Cocktail Hour
Oscar Degrees of Separation
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Siedah Sings To Hadley
As far back as the cave humans no doubt took satisfaction in what Samuel Johnson called “imagined connections to celebrity.” (“By the way, I know the chief’s brother.”) I am not above this guilty pleasure myself and can tell a “I did cocaine with Tim Robbins at the Howard the Duck cast party and talked about our future writing lives while the two midgets who wore the duck suits ran around and before hitting on Lea Thompson and yelling at her when she turned her nose up on me” story with the best of them. (True story by the way–for another post.)
And so now, at Oscar time, I will not focus on dull categories like “Best Picture,” but on the much more interesting “People We Want to Win Because They Have a Connection to Dave.”
Obviously Clooney and I go way back and have both faced the burden of being dashing 50 year olds, but George has gotten enough press this week.
Let’s instead start–and why not–with Siedah Garret, who is up for Best Song for “Real in Rio” in the film Rio. Here are some Bill and Dave reasons we want Siedah to win:
Getting Outside Saturday: Some Recent Journal Pages…A Mystery Solved
categories: Cocktail Hour
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More….
Trouble in Happy Valley: Penn State, Joe Paterno, and the Art of Fracking
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I spoke at Penn State on Monday. My hosts couldn’t have been more generous and engaging, but my thoughts weren’t always peaceful ones. First, there was all the fracking going on up north in central PA, which seemed to call for a cartoon. Here it is…..I call it….
THE FUTURE OF GROUNDWATER
What follows are some random observations (and pictures of me with Paterno’s statue….) Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Beginnings
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Today’s guest post is by Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory (Stories). He’s at work on The Sexual Lives of Missionaries (a novel). And he’s an all-around good guy. Like Bill, he works all night.
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Beginnings
I. Bad Advice
At Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, when someone offers “bad advice,” the advice that follows is usually pretty good advice. The phrase “bad advice” is armor, because you know how it goes. First, you offer good and useful advice, and then somebody gives you the one example of why the greatest story anyone has ever read would be a terrible story if the writer followed your good and useful advice. And then somebody else puts on a black beret and lights a cigarette and talks about how all true art is boundary-breaking, and all true artists would never accede to the tyranny of conformity. Then the open mic night begins, and somebody starts beating the bongos, and somebody else yells abstractions into a microphone and uses the word “poetry” a lot. Three friends in the front row say, “This performance really flows,” and the four drunk guys at the bar watch the basketball game, which is, let’s face it, the better of the two shows. Continue reading →
Rare Mystery Bird Identified
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Bohemian Waxwings: Easy I.D., But a Rarer Bird Awaits
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This morning on my daily rounds a flock of about two dozen Bohemian Waxwings followed me for more than a mile, flying in various factions from tree to tree, for a while stopping to sip at a break in the ice, Temple Stream. The sky was very, very blue. The birds are almost blue, but gray, with beautiful yellow tail tips and yellow in their wings (the sealing wax of their name, I guess). Baila the dog took a drink in the freshly exposed current, and by all signs you’d guess the date was March 20, not February 20. We walked on the ice, like breaking glass, all these layers and shelves and store windows, noisy. In the alders ahead I spotted a bird. I looked the other way so as to misdirect Baila, who obliged, tearing around the corner smashing chalices. And put the binooculars to my eyes. Small movements. A lot of black . Some yellow. Large, a little bigger than a Robin. I flipped through the indexes in my head–nothing. If I’d been in Montana, in summer, maybe a yellow-headed blackbird, but no, no. Casually I crept closer. And closer yet. The bird paid no mind, but kept up its subtle swinging movements. Closer. Still impossible to identify. Closer, Baila returning with a great crashing. Brave bird didn’t move. Closer. And if you click READ THE REST, you’ll see what it was. Amazing, rare, and clearly a wayward denizen of the upstream backyards. Continue reading →
Our Best American Essays: Shitdiggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Our Best American Essays
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Shitdiggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine
by Bill Roorbach
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“Hard work,” says Dicky Butts, and we haven’t even started yet.
. “Get wet today,” says Truman Lock. He pulls his greying beard, squints out over the bay. The blast of an offshore wind (strong enough to blow the boat and its no-lights trailer halfway into the oncoming lane as we made the drive over) is piling whitecaps, spraying their tops, Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: It’s All About Ice
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Rain, freeze, drain, sag, leaf.
We’ve had little snow, a certain amount of melting, cold nights. The stream is an ice-way, strange beauty abounding. Continue reading →
Dave’s Jungle Adventure! (Really!)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 8 comments
The next day--going back in
DUNGO IN THE JUNGLE
“Now the spoiler has come.” Robinson Jeffers
They were poaching deer and drinking dark rum out of a decapitated spring water bottle, Dungo and his friend. In the front seat were two shotguns–Dungo’s 12 gauge–he’d re-welded the barrel himself with bronze–and his friend Lilpo’s 16 gauge that looked like a Civil War musket. In the back of the truck lay two rusted machetes (pronounced with two syllables–ma-chet–in southern Belize.) Lilpo thought he saw a light far down the trail and so Dungo drove in further over the bumps and ruts, though he didn’t see it himself. But as they got closer, they were sure they made out two or three flashlights.
As it turned out we were the ones waving the flashlights. They stopped twenty yards from us and called out.
“Jake?” I yelled back. Jake was the name of the man who ran the research station we’d been scheduled to hike into that day. We’d been lost for several hours so I thought he might have come looking for us.
“No, it’s not Jake, man,” Dungo yelled back, already laughing. He pulled the truck up to where we stood.
I later teased my wife that she ran up to them as if they were Triple-A rumbling up the interstate: Continue reading →
Rock Lit 101 (or: Rock and Roll for English Majors)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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[Today’s guest blogger is Mac Bates, who writes about Rock ‘n’ roll on his website All Those Wasted Hours. He’s Bill’s brother in law, and lives in Snohomish, Washington. The portrait is by MacKenzie Brewer and Mac’s daughter (Bill’s niece), Isabella Bates. Mac is an English teacher, mountaineer, record collector, and author.]
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ROCK LIT 101
As a teenager besotted by rock and roll, except for the one night when I sneaked into my parent’s liquor cabinet and sipped my way through a little vermouth, a little sherry, a little drambuie (A note to the kids: Do not try that at home, trust me), I wanted more than anything for my parents to love the music, which ran counter to one of the basic tenets of rock: we love rock and roll Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Beware to Com-PARE!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Dismissal at my daughter’s elementary school is staggered by ten minutes, with the younger kids leaving earlier. Hadley leaves at 2:30, and on the rare days I get there early I sit out front and wait with the first graders. The other day one of them – we’ll call him Johnny, which I’m reasonably sure is not his real name – was in a bit of a state. While his classmates sat quietly on the front stoop, he marched up and down the sidewalk as if he were orating . “I’m so mad at Bill. I know he’s had three play dates with Dave, and now they’re having another play date this weekend.” Johnny was wonderfully unselfconscious about his jealous frenzy, the way only people under the age of six can be, and he didn’t mind at all that his entire social world could hear his griping. It was time for Ms. Rennie, the first grade teacher, to intervene.
Ms. Rennie was Hadley’s teacher last year and I Love her so much that I had to capitalize the word. She was born to teach young children: wonderfully kind and serene, with a soothing and melodic voice, but also with an almost mystical ability to impose order. I watched her stride across the sidewalk, place both hands on Johnny’s shoulders, kneel down and look him in the eye. Continue reading →
