The Guerilla Drive-In showed Back to the Future on top of the Bicentennial Garage in West Chester, and the show was an absolute blast for me. A crew of volunteers showed up in the morning to build our first actual, by-God movie screen, and by two PM, we had a beautiful plywood screen eight feet tall by eleven feet wide, braced on a portable sawhorse frame, with two coats of silver paint underneath a coat of flat white latex (Chris Smith's secret formula for outdoor-screen success, and it looked great.)

From three to six, I noodled around with a team from the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. First, we filmed the MacGuffin at its Secret Location. (While I was leaving, a car full of young people pulled in, faces intent as they listened to the radio. I asked them if they were looking for the MacGuffin: "yes!" they said, their faces brightening, and I told them to go get a hint from the, you know, NATIONAL NEWS MEDIA right over there by the SUV with the tripods. I hope that was an awesome payoff for those kids!) Next, I drove up and down High street while Paul, the camera operator, braced himself in the back of Randy's pickup truck. Every time I drove by the frat houses across from the Burger King, the shirtless jocks out on the lawn would holler louder and louder, until I was rolling past brandishing my fist in the air like a brutal conquering dictator. Well, a brutal dictator whose subjects go "WOOOOO! YEAH! WOOOOOOO!"

When I made it back to the Bicentennial Garage with Kate at about seven, several DeLoreans had already arrived. We had no less than EIGHT DELOREANS come out from the DeLorean Mid-Atlantic club, and when I came around the last corner to the top of the garage, the little cars were arrayed in a bright silver chevron on either side of the topmost ramp, noses facing in, gull-wing doors open, as if the AWESOMEST CAVALRY IN THE HISTORY OF AWESOMENESS had arrived from the blue sky above.

The DeLorean owners were cordial and friendly. The battery-powered, bottlecap-mounted ninja streetlight put-outers that Mike Lamprinos hacked together in the previous 24 hours worked flawlessly in both daylight tests and nighttime action, keeping the bright streetlights off by shining light directly into their daylight sensors. Eric Lewis handled the projector beautifully. Matt and Kristen carried a white leather couch up to the roof and sat in it, dressed to the nines. The screen did not blow over, the flux capacitor tattoos that Chris Thompson made and Jonathan Ross sprayed were wonderful, the colors were bright, crisp, and vivid on the screen...

...I was absolutely thrilled, delighted, and amazed by all the cheerful, enthusiastic ingenuity that people in West Chester came up with, and I'm more convinced than ever that this is a very, very special town. We had a lot of people come out (150? 200?), and during the first couple of intermissions between reels, the CBS team prowled around with their cameras and interviewed folks. Jack, the producer, promised to let me know when the story will air (it's about guerilla drive-ins in general, not just this one), and of course I'll post that information here.

The thing that made me the happiest was seeing folks introduce themselves to each other, making it clear to me that this was an actual community event, not just a regular movie in a different venue. This was a great time. I may have kicked this event off, but it's now clear that the lion's share of the awesomeness is coming from all the other people engaged in the project: Jim Haigney, Ellen Peters, and Michael Estrada, Eric Lewis, Mike Lamprinos, Chris Thompson, Scott McMullen, Randy Schmidt, Toren Peterson, Andy Rodriguez, and Jonathan Ross -- thanks to all of you for (literally) putting together such a fun event!

You can see lots more photos:

• On Ellen Peters' Flickr stream,
• On Andy Rodriguez' Flickr stream,
• On the Honest Hypocrite blog, and
• On Eric Lewis's unhub stream (before it gets pushed below the fold)

On July 18th, the Guerilla Drive-In will be taking a break from all the secrecy and going to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Colonial Theater. As with all Guerilla Drive-In events, you are very cordially invited; watch the Guerilla Drive-In schedule page for announcements.

"Maggie, Kevin and CJ... We are 2 brothers and a sister who are bffs and had a seriously awesome day together yesterday. We went on an adventure to find the MacGuffin, saw Texas Longhorns, and drove down a precariously wooded road. Once we found it, we hung out with the cbs guys, then had a spectacular day in west chester, eating bar-b-q and ice cream and buying comic books. Ending our night with our first guerilla drive in was great. Even though we didn't have chairs; the delorians, the bell tower, and the flux capacitor "tramp stamps" made up for that. Even though we love hanging out, but a noticable age gap (21-16) makes it difficult for us to find things to do together. This is the perfect solution and aready a highlight of our summer's. Thank you!!"

At the Chester County Balloon Festival. This is the side of the trailer parked next to the tethered hot-air balloon that's giving rides.

Upon seeing this, I immediately marched over to the ticket booth and asked for two tethered-ballon ride tickets. While paying, I asked the nice lady behind the desk: "Does the price include the story about the alligator castration?"

She looked deeply startled. I realized she must be a volunteer, not one of the tethered-balloon crew. "Oh", I said, trying to sound noncholant, "you probably don't know what I'm talking about, do you? You see, the alligator castration..." and I waved feebly over at the trees where the trailer was parked.

"No..." she said uncertainly and visibly edged away from me.

You can see Grant Aiello (the casual hero) wowing the crowd on Flickr here.

  

UPDATE: We came back at 6AM the next morning for an hour-long balloon ride, but when we got there, the trial balloons they had sent up had gone directly towards the approaching storm front, and all ascensions were canceled. So we hung out at the Balloon Pilot's Tent, drinking champagne. Of course we drank champagne. I asked the pilots if they had any coffee, and they gave me a blank look. "...We have champagne..." one of them offered helpfully after a brief silence. For balloon pilots, I think champagne is the only liquid that exists. They can't even see water, or coffee, or milk. Maybe their pancakes always taste awful when they're cooking at home.

While he was washing last night's dishes in a big plastic tub filled with Moet, Grant told us lots of great stories about:

• International balloon races (it's not speed; you go away at least two miles, then you come back and try to throw a sandbag into the center of a big "X", with the result that anytime he sees an "X" on the ground anywhere, he has an urge to throw something at it),
• Whether or not balloon competitions have white-coated heroes and black-hatted villains (Grant assures me that they do), and
• If Grant would be willing to land his balloon squarely in the middle of the audience at a Guerilla Drive-In showing of "The Great Race", "Around the World in 80 Days", or maybe "The Wizard of Oz". (Grant accepted immediately, especially when I promised to make the biggest, whitest "X" over the audience seating area that he had ever seen.)

Kate and I both told our stories about growing up in Chester County, and how you'd occasionally hear the big dragon WHOO-O-O-OOMP outside, and you'd run out and see a balloon directly over your house. The pilots looked at each other and nodded sagely. "Must be Dave", they said. This adds a new dimension to my childhood memories -- inside that peaceful-looking Gondola was Dave, the Mad Ballooning Daredevil of Chester County, flouting rules and convention in order to buzz the locals and bring them out on their lawns? EXCELLENT. I imagine a leather flight helmet and a billowing white scarf. And, of course, champagne.

The Chester County Balloon Festival will be running again in 2010; according to the site, you should check in January for information on next year's event. I'll see you there!

While I was out there, I took a picture of the Ancient and Most Secret Guardians of the MacGuffin, relaxing after a hard day of foiling gentleman archaeologists (and cooking burgers on the outdoor grill, and driving red schoolbuses up and down the Brandywine, packed with schoolkids, and shoveling, and generally working hard):

"What should we tell people who ask us: 'Um... we're looking for the MacGovern?'"

"Tell them anything you like! Tell them that you've never heard of it. Or that it's floating in the middle of the river. Tell them it was here, but it's been gone for years."

"Can we make this face [makes grim face] and do this?" [pantomimes pumping a shotgun]

"Yes, absolutely. Think of yourselves as, you know, the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."

"Okay, we can totally do that."

'Guerrilla drive-ins' turn nostalgia on its head

I will be perfectly honest here. (Isn't your blog the place for True Confessions about unimportant things?) The reason I like that picture so much is that it makes me look skinny. I find myself not really caring if I look like a ghastly showboat. I mean, I am a ghastly showboat, but at least here I look like a skinny ghastly showboat.

Tonight, I must attend a meeting of West Chester Borough Council to ask permission to use a municipally-owned structure for an upcoming showing. Since the story has been picked up by both the Inquirer and the Daily Local News (I checked; of course I checked!) I'm hoping that at least one of the folks on Council will have seen it, emboldening me to ask if we can go ahead with the flaming tire tracks and the careening VW bus.

For a while, I've known that there's a Japanese house in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park called "Shofuso" (literally, "Pine Breeze Villa"), and I knew it was built in a traditional sixteenth-century style, and I wanted to hold a coworkout session there, or maybe show "Ran" for the Guerilla Drive-In, but I had never visited. Lydia and I went there yesterday, and OH MY GOD I'm suffering from Stendahl syndrome trying to process all the amazingness that we found there.

Probably the best way to do this is just to dump all my impressions, plus a late night of Wikipedia-ing and reading the house's excellent website, in no particular order:

• The house was designed and built in Japan in 1954 as a goodwill gift to the people of the United States. The house and garden were built for a two-season display in the courtyard of MoMA in NYC.
• The rocks in the garden come from Japan. Once they were selected, they were WRAPPED IN PAPER to preserve the lichen and moss.
• The house was re-assembled, and the garden was re-created, in Philadelphia in 1958, on the spot where the Japanese pavilion had been in the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. There had been a temple gate at the spot since then; this corner of Fairmount Park has always been Japanese.
• You take your shoes off and put them in a rack before entering. The tatami mats smell sweet, like hay in the sunshine. Together with the smell of waxed cedar in the veranda, and the flowers in the garden, it smells WONDERFUL.

• The house is surrounded by a wall with a moat. Because this style of Japanese architecture runs seamlessly from indoors to outdoors (there might not even be any external walls during hot months, just room, then veranda, then garden), the wall around the garden kind of is the outside wall of the house.
• The portion of the veranda outside the kitchen is carved into a non-slip surface, which is just about the best thing ever in the whole entire world

• There's a small separate structure across a very short bridge.
• A BRIDGE. OVER A STREAM. IN YOUR HOUSE. EXCEPT THAT IT'S ALSO OUTDOORS. OH, MY GOD.
• The structure on the left is the teahouse, where tea ceremonies are held. The house is very small, almost hobbit-sized, and clearly not for standing up inside. It has the vibe of a playhouse, but it's a sophisticated, grown-up playhouse vibe. Lydia was so excited by this little teahouse that she started visibly vibrating.
• Oh, did I say Lydia? THAT WAS ME.
• The Japanese started building small standalone teahouses in the Sengoku period, when the entire country was going to hell in a handbasket. Earthquakes, famines, armed uprisings — who would not want to build a small, simple rustic teahouse and sit in it, concentrating deliberately on small actions? Oh, MAN, I totally get this appeal.
• The Japanese aesthetic of simplicity and appreciating imperfection, wabi-sabi... oh, that's seductive. In many ways, it's already very similar to Quakerism, and many have already drawn the line connecting Shaker aesthetics. But I did not know how much emphasis was placed on the natural world, and on embracing rusticity imperfection. I just finished reading "Shoes outside the Door", about the San Francisco Zen Center's troubles in the 1980s, and I read about Richard Baker's expensive antique bowls, but I had imagined translucent eggshell china, not pottery that's imperfect and asymmetrical and TOTALLY COMPELLING. OH, WOW.
• I know what Thorstein Veblen would have to say about all this: "You're looking at an aesthetic of curation built upon free time that in turn depends on economic oppresion!" But Veblen can stick his wet blanket WHERE THE SUN DOES NOT SHINE. Looking at the careful, clever, and irregular repairs made to the edges of the veranda brings to mind the "Repair Manifesto" that modern nerds are promulgating. Beautiful materials, carefully cared for, in a small, lovely environment? It's totally amazing.
• The reason it's totally amazing is due to the dedicated work of a nonprofit group that took over a vandalized, under-maintained structure in the seventies and eighties, and loved it into the jewel that it is now.

You can see a few more pictures that I took on Flickr, and you can read a lot more about the house on its website at shofuso.com. I've reached out to them about visiting for Coworkout, and I really really hope that we can spend a day pretending that it's actually where we work.

I'm not quite sure how you manage yourself and your laptop when you can't lean up against the wall, but I look forward to figuring it out!

Kitty Bo was one of the Big Shadowy Grown-Ups that I remember especially fondly. Her blog is in my RSS feed. I love glimpsing the slices of Texas that come through when she visits the rodeo with her Chihuahua Tink, and posts pictures.

As the father of a five-year-old girl, I especially like the images of Texas girlhood she catches:

You can see a whole bunch of photos that she just uploaded here on her blog, each photo with interesting comments. Go check them out!

This is one of the things that I think is most wonderful about blogging. You get to see a different slice of the world through someone else's eyes. But the glimpse you're given is not delivered in a carefully curated way. When you're reading a book, you know that the author has thought very carefully about the impression they're going to give and you keep a weather eye out for the author's intention. The informality and shorter timeframe of blogging -- well, it's more like you're looking through a window with that person, than that you're being told a story by that person. You get to enjoy the view and the company, without there being the formal contract of a narrative. Or something. Anyhow, I love Kitty Bo's pictures and her comments.