Category: Film

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Zzzzzz…

Well, Stalker was a bit of a disappointment. Not because it was an uninteresting film, I fell asleep about five minutes into it–that kind of sleep where you think you’re awake but each blink lasts about three minutes, and then the movie’s over. I don’t think the film was as experimental and non-linear as I experienced it. What a drag. The last time it came to SF was in something like 1992. Note to self: Do not spend eight hours pruning and hauling before three-hour meditative Russian films.

I’m learning, the hard way, that framesets are not a good idea. Hmmm. Does anyone have suggestions for this budding webdesigner about what to do when single frames appear in search engines with no reference to the parent frameset? BC is working on something, but all of the literature I’ve come across advises the same thing. Don’t use framesets. Great. Okay, back to the drawing board.

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A Bum Knee, Solaris, and Manny 18 Years Ago

I fell down my stairs, again, on Sunday, a few hours after banging into my “health chair” while grappling for the light in my studio downstairs. It didn’t bug me until tonight, my knee, after doing a little Christmas shopping, well, actually buying myself the new Criterion release of Contempt while shopping for my loved ones, and then after climbing my hill and the flight of stairs to my flat and, whammo, instant inflammation. I made a long entry last night in my blog about Manny–I spent an hour or so on it–but then inadvertently deleted it. So I’ll try to recap, although the throbbing in my knee and the half bottle of wine I drank at BC’s will surely temper the sentiment of last night into something perhaps less sappy and hopefully less lengthy.

So I went to see Solaris with Bob last night, a fairly decent stylish and moody remake of the Tarkovsky film, directed by Steven Soderbergh. George Clooney plays a psychologist, “Chris,” who is called to investigate the strange goings-on in the space station orbiting the planet Solaris. Upon his arrival, he discovers that two of the inhabitants of the station have killed themselves, and after a night of restless sleep filled with unsettling dreams of his recently deceased wife, who had also killed herself, he wakes to find her, his wife, actually there with him.

Last night was the anniversary of the night that I met Manny, 18 years earlier, while working at Marcello’s Pizza on Castro, when he picked me up (saying he was 40), despite my protestation that he should be picking on someone his own age (I had just turned 19). The movie made me think of a dream that I had of Manny in 1993, about a year and a half after his death, while renting a freezing cold apartment in Florence with Bob from the Marchsesa Frescobaldi. In my dream, while driving down Market Street, the sun setting, the city bathed in that late summer golden haze, I noticed a man on the side of the road who looked like Manny, seated in a wheelchair with a blanket over his lap, soaking up the last of the rays of sunlight. As I got closer I realized it WAS him, slammed on the brakes and ran to him, ranting hysterically, unbelievable. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing there, why he was alive, but I was so happy to see him again and to hold him. He held me for the longest time without saying anything, and then said, “Ya know, Christian (he always called me that, but it’s not my name), I’m really happy here, very cumftable (he grew up in the Bronx), and I’m going to be okay. And you’re going to be okay, too…” I got back in the car, drove away, and woke up, feeling that sadness that’s like a boulder on your diaphragm. Something was over.

For months after his death, I had thought that I had seen him here and there, and even once leapt from my car and chased a guy down, thinking it was Manny. I had so deeply and intensely loved him, a love bound to his physicality, the smell of his breath and the taste of his skin, that I couldn’t convince my senses that they were to be deprived of his molecules. Waking from my dream, I understood that he was completely gone, and more importantly, that I was letting go of him, too.

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Eddie G.

I spent the entire day yesterday at the Castro theater, watching pre-code films. The films were selected by Mick Lasalle, our local film critic and the author of a book on female stars of the pre-code era, Complicated Women, which I wasn’t that crazy about. He’s an excellent critic–witty and insightful, but his book, although encyclopedic and thorough, didn’t offer an interesting or new perspective on the period or the women, although his passion for Norma Shearer is contagious, and his crush on her is a delight to witness. The showing of these films coincides with the release of his new book, Complicated Men. The first two films were only so so, typical dramas of the period with fast talking reporters, tough guys, and platinum blondes. But, Lord have mercy, the third film featured a performance by Edward G. Robinson that had me sobbing in the 9th row center.

The film was Mervyn LeRoy’s 1932 Two Seconds, referring to the two final seconds of brain activity following execution by electrocution. It opens with Robinson being led to the chair. As the switch to the electric chair is turned on, we slowly cut to the events leading to his death. Of course it’s a “tomato,” and of course it’s money. After Robinson’s best friend, a highly paid riveter, like Robinson (“That’s more money per week than a professor!”), falls off a building in an argument with Robinson about his wife being a slut (the camera follows him all the way to the ground!), Robinson becomes slowly and magnificently unhinged. Unable to work due to his nerves, his wife goes back to the dance hall, supposedly, but is actually sleeping around with the dance hall boss. When Robinson catches the two lovers together, he shoots and kills the floozy. I haven’t read about this film in any film noir anthologies, or maybe I have but forgot, a much more likely scenario, but it seems to be an important precursor stylistically and thematically.

Following his sentencing, he pleads with the judge that the state’s killing the wrong man, that although he had always wanted to kill his wife, he had finally paid his debts, that he should have been killed when he was living off of his wife’s indiscretions, when he wasn’t a man, that he was now free from her, free from his dept–he screams, “You should have killed me then, you’re killing the wrong man!!!” I was totally convinced, sobbing right along with him. God, what an actor. In all of his films that I’ve seen, he consistently moved beyond the character acting of the time into a realism that can still shock today.

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Two Saints, Godard, Work and a New Haircut

Überbearpornstar Jack Radcliffe gave me a big sweaty hug at the Castro Street Street fair on Sunday last. The crowd parted and the sun revealed his dazzling smile and outstretched arms. He’ll always be a Bellini saint to me. I spent the following Thursday evening with a less-hairy and more-than-likely less-hung saint, Messaien’s Saint Francois d’Assise at the SF Opera, which aside from being melodically challenging and brilliantly staged, Neue Sachlichkeit meets the Franciscans, and five hours long, introduced me to the ondes martenot, an electronic instrument dating from 1928 similar to the theremin, but with fixed notes and a keyboard, which Stravinsky described as “the musical equivalent of a colonoscopy.” I’m not sure that I would agree with Stravinsky, unless he thought colonoscopies were stimulating fabulous experiences. Seeing the opera in San Francisco is so much more comfortable than what I imagine the experience to be like in other big cities. First of all, you could wear a t-shirt, or khakis after Labor Day, or a pink tuxedo and nobody notices, not even the society people, who all wore black, as they don’t deviate from what’s expected of them seasonally, and would anything they say about me get back to me anyway? Their little world is very closed and their behavior very apelike–all posturing and preening and feral. I was very hot, as in sweating like a pig, in my Dolce & Gabbana chartreuse velvet suit. (80% off at Wilkes Bashford.) I am definitely dressing like the little dude in line at the bar downstairs next time and going for the t-shirt and gap khakis look. I’m sure that all of us non-society people who saw him thought the same thing–forget this velvet designer crap, I’m wearing my underwear next time! The opera was pretty stunning, with a rotating stage consisting mainly of an S-shaped ramp with a detachable snow-covering which hovered a few feet over it in the winter scene. On either side of the stage was a 3-level open tower, out of the second floor of one a blue angel with one wing appeared cantilevered over the stage below.

Last night I saw Godard’s new film, In Praise of Love, which I can’t honestly say I liked or not. I and the audience (all 5 of us) slept through half of it. I think I’d like to see it again, for what I did see seemed intriguing–a film about a director making a film about the four stages of love, and the obstacles that frustrate creativity. The first half was black and white, and looked exactly like a new wave film from the early 60’s, but not self-consciously. The second half was filmed in digital video, but that’s where I got lost in slumberland, so not much else to say about it. There did seem to be no joy, and a lot of anti-American sentiment which, while a necessary plot device, left me feeling slightly battered.

His Contempt is still one of my favorite films.

Today at work I set up an e-mail account for my boss’ friend, who is traveling to Bali next week for a month. She runs a travel service offering scuba tours of Indonesia. She’s currently her only client. She and the boss have property in Panama and are planning on building a house together. Their joint ventures remind me of Bob’s parents’ 2 big investments; Israeli oil and California City. After his parents’ Israeli oil stock became worthless, it was discovered that their property in California City couldn’t be developed because of the desert tortoise.

Yesterday I got my hair cut by the same barber who sexually harassed me a few haircuts ago. (Little Dave calls him “Big Red.”) He’s purchased the shop down the street from me and is going to make it into the haircutting equivalent of the Starbucks on 18th Street. A bear barbershop. His demeanor was disappointingly subdued, but he did shave my neck with a straight razor. Hot!

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A Wedding, Silent Japanese Films, Peter, Lee, Emily and I Want My Beard Back

My family is in town for my little brother Mark’s wedding, all of them, and they’re all staying with me, on the floor, in my bed, my studio… Carol and Sue are putting the finishing touches on Keith’s (the bride’s) dress, 80 buttons, Carol’s design–a low-back silk/satin sheath with a bateau neckline, lace appliqué and pearls, fish-tail hem, detachable silk organza sweep train. It’s stunning. Carol’s designs remind me of Adrian’s–typically cut on the bias and form fitting. She has a line of clothes called “Retreads” using vintage designs and made from vintage table cloths, wool blankets and such.

I saw three really interesting silent films at the PFA on Sunday. The films were presented with the live accompaniment of a Japanese benshi, one of the few remaining practitioners in Japan. Benshi provided simultaneous spoken interpretations of the dialogue and plot of silent films during screenings in the silent film era, which lasted in Japan well through the 1930’s. It was an art form that was integrated into the experience of silent film, similar to the narrator in Kabuki. The benshi, Midori Sawato, has been performing for 30 years, and although I didn’t understand much of what she said, her tonal inflections and mimicry of the dialogue really brought the images to life. My friend Earl Jackson, who speaks fluent Japanese, told me that she not only related interpretations of the dialog and scenario, but also offered her own interpretations of and speculations about manners, language and style.

One of the films was a very early film by Ozu, I Was Born, But…, made before he developed his signature visual style of single long shots, compositions with no closeups, panning, or tracking shots. The film is about how two young boys learn about the hierarchy of the Japanese social structure, coming to terms with who has power in the adult world and why, while realizing also that it doesn’t apply to them yet, and working it while they still can. There was also a short about a man who is killed by his lover’s father and then comes back as a ghost to successfully woo her. He returns to the world of the living only after trying and failing quite comically to get comfortable in his teeny little grave. The final film was Cecile B. DeMille’s The Cheat, and featured an evil high society Japanese character, who BRANDS his white socialite would-be-lover when she fails to surrender the pink after borrowing $10,000 to cover for her failed stock market investment–and remember this was all shown with the benshi’s near-hysterical renderings of all male and female dialog, in Japanese.

I’ve reconnected with my very dear friend, Peter, my oldest and bestest friefnd in town, with whom, for some inexplicable reason, I’d lost contact. His boyfriend of 13 years is leaving him, or until last night, was, anyway, but now it seems that they’re willing to call time out until the boyfriend works through his confusing and conflicting desires. Peter came over for dinner Friday and I wouldn’t let him go. Have you ever enjoyed someone’s presence so intensely that you fear the silence that will follow their departure? In Wuthering Heights, Cathy describes her love for Heathcliff and their kindred souls in increasingly histrionic terms, culminating in the realization “I AM HEATHCLIFF!” I AM PETER!

Speaking of Peter’s once and maybe future boyfriend–he has opened a Chinese antique shop south of market–I went to the opening tonight. It was like Auntie Mame’s place after the trip to the Orient. Oh my God. If you need a Tang Dynasty horse, get on down to “Artique.”

Speaking of antiquities, I picked up my latest piece of California Faience today–a matte blue vase, tapered severely at the base (making it top-heavy and thus scarce), with an elegant flanged top and inwardly tapered lip.

Tonight over dinner with the fabulous and talented artist Emily, we talked a lot about consumption, and love. As I was signing the bill, I realized that I had lost the ability to write cursive in sixth grade due to an intense crush that I had on Lee Little. Lee… I didn’t quite understand and couldn’t articulate the attraction that I felt for him back then, but instead adopted his printed upper case R’s and E’s as a way of having him in some way. Every time I wrote my full name, which has three R’s and two E’s, I was making love to Lee Little. Being him was the next best thing to loving him–or the only thing I could think of.

Okay, so after my brother’s wedding, I’m growing my beard back. I keep stroking my phantom fur, and there’s face, only face…

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Mole Poblana and The Miguel Arteta Film Festival

Bob is at the Opera tonight, sans me, for Turandot. We went to see the production a few years ago when I was buddies with the Development Director, who gave us free front-row right corner seats. The far right corner. There was all this hype about the lion that they made for the production–it was even paraded through town for the opening–and sets by David Hockney. Because of our seats, we were able to see only a giant paw and the waving hand of the princess, and the far left corner of the Hockney set.

I am listening to the strangest compilation of sounds, burned onto a CD and presented to me by Mamooshka! last night. He came over to feast on chicken molé poblano with me at Big Chrissy’s, and he also presented us with the strangest but oddly compelling bottle of wine, shaped like what you would imagine a ribbed condom to look like if it were filled with 750ml of wine and made of glass. Chris and I kept rubbing it all night, like Marylee stroking the oilwell on her daddy’s desk at the end of Written on the Wind. So the CD–imagine Nino Rota lost in the Bulgarian Girls’ camp with Serge Gainsbourg and… and.. was that a harpsichord? What am I listening to? Mamooshka!, thank you for making all these sensory experiences possible.

The one thing I regretted was not being able to indulge in Mamoo’s dessert completely, due to an allergy to pecans (note to future hosts and hostesses). As a kid, my parents, who are generally wonderful supportive liberal freethinkers, somehow could not grasp that I was allergic to pecans, or especially walnuts, because the family pastry from the old country had walnuts in it. Dad learned to make it from his mom, and she from hers, and on up the tree… Even now, when they come to visit, and Dad proudly offers me the family pastry, both he and my mom together ask in that same sincerely surprised and disappointed way when I once again gently decline to have a near-death experience to prove to them that I am allergic “You’re allergic to walnuts?”

I’m having a little Miguel Arteta film fest tonight all by my Chrissy. I so admired The Good Girl and Chuck and Buck, particularly Arteta’s balance of parody and sincerity, and artifice and depth, that I’m watching Star Maps, his first film. Okay so maybe one film doesn’t qualify as a film festival. If a film from 1930 is “classic” and Barry Bonds is a “legend,” and you can order Huevos Rancheros “with eggs,” then a “film festival” can be me and my little movie.

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Third Thundercrack! and Studio Visit

So my meeting with the museum curator went great. She was very encouraging and amazingly honest. At one point she asked if she was being too rough, and when I responded that since most of my friends tend to be too nice to say “Chris, this isn’t working for me,” I encouraged her to be honest since I respect her opinion and that I could take it, well then she really let me have it, but it was all really accurate and smart and she even confirmed some of my own misgivings about several pieces. She said the work was very strong, and when looking at Scylla and Charybdis, she actually gasped and said, “I’ve never seen anything like this before…” and added that it showed a real deep engagement with my subject matter and with looking.

So anyway, this morning I went to see a film at the Jewish Film Festival that a friend of mine from New York, Lily made. It was a little gem about Lily’s relationship with her father, more specifically about her coming to terms with the complexity of her father, who cheated on his wife but then later took exquisite care of her in her dying days. Lily asks her bedridden dad, his legs amputated, why none of his children can communicate with him, and he just blows off her question–she’s left to deal with the subject on her own–and she does just that. Afterward we had lunch at Luna Piena, which I guess is now just Luna, with her west coast friends and family, and drank wine that David made. Which is probably why I have a headache at the moment.

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Tonight and Tomorrow

Well, the jam is pretty tasty, but I think I heated it to too high a temperature. It’s a little too firm, but still well within acceptable parameters. It’s hard to reach that delicate balance between runny and firm that your grandmother seemed to be able to reach without a candy thermometer.

Big Chrissy and I watched the new Todd Solondz film Storytelling tonight, which I thought was great. Not as stellar as Happiness–bleaker, and more cynical. The characters weren’t given as much depth, too. I find that he often creates characters who are defined by a particular flaw or idiosyncrasy (and sometimes even named after them, like “Hope” in Happiness), but rather than be limited by their one-dimensionality, they’re surprisingly complex. So although these characters were interesting and given great dialog, they seemed a little thinly drawn. I really like his directorial style, though, particularly in how stilted all the acting is, which somehow isolates the actors and draws attention to their actions and words, and abstracts the emotional content.

Tomorrow the museum curator is coming over to visit my studio. I’m hoping to finish this piece that I’ve been toying with for the last few weeks, so that I’ll have three pieces from my Thundercrack! series to show her in addition to all of my other obsessive works. Keep your fingers crossed!

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Ashes, Ann Miller

I just got back from the movies, Wong Kar Wai’s Ashes of Time, which started an hour late due to a burned out bulb so I was late getting home to talk to BC, who hung up on me, so instead, I’ll snuggle up with my Dear Blog and update you on my evening with Ann Miller last night!

I drove down to Palo Alto this morning to pick up my new coffee table with Big Chrissy, which turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment (not original finish, no identifying marks, scuffed well beyond “great shape”), then on to the LAB’s board retreat with my house guest Carla, an experimental playwright with an association to the language poets, she’s married to one, who’s in town from Detroit for a residency at the LAB. I stopped in as a member of their advisory board to see what was up and say hi, and to have Carla talk to the board about her residency. The retreat was at Minnette’s, an old pal and photographer (her son is Michael, the film director). I was on the board for about 5 years, and last year left to serve in an advisory capacity. Elizabeth, the administrative director, greeted me with a pat on the stomach and “Chriiiiis, you’ve GROWN so muuuuuuuuch,” and Richard greeted me with “You’re so gray…” Have I gone downhill that fast? Anyway, Ashes of Time was great–almost incomprehensible but with fabulous fight scenes and deeply moving highly manipulative expressions of emotional intensity that just popped out of nowhere and left you crying before you could really figure out why.

Okay, so the evening with Ann Miller started out with a little reception for her, at the Castro Theater. She held court in the lobby, surrounded by drag queens and old movie buffs. I decided to go upstairs and grab a bite before introducing myself and telling her how much I totally worshiped her, but ran into Roberto from the BAR and had a few too many glasses of wine, so by the time I meandered back downstairs, she was gone! The pre-show entertainment was pretty swell, though, with a tap-dancing drag queen recreating Miller’s “Shaking the Blues Away” number and Connie Champagne doing a very believable Judy Garland. At one point, the drag Ann stepped up to the mike and said “I have some bad news–I’ve just been told that I’m not Ann Miller….” and then introduced the real McCoy, who was interviewed for about an hour by Jan Wahl, who asked fairly tame questions, but the crowd went wild whenever Ann said anything. After the interview, the drag queen in front of me pulled off his big hair, opened his suitcase, set a mirror on top, took off his makeup, slipped out of his leopard-skin dress and into a gray sweatshirt. During the screening of the film, Kiss Me Kate in 3D, he and his companion took numerous flash photographs of the film. Can’t wait to see those…

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Lovely and Amazing and Doris and Rock

I’ve had a few days to settle back into San Francisco, and now back to the movies. Tonight I saw a little bit of Rock Hudson and Doris Day in Lover Come Back, not enough to get a complete take on the film, but enough to want to see more of it, and to revisit Pillow Talk and to think about Doris and Rock. They’re so much fun to watch, I think it’s because they present a humorous inversion of traditional sex roles. Doris is a total top, always in control, never duped–even with the soft focus close-ups, her femininity just seems so, well, manly. Rock is just dreamy, a big cream puff who is typically manipulative and charming, often at the same time and with his own vain interests in mind, and seems to always end up is some state of partial nudity. In the end, Rock’s seemingly misguided feminine antics win out over Doris’ masculine logic, in a unique perversion of film tradition. (Nick and Nora experience similar dynamics, but without the partial nudity.)

I also saw Lovely and Amazing tonight, a fine film with really solid acting and a good script. It was like a Todd Solondz film without the perverted edge–ordinary screwed up people, wasted lives and regrets, and bitter, angry women. And their adoped crack ho’ babies. And lots of laughs, liposuction, and inconsequential men.