Anyone who’s ever accidentally blown pot smoke into the face of a baby should see this film. It all started in 1969, when filmmaker Ralph Arlyck made a short documentary about a precocious boy named Sean. This four-year-old was the son of San Francisco hippies extraordinaire, and in the film he famously claimed, “I smoke grass.” When Arlyck asked him to describe the experience, the tyke retorted, “If you have any grass, I’ll show you.” Decades later, Arlyck has tracked down Sean and, in a new documentary, reveals what became of him. Just so you know, Sean is not in prison, nor does he collect pretty butterflies. 612-331-3134; www.mnfilmarts.org/bell
Year: 2006
-
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
“More than a state of mind, the South is an atmosphere. The blood rules them. They don’t rule the blood.” That’s coming from Florida native and alt-country singer Jim White, who takes us on a weird, close-up tour of the hidden crevices of the Bible Belt in this meandering documentary. Through encounters with locals who sing, pray, and search for roadside treasure, director Andrew Douglas aims to make it clear that there are still many inhabitants of the Old South who are in no danger of succumbing to our nation’s growing cultural homogeneity. With a musical backdrop by the likes of the Handsome Family, Johnny Dowd, Lee Sexton, and David Johansen.
-
Ask the Dust
Robert Towne brings to the screen what has been called the greatest novel about Los Angeles ever written. Ask the Dust is the gritty tale of a young Italian man, Arturo Bandini (played by Colin Farrell) who struggles to write the Great American Novel while trying to pay his rent, get enough to eat, and fight his feelings for Camilla (Selma Hayek), an impoverished Mexican waitress. All the while, memorable lowlifes drift in and out of his life, eventually vanishing into the Southern California desert. Originally planned as a part of Towne’s “L.A. Trilogy”–Chinatown is the first–Ask the Dust’s story is relentlessly bleak and mournful, and fans of the novel will be displeased to learn that Towne foolishly has meddled with what was one of the greatest endings in modern literature
-
The Super Shammy Man
Spring was still months away, and standing just inside the entrance of the “Twenty-fifth Annual Cycle World International Motorcycle Show,” at the Minneapolis Convention Center, two blond girls were handing out plastic bags. They looked old enough to get their first tattoos, but demure enough to keep tugging at the creeping hemlines of their neon-green mini dresses. With their skinny legs clad in nude panty-hose and knee-high platform boots, they looked like they were playing dress up. My friends and I took our bags, hoping to fill them with freebies.
Inside, the hall was a circus of brand names— Yamaha, Suzuki, Ducati, Moto Primo, Vanson, BMW, Buell, and, of course, the elephant in the tent, Harley-Davidson. Most of the salespeople stood back and let the booths and the bikes do the talking, while the hungrier ones lurked around the perimeter like hyenas. The more aggressive or desperate vendors darted into the slow-moving herd, hoping to hook a few weak-willed stragglers.
“Say, I noticed you have some sunglasses there, if you have just a minute—” Like a perfume salesgirl, one predator popped up in front of me armed with a spray bottle, but I ducked and dodged. Safely out of range, my friend confided that her husband got roped in earlier. “And you know what?” she whispered. “He said his glasses were the cleanest they’ve ever been.”
After an hour, my swag bag was still empty. No one else seemed to be scoring anything, either.
At the very back of the hall a small crowd had gathered. Despite the lousy location, spectators were standing three-deep around a booth and pushing in to get a better look. Above them, on a platform, stood a man with his shirtsleeves rolled up, his face red and moist from the lights flooding his stage. He spoke into the round foam ball of his headset and somehow managed to make eye contact with everyone and no one all at once.
“Folks, you’ve probably seen something like this on TV, but I can guarantee,” he said, punctuating his words with finger jabs, “You have never seen the Super Shammy.”
He grabbed a large bottle filled with some kind of cola and poured it all over a square carpet sample. As he talked, he held a fan of yellow swatches and dealt them out to the crowd. “As you can see, folks, the Super Shammy isn’t just absorbent, it’s super absorbent,” said Super Shammy Man as he pressed a piece of the magical material onto the carpet. He soaked up all the liquid, then lifted the dry carpet up high for all to see. He proceeded to mop up all the excess soda on the table, too. Then he squeezed the Super Shammy, with its bulging payload, over a rubber dish pan filled with murky grey water. The stream seemed endless. There was the roar of the stunt bike demonstration going on nearby, but Super Shammy Man’s crowd was completely silent. They heard only the sound of that nasty, unwanted liquid trickling into the plastic tub.
“Folks, the Super Shammy isn’t just for sunglasses, spills, and shiny shoes. The Super Shammy is great for”—he whirled around and caught me taking his picture instead of listening to his pitch—“cameras like yours, honey.” He moved on. “What about the bathroom, the kid’s room, the boat, the RV, the soccer game?” He didn’t even bother to mention motorcycles, but his audience was spellbound nonetheless.
We moved on without buying anything, but the huckster’s fading monologue lingered. When was the last time a salesman trudged the rural roads of this country, serenading the Lady of The House with his shtick? When was the last time the Lady of The House was even home and willing to open her door to strange men?
The next day I wanted to ask Super Shammy Man about his job and his life, but none of the event coordinators had any information. They knew him only as the exhibitor in booth 147. His accent—Canadian, I think—suggested that he wouldn’t be sticking around after the last day of the show. My Super Shammy samples don’t have logos or toll-free numbers. Super Shammy is on the web, but it seems they’re distributed exclusively by lone peddlers like the guy at the Cycle World show. These characters buy their stock from the Fuller Brush Company, the outfit that once upon a time jammed thousands of well-worn shoes into front doors all across the country and, according to the cartoons in old Playboys, offered occasional “private demonstrations” to some of those lonely housewives.
The four of us left the show without a motorcycle, a young spokesgirl, or even a bagful of free souvenirs. Still, I felt like the farmer’s wife left holding the bogus receipt for a family Bible and yet smiling as she watches her thief in the night heading down the trail to his next mark. Now I wish I had let Super Shammy Man wring a few bucks out of me. He and his increasingly rare brand of late-night infomercial seduction was more satisfying and a lot less humiliating than the twelve-dollar admission fee I paid for the privilege to ogle motorcycles that cost a thousand times that much and which I wouldn’t even be able to use for another three months.—Sari Gordon
-
From Syria >> Board Game Diplomacy
Game Night at the American Language Center in Damascus is an eagerly anticipated annual event. Each classroom offers a different game, with a volunteer to explain the rules, supervise play, and arbitrate potential disputes. A day before the event, my co-worker Tanisha informed me that I’d be presiding over the board games Risk and Monopoly. The choices were purely coincidental. But the juxtaposition of games offered an unintended comment on American culture. “Have fun,” the language center seemed to be suggesting to its students, “and gain first-hand knowledge of two things Americans have excelled at over the years: accumulating wealth and invading other countries.”
As the students poured into tiny classroom seven, I discovered that both Monopoly boxes were missing dice and game pieces. The Risk game sets were also incomplete and required about five minutes to assemble. But I enlisted two students, Tarek and Amer, to separate and stack the perforated sheet of game cards while Nawras and I made the dice by placing tiny stickers onto the uneven surfaces of three black plastic cubes. Amer’s brother Alaa and a reticent female student named Noor sorted the plastic armies according to color. As we set up the game, I explained the rules. Game cards are distributed among five players, with each card representing a particular territory on the board. The students must distribute their armies according to whatever cards they receive. The purpose of the game is to occupy territories and attack adjacent countries, while the ultimate goal is to eventually conquer the entire world. Armies are lost by low rolls of the dice. The reward for conquering a territory is a game card, and these cards can eventually be exchanged for additional armies.
Ten minutes into the game, his position on the board already virtually indefensible, Nawras’ cell phone erupted with a popular Arabic tune. “Joel, I have to go,” he informed me moments later, and headed for the door. In the absence of newcomers, I decided to sit in. My presence seemed to spur an instant, politically motivated enthusiasm in the other players. This newfound interest was confirmed by Amer and Alaa’s two brothers who entered the room minutes later. “Where are you from?” one asked me. I pointed to the west coast of North America on the game board. “We are four Iraqis,” he laughed, and the rest of the room laughed with him.
Veterans of Risk understand that the game is won and lost by ephemeral alliances that form between players. Essentially, you can’t win without the help of other players, so you try to persuade them it’s in their interest to attack someone else instead of you. Tarek and I were friends outside of class, so we formed a non-aggression pact out of mutual self-preservation: I wouldn’t attack him in Europe if he left me alone in Africa. But the common enemy of the four brothers from Baghdad is obvious, so I decided to find out if Noor could be persuaded to do my military bidding. I gestured for her to overwhelm Alaa in Asia from North America. “Come on, Noor,” I said. “If he holds onto Asia until next turn, he gets an additional seven armies. You can’t allow that.” But Noor, who is Syrian, required no convincing from the Iraqi brothers to join their anti-American alliance.
I plotted my next move. Apparently inspired by the sight of my unintentionally serious countenance bent over the board, Noor lobbed an insult in my direction: “You look like George Bush!” My mouth dropped open. “I was joking,” she assured me a moment later, and all was forgotten except for the job at hand: to gang up and attack me in successive turns. Amer in particular was clearly delighting in watching his American teacher erased from the board. As we fought over South America and Africa, denying each other armies by pushing into each other’s territory, his brothers plotted my eventual destruction from behind the scenes. Whenever Amer won a roll against me, he gleefully exclaimed, “See you!” before removing my plastic pieces from the board.
Tarek, languishing in Europe, was the first to be eliminated. Just before he was attacked by Amer’s brother Alaa sweeping in from the territory labeled “le Moyen-Orient” (the Middle East), I intervened ineffectually on his behalf. When Alaa eventually decided to attack me in Egypt, I responded with mock incredulity: “Come on! Mubarek wants peace! Can’t we all just get along?”
Other students came in and gathered around to watch. Amer’s brothers continued to whisper strategy to Noor, making sweeping motions with their hands—like a conductor motioning for a crescendo from the tympani section—over my weakly held territories in Africa. It was Amer who was rewarded with the task of finally finishing me off—a moment of sweet justice denied his country in the real world. I began to wonder how the game would end. Noor would be the next to go, I reasoned. But would Alaa and Amer eventually have the fortitude to attack each other? Amer, however, had a more benevolent plan up his sleeve—a harmonious alliance of Christian and Muslim brothers controlling the world with no unilaterally aggressive American army in sight to foul it up. As soon as I was off the board, he proclaimed triumphantly, “Now we can have peace!”—Joel Hanson
-
Manderlay
The most insightful films about the Holocaust certainly haven’t been made by Germans, so why shouldn’t a Dane director investigate the legacy of slavery in the United States? Of course, that leaves redemption and uplifting escapes out of the script, but the story Lars von Trier tells is filled with assumptions, speculations, and unexpected turns that make Manderlay less a history lesson than an allegory. The second film in his “America Trilogy” finds Grace (played by Bryce Dallas Howard; Nicole Kidman declined this itchy sequel to Dogville) and her gangster father discovering a plantation where slavery was apparently never abolished. Appalled, Grace confronts the dying master and takes over, intending to run the place as a free community and make right a situation that has simmered to a point of psychological perversion. That hardly makes it an uplifting film, though. Von Trier shifts the victim role around with casual and even insulting ease, and his script takes enough dark and uncomfortable turns that many African-American actors were turned off (though Danny Glover takes a leading role, most of the other black characters are played by British actors). Ultimately, Manderlay is a sort of bizarre fairy tale–one made by a man who, because of his fear of flying, has never even come here.
-
Antonya Nelson
All the would-be writers out there claiming that having kids makes it impossible to start a novel should take a tip from Antonya Nelson. When the kids are young and demanding, write short stories during Sesame Street. When they get older and head to grade school, expand with a novel or two. When adolescence hits, go back to short stories, but be careful not to touch on anything too overtly autobiographical. That formula may sound simplistic, but with insight, empathy, and wily craftsmanship, Nelson has made it work. Now, with her kids in phase three, she’s produced a new collection of short works. Many of these stories dwell on the miasma of miscommunication, the cruelty, and the loneliness that falls upon both adults and sub-adults during those delightful teen years.
-
Colson Whitehead
Here’s a guy whose novels always start with really good ideas. In fact, Whitehead’s jacket copy often is more interesting than other authors’ entire novels. That’s an impressive gift, indeed. Nor does he disappoint over the long haul, spinning those ideas–hooks, really–into clever, entertaining, and deceptively weighty stories. For instance, his first novel, The Intuitionist, which focuses on a group of elevator inspectors, addresses questions of racial equality and upward mobility. Whitehead’s latest zeitgeist comedy of manners and errors involves a former whiz-bang “nomenclature consultant” who is summoned to help the citizens of a community choose a new name for their town. Given WhiteheadÕs track record, that should be good raw material for his imagination to work with.
-
Allegra Goodman
Allegra Goodman is one of those ridiculous prodigies who managed to sustain and build on her early buzz. Her first collection of stories, Total Immersion, was written while she was an undergraduate at Harvard, and she’s since published another collection and a couple of novels, including the remarkable Kaaterskill Falls (a National Book Award finalist). Intuition initially seems like a bit of a departure, but on closer inspection, the book explores many of the writer’s signature preoccupations. Goodman is particularly adept at zeroing in on individuals within closed communities and intensely collaborative situations. In this case, that means a cash-strapped research lab where a group of scientists believes it has stumbled onto a cure for cancer. When the discovery is scrutinized and deemed fraudulent, Goodman’s novel becomes a mystery that addresses such complex and timely subjects as medical ethics and unchecked human ambition.
-
Kiki Smith: A Gathering
While some artists can explore one theme or medium for years, Kiki Smith is notable for how far and wide she has ranged in her work. Despite its variety, you can see it shifting, in a sense, from the micro to the macro. In the eighties, Smith was sculpting individual body parts and organs, moving from there to life-size human forms, with an emphasis on the female body. Then she began looking at the larger cultural world, incorporating elements from folklore, myths, and religion, often by using animals that have symbolic roles in those stories. While this retrospective brings together 125 pieces, Smith herself has curated one gallery as an intimate “cabinet of wonders,” showcasing some of her oldest and most recent works. 612-0375-7600; www.walkerart.org