While Sudan and Qatar might be tougher bets, most Americans could spin a globe and pinpoint Saudi Arabia’s deserts with relative ease. Even if your geography fails you, you’ve no doubt at least heard of Saudi and perhaps recall Peter O’Toole shouting across the desert sands in Lawrence of Arabia. The average American might know that the country is the world’s largest oil producer, that it has two coasts—its arid land mass is sandwiched between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf—and that it is one of America’s allies in the Middle East (this, in spite of the fact that Osama bin Laden was a Saudi national). You might also believe, if you’ve watched certain afternoon talk shows, that women there are imprisoned in their homes and regularly beaten. Or, if you are a Michael Moore fan, that the princes of the Saudi Kingdom have conspired with the Bush family to start wars for oil. If you listen to right-wing radio, you might think that the country is almost entirely populated by people who hate freedom.
CONVERSATIONS REAL & IMAGINED: ONE MAN’S TRASH
Norman Andersen flipped a switch on the side of a contraption that looks like a combination of a pipe organ and a china cabinet, albeit with a bright red Scandinavian door harp perched like a cherry on top. “This is called Valkommen!,” Andersen said. The thing began to wheeze and hum, then the pipes moaned out an uneven dirge. A bass drum started booming slowly from within while a mechanical arm strummed a shrill tune on the door harp, another tapped a handmade cymbal, and a pair of cheap red castanets clattered. After a few minutes, the whole thing folded back into itself with a gentle sigh. It was a mesmerizing performance. “Thing is, I just can’t sell these,” Andersen explained. “They’re like elephants. Everyone loves elephants, but no one wants to own one.”
Posted in A Raging Gallimaufry: Everything Else, Conversations Real & Imagined
Tagged Norman Anderson
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WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
Brief Encounter, 1945. Directed by David Lean and written by Noel Coward. Starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard.
Sometimes it helps to escape a blue weekend with a mindless comedy, some blood and gore, or a spectacular adventure full of explosions. To wander into the local Cineplex with twenty bucks, grab your ticket, and check out from life for two hours. Look around you: every theater has its share of time-wasters, a brief moment in the darkness to distract you from the weight of the world. Sometimes, that is what movies are for.
Then again, sometimes it is good to give in, to allow some subtle little movie, a forgotten gem that you’ll have to rent and with which you’ll drink cheap red wine, to worm its way into your heart and shake you to your core. Despite the pain, and perhaps the sleeplessness (definitely the sleeplessness), this is often a good thing. A perfect example: Brief Encounter.
Posted in Lost in the Temple: Movies
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THE BOTTOMLESS WELLES
I was ten years old when I first saw Citizen Kane. My father hauled my brother and me to the enormous Temple Theatre in downtown Saginaw, Michigan, and with a crowd of maybe two dozen, we noticed that Kane was more than just a chapter of film history; it was hilarious and melancholy and eminently bizarre. Like the eponymous boy in The Little Prince (which Welles at one point adapted into an unfilmed screenplay), Charles Foster Kane is less William Randolph Hearst and so much more the young Orson, bouncing from experience to experience in his fruitless quest for true love. Here was a curious and melancholy figure, trying desperately to hold on to his childhood as he grew older. Just like the rest of us. Or so I thought.
Reading about Orson Welles in the hopes of understanding his character (or his movies) is akin to dropping into a deep and unmapped cave. For someone who made only twelve full-length features (one remains unreleased due to myriad legal problems, and there are many others he may or may not have directed), Welles has had a tremendous amount scribbled about him.
MAN OF LA MANCHA
Teeming with beautiful people who routinely burn beds or weep openly out on its streets, Pedro Almodóvar’s Madrid is a strange and magical place. Exploding in color, it is a city subjected to a constant torrent of emotion and deceit churned up by outrageous women and handsome but impotent men. The Spanish capital—where all his movies save his newest are set—is a place that makes the real world seem destitute by comparison. Watch one of his films and then ask yourself: Why aren’t Almodóvar’s people wandering our streets? Where are the transsexual whores who mingle with the city’s top actresses? The paraplegic cops who sleep with and marry heroin addicts? The babies who are born on city buses, squalling while midwives bite their umbilical cords free? Almodóvar might say that they are everywhere we can come under the spell of a movie. Like the aged Don Quixote transformed into madness by his romances, his coterie of oddballs is enriched by films, even as they try to live up to cinema’s impossible fantasy.
CONVERSATIONS REAL & IMAGINED: THE SHRIEK OF SILENCE
“Our work is a subjective observation of sound,” said David Berg. As a scientist of sorts for the Acoustics and Audio Group at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Berg listens for a living. For instance, if you ever wondered what noise a cell phone’s seemingly silent display makes, he has the wherewithal to tell you. Not only that, but he can analyze the tiny purr and determine whether it can be improved upon. To do so, he would probably retreat to a room at the center of the Labs, a spot the Guinness Book of World Records has named the quietest place on earth.
CONVERSATIONS REAL & IMAGINED: TINKERER EXTRAORDINAIRE
“Dig around and find something!” Steve Jevning said, poking through a box of doll heads. “That’s how we do it here. See it, touch it, if something talks to you, grab it!” Jevning is the founder and executive director of Leonardo’s Basement, a South Minneapolis educational center for children of all ages. In a space beneath the Anodyne Coffee Shop on Nicollet Avenue, kids can do anything from computer animation to welding to mummifying Barbie dolls. The place is packed to its dusty rafters with the detritus of salvage shops, electronics warehouses, armament factories, and other enterprises that donate materials. As the pirate captain of this strange organization, Jevning presides over nearly two dozen instructors; in summer the place kicks into high gear, tripling the number of classes it offers.
Posted in Conversations Real & Imagined
Tagged Conversations Real & Imagined, Steve Jevning
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MEDIUM COOL
I long ago discovered the correlation between the price paid for a pair of sunglasses and the speed at which I lose them. I once dropped a sweet pair of Ray-Bans over the side of a friend’s Sunfish and watched them sink to the bottom of Lake Michigan after only one week. Eventually, frugality had forced me to stop wearing sunglasses altogether. That is, until the wretched sunlight began to wear away at my good nature—squinting put me in such a foul state of mind last summer that a stranger stopped me on the street and told me I ought to smile more. It was time to get a real pair of shades.
DOME DAYS
There is probably no more beleaguered building in all of Minnesota than the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. If there’s one thing both sides of the stadium debate can agree on, it’s how hideous the place is for baseball. Nevertheless, in its twenty-four years, Minneapolis’ “Rec Room” has become surrounded by a nebula of strange little shops, odd industrial enterprises, and food vendors on game days. It is precisely these places that make the Metrodome area so promising to the meanderer.
HOLLYWOOD HIT ‘N’ RUN
Though it now seems long ago, it’s only been a few weeks since a brace of bona fide Hollywood stars descended on downtown St. Paul. The city was abuzz with famous people and the regular folks who admire them, but nothing rivaled the enthusiasm of the international, domestic, and local press. Since this was, after all, the national premiere of a major motion picture, a full-scale, Hollywood-style press conference was set up inside the Saint Paul Hotel. There were dozens of lensmen, talking heads, beat reporters, stringers, and hacks in attendance. There were big-timers from organs like People magazine and the Associated Press.
Posted in A Raging Gallimaufry: Everything Else, Lost in the Temple: Movies
Tagged A Prairie Home Companion
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