stadtkatze

l.a. at night

blue wet heart

V

bodies

large version

sweet reach

chess

I think there's a limited number of really cool girls in this world, and I seem to know more than a handful of them. I have good taste, what can you say? She's one of those really cool girls who's always slipping out of boys' fingers, because those kinds of girls move so fast that nobody can ever hold them down, not churches nor smothering families and certainly not the social conventions.

The conventions say that girls don't play chess--but she does. So that's why when I walked in, the men there were reluctant to greet me for fear of scaring me away. It's one of those really old fashioned buildings with the tiles set a certain way that set me in a nostalgic mood for the years I spent going to school on the east coast of the United States too. Even the old, scratched desks and the high ceilings reminded me of a youth reading Homer in buildings without air conditioning.

Maybe it's also that I'm so old, or my memories are distorted, that education was held to such a different light than it is in so many people I encounter today. Learning was priceless, a strange religion, strangely divorced from the realities of everyday life and certainly not thought to be preparation for the world of work. You drank learning in all its uselessness and then figured out everything else afterword. It's so different now, or maybe it isn't, but I was proven wrong; my useless education proved immensely useful down the road. And perhaps most wonderfully of all, in that space of time I attained a beautiful relationship with education, treasuring it and hoping to continue it throughout my life.

And then the bits of Russian that the older men spoke, which I have so completely forgotten, but I remember enough to catch scraps of what people are talking about when they are discussing small things. When I hear Spanish or French or Russian, I can catch the scraps and pin them down and get the gist of what people are saying. "A little bit of this... no, not that..." Ashamed for not mastering more than two or three languages, but I still have time, right? So many people I know can rattle out four or five languages fluently, some so violently unrelated as to make the task impossible, like five dialects of Chinese versus english, but they do it anyway.

All these girls materialized at once, and then the barrier was broken, and the men volunteered to show us where the bathroom was, and how to read chess notation. There were seriously ancient magazines in the bookshelf from the 1970s. After failing miserably at chess, I learned the basics of chess notation; I had been lazy in middle school, where played chess in our classes, and my strategy is weak, flinging pawns everywhere. They reviewed the notation with me; we followed a chess match of two famous men somewhere in Amsterdam last week, torn out of a section of the San Francisco chronicle.

When I went to the bathroom it was just like those really old New York City buildings. It's so strange, everything is so old there, even more old-fashioned than Europe, where so many buildings are so modern and strangely Californian. I don't think west coast people realize how old-fashioned heaters are in New York City, how the radiators would rattle and make your room so hot you'd have to open the window in the winter. In my apartments here the walls are paper-thin. I half-expected the toilet to be flushed with a chain, and connected patterns out of the hexagonal tiles on the floor, washed my hands with old-fashioned faucet handles turned all the way.

Cool girls annhilate you in chess; i was eaten alive.
When we ran down the staircase with its worn-down wooden rail, I thought of those days, so long ago, running down similar staircases with heaps of books in my arms, back when no all students had laptops. I would like to play chess more often now, I thought, maybe over the computer. People play those sorts of things online nowadays for free, against housewives in India or Iran, maybe not as beautiful as playing in a gigantic room full of people where you can stow your pawns aways in cubbies and press your fingers against felt chess pieces hanging against the wall.

los angeles

dark dreams

wandel

bartendress @ the zeitgeist beer garden

I miss these really gruff, frank no-nonsense women that go around in dirty t-shirts. Maybe it's because I'm such a girly girl lately, walking around in ironed shirts and even trying out heels but too afraid to buy them for fear it will destroy my soul. There have been several epic battles this year, but that's a tale for another day.

The bartender at the Zeitgeist was one such San Francisco lady; she was polite, knowledgeable, and able to handle orders while chatting about how she didn't like her new haircut. Also, she has the best beer on the planet, all the new Californian microbrews. There is good American beer, you know, although nobody will believe me. While most people are drinking the worst possible beer on earth throughout the country on Superbowl Sunday, there are friendly bartenders filling up big pitchers of Stella Artois for beer fanatics.

She's not pretentious about it though. And she doesn't overdo the service, like how some bartenders ask you how you are doing even though they don't really care. Lean back and watch her move back and forth the bar plastered with a zillion generations of punkrock stickers and big floppy bottles of vodka and whiskey. They're all here for the beer though.

At the end of the night she'll be wiping the countertops with a gray rag tucked into her back pants pocket, back aching, and then go stand outside smoking a cigarette in the outdoor beer garden with the rest of the crew. She's probably heard a lot of the drama that has gone on tonight but has learned to filter it out. It's one of the tricks of the trade.

graciela iturbide