There was a golden age of pre-streaming Netflix, and for me it happened to coincide with a frenzied stretch of deep-time bachelorhood. A happenstance that meant most nights during this period I could be found alone in my apartment in San Francisco’s Presidio, watching a movie. I say it was a “golden age” for Netflix because their DVD catalog was at that time deep and diverse, and combined with offerings from the SFPL, I could be assured of something amazing to watch every night. Black and white noir favorites, UK Angry Young Men films, 70’s auteur deep cuts I hadn’t seen yet, or schlock giallos that always sounded like they were going to be awesome but rarely were (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, I’m looking at you). Compared to what modern-day streaming Netflix offers, it’s like the difference between the Library of Alexandria and a Citgo station magazine rack.
After work, I’d grab a burrito and a tallboy and bike to the beach, eat at a windswept picnic table and then head home. I lived in a converted officer’s housing deep in the woods of the park. Straight up hill to a Nixon-era carpeted condo, sagging into the grass and blackberry bushes. My cathode-ray TV and DVD player—parting gifts from a long-lost ex-girlfriend—were propped up on a fold-out hardware table that wobbled when you touched it. After the film, I’d still have time to sit down and draw for an hour at my desk while I drank a bottle of wine and then maybe play a round or two of darts with my buddy Jim, blasting Neil Young out into the fogged-over eucalyptus.
Nowadays I’m mostly amazed at how much free time I had back then, and also how very different my life is now. The otherness of this memory is compounded because it is also compartmentalized, like many of my memories. Decades of ambling along from place to place, job to job, lacking a life of continuity. Instead of roots, I laid down a lot tiny saplings, all across the country, all of them bloomed and blown away. Lives touched long ago, now just faces on social media if at all. It’s a bit melancholy.
But so, one night there in the Presidio I watched Tarkovsky’s Stalker. I think I’d drank too much wine, and kept falling asleep. You really have to work while watching a Tarkovsky film, and I’d must’ve had enough of work that day. I was more in the mood for a Fred Astaire picture. Stalker’s inscrutability left me as cold as its imagery: all that filtered brown and drab Soviet industrial detritus, laden with a sense of emptiness.
All of this comes to mind as I’m reading Arkady and Boris Strugastky’s Roadside Picnic, the novel on which Stalker is based. Loosely, as they say. The brothers Strugastky seem more interested in the science fiction conceit than Tarkovsky was. Tarkovsky reminds me of David Lynch in the sense that he’s really only concerned with one thing in his films, one central problem or idea that he attempts to work out over and over again. What that central problem is, I can’t quite say. For Tarkovsky, maybe the persistence of memory? For Lynch, maybe something about the performative aspect of identity?
But the sense of otherness that Tarkovsky laid out in his filmic imagery runs deep as I read the novel. I love that I can’t figure out where this novel is supposed to take place. I consider the authors as I read, a pair of mid-century Russian siblings. The smoky, rattling Peugeots, the dirt track roads, the brothels, the hard drinking, the bureaucratic hierarchies and chaotic nature of a society overcoming a cataclysm, it all seems very Eastern Bloc, but there’s many nods in the writing that make you think it might be in the U.S.. Europe perhaps? Australia? Was that a political consideration, I wonder? The brothers transposing their world onto the faraway capitalist dreamlands, like when Shakespeare had to skip-hop history to avoid casting a shadow on the Virgin Queen? I’m a third of a way through the book, and I sense a dark ending coming, perhaps darker than Tarkovsky’s, which wasn’t so dark, just a little bleak, a little lonesome. The central conceit of the roadside picnic is a powerful one. Just an abandoned little place, a little blip on the map where something happened once.