A Satisfied Mind

You never know which way the wind will blow me.

Yesterday, I was siting on a ferry behind a table of eight New Jerseyans unwilling to go below deck to smoke, so instead playing cards to pass the time crossing ("Who's in? Ten cents a card!" to which someone responded, "No, 20 cents a card!") and tonight I was watching a German expressionist film while listening to Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas play the soundtrack he'd composed for it.

Because I've been away all week, tonight was my first opportunity to take advantage of the James River Film Festival and with Lucas accompanying "Der Golem," I was getting a two-fer: music and movie.  All I had to do to get a hat trick (eat-film-music) was stop by Asado on my way to the Grace Street Theater.

Crowded because it was happy hour, I took the only available bar stool, in between a couple of women razzing their male friend about all the texts he was getting from someone named Jazmyn ("You do know that proves she doesn't know how to spell her own name, right?" one teased) and a sullen young man nursing successive whiskey shots and staring at the wall.

Welcome to Friday, millennial style.

Meanwhile, I overheard one of the bartenders ask his roommate (who was finishing up a mound o' fries) what he was doing next. "I'm gonna go home and take a shower, then sit down and start drinking. When are you getting home?" The bartender explained that he was going to need to shower, too, asking if the drinking could hold off till he was ready, too.

"Not a chance," his roommate said without so much as a grin. Apparently Friday drinking waits for no man, not even your own roommate.

By the time I'd finished my honey sriracha shrimp tacos, there was a line of people waiting for seats, so I graciously gave up mine and walked over to the theater even though it was half an hour till showtime. I wasn't first, though, so I had the conversation of others to provide some entertainment.

I heard two women talking about the good old pre-GPS days of using maps, except one said they were inconvenient because you had to pull over to look at them and they got torn and creased. "Yea, but remember those Trip-tiks AAA used to give you?" the other asked reverentially.

It was funny to hear since Mac and I had just been discussing Trip-tiks and our fond memories of them while road-tripping to Cape May this week.

Then there was the conversation where someone was saying that he'd wrecked his mother's car coming home from an Edgar Winter, Peter Frampton, Bad Company show where he'd had second row seats in front of the Stacks. "When I left the concert, I was functionally deaf," he claimed. "I tried to tell my Mom that's why I'd wrecked the car."

From there they were off on a '70s tear. "I skipped school to see Todd Rundgren and I didn't even know who he was!" one humble bragged.

You get the idea about the make-up of the crowd. In fact, when JRFF organizer Mike Jones ("I'm basically the glue stick that makes this festival happen...with  a lot of help") came out and began talking before the film, at one point he asked how many people had Depression-era parents and the majority of people raised their hands. Young we were not.

And I don't know whether it was the Frankenstein-like aspect to the film or that a musician who's collaborated with everyone from Jeff Buckley to Chris Cornell was playing, but I'm here to tell you that the audience was easily 80% men. Guitar nerds abounded.

Lucas, who is Jewish, spoke about how tickled he'd been to discover this 1920 silent film based on a Jewish folktale ("A Jewish monster and a rabbi saves the day, how cool is that?"), so much so that he'd written a soundtrack with a musician friend and performed it all over the world, earning him a spot in the JAM (Jewish avant garde music) pantheon.

His soundtrack was masterful, taking us through the story of a rabbi who foresees disaster for the Jewish people and creates a clay monster (immense and awkwardly heavy-footed, a precursor to Frankenstein) he asks the spirits to animate to help defend his people. All the potential problems you'd expect from creating a monster ensue, but it ends up dead and the Jews are saved.

Praise Jehovah and pass the Manischewitz.

As if that wasn't enough excellent entertainment for the evening, it was followed by local band Zgomot taking the stage and playing a couple of Lucas' songs set to experimental short films. Then the man himself came back out to join them, doing a couple more, including one he'd written with Jeff Buckley.

If I needed to be baptized back into the cultural world, I couldn't do much better than with one of the top 100 horror films you must see before you die, accompanied by a guitarist who's played the Venice Biennale and Shakespeare & Co. in Paris.

All I can say is, beats the hell out of playing for 10 cents a card. Or even 20.