Ivan's Childhood (1962)
Wednesday, April 30, 2003 | 1 Comments
Dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky
Images: Expressionistic camera angles, most notably in Ivan's more terrifying dream sequences. Striking but occasionally heavy-handed symbolism, such as that beautiful cross amid the bombed-out landscape. Most memorable images are those that display Tarkovsky's emerging aesthetic: the slow tracking shots through the birch forest, the close-ups of Ivan, the use of found footage, the final fantasy sequence.
See Also: Sculpting in Time
• • •
A few summers ago, I had the rare opportunity to see Stanley Kubrick’s “lost” films at a special screening presented by the Mary Pickford Theater at the Library of Congress. His early shorts were interesting, of course, but the main attraction was his first feature, Fear and Desire (1953), a film that so embarrassed Kubrick in his later years that he reportedly collected and destroyed every print in circulation. According to the librarian who introduced the series, their print was discovered quite accidentally — a treasure among a collection of films shipped from a storehouse somewhere in Puerto Rico, as I recall. And much to Kubrick’s dismay, I’m sure.
I’m hesitant to introduce a response to Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood with mention of Fear and Desire for fear that the latter’s reputation might somehow tarnish the former’s. So let me make this point clear: Tarkovsky’s is a much, much better film, a great film even. But both suffer the effects of youth. This can on occasion be a good thing, of course. There’s often a refreshing fearlessness in the works of those artists who are still seeking a voice, who haven’t yet learned the rules and mastered the fundamentals. But that fearlessness is often matched by a naïve worldview and reckless ambition. Actually, in Kubrick’s case, I would go so far as to call that ambition hubris, as he and co-screenwriter Howard Sackler — who, like Kubrick was only in his mid-20s at the time — set out on a shoestring budget to make a film about “the two greatest motivating forces in human history,” or some such nonsense. Set in a fictional, dreamlike landscape amid a fictional, dreamlike conflict, Fear and Desire is a war picture drowning in banal allegory, notable only for its notoriety and for the occasional startling image that hints at all that would come in Kubrick’s five-decade career. I’m glad I saw it. Once.
That Ivan’s Childhood continues to impress and teach with repeat viewings is perhaps the best testament to the film’s lasting import. Like Fear and Desire, it is a war film that deliberately transcends many of the genre’s conventions, but it does so with a grace and humility that prevent Tarkovsky’s occasional missteps from spoiling the experience. Clearly, his aesthetic is still in gestation here. We’re offered brief glimpses of that mysterious poetic logic that informs his later work, but it is at times encumbered by weighty symbolism and Bergmanesque expressionism. Dare I say that Tarkovsky’s hand feels a bit heavy at times? If Paths of Glory is the first complete Kubrick film, the first to combine each of the particular stylistic devices and thematic obsessions that have come to define his status as an auteur, then I would argue that Andrei Rublev is our first taste of the full Tarkovsky, unburdened by another’s source material (he inherited the Ivan project from another director) and enlightened by palpable maturity, insight, and confidence.
Ivan (Nikolai Burlyayev) is a hollow-eyed orphan who, after watching his parents and young sister killed, fashions himself as a spy on the eastern front. In the film’s opening act, Ivan trudges through a swamp under the glow of enemy tracers, carefully working his way from behind enemy lines to a Russian outpost where he’s greeted by Lieutenant Galtsev (Yevgeni Zharikov), a commanding officer only a few years his senior. The twelve-year-old spy is exhausted and sickly but determined to deliver his intelligence to Colonel Gryaznov (Nikolai Grinko), who, we eventually learn, has become something of a father figure to Ivan. Gryaznov and Captain Kholin (Valentin Zubkov) conspire to secret Ivan away to a military academy, but the young soldier proves too stubborn and determined. He runs away, then, after being discovered hiding amid the desolate, bombed-out landscape, convinces his friends and superiors of his unique value to the cause. The remainder of the film documents the making of preparations for Ivan’s subsequent mission back into Nazi territory.
As with all of Tarkovsky’s work, a simple plot summary makes for an insufficient record of the film itself. Although it is the director’s most traditionally narrative-driven feature, Ivan’s Childhood is less concerned with war’s stories than with war’s human experiences and its aftermath: physical, emotional, and spiritual. At the risk of sounding pedantic, I would argue that, in this film, Tarkovsky forsakes the terrain of the traditional battlefield in order to more fully explore that of the embattled body. In an early scene, for instance, we watch as Ivan strips naked and bathes in a small metal drum. It’s a stunning image — Burlyayev, the young actor, is a pathetic, emaciated mess of ribs and knees and shoulders — an image that strips away the naïve romanticism that tends to accompany the genre. Tarkovsky’s camera exposes both Ivan and Lieutenant Galtsev not as the manly war heroes who they (and most war films) would imagine themselves to be, but as children without options.
When Galtsev later says of the young spy, “A war is no place for children,” his words are all the more poignant and absurd for coming from this teenaged officer’s mouth. He uses a similar line — "War is a man’s business" — after deciding to send Masha (Valentina Malyavina), a young nurse, home from the front. But, again, the line falls flat. It's a false, empty performance of bravado, a deflation and deconstruction of the countless odes to heroic sacrifice that inform our stories of war — epic, mythological, literary, and cinematic. By treating such conventions truthfully and with seriousness, Tarkovsky manages to expose the dehumanization of war without slipping into cynicism or satire. (Would that an American filmmaker could avoid the same trap today.) The film's final shot of Galtsev is also one of its most memorable. A few years older and with the war now behind him, Galtsev is quite literally scarred by his experience. But the actor's young face refuses to lend the image the symbolic weight we might expect from the coda of a war film. He is not a wizened, toughened officer — a "man" who has proven his mettle in the manliest of arenas. Instead, like Ivan, he remains a boy, but one carrying tragic wounds.
Throughout the film, Tarkovsky makes remarkable use of close-ups of his actors’ faces (most notably, the final shots of Ivan) as a traditional technique for blurring the boundaries between objective and subjective experience. That blurring is critical to the success of this film, which is as much a psychological profile as it is a biography or war picture. We are offered access to Ivan’s subjectivity, in particular, through a series of dream sequences — some idyllic, others terrifying. But, really, the entire film is so closely bound to his perspective that it plays, with only a few notable exceptions, like Ivan's psychic projection. Tarkovsky's tack works quite successfully, for the most part. In Sculpting in Time, he writes:
in film, every time, the first essential in any plastic composition, its necessary and final criterion, is whether it is true to life, specific and factual; that is what makes it unique. By contrast, symbols are born, and readily pass into general use to become clichés, when an author hits upon a particular plastic composition, ties it in with some mysterious turn of thought of his own, loads it with extraneous meaning.
Ivan's Childhood, I think, offers examples of both. There are, surprisingly for Tarkovsky, occasional missteps into symbolism — that beautiful but strangely empty image of a cross on the battlefield, for instance, or the cock-eyed camera angles that compose Ivan's nightmares and that would feel more at home in Wild Strawberries than in Rublev. More often, though, the director manages to create moments that could only be described as Tarkovskyan — those amazing moments that make him one of the few geniuses of film. He's at his finest in a sequence involving Masha and Captain Kholin, who pursues the nurse into a thick forest of birch trees. Tarkovsky's camera tracks their movements at a distance before joining them, finally, in a strange, low-angle embrace over a small trench. The scene achieves his artistic ideal:
A true artistic image gives the beholder a simultaneous experience of the most complex, contradictory, sometimes even mutually exclusive feelings.
Kholin's and Masha's encounter is a desperate act of human contact, but it's also vaguely degrading; it's a moment of near transcendent delight, but it's one that feels debased and compromised. I can't make sense of it, really, though I feel compelled to, which is probably why Ivan's Childhood is one of the few war films that I return to with any frequency. That complexity of emotions and motivations should always form the foundations of our war stories, or we'll make the mistake of flattening the world, reducing its rich textures and varied peoples to stark black and white.
The Agenda
Tuesday, April 29, 2003 | 0 Comments
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me begin by saying that, within the strange confines of my personal experience, many of the "Regular Joes" who support President Bush and his agenda seem to do so because he is pro-life and because he evidences publicly the recognizable signs of a "committed walk with God." Within this community — this large, evangelical sub-culture — voting Republican is a "moral" act, a single gesture by which evangelicals hope to restore America to its Christian foundations (whatever that means — and, of course, it doesn't mean anything, which is the beauty of empty, historically-blind rhetoric, but that's another rant entirely).
So with that out of the way — along with the obligatory acknowledgement that there are, of course, notable exceptions to my rule — I want to dig into William Grieder's recent piece for The Nation, "Rolling Back the 20th Century," which does a nice job, I think, of summarizing the Neoconservative agenda. The thesis of his argument, as implied by the title of the article, is that, since Reagan's election in 1980, the Right has moved slowly but steadily toward a dismantling of New Deal America with the ultimate goal of returning us to the "lost Eden" of the McKinley Era. This is the line that really grabbed by attention:
Many opponents and critics (myself included) have found the right's historic vision so improbable that we tend to guffaw and misjudge the political potency of what it has put together. We might ask ourselves: If these ideas are so self-evidently cockeyed and reactionary, why do they keep advancing?
If you're a regular reader of Long Pauses, then you know that I'm plagued by the word "praxis" — the symbiotic relationship of theory and action. I was reminded of it again last night as I finished reading Radical Chic, Tom Wolfe's 1970 account of a fund-raising party held at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein in honor of the Black Panthers. At one point, the trio of Bernstein, Otto Preminger, and Barbara Walters (!) assail Don Cox with pointed questions concerning the risks of violent revolution, and the leather-clad, afro-ed Panther is able only to regurgitate the Maoist jargon of "petty bourgeois oppression" and "individual freedoms." He isn't very convincing.
But the Neocons are. I keep thinking of a line from Angels in America, when Joe — the mostly-closeted Mormon, Republican lawyer — asks Louis — his Jewish, progressive lover: "Do you want to be pure or do you want to be effective?" The Neocons seem to have discovered praxis in spades, though it's praxis built upon grossly immoral theories of capital. Grieder summarizes the main points of that agenda, each of which is explained in much greater detail in the article:
- Eliminate federal taxation of private capital, as the essential predicate for dismantling the progressive income tax.
- Gradually phase out the pension-fund retirement system as we know it, starting with Social Security privatization but moving eventually to breaking up the other large pools of retirement savings, even huge public-employee funds, and converting them into individualized accounts.
- Withdraw the federal government from a direct role in housing, healthcare, assistance to the poor and many other long-established social priorities, first by dispersing program management to local and state governments or private operators, then by steadily paring down the federal government's financial commitment.
- Restore churches, families and private education to a more influential role in the nation's cultural life by giving them a significant new base of income — public money.
- Strengthen the hand of business enterprise against burdensome regulatory obligations, especially environmental protection, by introducing voluntary goals and "market-driven" solutions.
- Smash organized labor.
Later in the piece, Grieder boils it down even further: "Dismantle the common assets of society, give people back their tax money and let everyone fend for himself." It's an oversimplification, obviously, but it's also a frighteningly accurate summary of Bush's domestic policy. I guess the question that plagues me is: How did this agenda become the guiding light for America's evangelicals? How did a Church founded on Christ's ministry become united behind a political ideology that elevates market forces over justice and mercy? Do we so completely lack imagination and understanding of history that we've concluded that this is the best we can do?
Grieder concludes:
I do not believe that most Americans want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country. This is a failure of left-liberal politics. Constructing an effective response requires a politics that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush's governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more positive, inclusive, forward-looking vision.
Perhaps it could be modified slightly and still retain some of its weight:
I do not believe that most Christians want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country. This is a failure of the evangelical church. Constructing an effective response requires a theology that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush's governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more graceful, just, and merciful vision.
Just doing my part for the cause.
Song of the Moment
Monday, April 28, 2003 | 0 Comments
Given my general musical tastes, one of the oddest birds in my CD collection is Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury by The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. Ten years later it still gets a good bit of play in my house, mainly because of Michael Franti's voice and his witty, literate, progressive lyrics. "Television" and the title track are both classics. And "Satanic Reverses" (can't find the lyrics online) is more appropriate now than in '92. (How many hip-hop artists can say that?) In '94, Franti formed Spearhead, one hell of a roots-based band, and has remained politically engaged. "Bomb the World" is his response to recent events. The link will take you to his download site, where you can get two versions.
Eight Dollar Magazines
Saturday, April 26, 2003 | 0 Comments
I never buy eight dollar magazines. Ever. On principle. Even the really tempting ones like Paste that come with those nifty CD samplers. Which is why it's so odd that, tonight, I bought an eight dollar magazine. But I didn't really have any choice in the matter, because, well, The Believer might just be the coolest damn magazine I've ever seen.
A small sampling of the contents of The Believer Vol.1, No.1, March 2003, 127 pages:
- "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard! A Call for a New Era of Experimentations and a Book Culture That Will Support It" by Heidi Julavits
- "The Most Pre-Protested Would-Be War in History" by Marc Herman
- "Badlands and the 'Innocence' of American Innocence" by Jim Shepard
- "Magical Realism: A Short, Loose History"
- "A Conversation between Salman Rushdie and Terry Gilliam"
- "An Interview with Beth Orton"
- "An Interview with Kumar Pallana"
So what are you waiting for? Go subscribe already! A magazine this interesting won't be around for long — at least not without our support. (Oh yeah, and go subscribe to Beyond while you're at it.)
Miscellaneous Debris
Wednesday, April 23, 2003 | 0 Comments
And the Good News is. . . Newt is back, and he's still a jackass. Folks in Washington are surprised to discover that the Shia majority would prefer a Muslim Theocracy to Western Democracy. Bush and Blair are liars. And Americans are already growing impatient with the messy and expensive clean-up. So what's the good news? Bruce McCulloch, my favorite member of the Kids in the Hall, has joined the cast of The Gilmore Girls, my favorite TV show. Somehow that makes it all just a little less awful.
Oh My. To think that I moved to Tennessee in search of an education. Tennessee — home of one of the nation's most regressive tax structures. And it's beginning to catch up with us. My department was forced to trim about $250,000 (six positions) this year, and a friend of mine is in the process of laying off seventy percent of her staff. Seventy percent! And now this. Today, the Knox County School Board met to trim $10 million from its operating budget. It's a good thing no child will be left behind. (How much do them smart bombs cost?)
One More Thing. I've added a new link to my daily reads. Catoptric is an interesting blog that began as a teaching diary and now features personal commentary on politics, education, and the arts — all subjects near and dear to me.
Deep South
Monday, April 21, 2003 | 0 Comments
I spent the long Easter weekend in Monroeville, "The Literary Capital of Alabama." It earned its moniker by virtue of being the home of Nell Harper Lee and the setting of her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. (Gregory Peck came to town for the local film premiere. I've seen pictures.) A young Truman Capote was also known to roam its streets on occasion, as was my wife, who grew up there and whose family still calls Monroeville home. Miss Nell was invited to our wedding, actually. She didn't come, but, as I recall, her sister sent a nice note.
After spending the last decade or so transplanted in various locales throughout the South, I feel pretty comfortable calling Monroeville a typical deep South town. It's filled with nice folks and big churches. It's got a Wal-Mart and a Rite-Aid, a McDonald's, a Hardees, and a Burger King. Two courthouses fill the town square (the old one is now a museum), and the air smells of azaleas and paper mills. It also has that Old South segregation — unofficial, of course. Most of the whites who can afford to, send their kids to the private Academy — the new "white flight," you could say. According to the 2000 Census, about 25% of Monroe County's residents live below the poverty level and only 55% of those over the age of 16 are employed (that last one's a complicated statistic, I know). Just over 40% of the population is African-American. I can only guess how closely all those figures are linked. But I seldom see that side of Monroeville.
We were married at the Baptist Church — not because anyone in the family attends there (they're mostly Presbyterians and Methodists), but because it was the only one large enough to hold all of the guests. I kept my nose out of the arrangements, so I don't have an exact figure, but I clearly remember standing up there, looking out over the deep rows of pews and the hundreds of strange faces as my bride walked towards me. Quite a sight. Then I remember being whisked away to the reception, which was held beneath an impressive encampment of rented tents in the back yard of a restored Victorian home. If you've seen Sweet Home Alabama and remember the wedding that wasn't to be, then you can probably picture it. My midwestern family and Yankee friends from back home had never seen anything like it. Several of them still call it the "Big Party in Alabama."
"The Party" was, of course, paid for by my father-in-law, the honorable small town doctor who reduced my wife to tears at our rehearsal dinner by stepping up to the microphone and delivering flawlessly Steve Martin's monologue from Father of the Bride:
I used to think a wedding was a simple affair. A boy and girl meet, they fall in love, he buys a ring, she buys a dress, they say "I do." I was wrong. That's getting married. A wedding is an entirely different proposition. I know. I've just been through one. Not my own. My daughter's. Annie Banks-MacKenzie. That's her married name. MacKenzie. I'll be honest with you. When I bought this house seventeen years ago, it cost me less than this blessed event in which Annie Banks became Annie Banks-MacKenzie. I'm told that one day I'll look back on all this with great affection and nostalgia. I hope so.
You fathers will understand. You have a little girl. An adorable little girl who looks up to you and adores you in a way you could never imagine. I remember how her little hand used to fit inside mine. How she used to sit in my lap and lean her head against my chest. She said that I was her hero. Then the day comes when she wants to get her ears pierced and she wants you to drop her off a block before the movie theater. Next thing you know she's wearing eye shadow and high heels. From that moment on, you're in a constant state of panic. You worry about her going out with the wrong kind of guys, the kind of guys who only want one thing--and you know exactly what that one thing is because it's the same thing you wanted when you were their age.
Then she gets a little older and you quit worrying about her meeting the wrong guy and you worry about her meeting the right guy. And that's the biggest fear of all because then you lose her. And before you know it, you're sitting all alone in a big, empty house, wearing rice on your tux, wondering what happened to your life.
See, that's one of the perks of marrying into the South. In all of the weddings I've attended up north, I've never seen anything that cool. That gentle, soft-spoken man put himself on display, but managed still to turn the spotlight on his daughter on her day. That's the part of Monroeville that I see. The part where cousins drive you out onto the property they manage for a day of catfishing. The part where friends take you for a morning horseback ride and let you spend the day in their camphouse. It's Utopian. Kind of.
One of my best friends is writing his dissertation on the intersections of race and class in Southern literature. I'm hoping that, by the time he finishes, he'll have some advice for me, something that will cure me of the paralyzing ambivalence I feel whenever I visit Monroeville. I tend to slip quietly into a reserved resignation when there. I smile politely at the jokes and find excuses to leave the room when talk turns to politics. It seldom seems worth the effort to me then. Pass the pie, please.
A Good Read
Tuesday, April 15, 2003 | 0 Comments
The only way to be in the world was to write himself there. His thoughts and words were dying. Let him write ten words and he would come into being again.
— from Don DeLillo's Mao II (p. 204)
I've been reading quite a bit lately. I tend to go in fits and starts, alternating between binges on books and on films, my twin addictions. Given a choice between the two, I'd take the books. No doubt about it. Reading is a richer, more intimate experience, demanding more from the audience and offering greater rewards in return. On the plane Saturday, flying back from Fort Lauderdale, the woman sitting beside me noticed my book and recognized in me something of a kindred spirit. She asked me about the author, jotted down his name, then offered a quick review of her latest read. Wallace Stegner. Can't remember the title. "I like people with an intellectual curiosity," she told me. "I wish more people had it."
When I was studying for my comprehensive exams, I often felt like I was training for a marathon. It required the same discipline and exhausting effort. 100-150 pages a day. Everyday. Type up the notes. Check it off the list. Memorize and move on. I'm grateful for that experience now, but I thought it might kill me at the time. I had to take one of them twice, actually — a major disappointment and a story in itself. But I finally got through it all, and it was worth it. On good days, I even feel qualified to hold an opinion.
On Saturday, on that plane, I was reading Illuminations, a collection of "Essays and Reflections" by Walter Benjamin, the influential, early-20th century German literary critic. In the first essay, "Unpacking My Library," Benjamin exposes himself as another of my kin. Describing the ideal "Bookworm" and his meticulously acquired, obsessively organized library, he writes:
For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector — and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be — ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.
Back to the books.
Bad News
Monday, April 14, 2003 | 0 Comments
After a nightmarish week during which I slept in four different beds in four different cities (how do business travelers do it?), I returned this morning to the latest news. And suddenly I feel like a real ass for describing the minor annoyances of my life as "nightmarish."
Of course, we shouldn't be at all surprised that Washington has turned its attention to Syria. The administration's longterm strategy has been obvious for some time now — and by "some time" I mean at least since 1992. (I hold to my long-standing prediction that Iran will become a "grave threat" to American security in the months leading up to the 2004 Presidential primaries. And that all of the electable Democratic candidates will trip over themselves showing off their Hawkish pedigrees. If he can stay in the race long enough to reach the Tennessee primary, Dennis Kucinich will probably have my vote.) That our Syria policy has already spawned new double-speak, though, makes me want to hit the road again, this time on one leading due north. I hear Calgary's beautiful in May.
Preemptive deterrence? Please, someone explain this one to me. Aside from the obvious redundancy — would it possible, instead, to deter someone from having acted? — I'm most exhausted by the thought that, over the next few weeks, I will be hearing Fleischer and Rumsfeld spew this garbage with their trademark soulless authority. And a small majority of Americans will buy it. Totally. And a small majority is all they need. And they know it. Excuse me while I scream into my pillow.
Children of Heaven
Sunday, April 13, 2003 | 0 Comments
As an antidote to the American media, lately I've been spending my precious down time with films from the Middle East. Quick tangent: Long Pauses attracts an odd assortment of readers — undergraduates looking for "Benito Cereno" papers to steal, disenfranchised Christians seeking fellow travelers, and film buffs, mostly. For those of you not in the latter group, let me just say that, for the last decade or so, Iran has produced many of the world's most remarkable films and filmmakers. Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi, and Majid Majidi, to name just a few, are among a select group of active directors who consistently meld craftsmanship, beauty, honesty, and a vital social-political voice. For more info, check out my friend Acquarello's invaluable site, Strictly Film School.
Majidi's Children of Heaven (1997) is a sweet little film that I can't help but compare to two of my all-time favorites: Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955). Like De Sica's classic of Italian Neo-Realism, Children of Heaven concerns a hard-working father who wants only to provide for his wife and children, but who is trapped in a world that seems determined to frustrate him. Like Ray, Majidi tells his story from the low-angle perspective of the children, a boy, Ali, and his younger sister, Zahra. The plot turns on Ali's having lost Zahra's only pair of shoes and on their efforts to recover them, which are often pathetic but never overly sentimental. Majidi must surely have been thinking of Ray's original Apu (Subir Bannerjee) when he cast Amir Farrokh Hashemian as Ali, for the two share that wide-eyed yearning on which the success of both films depends. (As a strange aside, both boys also remind me a great deal of my oldest nephew.)
Like his predecessors, Majidi shoots on location and employs non-professional actors, which lends the film an urgency often lacking in Western productions. But it's also quite beautifully filmed, contrasting stunning images of Tehran's superhighways, mansions, and high rises with its alleys, markets, and elementary schools. Children of Heaven would be a great rental for any of you who might otherwise be reluctant to enter the "Foreign Films" aisle. Most reviews in the popular press have described it as "heartwarming," which it certainly is, and it also delivers a deliriously tense finale. While the film lacks the explicit political critique of something like Panahi's The Circle (banned by Iranian officials) or Kiarostami's Close-Up, it offers a wonderfully told story, and it also performs a service that is terribly important right now: Our hearts should be warmed to the people of the Middle East, the people who are (or who soon will be) hiding out under the devastation of our bombing campaigns.
(P.S. I realize that that last sentence smacks of stereotypical bleeding-heart liberalism. But, well, sometimes that's a good thing.)
Song of the Moment
Friday, April 11, 2003 | 0 Comments
I usually use the "Song of the Moment" to promote music that readers might not hear otherwise. So why U2? I'm just stuck on "Until the End of the World" right now, and I'm not sure why. It has nothing to do with politics (although I've certainly admired many of Bono's recent statements). And I never even got around to buying Achtung Baby. I think it's because I've had Angels in America on the brain lately, and the production we saw blared late-80s, early-90s U2 during the scene changes. Yep. That's gotta be it. Enjoy.
News from the Front
Thursday, April 10, 2003 | 0 Comments
Tonight, I listened to Shane Claiborne tell stories about Baghdad. He's taller than I expected (6' 3", maybe) and skinnier and younger. I mean, I knew he was young, but after reading his diaries for the last few weeks I somehow expected him to carry the weight of his experience in his skin. He's just a kid, though — a couple years younger than I am, in fact. Looks like that skater kid who annoys you at the mall. The one with the flared pants and chunky glasses who you avoid making eye contact with. Shane had the pants and the glasses, along with a light brace around his chest that restrained his left shoulder. The one he dislocated while riding at high speed through a militarized zone on the road from Baghdad to Amman. The one he dislocated while bombs fell in every direction. The one he dislocated while his friends' skulls cracked open beside him.
Shane is a local boy — a graduate of Maryville High School who went off to college in Philadelphia a few years ago and decided to stay. He and several friends committed to spending five years together in community, living Christ's example in an inner-city neighborhood. After his talk tonight I told him that I was glad he was home safe, that I had prayed for him. Then I thanked him for being one of those voices that has brought me comfort in recent months, when I have felt so alienated from so much of American religion. With typical grace, he smiled and said, "That's the struggle, isn't it? At some point you have to stop complaining about the Church and start being the Church." The Simple Way, they call it.
Shane left for Baghdad a few weeks ago as part of a Christian Peacemaker Team, in cooperation with Voices in the Wilderness. He went, he told us, with two goals in mind: first, to comfort the people of Iraq, showing them the other face of America, and second, to document that experience so that it could be shared with everyone willing to listen. I was deeply discouraged to hear him confirm my worst suspicions. Whenever they fought to bring specific humanitarian crises to the attention of reporters, the international media would soon be on the scene, asking questions, conducting interviews. Shane's one experience with the American media — a live interview on one of the morning news programs — was cut off soon after he began answering the first question: "How does it feel to be considered a traitor in your own country?" A quick sidenote: one of the crises that they experienced was the bombing of the Baghdad market. Shane visited the scene the next day, and tonight I held a small part of a civilian vehicle that was incinerated in the attack, immediately killing all of its passengers.
He had plenty of stories to share, many of which are posted in his diaries. There's the one about the thirteen year old girl whose birthday party he attended. She wished for "Peace" as bombs blasted the horizon, an image that I would dismiss as cheap sentimentality in a film, but not in life. There's the one about the bombs that explode before impact, spraying uniformly sized cubes of shrapnel into homes and families — the cluster bombs that we promised we wouldn't use this time. (Shane has photos of those cubes, scraped from the bloodied walls of apartments near his camp.) There's the one about the well-spoken (in English, that is) Iraqi doctor who stitched Shane and his friends back together after their accident, refusing payment. He asked only that they tell the world that the Americans had bombed their smalltown hospital three days earlier.
My favorite story was of an Iraqi Christian who Shane met during a worship service. I didn't realize that there were so many Christians in Iraq — upwards of one million, he told us. After a service, this man and Shane were discussing the war, and the man asked, "Do Americans support this war?" "Some do, but there is growing opposition." "And the church?" Shane said that his heart sunk when he heard that second question. "Well, most do not, but some parts of the Church do support the war." "Not Christians," the man said, startled. "Yes, Christians."
"But, 'Blessed are the peacemakers.'"
What I love about this story and about this man is that his mind could not reconcile such a gross contradiction. It was impossible for him to imagine a Christian Church that imagines disaster and that accepts Bush's heresy of redemptive violence as so many segments of ours have. He is such a wonderful reminder of the catholicity of Christ's church and of how powerful it is despite our best efforts to castrate it.
New and Improved
Saturday, April 05, 2003 | 0 Comments
With more than one hundred html documents, nearly three hundred images, and thousands upon thousands of words, Long Pauses was getting a bit unwieldy. If I've done this correctly, the redesign will help in a number of ways.
- CSS — God bless Cascading Style Sheets. My main goal in this whole endeavor was to make better use of CSS, giving me site-wide control of formatting. More than a hundred pages and not a single <font> tag to be found. It's a thing of beauty. I originally planned to design everything with CSS, even abandoning nested tables, but there were just too many browser issues. One of my earlier designs absolutely exploded in Netscape 4. This one is a good compromise, I think. Not bad for an English major, eh?
- Variety — That gray background was getting old. This design, as you'll see in the coming weeks, allows me to change the entire look of the site in about two minutes. Should be fun. So, if you don't care for the current Long Pauses banner (bonus points if you can name that film), be patient. It will change often.
- Content — I also wanted to continue paring down the design, focusing more of my efforts on the content rather than flashy images. I'm hoping that you'll find the new format more readable, and it should print more accurately, too.
- Spring Cleaning — Revisiting every page gave me a much-needed opportunity to fix broken links, check spelling, and clean up fat code. At times I was also tempted to revise history — to edit some of the writing that no longer seems quite as insightful or clever as I once imagined it to be — but I fought the urge. The only links I didn't check are those from my blog to external sites. I've always assumed that most of them would break. It's just the nature of this beast.
- Blogosphere — Since I launched Long Pauses, the Internet, along with many other media and traditional journalism, have been reshaped by blogging. This new design reflects that change to some extent. My blog now looks and functions more like others, including the addition of permalinks (Karen!). I decided against making it interactive, though, for several reasons that aren't really worth sharing.
- Experimentation — Long Pauses will always be a blank canvas, of sorts. If I were able to draw or paint or sculpt or create in other ways, I probably wouldn't spend nearly so much time sitting behind a computer. But I can't, so I do. Hopefully it's worth the effort.
So, what do you think? I'm guessing that an assortment of bugs and CSS quirks will reveal themselves over the next few days. Let me know if you stumble upon any. Unfortunately, blog updates will continue to be few and far between for the next week to ten days. Things are a bit hectic around here.
Thank you for reading, and thank you especially to everyone who has sent kind notes over the last few days, asking for updates. I genuinely appreciate it.
Darren Hughes is a web designer and freelance writer in Knoxville, Tennessee.