white with foam

Matt Wilkins makes movies the way a cheironomer makes music, or the way Kennedy plots against Castro: He assembles assemblies, describes contours and nurtures key plot points, but the title of director is ill-fitting and plausibly deniable. You could almost say his film company doesn’t even make movies — they make processes, one of which will have its Seattle premiere during SIFF this year.

Believe me, it’s not half as precious as it sounds. Marrow is dark and tough as nails. It’s about the all-too-familiar family conflicts and the backhanded way legacies are sometimes passed down.

Previous Sisyphus projects had smaller budgets and lesser visions. How small? Small enough to draw the titles for one in ketchup on a bathroom floor. That’s one reason why I’m encouraging you to see Marrow: Matt’s maturation as a filmmaker might have been inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less delightful to witness. Mainly, though, it’s a good movie, plain and simple.

Wednesday, June 1
7:00 pm
Harvard Exit, Capitol Hill

Saturday, June 4
3:30 pm
Admiral Theater, West Seattle

BUY TICKETS

Tags:   Marrow · Matt Wilkins · SIFF · Sisyphus Productions2 Comments

For all the lip service I pay to letting people make up their own minds, I can’t deny thinking it would be great if the Internet came with its own bullshit filter. The Chinese government would probably agree, asterisk. But holy cow, people believe a lot of weird things, all of which have an online bulk way beyond what their shaky legs can support. These are articles you read through rather than read over. A Facebook friend, for example, thinks Obama has signed into law a UN provision that bans nutritional supplements. A guy I work with thinks cell phones cause cancer, and the decrease in the world’s bee population proves it. Another guy believes the Windsors — every last one — should be carted off to Bannockburn and shot with heirloom pistols. Sheesh, what a mormon, that guy! Oh, wait a sec…

Earlier I was slumming at a site about this stupid rapture campaign, which led me to Psalm 60:4: “But for those who fear you, you have raised a banner to be unfurled against the bow.” Downblog G*d brags: ”Ephraim is my helmet, Judah is my scepter. Moab is my washbasin, on Edom I toss my sandal.” Which led me to Stephen Fry’s autobiography. Which in turn led me to the Wiki article on the kingdom of Moab, east of the Dead Sea, whose origin story is that Lot’s oldest daughter got Lot drunk and lay with him in order to continue the line, having lost her fiancé in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. His daughter. Because every child deserves a mother and a grandfather.

Reading a bible is a pure act. Reading an annotated bible is tainted by knowledge, the thirst for which drove Adam & Eve out of paradise — and not a moment too soon. Reading a hotlinked bible online is just plain wicked, and not in the Bostonian sense.

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James Kelly, whose Urban League received over half a million dollars in contracts from the independent nonprofit SPS’ Regional Small Business Development Program, is smelling like a rose right now. His facile quote to the Seattle Times captures a sentiment no one would dare say aloud during the flush years: “The Urban League loves everybody — we love Republicans, Democrats, rich people, crooks.”

The damage here is not limited to the trustworthiness of the district or contractors and subcontractors like the Urban League, Elaine Ko, and Velma Veloria. The damage is to public education and to nonprofits in general, which will have to contend with a perceptual as well as a financial hit when appeal season comes around. So thanks, Silas Potter, for making the world a little crappier and the climb a little steeper for people you were supposed to help.

Tags:   Seattle Public Schools · Silas PotterNo Comments.

Pho Viet, Jackson Street, February 2011

With Karyn out of town on exciting business this week, I’ve been hoisting the freak flag to a reasonable height like only a middle-aged white guy can: staying up ’til nearly eleven, cooking unlikely food, leaving the seat up. I know, whoa there cowboy, right? Chauncey doesn’t know what to think, but I rely on her willingness to roll with it much more than her Mama does. Wednesday night, frex, the two of us went out for photos and pho — the real stuff in Little Saigon, not that faux pho from Than Brothers. I had in mind a certain majestic low angle on Charlie Dang’s accountancy office that included the Deco wonder of Pac Med at night behind it. Dang flies a ragged banner of his own; it reads something like “File with us and you could be a millionaire!”

On Boren just short of Stewart, though, we had to detour. Ahead I could see a regular waltz of red moonbeams, right there on the corner where John T. Williams was shot last summer. Swinging over to 9th and up to Olive, I successfully diverted us from real poignancy for the sake of some cheap rice noodles. Wednesday, of course, was when it all came down for Officer Birk: unprosecuted in the morning, slammed by his superiors and off the force by day’s end. And here we were at ground zero in golden-hour light with a fully charged camera and a tripod right there in the car.

So, what did I do? Whiffed it, that’s what. I held back. It’s not that I didn’t consider stopping, if a parking spot opened up and it wasn’t too far away…. That ellipsis is my mind going blurry and disengaging, attendant only to its own echoes: Chauncey in the car all by herself. Warm pho. You could be a millionaire. All while putting ever more distance between me and this one-of-a-kind moment of Seattle history.

You can’t command a moment to be decisive. That’s why I’m disinclined to work in a photo studio. You can, however, learn to spot when conditions might be favorable for letting your heart take the wheel. Because when people say of a photographer, “she has a good eye,” what they really mean is “she has a good heart,” the care and feeding of which is a sure way to improve yourself. The hard part is recognizing what’s food and what’s, you know, just there.

So, to recap:
• Cops protect and serve, but don’t look at them sideways even if your knife is closed.
• “f/8 and be there”
• Focus is good, but not if it blinds you.

Tags:   Charlie Dang · John T. Williams · modern maturity · photo ops1 Comment

Captain Wade Wilkenson of the Navy’s 28th Squadron has died. Parsed in the news accounts, the captain’s resumé traces a remarkable 25-year trajectory of success. Before all that, I went to high school with Wade, and while we weren’t friends, this week I’ve been trying to make sense of his death — his suicide — with a combination of online research and suitably shabby stereotyping based on his youthful discretions. You could say he was always a straight arrow, but so what? People always say that. My hunch is that the thoughtful kid who grew to be Captain Wilkenson was incapable of being ordinary. Combine that with the Navy’s pyramid structure, with the behavior expected of its most elite, and you have to wonder at his sad end.

Wilkenson commanded seven destroyers and one frigate. Can you imagine? He lived at the front line of the Global War on Terror, wherever that is. Actually, with his Southern Command experience, he lived where the GWOT and the War on Drugs meet. He pushed for a law, which was passed in 2008, to make it easier to prosecute a newer kind of international drug traffic vehicle: the self-propelled semisubmersible (SPSS), a kind of Prius of mules. Made of fiberglass or wood, impervious to radar with a tiny thermal footprint, the SPSS has edged out faster surface boats as the preferred transport of FARC’s more discerning cocaine traffickers. It’s also designed with a series of valves to open should the need arise, scuttling vessel and payload in a minute or less: No evidence, no case. The ability to prosecute without evidence, entirely plausible in this day and age, is the most flexible (though the most constitutionally vague) part of the law Captain Wilkenson advocated for. A close second might be the provision for applying the law in international waters.

Befitting a Southern Command captain, Wilkenson offered a doomsday scenario in his advocacy for this new law: what if the Columbians loaded an SPSS with a bomb, and sent it on its merry GPS-guided way to Tampa or Galveston?

Like Dexter Morgan, Wilkenson was a warrior with a wife, some children, and ties to Miami, and yet in Norfolk he lived in bachelor’s quarters. A more salacious speculation might make much of this, but I see no need to go there. Additionally, a few of the local stories mention that he was ‘under investigation’ by whatever Naval bodies do so, but this being the military, nobody is saying why; normally, I’d count on this information being scuttled soon, but at the Norfolk newspaper, the writer covering the military beat tells me the dead can’t legally claim a right to privacy, so her FOIA request for the investigation’s report should yield something in due time.

Oh, and Westboro Baptist has announced they would picket his funeral, which I guess brings us full fucking circle. Fair winds and following seas, Captain.

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