[Reviewed by Katherine Merriweather]

Poetry is usually a quick read for me. The books I pick are slim. When I got ahold of this book, it was nearly 200 pages. Stunned, I wondered what I could be getting into.

This collection, a love story written during a time of struggle, led me into its universe and didn’t want to let me go.

In the forward, Wade Alexander’s wife, Mara, tells the reader that although their marriage was good from the start, life issues began to take their toll and a hell that spanned two and a half years was the hardest.  Mara withdrew during that time to shield herself from the pain. Wade began writing poems to reach out to her and to heal himself from his own mental suffering. The collection presented is the result of that time.

Wade’s words carry a deep message in seemingly simple verses about love, loss, life, and the Universe. I felt that some poems were quite Zen (such as “Quiet Your Mind” and “Life Is A Riddle”). Enthralled by the melancholy, sometimes tortured work, I took his book everywhere, reading a few pages when I had the time. I found myself re-reading the book as I found this collection therapeutic because I was also going through a love struggle.

I recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of poetry, and to those going through a hard time, romantically or not.

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You can contact the reviewer, Katherine Merriweather, at knmerriweather@yahoo.com.

A TRAGEDY―AND A TRIUMPHANT DEBUT

 A review by Christopher Bernard

Why do so many critics seem to hate Angelina Jolie?

Because otherwise they might have to respect her. Even admire her.

Jolie, you see, is guilty of the supreme cinematic crime: creating, on her first outing as a writer and director, a morally challenging, almost unbearably honest film, and doing so with greater artistry than one can reasonably respect from such a comparative neophyte – especially when such a work is committed by a woman the press has never been terribly comfortable with, whom it prefers to see as a narcissistic sex symbol and tourist activist bent more on displaying a self-regarding compassion than on ending the suffering that evokes it.

The reaction of many critics has been a disgrace to the profession – but then, many of the reviewers were a disgrace to begin with.

The press rarely forgives being misled by its own prejudices. We don’t like being made fools of, even when we have been fooling ourselves. Many of us still haven’t forgiven Woody Allen for “Interiors” or “Stardust Memories,” near-masterpieces though they are (watch them with an open mind if you doubt me; but then, I have always felt Allen’s early films were the over-rated products of a talented adolescent; when he finally grew up, many in the American intelligentsia refused to grow up with him). Fortunately, the films will continue to live, on the love and admiration of audiences, long after we critics are moldering, clutching our press clippings, in our graves.

In her first feature-length film, Angelina Jolie has taken on an enormous task in terms of moral weight, intellectual daring, and cinematic artistry. That she has not entirely succeeded should come as no surprise; that she might be in a bit over her head is no dishonor. That she has succeeded as well as she has is little short of miraculous.

For this is a brave, and often terrifying, film; one that should be seen by anyone with concern about the devastations of modern warfare, the calamity of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, or the plight of Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, or indeed wherever Muslims are the subject of bloody-minded bigotry and hatred; above all, it must be seen by anyone who wants a candid look at the horrors faced by women in modern war. Indeed, for that alone, Jolie deserves our deepest gratitude.

By now, most movie viewers will be aware of the film’s setting in the Bosnian war in the 1990s, its use of Serbo-Croatian throughout, and the outlines of the plot: the Romeo-and-Juliet love affair between a Serbian policeman and a Muslim artist that, literally, blows up one night at a dance club in a provincial Bosnian city; the quick descent of Bosnia into war of Serbian against Muslim; the rounding up of Muslim women as servants and sex slaves for the Serbian army, and the continuation of the love affair when the Serbian officer discovers his Muslim lover among the profaned and humiliated women. They will also be aware of the sheer violence, the casual atrocities, of the film; none of it gratuitous or played for our entertainment or the frisson of the morally righteous – all of it both shocking and unsparingly illuminating of the depth, the depraved perspicuity, of human evil.

The cruelly ambiguous relationship between the lovers Daniejl and Ajla is presented with an aching awkwardness in a storyline that echoes such films as “The Night Porter,” “The Collector” and “Schindler’s List,” though with a twisted and fearful tenderness of its own. That it is not always convincing is partly the fault of the male lead, discussed below; partly from a lack of that final subtlety in the writing that perhaps only an Ingmar Bergman or Andrei Wajda might have pulled off.

The relationships between the victims (the fraught and terrible furtiveness of the impotent) and between the violators (the bitter, ageing general, who represents an older generation steeped in hatred and refusing to die without taking as many others with them as they can, and his intimidated son, the brittle, morally torn Danjiel who, in the end, cannot face down the domination of the patriarch), some of whom are as morally disgusted as the most impartial spectator, but who are caught in the trammels of resentment and hatred, the power relations of a deeply patriarchal society, are displayed with the insight and sensitivity one would expect of a far more experienced director.

As in the best war films, we are given a victim’s-eye view of warfare – lost in a bewilderment of fire, blood, screaming bullets, bomb thunder, relentless violence, and unpredictable catastrophe that display the world as the viciously senseless place it so often can seem to be even in peacetime but only now shown unmasked and naked.

The film has its weaknesses, the most serious being Goran Kostic as Daniejl sho wears a swagger that’s too slick by half, and seems to see too much of a mirror in the camera: the expression of emotional subtlety, ambiguity and complication do not seem to be his strong suit; a shame, as the film’s fatal and ineluctable conclusion loses some of its power and truth as a result.

However, Zana Marjanovic as Ajla makes up for many of her opposite’s flaws, in a performance trembling with a delirious passion for her blue-eyed policeman that by itself explains the enormous emotional tug for him later on, when the stakes will be her life itself.

The subordinate roles are handled astutely for the most part; Rade Serbedzija playing the poisonous, shrewd and bitter monster of an old general with an almost Shakespearean conviction. Shrewd camerawork and a discreet score complete this very fine film.

But you may not be ready for the ending, inevitable as it is. Unlike most American movies, where the logic of a situation is rarely allowed to get in the way of the triumph of love and the miracle of redemption, in this tragedy there is no salvation.

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In the Land of Blood and Honey

Written and directed by Angelina Jolie

Christopher Bernard is the founding editor of Caveat Lector magazine and author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins. Work by him appears in the recent anthologies Conversations in the Wartime Café and Occupy SF: Poems from the Movement.

ELECTRIFYING

A review by Christopher Bernard

Mugwumpin specializes in “theater, performance, and strange occurrences.” Nikola Tesla – the wizard of electricity, the rival of inventors Edison and Marconi, victim of a treacherous backer, J.P. Morgan, and hero and anti-hero of  Mugwumpin’s ingenious “Future Motive Power” – specialized in inventing some of the seminal technologies of the last century, and speculated about some of the strangest technological fantasies of our fantastic age, an age when “strange occurrences” have become more the norm than the exception.

So it may have been only a matter of time before the wizards of Mugwumpin met the wizard of Smiljan on their common home ground of theatrical and experimental magic.

There was once talk of the fine line between genius and madness; in Tesla’s case there may have been no line at all – his genius was partly mad (distributing electricity through the air?), and his madness was not half-genius (sending radio signals across hundreds, even thousands, of miles, through air, buildings, walls? But of course! Tesla was the intellectual father of radio, TV, GPS, cell phones, wi-fi; the better known Guglielmo Marconi was, according to some, the thief of Tesla’s ideas who got the undeserved credit for inventing the radio, the Ur-technology of today’s wireless world).

“Future Motive Power,” with its own engaging inventiveness, applies a modernist/postmodernist mélange of theatrical stylizations to the tropes of the bio play. Christopher W. White’s sprightly, goofy portrayal of the eternally eccentric inventor is accompanied by a trio of chorus-like figures (Misti Boettiger, Natalie Greene and Rami Margron are the audacious adepts) to guide and frame the action, and using a mere two more actors (White and the endlessly adaptable Joe Estlack) to animate Tesla and his nemeses; the five performers, their ingenious prop masters, and the lighting and sound designers create, between them, the sense of a thronging, dynamic, endlessly changing world.

Using the barest of low-tech props, the show manages both to create, in the finest steampunk style, a nostalgia for the cranky, industrial modern and to suggest the boundless hopes that science and technology at their best have always lighted in the susceptible hearts of the endearingly left-brained.

The sheer craziness of modern science (which has only gotten crazier since Tesla’s comparatively rational era) is put over with madcap energy and wit, to say nothing of a resistance to such old-fashioned concepts as identity and coherence and even cohesion, that is often liberating, if occasionally taxing for the more commonsensical spectator, as the performers melt away from representing mere people to portraying particles and waves of emergent energy, the needles of inspiration, the voices that forever warred in Tesla’s over-stimulated brain, and other, nameless but highly energetic abstractions. (The script was created by the Mugwumpin ensemble, and this sometimes shows: a more controlling hand, a mightier editor, may have sharpened the piece’s sometimes careening focus.)

Not least of the show’s pleasures is its venue: the variously brick-vaulted, stone-floored, half-lit, many-chambered labyrinth of the basement (once gold-filled, now ghost-filled) of San Francisco’s old Mint, the source of the West’s coinage for much of a century. After a comfortable first hour seated in a spacious, industrial lab of a room, the audience is walked to different locations, concluding in a dramatization of Tesla’s tragic end that ensured his legacy as much as his martyrdom. The audience is made a gentle, but inescapable, protagonist in the show’s moral, its politics, of recognition and responsibility.

There’s talk of extending the run. If that happens, run, don’t walk, and take your science friends with you: the talk sure to follow is guaranteed to eat away much of the night.

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“Future Motive Power,” produced and performed by Mugwumpin at the Old Mint, San Francisco, through January 29.

Christopher Bernard is a San Francisco writer, author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins, and founder of Caveat Lector magazine.

Art: Sara El Hamalawy & Ahmed Mohamed Hassan

Egyptian International Short Story Competition

Resurrection of Ancient Egypt

Literature has always been a method of communication, whether between the author and the self, the author and the reader, or a book discussion between several readers. These means of communication are outstanding that they can be fulfilled by communicating with the past, and creating some sort of telepathy.

The aim of the Forgotten Writers Foundation is to empower the forgotten literature of some cultures, and thus it issued its first short-story competition, which is about Resurrection of Ancient Egypt.

The competition is about writing fictional short-stories at the era of Ancient Egypt, whereas the stories must not be very much related to historical events. It is open to anyone, giving enough space for the writer to become creative and write about any genre, with any style.

The winning stories will be gathered and published in one book. The aim of this competition, apart from shedding the light on the mysterious culture of Pharos, is to perform an analysis on how Egyptians and non-Egyptians define and view one of the oldest cultures on Earth, and with this analysis we should excavate guidance to our contemporary world.

The formal deadline is on the 25^th of January, 2012. However, stories sent within a month time after the deadline will be accepted into serious consideration. The most satisfying output is more important than being strict in the rules.

For Guidelines:

http://mahmoudmansicriticreviews.blogspot.com/2011/12/short-story-competition-resurrection-of.html

Submissions and Questions:

Native_Writer@yahoo.com

Mahmoud Mansi

Limitless Sensitivity explores how sensitivity overload can often lead to fearlessness. Contributors this month uniquely show how severe observation is processed differently from one individual to the next: brightness, darkness, sweet, sour. Megalomania is also a consequence of this type of sensitivity.

There are several short stories this moth, including The Hidden World, by Mark Russell Gelade, and Lost Souls (Part 1), by J’Rie Elliott. In George Sparling’s energetic piece Lush, the main character is impulsive and intentionally self-degrading. Additional writing includes Glitter on Glue, by Brian M. Barbeito.

You can catch Leena Prasad’s monthly column by clicking here. Whose Brain Is It? Presented within the flow of the lives of fictional characters, this is a monthly column with a journalist’s perspective on brain research.

If photography is more your style, check out the article by Suzanne Birrell. Birrell recently attended a lecture on aerial photography by Charles (Cris) Benton, Professor of Architecture at University of California, Berkeley.

Also this month, we have two poetry contributions, from Linda Allen and Danny P. Barbare.

In Reviews…

Books:

• J’Rie Elliot on Portrait of a Girl and Her Art, by Elena Caravela
• Nicole Arocho on Solidarity With The Flesh Eating Mosaic And Other Poems, by Raj Dronamraju

Music/Performance:

• Bruce Roberts on Michael Londra’s Celtic Yuletide at the Marines’ Memorial Theatre in San Francisco, California
• Katherine Merriweather on Devaa Haley Mitchell’s album, Sacred Alchemy

SynchChaos Cares

We regularly make announcements on our Website and Facebook Fan Page about ways that you give back to local communities and disaster relief around the world. This month we encourage you to:

• Visit the winter online art auction presented by the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP). Click here to learn more about CCWP’s mission.
• Donate to Philippine flood relief efforts. eBay highlights several charitable art prints for sale, or you can donate directly to the efforts by clicking on any of the organizations listed on the site.

We hope you enjoy this month’s issue! Your comments are welcome and please feel free to contact any of the contributing writers directly at the email addresses provided at the end of each post.

The Hidden World

I believe there’s a hidden world that—on this particular April morning, walking in the park, hearing the surf crash against the rocks, with the wind blowing through the Cyprus trees and the sky intentionally blue and flawless—reveals itself to be something highly selective and not at all obvious to the casual observer.

Sometimes this sensation, alive with desire, will be heightened by the introduction of a beautiful young girl with cherry-red toenails and a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses, that, together with the ability of shrubs to suddenly burst into clusters of purple petals, signaling spring, produces something like joy, which is also a key with which to enter this hidden world.

Then my sweet Antoinette will send a text message, asking when we can meet. And I will have to tell her that my car has broken down again and there is nothing I can do now to change that.

Then her lips will pout and she will not be happy to hear this. She’ll stop sending messages and will later on accuse me of taking her for granted, which is exactly how the sky and trees are not being treated, or so she’ll say.

And this will be the beginning of a dark exchange that will move in over us like a gray cloud; until once again, hours later, the hidden world will call out from a golden poppy in a language that only a lover could fathom.

And so a balance will finally be achieved. I will tell Antoinette that if she can wait until morning, I will arrive at her door with warm rolls, fresh coffee, and a smile she can store in her heart for as long as she needs.

And then she will say that this is her lucky day, her happy day; and she, too, will see an opening to the hidden world—one that was planted in her heart, a long time ago.

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Mark Russell Gelade may be reached at mark94121@yahoo.com.

Lost Souls

Pt. 1

by J’Rie Elliott

He was sitting in the dark; the silence that consumed him was almost deafening. There was no laughter, no cries, and no music nothing in this horrible decrepit house to cause a sound other than the sound of his retched breath. This had not always been the case for this lonely, twisted, heart sick man. In a past life he had been a son, a husband, a father—now he was just an empty shell taking up the space that he occupied in his sad small constantly diminishing world.

He stared at the empty bottles occupying the table in front of him when he heard a sound coming from the kitchen. A door slamming, the small voice of a young boy called out, “Daddy, guess what I did in school today? I got an A+ on my spelling test! Daddy, aren’t you proud of me? Daddy, are you here? Daddy where are you?” The man entered the kitchen and saw his son, William, standing before him looking around; he knelt to the floor.

“Here I am son. Give me a hug.” The little boy came running through kitchen into his daddy’s waiting arms, only to vanish before reaching those waiting arms. He was alone in the house again; his son long ago grown into a man. Tears began to fill up in his eyes the same time the aroma of bacon and eggs filled the air, and Fleetwood Mac played in the background; he looked across the kitchen and there stood his young wife, Hannah, beautiful in the warm morning light, with the sun glistening off of her face. The prism she kept hanging in the kitchen windows catching the rays of the sun filling the room with dancing rainbows; she smiled and spun the crystal sending the rainbows swirling around her. She was in high sprits this morning as though there was no heart -ache in the world; the world was a place filled with as much light and warmth as her kitchen in the mornings.

He could see her speaking, see her lips moving but there was no sound coming from her, just the music in the back ground. The bacon cooking on the stove was fragrantly delicious but made no sound. She called over her shoulder as she gathered the bacon out of the pan and placed it on a plate covered with paper towels. She took the eggs off the stove with her right hand and with her left she lifted the coffee pot and poured coffee into a mug. William came barreling into the kitchen followed by a girl slightly younger, Janet. They pulled the chairs from the table and sat down; Hannah sat the eggs, bacon and her coffee cup on the table as William poured him and his sister a glass of orange juice from the carton which was sitting out. The three sat down and started eating, the food was too good to let get cold.

“Darling, I’m here. Baby can you see me?” He waved his hand in front of her face; she reached across the table and wiped juice from the Janet’s chin. “Please Hannah, look at me. I’m right here; I’m right in front of you. Oh, God why are you doing this to me?” He leaned over his son’s shoulder, “William I’m right beside you; Daddy is right here with you. I made it to breakfast this time.” He walked around the table to the side of his daughter, “Little one, look at Daddy please. Baby, please give Daddy a look.” He begged and beseeched to no avail. “Stop, whatever it is, stop it!” He screamed out into the universe. He held his head and sat on the floor—he began to sob.

The house turned gray and cold; there was no sunny kitchen, no Sunday breakfast, the happy smiling family dissipated into the air like a mist on the wind leaving just a miserable old man. These memories were not even his, theses were shots of the life that he left; the life that was not good enough for him. He could never be tied down, never loose he’s freedom. He had basically left by the time Janet was four and William was seven, he had left Hannah emotionally even before that; he was too focused on what he wanted–himself.

He stood up from the dirty kitchen floor and walked back into the living room of the house. Sitting in the corner was a very old artificial 4 foot Christmas tree, one from a Christmas years ago when Janet and her family were going to spend Christmas with him; that was ten years ago now and the tree still sat in the corner covered in cob webs. Now it only looked of despair and sadness rather than festivities and light. He looked at the little tree and tried to remember why he had not shown up that year; then he remembered, he was working that Christmas day; not that he had to, there were no deadlines to meet, no lives on the line; he just wanted to work, so he chose to sit in his office alone rather than spending Christmas with his daughter, son-in-law and grandkids.

He heard the sound of an engine outside; he looked through the window and there they sat, Janet with Mike and their kids. The air was crisp and there was snow covering the ground; Janet got out of the car and walked gingerly to the door. He ran to the door to answer it, but could not turn the knob. She knocked and waited and knocked again.

“I’m home this time Baby!” he called to her. “The door is stuck!” Janet turned to her husband sitting in the car with the engine running and shrugged her shoulders; Mike motioned for her to come back. She walked carefully back down the path and got back in the warm car; he could see them talking through their windows, they decided to wait. He called to them again, but they could not hear him; the clock on the wall began ticking off minutes in seconds and hours in minutes until three hours had past. He saw Janet holding her face in her hands and her husband Mike red with anger as they backed out of the driveway and left. Three hours they had waited; Janet not wanting to give up on him; surely he would come for Christmas she said—she had been the last passenger but that was the day she boarded the ‘just let him go’ train.

William boarded that train when he was twenty years old; at that age he was no longer a boy, but still not quite a man either. He needed a guide in his life, a father in his life; which was not something he had growing up. Will had always held out hope that when he got older his father would want to know him; want to know the kind of man he turned into, the kind of girl he had fallen in-love with, to know the things every father should know. William’s faith had been placed in the wrong man. For every door Will tried to open his father would slam shut; regardless of the sacrifices William made to try and be the son he thought his father wanted it was never enough. The year he turned twenty was the year William boarded the train and he took his young family with him.

Hannah had been the first to buy her ticket on the ‘just let him go’ train. Hannah’s came the winter that the heat in their house went out; Janet was just four that year and a sickly little girl in and out of the emergency room as though she were on a Ferris wheel. Hannah had a fire burning in the stove, but the wood ran out and the fringed temperatures were too much for the run down little house without a heater. Janet turned blue while she was sleeping in Hannah’s arms; little William shivering under the blanket next to her. She called and told him she needed him to come home; he had been gone for so long, there was no heat other than the stove and the wood was running out, the house was so cold and she was scared for the babies. He never came; he was too intoxicated to even know who was on the phone. Hannah wrapped up the children as best she could and walked the half a mile to a neighbor’s house carrying Janet as William followed. Hannah never spoke to him again; divorce papers arrived in her mother’s mail box six months later along with papers signing over custody of the children.

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J’Rie Elliott is a poetess and ongoing contributor of Synchronized Chaos. To contact her, send an email to dixiepoet@gmail.com.