Bonus Feature

As the final, final post to One Man’s Tofu before we close up shop for good, we thought that it would be nice to include as a “bonus feature” the first (and only) published work we ever managed to pull off.

This is especially pertinent at this particular time, as it originally appeared in the January 1, 2003 issue of the Pittsburgh City Paper weekly, exactly 10 years ago this week. It was part of CP’s late and lamented “Rant” column, in which CP readers could submit short pieces for publication. The pieces generally consisted of bitching about what ever happened to be stuck in the author’s craw, hence the column’s title. Although our piece wasn’t exactly a “rant” in the traditional sense, the editor liked it enough to publish it in the column anyway.

It was a real thrill for us when it was published, and even though it’s pretty tame (and pretty lame) stuff compared to some of the things we did in OMT, its inclusion here brings a sense of completeness to our canon.

We were paid in the form of a $10 gift certificate for something we didn’t like and so we never used it, if memory serves, and our payment may very well still be lurking in a drawer somewhere. Thus, our amateur status as a writer is assured.

As we read the piece, we were very tempted to go back and do some tinkering with it to improve it and bring it more in line with how we are writing today. But we resisted this, deciding that the right thing to do was to let it stand exactly as it was.

Even though parts of it make us cringe.

We have, however, taken the liberty of restoring our original wording to the only bit of editing by the CP editor that we didn’t agree with — he changed our “more stark” to “starker”, which, at the time, we felt broke the stride of the sentence.

We still do.

Enjoy …

            (-daj)

ps. You’ll note that we also put up a more appropriate seasonal header image, but don’t go looking in the OMT Gallery for a new entry. We re-used one of the images from last winter.

We really are done, you know.

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Gaining Home Depot Not Worth Losing Shadyside’s Rollier’s

By Dave Juliette

I went to Shadyside on a recent Sunday, ostensibly to do some Christmas shopping, but primarily to pay one final visit to Rollier’s Hardware. I recently learned the Rollier’s will be closing its doors permanently after the holidays, yet another victim of national chains like Lowe’s and Home Depot.

I lived in Shadyside for almost 15 years during the ’70s and the ’80s, and Rollier’s was the neighborhood store where I could go for virtually anything I needed. When I rented my first Shadyside apartment, a one-bedroom on Negley just down the street from Walnut, it was Rollier’s that outfitted me with everything, from glassware to bookcases. Its aisles were packed with a wide variety of items from electrical and plumbing supplies to house wares, hand tools, chains of all sizes, clocks, bins and shelving (what are now called “storage solutions”) and much more. We always used to say, paraphrasing Garrison Keillor, “If you can’t find it at Rollier’s, you can probably live without it.”

The people who worked at Rollier’s were always helpful, patient and tolerant, even when the customer was woefully inept (as I tended to be) or downright bizarre (as was not unusual in Shadyside in those days). They made sure that I was properly outfitted for my project both in terms of equipment and advice before I walked out of the store, and would even ask how things went when I returned on subsequent visits. In the checkout line I could usually count on hearing some new tidbit of Walnut Street gossip.

Living in Shadyside, I managed to develop relationships with many who worked at the shops on Walnut Street. Oftentimes, we didn’t know each other’s names, but after a few years of regular visits, a mutual regard began to take shape almost without an awareness that it had developed. This happened to me at Rollier’s fairly early on. The people who worked there seemed to genuinely care about their business, their neighborhood and their customers. To anyone who has had the misfortune to deal with the return counter at Lowe’s in The Waterfront, the contrast could not be more stark.

When I went to Rollier’s that Sunday, I noticed that the area in the back that used to have the gardening equipment had been partitioned off and a small tavern had taken up residence. Also, there were far fewer Christmas decorations than usual, presumably owing to the upcoming closure. I didn’t recognize any of the clerks that were working that day.

But before I went to the checkout, I walked downstairs to the basement where the electrical and plumbing supplies were, and from the back, long-time Rollier’s employee Rick Faller saw me and came out to ask if there was anything I needed. I don’t think that he remembered me, so many years had passed. But I said no, I didn’t need anything. I told him that I lived in Shadyside many years ago, that I read in the paper that they were closing and had come in for one final purchase. I told him how sorry I was that they were closing and he seemed grateful to hear that. I was grateful simply to have had the opportunity to tell him.

I walked back upstairs and stood in the checkout line while the girl behind the counter made arrangements for a new job with the customer ahead of me. I think it was at the cosmetics counter in a store somewhere, maybe on Walnut Street …

The giant national chains may give us lower prices, a wider selection and more convenient hours, but if the Home Depot in East Liberty were to close, people would just go to the one in Monroeville. Some of them might be bigger than others, but essentially they’re all the same. The only reason someone might be upset would be the loss of convenience.

When Rollier’s closes for the final time, we will have lost something increasingly rare: a first-rate neighborhood hardware store. Of course, the Walnut Street of today is not the Walnut Street that I remember, and the closing of Rollier’s is just another step away from the character that once gave Shadyside its unique appeal.

My final purchase? A digital alarm clock. Not a clock radio, just an alarm clock. Every place else I went only had clock-radios, but I didn’t want a clock-radio. I wanted an alarm clock.

Leave it to Rollier’s to have just what I needed.

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Reproduced from the Pittsburgh City Paper, 1/1/2003, All Rights Removed.

Five Years, and Not Counting Anymore

Sunrise doesn’t last all morning;
A cloudburst doesn’t last all day.

            — George Harrison

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It was five years ago today that we launched One Man’s Tofu, and in celebration we are announcing that we are, once and for all, closing up this franchise for good.

There are a number of reasons for this, but chief among them is our waning interest in maintaining a blog, in politics, and in writing in general.

It’s been a great ride (802 posts over five years), and we are grateful to all of you who have followed this blog, especially those of you who have followed it since the very beginning.

But five years is long enough, and it’s time for us to move on. As we haven’t contributed much in the past few months, we are long overdue for pulling the plug, and this seems like as good a time as any. Maybe better than most, actually, since it allows us to tie things up in a very neat package — a perfect 5 years.

And, as blogs go, we think that OMT was quite an achievement — not as good as some, a bit better than a lot of them, and far superior to the overwhelming majority of shit that people are posting online.

Even if we do say so ourself.

And we do.

It’s the real deal, this time … we won’t be coming back.

To OMT anyway — we might consider doing something like this again in the future, but not right now, and not in this format.

So, we’re OTFD, as we used to say in the USAF.

Thanks for reading.

(-daj)

Our Long National Nightmare

The light at the end of the tunnel of America’s two-year presidential election orgy is shining brightly and clearly from where we sit this morning, and we think that we’re likely not the only one who is feeling a sense of relief that one of the most wrenching, anti-democratic, embarrassing, divisive, ineffective, and hate-filled spectacles in modern politics is finally coming to a long-overdue close.

The rampant and abject failures in every single institution in America — from the government, to the courts, to the media, to business, to the financial sector, to the people themselves — have been on vivid display, for all the world to see, making a mockery of the principles of representative government once deemed so important that hundreds of thousands of loyal Americans laid down their lives — from Lexington and Concord, to Basra and Takrit — in their defense.

What we have witnessed over the course of the past two years is not worth defending in these pages, let alone on the battlefield. America’s precipitous decline in every virtually metric imaginable — a process unleashed 30 years ago with the election of St. Ronnie of Bonzo — has only accelerated with Misterogers’ generation of unempathetic narcissists coming online in the political process, bringing along with them the fascism that will ultimately be this country’s undoing.

With our electoral system awash in unimaginable sums of billionaire cash — a catastrophe of pollution on a par with the BP oil spill of a few years back — with voting laws in many states that disenfranchise millions of legitimate voters all to prevent a perceived threat which has never materialized, and with millions of voting machines all over the country under the control of a single corporation — a corporation whose CEO is deep in the pockets of the tea party radicals — one can be forgiven if one comes to the conclusion that it isn’t even worth voting anymore, since the fix is in.

We believe that President Obama will win the presidential election, of course, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory. Although the Democrats will likely make gains in the Senate (primarily because the GOP has nominated a number of white male Senate candidates who believe that the rape of a woman is a “gift from God”), it is unlikely that they will get the 25 seats required for a Democratic majority in the House, which means that we will be in for four more years of gridlock, as the GOP doubles down on digging in its heels in order to ensure that “this president fail”.

And for this, we blame the people. After eight years with the Republicans in power, America was on the verge of economic collapse in 2008, what with trillions spent on unnecessary wars, those infamous tax cuts for the rich, and the veritable elimination of all forms of regulation on the finance industry. Upon assuming office in January of 2009, President Obama was handed arguably the biggest unholy mess that was ever handed to an incoming president by the Republicans, with the possible exception of the unholy mess that the GOP handed to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

The griping about President Obama not moving fast enough started almost immediately, with, astonishingly, many of the people leading the charge being from the left. Anyone who is laboring under the delusion that any president, let alone a president beleaguered by an opposition accusing him of being everything from a “Kenyan-born, anti-colonialist, socialist” to a “Manchurian candidate who favors death panels for grandma” can reverse an economic trajectory that was 30 years in the making, needs to grow the fuck up.

But even in the face of all of that, President Obama managed to revive the American auto industry, saving hundreds of thousands of jobs. The stimulus package created many thousands more, improving our roads, bridges, schools (saving 300,000 education jobs in the process), and other infrastructure, and helped thousands of people stay in their homes and stave off foreclosure. All of this, mind you, was pretty much under the radar of the media, although we understand that the media’s radar has been on the fritz for some time now.

Oh, and by the way, the Down Jones Industrial average was 6,626.94 on March 2, 2009, six weeks after President Obama was sworn in. Last Friday, it closed at 13,093.16.

Not a single time was that particular metric mentioned by anyone in the two years that this presidential campaign has been underway.

These are just the highlights, of course. That he managed to do anything at all with a Republican opposition whose stated goal at the outset was not “to help the American people”, or “to work with this president for the good of the country”, but instead to make sure “that this president fail”, is all the more remarkable.

Why anyone would possibly want to give the reigns of power back to the very people who brought this country to the brink of economic collapse — Mitt Romney being cast from the same defective mold that produced all of the major players in the 2008 financial crisis — is beyond us entirely, and speaks very clearly to both the outrageous stupidity and self-delusion of the average American voter, and the effectiveness of the Republican propaganda machine, led by Fox (ahem) News, and abetted by the nattering morons of talk radio.

History teaches us that no one has ever lost a dime betting on the stupidity of the average American, and that was in the days when we were in the hands of a generation that was still capable of achievement. Since those heady days of moon shots and social safety nets, America has made the decision to sit out the 21st century, abandoning the leadership of the planet to those well-known humanitarians, the Chinese, while we focus instead on ourselves, our celebrities, our pharmaceuticals, and our electronic gizmos, indulging ourselves in our God fetish, and ransacking the curricula in our schools, replacing science with idiot theology. Meanwhile, the Chinese are cranking out the doctors, engineers, mathematicians, and other professionals that will likely solve the planet’s energy and environmental crises while America devolves into a xenophobic fascist dictatorship with death camps for liberals and too many weapons of mass destruction.

The people who are betting on that stupidity are the very same people who are unleashing the billions that have made this election cycle the monument to failed states that it has been. They keep pissing into America’s ear and telling them that it’s raining, and America rushes to buy up all of the umbrellas.

They wail about “voter fraud” when the only people perpetrating a voter fraud upon the American people are the Republicans.

They tell us that President Obama is a socialist (or a fascist, or whatever) who has apparently declared a “war on coal”, who has put America “500 trillion dollars” in debt, when it is the GOP that has fascist designs upon America, who has declared a war on democracy, and will, if given the reigns of power, actually achieve half a quadrillion dollars in debt for this nation if given half a chance.

But the American people, like starving children, gobble up all of the lies and innuendo, putting their trust in the very people who are fucking them up the ass, and seeming to love the incessant pounding on their bottoms.

If, as Joseph de Maistre observed 200 years ago, “Every nation gets the government it deserves,” then it speaks volumes about America that what is unfolding in this country today constitutes what its populace deserves.

It’s appalling, to be sure. Although not so appalling as the fact that America is going down the path to tyranny with its eyes wide open.

We’re not going to tell you to vote Democratic.

But we will tell you to vote against the Republicans.

If that means voting for a Democrat, so be it.

Our Second Act

Tales From the Unemployment Line — Day 539

We didn’t plan to be off the air for the entire month of September, but it was gone before you know it. We were busy, of course, with other more pressing matters, and something had to take the hit, and it turned out to be OMT.

And it looks as though we may have just made the task of running a respected news organization — which is, after all, what OMT is — just that much more difficult for ourself.

Starting today, we will be able to count ourself among the gainfully employed once again, after 18 months outside the workforce.

We made the strategic decision not to go back to the technology field, where we had a successful career for 40 years. No, now that we’re in our 60s, we’ve decided to ride a less challenging trail, with fewer hills, less traffic, and fewer opportunities for road-rage incidents.

We’re starting work today as an overnight security guard at a suburban office park. The Internet being what it is — and our being old school as we are — we are not going to blab about the particulars of the position for the whole damn world (wide web) to see. Putting every detail of one’s life online is a young man’s game, and even if we were still young, it’s unlikely that we would embrace that idea with any enthusiasm at all.

Also, putting details about a security assignment online is hardly the secure thing to do. It was this very ability to exercise common sense that set us apart from the other candidates for the position, or so we’ve been told.

We will say, however, that we’ll be working 40 hours a week over the span of 4 days. All on the “hoot-owl” shift, which will be quite a change for us.

So it’s unlikely that we’ll be picking up the fallen OMT standard any time soon, owing to our immediate need to readjust our circadian rhythms to this new schedule.

But with the 2012 presidential race rapidly approaching its dénouement, we will try to get our act together in time to wade hip deep into the ugly cesspool that politics in 2012 America has become.

It is, after all, our goddam raison d’être.

New week, new month, new quarter, new job.

We have a uniform, a badge, and everything …

Errata

Regular readers of OMT will recall Coffee and Milk, a film that we presented about a month ago as part of the OMT Summer Film Festival.

It was one of our favorite films from the festival, and was made even more so by a recent email that we received from the filmmaker himself, Steve Sirski, who thanked us for promoting his film, while at the same time pointing out an error on our part. We’d branded Steve as being an American, when he is, in fact, from Canada.

The kind of good-natured civility that Steve showed us when pointing out our error is one of the things that separates most Americans today from our good friends to the north.

Anyway, sorry Steve … We’ve corrected the original post.

Time For a Break in the Action

Now that the OMT Summer Film Festival is behind us, we think that the time is right for us to take a couple of weeks off from the daily grind of blogging.

2012 has been quite a run for us. Just before New Year’s, we published OMT post #600, and the one you are reading right now is OMT post #798. Almost 200 posts so far this year, and it’s only the end of August, with no significant breaks (the longest break we’ve taken all year was the three days around Memorial Day weekend).

So we think that we’ve earned some time off before we take to the final stretch of the campaign trail, which from all appearances, is going to be nothing if not taxing. And so for us to be fully engaged in the whole dreadful process, we need to husband our resources, take some time to recharge our batteries, and drink from the fountain of leisure so that we can hit the ground running once the conventions are out of the way. Republican-bashing can be a resource-draining activity, and considering the crowd they’re putting forward this fall as legitimate candidates for political office, it’s going to take every ounce of strength — not to mention guile — that we can muster to properly malign them. We can’t use our tried-and-true calls to the forces of reason with these bastards, so we’ve got to go off and figure out a new strategy that will allow us to go mano a mano with the forces of evil within the ranks of the GOP that are waving their flags and appealing to our sense of patriotism as they lead us down the road to tyranny and economic ruin.

We have to admit right off the top, though, that we were surprised at who Mitt Romney has chosen as his running mate. We’d always wondered what happened to Eddie Munster. Looks like he’s all grown up now.

And as long as we’re on the subject of Republican vice presidential picks, we thought we would sate your appetite for OMT political analysis with a piece that we wrote four years ago this week — it was our first piece ever on Sarah Palin. This was before she became something of a regular feature of OMT until she became so pathetic that we were no longer able to glean even an iota of joy from trashing her, along with her über-redneck Alaska secessionist freedom fighter husband Todd, and their strange little brood, Track, Bristol, Trig, Signpost, Highlift, the twins Brace and Bit, and little Sewerpipe, the bastard child of Bristol and her hunky whoremaster, Leviticus The Simpleminded.

But we don’t have Sarah Palin to kick around anymore. Who knew just four short years ago when John McCain foisted her on the American body politic that by the next presidential election cycle she would have proven to be the prototype for today’s garden-variety GOP candidate? There are more Republican whack-jobs to kick around today than Imelda Marcos had shoes for the kicking.

Sort of makes you wonder where the Republican Party — excuse us, the Republican Liberation Army — will be four years from now.

And into what tyranny their inertia will have jerked the rest of America.

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We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on the Film Festival, and we thank all of you for all of the kind words we’ve received via email as well as in person. We were a little disorganized with it this year, as we just sort of stumbled into it on a lark, but by next year we hope that it will be a more fully-realized presentation.

It probably won’t be, but we at least we hope it will, which should count for something.

As usual, thanks for reading (and watching) OMT.

We hope to be back on the air sometime around the Autumnal Equinox.

See you then.

The Candy Shop

OMT Summer Film Festival

We ring down the curtain on the first annual OMT Summer Film Festival (a week earlier than we had planned) with a serious film about a serious topic.

Atlanta is something of the citadel of child sex trafficking in the United States, with upwards 500 underaged girls (and fewer, but still a scandalous number of boys) a month being lost to the dark underworld of the sex trades in a city that likes to preen itself as “the capital of the New South”. Not only is Atlanta the number 1 city in the US for the child sex trade, it comes in at number 10 in the world, right up there with Bangkok, Singapore, and other festering holes around the globe where the Jerry Sanduskys of this world travel on “sex vacations”.

The Candy Shop is a “fairytale/parable” about child sex trafficking that was produced by the Doorpost Film Project to raise awareness about an epidemic whose epicenter in this country is right in the middle of a city that we have loathed for most of our life for a host of other, personal reasons, and for which, in the light of this new revelation about the rotten core of that hideous metropolis, we now feel completely justified.

The film is part of a city-wide campaign in Atlanta (which they hope spreads to the rest of the country) to bring this problem the kind of profile it needs to get people riled up enough to stamp it out.

You would think that with CNN being headquartered in Atlanta, that the country would already be aware of what is going on in that 21st century Gomorrah with a drawl.

Support for this film was also given by Street Grace, an Atlanta-based organization that works to end child exploitation.

Produced by Whitestone Motion Pictures, a “boutique film company from the haunted foothills of the Appalachia”.

Young Jimmy Balcom has a job selling newspapers during the depression. His stand is right across the street from a strange little candy shop whose owner is a bizarre creature, and whose clientele is all older men. The shop keeper spots Jimmy, and offers him a Faustian bargain.

This film clocks in at 30 minutes.

If your browser doesn’t support embedded video, click here.

There’s a Hole in the Ozone Layer Just Above Clonboo

OMT Summer Film Festival

Billy McCannon doesn’t just work in grim subjects like that in Recoil, as the quirky There’s a Hole in the Ozone Layer Just Above Clonboo certainly proves. Starring Vincent Murphy as Padraig and Rachael Dowling as Maura.

If your browser doesn’t support embedded video, you can click here.

Recoil

OMT Summer Film Festival

Recoil is the story of Peter (Kieth McEriean), a family man, and also an Irish Republican Army operative, who perpetrates a terrible crime. He’s brought into the police station for interrogation, in this drama written and directed by Barry McCannon.

If your browser doesn’t permit embedded video, you can click here.

Unmoored

OMT Summer Film Festival

James was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

Sarah stole his ashes from James’ mother, stuffed them in an empty cookie tin, and spirited them away to the cabin by a lake that they owned before James died.

Whereupon the afternoon begins.

Starring Stacey Cabaj and Mark Scheibmeir.

From a story by Jenny Connell and Erica Saleh.

If your browser doesn’t support embedded video, you can click here.

Move, Learn, Eat

OMT Summer Film Festival

Here is one of those interesting and visually-arresting projects that we can’t seem to be able to resist.

It is is the fruit of, according to the accompanying promo, “3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage”, all edited together to create three short (all of them are in the neighborhood of a minute), but compelling films.

The thee guys are Rick Mereki (director, producer, additional camera and editing), Tim White (director of photography, producer, primary editing, sound), and Andrew Lees, the actor who appears in the all three films.

The music was composed and performed by Kelsey James.

We think that this would have made a great single film if edited together in a traditional way, perhaps with some narration, but that’s our stuffy side talking. It also says that this is a pretty paltry return on what looks like a terribly expensive shoot.

But, hey, we’re not paying for it, so maybe we ought to just shut up and enjoy their work. It’s all in good fun.

——————–
The first of these is called Move, which more or less documents the trip that they made while filming.

If your browser can’t handle embedded video, you can click here.

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Next up is Learn, which has Andrew Lees trying his hand at a wide range of things along the way, from cooking, to wine tasting, to rock climbing, to glass blowing, and many things in between. We think that this film in particular would have been a good subject to expand into a larger project.

If you only see a black square above, you can click here to see the film.

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Finally, we have Eat, in which Lees chows down on various exotic and not-so-exotic fare from the various locales they visited. If you’re not hungry when you press the “play” button, you will be by the time this film has finished.

If your browser isn’t cooperating, click here.

Three From Studiocanoe

OMT Summer Film Festival

Studiocanoe is Temujin Doran’s project in which he incorporates music, field recording, photography, illustration and film. Today, we thought we’d bring you three of his offerings.

The Diary of a Disappointed Book chronicles the life cycle of a book (which turns out to be Black’s Encyclopedia for Children) from its origins as a gift until its inevitable denouement, all in the space of less than a year. Some people apparently don’t value the gift of a book in the same way we do.

If your browser doesn’t support embedded video, you can click here.

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The next film, Hitchin’ on the Icefields Parkway, is a goof piece that Doran filmed on a deserted stretch of Highway 93 in Alberta, Canada, with some of the province’s breathtaking scenery as a backdrop. It’s both fun and beautiful.

Highway 93 runs from Jasper, Alberta to Lake Louise, and has some of the most stunning scenery on the entire North American continent.

If your browser isn’t cooperating, you can click here.

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In North, his latest film, Doran gets serious about a serious topic — climate change. Filmed on Svalbard, an archipelago to the north of Norway (now, that’s north), Doran tells us that concern about the warming of the planet is not a recent phenomenon.

He also talks about some environmental catastrophes on Svalbard, and its largest island, Spitsbergen, that were a direct result of the Second World War.

At 14:04, it exceeds our self-imposed time limit, but not by much. It’s worth watching.

We think that for next year’s film festival, we’ll impose a 15-minute limit. We passed up on several good ones this year because they were too long.

If you can’t see the above video in your browser, click here.

The Last Waterman of Wittman

OMT Summer Film Festival

Steve Jones has spent his life as a crabber in Whttman, Maryland, but things aren’t what they used to be. He reflects on this, and about a way of life that is giving way to other priorities.

From ListenIn Pictures.

If your browser doesn’t support embedded video, you can click here.

Maestro

OMT Summer Film Festival

Daydreamer Eliot (Zach Gallen) and his friend Jared (Tosh Silverston) both want to get into a good music school, but Eliot is not without his academic challenges. His music teacher (Charles Iacuzzo) sympathizes, but tells him he’s going to have to carry his own water, and, accordingly, leaves Eliot a bucket. He returns the next morning to see whether or not Eliot has filled it.

Written, edited, directed, and scored by Matthew Fredrick.

If your browser doesn’t accept embedded videos, you can click here.

Table 7

OMT Summer Film Festival

A couple on the verge of a break-up goes to a Chinese restaurant, only to have their conversation monitored by a shadowy figure who is taking copious notes in a dank room that looks as though it’s right out of the 1950s.

When we first watched Table 7, we thought that it was clever, but upon subsequent viewings and given time to consider it, we slowly came around to the opinion that it’s pretty creepy. And not nearly as clever as we thought it was the first time around.

See what you think.

Written and directed by Marko Slavnic, and starring Ray Rosales and Stephanie Lozos as the couple at Table 7, and Isaac Kim as “the recordist”.

If your browser doesn’t support embedded video, you can click here.

Two Men

OMT Summer Film Festival

Based on Franz Kafka’s short story, Two Men Running, Dominic Allen’s short film, Two Men, filmed in the Australian Outback, and using an all non-professional Aboriginal cast, ponders a simple question, and concludes with profundity.

What more can you ask of a film?

Outback Australian English, with English Subtitles.

If your browser doesn’t support embedded video, you can click here.

Ten for Grandpa

OMT Summer Film Festival

Written and directed by Doug Karr, Ten for Grandpa tells the story of what it’s like to grow into an adult and know only tantalizing bits of information about your grandfather, who died just before you were born. Starring David Alplay as the grandson with all the questions.

If your browser can’t handle embedded video, you can click here.

Ice Fishing – Redux (Bat Country)

OMT Summer Film Festival

Apparently there is a problem with the embedded code on the previous video (Ice Fishing), and all of our attempts at debugging it have failed to find a resolution. Oddly, it was working perfectly when we originally posted it, and still for some hours afterward. It wasn’t until we attempted to view it just now as we were about to post our latest film that we noticed that there was a problem. We’re using the embedded code that Vimeo provides, and still it won’t play, which leads us to believe that somebody at Vimeo has pulled the rug out from in under us.

This is what you must deal with when working with partners.

It seems to work when you go directly to Vimeo’s site, which you can do by clicking here.

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What’s a film festival without a glitch or two, anyway? “You’ll have this,” Redford told us on the phone this afternoon when he called to see how things were going. “The thing to remember is that nobody really cares about shit like this,” he said. “Everybody’s having a good time watching the films, and if they can’t see this one, there’s always another one playing right around the corner. You do have another film ready, don’t you?”

We sure do, Bob, and here it is.

Bat Country is about a bunch of guys and their four-wheel-drive SUVs on a camping trip through some beautiful terrain. There isn’t much information provided by the folks at Vimeo about this film … no indication as to where this is (although it appears to have been filmed the high sierra in California), nothing about the participants, or who filmed this, edited it, or anything like that.

Now, to be perfectly honest, we’re not big fans of people tearing up pristine countryside with their on or off-road vehicles, and we shake a disapproving finger at these assholes.

But sometimes we forget what we used to be like when we were younger. And quite frankly, 40 years ago we would have been right out there with these guys. The only difference being that we would have brought along copious amounts of reefer to sustain us through the journey, thereby putting an entirely different mood on the proceedings than seems to be exhibited here.

These guys redeem themselves, though, by using a Neil Young song at about the 7-minute marker …

If your browser doesn’t support embedded video, you can click here.

Ice Fishing

OMT Summer Film Festival

What could possibly be more appropriate viewing for an August weekend than watching men fishing on a frozen lake in Saskatchewan at 40º below zero? That’s what we were thinking when we selected this short film from the Canadian Tourist Board.

Unlike their Minnesota counterparts, these guys forgo the portable shack over the ice hole, and just fish out in the middle of the frozen lake, fully exposed to the elements.

We can only imagine how delicious fresh-caught, fresh-fried fish tastes in the crisp, -40 degree air.

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Blue Canoes

OMT Summer Film Festival

In this film by Jeff Goldstein, abstract artist Sid Dixon, whose worshipful fans can be as fickle as they are cloying, opens a letter one day that upends his self-styled angst, forcing him to confront his art in a way he never expected.

With Randy Forte as Sid Dixon, and Mike Digirolamo as his nemesis.

From a story by Michelle Culver.

We think that this film would have been much funnier in the hands of more skilled actors, and a director who doesn’t think that zig-zagging the camera back and forth between the actors is a legitimate comedic filmmaking technique.

But that’s just us.

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Cross

OMT Summer Film Festival

Filmmaker Oliver B. Milne tells a World War II story in Cross, about an American medic (Steve Lund) who wakes up in the forest after he got separated from his platoon. As he searches for his buddies, he comes upon a ramshackle shack with a dead American and a very much alive, but wounded Nazi soldier (Michael Brian).

The film was produced by the Vancouver Film School.

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Yosemite Range of Light

OMT Summer Film Festival

Shawn Reeder describes himself as “a destination visual artist who specializes in photography, timelapse cinematography, and filmmaking.”

In his film Yosemite Range of Light, Reeder draws on all of those specialties to produce a film with stunning visual impact. This is a time-lapse feature, filmed entirely in Yosemite National Park, and it’s truly extraordinary.

Although we haven’t recommended it explicitly, we hope that our readers have been taking advantage of “full screen” mode when watching these films. We are restricted to a 525×300 window in the particular theme that we are using for OMT (we can go a bit bigger, but it doesn’t look very good), but if you switch to full screen mode (click on the four radiating arrows at the bottom, to the right of “HD”), you will find that these films are much more enjoyable.

That is especially true with Yosemite Range of Light, as will likely become obvious to you within the first 30 seconds of the film.

The music in this film is provided by Seattle cellist Shaun Paul, who’s worth a look, too.

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Union Dues

OMT Summer Film Festival

Written and directed by Adam Gasner, Union Dues is about tiny Atkins Electric, a two-man operation, fighting for their piece of the local service pie against conglomerate Gregory Plumbing, who has been buying up all of the other little guys in the area so that they can provide a “full service” operation. Will Atkins (J. P. Coakley) finally decides to give in, but his assistant (Brandon Henry) is not so easily convinced about the wisdom of the move.

Professional tradesmen meets the wild west.

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Detour

OMT Summer Film Festival

Takashi Doscher and John Merizalde co-wrote, and Doscher directed this film from Intellectual Propaganda, a collective of artists led by Doscher, Merizalde, and cinematographer David Torcivia.

In Detour, Frank Hartman (Ted Huckabee), is an Atlanta cabbie, and a big-time baseball fan. He wins a radio contest and snags a ticket to the 7th game of the World Series in Atlanta. This, in spite of the chaos in the back seat of the cab while he’s on the phone to the radio station.

On game day, he cuts his last fare short and heads off to the ball park, with just minutes to spare until the first pitch. While sitting at a traffic light, a passenger, Hannah (Addy Miller), gets into his cab, and, well, we’re getting ahead of ourself here …

Detour premiered at this year’s Atlanta Film Festival.

The music is by Taylor Ronne.

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The Walk

OMT Summer Film Festival

Sheldon Candis produced and directed this film, and co-wrote it with Justin Wilson, in association with a group calling itself “The Cinephile Academy”, about which such a dearth of information can be found on the World Wide Web that it is downright refreshing.

His film, The Walk stars Porter Fowler as a wheelchair-bound old man who is working on a Rube Goldberg contraption that he hopes will allow him to walk again, and Ian Hamrick as his not-terribly-willing grandson, who the old man presses into service as his assistant. Along the way, the two forge a bond that transcends their work.

The music is by Jeffery Alan Jones.

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