Later, in the Polo Lounge again: Surprising how otherwise-charged a piece of real estate, familiar to those of us who work in TV and film and from the occasional TV appearance of its own, can reveal itself to be charmingly mundane when you’ve been here for just long enough to get over the buzz of the bizz.
The Guitar Guy is reprising / covering various Chris Cross / Elton John goodies, fronting on guitar while the machinery fills in the background and his previously-laid-in vocals. The place is full of the mundane sound of people chatting. Once the rhythm was broken while some diner was sung Happy Birthday to (and if I patched in Peter’s name, over here in my quiet corner, no one noticed at all). Outside on the patio, the occasional lightning of someone’s flash photography lights up the night and freezes the palm fronds in place for tenths of a second at a time.
There’s a big old olive tree outside, with little white lights dangling all over it, an unusual crop. From the girth of the trunk, it’s at least sixty or eighty years old, a noble thing in this part of the world, where so many trees have died young — with the occasional exception: I think of the great oak which should have been chief among those that gave Encino its name (from los Encinos, the Oaks) — a huge-trunked creature that still stands a little way off Ventura Boulevard, a thousand years old and more, they say.
Whenever I see that tree, I think of Eddison’s line about trees “that had seen Vikings in Copeland in their seedling-time” — this tree would have been one of those trees’ contemporaries. It looks out at shopping centers and the never-ending rush of traffic on Ventura, and all those dangly branches sway slightly in the wind…
I love this place. All the more because it’s unstable.
A long lunch today with an old friend. Strange things are happening in her life, as in mine. By way of rounding the evening out, here I sit over in a corner of the Lounge, blogging gently, eating sweet toasted walnuts and drinking a Tokaj from the Friulan part of Italy which we visited last year, around this time. The thought makes me think of Max and Lucia, who we meant to take to dinner, and who weaseled out of it and insisted they had to pay because we hadn’t faxed them our intent to pay — the idea being that an e-mail, under Italian law, isn’t binding as a contract: binding contracts have to be on paper. We’ll get them for that yet, the wicked creatures.
Wow, they just turned the lights way down in here. “Atmosphere!” It may be a while until my eyes get used enough to the dark to blog any further.
