Berl's is in a former gallery space, subleased from two artists, with exposed brick walls that have been painted white, barrel ceilings, a gray Lego sculpture of Walt Whitman, and an eighteen-chair area for readings.
As Gay Bar and She's White barrel along, dropping queasy puns and sharp guitar riffs in equal measure, you feel you are listening to a musical equivalent of Brass Eye: a band for whom no subject is too touchy to satirise.
They look like orange-and-black-striped shields, mating on the tops of the tops of the smooth, blue-green leaves, or on the undersides, where they lay their white, barrel-shaped eggs in between chewing, always chewing.
The river has little ripply waves, maybe from a speedboat out beyond the white barrels.
Some kids were splashing in the water, which rippled from a passing speedboat that made the white barrels rise and fall.
There, a few dozen white barrels line the edges of the rooftop; inside, a bright green jam is bubbling in the heat.
Then the white barrels, the wooded hills on the far bank of the river, and beyond the hills the other side of Connecticut, the trip to the whaling ship at Mystic Seaport, somewhere out there Cape Cod, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa.
I was sitting next to you, taking it all in, the brown-green water, the wet ropes between the white barrels, the gleam of the lotion on your arm.
This camp sits in the south, near Sidon, behind a Lebanese Army barrier that looks like a conceptual sculpture -- red and white barrels piled precariously among sandbags sprouting weeds as tall as a child.
The sun is shining, Julia's waving him on, the white barrels are rising and falling gently, and what he wants is to go back to the wooden sign with the tomahawk and start waiting for the shore of the river.
This no-name place is gentler than a beach, more quiet, more shut away, with the slope behind him, the green-brown water in front of him, the white barrels moving up and down a little, as if the water's breathing.
