Portrait


I'm sitting on a stool at the counter of a Thai place, sipping the Negroni the bartender just made me — good Negroni. A few minutes later, the same bartender hands me a notepad that has a whiff of 1980s junior high. On the open page there's a pencil sketch.

It's a face, in profile.
My jaw drops in surprise, and then I smile at him.
That face is mine.
I don't know how much it looks like me, but it's definitely me. And the less it looks like me, the more I like the idea, because it means that by observing me and letting his creativity run free, he was able to imagine me in his own way.

I don't even know if it's a good drawing, technically speaking. I like it, but I'm no expert. I can have a competent opinion on a piece of writing, an idea, a movie, a piece of music, but when it comes to drawing, I understand very little. To me, every effort at GENUINE creativity is beautiful. My little niece's drawings have always looked like works of art to me, in their own genre.

In a world where you have to stay on your guard and slip away so you don't end up as an extra in some goddamn "video story," running into someone who draws your portrait while you don't even notice is a pleasant throwback. A return to the past that, amid the disorientation of the present, feels like a good omen for the future.
Kudos to the "bartist" — part bartender, part artist.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Most popular shreds (so to speak)

On the black hill - Bruce Chatwin

Image
I’ve had Bruce Chatwin on my author list for a long time. I thought he was mainly a travel writer: I remember some friends of mine referring to “In Patagonia” and “What am I doing here” as great travel literature. When I found “On the black hill” on the shelves of one of my favorite used book stores I realized that he wrote fiction as well.
Read the rest of this post »
 

AirAsia: not so cool anymore

Image
Having been a rather regular customer of AirAsia - since the beginning, when they were still using old planes and few people trusted them (“They are always late...they'll lose your luggage.” was the typical refrain people were singing in Malaysia) - I can say that their online booking procedure was fast, simple, transparent and fair, their prices among the cheapest and their brand one of the coolest. Well...not anymore. Going through just a few screens, filling a limited number of fields and clicking some buttons one could choose date, destination, number of passengers, one way or return, could select their favorite flight among the available options, enter their personal data, the credit card ones and that was it. As I said: fast, simple, transparent and fair. No free meal and no seat allocation, true, but their prices were dirt cheap, really unbeatable on some routes. This took by surprise the traditional carriers that lost large shares of the market while AirAsia, from a ...
Read the rest of this post »
 

Panic exponential function - Shanghai, China

Image
My guitar, my bag and Luce, the ear-licking chihuahua I'm at the last X-ray luggage scanner. I'm traveling from Guangzhou to Suzhou along the following route: subway to Bayun airport, flight to Shanghai-Hongqiao, subway to Hongqiao Station and train to Suzhou-Yuanqu, the so called SIP (Suzhou Industrial Park), a mixed residential, industrial and university area where both L - a friend who works near there - and D - another friend who teaches maths - live.  This should be the last scanning, since the platform where the train to Suzhou leaves from is right beyond the machine. I can't remember how many of these checkpoints I've gone through so far. In any other place they shouldn't be more than a couple, as I only took one flight. Considering the Chinese authorities paranoia though, and their fondness for this type of technology , it's safe to multiply the aforementioned number by a coefficient ranging between 1.5 and 2.5. Let's say 2: four scanning points...
Read the rest of this post »