With keyboard player Kayo about to graduate*, Kirsty Evans caught up with the band a few days into the American tour to chat about how things are going and their plans for the future.

(In Japan the term graduate is used to indicate that someone is leaving a band, or that a band are leaving a record label. The implications are positive, not negative. Also, please note that unless otherwise noted, the singer, Hiro, is doing the talking.)

How is the tour going?

All the shows have been great. The new songs from the new album have been very well received and we’re having a lot of fun.

How did Polysics get started? The only two original members are Hiro and Kayo, correct?

Actually I am the only original founding member. I saw the video for “Satisfaction” by Devo when I was in high school and was deeply influenced by it. I went to get my jumpsuit the day after that! I started the band but the various members were just in and out throughout the first couple of years. Kayo and I went to school together so I invited her to join the band and that’s how we ended up with the two steady members.

The boiler suits and shades look obviously was inspired by Devo. When you originally adopted that look did you think you’d still be doing it more than ten years later?

(Laughs) No, we had no idea we’d still be doing this after more than ten years.

You have kind of a unique sound. Other than the Devo influence, where else did you get your inspiration from?

Other than Devo, there were tons of artists that influenced Polysics, like Kraftwerk, a lot of German and British New Wave bands. Electropop is one of our big things but also we have punk and metal influences, progressive – it’s definitely all over the place. I think the one thing you can say about all our influences is that they were all the pioneers of the time – they were all pushing the boundaries back when they were active.

Before Polysics did any of you ever have a regular, boring day job?

(Kayo) I worked at the register in a grocery store!

(Hiro) Actually we were all still in school before Polysics so not too much. I worked at a donut stand.

(Fumi) I played guitar in another band and also worked at Denny’s.

(Masahi ) I had another band too and was also working part-time.

When you guys are onstage you seem like you’re having a really great time, there’s a lot of energy. How long can you see yourselves physically being able to sustain that? Ten or fifteen years from now do you think you’ll still be able to put on that kind of show?

(Laughs) I feel like we could do it. (Laughs) I might not be as reckless as I used to be when we started out, maybe, but that’s the only difference. I think we can still put on a great show ten years down the road.

Your sound has been fairly consistent for a while – obviously the skill level has improved in a technical sense, but the actual sound is the same. Do you have any interest in experimenting with very different styles or do you always want to stay true to that original sound and idea that you started out with?

A drastic change might occur after March, when we’ll go back to Japan and do a big show at Budokan, which is Kayo’s graduation. At this point we plan to carry on as a trio, so there might be a little bit of change there in terms of musical style. We definitely would like to experiment, but we do want to remain true to the spirit of the band.

Live on stage. Photo by Kirsty Evans.

As far as the Budokan show, have you ever played a show that big before that was just Polysics? Is it challenging to adapt your usual stage show to such a huge venue?

Budokan will be by far the biggest venue that Polysics have ever played, so it will be a challenge, but I think we’ll still put on a great show in the same spirit we usually do. The method or approach is the same, we’ll just try to do a bigger, Budokan-sized version of the Polysics show, which I’m sure is going to be great.

How did you end up suddenly playing such a large venue? Has your popularity been increasing lately?

The fanbase has been growing. That’s definitely one of the factors, but Budokan itself is just a very special place for a lot of Japanese musicians, and this is the tenth anniversary of Polysics being on a major label, the tenth album, and Kayo’s graduation, so there are a lot of special things happening around this particular show. That’s why we decided to go with Budokan.

As far as Kayo’s graduation is concerned, how are the rest of the band members feeling about that now?

It was never a surprise. We’ve all been talking about this for a long time. The rest of the band is very positive and happy about her departure and the new life that she’s going to lead after this. It’s a celebration – it’s a very positive occasion.

Have you experimented at all with playing as a trio to see how it goes and how it’s going to work?

We’ve had to play shows as a trio before for various reasons such as illness. That’s always been a temporary thing though, a case of filling in the blank spots of the person who’s not there, whereas this time it’s going to be kind of a new thing. It’s an opportunity to experiment, basically. We’re going to try to come up with a new Polysics sound, which may be totally different. It’s going to be a challenge, but I think it’s a positive thing.

Are you planning to do that thing that a lot of bands do where they have someone stand in the background and fill in during live shows but they’re not really a member of the band?

Basically, there is no replacing Kayo. We could possibly find a great keyboard player but it’s not going to be the same, so whenever we’re going to try and play the old songs we’ll just have to come up with a new way. We haven’t really thought about it yet.

After the Budokan show you’re going to take a little break, right? What are you guys planning to do during your hiatus? It seems like you’ve pretty much been working constantly for years.

It’s not really a break. We don’t actually intend to stop working. Right after the show we’re going to get started on preparations for the new Polysics right away, so it’s not going to be long before people get to see the new Polysics.

One Kayo has graduated, do you think there’s a chance that she might occasionally come back as a guest or call the other members up and go “by the way, I wrote a song”? Do you think there might be some ongoing involvement, not on a regular basis but occasionally?

I think that might be a great idea for our twentieth anniversary, to have Kayo come back and play a song or two. We haven’t really thought about it yet, but it might be kind of a cool thing to do.

More from the Polysics show. Photo by Kirsty Evans.

I guess the question is, if you’ve been writing songs for ten years can you just stop?

(Kayo) It was Hiro who asked me to join the band in the first place, and I never really had much of an aspiration to become a full-time musician. Twelve years has been a fun ride, and I’ve been enjoying it a lot, but I want to see how I feel after I kind of take a break from it for a bit. It might come back and I might get hit by a musical bug and want to start writing again, but at this point I just kind of want to take a break from it, step aside for a little bit and then see how I feel.

That’s actually a question for the other members too. Obviously if you’re in a band it’s not something that you can do forever – is there anything else that any of you have ever thought that you might want to do when you’re older?

We’ve never really had anything in particular that we’ve wanted to do other than music.

You mentioned that the change brought about by Kayo’s graduation might lead to a change in your musical direction. Any thoughts yet about what that might be and what direction you might end up going in?

We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Any idea yet of the timeline as far as when fans might be able to expect something new from you?

No idea really at this point, but it’s not going to be long.

To wrap things up, is there anything that you want to say to your fans overseas?

The album Absolute Polysics is definitive I think, and everyone in the band is very satisfied and happy with it, so if you love music go out and get it!

And for anyone who might be planning to check them out this time who’s never been to a Polysics show before, what should they expect?

An out of the ordinary, crazy, happy space.

It’s not that I am particularly happy to note how easily the promises of the Orange Revolution were squandered, and how bitter and disenfranchised the majority of the Ukrainian electorate is. It brings me no joy to point out that in this country, people must worry about everything from the skyrocketing price of cheese to the stoking of mass hysteria surrounding swine flu, before they worry about which one of their candidates is pro-Western enough.

Still, it does bring me joy to mock Professor Kuzio’s sage advice from on high. I’m sure he can take it in stride. He’s not the one who just had to help bandage his kid brother’s arm because the ice on the streets of the capital is not getting cleaned up, and people are falling left and right, falling on the way to the polls to cast ballots for candidates who rarely deal with the reality of what it means to be an average Ukrainian. The way I see it, people who urge Ukrainian voters to lay aside petty practical concerns and see the big picture are getting off easy.

Here is where Victor Yanukovych comes in. Yanukovich, you might recall, was the reason why 2004’s Orange Revolution happened in the first place. His initial win in that election was declared to be the result of electoral fraud. Undaunted by his reputation as a Kremlin shill, Yanukovych hunkered down in the opposition and set about re-branding himself. And after the pathos and euphoria of the Orange Revolution had passed, after political deadlock seized the country, after President Victor Yuschenko utterly failed to unite Ukraine on most issues, Yanukovych began to seem more and more appealing.

Most outsiders do not quite understand the charm of Victor Yanukovych. He is not particularly eloquent. He has two criminal convictions under his belt. He is, in many ways, just as divisive of a leader as Victor Yuschenko turned out to be. But for a narrow majority of voters, Yanukovych represents a chance at stability. He is solid and calm, the very opposite of flashy. He has pledged to introduce Russian as a second state language, an issue which is seen as crucial by millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who get as fired up about it as the American conservative base does about abortion. For a man of his background, he is often surprisingly mild-mannered. His campaign slogan, “A Ukraine for human beings,” belies a certain uncomfortable truth about standards of living in this country.

"I've lived a complicated life!" Victor Yanukovych on the cover of Korrespondent. Image: Yanukovych.com.ua

“There is no one in charge in this country,” a taxi driver told me bitterly as he attempted to navigate a snow-choked street in the early morning the other day. His sentiment is one that, I believe, was echoed by millions of Ukrainians as they cast their vote. Combine this with low voter turn-out in Western Ukraine, for all intents and purposes the birthplace of the Orange Revolution, and Yanukovych’s projected win makes total sense.

For a symbol of a failed revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, who was beaten very narrowly just now, has shown remarkable tenacity. “She belongs in the opposition,” a member of Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions recently said on television. “She has that contrarian spirit.” The remark, meant to be dismissive, does highlight an important element of Tymoshenko’s politics: she appears to really hit her stride while in active conflict. Opposition politics are as crucial in Ukraine as they were five years ago, and they will continue to be crucial. When life in the country is not improving, however, in-fighting becomes exhausting. One can hope, though, that as far as her political activity is concerned, Tymoshenko will not simply take her toys and go home.

In the meantime, Ukraine remains as divided as ever. Expectations are low, which is dangerous, because low expectations automatically mean complacency on part of leaders.

Perhaps Serhiy Tihipko, who came in third during the first round of elections and is considered by many to be a breath of fresh air, will start building a decent coalition for a new opposition while everyone is still going on about Tymoshenko’s tiger and Yanukovych’s oligarch allies.

The ad itself features the story of Pam Tebow, who was allegedly told by doctors during her pregnancy with Timothy Tebow that she should abort because she had a medical condition that threatened her life. Like all pro-life advertisements, this is framed as a “choice for life,” but the ad neglects to mention that Ms. Tebow made this so-called decision in the Philippines, where abortion has been illegal since 1870. Can a choice really have been made under these circumstances? And what to the meaning of the choice to become a parent in general? Could we be missing something important here?

Organizations like NOW and The Center for Reproductive Rights have been very active in challenging the position that this ad represents choice. In a letter to Matthew Margo [PDF link], the Senior Vice President of Program Practices for CBS, The Center for Reproductive services contend that considering the dire consequences for women who are found guilty of terminating a pregnancy, it is highly unlikely that Ms. Tebow was indeed advised to procure an abortion. Both NOW and the Center for Reproductive Rights assert that this is ad does not meet the standards that CBS has set regarding accuracy in advertising.

NOW and The Center for Reproductive Rights present a cogent argument to invalidate the claims made by both Ms. Tebow and her son, Timothy. Pro-life groups in the U.S. have a history of presenting the women who have chosen to keep their babies as emblematic of an anti-abortion stance without acknowledging that these women only had the ability to choose because abortion is a legal procedure in the United States. The absence of free will invalidates the argument that a conscious choice has been made.

Meanwhile, if Focus on the Family had chosen to highlight the story of a woman who had indeed chosen motherhood, would the current opposition to this advertisement still exist?

When asked whether the opposition was based in supporting a woman’s right to choose or the falsehoods asserted in the advertisement, Dionne Scott the Senior Press Officer for The Center for Reproductive Rights, stated:

“We’re concerned that the Focus on the Family ad may be presenting a misleading picture of the reality of abortion in the Philippines and that CBS should determine whether the ad meets accuracy standards… CBS recently announced that it had relaxed its policy regarding advocacy ads. If that’s the case, then accepting an ad that tells a story that’s out-of-context and promoted by an anti-choice organization is a problem. And CBS should pull the ad and keep football as the main attraction.”

Though Ms. Scott once again cited the falsehoods of the clams made by Focus on the Family, you will note that in the end she asserts that the ad should simply be pulled, which suggests that she believes that Focus on the Family should be denied an opportunity to present their argument. The Super Bowl may not be the most advantageous venue to have such a highly politicized debate, but it should be acceptable to promote the idea that women do indeed choose to give birth. Validating choice means not reducing women’s reproductive decision to abortions, and supporting all women’s decisions, whether or not they decide to carry a pregnancy to term.

Both sides are so blissfully wedded to their ideological positions that the women they claim to advocate for become little more than props. Pro-lifers are often referred to as “pro-birth,” and pro-choicers are often referred to as “abortion advocates” because neither side openly admits that “choice” means that women will indeed make the decision that best suits them. The existence of legal and safe abortions does not mean that women will forgo motherhood, and this legitimate choice needs to be actively supported.

The fight for reproductive freedom came out of radical feminist organizing in the seventies and as such, it still suffers from the idea that women must be freed of domesticity. Mothering may not be in the life plans of numerous women, but there are many mothers that enter into this role with full awareness of both the consequences and the pleasures that it will bring.

Why is this reproductive choice not actively part of the discourse for those that claim that their priority is reproductive freedom? How can we socially understand that women have agency and legitimacy if we fixate solely on deaths that occur when women are forced to choose a back-alley abortion? Pro-choicers are falsely understood as “pro-abortion,” simply because there is a real failure on their part to talk about the other side of that choice – motherhood.

Clearly, Focus on the Family is not a pro-woman organization and their advertisement is full of mendacious assertions that need to be challenged, but the idea that women do indeed choose to become mothers is something that should always have a place in any and all advocacy. Motherhood is one of the most demanding roles that a woman will take on her lifetime, and when women are still not supported in this critical role, then how can any organization claim to truly be pro-woman?

The problem with reanimating long dead but beloved television shows is that like zombies they can turn around and rip your face off if you take your eye off them for even a second. “Edge of Darkness” is often lauded as the most influential political thriller of all time, so relocating it to contemporary Boston and cramming a six part series into less than two hours was always going to be a gamble.

Does it pay off? Well, it wont break the bank, but as a good old fashioned conspiracy thriller it will deal Mel back in the game and give him some chips to play with at the top table. Gibson’s Detective Thomas Craven is more than just a grieving father investigating the brutal slaying of his daughter; he’s a cathartic battlewagon bludgeoning out the star’s black demons on the faces of his supporting characters.

Gibson’s features have been hammered out of sheet metal, his eyes dulled by whatever darkness haunts his soul and his screen presence is all the more electrifying after nearly a decade away for it. His Craven doesn’t drink and wears his Catholicism firmly around his neck. This is Gibson firmly off the booze, but unrepentant about his faith and his Old Testament-style revenge as he rains down fire and brimstone onto corporate America represented by his late daughter’s employer the shadowy Norhmoor Company.

Northmoor’s headquarters would make Ken Adams proud-an old missile silo leased from the U.S. Government. Something’s defiantly afoot as everyone is petrified about revealing what goes on inside its spectacular glass vistas. Sure, Danny Huston’s tanned Bennett is all smiles and double breasted suits, but when he asks Craven about his daughter’s death,” What does it feel like?” It feels like someone just walked over your grave.

As the plot thickens, the mysterious Jedburgh materialises from the shadows to dispense cryptic advice that may help or hinder Craven’s investigation. Jedburgh speaks Latin and French, smokes fine cigars and enjoys a glass of red. He has one of those clandestine jobs that only seem to exist in the movies, answerable to nobody whilst manipulating everybody. “What’s that like not being anyone in particular?” Craven asks him.

Jedburgh is someone all right; he’s Ray Winstone stepping into Robert De Niro’s shoes at the last minute. His cockney conspirator neatly reverses Joe Don Baker’s Texan nightmare from the original series. Back in the Britain of the 1980s, a giant American seemed more threatening, more alien, more exotic in that grim decade than an Englishman abroad does today. Winstone’s Jedburgh does have the same doom laden silhouette as Baker, that lurking menace. When Jim Pine bleats indignantly, “I’m a United States Senator,” his rasping answer slits the words from his throat, “By what standard?”

Craven’s exchanges with Jedburgh are never less than intriguing, but what really saves “Edge of Darkness” from being a pumped up television movie is Craven’s grief for his daughter. She maybe dead, but her ghost inhabits every frame of the film. Campbell clearly grasps the double-edged sword of our need to record every aspect of family life as Emma Craven answers her dad back through photographs and DVDs, he even dreams about her in videotape. Does this help the grieving process or make it worse?

As Craven investigates his daughter’s life, we feel his unease of not only discovering the secrets she was harbouring, but also the realisation that he never really knew her. How many of us truly know our families? We cringe at what he might find as he checks through Emma’s mobile or empties out her bags onto her bed. Gibson handles these scenes with a stunned dignity, especially as he watches the last of her blood swirl down the sink after keeping a bloody flannel as the last physical reminder of his daughter.

“Edge of Darkness” does have the courage of its convictions and is as bloody and bleak as a mainstream thriller can be. Some of the sequences seem abrupt, as if an hour has been stripped from its running length, but this is all about Mel Gibson’s redemption as an actor. His performance is first rate and a reminder of the star power he once wielded. You’ll see what Gibson thinks of his comeback in the last frame. It remains to be seen if the audience agrees with him.

As Craven says, “You better decide whether you’re hangin’ on the cross or bangin’ in the nails.”

SIDE A

I offer instant credit to any band confident enough to start an album with the words “Let’s talk about you for a minute” before spending the rest of the album gripping tightly to “I”.

When this commitment to first person narrative works it’s gut wrenching. I must’ve listened to Romance Is Borings’s ‘I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know’ a few dozen times to soak up the way Aleks Campesinos! pleads to become “the one that keeps track of the moles on your back”, conjuring the promised intimacy held in every relationship/crush/glimpse ever known. ‘In Media Res’ achieves it too, sketching the cramped confines of a late-night car with the accuracy of someone who dwelled on it while crossing the Atlantic (“I flew for seven hours. The sky didn’t once turn black”). But, just as acutely, when it’s less than moving the self-obsession is sickening. ‘Straight In At 101′ tilts around the metaphor of break-ups as best of television, but nose dives into graphically unfulfilled sexual desire in a way that conjures only coldness.

Where Los Campesinos! take the most flack is the diarism and juvenalia of their lyrics, but with Romance Is Boring such a remark totally misses the point. Their problem is that they communicate an emotional maturity and complexity that spends so much time trapped in the minutia of love and its converse it becomes draining. I clench my teeth time and again wishing I could hear a metaphor (like ‘We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed’s “I’ve got a fist on fire!”) that says more than the snarled epithets attributed to love and loss in this album.

SIDE B

At the Rough Trade instore album launch (and online, and in interviews and other times I’ve seen them live) Gareth Campesinos! reflected on the boredom induced by touring ‘old’ material, which is a repressing statement to make to an audience. It clips wings and enthusiasm so neatly I’ve started to assume it’s premeditated. Maybe the romance of it all got burned out of them in America?

Lyrically speaking, it’s clear this band has loved and lost on the road. Hammering between states must be an endless slog, all process and containment, scarring the Oklahoma into their collective memory alongside the Manhattan Skyline, Mexico and Missouri. 2008/9 saw Los Campesinos! entrenched in the U.S., rattling from city to city while recording the best part of two albums there. Their return to the UK seemed to be accompanied with the kind of nostalgia for this trip usually only achieved after years of distance. The album’s ‘Coda…’ vacuum packs that sensation, and I have sympathy for it, but the Los Campesinos! that went out there first time around could sing about “blood and cherryade” in a way that would make this version sick to the stomach.

Photo by Matthew Sheret

In Image comic series Phonogram, the Dexys Midnight Runners obsessed Lloyd is nudged towards the music of Los Campesinos! to (essentially) stop him being so serious. I can’t help but imagine his frown lines return as he hits play on ‘Plan A’, bullied into embracing his old self by a band that stopped smiling.

SIDE C

I wonder how much bullying it will have taken to get the crowd into Rough Trade, briefly, before realising the answer is ‘not much’. Most of the room remember Britpop as Blur vs Oasis and danced to ‘Common People’ before going to sixth form. Gathered in London’s best known independent record store, beside the city’s best loved Sunday market, they make up the core demographic of Los Campesinos! audience; indie kids one and all. They will not judge the band on this performance alone…

(which is just as well, because it isn’t very good. The sound pops and jitters, instruments slamming up in volume before dropping altogether in a way that My Bloody Valentine spend thousands trying to emulate. Half of the band can only be seen by the front row and the room itself seems to resent the disruption. I like Rough Trade and I like live music, but their purposes aren’t well suited tonight)

(but that may not be entirely true, because there are flashes between feedback squeals of something pure. Tom Campesinos! is the axis around which the band spin, creating a tumbling electric orchestra of noise that thumps home. They make me think about the pace of the new material, songs that purr and run like an engine rather than a party. Once again the rhythm section act as a platform off of which the strings and guitars soar and live Harriet Campesinos!’s violin brings a tear to the eye; on record she brings them running down your cheek and onto the keyboard)

…and nor should they. While an audience on tour might be a better representation of who the band reaches, I’ll bet it’s not as all-encompassing as they want it to be. And there’s an untapped audience who really could stand to see this gang create beautiful things together.

SIDE D

In Brick Lane they close with ‘The Sea Is A Good Place To Think About The Future’, a track I’m unashamedly in love with. In part it’s an observational essay on the hopelessness of others, while also filling the imagined ocean with pregnant optimism: somewhere over the horizon there’s change. It casts me upon imagined shores, where chats with people I love and respect can give me the focus and strength I need to swim off. Straddling both sides of the Atlantic, Los Camp! are a band wholly conscious of the power of escape.

I know people whose lives are lived in a state of momentum – both internationally and within London – that I need to think twice about phoning in case I get an international dial tone or just slow them down. They are far from rock stars. This when every day I find myself surrounded by a ‘no future’ rhetoric of financial stagnation that chokes the half formed dreams of school-age Brits. At the same I’ve spent all day listening to an album by people who have barely graduated that’s all about interstates and momentum rather than England’s pylons and crumbling piers, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Except that, also, everything is wrong with that, because if you acknowledge the escapism it takes to get there then you can change lives.

Romance Is Boring is locked in some holding pattern of truth, as if a little lie here and there might stop people dead, but sometimes truth is the last thing we need. I want to be afforded the luxury of imagining somewhere better on another shore. Gareth is an incredible songwriter, nailing observation and confession with an attention to detail that would floor most novelists, but he holds so tightly to heartbreak that he loses all sense of hope. He could light a fire under a country of teenagers who think they know what their future holds, could burn the memory of Bridgend clean off of South Wales… and it’s okay that he hasn’t yet. But maybe he should soon.

Screenwriter Tony Grisoni has made a shockingly coherent miniseries with the tone and texture of an epic poem. Credit the directors for much of this atmosphere: each amplifies and holds the more operatic notes. The cliché “intimate epic” fits perfectly here, especially with the first film, subtitled 1974. Its brooding intimacy and tactile interiority rival Lynn Ramsay’s “Morvern Callar.” But Morvern Callar was about one woman coping with her boyfriend’s suicide. “Red Riding” is about an entire region of England responding to a string of grisly femicides. Somewhat miraculous, then, that the series sustains a touch as delicate as its fragile victims, reeling witnesses and tormented heroes.

“1974″ steps into—and rarely leaves—the shoes of a rookie crime reporter investigating serial killings in Yorkshire. It is the strongest of the trilogy because of this intense subjectivity. We follow mama’s-boy journalist Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) through every bend and curve of his days, whether bullshitting with newsroom colleagues, bedding down his hot ex, taunting crooked cops, coaxing testimony from (and bedding down) a hot grieving mother (apparently, guys like Eddie get laid effortlessly), or enduring his own mother’s doting ways. This is emo noir.

It’s also a classic fit for the serial killer procedural canon alongside “Vengeance is Mine,” “Se7en,” “Memories of Murder,” and “Zodiac.” “1974″ resembles the latter flick most, because it concerns an upstart in over his head who eventually takes center stage in the investigation. But like all the great ones, it’s less concerned with tracking a killer than with the moral tests his acts impose upon a harried, claustrophobic community.

The second film, “1980,” runs a very close second to “1974″ in entertainment value and artistry. It focuses on a big city investigator descending upon the same small town to figure out why, to date, it has solved only one murder case related to the serial killer. Like Dunford, Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) is a manifestly decent guy facing some sharp moral dilemmas. For one thing, his ace detective, who happens to be his former mistress (Maxine Peake), is in love with him. Makes it kind of hard to concentrate on the volatile politics of an internal affairs investigation, not to mention going home to his unsuspecting wife.

Andrew Garfield in "1974"

In the flashiest but least inspired chapter, “1983,” sideline characters who earlier seemed present mostly to deliver exposition and plot points emerge as the most important ones across the series. There’s also a new arrival, a burned out lawyer (Mark Addy) who gets a shot at (aw, jeez) redemption by tying up the decade-long case of a town that mysteriously rewards its police department’s failures. The title “1983″ is apt: that’s the year Return of the Jedi, another, similarly inflated but underwhelming trilogy closer debuted. Grisoni’s dialogue loses its punch, becoming prosaic and humorless. Director Anand Tucker wallows in the ponderous mood rather than modulating and offsetting it with other flavors. (Since I haven’t read the four David Peace novels these films are based on, I can’t tell you whether he deserves some of the blame.)

Not to spoil anything, but “Red Riding” isn’t for gorehounds, as none of the killer’s crimes happen before the camera. The most gratuitous element here is not blood but hardboiled detective movie cliches, which directors Julian Jarrold (“1974″) and James Marsh (“1980″) keep at bay with naturalistic performances across the board, but which “1983″ Tucker too often serves up with a heavy swat.

Still, in full, “Red Riding” is a shapely, satisfying chronicle not of a killer on the loose but of how widespread corruption and complacency in the name of upward mobility can make any town a killer’s paradise. Rabid self-interest keeps almost everybody’s eye off the ball. (Era-specific politics weigh in mostly via radios and TV’s, which, in “1974,” tell us about a victorious miners’ strike, and in Thatcherized “1980,” remind us that Northern Ireland is buggin’ out.) This box set of despair damns the church, the state and big business (in the person of iconic heavy Sean Bean) with a surprising amount of tenderness and poetic fury.

In “God Loveth His Children,” the Church of Latter Day Saints clearly states its position on homosexuality:

“The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi voiced feelings we all have when he acknowledged that he did not “know the meaning of all things.” But he testified, “I know that [God] loveth his children” (1 Nephi 11:17). God does indeed love all His children. Many questions, however, including some related to same-gender attractions, must await a future answer, even in the next life. But God has revealed simple, unchanging truths to guide us. He loves all His children, and because He loves you, you can trust Him.”

In this passage, we can see that homosexuality is understood to be a challenge that must be overcome. Ultimately the flesh is constructed to be both the temple and the site of sin; lesbians and gay men present a paradox to this construct. How can one be divine and yet full of sin? The Mormon Church has resolved to love the sinner and hate the sin.

Elder Dallin H. Oaks said, “All of us have some feelings we did not choose, but the gospel of Jesus Christ teaches us that we still have the power to resist and reform our feelings (as needed) and to assure that they do not lead us to entertain inappropriate thoughts or to engage in sinful behavior” (“Same-Gender Attraction,” Ensign, Oct. 1995, 9). He also claims, “Improper thoughts diminish if you replace them immediately with uplifting, constructive thoughts.”

The Church advises that that those who experience same-gender attraction (their term for homosexuality) to abstain from all sexual activity. Gay Mormons have been erased from public discourse through the command to abstain, and this is what makes the character of Albie on “Big Love” so very transgressive.

From the very first season, it was clear that Albie entertained ideas and/or fantasies that were not purely heterosexual. As the son of the Prophet Roman, Albie not only sought power at his home, the Juniper Creek Compound, he also desired to live The Principle to gain entrance into the proverbial celestial kingdom.

Each season, we have watched Albie struggle with his homosexuality. At first, there were clandestine encounters with strangers in truck stops and parks for anonymous sex, but this season, it seems that Albie has finally found love. Though Albie has made it clear that he sees his homosexuality as a curse, he clearly can no longer continue to deny himself.

Standing alone in his lover’s home, his father’s ghost taunts him by saying, “You’re a pathetic crybaby who masturbated himself into a sodomite.” Though Albie finds himself irresistibly drawn to Dale, his new love interest, the guilt brought on by his strict Mormon upbringing plagues him.

Dale also has a conflict. He is a married man with children, and repeatedly cites them as a reason to end his interactions with Albie. In the first on-screen kiss between Albie and Dale, the two are standing outside of a meeting center whose sole purpose is to counsel gay Mormons to resist the temptation of the flesh and lead a heterosexual lifestyle.

Each week through their work, the actors and writers of “Big Love” are giving voice to those that the Mormon Church would silence for an eternity. Though Dale claims that “same-gender attraction does not exist in the Celestial Kingdom,” his inability to resist Albie exemplifies the futility of his struggle; he is as God made him to be.

I contacted the Mormon Church in Utah to get commentary regarding their thoughts regarding the burgeoning gay love story in “Big Love,” but my calls were not returned. In 2006 the Church did release the following thoughts on the HBO show,

“Despite its popularity with some, much of today’s television entertainment shows an unhealthy preoccupation with sex, coarse humor and foul language. ‘Big Love,’ like so much other television programming, is essentially lazy and indulgent entertainment that does nothing for our society and will never nourish great minds.”

“Big Love” may not speak to the experience of heterosexual Mormons, but it certainly is an eye-opening look into the struggles that gay and lesbian Mormons face. Mormonism is more than just a religion in the traditional sense, it is also a community. Along with the personal shame of feeling as though one’s sexuality is a sin, there is also a risk that if homosexuality is revealed, the “sinner” will lose family and friends. Albie’s entire life centers around the Juniper Creek Compound. If it were revealed that he was attracted to men, not only would he face the personal shame of sin, he would be cast out from the only home that he knows. This extreme shunning and the fear of isolation is enough to keep many gays and lesbians in the Mormon community closeted throughout their lifetimes.

Katherine Rosman’s article for The Nation, “Mormon Family Values,” is the account of one family struggling to come to terms their son’s homosexuality and their faith. Though they had tried to reconcile themselves to the Church doctrine, the attempted suicide of Judd Hardy, their son, placed them in the position of having to choose between their faith and their child. Suicide, for gay Mormons, is not an uncommon action. There is currently a Reconciliation Petition that tracks and honours those have taken their lives because of an inability to negotiate their faith and their sexuality.

“Big Love” may just be a cable show, but for those that the Mormon Church treats as invisible, the character of Albie illustrates a struggle. People need to see themselves represented in order to understand that they are not alone. Many struggle to reconcile their faith with their sexuality, and it need not be the isolating experience that the Mormon Church encourages. It is quite simple: if people feel that that they are alone, they are much more likely to conform, even if that conformity brings them pain, than face complete isolation from their community. GLBT characters are underrepresented in the media, and having a gay male Mormon character in the mainstream is a transgressive act which supports inclusivity.

I read the speech the next day. It was better—but still a stump speech. Talk of a spending freeze that doesn’t include defense spending leaves me more angry than impressed. But I had to turn on the TV (well, the YouTube) two days later and watch a rather different kind of Obama event, one that’s since been dubbed “Question Time” after the British tradition of letting the opposition party at the Prime Minister for some unbridled fun—er, questioning.

After Joe Wilson’s shout during that health care speech, I called for less “respect” and more engagement, more criticism. Well, there were no shouts of “you lie!” at the Republican Issues Retreat, where Obama was allowed to speak his (predictable) piece and then took questions from the (white) Representatives gathered.

Indeed, the only accusations of lying came from Obama, delivered with a grin at some times, at others with a stern look and a list of the actual facts.

It was great political theater, and as many who watched the event live tweeted, it made many former supporters like the president again. He certainly ran rings around many of the reps who got up to make stump speeches of their own, grandstanding in front of a mic before the President inevitably picked apart their statements.

There was a birth certificate joke, but the wilder accusations didn’t come. There were no questions about death panels, and Michelle Bachmann was nowhere to be seen. It’s harder to lie boldly to someone’s face, I suppose.

As for Obama, he was funny, self-possessed, and capable of substantive answers to any number of gotchas. He should be funny more often. Funny breaks through to people—it keeps unrestrained anger and fear from growing. You get angry at someone, but you can laugh with them.

He also managed to slide in subtle put-downs that were red meat for progressives watching, repeating the need to find “credible” economists to support Republican proposals (though the credibility of his own economic team is hardly impeccable) and “health care experts.” His tone shifted depending on who he spoke to—Marsha Blackburn’s voice oozed condescension the way John McCain’s did during debates, but Obama coolly out-condescended her, reducing his sentences to one-syllable words.

So, yes, the event rallied the troops for Obama, and Republican reaction afterward indicated that they knew he’d won the debate.

But more importantly, this was a victory for transparency and for a possible real change in the way things are done in Washington.

Perhaps we were only riveted by the fact that it was a new event. Certainly the fact that veteran Washington reporters like Mother Jones’ David Corn called the event “gripping” says something for the novelty of the moment.

Corn wrote:

Obama campaigned to bring change to Washington. Regular public encounters between the president and the opposition party would be real change. (It might even have an impact on what sort of politician could consider becoming president.) NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd tweeted that Obama “will win tons of pundit plaudits but will policy come out of it?” Yet good debate can shape good policy. Here was an unfiltered exchange between the opposing camps of Washington. Citizens could watch and decide.

This morning, there’s a petition calling for more events of this nature. Tweeters quickly hashtagged it #questiontime and demanded more as well, and different events: many of us would like to see Obama take questions from, say, the House Progressive Caucus and have to defend his left flank, or even have a similar roasting of the Blue Dogs.

Imagine the president not only taking very basic, pointed questions from average citizens at town hall meetings on a regular basis, but fielding the questions of the opposition party for prime-time TV cameras. It would change the debate. Hyperbole and lies would have less traction if they had to, at some point, be said to someone else’s face and not a flock of fawning reporters. It’s like high school—it’s much easier to start a rumor and deny you said it later than to be forced to say it out loud.

And yet, what does it say about our news media that we have to call on the president to take questions from the opposition in order to hear him answer their points? None of the GOP talking points broached were exactly new—I was slightly surprised to hear a Republican offering a Democratic president a line-item veto, but most of the talking points were predictable deficit, spending, deficit, spending, health care, entitlements, why won’t you listen to us? These are age-old party ideas, cornerstones of their platform, even, that any White House reporter worth her press badge could ask at any press conference.

They don’t.

Transparency from the administration is a good thing. Public debate is a good thing. Yet many of the Washington reporters cheering this event could put the president on the hot seat any time they wanted just by asking serious, difficult questions.

I would take more events like this one over more prime-time speeches, certainly, and I suspect after the performance here, Obama’s people are rethinking their strategy. They certainly were reminded that the best weapon in their arsenal is the fact that this president is not a nitwit or an empty suit, and that part of his appeal has always been his ability to talk about issues in a way that people can understand, at least as much as his stirring hope-and-change rhetoric.

But I’d also love it if the White House press corps took some lessons from the Republican representatives—yes, I said it—and actually pressed the president when they have access to him on policy issues.

If another nation-state were to down the power grid, would that constitute an act of war? It seems so. But what if a lone operative were able to distribute the wrong user manual to electronic company employees? It hardly seems to meet the definition of “war,” yet could have expansive results. In Georgia and in Estonia, targeted cyber attacks crippled the national government; in Mumbai, cyber attacks accompanied bombings to impair the emergency response and perpetuate panic.

Yet cyber attacks do not elicit the same emotional reaction as bombs, and January’s attacks are another manifestation. Our reactions to China’s (allegedly) aggressive infiltration work against the US government, from Titan Rain to the East Asia Bureau and the Commerce Department attacks, are not the same as if they had sent tanks or hijacked a plane. If our concern were purely economic (measuring the loss), then one might expect our reactions to cyber attack-related damage to be the same as any other terrorist-related damage. But they don’t seem to be.

Harvard negotiation professor Robert Mnookin’s new book explores the ways in which emotional and moral aspects of a decision can affect our cognitive process: when we ask whether to bargain with a “devil,” purely economic rationale is not always the method we invoke to answer the question. Where we feel an inherent sense of evil– 9/11 and Al Qaeda; the Holocaust and the Nazis, for example– there is an extra layer in the decision-making process.

In the same vein, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has written on the reasons our cognitive economics of reaction are not according to rational choice theory. “Rational” or not, cyber attacks seem to have a degree of sanitation that a bomb lacks. The backroom with a computer is layers away from the explosions and blood, even if the keystrokes result in the same destructive, even fatal, effects.

Our perception of the gravity of a situation seems tuned to our degree of visceral reaction– having a “face” to the threat is crucial (as recognized by psychologist Daniel Gilbert in his evolutionary-psychology hypothesis that global warming does not push our buttons like terrorism and other threats “with a mustache” do). Each time Osama bin Laden releases a new video, as he did last week, he stirs an emotional maelstrom. Consider too our national concern for one Natalie Holloway, as compared to the vast number of hunger- or cancer-related deaths in the world. We rationally recognize hunger and cancer as problems, but we spend irrational amounts of money to salvage one life because we have a face for both the victim and her alleged aggressor.

In fact, this seems to be one of the reasons why terrorists haven’t historically chosen to launch cyberattacks (any lack of technical savvy seems reconcilable if they contracted out, Bin Laden is a millionaire after all): with an eye towards getting under our skin, terrorists prefer to blow things up than hire a computer hacker to inflict an attack. But the latest news on the China Google hackings suggests the attacks may have been conducted by a Google insider, and if there were a showy way to use cyber weapons to effect death in the “kinetic” (physical) world, then terrorists–or other actors– may harness it.

The stakes soon will be as high online as they are offline. Most attacks so far have focused on accruing money (such as the $9M ATM scam the FBI uncovered last year) or aggressive social commentary (like the Estonia attacks following the removal of the Bronze Soldier of Talinn statue)– but war-scale damage to objects and people is a continuing prospect. Moreover, the cyber attacker may be uniquely freed of retribution to the extent that they can successfully anonymize themselves against forensic traces back to the “smoking keyboard.”

And of course we must hold ourselves accountable as well. As our reactions to cyberaggression are tempered by the sanitizing factor, our willingness to execute cyber attacks may be freed. A few days ago, the Pentagon called for a high-tech “Office of Deception” [PDF link] of sorts, to barely a raised eyebrow. In offensive cyber activities, the laws are cloudy and the work is classified–the Department of Defense acknowledges they are happening but releases no information.

Our sense of Internet rights must keep up with our sense of human rights, and when using or responding to cyber weapons, we ought to be cognizant regarding the effects of hard-wired perceptions of ethical distance upon our willingness to engage.

Merritt Baer is a Harvard Law School student in Cambridge, MA.

She took some time to talk to Sarah Jaffe about the progressive media in the age of Obama, media’s role in social justice efforts, and the changes she still hopes to see.

Sarah Jaffe: I guess we can’t start a discussion of the progressive media without talking about the end of Air America this week.

Tracy Van Slyke: Air America was its own unique model in a lot of ways. Investors put a lot of money in a model that takes many many years to work, and they were looking for a very quick return on their investment, which is not the way the media works in general, and especially not for-profit media. Then each time ownership switches hands everybody’s got a brand new idea of what’s going to happen. Starting from the beginning again, there’s no way to create momentum.

It did launch a lot of progressive media darlings, from Laura Flanders to Rachel Maddow to Al Franken becoming a member of the Senate. There’s pros and cons to Air America’s story.

SJ: Doing old-school radio doesn’t really fit into the kind of new media model—they were getting there with the new website, but…

TVS: The traditional way of radio communicating is still vitally important. The right still dominates the media landscape. I don’t think we figured out how to do radio for the left the way they figured out how to do media for the right. Mimicking the Rush Limbaughs of the world and just making a left version of that certainly doesn’t appeal to me. I think that was an issue, although I think they tried to move away from that over time.

Progressives have really demonstrated how to operate online, but incorporating that into a one-way communications model is interesting.

things have changed

SJ: Money and funding are less of the subject of your book, but definitely a huge part of the problem.

TVS: That’s a whole other book, and you’re not going to come up with an answer in a book about business models. It’s really about the experimenting and the learning and the evolution.

A lot of the organizations that we feature do have successful business models, but it isn’t what we write about. We write about their media production in this new networked media environment, why that’s successful and why does that matter?

SJ: There are some innovative ways these companies have figured out how to make money, but in a lot of them it still comes down to advertising and a lot of free labor.

TVS: There’s a mix, some advertising, a lot of free labor, foundations or individual donors with large pocketbooks. We do see some instances, like with TalkingPointsMemo, who did sort of a deliberate callout for fundraising for a specific thing that Josh wanted to do. Which is somewhat different than what other organizations do.

I think that’s something we’re going to be seeing with some different spaces, like Spot.us. Recently Page Williams did this article that no one would pick up, although she was an incredibly well-known reporter, so she self-published it and asked for support afterwards. I think we’re going to see that sort of crowdsourced fundraising being replicated on a more institutional-infrastructure level.

SJ: It seems to work with TPM because crowdsourcing is such a part of their journalism.

TVS: What they’ve done is they’ve built up a community who is very invested not just in accessing the journalism, but being part of the reporting team, and very interested in accessing the opinions of the top dog at TPM, Josh. They’ve created this really great recipe to communicate with their audiences and interact with them, so it’s much more natural to go to that audience and ask for money. Although they only do that on very rare occurrences.

The audience and users see them as people that they can actually interact with, not just people behind a wall. Not every journalism organization is going to do that. You have to ask: what is the best way to interact with your users?

SJ: You say, “Address readers as members of communities.” I know you come from an organizing background as well as media, can you talk about how that drove you to found the Media Consortium?

TVS: I’ve always been fascinated with how journalism and media can impact the world. The organizing, actually providing the tools for people to organize and take action themselves, has been the other side of me. I think a couple of years ago, people would freak out if you put that in the context of journalism, but with the changing landscape and technology and online environment, the two not only naturally fit together, but it’s imperative for media organizations to figure out how to interact, how to embolden their audience in different ways, for a couple of reasons.

Journalism organizations, particularly progressive media organizations, always struggle to define what their impact is. They’re always pushed aside as just preaching to the choir, but the right’s been doing that for 30 years and they’re pretty powerful. Even preaching to the choir, giving them the tools to go out and fight their own fight is incredibly important.

And by the way, there’s a lot of disagreement among the progressive left—they’re not one homogenous group.

When Jessica and I started this work 6 years ago, it was really to understand: how does this system work and how do we understand what impact it has? A lot of funders, investors and even audience members didn’t realize the importance and the impact that it has on our landscape.

Combining those two elements, the need to show impact and to support the organizations that make that happen is like a melding of my two worlds.

And literally, on a future-of-media level, journalism organizations have to figure out how to do this. Amy Gahran says that media has programmed the audience to be passive receivers, which is not their natural element. Journalism and progressive media organizations have to find that combination of being comfortable producing media but also moving their users, engaging their users in ways that can impact the larger political landscape.

Visit beyondtheecho.net for more info

SJ: You mention Indymedia briefly, which came out of very specific organizing, but doesn’t really get acknowledged in the blogosphere. We get this strange self-congratulatory note among the mostly-white middle-class educated male punditocracy there sometimes. You quote Rosen talking about the culture of those who like leading the legacy media, but there’s plenty of that in the blogosphere as well.

TVS: I think the models that many of them have created are fantastic. I think there’s a blindness when you get to a certain point. A lot of people say that the Internet is open so everyone has access, but if you already have power, it’s that much easier for you to decide who else has power, and who doesn’t, and what’s important and what’s not.

In the “Beyond Pale, Male and Stale” chapter, we do talk about the opening up of gender diversity and communities of color, and I think that crosses a lot of different areas of the media system.

In the book, we did focus on specific examples that you could follow over time, of media organizations that had a broad impact on certain political moments. That does not dismiss in any way the importance of the Indymedia movement and the role they have played and the role they still play for many, many people.

While we’re lauding a lot of these organizations we do point out a critique of what we’re still missing. And some people aren’t going to like that. They’re like “I do my thing, you go do your thing.” And it’s harder than it sounds. We’re going to have to figure out how to force those people at the top to either reexamine how they do work or how they broker partnerships, or we’re going to have to really invest in these communities developing enough power so they can rival the others.

SJ: You talk about fighting the right as a strategy, but occasionally it seems like too many media outlets are focused on fighting the right and not on putting forward alternate narratives and ideas.

TVS: It’s one strategy of a multipronged strategy. What we point out about fighting the right is it’s not just about being reactive, it’s about being proactive, putting out strategies. To me that’s one major difference from the sort of reactive fighting-the-right mode we’ve been in for years.

The right still does dominate, we have to recognize that. If we back off, they’re just going to swallow even more. At the same time, that shouldn’t be the role for every progressive organization. Once again, it’s about what is the message of that organization, where do they fit in the overall progressive media landscape, what impact do they want to have?

From GRITtv to Mother Jones to the Nation, everyone’s doing it, but how much do you want to make it of your strategy, how in-your-face and transparent are you going to be about it, and what’s going to happen because of that?

SJ: Cohesiveness was easy when we had Bush to hate. These days we’re fighting each other as often as anything else and it gets very nasty. I rather worry that we’re using the same strategies we honed on the right.

TVS: We’ve gotten too good for our own good. It’s difficult to watch in one sense because over 2004 to 2008, the relationships that were built felt really profound. The actual personal relationships that were built were really fundamental to all this work happening. I’m not in all the conversations and fights and all the different fractiousness, but unfortunately the learning curve when you’re back in sort of “power”–it’s not a fight over one monolithic enemy, it’s a fight over legislation and policy.

I’m hoping that the relationships that were built were cemented enough that the fractiousness and fighting can go back to actually having conversations with each other. And that’s not to say that everyone needs to be on the same message, or they need to do the same thing, but we don’t want the verbal flamethrowing.

SJ: Rick Rowley said on GRITtv that the success of left movements comes from “one no and many yeses” but it seems at times like the many-yeses part gets forgotten.

TVS: We were united a few years ago, and in every one-big-no movement there’s all sorts of little disagreements. I’m sure on the right now there’s all sorts of little disagreements, but we feel like we’re fracturing. It’s really important to think about what do we want as a landscape, as a movement, as media production. How do we get there?

SJ: Before this got to be so messy, health care organizing was led for a while by FDL and HCAN.

TVS: What FDL did was they moved from just preaching to the choir to assembling the choir, where the transparency and relationship they had with their users, the trusted opinion and reporting, really allowed them to take the step of saying, “Let’s take this action collectively.”

And it had profound effects on different elections, on different media moments. How we can start replicating that and going back to that is really important on a larger structural level.

Some things are going to shake out and be OK in six months, and some things are going to fracture. But once again, media organizations individually, collectively need to start thinking about the overall long-term success both of the progressive media and democracy itself.

SJ: Obama’s response to the netroots for a while seemed disdainful, but do you see the return of Plouffe and the quick response to Citizens United as hopeful signs?

TVS: It was interesting, wasn’t it? I think he was probably going to come back for the 2010 election cycle anyway. From the debate over OFA to how the White House has engaged with the netroots, there was sort of a strategic recognition that they’ve lost control of driving the message, not just a moment-to-moment level but for the long term, and they needed that.

SJ: How do you see this model expanding to global media organizing? How can we network not just within the US but around the world?

TVS: In many ways I think the world is doing it better than we are sometimes. In developing countries in Africa, everyday people are using their mobile phones to report on what’s happening and it’s being housed and coming back to them—we’re not doing that here. But that’s also because in many of those places they don’t have an established media system, and as many stones as we can throw at our mainstream media system, it exists.

I think there’s a lot of lessons that we can take from around the world in terms of engaging citizens in the process and what that can do for news production and dissemination of information.

I hope we can learn from humor from other countries as well. Sometimes we seem very serious with our politics. I think we need to not lighten it up, but create media that doesn’t just appeal to our political senses, but to our other senses. That’s how you’re going to start engaging other communities in the information and the news that is really important for their lives.