REVIEW - CATCH-22 (HULU SERIES)

I just finished watching Hulu's recent adaptation of the Joseph Heller novel, Catch-22. I have never read the book and am only familiar with the 1970 film adaptation. Now, from what I've gathered after checking out a few reviews online after finishing the mini-series, I think your enjoyment of this is going to be heavily dependent on what you're familiar with. Fans of the book seem pretty universally harsh on both the film and this 2019 mini-series. However, without that background, I'm only comparing this to the film, which I saw on several occasions in my youth. Despite the critics, I'll also note that on both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, this series still gets very high average scores all round.

I've always liked the film and found that this six part TV adaptation worked even better for me in terms of fleshing out the story. If you're not too familiar with it, this is NOT a story about WWII, even though that is the setting. What it's really about is the incompetence of bureaucracies and the sociopathy of capitalistic systems, using the war as an allegorical device to explore these themes. It's a straddling of satire and trauma illustrating how these systems create irreconcilable personal conflicts when social structures are engineered such that expectations are untenable, where the goalposts of success are constantly being pushed further away, just out of reach. It shows how power and authority often end up in the hands of those least capable of coping with them, engendering sadism and cruelty as tools to protect those in authority from being exposed for the frauds that they are. It's a story which, while originally published in 1961, deals with themes that are strikingly relevant to the present day.

The issues, if you have any, may come with the degree to which the series is faithful to the book. Critics who are fans of the book complain that its message has been diluted or "dumbed down" for mainstream entertainment. That may well be true, but from my own subjective standpoint and judging it solely on how engaging I found it, I'd say it's rather an excellent series.

To begin with, the overall production values are top notch. It looks authentic and period accurate. The cinematography looks great and the action scenes are rendered very believably while avoiding gratuitous flamboyance and gore. The cast all worked very well for me and delivered what I found to be poignant and appropriately humorous characterizations, because this is driven by satire, wicked at its best.

Now, I may very well one day read the book and then look back on these interpretations as faint and feeble, but on their own, judged on their own merits, they still have something valid to say. Having the time delve into it over the course of six 45 minute episodes gives it a lot of room to breath and I found myself very much engrossed in the story and moved by both its highs and lows.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - MUSLIMGAUZE, BUDDHIST ON FIRE

Influence, in music, isn't always about the music itself. Sometimes, artists inspire influence for other reasons and get you to think about certain things a little differently or to look more closely at a particular subject. Being "political" doesn't always require writing protest songs with one's stances spelled out in the lyrics. Sometimes, artists can cleverly coax listeners to question things simply through a few careful signifiers.

I remember hearing Muslimgauze's 1984 LP, Buddhist on Fire, probably late in 1985 when my room mate at the time bought the album. The cover, of course, was very provocative, showing the aftermath of a Tibetan monk's protest after self-immolation. Right there I was educated by the fact that I didn't even know about this practice at the time. The second clue was in the "band" name, Muslimgauze. Again, I assumed there was some religious significance, but I didn't know much about it at the time. At that point, I was only interested in the music and what I heard on the album was pretty interesting.

Muslimgauze began in the early 1980s as simply a guy with a drum machine. His first releases were stark and minimal with nothing more than rhythm. Created solely by a British fellow, Bryn Jones, his approach was fairly blocky and crude at first, but by the time of Buddhist On Fire, his 3rd LP, he'd started to evolve a certain flair and sophistication. There were only 5 longish tracks on the album, but their rhythmic insistence was mesmerizing and song titles like Soviet Occupied Territories, Turkish Falaka & Dissidents In Exile gave the proceedings a subversively militant aura. It was all enough that, within my music collecting circles, Muslimgauze LPs, whenever they'd show up in the shop, were immediately snapped up.

I wasn't always able to buy them myself, but I'd always manage to record them on cassette from my friends. As each one came around, we'd get familiarized with the various terms of revolution used in the middle eastern conflicts. Without preaching or proselytizing, these records began to expose the hypocrisy of the situation and the injustices being committed against these people. It was a strange process whereby the use of the terms and the images on the album covers became an invitation to empathize and investigate.

The odd thing is that Jones never traveled to the area, had no relation, racially, to the culture and did not even consider himself religious, let alone a "Muslim". Yet he spent nearly two decades, until his tragic, sudden death in 1999, spewing forth a deluge of releases promoting the cause of these people. If he'd become rich from this endeavor, it might have been tempting to accuse him of cultural appropriation, but this was not in any way "mainstream" music. He did very small runs of these records on little indie labels. But he was prolific. He released dozens of albums over the course of his career and left enough unreleased material in the vault to keep providing new content for another two decades since his passing.

Over the years, his works evolved from their primitive drum machine roots into richly intricate compositions in the late 1980s and early 1990s and then shifted into deliberately crude, yet fluid excursions into extremes of tribal downtempo dub, pushing distortion and bass frequencies to levels as radical as the politics which inspired his works. Today, the Muslimgauze catalogue spans some 200 or so releases with more miraculously surfacing each year. Sure, there's a good chunk that's a bit dubious in terms of it's quality, but there's a surprising amount which holds up and still sounds cutting edge. If it doesn't get your head bobbing, it should at least get it nodding in recognition that he's clued you into a real struggle which persists to this day.