Other Stuff

What I Did On My Vacation

In the twenty-five years I've been doing cinema in our little hamlet, I had never seen Corvallis like this. It was March 2020, and we were supposed to close for a few weeks. The day the Governor sent the shut-'er-down edict, all the downtown storefronts were decorated with signs asking people to be safe and swearing to light the open sign again once this plague has passed. But for the rest of 2020, only a ghost light glowed. When we opened the calendar to 2021, we were all still closed. We at the Darkside sold t-shirts and popcorn, and people voted with their bucks and told us they wanted us to hang on. I'm not good with accepting help, but we needed it, and our community came through. Lainie unsheathed her sword that glints like justice in the rising sun of hope and continues to slash away at the red tape while the donations from the good folks of our community helped keep the workers paid for doing their part.

Personally, I had been working on a long-term plan to start moving away from full-time at the Darkside. Well, that didn't quite work out. Instead, there I was tearing out seats for social distancing, rebuilding speakers, putting down flooring, and washing my hands every ten minutes. Years of neglected chores rattled the cage of my procrastination. Even though I was playing catch-up with neglected projects, I still worked fewer Darkside hours a day than I'd been. This left me with a strange commodity: Time. I started walking again, recreationally. Every morning I put in the earbuds, reacquainting myself with John Prine and Modest Moose, and headed to the campus. Oregon State University was unsettlingly abandoned; not a soul in the kingdom. This is only the most minor of exaggerations. Those few other souls would keep a wide swath of outdoor air between us. We hid behind our masks and carried on. The sidewalks and trails still wandered between buildings as they did when I was a student. All these decades later, the flowers are still wondrous and were now all mine. Fragrances of plants I couldn't name even at gun-point ambushed me, bringing me back to the moment. It is a fantastic place to haunt and a fine place to talk myself down from the growing panic as this virus killed more people than we ever imagined. My Sasquatchian silhouette afforded me solitude, dispelling the notion I should be approached. I claimed this campus and everyone left me alone, except the spooky weird plastic motorized blobs with wheels and orange flags that seem almost predatory in their movements. These mobile minions of foodservice look the way a stormtrooper's dog would look if that dog were a white armored obese bulldog. The first time I saw one, it had unceremoniously snuck up behind me, looming. Waiting for me to move out of its way. My reaction lacked elegance.

As if they had some damn right to be there, the students returned. When I found myself navigating around people walking six abreast down the sidewalks, eschewing masks and distancing, I reimagined my morning walks.

I have more than a passing familiarity with Finley Wildlife Refuge, just 15 minutes south of Corvallis, as the pelican flies. There are several places in the refuge where I watch the hawks hang like Jesus in the sky while the coyotes lope and pounce their way across the plains. When the day wanes, the elk will often saunter across the fields. I once counted over a hundred head in a single herd. Summer means the wind and sun turn the tall grasses in a synchronized woosh of movement that can travel across a whole field in one swoop. The stars are brighter and the frogs are louder. My mom was French Canadian and used to call the French folks in her family Frogs (She believed it was because they fought in the resistance and swam the rivers to travel unmolested. I'm gonna roll with that, Mom.) For some damn reason that tumbles through my mind every time I hear frogs. The plump herons hunt the poor croakers with a stoic stance that explodes into movement, spearing some unsuspecting amphibian. ("Mon du!" shrieks the frog. Thwack! goes the heron beak. "Merde!" Sighs in French, "Ces't la vie.") With more time on my hands came the unearthing of hidden photo gear. I had the time to enjoy hours of watching the night steal the light from the day, and I'd witness the constellations render slowly in the deepening blue sky. Sitting in my camp chair with a forest of tripod legs in front of me, I'd photograph comets and glowing horizons, listening to the critters skitter around me. The virus had no place out there.

Many of the people who kept me sane through the COVID horror show have left the area, seeking opportunities in other states. This made the ones still here all the more precious. The conversations in my shop about motorcycles and airplanes and cars became more important. Other people in my complex were feeling the social deficit, and we always made time to sit on milk crates and tell stories. It produces a vital communion with the blue-collar side of my brain. I couldn't get my mind around the lethal politics and crushing change of my economic landscape, but I could count links on a timing chain and get cam timing right.

It was not a stretch that I was becoming a little too enamored with my own company, preferring to hang solo or with a select few introverts rather than participate in the world. As if on cue, it came time to try to get the Darkside's legs back underneath her. Cinemas across that land and seas had never been closed for an eighteen-month chunk of time in the hundred-plus years cinemas have been a thing. Turns out it kills the projectors. Like cam timing and friendships, cinema equipment needs tending. This means our projection booth was in complete anarchy. As of this writing, Joey and I are still mystified why one of our projectors works. We caress it lovingly and give it positive affirmations. Since we keep selling tickets to the auditorium whose screen it illuminates, we optimistically hope that whatever spirit keeps it bound to our world remains appeased. Until recently, the lobby was my second office, strewn with paperwork, note pads, boxes, envelopes, frogs, tools, and empty cans of Zevia. And more tools. It is now filled with people. Showtime! Suddenly I was interacting with my community again. It is overwhelming, and I find myself retreating to the booth frequently to re-center before jumping back into being the host. All my workers came back, and they fell fluidly into their tasks with a grace that belied their absence from the Darkside. I see and talk to our patrons. I had no idea the depth I missed them, so I recalibrated for polite society. Success on that front has been hit and miss. I'm still getting used to this, but I'm grateful to be back.

So, gratitude. There are stock phrases used to express such feelings. Control+C. Control+V. When I started writing this paragraph I leapt right in with a few of the old standbys. Then I deleted them. I wanted to find something that felt a little more sincere and at this point in this paragraph, I still think I can do better. Gratitude. The Darkside exists within the vacuum of our community. Without the care and feeding of all of you, the Darkside would revert to a hollowed-out second floor of an old department store. I feel we haven't found an excellent way to say how privileged we are to be the ones bringing the movies we do to Corvallis, except to keep doing it. When the world stopped spinning, we couldn't even be sure we were going to make it. None of us at the Darkside forgot we have a tacit agreement with you: We'll put our shoulders to the grindstone and you help us pay the bills, and not forget to make sure we know you still want us to keep grinding away. When it all gets to be a lot, we remember for whom we're working and that you deserve the best we can provide. You came through for us in pyrotechnic glory. Above and beyond. Thank you seems trite, but I'll say it anyway. Thank you. Thanks to you, we fucking made it. Now the real work begins.

Movie Review: f11 and Be There

For 65 years and counting, Burk Uzzle has been behind a camera. Whether he was photographing Vietnam, hippies at Woodstock, the death of MLK, or the disenfranchised masses not pretty enough for Vogue, this slightly built, energetic, and kind man was behind the iconic images that tell the story of the last 50 years in America.

At 23, this skinny kid with a bike basket full of cameras somehow got hired as a photographer for Life Magazine. From there, Uzzle took his love of photography and honed it into a surgical instrument that could isolate the most critical moments of the day. But, F11 AND BE THERE is about the man as well as his art. A man that today, in his 80s, is still out making images, honoring the people he photographs, humanizing those left behind by the American Dream. There is a craft to that, and maybe a little luck.

Back in the days when photography was all chemistry and shutter speeds, f11 was considered the workhorse of aperture settings. (The f-stop is the size of the opening at the lens, which regulates how much light hits the film.) There is an animated segment in the movie where Uzzle runs down the cameras he's used over the years—none of which had auto-focus. He had to manually check exposure, adjust aperture and shutter speed appropriately, then focus and hope he was close. He got a measly 36 shots on a roll of film, and then he had to reload his camera—a process neither fast nor easy on the fly. There was no checking images on an LCD screen on the back of the camera after a shutter click. Unless you were developing your own film, it was sometimes weeks before you would know if you got it right. And when you're shooting news, there are no retakes. Learning your craft was a huge part of being a professional photographer, and as Uzzle points out, having something exciting happening in front of your camera is also essential: "F11 and Be There."

As a life-long photographer, the technical aspects of this movie made me swoon. This documentary drove home the humanity of a man who knew how to "be there." In his studio, he brings "there" to him. Watching him work with people well outside of his demographic brings into focus why this man has had access to the hearts of those of us raised on his images, and those whom he renders now into artistic immortality.

Today, his studio is equipped with all the latest technological pieces of equipment that can be had. But, he still has the Nikon he dropped into the Mekong Delta while getting away from sniper fire. He handles it lovingly as he tells the story of reviving it after it drowned in saltwater. Any photographer who has ever had a favorite camera will weep silently and cling to the hope that if the day ever comes when they slog their camera-bestie through the dirt, it too will rise from the muck.

It is trite and annoying to hear those bemoaning the ubiquity of cellphones and digital cameras, not that they are wrong. Not that I don't do the same. To excess. Point, shoot, don't give it another thought. The suspense of waiting for your film to come out of the developing tank or back from the drug store is now a quaint shadow. The craft of photography can be enjoyed by anyone with a selfie stick. But, is it a craft? Some will always make their pizza from scratch and organic basil grown on a windowsill, and some have Domino's on speed dial.

I spent my 20s in a photo lab, processing sports group shots and restoring old photos. We used a three-hair brush and SpotTone ink to recreate the grain of film in damaged relics. Hours were spent behind magnifying headgear, arguing about what cassette tape would play next (Dear, God. Not March of the Blue Turtles AGAIN) and trying not to kill people who bumped into the table. This was long before Photoshop could remove a dust spot with a mouse click. I still do a lot of my photography with a trusty digital camera, but I enjoy the meditative process of using my film cameras to create images that will be revealed in the future.

A segment of the documentary follows Uzzle around the US in his van as he creates images with a view camera that uses a big-assed 8”x10" negative—a deliberate and physically demanding process. This man is not relying on the technology that drops 60 million pictures on Instagram and a third of a billion pictures on Facebook EVERY DAY. He is going back to the roots of what gave him the vision that brought him into his amazing life. He encourages burgeoning photographers to examine the works of important painters, wandering back hundreds of years before "Point de vue du Gras" (1827)—the oldest known photograph.

It is said that everything is derivative. Even if you are the one from whom much is derived, that doesn't excuse you from honoring your ancestors. Knowing and practicing such things permeates an artist's work and makes it more personal, and that can be felt a little more deeply by those experiencing the art. Not everyone strives to that sensitivity, which means one must embrace it on their own, making it all the more critical. This in no way advocates eschewing modern tools and work. Hanging with the old masters speaks to a more holistic understanding of what one practices today. When I started working in movie theaters as a projectionist, I handled miles of 35mm film every day. We had carbon arc lamps that spit and sparked with deadly amperage, and most of being a projectionist was listening, knowing the sound of a bad splice going over the aperture plate or an intermittent that's low on oil. That doesn't mean I can't change the bulb in my new digital projectors. But, the old habit of walking into the auditorium and making sure the show is at its best and manually lowering and raising the lights keeps any projectionist more engaged with the process of showing a movie. I want to think that Uzzle still habitually starts every shoot by setting his camera to f11 before even picking up the light meter. 

F11 AND BE THERE is about a man who took his art to the world. He did it with heart and skill. Even if a viewer doesn't know the difference between a shutter release and a lens cap, the emotion and depth of Uzzle's life's work will resonate with anyone who has a passion. The psychology is the same, whether it's cooking or canoeing. One needn't be a rock climber to appreciate El Capitan, or pack around a 4x5 view camera to feel the love of a man in love with the human race.

Because Mosquitoes Weren't Bad Enough, God Smote Us with Vinyl Flooring

I intensely dislike installing flooring, but we have to rework the snack bar to make it social-distancing friendly, which sounds almost oxymoronic. So, I'm on what's left of my knees, making the tiles we scored from Halabut for Huge Manities fit, somehow, with the old tiles. I'm not good at it. And it's hot.    But, it is all part of the process of getting ready to have people back in the Darkside. We put in a spiffy new entrance door and upgraded the restrooms, to name just a couple of improvements. Oh, and laid new flooring. If all goes well and the onslaught of complications that is 2020 keeps to a dull roar, we should be open for private shows soon.    We have some unique challenges at the Darkside when it comes to reopening. We have small auditoriums. So, to conform to current social distancing models, we'd be able to host only a few people per room. That doesn't quite work with any of our plans to stay in business. But we CAN offer private screenings to members of the same household. People who already share space and air can (usually) be safe watching a movie in one of our auditoriums. See? Brilliant. We're hammering out the price structure now, so stay tuned.    The bigger theaters can pull seats and make lots of room for people to float by each other and not share germs. Such modifications have proven to work well for a lot of cinemas. We get asked a lot why is so-and-so open, but we aren't. First and foremost, we'd rather not get you sick. Everything else is an offshoot of that. I'm a pretty clever guy and been doing this awhile. You can believe that as soon as I figure out a safe way to open that complies with what the folks with name badges and clipboards will bless (and my common sense) we'll be welcoming you back.

We closed the doors on March 17th, in the year of "My Dear Lord, What the Hell Did We Do to Offend Thee for You to Deliver this Pestilence Upon Us?"—or, as some of us refer to it: 2020. When we switched off the open sign, it was supposed to be for three weeks. You know, about the time it would have taken to handle this virus if everyone just played nice at home. Say, like a lot of other countries. Sucks to be us. Meanwhile, the Darkside is doing things to make sure you know we are still here, using wisely the money you folks gave up for gift certificates, t-shirts, or just because you wanted to make sure we knew you still believed in us. We’ve been selling popcorn and soda for pick-up on the weekends and offering virtual cinema films you can reach through the listings on our website. And while all that is happening, I get to roll in the flooring adhesive. Seriously, every time I stand up I have like six tools stuck to me.

This is all to say; we are still here. We are plugging along, making the Darkside 2.0 safe and every bit that which made the pre-COVID Darkside a part of this community for a quarter-century. Damn, I'm old. We soldier on. Cinemas are among those at the back of the line of businesses that will be allowed to open. Most theaters are not easily convertible into a place that can keep people out of each other's air space. So, we'll wait. While doing so, we'll be doing the work we need to do to have people enjoying movies again in a place that is part of our community. Safely.   Speaking of flooring adhesive, we finally got that atrocious grey carpet out of the women's restroom and laid in some snazzy tile. We had to make do with the colours they had at Habitat ReStore, but my general lack of style cleared the way to get the job done without consideration for more traditional decorating esthetics. Seriously, we should sell tickets for a peek at that floor. There'd have to be a waiver to sign so we are not liable for any injuries caused by vertigo. I look forward to your gasps of horror when we reopen.    Until then, please be safe. All of us at the Darkside miss you crazy kids.

Four Months and 12 Days

I walk. Every morning. Well, usually. I'm paying for the sins of my youth when certain invincibility hadn't met with inevitable old age. My knee has seen some hard use. I can climb stairs like a rock star all day, but going down the stairs is a horror show. The Oregon State University parking garage is an excellent rehab spot. (For my physical injuries. Not for, well. You know.) I can gazelle my ass up the stairs, then sloth the car ramps down, slow and easy, before gazelling back up again. The campus, responding to COVID, is deserted. I see only the odd runner coming by with knees a third the age of mine. Enjoy them now young human, and try not to spend your youth kickstarting old Harleys and British motorcycles.

I now seem to have a little time to do some of those things I should have been making time for all along, like walking. (Or getting tackled on the beach by a golden retriever. Totally worth the ibuprofen needed to walk the next day.) The campus is my own private garden; abandoned without being dystopian. Earbuds in and mask on, I explore and visit the university where, 25 years ago, I dropped out to build the Avalon Cinema. My knee hurt less then.

This is all under the crushing weight of the Darkside being closed and the stupidity that led to that. I show movies for a living, not chase government money. I'm not comfortable begging the good people of my community for support, which has been nothing short of breath-taking. Our snack bar is in chaos because of the renovations needed to be COVID-safe. I'd prefer to be upgrading the picture and sound in the auditoriums. But, because our leadership failed to make us all grow up and put on our big-girl masks when this shit hit, I'm putting locks on restroom doors and installing hands-free towel dispensers.

My protests have always been on my screen, not my sleeve. But my screens are dark, and my rage is getting darker. I am clinically non-political. It's part of the business. Professionalism. Like a urologist not talking about patients' penises at dinner parties, no matter how magnificent. Then there's the total lack of professionalism exhibited by faceless bullies eschewing restraint and using the actions of a few assholes as a license to cripple anyone exercising their first amendment rights. So I put funny stuff on the marquee that goes viral and avoid FaceBook, unless it's to see pictures from Finley Wildlife Refuge. Yet, the damning evidence of the incompetence that leads me to be walking every morning rather than showing movies every evening is piling up like the dead from this virus. I want to put on my motorcycle off-road armor and head to Portland and be part of the chorus calling for treating people like people and be "one of those" shoving half the peace sign into the faces of those cowards who hide behind badgeless anonymity; who have tarnished their oaths by beating fellow Americans. I've been in the theater business for most of my life; I can take a beating. But, one baton hit to the knee, and a lot of people depending on me are going to be seriously pissed. It would also invite commentary from those who have never read the constitution. (Here ya go: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/) I guess I could poke them with a crutch. For now, I can still hide behind my cowardice of apoliticality, calling for understanding and seeking common ground from the saddle of my high horse. Hi Ho Silver! To the dispensary!

Also, I want the new normal to include my friends who disco on the right side of the political dance floor. It's hard making new old friends. I'm sure there are a few who won't have me back, or whom I won't have back. Genies can be hard to put back in a bottle. After years of not responding to their critically-challenged views, my silence has been taken as an emphatic agreement. Thus, I am now a traitor, defecting to the other side. If they'd shut up long enough to let me talk, they'd'a seen I was there all along and might know why. The days of letting folks be grumpy when challenged with facts have gone. Much like the proper functionality of my knee.

The Darkside will reopen when that can happen without making people sick. I know that day is coming. I know it in my heart, but the wait is getting old. I miss my customers. As a militant introvert, that says a lot. I miss seeing my workers stoking the star-making machinery behind the popular film. Since I have a theater to rebuild, I'm not going to be a free man in Paris, unfettered and alive, for a bit. But, I have a future to decide, and I have decided to fight the fight to get the Darkside and Corvallis back to where it was before a comet in the sky offered more comfort than anything coming from Washington.

I'm rooting for the people who can bend a knee for the eight minutes and 46 seconds it took the knee of a shitty human to kill yet another black man in handcuffs. Getting down on even one knee is a little tricky for me these days, so I'm anxious to get my feelings back on a movie screen. For my whole life, good movies (and a few bad ones) have resonated with how I feel better than any pundit or protest. At my most misunderstood, an understanding voice first came to me in mono sound from a tube amplifier, and still speaks the truth today in 8.1 Dolby Digital. Those words and those dancing images are not just for me. They were meant for a room full of strangers taking a chance on a film, and each other, daring to commune back when the most significant risk was a noisy eater in the front row or some idiot texting in the back. They will return along with the days of crowds so big we have to count seats to make sure we didn't oversell, and one of us would get in front of the room and work the crowd, making sure people were laughing and not fretting. I want those words in all those different languages to be washing over an audience again—our audience, our community. Then I will have my voice back. It would also make my knee feel better.

Shakespeare in Good Company

I had no idea where the heck I was, which is a good indicator of a great motorcycle ride. This is how I social distance on my afternoon off.

I’d stopped to rehydrate and popped open the trunk that pitched-in as a backrest. Festooned snugly in the corner of the box, was my water bottle. Next to it was the notes for the second edition of my book, crammed unceremoniously into a well-loved copy of the book. Under that was a 150-year-old leather-bound volume of the complete works of William Shakespeare. If my ride ended with me finding out absolutely if there is an afterlife, I could imagine the cops trying to make sense out of the contents of my trunk. There'd be a grizzled detective under a fedora, sporting a trench coat where he packs his camels, next to his cigarettes. He'd poke at the ephemera of my trunk with a ballpoint pen. Spotting the Shakespeare, he'd heft the weighty tome from the rubble. The book would open, and he would read the first stanza at the top of the page: "When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."

I was returning from a nice lunch on Buddy's deck. We were supposed to ride, but his sidecar ate its fender long before we ate our tuna sandwiches and pickles. So, he was grounded, but we beat the hell outta my novel, shaking it down for the next rewrite. Buddy and his lovely wife, Sylvia are in their 80s. He was a shrink, so medical stuff is his thing and still is, judging by the stack of medical journals in his bathroom. (For reading.) Thus, I trust his protocols to make sure the pesky pandemic doesn't land on them. With no shared condiment bottles and putting me six feet downwind (Always advisable in any situation when I've been on the motorcycle.), I got two and a half hours on the deck in the best weather an Oregon spring has to offer with good friends. I trust his decades of wandering around in other people's heads give him the superpower to know when it's worth risking coming out of the bunker for some conversation. When I left, it struck me he didn't do this for himself.

I make fun of damn near everything. But, when it comes to the health and welfare of those two octogenarians, I can get pretty un-humorous. Days before, I was in the paint department of a big box store, deemed an essential business, looking for a specific kind of paint. A stylish young person of the hair-bunned variety, dressed more for painting the town than a mid-century modern ranch house he most certainly was renting, started getting a little close. I turned and gave him my best 'get off my lawn' look. He smiled at me.

"Perhaps you are unaware of how close you are," I suggested. He smiled again.

"Okay, let's try it this way: Have you heard of social distancing?"

"Sorry, I didn't get the memo," he said flatly.

Here it is, folks. Anti-intellectualism in a gingham shirt buttoned to the top. Sweet. I cleared my throat and continued. "The memo pointed out when someone is glaring at you for being too close; you are supposed to move six feet or more away."

"Cool."

Oh, this guy's good. "Cool? All ya got is 'cool'?"

"What? I'm supposed to be scared of you?" he asked, snidely.

"That was roughly my point."

"Wow," he said like he just watched me hit on a nun, or a tall penguin.

Feeling the need to drive the point home, I offered, "The old people in my life mean more to me than your feelings, sport. Step back."

"You're kind of a dick," he said, with the same lilt of a teenaged girl being told that she can't have the pink, jeweled case for her iPhone 16.

At least I was keeping my ad hominem in my head, unlike this asshole. (See what I did there?) I said, "You're making me uncomfortable. That's not something you get to do."

He was winding up a pitch, so I jumped in. "Just don't, okay?"

That seemed to do the trick. He shook his head in disgust, which made his man-bun swing like the scrotum of an elderly goat on a hot day, and he stepped back. I resisted the urge to honk his hairball like a horn. Instead, I feigned maturity and thanked him when I walked away with my can of utility porch and floor paint. Light grey, in case you were wondering.

There seem to be extremes of thought and thoughtlessness when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic. The alt-right folks think it's a con-job to line the democrats' pockets. The other end thinks it's nothing an essential oil enema and free love can't fix. Both sides seem convinced there is something about a barricade of toilet paper that will protect us from evil. The science around this virus is solidifying, which gives us some pesky facts. Wash your damn hands. I mean, washing your hands is the easiest and least political thing you can do. Not doing that is like hating Girl Scout Cookies. Shelter in place blows. You have a whole planet who feels your pain. (Did I mention Buddy had polio as a kid and spent a huge chunk of his childhood in a hospital bed before the internet and cable TV? He would love to hear how bored you are now. He's awaiting your cards and letters.)

Admittedly, I do chortle at the internet videos of what the locked-down are driven to do to suss out distraction. This one guy flips a slice of cheese over his shoulder, landing it on his complicit wife's forehead, IN EVERY ROOM OF THE HOUSE. It is yet another video blasted into space that will keep the aliens away. Conversely, using SIP to create art makes me smile. So I upvote or like, or whatever the new "good job" thing is the kids with man-buns use today.

There's a lot of things in our lives that we miss from the pre-pandemic days. Personally, there are things I don't miss at all. Like the smog. You can actually see New Zealand from New York right now. Seriously. And giraffes have returned to downtown Corvallis. It's amazing, in a Chernobyl-y kind of way. I do miss my skin. I'm old, so I didn't have a soft epidermis before the virus. A picture of my hand now could be used as a Tinder profile for bearded dragon dating. Sanitizer gel with multiple hand washings has turned my skin reptile sexy.

The Shakespeare volume was something Buddy tucked into my trunk along with his usual care packages of magazines, curated articles of the NYT, motorcycle parts, and, on a really good day, Sylvia's lemon cookies. He thinks I'm a writer. The Book of Bill provided me the quote for the cop at the opening of this mess. The story in the paint department is a compilation of several stories, all seasoned with a bit of horseshit and goat balls. The colour was true, though. It was a light grey. Also true is you really can now see New Zealand from New York. Seriously!

"If I do lie and do

No harm by it, though the gods hear, I hope

They’ll pardon it."

Cor-virus

Downtown became a Gregory Alan Isakov song. Quiet in the front, but a lot going on behind. The streets are cautiously traveled by numbers so small they are almost fractions; groups divided into smaller pieces. The quiet peals a quiet truth, much like a little banjo or steel guitar can Americanize a song without a power chord.

Fewer people have fewer places to go. Destinations have become shells with pithy signs laughing through their tears, to reopen at a date be determined by an acceptable viral death count. We now live in the times when hugging has become lethal to those who need it the most.

There it is. That voice. That rising note of realization swelling over the guitar. Things really are different. It looks like after midnight in any town that’s small enough to fold into itself quietly when most reasonable folks are in bed. Maybe a Tuesday. A school night—predestined for homework and preprogrammed for mid-week angst. But it’s Saturday, and it’s warm. And it’s barely after dinner. The traffic lights seem ridiculous, blinking their orders into empty space. Quiet space. I can smell the rain, as one does. Rain makes sense. If it’s raining, then people are inside. One wouldn’t expect them to be wandering down the streets, annoying their designated driver with loud voices, turned free by iconic microbrews. That is how it should be now—would typically be now. Reasonable people strumming their footsteps on these now bleak streets. If there is rain, then maybe it’s not wouldn’t be so odd for people to be communing elsewhere. Somewhere dry.

However, there is no rain. No traffic. No people.

It changed. Priorities have been recalibrated for basic survival. The silver screen and stage are gloomy dark, and the best table in the place has the chairs flipped on top. The playgrounds are tied up with yellow bows with black type, and nothing is open 24 hours in a row. We see the worst of those we hired to be the best. Yet, the wage earners are at their best, and all they ask for is more masks.

The bad words and separations and bad luck of the last two weeks or two decades lose their point. The background rumblings from the past can fuck right off. Anger is fuel for change. If there cannot be change, then anger shouldn’t be making choices. Well, it shouldn’t be.

I could tell he was going to talk to me before I tried to pass him on the sidewalk. Downtown has devolved into a mixture of people for whom movies and plays and fine dining are distant ghosts. There was something different about this guy. He had a calm focus, so I let him get within six feet of me. But no no closer than five and a half. There was no conversation about money. Is there a McDonalds down the street there? I got a gift card and I can get food. Maybe sit down for a bit. You’re about two blocks away, but no one can sit down anywhere inside, buddy. Where’s the Grocery Outlet? A couple miles. An easy walk. We looked at the sky, thinking the same thing. I asked him if he knew where the shelter is. Piercing me with kind eyes, he told of fear and meanness peeling the paint off the walls. I can’t go back there. We looked at the sky again, like it was our muse. Getting to Grocery Outlet seemed to give him a thing to do. I didn’t need to know why. You’ll make it before the rain. I like to walk—it’ll be good.

I trust it was.

Part of history. Again. Lucky me. At least when the towers fell, people came to the movies. We played a French comedy. We filled the place that September evening. Eight years later, when the stock market came tumbling down, we turned one of our auditoriums into something rented by someone else. I crawled around on the floor, collecting the screws from the remodel. We used those same screws, entombed tangled and dirty in the bottom of popcorn tubs, when in 2018, the prodigal auditorium returned. So there is one of my stories from that historic time.

Film dissolved into pixels in 2013. Cast iron was traded for silicon. Reels and splicing tape and huge, heavy machines are shuttered in dark places out of the way. The projection booth has become like looking out from the inside of a Christmas tree. Twinkly lights everywhere. LEDs, not the beautiful flickering movies rattling out the business end of a projector—a little of the show reflected onto the walls and ceilings of the small, black room. Touch screens and LAN lines now.

Now a shelter-at-home order. The virus. March 16th, 2020 was the last show at the Darkside for a while. History: The; the first time all theaters in the country and almost all over the world are closed. Like air travel 19 years ago. Time to start collecting those screws leftover from this mess. I’ll toss ‘em in a popcorn tub for when we climb out of this hole, and it’s time to rebuild.
I’ll keep the popcorn tub handy.

I’ll keep the tub will be handy. ‘Might need it soon, with any luck.

 

So, I Wrote a Book

For both of you who had noticed that I’m not keeping up on my blog, thanks for noticing. In case you’re curious why, it’s because I’ve been writing a book. No, really. Yeah, a novel. That doesn’t mean I’m gonna go back to writing essays. (I guess we call them blog posts now.) So, don’t get all excited. Instead, I’ll probably write another novel. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. So, I wrote a novel. *footnotes, is the title. Right. About the novel. It’s kind’a serious. Here’s the synopsis from the back page:

 

*footnotes examines the suicide of a young woman and how the act affects three generations of people with whom she shared her life. The story flows from the dry Arizona desert to a growing Las Vegas to the rain-swept Pacific Northwest. This fictional account shares some of the lesser-known aspects and challenges of mental illness. People who carry the weight of an unsound mind often feel they are insignificant, mere footnotes. In this novel the burdens of war, childhood trauma, or merely faulty brain chemistry inspire compensations that become part of the character’s lives and maybe some of the best parts of who they are. *footnotes uses humor and vivid imagery to bring the reader into this often invisible world.

Here's the book:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081RLNZL9?ref_=pe_3052080_397670860

 

The fact is I took this pretty damned seriously. I did research. Hung out with those who have suffered loss. Spent time with military corpsmen and medical people. Bounced sections of this book off of those in the know. When one of the people with whom I was consulting took his own life last summer, I hunkered down and wrote. So, here we are. 84,000 words of what I hope is a look into a world most have avoided. It’s not all serious. It’s kind’a funny in places. It also paints a picture of Arizona, Las Vegas, and our very own PNW a little differently than one might think. Also, I can throw a story together so you don’t get bored. 

 

Now this is the part where I ask you to buy it. It’s available for Kindle and the paperback will be available at the local bookstores as soon as it is released. It took me 60 years before I could put these ideas into words that I hope will resonate with others. I hope you give it a shot.

Summer, 2018

These boys, with their untested adulthood. Comfortable in their dirty jeans, shirtless, riding a skateboard from one unit to the next. The long, narrow buildings, facing each other like opposing armies. We, the citizens of this complex, glide down the blacktop territory between, moving from the auto shop to the metal fabricators to the machine shop. The music gets a little louder when the young people all gather in the glassblower’s studio. The gurgling of the waterpipe and the vortex of smoke are easily detectable. They are allowed. If I can eat a pound of blackberries right off the vine in the basking summer sun, then these boys can get a buzz on and spread their cobbled cars into the parking spaces in front of my shop.

 

I’m from an era when cars were carved from a single piece of Detroit iron and brought to life with leaded fuel. Tail fins and bucket seats with chrome trim. Window cranks and radio knobs. These days it’s Asian coupes that are tuned with a laptop. The cars are different but, people? Not much changes. Forty years ago that was me. Just as young. Just as sure days like these, these summer days were the way it was always going to be. I was just as ignorant that these days, these summer days would become so very, very precious when there are fewer before me than there are behind.

 

I’m the old guy with the motorcycles. Maybe this is the part I hoped I’d play when I got to be where I am now, willing to pull myself out from under my project and show a kid how to tickle a bearing out of a race with just a little heat or to exhume my engine hoist when they get to the point where the damned engine just needs to come out. I keep my distance for the most part. Those of us out there closing in on the last third of our lives tend to wander about each other’s shops, looking at airplane parts or hammered copper with an eye toward the young ones. But, the boys are right next door so I’m underfoot.

 

I know the panic. The sun is going down and the manager’s rule is that no cars can be left outside units after 10pm. The gates close and everyone has to go home. But, if the front wheel is not going on and this is their only way to get to work in the morning and parts are spread all over the blacktop ... Yeah, panic. They’re so grateful because they are good kids. I realize there is no way I can communicate to them that I am the one who is grateful. Every moment I’m squatting on the ground with them and dirtying my hands, I’m given the gift of seeing myself and my friends as we once were. Is it better to be young and living as a young person, oblivious to its value, or to be three times 20 and grateful for having been young enough to be that ignorant? The real gift to them is believing it’s always going to be summer days. As the malignancy of adulthood crashes the party, the seasons change. We trade in a little of our summer sun for a car that won’t need fixing in the dead of winter. Sometimes old injuries prevent long motorcycle rides so we get our sunlight by gorging on wild oregon blackberries on the vines behind the shop. Not the bushes where we pee.

I was 37 years old when I built the first art cinema in Corvallis 21 years ago, the Avalon Cinema. I sold my 1969 Norton Commando Roadster to help finance the project. It had a yellow fiberglass tank and wasn’t as fast and didn’t handle as well as I thought it did, but it remains the most beautiful motorcycle I ever owned. I bought that bike when I was 21, but before that—when I was just 19 years old—I bought a 1962 Impala Super Sport for $750. Roman red with a red interior and a 327 under the hood. Never as nimble as the fun-sized cars my now-neighbors consort with, but worth the compromise for elegance. Today that Impala sits in my shop. Harleys and Nortons have come and gone, but that old Chevrolet never left me. During the building of the Darkside I did entertain offers from interested parties. There were times when Lainie and I were grappling for any way to throw a few more bucks into the kitty just to keep the doors open. We closed and rented out an auditorium and I was doing construction jobs during the day and working shows at night while Lainie kept the bills paid with a real job. Here we are now, fifteen years gone, with the Darkside still open and my 1962 Impala still in my shop. The paint is dead and the engine block rests bare waiting to be tested for cracks. With a wide brush, that same description could paint a picture of me and my old motorcycle and car buddies.  

 

Recently auditorium two was returned to us at the Darkside and I’ve spent the last couple of months tearing out years of other tenants’ modifications and returning the room to what it was. (Hope to have it open again by the holidays.) This time I have a 20 year-old helping me who manages to cover herself in sheetrock dust no matter the task. These young people, they’re everywhere. She loves getting her hands dirty as much as I do. When she takes off her safety glasses and dusts off before running off to English classes, I stand on a rickety scaffolding grateful to remember being 20 and swinging a hammer before I ran off to class.

 

Corvallis is not a place that embraces automotive culture. We love our bicycles and Co-op. And the Darkside Cinema. It was the love of cars that gave me the skills to keep the cast iron and clattering gears of film projectors operating, so there is some humor in the fact that car culture allowed the Avalon/Darkside to bring art and foreign film to this community. Now projection is all digital with touch-screens and internet connections. Not much grease in the projection booth these days. Hours of massaging the movie making machinery has been traded for a few seconds of button pushing. That’s good. It means the kids keeping the goods moving across the Darkside counter can spend more time in the sun and with their families. It also means I have to get the grease under my nails from under the hood of an old GM product or from the sprocket and chain of a newer Honda.

The Abbey

The quaint town of Mt. Angel, right here in Oregon, has a sausage house. They call it the Sausage Company, but it’s a restaurant. So for me, it’s a sausage house. Since Mt. Angel is noted for its Octoberfest, it is emblazoned with stores and restaurants with names like Glockenspiel and Touch of Bavaria. But the sausage house/company puts out a damn fine meal complete with the festive regional music and the expected kitsch. The accordion-enhanced polka makes the odd appearance over the Lo Fi sound system, proving that it takes lots of beer to embrace that form of music. They have a fireplace which is very much appreciated when I’ve been out on the motorcycle all day in less than perfect weather. They let me dry my wet gear on the hearth and drink coffee under the influence of the flames. Orders are taken on iPads, which seems a little anachronistic, given the old world charm. But they have RC Cola, which forgives many sins.

 

Speaking of sins, this is an area steeped in Catholicism. Mt. Angel is at the foot of the Mount Angel Abbey, a Catholic institution set atop a hill that rises several hundred feet over the Willamette Valley, a little east of Salem. The Abbey is officially its own little town: St. Benedict, Oregon (97373) is home to a seminary and monastery. It’s been around since 1882 so the campus is quite cultured and the cathedral invokes the awe such buildings do. The Stations of the Cross mark the wooded drive up to the monastery with their uncomfortably graphic dioramas.  

 

I’ve been coming to the Abbey for over 40 years. Though I do not share the faith, my family has a lot of it in its history. My Uncle Paul, after whom I'm named, was a Franciscan friar and had a huge influence on the sense of humor that has delighted and/or horrified all who know me. I worked at the Woodburn Drive-in as a lad. When the field had emptied of cars on those sultry summer nights of my youth, a few of us would pile in a convertible Chevrolet and take a slow drive up to the top of the abbey to view the valley below. A severe addiction I’ve yet to shake is photography. I’d spend hours up there with a view camera. With my head under the drape, I’d focus the ground glass until the upside down scene popped into sharpness. The monks with their deafening vow of silence seemed to find my hobby both fascinating and vexing. They’d hover about, black robes and all, yet never say a word. I’d wait for hours for the light to be the way I wanted it before hitting the shutter release. No one bothered me. My red-on-red 1962 Impala Super Sport lounged in the lot with a trunk big enough to hold my huge camera, a tripod that spread to the size of a teepee, piles of film holders, bags of gear, and a family of four Bavarians—all living.

 

When I have my most spontaneous explosions of inappropriate humor, I tend to blame the spirit of my Uncle Paul. The guy’s dead, so he won’t argue. I could feel his warm Franciscan presence as I walked up the steps to the campus the other day. At the top of the stairs two older priests stood, like they were waiting for me...at the gates of...something.... When I stepped off the last step, one of the priests asked, “What brings you to the Abbey today?” The spirit of uncle Paul seized me and I responded, “We’re here to buy drugs. We hear Father Joseph has the best stuff in the valley.”

 

My companion looked at me the way Stewie looks at Brian when Brian is off the rails, tilting his football shaped head a full 90 degrees. The priest, a man obviously cut from the same cloth as Uncle Paul shot back with, “Did you bring the coupon?”

 

“Got it right here in my phone,” I said.

 

We all laughed and as the silent priest blessed us, the other said, “Don’t try to out smart-alec an Irish Catholic.” We went our separate ways in peace.

 

My friend said, “I can’t tell this story to anyone. No one would believe it.” I should note her head is not at all football shaped.

 

I still dabble in photography. Slow to embrace digital-ism, I can be found peering through an old Canon F or a Yashica 124. If you smell vinegar as I pass you in the lobby, it’s the stop bath I dripped on my clothes because, yes, I still develop my own film. The Abbey library was designed by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. I have no idea who that is, but the building is an amazing collection of angles, curves, light, and books. Feeling like I was ignoring library etiquette, I found my iPhone in my hands. I’d move it side to side watching composition and form on the glass screen, sending up a silent prayer for forgiveness from St. Ansel. I wondered how big of a donation it would take to permit me to bring in a film camera and a tripod.

 

The trip back down the steps was not spiced by the same ecclesiastical wit as our ascension. This time it was not to load into my old Chev, but into my van. Yes, a minivan. But, it has a/c and uses less gas than my rowdy 327. Back when my Chev graced these grounds, I could kill half a large Abby’s Pizza without a care. This day was a day off so I enjoyed my sinful Bratwurst burger tucked into a bun of pretzel dough. The sweet mustard tops off my carb load for the week, but totally worth it. I think I did a good job of not calling it, “Heavenly.” If I had, Father Paul would be heard groaning from heaven above. “The best thing about you is your absence,” he’d say when my powers of annoyance exceeded his priestly patience.  

(All photos were shot with my iPhone. I know....)

What a Lovely Neighborhood

Corvallis is letting go of its old, cheap buildings and housing in favor of newer, less financially accessible stripmalls and condos. Many Corvallis citizens are clinging to the idea that this is still the sleepy hamlet that birthed our land-grant college known as Corvallis Academy in 1856, now known as Oregon State University. But problems that were once the province of big cities have come home. The cost of living has most of those who serve our organic fair trade coffee and artisan craft beers living paycheck to paycheck. Downtown residents are stratified binarially between the reasonably wealthy on-up and the classically poor on-down. Street people fill many of the doorways at night and scream obscenities in the alleys at all hours. Corvallis is in this strange adolescence. Traffic is near saturation of the infrastructure. We no longer have the right to dawdle along under the speed limit. Being tailgated causes stress and the ripple of impeded traffic behind the slower traffic brings even more anxiety to the table. This means we don’t see bicyclists and pedestrians and this takes the incentive out of being one. It’s safer to just drive. And so it goes.

Gentrification is all the rage in our country. It has been bubbling up in Corvallis for a few years now, as evidenced by more and more “rabbit hutch” housing blooming where less trendy digs once squatted. By rewiring a town for a more affluent demographic we do get lovely non-nationally branded restaurants, boutiques, stores, bars, and weed dispensaries. It’s unfortunate we have to step over the street people to get to them.

The Darkside Cinema is now showing BLINDSPOTTING, which uses the gentrification of Oakland, California as the hook on which to hang the story of two people born and raised in Oakland grappling with their identities in a place that’s changing its identity. This is one of the best films of the year, and could be a cautionary tale for the future of Corvallis.

The Darkside Cinema has had lousy luck in the past with films that centered around the urban experience, especially the experience of people of colour. When MOONLIGHT came out a couple years ago we made damn sure it stayed around long enough to get noticed. It started off weakly here, but ended up strong, and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (You’re welcome, A24). MOONLIGHT’s success was helped by a script and acting so precise it granted access to the characters’ lives, even if those lives were many times removed from the viewer’s reality. BLINDSPOTTING is not as refined as MOONLIGHT, but it can grant the same access to a distant world. Spike Lee’s BLACKkKLANSMAN raises the bar on issue-oriented filmmaking with solid acting and directing that doesn’t overseason with the “us and them” mindset. BLINDSPOTTING didn’t have the budget or the same pool of talent from which Mr. Lee could draw. So, they take the viewer on a ride to places the locals go and where the old culture still rules. They do it with humor and spoken word staccato, punctuated with intensity that rivals BLACKKLANSMAN. All three of the above films return us to a place of hope before rolling the end credits. If not by their story, by the fact such films exist and are being seen.  

Perhaps the Darkside and movies like BLINDSPOTTING grant hope. Corvallis is changing into a place where the Avalon and Darkside Cinemas would never have had a chance to root. But we are still here and planning for the future. The movie business centers around multiplexes and big name product (movies) tied into shameless promotion. Yet, a quietly promoted movie like BLINDSPOTTING gets made and is picked up by one of the biggest distributors in the world. And they gave it to us rather than to a multiplex. And you keep coming.

I’m seeing my summer vanish into fall without having done some serious summering. When I start to get pissed about how busy I’ve been, I remember that the other day I ate almost a pound of perfect blackberries off the vine. They were just as unwashed as my hands were after installing the new sway bar link in my van. I never give a thought to parasites or bird poop on the berries because it’s summer and in Corvallis our summers grant us immunity to such things. Blackberries poached from the needled vines are an inoculation against the wet winter. So is goat yoga, I guess. I like berries more than goats. Also, I saw a fox while picking the berries. We agreed it was a fine day and with no drama wandered off in our own directions.

The blackberries in all their invasive-species glory are still a gift of summer. Kids still come from all over this hamlet to play in the riverfront fountain, splashing in the water and sunlight. And the Darkside is still playing movies like BLINDSPOTTING.