Category: Euro-art-stuff

CINEMASTHESIA MOVING IMAGE SERIES

co-sponsored by Monkey Brains & Central Services

933 Treat St, SF. Doors 6PM Movies 7PM

FREE!

donations gladly accepted

 

1st run: Psychgeography

Artwork by Hugh D’Andrade

A subjective take on filmic representations of various aspects of urban exploration (urbex, UE, place hacking, etc)

WEDNESDAYS> August 13th, Sept 10th, October 8th, November 5th & December 3rd – Doors 6PM, movies 7PM. 

 

August 13th: 

–To Live and Die in LA

Movies are the next best thing to real life, if your real life is dramatic, exciting, unnerving, joyous, terrifying, confusing, engaging, deeply depressing, and reflects all those and other feelings. If your life is not like that, then there are always movies.
The first two movies that I remember seeing as a young child are Santa Claus Conquers the Martiansstarring Pia Zadora and First Men in the Moon, starring Edward Judd.
I saw both of these films in a theater when I was about seven years old. I certainly saw stuff on teevee before that – we got our first B&W teevee a few months before John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and that is the first “teevee show” or rather ongoing dramatic news story that I remember vividly. I imagine that my memories of that horrible event were “baked in” due to how distraught and vocal my typically stolid and calm parents were.
That sort of thing has an effect on a youngster.

-LA River (short)

 

–Dark Days

To be clear, I don’t really remember much as far as actual full length narrative films before the moon and the martians. Both of these films really scared the poop out of me! They were really creepy. This deep impression has stayed with me til now, despite an adults eye revealing the undeniable hokeyness of both films.
The next, forever ingrained in memory movie experience of mine, was one that I shared with millions of Americans. And that would be the annual showing on television of The Wizard of Oz. This peculiar societal ritual might seem strange to younger people nowadays, but in the mid 1960s, it was a major event that millions of children & child-like adults awaited with great anticipation.  The Wizard of Oz became a deeply felt and profound collective cultural experience shared by so many fellow Americans (as far as phenomenal fantasy films of the 30’s I would vigorously champion MGM’s Max Reinhardt’s stupendously magical A Midsummer Nights Dream. I actually prefer it to WOZ.)

September 10th: 

–Subway

For me, as I grew older, going to the movies became a thing. I grew up mostly in a little town in Michigan that had one movie theater. My friends and I would go there as often as we could. I remember one night in 1973 when I went with three of my buddies to an evening showing of Richard Lester’s Three Musketeers. Rolling out of that movie house, we immediately grabbed the closest sticks and spent the next several hours chasing one all throughout the dark and quiet streets of Big Rapids Michigan sword fighting and leaping about as energetically as humanly possible. We eventually ended up climbing the old water tower right at the edge of town, where the Ferris College grounds started. We were thoroughly energized and brilliantly inspired by that fabulous action adventure movie. ATHOS!! PORTHOS!! AREMUS!!! and KEN!!      

That run around town under the cover of night pretending to Aramus after seeing one of the greatest adventure films ever, was a truly unforgettable experience, not to mention my first exposure to one of the gods of acting: Oliver Reed.
As we got a little bit older, we realized that if you went to the very back exit out of the theater, the one by the screen, that we could walk in backwards, while people were walking out and nobody would notice, and then we would quickly burrow down deep into the very front row of seats, where nobody from the back of the theater could see us. From there we would watch the movie, actors and movie scenarios towering high above us. We did this a lot. It’s how we, three 14 year-old kids, saw the scandalous and X-rated A Clockwork Orangewhen it first came out.

 

October 8th:

–Stalker

I finally made it to San Francisco in 1976 and a year later I joined the Suicide Cluband Communiversity. Suicide Club avatar and “first among equals” Gary Warne, along with his friend Ron Sol ran a thing they called Fantasy Film Festival out of Gary’s bookstore The Circus of the Soulon Judah at 10th Ave in San Francisco.

 

–Mad God 

 Gary stashed dozens and dozens of pillows atop the towering bookshelves in the store and every Sunday night we would move some things around, drag the pillows down and throw them on the floor; Gary would fire up his 16mm film projector and would show a double bill of what he & Ron thought were the strangest movies.

 

November 5th:

–The Element of Crime

2 years ago my friend Rob Schmitt created Films With Friends a wonderful North Beach film series taking place monthly at various venues. This series was unique to my knowledge because multiple films were screened at a number of venues simultaneously in the same neighborhood, the primary intent being to liven up the hood by encouraging folks both local and from other corners of the city to invite friends to wander about North Beach, either settling on one program or dropping in on a few.

 

-LA River (short)

 

–The Naked City

As you can see, I have been enamored of and involved in many atypical movie showings and series over the decades Fantasy Film Festival. Brain Wash Film Festival (a very scrappy low budget film series ongoing since the mid – 90s where films are shown in a great variety of peculiar places), original film premieres in the sewers under Yonkers, New York, Old Suicide Club movie showings in abandoned theaters as aesthetic programming for an actual physical event to follow, and all sorts of other great venues and peculiar methods of screening.

 

December 3rd:

–RoboCop

Not to mention the late 70s through the early 90s when San Francisco had as many as 25 repertory movie houses around the city that showed odd bills. The Strand, the Embassy with its 10-0 Win and one dollar entry cost. If you came to the Embassy when they opened at 10 in the morning, you could stay all day until midnight or 1, and people did.

–Big Trouble in Little China

I’ve wanted to do my own movie series for a long long time, but was always busy with other stuff or just didn’t really have the right venue. I would like to thank Rudy Rucker Jr. and “Devo” for graciously offering up their small company theater for this ongoing series. I am sure that like me most of you have your favorite end of the world movies. We’ll see how it goes. If we get a decent turnout for the first chapter, psychogeography then will run the second chapter Apocalypta.

Well, there are a lot of end of the world films, some of them are pretty obscure. I’ve wanted to run my favorite list of apocalypse films for a long long time. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to do it…

If we do get through to the third iteration, I encourage all of you to come out for the films of Larry Cohen. It’s impossible to describe them.

Seriously. If any film auteurs deserve their own category, Larry Cohen would surely be in there with Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman, Fellini, Polanski, and all the rest of the unique filmmakers. I’m not necessarily comparing Cohen to those others on a qualitative level mind you. But I can honestly say that at least for me as far as entertainment, it gets no better.!

The Gift

#Giving Tuesday

In a world where everything has a price, the most priceless things are free.

THE GIFT https://vimeo.com/78845545

I have the honor and pleasure of introducing a new film by Robin McKenna called “The Gift” at the Castro Theater this Thursday November 29th. This movie is a visually delicious sampling of personal stories that illuminate some of the philosophy behind the popular and influential book by Lewis Hyde published in 1983.

Robin showcases four examples of “gifting” as manifest in some very different cultural settings. My favorite is the story of a anarchist(y) squat in a giant abandoned commercial swine abattoir.  Roma gypsys, immigrants and struggling artists conjured Metropoliz out of a derelict property on the outskirts of Rome that no one seemed to want. This experiment ran into some bumps when the real estate started rising in value. A clever counter to this inexorable tide of property greed we have all had to contend with in some fashion was for Metropliz to emphasize the (soon internationally recognized) artistic contributions that famous artists have painted on the various huge walls of the complex. The stature of this new museum has helped fend off eviction attempts by real estate concerns and their political servants to date. The Gift here is an ongoing sharing of the space with the occupants and the outside world of art and culture afficianados.

Another of the four samples of “Gift economies” finds Robin and crew documenting a native potlatch Kwak’wakwala community in Alert Bay in Pacific Northwest Canada. The idea of “The Gift” in some form or other is a part of many tribal and indigenous cultures going back to pre-history. Gifts are not always accepted and often weighted significantly with social and cultural obligations; the unifying factor is simply that the The Gift must not be held. It must be shared with others who in turn are obliged to pass it along.

The Gift also follows the work of artist Lee Mingwei who’s work is a “life meets art/art is life” in the Zen tradition.  His work is influenced by Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, a book he carries the book around with him when he travels. Hyde has wrote an introduction to Mingwei’s work, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Last but not least in the quartet of lovely of Gift vignettes is Michelle/Smallfry who created a “circular gift” camp, art car (giant bee called Beezus Christ Supercar) and crew of busy bee pals that took gifted honey from SF beekeeper acquaintances and passed along for free on the playa at Burning Man.

I enjoyed these four symbolic and literal tales, each illuminating the concept of “The Gift” in different though related fashions. Our world, western culture, is driven in large part by the great and valuable philosophies of the spirit of the individual, freedom of will and self determination ruled by “none other.” Unfortunately, we have swung too far in that direction, abandoning the balancing power of community, sharing of resources, the idea that some things must remain free. The Gift is a timely message in this world where literally everything has a monetary value, a price – whatever “the market” demands. If we cannot return to a balance between the individual and the communal, we are surely doomed to a future of even more greed and inequality.