Party People,

FS3's Read and Watch List continued:

Read

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami
Catch 22, Joseph Heller (I haven't read this one yet, it's on my personal list just as it is on yours)
The People of Paper, Salvador Placencias (I've recommended this one before, but it begs repetition)

Watch

Fight Club
Divorzio Al'italiana
Detour
Being John Malkovich
The Good German

Burn After Reading

This past Sunday, my wife and I met my parents at the Empress Theatre in Vallejo, CA. My wife and I drove up, around 5:45 in the evening, when it was already dark, through the old neighborhood of Victorian Houses and alleyways. Who knows what they did there in the old mildewed basements and what smells came from the alleys. We were in the car, windows rolled up. You couldn't be too safe.

"Damnit, I told you we couldn't turn from this street. It's one way. Now we have to drive around."

"Just drive around."

I drove to the next street and circled around.

The Empress stood beautiful. No other place in this diminishing city has kept to its original mission of pushing non-discriminating art and culture to the people. Let them taste and savor every bit of it. Let the politics explode here and all the protests for Gay Marriage and Good Christian Values meet and see what happens. This mission.

Somehow its flashing marquee lights told me this.

They haven't strayed from the original design. Just looking up at the lights after we got out of the car and hearing the electric hum, feeling its rhythm as the red and yellow blinked in some fashion, like electricity trying to be fire, the original designer and architect were laughing at the hold they had on the nostalgic minds who renovated this place. Laughing maniacally - what other way could they laugh, they're old and dead?

The theatre first opened its doors on Valentine's day, 1912.

There was some confusion about whether my parents were already here. We bought our tickets. 2 for 1. This great American theatre automatically kicks any other theatre I've been too's ass because of this. What other theatre around here regularly gives out monthly discounts? Nose upturn to the financial woes of California. What crisis? California is burning, baby, lets have fun. Here's a free ticket.

That's what this theatre says. What else can you do but join the party, or be horribly, horribly shunned and shamed and made impotent from denying it. This party will go on without you.

The Empress Theatre. Run by two die hard people, Randy and Kitty. They've made it their mission to keep this theatre running after all that it has been through - a fire that burned the whole interior in the 1930's, the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, the slow sickness of neglect and a diminishing of Vallejo's Downtown - the Empress, this beautiful bitch, keeps her stiletto heel dug into the ground here and watches the seasons come an go. No man can move her. No bout of nature can topple her, but only blow up her dress and give her a little tickle. She laughs as the original architect and designer do - with insane glory as people fall around her dead.

And she continues to live.

It turned out my parents arrived after us and we went back out to meet them. Then I introduced them all to Randy and Kitty, the General Manager and Assistant Manager respectively. Randy seemed unsure of who I was. It didn't matter. I knew who they were. I damned well knew. Those good bastards who keep this theatre running. They looked tired.

We went into the theatre and my parents awed at the flourish of decor. A wave of gold colored plating curling from the screen to the back, across the ceiling, with a blue glow hinting at the majesty here. We climbed the stairs and we took our seats. In retrospect I wonder at what this place looked like during it's renovation before reopening this March.

No doubt whatever blights that existed here were done away with. The theatre was sexy now.



We watched the movie.

Then we went to eat at a Mexican restaurant called City Lights Cantina. The restaurant being just up the street, we walked. City Lights had the spirit of Old Downtown Vallejo, its square room, its wainscot ceiling, I thought it was made out of an old church. Where the bar stood now, once stood the altar, and the people feasting on their high stools, the chancel at the feet of the breaded Christ. But we soon found out it used to be a banquet hall, and before that the PG&E company.

The restaurant shares the same lovely snobbery as the Empress - that lack of fear and disregard of money. To the man of logic, this is no time to start a restaurant or renovate and re-open a theatre. We watch our cash falling to the floor and leprous hands stamping down on them, snatching them through the folds of a purple curtain. The City Lights Cantina, however, laughs at those sorry sons of bitches. It stands open to feed you while all other restaurants lose their nerve and shrink away. Fuck Starbucks. Let them lose their excess limbs until they have four left and remember what it means to be human.

Delightful Mexican food from City Lights. It tastes better when you know the food is clean.

So, we talked about the movie for a while. My mom thought that there should have been more people at the theatre. The movie was funny. I agreed. Funny. But more, you never saw a real political satire on screen in a long time. We talked more about the movie.

The food took a long while to come out. We speculated about that. Perhaps the bartender, who had by then disappeared, was also the cook. He was the one who took our orders too, served our drinks. I looked around at the people sitting at the high tables and in the booths having their separate, intimate conversations, enjoying their alcohol. They seemed to not notice. Everything was copacetic. I drank my water deliberately. That late at night, drinking soda would have sent my nerves to spark.

There's no excuse for addictive substances like caffeine that late at night when you don't plan on staying awake and listening for intruders in the dark. You think you hear voices and you want to go out and check. But what if they're breaking in and intend on raping you? Just you. Because that's their fetish.

They want to come in when everyone is asleep and abduct you, they're masters at it so they take you slowly from your bed and your wife doesn't wake. They have you and they take you to the front room where they have their way with you. Then they put you back. Quietly.

Checking on that sound will definitely alert you of their presence early if that were to really happen, you can prepare. But something inside you makes you stay awake and super alert in bed, not leaving bed, just thinking about how that could happen. As if that were the best way to be taken if then, all and prone laying down, instead of with a fight.

Well, the movie was indeed a good satire on all the paranoia that hovers around us when you find things that don't belong to you. That paranoia when you think someone is watching you. You see that person look your way and you think he's got it in for you. What agency is he a part of? What do they want from you? It's because you found that file folder on the floor of the gym locker room. There's something secret in there. It's big. It's bigger than you or me.

That Paranoia. It plays well in the movie. And something has to be said about the way all the women make out with the money in the end. About how all the men die in the end, or wind up in Venezuela. Or going on with their job because none of it has anything to do with them and they don't want the trouble because things tied themselves up well, neatly, and without any hitch. That too.

The night went famously.