Day in the Life of an Idiot

 
Image: Scream it Off Screen mascot, Screamy.

In October, I happened to be listening to MNPR in the morning and heard their arts correspondent talking about an absurdist short film festival called Scream it Off Screen. I've actually always been a short film aficionado, ever since my college days. Maybe it doesn't seem like me, but I've gone, often alone, to animated short film festivals, international short film festivals... the point is, they had me at "short films" and then the MNPR correspondent cinched it for me by adding this little descriptor: "It's part performance art, part competitive film festival."

I immediately asked my friend naomikritzer if she'd be willing to try this out with me and bought tickets. I picked Naomi over my wife, because Naomi regularly attends the Minnesota Fringe Festival, and Shawn's tolerance for the absurd is much, much, MUCH lower. I bought tickets for the November 3 showing. 

In the meantime, I did a bit more research into this thing. From what I could tell, the competitive part of the film festival operates a bit like the old Gong Show. I suspect that most of the people reading this have no idea what I'm referring to, so I will give a quick explanation (or you can read about it on the Wikipedia article I linked to.) Basically, The Gong Show was a 1970s variety show where performers would come onto the stage and a panel of judges would decide whether or not they could complete their act (not, actually, unlike a lot of the musical competition shows popular now, like American Idol.) If the judges didn't like an act, the would get up out of their seat and bang an actual, physical gong. The Scream it Off Screen people also have an actual, physical gong, but they let the audience decide if we finish watching the film.

The films are given a decent amount of time to establish themselves, however. They are allowed to roll for several minutes (none of them are longer than 15 minutes in total) and then, when a red light on the side of the stage turns on, the audience can either shout "Gong!" or "Let it Play!," or, if the decision is contentious both at once. If the emcees can't decide which team is loudest, they turn on the houselights and aske the "Let it Play" people stand up and they do a quick guestimation as to whether this constitutes a majority.

The films that are allowed to compete in Scream it Off Screen have to fit certain criteria, they have to be less than 15 minutes in total, they have to be original, and they have to have subtitles. Otherwise, it's nice if the film is on theme (the November theme was "harvest.") Like the MN Fringe, the films are not juried, and in this case, also not pre-screened. 

Okay, sounds kind of fun, right?

What is less clear until you get there is how the performance art figures in. 

What you may notice lacking on the list of requirements for the films is format. So, the projectionist has their work cut out for them. As reels are being shifted, digital content being loaded, etc., there are... skits, if you could call them that. There are amateur musicians, also? (This month they asked people to submit an audition tape to sing songs by Neil Young.) 

And here's where shit gets weird.

Naomi and I had a long talk about this experience afterwards. Both of us generally enjoyed the short films and the experience around shouting them off, etc.  There were some real stinkers that got immediately gonged, a few that caused the house lights to have to come up, etc., and others that, in comparison, were quite good--even laugh out loud funny or heartwarming. But, that was, as they say, as advertised. Naomi noticed that all the film makers (who were invited up to the stage to introduce their work) were white men, and that nearly all the actors in the films were also white men. I will admit that it never occurred to me, in part, because as soon as Shawn heard a description of this event she gave me the side eye and said, "You realize this will be entirely populated by the worst kind of hipsters, right?"

But, I would say, despite that, generally, this part was what I expected and about as fun as I hoped it would be.

The part that didn't really work was the stuff in-between. For reasons known only to the organizers, after they explained the rules to us, they opened the show with an "expert" on harvest. This was a guy who maybe actually did own a maple syrup farm, maybe didn't? Who then spoke AT LENGTH, very seriously about how maple syrup was made. What was off-putting about this was that it was really, really unclear whether or not this was meant to be taken seriously. At one point during this extremely long, deadpan presentation (with slides!) someone yelled out "Gong!" from the audience and the emcee got legitimately hostile with that person, demanding that if they were experts in harvest, then they should come up to the stage and explain maple syrup making!!  And, then, with the audience feeling very "??" they then let this maple syrup guy go on and on... and ON. If it was funny in a kind of absurdist way, it stopped being so after 15 full minutes of this. It felt, instead, Stockholm Syndrome-y, or like we'd come to the wrong thing, you know? Like, it was clear that the full house was made up of a lot of people who had never attended this event before and we were all being asked to sit through something we did NOT sign up for and which was in no way funny or fun. 

That put a pall over everything.

So, when, later they had someone up from a fake organization called the Minnesota Farm Preservation Society, I also didn't feel like laughing at any of her obvious jokes because I didn't want the emcee to grab the mike and yell, "This is serious!" because I had no real idea how to take what came next, you know?

Afterward, when Naomi brought up the lack of women and people of color (both participating in the event, in the films as actors, and in the audience) we were like, "Yeah, WHY WOULD PEOPLE FEEL UNWELCOME, I SURE DON'T KNOW." /Sarcasm. 

That being said, I enjoyed 65-70% of the experience. I am willing to, at some point, give this event another try. (It happens the first Friday of EVERY month.) However, it's not immediately going into rotation for me, despite my life-long love of short film festivals. In many ways, this should be entirely up my alley, even with the weird performance art, but there was such an "insider" vibe and this weird controlling-ness of the opening that I'm quite put off for the moment. I expected weird? But, this weird felt... unfun.

Which is a shame. Having a venue like this for amateur film makers is kind of cool. There is a small cash prize for the winner ($100), and zero experience in film-making is required to enter a piece. I could enter something for next month, for instance (immediately boosting the number of women and queer submissions.) There was at least one science fiction themed short, which I rather enjoyed, which made it to the final round. Someone even submitted an animated film.

Like, I said, I really quite liked the parts that involved the actual films.

Maybe it was an off performance? This is why I'd be willing to give them another go at some point, but... yeah. Bummer. I would recommend it to people who might be interested, but with the caveat that you just need to be aware of how white, het, cis male the whole thing is. (Also, Naomi and I were two of maybe six people masking in the entire packed theater.) On the flip side, if this all sounds fun, but not if you're sober, you can buy alcohol and snacks at the theater. The Parkway is very much set up for these kinds of events. The lady sitting next to me had several fancy cocktails during the show (very wisely opting out of a lot of the performance art.)

 
Image: A torii gate surrounded by cherry blossoms (near the Ayato-kunaka-jinja Shrine, Minami Ward, Kyoto.)

I will probably tire of these some day, but, right now, I'm still finding a lot to enjoy. 

First up this week, the demon tour guide, Makoon, took us to a World Heritage site, Tenryū Shiseizen-ji  at sunrise. This was a very special tour, because the monks at the temple allowed Makoon in hours before the gates officially opened, so it was just us (really just Makoon and his livestreaming gear.) 

I've talked about this guide before, because he has distractingly long fingernails. In an anime, this would totally be a clue to the big reveal that he is secretly a demon or part-demon (or a demon working a part time job!!)  I spent a weird amount of the time trying to get a good shot of this man's amazingly demonic fingernails and I do think I managed to get a decent one.


Image: Not the best, but you can see a bit of the sharpness on the nails on the bottom left hand side.

His hands are lovely? He's a great guide? It's just that the fic writer in me really would love a universe where, you know, this nice young man is living an alternate life as a demon. Is that too much to ask?? I mean, it does add a certain something to the tour to imagine that at any minute a Hell Gate could open and Makoon would be forced to transform into his True Self in order to protect the universe from the denizens of hell, aka his colleagues. Meanwhile, he's just living his best life pretending to be human. 

I would read the f*ck out of this manga, honestly.

Anyway, back to what REALLY happened on the tour, which was that we walked around a very serene garden of the temple, which is located in Susukinobaba-chō, Ukyō Ward, Kyoto, Japan. 


Image: a classic scene of a stone lantern perched on a moss hill, framed in light pink cherry blossoms.



Image: The tahou-den constructed in 1934 (though built in the Kamakura Period style.)

The thing that was funniest to me was the amount of time that Makoon explaining to us the purpose of meditating and then sitting in front of a crystal clear lake encouraging us to do the same. I mean, I was eating dinner? 


Image: The Sōgen Pond with a reflection of the mountains on the still waters.

The next HeyGo tour I went on last week was to Hiroshima with a new guide: JJ (Joy) Walsh. Joy is an interesting tour guide. She is another expat, who is apparently (if I understood correctly) originally from Hawaii. English is her first language, but she speaks at least some Japanese. She also has a YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/JJWalshInboundAmbassador/videos in which she focuses on sustainability issues in Japan. As part of this she interviews a lot of people (in English, though in at least one video she also hired/has on a translator.) I have to respect this a lot.

She lives in Hiroshima with her family and she took us for a lovely riverside walk among the cherry blossoms.


Image: a lovely path among the cherry blossoms in Hiroshima.

I took a TON of postcard pictures of this walk, but it seems silly to try to share them all here, since they are variations on what you see above. 

Joy also took us over the Miyajima Island, also known as Itsukushima. You have probably seen pictures of this particular temple complex, because of the famous red, "floating" torii gate in the sea. Unfortunately, the gate itself is under construction, but we did wander around the rest of the floating temple. Because so many of the tours have to be in the early morning in order to catch North American and European viewers, the tide had no entirely come up yet, which was kind of fascinating in its own right. You never think of the fact that you could walk up to that Tori gate when the tide was out.

At any rate, her is a picture of the Five Story Pagoda which is also on the island.


Image: Miyajima Island's Goju-no-to (Five story) Pagoda through the cherry blossoms

Here is a shot of the floating shrine at low tide:


Image: Floating shrine at Miyajima Island

The island apparently has a lot of lovely hiking trails, as well. Joy recommended that if we ever decided that we wanted to see this place that we should actually find a hotel on the island somewhere. Even just walking up to the pagoda, Joy ran into one of the locals.


Miyajima Island deer.

Apparently, they used to sell crackers you could feed the deer at the train station and so visitors used be mobbed by the hopeful deer. A few still come looking for handouts, even though they stopped selling the crackers some time ago.

Then, I went on another cherry viewing walk, near the Lake Biwa canals of The Philosopher's Walk, Tetsugaku-no-michi.  

Image: the cherry blossoms in Kyoto

This is a tourist destination. It's called The Philosopher's Walk because two 20th century university professors, Nishida Kitaro and Hajime Tanabe, apparently took this path as part of their daily exercise. But, it just a lovely path that walks along the canal and past a number of shrines. This was another walk where I took a ton of postcards, but they really basically all look exactly like this. I mean, we did see a couple of ducks swimming in the canal, but, you know, I will not bore you with that.

I suspect this is already a LOT, as the kids used to say.

Fortunately, we have reached the end of last week's various tours. I have a lot of other stuff I want to tell you all about that happened over the weekend, not the least of which is that I got my hearing tested. I passed with the caveat of "for someone my age," which means I have lost a bit of the upper register, which was pretty much as expected. I went in because I am turning 55, and because there is a lot of "did you hear me?" at this point in out lives in this house of aging women. But, that's not what I wanted to tell you. The whole test was so weird. I mean there were beeps and such, like I remembered, but then there were bits that had me half expecting to have my inner Winter Soldier awaken, since, as part of it, they have you repeat these very unrelated words. Longing, rusted, seventeen, daybreak... I mean, obviously not those exact words, but it was totally like this!  Then there was a section where I had to repeat a very odd phrase that was long and complex, as best as I could, but with louder and louder "cafe babble" happening in the other ear. That one was straight out of Blade Runner, because the phrases were like, "In a dry, lonely desert, the man came across a turtle on his back." I was tempted to start shouting, "My mother? I'll tell you about my mother!!" *table flip*  But, the audiologist said I did better than a lot of people, and I think that was entirely due to the fact that I found the phrases like weird little story prompts and so they stuck in my head.

The other thing I want to share is that I was able to attend a livestream of a theater play in Portland, that stars my god(dess) daughter, Naomi. So much fun! But, I want to give that one a bit more context so I will save it for tomorrow.

See you all then!

I haven't checked in since the anniversary, so here's a full report of my weekend, starting with Friday, the big anniversary.  

Mason, as I think I've mentioned, is in debate this year.  The debate team has the craziest tournament schedule. This last Friday? They were in Eagan until sometime after ten. I didn't get him home until almost 11:30 pm, and then they get up to be on the bus again, Saturday morning, at 6:45 am.  

The only upside of that, for Shawn and I, was that we had the whole night together.  Va-va-voom, wink-wink-nudge-nudge. That's right. We got take-away from Vina (a Vietnamese/Thai restaurant in Highland Park) and binge watched "Longmire." I don't expect my nerd friends to be terribly familiar with "Longmire" as it's the type of show that I tend to associate with the "wine mom" set.  It's a Western/Police procedural that takes place in a make-believe county in northern Wyoming. The hero is a manly-man of few words and (supposedly) sterling character. There's nothing about what I've just describe to you that would normally make me say "OOoooHHHH! SIGN. ME. UP."  Except, the story telling is very compelling, and I'm fascinated by the intersections between the county Sherif's Department and the various tribal police (Cherokee and Crow nations). I have no idea how accurate it is or what the American Indian community thinks of the show, except I do know that the actors are all Native. 

It was, however, a grand way to spend the evening with Shawn.

Saturday, while Mason was away debating again, we made a lot of Solstice cookies.



I love making these because I love mixing the color into the frosting.  (I'm still very much a little kid in this regard.) Not shown are the date cookies... with are also favorites because I have a strange weakness for warm fruit.

Sunday, we intended to keep baking but, after I made an amazing yeast-based plate of cinnamon rolls, we kind of topped out.



This is a new recipe that Shawn found for "easy" cinnamon rolls. They were, actually, fairly easy for me, though that's said by someone, like myself, who makes a LOT of yeast breads and has done for decades.  So, if you're not super-confident with yeast, I wouldn't necessarily call this recipe "easy."

I can post it in the comments, if anyone asks for it.

Then Sunday night, Mason and I hopped on the light rail and headed into downtown Minneapolis to see "Brain Candy" with Adam Savage and Micheal Stevens at the Orpheum.  That was a good show.  It was basically LIVE science, but Adam Savage is very much the same sort on stage that he is on MythBusters (impish, vaguely dangerous, funny...).  We watched Adam build (and explode) things and Michael (a science You Tuber that Mason loves) explain things.  Even though it meant another LATE night for Mason, it was well worth the price of admission.  

We actually had really nice seats, too. We sprang for the middle-range price tickets, and so got first balcony, front row. We had ZERO leg room, but we had no one sitting in front of us.  The house was packed, too.  We were cramped knee to cramped knee with a full row, but the show was entertaining enough that I didn't actually mind at all.  Mason had never been to the Orpheum and said, "Wow. I feel under dressed," because it's the kind of theater that has a giant chandelier and fancy architecture (being historic, and all.)  

I hope we can keep doing things like this. That was a lot of fun.  A friend of mine at the coffee shop this morning said that the University of Minnesota puts on some kind of science show in January that's worth seeing. I'm going to see what Google coughs up about that, and see if Mason is interested.  These things get expensive, but, with luck, we can do them now-and-again.

That's the weekend.  Onward.  I'm planning on doing even more cookie-making today, because holidays. We're not even having guests, but Shawn and I love to celebrate Solstice with lots and lots of treats.