The Play's the Thing...

Water in a Broken Glass - Trailer from Lodge Street Films on Vimeo.


Last night Patricia and I went to the historic Senator Theater to see the premier of Water in a Broken Glass. We were invited because our home on Madison Ave in Baltimore was chosen as location for several scenes in the film. The director found photos of the house on AirBNB and immediately contacted us. She rented the bottom two floors for 4 days...our TV room became the dressing room/makeup room, our dining room was the mess area, our kitchen was the equipment space. And our living room and 2nd bedroom became a central character's house.

The opening was PACKED. I haven't seen the Senator that jammed with people since those midnight showings of the Lord of the Rings movies. They had the restored lobby bar open. Everyone was dressed to the nines and getting photographed in front of Art Deco fixtures and a giant vinyl wall hanging with sponsors' logos and the movie title in a repeating pattern.

A bit more than midway through the movie the main character pulls up to our house, parks next to our neighbor's VW, and gets out and knocks on our door. But we don't answer at "our" house. The "owner" lets her in.

It was a peculiar and mildly unsettling experience to see our house--our belongings, our furniture--on screen at the Senator. There was our art work--stuff by Matt Muirhead, Sogh, Lance Moore. There were my knick-knacks. My bookcases full of art books and history tomes, and objects from our travels. The Chinese papier-mache painted cabinet found in Singapore, the pottery from Honduras. The Ifugao blanket from Banaue. Our mid-century throwback SCAN furniture. And in the film none of it is "mine" or "ours," but rather "hers"--it all belongs to the character Satin, who owns a bookstore on "The Avenue," but not really on The Avenue. Satin "owns" our house. But Satin's house is somewhat different. She had rearranged some of "our" art. Satin had taken other works down and replaced them with her own. Our ironing board gets screen time. And (spoiler) Satin has sex in our bed, though at the time it was our AirBNB suite's bed..and after 3 three years of AirBNB and hundreds of guests, Satin was not the first to do so. The stagers replaced several ceiling bulbs with purple bulbs for the movie, and it looked kind of cool with the period Victorian wall colors. (I remember spending a Saturday replacing our stuff after the stagers from the film crew had mis-replaced a bunch of it).

Adding a strong nostalgic and somewhat melancholic tinge to the peculiarity of seeing our house and stuff associated with a film character on a big screen, was the fact that the house is vacant now and up for sale. All the colorful Victorian era wall paint is covered up in a generic bright gray, much of the furniture has been sold or donated, and we are currently preparing to sell, donate, and store even more of it. Last year we left that house and down-sized in preparation for an upcoming move. And seeing how beautiful our home looked on screen, and hearing people in the audience commenting about it, and knowing it is no longer like that at all--that the house which was real at the time it was used in this fiction, has in fact become past that only exists now in that film as "Satin's" house--it was all made even stranger by that reality.

The main character hangs out on a bench in Druid Hill Park next to cherry trees. That bench and those trees are now gone as the Park is being renovated substantially. So that Park is now also a fiction, or a past recorded in a fiction.

So while the date-movie love-triangle story washed over me, I was thinking about how happy we were in that place, in that neighborhood, and at that time. What a great palace we had. And Satin is lucky to live there.

Last summer, Single Carrot Theater did a show called Promenade. Patricia and our next door neighbor and several other people from the neighborhood participated in the creation of the show by telling their stories about Baltimore or their neighborhood. As these stories played on headphones, the spectators rode a bus around different neighborhoods in the City. The bus stopped several times for perfectly-timed, finely executed little vignettes to happen on the street. Several extended segments of the audio were my wife and my next-door neighbor telling stories. I heard the local rabbi telling a story. While I was listening to this I was in a bus next to my wife and the rabbi and our next door neighbor were on the bus as well. As I listened to them on tape--as all the spectators did--they also listened to themselves telling stories on tape as part of a performance. Outside the bus window, the City had become a stage where actors were performing on the street right next to "real" people, who often walked through a scene, or stopped to watch because to them there was no way to know this was a show with a bus-full of spectators watching from the parked bus. And watching my own shit on screen at the Senator in a setting which no longer exists was very similar to sitting next to my wife as we watched a theater piece featuring my wife speaking on tape while I was sitting in a bus with her going past our house where actors were acting outside...it all makes me wonder if any layer of this Philip K. Dick shit I experience all the time is actually real? At one point in Promenade the bus pulled into a vacant lot and a flash mob of green-shirted people wearing visors ran over and simultaneously washed every window on the bus while staring blankly into the eyes of the spectators. As if to say "this is not a stage, not a fiction, but perhaps you need to see more clearly what is happening."

You don't know Dick

My intention in 2007 was to eliminate almost entirely the personal journal entries from Blog-Sothoth, and migrate to a book/film/music blurb model. Of course bloggers are capricious creatures, and I'm not merely capricious but restless and unfocused as well. For months here book/film/music blurbs have been few and far between, while the personal journal entries abound. Sigh.



Dick's writing is often a pastiche of the language found in hard-boiled detective fiction. Many of his characters of course are cops or druggies or thugs, so this makes a kind of sense. It's often charming to find stories set centuries in the future wherein the characters spout Bogie and Bacall talk. You don't read Dick for literary style. Clipped, terse, tough sentences. No bullshit.

You read Dick for his marvelously inventive paranoia. There are layers of time, with precognitive mutants who can see bits of the future, of folks who journey to the past and fuck things up, but not in the cliched and expected sci-fi manner. There are characters who read minds, who communicate from beyond the grave, who exist simultaneously in the past, present, and future. Nothing is ever as it seems. I recall turning on the news once while blasted on 'shrooms. I was disturbed to note that I knew in advance the sequence of stories, and even knew what commercials were coming up. That's what reading Dick is like. You feel slipped out of time or reality and into something larger and more mysterious, something beyond reckoning. A Lovecraftian void of mysterious damnable geometries and mindless deities. Kind of like the set on the Teletubbies.

What surprised me most is the humor in a few of these stories. I'd never thought of Phil Dick as a funny guy. He did, after all, go back in time and live for a few years as a persecuted Christian under Roman rule. And then his robotic head was stolen. But Dick has some fun at the expense of fellow sci-fi writers here.

There are a few duds in this collection, but overall The Minority Report is a solid volume of inventive sci-fi. Worth a look for a few mind-fucks.

Netflix

I really enjoyed this. I think Dick's novel--inspired by the amplified paranoia surrounding Nixon's late phase--is perfectly timed for today's descent into Bush's amplified mimicry of Nixon's late phase paranoia. And Linklater's film does Dick's book justice.

Of course no actors playing burnout paranoid drug abusers could be more unbelievable in the role than Robert Downey, Jr., Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson, and Keanu Reeves. Am I being sarcastic? Who knows any more, to paraphrase an old Simpsons episode.

The animation is beautiful and jarring. I'd of course not know from experience, but would imagine that looking at oneself in the mirror blasted on mescalin or psilocybin might be similar to looking at the shimmering features of these actors given whatever special technical treatment they received in order to jazz up the imagery. And Winona's cartoon boobs are nice.

Yes, Keanu does say "Woah" at one point. His fans shan't be disappointed in that regard.