Titus Andronicus at Appomattox

April 3, 2015 2:57 am Leave a Comment

The cannon fell silent at Appomattox nearly 150 years ago, as Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant in the antechamber of a small house. Just over two weeks later, Joseph Johnston and his Army of the South also surrendered, this time to the marauding William Tecumseh Sherman, finally bringing an end to four years of civil war. In the summer of 2009, a group of New Jersey punk rockers — named after Shakespeare’s most violent play, Titus Andronicus — assembled to record an album that would examine that terrible conflict.

I know of no other record quite like “The Monitor.” Named after the Union’s first ironclad warship, the album loses itself in the infinitude of the Civil War, dives headfirst into American history and wades through our complicated memory. Between most songs comes a lengthy quotation of sorts, spoken through a distorted microphone, as if from behind a veil — from Lincoln and Douglass, or perhaps from Garrison or an anonymous soldier.

“A More Perfect Union,” the album’s opening track, a microcosm of the record. It opens with a prescient speech from Lincoln, delivered twenty years before the war began: “As a nation of free men,” Lincoln says, “we will live forever or die by suicide,” a prophecy at once terrifying and thrilling. Soon, Titus Andronicus is off and running, as the percussion propels the band forward and singer Patrick Stickles spits out images of the rusting modern Northeast. He re-appropriates Springsteen — “Tramps like us, baby we were born to die” — and the guitar breaks into an untamed solo. Two minutes later he borrows extensively from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” urging his ragged band of Jersey punk warriors to rally round the flag and shout the battle cry of freedom. The song moves with rebellious spirit — the result of its lo-fi production and unruly instrumentation. But the record has much more in store.

For “The Monitor” reaches stunning heights. Unlike most other modern rock albums, this is no mere assortment of songs — no, this is a symphony, in which the music comes and goes but never ceases; it demands total attention throughout. One brilliant riff comes after another, and melodies arrive in rapid succession, all coming together to create a violent, rowdy work of punk rock. There are no choruses in this album, only repeated anthemic refrains, shouted with an intensity and fervor rarely heard in modern music. Those refrains provide the record’s most dramatic and poignant lines: the volcanic “You will always be a loser” in “No Future Part III,” strangely triumphant in its defeatism; the nervous “The enemy is everywhere” in “Titus Andronicus Forever,” reassuring in its paranoia; the frantic “It’s still us against them” on “Four Score and Seven,” unvanquished in its defiance. Titus Andronicus uses a musical structure that few other artists have dared to use, and the results attest to their success.

I doubt that any other bands approaching the mainstream could have pulled this album off. Titus Andronicus — fundamentally rebellious, but with an intensely cerebral bent — seems perfect for the job, bringing just the right combination of perfectionism and innovation. One cannot understate the importance of Stickles himself to this undertaking; without the distinctiveness of his voice, the record would have little chance of success. Like all good punk rock singers, he has a predisposition to rage, an inclination to which he often succumbs, letting his voice rise into a swelling fury, seeming to hit all notes at once. But at times, he betrays a remarkable tenderness. “To Old Friends and New,” the album’s finest ballad, is a gorgeous track, and it thrives on guest singer Cassie Ramone’s electric ambience and the undeniable authenticity of Stickles’ own voice. No one would claim that Stickles has the vocal ability of, say, Kurt Cobain, but he sure knows how to use it his range.

After 49 minutes of nearly continuous sound, Stickles and his band arrive at their closing number: the hugely ambitious, 14-minute “The Battle of Hampton Roads.” It begins simply, with Stickles narrating the aftermath of the clash between the USS Monitor and CSS Merrimack over a bare electric guitar. Steadily it grows, ever tenser as it progresses and Stickles sings of a world that has lost all morality. For ten minutes it goes on, until finally it breaks, now ready to reveal the album’s culmination: bagpipes, piercing through the music like Joseph Chamberlain’s men sprinting down Little Round Top. Whether they call the retreat or sound the advance we know not.

Those bagpipes force us to reconsider the entirety of the album. “The Monitor” is a work of existential conflict, of the bitter divide between the burdensome past and the bleak future. Quotations from men long since interred alternate with dead-end visions of the Northeast, where I-95 is the lifeblood, and the promise of a raucous Saturday night the only reason to keep on going. The songs themselves come across as abortive attempts at catharsis, at liberation — an impossible task, for the ghosts of the Civil War reappear again and again. By the time the album fades into ambient noise, any attempt to try to leave the past behind has lost all purpose.

Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This country has never quite shaken the Civil War. As a society we feel we have lost all direction; far from being a cohesive polity, we are nothing more than a group of people all looking their own ways. Titus Andronicus cannot accept that reality; something about it disturbs them to their core. “The Monitor” is a desperate attempt to find meaning in the modern world by looking back a century and a half to the men who made the country into its modern form. Perhaps we should all do the same.

OSCARS ALERT: WKND BLOG considers "Lincoln"

February 23, 2013 2:53 pm Leave a Comment

Lincoln and “Lincoln”

by Scott Stern

I was that guy — or, at least, I wanted to be. In the theater. After the movie. The one who walked out going, “They all looked so accurate. Especially Edwin Stanton! And Salmon P. Chase. And did you notice how Lincoln’s body was slanted at the very end? That’s historically accurate!”

Last year, I took a class called “Lincoln in Thought and Action.” I went into the class a Lincoln skeptic. This was the man, after all, who suspended habeas corpus, who was a moderate on slavery, who announced his willingness to accept slavery so long as it didn’t spread. I finished the course, as did, I believe, every single one of my classmates, a Lincoln believer.

I have a friend who told me I had a “Lincoln fetish,” because I talked about Lincoln so much at lunch. And breakfast. And dinner. And parties.

For “Lincoln in Thought and Action,” I purchased two handsome, blue volumes of Lincoln’s speeches and writings. For the next several months, my classmates and I delved into Abe’s oratory, discussing, analyzing, arguing. My interpretations — pretentious and dilettante-ish — rarely held water. But every now and then, I struck gold.

Fast-forward one year. I am sitting with nine of my former classmates, watching the man, the legend, on screen. Our professor is with us. We are there to see “Lincoln,” Steven Spielberg’s latest instant-classic, a film so well-cast and well-done that it has the Academy drooling Oscar juice already.

The film doesn’t end well for its title character. But in a blurry sort of flashback, at the end, we see Lincoln giving a rousing speech in his weirdly high and whiny voice. (Also historically accurate!) “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” I mouth along. It’s Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, usually grouped among his best speeches. My pride in the man cannot match my pride in my memory.

Alas, I am losing my Lincoln knowledge. I have attempted to rejuvenate it with supplemental readings like “Manhunt” and “The Fiery Trial” and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s epic and epically long “Team of Rivals.” But I am losing my knowledge all the same. Never again will I know quite so much about an American president.

For our final in “Lincoln and Thought and Action,” we were given a list of numerous, semi-obscure Lincoln quotes, and we had to name the year, the speech, and the context. Take a dozen or so quotes, divide them by the hundreds or thousands of pages of Lincoln we read, and you’ll begin to understand the spike in my blood pressure. Never before (and never again) will I spend quite so much time studying for a test worth, I believe, 15 percent of my final grade.

But it was worth it.

For instance, I can tell you that “Lincoln” the movie gets some things wrong — a few of them major. Lincoln was not nearly as dictatorial as he is portrayed to be. A number of the film’s premises are predicated on historical possibilities, not historical fact.

Still, the movie was excellent. The class was excellent. And Lincoln remains — to me, and my classmates and Tony Kushner — transcendent. For his entire life, he harbored an abiding revulsion of slavery. Slavery, and indifference to slavery, were among the only things he ever truly loathed. It was discussing slavery and its spread that Lincoln used the word “hate,” one of very, very few times in a long political career that he did so. About indifference or “covert, real zeal for the spread of slavery,” Lincoln said, “I cannot but hate.” He was not a religious man, but he hated slavery with a righteous passion. He could not but hate it. It was not a choice.

Lincoln was not perfect, nor does “Lincoln” portray him to be perfect. But it seems to me that he was as close as we’ll ever get. Lincoln qualified his opinion on slavery in public, until, after decades of work and a Union victory to soften the blow, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” tells the next chapter of the story — the passage of a constitutional amendment banning slavery once and for all.

At dinner after the film, one of my former classmates asked our former professor, why so much hullabaloo about a former president? My professor responded with a number of reasons: we’re now in the middle of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and, soon, Lincoln’s assassination. We’re now in the middle of the presidency of Barack Obama, a man frequently likened to Lincoln (aided by Obama’s own notions of himself).

I agreed. But it’s more than that. Lincoln is relevant to any time, any age. His popularity will come in swings, but it will never truly go. It can’t. I have a notebook full of class notes and a ticket stub to prove it.

Our Man of Illinois (or, Saint Abe of the Prairie State): A Review of “Abraham Lincoln” (1930)

by Patrice Bowman

Historical figures never fail to interest us common folk. When these famous people come alive on the movie screen, we can experience their moments of greatness (and not-so-greatness) for ourselves. So it makes sense that in the right director’s hands, Abraham Lincoln’s life can be depicted with a balance of heroism and frailty that awes viewers. It’s no wonder that Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” has twelve Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture.

But before Spielberg, another prolific director portrayed Lincoln’s life — and, no, I’m not talking about “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” (2012), because that shouldn’t have been a thing. D.W. Griffith’s “Abraham Lincoln” (1930), like Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” ostensibly divides its time between some of the historical facts and what Lincoln symbolized: freedom, unity and honesty. But Griffith is so devoted to Lincoln the Symbol — even more so than Spielberg — that he doesn’t show the more engaging Lincoln the Human.

The episodic structure covers many parts of Abraham Lincoln’s (Walter Huston) life, going through his time as a shop-keeper, career as a lawyer, marriage to Mary Todd (Kay Hammond), his debates with Stephen A. Douglas (E. Alyn Warren), his presidency, the Civil War and his death. The staccato storytelling strips the entire cast, except the Lincolns, down to their barest functions in the plot. Hammond’s Mrs. Lincoln is a shrew when she should’ve been a more complicated woman. Huston is a decent Lincoln. He looks the part and speaks in an authoritative tone, which I missed in Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal; however, Huston awkwardly plops portions of Lincoln’s speeches into normal conversation. His interpretation, unlike Day-Lewis’s, is stiffly hagiographic for the most part.

I could blame the stagnant feel on the 1930s film industry’s transition from silent to sound, because the new equipment impeded the fluid movement of cameras and of actors. Sound or no sound, though, Griffith’s grasp on narrative rhythm is shakier than Hammond’s Southern accent. Lincoln’s development into a wise man is a bombardment, not a flow, of events.

Another issue is that, as Spielberg does in his “Lincoln,” Griffith ignores slavery’s horrors and pushes Blacks to the sidelines. The former ignores all of the efforts of African-Americans to abolish slavery, but the latter rarely shows them at all. Considering the buffoonery and brutishness connected to onscreen Blacks (both real and “Black-face” ones) in his legendary “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), I suppose he thought the safest option was to not take any chances.

Yet even with this precaution and the prestige of the subject, the film didn’t see huge success in the ’30s. If both films portray the same figure and share similar issues, why was Spielberg’s version received better than Griffith’s? Let’s start at the states of the filmmakers’ careers when they made the biopics. Spielberg had directed two successful films (“The Adventures of Tintin” and “War Horse”) in the same year that he released “Lincoln” and was at a directorial high-point. On the other hand, after “The Birth of a Nation,” Griffith’s subsequent works didn’t consistently earn him financial or critical success. He was, until his death, in something of a rut.

And apart from career highs and lows, Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is the better film. It benefits from tighter narrative focus and technique—not just from advanced technology, but from a better acknowledgement of the cinematic ideas Griffith himself helped set up with “Birth of a Nation.” True, Spielberg has his moments of sentimentality. And he still portrays Lincoln as the “Great White Savior of the Slaves” when, historically, the real man was less ideal. But there’s still some moral ambiguity within “Lincoln.” With Griffith’s “Abraham Lincoln,” there’s too much melodrama and not enough, well, drama.

Wounded, and Not Walking

February 8, 2013 5:21 am Leave a Comment

From the head up, 19-year-old Charles H. Wood could have been posing for his senior portrait. At any rate, his noble countenance suggests a person far more mature and prepared to graduate than I in my own rogues’ gallery of commencement pictures taken this past June. Evident in those photographs is only raw petulance at being asked, yet again, to strain my head at a neck-snapping angle, then stupidly hold an artificial rose before my lips as though it were a flute. Charles, on the other hand, looks like a decent person who posed like he was told. If you fix your gaze upon his face, you see a boy who might one day have been president. For senior portraits El Dorado Hills contact Kimberly K Photography.

Except his face, one among many at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library’s “Portraits of Wounded Bodies: Photographs of Civil War Soldiers from Harewood Hospital, Washington, D.C., 1863–1866,” is the last to register at first glance. Instead of a future president, you see a man missing a left arm. Blown off by gunshot at the Civil War battle of Petersburg, Va., 1865, the arm was amputated on the field, leaving in its place a dimpled stump. Charles would not die of injury-related complications, but his was a rare example of wartime treatments progressing according to plan. With an average of 504 deaths per day, and more men dying from uninformed surgical interventions than actual injuries, the Civil War left in its wake fodder for an unfortunately comprehensive photographic catalog of battlefield wounds.

Compared with the other images on exhibit, Charles’ is relatively tame. Photographed on his deathbed, the 18-year-old private Henry Krowlow was only vaguely corporeal, a wasted skeleton upon which flaccid limbs of uneven lengths were draped. The violently mustachioed Thomas H. Mathews was marked by an even more violent saber gash below his left eye. An image of John Miller evoked a jigsaw where someone cruelly forgot to piece in his left thigh. His hands cradle a gangrenous stump that resembles more a crusty boule than the remains of something that once promoted mobility.

The photographs were drawn from the compilations of Dr. Reed Brockway Bontecou, chief surgeon at the Harewood U.S. Army General Hospital in Washington, D.C. Bontecou, believed to have originated the application of photography to military surgical history. He intended the photos to be of educational value to future doctors while maintaining portraiture conventions. Soldiers’ faces are `free of the requisite grimaces, replaced instead by stoic expressions evincing none of what was surely intolerable pain. In one example of convention, Thomas L. Roscoe, too weak to set his head straight upon his shoulders, was propped against the wall with a wooden plank. Even with his back to the photographer, his hands were neatly arranged on his knees, and his head betrayed only the slightest droop.

It is a theme common to the entirety of Bontecou’s work: a jarring disfigurement is no grounds for an inartistic presentation. It was an intelligent move that does not hide but rather dramatizes the reality of his subjects’ suffering. Rather than the crumpled, wasted faces of the weak, we see the enduring, steadfast faces of the strong. We sympathize with and pity the former, but the latter wins our respect.

In the library foyer one can find background to the doctors themselves and their medical practices. Medical practitioners quickly deduced that illness and injury would pose a more significant threat to life than bullets and bayonets, and established the United States Sanitary Commission to ensure improvements of wartime medical treatment. Lest we think these emissaries of Asclepius saw nothing but whitewashed hospital interiors, here on display are the books and writings of Civil War doctors — in a letter by a Confederate surgeon, the author describes helping himself to a “churn of excellent buttermilk” one moment and being nearly shot at the next. A hallmark of wartime medical practice was the element of surprise, both in the volatility of the surroundings and the nature of encountered maladies. Doctors, nurses and volunteers — most notably, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott, who wrote copiously about their experiences — were as entrenched in the turbulent proceedings as their warrior patients.

We expect bravery on the battlefield, exulting in the boldness of our heroes who know no fear. Less expected is bravery from the prone on their silver gurneys, wincing at the slightest touch like children before their first vaccines. Pry the guns from their hands, and gingerly lift their crisp uniforms from their battered bodies, and suddenly they are no longer soldiers but patients, free to fear as much as they like.

Yet in these photographs is a palpable defiance, not the anxious tremors of the fallen. Perhaps these men and boys were just following Bontecou’s instructions, angling their stumps and scrapes bravely before the camera because that is how they were asked to pose. Consider, though, what brought them to war in the first place: the relentless pursuit of principles on which their entire lives, and the endurance of their homeland, would rest.

Charles H. Wood was fighting for his country. And what is an arm to a country, anyway?

Yale Daily News

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