gpc

At the after party (“What screening was this for?” “I’m not...

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:33:00 -0400

At the after party (“What screening was this for?” “I’m not sure…”) I meet my old landlord. For several months I rented a desk in her company’s studio — the lease for which is now up. The company was sold last year, and she lives in L.A. now. She’s in town to clean out what’s been left behind in Greenpoint.

She tells me that the guy who used to sit in the corner desk — the one who would occasionally try to sell me on Gillian Welch during lunch at Acapulco or Ashbox — will be a father soon.

I feel that pause, the one before it becomes my turn to report something, some update, some major life change.

She sees me hesitating, and then bails me out by pointing over my right shoulder.

“Why don’t you get a drink, 張.”

Noon, Chair Five

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:23:47 -0400

As he circles my chair, the man with the gold shears tells me about his non-day-job work. The real work. He knows some collectors, he says, but he would rather know more. He knows dealers and gallery owners; he wants to meet more. The group show in Chelsea was nice, but he wants a solo one.

“I want more, damn it,” he says with a laugh. “But it’s time and it’s luck. Meeting the right people, being seen by the right people. It’s the hustle.”

In between the day job and the hustle, he is wooing. I ask about his latest, an academic who lives in Jersey.

“She’s forty-three, which is a little young for me. I’m an old dude, man.”

I ask why he insists on an age limit.

“Well, the last time I dated someone who was a little too young, it just killed me, you know. You end up feeling so fucking vulnerable all the time. It’s like I’m nineteen in my head all over again, nonstop, just horrible. That’s not how I want it to go at my age.

“Anyway,” he continues, “so tonight’s is forty-three. Tomorrow I’ve got someone a little older: fifty-one. When you get older, you don’t feel that instant connection with people as much anymore. So you gotta wait things out, try out different people, be patient and see what happens.”

He puts the scissors down for a second.

“So what’s going on with you?” he asks. “You seeing anyone right now?”

“That’s a good question,” I say, before answering.

Void If Detached

Sun, 19 May 2013 23:15:00 -0400

A reunion of sorts, with Professor Okie (in town for two days) and the former Chelsea Narrator (who, since leaving Chelsea, has moved on to a transitional phase in Park Slope).

The last time the three of us were in the same room together was about six years ago, in Inman Square. Before that, it was probably in a triangular common room while watching the Toby Bailey air ball. But I could be wrong…

We remain seated through the end of the credits, although it’s not really clear to me whose inertia is dictating the wait. In the process I snare a few key details — the Bar Girl’s non-Federation identity and the title of the only blues you will hear on the soundtrack (which is apparently the music supervisor’s attempt to foreshadow a plot point).

Later, as we wait for orders of tacos, chips, and beer, the Transitionalist Formerly Known as the Chelsea Narrator shows us the Khan Whitewashing Defense bingo board on his phone.

“I think they had to use a white guy,” I say. “I mean, if they cast Irrfan Khan or anyone with a vaguely Indian name, you’re giving it away, right?”

The Professor, himself a brown man, nods. “Hmm, that’s a good point.”

“That movie was like one giant in-joke,” says the Transitionalist. “An in-joke plus explosions.”

“I liked it,” the Professor admits. “Very action-packed.” He looks at his watch. “By the way, how long will it take me to get to JFK from here?”

The Transitionalist calculates: “LIRR, AirTrain, say, fifteen minutes to get to the gate. Leave here at quarter after and you should be fine.”

The Professor nods.

“Actually, you might want to make it thirty minutes to the gate — because you’re a brown man.”

Ticker Tape

Thu, 09 May 2013 22:09:32 -0400

The tick-tock dream. I’ve got two variations.

Variation No. 1 involves an audition. Growing up, I went through a lot of auditions, mainly for violin sections of orchestras. (The last one was for a college orchestra; I didn’t make the cut.) In Variation No. 1, the audition is an hour away but I still haven’t practiced for it. The plan is to cram: practice like a maniac for forty-five minutes and that’ll be good enough for, say, first stand in the second violin section. I open my violin case…empty. I look around the room. It could be under the couch or behind the TV. Or not. I go outside — maybe it’s on the porch or in the mailbox or inside a parked car. I remember to check the time. I have five minutes. That’s okay, I decide. I’ll just bail on the audition — easier that way, I can spare myself the grief. But at the scheduled time, I am standing in the windowless audition room, in front of two judges: the conductor and the concertmaster. “Where is your violin?” one of them asks. I struggle to come up with a reply, and somewhere within that struggle is when I wake up.

In Variation No. 2, the deadline is an exam that I haven’t studied for. It’s a few hours away, so the plan is to cram. Seriously, how hard could it be? The exam is for a course called Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Optimization. I don’t know what that means, but I know I can swing it in a couple hours. But first I have a few errands to run. I finish one errand and look at my watch and the exam is going to start in ten minutes. I am now freaking out, flipping through pages of notes, not really sure what I should be reviewing. The freak-out process seems to last much longer than ten minutes. It might last for hours, in fact, but I’m not in a state of mind where I can exploit any of this pseudo-extra time and actually study. I’m too panicked and too annoyed with myself for having squandered the time. The only way out is to become conscious in my sleep — to remind myself that I am no longer in school. It takes me a while to piece together the underlying logic: How could you be panicking for an exam when you already get spam from the alumni development office? Why are you still trying to study? You already passed that class, you dumb-ass. I wake up when I get to the “dumb-ass” part.

A few nights ago, during Variation No. 1, I finally was able to summon the strength to reply to the conductor at the audition. I said to him, “Holy shit, I’ve got an exam in a few hours. Gotta go.”

And so I ran off, out of the windowless audition room, and straight into Variation No. 2.

G is for grudge, R for repurpose. Grrrr.

Thu, 02 May 2013 17:29:00 -0400

The Ocean Hill narrator (formerly the Prospect Heights narrator) explains to me her policy on exes.

“There are still things that I like about them that I liked before, when I was dating them,” she says. “So why shouldn’t I try to keep them in my life?”

I don’t question the why; it’s more about the how.

My policy, on the other hand, does not require any methodology. I cut them off.

“Yeah — how about you explain that, Mr. 張.”

I could. But instead I choose to let them explain it, one by one by one, so that I do not have to.

Time to find a hiding place (or a HEPA filter).

Thu, 02 May 2013 14:32:27 -0400

Time to find a hiding place (or a HEPA filter).

Jimmy Rushing leaning on the piano. It’s easy to forget...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:16:07 -0400

Jimmy Rushing leaning on the piano. It’s easy to forget about the piano man in this picture — so I’ll remind you.

—
Photograph by Bob Parent

I first saw Three Colors: Red in Singapore — I remember...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 16:17:16 -0400

I first saw Three Colors: Red in Singapore — I remember the surprise of seeing it listed in a theater ad in The Straits Times, a few years after I’d watched Blue back home.

“Where is Yangtze Complex?” I asked my girlfriend at the time.

She gave me a strange look. “Why you need to go there?”

I handed her the newspaper and mentioned the movie — that a friend from college had recommended it, but I never got around to renting it.

“Yeah, right. Bullshit.”

She agreed to take me there and invited herself to come along. “It better be good,” she warned.

The “Complex” was the fourth floor of an old shopping mall in Chinatown. There was a food kiosk in the back and an arcade in the middle — kiddie rides that no one seemed to have used in years. At the ticket window, an older woman presented a place-mat-sized floor plan of the theater, and we pointed to two aisle seats on the right. She crossed out the seats in pencil and handed me the tickets, and then stared at us.

We took our seats. No one else came inside. The lights dimmed.

Over the next fifteen minutes, people began to file in, in the dark, until the room was packed. My girlfriend jabbed her finger into my arm.

“What?” I whispered.

Obscuring the soundtrack was a lot of animated grumbling in Hokkien and Malay. The voices of men — not in conversation, but in commentary barked at the screen. After each close-up of Irène Jacob, there was more grumbling.

I felt another finger jab into my shoulder.

A little over an hour into the movie, the grumbling stopped as Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit) crept out onto the ledge to find out the truth about Karin (Frédérique Feder). The ah pek elders and young migrant workers in the theater all held their breath; after an hour of subtitled dialogue and bowling ball tracking shots and Zbigniew Preisner’s plush score, they were finally about to see what they had paid for: a sex scene that had been approved for public consumption by the government Board of Film Censors.

More grumbling — this time followed by a stream of disappointed viewers heading for the exit. My girlfriend started laughing.

“I almost feel bad,” she said. “The poster gave them so much hope.”

A small group of holdouts stuck around for the final scene with Jacob and Jean-Louis Trintignant talking in the theater. But by the time the lights went up, they too were gone.

And that’s the story of how I ended up watching Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Red in Yangtze Complex, a Singaporean soft-core porn theater that is now no more.

criterioncollection:

We’re celebrating Jean-Louis Trintignant with a series on Hulu!

Barry. Then Otis. Then James. Then a Tecate. The bar here is...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:31:30 -0400

Barry. Then Otis. Then James. Then a Tecate.

The bar here is good for elbows — it has a wide, high rail molding — but lousy when it comes to humans eating off of plates. I look down and see a few other incompletes at the bar; all are leaning far forward, stooped and hovering over their dinners. It could be bingo night here.

This’ll be quick. Something to wolf down. A beer. Forget about today. A beer, maybe two…

The bartender takes my order. Her smile looks a bit clenched — the later it gets, I bet the harder it is to smile in here.

The guy to my left asks her for another water. He is reading Consider the Lobster — sort of. Right now he’s actually busy reading his phone, but next to the phone is a copy of Consider the Lobster in very good condition

Etta — I didn’t know she covered this one. Good to know…

I have a fleeting bad memory of this place. I took a friend out to dinner here a year ago, and she hates cilantro but when she ordered she forgot to ask the waitress to hold the cilantro, and even if you pick out all the cilantro from something it is still apparently steeped in essence of cilantro and she was trying hard to not make a fuss and insisted on not ordering something else and so she starved during dinner.

“The horchata is good,” I remember her telling me.

The fajitas are — is? — placed in front of me, and I join the others in bingo posture. Something seems to be missing. Salt? Hot sauce? No, something else.

I need the neck of a giraffe to eat here.

"Hokum Stomp (1930) — This song repeats the harmonic structure of Brownskin Shuffle. It is played in..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:42:15 -0400

“Hokum Stomp (1930) — This song repeats the harmonic structure of Brownskin Shuffle. It is played in the key of C. After beginning with the chords G7-C-G7-C-F-C-G7-C, Broonzy and Georgia Tom respond to Jane Lucas’ ‘I feel a change coming on’ by playing a A-D-G7-C riff. Upon Georgia Tom’s pronouncement, ‘I feel another change coming on,’ they return to the initial chord set-up. Tom’s next hint of imminent ‘change’ precipitates another A-D-G7-C sequence, which is followed by yet another new interlude. The piece ends on a descent to its introductory chord pattern.”

- Stephen Calt, Nick Perls, and Michael Stewart, in their liner notes for The Young Big Bill Broonzy (Yazoo 1011).

I always appreciate an earnest hokum scholar.

Shenzhen Frenchman. —Guy Delisle, Shenzhen: A Travelogue...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:06:07 -0400

Shenzhen Frenchman.

—
Guy Delisle, Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China
Drawn & Quarterly, 2006

Conventional, Pt. 4

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 12:00:39 -0400

In about nine hours, including the layover, I’ll be home. On my way to the taxi stand, I run into W—— just outside the hotel. He doesn’t recognize me, as it’s been a few years, but I decide to wave and say hello. He scans my badge for a second.

“Oh — howsit going, 張? Been a while, hasn’t it.”

W—— is technically retired, but every once in a while he turns up in a consultant emeritus role for my employer. That is, if you can find him.

“Well, my last extended disappearance was for twenty-five days. No phone, no nothing. Off the grid in the wilderness. You have no idea how good it feels to be utterly disconnected.”

I mention to him that I’ve moved to New York since the last time I saw him.

“New York City? Good lord, that’s like the total opposite. Hyperconnected, I would imagine.”

“Eh, it depends, I guess.”

I tell him that I’ve got to run to the airport, so we shake hands and agree to continue this conversation another time, perhaps in one year.

Conventional, Pt. 3

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 18:55:12 -0400

One thing I have trouble getting used to is all the belly-button stalking — the friendly, smiling people sneaking a glance down at that badge hanging at the end of the black lanyard.

“張! How’s the Big Apple?”

“張! I went to college with someone named 張!”

You’re supposed to reciprocate and then address the addresser by name when this happens, but I’m often so startled that I forget to do it.

“Oh, it’s, uh…Hi, how are you?”

At a packed session on standards syntax, I sit on the floor at the back of the lecture hall, next to Bob from Portland and John from Tokyo (he’s Australian). Just before the presenter begins his deck, a pair of brown knee boots steps over my outstretched feet. I look up and see a woman pointing to a section of floor about a foot and a half wide and just to the left of me.

“Can I sit there?”

“Why, sure you can, Brooke,” Bob answers. “How’s things down in Texas?”

“Oh, they’re…they’re good,” she says.

She looks at me and glances at my badge but doesn’t say anything until a few minutes later, when she tells me who she works for. (I once turned down a job offer from her company.) Like me, she’s here to observe, get a read on the customer base.

I ask how she got into this line of work.

“It wasn’t really planned,” she says. “I was freelancing for them a little bit. And then it become a full-time thing.”

How much longer do you think you’ll stick with it? Are you planning to go back to school? What is it that you want to do? Shall we perhaps exchange valuable trade secrets?

Instead of asking any of these questions, I keep it business-like, but at the same time I am tracking things — what she asks me, how she talks about herself, her reaction when she figures out that I’m older than I look.

With about a half-hour left in the talk, she excuses herself.

“Gotta run to another workshop. It was nice meeting you.”

“See ya,” I say, and in five seconds she is gone.

Conventional, Pt. 2

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:05:19 -0400

One of my vendor contacts requests that we meet in person. (Up to this point we have only exchanged e-mails and talked on the phone.)

“Maybe we can meet up near the booth,” I suggest.

At the scheduled time, I notice a gray-suited middle-aged man on the expo floor waving an arm at me from about twenty yards out. He has never seen me before, never seen a picture of me, and the exhibition hall is packed. All he knows is my first and last name.

He grins as he shakes my hand: “Great to finally meet you!”

I scan the crowd for a few seconds before saying anything.

“So…pretty damn easy to find me, eh?”

No, I didn’t really say that. But I thought about it.

Conventional, Pt. 1

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:11:03 -0400

I get a message that the marketing team has secured a table for twenty at a steakhouse near the convention center. It ends with Join us if you can.

Unfortunately my flight gets in late — at least that’s what I plan to say — so I miss out on a night of managers ordering martinis and predicting fallout from the next round of restructuring.

At the check-in desk, a man tells me that they had to switch rooms for my reservation. (The last time this happened to me, I had to keep the coffee maker running at night to overpower the cigarette stench from the wallpaper.)

“Down worry, Messer 張,” he says. “I get something fix up for you man.”

The fixed-up room has a long corridor leading up to a window that faces west, toward downtown. Take a right, and there’s a deluxe suite waiting to be occupied. (“How about maybe we keep this one between you and me, Messer 張.”) I sit on the floor in front of the window and consider possible beelines for dinner…

…The last time I was at a Denny’s was in Page, Arizona — fueling up for the Bryce Canyon leg of the road trip. I remember the waitress talking us into an order of pancake puppies that no one really wanted. (We were too tired to object.)

A pair of waiters are on night shift tonight; the back part of the dining room is cordoned off with the lights dimmed. I’m seated at a table that’s about an arm’s length from a booth shared by two young women who have both ordered avocado chicken Caesar salads with the dressing on the side. Their accents sound West Coast to me. They work together in the same department. One is a Chinese-American who lives with her boyfriend and their dog; the other a Greek-American who recently moved back in with her parents. Like me, they have older colleagues who flew in earlier today or yesterday. Like me, they ducked into Denny’s to keep some distance from them.

It would be easy for me to strike up conversation with them — and for this trip, you could say I’m supposed to, as they’re technically customers (or potential customers). It would go something like this: I interrupt with a question, and after they answer it, I introduce myself and steer them through a conversation that allows me to mention a few things we sell that might help them do what it is they do. I might get an e-mail or business card out of them. I pick up their check and remind them to visit our booth. And that would be the last I see of them.

But as I listen to the two Californians with their salads, I find myself hesitating. Over the next few days they’ll be bombarded with swag and pitches and propaganda. Why should I be the one who starts the avalanche? Let someone else do it.

The waiter takes my empty plate and asks if I want more coffee.

“Um…yeah. Just a half cup.”

I look down at the place mat, which I had not noticed earlier, and now I kind of regret passing up the chance to chat up those Californians. Instead of the standard line — “Excuse me, are you here for the convention?” — I could have chimed in with something better, something far stranger and more up my alley.

“Hey — can one of you explain to me why tomato beats bacon?”

Now healed, and feeling obligated to get the most out of my...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:20:00 -0400

Now healed, and feeling obligated to get the most out of my two-minute follow-up consultation, I ask a stupid question.

“So is there anything I could have done beforehand? You know, to prevent it from happening? Diet? Vitamins? Anything?”

“No,” the physician replies. “We don’t really know why it happens.”

“So it’s just bad luck.”

“That’s right,” he says. “Bad luck.”

—
Nina Simone, “Born Under a Bad Sign”
Paris, 1969

"Dude, he’s got like this spiritual jazz, late-Marvin Gaye song thing going."

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 20:09:57 -0400

“Dude, he’s got like this spiritual jazz, late-Marvin Gaye song thing going.”

- A bearded guy on Frankencorner — who, it should be known, had this dismounted-bike, skewed-tweed-driver cap, Noxzema-sheen talk thing going.

Criteria Collection

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 15:19:00 -0400

A Korean, a Hawaiian, a Filipino, and a Chinaman walk into a taco joint. (I feel the need to do this from time to time: listen to the youngsters talk.)

“I don’t date Asians,” the Korean declares. I remember hearing this spiel when I first met him a year and a half ago.

“Why not?” asks the Hawaiian.

“White girls are just more fun,” he replies. “I mean, if we’re drinking? No Asian girl is gonna keep up with me.” (The script has not really changed. I give him a year or two before he decides to revise it.)

The waiter brings a Pacifico for the Hawaiian, a Negra Modelo for the Filipino, and a Flower Power IPA for me. Nothing for the Korean; he’s driving. After dinner, he’s off to meet up with (wait for it…) a white girl.

The Hawaiian tells us about one of her girlfriends who recently told a guy to back off after he played the I-thought-we’re-more-than-just-friends-aren’t-we? card.

“Man, that’s cold,” says the Filipino. “Why she gonna send mixed signals like that?”

“It’s not her fault,” the Hawaiian counters. “She just thought he got that she wasn’t interested in him in that way. You can’t blame her if the guy is clueless.”

“Naw naw, man, that’s on her. How he supposed to read that?”

The Korean turns to me. “Do you know either of these people they’re talking about?” he asks.

“Not the girl. I’ve met the guy once—”

“She cute?”

“She’s Chinese,” answers the Hawaiian.

“Oh. Never mind…wait, you got a picture?”

A phone is handed around the table. The picture was taken at a bar — a young, petite Chinese woman smiling and holding the arm of a towering white dude.

“Um, no thank you,” says the Korean.

“張, what about you?” asks the Hawaiian. “She’s pretty, right?”

I wait for the rest of the pitch.

“She is super smart. She has a Ph.D., did a residency program, she’s really active and loves doing outdoorsy stuff, she is soooo funny and fun to talk to…”

I glance over at the Filipino, who looks doubtful. “I don’t know, man. I met this girl. You saying she’s active and all that but she ain’t the one being active. She’s just waiting around for someone else to suggest something active and she’s like, ‘Okay, I’ll go too.’ To me that doesn’t mean she’s active. That’s kinda boring to me.”

I hand the phone back to its owner.

“She really needs someone younger,” I say.

“So how’s the pinkie?” asks the orthopedic...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 15:00:00 -0400

“So how’s the pinkie?” asks the orthopedic resident.

I tell him I can type okay but can’t yet finger an E7 chord. I can pick things up with my left hand, but if it’s something heavy I can’t hold it for very long.

“Yeah, you’re going to need to do some stretching exercises,” he says. “Here, make a fist with your left hand for me.”

I curl my fingers into a fist. The pinkie won’t close tightly so he clamps down on it.

“Ow.”

“Yeah, it’ll hurt a little. Just hold it down like this with your other hand. Force it to go down and hold it for about ten seconds” — ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow owww — “and then do that five or six times.”

He lets go and I have to think almost out loud — Brain, please unclench pinkie — in order for the finger to straighten out again.

“The other thing you can do is one of these karate chop moves.” He puts his elbow on the table, and retracts his fingers back into a vicious-looking claw — like Hong Xi-quan going for Pai Mei’s eyeballs.

“You want to tense up your fingers as much as you can, and you’re trying to get that tip of the pinkie to touch your palm.”

I try to make the same tiger-boxing “claw” with my left hand. The pinkie doesn’t quite get there, so again the doctor presses it into position. (The scar tissue laughs at us.)

“Not bad,” he says. “You’ll get there.”

“I’ll practice while watching some kung-fu movies.”

“Do you have loratadine?” “On me?...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:23:00 -0400

“Do you have loratadine?”

“On me? No…”

“How long before you will start sneezing?”

“If you’re this close…three minutes, give or take.”

“I am sorry — you prefer if I keep the paws off your knee?”

“It’s okay. As long as it’s under three minutes.”

“Why won’t you rub my head?”

“Sorry, can’t do it. Won’t do it.”

“Jesus, look at all this affection you’re missing out on! And all these people walking by saying, ‘Awwwww.’ Don’t I make you feel special?”

“Not really. I look at you and all I see is cute, cuddly co-pays to my allergist.”

“Why is it taking her so long to buy coffee?”

“There’s a line. Dogs don’t really get it, but humans do strange things like waiting in line.”

“Do you like her? I like her! I rrrrrrrrrreaally like her!”

“She’s cute. Nice mocassins, too.”

“Oooooh, the mocassins. She gets mad when I chew on the mocassins.”

“Way to treat the masta.”

“I’m irritated now. This is the longest I have gone without someone rubbing my head.”

“Nice try. My hands are tied.”

“Hey hey hey, where are you going? You haven’t even finished your coffee. Plus I don’t like being left alone out here on a leash.”

“It builds character. Goodbye.”