Thursday, April 30th, 2009 .:.
More Food Art
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Credit: Anuj
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Credit: Anuj
Fruit Fly | World Premiere
Director, Producer, Writer, Editor, Music: H. P. Mendoza
Cast: L.A. Renigen, Mike Curtis, Theresa Navarro, Aaron Zaragoza, E. S. Park
If there’s one thing this festival needs, it’s a toe-tapping musical, or a tribute to San Francisco, or a young Filipina American seeking her true self, or a nice tune about versatile bottoms, or maybe a crooning love-duet between a man and his Macbook image, or especially a song filled with enough unprintable slang to burn the ears off of every Prop-8′er in the state. Fortunately, all of that, and a thousand things more, is what FRUIT FLY supplies, and for that we have resident boywonder H.P. Mendoza to thank.
The composer and co-star of festival hit COLMA: THE MUSICAL (SFIAAFF ‘06) returns with a solo directorial debut that aims his poisoned pen and catchy Casio keyboards toward that never-dead city to Colma’s north, San Francisco. Here we discover Bethesda (a radiant L.A. Renigen of COLMA fame), newly arrived from Maryland and Manila, eager to succeed in the performance art world and hoping to find her birth mother, who abandoned her as a child. (“Will that help with your show?,” someone asks.) Her new flatmates, various artists united by their rootlessness (I won’t be here long, is the whisper that lingers in these walls), soon whisk our young Dorothy over the rainbow and into San Francisco’s alcoholic nights and hungover days, all filled with (of course) song and dance. Crawling through bars gay and straight, the still-disoriented Bethesda finds herself saddled with quite a few new identities (fag hag, homo honey, fruit fly, hack, slut, etc), but none that she actually wants; she’s got plenty of places to go, but still nowhere to be for long.
Funded by CAAM, FRUIT FLY represents a new generation of Asian American filmmaking; its deceptively casual mash-up and embrace of ethnic and sexual identity politics is nuanced enough to fuel a masters’ thesis, but one doesn’t need a degree to understand what’s going on. It’s also textbook guerrilla filmmaking, a loud-and-proud, indie-Asian/gay hijacking of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG that turns the Mission, the Castro and more into an all-singing, all-dancing whirl of performance artists, thwarted lovers, sneering sideliners, punk lesbians, fag hags, leather bears and versatile bottoms, all ready to join you, ever so tunefully, in whatever journey you’re on.
A few weeks ago I watched my first film-festival film. The movie was called “Fruit Fly”, as I have so often been called, and was featured as part of the Asian American Film Festival. You can read a review of the movie in the purple box to the right.
I really enjoyed the movie, especially the songs, but Arnon loathed it. In fact, he was livid at what he considered a seriously inadequate conclusion to the film. We clearly have differing tastes in movies.
Here are a couple photos of Jason and Richard who were with us. The third photo is of Arnon and me in front of The Grill next to the Fairmont Hotel where Arnon and I went on our first real date nearly ten years ago.
Below are the before, during and after pictures of our bathroom. As you can see, we still don’t have a mirror above the vanity, but otherwise the bathroom is finished. Actually, it’s been finished since December but I was hoping to have a mirror before posting photos. The contractor ordered the mirror but who knows when we’ll get it.
We opted for black granite slabs in the shower, a floating vanity and black shelves. It’s hard to tell from the photos, but the shower stall is quite large. Three large men could shower comfortably together.
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