Re: "It's like I'm being paid to become Cliff Clavin, and fill my mind with useless but fascinating trivia."
This is funny Barry! As I recall, Bob was the first one to point this specific analogy out to you. Ha. Have a selfless weekend. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Dyi1qRyXfE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Dyi1qRyXfE ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : Oh woe. I was wrong about the First Noble Truth and life really *is* suffering. Not. I plan to spend much of my Day Off today lounging in canal-side cafes such as this one, officially Fucking Off. It's not that I mind work. It's actually pretty fascinating work, rendering scientific research into English, so I get to learn a lot of fascinating shit. It's like I'm being paid to become Cliff Clavin, and fill my mind with useless but fascinating trivia. But I've gotten pretty fast at it, so I often (like this week) manage to churn out my weekly quota of articles in four days, and wind up being able to take the whole weekend off. Now that the weather is better, this is officially a Good Thing. Relatively speaking, of course. For me it's a Good Thing because I'll get to sit in more cafes like this one and write more Friday Turq Raps. For others, it may not be such a Good Thing because they have to click past more Friday Turq Raps. Now, what to rap about? How about this cafe? It's on one of the main canals of Leiden, near the town hall and where the open market happens Wednesdays and Saturdays. Today it's less crowded, of course, and I'm sitting at an outside table at a place called Vooraf en Toe. Don't ask me what it means...probably "Kick me in the af with your toe" in Dutch...but it's the Artists' Cafe here in Leiden. It's where most of the producing artists and musicians who live here hang out. As you might imagine, it's one of my favorite hangoouts. It's the Leiden counterpart of Downtown Subscription in Santa Fe, where I whiled away many a happy hour. Artists are a cool group to hang with. At least in Santa Fe and here in Leiden. If they've decided to live in either place rather than New York or London or Paris, they're usually Cool Artists, meaning that they've gotten past most of the ego games that proliferate in the art world. Paris was bloody insufferable in terms of ego. You felt like you had to take a shower after returning from an art opening. But here...different story, and different crowd. I've been to openings of some of the artists sitting around me, and some of their work is quite good. Some of it. But all of the artists I've met themselves, whatever I may think of their work, have been pretty cool froods. Even the ones who are internationally famous and thus might feel entitled to push out a lot of ego manage to avoid doing so. Go figure. I tend to go here when I've had my fill of FFL. :-) There is a certain joy -- at least for me -- in finding a group of sympatico people who don't feel the need to push out their egos. That was what made Santa Fe so special. And in Sauve, in the south of France. You'd meet megafamous people there, and if you didn't know beforehand that they were famous, nothing they'd ever say or do would lead you to suspect that they were. I had a female drinking and conversation buddy in my fave bar in Santa Fe for three years before I ever learned that she was an heiress and an artist worth zillions of dollars. And even then, someone else had to tell me. It had just never come up in conversation, so it had never come up. Artists and performers who are like that when you meet them are rare, but that makes them even more refreshing when you run into them. I hear Bonnie Raitt is like that. I know that Bruce Cockburn is like that, although he becomes shy when he figures out you've recognized him. Gene Hackman was like that in Santa Fe, and so was Robert Redford when I ran into him once by accident, which one might expect less. Compare and contrast to other celebs, like Val Kilmer. Val lived in Santa Fe, too, and the best contrast I can provide to the other named celebs is to tell a story. I was having a drink at the bar of a favorite hangout and I noticed the waitresses "drawing straws" from a cocktail glass, obviously to settle a matter of dispute. I asked them what was up. One of them said, "Oh, we've just heard that Val is coming in tonight for dinner." I said, "Oh, so you're drawing straws to see who gets to wait on him?" She replied, "No, we're drawing straws to see who HAS to wait on him." 'Nuff said about Val, but he really does provide the perfect contrast to those who *don't* push out their egos. Anyway, this has nothing to do with Fairfield Life, where as we know no one has an ego any more, after their respective decades of spiritual practice. And certainly no one pushes out an image of themselves that they are clearly attached to. So I guess you can file this particular Friday Turq Rap in the box labeled, "Non-Sequitur" and "Irrelevant." My bad. I'll try to do better in subsequent raps this weekend.
