Monday, May 20, 2013

Star Trek Into (Spoiler-Free) Darkness

Four years ago I wrote, “In the Star Trek universe, yesterday's movie is only as good as tomorrow's.” Well, I saw “tomorrow's” movie — yesterday — and thought it was roughly as engaging as Abrams' first franchise movie had been. Which is to say, the sense of diminishing returns is setting in, big time.

I did have fun, yesterday, watching the kids explore and play with the grown-up roles they've been handed. And it was mostly fun tallying up the “alternative” tweaks the new time-line introduces. But here the strain of the premise is beginning to creak — at times quite painfully.

"Captain: he did say 'creak,' did he not?"

J.J. Abrams' is resolutely non-Trekkie — which needn't be a problem. Nicholas Meyer wasn't a Trekkie, either, and he single-handedly resurrected the franchise with his narrative instincts. But where Meyer demonstrated a novelist's capacity for depth of character and irony patiently cultivated for the distant pay-off, Abrams and his (assuredly) Trekkie writers are resolute storyboard dazzlers, opting for flash and distraction and perpetual one-upmanship. “You liked ____ in The Original Series, right? Well, we do it too — only this way!” I burst out laughing at one such tweak — unfortunately at a time when Abrams & Co. were hoping I'd be dabbing at my eyes.

“This new franchise is starting to feel like the young trophy partner we left our soul mate for,” says Locke Peterseim, in a terrific (spoiler-free!) deconstruction: “sleek and alluring and lots of fun, but eventually blithely inane.”

I wanted to send our mutual trophy partner a little post-coital reading — David Gerrold's TOS corrective.* But two realizations stalled this impulse: a) Trek has always worked best as television, where it can be oh-so-patiently developed into a vehicle with legs. And b) this Trek isn't really for Locke or me, or our generation — not primarily, at any rate. That we can willingly take our kids to see these movies and not complain too bitterly on the ride home is pure gravy for Paramount. In another four or five years the kids will be taking their dates to see the next instalment, while we old-timers stay home and content ourselves with DVD memories of the soul mate that slipped away.

And Paramount is super-fine with that, too.

"You say 'trophy partner' like it's a bad thing!"

*Gerrold calls out, among other howlers, the egregious absurdity of a Starfleet flagship staffed by over 400 professionals playing host to three or four hot-shots who do all the work and have all the fun.

# posted by Darrell Reimer : 3:17 PM  2 comments

Friday, May 17, 2013

Robert Crumb, Chris Sanders & The Fine Art Of Genuine Desirability In A Disney Pin-Up

All links SFW, with one noted exception.

Some furor has been raised over Disney's manipulation of Pixar character Merida. The headstrong tomboy in Brave has been given a makeover, rendering her more Disney-feminine. The aesthetic formula at play seems to work something like this: Fancy Strapless Shoulder-Baring Gown + Shiny Buckle – One or Two Ribs – Signature Weaponry = Pretty Princess.



My first reaction was surprise at how deftly both Disney and Brenda Chapman, Brave's creator, capitalized on the moment. Brave was a fair-to-middling Pixar product that garnered fair-to-middling box office results (in league with How To Train Your Dragon and Dr. Seuss' The Lorax but nowhere close to Toy Story 3). As the parent of daughters I applauded the attempt at a female lead impelled by passions unrelated to Finding True Love, even if I (and my daughters) finally found the emotional content underwhelming.

But with regards to the controversy of Disney's Body Image Problem, I have to admit — it is a problem. That Disney attends to the aesthetics of sexual attraction* doesn't bother me: if their characters didn't have some sexual appeal, Disney's standard storyline would be entirely without interest. Still, as a hetero dad who's endured a parade of Disney cheesecake, I find it remarkable how aesthetically forgettable most Disney heroines are — forgettable because they're interchangeable. The Little Mermaid, Jasmine, Belle, Tiana — what's the difference, and who cares? If a straight fella (who enjoys a little lewd cartoonery (SFW, unless you scroll through the slideshow)) ain't piqued by the Disney figurine, I have to conclude the artists are banking on the age-old absurdity of fashioning heroines who are aesthetically attractive to girls.

That Disney apes Vogue in this regard is hardly a surprise: Disney has commodities galore it intends to sell, to as many children and parents as possible. Whether Disney has a larger interest in expanding its aesthetic is finally for the market to determine. The Merida Makeover is their canary in the coalmine.

Anyway, as I mused over the past decade-plus, I realized there is exactly one (1) Disney heroine whose desirability factor stands head-and-shoulders — or hips-thighs-calves-and-feet — above this parade: Lilo & Stitch's Nani Pelekai.

Nani, on right.


Here she stands in contrast to a “Pamela Lee Anderson” figure — another body-type we don't see much of in Disney movies:



I won't say I find the latter body-type unattractive, what with its sweeping hips, the supple shoulders supporting an ample, but not grotesque, decolletage, and of course those arms and the cut of the . . . uh . . .  where was I? Right: let's not replace one culturally predominant unrealistic body “ideal” with another. Perhaps it is best to note Nani's posture and facial expression, which indicate Our Hero is in a supplicant relationship to the curvier (white) woman. (The scene ends badly.)

Still, Nani, as drawn by Chris Sanders, is a figure of considerable power, thanks chiefly to her muscular, almost chunky, base — more than a little reminiscent of Robert Crumb's favoured proportions, on display here . . .



. . . and more explicitly here (NSFW, I suppose — there's none of Crumb's unhinged sexual hi-jinx, but, y'know, she is nude).

I Googled for more Chris Sanders, curious to see where Nani fit in with his overall aesthetic. When it comes to his pin-up art, Sanders does indeed have a fetish for sturdier bases . . .

"Where's Spring Breakers playing, again?"

. . . but after that the distinctives become subtle to the point of disappearing. Bruce Timm, Dean Yeagle and even Darwyn Cooke lean heavily on many of the same tropes: essentially wasp-waisted, pert-nosed, late adolescent girls in varying states of compromised (or soon-to-be-compromised) innocence. I understand the thematic predominance, but if you draw up a giant screen of these guys' pin-ups, the final effect is a blurred uniformity — 21st Century America's india ink version of the Venus of Willendorf.

It may be that Nani's singular appeal relies on her sharp aesthetic contrast to the Disney template. But as bold a departure as her curvature is, the power of her story also contributes — greatly — to her appeal. She is perhaps Disney's most fully-realized female character.

A single young woman who becomes the sole guardian of her little sister after their parents are killed in an accident, Nani finds she cannot manage the physical, never mind the complex emotional needs of the grief-struck child. She gets considerable support from David, with whom she seems to have had something going on, prior to the tragedy. You can see he's crazy about her, and that she cares deeply for him. But theirs is a relationship that has, understandably, been put on hold while Nani seeks to secure physical and emotional shelter for her sister.

Say, he's pretty hot too, isn't he?



Lilo and her “pet” Stitch form the nexus for the movie's action, but the deeper revelations all belong to, and are embodied by, Nani. One of the “lessons” a viewer innately gathers through Nani is how the terrible events that accrue in any life can either drive people into a larger concept of family — or into crippling isolation. This makes Lilo & Stitch Disney's most visceral movie since Dumbo, and it has certainly earned an emotional connection with me. I can't even write about it without choking up.

Weirdly enough, here, too, I'm reminded of Crumb. It ain't just the cross-hatching and stippling that sets his pin-ups and other work apart from the Timms and Yeagles and Sanderses of this world. For those who can stomach it, it's Crumb's candour and never-ending internal conflict being brought into play against hapless Others that make his work work. Self-knowledge is a dangerous thing — and absolutely necessary to the erotic imperative.

So, to Disney or anyone else out there in the business of crafting pin-ups: more of that, please, and I for one will buy it.

*Sexual desire is a motivation Pixar mines, if at all, as a very distant secondary concern — with one exception, which adroitly dodges the issue of body-image aesthetics altogether.

# posted by Darrell Reimer : 4:01 PM  2 comments

Thursday, May 09, 2013

Gatsby vs. The Haters!

We still have a few hours before the unwashed masses gain admittance to Baz Luhrman's adaptation of The Great Gatsby, but already the haters are hatin'. Not the movie, mind you* — the book.

“I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent,” sez — nay, thunders! — Kathryn Schulz. “I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains.” You hear that? Lessons! So rev yerself up for some good book-larnin', kiddo, and click on that link.

“The Great Gatsby has often been called 'a novel of yearning,' which for me has always meant a yearning for it to be a better book,” sez — nay, snarks! — The Globe & Mail's new Books editor, Jared Bland. “So why do we keep caring? . . . because for the most part we have it all wrong.” So get it right for once, you numbskull, and click on that link!

Some years back this guy did a “Reader's Manifesto,” which I thoroughly enjoyed (as I did these two pieces). He went one further than Schulz and excised large swaths of writer's prose, which he then excoriated. I giggled along with the man, for the most part, but every once in a while I thought, “Uh — sorry, dude, but this time the author's got me onside.”

Similarly with the passage Bland stabs at:

He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky and frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifting fortuitously about . . . etc.

Sitting on its own like that, the passage does indeed emanate a purple aura (this guy's sentences suffer similarly). But “poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air”? I can dig it.

You get to a certain age and you realize it doesn't matter what your youthful aspirations might have been: your dead ancestors are more present than ever, consuming your dreams and angling for the final word on your life. So by my reading, this metaphor works just fine — for me, and most certainly for Gatsby's larger themes of striving and deficiency (not that you'll ever hear me declare my reading to be The Right Reading. I kinda thought we were beyond all that).

Still, it's a bracing pleasure to catch a little acidity from The Gloat & Wail's Books editor. The previous editor, Martin Levin, was eminently fair-minded and even-tempered — traits that served him and his pages very well during the era of Carol Shields (surely the most fair-minded and even-tempered literary talent this country has laid claim to), but not-so-well in the age of digital decimation. A scrappier temperament might yet inject a little life into those pages — and links. So keep throwing down, Mr. Bland — our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

"Here's mud in yer eye!"

*Although from the outset Luhrman has been dressed down by the usual scolds, a force of habit for some that shows no signs of stopping.

# posted by Whisky Prajer : 5:22 PM  2 comments

Friday, May 03, 2013

When Is An OS Not An OS?

You know I'm a Linux user. My PC has been a dual-boot for the past seven years — i.e, I use Windows, too, but only to sync up the family iPods. About a week ago I installed the new desktop version of Ubuntu.

And then the problems started.

I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say they weren't the usual stutter-starts that occur when an OS has been released prematurely. No, this stuff was “Everything is hanging in the balance” serious. I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, keeping my super-talented brother on speed-dial.

At first I assumed the problem was with me — I'm as fluent in coding as I am in German or French. Put me in a roomful of natives (or open a terminal) and I'll eventually get my point across, but it won't be pretty.

As the trials (and days) wore on, I began to wonder if something wasn't seriously messed up with this release. That's happened before, and with Ubuntu's stubborn insistence on a tablet desktop (which is crap on tablets and worse on PCs) it could be that their development eye is so far off the ball they've forgotten how to cover the basics.

But when, after various re-installation attempts for Ubuntu and Windows 7, I was greeted with this screen . . .



. . . my brother began to wonder if the problem didn't originate with “our friends in Redmond.”

Maybe, maybe not. All I know is:

a) right now Windows 7 is the only OS that installs successfully on my PC.

b) Windows 8 is Microsoft's “closed” OS — i.e., Microsoft is now emulating Apple's method (to dubious effect, of which I'll say more later).

c) Windows 8 monkeys with the host BIOS. In other words, if you install Windows 8 on a machine — or get a machine with Windows 8 already on it — Windows basically breaks into the BIOS and changes the locks behind it, so that Windows 8 is the only OS that will run on that machine.

Microsoft isn't the only outfit that can monkey with a BIOS, of course. As my friend, who did time as a BIOS engineer, is fond of saying, “Firmware ain't that firm.” But I'm not a hacker. I doubt I even qualify as a geek. Opening up the BIOS and putting it back together so it does what I tell it to — I'd have an easier time performing that function on my cat.

Besides, “User Error” is still the likeliest cause of my troubles. For now I'm stuck using a functional-if-disagreeable OS, and contemplating Microsoft's larger market strategy. The whole experience has got me wondering.

Why would Microsoft lock up the BIOS? More to the point, why would hardware manufacturers consent to this? Anyone who buys a new PC hoping to install something else on it now faces a hacker's challenge, which the manufacturer's End User Licensing Agreement strongly discourages. I studied Hewlett-Packard's EULA this week, and they aren't threatening patent infringement lawsuits — yet. But as my screen message amply displays, the component manufacturer is keen to let the user know this is certainly a possible scenario.

This antagonism toward the consumer is baffling to me. It's hardly putting the best foot forward with potential customers. For Apple to sell their closed and externally controlled environment they had to have a product that made the consumer swoon. Windows 8 ain't doing that. Sales for their OS aren't just hurting, they're having a negative effect on the hardware that hosts it. Meanwhile, closed systems are losing momentum precisely while “open” systems like Android are taking flight.

But secondly, just consider the ironies of my situation: I only bothered myself with a PC because it could run Linux simultaneously with Windows, which accommodated my household Apple products. If I am now forced to align myself with a closed system, whatever would possess me to take up with the company that pulled the rug out from under my feet?

Anyway, I've already put the money down, so for the foreseeable future a Windows 7 user I shall be — which ain't a bad OS, frankly. Who knows? I might just finally give Halo a spin. New mantra: contentment in confinement.

All I'm saying is, any OS that bears down hard on the dilettante coder cannot be a good thing.

# posted by Darrell Reimer : 5:02 PM  0 comments

Friday, April 26, 2013

"If I Could Play The Blues Like They're Playing Me" - Wayne Hancock's Wild Ride

Spring is taking its cussed time, up north of the 44 at least. It's been too cold and rainy to do a proper cleaning of the car, but when that day finally arrives I expect I'll still be listening to this year's Car Wash Soundtrack: Ride by Wayne Hancock.



Hancock is new to me, but it sounds like he's been around forever. Part of this is due to his sound, which hews to an earlier, considerably less processed iteration of country music — honky-tonk, or juke-joint music, really. Hank Williams' grandson, Hank III, claims “Hancock has more Hank Sr. in him than either I or Hank Williams Jr.” an appraisal that is not entirely disingenuous. Hancock's songs of heartbreak have a similar disconcerting candour that leaves you wondering how delivery so muscular can be so unabashedly fragile as well.

That muscularity, force and confidence is the engine of the project, and it's fuelled with high-octane licks from some mighty fine guitarists. A number of songs have three of them trading rockabilly jams. I'm a sucker for the style, and this is the sweetest I've heard it played in many years.

“If I could play the blues like they're playing me,” moans Hancock early in the record. He might not have the upper hand on 'em, but he sure does give 'em a ride. As soon as the weather warms, I'll be rolling down the windows to Wayne for sure.

The album site (Bloodshot Records) is here, and I think the snippet from The Big Takeover review* is spot-on. Hancock's own site is here.



* “It doesn't hurt either that each song is filled with instrumental breaks from three guitarists who let loose and trade off in styles that are at once respectful of the vintage music and as demented as any rock guitar breaks…Despite the fact that there's no drummer on this record** it has the energy of the first Rolling Stones record but taking on rockabilly rather than American blues.”

** Huh. Hadn't really noticed the absence of drummer until it was pointed out to me. Had you asked, I probably would've sworn there was someone smacking the trap behind these fellas. Goes to show ya.

# posted by Darrell Reimer : 9:33 AM  0 comments

Friday, April 19, 2013

Congrats, RUSH

I was going to let the occasion slip by without comment — if getting inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame was a non-starter for RUSH, I figured it was a non-starter for me, too. But Geddy Lee says it makes his mother happy, and that makes me happy, too. Congratulations, Mrs. W. You must be very proud.

"So now we're, like, famous rockers, eh?"

The CBC and various FM radio hold-outs saw fit to celebrate the day by putting “Tom Sawyer” and “The Spirit Of Radio” on constant rotation. I got a little tired of that, even if I understood the reasoning. Those are the songs that have reached near-universal ear-worm status. Up here, it's common practice to hear their opening bars before the puck gets dropped at NHL games.

Also, those two songs probably signify, more than any other, the “a-ha!” moment for most RUSH fans — that moment when it first occurred to the listener that rock 'n' roll could be so much more, and still rock. And, more to the point, that these three guys had something incredible going on, and were capable of rewarding decades' worth of attention.

Still, singling out two songs from such a massive catalogue strikes me as a shame, especially when Clockwork Angels, their most recent album, is one of their very best. Were I a DJ I'd have played “The Garden” a time or two. It strikes me as a retrospective mission statement, and a loving summary of the forces that sustain us.



# posted by Darrell Reimer : 7:54 AM  0 comments

Friday, April 12, 2013

Of Indeterminate Legacy

If someone leads a literary profile with, “The Greatest Novelist You Haven't Read” I'm already on the defensive. If said novelist turns out to be someone I have in fact read, defensiveness turns to scorn.

Dear Literary Critics and your Editors -- just . . . please, for one nano-second, consider the day we live in: the task of becoming “well read,” never mind “deeply read,” is by any measure impossible. So if I, a near-anonymous blogger of scant ambition in the hinterlands of Canada, have read James Salter (three books and counting), what accounts then for your prestige press blanket assessment that the 88-year-old Man Of Letters, is “underappreciated” (Alex Heimbach); “revered” but, alas, not “famous” (Nick Paumgarten); “has not been widely embraced as a great writer,” whose “books have never quite caught on” (Katie Roiphe), etc.

"Maybe if I hang with movie stars I'll be appreciated, and widely embraced."

To me it reads as a lazy way of giving the old man a sentimental send-off.

If, in the movie business, it is true that “Nobody knows anything,” the corollary for the publishing business is surely, “Nobody gets what they deserve.” And precisely what accolades and attention Salter's material “deserves” is a matter of more debate than the laurels above might suggest. Just for starters, both Vivian Gornick and Jonathan Dee cautiously express some reservations.

Cautious reservation strikes me as entirely appropriate. It's easy to get a little giddy when reading Salter: The sex! The glamour! The ennui! With Salter the first blush is always the loveliest — best to acknowledge that observation and move along. It is the return — to the memory, and to Salter's prose — that provokes doubts.

Consider just one quote that Heimbach admires: “The great chandeliers hang silent.” Evocative, or absurd? Honestly, I thought “evocative” the first time I read it, then “absurd” when I returned to it. One might argue that Salter was “slumming it” in People magazine, but how about, “They made love like it was a violent crime” (a favourite of Roiphe's)? Best to move on (to Fagen and Becker, perhaps).

Or how about this line, from Salter's memoir, Burning The Days: “The great engines of the world do not run on fidelity”? There are many ways to read a line like that, the most complimentary being, “What do the 'great engines of the world' run on?” (a Salterian mission statement, perhaps). Another might be, “The great engines of the world run on infidelity.” Huh. Okay, now I'm wondering how we should go about defining these “great engines of the world,” whether they're something that invite any sort of definition at all, or if they're just a metaphor, or vague phantom enticing our writer to make bold declarations.

The line could also just be Salter's poncey way of proclaiming “I been a baaaaaaaaad widdow boy!” That's a simpler, perhaps simple-minded reading. But the fact that Salter proceeds to queue up accounts of screwing around on the wife (sex! glamour! ennui!) does little to discourage this reading.

So this reader never quite shakes the notion that Salter's books finally amount to advertisements for himself: “I'm James Salter — and you're not.” Not that that's a bad thing. He's done a magnificent job of being James Salter — much better than I would have. I just happen to prefer, say, Richard Hell's straightforward astonishment at his capacity for self-indulgence over Salter's ennui and innumerable light metaphors. Somehow Hell just reads more honestly — and sometimes a slim volume of blunt honesty goes further in establishing a legacy than might an entire library of well-turned phrases.

*****

When it comes to literary legacies, I defy anyone to conjure up one weirder than H.P. Lovecraft's. The man's prose is awful: florid, overwritten, wildly off-key. And yet it inspires its own occult orders, blockbuster movies, and cultural memes galore. And now: serious philosophical consideration. The brute power of a well-conceived idea, it seems, can overcome its spectacularly inept expression.

If you haven't yet read any Lovecraft, I strongly urge you to head straight for SelfMadeHero's comic books. Lovecraft anthologies Vol 1 and 2 and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward are terrific adaptations vastly superior to the work that they draw from.

And yet, and yet . . . there is something about a reader conjuring the inconjurable that makes the experience so much more unsettling. Here's an idea: read 'em both, and decide for yourself which is more disturbing.



*****

Roger Ebert is gone, but his legacy is likely to grow, for a bit longer at any rate. His written meditations on movies are likely to be referred to for as long as the applicable movies remain of interest. As for his not-exclusively-devoted-to-the-movies material, it's anybody's guess.

That was the stuff I most enjoyed reading, though. His blog, especially in the years after he lost his voice, was as vigorous and wide-ranging as you'd expect: movies and life-around-the-movies of course, but also childhood memories, ruminations on passing eras, and plenty of thoughts on religion, politics, and anything else that mattered to him. The politics got him a heap of “Stick to the movies, Roger” snark. As if. You didn't have to be a close reader to see that even his movie reviews couldn't “stick to the movies.”

I've sometimes thought he embodied the best of the '60s: he always seemed up for a good “happening.” He sat at the feet of Pauline Kael, played chess with The Duke, gamely followed Lee Marvin around when he was stinking drunk, and later when he sobered up. But he was far too impressively invested in-the-moment to be a '60s artifact. Al Gore might have invented the internet, but Roger Ebert mastered it. His club and the “far flung correspondents” he attracted kept the Happening very much alive.

“Invested in the moment,” though, that's the quality that kept me coming back, even to exuberant reviews of mediocre movies. That guy was alive to possibilities in a way that seemed attainable, and well worth emulating. I can't imagine a day when I won't silently ask, “I wonder what Roger would think?”


“Roger” — now that's a legacy.



# posted by Darrell Reimer : 2:04 PM  0 comments

Thursday, April 04, 2013

If You See It, You Might As Well Admit It: Spring Breakers

1942-2013: Thanks, Roger. God love you.

 “The only American movie that matters right now,” sez The Globe & Mail's Sarah Nicole Prickett, of Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers. I'd followed enough of the pre-release hoo-ha to think this claim might actually have some substance to it. So, without reading beyond the headline,* I bid the ladies of the house farewell, then hopped into the car and took off for the nearest multiplex to check it out for myself.

Not that I admitted to anyone what I was about to see. Caution before disclosure seemed a prudent strategy. And, sure enough, about 15 minutes after the lights went down I was mentally scrolling over the list of movies playing around me, considering plausible alternatives to the flick I was actually watching. The important thing to remember, I thought, is that no-one should ever, ever know I have seen this movie.

At that early point in the movie Korine is splashing every possible “Spring Break” fantasy (or nightmare, depending on your POV) across the big screen in super-bright, super-garish pastels. Boobs, bottoms and bongs. Girls drinking hooch by the bucket, girls fellating popsicles, girls doubling down on the glass pipe. So far, so very grade 9 — minus the violent vomiting fits, of course, and those anxious shuddering crying jags that take over once you've crossed seven or eight borders you didn't know were there.



Korine seemed to be re-fetishizing already over-fetishized objects for the YouTube generation — an aesthetic I found rough, prurient and unpleasant. On the ride down I had silently joked with myself that what this movie probably needed was a middle-aged guy in the audience, to complete the creepy vibe. Now I wondered if I'd get so much as a second glance had I worn a trench coat and left my pants at home.

I stayed put, though, because Korine had dropped — like anvils from a balloon — plenty of signifiers that this film was SERIOUS, man. It starts in a college classroom where the prof speaks earnestly of how the Greatest Generation took on the challenge of the American Civil Rights Movement. Next we witness a youth group of Holy Rollers worshipping Jesus, with one of the girls reluctantly participating. She's also the first to bail when things get a little scary — and her name is Faith! Etc., etc.

What finally mesmerized me beyond the images was the dialogue, which from the git-go seemed a little off-sync with what was happening on-screen. Every utterance is earnest, and skirts (like everything else in the movie) dangerously close to camp. The talk about how beautiful it all is, and “How much I love you Mom/Grandmom” and how there are “good changes taking place inside” all seems like it might fit with the action (if the characters are, in fact, as impermeably deranged as they appear to be), but also seems off-puttingly incongruous to it. It's like riding a bicycle with a chain that can't quite find the gear it's supposed to be on, then realizing that's how this bicycle has been built. It makes for a weird, discombobulating ride, lemme tell you.

When the show was over the four young fellas** down the aisle from me loudly declared this, “The lamest movie ever.” But they liked James Franco's character, Alien, and certainly weren't complaining during the titty-shots. They also clapped and hooted when Alien boasted of having Scarface play on constant repeat, 24/7, so I'm guessing they were hoping for a movie more like DePalma's, only with lots and lots of super-hot babes.

The movie's conclusion, though, is the studied antithesis of Scarface, so here's the obligatory SPOILER ALERT: rather than holing up, getting high and waiting for the inevitable siege, the girls goad Alien into taking the action to the drug-lord he's been inconveniencing. When they show up at the lair, Alien takes a bullet in the face before he can fire a single shot, while the babes in bikinis and balaclavas pad about and dispatch one (very large, very black, very well-armed) enforcer after the next, before locating the gangsta in question and shooting him, too — all with a single clip of bullets in their guns. END SPOILER.

It's all framed in a matter-of-fact style, with all the tension of a video game on cheat code. In other words, if you came to this movie hoping your jones for Redemptive-Cathartic Violence might get stroked and put to bed, well . . . dude — you are being mocked. Lest there be any doubt, the girls phone home and, in dreamy tones, talk about how they're “ready to get serious about their studies, now.”

Such a withering excoriation of that particular trope could not come at a better time. And there are so many others Korine and his girls tuck into — and plenty of interpretations as to what it all means. It's all snotty, brash, bright and loud, making Tarantino's late indulgences look like something from Clint Eastwood's declining years. Some viewers might have fun, some might be perplexed, sooner or later most will feel insulted.

As for me, it's been years since I last left a movie and puzzled this much over “why this and not that?” questions. And darned if I'm not thinking Spring Breakers really might be “the only American movie that matters right now.”


*Prickett's essay is very good. Bonus: if you read it, and skip the movie, you'll feel no shame.

**After the preview for the Jackie Robinson biopic was over, I heard, “Ima see that one, yo.” Sincerely said, so far as I could tell. Need I add that these guys were as white as the driven snow?

# posted by Darrell Reimer : 3:23 PM  0 comments

Friday, March 22, 2013

Walker Percy's Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

I understand, I think, the adoration some readers have for Walker Percy's Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. But while I might garner an aloof admiration for Percy's project, I can't generate much love for it. This is partially because Percy worked hard to keep the book “cool” (in the McLuhan sense of the word), and thus difficult to love (surely a “hot” response). It's also partially because I kept getting the sense that even Percy was having trouble whipping up affection for the work.

The ubiquity of television seems to have rattled some writers the way the internet does writers today. In 1980, three years before Lost In The Cosmos was published, George W.S. Trow released a shrapnel-grenade of ironic observations entitled Within The Context Of No Context. Trow saw television's accommodation of the immediate and argued that this speed-of-light process of adoption and abandonment created an entirely new context for the viewer: that of no context whatsoever. By essay's end, the only whimper Trow could muster was, “Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned — not out of any wish of mine but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me.” Trow's final refuge was a nostalgia for the era and mores of his parents (which he indulged to squirm-inducing effect in his final publications).

Percy's observations are somewhat similar, occasionally even in tone:

The salvation of art derives in the best of modern times from a celebration of the triumph of the autonomous self — as in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony — and in the worst of times from naming the unspeakable: the strange and feckless movements of the self trying to escape itself.

If Kafka's Metamorphosis is presently a more accurate account of the self than Beethoven's Ninth, it is the more exhilarating for being so . . .

Further down the same page:

Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

And, if the reader needs any help visualizing the problem, Percy offers this cheeky illustration:


Percy sees television, and particularly Phil Donahue (the ur-Oprah), as the final embodiment of both expressions — the Celebration of the Unspeakable, you might say (“Man-Turned-Cockroach Marries Childhood Sweetheart: Exclusive Footage — Next!”). Throw in Percy's steely adherence to an all-but-extinct pre-Nietzschean classicism, the absurdity of which he wearily acknowledges, and what's not to love about this blunderbuss of eccentricity?

Well, there is the insistence on thought experiments as a genre, some of which fall with an undeniable thud. Witness this bit from “The Last Donahue Show”:

DONAHUE: C'mon, Allen. What are ya handing me? What d'ya mean you're happily married? You mean you're happy.

ALLEN: No, no. Vera's happy, too.

AUDIENCE (mostly women, groaning): Noooooooo.

DONAHUE: Okay-okay, ladies, hold it a second. What do you mean, Vera's happy? I mean, how do you manage — help me out, I'm about to get in trouble — hold the letters, folks —

Etc, etc. Scenes of this nature tend to generate unintended thought experiments of my own. To wit: Reader rolls eyes, sighs loudly and says, “Yes, yes, Doctor Percy: we get it.”

Part of this frustration is generated by a frustration I sense (help me out, I'm about to get in trouble) from the author himself. Here's a passage preceding the one I just quoted, from ALLEN'S Point-Of-View:

I'm a good person, I think. I work hard, am happily married, love my wife and family, also support United Way, served in the army. I drink very little, don't do drugs, have never been to a porn movie. My idea of R & R — maybe I got it in the army — is to meet an attractive woman. What a delight it is, to see a handsome mature woman, maybe in the secretarial pool, maybe in a bar, restaurant, anywhere, exchange eye contact, speak to her in a nice way, respect her as a person, invite her to join me for lunch . . . what a joy to go with her up in the elevator of the downtown Holiday Inn, both of you silent, relaxed, smiling, anticipating . . . .

Here we have a voice that Percy's readers know intimately: that of a self-satisfied roué who has mastered the ability to overlook the considerable impediments of his own character. It is also jarringly out-of-character with the piece that contains it, the bulk of which reads like an awkward parody of a show that could — within the context of no context — already be seen as self-parody.

This bit leaves me wondering if Percy didn't originally attempt to place his larger concerns within the context of a novelist — said novelist having already exploited the many suspensions of disbelief a movie-goer permits himself. Reading on, I have to wonder if Percy didn't also attempt the essayist's context, before giving up on that, as well. Lost In The Cosmos is a strange enough book that it might finally have revealed its relatively unique format to Percy by happy(ish) accident. Whatever the case, there are enough uneven (I'd go so far as to say, “indulgent”) passages to prevent the most trenchant of the book's insights from hitting with the force of authority Percy struggled to muster.

But then here am I, struggling to muster a little authority of my own. Whatever you do, don't give me the final word — sharper people than I (Tom Bartlett and Alan Jacobs, for starters) think this book is a terrific read. Get a copy and decide for yourself. I'll be returning to The Moviegoer and Lancelot for what I consider to be the deeper and more disturbing insights Percy has to offer.

"Say, I'm pretty LOST too, y'all. Get it?
Do ya? I'm LOST, I'm LOST, I'm ...
Never mind."



# posted by Darrell Reimer : 3:40 PM  0 comments

Friday, March 15, 2013

Wisdom Literature, And The Fuck-Ups Who Write It


Wisdom Literature is a genre I've precious little appetite for. I've read the stuff in the Bible, committed some of it to memory — usually to be recited in an ironic context. I don't voluntarily return to it, though.

Some — maybe even most — people seem to find it super-important. Recognizing that, I've taken a stab at reading varieties of Wisdom Lit: the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Koran, Marcus Aurelius, Confucius, Rumi, Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet. Couldn't finish any of 'em.

Back when I worked the bookstore Khalil Gibran's The Prophet also caught my eye. Try as we might, we could not keep enough copies of that homely-looking book in stock. At some point we finally caught up on our back-orders and I took a copy home to see what all the fuss was about. I could have read it in an evening, but didn't. Sleep overtook me, and the book was back on the store's shelf the next morning.

Gibran retains his popular appeal, though, so he's an inviting subject for critic-journalists keen for a peek-behind-the-curtain, like John Dodge, who riffs off Joan Accocella's in turn. Reading those pieces this week put me in a funk, for reasons I've had trouble identifying. I have no investment in Gibran's strain of wisdom, so a writer might reasonably expect a reader like me to indulge in a little schadenfreude. But I find the death of an alcoholic just plain sad, and Gibran's is no exception.

My responsive glumness is also the residual effect of reading Listening For Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L'Engle In Many Voices (A). Leonard S. Marcus does a fine job of pulling together recollections of the woman from friends, writers and book-biz types, and others who naturally had dealings with L'Engle. What emerges is pretty much the expected picture: L'Engle as grand dame who, while fully in touch with her formidable charisma, very pointedly cultivated an air of approachability.

Marcus' conversations contain few surprises, and those are rather gentle. This is chiefly because it is Cynthia Zarin who first encountered and, in this NewYorker piece, exposed all the astonishments. Many of Marcus' interviews feel compelled to comment on Zarin — not on the revelations per se, of course, but on the spirit in which they were presented. Marcus, in turn, concludes by interviewing Zarin, commendably giving her the last word on the matter.

From my first reading to the present, Zarin's piece never struck me as sensationalist or exploitative or vituperative (in fact, I wish it was included in Marcus' book). Nor were her revelations a source of disappointment — sadness on behalf of someone encountered in the printed word, but not disappointment. L'Engle wrote frequently and forcefully on the subject of, for instance, marital fidelity, but there were also frequent (occasionally cloaked) asides that suggested these utterances had some unspoken history behind them. Her marriage to an actor from a popular soap came of age during the 60s and 70s. The marriage ideal might well be a two-part invention, but presuming strict fidelity on the part of two public “superstars” in the environment of that era requires a third party: the reader's willing suspension of disbelief.

Readers gave it, though — and still do. That's some sweet-tasting punch to be had, and no-one appreciates the suggestion it has been in any way tainted. So it is also no surprise if friends and colleagues subtly (or not so) cast aspersions on Zarin's character. Thomas Cahill, however, surprises me when he says,

The profile of Madeleine that appeared in The New Yorker really shocked me. What shocked me was not whether this or that detail was true. What was said about Bion,* for example, sounded more or less accurate. It would have been fine to say those things once she was gone. What shocked me was that Madeleine's family had talked about her in that way while Madeleine was still reading.

Emphasis is mine. Cahill seems to imply he'd be okay with reading this stuff after she'd died, and not a moment before.

I have to say I have considerably greater sympathy for L'Engle's children. The maintenance of a publicly revered parent is also a three-part invention, requiring the often reluctant participation of the children. Consider how, as L'Engle's physical and mental state was deteriorating, her public persona grew increasingly saintly. As the family casualties mounted, and the matriarch required ever more intimate care, receiving adulatory mail from strangers who presumed a deep connection with this person (“Madeleine was the mother I wish I had” is a common sentiment) must have become a staggering burden, especially if it appears that hagiography is nearly inevitable. Before Crosswicks becomes a tourist destination, and busloads of earnest believers spill out to tell you, ad nauseum, what a truly wonderful person your mother was, you might want to preemptively let a little air out of the tires.

You might also, consciously or no, want to prep her for deathbed conversation. It's debatable just how necessary it is to actually have these conversations, but one way or another, before or after death, a kid has to “say” “You fucked up. Not only that, you fucked me up. But I forgive you. I love you. And I will miss you so much more than I can say.”

Our parents, with all their flaws, try to pass on what wisdom they glean during their own lives. Beyond that, any Wisdom Literature we adopt we then endow with parental authority. It only stands to reason that this, then, is a conversation we readers ought to “have” with the writers of our Wisdom Literature.

Writing Wisdom Literature was a gig Madeleine took to, with obvious pleasure. In fact you could argue, as she elliptically did, that it is every writer's gig, whether they acknowledge it or not. Speaking with some personal experience, forgiving an author for his or her personal shortcomings can have a surprisingly freeing effect on the words they wrote. It may be that the only truly Sacred Literature we get in this life is written by people we have learned to forgive.

*If you haven't yet read Zarin's piece, Bion is presented as the golden-haired child who drank himself into an early grave. Sensing a theme, yet?

**This is the last time I link to Larkin's This Be The Verse. Now here's a link to his second most-discussed poem.

# posted by Darrell Reimer : 6:15 PM  0 comments

Friday, March 08, 2013

KISS-oterica: KISS In The Comics

But enough with Anabaptist esoterica, and its tightly constrained, faintly occult pleasures. If Mennonites make for vexatious company when they're alive, devoting further time to them after they've been dead a few centuries only ups the irritation factor. There remains more pleasurable esoterica to be explored, starting with the shared texts inspired by KISS.

One of Allan Bloom's frequent gripes — or laments, if you prefer — was that the Rock 'n' Roll generation had sacrificed preceding generations' depth of insight and character for the immediate, relatively trifling purview of sexual gratification. In aid of his argument Bloom would reach for lyrics from popular songs, and dryly recite them from the podium. By Bloom's reckoning, the orgasmic juddering of “Louie, Louie” was a very distant, inbred cousin to, say, Cole Porter's subtle wordplay (to say nothing of the bard responsible for The Song of Solomon), and Boomers were the worse for it.

Reducing rock's appeal solely to its copulatory evocations is easy, and (if what remains of radio is any indication) getting easier by the year. But it clumsily sidesteps the appeal of a band like KISS. If all we had to go by was their collected lyrics, and the various band members' accounts of bacchanalian excess, then, sure, it's all about the juddering. But as Gene Simmons, the band's self-designated spokesman has repeatedly made plain, KISS is a Brand before it is a band.

“KISS as Brand” is 21st Century marketing ontology being applied to what essentially remains a Carter-era super-phenom, but as retrospective analysis it works quite well. For a band with such plain-spoken lyrics and blunt musical delivery, KISS inspired within the collective imagination of its fans — and detractors — a nearly limitless volume of speculation.

Buying and listening to an album was just the smallest tip of the iceberg. There was the album art, a distant but stunningly potent evocation of the concert experience. Then there was the concert experience. What was with the pyrotechnics, the flying, the blood-spitting, the fire-breathing — the makeup? Fifteen-year-olds and their parents might wonder what it all meant (Knights In Satan's Service? Kings?!?), and 21-year-olds might dismiss the entire carnival out of hand for its lack of signifiers. But 12-year-olds didn't wonder — they wanted more.

Enter MARVEL comics: Stan Lee took note of (or, more likely, had it pointed out to him) the insatiable fans who, despite the predictable rotation of stock photos, bought every pulp magazine churned out in devotion to the band's never-ending concert circuit. All this ardour needed, perhaps, was a quick application of the “Stan Lee” template to the four figures papering the bedrooms of adolescent America, and ka-ching!

Et voila:

Here we have a ploy typical of 70s comic book covers: a fantastical illustration that bears only a metaphorical relation to the story within. The narrative mechanics are stock-and-trade “Stan Lee”: take your average 12-year-old wisenheimer out of the classroom, give him the power of the gods, and then pit him against a smarmy, entitled goon who needs to be put in his place. Multiply it by four, make them trade quips with the Avengers . . .


. . . and, for marketing purposes, go out on a limb and do something slightly creepy but not altogether out of sync with the Brand mystique — like adding the band's blood to the ink.


It's this stunt, duly photographed by some hack with a 35mm camera and flash, which almost undoes the conceit. Here we have four performers in costume, submitting backstage to the arena sawbones whose usual job is to administer ice-packs to concussed rodeo wrestlers. If it weren't for “Lee's” celebrated “pandemonious puffery” the effect of the pictures alone would be rather deflating. The figures are recognizably human, having their blood drawn by a side-burned schmuck in a smock. Revealing the band's humanity was a card eventually played to buy the band a few fleeting minutes' reprieve from diminishing public interest, but at this point in KISS-story it's best the KISS Army not associate these figures with mortality.

"No, no, nooooo ... !"

What the pancake makeup projects is imminently more interesting than the flesh that wears it — something Todd McFarlane adroitly recognized when he signed the Brand to his upstart Image Comics. By the time McFarlane got to them in the late-90s, both the band and the Brand were flagging. Utilizing the McFarlane hyper-articulate Manga aesthetic, the four kabuki characters received a massive and reverent facelift. More pertinently, writer Brian Holguin took the standing comic book trope of “Humans-Endowed-With-Godlike-Powers” and put it on its head. Gone are all traces of “Gene” “Ace” “Peter” and “Paul” and their lewd, crude, charming/off-putting antics. Now we had four pagan deities, in thrall of a travelling carnival, who begrudgingly restore cosmic balance in concert with the affairs of humanity. KISS's mojo was back.


Holguin's deity characterizations can be faintly Jungian, or stock D&D Handbook, depending on the issue you pick up. Either way, Holguin's demiurges are never boring. While some episodes are hobbled by the missteps that inevitably occur in serial storytelling, the series as a whole is astonishingly strong. In the span of 31 issues, the series launches from an episode-by-episode Outer Limits platform into a massive Competing Realities story-arc that, in its complexity, approaches near-Dickian heights.


The Image years show the Brand at its zenith, comic book wise. This was not an altitude the Brand (nor Image Comics, for that matter) could maintain: when KISS changed houses to Dark Horse Comics, the characterization and story-lines returned to the stock-and-trade model, albeit with greater sobriety and discipline than was demonstrated in the MARVEL years.

All three iterations (plus some lamentable “for the fans” one-offs) can be found in this volume, which, if you purchase it on-line, is probably much larger than you imagine. It's ungainly, but affordable, and contains Holguin's Image arc in its entirety.

These days, as entertainment industries scramble to retain the smallest scrap of their once dominant hold on the public imagination, it all makes for a curiously poignant read. The era when four hungry youths could put on costumes, pick up instruments and mesmerize a nation seems to be over. However, the era of carnivals and other expressions of pagan exuberance — and conflict — is anything but.

# posted by Darrell Reimer : 10:02 AM  0 comments

Friday, March 01, 2013

"Fools In Old-Style Hats & Coats": A 21st Century Blasphemer Reads Anneken Heyndriks

Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee — Deuteronomy 32:7

We must cling to a God who approves of blasphemy because he hates Jehovah and Nobodaddy and Zeus . . . all the other kings of terrors and tyrants of the soul. To a God who appreciates obscenity because he looks not into the secret of our hearts, but into the hearts of our secrets, and knows that our bloodfilled guts and cocking guts are the real battlefield — Northrop Frye

Some people should die. That's just unconscious knowledge — Jane's Addiction


I have friends — born and raised and baptised Mennonites — who went on to become Catholic. I've also spoken with former Catholics who pointedly embraced Anabaptism so completely that they submitted to a second baptism of conscious consent. I've converted several PCs from Windows to Linux. Maybe the metaphor is too facile to be pertinent, but it seems to me these people have allowed their guiding, religious Operating Systems to be similarly converted.

Some of these conversions provoked considerable consternation among family members. But physical violence? Not really. A parental eye-roll, a noisy sigh of exasperation, occasionally some shouts and unfortunate words. Nothing in league with getting tied to a ladder and dumped into flames.

So my first, unfiltered response to poor Anneken's demise: is there any stupidity more brutal than the attempt to physically exorcise one's religious doubt in the face of another's religious certainty? Funny (o ho-ho — my sides) how religion provides convenient license to execute: if you're a bailiff in 16th Century Amsterdam, a Communist in 20th Century China, an Imam in 21st Century Tehran — or (it could, and probably should, be argued) a drone pilot for present day America. “I'm right. You're wrong. Go to Hell.”

"Here's me under the ladder,
losing my religion..."

The more circumspect side of me wonders what this account is not saying.

Anneken Heyndriks was a relative newcomer to Amsterdam, from Friesland — which even today's Amsterdamers consider a back-water. She couldn't read or write, but (if we take the account at face value) she was no slouch at committing scripture to memory: her response to her underbailiff neighbour's intrusion is remarkably similar to her Savior's, when He was finally approached by the State constabulary. It is this adept knowledge of the Gospels, or at least of their Passion narratives, which she is keen to impress upon her (Christian) captors.

What did she do to piss off her neighbour? Sixteenth Century Amsterdam was a city of massive commerce, and a modestly successful diaspora: even Jews — the most obvious, and thus the most frequently persecuted, dissenters to the ruling religion — were tolerated by the authorities. The regents who ran the place clearly had more pressing concerns than hunting down illiterate peasant heretics. Yet something about Anneken prompted Evert to drop the hammer. Perhaps the sound of hymns being furtively sung in the neighbouring barn during the wee small hours of the morning woke him up once too often.

Or perhaps it was something more personal. Listen to her response, preferably in Plaut-Dietsch or German, when he shows up with the rope: “Neighbour Evert, what is your wish? If you seek me, you can easily find me: here I am at your service.”


“Meek spirit,” you say? Riiiiiiight. Listen, I've known a few Heinrichses in my day. If you're in the right frame of mind, they can be a barrel of laughs. If you're not, they're a pain in the ass (a little like some Reimers, maybe). When Anneken spoke, Evert clearly wasn't in a laughing mood — yet.

And she goes on to speak a great deal more, with a liberty perhaps born of the realization she has nothing left to fear or lose. Or maybe she just likes to talk — some Heinrichses are like that. The fact that she, a peckerwood Frieslander, moved to the nation's bustling metropolis — at her advanced age — indicates a remarkably robust spirit (again, another trait common among the Heinrichses). Whatever the case, she does what she can to keep the spotlight trained on her, whether her audience consists of passersby or Pieter the Bailiff or Sir Albert the anointed chaplain of State.

Go on and look at me, an old woman all hog-tied and off to jail. What for, do you think? Prostitution? Robbery? Nope: following Jesus — you know: that guy you stare at every Sunday morning at Cathedral. The one ON A CROSS. Kind of ironic, isn't it? Kind of makes you think, doesn't it? Well if it doesn't, it sure should. Say, He was tried by the religious authorities of His day, too, wasn't he? Sure makes a person think, alright. Hey, good neighbour Evert: you remember that guy Judas, who led the State authorities to Jesus? Jesus died, Judas lived — for a bit longer, anyway — you know the guy I mean. Where's Judas now, do you suppose?

So Anneken, our determined saint, gets the final word; Evert, the last laugh.

"Fools in old-style hats & coats,
who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats."
Philip Larkin

Or does he? Both Anneken and the Mirror's scribe clearly (and quite understandably) expect God's Righteous Judgement to mete out a proper turnabout to underbailiff Evert in the Hereafter. And even if the staunch materialists among us determinedly dismiss this theological phant'sy, a curious historical irony nevertheless takes place.

You see, I happen to know a few Ewerts, also — in fact, it's a fairly common name among Mennonites. They're wickedly intelligent, and possess a weary sort of humour that I deeply enjoy, especially in difficult times. They're also an incredibly supercilious bunch (again, a little like the Reimers). It seems that somewhere in the untold part of this story, family members of the villainous underbailiff were radically converted, and joined the community this man hated with a murderous passion.

So it goes. Perhaps a few 21st Century Ewerts have even returned to Catholicism. And of course there are Heinrichses, Ewerts and Reimers who have committed apostasy — that's inevitable, no matter what your clan or religion. You can be as pious as you like, but walk far enough and you'll eventually cross paths with someone who thinks you're beyond the pale. In my hometown, back in the day, there were elders who considered a zipper on your pants an act of heretical pride.

I gave last week's post to my wife to read. She said, “There's something ghostly about those accounts, isn't there?” There sure is. Read it in its ancient font, with the crude illustrations, inside a 1200-page hardcover too heavy for your coffee table, and that “ghostly” quality is magnified something fierce. But do keep reading it. These people, who were just smart enough to get into the worst kind of trouble, changed the world.

Are you enjoying your religious freedom, the freedom to have no religion at all, the freedom to read whatever you like? You owe it all to the Age of Enlightenment — a tertiary ideological engine set into motion by the Reformation, the wheels of which my people greased with their blood, motherfucker. And you're welcome.

You're even welcome to chuckle at the old fart with the combed beard who tut-tuts the zipper on your pants. Perhaps he knows, like few people do, that in the bloody tide of our species' history your many blasphemies are trivial and banal, enacted to no great effect and easily forgotten.

Further reading: Mennonites, patron saints of mediocrity; awfully full of themselves, but boy, can they sing; and please won't you join my Long Line of Nüscht?

# posted by Darrell Reimer : 8:30 AM  0 comments

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Anneken Haunts Me

Anneken Heyndriks isn't done with me — nor I with her. Here is the account of her trial, torture and death from Martyrs Mirror. I'm hoping to post some further thoughts by Monday.


 In the year 1571, there was burnt alive, at Amsterdam in Holland, for the testimony of Jesus, a woman named Anneken Heyndriks, aged about fifty-three years. Having come from Friesland to Amsterdam, she was betrayed by her neighbour, the underbailiff, who entered her house in order to apprehend her. She said to him with a meek spirit: “Neighbour Evert, what is your wish? If you seek me, you can easily find me: here I am at your service.” This Judas the traitor said: “Surrender, in the name of the King.” And he bound Anneken with a rope, and led her along with him, as Judas and the scribes had done with our predecessor, Jesus.

When they arrived on the Dam, Anneken said that they should not hesitate to look at her, since she was neither a harlot nor a thief, but a prisoner for the name of Jesus. After arriving in prison, she thanked and praised her Lord and Creator with an humble heart, for counting her worthy to suffer for His Name's sake. And she boldly confessed her faith before Pieter the Bailiff and the other lords. They greatly tormented her with Baal's priests, in order to cause her to apostatize; but through the grace of God she valiantly resisted it. This greatly astonished the bailiff, that she did not pay more regard to his spiritual lords, and he said to Anneken, “Sir Albert, our chaplain, is such a holy fellow, that he ought to be mounted in fine gold; and you will not hear him, but make sport of him, hence you must die in your sins, so far are you strayed from God.”

Thus they suspended this God-fearing aged woman (who could neither read nor write) by her hands, even as Christ had been, and by severe torturing sought to extort from her the names of her fellow believers, for they thirsted for more innocent blood. But they obtained nothing from Anneken, so faithfully did God keep her lips. Hence the bailiff preferred against her the charge of being infected with heresy, having forsaken the mother, the holy church, now about six years ago and having adopted the cursed doctrine of the Mennonists, by whom she had been baptized on her faith, and married a husband among them. Thereupon she was sentenced to be burnt alive. She thanked the lords, and said with humility, that if she had done amiss to anyone, she asked them to forgive her. But the lords arose and made no reply. She was then tied on a ladder. Then she said to Evert the underbailiff, her neighbour: “Thou Judas, I have not deserved it, that I should be thus murdered.” And she asked him not to do this any more, or God should avenge it on him. Thereupon Evert angrily said that he would bring all those that were of her mind the same trouble. The other bailiff came once more with a priest, tormenting her, and saying that if she did not renounce, she should go from this fire into the eternal. Thereupon Anneken steadfastly said: “Though I am sentenced and condemned by you, yet what you say does not come from God; for I firmly trust in God, who shall help me out of all my trouble.”

They did not let her speak any more, but filled her mouth with gunpowder, and carried her thus from the city hall to the fire into which they cast her alive. This done, the traitor Evert, the underbailiff, was seen to laugh, as though he had done God an acceptable service. But the merciful God, who is the comfort of the pious, shall give this faithful witness, for this brief and temporal tribulation, an everlasting reward, when her stopped mouth shall be opened in fullness of joy, and these sad tears (for the truth's sake) shall be wiped away, and she be crowned with eternal joy with God in heaven.

Note: we have obtained this sentence of death of this pious and valiant heroine of Jesus Christ, as the same was read to her in court; as also the record of her torture, which, as it appears, took two weeks before her death; which we shall place here one after the other, as they were copied by the secretary from the criminal records of the city.

# posted by Darrell Reimer : 6:50 PM  2 comments

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