headed back to spend my last night on the sail boat.
This sail boat was supposed to take me through the Baltic - we know. But I am walking and wondering and wondering. And the ships are so slowly rocking and it is all so peaceful and wonderful wonderful. In my pocket is a ferry ticket and the next day I was supposed to board a ship and head to Tallinn, and then to Riga.
Suddenly it strikes me I have no interest in going to either of these places. It strikes me like a church bell breaking the quiet of an early morning.
All of a sudden I am sure that there's one place I should go to. It is like a million tiny bells now, ringing inside of me, I am so excited, for this is the place I have meant to go to all along, and isn't so wonderful that I didn't even really plan on going there, that it was all some huge accident, all some quiet drunk walk home from a Helsinki kareoke bar? And the man who died. . . Isn't Paris, well, isn't that the best way to go ... not planning it ... and so in the rapture and laughter of a death and a kareoke bar, I called the airport and made a reservation for the next flight.
I stayed up for the next few hours, and hung around the dock yards to watch my ferry leave for Tallinn. I lifted my hat, since I was wearing an old beaten up traveler's hat, and saluted my ferry as it left me behind at the dock. And after some coffee and some jam pastries near the fish markets, I stumbled onto a plane, and left.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
Helsinki night club
Throughout this four-part conclusion to the Cuenta, I will be telling you a few nice little vignettes, little gem stories that are very shiny and heartbreaking. But I want you all to know, that I will really be writing about something else entirely, something that has nothing to do with Helsinki, or a boat, or leather jackets, or France.
And while I could let you all guess what that something else is, I would rather just come right out and say it: I will be writing about how I became a chaser of metaphysical butterflies, little creatures fluttering always out of reach, playing keep-away with their own heavenly, euphoric bodies. (I hear eating moths is poisonous, but it seems justifiable to assume eating butterflies is magic, like encountering and eating god … if only we could eat metaphysical butterflies!)
Chasing these beautiful creatures is always romantic and risky, and leaves one, inevitably, exhausted. There are butterfly catchers and chasers, and so far, I am just a chaser.
It might help, too, to let you know that I am writing you about this romantic sport, tacitly, from the third-floor balcony of the Hotel Caulaincourt in Paris, which is a block away from where thousands of drunks, tourists and lovers (all of whom are, I think, butterfly watchers), gather at night on weekends to see the city twinkle and the Eiffel tower effervesce – which it does every so often. I have a little round wooden table, which faces the window, and on the table I have propped up a small canvas oil painting by Gauguin, called “femmes aux mangues”, and it is Sunday. I have also three cans of Heineken, and just met my new roommate, who says he comes from Istanbul but is a student in Portugal. When I want to smoke I lean out the window and I can see the lovers walking up and down the steep and long series of stone steps, hugging Montmartre.
I also want you careful readers, and especially the very careful readers – the ones who love me – to know, that while most of what I am about to tell you is true, there are some lies – rather big lies – that I am about to effect. Sometimes I will make it clear that I am lying – inventing – and sometimes I will not, and will allow the deceit to live and grow inside your heads with dignity.
The thing is, however, the lies are essential. It is impossible to catch butterflies with a net built by Descartes. Metaphysical butterfly nets are not woven in square-like predictable patterns, with horizontal and vertical axes of cotton thread; they are dances of the loom. Drunken ladies of shalott, from their medieval towers, they weave these nets, from the blossoming, shrieking nature they wantonly ingest, from those shiny, legendary mirrors.
There was a precedent I wanted to set before ending this blog, and I lusted for a defiant, greedy success with the papillions. But I have only just started using my mazy net, and am now headed back “home.” Home, home, home.
Home: written under erasure. Home. (In a recent entry in my journal, I lost all connection to the meaning of the word. As I wrote in a frenzy from the steps of the Sacre Coeur Basilica, as the stars of the city fluttered around my head, I referred several times, by accident, to Buenos Aires and Argentina as my “home”, which, taken as Freud would have, is an incredible, joy-tweaking thing to watch happen . . . It’s strange how I wrote that, just now, “watch happen”, watch me, myself, write, as I watched myself write about home, about my home, me. )
As I was saying, I am headed back to Canada. My flight is tomorrow, and I have only just begun . . . and well, we will get to this part again, a little closer to the finish line, but for now let’s move on with the program.
I wanted to start by telling you about Helsinki … however, I have just come from a little stroll down Caullaincours and the simplest things were beautiful. Some shiny green gems, to be polished, like the two men with lapdogs, eating at the café terrace in the court yard. Or the two other middle aged men, well dressed, outside a very busy bistro, laughing as one of the men fished a lighter out of his glass, laughing as he sucks the wine off the orange plastic lighter. Or the little child, with blonde hair in pony tails, a little girl in an orange and purple flower dress, skipping along the grassy part of the boulevard, lassoing sparrows with a shoe lace noose, as an old clochard watches in amazement from his pile of newspapers. The little girl hopping along, with three or four black sparrows like kites on the end of short white strings, and the drunk smoking, and drinking, and disbelieving, smiling toothlessly.
But no. I wanted to tell you about Helsinki, there was a good reason for it. So I will and I should start now, as the sun dips and the tides, somewhere, spring.
(to be continued)
Friday, June 12, 2009
child in the street pushing his own stroller
I feel like a kid in the street pushing his OWN stroller
I am a sieve of light; no I am a sieve FOR light;
as I told my closest friend, ANC2 = I was waiting to tell you all where I was in a very well though out way (I must say I am hurt, or bruised; that no one has asked in a week) I have made a video where there i am with a clean shaved face about 2 feet from the camera, obscuring the land mark behind me)
i was supposed to write the prologue to the end = i should tell you all right now that this is the end of la cuenta grande, but its a four parter
heres what the last four stories are going to be, they will all be written very soon; then thats it for this blog;
1) Helsinki kareoke bar and cigarettes in Chile
2) the Jacket part 2: a fantastic adventure and broken love story
3) the million twinkling lights of a certain pyramid shaped tower and children on the street pushing their own strollers
4) how it is that I became a sieve of light; a conclusion with photos and a wedding
stay tuned
I am a sieve of light; no I am a sieve FOR light;
as I told my closest friend, ANC2 = I was waiting to tell you all where I was in a very well though out way (I must say I am hurt, or bruised; that no one has asked in a week) I have made a video where there i am with a clean shaved face about 2 feet from the camera, obscuring the land mark behind me)
i was supposed to write the prologue to the end = i should tell you all right now that this is the end of la cuenta grande, but its a four parter
heres what the last four stories are going to be, they will all be written very soon; then thats it for this blog;
1) Helsinki kareoke bar and cigarettes in Chile
2) the Jacket part 2: a fantastic adventure and broken love story
3) the million twinkling lights of a certain pyramid shaped tower and children on the street pushing their own strollers
4) how it is that I became a sieve of light; a conclusion with photos and a wedding
stay tuned
Friday, June 5, 2009
FROM THE ARCHIVES: City lights
"When you come right down to it," Gregorovius said, "Paris is one big metaphor."
Martini Bar
I'll start simply enough. With the date and the time. It is early May in Buenos Aires, and the autumn air is strange and satisfactorily alien. I am in a filthy, neon-lit alley in the Once, and here it looks to me, momentarily, like Paris — only a suffocating Paris where the stone buildings collapse and gasp for air as the black iron street lamps tilt and screech; the whizzing, puffing cars vanish in clouds of dust, the cobble stone alley ways keel over like sinking Titantics. You are struck, paralyzed, as you perceive some invisible god tightening a massive belt around the entire stone built city, which any second now is going to give. But the well dressed people, smelling like perfume, seem to breath amid all this shrinking, and head to the theatre, or are leaving, and going to drink coffee in crowded, midnight cafes. All these druplets, all the city, materialize through brown-grey oil slashes of some mad painter's sure hand, perhaps.
I'm heading to see a friend's play, and I have one hour until the curtains are drawn. As I cross busy streets, I'm in a mad search for the right place to get tight. With only a few days left in this city, I should squeeze out all the glory-filled moments, real story-worthy stuff, that fills the books of all the men who have made cities dissapear, replacing them in twinkling lights and — now I see it — mystic shadows.
There's a green-lit neon sign which says Martini bar, in curvy '50s font, and reading the menu posted on the glass and bronze door, it seems just cheap enough to sit in. I sit down and take a seat facing the window, waving the menu away as the waiter approaches, "un martini, por favor, con hielo," I say. He walks off and shouts out to the bar man the drink order. I get up and head to the back of the house and use the toilet. By the time I get back, the drink is there, and the waiter is plopping two ice cubes into the tall glass they made it in. He sets down a bottle of seltzer next to the glass and steps back as I take my seat.
Already, I am feeling a hell of a lot better. A kind of wonder washes over me. With a displaced nostalgia for golden days, I watch my waiter as he walks about to another table taking an order. The most striking thing about him — and the two other waiters in the place — is what they are wearing. They wear black bow ties over these perfect old tuxedo shirts, faded and yellow, impossible to call white, yet still, undeniably white, somehow. Advertizements aged in storefront windows — or, wait— the exact colour of sun bleached newspaper.
With great, inexplicably deep enjoyment I observe my man wipe counters with a dirty, navy blue rag. When he's not busy he stands next to me, straight up glowing with pride, about one metre away, hapilly looking towards the front of the house. He whistles, maybe, a little tiny bit. I scan his clothes. As I play with the seltzer bottle and stir the ice, the night begins to glow and I see hundreds of beautiful twinkling lights forming in my mind.
I order one more, this time with olives. I slam it down and enter the air again, wide open this time and full of warmth. I stroll to the theatre and I am 20 minutes early, damn. I order a beer and sit on the patio, smoke and speak to the theatre owner's wife.
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