Too Good To Be True Streetwalkers of San Francisco

I did this piece a few years ago. It was not a good time in my life. When I came back from my work in El Paso with Ministry I was pretty jaded. I hadn't had a steady girlfriend in over two years. The only women I did "take comfort in" during my time in El Paso were strippers and whores. After my return to NY I hooked up with The Men Of Sterling, and I did "The Sterling Men's Weekend" which was very misogynistic. Shortly thereafter I began dating a woman who lived in NYC. It was just one of those things. One day after a bad date (I think it may have been our last) I was on my way from NYC back home to Poughkeepsie on the train. I had recently been told by my friend Joe about this collection of images of San Francisco streetwalkers being sold on eBay. Joe had coincidently introduced me to the woman I'd been dating. I clipped all the shots from the eBay page. There were a couple of dozen in all, presented as a sampling of the book being auctioned, which contained hundreds. I had my laptop computer with me on the train and I was looking at the pictures. I was also listening to music, using iTunes in random shuffle. The Benny Goodman Quartet was among the items in the play-list and “Too Good To Be True” happened to play while I looked at the pictures. I started to laugh out loud. The images are so demeaning, some of those women are truly horrifying. The Benny Goodman tune with Helen Ward’s vocal is so sublime, her delivery so wonderfully mirthful. The lyric is such a stark contrast to the life of a streetwalker. It was just so profoundly and perfectly wrong. I immediately began an iMovie session and assembled the whole collection of images into a slide show with the tune and was done with it by the time my train reached the Poughkeepsie station.

I agree that the film seems somber, maybe even a bit mean spirited in a way. Making it definitely stroked my "He-Man Woman-Hater" bone. Like I said, I was pretty jaded at the time. But it is interesting to think about those women and what their lives might have been like, and what the world was like back then. Its also interesting to think of the ways the world has changed, and all the ways it hasn’t. I think it’s a good film because it does make you think. I think its Umour because it makes you feel somewhat uneasy.