pause = drama
stammer = emotion
Two myths of acting
15
Category Archives: Observations
Epitaph
I was waking home last night, past the sprawling graveyards. The moon, gravid, rode shotgun, lingering by my shoulder even as the rest of the world passed by. My peace was broken only by the occasional car crashing past. From over the walls I smelled decay – life, death and rebirth.
The walls, stone set by men to separate the city of the dead from the world of the living, are covered with graffiti. Marks made with spraypaint, an attempt at permanence in a world that quickly forgets. Not so different then, than the carefully carved stone within.
By any other name
I’m sitting in the Little Cafe Near Home, at my usual table in the corner. Above me on a hook hangs today’s issue of Blesk, a fine example of journalism if ever there was one — if by journalism you mean sensationalistic and lurid stories of sex and celebrity.
On the cover of today’s issue there is a picture of a beautiful woman whose name, apparently, is Alice Bendová.
The Sound of Power
I was walking down the street today, the main shopping drag here in my ‘hood, looking in the windows of the little shops, thinking about lunch, when I heard the roar. The source of the sound was obscured by a parked truck, but I didn’t need to see it to know what it was. After the initial burst it settled into a throaty, uneven growl, the sound that only an American V-8 that’s been tuned for maximum power can make. It could hardly idle at all; the thrumming was choppy, rolling down the busy street.
Perhaps it had difficulty idling, but when the driver touched its throttle the glittering silver coke-bottle Corvette purred like a sabre-tooth dreaming of meat. It eased from its illegal parking place and stalked away.
Advertising reaches a new low
They have the Monaco Grand Prix playing here in the bar, and I’m mostly able to ignore it, but something just caught my eye I had to mention. One of the cars had a flat tire, so they switched to a camera on the car facing directly backwards so we could watch the smoke trailing behind as the car sped around the track toward the pits.
“Star Wars” the rear wing of the car proclaimed. (You may not have heard – there’s a new Star Wars movie out.) I thought to myself “those guys lucked out. They’re getting bonus exposure for their advertisement and their car’s still in the race.” The car pulled into the pits where the crew was waiting. They put on a new tire, topped off the gas, and the car was back out on the road. A textbook pit stop.
The crew members were all dressed as Imperial Storm Troopers.
You got your beautiful, and you got your pretty
Perhaps some of you have caught on by now that I enjoy regarding the female form. I, as most men before me, have raised observing that form to a science, complete with its own jargon and erudite theses. My own system of appreciation is reflexive; my appreciation of the members of the opposite gender is for me a way to measure myself. Hour by hour I am changing, or perhaps looping, and I can measure my progress against the world around me.
James Thurber said the most beautiful women are in Spain. He was a good writer, so maybe he knew. Prague has her share, and San Diego, forget about it. When it comes right down to it, there are beautiful women everywhere. And life is good.
But surrounded by all this beauty, occasionally I meet someone who makes my heart stop. She may be beautiful, she may not be. Beauty, the physical form, the delicious curvatures, I’ll never get tired of it. But then there’s pretty. Beauty is form, pretty is substance. Pretty comes from the inside and flings itself outward in joyful exuberance, making the world around richer. Pretty is in the corner of a shy smile, the raising of a saucy eyebrow, the easy laugh. Pretty is different every time, reinvented and redefined by the few who really pull it off. Beauty is cheap next to pretty.
Nobody else in the bar knows how foul the lyrics are
It’s a rap song, hip-hop as the kids say. This bar plays the music loud, which is fine by me. When I got here it was good ‘ol AC/DC, and I was rockin’. It moved on to Cher, her overproduced later work, a bit of a letdown after the shameless guitars and lyrical shouting. I didn’t notice the music that came on next; it just wasn’t memorable.
Next came this. Let’s get it right out there that I don’t consider rap to be music. Music has to have music in it. Rap is a poetry recital. I’ve got nothing against poetry. In fact, I like the stuff. Sometimes.
Our modern urban poets don’t do much for me, at least not the ones represented by major record labels. Maybe it’s a language thing. Maybe I just don’t have the vocabulary to feel the nuances of the lyrics. I suspect, however, that it is they who lack the vocabulary. Instead they use the few words they own for shock value.
The bit playing when I started writing this episode is a case in point. The woman chanting has found her niche, and it is sexually explicit. I can see how the marketing of this crap would be pretty easy, young masturbators would eat it up. Musical porn. Rather sick porn at that. I’m in a bar in a mall, people coming and going, and blaring from this place are descriptions of acts I will never, ever, do. The place is emptier now, so perhaps I’m not the only one who could understand the lyrics.
As I am packing up to leave, the music has changed. It sucks less now, but I think I’ll be going anyway.
A brief musical rant
I’m hanging at Roma, feeling my life return to normal. fuego was here earlier, but he needs a little more decompression time before he is able to breathe normally again. So now it’s just me, and I’m doing all right, as long as I have the cash to cover the tab.
So over here MTV plays music, and that’s what’s on the tube right now. The TV is at 5 o’clock high, back over my right shoulder, where the glittering lights can’t eat through my optic nerve and into my brain.
One thing I have noticed however, is that much of the music they’re playing I have heard before. A few minutes ago there was a quartet of singers, two male, two female, covering Super Trouper by Abba. For part of the time I thought they were merely lip-synching to the original tune, only taking the trouble to superimpose a tiresome disco beat. In the end they were so shamelessly self-promoting (finding any excuse to get the name of the band into the video – “We’re not ABBA!”) that I had to conclude that however misguided the project was, no matter how shamelessly exploitative the marketing, these people really did wish they had talent that even approaches the annoying band they are trying to emulate.
Which brings me to my little rant. My rantito. My rantček. If your goal is to make music that sounds exactly like someone else, why bother? I’m still not sure the group I saw tonight wasn’t just playing the original record and wagging their lips. The whole thing lacks courage. It’s ruled by cowardly record executives who get paid piles of money to do the same shit over and over. The sad part is people still buy the crap they’re dishing up.
Just say no, kids. Save your music-buying dollar for musicians.
Why would a dude wear shoes like that?
White leather, elaborately carved, with long toes. Elf-toes. The shoes stretch out so far beyond his feet it’s silly. Naturally as he walks in this goofy footwear they have started to curl up at the toes.
My czech is not that good, but I’m pretty sure I just heard the dude say he represented the lollipop guild.
Home is where the water’s hot
About a week ago Pan Ptaček brought a guy up to see about fixing my hot water situation. It was kind of out of the blue—after all, I’ve been living here more than two months. There was a polite knock on the door and I opened it to find my landlord and his handyman. The guy looked and sure enough the hot and cold hoses seemed to be reversed. he swapped them and while things worked better over all, there was still no hot water. He told Mr. Ptaček that a new water heater was required.
I wasn’t so sure. It seemed to me like the valve between the sink and the heater wasn’t right. I tried to explain my opinion with no success whatsoever. My landlord grimaced at the expense of a new heater, and understood not at all when I told him I thought he was wasting his money.
At the same time, I knew the valve assembly was probably designed for exactly that purpose. Still, the way it worked just made no sense.
Tonight I came home to find in the cabinet over the sink a new heater unit. Bigger, badder, and with an energy efficiency label that showed a rating of very bad, but not the worst. I looked at it hanging there, then turned and walked away. Sooner or later I would have to turn the hot water tap and find out where I stood. I puttered about, stalling, but before long I was back at the sink. I took a breath and twisted the hot water tap.
The water came out clear and cold, and never warmed up. I closed the valve. The hot water valve. You know, the one on the left, the one colored red. The friggin knob that everyone in the civilized world would assume is the hot water. You know where this story is heading. The right-left cold-hot thing is not a strong tendency here, but the blue-red thing is usually reliable. Not in my house. But the difference between now and yesterday is huge. Before I had two ways to get cold water in the kitchen sink. Now I have variety, and no excuse to put off doing the dishes.
A Day Going Here and There
I love the trams. The metro is all right, it’s efficient and everything, but I love the trams. The network is complicated; even the natives don’t know where all the trams go, but they go everywhere. For less than it would cost you to drive you can get where you want to go, and there’s no worry about parking when you get there. As you trundle along you see the city.
Just like any city, Prague has its good parts and its bad parts. Graffiti is everywhere. There’s a section on the route of tram 26 where it passes through a grim concrete junction and there the art spraypainted on the concrete is welcome. Other places it is simple defacement.
Riding home from my czech lesson today (we introduced numbers and plurals in the nominative and accusative forms for inanimate masculine, feminine, and neutral nouns with hard, soft and other ending consonants, and the corresponding changes to possessive pronouns and adjectives. Plurals for masculine animate nouns will have to wait.), the pilot of tram seven could ring his bell like he was playing guitar. The bell is a distinctive sound and the Czechs are wise to leave it be as they upgrade the trams.
You get a feel for your driver – some of them are patient, others put the hammer down and woe to anyone who gets in their way. I love standing at the back, watching out the window as the city falls behind, carefree, knowing where I’m heading but letting someone else do the work.
I went to a wine tasting tonight; Tram 26 got me there with no problems, and when the dude poured me the first of thirteen glasses I said to my self, “I’m glad I’m taking the tram home.” I was doubly glad when after the thirteen rounds were over that Petr, my new best friend, ‘captured’ a few more bottles of wine for us to drink. Some of the wine was pretty good, others, well, not so much.
I was there with Andrea. She got pretty toasted. Not sloppy drunk, not even ‘I love you guys’ drunk, but she’d had enough. She rode on 26 part of the way home with me, and I’m reasonably confident she knew how to connect with other stuff to get home. I offered to accompany her the rest of the way, but honestly I didn’t have much to contribute.
Some time after that, I offered up a prayer to any deity that might be listening. I promised everything I have for any sort of bump or lurch of the tram that would fling the girl hanging casually to the pole in front of me into my lap. I’ve been on many a tram filled with pretty women, and I am not ordinarily a praying man, but tonight she forced me to make an exception. No deities responded, the tram carried on as the trams always do, and no one fell in my lap. Some might take that as a sign that there are no deities, but I think it is more just proof any and all gods out there are not interested in anything I have.
There is a politeness on the trams – seats are limited but the punker-anarchist will give up his seat to an elderly person. I expect it’s one of those moments you never forget, the first time someone offers you their seat on the tram. I don’t have any facts or anything like that to back this up, but I expect among a certain age group that has to be a topic of conversation.
Now I am home, safe and sound, the amount I paid less than what I paid to insure my car for a day in California, let alone gas it up. I saw people, I saw the city, I did some in-head writing. This, friends, is how it’s supposed to work.
A measure of loserment
Loud Phones
You know, modern phones know with great precision exactly where they are. (Which means they know where you are.) So why can’t they just make it so phones change ring mode by location? In a theater? No ring. In a restaurant? Quiet ring or no ring, the restaurant’s decision.
That would be cool.
No minimum sample size
OK, so the Czech Republic is a whole country and everything, complete with it’s own traditions and character. You won’t find much of that on Czech TV. They have their own version of Superstar, on TV, where people with moderate talent compete to sound exactly like pop stars and thus become pop stars themselves. Just like America.
What prompted this episode, however, is the show blasting here at Roma right now. I think it’s titled “I’ll join your sham of a talent show and humiliate myself as long as you put me on TV.” The name is much shorter in czech, but I’m pretty sure of my translation. It’s like the gong show with more contestants and no gong. And the talent pool – and I’m using talent in the loosest possible sense – is much smaller here. Scary.
Spring is coming!
It wasn’t so long ago I was talking to a Praguista and noting that it was still light at 4:30 – a notable improvement. Spring was right around the corner, we agreed. Dang! Now it’s light until after six p.m. Spring really is coming.
Today the temperature was above freezing for a sustained period. I imagine the snowman on the front of tram seven has finally met its demise. He was riding up there for several days, on the car painted bule to sell Japanese electronics or some shit like that. When I first saw the tram heading my way I thought there was some sort of effigy on the front, but when it got close I saw a meter-tall snowman mushed onto the hooking-up-thing that jutted from the tram car, its little snow arms spread in joy. “I’m the king of the world!!!!” the snowman proclaimed.
Days later I saw the same tram car, and the bowsprit was still there, spindly arms and all. And why not? Nothing had happened in the meantime that would cause snow to melt.
Today, I suspect, the snowman tipped off his precarious balance and was crushed beneath the wheels of the tram.
Spring is coming, and I’m ready for it. As much as I whine about it I really do enjoy the cold, but spring brings more than just warmth. It brings miniskirts. There are a few women who wear them even in the dead of winter, and I love those girls for suffering so my life can be a little better, but even now, as the days get longer, the skirts get smaller.
In San Diego, working a couple hundred meters from the beach, I had ample opportunity to appraise the female form, but for all I like the bikini, I like the miniskirt more. A little more mystery, a lot more swish. There are miniskirts burned into my memory the way no bikini ever could be. Some are recent – watching the girl with bare legs walking down Vinohradska as I huddle in my coat. Some are ancient – watching the walk of a San Diego bartender who shall go unnamed but who is neither Amy nor Rose as she nearly drove me to madness.
Good times. Fond memories. I hope I die before the miniskirt goes out of style.