so undercover cops have been hanging around Dinner House M and everyone is on high alert. apparently micki (the owner) got arrested last weekend, although she's not in jail and doing ok. we postponed dining room this week cause i was sickkk (STD NOV 17!!) but also ashland is warning me now there's a chance we may not go on much longer.
a couple of weeks ago, during GROWN DINING ROOM a friend of mine, who is a queer woman of color (API/latina) joked with me, "so i see you traded the mexicans for the asians!" i guess i could see the humor for a person of her particular mixed ethnicities, but it also really hit a nerve- an old wildness nerve. a sensitivity to people making light of a very loaded dynamic between young party throwers/goers and the native proprietor/scene. a very fragile dynamic, that walks the line between building safe meaningful community spaces and just like... LAND USAGE. it's hard to articulate without over-simplifying - but it's at the heart of making damelo todo.
around the time that the LA weekly article came out about wildness, we all felt a very real fear and responsibility about whether it was going to do "damage" to the safety of the silver platter. as the story goes... was wildness going to destroy the thing it loved most? that FEAR is the realest thing, and the only thing i know for sure. it's hard to say, after the article came out, were there more obnxoious gawking tourists? were more women getting arrested and deported? would that make us at fault? i actually had a yelling confrontation with the journalist months later, when we met in a cafe in silverlake. i accused him of everything. i was haunted by the lurking fear of not knowing what our "impact" was. i felt guilty, responsible, powerless.
those feelings now are the realest thing to me as i edit the movie. trying to trace, in a really critical way, where do those feelings really come from, and to what end?
nicol says something in her interview, which i think is theee most brilliant insightful thing of the entire movie. she says:
"what [the journlist] saw, is what the Silver Platter is.
it is not what his mind dictated afterward that he wrote."
i feel profoundly affected by how much this idea translates across the board to everyone, and particularly implicates the film. the bar is a PLACE. it is a physical location that draws people together. but what it means, we can only grasp at what it means beyond ourselves. so in that sense, the movie is no more what the bar is than sam slovick's stupid article. it is what my mind dictates it to be, and that's it. and i guess that's a lot. to me. ;)
(me & nicol, more rick owens)
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