The Movies, or the bar at The Movies

They are unique in comparison, you know, unique next to any other traditional watering hole. It’s the flow you see. From opening to the first screening, slowly and steadily the place fills up and the volume of everything increases. The rumbling of the glasses and the human chatter grows, rises, until reaching its apex.

Then empty.

Most often occurring on the full hour, well and the occasional half an hour, everything dies, and all becomes quite.

No more clinking glasses or quarrelling sounds of forever-seemingly-angry espresso machines.

Waiters and waitresses step out, lean against walls and smoke cigarettes. Meanwhile on the empty inside, seemingly out from the walls, the smooth, almost pretentious, Chet Baker-ish kind of jazz reappears in the sound system. Then after a passing while of emptiness a person at the bar, and then another, and another, and the story repeats itself. New people, same scenario. different film, same soundscape. different drinks, same conversations.

The sounds; quarrelling, clinking, snapping, braking, laughing, pouring, drinking, overwriting sounds. Now all in a jazz-les universe.

Then as if, again, flushed away.

Empty…

Once standing in a Japanese flower garden, there, a fountain.

A broad bamboo cane collecting water.

It was mounted on some kind of a rotating axle, and when full it tipped over with the gentle help of gravity. The gathered rain water poured out of the bamboo cane into a small pond. Then weight less, imbalanced, it repositioned itself under the stream, and started gathering.

From where i stood the pouring process always looked identical to the prior, even though the water was always fresh.