Saw my friend Alyse Emdur’s film “Something Small” at the Little Tokyo Marketplace on Sunday; it was fun to watch people suddenly start watching the film on the monitors, confusing the shoppers in the market who had no idea there was a film premiere transpiring. Alyse’s work is beautiful, strange, innocent, and sophisticated at the same time. She has a wonderful sense of timing in her editing, and she appears as an actress in the film (as well as her sister Remi). My old friend Peter Cerrato saw my tweet about going to see the film, and he was there, and he and I, Alyse, and a bunch of Alyse’s friends went out to eat afterwards at a hip new bratwurst restaurant called Wurstküche; yes, hip bratwurst, if you can believe it; they have tons of vegetarian and non-red-meat options, not to mention a healthy variety of both alcoholic and non-alchoholic beverages (including lots of exotic sodas, sasparillas, and the like, which I really appreciated.) It’s a very West Coast restaurant; hip, traditional, healthy, and indulgent all at the same time… hard to find that sort of combination on the East Coast, where restaurants tend to be either inexpensive and a bit greasy or expensive and fancy but also pretentious and somewhat unfulfilling.
As I dozed on the plane coming back to New York, I woke suddenly and decided to look at the GPS channel; we were passing by Denver. I peered out the window and saw dim city lights in the distance. It was pitch black so I couldn’t see the mountains directly but I could see them as dark masses surrounding the lights below. Denver is the city where my parents first met, where my mother grew up, in the center of the country and high above it, my aunt and cousins are there still, and other people I love and think about. I imagined them nestled in amongst the lights far below, strangely close, for a little while. I wrote someone down there a note, flying above them in the night, and set it to send when we landed.
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