Thursday, March 15, 2012

We Hold These Truths To Be Self- Evident

Poetry is the way we live.

Three minutes is enough for certain mollusks.

Ottowans will expect neighborhood wine shops.

Go ahead and leave, but you will return with a new appreciation for here.

No film school is required to make films.

If you're dying of a mysterious illness, never take something from a bottle labeled "The Cure."

Act One

The scene: Bistro 27

The players: Yours truly and a wine-savy friend

The food: Three-minute calamari in a basil tomato sauce over Byrds Mill grits. Cheese-stuffed empanadas with pesto aioli.

The surprise guests: A Canadian couple here for a real estate conference. They were impressed with how friendly people here are and appalled at their inability to find wine shops within walking distance of their hotel (I told them about The Hoppy Dog, a block away).

The conversation: Holding grudges, how a certain bass is a metaphor for a woman and a new winery.

Act Two

The scene: Firehouse Theater

The reason: "Days Gone By," the debut film of John Zhao, who was not a film student and had never made a film. After someone tried to rob him on Broad Street, he took refuge in the Firehouse where Project Resolution was showing local film shorts and he was hooked

The hook: The film was shot in digital, analog and on film.

The sentiment: After having moved to NYC (like countless other Richmonders), he's returned and acknowledged how much he missed this town and how satisfying it was to be back.

The surprise: The short film shown first, made by an HIV-positive black gay man who told his life story and thoughts via spoken word and a desire to make his life poetry, despite every societal strike against him.

The plot: Despairing boyfriend watches girlfriend dying and hallucinates along the way, with a few "A Clockwork Orange" moments thrown in for good measure. Oh, and some David Lynch.

The conclusion; King Family Viognier is good. Drugs mixed in a blender with alcohol and a stuffed animal are bad. Never fall for a girl just because she dances alone and you watch her.

The sweet ending: Limoncello, dark chocolate-drizzled pineapple and cheap laughs for language geeks.

The past, the present and the future walk into a bar.

If my life is a poem, I am hoping it is a rhyming couplet with the slyest of humor.

It was tense.

Too funny...and not at all the way I live.

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