An Afterthought

Josh Nathan — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:20:20 +0000

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.

Only once is there a moment void of society. The shot stands alone about halfway through the film, it shows a prairie-like patch of land. The frame lingers for a moment and then pans right to reveal a Southern Pacific crawling across the landscape, destroying the stillness and returning the film to the lumbering world of technology.

The soundtrack of the movie consists mainly of train horns and engines. At various points in the background the audience can hear jarring strings playing, or choppy piano music that sounds like a five-year old pounding the ivories, all of which adds to the general and overwhelming noise of trains. The words that appear are menacing, and since the film has no dialogue, they stand out. The audience sees ‘Loader’, ‘Insulated’ and other technical terms as they patrol across the screen.

At the finish of the film there is a shot of a Castro Street sign, and it makes me wonder: Did the filmmakers mean to say, ‘here, this is the end product of American industry, an average working-class life, a working-class neighborhood, a working-class society?’ Castro Street in Richmond, CA was the same working class neighborhood that existed in Kansas, Iowa, New York, and everywhere else in the country. The director, in my view, is using Castro Street to prove that industry is what powers our country, even in the most active and disconnected of cities. We are bound together by it. It’s the backbone of our country. Where would we be without our machines?

You can view the film in its entirety here.

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Josh Nathan: The Last Book I Loved, Slapstick

Josh Nathan — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:31:09 +0000

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. Put another way, he is an optimistic pessimist.

Slapstick follows Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain through his life in a kind of post-apocalyptic America. Vonnegut creates a bizarre, quasi-science fiction story then injects his brand of humor into this tale of a frustrating human existence. It’s a story only a young child (or Vonnegut) could think up.

The author is the literary version of Woody Allen, but as opposed to Allen who’s hit or miss, everything Vonnegut makes is a gem. In Slapstick, he mixes crazy ideas (such as his notion that the Chinese have created a way to shrink themselves to use less energy) with ideas that are somewhat plausible (he says, for instance, that the pyramids were built because at that time in history there was less gravity).

And when Dr. Swain eventually runs for president his campaign slogan is “Lonesome No More.” Each time I read a book by Vonnegut I feel less alone in dealing with the bruising, confusing sides of life. To me that’s a helluva feat. Hi Ho.

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An Afterthought

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Josh Nathan: The Last Book I Loved, Slapstick

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