July 25, 2006 New York Times

TV Review

‘P.O.V.’ on PBS: How Missionaries Spread the Word, and U.S. Capitalism

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Are evangelical missionaries good or bad? That’s the question in tonight’s PBS documentary, “The Tailenders.” The missionaries’ smugness and salesmanship tend to irritate other humanitarian workers, who typically see themselves as more respectful of the people they’re tending to. What’s more, the program implies, silencing the stomping beats of, say, the Solomon Islands in favor of pallid “Jesus Loves Me” singalongs seems just wrong.

But more disturbing than this, the documentary contends, is the psychological and spiritual danger that many progressives believe is wrought by missionaries, who swipe from indigenous people their happy, peaceful ways and stick them instead with the greed, selfishness, jealousy and wrecked natural landscapes known to be the key features of global industrial capitalism.

Despite a century of such complaints, however, Protestant missionaries persist. And they’re dogged. They dress in uncool hiking clothes and pack up uncool backpacks and buses with uncool food and uncool Bibles and venture way the heck into the jungle where they — and this is the subject of “The Tailenders” — learn thorny indigenous languages so they can actually talk with people who have never heard of America, capitalism, jihad, McWorld or Jesus Christ. Missionaries may be the most parochial and audacious avatars of our modern world.

Still, after tonight’s effort to wrestle with this paradox, you will not know for sure whether missionaries are good or bad. But you will talk about it. This gorgeous, inspired and gutsy film, the first feature documentary by Adele Horne, who also produces video art, opens up new ideological vistas on religion, technology and globalization. It dares viewers not to be surprised by it.

The focus of “The Tailenders” is the Global Recordings Network, founded in 1939 in Los Angeles by an evangelical named Joy Ridderhof. She wanted to disseminate Bible stories via phonographs and gramophones. Still photographs bring to life her adventures among those she aimed to convert; there she crouches, pale and delicate, with various less-delicate-looking figures in jungles and on beaches, marveling at a tape recorder. Of the 8,000 languages and dialects believed to exist, Global Recordings has now produced Christian propaganda in more than 5,485 of them. No linguistics department could pull this off.

The idea of releasing disembodied sound on unsuspecting people — like God in the burning bush — clearly fascinates Ms. Horne, who conveys an infectious sense of “this blows my mind.” The ingenious hand-cranked audio devices, engineered to be usable by people without electricity, are presented with the amazement that only a filmmaker pious about audiovisual technology could convey.

“Every physical movement and action reverberates throughout time and space, for good or ill,” says the spacey- and sad-sounding narrator, finding an analogy for the way sound echoes. “The ripple on the ocean’s surface caused by a gentle breeze and the deeper furrow of a ponderous slave ship are equally indelible.”

This airy poetry is anchored by down-to-earth reporting in India, Mexico and the Solomon Islands. At one point, a missionary is translating a message about Christian redemption into dialect. A native speaker finds an error. As he tells the missionary, the message now says, “We will wash away God’s sins.” Something needs to change.

Less effective than the vérité and the impressionistic voice-over are Ms. Horne’s sporadic efforts to jam her material into an interpretive framework. At the end of the film, which has presented disembodied audio as a religion unto itself, Ms. Horne seems to balk at her own originality and retreat into clichés.

The voice-over says: “Where Protestant missionaries go, industrial capitalism follows. To convert to evangelicalism is to replace indigenous collectivity with the pursuit of individual economic gain.”

And then there’s a lament for what’s lost. One of the converts says that new Protestants are shunned by their villages; they’ve forgone the religion of their parents. Only if you’ve been watching closely will you realize that that lost religion is Roman Catholicism. These congregants have not lost tribal practices, they’ve just moved on from the last wave of colonial proselytizing.

(Click here to read previous Letters From Damascus.)

Monday 24 July
Last night while waiting for a friend in the shadow of the Ummayad
Mosque, we ended up getting pulled into a conversation with a young
man selling rugs and Damascene souvenirs to tourists. “You’re not
rednecks, are you?” he asks. “There are a lot of rednecks around
here.” As it turns out, he knows a couple of the girls from Ohio State
that came here last summer. It’s a small world.

Unfortunately the rumors of anti-Americanism that we’ve been hearing
bear some truth. We’re seeing more Hezbollah flags and pictures of
Nasrallah everyday, and I’d swear that we’re getting more glares as
the crisis in Lebanon continues. A couple of my fellow students got
into it with a vendor in the souq yesterday. “Fuck you Americans,” he
told them. At the same time, we’re seeing more westerners in Damascus
than ever due to the situation in Lebanon. Many of those who left
Beirut have ended up here, ironically, making it increasingly
difficult to keep a low profile. On that note, my host family rented
my room out today. My replacement — a student from Seattle who was
studying in Beirut — moves in on Friday.

I spent the day waiting around for DHL to deliver our paper tickets
for the flight from Damascus to Cairo. Later, we found out that
they’re still in Ohio and we should expect them to arrive no later
than Wednesday, the day before we fly out. We’ve also heard that
EgyptAir is trying to cancel our tickets out of Damascus. They’ve
oversold the flights and are looking for seats to cancel. Getting out
early has been a giant hassle, I can’t imagine what it would be like
if something actually went wrong.

(Click here to read previous Letters From Damascus.)

The Boston Globe- July 23, 2006

In a perfect world

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s far-out science fiction dystopia, `We,’ showed the way for George Orwell and countless others.

By Joshua Glenn

IT IS WITH REGRET that I see, instead of an orderly and strict mathematical epic poem in honor of the One State-I see some kind of fantastic adventure novel emerging from me.” So laments D-503, mathematician and rocket designer, halfway through Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel “We.” Completed in 1921, but not published in Russia until 1988, half a century after Zamyatin’s death, it appears this month from the Modern Library in a new English translation by Natasha Randall.

Zamyatin’s vision of a totally controlled society, one in which unresisting citizens eat, sleep, work, and make love like clockwork-and in which thinkers and writers sing the glories of “the morning buzz of electric toothbrushes and . . . the intimate peal of the crystal-sparkling latrine”-was considered too dangerously satirical by the early Soviet state, and it was smuggled abroad in samizdat form. Written a decade before Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” its influence can be seen in George Orwell’s “1984,” and it has been hailed as a warning of the totalitarian dangers inherent in every utopian scheme. (Orwell, who believed Huxley had read “We,” wrote in 1946, three years before “1984″ was published, that Zamyatin’s “intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism-human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself” made the novel “superior to Huxley’s.”)

A Bolshevik student activist in the years before the 1917 revolution, Zamyatin went on to become an engineer and ship designer, and only started writing to pass the time when the Tsarist police exiled him from St. Petersburg. Yet despite his youthful Bolshevism, Zamyatin-like Boris Pasternak, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Anna Akhmatova, and other independent Russian writers of the Soviet era-despised authoritarian communism. In an essay written at the same time as “We,” he castigated critics who demanded that writers be subservient to the Party. “There shall be no more polyphony or dissonances,” he warned. “There shall only be majestic, monumental, all-encompassing unanimity.”

Without a doubt, Zamyatin’s far-out narrative, set in a city-state cut off from a depopulated Earth by an impenetrable glass dome, is anti-totalitarian. Extrapolating from the over-heated rhetoric of Communist planners who believed that mankind would profit if American scientific-management techniques (like those of Frederick W. Taylor and Henry Ford) were extended into every sphere of daily life, Zamyatin has D-503 rhapsodize about “the mathematically perfect life of the One State,” where nothing spontaneous is permitted.

But is “We” really an anti-utopian novel? From today’s perspective, it looks as though “We,” like Huxley’s “Brave New World,” is less a rejection of utopianism than a jeremiad against the creeping of industrial standardization into politics, culture, and every other aspect of modern life.

. . .

In his 2005 book “Picture Imperfect,” social critic Russell Jacoby describes a group of writers he calls “blueprint utopians”-idealists such as Thomas More, Condorcet, Enfantin, Edward Bellamy, and others who devised solutions to the social problems of their own eras by mapping out the future in inches and minutes, giving precise instructions for how men and women should work and live, and not hesitating to prescribe force against dissenters.

The One State described by Zamyatin does bear a close resemblance to these imagined social orders. “We” describes a rigid world of efficiency and perfection, one in which individuals (called “ciphers”) are issued numbers instead of names and are nurtured by Taylorist systems from childhood. The One State is ruled by a Benefactor, who is automatically voted in every year, and watched over by spying Guardians, who ensure that nothing unexpected ever happens; those ciphers who do fall out of step (literally) are whisked away to the Gas Bell Jar.

This state of “mathematically infallible happiness” (as the One State’s official newspaper describes it) is considered by its citizens to be a revolutionary improvement on the chaotic condition of freedom humankind once knew. War has been banished along with quarreling nation-states; hunger and poverty have been eradicated through collectivism; and even sexual jealousy has been vanquished via an equitable system of distribution in which “each cipher has the right to any other cipher as sexual product.”

D-503, who has started a journal intended for use as propaganda on newly colonized planets, is full of enthusiasm. He soliloquizes about the mandatory afternoon walk, when uniformed workers march along in rows of four, “rapturously keeping step.” He even boasts of a pioneering new medical procedure, the excision of the imagination via brain surgery (in his case, this is unnecessary).

But then D-503 falls in love-seduced by a beautiful revolutionary, I-330, who wants to hijack his rocket ship and overthrow the government. I-330’s effect on D-503 is explosive. A personality so tightly wound that he remembers being frightened of irrational numbers as a child, D-503 suddenly finds himself in “a world of square roots of minus one.” Alas, the plot fails, I-330 ends up in the Gas Bell Jar, and D-503 is subjected to the imagination-cauterizing operation.

But not before I-330 succeeds in converting him, if only momentarily, into a champion of spontaneity and freedom of individual choice. She does so by arguing against the received wisdom that the utopian revolution that resulted in the founding of the One State was necessarily the final revolution. Speaking in D-503’s own language of mathematical philosophy, she asks him, “What is the final number?” When he responds that the number of numbers is infinite, she argues that revolutions should be infinite, too-not exactly an anti-utopian sentiment. She leaves open the possibility of ever-improving worlds to come.

I-330 agrees with D-503 that their ancestors were right to invent a more equitable social order. “They made only one mistake,” she says. “Afterward they believed that they were the final number-which doesn’t exist in the natural world, it just doesn’t.”

Joshua Glenn is the Globe’s Living Arts web editor. E-mail jglenn@globe.com.

from Harvard Film Archive:

A pioneering work that blurred the boundaries between fictional and documentary styles, Ice was hailed by filmmaker and Village Voice critic Jonas Mekas as “the most original and most significant American narrative film” of the late sixties. An underground revolutionary group struggles against internal strife which threatens its security and stages urban guerrilla attacks against a fictionalized fascist regime in the United States. Interspersed throughout the narrative are rhetorical sequences that explain the philosophy of radical action and serve to restrain the melodrama inherent in the “thriller” genre. Shot in the gray landscape of New York City in a gritty cinema-verité style, the film has been compared to Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville.

from Coolidge Corner Theater:

Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader: “One of American independent Robert Kramer’s strongest “underground” features (1969), arguably his best, made in and around New York before he resettled in Paris. This potent and grim SF thriller about urban guerrillas of the radical left, shot in the manner of a rough documentary in black and white, has an epic sweep to it. (Like many politically informed art movies of the period, starting with Alphaville and including even THX 1138, it was set in the future mainly as a ruse for critiquing the present.) Now as then, the power of this creepy movie rests largely in its dead-on critique of the paranoia and internecine battles that characterized revolutionary politics during the 60s; the mood is terrorized and often brutal, but the behavioral observations and some of the tenderness periodically call to mind early Cassavetes. A searing, unnerving history lesson, it’s an American counterpart to some of Jacques Rivette’s conspiracy pictures, a desperate message found in a bottle.”

Jonas Mekas said that ‘ Ice ‘ was “the most original and most significant American narrative film of the late sixties.

Born in New York in 1939, Robert Kramer ranks as one of the most original directors of American underground cinema. This exacting loner, the bard of the counterculture, has worked on the fringe both in his homeland and in France. In 1967, he founded The Newsreel, a militant collective that was among the first to produce films about the Vietnam war and its impact in America. His films constantly work at wearing away the impermeability of documentary and fiction forms, paying special attention to his characters. In 1969, Kramer visited Hanoï and brought back Peoples’ War. He returned 23 years later, keen on understanding what had become of Vietnam in the nineties – the result was Starting Place/Point de départ. The country was then in pieces; the old generation had its pride intact whereas the new generation had forgotten. Starting Place is also a melancholic stroll among faces, objects and vestiges that question our relationship with memory and images. His exploration of the American heartlands has been the other fixture of his work. Milestones (1976) is the polyphonic evocation of a rural community, which paints a pessimistic portrait of American society in the seventies. In 1989, he made Route One/USA – Route One is an historic, now disused, road that runs down the east coast. Through Kramer’s eyes, this route becomes the focal point that condenses American history and its traditions of violence, blends fiction and documentary, sets up echoes between collective memory and private recollections. This geographer’s work evokes wars (from the Civil War to Vietnam), confronts feminists with Christian fundamentalists, examines the demands of minority communities. There gradually takes forms a mosaic of America and its history as a living organism with a thousand facets.

From July 22, 2006 Los Angeles Times…

POP MUSIC REVIEW

Music fest is a many-octaved thing

Outsider artists come together for “5 Nights of Soleros and Bandoleros” to give “folk” a punky, esoteric, jazzy tinge.

By Ann Powers, Times Staff Writer

Devendra Banhart was as pleased as tequila-laced punch, holding his empty margarita glass proudly in the El Cid courtyard Tuesday as the first installment of the ambitious five-night outsider folk music festival he programmed slowly turned into a sellout.

He laughed when someone commented on all the bearded males in the room. “It doesn’t take any work to grow a beard,” he said. “You just let it happen.” That’s rather like the scene the gifted singer-songwriter has helped define, made up of lone wolves and outsider collectives emerging out of dusty corners from Venice to Granada.

Banhart, the unofficial leader of the handily named “freak folk” movement (though, naturally, he resists such labels), has a lot of Allen Ginsberg in him. He projects that same twinkly aura the great poet possessed, part hokum and part prodigious vision. This fete, titled “Hypnorituals and Mesmemusical Miracles Hanging in the Sky: 5 Nights of Soleros and Bandoleros,” brings together his “wish list” of semi-unknowns working on the edges of folk-influenced balladry. “A lot of these people came from punk rock,” he said.

Though the trappings were more hippie-ish than punk — El Cid’s small main room overflowed with women in gauzy dresses and men wearing sparkly scarves — the sounds made during the program’s first two nights reflected the values those two subgenres share: unpolished enthusiasm, impetuous experimentation and an insiderness that nonetheless welcomed listeners willing to learn the ropes.

The eight acts appearing over the fest’s first two nights (both bookended by jovial readings by poet and painter Eric Ernest Johnson) ranged from solo acoustic guitar-based bards to shambling collectives. Listening felt like wandering through hallways in an old house, opening up doors to find things that never asked to be revealed. Yet the best acts had enough song sense and communicative skills to bring their esotericism into the light.

Most thrilling was Tuesday’s headlining band, Feathers, the Vermont-based collective whose debut album came out in April on Banhart’s Gnomonsong label. Feathers’ seven members alternate instruments every song, a nightmare for anyone wanting a tight set but a revelation for those interested in how improvisation becomes songcraft.

Everyone in the band — two women and three men presented their compositions — had his or her own sparkle, whether leaning toward winsome Baroque pop or feminine introversion. The collective approach and the club’s iffy sound might have sunk a less skilled crew, but Feathers showed how careful listening and subtle self-control can turn a potential mess into magic.

Conversely, Jana Hunter presented her reticent songs with a quietly fierce sense of solitude. Hunter, who hails from Houston and is also a Gnomonsong artist, writes fragmentary verses that work on the page. But it’s her voice, with a tone that’s fluty and rich, that makes her song sestinas memorable. Looking like Thora Birch in “Ghost World,” plucking at a worn guitar, Hunter was an unlikely inheritor of the folk goddess mantle. Her lack of aplomb only served to emphasize her songs’ quiet artfulness.

Entrance, who also performed Tuesday, was all aplomb: This pseudonymous wild man keened and slashed at his guitar, raising a flurry of psychedelic blues-punk that carried shards of Middle Eastern drone in its wake. Not always nailing the falsetto he preferred, Entrance still impressed with his dogged intensity as he sang disturbing meditations on death and transcendence. Not exactly accessible, but completely in the audience’s face, Entrance took the crown as the festival’s most determined rock star.

The only truly notable performer Wednesday couldn’t have been more different. Ruthann Friedman took the stage with unassuming sweetness, looking more like someone who’d headline a community picnic than a hipster gathering. The 62-year-old Los Angeles resident, who recorded one album in 1969 that was recently reissued, is best known for writing the Association’s vanilla pop classic “Windy,” but her set at El Cid showed her talent beyond one-hit-wonder status.

Friedman, a former housemate of David Crosby and the Jefferson Airplane, showed the influence of her peers, but her jazz-touched, melodically complex songs went beyond mere hippie confessions. One reflectively mourned her sister’s suicide; another she dedicated to Astrud Gilberto, and, though Friedman’s voice and guitar-picking showed the effects of years not performing, she captured that Brazilian lilt. As she shared stories from her long, strange trip, many of the festival’s other performers sat rapt, grateful that Banhart had rescued a mentor from obscurity.

Allen Ginsberg once described poetry as representing “that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public.”

That’s the essence of the scene Banhart is exposing. This evening’s final episode of the Hypnorituals festival, presented this week by Arthur Magazine and the Fold, brings esteemed folk elder Michael Hurley, Sun City Girls member Richard Bishop, and Britain-bred, Spain-based experimenters Stuart and Caan. Expect some doors to open.

Sunday, July 30, 2006 8pm – midnight

Arthur & Zebulon present a DVD Release Extravaganza!

Ira Cohen’s The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda + Brain Damage (PREMIERE)

Reading by Ira Cohen
Live scores by Sunburned Hand of the Man + mahasiddhi
Soul/Funk provided by The Rumpus Room Sound System DJS

Invite (click to view): http://www.iracohen.org/zebulon/

Location:
www.zebuloncafeconcert.com
718.218.6934
258 wythe avenue
brooklyn, ny 11211

Map it!

From the Associated Press

Thomas Pynchon fans, the long wait is apparently over: His first novel in nearly a decade is coming out in December. But details, as with so much else about the mysterious author of such postmodern classics as “V.” and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” have proved a puzzle.

This much is known about the new book: It’s called “Against the Day” and will be published by Penguin Press. It will run at least 900 pages, and the author, who doesn’t make media appearances or allow himself to be photographed, will not be going on a promotional tour.

Late last week, the book’s description was posted on Amazon.com. It read:

“Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

–Thomas Pynchon”