What I Really LikeÖ (Fashion Only Forum 2/18/00)

I met a model at Cafe Bassam tonight to talk about working together. We were pretty much done talking, but the coffee (and chai) weren't quite gone yet, so I kept nervously chatting away, as I'm prone to do when the silence begs for noise. She was looking more nervous too, which makes some sense as this relatively big middle-aged stranger across the table kept jabbering away well after any useful words were done. But the coffee was soon gone, and we went our ways planning to shoot, perhaps sometime next week.

I walked the three and a half blocks to where the car was parked, carrying the portfolio that she'd looked at and made polite comments about, and looked up at the buildings like a tourist. There's a little mist coming down tonight. We call that "inclement weather" here. And it's cool outside.

Driving the car away I forgot to turn on the lights, as the other lights in the city seemed to be enough. Caught it before the constabulary did though, and found my way out of downtown, and over toward the harbor to get on the road back to the studio. About where you turn onto Harbor Drive there's a small parking lot surrounded by Eucalyptus trees, with the leaves lit from below by the standing lights, and it makes a vague tunnel farther into the night. The pavement of the lot was wet, adding another texture to the picture through my windshield.

As I turned left onto Harbor and drove up over the railroad bridge I looked out onto the train cars parked in the lot and saw the polished tops of the tracks with the security lights edging them extending on to the docks.

The cars themselves were wet and twinkling through the bit of fog in the yard and I rolled down the window to feel the air and listen. The trolley was rolling on the other side of the road, and the windows were filled with people going back south from downtown, or outlying ends of the line. I stopped at the crossing, of course, and came back to the studio, checked the emails and went out to eat.

Chueys, three blocks away, is a Mexican restaurant with a pretty good reputation for food, and some cute waitresses, so I dropped in there, with an Octavio Paz anthology (mentioned earlier in one of the pretentious posts on language) and was waited on by a pretty girl who asked what I thought of Paz. She asked in Spanish, and I don't speak Spanish, so I told her it was in English, and not his poetry but essays on language and convergence of art, blah, blah, blah...

But even knowing I was some kind of fool, she let me eat there anyway, listening to the rock and roll coming from the bar end, and the whooping of the party types down there, and there was Bohemia and enchiladas, and carrots and chips, and I read, once in awhile looking up to watch the waitress walk by.

As everything ends, the food was gone, the waitress paid, and I left looking out at the old cannery across the street that has the aquatic life mural in bright Mexican colors lit by yellow street lights and the brighter xenons from the trolley station, and thought to myself, "there's a post in this somewhere."

No reason to go to bed early tonight. I'm taking tomorrow off to go up to LA, originally to shoot in a hotel room then to have dinner with Pilot and company, but now that the shoot's canceled, it's a day I can sleep in. No hurry to do anything tonight. So this is the post about feeling the city night in a very low-key sort of way.

I like night in the city. Maybe that's one of the reasons my best work is done at night. It feels right to me. I'm comfortable at night.

What do you really like? Where or how would you work if you had your preferences? Does some place or time or situation get to your core?

-Don