Dear San Francisco, it's so nice to be in you again

Light posting lately. One reason is that Elizabeth and I have been (and are) back in San Francisco for another business/pleasure trip.

In lieu of a real post, here are some random thoughts I've jotted down while here:

• Fave thing about San Francisco #42: The number of people you pass on the street who look like characters in a movie or novel set in San Francisco.

• From the Fillmore-area house that's becoming our regular SF pied-à-terre, we set out for wine with the manager in his Seven Sisters house, which will be a setting in Elizabeth's next novel. Bourbon and cigars with Dashiell Hammett afterward.

• From notes for next theatrical production, based on current lodgings: Genre - musical comedy. Title - There's Something About a Bidet. Consider "Dancing Fountains" number in second act.

• While researching her novel, a murder mystery set in San Francisco in the 1920s, Elizabeth guided us up Telegraph Hill to seek out the site of Edwin Booth's cottage. Why? because according to public records he complained about the gravel quarry that, before his death in 1893, was eating away the hill so deeply it threatened to landslide his house into the bay. The quarry was still there in the '20s, so Elizabeth decides there's a great place to ditch a body. Also while there, I noted that anyone high up Telegraph Hill in 1906 would have had an astounding view of the earthquake and subsequent fire devastating the city below. As a reminiscence from a character, that's now going into the novel.

 

With Elizabeth and Jacques Tati back at Cafe Zoetrope (owned by Francis Ford Coppola).

The dream factory

Today after we woke up, I brought Elizabeth her cup of coffee in bed as I do every morning. Lying there between sips, we shared the dreams we'd been having the moment the alarm clock went off.

For Elizabeth, we were having dinner with Johnny Depp in New Orleans.

As for me, we were dining in a restaurant/bar here in Seattle. Miranda July was sitting by herself at a table across the room. I approached her, said hello, and she invited us to join her. After some chat about each other's work, she invited me to join her on her next production, both as an actor and behind the scenes. (In the dream I told her that her recent film The Future didn't entirely work for me, but apparently this was no obstacle. She was pleasant throughout.)

What fed our respective dreams were two things, I think:

1. Seeing and utterly adoring Martin Scorsese's Hugo this weekend. (I'll post about that later.) During the closing credits we noticed that the movie was produced by Johnny Depp, and during the film Elizabeth noticed that the actor playing Django Reinhardt (Emil Lager) looked a lot like young Johnny Depp, which she thought was okay indeed.
2. Before switching off the light, Elizabeth had been reading Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House. I saw Miranda July's name on the cover for her new story "Oranges." I like her short stories.

Now I'm wondering what dreams we'll wake up to tomorrow. Maybe I can talk her into going out to dinner tonight (obviously dining well must be involved), followed by a showing of My Week with Marilyn....

How Kai understands "The Hound of the Baskervilles"

Earlier this week Elizabeth got a yen to watch the 1959 Hammer production of The Hound of the Baskervilles starring Peter Cushing (as Sherlock Holmes), André Morell, and Christopher Lee. Thinking that I might do some Sherlockian blogging here ahead of the release of the new Robert Downey Jr. movie, I acceded with pleasure.

As usual, our dog Kai, a 90-pound Mostly Malamute, joined us in the movie room for the showing.

Afterward, Elizabeth mused about how Kai might interpret the story's famous climax through his own perspective and nature. She suggested it might go something like this:

Baskerville: "Help! It's a terrible great evil hell-hound come to kill me!"

Hound: "It's a human! I can get petted!"

Baskerville (running): "I must escape from this giant, evil creature!"

Hound (jumping up and knocking him over): "Stop! Rub my tummy!"

Baskerville: "Help! Arrgh! My heart!"

Hound: "Finally, I can lick your face. Oh human, I adore you. Here, I'll lie on your chest to get closer. I love you, human!"

Baskerville: "Hellllllp!"

Suddenly the villain Holmes, knowing nothing about dogs, appears and shoots the good boy instead of giving him a reasonable command such as "Off" or "Down" or "Greet." He doesn't even offer an ever-present pocket treat.

To Kai, it's one of the great cinematic canine tragedies.

I see dead people - lots and lots of dead people

During our trip to London last month, Elizabeth and I strolled through Highgate Cemetery, the Halloweeniest of them all.

A movie reference!

Naturally I left a pen at Douglas Adams' site.

Flickr photo set here.

London bound again

... for a week-and-change of jaunting and gallivanting with Elizabeth and a friend, taking in some theater, and getting a spot of work done on a writing project (or two). A change of socks, my iPad — there, packing's all done. If any of my London readers care for a meet-up, feel welcome to email me via the address on the image you see here.

Avast, me hearties!

For me and Elizabeth, this weekend marks either our 16th anniversary or the 16th reel of our ongoing honeymoon rom-com. So yesterday we dashed out of Seattle like impetuous romantics* and headed north to the San Juans.

Now we're on Orcas Island overlooking Massacre Bay within view of Skull Island! I'm in my own private pirate movie!

(On a side note, I can also testify that deer are to Orcas Island what squirrels are to everywhere else.)


* Tom Hanks will play me in the film adaptation, dammit, although those who keep saying I remind them of Paul Giamitti can make their case with his agent.

"Metropolis" with the Alloy Orchestra live

This evening, Elizabeth and I are catching Fritz Lang's 1927 science-fiction epic Metropolis, newly restored from recently discovered elements, at the Seattle International Film Festival Cinema.



That's cool enough all by itself, but what makes this presentation even better is that the film will receive its musical scoring performed live by the Alloy Orchestra.

My favorite "silent movies music" combo for years, the Alloy Orchestra are the most eclectic and eccentric — and brilliant — film re-scorers working. This Boston-based trio possesses the uncanny ability to be hip, odd, clever, raucous, delicate, or playful while simultaneously showing respect and affection for the films we're watching. Their nontraditional percussive, quirky orchestrations are action- and scene-tailored while avoiding the temptations of "old-timey" clichés or "postmodern" avant-garde ambiguities. Their scores are fresh and thoroughly modern but aren't likely to ever feel frozen into a definable "now."

With their newfangled approaches to vintage movie scoring, the Alloy Orchestra can be an acquired taste. Some traditionalists don't care for their distinctive innovations. Others — yours truly, for one — acquired the taste in the first bite. In my case, that was David Shepard's restoration of The Lost World, followed soon by the Image Entertainment DVD editions of Buster Keaton's The General / Steamboat Bill, Jr., and Slapstick Masters. They've been doing this sort of thing for a while: in 1999 Entertainment Weekly listed them among "The 100 Most Creative People in Entertainment."

Think of them as, perhaps, They Might Be Silents.

The Alloy Orchestra's Metropolis soundtrack is available (MP3-CD format) via their website. It will sync up with the Kino DVD and Blu-Ray release of the film (see below).

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Oct. 22 — Edited to add post-viewing thoughts:

The SRO crowd gave the movie and the Alloy Orchestra an extended standing ovation. Well deserved too. The new score was electric and note perfect. 

As for this edition of the movie itself, its narrative tracks much more smoothly now. Old gaps in sequence and plot logic are (for the most part) sewn up, and the nefarious character of the Thin Man (not William Powell) finally has a sense of purpose (and that actor is a real standout in a film full of interesting faces). Also clarified is the backstory between Joh Fredersen and the necromage Rotwang, how their rivalrous love for the lost Hel feeds Rotwang's scheme to create the Maschinenmensch and take from Fredersen everything he believes in. Best of all, this time I came to really appreciate how terrific an actress Brigitte Helm (age 17-18 during filming!) was in the dual roles of Maria and the faux-Maria robotrix.

I've always found Metropolis to be more impressive cinematically and historically than narratively, a stance that probably doesn't make me some radically contrarian outlier. It's visually stunning, of course, like no other film of its era, and this new restoration bolsters that even more so. Yet for me its visual and social metaphors are as subtle as an undergrad paper on Poetic Symbolism, and that grates. The plot's reductive simplicities — previously heightened by the gaps in logic and structure that this edition mostly remedies — have always been speed bumps on my path toward fully embracing the film's singular awesomeness on an emotional level. With this newly refurbished edition of the film some of those bumps still remain, but they hardly matter. Mere molehills. I recommend this Complete Metropolis with a hearty Oh hell yeah.

Kino International's Complete Metropolis Restoration site.

May 4, 2010 NYT article on the restoration.

Roger Ebert's review of the 2010 restoration is here.

David Bordwell serves up plenty of fine analysis and background leading to this restoration here.

And most exhaustively, the International Federation of Film Critics' webzine Undercurrent posts Metropolis Found, a comprehensive history of the movie in all its tangled iterations, focusing on the game-changing near-complete print, uncovered in Argentina, that provided this restoration. It's by Fernando Martin Peña, excerpted from his book Metrópolis.

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In related news, Kino International has announced the Nov. 16 release of on DVD and Blu-ray. According to Kino's press page, this edition will finally let us bring home the film...

...with 25 minutes of previously lost footage and the original Gottfried Huppertz score. Only six minutes short of the film Fritz Lang premiered in January of 1927 (in Berlin), THE COMPLETE METROPOLIS was made possible due to an essentially complete 16mm dupe negative (struck decades ago, from a now-destroyed nitrate print) discovered by the curator of the Buenos Aires Museo del Cine in 2008.

Such a rare discovery demanded another restoration of this classic film, and the Murnau Stiftung (Foundation), under the supervision of Film Restorer Anke Wilkening, embraced the challenge of putting together the most historically accurate version of this German masterpiece.  Also returning was Martin Koerber, Film Department Curator of the Deutsche Kinimathek, who had supervised the 2001 restoration.

As special features, THE COMPLETE METROPOLIS makes available (both on DVD and Blu-ray) a never-before-seen 50-minute documentary on the making and restoration of Metropolis - as well as an interview with Paula Felix-Didier, curator of the Museo del Cine, in Buenos Aires, and the Trailer to the 2010 restoration. This new 147-minute version (being released as THE COMPLETE METROPOLIS), opened theatrically in April of 2010 and has broken box office records in many of the 100-plus markets it has played in.

This Blu-ray hits the shelves two days before Elizabeth's birthday, and I love, love, love the fact that I'm married to a woman who, immediately after viewing that trailer up there, let me know what her present should be. She blogs about the movie here. (I loved typing that.)

It's a Vertigo kind of day

...although it's not because I'm feeling unbalanced. Well, no more than usual anyway.

Elizabeth was in the mood for some Hitchcock recently. So I connected this Macbook to the big screen and, voila!, via Netflix steaming we watched Strangers on a Train. Chances are good that The 39 Steps will be next in line.

Since then, ol' Alfred has been popping up on my day-to-day radar with unnerving frequency. Last weekend Seattle's SIFF Cinema featured a Hitchcock series. Our friend Wendy emailed to ask if we might be in Portland for Halloween, in which case we could catch Psycho screened with Bernard Herrmann's signature score performed live with the Oregon Symphony. My big blog post on the near-miss of a Hitchcock version of The War of the Worlds drove email into my Inbox as recently as this morning. Meanwhile, downstairs in our movie room, the North by Northwest poster framed above the shelves urges me to slide that Blu-ray disc into the player again. Or else Rear Window, my other Hitch fave.

And now, mere minutes ago, Elizabeth sends me email stating that our upcoming trip to San Francisco (where my stepson Austin rocks grad school, and where we have friends and relatives) will include reservations at Hotel Vertigo...

... a newly-opened homage to Hitchcock in San Francisco. It's been 50 years since Hitchcock's thriller of the same name was released (some scenes were filmed in the original hotel that occupied this building); to mark the occasion, the movie will be projected onto the floor of the lobby, and screened in the rooms 24 hours a day. Madeleine cookies (named after Kim Novak's character) are dished out to guests on arrival, and bedrooms will be decked out in a giddy white-and-tangerine combo. Hitchcock obsessives should book into Suite 13, where they can spend sleepless nights hunting for the 13 references to the film.

Maybe we'll take the Vertigo Movie Tour of San Francisco. The fact that a movie buff can make such a pilgrimage amuses me amply.

And finally, just a few hours ago I spied my most frequent Hitchcock reminder. It's exactly three miles from our house, on the other side of the West Seattle Bridge (once home to the mysterious Grouchos). It's an example of vintage neon signage that I pass routinely on my way into downtown Seattle.

That's the Vertigo Building on 1st Avenue South. The sign is indeed an image of Jimmy Stewart as "Scottie" Ferguson in Vertigo.

Although you'd be forgiven for thinking of North by Northwest:

I've seen businesses come and go there over the past five years. Earlier this year the building was empty and up for lease, so I feared that its odd and magnificent sign would soon end up either in a trash dump or on eBay. Yet this summer J&J Cigars moved in, and cigar aficionados may now gather together in the second-floor Vertigo Club. I'll gladly take that as a clue that the sign is staying.

Naturally, there's an obvious question you've already asked. What the hell's up with that sign? Where did it come from?

A little googling turns up a Seattle Times neighborhood profile from 2003. The building is owned by Dr. Scott Andrews, a dentist and developer who "imprinted his personality, hobbies and memories" on this section of the largely industrial neighborhood. The Vertigo sign is the last remaining item of Dr. Andrews' street nostalgia. The attached building next door once displayed three leaping cutouts of old-time baseball players, and a 1950s-vintage Superman hung in mid-flight on a building across the street. Those are gone now, alas. According to the Times piece,

Andrews still practices dentistry, but keeps an office in the building. He pushes a bookcase door to reveal his private theater, with eight double-wide leather seats. His party room on the same floor is adorned with movie posters and worn stadium seats, representing old Sicks Stadium. Soon, he hopes to have an old-time hotdog stand on a nearby street corner.

"Everything here relates in some way to my childhood," Andrews explains.

I wonder if he's still practicing seven years later?

Here's hoping this recent The Birds-like clustering of random Hitchockiana around me peters out soon. Not that I don't dig Hitch, mind you. It's just that any day now I expect him to start making cameo appearances in my life:

Eugene O'Neill with a Groucho chaser; or, Hello, I must be blogging

Elizabeth and I spent three days last weekend on a "working vacation" in Portland, OR. We visited old friends (some of whom I've written about here before), enjoyed the city's inherent lovely greenness, ate very well in excellent company, finally caught up with Me and Orson Welles (mostly loved it) and Kraken rum (I make a mean Dark & Stormy), and managed to catch William Hurt in the Artists Rep production of Eugene O'Neill's bleak autobiographical 1956 drama of addiction and family dysfunction, A Long Day's Journey Into Night.

Now, being a theater dude I went into Long Day's Journey aware that any company these days has a hard road to hoe in making that particular four-hour Pulitzer Prize-winner fresh and gripping for a modern audience, for whom O'Neill's once-searing and pioneering realism may have been diluted to homeopathic nullity by the intervening decades of "reality" media saturation. While I bear nothing at all against O'Neill's masterfulness — cf. my post about The Iceman Cometh — I predicted that this play in particular is now past its sell-by date and that only an extraordinary and bold production could undo that. This one was neither extraordinary nor bold, plus was riddled with artistic and directorial choices that left me wondering if everyone involved knew they were supposed to be working on the same play.

So, although actors William Hurt and especially Robyn Nevin were several kinds of terrific, I came away needing a palate cleanser and mood lifter. And for me the Marx Brothers have always been a reliable tonic when such needs arise. I reached for their second film, Animal Crackers, in which Groucho riffs on O'Neill's expressionistic play Strange Interlude by stepping forward to address the camera (that is, the audience) and soliloquizing thusly (the 2:20 mark):



Suddenly the world was brighter again.

Among the many things I love about 1930's Animal Crackers (and its 1929 predecessor, The Cocoanuts) is that they are just about our only records of what it was like to see the Marxes performing live on Broadway. The films, shot in Paramount's Astoria studios in Queens, NY, were adaptations of two of their Broadway shows. The Brothers shot The Cocoanuts at the studio during the day, then hot-footed back to Manhattan to perform Animal Crackers on stage in the evenings. It wasn't until their third (and first all-original) film, Monkey Business (1931) that they moved to Hollywood, where they spent the rest of their lives.

The original stage script was pared down for the screen, so as a film Animal Crackers is a rough approximation rather than a full-on reproduction. Still, as an historical document it benefits from unadorned point-and-shoot camerawork, a proscenium staginess, and lack of cinematic flair. A script credited to Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and George S. Kaufman doesn't hurt either, even though showbiz legend has it that Kaufman, backstage during one of the shows he wrote for the notorious ad-libbers, once exclaimed, "Wait! I think I just heard one of my lines!" (I have more to say about the Marxes' Paramount films at DVD Journal.)

So when Groucho quips, "You're very fortunate the Theatre Guild isn't putting this on, and so is the Guild," it's a line that would deliver an extra layer of funny to a Broadway audience, especially since it was the Guild that had recently premiered Strange Interlude for the play's 1928-29 run. The Internet Broadway Database tells me that from Oct. 23, 1928 to February 1929, the Broadway runs of Animal Crackers and Strange Interlude overlapped as they played simultaneously at the Forty-Fourth Street Theatre and the John Golden Theatre respectively.

Oh, what it must have been like to catch both shows on consecutive nights.

www.marx-brothers.org has more about Animal Crackers on Broadway, including sections trimmed out for the film and pages from the program book.

In his current series on the Marx Brothers, Mythical Monkey's excellent blog takes a good look at the Brothers at this stage of their stage-to-film career.

Hello, I Must Be Going

 

"Yeah, I know, and such small portions"

Today's my birthday.

No big deal, ordinarily, except that one year ago this same date was so close to being my final birthday — given that I kind of died for a bit that morning during a "routine" heart surgery gone horribly wrong — that you would have made a foolhardy bet to lay down money otherwise. (cf. This blog's first post.)

And yet here I am, pleased to be here, thrilled to be married to a rare woman who was fiercely determined to stare down those odds and slam Death's door so hard you could hear his bony foot crunch in the jamb. I'm here enjoying a (re)birthday with a new appreciation of the expression, "Whoa." Thanks yet again to all of you who were near us (figuratively as well as geographically) through the ensuing weeks and months deep into 2010. It's good to be alive, and many of you are among the reasons why.

Now, after a year the moratorium is up. Having glimpsed The Other Side, I’m finally permitted to tell the truth about it:

It's an enormous mid-range restaurant. Its staff is made up of every god human beings have invented in our own image. In other words, they get to serve us for a change. Its branding slogan: "Have it Yahweh."

 Seriously.

The decor is tacky — think Denny's with the orange extending to every horizon — but as tidy and clean as a Carnival Cruise Line lounge. For the most part the service is impeccable. ("Hello, my name is Osiris, I'll be your waiter.") But I swear that when Dakuwaqa, the Fijian shark god, refilled my water glass he copped a bit of an attitude. Fortunately it was Aphrodite's shift and when she saw him do it she dropped his ass into the decorative fish tank near the salad bar.



The menu comes chiseled on two stone tablets, so it’s unwieldy. Nonetheless, I'm here to say that Thor's Grand Slam breakfast is literally awesome on toast, and that Quetzalcoatl can brew one fantastic bottomless pot of coffee. I passed on the daily special — the Prometheus pâté — in favor of Herne the Hunter's all-natural veggie burger, which was a bit dry but helped me carb up for my weeks in a coma. Sadly I wasn't there long enough to try the pizza ("The Passion of the Crust"), but I can testify that Zeus does indeed wash his hands after using the restroom, although I'm thankful for the ceiling fan in there.



Naturally I checked out the juke box. Too much Styx, and evidently Zarathushtra got the rights to his theme song back from Stanley Kubrick. I really dug a new group called Chthonic Youth. But before I could punch in the entire Eric Clapton catalog, I heard Mercury call my name over the loudspeaker. Time to go.

On my way out, I wanted to buy a t-shirt, but the deity at the counter was a Mayan howler monkey god in a bad mood and who could fling something unmentionable with an arm like Cy Young. Damn. I did, however, duck fast and yoinked a fistful of mints from Kali, who was restocking the bowl while simultaneously making change and scrubbing down the counters.

Happy solstice, whatever your hemisphere

With Elizabeth at the Prime Meridian marker, Royal Observatory, Greenwich, London. Nov. 2004.

The first 15 were so good, let's go for another

Tomorrow, Elizabeth and I will enjoy our 15th anniversary. Thought I'd show you what I got her.

First, a little context:


View Larger Map

Now:

Now, unless you know me personally, the ♥ may need further context. You can find that via this blog's first entry from March 17, "Rebooting." From there you'll find links to LiveJournal posts from me and Elizabeth regarding the should-have-been uncomplicated heart surgery that nearly killed me several times over, placed me in a weeks-long coma, pushed me into months of recovery from complete muscle atrophy, and, well, rebooted my life after an unexpected systems crash.

It's a story that ended only today, in fact. This morning I returned from the hospital with a coronary stent, a "fix of the fix" that should put right what went horribly wrong last July 10 (which was — can you believe it? — my birthday).

I'm pleased to report that our anniversary tomorrow, and my next birthday one month later, are expected to offer up only pleasant surprises. (And hey, I'm working on a short film screenplay inspired by the freaky hallucinatory dreams I had under coma sedation.)

It's good to be alive, isn't it?

Music: Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong, Ella & Louis Again
Near at hand: A glass of pretty good pinot grigio.

The Space Needle considered as an unguarded ham sandwich. Or maybe a squirrel.

For your reading pleasure....

Pleased and proud to report that my wife Elizabeth's first published fiction will appear at a book store near you in the May/June issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Pick up a copy. It's a good one.

Rebooting

To those of you who still follow this blog after months of it lying fallow: I'm back, and thanks for sticking around.

While the general thrust and tone of this blog will remain the same, I'm going to implement some changes, starting with removing all previous posts and rebooting.

Why restart this blog now? Simple: I'm in the mood for a fresh start on a refreshened site at a time when renewal and new starts are much on my mind.

I won't rehash the near-death (very, very near death) medical cataclysm that rendered much of my 2009 calendar moot and void, and put a dent in the first months of 2010. (Hint: Long-expected, "minimally invasive" heart surgery to fix a congenital aortic stenosis, followed by, to phrase it with comical understatement, "complications.") You can backtrack through it via my wife Elizabeth's daily LiveJournal starting July 11, '09 (some posts Friends-locked), and/or open my own handful of LiveJournal summary write-ups under my LJ tags "heart surgery" and "heart surgery recovery" dating back to July '09.

Addendum: Here in Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL, a couple of later posts under the Blogger label heart surgery serve as brief follow-ups.

So, yeah, I had my life shaken up like a bag of marbles in a clothes dryer that tried its best to plummet off a cliff and burst into flame. But now it's Spring 2010, I'm alive, chugging through recovery just fine, scars are fading, life's feeling pretty good, and I'm looking around wide-eyed asking, "Now what?" Months of incapacitation piled onto the current crippling recession means that my reasonably healthy freelance writing business is experiencing its own temporary slowdown. It reminds me of that scene in Singin' in the Rain:

Cosmo Brown: "Talking pictures, that means I'm out of a job. At last I can start suffering and write that symphony."

R.F. Simpson: "You're not out of job, we're putting you in as head of our new music department."

Cosmo: "Oh, thanks, R.F.! At last I can stop suffering and write that symphony."

Whether I like it or not, at last I can start and/or stop suffering and write that symphony. Which in my case means getting back to the fiction and other writing I've put off for too long. (For a while there I was a hot up-and-comer in the science fiction & fantasy field, and then I stopped. Several reasons, all boring now.) I'm also considering some travel writing, specifically a chronicle, Bill Bryson-style, revisiting my Southern roots; especially since, with both parents passed on, I'd be revisiting certain shaping places and influences for the first time in my adult life without external duty forcing me back there. But that's for later.

This new(ish) blog is a tool. It's here to help me refocus attention onto some new writing as well as who I am and what interests me after the events of 2009. To help me answer, "What now?" And to keep me in touch with friends and acquaintances -- some old, some new -- who revealed themselves to be more numerous and more important than I had suspected before.

Thanks for being here. It's nice to be alive to see you.

Music: Steely Dan, Gaucho
Near at hand: duck-on-bike windup