Speed and Bill
Last night, I ended up
hanging out with a few of Miriam's friends. While
this is normally an experience in and of itself as Miriam's friends are
often colorful and intelligent, last night, we would be hanging out
with Speed.
To Preface:
When you get Roadrunner, they can't help but give you 40 or so cable channels even if you don't pay for them. I don't really understand the glitch that makes it possible, but for some reason, when we just had internet for a few months at the apartment, we got the basic channels and a few odd ones like the Independent Film Channel. Because it was our only source of movies and anything that wasn't a crappy sitcom or a rerun, we watched a whole lot of it, and caught a movie called "The Cruise."
IMDB sums it up as an "Affectionate portrait of Tim "Speed" Levitch, a tour guide for Manhattan's Gray Line double-decker buses..." More than just a portrait, the movie is a platform for Speed's ruminations on living life, really "seeing" the world, the city, the things around you, and everything in between. When he's talking, you often feel that he lives in a world completely apart from ours, looking at everything from a very different perspective. At the core of it, you really don't know if he's brilliant, or crazy, or both.
Check out this interview over at citypaper.net to really get a feel for what Speed is about.
So hanging out with him was a lot of fun, but I realized we were neglecting the person who's apartment it actually was, and struck up conversations with Bill.
Turns out that Speed's friend Bill Brunner is actually really awesome
too. He at first seemed shy and maybe a bit apprehensive at having a
gaggle of young 20 somethings overrun his apartment, but once I got
talking to him, he had a lot to say and was a lot of fun. I
didn't probe him too much for info, but I did get out of him that he
travels the world working as an architect, and most recently worked on two houses
on the incredibly impressive Managua Cathedral
(Catedral
de
Managua) with Legorreta
Architects. He was very cool to talk to, and I wish that Tate,
our resident up-and-coming architect at Common Ground had
been there to chat as well.
