![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Not Dinner and a Show....
Jan. 31st, 2023 03:35 pmbut no dinner and two shows. Just me this time, after an utterly dull and dissatisfying workday split between both offices. The dullness was amplified by the almost perpetual cloud cover that's kept the sun away here for almost this entire year. The easiest metric of that is a look at our solar panel production for the month through halfway through today:
The graph doesn't look that bad, but it adjusts to show the comparatively low daily amounts. Most days, year round, we're well over 10 kilowatt hours being produced. We only broke that once this month before today. In reality, then, it's pretty puny for us, even a full 40 percent lower than December- a month when we were completely out of production for five full days due to snow and blizzard things.
So where work and sunshine don't provide the needed boosts, there's entertainment to be sought out, and last night, just three removed from our outing together here, I made two stops at the same venue for first music, then film.
----
I've written before here many times about The Little, the only surviving cinema of Rochester's golden age of movie houses. It was part of a cinematic trend of almost a century ago and was intended to be little compared to the giant vaudeville-era movie palaces that once lined the avenues of downtowns. Most of those around the country, and all of them in downtown Rochester, fell to decay and disuse, and finally destruction, after television and suburbia supplanted them. The Little itself came close to repurposing if not wrecking ball in the 70s, saved by three movie lovers who turned it into a home for foreign and independent films. The original 20s auditiorum was eventually joined by four more screens in two adjacent buildings behind it, and in time they were joined by a cafe-
-offering more than just sticky sodas and overpriced popcorn-
Like so.
While the original Little 1 often hosts larger live performances (where I've seen Jill Sobule and Dayna Kurtz in the past year), the cafe also accommodates musicians in a smaller, less formal and unticketed setting. One I'd seen there before was Tyler Westcott, a Buffalo friend of many musical talents and permutations. Pre-pandemic, he did a once-weekly January residency in the cafe with four different groups he regularly performs with; I got to one of them back in 2019 with this incarnation:
After the COVID pause, this January brought the return of another set of weekly appearances by Tyler and his Rotating Bands. Last night's wasn't even one of the groups he fronts, with his friend (and mine) and neighbor (not of mine) Kathryn Koch bringing her trio to town for his final week of residency:
You can't see the drummer back behind him, but he will be important later. Kathryn did mostly her own songs, with some traditional and Dylan mixed in.
(At one point, we shared an odd coincidence, several hours apart. Earlier in the afternoon, shlepping around filing in Rochester a mile or so from this venue, I realized my right foot was hurting, and not where it usually does. When I got to my office, I discovered the culprit: a cat, 80 miles away, had deposited one of his toys in one of my shoes:
,
Fast forward to the show, where Kathryn ended a number by realizing she'd broken her guitar pick, and reached in to get a new one. From her bra. The problem with womens' clothes is they don't have pockets!)
Joining them were her two regular bandmates: Sean McNamara, who I'd heard performing before with her in another of her various musical incarnations-
(I was close enough to touch the strings from the table right in front of where they were set up)
- and behind them all, in more ways than one, just another Buffalo Music Hall of Famer to meet: Jeff Schaller behind the drum kit with Samuel L. Jackson's head from Pulp Fiction in front of it-
I wound up meeting Jeff and taking him down the theater hallway for another coincidence of the night I will get to after talking about Women Talking.
----
Yes, the Little still shows films. Good ones. At least two Oscar nominees on offer there last night that you still can't see on a Buffalo area screen. I used to be a Little regular even before meeting Eleanor, and we then went many times before and after Emily's arrival; our first date night with a babysitter for la chica was a film there. It's been years since I've been back for a film, though, but I wanted to see Women Talking, and Eleanor suspected the subject matter would be too dark for her even if the drive would have been tolerable.
The suspicion was at least partly correct. What the Women are Talking about is their own endangerment at the hands (and other body parts) of evil men, in acts of sexual assault and poisoning occurring in their early 21st century Mennonite colony. The true story the novel and film drew from was from a group of North American-natives who settled in Bolivia; this film never states exactly where it is set, and clues to that setting are ambiguous. There's nothing ambiguous about the terror inflicted on the women and children of the colony, though, and while the violence is almost entirely off-screen or captured in single-second photo blasts, it still was unsettling to imagine.
Yet somehow, the words of the Canadian author Miriam Toews, and the adaptation to screenplay and direction by Canadian actor-director Sarah Polley, come across with beauty, truth and even a few laugh-out-loud moments of humor. None of the ensemble cast made Oscar's cut for best leading or supporting actress; while several of the younger stars are better known among audiences, and while Frances McDormand has already accumulated Academy hardware from prior performances, it was the colony's elder stateswoman Greta who stood out the most to me. She's portrayed by Sheila McCarthy, who we first saw 30-plus years ago in that very cinema as a very naive young woman in I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.
The film's 144 minutes end with a black screen and near silence over the closing credits before a song, heard earlier in the production and likely to win the Forever Oscar for "how to ruin a sweet 60s pop song," begins playing. We in the audience also sat in silence until that song began, just processing the weight of what we had just seen these women endure.
----
As I headed back to the exit, I noticed that this auditorium, and at least one other, had acquired names since I'd last seen a film in there:
Larry was a local developer who took an interest in restoring many downtown projects that might have been bulldozed or underutilized in previous generations. He and his wife were also relatives of longtime Rochester friends of mine; they helped save Lisa's life a few years ago by flying her back home on their private plane from a sudden and dangerous medical event in a midwest state, so she could finish her care surrounded by her own doctors and family. Jane and Larry would tragically perish in a crash of that same plane a few years ago, but their legacy lives on in many places, including this one.
As does Tarantino's, which gets us back to that drummer. After the movie and the cafe performance were both done and the band was packing up, I went to say goodnight and thank you to them. When Jeff told me about his love of Pulp Fiction, I invited him back down the hall to see the permanent tribute to Jackie Brown, another of Tarantino's films. It turned out to be his favorite of them, and I got a picture of him taking his own selfie in front of it-
You can barely see it behind the phone and the pointing finger, but Robert Forster, the star of that film, autographed that poster to the then-owners of the Little to thank them for a special screening in his honor. Forster was a native Rochesterian and a UR alum, which Jeff did not know.
I was home by 10 and back for another day of dull-as-dishwater Tuesday at my desk. But these moments of song and story go a long way to make that much easier to go through:)
The graph doesn't look that bad, but it adjusts to show the comparatively low daily amounts. Most days, year round, we're well over 10 kilowatt hours being produced. We only broke that once this month before today. In reality, then, it's pretty puny for us, even a full 40 percent lower than December- a month when we were completely out of production for five full days due to snow and blizzard things.
So where work and sunshine don't provide the needed boosts, there's entertainment to be sought out, and last night, just three removed from our outing together here, I made two stops at the same venue for first music, then film.
----
I've written before here many times about The Little, the only surviving cinema of Rochester's golden age of movie houses. It was part of a cinematic trend of almost a century ago and was intended to be little compared to the giant vaudeville-era movie palaces that once lined the avenues of downtowns. Most of those around the country, and all of them in downtown Rochester, fell to decay and disuse, and finally destruction, after television and suburbia supplanted them. The Little itself came close to repurposing if not wrecking ball in the 70s, saved by three movie lovers who turned it into a home for foreign and independent films. The original 20s auditiorum was eventually joined by four more screens in two adjacent buildings behind it, and in time they were joined by a cafe-
-offering more than just sticky sodas and overpriced popcorn-
Like so.
While the original Little 1 often hosts larger live performances (where I've seen Jill Sobule and Dayna Kurtz in the past year), the cafe also accommodates musicians in a smaller, less formal and unticketed setting. One I'd seen there before was Tyler Westcott, a Buffalo friend of many musical talents and permutations. Pre-pandemic, he did a once-weekly January residency in the cafe with four different groups he regularly performs with; I got to one of them back in 2019 with this incarnation:
After the COVID pause, this January brought the return of another set of weekly appearances by Tyler and his Rotating Bands. Last night's wasn't even one of the groups he fronts, with his friend (and mine) and neighbor (not of mine) Kathryn Koch bringing her trio to town for his final week of residency:
You can't see the drummer back behind him, but he will be important later. Kathryn did mostly her own songs, with some traditional and Dylan mixed in.
(At one point, we shared an odd coincidence, several hours apart. Earlier in the afternoon, shlepping around filing in Rochester a mile or so from this venue, I realized my right foot was hurting, and not where it usually does. When I got to my office, I discovered the culprit: a cat, 80 miles away, had deposited one of his toys in one of my shoes:
, Fast forward to the show, where Kathryn ended a number by realizing she'd broken her guitar pick, and reached in to get a new one. From her bra. The problem with womens' clothes is they don't have pockets!)
Joining them were her two regular bandmates: Sean McNamara, who I'd heard performing before with her in another of her various musical incarnations-
(I was close enough to touch the strings from the table right in front of where they were set up)
- and behind them all, in more ways than one, just another Buffalo Music Hall of Famer to meet: Jeff Schaller behind the drum kit with Samuel L. Jackson's head from Pulp Fiction in front of it-
I wound up meeting Jeff and taking him down the theater hallway for another coincidence of the night I will get to after talking about Women Talking.
----
Yes, the Little still shows films. Good ones. At least two Oscar nominees on offer there last night that you still can't see on a Buffalo area screen. I used to be a Little regular even before meeting Eleanor, and we then went many times before and after Emily's arrival; our first date night with a babysitter for la chica was a film there. It's been years since I've been back for a film, though, but I wanted to see Women Talking, and Eleanor suspected the subject matter would be too dark for her even if the drive would have been tolerable.
The suspicion was at least partly correct. What the Women are Talking about is their own endangerment at the hands (and other body parts) of evil men, in acts of sexual assault and poisoning occurring in their early 21st century Mennonite colony. The true story the novel and film drew from was from a group of North American-natives who settled in Bolivia; this film never states exactly where it is set, and clues to that setting are ambiguous. There's nothing ambiguous about the terror inflicted on the women and children of the colony, though, and while the violence is almost entirely off-screen or captured in single-second photo blasts, it still was unsettling to imagine.
Yet somehow, the words of the Canadian author Miriam Toews, and the adaptation to screenplay and direction by Canadian actor-director Sarah Polley, come across with beauty, truth and even a few laugh-out-loud moments of humor. None of the ensemble cast made Oscar's cut for best leading or supporting actress; while several of the younger stars are better known among audiences, and while Frances McDormand has already accumulated Academy hardware from prior performances, it was the colony's elder stateswoman Greta who stood out the most to me. She's portrayed by Sheila McCarthy, who we first saw 30-plus years ago in that very cinema as a very naive young woman in I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.
The film's 144 minutes end with a black screen and near silence over the closing credits before a song, heard earlier in the production and likely to win the Forever Oscar for "how to ruin a sweet 60s pop song," begins playing. We in the audience also sat in silence until that song began, just processing the weight of what we had just seen these women endure.
----
As I headed back to the exit, I noticed that this auditorium, and at least one other, had acquired names since I'd last seen a film in there:
Larry was a local developer who took an interest in restoring many downtown projects that might have been bulldozed or underutilized in previous generations. He and his wife were also relatives of longtime Rochester friends of mine; they helped save Lisa's life a few years ago by flying her back home on their private plane from a sudden and dangerous medical event in a midwest state, so she could finish her care surrounded by her own doctors and family. Jane and Larry would tragically perish in a crash of that same plane a few years ago, but their legacy lives on in many places, including this one.
As does Tarantino's, which gets us back to that drummer. After the movie and the cafe performance were both done and the band was packing up, I went to say goodnight and thank you to them. When Jeff told me about his love of Pulp Fiction, I invited him back down the hall to see the permanent tribute to Jackie Brown, another of Tarantino's films. It turned out to be his favorite of them, and I got a picture of him taking his own selfie in front of it-
You can barely see it behind the phone and the pointing finger, but Robert Forster, the star of that film, autographed that poster to the then-owners of the Little to thank them for a special screening in his honor. Forster was a native Rochesterian and a UR alum, which Jeff did not know.
I was home by 10 and back for another day of dull-as-dishwater Tuesday at my desk. But these moments of song and story go a long way to make that much easier to go through:)