We are too alienated from the floor.
Friday, May 23, 2003
We are too alienated from the floor.
Thursday, May 22, 2003
After, C. K. and I marched up Second, looking for a place to shoot pool. We stopped into Nightingale's after I told her about the manager Tom, how great he was, the tremendous leather-clad rail-thin drunk fairy, he loved us and we loved him; he had us play when he knew we'd not earn him a penny; the Chinese guy who owned the club made him replace all the beer he drank at the end of the night. On one of the last nights we played J. T. and I saw him at the deli down Second at about 4 o'clock in the morning, slurring, hobbling to the front with a case of Rolling Rock. We were there to buy beer to drink and he was there to buy beer he'd drunk.
Sunday, May 11, 2003
Thursday, May 08, 2003
Thought about theater disasters tonight, of fires urgently disturbing our most civilized sanctuary, the stage. Was watching the decorous performance scenes in "Topsy-Turvy," where things are in fact in their place; it seemed unconscionable that anything should disrupt the pristine suspension of reality among the crowd. There goes the bellowing Mikado, there's the Lord High Executioner. Why yes.
And if there were a fire? There'd be an awful moment when the actor abandoned the line. Fans clattered to the floor and the baton was stilled, and fell.
The human drama supersedes.
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
A dreary mantra plays in my head as I lift my groggy head out of bed, step into the shower, walk down the street to the bus stop:
Hundreds of dollars.
Hundreds of dollars, hundreds of dollars. Sometimes like an old folk song, or maybe I'm just thinking of the line in that Jimmie Rodgers song: "She took a hundred dollars to buy me a suit of clothes." To buy me a suit of clothes. That delightful, unnecessary repetition: suit of clothes, not just plain suit; it was crucial to the rhyme of course but in the end it doesn't sound contrived, it sounds perfect. She didn't just buy me a suit, she bought me a suit of goddamn clothes, for Christ's sake.