I have continued to teach brilliant university students whose desert-island discs are hip and arcane but whose desert-island novels are always Harry Potter. A magical, Manichaean, neobiblical view of the world might be less possible for those belonging to an older generation, whose desert-island book might be, for example, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, and so the death of bin Laden was, in general, treated more soberly by the middle-aged. The new boss, as Pete Townshend once said, may be the same as the old boss. And one whiskey priest can be replaced by another.
The fierce idealism of younger generations continues in every part of the world. And yet who would want to rid the young of their idealism? It leaves us without even the gruesomely cheering Harry Potter readers, celebrating bin Laden’s assassination. It would leave us with people even more mysterious and unnerving. Who may or may not optimistically show up for work the next day. Whose commitment to the resumption of the everyday may be as shaky as terrorism’s proponents would like it to be.
Ten years ago in the pages of The New Yorker, writers grappled eloquently with the bombing of the Twin Towers, meticulously describing the billowing smoke, the blue sky, the recurrent dreams of flying low through a city. The word cowardly was semantically parsed. Bravery was praised. Middle-of-the-night calls were confessed to, and an intelligent attempt was made to contextualize the event in a longer global history of political tragedy and war conducted in urban streets. Yet what has transpired in the ten years since 9/11, both here and in the Middle East, was not anticipated by any of these writers, all of whom are paid for their finely tuned imaginations. J. K. Rowling, showing up at her desk in the aftermath, feeling a generation’s bolt-of-lightning scar, and imagining a long battle laced with fantasy, may have outwritten everyone.
(2011)
GOP Primary Debate
Already in a condition of satire, the opening of the Tea Party–hosted GOP debate on Monday night in Tampa presented the eight Republican presidential candidates as good-looking characters—the Diplomat, the Newcomer, the Firebrand—who would have to battle one another off the electoral island. Music, brassy and tense, and a baritone voice-over let you know that this reality show was part of the ongoing Apocalypse Lite that has infused our television programming and made the networks almost unwatchable. There was little even Jon Stewart on his show the next evening could do to make fun of what was often comedically predigested—except to say that the red, white, and blue stage looked like the inside of Betsy Ross’s, well, sewing room. I’m paraphrasing.
There is always something if not a lot to learn by watching a circus—one is both amazed by and sorry for the animals. The clowns are clearly just pretending. The self-pity one arrives with enlarges to become societal. In a certain way all the candidates on Monday struggled admirably. The Mormons (Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney) as well as the Catholic Rick Santorum actually knew the words to the national anthem and were the only ones to sing along. They seemed like Mama’s sweet choirboys. The others, with more husky snark and testosterone, and I do include Michele Bachmann, did not sing, and nothing in the eyes gave a look of knowing what song it might be or what verse anyone was on. But everyone’s hands were on their chests or in anatomically approximate places. (Romney may have been clutching his side—his performance next to high-testosterone men has not always been good. In 2008 he withered next to John McCain and sometimes looked as if he might burst into tears; he is somewhat more confident now but similarly dweeb-spirited next to Rick Perry, whose voice is gruffer and lower—perhaps too gruff and low to sing.)
In the Tea Party audience on the Florida State Fairgrounds, even fewer seemed to know Francis Scott Key’s words.
It is indeed the audiences who are getting scary. The MSNBC crowd last Thursday applauded the state of Texas’s record-breaking death-row executions. On Monday in Tampa at least one person cheered the prospect of (in a question posed to Ron Paul) an uninsured man in a coma being left to die. Monday’s audience also booed Perry’s defense of public education for children of illegal immigrants, as well as Paul’s skeptical remarks about American exceptionalism (“We’re under great threat because we occupy so many countries. We have nine hundred bases around the world”). This kind of hoo-ha heartlessness is recession road rage at its worst, and that this is the electorate these candidates are trying to court often seems to startle even them, though this is reflected less in the policies they endorse than in their faces, which can veer to and from their lecterns in disorientation and fog.
Each of the candidates did have something genuinely interesting to offer: Paul is strongly antiwar. Perry would like to give the children of illegal immigrants the right to go to university. Bachmann seemed to have the goods on Perry (a genuine scandal involving the pharmaceutical company Merck, a former staffer who was a lobbyist for Merck, and Texas’s executive mandate for a controversial vaccine made by Merck). Herman Cain would like a simplified tax system with no loopholes and a rule that says no congressional bill can be longer than three pages. Huntsman has a more progressive though also flattened tax system (you can see him, with nervous dismay, counting his island days). He is also trying to keep science in the platform and religion out and would (like Perry) work to wind things down in Afghanistan. Newt Gingrich is honing his wittiness, something of which he’s always been proud (Bachmann brings her loud, rough laugh to it all, so he may be flirting with her). Romney is tall. Romney also arranges his face warmly when others are speaking—unlike Perry, who often looks concussed, though Perry’s beauty, a cross between Burt Reynolds and Hilary Swank, springs to life when the suggestion that he can be bought for only five thousand dollars comes up. He has a price, he seems to suggest, but it’s much higher than that. And—as reports roll in—so it is.
The garish red theatrical set of last Thursday’s MSNBC debate, which caused most of the candidates to show up in popping blue ties (and Bachmann in a high-collar blouse, an attractive style she is ruining for Democratic women), had on CNN’s Monday debate become mostly blue, making it a red-jacket (Bachmann) and red-tie affair, although a few (Gingrich, Paul, Santorum) seemed not to have gotten the memo. Romney and Perry were once again put center stage, and this time Perry’s suit was slightly lighter and browner, suggesting that perhaps he will be the running mate in what is shaping up to be the likely GOP ticket—in imitation of that other cowboy and nebbish team of former Democrats, Reagan and Bush.
Throughout the many subsequent debates that’s what we are going to be watching: Mitt and Rick getting to know each other. It’s up to everyone else to go after them. That this will be going on while the tired but dignified Barack Obama tries to get his jobs bill passed and has to endure the wrongheaded wave of Clinton nostalgia that has swept over his party is our democratic system at its circus-saddest. But Obama’s situation is a reminder that, despite the seeming meaninglessness of the debates, until election reform really takes hold (a key reason to explore space for other inhabitable planets or at least for other supreme courts), the primary matters. It can create divisions that haunt for years. The voters that now complain the most about Obama are the skeptical ones he never had in the primary to begin with. In a system of government designed for gridlock by eighteenth-century visionaries in a hurry and a huff, one can long for a parliament with a prime minister, something we almost had with LBJ. Who then got out, exhausted. But with a legacy.
(2011)
Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss
A documentary film is often part stunt, part lab experiment, and the way a documentary filmmaker pursues his or her story will always involve a bit of amateur sleuthing, as well as improv. That such scriptless adventures have attracted a great director like Werner Herzog is curious but not alarming. Good documentary films can be made cheaply, and we seem to be living in an abundantly golden—or at least copper (pennywise)—era of them. Herzog’s latest film, Into the Abyss, much like his 2005 documentary, Grizzly Man, uses the camera as a Geiger c
ounter to locate some of the more toxic elements of the American cultural psyche as seen through the questing mind of a pseudosqueamish European. Here the setting is small-town Texas’s well-traveled road to death row. Once again, in his soft, Teutonic off-camera voice, Herzog insinuatingly and gently coaxes his interviewees while his camera registers a more ambiguous, startled fixation on people and places, plus a willingness to stare bluntly. Director and camera are like good cop, bad cop.
While given the banal subtitle A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life, Herzog’s documentary doesn’t have its hands on entire tales as much as the shiny pieces of many. The project seems to have initially aimed to tell the story of Mike Perry, a Texan inmate who had been on death row for ten years, since the age of eighteen, and who, when Herzog meets him, is scheduled for execution in eight days. Although the boyish, bucktoothed Perry eagerly speaks to Herzog and breaks the viewer’s heart (almost all who are interviewed speak movingly and with great ostensible openness; how confessional reality television has prepped their personalities one can only guess), Perry’s family refused to appear in the film—a very large hole. So Herzog is forced to roam around the whole Texas scene of small-town dysfunction and capital punishment protocol.
The actual crime—the shooting by Perry and his friend Jason Burkett of three people in order to steal a red Camaro in a gated community—is so senseless and stupidly conceived it is really just a worst-case portrait of teenage boy drunkenness, impulsivity, poverty-addled sociopathy, and a country so awash in weapons that it has arrived (perhaps once more) at a point in history where every high schooler knows how and where to get a gun. (This aspect is missing from Herzog’s social critique, which focuses on capital punishment.) The coveted red Camaro, a kind of CSI MacGuffin, now sits in a police crime lot with a tree growing through its floor.
The first person interviewed is not Perry but the Death House reverend, who will speak to Perry of God (everyone in this picture, except Herzog, speaks of God) and who, as a gesture of kindness, will hold Perry’s ankle during the execution on the gurney. The reverend is against the death penalty, but in thinking about it before the camera he veers off into an anecdote about a golf trip and his relief at not hitting a squirrel and killing one of God’s creatures, and we can see how, when pressed to illuminate its own contradictions, the human mind can go on the fritz. This may really be Herzog’s theme. His later interview of Fred Allan, the former captain of the Huntsville staff that straps the prisoners to the gurney, is a stirring example of someone who cracks under the pressure of paying work that involves killing up to two people a week. After the execution of Karla Faye Tucker, to whom Allan had begun to feel close, he had something of a breakdown and eventually quit his job, forswearing capital punishment as well as his pension. Although he has nothing to do with Mike Perry’s story, he is an important part of Herzog’s film.
Perhaps the most moving soliloquy belongs to Delbert Burkett, the jailed father of Mike Perry’s partner in crime, Jason Burkett. Jason—who appears in the film looking simultaneously soldierly and apprehensive—is given life imprisonment, rather than the death penalty, thanks to his father’s testimony during the sentencing hearing, which so moved and mercifully softened the jury that he reiterates his eloquently self-blaming remarks for Herzog. Although his son Jason was living in a trailer park at the time of the murders, Delbert at that same age had won a football scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, only to drop out his senior year and, demoralized, eventually become a drug addict and thief and abandon his family. He and his son, both incarcerated, recently spent a holiday dinner together, handcuffed, a low point in the father’s life that he describes with a kind of naked shame. His memories of Jason as a sickly child with several neuroblastomas (a deadly cancer) that required painful bone marrow treatment are heartrending and give a further glimpse into the injury and difficulties that can beset an already wobbling family and send it off the rails.
Herzog is interested in American violence reflected even in the names of Texas towns—Cut and Shoot is one—as well as the way that death and mayhem lying literally next door are moved on from, whereas superstitions—rainbows and departed spirits—are not. Crater Lake, a spot where bodies were infamously disposed of, and which in the Perry-Burkett crime was also used for that purpose, is a stone’s throw from the gated community in Conroe that harbored the beloved Camaro. A new house near the crime scene is shown with a long, winding driveway that paves over the spot in the woods where one of the bodies was found. Herzog’s camera takes an unflinchingly quiet look.
Dedicated to the victims and their families, the film gives perfect expression to the fear of a phone ringing: one of Herzog’s bereaved interviewees has had the phone removed from her house.
In seeking the bizarre, Herzog has one thing after another just fall into his lap. Perhaps nothing seems stranger than the marriage of inmate Jason Burkett to a young Kansas woman who takes an interest in his case and begins writing to him. She is well groomed and plainspoken, filmed against the backdrop of a cozily domestic living room. Their courtship, which she recounts to Herzog, is a perversely mythic one that echoes the Wild West’s sending east for schoolteachers and wives. After their marriage she manages to become pregnant with Jason’s child—he wants fifty children, he says—and although she is at first reluctant to reveal the illegal details of this, Herzog’s Viennese therapist’s voice, not completely unlike that of Hannibal Lecter talking to Clarice, entices it out of her. She then, holding up her smartphone, shows us the ultrasound of the fetus, a ghostly image that Herzog’s camera does not succeed in turning away from. “Scott Peterson gets a hundred letters a day,” says Melyssa Thompson-Burkett, in an attempt to distinguish herself from other women who have fallen for handsome death-row inmates. Like so many other people in this riveting film, she does not on the surface appear to be crazy.
(2011)
Suzzy Roche’s Wayward Saints
Suzzy Roche is mostly known as the youngest member of the three-sister band the Roches. The heyday of their somewhat cult following (cult in this case meaning “passionate, but shy of glamorous commercial levels”) began in the late seventies and crested in the mid-eighties. The Roches themselves hung on professionally in various combinations and incarnations into the 1990s and beyond; Suzzy has recorded both alone and with her sister Maggie. Many a fan has stared at their album covers, contemplating Suzzy’s long dark hair, her playful stances, her scrawny baby-of-the-family girlishness while trying to figure out which voice is hers in the tight, intricate harmonies that fill the Roches’ recordings. What might be less well known is that Suzzy Roche—who is now in her mid-fifties—is part of a larger musical clan: with the folksinger Loudon Wainwright she has a daughter, Lucy, who is also a singer-songwriter and whose half siblings are Rufus and Martha Wainwright, the children of Kate McGarrigle of the much-loved McGarrigle Sisters.
The Roche-Wainwright-McGarrigle intertwinings comprise a musical family the sprawling brilliance of which has not been experienced perhaps since—well, we won’t say the Lizst-Wagners—but at least the Carter-Cashes. The extended family oeuvre, though varied, often has a conversational, smart-kids-at-summer-camp quality that is both folky and jokey. The Roches’ own wistful, clever songs are written with a sweet street spontaneity and prosody, and their clear, pure voices are like a barbershop trio of sassy angels. Sometimes they are overdubbed, to enlarge the sound, and the effect is close to celestial. But most often they sound like plucky girls riding home on a school bus, making things up as they go along. Their lyrics have unexpected line breaks and enjambment. In “The Train,” from the Roches’ first album, Suzzy writes,
I sit down on the train
with my big pocketbook
the guitar and a sugar-free drink
I wipe the sweat off of my brow
with the side of my arm
and take off all that I can
I am tryin
g not to have a bad day
everybody knows the way that is.
In the later song “My, My Broken Heart,” she pines,
I would be as good as maybe grandma
but I must get a grip on
my, my broken heart.
In “My Winter Coat,” the Roches sing (à la Lorenz Hart in “Everything I’ve Got Belongs to You”), “The cuffs are purple which perfectly suits / a pair I already had of boots.”(One is reminded of the Yoda-like syntax of Hart’s “There’s a trick with a knife I’m learning to do.”)
The Wainwrights, each performing before their individual audiences (in 2006 Rufus—a crooning balladeer who, like his father, has a bleak comic streak—devoted an entire Carnegie Hall concert to the songs of Judy Garland), write and sing with a similarly loose, improvisatory aspect. The 1970s novelty song “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road” by Loudon Wainwright has been the biggest family hit and atypical for all. The McGarrigles were renowned Canadian musicians; their most famous and beautiful song, “Heart Like a Wheel,” was covered by Linda Ronstadt. But despite—or maybe in keeping with—their penchant for the whimsical and ad hoc, the Roche sisters have been the most adventurous and original act in the family and have even recorded amusing yet exquisite a cappella versions of compositions by Handel and by Cole Porter.