What if the Rapture came and All the Wrong People Left?

LEFTOVERS (2011)

Tom Perrotta

St. Martin’s 978-031235034

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What if the Rapture occurred, but it was nothing at all like the End-of-Times evangelical Christians—called dispensationalists, if you care—said it would be? What if millions of people suddenly disappeared but there was no discernible rhyme, reason, or pattern? What if way more children, reprobates, animists, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, non-devout Christians, and everyday sinners disappeared than Born-Again fundamentalists? How would the world react? This is the intriguing question novelist Tom Perrotta poses in Leftovers, a book clearly aimed at the smug certainty of Tim LaHaye and Apocalypse-worshipping devotees of his Left Behind novels. (Perrotta also had the good fortune to have this book hit the shelves when Christian radio loose cannon Howard Camping predicted the world would end on May 21, 2011.)

Much like cartoonist Matt Groening (The Simpsons), Perrotta chooses a white-bread suburbia to play out the drama of the post-disappearance world. His Springfield is called Mapleton, a place that feels like one of those fixated on 50s-style family values ‘burbs in the Bible Belt (think Greater Atlanta). As one might expect, what was dubbed the Sudden Departure caused range of responses in Mapleton. The Rev. Matt Jamison is among those men of the cloth who insisted that the event was not The Rapture. His unique proof of that assertion is to become a one-man smut-and-truth exposé squad who reveals the affairs, substance abuse, and general unworthiness of those who vanished, which he duly broadcasts to Mapletonians. Learning that her husband was a philanderer is not helpful to Nora, an attractive young woman who lost her spouse and two children to the Sudden Departure and is so depressed that she spends her days watching the Spongebob Squarepants reruns she once shared with her offspring. Even those families left intact are confused. Perrotta focuses on the Garveys. Paterfamilias Kevin has just been elected mayor of his shocked town, while his wife, Laurie, becomes unglued and joins the Guilty Remnants, one of the many cults that emerged. The Garveys’ son, Tom, is also in a cult—one run by Holy Wayne, a former UPS driver with a harem of young Asian women. Too young …  as it turns out. When Wayne is carted off to jail for pedophilia, Tom loses most of his faith, though he accepts the task of ushering one of Wayne’s wives to a safe house as she is alleged to be bearing a son who will be the new messiah. Daughter Jill chooses a live-for-today route; she befriends bad girl Aimee, who moves in with the Garveys about the time Laurie moves out, and assists Jill’s transformation from honor student to angry low-life.

The book is provocative and, as one might expect, has been widely denounced by those who believe in The Rapture. The Guilty Remnants are especially controversial, as their level of fanaticism suggests all manner of unsavory things about those who live beyond reason. The GR—as they refer to themselves—dress in white, take vows of silence, and make it their mission to become worthy of being raptured by shaming the rest of Mapleton. Their presence is generally heralded by their smell; they chain-smoke, a thoroughly modern mortification of the flesh that’s easier to accommodate as cigarettes are more attainable than hair shirts.  Many of their mannerisms reminded me of the Ellen Jamesians in John Irving’s The World According to Garp.

Perrotta also dares to ask what would happen if years passed with no more disappearances and no explanation for the ones that did occur. Is it possible to move on? Can, for example, Kevin and Nora ease their individual sorrows in each other’s company? This is the sort of question Kevin Brockmeier raised in a different context in his own The Illumination, though he handled it better than Perrotta. I reveal nothing by telling you that many readers will be unsatisfied by how Perrotta’s novel ends. Don’t let that deter you; Leftovers is the kind of book that sparks spirited and needed debates over the presumptions of faith, public morality, private guilt, and collective healing. Sometimes the book’s ideas outclass its style and plot, but there’s nothing wrong with that.  --Rob Weir

Ewan McLennan a true Emerging Artist

EWAN McLENNAN

Rags & Robes

Fellside 235

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This review originally ran in SingOut! Magazine issue 54:4

“Emerging artist” is an overused phrase, but I’m happy to make an exception for the stunning debut release of Ewan McLennan. With songs such as “Arthur McBride,” “A Man’s a Man,” and “I’m a Rover,” the Edinburgh-raised McLennan covers familiar ground, but he does so with a gentleness and a freshness of voice that makes the old new. It’s a quiet album reminiscent of Andy M. Stewart’s post-Silly Wizard solo work in mood. And, like Stewart, McLennan’s tenor voice is unique. It has the timbre of a contemporary such as Paul McKenna, but with more vibrato and with a hint of a rasp. If that sounds gritty, the effect is quite the opposite; McLennan keeps all the ornaments under control and croons with a soothing smoothness. Thus he transforms the feel of a rough roustabout song such as “Tramps and Hawkers” into something that sounds like carefree lads at sport. Equally affecting his velvet-gloved version of “Jack Stewart,” which emerges as less of a drinking song than fellowship with an elderly friend. Each of the fourteen tracks pleases, and each leaves you wanting to hear what McLennan will do next. 

Rob Weir

The Tiger's Wife Way Better than Recent Pulitzer Winners

Téa Obreht

The Tiger’s Wife (2011)

Random House 978038543831

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Count me among the stunned when this year’s Pulitzer committee declined to name a winner for fiction–virtually every novel I’ve read this year is superior to last year’s honoree, Jennifer Egan, and her mediocre A Visit from the Goon Squad. [See review.] Any list of superb novels for 2011 should certainly include Téa Obreht’s stunning debut, The Tiger’s Wife.

The blood-soaked Balkans forms the backdrop for the novel, and a curious incident from World War II provided the inspiration for the title. In 1941, the Germans bombed Belgrade; a misguided missile hit the local zoo and liberated animals it didn’t kill. This included, briefly, a tiger. Obreht uses this incident as entrée into looking at a more recent Balkan tragedy: the terrible civil wars that ensued as Yugoslavia disintegrated between 1990 and 1995. She introduces this through the eyes of a young girl, Natalia Stefanovic, whose prewar ritual accompanying her beloved grandfather, a local physician, on his periodic visits to the zoo to view the resident tiger. The kindly doctor always carried a copy of The Jungle Book with him, an appropriate prop for a man whose later life was consumed by storytelling. Flash forward to the early 21^st century and we find Natalia as a young adult who has followed her grandfather into the medical profession, though she’s come to think of him as a compulsive oddity and appears to have been less shaped by his stories than by 1960s-style folk music, 70s/80s rock and roll, and the ennui tempered by cynicism emblematic of a generation trying to pick up the pieces left by years of war. We meet Natalia and a colleague, Zóra, in a neighboring breakaway nation, where they try to administer help in a Balkans-style Physicians Without Borders program, but are met with stares, suspicion, and resistance that serve to deepen divisions rather than heal them. To make matters worse, Natalia has just received word that her grandfather has died on a trip to visit her, a sojourn about which she was unaware, but needs to explain.  

Phew! That’s a lot of claws scratching at the plot and plenty more unfurl in the pages to come. Luckily, this is not a conventional novel and Obreht can play loose with facts, chronological sequencing, and objective reality. The book isn’t about the Balkans or Natalia per se; it’s about regional identity, antagonisms, family, and those transcendent moments in which shared humanity dissolves individual and cultural differences. Obreht writes in a magical realism style that brings to life folk tales, fables, and incredulities. Do not think of this is a single, coherent story–it is actually a collection of short stories, each of which provides threads from which a larger truth can be spun. The stories intersect, but you’ll need to be on your toes. Don’t look for objective history either; Obreht deliberately elides historical detail, falsifies geography, infers ethnicities, and obliterates judgments so that we concentrate on the individual human dramas that would otherwise be lost amidst the larger tragedies.

Her grandfather’s native village, for instance, is rendered as Galina. (I seem to be the only reviewer to have noticed that this is Russian for Galen, the name of a famed Roman physician.) The 1941 zoo bombing has been moved to this city, which is patterned on Mostar. (The allusion to the bombing of a famed bridge gives it away.) The tale that gives the book its title involves a deaf-mute woman, who is also Muslim, who has been badly abused. Her husband, Luka, was tricked into marrying her, the latest disappointment in his life. He is the local butcher, but he had dreamed of becoming a poet and gusle player. (The gusle is a one-stringed instrument favored by poets and troubadours.) When Luka meets his demise while trying to hunt the tiger, his wife is assumed to be in league with the animal and villagers whisper that she has bedded the beast. (The tiger, in this sense, appears as a Satanic symbol for superstitious and Islamaphobic Christians–another metaphor for the Balkans wars.)  

Another tale that makes numerous appearances is that of the Deathless Man. It does not matter how badly he’s abused or disfigured, he survives his horrors with little more to show from his traumas than scars and a voracious thirst. This one intersects with a 21^st century story of a villager hell-bent on finding the bones of a relative he hastily buried during the recent war. One could easily see both as metaphors for the indomitable human spirit–perhaps even as symbols of how humanity survives despite its best efforts at self-annihilation. Those who wish can probably find symbolism in just about everything. The tiger, for instance, could be a play on TIGR, the acronym of a Slovene anti-Nazi resistance group during World War II. Who knows? As I said, Obreht does not name or point fingers. Want to complicate things more? She’s actually of Croat descent, but her family left Yugoslavia before the Balkan wars and she grew up in the United States.

The beauty of this book is that you can play detective and try to connect all the dots and match the fictional scenes to real places and events. Or you could just surrender to the mystery and magic. I won’t pretend that The Tiger’s Wife is an easy read, but it’s moving, thoughtful, and uplifting in very unexpected ways. And it sure is better than anything that’s won a Pulitzer lately.--Rob Weir

Grateful Dead Film Super Musical and Problematic Historical Chronicle

THE GRATEFUL DEAD (and others)

Dawn of the Dead

Sexy Intellectual, 2012, 138 mins.

The Grateful Dead machine continues to pump out merch. Even diehard Deadheads admit that Grateful Dead films stretch the definition of surrealism, hence Dawn of the Dead will come a revelation–it’s easily the most comprehensible film project ever done on Jerry Garcia and the lads. The hardcore may not be as pleased to see their heroes as just part of a larger drama rather the movers and shakers of all things groovy.

The Grateful Dead is placed solidly within a broader context: folk music, jug bands, avant-garde modernism, and emerging subcultures. We see the Dead emerge from late 50s/early 60s ethos in which the Beats slowly yielded to hippies, with a big assist given by the Merry Pranksters. The film smartly documents the musical evolution in the Bay area, a reminder that acid rock owed as much inspirational debt to protest singers, bluegrass pickers, experimental composers, and jazz artists as Stanley Owsley’s prowess with a chemistry set. Once the Bay area scene unfolds, the film makes The Dead central, but the video gives lots of screen time to others, including: Monterrey Pop artists, The Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Charlatans, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Members of the latter two groups have as much to say about what went down as Dead insiders such as Rock Scully, Phil Lesh, and Bob Weir. We witness the rise of mid-‘60s utopian dreams, which culminated in Family Dog Productions, the Diggers, Bill Graham and Fillmore West, and the 1967 Summer of Love. We also see the magic dissipate amidst San Francisco’s post-‘67 urban chaos and the 1969 Altamont festival, The film is one of the best explanations I’ve viewed of the Americana musical retreat beaten by former psychedelic artists fleeing to the relative sanity of Marin County and beyond. Overall the film is a dizzying tour of musical (and hippie) milestones between 1960 through 1971.

As a musical history it is absolutely first-rate. Its major weakness is that it could stand to lose a few music critics in favor of consulting some social historians. There is an unintentional reductionism to the film in that the Bay area is viewed as way more representative of the 1960s than it really was. There is not question that San Francisco occupied a mythical psychic space for those seeking the Flower Child vibe, but that was just one of many paths followed in the Sixties. The filmmakers elide the counterculture, politics, and ideology, and fail to tell us that America often looked quite different once one strayed beyond Haight-Ashbury. There is also a tendency to view all young people as homogeneous, as if hippies were also politicos, for instance. Many–including the notoriously apolitical Grateful Dead–were quite separate, just as the East Coast scene was often very different from the West Coast. (This film culminates in 1971, but The Grateful Dead are not a major phenomenon in the East until later in the 1970s.) Dawn of the Dead is a superb musical chronicle, but don’t trust the social commentary.--Rob Weir

Sibiri Samaké's Trance-Like Magic

SIBIRI SAMAKÉ

Dambe Foli: Bamana Hunters Music

KSK CD

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Sibiri Samaké is a man who wears many headdresses. In his native Mali he is known as a griot, a traditional healer, a son of nobility, a hunter, and offspring of a musical family. Hunting societies confer great status in Mali, but Samaké would have attracted notice for his music if nothing else. He brings to bear all of his influences on this, his second album. Call it where tradition meets the present. You will hear hints of African blues and of Western drum and bass records, but mainly you will hear Samaké’s pastiche homage to his roots. There is, first of all, the instrumentation–a few which could be plugged in, but mostly assorted wooden stringed instruments, scrappers, and shakers. The album is more than 66 minutes long, yet it contains just four tracks. On each, Samaké uses the instruments to evoke the natural world and his voice to command the center around which band mates and backing vocalists rally. His leads set the table for call-and-response singing, but of the sort that conjures a shaman leading supplicants. His voice is strong and bold; those that respond are often short syllables, moans, and vocalizations. The pacing is deliberate and chant-like, as if Samaké is conducting a healing ceremony.

This one may take some getting used to for Westerners whose bodies and psyches do the double-time boogie, but patience is rewarded for those who surrender and go with the flow. It’s the sort of album that’s sublime for intent listening or for background ambience. But if you’re in the midst of a busy task and start playing this one, don’t be surprised if you drift away and the task lies undone. --Rob Weir   

Here's a short (for Samaké) YouTube clip that will give you an idea of style: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdHdLJIXjAY 

Man Who Never Died the New Standard on Joe Hill

The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon, By William Adler. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. 349 pp. + sources, bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-1-59691-696-8

In the annals of labor history, the 1915 execution of troubadour Joe Hill ranks with cases such as those of the hanging of the Haymarket martyrs (1887) and the electrocution of Sacco and Vanzetti (1927) as among the great legal injustices of all time. Hill is equally vital in music history, both for the songs he wrote in support of the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (“Wobblies”), and for songs written in his honor by luminaries such as Ralph Chaplin, Phil Ochs, Steve Earle and, of course, Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson (“I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night”). William Adler’s new book is the most through treatment of Hill to date, and is destined to displace Gibbs Smith’s 1969 biography as the definitive work on the subject.

In the usual telling, Hill–born in Sweden as Joel Emanuel Hägglund and also known as Joseph Hillström–emigrated to America around 1902, and struggled in obscurity for several years before joining the IWW around 1909, where he quickly gained renown for his sharp wit and songwriting skills. In 1914, however, he was arrested for the murder of John Morrison, a Salt Lake City grocer, was found guilty and sentenced to die by a kangaroo court more intent on looking at Hill’s radical beliefs than the evidence. Adler agrees that Hill’s judgment was unjust, but he goes much further than most other researchers; he fingers the man he thinks to be the real culprit: a career criminal who known as Frank Z. Wilson, who was actually a Norwegian immigrant who bore an uncanny resemblance to Hill and bore a grudge toward Morrison. The main piece of evidence against Hill was a bullet wound for which was treated the night of Morrison’s murder. Adler also names the man who shot Hill the same night, traveling partner Otto Appelquist, and exposes the woman over whom they quarreled, Hilda Erickson.  

Adler’s best sleuthing is the depth he gives to Hill’s sketchy pre-1909 biography. He provides rich details of Hägglund’s/Hill’s life in Sweden, a plausible reconstruction of his life between 1902 and 1909, and a rare telling of Hill’s participation in the IWW’s raid on Baja, California during the Mexican Revolution. (The latter event earned the enmity of rabid IWW foe Harrison Gray Otis, who owned land in Baja, edited the Los Angeles Times, and spearheaded the anti-clemency movement.) Adler is equally vivid in taking us inside the mind, struggles, and character of West Coast Wobblies–their lumber camps and dockside shapeups, their free speech battles, the hard knocks of itinerancy, and the vitriol of capital/labor strife.

Does Adler solve the Hill case? As a labor historian, I have looked at a lot of the same evidence as Adler. I’m simply not convinced that Hill was the innocent of legend. Hill’s willingness to don the martyr’s mantle seems abrupt, and there’s not much past evidence of a Victorian temperament that would accept death rather than besmirch a lady’s reputation. (And why would Erickson, who was present throughout the drama, remain silent as her lover went before the firing squad?) West Coast Wobblies were a rough-and-tumble lot with no love for capitalists. Put bluntly, I think it’s quite possible that Hill and Appelquist, who absconded, actually did kill Morrison. Having said that, the standard of American justice is supposed to beyond a reasonable doubt, not possibility. By that criterion, Hill’s execution is indeed the stain upon American jurisprudence that Adler insists that is. Bottom line: even if you don’t buy into the Hill-as-martyr image, Adler’s is still the best book ever written on Joe Hill. 

Rupert Murdoch Unfit to Head Media Outlet? Who Knew?

Page-three girls--the sort of outstanding journalism we've come to expect from Rpuert Murdoch. 

A new British Parliamentary report on the phone hacking scandals involving Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World operation concluded that Murdoch is “not a fit person” to head media conglomerates and news agencies. Wow! Who would have guessed? In related news, scientists have offered conclusive proof that grass is green and the sky is blue.

The Parliamentary report is as outmoded as the monarchy. Where have they been since 1969? That’s the year Murdoch landed in the UK and took over a decent-but-troubled newspaper called the Sun, converted it into a tabloid, kicked out its vaguely left-oriented staff, and made the “page-three girl” part of the British lexicon. (For those who’ve never seen a page-three girl, think Playboy in newsprint.) Murdoch was a Thatcherite during the 1980s, though he admired the Iron Lady from abroad, having moved to the United States and taken citizenship there in 1985.

His first big U.S. venture is another milestone for creative journalism–he took over the Star, that staple of bored patrons standing in supermarket checkout lines across the nation and the major faux news rival of the National Enquirer. In 1986, Murdoch launched the Fox Broadcasting Company. Need I say more?

Well, yes, I should. In 1995, the Federal Communications Commission investigated Murdoch for violation of media antitrust laws. Once upon a time, media mogulship was controlled in this country–one was not allowed to own multiple news outlets in the same market. There was a quaint idea circulating that competition prevented manipulation of information, ensured that multiple viewpoints and ideologies would be aired, and gave consumers a silly old thing called “choice.” That great “liberal” Bill Clinton scuttled that rule. (If Clinton’s a liberal, I’m the schizophrenic reincarnation of both Marx and Engels!) Thanks to Bonkin’ Bill–whom Murdoch repaid by running several fundraisers for Hillary, though he generally channels about $1 million per year to Republicans–Murdoch was able to launch a new venture in 1996: Fox News. That outlet is to objective news what a gallon of Jack Daniels is to sobriety. I’m sure that America’s squeamishness about sex is the only thing between anchor Patti Ann Browne and a video version of the page-three girl on Fox News Live.

Murdoch’s record has been tawdry and sleazy everywhere he’s set up shop, and that includes Italy. My lord! What does it say when a country that produced the Borgias and whose major media player is Silvio Berlusconi finds Rupert Murdoch’s behavior questionable? Is there anyone on the planet who thinks Murdoch is fit to run a media empire? Probably not, but the better question to ask is whether there’s anyone in the United States that cares enough about the public to strip Murdoch of his power, overturn Clinton’s foolish ruling, and restore competition to the North American media.