There probably aren’t many places in Houston more suitable for a tarot card reading than Notsuoh. The nooks and crannies of the eclectic Main Street art bar – which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this week – lend themselves perfectly to the mystery and enlightenment of tarot’s divination.
Producer/director Seamus Moran clearly considered this when he made Notsuoh the setting of his new short film, Today’s the Day: TAROT. The experimental video was shot last fall and is helping kick off the Notsuoh Dirty Thirty Anniversary Festival. The four-day event starts with the film’s 8 p.m. debut on Wednesday, May 6 and concludes Saturday, May 9, book-ended by the premier of Purple Necklace, a film by Notsuoh owner, Jim Pirtle. In between, the festivities will include music, art installations, poetry, performance art, interactive crafts and more. In short, the kinds of weirdly wonderful activities the space at 314 Main has hosted since its inception in 1996.
Moran is a longtime member of the city’s arts and entertainment scenes, best known for his work on KPFT 90.1 FM, and as a photographer and filmmaker. He’s worked with folks like Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra, humorist David Sedaris and This American Life’s Ira Glass. Moran said Today’s the Day wasn’t created expressly for Notsuoh’s anniversary celebration, but it was a logical addition to the roster of events.
“Well, I know Jim Pirtle and I met Mark Pirtle first, his brother, back in the day, and he helped me learn about filmmaking. I wanted to shoot there because I was a fan of Notsuoh when it first opened,” Moran said. “I think I might have been one of the people that could see the potential because a lot of other people thought maybe that wasn’t such a great purchase back in the day, 30 years ago. But (Jim) saw something and I’m happy to help him celebrate his 30th anniversary. And since I shot this there, we both thought it would make sense that I would show it there as part of the celebration.”
Moran teamed with students from Houston City College to bring the 22-minute film to life. He said he’s had a long fascination with tarot and cards of all kinds. The film is the first of four shorts planned around cards. Future installments will feature playing cards, trading cards and resident alien/immigration cards. For the series opener, Moran reached out to local tarot practitioner Amber Ambrose.
“I’ve always had interest in that kind of stuff, any meaningful coincidences or synchronistic events,” he said, noting the attraction is also attached to the mysticism and risk-taking of tarot, an art which is traceable back to 1300 B.C., according to Moran. “You know, I definitely had some meaningful coincidences, even when I started editing this. If I would have called or emailed Amber every time that I thought she would find something interesting, that ‘While I was editing, you won’t believe what happened,’ I think she would probably distance herself from me. So, I didn’t do that. But I really did have some and it was cool to recognize what I thought was a meaningful coincidence.”
The events which transpire in the film, shot in an alcove at Notsuoh which gives parlor vibes, were by chance because Moran elected to shoot Ambrose at work and unscripted.
“She’s just immediately likable. She’s got great psychological insight into tarot, the cards and the history and the artwork of tarot,” Moran said. He recruited artist and musician Isa Machado to have her cards read and to engineer the film’s audio and fellow HCC student Pegah Shariatmadari to create credits for the film.
Machado and Shariatmadari are recent graduates and Houstonians by way of Mexico and Iran, respectively. Moran said the story was formed “by kind of letting the cards inform me how the structure of the video was going to be.
“So, yeah, it was a real video document. There was no script. They had never met before, Isa and Amber, so they had about 20 minutes to sit around while I got the cameras set up. And then the luck of the draw, whatever happened. You know, it happened in a really cool way. To say Isa got a great reading would be an understatement and it kind of surprised Amber about the cards that she drew. For this particular reading she drew from three different decks so the odds start getting pretty high for the cards that she drew to match from different decks.”
Without giving too much away, Moran said Machado got a very positive reading. With Ambrose turning and reading the cards, the experience was akin to “two people wishing each other well and having the tarot cards be the mechanism for how that message is delivered. It’s really cool,” Moran shared. “It was like giving each other best wishes, like good stuff is in store for you. It’s just something you don’t hear a lot of these days.”
The press materials Moran sent to pitch the screening included a blurb, describing the document as “a timeless message about trusting the journey.” You don’t need tarot cards to read between the lines. Two immigrants new to Houston, trying to find their fortunes are involved in the film. Its director also came to Houston new – back in 1976, by way of Canada – and found a home here. The venue the film was shot in, which has become a Houston arts staple, was also a gamble for its visionary owner, Jim Pirtle.
“I’m pretty sure it’s common knowledge he took out his teacher retirement fund, which was a good amount of money, but that was just not a place that anyone went,” Moran said of downtown Houston in the 1990s. “No one in Houston stayed after work to go somewhere downtown and no one came into town on the weekends to go anywhere downtown.”
Pirtle trusted his gut and the process and Notsuoh is presently experiencing a rebirth of sorts, with new generations of Houstonians, like Machado, enjoying new and improved elements of the bohemian space. Unlike many of her fellow Houstonians, she’d never been to Notsuoh until the day of her reading.
“She’d only seen it from the outside and didn’t know if it was abandoned because she’d go by in the mornings or something and it was always closed. So, when she came in, she really did come in for the first time,” Moran said.
“A week or so later, I asked her, you know, what do you think about this? I just did an audio interview with her and some of the things she said I diced up into the opening audio, so it kind of has a message. Really the takeaway is like, don’t be scared. Even though it’s a whole new world, coming to America, especially for Pegah as well, and then coming into this building and no one’s sure what’s going to happen. So, I made it a little creepy and then I made it very uplifting, all in the same video.”
Today’s the Day: TAROT screens at 8 p.m. Wednesday, May 6 at Notsuoh, 314 Main. The film will be aired in The Dome at Notsuoh, the art bar’s 20-foot mini-dome theater, and is part of the venue’s 30th anniversary celebration.
