Monthly Archives: June 2016

A Sinner in Mecca (YGtCTO #21)

Film directed by Parvez Sharma
Written by Parvez Sharma, Sajid Akbar, and Alison Amron

I will never visit Mecca or see the Black Rock in person. Not being raised in Islam or inclined to conversion to it or any other faith, I will not live to see a day when a non-Muslim may travel to the destination of so many pilgrims. Moreover, filming the Hajj is also forbidden, though it remains unclear to me who has done the forbidding- the Saudi government or religious authorities or, most likely, a collaboration of both. A few years ago, the Vice people smuggled out some long shots of the rituals around the Kabba. That is the first film that I know of that captures the complete stages of the pilgrimage, though there may be others.

Sharma is a gay man born in India, now married and living in New York City. As an outsider within his religion, he proves a remarkably adept guide to the entire journey asked of every Muslim at least once in their lives. Even so, this could have been Rough Guide to the Hajj. Throughout his time in Saudi Arabia, the danger of being both gay and filming the sacrosanct lend an exceptional tension to the film. Yet, I don’t know if that would have raised the whole enterprise beyond the level of watching Anthony Bourdain eat the parts of some poor animal prepared as a local delicacy someplace with questionable hygiene. Really, we’re all reduced to waiting for the inevitable unfortunate backlash, hoping the filmmaker merely pays for their transgressions with a little discomfort and a quick flight home.

No, the art here is the open-hearted invitation from Sharma to join him on a journey to understand the faith of his mother and his ancestors. He longs to appreciate the necessity of the Hajj. True, his innate questioning throttles the power of the experience back from transcendence, but he is not alone. Many of those around him have clearly had enough of the bullying by the authorities too intent on keeping the crowds moving to provide adequate water, shelter, or sanitation. I am not denying that the experience of following the steps to redemption prescribed has a powerful affect on many of the participants, but rather that sustaining their focus on the transcendence of their journey has been significantly more difficult on an already difficult path. Sharma himself has moments of honest reflection on the significance of the stages, without which the film loses its heft.

Time and again, I find myself drawn back to works of art where the creator reveals something of their soul. Outside the world of A Sinner in Mecca, the rest of the world has not always welcomed Sharma as an openly gay Muslim who has revealed the censored. Much like Emile Zola and Woody Guthrie, the art is as much courageous as it is high craft. Comfort makes it too easy to remember that the artist must remain true to himself and sometimes proclaim that which no other will say.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 279 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

The Talented Mr. Ripley (YGtCTO Words #7)

Book written by Patricia Highsmith

Few authors inspire such strong reactions as Patricia Highsmith, even from those who have not read her work, but only seen movies made from her writings. She started out writing a classic, Strangers on a Train, and proceeded to create the ultimate serial killer, Tom Ripley, whom she chronicled for thirty years. In the meantime, she wrote brilliant short stories about animals (not children’s stories and not for the faint of heart). Her memoirs revealed much, though the clues always seemed to be there in her tales.

Highsmith is an incredibly seductive writer. By now, you don’t crack one of her books without being vastly aware that bad things are going to happen. Even so, the prose lulls the reader into a state of comfort. No, she is not dull because she always gets to the point quickly, but rather she luxuriates in the emotions and surroundings that make life a commonplace around the world. She is always the observer, taking in the feelings and the choices that we all make and putting them back out there for us to see just off kilter.

Ripley is the perfect avatar for this style, as he is undoubtedly a psychopath, as well as extremely talented at mimicry. As a youth, that involves stealing the lives of others by inhabiting those lives better than the original. Amazingly, he grows beyond such thefts and instead takes on the role of country squire in the French countryside. Here, his skills are turned to emulating the emotions and behaviors of those around him (albeit with a thin skin too often affronted). Throughout his tales, Ripley is always observing and assuming the appropriate part for the moment.

Highsmith’s animal stories demonstrate another fascinating take on her distancing effect. I don’t know where the average elephant might score on the psychopathy index, but it might well surface some tendencies that make Dumbo rather frightening. Either way, I doubt animals view the world in any fashion like people, no matter how much we anthropomorphise. In Highsmith’s hands, the creatures around us do not view humanity in benevolent terms; often they do not view the world in anything resembling kindness. It is life and it must be lived. You observe and you react. Of course, that sounds an awful lot like Tom Ripley.

No one can read a lot of Patricia Highsmith without dabbling in pop psychology. From the very beginning of her writing, the crimes often touch that reptilian brain at the core of our reactions. The characters have blank spots about the warmer feelings upon which most of us base our behaviors. Hope and love often land one in a very bad place. Even simple curiosity can be a remarkably bad idea. I can’t say there is really anyone to root for, although the occasional victim of abuse gets to mete out some justice.

Maybe it speaks more about her dedicated readers, but I don’t find all this depressing. The shenanigans are plotted so well and seem to arise so naturally that every story is like getting into a rowboat with a slightly off oarsman, just hoping for the best.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 280 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Starting Over (YGtCTO Music #7)

Song written by Eric Carmen
Performed by The Raspberries

No one wrote more brilliant songs about music than Eric Carmen, so I always felt strange hearing him on the radio in the eighties with movie soundtrack love songs. I always wanted to grab the nearest person and explain to them that this guy had done some of the greatest pop music since the Beatles. I was young and brash and did not appreciate whatever had led from Go All the Way to Hungry Eyes, let alone Overnight Sensation to Make Me Lose Control. Of course, the explanation is probably right there in front of me.

I will come right out and say that Starting Over, the last Raspberries album, is one of the greatest rock albums. Keep in mind that it was released a year before Born to Run. The band only released three albums before that, populated with a lot of great music, but the cohesion of the commentary on the music business makes Starting Over a complete experience that few groups accomplished.

The Raspberries get cited for creating power pop (just listen to Party’s Over for all your cowbell needs) while the Ramones were busy giving birth to punk music by this time, so the disconnect was there with disco ready to pounce. Gerald Ford had assumed the presidency and the Raspberries recorded Rose Colored Glasses– maybe Starting Over is about more than just the music business… Radio DJ’s were telling us that they played the right kind of music for us which only made things more fractious. In a world with far fewer media outlets, we could not envision the breakdown in the common cultural voice that was to come.

Cry should have been the Love Yourself of its day. Hell, just listen to Cry whenever you want to listen to Justin Bieber. The Raspberries were accused of being too smooth for good old fashioned rock. (Cleveland mods was their style, doing a take on The Who and that lot). What a phenomenal breakup song…

Great googlymoogly, don’t you just want to play air drums along with I Don’t Know What I Want? Is this song like listening to every Van Halen hit at once? Then there’s All Through the Night and Hands on You which probably presented challenges to any radio station looking to comply with FCC rules. Makes you wonder how Go All the Way ever became a major hit – although word of mouth can always work miracles. Besides, it sounded just enough like Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey and that was a song about something or other.

Let us now praise fabulous vocals– something got lost in the last twenty years or did musicians just stop wanting to harmonize? Throughout the album, that piano sound, too, it just kills me. It’s what brings me back to Horowitz and Gould, but to find it again in pop music… Starting Over was the swan song for the Raspberries, an ode to what was lost and what was gained. Not a lot of art looks forward while learning from the past.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 281 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.