We had a ritual. I would drive into the city to see a show, usually at SF Jazz in the bustling Hayes Valley, which happened to be his favorite haunt. We would always meet at the Blue Bottle coffee kiosk. After a far-reaching philosophical discussion about the role of hallucinogens in the evolution of human consciousness or an in-depth Jungian analysis of Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, we would head over to Two Sisters or Arlequin for a late afternoon bottle of wine. I would then take him out to an early dinner and go to the show on my own. Sometimes I even took him with me. It was always a delight to see my whimsical friend.
The first thing to say about Elysium FC is that it doesn’t exist, and never did. The club’s ghost stadium – kinda like a Spectral San Siro, a Stade des Fantômes – is an amazing place at 3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. Elysium FC will never die is the ghost chant from the ghostcrowded terraces. Elysium FC will never die. There is something in the air here. Something deep, human, full of belief. Transcendental. I walk around. I move like a phantom. I’m at a loss to explain it though, this vibe. Then my phone rings. It’s André Breton.
He has this to say:
Everything flows to make us believe that there exists a certain part the mind where life and death, the real and the imagined, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
And I think ‚ Oui, André, c’est vrai‘ but the phone goes dead.
So I WhatsApp my reply: Tout est vert, tout d’un coup.