Dry Ice Factory

So it was a good weekend. The Solstice Parade on Saturday was a blast, with the weird giant babies and the goddess with the fountain breasts a particular highlight, even if it did slow the parade down. Afterwards, I got a cajun salmon burger at Ballard Brothers and visited with Art Widner, holyoutlaw and juliebata for a while. Art confessed that he invented science fiction gaming in 1943 with a board game he called Interplanetary, in which the planets move and you have to calculate a course to land on them. In the evening, Denys and I went next door for a barbecue, and still later, round midnight, the neighbor came in through my window to drink, smoke, and listen to music. Welcome, o Summer!

On Sunday, I watched movies, starting with the Hong Kong musical Perhaps Love (2005), which ended up gutting me like a trout. It was a fitting companion to Choose Me (1984), which I watched for a second time on Friday. Choose Me is, in akirlu's memorable phrase, an odd species of '80s noir, with an overriding mood of romantic melancholy. The title is a plea for love, and the ensemble of well-drawn eccentric characters are all looking for it in the wrong places -- every one of them (except perhaps Genevieve Bujold's delightful Dr. Love) a femme or homme fatale. It's a smoky, jazzy meditation on how love makes fools of us all, with a wonderful, soulful soundtrack by Luther Vandross, mostly sung by Teddy Pendergrass.

So that got me in the mood, and then Perhaps Love delivered the sucker punch. It's a postmodern musical about the filming of a movie. The movie within the movie is about a girl who loses her memory and is taken into the circus by a ringmaster. The boyfriend she has forgotten comes to the circus to try to get her to remember him. As they film this story, we learn that the actress playing the girl was once in love with the actor playing the boy, and that she left him to become a star under the tutelage of the director, who is now her lover. While I found the male ingenue, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro, irritatingly mopey and whiny, the story of first love, lost love, and then the attempt to rekindle it, the desperate plea to not be forgotten ... At the emotional climax of the film, I was bawling like a baby, and that ended up pissing me off, because I thought I was well over it, seven months on. But I dreamed about her last week, and she grew colder and more distant in my dream. So maybe I needed another cry to let go a little more, but it pissed me off to need it.

But instead of spinning out, I counterprogrammed by then watching the first part of Louis Feuillade's serial crime thriller Fantomas (1913) -- a movie, or at least character, that got several namechecks in Banlieue 13. Once in the dreamlike world of silent movies, I had to continue with an umpteenth viewing of the old dark house thriller, The Bat (1926), with its wonderful towering gothic sets that must have influenced Gorey as much as the titular character's bat signal influenced Bob Kane. No romantic melancholy here, and it seemed that everything was okay again. Dunno what or if I dreamed after that, but I woke up this morning refreshed. The gutted trout miraculously swims upstream ...