BACK FOR ANOTHER YEAR--A Sunday Journal

It has been nearly a week since Mark and I returned from six days in San Francisco.  The extra-ordinary geography transformed me in much the same way that I imagine the original terrain, with its impossible hills, was slowly transformed into a languid and vital place to live and visit.

Whether we managed to find the places and the experiences we were predisposed to enjoy, or whether they mysteriously found us, the fact is that we were constantly in love with whatever the moment had presented to us, wherever we happened to be.  It was as though the city prepared itself especially for us.  A brief sketch of a few of these things reads like a list that might describe us:

-The little dog who greeted us as we first arrived at our B&B;
-Our sparse but cozy second-floor room next to a busy bar, whose muffled rumbles of voices and music lulled us to sleep at night;
-The couple who ran the place, one a retired architect and musician, the other a Russian art collector and film buff;
-The famous Castro movie theater around the corner that showed, for one night, a movie I have wanted to see all my life;
-The Italian tourists I met and befriended, who patiently allowed me to speak haltingly in their mother tongue;
-The Italian restaurants (especially the one right next door that projected Fellini films on its wall);
-A long-running musical-comedy revue that welcomed me with numbers from "Hair" and "Nine";
-Architecture of the residential homes and the commercial buildings that pleased me on a deep unspoken level, as if I belonged within those spaces;
-Macondray Lane, the inspiration for Armistead Maupin's Barbary Lane;
-City Lights Bookstore, whose atmosphere was effervescent with the spirits of Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsburg and Ken Kesey, and which had the best Film Book section anywhere; 
-Harvey Milk's camera store, vacant now, conferring a blessing on us and a hearty welcome to enjoy it all; 
-The ease of getting around without a car; and walking everywhere, with our camera at the ready;
-The best coffee I have ever had, anywhere;
-The flock of wild parrots of Telegraph Hill made famous in the book and documentary.... and the sea lions, squirrels, and many, many dogs....

What I realized is that, although I can no longer consider myself "young and impressionable", I still am at least "impressionable", and hope never to lose that trait, that openness to awe, to allow one's life to follow wherever beauty and compassion might lead it, tempered with wisdom, informed by history. 

That gets harder with age....but it's a necessary ingredient in reinventing a life, changing an attitude, overcoming a flaw....

As I start Year Two of this journal, there will be a new Series, the San Francisco Album, with short essays and original photos of the experience.  The city needed to reinvent and rebuild itself after the1906 Earthquake, and several times since then....I hope personal re-invention will not require as seismic an incident!  

Plus...the usual re-views, of movies and music and theater, and the outpouring of heartfelt opinion on anything from animal shelters to gay rights, from political absurdity to healing humor.

Welcome back!  

FIRST ANNIVERSARY!!

"Reinvention..." has reached a milestone...a One-year Anniversary. 

On September 7, 2009, I wrote and published my very first post.  It was, in fact, Labor Day one year ago.  I wrote about a little amusement park in the Chicago area that was closing. 

http://tom-samp-journal.blogspot.com/2009/09/daily-journal-september-7-2009.html

I looked back at this significant place from my childhood, and from there, sought to explore the future while understanding what had gone before.

And this journal was born.

Not a day has passed in the past year when I have not thought about, agonized and labored over, or pondered what has transpired here.  To some, the process of a blog is simply an everyday activity.  To me, it is a legacy, an exercise, a way to reach out, a quest for understanding.  I know that words can change lives, and in turn change worlds.  I hope that my readers have enjoyed, learned, questioned, and were encouraged by what they found here.

Have I succeeded in "reinventing" myself?  Better yet, have I finally defined that term?  What has it been about my love of dogs, passion for movies, quest for new books, and search for meaning in a chaotic world, that has made me a different person from a year before?  

Mostly, it has been the process, the thinking, and the inspiration to see my personal loves and activities through a lens with which I have attempted to record my point of view, and put it out there in hopes that others will see the world as I see it.

Have you gained a new perspective? Shaken your head in disbelief?  Rallied to my cause?  Struggled along with me in my confusion?  Did the fog lift sometimes for your own clarity?

I followed my heart,, and mind, and interests....Sometimes I let the world dictate the topic.  Mostly, it was a need to resolve something, or share a laugh, or display my pride and expertise in a distinct world of film in hopes that someone else would be as excited as I was.  Or maybe it was a need to seek or to provide comfort, or cry, as dog stories usually require.

Anyway, I thank all of you for reading, and for becoming a friend to me. 

I am putting the blog away for a very brief time, in search of new adventures, to explore a new area, and to fill the pipeline for Year Two of shared stories, Movie Reviews, and shelter antics.  Will I put my Italian to practical use?  Will I finally adopt a dog?  What will I think of the latest films?  Why are some old favorites still so important to me?  Will Oscar be golden? Will I finally write the Great American Short Story?  Will I leave behind a Classic Novel?  Will I one day accept a Screenplay Oscar of my own? 

Be well....keep reading...and writing.....I look forward to getting back, in a week, or so.

If we stop reinventing ourselves, we stop living.  Hope you'll join me in the effort!

TOM

"The Tillman Story" and American Mythmaking.

This is a great documentary, essential viewing, and a necessary addition to the archives of American political and military manipulation of American public sentiment.

Soon after the disaster in New York on 9/11, Pat Tillman, rising star of the Arizona Cardinals NFL Football Team, felt like he wanted to make an important contribution to his country.  In 2002 he left the team, enlisted in the Army, where he joined an outfit of Rangers, and was deployed to Afghanistan.  During a mission in which his team was split, an "ambush" ensued, in which Tillman was shot and killed.  The military, learning that Tillman's death was the result of friendly fire, sought to spin the story, exploiting Tillman, and his family's grief, as a tool for recruitment and support for the war.


Director Amir Bar-lev tells this story with effective use of archival footage, photographs, redacted documents, and recent interviews with family members and colleagues.  As a film,it is as compelling as some of cinema's best political dramas like "All The President's Men" and "Z".  As a chronicle of loss, deception, and misguided mythmaking, it is evenhanded and clear-headed, the anger seething but never boiling over into sanctimony.  

The film chronicles Pat's life, his relationships with parents and brothers and childhood sweetheart (who became his wife), his disillusionment with the war in Iraq, the incident that killed him, and the attempts by military and political figures to hide the truth and "create a heroic myth" for an unsuspecting American public.

We learn about the human being that was Pat Tillman, so our identification with his grieving, angry and questioning family is complete on the most basic emotional levels.  Tillman's integrity, openness and intelligence runs counter to the stereotype for the privileged athlete.  He had heroic qualities to be sure, which were co-opted and misinterpreted for political reasons.   The film does not attempt to avoid Tillman's flaws, and so the narrative built around his athletic purity and unflinching patriotism and sacrifice tears viewers in several directions.

Some (like me) will bring some questions and assumptions into the theater.  Would we have even heard of Pat Tillman had he not played professional football?  Was Tillman accorded some special treatment?  Should Tillman's motivations be questioned any less (or more) than any other enlistee?  How could the American public blindly accept the myth that was being forced upon it?   The movie effectively lays to rest some of these preconceived resentments and questions, and presents its facts for maximum emotional impact.  Viewers will have much different reasons for being angry, and will have  renewed encouragement to cast a very cynical eye and ear to mainstream media and military pronouncements.

Tillman was also involved during the "rescue" of Jessica Lynch, another incredible re-working of the truth in order to placate American sensibilities and reinforce the fraudulently exploited narrative of the American hero. 

An essential companion piece to this film is Susan Faludi's book,  "The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America", which includes an in-depth chapter on the Lynch incident and an exquisitely detailed explanation of how and why Americans still cling to its frontier myths.  This is a fabulous, important book, which many in Congress, the military, even Hollywood, would wish you would ignore.

Two days after seeing "The Tillman Story" , the most vivid image is still that of Tillman's face....I have not been able to forget that face, and my appreciation for him, flaws and all, and my regret for the family still trying to get official acknowledgment of the truth and to hold those to blame responsible.  Looking at that face, in its many angles and ages, the honest gaze and ready, exuberant smile, I realized that while I watched this film I had engaged in a private conversation with it, and I asked questions that the film attempted to answer, and motivated me to learn more, and gained an understanding beyond the boundaries of the movie itself.  That's what great documentaries can inspire one to do. 

A Guilty Pleasure; An Old Favorite--Thursday Journal

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Two recent viewings from my personal DVD Vault:


The 2007 thriller "Disturbia" appealed to me on many levels, to my complete surprise, and delight.


Those who check in here regularly know that my taste in film is toward more esoteric, obscure, retro and socially significant works.  I generally avoid films that are marketed as mindless social lubricant to a more frivolous mindset.  Some may find my own favorite films irrelevant....or that I'm out of touch for scorning the latest technologies.

But in spite of its obvious pitch to the sex-and-horror teen market,  I found "Disturbia" a really effective mix of the standard teen love-and-buddy story and stalker-thriller. 

What sets "Disturbia" apart is its heart.  It finds human relationships important, and honestly explores the troubles and psyche of an extremely likable, good-hearted, sometimes goofy teen named Kale (Shia LaBeouf) who suffers the painful loss of his father and finds himself confined to house arrest after assaulting his teacher.


In a clever mix of "Rear Window" and "Silence of the Lambs", this kid enlists the help of his best buddy and the new girl-next-door to expose and thwart a possible serial-killer  who lives across the street.  It's all absurd, but the screenwriter mines it for its human elements, and creates some wonderful set-pieces in the romance and action departments.


(I was completely won over when Kale expresses admiration for his girl Ashley (Sarah Roemer) by confessing the beauty he found in her while "spying", including the fact that she reads books, not just fashion magazines, but "substantial books.")


The direction is smart and effectively keeps the action within the house and the boundaries within which our hero must restrict himself to or be arrested.  Credit to the art directors for creating a detailed and authentically suburban milieu within the house and outside of it; to the cinematographer who covers the action with lots of movement and elaborate, seamless lighting design; and the film editor for achieving clean pacing and using exquisite closeups.


Shia LaBeouf is also terrifically watchable, and won me over with his mischievous boyishness and surprising depth of emotion.  Carrie Ann Moss is so believable as a reasonable mother coping with her husband's death and the repercussions felt by her son.  Moss is so straightforward that we never doubt her love for her son.  And David Morse radiates the evil of Hannibal Lecter, alternately bland and sinister.


The violence is cartoonish and startling but not explicit, and elicits the gasps of the funhouse.  It's a solid little movie that will not go into the annals of the classics,  but will be worth bringing out again as Halloween approaches.

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Next evening I reveled in Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets", and remembered what it was I found exciting about Scorsese so many years ago when he (and I) discovered the possibilities in the medium of film.


This was a product of the early 1970's when movie audiences accepted a film that was content to observe human behavior and needed no artificially imposed plot, no pandering or lame jokes or tidy endings.


Scorsese was experimental in his camera movements and film speed, color and ambient sound and music.  The score, in particular, has a bite that "American Graffiti", blandly nostalgic, lacked.  "Mean Streets" plays like a dry-run for the more polished "Goodfellas".


Robert DeNiro burst into stardom with this film.  (A year later he would win an Oscar for his portrayal of a young Vito Corleone in "The Godfather Part II".)  It is so clear, watching this, that Scorsese could push his own boundaries and turn up the intensity when he had DeNiro as a collaborator.  They brought out each others best strengths, and enhanced them, to maximum effect.  DeNiro's appearance in common comedies and weak dramas, and Scorsese's reliance on the puppyish Leonardo DiCaprio, make me long for the old dynamic duo and the horrific magic they created together, unforgettably, in this film, "Taxi Driver", and "Raging Bull".


When I first saw "Mean Streets" I was, at the time, shooting and cutting my own movies on Super-8 Film stock--the same kind used in the credit sequence.  Still one of my favorite credit sequences, and a highlight of "Mean Streets".  Enjoy!

"The Movie Lover"...An Idea for a Work of Fiction

It is early, early morning on September 1, and I have to be up and out of the house in a few hours.  I'm meditating, in a creative zone, about a work of fiction I have begun.

An extended monologue, it is a first-person narrative told by an adolescent who is alone in the madhouse of his suburban schools.  He's too smart for his own safety, obsessed with creating his own little super-8 epics, and always anxious.

He lives in a small and over-protected household with tightly-wound parents and a series of dogs who are adopted and then casually given away.

In his energetic stream-of-consciousness narrative, he frames the world in terms of his favorite movies, or those he longs to see if he were old enough.  The story moves him through the terrifying years of his youth, in which he retreats into (and finds strength from) a mosaic of images, daydreams, original stories, fantasies about the boys he admires, his hilariously feverish sexual awakening (alone), and his fear of never being "normal". He memorizes the nuances of Beethoven in the music from "A Clockwork Orange", dreams he can fall in love with a girl like Sally Bowles, and gets a heated aesthetic thrill from watching the coming attractions for "Easy Rider" and "The Wild Bunch".

In college he continues his monologues which are peppered with references to hundreds of movies..in the back of the book, each film mentioned gets a capsule review AS WRITTEN BY THE NARRATOR. 

It is at this point in the story that he "falls in love" with a lesbian who breaks his heart, forms a lifelong bond with a kind and athletic dorm-mate, and finds recognition through his own filmmaking, inspired by heroes named Fosse and Bergman and Kubrick.

It's all about education in America, finding life's meaning in the movies of the '60's and '70's, the fascination and ultimate disillusion with pop culture, curing depression by keeping a dog illegally in your dorm room,  the outlandish ways a closeted gay boy navigated the demands of his body, heart and mind in the disco-drenched sex-soaked culture of "Goodbar" and "Cruising",   and how an eccentric like Annie Hall can mend a broken heart.

He will thrill to how all is connected in life, if he can just observe it as carefully as Altman observed Nashville.

And it will be funny.  And romantic.  And it will be a revel for lovers of movies.

So I must sleep now..my work is laid out for me.