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.

Till Death When I Part

I can only hope my obituary does me justice.

After all, I'm out here, actively trying to live the kind of interesting life that will inspire someone to weave a seductive historical spell describing me after I've kicked the bucket. That I may live long enough that my obituary will only show up online because newspapers will be long gone is just a tragedy.

Unlike a lot of people, I don't have any quarrel with Mondays. They're just as likely to be fun days as nose-to-the-grindstone days since I work for myself, but today's started off strangely because the power went out. That may not sound like a big deal, but in 11 years of living in Jackson Ward, I think I've lost power twice. We're spoiled that way here.

Then there was the little matter of the weather. Intellectually, I knew that after last night's rain it would turn cooler - I even closed all but one of my bedroom windows last night - but emotionally, I wasn't ready for a high today of 63 after yesterday's glorious 80 degrees.

That meant swapping out yesterday's shorts and t-shirt for a wool dress, leggings, a jean jacket and a scarf when it came time to head out. Wool, for crying out loud because it's going down to 46 tonight.

Starving after a day that had been busy physically and professionally, I walked over to Asado only to find the bar looking full. Reluctant to waste a table on just me, the bartender pointed out a lone stool wedged unseen between lively happy hour revelers.

Immediately the guy at the end of the bar greeted me, asking how come I hadn't walked past his nearby barber shop lately. I told him my walks usually lead me to the river these days, causing the guy next to me to ask if I was talking to him. Nope.

"Well, you don't have to be snippy about it," he joked, then pivoted. "Do you know what Skunk Works are?" Um, nope.

He went on to explain that it was the code name for some revolutionary aircraft program and he was asking people because he was curious if they knew where their tax dollars were going. Clearly, I didn't, but I also discovered that the only reason he knew was because of a sister in the Air Force.

Just as he was introducing himself as Charles, sirens began wailing and lights flashing just outside the restaurant, so we turned around to see two ambulances had pulled up to deal with an accident that had just happened at Laurel and Broad. Some people flocked to the windows to watch, but I had no desire to see strangers put on stretchers.

Meanwhile, Charles is showing me a photo of an SR 71 Blackbird (which meant nothing to an aircraft imbecile like myself) and explaining that he's an accountant by day and a tutor in math, accounting and economics by night, which is why he's at this bar in the middle of campus.

Although he and his buddy have obviously been enjoying happy hour beverages for a while, he assures me his compromised state will not be an issue when he begins tutoring in 15 minutes. Since he had just explained to me that the reason he has a second job is because he's in that 1% who are allergic to most medications (so he needs to save for the expensive drugs he'll need if he gets sick), I raised my glass to his health, minus the affection for alcohol.

He wasn't even out the door before some of his friends took their seats and began discussing itemizing on their income tax. The bartender looked at me and wondered aloud if I thought that was as boring a topic for a bar as she did (hell, yes) and one of them overheard us and ended the discussion.

The one next to me had on an Edo's Squid t-shirt (he lives right behind it) and frequently walks the Northbank Trail. His buddy was in the process of moving to the city from Mosely (kill me now) and he was worried he'd miss all that Chesterfield County outdoors.

I reminded him that we have a whole riverfront to help with that. Then I shared a couple of my routes with the walker, who thanked me, saying the Northbank had gotten stale after walking it so long.

I'm just here to help.

When my honey sriracha grilled shrimp tacos showed up, the bartender said that they were her favorite, causing the pretty young thing busy doing shots of rail tequila with a beard, to pause, lime wedge in hand, and announce, "They're my favorite, too!"

Now that there was a consensus, I could chow down. By the time I finally said sayonara to my fellow bar sitters and left, I passed three cop cars still blocking Laurel entirely as I made my way to the VCU Student Commons Theater.

The Society of Professional Journalists was showing the award-winning documentary, "Obit," the story of the New York Times obituary-writing department, something other papers don't have. That's right, a documentary about the people making a living writing about death.

Except, as they pointed out so eloquently, the death part of an obit is generally two sentences and the entire rest of the article - whether 500 words or 1,000 words and 15,000 if you're the Pope - about the most interesting parts of the deceased's life.

It's a huge amount of research to track down and talk to those close to the departed (now and in the past) and try to locate as much background information as possible in a single day. Then they've got to write it up in a pithy and compelling way.

In order for The Times to deem someone worthy of an obit, the person has to have made some sort of impact, whether it was Brezhnev or the creator of the Slinky.

The obit game-changer came in 2012 with a piece about the death of John Fairfax, a handsome adventurer who'd crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific in a rowboat. As a Boy Scout, he'd settled a fight with a pistol and as a young man, attempted death by jaguar over a broken love affair. Oh, yea, he'd also been a pirate's apprentice.

His story was too good not to be told in his obit.

As a result, the obit-reading public went crazy, proving that obits could be as riveting and swaggering as their subjects, the better to do justice to a life.

And while I've never written an obit, I could completely relate to the journalists onscreen, particularly the one who typed with two and three fingers (don't judge). But also, the familiar negotiating writers and editors do about word counts and article placement.

Then there were advance obits, ready to go as soon as someone shuffled off the mortal coil. The Times has 1700 advance obits ready to go, which is only a problem when someone dies young and unexpectedly.

Someone talking about the Reagan assassination attempt recalled the panic, because of course they had nothing ready, the man had only been in office four months. About his fellow staffers, one writer said, "I don't care if they voted for him or not, they were praying he lived because we had no advance obit for him."

The kind of thing only a journalist would say.

With any luck, my swaggering obit will reference my beginnings as a love child, my brief relationship with Bobbie Gentry and my time spent at Squid Lips.

They'll just have to use the blog to glean the rest.

A Film Supreme

It's in my own best interest to take a musician with me to see a film about music. Or even two.

When I saw that the 2nd annual Afrikana Independent Film Festival was showing "Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary," I wasted no time in inviting a musically-inclined date. Then, for good measure, I invited another favorite musician, because I can never have too many musicians to ask questions of.

And while he wasn't available for dinner beforehand, my date was, so we strolled over to Asado and managed to grab the last two bar stools in a place full of the usual Friday night revelers as well as Afrikana-bound film lovers.

For all we knew, there were counter-protesters eating and drinking away, too.

Given the clutch of people outside on the sidewalk waiting for an opening, one thing no one was doing was lingering, so we ordered guacamole and chips to buy us time to check out the menu and then ordered promptly.

Although I'm not particularly a heathead, I was completely seduced by the honey sriracha shrimp tacos with their reassuring kind of heat - the kind that immediately fires up your mouth and then drops off quickly. All the fire, none of the pain. My date seemed to think his barbacoa tacos surpassed mine, but he was mistaken.

We didn't gulp our meal, but we definitely inhaled it faster than my grandmother would have approved of, mainly because of all the hungry people hovering near the door. I got up to use the loo before we left and a guy swooped in and claimed my stool before I even opened the bathroom door.

Our walk continued to the Grace Street Theatre where we met up with musician #2, a longtime Coltrane fan. One of several festival photographers came over and asked to take a shot of us representing some of the first VIP passholders in line (I'm just hoping it's not captioned, "A musical idiot accompanies two men with a clue").

Inside, we found excellent seats in the center and watched a jazz trio onstage, notable because the sax player's instrument was clear. As in see-through. I don't know about you, but I had no idea clear saxophones existed.

And I'm going to guess that Coltrane himself couldn't have imagined such a thing, either.

The film was a fascinating primer on Coltrane's short life (he died of liver cancer at 40) and for me, it was invaluable in laying out how the man's sound and musical philosophy developed. Equally compelling was learning who had influenced him along the way: Dizzie Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk.

Of the various talking heads in the documentary - John Densmore of the Doors, Carlos Santana, Bill Clinton, Wynton Marsalis and various former bandmates of Coltrane's - by far the most engaging was Cornel West, who managed to add a dramatic element (eyes wide, voice inflection, body lean into the camera) to every comment he made, often eliciting laughter from the crowd.

One of the funniest anecdotes told was about the extended solos Coltrane did while working with Miles Davis. In one scene of Davis' band playing live, we could see Miles taking a cigarette break on the side of the stage with other musicians while Coltrane blew his solo.

Apparently, Trane's solos ran way longer than Davis' and he called him on it. Trane explained that he didn't know how to stop playing and Davis told him to try taking the horn out of his mouth. Hilarious.

And because Coltrane never did any TV interviews, his words from print interviews and liner notes were read by Denzel Washington to accompany still photos and that would be my only complaint about the film. It's impossible not to recognize Denzel's voice, which makes it tough for the words to register as Coltrane's.

There was footage of Coltrane playing at the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival, where his atonal, more challenging and exploratory new style caused half the attendees to walk out mid-set.

Interestingly enough, one of those who'd walked out was saxophonist Plunky Branch who, along with hip hop artist Talib Kweli, gathered onstage after the film to discuss Coltrane and take questions from the audience.

Not surprisingly, Plunky had some regrets about walking out that long ago day.

I didn't walk out of the film a Coltrane expert by an stretch, but I did leave with a far better understanding of the man and how his soulful, spiritual tone became a new standard in jazz. Like Santana said, Trane didn't limit himself to any one genre because he "played life."

Walking out of the theater, all three of us acknowledged that we'd learned things about Coltrane we hadn't known and isn't that the point of a great documentary? It only made sense to begin our post-film discussion (and my questions) on the walk home.

Once my date and I were back at my place and comfortably ensconced on the balcony, I played the only Coltrane album I own, not "A Love Supreme," but "John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman" from 1963.

It sounds like the ultra hip late night music of the early '60s when the U.S. was on a post-war high and acting like it was the coolest kid on the planet. The kind of sound that inevitably involved a low-ceilinged club, lots of cigarette smoke and a singer, in this case, Johnny Hartman, with the classic jazz vocal range of an Ella Fitzgerald.

And, you know what? His sax solos frequently lasted longer than the verses sung by Hartman. Unlike Miles Davis, though, neither of us had any complaints about that.

Conclusion of a musician and a musical imbecile: no one beats Trane for "playing life" on a warm September night.

Kissing Like a Bandit

Because ultimately, don't we all gotta have it?

But  first of all, we gotta have that indefinable "thing."

Sitting in the Grace Street Theater waiting for the second installment of the inaugural Afrikana Independent Film Festival, the three of us - full as ticks after fish tacos at Asado - were seriously grooving to Afrikana's usual excellent pre-show mix (see 1985's "Oh Sheila") when "Wishing Well" came on and all our faces lit up.

"Terrance Trent D'Arby," my photographer friend announced authoritatively and his girlfriend immediately leaned over close, rubbing up against him, saying, "I love this man" because he'd known the artist's name.

Of course, in my perfect world, all men would recognize the sound of Terrance Trent D'Arby. It would be a fine way to separate the men from the boys.

We agreed that everyone needs their person to know certain things and he'd just scored big by knowing that one. But there's no way to know what your potential person needs you to know and therein lies the rub.

Seeing Spike Lee's first film, "She's Gotta Have It" on this, the 30th anniversary of the film, delivered a fascinating look at the '80s (white socks almost up to the knees, jumpsuits, Jane Fonda-era workout gear and men in gym shorts), female sexuality (I recall from seeing it in the theater what a huge deal the depiction of a black woman's sexuality was) and the very beginnings of the indie movie genre.

I can't recall how the black and whiteness of the film registered in '86, but tonight it felt right for the time, meaning that the interlude in color with singing and dancing amounted to an unpleasant reminder of bad '80s cliches.

For that matter, the audience cracked up at many of the cheesy '80s details throughout, but then, it had already been established that few in the audience had ever seen the film on a big screen, being far too young.

Which means that for them, the film's message of societal acceptance of female choice when it comes to number of partners must seem ridiculously obvious since they've never known any other reality.

For those of us seeing it 30 years later, it was a poignant reminder of the long arc of the double standard.

Because whether they're concurrent or consecutive, we shes of the world do gotta have it. Fact.

Bidding goodbye to the "sleepy" (perhaps a euphemism for "needing to have it") couple, I did a fast walk to Comedy Coalition for "Live from the Pacement," a variety show staged by trombonist/percussionist extraordinaire, Reggie Pace.

He and co-host Aaron sat in chairs with a revolving colored lamp on the floor casting patterns on the wall and welcomed an odd assortment of guests, to great hilarity.

Josh told online dating and Tinder ("The shallowest dating app ever") stories, asking for a show of hands on who's used Tinder, only to find a model couple there who'd met on the shallow app. In his own experience, he'd learned that nerd girls date for life because ~ spoiler alert, he said ~ to them, they don't see any difference in one guy from another.

From my vantage point of seniority, I could challenge that but I won't.

We got music from jazz guitarist Scott Burton, keyboard player Larry Branch and Reggie playing his smorgasbord of percussion, after which he pocketed his triangle. That led to a discussion of how John Popper wears a bandoleer to hold all his harmonicas and a side story about a man who carries his pacemaker in a similar vest.

It was real variety with potato jokes courtesy of comedian Katie as Mrs. Potatohead (What's the difference in mashed potatoes and pea soup? Anyone can mash potatoes), interpretive dancing (Josh: "That was proof that the girls in "Napoleon Dynamite' do grow up") and, in a more serious vein, a gorgeous flute rendition of "Winter Spirits" by Lauren Serpa.

"That was beautiful and now we're gonna ruin it," Aaron said, introducing Jim as Eleanor Gasm, who had the ability to read people's sexual histories by touching their foreheads.

Touching a couple's foreheads, she announced, "They don't love each other." To a guy with a peculiar high-pitched laugh, "You're going to die alone." To a guy about his date: "She likes the goatee, but lose the mustache." Her: "No, it's the reverse, lose the goatee."

To the crowd, "Who's willing to go home with someone here tonight?" No hands raised.

When he got to me, he touched, asked how I was doing tonight and announced that I was looking for two men. No one said Eleanor was always right.

The two guys next to me got highly uncomfortable when he asked how long they'd been dating (a month) and then if they'd done it yet ("We're not going to talk about that," the more uptight one said).

Man of the evening Reggie expressed amazement that Eleanor was polling the audience on their sex lives, noting that things had taken a turn for the worse. That was actually one of the best parts of the evening: watching Reggie as audience member onstage (when he wasn't performing), squirming and laughing along with the rest of us

Before the night was over, there was a hot dog break with three costumed hot dogs and a riff on "Rapper's Delight" done by Reggie's "father" in a bad fake mustache and high voice ("My boy is so talented!").

The collection of hosts and performers on the stage eventually came up with a takeaway for the evening: Things can always get worse.

Now there's a mantra for a Friday night.

To prove it, the show closed with "Barb" in a glitter vest and wearing rollerblades, entreating people to join her in karaoke, including a Dido tune which evolved into a rousing group singalong.

Because sometimes you gotta make do when you gotta have it and can't.