Category: Article

Minnesota’s most venerable company landed one of the biggest private contracts ever awarded by the Chinese government. And promptly lost it, because of—what else?—sex and cars.

The Orient promises untold riches. And yet for centuries those riches have remained untold. From Marco Polo to AOL, Queen Victoria to General Motors, the history of foreign investment in China is undistinguished, occasionally despicable, and mostly ruinous. But that’s never stopped anyone. In the early 1980s, as China began to open its markets to foreign investment, a new generation of corporate Marco Polos decided it was time, once again, to conquer the Orient.

Minnesota’s 3M led the charge.

In 1984, 3M became the first foreign corporation granted a license to operate on the mainland without a Chinese partner. It was a significant honor, and that’s what it remained for a long time: 3M maintained an office—or presence, as they like to say—that generated almost nothing. Twenty years later, 3M China’s Shanghai manufacturing facilities and seven national service centers produce dynamic growth rates and glowing press releases. Whether they produce profits is another matter, and one not revealed in the company’s quarterly earnings statements or filings with the SEC. Nevertheless, the company insists that it is in China for the long-term, and its long experience in the country is one of its primary marketing tools. “With ten years of business savvy to date,” the company claimed as early as 1995, “3M China is as knowledgeable as any in delivering its global technology.”

In June 2002, as part of his celebrated trade mission to China, Gov. Jesse Ventura visited 3M (3M China spokesman Kelvin Li fondly recalls the governor as the “King of Wrestling”). The drop-in was typical for an official visit: drums, dragons, a brief tour, and the announcement of a large deal. In this case, Governor Ventura was pleased to declare that 3M would be providing “digital license plate technology” to China’s Ministry of Public Safety. Kenneth Yu, managing director of 3M China and the China Region, told reporters that the deal could be worth more than $100 million over several years. He also told a Minnesota Public Radio reporter that Ventura didn’t deserve much credit for the transaction: “All the deals you see that are signed in any trade mission didn’t happen just because the trade mission is over there, you know.” Yu wanted the media to know that 3M had been working on the project long before Ventura crossed the Pacific.

Kenneth Yu’s pride would be tested. Less than three months later, the Chinese government had placed the deal “on hold.” Meanwhile Yu was revising himself, bluntly telling The Rake that “It was never a deal.” Deal or not, the suspension was covered in every major Chinese newspaper (it has never been covered in Minnesota’s business press, including the Star Tribune, despite that same paper’s enthused coverage of the original announcement). Though 3M was never mentioned in those stories, it is widely known in China’s foreign-invested business community that 3M let loose blatant sexual innuendo on the streets of Beijing, thus ending the program.

In the year since the suspension, the tale of how 3M botched a $100 million deal in ten days has taken on near-mythic status in China’s foreign business community. Some recount it for laughs and others for consolation. In free-market China, failure is more rule than exception for large corporations. Even the biggest players are capable of doing something breathtakingly stupid. In spite of its extensive China experience, 3M Corporation proved it.

Over the past decade, China has become the fastest-growing automobile market in the world. In the first half of 2003 alone, passenger car sales in China increased by eighty-five percent. By the end of the year they’ll certainly exceed the record 1.2 million units sold in 2002. Predictably, the growth in private car ownership has stressed public resources. Roads are overwhelmed by traffic; cities are choked with exhaust. More prosaically, China’s local governments are running out of license plate numbers.

University of Wisconsin English professor Bukoski grew up—and still lives—in the Polish community of east-side Superior, Wisconsin. It’s been the setting for several books of short stories that form a kaleidoscopic portrait of Bukoski’s community, like Yoknapatawpha on the Gitchee Gummee. The latest, Time Between Trains, contains thirteen new tales that show Superior the way his people see it. In the title story, a lonely railroad inspector, the only Jewish man in town, strikes up an unlikely friendship with an isolated widow who lives near the tracks. “Closing Time” takes us through a bad night in the career of the well-meaning but overbearing accordion player at the local bar. And Bukoski, a Vietnam veteran, gives us what we can only imagine is a thinly disguised version of himself in younger days, in three stories about a nineteen-year-old corporal named Thaddeus, whom we first meet as he is stumbling drunk around town, unwilling to admit he’s terrified of going to war and poignantly unaware that he’s walking around for one last look at the town he might never see again. Bukoski has a deep well of empathy for his characters and does a nice job drawing out their emotions. If we could change one thing, it’d be his occasional bouts of clonking prose style.
Ruminator, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul,
(651) 699-0587, ruminator.com

Ghouls. Hags. Evil curses… Sure signs either that the family is headed to my house for holiday dinner this year, or that Jeune Lune has brought back Circus of Tales for a second year. Popular with audiences last year, The Circus of Tales combines the magic of Italian fables with a one-ring flying circus in a fantasy world featuring such familiar characters as the frog prince, the beautiful princess, the hungry ogre, and the fool. A number of stories from the folklore collection Il Pentamerone (or The Tale of Tales) are woven into one fable as seamlessly as the choreography swoops overhead. Directed by Robert Rosen and created by the Jeune Lune company, The Circus of Tales is a collaborative effort onstage and off. Five renowned aerialists from Xelias Aerial Productions perform breathtaking stunts and acrobatics alongside the Jeune Lune artists helping to illustrate the stories. The Circus of Tales is good, clean fun for the whole family, and with half-price tickets for children under twelve, it provides a well-deserved break from the hectic holiday season—especially if turkey dinner at your house resembles more of a high-flying food fight.
Jeune Lune, 105 N. First St.,
(612) 332-3968, www.jeunelune.org

I’ve been thinking about spaghetti sauce a lot lately. I grew up in a very busy household with parents who didn’t have a lot of time to cook, so the sauce on our noodles was always of the canned variety. Not knowing the different between canned and fresh, we kids slurped it right up—the soggy vegetables, the sugared tomato sauce. It wasn’t until I went to college and started cooking for myself that I discovered how good fresh, homemade spaghetti sauce can be. I avoided the misexperience of canned sauce again until a few weeks ago, when my roommate offered to share some of his lunch with me. I had to push it away after one bite, so unwilling was I to waste taste buds and calories on such slop. It made me wonder: Why have Americans allowed themselves to become so busy that they traded in Mom’s delicious, homemade sauce for something that is judged solely on how thick it is on TV? Isn’t that aiming a little bit low? I mean, I understand economies of scale, agribusiness, convenience, and all that. But really, there is no substitute for homemade quality, and no excuse for its demise.

Our economy thrives on the masses: mass markets of mass-produced goods changing hands in mass purchases. This is necessary, of course, and not altogether evil. It’s hard to make it as an artisan these days, and those who are making it are working their tails off just to belong to an entry-level tax bracket. Have we gotten so sensitive to price, and so insensitive to quality, that true artisans are an endangered species? Maybe. But I always look for the exceptions that prove the rule.

Next: A real tailor…

The short movies showing in this three-day, kid-friendly program can’t and don’t compete with the big-budget snazziness of Finding Nemo or Spirited Away. For these films, spanning thirty years of Iranian animation, the creative spark comes from the minds of the animators, not the wallets of the producers. The series is subtitled, but even pre-readers will probably enjoy the stories, which are more often than not nearly dialogue-free anyhow. And if a lesson about sharing, standing up to bullies, and being nice to each other isn’t universal, what is? U Film also screens The Traveler, the 1974 debut of Iran’s most highly acclaimed director, Abbas Kiarostami. It’s the tale of a soccer-crazy boy who turns to crime so he can buy tickets to a big game in Teheran, and should also appeal to children even if they don’t pick up on the thematic echoes to Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief. You know how five-year-olds just go crazy for the 1940s Italian neorealism.
U Film, 10 Church St. S.E.,
(612) 3313-3134, www.ufilm.org
Walker, 725 Vineland Place,
(612) 375-7622, www.walkerart.org

MOVIES
British Television
Advertising Awards
Walker Art Center, December 5-28
Thanks to the ubiquitous idiot box, we all see more thirty-second films in a week than feature-length ones in a year. It’s too bad, really. Very short movies are a perfectly valid artistic form, but our viewing habits make us resent them because they’re always buzzing around trying to sell us something. Still, the best really do approach the level of art. That’s one reason this compilation of the Queen’s best adverts is such a perennial Walker audience favorite. Another is, we’re all still trying to figure out what “marmite” is and why anyone would want a jar of it. The cleverness and wit that the award winners display here is formidable, and is still more entertaining than an evening at home watching American commercials, though that line’s been blurring every year. It’s a little disappointing to see how many of the British spots are for all-too-familiar products like McDonald’s and Nike, Cockney accent or not. Of course, England still has a distinct advantage in the production of emotionally wrenching public-service announcements of the sort unimaginable on U.S. screens.
Walker, (612) 375-7622, www.walkerart.org

Before investing three and a half hours into the final Rings film, there’s one or two things you should know. A) If you have ten and a half hours to spare, you may also want to see the first two movies again on the big screen, with all the DVD versions’ added scenes. Or, B) If you don’t, there are plenty of people who will, and later they may sit next to you in the theater, so bring plenty of nerd repellent. We’re also wondering if there will be a special shortened edition of the trilogy in which the giant eagle that saved Gandalf in the first movie simply flies Frodo off to destroy the ring of power. That one would be about ten minutes long. (As to whether we’re in camp A or B, the fact that we know that the eagle’s name is Gwaihir the Windlord is all the evidence we’ll give, and all you should need.)

It’s exponentially less likely than, say, Cold Mountain to pick up an Oscar nomination, but Bubba Ho-Tep’s got the makings of some glorious kitsch. And this inventive horror-comedy, based on a story by Texan novelist Joe R. Lansdale, has already succeeded wildly on its own low-budget terms, picking up enough good word-of-mouth at festival screenings to avoid direct-to-video hell and garner a theatrical release. Evil Dead’s Bruce Campbell stars as Elvis Presley—and if you’re like us, that’s when you decided to buy your ticket—who didn’t die in the seventies, but now lives crabbily under an assumed name at a rundown east Texas old-folks home. The King’s best friend is a fellow pensioner (Ossie Davis) who insists he’s really John F. Kennedy, despite being a black man. As happens so often when dead celebrities meet, the two join forces to defeat a soul-sucking Egyptian mummy. Campbell was born to play Elvis, and his Bubba performance is one of his best. It’s not merely camp, but a well-rounded portrait of a bitter old legend who rediscovers his heroic nature. Bubba’s also the career zenith for director Don Coscarelli, whose B-movie auteur status previously rested on Phantasm and Beastmaster, neither of which are titles we’d want carved on our gravestone. No fool, Coscarelli’s already talking sequel, pitting a Clambake-era Elvis against a squad of she-vampires—staking care of business in a flash.
Uptown, 2906 Hennepin Ave.,
(612) 825-6006, landmarktheatres.com

You know, Disney always left us cold, even as young Rakesketeers. Mickey and his tedious, bland bunch… Feh. Bugs, Daffy, Yosemite Sam—now, those are cartoons. Brash and anarchic. Gleefully punning, with their comic timing perfect to the second. Ducks getting hit with frying pans. That’s our America. (We’re choosing to ignore Space Jam and Back in Action.) For the classic toons, this set is just about everything you could hope for. Fifty-six of some of the best cartoons, mostly from WWII to the early sixties. “Duck Amuck.” A couple of Marvin the Martian appearances. The ones where Bugs Bunny bullfights and meets the Tasmanian Devil. Enlightening documentary extras, not just promos for other WB product. Ducks getting hit with frying pans, then calling rabbits despicable. With more than a thousand cartoons to cull from, some omissions are inevitable. But still, how can you leave out “What’s Opera, Doc?” The “kill the wabbit, kiiiilllll the waaaaabbiiiiit” Wagner parody was the first one we looked for. Surely that’s not all, folks.

FOX canceled this sketch-comedy show ignominiously after only half a season in 1992, but in retrospect it’s clear that its chief fault was being too hip for the room. There’s the posthumous Emmy, and the ongoing success of cast members Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk (Mr. Show) and Andy Dick (NewsRadio), repeatedly proving their satiric skills on other projects. Truth be told, the show was so obscure that until Comedy Central picked it up briefly a few years later, we’d only seen clips when Stiller guested on Later With Bob Costas (now there’s another gem of the TV dial gone missing). It wasn’t unfailingly brilliant, but the show was a clear precursor to the smart, razor-sharp absurdity that Odenkirk and David Cross generated on Mr. Show. And, more to the point, it was very funny very often. Years after seeing the sketches, we still laugh when we think of the surly, ALF-like sock puppet called Skank, or Stiller’s wonderfully overearnest parody of U2’s Bono, crooning his heart out over a cereal commercial as if marshmallows were going to singlehandedly save the world. This two-DVD set collects all thirteen episodes of the series, including one never broadcast.

Although it would be a mistake to overpraise the last decade of the Man in Black’s career, it’s certainly true that the four albums in his American Recordings series more than rehabilitated his eighties-era reputation as an irrelevance. The work he did with producer Rick Rubin was of such consistent high quality that when he died in September, his status as one of the century’s great American singers was unquestionable. No posthumous rediscovery needed here. The new box set Unearthed treats his legacy with due gravity, even while its raison d’etre is largely to clear out Rubin’s vaults of the Cash material that didn’t quite make the cut for the initial releases. This wouldn’t be the place to begin exploring Cash’s work, but the sixty-four previously unreleased songs here include any number of must-hears for the initiated. Among those are an entire disc of acoustic spirituals Cash learned from his mother as a boy, and his duet with Joe Strummer on Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”—beautifully low-key and dignified, a worthy song to remember both of the dearly departed by.