April 27: …We watched Village of the Damned and ate skewered shrimp…
April 29: …We watched Alien. I had never seen it. Then Time After Time…
April 30: …At about 1:30 I watched The Birds…Picked up Ruthless People…
This was the consequence of having a VCR. Being able to watch a movie whenever we wanted to was astonishing, a new “normal” that made binging on movies this way — even though it meant driving to and from Tower or Blockbuster — seem normal. Can’t imagine doing that now.
Friday night was the Shabbas for the Jewish Film Festival.
It’s always held at the house of wealthy patrons who live just two blocks away from H&C. With this in mind, I dressed for work in my usual black party garb and carried my nice black boots in a plastic bag, since I didn’t trust their heels to survive the long walk to Cow Hollow. I ended up staying late at H&C anyway, (with Addie shadowing me and occasionally threatening me with health benefits and paid vacations.) At 7:00 I walked to the address on the invitation Michael had handed me that morning.
Fancy even by Cow Hollow standards, the house is on a huge corner lot, a pale square of a mansion fronted by a gate and edged with rosebushes and fountains. Two darkhaired, exuqisitely dressed women arrived at the same time I did, one of them delicately pretty, the other round-faced and jovial. The three of us wandered around the garden, too intimidated to penetrate that wealthy facade. I was embarrassed by the plastic bag I carried holding my ratty black high-tops, and kept thinking of an expression I’d heard once about a bad poker hand. “Like a shiksa’s wardrobe. Nothing matches.” When I pointed out a strawberry growing on a bush near one of the paths, the round-faced woman picked it up and popped it in her mouth. Her apblomb made me feel better.
At last someone poked their head out and invited us in. We walked past a strange pair of life-sized fabric dolls set in the marbelly, white-walled foyer, at the base of a stairway blocked off with a white silk cord, as if we were in a museum. The dolls looked like an elderly lady in a flapper outfit and an elderly man with a moustache, dressed in a tuxedo and yamulke. They were placed as if they were greeting newcomers.
There were a few other guests adrift in airy, perfecctly decorated rooms, a bar covered with a crystal regiment of glasses filled with white wine, occasional islands of bread, crackers and brie, clear plastic cannisters filled with jelliebellies and gummy worms. The main room for the party was next to the open kitchen, with windows looking out onto a balcony with a view of the Bay. Overhead was a ridge that indicated where a movie screen could be lowered. Larry, who always handles the catering for the Shabbas came over to say hello, complimenting me on the fact tht my hair is no longer dyed a shade of red that changed with every hairdresser appointment.
I wasn’t conscious of the number of people streaming in until talking and holding a drink had become difficult. Michael arrived, but got snagged on some folks somwhere near the entrance.
There were the usual rites. The challa was passed around and everyone introduced themselves. We ate salmon and salad, and Michael talked with an Israeli filmmaker, Eitan Wetzler, who’d known Michael back in Chicago when they both worked for an Israeli bank and Michael had been a young executive, Eitan a security guard.
What I mainly remember about that night are those fabric dolls, which were familiar from previous shabbas’ but always surprised me.
Tonight is the library’s twice-yearly members’ meeting. Our bylaws require it. Normally we would spend the afternoon getting the room spruced up, setting out the wine and a platter of food, ordered from a La Mediterrenee, bringing down the decorative sign-in book that resides upstairs in the Membership office. This time the preparations just involve interdepartmental negotiations about whether it would be a Zoom meeting or a Webinar.
I suspect the main question members ask tonight will be about when we re-open. There is talk about a partial end to the city shut-down this July. I am ambivalent. As much as I long for a return to normal life, I am skeptical about safety, and about the practicality of reopening the building. I’ve heard talk at other venues about taking people’s temperature before they can enter, requiring masks, gloves, drastically limiting the number allowed in, etc.
As someone who was tasked with making sure members behaved in gatherings, dealing with nuttiness, medical emergencies, intoxication, I wonder if the belligerence about social distancing rules we’ve seen in in other cities can happen here. Before, my policing of events mainly consisted of discreet “shushes” during films. I’d hand out water and hard candies to coughers, snatch away the microphone (if I had to) during Q&A. I’d summon either the guard downstairs or an ambulance in the event of faints. At worst, I’d call the police — which I only had to do once in over fifteen years because of an out-of-control drunk.
How would I deal with some aggressive person putting his face close to mine, yelling, threatening? With several?
My first chore was to copy Fritz’ manuscript. I did it in a little copy shop in Montclair. It took me an hour and a half, and didn’t get to Charlie’s until about eleven am. Sent it off at the end of the day.
Are there still self-service copy shops that that one, or have shared documents made them obsolete?
I remember the boredom of standing beside the printer in that sterile, flouescent-lit space that smelled of electricity and carpet cleaners, making sure everything was in order, and telling myself it SHOULDN’T be boring, this was a new novel by a famous writer.
But it was still boring.
Last Sunday was the final showing for the season of Cinema Club. I drove in with Michael. The movie was The Five Senses, an Atom Egyoanish Canadian film, well made and well-acted, complex, enjoyable. Attendance has gotten so high at Cinema Club it was hard to find a seat.
After the first feature we drove to Los Gatos for the second showing. Los Gatos is a pretty little town at the bse of the hills, with a chic, upscale main street that reminds me of Cow Hollow. We ate lunch at our usual place, The Willows. Aftewards, I went for a walk, stopping at a massive Borders bookstore and browsing in a couple of kitchen supply shops. All of those gift shops in Los Gatos and Cow Hollow look alike — bright, shiny faux-naif ceramics, fancy soaps cut into deliberately crude blocks, cookbooks that emphasize the pictures rather than the recipes… I enjoy looking at those things and, in the case of the soaps, picking them up and smelling them, but I have no desire to spend money on them.
Cinema Club was held one Sunday a month, with two showings, one in San Jose, the other in Los Gatos. The idea was to watch a film with no preconceptions — attendees were supposed to have no idea what was going to be shown, whether it was a foriegn film, (Like Wandafuru Raifu’s Afterlife) a documentary (Like Errol Morris’ Mr. Death) or an indie (Like Lance Young’s Bliss).
In reality, there were some members on the mailing list Michael would send a heads up to in order to forestall any angry walkouts. I suspect it was the reaction of some members to Mr. Death and an indie feature about necrophilia called Kissed that prompted this. One person stalked out of Mr. Death at the point where Fred Leuchter, a designer of electric chairs, describes in unadorned, unemotional detail the physical realities of executing a human being. The woman who left complained the film (which is in fact about Leuchter’s embrace of Holocaust revisionism) was obviously “anti-death penalty propaganda.” Another person angrily shouted during the Q&A that Kissed, a strangely restrained, unexploitative film based on a Barbara Gowdy short story, had been made “solely to make money!” I still have a hard time imagining whoever pitched it to the studio making the case that a film about necrophilia would bring in the big bucks.
Like many these days, I’ve been watching a lot of videos. One that I keep going back to is a two and a half minute scene from the old biopic Paracelsus, directed by the great G.W. Pabst.
It depicts an outbreak of a mysterious epidemic that allegedly tore through Western Europe at the time — the Dancing Plague, which is said to have caused large groups of people to mindlessly dance for hours. What caused it, or how dangerous it was remains unclear. There are accounts of people dancing until they dropped dead from exhaustion, but that’s never been verified.
The moment in the film depicts an outbreak in a tavern. A single man begins to mindlessly, gracelessly dance to strange music. Slowly the dance spreads through the room until every individual is reduced to a face in a crowd, a mass of empty-eyed, staring people all following identical, senseless steps.
The movie was made in 1943. It’s hard for a 21st century viewer to avoid drawing a parallel between this scene and the rise of Nazism.
But here’s the kicker — It’s a Nazi film, made under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels.
Pabst, who was no Nazi, had tried to escape, but got trapped in Paris by the Nazi invasion and had to return to Germany. This was one of two films he made — or was forced to make. It’s not hard to imagine this moment in the film as a subversive dig at the Nazis by a man who had no doubt seen the “contagion” of Hitler’s Nazism spread even among people he considered friends.
And yet, it had to have been viewed by Goebbels, and Goebbels had to have approved of it. Otherwise the movie would never have been released.
As satisfying as it might be to imagine Goebbels as too dense to notice this scene’s comment on conformity and irrationality, he was a hateful, subtle and brilliant man. Goebbels knew committed Nazis would not see this scene as an attack on them, but an attack on those others, the Socialists, the Communists, the non-Aryans who, the Nazis insisted, could “infect” helpless people with their ideology and lead them into madness. He knew that Nazi audiences would not imagine themselves as the dancers.
Today in the United States, we are seeing not just an epidemic of a virus, but of mindlessness. Science is rejected in favor of whatever the president says is true. The same people who contemptuously thrust aside the advice of experts are calling those who don’t blindly follow Trump “sheep” and seeing themselves as courageous non-conformists — just as many Nazis saw themselves as clear-thinking rebels ushering in a new, scientific century.
I think Americans are naïve about how just how entrenched irrationality can be once it spreads. One of the tropes I’ve seen frequently in American fiction (A Face in the Crowd comes to mind) has been the authoritarian leader exposed by someone recording what he truly thinks of his followers and broadcasting it to them. This is sometimes depicted as an almost miraculous cure that opens the followers’ eyes and turns them against that leader.
If only that were so.
This scene from Paracelsus should remind us that willful blindness includes a refusal to see one’s reflection even when a mirror is held up inches from one’s nose. I could be wrong, of course, but I imagine Pabst filming this scene, pouring into it his anguish, his anger, his contempt for the “infection” that had spread through both Germany and Austria. I imagine him sitting next to Goebbels in the screening room afterwards, feeling anxious and silently defiant.
And then I imagine Goebbels’ vulpine grin at Pabst as he nods his approval and declares it a good, Nazi film.
The first thing I discovered this morning was that, again, someone had slept in my car. The front seat had been tilted back as far as it could go, and there was minty-smelling, Pepsident-like stuff smeared on the steering wheel.
I picked up the manuscript at Fritz’s. This one we will end to the Richard Curtis Agency, keeping another copy at Charlie’s. Tomorrow I’ll Xerox yet another copy for Fritz to keep.
Mailing went fairly smoothly. The only real hitch occurred after Shelly, Trevin and I got the West Oakland Post Office. When we came back from paying for Second Class, we found a spreading puddle beneath the Locus car. The radiator was leaking. We managed, with much smoke and the smell of burning grease, to make it to the loading docks. The fellow that has been helping us unload tinkered with the car, bypassed the leaky hose and fixed one other leak with a dab of oil. We made it back, but just barely.
After work, I stopped to see if there was anoyone who could fix my window, but the guy at the Chevron station just shook his head and said it was “a big job.” When I told him people were sleeping in my car he acted amazed. “I never heard of such a thing,” he said.
The past couple of weeks have been exhausting. We’re shorthanded because K is on vacation, and I ended up fulltime at H&C, mainly concentrating on Sunday ads. Computers crashed, software refused to work, Xerox machines jammed, brokers became fractious, indecisive and anal about working in their classifieds, the postage meter broke, and one of the FAX machines developed constipation and had to be unplugged and replaced with a healthier model. I felt like a hamster my youngest brother used to have, that would run and run in its little wheel, stop, get out, look around, and then appear disappointed that it was still in the same place.
Addie the comroom supervisor, has begun making sinister noises about hiring me permanently.
Fortunately, Ellie has proven to be more than competent and was a true help.
She was excited on Thursday about going to her first baseball game at Pac Bell Park. It turned out to be in an executive box, with champagne and free noshes (hardly the normal baseball experience.) She said it was “brilliant.”
Without comment Michael handed me his phone last night to show me the announcement that Specialties has closed permanently. Specialties was a chain restaurant that catered mainly to office workers, offering both take-out and eat-in with excellent sandwiches and legendary cookies. One had been located quite close by the library for well over a decade, first as a small stand, then as a restaurant space in the downstairs plaza. I only had to go around the corner to pick up a paper-bag lunch with a Caprese and a pack of chips to eat at my desk. Very shiny place, scrubbed clean, but a came-of-age-in-the-80s umber rather than 50s-diner-white. It had the usual bland bought-by-the-yard framed pictures on its walls, and a dining area of brown leather booths that looked barely used even during the lunch rush. But the lines for takeout were always long, and the shelf of pick-up lunches always crowded with paper bags . Another familiar place and flavor gone.
Its more downmarket counterpart in San Francisco is — or was — Lee’s, a mainly serve-yourself takeout-joint. A typical Lee’s is — or was — a plain storefront with a small entrance that led into a dark, undecorated, surprisingly large space crowded with hot tables of chow mein, fried rice, chow fun, glass noodles egg-rolls, dim sum, kung pao chicken, pot stickers, fried chicken, stir-fried beef, spicy tofu and cold tables of salad fixings, fruit, hand-rolls, and nigiri. At least one wall would be dedicated to a long counter with a sneeze-guard and behind it workers in aprons waiting to serve up hot soup or sandwiches. Takeout from the tables was charged by the weight. You’d load up a stiff paper container, bring it to the check out counter near the front, and the Asian women — I don’t remember seeing any white person or any male working there — would weigh it on a scale before ringing it up. If white, shiny Specialties has gone under, can Lee’s survive?
I spoke to my mother on the phone this morning. She sounded good, though it was raining and she had to stay inside. Her shut-down project these days is transforming her back deck into a garden and bird sanctuary, with plants, feeders, perches, etc. She’s always loved birds. Lately a cow bird has been hanging around on the back of a chair near the sliding glass doors, apparently in love with its reflection. “He puffs up his feathers and makes noises and paces like he’s flirting. Every now and then he flies over to the feeder to eat but he always comes back. I just know it’s a male. A female bird wouldn’t have the time. Narcissus was a man. There’s a reason for that.”
Lee’s is also gone now.
Collating tonight. I drove Charlie to Chinatown to pick up food for the dinner. When we got back to his house the issue had arrived. I ate a quiet lunch, then helped set up the First Class bundles.
Charlie was on edge, partly because people kept calling to cancel, but also because the labels weren’t sticking properly to the new plastic bags used for Second Class. He blew up at Faren when she mentioned it, barking, “SHUT UP AND DO IT!” (Russ, who’d arrived early, was alarmed by this.) Maybe the labels will do better tomorrow, once they’ve set. Aside from that, everyone enjoyed the Dim Sum. I drove Russ home at the end of the evening.
That, alas, was Charlie’s management style.
I wish I could remember more about the mechanics of collating. All I can recall at this point is my dismay that night at at the address labels refusing to stick on the plastic bags. I pictured them dropping off in transit, countless magazines rattling around unaddressed and astray in post offices across the country.
Collating parties began at Locus’ first beginnings, held, I believe in the small New York apartment Charlie and his first wife shared. By my time, they were monthly parties at Charlies house/Locus offices, where music played and friends and employees were fed anything from Dim Sum to Charlie’s excellent barbecue.
Attending collating was always a sign you’d remained in Charlie’s good graces. I was not invited after I left Locus, which saddened me, but was beyond my control. Collatings were popular occasions. Charlie didn’t allow shoes in his house, and the pile of footwear near his door was always large on those nights. The food was good and everyone had a fine time. Whatever his other faults, Charlie was a good host.
The Chinatown we visited was not SF’s narrow-alleyed, shadowy tourist haven, but Oakland’s broad, sunlit, business-like Chinatown, which is uncluttered with curlicued pagoda roofs and dangling lanterns. That was where Charlie introduced me to Dim Sum shortly after I was hired. We typically brought back, among other things, pork buns, shrimp rolls, custard tarts, and cartons of luciously greasy Peking duck.
Pam Troy 