Day 1: Basquiat, Personal Meterologists, and Dirty Martinis

OK, so I didn't get to meet James Ivory or see his new film "The City of Your Final Destination". But opening night was a blast nonetheless!

In the afternoon, I dropped Grover off at the boarding place. They dragged out his chart and said, "Uh oh." So evidently Grover was not very well-behaved the last time he was there. Doesn't play well with others. "He settled down after about a week though," they said, trying to reassure themselves a little.

So Grover, if you're reading this, you better settle your butt down! Or the next time, I'll be dropping you off at the ASPCA.

I checked into the Strathallan at - the perfect HQ for this festival - the two venues are about a mile away from each other on East Avenue, and the Strathallan is smack dab in the middle. I got a suite with a balcony and a kitchenette, and it was dirt cheap! I immediately stocked up on my patented hangover cure - raisin brain, milk, and lots of Poland Spring Bottled Water. That came in handy.

It was around 6:10, and too late to get to the "City of Your Final Destination" screening, but the festival runs four screens pretty much nonstop. So I landed at the documentary "Basquiat: The Radiant Child." It friggin' blew my mind! I didn't know much about the artist Basquiat, but the culture he painted in - 80's New York City - is pretty familiar. His style is visually assaulting and post-modern before post-modern was all the rage. The film was centered around some pretty intimate interviews done in LA, and like all good documentaries, it leaves you to fill in the details in your own mind. Basquiat was a crazy genius-head, and to see that in raw form is pretty revolutionary in the history of the whole friggin' universe, if you think about it. If we had a camera on Van Gogh or John Milton or Mozart, what would we have seen?

Afterwards, I pattered my way up through the rain to the George Eastman House for the Opening Night soiree. Fueled with Cabernet and decked out in schmoozing clothes, I worked the room and found less industry types and more just-plain-film-buffs than I thought! They had all seen the Ivory screening, so they pretty universally loved it ... EXCEPT for Taylor. Taylor, who is a film archivist, said "I thought the sound production was pretty distracting." Negative nit-picking fall-de-roll! She and I are gonna be best buds by the end of the festival.

Anyway, I've learned two important things. First, the All Access Pass means your a deity! Staff in Film Festival t-shirts fall all over themselves to make sure you're well-stocked with goodies, and your glass of Cabernet is always full. To get into the Basquiat film, I pulled out the pass attached to a lanyard tucked inside my blazer and the woman said, "Don't hide it! Be proud!"

Second, the next person who says "The Birthplace of Film" is gonna get hit. I'm already tired of that phrase, and I'm not sure how much it means in a city where 54 of the 58 Kodak factories are now abandoned. Let's move on.

And move on I did, to the Strathallan bar. Being Cinco De Mayo, they had a special on ... Dirty Martinis. OK, they're not very socially hip at the Strathallan Bar. But the dirty martinis were to die for, and I had a few too many, so I'm kind of dying in my own way right now. Anyway so the guy next to me is a meterologist. And we're talking about the Lake Effect and all that business and finally he says, "Yeah, I'm Josh Nichols."

Josh Nichols???? Holy crap!!!!

So who is Josh Nichols? Well, every night I fall asleep to WRVO public access radio from Oswego. They do old time radio shows every night - you know, The Green Hornet, Gunsmoke, Suspense, etc. Anyway, every night at 10:07, right after NPR News and before the first show, I get the weather report from Josh Nichols. Basically Josh tells me whether I can ride my bike to work or not the next day. Josh is a constant for me. He's the last voice of authority I hear just about every day.

So I invite Josh up to my hotel room. "C'mon! It's not like you're not there every night with me!" I tell him. He thinks this is pretty funny, finishes his mile high drink of something-and-grapefruit soda, and we part ways. But now, sitting on the Strathallan balcony with a dirty martini headache, I think of what might've been.

Art, as I keep saying, is a device for living all the lives you don't get. But sometimes you get to live inside your art - you get to compose the life you want to live and live it immediately, like a jazz tune. It feels like that right now.