I just finished watching Opening Night on DVD again after having not seen it since it opened in LA sometime around Christmas in 1977.

1977.  LA.  Another lifetime ago.

That would be the first Christmas season at Intellectuals & Liars with Jimmy, Gordon, & Joel, before Randy joined us, or Bill.  What did we sell then: the literature, the poetry: the small press editions like Black Sparrow copies of Charles Bukowski or Mulch Press books of Paul Blackburn, novels by Joan Didion, Thomas Hardy, Hemingway, E.M. Forster, Tom McGuane, Don DeLillo, Robert Coover, Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara.  Barely 1000 feet of selling space divided into 2 rooms, those reminder tables in the back with hardcover copies of Scandinavian plays for $1.98 and the hardcover copy I kept of Sunflower Splendor, 3000 years of Chinese poetry, which I have here in Istanbul and periodically still lose myself in.

I loved that store, that brick wall with the barred window, the coffee urn and 2 armchairs with a can for contributions that never seemed to get as many coins put in as were taken out by various local denizens who came in not to buy any poetry but for a cup of coffee to go.

But there were the readings, the lively talks afterward fueled by our passion for the written word and Gallo Hearty Burgundy, the customers many of whom are still dear friends.

But this isn’t about the bookstore.  This is about that damned film that brought these memories back, about the young woman in a black evening dress sitting in the audience next to Zohra Lampert who plays Ben Gazzarra’s wife, one of the hundreds of extras there to play audience members watching the play within the film being performed and who dreamed of being stars one day themselves.  About seeing a ghost from the past and remembering the time, that first I&L Christmas, going to see that movie in Hollywood, and then the rest of the images: the bar at Tampico’s Tilly’s, Bill Mohr dancing in his seat at the Air Lane Bar across the street, Jimmy Powell having his Coke and cigarette for breakfast, Randy Signor charming the female sales reps, Vimal Duggal sharing a bean & beef burrito lunch every weekday, Ren Weschler instructing me in the fine art of seeing, Maureen Strange raving on about some Donald Barthleme story in the New Yorker, playing pool with Chuck Thegze while listening to The Police sing Roxanne, running with my dog Frodo on the beach in Santa Monica, my friends, some long gone, others still a part of my life, but not that face, not that black evening dress, not that Midwestern smile, nor that store, or those poets raging in the night, or the madness and humor and sorrow that was LA, that was part of our youth, so very long, long ago.

Movies, like music, like books, when viewed, listened to, read again, can transport us back, if we’re not careful, to places we may not wish to go.  Perhaps, though, whether we want to or not, it’s best to take these journeys.  It doesn’t change the way things are, but maybe, just maybe, it can change the way things will be.

And isn’t that what they say history teaches us: what to duplicate, and what to avoid, and the wisdom to know which is which, and what is what.