gargoyle drumming

My login name to Moveable Type is "nedlog," and I can't believe that name has stuck to me, or that I stuck it to myself. I came up with it when I needed a handle for blogging on randomWalks. Why didn't I use my real name, Mike, the way Sudama used his, Sudama? I guess I felt that next to "Sudama" "Mike" would sound rather bland. Nedlog came from the brand name of a kind of juice that was for sale at the dining hall at Hampshire College when I visited Sudama there, when we were both freshmen in college.

I had a pleasurable day of waking up, meditating, diddling around on the laptop for far too long and with far too little to show for myself, lifting weights at the gym, going to Target to buy a floor lamp I'm not sure I like, going Christmas shopping for Catherine (she left for Arizona before Xmas and gets back New Year's Day, and was kind enough not to appear to care that I didn't have most of her presents for her when she left), eating a Chipotle burrito (there's a new one open near my house, alleluia, but I'd rather live closer to El Charrito Caminante), then watching Fishing with John.

Have you seen this show? I think I read about it in Spin years ago, when I first read Spin and before I stopped for many years, and somehow it stuck in my memory all that time. So I got it from Netflix. The premise is that John Lurie, an actor, artist and musician that I first saw in Jim Jarmusch films, goes fishing in various locales in the company of Jarmusch, Willem Dafoe, Tom Waits, Matt Dillon and Dennis Hopper. Lurie has said that it was inspired by the more straightforward fishing shows you see on sports networks, but it has little in common with those.

I was anticipating something unusual, but I wasn't expecting the combination of cinematography that seems to feast on serendipity with the dialed-back, low-key surrealism of the scripting. For example, the show's narrator has the gravitas and grainy voice of a genuine nature-show voiceover guy, but is given to saying things such as "I'd love a bite of your sandwich" or "I think this is John's best show." At times, footage of birds on the wing or crocodiles slithering into rivers, rendered in dramatic slow-motion, inexplicably runs in reverse as well. In the episode with Dillon, Lurie and his compadre consult a reticent village sage for advice about a fish dance, which they then perform on the banks of a river with loony abandon (also rendered in slo-mo, incidentally).

Each episode is less than half an hour, a tasty nugget of cryptic absurdity. Eat all six! Now I'm a tasty nugget as well. Anyway, I saved the Dennis Hopper episodes for tomorrow.

The plan tomorrow: arise early enough to throw on my Saturday best and get to the Falls Church Farmers' Market to buy some Hondo Coffee. In Catherine's absence, I've reverted to drinking green tea in the mornings, but as I sipped bi luo chun today I thought, this is good, but it's not stacking up to a cup of rich black coffee. Coffee. There's nothing like it on earth. It is not just a drink but an experience, don't you agree? If this is not true, then why do we meet over coffee, read the paper with coffee, eat ice cream or cake with coffee, listen to folk music or poetry slams with coffee? We do so many important things with coffee nearby. Thus, it is a collective watering hole for our culture, but splintered into an infinite number of smaller holes whose surfaces wobble and shimmer in our mugs and cups made of paper and Styrofoam.

I must have freshly roasted coffee. From oily, shiny beans. And a French press. It shall be so. G'night.

Posted by nedlog at December 29, 2007 12:42 AM | TrackBack