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Waiters are actors who are following scripts written by restaurant owners. The scripts and performances can be annoying and also hilarious. Here are New York Times food critic Frank Bruni’s article and his follow-up blog. Thanks to Butch for the links.

Restaurant story. Some years ago my friends were having dinner at a Malate restaurant (now closed) when the lights suddenly went out. The rest of the establishments on the street had their lights on, so it must’ve been a blown fuse. Five minutes after the lights went out, the good-looking waiter went up to my friends’ table and said, “Sir, we heb a froblem.” My friends stared at the good-looking waiter and awaited an explanation. “Sir,” he went on, “We heb no fower.”

Musee d’Orsay, originally uploaded by Koosama.

April in Paris, a cliche that works. Broad tree-lined avenues and outdoor cafes teeming with people smoking or entertaining deep thoughts or both. Masterpieces of the Louvre, eminent skeletons of Pere Lachaise. The splendor of Notre Dame that the Nazis couldn’t bring themselves to blow up, or was that Sacre Coeur? In the midst of all this beauty it would be rude not to have an existential crisis. Ghosts of the Impressionists walking the cobblestones of Montmartre, haunting the fleshpots of Pigalle. The French Revolution, the Cinematheque, Anna Karina and her two swains running across the Louvre in nine minutes something. A schoolboy plagiarizing Balzac. Herald Tribune!

Paris, 9.30pm. Chaos at Charles De Gaulle Airport, endless renovations of the Metro, new arrivals herded onto buses and snuck into the city—is there a standard chic test we’ve flunked? Stink of piss as you emerge from the Gare du Nord into the twinkling evening: I lift my suitcase to avoid running over a man in rags snoring open-mouthed by the door. The cabbie’s nose so big that when he turns around to ask for the address I instinctively duck. He’s delighted to discover a street he’d never heard of.

Dog turds on the sidewalk, used metro tickets carpeting the street. I punch in the security code and the lock clicks open. The elevator is out of order. The stairs creak and groan like an arthritic grandmother. My suitcase bangs painfully against my leg as I drag myself up to the third floor. Much later I will recount with exaggerated horror how I carried a huge suitcase and a giant backpack up four flights of stairs in Paris. The point of the story won’t be the weight of my luggage or the creakiness of the stairs, it will be the fact that it happened in Paris.

Bob is an American filmmaker who’s editing his movie in Manila. Or at least that’s his cover. Here’s his account of meeting the director Werner Herzog (Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo) while standing in a queue at a bank.

I hate going to the bank because there are only two reasons for me to go: 1. I have no money and I’m going to the bank for an explanation (“You don’t have money because you don’t know how to save it,”) or 2. The bank is sending me letters telling me I have no money yet I keep trying to spend it and they want an explanation, (to which I usually reply, “I don’t have any money because I don’t know how to save it.”)

One day I found myself standing in line at Bank of America, in the middle of Hollywood. I was lulled into a trance by the banality of the environment. Posters offering low mortgage rates, credit approvals, ringing phones, little old ladies filling out withdrawal slips, I was unconsciously marching in line towards the next available bank teller. In my trance, I accidentally walked into the man in front of me. The man turned slowly and I began to mutter an apology, but I stopped short as Werner Herzog faced me. The next few moments were a blur, thoughts raced across my mind. What the hell is Werner Herzog doing at Bank of America? Did I remember to put on pants this morning? I wonder what I’ll have for lunch? Was that cute blonde looking at me? Holy shit, it’s Werner Herzog! I snap back to reality. Silence. Herzog and I stare at each other for what seems like an hour. Herzog has steel blue eyes. Staring at him is like looking into the void. He could probably stare down a charging bull. It’s called the thousand-yard stare, Herzog has it.

What do you say when you come face to face with one of your heroes? I wish I could have said something worthwhile to this cinematic giant, this god among men, my idol, but I opened my mouth and all that came out was, “Mr. Herzog, I really love your films, they have had quite an impact on me.” (Doh!) Thankfully, Herzog didn’t miss a beat, he laughed and replied in his thick German accent, “Well, you must really love movies if you love my movies.” I fired back a response, trying to keep the conversation going, “Ya, I just watched Little Dieter Needs To Fly again recently. Dieter Dengler was such an amazing man.” (Double Doh!) And then, Herzog did it. He confirmed my suspicion. Underneath the wild existence of his public persona lies a brilliant, sensitive artist, a man operating in the world in his own unique consciousness. Herzog replied, “Yes, Dieter Dengler was the purest of men. To look into the soul of Dengler was to look into the soul of an angel. Dengler’s heart could provide solace for the desperation of man.” Silence. I literally looked around to see if anyone else just heard that. Did Herzog actually just say that? Soul of an angel, desperation of man? How do you respond to that? I just stared at him in awe. Herzog continued, “I think what you should know is…”

Suddenly a woman’s stern voice interrupted Herzog. “Sir!” Herzog and I looked over. The bank teller was waiting for Herzog, his turn had come. Herzog looked at me once more. My mind raced trying to figure out a way to keep Herzog there, to convince him to finish his last sentence. What was it that he thinks I should know?! Herzog smiled and walked away towards the underpaid, overworked, annoyed bank teller named Bonnie. I hate Bonnie. Because of Bonnie I will be forced to live out my days searching for the elusive truth that Herzog was no doubt about to pass on to me. Stupid Bonnie.

I don’t remember what happened to me in the bank after that. I don’t remember the drive home either. The next thing I remember is telling a friend about the Herzog encounter. This friend has no idea who Herzog is and thus no real appreciation for the story. After struggling to convey the significance of what happened to me with Herzog, my friend looked at me and said, “Dude, you should have just waited outside for him and offered to buy him a cup of coffee.” Damn it! Whatever, I still blame Bonnie.

Dostoevsky’s Batman, originally uploaded by 160507.

The Again With the Comics blog features an out-of-print classic: Dostoyevsky Comics. R. Sikoryak adapted Crime and Punishment starring Bruce Wayne. Thanks to Butch for the link.

Meanwhile, I was surprised to enjoy Beowulf, as I’d expected a howler. The Zemeckis and Gaiman-Avary project is a clever deconstruction that has a feel for the epic. The blustering and swaggering, the dick contests, victory laced with sadness, glory with regret. It understands that the epic is in love with death. I’m pretty sure that’s not the Beowulf I was required to read in school, and as Don pointed out, I’m sure Professor Tolkien will not approve. I remember my resentment at having to read Beowulf (although the part where Grendel eats the men in the hall was fun) and the boring discussions in class—that was several hours of my life I’ll never have again. I feel like I got back 90 minutes. There’s still a problem rendering faces—at times they look like animated corpses—and movement, but the CGI is improving.

However, if there’s only one movie you can catch in theatres this week, it’ll have to be Superbad. There’s a classic.

Asad Raza writes in 3 Quarks Daily: “There’s a quasi-famous shot I keep remembering in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 movie Brazil. In it, Jonathan Pryce’s character, who has come to realize he lives in a fascist state, drives down an expressway. The walls to either side of the road surface are covered in billboards and advertisements. As Pryce’s car drives away from the viewer, the camera ascends, revealing that just outside the walls, invisible to drivers, lies a grim wasteland. The vivid and friendly billboards hide the truth, which is that the actual world hidden from view by their flimsy walls is barren. It is post-industrially empty–and having stripped it, the state consoles its subjects by substituting pasted-up two-dimensional images advertising island vacations. When the movie opens, Pryce’s Sam Lowry is an obedient, crushed civil servant whose only escape is dreams. Now he, and we, learn that this reality is a façade; the truth is bleaker and wilder.”

Holy crap, we’re living in a Terry Gilliam movie!

The photographer Melanie Dunea has a new book called My Last Supper—portraits of 50 chefs who described what they would order if they knew the meal would be their last. In his introduction to the book, Anthony Bourdain explains the morbidity of chefs: “After their kitchens had closed, sitting at a wobbly table on the periphery of Les Halles in nineteenth-century Paris and drinking vin ordinaire, or while nibbling bits of chicken from skewers in the after-hours izakayas in Tokyo, or perched at the darkened bar of a closed New York City restaurant . . . someone always piped up: “If you were to die tomorrow, what single dish, what one mouthful of food from anywhere in the world or anytime in your life, would you choose as your last?”

Most popular answers: truffles, caviar, foie gras, bread, duck fat, sea urchin, whiskey.

Ali G asked a former US Attorney General if a death-row inmate could put off his execution indefinitely by requesting an all-you-can-eat buffet.

What would you order?

“We went up to the second floor where the shelves, sofas, tables and lamps are all arrayed into tasteful little room settings — rooms, but with mysterious tags hanging everywhere. Immediately I thought it was like entering a videogame world. Who lives here? What do they do? Why is that book on the table? Is that significant? Could it be some kind of clue to the occupant’s identity?

“Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could. . .” Walk-in videogame in the David Byrne Journal.

“Things happen on a Werner Herzog set: mutinies break out, actors’ lives are threatened, crew members are beaten and thrown in jail in the wildest corners of the world - and all in pursuit of the ‘ecstatic truth’ about humanity. Daniel Zalewski joins the German director shooting his first Hollywood film in the Thai jungle.” Herzog shoots.

I know someone who accosted Werner Herzog in a queue at a bank and got a lecture on film. Will post the story.

From The Observer, a profile of Alexis Lemaire, possibly the world’s greatest mathlete: “On 24 July 2007, in controlled conditions at Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science, Lemaire broke the world record for finding the 13th root of a 200-digit number. This involved being presented with an enormously long random number (which, if reproduced here, would take up six lines of text) and working out in the space of 77.99 seconds that its 13th root was 2396232838850303.”

There’s a lovely piece in one of Oliver Sacks’ earlier books The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, about two brothers whose IQ scores were in the idiot range, who sat around reciting 7-digit numbers to each other. Dr. Sacks realized that the numbers they were tossing around were prime numbers.

Here’s my Robert Duvall impression.

I love the sound of Currimao at midnight. It feels like. . .the apocalypse.

Cue helicopters. Cue Ride Of The Valkyries.

Northern Exposure in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

You and your pets are invited to the grand launch of Pupil’s second album Wildlife tomorrow, November 9, from 8pm onwards at Eastwood City Central Plaza. You’re encouraged to wear red, black, and white; pet outfits optional. The album is now in stores.

Watch James Gray’s terrific new film We Own The Night (motto of the New York Police Department) starring Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, and Robert Duvall, and discuss: Why do most of today’s good movies look like they were made thirty years ago? Did American cinema peak in the 1970s?

In totally unrelated news, a priest has been arrested for stalking and harassing Conan O’Brien, the talk show host and father of my eldest cat, Koosi O’Brien. Apparently the priest had been following Conan’s career since they were at Harvard. In his letters he made reference to the Virginia Tech shooter and to the gangster Frank Costello, who was shot in the Manhattan building where Conan lives. The priest is said to have been turned on to religion by Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Which tells us that maybe something’s not quite right there. But I would understand people who get the calling after seeing La Strada.

Some weeks ago Tina alerted me to this classic Craigslist exchange on the economics of mating. It’s kind of like Lola Edith Wharton or Lola Henry James, minus the subtlety and layers of meaning. Marriage is an economic issue; I’ll make my own money, thanks. With the weak dollar, $500k is not what it used to be. I don’t hang out with any open gold-diggers (I knew one who married another gold-digger so imagine their great joy), but the guy who answered the post sounds like many of my friends, give or take a decimal place.

This was an actual post from the Craigslist website with an actual response from someone who seems to be an investment banker. The exchange, which has been forwarded many times through email, was written about in the New York Times. The guy was discovered to be a top manager in one of the world’s leading investment firms. The identity of the woman has not been revealed.

********************************

THE POSTED LISTING

What am I doing wrong?

Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I’m articulate and classy. I’m not from New York. I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.

Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200 - 250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won’t get me to central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level? (Continued)