Book Review: Skulls To the Living, Bread To the Dead by Stanley Brandes

Skulls To the Living, Bread To the Dead:

The Day Of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond

by Stanley Brandes

      In the 1990s while living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I went to a Day Of the Dead celebration. On the day after Halloween, a crowd gathered in the neighborhood of Barelas. Many wore skull masks or homemade calavera costumes. Some just wore ordinary street clothes. Some solo musicians strummed guitars while others beat on congas. There were kids and adults, people of all ages, ethnicities, and economic classes. Political activists and artists showed up and camera crews from the local TV stations were there to make 30 second clips to be shown at the end of the 6:00 news. The crowd formed into a procession and circulated through the main streets of Barelas. It was fun and inclusive. Nobody was turned away or told to leave. Occasional cars would pass by, the drivers honking their horns to arouse cheers from the procession, but there were very few people standing on the roadsides watching, something unusual for a parade. But the emphasis was on participation more than observation. After winding through the neighborhoods a few times, the sun began to set and the procession found its way to the Mexican-American community center where information booths were set up and vendors sold sugar skulls, tamales, and hot chocolate.

This way of celebrating the Day Of the Dead is controversial to some. Purists might think it is an inauthentic reinterpretation of a holiday that doesn’t respect Mexican traditions. Less conservative people might say it is an educational opportunity that raises awareness of the Chicano community in America and brings people of other backgrounds into friendly contact. The anthropologist Stanley Brandes, in his study of the Day Of the Dead Skulls To the Living Bread To the Dead, explores the way this most famous of Mexican holidays has changed in practice and meaning over time.

While doing fieldwork in the town of Tzintzuntzan, set in the Mexican state of Michoacan, Brandes began seeing changes to the way the Day Of the Dead, which should properly be called the Days Of the Dead because it is celebrated on November 2 and 3 on All Souls Day and All Saints Day, was celebrated. More people from outside the town were coming in for celebrations and a commercialized aspect was being introduced. This was in the 1960s. To his surprise, the local people welcomed these changes. So he set off to explore the origins of the holiday, how it changed over time, and what it has become today.

Brandes starts off with the common belief that the Days Of the Dead originated with the pre-Conquest indigenous people under the Aztec empire. After checking all the written records in the documented history, he did find evidence that those people had festivals commemorating death, but he did not find any direct connection to the Days Of the Dead. In fact, in most of its aspects, including sweet foods, altars, and the symbol of the skull, it appears to have been imported to Mexico by the Catholic church. In its most traditional form, people built altars in their houses, cleaned ancestral graves, gave sugar skulls to children as gifts, and attended an overnight mass in the cemetery. It was a small affair that mostly involved the family and not much else.

During the Mexican Revolution, the artist Jose Guadalupe Posada used iconography from the Days Of the Dead to make scathing commentaries on the politicians of his day. This brought the holiday into greater prominence both nationally and internationally. By the 1970s, the Mexican government realized how the Days Of the Dead could be used to promote a stronger cultural identity for Mexicans and attract tourists for the commercial benefit of the country at both local and national levels. As Halloween became more popular in Mexico and elements of the two celebrations merged, some Mexican intellectuals started questioning the meaning of the Days Of the Dead and how it related to Mexican national identity.

The controversies get more heated as Brandes’ studies take him north of the border into the United States where he examines the use of the Days Of the Dead as an educational tool. A whole passage is dedicated to how the holiday is presented in public schools, children’s books, and displays in libraries and community centers. He goes a little too in depth here for my tastes. He examines some of the Latino community’s reactions including controversies about what is presented and how. From my own point of view, which has nothing in common with anything the author says, these types of educational programs either overly-glorify aspects of cultural diversity or underwhelm the observer with watered down versions of cultural differences. From my own American perspective, educational programs teaching people about a holiday like Thanksgiving can be misleading. Books and displays make it look more festive than it really is and present history as if it is an important part of every American’s life. The truth is, most Americans can’t explain what Thanksgiving is supposed to be about let alone how it originated. Most people see it as a time to eat like pigs and care little about its intended meaning. Thanksgiving dinners with my family tend to be less than exciting and often not much different from other dinners we have together with the exception of what we eat. Likewise Mardi Gras, as celebrated in New Orleans, is a huge party where lots of people get blind drunk, but very few of them have any idea of what the celebration is actually about. But a survey of children’s literature on these holidays would give an entirely different picture. Community educational displays are also often weak and shallow without providing much in the way of experience or insight; they often come across as little more than scraps of information in a society already super-saturated in information and advertising. My whole point here is that attempts at teaching cultural and national traditions should be looked at with a critical eye since the people producing them mostly fail to give an accurate picture, usually little more than a small taste, of what they present. This applies to the educational representations of the Days Of the Dead just as much as to Thanksgiving and Mardi Gras.

There is little wonder that Chicano community leaders and their supporters raise questions about the authenticity of how the Days Of the Dead are promoted and celebrated in the United States. Brandes examines the whole spectrum from an activist group, at one extreme, that tries to create a Days Of the Dead celebration that is entirely composed of pre-colonial indigenous cultural motifs and from there to a working class neighborhood fiesta with music, dancers, theatrical performers, and vendors that seeks to build bridges between communities while fostering a positive image of Chicanos to those of other ethnicities. Beyond that is a Days Of the Dead art fair in the Mission District of San Francisco that is organized by a Korean woman and has displays that only marginally touch on the themes of the holiday. This is further complicated by the fact that the Mission District used to be a Mexican and Central American enclave that has since been gentrified and now is a predominantly Korean and Asian neighborhood. Brandes analyzes how each festival along this entire range generates its own controversies and disputes about representation and the Mexican-American identity in the USA. This is important as the Chicano community is growing and they need to establish some sense of identity in a sometimes hostile cultural environment where your average citizen knows nothing about Mexican culture aside from tacos, undocumented immigrants, and drug cartels along with whatever caricatures and cliches are found in popular culture.

Brandes finishes the book with a discussion on how the Days Of the Dead prove that Mexicans have a uniquely jocular attitude towards death. He contrasts Mexicans with other Western nationalities who he claims are more serious and less accepting of death. I have to say I disagree with him strongly on this. While I’m not qualified to speak on behalf of Mexican people, I can say that Americans are not any less casual about imagery representing skulls, grim reapers, ghosts, or other things we consider to be macabre. Horror movies are wildly popular as are haunted houses that are staples of carnivals and amusement parks, not to mention the ones that crop up at Halloween time. Jack o’lanters are ubiquitous in the Fall. Skulls are common on t-shirts, album covers, and tattoos. People tell jokes about death and it is a common subject for songs especially in the punk, goth, and metal genres. There was a musical trend in the 1950s called “death rock” in which teenage crooners sang about losing lovers in car wrecks. Death and murder as plot devices are ever-present in movies and TV shows. True crime is a popular genre in literature. And doesn’t he even know about the Grateful Dead? That cult band has done more to spread Days Of the Dead imagery around El Norteno since the 1960s than anybody else with their t-shirts and album covers. The list can go on forever. We see so many skulls and crossbones in America that it hardly even registers with us. Nobody is sad, disgusted, offended, or disturbed when somebody wears a Misfits t-shirt in public. We have a casual attitude towards death too; it just manifests in a different cultural style. Brandes isn’t the only anthropologist I know of who has made this erroneous claim about Mexico either. Leave it to the academics to be completely unaware of their own culture, the one they live in. I guess fish don’t comprehend the water they swim until they reach dry land.

While the conclusions aren’t infallible, Skulls To the Living Bread To the Dead provides a useful history and cultural analysis of Mexico’s most famous holiday. It forces us to question what cultural authenticity really is and also draws attention to socio-political issues embedded in representations of traditional practices. Stanley Brandes doesn’t come to any strong conclusions, but he thoroughly provides enough information to give the reader direction in how to think about Mexico and the Days Of the Dead.

 

Book Review: Chapel of Extreme Experience by John Geiger

Chapel of Extreme Experience:

A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine

by John Geiger

      If you’ve ever found yourself staring into the dancing flames of a campfire and suddenly realized time has slipped away and you’ve been entranced, you probably were in an altered state of consciousness without even realizing it. Further, if you’ve sat around a campfire with friends with the play of orange and yellow light alternating with shadows in irregular rhythms moving across their faces and the conversation has taken a turn towards more philosophical, speculative, spiritual, or introspective territories, you may wonder why these kinds of conversations flow more lucidly then they do when you are immersed in the mundane aspects of everyday life. There is something primal about the presence of flames, something that taps into the deepest layers of our being, relaxes us, and allows the contents of consciousness to flow freely into our waking minds. John Geiger, in Chapel of Extreme Experience, scientifically calls this phenomenon “flicker” and explains how its effects have been studied by scientists, induced with new technologies and drugs, and embraced by counter-culturalists and artists who turn to it for artistic inspiration and a deeper understanding of who we are and how we connect to the world we come from.

According to Geiger, flicker can be induced in a variety of ways. At its most basic level, a child experiences it when looking at a light and passing its spread out fingers back and forth in front of its eyes. Some epilectics experience something similar before going into seizures and schizophrenics may encounter it through audial or visual hallucinations. In modern times, film reels work through the use of flicker and the invention of the stroboscopic light brings on trance and hallucinatory conditions that extend for prolonged periods of time, making it possibly for psychiatrists to study its effects on brain activity. During his childhood, Brion Gysin, the largely overlooked mover and shaker of the counter cultures of the 1950s and 1960s, had the experience hallucinating when sitting in the back seat of a car that was driving under tree branches during an intensely sunny day. This experience led him to his interest in the Dream Machine, the central focus of this book.

Geiger starts off with a brief survey of scientific studies from the early 20^th century conducted in the field of neuropsychiatry and pharmacology. One major finding, and the one that preoccupies Geiger most, is that flicker induced through the use of strobe lights synchronizes and alters the rate of alpha waves in the brain. Alpha waves are associated with relaxation, dreaming, and fantasizing. The science he refers to is primitive by today’s standards and the hypotheses drawn are potentially suspect, but this isn’t irrelevant in the context of this book because Geiger’s purpose is to demonstrate the cultural impact that flicker has had over modern times.

This brings us to the Dream Machine, a device originally invented by Ian Sommerville, the boyfriend of Beat Generation, transgressive, and science-fiction author William S. Burroughs in the late 1950s. The Dream Machine is made by placing a bare light bulb on a turntable surrounded by a cylinder of cardboard with shapes cut into it. As it spins, the flicker causes trances and hallucinations. Brion Gysin became fascinated with it because it could cause an altered state of consciousness without the use of illegal drugs, without dangerous side effects, and without harmful after-effects. Since the Dream Machine works best with closed eyes because its effects are strongest when the flickering lights penetrate the translucent skin of the eyelids, Brion Gysin called it the only work of art you look at with your eyes closed.

Although anyone with minimal engineering skills can construct a Dream Machine, Gysin tried to market it as a psychedelic alternative to television. He was modestly successful as some big corporations liked the idea but eventually abandoned it for being too difficult to advertise. Geiger claims it posed too great of a risk to epilectics, but this explanation sounds hollow. A simple warning label on the package could easily have dealt with that problem. My own theory is that it didn’t catch on because it requires active engagement from the user. Television is an entirely passive medium that requires absolute submission on the part of the viewer who sinks into a dream-like state and absorbs whatever content is fed to them. You can consciously choose to think about what you watch, but few people are motivated enough to do so. The Dream Machine, on the other hand, requires attention and interaction from its users, demanding a kind of self-awareness and observation of one’s own subjectivity to be of any value. Most people are just too shallow and lazy to derive any benefit from the experience (see Marshall McLuhan on the difference between hot and cold media).

While Gysin failed to bring the Dream Machine into the living rooms of mainstream America, he influenced culture in other ways. John Geiger explores his dalliances with the Beat Generation and the hippies when owning the Beat Hotel in the Left Bank of Paris and the 1001 Nights restaurant in Tangier, Morocco where he liaised with the Rolling Stones and introduced Brian Jones to the tribal mountain musicians who he recorded as The Master Musicians of Jajouka. He explored hallucinogenic drug use with William Burroughs and Timothy Leary after having met with Aldous Huxley to discuss his experiences with mescaline. Gysin’s art never received widespread acclaim among critics although his attempts at incorporating elements of flicker in his paintings of Arabic calligraphy and Moroccan market scenes inspired the Op Art movement and other postmodernists. He was associated with some of the most famous counter-cultural figures and late 20^th century artists, film makers, and musicians so his influence is largely felt yet also largely unacknowledged.

Towards the end of this short tour around technology, art, culture, and psychotropic drugs Geiger returns to the scientific study of flicker in our hyper-technological age. He dips into the realms of parapsychology, telepathy, and other pseudoscientific muck that I tend to avoid. Make of that what you will.

John Geiger’s Chapel of Extreme Experience amounts to being more of an homage to the intersection between technology, psychedelic drugs, culture, and art than a treatise that makes a definite statement. Taken that way, it’s a brief and interesting read. It does, however, show how Brion Gysin acted as a connecting thread through all of those fields, a pioneering psychonaut and maybe even the Godfather of Psychedelia. Maybe he will remain an unsung genius destined for obscurity because he was too authentic for the human species which seems to be passively stagnating in the fake realities imposed on them by digital technology. This is an obscure book probably destined for further obscurity and of most interest for future book collectors more than anyone else.

 

Book Review & Analysis: His Name Was Death by Rafael Bernal

His Name Was Death

by Rafael Bernal

      Don’t make the mosquitoes angry. Actually it’s probably too late. Mosquitoes worldwide think the human race is inferior to them and we don’t amount to much more than a food source for this insect we consider to be a pest. In fact the mosquito population has a plan to enslave humanity to make food production more efficient for them. There is only one small problem; without a common language between people and these flying bugs, their plan is impossible to carry out. This is the natural dilemma posed by Mexican author Rafael Bernal in his quasi-science fiction novella His Name Was Death.

Actually, the mosquitoes are only half the story. In the center of it all is a man without a name. He wants to be an author so all of humanity can praise his genius, but they reject his works and he descends into a nightmare of alcoholism, homelessness, and humiliation. After getting fed up with the human race, he heads out into the jungle in southern Chiapas, Mexico where he encounters two villages of Lacandon people, a sub-branch of the Mayan Indians. He kicks his drinking habit and the Lacandon people take a liking to him. They give him the name Wise Owl. They convince him to become a shaman and then, while listening to the buzzing of mosquitoes in his hut, he notices patterns to their sounds. Wise Owl records these sounds as musical notations in a notebook and begins imitating them using a wooden flute. Eventually he learns to communicate with the mosquitoes.

Meanwhile, Wise Owl gets chosen to be the chieftain of the Lacandon people because he convinces the mosquitoes to leave them alone. At this point his intentions are beneficient. He commands the two villages to stop fighting and unite into one. When they are reluctant to follow his orders, he directs the mosquitoes to harass them until the villagers agree to obey. Otherwise Wise Owl leaves the Lacandons free to do as they please.

Wise Owl signifies colonialism in New Spain. Like Wise Owl, the Spanish kingdom was in turmoil when the conquistadors arrived in the Americas. Unannounced and unnamed, they landed and the native Toltecs and Aztecs welcomed them, believing them to be the prophesied arrival of the sun god Quetzalcoatl. After Wise Owl appears out of nowhere and becomes leader of the Lacandons, they designate him as Kukulman which is the Mayan name for Quetzalcoatl.

But the mosquitoes are not simply passive subjects to Wise Owl, the pretender to the throne of his own invented Mexican kingdom. As Wise Owl communicates with them, he learns about the structure of their society. It is a rigidly hierarchical society led by an unknown mosquito king and ruled by a governing council supported by an intellectual class and a military. At the bottom of the hierarchy is a class of slaves. The mosquitoes claim to be more advanced on the evolutionary scale than humans and they are furious because people have polluted the waters and deforested most of the Earth. Their plan is to eliminate most of humanity and breed what remains as a food supply, a lot like how humans breed cattle and other farm animals. Since Wise Owl is the only person who can communicate with them, they offer him unlimited power over humanity if he acts as their spokesperson. And that offer is too good for him to refuse.

This novella was written in 1946, so it is possible that Bernal intended the mosquitoes to be a representation of the fascist state of Nazi Germany, though you could easily insert any totalitarian system into that metaphorical slot. Their ideology, rigid political hierarchy, and conspiracy to dominate the world certainly resonate with the trappings of fascism the world was familiar with at the end of World War II. The mosquitoes are a strong counterpoint to the Lacandons in the story and by placing Wise Owl in the center of the two, a connection can be made between the project of colonialism in New Spain and the fascist political movements of modern Europe.

While Wise Owl pursues grandiose fantasies of domination, just like Hitler, a third element enters into the story. A team of anthropologists arrive along with a company of loggers representing the encroachment of modern science and education into the world of the colonized while profiteering modern industry disrupts the natural environment that the colonial subjects depend.

The loggers are one weakness in the story. After introducing them, Bernal does not have them do anything. He misses an opportunity to further explore the conflict between modernism and environmental destruction, a major point of contention for both the Lacandon and the mosquitoes.

In any case, the anthropologists are led by a professor named Wassell. Accompanying him are his secretary Ms. Johnes and an ehtno-musicologist named Godinez. Ms. Johnes and Godinez are engaged to be married although Wassell wants her for himself. This love triangle proves to be their undoing.

Wise Owl tells them of his ability to communicate with the mosquitoes. They think he is insane, but Ms. Johnes finds him interesting nonetheless. He appears to be a benevolent eccentric who has tricked the Lacandons into thinking he is a god which is ironically only partially true because he didn’t make any attempt to take over their villages; they thrust him into that position and he just accepted it.

In fact, as a reader you may wonder if Wise Owl’s pact with the insects is merely symbolic or hallucinatory until the scientists refuse to believe his story about the mosquitoes conquering the world. Wise Owl convinces the mosquitoes to eliminate the competition for Ms. Johnes since he has also started having feelings for her. Even after proving that he can command the mosquitoes to kill for him, they still refuse to believe Wise Owl is sane and end up paying the ultimate price for their disbelief. However, their disbelief is also the undoing of the mosquitoes’ plan for world domination since if no one believes Wise Owl, their plot amounts to nothing. Through this complex of events and ideas, Bernal informs us that one weapon in the fight against fascism is to simply disbelieve that the authoritarian ruler has a right to their authority. The authoritarian’s power is diminished when people refuse to acknowledge their superiority. A king is only a king because people define him as such and not because there is anything in his nature to make him superior.

Finally, Wise Owl has a moral awakening when he sees Ms. Johnes suffering after the death of Godezin. He decides to sabotage the mosquitoes’ conspiracy by secretly meeting with the mosquito slaves. He uses religion and belief in God to convince them to rebel against their masters in order to set themselves free. But it all goes horribly wrong. This is one of the worst parts of the book because there is so little description of the battle. Bernal could have taken a cue from Henry David Thoureau who described a fight between ants in such minute and vivid language in Walden. Bernal’s lack of visual input makes the narrative fall off a cliff.

Where does all this lead? Recall the title. Just like Jim Morrison sang, “no one here gets out alive.” No one, that is, except for the worst of the mosquitoes and some of the Lacandons. Wise Owl accomplishes nothing but destroying almost everything he touches.

Bernal’s novella raises a range of interesting topics. One is the psychology of tyranny in the person of Wise Owl. He is a loser at the bottom of society so he pursues power in order to be at the top of society for compensation. Bernal is saying that there is an internal weakness and insecurity that motivates people to seek out positions of strength. Another theme is that of our place in the universe. The mosquitoes are a reflection of humanity even though we might be inclined to think of them as evil for plotting to conquer the world and farm humans as a food source. But how can they be evil when their goal is to do what humanity has done? What makes it wrong for them to do what is right for us? We look at mosquitoes and see nothing more than a pest that carries diseases like malaria. Yet we never stop to consider that we carry diseases that harm nature and we could very well be considered a pest by the vast majority of nature’s inhabitants. And maybe we aren’t justified in hating the mosquitoes for conspiring to kill most of humanity when we have been attempting to exterminate the mosquito population ever since pesticides were invented. We haven’t even been clever enough to succeed. Maybe we aren’t any better than them after all and if so, what does that say about our place in the natural world? Do we even have a metric of judgment that takes nature from nature’s point of view into consideration? Maybe such short-sightedness is a weakness on our part, one that could do us irreparable harm in the end. Finally, the story poses the question of what ethical responsibility supposedly advanced people have in our treatment of supposedly inferior indigenous people. Bernal doesn’t propose an answer to that question in this story, but the theme hangs heavy over the whole book.

His Name Was Death is jam-packed with a lot of complex ideas. Despite being a quick and easy read, it is the kind of story you have to analyze long after you finish reading it to flesh out everything it has to offer. It has a few clunky parts in the writing, but the wealth of ideas and their presentation override any of its imperfections. It should make you uncomfortable in subtle ways if you give it the time to allow its philosophical implications to sink in. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: Falling Angel by William Hortsberg

Falling Angel

by William Hjortsberg

It’s midtown Manhattan, 1959. A private eye is called to a meeting with an elegant and mysterious man to search for a singer who disappeared after returning from World War II. The detective’s name is Harry Angel, the man who hires him is Louis Cypre, and the missing musician is Johnny Favorite. The names themselves should give you enough to think about. While William Hjorstberg’s Falling Angel is written with the elements of a neo-noir thriller, the underlying theme is that of a search for a lost identity...maybe. Possibly it is more of a search to lose an identity.

The literary trick that Hjorstberg plays is to give away the solution to the mystery at the beginning of the story. The discerning reader should have no trouble figuring out that Louis Cyphre is Lucifer, otherwise known as Satan. Harry the Falling Angel is an all too obvious reference to Satan, the falling angel in Milton’s Paradise Lost (that epic poem that foreshadows almost every literary theme that has been explored since the 18^th century). Johnny Favorite references Milton too since Satan was God’s favorite angel before he got kicked out of paradise for not staying in his place and trying to usurp the throne of God. Combining the names “Favorite” and “Angel” should provide a huge clue as to where this mystery is headed. So should the fact that Johnny Favorite fought in Algeria during World War II, received a facial injury that required plastic surgery when he returned, was committed to an asylum, and then was taken away. Harry Angel also fought in Algeria during World War II and had plastic surgery to repair his nose. There are further clues all throughout the book indicating the relationship between the two.

Angel’s whereabouts after returning from the war are barely mentioned. Cyphre sets him the task of finding out what happened to Johnny Favorite after he was taken from the asylum. The surface mystery of the plot is solved for any reader who can put two and two together. That is deliberate. Hjorstberg wants that part to be obvious because Harry Angel’s investigation is about a deeper issue.

Angel’s hunt for Johnny Favorite starts as standard noir detective work. Each character he encounters gives him a new piece of the puzzle and the people he encounters become more colorful as he goes along. He starts by questioning the morphine addicted doctor at the asylum where Johnny Favorite lived. Then he meets with a pianist in a blues band that once played in Favorite’s band before the war. This leads Angel to an Obeah cult led by the manbo Epiphany Proudfoot, the light-skinned daughter of Evangeline Proudfoot who was Johnny Favorite’s Afro-Caribbean lover. Epiphany’s light skin is of major importance. Figure it out for yourself.

On the caucasian side of town, Angel pays a visit to Margaret Krusemark, the one time fiancee of Johnny Favorite. Margaret is an astrologer and practitioner of black magic. She is also a key character in understanding why Favorite was taken from the asylum and what happened after he left. Just as important is Margaret’s father, Ethan Krusemark, who is the CEO of a maritime shipping company with an office on the top floor of the Chrysler Building.

The characters who provide Angel with the most information about Johnny Favorite all get murdered in brutal ways. Note that none of them recognize Harry Angel when they meet him even though, knowing the secret of his identity, they probably should. Other people that Harry Angel questions are mostly musicians who played with Favorite before the war. As minor characters, they have less to say and likewise end up surviving.

Harry Angel’s detective methods are creepy but standard for noir fiction. He impersonates people, he lies, he breaks into homes and offices, and he spies on people by watching them through windows or eavesdropping. He also shows up, secretly and uninvited at an Obeah ceremony and a black mass a la J.K. Huysmans’s La Bas. Is he just a curious voyeur or is he unwittingly being summoned by the cultists? Harry Angel also spends a lot of time in the lower sections of New York, going to bars, visiting Coney Island in the off season to talk to carnies and sideshow freaks, patronizes Epiphany Proudfoot’s herb shop in Harlem, and watching Louis Cyphre perform a magic show at the legendary Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus on 42^nd Street (the space is now occupied by Madame Tussaud’s wax museum). It’s almost surprising that Herman Slater’s Magickal Childe book store is never mentioned, though I suppose it didn’t exist in 1959 when the novel is set. These dwellings contrast starkly with Angel’s luncheon with Cyphre at an upscale French restaurant and Ethan Krusemark’s corporate office at the top of the Chrysler Building. Remember the title is Falling Angel in reference to Satan’s fall from paradise. Also don’t forget that Milton portrayed Satan as a sympathetic character in Paradise Lost.

On a side note, there is a subtle anti-racism theme in that Harry Angel mixes freely and comfortably with the African-American characters who are also portrayed almost entirely in a positive light. The police following Harry Angel are also bigots in an ugly way and are just as offended by Angel’s sexual affair with the mulatta Epiphany Proudfoot as they are with the homicides they investigate. And Louis Cyphre gives a sermon to an all-Black congregation of Pentacostals while Harry Angel sits unnoticed in the audience.

If Harry Angel is searching for Johnny Favorite he is also searching for the identity of Louis Cyphre. The surface connection of “Louis Cyphre” and “Lucifer” may be obvious from the start, in fact so obvious that’s it’s hard to understand why Harry Angel never makes the connection, but a deeper semiotic unpacking of the name reveals more. In cryptography, the word “cyphre” or “cipher” means a key that unlocks a code. It translates a scrambled coded language into a decoded language that is understandable, hence the word “decipher”. So understanding Louis Cyphre’s identity and the role he plays in Angel’s life reveals what the dilemma is all about. Looking deeper into the name, “cyphre” is a French word derived from the Arabic al-sifr. In old Arabic, this word means “emptiness” or “nothingness”. Note that when Cyphre addresses the Pentacostal congregation he appears under the name Al-Sifr while wearing an Arabic style turban. When applied to a person, a cipher can also be an unimportant person or a person of no consequence, a persona non grata. Yet Louis Cyphre seems to be the deus ex machina, the puppet master, of the whole story. So what does it mean if the puppet master is a nobody? Hjorstberg appears to be telling us that Louis Cyphre isn’t real; in other words, he is an imaginary projection of Harry Angel’s darker motivations. Harry Angel, in his inner struggle of good against evil, believes Cyphre is killing the associates of Johnny Favorite and arranging circumstances to implicate him. But if Cyphre doesn’t exist, it must be Angel doing the killing and tricking himself into thinking he is innocent by displacing the crimes onto an imaginary antagonist. Or maybe Harry Angel actually knows what murders he is committing and Louis Cyphre is a symbol of his sadistic impulses he is unable to control.

So if Johnny Favorite became Harry Angel after the war, as Ethan Krusemark explains, and Louis Cyphre is a disassociated projection of Angel’s evil urges, what exactly is Harry Angel searching for? He probably isn’t searching for anything but an escape route from his past. Johnny Favorite sold his soul to the Devil for fame and success then he thought he could trick the Devil by transferring his soul into the body of Harry Angel. He succeeded to the point where the people who know the most about him are unable to recognize his current form as Harry Angel. So Angel has to murder them to erase any last traces of memory attached to Johnny Favorite. But Angel can’t escape from Louis Cyphre because Cyphre is an aspect of himself. But if this interpretation is wrong and Cyphre literally is Satan, where does that leave Harry Angel? The hapless detective is little more than a marionette being manipulated by Cyphre to do the Devil’s work without realizing it. But in any case, Harry Angel is a man trying to leave his past behind. At the age of 39, he is entering into a midlife identity crisis while trying to come to terms with his past by eliminating anybody he was connected to in a meaningful way. In this endeavor, he fails. Once you’ve sold your soul there is no escape. Maybe there is no cure for evil. Maybe Harry Angel is an embodiment of Satan himself. Maybe he has too much pride to repent.

How can we be sure any interpretation is correct? We can’t. William Hjortsberg has given us what I call a Devil’s Ending. When the first and second layers of the mystery are solved, we are left with a deeper mystery that can’t be resolved. The deeper certainty is in territory that is too murky and so far beyond our grasp that we can only shoot in the dark when trying to solve it. You can twist your mind into knots trying to make sense of it all, but there can never be any closure. The Devil’s Ending is a good literary device that, when used effectively, makes a book stay with you long after you finish reading it simply because it leaves some questions open ended.

Speaking of writing style, this novel evokes the sensations of Art Deco in its use of language and story telling. Without a doubt, New York is the greatest city for Art Deco architecture in the world. Art Deco has smooth and shiny surfaces, sharp lines, bold curvatures, and planes of flatness that are layered to create the illusion of depth. It draws you in by suggesting the presence of something hidden beneath the surface. It uses occult motifs borrowed from astrology and Pagan pantheons. It is a style that reaches back to the ancient statuary of Babylon and the angularity of Egyptian hieroglyphics while maintaining the slick appearance of an eternal modernity. The author tells this story in a way that reflects this Art Deco attitude. It is hard to explain why, but his sentences are short, sharp, simple, and direct. The plot flows smoothly like steely water, turning sharp corners, rounding bends, and moving in and out of layered facades. And those surfaces are turning grimy from all the exhaust and smog coming from heavy traffic. All of this is like a chrome plated urban environment, a setting for living, breathing human beings of flesh and blood. William Hjorstberg really captures a slice of New York City’s soul in both the style and substance of this novel.

Enough can’t be said about all the clever details in Falling Angel. It is also impossible to ignore that it is just plain fun to read. It will probably be worth reading again. But that all depends on how long the Devil lets me live. That shouldn’t be a big problem though since I’m certainly not an angel, falling or otherwise.

 

Book Review: The Mexican Revolution 1910-1940 by Michael J. Gonzalez

The Mexican Revolution 1910-1940

by Michael J. Gonzalez

      Tons of books have been written about the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. They vary widely in length, attention to detail, attitudes towards the people involved, and political bias in general. They also contradict each other depending on what information the authors had access to. Content can be confusing as well since different leaders and factions of the Revolution changed allegiances and sometimes fought with those they previously supported. And from the top political leaders to the military commanders to the common rank and file soldiers, there is an extremely wide range of reasoning for joining in the battles. Whether it was even one revolution or a series of loosely related rebellions and counter-rebellions is still an open question. In short, learning about the Mexican Revolution can be a mind-boggling task. Some places are better than others to start. Michael J. Gonzalez’s The Mexican Revolution 1910-1940 is one of the better entry points into this vast and overwhelming period of Latin American history.

As a historical text, this one reaches back into the 19^th century, charting the rise of Porfirio Diaz. He can largely be credited with ushering Mexico into the modern age by introducing industrial technology into the country and embracing liberal, big business economic policy. While this benefited the wealthy class most, it also left the majority of Mexicans behind in poverty. The hacienda system of economic organization also disinherited some agriculturalists from their holdings. American businessmen and multinational corporations, especially oil companies, were given almost free access to Mexico’s natural resources. None of this benefited the Mexican people except for the well-connected oligarchs and technocrats. It is the old story of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Porfirio Diaz became more autocratic and dictatorial while the rest of the country went into economic decline.

A pro-democracy movement started with the Portuguese aristocrat Francisco I. Madero. The initial battles of the revolution started when the peasantry joined forces with members of the middle and upper classes to overthrow the Diaz regime. This inspired land reform movements led by Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. After Madero’s assassination, the Huerta counter-revolutionary presidency took over. It was short lived and after the revolutionary conference of Aguascalientes, another landowner named Venustiano Carranza took office and established a new Mexican constitution. As the warfare wore down, leaders like Obregon, Calles, and Cardenas institutionalized the ideals of the Mexican Revolution although the Zapatista ideal of land reform that received so much support from the rural peasantry fell by the wayside. Mexico’s ruling party, the PRI, was established but, unfortunately sold out by becoming more autocratic and corrupt, allowing foreign corporations to access their resources once again though to the chagrin of the American empire, the PRI nationalized the oil fields. They continued making noises about pushing Mexico towards the status of a first world nation, but forward movement progressed only in bits and pieces. The PRI betrayed some of the dreams of the Mexican Revolution, but not all of them. The realization of that dream is yet to come.

Gonzalez’s analysis of the years following the end of revolutionary combat operations is one of this book’s strong points. A lot of books on this subject end with the political ascendancy of Obregon. It’s as if the forces set in motion by the revolution just abruptly stopped in 1920 according to many accounts. Of course, any student of history will tell you that isn’t a realistic way of looking at political upheavals. Otherwise this book is mostly a top down view of the Mexican Revolution meanng the emphasis is placed on politics at the governmental level. While the activism and leadership of Villa and Zapata are readily acknowledged, they take a back seat to what went on at the federal level. Villa’s stint as governor of Chihuahua is never even mentioned. Details of different battles are almost entirely left out and biographical information about key figures in the revolution is absent too. This book really just documents and summarizes the high points of the movement according to Gonzalez’s viewpoint. He does this in a way that is accessible, clear, and engaging though.

The Mexican Revolution 1910-1940 serves as an easy introduction to this pivotal conflict in Mexico’s modern history. It draws you in and prepares you for further reading from more in depth sources. It can also be of interest for those who already know about the Mexican Revolution and who the major figures were. It can clarify the intricate mess that more complete studies make it out to be. It can also be a good recap or refresher if you’ve previously read about it and want to get back into the subject matter after some time has passed. Michael J. Gonzalez has written a good functional book that doesn’t exhaust the subject matter but does prime you for more. The Mexican Revolution is a significant event in the formation of the Mexican national identity and understanding what went on will help you understand the roots of contemporary Mexico and their relations with the rest of the world, especially with the United States. This book is a good place to start. 

 

Book Review: Blood In the Soil by Carol Townsend

Blood In the Soil:

A True Tale of Racism, Sex, and Murder In the South

by Carol Townsend

Who could possibly be a bigger creep than Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine? The guy who tried to assassinate him, that’s who. Carol Townsend’s Blood In the Soil tells the tale of the man who attempted to murder the world’s most famous pornographer. It’s not a happy story.

Not surprisingly, Joseph Franklin had a miserable childhood. He grew up iimpoverished in Alabama. His parents were cruel and he had no friends. He dropped out of high school and turned to religion to find meaning and connection to a community. Up to a point, our basic capacity for sympathy kicks in and we can feel pity for him considering how terrible his upbringing was. But then we learn that he felt deeply hostile to the rise of integration, especially when it came to interracial dating. His search for community led him to join the Ku Klux Klan. You still might have an ounce of sympathy for him, thinking that because of his circumstances he was misguided and took a wrong turn in life. But it only gets worse from there. He regarded the Klan as little more than a fraternal drinking club and what he wanted was something on a more revolutionary scale. He decided to go on a terrorism and killing spree in order to spark a race war.

Franklin had a habit of frequenting newsstands and poring over their racks of pornographic magazines without paying for them, of course. He had a particular interest in Hustler but what he saw one day enraged him. Larry Flynt had published a pictorial of a naked African American man with a naked white woman, something that infuriated Franklin to the point of stealing a Ruger .44 semiautomatic rifle he would later use in an attempt on Larry Flynt’s life. Franklin claimed the pictorial layout was degrading to white women, but that is an odd opinion to have since he was highly abusive to the women in his life.

Flynt was in the town of Lawrenceville, Georgia on trial for obscenity. While he and his lawyer were walking from a restaurant to the courthouse, Franklin opened fire on them, nearly killing both. Flynt’s body was nearly ripped in half from the bullets and his spinal chord was almost severed. He managed to survive though and a good portion of this book gives details on the pain and suffering he went through after the attack. Larry Flynt’s biography is weird enough to merit its own book.

Franklin, meanwhile, went on a crime spree that included bombing synagogues, armed robberies, and shootings that mostly involved interracial couples. Overall, he is known to have killed 22 people. While his attempt on Flynt’s life takes up most of the oxygen in the room, it is important to remember the humanity of Franklin’s other victims, none of which were pornographers whose only crimes were having the wrong skin color and socializing with white people. They may be forgotten now, but remember they were the types of people who we have as friends, colleagues, neighbors, and family members.

The story shifts between Carol Townsend’s narrative and testimony from the detective Michael Cowart who solved the case of Larry Flynt’s attempted assassination. Cowart spent time meeting with Joseph Franklin in to get an official confession from him. A lot of what we know about Franklin’s personality comes from Cowart’s interactions with him. Their meetings took place in a maximum security prison after Franklin had been incarcerated for other crimes. He was never charged or brought to trial for the assassination attempt because he was already on death row for a synagogue bombing.

Townsend never takes a deep dive into the mind of Joseph Franklin. Her explanations are predictable. His rotten childhood made him the monster he became. He was a psychopath. He never got the opportunities he needed, so on and so forth. These are generic explanations you get from any true crime book. There are lots of people who are born into similar circumstances who don’t become terrorists and serial killers so it would be useful to know what set Franklin apart from those others. Even worse, she tries to blame his pathological hatred on the racist history of the South by saying the soil is saturated with racism because of slavery and the Native American genocide. It’s as if the racism just radiated upwards into the Southern white community by osmosis and animated them to commit hate crimes against ethnic minorities. The problem with this is that racism exists wherever humans exist. All nations have been built on a foundation of conquest, bloodshed, and genocide so there isn’t any excuse for the American Southeast to stand out in regard to every other piece of land on planet Earth. Besides, saying that Joseph Franklin is a conduit for racist violence that preceded his existence is just a kind of way to provide an easy explanation where there isn’t one.

There is an interesting pattern to notice though. Many of the people Franklin shot were in pairs. Most of them were either interracial couples or pairs of friends. One involved a pair of African American men who were jogging together. Franklin was a loner who failed to make social connections with others, so there may be an element of jealousy in his murders. Since synagogues are also places of community, it is possible that the bombings of the Jewish temples grew out of resentment since he failed to find the type of religious congregation that suited his needs. Loneliness, isolation, and living without love and affection are fundamentally existential problems for individual humans.

Townsend starts this book by waxing poetic as if she wants to reiterate Truman Capote’s finely crafted true crime novel In Cold Blood. But her language is cliché and more purple prose than poetry so thankfully she drops the literary pretentions a short ways into the story and finishes with straightforward writing. For the most part, this is written like standard true crime fare.

Blood In the Soil is a gritty and depressing read about a man who possibly was little more than pure evil. Even before being executed, Joseph Franklin was given a chance to redeem himself, but his apologies were little more than an act. And Larry Flynt spent the rest of his life living as a millionaire pornographer in a gold-plated wheelchair paralyzed from the waist down. We’re left with the impression that our planet is a Hell that we often make worse through our own actions. 

 

Book Review - Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask by Nick Henck

Subcommander Marcos:

The Man and the Mask

by Nick Henck

It was the night of New Year’s Eve, 1994 in San Cristobal de las Casas, a small city in the Mexican state of Chiapas. An army of guerilla warriors blocked off all roads to the city and seized the town square. Their spokesman emerged, wearing a green army uniform and a black ski mask. He smoked a pipe. He called himself Subcomandante Marcos and his image would soon spread around the world. Marcos’s army was called the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional or the EZLN, though they commonly came to known as the Zapatistas. Since it was the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, Subcomandante Marcos declared this to be an uprising against the establishment, one that would put the rights of Mexico’s Indios in the spotlight in a bid for higher living standards and greater political autonomy. Nick Henck’s Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask gives a comprehensive history of the EZLN movement and the most in depth biography of its leader to this day.

After the uprising in 1994, and a few years into the 2000s, Subcomandante Marcos’s identity remained a mystery even though his image and message spread rapidly around the world due to media coverage. Nick Henck did a bit of digging around to find out who he was and where he came from. The first third of the book gives as much biographical information as he could find. Marcos’s true identity was that of Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente. He came from a middle class background, got a college education at a liberal arts university, worked as a philosophy professor at another university, and got drawn into left wing politics. Initially he was a Marxist and joined a radical activist organization called the FLN. Their plan was to overthrow the Mexican government and establish a new socialist state. This section on the early life and radicalization of Marcos wears a little thin at times. The author gets sidetracked into some long discussions about the political climate of Mexico and its history that don’t help to clarify or add much to the overall story of Marcos and the EZLN. The narrative picks up again in the second section.

By the mid-1980s, Marcos had had enough of revolutionary theory and decided he wanted action. The FLN assigned him to the jungle highlands of Chiapas to prepare for guerilla warfare. He attracted a loyal army of Mayan Indios and landless agricultural workers. Marcos learned to speak their language, lived according to their lifestyle, and ate only the food that they ate. Critics of Marcos have accused him of exploiting the Indios and luring them into a political conflict they otherwise would not have engaged in. His supporters have countered this accusation by pointing out that he completely integrated into their society and became one of them. He still lives a humble existence with the Mayan people to this day. In any case, he spent ten years preparing the EZLN army for the uprising of 1994.

One interesting problem Marcos encountered along the way was related to the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of communism. Marcos had been teaching Marxist and Maoist political theory to his followers for some time when the Iron Curtain came down and suddenly the politics of the Left looked irrelevant. The FLN realized they had to change their message or else they would never be taken seriously so Marcos eventually phased out the Marxist jargon and began emphasizing the need for stronger representation of Indigenous people in the Mexican government. He came to advocate for the Mayan people to have their own semi-autonomous government, acting as a sub-nation within the nation of Mexico.

The third section of the book explains what happened after the initial uprising of 1994. After some minor skirmishes that resulted in a small number of Zapatista deaths, Marcos realized his guerilla army was outgunned. The uprising caught the media’s attention and he seized on the opportunity to bring the cause to the public. The Mexican middle classes came out in strong support for the Zapatistas and as long as they stayed in the eye of the press, the EZLN maintained their support. Subcomandante Marcos also pioneered the use of the internet as a tool of revolution. He reached a worldwide audience by writing communiques that were witty, imaginative, and a bit fantastical. Some of his supporters even claim they had valid literary merit though only time will tell if that is true. Pro-Zapatista activist groups sprung up on every continent and suddenly the subject of post-colonialism and the rights of Indigenous people around the world filtered into a new Leftist reorientation, carrying over into the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 2000 and Occupy Wall Street a few years later.

Subcomandante Marcos was winning a war of wits with the Mexican government. This probably was aided by the widespread opposition to Mexico’s PRI party that had been ruling the country since the 1930s. With minimal violence, a high profile media campaign, massive street demonstrations and conferences of varying success, the Zapatistas managed to establish their own alternative government based on traditional Mayan principles in Chiapas and also got their cause brought up in a Mexican congressional hearing. Finally they succeeded in striking a deal with the government that was beneficial to the Indios of Mexico. In the end, Marcos hed led a semi-successful political movement with minimal bloodshed. Subcomandante Marcos has since remained reclusive, living with his people in the highlands of Chiapas. He remains a mysterious figure and actually sounds like a pretty decent guy. One thing you can say after reading this biography is that he was authentic and sincere.

There isn’t much to critisize in this book. There are some slow parts in the beginning that border on irrelevancy, but everything else is clearly written and sufficiently explained. There are some missing pieces that could have been included though. A brief description of Mayan culture would have enhanced the context and a little more description of the jungles and mountains would give it an added depth. It would also be helpful to hear more from the Mayan people themselves about the EZLN; it would be interesting to hear what they thought of the outsider Marcos considering he was a middle class mestizo who came to them from Mexico City. Although it is beyond the scope of this book, it would also be interesting to learn about the long term effects of the EZLN uprising and whether or not it continues to make a difference in the lives of Mexico’s Indigenous people.

This is the best book about Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatistas, and the January 1, 1994 uprising I know of so far. It’s also inspirational. Marcos spent a decade preparing for a guerilla war. Once it started he realized that bloodshed would lead to nothing but mass suicide for his followers. He was quick-witted and pragmatic enough to see how he could influence public opinion without having to resort to further violence. More than ten years after the initial siege of San Cristobal de las Casas, the EZLN were able to get something they wanted. Patience, adaptability, and communication were their greatest allies. They proved that change doesn’t have to be immediate or even grandiose. There is a lot for future activists to learn here. The fact that this political movement happened fairly recently in Mexico makes it all that much more interesting.