My brother, Patrick, held dear a mug from the Salinas coffee house the Cherry Bean with which we grew up. It was a sort of monochromatic marionberry color with the simple cherry/coffee bean ménage logo in white. However, he recently broke this childhood relic in his apartment in Seattle and bought a new one during his Christmas visit to Salinas. He forgot to bring it back with him so the purpose of the journey also comprised of a bag which in turn comprised of this mug, along with a miniature baseball bat with a Giants logo he asked after during his yuletide stay, etc.We left Patrick’s apartment with coffee in this mug to make pancakes at Annie’s apartment. We then went to Cal Anderson Park to play a game of bocce with the mug in a canvas tote bag. I placed the bag to the side of the area of Astroturf away from all of the soccer playing to mark the halfway point of our makeshift court and marked its end with another bag thirty feet away or so. I rolled a ball in the other direction to see how they rolled and it gravitated toward and collided with the other bag making a loud clink sound. I rushed to the bag and found the Cherry Bean mug split down the middle.
2:00 PM Cal Anderson Park, Seattle, WA
Patrick Shaw-Kitch & Annie Tisher
15
Tristan Kadish & Andrew Shaw-Kitch
13
An unpredictable element, it should be noted, did influence this round: a baby intercepted a throw of mine and kicked it like a soccer ball, to the horror of his mother, away from the pellino. The point was replayed and it may be argued that our game never recovered.* * *
The opening of Sofia Coppola's Somewhere is a shot of 1/4 of an ovular race track in the desert, one of the two sharper turns of the circuit. For what feels like an over-indulgent lifetime a sportscar zooms through the shot, disappears with a roar that fades, then returns, before climaxing with another appearance, disappearance. After too many repetitions of this the car stops, fortuitously in the frame as now something is happening, and appropriately in an arty composition, and its driver gets out and walks a little, stops and looks off.
It was in this moment of the journey in which we were watching the opening credits of Somewhere in Capitol Hill in Seattle with my brother, his girlfriend, and David, that the climax was felt and quietly acknowledged as past. No new characters were to be encountered, we had only to return, complete the circle, reprise our brief appearance/reappearance in each city through which we had passed. Once the limits, the aims, the potential of something are known, what was once a thrilling build-up to something magnificent, becomes the mediocre content of a project unfulfilled. And there we were: fully invested—tickets and popcorn—in an unfulfilling insult to our taste and intelligence. All of this money and talent and film and electricity and time was, in the enlightened consciousness, mis-directed and self-serving.
It can never be productive to conclude as such about the work of someone else in the moment that doubt and lethargy enter your own work. It is a poisonous partnership that rattles the critical foundations of your perspective and make you doubt the initial conclusions that began the chain of your ethos.
An Andrew in tune with the truth of my idiosyncratic standards and expectations would have intuited that the Sofia Coppola movie was a frustrating waste of my time; I should have known it would have disrupted the positive flow, the centrifugal force of the trip, that we would be stalled by entropy right at the abyss of the journey. The hero was not acting, as was his profession, nor was he literally acting, grabbing hold of himself and actualizing his life. It represented the danger of giving up, quitting bocce—our veritable profession—and losing hold on the story, letting Bocce Balling on the West Coast flounder, as a legend unactualized, an idea incomplete, mediocre in essence and substance, a footnote to a wikipedia page deleted because I was the only one to corroborate its truth.
Somewhere
Bocce Balling on the West Coast
I miss coffee, coffee mugs, listening to NPR while drinking coffee from a mug, going somewhere random and buying coffee, walking in the cool grey blandness with coffe, sitting and doodling with a blue pen while drinking coffee and looking at women, so badly.
ReplyDelete