07-XI-2005.
Overyester that Les's roommate, Will, brought his car too, first he had only a motorbike. The car is a real american road cruiser, all angular, white and nickel plated here and there.
[In the] afternoon we swung by the library, made a better shot of that mobile sculpture which doubles as a sailboat. We found a hill of various manuals, even how to make coffins, for people and animals. They believe they can learn anything from them... Except they can't learn the meaning of words, for example international. They divide languages into english and international... Okay we can say german is international, it's spoken in four countries. But... in how many countries are hebrew or japaneses spoken? One each. Even worse, they stuffed latin in there, which is spoken in not even one country. English, on the other hand, is spoken in at least six countries as an official language, is not international.
The new[s] of the week, Nina's labor permit arrived. We drove to Richmond, to visit Go and Ricardo. Lena got spruced up into some white shirt with short sleeves, necktie and black add-ons to the sleeves, which are tied around the elbow and go to the wrist... something out of some manga or anime, whatever, fits her very nicely.
Yesterday on Manhattan it was quite foggy. I take a left some three corners before Chrystler's tower, and I took shots from there, and on the shot one can see only that there behind the clouds there's a sunlit mass... without details, can't even see whether it has any windows.
In Nyork, endless fuck with the label printers. The Dymo is sort of okay, I bought one (and got reimbursed for it) so I messed with it at home, that was easy, it's these Zebra printers, that's just enough to go bonkers. Works from one application, from the other one not, and from the third it works but gives no damn about paper size, prints everything shifted to one side... a chaos. Ten more whites in [my] beard.
I took my smoke breaks a bit more frequently. This gray little barrel with a periscope is a cinderella [pepeljuga, i.e. pepeljara - ashtray]... there's a vessel with coarse sand on the bottom, which they sift from time to time, to extract the cigarette buts, inserted through the hole on top. Paula scratched a couple of cigarettes from me, give what you give even if it's those roll-owns of yours. She lives across in Noo Joizy, forgot to buy a pack on her way, it's 3,75$ a pack, here it's seven, much even for her... Whoa, how did leaves reach the fifteenth floor terrace? There are no trees at that height. Must have been some nasty wind, and then in these street cannyons I wouldn't be surprised if it blew them all the way up the Building of the Imperial Country (aka empire state billding).
In the evening at Mohan's... as described a week later for oldwave (added a few things I remembered while translating this):
Heh, that's where I'm still picky. Net King Kol, Sinatra, Din Martin and the remainder of the hollywoodlian bunch still can't digest at all. Just like I don't Zvonko Bogdan, truth be told (specially since I heard the originals of some of "his" things). The Predrag Ivanović Kvintet, and the whole genre. Classic blues texts have been added to the list recently („if it begins with 'I woke up this morning' and is not by ten years after, it flies away from the disk monumentarily“). And there's more, not to bother with that.
And now the scene: thursday evening, I quickly move to a different hotel, closer to Broadway (because in the first hotel they abruptly raised the price from 139$ to 249 for the weekend, and Jüzek is a heavy cheapskate when he has to pay drinks or roof for any of us; other expenses are at will), because they suddenly extended my stay for another day and I already checked out. This other hotel is huge. The Hindu's old Ramada has a lobby of perhaps thirty squares, here it's sized as a checkin on a better airport. My reservation checked okay, got the room, doesn't face the avenue but rather the next building, some offices or what. I go out, fish for the most suitable subway station, to avoid changing lines for three hours, and arrive in Queens/Astoria at Mohan's. That was a whole different experience this time... because he had an incredible sound system, or rather a whole digital movie editing studio. A mac in the middle, monitor speakers around it, a 16 or 26 channel mix board in front of it, and the sliders on it were... ahem, digital. When he played the video he just edited, the sliders neatly followed the positions they were when it was edited... and if he stops the playback, you find them exactly where they were for the current frame. And the sound... I shat myself when he played the live recording of „Hotel California“, it sounded better than being right there. With this tech, he said, it's no problem to make a feature movie with just 10K$. Which he intends to do.
We walk out to a morroccan restaurant for some seafood and wine, and along the way he goes "...ki sas, ki sas, ki sas" (found it now, it's "quizas, quizas, quizas“). Haven't heard that one, maybe since I was a kid. Says, Sara Montiel. Sarita Montiel, I remember those Chilenos [actually Jorge alone] called her that and no other way.
When we returned from the dinner, it turned out that that song is his "little wing" project, he played some seven versions for me (the Net King Kol having lasted for about five seconds, guess he read my face).
In other news, I am currently collecting "Down by the river". That song is not even a project, it's a whole genre :).
Mentions: Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Jorge Delgado, Les Paul, Mohan Merchant, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), oldwave, Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), Yisaac Kwiatnik (Jüzek), in serbian
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