Salon.com > Jon Mooallem

The bears of Churchill

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 12:30:00 +0000

One morning last fall, Claude Daudet drove out to check his snowmobile trails around Churchill, Manitoba, a tiny town on Hudson Bay's western edge, south of the Arctic Circle. He grimaced at the unfrozen ponds speckling the tundra. His one-man snowmobile tour company had just been forced to cancel its first group of the season for lack of snow. As we bounced along in his truck, the generally sanguine Daudet, 47, seemed sunk in worries. Among these burdens was Camus, his dead dog, which, at the insistence of his animal-lover girlfriend, was boxed in Daudet's freezer, awaiting cremation on their next trip to Winnipeg. Then there was his business, of course, the muddy terrain, the belated winter, the absent wind, climate change and so forth.

We got out at the small warming hut he'd built in the woods. He started pacing. Normally at this time of year, he'd be inside the hut, serving hot chocolate and homemade Nordic cookies, after leading a convoy of snowmobiling tourists across the frozen Churchill River on a day tour. He pointed to a jagged tear in the door made by certain furry uninvited guests. They have been turning up more frequently, increasingly desperate for something to eat. This is another worry. "We can no longer get insurance for polar bear break-ins," he said.

I see dead people

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 21:52:00 +0000

The first thing you see when you walk into the installation "The Universe Within" is a dead Chinese man with very little skin. His hands are triumphantly on his hips, and he's made to revolve slowly on a turntable like a track and field trophy. A large rhombus of muscle is partially carved off his buttocks and peeled forward, and if you look closely at its edge you notice the familiar, pinkish marbling of a raw flank steak. And then you have an indescribable little epiphany: You realize that you're looking at this gentleman's actual flanks.

"The Universe Within," now at San Francisco's Nob Hill Masonic Center, is a traveling road show of 21 provocatively posed human bodies and a menagerie of organs, all embalmed by a process called "plastination," in which body fluids are replaced with liquid plastic. It hails from China and joins two other wildly successful touring exhibits: "Body Worlds" and "Body Worlds 2" (currently in Chicago and Cleveland, respectively). Those exhibits are promoted by plastination's inventor, Gunther von Hagens, and have grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide. They've also incited almost perpetual controversy, due in part to von Hagens' Barnum-esque eccentricities. (Most notoriously, after bullet holes were found in two of his specimens' heads, he was accused of, but never charged with, using the bodies of executed Chinese prisoners. Then in March, when the Body Worlds 2 exhibit was in Los Angeles, someone walked off with a 13-week-old plastinated fetus.)

“Moses, you splendid, adorable fool!”

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 20:59:00 +0000

ABC's airing of Cecil B. DeMille's biblical epic "The Ten Commandments" this Sunday will be the network's 24th broadcast of the film in 31 years. Almost every one has been timed to fall on either Palm or Easter Sunday, turning this glitzy, sexed-up production of the foundational Jewish story of deliverance from Egypt into a Christian Holy Week tradition. The "Ten Commandments" broadcast has also often coincided with Passover, when Jews retell that same story during a ritual dinner. Around the country, doubtless more than one family has wound down its Passover Seder amid empty Manischevitz bottles, watching Charlton Heston part the Red Sea.

The film still generally wins the night's top ratings; last year it won both the adult and kid markets, with an average of 10.6 million viewers. And its influence stretches further than anything Nielsen can measure, though especially to modern eyes it's little more than a load of camp, with outrageous costumes and overacting, which is never more apparent than in the bedroom scenes between Moses and Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. "Oh Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool," she tells the prophet, who has spent the afternoon making bricks with his enslaved Jewish brethren. "You can worship any God you like, as long as I can worship you." TV Guide dubs the movie "a great big wallow, sublime hootchy-kootchy hokum." In a recent article on "The Passion of the Christ," Variety cites a Hollywood "axiom" that you can't make films about religion, "unless it's a harmless Cecil B. DeMille-type biblical saga."