The Revolution of Everyday Life

The recent death of Raoul Vaneigem, at the age of 92, must give all of us pause for thought.

To be honest, I’d never heard of the man until I saw his obituary in the Times. His chief claim to fame was to have written a manifesto in 1967 called The Revolution of Everyday Life, which was an inspiration to the student uprising that closed down universities in Paris and elsewhere in May 1968.

The literal translation of this little book of aphorisms—sort of like Mao’s “little red book,” I suppose, also popular at the time—would be The How-to-Live Handbook for the Young. Whatever wisdom this book may contain, I’m probably too old to benefit from it. But I requested a copy from the library, and I also requested another of Vaneigem’s many subsequent books: A Cavalier History of Surrealism.

Meanwhile, I fetched from my basement stacks a slightly musty paperback copy of The Spirit of May by J.-J. Servan-Schreiber (marked ‘25 cents’ in pencil on the front fly) and also the hardcover volume right next to it, The Taxis of the Marne, by Jean Dutourd (one dollar).

Perhaps you see the connection. The taxis Dutourd refers to were used to transport soldiers to the front lines in the exuberant early days of World War One.

I had originally planned—that is to say, forty years ago—to include a third volume in a study of the vicissitudes of the modern French state: Strange Defeat by Marc Bloc. That essay never got written. None of those books got read. I can’t find the third one. Is it still around somewhere? (Who cares?) Anyway, if you're familiar with the books, you can connect the dots.

Perhaps I was intuitively following the path set out by Vaneigem: down with capitalism, screw the state, abandon the quest for wealth and glory and enjoy yourself, your friends, your community.

In one line quoted in the Times obit, Vaneigem asks: “Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?”

I guess this is where surrealism comes in.

Vaneigem’s name came up during a breakfast conversation I had recently with a friend of mine at the Buttered Tin. We also talked about Agora, the classic film set in ancient Alexandria in the months before its famous library burned down. Jeff had recently had breakfast with a mutual friend, the documentary filmmaker and poet Mike Hazard. Jeff did the sound production for several of Mike’s films.

I’ve heard it said more than once that “everyone knows Mike.” It might almost be true. I worked with Mike briefly on a book of poems by the late Roy McBride, but I’ve run into him here and there at other times. He once came up to me at a book convention covering his face with three pieces of “poetry on a stick.”

There’s a touch of zaniness, color, freedom, and “Why not?” in much of Mike’s work, and his films often focus on other masters of this poetic domain.

It was a beautiful morning, and when I got back home from breakfast, Hilary and I decided to pay a visit to the Andersen Library on the West Bank, which is hosting an exhibit of Mike’s work.

We came prepared with a telephone number. The building is locked: you have to call someone to come to the door and let you in. This may explain why there was no one in the galleries but us. The exhibit spaces are small but elegant, almost lavish. Several Plexiglas kiosks contained samples of postcards, flyers, chapbooks, and photographs that either depict Mike’s work in arts education or are the result of it.

You can view quite a few of Mike's works, including videos, here. 

A second room, beyond the main gallery, has been given the look of a gentleman’s club: antique globes, finely unholstered wing-back chairs, stained glass windows, and maybe even a replica of a bust by Houdon. It reminded me of the rare books room on the fourth floor of Wilson Library and the book-collecting legacy of James Ford Bell and the library’s namesake, Governor Elmer Andersen, both of whom employed book scouts for years to explore antiquarian collections in London and the Continent in search of rare volumes.

It made for an interesting contrast—aristocratic digs and exuberant ephemera. I love them both. I have enough books in the house to satisfy almost any pang of curiosity, but I also have a cheap metal pin stuck into the window-frame behind my desk that says “Demolish Serious Culture.” I picked it up years ago at the Walker Art Center’s extensive Fluxus show dedicated to the work of Joseph Boyce and the German avant garde.

Some of that stuff is playful, some of it is pretty angry, or grim. By way of contrast, here’s a poem by Mike, reprinted in the little handout on a table near the door.

Namesake

Pounding a black gavel

Engraved with a nickname HAP,

The handle of a grandfather I never met for real,

And my last name, HAZARD—

My heart pounds.

 

It was time for lunch, and we decided to cross the bridge on the freeway to Dinkytown to find a place to eat. I don’t need to tell you that the neighborhood has changed since 1978, the last year I tended parking lots for the U of M. I don’t need to list the used bookstores, hamburger joints, bakeries, guitar shops, and Italian restaurants that have vanished either. 

We had a perfectly decent lunch at a Vietnamese café called Pho Mai that seems to be an offshoot of a more elegant restaurant in Brooklyn Park. To be honest, it was better than the tendon we used to get at the Tokyo cafe years ago. But the street is entirely different. Perrines is gone. Annie’s Parlor is gone. Gray’s Drug is gone. The Loring Café is gone. (Wasn’t I going to skip that part?)

Around the corner, the upstairs incarnation of the Bookhouse is still there and still packed with used books. Yet in this case, I find that my interest is gone. You can tell at a glance that most of the books are rattier than the ones we have at home. The poetry section is especially bad. The books are too skinny, dust jackets gone, you can’t read the titles on the bindings. All is lost. They might as well chuck the whole section into the Mississippi.

As I was passing the front desk I heard a young man on the telephone: “Books from that era are usually so ragged that they aren’t worth anything. Old is not necessarily good.” I was impressed: he’d heard it all before--and said it all before--but by the tone of his voice I could tell he was being good-natured about it.

 

Winona Beethoven Overnight

Winona has been holding a midsummer Beethoven Festival annually for almost two decades now, with world-class performers and a wide array of classical ensembles, styles, and programs. After reading about the event for years—often after the fact—we finally committed ourselves this year to an evening of Beethoven quartets performed by the Ariel String Quartet.

It wasn’t the most auspicious moment to embark on an overnight getaway to Winona. Temperatures were in the 90s and forest fires in the BWCA had sent the air quality index to dangerous heights. The smell of stale smoke was everywhere, and the Minneapolis skyline had been reduced to a vague dystopian silhouette.

We went anyway. We’d already booked the tickets and the motel. And there was reason for hope. The forecast mentioned the possibility of rain, which would wash some of the smoke away, and the NW wind might just shush the nasty stuff east into Wisconsin.

We left town at 1:30. There was water on the roads in Red Wing. The air had improved. Patches of blue sky appeared. Clouds took shape.

It rained heavily while we were checking into our motel on the outskirts of Winona. (Good timing.) We dressed for the concert (summer casual) and headed down into the city a few minutes later, looking for a place to grab a bite to eat. Hilary was scrolling the possibilities on Trip Advisor and happened on Sapori di Sicilia, which described itself as a “panificio : pasticceria.” A bakery and pastry shop?

It was only three blocks away. We parked right in front of the steps leading up to the place. Downtown Winona is full of half-decrepit storefronts, but this place seemed to be housed in a repurposed bank. Modern. Large tiles on the floor. Bakery cases half-full of tasty-looking morsels.

A closer look at the menu on the wall behind the cash register suggested that we’d come to the right place: truffle fries, falafel fritters, capicola panini. aglio e olio, gnocchi. And six or seven house wines at $ 6-8/glass.

Everything tastes better in an oversized bowl.

We ordered a Greek salad and pasta carbonara, took a table by the window, and settled in to watch the passing scene. The chairs were remarkably comfortable. Hilary had a great view of a group of seven elderly women engaged in animated conversation. A book club? University professors discussing some upcoming candidate for tenure? Or were they all headed to the Beethoven festival later that evening?

We nursed our orders, passing them back and forth across the table, happy to be inside watching the weather improve through the window. At one point I went up to the counter to get two glasses of water and said to the young woman behind the register, apropos of nothing, “This image on your menu looks like it came from Crete.”

“Well, it happens to be in the center of the Sicilian flag,” she replied, cracking a hint of a smile.

The concert took place at a theater on the campus of St. Mary’s University, tucked into the wooded bluffs a five-minute drive up the hill from our motel. The night wasn’t cool, but it was no longer unpleasantly hot, and the air had improved so greatly that Hilary spotted the crescent moon peeking through a rift in the clouds. People were milling around on the terrace in front of the concert hall, and it seemed the only thing missing was the sharp report of a passing nighthawk.

The concert itself was deeply expressive and thoroughly engaging: Beethoven—early, middle, and late. Works like these don’t carry you along like a breeze, they draw you in like a compelling argument, and the Ariel Quartet offered a flawless exercise in emotional logic and probing intensity. The first half of the program ran 90 minutes. The single piece after intermission was a mere twenty-two. The balance seemed perfect.

I was impressed. I had never heard of the Ariel Quartet prior to coming upon them in the festival schedule, though they’ve been playing together for almost thirty years. But I’m sure these musicians are less concerned with impressing people than with fully exposing the challenge, the anguish, and the beauty of Beethoven’s imagery.

The next morning, after a "light breakfast" at the motel, we returned to our new favorite Sicilian cafe stop to sample the bakery goods. The same young woman was behind the country, and when she brought us our coffee we learned a bit about the owner's background.

From there it was across the river to Trempealeau NWR, where we drove the nine-mile gravel circuit, stopping hear and there to take a walk or get a better view of a bird. The sky was clear and the humidity had dropped, though not by much. 

We spotted four or five indigo buntings along the way--they like to sit in the open at the tops of trees, displaying their iridescent feathers--but most of the birds were sheltering in the shadows of the vegetation. We heard warbling vireos, common yellow-throats, great-crested flycatchers, Eastern towhees, robins, pewees, yellow-bellied woodpeckers, catbirds--the usual suspects. Hilary spotted a few pelicans drifting out in the river. A beaver swam by. Perhaps our best sighting was of a red-headed woodpecker disappearing into the underbrush. 

   

Summer Reading: Three Japanese Novels

 

Convenience Store Woman is a novel about—guess what—a woman who works in a convenience store. There’s nothing so unusual about that, but Keiko has been doing the same job at the same store, part time, for eighteen years. She likes it, and she’s good at it. The position is lowly, but Keiko shoulders her responsibilities with utter dedication and professionalism. It’s basically her life.

Keiko knows she’s a little different. In the novel’s opening pages, she relates the story of a schoolyard fist-fight she witnessed as a child. All the kids were standing around shouting “Break it up! Break it up!” Keiko picked up a shovel, knocked one of the belligerents unconscious, and considered she’d done a good job. “I still don’t see anything wrong with what I did,” she tells us.

But Keiko isn’t driven by irrational or antisocial impulses; she just likes to keep order and make sure everything’s in its proper place. Much of the novel—which sold more than a million copies in Japan—deals with the minutia of her day, managing inventory, re-ordering products, setting up special sales depending on the season, tending the cash register, and remaining forever cheerful in the face of customer requests throughout her shift.

If I happen to enjoy reading about such things, it might be because I worked in a book warehouse for twenty-odd years, so I’m familiar with the satisfactions that such work can sometimes provide. That might also explain why I enjoyed the German film In the Aisles (2018).

But just when things start to get tedious, author Sayaka Murata gives her story a twist in the form of a new employee, Shiraha, hired by the manager out of desperation during a busy season. Shiraha is a loser, a slacker, an arrogant miscreant, practically homeless. Needless to say, he and Keiko don’t get along …

Tokyo Express, originally published in 1958, has the look of a mystery novel. It focuses on the question of whether an apparent murder/suicide on a lonely beach on the southern tip of Japan might actually have been a murder. But there is never more than one real suspect in the case, and from the early chapters to the end of the book, Inspector Mihara spends nearly all his time trying to break that suspect’s seemingly water-tight alibi. There are three or four “Why didn’t I think of that sooner?” moments, plenty of interviews with subsidiary characters, and lots of analysis of train schedules, all of which establish an atmosphere of mild intrigue. But the fact that the book’s first few chapters focus on the behavior of two waitresses and an eminent businessman with ties to a government scandal would be hard to explain if he weren’t somehow connected to the crime … presuming  there was a crime ...

 The Summer House follows the early career of an inexperienced and sometimes dilatory architect, one Tōru Sakanishi, who, by a stroke of luck, gets hired on to the firm of master architect Shunsuke Murai. Murai needs some help: he’s preparing an entry for a competition the design Japan’s National Library of Modern Literature. In the past, he has avoided such competitions, preferring to work with clients who know and appreciate his quiet, subtle style. It’s almost as if he knows he’s approaching the end of his career. And perhaps his life.

Little by little, Sakanishi picks up the rhythms of the architectural team, which has moved up to a mountain retreat to work on the project together. He’s eager to make himself useful, though the tasks he’s given seldom have much to do with the competition entry itself. It takes him a while, for example, to catch on to the fact that in Shunsuke’s world, it’s taboo to sharpen your pencils after 5 p.m.

As the summer passes, meals are shared, errands are run. We listen in on discussions about furniture design, acoustics, the proper location of fireplaces, and sundry other architectural issues. In the course of his narrative Sakanishi also drifts into lengthy digressions on the careers of Frank Lloyd Wright (with whom Murai studied as a youth) and the Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund, whose famous design for the Stockholm Public Library has captured Murai’s interest.

Among the team are two women, Mariko and Yukiko, and Sakanishi takes a liking to them both, adding yet another subtle, almost unspoken ripple to the stream. Murai himself rekindles several personal connections in the mountain neighborhood, where he’s been coming for decades. Meanwhile, under an atmosphere of professional calm and unspoken reverence for the master, weeks pass, months. The competition deadline approaches.

Author Matsuie won Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Prize for this, his first novel. He succeeds in transforming what might have been a plodding narrative filled with attestations of respect that we can acknowledge but have been given no reason to share, into an exotic and atmospheric whole, where relationships between walls, chairs, books, and people are in constant flux, restrained by patience and tact, buoyed by a sense of balance and proportion, fueled an unspoken affection, and threatened by the passage of time.  

Doors Open Minneapolis 2026

On a cool sunny Saturday morning we drove downtown to take advantage of the Doors Open festival, a program designed to make it easy to visit a variety of businesses and institutions free of charge, just for the hell of it. In previous years we’d joined tours of the Federal Reserve, Open Book, City Hall, the Ivy Hotel, the Lakeview Cemetery Chapel, and a low-slung building that was once home to a Ry Krisp factory. This year we studied the maps and came up with an even wider range of options.

We parked on the brief unmetered stretch of River Road between Plymouth Avenue and the lock and dam—a two-hour limit. How much money did we save? I don’t know. But matters of cost aside, the walk itself was delightful. This is an attractive and interesting part of town, though it’s changed a lot since I worked in that neighborhood. In those days it was home to the International Design Center, Moose and Sadie’s Coffeeshop, J.D. Hoyt’s, Origami, a bicycle supply warehouse, a Caribou Coffee warehouse, Rykodisc CD distributor, an Asian import shop called Indigo, a restaurant supply warehouse, etc. The few people who lived in the vicinity were squatting in genuine lofts accessed by freight elevators, perhaps illegally.

The warehouse I worked at was heated by coal, which was delivered by rail and dropped down a wooden chute into a bin in the basement, from which point it was fed into the furnace by a conveyor screw. That building has long since been converted to expensive loft/apartments.

The owner of Indigo, a kindly man named John, told me before they moved out that they’d been given a sweetheart ten-year lease back when the neighbor was struggling. The lease was up, not to be renewed, and besides, as John put it, “There’s no longer anywhere for customers to park down here!”

The day was bright, windy, and cool. We zigzagged through the North Loop, intoxicated by the towering urban-ness of our surroundings, past the Lindsay Brothers Building, the jazz club Berlin, Origami, the Yamasaki Building (soon to reopen as a luxury hotel, so they say) and a variety of other buildings, both flashy and non-descript.

It took us forty minutes to reach our first destination, the Minneapolis Athletic Club. Our tour guide, a realtor by trade, took us through the classy, old-fashioned rooms, up and down stairs, through the observation galleries of the squash courts, into and through the weight rooms, ballrooms, a tap room, and a “reading room.” with its overstuffed chairs, chandeliers, Persian carpets, and mahogany paneling. 

“So, this is a reading room …” I asked him. “But I don’t see a single book.”

“It’s the same with my real estate clients,” he said. “I used to examine their books, their CDs, and the contents of the refrigerator, to get a better feel for who they are. Now, the only thing of interest is the refrigerator.”

Our walk back to the car took us down Nicollet Mall, which was far drearier than I’d expected. Most of the shops are gone. Pedestrian traffic is almost nonexistent. Along the way we did have the good fortune to come upon some public works employees who were showcasing the city’s sewer system. We looked down a manhole to the pipes eighteen feet below. And one of the men let me drive his mechanical exploratory mouse back and forth through a foot-wide plexiglass tube.

A few blocks to the west we stopped briefly into a small digital advertising agency called Shinebox equipped with a bar and lounge on the first floor and eight or ten cubical work stations in the basement. We chatted briefly with a young woman from England.

Back at the car, we headed to Northeast, where we tossed around several ideas for lunch—Anchor Fish and Chops, Aki’s, Sample Room—before settling on Mayslack’s, a Polish dive bar that’s been around since 1956. I heard about it often back in my days on the loading dock, but had never been there. The waitress was friendly, the atmosphere authentic, the sandwiches huge.

Where's the sandwich?

Our next stop, the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization, is housed in a low-slung modern building on the river just north of Lowry. There’s a motor boat parked out back. The task here is to monitor the river for phosphorus, chlorine, and other chemicals, but they send most of the samples to a lab off-site. It seems the place is mostly used as an educational facility, and various exhibits were attended by cordial and well-informed high school kids.   

From there it was on to the U of MN off-site book storage facility, located In an obscure corner of the Como neighborhood, a few blocks south of the Newgate car donation center. The doors are 12 feet high—the tallest in the university, so we were told. But they’re dwarfed by the shelving area itself, which is fitted with seemingly endless rows of shelving that are 32 feet tall.

The building is equipped with numerous eco-friendly features. I was not aware of any volcanic activity in the area and asked our tour guide about the geothermal heating system. She told me they collect rainwater in the summer and pipe it deep underground. In the winter they heat the place with the water, which is now much warmer than the surrounding air.

The building is designed to hold 3.7 million books. The storage is based on nothing but the dimensions of the book; putting books of the same height in the same box saves space. Each book is given a bar code. Also, each box. Beyond that, it’s all just a matter of sliding the boxes in and using the reference system to retrieve whichever book a patron requests.

Retrieving a book that’s 30 feet off the ground isn’t all that easy, however.  

Part of the fun of Doors Open is cooking up a route from one site to the next. From the library mega-stacks we took an interesting route down Como, past Van Cleve Park, then south across the 10^th Street Bridge to the KFAI radio studios at Cedar-Riverside.

I don’t listen to the radio much, but I thoroughly appreciate and admire the social commitment and musical range of this mostly volunteer broadcast endeavor. Inside the second-floor studio, equipped with offices and three or four broadcast rooms, we spoke at some length with program manager Miguel Vargas about the standards and methods of the station, the methods they use to store and organize new releases and antique collections. In the next room, a volunteer told us about a show he’s planning to produce about some local punk bands—high school kids mostly. “I’ll be taking classes this summer to get my license.” He looked to be at least 50 himself.

As we were leaving, we met up with another visitor, who said. “I love this place! Look at it. Paper-clips, compact discs, Scotch tape, and not a video screen in sight. It’s like the 70s!” 

The next morning we set out for Northeast again. Our first stop was Clay Squared, a custom tile manufacturer fitted with electric kilns and all sorts of tools for creating ceramic tiles. Down the hall was the studio/classroom of Layl McDill, a polymer clay artist who was hand-shaping beads and buttons for an upcoming class. We waxed nostalgic for a minute or two about the Play-Dough Fun Factory sets we both fiddled around with at kids. Layl went on to make a career out of the artform.

Our second stop was the Groveland Galley, set on the hillside of a tony neighborhood the Walker Art Center. Lots of nice landscapes and prints ... but a little out of our price range. The smallish exhibition rooms were crowded, but programming director Victoria Keith took the time to draw my attention to the subtle works of plein air master Joshua Cunningham.   

A short dash on the freeway took us to the Russian Museum, where we wandered through an extensive display of Cold War American and Russian toys, posters, comic books, and other kitsch. The collectors themselves were present, and not hard to spot.

"Is that an official NASA spacesuit?" I asked one of them.

"How should I know?" he replied. "I got it on eBay."

We took the long way home, north on Lyndale, west on 36th Street past the tulips in Lakewood Cemetery, north along the shores of Bde Maka Ska, then a meandering route up the parkway past Cedar Lake. 

We were taking our time, relishing the wonderful afternoon, and also the richness of our fine urban world.

 

 

Film Fest Notes 2026

The MSP International Film Fest is in full swing once again, and the riverfront across from downtown Minneapolis is lively. The glorious weather doesn’t hurt.

The organizers have rearranged the venue somewhat, moving the office and various lounges a block down the street. There are now more bars and glitzy social spaces, but the buzz that used to enliven the halls east of the theater lobby is largely gone. Hilary and have developed a new routine, too; we cross the river at Plymouth Avenue and park on Marshall across from the Ukrainian Church, as close to Hennepin as we can get. From there it’s a ten-minute walk to the theater.

We’ve seen six films so far, covering a range, geographically, from China and Viet Nam to Belgium and Montreal, with stops in Iceland, Syria, the French Alps, and Germany. It’s been lots of fun.

Three of the best were Living the Land, Ky Nam Inn, and A Lovely Day. Also good were Girl in the Snow, and A Silent Friend.

Living the Land offers a portrait of rural China circa 1991. It follows the daily life of a young boy who’s been left behind to be raised by his aunt and grandma while his parents look for work in the city. Promotional material for the film highlights the themes of modernization and social change during that era in China, but the film actually dwells almost exclusively on village customs and farming techniques that haven’t changed for centuries. There’s a lot of shouting and horse-play, a funeral or two, a wedding, and disruptions caused by the local officials who are trying to keep track of who’s related to who, during an era when the appearance of a second child could lead to the loss of social benefits or a civil service job.

It’s polyphonic narrative. and the documentary style might remind some viewers of Tree of the Wooden Clogs—less polished cinematically, perhaps, but far more energetic. Director Huo Meng won the Silver Bear for his work at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival.

A Lovely Day is a comedy focusing on a single wedding day, but it draws together strands of narrative from every direction by means of flashbacks to earlier periods in the groom’s life, and also to incidents in his parent’s life before they divorced. 

Weddings tend to be fun, and this one is no exception, though it’s sullied repeatedly by Alain’s parent’s animosity, the untimely reappearance of an old “friend,” and especially by Alain’s long-standing personal anxieties and other health issues.

Alain, played by Neil Elias, reminded me of Northern Exposure’s Joel Fleishman—smart, fidgety, annoying, prone to excess … but likeable just the same. The film’s original title, Mille secrets, mille dangers (A Thousand Secrets, a Thousand Dangers) perhaps better conveys the atmosphere of the tale. Alain’s fiancée shows remarkable—almost unbelievable—calm and forbearance throughout the day.

It was a treat to listen after the film to director Philippe Falardeau answer questions. He’s a witty man, sharp, scattered, and self-depreciating. One highlight of the Q & A was the remark by a young woman in the audience who said; “I’m Lebanese, and I want to let you know that you nailed the ethos of the Lebanese community perfectly.”

Falardeau replied, looking right and left into the crowd, “Does she work for the festival? Did someone pay her? Thank you SO MUCH!”

The Girl in the Snow is an unusual piece, and all the better for it. Set high in the French Alps, it follows a few months in the life of a woman who’s been hired to give lessons to the children in a small hamlet during the depths of winter, when most of the village women have gone down the mountain to find work as domestics. The kids are unruly, the men taciturn and stand-offish. The snow is deep and it gets dark early. But gradually the woman begins to fit in, attending a gathering in a nearby lodge where the dance steps are as lively as the hurdy-gurdy music is simple.

Much of the film is shot indoors, in rooms lit by firelight with dramatic chiaroscuro reminiscent of Caravaggio. The men and older women tell stories about ghosts. Avalanches are an ever-present danger. But it isn’t long before one or two of the men start to take a deeper interest in the attractive newcomer. And as the story unfolds, it begins to take on the form of one of the occult tales the mountain folk have been sharing by the fire.  

Ky Nam Inn might be the most polished film we saw. It follows Khang, a quiet, well-mannered young translator who's landed a job translating The Little Prince into Vietnamese, in part due to the influence of a relative he hardly knows. He moves into a collective housing block and soon becomes acquainted with Ky Nam, the widow downstairs, who makes a living cooking meals for people in the neighborhood. When she injures her hand, Khang offers to help her out in exchange for regular meals.

In the course of the film, we also get to know quite a few of the building's other residents, including Ky Nam's son, who's soon to be married, and an elderly doctor with whom Khang plays chess when he's not in the kitchen or at the typewriter. It's inevitable that several of the younger women in the building take an interest in Khang. Everyone knows everyone, and gossip gets around. It comes as no surprise for us to learn that Ky Nam has a checkered past. We just don't know what it is. And neither does Khang.

The mysteries and complexities of the plot aside, the film has an unusual and attractive "look." Is this what Viet Nam looked like in 1985? I should have asked the director, who was present and spent a good deal of time answering questions after the screening. He told us some funny stories about the censors, and tried to explain some of the racial nuances between northerners, southerners, mixed-race Vietnamese, and "left-behind" offspring of American soldiers--distinctions of which some in the audience, including me, were only dimly aware.

Time and Water is a low-key look at Iceland through the medium of home movies. Its central event is the discovery by Icelanders that one of their smaller glaciers has entirely disappeared. It was declared dead in 2014. This really shouldn't have come as a surprise, considering that the glacier has been shrinking for a long time, Icelanders have been studying their glaciers for centuries, and the understanding of global warming can be traced back to the nineteenth century. In fact, glaciers have been coming and going for almost two million years now. Yet the narrator keeps repeating, very slowly, "I never imagined that ..."

More interesting than the central thesis are the grainy home movies that show the narrator's family having a good time, going on expeditions, celebrating birthdays, smoking endless cigarettes, cross-country skiing, and so on. Views of the landscape, the waterfalls, and the glaciers themselves also contribute to the film's interest. 

Our Silent Friend is a far more polished and ambitious film. In fact, it's three films in one. They're set in different time periods and are connected only by the fact that they focus on botanists and take place on a college campus in the vicinity of the same ginkgo tree.

The best of the three examines the history of a brilliant young woman who's struggling, at the turn of the twentieth century, against the rampant sexism of academic gatekeepers who would rather she devoted her sense and intellect to making coffee than to exploring the jungles of Indonesia. It's shot in a glistening black-and-white tone and is well acted. (Luna Wedler recently won the "emerging actress" award at the Venice Film Festival for her performance, joining the company of previous winners Gael Garcia Bernal, Jennifer Lawrence, and Mila Kunis.) Every frame is a pleasure to watch.

The second tale focuses on a young woman in more recent times (maybe the eighties?) who's conducting research on a potted geranium in her dorm room. She's hooked it up to a polygraph to study its responses to her watering schedule, among other things. She leaves on a backpacking trip and entrusts her research to a newfound campus friend--a self-styled farm boy who's sick and tired of plants and would rather spend his time reading Rilke. But in her absence, he begins to take an interest in the experiment, and eventually makes some remarkable discoveries.

In the third narrative, a child psychologist who's trapped on the same campus grounds during Covid, modifies some experiments he'd been using on pre-verbal children to see if he can arrive at similar insights regarding the inner life of trees. He eventually resorts to harvesting magic mushrooms from the botanical garden in his quest for results.  

These strands are intertwined time and again throughout the film, but they never coalesce, and none of the three arrive at a conclusion. The film ends, somewhat arbitrarily, with what might be called a cosmic New Age sensory forest bath.

One critic has described Our Silent Friend as "beautiful, elusive, and peppered with provocative nuggets about the nature of life and our place in it." My reaction was more in line with that of the critic who, in a generally positive review, described it as "glacially slow," "prioritizing philosophical atmosphere over narrative momentum," "not driven by cause and effect," and demanding a "surrendered mindset" from the audience. 

I guess I'm not ready to surrender. 

There has been a steady stream of material in recent years exploring what we might call "the hidden life of trees." I read (and liked) forester Peter Wohlleben's book by that name when it came out in 2015. The works of Suzanne Simard in this field have also been widely disseminated. Most of this material deals with biochemical relationships between trees and soil, trees and one another. Not much has been unearthed about what trees may have to say to us. 

It strikes me that we could develop a better rapport with our natural surroundings by dropping the quest for scientific exactitude and begin to think more like the infants the child psychologist describes in Our Silent Friend's opening minutes. You might get a sense of this more open and curious but less analytically focused attention in the films of Terrance Malick. In short, less science, more poetry.