Great Old Photos #2

This is a photograph of my mother's mother and father. Grandma died when I was young; I can only recall her as a stern (and sturdy) farm lady who yelled at me for running around in her little  house. I remember her chastising me for not knowing how to tie my shoes and for needing her help in doing so. In my memory, she comes at me with the "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime" parable, and forces me to fumble with my laces until I can do it by myself. It is likely that this "teach a man to fish" dialogue has been retroactively inserted into the memory, but that is the way scene plays out in my mind. I remember it like it was yesterday, standing in their unpaved driveway, the midday Eastern Washington sun beating down, the muscular walnut tree and postage stamp yard off to the left, the rusty horseshoe marking the entrance to the small garage behind (filled with a museum of old farm tools), the pulse of sprinklers irrigating the surrounding corn fields, the buzz of dragonflies in the air. I'm sure this is romanticizing it; my cantankerous grandmother would probably have something to say about this kind of sentimentality. 

The picture tells a different story, however. It is hard to believe that my grandmother and this handsome young woman in cute shoes are the same person.

I love this picture so much that a few years back I included a passage about it in "Baleen," a short story about an old man who transmogrifies into a right whale. Some of the details have been fudged, just like in my memory.

"In the picture Gramps and Grammy were standing up against a Twenties-model Ford, the kind with running boards below the doors. They looked so young that it startled him. Gramps was skinny and cocky, with a long nose and pointy jaw just like Kevin. His mouth was open in a laugh and the hat on his head was tilted at an angle, like a fashionable Scandanavian gangster.

"Grammy looked like she wasn’t even twenty years old. Her hair was dark and curly and longer than he'd ever seen before. She was strange and beautiful at the same time. She had her right foot on the running board and her left hand on Gramps’ leg, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"You could tell she thought she had a pretty good catch."

Great Old Photos #1

K and I are currently in the process of creating a wistful, comic "growing up" slideshow to play at our wedding and get the guests all weepy. Let's play get the guests!

I've going through thousands of old photographs and come across some real gems. It's not always the content of these pictures that is spectacular (although the content is often remarkable), but it's something else, something invisible that makes these pictures really stand out for me.

I'm starting a short series in order to wrestle with these photographs.

Here is Great Old Photo #1

The scan of this picture doesn't really do it justice. The blacks look kind of washed out and the whites are dirty. Try to view the screen at an angle to really bring the contrast back to make the whites sparkle and the blacks black.

I love this photo for a lot of reasons, mostly because of its noiry starkness. Mom and Dad are so young here (I think it is 1965, probably Christmas by the look of the Christmas cards attached to the wall) -- Dad would be 29, Mom 25. They would have been dating for about three months at this point. It looks like a house they are in, and not an apartment, which could make it the house of Dad's brother-in-law, Uncle Louie. Or perhaps it is the house of some random couple hosting a party. It is hard to say.

The first thing one notices is the bright flash perfectly positioned in the mirror on the far wall. This is what makes the picture so wonderful. Imagine if the flash did not exist. It would still be a decent photograph but it would lose its interrogative shock. We see the very thing that is causing Mom to open her mouth in protest, a bright flash illuminating their secret (risque?) embrace. She is in his lap and his tie is rumpled. The rest of the house is dark and quiet. Dad's smirk puts him in league with the faceless photographer, but Mom's mouth is forming the shape of admonishment. She has seen the photographer approaching and is yelling at him to stop. This sense of fun is what takes the picture out of the realm of Weegee, although the aesthetic is the same. They are up to no good, and so is the photographer.

I love the beautiful square frame, something usually reserved for portraits and medium-format photography. Mom's face, which is foregrounded and receiving the glare of the flash full-on, is in the virtual center of the frame. They have too much headroom and the camera is tilting dynamically to the left. Do we feel tense because we have seen Orson Welles movies and others like it and we have learned that angled frames are a harbinger of bad things to come? Or do we innately feel tense because vertical lines are not vertical anymore and all is not well and right with the world? There is no time to set up this shot; the photographer is moving forward and the horizon is jostled. It is not so much composed as it is aimed. I imagine the camera continuing to tip counter-clockwise, becoming more and more dutched. Mom's head remains in the very center of this image as the stark world whirls chaotically around her.

A conical lamp hovers above her. It looks like a party hat that has just popped off her head, due to the sheer force of her surprise.

The Cinephile & the Megalopolis

For many years I have chalked up my decreasing interest in cinema to my decreasing interest in my movie industry job. I am watching fewer movies per year than at any other time in my life. I’m getting older, of course, and when one gets older he has less time to fritter away watching movies and reading novels. It isn’t totatly fair to compare the cinephile I was in college with the busy curmudgeon I have become. Look at all the free time I use to have… We all used to have.… Sheesh.

But something strange has been happening over past couple of days. I’ve been in the Northwest visiting the folks and I looked in the paper to see what was playing at the local art house theater. I hadn’t heard of any of the films, actually, but I was curious about what they were and actually expressed an interest in finding out. Strange behavior for someone who never watches movies anymore.

Some easy explanations:

 1. Of course I’m interested in filmgoing again while up in the NW. I have a ton of free time and no perpetual work-related stress. Let’s go to the movies! Why not?

 2. I am experiencing some kind of flashback behavior here. My mind associates the NW with the pleasure of heavy filmgoing, so it, of course, assumes that that is what happens when I’m up here. It rains, the Seahawks lose, Eric goes to the movies.

 3. I don’t have to battle murderous crosstown traffic for 45 minutes in order to see the film in question. Here in Tacoma the lines are short and the commute even shorter. I was telling Middlebrow how much I envied his life in the SLC. The SLC is tiny compared to Los Angeles or Chicago or NY, but it is large enough while still remaining small. Everything culturally relevant comes through the SLC… You may not have any Puppetry of the Penis or fringe stand-up acts or roller derby, but you get everything else and everything else is way more accessible! Do the Flaming Lips come to Salt Lake? Okay!

But I actually think something else is going on. Sometimes I like to fantasize about moving from LA and starting over in a small town somewhere… I like to think that I would get involved in the Film Society of this fictional town. That I would get involved in the community and help to program films from all of the world. That I would get directors and writers and other guest speakers to come and program live Theramin accompaniment to old silent films, etc…And then I would recapture my passion for the cinema.

Up here I feel people are way more committed to film and literature and music. They consume more and discuss it more – their love of it is pure. They consume it for its own sake. They love the cinema because they love the cinema – not because they are filmmakers and they are watching a film because they have to or because they are looking to steal ideas from this film.

Perhaps I’m just being contrarian. I don’t watch movies in LA because that is all everybody ever talks about. Movies and the movie business. It really drives me away. I don’t want to compete with these people – I don’t want to have another discussion about Quentin Tarantino or Ron Howard. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t even want to think about movies. I want to do things nobody is interested in, even me.

Living in the Northwest makes me want to study cinema again. Living in Los Angeles makes me want to write novels. 

Folding Up Shop (Long)

Some time ago I started feeling the pull to make another documentary film. I was getting over my production hangover from the first one (“It wasn’t that bad, was it?”) and wanted to put my newfound skills to use. How great would it be to not have to encounter every situation for the first time? To not have to muddle through every decision? To actually build on all of this suffering I endured making the first film? To not make another film seemed irresponsible, wasteful almost -- analogous to plowing away through law school and then deciding not to take the bar exam.



The subject? Something even more esoteric and impossible to market than air hockey: folding. I was interested in technical “professional” origami, knot theory, pop-up books, real-world packaging applications – basically the intersection of art, math, and science in regards to folding.



Even stuff as mundane as tie tying, flag folding, and fitted sheet folding seemed interesting—maybe this was fertile territory, perhaps there was something culturally significant going on there as well. There were countless examples—here is a crocheted version the hyperbolic plane.



Middlebrow was one of the few people who supported this idea. I’d already given up on trying to find funding for this; it would be a passion project. Who would finance a documentary about folding? Everyone I pitched the idea to out here in Los Angeles looked at me funny. Perhaps my pitch was lousy. Maybe there was no clear protagonist and no clear goal so it was hard to see the point of it all. I was making a film about ideas, ha ha!



I continued to believe in this project, however. More than anything, the subject was interesting to me--something I could immerse myself in for over a year, which is the most important thing of all when doing a film, I believe. Even more important than marketability. That feeling of danger, that feeling of not knowing what you’re going to get. Feeling like you are going to discover many wonderful things along the way instead of going out on the road and trying to find sound bites to plug into your pre-written piece.

Well, today I discovered this:



Looks like somebody beat me to it!

I feel legitimized and very very sad at the same time. “See!” I said. “This movie won awards all over the place! I knew it was a great idea!” And then, “Shit!”

I’m sure this has happened to everyone. What do you do when you realize your beautiful little baby has already been done and done better by someone else already? I never thought I would see this happen with this particular documentary project, though. Out of all my ideas, this is the one I never thought anyone would ever be interested in.



Sure, one could argue that it’s probably a very different film than the one I would make, but the vibe of the trailer seems eerily similar. A friend of K’s has a movie called “Children of Invention” that is making festival rounds. It’s about two Asian kids who are abandoned by their mother for a short time and have to fend for themselves. Well, it just so happens there is another movie also making the rounds called “Treeless Mountain” which seems to be eating up more of the oxygen in the room. “Treeless Mountain” is also about two Asian kids who are abandoned by their mother for awhile and have to fend for themselves. Both of these films owe a huge debt to the Japanese film “Nobody Knows” (which is only 5 years old), but that is another story..

K said “Children of Invention” had trouble getting into some festivals because “Treeless Mountain” had already been accepted, and the films were too similar in tone and plot and character for the festival to program both.

So, there you go.

Here’s a link to the nice trailer of “Between the Folds”:

http://www.greenfusefilms.com/