Zimm put the ‘create’ in the ‘Creature’

There is always a local angle, and “in this digital age,” writes UC Berkeley law school Professor Franklin Zimring ,“a good idea can have a half-life of 60 years.”

Zimring’s father, Maurice Zimm ,a writer for radio, movies and TV, “invented” the “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” upon which is based the creature in this year’s Oscar-winning “The Shape of Water.”

In the early ’50s, Universal offered Zimm a five-week contract for the invention of a new monster movie format. Previous “monsters” King Kong and Godzilla, for example, were based on size. Zimm wanted to create an amphibious being only a bit larger than a human, with gills and fins.

“The Maurice Zimm creation was powerful, but not predatory, innocent about the motives of those in pursuit of him, but only inclined to use force in self-defense,” writes his son. When he took off with a woman, his intentions, writes Zimring, “did not seem either hostile or forcible.”

So a flip of the gill to Maurice Zimm.

A few weeks ago, Karen Logsdon reported about that “This Unit Will Be Out of Service Until” sign atop the broken escalator at the Montgomery Street BART/Muni station, to which someone had affixed the handwritten estimate, “the 12th of Never.” It has been changed, reports Logsdon, to “13th of Never.” But there are lots of possibilities there, until “pigs fly” and “hell freezes over” among the best known.

Hasta la vista, Rex Tillerson, and “How long until Trump needs to start getting visas for his administration?” asks Janice Hough, “because no Americans will take the jobs.”

Journalist and radio producer JoAnn Mar, host of a music show on KALW, started a crowdsourcing campaign to cover the medical costs for Striped Cat, who lives outdoors on the hillside above the station and was hit by a bullet that pierced one leg and shattered a bone. Mar took him to her vet, who amputated the leg. She’s looking for a family to adopt the amputee, and meanwhile is trying to cover medical costs with the campaign. It’s awful that some innocent creature got shot, but I’d say that Striped Cat lucked out afterward.

A reader who attended a performance of “Weightless” at Z Space the other night said a woman sitting nearby was “very enthusiastic about the work, sometimes doing that loud ‘through the teeth’ whistle, head-bobbing and foottapping with the music.” The reader looked closer; the fan was Frances McDormand.

“The Train: RFK’s Last Journey” opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art over the weekend, and there was a preview of it on Thursday, March 15, at the museum. Sam Whiting’s already described the exhibition, which includes works by three artists:

Paul Fusco’s pictures of crowds lining the tracks when Robert Kennedy’s body was carried from New York to Washington; Philippe Parreno’s seven-minute movie re-creating the scenes of onlookers; Rein Jelle Terpstra’s collection of snapshots and slides taken by those spectators.

So upon walking into the show and looking at the first few pictures, I found myself taken back to the shocking day that RFK was shot; grief-stricken all over again. The images — whether created by the artist or shot at the time — are similar, people waiting for the train, looking at it respectfully. (Only one slide, discovered by Terpstra, is marked; it shows a waiting crowd with the words scribbled in the margin, “Here it comes!” as though waiting for a circus train.)

But after peering closely at the images, my own point of view refocused. I wasn’t thinking of the assassination as it personally affected me, nor, admittedly, of the victim of the shooting. Looking at the crowd at the side of the tracks, I was wondering whether the woman in the housedress was friends with the man in the baseball uniform, whether the kid with the bicycle knew the preacher in the black suit.

The opening was crowded, and there was the usual buzz of excitement when old friends — photographers and photography aficionados — greeted each other. Many, of course, were saddened to be reminded of RFK’s tragic death. But despite the solemnity of the subject matter, it seemed that many were appreciating their sense of community, too.

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “Is this the line for Rolling Stones tickets?” Woman observing line at Social Security office, overheard by Norm Goldblatt