When the server is having problems, trying my hand at racketing out quick entries that fly into permanency under the server radar.

Last weekend's "best of 5" roadshow at the Pgh Film Cooperative showed a selection of new films and a few older ones, most notably "Invocation of my Demon Brother" by Kenneth Anger (and with music by Mick Jagger).

I've seen a couple of Anger's others films -- he was pretty groundbreaking in showing openly gay themes in movies -- but not this one. It didn't take a few moments to realize that this was is one of his 'later' films that delved into his interest in devil worship. So, OK, not a problem, I'm not exactly pro organized religion. But how will the audience handle this?

Well they loved it. Of the films, none over 30 mins long, they clapped the most for this one.

Cool, I thought, we either have hardcore satan worshippers in Pgh or folks are truly freed from the boundaries of religion and are appreciating the film for its *artistic* aspects.

Then we moved onto a film by Boston filmmaker Luther Price. His film "Clown" alternates between shots of one clown in a mask grunting perversely and another clown screaming. I've seen this film before and it was just as good this time. I spent most of the time laughing.

A number of people walked out.

"So, what did you think of CLown?" I asked at the Pgh homegrown brewery we went to afterwards (appropriately in a former Catholic church).

"Only a couple of people were laughing, like J -- and you know what a wack job she is."

"You're like the only person I know who think's it's funny!" my friend said, "Oh my gosh, don't you remember when we showed it the first year and that woman who was into you got up and looked at you and said, 'how can you be laughing at this? this is disturbrng!' and then never talked to you again?"

"Clowns have the aspect of provoking nervous reactions," said our host for the trip, "They are invariably inbued with the baggage our culture places on them, and so people can only react nervously when they see images that don't match their preconceived ideals."

"Yeah, I know!" I was buzzing on some tasty pgh brew, "Isn't that film *hot*?"

(I bet I made quite an impression.)

And what I get from the evening is that folks disturbed by screaming clowns also like films about demon worship...