Heaven and Earth Tragic

Last Thursday, I decided to get to the Castro early to grab some some drinks before lining up to see the screening of Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic, with a new sountrack performed by deerhoof. As I rounded the corner at the glass coffin at about 7:30, I saw police tape blocking off the entire block of Castro between 18th and Market, a mess of cop cars and an ambulance but no flashing lights and 9 burned out cars all in a row--anyone around here still remember White night, but these weren't burned out cop cars and there was no angry mob, just people running errands or grabbing drinks, a place of commerce, a colder kind of retribution. From overheard conversations at the bars and some inquiries of onlookers, I pieced together the story: a head on collision, a gas tank exploded, gasoline leaking downhill and torching 7 parked cars in front of cliff's variety, someone in the hospital, someone dead at the scene. The Chronicle the next day claimed a southbound car, probably barreling down the hill, ran a red at Market and Castro, swerved into the wrong lane to avoid double-parked cars and ran into another car turning into the Theater parking lot.

Heaven and Earth Magic is an hour long film of animated victorian cutouts, Indian dumbell exercisers and gentleman boxers, ladies with parisols and mechanized torsos, copious cats and basalisks, the universe of a curio closet engaged in a tarantella. This was Harry Smith's alchemical cosmology, the principals of equivalent exchange: bodies and objects, life and death bartered for knowledge and power, desire the only true catalyst, an endlessly unfolding diorama of gnostic epiphanies. deerhoof live is always a revelation, the same songs never sung quite the same, the peripa-pa-pa-tetic-tic-tic drummer always adding an extra beat here and there like an adrenaline-rushed heart murmur, the singer with her breathy childlike incantations thrown into staggering cadences by the runaway beats, errant twangs, bleeps and majestically rising caterwauls, all reverborating clearly and ominously in the darkly lit cavern. This is the only music for me that could ever color the apocalypse as a joyously cataclysmic event. I would laugh and cry as the flames rose and the earth fell to the sky.