Castro Street was released in 1966 by Bruce Baillie. The film went public before there was ‘The Castro’ as we now know it in San Francisco. The Castro Street Baillie focused on was in Richmond, CA and ran by the Standard Oil Refinery.

Baillie’s film is dark and psychedelic. It has nothing we’d recognize as a narrative arc, or a plot. It juxtaposes and distorts shots of trains, train stations, pipes, and other technical objects that ultimately create a ten-minute mind trip through an industrial wet dream.

…more

I began reading Kurt Vonnegut after I had slid too far down to climb back up the slide of becoming a full-blown pessimist.

I remember feeling this during a month long trip to Mexico. I saw villages with homes made of cardboard boxes and sheet metal. I saw the corrupt government manipulating its uneducated citizens with religious and political propaganda.

Vonnegut has become the Paxil to my pessimism. …more