A man of four-and-twenty that hasn't learned of a trade

A series of semi-related updates. To wit—

One of my oldest friends has been in town since Thursday for the wedding of one of her oldest friends. We lived next door to one another in Arlington, with a hedge of lilacs between our houses; once a pumpkin from their garden snaked over into ours and was politely poached for a jack-o'-lantern that fall. When I was much younger—she's a couple of years older than I am—she used to come over and babysit for me and my brother, and now she has three children of her own.* She leaves tomorrow, but it's been really good to see her. I think the last time we talked in person, I was in college.

We finished Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy the night before last; I have now determined someday to own the DVDs, if only for the performances of Alec Guinness, Ian Bannen, and Ian Richardson. I would have picked up the book for comparison, but all the libraries around here seem to be closed on the weekends. Is this some conniving plot by booksellers? Not that I object to owning more John le Carré, but it's the principle of the thing . . . We'll probably start Smiley's People (1982) tonight. And then I suspect I'll make my brother watch The Spy Who Came In from the Cold—the first le Carré I ever read, one summer in my grandparents' house, and the first role in which I saw Richard Burton. I don't think either was a bad place to start.

I also took my brother out for his first legal purchase of alcohol last night: we went to the Legal Sea Foods in Burlington Mall and were mistaken for a couple by the waitress. "She's much older than me," my brother helpfully explains as the woman checks our IDs. Dryly, she says "Nice," and my brother protests, appalled, "She's my sister!" To which the waitress eloquently responds, "Er," and disappears. We had appetizers; he ordered a mojito made with twenty-three-year-old rum and I got my Jamaican national drink. And by the kind loan of nineweaving, we came home and watched Still Crazy (1998), which was delightful. Stephen Rea and Bill Nighy particularly stood out for me as, respectively, the former keyboardist and lead singer of the rock band Strange Fruit, whose career came to a spectacular end one night at an open-air festival when their sound system was struck by lightning: twenty years later, Rea's Tony Costello is attempting to regather the band for a nostalgia tour and maybe a record deal into the bargain. Whether any of the Fruits can stand one another long enough to rehearse, however, is an open question; never mind surviving their own neuroses, of which Nighy's Ray Simms has plenty. These days, Tony supplies condoms for hotel vending machines, though he still slouches around with the louche swagger of a certified sex symbol and despite having Stephen Rea's face pretty much gets away with it—but at least he's aware that he's entered middle age. Ray, on the other hand, freezes up every time he's reminded that he has a birthday coming; he has the half-terrified, half blissfully zoned inarticulacy of someone who left most of his brain cells back in the heyday of glam rock but unfortunately kept the hair and the clothes, and doesn't quite know where the intervening decades went. They're both fantastic, and so are the other characters around them. But the most impressive part of the movie, we thought, was the fact that the music doesn't suck. And Bill Nighy and Jimmy Nail can sing.

Lastly, my short story "The Boy Who Learned How to Shudder" will appear this month in Sirenia Digest #9, so if you want to read one of my rare forays into science fiction, you had best subscribe. Brain-piercing tentacles. Come on. You know you want to . . .

*I still haven't quite adjusted to that: it's weird enough that I have so many friends who are married, let alone some that are parents. Her eldest child is a voracious reader, however, so there must be something in this genetics business after all. And I haven't met the youngest, but in photographs he's criminally cute.