"Crying out to me from the ground": Father Patrick Desbois on the Search for Mass Graves of the Holocaust -- St. Ambrose University, Davenport 8/27/09

Look out your window and imagine armed men entering the home across your street, dragging the family out, lining them up, and marching them away at gunpoint. Imagine this happening up and down your street, the people--men, women, and children--lined in rows of five and marched away. You rush outside to get a closer view of what is happening. Women--mothers you know personally--carry their infants. You hear gunshots: some people have refused to leave their homes and they have been shot dead inside them. Everyone else you know in town--everyone who has not been led away--has streamed out of their own homes as well and you all follow the soldiers and your defenseless neighbors. The armed men bark orders at your neighbors and smile and joke with each other and generally act like people bored on the job. The march stops at a pit near the woods outside of town. Your neighbors, who have been ordered to give up their heavy winter clothing, or even forced to strip naked, are ordered to line up along the edge of a newly dug pit. Soldiers and hired men, some cold and detached, some drunk, raise their guns and shoot your neighbors in their heads. Your neighbors fall into the pit. Some of them, anyway. Some of the shooters missed. Those missed targets--men, women, and children--are pushed by other soldiers and hired men into the pit. They will be buried alive by their neighbors. Your neighbors. Buried alive.

By the end of the day, nearly every family on your street is in that pit. Every home on every street for blocks around is vacant. All of those families are in that pit. Your town's population has shrunk by one thousand or four thousand or ten thousand--or even more. Those thousands are dead--or still dying. That pit, dug half a mile from your home, by trees and views you have known all your life, is moving. It won't stop moving for three days.


Last night I attended a talk at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, by French Roman Catholic priest Father Patrick Desbois, whose work to find the mass graves of Jews shot to death in Eastern Europe is described in his book, "The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews."

The mass murder of Europe's Jews and Gypsies was not only carried out in the death camps. One and a half million Jews, along with Roma, Polish intelligentsia, Soviet political commissars, and Communist Party members, were killed throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by pistol or machine gun by special German paramilitary groups called the Einsatzgruppen and local volunteers between 1939 and 1944 (the majority occurring between 1941 and 1944). I learned about the killings in Dr. Werner Braatz's excellent courses on the Third Reich and the Holocaust years ago when I was a student at UW-Oshkosh (I highly recommend reading Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland on the topic), but I didn't realize until recently that few people in the general public know anything about this chapter of the war. Given that fact along with the honorable nature of Father Desbois's work, it was a privilege to have the chance to hear him speak.

Father Desbois described how the killings were done, how he seeks out the graves, and how he is received by witnesses. He answered questions from the audience after his lecture. The event was eye-opening.

After the massacres, the pits were covered with dirt and left unmarked. The residents of the villages in which these murders took place, most of whom are poor people who have never left their hometowns, witnessed the killings as children and now are being asked their stories for the first time. Father Desbois and his ten-person team are working against time, as these witnesses are dying of old age.

Father Desbois is also working against denial. The mayor of Rava-Ruska in western Ukraine denied over and over to Desbois any knowledge of a massacre in the city. That mayor's eventual replacement brought Desbois the truth that everyone in the village knew. Now Desbois goes straight to the average people as they walk down the street, conducting their everyday lives.

He has met a woman who was compelled by the Germans as a young girl to climb a tree--a tree the woman could see from where she stood during the interview--to retrieve the body parts of a woman blown apart in a pit by grenades, which the Germans had thrown in after the shooting to kill survivors.

Rarely, survivors managed to crawl out of the pits at night. Some are now witnesses.

Father Desbois and his team have interviewed over a thousand witnesses, covering half of Ukraine. They have just begun work in Belarus. They have yet to begin in Russia. Unfortunately, they likely only have a six- or seven-year window in which to collect these testimonies before the witnesses are all gone. The memories of the villagers, forensic evidence collected at the sites that the villagers help the team locate, and the endless job of reviewing German and Soviet government archives--the pages of which number in the millions, according to Desbois--are what make it possible for the grave sites to finally be marked, nearly seventy years later.

Unfortunately and frighteningly, Desbois and his team have been witnesses to anti-Semitism, alive and well. They interviewed a family at their home on Christmas Day and, as part of the family's celebration, watched the performance of a Christmas play. The nativity portion, said Desbois, was lovely. Then came the arrival of Jewish characters, portrayed as evil, thieving hoarders--caricatures that could have been pulled straight from Nazi propaganda but have existed for centuries longer.

This sort of dehumanization has been appallingly effective throughout history, of course. Desbois, discussing the fact that it was legal to kill Jews in Eastern Europe during World War II and that villagers turned in their Jewish neighbors to the Germans for money, shared the worst example he knows of this kind of trade: a woman whose daughter had married a Jewish man took advantage of her daughter's absence one day and turned in her six grandchildren to be shot.

Apart from the village raid graves already described, there are more mysteries to be solved: Desbois spoke last night of the fact that the Germans did not kill all the Jews in the villages; they kept some alive to work for them. This included a group of girls kept as sexual slaves. At the end of the war, these young women, pregnant, were shot. Desbois asked last night, "Where is their grave?"

The Rogalski Center at St. Ambrose was, thankfully, full. In a world where Holocaust deniers do not seem to be going anywhere and hold frightening positions of power--Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--and in which one still hears things like "He jewed him down on the price" thrown around casually, Desbois's work is extremely important. Desbois, who is an advisor to the Vatican on Jewish relations and whose life's work has been confronting anti-Semitism, discussed why he is drawn to the task of finding these graves. He spoke of the story of Cain and Abel, specifically the Bible passage in which Cain denies knowing his slain brother's whereabouts, famously asking, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Desbois quoted God's answer: "Listen! Your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground."

Donations can be made to Father Desbois' nonprofit organization, Yahad-In Unum, which searches for and documents the mass execution sites of Jews in Ukraine and Belarus, here. All profits from his book, Holocaust by Bullets, also go to Yahad-In Unum. The organization is also looking for a college senior or graduate student with excellent writing skills to work for Yahad-In Unum as a telecommuting intern. More information can be found here. Go to www.holocaustbybullets.com for more information on Desbois's work.

Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road is a brilliant, riveting movie with an absolutely heartbreaking ending. I haven’t read the novel, but Sam Mendes’s take on it is a great film.

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio’s performances as April and Frank Wheeler, a discontented young couple living in suburban Connecticut with their two children, are flawless. The unraveling of the Wheelers’ relationship is made tragic by the real love and passion they feel for each other, feelings only amplified by the realism of their bitter arguments and animosity. As April conveys in their last big blowout of the movie, love can too easily turn to hate, or loss of any feeling—on the surface—at all.

Michael Shannon as John, the mentally ill adult son of the Wheelers’ friend and real estate agent, Helen, played by Kathy Bates, is perfect as the voice of truth—truth inspiring and ugly—in the movie. A snide and angry sort of Greek chorus, he asks the questions no one will ask and makes the comments no one will make, a jarring foil to the suburban sleepiness all around the Wheelers.

My sympathies in the film lay with April. Frank is by turns no prize and wonderful, which is true of all of us, but while April is not perfect either—she does some terrible things of her own by the end of the film—Frank's contention that April needs a “shrink” because she does not want to have another baby—while he deals with his own emotional despair with a penchant for secretary screwing—is a particularly ugly piece of chauvinism. His dismissal of the Paris plan as unrealistic is weak, and John’s pointing out of that fact feels triumphant to watch. April probably does need therapy—of a twenty-first-century variety, not what she would probably have gotten in the shock-therapy-happy and abysmally gender-defined mid-1950s—but Frank’s reasoning for it is disgustingly insulting.

The lessons the film teaches are crucial: first, do not let your dreams die, for when they die, so do you, and you begin to kill everyone else. Frank’s boss tells him “you get one or two chances in life, and you’ve gotta grab them by the balls” after biting the morsel off his fork with a chomp like a big-nutted alligator, and, unfortunately, Frank is successfully manipulated by his mention of Frank’s salesman father and sees the promotion, rather than Paris, as that “chance.”

Lesson Two: do not let your dreams crush you. April falls victim to this.

And third: open yourself to love or you will die inside and take your marriage with you. Despite Frank’s faults, he is trying like hell to have a healthy relationship with April. While I sympathize with April when she tells him repeatedly to back off, this is because he is coming on so strong. We learn over the course of the movie that April’s refusal to talk about the issues right in front of their faces is what has led him to come on so strong. The morning after their last big fight is, in my mind, full of hope. For April, it is fraught with the same quiet desperation as before, but it does not have to be. She is doing the right things—she is taking an interest in Frank’s work and life, and he is blossoming under it before her eyes. If she would only see how much power she has, that one compliment from her can make Frank twice the man he was—for he adores her—they could pave a way to a real connection with or without a move away from suburbia. She feels powerless, but this is a tragic illusion.

The last scene is wonderfully symbolic as we listen to Bates’s Helen turn catty on the Wheelers and watch her husband turn down his hearing aid until he, and we, cannot hear her anymore. We now know how each of these tangential characters deals with their quiet desperation.

Grade: A+

Laura Ingalls Wilder Country – William Anderson

Something for Supper

Two summers ago my husband and I went on a weeklong trip to the Black Hills area of South Dakota. This spring, we moved from the Chicagoland area to a small town in Iowa. Something unexpected happened to me with both events: I fell in love with America. The great expanses, beautiful under the warm sun, brought me closer to nature than I’d been in years and showed me that the rural Midwest is truly the heart of the country. Where blue skies meet golden prairies or great stretches of green cornfields, wildflowers line the roads, and wildlife is easily sighted, peace of mind comes easily and fortitude seems to spontaneously spring within you.

I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series as a child and loved it, and Laura Ingalls Wilder Country, William Anderson’s illustrated tour of the many places Wilder called home, reminds me just how central the sense of place—physical place—was to Wilder's life and is to her books. I'm glad I stumbled upon Anderson's book and bought it in South Dakota and finally recently read it after visiting one of the Ingalls family residences, the Masters Hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa.

Laura Ingalls Wilder Country brings together gorgeous modern photos by Leslie A. Kelly of the landscapes where Wilder lived in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, and Missouri with photos of the exteriors and interiors of the Ingalls and Wilder homes, the families’ belongings, and the family members themselves. Pieced throughout are illustrations from the Little House books by Garth Williams—which brought warm memories rolling back to me—as well as first-edition Little House book illustrations by Helen Sewell and Mildred Boyle, along with artwork depicting the regions, including paintings by Wilder herself. Informative text and captions describe the Ingalls and Wilder families’ lives in each place. From the log cabin in the Big Woods to Laura and Almanzo’s beloved farmhouse in Missouri’s Ozark Mountain country, each home and landscape comes to life thanks to Anderson’s research, Kelly’s beautiful color photos, and the absolutely fascinating photos of the Ingalls family and objects such as Pa’s fiddle. Special sections on Laura and Almanzo’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane; Almanzo’s family and his childhood near Malone, New York; and the lives of Laura’s parents and her sisters, Mary, Carrie, and Grace, beyond the Little House books round out the work.

Anderson’s book has inspired me to reread Wilder’s books, and I can’t wait to see them through my adult eyes.

Grade: A

The Prairie Is My Garden
Paintings by the fantastic Harvey Dunn (1884-1952), the renowned South Dakota artist, whose uncle Nate Dow actually married Grace Ingalls.

The Reader - Bernhard Schlink

German author Bernhard Schlink’s 1995 novel The Reader is a tour de force character study that weaves questions of guilt, truth, and evil together with spare, beautiful prose. In 1959, fifteen-year-old German schoolboy Michael Berg has a five-month affair with thirty-six-year-old streetcar conductor Hanna Schmitz, is abandoned by her, and encounters her again by chance seven years later in a courtroom, where he is observing a trial for a law school seminar—and she is being tried for a war crime.

A fast read, the text is full of striking images of eroticism, nature, and tenderness. Hanna is a strong physical presence, vividly described and by turns tender and physically abusive, and she proves to be just as strong an emotional presence for Michael after she is gone. Hanna strongly contrasts Michael, who is cerebral, analytical, and vulnerable to her strength of personality, yet she herself is a walking contradiction. Her tenderness is paired with coldness; her strength is paired with her own remarkable vulnerability; her care for him upon their first meeting, when he vomits in the street at the start of a case of hepatitis, is sudden, brusque, “almost an assault,” yet she embraces him when he cries. She primarily calls Michael “Kid,” and she often plays a mothering role in their encounters, bathing being the introduction and coda of their affair, but this tenderness does not change the fact that she is molesting a fifteen-year-old boy. Most troubling is Hanna’s strange combination of strength and weakness.

Michael learns during the trial that Hanna was an SS guard at Auschwitz and another concentration camp during the war and that during a journey to move many women prisoners, a church holding the prisoners had caught fire during a bombing, and Hanna and the other guards had left the church locked while it burned. Hanna explains that she did this because she and the few other guards present would not have been able to control the prisoners when they flooded out of the fire: “We couldn’t just let them escape!” Her explanations destroy her case.

Accountability and decision-making seem foreign to Hanna. She is an example of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” and, though a strong presence, she is ultimately weak because she drifts from one situation to another as if she has no choice in the matter—and yet we know, once we know her personal secret, which I will not reveal, that she did have another choice; but she dismissed it out of pride. At the age of twenty-one, she voluntarily joined the SS after being offered a job as a foreman at Siemens, the factory at which she worked. For Hanna, hiding her secret comes above making moral decisions. When questioned about her involvement in selecting prisoners in the camps to be put to death, she asks the judge, not in defiance, but in earnest, “I … I mean … so what would you have done?” Further along in this questioning, she asks aloud, “So should I have … should I have not … should I not have signed up at Siemens?” When questioned about her decision not to unlock the church doors, she again asks the judge, “What would you have done?” There is a strange virtue in her honestly seeking right answers to what she should have done. But it is disturbing that these questions are only coming now, years after the horrific facts.

Hanna remains a mystery throughout the novel, and her actions always leave Michael alone to pick up the pieces, first when she leaves town without an explanation, then at the end of the trial, and again at the end of her life. Yet her apparent cruelty is tempered with the true affection she felt for Michael after they parted and her desire to learn as much as possible about the Holocaust and its victims, both evidenced by the possessions in her prison cell. Further, she claims to be haunted nightly by the ghosts of her past. The puzzle of The Reader is whether Hanna is a monster or a sympathetic character. This question bonds us to our narrator, Michael, who spends most of his life enduring the same conflict, consciously and subconsciously.

Schlink's novel is gorgeous and haunting long after one finishes.

Grade: A

New York Minute

This movie cruises along the Avenue of Dumbness for the first hour and ten minutes or so, and then it suddenly becomes entertaining during the House of Bling scene, in which Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, as hapless twins in the city Jane and Roxy Ryan, are given makeovers by a group of over-the-top urban stylists. Roxy calms her panicking sister down by throwing a glass of water in her face, and Jane’s answer, “Thank you. I wasn’t thirsty,” had me laughing my ass off on the couch. The hair salon antics from then on (despite the pretty dumb makeovers themselves) are genuinely funny, and the movie from then on is genuinely entertaining--for the last twenty minutes.

The plot is this: Jane and Roxy are opposites—Jane the uptight scholar, Roxy the rocker chick class-cutter. The girls wind up in New York on the same day when Jane travels downtown to give the speech of her life in a competition for an Oxford fellowship and Roxy heads to the city too to take part in a Simple Plan video shoot and promote her band. Meanwhile, Roxy is being chased by a gung-ho truant officer played amusingly (despite the bad writing) by Eugene Levy. Disasters strike and the hostile sisters must work together to get through the day.

Soon after the House of Bling, another shock arrives in the form of a surprisingly affecting dramatic scene between the Olsens. I even found myself tearing up a little as the twins fought with tears in their eyes. Where did that scene come from?

After that, Andy Richter’s character, the very white “first adopted son” of Ma Bang, a Chinese dealer of pirated movies and music, becomes genuinely funny with his affected Chinese accent, whereas earlier in the movie the character was just … you guessed it, dumb (no matter how much I wanted to find him funny). Who turned the switch? Add to that a very funny scene between Levy and a pair of tourists from Minnesota, and another funny scene involving said tourists at the fellowship competition.

In the end, this movie may have just enough heart to earn it “So bad it’s good” status down the road. The puzzling presence of truly entertaining actors such as Levy, Richter, Darrel Hammond, and Andrea Martin (and an inspired “Wink wink” moment with Bob Saget) helps.

Grade: C-

Nowhere Is a Place - Bernice L. McFadden

Bernice L. McFadden’s Nowhere Is a Place was an unexpected gem. I hadn’t a clue what it was really about when I picked it up, and it wound up being quite moving. A story within a story, an African-American woman and her mother drive cross-country to a family reunion in Georgia, but the narrative about the lives of their ancestors that springs forth from this road trip becomes the heart of the novel.

The thirtysomething daughter, Sherry, has long puzzled and frustrated her mother, known to family and friends as Dumpling, with her travels, her searches for meaning, and her relationships with white men (and men of other colors). In a loving relationship and newly pregnant, Sherry decides it is time to finally understand an event from her childhood: a violent and unexplained slap from her mother when she was six years old. She comes to find that slap was generations in the making.

Sherry and Dumpling are both readers and writers in the story, Dumpling presenting an oral history of their family’s roots and Sherry, after “reading” this history, novelizing it and presenting it for Dumpling to read. While I find the idea of Sherry writing this polished work during a few stops at motels and other spots along the trip a bit weak (that aspect of the plot becomes thankfully easy to overlook after awhile), Sherry and Dumpling’s roles as readers and writers are central to their eventual mutual understanding. Further, it is only after Dumpling comes to know her own story from an older family friend, giving Sherry the final pieces of the puzzle regarding that slap, that Sherry is able to overcome her reticence and let Dumpling in on her current story, allowing her mother to speak to the—white—father of her child on the phone.

In some ways, Sherry is the reader of this story along with us. Sherry’s open-mindedness on race and philosophy is in line with the “color-blind” way many of us think we see the world, or want to see it. Dumpling, meanwhile, sees the world in black and white. Reading their family history, we and Sherry come to understand just why that is. By the end, we have met in the middle, but not before being confronted with the brutal truths we conveniently like to forget about our country’s history and like to ignore regarding the reasons our racial divide is still so wide.

I must say that McFadden’s poetic prose, while sometimes gorgeous, is often just too much. This first printing of the book is also irritatingly in need of a proofreader. But McFadden is incredibly gifted in the art of creating vivid characters. Lou, Buena, Brother, Suce, Lovey, and Dumpling leave indelible marks, and I missed them when I was finished reading. The lost childhood of Nayeli, the Native American girl who is sold into slavery, named “Lou” after a dead family dog, and becomes the family’s matriarch, is tragic, and her choices and sorrows are shocking. Brother, Suce, Willie, and the others’ mundane but terrifying existence in the shadow of the big house and their crazed, bedridden master, unaware of their own freedom and then struggling for a way to claim it, is riveting. The sheer amount of this family’s history that is packed into the novel’s 280 pages—in the form of an engrossing plot—is stunning. McFadden has talents for both emotional punch and narrative structure. The book began slow for me—the first twenty-five pages were okay but not thrilling—but once Lou’s, and the family’s, story began, the work became a page-turner.

Nowhere Is a Place came out in 2006; McFadden has five other novels, and I definitely plan to check them out.

Grade: A

OK Go - Double Door, Chicago 4/23/09

I went to this late show at the Double Door to hear the new songs OK Go are playing from their upcoming album (to be released this summer), and I left wanting the new album now. Having been a fan for years and having seen them play a gazillion times, I was sure as heck hoping the new stuff wouldn’t feel like a rerun. New stuff did not disappoint.

From the arrival of a big ol’ drum (I wish I knew the name of this particular piece of percussion, but I don’t—timpani perhaps?) in the middle of the tiny, tiny stage, I knew something different—or, at the very least, interesting from a performance standpoint—would be happening. It wasn’t the big, bouncing, banging “Do What You Want, Pt. 2” it could have been. Score! It was an entrancing, refreshingly acoustic-guitar-fueled little number that had me from the get-go. Bassist Tim Nordwind provided the steady drum booms. (Listen to a 3/27/09 live performance from Portland, OR, below.)

The band played seven new songs in total, and they’re all keepers. That’s only half of what’s to come on the new album, to be titled either Help Is On the Way or The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Color of the Sky (I prefer the latter), and between those and the b-sides the boys have apparently recently been recording, OK Go fans have a lot coming their way, and hopefully it will all taste as good as these first pieces have.

Some of it is dancey and slinky—“I Want U So Bad” is a sexy little funk song and “White Knuckles” sounds a lot like Prince and his protegees, the Time—but other songs like “Back From Katmandu” are gloriously melancholy and driven by messy guitars. (Listen to a live 3/25/09 “Back From Katmandu”--I’ll trust this title only when I see it on the album--from San Francisco below.) "I Want U So Bad" does include an unexpectedly rock-y guitar solo from Andy Ross alongside its dance groove.

“Last Leaf” is a touching love song that makes you want to reach out and squeeze the one you’re with. [An aside: It shows just how much of a snot-nosed smartass Damian Kulash always is onstage that he had to state plainly that the upcoming tune was an earnest love song.]

“Skyscrapers,” the studio version of which is available now on a compilation album from Banana Republic of all places, is an impressive tune for its moody depth and its inclusion of tubular bells alongside a dance beat. Some people are comparing this song to Prince, but it owes much more to Cheap Trick than the Purple One, as the song somehow, and not unpleasantly, morphs into CT’s “Gonna Raise Hell” in its second half. Singer Damian Kulash’s successful falsetto invites Prince comparisons, but his all-out screams in the middle sound more like an attempt to be Robin Zander than the Artist Formerly, and regardless of whom he might be aping, lemme be clear on this point: it doesn’t work. I’m not sure if I rolled my eyes at the show or just cringed, but my eyes have been rolling every time that section comes in my listens at home. (Hear the 3/27/09 live version from Portland, OR, for yourself below.)

Dan Konopka’s drums at the beginning of “This Too Shall Pass” (check it out from the 3/27/09 Portland, OR, show, below) sound bizarrely like U2’s “Bullet the Blue Sky,” but the rest of the song, whose title tricks you into thinking there’s a ballad on the way, doesn’t—it’s one of the upbeat, hooky numbers. But its hook is of a rocking variety rather than candy-coated pop (more toward Oh No than their self-titled debut), which is just fine by me. Damian's repetitive, spit-out vocals toward the end are fabulous, and the song actually sounds a lot like their pre-debut track “Unrequited Orchestra of Locomotion,” and you can’t go wrong with that.

Overall, the new stuff is heavy on the rhythm section, guitars, experimental instrumentation, and straightforward, emotional lyrics, making the whole endeavor feel much more organic than the band’s last two albums. My personal hope is that the melancholy bits outweigh the dance bits this time around, but we shall wait and see.

As for the other songs they played, “Get Over It” and “Oh, Lately It’s So Quiet” could go away at this point without me raising a peep. “Don’t Ask Me” and “Invincible” don’t seem to have lost their punch, however. “Do What You Want” felt like just another song rather than the rousing showstopper it once was—I think it has run its course. “It’s a Disaster” is floating around in my head as unmemorable. Some people are sick to death of “Here It Goes Again”; I’m not, so I enjoyed it. “A Good Idea at the Time” still has its swaggering appeal, but it became more humorous than swaggery when Damian sang the same verse three times. “A Million Ways” was fun to hear live because I think I’ve only seen it played live one other time; all other times, I saw it danced. And then there’s “What to Do.” The boys have put together another performance piece to boggle the minds of audience members: OK Go as a handbell choir. When I watched this YouTube vid weeks before the show,



I sat in stunned silence alternating between a jawdrop and a stupid grin, filled with warm, fuzzy amazement similar to what I remember from watching the “Here It Goes Again” treadmill video for the first time. The boys can still floor you. Unfortunately, when I saw it live only a couple weeks later, without spastic, repeated watchings of the YouTube video in the meantime, mind you, it already felt like a gimmick. The tricks have come to the point of diminishing returns; it may be time to leave them in the backyard.

The band also went extremely heavy on the confetti gun, to the point of comical and the edge of annoying. I lost count of the confetti blasts, and in that small venue, each one counted. One fan hilariously referred to the three-inch layer of fallout as “confetti carnage.” I wish I had taken a picture of the floor.

I wish badly that Oh No's “No Sign of Life” had stayed on the set list, but what are you gonna do. The wallpaper slideshow backdrop has gotta go, though; it’s been around since 2005. Having not seen them live in a year and a half, I was shocked to see it appear at the start of their set.

Overall, the group was tight and showed what a good live band you can become, musically, when you tour for years on end. But as a show itself? So-so. As an album preview? A+.

Openers U.S. Royalty gave a good performance despite the cramped confines (with both their and OK Go’s gear up there, the stage looked like a storage closet—in size and contents) and terrible sound that was so extremely heavy on the bass it was shifting my internal organs and likely could have caused a spontaneous bowel movement. Very hairy singer John Thornley has charisma and rocks an organ. Their standout song had some connection to New Orleans in a voodoo kind of way—I of course cannot remember the song’s title or find it anywhere online. Black … something? “Spell”? Anyway, it was a rocker. I don’t foresee these guys taking over the airwaves, but they’ve got some good songs and are a worthwhile live band.

Hot Tracks

Heads Will Roll Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Back and sassy. I haven't heard the whole album yet, but I sure like this. "Off with your head/Dance till you're dead": a killer disco-ey dance track with a great, dark electronic groove.

The Great Defector Bell X1
What a three-way between the Talking Heads, Soft Cell, and Sufjan Stevens would sound like. Orgasmic!

The Fear Lily Allen
Pop perfection + satire of the E! Network set = a fantastic song that feels like spring & summer.

Sometime Around Midnight Airborne Toxic Event
Adam from U2 likes them and recommended them on U2's recent "radio takeover" hosted by Shirley Manson of Garbage (who has become an actress. She's on that Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles show or whatever it is. Weird.) The song starts off slow but builds big, and it has this great line: "You just have to see her to know that she'll break you in two." Wow. Check them out. Listen loud.

I'm Falling Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3
The verses have a nice, easy feel to them, and the more rousing "Take it away" chorus is great.

What Are You Like Indigo Girls
Good, happy tune about how nice it is to have someone who knows you better than you know yourself. Aww.

Crap
Sex on Fire - Kings of Leon
I don't understand why this song is such a hit and everyone's crazy about Kings of Leon. This is one of the dumbest songs I've ever heard, and I hate how Caleb Followill sings in general. If the song were even slightly sexy, I'd feel differently, but it's just stupid, Followill's singing is irritating, the guitar during the chorus makes my skin crawl, and the lines "Your sex is on fire/Consumed with what's to transpire" make me want to never have sex again. The ironic thing is that Followill didn't even like the song when he started writing it. He thought it was "terrible," but the other guys encouraged him to keep going. Follow your gut, songwriters everywhere ...

Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction is a wonderful movie. It is the story of a man who begins hearing the voice of a British female narrator in his head, chronicling his life as it happens, and discovers, with the help of an eccentric literature professor, that he is the protagonist of said British author's latest, long-unfinished novel and that she intends to kill him.

Harold Crick is an IRS agent who lives a by-the-numbers existence, alone. Shortly after he begins hearing the maddening voice, he meets Ana Pascal, a nonconformist young baker he is auditing. The development of their relationship is not too sappy, not too flashy--I liked it. As he develops a desire for Ana and as he comes to know Professor Hilbert, who prompts him to examine whether his life seems to be a comedy or tragedy, Harold begins a quest to make his life worth living. Again, this is done in a way that is not too flashy, not too sappy.

Meanwhile, Karen Eiffel, the chain-smoking, down-on-her-luck author steering Harold's life, does not know that Harold is real. Until she learns this, her struggle is simply to come up with a way to kill Harold in a fashion that her novel deserves and finally finish the thing after ten years--without abandoning her artistic principles, despite the presence of Penny, an "office assistant" sent by her publisher to help the writing process along. When Karen meets Harold, the question of how the story should end takes on a very new meaning.

Will Ferrell gives a perfectly understated performance as Harold (yes, Will Ferrell: understated). Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of the professor is great and took me back to my college days, especially when he quoted Italo Calvino. Emma Thompson gets the job done, as always, as Karen Eiffel, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is believable as Ana, the opinionated but sweet bakery owner who hates paying (part of) her taxes. Queen Latifah is perfectly capable as Penny, Karen's publisher-assigned assistant, but I'm not sure what the point was of putting a big name in that role.

The movie is warmly entertaining throughout--nice humor, an intriguing mystery, and an exploration of life's mundaneness without getting too heavy--but its best part is the ending, which shows that life's greatness is in its seemingly small moments, not its great tragedies. The question of whether great art will triumph over real life is satisfyingly answered. Rent it!

Grade: A

Notable: it has a great soundtrack. The arrival of Spoon's "I Turn My Camera On" (from Gimme Fiction, an album I am now nearly four years late in acquiring, which is just plain silly, considering how great 2007's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is and that Gimme Fiction is supposed to be better ... I digress) was a highlight for me. The Jam was fun, too. And Will Ferrell's a pretty good singer when he's not hamming it up. Also notable: Tom Hulce's turn as an unhelpful, aging hippie therapist. WOW, he's aged.

Interesting fact: Spoon singer Britt Daniel co-wrote the movie score.

Interesting fact II: The movie was filmed entirely in Chicago, and I hadn't a clue while watching it.

No Line on the Horizon - U2

The new U2 album is not a perfect U2 album (The Joshua Tree and Boy are), but it is very good. The boys still have it, they're still experimenting (and cannibalizing), and when they really hit it on the head, there's not much better.

I'll go song-by-song here.

No Line on the Horizon - Pretty good, not great. It's fun to listen to loud. Edge stole the guitar part from himself (it's also in "The Fly" and one of the band's very best b-sides ever ever ever, "Lady with the Spinning Head"). Every artist is a cannibal, after all.

Magnificent - It is magnificent. This song is one of U2's best ever. I had been hitherto listening to it on my computer and my iPod and already loved it--today I stuck it in the living room stereo and turned it up loud, and WOW, it's a whole new animal. As soon as it started, I could not wait to (hopefully) hear it live & in-person. It fills a room; it's a beautiful thing. It's greater than the sum of its wonderful parts (incredible guitar, synths used in just the right way, fantastic vocals, perfect lyrics, and what sounds like a Middle Eastern or Asian influence), and it just keeps getting better as the song goes on, and with more listens. It fucking rocks.

Moment of Surrender - This one has a lot I like but a lot I'm not thrilled with. The beginning through the first verse is excellent; Bono's vocals are amazing and bring to mind The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree, and Achtung Baby, and I love that verse's lyrics; but the chorus leaves me flat.

Unknown Caller - One of my favorites from the album. It took a few tries, but it's now solidly in the good (great?) category. Again, loud listening on the stereo helped me really hear how all its parts go together. The chanting (sounds like Brian Eno and/or Daniel Lanois are in there with Bono, or maybe it's the band, or all of them together) and technologically themed lyrics became unexpectedly spiritual when listening that way, and when the organ slides in at 4:25, it makes you realize where you are in this song and what you're doing. I love that beat of Larry's--we've heard it before in U2, not sure what all the songs are at the moment, but it's great; and Edge allows himself a guitar solo: a good one, and a long one. He should allow this more often; guitar solos may suck often, but it sure sounds like U2 ones don't.

I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight - This song is very listenable--it's very song-ish. I don't dislike it really; it's just that I don't like it all that much. It's got that cloying refrain that reminds me of "Walk On" or something else from All That You Can't Leave Behind and maybe something from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. It's okay. (I love "Walk On," but I love it as a song of encouragement and healing ... I don't think it's a great song artistically, truth be told.)

Get On Your Boots - It's a fun song. Fun vibe, fun sound, fun lyrics. "I got a submarine, you got gasoline" is particularly good; Bono singing about taking the tugboat to tuna town could never not be entertaining. The "Let me in the sound" part is not the most rousing chant they've ever had, but I'm a sucker for a rock-music-as-sex metaphor, and Bono wanting to get in the audible sound while his submarine wants to get in the watery sound is as good as any. And I like the honking sound that comes after "Hey sexy boots."

Stand Up Comedy - After a drumbeat intro that threatens to turn into "Stuck In a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" (another U2 song I really like but don't want them to make again), a "Love and Peace or Else"-style hard-ass guitar line comes in and saves its ass. But not completely. I can't figure out exactly what keeps this song from really working for me. It goes into a bit of a funk thing during the verses and then morphs into an Achtung Baby or ATYCLB-style bit leading up to the "Stand up for your love" chorus, and I don't like how that all goes together. I also think "Stand up for your love" is a little bit lame as a line. I may not have listened closely to it enough yet, but it seems to me Bono wrote a bunch of lyrics in a notebook, figured out what song to put them in, and then tacked "Stand up for your love" onto it as a "can't argue with that one!" topper. There are some great bits of lyrics in there, though, not least of which are these:

The DNA lotto may have left you smart

But can you stand up to beauty, dictator of the heart

---

But while I'm getting over certainty

Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady

---

Stand up to rock stars, Napoleon is in high heels

Josephine, be careful of small men with big ideas

FEZ-Being Born - Jury's still out on this one. I've wished for awhile that they would get back to some of the experimental type of stuff they did on The Unforgettable Fire, but I'm not sure this is what I was wishing for.

White as Snow - Very good. Excellent lyrics, music that doesn't fight with them. It tells a sad story; it feels like a movie in a song. I like the lyric "If only a heart could be as white as snow." Bono gives a great vocal performance in the last verse.

Breathe - Another of my favorites from the album. I love how Bono spits out the lines, and the music rocks. If their performance of this on Letterman is any indication, this will be another great one on tour. I really like the lyrics to this one, also. And the last bit, from "We are people borne of sound" to the end, is rousing, invigorating--it just makes you feel good, makes you feel right. I think the background singing in that section turns Bono's part into a gospel solo. And when he sings, "Sing your heart out, sing my heart out," wow. Suddenly the boy/man of the first five albums is back. It's incredible when you suddenly realize he sounds the same, because overall, I usually think his voice has changed. I think it's mainly the delivery. Listen closely to that line and you'll fall into a time machine.

Cedars of Lebanon - Jury's still out on this one, too. Bono's delivery and the way it's mixed sound similar to a couple other near-end-of-album songs they've done--"If You Wear That Velvet Dress" comes to mind--and I've never been real fond of them. Very interesting lyric about enemies:

Choose your enemies carefully 'cause they will define you

Make them interesting 'cause in some ways they will mind you.

They're not there in the beginning but when your story ends

Gonna last with you longer than your friends.

Grade: A-

Tristan + Isolde

Last night I finally watched my sister's copy of Kevin Reynolds's 2005 take on the old legend in which star-crossed lovers find themselves in a royal love triangle and therefore screwed.

This legend influenced a later legend, of course--that of Guinevere and Lancelot in King Arthur's court. The studio used Romeo & Juliet as the comparison point in the trailer and advertisements. So you get the gist: two people find love and because of various obstacles and obligations they did not create and cannot in good conscience avoid, they must resist their passion for each other or only get busy in secret.

The movie draws on the super-old Celtic roots of the story for its setting and plot. Kudos to the screenwriter, Dean Georgaris, for piecing together a coherent plot from the several complicated soap opera versions of legend, which you can get a taste of here; not only is the movie understandable, but it cuts out the dragons and other fantasy bits; I liked the historical feel, like it could have been a (Hollywood-ized) true story.

The look of the movie is swell; the acting is good; it's got lots of swords and arrows, which my husband liked; neither Tristan nor Isolde is annoying (for the most part); and you really want them to get together. I also really liked Bronagh Gallagher as Isolde's maid (since childhood--Isolde is the Irish princess) and Rufus Sewell as Lord/King Marke, who raises Tristan after his parents are killed, makes Tristan his right-hand man, and winds up marrying Isolde to form a shaky truce with Ireland, not knowing that his boy Tristan is in love with her and already knew her in the biblical sense while he (Tristan) was supposedly dead.

Here are our lovers:Sorry, that's from Wagner's opera. Instead, we've gotta look at these dogs:

James Franco and Sophia Myles

Grade: A

A point of interest: It does not hurt this movie in the slightest that James Franco is real yummy and spends a quality amount of time shirtless.

The War Zone

This movie was hailed by critics and a favorite at the major film festivals, but to me it was icky and made me want to walk out in front of a speeding bus. And I can do bleak. And I'm interested in the issue of incest! But ... ick.

Sixteen-year-old Tom discovers that his eighteen-year-old sister Jessie has been having sex with their father, then struggles with what to do with that knowledge.

The first shots of Tom, where he's seen riding his bike on a winding path to his family's new home near the seaside in Devon (where they have recently moved from London) are fun to watch. Enjoy them, because everything in the rest of the movie is disturbing and miserable.

Every shot inside the house is claustrophobic. It is always dark. It is always cluttered. The wallpaper in Tom's room is enough to make you go completely Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Not long after the movie starts, Tom and Jessie's pregnant mother goes into labor. While the family speeds to the hospital with Mum screaming in pain and Dad yelling at the teenage kids, the car goes off the road and rolls over (everyone, including the baby, comes out fine)--an odd event that is supposed to be symbolic of the family's coming destruction, but all you truly needed for foreshadowing was that wallpaper. Meanwhile, every shot of the coast is bleak and threatening.

On top of all that, for the first third of the movie, Tom, the character we are supposed to identify with, is the person in the family that I liked least. For the second third, pretty much everyone, save Mum and baby Alice, was unlikeable. Interestingly (before it becomes clear what he is doing to Jessie) the father is an unsettling mix of asshole and likeable and respectable man. In the end, I finally came around to liking young Tom, once he finally (sort of) told his mother something was going on. At this point, Jessie also became a sympathetic character.

One of the things that turned me off most is the continual inappropriate nudity and sexual undercurrents in this family. Mum sits at a table with her breast hanging out of her zip-up breastfeeding bra looking right at Tom, who is staring at her. Dad gets out of bed in the middle of the night to answer the phone completely nude, walking past Tom. Tom stops and stares in at his bra & underwear-clad mother through the open bedroom door, and she thinks nothing of it. Jessie bursts into the bathroom while Tom is on the toilet and yanks a magazine out of his hand. Jessie is topless or nude half the times Tom talks (or wrestles/fights) with her, and neither of them seems to think this is strange. Apparently there is a point to this in the novel on which the film is based. But in the film it just feels pointlessly gross. Perhaps this is because the nudity is not implied; it is laid out plain for the camera. Meanwhile, Jessie seems obsessed with sex (a symptom of abuse, I know, but it feels odd here, for reasons I'll cover in the next paragraph), and the second time that Tom observes a sexual act between Jessie and their father, he watches the entire thing (as do we: the whole thing is presented in all its disturbingness, with the victim's body plain for us to see). Tom and Jessie's relationship increasingly takes on a sexual charge. The whole family has a disturbing sexual cloud hanging over it, and, unfortunately, no one--no one--goes untouched, as becomes clear when the baby winds up in the hospital.

The things about the film that are most problematic to me have to do with Jessie's abuse. It seems to me that War Zone novelist and screenwriter Alexander Stuart and director Tim Roth didn't know, or didn't agree on, exactly what direction they wanted to go. I have not read the novel, but according to synopses and reviews I've read, Jessie instigates the sexual relationship with her father. She also ends up having sex with Tom in the novel. When I watched the film, I indeed got the impression early on that Jessie had started the relationship with their father and that she wanted Tom to simply leave them alone. But during the sex abuse scene between Jessie and their father, things become confusing. Her body language is that of a passive participant; a victim. But if I'm hearing her correctly, she asks why he won't have sex with her like he does with her mother: vaginally. She sounds like she wants to have vaginal sex with him. He takes her anally, painfully. She cries. She looks horrified by the situation; this is a scene of sexual abuse. But I'm oddly left with this question: would she feel abused if he'd had sex with her the way she wanted??

Ultimately, she is a victim either way, and he is a perpetrator either way. But I'm trying to understand her motivation, and I'm trying to understand what this film is trying to tell me. The DVD has text extras that say this film was made to bring incest out into the open and help its victims; and information, guidance, and resources for victims of sexual abuse are provided. In the director's commentary (of which I watched chunks, not all), Tim Roth speaks of the film like it is a straight exposure of the horror of incest and what it does to its victims. But this isn't simply a story of a daughter terrorized by her father. Or is it? At the end of the movie, and in the presentation of the movie, apparently the makers of the movie want it to be. But that's not all that's going on with Jessie. My point is not that it wasn't sexual abuse, or that it wasn't horrible and wrong. It is that, according to the novel, Jessie was disturbed before sex with her father even started. This is implied in scattered comments in the movie, but in the end, the movie doesn't seem to want to go that way. Because of that, even apart from it just being an unenjoyable movie to watch (and not because of the subject matter), I think it fails. Why was Jessie disturbed? Why is everyone naked all the time? Why did the mother believe immediately that her husband shouldn't be trusted, when Tom gave her pretty much nothing to go by concerning why? This is not a seemingly loving family gone wrong, in my impression; this is a wacked-out family finally disintegrating.

Having said that, Tilda Swinton and Ray Winstone are excellent as the parents. Lara Belmont does an amazing job as Jessie, especially considering this was her first acting job. The casting is excellent from a physical perspective also: Jessie looks like a perfect younger version of her mother, which, of course, adds to the creepiness of the crime at hand. Freddie Cunliffe as Tom ... this was his first acting job, too. Considering that, he is impressive. But overall I found him annoying and, to tell the truth, creepy.

One other thing I will say for the film: the setting and composition of the brutal sex abuse scene are genius. It's in an old stone structure on the coast, with slits for "windows." Tom watches through a vertical one, looking in at the events, while two horizontal rectangles with sky behind them watch back like eyes. They watch the proceedings while Tom does; the event is on display. We are all seeing the horribleness of this man, their father, in all his disgustingness, fucking his own daughter while she cries in physical and emotional pain and psychological horror.

My main problem is that there just seems to be absolutely nothing edifying in this film. I just watched a clip on YouTube in which Roger Ebert talks about how incredibly happy this family is before the shocking secret tears them apart. Happy? Where was the happy? Where was I for the happy family?

And the ending ... "What are we gonna do now?" Tim Roth says it's meant to show there are no easy solutions to this abuse. People are left wounded, scarred, floundering in its wake. But other victims could, hopefully, seek out and get the help they needed. While it was satisfying to see their father murdered, what can possibly be next for Tom besides prison? Fantastic ...

Grade: C-

Hiroshima Mon Amour

This 1959 film by Alain Resnais sets an intense tryst between a Japanese man and a French woman against the backdrop of the bombing of Hiroshima—or, rather, the memory of it. I had never heard of the film before it popped up as a suggestion on Netflix after I rented Resnais’s Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, so I went into it knowing nothing about it but the summarized plot on the envelope.

I’m glad I knew nothing of it before, because part of the power of the film, for me, was the style of the story’s unfolding. The unnamed protagonist, played by the incredibly stunning Emmanuelle Riva, reveals a piece of her past to her new and passionate lover, also nameless in the film, played by Eiji Okada, taking the film and the viewer in an unexpected direction. Her story of pain and loss mirrors her lover’s story, which he never truly tells, that of Hiroshima’s pain and loss, but which everyone already knows—or which everyone believes they know. The reason he does not tell Hiroshima’s story is that he was not there when his city was bombed. His family was, but he cannot know the trauma firsthand. However, he becomes the prompt for his lover’s narrative: he is the frame for the real story in the film, and he plays an integral role in the telling.

The film is beautifully shot, poetically spoken (entirely in French, but that’s not why it’s poetic), wonderfully scored, and, in my opinion, brilliantly acted. (Especially considering this is Riva's first film. Her performance does suffer at moments from the odd suddenly delivered line accompanied by a dive into her co-star’s arms, which seems to happen in every movie containing an actress right up until say … 1970, but it’s rare here and forgivable.) I had never heard of Emmanuelle Riva before this film, and she is quite a find. Her light moments in the first section of the film belie her darkness and intensity later. We know early on that there is more to this woman than meets the eye, but her initial attempts to keep her lover—and us—out of her head do not quite prepare us for the darkness of the memories she holds within. Throughout the film she is a surprise—to everyone, seemingly, except for the stranger with whom she has spent the night, who seems to already know her tale.

The central themes of the film are remembering and forgetting. Which is worse: the pain of remembering or the horror of forgetting? The film relies on metaphor and is built on the duality of absence and presence. A story told can never be a story lived; is a listener(reader)(viewer) less important than the storyteller? One cannot be without the other. Can one person represent the pain of a nation, a race, a gender? Can one person encompass an era—a time and place? Perhaps not for the whole world, but for one other person. But only if one’s story is listened to closely; as Riva says early in the film, one must learn to look at things closely. Can the telling of a story exorcise one from the power of the memories it contains? It is ironic (or perhaps not) that the woman’s hometown is the French town of Nevers. She can never forget her loss, despite her attempt to shut it away, and she will never remember all that she wishes she could remember, not in the way she knew her joy when it was happening. In a way, her struggle has always been a fight against the progression of time.

This is the kind of film where every shot means something, and every line means something. Aesthetically, it is gorgeous. Each frame’s composition is striking, and the starkness of the black-and-white fits the mood, the themes, and the bleak backdrop woven from war, destruction, and uneasiness about the future. The dialogue, which occurs only between these two characters throughout the whole film, is graceful and spare. Repetition is used effectively in writing, image, and music. And the story makes one think and think some more. The whole thing is constructed wonderfully.

Grade: A+. I loved it.

Interesting fact: Eiji Okada learned his lines phonetically for the movie. An incredible feat.