talk to me

We saw “Talk to Me” today, the movie with Don Cheadle about Petey Greene, an ex-con who became a radio disk jockey in the 60s in Washington, DC. WOW! It is a fabulous movie.

Why is it only playing in one movie theater in all of San Francisco? It is hard to believe in this day and age that a politically relevant movie about racism and the civil right movement is not playing on at least as many screens as Pirates of the Caribbean or I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

Maybe it is true that the primary market for the movie industry is 15 year old males. I’ve heard that for years, but it is hard to actually accept it. But what about all the art houses, like the Embarcadero? I read some on-line reviews, and several people mentioned the limited release of the film.

I sincerely hope that word of mouth turns this movie into a sleeper, and that it gets a wide release. The soundtrack alone is worth the price of admission.

A few things struck me. Petey Greene sat in the same high-back wicker throne that Huey Newton sat in. I wonder which came first. And when we got home, we were telling my girlfriend’s 15-year old son about the movie, and he asked, “What’s a disk jockey?”

It was one of those moments when you feel really old, but glad that you were around in the 60s. So go see it, dig the music, and make sure you bring plenty of Kleenex.

the accidental garage sale

Today I worked like a rented mule. Two men from the San Francisco Day Labor Program and I put 2,740 pounds of junk from my girlfriend’s garage and carriage house into a 14- foot rented truck and took it to the dump.

This task had been planned for a few weeks, so it was a bit serendipitous that a few days ago a flier was left on the door announcing a block-long garage sale. How could we say no?

A few words on the carriage house. It really is a stable in the back yard that actually housed a horse. There is a hay loft on the second floor. There must not be too many of these left in the Mission, because two gay men who stopped at the garage sale almost fainted when they caught a glimpse of it through the open garage door. They were members of the Victorian Alliance, and D. took them on a tour. They begged her not to tear it down or upgrade it, but to leave it in its state of “arrested decay”.

Because we were cleaning out the carriage house during the garage sale, everyone wanted to come back there, and people were literally buying things as I was unearthing them

We found some original tools from the early 1900s, but the best moment was when one woman asked, ”What about the stuff in the truck? Is that for sale”?, at which point she jumped up into the truck and started digging around. She took a few things, and I couldn’t stop marveling at the magic of it all.

After we cleaned out the carriage house and the truck was loaded, we started giving everything away for free. Seeing the look on people’s faces when we said “it’s all free” was payment enough.

We also did some rearranging and clearing in the house. Then we went and celebrated Bastille Day at a cute French restaurant in a tucked away corner of Nob Hill. We had a fabulous meal! When we left, I asked the waiter if he could call us a cab. He said it would probably take half an hour, and the best thing was to walk four blocks to California Street. Since we could hardly walk, that sounded like a horrible idea.

As we stood on the corner pondering our fate, a few full cabs went by. D. said maybe one would drop people off at our restaurant. Lo and behold, one stopped, let people out, and we hopped in. We were reaping the karmic rewards of our free garage sale.

Let’s see how the spirits rest tonite.

take me out to the ball game

I don’t really like baseball, but I do love AT&T Park, formerly known as SBC Park, formerly known as Pac Bell Park. It’s one of those new stadiums that never had a non-corporate name. Somehow the pre-corporate stadiums always manage to maintain their pre-sponsored name. “The Stick” will always be “the Stick”, no matter how many never-before heard of corporations buy the name.

So once or twice a year, I like to go to the park and sit up high and look at the bay and do nothing for three hours. Some people bring their laptops and “work from home”. I just like to sit there.

Last night I found myself at the ballpark at the Home Run Derby, part of All-Star Week. It was mostly through my own naiveté. I thought I was buying tickets for the All-Star Game for my girlfriend’s son.

He is the ultimate athlete. Through a friend, he met Jerry Rice, who said to him, “You look like a ball player.” His feet didn’t touch the ground for weeks. So it just didn’t seem right that the All-Star game would be in San Francisco for the first time in 23 years and he wouldn’t be there.

So I went on Craigslist and bought two tickets to the game, or what I thought was the game. Turns out they were for the Home Run Derby the night before. No wonder I thought I was getting such a good deal. You can imagine everyone’s disappointment when I realized that he didn’t have tickets to the Big Game. So after I calculated how much money I have saved by reaching 53 years of age and never having had children, I decided rather than selling the Derby tickets, I would go myself and get him another set of tickets to the All Star game, where he is right now.

So I invited my friend and colleague Craig, and off we went. If I had only followed my intuition and brought my overcoat(summer in San Francisco-you know how it is), the evening would have been perfect. At one point, I said that baseball would really be boring now, after seeing only home runs for three hours. Like having only dessert for dinner or eating an artichoke heart without having to eat all the leaves first. Home runs are exciting.

It’s been a mighty expensive week.

a tale of two cities

I just got back from New Orleans. I went as a tourist, plain and simple. I have one word to say after spending four nights and three days at a beautiful hotel in the French Quarter. GO!

The best thing you can do for New Orleans right now is go as a tourist. It is as safe- if not safer- as any another tropical tourist destination I've been to where you combine (a) white tourists with money and varying degrees of class consciousness with (b) the poor people who live there, and (c) heat and humidity. I was not asked for money once, which is not what I would say about Havana.

It brought home to me that two parts of a city can exist side-by-side, and the reality of the people who live there couldn’t be more disparate. That split existed in New Orleans before Katrina, but the gap is even wider and more apparent now. Aside from being shown on international television during "the storm", as they call it, almost two years later families are living in small FEMA trailers a few blocks outside of the French Quarter.

One whole section of the "projects" is shut down to protect the safety of the former residents, while identical projects on the other side of the freeway are occupied. The story, unconfirmed by me at this point, is that they want to put a golf course on the site of the public housing units that the tenants are fighting to save.

One story I read today said there they found burn marks, traces from bombs, on concrete sections of the levy that divers brought up.

This all couldn’t possibly be about a land grab to gentrify New Orleans? I had heard theories of this at the time, but even I couldn't go there. But seeing who has rebuilt and who hasn't makes it all so black and white, as they say. Why rebuild your house when it could happen again? The levees are not being improved, just patched.

On my way to the "swamp tour", I saw miles and miles of abandoned suburban, garden-style apartment complexes whose shells were basically intact. I saw blocks and blocks of wood-frame houses in an African-American neighborhood relatively close to the French Quarter that were boarded up, and what few houses were occupied had FEMA trailers parked in the front yard.

I am inspired to return as a vounteer, possibly with a project to rebuild green. But I say just go. Go shopping on Royal Street in the French Quarter and see those beautiful old trees and mansions in the Garden District and eat the best grits and fried oysters and oyster po' boys and crab meat cheesecake and the "you-name-it-it's good". And go hear jazz and support the musicians. They need us. For better or worse, tourism is their major industry. Who knows, you might even see a ghost. (hmmmmmm..i swear i tried to get that link to work about 12 times....that link just might be haunted)