Followup, as promised. From the archives, before Heathen existed as a web site and I was forced to share my wit and wisdom via the mailing list named below. Arrant Knaves, represent!
From: chet@netexplorer.com Sun Jul 26 22:36:12 1998
To: “Some Arrant Knaves I Know”
Subject: David Fucking CarradineSo I’m sitting in the bar in the Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin, right? Not at some nebulous point in the past; right the fuck NOW. Jan Watson and I are over here for some client meetings, and rather than zoom over at some godawful hour of the morning, we came over on Sunday night.
So we’re all checked in, and have retired to the aforementioned bar for an aperitif whilst we revisit the documents for Monday’s meeting. It’s a quiet night at the Driskill; we’ve got the bar to ourselves. The bartender’s a chatty kid who’s quick to refill our Shiners, and we’re actually getting some work done.
A guy wanders through and asks the bartender if it’s a nonsmoking bar. Of course not, says the bartender. So the new guy leaves, only to return moments later to sit down behind the grand piano and begin tickling the ivories. At this point, Watson and I notice something unusual about the impromptu pianist. He is, as it were, David Carradine. David “Snatch the Ivories From My Hand, Grasshopper” Carradine. He of a thousand episodes of two (count ’em) Kung Fu serieses. He of (no doubt) an eminently forgettable series of movies running on USA even as we speak. A genuine B-Movie Icon. Playing occasionally bad jazz piano in the Driskill Hotel bar at 10:30 on a Sunday night, apropos of nothing.
I love Texas.
Godspeed, Grasshopper.
Chetster I am concerned that you have email archives dating back to 1998. Did we learn nothing from Enron?
On the other hand, what an awesome recount of that evening. You did leave out the part where you tried to get me to make a request…
“Play Misty for me judo boy!”
RIP Grasshopper!
Heh. Well, for most of the last 10 years, hard drives were getting so much bigger so fast that I just copied the entire previous drive into a subdirectory on the new machine. This is why, on my Mac, I have nested folders from my little black Thinkpad that contain folders from the Dell that preceded it, etc.
Buried in there, of course, was an old Eudora mbx file that has, in addition to the Carradine bit, discussions of NetEx deals at PGS, PDVSA, Exxon, and of course SemaTech. Ah, the boom years. They were fun while they lasted!
A couple of friends loosely connected to the movie industry have posted stories around the web about how just freakin’ cool Carradine was to them in various settings. Seems like he was a genuinely sweet, if often downright weird, guy.