SEPIA SATURDAY: Shattering Bubbles of Time

Every moment is a bursting bubble of time, gone even as it happens.

This concept has fascinated me -- and Landron -- for a very long time. The Shattering of Time.

Nothing embodies this concept more than "A Trip Down Market Street", perhaps the most important film ever made in and about San Francisco.
I was pleased that 60 Minutes chose to feature it and the recent conclusion that it was not made in 1905 -- as was long assumed -- but in April 1906, likely days before the great earthquake and fire if not the day before. In 12 minutes of real time, we see people, buildings, vehicles and animals, many of which likely perished shortly after the film was made. The only familiar sites are the street itself and the ferry building in the distance that at first looks like a painted stage set and then becomes increasingly real as the camera nears.
It's at the ferry building, in the final minute of the film, that things become truly fascinating and the images are closer, more fleeting and transcendent. The man in the Eureka - California wagon appears for less than a doezen frames, but I find myself wanting to know his story.
The car driving erratically with a group of men in bowler hats equally fascinates me.
As we arrive at the end of Market and seem nearly to crash into the Ferry Building, men gawk and women seem to either sneer or demure. Who is the woman in the cape? The woman on the left seems equally dubious about being captured on camera.

Suddenly, this cheeky fellow on the right races in, seemingly aware that this is a chance to be caught for posterity but not aware of the fate facing him mere days or hours ahead.
Finally the cable car and the camera rest for a moment, but not the action. We see this trio of men standing near the ferry building's corner stone.

The camera is motionless, but the old man's long gray beard dances in the Pacific breezes. Just a few years earlier audiences were fascinated when they witnessed trees and grass blowing in the wind in films by the Lumiere brothers. The very concept of capturing the action of wind was completely revolutionary. Seeing this old man, the emotion of his eyes only faintly shadowed by the brim of his hat, I wonder if he could have been part of the gold rush less than 50 years earlier.

Finally the camera pauses, then rapidly pivots to give a reverse, westward view, the final miles of the continental U.S. before the Pacific. A sea of news boys jump and wave -- a joyful, sunny moment in the early 20th century spring sunlight. It's as if they are shouting "We were here!" across more than a century, and for a few seconds we are there with them, and then it's all gone. A bubble of time forever captured. People caught and unaware of tragedy looming. Joy pressed in a book forever, like dried flowers whose petals and colors we may distinguish, yet we'll never experience the exact aroma and freshness.

Each moment, already over just as it has begun. I don't know how many frames are in "A Trip Down Market Street" but I want to explore each one, champagne bubbles forever holding the moment in amber.

A Bit of Light in the Grim Anniversaries.

The past week is that weird time of the year when, in the course of three days, we have a trilogy of back-to-back tragic anniversaries -- the San Francisco Earthquake and fire (April 18, 1906); the Oklahoma City Bombing (April 19, 1995) and the Columbine massacre (April 20, 1999). I left San Francisco last week to be in Denver where there were a few people from Oklahoma, so these three sad anniversaries were top of mind. I was in Oklahoma at the time of the 1995 bombing and routed through Denver the day of Columbine, so they hold special meaning.

Believe it or not, I wasn't around for the 1906 earthquake.

I just came across the great videos above by Rick Prelinger of The Long Now Foundation. Some great images of Bay history that I've never seen and interesting commentary.

Keeping on the Theme: Timeless

Since we're on the Cass Elliott theme, this week's latest paranoid news reminds us that her songs have as much relevance today as they did three and a half decades ago. This is the most (and probably only) Zen song I've ever heard about natural disasters. What will be is what will be.

Junk-quake & Flames

Growing up, I refused to see the multitude of disaster movies that plagued the big screens during the better part of the early to mid-1970s. Why have they recently slowly woven through my life with the connecting thread of George Kennedy? The year 1974 seems to be the apex when San Francisco in The Towering Inferno and Los Angeles in Earthquake blasted the screen. Tonight I am watching the later, albeit without the ground breaking Sensurround that accompanied it in theaters. How can you knock a movie that features both Marjoe Gortner and Pedro Armendariz Jr. (who, of course, is nothing compared to Pedro Armendariz Sr.)?

Most amazingly, it unravels the long standing riddle of the Hollywood Sphinx and the 1990s incident of the slapping of a police officer by Zsa Zsa Gabor. One of the earliest action sequences involves a crisis when a police car plows through Zza Zza's hedge and they are distraught. They knew what would follow.

Do these movies make us howl with laughter today because they are so horribly made, or because they so pathetically anticipate a reality that would so gruesomely be realized in the 21st century? Burning and exploding buildings, planes crashing without pilots to guide them and only the young and beautiful surviving. If you are Ava Gardner, a woman over 50 and not fit, you are doomed to be sucked into the sewers of Los Angeles. Same goes for poor Jennifer Jones, her Aqua-netted head bouncing off the gleaming windows of San Francisco's financial district's glistening towers as she meets the bitter fate of no longer being able to pass for 35.

I will only start to worry when these movies outnumber my Criterion collection library.

Felt Just After 8

Nearly a dozen years here, and this was the first time I absolutely felt one. I was sure that it was the funky plumbing upstairs again but heard no water when that familiar feeling came, though this time with the windows humming. I switched from Kind of Blue to KQED but heard nothing for sure until a good 45 minutes later. Hearing a wave (as I did) and not a jolt is reason to stay calm and a sign you're 45 miles aways from the epicenter as I was. I'd already forgotten about it until deciding to watch the 11 p.m. news. There is seismic activity in the Pyrenees too.

Sluggo Sleepover

Most people recall their first big crush, even if it was on a movie star or fictional character. I certainly recall mine who serves as a role model to this day – Sluggo. The comic strip Nancy & Sluggo was one of several strips like Blondie, Dondi, Our Boarding House and Gasoline Alley that were set in a netherworld that certainly was not contemporary and seemed somewhat stuck in the 1930s. Most of the styles and characters in those strips gave me the willies with the exception of Sluggo.

There was something so sumptuously rounded about him, and there was that buzz cut head that certainly conjured up images of wanting to run barefoot through it. He usually covered it up with that little red tough guy cap, but when he sometimes let the world see that sensuous bristle noggin of his, my entire body quivered thinking of what it must have felt like to touch. Though I certainly was not like Rollo, Nancy's rich kid friend, I knew that Sluggo came from the wrong side of the tracks and wore wonderful tough guy clothes instead of mine that had gone through two cycles of fabric softener and a light sheen of spray starch administered by our housekeeper. Of course, in my worst nightmare I was Nancy -- a chubby little fuzz head in a too tight skirt and blouse with a pathetic little ribbon on top like a maraschino cherry on an unworthy ice cream dessert.

Besides owning a monkey, one of my recurring pre-middle school fantasies was to have Sluggo over for a sleepover so I could feel that crisp, sandpaper sensual scalp as we snuggled in my bed with my stuffed toys and favorite blankets. From the age of five to about 11, I loved having boys from school for sleepovers, and just when their breathing suggested that they had fallen asleep, I’d haultingly move my hand from my visitor’s stomach to the top of his head to see if he possessed the crown I was in search of. Only once did one wake and mumble, “Hey, what are you doing?”

“Oh, just trying to see if you have Sluggo-worthy hair.”

“Okay. But just don’t try any funny business.”

Alas, I never found a worthy Sluggo surrogate at my school. Most were too equally intrigued with watching Kukla, Fran & Ollie’s International Film Festival or making toll house cookies with me to convince me that they had that Sluggo edge.

Finally I decided that it was because I lived in the wrong part of the country. I sense that Sluggo was probably from Newark or south Boston, the perfect urban animal. When my grandparents took me to Manhattan every October beginning at age eight, I was always on the look out for some little Sluggo hanging out in an alley. I was prepared to be my own Fresh Air Fund of one to sponsor an inner city boy of my exact age, giving him all the great Midwest sunshine and unpolluted air that would strengthen his little lungs. Sadly, most of the other eight year olds attending How Now Dow Jones and George M! were equally overly intense grandsons with doting grandmothers straightening their blazers with faux crests as they meticulously read the “Who’s Who” in the cast from Playbill. “Look Grandma, she was in 70 Girls 70 that we saw last year!”

Looking back at my most passionately adult romantic pursuits, there was always a Sluggo factor in the process. Always a hope that he was from the wrong side of the tracks but would still be interested in me. Several of them wore caps and striped shirts and would look both ways before sneaking a kiss in public.

I once wrote a short story about what happened to the adult Nancy and Sluggo. They ended up in San Francisco in the mid-1980s where Nancy, whose round face and figure were always at the center of her self-esteem crisis, took a very low level job at the Bank of America. She commuted every day from her tiny, overpriced studio in Alameda. The plumbing leaked, and the ceiling was sagging, but she lacked the self-confidence to complain to her landlord.

After first sharing the apartment with her, Sluggo soon went through a series of increasingly wealthy boyfriends until he finally settled with a partner in Noe Valley where they had a quaint garden and a pair of Jack Russell terriers named Chucko and Mimi.

Nancy was driving home from work in her 12-year-old Honda Civic in October 1989 when the expanse to the Bay Bridge collapsed and she died instantly. Sluggo went into a deep depression, repeating: “I always told her to drive across the bridge with at least one window partially rolled down. That way you’ll have a chance to breaking out of the car from the bottom of the bay.”

I wonder if Sluggo is still out there? Maybe I’ll have dinner in Noe Valley tonight after all.