In old Ballard and beyond

[randy_byers]

Lovely evening in Ballard yesterday with holyoutlaw. We caught a set by Sage at the Sunset Tavern as part of something called Reverb Fest, which was appropriate, since Sage's guitarist, Marc Olsen, uses a fuckload of reverb. I was reminded that the *last* time I saw a Sage reunion show, several years ago, I walked out on them, but they sounded good yesterday. Still playing their old songs, except for the opener, which I didn't recognize. Luke told me that when he first heard their music back when, it sounded creepy to him, and there is a demented circus quality to some of it. This is a good thing. They finished with the hallucinatory "Zhong Quo," which has always been my favorite of their songs. (And yes, Ron, I delivered your package to Marc after the show.)

After that we had dinner at Madame K's, which purports to be an old brothel, with the waitrons dressed in lingerie. Or so Luke told me. I hadn't even noticed. I guess I expect my waitrons to be dressed in lingerie. However, I was obscurely reminded that both times I've walked along Ballard Ave in the past couple of weeks, I've noticed a three-story building that has a shop or restaurant on the ground floor but nothing above. It's one of ye olde buildings, too, and it seems like it could be fixed up into a boutique hotel for bands that play the Tractor. Or something. It's very interesting to compare this area to Fremont. Both of them are gentrifying, but Ballard has more of an olde core, which makes it feel more like Pioneer Square. Fremont doesn't have as many old storefronts and brick buildings.

After dinner, we finally saw Burn After Reading at the Majestic Bay. Took it a while to get going, but it had me laughing by the end. George Clooney makes a good sleaze bag, and Frances McDormand is wonderful as a woman who desperately wants to remake herself. This is an absurdist movie about stupid people getting in way over their heads and some of them paying a shocking price for it. It did seem to me that it ended rather abruptly, with much of the resolution said rather than shown. Also, Tilda Swinton's character is strangely forgotten in the wrap-up. Still, good dildo joke.

I said farewell to Luke after the movie and came home. Watched "A Trip to the Moon" (1902) and the first ten shorts on the five-disk Georges Méliès - First Wizard of the Cinema (1896-1913) DVD set. I had forgotten that "A Trip to the Moon" combines story elements from Verne's A Trip to the Moon and Wells' First Men in the Moon (the Selenites), as well as adding a snowstorm of its own. The first ten shorts in the set are from 1896 to 1898, and all of them about a minute long. In many, Méliès is playing around with trick shots to recreate magic tricks or create ghosts and nightmares, but there are oddities like "After the Ball" (1897), which consists of a woman stripping out of her elaborate gown down to her last piece of skimpy underwear and then taking a "bath" (the water comprised of sand). This is purely for titillation, but perhaps that's another kind of trick.

Most interesting to me was "Divers at Work on the Wreck of the 'Maine'" (1898), which shows men in the old-style diving suits working around a painted set of the wreck of the Maine at the bottom of the Havana harbor, pulling a completely fake-looking corpse in a Navy suit out through a gash in the hull, attaching it to a line, and watching it pulled up to the surface. The trick shot here is that this is all filmed through an aquarium, so that live fish appear to be swimming around the divers, as though they were under water. But what was the intent? Was it a docu-drama, "torn from today's headlines"? Was it meant to stir feelings of horror or grief or anger? Who was the audience? A very curious little film.

Comments

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

OT: you've now got compettion for me at Corflu with a conference in ATHENS. When do we get news about how fab you're gonna be??

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I'm always fab. This is news to you?

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a lovely afternoon and evening. Marc with reverb! I wonder if I will ever hear him play again? Thanks for delivering the music and letter.

Funny how new Coen Brothers' movies have almost no claim on my interests. I've seen only three of them, and while one is among my all-time favorite movies -- Hudsucker Proxy -- the other two left me so cold or creeped that I've not bothered to see any others. It's taken years for me to develop an interest in O Brother, Where Art Thou? -- I finally bought the DVD in a sale a few months ago, but haven't watched it yet. Part of what draws me is that in an oddly tangential, unactionable sort of way it's apparently a ripoff of Howard Waldrop's A Dozen Tough Jobs, a novella I adore.

I am tickled by the birthday present you bought for yourself -- so lovely that you've finally made your way almost to the green flash at the dawn of film if not time. Fascinated by your comments on Méliès -- I remember reading about him in The Oxford History of World Cinema, a book I keep meaning and forgetting to recommend to you. Consider it done. I'm reminded that there is a modern film that dramatizes aspects of Méliès's life, starring Tom Hanks as the man himself. Apparently they went far towards a meticulous recreation of the sets for A Trip to the Moon -- and having written that last I'm suddenly thinking I'm mistaking Méliès's film for another, made a handful of years later (?), called From the Earth to the Moon, and that the Hanks scene is actually from the final installment of the 12-part HBO series of the same name. It all dovetails! As all film must, finally, Steve Erickson in Zeroville understanding and demonstrating this as no film ever could but as all film must.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I have mixed reactions to the Coen Brothers too, although I love Fargo and The Big Lebowski (which I didn't like at first, but it's grown on me big time.) They remind me of Tom Disch in some ways, with the fascination with stupidity and absurdity, and the horror of the everyday or of the mundane. Perhaps the flipside of the banality of evil. But yeah, their movies are frequently cold and creepy. Minnesota gothic?

Méliès is somebody I've been interested in for quite a while, because of his interest in the fantastic and in special effects. This certainly pushes my own collection back further than anything else. I have a collection of DW Griffith's Biograph shorts that begins in 1908 or 1909. I also have a collection of films made at Fort Lee, New Jersey (which was a predecessor to Hollywood), which includes a short from 1905. I remember that when I first started getting deeper into film history, I was astonished to realize that by the late silent era in the '20s, the film industry was already thirty years old and chock full of well-established tropes and techniques. It all seems so foreign as you push backward, but now the movies of the Teens seem much more interesting to me than they once did. (Last night I watched most of DeMille's Male and Female (1918) again. Completely assured and highly-refined film-making, even if it is typical bourgeois bollocks.)

[paulcarp.livejournal.com]

What did we learn?
Burn After Reading was a hoot. Glad you got to see it.