My extravagantly-planted garden and my attendance on it since it was planted have turned out to be a draw for bees as well as a guy (latent gardener?) magnet.
"Watering again? Looking great!" my neighbor calls out, exiting his sleek Jaguar. Doing what I can, I say. "If anyone can, you can," he assures me with a wave.
A man walks by yesterday as I'm examining it, trying to decide how many stepping stones I need. "Three," he advises after assessing the situation and wishes me well. Tonight, he walks by again to find me staring just as intently as yesterday.
"Still working on that garden?" he cracks. I apologize for not having had time to get the stepping stones he suggested yet. It's on my list, though. Why do I think I'll see him again soon to check on my progress?
Leaving for Cinema Noir, I pause to admire how lush and colorful everything looks after a good sprinkler soaking earlier.
"Looks great!" the new guy next door walking up to his porch tells me enthusiastically, as if we've had a conversation before. Standing near the pink and white English daisies, he tells me about all the birds he's seen in my birdbath lately, so I tell him the birdbath's history of being rescued from behind an old wooden schoolhouse slated for demolition.
We discuss whether I should add a bowl to the top of the pedestal for a wider bird bathing surface. Being a guy, he wants to know how heavy the thing is was, if it has a drain and what the bottom of the pedestal looks like. Heavy, no, flat.
"I dig it," he says with a big smile.
At Cinema Noir, the DJ is playing a brilliantly-crafted tribute to Prince, an ideal soundtrack for this dark day.
Earlier, I'd chatted with my downstairs neighbors - students and musicians, including two guitarists - to inquire if they had been Prince fans. No, but they'd heard he was dead.
"I never really got into him," one said with no real interest. "I mean, I knew him, but not really," the other said.
Sound of record scratching.
Wait, you don't seem to understand what this man represented, what he did to bring a combination of rock and funk to black and white audiences. How about his mad musical skills, his stellar production abilities?
By the time I finished making my "why Prince matters" speech to these two whippersnappers, they got it. "Man, I never knew any of that about him," one said, clearly impressed. Someone needs musical guidance is all I can say.
Tonight's short film, "Only Light" was about the $32 billion a year human sex trafficking industry, a heavy yet important topic, followed by a trailer for a documentary on the same subject, "Amazing Grace: Freedom's Song" by musician and cultural ambassador Yewande.
Afterward, during the Q & A, a man asked what he and others could do to make a difference.
"I knew nothing about this, but I want to help," he said. "I was brought here tonight by an intelligent woman or I wouldn't have even known about it."
"Repeat that part," Yewande told him to laughter, and the second time he referred to his date as both intelligent and beautiful. Smart man.
Best line of the night: "Sometimes, I think I should have said yes to some of those goat herders' proposals."
She was probably just minding her own business, tending her garden, when goat herders started showing up to talk to her. Now she regrets not taking them up on their offers.
I can totally dig it.
Showing posts with label noir cinema series. Show all posts
Showing posts with label noir cinema series. Show all posts
Friday, April 22, 2016
Friday, February 19, 2016
I Do Want Change
How about Wednesday?
I can not go.
Okay, do you want to do something any other night?
Thursday or Friday?
How about Cinema Noir?
OK, cool!
So we're on for Thursday?
Yeppers.
Okay, so I want to stop by the opening of the new exhibit at the Branch Museum before the movie. If you want to join me for that, we can go somewhere first to eat.
You are such a party animal! I'm off at 2, so sounds all good to me!
You read right, I got called a party animal for wanting to go to an architecture museum and eat dinner before a movie. Whoa, things are getting crazy here.
Say, what happened to late nights, excessive drinking and wild behavior...or is that so party animal 2015?
Doesn't matter, I suppose, since we had a fine time at dinner, seat-dancing to the '80s and stuffing our faces for the sake of my livelihood (he's good about always taking home the leftovers so I don't have to) while talking about life.
It was important to him to bring me up to speed on the hilarious SNL "The Day Beyonce Turned Black" video - "Kerry Washington can't be black! She's on ABC!" - once we finished eating.
Apparently he worries about others mocking my lack of cultural literacy and he's here to save me from that.
Judging by the sedate-looking crowd at the Branch Museum, I certainly didn't need to be up to speed before the opening of "The Historic American Buildings Survey: Documenting Virginia's Architectural Heritage," not that I didn't find it fascinating.
Turns out that HABS was yet another brilliant New Deal initiative in 1933, implemented to begin the important preservation process as it pertains to the built environment, engineering technologies and landscape design.
An architecture nerd's wet dream, in other words.
Using large-format black and white photographs and detailed architectural renderings, the exhibit displayed the work of countless people who painstakingly recorded specifics about important buildings, such as the Rising Sun Tavern on Caroline Street in Fredericksburg (a street I know well), erected before 1781, and Bacon's Castle in Surry County, built before 1676.
Equally familiar to me were Menokin on the Northern Neck, the Jefferson Memorial in Washington and Monticello, although the specificity of details was far greater than any average Joe would know, or even any art history fanatic.
When we left there, it was for me to get a hot fudge sundae at Bev's - where we were alone since ice cream is not the most popular sweet in February - while my friend explained his lactose intolerance and sipped a cup of coffee, his drug of choice.
In no hurry, we took the alley on our way out, resulting in a couple of fun discoveries. The first was a mural on a garage door of the "Spy versus Spy" characters expertly rendered and the other was a discarded mattress on which someone had spray-painted, "Nothing else mattress."
Dyslexia humor is a wonderful thing.
Eventually, we made our way over to Manchester's Browne Gallery on Hull Street for Cinema Noir where I found myself back on the same stretch I'd walked a few weeks ago, discovering Croaker's Spot and Sweet Fix Bakery in the process.
The gallery was filling up quickly, so we nabbed seats in the second row and another friend showed up to sit just in front of us. One of the great things about this event is the pre-film music and tonight's was especially good, all Earth, Wind and Fire in tribute to Maurice White's recent earthly exit.
Several EWF album covers were placed around the gallery as visual reminders, a couple next to a classic classroom turntable, inspiring my friend to ask, "Where's the slide projector?" like the AV Club geek he probably was.
Tonight's short film was director Pete Chaimon's "Blackcard," a subtly scathing look at a world where a group called The Commission makes it their job to check on infractions by African Americans of the "black code."
The audience was cracking up within the first two minutes of the film.
It began with Commission staff raiding a woman's refrigerator, nodding in approval at malt liquor, sniffing a pitcher of ice tea to determine if it was sweetened and ultimately discovering unacceptable items such as kale and, later, a book by Malcolm Gladwell.
"Malcolm Galdwell?" the agent asks. You'd have thought he found "Mein Kampf."
It's these kinds of things that cause our heroine Lona to lose her black card, a fact that doesn't bother her boyfriend because he thinks self trumps race. She's not so sure.
Interrogating another man about his blackness, the guy admits to voting for Romney. Incredulous, the Commission investigator, asks, "You didn't want change?"
The films' leitmotif - whether to chose oneself over one's race - provided much of the post-film discussion with director Pete, looking very hip perched in a director's chair at the front of the room.
"Black is not a genre," he said, explaining why he thought of the term as pejorative. A film made by and/or with blacks can be any genre a white film can: romance, sci-fi, western, comedy or drama, a fact which should be obvious to anyone.
Although his film contained much to laugh at, he saw the comedy as being in service of the dramatic element, namely Lona trying to get her black card back and, ultimately, Leonard laying his on the ground and opting to follow his own path rather than the prescribed racial one.
Pete pulled out metaphors galore and a recent eating example -questioning his own meal of quinoa in Los Angeles as "un-black" - to explain the importance of making individual calls about what kind of black you choose to be.
Many of his tight, slightly awkward camera angles owed a debt to Terry Gilliams' "Brazil," he explained, saying, "You're going to turn me into a film nerd now."
Truth be told, that's the absolute beauty of these Cinema Nouir evenings. As intriguing as it is to get to see a contemporary black film short, it's always the discussion afterwards that makes them such compelling evenings.
I'm far more interested in the day Richmond becomes successfully multi-racial than I am the day Beyonce became black. What's cool is that Cinema Noir and the Afrikanna Film Fest are chipping away at that every single month.
And if I have to be a party animal to be a part of that, well, that's the way of the world.
I can not go.
Okay, do you want to do something any other night?
Thursday or Friday?
How about Cinema Noir?
OK, cool!
So we're on for Thursday?
Yeppers.
Okay, so I want to stop by the opening of the new exhibit at the Branch Museum before the movie. If you want to join me for that, we can go somewhere first to eat.
You are such a party animal! I'm off at 2, so sounds all good to me!
You read right, I got called a party animal for wanting to go to an architecture museum and eat dinner before a movie. Whoa, things are getting crazy here.
Say, what happened to late nights, excessive drinking and wild behavior...or is that so party animal 2015?
Doesn't matter, I suppose, since we had a fine time at dinner, seat-dancing to the '80s and stuffing our faces for the sake of my livelihood (he's good about always taking home the leftovers so I don't have to) while talking about life.
It was important to him to bring me up to speed on the hilarious SNL "The Day Beyonce Turned Black" video - "Kerry Washington can't be black! She's on ABC!" - once we finished eating.
Apparently he worries about others mocking my lack of cultural literacy and he's here to save me from that.
Judging by the sedate-looking crowd at the Branch Museum, I certainly didn't need to be up to speed before the opening of "The Historic American Buildings Survey: Documenting Virginia's Architectural Heritage," not that I didn't find it fascinating.
Turns out that HABS was yet another brilliant New Deal initiative in 1933, implemented to begin the important preservation process as it pertains to the built environment, engineering technologies and landscape design.
An architecture nerd's wet dream, in other words.
Using large-format black and white photographs and detailed architectural renderings, the exhibit displayed the work of countless people who painstakingly recorded specifics about important buildings, such as the Rising Sun Tavern on Caroline Street in Fredericksburg (a street I know well), erected before 1781, and Bacon's Castle in Surry County, built before 1676.
Equally familiar to me were Menokin on the Northern Neck, the Jefferson Memorial in Washington and Monticello, although the specificity of details was far greater than any average Joe would know, or even any art history fanatic.
When we left there, it was for me to get a hot fudge sundae at Bev's - where we were alone since ice cream is not the most popular sweet in February - while my friend explained his lactose intolerance and sipped a cup of coffee, his drug of choice.
In no hurry, we took the alley on our way out, resulting in a couple of fun discoveries. The first was a mural on a garage door of the "Spy versus Spy" characters expertly rendered and the other was a discarded mattress on which someone had spray-painted, "Nothing else mattress."
Dyslexia humor is a wonderful thing.
Eventually, we made our way over to Manchester's Browne Gallery on Hull Street for Cinema Noir where I found myself back on the same stretch I'd walked a few weeks ago, discovering Croaker's Spot and Sweet Fix Bakery in the process.
The gallery was filling up quickly, so we nabbed seats in the second row and another friend showed up to sit just in front of us. One of the great things about this event is the pre-film music and tonight's was especially good, all Earth, Wind and Fire in tribute to Maurice White's recent earthly exit.
Several EWF album covers were placed around the gallery as visual reminders, a couple next to a classic classroom turntable, inspiring my friend to ask, "Where's the slide projector?" like the AV Club geek he probably was.
Tonight's short film was director Pete Chaimon's "Blackcard," a subtly scathing look at a world where a group called The Commission makes it their job to check on infractions by African Americans of the "black code."
The audience was cracking up within the first two minutes of the film.
It began with Commission staff raiding a woman's refrigerator, nodding in approval at malt liquor, sniffing a pitcher of ice tea to determine if it was sweetened and ultimately discovering unacceptable items such as kale and, later, a book by Malcolm Gladwell.
"Malcolm Galdwell?" the agent asks. You'd have thought he found "Mein Kampf."
It's these kinds of things that cause our heroine Lona to lose her black card, a fact that doesn't bother her boyfriend because he thinks self trumps race. She's not so sure.
Interrogating another man about his blackness, the guy admits to voting for Romney. Incredulous, the Commission investigator, asks, "You didn't want change?"
The films' leitmotif - whether to chose oneself over one's race - provided much of the post-film discussion with director Pete, looking very hip perched in a director's chair at the front of the room.
"Black is not a genre," he said, explaining why he thought of the term as pejorative. A film made by and/or with blacks can be any genre a white film can: romance, sci-fi, western, comedy or drama, a fact which should be obvious to anyone.
Although his film contained much to laugh at, he saw the comedy as being in service of the dramatic element, namely Lona trying to get her black card back and, ultimately, Leonard laying his on the ground and opting to follow his own path rather than the prescribed racial one.
Pete pulled out metaphors galore and a recent eating example -questioning his own meal of quinoa in Los Angeles as "un-black" - to explain the importance of making individual calls about what kind of black you choose to be.
Many of his tight, slightly awkward camera angles owed a debt to Terry Gilliams' "Brazil," he explained, saying, "You're going to turn me into a film nerd now."
Truth be told, that's the absolute beauty of these Cinema Nouir evenings. As intriguing as it is to get to see a contemporary black film short, it's always the discussion afterwards that makes them such compelling evenings.
I'm far more interested in the day Richmond becomes successfully multi-racial than I am the day Beyonce became black. What's cool is that Cinema Noir and the Afrikanna Film Fest are chipping away at that every single month.
And if I have to be a party animal to be a part of that, well, that's the way of the world.
Friday, March 20, 2015
Prove It All Night
Never believe a man who tells you his fish is this big. Unless, of course, he shows you a picture to prove it.
I saw not one but three funeral processions on my walk this morning. I spent all afternoon inside my head and on the computer first making story pitches to my editor and then writing a snappy piece about a tenth anniversary. Enough already.
By early evening, I was more than ready to go on a date with myself. First stop, the Magpie since it had been a while.
The bar was all mine and as far as the two tables of young couples were concerned, I was invisible drinking Tenuta di Tavignano Verdicchio, spooning up my potato, cauliflower and Manchego soup and reading my Washington Post. Fine by me.
The sweetest story I read concerned a documentary about Lady Bird Johnson's beautification efforts (which I'm sure we'll never see in Richmond).
When Congress was stalling on LBJ's highway beautification bill, he's shown telling his Cabinet, "You know that I love that woman. And she wants that highway beautification bill and by god, we're going to get it for her!"
I don't know about you, but I have only admiration for a man who not only has beagles but is up front about telling his coworkers on camera he loves his wife. Very nicely done, LBJ.
With the radio set to the Old 97s, the bartender and I discussed the ordering of music genres at a restaurant. He was telling me that this station would soon be replaced by something louder and more raucous, say T Rex or Bowie, as the evening progressed. He was impressed that I'd seen the Old 97s while he'd just recently been unable to get off work to catch them at the Jefferson.
I ordered a special of beef tri-tip carpaccio topped by white bean and onion salad, housemade Bloody Mary mix and olive oil, enjoying the savory salad almost as much as the tri-tip. What I wasn't enjoying was an article about Meerkat, the breakout app at SXSW.
Tell me we don't really need a live streaming app that lets iPhone users share real-time video directly to their Twitter feed. People talk about how tangible it feels, as if they were really there. The awful part, as the article points out, is that we're redefining "experience" from something you actually do to something you witness digitally.
I don't know that I want to be part of a world where seeing something on a tiny screen replaces experiencing it in real life, but I fear that ship has already sailed.
Setting the paper aside, I decided to focus on my reality and indulge in another of the evening's specials. The chef had been showing off a photograph of the four-foot rockfish he'd gotten in today, a truly impressive specimen, its head as long as his chef's knife.
What spoke to me was rockfish collar, also on special tonight. First rule of fish eating: never pass up a chance for collar.
Basted in lime, honey and tequila before being pan fried and served with pistachios and peppers, it looked as fabulous as it tasted. Flipping it over to get at the hunks of white meat, I was soon eating with my fingers as if it were a whole fish.
All I can say is, no live stream could possibly convey the succulence of this rockfish collar.
When I looked up from my fish feast, I realized the two young couples had been replaced by four middle-aged couples. The times they were a -changin' and if the grown-ups had arrived, it was time for me to leave.
I'd taken so long digging out every morsel of collar that I was almost late to the Noir Cinema series, this month at Ghostprint Gallery. After finding a seat, a handsome man with braids sat down in my row only to check his phone and look at me sadly. "VCU just lost in overtime," he informed me in his deep voice.
What a shame. Let's talk.
Tonight's film was "Jump" by filmmaker Anthony Harper who'd made it as his senior thesis at Howard University. The short film was set in rural Virginia and focused on a disabled mother and her college-bound son.
I saw it as a power struggle between generations as a parent refuses to let go of a child, a universal theme told in a succinct and beautifully-filmed way. During the Q & A, I was fascinated as people brought up points I hadn't even noticed.
One person was impressed that the main character, a high school student, had been shown as part of an intact black family. Another was struck by how matter of factly it was presented that all the black high school kids shown had college plans.
All I could think was how the media must constantly rely on black cultural stereotypes in mass media for things like these to stand out to people. They hadn't even occurred to me, perhaps because I'm not black.
That's one of the reasons I enjoy the Noir Cinema series so much. Getting to hear how others interpret black-made films about black characters is reliably a reality check on the state of our supposedly post-race society.
When the evening ended, I wandered up to Bistro 27 for dessert. Walking in, a smiling woman asked me if I was a nurse. Do I look capable enough to be a nurse?
She asked because there was an event for nurses happening, but I sidled by them and made my way to the bar for dessert. Chocolate pate with fresh whipped cream and blackberries may not have been what I needed, but it definitely qualified for what I wanted.
As luck would have it, a friend showed up and we wiled away a little time chatting about upcoming trips, the best place for a quick breakfast and sliced versus chunks of pastrami on a sandwich (I'll take either).
Before we knew it, a light rain was starting and since I'd walked over, it seemed like a good time to begin heading home.
Which means I got a little wet because I wasn't watching a live stream of a woman walking in the rain after eating rockfish collar and discussing race, I was actually walking in the rain.
And by god, that's the way I want it.
I saw not one but three funeral processions on my walk this morning. I spent all afternoon inside my head and on the computer first making story pitches to my editor and then writing a snappy piece about a tenth anniversary. Enough already.
By early evening, I was more than ready to go on a date with myself. First stop, the Magpie since it had been a while.
The bar was all mine and as far as the two tables of young couples were concerned, I was invisible drinking Tenuta di Tavignano Verdicchio, spooning up my potato, cauliflower and Manchego soup and reading my Washington Post. Fine by me.
The sweetest story I read concerned a documentary about Lady Bird Johnson's beautification efforts (which I'm sure we'll never see in Richmond).
When Congress was stalling on LBJ's highway beautification bill, he's shown telling his Cabinet, "You know that I love that woman. And she wants that highway beautification bill and by god, we're going to get it for her!"
I don't know about you, but I have only admiration for a man who not only has beagles but is up front about telling his coworkers on camera he loves his wife. Very nicely done, LBJ.
With the radio set to the Old 97s, the bartender and I discussed the ordering of music genres at a restaurant. He was telling me that this station would soon be replaced by something louder and more raucous, say T Rex or Bowie, as the evening progressed. He was impressed that I'd seen the Old 97s while he'd just recently been unable to get off work to catch them at the Jefferson.
I ordered a special of beef tri-tip carpaccio topped by white bean and onion salad, housemade Bloody Mary mix and olive oil, enjoying the savory salad almost as much as the tri-tip. What I wasn't enjoying was an article about Meerkat, the breakout app at SXSW.
Tell me we don't really need a live streaming app that lets iPhone users share real-time video directly to their Twitter feed. People talk about how tangible it feels, as if they were really there. The awful part, as the article points out, is that we're redefining "experience" from something you actually do to something you witness digitally.
I don't know that I want to be part of a world where seeing something on a tiny screen replaces experiencing it in real life, but I fear that ship has already sailed.
Setting the paper aside, I decided to focus on my reality and indulge in another of the evening's specials. The chef had been showing off a photograph of the four-foot rockfish he'd gotten in today, a truly impressive specimen, its head as long as his chef's knife.
What spoke to me was rockfish collar, also on special tonight. First rule of fish eating: never pass up a chance for collar.
Basted in lime, honey and tequila before being pan fried and served with pistachios and peppers, it looked as fabulous as it tasted. Flipping it over to get at the hunks of white meat, I was soon eating with my fingers as if it were a whole fish.
All I can say is, no live stream could possibly convey the succulence of this rockfish collar.
When I looked up from my fish feast, I realized the two young couples had been replaced by four middle-aged couples. The times they were a -changin' and if the grown-ups had arrived, it was time for me to leave.
I'd taken so long digging out every morsel of collar that I was almost late to the Noir Cinema series, this month at Ghostprint Gallery. After finding a seat, a handsome man with braids sat down in my row only to check his phone and look at me sadly. "VCU just lost in overtime," he informed me in his deep voice.
What a shame. Let's talk.
Tonight's film was "Jump" by filmmaker Anthony Harper who'd made it as his senior thesis at Howard University. The short film was set in rural Virginia and focused on a disabled mother and her college-bound son.
I saw it as a power struggle between generations as a parent refuses to let go of a child, a universal theme told in a succinct and beautifully-filmed way. During the Q & A, I was fascinated as people brought up points I hadn't even noticed.
One person was impressed that the main character, a high school student, had been shown as part of an intact black family. Another was struck by how matter of factly it was presented that all the black high school kids shown had college plans.
All I could think was how the media must constantly rely on black cultural stereotypes in mass media for things like these to stand out to people. They hadn't even occurred to me, perhaps because I'm not black.
That's one of the reasons I enjoy the Noir Cinema series so much. Getting to hear how others interpret black-made films about black characters is reliably a reality check on the state of our supposedly post-race society.
When the evening ended, I wandered up to Bistro 27 for dessert. Walking in, a smiling woman asked me if I was a nurse. Do I look capable enough to be a nurse?
She asked because there was an event for nurses happening, but I sidled by them and made my way to the bar for dessert. Chocolate pate with fresh whipped cream and blackberries may not have been what I needed, but it definitely qualified for what I wanted.
As luck would have it, a friend showed up and we wiled away a little time chatting about upcoming trips, the best place for a quick breakfast and sliced versus chunks of pastrami on a sandwich (I'll take either).
Before we knew it, a light rain was starting and since I'd walked over, it seemed like a good time to begin heading home.
Which means I got a little wet because I wasn't watching a live stream of a woman walking in the rain after eating rockfish collar and discussing race, I was actually walking in the rain.
And by god, that's the way I want it.
Friday, January 16, 2015
City Fixes, Women's Stories
The evening promised several things, but I never saw the urban brilliance or oral sex coming.
I'd begun at the Virginia Center for Architecture's opening of "Reprogramming the City," the latest exhibit. All I knew was that it involved re-imagining city systems and structures, which didn't sound like it had a lot of razzle-dazzle to it.
Turns out I couldn't have been more wrong. This wide-ranging overview of global brilliance sucked me in with clever, thought-provoking ways to make city living better.
First off, I learned something. You know why there's always so much scaffolding in NYC? Because they have an ordinance requiring every building have a facade inspection every five years. What that means is that scaffolding will always be a fact of life in the city.
Along comes someone with the idea to make the most of this necessity. Added to the scaffolding are counters for eating, pull-down seats and planters, making something formerly purely utilitarian now pleasant and inviting, a reason to linger, even.
In Sweden, where sunlight is at a premium during winter, many people experience seasonal affective disorder. So what do those smart Swedes do but install sunlight-simulating lamps in the bus shelters to allow people to grab rays while waiting for the bus. P.S. Bus ridership is way up.
Or how about the brilliance in St. Petersburg, Russia where they've installed "lampbrellas," light poles with umbrellas built in that sense rain and open automatically. People caught outside without an umbrella have a dry place to wait it out.
You know how seriously Parisians take their food, so they came up with tables that can be grafted onto plaza steps of buildings to create tables where people can eat sitting across from each other. The tables are easily put up and taken down. So civilized.
Even those airheads in Los Angeles showed off by converting former billboard frames into air-cleaning bamboo gardens. Do you know how much more attractive a billboard structure looks with bamboo growing out of it instead of some smarmy marketing message? Gardens in the air, beautiful!
In Vienna, Austria, phone booth usage was down but more people were buying electric cars, so what do they do? Add charging stations for cars to the phone booths.
As I walked around the exhibit, I was repeatedly blown away by how cities are re-purposing existing objects for 21st century lives.
It was the kind of show where complete strangers would be looking at something with you and then turn and begin discussing some aspect of it. It happened to me several times.
Best of all, they had a big glass bowl for suggestions for ideas to improve our own fair city. I say we start by copying L.A., Russia or Paris and move on from there. No sense reinventing the wheel right off the bat.
When I left there, my intellect was fully stimulated as I let my mind consider the marvelously creative ideas I'd just witnessed.
My next stop (yet again) was Balliceaux and this month's edition of the Noir Cinema series, one of my new favorite events. This month, they'd brought in director/actor Ka'ramuu Kush to screen his short, "And Then..."
After finding a seat in the third row, I looked around for someone I recognized besides the woman who runs the event. Not a soul. A few minutes later, a guy I see at shows took the chair next to me, immediately asking what I thought of last night's New Orleans band, The Naughty Professor, and, just like that, I had company.
But woman can not live by conversation alone, so I also enjoyed a Scotch egg, something new from the kitchen. The soft-boiled duck egg was covered in sage and thyme sausage, rolled in cornbread and deep fried before finding a home on a bed of shiitake mushrooms and beef demi-glace. Oh, yes, and there was a bit of shaved truffle on top.
It was obscene and I mean that in the most complimentary way. A couple of those at brunch and you wouldn't want to do anything but spend the day napping. I shared part of it with the guy next door lest I fall asleep during the film.
I needn't have worried. Even with an hour delay in starting due to technical difficulties and plenty of spirited conversation with strangers (about the history of the Moors, "Selma" and British actors doing American southern accents), enthusiasm for the film stayed high.
In fact, it probably grew when L.A. filmmaker Kush (originally from Detroit) introduced the coming of womanhood film, saying he was glad there were no kids present because, "This is a film for grown folks."
It begins with a close-up of feet dancing and moves up to where we can see two very attractive people dancing together (he was one of them). From there, we go to the bedroom where she's screwing up her nerve to tell him she didn't like something he'd done in bed while they were having sex.
When she tells him, it leads to a wonderfully honest scene between them as they discuss what they do and don't like - about sex and relationships. His key point is, "Hurting you can never make me feel good." You could almost hear the women in the room swoon when he said it.
But it was the denouement that caught everyone by surprise and not just because it involved obvious oral sex, although that part had some in the audience reacting very vocally.
Given a title of "And Then..." you can probably guess that no answers were provided at the end of the film. Each viewer was left to decide what may have happened next. For a lot of women watching, there was some serious fanning going on after that final scene.
If the DJ had begun playing at that point, there would have been no telling what might have happened on the dance floor. Instead, Kush took the director's chair in front of the screen and the audience unleashed a torrent of thoughtful questions on him.
Mostly it was women, curious about his take on relationships, communication and ego. Many times, he commented on what good questions were being asked, but I think it was mainly a case of women (because 98% of the questions came from women) wanting to discuss the points his film raised.
Namely that certain conversations need to be shared in a relationship, even if the man's ego is on the line. Even if they're difficult conversations he doesn't want to have. He almost got cheered when he said that because men have the privilege in a relationship (like whites over blacks or rich over poor), it's up to them to try harder to talk about the things that matter to a woman.
Before long, we were discussing deep stuff brought up in the film. At what point in a relationship does having sex become making love and when do you talk about which you're doing? How valid is marriage realistically? How far should you go to accommodate someone you love?
Because Kush chooses to make films that tell women's stories, he took a lot of questions about how he gets in the head of the other sex. In the case of this one, he and a female friend traded off, each writing one page of script and then turning it over to the other for another page. "These are conversations that need to happen between couples in real life," he said.
In this case, it meant that he got to write some women's parts and she some men's, making for a distinctive viewpoint that resonated with the audience. Women just kept asking him questions, not just about the film but about men and relationships.
When one asked how old he was (41), he laughed and asked why she wanted to know that. "Because you seem really thoughtful and intuitive so I figure you must not be too young since you've figured out so much already." One woman asked if he got handed panties and phone numbers after he screens the film (head shots and bios mostly).
The Q & A went on for well over an hour, an obvious indicator of how many women in the room related to the issues raised. He's shooting his first full-length feature this summer and it'll also deal with sex and gender issues. We even got his word that he'll screen it here for us.
And then...we'll probably have another fascinating discussion about coupling. Why? Bamboo on billboards: easy. Men and women: still a work in progress.
Just ask any grown folk in the room tonight.
I'd begun at the Virginia Center for Architecture's opening of "Reprogramming the City," the latest exhibit. All I knew was that it involved re-imagining city systems and structures, which didn't sound like it had a lot of razzle-dazzle to it.
Turns out I couldn't have been more wrong. This wide-ranging overview of global brilliance sucked me in with clever, thought-provoking ways to make city living better.
First off, I learned something. You know why there's always so much scaffolding in NYC? Because they have an ordinance requiring every building have a facade inspection every five years. What that means is that scaffolding will always be a fact of life in the city.
Along comes someone with the idea to make the most of this necessity. Added to the scaffolding are counters for eating, pull-down seats and planters, making something formerly purely utilitarian now pleasant and inviting, a reason to linger, even.
In Sweden, where sunlight is at a premium during winter, many people experience seasonal affective disorder. So what do those smart Swedes do but install sunlight-simulating lamps in the bus shelters to allow people to grab rays while waiting for the bus. P.S. Bus ridership is way up.
Or how about the brilliance in St. Petersburg, Russia where they've installed "lampbrellas," light poles with umbrellas built in that sense rain and open automatically. People caught outside without an umbrella have a dry place to wait it out.
You know how seriously Parisians take their food, so they came up with tables that can be grafted onto plaza steps of buildings to create tables where people can eat sitting across from each other. The tables are easily put up and taken down. So civilized.
Even those airheads in Los Angeles showed off by converting former billboard frames into air-cleaning bamboo gardens. Do you know how much more attractive a billboard structure looks with bamboo growing out of it instead of some smarmy marketing message? Gardens in the air, beautiful!
In Vienna, Austria, phone booth usage was down but more people were buying electric cars, so what do they do? Add charging stations for cars to the phone booths.
As I walked around the exhibit, I was repeatedly blown away by how cities are re-purposing existing objects for 21st century lives.
It was the kind of show where complete strangers would be looking at something with you and then turn and begin discussing some aspect of it. It happened to me several times.
Best of all, they had a big glass bowl for suggestions for ideas to improve our own fair city. I say we start by copying L.A., Russia or Paris and move on from there. No sense reinventing the wheel right off the bat.
When I left there, my intellect was fully stimulated as I let my mind consider the marvelously creative ideas I'd just witnessed.
My next stop (yet again) was Balliceaux and this month's edition of the Noir Cinema series, one of my new favorite events. This month, they'd brought in director/actor Ka'ramuu Kush to screen his short, "And Then..."
After finding a seat in the third row, I looked around for someone I recognized besides the woman who runs the event. Not a soul. A few minutes later, a guy I see at shows took the chair next to me, immediately asking what I thought of last night's New Orleans band, The Naughty Professor, and, just like that, I had company.
But woman can not live by conversation alone, so I also enjoyed a Scotch egg, something new from the kitchen. The soft-boiled duck egg was covered in sage and thyme sausage, rolled in cornbread and deep fried before finding a home on a bed of shiitake mushrooms and beef demi-glace. Oh, yes, and there was a bit of shaved truffle on top.
It was obscene and I mean that in the most complimentary way. A couple of those at brunch and you wouldn't want to do anything but spend the day napping. I shared part of it with the guy next door lest I fall asleep during the film.
I needn't have worried. Even with an hour delay in starting due to technical difficulties and plenty of spirited conversation with strangers (about the history of the Moors, "Selma" and British actors doing American southern accents), enthusiasm for the film stayed high.
In fact, it probably grew when L.A. filmmaker Kush (originally from Detroit) introduced the coming of womanhood film, saying he was glad there were no kids present because, "This is a film for grown folks."
It begins with a close-up of feet dancing and moves up to where we can see two very attractive people dancing together (he was one of them). From there, we go to the bedroom where she's screwing up her nerve to tell him she didn't like something he'd done in bed while they were having sex.
When she tells him, it leads to a wonderfully honest scene between them as they discuss what they do and don't like - about sex and relationships. His key point is, "Hurting you can never make me feel good." You could almost hear the women in the room swoon when he said it.
But it was the denouement that caught everyone by surprise and not just because it involved obvious oral sex, although that part had some in the audience reacting very vocally.
Given a title of "And Then..." you can probably guess that no answers were provided at the end of the film. Each viewer was left to decide what may have happened next. For a lot of women watching, there was some serious fanning going on after that final scene.
If the DJ had begun playing at that point, there would have been no telling what might have happened on the dance floor. Instead, Kush took the director's chair in front of the screen and the audience unleashed a torrent of thoughtful questions on him.
Mostly it was women, curious about his take on relationships, communication and ego. Many times, he commented on what good questions were being asked, but I think it was mainly a case of women (because 98% of the questions came from women) wanting to discuss the points his film raised.
Namely that certain conversations need to be shared in a relationship, even if the man's ego is on the line. Even if they're difficult conversations he doesn't want to have. He almost got cheered when he said that because men have the privilege in a relationship (like whites over blacks or rich over poor), it's up to them to try harder to talk about the things that matter to a woman.
Before long, we were discussing deep stuff brought up in the film. At what point in a relationship does having sex become making love and when do you talk about which you're doing? How valid is marriage realistically? How far should you go to accommodate someone you love?
Because Kush chooses to make films that tell women's stories, he took a lot of questions about how he gets in the head of the other sex. In the case of this one, he and a female friend traded off, each writing one page of script and then turning it over to the other for another page. "These are conversations that need to happen between couples in real life," he said.
In this case, it meant that he got to write some women's parts and she some men's, making for a distinctive viewpoint that resonated with the audience. Women just kept asking him questions, not just about the film but about men and relationships.
When one asked how old he was (41), he laughed and asked why she wanted to know that. "Because you seem really thoughtful and intuitive so I figure you must not be too young since you've figured out so much already." One woman asked if he got handed panties and phone numbers after he screens the film (head shots and bios mostly).
The Q & A went on for well over an hour, an obvious indicator of how many women in the room related to the issues raised. He's shooting his first full-length feature this summer and it'll also deal with sex and gender issues. We even got his word that he'll screen it here for us.
And then...we'll probably have another fascinating discussion about coupling. Why? Bamboo on billboards: easy. Men and women: still a work in progress.
Just ask any grown folk in the room tonight.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Aglow and Affectionate
Once in a blue moon, that's how often I have two reasons to go to southside in one evening.
The first was my annual Christmas celebration with Moira, who lives on that side of the river but works on this side, so we always meet in the city. Not so tonight when our destination was Southbound.
Let the record show, I've been a fan of Chef Lee Gregory's cooking for a very long time. Waaaay before the Roosevelt. I was a regular back at Six Burner when he was the unsung hero there. During his stint in Charlottesville, I drove an hour to eat his food.
So of course I was going to cross the river to see what had been wrought in this enormous new place.
I got there just as they opened and was the sole occupant of the three-sided bar. Moira showed up before long craving a Christmas cocktail, but instead we toasted another year of friendship with glasses of a Macabeo blend Cava (from a list that included only two Virginia wines) and followed with recent tales from our lives. She was bowled over with the Christmas spirit of my flower savior, here. Hell of a guy.
As we tucked into a charcuterie and cheese plate of Mortadella, salami, chicken liver mousse, cheddar and brie (mortadella and onion jam were decided highlights), we watched in amazement as a steady stream of humanity began to fill up the place.
Given the early hour,many in the crowd were older but there were families, too. A mother and elementary-age son sat side by side at the bar. Moira ran into the man who built her new porch and I was surprised to run into the woman I lived next door to for 13 years on Floyd Avenue.
By 6:15 every seat was taken. We were told that 200 people were served last night. Great balls of fire.
The bartender got major points when I gave Moira her gift, a copy of Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking," because she clutched her hands together in rhapsody at the sight of the book, Didion being a personal favorite she said. Who knew millennials read?
We moved on to the one-two punch of Thai chili wings followed by sticky and crunchy pickled chili smoked drumsticks, at which point Moira had a French 75, satisfying the cocktail craving she'd arrived with. I had a few sips of the heavenly gin and champagne cocktail before returning to bubbles.
That'll get a girl in trouble.
Around us, people were milling about awaiting a table or bar stool to empty, but since we'd been there first and it was our annual fete, we continued our conversation oblivious to them.
"I've had just enough alcohol to go home aglow and affectionate and make a few demands," she announced, giving me the best laugh of the night. We finally gave up our valuable bar real estate only because we had somewhere to be.
With no demands to make, my next stop was the Artisans Cafe at Stony Point Fashion Center, a place I avoid like the plague (truthfully, I avoid all malls).
Tonight was the monthly installment of the Noir Cinema series and NYC filmmaker Stefani Saintonge was showing her short film, "Seventh Grade." Two of her films were being premiered tonight in other cities, so it was a coup that she'd chosen the Richmond premiere to attend.
The brief film chronicled a middle-schooler named Patrice who still happily played with her Barbie and Ken dolls, albeit making the noises for them as they made out, while her best friend had moved on to real boys. Before long, the boy has told everyone in school what service she provided for him in the bathroom and everyone's making fun of her.
Patrice comes to her friend's aid by doing something that becomes the new hot topic and leaving her dolls and childhood behind.
Saintonge took the floor to discuss the film and take questions, saying she'd been trying to convey the culture that permeates the hell that is middle school.
One of the most interesting questions was directed at a member of the audience, a ninth grade boy. He was asked if the film was an accurate portrayal and if now kids used phones and social media to perpetuate the rumor mill at that age. "Yes, definitely," he said.
Reports of the early death of childhood circa 2015 are apparently not exaggerated. This must be a truly awful time to have to navigate the waters of budding adolescence.
The film has already garnered Saintonge a 2014 Essence Black Women in Hollywood Discovery Award and a trip to L.A. to meet film luminaries, no doubt in part because everyone can relate to the horrors of seventh grade.
What I remember about my own experience that year is how mortified I was when a brainy kid named Anthony told me I had food stuck in my braces as we were walking into the school building one morning.
Then, I'd wanted to die of embarrassment. Now, I understand what a favor he was doing me.
Maybe if it had been those killer drumsticks stuck in my braces, I wouldn't have cared anyway.
The first was my annual Christmas celebration with Moira, who lives on that side of the river but works on this side, so we always meet in the city. Not so tonight when our destination was Southbound.
Let the record show, I've been a fan of Chef Lee Gregory's cooking for a very long time. Waaaay before the Roosevelt. I was a regular back at Six Burner when he was the unsung hero there. During his stint in Charlottesville, I drove an hour to eat his food.
So of course I was going to cross the river to see what had been wrought in this enormous new place.
I got there just as they opened and was the sole occupant of the three-sided bar. Moira showed up before long craving a Christmas cocktail, but instead we toasted another year of friendship with glasses of a Macabeo blend Cava (from a list that included only two Virginia wines) and followed with recent tales from our lives. She was bowled over with the Christmas spirit of my flower savior, here. Hell of a guy.
As we tucked into a charcuterie and cheese plate of Mortadella, salami, chicken liver mousse, cheddar and brie (mortadella and onion jam were decided highlights), we watched in amazement as a steady stream of humanity began to fill up the place.
Given the early hour,many in the crowd were older but there were families, too. A mother and elementary-age son sat side by side at the bar. Moira ran into the man who built her new porch and I was surprised to run into the woman I lived next door to for 13 years on Floyd Avenue.
By 6:15 every seat was taken. We were told that 200 people were served last night. Great balls of fire.
The bartender got major points when I gave Moira her gift, a copy of Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking," because she clutched her hands together in rhapsody at the sight of the book, Didion being a personal favorite she said. Who knew millennials read?
We moved on to the one-two punch of Thai chili wings followed by sticky and crunchy pickled chili smoked drumsticks, at which point Moira had a French 75, satisfying the cocktail craving she'd arrived with. I had a few sips of the heavenly gin and champagne cocktail before returning to bubbles.
That'll get a girl in trouble.
Around us, people were milling about awaiting a table or bar stool to empty, but since we'd been there first and it was our annual fete, we continued our conversation oblivious to them.
"I've had just enough alcohol to go home aglow and affectionate and make a few demands," she announced, giving me the best laugh of the night. We finally gave up our valuable bar real estate only because we had somewhere to be.
With no demands to make, my next stop was the Artisans Cafe at Stony Point Fashion Center, a place I avoid like the plague (truthfully, I avoid all malls).
Tonight was the monthly installment of the Noir Cinema series and NYC filmmaker Stefani Saintonge was showing her short film, "Seventh Grade." Two of her films were being premiered tonight in other cities, so it was a coup that she'd chosen the Richmond premiere to attend.
The brief film chronicled a middle-schooler named Patrice who still happily played with her Barbie and Ken dolls, albeit making the noises for them as they made out, while her best friend had moved on to real boys. Before long, the boy has told everyone in school what service she provided for him in the bathroom and everyone's making fun of her.
Patrice comes to her friend's aid by doing something that becomes the new hot topic and leaving her dolls and childhood behind.
Saintonge took the floor to discuss the film and take questions, saying she'd been trying to convey the culture that permeates the hell that is middle school.
One of the most interesting questions was directed at a member of the audience, a ninth grade boy. He was asked if the film was an accurate portrayal and if now kids used phones and social media to perpetuate the rumor mill at that age. "Yes, definitely," he said.
Reports of the early death of childhood circa 2015 are apparently not exaggerated. This must be a truly awful time to have to navigate the waters of budding adolescence.
The film has already garnered Saintonge a 2014 Essence Black Women in Hollywood Discovery Award and a trip to L.A. to meet film luminaries, no doubt in part because everyone can relate to the horrors of seventh grade.
What I remember about my own experience that year is how mortified I was when a brainy kid named Anthony told me I had food stuck in my braces as we were walking into the school building one morning.
Then, I'd wanted to die of embarrassment. Now, I understand what a favor he was doing me.
Maybe if it had been those killer drumsticks stuck in my braces, I wouldn't have cared anyway.
Friday, November 21, 2014
The Deep and the Shallow
Brag about your neighborhood all you want, it can't top mine.
That's because I can walk out of my door at night (after spending the afternoon with a 78-year old artist in his enormous Carver studio laughing and talking about art and life) and find the most interesting things to do within a five block radius.
The first was the Noir Cinema series, a monthly opportunity to see a black-made short film and hear about it from the filmmaker, tonight being held at Candela Books & Art. Walking in, a gallerist mentioned my art piece in this week's Style Weekly, noting that his wife had decided after reading the piece that she wanted to buy one of the pieces at Ghostprint Gallery.
It's always thrilling to know that something I write spurs people into action, especially when an artist stands to make money off of it.
There were maybe 25 people there when I arrived, so I laid my bag on a chair with a good view and went next door to buy a hot chocolate at Lift. The guy frothing the milk made sure I knew they closed in five minutes, but I informed him it was for the movie next door. Suddenly he looks at me differently.
"Oh, you're going to the Noir Film at Candela?" he asks. "That's so cool."
Back in my seat for the movie, a guy I know from music shows approaches and we start talking about Candela. "I love this place," he says. "This is like a gallery you'd see in San Francisco or New York City." He should know; he moved here a couple of years ago after 20 years in San Fran.
People kept arriving and finally the film "Contamination" was introduced, with the information that it was its sixth film festival screening and the Virginia premiere.
The film was a brief but compelling look at obsessive compulsive disorder through the lens of a character who hasn't left her apartment in over a year for fear of germs and getting sick. She scrubbed her hands fastidiously, wore latex gloves and an air mask and generally did nothing beyond cleaning things.
When the movie stopped abruptly midway through due to technological difficulties, I was disturbed to see some people immediately pull out their phones. Soapbox: people have lost the ability to wait for anything without looking at a screen. It's tragic.
Once rolling again, we watched as the woman tried to deal with her mental illness while losing all contact with the outside world. Eventually she reached out and the film ended.
Director R. Shanea took the director's chair in front of the room and told us a bit about how she'd come to make the film, hoping to provide a voice for mental illness in the black community, apparently something often swept under the rug and ignored.
A question and answer period followed with as many questions about the making of the movie ($7,000 and two 13-hour days filming) as about the topic (she suffers from anxiety issues). When asked how she'd gotten the lead actress, she gave the expected 21st-century answer: Facebook.
One man's comment was, "The only problem I had with your short film was that it was too short." Many people expressed interest in seeing it developed into a feature film.
Honestly, I feel the same way about movie shorts as I do short stories. In the right hands, a masterful story can be told briefly and there's a distinct pleasure in the brevity. More is not necessarily always better.
The Q & A kept up for a good, long while, an indicator that the film had gotten to the audience. I liked that.
Afterwards, I only had to walk around the block to Gallery 5 for "An Evening Among Exiles," a night of speakers of all kinds. I arrived as the first guy was finishing his story (all I heard was the last line about his Dad losing his wallet), said hi to a friend and found a seat in the back row.
A comedian named Joshua was first for me and he began by telling us, "We've had a lot of deep shit. It's time for some shallow shit." A recent graduate with a (useless) degree in English, he said saying that was a fancy way of saying he's unemployed and in debt.
Seems he wanted to be a poet and instead he works at Target while honing his comedic skills at night. He may be a poet yet.
Mary was up next and said while she'd known for a month and a half that she had this gig, she'd done no preparation until today other than deciding what she'd wear (all black, brown belt).
Sometime today she'd decided to riff on lists, which led her to talking about all the online quizzes she takes ("Which Kardashian are you?"). The one that bothered her most was about which "Sex and the City" character she was because the internets kept saying she was Miranda and she was convinced she's Samantha.
Since I've never seen the show, I have no idea who she is beyond Mary. And, for all I know, that could have been an alias.
A big part of her spiel was about the "How Kinky are You?" quiz where, despite lying to the internets about cucumber usage, she came out a super freak. Her conclusion? "I'm okay with being a slutty cat woman." At least until her cat dies, she said.
In between speakers, we heard snippets of the unlikeliest music - Billy Joel, Simon & Garfunkle and perhaps most improbably, Tony Orlando and Dawn - as people made their way to the stage.
Host Shannon announced a break then so people could belly up to the bar, but I used the time to chat up a couple of friends, one of whom was a tad nervous because he was going on later. Another, looking professorial in a cardigan, told of a long day dealing with state and city employee types. I offered my condolences.
Shannon got the evening rolling again with a monologue about going to friends' weddings and returning to red wine bendering, something he'd moved away from with good reason (blackouts).
Kylin Ann took the stage next looking cute in a full skirt with tattoo-looking tights and read the speech she'd written for her grandfather's funeral as an introduction to a winding tale of her family's dysfunction.
Arriving at the family homestead after Grandpa's death, she found her relatives drinking and trying to figure out what quote to use on the old man's funeral card ("It looks like a baseball card laminated"). Once they found the perfect one and discovered it was by Helen Keller, the evening descended into Helen Keller jokes.
A year later, the family regrouped to scatter Grandpa's ashes except only half were being scattered and the rest were being divided up into Zip-Lock bags for family members. Her aunt planned to divvy with an ice cream scoop until someone expressed shock, at which time she realized Gramps' favorite food was soup (it was Uncle Jeff who loved ice cream) and switched to a soup ladle to dole out the ashes.
What I love about evenings like this is that you hear the craziest stuff. You couldn't make up this stuff because no one would believe it.
Quietly taking the stage, PJ began by saying, "If I bomb tonight, it's because I didn't listen to my wife." Unfortunately, she wasn't there to hear him say that, but he also said it would be on her if he didn't bomb. And he not only didn't, he was terrific.
You see, PJ takes photographs of bands as a hobby and tonight he shared some of his adventures in shooting bands.
Explaining that sometimes you need to write something to go with photos of bands in order to get press credentials, he'd managed to get them to talk to Henry Rollins (only one guy in the crowd admitted to not knowing who Rollins was).
Nervously setting up for his first interview, he was caught off guard when Rollins answered the phone himself after half a ring. "I asked him low-hanging fruit type questions," PJ said and while he'd been allotted 15 minutes to talk to the punk legend, he only used seven of them. Fear, pure fear.
His story of going to the Black Cat to interview and shoot Daniel Johnston was just as good because a local show, "Pancake Mountain," was also there filming - but with puppets - and Johnston kept screwing up each take on purpose by telling the puppets to go f*ck themselves.
Afterwards, they shot video of Johnston playing with the band and people, including PJ, dancing behind them. So now I know that PJ is sort of a celebrity because he's on YouTube.
At Merge's 20th anniversary festival, he shot Lambchop ("A f*cked-up country band, not punk, not my thing") and said it ended up being one of the best performances of his life. Even better, Lambchop liked one of his pictures so much they wanted to use it as an album cover
He got to shoot at a Foo Fighters concert (when he didn't want to fight the crowd to go down to the stage to shoot, his cute wife reminded him that he'd regret it if he didn't and she was, of course, right, so he went), something he'd gone on record as saying he wanted to do 7 or 8 years ago. The band ended up using one of his shots on their Twitter feed, a major thrill for him.
He closed with his advice for happiness. "Keep doing stuff that makes you feel awkward." I second that.
Last to take the stage was Kevin, a come-here who captains a canal boat and he'd brought three pages' (front and back) worth of Richmond's rich history to share with us, namely Elizabeth van Lew and Mary Bowser. He intended to weave a tale, he said.
And he did, talking about how van Lew freed her father's slaves, including little Mary, whom she educated in Philadelphia. The two then became the best spies in the south for General Grant, gleaning information from soldiers in Libbie Prison and sending it off to Grant in bouquets of flowers from her garden and eggs (yea, I still don't understand how she did that).
He seemed most impressed with Mary when she posed as a slow-witted, able-bodied slave in the house of Jefferson Davis, spying from within using her photographic memory. Brilliant.
Of course, after the war, both women were run out of town, but Kevin wanted us to know that Mary Bowser was badass.
Now, you tell me. Can you walk out of your house and see a provocative black-made film, hear a story of smoking pot with your Uncle Dave and learn a little espionage history, all within a matter of blocks of home?
FYI, that's a low-hanging fruit type of question. My guess? Probably not.
That's because I can walk out of my door at night (after spending the afternoon with a 78-year old artist in his enormous Carver studio laughing and talking about art and life) and find the most interesting things to do within a five block radius.
The first was the Noir Cinema series, a monthly opportunity to see a black-made short film and hear about it from the filmmaker, tonight being held at Candela Books & Art. Walking in, a gallerist mentioned my art piece in this week's Style Weekly, noting that his wife had decided after reading the piece that she wanted to buy one of the pieces at Ghostprint Gallery.
It's always thrilling to know that something I write spurs people into action, especially when an artist stands to make money off of it.
There were maybe 25 people there when I arrived, so I laid my bag on a chair with a good view and went next door to buy a hot chocolate at Lift. The guy frothing the milk made sure I knew they closed in five minutes, but I informed him it was for the movie next door. Suddenly he looks at me differently.
"Oh, you're going to the Noir Film at Candela?" he asks. "That's so cool."
Back in my seat for the movie, a guy I know from music shows approaches and we start talking about Candela. "I love this place," he says. "This is like a gallery you'd see in San Francisco or New York City." He should know; he moved here a couple of years ago after 20 years in San Fran.
People kept arriving and finally the film "Contamination" was introduced, with the information that it was its sixth film festival screening and the Virginia premiere.
The film was a brief but compelling look at obsessive compulsive disorder through the lens of a character who hasn't left her apartment in over a year for fear of germs and getting sick. She scrubbed her hands fastidiously, wore latex gloves and an air mask and generally did nothing beyond cleaning things.
When the movie stopped abruptly midway through due to technological difficulties, I was disturbed to see some people immediately pull out their phones. Soapbox: people have lost the ability to wait for anything without looking at a screen. It's tragic.
Once rolling again, we watched as the woman tried to deal with her mental illness while losing all contact with the outside world. Eventually she reached out and the film ended.
Director R. Shanea took the director's chair in front of the room and told us a bit about how she'd come to make the film, hoping to provide a voice for mental illness in the black community, apparently something often swept under the rug and ignored.
A question and answer period followed with as many questions about the making of the movie ($7,000 and two 13-hour days filming) as about the topic (she suffers from anxiety issues). When asked how she'd gotten the lead actress, she gave the expected 21st-century answer: Facebook.
One man's comment was, "The only problem I had with your short film was that it was too short." Many people expressed interest in seeing it developed into a feature film.
Honestly, I feel the same way about movie shorts as I do short stories. In the right hands, a masterful story can be told briefly and there's a distinct pleasure in the brevity. More is not necessarily always better.
The Q & A kept up for a good, long while, an indicator that the film had gotten to the audience. I liked that.
Afterwards, I only had to walk around the block to Gallery 5 for "An Evening Among Exiles," a night of speakers of all kinds. I arrived as the first guy was finishing his story (all I heard was the last line about his Dad losing his wallet), said hi to a friend and found a seat in the back row.
A comedian named Joshua was first for me and he began by telling us, "We've had a lot of deep shit. It's time for some shallow shit." A recent graduate with a (useless) degree in English, he said saying that was a fancy way of saying he's unemployed and in debt.
Seems he wanted to be a poet and instead he works at Target while honing his comedic skills at night. He may be a poet yet.
Mary was up next and said while she'd known for a month and a half that she had this gig, she'd done no preparation until today other than deciding what she'd wear (all black, brown belt).
Sometime today she'd decided to riff on lists, which led her to talking about all the online quizzes she takes ("Which Kardashian are you?"). The one that bothered her most was about which "Sex and the City" character she was because the internets kept saying she was Miranda and she was convinced she's Samantha.
Since I've never seen the show, I have no idea who she is beyond Mary. And, for all I know, that could have been an alias.
A big part of her spiel was about the "How Kinky are You?" quiz where, despite lying to the internets about cucumber usage, she came out a super freak. Her conclusion? "I'm okay with being a slutty cat woman." At least until her cat dies, she said.
In between speakers, we heard snippets of the unlikeliest music - Billy Joel, Simon & Garfunkle and perhaps most improbably, Tony Orlando and Dawn - as people made their way to the stage.
Host Shannon announced a break then so people could belly up to the bar, but I used the time to chat up a couple of friends, one of whom was a tad nervous because he was going on later. Another, looking professorial in a cardigan, told of a long day dealing with state and city employee types. I offered my condolences.
Shannon got the evening rolling again with a monologue about going to friends' weddings and returning to red wine bendering, something he'd moved away from with good reason (blackouts).
Kylin Ann took the stage next looking cute in a full skirt with tattoo-looking tights and read the speech she'd written for her grandfather's funeral as an introduction to a winding tale of her family's dysfunction.
Arriving at the family homestead after Grandpa's death, she found her relatives drinking and trying to figure out what quote to use on the old man's funeral card ("It looks like a baseball card laminated"). Once they found the perfect one and discovered it was by Helen Keller, the evening descended into Helen Keller jokes.
A year later, the family regrouped to scatter Grandpa's ashes except only half were being scattered and the rest were being divided up into Zip-Lock bags for family members. Her aunt planned to divvy with an ice cream scoop until someone expressed shock, at which time she realized Gramps' favorite food was soup (it was Uncle Jeff who loved ice cream) and switched to a soup ladle to dole out the ashes.
What I love about evenings like this is that you hear the craziest stuff. You couldn't make up this stuff because no one would believe it.
Quietly taking the stage, PJ began by saying, "If I bomb tonight, it's because I didn't listen to my wife." Unfortunately, she wasn't there to hear him say that, but he also said it would be on her if he didn't bomb. And he not only didn't, he was terrific.
You see, PJ takes photographs of bands as a hobby and tonight he shared some of his adventures in shooting bands.
Explaining that sometimes you need to write something to go with photos of bands in order to get press credentials, he'd managed to get them to talk to Henry Rollins (only one guy in the crowd admitted to not knowing who Rollins was).
Nervously setting up for his first interview, he was caught off guard when Rollins answered the phone himself after half a ring. "I asked him low-hanging fruit type questions," PJ said and while he'd been allotted 15 minutes to talk to the punk legend, he only used seven of them. Fear, pure fear.
His story of going to the Black Cat to interview and shoot Daniel Johnston was just as good because a local show, "Pancake Mountain," was also there filming - but with puppets - and Johnston kept screwing up each take on purpose by telling the puppets to go f*ck themselves.
Afterwards, they shot video of Johnston playing with the band and people, including PJ, dancing behind them. So now I know that PJ is sort of a celebrity because he's on YouTube.
At Merge's 20th anniversary festival, he shot Lambchop ("A f*cked-up country band, not punk, not my thing") and said it ended up being one of the best performances of his life. Even better, Lambchop liked one of his pictures so much they wanted to use it as an album cover
He got to shoot at a Foo Fighters concert (when he didn't want to fight the crowd to go down to the stage to shoot, his cute wife reminded him that he'd regret it if he didn't and she was, of course, right, so he went), something he'd gone on record as saying he wanted to do 7 or 8 years ago. The band ended up using one of his shots on their Twitter feed, a major thrill for him.
He closed with his advice for happiness. "Keep doing stuff that makes you feel awkward." I second that.
Last to take the stage was Kevin, a come-here who captains a canal boat and he'd brought three pages' (front and back) worth of Richmond's rich history to share with us, namely Elizabeth van Lew and Mary Bowser. He intended to weave a tale, he said.
And he did, talking about how van Lew freed her father's slaves, including little Mary, whom she educated in Philadelphia. The two then became the best spies in the south for General Grant, gleaning information from soldiers in Libbie Prison and sending it off to Grant in bouquets of flowers from her garden and eggs (yea, I still don't understand how she did that).
He seemed most impressed with Mary when she posed as a slow-witted, able-bodied slave in the house of Jefferson Davis, spying from within using her photographic memory. Brilliant.
Of course, after the war, both women were run out of town, but Kevin wanted us to know that Mary Bowser was badass.
Now, you tell me. Can you walk out of your house and see a provocative black-made film, hear a story of smoking pot with your Uncle Dave and learn a little espionage history, all within a matter of blocks of home?
FYI, that's a low-hanging fruit type of question. My guess? Probably not.
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