Hat Party / acting / Mercury vs. Village Voice

The Hat Party was fun, but the after-party crowd didn’t turn out. Neither did several of the people I went to the trouble of putting on the guest list. (Grrrrrrrrrr. I’m not mad at Vicky, though. She had a valid excuse, plus she’s going to let me store my boxes in her basement until I can have them shipped to San Fran, which is a lifesaver.) It was exciting until 10 or 11pm, then tapered off sharply, and I left around 12:30. Got great footage of the performers and the hat contest. Seventh and Element showed up early and made quite an entrance, since Element was wearing nothing but a leather harness and black jockstrap, and shaking his bare ass on the dance floor. I was glad when they appeared, though, ‘cause the party needed that extra push into un-inhibition. Sean and LeeAnn both snapped mass photos. The cute go-go boy from last year wasn’t there, they had other ones instead. I met a girl named Alison, Baby LeStrange’s friend, who is a film editor and photographer and gave me her card. Also a guy named Gregor, a former Silverado bartender, with whom I traded old memories of the City Nightclub and Portland back in the day. He said when My Own Private Idaho was filming River and Keanu would come to the City and Keanu would smoke pot in the bathroom constantly and River was “a weird guy.” (He’s also the first person I fell in love with, before Dylan, and before Ben Whishaw, unless you count Krystal Capps, but that was a different, platonic sort of love.)

Joel showed up after 10pm and said he loved the way Art Police turned out. He said every time Justin was on screen it made him laugh, and that Emie has the quality of a silent movie star – those big, expressive doe eyes. (“You should make a silent film with her.”) He also praised my editing, saying “You created spaces that didn’t exist.” It’s true that editing is where the magic really happens: you can take a bad movie and make it a good one through editing, that’s how potent it is to the final mix. Kirk said I should check into doing some community theater when I get to San Francisco, which is something I was already considering. Acting will help bring out my emotions more. I’m already starting to come alive again. I feel like the last eight years or so have been a slow recovery from the time I almost died from drugs, and for a long time after that I was in a sort of semi-zombified state, half alive you might say, which is why I related so much to Andy Warhol (post-assassination attempt Warhol, I mean). But I think I’ve finally made a full recovery. And corny as it may sound, it’s a certain English actor I’m obsessed with that brought me the final step back to being fully alive. Because if you lack the ability to love you can’t be full alive as a human being.The moment I first saw “Brideshead Revisited” in the theater it instantly became one of my favorite movies of all time. I’m going to do a series of expressive portraits of Ben when I get to Maui, I’ve decided. I did a preliminary drawing last night, and it came out really well. I think I’ll send it to Ben, in fact. I believe I am actually friends with him on MySpace.

Yesterday after seeing "Sunshine Cleaning" Joel and I had lunch at the Sunshine Cafe (where I had one of the worst gyros I've ever eaten and a semi-decent peanut butter cookie) and I brought up newspapers, saying I'd like to find one to write for in San Fran. I said the Village Voice would be my ideal, and Joel said the VV is only so revered and important because it's in New York, "If the Mercury was in New York it would be the Village Voice," he said, and I said I thought most of the writing in the VV is better than what's in the Mercury - the Stranger might be a better comparison - and I went off on the relentless snarkiness of the Mercury, and Joel said he likes that their reviews of bad movies are brutal, just tearing the film to shreds, but I said yes, they do that well, but they don't have the OTHER side of it. Let's say I wanted to write a review of "Brideshead Revisited," a film that truly moved me, that I think is beautiful and the highest cinematic art. I want to write a review that expresses that in a sincere, passionate, truthful way. And the sort of review I would write about a movie I loved wouldn't fit in the Mercury. They're too concerned with proving their coolness by being cynical and snarky to genuinely and unselfconsciously praise the beauty of a film. That is a LAME definition of cool and not one I will ever accept. I want to write for a paper where I can express the full range of my responses to art without tailoring them for a mentally deficient or emotionally lopsided audience. If you've read my film reviews in Just Out, you know I can decimate a shitty movie with the best of them, but that is hardly the range of my abilities.

All I care about is telling the truth as I see it.

I ran into Cliff at PSU yesterday – little Cliff who I made “Pestilence” with last year for our video class with Holly Andres. He said, “Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere else?” I guess I copied him on the email I sent out before I left for Glacier. Melanie arrives late Thursday night, and Lisa next Tuesday (St. Patrick's Day), and then it's only a week until I'm leaving on a jet plane for the islands! Oh, joy! My adult life begins NOW.