In old Ballard and beyond

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.