Daydreaming and Black Holes

I read three children's books at an open-air kink festival. I get invited to take an advanced look at a new documentary.

This Sunday past I went to the fortieth Folsom Street Fair, San Francisco’s annual Gomorrah by the Bay where for one day and several square blocks polite society’s rules against public nudity, public self-gratification and public fornication are entirely suspended. Consenting adult attendees can wear whatever and/or as little as they want and do pretty much whatever they feel like to themselves or any other consenting adult attendee(s) short of outright violence (but certainly including open-air bindings, floggings and other degradations of the sort to which some people enjoy being subjected).

Brightly-colored clothes are suitable for those who aren’t strutting around nude or wearing BDSM leather and chains, so I donned my onesie and cap. Wearing self-designed gear unfailingly puts some glide in one’s stride, but wearing a psychedoolic cartoon onesie with a front-facing zipper that can be adjusted to display precisely the preferred amount of chest hair at an open-air sex/kink festival is an opportunity to be savored. Kink and BDSM cultures are my scene strictly from an anthropological point of view and I observe some fascinating goings-on and style choices when I run the Folsom gauntlet. My angle of access is along an aesthetic axis.

Aside from wearing crazy cartoon clothes from the future, I took several other precautions going in.

• I brought a pack of Haribo gummies for a snack, sent to me by Frienefactor because she knows I like them. They were pretty much all I ate during my several hours at the Fair and for what turned out to be a miles-walk south all the way home through several lovely San Francisco neighborhoods that were bathed in picturebook-perfect sunlight from a cloudless sky.

• I brought along three children’s books by Richard Hargreaves, also from Frienefactor. Remember those Hargreaves books? Strange, succinct paperbacks where each spread has a verso page of narrative text in a boring sans serif typeface and each recto page has a simple marker-rendered illustration of kooky characters like Mr. Funny, Mr. Daydream and Little Miss Naughty. Those were the three titles I was sent and I decided before leaving in the morning to read all three at the Folsom Street Fair for no reason. She couldn’t have planned for a trinity of titles that would better align with the vibe for a day out on the Fair.

• In between stealing a quick read of Mr. Funny and later getting on to reading Mr. Daydream and Little Miss Naughty, I consumed a reasonably healthy dose of psilocybin just to make the Fair even weirder for myself. I did the same thing last year but this time I had also made a new friend while waiting in line to get in and was kinda showing him around a bit since he had never attended before. He was strutting around in a leather top without a stitch of clothing from the waist down and I was marauding in my splashy onesie and cap. It was fun to have any nice person, even someone I had just met, to explore alongside of.

I assured my new pal that we could find a dead-end alley down which a large group of men would be having various types of sex and flirtation together. I had seen it all last year, in fact down the same alley that we explored, and so I let him take his time inspecting the scene while I let the psilocybin kick way in, sprawled myself on the sidelines and read Mr. Daydream and Little Miss Naughty. I was almost assuredly not the only person in that alley under the influence of intoxicants but I was verifiably the only one on site reading books. At an event like Folsom this could have come across one or both of several ways: made me a noteworthy eccentric and/or was just another expression of inscrutable hyper-individuality at an event devoted to being whatever and doing whomever one likes. I was in no condition to speculate about which of these auras I was radiating more robustly. I did look good, though; that much I could feel with and without the help of psilocybin and Hargreaves.

Taegan MacLean is a writer and filmmaker I alluded to in an older entry who got me onto the fine Hirokazu Kore-eda film After the Storm, which MacLean had recommended to me in response to me suggesting he take a look at the work of Ross McElwee.

I had prodded MacLean in the direction of the more well-established documentarian McElwee because of the commonalities between their work, though Taegan apparently had not previously known of McElwee’s pictures. Like McElwee’s, MacLean’s films are autobiographical meditations on seemingly mundane yet piercingly relatable topics for which auteur writer/director also serves as first-person cameraman and narrator.

But MacLean’s pieces are more contemporary, more concise and more philosophically than narratively motivated in comparison with McElwee’s. He uses his newsletter One Word as a forum to post his video essays once monthly, each inspired by and titled after a single word. He’s a man on a schedule with a healthy system of constraints, forcing himself to keep moving and to learn by doing.

To this end I was privileged to be asked to take an advanced look at his newest offering Woodbine. I haven’t previously given Taegan’s films the scrutiny needed to merit write-ups in One Could Argue but he was interested in some no-bullshit feedback on the newest piece. He came to the right shop; I respect him and his work too much to be anything but honest. And my honest view is that Woodbine is a deeply affecting and overall very well-made film, and often not in the ways that I expected.

If you don’t want to know too much about it, go to One Word to watch Woodbine before you read on. The film sets out to be about Taegan’s relationship to the memory of his father Dave MacLean, a handsome and well-liked professional horse trainer who, before dying in 2007 at the age of fifty, worked at the Woodbine Racetrack and Casino on the outskirts of Toronto. All of this is established in precisely the first ninety seconds of the picture, at which point Taegan records himself stepping out of his front door before dawn to embark upon a twenty-four-hour visit to Woodbine, having not set foot on the grounds since before his father’s death. He’s walking back into his own childhood memories while simultaneously viewing Dave’s workplace through the eyes of a man who is now the age that Dave was during the height of his career there. Woodbine Racetrack becomes, as Taegan remarks utilizing words chosen with telling precision, a “conduit” and “foundation” for exploring memories, regrets and hopes.

As this month’s one word, “Woodbine” establishes the foundational jumping-off point for this emotional journey, but the conduit is through a metaphor that leads off into some surprising areas. Taegan describes doing internet research to try to deal with the invasive vines that are overrunning his yard and stumbling upon the realization that this particular plant is also called “Woodbine,” a coincidence that is not too implausible to be genuine but is definitely too poetic not to use in this film. In following those literal and narrative vines to see where they lead, he claims to have found a large hole in his fence that he associates with the cosmic phenomenon of a black hole. This symbol for the Rubicon of death beyond which Dave has already passed becomes the conduit Taegan needs to digress into further musings, and what I liked best of all about Woodbine is the unexpected conclusions towards which this process guides him.

This thematic sprawl demonstrates Taegan’s bravery and ingenuity in starting his film at the Woodbine Racetrack and not binding himself to an obligation to end it there. It connects to more interesting territory where Taegan discusses and shares bits of a meticulously-planned conceit to use Dave’s expired horse trainer licenses for transitions, as well as some “artsy, black-and-white sequences” in his yard with the Woodbine vines, all of which he shows bits of but self-referentially mentions having essentially revised right out of the film. We’re watching a finished piece that partly documents its own creation, an unselfconsciously fumbling effort to weave something palpable from threads of memory.

Taegan was in the room with his father when Dave died, but he also has a younger brother named Kelly who made the deeply personal choice that was right for him as a child to elect not to be present when Dave passed from life into death. In a sequence that gently mirrors Taegan’s comments on his own process of filmmaking and revision, Kelly, a skilled player who uses Dave’s old golf bag on the course, takes Taegan for his first-ever golf outing and shows his older brother the basic mechanics of the game. It becomes apparent that this is the most readily-discernible trace of Dave that can be observed in both of his sons: in their differing ways, both brothers have chosen to fill their free time with pursuits, one a famously difficult sport and the other an esoteric and time-consuming creative hobby, that have nothing in common except that they are both extremely hard to get good at and can never be fully perfected. The same could probably be said of Dave’s career, and perhaps in some ways of any single human life, whether or not it is cut as sadly short as Dave’s was.

Here on the gently rolling back nine of Woodbine we find that the film is finally largely about Taegan, in making peace with his father’s passing and his regrets over how he handled certain aspects of it, stepping more fully in to fill the void of adulthood and fatherhood that Dave’s death left all those years ago. In so doing he finds himself wrestling with the kind of artist he wants to be, which brings me to several things I would be interested to see him keep getting less unskilled at in upcoming installments of One Word. Taegan is lassoing in a lot in a relatively short film that contains references to physics, ancient Egyptian mythology, gardening, horse training, golf, filmmaking, parenting, living with cancer, memory, death, regret, gambling and old family videos from the Nineties. In coralling this wealth of material into a cohesive film he is forced to lean on efficient transitions and solicitous narration, and these joints are the only creaky ones in his still-maturing aesthetic: clearly a skilled technician who is doing most of his own camera and sound operation, Taegan as editor is quick on the draw with his restless cuts and showy transitions, and his empathetic narration has a faltering nerdiness that occasionally contributes to an ambience of eager agitation. Helpfully he does also make the tasteful choice to deploy an ergonomic musical score by the composer Fog Chaser that helps to sand off Woodbine’s splintered edges.

Early in Woodbine, once Taegan has begun to establish a level of comfort at the Racetrack, comes a striking image of a horse and rider moving in mid-ground juxtaposed against the background of a passing train going in the same direction. It’s a lovely and arresting framing and demonstrates Taegan’s instinct for letting his camera lead him instead of the other way around, a talent that produces some genuinely beautiful images when he can slow down enough to let them breathe and linger. As a responsible journeyman he is churning out good content too consistently not to get a lot better at it as he goes, and I am excited to see him continue to assert his clear technical facility as a one-man filmmaking crew but also to settle into a slightly more relaxed level of comfort as an editor, storyteller and narrator.

In a way this turns out to imbue Woodbine with its most subtly affecting moral significance. It is a lovely film that starts at the Racetrack asserting to be about claiming peace with the past but ends up locating that peace in the black hole metaphor amidst the swirling emotional violence of practice and growth. “It’s up to the living to say goodbye to the dead,” Taegan says in the film’s closing frames, before casting a glance over his shoulder into the event horizon of the hole in the fence and dedicating his film not to Dave alone but “to the people and horses of Woodbine Racetrack.”

Maybe if I play my cards right I can get T-Mac to give me more early glances at his work, so prepare yourself for the possibility of seeing his name show up more in the pages of One Could Argue.

I promise nothing.