Sweeney for Pitch

For Winter 2008 issue of Pitch

VADE RETRO, SONDHEIM!
John Doyle kidnaps Broadway and does it a few favors

In mid-nineteenth century London, a series of ‘penny dreadfuls’—proto-pulp fiction serials targeting working-class teenagers—introduced the macabre story of Sweeney Todd, a barber cum serial killer who grinds up victims’ bodies and peddles them to the public in meat pies baked by his landlady and accomplice, Mrs. Lovett. After its adaptation into a gothic melodrama by George Dibdin Pitt, the story worked its way into the realm of urban legend, gaining traction as a parable of cold-blooded profiteering and industrial alienation.

Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 Broadway musical Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street, itself closely based on Christopher Bond’s play of the same name, is the legend’s most spectacular and widely known manifestation (though Tim Burton’s film version may have bested it, with droves of introspective types in eye shadow mobbing the box office since it opened in December). Crucially, the Bond-Sondheim interpretation of the legend reshaped Sweeney from a one-dimensional villain into a tragic anti-hero who, after being victimized by a cruel and corrupt legal system, sheds all moral strictures in order to better inhabit the baleful madness of his city and times–and have his vengeance.

On the Sunday before Halloween, I went to see John Doyle’s production of Sweeney Todd at the Colonial Theater in Boston. The British director debuted this new production in Newbury’s Watermill Theater in 2004 to much critical acclaim; soon after, he took it to London’s prestigious West End and then to Broadway in New York. The show is now touring the United States and will arrive at Louisville’s Kentucky Center in mid-February.

Perhaps a little too aptly, there were faint orange traces of the previous night’s liberally applied fake blood on my hairline, and I zombie-walked down the aisle to my seat plagued by a hangover subdued only slightly by a cup of South Station coffee. My harried state, compounded by an admittedly snobbish cynicism toward musical theater and all its necessary indulgences, made me somewhat wary of the performance ahead.

I’ve always though of musical theater in its commercial apotheosis on Broadway as the theater’s equivalent to the worst aspects of Hollywood cinema—that unstoppable phenomenon by which the reigning mainstream’s unlimited financial, professional and creative resources must nevertheless bow to the profit margins of formulaic mediocrity. The crucial difference being that Hollywood’s formulas have long constituted the standard for our most basic narrative codes, while Broadway musicals necessarily rely on what have become little more than obtrusive, outdated eccentricities—quaint at best, laughable at worst.

And yet there was hope. I knew the production would exhibit Doyle’s celebrated trademarks of austere and inventive dramaturgy, drastically paring down the orchestral and scenic grandiosity of the Broadway original to a skeletal set and a cast of ten who, in the absence of an orchestra, double as the sole instrumentalists. Perhaps Doyle would successfully re-instill Sondheim’s extravagant, operatic musical with the Brechtian turns of Bond’s play.

Indeed, Sweeney Todd’s virtuosity—lyrical, musical, thematic—is remarkable. But it remains hopelessly particular to its genre. A fan of the genre will be entertained by the lyrical ingenuity and unusually sinister plot; a more rarefied aficionado will be stricken by the complexity and intelligence of the score, perhaps even noting (as I could not) the eponymous composition’s frequent quoting of the Gregorian Dies Irae; the rest of us, meanwhile, will be left to wonder when Sweeney’s going to stop singing about his goddamn razor blade and kill someone with it.

Back in 1979 Sondheim and Harold Prince, the show’s first director, were relatively unabashed about Sweeney Todd’s socio-political dimensions. The decay of virtue and the social injustices of Dickensian London ostensibly functioned as tidy analogues for an America closing off a decade of ideological uncertainty, jaded decadence and post-industrial malaise. The overarching message is encapsulated in the play’s final musical number: Sweeney, we are told (or rather, sung), is not an inhuman aberration but an emblem of our times; he is everywhere and he is in everyone. A compelling enough message, sure, but one that loses all subtlety when communicated in rhyme by a line of singing, costumed actors contorting their painted faces and waving their limbs dramatically about.

Nevertheless, by the time intermission rolled around I was willing to grudgingly abandon some of my predispositions. It seemed that Doyle had, in fact, managed to reconcile the fatal contradiction inherent in a story whose ostensibly grim, brooding and profoundly serious themes are packaged—caged—in the aesthetic norms of a genre that is anything but. About halfway into the second act, after a number of characters had died under Sweeney’s razor and yet remained onstage as musicians in white lab coats drenched in blood, I realized that the achievement of Doyle’s production is significantly greater than the mere reconciliation of a contradiction. It is, in fact, rather the opposite. The story’s socio-political underpinnings, born into a desolate, phantasmagoric landscape, achieve a dizzying and deeply disheartening ambivalence. Rather than pining for humanity’s loss of some concrete moral rubric, the play questions what these lost values were and whether they ever existed in the first place. At the story’s heart is a jarring discontinuity between the subject matter and the means of its delivery—a fundamental, unsettling and self-propagating irony. The city is aflame with madness and death, but its inhabitants nevertheless proceed—bizarrely, with either pathetic naïveté or, more often, a sort of mechanized desperation—through the stylized song and dance of their inescapable routine. The scarcity of unsung dialogue (which has won the play numerous flattering associations with opera over musical theater) confirms this; the characters are hopelessly trapped in the grossly incongruous performance of their lives.

Doyle’s production seizes on this grotesque and irreducible irony and thrusts it center-stage in a way the original Broadway show never could have. In Harold Prince’s original, Sweeney Todd harbors no internal tensions—the hopeless, violent reality of the characters and setting is summarily absorbed by the sort of lavish set design, orchestral performance, and rotating stage set-ups only Broadway dollars can buy. These are precisely the things with which Doyle has so wisely dispensed. His actors, clad in ambiguously modern and altogether unremarkable dress, amble around a set no less daunting for its starkness. Wooden planks are strewn about, a coffin doubles as a table, a handful of chairs litter the stage. In the background, shelves cluttered with bric-a-brac tower toward the ceiling, displaying chipped porcelain, bread-boxes, and, in a telling detail, the occasional crucifix. The play’s formal elements intrude insistently upon their own proceedings: the young and foolishly idealistic sub-protagonist sings a song of admiration to a love interest who is busy, front and center, playing the cello.

Deep digging

Gathered from the College Hill Independent, March 2006-April 2007

Literary – 22 April, 2007

MARKETABLE MYTHOLOGIES
Roberto Bolaño and the future of Latin American literature in the United States

When Gabriel García Márquez delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1982, he was issuing a plaintive warning as much as an expression of gratitude. On behalf of the generation of Latin American writers exaltedly categorized as ‘magical realists’ by the academies of the First World, he dispatched this simple caveat: Be careful how you read us. Be careful, because the magic and wonder you have so consistently gleaned from our words is not a mere stylistic indulgence; it is the only way we have found to interpret a reality perhaps too grim and violent for you to understand.

In retrospect, this message seems little more than a depressing premonition. As Old Gabo and his contemporaries settled into their placid lives as elder statesmen, an ensuing generation of Latin American writers churned out one mediocre rehashing of One Hundred Years of Solitude after another. Magical realism became just what García Márquez feared: an easy and empty formula, a decadent aesthetic that did nothing to address or decipher the turbulence and brutality of its countries of origin, even though (or precisely because) it sold by the millions in Europe and the United States.

As the visionary accomplishments of the Boom generation were cemented into the modern literary canon, international perceptions of Latin American literature entered a vicious circle of stagnant exotification—and, as a result, so did much of Latin American literature itself.

ALL THE BUTTERFLIES ARE FINALLY DEAD

Enter the Hero, the demolisher of categories, the artist-martyr and torch-bearer for a new era: Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean writer who achieved near-unanimous recognition as the foremost Latin American novelist of his generation before dying of a diseased liver four years ago at age 50.

Though his reputation was established in the world of Hispanic letters well before his death, Bolaño’s novels and short stories have only recently begun to attract the attention of American readers and critics, particularly in recent weeks. Since the publication earlier this month of Natasha Wimmer’s English translation of 1998’s The Savage Detectives (his most critically acclaimed novel and the fourth to appear in English), Bolaño has been the subject of a flurry of exultant articles in dozens of mainstream American publications.

This is certainly a cause for celebration. Bolaño’s work makes a clean break from the exotic environments and lyrical affectations of the Boom generation. (He was, in fact, famously merciless toward any and all ambassadors of that geriatric tradition, poking fun at its high priests and even going as far as to openly call Isabel Allende, on multiple occasions, a “bad writer.”) And yet the importance of Bolaño’s work doesn’t lie exclusively in its dismissal of weary stylistic formulas.

Indeed, young Latin American writers, whether individually or in concrete movements, have long eschewed or even militantly rejected the tired tropes of magical realism (Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla and the rest of Mexico’s ‘crack’ movement, for instance, were often championed by Bolaño himself). But Bolaño is the first writer in decades whose work is capable of captivating an international audience—specifically an American one—and thus the first who shows any potential to finally break magical realism’s decades-long stranglehold on Latin American literature.

THE ITINERANT PROPHET

There are a number of reasons why Bolaño’s work—particularly The Savage Detectives—has proven so appealing to readers in the United States, the least of which is the ease and grace of English translation offered by his buoyant, conversational prose.

The Savage Detectives displays a level of intertextual play, formal self-consciousness and perspectival multiplicity rivaling that of the most revered postmodern American authors, all while adeptly circumventing the stiff and pretentious academicism to which John Barth and his cohorts have so often fallen victim.

In its place, the novel exhibits an astonishing elegance in capturing those simple and universally accessible concerns from which much of American fiction has drifted: human interaction in all its joyful and melancholic transience; the bitter ironies of personal ambition laid bare by the passage of time; pride, jealousy; violence, sex.

But it seems that the most effective element in advancing Bolaño’s popularity is his biography, which lends itself to one of the most alluring of romantic mythologies: that of the peripatetic life-artist, swiftly outrunning every oppressive societal norm, sacrificing every second and ounce of his existence to the ideal of artistic creation until the line between the two has disappeared entirely.

Bolaño, as is pointed out (and often inordinately stressed) in nearly every article on his work, spent much of his youth as a wandering poet and political radical. Moving primarily between Mexico, Chile and Spain, he supported himself through a series of odd jobs and the occasional bout of drug dealing, became addicted to heroin, founded at least one belligerently avant-garde literary movement and lost all his teeth. That Bolaño’s years as a nomad eventually cost him his life only adds to the romance.

It doesn’t hurt, either, that The Savage Detectives is the most autobiographical of Bolaño’s works. Much of the novel chronicles the youthful exploits of Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s rather obvious alter ego) and Ulises Lima, partners-in-crime as leaders of the “visceral realists,” a group of fast-living and artistically uncompromising Mexico City poets. They fund their experimental publications by selling marijuana (Acapulco Gold, to be precise) that they carry around in backpacks; they steal every book they read, and they harbor an escaped hooker with a heart of gold and get shot at by her pimp. To Americans who have spent the last three decades collectively waxing nostalgic over the lost ideals of the ‘60s, what could possibly be more appealing?

Once again, there is reason to celebrate. The Savage Detectives and the rest of Bolaño’s novels and short stories are, for the most part, brilliant, and they deserve to be read as widely as possible. In the best-case scenario, the skyrocketing popularity of his work will lead American readers to finally understand that Latin American literature after Borges has long been much more than colorful gypsies, generals and butterflies.

READ ATTENTIVELY, TREAD GINGERLY

Yet a more cynical observer cannot help but feel the pangs of pessimistic anticipation. After all, the stagnant hegemony of magical realism in Latin American literature is merely one expression of a phenomenon intrinsic to the larger industry of literature in translation. Any significant movement in art spawns its endless series of blind adherents and mediocre imitators. But when a concrete, critically successful and (above all) lucrative aesthetic is pegged to the literature of a particular region of the world, it becomes increasingly difficult for writers who don’t fit that description to be translated, published and reviewed abroad—and this, of course, only stokes the fires of second-rate mimicry.

In the worst-case scenario, then, magical realism will finally be banished only to be replaced by something much worse: the hackneyed conceit of the wandering, politically idealistic life-artist. A long series of novels more akin to The Motorcycle Diaries than anything else will then pour relentlessly into the hands of translators, while the work of more innovative writers lies fallow.

This, of course, is pessimistic hyperbole; whereas magical realism originated as a legitimately groundbreaking aesthetic, the notion of the life-artist is less a stylistic template than a mythologized image as old as the very idea of an avant-garde (if not older). And yet a different permutation of the machinery that established magical realism’s dominance is already in play, whereby the aspects of an author’s work that are stressed and celebrated are not those that set him apart from other writers but those that associate him with a successful movement, aesthetic or ideal.

In terms of Bolaño, the first signs are already here: much of the recent onslaught of publicity surrounding him unabashedly fetishizes his young life as a nomad poet. Never mind that he didn’t start publishing novels until later in life, settled down and sobered up in a Spanish beach town with his wife and two children, gravely ill and acutely aware of his own impending death.

Indeed, The Savage Detectives is less a novel about reckless and idealistic youth than about its very loss. The book is divided into three sections: the first and third are set in Mexico in 1975 and ‘76, and contain the volatile escapades of the visceral realists. But the middle section consists of a dizzying series of interviews with the young poets’ friends and acquaintances progressing into the late ‘90s; here we see Belano, Lima and most of their entourage drift slowly into the poignant disappointment or quiet melancholy of middle age.

Nevertheless, many American critics (including Richard Eder of The New York Times) have expressed a sense of boredom over the middle section of the novel. More amusingly, the author photo in the English edition of The Savage Detectives shows Bolaño the poet, a young hippie with long, untamed hair and a mustache, even though Bolaño the novelist consistently wore short hair, large eyeglasses and an awkwardly oversized black leather jacket—those clever marketers at Farrar, Straus and Giroux evidently knew which parts of the novel would send cultured baby boomers flocking to the bookstores.

But there is reason to hope for the best. Even after his days as an itinerant, toothless poet were over, Bolaño remained an irreverent iconoclast, and his writing preserved its staunch intolerance toward any and all easily digestible aesthetic categories; as more of his novels, stories and essays appear in English, his work will inevitably resist the seduction of marketable mythologies.

What Bolaño once wrote of James Ellroy’s memoir, My Dark Places, will be true of his own body of work: “It ends with shit and tears. It ends with a man alone and upright. It ends with blood. In other words, it never really ends at all.”

David Noriega B’08 steals every book he reads.

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Week in Review – 22 March, 2007 [A little amusingly anachronistic, now that Chávez has gone as far as requesting that FARC's label as a terrorist organization be internationally lifted (not to mention proving himself a showman far beyond the ranks of Shakira).]

IN COLOMBIA, MISCOMMUNICATIONS AND AN UNINVITED GUEST

On his tour of Latin America last week President Bush made a special stop in Bogotá, mostly to thank Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe for devoutly licking his combat boots for the last five years. (Uribe, in turn, thanked Bush for all the pretty green dollars and scary black helicopters.) Not since Ronald Reagan, that intrepid ray of California sunshine, has a US president deemed Bogotá safe enough to visit in person. And rightly so, it seems: within hours of Bush’s arrival, there were already a number of videos posted on YouTube of Colombian university students chucking live tear gas canisters and fiery cocktails at riot police, as well as an adorable interview with a bent-over septuagenarian protester calling Bush’s visit “the worst calamity that could possibly befall our country.”

Much of Señor Uribe’s presidency has been a struggle to maintain peaceable relations with countries near and far, in spite of the boisterous opinions of his countrymen. And occasionally, the tenuous balance of Colombia’s international affairs is compromised not only by its outspoken senior citizens and belligerent, street-hitting youth but by its very foreign dignitaries as well. On Wednesday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Fernando Araújo had the gall to suggest that FARC, Colombia’s leading guerrilla faction, is an enthusiastic admirer of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Uribe chastised Araújo for his comment, fearing that such statements might puncture Chávez’s normally Zen-like composure and generate tensions between Colombia and its easternmost neighbor. Never mind that Araújo was kidnapped by FARC in 2000 and spent a full six years captive, during which time he may or may not have picked up a bit of knowledge on the guerrilla group’s ideological leanings. Furthermore, Araújo made his comments in Washington, where President Bush (if he paid attention to these things) would have doubtless given him a pat on the back for indirectly calling Chávez a dirty violent commie.

Araújo was nevertheless made to apologize for his comments. And one must admit he did so gracefully: having seen guerrilla fighters excitedly cheering many of Chávez’s televised speeches during his kidnapping, Araújo simply explained that FARC soldiers admire Chávez “in much the same way that many other people admire Shakira.”

DRN

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From the Editors, 15 March, 2007

Baudrillard: An Autopsy

Jean Baudrillard, who died last week at age 77, had a prankster’s taste for the enigmatic. Most of his movements outside the circles of academic theory and into the sphere of public debate followed a clear—and frequently amusing—formula: having spouted some oblique and contentious aphorism (“the Gulf War did not take place” being the most infamous), Baudrillard would respond to the challenges of the outraged and befuddled with a new series of equally laconic quips. Rarely explaining or even defending himself, he chose instead to let his most contested statements sit still and attract swarms of impassioned argument.
This behavior understandably won Baudrillard many a dogged critic, and time after time his theories—along with his unwillingness to elucidate them—were derided as socially and philosophically irresponsible. Some even went as far as to dismiss his validity as a thinker altogether, find in his obtuseness the sure sign of a meaningless, empty and self-indulgently flippant rhetoric.

But Baudrillard himself acknowledged a deliberate intellectual strategy in his nature as provocateur. The clearest example, from the final chapter of Simulacra and Simulation: “I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.” (That Baudrillard likened himself to a terrorist is especially poignant in retrospect, after the various allegations of sympathy with the violence of Islamist terror after his remarks on 9/11.)

It seems, then, that Baudrillard’s overarching mission as cultural critic, above presenting analyses of contemporary phenomena, was to question and redefine the very purpose and value of philosophical thought in a globalized, media-saturated world, in which truth has been displaced by its simulation. Here the philosopher must abandon his pretenses as truth-seeker. He must don instead the garb of the anarchist clown, stripped of all ideology, and puncture as best he can the bubble of illusion—not to reveal what it hides, which is only itself, but simply to draw attention to its ubiquity.

As of last Tuesday, though, we face a different question: what becomes of the philosopher-clown when he is dead and buried? A dead man can’t ride a unicycle. A dead man can’t chuck cherry bombs at the enraptured crowd. Baudrillard might have said it makes no difference: he was only ever the simulacrum of himself. But without this simulacrum—a moving mouth on television, fresh words on newsprint and computer screens—Baudrillard’s body of work, aside from a handful of catchphrases, may very well fade into a forgotten and stagnant ignominy.

It doesn’t help that a palpable current of mordant resignation (“radical pessimism”) underlies the bulk of his writings. He was, after all, widely recognized as one of the leading theorists of an era defined by its ‘posts’: post-industrial, postmodern, even (abstractly) post-apocalyptic. Such an era is necessarily listless, directionless, buried in retrospection. It represents, as Baudrillard wrote in “The Anorexic Ruins,” a “state of inertia” in which all ideologies are exhausted and all politics is but a series of empty and self-sustaining gestures. We have neither revolution nor nuclear catastrophe to look forward to.

Without him around to actualize and bring them to life in the public sphere, Baudrillard’s theories are fundamentally self-defeating. Pessimism is no longer radical: it is merely pessimism. What, then, is the use? Why bother building meaning out of Baudrillard’s disjointed, oneiric imagery? Or anyone else’s, for that matter?

Perhaps it’s all for the best. Maybe in a few decades students of culture in the American University will have stopped plodding through the opening chapter of Simulacra and Simulation in their course packets. Who knows? If Baudrillard was wrong, The Bomb will by then have ceased to be only a metaphor; Manhattan will be under water and there will be no American University to speak of. If he was right we’ll have little to worry about but the aesthetic harmony of our suburban homes. At most we might be slightly disconcerted by the world at large, “eerily quiet like an abandoned November field.”

DRN

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From the Editors – 28 September, 2006 (With Ben Ewing)

The Bush administration’s inability to own up to its legacy of mistakes has long been fodder for some of the darkest, funniest humor of our generation. For several years satirists have had their acts readymade for them by basic cable news networks; the administration’s public face is that of a self-parodying comedy troupe. The routine is by now predictable: when the audience spots Bush with his pants down, instead of pulling them back up, he either plays dumb or sternly declares they were never up in the first place. When exhaustive searches revealed that Iraq never had WMDs, we were told that the war was never really about them anyway—it was about humanitarianism; when this revelation made an ass out of George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom; over a year after Cheney trumpeted the insurgency as being in its “last throes,” he berates anyone who doesn’t appreciate that the struggle in Iraq will be necessarily long and arduous; as Donald Rumsfeld appears increasingly inept at his post, Bush’s unquestioning faith in him has taken on an almost religious fervor.

Though Bush has reveled in macho displays of his determination to catch Osama bin Laden—such phrases as “Wanted: Dead or Alive” and “We will make no distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them” come to mind—earlier this month Pakistani Major General Shaukat Sultan Khan was equivocal when asked by ABC News whether Bin Laden would be captured if he were found to be hiding in northern Pakistan, where many in the international community suspect he has found refuge. The comments came on the heels of a Pakistani army agreement with the Taliban to pull troops out of the North Waziristan region, which in the words of former White House counter-terrorism director Richard Clarke, signaled that “the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership have effectively carved out a sanctuary inside Pakistan.” In a press conference with Pakistani President Musharraf last week, Bush broke into his usual routine: “When the President looks me in the eye and says, the tribal deal is intended to reject the Talibanization of the people, and that there won’t be a Taliban and won’t be al-Qaeda, I believe him, you know?… And when he says, if we find—when we find Osama bin Laden, he will be brought to justice, I believe him.”

Now, we learn of a major intelligence report—representing the collective analysis of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and 13 other American intelligence agencies—that concludes what we’ve been hearing from various, far less weighty sources for three or more years: the occupation of Iraq, rather than stunting, curbing or even denting the surface of the Jihadist movement, has directly fueled its growth, creating new generations of radical Islamists and thus significantly raising the threat of terrorism to the United States. For many of us, this contention was already supported by intuitive logic, but now it has the seal of approval of the tremendous infrastructure of American Intelligence—the very apparatus that ostensibly whirrs, spins and murmurs behind innumerable decisions of government.

In an era less jaded one might think the news earth shattering. One might envision endless boardroom meetings with huge maps and top-secret folders, loosened ties and black coffee ashtrays, culminating feverishly in the necessary shot of a printing press copiously expectorating papers with that headline we’ve all been waiting for—or at least the one we’d settle for: BUSH CONSIDERS POSSIBILITY OF RECONSIDERING IRAQ POLICY.

Instead we watch the original headline—announcing the intelligence report’s conclusions—drop from its feverish day or so atop the New York Times’ list of most-emailed articles down to number 10, pause, then disappear altogether. This is, after all, merely the latest installment in a dizzyingly long series of straws unable to break the camel’s back, and the whole affair has come to resemble an absurdist play of the sort that must have been disconcertingly poignant and funny some 60 years ago. Now, though, it all falls into a fairly clear pattern: every jarring contradiction, every profane incongruity is effortlessly subsumed under the messianic struggle against Evil—or rather, the muddled, dirty and fundamentally farcical struggle against that ever-unstable, ever-destabilizing category: Terrorist.

When’s intermission? This joke isn’t funny anymore.

BHE & DRN

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Week in Review – 21 September, 2006

U.K. TOWN PIONEERS TALKING CCTV CAMERAS; WRITERS STRUGGLE TO INSERT ORWELLIAN REFERENCES INTO ARTICLE TITLES

Unlawful citizens of Middlebrough, England, received an unpleasant surprise early this week when authorities installed seven talking CCTV surveillance cameras in the town center. The cameras allow officers watching in real time to reprimand, instruct or “give advice” (BBC) to public boozers and brawlers, litterbugs, inconsiderate
pedestrians and all other sorts of town square ne’er-do-wells.
The cameras were pushed through by former senior police officer and current mayor of Middlesbrough
Ray Mallon, dubbed ‘Robocop’ in bygone days for his institution of zero-tolerance policies in law enforcement as well as his part-human, part-machine physiological composition and deeply fucked up past (also that time he read that guy his rights while throwing him through a bunch of windows).

The talking cameras have so far been lauded as highly successful in deterring petty violations. Normally self-confident perpetrators have been scampering off tail-between-legs on a daily basis after having their egregious affronts verbalized and brought loudly to their attention—man’s petty vice enters its mirror stage via modern technology; the unwilling and unruly debris of late capitalism’s callous selfishness turned in upon its tattered self in an extraneously imposed
act of introverted scrutiny, yadda yadda. One can only hope that Providence invests in a similar system for the ever-unruly downtown district surrounding
Kennedy Plaza—if not to increase security, then at least to complement the phalanx of officers puttering around on Segway scooters with hyper-aerodynamic bicycle helmets.

DRN

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From the editors – May 2006

The Gospel of Judas

The codex was discovered almost completely disintegrated, decayed into more than one thousand little fragments of brittle papyrus. The digitalized representations of each of its individual pages, eyes blurred and head tilted back, resemble asymmetrical Rorschach inkblots. Zoom in with the handy toolbar on the left and watch the faded text grow clearer, like dried blood on stiff old fabric, shaped by sheer chance into a perfect calligraphy with decidedly sinister undertones—almost cartoonishly so, a prop in a live action role playing game or fodder for the imagination of a middle school Wicca.

But this is serious stuff, folks: the only existing manuscript of The Gospel of Judas, an inherently heretical document transcribed in Coptic by Gnostics of the 4th century AD. Its fragmented narrative of about 26 pages recounts Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Christ not as the most despicable of sins but as the holiest of sacrifices—a sacrifice explicitly requested by the savior, no less. And we couldn’t even read it until last Thursday. Years and years of meticulous reconstruction, conservation and radiocarbon dating can finally say it loud and clear: this is for real.

Yet what, precisely, does it all mean? The manuscript, written several hundred years after the events it purports to illuminate, is pretty much historically worthless—it is no more or no less a reliable account of the lives of Jesus and Judas than the four gospels considered by most Christians to be authentic. It is, however, old enough to lend its theological implications the unsettling solidity of the ancient. And what theological implications they are: the very personification of treachery and evil becomes Jesus’ best buddy, his partner in crime, his right hand man. Bad becomes Good, fundamental symbols are ruthlessly gutted and hung by their feet.

But Judas’ betrayal has been the subject of theological and philosophical tinkering for some time. Jorge Luis Borges’ “Three Versions of Judas” moves through variations of the Gospel’s propositions—the betrayal as a deliberate sacrifice intended to help Christ fully realize his mission on earth—to reach a radical thesis: Judas, not Jesus, was the savior, God himself brought to the deepest recesses of the human abyss to there preach his Word. But Borges’ tale is trapped in an impenetrably layered web of fictional texts—its theological theses are buried in the forgotten work of a Scandinavian scholar, itself buried in an opaque, multilingual mass of footnoted addenda: commentaries, prologues, commentaries on prologues.

Borges’ scholar is condemned first to delirium and death by a brain aneurysm, and more horrifically to permanent obscurity—an eternal Life as Letters, holed up un a tiny university town in Sweden. Logos becomes not a gift from God but a remote circle of hell, dry and lonely as a desert. And the torment of this hell lies, of course, in infinity—nothing beyond or beneath the sand but more sand; nothing within or beyond the text but more text.

Is The Gospel of Judas a step toward the truth of a theological mystery or merely another layer in an eternal palimpsest? Neither, probably. Or maybe both. Or maybe I should just take some advice from Jesus himself, in the form of a brilliantly curt and poignant question addressed to Judas within the very document in question: “Why do you try so hard?”

DRN

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Features – 16 March, 2006

THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT A RUSSIAN SUBMARINE
Visiting, Revisiting and Re-revisiting a Local Curiosity

I.
As April approaches, bringing warm and joyful times, it is only natural to set our eyes firmly on the pleasures awaiting us in the months ahead. Yet we must never let the frivolity of spring blind us completely to the past. For even on the warmest of days, replete with Frisbee-crossed blue skies and flip-flop-clad youngsters, we must leave at least a little room for the remembrance of our nation’s longest, coldest winters.
So, on the next warm weekend day, take the stroll down to Collier Point Park and visit the Russian Sub Museum, a truly remarkable memorial to the Cold War and its veterans. The museum consists of a 300-foot-long Soviet submarine moored a few feet off the park’s coast, open to the public for an admission price of eight dollars. The submarine, designated by the Soviet Navy as K-77 and by NATO as Juliett-484, still contains most of its original trappings—equipment covered in knobs, wheels, dials and lights, narrow bunks and officer’s quarters. Visitors are free to guide themselves through the submarine, provided they wear sensible footwear and are capable of crawling through the small hatches that connect the boat’s various compartments.
The Soviet Navy launched K-77 in 1965 as part of a fleet intended to target major US east coast cities with nuclear cruise missiles. These missiles eventually became obsolete, however, and the submarine’s mission changed: armed with 22 torpedoes, it was to shadow, target and, if necessary, destroy US aircraft carriers at sea or at port.
It may seem paradoxical to preserve and display an enemy war craft as an homage to the American men and women in uniform it was designed to target. Juliett-484, however, is only a stepping-stone in a much larger road to remembrance. The submarine belongs to the USS Saratoga Museum Foundation, a non-profit organization whose ultimate goal is to obtain the USS Saratoga, a 1067-foot aircraft carrier that is still in the possession of the US Navy, and display it alongside the submarine as the central attraction in an enormous, park-like museum. According to the Foundation’s mission statement, this park would seek, in focusing on the role of Rhode Islanders in 20th century naval history, to “honor veterans of all services” and “educate the public about the cost of freedom.”
These are, after all, troublesome times, and if there is anything that we as Americans must remember it is that freedom isn’t free. And Juliett-484, that one-time mortal enemy, is now an invaluable tool in constructing a giant, collective salute to the Stars and Stripes and the freedom they represent, as well as a giant, collective warning-finger-in-the-face to anyone who dares threaten them.
But let’s not get too serious, folks. I should mention that, in the year 2000, Juliett-484 was towed to Nova Scotia and used to shoot the action movie K-19: The Widowmaker, co-starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. So, if you do choose to visit the museum, you will not only be honoring the military men and women of our country: you will be effectively crawling through the cramped innards of a retired movie star.

II.
The post-retirement history of K-77 is one of resistance. Upon being decommissioned by the Soviet Navy, the submarine’s use-value vanished instantly into thin air. Far from rusting in a shipyard, however, the ex-war craft was priced, purchased, repainted and towed slowly into the waters of its enchanted afterlife as commodity. It first served as a novelty restaurant-bar in Helsinki. Camera shutters clicked. Martinis were spilled on the submarine’s floors. But not enough money changed hands. Bankrupted, the submarine was transported to St. Petersburg, Florida to masquerade as a tourist attraction. Fewer camera shutters clicked, less money changed hands. Posted on an internet auction site at a starting price of US$1,050,000, the submarine received no serious bids.
It took Hollywood, the ideological heart, brain and muscle of Western capitalism, to cast the exchange-value spell on K-77 with any success. Graced by the chiseled jawbones of movie stars, it was sold at the box office to millions of consumers as the set of a pseudo-historical action/thriller narrative. With its commodity status thus ephemerally immortalized on celluloid, K-77 was finally re-retired to the dingy shores of America’s smallest state, where it floats surreally amidst the steel beams and smokestacks of a rust-orange industrial landscape.
K-77 is now a “museum.” A museum of what, exactly? Of recent American history? Of recent Russian history? Or is it of 20th century nautical warfare? One can surely learn a thing or two about all of these things by crawling through the submarine’s tiny round hatches, but it’s nothing one couldn’t learn from books. The museum serves another purpose altogether. It preserves and displays, frozen under layers of fresh paint, embodied in the steel of its one-time adversary, the triumphant omnipotence of capital.
For a price, parents can throw their children a cake-and-ice-cream birthday party in the belly of K-77. They will then wander, wide-eyed and satiated, through the craft’s dark, phantasmagoric passages. At the submarine’s end they will smear their fingerprints on the green-painted steel of an impotent torpedo. The torpedo will sit motionless, pointed toward an adversary lost somewhere behind the curtain of history. The children will then emerge into the gleaming sunlight.

III.
[There is a trailer parked near the spot where the submarine is moored that functions simultaneously as a ticketing area, gift shop and small exhibition space for submarine-related artifacts. While waiting for the assistant site manager to arrive and answer some questions, the College Hill Independent exchanged a few words with the museum cashier on duty at the time. The cashier was a young man wearing a black t-shirt with red block letters reading, "Our Museum Can Sink Your Museum." The t-shirts are on sale at the museum gift shop.]
COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT: How long have you worked here?
CASHIER: I’ve been here since, ah… August of 2003.
CHI: Huh…
[Pause. Sound of the College Hill Independent shifting uncomfortably]
CHI: So, um… is the submarine active?
CASH: No.
CHI: So… the museum couldn’t actually sink another museum…
[Pause.]
CASH: Well, we do have a dummy torpedo but, ah, that’s not going to do anything.
CHI: Right…’cause it’s a dummy torpedo.
CASH: Yeah.
[Pause]
CASH: One thing of note is that the submarine was on eBay for a while. [Sound of cashier walking to a computer printout of the auction site posted on the wall in the next room]
CHI: Oh, really? Did it get sold, or…?
CASH: No, it never sold…but a few Middle Eastern countries contacted the seller, all with the same question—could it be made operational again?
[Pause.]
CHI: Middle Eastern countries?
CASH: Yeah.
CHI: Huh.
[Pause.]
CHI: So…when people asked if it could be made operational, they just didn’t sell it to them?
CASH: Uh, I wouldn’t know about that. You’d have to ask Ken.
CHI: Okay.
[Pause.]
CASH: And I’m not entirely sure that that was actually fact, but that’s what a lot of the guys say, um…happened. So…
CHI: Yeah…
[Long silence, punctuated by a few seconds of loud, garbled noise as the College Hill Independent accidentally releases the "Record" button and remembers that the only cassette he could find for this interview was an old Led Zeppelin tape he recorded when he was ten.]

David Noriega B’08 would like to note that the amplifiers in the submarine’s sonar room go up to 11.

The Saga of Emmanuel, pt. II

Yesterday as we were drinking a beer in a faux-English pub near a park in Bogotá, the girlfriend of an old friend called a conversation time-out to inform us that FARC had communicated a precise set of coordinates for the release of Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzáles. The release went through successfully this morning in Guaviare, and the two women, both apparently in good health, were flown to Venezuela to reunite with their families. Emmanuel remains in Bogotá under the custody of the ICBF.

A seemingly noble end to a flagrantly ignoble travesty. The release this morning took place without December’s international publicity fanfare, and Chávez’s remarks on the matter were decidedly more toned down this time around.

Is this, nevertheless, a victory for the Venezuelan president? The idea is that without Chavez’s intervention, FARC would never have considered releasing the hostages; Uribe’s presidency is unabashedly dedicated to eliminating any and all guerrilla presence via (largely US-funded) military pressure, and such a policy logically tends to exclude any sort of peaceful negotiation. FARC, on the other hand, has clearly been willing to deal with a leader like Chávez, whose politics are theoretically more aligned with those of a leftist guerrilla group.

The fundamental problem here is the assumption that FARC, behind their anachronistic rhetoric, has any sort of substantial ideology at all—for decades, their methods (which consistently and brutally victimize the very peasant communities one would think a Marxist guerrilla force would represent and defend) have rendered such a notion hard to believe. Nevertheless, the alternative offered by the Uribe regime is not much easier swallow: an authoritarian right-wing military campaign which, a) is explicitly aligned with the American imperialist project through dollars channelled toward the hopelessly misguided Wars on Drugs and Terror, and b) many of whose leading officials have been proven to hold strong ties with paramilitary groups whose methods are just as despicable as FARC’s—if not more, given their de facto (though illegitimate and clandestine) sanction from certain segments of the Colombian government, and by extension the U.S. policy that backs them.

Then, of course, there’s Chávez. And herein precisely lies the impossibly huge question posed by this mess of a situation and its apparently clean denouement: do the policy and rhetoric exemplified by Chávez constitute, after all, a valid, cohesive and actualizable Latin American left? The kind that, as many of us (perhaps a little starry-eyed) hope, could possibly transform the long-sorry state of an entire continent and add substantially to the international opposition to America’s overlarge combat boots? Chávez and many of his underlings and allies have often proven alarmingly hypocritical, cynically demagogic, and on occasion delusionally paranoid. Are these merely flaws we have to put up with on the road to such a unified left? And how much can we allow this hypothetical left to deal peaceably with groups like FARC, whose only real guiding principle is ruthless violence for the sake of moneymaking?

The problem exists locally as well as internationally: Colombia’s various left-wing parties united fairly recently into the Alternative Democratic Pole (Polo Democrático Alternativo, PDA, most often simply ‘El Polo’), which has successfully elected two consecutive mayors in Bogotá. Many left-leaning colombians I’ve talked to consider El Polo to be a brilliant idea with something of a shady execution: doubtless the effort to consolidate the Colombian left is indispensable, but many of its top representatives have shown themselves to be unproductively dogmatic and disappointingly unwilling to distinguish themselves and their principles from FARC’s.

Point being: beyond its obvious humanitarian worth, should we take the release of Rojas and Gonzáles to be a victory for Chávez over Uribe? And, by extension, a victory for the Latin American Left over the Latin American Right? The implications are many and complicated—the clearest is that ’left’ would thus be inalienably equated with Chávez and potentially even with FARC. Is this really what we want?

Kindly send hopeful and enlightening answers to   noriega [dot] david [at] gmail [dot] com

He that’s born to hang need fear no drowning

“IX. A man walking home through traffic is struck briefly by the notion that nothing (people, places are the words like stamps on acetate) is important, in the commonly understood sense of the word, if only we weren’t so equivalent to them in perspective, though never equal to ourselves. And two hours later he folds a tortilla over some shredded cheese and heats it in the microwave for thirty-five seconds, then ten more, and sits on his couch with his paper plate and glass of orange juice, wondering at the level of monotony he is able to withstand in his daily meals; wondering at how we are made to hurt others, when we know for a fact that we wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

-Ireneo Infante, Fragmentos

The Saga of Emmanuel

My first morning here in Bogotá I awoke to a frenzy of talk radio chatter surrounding the identity of a child legally named Juan David Gómez Tapiero who, under the custody of the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare (Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar, ICBF), was being submitted to a series of mitochondrial DNA tests. The question: Is he or is he not Emmanuel, son of Clara Rojas, the currently kidnapped aide to former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt? The young boy’s identity has been the subject of incessant talk all over Colombia, in living rooms and on the street as much as on the radio and in the papers, and is but one part of a much larger and very theatrical political battle between the ideologically at-odds presidents of Colombia (Álvaro Uribe) and Venezuela (Hugo Chávez). For days it was hard—and to a lesser degree still is—to spend an hour here without hearing the word “Emmanuel” coming from someone or somewhere. A somewhat reductive backstory: 

Clara Rojas and Ingrid Betancourt were kidnapped by FARC in February of 2002, during the latter’s campaign for the presidency. Both are still captive. 

Sometime around 2004, Rojas gave birth to Emmanuel, the child of a guerrilla fighter.

Last December, Hugo Chávez pulled his weight as a leftist and former rebel leader to initiate talks with FARC about ”Operation Emmanuel,” i.e., the highly publicized release of Rojas, Emmanuel, and former Colombian congresswoman Consuelo Gonzáles (who was kidnapped in 2001). His intentions, of course, were as much political as humanitarian; if successful, Operation Emmanuel would theoretically signify Chavez’s ideological superiority over Uribe, a staunch right-winger and steadfast G. W. Bush ally,  in assuaging the turmoil of Colombia’s decades-long civil war—and, in general, in spreading his brand of politics across Latin America.

Everything seemed to be going swimmingly for Chávez. FARC agreed to release the three captives in an undisclosed location late in December, and starting on the 26th, a large group of international delegates (including Argentine ex-president Nestor Kirchner and, a little dubiously in my opinion, American filmmaker Oliver Stone) stood around the Colombian plains neighboring the Venezuelan border awaiting this  historical landmark in humanitarian progress.

For days, nothing happened.

Then, on the 31st, as the delegation grew increasingly peeved with FARC’s absence (which they explained as due to “heavy military activity” in the area) and prepared to give up on the matter entirely, Uribe went live with a hypothesis regarding the no-show: FARC didn’t have the child Emmanuel. He grounded this theory on the finding of a boy abandoned to the ICBF two years prior, now in Bogotá, who matched various descriptions of Rojas’ son.

The delegation went its various separate ways; Chávez returned to Caracas defeated, tail-between-legs, etc; Uribe returned to Bogotá outwardly bemoaning the failed mission, inwardly (I’m sure) gloating at Chávez’s red-faced exeunt. This is where I came in, with Colombia in a furor over the ambiguous identity of the boy in Bogotá, abandoned and malnourished.

To summarize the situation so far: the mitochondrial DNA tests, performed with samples from known relatives of Rojas’, came back 80% positive.  Soon enough FARC acknowledged that the boy is, indeed, Emmanuel, and that soon after his birth they abandoned him to an ICBF branch from which he was eventually transferred to the capital. Their acknowledgment, of course, was framed as an allegation that the boy was no less than “kidnapped” by Uribe’s “narco-paramilitary regime and its masters in Washington,” and that their attempts to recover him before effectuating Operation Emmanuel were stunted by the ICBF’s (evil) bureaucracy. 

If this whole charade seems a little on the ridiculous end (one writer I spoke to likened it to a cross between García Márquez, Tom Clancy and Ionesco), that’s because it is. What should have been a breakthrough in rational, peace-oriented progress in a country whose sense of moral and political principle has been worn paper thin by fifty years of violent conflict—one, moreovoer, in which the stance of any single party involved stopped seeming justifiable or even substantial decades ago—proved instead to be little more than an aggrandized round in a battle of tail-feather posturing between equally hollow ideologies and their desperately selfish, chest-thumping proponents.

Nothing new in Latin America, but disheartening nonetheless.