It's officially official: I've been laid off (although I volunteered to be (long story)). Friday 20 February is my last day, and then preparations for my long-awaited reverse roadtrip kick into high gear (yeah, it's only been about 18 months, but that's a long time for me to live anywhere, let alone on the wrong coast).
It's weird to think that this was the start to my inaugural weekend: Cocktails at Halo, complete with red, white, and blue ambient lighting. Good friends, good drinks, followed by good food, followed by math jokes on chalkboards (integral of e to the power of x, anyone?)...
Sadly, the fun-filled weekend was destined to be short lived.
Actually, what I found while taking out trash pre-night-out-on-the-town should have clued me in to what was to eventually follow:
Yeah... Not a pretty picture by any stretch of the imagination. I only hope the little guy had expired before the gate closed (if that doesn't make sense, don't ask... trust me, you'll be better off).
At any rate, my fun night out on the town was on the happier side of a punctuating phone call I'd rather not go in to at the moment. Suffice it to say, that call led to a last-minute flight reservation, a 5 a.m. trek to the Dupont Circle Metro station...
...some quality reading time spent at a practically deserted gate...
...a window seat...
...which was awesome. The screaming baby sitting directly behind me? Not so much...
...some fantastic astronautically inspired artwork throughout SFO...
...complete with some bitching robots (I'm a sucker for robots (they're the new pirates, you know))...
...and that's all I really feel like getting in to at the moment. Maybe I'll talk about it more later on. Then again, maybe I won't.
If you have the chance to check out Eric Lewis, I strongly suggest that you do.
DCist tipped me off to the fact that he was playing at HR-57, so I talked to my fellow California transplant Sean, and we decided to check it out.
First things first, the joint takes its name from House Resolution 57, passed in 1987, which established jazz as a valuable American artform. Legislation worth remembering, who knew?
Second: Jazz Club + BYOB = Too Hip For Words.
And completing the trifecta, it's all about the atmosphere. Exposed brick, cozy candlelit tables tucked away in darkened corners, it's got a speakeasy vibe that's unlike any venue I've ever seen. Love it.
As if that weren't enough to make a night of it, the music... totally mind-blowing. The first set started with an improvisational interpretation of "Clocks" by Coldplay—a song I've never liked, and yet, by some auditory miracle, suddenly I found myself falling in love.
And that was just the beginning.
From there, things got progressively more intense, from the violinist soloing so furiously he snapped the catgut of his bow to Lewis banging out notes on the piano's strings. You couldn't ask for a more electric, high-energy performance. I easily call it one of my favorite East Coast moments.
Definitely worth more than the price of admission.
Nor is it what Lichtenstein means to me. But that's neither here nor there.
It's strange how we can carry around mental postcards of people we've never known, stranger still how it's impossible to envision them in any other scene. Or fashion. Or skin.
I'm physically incapable of picturing William S. Burroughs as anything other than a withered old raisin of a brilliant junkie who shot his woman dead. Just can't buy the young man pre-William Tell version. Allen Ginsberg exists only as words on a page and a disembodied voice as Jack Kerouac howls drunkenly in the background.
Samuel Beckett is a portrait hung above my favorite table in a pseudo-Irish pub in Berkeley. And the sound of isolating laughter in a darkened London theatre off Picadilly Circus.
David Foster Wallace is his black & white author's photo at the back of Infinite Jest... which I guess is better than the memory of a man whose light was extinguished at the end of a rope.
And Sylvia Plath? Not the broken woman with her head in the oven, not to me. Just quick, clean, cold:
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