& Moira Bianchi: High Fidelity

quarta-feira, 2 de abril de 2014

High Fidelity

How could I resist?
a cool movie, a cool book, good music, John Cusack & Jack Black.

Here we go, 38th book:

Nick Hornby

page 40

Chapter Four

"The three of us go to the Harry Lauder. Things are cool with Barry now; Dick filled him in when he came back to the shop, and the two of them are doing their best to look after me. Barry has made me an elaborately annotated compilation tape, and Dick now rephrases his questions four or five times instead of the usual two or three. And they more or less insisted that I came to this gig with them.    

It's an enormous pub, the Lauder, with ceilings so high that the cigarette smoke gathers above your head like a cartoon cloud. It's tatty, and drafty, and the benches have had the stuffing slashed out of them, and the staff are surly, and the regular clientele are either terrifying or unconscious, and the toilets are wet and smelly, and there's nothing to eat in the evening, and the wine is hilariously bad, and the bitter is fizzy and much too cold; in other words, it's a run-of-the-mill north London pub. We don't come here that often, even though it's only up the road, because the bands that usually play here are the kind of abysmal second-division punk group you'd pay half your wages not to listen to. Occasionally, though, like tonight, they stick on some obscure American folk/country artist, someone with a cult following which could arrive together in the same car. The pub's nearly a third full, which is pretty good, and when we walk in Barry points out Andy Kershaw and a guy who writes for Time Out. This is as buzzy as the Lauder ever gets.    

The woman we have come to see is called Marie LaSalle; she's got a couple of solo records out on an independent label, and once had one of her songs covered by Nanci Griffith. Dick says Marie lives here now; he read somewhere that she finds England more open to the kind of music she makes, which means, presumably, that we're cheerfully indifferent rather than actively hostile. There are a lot of single men here, not single as in unmarried, but single as in no friends. In this sort of company the three of us — me morose and monosyllabic, Dick nervy and shy, Barry solicitously self-censoring — constitute a wild and massive office outing.    

There's no support, just a crappy PA system squelching out tasteful country-rock, and people stand around cradling their pints and reading the handbills that were thrust at them on the way in. Marie LaSalle comes onstage (as it were — there is a little platform and a couple of microphones a few yards in front of us) at nine; by five past nine, to my intense irritation and embarrassment, I'm in tears, and the feel-nothing world that I've been living in for the last few days has vanished."
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Top 5 40th pages? Mmmm...
Let me think. 
Hit me, DJ.




Disclaimer: 40 pages 40 is my way to come to terms with celebrate my 40th birthday. By promoting 40 awesome books I like in no way I intend to dupe the original authors. If you, as me, like what you read, buy them!
All 40 books can be found on the right side bar. ►
All images found on Google. Kudos to the original poster.

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