Salon.com > Jennifer New

The odyssey of “Genghis Blues”

Wed, 22 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

It's safe to say that whatever Tom Cruise and Annette Bening were doing after learning of their recent Oscar nominations, they were not preparing for six days in the Gobi. That's the Gobi Desert. Middle of Nowhere. Land of severe weather, yurts and nomadic people. But for Adrian and Roko Belic, the brothers behind the Oscar-nominated documentary film "Genghis Blues," spending six days in sub-freezing temperatures, huddling in their sleeping bags at night and traveling via camel was just where they wanted to be.

"Our agent was like, 'Guys, guys, do you have to do this again!'" laughs Adrian. The agent was referring to how they had flown off to New Zealand the day before their first film premiered in Los Angeles.

But in both cases, a free ticket to an unexplored place proved more compelling than anything Hollywood could dish up. So a week before the Oscar nominations, knowing that they were already on a list of 12 non-fiction films that had been whittled from an initial 55, they left as much pertinent information and VHS copies with friends and family as they could muster, then headed off to be the featured speakers at a filmmaking workshop in Mongolia.

Thanksgiving: A personal history

Wed, 24 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

In trying to explain what was missing from her life, how it felt hollow, a friend recently described to me a Thanksgiving she'd once had. It was just two friends and her. They had made dinner and had a wonderful time. "Nothing special happened," she explained, "But we were all funny and vibrant. I thought life would always be like that."

This is the holiday mind game: the too-sweet memory of that one shining moment coupled with the painful certainty that the rest of the world must be sitting at a Norman Rockwell table feeling loved. It only gets worse when you begin deconstructing the purpose of such holidays. Pondering the true origins of Thanksgiving, for example, always leaves me feeling more than a bit ashamed and not the least bit festive. Don't even get me started on Christmas.

Every year, I think more and more of divorcing myself from these blockbuster holidays. I want to be free from both the material glut and the Pandora's box of emotions that opens every November and doesn't safely close until Jan. 2. Chief among these is the longing for that perfect day that my friend described, the wishful balance of tradition, meaning and belonging. But as an only child in a family that has never been long on tradition, I've usually felt my nose pressed against the glass, never part of the long, lively table and yet not quite able to scrap it all to spend a month in Zanzibar.

Bare, naked ladies

Fri, 02 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

It's summer 1978 and music blares over the intercom. The song, tinny and full of static, wafts over the now-still Olympic-sized pool and disappears into the grove of walnut and oak trees in the park beyond. "Hot child in the city," some of us sing along in the shower, "acting wild and lookin' pretty." Suds roll down our bare backs, the patterns from our Speedos tanned into our skin: paisley swirls, American flags. We use hair bands to keep the shower levers wedged on, indulging ourselves in the streaming hot water. At home our mothers scold us for this, for using up the water at a languorous pace. But there's not a mother in sight; this place is ours.

Iowa heartland

Wed, 30 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000

It was late February and an Arctic blast had descended on Iowa. Gone was the beauty of the first snowfall or the comfort of donning a favorite old wool sweater following an Indian summer. Now, dirty snow was piled in parking lots and boots were covered with the white smudge of salt stains. A molelike quality had overcome many people, due to both the cold and the short days. Bleak March was yet to be endured.

But I was in Los Angeles, swimming laps outside and going barefoot through the Huntington Gardens, sandals in hand. With any luck, it would be sufficient sustenance to hold me until spring. A friend and I headed north from the city one day in search of beaches and mountains. Stopping at a roadside fish and chips stand, we wedged ourselves into the only available space and shared a table with two hirsute guys. Between gulps of Snapple and bites of battered shrimp, one of them was considering his travel options. "You know where I'd really like to go?" The other man didn't look up from his fish. "Des Moines. They always dump on that place in the movies, so I figure it's probably all right. All right by me anyway. Then I want to see Cheyenne."

Leap of faith

Sat, 14 Mar 1998 14:12:00 +0000

"Pull back the curtain. Go ahead." My mother-in-law reaches over me and lifts a thin synthetic curtain that looks as though it were sewn by a newlywed, circa 1952. Below, the men in the synagogue are supposedly praying and observing the beginning of Shabbat, though it looks to me as though they're catching up on the week's gossip. But what do I know, a shiksa from Iowa standing in the women's balcony of an Israeli synagogue. With my straight blond hair and jet-lagged blue eyes, I don't belong here. And yet I do. I am with my mother-in-law. We whisper in each other's ears, lock arms and, days later, dance together. We are here in Israel to learn each other, to move irrevocably beyond our past.

Behind us is a rocky place filled with misunderstandings. On her part, there was a blind desire for her son to marry a Jew, an inability to view me whole. My own movement to forgiveness and understanding has been slowed by an assumption that I know what I need to know about Judaism. Littered between these two stubborn positions lies the residual guilt of the Holocaust, coupled with a murky, groping understanding on both of our parts of what it means to be a good mother, a good daughter. I'm not sure whether the stark and horrifying tragedy of the Holocaust or the centuries-old wounds between mothers and daughters is the larger gap.

Paper-clothed strangers

Wed, 08 Oct 1997 16:26:00 +0000

Jadine, is that her name? Why can't I remember her name? There is her bulk, her blues, her weariness. She reminded me of a large, scuffed suitcase that for years had been filled with other people's stuff. She was entrusted with the safe-keeping of their dreams, their wrongdoings, their children, their illnesses. Forty-four years old and patiently exasperated, she muttered, "I didn't think this could still happen." Her voice was tired. This was just
one more damned awful thing she had not been intending to have to deal with, but here she was -- dealing.

She stared at the ceiling. Occasionally she closed her eyes, lightly. She tried to smile or nod at us. Hers was the lengthiest abortion I've seen. I really don't know how long we were all in tiny Room 4 at the end of the hall. It was a warm summer evening, and with five of us in there the temperature rose. Through it all, people were prodding at her body. One doctor inserted a saline drip in her arm to keep her blood pressure up and to hydrate her. At Jadine's feet, the clinic director and another doctor, pale with concern, were tensely discussing whether to proceed. Jadine was more than 12 weeks along,
12 weeks being the maximum stage for which
this clinic was equipped.

Ain't gonna work on Bill G's farm no more

Thu, 25 Sep 1997 16:44:00 +0000

Last year I moved back to Iowa, the place where I grew up, the place I'd left eight years earlier for graduate school and Seattle. The move raised a lot of eyebrows: It was made clear to me, by both Seattlites and Iowans, that you move to only one of these places and away from the other. Clearly I had it backward.

"Why leave Seattle?" people would ask, and I'd say, "to get away from Microsoft." This always got a laugh, until they realized I was in earnest. I had a near-compulsive, overwhelming need to escape all things Microsoft, to elude the corporation's omnipresence in the Emerald City. Unfortunately for me, the company and the city had become one.

Before actually moving, I first tried quitting my job. I had been a contractor on "the campus" for three years. I worked in four different buildings, had seven offices and contributed to six different products. I'll never know how much of my life was sacrificed to the daily commute across Lake Washington, but a little more than 1,000 hours, or 42 days, is a rough guess. I made at least one and a half times the salary I now make -- which means I went out to eat that much more, bought that many more clothes, put a great deal more into savings and saw a therapist on a regular basis. I also had free beverages and inexpensive, company-subsidized food from the campus's many cafeterias. I weighed about 10 pounds more, and my back felt like it was approaching 70 years old rather than 30.