As I mentioned in my last entry, I had bought tickets for three films on Monday night, the day I was returning to Vancouver from Portland. A late start and rush hour traffic in Vancouver caused me to miss the first film. Then I waited fruitlessly for Omar to call and claim the backpack he left at my place. I was sure he'd keep his word this time, since he had to leave the country the next day, but he didn't.
On Tuesday I went to see "Fig Trees", the new John Greyson film. It was an opera about the works of two very different AIDS activists, Tim McCaskell in Toronto and a South Asian fellow named Zacky in South Africa. Documentary and interview footage was spliced with black and white scenes of humans imitating nuns, saints, angels and the occasional albino squirrel, singing opera, wandering aimlessly through fruit orchards and making senseless palindromes. There were also scenes from a Gertrude Stein opera where the angels of 34 Black saints come to earth for a picnic. The various themes were very loosely connected at best. Greyson was there in person and was able to answer some of the many questions of what he was trying to do. It helped a bit to make more sense of it, but I left with the sense that the huge and noble struggles of the AIDS activists were somewhat trivialized and side-stepped by the silliness that surrounded their stories. To make matters much worse, the woofers in the theatre speakers were somewhat fried and every time a particularly strong operatic note was hit the sound terribly distorted and discordant.
I met both Tim McCaskell and John Greyson during my earlier life in Toronto. Neither would remember me now. I was pleased to see that they are both married to their respective partners and doing well, but the evening reminded me that they and the rest of my time in Toronto are meaningless to me now.
Thursday night I went to Tinseltown to see another film by a queer Toronto director, this time Bruce LaBruce. This film was "Otto: Up With The Dead". It follows a young, cute gay zombie named Otto as he stumbles his way through the countrysides, junkyards and Berlin looking for meaning in his un-life. It was clever and touching, and at points terrifically funny. "I wanted to eat the flesh of men, but I could not bring myself to do it. I began to suspect that I had been a vegetarian in my former life, or even worse... a vegan!"
I related to Otto a bit too much. I tottered out of the theatre at the end much the way Otto walked, my legs still weak from 2+ hours of sitting, feeling alienated from the sea of gay men and women around me. In a way I was a walking dead man, my existence being irrelevant to others of my former community and always vulnerable to mishaps and attacks (which I felt strongly waiting half an hour for a bus in the worst part of town).
Last night, after Omar didn't show, I went the VanCity Theatre to see a program of 3 archival films, one a Kenneth Anger film from 1947 about dreams of sailors, an early 1984 Derek Jarman film about Russia called "Imagining October" and a longer film about a group of Russian sailors living a utopian quasi-gay existence on an island in the Gulf of Finland in the years after the Bolshevik revolution. I left before the latter one finished.
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