Manafonistas

I cannot say how much I’ve been sucked in by those first two chapters of Sarah Bakewell’s book „At the Existenzialist Cafe“. In fact I like the balance of her storytelling and telling thoughts – I do now have seriously to consider drinking something bizarre as an apricot cocktail. The other thing I’m really keen on at the moment is strolling (with my eyes and ears) through the appartment of Harry Bosch (from the TV-series „Bosch“). Panaroma windows upfront, looking down from Hollywood’s hillside: a one million lights view, a decent record player, a valve tube amplifier, and a big collection of old jazz records. The Clint Eastwood-connection of cops and their love for jazz. Apricot cocktails don’t fit here, existenzialism does. When I was a teenager, 18, I drove with my first car (a white VW 1303) to the Netherlands, to Scheveningen, with two girls. They were both intellectuals, so there were three intellectuals. They loved books with unhappy women getting wild, and I loved books with cool detectives like Marlowe, Spade or Hammer. The threesome we had was rather underwhelming, somehow sad for everyone: they were thinking too much while fucking, and I was dreaming too much of the ones I really wanted to fuck/love. Even the lesbian moments were sobering, at least worth watching. A day later I was alone, one long afternoon, and I read a book, in my little room on a rainy day, Charles Bukowski’s „Notes of A Dirty Old Man“, drinking one glass of Cointreau, and some more. This was the closest I ever came to apricot cocktails. They must cost a fortune in Paris. I still know that I was quite drunk when I left the house to look for pommes frites. When I stood at the window of a rather ugly store, eating fat potatoes, looking through the rain, and to the sea, I heard Paul and Linda McCartney singing that famous song about their dog. Call it pure, uninhibited joy.