Haunted By Stupidity (In Praise of Community College, Gabriel Figueroa, and Uncle Neil)

For a guy who prides himself on not living in the past, I’ve been thinking a lot about the back-in-the-day days. Yes, there were the lurid episodes (holding cells! LSD!) in those knocking around years, but by hook or by crook, I did manage to get myself a kind of education. 

After barely graduating high school, not really knowing what an SAT even was (the whole college prep chapter kind of got past me), I set my sights on Diablo Valley College (DVC). It was free and they accepted anyone. Two for two!

Community college gets a bad rap. And yeah, for some, especially back then, college can be just a way for middle class kids to put off the inevitable. 

That pretty much was my motivation. Till I lucked into some classes that changed the course of my life. 

Mr. Undeclared here was squeaking by in his classes, mostly trying to avoid the really boring stuff and playing in bands. (Energy!) I did take a Journalism class. And one in acting. Public speaking—the instructor was attractive, wore oversized dark glasses like Mia Farrow in “Broadway Danny Rose,” and said to me, “Oh, you have a beautiful voice.” She immediately became my favorite instructor. If Rate My Professor had existed back then, I would have given her 10 stars out of 5! 

She’d talk about her life. She was married to a Brit and proudly went on about how in England the proper etiquette is that a lady orders a half pint, but she’d defiantly order a full pint. No pint shame for her. 

Once she took off those glasses and revealed bruises and black eyes. And said something like, “What’s the point, my husband is a jerk.” I’m still haunted by that. Just now I texted Kara, who took the class with me, asking if I’d misremembered, and she said, “She talked about her husband: he was younger than her and had a bad temper. She was afraid he would have to leave the country if she said anything.” Yeah, she’d pulled Kara aside and confided in her. Like it was something she’d had experience with. 

But what can you do? That seems to be what she was saying.

 “What can you do?” A lot actually. But I was an idiot.

As for journalism, it seemed to me like a cool vocation if you had to pick one. All I really knew going in I’d picked up from “All The President’s Men.” The racket of all those typewriters rat-a-tat-tatting away in unison at the Washington Post hooked me. Or maybe it was the glee in hearing Jason Robards growl “Where's the fucking story!!” But there were assignments in the class and guess-who didn’t turn them in? (Or when he did, “applied himself.”) 

There was also a Film Noir Humanities class where we read Patricia Highsmith and watched what I now assume was a 16-millimeter print of “Strangers on a Train” in the school theater. That was god-like. It was world-class Hitchcock all the way. I caught that Noir wave and coasted right through the 80s hoovering up all I could find while the world went through a kind of Noir renaissance. That New Wave of Noir started right there for me. Reading Chandler and James M. Cain.

It’s the same old scene. Whether it’s “Strangers on a Train” or Elmore Leonard’s “Ryan’s Rules.” I never get tired of those it-doesn’t-matter-how-well-you-plan-it, you-won’t-get-away-with-it stories. Or as James Ellroy says, the best noirs all mine the same theme: “You’re fucked.” 

I lived in matinees, and the 80s were a feast of neo-noir: “Blood Simple,” “Body Heat,” “At Close Range.” And the 90s too: “Red Rock West,” “One False Move,” and “The Grifters” with Annette Bening. (She was a theatre arts student at San Francisco State.) There’s a million noir stories to tell, but as Jim Thompson says, there’s only one plot: People are never who they appear to be. 

I remember seeing “At Close Range” with Dan Stuart and Suzi Wren at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Sean Penn and Christopher Walken. I recognized Sean Penn from the excellent “Bad Boys. “Fast Times,” too.

At DVC, along with the classes that spoke to me, I did manage to get through the requirements, and after two years was able to transfer to a four-year college: SF State. Which got me into the City, where my real education started. But not at SF State. My time there didn’t amount to much.

Thanks to my memories of DVC, President Joe Biden got my attention when he tried to up the game of community colleges everywhere with his Build Back Better (or the Bell Biv DeVoe as I like to call it) Bill, which included a free community college plan. Something Uncle Joe knows a little about. Dr. Jill Biden runs the show at a community college in Virginia, don’t you know. But unfortunately, they weren’t able to get the free tuition part across the finish line. 

Now, I never took on any loans. Didn’t really need to. Can’t say I was aware of them, anyway. I made the rent with a series of crappy jobs. And though I may have been busking my way through my higher learning, taking acid and generally being stupid, there were other students: single moms and dads just trying to get to that next level and improve their job prospects. Tom Nelson, with who(m!) I played in a band, took electrical engineering at DVC. He learned all about semiconductors and telephone switching systems and as far as I can tell, ended up making a solid living installing systems in businesses and raising a family. Naomi Judd was a College of Marin nursing student. Chabot College in Hayward is the alma mater of a theater arts nerd named Tom Hanks. He did all right. 

***

Doubling back to film noir, even recently, I thought I’d seen it all (double-crossing double-crossers, sexual predators, serial killers, corrupt politicians) until right before the pandemic I saw an excellent Mexican noir film at the The Castro Theatre here in San Francisco. And got turned on to the cinematography of Gabriel Figueroa (“Under the Mexican Sky”).

Gabriel Figueroa’s work heavily influenced the cover art/graphics to “The Land That Time Forgot,” which was shepherded along by Javier Rosas Herrera of Oaxaca, Mexico, who does brilliant work. We’re hoping to visit him in the fall, when as Javier says: “It’s the most spiritual time. The weather is cool and harvest has been done.”

The dark and foreboding cinematography. All that hopelessness. It really appeals to you when you’re young. I mean, is it any wonder? I look back at all the music I was listening to back then. Van Morrison’s “T.B. Sheets” on repeat. Alex Chilton looking in the mirror comparing a girl to the Holocaust. And Richard Thompson’s “End of the Rainbow.” Oh, and Uncle Neil singing “he tried to do his best but he could not.” SPOILER ALERT: He could not. He died. Out on the mainline.

The dark stuff, man. Nowadays I love Cumbia and Reggaeton dance music. I wonder why?

Oh and for extra credit. Here’s a deep noir cut. From the 80s. In terms of the devil getting his money’s worth. I’m not exactly in a big hurry to see a film where I have to sit through watching Sting break someone’s arm with a steel pipe. But your Noir mileage may vary, as they say. Then again, I think there's an unwritten law that you can never go wrong with Tommy Lee Jones. I remember thinking this film was pretty cool at the time.

I would have been happy to watch any Gabriel Figueroa jam with the sound down sans subtitles. They’re that beautiful. If cinematography is “painting with light,” as they say, Figueroa is a master painter.

***

Which reminds me, in the early Green on Red days we did a BBC session with one of Thompson’s sidemen (Clive Gregson) producing. Don’t remember much about the session or where it was (Manchester?), as I had been up for 48 hours or more, after a snafu at immigration re-entering the UK from France. Work permit issues meant staying put in our old friend a holding cell until it got sorted. Is it any wonder my band looks at me like they don't know me when I turn Headmaster around anything involving work permits.

Anyway, on a rare night off, Gregson invited Green on Red to a Richard Thompson Band show. We took the train from London to Croydon, where Richard encored solo electric with “End of the Rainbow:” “Your sister she’s no better than a whore.” 

Like I was saying, I try not to live in that dark place these days. Cumbia and Reggaeton may not be all you and me and rain on the roof, but they get a crowd on their feet no matter what the song is “about.” 

And when I do decide to go back to my noir roots for a visit, Richard & Linda can take me there faster than any movie, in under four minutes:

And the man holds a bread-knife
Up to your throat, is four feet wide
And he's anxious just to show you what it's for. . .

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Onwards, 

     – CP