Noir City Special: We Crash Dashiell Hammett's Apartment

So, more than once I mentioned that Jenifer had lined up something highly unusual for my visit to San Francisco that was going to be a real topper for the trip out.

She told me ahead of time that she'd gotten this set up, but it didn't make any sense at the time.  After having spent a few days with Jenifer, I now get that she's just one of those people who has the near-magical ability to make things work.

Its also worth mentioning that Jenifer figured out from looking at pictures that she lives across the street from the recently renovated former apartment of pulp hero, Dashiell Hammett.

The story around the apartment itself is kind of amazing, and involves sleuthing on the part of his truest fans.  Its true Hammett lived in multiple buildings, but by looking at return addresses on envelopes from letters, descriptions of Sam Spade's apartment in The Maltese Falcon and a few other contextual clues, they've narrowed it down and figured out that this was the apartment Hammett resided at for a few years in San Francisco, and when he wrote The Maltese Falcon.

I'm still not entirely clear on how Jenifer made the contact, but this morning we met up with one of the organizers of Noir City, who had been one of those investigators and who had lived in the apartment himself and did a lot of renovations.  I won't go into specifics, but basically the apartment is now a very weird spot.  Nobody lives there, and its a residential building, so there are no tours.  Essentially its supported by a philanthropist who pays the rent and maintenance and the place sits empty most days except for an occasional tour like ours or a walking tour.

Jenifer models next to the plaque talking about Hammett outside the security door.

The building is down the street from my hotel, as well.  And one thing I've learned in my short stay is that behind a lot of these facades, there's something going on or some crazy history in a lot of these buildings you wouldn't guess walking by, be it a famous author's former residence, or a secret stash of vintage cars or swimming pools by big doors.

Just inside the doorway

It doesn't seem that anybody was really aware of the building's history until the last 20 years, and so the apartment had to be basically re-done to match the original decor.  The building went up in 1917, and so Hammett would have lived there about 10 years after it opened.  Since that time, landlords had removed doors, painted over glass, added a hundred layers of paint, etc...

Dedicated folks pieced together the apartment from fixtures in apartments from the building that were original, found items that matched the book, etc...

Its a fairly small place.  A bedroom/ living room with a murphy bed, a small bath (with the original clawfoot tub and toilet, so you can stand where Hammett stood as he showered, I suppose), a small kitchen, etc..   So this was not from a period in Hammett's life where the money was just rolling in.  Its a modest living space in a part of town with a lot of character now and then.

I did take more pictures, and when I upload them to Google, I'll post a link.

Oh, the Falcon on the desk?  I'm not sure what that's about.

No, this was not Hammett's chair, but its a nice chair, right?

Of a very special, very noir weekend, this was an unbelievable bit of history that put a near surreal spin on things.

Thanks to Jenifer for arranging the tour (and so much more during my stay), to Bill who was more host that tour guide, and Doug, who was... there, I guess.

More pics when I get home and get them off my phone.

So, San Francisco is an interesting town.

I do love my little hamlet of Austin, Texas, and I'm not one to plan to move anywhere because I had a few nice days of vacation, but San Francisco is an interesting burg.

I've had the good fortune of having Jenifer (aka: @J__Swift) as my tour guide.  Today it was not pouring down rain, and so we went to breakfast and wandered into a cafe where we ran into Bruce McCulloch of Kids in the Hall fame (and because he's one of the Kids in the Hall, he's also one of the funniest people I can think of) and tried to very nonchalantly eat brunch outside the window he was eating inside of.  So, like, a foot away.  I guess he could hear us a little because when Jenifer came back to the table and asked "was the Bruce McCulloch?" he waved at us.



He doesn't live here.  He was just in town for SF Sketchfest, which is an awesome event and something else we don't have in Austin (like a Thai restaurant every block, as near as I can tell).

So he probably heard some of my super-lame anecdotes.  You're welcome, Bruce McCulloch.

Jenifer took me around a bit to see some sites, not the least of which was the Cartoon Museum.  A small space, but with a great variety of examples of work of iconic cartoonists, from Al Capp to Gene Colan to a current exhibit by Keith Knight.  Every few panels I'd find something I was amazed to see, be it a print of a Yellow Kid strip, or original Gene Colan Daredevil art, to...  well, it was worth it.

Jenifer and her pal Morgan took me to a nifty vintage shop where I found a Superman vinyl record of the old radio broadcasts (it was inexpensive, Jamie), and a reprint of a World's Finest comic in a format I'd never seen before.

This evening returning via public transportation I saw no less than two couples in wedding outfits.  Today, I saw my first real-life version of Reals (real life superheroes walking down the street).  And, I guess, Victorians wandering about this evening in their finery.  Yes, I totally stared one dude down with a "boy, what are you doing?" look which was totally inappropriate given my own costuming choices Friday night.  Lots of crazy hobos, too.  If Austin wants to believe itself weird, its really going to have to step it up.

The Film Noir Fest has been fascinating.  I thought Austin was a movie town, but, sorry, Austin.  What I've come to see as a crucial difference is the lack of hipster-ness, irony, etc... that I take as part and parcel of the film-going experience at The Alamo.  While the population of San Francisco and surrounding communities is considerably larger than Austin, what you would not see is a 1400 seat theater sell out for double-bills of noir two nights in a row.  And sustain a 10-night Noir Fest.

The crowd is all over the place in terms of age, which is interesting.  It does remind me of the better nights at Austin's Paramount Theater, where you really do see all kinds of people.  And because I'm selfish and want to see movies I'd care to see on the big screen, I keep thinking about how one could replicate such a feat.

There is a tragic lack of Rice-a-Roni, but I have secured a tin trolley car which goes "ding" about which I am quite excited.

I do want to thank Jenifer for taking her time and energy and devoting both toward my entertainment and amusement.  She's been a real champ, and its been a huge pleasure not to speak to her entirely in 140 character tweets.  Look her up if you come out this way.

Noir Watch (Noir City Edition): Dark Passage and The House on Telegraph Hill

Friday evening I attended the opening night of the tenth edition of the Noir City film festival, hosted by Eddie Muller, the Czar of Noir.

We attended the reception ahead of the show, which was a real kick.  Lots of folks in approximations of period attire.  You can see myself and J__Swift below.  

a very vintagey reception at The Castro

I had seen Dark Passage (1947) twice before, and hadn't particularly loved it the first time, liked it much more on the second, and loved it on the big screen on this go round.  The movie takes the risk of starting from the protagonist's POV, literally, and that part of the movie goes on for a bit, which is why I think I was a bit turned off the first time I watched the movie.  It seemed like a stunt, but on the big screen versus the 27" TV I watched it on the first time, it really, really works.

A Noiry Night

Noir City X is in full swing. The Festival opened this evening with the video below, a loving clip show of some great movies.



Great stuff.

This evening I met the great Eddie Muller and got to see two fantastic movies, Dark Passage and The House on Telegraph Hill. More on those later, I suppose.

Anyway, a terrific night out with J__Swift and her pal, Morgan. Hope things are well with you.

Dark Vacation

Well, on Thursday I am off to San Francisco for the 2012 Noir City Fest.  I'll be in San Francisco from Thursday afternoon until Monday morning.

I expect if you want to see me whilst I am in the Bay Area, you'll know how to track me down.

The schedule is pretty packed, but I do plan to write up all the movies one way or another as part of Movie Watch 2012.


Thursday night I'm actually headed for Riff-Trax Live with Dug, K and J__Swift.  Possibly MikeF and Rus.  We'll see.


Despite living in the town with the Austin Film Festival, SXSW, Fantastic Fest and more, I've never bothered with a film festival, so this is all new to me.  Mostly I wonder about how well my back can handle sitting in movie-theater seats this many hours.

between you and me, I hope this doesn't happen to me while I'm there

Jenifer (our J__Swift) has arranged a special EXTREMELY AWESOME/ SUPER NOIR event for me on Sunday that I'm keeping under my hat until I can post photos.

I got some hints on FaceBook about places to eat, etc...  we'll see if I can pull that off given our crammed schedule, but I appreciate the hints.

So, no idea what the next few days will hold, blog-wise.

Jamie on UFC

On what happens if we leave the TV on Fox Sports Southwest after the basketball game:

Jamie:  See...  I don't even know why you'd watch wrestling.
Me:  That's not wrestling.
Jamie:  It's two guys rolling around on the ground holding each other.  What is it...?  Hugging?
Me:  That's Mixed Martial Arts.
Jamie:  Its two grown dudes hugging.
Me:  I don't even know if that's Mixed Martial Arts.  Its "Ultimate Fighting."  Its for guys who were good at exactly one thing in high school and it wasn't math.
Jamie:  Hugging?

and scene.

Lack of posting is like a SOPA Blackout Sympathy thing

So it seems we are going for a bit of a blackout to draw attention to the SOPA Bill.  If you don't know what this is about, Google it, check it out on Wikipedia, or read up on it at BoingBoing.

In Blackest Night, people.

You're on your own til Thursday.  Contact your representatives.

I know how Enemy Ace feels...

Signal Watch Reads: Feynman

A few months ago Jim Ottaviani visited Austin during the promotional tour of his graphic novel, Feynman, a biographical sketch of famed physicist Richard Feynman.  It turns out that Jim's day job is in the field of digital libraries, and he had a sort of informal chat at the library, where it turned out he knew two of my colleagues from graduate school.

Its a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it.*

A few things:  

1)  I struggled mightily in high school physics and stuck with geology as much as possible in college when asked to to take science (rocks!).  My investigations into modern physics (stuff they were not teaching at my high school) have been mostly catch-as-catch can through television specials, reading articles online and this, my third comic book on physics in any way, shape or form.  I know some basic principles, I know some names, I understand that light behaves like a wave and a particle, and aside from that, I sort of stop and start with what everyone who has ever owned more than one Pink Floyd album knows about Schroedinger's Cat.  And, as I understand it, what we consider the point of the experiment is incorrect.

2)  I don't pretend like I had ever heard of Richard Feynman before this book hit the shelves.  The pop-culture aspect of science also eludes me, and so I had not read any of Mr. Feynman's books or sat about urbanely quoting the man over coffee served in a small and delicate cup.  

3)  I have a hard time remembering the basic fundamentals of physics.  Every time I return to the material, that part of my brain re-engages, and neurons re-fire, but its not something I think about very often.  Its sort of how I wrote down what the Higgs-Boson is just so I had a place to go look it up every time I needed to know while reading an article on the LHC.

My hat if off to Jim Ottaviani for his handling and structure of a book that could have been an horrendous mess.  The book is really 85% biography, 15% physics lesson in order to explain why Feynman matters to Sally Q. Reader.  As he states in the afterword, I had no doubt that Ottaviani had done his research enough to both understand and not judge the man particularly one way or another, and to internalize what Feynman was on about enough to share it with an audience as clueless about physics as myself.

Movie Watch 2012: Annie Get Your Gun

As biography, the splashy Irving Berlin musical Annie Get Your Gun is, charitably, less than accurate.  But that's not really the point of Annie Get Your Gun, so if that's what you were looking for, you may want to move on.

To be honest, I thought I'd seen this movie as a kid, but I now believe what I was watching was Calamity Jane featuring Doris Day, so that's going to be somewhere in my queue.

The movie is a bright, colorful MGM spectacular from 1950.  Annie is played by Betty Hutton, in her defining role as the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show sharpshooter of legendary skill.  Howard Keel, in an early part, plays Frank Butler (he'd show up a few years later in Calamity Jane as Buffalo Bill, just to add confusion), a fellow sharpshooter and the man of Annie's dreams.  The performances are hokey and broad, but this isn't exactly A Streetcar Named Desire, so much as a sweet story in service of big show tunes.  The "Get Your Gun" of the title is, of course, not literal, and drives the feather-light story.