Mardi Gras: Made in China / 2004 / 74 minutes

Mardi Gras beads were once made of Czechoslovakian glass and often kept, whereas the plastic beads, popular since the 1970s, are usually thrown away after the festival¹. Today’s bead industry sustains itself by continuously remanufacturing a disposable product. David Redmon’s documentary, Mardi Gras: Made in China, traces plastic bead necklaces, masks, oversized genitals, and other Mardi Gras accouterments from the New Orleans festival back to a bead factory in China, tying production to over-consumption. The film is direct, even-handed, and honest—not easy for a documentary. In interviews with Mardi Gras revelers, the bead distributor in New Orleans, the factory owner in China, the factory workers, and the parents of workers, Redmon’s questions are simple and straightforward, free of angry invective. He visits the bead factory as an anthropoligist or, at most, as a cultural ambassador, not as an investigative reporter, and that’s why Mardi Gras: Made in Chnia is the best documentary I’ve seen this year. Mardi Gras participants are asked “Do you know where the beads come from?”, and factory workers are asked, “Do you know where the beads end up?”, and it’s clear that neither side is fully aware of the other’s existence. The factory workers are incurious about who would want to buy “these ugly beads.” Sadly, the Chinese workers don’t venture to characterize the thousands of purple necklace and plastic penis consumers, while the Mardi Gras revellers are either ignorant of the beads’ origin, ambivalent and momentarily embarrassed about their role as consumers, or too drunk to care. A typical response: “Please don’t make me think about it—I’m on vacation!”

The Chinese workers, 95% of them teenage girls, are paid around $1.50 for 12-18 hour days in the factory. They live at the factory, and are only allowed to leave on Sundays (if their day off happens to fall on a Sunday) and holidays. The factory owner proudly explains his labor policies: every worker has a Sisyphean production quota, there is a 5% penalty for not meeting your quota, and an “up to 10%” bonus for going over your quota. One worker’s stated maximum output is 100 items per day, but her quota is 200, so she gets penalized every day. Penalties are a big part of what keeps the workers in line: a day’s pay is deducted for talking at work, a week for any machine failure under your watch, and a month if you’re caught hanging out with the opposite sex in the evening. The factory conditions are clearly dangerous, and much of the loud, aging machinery is operated around the clock. But it’s not entirely clear from the film whether these workers are unhappy at the long hours and repetitive work, angered by the low pay, or simply relieved to have a job “on the outside.” The girls are without much hope (“hope is irrelevant for me,” says one, who is saving money so that her little brother may go to school). Despite their working conditions, their spirits are high and they do not seem overtly angry or bitter.

After interviewing the producers and consumers, Redmon decides to do a cultural exchange: he makes photographs of Mardi Gras partiers and shows them to highly amused factory workers (“She’s showing her boobs!”). They recognize the cultural differences: “We would never think to do anything so embarrassing. Those Americans are crazy!” Redmon again returns to New Orleans and shows his footage from China in the streets during Mardi Gras. People are shocked about the wages and working conditions, others brush it off with blind acceptance. “It doesn’t matter—it’s all relative. In China, $1.50 is probably a great wage,” says one vacationing MBA student. No boycott was announced—no necklaces were removed in self-disgust. But I can say with certainty that I’ll never show my tits at Mardi Gras again.

¹ Some are made into creepy folk art, and John Lawson makes gaudy-beautiful plastic bead mosaics.

This weekend, Karl and I went to the Boston Independent Film Festival. Here’s a quick review of the first two movies we saw. More to come!

Don Gorske: Mac Daddy / 2005 / 16 minutes
In a Nutshell: A Portrait of Elizabeth Tashjian / 2005 / 80 minutes

The first movie we saw was about Wisconson-based obsessive Big Mac eater Don Gorske. It’s a short profile of Gorske, who ate his 20,000th Big Mac this year. He eats nothing for breakfast, nothing for lunch, then stops by McDonalds and picks up between 1 and 4 Big Macs for dinner. Every day. For the past 25 years. The director of this short saw him featured in Super Size Me last year, and she thought he could carry a short film on his own.

Gorske shows us his “McDonalds Museum,” which occupies a spare bedroom and most of the attic in his house. He has Ronald’s clown shoes, Big Mac containers from 1975, and hundreds of photos of himself in front of hundreds of McDonalds restaurants. He has all kinds of awards and newspaper clippings, including a Guinness Book of World Records entry. “Most of the people in this book [Guinness] are obsessive-compulsive,” he says, “so I guess I fit right in.” He says people call him John Lennon, because he has a Wisconsin version of Lennon’s hair and glasses, but he reminded me more of Forrest Gump.

And he reminded me that anyone could get famous by doing something, anything, with obsesive consistency. Etch another vote into the stone for long term projects, no matter how mundane.

From the McDonalds Museum, we go east to Connecticut, to the now-defunct Nut Museum in Old Lyme. Elizabeth Tashjian, now ninety-three, started the museum wheh she was in her fifties, and for thirty-odd years it was the outlet for her art projects. She researched nuts, painted nuts and painted paintings of nuts, wrote songs about nuts, collected nuts, and became an icon for nuts, appearing on many national TV shows and “weird news” briefs through the decades. Tashjian lived with her mother until she died (Tashjian was in her forties), then lived alone and penniless, but quite happy, in her mother’s mansion until recently. She was the sole curator, director, and historian of the Nut Museum, and her self-proclaimed title is Nut Culturist. On a visit to the museum, the camera shows that Tashjian is truly the main event: she’s as much a performance artist as a visual artist. She is very intelligent, charismatic, and entertaining. I was reminded of Little Edie in Grey Gardens. Tashjian is not as messy or flippant as Little Edie, but she radiates the same sort of creativity, and she represents a past generation of New England intellectual wealth that is now nearly extinct.

In 2002, Tashjian was found unconscious by a state social worker. She went into a coma. The state emptied her house and put it on the market (to cover back taxes), and her life’s work was donated to Connecticut College’s art department. To everyone’s surprise, she recovered a month later, and she was devestated by the news. She now lives in a nursing home and has been considered incapable of managing her own affiars. Her house was sold and remodeled, her heirloom nut trees torn down, and her chances of moving back to Old Lyme are all but gone. She has regained hope in her work, however, and she continues to persue her obsession. A retrospective of her work was held last year at Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, CT, and, of course, this docmentary premiered in February. It’s a touching story, well presented. It raises questions about how excentric artists fit, or don’t fit, into rural communities. It shows a sad reality that many older women without any family support face. But it’s also creatively inspiring: to see someone live such a free and rich life with so little, with so much energy. And she came into her prime after 50.

Related articles:
Big Mac fan eats 2 a day and stays slim
Wikipedia: Don Gorske
Resource Library Magazine: The Nut Museum: Visionary Art of Elizabeth Tashjian
The New Yorker: The Nut Lady Returns

The first wheelchair rider

The snacks.

Women’s first place: Catherine Ndereba of Kenya

The law.

The camera club.

Men’s first place: Hailu Negussie of Ethiopia

1/1000th of everyone else.

Dyson US, the vacuum people, are releasing their new Ball vacuum on April 21st. It looks like a combination of their upright vacuum and the Ballbarrow (pictured here).

I don’t have enough living space to need a vacuum, but I’m still psyched.

This makes a ton.. like 8-10 servings. I have never made this before so I looked around for recipes and just sort of made something up. I had heard from a friend that you simply put everything in a pot with coconut milk and boil it until it’s done, but I thought I could cook things more evenly (and get some nice browning) by doing the whole thing in a wok. I think this is a decent first attempt.

2-3 Tbsp peanut oil
1 eggplant, 1/2” dice
1 red & 1 green pepper, sliced thin
1/4 lb green beans, ends lopped off
1 medium onion, roughly chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2” ginger, minced

6 kaffir lime leaves
2 Tbsp green curry paste
2 Tbsp fish sauce

2 14oz cans coconut milk
1 cup chicken stock
2 boneless chicken breasts, 1/2” cubes

Thai basil (if you can find it) or just basil, to top.

Heat the oil in a wok over medium-high and stir fry all the veggies. When they are almost done, clear a space at the bottom of the wok and add the garlic, ginger, lime leaves, curry paste, and fish sauce with a little extra oil. Press the mixture into the wok with a spatula and let it fry for a few seconds before mixing it in with the veggies.

Meanwhile, boil the coconut milk and stock, and add the chicken bits. Cook a few minutes until just about done. Add this to the wok and bring the whole thing to a nice simmer.. let it simmer a bit to blend all the flavors.

Serve with the basil and steamed rice. Yum.

Notes to self for attempt two:
- figure out stir fry time differential for the different veggies, so that I know when to add at which stages (this is really just a practice thing, I think).
- how long does chicken really take to boil/fry?
- make this a one-dish meal: do the whole thing in the wok.
- It seems too liquidy, too thin. Use only 1 can coconut milk, and possibly reduce it with the stock for a while before adding the chicken?
- use a little less curry paste and perhaps one or two more lime leaves or some extra lime juice.
- add bamboo shoots?
- How can I blend the flavors better (we’ll see tomorrow whether time in the fridge does the trick)