Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

vielleicht

There’s been a bunch of miscellanea building up on the blogging back boiler, but it’s getting harder and harder to blog these days. Recently, we rented In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-Wai. Every since seeing Wong’s Chungking Express, I’ve been a fan. The sixties decor seemed especially alien in the Hong Kong apartments and offices, and Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are happy together. It’s one of the western pop songs that Wong uses that’s stuck with me: Nat King Cole singing Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps in Spanish (Quizas, Quizas, Quizas). This song came back to haunt me late on Saturday night. I’d just joined a couple of friend in the Mission district of San Francisco, first to hear Richard Friedman’s sound design for Threads at the ODC Theater. It was a fantastic show. Before it, we’d eaten at a Vietnamese restaurant, Thanh Tam II, and afterwards we had ice cream at Mitchell’s. Hmm. But the song: turns out that the local PBS channel is showing a British sitcom on late on Saturday nights. And the theme music for Coupling is Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps. The show is a mix of Seinfeld, Friends, and Frasier. I watched two episodes from the first season. I had not heard of it, and I had missed (thankfully) the American remake which lasted (mercifully) four episodes. On Friday, at work, Erling and Lynne called me up from Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse in NYC. They and everybody else in the place were having a bunch of fun. The Simpsons has just entered its 16th season, and Thomas Pynchon dropped by again to make some bad puns with two of his book titles.