Newport Beach Film Festival, a trip to the dentist and the road paved with Gold mythos

I’m not going to lie. I’m pretty jacked to be in the Newport Beach Film Festival, my first major festival that will premier The Crooked Tune, An Old Time Fiddler in a Modern World. Of course I now stand as a dupe, the newcomer on the shore clutching my guarantee that all the roads are paved with gold only to run into the sharp elbow hustle of the Good old US of A. But I’m still going to chase that myth where a lowly independent scamps find a likeminded P.T. Barnum who takes a gamble and writes out the check, and dreams turn to golden reality. Synchronicity is supposedly how it works. But I also know myself. I love parties, but when I’m there I tend to not do so well. Everything sounds like a muffled echo chamber. I can’t focus and I end looking for the chill out space (surely they don’t call ’em that anymore). I was thinking about all this as I sat in the dentist chair.

Dentists tend to make me nervous, probably due to my childhood dentist’s tendency to wing it without Novocain but the chairs make me so relaxed. Talk about being good for the lumbar. And there I was tasting the sweet chemical hint of numbness, getting into a major conversation with the assistant, a true Baltimore old timer, with fake black hair and the rolling Ohhhh accent, getting into the history of Catholicism. Poor Baltimore. The city served as the foothold to Catholicism, but that was so 18th Century and the world has moved on.

But the old church is still there. “It should have been the Basilica (later built on Charles and Cathedral Streets) but they didn’t have anyone important or a part of someone buried there.”

Baltimore’s shopping district at the turn of the 20th Century, right at the cusp of the Department Store heyday

The place she’s talking about is The Mother Seton House which after two hundred years is ensconced with layers of old world development from when Lexington Market was the market in Baltimore, to when Howard Street was the corridor of department stores, to when it became a major shopping destination for the city’s poor, which means the leaders can use eminent domain, and make way for big time shopping stores, which of course never happened. Thus the strata of America in brick and mortar stands ramshackle and alluring and we talk about this West Side. The assistant knows her stuff down to who sold the bricks to the Basilica and the legend of the One Mile Tavern, and I pipe in my go to conversation piece, The Blueman. Jim Hall was a career city planner, but when he retired in the mid-nineties he tattooed his entire body, making him the second most tattooed person in the world. I did a cover story and a short movie. The dentist and the assistant know the Blueman well.

Photo by the late great Sam Holden
https://vimeo.com/93081960

He’s been a client there for years. And we’re having a good ole time talking about the Blueman and all thing Baltimore and I’m holding with all kinds of dental gear and a suction tube in my mouth. In fact, it’s one of the best conversations I had in a while and I’m thinking if only I could take this attitude to the Newport Beach Festival when I find myself alone at the opening Gala, which starts at 10 p.m. My wife won’t join me until a few days later. Money is tight, my career is so on the cusp, my standards for a real job are going have to change when I get back, that is if I can make conversation as if a dentist is drilling out my tooth and we’re talking about a 70-year-old guy who just finished tattooing his entire face. Then I might have a shot of turning myth into gold.