Oh My Godard, What a Deal

In these recessionary times, we're all looking for good deals. And while I often snicker when I hear the cultural backwater that is San Francisco referred to as the "Paris of the Pacific", I was pretty pleased that last week when our humble Castro Theatre hosted the first screening in the U.S.A of Jean-Luc Godard's (ironically) Made in the U.S.A. Sadly, travel prevented me from catching the screening, but I suspect a Criterion DVD is just around the corner.

And, speaking of Godard, our local rag The Believer magazine has just released their 2009 film issue. This magazine is really hit or miss, but this issue is worth its $10 cover price for the magazine alone, but inside is an amazing little jewel of a DVD dedicated to Godard in the U.S.A. There are two Dick Cavett interviews, an interview of him on the beach in a bikini in Del Mar with Alice Waters, and several other extras.

I got my copy at the 826 Valencia store for $8.26 (go figure) including tax.

And while I was out on Valencia, I was thrilled to see that Dog Eared Books had several copies of the dear old Horizon magazine, a periodical published from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. This arts quarterly -- like American Heritage magazine -- arrived boxed and in a hard cover. I almost teared up as I thumbed through the familiar pages of this magazine that was on coffee tables of several of my relatives as a child and formed many of my early impressions about art, taste and aesthetics. How fitting that two issues featured favorite artists of Catalonia -- Gaudi and Miro.

We can't put a price on things that bring us happiness, but having Horizon and Godard on a Saturday afternoon is pretty close to bliss.

A Touch of the Castro and Weimar Chili

It's barely a week into the year 2009, and I'm already halfway to meeting the grand total of number of visits to the Castro I made in 2008 -- two. It's hard to believe that I'd find much reason to exceed that number of visits this year since it's really hard to find much in that neighborhood that is remotely relevant to my life. Though now that the Noe Valley Streetlight Records is gone, I may have to venture over there more often, but if I've already gone that far, why not just drive or 33 it over to Amoeba in the Haight? Anyway, I was able to pick the full two seasons of Stockard Channing's 1979-1980 sitcoms (worth the $6.98 price but not a penny more).

The main purpose was to see the screening of Orson Welles' 1958 A Touch of Evil. It was great to see it on the big screen. There was murder, drugs, racism, alcoholism, obesity, oil wells, Zza Zza and inter-racial marriage.

Here are what I consider to be the highlights:
* Dennis Weaver saying that it was not his job to change fuses at a remote desert motel.
* Orson Welles saying "Lawyers? Phooey with lawyers, all they care about is the law."
* Marlene Dietrich making the most famed chili on both sides of the border.
* Janet Leigh proving once again that she has the worst motel karma in the history of travel.
* Mercedes McCambridge simply snarling and looking very butch.
* Acid being thrown on a poster of Joi Lansing's character "Zita".
* Orson Welles snarling, "English! Say it in English. I don't speak Mexican."
* Evidence that in the late 1950s everyone in border towns drove enormous convertibles with enormous fins.
* Welles standing beneath a forest of oil wells.
* Seeing Charlton Heston's "Mexican" make up in the sunlight.
* Marlene Dietrich having the last line of "Adios" and then walking into the darkness, likely off to make more chili.

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.

Shh...the Silents Are Coming

Film discovery of the week was the career of Lois Weber whose 1915 The Hypocrites which is credited with being the first mainstream film to feature explicit female nudity, albeit in the Biblical visions of a troubled suburban vicar. Kino is often equal to Criterion of bringing obscure, and especially obscure American silents, to the weary DVD consumer. It's a perfect prelude to the upcoming Silent Film Festival the best of all celluloid gatherings of the year. Tickets bought, research underway. Oh, and Guy Maddin will be there.

Sunday's Stroll

Signs of Change But No Transformation

While out this afternoon, I spent a bit of time in the Castro to see the much ballyhooed transformation of the district from 21st century to mid-1970s. Of course, none of the more defining accoutrements such as cars and characters were there. The vintage signs were mildly amusing and provided reason for me to spend 90 seconds instead of my usual 30 seconds there.

When I came home I reread highlights of journals from when I first arrived in San Francisco in the mid-1990s when the city and even the Castro held a mild fascination. (These are part of exhaustive journals I've kept since age eight.) I came away not with an epiphany but reminder that today the Castro has about as much relevance to me these days as a T.J. Maxx in Des Moines. I think the last time I was there was in July for the Silent Film Festival.

I was reminded of how, in the fall of 1995, my neighborhood went through a similar retooling for pivotal scenes in The Pursuit of Happyness. Sadly, they took away the mega Monte Carlos and Grande Prix and circa 1977 Muni buses. It was really cool here for four weeks, and I got $500 from Columbia pictures for keeping a lamp on in my window on for two nights. My one moment to have some role in an A-list Hollywood production.

Everyone in Vicuna!

LEFT: Junk Thief in a rare Andean albino vicuna collar coat - 2008

RIGHT: Orson Welles in traditional vicuna collar coat - 1962

Not even a full 48 hours into 2008, and I was about to head off to what I knew would prove to be one of the most glorious, glittering cultural events of the year. Yes, I'm talking about the screening of The V.I.P.s at The Castro Theatre in San Francisco's Homosexual District, an arrondissement that I visit maybe three times a year. And, puh-leeze, it's The V.I.P.s not The VIPs or even worse The V.I.P.'s or The VIP's.

I recall seeing this as a tiny tot in the mid-1960s on late night TV much against my mother's wishes because it was an M-rated movie that featured (gasp) adultery. But she knew that I was a pretty cosmopolitan tot even then and caved in and let me watch. Would it hold up more than 40 years on? Would I wow the crowd arriving in the hat I had nabbed from Orson Welles (shown above in a traditional vicuna collar next to me in my rare albino vicuna collar that I picked up while touring with my flamenco dance troupe los Ladrones de Bilbao in Cochabamba back in the mid-1990s.)? Would my fellow V.I.P.s Friendatella and Bryce Digdug be able to contain their excitement at such an event? Would the paparazzi glare diminish the experience as we rattled our jewelry and waved from our opera box? Would I be mistaken for the character Welles himself played in the film, Mr. Max Buda?

Just as I was about to overheat in a quandary as these questions filled my head, Friendatella called to share devastating news -- the print was damaged, and the Castro had cancelled the screening. It is available in installments on YouTube, but it's just not the same as seeing it on the big screen in the company of fellow V.I.P.s. Friendatella and I still connected for grub at Chow and a bit of scintillating dish over our plates, but it still wasn't the same. I opted not to wear my Max Buda hat and went in my more sedate pork pie hat. It just felt like the right thing to do considering the circumstances.

On My Way to Chow

Toasting Melba and m00nchild

Some weeks, wasted hours of blog searches yield nothing but absolute crap, especially on the "LGBT" front, and especially when it comes to this particular group in SF. (Sample quotes from blogs discovered: "Here I am with my boyfriend and a porn star at the Castro Street Fair. Woof. Woof." "Here we are with all those hot, hot 425 pound bears at Hairison Street Fair. Aren't big boys just too caliente?" "Here was are at the La-Z-Bear Weekend in fabulously rustic Guerneville." My reaction: "Egads, no, give me back my chopsticks so I can poke my eyes out now!")

But this week I was pleased to come in contact with one super cool local who operates the sweetly sinister, viciously vivacious blog Lunacy's Child. Besides being cute as a button (I say that a lot, don't I?), he deliciously lays out everything in a way that's caustic but not completely jaded. His observations about gay life in SF are spot on, and he seems to find light at the end of the often hopeless tunnel called being gay in San Francisco. It can be a wretched little flower in this berg by the Bay, but sometimes in all its alienating friendliness comes a sweet, swift kick of hope.

On top of that, Lunacy's Child also has an great DJ site called m00nchild (zeros not Os) with some really great mixes. I'd given up on "dance music" eons ago, especially the soulless crap that I hear coming out of so many bars or pathetic HiNRG internet or air wave stations. His stuff has a great 1977-1979 vibe, giving a sense of a time that was not his and does not exactly embody what it really was but is still a wonderful place to make dreams of. I've been listening to his stuff all day, feeling a little more bounce in my step, twirling around the JunkPlex and thinking "Wow, I'd love to live in a city that had this kind of music. Oh, wow, I do."

And anyone under 40 that digs Melba Moore in her prime is pretty cool in my book. Glad I came across this child of lunacy and the moon, and I look forward to reading more of his blurbs.

Thieves Be Not Too Proud to Beg

I've long been a great fan of silent films, something that some folks consider insane. Why follow an obsolete, inferior medium when there are so many glossier, noisier options, some may ask. It's so melodramatic? As if opera isn't I reply? Don't you want to go to a movie to be entertained instead of being forced to read? You do more reading with subtitled films, I respond. Folks either get it or they don't.

I agree that there are some really bad, overblown silent films with too much make up, primitive camera angles and lame scripts. But when they work, they have the capacity to transport you into a time and place far, far away that are far more compelling than most high tech CGI adventure. So I always greet the San Francisco Silent Film Festival with great anticipation and usually see at lest two to three offerings. Last night Friendatella joined me for William Wellman's Beggars of Life, a not exactly great but compelling film that had the distinction of being Louise Brooks' last film before going of to Berlin to be turned into an art house icon by G.W. Pabst.

I've only seen her three European ventures, so I held out mixed hopes for seeing if her claim that she was a lousy actress was true. Would she prove to be just a pretty tool of the Weimar era puppet master in her Hollywood era phase? Fortunately she was anything but that, and she was just as captivating as "the girl" as she was as Lulu. Dressed in "boy's clothes" she could pass for boho chic in any urban environ in 2007. Her co-star Richard Arlen was equally fetching. A tidbit of trivia that Friendatella shared was that in the 1960s Arlen and Wings co-star Buddy Rogers were reunited on Petticoat Junction. The relationship between the two leads in Wings has often been characterized as having strong homoerotic overtones, plus it has a very young Gary Cooper, who in his youth managed to send the homoerotic score of any film a few notches up the scale.

According to Patrick Loughney of the George Eastman House. who introduced the film, there is a long lost sound and dialogue track for the film that may surface some day. Though not quite worthy of a Criterion treatment, I hope Beggars of Life makes it to DVD by itself or with a few other Brooks' Hollywood era films. In the meantime I've been toying with buying the VHS of Overland Stage Raiders (1938), Brooks' last film made with, oddly enough, John Wayne just months before he went huge with Stagecoach.

On Our Way

Heading over teh Samovar this morning, I was so distracted by the gorgeous weather that I almost fell flat on my face around 17th and Sanchez when I ran right into a pile of discarded electronics in my path. Fortunately I caught my balance and have this little slide show as evidence of the journey.