Yev;
Miraculously, it's April, 2025. In the process of organizing and getting all the myriad stuff set up for packing, I have this week had the advantage of consulting notebooks and journals I have not laid eyes upon in many a moon, such that I now may state, with other unmentioned bits of evidence also in underhanded hand covering my back, that the two of us have not been in the same room or on the same hot tarmac or any such place in very nearly seventeen years. Having fallen headlong into criminal misadventures intended to enrich us but clearly more inclined to imperil us mortally, we came to the stark conclusion that your mentor and personal handler Augie had been spot on the money when he said that sometimes you see a bullet coming at you very slow and it infuriates you that there's nothing you can do to move yourself out of the way. We figured we'd hedge on the yet-unproven prophecy and drive up into Ontario through Michigan and up to Québec's Laurentian Mountains, near the town of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, right on Lac Brûlé, where you had a group of friends and co-conspiracists likewise squatting in tense anonymity and waiting for the heat to blow off. Your friends were holding their nerves together like weathered bundles of frazzled red wool utilizing the tried-and-true Canadian method of sitting by the lake and remaining agreeably inebriated all the livelong day on Labatt 50 and Canadian Club. They pumped me full of beer and whisky, not that I was exactly fending them off, and by nightfall I was wobbly and nauseous, just in time for the guys to give me psilocybin mushrooms. Shortly thereafter I was peaking on the hallucinogenics in the back of a car looking out the sunroof at the gigantic towering trees of the forest as they zoomed by majestically and "Tainted Love" played on the sound system. And then I was puking all over somebody's boat house. I could not locate you the next morning and have not seen you since, though it pleases me to see we've both kept busy, and you can go right ahead and apprise me of where you see my narrative veering from yours.
It should already be clear that I miss you still and reflect upon you regularly, though not in some lovesick puppydog way you'd obviously never expect or tolerate of me. This really funny thing happened tonight and I'm confident it will make for a good story; it also happens to centrally hinge on a lovely woman I just met for the first time who reminds me more than a little of you. I have these friends who live over in the Renfrew neighbourhood near the detox facility. In a lovely old stucco house with two dogs and a big fenced-in backyard with a fire pit where my friends are wont to host parties and barbecues. His name is Maurizio and hers is Sarah. He is a multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer while she does drawings and tapestries and works as a university administrator. Normally, Maurizio would text to invite me over for a dinner or a fire pit hang, but earlier today it was Sarah who messaged me, extending an invitation to both join them tonight for barbecued hamburgers and to meet an old university friend of Sarah's named Cecilia who is just in town for a few days and is assuredly the kind of lady out of whom I'd be liable to get a kick.
Cecilia looks a bit like you, there can't be any denying it, though originally she's from Belize and definitely has that hotblooded Latina thing going on...to go with her vivacious physicality and slender, athletic build. She came to Canada at thirteen, lived in Nova Scotia until the end of high school, and has resided in Montreal ever since. Sarah was right. I was pretty taken with this comely visitor right off the bat. While we were out back by the barbecue with the dogs running around and fetching, Sarah told Cecilia that I'm writing a book on the whole history of movies and then it was indicated that I ought to explain said (totally unwritten) book. I told them that the book begins with Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, and the birth of cinema in the late 19th century and ends prognosticating at length about possible image cultures of the future, but that right now I'm looking at Hong Kong action films and melodramas of the '80s and '90s with a critical eye for considerations of urban infrastructure and the metaphysics of simultaneity. I elaborated by means of example: in one of my all-time favourite Hong Kong films, PTU by Johnny To, the operative viewpoint is less 'bird's eye' than 'malfunctioning satellite.' To hopefully further clarify: I'm looking at basic problems of geophysical locality. Maurizio in chef's chapeau was engrossed in his burger-flipping responsibilities and Sarah did not appear to make a mental mark of so much as a single thing I'd said, but Cecilia grew both animated and visibly pensive. She could see that the implications of my concept were extensive, perhaps too much so, and she was doubtlessly right on both fronts. She told me she had loved the movies and almost hid under them like a big, safe blanket when she'd been a child. She said she was lonesome and squirrely all the way back to the cabbage patch. Classical Hollywood movies are Cecilia's favourites and she attributes this to her ongoing tendency to seek refuge in Turner Classic Movies when visiting her mother, also a fan of the station, in Nova Scotia. This really popped my lids open because it's the exact same way with me: how is one supposed to manage Halloween without Bride of Frankenstein or Christmas without The Bishop's Wife? After we laughed a little about that I asked if she had any standout Classical Hollywood favourites to which she answered: Marlene Dietrich movies! especially Shanghai Express and The Scarlet Empress. I had to confess in direct honesty and a spirit of openness that Shanghai Express might well also be my favourite of Dietrich's pictures if only because it pairs her with the incandescent and searing Anna May Wong. Cecilia said the cutest thing: they are ancestral astral cousins.
Meandering chatter pertaining and not pertaining to motion pictures and the gods and goddesses of the hallowed silver screen led us circuitously back to the kitchen and the unfussily-set dining table. While we were all sitting down Cecilia got excited and said that she'd almost forgotten the wonderful semi-old classic movie she'd just seen in a small boutique theatre in Montreal before her departure and brief journey west. The film was My Dinner with Andre (from '81), which I'm confident you recall is the widely-beloved pic in which Louis Malle films Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn having dinner at some chic joint in Manhattan. I've seen the film numerous times and was about say so when out of the blue Sarah, who had not for some while appeared to be paying much attention, burst out almost as though without the remotest capacity to suppress the impulse, with: I hate that movie! Maurizio stiffened in his seat and cleared his throat, eyes wandering slightly askance. Cecilia sat there with her hands folded and was obviously crestfallen and a mite thrown but she didn't appear to be all that damaged or perturbed. After a brief silence, I asked Sarah if she wanted to walk us through the animosity. Her first point was that she'd spent a good deal more time than the rest of us with these fake metropolitan NYC New Yorker magazine dweebs and that she'd been to their parties and beheld the inconceivable and apparently invincible tedium vouchsafed therein. Plus also Wallace Shawn has an annoying nasally voice and an annoying goblin laugh. I said I was reminded of a bit in Don DeLillo about hip high society parties that are boring and demoralizing in the manner of the most punishing stretches in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Maurizio perked up, being a fan of the author, as I knew well he was, and asked if I knew which DeLillo that was from. I said I thought it was Americana, the first one. Letting out a hardy laugh, Maurizio said Americana was the first DeLillo he had read as a teenager and that when asked by his father what it was about he'd said it's about a troubled advertising executive who sits around his office masturbating, only for his father to respond, quick, sharp as a tack: this man sounds more like a lawyer to me. After this there was some pregnant silence and burger-gnoshing.
Having sat on it for a good two or three minutes—all of us mostly sort of just sitting and munching our burgers—Cecilia said that it's true that Wallace Shawn has the conspicuous vocal-type characteristics attributed to him by surly old college buddy Sarah, and it's kind of interesting because it is actually true that Cecilia underwent a gradual transfer of identification while watching MY DINNER WITH ANDRE with an audience in Montreal, first identifying with Wallace Shawn's beaten-down playwright, who in the film is after all 36, same age as Cecilia, and whose grievances with respect to work, time, and money seemed timely and pertinent for her personally, and then identifying gradually much more with Andre Gregory, who at first seems a little slick and smarmy but who ultimately wins the love of the audience because he is full of, per Cecilia herself: sweetness, gentility, and joie de vivre. It's true also, she added, that Gregory's gospel of the fall of a mankind already plenty fallen seems ineffaceable, whether by virtue of the hordes of zombie consumers we encounter every day or all those who have outsourced their neural programming to the most unscrupulous of agents. And then this additional and very direct tidbit directly from the mouth of Cecilia: I really like the author Malcolm Gladwell and I pay attention, you might catch a good read on the stuff that's tipping and get yourself way off to the periphery to own the good humour you deserve having had the opportunity to reflect and to see that what you have done are good works and that you deserve in serenity whatever it is that is going to happen to you, because that impassable future distance is right here and right now the full measure of you. At this moment I noticed that while Maurizio and Sarah were enjoying their customary canned India Pale Ale, Cecilia was drinking soda like me. I asked her if she goes to church. Yes, I love it best when the priest can't sing but tries very, very hard.
We didn't talk into the night. We're getting old and Cecilia and I were sober and somnolent. As it had seemed to be the case that Blue Velvet was the one film all four of us had agreed monumentally altered the topographies of our respective youths, I thought I might shoot my shot, her attenuated presence in this slow prairie city notwithstanding, and ask Cecilia as I was leaving if she wanted to go see Wild at Heart with me tomorrow (almost tonight!) at Chinook Centre. It's true. They are doing a David Lynch retrospective at a shopping mall near here. There didn't appear anything fake or phoney about it when Cecilia stood there bouncing a little on her heels and told me she'd love to. You know all too well I'd have tracked it if her affect had been the slightest bit off.
Ever,
Jason
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