CITY LIGHTS
CITY LIGHTS
HYENAS
SANS SOUCI IN THE HAPPY HOOKER GOES TO WASHINGTON
In a dazzling cross-cultural literary adaptation, director Djibril Diop Mambéty turned a 1956 work by Swiss-German playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt into a study of poverty and greed in a Senegalese village—and made it hilarious and mysterious all at once. The basic plot comes from the play: a wealthy older woman (Ami Diakhate) returns to the impoverished village of Colobane that cast her out 30 years ago when she became pregnant out of wedlock. She’s ready to pump millions into the village, on one condition: that the people kill the man who got her pregnant (Mansour Diouf ). Mambéty’s 1973 feature debut, Touki Bouki, was a revelation of sub-Sarahan cinema, and the 1992 film Hyenas is just as strong, injecting the vibrant colors of women’s dresses into a land otherwise dominated by earth tones and men who wear sacks for uniforms. The poverty on view is sobering in time when grocery store shortages of paper products are sending civilization into a frenzy. And a frenzy ensues when Colobane’s villagers start spending their new fortunes on refrigerators and air conditioning. Mambéty’s cynical view of humanity seems to argue that we will all be doomed if we don’t take stock of what’s really important. The film was to be screened at the National Gallery of Art on March 19 as part of the series African Legacy: Francophone Films 1955 to 2019, but you can watch it for free with your D.C. Public Library card. The film is available to stream on Kanopy. Free. —Pat Padua
If you’re hunkering down and forget what it looks like inside a restaurant, the terrible and dated 1977 drama The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington features a prominent reminder of Washington’s culinary past: Sans Souci, the fabled French restaurant that operated on 17th Street NW until 1983. 1970s TV icon Joey Heatherton stars as Xaviera Hollander, and can be seen dining at one of the city’s finest with another mainstay of the era, George Hamilton. The vinyl booths and elegant décor may have better acting chops than the cast, but there’s at least one line of apt dialogue: “We gotta look out for each other, because no one else will.” You only get to bask in local history for a few minutes, but the scene doesn’t stop giving; watching over this power lunch is veteran 3 ft. 9 in. character actor Billy Barty, another name that us old people will immediately recognize. Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald once wrote that before Sans Souci, “there was no power lunch.” While the restaurant is long gone, you can still dine where presidents and power couples ate beef tartare and sole amandine. But today, you’ll have to settle for the Big Mac; it’s a McDonald’s now. The movie is streaming, which may be as close as you can get until social distancing ends. The film is available to stream or rent on Amazon Prime. $3.99. —Pat Padua
CITY LIGHTS
CITY LIGHTS
THE CREATIVE INDEPENDENT
LOCAL PHOTOGRAPHERS’ ONLINE GALLERIES
Sometimes, you want to create but run into a roadblock. You aren’t alone in that. Go to The Creative Independent, a growing collection of interviews, how-to guides, and more with musicians, writers, visual artists, and others. A safe place for artists to feel understood and learn, this internet gem focuses on been-there advice that’s practical both inside (your emotional journey) and outside (putting your work out there). Among the many generous people with D.C. ties who share their tips and thoughts here are the writer Marcus J. Moore; writer, producer, and Navajo tapestry weaver Sierra Teller Ornelas; and the musicians and label owners Katie Alice Greer and Ian MacKaye. Just two of the sections I’ve scoured with gratitude in my heart include “Making the Time for Creative Work” and “Overcoming Adversity.” Founded by editor-in-chief Brandon Stosuy and former Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler, the website has an utterly simple design, loads of wisdom, love to the world, and charm. If art is food for the spirit, like the great painter Wassily Kandinsky said in his 1910 treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, then The Creative Independent is sustenance for artists—artists just like you. The website can be found at thecreativeindependent.com. Free. —Diana Michele Yap
Museums and galleries around D.C. are closing down for coronavirus 2020, but it’s still possible to experience some first-rate photography from the comfort of your own quarantine quarters. Just tool around the websites of some of the area’s best photographers. Here’s a selection of local photographers who are offering the public a detailed (and free!) online look at some of their best portfolio work. They include Gary Anthes, whose works included a rain-slicked boardwalk scene at night; Sarah Hood Salomon, whose series The Spirit of the Woodlands features ethereal, even ghostly, portrayals of trees and water; Patricia Howard, who produced House to House, a project documenting the eight homes in Spencer, Indiana, that her mother lived in between the 1920s and 1940s; and Craig Nedrow, whose series on steel mills offers a bracing, black-and-white depiction of industrial decline. The images are available on garyanthes.smugmug.com, sarahhoodsalomon.com, howardpatricia.com, and nedrowphotography.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson
CITY LIGHTS
CITY LIGHTS
THE DC1968 PROJECT
I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE
All that many people know about 1968 in Washington, D.C. is that there was an uprising after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and parts of the city burned to the ground. Fifty years later, in 2018, historian and author Marya McQuirter created a way to address that with the dc1968 project. Each day in 2018, she shared on the website and via Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter something that was happening on that date in 1968. She leaned heavily on items from the Washington Evening Star newspaper collection at the DC Public Library, but also used clippings from the Howard University newspaper and photos from various other sources. She has posts about subjects including the black-activist-owned Drum & Spear bookstore, the Gibbs Elementary School glee club, a Roberta Flack benefit concert, and McKinley Tech High School students protesting the Washington Post’s manipulation of the high school football rankings. There are national news-related postings as well, including a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on Feb. 7, 1968, at the Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, submitted and taken by the now-late D.C. artist Vernard Gray. Some of the posts contain a lot of detail, while others simply request information from the public about the photo that was shared. McQuirter closes out the series with a diary entry from an observant 14-year-old, who notes she watched the TV show The Mod Squad, ate pizza, and then laments the “assassinations, riots, deaths, invasions of the freedom of other countries” she’s seen, praying that the next year can be better. All the posts can be found at dc1968project.com. Free. —Steve Kiviat
Coronavirus concerns forced The National Museum of Asian Art to scrap its Tsai Ming-liang series, which was to feature 35mm prints of several films from the prolific Taiwanese director. Tsai’s patient, alienated work is perfect for the time of social distancing; in Vive L’Amour (streaming on Kanopy), three lonely strangers in Taipei share a duplex apartment and manage to stay out of each other’s way for the better part of two hours. In the 2006 feature I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai, who grew up in Malaysia, immerses the viewer in working class Kuala Lumpur, where people live in hovels that look like the ruins of civilization. An immigrant worker is robbed and beaten and left for dead while a Good Samaritan takes him in and nurses him to health; a mother tends to her paralyzed son, cleaning him diligently every day. These lost, lonely figures, who resort to wearing face masks when a fire rages across the land, are desperate for touch and connection, their dire straits looking like what our own world might descend into. What gets them through life? Affection, of course, and a tender compassion that asks for nothing in return. With long sequences short on dialogue and long on human touch, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone may seem the antithesis of our historic moment, but it’s a reminder that even under the worst conditions, the human urge to take care of each other is strong. Catch it on The Criterion Channel—if you’re the type of moviegoer who seeks out a slow Taiwanese drama, you should already have a subscription, right? The film is available to stream on The Criterion Channel. Free with subscription. —Pat Padua
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