travelling notes (xcvii)

If a severe power outage in downtown Manhattan means that Konrad Paszkudzki plays the piano in a dim room lit by candles, and afterwards we catch an equally intimate Birdland set of the legendary Freddy Cole, then, Christ, I'm all for it.

travelling notes (xcvi)

Mezzrow Jazz Club in Greenwich Village could be the first place in my life where I did not give a damn about the quality of Old-Fashioned. Not with that piano, trombone, voice.

travelling notes (xcv)

There is a beautiful Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park, and there is this little boy sitting on one of the mushrooms. Camera at the ready, his babysitter is telling him to hide the plastic bottle behind the mouse, but the boy keeps fumbling and the crowd by the sculpture keeps growing bigger and bigger. Phone-wielding people do not want this boy in their picture are they are becoming restless. There is one woman in particular who is about to burst with all that righteous indignation. The scene drags on and on, with the babysitter giving instructions, with the boy sitting on the mushroom, with the crowd seething. I wish this could go on forever. I'm sure Lewis Carroll would wish that, too.

travelling notes (xciv)

The 1912 Brooklyn, as described by Betty Smith, is the 2019 Brooklyn I'm seeing today. They are walking the same dogs. They are singing the same songs. The only difference is they won't give you a penny for pinching your cheek. Or will they?..

travelling notes (xciii)

New York City is like an intense girlfriend.  

My Cultural Highlights: WHITE

If at some point in your adolescence you were not fascinated by socialist ideas, you wasted your youth. 

At sixteen, I read a lengthy interview with Oliver Stone in some British magazine. He was travelling around Central America during that period, visiting countries like Guatemala and Cuba. This particular interview was him enchanted by the 'Freedom Island' and its unfading leader, Fidel Castro. What struck me then was that I was under the spell of his words about Castro and socialism and yet I never really cared for his filmmaking (except for Salvador, ironically). 

More than that. A little later I was having a conversation about Soviet socialism with an American acquaintance, and somehow we got to the subject of Oliver Stone and The Doors. I said I did not like the film but I liked the man. This was bullshit, of course, as my opinion was based on my brief fascination with people like Leon Trotsky as well as the Oliver Stone interview in a British magazine. The American said, "It's interesting... You like Oliver Stone but you don't like the film". Which was basically him saying, "My dear man, you are making no sense". 

And - emphatically - I was not. Years later, I would be disappointed with Oliver Stone as an artist (Alexander was hammy filmmaking at its worst) and as a socialist (which in Stone's world presupposes sycophantic admiration for corrupt dictators). But the feeling stuck: you can dislike the art but fall in love with the artist.       

I do not dislike the art of Bret Easton Ellis. I loved American Psycho and I loved The Rules of Attraction (the latter a great deal more than the former), but I could never get into any of his other books, scripts and (do I even need to bring this up?) attempts at directing. And yet somehow I have always loved the man and could listen to him talk for hours on that great podcast of his where he speaks about movies and SJWs and has this incredible ability to formulate a question with a million words and then get a brief reply from a guest. His thoughts are incisive and articulate and his interviews with people like Mark Z. Danielewski and Quentin Tarantino are fascinating. In fact, these opinions and these interviews rival the best pages from his greatest books. 

So it was an easy decision, in that very German and very orderly bookstore in Bonn, to choose his first collection of non-fiction called White (but of course) over the latest novel by Ian McEwan. 

And it is a great book. The title alone is a stroke of genius and will no doubt provoke all the right people. You could call these people whatever you want, but the term that Bret Easton Ellis uses is 'snowflakes'. Snowflakes, or social justice warriors, are those thin-skinned hypocrites who are thrashed with special gusto in the book as well as on the B.E.E. podcast. In White, Ellis recounts several stories of him being attacked for his opinions (Trump, #MeToo) on Twitter and elsewhere. In times less hysterical than ours, these opinions would raise no hackles at all, but in this day and age one word in feeble support of Donald Trump or Kevin Spacey means you will be eaten alive. It is infuriating and yet it leads to a set of thrilling stories. In fact, Ellis's views on Trump and post-2016 America are perfectly reasonable and so are his views on the hapless Democrats who have resorted to the same tactics they decry and have thus been 'Trumped'. And remember: this is all coming from someone whose most famous novel was so prescient in predicting Trump and even had him as one of its (unlikable) characters. 

The book is full of Ellis's thoughts on the aesthetics of movies, his fickle friendships and his great heroes, his struggles and successes as a writer and a journalist (his first New Yorker assignment is a particularly good story) as well as his rumination on identity politics and the perils of having it all in one click. He is not scathing or dismissive of younger generation (his boyfriend happens to be a millennial), but he is concerned about so many of them turning into a faceless army of snowflake warriors who have a very skewed idea of justice and who do not understand the key principle underlying the freedom of speech: "Laugh at everything or you will end up laughing at nothing".

Скетчи про Минск. Уличные музыканты.

В Минске всегда были уличные музыканты. Так, я помню длинноволосого молодого человека, что сидел на скамейке недалеко от университета и играл "Exit Music (For a Film)". Играл с таким искренним надрывом, что хотелось переслушать тот проклятый альбом и наконец его полюбить. Еще я помню мужчину с растрепанными седыми волосами, который стоял на ступеньках подземного перехода и играл ветреные дилановские мелодии на своих десяти губных гармошках (однажды я купил у него одну из них). Я часто думаю о том, где теперь эти двое, и смогли бы они найти себя на улицах другого Минска. Мне кажется, нет.

Потому что Минск и правда другой. Том Вулф назвал 70-е годы прошлого века я-десятилетием, но если это так, то 70-е годы наступили здесь только теперь. И вот на каждом углу стоит человек со скрипкой, саксофоном или гитарой. Я никогда не видел в Минске такого количества уличных музыкантов. Порой это здорово, порой они оживляют город в самых неожиданных местах, но порой создается ощущение, что любой человек, который идет перед тобой, может в один момент сбросить с себя пальто и начать играть на флейте. Так часто я ощущаю себя персонажем рассказа Уилла Селфа, где каждый человек в городе почему-то решает, что может написать роман.

При этом рядом происходит одна и та же комедия: перед музыкантом стоит человек и в безумном пьяном угаре танцует что-то необъяснимое. Это троллинг. Это плата за я-десятилетие. 

Так что я снова запомню двух из них. Безумного человека в спортивных штанах, со свистком, который уже целую вечность стоит рядом с выходом из метро и свистит бесконечную трель. (Правда, недавно он потерял свисток и теперь отбивает свой дьявольский ритм на бубне.) И еще я запомню того мужчину, что стоит в подземном переходе на улице Богдановича и играет на аккордеоне одну и ту же мелодию из дурацкого французского фильма. Эта мелодия никогда не меняется и, заканчивая очередной раунд, он начинает все сначала. Что за причина скрывается за потребностью стоять там изо дня в день и играть все это? 

Мне кажется, эти двое из другого десятилетия, они играют без какой бы то ни было причины, и потому вот их я и запомню.