“Talking About Terror - Huffingtonpost.com” plus 1 more |
| Talking About Terror - Huffingtonpost.com Posted: 27 Aug 2010 12:06 PM PDT I have just received a letter from a man in prison. His name is Hemant Lakhani. Lakhani was a women's clothing salesman who, in 2005, was convicted of selling an Igla missile to an FBI informant posing as a member of a jihadist organization. Lakhani is one of the people I write about in my new book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb. He learned about the book's publication by reading a review in the New York Times. Mr. Lakhani writes to congratulate me but also to invite me back. There is more to tell, he writes. If I listen to his story, and write about it, he promises me that the book will be a bestseller. I will be interviewed by the mainstream press, including Charlie Ross (sic). The Times review had also mentioned that I had visited a strip-club outside the Missouri high-security prison where Lakhani is incarcerated. I had a conversation there with a dancer about the man I had come to meet in Missouri. This didn't sit well with Mr Lakhani and he writes in his letter that I must promise him that I will not go back to the strip-club again. Actually, in my opinion, Mr Lakhani is neither very moral nor very smart. But like his lawyer I'm very convinced that his client would not have made a good arms smuggler. No real terrorist would have come to him. There is little chance that he would have acquired a missile unless the FBI had arranged for one to be given to him. Mr Lakhani is 75 years old and in poor health. It is very likely that he will die in prison. His letter to me is a sad document, and I apprehend its appeal, but I'm unwilling to engage it any further. It is true that I'm critical of the US government's war on terror, and its futile and expensive engagement with minor characters like Mr. Lakhani. But that doesn't mean that I'm also willing to pack up my bags any time soon and leave for Missouri. But mine is hardly the only way to write about the war on terror. Lorraine Adams is an American writer who was awarded a Pulitzer for work in journalism. But she quit her job as an investigative reporter for the Washington Post to write a prize-winning debut novel, Harbor. The novel tells the story of Aziz Arkoun, a 24-year-old Algerian stowaway who surfaces in the waters of Boston harbor. Aziz was based on a real-life character, an Algerian man named Aziz Ouali, a 26-year-old East Boston dishwasher. He too had been a stowaway. After spending 52 days in the hold, he had swum ashore. This was in the late nineties. An Algerian man named Ahmed Ressam tried to cross into the US, near Seattle, with the trunk of his rental car packed with explosives. Soon, the government carried out a massive sweep, detaining Algerians across the board. Ressam was carrying a cellphone number that led the police to another Algerian man who was a room-mate of Aziz Ouali's. They were all arrested. In Adams's treatment of her character, there is a great deal of sympathy. Aziz Arkoun has a rich past; like Ouali, he is a refugee from political violence. But, in what is certainly more a feature of fiction, Adams endows her protagonist with a fine and sensitive interior life. He is sentient in a way that earns the reader's respect. A few months ago, Adams wrote about the fate of Aziz Ouali. He was in prison, awaiting deportation. Ouali is a flawed character, of course, and Adams's attention to this ambiguity is a part of the persuasiveness of her plea. In fact, the many pitfalls in his life, some of his own doing, make for heartbreaking reading. In doing what she is doing, Adams has produced fiction that stands in opposition to the Manichean fictions of the post-9/11 state. In Mao II, Don DeLillo had famously written: "I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory." But people like to repeat this quote without in any way elaborating on the fact that the surveillance state has been most successful at governing our social spaces and our individual imaginations. An Aziz Ouali knows he is alive, or he is well, or if his family is whole, if he can see the outline of his face on a tiny piece of plastic called a green card. The argument I am making here could be made clearer with another example. Do you remember the news-report about a videotape that showed Jose Padilla, jailed in solitary confinement for three and a half years, being taken out to a dentist? Padilla, jailed on suspicion of plotting a dirty-bomb attack, had been in his cell in the army brig in Charleston, South Carolina. In the report, his lawyers said that the video-tape showed that the torture, including solitary confinement, which their client has undergone at the hands of the military, has left him so psychologically damaged that he could not stand trial. In fact, Padilla's lawyers had a difficult time persuading him that they were on his side. In an article in Artforum, critic Graham Bader had this to say about Padilla: "In the videotape documenting one short episode of his military detention, he is shown on his way to a root canal down the hall from his cell, wearing blackout goggles and noise-blocking headphones, thereby prevented from experiencing even briefly anything outside himself, outside his merest existence as bare life, wholly at the whim of the state." The video is testimony to "the state's role in authoring the most basic experiences of life and death." The state is the real author, not Adams, not I. The state produces our stories and handcuffs them to our selves. We can reach out for other stories, but it is difficult. Adams has written that Ouali didn't have enough English to read Harbor. Her wife, an American woman from Boston, never told him about it. She said it was too painful.
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| 'Louis': A 'silent' film that illuminates the great Satchmo - Chicago Tribune Posted: 26 Aug 2010 08:47 AM PDT Silent films periodically have been revived with full orchestral accompaniment, Charlie Chaplin's "City Lights" and Abel Gance's "Napoleon" among noteworthy examples. But the world premiere that unfolded Wednesday night in Symphony Center represented a different kind of gamble. For director Dan Pritzker's "Louis" – inspired by the childhood of jazz icon Louis Armstrong – was not created in the era of silent movies. On the contrary, Pritzker has fashioned a modern-day silent film, complete with predominantly black-and-white imagery, brief titles of dialogue and live musical accompaniment. That the score was performed by trumpeter-composer Wynton Marsalis, a large group of jazz musicians and the classical pianist Cecile Licad only raised the stakes on this enterprise. One question, above all, hovered over this event: Is it possible – or even worthwhile – to produce an effective silent movie in the 21st Century? The answer, judging by this remarkably polished first performance, was a resounding "yes." For Pritzker, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, composer Marsalis and associates have created an inspiring – if fanciful – contemplation on Satchmo's early life. To their credit, the filmmakers quickly persuade the audience to forget that we live in the IMAX world of "Avatar" and "Inception." Suddenly, we're absorbed in the lives of characters who move their lips but do not speak, their facial gestures and body language therefore becoming all the more potent. And the musical score, which typically serves as backdrop in modern-day films, itself becomes a character in the drama of "Louis," swelling up in love scenes, driving hard in chase sequences. In "Louis," the pleasures of concert-going pair up with the satisfactions of watching a story line develop on screen, and both benefit. The film takes us to the Storyville vice district of New Orleans, in 1907, where sex, drugs and nascent jazz coursed freely. If Zsigmond's glowing cinematography and Pritzker's high-gloss set represent a somewhat idealized view of this down-and-dirty setting, the results certainly seduce the eye. Storyville may not have been quite so sumptuously lit, nor did its denizens ooze such glamour, but we're more than happy to step inside this fantasy. The invented plot line also stretches credulity, but the movie so successfully lures us into its world that we don't care (at least while the film is rolling). In real life, a high-toned prostitute such as Grace Lamennais (delicately played by Shanti Lowry) would not be spending quality time with a dirty, impoverished young ruffian such as Louis Armstrong. Nor would the corrupt Judge Leander Perry (hilariously portrayed by Jackie Earle Haley) coincidentally look just like Charlie Chaplin, whose work prompted Pritzker to create "Louis" in the first place. None of these contrivances disturb the progress of this film, however, for Pritzker, Zsigmond and the rest have managed to capture the look and feel of old silent movies without lampooning the genre. The herky-jerky movements, melodramatic twists of plot and somewhat overwrought facial expressions feel true to the silent era – the same period, in fact, when Armstrong emerged, at the dawn of the 20th Century. Yet in certain passages, "Louis" achieves feats that would have been technically impossible in the silent era. In a five-minute tour de force of cinematography and choreography, Zsigmond's camera weaves through a brothel, showing the balletic seductions as they start, then taking us upstairs to where the action will take place. The prostitutes move like dancers; the clients succumb to their powers; the audience marvels at the convergence of sex, rhythm and jazz. Other stunning passages include a Chaplinesque scene pitting man against machine, and dream sequences in which Armstrong's musical flights take him literally to the heavens. The score embraces old and new works by Marsalis, as well as period pieces by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Frederic Chopin and Jelly Roll Morton, among others. Marsalis, members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and pianist Licad played this work so idiomatically that it would have been enthralling to hear even without the film. Jazz scholars undoubtedly will balk at the fictions in "Louis." But the film conjures the irrepressible spirit of its subject while, incidentally, proving that the silent-movie era may not be finished yet. "Louis" next moves to other cities, with a possible theatrical release to follow. hreich@tribune.com This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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