Under the Banner of Heaven (miniseries)

Gil Birmingham & Andrew Garfield
"Under the Banner of Heaven"
(FX, 2022)

It’s that second day after a major procedure, when you can feel the worst. That’s where I am right now. Tried to sleep sitting up, tried to sleep lying on my chest. Around four in the morning I curled up on my side with my head twisted to the right and I was finally able to get a couple hours rest.

Meantime, I have been burning through the FX miniseries, Under the Banner of Heaven, Based on the true crime novel by Jon Krakauer.

My father first shared Krakauer with me. The summer my wife and I got married, I read Into Thin Air, his account of the 1996 Chomolungma (Everest) Disaster, while sitting on my porch in 90° weather, and it literally made me chilly. On our honeymoon, she was reading Into the Wild on the patio of a hotel room at Denali, not even 20 miles from where Christopher McCandless died.

Under the Banner of Heaven begins with a double murder which just happened to take place thirty-eight years ago today, July 24, 1984. A pious young woman and her child were killed by men who felt their actions were justified by God. Victim and assailants thought of themselves as Mormon, but had different ideas of what that meant. But women dying at the hands of men in a quest for dominance is universal, and not unique to any one belief system.

I haven’t read the book this series is based on. Father did, an amateur historian and devout Christian. I can only imagine how he may have judged each of the individuals represented in the book, those who are members of the Mormon faith.

I feel however, that this miniseries adaptation, like the musical The Book of Mormon, is not a critique or condemnation of this one Christian religion, but of all religion. In this case, it is also a metaphor for the United States as a whole. Watching this show, which follows the murder investigation and also depicts the historical origins of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I believe that the Mormon church is possibly the most American thing ever created.

I believe that Americans are essentially good, and that the American experiment has allowed us the freedom to live independently from strictures of the past. But it has also allowed for a minority of white men to pursue paths of complete selfishness which they defend through a mutating set of beliefs which they call righteous but are always a means to whatever end they desire.

So it is with the LDS, and also the Supreme Court.

Heavenly Father wants us to do this is a common phrase throughout the series, and it is as mutable as the assertion Founding Fathers want us to do this. Interpreting and perverting their unknowable wills has become its own religion.

Play a Day: The Crown Forum

Craig Ester

For Tuesday, I read The Crown Forum by Craig Ester and posted at New Play Exchange.

“Everybody’s so worried about being ashamed that they don’t get better.” Facts.

Ester pens a familiar yet fresh family drama, the young PK saddled with the weight of his father’s legacy and haunted by his own lack of faith. Often in these narratives, doing the right thing takes precedent over being true to yourself. In this case, however, Ester’s characters possess a true and honest affection, and a refreshing impatience with bullshit. The reconciliation provides satisfaction, and the world moves forward.

“You can’t tell somebody you love them and then disappear when that love requires action.”

Who should I read tomorrow?

The Sparrow (book)

Driving to work I saw a woman at the bus stop wearing a sweatshirt reading, “Bad Choices Make Good Stories.” Mary Doria Russell’s acclaimed novel, The Sparrow (1996) tells the story of a man with the best of intentions who paves his own road to hell.

Sandoz

When radio signals are found to be emanating from the Alpha Centauri system, the Society of Jesuits send a team to explore this “new world.” As always happens when civilizations meet, mistakes are made.

Our protagonist is Emilio Sandoz, a priest and the expedition linguist. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Sandoz had a rough upbringing and through the intervention of the Church was one of the few in his family to escape a cycle of destitution and crime.

When the expedition reaches the source of the transmissions, the planet Rakhat, the once skeptical Sandoz comes to believe that God has indeed chosen him to first meet the natives of this planet and to unite His children.

Tragic misunderstandings follow and Sandoz eventually returns to earth; tortured, maimed, near death and in despair. He is torn between the belief that either there is no God, or that God exists and and that He is (as Jeb Bartlet would put it) a feckless thug.

Russell

The Sparrow was Russell’s first novel. The year 1992 was the quadricentennial of the arrival of Columbus in the Americas. An anthropologist, she was unconvinced by all those who speculated that if the early settlers from Europe had only not been so ignorant, the Western experiment may have gone much less tragically -- that is was a mistake we would never make again.

The book was summer reading for me in 2001. My wife and I were taking a vacation in Britain. The trip was last-minute, we hadn’t intended to travel anywhere that summer. We intended to have a newborn child. Deus vult.

That fall I saw Russell speak at Wooster College. She said one of her inspirations was the tale of one who lost his wife in a traffic accident. He’d fallen asleep at the wheel and the passenger side of his car was sheared off by a truck. His wife was killed, he was barely touched.

It was entirely the man’s fault, you see. His wife had asked perhaps twenty minutes before the accident if he was tired, and suggested they stop, but he wanted to press on. After the tragedy he said he was grateful to be an atheist because while he could comprehend the senselessness and grief of this horrifying loss, he couldn’t imagine believing in a God who would have any reason for this to have happened.

At that time I was still reeling from our stillbirth, and I took comfort myself in that thought. Many had told us that God loved our son so much He needed him in heaven. Its is a sentiment I still find heartless and repellent.

Carroll

John Carroll University

A twentieth anniversary edition of The Sparrow was released this year. The story moves back and forth between two timelines; the events as they occur and also as they are recounted decades later. Though we receive some biographic background on Sandoz, the action truly begins as he and another character meet for the first time in a coffee shop near the campus of John Carroll University in 2016.

Russell's tale begins twenty years into her own future.

She also set this important opening bit in University Heights, which is totally awesome because all great and terrible journeys begin in the Cleveland area. (Ms. Russell lives in Lyndhurst.)

Reading fiction set in the not-too-distant future can be challenging as certain technologies have or have not developed or come to pass. Fortunately this was composed just as the Internet was gaining prominence, an element which must be the most significant detail absent from most twentieth century works of science fiction.

We can’t all be Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game, 1985) or E.M. Forster (The Machine Stops, 1909) to name two authors who predicted the “world wide web” but Russell was keen enough to note that most if not all information and media was soon to be transferred through what is here commonly referred to as "the nets.”

Most prescient are the existence and everyday use of ROM-tablets which you and I today would actually refer to as simply a tablet.

Pitt

The book has been optioned for a film on two previous occasions. Universal wanted Antonio Banderas to play Emilio Sandoz, and though I personally would have found him a bit too Hollywood handsome for a character I see as a slightly diminutive scrapper (he is described many times as being less than average height) theirs was a much better choice than the man Warners Brothers tapped -- Brad Pitt.

Pitt was looking for good projects for his new production company, and while I admire his work in practically everything I’ve ever seen him in, simply put he’s not a Latino. Ten years ago, and basically since the film industry began, this wasn’t an issue. Today it is, and thankfully so. People of color and their allies have made great inroads, pressuring film corporations who adapt novels and comic books to cast popular characters with actors who represent their ethnic heritage.

Just this week Disney announced they are scrapping a treatment of their live-action adaptation of Mulan which was told from the point of view of a white European sailor. Word is they are now looking specifically for an Asian director.

Russell’s description of Sandoz’s difficult childhood in La Perla is rich and significant, and deeply important to his character. The decisions he made, not the largest of boys or men, that he survived his childhood and stayed out of prison with his remarkable intellect and toughness. That this man joined the priesthood and his ability with languages took him around the world, and then across space. She created a proud Puerto Rican to be the hero of her story. Not Brad Pitt.

Muñoz

Javier Muñoz

Reading the book again in 2016, I had a very clear picture of Emilio Sandoz, of what he looks like. I cannot remember who I pictured fifteen years ago, but now I couldn’t think of anyone else. It was Javier Muñoz, who we had seen play the title role in Hamilton on Broadway last August.

Once the designated alternate for Lin-Manuel Miranda, Muñoz is now the star of the biggest show on Broadway. He has been praised for bringing a “cutting carnal edge” to the role and has gained the nickname Sexy Hamilton.

His comfortable sexuality combined with a fierce determination now drives the show in a way Miranda did not. Don’t get me wrong, Miranda’s ambition in the role is undeniable, but so is his inherent childlike sweetness which is even more apparent now that he has cut his hair after leaving the role. Did you see SNL last week? The guy looks like he’s 25 again. Sigh.

The defined line of his cheek gives Muñoz the look of hungry yearning and he has a wide smile that is both inviting and challenging. Sandoz has a habit of putting his hands to his head and pulling his fingers back through his hair, and Muñoz has that hair. In my imagination, Javier Muñoz became the face of Emilio Sandoz.

He and Miranda worked together on In The Heights, and Muñoz first took over the lead role in that show on Broadway from Miranda as well. It is my fantasy that Miranda would secure the rights for The Sparrow to adapt into a musical, but that he create the lead specifically from Muñoz to play.

Currently, however, the rights are held by AMC which may or may not eventually produce a series.

Calvin

I remember the night I finished the book, lying in bed at my brother’s home in Battersea. I lie awake for maybe an hour in the dark, staring up into the starless sky through wide open window at the head of our bed, contemplating Sandoz’s loss, his feelings of abandonment, the destruction of his hope and his complete and utter sadness. I did not revel in the feeling, but it did provide a certain perspective. As the story draws to a conclusion we do believe there is the possibility of hope. There must always be hope.

The title comes from the New Testament, Matthew 10:29. The King James Version reminds us, "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father."

The Annunciation Triptych, Rogier van der Weyden (1434)

Hamlet also refers to this passage in Act V, scene 2, when he warns Horatio against acting to alter fate. "There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow," he says. His audience would have known the verse.

Some say the same man composed both lines, but well.

The message is, nothing happens without God being aware of it. Without His knowledge. Without His knowledge and His implied consent.

To wit; “That baby was never meant to live.”

In I Hate This I recount a moment my brother and I had before "The Annunciation Triptych" at The Cloisters (in the Heights!) The vision of the Holy Ghost, tiny and white like a fetal baby Jesus, sailing down towards the unknowing Mary, the baby clutching a cross, heading into the womb “equipped with the means of his own death.” In this image I understood the verse in its Biblical context, with Jesus as the sparrow, in this painting falling to earth.

Why did Jesus need to die? Why does anyone?

Deus vult. God wills it.

Sources:
In Hamilton Javier Munoz Puts A Different Spin On The Title Role, Ben Brantley, The New York Times 11/30/2015
'Mulan' Mania: Disney, Sony Hunt for Asian Directors to Helm Rival Action Pics, Rebecca Ford, The Hollywood Reporter, 10/12/2016
MaryDoriaRussell.net

The Joy of Christmas

Don't smile.

People, all kinds of people, like to kvetch and moan about how much better things were in the past. Some undefined past, could mean twenty years ago, could mean fifty. But things were less troublesome, more gooder, you weren't being inconvenienced by the thought police and gas was cheaper.


Well, I don't know about all that. If you know me, you know I believe society is a continuum where fates and fortunes are rising for some and falling for others. Ask a member of the homosexual community if things are better for them now than they were fifty years ago.

One community, however, which is always being persecuted, because it is part of their charter, is the Christian community. And who can blame them, since Obama took God off our coins, and no one says the Pledge of Allegiance in our public schools anymore.


What I can say is this, The Joy of Christmas would probably not have been produced today. Fall, 1979 the choirs of Bay Presbyterian Church were asked to participate in a holiday Christmas special for WEWS (ABC) hosted by Eyewitness News anchor Ted Henry.

Anchorman 2 opens December 13.

The holiday set, with fake lampposts and artificial snow was set into one corner of a large room in the WEWS studios on Euclid Avenue. This one room also included the set for Eyewitness News in another corner, for Morning Exchange in yet another corner, with the much smaller set for the Ohio Lottery wedged between.

Mother tells me I joined the choir for that one year so I could be part of the broadcast, which I do not remember, but may be true. However, if I was hoping to "shine" on local television, that did not happen. While the producer kept asking us to put on a bright and cheery holiday smile for the camera, our choral director, Ernie Hisey, quietly warned all of us to do no such thing. The result is that I look a little pissed off.


The program was repeated a Christmas season or two, but was soon after shelved no doubt because of its strong religious content. This is a Christian celebration of Christmas, including Bible verses from the host, classical images of the birth of Christ, and a family sitting around to read the Bible to each other.

It is not true, however, that the big bad president has taken God off our money, he hasn't. It is also not true that kids no longer recite the pledge in public schools, they do, all across northeast Ohio for certain, because I see and hear them do it all the time as part of my job. The United States government, which is supposed to be religion-neutral, is not.

But a program like this may never again be created by a commercial television station, and for strictly commercial reasons. They aren't worried about offending anyone. They are worried about not pleasing everyone, which is quite different. They are worried about losing money, that same American money that still says "In God We Trust" on it.

Happy Black Friday.

Days of Awe

From American Public Media ...
My brother and I closed the evening at Sweeney’s Saloon in the Selby/Dale neighborhood. Legend has it Sweeney’s was a favorite haunt of August Wilson’s during his time in St. Paul, a place for him to drink, smoke and write. The owner would turn the lights up when Wilson would come in so he could see better to do his work.

If this legend is so, I have to imagine things have changed a great deal in this neck of the woods. Last night it was a very popular place, packed with college students and hipsters, not the kind of place I could imagine anyone being able to concentrate and compose anything like Two Trains Running.

We sat at a table outside, enjoyed a local beer, and had a nice long talk. For me, this was the best part of the trip.

This morning was the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon, The Most Beautiful Urban Marathon in America®. The race began at 8 AM, and at 10 AM the family and I walked two blocks to Fairview and Summit in time to catch the first few runners. It’s a bright, cool day today, perfect for running. I did not bother bringing my kit this trip, thought my time would be better spent available to my brother, but I did wonder out loud if I might not try the "Full Cleveland" this May.

Maybe you are not aware I also keep a running blog.

Church services at the Unity Church-Unitarian began at 11 AM. I joined Denny and Julie in marriage there in August, 2006. (Didn’t know I could do that, did you?) As a celebration of the High Holy Days, the theme for this morning was forgiveness. It was a painfully well-timed homily.

First step of forgiveness:
We must all give up hope of a better past.
It is a question we ask in The Crucible residency. What is forgiveness? Why is forgiveness necessary? Is it necessary? Who is the benefactor of forgiveness, those who give or those who receive it? Can you forgive and not forget?

“I forgive myself, I forgive you. We begin again in love.”
On our way to the airport, my brother gave me a tour of the MPR studios. It’s a very large, impressive facility, the central nervous system of NPR affiliates around the state, their news, classical and popular music stations. I think I am going to become a die-hard, online fan of The Current 89.3.

And now I am waiting at the gate, informed that my flight took off from Hopkins, and then abruptly turned around for a “maintenance issue.” My departure from MSP is in question, but I have a coffee, cash for dinner if I want it, and a very large book.

LATE UPDATE: Touching down at CLE, 12:30 AM.

We are brothers.