Friday Night Massacre
After manhandling a Delux salad and seeing the subtle and touching film The Savages at The Harvard Exit, CC Rider and I dropped in on Bookstore Danny last Friday night. Apparently the best shift you can have at a hipster used bookstore on Broadway is the 6pm to 2am closing shift. Nothing much to do but chat people up, play your favorite music and get to know the intimate lives of the 18 cats that live there. We smuggled in cheap food and expensive beer, talked shit with the felines, bought a book every hour or so and listened to a cool record by Devendra Banhart. I found myself envying Dan's second job. For a literary buff like him, I reckon this is as much fun as it would be for me to moonlight as a deejay over at KEXP.
When we left at 2am, we encountered a drunken lot of hooligans who had just set fire to their obsolete Christmas Tree on the side of the street. I got caught up in the Bacchanalia and started chanting "Burn the Tree, Burn the Tree!" which is a joke only regular posters on Lookout Landing would have gotten. Moments later fire engines arrived, ironically creating far more disturbance to the sleeping denizens of that block than a burning tree ever could. CC was on the spot with her camera phone:
The perfect end to the evening!
Labels: Dear Diary
posted by John @ 6:03 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
In Spain they love to burn things. One night I was out quite late in the center of Madrid and we came across a group of all ages (with older women being especially prominent) setting fire to bits of furniture, produce crates and just about anything else they could get their hands on. There was much holding hands and moving around in a circle. The cops just watched. (As my friend Mairi would put it, "Yet another example of Spain's complete disregard for health and safety." Although to be fair, while the street was narrow, there was plenty of room for this mini bonfire. No traffic could get by, though, as it was in the middle of the road.)
I was later reminded that this was a traditional activity for whatever saint's day it was, although I'd managed to live there for years without ever witnessing it and had thus forgotten. Burn your old bits and clear out the bad spirits seemed to be the order of the day. So pagan and wonderful! Maybe I should do that instead of taking my stuff to the Goodwill.
Post a Comment
<< Home