Thanksgiving

After the Upstairs Baby and his parents moved away, the building settled into a beautiful peacefulness. As much of a beautiful peacefulness as a building on a major thoroughfare can settle into, that is. Buses and motorcycles and semi trucks and fire engines and drunk people continue to pass by my windows in a constant stream. The trash pick-up and its crashing cans and idling truck still wakes me every Tuesday at dawn. Nevertheless, there was no noise coming from overhead and this changes everything.

For months the apartment stood empty and then erratically scheduled open houses started cropping up. My next door neighbor and I would sneak to our front door peepholes and spy on the would-be tenants and then send each other panicky judgmental emails in which we assessed how noisy we thought people would be based largely on their outfits. Once, I had a brief exchange with two young women as I was leaving the house and concluded that they were wearing way too much makeup to be quiet people. I know. I wasn't proud of it.

Last weekend, I heard some commotion in the entry way, so I sneaked to the peephole (I know, I know) to gather reconnaissance about the latest open house. Except this time, it was what I had dreaded most: strangers with keys. The management company does not allow anyone to view the apartment without an official minder, so strangers with keys can only be neighbors.  We had new neighbors. Three of them. Three very young men. Three young men who probably had a passion for techno music, a penchant for indoor lacrosse, a rotating roster of shrill girlfriends, nothing in their fridge but a keg, and aspirations to master the electric guitar. Shit.

My (beloved) next door neighbors were out of town, so I sent inflammatory electronic dispatches with every new development: I can hear their stereo!  They have a motorcycle!  They keep laughing! Each missive generated the desired alarmed response: we were duly united against the invasion.

Nevertheless, I make it a policy to bake for new neighbors, usually almond cake, though once chocolate chip cookies. This is a very small building and we are all in each other's pockets. There is no reason not to begin with neighborliness (and secret slanderous emails). Additionally, many of my neighbors have been new not only to the city, but to the United States. Are these poor people meant to just innately understand the intricacies of San Francisco trash separation?  I think not. I am a self-appointed one-woman Welcome Wagon armed with treats and information galore.

I decided that for a trio of young men, cupcakes were the way to go. I had neither the necessary ingredients, nor the time to get them, so I skulked around like a criminal for a couple days for fear of meeting the neighbors in a cupcakeless context, thereby undermining my dazzling premeditated friendliness with the sort of sloppy spontanenous friendliness practiced by normal people.

On Monday night, I launched Operation Cupcake immediately after work. As soon as they were cool enough to frost (among the stickiest undertakings of my life, incidentally. I will henceforth stick with almond cake) I started getting nervous. What if the boys didn't get home until midnight and the cupcakes were already stale? What if they were out of town for Thanksgiving? What if they are vegans? Soon though, I heard someone fumbling with the lock (I can't help it.  Our entryway has the astonishing acoustic properties of an ancient Greek theatre and these guys are routinely having a great deal of trouble with their keys) and basically ambushed him. With cupcakes. A big-city danger that his mother probably never even warned him of.

And that is how I came to meet Filippe, a young man from Chile by way of Madison, WI. with a wide, dimpled smile. He says that should anything ever be too noisy, they will knock it off immediately. He tells me that all three of them are friends from Madison and all three now engineers at Tesla. It is his first real job. They don't yet have a dish drainer, or matching silverware, or a trash can, or a table, he tells me, but they're working on it. He tells me that if I ever need to move anything heavy, I should call on them for assistance. He appreciates knowing about the trash, the back yard, the location of BART, and where I get my favorite burrito. Above all, he appreciates my assurances that he is not crazy, that Whole Foods is really expensive. 

This morning, there is a knock on the door. I open it to a smiling Filippe. We both have bedhead, but he wears his better. "Hi neighbor." he says. "I don't know if you have any plans for tonight..." And then my young neighbor, who has lived in San Francisco for three weeks, and in this apartment for five days, invites me to join them and some of their friends for Thanksgiving dinner. Suddenly we are acting out the fanciful 4th grade version of the Thanksgiving story. I have been cast as the Indian, who has shared knowledge and exotic foodstuffs of my native land, and he, the Pilgrim, having cobbled together a passable homestead, makes this overture of thanks and fellowship by offering some food he has foraged for himself. 

The earnest kindness of this invitation overwhelms me.

I tell him that I will actually be spending the holiday with my family. "Even better!" he says.  "Do you have a table yet?" I ask him.  "No." he smiles. "But we're getting one today!" I thank him again and wish him a good evening. We agree that we'll see each other soon.  "Peace out." he says by way of farewell.

Peace out, everyone.
Happy Thanksgiving.

A bit of cheer

Today I neither want to write the frivolous thing I planned to write about making cupcakes for the neighbors, nor do I want to try my hand at a weighty analysis of race relations in this country. (However, I didjust get The Warmth of Other Suns from the library because starting somewhere is better than starting nowhere.)

Instead, for today, a snapshot.

When driving to work, groggy and overcome by the litany of worldwide bad news on NPR, it is an unexpected moment of grace to miss the green light. This accident of timing positions you as the first car at the intersection and therefore the one with the best view when the excited jumble of children spills into the crosswalk behind their teacher, laughing and chattering, bound for who knows what field trip adventure. It also means that when one girl turns sideways to face the cars and waves and waves to see what she can make happen, it is you who get to wave back.

16th and Valencia

I seem to be spending a lot of time at 16th and Valencia lately.  When I was there last weekend, though, I didn't look around much. it was all Roxie all the time. I hurried to the theatre (I always seemed to be arriving breathless and a bit late) got in line, shuffled into the movie darkness and didn't emerge for hours.

Last night, though, I had been to see some solo performance at Stagewerx (a worthwhile thing to do, in case you were thinking, "hmmm. Should I be seeing solo performance?") and as I was walking back to my car, I noticed that the corner store of very long standing has boarded its windows. Beside it, the beloved Breton crêperie that was there for about twenty years has morphed into some sports-centric something or other with many, many large televisions and the smaller bit, which had been a crêperie addition iis now a  cookie purveyor with incongruously bright light. Light that you could perform surgery by. Indeed, the whole cookie store aesthetic is not unlike a fun! whimsical! operating room--slick surfaces easily sanitized, but all in primary colors. It is a strange addition to a street where every other new establishment tries to reclaim as much wood as possible before opening to the public. Next, I passed a pretty bar (no doubt fashioned of reclaimed wood) possibly in the former site of a bookstore, but the typography of their logo is so stylized that I have no idea what the place is actually called.  I stood there for several minutes trying to decode it, but reached no definite conclusion. Something with some a's and some v's I think.

Just as i was sinking into a "oh how everything has changed" reverie combined with a bit of "how will I ever remember to drink here if I can't read the name of the bar?" (participating in gentrification while decrying it is a something of a hobby for people of my ilk), I passed a group of men outside a closed mechanic's shop where they had assembled some dubious wares for sale on the dark sidewalk. They were in mid-conversation as I passed.  One man was excitedly trying to rise above the general chatter, "Do you know who the first rapper was?  But do you know who the first rapper was?"  he paused. "Mohammed Ali!  Mohammed Ali was the first rapper!"

It cheered me up immediately.

The French had a name for it

Last weekend I felt pretty lousy--was it the shortest cold in history?  Was it a strangely excessive bout of allergies?-- I will never know. Whatever it was, from Friday to Sunday, thumbs were decidedly down.  I was very dismayed by this since I had planned to settle in at the Roxie on Saturday afternoon and refuse to leave until Sunday night. 

Pourquoi?

PARCE QUE

Another Noir festival? At the Roxie?  And it's in FRENCH?

Obviously, this was no time to be lying prone, sneezing and cursing fate.  I scraped myself off the sofa, put a box of tissues in a tote bag and shuffled off to infect my fellow citizens, because I was not going to miss this.   I was not alone in this sentiment, as it turned out. I have never seen the Roxie so full in my life. 

I only had the stamina for two movies on Saturday, but I managed three on Sunday (for which I sat on a chair in the aisle. It was that crowded. Go Roxie!), so I now feel qualified to tell you the primary difference between French and American Noir. And that is: boobs.  Oui!  While America was in the grips of the Hayes Code, actual bare bosoms were gracing the grand êcran of France. There was also glimpse of the shapely derriere of Brigitte Bardot as she scampered from bath to bed, the thrill of which was intensified because she was not talking at the time. 

Did I find Brigitte almost unbearably exasperating in her role as a prostitute who, in a big career move, becomes a kept woman?  I am sorry to say that I did. (in the words of my friend Elliot, festival programmer, "Women often feel that way [about Brigitte Bardot].") In fact, if you take a look at the expressions in this still, you basically have the whole movie in a nutshell. "Hi, I'm quite patronizing."  "Oh really?  Well I'm like a helpless, ultra sexy Disney woodland creature, only whinier, so that should work out."

In fairness, I did see another movie starring Jean Gabin (Voici le Temps des Assassins) and I loved it and him. In fact, you should see it. So much scheming!

Indeed, if you like your Noir with an evil dame doing nonstop scheming (and who doesn't?), you cannot do better than Chair de Poule (Highway Pickup is the English title) the moral of which is: do not marry a hot little number from Marseille and expect her to live cheerfully in an isolated mountain service-station.

Compared to other film festivals in San Francisco, the audiences for which are often fashionable and/or costumed youngsters, festivals at the Roxie feature many hardcore, old-timer film buffs who, it's true, may not be particularly attune to current views on pleated pants, but who know a lot more about everything that flickers by on that screen than you and I ever will. I'm always relieved to find that San Francisco still sometimes looks like the Roxie as much as it looks like, say, Outside Lands.

If you wish you'd been in on the action, it's not too late. This festival was so hugely popular that there are plans afoot to bring more French Noir in December.  I will be there. Hopefully without a box of Kleenex.