We watched it at a mutual friend’s (Pedro) pad, who is paying nearly half of what I am and yet has a beautiful art deco apartment, completely spotless with wood floors, ceilings, and a great view over Alfama. As we watched the movie I sat next to the window so I could occasionally glance at the half moon shining over the old Moorish labyrinth as the smell of smoked ribs and grilled sardines wafted in with the sounds of some beautiful Fadista voice singing of the torturous melancholic longing of a husband seafarer lost somewhere in ultramarine conquests. The word for this is saudade, and it is a distinctly tragic Portuguese sentiment, perhaps why so many people here still dress in so much black (I mean besides the fact that black is the new black (as it always was and always shall be.))
Belarmino was a boxer (that looked a lot like Jack Kerouac) who shoulda been a contender. He went from a shoeshine boy to an amateur pugilist to a Portuguese champ in short work and never saw much of the money he won because he had a third grade education and all of his managers grifted him. He ended up touching up pictures for a living when he was too old to box. In all the interviews he was amazingly profound while talking in the most brutish street Portugese and whistling at literally every woman who passed by. The film has the prettiest camera shots of the neighborhoods I haunt filmed back in the 60s, and the smokey jazz club shots have a real “Lamotta’s” feel to it. I swear I found the secret of the Scorsese sphinx.
Last night I had a dream that I was walking toward a restaurant where Bobby & Steve’s should be on Washington Ave. for my birthday with my friends Ehsan and Ryan. Natasha was conspicuously absent since, although I had known it was her birthday, I hadn’t written her due to the fact that, instead of just saying “hey, happy birthday” I wanted to compose a well-crafted tribute to all of her brilliant/neurotic qualities. So I put it off, and then off some more, then my internet went beserker, then it was ridiculously late and I found I couldn’t put into words what I had to say anyway. So I sent an apologetic happy belated birthday email to her and was haunted with different dreams that same night. The only one I remember was this one where Ehsan, Ryan, and I walk by two guys that I immediately recognize as important restaurant figures in the Minneapolis scene: Tim McKee, and Steven Brown (which I’m sure never hang out). We talked for a bit and then, as we proceeded, we ran into two other famous people who Ryan immediately identified as Keith Haring (who is dead) and Woody Harrelson. I told Ryan that he was correct that they were famous, but he had wrongly identified them. The man he thought was Keith Haring I said was Keith Harrington (I don’t know who that is) and the guy he thought was Woody Harrelson was actually Luke Wilson. I realized after I woke up that the first guy was Mike Ditka, and the other guy was Matthew McConaughey. So when I said this to Ryan I immediately woke up as if my subconscious was so revolted by my lack of knowledge of pop cultural references that it was like “Fuck it, if you don’t even know the names of these people how am I supposed to teach you the lesson about the distractions of the ego and the city and the importance of friends”…or whatever problem it was trying to resolve. And so I went back to sleep and I think for the rest of the night my subconscious sort of treated me in a real infantile manner because all I could remember when I awoke were images of like Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald, etc. So anyway…sorry Natasha. I am paying the price now for my carelessness, day and night.
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