by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I had planned to attend the live screening of
the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Dvorák’s rarely heard opera Rusalka but we got the time wrong and got into the theatre
about half an hour late, thereby missing the score’s most famous aria — the
“Hymn to the Moon” sung by the female lead, the water sprite Rusalka — as well
as a lot of exposition needed to understand the plot. We did get to see the remaining 2 ½ acts of the opera, and
earlier this morning I heard a very
poor-sounding recording of the first act online. To the extent that Rusalka has a modern-day following at all, it’s because of
Renée Fleming, who made the “Hymn to the Moon” her audition piece for the Met’s
young singers program when she was starting out and has become by far the
world’s most famous living exponent of the title role. Though Rusalka is by a composer who’s quite well known among
classical music fans, it’s got a strike against it in that it’s in Czech, not
exactly one of the big operatic languages — Charles found an online post of an
acoustic recording of the “Hymn to the Moon” by soprano Emmy Destinn, and
though it was hard to tell I got the impression that even Destinn, who was Czech, was singing the aria in German (the one Czech
opera that did make it into the
international standard repertoire in the 20th century, Smetana’s The
Bartered Bride, was until recently usually
performed in German translation).
It’s got another strike against it in that
Dvorák was a great composer, but his reputation these days hangs mainly on his
symphonies and chamber music rather than his operas — and one gets the
impression he was more comfortable in these shorter forms and writing for
instruments exclusively rather than voices. The “Hymn to the Moon” is a
glorious aria, but like “Ebben, ne andro lontana” from Catalani’s La
Wally it’s the sort of “greatest hit” that
gives you a false impression of the opera it’s from. Just as you wouldn’t guess
from “Ebben, ne andro lontana” that the rest of La Wally is heavily Germanic and sounds a lot like an Italian
composer trying to do a pastiche
of Wagner (not surprisingly when you realize that the opera is set in the Tyrol
and the characters have Germanic names), you wouldn’t guess from the “Hymn to
the Moon” that the rest of Rusalka
is in a mishmash of styles. Plotwise, it’s the old one about the fairy goddess
— here a “water sprite” — who’s in love with a mortal, and how nothing good can
possibly come of such a mismatch; Rusalka (Renée Fleming), oldest of four
water-sprite sisters, has spied a character merely referred to as “the Prince”
(Polish tenor Piotr Beczala, whose name I have heard pronounced more than one
way; last time he appeared on a Live from the Met show it came out something like “Bek-WAH-nuh” and
yesterday it was more or less “BESH-ah-luh”) hunting in the woods near the lake
where Rusalka, her three water-sprite sisters (Dixella Larusdotter, Renée Tatum
and Maya Lahyani) and their dad, the Water Gnome (John Relyea) all live.
Supposedly Rusalka and the Prince have spied each other and it’s love — or at
least lust — at first sight, even though both the Water Gnome and the local
witch Jezibaba (Dolora Zajick) warn Rusalka that if she falls in love with and
marries a mortal she will lose her power of speech — meaning that for the
second half of the first act and the first half of the second Rusalka isn’t
allowed to sing at all, which makes it rather disappointing for someone who’s
bought a ticket to hear Renée Fleming’s voice to get to hear so little of it.
In the second act the Prince takes Rusalka to his castle, whereupon he’s
confronted by the Foreign Princess (Emily Magee), whom he’s expected to marry
for reasons of state, though the Princess also genuinely has the hots for him
and gets to sing an aria (far more passionate and intense than anything Rusalka
gets to sing!) about how she’s fiery and sunlit while Rusalka can only offer
him the chilly embraces of the moon. (I give the Met’s costume designer credit
for dramatizing the text by having the Princess dress in “warm” red and Rusalka
in “cool” light blue.) Meanwhile, Rusalka is confronted by her father, who
tries to get her to go back to the lake and abandon her mad infatuation with a
Prince who’s so easily led astray by a woman of his own kind — and I suddenly
realized that Dvorák and his librettist, Jaroslav Kvapil, had copied the four
principals and their interrelationships from Verdi’s Aïda and simply transposed them to a supernatural story.
There’s the tenor who has social position, the mezzo he’s supposed to marry to
ensure his power, the outside woman (the soprano lead and title character) he’s
really in love with, and the outside woman’s father (the baritone) who’s trying
to break them up — only Verdi and his libretto committee (the basic plot of Aïda was worked out by a French Orientalist who called
himself Mariette Bey in honor of his interest in Egyptian culture, Antonio
Ghislanzoni was hired to turn Bey’s French prose into Italian verse, but for
two of Aïda’s biggest emotional
moments, the aria “O patria mia” and the final duet, Verdi tossed out his
librettists’ contributions and wrote the final text himself) came up with not
only naturalistic but entirely reasonable and comprehensible reasons for the
principals to behave as they do. Dvorák and Kvapil worked under the same
misapprehension as a lot of modern-day fantasy writers (including such “names”
as Stephen King and Neil Gaiman): that once you have set your story outside of
the bounds of normal human reality you can literally make anything happen, no matter how little internal sense it makes
or whether what happens in Act III necessarily follows the ground rules you
laid down in Act I.
Act III takes place back at Rusalka’s lake, where her three
sisters have taken over the ritual to the moon and Jezibaba (ya remember Jezibaba?) tells her that the only way Rusalka can end her
exile from the water-sprite community is to take a magic knife and stab the
Prince to death. Later on Rusalka is told by her dad that just by embracing the
Prince again she can kill him without bloodshed, but even after she does so
she’s told that that’s not good enough — I guess we were supposed to think that
she actually had to spill the Prince’s blood to be redeemed — and how it ends,
at least according to the synopsis on Wikipedia, is, “Rusalka thanks the Prince
for letting her experience human love, commends his soul to God, and returns to
her place in the depths of the lake as a demon of death.” That really isn’t at
all clear in the Met’s production, which leaves Rusalka more or less alive at
the end but doesn’t spell out her fate except to make it clear that it’s a
miserable one — but then it’s a 19th century opera, so what do you
expect? A happy ending? (Actually
one reason so many 19th century operas end tragically is composers
and librettists of the period were rebelling against the 18th
century convention that operas were supposed to end happily, even if they
literally had to resort to the old deus ex machina gimmick to do it.) As gloriously as Renée Fleming
sounded in the third act once she finally got to let her voice out again after
the “Hymn to the Moon” and the limited amount of singing she gets in Act I
until she meets the Prince and is obliged to shut up, by this time I was just
getting anxious for the whole thing to end. Rusalka might be one of those operas that it’s better just
to listen to than actually to see, and though I give the Met points for doing
this in a traditional production and not trying to update it (to when and where,
one wonders — modern-day Disneyland?), there’s a certain in-your-faceness to a
Live in HD presentation you don’t get in the house. “Live” you would be far
enough away from the Water Gnome not to notice that his costume is essentially
a velvet jumpsuit with dirty-green tassels hanging down from it to indicate
he’s covered in seaweed; on a movie screen in close-up that’s all too obvious.
There were also three creatures in the opening act, children getting to play Jezibaba’s
familiars, which were supposed to be young frogs that have acquired the ability
to stand on two legs, who quite frankly looked more like they belonged in a
fantasy by H. P. Lovecraft (one could well imagine the half-man, half-fish
creatures of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” looking like this) than one by
Jaroslav Kvapil.
As for the singing, Renée Fleming’s voice is glorious as ever
but acting has never been her strong suit — the first time I saw her, in a c.
1990 Met telecast of Verdi’s Otello,
she sang beautifully but seemed like a dramatic nullity (especially by
comparison to her co-stars, Plácido Domingo and Justino Diaz, who grabbed hold
of their characters and portrayed them vividly — yes, there’ve been Domingo
performances in which he seemed to be “phoning it in,” but not that time!), and
during the long periods of Rusalka
in which the central character is mute, I couldn’t help but think how much
better Leontyne Price (whom I saw in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf
Naxos and who was such a powerful “presence”
she could dominate a stage with her back to the audience) could have handled the challenge of an opera
character who can’t speak (or sing) for much of her opera. Piotr Beczala was
annoyingly stentorian, though I can’t blame him much for that because it’s an
excruciatingly difficult role; you have to sing long Italianate vocal lines
over an orchestra of almost Wagnerian volume and you have to bring an heroic quality to the role
(even though Kvapil’s libretto writes him as the usual tenor idiot, singing
long odes to his “white doe,” as if he’s encountered Rusalka while hunting and
therefore isn’t even sure what species she is) while at the same time singing
very high, including a D above high C, which Beczala made but unattractively.
Frankly the supporting cast members, notably Emily Magee and John Relyea, sang
more powerfully than the leads! It also doesn’t help that the opera is so
musically uneven; parts of it are magnificently beautiful, while parts of it
simply mark musical time and make one all too aware of why Dvorák’s reputation
today is as a symphonic and chamber-music composer rather than an opera
composer. At the start of Act II there’s a duet for two rustics — servants of
the Prince — the Gamekeeper (Vladimir Chmelo) and the Kitchen Boy (a “trouser”
— woman-in-drag — role for Julie Boulianne) — which gives us some more plot
exposition and is about the only thing in this score that sounds like the work
of a Czech composer.
I was beginning to wonder if I would have liked Rusalka better if we’d arrived on time and hadn’t missed its
Greatest Hit — until, between Acts II and III, the Met showed a promo of their next Live in HD presentation, Borodin’s Prince
Igor (in a new and highly controversial
edition of the score by director Dmitri Tcherniakov),
and the two bits they presented, a powerful military song for the title
character and a seduction aria from the princess of his enemies, the Polovsti,
who tries to seduce him among what the narration described as a field of
poppies (“Take my hand, I’m a stranger in poppydise,” I sang sotto voce to
Charles, referencing the famous pop song taken from Prince Igor) though they looked more like poinsettias to me — and
damned if Borodin’s music didn’t seem so much more powerful, dramatic and alive than Dvorák’s that I found myself thinking, “Now that’s an opera!”
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Thursday, February 6, 2014
The Amish: Shunned (PBS, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Amish: Shunned, a follow-up to a documentary on the Amish done for the PBS American Experience series which was made last year and aired a week before (right after President Obama’s State of the Union Address — I recorded it but I didn’t watch it, nor did I watch Obama’s speech until the recording concluded and I was able to finalize my disc), and quite a moving, powerful and unexpectedly somber piece. The show was written, directed and produced by Callie T. Wiser, and it profiled seven defectors from the Amish community — including perhaps the most interesting, a couple from Indiana who were not Amish to begin with, got married (there’s a photo from their wedding that looks like a standard 1950’s-issue straight couple getting started in their lives together, posed in full modern-day wedding regalia in front of their cars), settled on a farm in Indiana, found that they really didn’t know how to live off the land, started going to their Amish neighbors for advice and ultimately were so impressed by the community and its values that they converted. Years later they found the Amish rules too confining and left, though their son Paul stayed behind — and while eventually he left too, they noted that he’s still living like an Amish person, farming his own land with a horse-drawn plow. What I hadn’t realized about the Amish before this — well, there are a lot of things I hadn’t realized about the Amish before this, including that there are at least five major sects within the Amish that vary mainly in the degree to which they reject modernity. At least one Amish community was shown by a clip of someone milking cows and using obviously modern implements to do this, including clamps to fit around the cows’ teats and industrially manufactured buckets and pails in which to store the proceeds.
I also didn’t realize that the Amish have their own language, variously described in the program as “Pennsylvania Dutch” and a dialect of German — and that at least some Amish communities use the word “English” not only to denote America’s majority language but the entire modern American world from which they seek to isolate themselves and their families (i.e., “She left us and entered the English world”). Indeed, one of the difficulties faced by that Indiana couple was that they never really mastered the Amish language and therefore felt isolated from the community even when they were technically part of it. What I particularly liked about Wiser’s work on the program was that she neither romanticized the Amish nor ridiculed them — and it would have been all too tempting to do either — rather she did an excellent job showing both what is appealing about them and what is oppressive. Though she didn’t use the word in her actual narration, the notes she put up on the show on PBS’s Web site say that the word the Amish use to describe their system is Ordnung, which is literally the German for “order” (and which has some pretty chilling implications to someone who’s read as much about Hitler and the Nazis, who were also big on Ordnung, though they meant something very different by it). The Amish are alternately incredibly stern and surprisingly forgiving — they’re fond of quoting the parable of Jesus that if a shepherd loses one of 100 sheep he will leave the 99 behind and chase after the one (and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if the story of the Prodigal Son is also one of their favorite passages from the Bible), and at the same time they will kick people out for seemingly absurd transgressions, like forgetting to tie the string on the cap Amish women are always supposed to wear in public to missing a church service or a meeting to which the Amish elders have summoned you.
What struck me most about the show is not only the severity with which the Amish (especially the most strict ones — the Swartzentruber group is cited by Wiser in her on-line notes as the most hard-line) make rules about avoiding cross-contamination with the “English” life outside but the centripetal pull young (or not so young) intellectually or socially restive Amish must feel between the lure of the rest of our nation’s life and the intimidation of their tradition, particularly the statement that any transgression, no matter how (seemingly) minor, can consign the soul to hell. And yet a surprising number of Amish have the resources to leave — while some Amish sects don’t educate anybody past the equivalent of eighth grade, others give their members enough of a grounding in “book learning” that they’re able to enter college once they leave (like Naomi, one of the people profiled in the show, who was able to visit relatives in Florida and, once she quit, to enroll in college and get a degree in nursing). I was particularly struck by the two young men who left the Amish, settled in Florida and were able to buy a car (how did they get the money, and how did they learn to drive?), and when one of them joined a Fundamentalist church (you could tell it was Fundamentalist because the minister had the congregants hold their Bibles aloft in the air and asked, “What do we believe in this book?” — and they answered, en masse, “All of it!”) he regarded that as a liberation from the strictures of the Amish (just as some Dari-speaking immigrants from southern Afghanistan make it across the border into Iran and regard Iran as a land of incredible freedom and opportunity — which it is, by comparison with what they were leaving). Though several people were profiled in the show, Wiser’s Web site contains a post by Saloma Miller Furlong (an ex-Amish who runs what’s essentially an Underground Railroad for people leaving the faith/community) which focuses on two of them, Naomi and Anna. As Furlong writes:
The film was The Amish: Shunned, a follow-up to a documentary on the Amish done for the PBS American Experience series which was made last year and aired a week before (right after President Obama’s State of the Union Address — I recorded it but I didn’t watch it, nor did I watch Obama’s speech until the recording concluded and I was able to finalize my disc), and quite a moving, powerful and unexpectedly somber piece. The show was written, directed and produced by Callie T. Wiser, and it profiled seven defectors from the Amish community — including perhaps the most interesting, a couple from Indiana who were not Amish to begin with, got married (there’s a photo from their wedding that looks like a standard 1950’s-issue straight couple getting started in their lives together, posed in full modern-day wedding regalia in front of their cars), settled on a farm in Indiana, found that they really didn’t know how to live off the land, started going to their Amish neighbors for advice and ultimately were so impressed by the community and its values that they converted. Years later they found the Amish rules too confining and left, though their son Paul stayed behind — and while eventually he left too, they noted that he’s still living like an Amish person, farming his own land with a horse-drawn plow. What I hadn’t realized about the Amish before this — well, there are a lot of things I hadn’t realized about the Amish before this, including that there are at least five major sects within the Amish that vary mainly in the degree to which they reject modernity. At least one Amish community was shown by a clip of someone milking cows and using obviously modern implements to do this, including clamps to fit around the cows’ teats and industrially manufactured buckets and pails in which to store the proceeds.
I also didn’t realize that the Amish have their own language, variously described in the program as “Pennsylvania Dutch” and a dialect of German — and that at least some Amish communities use the word “English” not only to denote America’s majority language but the entire modern American world from which they seek to isolate themselves and their families (i.e., “She left us and entered the English world”). Indeed, one of the difficulties faced by that Indiana couple was that they never really mastered the Amish language and therefore felt isolated from the community even when they were technically part of it. What I particularly liked about Wiser’s work on the program was that she neither romanticized the Amish nor ridiculed them — and it would have been all too tempting to do either — rather she did an excellent job showing both what is appealing about them and what is oppressive. Though she didn’t use the word in her actual narration, the notes she put up on the show on PBS’s Web site say that the word the Amish use to describe their system is Ordnung, which is literally the German for “order” (and which has some pretty chilling implications to someone who’s read as much about Hitler and the Nazis, who were also big on Ordnung, though they meant something very different by it). The Amish are alternately incredibly stern and surprisingly forgiving — they’re fond of quoting the parable of Jesus that if a shepherd loses one of 100 sheep he will leave the 99 behind and chase after the one (and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if the story of the Prodigal Son is also one of their favorite passages from the Bible), and at the same time they will kick people out for seemingly absurd transgressions, like forgetting to tie the string on the cap Amish women are always supposed to wear in public to missing a church service or a meeting to which the Amish elders have summoned you.
What struck me most about the show is not only the severity with which the Amish (especially the most strict ones — the Swartzentruber group is cited by Wiser in her on-line notes as the most hard-line) make rules about avoiding cross-contamination with the “English” life outside but the centripetal pull young (or not so young) intellectually or socially restive Amish must feel between the lure of the rest of our nation’s life and the intimidation of their tradition, particularly the statement that any transgression, no matter how (seemingly) minor, can consign the soul to hell. And yet a surprising number of Amish have the resources to leave — while some Amish sects don’t educate anybody past the equivalent of eighth grade, others give their members enough of a grounding in “book learning” that they’re able to enter college once they leave (like Naomi, one of the people profiled in the show, who was able to visit relatives in Florida and, once she quit, to enroll in college and get a degree in nursing). I was particularly struck by the two young men who left the Amish, settled in Florida and were able to buy a car (how did they get the money, and how did they learn to drive?), and when one of them joined a Fundamentalist church (you could tell it was Fundamentalist because the minister had the congregants hold their Bibles aloft in the air and asked, “What do we believe in this book?” — and they answered, en masse, “All of it!”) he regarded that as a liberation from the strictures of the Amish (just as some Dari-speaking immigrants from southern Afghanistan make it across the border into Iran and regard Iran as a land of incredible freedom and opportunity — which it is, by comparison with what they were leaving). Though several people were profiled in the show, Wiser’s Web site contains a post by Saloma Miller Furlong (an ex-Amish who runs what’s essentially an Underground Railroad for people leaving the faith/community) which focuses on two of them, Naomi and Anna. As Furlong writes:
* Naomi managed to fly to Florida
and live there with minimal supervision.
* Anna was not even allowed to ride
in a car, which meant she had never been further than fifty miles (a two-day
buggy ride) from her parents’ home.
* Naomi had a decent basic
education, even though she was educated in an Amish school. She was able to
pass a GED without too much trouble, soon after she left the culture.
* Anna was also taught in an Amish
school, but one in which education is de-emphasized. It is not important to the
parents whether their children learn proper English. Anna was reading at the
fourth grade level when she left her community.
* Naomi left with a desire to
further her education and become a nurse. She looked forward to making her own
choices.
* Anna struggled with making her
own choices, because back in her community, nearly every decision was made for
her. She was still being tutored in preparation of earning her GED.
The difference between them becomes a powerful visual motif in the film, as Anna continues to wear the
long baggy dress prescribed by the Amish, continues to wear her hair long and
hanging down, is shown doing household chores with an incredibly hang-dog
manner and posture, and ultimately — Wiser clearly intends it to be a surprise
but it isn’t, really — returns to the Amish. I suppose I react to material like
this somewhat differently from others because of my general skepticism towards all religion, and especially towards religions that
demand total submission to authority and deny that humans either can or should
think for themselves; I got a cold chill when I heard one of the Amish (who
appear in the program only as disembodied voices since the Amish — or at least
the ones Wiser interviewed — were allowed to be tape-recorded but not to be shown visually on camera being interviewed)
use the word “submission,” and I couldn’t help but recall the literal meaning
of the term “Islam” is the Arabic for “submission” (though Faris Kermani’s and Ziauddin Sadar’s recent PBS
documentary Life of Muhammad
rendered the word as “surrender,” not that that’s much better) — though not all
religious people behave that way, in just about every religious tradition there’s a tendency to tell the
members essentially to turn off their intellects and just “believe.” This is
especially an issue with a group like the Amish, who for all their good points
(their general placidity, contentment, freedom from the angst-inducing rat race of contemporary “civilization” and
commitment to a slower, more pastoral and far more environmentally sound and conscious lifestyle
than the one most Americans live — including yours truly, who’s writing this on
a computer that’s also playing him digital dubbings of 1920’s dance records,
and will be posting it on the elaborate electronic infrastructure called the
Internet, powered mostly by fossil fuels, so you can read it) certainly act
like more recent cults, which underscores the sour joke I once made when
Charles asked me what I thought the difference was between a religion and a
cult and I said, “About 100 years.” I was only being half-joking; later I
clarified that one of my benchmarks was whether the spiritual movement survives
the death of its founder — as Mormonism, Christian Science and (much to my
surprise, since I didn’t expect it to) Scientology have done.
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Pete Seeger: The Power of Song (Weinstein Co., PBS, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
One was a PBS American Masters presentation called “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song,” a 2007 documentary that apparently got at least some theatrical screenings (it’s listed on imdb.com and a user commentary indicates this person had seen a public screening at which some audience members started singing along with Seeger). Directed by Jim Brown and featuring interviews with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Seeger collaborators Ronnie Gilbert and Arlo Guthrie (who interestingly did not talk about his dad’s work with Seeger but focused on his own relationship with him) and his family (there was a marvelous clip towards the end showing a recent Seeger concert at Carnegie Hall with Arlo Guthrie and Seeger’s grandson, Tio Seeger Rodriguez — and I couldn’t help but reflect on this man’s multi-racial background: a Latino father and white and Japanese grandparents!). It basically hit the high points of Seeger’s career, from his radicalization as a student at Harvard in the 1930’s (and before that his interesting encounter with folk music — his parents, musicologist Charles Seeger and violinist Constance Seeger, built their own trailer and decided to tour backwoods America playing classical recitals in small towns that had never before heard “good” music, and Charles Seeger heard the music of the mountain people in Appalachia and the South and decided it was as “good” as any of the classical pieces he and his wife had rather patronizingly sought to bring them) through his involvement in just about every Leftist political and social cause ever since. Though it didn’t show us Seeger singing any one song start-to-finish (a perpetual annoyance with me and music documentaries), that bothered me less than usual because it was as much a cultural history as a musical one — since for Seeger the two are inseparable — and the film paid tribute to Seeger’s knack not only to get his audiences to sing along with him (I couldn’t help but recall Rick Burkhardt’s joke that the most frightening words you can hear at a folk-music concert was, “And now we’d like you to sing along with us”) but actually to get them to sound good doing it.
The film covered the history of the Weavers and their brief foray on top of the charts with “Goodnight, Irene” and “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” (when Charles and I had watched the documentary on the Weavers, Wasn’t That a Time!, I had noted the irony of seeing “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” and being flashed back to a time when Leftists liked Israel) before the blacklist did them in. It showed Seeger facing the House Un-American Activities Committee and refusing either to renounce his past in the Communist Party and name names or to take the Fifth Amendment (though his skill at evading the are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been question would have done a mainstream politician proud!), and the only part of the documentary that I thought was a whitewash was its failure to mention that in the 1939-1941 period, during the Soviet Union’s short-lived alliance with Nazi Germany, Seeger and Woody Guthrie both obediently went along with the Communist Party line and wrote and sang songs urging against any American involvement in the war, then abruptly changed course as the Party did when Hitler invaded Russia. (The American Masters program on Guthrie faced up to this one honestly, but that’s easier to do when you’re profiling someone long since dead than when your subject is still alive and you’re counting on his cooperation.) Aside from that defect, this was a fascinating show and particularly amusing in that the FBI actively enforced the blacklist against Seeger but allowed him to perform unmolested in camps where his audience would be children, figuring he couldn’t do any political harm to people whose ages were still in single digits. What they didn’t realize, of course, was that those kids would eventually grow up — and many of the kids who attended Seeger’s workshops in the 1950’s and learned the rudiments of banjo and guitar from him were teenagers and young adults in the 1960’s and started radical folk ensembles (including the New Lost City Ramblers) of their own. — 3/3/08
One was a PBS American Masters presentation called “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song,” a 2007 documentary that apparently got at least some theatrical screenings (it’s listed on imdb.com and a user commentary indicates this person had seen a public screening at which some audience members started singing along with Seeger). Directed by Jim Brown and featuring interviews with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Seeger collaborators Ronnie Gilbert and Arlo Guthrie (who interestingly did not talk about his dad’s work with Seeger but focused on his own relationship with him) and his family (there was a marvelous clip towards the end showing a recent Seeger concert at Carnegie Hall with Arlo Guthrie and Seeger’s grandson, Tio Seeger Rodriguez — and I couldn’t help but reflect on this man’s multi-racial background: a Latino father and white and Japanese grandparents!). It basically hit the high points of Seeger’s career, from his radicalization as a student at Harvard in the 1930’s (and before that his interesting encounter with folk music — his parents, musicologist Charles Seeger and violinist Constance Seeger, built their own trailer and decided to tour backwoods America playing classical recitals in small towns that had never before heard “good” music, and Charles Seeger heard the music of the mountain people in Appalachia and the South and decided it was as “good” as any of the classical pieces he and his wife had rather patronizingly sought to bring them) through his involvement in just about every Leftist political and social cause ever since. Though it didn’t show us Seeger singing any one song start-to-finish (a perpetual annoyance with me and music documentaries), that bothered me less than usual because it was as much a cultural history as a musical one — since for Seeger the two are inseparable — and the film paid tribute to Seeger’s knack not only to get his audiences to sing along with him (I couldn’t help but recall Rick Burkhardt’s joke that the most frightening words you can hear at a folk-music concert was, “And now we’d like you to sing along with us”) but actually to get them to sound good doing it.
The film covered the history of the Weavers and their brief foray on top of the charts with “Goodnight, Irene” and “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” (when Charles and I had watched the documentary on the Weavers, Wasn’t That a Time!, I had noted the irony of seeing “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” and being flashed back to a time when Leftists liked Israel) before the blacklist did them in. It showed Seeger facing the House Un-American Activities Committee and refusing either to renounce his past in the Communist Party and name names or to take the Fifth Amendment (though his skill at evading the are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been question would have done a mainstream politician proud!), and the only part of the documentary that I thought was a whitewash was its failure to mention that in the 1939-1941 period, during the Soviet Union’s short-lived alliance with Nazi Germany, Seeger and Woody Guthrie both obediently went along with the Communist Party line and wrote and sang songs urging against any American involvement in the war, then abruptly changed course as the Party did when Hitler invaded Russia. (The American Masters program on Guthrie faced up to this one honestly, but that’s easier to do when you’re profiling someone long since dead than when your subject is still alive and you’re counting on his cooperation.) Aside from that defect, this was a fascinating show and particularly amusing in that the FBI actively enforced the blacklist against Seeger but allowed him to perform unmolested in camps where his audience would be children, figuring he couldn’t do any political harm to people whose ages were still in single digits. What they didn’t realize, of course, was that those kids would eventually grow up — and many of the kids who attended Seeger’s workshops in the 1950’s and learned the rudiments of banjo and guitar from him were teenagers and young adults in the 1960’s and started radical folk ensembles (including the New Lost City Ramblers) of their own. — 3/3/08
•••••
I watched the rerun of PBS’s American
Masters documentary “Pete Seeger: The
Power of Song,” originally made in 2007 and presented in 2008 but now
repurposed as a memorial to this extraordinary singer, activist and human being
since his death January 27, 2014 at the age of 94. I’d reviewed my previous
notes on the film the night before and I reacted to it pretty similarly, but a
bit differently, this time around. I’m still upset at the whitewashing of the one point in
Seeger’s career at which he compromised in a way I find morally offensive — the
two years during which, as an American Communist (he was a CPUSA member from
1933 to 1949, something he courageously refused to talk about before the House
Un-American Activities Committee but did speak publicly about years later, when it really didn’t matter to his
career or his reputation one way or the other), he backed away from his
principled opposition to fascism and went along with the CPUSA’s “line” during
the two years of the Soviet Union’s uncertain alliance with Nazi Germany that
the war was an imperialist conspiracy and the U.S. should stay out of it. I’m
not as upset at that one lapse in
Seeger’s principles as I was the first time I watched this program — not after
I’ve heard the album Songs for John Doe, Seeger’s recording debut, the pacifist and isolationist album the
Almanac Singers, Seeger’s first group, recorded in May 1941 (just before Hitler
stabbed his erstwhile ally in the back and invaded the Soviet Union, propelling
the U.S.S.R. onto the other side of the war). Despite the uncomfortable (to say
the least!) motivation of this album, its central critique — that wars, all wars, are ways for the ruling class to profit and
everyone else to shed their blood to make the 1 percent richer — is right-on,
and the songs themselves (especially the incendiary “Plow Under,” which I
suspect is the edgiest and nastiest
political song ever written until the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” 36
years later) stand up as honest and emotionally intense attacks on war,
imperialism, capitalism and the nexus between them. At the same time the
Almanacs’ last album, Dear
Mr. President (recorded in 1942, not only
after the German attack on the Soviet Union but also after Pearl Harbor and the
CIO’s controversial decision to order its unions not to strike “for the duration”), almost seems like an
apology for Songs for John Doe —
particularly the direct attacks on both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in the
song “Ballad of October 16” (the date is October 16, 1940, the day FDR signed
America’s first peacetime draft law). This time around the final song really
did seem like an elegy, and the most powerful aspect of the movie was the way
it seemed like the struggles keep repeating themselves — not only the political
struggles (the film included a brief interview with Natalie Maines of the Dixie
Chicks — whose career wasn’t quite as thoroughly destroyed as the Weavers’ had
been a half-century earlier when she made her famous comment about how she was
embarrassed to be from the same state as President Bush, but her records got
pulled from radio stations and many of her fans turned against her) but the
musical ones.
After having researched Seeger’s life and the career of the
Almanac Singers for a couple of radio programs, and having read that one of the
Almanacs’ biggest departures from showbiz orthodoxy of the day was performing
in street clothes instead of tailored suits for the men and fancy gowns for the
women, it was startling indeed to see a TV clip of the Weavers, Seeger’s second
group, in full cry doing “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” with Seeger and the other male
members of the group, Lee Hays (co-writer with Seeger of the anthemic “If I Had
a Hammer” — and a huge man, built like a football player — we tend to think of
all male folksingers as either scrawny tall guys like Seeger or scrawny short
guys like Bob Dylan) and Fred Hellerman, in tailored suits and the one woman,
Ronnie Gilbert, in a fancy gown. (Also, is it heresy or can I get away with saying
that, purely as a voice, Gilbert
outsang the rest of the Weavers, including Seeger? Had the Weavers’ career not
been interrupted by the blacklist, one could readily imagine Ronnie Gilbert
becoming a major solo star in the 1950’s much the way Janis Joplin did at the
end of the 1960’s after leaving the group she started with but within which she could not be
contained.) As I’ve noted elsewhere, the “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” clip (which
features Seeger singing a chorus in Hebrew) is also a souvenir of the long-ago
days when Leftists liked Israel —
this was the time when the Labor Party was ruling and the kibbutzim were being organized, and a lot of Leftists in the
U.S. and western Europe were hoping Israel would be the place where all the
people persecuted for both being
Jewish and being Left would come together and build the democratic socialist
paradise that would answer the evils of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It was interesting to
see Seeger in various live clips at different times of his career — I remember
when I saw him at the 1966 Berkeley Folk Festival he was already considered an elder statesman of folk music, and
politically aware folk music in particular, and I’d have been flabbergasted if
anyone had told me he still had another 48 years to live (and sing) and he’d
outlast some of the major talents who came along in his wake, including Tim
Buckley and the brilliant Phil Ochs.
Charles said one of the things he most admired about Seeger was his ability to get his
audiences to sing along as he performed — a point made in this movie (they even
show a clip showing him joke about the few members of his audience who weren’t joining in as a way of putting peer pressure on them
to get with the program), which argues that Seeger saw singing as a participatory
sport, something you actually did yourself as you worked and went about the
daily business of life instead of something you paid other people (either
through concert tickets, record purchases or buying a radio or TV) to do for
you. And though Seeger had access to enough of a network of small record
companies that he didn’t quite have to do the D.I.Y. thing to get his voice on
records the way the punks did later (the real pioneer of the artist-owned
D.I.Y. record label was avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra), he did do D.I.Y. songbooks and in some respects Seeger’s
entire life was D.I.Y. Unable to buy a home in New York City in the late 1940’s
for his wife and their kids (he had his family so quickly this documentary
suggests the song “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” was autobiographical), he scraped
together what cash he could, bought some farmland in upstate New York and built
his house himself. He used that home as his base of operations for the rest of
his life — and one reason he got as heavily into environmental issues as he did
(at a time when most of the Left regarded “conservation” as too safe and
mainstream an issue for them to worry about) was that his land sat on the bank
of the Hudson River and he watched in horror as every year the river got more
polluted until the federal government actually declared it, in essence, a toxic
free-fire zone. R.I.P., Pete Seeger, though he’s one of those people (like his
great predecessor and role model, Joe Hill) who will remain alive in spirit as
long as the human race survives and as long as there are people in it fighting
for justice, equal rights, a fair distribution of wealth and income, a livable
and thriving environment and an end to the scourge of war. — 2/2/14
A Man Called God (Pea Jays, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
A Man Called God is a remarkable movie that has its roots in the 1970’s in the careers of two men: Blaxploitation actor Christopher St. John and his son Kristoff. Christopher’s best-known credit is probably as the leader of the “Lummumbas,” the Black nationalist group who work with Black detective John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Black businessman in the original 1971 Shaft. He was married to a white actress and had a son, Kristoff; then they broke up and he married another white actress, Maria, and the couple raised Kristoff. In 1972 Christopher St. John wrote, produced, directed and starred in Top of the Heap, about a Black police officer who harbored a Walter Mitty-esque dream to be the first African-American to become an astronaut and visit the moon — A Man Called God contains a film clip from this which suggests it might be a movie worth seeing — only he got a reputation in Hollywood as a troublemaker and got blacklisted (at least that’s what his son says in the narration to A Man Called God; the usual legend is that the formal blacklist was over by 1972 but it’s entirely possible that the underground blacklists, the subtle don’t-hire lists that had circulated in Hollywood for decades, did in the elder St. John’s career). At loose ends, Christopher and Maria St. John drifted into an involvement with Eastern religion and eventually became devotees of a guru named Sathya Sai Baba.
For anyone whose mental image of an Indian guru is an old guy with long hair and an unkempt beard — the appearance of Paramhansa Yogananda, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Meher Baba and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh — the first sight of Sai Baba in this movie is going to be startling: he was baby-faced, clean-shaven and, quite frankly, looked more African than Indian: he had a broad nose and his hair was in a tall “natural.” He always dressed in an orange robe — at least during his public appearances — and he taught what a writer for Creem magazine, covering the movement of Guru Maharaj Ji (the teenage guru who briefly emerged in the early 1970’s being promoted by his mother, who later fired him and replaced him with his elder brother; the reason a rock magazine like Creem was interested in him was that part of his entourage was a promising young rock musician named Freddie Mercury, who later became the lead singer and one of the two principal songwriters for Queen), called “the usual Hindu-based snake oil.” Actually, though its roots were clearly in Hinduism (which is, after all, the oldest of the world’s religions with a current mass following), Sai Baba claimed to be synthesizing all the world’s major religions in his teachings. He also — and this is where the title of the movie comes from — literally claimed to be God on Earth and to have (presumably in a previous incarnation) fathered Jesus Christ. Christopher and Maria St. John got so involved in Sai Baba’s organization that they ended up living in his main ashram in Puttaparthi, India — the tiny village where Sai Baba had been born and which turned into a major religious center as his movement grew. Because he had moviemaking experience, Christopher St. John was hired by Sai Baba to make a documentary film that would hopefully recruit more people to the movement. He brought filmmaking equipment and shot many of the activities around the compound until he was abruptly ordered to leave — A Man Called God starts out with his being thrown out of the ashram, hints at dark secrets the St. Johns had found out about the guru that made him want to get rid of them, and the rest of the film describes the story of their relationship with the movement.
The bulk of the film consists of the footage Christopher St. John shot during his months at the ashram, which came to an abrupt end right after Sai Baba’s elaborate 55th birthday celebration in November 1980; when Sai Baba threw him out he demanded that St. John leave all his film behind, but in a daring escape his son (who co-wrote the script with Marc Clebanoff and delivers the narration in first-person) compared to the film Midnight Express, the elder St. John got the film out of India with him and resettled in Hollywood — where the footage sat for over two decades until his son finally hit on the idea of making a movie out of it and telling his own tale of his life in the ashram and how and why it ended. Kristoff St. John and Marc Clebanoff (who’s credited on the postcard announcing the film merely as co-editor but clearly had a key role in writing the script and working out the film’s overall structure) build a quite good suspense story out of the experience and his dad’s old footage (it’s because virtually everything we see was shot by Christopher St. John that he is officially credited as director, even though the film’s IMDb.com page lists Kristoff as the director). At first they show the positive aspects of Sai Baba’s movement, including the enormous amount of money they put into hospital construction and social improvements around India in general and Puttaparthi in particular — for once, you think, one of these gurus actually shows a sign of giving a damn about the grinding poverty afflicting much of the human race and especially much of his home country — and it’s only later that Kristoff and Clebanoff start dropping hints of the darker side of the story. Kristoff, who in the old footage is shown wearing Indian shirts and a “natural” of his own that makes him look more like Sai Baba’s son than Christopher St. John’s, recalls how dazzled he was by Sai Baba’s purported power to materialize objects, including rings, medallions and sacred vibhuti ash, out of thin air. As a boy in Sai Baba’s ashram, Kristoff was jazzed when Sai Baba gave him a silver medallion he had supposedly created out of thin air; only years later, after his and his family’s disillusionment, did Kristoff realize that this was a simple sleight-of-hand trick that any stage magician could do (which reminded me of Harry Houdini’s famous campaign against phony spiritualists, and in particular the $10,000 reward he offered to any spiritualist or medium who could do something Houdini could not duplicate himself with his skills as a stage magician — needless to say, nobody ever collected).Things got worse as hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from India but also from all over the world, thronged the ashram for the three weeks of celebration before Sai Baba’s birthday in 1980 — and Christopher St. John, with his film credits as both actor and director, was ordered to direct a play about Jesus Christ (Sai Baba’s son, remember? At least to the true believers!).
Though Kristoff recalls that there were certain parts of the ashram he and his crew were not allowed to film, they did get to record one of the rehearsals for this play — the scene in which Jesus is throwing the moneylenders out of the Temple (you remember) — which looks as wretched as you’d expect given that he was working with a nonprofessional cast and an awfully stiff script (the film hints, though it doesn’t come right out and say, that Sai Baba wrote it himself). Around this time [spoiler alert!] someone else, a pre-pubescent boy, came to Kristoff with a story that Sai Baba had lured him into his private room and, under the guise of doing a “purification” ritual called “genital oiling,” jacked him off and forced him to suck the guru’s cock. Kristoff believed it instantly because Sai Baba had similarly molested him, and after it was over had sworn him to secrecy and told him never to tell anyone, even his parents. As narrated on screen, the molestations didn’t sound all that different from the sorts of things Roman Catholic priests had been doing during all those long years that even the priests who weren’t molesting kids were covering for those who did, but there’s a difference between a pedophile who’s part of a hierarchy that’s supposed to be supervising him and making sure these things don’t happen (or are dealt with properly, quickly and definitively when they do) and a pedophile who’s also the unchallenged head of a religious movement with millions of followers worldwide who literally think he’s God. Indeed, A Man Called God opens with a montage of similarly destructive cult leaders, including Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate, and Bhagwan — as well as some like David Koresh whose transgressions against his followers included sexual exploitation. (Kristoff missed one particularly intriguing parallel: Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Mormon Church, who when he wanted a younger, hotter wife than the one he’d married legally simply declared that it was the new doctrine of his church that men not only could but should marry more than one wife.) More recently there’s been the Vanity Fair exposé of Bikram Chaudhury, founder of the Bikram school of yoga, who didn’t go after kids but did lure 20-something women to his movement with promises of training them to be yoga teachers and then, at least according to the Vanity Fair article, got them alone and out-and-out raped them.
Though Sai Baba died in 2011 (Kristoff, leading a Q&A after the screening, was asked if he and his dad deliberately waited until the guru died before starting the film about him, but he said they had already got it underway while Sai Baba was still alive, albeit in ill health and clearly on his way out), his pedophile exploits did get exposed during his lifetime in TV documentaries produced by the public broadcasting company of Denmark in 2002 and the BBC in 2004. The BBC film, The Secret Swami, claimed that there were hundreds of boys who had been victimized by Sai Baba, but that they and their parents wouldn’t complain to the law because so many of the most powerful people in India were members of Sai Baba’s faith. Kristoff and Clebanoff include clips from The Secret Swami in A Man Called God, including a chilling interview the BBC did with one of Sai Baba’s most powerful non-Indian devotees, Isaac Tigrett, founder and owner of the Hard Rock Café and House of Blues chains. (Ironically, Kristoff was staying at a Hard Rock Inn during his trip to San Diego to show his movie.) Tigrett is shown being asked if his attitude towards Sai Baba would change if it was established that the guru was a pedophile who was regularly molesting pre-pubescent boys — and Tigrett replied that it wouldn’t make a difference because Sai Baba had done so much good in the world that compared to that, even if he had molested kids, it wouldn’t matter to him. A Man Called God had a definite streak of homophobia in that it suggested that Sai Baba had relationships with adult men as well, and Kristoff’s writing seemed to reflect a view that this was part of the same moral evil that caused the guru to molest him and other boys at the Puttaparthi ashram — he doesn’t come right out and say that Sai Baba was a bad man because he was Gay, but the hint was there and it was strong enough to annoy me. In the where-are-they-now epilogue, Kristoff tells the story of Satyajit Sailan, who after Sai Baba’s death filed a lawsuit challenging the claims of Baba’s relatives on his $9 billion estate and saying that the guru had meant it to be left in trust and administered by Sailan, whom Kristoff claims was not only Baba’s aide but also his boyfriend.
Though I could have wished for a bit more material in A Man Called God about what attracted people in general and the St. Johns in particular to Baba’s cult (to me that’s the most interesting aspect of cult stories: why do people get involved in these things in the first place; and once they’re involved, how do they rationalize staying in even as they learn some of the cult’s darker secrets?), the film as it stands is a chilling tale which alleges that Sai Baba’s crimes didn’t stop at raping boys; he also had his security people (some of whom are shown in the film in rather grainy still photos — and they look as fearsome and intimidating as you’d expect) simply murder people who were in his way, confident that his connections with some of the most powerful people in India would ensure that these crimes would never even be investigated, much less prosecuted. There’s also a sense of tragedy in that Maria St. John was so convinced that Sai Baba was a righteous man and a legitimate spiritual leader that she not only refused to believe her stepson’s tale that the guru had molested him (would she have been more likely to believe him if he’d been her flesh-and-blood son instead of her stepson, I wondered), and when her husband and stepson were thrown out she refused to leave, camping out on the outside of the ashram, pleading for an audience with Baba and leaving only when those hefty, intimidating security guards told her to get out or they’d do her bodily harm. Like most cult stories, A Man Called God is another illustration of how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely; once you’re surrounded by people who literally believe you’re a prophet, or a god, or some other sort of “special” person (the entourages of celebrities, especially notoriously reclusive ones like Michael Jackson, are not that different from the literal cult shown in this film), and who have essentially granted you the power of life and death over them, they will do just about anything to stay in your good graces — and you’d have to be an extraordinarily humble and saintly human being not to take advantage of that for some sinister purpose or another: financial, ideological (there’s a sequence in the Baba camp that was strikingly like the scenes of the tents in Nuremberg where people were staying for the Nazi rally in Triumph of the Will, and later Kristoff and Clebanoff use a clip from Triumph of Hitler being driven in triumph, in the literal sense with which the Romans used the word, through the city’s streets) or sexual.
A Man Called God is a remarkable movie that has its roots in the 1970’s in the careers of two men: Blaxploitation actor Christopher St. John and his son Kristoff. Christopher’s best-known credit is probably as the leader of the “Lummumbas,” the Black nationalist group who work with Black detective John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Black businessman in the original 1971 Shaft. He was married to a white actress and had a son, Kristoff; then they broke up and he married another white actress, Maria, and the couple raised Kristoff. In 1972 Christopher St. John wrote, produced, directed and starred in Top of the Heap, about a Black police officer who harbored a Walter Mitty-esque dream to be the first African-American to become an astronaut and visit the moon — A Man Called God contains a film clip from this which suggests it might be a movie worth seeing — only he got a reputation in Hollywood as a troublemaker and got blacklisted (at least that’s what his son says in the narration to A Man Called God; the usual legend is that the formal blacklist was over by 1972 but it’s entirely possible that the underground blacklists, the subtle don’t-hire lists that had circulated in Hollywood for decades, did in the elder St. John’s career). At loose ends, Christopher and Maria St. John drifted into an involvement with Eastern religion and eventually became devotees of a guru named Sathya Sai Baba.
For anyone whose mental image of an Indian guru is an old guy with long hair and an unkempt beard — the appearance of Paramhansa Yogananda, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Meher Baba and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh — the first sight of Sai Baba in this movie is going to be startling: he was baby-faced, clean-shaven and, quite frankly, looked more African than Indian: he had a broad nose and his hair was in a tall “natural.” He always dressed in an orange robe — at least during his public appearances — and he taught what a writer for Creem magazine, covering the movement of Guru Maharaj Ji (the teenage guru who briefly emerged in the early 1970’s being promoted by his mother, who later fired him and replaced him with his elder brother; the reason a rock magazine like Creem was interested in him was that part of his entourage was a promising young rock musician named Freddie Mercury, who later became the lead singer and one of the two principal songwriters for Queen), called “the usual Hindu-based snake oil.” Actually, though its roots were clearly in Hinduism (which is, after all, the oldest of the world’s religions with a current mass following), Sai Baba claimed to be synthesizing all the world’s major religions in his teachings. He also — and this is where the title of the movie comes from — literally claimed to be God on Earth and to have (presumably in a previous incarnation) fathered Jesus Christ. Christopher and Maria St. John got so involved in Sai Baba’s organization that they ended up living in his main ashram in Puttaparthi, India — the tiny village where Sai Baba had been born and which turned into a major religious center as his movement grew. Because he had moviemaking experience, Christopher St. John was hired by Sai Baba to make a documentary film that would hopefully recruit more people to the movement. He brought filmmaking equipment and shot many of the activities around the compound until he was abruptly ordered to leave — A Man Called God starts out with his being thrown out of the ashram, hints at dark secrets the St. Johns had found out about the guru that made him want to get rid of them, and the rest of the film describes the story of their relationship with the movement.
The bulk of the film consists of the footage Christopher St. John shot during his months at the ashram, which came to an abrupt end right after Sai Baba’s elaborate 55th birthday celebration in November 1980; when Sai Baba threw him out he demanded that St. John leave all his film behind, but in a daring escape his son (who co-wrote the script with Marc Clebanoff and delivers the narration in first-person) compared to the film Midnight Express, the elder St. John got the film out of India with him and resettled in Hollywood — where the footage sat for over two decades until his son finally hit on the idea of making a movie out of it and telling his own tale of his life in the ashram and how and why it ended. Kristoff St. John and Marc Clebanoff (who’s credited on the postcard announcing the film merely as co-editor but clearly had a key role in writing the script and working out the film’s overall structure) build a quite good suspense story out of the experience and his dad’s old footage (it’s because virtually everything we see was shot by Christopher St. John that he is officially credited as director, even though the film’s IMDb.com page lists Kristoff as the director). At first they show the positive aspects of Sai Baba’s movement, including the enormous amount of money they put into hospital construction and social improvements around India in general and Puttaparthi in particular — for once, you think, one of these gurus actually shows a sign of giving a damn about the grinding poverty afflicting much of the human race and especially much of his home country — and it’s only later that Kristoff and Clebanoff start dropping hints of the darker side of the story. Kristoff, who in the old footage is shown wearing Indian shirts and a “natural” of his own that makes him look more like Sai Baba’s son than Christopher St. John’s, recalls how dazzled he was by Sai Baba’s purported power to materialize objects, including rings, medallions and sacred vibhuti ash, out of thin air. As a boy in Sai Baba’s ashram, Kristoff was jazzed when Sai Baba gave him a silver medallion he had supposedly created out of thin air; only years later, after his and his family’s disillusionment, did Kristoff realize that this was a simple sleight-of-hand trick that any stage magician could do (which reminded me of Harry Houdini’s famous campaign against phony spiritualists, and in particular the $10,000 reward he offered to any spiritualist or medium who could do something Houdini could not duplicate himself with his skills as a stage magician — needless to say, nobody ever collected).Things got worse as hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from India but also from all over the world, thronged the ashram for the three weeks of celebration before Sai Baba’s birthday in 1980 — and Christopher St. John, with his film credits as both actor and director, was ordered to direct a play about Jesus Christ (Sai Baba’s son, remember? At least to the true believers!).
Though Kristoff recalls that there were certain parts of the ashram he and his crew were not allowed to film, they did get to record one of the rehearsals for this play — the scene in which Jesus is throwing the moneylenders out of the Temple (you remember) — which looks as wretched as you’d expect given that he was working with a nonprofessional cast and an awfully stiff script (the film hints, though it doesn’t come right out and say, that Sai Baba wrote it himself). Around this time [spoiler alert!] someone else, a pre-pubescent boy, came to Kristoff with a story that Sai Baba had lured him into his private room and, under the guise of doing a “purification” ritual called “genital oiling,” jacked him off and forced him to suck the guru’s cock. Kristoff believed it instantly because Sai Baba had similarly molested him, and after it was over had sworn him to secrecy and told him never to tell anyone, even his parents. As narrated on screen, the molestations didn’t sound all that different from the sorts of things Roman Catholic priests had been doing during all those long years that even the priests who weren’t molesting kids were covering for those who did, but there’s a difference between a pedophile who’s part of a hierarchy that’s supposed to be supervising him and making sure these things don’t happen (or are dealt with properly, quickly and definitively when they do) and a pedophile who’s also the unchallenged head of a religious movement with millions of followers worldwide who literally think he’s God. Indeed, A Man Called God opens with a montage of similarly destructive cult leaders, including Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate, and Bhagwan — as well as some like David Koresh whose transgressions against his followers included sexual exploitation. (Kristoff missed one particularly intriguing parallel: Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Mormon Church, who when he wanted a younger, hotter wife than the one he’d married legally simply declared that it was the new doctrine of his church that men not only could but should marry more than one wife.) More recently there’s been the Vanity Fair exposé of Bikram Chaudhury, founder of the Bikram school of yoga, who didn’t go after kids but did lure 20-something women to his movement with promises of training them to be yoga teachers and then, at least according to the Vanity Fair article, got them alone and out-and-out raped them.
Though Sai Baba died in 2011 (Kristoff, leading a Q&A after the screening, was asked if he and his dad deliberately waited until the guru died before starting the film about him, but he said they had already got it underway while Sai Baba was still alive, albeit in ill health and clearly on his way out), his pedophile exploits did get exposed during his lifetime in TV documentaries produced by the public broadcasting company of Denmark in 2002 and the BBC in 2004. The BBC film, The Secret Swami, claimed that there were hundreds of boys who had been victimized by Sai Baba, but that they and their parents wouldn’t complain to the law because so many of the most powerful people in India were members of Sai Baba’s faith. Kristoff and Clebanoff include clips from The Secret Swami in A Man Called God, including a chilling interview the BBC did with one of Sai Baba’s most powerful non-Indian devotees, Isaac Tigrett, founder and owner of the Hard Rock Café and House of Blues chains. (Ironically, Kristoff was staying at a Hard Rock Inn during his trip to San Diego to show his movie.) Tigrett is shown being asked if his attitude towards Sai Baba would change if it was established that the guru was a pedophile who was regularly molesting pre-pubescent boys — and Tigrett replied that it wouldn’t make a difference because Sai Baba had done so much good in the world that compared to that, even if he had molested kids, it wouldn’t matter to him. A Man Called God had a definite streak of homophobia in that it suggested that Sai Baba had relationships with adult men as well, and Kristoff’s writing seemed to reflect a view that this was part of the same moral evil that caused the guru to molest him and other boys at the Puttaparthi ashram — he doesn’t come right out and say that Sai Baba was a bad man because he was Gay, but the hint was there and it was strong enough to annoy me. In the where-are-they-now epilogue, Kristoff tells the story of Satyajit Sailan, who after Sai Baba’s death filed a lawsuit challenging the claims of Baba’s relatives on his $9 billion estate and saying that the guru had meant it to be left in trust and administered by Sailan, whom Kristoff claims was not only Baba’s aide but also his boyfriend.
Though I could have wished for a bit more material in A Man Called God about what attracted people in general and the St. Johns in particular to Baba’s cult (to me that’s the most interesting aspect of cult stories: why do people get involved in these things in the first place; and once they’re involved, how do they rationalize staying in even as they learn some of the cult’s darker secrets?), the film as it stands is a chilling tale which alleges that Sai Baba’s crimes didn’t stop at raping boys; he also had his security people (some of whom are shown in the film in rather grainy still photos — and they look as fearsome and intimidating as you’d expect) simply murder people who were in his way, confident that his connections with some of the most powerful people in India would ensure that these crimes would never even be investigated, much less prosecuted. There’s also a sense of tragedy in that Maria St. John was so convinced that Sai Baba was a righteous man and a legitimate spiritual leader that she not only refused to believe her stepson’s tale that the guru had molested him (would she have been more likely to believe him if he’d been her flesh-and-blood son instead of her stepson, I wondered), and when her husband and stepson were thrown out she refused to leave, camping out on the outside of the ashram, pleading for an audience with Baba and leaving only when those hefty, intimidating security guards told her to get out or they’d do her bodily harm. Like most cult stories, A Man Called God is another illustration of how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely; once you’re surrounded by people who literally believe you’re a prophet, or a god, or some other sort of “special” person (the entourages of celebrities, especially notoriously reclusive ones like Michael Jackson, are not that different from the literal cult shown in this film), and who have essentially granted you the power of life and death over them, they will do just about anything to stay in your good graces — and you’d have to be an extraordinarily humble and saintly human being not to take advantage of that for some sinister purpose or another: financial, ideological (there’s a sequence in the Baba camp that was strikingly like the scenes of the tents in Nuremberg where people were staying for the Nazi rally in Triumph of the Will, and later Kristoff and Clebanoff use a clip from Triumph of Hitler being driven in triumph, in the literal sense with which the Romans used the word, through the city’s streets) or sexual.
Monday, January 27, 2014
56th Annual Grammy Awards (National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences/CBS, 1/26/14)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The 56th Annual Grammy Awards were the usual preposterous mix of genuinely moving music and insane spectacle — sometimes simultaneously; I love Pink’s music (I think she’s a genuinely powerful, emotional singer) but I don’t really need the Cirque du Soleil stuff she feels she has to do as part of her act. What’s more, it was obvious that during her main song, “Get Up and Try” (on a lot of these numbers I’m just guessing at the titles), she was so busy maintaining her balance on that acrobatic swing that she wasn’t actually singing but just miming to her record. The show suffered from the usual pyrotechnics (actual as well as figurative) and enough dry ice to have kept your average disco in business for a decade, though ironically the most emotionally powerful performances came early on and were the least “produced.” Lorde, a singer from New Zealand, did her hit song “Royals” (an ironic title since the piece is about twenty-somethings with either no jobs or nothing jobs, aimless lives and — advancement opportunities? Are you kidding?) dressed in a black pantsuit and a wig that made her look like the actress Carolyn Jones (she was perched midway between Jones’ “beatnik” roles in 1950’s movies and her Morticia Addams in the 1960’s TV series The Addams Family), and both her restrained performance and the song itself added her to that quirky list of female singer-songwriters I especially like: Melanie, Sinéad O’Connor, Tori Amos and Neko Case. (She won Song of the Year for “Royals” even though she wasn’t even nominated for either Record or Album of the Year — and I was taken aback at her lack of a songwriting credit on “Royals” until she came up to accept the award along with her male partner — whom I suspect is her boyfriend as well — and I realized that, like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and the later Elvis Costello, she’d taken her songwriting credit under her real name.)
Right after her Hunter Hayes did an anti-bullying anthem called “Invisible” and, though the song was a bit too carefully crafted (it made me think he wrote it for an It Gets Better video), he sang it with real righteous emotion and white-boy soul. The show went downhill from there but still had its moments; the opening song was by Beyoncé and her current husband Jay-Z (a real Beauty and the Beast pairing there!) and was from her new album, released too late to be eligible (which means we’ll probably be hearing — and seeing — more of it next year) and later there was a pairing of Robin Thicke (yet another white soul wanna-be!) with the aging jazz-rock band Chicago on three of Chicago’s nostalgia-inducing hits (“Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?,” “Beginnings” and “Saturday in the Park”) and something called (I think) “Good Girl” that must have been Thicke’s own song. Keith Urban did a nice country song about meeting his girlfriend in the back of a cop car when they’d both been arrested, John Legend did an O.K. pop-soul number, Taylor Swift turned in a surprisingly impassioned performance on something I suspect was called “All Too Well,” and after Pink’s solo number in which she was whirled around in space she came off the swing for a duet with Nate Roose of the band fun. (lower-case and with the period at the end) in which she was clearly singing live and acquitting herself better than she’d done during her acrobatic act.
The show included a semi-tribute to the Beatles — the two surviving ones, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, both came on; Ringo did his 1973 hit “Photograph” (behind him on stage they projected, you guessed it, photographs of the Beatles during their glory years), though he only sang, not drummed; and later he joined Paul not for a remake of a Beatles classic but a new song off Paul’s current album, “Queenie Eye” from New. After “Photograph” rapper Kendrick Lamar — who lost the rap categories to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, a white duo from Seattle who made it with a song called “Same Love” that endorsed same-sex marriage (how nice, for a change, to hear a rap song about Gays getting married instead of Gays getting Queer-bashed!!!!!) — joined a band called Imagine Dragons for yet another one of those annoying “Grammy moment” pairings (I’d probably like Imagine Dragons’ song if I didn’t have to hear it with a typical “street” rap called “Duck” — Lamar is from Compton and his song, if you can call it that, is solidly in the N.W.A. tradition about street violence, though at least it’s more about surviving it than committing it) and then Kacey Musgraves, the surprise winner in the country awards, doing a song called “Follow Your Arrow” that was about doing what you want — including kissing a member of your own gender “if that’s what you’re into” — and actually had more of a traditional country sound, complete with a pedal steel guitar, than most of the “country” out there today. (The morning of the Grammy Awards the Los Angeles Times Art & Music section ran a tendentious article suggesting that rock is dead because so few guitar-driven songs are making the charts these days, and maybe it’s time to put it out of its misery — I’ve got news for that writer: rock isn’t dead, it’s just taken on a Southern accent and is masquerading as “country.” Most of the “country” nominees were what in the 1970’s we used to call “Southern rock” and owe more to Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers than Hank Williams or Johnny Cash.) One of the big “tribute” numbers combined recent “country” star Blake Shelton to some of the surviving 1970’s “Outlaws” — Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard — on a medley of “Highwayman,” “Okie from Muskogee” (a song I can remember being “fighting words” in 1969 — ironically Haggard himself has retreated from its Right-wing politics; his recent works have featured songs about safer sex as well as blasts against talk radio and Bush’s war in Iraq) and “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”
Then there came a number by Daft Punk, who despite their name have nothing to do with punk as the term has ever been defined; rather, they’re an electronic-dance duo from France who perform in robot costumes, complete with high-tech helmets that look like something an NFL contractee is going to come up with any day now to try to minimize concussion injuries from football. With their white helmets and their white suits, I got the impression they called themselves “Daft Punk” only because “Crash Test Dummies” was already taken. For their most recent album, Random Access Memories (a neat pun on nostalgia and computerese), they dragged in some old-line producers like Nile Rodgers and rented time in studios from the 1970’s to achieve a nostalgic glow on their album, so it would sound more “crafted” that the dance-music records people spit out on computers these days. Since the people in the robot suits don’t talk (and since we can’t see their mouths it’s anybody’s guess whether they actually sing or, like Milli Vanilli — remember them? — they have professional “ghost singers” doing that for them), their spokesperson was their main producer, Pharrell Williams, dressed in a dorky-looking costume that was apparently supposed to make him look like a Mountie. Their performance last night of their big hit, “Get Lucky,” featured a guest appearance by Stevie Wonder, of all people, playing a chiclet-sized electronic keyboard and probably thinking, “Gee, I could write a much better song than this!” Then there was a performance by classical pianist Lang Lang — the one the American Record Guide once derisively called “Bang Bang” (I mentioned that to Charles and he quoted Liberace’s line, “I cry all the way to the bank” — appropriate because Lang Lang’s act last night was something I could readily have imagined Liberace doing) — sitting in with Metallica for a song called “One,” and Lang Lang’s heavy-metal pseudo-classical piano fit right in with Metallica’s lite-metal.
The Metallica guitarist was wearing a T-shirt of Lou Reed’s Transformer LP cover — the only references last night to Lou Reed’s passing was that and a reading by Jared Leto (an Academy Award nominee for playing a drag queen in Dallas Buyers’ Club) of the first verse of “Walk on the Wild Side.” I’d have appreciated a musical tribute to this monumental rock genius (but if they’d done one, it would probably have been a pachydermous tribute with a lot of unsuitable artists coming up and each doing a chorus of “Wild Side,” a great song but hardly representative of Reed’s best — indeed, despite the way critics savaged it at the time, including one reviewer who called Reed a “nasal-voiced sickie,” I think Reed’s album right after Transformer, Berlin, is his greatest work). Just before the Metallica number (and Metallica had a Lou Reed connection — they were his backup band on his last album, a two-CD rock opera based on Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays), there was an intriguing duet between Carole King and Sara Bareilles — King doing “Beautiful” and Bareilles doing “Brave” — and the show closed with an Everly Brothers tribute from Miranda Lambert and Billie Joe Armstrong (Charles savored the idea of a man who hit it big with a song about masturbation doing a tribute to an act which made rock sound “safe” for adult listeners!) and an ensemble performance by Queens of the Stone Age, Nine Inch Nails, Lindsay Buckingham and Dave Grohl (who’d been onstage with Paul McCartney earlier in the evening, accepting an award for the song he and Macca recorded with Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear — as I noted the last time this came up, who’d have thought that the artist who would take Kurt Cobain’s place in a Nirvana reunion would be, of all people, Paul McCartney?) on two forgettable songs from the Queens and Nails repertoires.
The other big news was that the independent white Seattle rap duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis not only won in the rap category over the usual creeps — Los Angeles Times critic Mikael (i hate that spelling of his first name!) Wood predictably sniffed at their win, calling them “distressingly sanctimonious” and saying the award should have gone to Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West (what is this between the L. A. Times music critics and Kanye West? Before Robert Hilburn retired, his praise of West was so fulsome that I wrote a letter to the editor, which they did not print, saying that any day now I expected to see an article in which Hilburn said he had personally witnessed Kanye West walk on water) or Drake. Well, I for one am glad that the rap award went to someone with a positive message who actually likes Queer people and thinks we ought to be able to marry each other, instead of the racist, sexist, Queer-hating, capitalism-loving reactionary “gangsta” crap that still dominates the rap (or “hip-hop," the euphemism you use for rap if you like it) genre. Macklemore and Lewis got to present their pro-marriage equality rap song in the context of a special event that was weird even by Grammy standards: they were introduced by Queen Latifah and performed as part of a grandiose spectacle that included Latifah, Trombone Shorty and a full horn section, Madonna (making her amends to the Queer community after the years she was married to anti-Queer British film director Guy Ritchie and, according to her Gay brother Christopher Ciccone, turned her back on us to please the new man in her life) — and a mass wedding of 33 couples, mostly male-female but quite a few male-male (I didn’t spot any female-female couples even though most of the stats on same-sex marriage show that Lesbian couples tying the knot outnumber Gay male ones 2 to 1) officiated by Queen Latifah herself. Charles joked that he would have liked to have had Queen Latifah officiate at our wedding, though I reminded him that the person we had (Rev. Gerald Green of the Unity Fellowship Church in San Diego) was at least an African-American who can sing.
Between the mass wedding, the endorsement of Macklemore’s and Kacey Musgraves’ pro-Queer songs with major awards and Hunter Hayes’ remarkably soulful performance (even though his song sounded more sanctimonious than Macklemore’s and Lewis’s did!), this was an awards show that definitely communicated a pro-Queer, anti-bashing, anti-bullying message and probably left any Right-wing Middle Americans watching it with yet more “evidence” that American culture is in decline because its culture artists are in headlong flight from “real American values.” Overall, this year’s Grammy Awards were the typical lumbering spectacle, but there were enough nice moments to make the whole show worthwhile — and I could definitely see myself buying Lorde’s, Hunter Hayes’ and Kacey Musgraves’ CD’s on the basis of what I heard last night!
The 56th Annual Grammy Awards were the usual preposterous mix of genuinely moving music and insane spectacle — sometimes simultaneously; I love Pink’s music (I think she’s a genuinely powerful, emotional singer) but I don’t really need the Cirque du Soleil stuff she feels she has to do as part of her act. What’s more, it was obvious that during her main song, “Get Up and Try” (on a lot of these numbers I’m just guessing at the titles), she was so busy maintaining her balance on that acrobatic swing that she wasn’t actually singing but just miming to her record. The show suffered from the usual pyrotechnics (actual as well as figurative) and enough dry ice to have kept your average disco in business for a decade, though ironically the most emotionally powerful performances came early on and were the least “produced.” Lorde, a singer from New Zealand, did her hit song “Royals” (an ironic title since the piece is about twenty-somethings with either no jobs or nothing jobs, aimless lives and — advancement opportunities? Are you kidding?) dressed in a black pantsuit and a wig that made her look like the actress Carolyn Jones (she was perched midway between Jones’ “beatnik” roles in 1950’s movies and her Morticia Addams in the 1960’s TV series The Addams Family), and both her restrained performance and the song itself added her to that quirky list of female singer-songwriters I especially like: Melanie, Sinéad O’Connor, Tori Amos and Neko Case. (She won Song of the Year for “Royals” even though she wasn’t even nominated for either Record or Album of the Year — and I was taken aback at her lack of a songwriting credit on “Royals” until she came up to accept the award along with her male partner — whom I suspect is her boyfriend as well — and I realized that, like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and the later Elvis Costello, she’d taken her songwriting credit under her real name.)
Right after her Hunter Hayes did an anti-bullying anthem called “Invisible” and, though the song was a bit too carefully crafted (it made me think he wrote it for an It Gets Better video), he sang it with real righteous emotion and white-boy soul. The show went downhill from there but still had its moments; the opening song was by Beyoncé and her current husband Jay-Z (a real Beauty and the Beast pairing there!) and was from her new album, released too late to be eligible (which means we’ll probably be hearing — and seeing — more of it next year) and later there was a pairing of Robin Thicke (yet another white soul wanna-be!) with the aging jazz-rock band Chicago on three of Chicago’s nostalgia-inducing hits (“Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?,” “Beginnings” and “Saturday in the Park”) and something called (I think) “Good Girl” that must have been Thicke’s own song. Keith Urban did a nice country song about meeting his girlfriend in the back of a cop car when they’d both been arrested, John Legend did an O.K. pop-soul number, Taylor Swift turned in a surprisingly impassioned performance on something I suspect was called “All Too Well,” and after Pink’s solo number in which she was whirled around in space she came off the swing for a duet with Nate Roose of the band fun. (lower-case and with the period at the end) in which she was clearly singing live and acquitting herself better than she’d done during her acrobatic act.
The show included a semi-tribute to the Beatles — the two surviving ones, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, both came on; Ringo did his 1973 hit “Photograph” (behind him on stage they projected, you guessed it, photographs of the Beatles during their glory years), though he only sang, not drummed; and later he joined Paul not for a remake of a Beatles classic but a new song off Paul’s current album, “Queenie Eye” from New. After “Photograph” rapper Kendrick Lamar — who lost the rap categories to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, a white duo from Seattle who made it with a song called “Same Love” that endorsed same-sex marriage (how nice, for a change, to hear a rap song about Gays getting married instead of Gays getting Queer-bashed!!!!!) — joined a band called Imagine Dragons for yet another one of those annoying “Grammy moment” pairings (I’d probably like Imagine Dragons’ song if I didn’t have to hear it with a typical “street” rap called “Duck” — Lamar is from Compton and his song, if you can call it that, is solidly in the N.W.A. tradition about street violence, though at least it’s more about surviving it than committing it) and then Kacey Musgraves, the surprise winner in the country awards, doing a song called “Follow Your Arrow” that was about doing what you want — including kissing a member of your own gender “if that’s what you’re into” — and actually had more of a traditional country sound, complete with a pedal steel guitar, than most of the “country” out there today. (The morning of the Grammy Awards the Los Angeles Times Art & Music section ran a tendentious article suggesting that rock is dead because so few guitar-driven songs are making the charts these days, and maybe it’s time to put it out of its misery — I’ve got news for that writer: rock isn’t dead, it’s just taken on a Southern accent and is masquerading as “country.” Most of the “country” nominees were what in the 1970’s we used to call “Southern rock” and owe more to Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers than Hank Williams or Johnny Cash.) One of the big “tribute” numbers combined recent “country” star Blake Shelton to some of the surviving 1970’s “Outlaws” — Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard — on a medley of “Highwayman,” “Okie from Muskogee” (a song I can remember being “fighting words” in 1969 — ironically Haggard himself has retreated from its Right-wing politics; his recent works have featured songs about safer sex as well as blasts against talk radio and Bush’s war in Iraq) and “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”
Then there came a number by Daft Punk, who despite their name have nothing to do with punk as the term has ever been defined; rather, they’re an electronic-dance duo from France who perform in robot costumes, complete with high-tech helmets that look like something an NFL contractee is going to come up with any day now to try to minimize concussion injuries from football. With their white helmets and their white suits, I got the impression they called themselves “Daft Punk” only because “Crash Test Dummies” was already taken. For their most recent album, Random Access Memories (a neat pun on nostalgia and computerese), they dragged in some old-line producers like Nile Rodgers and rented time in studios from the 1970’s to achieve a nostalgic glow on their album, so it would sound more “crafted” that the dance-music records people spit out on computers these days. Since the people in the robot suits don’t talk (and since we can’t see their mouths it’s anybody’s guess whether they actually sing or, like Milli Vanilli — remember them? — they have professional “ghost singers” doing that for them), their spokesperson was their main producer, Pharrell Williams, dressed in a dorky-looking costume that was apparently supposed to make him look like a Mountie. Their performance last night of their big hit, “Get Lucky,” featured a guest appearance by Stevie Wonder, of all people, playing a chiclet-sized electronic keyboard and probably thinking, “Gee, I could write a much better song than this!” Then there was a performance by classical pianist Lang Lang — the one the American Record Guide once derisively called “Bang Bang” (I mentioned that to Charles and he quoted Liberace’s line, “I cry all the way to the bank” — appropriate because Lang Lang’s act last night was something I could readily have imagined Liberace doing) — sitting in with Metallica for a song called “One,” and Lang Lang’s heavy-metal pseudo-classical piano fit right in with Metallica’s lite-metal.
The Metallica guitarist was wearing a T-shirt of Lou Reed’s Transformer LP cover — the only references last night to Lou Reed’s passing was that and a reading by Jared Leto (an Academy Award nominee for playing a drag queen in Dallas Buyers’ Club) of the first verse of “Walk on the Wild Side.” I’d have appreciated a musical tribute to this monumental rock genius (but if they’d done one, it would probably have been a pachydermous tribute with a lot of unsuitable artists coming up and each doing a chorus of “Wild Side,” a great song but hardly representative of Reed’s best — indeed, despite the way critics savaged it at the time, including one reviewer who called Reed a “nasal-voiced sickie,” I think Reed’s album right after Transformer, Berlin, is his greatest work). Just before the Metallica number (and Metallica had a Lou Reed connection — they were his backup band on his last album, a two-CD rock opera based on Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays), there was an intriguing duet between Carole King and Sara Bareilles — King doing “Beautiful” and Bareilles doing “Brave” — and the show closed with an Everly Brothers tribute from Miranda Lambert and Billie Joe Armstrong (Charles savored the idea of a man who hit it big with a song about masturbation doing a tribute to an act which made rock sound “safe” for adult listeners!) and an ensemble performance by Queens of the Stone Age, Nine Inch Nails, Lindsay Buckingham and Dave Grohl (who’d been onstage with Paul McCartney earlier in the evening, accepting an award for the song he and Macca recorded with Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear — as I noted the last time this came up, who’d have thought that the artist who would take Kurt Cobain’s place in a Nirvana reunion would be, of all people, Paul McCartney?) on two forgettable songs from the Queens and Nails repertoires.
The other big news was that the independent white Seattle rap duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis not only won in the rap category over the usual creeps — Los Angeles Times critic Mikael (i hate that spelling of his first name!) Wood predictably sniffed at their win, calling them “distressingly sanctimonious” and saying the award should have gone to Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West (what is this between the L. A. Times music critics and Kanye West? Before Robert Hilburn retired, his praise of West was so fulsome that I wrote a letter to the editor, which they did not print, saying that any day now I expected to see an article in which Hilburn said he had personally witnessed Kanye West walk on water) or Drake. Well, I for one am glad that the rap award went to someone with a positive message who actually likes Queer people and thinks we ought to be able to marry each other, instead of the racist, sexist, Queer-hating, capitalism-loving reactionary “gangsta” crap that still dominates the rap (or “hip-hop," the euphemism you use for rap if you like it) genre. Macklemore and Lewis got to present their pro-marriage equality rap song in the context of a special event that was weird even by Grammy standards: they were introduced by Queen Latifah and performed as part of a grandiose spectacle that included Latifah, Trombone Shorty and a full horn section, Madonna (making her amends to the Queer community after the years she was married to anti-Queer British film director Guy Ritchie and, according to her Gay brother Christopher Ciccone, turned her back on us to please the new man in her life) — and a mass wedding of 33 couples, mostly male-female but quite a few male-male (I didn’t spot any female-female couples even though most of the stats on same-sex marriage show that Lesbian couples tying the knot outnumber Gay male ones 2 to 1) officiated by Queen Latifah herself. Charles joked that he would have liked to have had Queen Latifah officiate at our wedding, though I reminded him that the person we had (Rev. Gerald Green of the Unity Fellowship Church in San Diego) was at least an African-American who can sing.
Between the mass wedding, the endorsement of Macklemore’s and Kacey Musgraves’ pro-Queer songs with major awards and Hunter Hayes’ remarkably soulful performance (even though his song sounded more sanctimonious than Macklemore’s and Lewis’s did!), this was an awards show that definitely communicated a pro-Queer, anti-bashing, anti-bullying message and probably left any Right-wing Middle Americans watching it with yet more “evidence” that American culture is in decline because its culture artists are in headlong flight from “real American values.” Overall, this year’s Grammy Awards were the typical lumbering spectacle, but there were enough nice moments to make the whole show worthwhile — and I could definitely see myself buying Lorde’s, Hunter Hayes’ and Kacey Musgraves’ CD’s on the basis of what I heard last night!
Friday, January 24, 2014
NOVA: Zeppelin Terror Attack (PBS, 2014)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched another video last night after Guilty Conscience (we were going to watch the latest episode of the American modern-dress Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Elementary — a first-rate show we both like better than the more intellectually regarded British Sherlock — but it turned out to be a rerun of an episode we’d already seen, centered around an Edward Snowden-like figure): an episode of the PBS series NOVA I’d recently recorded called “Zeppelin Terror Attack.” It had a bit of “first-itis” at the outset, suggesting that the people of London and the other British cities that were bombed by Zeppelin dirigibles during World War I were not only the first victims of bombing attacks by aircraft (which they were) but the first civilian targets of war, period — which they weren’t: the ancients had bombarded each other’s cities with giant catapults and in the 19th century both the Germans and French had developed ultra-long-range cannon with which they could attack urban centers and their civilian populations. Nonetheless, it was an interesting program, split as is the NOVA style between actual footage of the attacks (and, in one rather quirky scene, a clip from Howard Hughes’ 1930 film Hell’s Angels showing the gondola suspended under the Zeppelin which contained observers who scanned the ground looking for targets — they needed this because the Zeppelins flew above the clouds and they needed “eyes” below the clouds to tell them where to bomb) and their aftermath, and modern-day re-creations led by a researcher named Hugh Hunt.
Hunt’s brief was to figure out not only how the Zeppelin bombs had been able to inflict so much damage (they were incendiary devices ignited by thermite with benzene that started the conflagration, and a tar-soaked rope tied around the metal case so the fire would keep burning long enough to start the hoped-for firestorm) but also why the British found them so hard to shoot down even though (especially since when most people hear the word “Zeppelin” today they think of the Hindenburg and its fiery end over Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937) the Zeppelins were basically giant bags filled with highly flammable hydrogen. They also found out what the bags were made of — cow intestines (the same stuff used to wrap sausages — which meant that, since it took so many cows to make enough intestines for one Zeppelin, Germans had to do without sausages for the duration of the war), which were not only flexible but could easily be glued together and tightly sealed just by moistening them. The way the British finally realized they could counter-attack the Zeppelins was by developing two new sorts of bullets — an incendiary bullet and an explosive one — putting them in machine-gun rounds so they would alternate, and getting a plane to fire these bullets at one spot on the Zeppelin until they punctured the bags containing the hydrogen and set it on fire. (The show repeats the old idea that the Hindenburg was brought down by a leaking bag that released hydrogen, which was set afire by a spark of electricity in the air; an earlier PBS documentary said the Hindenburg accident was caused by a change in the Zeppelin company’s recipe for the outer covering of their aircraft, which inadvertently mixed together the two main ingredients of gunpowder — thus, when a small flash of lightning hit the outside of the Hindenburg, it exploded the shell and that’s what set the hydrogen on fire and led to the disaster.) One thing I hadn’t realized until I saw this show was that the Zeppelin company is still a going concern in Germany — Hugh Hunt was shown going for a ride in one of their modern-day craft, a white blimp (they don’t build rigid airships anymore, but then nobody else does either) — and he’s also seen in a simulator which duplicated the thin atmosphere experienced by Zeppelin crews flying at 21,000 feet in an era before aircraft manufacturers had invented the pressurized cabin. It’s a wonder they could even think up there, let alone aim a bomb!
Charles and I watched another video last night after Guilty Conscience (we were going to watch the latest episode of the American modern-dress Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Elementary — a first-rate show we both like better than the more intellectually regarded British Sherlock — but it turned out to be a rerun of an episode we’d already seen, centered around an Edward Snowden-like figure): an episode of the PBS series NOVA I’d recently recorded called “Zeppelin Terror Attack.” It had a bit of “first-itis” at the outset, suggesting that the people of London and the other British cities that were bombed by Zeppelin dirigibles during World War I were not only the first victims of bombing attacks by aircraft (which they were) but the first civilian targets of war, period — which they weren’t: the ancients had bombarded each other’s cities with giant catapults and in the 19th century both the Germans and French had developed ultra-long-range cannon with which they could attack urban centers and their civilian populations. Nonetheless, it was an interesting program, split as is the NOVA style between actual footage of the attacks (and, in one rather quirky scene, a clip from Howard Hughes’ 1930 film Hell’s Angels showing the gondola suspended under the Zeppelin which contained observers who scanned the ground looking for targets — they needed this because the Zeppelins flew above the clouds and they needed “eyes” below the clouds to tell them where to bomb) and their aftermath, and modern-day re-creations led by a researcher named Hugh Hunt.
Hunt’s brief was to figure out not only how the Zeppelin bombs had been able to inflict so much damage (they were incendiary devices ignited by thermite with benzene that started the conflagration, and a tar-soaked rope tied around the metal case so the fire would keep burning long enough to start the hoped-for firestorm) but also why the British found them so hard to shoot down even though (especially since when most people hear the word “Zeppelin” today they think of the Hindenburg and its fiery end over Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937) the Zeppelins were basically giant bags filled with highly flammable hydrogen. They also found out what the bags were made of — cow intestines (the same stuff used to wrap sausages — which meant that, since it took so many cows to make enough intestines for one Zeppelin, Germans had to do without sausages for the duration of the war), which were not only flexible but could easily be glued together and tightly sealed just by moistening them. The way the British finally realized they could counter-attack the Zeppelins was by developing two new sorts of bullets — an incendiary bullet and an explosive one — putting them in machine-gun rounds so they would alternate, and getting a plane to fire these bullets at one spot on the Zeppelin until they punctured the bags containing the hydrogen and set it on fire. (The show repeats the old idea that the Hindenburg was brought down by a leaking bag that released hydrogen, which was set afire by a spark of electricity in the air; an earlier PBS documentary said the Hindenburg accident was caused by a change in the Zeppelin company’s recipe for the outer covering of their aircraft, which inadvertently mixed together the two main ingredients of gunpowder — thus, when a small flash of lightning hit the outside of the Hindenburg, it exploded the shell and that’s what set the hydrogen on fire and led to the disaster.) One thing I hadn’t realized until I saw this show was that the Zeppelin company is still a going concern in Germany — Hugh Hunt was shown going for a ride in one of their modern-day craft, a white blimp (they don’t build rigid airships anymore, but then nobody else does either) — and he’s also seen in a simulator which duplicated the thin atmosphere experienced by Zeppelin crews flying at 21,000 feet in an era before aircraft manufacturers had invented the pressurized cabin. It’s a wonder they could even think up there, let alone aim a bomb!
Guilty Conscience (Levinson-Link Productions, Papazian Productions, 1985)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Guilty Conscience is a 1985 TV-movie produced by Robert Papazian, directed by David Greene and written by Richard Levinson and William Link. Papazian’s and Greene’s names meant nothing to me before but Levinson’s and Link’s certainly did; in the 1970’s they were in charge of Universal’s long-form TV mystery series (the shows ran in 90-minute time slots and rotated each week) and were particularly famous for having created the character of Columbo, the raincoat-clad, Peugeot-driving detective played by Peter Falk whose whole strategy seemed to be annoying the murderers into confessing. Though neither Columbo nor any other official police officers appear in this one, the plot is certainly the sort of crime he might have investigated. Guilty Conscience is basically a blend of Diabolique and Sleuth: famous criminal defense attorney Arthur Jamison (Anthony Hopkins) wants to dump his wife Louise (Blythe Danner) but doesn’t want to divorce her because her alimony demands would impoverish him instantly. He’s been having an ongoing affair with a mistress, Jackie Willis (Swoosie Kurtz — I joked to Charles, “In the 1930’s and 1940’s that was the sort of name that got changed,” and he joked back, “And in the 1970’s and 1980’s that was the sort of name people changed to!”), but he’s cheating on her, too, with an art dealer and Canadian immigrant we never actually see.
All this takes place in San Francisco, with an opening scene at the Fairmont Hotel where we see Arthur lecturing to a legal conference and giving a highly jaundiced view of the court system and a defense attorney’s role in it — though we later learn this is just a fantasy sequence envisioning a way Arthur is thinking of killing his wife. Supposedly he arranged for this conference to take place within a 15-minute drive from his home so he could slip out of it, kill his wife, fake it to look like a burglary (we see him jimmying the lock and breaking into his own home) and slip back into the conference without anyone there having noticed he was gone. Arthur also has an imaginary alter ego (Donegan Smith) who questions him about his various schemes for killing his wife and pokes holes in each of them. Meanwhile, Louise and Jackie have met each other and, realizing that they’re both being screwed (literally and figuratively) by Arthur, have hatched a plot to kill him, and we see fantasy flash-forwards about how they might kill him and how their plans to cover for themselves might get undone by a hot-shot attorney like … Arthur Jamison. Guilty Conscience isn’t much plot-wise (I suppose I should add the original version of Unfaithfully Yours as an influence because it, too, is about a rich man fantasizing various ways of killing his wife) but it’s saved by the deliciously perverse writing of Levinson and Link, some surprisingly creative direction by Greene — in a film that’s so talky, and that never leaves the living room of Jamison’s home after that opening scene at the conference (which made me wonder if Levinson and Link had originally written it as a stage play and only later decided to convert it to a film) Greene’s offbeat angling and heavy use of the camera crane keep the film flowing and make it cinematically interesting instead of just “canned theatre” — and, above all, the first-rate cast.
Hopkins is utterly marvelous in his role even though he seems to be channeling Richard Burton more than usual (is it just coincidence that his performance is so Burton-esque when this was filmed one year after the real Burton died?); Danner and Kurtz are equally good (and well differentiated) as the two women (at least the two we actually see) in his life; and though part of me wishes they would have cast Hopkins himself as his alter ego (they probably didn’t because the trick photography needed to show Anthony Hopkins cross-examining Anthony Hopkins would have blown the TV-movie budget), Donegan Smith is excellent in the role, appropriately hectoring as he picks apart every flaw in every elaborate murder scenario Arthur concocts, including the attempts to cover it up after he actually does kill his wife in a struggle in which They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine Watkins, your plagiarism attorney is calling from Aruba to thank you for financing his trip) — or does he? This film is probably more full of sequences that we think are real events in the story but which turn out later to be the fantasies of the various characters than just about anything ever made, but Levinson and Link are good enough writers that they play fair with this device (a lot of other people who’ve used it haven’t), and though it’s a minor work Guilty Conscience is a delightful 90 minutes (imdb.com gives the running time as 105 minutes but the version we watched was considerably shorter, mastered on a rather tacky DVD that started immediately on insertion into the player and might be a bootleg copy rather than the official release) spent with four fine actors and a script that gives them quite a lot to chew on and is fully worthy of them.
Guilty Conscience is a 1985 TV-movie produced by Robert Papazian, directed by David Greene and written by Richard Levinson and William Link. Papazian’s and Greene’s names meant nothing to me before but Levinson’s and Link’s certainly did; in the 1970’s they were in charge of Universal’s long-form TV mystery series (the shows ran in 90-minute time slots and rotated each week) and were particularly famous for having created the character of Columbo, the raincoat-clad, Peugeot-driving detective played by Peter Falk whose whole strategy seemed to be annoying the murderers into confessing. Though neither Columbo nor any other official police officers appear in this one, the plot is certainly the sort of crime he might have investigated. Guilty Conscience is basically a blend of Diabolique and Sleuth: famous criminal defense attorney Arthur Jamison (Anthony Hopkins) wants to dump his wife Louise (Blythe Danner) but doesn’t want to divorce her because her alimony demands would impoverish him instantly. He’s been having an ongoing affair with a mistress, Jackie Willis (Swoosie Kurtz — I joked to Charles, “In the 1930’s and 1940’s that was the sort of name that got changed,” and he joked back, “And in the 1970’s and 1980’s that was the sort of name people changed to!”), but he’s cheating on her, too, with an art dealer and Canadian immigrant we never actually see.
All this takes place in San Francisco, with an opening scene at the Fairmont Hotel where we see Arthur lecturing to a legal conference and giving a highly jaundiced view of the court system and a defense attorney’s role in it — though we later learn this is just a fantasy sequence envisioning a way Arthur is thinking of killing his wife. Supposedly he arranged for this conference to take place within a 15-minute drive from his home so he could slip out of it, kill his wife, fake it to look like a burglary (we see him jimmying the lock and breaking into his own home) and slip back into the conference without anyone there having noticed he was gone. Arthur also has an imaginary alter ego (Donegan Smith) who questions him about his various schemes for killing his wife and pokes holes in each of them. Meanwhile, Louise and Jackie have met each other and, realizing that they’re both being screwed (literally and figuratively) by Arthur, have hatched a plot to kill him, and we see fantasy flash-forwards about how they might kill him and how their plans to cover for themselves might get undone by a hot-shot attorney like … Arthur Jamison. Guilty Conscience isn’t much plot-wise (I suppose I should add the original version of Unfaithfully Yours as an influence because it, too, is about a rich man fantasizing various ways of killing his wife) but it’s saved by the deliciously perverse writing of Levinson and Link, some surprisingly creative direction by Greene — in a film that’s so talky, and that never leaves the living room of Jamison’s home after that opening scene at the conference (which made me wonder if Levinson and Link had originally written it as a stage play and only later decided to convert it to a film) Greene’s offbeat angling and heavy use of the camera crane keep the film flowing and make it cinematically interesting instead of just “canned theatre” — and, above all, the first-rate cast.
Hopkins is utterly marvelous in his role even though he seems to be channeling Richard Burton more than usual (is it just coincidence that his performance is so Burton-esque when this was filmed one year after the real Burton died?); Danner and Kurtz are equally good (and well differentiated) as the two women (at least the two we actually see) in his life; and though part of me wishes they would have cast Hopkins himself as his alter ego (they probably didn’t because the trick photography needed to show Anthony Hopkins cross-examining Anthony Hopkins would have blown the TV-movie budget), Donegan Smith is excellent in the role, appropriately hectoring as he picks apart every flaw in every elaborate murder scenario Arthur concocts, including the attempts to cover it up after he actually does kill his wife in a struggle in which They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine Watkins, your plagiarism attorney is calling from Aruba to thank you for financing his trip) — or does he? This film is probably more full of sequences that we think are real events in the story but which turn out later to be the fantasies of the various characters than just about anything ever made, but Levinson and Link are good enough writers that they play fair with this device (a lot of other people who’ve used it haven’t), and though it’s a minor work Guilty Conscience is a delightful 90 minutes (imdb.com gives the running time as 105 minutes but the version we watched was considerably shorter, mastered on a rather tacky DVD that started immediately on insertion into the player and might be a bootleg copy rather than the official release) spent with four fine actors and a script that gives them quite a lot to chew on and is fully worthy of them.
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