Gardenias tucked behind ear, sit-down simply breakfasts, pinball, ham and cheese croissant sandwiches, a fistful of watermelon, slurping root beer floats while watching Critters, dancing on booze-slippery floors, finding Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth at the Ashby flea market; guitarist's fingerwork at the Stork Club, described by Kevin as "butterflies mating. On your finger." And Tran Vu's brutal bloody book of short stories (and no wonder, it's all history), The Dragon Hunt:

"More than 20 years later, my generation still lives with their intermissable wars. Whether they came of age in Hanoi, Saigon, New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, or Paris, we're too young to have participated in the bloody games, but were old enough to have suffered from them, to be conscious of Vietnam's tragedies. In my stories, people undergo terrible transformations, from being victims, abandoned, to being rapists, torturers of others. This is what can happen to us in war, I have noticed."