no role

THAT SUMMER I was cast in a film where I was set to play the father of a large family.

Filming would be at a warehouse in Tallinn, somewhere out by the airport and downwind of Lake Ülemiste. Koidu, my agent, got me the job. It didn’t pay especially well but she promised me that it might lead to steadier, more reliable work.

Though it was summer, much of the film would take place during winter. A traditional family Christmas dinner scene was planned, for example. Part of the role called on me to play Santa Claus too. I was expected to burst through the door with a big and bulky joulupukki outfit acquired during a summer sale at a Helsinki supermarket with a bag full of gifts for everyone. Fazer was sponsoring the production and Geisha chocolates would tumble out like gold coins. Playing the pater familias sure seemed like an easy gig but then everything went shit wrong.

To start, Koidu is an Estonian agent, which means she suffers from some mild communication impediments. She assumes beforehand that information is known and therefore believes there is no need to reiterate certain points, because telling me again what time I was expected on set would be, in her mind, a waste of time and energy. As such, I had no idea what time I was supposed to be there. I tried to reach out to Koidu that morning, but she was in an important meeting out at Noblessner, and didn’t respond. The timing of the filming was probably mentioned off-hand in some list. Everyone else had read every message, naturally, but me.

There was a second problem. I had lost my phone. It just disappeared from my fingers at the Sõõrikukohvik on Kentmanni Street. It was the strangest thing. I had just tapped out a message to Koidu, and then tried to scan the message list for more information, but found none. I sent a quick message to the director, but it went unread. He was understandably busy doing something else. A woman walked by and saw the day’s copy of Postimees spread before me and asked if I was done reading it. I said I was and handed her the newspaper and then, that was it. The phone was just gone. It wasn’t on the table, or under it. It wasn’t in my pocket, it wasn’t under my plate of widely-acclaimed and extra soft and sugary donuts. It was just gone, and I had this suspicion that I was already late. I ran out the door, got in my car, and drove off.

The rest of the cast was a group of twentysomething actresses from Nukuteater, one of whom was supposed to play my wife. Her name was Johanna and she had curly yellow-gold hair and a childlike look to her. Maybe they would need to age her face with AI, the same way that they de-aged Harrison Ford in the new Indiana Jones movie. We had met once to go over our lines. In the film, our marriage was on the rocks, but it was saved by the Christmas festivities. I had only seen the photos of the actresses who were set to play our daughters on social media. I imagined the whole production as a modern day version of Little Women, except with Estonians cast in all the main roles. Estonian Women? They were all on set at the right time, I was sure, but then I was upset by a third logistical issue: my car broke down near the Liivalaia Selver and I had to trudge the rest of the way to the set through a tropical July downpour.

By the time I reached the set, I was soaked and the door was locked. I could see Johanna through the glass. She was on the phone with someone and pacing. She came to the door and handed the phone over to me. “Koidu would like to speak with you,” was all she said. I held the phone up to my ear. “What’s going on?” “Where were you?” Koidu said. “They have been waiting for you for hours!” “I had some car trouble.” “So what! Couldn’t you have also taken a Bolt?” “I also had some phone trouble. Anyway I am here now. I am ready for my role.” There was a pause. “You’ve sabotaged your career again,” said Koidu. “There’s no role left for you anymore.” “What do you mean no role? I was supposed to play the father of the family. I even have my joulupukki costume!” “It doesn’t matter,” Koidu remarked. “They got some other guy to play the father. It’s not such a hard role to recast, you know. All of you guys are the same.”

I handed the phone back to Johanna who just stared at me. Then she disappeared behind the glass door again. I could see her walk across the set, talking to some man I didn’t know. He must have cracked a joke, because I saw Johanna laugh. I had never seen her laugh that way.

After that I walked alone for a while. It was a hot day and I decided to stop into a gas station. I skimmed through an issue of Kroonika. The cover story was about the exploits of middle-aged actor and his new 25-year-old love. I bought a bag of potato chips and a drink and stood reading about this new pair. They looked happy in the photos at least. I had to give them that.

Principios de Declaración by Tomás del Real

I WANT TO TELL YOU about my friend Tomás del Real. Today is his 30th birthday and he will celebrate it here in Viljandi, Estonia, which is the small, spacious and at times inspiring Estonian town we both happen to live in.

Tomás also has a new album out called Principios de Declaración. It is inarguably his most achieved and most mature work as a songwriter to date. His first two records, Tomando Forma (2014) and Tiempo (2017) featured bands, but over his past few records, Sembrar de Nuevo (2020) and Huracán (2022) with the folk music group Don’t Chase the Lizard, has has become a devotee of the guitar and opted for a sparser, stripped back, minimalistic sound.

The 13 compositions on Principios de Declaración are therefore built on his voice and guitar, with some light additional instrumentation added to fill out the atmospherics. He claims it is the perfect midnight record, but it also has the sound of a new morning to it, or even a late-afternoon stroll. It is a beautiful work of art created in a beautiful place. The melodies are earnest, haunting, and they stay with you.

Tomás chalks up the changes in songcraft to living in a small northern town, where one feels a stirring kind of isolation. Viljandi does attract its share of musicians, poets, writers, artists, and other outside thinkers for this very reason. He arrived during the pandemic, leaving behind political uncertainty and upheaval in his native Chile, and seeking out something fresh and new. Like a lot of artists from the New World, he has found inspiration in the Old World. They call it reverse emigration.

“The way I communicate with people now is different,” Tomás says of how the Estonian environment changed him. “The pauses, the space, the connection with nature, every part of Estonian culture and what I have been living during these years has got into my songwriting.” It is no wonder then that the songs on his new album have titles like “Los Momentos”, “Silente,” “Pausar”, and, of course “Viljandi.”

Kerttu Kruusla, a Viljandi-associated photographer and visual artist also provided the memorable artwork for the record. “She is a close friend of mine, I trust her,” Tomás says. “I knew she was someone who would be emotionally involved during the process.”

Being in front of non-Spanish speaking audiences also allowed him to let his hair down, so to speak. He felt less pressured to deliver topical lyrics intended to wow and impress audiences. “I could be super honest with myself and not filter anything that I need to share in the shape of a song,” he says of this phenomenon. In the past he might have avoided some things, but in an international context, there is no need to avoid anything he feels. That, some might argue, is actually the perfect environment in which to create anything of significance.

You really have to appreciate the work ethic that Tomás del Real has. After putting out and touring Huracán last year with creative partner Lee Taul, one might have expected a pause or a vacation. Instead he came up with 13 new compositions which, honestly, rank among his best, or most developed songs. Some personal favorites on Principios de Declaración are the gorgeous “Canción de Huída” in which he trades vocals with Darla Eno, a British singer he met 10 years ago.

“We were both very young and we met somewhere in Scotland,” del Real says of the collaboration. “During that period, some of the Edinburgh folk people would do singing circles and singing sessions, where everybody would learn some folk songs and sing along. Everything in Europe seemed so new and exciting to me, so I was listening very carefully.”

The foundation of “Canción de Huída” is actually a verse that Eno shared with him from an old folk standard called “The Butcher Boy” (check out Irish legends The Clancy Brothers performing the same tune in 1965). He said the chorus was so “nostalgic and profound” that he had to remake it in his own way.

“I basically wrote a song around it so I could sing the song as well,” said del Real.

Eno isn’t the only collaborator on Principios de Declaración. He also partnered with Chilean musician Javier Barría, who duets with him on the song “Acantilado,” and the album was mastered by Chilean sound engineer Jorge Fortune in Chilean Patagonia.

A personal favorite song of mine on the record is “Las Campanas,” which means “the bells.” Tomás said this particular tune developed out of a sense of isolation and anxiety about the world during the pandemic. “I was in a very dark place, and even music wasn’t flowing,” he says of this time. To survive, he indulged in classic 1960s and 1970s folk singers, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, and Paul Simon among them.

“I just needed something to give me a little bit of light,” he says. The concept underlying the song is that no matter the pressures of the day, there will always be tomorrow, and the bells will once again ring.

And then there is “Los Momentos,” which is the sparse and hypnotic debut single from the album, and at the beginning of which one can hear del Real striking a match to start a fire.

“This was one of the last songs I wrote that made it to the album,” he says. “After processing all that happened, and the songs I wrote along the way, I was exhausted, and found myself sitting by the fire, contemplating what I had been through.”

Most of the songs on Principios de Declaración were written during the long and introspective Estonian winter, and so the imagery of fire as a cleansing phenomenon that does away with the past after a long journey is at the front of “Los Momentos.”

“You summon the fire to clean it all out, and finish the trip the same way, making the album a very cyclical trip in my opinion,” says del Real. The guitar lines in the tune helped to ground him after many adventures. “I just wanted to explore that feeling of being grounded and just being.”

There is also the album title. Tomás says that he decided to call his new record Principios de Declaración for a variety of reasons. He sees it as a sort of personal constitution, one that communicates his principles, the fundamentals of what he wants to share with the world. “It reminds me of Blue by Joni Mitchell,” he says. “The way she says, ‘If I am going to do this as a living, then there will be no more disguises or costumes. This is it.'”

But the Spanish word principios can also means “beginnings” in this context. So these songs are merely the start of his declaration. That means, hopefully, there will be much more music to come.

elevator jazz

AFTER SONJA STOLE my lost book of erotica, she continued her music studies, later becoming a rather impressive jazz singer and all around chanteuse. She gave concerts on the top of the tallest hotel in Tallinn, which is not that tall, but still pretty tall. From there, on summer evenings, one could feel the brisk winds of the north and stare off into a Matisse swirl of stars and purple orange sunset fused into a stellar blue stardust trail of Baltic melancholy. It was pretty, in other words, and she was beautiful. She played with a little Finnish trio. They were not as beautiful as blonde Sonja was, but they played beautifully. There was a drum solo.

I started attending the rooftop jazz concerts around the time I returned from America, where I had to visit family with Jane and her new lover Hans, the Dutch screenwriter. They got to stay in the guest bedroom while I was there, and, well, I had no place to sleep. To make matters worse, nobody could understand why this fact bothered me. “Why are you so moody? You again with your moods! You should go see a psychologist! You seem to have a lot of issues.” Hans and her shacked up in my parents house, and I went and slept in the guesthouse. Agnetha was there, with her young daughter, and I gave them my bed. I curled up to sleep beside them on the hard floor. It was uncomfortable and I went back to Europe after that.

That was how I stumbled upon Sonja and the hotel concerts. She was a good singer. Usually this kind of elevator jazz bores me, but hers was a more ambrosial blend. But jazz alone doesn’t pay the bills, does it. Sonja was also working as a waitress at the hotel bar. At breakfast, she brought me a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. In Islam, orange juice is a rich and promising symbol. If you are poor, you will become rich if you drink enough orange juice. If your heart is broken and you have suffered many hardships, your pain will be relieved by the tang of this tropical nectar. I don’t think Sonja knew this though. She just needed the money. Then she walked over to the elevator and took it back up to the roof for some rooftop jazz.

It was time to rehearse.

miss maritime

MISS MARITIME was seated at a desk in a silver dress. I saw her the day after I ran into Celeste. She was gentle, vivid, and memorable, like the slopes of the best childhood beaches. She was small. She was young and had blue eyes and brown hair. But at least Miss Maritime was still there.

The classroom was in the part of the school that used to house the theatre arts program. It was fall and there was lightning outside the windows. We had all been assigned group work and I had been placed on her team. She was apprehensive, but I guess it was all for the best.

Hours earlier there had been a jailbreak from the school. All of the students ran down the hallways. It had been sunny then and through the windows of the corridors you could see the dust in the light and smell the chalk. That chalky smell of an old school constructed in the 1930s. They tried to contain the uprising, but it was of no use. All of the students spilled into the streets. We went with them and by the ponds I saw a boy run into the Taylor House. He went inside and I could see there was a party going on there behind the door of Edwardian textured glass. By that time the weather had started to turn and a few of us went back to the school, Miss Maritime among us.

In previous incidents with her, various weird things had happened. Once, she had told me she needed to go to the Faroe Islands. Another time, she was being hoisted on a chair while well wishers wished her a happy birthday. This time she was seated across from me in a silver dress.

“Well, here we are again,” I said. We had to give a presentation about the Vikings. “Thank you,” Miss Maritime said, “for being on my team.”

substitute

IT WAS NAIVE of me to think that I could have ever replaced you. I tried so hard, for years, and failed spectacularly. I don’t even know why I started trying, or how many astrologers, witches, healers, tarot card readers, and other masters of the black arts I consulted, only to be led deeper into my own delusions. I did it for you, to free you of me, and to free myself of you. I saw it as a mutual liberation. That’s what you asked of me. In retrospect, it was wrong of me to wish for anything, one way or the other, and especially wrong to try to course correct and to play god. I had to learn the unfortunate lessons that all people must learn, that the more you tinker, the more you pry, the more you struggle against the web of time, the harder things become, the less natural they are, the worse off everyone in the end is. The only right path forward is the raw and honest one, I think. There isn’t any other legitimate way. I could find 15,000 substitutes, and they would all crumple in the end. I didn’t make it so. That’s how it is.

second century romans

I WAS LOST AGAIN, driving a convertible in the dark. De Niro and Pacino were in the backseat, clutching their newborns, and feeding them formula. We were in a vast underground aquarium that had been built by the Romans in the second century. Some areas of the site were still unknown to archaeology. These were dark and blotted out by an ominous swirling mist. We drove beneath the arch of an aqueduct, but I decided to turn around. “Do you even know where you’re going?” De Niro piped up. “Well, we’re not going in there,” I said, gesturing. “If you go in there, you only fall more deeply asleep.”

We took another road and soon arrived at a brightly lit exhibit called “The History of Cheese,” which was on loan from the Smithsonian. Some pieces were contributed by the Amalienborg in Copenhagen too. Pacino was impressed by the Caseus Fumosus Velabrensis or Smoked Velabran Cheese. “Bobby, get over here. Try it, just try it.” Pacino slipped his baby a taste.

I left the veteran actors at the cheese exhibit and went to a book launch after that, and there was a lot of cake for the guests. Jane was there eating the cake and selling books and she didn’t want to leave. Antti, a spectacled Finnish reader who likes to talk geopolitics, also showed up and was having the cake and whispering to me about Bourdain and Nord Stream. “Splendid work,” he kept muttering aloud and pacing. He was carrying a fresh issue of The Economist. Jane couldn’t be pulled away from all of the after hours cake and mingling and networking.

On the steps on the way out, we did hug, and it felt refreshing, as if all was healed, but then she told me she had rented a garage in the city and was going to start raising some sheep there. She already had a few lambs. Bolt scooters soared by, and in the distance I heard the metallic clang of an urban fender bender. The lambs were pressing themselves against the walls. They were frightened. “Look, this is no place for sheep,” I kept trying to convince her. “The city is no place for sheep!” She wouldn’t listen to me, so I left.

My convertible was parked in a garage that had served as a site of crucifixion for early Christians. I paid the attendant a few euros for his troubles, coaxed De Niro, Pacino, and the brood from the cheese exhibit and we were off, but not empty handed. Pacino kept feeding me blocks of ancient cheese over my shoulder. “Try this, man. A precursor to Pecorino Romano. Hoo-ah! I just love this shit.”

l.a.

AFTER MY WIFE AND I SPLIT, she took up with a Dutch screenwriter named Hans and moved to L.A. When Hans was on strike, they invited me out to visit and I obliged. We agreed to meet at an exclusive beach club that had a special iron gate at its entrance. From the club promenade one could look out and watch the whales diving and singing in the straits. Hans seemed nice enough, but I couldn’t understand his desire to befriend me. He was a wiry sort, with orange-red hair, and he liked to wear dark clothes, even in the summer and in California. “What would you like to drink?” “Was your flight all right?” “Is the hotel comfortable?” “You know, you can always stay with us.” He also tried to win me over by gifting me various treasured items of modern day hipsterdom, such as a freshly pressed edition of Talking Heads’ classic 1980 album Remain in Light. “This is high quality, 180-gram vinyl,” Hans said, displaying my gift. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that because of the divorce settlement, I didn’t have the money for a decent turntable or sound system. I decided to file the record away for future listening. A man’s got to have some goals, you know. He also presented me a copy of Thunderball signed by Ian Fleming. Such artifacts are easy to come by if you are one of Hollywood’s top writers, even if you are on strike. I put it away in my knapsack. The club had a tennis area divided into two sections. The first had “batting cages,” where new players could try out their backhands, and then the second had the proper, luxurious courts. Taylor Swift was there playing tennis against Idris Elba. “Fifteen-Love,” Taylor announced. “Thirty-Love.” They both wore shorts so bleached white you had to squint to look at them. “Do you want to play a game?” Hans said. My ex was behind him, toying with an umbrella like Deborah Kerr in The King and I. “After that, we can have lunch at the club restaurant. It’s no problem.” I agreed and said I needed to go and change my clothes. On the way out, I left the Talking Heads LP and the Ian Fleming novel with someone up front. I knew Hans meant well, but L.A. was not for me.

salmon pink

FOR A LONG TIME, I didn’t give the woman in the other apartment much attention. I would only see her in the corridors of the house on Väike-Patarei, or Little Battery Street, overlooking the bay and the gulf. The halls inside the house were poorly lit, with only a single blinking lightbulb surrounded by a worn meshed textile material that in some day and age was thought of as a lamp. The steps in the house were tiled, in a familiar pattern of light and dark. The place smelled of moisture and light rot, though pleasantly.

On a typical writing day, I would only hear the comings and goings of the woman. I would hear her shoes on the tiles, the sound of which would grow when she was coming, and retreat when she was leaving. I could hear her fumbling for her keys. She seemed to have many of them, and it took her time to grip the right one and slide it into the lock, turn it, and open the door. The door creaked open and then shut. The sound of the door closing did fill me with a sense of dread or alarm. There was an abruptness, a heaviness to the way that door shut.

I found out from the girl who worked at the pastry shop that the woman’s name was Sylvia. I had seen her just a few times in person. She had blonde hair, of course, and a fondness for wearing black or dark blue dresses. I usually regard other writers with a necessary caution. There are dark waters there. Two dark waters don’t make a particularly pacific ocean. I was intrigued though. I wondered what Sylvia was writing. The pastry girl said she was a novelist.

One day, there was a knock at the door. My own office was a mess. I had been sorting through notes and papers, and there were piles all over the floor. When I opened the door, Sylvia came through it. She kissed me immediately. I wish I could tell you what she looked like. I can tell you her skin was smooth and tanned, and I remember the fleshy pink of her lips, and the slope of her cheek and the aroma of her hair. She wore a tiny silver medallion around her neck that I later learned depicted Jeanne D’Arc. We somehow tumbled into the papers, and I apologized for how messy and unmanageable my life was. Sylvia didn’t care. She tugged up her dress, this time white and linen, and we were soon deeply connected. She was mumbling about her ex-husband James half the time. She told me that he had gone off salmon fishing. “He loves salmon more than me,” she said. “Don’t you see? James loves salmon fishing more than me!”

She was crying. Then she came.

Afterward, she smoothed out her dress. My hips ached and I was as deflated as an old party balloon. There were pages stuck to my back. Those notes from the trip to Mexico in ’00. I still hadn’t used them. Some of the pages were soaked. “I’m sorry for the mess,” I repeated. “Could you please stop apologizing,” Sylvia said. She kissed me again and stood up. “I have to go now,” Sylvia said. “I have a deadline today.” “I’m also on deadline,” I said. I was. After she had left, I positioned myself in front of the old typewriter. There I tapped out the following line.

“Theirs was a love of escapism, but sometimes a sweaty escapism is just what this sordid life of ours requires.”

tugboat

I HAD TO GO HOME, if home is the place where you lived when you attended high school. I was down by the village green at dusk, at that forested intersection of Old Stone Street and Welsh Tract Run, where the constable usually sits in his car eating donuts and waiting to catch a speeder or two. That’s when I saw the tugboat pulling the distressed oil tanker into Sowassetville Harbor. I ran down to the pebble beach and began to walk along it, among the high reeds and tangy stink of rotting clams and seaweed. You could see the stars in the purple sky already, and I noticed the faded writing on the bow of the tugboat that read, SS Jimmy Carter. I didn’t realize that the bay here was deep enough to accommodate a tanker of that size. Maybe it had been dredged? It went right by the Smiths’ place, and then a moment or two later was off Dead Indian Point.

I followed that tanker toward the opening to the port, which was where my family still lived, only to learn that Hannah and Lewis had started living with them. These were two high school friends who had married and, basically, disowned me for having abandoned them by not living on the same continent. “You ran away from America,” they had always said. This time they were happy to see me though, while reminding me that I owed them about $700, which I didn’t remember borrowing. They had become proper suburban liberals in the meantime. Lewis, with his graying black beard, had even taken to smoking and gesturing with a pipe. Hannah had made a small fortune advising others on what was wrong with their lives. They lived comfortably and had no worries. The children were being battle trained in lacrosse. All food in the pantry had been certified organic. They wanted the money repaid though. “Pay us half up front, the other half in a month,” said Lewis.

O’Mara, another high school friend, was there too. In my time away he had been admitted to the bar and remade as the family attorney. He came out to speak with me briefly, playing with a pocket watch from time to time. He wore a three-piece suit. The family was not ready to meet with me. First we had to reach a binding agreement.

O’Mara was also disappointed to see that there was a woman with me, Rakel, who was a psychologist from Denmark. Don’t even ask me how we met or what she was doing there. O’Mara the attorney toyed with his pocket watch some more and studied the strange blonde girl in her tight red sweater. He squinted at her through pince-nez glasses. “Officially, she is not welcome at the coming legal proceedings,” he said. “But she seems nice enough. We might be able to make an exception.”

After he went back inside, Rakel and I walked down to the Sowassetville seaport. We admired the rusty oil tanker, and that proud little red tugboat, the SS Jimmy Carter. It was a fine ship, and it had helped this tiny New England maritime enclave avoid an environmental disaster. The crew was being celebrated in port. Someone brought out champagne and the captain was waving his hat. Maybe he could smuggle us out.

key west

I WAS ON MY WAY HOME when I passed by the café. There were colorful balloons tied to the awnings and customers out the door and into the streets, drinking coffee and beer and kombucha, and spooning mouthfuls of creamy tort into hungry mouths. Through the glass I could see them hoisting the girl up and down on a chair. “Twenty-four, twenty-five!”

Was that how young she was? She already looked different though. Did a few days really age a woman that much? More mature, I suppose. There was something more captivating about the way her dark hair dangled loosely around her shoulders. The young lady saw me briefly through the glass. “Happy birthday,” I mouthed to her, and she mouthed back, “Thank you.” Then I left her alone again, as I had promised myself, and went along my way.

Our new house was in some derelict back district, an old tenement building with crumbling brick stairs. The floors inside were just wooden planks laid out side by side. My ex-wife was in the kitchen stirring a black cauldron of stew and listening to a podcast about the end of the world. When I came inside, she told me to be quiet and that she was very busy. I tiptoed across the floor and picked up a sack of books and was out the door.

Chan, my editor, pulled up in a jeep with the top down. He was in the driver’s seat as usual, looking like, well, an editor. He wore his glasses and a crisp white shirt. His black hair was combed back and fixed into place. Chan honked the horn and I left the house and got in. Maple Leaf, an Estonian hippie percussionist, complete with beard, tribal headband, and perplexed look, was also seated in the back. We began to drive and soon we were out of the town bearing down on the Florida Keys.

When we pulled into sunny Key West, we cruised past Sloppy Joe’s Bar. There was a shouting match going between some bearded, Proud Boys-looking figures at Sloppy Joe’s and at Irish Kevin’s next door. You know the types, braggarts with Viking rune tattoos and piercings. One pulled out a semiautomatic and began spraying the Irishmen with bullets. An Irish Kevin responded with a blast from a grenade launcher. Chan just kept driving toward the wharf, as cool as cracked ice. He had said there was a boat that could take us to Havana.

“Welcome to Florida, boys,” Chan announced, as we drove through the billowing and stinking grenade launcher smoke. “It’s real fucked up.” Maple Leaf was in the back observing the scene and tapping lightly on a bongo drum. I think he was high. “Why did you even move down here anyway, Chan,” I yelled. “If you don’t mind me asking.” “For the weather,” Chan said.