Frog princess (2/8/95)

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Or, Slackers on a Train: itinerant students Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet cute en route to Vienna and talk even cuter, conversing with intense animation about love, death, time travel, ideas for television series, and why dogs are beautiful sleeping in the sun but people standing in line at the ATM look like morons. When Hawke gets off, he asks Delpy to come along and [since he lacks money for a hotel] walk around the city with him all night; predictably smitten, she acquiesces, and the two tour the Austin of mittelEuropa, discussing sex, first love, what they hate, what records they listen to, the war in the Balkans, their parents, the media, the moral imperative for foreigners to learn English, and what one may learn riding on the bus. — They visit the Magic Theater; Julie gets her palm read; Ethan explains to her that we are all stardust [a line I’ve used myself, though of course it never gets me anywhere.] Finally they make it in the park by the faint diffused light of the distant and inscrutable stellar furnaces in whose bowels our atoms were all made. — The punch line, let drop at the station as they bid farewell, is that this miniature Odyssey is all supposed to have transpired on June 16th: Bloomsday. — As an afterthought they agree to meet here again in six months’ time — i.e., in the city of Beethoven, on his birthday. Thus intimating the moral of Joyce himself: that the apparently trivial and quotidian can have an unseen dimension which may be very deep indeed.

That, or maybe this is just another idea for a television series. But with two such charming talking heads, I suppose I might actually watch it.


My job sucks, of course, but there are perquisites. — The girl who tends the night desk in Cheyenne-Arapahoe, for instance: Miss Wonderbra 1995. — I’ve abandoned my standards, now. Once I might have insisted that she know quantum mechanics. Now I think if she can simply spell “quantum mechanics” then she must have my child. — Provided of course that she has no standards.

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Beach babe falls for syphilitic philosopher (12/18/94)