...winter and 'A Moveable Feast', Hemingway...

"On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive."-Ernest Hemingway, "Shakespeare and Company," A Moveable Feast

"All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife - second class - and the hotel where Verlaine and died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked."

-Ernest Hemingway, "A Good Cafe on the Place St.-Michel," A Moveable Feast

...Magical Realism as Tableaux de "Amélie"...

"Carmelita Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves over Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano Jose had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards." (153) - Márquez, Gabriel García, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967

Amélie or Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain is a 2001 French film from director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and co-written by Guillaume Laurant available for stream on Netflix.  The world of Amélie Poulain is full of the richness and vibrancy of a young woman's whimsical nature.  A world of rich romance and color, painted by Jeunet and Laurant and brought moreso to life by a young Audrey Tautou.

It's grounding as an original screenplay is wholly apparent as the kinetic energy and overly detailed (OCD like) story begins.  It is visual and sensory.  It is, at its core, magical realism.

If you reminisce of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years or Love in the Time of Cholera, you will hear the same frenetic beat.  Or visit Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, "You must take care to light the matches one at a time. If a powerful emotion should ignite them all at once, they would produce a splendor so dazzling that it would illuminate far beyond what we can normally see; and then a brilliant tunnel would appear before our eyes, revealing the path we forgot the moment we were born, and summoning us to regain the divine origins we had lost. The soul ever longs to return to the place from which it came, leaving the body lifeless.”  Joanne Harris' Chocolat is of the same abandoning tone, "I could do with a bit more excess.  From now on I'm going to be immoderate - and volatile - I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry.  I shall be rampant."

The characteristic elements of magical realism can include the most fantastical elements, the seemingly supernatural, all upon the backdrop and the ground of the real-world.  It will sting you with disorienting detail (plenitude as it were).  It will key you in to its colors, its smells - the dizzy dancing of life if we lacked the walls to put order to chaos (how sad that world would be).  It is Latin American by design, it is Latin American in voice and temper.

Guillame Laurant, the co-writer had his own foundation set by a voracious love of reading as a child, "I read an enormous amount of books,” he says, “obsessively so – almost to an autistic degree, and for me, real life existed in books. I wanted to really live the life of novels; to see and do as much as I possibly could. I left school as early because for me, the idea of going through formal education didn’t make any sense when you could learn so much from experience."  The interview is available at Toot La France, Feb 2013.  It is shameful that it would lose to Gosford Park for the Academy Award...which is just another exemplary sadness of the awards and the points it misses.

Along with Jeunet, Laurant painted this wondrous world that seems ready to explode from the heart and mind of the young Amélie.  Her world is the Sacre Coeur de Montmartre, the Basilica in Montmartre, with its spectacular views of Paris beyond its steps.  The Gare de Paris-Est, the Belle Epoque train station once known as the "Strasbourg".  The statue adorning it a symbol of the mighty city that bears its name, sculpte by Philippe Joseph Henri Lemaire.

The little Au Marche de lat Butte, open grocer, facing the street with its best fruit forward.  The quaint lines of the Lamarck - Caulaincourt Paris Metro.  It's irregular shaped lines are pleasing to the eye.  And, of course, the Cafe des Deux Moulins, the centerpiece of much of the play, as the characters converge and move from this little cafe.  All of it a love letter to the Montmartre district, a center of dozens of painters who used its heights to look across Paris.

Laurant, a self taught writer, had an interesting aside about the role of writing and of cinema and taking the written word to the screen, "I think it's the same problem for literature. Someone who really liked a book, for its atmosphere, for lots of profound reasons to be almost always disappointed by his film adaptation. It's almost a rule. It's rare that we have some surprises in the other direction. A cartoon, a priori, it may pay more, but theoretically, because it has in common with a film to be a story told in pictures. At the same time, from the time when it becomes a movie image, even the frame that is made naturally in the BD has nothing to do with that of a film. One never finds what makes the nature of a comic related to color, design. It will never be quite the same. One has to take a bias by choice or aesthetic or narrative, which can be a successful result after but will anyway else." - translated from Les Nouveux Cinemaphiles, July 2005

Amélie is an example where the media fits the word as the word was designed for the media.

There is no better way to spend an evening with the one you love than with a bit of magical realism on the screen, small tips of limoncello and popcorn with lemon pepper.  I've tipped my hat of my wants tonight.

...Wallpaper Recent...1440x900...x3...Rain

Where, At #ces2015, I Take Many a Picture (05JAN15)

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...D...A Struggle...

"The struggle is imminent, no?"  The phlegm growl rattling in his exhalation, he sat in the corner of room 1639 opposite me.  Sat in the dark wood desk chair and I on the bed with my arm over my brow.  I stared at him through wisps of hair, trying to blot the little streams of afternoon sun spilling through the curtains.  He shouldn't smoke: I'll face a charge on checkout.

He had no eyes, or, I could not perceive them.  The light was a glowing smudge on the right side of his face, the details of his white hair, his light scars that crisscrossed his face were crisp.  They were tick marks of years of trouble.  Troubles that he impugned upon others in a trial of several decades.  He crossed his legs and laid his hand lightly on his knee.  A Southern genteel perhaps.  His voice had a singsong way about it.  That would be my prejudice.

"I've refined my art over many years, you see."  The use at the end, perhaps German?  The television was on, but the sound muted.  It was hard to stare at him.  This was all designed, this was dramatics.  The light in my face, the light on his, the light of the television.  He gave me something.  I felt like I had just run a marathon. Smells were harsh.  The smell of his cigarette mingled with the layers of smokes past.  The hotels on Fremont were of the old tradition.  There was smoke, unabashedly so.  He exhaled, the rattle almost soothing, it was long and rhythmic.  The cloud invader pushed toward me but dissipated.

I gagged.  He grinned.  I felt the weight in my body, a sickly heavy weight that grew with each breath.

"You see, you will die from arsenic.  A few cigarettes would not normally do this of course, the body can withstand a nominal amount of it.  In your case, I've provided an intravenous amount of lacetine.  Your body has grown grossly sensitive to arsenic.  It will be take only a few cigarettes to kill you."

I nodded.  What else could I do?  He was meaning to kill me.  That was that.

Days prior I had arrived at the D with a single duffel bag, twenty thousand dollars and a few slips of paper.  The slips of paper was worth much more than the cash.  I was to wait a day.  Assuredly, I was to wait so they would watch me.  Clovis Marshall would send a few men that I had never seen before.  I intentionally sequestered myself to the Fremont Experience.  The Experience was for those that had yet humiliated a grown man in women's lingerie.  Under the thousands of lights, rubes smiled uncomfortably at shift around the woefully desperate.  Scratch that off the bucket list.  I did not hide myself from them.  I knew I was obvious enough. Years of experience working with phantoms will do that.

I fed myself on a few shit restaurants.  I had to keep it light.  $2 hot dogs.  $2 shrimp cocktails.  I couldn't dig into the kitty.  20k in a bag is 20k, not a penny less.  There would be no problems from me.

I sat at the bar of the Four Queens, as I found them particularly helpful in providing drinks as I played .25 cent video poker.  I finally sensed a man taking an interest in me.  Those in my business have the instincts to detect another piece of shit, the soul sucking dregs that fed off of this life.

He flipped open a pack of matches and sucked on a stick.  He kept the matches out, the face to me.  The Golden Gate.  I imperceptibly nodded to him when he finally made eye contact.  Even then I could not see the color of his eye.  We would exchange bags then.

I went to the hotel, invigorated by the chance to leave this place.  I had nothing but business here right now.  I had an appointment with a guy from Madera to install some new rain gutters.  The current ones were like sieves.  It was all I could think about.

As I put away my dirty clothes in a launder bag, I miss old Vegas.  I do a few things when I come: hit up St Joan of Arc on South Casino (say a prayer for my parents), find a place with some Sinatra left in it (they are getting harder to come by) and I eat at Oscar's.  Spaghetti and steak.  Whiskey.  Water.  I've done this for the better part of seven years.  I listen to Sinatra 8-tracks the rest of the way home, a few bricks of heroin packed under the undercarriage of the Ford Fiesta.

There was a knock at the door and the white haired man stood there with a stone face, I only stared at his mouth.  It was flat, like an ocean's shore.  He moved into the room before I could even respond.  He locked the door behind us.  I kept my face to him, and we bantered for forty minutes when I turned my back.  It all made sense, but only after he hit me in the back of the skull with a sock full of dollar coin.  He hit me with one smooth stroke, a professional who did things right.

It all made sense and it all caught up with me.  Everything.

...Oh So Easy Literary New Year's Resolutions...

Keep it easy with two conditions, a light method and the advanced set.

1. Read a classic novel.  The Telegraph has an excellent selection of 100 novels to chose from.
Light) Simply buy a physical copy of one of these books, that's it.  You'll have it sitting there.  It'll stare at you.  Maybe you'll pick it up and turn it over in your hands.  Visitors to your place will think you're a real brainiac.  They'll dislike you.  You'll get used to it.  I have.
Advanced) Actually read it.  Read like you have thirty days to live.  Read it like you're going to win the Lotto if you finish.

2. Read an e-book from an up-and-comer.  Barnes and Noble has a refreshed list of up and coming authors.
Light) Newer authors put stuff up for free.  Depending on your e-book app, look up by 'Top Free'.  New authors are smart enough to throw stuff up to pique your interest.  Then, you haven't spent a dime you cheap bastard.
Advanced) Buy three e-books and read them instead of playing those mind-melting tap-tap games when you're at the dentist, or waiting for the bus.  Use your mind: you only get one.

3. Visit a place primarily for its literary draw.  USATravel has a list of sites.
Light) There's a literary place, I reckon, not more than 15 miles from anyone's house in the US at this point.  If there isn't, well, God bless you.  Make a bit of a treasure hunt.  There's probably a cafe, a bar, a natural site that inspired a story or a character in your own town.  Then, it's an excuse to get a beer or a slice of apple pie with a slice of cheese atop it.
Advanced) Go to a place that requires a passport.  You need to get one anyway.  Then get a beer or a slice of apple pie in a place that doesn't speak English.

4. Write one scene.  Need some direction, here you go.
Light) Write one paragraph.  That's it.  Bang it out: a scene about what you saw today, or the conversation you overheard at the WalMart.  One paragraph.  It's about as easy as you would suspect.  But, it'll get those juices flowing.  The literary kind, baby.
Advanced) Write a short story.  Follow something from inception to ending.  Even if it's as bad as one could write, you'll read it over and over again.

5. Give the gift of literacy.  FirstBook gives you the tools.
Light) Give $5 bucks and give up one of those stupid coffees.
Advanced) Give $5000 bucks because you're a rich, hot mess but care about kid's learning to love reading.

6. Talk with friends about books you've enjoyed.
Light) Say it between hot wings.  If they look at you and say, "Whah?"  Just say "Nothing", and go back to eating wings.
Advanced) Get into a fucking argument with your friends.  That's the best.  I love arguing a point even I don't care too much about it.  That's life.  That's amore.

7. Tell one kid in your life how important reading is.
Light) Tell a relative kid that reading will change their life.  Then offer them a smoke.  Just kidding.
Advanced) Tell a group of gang-bangers or anarchists hanging outside of the local Target to read a book.  Then run.  Run like hell.

Pablo Neruda