Well, so far I've accomplished some important work this holiday weekend. With our cross-country move to Portland coming up in less than 2 months, I spent yesterday (rather than packing) watching 2 of my all-time favorite movies, Romancing the Stone (1984) and Scarface (1983). You may be interested to learn that these movies, while very different on the surface, share a very important element in common: the very strong anti-Colombian sentiment that marked the early-mid 1980s as the drug wars made headlines, and Cubans and Colombians warred for turf in Miami. In Scarface, Colombians are portrayed as ruthless & sadistic killers in a drug deal gone wrong in a South Beach Hotel. Drug smuggling also plays a role in Romancing the Stone, when Joan Wilder and Jack T. Colton, on the run from a bloodthirsty Colombian general, take shelter in a cargo plane wrecked in the jungle and get stoned on the piles of marijuana they find in the fusillage. Which is pretty funny - due to the strong anti-drug climate at the time, they couldn't just light up a joint; they had to make a freaking campfire out of the stuff and then pretend they "accidentally" got high. It's a pretty classic scene, and I would argue that their romance begins under the influence of weed - and a little tequila.
In between screenings, I lolled about with Nate in Riverside Park reading Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary. It was one of those rare, early, breezy summer days when you can actually go to a park, smell the flowers, look around and think, "New York's not so bad..."
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