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Experiment in Rhythm

ACT I




I was up in the office on the third floor. Not doing much. Just staring blankly at a spreadsheet. I wasn't exhausted, nor sleep deprived, yet my energies felt hollow – an echo of it’s real strengths. Every year, during the week immediately following the oppressive month of December, we waiters experience ‘aftershock-lethargy’, as a consequence of the dramatic downturn in customer levels and requirements. The pre-Xmas period mainly consists of office and work end-of-year parties, so is dense with throngs of folk who normally don't get out that often and therefore necessitate so much more effort to serve. 'Amateur Month' is the handle we apply to the whole period up to New Year's Day. By the time the end is within sight, we're all pretty much running on fumes. Sleep starved, weight receding, new grey hairs appearing, drug intake alarmingly increasing and the fighting-spirit fading, every year seems to get harder. But we always get that one week afterwards to recover; one week to wander upstairs, whilst the last customers on a Sunday night are finishing their desserts and just stare at the computer screen.

Gotta Go To Work

Golders Green Station, North London. About 11am. Probably later. But I meant to get here an hour before I am due at work, so we'll call it 11am. Fictitious license, allows this here waiter to be viewed as punctual. The Charring Cross train arrives in three minutes and I wonder along, to the top of the platform. The wrought iron, Art-Nuevo, canopy shelter, drapes out only up to where the front doors of the second carriage will pull up to. It's not raining, but the roof also provides barrier protection from the cold, so I stop well short of the end of the ash felt platform. Despite the distracting, loud Bluegrass that the iPod is blowing into my head, I sense a lone, 28 year old female walking towards me. She walks heavy. Heavier than you'd expect of a girl as diminutive as her. Her petite feet are driven by gymnast strength calves into the ground. Those calves drive them feet hard. So hard, that, even though she's ten to fifteen meters away from me, I can feel her footsteps tremor through the ash felt, concrete and steel below my feet.

I'm Sure NZ Is Actually A Very Nice Place

I'm going to use the last post, 'Distance Will Come', like a permission note to school, from my Mum. It's going to excuse me from having to write about The Present. Well, for one more post anyway. I am sure tomorrow will find me something like UGGs or Fat People or Women's Tennis to rant about and this will drag me back into the present. (Very different to 'moaning' is 'ranting' - 'Moaning', needs a listener; a person to bring down to the moaner's level of suffering. 'Ranting' is launching a borderline senile, monologue at no one in particular and therefore, has a negative impact upon no one) For now however, I'm taking the note that got me out of wearing full uniform yesterday and illegally recycling it again today.

Distance Will Come

Seems to me, that lately I've been writing quite a bit about the past. Not just in the postings you get to see on this here page, but also in the notepads I use for the book I'm working on. Even trawling the paragraphs of the half started drafts for blogs I never actually upload, I've noticed less about London and The Road and more anecdotes that are set in St. Kilda and The US. Some Storytellers harvest in fields rich with fantasy, prediction and preemption. Their homes have windows that looks out into the forward distance and they are able to gaze out them with ease and at whim. My window looks out into Golders Green - a Jewish neighborhood so very similar to the one I grew up in. How's that for my life imitating my art?

Warning: This Blog May Contain Coffee Machine Technical Terms

I once ran a Gastropub back in Melbourne.  A large venue, based in an inner-city, pocket of a neighbourhood. I didn't work there for a very long time and neither do I think we every got to truly be a Gastropub. When I came onboard, it was essentially operating like a confused and earnestly hip restaurant, that some nights would convert into a cheap nightclub.  I immediately decided that my first aim was to try and make the whole product function in one cohesive presentation. One easily defined product.

I Really Should Know Better

I was born into a family so very affected by xenophobia. So too, the families of the kids i grew up around and with. The Melbourne Jewish Community, as it stands today, is the product of a genesis founded by an influx of immigrant individuals and families who fled the midsts, remains or precursors to religious persecution across Europe. They arrived on the shores of Australia's great Southern city and went about their rebirth as survivors. They recovered, rebuilt, grew, multiplied and re-established themselves in another place and time.

Jews carry stories with them like Americans carry Patriotism, Catholics carry Repression and The Irish carry Alcoholism. Whether its fantastical legends that border on the absurd, to side-splitting humorous retellings of a mundane every-day occurrence,  to more somber cautionary tales, stories are the key to the fabric of the very culture that unites Jews into a common and shared expression of existence. It's a stereotype, but as George Clooney's character in Up in the Air says, "I stereotype - it's quicker.".

Chapter from 'Don't Wanna Go Home'

Performance Art.

When someone throws out that term, they are are speaking of the toil and expression of Rock Stars, Broadways Dancers and aging Stuntmen. Of Actors, Stand-Up comics, Trapeze Artists and Lion Tamers. Perhaps you may be a little bit more pretentious than your neighbor and you term 'Performance Art' as differing from the more mainstream 'Performing Arts'. You would then only use the 'Performance' term to refer those (supposedly) avante-garde and (supposedly) intellectual 'happenings', that range from public poetry readings and naked gardening, to Street-Theater and suspending one's self in a clear perspex box for a week. Even the fool standing right now at the entrance to Covent Garden Market, painted entirely in grey and frozen in a pose whilst he waits for someone to throw a Pound at him so he can reward them with the amazingly complex and brilliantly challenging action of moving an arm or some such shit, is a Performance Artist.

Faith No More or Bob Dylan?

'Wonder Boys' was released in 2000 and is a film based on the novel by Michael Chabon. I've never read the book. In fact, I've never read any of his work, though lately quite a few folk have recommended The Yiddish Policeman's Union to me, so perhaps soon enough I will take up the weight of direction and read the man's work. I’ve never seen the film either. Well, that’s not true. I have seen virtually every scene and heard nearly every line of dialogue. To be entirely accurate, what I should have said was that I’ve never seen the film in it's entirety IN ONE SITTING. Over the past decade, I reckon it's at least a dozen times that I have turned on a TV and landed somewhere along the 111 minutes that the film runs for.

I am Spartacus Happy Pants

There is this photographer I know. He lives in LA now, somewhere downtown I believe. I first met him on The West Coast, but it was back in NYC that I got to know him better. He is one of those people who projects that very specific So-Cal, laid-back, beachy and breezy charm. It emits from his eyes, his sandy facial hair and the way his accent drawls and draws out the end of his paragraphs. He has compiled photo essays of war-addled Afghanistan, has been embedded with some sort of African Charity Soccer Team, held house parties way up in The Beverly Hills and signs off his letters with "Send my regards to The Queen". One of the things I like most about him is how his experience in and of the past so clearly dictates, informs and composes the character he is now in the present. He is only who he is and is that person to everyone. He is truthful in the image he projects. I don't know many people about whom I can say that.

Premeditation just results in too many parentheses....( )

I've written this posting several times. Not completely, but I’ve drafted the introduction, imagined a middle and constructed an ending. Whether in my mind or with pencil on my Europa Major Pad or even on my BlackBerry, whilst fighting against the predictive inaneness of (the so called)Sure-Type, I’ve put sentences together. I've tested the waters with discussions about some of it's key points and I’ve impassioned it's arguments. It's become so much more involved and weightier than the actual worth of a couple paragraphs which, at best, would be read by only three people(That excludes my Mum. Never count your Mum as a fan, viewer or follower - that's just cheating.). So much so, that the other night, somewhat drunk, I over ambitiously referred to it as 'an article'.

I've seen you before.

Have you ever run away?

Inadequately packed a swag, stumbled across the threshold, shouted a triumph over your shoulder, pinned your ears back and just ran. Eyes open, but rage or fear or love or desperation blinding any registered sight. You may have been pre-adolescent or post-university or in the twighlight of a cancer grip. Maybe it was after the third child was born, or just before the wife came back from the nail salon. Perhaps you were right, perhaps you should have stayed to fight your corner, perhaps it would have gotten better. Perhaps destiny chose your need to escape or maybe a deficiency in your character informed your selection. You may have left a note, your may have tried your hardest to close the French-Doors without emitting a sound or maybe you violently smashed that vase his mum gave to him on your way out, using the explosion of Mexican Glass to serve as the exclamation point to finish your rant.

Head/Skin

Skin. Head.

Head and Skin.

Two different words with two very distinctly different meanings.

"I've got you, under my skin" sings Frank Sinatra or Louis Prima (depending which version you prefer of the Cole Porter song - at the moment i'm more so into the Louis Prima and Keely Smith one)

"Man, that girl really got into my head." announces to me my friend from The South.

Skin and Head.

They can't both be talking about the same feeling, for Head and Skin are so very different.

Hey, Mr - ! You watching?

When i was younger, my back hurt less, i was quicker to anger, i couldn't carry a tune and i could bowl a wrongun, flipper and top-spinner to compliment my stock leg-spinning ball. i also never wrote the word 'God'. i'd instead write 'G-d'. This was due to a belief ingrained in me by parents and teachers, that somehow writing God/G-d's name in it's complete form would somehow incur his wrath. This is a strictly Jewish belief, because i am yet to encounter it elsewhere.

New Town

What have they done to the old home place, why did they tear it down?

And why did I leave the plough in the field and look for a job in the town

J.D. Crowe, 'Old Home Place'

My mate the Canadian placed her in the 'girl next door' genre. I suppose he was referring to how she drew attention in response to an easy warmth she projected rather than an eye catching strikingness. True. The thing that caught my imagination was the wake of a just passed knowing grin, that told me of an analytical wit at work. This is how i chose to see her anyways. It could have just been an uneasy smile. The sort one displays when slightly uncomfortable and nervous. But as de rigour, I ran with the more romantically appealing snap judgement.

Value

On the world financial market, the US Dollar is the barometer for ascribing value. It's the constant against which one can define the value of the gold, coal or Yen you have stashed under the bed. The exchange rate of USD to GBP dictated the amount of Pounds the aggressively eager, Pakistani man pushed under the thin slit in the thick perspex window at the Bureaux de Change, just outside of Leicester Square. This was an ever so simple transaction to understand. I expected how much i was to receive due to the rate displayed on the A-Frame board out on the sidewalk and i surmised the numerical total by reading the numbers printed large on the banknotes. What is a little harder to understand is what is the actual 'real' value of 1 Pound. What it actually gets you on the High Streets and how much is needed to maintain the lifestyle i've come to enjoy and expect.