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There is a subtle way to measure progress. Every time we head north to God’s country, we’re forced to bring along the cell phone. Normally, we refuse the electronic leash. But when we’re on the road in a secondhand mini-van full of kids, or when we’re trying to rendezvous with people who have already gone over to the dark side, who conduct their many important affairs, and also their petty ones, by cell phone—well, sometimes you just have to join them.

We notice the cellular networks have gradually and dependably migrated north to the Canadian border. It’s a mild entertainment to watch the rising column of connectivity in the LED window in our palms, where we used to watch the dip and rise of the passing phone lines out the car window. It is our particular cross to bear that our cell service is superior in the city where we never need it, and lousy where we do. North of Duluth, we would need another phone—one that would roam promiscuously in search of other, larger networks.

Until a couple of weeks ago, that would have necessitated a new phone number. We’re not sure what the impediment was, exactly, but federal regulators have removed it—the one preventing consumers from keeping their old numbers when they migrated across service providers or bought a new phone. One would have thought the marketplace sorted this out a long time ago. Now that 130 million Americans—nearly 70 percent of all adults—are sold on the idea of cell phones, they’ll undoubtedly be tempted to change phone companies and handsets, while committing for the long haul to one number.

In the past, most cell phones were used for an average of eighteen months, practically a lifetime. There are already 500 million decommissioned cell phones in the U.S. Another 100 million are thrown on the pile or in the sock drawer each year.
Increased coverage in rural areas, along with stepped-up competition among phone companies, suggests that soon there may be more cell phones than televisions, which cannot be a good thing. We don’t have much patience for the casual Luddite who grumbles every time he sees someone using a cell phone out in the bass boat, but there are good reasons to be worried about this growth.

In the north, it’s a special example of the hen coming home to roost where the eggs are being hatched. Anyone who has paged through the literature that accompanies a Minnesota fishing license will tell you that it’s not exactly smart to eat Minnesota fish—even if you’ve caught them in the most isolated BWCA backwater. The lake at the foot of Will Steger’s middle-of-nowhere homestead, for example, contains walleye and northern pike that a wise person would not eat more often than once a week.

The culprit, long known and understood but still ubiquitous, is mercury. It is brought on the wind and in the rain, even to virgin lakes that have never been churned by an outboard. Mercury is a common component in batteries, and because wireless technologies are becoming more common, not less, we can expect this problem to increase. We’ve slipped dead batteries into the trash often enough to realize that general public awareness of the problem is no guarantee that it will go away.

We are accustomed to thinking of this “information age” as being environmentally benign at worst—virtual worlds, paperless offices, telecommuting, and all that. But this ignores the serious environmental impact of numerous toxins and heavy metals that go into a PC, a Palm Pilot, or a cell phone. If we learn one thing from our newly networked world, it should be this: What you can’t see can hurt you.—Hans Eisenbeis

When Billy Bragg paints you a picture, there’s always a lot of red in it. His music alternates passionate expressions of his socialist ideals (“There Is Power in a Union”) with more personal songs of love and heartbreak, the best of them remarkable for their emotional incisiveness. It’s a dichotomy he once acknowledged with the self-mocking couplet “Mixing pop and politics, he asks me what the use is; I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses.” Though his political commitment hasn’t lessened a whit over the years, it’s that genuine affability and sense of humor that have probably kept his career going for more than twenty years. For a polemicist like Bragg, such qualities are vital for avoiding the sin of stridency, a turnoff whether or not you agree with his views. Though it’s a pity there wasn’t room for another half-dozen songs, this two-disc career-spanning collection does a pretty decent job of cataloging Bragg’s high points from his early days as a fiery solo guitarist to his terrific collaboration with Wilco, breathing life into a set of unfinished Woody Guthrie songs.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.)

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

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…

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