Killer Cocktail Read Online Free PDF

we’ll talk again later.” Aunt Cynthia arose and swirled off, leaving us staring after her, which was, I’m sure, the desired effect.
    Dinner was served. The Asian-French fusion menu was elegant and delicious, the wine and champagne were superb and plentiful, and the tablemates were shrill and annoying. We were with two of David’s college buddies who, Tricia whispered from behind her napkin, she had seen drunk and naked far too often while visiting David at Brown. Brent was an investment banker who kept leaving the table to scream into his cell phone, so he didn’t really even count as a tablemate.
    Then there was Jake Boone, a documentary filmmaker who kept trying to explain his vision of “wordless cinema du monde,” which sounded suspiciously like silent movies. And his Portuguese girlfriend and camera assistant, Lara Del
Guidice, who kept interrupting Jake every time he approached making a point. Usually, she wanted to expound on some obscure cinematic theory that baffled even him. I began to understand the appeal of silent movies for Jake: He clearly had a very noisy home life.
    I could tell Cassady had already decided she didn’t like him at all because she kept asking him questions, just as he was about to put food in his mouth. Between Lara and Cassady, the guy was going to starve to death. Unless pretension can sustain life by itself.
    “Then, your ‘wordless’ cinema,” Cassady prompted, just as Jake got a dumpling all the way to his lips, “emphasizes image over story.”
    The fork hovered in front of Jake’s mouth for another split second, but the temptation to talk overrode his hunger. He put the fork down and began to pontificate. “The image is the story.” He was momentarily distracted as Lara picked up the fork, ate the dumpling, then started drawing on the tablecloth with the fork. “That allows the story to transcend image and makes words irrelevant,” Jake pressed on. “Words are weighed down by their emotional connotation and distort the true expression of ideas, which is found in the silent image.”
    Lara fed him a dumpling and took over. “Jake’s vision for cinema recharges film with its mythic power by stripping away the verbal. Words, unlike images, have no existence beyond their immediate function in film. Their relationship is syntagmatic and not paradigmatic.”
    I’ve often wondered if people who are full of hot air are aware of it and just don’t care. Maybe they just can’t help themselves.
    “Any form of communication that relies on words is inferior,” Jake informed me when Tricia explained what I did for a living.

    “So this conversation is useless,” I said, as pleasantly as possible.
    “It will suffice, but it will not transcend.”
    I was considering showing him how my middle finger could communicate and transcend, all without words, but I didn’t want to help him make his point. “You’d prefer that I draw people a picture?” I tried to imagine the pictographs that might answer some of the letters I get, particularly the ones about love triangles gone bad. On the other hand, there’d be a great after-market in the modern art world. Hang that over your sofa, baby.
    Jake shook his shaggy head with great disdain. “I want people to escape the tyranny of the word by rejecting their media-dominated lives and embracing the purity of noneditorialized experience.”
    “For a guy with no faith in words, you sure talk a lot,” Cassady pointed out.
    “Words can be a beginning. Foreplay. But for the union of thoughts and passions to truly illuminate, it has to live in a space beyond words. Not everyone’s equipped to dispense with words, but we’re moving there. Now, it’s cell phones with cameras. Soon, it’ll be motion-capture gloves and 3-D visors so we can make art on the move. In the streets. Without words.” Jake leaned over, trying to get closer to Cassady, apparently operating under the delusion that he was winning her over.
    His moment was