Sunday, March 22, 2009

Life story

"I remember when my mom got into a car accident when I was two," he tells me from across the table. I can barely hear him over the awful karaoke happening only feet away from us.

"You remember things from when you were two years old?"

He nods. And then he proceeds to offer me his life story as my next writing project. 

I know he's trying to help me. I'm a writer who does not write. I explain to him my theory about writers and crazy people. Crazy people listen to the voices in their heads and do what the voices tell them. Writers just write down what the voices say.

He laughs, but I'm not sure it's because of my wit or because of the karaoke.

I try to avoid writing about people I know. It's been a jynx in the past, and is one of those things that has great possibility for pissing people off. I've done it in the past to mixed reviews.

In fact, I wrote about him briefly years ago. It didn't turn out terribly, but it was half fiction when it was finally printed.

But to sit down with someone and have them lay out the pieces of their life to that you can try to make enough sense of them so as to commit them to the page? That's a huge responsibility. And I am honored that he would trust me enough to offer.

In the end, I'm a lazy writer and his story may never be published. But it offers us both an opportunity: for me to write, and for him to come to terms with his past.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

An evening with Che Guevara and Steven Soderbergh

Silly me, I didn't have dinner first. 

I had a conversation with a friend a few days ago about how Portland is not the center of the universe. That's fine, I guess. He tends to be a bit of a wanderer. He's got a bunch of stamps in his passport, but he always ends up back here. 

I like the idea of travel. But my sort of travel is born of working in hotels for a decade. I like clean sheets and upgraded rental cars. I like a morning paper to be delivered to me each day. I like working elevators and toilet paper that doesn't give you splinters.

Most of the time, I'd just rather be here. I like Portland, center of the universe or not.

Where else can you see Soderbergh's epic Che in its entirety with the director there to take questions afterward?

The answer? Probably not anywhere else in North America. At least not anytime soon.

The "Roadshow Version" of Che runs just short of four and a half hours. With the intermission built in and the director's Q&A following, it was about a six hour commitment. 

Honestly, I am incredibly glad I went. I know virtually nothing about Cuban history other than the relations between Cuba and the US make it illegal for me to travel there. I know Che as the guy on the artsy kids' t-shirts. I know Fidel Castro as a tyrant and a Communist.

Admittedly, only parts of Che's story are told in the movie. "We could have taken it to HBO, presented it as a 10-hour miniseries and made a lot more money," Soderbergh told his audience afterward.  

It's been released in Japan as two separate films and has done "really well" according to Soderbergh. Part  one follows Che's travel from Mexico City into the jungles of Cuba, leading rebel fighters over mountains and through rivers. It ends earlier than I expected, not with their arrival in Habana but two hundred miles from there when they hear of the flight of Batiste. Part two follows Che in his failed campaign in Bolivia nine years later. 

But what was the most important thing I cam away with?

Benicio del Toro, who plays the title character, is a producer on the film. In pre-production for nearly a decade, neither he nor Soderbergh were sure it would ever get done. "The only thing worse than doing it and fucking it up", Soderbergh told him,"would be to not do it at all."

A lesson to us all.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

A beginning...

I used to live in coffee shops. I wrote, I drank coffee, I existed as part of what I thought was a uniquely Portland subculture.

Then I stopped. I'm not sure why. I just wasn't there anymore. 

My favorite coffee shop haunt has changed hands now and not what it once was. All my overly-caffeinated brothers and sisters have gone their separate ways. 

It's been over a decade since I regularly spent time sipping lattes and writing anything at all. 

But here I am. I'm back. 

And this time, there's pie.