Film Review: The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life, which I saw last night in Kilburn, is Terence Malick's fifth feature-length film - in his late 60s, he has just wrapped up filming a sixth.  As most film followers are aware, he is a cult director of genius, whose latest won the top prize at Cannes this year.  His style, which is entirely original, and influential, features jump-cuts, reveries, meditations, lots of voice over, rural Americana and childhood themes, nature shots, and a lyrical sense of the world as a place of peril and wonder, always about to lapse from Eden.  The Tree of Life left many in my British audience giggling last evening, at its end - and no doubt it feels very long.  The film is semi-plotless.  Instead, it deals with the biggest themes imaginable - literally, Genesis, or the creation of life, from the Big Bang, through to the formation of Earth, to the first life, death of the dinosaurs, and culminates in Texas, in 2010 or thereabouts, as a rich man looks back upon his early childhood in the late 50s and early 60s in Waco Texas; and reflects upon the death of his musically-gifted brother, presumably in Viet Nam.  We never see any depictions of warfare (or sexuality) - instead, the film emphasises the smallest moments and gestures - hands brushing against hands, looking at light, rain drops, running, climbing trees, glimpses, glances, small lessons handed down - and in almost every scene the sun is setting or rising.  Filmed mostly at "The Golden Hour" it is the most achingly beautiful film ever made by an American about childhood, and must bear comparison to the work that Twain did on the subject.  However, it is also one of the five most ambitious American films ever, if once includes Birth of a Nation, Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Apocalypse Now.  The film is insanely vast in canvass - Miltonic, sublime.  It is not for the secular - for it is everywhere asking for God (literally) but also noting "His" absence.  To judge it by normal standards would be futile - it has no narrative pleasures, and though there is much suspense, little pay-off in the usual sense.  The scenes near the end are extraordinarily moving, but then the film ends suddenly, and little has been explained. How can it be?  Life is inexplicable, and always happening.  The film's central spoken messages refer to Love, Nature, Grace - and show the struggle between a patriarchal instinct (Brad Pitt, never better, as the father who can play the organ, is an inventor, and a pilot), and the mother, who floats, gently, above things, heals, plays, and protects.  Very few movies are likely to provoke yawns and cheers of joy quite as much as this.  But I am better for having seen it.

Just No More Things: Peter Falk Has Died

Sad news.  Peter Falk, the great American actor with the glass eye and the peculiar drawl, best known for playing Columbo, arguably the best-loved TV detective of popular culture, has died.  He was also a character actor known for taking challenging roles in art-house films, such as Wings of Desire, A Woman Under The Influence, and Husbands.  His first TV role was in 1957, and his last was in 2009.  In that 53 years, nothing he did equalled, in terms of sly charisma, the brilliance of Columbo, the highwater mark of intelligent adult entertainment drama on US television during the 1970s and 1980s; it was certainly always a special night when a Columbo show was on.  What I loved about the shows (as did my father) was how the unassuming, seemingly bumbling rumpled detective, who always smoked a cigar and referred to his wife, was actually a genius, more than a match for the psychopathic narcissistic killers he would eventually outwit - usually brain surgeons, conductors, authors, magicians, and other megalomaniacal professionals.  In short, he was an updating of Father Brown, removed from the ecclesiastical English context and transplanted to America.  Falk will be much missed.  His Columbo will live forever.

James Arness Has Died

James Arness, who played Marshall Dillon for 20 years on one of American TV's greatest, longest-running and most-beloved shows, Gunsmoke, has died at the age of 88.  Arness, who was six-foot-six, had a tragic personal life in that his wife and daughter predeceased him due to drug overdoses.  He will be much missed but is a rock-solid part of the cultural landscape of American popular culture.

Giving Birth

It is now official: 25% of Americans are not just stupid, but plain wrong.  When push came to shove, Mr. Obama, born in Hawaii in 1961 (making him 50ish), today produced his full birth certifcate, immediately rendering the "Birther Movement" null and void; it has long been inane.  Where does this leave a quarter of all Americans?  Those too dumb to face facts?  Well, for a start, they can continue to think that Donald Trump is a model of good citizenship.

Featured Poet: Brian Turner

Eyewear is very glad to welcome American poet Brian Turner (pictured) to its pages this Friday - aptly enough, perhaps, as revolution continues to stir in the Middle East, the source of much of his most powerful material.  Turner is the author of two collections of poetry: Here, Bullet (Bloodaxe Books, 2007) and Phantom Noise (Bloodaxe Books, 2010).  For the second of these, he was shortlisted for Britain's most prestigious poetry prize, The T.S. Eliot Prize.

Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division (1999-2000).

His poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, and other journals. He's been awarded a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. His work has appeared on National Public Radio, the BBC, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and Weekend America, among others. He teaches at Sierra Nevada College.

Turner, compared by some to Keith Douglas, is the most significant and effective soldier-poet of the first decade of the 21st century writing in English, and therefore his work takes on an almost talismanic power, which the quality of the writing supports.  Given that the biggest story of the last ten years is 9/11-Iraq-Afghanistan-Egypt, and American responses to those iconic nouns, Turner should be read by anyone interested in the world as it is, and the world of poetic imagination, and reckoning.  His poem, "The Hurt Locker" was later the title to an Oscar-winning film.

Professor Suman Gupta writes in his important new study of Iraq invasion literature, Imagining Iraq, on Turner's Here, Bullet (published in America in 2005).  He says the poems articulate "an exquisite sensitivity to being a foreigner" in Iraq post-war.  Gupta notes how the book explores the metaphoric and linguistic implications of translation and its failure, and the violence which results.  He observes how Turner seemingly withholds judgement, the better to impact the reader.  It is, Gupta argues, a "poetry of alienation arising from the occupation experience". Turner will be reading for the Oxfam Poetry Series, London, in July 2011.  Can't wait.

The Mutanabbi Street Bombing

                                                      March 5, 2007

In the moment after the explosion, an old man

staggers in the cloud of dust and debris, hands

pressed hard against bleeding ears

as if to block out the noise of the world

at 11:40 a.m., the broken sounds of the wounded                     

rising around him, chawled and roughened by pain.

Buildings catch fire. Cafes.

Stationery shops. The Renaissance Bookstore.

A huge column of smoke, a black anvil head

pluming upward, fueled by the Kitah al-Aghani,

al-Isfahani’s Book of Songs, the elegies of Khansa,

the exile poetry of Youssef and al-Azzawi,

religious tracts, manifestos, translations

of Homer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Neruda—

these book leaves curl in the fire’s

blue-tipped heat, and the long centuries

handed down from one person to another, verse

by verse, rise over Baghdad.

                          *

As the weeks pass by, sunsets

deepen in color over the Pacific. Couples

lie in the spring fields of California,

drinking wine, making love in the lavender

dusk. There is a sweet, apple-roasted

smell of tobacco where they sleep.

They dream. Then wake to the dawn’s

early field of lupine—to discover themselves

dusted in ash, the poems of Sulma

and Sayyab in their hair, Sa’di on their eyebrows,

Hafiz and Rumi on their lips.

                                                         In memory of Mohammed Hayawi

 ----

VA Hospital Confessional

                                            

Each night is different. Each night the same.

Sometimes I pull the trigger. Sometimes I don’t.

When I pull the trigger, he often just stands there,

gesturing, as if saying, Aren’t you ashamed?

When I don’t, he douses himself

in gasoline, drowns himself in fire.                                 

A dog barks in the night’s illuminated green landscape

and the platoon sergeant orders me to shoot it.

Some nights I twitch and jerk in my sleep.

My lover has learned to face away.

She closes her eyes when I fuck her. I imagine

she’s far away and we don’t use the word love.

When she sleeps, helicopters

come in low over the date palms.

Men are bound on their knees, shivering

in the animal stall, long before dawn.

I whisper into their ears, saying,

Howlwin? Howlwin? —Meaning, —Mortars?Mortars?

Howl wind, motherfucker? Howl wind?

The milk cow stares with its huge brown eyes.

The milk cow wants to know

how I can do this to another human being.

I check the haystack in the corner

for a weapons cache. I check the sewage sump.

I tell no one, but sometimes late at night

I uncover rifles and bullets within me.

Other nights I drive through Baghdad.

Firebaugh. Bakersfield. Kettleman City.                          

Some nights I’m up in the hatch, shooting

a controlled pair into someone’s radiator.

Some nights I hear a woman screaming.

Others I shoot the crashing car.

When the boy brings us a platter of fruit,

I mistake cantaloupe for a human skull.

Sometimes the gunman fires into the house.

Sometimes the gunman fires at me.

Every night it’s different.

Every night the same.

Some nights I pull the trigger.

Some nights I burn him alive.

poems by Brian Turner; reprinted with permission of the poet

Those Civil Rights Glasses

Around 20 years ago - when I was a young man in my early 20s, and an avid film-goer - a curious cultural event happened - Sixties horn-rimmed glasses became cool.  A mini-genre emerged, roughly between 1988 and 1992, which, in this five year period, created some of the best American films - The Civil Rights movie.  Perhaps it starts with classic redneck vs. G-man Mississippi Burning, which features a startlingly young Willem Defoe as a buttoned-up Kennedy-boy FBI man and a brilliantly simmering Gene Hackman, in perhaps his finest role other than the French Connection films.

Defoe wears the specs here.  Then came 1991's masterwork, JFK, Oliver Stone's own conspiracy-theory Citizen Kane/Rashomon, which retells the Kennedy assassination and general 60s paranoia, from the perspective of Kevin Costner (never better), as Jim Garrison.

 

Finally, Malcolm X, with Denzel Washington, appeared in 1992, and here, Spike Lee's great biopic does not spare us the eyewear, either - those same glasses appear.  Indeed, in some circles, these are known as Malcolm X glasses.  Indeed, so cool were those glasses, that in 1993, Michael Douglas appeared with them on in Falling Down - as if to signify his bottled-up killer's debt to both the lost dignity of Kennedy-era America, and his revolutionary focus.  Again, 1992's Thunderheart borrowed the earnest FBI man motif, but set it in the 1970s, as another civil rights issue developed on the reservations; this time, great playwright Sam Shepard played the older man, and both wear sunglasses, but with a notably funky look.

Notably, characters wearing Malcolm X glasses are, to misquote Yeats, filled with passionate intensity, but don't lack conviction - they marry the action man with the man of thought - as the man under the floorboards thought was impossible.  Watching Hackman take on Brad Dourif in the cornpone barber's chair, the other night, I recalled how thrilling such films are, where a clear moral evil (Southern bigotry) collides with a clear moral good (government-protected civil rights) - a Democrat's version of the roughneck 80s actioners that were more Reagan-era in their lone wolf brutality.  Now, when the Tea Party again questions the role of "big government" we need to be reminded of the value of men in glasses.

Sands of Change

Like in 1989, or during the French Revolution, or the American Revolution, or the Prague Spring - the events in the Arab world of late - Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen - inspire and trouble at once.  The inspiration is easy to comprehend - what is not admirable about millions of people freely choosing their destiny?  Nothing much else is more moving than that sort of civic movement.

The trembling at the threshold, though, is harder to put a finger on - and has led to some pretty ugly hemming and hawing from the White House, which talks a good talk about Democracy, except when it rears its ugly head.  And, was it Rumsfeld, or Cheney - those awful men - who said that democracy was messy?  Freedom is, despite the cliches, ungainly at the best of times.  It unleashes a Palin as soon as a Clinton.  But we mustn't fear what will happen in the Middle East - because, for better and worse - it will be what the people want.

The masses are - on the whole - the best idiot we have - they are us - and, though we might want to be saved from our selves, the West cannot now pretend to try and save Egyptians from their own decisions.  America shed blood over slavery and had a Lincoln.  Let history work its terrible magic.  Things could hardly be worse.  A whiff of spring in the sandy street cannot be all bad.

Speech Acts of Violence

As Judith Butler showed us, and as the assassination attempt in Arizona reminds us, speech acts - especially political commentary in the public sphere - can be violent - and lead to more violent acts.  The sheriff in the case was quick to draw the conclusion that incendiary rhetoric was potentially to blame, and it cannot be ignored (nor has it been) that Palin's website had stamped a gun target over the district of the shot congresswoman Giffords (who is doing as well as can be expected at time of writing).  At times like these, one wants to draw comfort from the hope that good can come from evil deeds - that perhaps this massacre will dampen the powder keg, and   spoil the Tea Party.

But, as was seen recently in Pakistan, assasination of liberal and brave speakers can simply be a herald of more anarchy to come.  At stake here is, at least, this: the world is becoming increasingly intolerant of difference; fundamental positions are hardening; deafness is the new default position; and those not with us are against us.  For all the social networking hype, we are a world at war, and contra each other.  The media, Murdoch most of all, seems, in the West, to be profiting from this Babel of nasty idiocy.  It needs to be reined in.  And, if America was saner, there would be fewer guns around - note that this gunman was not shot down by a pistol-packing citizen, but "wrestled" to the ground.

War?

It seems unlikely that North Korea will continue to press its aggression on its neighbour - given the pressure from both China, and America, to do otherwise.  However, it is an erratic, fragile and attention-seeking state, and anything could happen.  If war does break out, then it would be potentially a trigger for a "third world war" - precisely the reason why China, a rather cool and moderate customer on the world stage, all things considered, would not let that happen.  Still, yet another reason why nuclear weapons in the wrong, infantile, hands, can be a bad thing.  In any hands.  The Republican urge to sink recent arms reduction treaties for short-term gain, in the light of rogue proliferations, appears ever more craven.

Neil Fujita Has Died

Sad news - one of the greatest graphic designers of the 20th century has died - Neil Fujita.  Fujita made a stylish, indelible mark on the 60s and 70s with his album covers for classics like Brubeck's Take Five, and the book covers for hugely-bestselling paperbacks The Godfather and In Cold Blood.  Fujita overcame racism and internment to become a vital part of post-war American culture, and is a remarkable figure, if not a household name.

Idiot America

What can an observer from abroad say, except, wha' happen?  Two years ago, America briefly appeared sane, visionary, and remarkable, electing a bright, liberal African-American with a multicultural name as leader-in-chief.  Flashforward, and pick yourself up from the floor - despite bringing in health care for 30 million poor people, winning the Nobel prize for Peace for arguing for nuclear disarmament, ending the Iraq war, and helping to avert a Second Depression - he is mocked by TV comedians for not doing "enough".  Enough?

Isn't it enough to wake up every morning and Not Be Palin?  Isn't believing in Global Warming, and trying to find justice in the middle east, and trying to contain violence enough?  Despised by Tea Party nincompoops and nutjobs for doing too much, and derided by the "Left" for failing to turn America into Vermont overnight, Barack Obama has in fact been a very good, centre-left leader, in overwhelmingly tough times.  Americans should have given him a hand, instead of making him walk the plank.

When they hand the Republicans a House Majority today, they will set back the cause of reform in the States by a generation.  That'd be tragic, if it wasn't stupid first.  The truth is, the tempest in the Tea Party was boiled up by the media, which increasingly generates hype and crisis daily, to fuel their own sense of vitality.  Language is perhaps a virus, but Murdoch definitely is - can the boffins at Cambridge find a cure for him?

The unmosquing of America

Friends of America, especially liberal friends, will be alarmed at the news that divisions over the placing of an Islamic cultural centre continue to escalate.  Hotter heads have prevailed, for now, and though the half-baked pastor has refrained from setting the world on fire with holy books, the inflammation has not settled.  Sadly, this feels like a crisis of ignorance and malice not seen since the darkest days of the civil rights marches in the Deep South, or perhaps the Witch Hunt era.  How has this happened?  For too long it seems, the freedom of speech which is America's oxygen, has also been fanning flames of misinformation so great as to resemble the Reichstag fire.  Fox, cuplrit numero uno, is an arsonist torching the truth - and Lady Liberty's high-held torch pales in the shadows cast by this smoking nonsense.  America needs a bonfire of the inanities, needs to lean to its better angels, and stop indulging in the luxury of letting lies lap like warm waves.  The 9/11 act was not caused by a religion, or even an ethnicity, but a belief system - one fed by such over-reactions.  The chemistry of American Tea Party numb-skullness is potent, and will mix badly with the needs of new terrorists.  The fundamentalists are now those who refuse to welcome all faiths to the party, and instead wish to pour jet fuel on the guttering lights of our better natures.

Bobby Thomson Has Died

Sad news.  Scotland-born American baseball player Bobby Thomson has died in the dog days of summer.  He hit the most famous home run in the sport - the shot heard around the world - which allowed the Giants to win the pennant.  The event has been immortalised in various films and books, not least Underworld.

My Voyage In Art

Not mine, actually, but Michael Lawrence's.  Lawrence is a fascinating, multi-talented painter, sculptor, and writer, based on the Greek island of Hydra, where he has his studio.  Lawrence, widely collected by Hollywood types like Oliver Stone, was greatly influenced by his mother and father, who were, if not Hollywood royalty, then within the palace walls: his father was famous film noir actor Marc Lawrence, who often played memorable heavies; and his mother was novelist-screenwriter Fanya Foss.  They moved to Italy in the 50s, and befriended many European and expat artists and actors there.  Returned to LA as a teen, Michael went to high school with Jim Morrison, of The Doors.  Lawrence's exuberant, joyous, playful, and colourful paintings, prints, sketches, and watercolours are inspired by Fellini, Tati, and in general represent a carnivalesque vision, referencing poetry, film, and other cultural signposts, as well as the sunny, sometimes erotic, lifestyle of the Greek islands.  He is an artist worth getting to know.  His book, My Voyage in Art, is a good intro to the man and his work.

Tony Judt Has Died

Sad news.  The great essayist, historian and thinker, Tony Judt, has died, age 62.

Gunned Down

Free at last!

In England, people may be bemoaning the 4-1 loss.  But in America, liberals are faced with a more serious 5-4 decision.  The Supreme Court's conservative decision to throw out all state and local laws aimed at gun control as unconstitutional hands the NRA and gun makers an almost unlimited victory over those who have sought to keep gun violence at bay in the States.  Sadly, according to some estimates, 30,000 (!) people die by gun every year in America - a health risk that is almost totally preventable.  Of course, far fewer people would also die if cars, alcohol, and tobacco were limited or banned.  Is the price of freedom the risk of a bullet?  One thing is for sure, there's never likely to be an army that takes total control of the US.  Or, for that matter, a police force.  Some would want to say, or a government.

Beyond Petroleum

The poet Nick Asbury has sent along this poem as a response to Eyewear's BP posts.  In 2008, he published a pamphlet called Corpoetics, made up of poems created by rearranging the words from corporate websites.  This is an addition to that project.  The link at the end he considers effectively part of the text.

Beyond petroleum

After the platforms,
the ships, the refineries,

After the solutions,
the fuel and facilities,

After the products,
the light and the heat,

After the pride
and the corporate need,

After today
and what we do now,

God and the world.
God and the world.

http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9028275&contentId=7051490

Mad Magazine

The fact that a top US General at war would think inviting a Rolling Stone reporter to hang out with him for two weeks was a good idea is something out of Mad Magazine or a Kubrick movie - in short - it's sort of Sixties/ Seventies retro, and inherently funny, in a Vietnam/Nixon era sort of way.  As one aid to Obama asked: what was he thinking?  To which the reply surely must be: what, me worry?

It's the oil, stupid

Eyewear is puzzled.  If BP stands to lose 20 billion or more dollars over this disaster-fiasco, why not spend £10 billion now, to invent some remarkable oil-sucking device?  Surely, ten billion thrown at some Nobel geniuses as a challenge, could yield a machine to do the trick.  I may be naive, but you have a hole a mile down gushing out oil under massive pressure.  Okay, that's bad.  But they got to the moon, yeah?  Why not build a huge dome or cone of some kind, lower it, and completely enclose a large swathe of the seafloor?  And send hoovering submersibles to capture the rest.  Last time I checked, they had one big pipe down there.  Why not put more down?  We're talking billions here - rather than waste that on mere pay-outs, spend it now, and get the eggheads to work!  Or, hire a hundred thousand people in small boats to each scoop oil up.  You could pay them each $10,000.

British Petroleum and American Impatience

The BBC 4 morning radio programme today featured a brief discussion of the cultural language differences between the US and UK which have tended to exacerbate the current Gulf of Mexico Spill Disaster's impact.  It seems perhaps a sign of BBC-media-navel-gazing to think that language is the main spur of the rage around the crisis, when perhaps massive environmental, social and economic degradation has more to do with it.  Yet, as we now know, Tony Hayward, BP's hardhat-wearing bumpkin, has infuriated an entire nation, and is now almost as hated as Osama bin Laden.  According to this BBC discussion, the idea was mooted that Hayward's accent and way of speaking itself was a red rag to the Yankee bull.  I would not be surprised.  Sometimes, it is is possible to misread (from a NA perspective) English sarcasm / wit as mere rudeness, especially when expressed in the sort of accent one associated with Nazi villains from the movies.  However, most of us are sophisticated enough to accept the crass likes of Ozzy and Russell Brand into our lunkheaded American hearts and minds, along with Alistair Cooke et al.  No, the main problem with BP is not the British, but the Petroleum.  But I am sure this will hurt reception of British poets in the short term.