Christmas time is here by golly
Disapproval would be folly
Deck the halls with hunks of holly
Fill the cup and don't say when.
Kill the turkeys ducks and chickens
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens
Even though the prospect sickens
"Brother here we go again"

--Tom Lehrer

Seriously, I don't dislike Christmas, but after a solid month of endless Christmas carols, many with the schmatlz cranked all the way to "eleven", I'm ready for it to die a quick and painless (for me) death.

So, feeling this way, why should I subject myself to a program of holiday music sung by the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus?  Well, first, because it's live music, and second, it's not so sugary as to put me in diabetic shock.

As on last Christmas Eve, I joined Deb and Shana for dinner and then the show at the Castro Theater. This year we're joined by Jim and Becky (2), as well as my friend Skip. We have a nice, casual dinner, the stroll over to the theater for a program that is just thr right length that you feel you got your money's worth, but doesn't have you looking at your watch.

I have a good enough time, but the show isn't as good as last year's. I feel like they're trying a tad too hard to be inclusive, and touching on everything from Christmas and Chanakah to Kwanza, Wicca and Druidism. This yields a bunch of unfamiliar, and, frankly, flat music. They get in some fun bits and play around with some Christmas standards, but the show is just not as well put together or as well staged as last year.  It's good, just not very good.

A bit of an anticliax after the Kinsey Sicks...but then, what wouldn't be?

Posted by molyneaux at 12:01 AM PST

Updated: Tuesday, 19 May 2009 10:38 PM PDT

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Mood:  silly

Met David and we made our way the the Herbst Theater (location of the signing of the U.N. Charter in 1945) to attend the holiday show "Oy Vey In A Manger" by "America's Favorite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet", the Kinsey Sicks' .

(To see excerpts from a previous year's show, click here!)

Hi-larious.

I've heard these four "gals" on CD, seen them on video, and seen, met and heard two of them at a fundraiser party a few years ago, and liked them each time, but finally seeing them live was a big treat. Let's face it, in this era of amplification, "sweetening"and lip sync, many acts far are less impressive in person than you'd like. Not so with the Kinseys! Amazing voices; tight, four part harmonies; lots of silly and often downright rude humor. Half the group is Jewish, so the show careened back and forth between Christmas Carols and Jewish themed songs, with some straddling both camps (for instance, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town as a minor key as a cautionary tale to Jews: "He's seen Schindler's List, He's rented it twice; He's gonna find out each Weinstein and Weiss").

 Trixie, Trampolina (v. 1.0), Winnie and Rachel: The Kinsey Sicks

A summary of the the songs I recall them performing: 

Dragapella Chorus -- to the tune of the Hallelujiah Chorus
God Bless Ye Femmy Lesbians — about how gays dress themselves
I Had A Little Facial — to the tune of I Have a Little Dreydel
Crystal Time In The City — ending with "O little town of Meth...mayhem!"
Chanukah Medley
     Jews Better Watch Out
     Hock Your Wages
Where The Goys Are — sung to a blonde haired "victim" Rachael plucked from the audience
A Lay In The Manger
Oh! Ho-ey Night — "Oh, the night, when I did porn!"
Worry — a Jewish inversion of Don't Worry, Be Happy (RACHAEL: "What if I'm thrown in jail?! What if I'm forced to be Barry Bonds' bitch?!" and then looks alternately horrified and turned on by the idea)
'Tis the Season to Drink Stoli — about office parties gone wrong
Christmas Medley:
     Vanna White Christmas
     I'll Be Cloned For Christmas
     O Come, Ye Unfaithful
     Feliz Navidad Parody (so nasty I won't type the title)
Soylent Night — the song following a discussion of the Donner Party, which Trampolina found fabulous, and Winnie found scandelous because they "only served frozen food!"
Macaroona — where the whole audience had to do a Jewish version of the Macarena in order to shed their holiday pounds
Jenny Craig Feel My Sorrow — wherein Trixie brings the house down by singing the soprano part of O Mio Babbino Caro, begging Jenny Craig to allow her to "pig out and not look shi-tty"
Papirossen — a song in the international language of love... Yiddish (RACHAEL to audience: "Something funny about Yiddish? Our people have suffered!  ...Now it's your turn.")
Harried Little Christmas
We Arm The World — You can SEE IT HERE!

My only disappointment was that of the two members of the group I'd met previously, the one who played Trampolina has left the group, so I didn't get to say hi. The new Trampolina ("Trampolina v.2.0") is fine and talented, though. I did get to talk to all of them after the show, and flirted shamelessly with Trixie. What a voice! What a face! She makes a hotter looking woman than many actual women.  Scandalous!

 

Posted by molyneaux at 12:01 AM PST

Updated: Tuesday, 19 May 2009 10:37 PM PDT

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Looked at my rough assembly of Flight Control, again. For the second time this week I discovered that when I did my shot logging I missed breaking down a large block of footage. The other night I found about 10 minutes I hadn’t logged, and today I found another 10 minutes!

  

 

This is actually good news, because the material I’m logging now is actually superior to some of the stuff I was using in the rough assembly. This material is from the last day of shooting when John, my actor, was most “on”. I can see I am going to do some replacing of shots in the rough assembly. Kind of exciting finding better stuff after you thought you’d seen the best you had!

Posted by molyneaux at 1:41 PM PST

Updated: Tuesday, 19 May 2009 10:39 PM PDT

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While I was in Vegas over Thanksgiving—and did the obligatory drive-bys of the places we lived, the schools and churches we attended, and even malls were we shopped—it occurred to me to drive down one street where I recalled a friend of mine had lived. He was someone I thought about often when we first moved from Vegas into the BFE of northwestern Nevada, but a memory that gradually faded as life stated anew in a small town, utterly divorced from the only life I remembered before that.

Since I got back home, I’ve found myself really wanting to find that friend. I don’t have a single photo of him, can’t really bring up his face in my memory, and even fuzzy on his last name. But, this has become oddly important to me. I think it’s because, on some level, he's a roadmark to a life I didn’t have because my family packed up and moved away to a smaller town and diminished options. I feel like I was a pretty happy kid around the age I had that friend, and when we moved, I lost that and was stuck in a place where I always felt the alien. I’m certain I’m idealizing that past at the cusp of age nine, but, illogical as it is, that almost forgotten childhood friend is someone I really want to find.

In the modern world, no one’s really that lost to you, if you know how to look for them. It took me about 24 hours, but I have what is, I’m fairly certain, his and his parents’ phone numbers. I could know for sure with one phone call... yet, I hesitate. Were we really good friends, or am I misremembering that? What if he doesn’t remember me at all? I couldn't quite remember his last name, and I still can’t quite recall his face. Can I expect him to remember even that much? How awkward would that be, both for him and me? And how do you call someone up after not seeing them for 35 years? “Hello. We used to be friends in the third grade, and the last time I saw you was your birthday party in 1972. What’s new?” Is that putting someone on the spot? Is there a better way to do it? A letter with photos to jog his memory? Or should I just leave it alone...it’s just someone I knew as a kid, now as alien to me as any stranger on the street.

And so I ponder.

Posted by molyneaux at 12:01 AM PST

Updated: Tuesday, 19 May 2009 10:39 PM PDT

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...not of God...of a film.

After a few long sessions, I got a relatively complete assembly of my unfinished short film Flight Control together. The shot choices aren’t final, as I need to review the footage again, but it’s the first time I got all the dialogue shots together and can play the whole story.

Looking at it, it’s impossible to really gauge if it works as film, because most of the footage is of my actor... this might sound weird, but the way the film was intended to be done was that a lot of what you’d see were the various readouts that the character—a flight controller—was looking at as he got information from and gave instructions to a pilot we never see or hear.

The only way I’ll get a real sense of how this would work is to have those readouts and displays...most of which I haven’t made yet.

One thing that is obvious is that I can’t use all the dialogue. I deliberately over-wrote the script so that I’d have dialogue to explain pretty much everything that is going on, in the event that the readouts didn’t make matters entirely clear. The rough assembly is clocking in at about 11.5 minutes, and I was really aiming for more like 8. Since I over-wrote, there’s a lot I can cut, starting with the professional technical jargon that sets the scene but isn’t essential to play out throughout.

This is going to be an interesting exercise... albeit in some ways a painful one.

Posted by molyneaux at 12:01 AM PST

Updated: Tuesday, 19 May 2009 10:39 PM PDT

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The recent death of my mother has, perhaps predictably, caused me to realize how much about her life I don’t know, and now will probably never know. I waited too long to ask her questions I should have asked years ago, or waited too long to write down the things she told me while they were fresh in my mind. Now I question the veracity of so much of my recollection of her stories and Italian Terror Tales™.

All of this has set me on a sort of quest to construct a narrative of our family and my own life, to revisit the past, not for the sake of nostalgia necessarily, but to sort of figure out where we come from and where we are, in the geographical, historical, and emotional senses.

As part of this, I have started to create a family story...I started by poring over old photo albums and documenting when the family was where. That done, I asked for input from my brother and my sister in trying to flesh it out. First to fill in the whens and wheres, and then to start filling in the stories and recollections. My brother tells me of the circumstances in which we lost our house is El Paso, and my sister reminds me of stories related to the only time she and I saw one of our grandparents; we, infant and toddler, she, on her deathbed.

One thing I have had some success in is reconnecting with a few people from younger days...a neighbors and friends and schoolmates. Fun, but not necessarily enlightening. It’s from the family where the real gems come.

Posted by molyneaux at 12:01 AM PST

Updated: Tuesday, 19 May 2009 10:40 PM PDT

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I hate being ill. This cold is nasty!

But during this time I decided to make myself useful and recaptured all the tapes of footage I shot four years ago for the unfinished short “Flight Control” and started logging the shots (which means to go through and write down what every shot is, contains, what the setup is, and what qualities the take has).

There are bits I like and a lot of it I can’t stand looking at. My gut tells me it’s not salvageable in the shape it’s in right now, as a lot of the shots are badly lit or exposed, and there are consistency problems with the performance. But, I’ve committed myself to making a rough assembly of the complete film to get an idea of how what I have works, and see if I think it’s worth finishing as is (unlikely), or if I think it’s worthwhile to reshoot, or if I don’t think the story works as film and scrap it.

Will it work? Is it destined for the scrapheap? Stay tuned to find out!

Posted by molyneaux at 12:01 AM PST

Updated: Tuesday, 19 May 2009 10:41 PM PDT

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Oh well, being down wit this cold gave me an excuse to watch the David Mamet film State and Main, the DVD of which had been gathering dust in the living room. Cute movie, but the cinematography was pretty flat and pedestrian. Yes, Mr. Mamet, we know your focus is on words, but this is a moving picture.

Posted by molyneaux at 10:43 PM PST

Updated: Wednesday, 20 May 2009 1:28 AM PDT

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Sick: I have come down with a cold.  Yucky!

SIC <sic>: Secret Identity Crisis the DVD is heading for completion. Scott has reassembled the film after a hard drive crash, and I am working on bonus materials for it, including commentaties and a behind the scenes bit. The latter was delayed because I mislaid the Mini DV tape that had the footage on it!  I finally found it yesterday. Whew!

Oh, and here's the crew photo...most of us are in this shot, with the exception of three of the actors (who had wrapped and gomne home), the Key Grip, Location Sound man, and Location Manager (who is taking the picture).

Back row (L to R): Brendan, Illya, Janet, Jenny, Bill, Dean (behind me), Me, Garrett (behind Scott), Scott

Front Row (L to R): Bert, Stewart, Dusty

And, yes, I'm wearing Solar-Man's goggles!

Posted by molyneaux at 3:07 PM PST

Updated: Tuesday, 19 May 2009 10:42 PM PDT

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While at Tommy's on Oct. 28th, Dr. Kern mentioned this silly western film he'd seen in the 70s. Julio had his laptop open at the bar, so I hijacked it and did a search on some fragments of dialogue that Kern remembered. Voila! I found it!

It's somewhat politically incorrect, but cute and harmless. What's really astounding is the quality of the pixelation work (meaning stop motion action done with humans).

Posted by molyneaux at 11:41 AM PST

Updated: Wednesday, 20 May 2009 1:29 AM PDT

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