John Marks

THE WALKING DEAD: The Culture War Gets The Monster It Deserves

2010-11-04T21:10:58Z

Zombies, as we know them, are Americans, created in the late 1960's in the vicinity of Pittsburgh. In folklore, the walking dead, or deeply sleepy, had existed for centuries, drifting in and out of world culture much like the vampire, the witch and the demon. This ur-zombie was no cannibal. He was a slave, the victim of magic, a day laborer in the vineyards of evil. What he ate hardly seemed to matter. By hiring a few non-actors, putting them in greasepaint and shooting them in black and white as they fought over intestines, a lapsed Catholic named George Romero changed all that. "They're coming for you, Barbara," says a soon-to-be victim in Romero's game-changing classic Night Of The Living Dead. Soon enough, they were coming for us all, still are, but no matter where they turn up, in the cosmically screwed up metropoli of Lucio Fulci, the ransacked London of Danny Boyle or the cleared-out Atlanta of Frank Darabont's and Robert Kirkland's new AMC series The Walking Dead, they owe their identity to one man. George Romero never gets enough credit for creating the definitive monster for the age of demonization: human beings as lurching, repulsive, utterly malevolent target practice. In 1967, Romero and his crew of costume designers and make-up artists made the zombie into an unconscious cannibal who hunts humans in dumb, ravenous packs. That's the key innovation. There were other ghouls in the 1960's, and a few of them--like the ghosts in Herk Harvey's Carnival Of Souls--look a lot like the dead in Romero's first movie. But Harvey's creations didn't bite. They goaded or seduced. They were unkempt, brooding ghosts. Others, like the undead vampires in Mario Bava's Black Sunday, aren't technically zombies, but seem much closer in spirit and in the flesh to the creatures in The Walking Dead than to Christopher Lee's portrayal of Dracula, their contemporary. Bava's vampires don't have fangs and don't eat flesh, but actress Barbara Steele has a peculiar hungry quality, a portrait of thwarted gluttony in gaunt cheeks, livid eyes and pale skin. A design concept had started to evolve, but it needed a context. 19th Century vampires had consciousness, if not conscience, and they tended to be proud individualists. They drank blood, but they also craved companionship and status. Bram Stoker's Count conformed to those earlier patterns, but he had brutish tendencies. More interested in gorging than knowing, he was arguably the first modern zombie. By the middle of the 20th Century, cinematic interpretations had begun to strip away the romantic yearning in the vampire and revealed the monster to be mostly a blood drunkard who lured his nubile female victims for sport and pasttime. With Christopher Lee and his portrayal of furious bodily hunger, sexual and gluttonous, the center could no longer hold. The vampire split in two. One version led to Robert Pattinson of the Twilight series, by way of Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows; the other led to Romero. Fury and horror attached to the zombie, who became in Romero's vision the cockroach inheritor of the earth, a devolved human who abandoned all civilization, urbanity and pretense to civility in the search for food sources. Fears of population explosion and race genocide further shaped this monster. A key influence would be Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, in which one man, Richard Neville, faces a horde of genetic vampires in the wake of a worldwide plague. In the novel, the monsters are identified as vampires, but that's not the bit that made its way to Romero. What really stuck was the apocalyptic scenario. Neville lives like a survivalist in a dead city. He arms himself with the latest weapons, boards up his besieged house and waits for other living humans to make contact. He sends out radio signals that go unheard. He rounds up supplies in decaying grocery stores and hunts sleeping vampires in their nests. His wife and children are dead of plague, like everyone else, but he feeds on memory like a vampire on blood. One memory haunts him, in particular, the night his dead wife came back for him. In 1964, an Italian company made a low-budget but very atmospheric version of the book starring Vincent Price, entitled The Last Man On Earth. In the movie's best scene, the wife comes back, and we hear her voice, her nails scratching at the door, and we are very close to Romero. She has a consciousness, but it is already fading. All she really wants to do is feed. In general, the vampires in the movies are schlubs. They dress in whatever they died in, suits, sports wear, party dresses. In The Walking Dead, the zombies are direct descendants of Matheson by way of Romero. They roam the streets at night--maybe because "it's cooler", one of the surviving humans speculates--and in the pack bobs a familiar face, the wife of a man who can't bring himself to kill the woman he loves, even if she would sooner eat him than kiss him. She wouldn't know her husband if she saw him; her mind is gone. The husband knows, though, and as the audience, we can't help but see that relationship as a big part of the horror. People we know, people we've loved, have died and come back as our irredeemable enemies. They have been inhabited by a virus, and the virus possesses them. They don't want anything from us but our flesh. They can't be reasoned with. They can't be bought off or made love to or in any way reached by friendly or hostile persuasion. They can only be dispatched by a shot to the brain. In a way, they are ideal occupiers. Moral complication is moot. You can never have a conversation with them, so they are easy to kill without conscience. No matter what they may have believed in life, in death they assert only one value. They are the most reductivist of monsters. Survivors rarely know exactly why the dead have come back to eat the living, but it almost never matters. The battle to survive so completely eclipses the need for explanation that attempts to understand begin to feel like suicidal tendency. In a world overrun by zombies, intellectual pursuits get you eaten fast. All of which should give us happy pause as this staple of low-brow, gut-bucket cinema goes decisively mainstream in the hands of one of our most sentimental filmmakers. Darabont makes movies about decent people caught in hell. His characters tend to be richly rounded in the grand manner. Their conflicts and identities rise above cliche, but never quite become original, which is a commercial plus. His best-known work, The Shawshank Redemption, a movie I don't particularly love, has a devoted following because it walks the line so well between maudlin sentiment and human complication. It's clear to me already in The Walking Dead that Darabont has big plans for the genre. Though he's working from the text and images of a graphic novel by Robert Kirkland, the novel itself is steeped in forty years of Romero-inspired zombie mythology. That's the starting point, but it's going to vanish in the rearview quickly. In one scene, a man who doesn't know what's going on sits on a sidewalk step while a lone figure approaches slowly in the distance. In an earlier scene, a little girl with a half-devoured face looks perfectly innocent at first. Closer inspections reveals the truth and makes her a threat. These may or not be frightening sequences, depending on your tastes, but they are very definitely direct lifts from earlier movies, which is shrewd. Darabont seems to be offering an olive branch early on to those who prefer the old ways, that primal world where zombies meet humans in mute combat, and no one tries to understand, and no one can afford much cosmic speculation on the meaning of it all. But it's only an olive branch. The series will definitely go for bigger prey. Early scenes suggest an uncustomary pathos. My favorite involves a sheriff who goes out of his way to find a haggard woman who had earlier menaced him. She's been left with half a body, and he just wants to put her out of her misery. When he finds her, he says, "I'm sorry this happened to you." It's a lovely and unexpected moment. It's also flagrantly emotional for a zombie flick, practically illegal. If I'm not mistaken, a suggestion of angelic choirs hovers in the background. Darabont goes there; it's what he does. I don't usually like this heavy touch, but it's a welcome approach here. He's making a promise. If it's true that the zombie is the ultimate monster of the culture war, our Godzilla, then we could use a long interrogation of that lurching creep. In the process, sadly, the walking dead will be lifted out of the realm of primal nightmare and into the sunlight of literary respectability, but that doom was inevitable. Zombies won't be scary for very much longer. They've crossed the Rubicon of AMC. That doesn't mean they'll go the way of the vampire, but they will have lost forever the element of surprise. Through Darabont, we'll get to know them extremely well. They will leave behind their dirt past and rise to significance, and their reign of terror will quietly end. Sesame Street will get a zombie puppet to replace the out-moded Count. Meanwhile, happily, unseen as yet, other monsters wait for us in the depths, not yet captured by art or commerce, but lethal and vital and indispensable to the maintenance of our fevered imaginations. Compared to them, the zombie may one day look as quaintly comforting as the vampire.

THE WALKING DEAD: The Culture War Gets The Monster It Deserves

2010-11-04T21:10:58Z

Zombies, as we know them, are Americans, created in the late 1960's in the vicinity of Pittsburgh. In folklore, the walking dead, or deeply sleepy, had existed for centuries, drifting in and out of world culture much like the vampire, the witch and the demon. This ur-zombie was no cannibal. He was a slave, the victim of magic, a day laborer in the vineyards of evil. What he ate hardly seemed to matter. By hiring a few non-actors, putting them in greasepaint and shooting them in black and white as they fought over intestines, a lapsed Catholic named George Romero changed all that. "They're coming for you, Barbara," says a soon-to-be victim in Romero's game-changing classic Night Of The Living Dead. Soon enough, they were coming for us all, still are, but no matter where they turn up, in the cosmically screwed up metropoli of Lucio Fulci, the ransacked London of Danny Boyle or the cleared-out Atlanta of Frank Darabont's and Robert Kirkland's new AMC series The Walking Dead, they owe their identity to one man. George Romero never gets enough credit for creating the definitive monster for the age of demonization: human beings as lurching, repulsive, utterly malevolent target practice. In 1967, Romero and his crew of costume designers and make-up artists made the zombie into an unconscious cannibal who hunts humans in dumb, ravenous packs. That's the key innovation. There were other ghouls in the 1960's, and a few of them--like the ghosts in Herk Harvey's Carnival Of Souls--look a lot like the dead in Romero's first movie. But Harvey's creations didn't bite. They goaded or seduced. They were unkempt, brooding ghosts. Others, like the undead vampires in Mario Bava's Black Sunday, aren't technically zombies, but seem much closer in spirit and in the flesh to the creatures in The Walking Dead than to Christopher Lee's portrayal of Dracula, their contemporary. Bava's vampires don't have fangs and don't eat flesh, but actress Barbara Steele has a peculiar hungry quality, a portrait of thwarted gluttony in gaunt cheeks, livid eyes and pale skin. A design concept had started to evolve, but it needed a context. 19th Century vampires had consciousness, if not conscience, and they tended to be proud individualists. They drank blood, but they also craved companionship and status. Bram Stoker's Count conformed to those earlier patterns, but he had brutish tendencies. More interested in gorging than knowing, he was arguably the first modern zombie. By the middle of the 20th Century, cinematic interpretations had begun to strip away the romantic yearning in the vampire and revealed the monster to be mostly a blood drunkard who lured his nubile female victims for sport and pasttime. With Christopher Lee and his portrayal of furious bodily hunger, sexual and gluttonous, the center could no longer hold. The vampire split in two. One version led to Robert Pattinson of the Twilight series, by way of Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows; the other led to Romero. Fury and horror attached to the zombie, who became in Romero's vision the cockroach inheritor of the earth, a devolved human who abandoned all civilization, urbanity and pretense to civility in the search for food sources. Fears of population explosion and race genocide further shaped this monster. The key text would be Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, in which one man, Richard Neville, faces a horde of genetic vampires in the wake of a worldwide plague. In the novel, the monsters are identified as vampires, but that's not the bit that made its way to Romero. What really stuck was the apocalyptic scenario. Neville lives like a survivalist in a dead city. He arms himself with the latest weapons, boards up his besieged house and waits for other living humans to make contact. He sends out radio signals that go unheard. He rounds up supplies in decaying grocery stores and hunts sleeping vampires in their nests. His wife and children are dead of plague, like everyone else, but he feeds on memory like a vampire on blood. One memory haunts him, in particular, the night his dead wife came back for him. In 1964, an Italian company made a low-budget but very atmospheric version of the book starring Vincent Price, entitled The Last Man On Earth. In the movie's best scene, the wife comes back, and we hear her voice, her nails scratching at the door, and we are very close to Romero. She has a consciousness, but it is already fading. All she really wants to do is feed. In general, the vampires in the movies are schlubs. They dress in whatever they died in, suits, sports wear, party dresses. In The Walking Dead, the zombies are direct descendants of Matheson by way of Romero. They roam the streets at night--maybe because "it's cooler", one of the surviving humans speculates--and in the pack bobs a familiar face, the wife of a man who can't bring himself to kill the woman he loves, even if she would sooner eat him than kiss him. She wouldn't know her husband if she saw him; her mind is gone. The husband knows, though, and as the audience, we can't help but see that relationship as a big part of the horror. People we know, people we've loved, have died and come back as our irredeemable enemies. They have been inhabited by a virus, and the virus possesses them. They don't want anything from us but our flesh. They can't be reasoned with. They can't be bought off or made love to or in any way reached by friendly or hostile persuasion. They can only be dispatched by a shot to the brain. In a way, they are ideal occupiers. Moral complication is moot. You can never have a conversation with them, so they are easy to kill without conscience. No matter what they may have believed in life, in death they assert only one value. They are the most reductivist of monsters. Survivors rarely know exactly why the dead have come back to eat the living, but it almost never matters. The battle to survive so completely eclipses the need for explanation that attempts to understand begin to feel like suicidal tendency. In a world overrun by zombies, intellectual pursuits get you eaten fast. All of which should give us happy pause as this staple of low-brow, gut-bucket cinema goes decisively mainstream in the hands of one of our most sentimental filmmakers. Darabont makes movies about decent people caught in hell. His characters tend to be richly rounded in the grand manner. Their conflicts and identities rise above cliche, but never quite become original, which is a commercial plus. His best-known work, The Shawshank Redemption, a movie I don't particularly love, has a devoted following because it walks the line so well between maudlin sentiment and human complication. It's clear to me already in The Walking Dead that Darabont has big plans for the genre. Though he's working from the text and images of a graphic novel by Robert Kirkland, the novel itself is steeped in forty years of Romero-inspired zombie mythology. That's the starting point, but it's going to vanish in the rearview quickly. In one scene, a man who doesn't know what's going on sits on a sidewalk step while a lone figure approaches slowly in the distance. In an earlier scene, a little girl with a half-devoured face looks perfectly innocent at first. Closer inspections reveals the truth and makes her a threat. These may or not be frightening sequences, depending on your tastes, but they are very definitely direct lifts from earlier movies, which is shrewd. Darabont seems to be offering an olive branch early on to those who prefer the old ways, that primal world where zombies meet humans in mute combat, and no one tries to understand, and no one can afford much cosmic speculation on the meaning of it all. But it's only an olive branch. The series will definitely go for bigger prey. Early scenes suggest an uncustomary pathos. My favorite involves a sheriff who goes out of his way to find a haggard woman who had earlier menaced him. She's been left with half a body, and he just wants to put her out of her misery. When he finds her, he says, "I'm sorry this happened to you." It's a lovely and unexpected moment. It's also flagrantly emotional for a zombie flick, practically illegal. If I'm not mistaken, a suggestion of angelic choirs hovers in the background. Darabont goes there; it's what he does. I don't usually like this heavy touch, but it's a welcome approach here. He's making a promise. If it's true that the zombie is the ultimate monster of the culture war, our Godzilla, then we could use a long interrogation of that lurching creep. In the process, sadly, the walking dead will be lifted out of the realm of primal nightmare and into the sunlight of literary respectability, but that doom was inevitable. Zombies won't be scary for very much longer. They've crossed the Rubicon of AMC. That doesn't mean they'll go the way of the vampire, but they will have lost forever the element of surprise. Through Darabont, we'll get to know them extremely well. They will leave behind their dirt past and rise to significance, and their reign of terror will quietly end. Sesame Street will get a zombie puppet to replace the out-moded Count. Meanwhile, happily, unseen as yet, other monsters wait for us in the depths, not yet captured by art or commerce, but lethal and vital and indispensable to the maintenance of our fevered imaginations. Compared to them, the zombie may one day look as quaintly comforting as the vampire.

THE WALKING DEAD: The Culture War Gets The Monster It Deserves

2010-11-04T21:10:58Z

Zombies, as we know them, are Americans, created in the late 1960's in the vicinity of Pittsburgh. In folklore, the walking dead, or deeply sleepy, had existed for centuries, drifting in and out of world culture much like the vampire, the witch and the demon. This ur-zombie was no cannibal. He was a slave, the victim of magic, a day laborer in the vineyards of evil. What he ate hardly seemed to matter. By hiring a few non-actors, putting them in greasepaint and shooting them in black and white as they fought over intestines, a lapsed Catholic named George Romero changed all that. "They're coming for you, Barbara," says a soon-to-be victim in Romero's game-changing classic Night Of The Living Dead. Soon enough, they were coming for us all, still are, but no matter where they turn up, in the cosmically screwed up metropoli of Lucio Fulci, the ransacked London of Danny Boyle or the cleared-out Atlanta of Frank Darabont's and Robert Kirkland's new AMC series The Walking Dead, they owe their identity to one man. George Romero never gets enough credit for creating the definitive monster for the age of demonization: human beings as lurching, repulsive, utterly malevolent target practice. In 1967, Romero and his crew of costume designers and make-up artists made the zombie into an unconscious cannibal who hunts humans in dumb, ravenous packs. That's the key innovation. There were other ghouls in the 1960's, and a few of them--like the ghosts in Herk Harvey's Carnival Of Souls--look a lot like the dead in Romero's first movie. But Harvey's creations didn't bite. They goaded or seduced. They were unkempt, brooding ghosts. Others, like the undead vampires in Mario Bava's Black Sunday, aren't technically zombies, but seem much closer in spirit and in the flesh to the creatures in The Walking Dead than to Christopher Lee's portrayal of Dracula, their contemporary. Bava's vampires don't have fangs and don't eat flesh, but actress Barbara Steele has a peculiar hungry quality, a portrait of thwarted gluttony in gaunt cheeks, livid eyes and pale skin. A design concept had started to evolve, but it needed a context. 19th Century vampires had consciousness, if not conscience, and they tended to be proud individualists. They drank blood, but they also craved companionship and status. Bram Stoker's Count conformed to those earlier patterns, but he had brutish tendencies. More interested in gorging than knowing, he was arguably the first modern zombie. By the middle of the 20th Century, cinematic interpretations had begun to strip away the romantic yearning in the vampire and revealed the monster to be mostly a blood drunkard who lured his nubile female victims for sport and pasttime. With Christopher Lee and his portrayal of furious bodily hunger, sexual and gluttonous, the center could no longer hold. The vampire split in two. One version led to Robert Pattinson of the Twilight series, by way of Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows; the other led to Romero. Fury and horror attached to the zombie, who became in Romero's vision the cockroach inheritor of the earth, a devolved human who abandoned all civilization, urbanity and pretense to civility in the search for food sources. Fears of population explosion and race genocide further shaped this monster. The key text would be Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, in which one man, Richard Neville, faces a horde of genetic vampires in the wake of a worldwide plague. In the novel, the monsters are identified as vampires, but that's not the bit that made its way to Romero. What really stuck was the apocalyptic scenario. Neville lives like a survivalist in a dead city. He arms himself with the latest weapons, boards up his besieged house and waits for other living humans to make contact. He sends out radio signals that go unheard. He rounds up supplies in decaying grocery stores and hunts sleeping vampires in their nests. His wife and children are dead of plague, like everyone else, but he feeds on memory like a vampire on blood. One memory haunts him, in particular, the night his dead wife came back for him. In 1964, an Italian company made a low-budget but very atmospheric version of the book starring Vincent Price, entitled The Last Man On Earth. In the movie's best scene, the wife comes back, and we hear her voice, her nails scratching at the door, and we are very close to Romero. She has a consciousness, but it is already fading. All she really wants to do is feed. In general, the vampires in the movies are schlubs. They dress in whatever they died in, suits, sports wear, party dresses. In The Walking Dead, the zombies are direct descendants of Matheson by way of Romero. They roam the streets at night--maybe because "it's cooler", one of the surviving humans speculates--and in the pack bobs a familiar face, the wife of a man who can't bring himself to kill the woman he loves, even if she would sooner eat him than kiss him. She wouldn't know her husband if she saw him; her mind is gone. The husband knows, though, and as the audience, we can't help but see that relationship as a big part of the horror. People we know, people we've loved, have died and come back as our irredeemable enemies. They have been inhabited by a virus, and the virus possesses them. They don't want anything from us but our flesh. They can't be reasoned with. They can't be bought off or made love to or in any way reached by friendly or hostile persuasion. They can only be dispatched by a shot to the brain. In a way, they are ideal occupiers. Moral complication is moot. You can never have a conversation with them, so they are easy to kill without conscience. No matter what they may have believed in life, in death they assert only one value. They are the most reductivist of monsters. Survivors rarely know exactly why the dead have come back to eat the living, but it almost never matters. The battle to survive so completely eclipses the need for explanation that attempts to understand begin to feel like suicidal tendency. In a world overrun by zombies, intellectual pursuits get you eaten fast. All of which should give us happy pause as this staple of low-brow, gut-bucket cinema goes decisively mainstream in the hands of one of our most sentimental filmmakers. Darabont makes movies about decent people caught in hell. His characters tend to be richly rounded in the grand manner. Their conflicts and identities rise above cliche, but never quite become original, which is a commercial plus. His best-known work, The Shawshank Redemption, a movie I don't particularly love, has a devoted following because it walks the line so well between maudlin sentiment and human complication. It's clear to me already in The Walking Dead that Darabont has big plans for the genre. Though he's working from the text and images of a graphic novel by Robert Kirkland, the novel itself is steeped in forty years of Romero-inspired zombie mythology. That's the starting point, but it's going to vanish in the rearview quickly. In one scene, a man who doesn't know what's going on sits on a sidewalk step while a lone figure approaches slowly in the distance. In an earlier scene, a little girl with a half-devoured face looks perfectly innocent at first. Closer inspections reveals the truth and makes her a threat. These may or not be frightening sequences, depending on your tastes, but they are very definitely direct lifts from earlier movies, which is shrewd. Darabont seems to be offering an olive branch early on to those who prefer the old ways, that primal world where zombies meet humans in mute combat, and no one tries to understand, and no one can afford much cosmic speculation on the meaning of it all. But it's only an olive branch. The series will definitely go for bigger prey. Early scenes suggest an uncustomary pathos. My favorite involves a sheriff who goes out of his way to find a haggard woman who had earlier menaced him. She's been left with half a body, and he just wants to put her out of her misery. When he finds her, he says, "I'm sorry this happened to you." It's a lovely and unexpected moment. It's also flagrantly emotional for a zombie flick, practically illegal. If I'm not mistaken, a suggestion of angelic choirs hovers in the background. Darabont goes there; it's what he does. I don't usually like this heavy touch, but it's a welcome approach here. He's making a promise. If it's true that the zombie is the ultimate monster of the culture war, our Godzilla, then we could use a long interrogation of that lurching creep. In the process, sadly, the walking dead will be lifted out of the realm of primal nightmare and into the sunlight of literary respectability, but that doom was inevitable. Zombies won't be scary for very much longer. They've crossed the Rubicon of AMC. That doesn't mean they'll go the way of the vampire, but they will have lost forever the element of surprise. Through Darabont, we'll get to know them extremely well. They will leave behind their dirt past and rise to significance, and their reign of terror will quietly end. Sesame Street will get a zombie puppet to replace the out-moded Count. Meanwhile, happily, unseen as yet, other monsters wait for us in the depths, not yet captured by art or commerce, but lethal and vital and indispensable to the maintenance of our fevered imaginations. Compared to them, the zombie may one day look as quaintly comforting as the vampire.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: The Great Atheist In Winter

2010-10-09T15:20:54Z

People who have seen Christopher Hitchens on television, but until now missed out on his writing--by far his best suit--will discover, among other things, the following in his recent autobiography Hitch-22: he is Jewish on his mother's side but didn't know it until late in his adult life; his mother and her lover, a lapsed Anglican priest, committed a double suicide in an Athens hotel in November 1973, and Hitchens had to go alone to Greece to identify her body; he regrets that he was not a better father to his children; his favorite movie is the Costa Gavras film Z, about police repression in Greece; and his most over-used word, he thinks, is "perhaps". On that last point, I must dispute the claim, a very Hitchens thing to do. "Perhaps" may be the most over-used word in sheer numbers, but the verb "invigilate" and its several derivatives "invigilated", "Invigilation", even "invigilating", are without question his darlings. I tried to go back and count how many times he deployed the uncommon term and failed to find more than one or two instances, but as I read through the first time I was struck again and again by the frequency. Consciously or otherwise, I think the latter, Hitchens is telegraphing something that he doesn't come right out and say. He feels intensely watched and always has and probably always will. Invigilation generally refers to the act of overseeing the taking of tests or keeping an institutional eye on children in museums, but the author uses it also to mean the effort by governments to scrutinize their own citizens. Invigilators are watchers, and Hitchens, as an English school boy, as a leftwing radical traveling the world in the 1960's and 1970's, and finally as a television celebrity notorious for taking contrarian and controversial stands, is the original Invigilated Man. He feels watched. More to the point, he feels the need to feel watched. Homo Invigilatus! The man who more than any public intellectual of our era made his name as a contradiction in terms can't escape the great eye in the sky, and it doesn't seem like a stretch to say that he has cultivated that invigilated quality in his intellect and persona more than any other. The book will exasperate his old pals at The Nation and prove deeply unsatisfying to those on the Right who believe he's come over to their cause, but its subtext has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the theater of being Christopher Hitchens. Watch and learn. He is the leftwing radical who quotes Marx with ardor and yet ardently supported the Iraq War, the same man who openly and relentlessly accused Nixon's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of war crimes while slowly but surely becoming an ally of the Bush White House, which his former self might once have accused of the very same crime, the preacher of atheism who believes in his godlessness with the same intensity that others reserve only for the godhead. This could all be the result of internal conflict. It could be little more than rank calculation. It is very definitely a show, and it would be easy to loathe him for the performance. Many do. Many see Hitchens as nothing more than the sum total of his poses. Neither ideology nor atheism are the point. Selling tickets is the idea. When he recently announced in the pages of Vanity Fair that he had esophageal cancer, one could hear, faintly but unmistakably, the hoarse cry of the carnival barker. That's the impression, and there may be truth in it, but among other things, it's a convenient way of avoiding the merits of any argument the man ever made. Given that he's weighed in on most of the great political and cultural controversies of the last thirty years, dismissing Hitch outright may be the equivalent of ditching on the arguments as well. At the very least, those who despise him must concede that he placed himself at the heart of the big stuff: revolution, war, fascism, socialism, totalitarianism, religion. In the interest of engagement with the whole enchilada, therefore, I made a quiet decision a few months ago that I shouldn't so quickly and easily scoff at the man. In the past decade, I had. His arguments about god might have struck me as unsophisticated and ahistorical. His support of the Iraq War left the aftertaste of moral abdication in my mouth. Behind the positions could always be felt a deeper complexity. His "flip-flopping" felt neither calculated nor empty. It felt necessary. But at its worst, it had a hectoring and even jingoistic quality. Still, even before I read his autobiography, I'd begun to reconsider. In the beginning, it was the cancer. It may be sentimental nonsense, but the sight of him struggling through an interview with an Atlantic Monthly editor brought tears to my eyes and forced me to face the fact that, despite every caveat, I was fond of the man. But why? Wasn't he just another pundit in a pundit-flooded age? * I found the answer in his autobiography Hitch 22, in the chapter on Salman Rushdie. "When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me," he writes. "It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship." I underlined the words as soon as I read them, and I knew, as if I'd been struck by a bolt of electric guitar, that I'd been a sort of hypocrite about Hitchens. I might disagree with him. I might deplore the way that he has damaged the state of dialogue in this country, but a fundamental level, and this could no more be denied than my own biography, I was on his side. It feels good to write those words. Mutatis Mutandis. I'm on his side. Should anyone have asked me--as Craig Detweiler sort of did in our documentary Purple State of Mind--what counted for me, what mattered, what formed the ethical and philosophical core of my being, I would have been happy to answer with the Hitchens list. As much as I try to defend religion and its legacy, at the end of the day, it is not one of the things I love in this world. Despite my fascination and my history with it, it tends to be one of those things that I dislike. I don't desire religious community and don't seek theological truth. Every truth I seek lies by its very nature outside the perimeter of the congregation and beyond the pages of holy writ. More to the point, however, is the list of things that Hitchens loves. If he added sex, as I'm sure he would in retrospect, the correspondence would be one to one. In the following paragraph, he goes further, formulating a political position based on his hates and loves. "To restate the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Englightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment of the Constitution could be imagined." Amen. At the risk of repetition, then, when push comes to shove, I'm on his side. I'm on the side of literature and against faith, on the side of ambiguity against ideological or theological dogma, in the broadest sense, a hugely unpopular point of view in this day and age, when literature seems obsolete and religion claims the mantle of both oppressed sensibility and moral superiority. If it feels liberating to say so, it's also sobering. Right away, an argument against him--and myself--rises in my mind. * No atheist ever hated Jesus. Atheists hate Paul, one of the great religious villains of world history, but never Jesus. Jesus is is the original atheist, the rock and roll Jew who spat in the eye of Roman and Pharisaic complacency. If he hadn't become the Christian god, he would be the Christian nightmare, a great Satan of human idiosyncracy, impossible to incorporate into any systemic mode of thought unless you make him divine and cut away the messiness, unless you can find a man like Paul of Tarsus, willing at any cost to rob a prophet of his humanity for the sake of a more perfect organization. As Jesus comes across in the Gospel according to Mark, the earliest of the accounts of his life in the Bible, placed in the context of 1st century Galilean zealotry and Second Temple Judaism, he is cranky, disconsolate, compassionate, charismatic, obtuse, erudite, judgmental, fanatical, difficult and gregarious to a fault. He likes to piss people off, but more than that, he likes to hang out. He loves to talk. If there had been a Greek coffee shop on the Sea of Galilee, and there probably was, he'd have closed the place down on weekends, especially on the Sabbath. As depicted, he was probably the greatest foe of dictatorship and religion in the ancient world. Like Hitchens, he was also an invigilated man and a consummate choreographer of his own internal conflicts. This isn't to call Hitchens a Jesus in the sense one comes to think of the term. God no! But it is to suggest an irony of the kind that the writer might appreciate in his dogmatic rejection of all religious experience. Jesus might not be the Savior, but he is the definitive ally to all who deny his divnity, the ultimate kindred spirit. Forget Rick Warren and Billy Graham and other such well-meaning folk. Can there be any doubt whose company the ornery rabbi who visited prostitutes and busted up the moneychangers would prefer? Obviously, these conflicted Jewish buddies would argue. Jesus wouldn't like Hitch's drinking. Hitchens wouldn't care for Christ's apocalyptic droning or his occasional prudery. Only one thing would stand in the way of a lasting friendship. And that thing is dogmatism. * Dogma isn't the problem. Dogma is written in human bone. Human beings need a sense of final authority when it comes to the great questions of life. How do you oppose dictatorship without an unimpeachable dogma that says dictatorship is wrong because it violates the fundamental dignity of the human being? How can you possibly defend Salman Rushdie and the First Amendment without a dogma that insists on a moral value every bit as deep and powerful and binding as the one attached to reverence for the gods? Dogma is necessary. Dogmatism is something else. Dogmatism is the malignant tumor that grows out of belief, burning through every healthy system, eating up complexity and ambiguity, a form of nihilistic vitality that feeds on fear, despair and hopelessness. Dogmatism is the spine of cowards, and it has grown like a weed in every corner of American democracy. Believer or skeptic, black or white, gay or straight, left or right, we have all become madmen for our gods. We have become educated through our universities and inspired in our churches and enjoined by our politicians to believe that dogmatism is the same thing as principle, that the purity of an idea is more important than the clarity of our own native vision. Dogmatism has become the American sickness par excellence, and it began to eat away at Hitchens long before the cancer. He caught it in the late 1960's, when inflexible ideology got deliciously sexy. The catalyst, of course, was Vietnam. "I had expected the newly elected Labour government to withhold British support for this foul war (and the amazingly coarse and thuggish-looking American president who was prosecuting it)," he writes, "and when this expectation was disappointed I began along with many, many of my contemporaries, to experience a furious disillusionment with "conventional" politics. A bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should have fucking well have been there, and felt it for yourself. Had the study of life and literature and history merely domesticated me to waste and betray my youth, and to gape at a spectacle of undisguised atrocity and aggression as if it should be calmly received?" The answer to his question must be no, of course, unless the reader is to consider himself or herself a monster, but that rhetorical flourish is the least interesting part of this crucial passage in the autobiography. In a few words, Hitchens links his best and most idealistic instincts to his worst and most degrading ones, necessary dogma to malignant dogmatism. It's one thing to call the war "foul", another to find it necessary to call the man who prosecutes it "coarse and thuggish-looking", as if the evil of the conflict distilled itself in the figure who commanded the troops. That is serious Manicheanism, and it has become part and parcel of our politics today, making vicious fun of the look and sound of the people whose ideas we despise, meeting our opponents not through the force of argument but through the power of mockery and insult. (Former Weatherman Bill Ayers may not have been much of a terrorist, but when he called the police "pigs", he threw a bomb that still goes off every day in this country.) But there's an even more telling moment in that paragraph, the one where Hitchens tells us "we should fucking well have been there!". How many times has that same sentiment echoed down the years through our culture wars? The best-known version of the line might be the anthemic cry from the era of the Clarence Thomas hearings: "You Just don't get it!" Women who defended star witness Anita Hill against her critics wanted men to know that they could never hope to grasp the humiliations undergone by females in the work place. There may be some grain of truth in the charge, and yet such accusations are the very essence of dogmatism. Human sympathy and moral imagination are not enough, the accuser says. We can never really put ourselves in the shoes of others. We have only one choice. We must take it on faith that the right people know better, because they have been there. We must take their view as true and resist any impulse to form our opinion based upon the best of our own instincts. Most important, however we come to our senses, we must do so in exactly the way our opponents require, or we are the "coarse and thuggish-looking" enemy. To their credit, conservative Christians have made efforts in the last few years to get away from ugly and upsetting language, but they have in the meantime ramped up the attempt to politely and politically force us all to accept their highly contested and deeply divisive vision of the country as a religious one. In the process, they have tried to turn gay men and women into sick people who don't know their own minds when they embrace their identities and unbelievers of all kinds into monsters who betray the real America. In response, Hitchens and others have fought back with every verbal weapon in the arsenal, taking unrepentantly harsh stands on the very right of religion to have a voice in the republic. Hitchens, in particular, has distorted history beyond all recognition, as his opponents do, resorted to low insult and blatantly selective argument, and worst of all, taken a line so rigid that he at times makes the late Jerry Falwell look intellectually complicated. Even as I write these words, though, I'm reminded of what I felt before, reading his chapter on Rushdie. Despite everything, I'm on his side. In the end, Christopher Hitchens is my natural ally, and I'm his. The argument against him lands first against myself. * If Christopher Hitchens and I share a deeper value, it is simply this. We value above all the right to be conflicted. if I admire him despite a thousand reservations, it's for this reason. Except in the matter of religion, he is a living example of a man who has never been able to give himself over completely to an absolute truth. The result is a mess. The result is chaos, but it's a true chaos, shared by millions who live between worlds that have grown increasingly hostile to one another. The right to be conflicted will never make it on any short list of human rights, and yet it's the right that ideologues of all stripes most want to destroy, the dire enemy of any belief system that requires a final conformity of thought. No sect has a monopoly on the hatred of permanent conflictedness. Devout Catholics loathe it as much a transgendered social progressives who insist that all gender is and must be constructed. To be conflicted in any serious way, to be torn between two deeply felt arguments about the nature of existence, and to insist upon that state as natural and healthy is to be the vampire in the Hammer horror film, circa 1965. The unresolved, like the undead, must be staked! Plenty of people despise Hitchens for his intransigent scorn of religion, but just as many, I would argue, revile him for the opposite, his penchant for switching sides, for being inconsistent, for letting down his end. How shattered will his atheist devotees be, for example, if he does signal in any way before he dies a more generous view of the divine? Yet if that happened, would it be so bad? He himself has articulated a fear of doing just that, of embracing in his decline a hope that he despises, which makes me think he has unfinished business in his own mind on the subject. A dying man can be forgiven anything, but Hitch seems to think that he could never forgive himself, not even in the grave, if he succumbed. But he should relax and realize something about himself. In the unlikely event of a deathbed conversion, it won't be the worst of his temperament at work, but the best, the very thing that his admirers should love him for the most. Among other things, an embrace of god would merely be a restatement of his lifelong war against dogmatism, fanaticism and religion, a sign that at the end he truly came to his senses.

THE LAST EXORCISM: My Summer Of Cinematic Dead Ends, Fat Chances And Unexpected Gifts

2010-09-06T21:36:38Z

Given the mortality rate of filmmakers in recent horror movies, you'd think on screen camera crews would pack automatic weapons instead of lenses; an easily accessible kitchen knife, at the very least. But no, as we anxiously observe in The Last Exorcism, young shooters and their feckless sound technicians continue to tackle subjects like demonic possession armed with nothing more lethal than a high def camera.

Yet, on the evidence of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Rec and Paranormal Activity, this is a habit verging on insanity. As depicted in these recent horror movies, documentary filmmaking has become the cinematic equivalent of the sport of noodling, during which crazy Southern anglers try to stick their fists in the maws of giant catfish. They have only themselves to blame if they get carried to the bottom of the river, never to resurface. In defense of the documentarians in The Last Exorcism, they do travel with a bodyguard of sorts, a confidently appointed and smugly disbelieving preacher who practices exorcism in order to debunk it, but anyone who saw The Exorcist knows that a skeptical cleric in a demon fight is about as much use as a paintball gun in Kandahar. How easily a night shoot turns into a nightmare. For the audience, of course, that's good news. It's a measure of my gratitude to the off screen filmmakers that I walked out of the movie with a smile on my face. Despite a last minute stumble that robbed the plot of a lot of its mystery, I had a good time in The Last Exorcism. Director Daniel Stamm and Screenwriters Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland deliver the basics. They create compelling central characters, including a pastor aptly named Cotton, played by Patrick Fabian, whose work here seems informed by homework or heritage. The down-on-its-luck Sweetzer family feels real enough to pity, particularly the goblin-haunted daughter, Nell, a convincing performance by Ashley Bell, who makes her a cocktail of all-too-trusting naivete, blind terror and otherworldly malice. The depiction of demon possession is nicely bare bones. Here and there, as when Nell's head shifts in impossible directions, we feel a touch of computer graphic wizardry, but by and large, technology never intrudes. The Last Exorcism is neither as scary as Quarantine, nor as astonishing as Cloverfield, nor even as unsettling as last year's surprise hit Paranormal Activity, but it offers a rare note of satisfaction in a summer of weedy desolation. In a shocking turn of events, these filmmakers apparently gave a damn about the audience. What possessed them? * Or am I asking the wrong question? Has it merely been the worst summer movie season in memory, making even modest achievements look significant?
Some have made that claim, but what a difficult hypothesis to prove. Even in the worst of years we tend to get a ravishing wonder or two.

The passage of time reveals hidden luster. Detritus gains dignity.

My own rotten movie summer (sounds like the title of a YA novel waiting to happen) felt at the time like 1985, when Clint Eastwood's all-time crappiest western Pale Rider competed for my bellhop's dollar with Explorers, The Goonies and Teen Wolf. I was stuck in the mountains of North Carolina and needed good movies more than I ever have before or since, but I kept getting overdoses of Michael J. Fox. He loomed over my life like a televised moon. There was no escape. On principle, I refused to go see Back To The Future.

That, of course, was my mistake. Looking back, I realize that it was also the summer of Prizzi's Honor and Fright Night, not the worst fate to befall an audience. A quarter century later, regarding the summer of 2010, it's easy to list the duds, but a lot of people may recall only one movie.

I'm talking, of course, about Inception, which galloped into July like a unicorn, opening to a magic carpet ride of stunning reviews and lavish box office. Golden-haired Leonardo DiCaprio arrived in the nick of time, following a June of wilted sequels and tepid reboots. In quick succession, I saw Iron Man 2 and Toy Story 3. Both received positive reviews, but I got the feeling that critics held back or didn't care or had gone so soft that they could no longer be trusted as guides to quality. They were in their own funk and couldn't be bothered to swat a fly, much less a big budget summer tent pole flick.

Now, let's be honest, there are far worse sequels than the second Iron Man, and Toy Story 3 has its charms. Robin Hood sounded dull, and Sex And The City 2 looked predictably avoidable, but who was surprised? Eclipse opened huge, scooping up the teen population, but people said it was the best of the three Twilight movies, so maybe the summer of 2010 wasn't really awful. Maybe it was just empty, like a boring conversation that refuses to stop.

Movie sluts like myself can be so damaged and sad, if we don't get exactly the right dose of pop and art house, we lash out.

Maybe I should have been happy with the demented yellow popcorn people of Despicable Me<. Maybe I was meant to bend over for The Last Airbender, and maybe the loud, wide suck of Dinner With Schmucks came as a personal delivery from movie gods who were tired of having to please my refined tastes. Maybe the ferocious incomprehensibility of Salt was meant to make my dinner inedible.

But if that's the case, why did everyone else have to be punished, too? And who on earth deserved The Prince of Persia?

By the end of July, after three months of disappointment and dismay, I saw blight. Something mottled and yellow had begun to creep across the American movie business. Hollywood executives had finally managed to infest the last shred of individual creative genius in their big budget movies, and nothing remained but a bright and shiny husk, the shape of a locust. Give a recent summer movie a whack and watch the dust spill out.

*

Then I saw Inception, the most eagerly awaited film of the summer, and it was like rain after a drought. You could feel smart audiences and critics alike licking the moisture off their arms. Life and hope could float again. My counterpart, Craig Detweiler, danced around rhetorically like a farmer whose crop is saved. He radiated screen shine, waxing philosophical about the deep themes of consciousness and free will taken on by Kubrickian wunderkind Christopher Nolan.

I, too, felt the relief. Inception has a soul. It's not a sequel. It's not a clone. It's not a former television series. Best of all, its success means someone else will get a shot at making an interesting big budget movie in Hollywood. For that alone, I owe a debt to Christopher Nolan.

I only wish I could like his movie. I tried. The movie isn't half as clever as its champions think, and as a road map to the depths of the mind, it's a complete fraud. Nolan took a complicated idea and translated it into big screen magic, but he didn't get much further than the idea that our minds are sort of like computer games; they have levels, and you don't want to get stuck in the bottom one. He signals to us through gloomy orchestral sounds and dour performances that serious matters are afoot, and we brace ourselves, but the seriousness resides almost completely in the music and the faces, which rarely if ever tell jokes or even smile. That would be unserious.

He's even less interested in the shape of the human mind than he is in the nature of moral corruption, yet he insists that we take him on such grand terms. I genuinely tried in The Dark Knight, too, but by the end of the movie I knew the truth. Nolan's movies always start "dark" and "serious", but at the halfway mark they begin to look like a style statement, and by the end feel suspiciously like an ordinary action movie.

Inception isn't ordinary. It soars at times, but what moves and excites is architecture, the spectacle of a huge plan hurled at great expense through space. The most interesting face in the movie belongs to the character of Arthur, played with somnolent urgency and suspicion by the great Joseph Gordon Leavitt. What I wouldn't have given to see what goes on in the underground aquifer of his mind!

For one, he's the only character who gets a real laugh, when he makes a move on Ellen Page, and for two, in a movie about the unconscious, he's the only one who makes a move on anyone. He alone seems to care about sex. Cue Alfred Hitchcock's scream.

At the very least, let's hope he's not designing skyscrapers in the depths of his brain, unlike DiCaprio's protagonist, whose deepest reservoirs of creative energy appear to have gone headlong into street grids and zoning codes. The constructed dreams of Inception feel motherboardish to me, the boulevards devoid of the wet work of human psychology, the men and women trapped inside a computer game that describes itself as a profundity.

Give me Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World any day of the week. In this movie, one of the biggest flops of the summer, men and women trapped are also trapped inside a computer game, but they're under no illusions. They exist in a modest little Canadian fantasy of fun, sex, rock and graphic art, but the amusement on their faces fizzes like a cold drink on a hot day. By the time Scott Pilgrim was over, I'd mostly forgotten the sins of Inception and completely changed my mind about the rotten movie summer of 2010. Things were looking up.

*

The best of the late August batch wasn't Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World. It wasn't even Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables, but the latter movie reminded me of a central truth about the art form. The human face is cheapest thrill and the greatest mystery that the screen provides, and this mindless action bonanza about over-the-hill mercenaries who kick butt after retirement contains the ruined crags and fallen brows of a dozen ghostly action heroes who have never been better. Stallone himself, never one of my favorites, turns in his most affecting performance since the original Rocky.

The plot of the flick is written in his weary eyes. That goes double for Mickey Rourke, whose dissipated, soulful tattoo artist ranks among his best performances. At times, The Expendables plays more like a documentary about the aging process of movie stars, and in that depiction, right beneath the surface of the story, we get a sad and unspoken and ancient truth. Beauty fades. Glory passes. Bullets are nothing compared to natural degeneration.

Other little treasures fell into my lap as the summer peaches ripened. The Other Guys, starring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, has at least five good laughs. When Ferrell's hot wife appears, she is embodied in every sense of the word by Eva Mendes, and Wahlberg's angry cop can't believe she sleeps with Ferrell. We can't believe it either, so when he keeps asking, "Who is that?", the joke echoes beautifully back over a thousand movies in which unbelievable hotties played the love interest to schlubs.

Christian Carion's Farewell, a Cold War spy thriller, is the best movie on that subject since The Lives Of Others, and Aaron Schneider's Get Low mostly avoids the killing quaintness of period movies about rural America.

Once more, I took pleasure in the faces: the skepticism and wariness on the molten candle that has become Bill Murray's head; the bright appeal and intelligence and wit of Sissy Spacek, whose welcome illumination contains flickers and hints of everything she's ever done, from Carrie through Big Love; and most of all Robert Duvall, whose performance is a reminder that one of the true giants of American cinema still evanesces before us.

In hindsight, how could I have mistaken the summer of 2010 for a dead loss?

The moment that changed my mind came halfway through Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, the most accomplished American movie of the year. In the movie, a pair of lesbian mothers played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore cope with the sudden appearance of a long-forgotten sperm donor in the lives of their two teenage children. The daughter is going to college, and the son may or may not be gay, and the last thing the women need is a footloose new heterosexual foil to complicate their lives.

The foil, Mark Ruffalo at his slacker best, wreaks havoc, and the moment of discovery, when Bening's character discovers just how far things have gone, is a superbly wrought masterpiece of camera work, sound design, editing and performance. The camera slows, and Bening observes a dinner party through the eyes of a relentlessly controlling woman in the instant when she grasps she's lost control of everything. The moment couldn't be more harrowing. It's as if she just discovered a bomb beneath the table.

Nothing in Inception comes close to this instant of heightened drama. No single face in the summer's most successful action movie has near the kick, the soul, the solidity that obtains to Bening in this scene. She's so much more interesting than DiCaprio that you want to take that funky elevator down a few floors into her unconscious and see what's crouching in her mental sub-basement, except, of course, it's not necessary, because Bening conveys more of buried conflict and ancient wounds in a turn of her head than Christopher Nolan managed in two and a half hours of pinwheeling vehicles.

Some of the credit for the performance has to go to Cholodenko, a veteran of the independent cinema and one of our finest chroniclers of relationship complication. In High Art and Laurel Canyon, Cholodenko specialized in making unlikely situations and people feel deliciously real, but in The Kids Are All Right, she has her first classic.

Under the circumstances, I had to happily revise my opinion of the summer. The worst of it was bad indeed. Most of June and July barely touched mediocrity. But the best, from The Kids Are All Right to Farewell, Get Low to The Other Guys, The Last Exorcism to Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, and not forgetting the cold splendors of Inception, gives me hope that American movies aren't dead yet, just sleeping through a long winter.

John Marks blogs at www.purplestateofmind.com.

GRUPO FANTASMA: THE PURPLE INTERVIEW

2010-07-06T22:00:16Z

Nothing transcends cultural and political division like music. Go see Loretta Lynn live and marvel at the conservative Christians and progressive lesbians getting ecstastic in the one and the same crowd.

To my mind, no current band so embodies this ability to fly over seeming contradictions and polarities like an Austin outfit that sews together half a century of rock, soul, funk and salsa. To see what I mean, you have to see the 10-man band known as Grupo Fantasma live. Once you've seen them live, You'll understand.

Watching Grupo Fantasma take possession of every living soul in a room is a singular pleasure. Or maybe it's the other way around. It's the pleasure of watching every living soul in a room become posessed by the band's sound. The only exorcism is dance.

As bass player Greg Gonzalez tells us in this interview, long years of experience have taught these musicians synchronicity, and in truth, in sound and in performance, Grupo Fantasma conjures up a sense elemental ease. They play like sun-warmed rain on an old street; the sound, formed communally in show after show, suggests half a dozen musical traditions and at least as many geographies, but the effect is never academic.

You barely have time to notice how well one tradition has been executed before another snakes out of the amp.

Nominated this year for a Grammy for its most recent record Sonidos Gold, the band has its roots in Austin, Texas, where it's common to find fusions of blues, country, conjunto, jazz and rock. The members hold down day jobs, but manage to tour a lot of the year, while some members, like Gonzalez, are working on side projects like the harder-funking Brownout or the spacier Ocote Soul Sound.

Like I said, even by Austin standards, the band is eclectic. Nothing in the Latin music tradition feels out of place here, whether New York salsa, cumbia, merengue or cuban son, but the guitar riffs are equally suggestive of James Brown funk or Led Zep rock. If these guys come to your town, go see them.

In the meantime, meet bass player Greg Gonzalez, who started his career by playing Metallica covers when he moved to Laredo, Texas in the eighth grade and met fellow Fantasman Beto Martinez. Music is the main event here, but we couldn't resist asking a question about the latest headlines from Washington.

Before we get to the music, I have to ask. We're about to see the confirmation of the first Hispanic justice to the Supreme Court in Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Is that a big deal for you guys, or just more politics?

While were always happy to see Hispanics and Latinos achieve in this society, we are generally a non political entity. Ultimately her rulings are what she will hopefully be remembered by, not the color of her skin or the makeup of her past. it is refreshing, but the Supreme Court is still greatly lacking in diversity, especially of interests and opinions. Plus theres a huge amount of old judges who are unfamiliar with the nature of this increasingly changing society/technologies etc. I think justices should be held up for review every so often, the whole idea of lifetime appointments makes me uncomfortable. So basically, were stoked to have a fresh and different outlook on the court, but only time will tell how much of a difference she will be able to make, aside from the symbolic importance of her selection.

Tell us about how the band came together. Does it start with you and Beto playing Metallica covers together, basically? If so, how do you get from "Kill Em All" to Sonidos Gold?

Last year we had the oportunity to meet and watch the Austin band the Sword perform at Bonnaroo. Not only were they nice guys and an awesome band, but they were esentially living the dream we originally had when Beto and I talked about starting a Metallica cover band back in 1989. But that was really just the motivation to start, once we actually got immersed in the world of music, our horizons began to expand and we started writing songs. We've been writing songs ever since. as a result, we ended up not playing Metallica covers, and we barely played any covers at all, becoming instead songwriters and creators of our own vision. After moving to Austin (with our then band the Blimp which featured our longtime drummer Johnny Lopez and out original singer Brian Ramos) we came in contact with even more influences and inspiring music groups. We began to experiment in larger configurations with new found friends "the Blue Noise Band" which featured longtime member Adrian Quesada and our original timbalero Jeremy Bruch as well as our saxophonist now manager Dave Lobel. It just went from there, growing organically, changing, developing and aquiring new members and songwriters. To this day, I credit the originality and vibrancy of our sound with our early reluctance to learn cover songs, and our desire to creat our own original sound informed by the richness of musical influences through the years. To this day, we still listen to Metallica.

On the website, you all talk about the Fantasma Sound, and anyone who has heard that sound knows that it's an amazing combination of instruments and players coming together in a very big way. How long did it take to get to the point where you really found your groove?

We've always had a groove. playing housepartys and co-op partys in austin really solidified our ability to lock in rhythmically and get people dancing, but it's been a long growing process ever since. We're still learning!
How about the live show? We've seen you twice now, and in both cases, the performances were unbelievably seamless, as if you were reading each other's minds. Is it as easy as it looks?

When we went to Iraq, the colonel who met us and welcomed us to the base said "professionalism is the ability to make a difficult task appear easy" we play so much and tour so much and play together in multiple bands (Brownout, Ocote Soul Sounds, the Blimp, etc) for so many years that we've made it appear easy through practice. It took 10 or 15 years to make it look that effortless.

How about writing the songs for the records? Who does it? Is everyone involved, or do you take turns?

We take turns. some people write and others dont, but all of the songs are shaped and developed communally through live performance. Our show is the lab where we test what works and try to make our songs as effective as possible before we record them.

There is a lot of Latin musical tradition buried in the Fantasma sound, but it's also got a real urban, funkified beat and here and there are hints of Led Zeppelin and Santana. Can you talk about the various musical rivers that flow into your music. Is it just me or do I hear a little conjunto in there, too, from time to time?

You do. You hear the whole spectrum of our influences in our sound from rock and jazz to latin and occasionally reggae funk or pop music.

Greg, your bass playing drives a lot of the deep sound of the band, but like most bass players, you're not as conspicuous onstage as others. Do you feel like you're secretly in control of things back in your corner?

I tend to think of my job as crucial and invisible. Christian Mcbride once said the bass player is like the offensive line in football. Nobody pays attention to the offensive line, but it forms the shape of the offense, protects the play makers and makes it possible for the offense to function. I might not make touchdowns very often, but I do set blocks so others can score.

I always felt that was a pretty apt metaphor. It's pretty difficult to be conspicious in this band anyway, with so many talented musicians. We generally take turns with the spotlight, spreading solos out amongst one another and filling the roles we do best the rest of the time.

I think of you guys as a quintessential Texan band, in the sense that the best Texas music constantly crosses borders and is never afraid to mix the blues, country, rock, salsa, folk, you name it. Flaco Jimenez is a classic example of that. Do you see yourselves as a Texas band, and is there any particular Texas artist who has particularly influenced you?

We're definitely a texas band. Our attitude and sense of humor, approach to life and other people, is essentially Texan. Besides, Austin is one of the few happening cities in this country where a ten piece band can afford to live decently (low taxes, reasonable rent, etc)

We write a lot about food on this website, and we know you guys get a Mexican feast whenever you come to Northampton. But you live in Austin, so what's your favorite place to get a great meal in the barbecue and Tex-Mex capital of the United States?

I'm not actually a fan of TexMex myself. I'm from the border so I'm a big fan of MexMex. Theres a bunch of great taco trucks and chain restaurants that are cheap and delicious. Some hilights are Arandas, Pollo Regio, La Mexicana, La Playa, etc. as for barbeque, theres a huge variety and they all crush barbeque elsewhere. I have always attributed that to the delicious smoky flavor of mesquite wood. some good spots are Rubys, Willies, Sams, and the Salt Lick. Also, check out Lamberts for some great upscale barbeque and live music most nights.

A lot of you guys hold down day jobs to support your musical endeavors. How do you manage it? The sound is so intricate and powerful that it's hard to believe you don't work on it all day, every day. What kinds of day jobs do you do?

We all have different hustles that we do. Besides Grupo Fantasma we also have another band Brownout which plays latin funk and is poised to release our second album in September on Six Degrees Records. We're all very excited about that. Besides that, there are cats in the band who teach music, give lessons, record jingles, do odd jobs, play with other random side bands. It's hard to generalize and the situation is always changing. Basically, Austin Texas has been very fruitful for us, full of opportunity and reasonably priced to live in. But regardless, the hustle continues daily, and it is this which will ultimately keep us building and growing and becoming better as a band and as individuals.

A Tribute To Don Hewitt

2010-07-06T21:57:49Z

Don Hewitt liked to say that his success in television news boiled down to this creed: "Tell me a story." It was the title of his autobiography, and the raison d'etre of his great invention, the CBS news show 60 Minutes, and yet ironically he was never much good at telling his own story. Listening to Don talk about the show was always a disappointment, because he never seemed to give verbal or literary life to the extraordinary thing he'd invented.

At times, he seemed so stiff in his account that it seemed intentional, as if he might be suspicious of trying to explain the thing that had grown to such magnitude under his guidance. 60 Minutes started in 1968. A decade later, it was the most watched show on television, and it remains in the top twenty to this day. What other show has been so popular for so long?

Don Hewitt died this week from complications related to pancreatic cancer. He was 86.

The real explanation for his lack of panache in relating his own saga is probably simple enough. Hewitt was a man of action par excellence. I don't mean that in the abstract, in the sense of the cliche. I mean it literally. Thinking back on Don, I always see him in movement. When he came into the screening room, ready to vet a new segment, there was seldom a moment of repose or ritual, unless it was the sight of Hewitt picking up the script and reading it even before the room went dark. It drove the correspondents crazy, but his motor didn't seem to permit the simple act of watching a narrative unfold.

He had to read and watch at the same time, and as soon as the lights came, he had to burst with his response. "Here's what you gotta do!" Or "That's great!" In my memory, Don is an exclamation point. He's a superlative. His words move with the force of an instant conviction that could be turned on a dime with a few changes, even if his first response to a piece was absolute rejection: "This will never air on 60 Minutes!"

When a correspondent, editor and producer made the changes, and Don's prescription turned out to be right--and so often it was--he'd go off like a small sun and the once banished segment would be back on the show. Maybe it would even lead.

I worked at 60 Minutes for five years, from 2000 to 2005. When I showed up on the 9th Floor of the building on West 57th Street, I didn't know a thing about the medium of broadcast news. I learned everything I know on the subject in the shop that Hewitt led for three decades. As a print journalist and novelist, I had expected to have to throw out most of what I'd learned about the craft of storytelling, but I was wrong. Hewitt's dictum allowed room for a wordsmith. He may have subordinated words to picture, but Don cherished the right line, which is why the show sounded even better on radio than it did on television.

A few years ago, I wrote a vampire novel called Fangland in which the denizens of a show not unlike 60 Minutes come face to face with the ancient horrors of a forgotten history. My intent was never to pillory the show, though some critics took it that way. On the contrary, I considered the book an homage to the true spirit of the place under Don. It could be hard and mean, but it was also vivid and unforgettable, a last magical place in the media universe, where legends of broadcast walked the halls and told their stories, where producers behaved like gunslingers and rock stars and acted as if the world lived or died by their interviews.

Don created an atmosphere of relentless competition that was the basis for a weird camaraderie. People survived Don's screenings and lived to talk about it afterwards in the bars up 57th Street. Producers had almost incredible tales of loud and angry fights between Hewitt and the correspondents, and I saw one or two of those, but also recognized the genius for narrative that could sometimes come out of the guy, even in the later years when he wasn't always at his best.

My favorite personal memory is this. Don and Morley Safer let me produce my first piece, a story about an Islamic school in Brooklyn. I had been on the ninth floor for almost a year and a half at that point, but I recognized that my first story as a full producer would be a sort of coming out party. After it had its first screening, and I'd made the changes that Don suggested, he turned to me and said, "Welcome to 60 Minutes."

When he said it, he had an infectious grin on his face, and he made those words sound like an abracadabra on the greatest job in American journalism. The work had its ups and downs for sure, and the show stumbled on occasion, but it was a place where a journalist could do excellent work with smart people. If things got crazy, well, the stress was profound, and the temperaments excitable. It was journalism, but it was also show business. If Don's original conceit of mixing entertainment and information bore some poisonous fruit in later years, his last and greatest contribution has been a high standard. 60 Minutes is one of the last news shows on television to honor the highest ideals of the profession.

If Don never told his own story about 60 Minutes well, he didn't have to. The show was his story, week in, week out. I don't know if he had much of an inner life, but he did, I'm willing to bet that it came in 15-minute segments and ended with a tick-tick-tick.

By John Marks, who blogs at http://john.purplestateofmind.com/

JANE CAMPION'S RAVISHING MASTERPIECE OF CHASTITY WOULD BE A BRIGHT STAR FOR CONSERVATIVES, IF ONLY THEY WOULD SEE IT.

2010-07-06T21:56:07Z

Next week, at the Landmark theater chain in Indianapolis, Jane Campion's extraordinary new movie Bright Star opens, and all of those conservative Indiana families who loathe and deplore the latest depravities from Hollywood should flock with their teenage children to see it, but they won't, because Bright Star is mostly playing the art house circuit, and as most everyone knows, art house cinemas tend to be found in the urban and politically Democratic comfort zone where the vast majority of fans of independent cinema choose to live.

Socially conservative families, hesitant to venture into enemy territory, or perhaps turned off by other fare on the marquee-Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story or The Baader-Meinhof Complex, a tale about German terrorism's finest hour--will almost certainly stay away, even though, if there were ever a mainstream movie for them, this is it.

It's shame, really, another symptom of what journalist Bill Bishop calls the Big Sort, the clustering of like-minded Americans into their own homogenous communities. Art house cinemas are a key marker of the politics of the Big Sort. If you regularly go out to see independent films in the theaters, chances are you're in a voting district won by Barack Obama in 2008.

Landmark Theatres, for instance, which describes itself as the only national theater chain devoted exclusively to the distribution of independent films, has 57 venues in 23 markets, all of them in the nation's big cities, from the Sunshine Cinema in downtown Manhattan to the beautifully restored Inwood Theater in Dallas, Texas, to the Keystone Art Cinema in Indianapolis.

Bright Star is a quintessential Landmark Theatres offering. It may play at a few multiplexes, but for the most part, it will be deemed too delicate a flower for the mass audiences who want to seeTransformers sequels. Art house would seem to be its natural home. If you're in Boise, it's playing at an independent operation known as The Flicks. If you're in Omaha, it's in the Film Streams at the Ruth Sokolof Theater.

And yet, this movie implicitly challenges the logic of the art house ghetto, and the politics that now surround our vision of the larger culture.

Bright Star tells the true story of the brief courtship between the English poet John Keats and the seamstress Fanny Brawne. Keats was in his early twenties and already ailing when the pair met on Hampstead Heath. They wrote a series of now infamous letters to one another, revealing the extent of their passion. Keats ordered her letters to be destroyed upon his death, but his survived. Later, other Brawne letters were discovered. The love appears never to have been physically consummated. The story charts the evolution of the affair from its inception until the poet's death.

From this material, director Jane Campion has fashioned one of the great movies of the last decade, a piece of visual music as irresistable and accessible as the blues, a song on film.Bright Star, a portrayal of a lost world by turns gorgeous and drab, resists most of the usual cliches of recent period pieces, the Masterpiece Theatre effect, but finds a new expressiveness in the form, a lyrical and disciplined vision of the natural world worthy of Terence Malick. It's a masterpiece, and surely one of the finest period movies ever made.

Bright Star also happens to be a cinematic hymn to the ecstasies of abstinence and the virtues of a world in which a few lines of the exquisitely turned English can occasion rapture or change a life. John Keats may not quote the Bible to his beloved, but his verse has nothing of the prurient or the puerile. He is reciting lines in the language that is an immediate heir to that in the King James version, and it transports the girl-and the audience.

This isn't to say that Campion is an advocate of sexual abstinence. She's not. In The Piano and her overlooked but flawed gem Holy Smoke, the eroticism is explicit, and she makes no apologies. At the same time, in interviews, the director made clear that she wanted to stay true to the known details of the relationship between Brawne, played with a witty soulfulness by Abby Cornish, and Keats, depicted as a bedragged emo boy by Ben Whishaw. The result is a home schooler's dream, an account of a corseted life of the mind that makes restraint seem sexy and a meeting of the minds orgasmic.

No one curses. No one gets naked. No one seems to exemplify an agenda.

When Keats dies young-I'm not giving anything away, I hope--we don't sense a vindication of his decision to refuse his lover's body when she offers it on grounds of conscience. We don't feel an argument. We feel the sorrow of an untimely death and the end of the possibility of joy, and we grasp the power of language to help us endure both. Keats doesn't leave Brawne with child; he leaves her pregnant with his poetry, and when she speaks it as she walks, we feel the magnitude not only of her inheritance, but of our own.

"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art-
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-
No-yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever-or else swoon to death."

Maybe I'm wrong to think that people who feel that their own world has been swept away by the forces of modernity might find solace and encouragement in Campion's vision of chaste love and ravishing language, but they owe it to themselves, the conservatives in our midst, to seek out this movie.

For my part, I found Bright Star almost overwhelming, not because of my politics or my beliefs or anything else that I can easily name,but because its invocation of the timelessness and grief in human yearning moved me to tears. Do our ideologies make us different? Or do they merely hide the fact that, after everything, after centuries of war and progress, conquest and loss, we are all unbearably and exquisitely the same under the stars?

THE DEATH OF CONSERVATISM, THE DWINDLING OF HIP-HOP

2010-07-06T21:53:24Z

Wouldn't it be interesting if the two were connected? The Death of Conservatism, as chronicled in a smart, beautifully written new book by Sam Tanenhaus, and the aging out of hip hop as a musical form, as asserted by Sasha Frere-Jones in the most recent issue of the New Yorker.

Here's how Tanenhaus describes the spectacle of the end of what he calls "movement conservatism":

Conservatives haven't "fallen all together mute," he writes. "On the contrary, they continue to intone the stale phrases of movement politics. If you attended a panel luncheon of prominent conservative magazine editors, as I did in the spring of 2009 at the Harvard Club, you heard the urgent call "to take back the culture" (but from whom, exactly?), along with dire admonitions that the Obama administration had placed America's "economic" freedom in jeopardy--this on the very morning that Wall Street had ecstatically embraced the Treasury secretary's plan for assisting the nation's banks."

"What these conservative intellectuals said wasn't just mistaken," writes Tanenhaus, himself a conservative. "It was meaningless, the clatter of a bygone period, with its "culture wars" and attacks on sinister "elites". There was no hint of a new argument being formulated or even of an old one being reformulated. More disturbing still, not one of the three panelists acknowledged that the Republican Party and its ideology might bear any responsibility for the nation's current plight."

Meanwhile, over at The New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones doesn't come to bury hip-hop, but to praise it. Yet the tone of funerary oratory is unmistakable. Something has ended, and it's not quite clear what will take its place.

"If I had to pick a year for hip-hop's demise," writes Frere-Jones, "I would choose 2009, not 2006. Jay-Z's new album, "The Blueprint 3," and some self-released mixtapes by Freddie Gibbs are demonstrating, in almost opposite ways, that hip-hop is no longer the avant-garde, or even the timekeeper, for pop music."

He continues: "Hip-hop, a spinoff from New York City's early disco culture, has been a commercial proposition since the release of "Rapper's Delight," in 1979. That's thirty years, a long time for any genre. If you want to be conservative and decide that mainstream cultural relevance kicked in toward the end of the eighties, with New York's golden age and the quick follow-up of gangsta rap, the wildly popular genre from Los Angeles, that still leaves twenty years of cultural impact. This may be a fine time for hip-hop to atomize. The original form has done an awful lot of work."

Movement conservatism and hip-hop have at least two things in common. Both occurred within history, and as a consequence both have their historical trajectories, their rise and fall, so to speak. That doesn't make them blood brothers as phenomenon, but it is intriguing to note the timing. They both hit their stride in the late 1970's and early 1980's, reached their moments of greatest influence in the late 1980's and early 1990's, and began to decline at the end of the last decade. That their death notices should appear in roughly the same season can't be a coincidence.

Let's face it, hip hop was the soundtrack of movement conservatism, even if the latter hated the former with a passion. It wasn't the soundtrack of choice, you see, but the true, deep, organic sound of the country as it grappled with the Reagan revolution, the noise of the crack-smashed streets transmuted into protest before turning into gold. It was a coded language of resistance, desire and desperation spun up into a relentless anthem of achievement and alienated from its roots, translated into background noise, finally, just as rock and roll and rock once was.

Movement conservatism has its roots in the Eisenhower era, when a group of young writers and thinkers began to agitate against the Notorious E and E, otherwise known as the Eastern Establishment, represented by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy in the White House, and embodied by the brain trust at places like Harvard and Yale. William F. Buckley was the key name. Buckley was the Grandmaster Slam of movement conservatism, just as Dr. Dre was the Barry Goldwater of hip hop, taking a noise from the neighborhoods and turning it into a plan for action.

I doubt very much whether conservatism and hip hop have really "died", but if they have, we'll live a long time with their influence. Hip hop conquered the globe and seems to have invaded every corner of the global musical language. You can hear it in almost anything that moves to a beat.

Conservatism, the brand identity of Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, not to mention their countless foot soldiers, has shaped the world in which we now live. All surviving progressive ideas were molded in the heat of battle with movement conservatism.

Conservatism and hip hop: the two weren't enemies exactly, or maybe they were--Enemies: A Love Story. So maybe their death is a kind of liebestod, and we watch in fascination as they go down together, ranting and rapping all the way.

Or to quote Run DMZ, my favorite crew from the early years of both: "It's like that, and that's the way it is--unnnh!"

PURPLE SIESTA: Senator Robert Byrd Is Gone, And So Are We

2010-06-28T21:22:00Z

Senator Robert Byrd, a legendary figure of the United States Congress, a man who had been in national elected office since the early days of the Cold War, who predated the Civil Rights movement and in many ways embodied a version of the South that resisted it, has passed ...

PETER BLACKSTOCK: Blue Rodeo, South of Home

2010-06-17T01:35:00Z

by PETER BLACKSTOCK First, a confession: Deep down, there's something about me that I've probably known for quite some time, something that has become increasingly impossible to deny as the years have passed. There's really no sense in fighting it anymore. I am a closet Canadian. Raised in Texas, granted. (Although born, fittingly ...

PETER BLACKSTOCK: Still Feeling Blue, From The Rodeo To The Shadows

2010-06-17T01:35:00Z

by PETER BLACKSTOCK You may recall I wrote last week about Blue Rodeo, the great Toronto roots-rock band that often plays to modest club crowds in the United States but enjoys nationwide stardom in Canada. Their relative anonymity in the U.S. aside, Blue Rodeo's story is mostly a happy one, a ...

THE PURPLE INTERVIEW: Edward Serotta Talks Helen Thomas, Israel And The Jews Of Central Europe

2010-06-15T00:59:00Z

by JOHN MARKS Last week, when 89-year-old Helen Thomas of Hearst told the world via YouTube that the Israelis should leave "Palestine" and go back to Germany and Poland--back to the heart of the continent, in other words, where most Jews were annihilated in the 1940's--she touched on a seldom-mentioned truth. ...

The Village Square: My love letter to Purple State of Mind

2010-06-11T13:36:00Z

By LIZ JOYNER Like all good teacher's pets, The Village Square studies hard ahead of our dinners on whatever topic we're about to discuss. Next up: The Culture Wars. It seemed only natural that I was living and breathing culture wars when I was told that my friends at Purple State ...

PURPLE INTERVIEWS: This Memorial Day Weekend, Kick Back And Enjoy Six Months Of Great Conversation

2010-06-08T22:03:00Z

While we take a much needed break for Memorial Day weekend, have a look at six months of Purple Interviews. It's a chat bonanza! If you're fascinated by the conflict between religion and science, don't miss this exchange with astronomer and humanities professor Salman Hameed about Islam, creationism and the ...