Last night's dream: "We're okay."

Overheard at the Bar

They told me that I was not in danger of killing myself and could leave the hospital. So I left, and then walked back in and said I was suicidal and they re-admitted me. I did this five days in a row.

Link to "lost" concert films, including Robert Franks: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/10/lost-and-found-classic-rock-shows-on-youtube.html

But

"He smelled like one of them restaurants they got, but he was all right." -- George Pelicanos

Bar Talk

"So he knocks on the door and I say 'Don't come in' and he opens the door anyway and I'm 'What are you doing in here?' And he opens the shower curtain and reaches in and takes the loofa."

No Sense

"It made no sense to have such a hard woman with such soft bread" -- Kate Manning from "My Notorious Life".

Fellow

"It took a real fellow to do that."  -- Umpire Billy Evans on Ray Chapman's apology for an earlier argument. see Hit By Pitch, by Molly Lawless.

Coffee & vanilla porter an acceptable substitute for human companionship. See you later.

Great moments in film 2013

"There's birds in here". Prince Avalanche.

Post. Drink.

Drink. Post.

Geoff Dyer Takes His Seat

"Sometimes when people give up their seat for me—as they ought—they accompany this generous gesture with the words “I’ve been sitting all day.” “Me too!” I say, happily taking the weight off my feet. If I’ve sat on my arse all day—and it’s definitely my English arse I sit on, not an American ass—then what I most want to do come evening is sit on it some more. But I do like to change where I sit on it. In the day I’m at my desk in one of those Herman Miller Aeron chairs that make one feel like a mid-level executive with back problems. For a while in the afternoon I move to a red leather chair that tilts back like a prototype of the first-ever business-class airplane seat in order to read, i.e. induce a nap. Having recovered from my nap, I put in a further quarter-hearted shift in my Aeron before moving to the living-room sofa for some real sitting: sitting in the sense of almost lying down with all parts of the body evenly supported. “Up go the feet,” I say out loud and from then until bed-time they come down only reluctantly."

 from article, about writers sitting, in The New Republic.

 h/t: Salon

In the spirit of experimentation . . .

. . . I'll have to try Plato. "[The letters between Plath and Sassoon] suggest that, along with reading Plato, erotic spanking was part of their experimental lovemaking." From NYRB review by Terry Castle.

What'll it be -- a crusta or a daisy?

Technically speaking, a cocktail is a type of mixed drink containing spirits, sugar, water, and bitters. . . . Now the word serves as a catchall term for any alcoholic mixed drink, but the cocktail was originally just one member of a family that included things like flips, nogs, daisies, cobblers, crustas, smashes, slings, sours, and the granddaddy of them all, punch.

 Ezra Glinter on The Golden Age of Cocktails:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/19/drinking-in-the-golden-age/

Bar talk: "The V.A. wants me to get laid. So that it will mellow me out."

Bar talk

 "You can win a fight and still get your tooth kicked in. I'm at the age now where I want to say 'I could totally kick your ass but I don't want to get my tooth kicked in.'"

More Orson Welles: I've always thought there were three sexes: men, women, and actors.

Orson Welles on the movies

 "It's the least interesting art medium for me to watch that there is. Except ballet - that's the only thing that's less interesting."




From "My Lunches With Orson"

Prophecy fulfilled

Bar talk:           "What's the short guy's name? Cause we're always doing shots together and I'm like "Dude, we've got to stop doing shots or I'll never remember your name.""

Abraham called Father of Monotheism, but it is the other way around. God declared Abraham to be Father of the one people.

Again:

Joy to the freeway
Joy to the cars
Joy to you baby
Wherever you are
Tonight Tonight Tonight

Josh Ritter

Just like that

"Sex with Hseng was like having ten thousand scalding-hot pork dumplings shot at you out of a greasy mortar cannon."

Ned Beauman, from "Glow"

Who are we?

"The fact is . . . we will believe what the brain tells us we see." NYRB review of Oliver Sack's "Hallucinations"

I may not understand what you say, but I'll defend to your death my right to deny it. -- Walt Kelly

Bartender Instruction:

"You have to have good wits and joints to be a great bartender for years."

Dream:

I gave Martin Scorcese, an old friend, a copy of "Treasure Island!!!" by Sara Levine. He seemed quite interested.

from My Little Chickadee.

On one of my travels through Afganistan we lost our corkscrew. Had to survive on food and water.

Bar talk: I love her. I just want to bite her face off.

Bar talk: "I'm pretty sure it is racist to call a black person Reggie unless you are positive his name is actually Reggie."

Also from Josh Ritter -- "I've had a lot of juice today. I feel about as healthy as it is possible to be, without being unhealthy."

Joy to the freeways
Joy to the cars
Joy to you Baby
Wherever you are you
Tonight
- Josh Ritter

Tragic tales of celebrity: John C. Reilly took my Guinness.

Bar Talk

"Okay, there is this Yogi guy who's really into me."

Underrated Lyric: And this loneliness just won't leave me alone.

More Bar Talk

"I'm a day drinker. But I guess with my job I can't do that so much."

Dream (bit of a joke that)

In this dream I had a big argument to prepare for in court.   At 7 am I learned the hearing was across town in an hour, when I had thought it was at 1 pm.  I had planned to use the time between 8 and 1 to do all my preparation.

Next phase:

Realized what I prepared wouldn't probably do, as it addressed not the legal case to be argued, but rather the general political situation.  I had planned to say: 

I think the voters are starting to blame the Republicans for the lack of bipartisanship in Washington.  And the voters want bipartisanship, because the economy right now is like a giant boulder.  No one party by itself can move the boulder an inch.  But both parties working together can budget.

"As the mister says "Who steals my purse steals gold -- who steals my name steals trash" or something" -- Walt Kelly

Further news from the bar:

I'm too chill to be from LA.

News from the bar (traveller's edition)

In San Francisco,
Bulliet is the bourbon of choice.  Even the guy from Bosnia has learned that, after only a month.

In Los Angeles,
people just want to be cool.

In San Francisco,
people want to be cool but pretend otherwise.

Self-Reliance

Overheard the other morning:

"You don't know me. I don't need anyone to open doors for me.  I'll kick the doors in.  Fuck you.  And fuck God."

Character description

Heard in a bar:

"He's like William H. Macy in Fargo, times a million."

2012 Reading

The Legend of Pradeep Mathew -- Shehan Karunatilaka
The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Panorama City -- Antoine Wilson
Gone Girl -- Gillian Flynn
The Three Christs of Ypsilanti -- Milton Rokeach
Lost at Sea -- Jon Ronson
The Vault -- Ruth Rendell
The Mountain Lion -- Jean Stafford
Colorado's Iceman and the Story of the Frozen Dead Guy -- Bo Shaffer
The Twenty-Year Death -- Ariel S. Winter
Parsifal -- Jim Krusoe
A History of the World in 100 Objects -- Neil MacGregor
The Piazza Tales -- Herman Melville
Tenth of December -- George Saunders
There But For The -- Ali Smith
Trent's Last Case -- E.C. Bentley
Pogo: The Complete Daily & Sunday Comic Strips, Vol. 1: Through the Wild Blue Wonder -- Walt Kelly
The Ghost Map -- Stephen Johnson
Cassandra at the Wedding -- Dorothy Baker
The Expendable Man -- Dorothy B. Hughes
Ben Jonson: A Life -- Ian Donaldson
The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Vol. II, 1941 - 1956
The Collected Stories of J.G. Ballard
Black Water Rising -- Attica Locke
How Should a Person Be? -- Sheila Heti
He Died With His Eyes Open -- Derek Raymond
Arcadia -- Lauren Groff
Suddenly, a Knock on the Door -- Etgar Keret
Talking Heads' Fear of Music -- Jonathan Lethem
The Best American Essays 2011 -- Edwidge Danticat, ed.
The Heart of Dankness -- Mark Haskell Smith
The Trail of the Spellmans -- Lisa Lutz
The False Inspector Dew -- Peter Lovesey
Leaving the Atocha Station -- Ben Lerner
Hons and Rebels -- Jessica Mitford
Wild Thing -- Josh Bazell
What it Was -- George Pelecanos
The Lifespan of a Fact -- John D'Agata and Jim Fingal
A Sight for Sore Eyes -- Ruth Rendell
Footsteps -- Richard Holmes
Purgatory -- Tomas Eloy Martinez
The Art of Fielding -- Chad Harbach
Pulphead -- John Jeremiah Sullivan
The Sisters Brothers -- Patrick deWitt
Stay Awake -- Dan Chaon
Death Comes to Pemberley -- P.D. James
Babe -- Robert W. Creamer