LORIGA, DICK, CHANDLER, CAFFEINE
“Oh god,” snorted the Madrid bookstore clerk, “...Ray Loriga.” I was in Loriga's hometown, purchasing his novel Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore. And the guy selling it made fun of me for buying it.
I haven't been able to locate a single Spanish person with good things to say about Loriga: he's vapid, he's a pijo, he likes shallow fame, he just writes about rich pijos having sex with each other, he's got a cheesy wrist tattoo and contorts himself adjusting the watch and cigarette to make sure it's visible in his publicity shots, he uses too much mousse which is to say you can't trust a man who spends both time and money to make himself look disheveled. Fair enough. But I wanted to find out for myself.
Justin had compared Tokyo to Philip Dick, which was good enough for me: on the basis of A Scanner Darkly (this is to say, willfully ignoring the fortysomething other novels he cranked out) Dick is one of the most exciting writers I've read in any genre in awhile, period. Hard to describe, but he´s good in a way that few are: the hilarity, the paranoia, the lucidity, the narrative charge & pacing, the souped-up druggy lucidity. The generosity. He believes in people, empathizes with undazzling frayed everyday people.
Why
judge a book by its cover when you can judge by the first
sentence? (Especially important to not judge Dick's books by
their covers, which tend to be embarrassing science fictiony/fantasy
if-someone-sees-you-reading this-in-public-they're gonna-think-you're
goofy- and/or-a Trekkie- style drawings.) A Scanner Darkly begins:
“Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.” The way
the rest of the opening treats poor aphid- and/or drug-afflicted
Jerry not with no trace of topdown caricaturization or pathos is a
refreshingly gentle, unassuming way for an author to relate to his
characters, even burn-outs and potential burn-outs. If you haven't yet, my
advice is to read Scanner before the movie debuts & Keanu
steamrolls in.
Aside: It's interesting to read Dick with Chandler in mind,
boozy Raymond Chandler for whom the morally ambiguous terrain of LA
is littered with abstract clues that eventually lead to a unified
truth--a solution; and pill-popping Philip Dick, whose LA is
hallucinatory, plural, personal in the way that one´s dreams or
nightmares or drug reveries are personal--dissolute.
alcoholic
L.A. vs addict L.A.
(This started as a post about Loriga but now it's about coffee. Namely espresso. Particularly, caffeine. In my bloodstream. I realized that the bpm count of my recorded output was dropping steadily, hence the new year's resolution : drink coffee. Later I'll try to wrest my own attention span back towards the book I just read.)
3 KINGS DAY
Today
is Día de los Reyes
in Spain, aka National Blackface Day, where the Biblical three wise
men (Santa surrogates to the secular)
leave presents in everybody's shoes, one king being Balthazar the
African. Even though plenty of Negroes populate Spain,
it's just as common to find a white Spaniard in black greasepaint
doing the honors. You'll see dozens of blackfaced Spaniards during this
time of year: on TV, in parades, waving at children in malls,
grinning over products in syndicated commercials, and so on.
I
know a lot of Africans here who wouldn't mind some extra cash around
Christmastime, but I guess getting white guys to charcoal their faces
is less hassle.
El roscón de Reyes is the typical holiday dessert—interesting only because in a land of exceptional pastries, it acts just like American fruitcake: leaden, dry, uneaten.
Conguitos, on the other hand, are a popular candy here any time of year. The tasty chocolate-covered peanuts aren't as black as white Balthazars, but they dance compatible shimmys.
