Thing 128: The 13th Annual Iranian Film Festival

So, here's the thing when you open yourself up to new cultural experiences and your only criteria is that it be free:  sometimes, those experiences suck.

It was truly with an open mind and fairly high hopes that Good Friend David and I headed to the Freer Gallery on Friday night to take in Banana Skin, the film that would kick off the 13th Annual Iranian Film Festival.  Despite a degree in Middle Eastern Studies, I admit to being fairly ignorant about Iranian culture though I've heard rumors that it's vibrant, critical and exciting.

Unfortunately, the movie was none of those things.  It was an unfunny comedy, poorly acted and lacking a plot that -- how do I put this delicately -- made any sense.  The rough story is much like It's A Wonderful Life, except the opposite.  A business man so focused on making money that he has no personal life to speak of gets hit by a car and falls into a coma (are we laughing yet?).  While 'dead,' he falls in love with a beautiful woman in the afterlife.  When he wakes from the coma, he decides that the only way he can be happy is to be reunited with his love.  Which means he has to die.  Except that suicide is a sin.  So he has to die 'accidentally.'  So he hires a hit man to murder him, but the hit man is a heroin addict who forgets to kill him.  

Never have I been so nostalgic for George Bailey's rosy-cheeked children and their glee at bell-ringing.

I'd love to expound about how the different viewpoints (better off dead v. better off alive) is a metaphor for the hopeless situation in Iran whereas the American dream allows for hope and optimism.  I am sure that that would be woefully misguided.  Sometimes a bad movie is just a bad movie, and I'd sure hate for all of American culture to be judged on Sweet Home Alabama.  

I should also mention that it was pretty obvious that the subtitling was terrible.  If I spoke Farsi, this may have been an adequate movie rather than a poor one, but I can't imagine it transcending higher than that.  I'm puzzled by its inclusion in a festival designed to highlight the films of Iran, which have to get better than this.

The festival continues through February with five other films, all of which are shown free of charge at the Freer.  While I can't in good conscience recommend Banana Skin, I do urge you to cast the dice and check out one of the remaining films.  If you do, please report back in the comments and let me know your thoughts.

Thing 117: The Folklife Festival

"We FINALLY went to the Folklife Festival," I told my dinner companion as we sat over salsas and ceviches at Lauriol Plaza, in answer to the fairly innocuous question of what did you do today?

"You couldn't possibly have done that yet...isn't it always the tradition that they hold the Folklife Festival at the hottest, sweatiest time of year? Part of the tradition is melting into a pool of sweat!"

Oh, rest assured. It was plenty hot for the annual Folk Life Festival, which closed this past Sunday. GFD and I went on the very last day, and melt into a pool of dusty, Mall sweat we did.

We also housed a plate of ribs in about a minute and half, walked through an authentic Buddhist Temple from Bhutan, and scratched our heads and said "NASA?"

Let me go back for a second, for those of you who didn't make it to the festival this year. Every year, for two weeks around the 4th of July (when the mall is at its sweatiest and dustiest), the Smithsonian erects a great many tents and pavilions and picks three cultures from the world to showcase in all their native, folk glory. There's always food, music, dancing, arts and crafts, and educational demonstrations, lectures and performances. In other words, it's a good time, sweat and all.

This year, the cultures highlighted were Texas, Bhutan and...NASA. NASA was celebrating it's 50th anniversary, and I guess spent a bunch of dollars to be spotlit at the festival, but come on. A folk culture it is not. GFD and I kept wandering around it saying "but isn't there...oh, I don't know...a WHOLE museum dedicated to this?...Like, right over there on the Mall already?!"

But Bhutan and Texas were pretty cool. Mostly, GFD and I ate our way through both cultures. We went to the Texas BBQ house and ate ribs.

Then we went ate the national dish of Bhutan, ema datsi, which is chilies with cheese and potatoes, and white rice with some kind of red rice mixed in. To be honest, we were nervous. But it turns out, it tasted like queso with jalapenos. Not so weird or exotic. It actually might have come out of an industrial can of nacho-grade queso, so underwhelming overall. We did think it was funny that the same thing could have been purchased at the Tex Mex booth, and we probably wouldn't have noticed. We also ate pork dumplings (God I love dumplings) inexplicably served with salsa that also seemed to have borrowed from the Tex Mex booth.

The music part of the Texas exhibit was great, with an opry house tent, and a dance hall tent. We heard country music, two stepping, and mariachis in the course of the hour we were there. And the arts and crafts piece of the Bhutan exhibit was pretty good too. Their weaving and textiles are bright and fun, with Buddhas and dragons and bright pinks knit with reds and blues and greens in lively patterns. They even assembled a model Buddhist temple, the pieces of which were hand crafted in Bhutan and shipped to Washington, DC for assembly. And inside, there were live monks making music (and looking remarkably hot and bored)!

It's too late for this year if you missed it, but next year be sure to go, even though you are guaranteed to dissolve into a sweaty mess. There is great music, good food, and a lot to see and do. I imagine if you have children, it is an ideal place to let them run and see and touch and dance. And maybe next year, they will focus on three actual folk cultures. Or maybe they will highlight the Department of Homeland Security instead.

Coming up: SotG!!!!! See you there! HBO Dance-off promptly at dusk.

Join me over at the Cork & Knife, where I tackle jam-making.

Thing 113: The Portrait Gallery

On Friday, I took the afternoon off of work, for no better reason than it's summer and GFD and I wanted to do frivolous things. We drank bloody Marys and ate fried zucchini for lunch, saw the Sex and the City movie, and finished with wings and tackiness at Hooters.

But we didn't want it to be all frivolity, so we threw some legitimate culture in there, too. We stopped in at the National Portrait Gallery to see a couple of exhibits that I've had my eye on for awhile.

I haven't spent a whole lot time in the Portrait Gallery. For the first several years I was in DC, it was under renovation and then when it finally opened I did a quick lap around it and then gave up and had lunch at Zaytinya. This time around, I specifically wanted to see the exhibit of hip hop portraits and of Herblock cartoons, and I quite enjoyed them both.

The hip hop exhibit was bright and playful and, as someone was has listened to hip hop since her formative years, a real acknowledgement that the cultural movement that is hip hop is worth celebrating within our larger culture of the arts. Thirty years ago when street kids were tagging subways in the Bronx, did they ever think that graffiti art would be lining the hallways of the Smithsonian? And yet here were huge, colorful tags spray painted on canvasses along the marble floored hallways, commanding respect as Art.

There were also some beautiful black and white portraits of artists on stage and back stage, including my love, Mos Def, and some really great ones of Erykah Badu, Public Enemy and ?uestlove. There was a video installation, and a spoken word/mixed media room but my favorite were the enormous portraits by Kehinde Wiley, bright with patterns and vitality, of various members of hip hop 'royalty' (LL Cool J, Ice T, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five) posing in the style of noblemen past. The musicians are posed with objects showing their style and wealth, in front of neon repeating patterned backgrounds and with a large crest to identify who they are (LL's crest for example included a pair of boxing gloves and a Kangol hat. Don't call it a comeback...). Here, Ice T is posed in the manner of the Emperor Napoleon -- ruling over his domain.

The other exhibit we saw was the Herblock political cartoons. I have lived in DC just long enough that I remember seeing his works in the Post, as he was nearing the end of a long and storied career. Herblock was a master at the political satire, and spared no president from his harsh pen. This exhibit covers a sampling of his cartoons of FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton. The opening text for the exhibition specifically states that only cartoons that aren't nice to their subjects were selected, and Herblock spares no one as he points out corruption, indifference or hypocrisy. Clinton washes his hands of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Johnson neglects and under funds his War on Poverty and Kennedy cowered as dictators took over Latin America. This exhibit goes hand in hand with Berryman's exhibit at the National Archives, and it's a great way to learn about history -- through the eyes of cynical and humorous cartoonists.

I loved both of these exhibits, and I think they are each a good example of some of the more forward ways the portrait gallery is defining portraiture. Sharp caricatures and classic portraits of modern figures, mixed media art installations about how we see ourselves, and even the graffiti tag as self portrait because that's how the graffiti artists choose to present themselves outwards to the world...they're all housed in the same place as the oil paintings of George Washington.

The hip hop exhibit is on until the end of October, and Herblock is up through the end of November, and I'd urge you to check them out next time you're up for a bit of summertime frivolity.

Thing 98: See the Constitution!

Thing 98: See the Constitution! Or, um, not.


Let me explain. I had a friend in town this weekend. He is an old and dear friend, who I've known since the ninth grade. He has now made this perfectly silly choice to go to law school. In an attempt to support this newfound interest in the law, I suggested that while he was in town -- and in between the late nights filled with booze and dancing -- we pay a visit to the Constitution. And while we were at the National Archives, we'd get to see the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta and this exhibit of political cartoons I'd seen advertised in the Metro.

Oh, but the Magna Carter was not on display, and neither was the Constitution! The powers that be are making improvements to the case, and so the documents have been holed up somewhere below ground, waiting until they can have an audience once more.

The trip wasn't a complete waste. Frankly, at this point the Constitution is so very faded and worn there isn't much to see, and the really good stuff is in the Bill of Rights anyway, right? In the main rotunda there are lots of other interesting documents, and the masses usually focus on the Constitution, so JFK's speech, the draft of the Articles of Confederation and the original Marbury v. Madison must be grateful to be getting some attention for once.

The special exhibit of political cartooning was really wonderful, too. It is a retrospective of the work of Clifford Berryman, pioneer of the political cartoon, cartoonist for the Washington Post and then the Washington Evening Star from 1898 through 1948. Berryman is the guy who drew that cartoon of the cute, cuddly teddy bear, creating an icon and a symbol of Teddy Roosevelt that stuck with him through his political career.

The cartoons are beautiful, elegant and still very relevant. I particularly liked the one of the Republican candidate, Calvin Coolidge, alone and unencumbered on the putting green as the Democratic candidates for president whacked each other in the Bitter Contest Bunker.


I also liked the cartoon of the tax payer, being supplicated on all sides by the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, and the Progressive goat. Candidates have been promising to cut my taxes since well before I was born -- ain't politics grand?


The entire exhibit is available online, click here to take a look, but if you are in the city head over the archives and see the original. And if you're luckier than my lawyer-in-training friend, you'll get to pop upstairs and see the Constitution while you're there.

Thing 51: The Museum of Natural History

50 "things" and not one Smithsonian? Is this possible? Let's correct that right now, shall we?


Last weekend, the Boyfriend and I ventured into the pits of tourist hell when we spent a couple hours at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. I had slept right through the Market, after the exertion of the Mos Def concert, and by the afternoon I got to feeling restless. I was overwhelmed by the need to see some dinosaur bones. And the Boyfriend, because he loves me, humored me in this, even though fanny packs make him physically ill.

We entered the Museum of Natural History from Constitution Avenue, and immediately upon passing through the metal detector, I was face to face with an authentic maoi statue. You know, one of those Easter Island heads. Devotees will remember that this statue completely stumped me and GFD during our Urban Dare adventure, and was the only thing keeping us from victory. So, with this picture I have officially completed the Urban Dare. Ahem, it only took me three months.

From the Constitution Avenue entrance, we had to go up a narrow escalator and then we were in the atrium of the museum, a wide, circular space at whose center is a a replica of an enormous tusked elephant walking through African sand. The atrium is lit through the sky light at the top of the large dome in the ceiling. The second floor's balcony is propped up by narrow, white marble columns. There is a desk for information, a desk at which to buy tickets for the I-MAX, and signs directing visitors towards all the various exhibits.

But mostly, there are tourists. It is July. In our nation's capital. In probably the second most kid-friendly museum in the city (second only, I'm guessing, to the Air and Space, which I simply am not going to venture into until at least October when the greatest gush of tourism will have subsided). It's not like I was surprised to find a sweaty, screaming, crying, running, hungry, cranky, photographing, bored and matching-shirted crowd there. I was ready. I had steeled myself. Still, it was overwhelming. Do tourists even enjoy the experience of the museum, or are there too many other tourists there for them to get even a moment to catch their breath and appreciate?

Which is kind of how I felt. The Boyfriend and I headed up first to the geology room, to see the shiny jewelry. In order to get to that great, glittering, blue behemoth that is the Hope Diamond, you have to wind your way through all these different exhibits about plate tectonics, meteor showers, earthquakes, mining and mineral deposits before you get to the pretty things. So much to learn, and so many people in the way. Every explanatory plaque, every interactive exhibit, every square inch of thick glass encasing twinkly gems was blocked by tourists in high-wasted shorts, their eager children or their impossibly bored teenagers. I can't say I learned much. Except that I really hope that, when the Boyfriend wins a bajillion dollars playing lotto someday, that he buys me a 142 carat emerald and diamond necklace.

We strolled down to look at the dinosaur bones, too. Again, there were so many people everywhere that I didn't really feel at leisure to learn much. Stegosaurus bones are cool. T-Rex's skull is neat. And, um....strollers look hard to steer.


There was also a really wonderful exhibit of nature photography. This I can happily and highly recommend. Even though it was also packed, I felt able to wander and admire and read without too much tourist interference. The photographs were all prize winning, the best of the best from the 2006 Nature’s Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards and the National Wildlife Photography Awards competitions. Each category had an amateur and a professional winner and the categories covered everything from birds to landscapes to human interactions with nature. All the pictures were displayed in full, perfect color, on large, glossy poster boards. One was an arctic sunset, with dark blues and bright pinks. One was of a big brown bear, rolling on his back, seemingly laughing. And there was this one, the grand prize winner of the whole competition:


The Boyfriend and I only lasted about an hour and a half before we had to get out of the crowd. There is so much to see, the stuffed mammals, the live spiders, the I-MAX movie about sharks. We will probably go back another time, when things quiet down. But right then, I needed to get out of there. The ginger chocolate chip molasses cookies I baked when we got home helped us recover.