Skiing the Oscars

Weather doesn’t mean much. And the months are merely conventions. Eighty mallards fly across the sky above our neighbor’s garage every night at sundown, again and again. I think he’s putting out corn, but I’ve never gone to look.

Perhaps it’s the corn that’s been drawing the deer, who wander desultorily across the yard at odd times of the day and night. Last Thursday they decided to spend the night—or a part of it, at any rate—hunkered down in the snow out there in the dark. They looked so content and sculptural and Buddha-like, sitting there silently in the snow with their heads erect, while we, inside the glass, were watching a bizarre French movie from another era called Diva, with gangsters and opera-singers and motor scooters and bootleg tapes.

Put the deer and the mallards together, and that’s far more wildlife than we saw last weekend in three days of Nordic skiing up in Itasca Country. I did spot a fisher by the side of the road just south of Big Fork, however. I backed up the car and we saw it again as it bounded off into the deep woods.

We skied the Sugar Hills (south of Grand Rapids) and the next morning we did a bit of the Suomi Hills north of town. Our morning ski was cut short when Hilary expressed concern that her cheeks were numb—it was -18 below at the time. One glance told the story. Her cheeks were bright red…except for a large triangle of white in the middle of one of them.

Yeah, we should probable head back.

At lunch we talked with a waitress in Big Fork about diamond willow. “People don’t realize, but it’s all over the place out here.” I told her about my grandpa McIlvenna, who used to stop the car and wander off into the woods looking for it, while his wife and daughter (my mom, who was just a little girl at the time) sat patiently in the car.

We eventually skied four different trails and didn’t see a soul. I guess everyone was over at Leech Lake watching the snowmobile drag-races out on the ice. Or the Stud Club Ice Racing finals out in Mille Lacs, which we passed on our way back to the Cities.

Had to get home to see the Academy Awards! It went in a flash. Anne Hathaway flashing her wide toothy smile, full of sincerity, and James Franco looking askance with his lips contorted into something between a sheepish smile and a supercilious grimace. He almost looked like he was trying to look like Billy Crystal (without the jokes) who, in turn, looked old as he came on to tell some funny stories about Bob Hope.

That was about the extent of the nostalgia. (Kirk Douglas no longer counts.)

There was never a dull moment. I would have given the Best Film to The Social Network, but The King’s Speech was flawless and moving. True Grit was good, too. (So was How to Train Your Dragon, for that matter.) Winter’s Bone. 127 Hours. They were all good. (The Kids Are Alright was a dud, but so it goes.)

The opening montage brought back memories of Billy Crystal’s intro pastiche of The English Patient, with David Letterman in a bi-plane.

Colin Firth was in that one, too. It's time he won one.

Winter’s Bone

Have you ever been driving down a country road past a ramshackle house on the edge of a bog, with a broken pick-up (or three) in the yard and a few mangy horses in the corral, and said to yourself: “I wonder what’s goin’ on up there?” If you happened to be passing through the Ozarks, Winter’s Bone would give you some sort of an answer—and it ain’t pretty. But it makes a pretty good movie.

Ree, the main character, is seventeen; she’s raising her two younger siblings because her mother is largely catatonic and her dad has been missing for a while. He makes crystal meth for a living—everybody knows it. (Half the people in the valley probably use it.)

When the sheriff informs Ree that her house will be repossessed if her dad doesn’t show up for a court appearance, she sets out to find him. But no one wants her nosing into the local “crank” industry. Even her uncle, “Teardrop,” tries to scare her off the hunt. Each person she meets is more hostile than the last, though many of them are neighbors and shirttail relatives.

It’s true, the woman across the way brings over a haunch of venison from time to time, and Ree’s girlfriend, who’s already a mother, finally wrangles the keys to the pick-up from her ornery husband, so they can poke around the countryside a bit. In the course of her investigations people tell her things that sort of make sense, and sort of don’t (just like in Chretien de Troyes!) all of which adds to the atmosphere of unrelenting confusion and fear that hangs over the proceedings, relieved only by a few mournful bluegrass numbers and Ree’s dogged determination to come up with a way to find her dad and keep her family—such as it is—intact.

Does Ree’s dad eventually turn up? I wouldn’t want to spoil the film by saying. But that issue aside, the conclusion leaves us with quite a few unanswered questions—things that Ree herself may never know, and probably would be better off not knowing.

Winter’s Bone is a backwoods family drama that steers clear of the hay-seed, cornball, Hee-Haw stuff, and skirts out-and-out melodrama with equal success, thus keeping our attention focused squarely on what these people’s live are actually like.

Jennifer Lawrence is superbly ordinary as young Ree, and John Hawkes is compellingly creepy as uncle Teardrop.

Valentine

Before a new week of work begins—work so heavy I’m developing a pain in my elbow and another one down in my wrist—I feel obliged to salute one of the great holidays. Obliged by whom, or by what? By the blogger’s imperative, I guess, to send forth remarks into the mute and unresponsive universe. It’s a love impulse, I assure you.

However, Valentine’s day is essentially a private occasion. An occasion for couples to indulge themselves however they think best. To splurge on that rib-eye streak, open that bottle of Glen Carlou chardonnay (South Africa) or some strange and long-forgotten red from the cellar such as the Capitel de’ Roari Amarone della Valpolicella 2003 that I’m looking at right now. The word Amarone sounds romantic, though the wine itself is the result of a late-harvest process known as appassimento or rasinate (Italian for “to dry and shrivel”) which concentrates the remaining sugars and flavors, making the wine “raisin-like.”

Asparagus is also likely to be on the menu.

This combination of privacy and shared indulgence can be delightful, of course, whatever form it takes, and its sanctification in a holiday may help us shake off the ever-present feeling that all pleasures are guilty pleasures until we make an effort to extend them as widely as possible to those less fortunate than we are.

There are times for extending our concern, and times for focusing our affection near-at-hand—concern and affection being two different things in any case.

These two impulses came together, I guess, back in grade school, when we were all required to exchange valentines with everyone else in the class, stuffing them into cardboard boxes we'd decorated with construction paper and snippets of red and white paper doilies. Most of these cards had some form of "I Love You" as the message on the inside. For some reason, I found the ones that had "not really" hand-written in parentheses on the bottom strangely disquieting.

On Saturday we went to hear a wise man from West Africa, Malidoma Somé, speak at Augsburg College. The gist of the presentation was familiar enough. Each of us has a mission. Each of us wants to be recognized for who we are—though “who we are” remains a mystery. Everything we experience is an initiation…and a homecoming. Grandparents and grandchildren get along well together because the one just came from where the other will soon be going.

Much of it sounded to me like Platonism, distilled and purified by village experience. The idea of making an effort to "recognize" others might be part of the Valentine message.

This morning the very earth has a big smile on its face, with melt-water trickling down the gutter-pipes and vast puddles giving a marvelous sheen to streets and sidewalks everywhere. At such a time I’m not much inclined to reexamine the theories of Rene de Rougemont (Love in the Western World) or Octavio Paz (The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism). Rather, I open a book of poems called What I Love, by the Greek poet Odysseas Elytis, and read:

Emotion. The leaves tremble living together and living apart on the poplars sharing the wind.

Then I open the door to the deck, and breath in a few lungs-full of moist 40-degree air. The wind’s no longer howling like it was last night, but for the first time in months, it carries hints that are strangely, pleasantly reminiscent of California.

More time for that later. Right now I've got some grocery shopping to do.

Another Year

Mike Leigh’s strange new film is thought-provoking. I’m not sure if it can be called “good.” It focuses on one year in the life of a middle-aged woman named Mary, in the course of which we learn that—well—she doesn’t have much of a life. She works as a secretary at a counseling clinic and occasionally goes out for a drink with a staff counselor named Gerry, who listens patiently to Mary’s daffy, long-winded analyses of her past mistakes and future prospects with something more than professional courtesy. The two are long-time friends, in fact, and it appears that Mary has been invited to dinner parties given by Gerry and her husband Tom on numerous occasions, though less often lately.

Early on in the film, we learn that Mary married young, got divorced, took up with a married man, got dumped, and now finds herself entering a lonely middle age with few comforts except a seemingly ever-present bottle of wine. Tom and Gerry, on the other hand, are a mellow couple who cook together, garden together, and read magazines on the sofa together. They have a grown son named Joe who’s on his own now but still enjoys their company.

When Mary comes over for dinner, it seems almost an act of charity on Gerry’s part. As Mary proceeds to get soused once again, Tom and Gerry humor her as well as they can. It’s painful for us in the audience, too, listening to Mary’s good-natured but delusional monologues.

The pain is amplified by the arrival of Tom’s old high school buddy Ken, a Sad Sack if ever there was one. Ken drinks too much, eats too much, smokes too much, and seldom shaves. He and Tom no longer have much in common beyond an occasional flash of adolescent rough-housing camaraderie. At an afternoon garden party held during Ken’s brief visit, he takes a liking to Mary, who finds him repulsive. She, meanwhile, begins to fancy young Joe, suggesting they go out for a drink some time.

The conversations are uniformly slow-moving and uninspired. How are you? How are you? Fine. Fine. I got a new car. What color? Would you like another glass of wine? I’m going to have one. What holds our interest is, first and foremost, the performance of Lesley Manville, who as Mary, delivers up an unending tour de force of nervous tics, hopeful glances, troubled shudders, wistful asides, and other indefinable and mercurial expressions. It’s also interesting to watch the expressions of Tom and son Joe, because it’s clear they both have a well-developed sense of humor, and as Mary prattles on, it’s difficult to tell where the graciousness and courtesy stop and silent mockery begins.

The film’s plot (such as it is) thickens when Tom’s sister-in-law dies and the family heads north to the funeral. And it really picks up steam when Joe brings a girl-friend home to meet the folks. Suddenly the conversations grow lively and we’re relieved to discover that Tom and Gerry are as interesting and articulate as we’ve suspected all along. The question arises: why have we been spending so much time with the likes of Mary, Ken, and Tom’s grief-stricken brother Ronnie?

The answer, I guess, is that Mike Leigh wants us to see what lives on the edge of abject loneliness look like, and to take note of how close that edge can be to “normal” life. Another Year is a film about compassion, but it’s also about “losers” and dead ends. Kindness and forbearance are admirable indeed, but the supply isn’t endless. As the atmosphere in Tom and Gerry’s household changes, Mary is cast further into the shadows and in the end, all Gerry can do is advise her to seek professional help.

Another Year isn’t much fun, but it has a haunting, unresolved, pathetic quality that’s memorable and rare.

Saint Paul / the Universe

Friday afternoon in sleepy St. Paul, Minnesota, it’s surprising what you run into sometimes. The Winter Carnival is in full swing and the sidewalks that crisscross Rice Park are lined with evergreens brought in especially for the occasion. Ice sculptures and concession tents are scattered everywhere.

We’d come downtown to see the Imax show about the Hubble Telescope. It’s a remarkable experience—about as close as most of us will ever come to exploring the nether reaches of the universe. More than half the show is devoted to recent attempts by astronauts to repair the Hubble, which circles the earth every ninety minutes. That’s compelling enough. But even better are the sequences that take us into the heart of distant nebulae where stars are forming. Evidently there are a hundred billion galaxies in our universe (at last count) and each one has maybe a hundred billion stars in it. Quite a few glowing balls out there, with some enormous stretches of emptiness in between—to say the least. It’s awesome to contemplate, dazzling to look at, and hard to wrap your brain around. What more can I say?

After a cheap, satisfying dinner at Rhum Mit Thai, we stopped in at the Landmark Center to watch a slightly more down-to-earth show: the Bounce Team tryouts. Contestants take a running start, then leap up onto a large round piece of canvas being held in place four feet off the ground by ten or twelve burly men. The young woman sits cross-legged as she re-establishes her balance, bobbing gently up and down as the men work the canvas. Then the head bouncer says “Here we go. One-two-three-up you go!” At that point the men pull harder and the young woman flies about fifteen feet up into the air. The better ones smile and touch their fingers to their toes while remaining upright. The other ones smile, too, as they flail wildly to keep from spinning upside down and breaking their neck when they hit the canvas again.

Our next stop was across the street at Meritage, where we nabbed two chairs at the new bar. We happened to be directly in front of the bartender’s work station, and after I’d watched the fellow make a Hatter—bourbon, vermouth, Chartreuse, and lemon peel, served straight up in a curved martini glass—I ordered one myself. The couple next to us was enjoying a large iced plate of oysters. The tiny lights from the trees across the street were twinkling in the darkness like a stray galaxy from ten billion years ago. (Or maybe the Hatter was beginning to take effect.)

Our final stop was upstairs in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s third floor concert space, where we heard concert-master Steven Copes and friends make their way through a frothy Britten oboe fantasia, Mozart’s quintet K. 515, and Brahms quintet opus 111. The Britten was a pleasant appetizer, and the Mozart was rich (though I’ve heard that piece so many times I have a hard time appreciating it fully). But the Brahms quintet was truly magnificent. Complicated, tuneful, masterfully constructed. The danger, in performing Brahms, is turgidity (is that a word?) but these musicians kept the piece lively, with various voices ringing out in ways I hadn’t heard before. It made the Mozart quintet, for all its texture and brilliance, seem like a warm-up exercise. I guess that’s saying something.

Home Cooking in Bayfield

Undaunted by the mercury, which stood at 12 below zero, we set off Friday morning for a weekend of Nordic skiing in Bayfield, Wisconsin.

There are countless ways to get there from Minneapolis—for a start, you can turn east from the freeway at Forest Lake, Highway 70, Hinkley, Askov, or Duluth. We hit the secondary roads at Hinkley, which sent us past St. Croix State Park and the HomeStyle Café in Danbury, Wisconsin. We didn’t stop: I think I might still be digesting the chicken-fried steak I enjoyed there in September. But it’s an unusual place, the owner cooks all the food himself, with the help of a woman from Montana.

(Native American, or Greek American?) who also waits the tables. Portions are on the gargantuan side.

We continued east to Minong before turning north toward Superior. Our immediate destination was the After Hours ski trails just west of the town of Brule.

We’d never been there before. Some parts of the gently rolling landscape have the feel of a tree farm, with vast acreage given to aspen, followed abruptly by seeming endless acres of tightly spaced, middle-aged white pine. But the plantings look like a forest all the same, rather than a regimented crop, and the sections of the trail that follow the heights above the Brule River are especially nice. We saw no one on the trail—the temperature had arrived at zero—and there were no critters in sight, either, though I at one point I spotted the tracks of a long-tailed weasel. Our two hours in the woods were given added dimension by the fact that more than a century ago, Hilary’s great-grandfather spent a winter logging in the woods near here before continuing west to Crookston.

We arrived in Bayfield at dusk and checked in at the Sea Gull Bay Motel, where you can rent an entire three-bedroom house for $70 a night. We took a sauna, whipped up some spaghetti, opened a bottle of fairly decent Cote du Rhone, played three games of scrabble and called it a night.

The next morning before dawn we watched through the living room window as some distant figures set up ice houses on Chequamegon Bay a quarter-mile out from shore. I made a few calls and discovered that the ice road over to Madeleine Island wasn’t open yet, and that you can’t get to the sea caves on the north side of the peninsula either. We drove downtown to the ferry dock, where a windsled operates a regular schedule of deliveries to the island. The sled was no where to be seen, but pine trees had been set out on the ice to mark the road, and while we were looking out on the vast sheet of ice stretching out toward Basswood and Madeleine islands, a couple of snowmobiles emerged from the white horizon and eventually passed us on their way to the snow-covered beach.

Our next stop was Bodin’s fresh fish market, a few blocks away on the south side of town. Evidently they’re still fishing with nets under the ice.

“We had some great herring fishing in October,” the man in the back room told us. “We brought in 250,000 pounds in two weeks. We had six semis backed up to the dock, one after another. And one rabbi, who stood at the back of each truck blessing the fish as it was loaded.”

“They must be taking it to the gefelte fish factory in Iowa,” I mused.

“Yup, they were going to Iowa.”

We bought a fillet of lake trout and another of whitefish, though it hadn’t been a part of our menu. Having done so, we then headed back downtown for some fish batter, parsley, butter, and a lemon. The Fryin’ Magic seasoned coating mix (made by Little Crow Foods of Warsaw, Indiana) was on sale.

An cheerful Indian woman was working the cash register. A young man from the Red Cliff tribal police was just in front of us in line. Another Ojibwe man was just leaving with a bag of plastic flowers (of all things). Before stepping outside he said, “See you at Kino,” and the woman replied in a musical voice, as if in agreement, “I'll be in the back row.” Then a woman buying a few things at the other register said, “See you at church.” It wasn’t clear to me to whom that remark was addressed, but no one responded.

A half-hour later we were setting out on the Jerry Jay Jolly Pike Creek Ski trails up in the hills west of town. No one in the parking lot. We were overtaken a quarter-mile in by a beautiful white husky wearing a day-glow orange cape, followed a few minute later by his owner. “I should have him on a leash, I know,” the man said, “But if I did, I’d probably strangle him or run him over on this hill we’re coming to. It’s not for the faint of heart.”

The hill in question was, indeed, one of those winding chutes down through the woods that have been removed from most well-designed trial systems. The kind that drop away out of sight in front of you while making a corner at the same time. The kind that you arrive at the bottom of with relief, not exhilaration. Hilary went first. When I spotted her tiny red figure a few minutes later amid the trees in the valley below, I started my own hair-raising descent.

Regaining my bearings at last, I found myself on the bank of Pike Creek, surrounded on all sides by snow-covered pines rising up the steep walls of the valley. The creek was flowing dark through the bed of snow-covered rocks. It was an enchanting stretch—winter at its best.

We spent the afternoon reading and snoozing, with the snow growing thicker and the distant outline of Madeleine Island eventually disappearing from view. The fishermen had disassembled their huts—they were gone. We drove down to the landing just to get out into the day one more time before darkness fell and were lucky enough to arrive a few minutes before the windsled was due on a return trip from the island. People were backing their cars out onto the ice, their trunks loaded with groceries. A man in a Green Bay Packers hat was standing on shore with what looked like three pizza delivery bags.

“So you live on the island?” I asked him.

“I’m fourth generation on the island,” he replied. “My cousin drives the windsled. Where are you from?”

“We’re from Minneapolis. Just up for some cross-country skiing.”

“Well, we’ve got plenty of snow for that. Trouble is, the snow screws up the ice on the lake. Insulates it. It started out real good but now it’s gone funny.”

We talked about the upcoming game between the Packers and Bears for a minute or two before the headlights on the windsled appeared through the wall of snow in the distance.

It’s quite a machine—orange, ensconced in canvas, riding on five huge runners, driven by wind generated by two enormous propellers at the back. It’s not likely to get stuck in slush, because it doesn’t require traction, and it won’t fall through the ice entirely, because the thing floats!

Meanwhile, I saw a man pass in a snowmobile on his way to the island clutching two plastic IGA grocery bags. (Honey, could you make a run to town to get some coffee?) And two people drove in from somewhere out on the ice on an ATV, caked in snow.

I spoke to them a few minutes later, as they were scraping ice off the underside of their vehicle. It looked to be a father-daughter team. They were from Ashland, and they’d been ice-fishing all day out near Basswood Island. Didn’t catch a thing. Other fishermen nearby had brought in thirty whitefish and gave them five or six. I told the man we’d bought some fresh trout at Bodin’s that we were going to fry up for supper.

“Fish soup. That’s really good. Or bake them. Just put some olive oil and lemon, maybe some onions…”

“In tin foil,” his daughter added an important detail, looking up from the underside of the machine.

“But frying’s good, too,” he said at last, tactfully. "We like fried fish, too."

True Grit

The Western genre has been dying a slow death since the early 1960s—or so we’re told. But genres are categories, not organisms. They can’t die. For that matter, most of the Westerns made during the 1950s are second-rate. In fact, most Westerns are second-rate, period, maybe because didactic violence and wide-open landscapes are hard to hold together on the big screen.

The string of very good “modern” Westerns is long and fairly impressive. It runs from High Noon (a take on the McCarthy witch-hunt?) and Rio Bravo ( Howard Hawks’ masterful remake of High Noon) to the Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Missouri Breaks (the quintessential “method” Western), and Heaven’s Gate (not as bad as they say…or so they say) and on up to Days of Heaven, Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, Open Range, and the remake of 3:10 to Yuma. And that’s not to mention the numerous campy contributions of Sergio Leone to the genre, many of then shot in Spain, which culminated in Once Upon a Time in the West.

Now the Coen brothers have entered the field with a remake of True Grit. It follows a few days in the life of Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl who’s determined to avenge the murder of her father, and it’s a picaresque affair. Mattie holds her own in encounters with stable managers, Texas Rangers, U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn, and outlaws of various stripes. Everyone in the film speaks with a slightly bookish diction, though Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) tends to slur, growl, or grunt his lines, and the Ranger (Matt Damon) gives them a slightly affected lilt, in keeping with his somewhat dandified character.

There are touches of classic Coen-bros black humor here and there in the film—for example, during a public hanging the Native American convict isn’t given a fair chance to deliver his last words—but for the most part, it’s a lovely recreation of the Old West, and even though the man-hunt that occupies the second half of the film takes place in winter, the landscapes are wonderfully rendered (well, it is New Mexico) and the cabin scenes are far more deftly lit (hence less phony-looking) than is typical of the genre.


True Grit has been called the “least ironic” of the Coen Brothers’ films, which may explain why it’s been the most successful. It may eventually surpass Dances with Wolves to become the most popular Western of all time. Jeff Bridges is a genuine riot, finally earning his Oscar one year after the fact, and Hailee Steinfeld, a relative newcomer to film in the role of Mattie Ross, succeeds at being a charming kid notwithstanding her fierce determination to hunt down and punish her father’s killer. The hymn-laden soundtrack also contributes to the atmosphere, which is as richly “western” as anything you’ll see in Stagecoach or Shane.