By Hook or By Crook
This week we are showing Harry Dodge and Silas Howard’s By Hook or By Crook (2001) on Friday, January 9th, at 7 PM.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’ll start the show at 7:10!
By Hook or By Crook is a true sui generis DIY gem of a film, co-directed, starring, written, and edited by Dodge and Howard, who play two star-crossed trans masc scumbums scraping by with whatever low-level scams they can think of. Dodge (who you may also know as partner of Maggie Nelson and prominent character in her work The Argonauts) is Valentine, a jittery little fast-talker, and Howard (who was a member of notable 90s queercore band Tribe 8) plays off of him as the stoic and James Dean-esque Shy. Howard and Dodge initially worked together as co-founders of seminal San Fran queer cafe and performance space Red Dora’s Bearded Lady. Shot on mini-DV, the film vibrates with a liberatory sense of possibility for how to make not just art in a new way, but of world-making in all sorts of new forms: making kin, making love, making oneself anew.
As Harry Dodge describes directly in his work of autotheory My Meteorite: “By Hook or By Crook is essentially a movie about care; about the love that flows between people who take a chance on one another, and work to make love work.” As explored in both that book and the film, Dodge and Howard’s work isn’t purely queer utopia, but instead deeply plumbs the tension between the intoxicating possibilities of trans world-building and post-human mythopoesis with the material realities of being born in this specific body, to these specific sets of conditions, whether that be the constraints of heterocapital that shunts Dodge’s Valentine and Howard’s Shy to the periphery, or the heartrending vulnerability in kin-making that Valentine goes through when confronting his deep need to find his birth mother.
Or, as Dodge writes elsewhere in My Meteorite, “There are moments when the ooze of the flesh of the world is swept into structure, howsoever that may happen: molecules congealing, language making, labor into wages, any kind of naming—forms from the informal. Which is to say, structuring happens, and then unravels again, or transforms and I’m interested in the fertility of that flexing, errant hybridity.”
Super Soaking the Hegemonic Vending Machine,
Charlie, Stefan, Stark
PS There are many many events coming up in January to show out for. In this new year, we are so lucky to be part of this growing film community in PDX. Here are a couple:
1/3 (TODAY!) 6 PM: Youth Liberation Film Group and Budding Roses presents School of Rock at Leaven Community Center!
1/7, 7 PM: Friends of the From Below Dylan, Owen, and Sarah are debuting new screening series DETOUR at Word Virus Books with Terence Davies’s filmThe Long Day Closes
1/8, 7 PM: From Below house band HORSEBAG is playing at Mother Foucault’s with two incredible bands, The Intima and Piggy Bank. Not to be missed!
1/14, 7 PM: Tom’s Movie Night presents Robinson’s Garden (dir. Masashi Yamamoto, 1987) at Performance Works Northwest
1/18, 7 PM: Spectrum Between presents Frederick Wiseman’s Aspen on 16mm at 5th Avenue Cinema