– 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?

– Jesse Winchester, “The Brand New Tennessee Waltz”

You can hear a pin drop.

I bet you heard that phrase before. Usually it refers to the quietness of a room. But let’s say it isn’t a room but something larger, like a park. And not just any park, but Golden Gate Park. Now that would be something!

Sitting in the middle of Golden Gate Park during the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival one gloomy October afternoon, several hundred folk-music lovers, myself included, were waiting for a songwriters circle to take hold. I’ve always enjoyed a good old-fashioned songwriters circle, also known as a round robin or a guitar pull. The format, which was probably originated in someone’s living room or back porch, is simple: a handful of songwriters pass a lone guitar around, each presenting his or her homegrown creations. For me, it’s the best way to really hear a song.

The lineup to this particular round robin was impressive, and we were all prepared to hear the fine craftsmanship of Guy Clark, the political rant of Steve Earle and the country stomp of David Olney. But it was the fourth participant, Jesse Winchester, who really got to us.

The crowd was romping, stomping and singing along throughout the first three performers’ sets, having a good ol’ time. But when the spotlight was on Winchester, not a single audience member made a noise. Even the birds in the trees shut their traps. All of us sat there and listened quietly, intently, to this one artist, with his delicate guitar picking and his fragile voice, playing songs about lost memories and crushed dreams.

I swear, you can hear a pin drop in that park.

And if you didn’t have a lump in your throat, you probably had your mouth wide open in wonderment.

And all the while I was thinking, who is this guy and why haven’t I heard of him before? I found out the answer months later.

Winchester was an all-American boy, fresh out of high school, growing up in Mississippi during the mid-1960s. He was spending his summer days playing guitar in several rock bands, until one day, he received his draft notice. Not willing to fight and die in Vietnam, he did what any normal human being would do: he skipped town and crossed the Canadian border.

Alone in Quebec, he began writing heartbreaking ballads about his childhood in the South, which caught the ear of Robbie Robertson. Robertson produced the young man’s debut album, and Winchester began promoting his music throughout Canada. Yet he couldn’t tour in his own homeland without the risk of doing jail-time. He had to wait until 1977 – the year President Carter pardoned all draft resisters – when he could step foot in the United States again. He finally moved back for good in 2002 and a year later he appeared on that stage in Golden Gate Park where I first saw him.

This summer Winchester is making the rounds promoting his latest set of songs. I’m going to catch him at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica this September. I cannot wait to hear his voice, his guitar, and the sound of that pin dropping.

Jesse Winchester makes Neko Case cry during in a songwriters circle on Sundance Channel’s music program, “Spectacle: Elvis Costello With…”

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

– Double Dee & Steinski, “The Payoff Mix”

Stuck in traffic again: That’s the Angelenos’ common status. So here I am in this man-made parking lot on the 405. Cars are coughing, horns are honking. The only saving grace now is music. I roll up the window, press “Play” on the CD player, and turn up the volume: A snippet of Otis Redding’s spoken introduction to “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” taken from D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Monterey Pop, immediately breaks into a funky backbeat and a voiceover of some math teacher from the 1950s says, “Lesson Three.” Yes, I’m listening to Steinski.

Now I’m a novice when it comes to hip-hop. But as I grow older and wiser, I’m really starting to dig this stuff, from the political to the playful and everything in between. And for me, Steinski soars above them all.

A Jewish kid working for a top advertising firm in the Big Apple, Steve Stein got together with sound engineer and fellow pothead Douglas Di Franco to form one of the greatest hip-hop producing teams of all time, Double Dee & Steinski. In 1983, the duo created their first remix tape, entitled “The Payoff Mix,” entering it in some audio-mixing contest that was advertised in Billboard. After blowing away their competitors, they kept on cutting together more and more innovated sample-based tracks throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

The duo called these sound collages “lessons,” but I think they are more like mini-audio answers to James Joyce’s epic modern novel Finnegans Wake. Just like Joyce, who used historical and cultural references – Celtic mythology, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Shakespeare, Giambattista Vico, the Holy Bible and the Qur’an – throughout his work, Double Dee & Steinski tossed up a pop culture salad in their “lessons,” stealing everything they could find on radio, records, television and movies: Odetta; John Coltrane; Groucho Marx; R&B singer Junior; Muddy Waters; comics Robin Williams and Gilbert Gottfried; Dion and The Belmonts; Little Richard; The Supremes; “Tonight Show” announcer Ed McMahon; The Rolling Stones; UC Berkeley activist Mario Savio; John F. Kennedy; Glenn Miller; The Incredible Bongo Band; Sly and the Family Stone; footage from Glengarry Glen Ross, Dirty Harry, The Pajama Game, The Maltese Falcon, Diner, Orson Wells’ radio program “War of the World,” Bollywood movies, and various science class films; and of course the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, James Brown, whose music is the backbone to every rap song out there.

Steinski’s later solo work ventured more into political commentary, focusing on topics like the first Gulf War and the 9/11 attacks. His most controversial work was “The Motorcade Sped On,” an astonishingly danceable deconstruction of CBS news broadcasts on the Kennedy assassination.

Nowadays as DJs all over the world copied his copying style, Steinski has packed up his magnetic tape, gone back to his old name, and left the music business. I don’t know how old he is, probably around my age. So Stein has retired to the suburbs, and I am here trapped on a L.A. freeway.

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a disc jockey for KZAP-FM, spinning 33s, 45s and 78s for a few hours in the morning. Well, it seems that Steve Stein lived my dream, except his “radio shows” were in six-minute increments and were passed around on cassette tapes. So, children, what does it all mean? Hm, I’m not really sure.

So, who else out there wanted to be a radio DJ?

The history of hip-hop, according to Double Dee & Steinski

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?

I turned on the CD player and The Dell-Vikings’ “Whispering Bells” came ringing in. After that snappy song faded away, a baritone began singing a melody that sounded like the pounding of a huge drum, and off went The Volumes’ “I Love You.” I knew I’d be stuck in traffic for a while, and there’d be nothing but doo wop on the stereo. And I was perfectly fine with that.

So why do I keep a complication of doo wop music in my car? Well, these songs make great vocal warm-up exercises. On my way to gigs, I play the CD full-blast and sing along, usually doing all the harmonies. Also, let’s face it – these songs are so goddam catchy!

Doo wop started, like all great movements, in churches. During the 1930s, singers from the East Coast took what they learned from gospel music and walked over to the street corners. Underneath the glow of a street lamp, they would sing a cappella in three-, four-, sometimes five-part harmonies. Many of the singers at the time were African American, but in the 1950s Italian American doo wop groups started to emerge, again standing under the lamps, singing into the echoes of empty crossroads.

Now I don’t know where the name comes from. I have yet to hear the phrase muttered in a song. I’ve heard plenty of “sha-boom, sha-boom” and “sha-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na” and “shoo-doo-be doo-be-wah” and even “rat-ta-ta ta-ta-ta too-a-oo,” but no “doo wop.” I guess the name is easier to say than “Bom-be-de-bom-bom, bom-de-de-bom …”

In the still of the night, under the blue moon, feeling a thousand miles away, I was now caught on the 101 North, cars smoking around me, city lights glowing. And I was belting along with The Mystics, The El Dorados, The Hollywood Flames, The Silhouettes, The Crows, The Marcels, The Elegants, The Cadillacs, The Monotones, The Teenagers, The Five Satins, The Jive Fives, The Skyliners, The Dells, The Moonglows, The Velvetones, The Penguins, The Crests, The Heartbeats, The Pastels, The Flamingoes, The Spaniels, and my favorite, Dion and the Bellmonts. And for a moment, I was far away from the Hollywood traffic, and was standing on a New York corner, under a buzzing lamp, singing a cappella with my chums. Oh, what a night!

So how do you kill time in traffic?

The Teenagers

Dion and the Bellmonts

– T. S. Eliot

It is one of those mornings, when the body moves faster than the mind … and the body is barely moving at all.

The sun breaks through the shades and shines on my weary eyes, like a cop’s flashlight. C’mon. Let’s move along. Okay, okay. It is morning, but my mind thinks it’s still the dead of night. I wash up, I get dressed. But this heavy fog of slumber lies in the valley of my skull. The only cure to lift this darkness: Coffee.

As I fight my way through traffic, heading to a local café, this Gregorian chant echoes inside my head: O Holy Coffee! Relieve me from my sins and guide me to the blessed light!

I make it to the “chapel” – a dark coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard. It is a sanctuary for amateur screenwriters, tapping away on their glowing laptops, working on a no-budget horror flick or some indie-bromance. I am standing in line for hours. The hold-up: This Bluetooth-wearing Hollywood agent, oblivious of his surroundings, struggling through the menu: black coffee, white coffee, Americano, cafe au lait, cafe latte, cafe mocha, cafe breva, cafe macchiato, cappuccino, dry cappuccino, espresso, espresso con panna, espresso macchiato, double shot, triple shot, red eye, black eye, hammerhead, iced coffee, iced mocha, iced latte, lungo, ristretto, flat white … 

In my mind: O Holy Coffee! O Holy Coffee!

“Do you have a caramel frappuccino?” asks Bluetooth Man.

“No. This isn’t Starbucks,” replies the barista.

O Holy Coffee! O Holy Coffee!

“Okay. How about a soy latte?”

“Single or double?”

“Double? Is that bigger than a Venti?” 

O Hol— Hey, asshole! He said, this isn’t fucking Starbucks!

Finally, I make it to the register. I am prepared. “Small coffee. Black. Thanks.”

I sit down and place the cup in the center of the table. I dive right in. I disappear into the black water. I fill my lungs, my veins, my brain with sweet caffeine. I rise with the steam. Rise up to the heavens. There I kneel down and thank the ghost of St. Juan Valdez. It is accomplished. Now I can go on with my day.

So who else is addicted to coffee?

How to order coffee in Los Angeles:

Coffee as the Universe:

A young, doe-eyed folk singer shared songs in a dark empty coffee shop in San Francisco. The songs, passed down to her by her mentors, were popular a decade before she was born and were written three, four, five decades before that. The floor boards creaked as she rocked to the rhythm of her guitar strumming. She didn’t have a great voice, but she meant every word, carrying the weight of the oppressed whom she never really met. “Still she’s overdoing it,” I thought, sipping my third cup of coffee. “But what the hell? It’s a chilly night and the entertainment in here is free.”

She began her second set, explaining the history of her next song. And the history – it went exactly like this:

In 1948, Woody Guthrie, forced to retire from performing due to early signs of Huntington’s disease, heard a radio report about a plane crash near Los Gatos Canyon. The dead were four Americans and 28 migrant farm workers, who were being deported back to Mexico. The radio announcer said the names of the four Americans but reported the others as “just deportees,” as if their names weren’t important. From this report, Guthrie did what every great humanitarian would do – he wrote a poem dedicated to those unnamed victims.

And so this young woman stopped talking and sang Guthrie’s poem, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” set to music by Martin Hoffman in 1958. Her voice shook as she stepped in the shoes of Guthrie, who stepped in the shoes of a lone Mexican worker, saying goodbye to his amigos who were flying back to the border. That flight didn’t make it to the border, but instead headed straight down into the canyon.

“Who are these friends who scatter like dry leaves?” cried the singer. “The radio said they were ‘just deportees’.” And at that moment, I felt the waterworks coming. By the time she sang the final chorus, I could barely hold my tears.

I was so unbelievably touched but I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was the way she was singing, or what she was singing about, or the fact the poet himself cared so much for these “friends” whom he had never met. Or perhaps, as horrible that plane wreck was, the real tragedy was that some people would be so heartless that they would brush off others like they were “dry leaves.” Those immigrants were human beings, for God’s sake, and to describe them as “just deportees,” well it was unspeakable.

It took me years to learn that song. I never wanted to play it, because it really hit a nerve. I just didn’t want to go there. But when I began playing at a farmers market here in Los Angeles, I put the song in my repertoire. At the market, I would run into immigrant farm workers and recalled that my own family, like so many Japanese American families at the turn of last century, worked on farms, worked there until the war started and they were placed in internment camps up and down the West Coast. Though they own their own properties, they were, and would always be, aliens in the eyes of the American public.

So I sing this song with a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye. Because at times I do still feel like an outlaw, a rustler and a thief, but I know that on both sides of the river, we die just the same.

“Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita/Adios mi amigos, Jesus y Maria/You won’t have your names when you ride the big aeroplane/All they will call you will be ‘deportees’”

So which song makes you cry?

My version of “Deportee”

It begins with the Word: “Everybody heard about the bird!”

I first heard the song when I was part of the theater arts department at Sacramento State. The school was not known for its fine arts, but lucky for us drama kids, it did provide the town’s best venue – Sac State’s oldest building, a 30-seat black box theater, which stood in the middle of the campus. The theater was truly a black box: no lobby, no ticket booth, no backstage. The bathroom doubled as a green room. Near the top seats was the lighting booth, which consisted of a stool and a rusty creaking machine that ran eight brand-new Fresnels, the only items in the room that weren’t from the early 1930s. We had to bring in our own sound system, a borrowed stereo offered by one of our classmates. Sure the theater doesn’t sound like much, and it wasn’t, but for us, it was The Place, mainly because we had complete creative control over it. No faculty ever came by the building. Ever!

My college friend Don Radovich and I put up our own plays there – short, absurdist works-in-progress, in which some of our fellow theater classmates love to participate, anything away from those great big boring musicals that the Drama Department was running in the main theater at the time.

During one midnight rehearsal there, we were working on a series of playlets, to be presented later in the semester. A freshman actor came up to Don and me and said, “There is a bird motif throughout these plays. Did you two intend that?”

“Bird motif?” I wondered. “I didn’t know there was a bird motif here.” I turned to Don. “Did you know about the bird—”

Don cut me off with his reply: “Everybody knows that the bird is the word!”

The actor walked away bewildered.

The next day, Don came in the theater and played an old cassette in the stereo. The first song: The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird.” There it was. That was the theme song for our production. Long after the show ended its run, I would play that song constantly throughout that year and the following several years.

The Trashmen, an obscure 1960s surfer band, could be considered the founders of the mashup genre, except they didn’t have any digital help. They connected two songs by the even more obscure R&B band The Rivingtons – “The Bird’s the Word” and “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” – to create the great “Surfin’ Bird.” I love all three songs, but “Surfin’ Bird” is the best. For a little more than two minutes, the rhythm section races down like a runaway train, as the distorted sandpaper vocals gnarls the lyrics, first chopping up “The Bird’s the Word,” then drowning in its own title, before coming up for air with “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow.” It’s pure punk, and nothing else.

Now you know about the “Bird.” Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-
pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-oom-mow-mow! Papa-oom-mow-mow!

So what song is stuck in your head right now?

– John Cassavetes, “Faces”

A few months after filmmaker John Cassavetes’s death in 1989, someone had the great idea of showing several of his films in theaters throughout the nation. It was a fitting tribute, and a necessary one, since Cassavetes demanded that his works not be shown on television, even after his death. This request was his final attack at Hollywood.

When the retrospective came around Sacramento, I caught his 1968 film, “Faces,” at a small suburban theater in the middle of a summer day. The theater was less than half-full. The audience looked young. Probably like me, they only heard of the director’s name but have not seen any of his movies.

After the house lights dimmed, the projector rolled and the film began. The first 20 minutes were mind-boggling – the black-and-white film was grainy and at times overexposed; the sound was full of echo and … my God, was this movie overdubbed? It seemed parts of it were. The characters on-screen – two middle-aged businessmen (John Marley and Fred Draper) and a 28-year-old blonde (Gena Rowlands) – had just left a bar and were continuing their fun at her apartment. They told bad jokes, ran through horrible college routines, and sang loudly off-key. The scene felt like it’s taking for hours, then suddenly one of the men noticed that he was being left out in the fun. Jealous, he went in for the kill. “So what do you charge, Jeannie?” he asked the woman. Time came to a halt. Suddenly insults were flying and wounds ripped open. Right then the film became interesting, although I felt I shouldn’t be watching it. It was so unsettling, yet my eyes were hooked on the screen.

The first three-fourths of “Faces” are like that scene. They follow the same formula – a drunken gathering is held; there are lots of laughter, dancing, joking around; then suddenly someone says something inappropriate and all hell breaks loose. And the audience members become flies on the wall, witnessing these battles and their bloody aftermaths.

The film’s last act is the hangover. Emptiness settles in. The bathroom mirror reveals the lines on the faces. Someone tries to kill herself, but then again, all of them feel like they need to be saved. So they cling on to the closest person lying next to them.

Gena Rowlands once recalled a preview screening for one of Cassavetes’s film. She and Cassavetes were standing in the theater lobby as the film was rolling. In the middle of the screening, a man storms out of the theater. He is sweating bullets, obviously aggravated by what he was watching on screen. The man stood there in the lobby for a moment. He then wiped his brow, took a deep breath, and walked back into the theater. Cassavetes had a big grin on his face. He knew his film’s magic was working.

I knew how that stranger felt. After seeing “Faces” for the first time, I felt like I fell down a flight of stairs. I picked myself up, brushed myself off and walked out of the theater. The sun was setting, and I never felt more alive. But man, I could have used a drink.

So what film changed your life?

A short look at “Faces”: