Great & Plentiful Photos from Cairo

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David Foster Wallace Speaks About Mike & Ike Italian Ice

So, I’ve reserved the conference room in our office all day today in order to conduct a solo taste test of Mike & Ike Italian Ice, a chewy candy from the Just Born corporation. Typically, an employee may only reserve our conference room for two hours. So, to get around this, I went around to numerous employees and vending machine restockers claiming the conference room sign-up sheet was actually a civil union petition for my home state of Illinois. Surprisingly, the people in my office are not quite as open-minded on this matter as those resupplying us with Butterfingers and Sprite.

I received from a friend of a friend employed by the Nabisco Corporation marketing department sample instructions from a taste test recently completed in San Diego for a new type of cracker and I’m applying these rules to the taste test. They are as follows: (1)

1)Don’t take a test if you’re sick. I am feeling well today.

2)Don’t eat or drink anything strong before the test. No garlic or coffee because those tastes linger. (2)

3)Do not smoke before testing. Smoking deadens your taste buds. It interferes with your nasal epithelium, which affects your sense of smell, which is linked to taste. Nicotine, when it enters the brain, can tie up nerve centers typically involved with taste, thereby reducing the brainpower you have to devote to tasting Mike & Ike Italian Ice. Very important.

4)Avoid strong perfumes or fragrances. I hope showering with soap doesn’t count.

5)Avoid talking during the evaluation. I am alone and will try very hard not to talk to myself.

6)Please turn off your phone. I left it at home.

First of all, Mike and Ike(3) is a chewy, fruit flavored candy with five flavors to each box. The different flavor themes are Original Fruits, Tangy Twister, Tropical Typhoon, Berry Blast, Italian Ice, Redrageous!, Lemonade Blends, Jolly Joes and Mike and Ike Zours, which is a sour-infused blend. The Italian Ice flavor is a relatively new addition to the Mike and Ike family and capitalizes on what is historically a cool summertime street dessert sold from wheeled carts. The candy version is not served cold, but at room temperature and just in case you’ve hastily purchased the candy for the first time and been wooed by the cool, icy-colored box into thinking it belongs in the freezer, there is a kind warning reading “To enjoy this Italian Ice, you do not need to freeze this product.” I would have capitalized the word ‘THIS’ just for clarity’s sake, but Just Born clearly knows its customers more intimately than I do.

The flavors are Lemon, Orange, Cherry, Blue Raspberry and Watermelon and I’ve poured out the entire box on the large conference table to accurately judge the color against the dark Formica. Atypical with the Italian Ice flavor is that they are actually inside a small, antiseptic white bag whereas most Mike and Ike candies just rest comfortably in a rectangular box board case with a convenient (though impossible to perforate without a Bowie knife) finger-sized dispensing slot. When opening this opaque bag, there is a powerful synthetic fruit fragrance to the candy, triggering flashbacks to former olfactory addictions to glue and turpentine. The pastels of the candies, shaped like inflated child's Tylenol, seem ripped from an Easter Sunday coloring book and my first taste is the lemon. Lemon is one of the most common frozen Italian Ice flavors and the Mike and Ike captures the modesty of the flavor quite well, to the point that you barely remember which flavor you just consumed. Most consumer lemonades should take a hint from this candy, in my opinion, and take it down a notch.

I decide to engage the watermelon next and it instantly calls to mind Big League Chew, which, having never played baseball as a child, I don’t have much experience with. Again, the taste comes and goes like a drive-by shooting. The cherry tastes quite like that artificial cherry flavoring found in most cough drops but not in actual cherries and I realize I’m only twenty minutes into this taste test. How I am going to fill the next seven hours is a slow-growing tumor metastasizing on the conference table next to my pool of Mike and Ike candies. I decide to smell the bag again and it has surprisingly lost none of its original scent. I inhale deeply, letting the fumes of the candy seep deep into the bronchial branches of my lungs, where hopefully they won’t rot away my ability to breathe like the candies will my teeth's ability to grind peanuts.

Mike and Ike prides itself on being both ‘naturally and artificially flavored’, yet it’s unclear which flavors are flavored naturally (and what that means) and which ones are flavored artificially (process also unclear). The ingredients list confoundingly includes pear juice from concentrate yet there is no pear-flavored candy. There is not even a relative of the pear within this flavor assortment.(4) I picture crates and crates of unsold pears day after day watching their apple, orange and banana brethren fly off in trucks to school lunches, grocery stores and sandwich shops when just before they begin to rot, the JustBorn team arrives in blue, embroidered vests to whisk them away to be squeezed down into juice concentrate and then inseminated along with magnesium hydroxide and Red #40 into a line of candies that doesn’t even claim pear as a flavor. Perhaps JustBorn should consider Pearnado! as a potential flavor for us Midwesterners sick and tired of seeing apples and bananas walk away with all the gold medals. We used to have a pear tree in our front yard that annually bore fruit, which the garbage men plucked and ate and left half-eaten in our yard. Pears are clearly second-class fruits. Apples are immortalized in the idiom ‘American as apple pie’ and cherries remain an omnipresent cocktail garnish while bananas provide the rare potassium in our diets and countless opportunities for phallic jokes, leaving the pear unknowable and unrecognized. It’s patently offensive to the pear to include it in the ingredients list.

Mike and Ike also boasts itself as a gluten and fat-free candy, though including ostensible selling points for healthy eating habits on a box of sweets seems to portray a candy in the clinical stage of denial.

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1 - It is not clear if these rules are listed in random order or in order of importance.

2 - Since I am a coffee drinker and beginning this taste test in the morning, this is most regrettable as I might either fall asleep or grade every chewy Italian Ice flavored Mike and Ike with the bitterness and anger of a man denied his morning cup of Joe.

3 - Mike and Ike, despite being a box of dozens of individual candies, seems to be both a singular and plural noun, in the same category as deer, fish, squid and sheep.

4 - I consider an apple to be cousin of the pear. The closest relative to a pear in Mike and Ike Italian Ice is probably the cherry, but I’d label them no closer than second cousins once-removed at best.

Mahmoud Didn't Shoah - Another letter to the President of Iran

Dear Mahmoud,

What happened to you last weekend?! Are you okay? I waited and waited and waited, but you didn’t show up. A world leader’s schedule is probably very busy and I will just assume something came up. Maybe there was a hiccup in your nuclear program that you had to attend to. I’ve never owned anything nuclear, but I imagine whatever it is requires a lot of upkeep. My Corolla, even though it’s a Toyota, needs constant attention.

Well, since you missed out on the movie, I’ll do my best to go over the bullet points (no pun intended) and some of the moments that most impacted me. However, I warn you that this recounting is a woefully inadequate substitute for experiencing the film in person. I can unequivocally state that I’ve never seen anything like it. Before I go into the film, I thought I’d set the scene for you a little.

I brought the following snacks to the movie: two clementines, one apple, a PB&J and Mike & Ike Italian Ice. My companion (Yes, I thought you might not make it so I invited someone else.) brought mini-boxes of NERDs. I also bought some popcorn during the second half. Outside the theater, my companion saw a man doing jumping jacks and upon finishing, he said, “Alright, I’m ready.” A man in the row in front of me brought microwave popcorn. I’m not sure where he microwaved this because movie theaters do not offer that service here (maybe they do in Iran?). Perhaps it was under his seat or he popped it at home and then brought it with him, which would have made it cold. During hour three, a woman in front of me leaned over to her husband and said, “What does SS stand for?” Her husband replied, “Secret Service.” Actually, sir, it’s Schutzstaffel, but I think she got the idea. A few audible ‘Oh my God’s and muddled gasps of exasperation were uttered as well, in addition to numerous sighs (mostly by one woman sitting in front of us) during the last two hours, when the film takes a strange turn chronologically and narratively by focusing on the Warsaw ghetto.

-Well, the movie opens with long scrolling text describing Simon Srebnik, one of the only two survivors of Chelmno, an extermination camp in Poland. An important note here is that this was not a concentration camp, but an extermination camp, essentially a killing factory designed for rapid, efficient killing of Jews and other people the Nazis weren’t fond of. We’ll talk more about this later. Anyway, Simon was only a boy while at Chelmno and was kept alive because he could sing beautifully and excelled at jumping and running contests among the inhabitants. He was actually executed with all the other Jews before the Soviets were to arrive. Shot in the head, the bullet luckily missed all vital brain areas and when he awoke, he crawled to a neighboring farm and eventually found his way to a doctor. He’s a modest, humble man who shows no signs of being shot in the head as a boy and when Claude Lanzmann (the director) brings him back to Chelmno, Simon remarks at seeing just forest and empty fields, “It’s hard to recognize, but it was here. They burned people here.” He says this very matter-of-factly.

-A survivor of the Vilna ghetto who unloaded corpses from the gas vans into mass graves said that the first time he unloaded them, he cried. On the third day, he saw his wife and children, placed them in a mass grave and asked to be killed, but the Germans wouldn’t kill him because he was still strong enough to work.

-Jews working in the camps were punished if they referred to corpses as ‘victims’ or ‘corpses’. Instead, they were told to use words like ‘rags’ and ‘puppets’.

-The Germans renamed some Jewish cities with German names after resettling Jews.

-A historian says the Final Solution was an invention, like a combustion engine or the Bessemer process. It was mechanical and industrial.

- The Treblinka gas chamber used a tank engine to create the deadly carbon monoxide fumes.

-Gas vans had hoses funneling the exhaust fumes from the van into the cargo area with all the Jews. They were driven to the mass graves and on arrival, the Jews would be dead. If they drove too quickly, they would still be alive and so they had to driven at a specific speed.

- Some gas chambers could kill 3000 people in 2-3 hours.

- A mother slit her daughter’s wrists herself to escape being killed by the Nazis.

- The Treblinka memorial consists of jagged stones, each representing a Jewish town or village that was exterminated at the camp. You heard that right - entire towns were wiped out.

-Lanzmann and company drive around Europe in a van resembling a VW bus visiting Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and other sites. It is white with a thick red racing stripe that runs around the chassis. It reminded me of an ambulance – a documentary ambulance.

-A camouflage unit made up of Jews was charged with taking branches from trees and weaving them around barbed wire to disguise it. This was an important part of making an extermination camp not look like an extermination camp.

-Another example of this includes an ‘infirmary’ with a red and white cross painted on it. In actuality, prisoners who entered this building were led to the edge of a ditch where bodies were continuously burning. They had to strip naked and then sit on the edge of the pit before they were shot in the back of the head. Then they fell in the ditch and burned. This is an example of the point the historian is making when he says ‘invention’. Someone had to invent or think of this in order to create it.

- In the Warsaw ghetto, one often had to step over the dead bodies of fellow Jews as one walked down the street. These dead bodies were Jews who had either starved, contracted disease or were just executed. I may be leaving out another method of execution, so forgive me for that.

- Oftentimes, right outside the ‘funnel’ at Treblinka, as people undressed and realized what was imminent, they would evacuate themselves. In other words, there were five or six rows of shit and feces outside the gas chambers, according to Franz Suchomel, an SS officer. It’s called ‘death panic.’

- Abraham Bomba, a survivor of Treblinka and barber who cut off the hair of Jewish women before they were gassed, is interviewed at his busy barbershop in Israel. He is cutting the hair of a customer during the interview. He describes a barber friend of his whose wife and daughter arrive to have their hair cut at Treblinka. He stops and cannot continue. He is filmed in this silent struggle for what seems like an hour as he tends to his customer. Lanzmann waits, then asks him to go on. Bomba cries, composes himself and eventually goes on. His friend could neither speak nor warn his wife and daughter of what was about to happen because the SS were right behind them and punished any talking with torture or death. In addition, since many of the incoming Jews had no idea what was going to happen, those working in the camp felt it was pointless to tell them they were about to die. I read on Wikipedia that some of this hair was used for make yarn-socks for U-boat crews. So, a German U-boat solider may have casually said to his mate, “My socks are made from the hair of a Jewish woman who was gassed at Treblinka.” Sounds unspeakably awful, doesn’t it?

- Claude Lanzmann asks this barber to imitate how he cut the hair of the Jewish women in the camp. The barber complies and demonstrates on one of his customers. This is a good example of the level of detail Lanzmann demands of his subjects.

-There is not a single swastika in the movie. There is one old photograph of a Nazi for a few seconds, so there could be a swastika on his uniform, but that’s the only possibility.

- The historian also describes in vivid detail the cost of running these trains. Someone had to pay for them. It was not free. He describes that when many Jews from Greece were forcibly removed, that in some instances their confiscated belongings and wealth were used to pay for their own transport to the death camps. Yes, some Jews essentially paid for their own voyage to the death camps.

Well, I hope this gives you an idea of what the movie is like. I’m afraid I cannot really do justice to such a landmark ten-hour film in just a short letter. Roger Ebert has a wonderful review of the movie here. The film is currently making the rounds here in the US, so this is the perfect time to book it for a theatrical engagement in Tehran if you have any favorite indie movie houses? Or maybe the Tehran Regal 16 might show it? In the USA, chain movie theaters don’t usually show long movies like that.

The film continues to play at the Gene Siskel Film Center for another week if you can make it up this way. If not, I’ll let you know about other upcoming films that might interest you. What kind of movies do you like? Comedies, indies, documentaries, sci-fi, comic book movies? The Music Box Theatre is showing Death Wish 3 tomorrow night. Do you like Charles Bronson?

Yours,

Mike Brune

P.S. The ticket was $20. Can you reimburse me? They wouldn’t give me a refund.

*Thanks to Script-o-rama for making the film’s transcript available online. Thanks to Wikipedia, too.

Digital Photo of the Week

Old Mercedes Benz on Pine Grove Ave.

Chicago, IL

My 2nd letter to my new cinematic Pen Pal - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

For clarity's sake, you may want to read our first correspondence here.

Dear Mahmoud,

We’re less than a week away from the screening of Shoah at the Gene Siskel Film Center here in Chicago and I wanted to check in and make sure that your travel plans are in order. Are you flying into the O’Hare or Midway airport? I have bought our tickets already. You can pay me back in Iranian money so that I can add it to my foreign currency collection. Is your photo on the currency? It should be $20 total. I went to the actual box office to buy tickets so we could avoid those unjust Ticketmaster fees. Do you have Ticketmaster in Iran? If you do, let me give you some friendly advice for your next election: Get rid of it. The Iranian people would love you for it and probably overlook any prior human rights violations, election tampering or squandering of their country's reputation.

Since there is not assigned seating, I wanted to inquire about where you like to sit when you go to the movies. As a head of state, you’re probably used to a private box in the balcony with a security retinue. Regretfully, they don’t have private boxes or a balcony, but I can assure you that even though I might not be much to look at, I’m a pretty tough cookie and can easily protect you from anyone throwing popcorn. However, if someone tries to stab you, I’ll probably get out of the way. My health insurance deductible is quite high. Don’t get me started on health care!

So, do you like the middle or the back or the aisle? You don’t seem like a front row kind of guy, though for this movie it might be best if you were up close. If for some reason your flight is delayed and you’re running late, I can save you a seat. Normally, I don’t like to do that because of all the dirty looks and questions this generates, but I’ll make an exception in your case. Believe it or not, some people are just as intolerant toward ‘seat-savers’ as they are toward Holocaust deniers. Nevertheless, you’re traveling quite a distance to be here and I want to make sure you get a good seat.

When I told a friend you were joining me for this film, she explained that your presence might cause a disruptive uproar at the theater because of some of your previous statements regarding Israel, the Holocaust, et al. We certainly don’t want the viewing experience of this special screening marred in any way, so I have a Chicago Cubs baseball cap and jersey for you to wear so you won’t be recognized. Do you have baseball in Iran? It’s our national pastime and quite a wonderful game. If it was spring or summer, we could attend a game. They might even let you throw out the game ball since you’re a President. Our Presidents do it all the time. Better warm up that arm just in case there’s a pickup game!

I hope to hear from you soon and I hope you’re as excited as I am about the movie.

Celluloidally yours,

Mike

Digital Photo of the Week

Belmont Ave. Hardware Store - Chicago, IL

David Foster Wallace Speaks about Holiday NERDS Rope

I've recently fallen in love with the writing of DFW and here is a little tribute to his genius:

Most people who work at East Coast magazines rarely frequent places that sell NERDS Rope let alone ingest it. Our Editor-in-Chief didn’t even know it existed and when presented with a sample, mistook it for a souvenir from Honeydukes, the sweetshop at Universal Studios’ Harry Potter Theme Park, which now sees more tourists per annum than most European countries. Our Managing Editor thought it resembled a ‘holiday’ vertebral column(1) his son made in his 1^st grade science class. A grizzled proofreader said it looked like someone ran down the bead aisle at Michaels with a glue-soaked Twizzler. He asked me if there was a razor inside of it. I told him I was about to find out.

The Holiday NERDS Rope is in a festive, sparkling green package cinched up tight on both ends. Dancing, flying, laughing, cavorting and plummeting along the wrapping are little red, green and white NERDS – tiny, bi-pedal creatures in stocking caps that resemble either shaved, dyed rabbits or cartoon germs. Didn’t I see these things battling my white blood cells in a seventh grade video on influenza? Wonka’s press kit states these are anthropomorphized versions of the candies, which begs the question of which human characteristics they possess. Are they loyal like a labrador or compassionate like a hospital nurse or violently insane like the Kool Aid man/pitcher? The packaging is not clear. NERDS look neither intelligent nor good conversationalists, but rather romping and brainless with the groupthink of lemmings in a gymnastics class with no teacher. No razor, by the way.

It’s easy to open and presented on a cheap, long cardboard shelf that slides out like a security deposit box. Tootsie Rolls and Almond Joys have this same shelf to ostensibly keep them from being bent or broken in transit from the candy factory to your grocery store. It would be elegant if the cardboard wasn’t perforated and almost as flimsy as the rope itself. There is something just unclassy about perforations. Why they try to intimate shapely elegance with a primordial, formless candy kids will undoubtedly whip their friends with is beyond me.

The package’s eating instructions call to mind phrases you might hear at an underground S&M club. Bite it! Chew it! Twist it! Pull it! I was so terrified by these commands I WHACKED it against my desk in a panic and the NERDS flew around the room like shrapnel from a claymore. My coworker still has a NERD in her tympanic membrane, giving all words entering her left ear a Wonkafied absurdity.

The taste is described as Soft Gummy Rope Covered With Tiny Tangy Crunchy NERDS Candy.(2) No commas are used, so these flavors may happen individually or in a simultaneous pell-mell attack reminiscent of Doughboys charging over a German trench. Be warned. It’s actually quite fragrant with a cherry fruit garden smell and the taste, like most candies whose main ingredients are dextrose, sugar and corn syrup, is more complex to describe than most mathematical proofs.(3) It’s quite delicious and wipes away the entire taste of the Indian food I had for lunch (as well as years of hard-earned tooth enamel) and leaves my mouth feeling like a dentist has pressure washed my mouth with microscopic sugar crystals. I washed it all down with a glass of milk. Merry Christmas.

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1- Santa’s spine would be classified as a holiday vertebral column. It’s red, green and white and evidences years of chimney-induced back injuries.

2- Cinta Sauve y Masticable cubierta con Dulcecitos Agrios y Crujientes NERDS. The packaging is also in Spanish as Wonka is clearly targeting the Latino/Latina demographic.

3- There is a hint of strawberry, watermelon, cherry and the white NERD is what I refer to as a mystery flavor due to the Airheads candy, which produces a white taffy candy called white mystery, a secret flavor with Fort Knox type security. The white mystery Airhead tastes remotely berry-flavored with a hint of lemon, lime, watermelon, (not the flavor of a garden-grown watermelon, but of a laboratory watermelon flavoring, which is different), banana (again, laboratory banana) and green apple (which is actually acidic like a granny smith apple). As a child, I used to think the white mystery Airhead took on the flavor of whatever you were thinking before you opened it and the candy through some inorganic form of ESP discerned your thoughts and embodied that flavor. It generally worked except for the time I wanted it to taste like root beer. You might be wondering what laboratory banana or watermelon tastes like. The flavors are more like fragrances laced on pieces of hardened sugar. Some are astonishingly close to their natural counterparts, like banana, and some are not, like artificial flavorings for grape. A banana flavored NERD, for example, tastes like a banana pumped full of steroids, biologically enhancing the flavor to limits Mother Nature clearly did not intend.

An Open Letter to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Dear Mahmoud,

How is Iran? I hope things have settled down for you since the election. I wanted to extend to you a personal invitation to join me at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, IL, USA on January 22^nd, 2011 for a special exclusive presentation of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, the Holocaust documentary from 1985. As a filmmaker and avid moviegoer, I can assure you this is a rare treat to have such a celebrated film presented in 35mm on the big screen. I approach each of these screenings with great care and try to find a companion who might glean the most from the film. Naturally, you came to mind. As one of the most vocal and visible Holocaust deniers (or do you prefer revisionist?), I thought this would be a great way for you to spend a Saturday and get out of Tehran for the weekend. Get away from it all, as we say here in the US.

Do you go to the movies much in Iran? I know you have a vibrant film community there and many films are banned, a designation which here in the US can bestow a little extra cache on the movie, translating into strong word of mouth. I guess we have that in common. I’m also envious that your country exiles filmmakers. Sadly, we don’t do that here though we have many directors who would be excellent candidates. Did you see Transformers?!

You might be apprehensive about Shoah’s length – a whopping ten hours and six minutes. Well, this is where I can be of assistance. If you need to use the bathroom at hour three, go right ahead. I’ll pay extra close attention and bring you up to speed on what the Nazis did to the Jews while you’re in the john (that’s how we say ‘bathroom’ here in the US). If you feel like you’re falling asleep, the café has caffeinated soda and a wonderful coffee bar to keep you awake and alert. They also have wine, but that generally puts me to sleep. How about you?

Shoah, which means ‘annihilation’ in Hebrew, is subtitled in English, which I know you don’t speak very well, but I’m certain the message of the movie will come across even if you can’t understand a single word. So what do you say? What does your calendar look like on January 22^nd? If that’s not good for you, what about January 29^th? Or you could visit Chicago for an entire week and see it over the course of two nights and also take in our great architecture, have a real Chicago hot dog and see some improv comedy?

I’m looking forward to seeing you and I hope you haven’t seen the movie already.

Cinematically yours,

Mike Brune

P.S. The popcorn is on me. I hope you like extra butter.

Me with Carl Dreyer, cat not filmmaker

Third Odd Job

This is my third odd job since I moved to Chicago. The first, in total time worked, was about twenty-five minutes and I made $25 which works out to one dollar per minute. I had to wear a Coke Zero shirt and pretend I was sleeping on the ground in the NBC Plaza downtown until we were cued to wake up, show off our shirts and smile for whoever was watching in the comfort of their own homes. It felt awkward and we were miscued once and had to pretend to be asleep and awoken all over again. The second time felt better and if we had had the entire day to rehearse, I feel like we would have nailed it. The second was, to use hyperbole, a dream job. I was hired to work a LEGO Kidsfest. Again, I was provided with a t-shirt. (Oh, we were allowed to keep the Coke Zero t-shirt so, I guess I made close to $40 using today's t-shirt prices.) This t-shirt was bright yellow. Here, I was paid $17/hr to supervise the LEGO racers play area, where children built LEGO race cars and then recklessly rolled them down small two foot ramps. Only one ramp had a an actual start and finish line. It was the steepest. At the bottom of each track a collision wall with a trough in front of it. No matter how well engineered the cars were , they would without fail disintegrate into dozens of pieces after striking the wall. Each crash received cheers and/or silent, jaw-dropped awe. If the crash troughs were too full, we yellow shirts transferred the pieces back to separate troughs at the building stations. Several people I worked with wandered the building stations and ramps and unceasingly picked up whatever pieces were in the troughs and returned them to the building stations. They would not wait for the pieces to pile up. If one car was wrecked and left, they'd go pick it up. They were always on the move, constantly moving, constantly performing this Sisyphean task for hours at a time. It makes me dizzy just thinking about it. I opted to spend my time building race cars with the kids and judging races. If I had kids, I would take them to this event. If I didn't have kids, I would take myself to this event.

This brings me to my third odd job - soliciting donations for the Evans Scholars Foundation, an organization that sends deserving caddies (yes, golf caddies) with a strong record and financial need to college. Try saying that with a straight face to a complete stranger right after Christmas in a moribund economy. I made about thirty dollars, but I visited the University of Chicago for the first time and passed by the Museum of Science and Industry in semi-darkness, marveling at its expansive, impressive footprint on Chicago's south side. It reminded me of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which was closing by the time I arrived years ago, so I only saw its exterior.

Seattle Film Archives

Vice Magazine 'Dos and Don'ts' clearly categorizes telling people about your dreams as a DON'T.

I've often ignored this vice and think if Stephen King ever followed the rule, we'd be more than a handful of fine books short in this world. Here I go again.

Last night I dreamt I was in the Seattle Film Archive (which doesn't exist). Imagine the dusty smell of a used book store and the antiquity and superfluousness of a baseball card shop. I stalked a clerk at the store asking if they had any 16mm prints of von Stroheim films. I guess in this dream I was rich enough to be able to afford an item as rare as that.

Instead, I left the store with what amounted to a lobby card of Humphrey Bogart from some movie I'd never heard of. It was the size of a baseball card, which was on the brain because earlier in the day when I was Skyping with my parents I learned that my father bought all the boys in my family an old-timey baseball card circa 1920. The one I received, in all it's muted monochromatic glory, was Rogers Hornsby mid-swing. Bogart was dressed similarly though instead of striped socks, he shirt was striped like an escaped convict. The card depicted on the upper torso of his body positioned as he was peering out from around a doorway. A dense fog enveloped everything else in the picture, as if he stowed away on a tug boat headed out to sea. So, he was floating there in mid-air, like in a dream. Eugene O'Neill might have written a screenplay based on this card.

I hope to make another trip back to the Seattle Film Archives.

Frederick Wiseman presents 'Wrigley'

I now live in Chicago, Illinois. For how long...who knows? Less than a week after my arrival, I had an opportunity to work at Wrigley Field for one day on a entertainment program that will go unnamed. Wrigley Field, aka The Friendly Confines, at first seemed like nothing more than a ballpark, but as the day wore on and I wandered the concourse, ramps and balconies, it began to resemble Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, which I visited this summer with the Brune brothers and Royal (Brune). As the second oldest active park in Major League Baseball and the oldest in the National League (my league), it's as storied and towering as Frank Lloyd Wright or Abraham Lincoln. With all my miscellaneous tasks to perform throughout the day, I managed to witness the slow wind-up of a Cubs night game, start time seven-0-five. Vendors arrive in the early morning to deliver kegs of beer, boxes of produce and dry goods. An old man in an over-sized Cubs jacket and hat, who works a six-thirty am to two-thirty pm shift with no lunch break, oversees Gate J/K logging all those who enter on the back of a scrap piece of white copy paper, jotting down numbers like L2345 in columns that slowly drifted as they ran down the page. No pre-printed charts, names or positions. He was doing it the old-fashioned way. I was able to see, hear and inhale the sights and scents of popcorn being popped, bagged and hung from stands like pennants. I held my own personal interior court in the modest, cramped administrative offices watching a 'Cubbie' hand-deliver a printed memo to all the cubicles. I drooled over a bucket of what appeared to be foul balls. I watched a colleague shake a bobble head and film it with his Iphone in close-up. A well dressed group of musicians in blue cummerbunds and long horns with banners hanging from them as if in some medievel kingdom gathered near the box office, preparing for what had to be the Star-Spangled Banner. Outside, at Clark and Addison, it was an ocean of red, white and blue.

I felt so out of place in khaki, green and white - not a bit of blue in my eyes and the only red on my lips.

It seemed like a document Frederick Wiseman might have captured already. How had he not? Not only is it a physical institution and business, but it lies within a much larger institution - baseball; and beyond that a larger institution still - sport. The closest he seems to have come is Racetrack and his relatively unseen film about Madison Square Garden. At Wrigley Field, I witnessed the everyday occurrences that so often feed Wiseman's poignant and simple tales of American life. I was reminded of a military convoy leaving the base in Missile, the students entering school in High School II, cattle being driven towards the slaughterhouse in Meat, and the supportive classrooms of The Spring in Domestic Violence. Lately, there has been a drought of movie-watching and making in my life. These droughts always seem rekindle my passion for what I feel is the most powerful medium we have - cinema. Wiseman's renderings came to life for me today in a place I never expected them to - Wrigley Field.

I am an old-fashioned kind of man, just like the man running Gate J/K. His home, place of worship and work is Wrigley Field. Mine is the cinema, but is no different. It is a home, a place of worship and a place of business. Each is historic, hallowed, strong, durable and meant for preservation. They were both built a long time ago and people passionately flock to them today just as they did then. To me, baseball and cinema are two past times I will drive to the airport or help move cross country or give my spare key to. Whatever they ask of me...my answer is yes.

I cannot wait for my first game in person. Let's play two!

Curta Cinema!

So far, The Adventure has garnered six awards from its nearly year-long festival run. Sometimes, these awards are ethereal and must be passed on through oral tradition only, but other times, something tangible is bestowed. I received my first tangible trophy from Curta Cinema 2008: Rio de Janeiro Int'l Short Film Festival. Check it out. I think it's inspired by the viewfinder of a camera or maybe the various aspect ratios of the cinematic tableau. I do like the simplicity of the black and white, which may be connected to some of the films shown at the festival this year.

I've learned to ask each festival to send back a copy of the program/catalogue along with either my tape or print. So far, they've all been happy to comply and it's nice to read about all the films one could have seen. From a more practical perspective, these programs are filled with contact information for many filmmakers and productions companies. The catalogue from Curta Cinema 2008 was especially heartbreaking to peruse because this year, they showed original Lumiere Bros. films on 35mm, including 'Train Arriving at the Station' and 'Workers Leaving a Factory'. In those days, you didn't have a choice. You had to make short films. (Sigh.)

Int'l Short Film Festival Winterthur - Films United

I felt compelled to share a little about my most recent festival adventure to Switzerland (Swaziland for a select one person). Here we go...

Obama's election swept me from the "red" state of Georgia to the country of Switzerland and more specifically to Zurich's well-dressed neighbor Winterthur. I felt rather proud to carry the Obama torch overseas and I felt like it gave a diplomatic quality to what was purely a cinematic mission. You might say, "Why Winterthur?" I might say, "A couple of reasons. No. 1: It's a short film festival and I have yet to attend a festival devoted only to shorts. No. 2: They have some very generous prizes awarded to the winners of the international competition. No. 3: They are very welcoming and generous to visiting filmmakers and suffice to say, they made it very worth my while to attend. My thanks to Reto, programmer and coordinator, for that. From my talks with other filmmakers at the festival, Winterthur's fest appears with Uppsala and Tampere as the jack, king and queen of the European short film festival deck. The ace, I think, would be Clermont-Ferrand. So I'm told. So I've heard.

On my first trip to Europe I sat next to a Colombian. On my second, I sat next to a
Colombian and he was just as friendly as every other Colombian I've met. Something in the water I guess. His name was Jesus and he works for Homeland Security. We parted ways in Paris and Charles de Gaulle airport. You know those silly cartoon representations of human organs in which dozens of workers toil laboriously maintaining the functions of the heart or brain or eye like it is some construction site or office building. That approximates CDG airport. It's a wonderful, confusing, spinning, crazy paradox. It's the embodiment of a Tati film. Well, my lodgings as provided the festival were located at the Hotel Banana City, heavy on amenities and light on indoor pools (none). This was quite a great place and I've included a short video of one of these amenities.


Our main festival venue was the Casino Theater in the heart of the city and a short walk from the hotel and it consisted on 3 floors of festivities. The first floor contained the main theater w/balcony, festival infodesk, restaurant and box office. The third floor was the smaller theater. The second, which I saved for last, was my favorite. Coat check and water closet facilities were located on this floor, but those are hardly things to holler about. In fact, there was no movie theater on this floor, but only a bar and and lounge, which for the festival, was turned into a teeming discotheque conducted each night by a host of DJs. Every year, the festival chooses a theme for this room and this year it was teddy bears and stuffed animals. It didn't seem to make any sense to me until the last day when people started pulling the animals off the ceiling and throwing them around and then it still didn't make any sense, but somehow it worked.

With a small festival like this, I got to know a number of filmmakers and festival staffers over the few days I was there and that was the true treat of the experience. Two of my favorites were Rodrigo, a Portuguese filmmaker and Tião, a Brazilian filmmaker. Rodrigo had just finished a feature film in HD and Corrente, his short film at the festival, was a trip back to the early days of cinema. He shot on 16mm reversal, developed and edited the film by hand, using only techniques available 70 years ago. I liked it very much. Tião's film, Muro (Wall in Portuguese), was my favorite of the festival. It premiered at Cannes' Director's Fortnight and it's a hard film to describe. The program reads, "Soul in vacuum, desert in expansion." That synopsis makes sense like the teddy bears hanging from the ceiling makes sense. I think maybe the film is about A race, though there are several races in the film. In one race, a group of children stand at the starting line and decide to race with one rule: they may not take a breath. The starter pistol fires...sounds pretty awesome, doesn't it? It is. I wish everyone could see this film.

I met a couple filmmakers from Tel Aviv (Rossi is pictured here next to me.), who were quite charming and funny and another filmmaker from Palestine, who was interrogated by Israeli Police for 4 hours before being allowed to board his plane at the Tel Aviv airport. I met Barbara(also pictured), a visual artist/filmmaker from Muenster in Germany and she was very nice and thoughtful and she had some insightful comments about my film. The list goes on... My other favorite films were Love You More, which I saw in Austin and ranks alongside Death to the Tinman as the best strictly narrative short films I've ever seen, and a film called Puppetboy, which won the grand prize of 12,000 CHF. It has a very Scandinavian sense of humor, probably because it's Scandinavian. If you asked me to describe what that is, I would fail, but if you saw the film, you'd come away thinking that same thought. In retrospect, it reminded me of Lars von Trier's The Boss of it All.

Originally, I had reservations about traveling overseas for a film festival for only a weekend. Now that I've returned, I would happily do it again in a heartbeat. It is astonishing how people can come together in such a small event and it seem as if the entire world and all its machinery present and accounted for. I still feel like such a child; amazed that their can be so many cultures and people driven to cinema to express the inexpressible. In full disclosure, I was interminably moved those 4-5 days. Perhaps to be moved, you must move, if only briefly. The world seemed flat and we all had our individual stories, but in reality, there was only one story. The word is 'universal'. It comes to mind whenever I think of Muro and the race. Film races through a projector. People race in the New York Marathon or to the moon. The earth is moving. We're all moving and racing at the same time. Look at me. I'm getting carried away. Forgive me.

Ann Arbor Film Festival - Day 3 and 4

My third day was nearly as eventful as the prior two. The patriarch of my lodgings made his debut and he was an inquisitive and kind man with whom I shared a breakfast of omelets and apple pie. At least I think it was omelets. This day marked the last I would see of my dear Google friends whom I would miss terribly. As a substitute for their great company, I turned to the big white screen and a Guy Maddin picture titled Brand Upon the Brain, which I enjoyed despite it's cloudy narrative. His devotion to the aesthetic of the silent film is tantamount to worthy of a statue in a plaza somewhere. After that I wandered around until the Awards Programs began and I skipped in and out of those, rewatching some films for a second time like My Olympic Summer and watching others for the first time.
My return came on an early Monday morning and I joined Transpo Coordinator Rick for the drive to the Detroit airport, for which I was very grateful. En route, we stopped to pick up another filmmaker who was traveling out the same morning named Juan Camillo, who hailed from Colombia. He proved my theory that Colombians are some of the nicest people on this Earth. As we trekked the 45 minutes to greater Detroit where the planes dock, Rick gave us a unadulterated history of the Ann Arbor Film Festival. He is a board member and has been involved with the festival, along with his wife, for many years. He told us, once upon a time, that the Ann Arbor Film Festival would only accept submissions if they were on 16mm. Imagine John Lennon...you could only submit to the festival if your film was on 16mm. That is what I call dedication and it's a lost way of life. He related to us the struggle AAFF recently endured to stay alive despite politicians pulling their funding for reputed 'controversial' programming. Read about the heroics here. His conclusion to this story is as touching as the end of It's a Wonderful Life and it just goes to show that no man, or festival, is a failure who has friends. I didn't hear any bells in the car ride, but damn it I should have. So, Rick and his wife, since they have no children, have willed all of their assets to the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Enough said. With passion and dedication like that, it seems nearly impossible for a festival of this kind to disappear. I was so moved I nearly lost my composure riding in that SUV. Generosity is the currency of our age. Here! Here!

The Big Red

Over the course of the past year, Blood Car has vacationed us in some fine areas of the continental United States, from red states to blue states and back again. Our most recent trip was to Denison University in Granville, Ohio, a highly selective liberal arts school of about 2400 students and nestled in what was once called 'the frontier of America.' The spirit of generosity and grit that once cradled these uncharted lands still rules, as does the danger of being attacked by vengeful Native Americans whose lands we usurped.* Adam and I were flown up courtesy of student Brian Crush and the Denison Film Society. We met him during our Burroughsian trip to the Jacksonville Film Festival this past May and he contacted Alex shortly afterward wanting to program Blood Car for one of their weekly film screenings. Since Alex was indisposed, we traveled in his stead. I had such great fun, both annoying Adam with bad joke/good joke ratio of 4 to 1 and visiting with our gracious hosts, who you'll meet shortly.

In the Atlanta airport's main atrium on our way to security, we were confronted by some janusian portraits by a photographer whose name I cannot remember. If you can tell me who the photographer is, I'll buy you lunch. These were displayed all across the atrium and were incredibly compelling. You cannot really see it here, but the split between the two faces is purposefully jagged and most of the photos were incredibly dramatic, funereal, beautiful and sorrowful. I chose to shoot one of the few of that had a smiling subject. I was in a good mood. This might make a good Xmas present for someone, but it also might make one sob uncontrollably. If you can't tell, one half of the face is just an older version of the younger half.

Chautauqua Airlines ferried us to St. Louis and then on to Columbus, OH in two very tiny, embracing planes that I could not stand up straight in. We were greeted by our benefactor Brian C. and a fellow film student named Taylor, who was working on a variation of the popular acronym WTF -- WTFuck. Go ahead. Say it...funny, right? I think it has potential. A scenic, thirty minute drive to the university allowed us to interrogate Brian C. and Taylor about their film program at Denison. Surprisingly, students are still mandated to shoot projects on 16mm. It's refreshing to hear that since our alma mater phased out 'film' just after we graduated and is now exclusively digital, at least for the undergrads. I also believe it imparts to students an understanding and appreciation of celluloid that is disappearing, much like the arctic glaciers. Yes, you heard me right, digital is the global warming of movies. HAHA.

On arrival, we assembled with our other gracious hosts, Cassie, Denison Film Society President, and Charlie, another film student, and dined at a bar that only served beer. I had some trouble finding a drink here since I do not drink beer or anything that tastes like beer. So I asked our waitress, "Are there any beers that do not taste like beer?" She either rolled her eyes or humored me and brought back two tasters' glasses, one that tasted like beer and one that tasted like a green apple jolly rancher cider. I had two glasses of the latter. It is a Belgian, unmanly, fruit flavored beer. During dinner, this cinematic quartet regaled us with the storied history of the DFS projection room, where several films have met with untimely fates, including Grindhouse and The Passenger. Taylor showed us one terrifying picture on his cell phone that encapsulated The Passenger debacle. Somehow, the reels became tangled up so intricately in the projector that they had to make over a dozen surgical cuts to free it from the jaws of the machine. The picture was of a student who looked like he dipped his hands in a bin of 35mm and the spools dripped off of him like water. His hands were held up proudly like a surgeon who had just emerged from a patient's chest cavity, bloodied up to his elbows. I covered my eyes. They assured us that they have dozens more stories of films that made it to the final reel, but those aren't very interesting. Ah, the essence of narrative and drama. Only when bad things happen is it worth committing to paper or celluloid or binary code. Can't argue with that.

We screened on DVD in a large lecture hall outfitted as a theater with full 16mm and 35mm projection facilities. A selection of snacks and soda were served for the attendees. Adam and I introduced the film, watched the first few minutes and then walked back into town for a drink while the film played. What also hearkened back to the frontier epoch was the price of the alcohol there; brawny quantities at 1850s prices. When we returned we happily answered questions, gave out a few t-shirts and some posters. In lieu of his presence, Alex drafted a short message to the students that I read before the talkback. It went as follows:

Dear Denison University,

Thanks for coming to the screening. I hope you laughed or were at least offended enough to tell someone about it. I'll take either. Atlanta is getting colder and I am getting some kind of sickness. It sucks. (I added as a joke, "I may not make it to spring.") How's the weather there? Well enough chit chat, let's get down to business. When I was in film school some professors, and especially people working in the film industry, treated doing their own projects as some kind of a pipe dream a younger version of them had. Well I just want to tell you that those people suck and you ca do whatever you want if it is important to you. Make the kind of films that you would like to see and there will be an audience somewhere for them. If you want to be a filmmaker, learn about it by doing. There is information everywhere about all aspects of filmmaking so devour it all. Read everything, volunteer, meet people, write, watch movies, take pictures- learn all you can. Mark Twain said it best- "Don't let schooling interfere with you education." ok, wish I could be there alex

I don't think Denison alums Michael Eisner, Jennifer Garner, Hal Holbrook or Steve Carell could have said it better. Carell might have been funnier. Holbrook would have had a few more Twain quotes up his sleeve. Garner would have been richer. Eisner would have been prettier. Actually, reverse those last two. Someday, these film students will be imparting similar wisdoms to the next generation of filmmakers and filmgoers. (Pictured from left to right; Cassie, Taylor, Charlie, and Brian C.)

For such a short trip, we produced a great deal of memories and inside jokes. From The Denisonian weekly, I learned that microwave popcorn fumes can cause "deadly, irreversible lung disease." I vanquished a couple of complete strangers in pocket billiards. We stayed at the Buxton Inn, which is supposedly haunted by former owners and a ghost cat. Some Denison students use roast beef sandwiches as bookmarks. Okay, just one of them.

*Not true.