Aujourdhui Personne Travail

Yesterday was May Day, and that means nobody works—in France, anyway. In the spirit of the day, I drove down to Surdyk’s to chat with the folks from Chateau Saint Andre Corbin, Chateau La Freynelle and the Aquitane Wine Company, who were in town to promote their products. (I’m not sure “products” is the right word, however, for the organic creation that the wine of any given year turns out to be.)
I’m always on the look-out for cheap red wines from Bordeaux that can evoke memories of the days when you could buy classed growths for less than $20.00. It’s true that in those days I was making $4.00 an hour unloading trucks, and $20.00 was a small fortune. All the same, nowadays even the cru bourgeois from the remote fringes of the area are running from $10 to $20, which is still the extreme upper end of my range.
The gentleman from Chateau Picque Caillou wore a suit, he had an old-fashioned haircut, and he could easily have stepped out of a Pierre Melville gangster movie or a Jacque Tati farce. His wine is from Grave—“Just down the road from Haut Brion,” he doesn’t mind mentioning—and it has greater finesse than body, which is fine with me. The 2006 lives in the shadow of the huge, Parker-esque 2005, he told me, but in a year or two it will be magnificent. In searching for the right word to describe the 2006 he kept returning to “classical—It’s more…classical.”
The two women at the next table, young and stylish, were promoting wines from their family vineyards. I had used up all my wine expressions at the previous table and was pleased to discover that I had purchased (and enjoyed) a bottle of the Freynelle Blanc a few days earlier. They told me how big their vineyards were—25 and 100 acres—how many workers they employed, what their production was, etc. The Mongavey was very nice, but all wines in that price range are nice, and it’s hard to differentiate when you seldom drink such things—especially at 9:30 in the morning. We ended up discussing the French film Seraphine, which I’d seen at the film festival a few days ago, and I’m sure they were relieved when I finally bid them adieu.
Did I buy any wines? Yes I did. May is my birthday month, and I had a few big bills burning a hole in my pocket that I’d picked up following a recent book presentation.

After that day of glorious idleness, which also included a bike ride along the Mississippi and an evening with The New York Review of Books, I made an effort this morning to get a few things done. It, too, was a glorious morning, the sun was bright and the air was cool. The leaves are in various phases of unfolding, the sand cherry under the bedroom window is blooming like an ikebana display, and the violets and periwinkle and just beginning to flower. I finished raking the leaves in the back yard, cut back the elderberry bushes, and gathered the dead branches from the silver maple that had fallen during the winter. Out front, I cleaned up the daylilies, removed a few dandelions with a sophisticated uprooting tool I bought last year, and apprised the task of reattaching a section of the lattice that fell off the front of the house a few weeks ago. The air is sooo fresh, and it’s warm enough to leave the front door open. And to top things off, I heard a loud squawk as I was tending the daylilies and looked up just in time to see a sandhill crane flying directly above me over the house.

Int'l Film Festival 3

The Silence Before Bach

The Silence Before Bach, a documentary directed by septuagenarian Spaniard Pere Portabella, is a very mixed bag. It’s intermittently intriguing to watch and never actually boring, but it promises a good deal less than it delivers. The most damning thing that might be said is that it’s less satisfying than simply listening to a competent performance of one of Bach’s masterworks. But Portabella has taken on a tall order—to make a film about Bach that gives us the cinematic equivalent of the great composer’s magic. Any film that attempts to approach such a subject sideways, as Portabella has done, deserves our attention and applause.

Among the highpoints of the film is the opening narrative sequence, in which two Spanish truck-drivers converse in a truck-stop over breakfast and later hit the road together. The driver had been extolling the value of playing classical music as a release from the tensions of the road, but his companion is the one who, as the flat beautiful countryside of Castile flashes by outside the cab, can deliver a mean Bach partita on the harmonica.

Another intriguing segment shows ten or twelve cellists playing a famous piece in the subway. We don’t know why they’re doing it—there seems to be no one else on the train—but it sounds nice.

One of the best segments involves two men in an antiquarian bookshop discussing Primo Levi, Cioran, the power of music, and the pain it brings to those who have no hope. And the sequence shot from a tourist boat on the Elbe River as it passes through Dresden is also engaging.

On the other hand, most of the historical recreations are weak. For example, we spend twenty minutes watching a man buy meat in an amateurish recreation of a nineteenth-century open-air market. He brings it home to his employer, Felix Mendelssohn, who opens the meat and discovers a Bach masterpiece written on the wrapping paper. But this episode is overdubbed with a woman singing a folksong about the myth of Mendelssohn’s discovery. The song she is singing is not by Bach, the episode is not dramatically convincing, the story itself (we are being told) is not true—so why has so much of the film has been devoted to it? Wouldn’t it have been more interesting to provide some scholarly information about the true course of events?

In another scene, we spend perhaps five minutes watching a very beautiful young woman take a shower in a glass-lined shower stall. The scene may be unforgettable, but it has no relevance to the subject at hand, unless we are being asked to infer that the contours of a Bach Prelude are similar in form to that of a young woman’s body. Chalk this one up to septuagenarian voyeurism. (We later see the woman playing the cello for ten seconds in her bathrobe. So it appears she is a musician.)

In the end the misfires in The Silence Before Bach outnumber the successes, and anyone hoping to see a work on the order of such brilliant films as 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, Into Deep Silence, Helvetica, or Dutch Light is bound to be disappointed. On the other hand, as you watch it, you feel that you’re in the heart of Europe, listening to Bach from time to time, riding on a boat, looking at beautiful buildings, touring the Spanish countryside, or drinking a cup of hot chocolate in a café.
I can think of worse ways to spent a couple of hours.

Four Boxes

Four Boxes might best be described as a dystopian comedy-thriller, though the laughs and the thrills have the upper hand throughout. And that’s just as well, because suburban malaise has been with us for a long time now, and its contours have been explored more effectively in any number of films from Ordinary People and The Graduate to The Ice Storm and American Beauty. What makes Four Boxes remarkable is that the three protagonists are on camera practically from start to finish, they say absolutely nothing of interest—and yet the film becomes more engaging with every turn of the plot.
How can this be?

Credit must go, first of all, to the actors in the leading roles. Justin Kirk, well known to viewers from Weeds, Angels in America, and a long string of what used to be called B-movies, plays the thoughtful, taciturn half of Go-Time Enterprises, a youthful but morbid business whose purpose is to buy up the junk in the homes of recently deceased people and sell it on E-Bay. Sam Rosen plays his moronic side-kick. It’s almost as if Jeremy Brett were still playing Sherlock Holmes, but Adam Sandler had taken over the role of Watson.

As the film opens, the duo have latched onto an unusually creepy residence. The house is full of bean-bag chairs, futons, computers, golf tees, chopped up family photos, and plastic bins full of weird objects. The liquidators almost immediately discover that the hapless owner was also a fan of Four Boxes, a reality internet show that Rosen also watches. The jaded entrepreneurs, bored with their work and their lives, focus in on the split screen broadcast, filmed in a house—no one knows where—which was once the domain of a guileless ingénue, though it’s been taken over by a bizarre set of individuals who almost look like terrorists!

The mystery and intrigue generated by these crude internet images adds a dimension to the film, and the appearance of Terryn Westbrook completes the package. Westbrook plays Amber, Rosen’s current (and Kirk’s former) girlfriend, and the three form an irascible love triangle, sustaining a humorously nihilistic banter that must be heard to be appreciated. It’s been referred to as text-speak and Juno-talk, but as long as we’re throwing cultural references around, why not add Samuel Beckett?

One of my favorite lines is delivered by Westbrook. She’s missing her computer, and Rosen remarks disapprovingly, “Is there anyone who loves computers more than you?”
She turns to him and shouts, “My Brother!!”We’ve never met Amber’s brother. We didn’t know she had one. No one ever refers to him again. Is this funny? I guess you had to be there.

An atmosphere of youthful angst and disillusionment hangs over the film, but it can’t do much to dispel the irrepressible energy of the protagonists, and when the terrorist TV show begins to gather momentum, the drama becomes intense. (Then again, it’s hard to get too worked up about killers whose weapon of choice is a leaf blower.)

In For Boxes, writer-director Wyatt McDill, his producer-wife Megan Huber, and a bunch of talented associates have done much with little. An afterthought. McDill is well-known in Minneapolis to be a marvelous chef. Yet everyone in Four Boxes eats fast-food tacos. I’d like to see a movie about smart young people who have jobs, know how to cook, and buy their produce at Mid-Town Market.

Minnesota Book Awards

I haven’t been to the Minnesota Book Awards since they were dropped by the Humanities Commission, taken over by the Friends of St. Paul Public Library, and turned into a celebrity event. But last year I worked with Margaret Hasse on the design and production of her book Milk & Tides, and when the book was nominated for an award the publisher, Norton Stillman, generously arranged for Hilary and I to attend the proceedings. By the time we arrived at the hotel, the main room was thronged with people, with a bar and food tables in the middle and the nominated authors arranged behind tables around the edges of the room. We said Hi to Margaret and to William Kent Krueger, who was right next to her. (A few weeks ago I made a guest appearance on Kent’s cable TV show to discuss book design, and he also did a reading recently at Hilary’s library, so he’s practically an old friend.) We also chatted with Julie Kramer, the first-time author of Stalking Susan, who aced Kent out for the genre award later that might.

I ran into artist Randy Sholes and we discussed the look of a recently-published book he and I had worked on, Jill Breckenridge’s The Gravity of Flesh. Over the dregs of the grilled vegetables I mentioned to Louise Erdrich how much I had enjoyed her little book on Lake of the Woods (old news to her) and soon thereafter we ran into Peg Meier. We discussed the films we’d seen at the film festival (no overlap), and she informed us that the Minnesota Historical Society had recently cut its frontlist from 37 to 20 books, with her children’s history being one of those that got the ax. She asked me if I was still putting out a paper edition of Macaroni, and I agreed to put her back on the subscription list.

Hilary ran into a friend who’d recently lost her job as Customer Relations Manager during a Barnes and Noble cutback. Later we chatted with Debbie Wright, a very old friend whom we hadn’t seen in a decade at least, and we reminsced about weddings and squash matches of long ago. She’s teaching sixth grade now, and, as she puts it with a sardonic laugh, “The kids are getting dumber and lazier every year.”

But although the economic and social trends seemed bad all the way around, the atmosphere in the ballroom was festive, and that mood continued once we wandered in to attend the ceremony itself. Margaret lost out to Heid Erdrich in the poetry division, alas, though in her acceptance speech Heid informed to audience that she’d already lost three times already. Margaret has now lost out twice. Her time will come. On the other hand, there is so much life and experience in even one book of poems, I find it remarkable that poets like Margaret keep on producing material.

Her wonderful book aside, I had read only a small part of one of the 32 finalists—Landscapes of Minnesota. Several of the winners were entirely unknown to me, including Kao Kalia Yang, whose Hmong memoir, The Latecomer, won both the memoir and the People’s Choice awards.

In their acceptance speeches the winners turned our attention repeatedly to the robust book community the Twin Cities sustains, with its book arts center, library programs, bookstores, small presses, and talented authors and illustrators. Yes, books are wonderful. And the people who write, publish, and read them are pretty neat too.

Int'l Film Festival 2

White Night Wedding

It’s a type of greatness we come upon too seldom—light humor filled with wisdom and affection. Chekhov’s works often have this quality, and the Icelandic film White Night Wedding, based on the Russian playwright’s seldom-performed Ivanov, brings that same combination of virtues to the screen with true bravura. The landscapes are stunning, the lighting is beautiful, the characters are charming and idiosyncratic, the pacing is deft, and even the most absurd bits of physical humor—sinking rowboats and golf balls in the graveyard—ring true.

At the core of the farce, though not its most compelling character, is Jon, a handsome if slightly graying professor of literature. In the opening scene he’s wrapping up a complex and perhaps even evasive lecture on the ethical stance exemplified by a literary character the class has been studying—an analysis with which Jon himself seems a bit bored. One of his young female students challenges him on the point—Is life really that complicated?—and the scene is set.
Jon’s wife is an artist, a bit high-strung and moody, taking medication for we know not what. She implores her husband to pay more attention to her, and the couple agree to return to the island where she grew up to start afresh.

As it happens, Thora, the student who had spoken up in class, is also from that island, and her parents own its only pub and general store.

A one-year time shift brings us to the impending May-December wedding of Jon and Thora. In a series of flashbacks we learn piece by piece what happened to Jon’s wife. That strand of the tale is a dark one, and it gives the film a bitter edge; in fact, we spend much of the film wondering if Jon is simply a cad. But the cast of secondary characters make a remarkable ensemble of eccentrics, and they buoy the plot from the moment we arrive on the island. Among them are the island’s premier handyman and entrepreneur, who enlists Jon’s help in a wild scheme to lure tourists to the island with a golf course; Thora’s mother, a battle-ax who beheads puffins with relish and rubs everyone the wrong way; Thora’s father, a former opera singer and a bear of a man who is kindness itself; the hapless local priest, so deeply unloved that even his own hair has fallen out in an effort to escape; Jon’s obese alcoholic buddy who has arrived from the mainland to play the organ at the wedding; and Thora’s somewhat “slow” sister, who minds the store. Most of the film takes place in the open air, and many bottles of wine are consumed in the course of the final twenty-four hours before the nuptials are to take place.

With White Night Wedding, director Baltasar Kormakur has crafted a light but almost seamless masterpiece on the order of Nikolai Mikhalkov’s Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano, or, (dare I say it?) The Rule of the Game.

Tricks

A slow-moving tale from Poland about a young boy who has never met his father, but carries a photograph in his pocket that convinces him that the man appears at the railroad station frequently. His much older sister denies it, though her behavior suggests it’s true. Much of the film is devoted to incidental events involving a flock of local pigeons and the sister’s attempts to learn Italian and get a job with the local multi-national firm, which are undermined repeatedly by her tag-along brother’s meddling. The boy himself becomes obsessed with the man on the platform, and attempts to take matters into his own hands. Lots of silences in this dreamy but intriguing work.

Int’l Film Festival

We wandered down to the Mississippi on Sunday morning, planning to grab a bit at Kikugawa and then see a film or two at the festival. The restaurant was closed but the nearby Astor Café was open. There were couples sitting here and there scanning their festival schedules, and a man walked past our table with a smile so open that I almost asked him to join us. I wish I had. Turns out it was Toshifumi Matsushita, the director of Pachamama, the first film we saw. Matsushita (who studied law in Japan before turning to films) has spent the last ten years making movies about indigenous musical traditions.

Pachamama (which means Earthmother) tells the story of a young boy who lives with his family on a salt desert in Bolivia. The first half of the film allows us to settle into the rhythms of life in the village and on the distant salt fields. In the second half, we follow the main character and his father, along with other villagers and a herd of llamas, up into the mountains to distribute the salt they’ve been cutting into blocks all year. There are a few dramatic moments and one or two surreal sequences involving masks and feathered costumes and dancing—just enough to vary the pace and bring us even closer to the lives of these kind and simple people. Near the end of the film the caravan arrives at a mountain town on the eve of its harvest festival, giving us a remarkable peek at a place and a way of life most of us will never view first-hand.

Matsushita spoke after the film, but we were obliged to rush to the theater next-door, where Carolos Saura’s latest film, Fado, was being screened. It shares with Saura’s earlier productions, Flamenco and Iberia, the use of stage sets, mirrors, dancers, and famous singers who (as usual) aren’t identified until the final credits.

Fado, as you probably know, is a Portuguese musical style characterized by melancholy ballads sung to the twittery accompaniment of the Portuguese guitar (a sort of oversized mandolin). Bouncy up-tempo numbers offer variety from time to time, though they draw upon the same vocal inflections and chord progressions. Considered all in all, fado is far less diverse and intense than flamenco, but it can be subtle and expressive in its own way, and Saura has succeeded in making an immensely satisfying film within its somewhat narrow range of wistful emotion.

Much of the credit, of course, goes to the performers themselves, many of whom I had never heard of. I recognized the reigning queen of fado, Mariza, the young back Cape Verdean diva Lura, and the flamenco cantor Miguel Poveda. Amália Rodrigues (who did more than anyone to put fado on the map during her 40-year career) appears in films clips, as do other stars. Near the end of the film a traditional fado club date is re-inacted, with various singers standing up from their tables to sing a few verses. The instrumental numbers are also first-rate, as is the fado hip-hop number. I left the theater in a very happy mood, saying to myself, “Gee, I guess I like fado more than I thought I did.”

We were in the mood for some Spanish bocquerones (deep-fried vinegar-cured anchovies) but such dishes not being available hereabouts, the smelt and calamari at the nearby Red Stag Inn served as a fitting substitute. Thus refreshed, we returned to St. Anthony Main for round three—a Lebanese film called One Man Village.

Though sketchier in technique and a more roundabout in development, this little gem explores the life of the only man remaining in a mountain village that once boasted forty-three families. Semaan had loved his family’s cattle as a youth, and has abandoned a career in the city to return to his childhood haunts along with five cows that he refers to affectionately by name and milks daily. Life is peaceful and simple, though various relatives and former neighbors return from time to time to keep the orchards in shape and enjoy the summer air high above the city.

In the course of interviews with Semaan and his visitors, we learn a little about why everyone left. It was during the Israeli invasion of 1982, though no one wants to talk about it much. We also learn why Semaan never married, how his parents died; and perhaps we even learn something about how he can remain satisfied with such a simple and apparently lonely life in an abandoned village. In fact, watching the film, I felt that I was back in Delphi or the Alpujarras. And that’s a nice feeling.

We resisted the temptation to join the line that was waiting outside the screening room next door to see a film about Iran’s president Ahmadinejad, returning home after a fairly long and stimulating day to read about Lebanon’s troubled history in Rashid Khalidi’s recent book Sowing Crisis.

But the film festival is just beginning.

Tax Time

April 15. One of the most distinctive days of the year. There is something beautiful about a society that calls upon its citizens to voluntarily calculate how much money they owe and send it in—and beyond that, to keep the records of their financial affairs for seven years.

I have always done the family taxes, and I like to keep it simple. If we end up giving a little more than absolutely necessary, it’s a small price to pay for the peace and security, the national parks and the fine schools, the FBI and the social security, the medical research and the Medicare and all the rest.

One of the pages of the federal tax book that’s seldom read, I suspect, is page 91, where they tell you what they spend the money on. I note that 66 percent of the national budget is devoted to social programs. This includes programs for retirees, Medicaid, food stamps, temporary assistance, education, the environment, farm support, unemployment compensation, assisted housing, the waiters at Mammoth Springs Lodge, and other fine services. Twenty percent has been spent on keeping our armed forces modern and funding the Global War on Terrorism and “other national defense activities.” Only 1 percent was spent on international assistance and diplomacy combined, which underscores the old adage, “Talk is cheap.”

I always feel good when the taxes have been filed. It’s like the start of a new life. We know a little better where we stand.

Lots of people are feeling they’re not quite so well off as they used to be, and many are really wondering how they’re going to make ends meet. A recent Homeland Security report warned that right-wing extremist groups have been gaining adherents at an alarming rate, due to the economy’s downturn, and that seems like a plausible turn of events to me. But conservative groups have been clamoring for a retraction. I think the time has come for the expression “conservative knee-jerk reaction” to gain wider currency.

That will probably never happen, because Democrats are far less likely than Republicans to resort to such dumbing-down slogans.

Oh the other hand, the Democaratic slogan “Hope is on the Way” is perhaps the worst of all time. With Obama, we feel, better results are on the way. Even Homeland Security suddenly seems like a good idea.

National Poetry Month

April is national poetry month. And these first few days of April also mark the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first examination of the heavens with a telescope. What a remarkable experience that must have been! Suddenly to see the shadowy edges of craters on the moon and canals on Mars! Even today, when you consider the fact that there’s a huge ball of dust and dirt circling the earth, and an even larger one off in the distance (to put it mildly) warming us with its thermonuclear heat—when you stop to think about it, it’s really quite remarkable.

And then you see the fuzzy tips of the magnolia tree opening in response to the increasing light, and the mallards bobbing their heads in a timeless mating ritual.

We passed two mallards engaging in this activity on the south end of Lake Harriet yesterday. The lake is still largely covered with ice, though it’s getting pretty gray and thin. A hundred yards down the way we spotted a second mallard—a male—floating idly in the water a few feet some shore, all by himself. I knew just what he was thinking. The same thing Hank Williams was thinking when he wrote:

Somebody else stood by your side,
And he looked so satisfied,
I can’t help it, if I’m still in love with you.

Poetry erupts, perhaps, when we stop to think about it. The awesomeness of the universe or the painfulness of our own loneliness and dejection. In either case it’s a matter of sizing up a situation in which we stand apart yet recognize something very valuable, very beautiful, lying just beyond our reach. This is an art worth cultivating, I think. It gives us pleasure, it gives us perspective, it allays our anxieties—and it doesn’t cost anything.

I was thumbing through a book of poems this afternoon by a Kashimi-American poet named Agha Shahid Ali. Though they often had the clear simple voice and short sentences that I like, I was not entirely enthralled by them. Too many moons and deserts and long phone calls home to the folks in the mountains ten thousand miles away, perhaps. But a remark in the introduction did strike my fancy. When asked what his philosophy was, Ali once replied, “I don’t have a philosophy, I have a temperament.”