Sandcastle Girls a Good Way to Start Thinking of Armenian Massacre

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THE SANDCASTLE GIRLS (2012)

By Chris Bohjalian

Random House, 299 pp.

* * *

Not the most effective cover art (or title)

Call it unplanned synchronicity. Just as I was getting ready to prepare a lecture for my immigration class that included the Armenian genocide, I picked up a copy of The Sandcastle Girls. In all honesty, I didn't know its subject matter; I only knew I needed a novel to read and that I liked some of Chris Bohjalian's other books. In fact, the title and cover art nearly led me elsewhere as each suggested a teen coming-of-age-at-the-beach book. It's not; it's a harrowing fictionalized treatments of the 1915 murder of 1.5 Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

Bohjalian calls it "The Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About," and so it is. The Turks would prefer you call it "Self-Defense Against Internal Traitors and Terrorists," but that's sheer rubbish–unless you think small children and their mothers took up arms against a defenseless Ottoman Empire. Actually, Turks would prefer you don't know about how they butchered Armenians like roasting chickens. If you know about that one, you might start asking questions about how they treated Azerbaijanis, Greeks, and Kurds as well. But back to the novel.

It's set in 1915, the year of the massacre and the early days of World War One. (If you need another history lesson, the United States will, in 1917, enter the war on the side of Britain and France against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Turks.) Boston Brahmin and recent Mt. Holyoke grad Elizabeth Endicott decides to accompany her father to Aleppo, Syria, where he will coordinate the regional efforts of the Friends of Armenia. The FOA is a do-good but totally ineffectual relief agency that the Turks brazenly lie to and ignore, and which even the U.S. consulate thinks is just in the way. Elizabeth, though, is undeterred and resolute in her desire to do some good. She may be naïve, but she's not blind and she knows not to trust the Turks when they say they are 'relocating' women and children to keep them out of harm's way (as in a mass grave). Her efforts eventually lead her to take into her household an Armenian woman named Nevart, and a small girl named Hatoun who doesn't say much and is prone to disappearing. As it turns out Hatoun doesn't say much because she witnessed the Turks behead her mother; she latched onto Nevart in a refugee camp. Elizabeth will also eventually meet and fall in love with Armen Petroisan, an engineer who once believed in the Ottoman Empire–until the racists took over and, he is forced to conclude, murdered his daughter and wife.

The novel plays out Elizabeth and Armen's relationship against a backdrop of war and murder–think Dr. Zhivago without the ice palace. There are some fine plot twists, including the unlikely but true story of how the Armenian holocaust was documented through the efforts of two German soldier/photographers who got their images smuggled out the region. There are also harrowing tales from the infamous Battle of Gallipoli bloodbath, peeks inside orphanages, and suggestions that the U.S. pandered when it should have pushed. Elizabeth is also a nice mix of a Braham and the New Woman.

The novel is strongest for what it tells us about "The Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About." In telling it, Bohjalian uses a device of which I'm not overly fond–using a present-day narrator/snoop to uncover the secrets of the past. In this case, it's Elizabeth's granddaughter and novelist, Laura Petrosian, who recalled her grandmother's "Ottoman Annex" home in Pelham, Massachusetts, but not much about her grandparents. Laura's character and story feel contrived. There are a few too many coincidences and, let's face it, a novelist character from the hands of a novelist feels pretentious. The book's central metaphor, the sandcastle, is itself built upon loose ground, a small incident in the book that you could easily miss if reading late at night.  I also couldn't help think of Eleni, which uses the deep, dark family secret trope more effectively. But when we are in Turkey in 1915, the story tells itself. This book won't win style points, but give Bohjalian props for blowing the lid off Turkish silence. If you know little about the Armenian genocide–and that would be most people–this is a good place to start your own snooping into an atrocity whose hundredth birthday we shall soon commemorate. 

Rob Weir

Welcome to the (Brain) Deado-cratic Party

Brian Schatz: OMG! He's liberal and wins!

Here’s what happened on November 4: the Democrats got their proverbial clocks cleaned. It was a GOP rout—an old-fashioned, ass-kicking, beat-down, barnyard whupping.  Here’s what should happen next: the Democratic Party should reinvent itself and jettison the pandering centrists whose shrill voices signify nothing. Here’s what will happen: the party bigwigs will talk about the need to move more to the center to attract the “middle class.” (That group of Americans was pretty much rendered defunct by class warfare in the 1980s.)  In other words, let’s have more Hillary Clinton and less Elizabeth Warren.

If there is a less imaginative group of people than the Democratic National Committee please don’t tell me about them. There is great handwringing over the Democratic “loss” of the U.S. Senate, a load of hooey as the Democrats didn’t control that body on November 3. That “control” rested on a handful of Republicans masquerading as Democrats. In 2014, they lost to actual Republicans. Don’t take my word for it, look at the data.

As you might expect, conservative think tanks keep track of the most liberal members of Congress. Check out the voting records compiled by the National Journal, which counts the Heritage Foundation among its supporters. Now compare them to Tuesday’s results. Using their data from 2013, here are a list of incumbent “Democrats” that lost on Tuesday; the percentage following their names represents their support for conservative issues as interpreted by the National Journal: Mark Pyror (Arkansas, 54%), Max Baucus (Montana, retired when polls went south, 42%); Mark Begich (Alaska, 45%), Kay Hagan (North Carolina, 51%), and Mark Udall (Colorado, 30%). Come Louisiana’s run-off you can add Mary Landrieu (42%) to the list. The only person on this list that could remotely considered liberal was Mark Udall, who simply didn’t get out the Hispanic vote needed to keep his seat.

Now let’s look at who did win and how often they supported conservative issues:

               

                Brian Schatz (Hawaii, 11.8%) –reelected with 70% of the vote

                Al Franken (Minnesota, 14%)

                Jack Reed (Rhode Island, 16%)

                Tom Udall (New Mexico, 28%)

                Chris Coons (Delaware, 30%)

                Jeff Merkley (Oregon, 32%)

                Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire, 33%)

The numbers are pretty clear­—Democrats who had principles won; with the exception of Mark Udall, those who acted like Republicans lost. Want more evidence of why it would be suicide for Democrats to move to the middle? The National Journal also ranks the “most moderate” members of the US Senate. Guess who was smack dab in the middle, the very model of non-partisanship? Soon-to-be ex-Senator Kay Hagan.

Will the Democrats get the message? Of course they won’t! They’ll continue to tell us of how Barack Obama was misunderstood or stymied at every step by evil Republicans. (It couldn’t be because he’s an empty suit devoid of leadership skills, could it?) They’ll wax nostalgic for the greatest “Democratic” Republican of all time: Bill Clinton. They’ll salivate when Wal-Mart Hillary stops her endless political striptease and announces she’s running in 2016. She might actually win, given that the current GOP presumptives are crazier than an asylum during a Thorazine shortage.

Democratic voices will be shrill and they will signify nothing. Will they speak on behalf of working people? Heaven forbid! They’d be accused of fomenting “class warfare.” Funny, Bernie Sanders always says the real class warfare is that perpetuated by Wall Street upon American workers and the only way the GOP will ever get his seat is when he shuffles off this mortal coil. Will Democrats go into black and Hispanic communities and tell them that the GOP is racist? Shudder! That would lose the “middle class” vote—read suburban white bigots. Will they talk about the free trade fraud that steals American jobs and saddles American children with crippling national debt? Nope—they’ll talk about the need for Social Security reform instead. Will they ask why the hell American kids are dying in places populated by Islamic lunatics that we ought to allow to rot in their own rubbish? Oh no, mustn’t offend our “military families.”

And the only Democrats that will excite anyone are the Elizabeth Warren types. Who can blame voters for ignoring the incumbents who lost? If act like a Republican, why not vote for a real one? If you take a path down the middle like Hagan, you’re just not paying enough attention to warrant it from voters. Remember what Bob Dylan wrote: “You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.” But first you have to open the window!

               

               

Standard Time is Substandard in My Book

Monday November 3, 2014: It’s 7:30 am and a beautiful sunny morning in New England. The sun is glinting off the hillside burnishing autumn’s fading glories with rusty red and yellowy brown hues. And I’m grumpy as I drive to work.

Take a good look New Englanders. 

No, I’m not in a foul mood because it’s Monday or because I’m going to work. I love my job, which means Monday is another opportunity to spend amidst smart, energetic young people. I’m seeing bright red (instead of fading red) because yesterday was my least favorite day in the calendar, the day we move the clocks ahead and lose an hour of late afternoon sunlight. In my view, Standard Time is a fraud perpetuated by energy companies to boost household consumption.

I hear people tell me they love the fall back clock adjustment because “I get an extra hour of sleep.” Really? Show of hands and be honest. How many of you actually slept an extra hour because the clock turned back an hour? Look, if you have little ones at home, clock time is irrelevant. If you don’t and if you work in anywhere other than a 24-hour convenience store, your body is operating on automatic rhythms and you probably got up yesterday after sleeping  as many hours as you usually do. Don’t believe me? Ask my cat, Minou. She was hungry at clock time 5 am and 4 pm, which her body told her was normal feeding time. I suppose an extra hour of sleep means nothing to a beastie that normally sleeps two-thirds of the day, but you’ve been sold a load of hooey if you think your one hour once a year means much to you. The clock changes at 2 am Sunday morning. How many of you actually changed your clocks before you went to bed? Plus, the next morning is Sunday and most of us can sleep in any damn Sunday we want.  

I do not need an extra hour of sunlight in the morning. I’m on my way to work and if I have turn on my headlights for the first part of my half hour commute, so be it. As I said, I love my job, but once I trudge from the parking lot to my office, I’ll be inside except when walking to and from my classes, and the sun is always up by then anyhow.  Later today I’ll be attending a lecture before going home. The event starts at 4:30 pm and I’d normally dawdle a bit to arrive after all the thanking of sponsors and longwinded introduction of a speaker whose bio I know or I wouldn’t be there in the first place. Not today, though. I’ll hustle a bit because the sun sets at 4:39 pm. By the time I get out, it will be pitch dark. Spare me all the public safety crap about morning light. Want to feel creeped out? Wander into a dark, remote UMass parking lot when the sun is down and get back to me.

Places such as Arizona and Hawaii never go on Daylight Savings Time. I don’t begrudge them that—they have more sunlight than they know what to do with. But I live in New England and before we start getting back a few precious seconds of light beginning December 22, our sun will set at 4:11 pm. For most of us, we’ll get up, get a peek at the sun on our work commute, and the Old Sol will bugger off to desert  and tropical climes before we get another look the next morning. Light-deprived depression is a very real thing up this way. It even has a name: Seasonal Affect Disorder.

So I say, no more Standard Time.  If Arizona can thumb its nose at the clock, so can New Englanders. Need an extra hour of sleep? Easily fixed—go to be an hour earlier! As for the rest of us, raise those hands, wave them about, and join in the chorus, “Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the suunnn  shine in.”

Angélique Kidjo Transforms the FAC Into a Global Village (with a Dance Hall)

ANGELIQUE KIDJO

University of Massachusetts Amherst Fine Arts Center

October 30, 2014

Angelique Kidjo

Miriam Makeba died in 2008. So vast was her influence that she was dubbed "Mama Africa," and so firm was her grip on that title that speculation immediately raged as to whom could possibly assume her mantle. That debate is over. Benin-born, Grammy Award winner Angélique Kidjo now reigns and commands such global respect that she has been dubbed "Sister Africa." For once the Music Hype Machine got it right.

Ms. Kidjo brought her high-powered act to the University of Massachusetts Amherst Fine Arts Center on Thursday night and transformed the building into a swaying, dancing village. You needed to be there to understand what a feat this was. The FAC is a cold, unlovable venue–a cavernous, windowless expanse of Brutalist concrete slabs whose architecture is evocative of East Berlin under Stalinism. If you can make that place rock, you can pop open graves and get skeletons to dance.

Kidjo is now based in New York City and belongs to the world, not just Benin. Her style is suitably au courant­—a veritable mash of pop, jazz, blues, folk, carnivalesque zouk, and soukous. For those unfamiliar with the latter two categories, souk is lively party music that developed on former French Caribbean islands such as Martinique and Guadeloupe; Benin was also a French colony, and Ms. Kidjo is fluent in French (plus English, Fon, and Yoruba). Soukous is a Congolese variant of rumba. The word translates "to shake," and few can do so with the facility and electric excitement of Angélique Kidjo. She informed the nearly full FAC that dancing at her concerts was a "rule." A rule, mind, not an option. And what a spitfire she is–think a muscular in-your-face mélange of Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, James Brown, and the twirling, fight-like stances of West African dancers. Only Tina Turner rivals Kidjo for bodily attitude and insouciance. When Kidjo decides to spin, get out of her way–as she pointedly reminded her guitarist and bass player at several junctures during the concert when she nudged them to the parts of the stage to which she wished them to retreat!

As I mentioned earlier, Kidjo is now a global phenomenon, which means it's a mistake to see her music as Beninese village music. She's the sort of force that can and has played with Bono, Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana, Counting Crows, Alicia Keyes, Cyndi Lauper, and Philip Glass. She's covered songs by Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and Miriam Makeba. If you must apply a label, the term Afropop is probably the best. Check out her smash hit "Africa," which got the FAC audience on its feet, and you can see how she fuses the germ of traditional styles with glittery pop.

With a voice such as hers, Kidjo could sing algorithms and you'd be impressed. As glorious as her visual show was, though, my favorites moments were when she slowed the pace, stripped down the instrumentation (guitar, bass, two percussionists, and programmed sounds), and just sang. Kidjo delights in singing across rhythms, sometimes on the off-beat, but there was a magical moment in which she visibly took a slow song down a notch because she needed to allow the reverberations of her voice to die down before the next blast, lest she unleash a concretized cacophony.

Kidjo is touring in support of her latest album, Eve, which is dedicated both to her mother (whose voice we heard on tape) and to women in general. Kidjo is also an activist for the rights of women and girls, messages she delivered in chat and song. Looking for a role model of a strong woman? There's this singer from Benin who can transform a room into a musical conversation…  Rob Weir

Me Before You an Unorthodox Story of Love and Social Class

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ME BEFORE YOU (2103)

Jojo Moyes

Penguin Books, 400 pp; ISBN 978014124544.

* * * *

Me Before You is a love story–of sorts. Two very improbable characters are thrown together by misfortune and tragedy: Louisa "Lou" Clark, a 26-year-old working-class woman, and Will Traynor, a 35-year-old upper crust high-flying London investor. Both lives take a dramatic turn–Lou's when she loses a café job that helps support her family, and Will's when he distractedly walks into traffic, is struck by a motorbike, and is left a quadriplegic.

Few people think about social class as much as the Brits like Moyes, who romanticizes neither the workaday proles nor the haute bourgeoisie. Lou lives in a shabby row house with her parents and single-mother sister, Katrina, in a Hertfordshire village that's about as exciting as watching the teakettle boil. Its sole claim to fame is Stortford castle, a place where tourists gather, but people like the Clarks visit only on school trips. Clark's family is too ineffectual to be dysfunctional. Everyone is just trying to make do–Lou's dad is on the dole and trying to pacify a wife who's a bit 'round the twist, Katrina coping by playing the victim/guilt/still going to be somebody role to the hilt, and Lou putting up with boyfriend Patrick, once pudgy-but-fun and now a personal trainer more concerned about his own body fat/muscle ratio than Lou's body.

On the other side of town, miles away physically and socially, Will sulks in his ruined body and in a home filled with money but devoid of passion or compassion. He is angry, unapologetic about his moral and intellectual superiority, and contemptuous of the notion that anyone should, as Lou has been doing, simply make do. She enters the unhappy Traynor household because she needs a job. Though she knows little of what she's getting into, Lou becomes one of Will's caregivers.

A relationship that begins with mutual contempt evolves into one of respect and love by a different name. Will considers his life over and has extracted a promise from his mother, Camilla that he will submit to caregivers for one year. If he finds no joy, Camilla has agreed to allow Will to go to a Swiss clinic and end his life humanely. Moyes employs the classic literary ploy of a race against the clock. (She cleverly juxtaposes Patrick's obsession with his running times with Will's count down.) Will comes to accept Lou, who is his match in irreverence and sarcasm. Over time, he finds himself oddly attracted to her bubbly optimism and plucky obstinacy. Mainly, though, it angers him that she's stuck in a town he calls a "placemat." He hates it in Hertfordshire and thinks everyone should.

We're not sure if Will is in love with Lou in his own way or simply living vicariously through her. For her part, Lou does everything she can to try to make Will consider that life is worthwhile, even when experienced from a wheelchair. Field trips become one of the ways through which their two worlds converge—Lou is elevated and Will voluntarily descends from a social perch he comes to see as shallow and hypocritical. Soon we don't know who is saving whom or from what. Both of our protagonists cling stubbornly to the belief that everyone has the right to live according to one's own terms, but each acknowledges that those terms are more fluid than once thought. The book's ending is morally ambiguous in a delicious way and will either be exactly as you'd predict, or completely the opposite. That either would be feasible and satisfactory is among the book's many charms.

Moyes is a much stronger storyteller than prose wizard, but her tale is so strong it will draw you in and make you care deeply about Lou and Will. I give the book kudos for doing something American novels seldom do any more–consider social class. Moyes deserves a second shout for how she handles the British class system. If in America we don't discuss class at all, in Britain, writers often do so by contrasting paste-up yobbos against twit-like toffs–neither with well-oiled brains. Me Before You shows characters with the capacity for self-reflection and growth, so much so that they can reinvent themselves here and in the hereafter.-- Rob Weir

For Halloween: Only Lovers Left Alive

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ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2013)

Directed by Jim Jarmusch

Sony Classics, 128 minutes, R (brief nudity, language)

* * * * *

I’m pretty bored with the overdone vampire genre, but I give a hearty thumbs-up to the stylish treatment given by director Jim Jarmusch. There aren’t too many people who can do laconic ennui tinged with surrealism as well as Jarmusch. Want a film for Halloween season viewing? You won't find a better one than Only Lovers Left Alive, a film that disintegrated at the American box office like Dracula exposed to sunlight. Idiots! This German/British production is chilling, touching, and visually stunning.

It centers on two vampires who have been lovers for many centuries. How many? Well, their names are Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), and that’s Jarmusch’s first little inside joke. If you recall, Eve ushered in Paradise Lost when she took up the serpent’s offer to eat from the Tree of Wisdom. In some translations, that arboreal temptation is the Tree of Eternal Life. In essence, Adam and Eve found a way around God by becoming immortal vampires.

After all these millennia, Adam is so bored he’s suicidal. He and Eve have lived apart for many years, but she decides to travel from Tangiers, where she lives surrounded by books, to rescue Adam, who resides in a post-economic apocalypse neighborhood in Detroit, surrounded by vintage guitars. (All traveling is confined to night flights, naturally.) Where better to be a vampire than in the deadest of dead cities? Adam is fed up with everything, including moronic people he calls “zombies.” Call it the second joke--if there’s anything more overdone than vampires, it’s zombies! Adam has, for years, passed himself off as a moody musician, first as a punk rocker then as a reclusive avant garde art rocker, hence all those guitars. Nobody quite understands his music, which means to the walking zombies it must be brilliant. Eve gets him, though. Both are classy, highly sexed, discerning vampires that require Type O negative blood to avoid getting sick on their sustenance. Detroit is a great place to find it, a place scarier than any vampire could ever be. Adam simply buys his blood from Dr. Watson (Jeffrey Wright), who needs the cash more than he needs to know why his mysterious client, Dr. Faust, wants it. Call their names more inner jokes.

Eve and Adam adore each other and almost have a good thing going until Eve’s younger vamp sister, Ava (Mia Wasikowska) drops in from Los Angeles and ruins a good thing.  Her LA demeanor is as trashy as Eve is classy; like LA, excess trumps restraint. She messes things up so badly that Adam and Eve must hightail it back to Morocco—at night, of course—to score some “pure” blood from Kit Marlowe (John Hurt). Another twist—he’s Christopher Marlowe, the real Shakespeare, who faked his death in 1593. Let’s just say not all goes according to plan. The film’s ending is both terrifying and beautiful.

This film is drenched in atmosphere—all of it tone perfect. There is a heart-wrenching scene involving a café singer (Lebanese star Yasmine Hamdan) that is positively otherworldly. The soundtrack, including music from Jarmusch’s own band, SQURL, rightly won an award at Cannes in 2013 and the film itself was nominated for a Palme d’Or.

You will walk away filled with doubt as to whether being undead might be preferable to being (semi) alive in Detroit and, of course, you will muse upon the question of whether transience is preferable to immortality. Hiddleston and Swinton have amazing chemistry together and, as usual, it’s almost impossible not to stare at Swinton when she’s on camera—her pallid complexion and icy demeanor jumping off the screen as all you’d imagine a vampire queen to be.  Only Lovers Left Alive is a small masterpiece whether you view it for Halloween or Arbor Day.

—Rob Weir

Parsonsfield afterparty Flirts Boundaries of Chaos

PARSONSFIELD

afterparty

Signature Sounds 2067

* * ½

How do you like your old-time (ish) music, straight up or mashed? Languid and melancholic, or caffeinated and raucous? Controlled or ragged? I generally get bored with stuff that hews too straight to tradition. In that spirit, Parsonsfield (formerly Pure Old Shine) ought to be just my shot of Old Red Eye. And so they are, but just one shot, not the whole jug. There is much to be admired about this young band, not the least of which is that everyone in it has a good voice and they know how to harmonize. They also sport a fine balance of whimsical songs (Mississippi John Hurt's "Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me"), funky (a cover of Bert Jansch's "Strollin' Down the Highway"), 50's style doowop rock ("Anita, Your Lovin'"), and some old-time mountain pathos ("Hang Me" and "Lay Some Flowers on My Grave.") Not only do these five lads sing well, they're also fine musicians on everything from the usual stringed instruments to things such as glockenspiel, trumpet, and musical saw.

So why a middling rating? Frankly, these guys exhaust me. afterparty is an EP and its seven tracks are pretty close to my limit. The reason lies in the execution, not the effort. These tracks involve the kind of involvement one puts into training a kitten–both the fun parts and the moments when you just want things to calm down. That is to say, Parsonsfield tends to arrange material that teeters on the brink of chaos. Usually they pull back just in the nick of time, but sometimes they don't. I get the idea that they wanted to make a spirited album evocative of evenings when the real party begins when the official one ends. I also get it that they wanted to keep the mood light and the music unrestrained. Oddly, though, all this full-tilt energy has the net effect of making seven really different songs feel the same. There's a reason why more experienced lineups spend a lot of time working on the pacing of their set lists. afterparty still makes it onto my personal playlist, but I like it a whole lot better when it's loaded on my iPod with other albums and the mode set to shuffle.  Rob Weir