THE GIFT of TIME

Waiting Up For You by James Aschbacher

You know how couples often have "our song?"

James and I had a song: "Tired of Waiting For You," by the Kinks.

James was known to actually slip this CD in the player and blast it all over the house when he was dressed and ready to go someplace and I was still in the bedroom, trying to drag some clothes together and fooling with my hair.

It seemed like I could never quite get out the door on time.

On yoga mornings, despite his reminders ("Wrap it up!" "Shut 'er down!" "Time to go!") I was still upstairs, trying to write that last sentence, or answer one more email, while he cooled his heels at the door, rattling the car keys, afraid interlopers would take our spots on the floor if we weren't there to claim them.

He made sure we always got to the movies on time, where scheduled showtimes waited for no critic.

(The same could not be said about our friend, Morton Marcus; at press screenings at the Nick, he habitually snuck into the theatre 10 minutes after the movie had started.

James teased him about it unmercifully, that Mort never saw this often crucial set-up to the story. "Mort, you missed the murder!" he'd say, as we critics thronged back out into the lobby.)

But when James and I were going out to visit friends, despite my best intentions, I never allowed myself enough time to get ready. Even my sunny willingness to claim all the blame ("So sorry! Totally my fault!") could never quite counter-balance the fact that I'd kept him waiting. Again.

We never fought over it. We never fought over anything. But in retrospect, I find myself thinking, geez, would it have killed me to be on time, once in awhile?

I'm never late now. I get rides to yoga and the movies from different people every week, and I'm always ready and waiting by the door. It's too bad I didn't show my Art Boy the same courtesy when he was still here to appreciate it.

Actually, I did. Once. On a Valentine's Day, when time had slipped away, and I had neither card nor gift for my sweetie, I folded a 3x5 card in half, drew a clock face on the front, and turned it into a "gift certificate" for The Gift of Time  — my pledge that I would not be late for one entire year.

His eyes lit up. "This is the best present you could ever give me!" he said.

And I managed to keep my pledge!

Too bad it was only good for a year.

SCENES FROM A MOVIE(HOUSE)

Long before I ever became an official movie critic, I fell in love with the Nickelodeon.

Back in my student days up at UCSC, I saw most of my movies on campus, either at student-generated film series (Film Noir! Swashbucklers!), or at any one of the six individual college dining halls where double-or triple-bills seemed to be playing every night. But when my best friend Jan moved to town in 1974, and we rented our first little downtown apartment in Beach Flats, I had to find some other way to feed my insatiable movie habit.

That way was the Nick.

Original owners Bill Raney and JoAnne Walker Raney had operated an art house movie theatre in San Francisco before they migrated down to open the Nick in 1969. The University was just getting started, so UCSC and the Nick sort of came of age together. The United Artists theatre chain owned basically all the other movie houses in town, showing a steady diet of Hollywood fare, but Bill had other ideas.

The original theatre had only one screen (what's now known as Nick I). An old-fashioned nickelodeon machine sat roped off in a place of honor in the lobby. The snack counter was dominated by its vintage popcorn popper, and contained such marvels as a bag of Swedish mints (round chocolate mint balls coated in pastel candy), which quickly became my drug of choice. Price was, I believe, 45 cents.

As if the regular fare of new foreign-language films by Bergman, Wertmuller, Fellini, and Truffaut (always subtitled, never dubbed), and non-mainstream American independents were not blissful enough, there were afternoon programs like a ten-week series of classic French New Wave. Jan and I went to all of them. People ask me where I acquired my "background in film." I say: at the Nickelodeon.

In 1975, I started reviewing movies professionally (ie: in some place other than my journal) for Good Times. Okay, it was awhile before I actually got paid for it, but I knew I had arrived as a real critic the day that Nancy Raney, Bill's second wife, invited me to my first press screening at the Nick.

It was 1976, and the movie was Francois Truffaut's L'Histoire de Adele H (The Story of Adele H), starring the beauteous Isabelle Adjani. I took along my posse—Jan and my brother, Steve—and we got to watch an entire movie with only a couple more people in the audience. (I had no idea who they were at the time, and I was too shy to ask, but it was probably Dale Pollock from the Sentinel, and whoever was reviewing movies for City on the Hill that week.)

What an illicit thrill! A private screening in the middle of the day for a movie that wouldn't be open for the public for another week—it was surreal! Little did I know that would be my new reality for the next 38 years.

Nancy was the consummate hostess. When the Nick screened Almodovar's Women On the Verge (Of a Nervous Breakdown), where gazpacho figures prominently in the plot, Nancy served everybody cups of gazpacho in the lobby.

 When Bill and Nancy bought the three-year-old Sash Mill Cinema in 1978 from its owner, Rene Fuentes-Chao, Nancy was able to use the adjoining Sash Mill Cafe for "dos," as she called them, wine-and-munchies receptions for the press to meet visiting filmmakers. (For Les Blank's doc, Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers, she even served up garlic popcorn.)

But she really outdid herself in 1987, promoting the Danish film, Babette's Feast, in which a Frenchwoman prepares and extravagant meal for the dour inhabitants of a 19th Century Danish village. Yup—you guessed it! In cahoots with Casablanca Restaurant, Nancy had Babette's entire feast replicated for about a dozen members of the local film-reviewing press, whose ranks had swollen over the years. (And you can see why!)

The point of all this was to get people talking about the movies and the little-art-house-that-could, that kept bringing the best of world cinema to our little burgh. And, oh, how it worked! Bill and Nancy opened a second screen at the Nick in 1976, and added two more in 1981.

While the Nick spread the gospel of indie and art films to the public at large, the Nick screenings pretty much begat local movie culture. I met so many folks (and made so many friends) in the Nick lobby at screenings, I probably can't remember them all. Morton Marcus came to Nick screenings regularly; he was so famous, I was afraid to talk to him for years!

I'd known Buz Bezore up at UCSC, but it was at Nick screenings that I got to know the other alt-journalists—Christina Waters, Michael S. Gant, Tom Maderos, Geoffrey Dunn —who would be staffing Buz's string of alternative weeklies for years to come.

Vintage me, vintage Nick lobby, ca 2004. My home away from home.

Bruce Bratton was writing his column for Good Times when I started at the paper, and was one of the most loyal screening attendees. UCSC film prof Vivian Sobchak was a regular, and, occasionally, her colleague Eli Hollander. I got to know all the various Sentinel film critics over the years—Dale Pollock, Rick Chatenever, Catherine Graham. And while I can't recall the movie being screened, I vividly remember the day I met the "new kid" at the Sentinel in the Sash Mill Cafe, at one of Nancy's dos—Wallace Baine. He was there with his wife, Tina, and he had their infant daughter in a baby carrier over one arm.

Early in my tenure at GT, I went to a screening of one of Bill Raney's favorite movies, the obscure, utterly impenetrable 1965 Polish epic, The Sargossa Manuscript. (He was bringing it back as a classic revival.) This time, there was only one other person in the theatre, and as he and I staggered back out at last into the light of day, laughing and utterly flummoxed, we bonded over the fact that neither one of us had a clue what the movie was about. This was the first time I met Jim Schwenterley, who was then writing for the Cabrillo Log.

Soon, Jim was working for Rene Fuentes-Chao, programming the eclectic repertory double-bills at the Sash Mill. When Bill bought the Sash Mill in 1978, Jim became part of the Nickelodeon family. When Bill and Nancy were ready to retire in 1992, they sold the business to Jim. Who else loved movies as much as the Raneys, or was better suited to maintaining the Nickelodeon legacy?

Jim and his then-partner, Chuck Vowiler, were responsible for bringing the dilapidated Del Mar under the Nickelodeon umbrella, and restoring it to its Art Deco glory. Next came stewardship of Aptos Cinema—to the delight of Aptonians starved for Nickelodeon-style film content down in South County. More recently, Jim and partner Paul Gotlober undertook the massive project of switching the theatres over from film to digital.

Now, after 23 years of savvy, challenging, and entertaining film programming, Jim and Paul are ready to step down. The Nick has been sold to Landmark Theaters; yes, it's a theatre chain out of Los Angeles, but its theatres specialize in art-house and independent films.

The current plucky staff of Nick, Del Mar and Aptos employees are being retained to do what they do best: continue bringing the best movies out there to our community. The theaters will be dark on December 17 and 18, then rise, Phoenix-like on Friday, December 18, in time for the holiday movie season.

Here's looking at you, Nick. Let's hope the fabled Nickelodeon legacy continues!

DARK MAGIC

Baby critic in the making: media was always the message

40 years on the movie beat in Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz in 1975 was heaven for a fledgling film buff. The movies were great: Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather Part II, Nashville. Admission was around $2.50 for a double-bill.

Those were the days! Much has changed in the world since then—especially the movie scene, and the moviegoing experience, here in Santa Cruz.

My affair with both began in the summer of 1974. As a freshly-minted UCSC grad, I packed up my BA, and went to work nights selling tickets and popcorn at the U. A. Cinemas (now the Riverfront). It was the streamlined "flagship" of the United Artist chain of theaters in town (which at that time included the Del Mar, the Rio, 41st Avenue Playhouse, and Aptos), before the corporation lost interest in Santa Cruz and let its theaters crumble into ruin.

Fledgling critic ca. 1976

The flip side of this corporate mentality were independently owned mom-and-pop movie houses. The Nickelodeon, operated by Bill and Nancy Raney (one screen, with a vintage nickelodeon movie machine roped off in the lobby), was a popular venue for foreign films, maverick indies, and festival programming. (Like a brilliant French New Wave retrospective that my roommate, Jan, and I drank in like fine wine every Saturday afternoon for weeks.)

The family-owned Capitola Theater, and Cinema Soquel, showed less-than-brand-new double features. (Although, in a couple of years, Cinema Soquel switched to X-rated films in a desperate, but doomed attempt to stay solvent.) The Skyview Drive-In was still showing movies, but Gary Culver had not yet opened Scotts Valley Cinema, and the Cinema 9 was not yet even a gleam in the developer's eye.

In January, 1975, Rene Fuentes-Chao opened the Sash Mill Cinema, with 25-cent popcorn and double bills like A Streetcar Named Desire with Last Tango In Paris, Sunday Bloody Sunday with Persona, or Chinatown with Touch Of Evil.

It had poor insulation, no ventilation, and a corrugated metal roof that guaranteed patrons would freeze in the winter and roast in the summer; raindrops sounded like Taiko drumming. We loved it. Its program of vintage and recent films changed three times a week, and they published a poster-sized schedule every quarter, which everyone I knew had taped to their refrigerator.
  

Early GT promo (ca 1977) for its new full-time critic

The Sash Mill and the Nick catered to Santa Cruz's new identity as a university town. Programming was inspired and offbeat, prices were relatively low, and the sense of community was enormous—especially among students (and recent students) discovering David Lynch, or RKO musicals, or Japanese samurai movies together.

Jan and I went out to the movies with my brother, Steve, almost every night. And I wrote obsessively about everything I saw in my journal, long before anybody ever paid me to do it.

Enter Good Times, a 12-page entertainment weekly started in April, 1975, by Jay Shore. By then, I was working at Bookshop Santa Cruz, in the textbook room managed by Steve, and my nights were free. When GT film reviewer Christian Kallen advertised for an assistant, I hauled out my old (manual) college typewriter, hammered out a one-page review of some dreadful B-movie we'd recently seen at the drive-in, and mailed it in. Two weeks later, Christian called me up to tell me seven people had responded to his column, but I was the only one who'd actually written something. It must have worked; I became Christian's official stringer

I love to write, and I love movies, but the rest was strictly on-the-job training. When Christian left town, about a year later, I inherited the job.

In the lobby of the "old" Nick, ca 2004

One of the greatest perks of that job was the fabled Nickelodeon press screening. In big cities, films are screened early for the press, so writers can meet their deadlines and get a review out on opening day. The Raneys embraced this idea for a small, movie-loving town like ours. Their eclectic films needed attention right away; if a movie didn't get reviewed that first week and draw a house, it probably wouldn't last a second week.

For years, Thursday afternoon press screenings at the Nick became the place for the SC film elite to meet. It was like a private club for local scribes, where we all got to hang out together, whatever rivalries might have been going on between our papers.

I had known Buz Bezore slightly at UCSC, but the Nick lobby is where I first met Christina Waters, Tom Maderos, and Michael Gant, all of whom wrote about film sometime or other in the various incarnations of the Santa Cruz Express/Independent/Taste/Metro/Weekly. Bruce Bratton was a regular, as were Rick Chatenever and, later, Wallace Baine, from the Sentinel. I'm pretty sure I met Morton Marcus for the first time at the Nick, and probably Geoff Dunn, when he was making his first local history documentaries. UC professor and film historian Vivian Sobchak attended the screenings for years, and, more recently, Dennis Morton and David Anthony from the KUSP Film Gang.

My first GT review! Monty Python & the Holy Grail. October 23, 1975

In one sense, we knew we were all on the same team—the collective treasure hunt to discover great movies and spread the word. We saw the sublime, the ridiculous, and everything in between at those Nick screenings. And since we rarely agreed on which was which, debates were spirited as we filed back out into the (always unexpected) daylight.

Sadly, those press screenings are no more, much like film itself.     Movies are projected digitally. Vintage film reels are preserved as objets d'art suspended from the ceiling in the lobby of the Nick, relics as quant as that old nickelodeon machine once was. Today, movies assault you in 3D, seats rock or recline, theaters call themselves "cafe lounges." But it was never about all that stuff. All that really matters is the transformative magic of the movies.

MEET the (MOVIE) PRESS

We're ba-a-ack!

After a dithering-imposed hiatus last year (um, we forgot to book the venue), it's time once again for the annual Critic's Smackdown, where we ink-stained members of The Press duke it out over our favorite films of the previous year and offer our fearless and/or clueless predictions for this years Academy Award winners.

For many moons, Bruce Bratton, of KZSC and Bratton Online, Wallace Baine, of the Sentinel, and I commandeered the Nicklelodeon for this event. Regretfully, this year, Wallace has had to opt out; he's too busy covering every other arts and entertainment story in the county to see enough of the movies.

But Bruce and I will be joined by longtime local journalista Christina Waters, whose opinions on film and food appear in the Santa Cruz Weekly, and online at Christina Waters.com.

Also new this year, our act is booked into the Grand Auditorium, downstairs at the Del Mar. Showtime is this Sunday, February 23 (one week before the Oscars), at 11 am. And, yes, we WILL be in 3D, but no glasses required!

Our leader: Morton Marcus

This entire event began years ago as an outgrowth of Morton Marcus' bi-monthly Saturday morning film discussion groups at the Nick. Mort attracted such a large, loyal following of passionate local movie fans that one year, he invited Bruce, Wallace, and me to participate in one of his early January discussions to talk about our favorite films of the previous year.

Turned out the audience loved having not one, but four local critics in its collective sites with whom to spar over their most and least favorite movies of the year. Mort invited us all back in March, a week before the Academy Awards broadcast, to talk about all things Oscar, and a tradition was spawned.

Mort is no longer here to chime in with his colorful opinions and encyclopedic knowledge of film history. But we do our best to carry on without him on what is now our tenth anniversary.

And now that the Oscar show comes so much earlier in the year, my fellow filmies and I have downsized to a single yearly mash-up where we discuss our favorite films of the year AND the upcoming Oscar contest. Expect diverse opinions, but a clean fight; as Mort would say, no kicking, gouging or spitting.

But, hey, nobody wants to listen to the critics blather on and on. The success of this event depends on you, The Public, telling us your opinion of the films of 2013. This is an interactive event that depends on audience participation, and the Del Mar is huge, so bring your friends—it's free!

That's this Sunday, 11 am, at the Del Mar. This is your chance to let the critics know what YOU think!

TALKING MOVIES

Due to a perfect storm of participant inattention and scheduling conflicts at the venue, our annual pre-Oscar film critics' smackdown at the Nickelodeon will not go on this year.

This is the event in which, in days of yore, our fearless leader, Morton Marcus, used to lead guest critics Bruce Bratton, Wallace Baine, and myself in a roundhouse brawl—oops, I mean civil, intellectual discourse about the year's best movies, along with our views on the Academy Award nominees. Even after Mort moved on the the Great Screening Room in the sky, the three of us kept the event going in his honor.

This year, the show will still go on, but in a different format. Although we won't be making a personal appearance at the Nick, we'll be talking movies on Bruce Bratton's radio show, Universal Grapevine, on KZSC, Tuesday, February 12, at 7:30 pm.

Wallace has had to leave our merry band, since he's so busy covering the rest of the entertainment scene in Santa Cruz, he rarely has time to see movies any more.  But longtime local filmie Christina Waters, of the SC Weekly, has graciously agreed to step into the breach.

We'll be discussing our favorite films of 2012, likely Oscar winners (and losers), and anything else that pops into our brains on the subject. Tune into KZSC, 88.1 on your FM dial, and check it out!

REMEMBERING MORTY

It's been three years since Santa Cruz lost one of its literary treasures—poet, raconteur, and bon vivant, Morton Marcus. But his memory lives on, not only in the hearts of those of us who knew him, but more tangibly in the Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading, the third installment of which is coming up this Saturday, November 10, at Cabrillo College.

In this annual event, a world-class poet from out of town (previous guests have been Robert Hass and the delightful Kay Ryan) shares the stage with local poets in a program presented free to the public.

This year's distinguished guest poet is Arthur Sze, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and winner of the American Book Award.

This year's event also includes a reading by the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Contest, sponsored earlier this year by the Santa Cruz Writes collective and phren-Z, the group's online literary magazine. David Sullivan will read an excerpt from  his contest-winning poem, "Take Wing."

As in years past, Gary Young, Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate (2010-11), will serve as master of ceremonies. You can be sure Mort's spirit of bonhommie will be there as well!


Also, in keeping with the tradition of alternating venues between co-sponsors UCSC and Cabrillo, this year's event will be held at the Samper Recital Hall in the new Cabrillo Collage Arts Complex. Other event co-sponsors are Poetry Santa Cruz, Ow Family Properties, and Bookshop Santa Cruz.


Admission is free, but seating is limited, so be sure you get there early. The program begins at 7 pm. Visit Morton Marcus.com for more details.

The INCONSTANT TRAVELER: AGOG IN PRAGUE

Just back from two weeks in the Old World, and I have something to declare: I am in love with Prague!

If you ever get the chance to visit this magical place, just drop everything and go.

Prague's downtown section, Old Town, is a well-preserved, never-bombed medieval city whose ancient buildings (often grafted together from different eras) feature gargoyles, outdoor frescoes and stencil paintings, unexpected statues tucked into odd spaces, and exuberant carvings like this fanciful mermaid, floating serenely above a cobbled side-street.

We traveled with our friend, Donna Mekis, who had spent a lot of time in the city with her husband, Morton Marcus, a trip we had all hoped to take together some day. Donna and Art Boy and I made this pilgrimage in his honor; we visited Mort's favorite haunts, followed his route to Charles University (where he taught a month-long summer course one year), and ate in some of Mort's favorite cafes, toasting him all the way.

With Prague Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral on the hill overlooking the town, and dozens of green patina domes, spires and medieval towers in all directions, Prague has a dreamy fairy tale look—especially when everything is lit up at night.

 Czech history, of course, has been anything but a fairy tale—which may account for Prague's thriving puppet culture. Here are some very cool hand-carved wooden specimens I found in the shop Marionety, in Nerudova Street. (Here's a link to their online shop, although you may have to run it through Google Translator, unless your Czech is better than mine.)

The best, like these, are carved by artisans from families who have been making puppets for generations. You can find plenty of shops and vendors hawking the cheap, molded plaster variety to tourists to take home to the kiddies, but it's not really kid-stuff.

Back in the various eras of repression (in the 20th Century alone, the Czech people were occupied by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Nazis, the Soviets and the Communists), it was humble marionette shows traveling through rural towns and villages that lampooned the powerful and spread the audacity of hope among the people in allegorical terms only the natives would understand.

No wonder the Czech national symbol is the wily jester, as one puppet-seller told us, and jesters—benign, arch, or downright scary—appear in every puppet shop. Of course these days, along with the usual kings, princesses, clowns, Pinnocchios, devils, and puppets in traditional Czech costumes, you also find Harry Potter marionettes, Captain Jack Sparrows, a smattering of Obamas, and—freakiest of all—Michael Jacksons.

For centuries before the Czechs had their own Republic, Prague was the capitol of old Bohemia, from which we get the notion of "bohemians" as arty iconoclasts. Prague is still a hotbed of spontaneous, interactive street art.

The John Lennon wall near Kampa Island (a couple of blocks from where we were staying in Malá Strana, the Little Quarter) started going up as soon as the Communists rolled out; graffiti artists and passers-by have been layering on political slogans, peace signs, Beatles lyrics, Lennon portraits, and who-knows-what-all ever since.

I decided to go native and leave my own mark on the wall with a handy Magic Marker some previous tenant left in our rented apartment. Two days later, my endeavor was almost completely covered up by another guerrilla artist wielding pink day-glo paint. Ah, the transitory nature of art!

Here's art with a little more permanence: the Love Lock Bridge over the Certovka  (The Devil's Stream), a narrow canal that separates Kampa Island from the rest of the Little Quarter. Nobody knows who started this one, but for about eight years,  couples have thronged to this bridge to declare their love by locking padlocks around the railing.

By now, the bars and cross beam of the railing are so thick with locks, lovers have started padlocking other bridges nearby. But the ever intrepid Art Boy found a space on the original bridge for our lock, which he painted red, and which I decorated with our names and dates.


It was tricky, but he managed to secure it, then he threw the key into the canal. So I'll always feel we left a part of ourselves in Prague—and vice versa!

CRITICAL MASS

Here we go again.

For, lo, these many moons, Bruce Bratton, Wallace Baine, and I have commandeered the Nicklelodeon about this time every year to hold forth on who we like (or not) in the upcoming Academy Awards showdown. 

We'll be at it again this Sunday, February 19, at the ungodly hour of 10 am, in the newly revamped and refurbished Nickelodeon. Admission is FREE! (And while you're there don't forget to check out the new auditorium carpets and newly repainted lobby!)

The whole thing began years ago as an outgrowth of Morton Marcus' bi-monthly Saturday morning film discussion groups at the Nick. Mort attracted such a large, loyal following of passionate local movie fans that one year, he invited Bruce, Wallace, and me to participate in one of his early January discussions to talk about our favorite films of the previous year.

Turned out the audience loved having not one, but four local critics in its collective sites with whom to spar over best and worst movies of the year. Mort invited us all back in March, a week before the Academy Awards broadcast, to talk about all things Oscar, and a tradition was spawned.

Sadly, Mort is no longer here to chime in with his colorful opinions (although his wife, Donna Mekis, tells me she's pretty sure he would have loved Hugo). And now that the Oscar show comes so soon in February, instead of  mid-Spring, my fellow filmies and I have downsized to a single free-for-all— oops, I mean event—in which we duke it out over then best and worst films of the year AND the upcoming Oscar contest.

But nobody wants to listen to the critics blather on and on. The success of this event depends on you, The Public, telling us your opinion of the films of 2011. It's always audience participation that makes for a lively discussion, so come join us at the Nick this Sunday, 10 am, and let the critics know what YOU think!

(Big thanks to Maurice Peel at the Nick for mocking up the very cool flyer, above.)

MORT: THE ARCHIVE

Just a reminder that the 2nd Annual Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading will take place this Sunday, November 20. Pulitzer Prize-winner and recent MacArthur Fellow Kay Ryan is the featured poet. And don't forget the change of venue and time: this year, the event will be held at the Music Recital Hall up at UCSC, 3 pm. (The idea is to switch venues between co-sponsors Cabrillo and UCSC on alternate years.)

And while you're up there, stop by the exhibit of material from the new Morton Marcus Archive, to be unveiled on the afternoon of the reading. From noon to 3 pm, Sunday, the public is invited to visit the Mort exhibit in Special Collections at UCSC's newly revamped McHenry Library. Mort's widow, Donna Mekis, has been working with Special Collections curators for weeks furnishing the exhibition cases with personal mementos from Mort's study, where he was wont to prowl around in the middle of the night, working on new poems.

Not that Mort couldn't write anywhere, at any time. On the first trip to France we took with Mort and Donna and the McDougals, after a few days in the countryside, haunting the village boulangerie, Mort disappeared into his room for an hour or so one morning. When he emerged, he read us all the first draft of the poem, "The Baker's Wife," with its wry, yeasty sensuality. (It's now in his collection, "Pursuing The Dream Bone".)

But Mort did most of his writing in his upstairs study, surrounded by his books, his cigars, his Buddha, and the other objects he loved. Donna has tried to capture the spirit of his writing environment in the Specia Collections exhibit, so come early and check it out on the way to the poetry reading. (Donna also suggests a stop at the new Global Village Café, operated by the Hoffmans, located in the atrium of the new Library.)

The Morton Marcus exhibit will be on view from noon to 3 pm, Sunday, November 20, in Special Collections at the McHenry Library. The Kay Ryan poetry reading, with guest readers Shirley Ancheta and Jeff Tagami, introduced by Santa Cruz Poet Laureate Gary Young, begins at 3 pm. Doors open at 2:30, and admission is free, but seating is limited (first come, first served), so plan to get there early.

(Photo of Mort Writing, as seen on mortonmarcus.com.)

(LITERARY) LION KINGS

It's been two and a half years since Jim Houston lost his battle with cancer, and Santa Cruz lost one of its most treasured icons (as well as one of its most beloved favorite sons). So it's quite an unexpected pleasure to hear that a new Houston book is coming out, complete with a star-studded launch party and reading this Sunday at Cabrillo College.

"A Queen's Journey" is the historical novel on the life of Hawa'ii's last sovereign queen, Lili'uokalani, that Jim was working on at the time of his death. The book is unfinished, but the 120 pages of solid storytelling left behind will see publication via Heyday Books, an independent publisher in Berkeley, as a gift to Houston fans everywhere.

Sunday's kickoff event begins at 2:30 p.m. at the Cabrillo College Music Recital Hall. Among Jim's friends and colleagues who will be reading from his work are Alan Cheuse, Maxine Hong Kingston, Al Young, Karen Joy Fowler, Wallace Baine, Geoffrey Dunn and Stephen Kessler. Jeannie Houston will also speak, and live Hawa'iian music will be provided by Braddah Timmy.

Admission is free, but advance tickets are required. Go here and print yours out right now. I'll see you there!

Speaking of lost literary lions, this month also marks the second anniversary of the passing of Morton Marcus. Although, in Mort's case, I'm sure he'd rather be remembered as a brown bear, his totem animal.

(Here he is, looking very debonair, on the road in France. The first time we went to France with Mort, his wife, Donna, and our pals Bruce and Marcia McDougal, Art Boy and I took the train to Switzerland for a couple of days and brought Mort back a Swiss chocolate bear from Bern, whose city mascot is the bear. The next time we went to France, we all went to Bern together, which became Mort's favorite medieval city—until he and Donna discovered Prague a couple of years later. That we never had a chance to all visit Prague together is one of the great regrets of my life.)

Anyway, it's ironic that we lost both Mort and Jim Houston in the same year, two very different men with different sensibilities, but longtime friends whose lives and careers were entwined for some 50 years. And as Jim has been memorialized by the annual James D. Houston Award established by Houston's family and Heyday Books, Mort is remembered in the annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading established in his honor by Poetry Santa Cruz, Cabrillo College, UCSC, and Ow Family Properties.

Last year's inaugural poetry event with Robert Hass at the Cabrillo Recital Hall was a sellout. This year's 2nd Annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading will spotlight Kay Ryan, Pulitzer Prize-winner and U.S. Poet Laureate, 2008-2010. Gary Young, Shirley Ancheta, and Jeff Tagami will also be on the program. But take note: this year the venue has changed to the UCSC campus, at the Music Recital Hall, 3 pm, Sunday, November 20. Admission is free, but seating is limited, so plan to get there early. As a special incentive, selected items from the new Morton Marcus Archive will be open for viewing at Special Collections in the newly refurbished McHenry Library from 1-3 p.m. on the day of the reading.

SPELLBOUND

Good news for fans of the esoteric: one of my all-time favorite movies is coming this weekend to the Aptos Weekend Matinee Classics series!

Maybe you had to be an impressionable teenager, like I was, when the movie Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro) first cast its simmering spell over me. I seem to remember watching it in a classroom, probably in 16mm, on one of those rickety, square pop-up screens, so it was probably with the after-hours movie club I joined in high school. But I've never forgotten the impact of this moody, romantic 1959 update of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with the pulsing samba beat.

Set in vibrant Rio de Janeiro during Carnaval, it's about a guitar-strumming young bus conductor, Orfeu (Breno Mello) who falls in love with Eurydice (the beauteous Marpessa Dawn), newly arrived in Rio. But her past catches up to her in the lurid figure of Death during the riotous Carnaval parade, and Orfeu must literally descend into a kind of hellish underworld to reclaim the woman he loves.

Shot in Portuguese by French filmmaker Marcel Camus, the story is set to a propulsive score by Luis Bonfa and Antonio Carlos Jobim, introducing their hip samba fusion music to the world. The haunting "Manha de Carnaval," soon to spark the entire bossa nova craze of the early '60s, was the theme song from Black Orpheus. An international hit, it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Picture. None of which made any difference to me; all I knew was I absolutely loved this movie to pieces when I saw it back in my misspent youth. Will it hold up after all these years? Let's find out this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, 10:45 a.m. at Aptos. Prepare to be swept away!

(Breno Mello and Marpessa Dawn in Black Orpheus, and, yes, the movie is in color.)

CRITICAL MASS

Just remember, if you go see Black Orpheus on Saturday, you can also come see Bruce Bratton, Wallace Baine and moi at the Nickelodeon on Sunday for our annual slugfest, oops, I mean discussion of the movies of 2010. Back in the day, when Morton Marcus was leading his bi-monthly film discussion group at the Nick, we all used to convene for a year-end wrap-up of our favorite (and otherwise) films of the year in January, followed by a pre-Oscars discussion the week, before the Academy Awards.

Nowadays, we streamline the event into a single, annual mash-up of opinions. Yes, we'll cover what the three of us predict will win the Oscars (along with what SHOULD win, often two entirely different things) when the Academy Awards are handed out next Sunday, February 27. But Wallace, Bruce, and I also reveal what our personal favorite films of the year were and tell you why we liked them. (Handouts of our respective Top Ten titles will be provided, in case you want to rush home and enter them in your queue.) But it's not all about us; we also want to hear about the films you liked (or not) this year. Here's your chance to tell the critics what YOU think! So hie thee down to the Nick, this Sunday (Feb 20), 11 a.m. Turn off your cell phone and join the conversation!

LIKE A ROCK

The story of Aron Ralston is a real-life thriller. An experienced young rock-climber and "canyoneer" from Colorado, Ralston was on an impromptu weekend trek into the remote Utah outback in April, 2003, when a freak accident left him stranded at the bottom of a deep crevice with his right hand pinned between the rockface and an immovable boulder. As the days wore on, hallucinating, and at the end of his single thermos of water, Ralston had to make an impossible decision: lose his arm or lose his life.

A lone man immobilized in a narrow crevice for five days may not sound like promising material for a moving picture. But trust inventive filmmaker Danny Boyle to ramp up the suspense and make something wildly kinetic out of Ralston's harrowing experience in 127 Hours…aided enormously by the charismatic James Franco in the starring role, capturing not only Ralston's up-for-anything cockiness, but his stoic resolve as well. (Read more)

Santa Cruzans interested in learning more about Ralston are in luck. For the next few Fridays, Community TV will be rebroadcasting a 2004 appearance by the real-life Ralston at Bookshop Santa Cruz. A year after his (literally) do-or-die moment in Blue John Canyon, near Moab, Utah, Ralston was on a book tour to promote his non-fiction memoir, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place." When he came to BSC, intrepid local videographer Peter McGettigan recorded the event.

Live, in front of an audience, Aron Ralston is quite the showman. It's said that when Charles Dickens was on tour, he thrilled audiences with his dramatic readings of sensational scenes like the murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist. Ralston takes it to another level: a funny, articulate speaker, he never reads a passage from his book at all. Instead, he re-enacts the story of his hike into the canyon, and his five fateful days trapped in the crevice. We know how it all comes out—he's standing there right in front of us—yet we are breathless with suspense the whole time.

Indeed, there's almost something shamanistic in his ritual storytelling. His performance is harrowing, emotional, wryly self-deprecating, and definitely not for the squeamish. (When he warns that three people have fainted during the course of his recitation at other bookstores, believe it!) He's also an impressive motivational speaker, spreading the gospel that we ordinary humans have the courage to do extraordinary things, encouraging each of us to confront whatever personal boulder is creating an impasse in our own lives.

Catch his act for the next few Fridays at 7 p.m. on "Book TV," (local cable channel Comcast 25/Charter 71) and streaming at Community TV.)


(Here's a self-portrait of the real-life Ralston back in 2001)

I waited until after I saw 127 Hours before I watched the Ralston video, and it's interesting to compare the two. The filmmakers replicate his outfit and gear perfectly, right down to the headphones, and Franco captures the engaging, devil-may-care chutzpah of the younger Ralston. Lots of scenes in the movie (including dreams and hallucinations) that might have been artistic invention figure in Ralston's real-life talk, as well. (Not so surprising, I guess, as Ralston was a consultant on the film.) But it's interesting that the most climactic moment in Ralston's presentation, and his greatest epiphany (let's just say it has to do with a decision he makes regarding the bones in his dying arm) is not actually in the movie—at least, I don't remember it. Director Boyle must have thought there was no way to explain to the audience what was going on in Ralston's head, and so preferred to—er—cut to the chase. No matter; the movie is plenty exciting as it is.

THE PETER PRINCIPLE

And speaking of Community TV, let's hear it for Peter McGettigan, the unofficial archivist-laureate of Santa Cruz pop culture. Name a concert, festival, art opening, public affairs meeting, or anything else going on at any given moment in Santa Cruz, and chances are Peter's there, recording it for posterity. Not everything Peter shoots makes it onto the air, but it's the principle of the thing—Peter hates to miss an event! In the meantime, he's amassing quite an archive of local events online.

Among the most recent additions to Peters online archive is a video of the First Annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading a few weeks back, at the Cabrillo Recital Hall. Robert Hass was the featured poet, with Joseph Stroud, Stephen Kessler, and emcee Gary Young all reading from Mort's just-released final book, "The Dark Figure In the Doorway: Last Poems."

Of course, nobody can read Mort's poems with as much vigor, drama and music as Mort did himself. Still, it was an impressive launch for an exciting new local poetry event. If you missed it, check it out online at Community TV.

WE REMEMBER MORTY

It's been almost a year since poet, film scholar, teacher, colleague and dear friend Morton Marcus left us, and I miss him like crazy. But his influence continues to ripple throughout Santa Cruz arts and letters. The 1st Annual Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading will be inaugurated in his honor on Saturday, November 6, 7:30 p. m. at the Cabrillo College Music Recital Hall. The event will feature a reading by visiting poet Robert Hass, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, and former U.S. Poet Laureate. This year's event also coincides with the release of Mort's final book of poems, "The Dark Figure In The Doorway: Last Poems" (White Pine Press). Gary Young, Santa Cruz County’s Poet Laureate, will serve as M.C., and join local poets Joe Stroud, and Stephen Kessler in reading from Mort's final book. The event is co-sponsored by Poetry Santa Cruz, Ow Family Properties, Cabrillo College English Department, and UC Santa Cruz. Tickets will be available starting October 5th, so start planning now. Admission is free, but seating is limited, so pick up tickets early at Bookshop Santa Cruz, UCSC McHenry Library, Cabrillo College Bookstore and Bookworks in Aptos.


Earlier this year, Mort's contribution to the local film community was celebrated when the 2010 Santa Cruz Film Festival offered its 1st Annual Morton Marcus Audience Award For Best Narrative Feature to participating filmmaker Eugene Kim (Liquor Store Cactus). Believe it or not, festival honcho Julian Soler is already soliciting for film and video submissions for next year's SCFF (the festival's 10th anniversary season), to be held May 5—14, 2011. The deadline for submissions is February 11, 2011, with an early bird discount for entries postmarked by November 19, 2010. Click here for submission info, or visit the SCFF website for more information.


By the way, did I ever tell you about my favorite Morton Marcus poem? There are plenty to choose from, I know, but when I heard him read "Smoking Cigars" at a book store once (from the collection "Moments Without Names"), well, it blew me away. Understand, I hate cigars in practice, but in a few fleet, lyrical phrases, Mort had me reimagining the whole idea of smoking as a way to commune with the spirit of a place and the souls of ancient lives, a consummation with history itself.

Unfortunately, this revelation didn't make me any more tolerant of Mort's sweet cigar smoke wafting upstairs from the porch below and into our open window late at night during the two vacations Art Boy and I, and Mort and his wife, Donna, took together in the French countryside with our friends Bruce and Marcia McDougal. But I'd give a lot to go back to France one more time and fall asleep breathing in those toxic fumes, knowing that Mort was still down there on the back porch, in rapt conversation with a lost world.

(Photos by Jana Marcus, as seen on www.mortonmarcus.com)