Maya VaVoom

Bryce Digdug was kind enough to treat Junk Thief to see the Lucha VaVoom show at San Francisco's historic Fillmore Auditorium where a shrine to Janis Joplin watches over the coat check stand. The show featured sex, violence and brown matter. We enjoyed it and felt it was worth the price. (Bryce won the tickets at a bingo game on the campus of Jesuit USF.)

When Junk Thief got back home, he told Mr. Sullivan all about it. At first he tought Junk Thief had seen his old friend Vivian Valvoom from San Diego. Mr. Sullivan was more intrigued that they have been playing several years at Los Angeles' fabulous Mayan Theater. It is a wonder that equals Copan which Junk Thief has visited three times. Junk Thief was probably the only Spanish speaker in the audience. The wrestlers were actually Mexican but probably not Mayan though a bit of the Mayan empire and Mesoamerica includes southern Mexico. Mexico and at least two Vancouvers are in North America. There is also a Mayan Theater in Denver that Junk Thief plans to check out in April.

Hush, Hush Sweet Junk Thief

I wrapped up the silent film festival weekend with two completely unrelated films as the afternoon moved into early evening.

A restored print of Her Wild Oat discovered in the Czech Republic and starring Colleen Moore was a nice treat. I first discovered her nearly 40 years ago in middle school when I picked up her autobiography in the bargain bin. Though she was the top box office draw in 1926 and 1927, she is pretty much forgotten by non-silent movie fans. Ironically, Louise Brooks was relatively obscure at the time and considered a cheap Colleen Moore knock off. Colleen had the flapper thing going long before Louise went to Berlin to be Lulu. Perhaps because she retired fairly happily and spent the next 50 years happily married and sane hurt her reputation as a legend. Her persona was somewhere between Clara Bow and Mary Pickford. Speaking of which, the feature was preceded by a two minute techincolor screen test of Pickford having dropped the orphan-waif and looking vampish, seductive and ready to play Lulu. Her Wild Oat merged the hard working orphan with the gauche flapper with scenes at the Del Coronado Hotel that seemed the template for Some Like It Hot to ultimately copy.
Having such a light but touching comedy before Teinosuke Kinugasa's Jujiro was not the best build up for such an intensely dark film. I appreciated that it was not a film about samurais, geishas, martial arts or an Ozu family chamber drama. Its central theme of a younger brother declaring to his big sister "I will follow you to the end of the earth" carried greater resonance after the screen faded to black, and it was all so dark -- sets painted gray and filmed at night -- with plenty of rain, blood, ash, painted hussies, a greedy old madam and a host of villains with bad teeth.

As always, this festival is the best trip to a foreign land -- the first quarter of the 20th century -- and I come away wishing I'd seen even more in the series.

Junk Thief Visits The City of Unnatural History

I am back from four days in San Diego, a place I've not visited in at least three years and have suffered not a second because of my absence.

My stay was at the incredibly odd Manchester Grand Hyatt at a productive conference but a conference all the same.

The waterfront and and convention center areas embody what I tried so hard to keep an open mind about but just could not help coming back to my long standing assessment: everything in San Diego is either bland, freshly dusted and sterile or smarmy, spooky and spiky.

Downtown has the feeling of having cropped up around 2003 with no sense of place or history.

The "historic" Gaslight District is pleasant, and I enjoyed sidewalk dining as folks from Omaha and Mobile milled by as the sun set. But it too feels much too quaint and pre-meditated. It has the first Urban Outfitters I've ever entered and was immediately greeted by clerks who asked if they could be of any help.

Despite having the nifty red trolley system to take you there, "Old Town" feels a lot like Branson on the Pacific. Even history feels manufactured here.

As in the past, Balboa Park proved to be a nice respite from Topeka on the Pacific, Blandiago or California Lite as many people call it.

I also enjoyed Balboa Park's desert gardens which I don't recall touring before. For the record, it was eight or nine degrees warmer in San Francisco while I was down south. But it's not just the weather that makes me glad to be back home. A little grit in the right place always makes me like California a bit more.