Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky
Novelist, journalist, poet and Zen teacher from Glasgow, Scotland, now based in Portland, OR, USA
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Posts tagged "murder"
Thinking about what I wrote about serial killers the other day, I remember something Dennis Nilsen said when asked to comment on Jeffrey Dahmer. He said that the term “serial killer” is inaccurate, because it implies the intention to continue to kill. “It’s like calling Elizabeth Taylor a serial bride,” he said.
Now Frank is being released on parole, and they both learn that their lives are still intertwined. Their story will end in a place even darker than it began. This shattering noir tale of suspense, sex, violence, love and death in the urban desert of Phoenix, Arizona, has been called “one of the great post-realist novels” by the French magazine Transfuge. It is Barry Graham’s most uncompromising novel to date, and Laura Ponto is his most unforgettable protagonist.
Written by Don Ferrarone and directed by Ami Canaan Mann, and co-produced by her famous (but less talented) father Michael Mann, it has attracted much less attention than it deserves. I went to a screening a few weeks ago, but had not heard of it before and have not heard of it since, though it opens in Phoenix today, and has been open elsewhere since last week.
Set in a town that we might call Anyshithole, U.S.A., this is a pitch-dark police procedural centered around a series of murdered young women’s bodies being dumped in the eponymous marshland that has such a fearful local reputation that even the cops are afraid to go there. The investigating officers are a middle-aged, Bible-thumping transplant from New York (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), an angry young thug (Sam Worthington) who grew up locally and is still trying to recover from the brutalities of his childhood, and his equally-thuggish ex-wife (Jessica Chastain). They are surrounded by people so desperate and so wounded that almost any one of them could be the killer.
But the emotional center of the story is a child, played with powerful conviction and understatement by Chloe Grace Moretz, who is trying to maintain her sanity and decency while living with her abusive, trick-turning mother and her gaggle of customers.
Ferrarone’s writing and Mann’s directing are compassionate but devoid of sentimentality, and harshly honest without being judgmental. The cops are well-intentioned but arrogant and incompetent, the criminals range from terrifying to pitiful, and everyone is too caught up in their own desperation to see what is going on. There is little hope, and no redemption, offered, but if Morgan’s character’s favorite book is right in saying that the truth shall set us free, then there might be a painful liberation.
- Christopher Columbus
Today the U.S. celebrates an inept navigator who thought that San Salvador was Japan and Cuba was China, and who enslaved, mutilated and murdered the natives of the lands his ineptitude took him to.
Also, it’s not true that most people thought the earth was flat in those days.
I think it’s fitting that the U.S. celebrates this, considering how this country was developed. It’s likely that the self-styled “greatest nation in the world” will be remembered by history alongside Nazi Germany.
- Booklist
Since moving to the U.S. from his native Scotland, Graham has staked out the Southwest as his territory, and written about it in a way that no one else has. His is not the Southwest of scenic natural wonders, petroglyphs and ancient Indian civilizations juxtaposed with modern spiritual seekers. His is the Southwest as gritty emblem of 21st Century America, of urban blight and the dispossessed, of the people left behind.
Graham writes with corrosive honesty, giving no quarter to anyone, especially himself. This book contains his award-winning story of the two executions he has witnessed, along with other pieces that form a beautiful and terrifying portrait of a civilization in the process of collapse.
Imagine this scenario in a T.V. show:
A man and a woman are kissing. We see the woman reach into her pocket and pull out a knife. They continue to kiss. We now see only their faces, but the woman makes a sudden, violent movement, the man cries out in pain, and it is clear that she has stabbed him with the knife.
Now imagine this scenario:
A man and a woman are kissing. We see the woman reach into her pocket and pull out a condom. They continue to kiss. We now see only their faces, but the woman looks down, we hear a belt unfastening, the man cries out in pleasure, and it is clear that she has put the condom on him.
The first of these could easily be shown on broadcast T.V. in the U.S. The second could not.
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I just watched the documentary Cropsey. M.V. Moorhead has already reviewed it, and I agree with his assessment of its quality. I don’t share his certainty that Andre Rand is guilty; the evidence against him is entirely circumstantial, and (though I think he probably is the killer) it’s possible that the only thing he’s guilty of is being mentally disturbed and extremely creepy.
The case against Rand depended on eyewitness testimony from alcoholics who claimed to remember what they’d seen twenty years earlier. Considering how unreliable anyone’s visual memory is, and considering the fact - as any reporter or cop knows - that people lie irrationally and randomly, had I been on the jury I would have had to vote to acquit Rand. The strongest piece of evidence against him - still circumstantial - is that no children in the community have disappeared since he was incarcerated.
Whether Rand killed these children or not, it’s clear that he should not have been at large. There is no reasonable doubt that he is is dangerously mentally ill, and had he been given the help he needed the story of Cropsey might have remained an urban legend.
I remember the run up to the first Gulf War, when certain newspapers carried fictitious reports of Saddam Hussein ripping premature babies out of hospital incubators just for the fun of it. To justify the war, it was necessary to create a monster to be chased with burning torches. Hussein’s real status as a local thug whose weapons had been provided by the U.S. wasn’t enough.
After the killing of Osama bin Laden, it was reported that he had resisted attempts to capture him alive, and that he had used a woman as a shield. The Guardian reveals that these claims were fictitious.
The truth is that bin Laden wasn’t killed in combat. He was unarmed, and U.S. operatives came into his house and shot him in the head and chest. That is murder. International law requires that he be tried for his crimes at The Hague. Instead, Barack Obama’s administration committed an act of terrorism, no more legal than the attacks on the U.S. in 2001.
Al Qaida believes it has the authority to ignore the law and kill whoever it sees fit to kill. And so does the U.S.
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