Cocktail Hour
Ab of Steel
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 7 comments
Poppy taught us to love a snack. One of his favorites was Saltine crackers with peanut butter and horseradish, slice of sweet bread-and-butter pickle optional, about twelve crackers at a time, stacked precariously six-by-six on your palm on the way to the TV room. Or a whole celery stalk salted hard and filled with peanut butter, or cottage cheese, or anything, really, to add some fat to the vegetable. Or the Dagwood sandwich–as much of anything and everything as you could stack between two slices of bread. You never ate a little dainty triangle of watermelon, but cut it in quarters or eighths, and ate it with your face. Toasty-pies required a toasty-pie maker, two long steel handles ending in like scallop shells. You buttered two pieces of white bread, pressed the bread into the mold, filled the resulting depression with jelly then clamped it shut and lay it over a burner on the stove long enough to brown both sides and seal the bread slices together, wow. Continue reading →
The Adventures of Mr. Id–Part 1
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I’m heading back to the Gulf of Mexico again for a week and this time likely won’t be blogging. While I’m gone I’ve decided to serialize the first section of The Adventures of Mr. Id, which is the opening of a novel I wrote three summers ago. It may be the first novel to be based on a Youtube video, since I got the idea while filming my own little film, Transformation. I have always been obsessed with transformations, loving werewolves and Altered States and having re-read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde not long before deciding to try my own hand at the form with this project.
1. GROWL
He had been a nervous child and a nervous teenager, and had grown, quite naturally, into a nervous man. But what struck Charles Kaiser now, after all those jittery years, was the sudden cessation of nervousness. The absence of familiar fear, rather than any positive emotion, was what splashed over him, like cold water driving out thought. The simile wasn’t a stretch: at that very moment he was splashing actual cold water onto his face, perhaps a little too vigorously, from the sink in the oak-paneled men’s room of the Harvard Faculty Club. He knew that he must look a little silly, splashing away like a child, as if he were kneeling down by a creek and not merely hunching over a wash basin, but the water felt good and there was no one else around.
A Night at the Opera
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Chaliapin as Godunov, 1913
This past Friday night I showered and shaved and dressed and rushed out of my elderly father-in-law’s apartment, Upper West Side of Manhattan, and hoofed it down to Lincoln Center, early curtain at the Metropolitan Opera. I got in the line for last-minute tickets and asked for the best seat available, knowing people often donate back their season seats at the last minute, also knowing it was a new production in its second performance, and sold out. But: Row J, orchestra center! A mere $210.00. Ticket in hand I rushed back uptown to get a slice of pizza (like four blocks away), wolfed it, and ran back, loving the new fountain in the refurbished Lincoln Center plaza, also the familiar and enormous Chagall hangings in the great windows of the opera house. Inside, I always love climbing the steps with all those dressed-up people (I’m always the one in blue jeans, or worse: one time I forgot the Leatherman on my belt of my shorts, got pulled aside–I showed Continue reading →
The Ballad of Ed and Sally (All Dogs by Hadley Gessner)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
Corn Maze
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
Good, Clean Fun
Saturday night [October 9, 2010] I was watching college football late, that great back-and-forth fourth quarter between USC and Stanford, two teams I don’t care much about, but a great game (I always root for the underdog when I’ve got no other particular loyalty, so USC, and they lost in the last seconds…). Around 11:00 or 11:30, I heard an engine rumbling outside on our rural road here in rural Maine. Nothing unusual in that, particularly, and the football game was exciting, so. Our house is close to the road in the old style—short driveway means short shoveling—and people are always stopping for one reason or another, maybe a pee on the little-travelled road, maybe a peek at the neighbor’s bison, maybe a make-out break, maybe anything. Saturday night and all that, teens cruising, Continue reading →
Attack of the Cashier
categories: Cocktail Hour
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A few months ago a flight attendant named Steven Slater made us all happy by grabbing a beer, giving folks the finger, and sliding off the plane through the emergency exit. If the end of my bookstore clerk wasn’t quite as dramatic, it was pretty close. Bill has written in this space about all the different jobs he has taken to support his writing/music life. For the story of one of my jobs, and its glorious end, click here: http://vimeo.com/15609976
(By the way, this was taped last month, on September 11th, for The Monti at the Carrboro Arts Center. Thanks to host and mastermind behind The Monti, Jeff Polish.)
Home and Cocktails
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 10 comments
We have lived in our new house for about a month and half. I have never owned a house before, but I spent my whole adult life dreaming of having a place to call home. It is strange that that house turns out to be in North Carolina, but less strange that it turns out to be on a salt marsh. Not only is the marsh a miraculous ecosystem where I can now daily hear the strange applause of clapper rails, but it connects me by water to the many other coastal places I have come to love over the years. I don’t mean this mystically, but practically. If one day I am feeling particularly ambitious, I can hop in my kayak and paddle down Hewlett’s Creek out to the Intracoastal Waterway and to the Atlantic beyond, and then, after banging a left, can paddle north back to New England until I reach the Kennebec River. There I can take another left, and another on the Sandy River and then a final left on Temple Stream, which I can follow until I hit Bill’s house up on the right.
Checking in With You, Gentle Dave
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Dave and Bill
Dave, it’s been an awesome six months, exhilarating, too, as we’ve seen that someone actually is out there, and proved that we have the stamina to keep the posts coming while also writing books and monitoring our massive Twitter following, and meanwhile moving into new houses (you), and attending demolition derbies (me), flying on the Cousteau team helicopter to the site of the BP oil platform explosion (you), and fishing with grizzly bears in Alaska (me). And in fact, it’s been a year or more since your brainstorm–took a while to get the site up and running, of course–a brainstorm that stemmed from a joke about our having a radio show based on NPR’s “Car Talk,” this one called “Book Talk.” Don’t read like my brutha! Don’t read like my brutha! I’ve really enjoyed Continue reading →
Checking in With you, Dear Reader
categories: Cocktail Hour
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We are coming right up on the six month birthday of Bill and Dave’s (as good a reason to have a drink as any) and I thought it would be a good time to check in with you, dear reader. Sometimes it’s a little lonely out here in the blogosphere. There are days when it feels like the cocktail hour is raging and it’s–as Homer Simpson once said–“the wittiest jig of the season.” On other days I’m alone with my beer in the corner.
You may have noticed that while Bill has taken up the slack, my posts have slowed down a bit of late (after the Gulf mania), and there’s a reason for that. One result of this blog was my trip to the Gulf and one result of that trip was selling a book called The Tarball Chronicles. In an effort to get that book together in record speed, I have been in crazy, Continue reading →
Odd Jobs #1: The Things A Writer Must Do (…an occasional series)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Cary Memorial Library
One of the pleasures of being a writer in Maine is that you get invited to read at Libraries in small towns and very small towns up and down and across the state. Reading in Presque Isle some years ago made me realize for the first time that you can drive six hours from Farmington (which has, by the way, a gorgeous, diminutive Carnegie library, solid stone) and still be in Maine. Quebec City is closer. Boston. Many of the smallest libraries are open but a couple of hours a week—enough time on a Sunday morning for the kids and the big readers to get their stack of books for the week, then shut the door again, occasionally even lock it. Bigger small towns have surprisingly active libraries, often open six or seven days a week, evenings too, longer summer hours, serious collections gathered by 150 or 200 years of head librarians, sometimes funded by old-line endowments, as often funded Continue reading →
