DAMON PACKARD’s FATAL PULSE
The season opens with a most extraordinary event—rising from the very depths of Hollywood, here’s the in person return to San Francisco of the prodigiously gifted Damon Packard, with his first feature in many years! In fact, his film happens to be ALL about his hometown—it’s a screamingly hilarious send-up of the super-stylized thriller genre that the industry was pumping out in the 80s/90s …and again, this magnum opus stars Damon himself! Truly a masterpiece on the order of Reflections of Evil, this NorCal premiere so clearly demonstrates Damon’s intuitive genius for lighting (much of it shot at night), mis-en-scene, editing, and sound design as to certainly cement his place as thee bête noire borne from the SoCal sleaze. *$9
Blog
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Other Cinema: X-TREME SATIRE
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Small Press Traffic (Colin Winnette & Tommy Pico)
Tommy Pico
Tommy “Teebs” Pico is author of the books IRL, Nature Poem, Junk, and Feed (forthcoming 2019 from Tin House Books). He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, a 2017 fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, won a Whiting Award and a 2018 American Book Award. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub.
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Colin Winnette
Colin Winnette is the author of six books, including Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio) and The Job of the Wasp (Soft Skull Press). His writing has won several awards, including Les Figues Press’s NOS Book Award, and has been published in numerous anthologies and publications, such as Playboy, The Believer, BOMB, and McSweeney’s Quarterly. He lives in San Francisco, where he’s trying to make it work. His website is a .net.
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ATA@SFPL: Brooklyn Bridge (screening at Noe Valley Library)
Brooklyn Bridge (Ken Burns, 1981) 58 minutes
Before he became synonymous with public television, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns had always intended his work “to be shown on film in a dark room with many people,” as he later would admit. His first major film as a director was shown at film festivals and nominated for an Oscar before it was first broadcast on the ninety-ninth anniversary of the May 24,1883 opening of its subject, New York’s famous Brooklyn Bridge. In one captivating hour, Burns explores the origins and the legacy of the world’s first steel-wire suspension bridge.
Brooklyn Bridge is structured as two halves reinforcing a whole. Part one focuses on the designers and builders who ushered the dream of forever connecting Long Island to Manhattan into reality. Because the post-Civil War period of construction predated motion picture technologies, Burns and his team found ways to use other original documents, particularly still photographs and written documents, cinematically. Part two considers the cultural and symbolic importance of the bridge since its creation, using clips from Hollywood movies, interviews with luminaries like Arthur Miller, and contemporary (1981) footage of the bridge in context with the New York skyline. Not only is the film a laboratory for Burns’s then-emerging, now-famous style, it’s also a poignant reminder of an America dedicated building bridges, not walls.
Noe Valley Library: 451 Jersey St, San Francisco,