I couldn’t even remember the first two words of the film’s title. I told the clerk at Rocket Video that it was “Jeanne … something …” and that the filmmaker was “something … Akerman.” How helpful was that?

“You mean, Andy Ackerman? The TV director?” he asked.

Um, no.

After several minutes, we finally figured it out and I walked out of the store with a copy of Chantal Akerman’s 1976 film, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” Years ago, I heard about this film from my brother and a couple of friends. I don’t know what made me recall it now, but it was a stormy day in Los Angeles, and it seems like the right time to see a three-plus-hour film starring Delphine Seyrig as a middle-aged widowed housewife doing her daily chores around the house.

And yes, that’s all she does in the film. Although you only get to see three days of her life, you get the sense that everyday she wakes up her son for school, makes coffee and breakfast, sees her son off, washes the dishes, does errands, checks the mail, makes lunch, babysits the neighbor’s kid for a half-hour, drinks more coffee, makes dinner, cleans the bathroom, helps her son study when he comes home, takes a nightly walk around the neighborhood, and then it’s off to bed. Oh, one more thing: to make some extra money, she prostitutes herself at 5 p.m. exactly for a half-hour.

So after an hour into the film, my mind began to wander, drifting into different directions. By the second hour, I started meditating on her chores; her duties, like her preparing veal for dinner or shining her son’s shoes, resembled religious rituals. She seems so focused on that veal! But then again, there is something comforting about our daily routines. We can turn off our minds and watch everything fall exactly where they need to be. The same results every time, no worries whatsoever.

Sounds boring? Perhaps. I mean, I had the urge to fall asleep during this film, since there’s nothing going on, but damned if I did.

By the end of the second hour, during the afternoon of the “second” day, something does happen. She forgets to cover the china jar, where she stashes her extra money. Then she forgets the potatoes cooking on the stove. That’s when the horror begins – Jeanne’s horror, that is. She begins to drop things, her daily routines are derailed, and even coffee doesn’t seem to taste good anymore. Suddenly Time itself turns against her, and she finds herself having an extra hour to kill. So she sits, waits, thinks. Anxiety kicks in. Something has to be done about this.

As her son rambles on about his confused philosophy on sex, as her sister complains in her letter about her own boring life, and as the neighbor’s baby just cannot stop crying, Jeanne barely says a word, but near the end of the film, she is screaming inside her mind. Then the doorbell rings. It’s 5 p.m. Another client is at the door. By the last 10 minutes of the film, something actually happens, something shocking, but I will stop there.

It is never revealed what caused the breakdown of Jeanne’s routines, but I get the feeling that it started right after the second john’s visit. Also not revealed is why the neighbor drops off her baby at Jeanne’s place at exactly 12 noon; though I’m guessing that the neighbor is turning tricks at that time, just like Jeanne does at 5 p.m. Perhaps the neighbor is following the same path as Jeanne’s. And that would be the start of another horror film.

An experiment: Take a look at the two clips below and ask yourself, so how do you peel potatoes? Do you find the task boring?

A scene from “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”

Last year, Criterion Collection released its DVD version of “Jeanne Dielman” and held a Jeanne Dielman Cooking Contest, which is pretty self-explanatory. Here is one participant’s video entry:

“I’ll never go again. I hated it. I didn’t enjoy it. It was like dancing on a grave.”

– A former resident of Chavez Ravine describing her first visit to Dodger Stadium.

On this year’s Fourth of July, America’s Independence Day, I was sitting on the balcony of my flat, a bottle of rum in tow, watching fireworks over Dodger Stadium five miles away. I imagined the crowd at the stadium was listening to the patriotic songs of John Philip Sousa or Irving Berlin or Toby Keith and gazing at the lightshow above. My soundtrack was Ry Cooder’s CD, “Chavez Ravine,” playing over and over again. Whether this was appropriate music for the day was for the ear of the beholder.

Chavez Ravine is a classic American story, unfortunately. A neighbor of Echo Park, the district was a “poor man’s Shangri La” for generations of Mexican Americans. Here, the residents formed their own metropolis, built their own churches and stores, and even created a whole new sound, blending corridos and boleros with swing music and boogie woogie. But outsiders found the area to be an eyesore and wanted to shut down the party.

Their first attempt was in June 1943, when American sailors started coming into the neighborhood to beat up “zoot-suiters” after a fellow sailor had his jaw broken from an earlier fight. Their search-and-destroy tactic exploded into the infamous “Zoot Suit Riots” in Los Angeles.

Then in 1950, the cops evicted many residents out of their homes. The reason: to construct a federal-approved public housing project. To add insult to injury, after the land was paved over, the city decided not to build new houses after all. Instead it gave the land to the Los Angeles Dodgers and built the stadium there.

Cooder – a session guitarist who has worked with Captain Beefheart, Randy Newman, The Rolling Stones, Ali Farka Toure and Buena Vista Social Club – was born in Los Angeles but had never stepped foot in Chavez Ravine. Yet his 2005 CD, a three-year project influenced by the photographs of Don Normark, sounds as if he’d lived there all his life.

The album’s characters are portrayed by some of that era’s real voices – Lalo Guerrero, Ersi Arvizu, Little Willie G and Chicano R&B legend Don Tosti – telling stories about the rise and fall of this great neighborhood. They sing about high school dances and lively street parties, as well as the police raids, the riots and finally the bulldozers. They even throw in the Red Scare and UFO sightings for good measure.

“If the dozer hadn’t taken my yard,” says a fictional parking attendant in the song “3rd Base, Dodger Stadium,” “you’d see the tree with our initials carved. [There are] so many moments in my memory. [It] sure was fun, because the game was free.”

As I listened to this music, I thought about those folks who have sat, are sitting, and will be sitting in Dodger Stadium, getting their fill of Coors Light and Oscar Meyer hot dogs, rooting for Manny Ramirez, Kuroda, Billingsley, and other highly-paid ballplayers. And I wondered if they ever thought about those former Chavez Ravine residents whose homes were torn down so that they could have a seat.

Ry Cooder’s “3rd Base, Dodger Stadium” accompanied by Don Normark’s photographs of Chavez Ravine

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

– Samuel Beckett

My wonderful friend Terri, who was a no-bullshit stage manager in the San Francisco theater scene, once told me an incident she witnessed at the famed EXIT Theatre on Eddy Street. An incident for which I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall. An incident about every performer’s biggest fear – brain farting.

It was during the run of a low-budget musical at the EXIT. One night an actor walked on the stage for his big number, as he had done plenty of times before. But this night, once the music started and he opened his mouth, he felt the lyrics evaporate from his brain. By the second chorus, the words were lost. The actor stammered, stuttered, hummed, pranced, and used every “lala” in the book, hoping to kick the lyrics back in his head. But blasted, they were gone! He aggressively repeated the failing tactic. Now he was gone. The song finished, the torture was over, and he got the fuck off the stage.

He sat in the green room, shaking, sweating bullets, plotting a way to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. His fellow actors and the stagehands looked at him silently, as if he were a teenager who just blew the biggest prom date in history. Finally one actor, God bless his heart, sat down with him and told him this story:

In 1959, jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald and her band arrived on a Berlin stage close to the midnight hour, as part of a tiring tour of Europe. The band rolled through gorgeous versions of Cole Porter’s tunes and Gershwins’ ballads, and then Ella turned to the musicians and suggested on performing a song to give the German crowd something to cheer about – Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s classic “Mack the Knife.” Even though the song was a standard among popular singers, from Louie Armstrong to Bobby Darin, the Queen of Jazz herself never sang the song before.

“We’d like to try and do [‘Mack the Knife’] for you,” she told the audience. “We hope we remember all the words.” Right there, she was cursed. By the third verse, she began to lose the grasp of the words. By the fifth verse, she was completely lost. “Oh what’s the next chorus to this song now,” she sang, without losing the beat. “This is the one I don’t know.”

So Ella made up lines on the spot, did her best Satchmo impersonation, and threw in verses and verses of scats. “Now Ella and her fellas, we’re making a wreck … of ‘Mack the Knife,’” she went on to sing. The band finally crashed to a sloppy halt and the singer was left laughing her head off.

Well, fortunately that concert was recorded, and a year later Verve Records released “Ella in Berlin,” which included the complete screwed-up “Mack the Knife.” And Ella went on to win the Emmy Award for best vocalist for the song.

A great story, right? It was a truly kind gesture that actor did for his friend in need. And most importantly, thank God no one reminded the poor guy that … well … that Ella was an exception of the rule of fucking up. The First Lady of Song belonged in that very small group of artists who could fall off a tightrope and not only walk away unharmed, but win an award afterwards. Ah, we should all strive to be that good.

So when was the last time you wonderfully failed at something?

Mid-morning at the Bourgeois Pig café in Hollywood. I’m sipping a single Americano and rummaging through a crumbled Los Angeles Times, minding my own business, when a young wired screenwriter comes waltzing in. This place is swarming with young wired screenwriters. The scribe saddles up on the stool next to me, warms up his laptop and orders a double soy latte. After tossing an ill-fated wink towards the barista, he turns to me and, without a beat, proclaims, “Say, do you know who you look like?”

Oh Christ, here it comes.

“You look like that Chinese dude from ‘The Hangover’.”

Okay, I haven’t heard that one before.

“You know who I’m talking about?” he proceeds. “That Chinese guy? He played the gay gangster … uhm yakuza? What’s his name? Ken Chow? No. Ken Yoshi? Ken Nakamura?”

Ken Nakamura? I think I know a Ken Nakamura from San Francisco. The guy owes me money or something like that.

Of course, this screenwriter is thinking of Ken Jeong, who is neither Chinese nor Japanese and doesn’t look a damn thing like me. Then again, this young man’s options are limited.

It happens every once in a while, and not only just in Los Angeles. Someone will say that I look just like … and name one or two Asian or Asian American celebrities who are hot in Hollywood right now. Yes, usually an actor would be named, since Asians have yet to break the glass ceilings in pop music and professional sports. And of course, this actor would have been cast as a sushi chef or a math nerd or a martial arts expert … whatever stereotype is needed for the film.

But the “gay Chinese yakuza” from “The Hangover”? I must admit, that’s a new one. For a long while, all I was getting was, “You look just like Bruce Lee.” Seriously? Bruce Lee? That’s the only celebrity you can come up with? The guy’s been dead since 1973!

Back at the café, I just grin at the screenwriter and brush the whole thing off, but the incident reminds me of the opening scene from Wayne Wang’s 1982 low-budget film, “Chan Is Missing.” Set in San Francisco, the film begins with Jo, an ABC (American-born Chinese) cab driver, picking up an out-of-towner. Jo mentally counts down the seconds, before the visitor asks, “What’s a good place to eat in Chinatown?” “Under three seconds,” Jo thinks. “That question comes up under three seconds ninety percent of the time.”

A nudge at that horrendously racist Charlie Chan serial, “Chan Is Missing” follows Jo and his fellow cabbie and “No. 1 Son” Steve searching for their immigrant pal, Chan, who apparently skipped town with their cash. They drive around Chinatown, interviewing loads of quirky characters, all of whom have different opinions about their missing friend. Their leads throw them into a maze of Chinese and Chinatown politics, while their subject slips further and further away.

“This mystery is appropriately Chinese,” says Jo. “What’s not there has just as much meaning as what is there.” The film concludes with a photograph of Chan, who is standing in the shadow, his face unrecognizable, smiling like the Cheshire Cat.

Most of the cast in “Chan Is Missing” are non-actors; they look normal, like people I know. I feel very comfortable watching the film, like I am part of that community, that family.

Then sometimes I feel like Chan, invisible to the world without identity, just about non-existent if it weren’t for what was being said by a handful of chums. I am okay with that as well. There’s something to be said about not being pinned down.

But apparently, somebody out there thinks I look just like that dude from “The Hangover.”

So, which celebrity do people say you look like?

Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert’s review of “Chan Is Missing”: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19820101/REVIEWS/201010310/1023

The guitar shop stood blocks away from the campus of CSU Sacramento. It sold acoustic guitars, classical guitars, dobros, resonators, banjos, a couple of Fender electrics, a pedal steel, and stacks of music sheets. It was also known for its cheap guitar lessons. I first stepped into the shop back in the late 1980s. I wanted to play guitar. Not just any guitar, but blues guitar.

I met Paul, this tall lean fellow, at the counter. Paul was the consummate blues guitar teacher there, and to prove it, he greeted me with nothing but a grin and a gorgeous finger-picking version of the standard, “Hesitation Blues.”

“So you want to play the blues,” he finally said to me. “Any type of blues?”

I opened my backpack and took out a taped copy of “King of the Delta Blues Singers” by Robert Johnson. I handed him the tape and replied, “I want to play this.”

Paul put the cassette in a cheap Radio Shack recorder. The first couple bars of “Cross Road Blues” came on. He stopped the song and tried to copy the sound with his Martin. He shook his head, rewound the cassette, and played the two bars again, attempting to figure it out once more. He repeated the strategy again, and again, and again. After spending a half-hour picking apart the first verse, Paul stopped the recorder and gave the tape back to me. “Screw it,” he sighed. “I’ll just show you some Hot Tuna songs.”

So for the next few months I learned some picking styles, a bit of slide guitar, and a couple of Chuck Berry tunes. We never went back to Robert Johnson.

So many stories have been written about Mr. Johnson – the most famous (or infamous) one was how he sold his soul to the Devil in order to become the world’s greatest guitar player, and how the Devil later collected his dues by spiking his client’s drink with poison in 1938. That tale may be true, since the bluesman was full of mystery – the only proofs that he was ever alive on this good earth were two photographs, a death certificate, and 32 songs.

To musicians like Paul, the man was an impossibly complicated guitarist, who invented licks that defied time and rhythm and played them so fast that listeners believed there were two guitarists in the room. To blues singers, he was a soul singer from beyond, who made his voice both crawl in the gutter and soar into the heavens. To songwriters, he was the truest of originals, borrowing lines from others to create not only songs, but a whole persona – the ultimate sinner who refuses to be saved.

As for me, I never really wanted to copy Mr. Johnson’s style, but to reproduce an image. And not a real image like those two photographs, but a fake one, more specifically a drawing from the album cover of “King of the Delta Blues Singers, Volume 2.” You see, the bluesman recorded his songs in the course of only three days – all done in a hotel room. And the album cover depicted that scene: In one room, engineers ran this reel-to-reel. Connected to the machine was a cord, which wandered under the door into another room and right up to a single microphone. In the latter room, Mr. Johnson sat in front of the mike with his guitar. He’s facing a corner of the room. It was to this corner that he preached his blues. And that was all I wanted – to have a corner to which to sing my songs. Does a corner hear our confessions? Probably not. But it feels good to tell our troubles to it. And isn’t that the whole point of the blues?