Polonia Global Fund

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – They are the oddest of couples: a sunny Hollywood storyteller with a strong sentimental streak and his director of photography, a master of shadows, beckoning him to the dark side.

Director Steven Spielberg dwells on beauty, said Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg’s director of photography, in a recent interview. Kaminski, for his part, sees beauty in the bleak and the ugly.

“He is very much interested in classical beauty,” said Kaminski, 42, who first teamed up with Spielberg on “Schindler’s List,” which won both men Oscars, for cinematography and directing, as well as best picture honors.

“I see beauty in bleakness,” said the camera director, who created the stark and at times startling black and white palette of the Holocaust drama.

Working with Spielberg, who he calls, “ultimate director,” Kaminski has cast the shadows that permeate the Hollywood director’s last seven movies, including “Catch Me If You Can,” a breezy new comedy which opens on Christmas Day.

The cameraman wants to present the audience with a “real” world, and he says Spielberg understands.

“He has just mellowed out so much,” Kaminski said, explaining that Spielberg has become more confident and tells better stories over the years.

And he added: “He is getting dirtier.”

Contrast the drug addicted hero played by Tom Cruise in “Minority Report” with the all-American, Indiana Jones played by Harrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” an early Spielberg masterpiece.

Kaminski chose the strong lights that cast the dark shadows of “Minority Report” and also lit the acclaimed “Artificial Intelligence: A.I.”

“If it is required to go a little bit ugly, I’ll go ugly,” says Kaminski.

Directors of photography are often said to “paint with light.” They design the look of films and collaborate with the directors on shifting focus, jobs that requires technical skill and have tremendous artistic impact.

UGLINESS FOR THE SAKE OF BEAUTY

Kaminski describes “Catch Me If You Can,” as “champagne,” a bubbly, caper movie, although after his first viewing of the complete film, he agreed there was a somber side to it.

An FBI agent played by Tom Hanks tracks down a masterful con man played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and the two develop an unlikely friendship.

The FBI agent and the check forger are both lonely figures on a chase that takes them through a lush 1960s world that Kaminski calls “funky” and “quirky.”

But Kaminski also created the unflattering, bleached out look of the FBI office where Hanks’ character works.

“You get this naive character such as Tom Hanks’ in this kind of an ugly, ugly environment to emphasize his innocence, to emphasize his naiveté,” Kaminski said. “I’m attracted to ugliness for the sake of beauty.”

Kaminski grew up in Poland on a cultural diet of American music and films, like “The Graduate” and the dark comedy “Harold and Maude.”

However, he only took up film making as a profession at Columbia College in Chicago after immigrating to the United States when he was 21.

He credits growing up in Poland, dominated by the Soviet Union at the time, as tuning his artistic sensibility and interest in the beauty of bleakness.

Kaminski developed techniques that made the opening scene of “Saving Private Ryan,” the storming of the beaches at Normandy by U.S. troops in World War II, seem like an old newsreel rather than the slick Hollywood production it was.

He also won a cinematography Oscar for “Private Ryan.”

Kaminski wants to delve deeper into the dark side of human nature, and he says Spielberg may join him on that journey.
“He is beginning to be interested in erotic subject matter from the perspective of an adult,” Kaminski said, recalling how Pablo Picasso began his career painting realistic portraits before making his reputation with an abstract style that was openly sexual.

“I can’t wait for that moment with Steven,” said Kaminski.

“I said to Steven, let’s go and make a little tiny erotic movie… I think he is interested.” he paused, reflecting. “He may not be ready yet.”

Peter Henderson, Reuters

For over twenty-five years, Don Samull has been publishing the annual Polish American Calendar. Although, each year is different, the format always includes a historic or cultural note for each day and a Polish recipe for each month.

The 8 1/2 by 11-inch, glossy finish calendar contains homey line drawings of landmarks associated with Polish-American history like the Kosciusko House National Monument in Philadelphia and Fort Pulaski in Savannah, Ga.

Recipes include Sweet & Sour Cabbage for October, Mushroom Barley Soup for November, and Dill Pickle Soup for December. There are also interesting factoids such as the population of Poles in each state and suggestions for heritage-honoring activities.

The 2003 calendar spotlights Polish Americans. Plans for the 2004 edition include an almanac of special Polish days including holidays, fast days, name days, and famous birthdays. The calendar is in English and includes Polish Language translations for the months and days of the week.

Calendars are available for a remarkable $5.75 per copy (postage included!).

Beside his calendar offers, Mr. Samull offers numerous other new and pre-owned Polish-related items and books. The items offered include imports from Poland such as Christmas & Easter cards, tree ornaments, Wigilia booklets, Opłatki, and food items.

Mr. Samull is is cultural enthusiast. He is a well known fixture in the Detroit and Hamtramck communities who is always ready to share his knowledge and enthusiasm for learning.

Mr. Samull fulfills orders and works with his loyal customers one-on-one. You will not find him running an e-business, but rather taking orders via postal or E-mail. To contact Mr. Samull, you may write to him at 1312 N. Drexel, Dearborn, MI 48128 or send him an e-mail.

CHESTERTON — The Country Cafe on Broadway was not crowded on a recent Saturday afternoon, but there was a steady flow of customers.

Some of them were curious about the new owner, who was talking in her shy Polish accent as she bustled briskly about the tables and tended the cash register.

The conversation was familiar to anyone who ever tried to explain the leftover food on his plate to a Polish cook.

“I try not to eat too much,” the elderly gentleman apologized.

“You want to take it home with you?” she asked eagerly.

In the two months that Marianna Halina Shedlock has been running the downtown restaurant with the all-you-can-eat-fish Fridays, she’s become one of the most talked-about women in town, something that makes her feel a little uncomfortable as a newcomer twice over.

“I was worried my first day here, will people accept me or not? I was from a different area,” she confessed.

Shedlock was said she was in her 30s when she decided 15 years ago to come to this country by herself from Augustow, a city twice the size of Portage in the northeast corner of Poland.

“I wanted to come. When I go to school, I studied, I learned many things about the United States,” she said.

Like many before her, Shedlock settled in Chicago. She brought her grown children three years later.

“I go to ask for any position in a restaurant. I got the job busing tables and then as a waitress,” she said.

Gaining experience, she was soon running her own bar at Cicero and Armitage, which she then sold and opened a restaurant on the south side of Chicago at Kedzie and Archer.

Shedlock said she had been looking for something in Northwest Indiana for several years while visiting friends near LaPorte, home of a notable citywide celebration of the peculiarly Polish holiday of Dingus Day.

She said that her unfamiliar speech caused her some problems with establishing credit and renting an apartment when she moved to Chesterton after buying the cafe.

“It’s my accent and my language. They know I’m not American,” she said of her second bout of trying to fit in as a newcomer.

But the town had a surprise for her with her new venture.

“The people were so nice to me. I almost cry sometimes because they say so many nice sweet warm words,” she said, a full smile spreading across her face.

Among the most frequent questions was, what will be the new name for the place, which she parried with, “Do you have a good name?”

Shyly again, Shedlock said she “has some plans” for the cafe, such as fixing up the kitchen and the basement to make things more comfortable for the staff, who stayed on to work under her.

Meanwhile, the mural of Broadway and its streetcar tracks from Calumet westward stays on the east wall, with the one real change being the addition of her special ethnic fare to the American, Italian, Greek, seafood and breakfast sections of the menu.

More than enough to bring tears of nostalgia for Old World home cooking is the Polish Combo Plate for $7.95: Rich soup that is definitely homemade, a Polish hamburger patty of beef and pork called schnitzel, a generous length of Polish sausage, mashed potatoes and gravy, that unmistakable Polish-style kraut, a half dozen cheese, kraut and potato pierogis (of course!), a cheese blintz, and other trimmings.

“So do you like Chesterton?” another customer asked as she came to clear the first course.

Not for the first time that afternoon, the words “I love it” passed across the table.

More ingredients:

The Country Cafe, 213 Broadway, Chesterton, Indiana. Open Tuesday-Saturday 7 a.m.-8 p.m., Sunday 7 a.m.-3 p.m. Phone 929-4567. Takeouts available.

© By Charles M. Bartholomew / Post-Tribune correspondent

Title and company: Co-owner, Wild Alaska Mama Bear Kitchen.

Services: Wild Alaska Mama Bear Kitchen, which Kunat founded with his wife, Ela, in 1998, sells spice blends for salmon and halibut, as well as Alaska-made cedar planks for preparing salmon, halibut, poultry and vegetables.

The planks, which have been used in salmon preparation by Natives in the Pacific Northwest for centuries, enhance not only the flavor but the presentation of Alaska seafood, Kunat said. Cooking salmon on cedar is not well known in this area because Southeast Alaska is further north than cedar traditionally grows.

In addition to rectangular planks, the business makes planks carved in the shape of salmon and halibut. He has applied for a patent in the United States and Canada for the fish-shaped planks.

“It makes the planking much more attractive,” Kunat said. “I always say that people eat with their mouth and their nose, but most of the time they eat with their eyes. The presentation of food makes a whole lot of difference.”

The shapes also allow for a bit of creativity in serving food.

“If you cook salmon on a plank in the shape of salmon, you can make an eye out olives, fins out of carrots or peppers. … The sky’s the limit,” Kunat said.

Wild Alaska Mama Bear Kitchen sells its goods to many stores in Alaska and several in the Pacific Northwest. Twisted Fish restaurants in Juneau and Palm Springs, Calif., use the planks to prepare salmon, and Taku Smokeries sells the planks and spices in its gift shop.

Keeping their products Alaska-made is important to the Kunats.

The plank “is a good product,” Kunat said. “It’s 100 percent Alaskan, made from Alaska wood that is not clearcut.”

The company buys, from the U.S. Forest Service, wood that has been blown over in storms or washed up on the shore. Alaska Litho Inc., in Juneau, makes labels for the company’s products.

“We could have printed less expensive somewhere else, but we like to keep it local,” Kunat said.

Biographical information: Jan Kunat and his wife were born in Poland and came to the United States 16 years ago. They’ve lived in Alaska for eight years, and developed the idea for Wild Alaska Mama Bear Kitchen when Jan was running a charter fishing business.

“I cook the fish people catch on board” he said. “I always have to spice it, so I asked my wife to mix some spices together. From that on it’s become our business.”

Jan credits his wife with starting the business. She creates the spices and seasonings and helps manage the business.

“Frankly, she does it all,” Jan Kunat said.

Family: Jan Kunat lives in Gustavus with his wife, Ela, and their four children.

Quotable: “The scientists, they look for why the salmon is coming back each year to the streams. I say they’re coming back to be baked on cedar planks. Salmon on a cedar plank goes together. It’s so good that once you try it, you might never try it the other way. … We guarantee that you will like the taste, and that’s a lot to say. Nobody has ever returned a plank to us.”

Contact information: The Kunats and The Wild Alaska Mama Bear Kitchen can be reached at (907) 697-2704.

© Copyright 1997-2002 Juneau Empire

From Poland to Melbourne, actor Jacek Koman has led a strange, if not secret, life, writes Catherine Keenan.

There have been some weird moments in Jacek Koman’s life. A curiously aimless attempt to enlist him in the Polish secret police. The time he and his brother were saved from destitution by a former Nazi. Plus, when we meet, he has just come from rehearsals for the Sydney Theatre Company’s upcoming production of Samuel Beckett’s absurd masterpiece, Endgame, a play about a blind man who can’t stand up, and his servant who can’t sit down, stuck in a lonely room after the apocalypse.

So I probably shouldn’t be surprised that there are times during the interview when I feel that we have both fallen down a rabbit hole into a strange, Beckettian universe. His conversation is littered with pregnant pauses, ideas that tail into nothing, and cryptic epigrams. “Beckett is bleak, bleak, bleak,” he says at one point. “But joyous, too.”

The 46-year-old actor speaks with glacial slowness and deliberation, as if – like his character, Hamm – he is following scripted pauses. When I ask what the production will be like, for instance, there is a long period of silence before he says: “This and any other faithful production of Endgame will be very, very similar, because it’s all so orchestrated.” Pause. “Like a piece of music.” Pause. “And a painting.” Even longer pause. I don’t know if he’s finished speaking: not for the last time, I find myself waiting for words that, like Godot, may never come.

Then, as if this, too, is scripted, comes a sudden flourish. “It’s paradoxically in those quite rigid limitations that you suddenly find mini-universes of freedom,” he concludes. I have no idea what this means, but when you have a gravelly eastern European accent and a face like his, you can say such things and make them sound both cool and profound.

This, it seems, is the paradox of being Jacek (pronounced yat-sek) Koman. He looks ferocious, like a kind of gypsy Mephistopheles. This, and his accent, mean he has spent much of his career playing bastards, from his award-winning turn as Roy Cohn in Neil Armfield’s production of Angels in America, to Dominic, Gab’s married boyfriend, in The Secret Life of Us.

Next year he and his wife, Catherine McClements (who also appeared in Secret Life as Carmen, Evan’s older love interest), will appear on stage for Company B as the most evil couple of them all, the Macbeths.

Yet off-stage, Koman could hardly be more different. Far from being formidable, he is quiet, gentle, and has an endearing vulnerability. His pauses and hesitations are the result of shyness, not intransigence, and he apologizes more than once for not being interesting enough. A week after we meet, he still feels guilty for “not giving me the good stuff”, and rings to ask if there’s anything more he can say or do.

Does he find it odd that he is constantly cast against the grain, in such dark roles? “Well, someone has to do it. And it better be done well,” he says, jokingly. But, yes, he does find it slightly disturbing. “The deeper you go, the more instinctive it inevitably is. And more dangerous. To what extent is it a purging exercise, and what extent is it a twisting one?” Then he shrugs, as French people do in movies. Epigrams seem to come naturally to him.

Theatre runs in Koman’s veins. He was born in Poland, where both his parents were actors, and although he went through the near-compulsory period of ambivalence about their profession when he was in his teens, he ended up enrolling at drama school in the city of Lodz.

When he left his country, just over 20 years ago, he assumed he would have to leave acting behind, too. It’s a measure of his determination he considered this a fair price to pay for freedom. His reasons for wanting to leave were mixed: partly to escape the communist regime, and partly because he wanted to see the world. He says he wasn’t especially political. “Not beyond what everyone was. There was this shared hatred towards authority, and you followed that because you sucked it with your mother’s milk.”

Still, there was that time he was leaned upon to work for the secret police. He was at drama school when he was caught with a friend who was carrying illegal papers and magazines.

“We were both pressured to get ourselves off the hook, to collaborate. There was no real pressure, just a gentle offer . . .”

But he didn’t give in. “I wriggled like a worm. I managed to wriggle my way out of it.” It soon became apparent, as his friend rose through the theatrical ranks, that he had accepted the offer to collaborate, but Koman says he didn’t really suffer because of his refusal. “I don’t want to make it sound so tragic and depressing. It was a fact of life.”

He and his brother, Tomek, found it surprisingly easy to get permission to leave the country in 1981 for a holiday from which they didn’t return. They went to Austria first, and after being refused entry to a refugee camp (it was full), ended up sleeping rough on building sites in Vienna, at the end of winter.

There was some petty theft involved, to get by, but in a Kafka-esque twist, their salvation came in the unlikely form of a family friend who was a communist Esperanto speaker, and his friend, an ex-Nazi. “We were staying at the ex-Nazi guy’s place. He was perhaps doing his penance for the past.”

After eight months of their hospitality the brothers left for Australia, because it was “far and quite unknown and exotic”. There is another Beckettian pause before he adds, thoughtfully: “When you’re running, you want to run as far as you can, and you can’t run further than Australia.”

The pair landed in Perth, where they got drunk, cleaned pools and gardened until Koman had mastered enough English to band together with some other Poles and, with the help of a council grant, put on theatre in public parks. It rekindled his desire to act, and soon the group had started their own company, Theatre Zart.

Koman stayed with them for five years and then he left for Sydney, because, he says, he was curious. But with his accent, it was virtually impossible to get acting work – he couldn’t even get an agent. “Those two years in Sydney were spent occasionally talking to an agent, but mostly fishing in the harbour and frying the catch, and getting ready to go to Perth to do some theatre.”

Melbourne was a bit more welcoming, and after stopping enroute back to Perth, he decided to make it his home. He worked with Anthill Theatre for five or six years in the late 1980s, and since then has received critical acclaim in a number of brutal roles. He has also fared well as a clown, playing Trinculo in The Tempest; Picasso in Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile (both under Neil Armfield’s direction); and the Argentinean strong man in Moulin Rouge!

But it is his role on The Secret Life of Us that brought him into people’s living rooms. In Melbourne he can feel people recognize him, even when they don’t say anything, and he finds this kind of spooky. Especially when they get confused, recognizing his face but not the context. One man was absolutely convinced that Koman had taught him at the local TAFE. “It makes shopping quite difficult and embarrassing.”

He is more comfortable with serious theatre, like Beckett. Like many shy people, one of the things he likes about acting is the immersion in other lives. “I enjoy submerging myself, like now, in the Beckett world, where I wouldn’t necessarily by choice decide to go.

“If you believe in fate, if you believe that things offer themselves at the time you are ready for them, or when it’s important for you to expose yourself to things . . .” He falls silent, and this time it feels like we’re both waiting for the words to continue. He never finds them – Godot doesn’t arrive this time either – though he does launch into an analogy between acting and the night vision of horses. I don’t quite understand it, but it doesn’t matter. As Beckett knew, not everything needs a meaning.

Endgame opens January 7 (previews from December 28), Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company. Details: 9250 1777.

The Sydney Morning Herald