Classical Art Crawl - Great Idea

Someone had a very good idea: a musical art crawl. And they found a good place to hold it: St. Paul's Lowertown. I guess it's been going on for a few years now. I read about it only the other day in Pamela Espeland's ArtSpace column.

Here's the idea. Various musical ensembles perform the same fifteen minutes of music four times during a two-hour span at venues in close proximity to one another. During the fifteen-minute intervals between sets, listeners are free to come up to chat with the performers or make their way to a nearby venue to hear something different.

During the next two hours, the ensembles and the selections change but the venues remain the same.

The six venues involved in this "classical crawl" were located in two buildings two blocks apart, making it easy to move from one to another without missing a performance. Brilliant. And fifteen minutes turned out to be ample time for a group to create a mood and display some musicality. In fact, it was downright refreshing.

I spent a good part of the morning before the event rearranging the performances listed in the online schedule by time-slot rather than venue, and came up with a musical itinerary that seem eminently doable. But as long as we were going to travel all the way across town from Minneapolis, I thought our first stop ought to be for lunch.

 Salty Tart was simply great. As it happens, we had eaten recently at two of Kim Bartmann's Minneapolis spots—Red Stag and Book Club. Both were distinctly "okay." Salty Tart reminded us of the word "flavor." My mushroom galette had that wild mushroom oomph. I don't remember what-all was in Hilary's dish but avocados and salsa were involved, and it was tasty. Bottomless cup of great coffee. Then on to the show.

We started off in the Baroque Room, located on the second floor of the Northwestern Building. A group called Flying Forms performed  J. S. Bach's Organ Trio Sonata in D Minor, BWV 527. Sprightly, then mellow. 

Right down the hall at Studio Z we tapped into  an engaging  improvisatory rendering of Pauline Oliveros's "The Well and the Gentle" (1982) performed by Zeitgeist on clarinet, piano, and vibes. Clarinetest Pat O'Keefe explained that an Oliveros composition consists not of notes but of pitches and text describing what the music is supposed to sound like. Beyond that, the musicians are on their own. He has worked with the composer personally and emphasized how important that is to getting the music right.

To me the performance sounded less random that "free" jazz often does. I liked it. I took a photo of the score. It might have been interesting to hear it four times rather than only once; I imagine that each iteration was significantly different. But we had other fish to fry, and climbed six flights of stairs to hear a group called Ladyslipper perform French lute and viol music of the 17th century by Lambert, Sainte Colombe, Gaultier.

From there we wandered down the street to the Nautilus Music Theater to hear the members of the Skylark Opera Theatre do a few arias. By this point in our itinerant  program the vigor of a well-trained human voice sounded heavenly.

 Then it was back to STUDIO Z  to hear the Pavia Wind Quintet perform transcriptions of some frothy spring-like piano pieces by Debussy, Poulenc, and Nino Rota. Once again, the brief performance times and the abrupt mood changes between genres were refreshing. It was as if I was listening harder, or easier—no time to drift off—in the knowledge that the event would soon be over.

 Our final stop was at the Black Dog Café to hear a couple of crisp movements from Mozart's Divertimento in Eb Major for String Trio, K. 563, performed by members of the Mill City String Quartet. In comparison to the Renaissance ensembles we'd heard earlier, the sound was louder, brighter, more concise...and let's face it, there's a reason Mozart is a household name, while Lambert, Sainte Colombe, and Gaultier are not.

The musicality, the diversity, and the logistical flexibility of this event commend it equally, I think. It's a great promotional opportunity for the ensembles involved, and to top it all off, everything is free. There are plenty of places to pick up a glass of wine or some food if you're so inclined. And you might even run into someone you know.

We bumped into local percussionist and old family friend Eric Corsen; MPR celebrity Steve Staruch, who filled us in on the early history of this event; and our next door neighbor Alice. By the time we got home, I was eager to reacquaint myself with my ten-CD set of William Byrd's complete harpsichord music.  

And even that sounded good.

One Final Note About the Film Fest

Shadow, the latest “period” drama by Chinese director Zhang Yimou, probably had the biggest budget of any film I saw at the festival, but I wouldn’t rank it among the best. For one thing, the entire film seems to take place in caves, during rainstorms, or amid the halls of giant palaces with the rain falling outside. It all seems a little dark and dreary, and the characters are often dwarfed by their elaborate yet shadowy surrounding. The film has little of the color or fantasy that distinguished such classics of the genre as House of the Flying Daggers and Heroes, and the central combat trope seemed a little lame to me: twirling umbrellas made of detachable, knife-sharp steel ribs.

During the battle scenes no one actually expired before being slashed and chopped and punctured at least fifteen times, and the sound of blood gurgling from wounds and mouths might easily have earned an Academy Award for some Chinese foley artist.    

That being said, I have to admit I liked the film, though my favorite scene involves a wild and lengthy duet performed on the Chinese zither by the emperor’s sister and the commander while the umbrella warriors are retaking the city.

Maybe the best word to describe Song of the Tree would be “singspiel,” a German word for a drama in which spoken dialogue is interspersed with folk songs. But it’s a strange term to apply to a film set in the harsh and largely treeless uplands of Kyrgyzstan. The action takes place in the late eighteenth century, when nomadic tribes lived in yurts and moved from place to place seasonally to find new pastures for their cattle, goats, and horses. Naturally there’s a chieftain with a beautiful daughter who’s fallen in love with the wrong young gent, a headstrong commoner who’s charming but also immature and generally inept. It’s a complex morality play about love, loyalty, sacrifice, and devotion to the clan, and songs erupt spontaneously here and there, challenging us in their simplicity to deny that the emotions they express aren’t the important things in life.

Two of the film's executive producers were in attendance, and during the Q & A they admitted to having cut out an hour of footage, including a lengthy subplot about the clash between Islam and the native religion. Too bad.  

 Harvest Season focuses on the role played by Latinos in the Napa Valley wine industry. Wildfires rage and seasonal immigrants sometimes wonder where they’re going to spend the night, but a good deal of the film—perhaps too much—focuses on Latino vineyard owners, who face the same problems as other vintners: what to plant, when to harvest, how to get the most from their grapes. Anglo, Latino, or Chinese, all vintners tell the same stories. I would like to have learned more about the workers.

   

I sometimes need to remind myself, when considering whether to go to the movies, that a film is almost invariably richer than the two-sentence description you read in the catalogue. Where Are You, João Gilberto? is that rare film that turns out to be much less interesting than its description. 

Gilberto is credited with inventing the Bossa Nova, a style of Brazilian music that took the world by storm in the late 50s and early 60s. He had a string of hits, including “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Desafinado,” then retreated into self-imposed isolation. Georges Gachot, our film-maker “hero,” heads to Brazil to find him, with the aid of a book written by a journalist who went on a similar quest before dying under mysterious circumstances. (A red herring, complete with remoulade.)

Gachot investigates nothing. There are lots of shots of him sitting in cafés and walking along the beach, hoping to spot João. He goes to a record store to talk to the merchant who sells João’s LPs. He visits the hotel bathroom where João was purported to have sat for eleven hours strumming his guitar. He talks to the guy who, even today, cuts João’s hair regularly; he talks to João’s agent in an attempt to set up a meeting; he talks to João’s ex-wife, who chats with João on the phone often. There is no mystery here. There is no story. And the Bossa Nova soundtrack soon grows tiresome.   

 

 Documentaries have been assembled about jazz artists of every stripe, from Bill Evans and Lee Morgan to Charles Lloyd, Anita O’Day, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Chet Baker. They tend to follow a similar pattern: success, innovation, drugs, domestic violence, decline, renewal, relapse. Often the artists’ wives and girlfriends figure prominently. Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock also tend to show up, like a couple of talented and impressionable kids who were THERE, and still happen to be alive. Lots of brief musical cuts—no one wants to hear the whole track!—and there are usually plenty of street scenes of Manhattan or LA at night.

I’ve never seen a jazz biopic I didn’t like.

The new Miles Davis documentary, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, follows the same format, though the stakes seem to be a little higher, due to the fact that Miles was glamorous, and angry, and cool, and for several decades he had a knack for assembling the best combos around, one after another. His first wife, the dancer Francis Taylor, still full of character and candor, adds a welcome dimension to the narrative.

I grew up on the Miles Davis Quintet. As I write these words I’m listening to Miles in the Sky, which was recorded in 1968. It’s the first of Miles’s albums to have a guitar on it, and its second track, “Paraphernalia,” figures prominently in the documentary’s soundtrack.

The film follows Miles’s career into the high-volume noise of Bitches Brew and well beyond. It’s all part of the story. If you haven’t listened to Miles, if you haven’t heard his story, this film would be a good place to start.

The Danish film Before the Frost, set in the mid-nineteenth century, focuses on a farm family that’s struggling to keep food on the table. In the opening scene, Jens, the old man, sells a cow he can ill afford to lose to support his lovely but malnourished daughter and the two nephews he’s raising now that his sister has died. Soon afterward a wealthy Swedish farmer who’s moved south to be with his mother in her old age offers to buy a patch of Jens’s land—land that Jens needs to grow fodder for his two remaining cows. These are desperate and dreary times, but Jens finally works out a deal, giving up his entire farm along with its livestock, in exchange for a pension. After all, the farm is insured, so if it burns down ... ? Also, the Swede will have to marry his daughter.

It’s a nightmare scenario—Jens and his daughter don’t fit in amid these sophisticated foreigners, not to mention the two nephews—but the situation unravels with stunning artistry, with new and ever more grim moral quandaries at every turn of the path.

 The last film we saw, and one of the best, was from Turkey: The Wild Pear Tree. It runs to more than three hours but the pacing is exquisite, and at no point did I find myself thinking, I wonder when this will be over. The film recounts the life of a young man names Sinan, fresh out of college, who returns from the city to the small town where he was raised. He plans to be a teacher though he hasn’t yet taken the exam. He’s also written a book and has high hopes of arranging to get it published. Trouble is, the book is a fictionalize memoir of his adolescence, and it paints an unflattering picture of his relatives, neighbors, and friends.

He chats at length with the mayor, who declines to help him, though if it had been a tourist guide he would have had no difficulty providing a subsidy. The mayor sends him to the man who runs the local gravel pit. Another lengthy and futile conversation ensues. Back in the city to take his exam, Sinan runs into a locally famous author in a bookstore and corners the poor man for quite a while to discuss a conference he attended once, his manuscript, the current state of literature, and so on.

Interspersed with these lengthy but discordant and futile exchanges are encounters involving Sinan's old high school flame, two imams stealing apples from a tree, and Sinan’s own parents. His home life has long since come unglued thanks to his good-natured father’s gambling addiction, and he often visits his grandparents on their rustic farm in the hills near town. 

In the course of these comings and goings, many of them carried out on foot, a picture emerges of an idealistic but tactless and increasingly bitter young man who sees few opportunities lying ahead for him other than military service or a dead-end job. Sinan isn’t all that likeable, but it’s fascinating to see him butt heads with former friends who've chosen to remain in town and more mature individuals who have no difficulty defending their seemingly dreary lives against his lofty criticisms. A few deftly introduced dream sequences complete this picture of a personality at odds with his social surroundings--and himself. 

Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the world's heavyweights. He won the Palme 'd Or at Cannes a few years ago, and his recent film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia was dark but stunning. Here he has given us a complete multi-generational package. Call it art. Call it life.

Volunteering for the fest as an usher, a floater, or a greeter, can be tedious or hectic, depending on the shift, but for the most part it’s simply great fun. You get free passes to the movies, and a certain collegiality develops as you get to know the other volunteers a little. The names don’t always stick, but among the individuals I’ve been working with this year are Zack, who holds down two jobs on the West Bank—at Palmer’s Bar and a hole-in-the-wall hotdog shop called the Wienery; Shelley, who also volunteers at the Fringe Fest and Theater Latte Da; Jesse, a young Korean-American woman who seems eager to get involved in the film world any way she can; Bruce, a retired psychology professor; Roger and Lesley, two transplants from Milwaukee; Colin from Cleveland; Peter, another retiree who spends half the year or more in Mayasia, where the weather is hot, people are friendly and often speak English, and the food is cheap.

Then there are the pass-holders, whom you begin to recognize because they’re there every day—the one with unnaturally red hair, the one who was featured in the newspapers a few years ago, the one with the long beard and the knapsack. You might easily strike up a conversation with one of them, or with Susan Smoluchowski, the film society’s executive director, who seems to drift at random in and out of the five theaters at St. Anthony Main, where the festival is held, or with Al Milgrom, who’s been involved in the festival since its inception forty-odd years ago, and seems to recognize you, though you’re quite sure he doesn’t know who you are.

You also run into your friends, some of whom have been going to a lot more films than you have. You stop in with them at Pracna or the Aster Café for a beer or a burger between films, or perhaps walk a few blocks together to Punch Pizza to take advantage of the $3 OFF coupon in the film fest brochure.

And then it’s over. And spring has arrived. And you jot down a few notes like these, to make sure you don’t forget about all these remarkable films from far-flung parts of the world.

More Films, More Films

Week two. The aftermath of war, and quite a few documentaries.

Ensemble offers a portrait of the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal as they embark on their first European tour. I suppose I've been spoiled by the recent Frederick Wiseman documentaries, but this effort seemed a little thin to me. The director never quite made it clear what kind of an orchestra we were observing, though it seemed to be a community-based entity that came together almost by chance and  kept itself alive long enough to attract some wealthy patrons and hire Yannick Nézet-Séguin, a top-notch conductor, to lead it.

The first half of the film tells the back-story of a few of the musicians and also includes extensive episodes of rehearsal time. The most interesting element in the second half, which follows the ensemble on tour, is the succession of European concert halls we visit. Some are hallowed venues—the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, for example -- while others are post-modern jewels and/or monstrosities. Nézet-Séguin, who guest-conducts often in Europe, is familiar with them all, and it's interesting to hear him describe the acoustics of these structures, one after another, to his musicians.

One film-fest "extra" that those who view the film in a theater or stream it online won't see is a charming video that the director shot with his iPhone. He was supposed to appear at the fest to discuss the film, but his wife, whom he met in Minneapolis five years ago at a festival, just had a baby. Here he is in the hospital, apologizing at length for his absence, then rotating the camera so we can see his wife breast-feeding their infant son from her hospital bed.

Meeting Gorbechev. Herzog begins this interesting if spotty documentary by presenting the former head of the USSR with what he thinks will be a startling question. "I am a German," he says. "The first German you ever encountered in your youth probably wanted to kill you. How does that make you feel?"

Gorbachev, after a long pause to listen to the translation on an earpiece, cracks a big smile and replies, "Wrong. My grandfather managed a collective farm. There was an ethnic German community nearby. They made gingerbread. Much better than anything we ate at home. My first encounters with Germans were very sweet."

And so it goes. Only a third of the film, I would guess, is dialog. The rest is stock footage recounting Gorbachev's career, his rise in the ranks of the Party, how broad his vision was compared to that of  the mass of apparatchiks and party hacks, his views about what the Soviet Union had to do to join the ranks of developed nations, his marriage to Raisa, and so on.

Film clips of foreign leaders including Margaret Thatcher, George Shultz, James  Baker, and Lech Walesa add perspective. But Herzog could more clearly have described the chain of events that included the failed coup-d'etat of 1991, the rise of Yeltsin, and the dissolution of the USSR. Many young viewers are entirely unfamiliar with these events, and for those of us who read about it in the papers at the time, the details have drifted out of focus.    

The film is well worth seeing, but because it focuses on a world-class statesman rather a quirky outsider,  it lacks the poetry and eccentricity we associate with a typical Herzog documentary, among which I'd include Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Grizzly Man, Encounters at the Ends of the Earth, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

Golden Harvest takes a long and affectionate look at something that's warmed the hearts of women and men since ancient times—olive oil. The film's writer and director, Alia Yunis, is from St. Paul, Minnesota, but her parents are Palestinian, and as a youth she was embarrassed by how "different" they were, and confused by how much olive oil they used in their cooking. This eventually sent on a quest to find out about the cultivation of olive trees, the pressing of the olives, and the "culture" of the oil itself, which differs from country to country. 

She visits Palestine, Italy, Greece, Spain, and Israel, discusses the growing market for "extra virgin" oil, the issue of adulterated oil from Tunisia Turkey, and other hot places being labeled as "extra virgin" Italian oil, and so on. She visits organic farms in Italy and co-ops in Spain exploring the diversity of approaches to the plant. Some producers harvest the olives by hand using little rakes, while others make use of heavy-duty machinery, yanking the trunks in every direction to loosen the olives from the branches. Some high-end bottlers hire connoisseurs to blend the oils from different orchards for export. Others are content to keep people employed and produce an affordable oil for home consumption.

It's a rambling journey, but the stops are varied and the enthusiasm high, the common threads being only the olive itself and the narrator's good-natured and whimsical curiosity. After the film, I felt it imperative to make one further stop—at the supermarket, to pick up some hummus and a variety of items from the olive bar. 

The Silence of Others opens with a very old woman placing flowers on a mound by the side of a highway. "In two days they'll be gone," she says, looking into the camera. My husband is buried there. Next is a white-haired man who tells us, "I was tortured by the Franco regime for my political activities. My torturer lives in that apartment right across the street."

I'm probably not remembering the scenes accurately, but these are the stories around which directors Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar build their film. Shot over the course of six years, it deals with the efforts of victims of the Franco regime and their loved ones to bring those individuals who persecuted them to justice—a task made more difficult by the fact that the Spanish government passed a law when Franco died giving amnesty to political criminals on both sides of the political divide.

The film isn't merely an expose of past crimes, however. It follows the efforts of a variety of victims to get legal redress under an international war crimes protocol. Their cases are eventually taken up by a court in Argentina. The Spanish court is reluctant to cooperate. It's a fascinating struggle, as well as a moving memorial to those who suffered and often died during the forty years of Franco's rule.

The Interpreter, a fictional narrative, also takes up the issue of war crimes, albeit at one generational remove. By a strange twist of events, a Slovak interpreter named Ali takes a job translating for Georg, the son of the S.S. chief who murdered his parents. Georg is determined not to feel guilty about crimes he didn't commit; he witnessed the effects of second-hand remorse on his sister, who starved herself to death at the age of twenty. All the same, he's deeply troubled by his ancestry and wants to visit the places in Slovakia where his father was stationed. But he doesn't speak the language.

Ali is marginally courteous, if terse and sometimes disdainful of his boorish, skirt-chasing "employer." Georg would like Ali to loosen up a bit. The first half of the film is comic, slow-burn, odd-couple stuff, though every scene carries undercurrents of Ali's indignation. At one remote farm where Jew's were hidden and later discovered and shot, an old friend asks Ali, "Why  did you bring that man here?" Ali replies, "Because he knows nothing."

As the road trip continues, we learn more about Georg, his father, and Ali, and what might have been simply an exercise in glib reconciliation takes on the aura of a minor masterpiece.  

   

Equally satisfying is the Finnish period piece Land of Hope, in which Anni, the daughter of a high-and-mighty bakery-owner, marries a clumsy lumberjack and takes up a new way of life on the farm he was eligible to receive in compensation for his war service—presuming he married first. A variety of colorful minor characters add fiber to the story, including the woman who donated the land, her alcoholic son, Anni's sister, and especially the crotchety old man who lives just around the point, often shows up in a rowboat, and provides all sorts of good advice to the young couple about clearing their land.

Oona Airola shines in the role of Anni. Her exuberance and grit allow her negotiate the labrinth of her father's business affairs and also keep the dream of the lakeside farm alive in the midst of a few setbacks. One reviewer observed: "Although almost everyone in this film seems to be marked by the war in one way or another, they still offer a helping hand or at least bring over a fish, while the most engaging supporting character turns out to be a horse – which, let’s face it, should always be the case."

Director Markku Pölönen has never made a splash on the international scene, perhaps because he's not much interested in villains. In a recent interview he remarked: 

I’ve always admired Frank Capra. You can choose the way you look at the world. You can see it as hell, but my theory is that at least 97.3% of the people living on this planet are good. The rest are arseholes. Maybe I’m a romantic, but you can walk on the sunny side of the street or stay in the shadow. Me? I like the sun. In order to survive, these people had to work together. You couldn’t just go to some office and say: 'I am in trouble, and I need money.' You had to trust your neighbors. I was born in 1957 – in the countryside, things don’t change that quickly, so we didn’t have electricity until I was 14 years old. I lived the same life as people after the war. But I have no interest in “social-issue cinema”; it’s not my cup of tea. I like films that end happily, and I try to see good things in people. Directing is not just a profession – it’s a way of seeing the world and showing it to others.

Film Fest Returns

The film festival is well underway and it's about time I said something about it.

It's great.

As usual.

Over the weekend I saw six films, few of which followed conventional lines of development.

The Israeli/Palestinian film Tel Aviv on Fire tells the story of a hapless young Palestinian who's earning money as a dialect consultant—but mostly as a gopher—on the set of a soap opera his uncle is producing. Early on in the film he's unexpectedly thrown into the role of script-writer, and his scripts improve when he starts gathering plot-lines and dialogue from the Israeli officer at the check-point he has to pass every day on his way to work. There is a major bone of contention, however: the officer wants the terrorist femme fatale from Paris to marry the Israeli general she's pumping for military secrets, while most of the Palestinians on the set want her to blow both the general and herself sky-high. Laughs abound. Really.

The Swedish film The Cake General tells the tale of an unsuccessful entrepreneur living in the town that's been dubbed in the Stockholm news as "the most boring in Sweden." He comes up with the idea of baking the longest sandwich cake in the world, thus putting his town in the Guinness Book of World Records.  He wins the support of the young woman who runs the local bakery, but his reputation as a wino with delusions of grandeur makes it difficult for him to generate widespread interest the project. 

The voice-over narration is by a local resident who was just a boy when the peculiar enterprise took place—it's sort of a true story. The lad was inspired by the man's determination to think creatively, and so are we.

In Hotel by the River South Korean director Hong Sang-Soo forges yet another appealing drama out of the flimsiest materials. His last film, At Night on the Beach Alone, explored the aftermath of an affair between an aging film director and his young star (Min-hee Kim) from the woman's point of view. That same woman appears here, further dissecting the failure of that relationship with her girlfriend, but the meat of the tale is to be found in the conversations between and old man (a famous poet) and his two sons, whom he's summoned to the hotel where he's staying because he senses that he's about to die—though he doesn't quite know why. 

Shot in exquisite black-and-white and peppered with delays, unlikely coincidences, missed appointments, and lingering silences, the film is reminiscent of an early Jim Jarmusch film, though the specific timbre is Asian. An atmosphere of idleness, peace, humor, and mystery envelops it, perhaps because there isn't really much going on.

One Last Deal immerses us in the world of Finnish fine art, as Olavi, an elderly art dealer, faces two challenges simultaneously. As the market for his bourgeois landscapes dwindles, he spots an unauthenticated painting at a local auction that might be a seriously undervalued masterpiece. 

Meanwhile, his estranged daughter asks him to take on his delinquent grandson for a few days as an intern to further the troubled lad's education. As Olavi struggles to come up with the cash to buy the painting, which even at a steep markdown he can't really afford, his grandson applies his digital investigative skills to the task of uncovering its provenance.

Heikki Nousiainen shines as the quietly obsessive Olavi who's neglected his divorced daughter for decades for the sake of his business. You might remember him as the blind priest in Letters to Father Jacob (2007) or the grumpy old racist in Unexpected Journey (2017).  

  The Brazilian documentary Edge of Democracy recounts the career of Lula da Silva as he rises to power on the strength of worker support bolstered by pragmatic compromises with the moneyed classes. His annointed successor, Dilma Rousseff, initiates a corruption campaign called Operation Car Wash, but so many elected officials find its net closing in  that they turn the same legal processes against their twin foes, impeaching Dilma and sending Lula to prison without much of a case.

That's the story we're being told, at any rate, by film-maker Petra Costa, whose activist mother spent a good deal of time in prison for political activities—though her maternal grandmother's family has been deeply involved for generations in the construction business, which is closely tied to right-wing politics. 

There are more riotous crowd scenes in the film than strictly necessary to advance the story, and also too many shots of the palatial yet sterile government buildings in Brasilia. In the midst of all the chaos and corruption, it seems almost inevitable that the "suits" will prevail, especially when the same crowds that brought Lula to power turn against him. The film has an elegiac tone, and so does the narrator's voice. Hope for Brazil? Not much. 

The Tobacconist is an old-fashioned drama/romance in which Franz, a sincere but naive rural lad on the cusp of maturity, is sent to help a distant relative at his tobacco shop in Vienna, a few months before the Anschluss of 1938. On the advice of one of his customers (Sigmund Freud) Franz pursues a young Bohemian woman, but blinded by love, it takes him quite a while to discern the opportunistic ties she's developing with the local Nazis. Franz learns about business, tolerance, and other things from his boss, who was maimed in WWI and now caters to Communists, Jews, and the local fascists with equanimity, and he and Freud (played with marvelous humor and understatement by Bruno Ganz) also become friends. The period detail is exquisite. The film's outcome is distressing.

The only real stinker I've come across so far is the Polish/Italian film Dolce Fine Giornata. It's point of focus is Janda, a celebrated Polish poet who fell in love with Italy and married an Italian decades earlier. Impulsive and eager not to act her age, she's bought a sports car and is carrying on an affair with young Arab who runs a taverna nearby. The locals respect her highly, but the mood shifts when she delivers a speech describing a recent terrorist bombing in Rome as a work of art, while criticizing her well-healed  audience as a bunch of xenophobic hypocrites. Unfortunately, her provocative statement isn't coherent enough to be meaningful, and by the end of the film she's exposed herself as a tiresome and self-centered prima donna. In fact, the entire film might well be considered the type of phony, unthinking, narcissistic stuff its heroine is posturing against. 

Also, way too much smoking! On the plus side, the scenery is nice.        

  

Are We in Kansas Yet?

When things get dreary in the North country, some people head for Puerta Vallarta, others for Costa Rica, New Orleans, or Palm Springs. A while back, just when the huge mounds of snow on either side of the driveway were beginning to settle, Hilary and I got in our little Corolla and headed south — for Kansas.

That's not exactly true. Kansas City (Missouri) had been an object of interest for quite a long time. It's a "classic" American city, it isn't that far away, ... and we'd never been there. I mentioned to my well-traveled cousin Pat that we were thinking of visiting Kansas City, and she said, "Why?" Our friend Dave stops overnight there on his annual Christmas trip north from Texas, so I asked him what he thought of Kansas City.

"It's a city," he replied.

Those ringing endorsements were not quite enough to spur us to action. Then one morning, as I was sitting here at my desk, trying to keep my winning percentage at cribbage above 68 percent, Hilary brought me an article from the Star-Tribune travel section about the sandhill crane migration through east central Nebraska.

It's an event we'd been meaning to take in for many years. But Kearney is 500 miles away, it requires some advance planning to book one of the blinds that give you the best views, and the weather is likely to be dreadful way out there in the flat, wind-swept prairie in late March—maybe worse than here!

But now we had a different plan. Drive out to Kearney, then head south and east to Kansas City. While we were at it, why not stop in Red Cloud, Nebraska, where the novelist Willa Cather grew up? From there we could continue south and east through the Flint Hills—the largest remaining tallgrass prairie in the U.S., by far—and slip effortlessly into Kansas City after spending the night in Manhattan, Kansas, where the Konza Prairie and the Flint Hills Discovery Center are located.

One corner of Omaha's Old Market district

If we had more time, I'd dilate on the impressive street sculpture in Sioux Falls and the lively Old Market neighborhood in Omaha—eight blocks of warehouse docks, restaurants of every persuasion, bars, hotels, and even a well-stocked used book store. It makes you a little sad, being there, to think how our own Minneapolis "warehouse district" has been largely ruined by hi-rise condos, valet parking, and expense-account restaurants.

We didn't reach Grand Island until our third day on the road. Early afternoon. (We'd spent a little time that morning at the Fontenelle Forest Wildlife Refuge just south of Omaha before leaving town). It's here, in the fifty-mile stretch between Grand Island and Kearney, that many, many cranes stop to feed in the cornfields for a few days, breaking their long journey from Mexico to their Arctic breeding grounds. You can't help seeing them alongside the freeway. Lots of them.

How many? It's hard to say. One field might contain 500 birds. The next will have none. Then you'll see 300 on a grassy piece of land lining a freeway ditch. There's no way to count them from a car, and there's no good reason to do so, either, but the numbers soon become staggering.

The day before we arrived, the local crane foundation that makes a scientific estimate of the numbers using aircraft reached a new total. Their best guess was that 659,870 Sandhill Cranes—plus or minus 61,378—were in the area. This eclipsed the previous record by 60,000 cranes, which they attributed to the fact that the recent flooding and cold weather had delayed a lot of birds.

Weeks earlier, when we started to cook up this adventure, all the blinds in the area were already booked, but I'd managed to secure a spot on the pedestrian bridge across the Platte River behind the Crane Trust Center for the evening of March 27. We pulled in about 2 p.m., let them know we were there, and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the sandy backroads of the region looking at cranes as we made our way west to Kearney, where I'd booked a room not far from the river.

But it seems I'd made a logistical mistake. Kearney is 50 miles from Grand Island. We'd have to drive the same distance back to the Crane Center that evening, and then return to the motel in the dark.

You may be wondering why anyone would want to book a spot on a pedestrian bridge across the Platte River. It's because at sundown all the cranes that have been feeding in the field congregate at the river to spend the night on one of its many sandy islands, safe from predators.

This is the big show. Yes, the sight of ten thousand elegant gray birds spread out across five hundred acres of corn stubble is impressive. But seeing these same birds descend en masse at dusk, wheeling and squawking, onto a sandbar no bigger than a football field, is something else again. And just when you think the island is packed, another "dance" shows up and insinuates itself effortlessly into the throng. (I looked it up: a big flock of cranes is called a dance. I've never heard anyone say that, however.)

We arrived back at the crane center an hour before the scheduled lecture and milled around with other enthusiasts looking at maps and informative kiosks. One elderly woman wearing on official-looking vest—knowledgeable and eager to share—gave us a bit of advice. "Don't leave the bridge too early. A lot of the birds come in at night. They'll swoop right over your head."

I mentioned in passing that we have cranes all over the place in Minnesota and western Wisconsin, though not in such extravagant numbers, and she said, "Your cranes are a different subspecies. They look the same but they're bigger."

The woman also mentioned that it was perhaps more exciting to see the cranes lift off in the morning, because they didn't just dribble off, but departed all together by the thousands. And the best place to watch that event was the Ft. Kearney footbridge, which happened to be quite close to our distant motel. 

After listening to an introductory lecture at the crane center, we walked out to the footbridge an hour before sundown. It was a glorious evening—the first of the year for us. Shirtsleeve weather. A golden sunset. Small flocks of cranes drifted by in the distance, high overhead, crossing the river at random in both directions. We stood alongside maybe forty people, most of them elderly, many of them sans binoculars, chatting in small groups with strangers or with the young biology students who had accompanied us as informal guides.

No birds, just sky and clouds

Through binoculars I could see a lot of birds in the fields a few hundred yards downstream, but more than an hour passed—a pleasant, idle, anticipatory hour—before three daring cranes emerged from the corn to occupy one of the distant sandbars, roughly the size of a rowboat. I could see other birds "dancing" along the bank of the river at the edge of the cornfield, lifting their wings high and prancing gracefully from leg to leg.

A few minutes later eight or ten birds joined the avant garde on the postage-stamp island. Soon a movement was under way to seize the nearer sandbar, which might have been the size of a school bus. Before long birds began to arrive on the nearer piece of sand twenty or thirty at a time. By this time the squawking had become loud and joyous, but the sun had set and it was getting dark. A great avian movement was underway, but we could barely see it. That might have added to the awesome mystery of the event. 

Birds begin to arrive on the nearer island

No sooner had I said to myself, that island is full, than another shadowy cloud of two hundred birds would arrive and descend onto firm ground, easily finding open space in the sand amid their relatives to spend the night.

Birds were still arriving when we left the bridge along with the last of the tourists and our volunteer guides. The drive to Kearney on the freeway was no big deal, perhaps because we'd learned from one of the guides that the footbridge at the Fort Kearney Recreation Area, a mere six miles from our motel, was one of the best places from which to watch the birds take off in the morning. But you had to get there before sunrise to see it unfold.

A thousand cranes take flight

Note: I could easily have found some majestic scenes online, taken at close range with telephoto lens, of cranes arriving or departing in golden light, like a Hallmark card, but that's neither what we saw nor how we felt. It was 40 degrees and drizzling slightly on the Ft. Kearney footbridge, and the wind was fierce.