People often ask me, “Is the jet-setting life of a third-tier film critic as glamorous as I, a timecard-punching third-shift drone at the tonenail-clipper factory, imagine it to be?” The answer, invariably, is YES!—suffering for other people’s art is even better than you can imagine. In addition to such distinct perks as a) not being able to responsibly sire children because of your almost-guaranteed lifelong dire poverty and b) having hugely dysfunctional relationships anyways because you are preoccupied squinting at review DVDs into the wee morning hours, scratching indecipherable notes on the back of an overdue electricity bill, while your peignoir-clad wife coos in vain from the bedroom… you also get to see the world!
For example, I have had occasion to spend the last weekend in Omaha, Nebraska, a city best known as the setting of Alexander Payne’s first three features and as track 2 on August and Everything After. Despite the fact that most of us not living in Omaha think of it little if at all, those who do happen to call it home take a great deal of pride in the fact that they do and, if my three days and nights were any evidence, they are not without reason. From the Bob Kerrey pedestrian bridge, you can take in views of the silvery Missouri which rival Henley-on-Thames… At the Joslyn Art Museum, an imposing, almost entirely-windowless chunk of pink marble on Dodge St., you may peruse a collection including fine Salvator Rosa etchings and a particularly admirable batch of Academic paintings (the Gérômes were out on loan to the Musée d’Orsay)… At Brothers Lounge, you can play Christian Death endlessly on the jukebox and inflict your presence on a gaggle of Russian students, engaging in barked conversations that you cannot remember a single syllable of the following day. Yes, it’s one toddlin’ town, all right!
The Classical being, as I have to constantly remind myself, a column about the Seventh Art, I should note that you can also visit Film Streams’s Ruth Sokolof Theater, a nonprofit two-screen space housed in the “NoDo” district (that’s “North Downtown,” chump), the branding of which suggests that some insidious New York City realtors have gone Westward, ho. One certifiable NYC refugee who I was privileged to meet was Rachel Jacobson, founder and director of Film Streams, who I learned had lived practically around the block from me in North Brooklyn’s (NoBro’s?) extensive vinyl-siding district. Inexplicably deciding not to spend her best years picking her way around refuse and rats, Jacobson returned to hometown Omaha in 2005 with her accrued nonprofit fundraising experience, which she promptly put towards doing something really fantastic for her community. How cool is that? Good on you, Rachel Jacobson!
The Sokolof is located in the mixed-use Saddle Creek Records complex, built by the Omaha-based record label, much of the funding of which must be attributable to the mid-aughts national break of native son Conor “Bright Eyes” Oberst. This name brings a particular memory rushing back: I was perusing the stacks of a record store called, unfortunately, Dingleberry’s, in Yellow Springs, Ohio c. 2001 when the worst song I had ever heard came over the PA. “What is this?” I asked the clerk. “Bright Eyes,” the clerk responded. (Internet research reveals that the song was “No Lies, Just Love”. One does not soon forget a lyric like “I sat watching a flower as it was withering/ I was embarrassed by its honesty.”) But, whatever, the indie lucre went to good use—so good on you, too, Conor!
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The Sokolof’s facilities were extraordinary, as was the very fact that a middle-sized Midwestern city could support such a venture—apparently largely through donations—in an age that increasingly constricts “moviegoing” to the living room.
This iconoclastic, upstream-against-the-flow-of-time accomplishment got me to recollecting another movie house, without the existence of which I almost certainly would not have been in Omaha criticastering. As late as 1997, my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio—boasting a metropolitan population practically three times the size of Omaha’s—supported an independent, full-time repertory theater. This was in addition to occasional screenings a the Emory, now fallen to rot and ruin, and the meetings of a secretive cabal called the Cincinnati Film Society—to this day I have not to my knowledge met a card-carrying member—who would project 16mm rentals of Bruce Conner and Andy Warhol shorts in the lecture room of the old Natural History Museum on Gilbert Ave., since demolished. Founded in 1981 as The Place, Cincinnati’s abovementioned rep house went through subsequent incarnations as Moviola, The Movies, and, by the time that I knew it, as The Real Movies. (The basement theater at 719 Race St. now houses the wholly worthless Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, one of those institutions that cropped up in the late 90s to siphon off NEA grants previously put towards blasphemous gallery art, so that schoolchildren could be treated to labored Elizabethan ribaldry rather than be educated, through historical example, in deciphering the image-based media culture which makes up the fabric of the world around them.)
If I can point to any single formative aesthetic
experience, it was being driven at age 14 to The Real Movies by two Older Girls, Becky and Molly, who I’d somehow become acquainted with in my young-punk perambulations of the University-area’s seedy strip of head shops, acoustic-black-hole rock barns, flyblown record stores, dildo vendors, and horrible restaurants, known then as now as Short Vine. I cannot remember their surnames; I cannot remember the make or model of the car, or even whose car it was. Of the girls, I can only remember that Becky looked like an angular Egon Schiele drawing and Molly had a pink Kool-Aid dye job. What I do vividly recall is that the only music they ever seemed to keep on hand was a cassette dub, one side of which had the debut of West Coast “horrorcore” rapper Brotha Lynch Hung, who dealt extensively in cannibalism and Crip-related issues, and on the other the self-titled 1981 debut LP by Orange County’s The Adolescents (whose guitarist, Rikk Agnew, later played on Christian Death’s ‘Only Theater of Pain’!). And here’s where my personal taste was set in aspic: listening to “I Hate Children” or “Locc 2 Da Brain,” while on my way to see Vertigo.
The end of The Real Movies was the end of rep days in the Queen City. As I recall, co-owner and programmer Larry Thomas—who I have only just now discovered reviews movies for Cincinnati Public Radio WVXU—made a valiant last stand at some obscure far West-side theater that you had to drive like a million miles down River Road to get to, which lasted about two weeks. Otherwise, one had to either trek five hours to the Cleveland Cinematheque—which is celebrating its silver anniversary, Congratulations!—or the Wexner Center in Columbus.
It is a source of profound concern to me that disturbed young men and women coming of age today within the I-275 loop can have no experience equivalent to my own—that wonderful confluence of aesthetic experiences which might keep them from a mortifying life of financial solvency, mature emotional relationships, and comfortable acceptance of the culture/generation that they’ve been born into. The question therefore arises: Where is Cincinnati’s Rachel Jacobson? Where is the person who combines a stubbornly prideful fixation on their hometown, as well as the contacts, practical knowledge and knowhow to do something for the civic good? Cincinnati is lousy with theaters lying fallow: Surely the Imperial on Mohawk Place just needs a coat of paint, and a little elbow grease to tidy up those decades of crackhead shit!
And don’t look at me. I ain’t going back to that dump.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.