Five Pleasing Pieces

As June comes to a close, I'd like to take a moment to note that the month has marked five years since I began this blog. At the time I was an underemployed cinephile with a few Senses of Cinema pieces under my belt. Looking for a way to channel my cinephile energies in a locally-oriented cinema-phile way, I decided to start a blog and begin writing. I borrowed the title of a 1955 gangster film (that to this day I still have never been able to see) because I thought it sounded cool, and started posting entries, usually one or two per week. I had no idea whether I would attract readers, but pretty soon indeed I did (I suspect thanks to google and to David Hudson more crucially than any other factors). Thinking of all the super-intelligent friends I've made, both online and "in real life", all thanks to the inter-connectivity of blogging, gives me chills.

I'm no longer under-employed; in fact I work six days a week at two separate and unrelated jobs now. So I don't have the time and energy to post pieces at Hell On Frisco Bay as often as I want and should. I've been able to parlay the blogging into other film-related writing projects, and I still even contribute to Senses Of Cinema on occasion (expect something in the next issue). This inevitably siphons time away from potential blogging. And I've directed a lot of my cinema-phile energies into microblogging; my twitter feed is more than just a valve for releasing the latest breaking news on the Frisco Bay filmgoing scene. It's also something of a distraction from this blog. I'd like to find a way to bring more balance to the two activities; the blog is for better or worse a much sturdier archive than the fleeting tweets, but the latter provide the instant gratifications of being read and passed on with more apparent frequency. It's all a constant work in progress.

A fifth anniversary seems as good a time as any to go back into my archives, including those of the first incarnation of this blog (long story) to find a few pieces that feel, for whatever reason, like they deserve to be spotlighted once more. Though the information on this blog dates quicker than on many, I have written a few things that seem to me to be worth looking at again despite their age. So, here are links to five of my past pieces that I still find pleasing to read; hope you do too. In chronological order:

1. Ten Decades of Frisco In Film. If there's one theatre that inspired me to write more than any other during my first year or so of blogging, it's the Balboa Theatre, which I used to live less than a mile away from, and which for a while was bringing some of the most exciting repertory and calendared programming to town. Neither of those situations is true any longer, as I live in the Mission District and the Balboa has largely become a venue for heavily advertised first-run fare with only the occasional special event (like this Friday's). But in April 2006, they screened the second of two series devoted to films set and/or shot in Frisco, and I used the occasion to talk about some personal favorites in that huge category of cinema.

2. Open Letter. When founding Hell On Frisco Bay I thought I might adopt a more cynical, embittered tone of voice than I naturally fall into. But I quickly realized that I'm more comfortable accentuating the positive, even to the point of verging on Pollyanna-ish-ness (is that even a word?) But even I have a rant in me once in a while, as I perhaps best proved in December 2006.

3. For Those Who Have Seen Tropical Malady. I mean it with that title; if you haven't seen Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2004 film Tropical Malady, well, first go watch it, then click the link. Though I'm extremely grateful for the time and effort donated from other writers I've been honored to share this space with over the years, and from the film people I've been able to interview, I'm particularly pleased with how this more informal collaboration turned out. In April 2007 I attended an event with a favorite filmmaker present, and reported on it while interjecting my own commentary along the way.

4. Steamboat Buster. I've contributed to a few blog-a-thon events, and generally find they inspire me to be more focused in my writing, and interesting to audiences outside my usual 'beat'. I think I'm proudest of my contribution to Thom Ryan's Slapstick Blog-A-Thon from September 2007. Thom is one I've been lucky enough to meet and converse with in person. He even provided a documentary account of our "irl" encounter.

5. The Cardinal. I don't write reviews these days, not really. It's a form I'm just not all that interested in, not when there are so many talented others out there who really care about preserving, honing, and expanding the craft of review-writing. I usually prefer writing something else a little closer to history than to criticism, or to news than to prose. This piece from December 2009 comes about close as I feel comfortable coming to writing a film review.

Note: image at the top of this post is from Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, a new print of which is part of the July calendar for both the Castro Theatre and the Pacific Film Archive.