Can't Be Sporty

The only thing about taking vacation is post-vacation.

I'm not talking about adjusting to the three-hour time difference, although it hasn't been easy. I went to bed at midnight last night only to discover that my body thought it was 9:00 Portland time. Let's just say by the time I finally fell asleep, it was well after 3 a.m. and I'd done nothing fun to show for that time.

I've got no problem with late nights, but I expect escapades in trade.

I'm not even talking about the inevitable unpacking, laundry, plant watering and grocery shopping required after you've been away from home all but one of the last ten days.

No, the biggest adjustment is shifting out of vacation mode and back into real life. For me, that means running errands, finally answering work e-mails and diving back into my social calendar.

It also means catching up on over a week's worth of Washington Posts left by my intrepid delivery guy who continues to make a stop here even when I've notified him I'm out of town. Unlike the rest of the world, when I go on vacation, I stop paying attention to the larger world to focus on fun.

Sure, now that I'm back, I see that Greece is in deep doo-doo, read the gruesome details of the latest North Carolina shark attack and learned that it's now okay to take pictures on White House tours, long verboten. With any luck, I'll get to today's newspaper before going to bed tonight.

But what I also needed was friends and the Silent Music Revival at Gallery 5 offered me that. I got barely a block away when I first saw lightening and turned around and walked home for an umbrella before proceeding. Turns out I didn't need it, but the sidewalks were wet by the time I got out, so it did happen even if I didn't see it.

The first friend I ran into shared the latest on the house she and her partner are rehabbing slowly but surely. Boards have been removed from windows so glass and caulking can make them usable. The hydrangea I'd given her for her birthday had been planted and is blooming.

They'd collected a wood-burning stove and claw foot tub from her grandmother's house, all the more impressive because the tub will be an outdoor tub, which may be the coolest thing I've heard of in a while. Sure, I've got my own claw foot tub but it's in that most mundane of places, the bathroom.

Jameson, the organizer of the event and always the supremely serene type, was tonight a bit keyed up because it had been one mishap after another preparing for tonight.

First he hadn't been able to locate tonight's feature, "Say Ah-h!" because it was in storage in northern Virginia. Attempting to download it, his computer had been infected with a virus. Then Gallery 5's projector was on the fritz. Somehow, he'd sorted all this out and while we were now seeing another film, at least he hadn't had to cancel.

It was the first time I'd seen the teacher/music fan who'd just spent five weeks in Europe, bouncing around between Germany, Romania (Transylvania, natch), Austria and Italy. A devoted metal-head, I wasn't at all surprised to hear about the multi-day music festival he'd attended (we compared notes on Strand of Oaks since I'd seen them here while he'd seen them there).

But I couldn't have been more surprised to hear that he and his main squeeze had taken a four-hour "Sound of Music" bicycle tour in Salzburg. The funny part was that he'd never even seen the movie until deciding to book the tour, so he'd watched it just before going abroad. He got to see it all  - the von Trapp mansion, the abbey and cemetery, the town - except the mountain where Maria sings to the hills. Seems that hill is in Berlin, not Salzburg. Who knew?

Tonight's crowd for the music and film was smaller than usual, probably because of the holiday weekend or even the impending rain, so I had no problem scoring a front row seat.

Instead of one film, we were seeing a bunch of animated shorts from 1907-11, created by Frenchman Emile Cohl, whom Jameson said was the first to use pen and ink drawings for animation. The earliest were white figures on a black background (meaning negatives), eventually giving way to black figures on a white background.

Providing tonight's soundtrack were DJ Harrison for the first set and DJ Ohbliv for the second, both hidden behind the movie screen. Their seamless mashups of song snippets were an ideal match for the fast-moving action in shorts such as "Affair of the Heart" with characters with hearts for heads and faces, "Art's Infancy" and "Mr. Crack" based on an operetta about Baron Munchausen.

More people arrived and a few left during the break, while I ran into a guy I'd met a few years ago and hadn't seen at all in the past year. I'm always surprised when people remember me after so much time.

The last half of the program was later work by Cohl, much of it foreshadowing the work of the surrealist and avant garde film makers of coming decades. More plot driven, they also featured much more of a mix of live action and drawn animation.

Mothers-in-law seemed to be a recurring theme, always drawn as hideous old hags with bad teeth and menacing eyes. "Let's Be Sporty" began with a figure trying to ride a horse, then drive an automobile, ride a bike and ice skate. "Nothing beats walking!" it seemed to conclude, but, walking was bested by jumping, a movement not easily captured at this stage of animation.

When the show ended, Ohbliv kept playing and Jameson queried the group, "One more?" which got him a rousing affirmative from the crowd in the room.

"The Mind of a Cafe Worker" began with a table of men drinking in a restaurant while the tired server slumped in a nearby chair (at least he wasn't on his cell phone). Once he fell asleep and began dreaming, it was about wine...and beer...and absinthe, fanciful bottles showering him in alcohol, so happy dreams. He awoke only because his patrons were squirting seltzer water bottles at him, laughing at him as the crowd laughed at them.

Classic silent films about walking and absinthe, two things I know a little about. Not a bad way to ease back into my Richmond life.

Degenerate Art and Tin Can Men

You start some things and before you know it, you lose interest.

Other things are so pleasurable, you keep doing them until you look up one day and realize years have gone by and you're still doing them.

That's the Silent Music Revival, for me at least.

I went to my first SMR back in 2007 and somehow six years have passed and I still never miss an opportunity to hear local music improvised to a vintage silent film.

Walking over to Gallery 5 tonight, I found SMR organizer Jameson sitting outside enjoying the beautiful evening.

As we talked about all the SMRs he's done over the years, he mentioned that he needs to add more silent films to his collection or he'll have to start repeating films from the early days.

"Of course, nobody but you would know that I've shown them before," he laughed.

And honestly, I wouldn't mind seeing a silent film I haven't seen in five or six years again.

When last he showed "The Mechanical Man" back in 2007, DJ Mike Murphy provided the soundtrack.

Tonight he'd carried that tradition forward, asking DJ Ohbliv to do the honors.

The evening kicked off with a 1928 Dadaist film called "Ghosts Before Breakfast" and Ohbliv getting warmed up doing music for it.

The nine-minute film, destroyed by the Nazis as "degenerate art" according to the opening credits, was full of the kind of ghosts that would have amazed 1920s audiences.

Flying hats, water going back into a hose, branches sprouting leaves, ties untying themselves.

In other words, stop motion and reverse film, but who knew that back then?

Introducing "The Mechanical Man," Jameson praised Ohbliv, saying, "No one's really holding down hiphop in Richmond like Ohbliv."

Then he explained that we were about to see a 1921 science fiction film that had been lost until a Portuguese print had been discovered in Brazil, albeit only part of the original 80-minute film.

To make up for what we weren't going to see, Jameson offered a "trailer version" to bring us up to speed on the plot.

Basically it amounted to the only way to stop an evil mechanical man was with another mechanical man.

Duh.

The first thing that struck me about MM was what mincing steps he took; you'd think a big scary robot-looking creature would take big, hulking steps, but he walked like a girl in a tight skirt and overly high heels.

In one scene, two women are taking off their jewelry after a party, putting it in a chest and storing it in a wall safe.

Then a title card tells us, "We were tranquil when suddenly Mechanical Man enters."

Ahhhhh!

Let's just say their tranquility was shattered when MM rips the safe out of the wall as the cowering women watch.

So much for tranquility.

In another scene, MM appears at a party, only this MM is supposedly a costumed guest and he's nice to everyone, even calling for champagne for those at his table.

Not surprisingly, he opened it by snapping off the top of the bottle, upsetting the men at the table, while the woman happily drank the glass he poured her.

Not long after, there was an epic battle between the two mechanical men which got the entire audience tittering over the clumsy effects, but no doubt impressed audiences in 1921 no end.

And through it all, the hospital scenes, the fire, the marauding MM, DJ Ohbliv kept the music apace with the action, whether fast or slow, scary or comical.

You have to appreciate a man who can think on his feet, since, like the audience, he was seeing the film for the first time.

And when our hero, Saltarello, manages to ride a stolen motorbike to the laboratory of the evil criminal Mado and flip a switch to short circuit the MM, Ohbliv's music was right there with the last minute save.

It was so good a climax, I almost needed a cigarette.

Now I just have to wait until October for the next installment of SMR.

I already know it'll be worth the wait.

Steady Slurp

It's so easy to justify a milkshake when it's 101 degrees outside.

So when I got asked to lunch, my  thoughts went immediately to the nearest source for a long, tall glass of ice cream and that would be The Village.

The place was packed and since I'm not a Village regular, I don't know if that's typical for a Saturday or a result of overheated people (like me) trying to escape the heat.

We took the two-top by the ladies room and got a witty server in return.

My chocolate shake got ordered first and when she brought it, I asked for a second straw so my companion and I could share.

Pushing it into the frozen contents of the glass, she announced, "Now you're going steady!"

What? No steady ring, no puka shell necklace, no nothing? Clearly going steady doesn't mean what it used to.

She insisted we order onion rings with our BLT and Reuben because the Food Network had raved about them in years gone by.

Back then they'd noted that the batter used PBR and Richbrau, but obviously there have been some modifications since Richbrau went under.

That said, they were better than average onion rings and neither of us was able to finish them.

While slugging the shake and eating the rings, we were visited by one of my walking regulars, totally out of context there.

He wiggled his eyebrows and made a face behind my lunch companion's back, apparently not used to seeing me in a social situation.

Looking at my mondo BLT and onion rings, he noted, "I'd like to see how all that food is going to fit in your little body."

He should have come back fifteen minutes later.

After gorging ourselves (because let's face it, having a milkshake with a meal is like having dessert throughout), we went to my favorite neighborhood record store, Steady Sounds, who'd bragged on Facebook that their store was a cool 73 degrees.

Count me in.

Today was the first in a four-date series called "Summer Sounds at Steady" and featured two performers for our afternoon's pleasure.

Producer/DJ Ohbliv (he of the very smooth mustache) got things started, twisting nobs and calling forth samples, all the while smiling and dancing in place.

After a while, White Laces' guitarist Alex French's solo project, Flossed in Paradise, took over, layering sounds from guitars, drum machines and synthesizers with his effects-laden voice for a sound I instantly fell in love with.

As recently as last night, I had described a favorite sound of mine as reverb-laden with unintelligible lyrics, affectionately known to those who know my taste as "music from a cave."

And ta-da! Here i was getting exactly that in post-punk style four feet from my sweaty, smiling face.

For the next hour and a half, the two traded off the spotlight, (mostly) seamlessly segueing from one set of long, musical-looking fingers to the other.

If there was a better way to spend a hot Saturday afternoon than with a milkshake and Flossed in Paradise, I couldn't tell you what it was.

And two straws do not mean you're going steady.

What is this, the malt shop era?