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Saturday, August 04, 2018
On 1943 Anti-Mexican “Zoot Suit” Riots (Quote of the Week) This June marks the 75th anniversary of anti-Mexican (and anti-black) riots in Los Angeles, dubbed the “Zoot Suit” riots by the bourgeois press.
On The Occasion Of The 170th Anniversary Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto”(1848)
On The Occasion Of The 170th Anniversary Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto”(1848)
A link to the Karl Marwx Achives for an on-line copy of the Communist Manifesto
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
By Political Commentator Frank Jackman
If anybody had asked me back when I was a kid, a kid growing up in the desperately poor, working poor but desperate nevertheless, Acre section of North Adamsville a town south of Boston in Massachusetts that I would be commemorating, no, honoring an anniversary of the publication in 1847 of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s seminal political document The Communist Manifesto in the year 2018 I would have said they were crazy. (I will not get into the issue of commemorating odd-ball year anniversaries of events, like a 170th anniversary, which in general I abhor since I have beaten that dead horse elsewhere and in any case such a whole historic event as here would draw a worthy exemption). Not because the document was, is, not worthy of talking about but back in the day, back in my teenage days I was adamantly an anti-communist in the tradition of almost all red scare Cold War post-war baby boomers who came of age, political under the threat of the nuclear bomb (some things seem to never change given the recent saber-rattling over the developments in North Korea by the American government).
Some, at least from that baby-boomer generation who have at least heard about the document which I cannot say is true for Generation X or the Millennials since they were not born under the sign of the red scare in a post-Soviet world, may be surprised that a backward working class kid in 1950s America would even had snuck a peek at that besotted document for fear of being tainted by the red scare coppers as pinko-red commie turn him in and be done with it. Except I was very interested in politics even then and had heard about The Communist Manifesto by some from their photographs nefarious heavily bearded German guys who wanted back in the 1800s to upset the whole applecart and henceforth the root of all evil, the root of the international Communist conspiracy that would kill us in or beds if we were not vigilant against “Uncle Joe,” his successors or their hangers-on throughout the world and especially those “traitors” in America.
I had first heard about The Communist Manifesto in a political way although I was naïve as hell about the whole situation and about who I was working with in 1960. In the fall of that year, the fall of the famous Kennedy-Nixon fight for the American presidency where I was a serious partisan for Kennedy, our local, Massachusetts local, Irishman who made good I was also very, very interested in nuclear disarmament (a subject I still am interested in as the world have not gotten qualitively safer from that threat) and had gone to the Boston Common and participated in an anti-nuclear bomb rally (as the youngest participant by far) along with others from SANE (Doctor Spock’s organization) who had called the demonstration, the Quakers, and others. (Those others would include I later found out, many years later, members of the American Communist Party but not under that name but that of some “front” group. Of course by that time several years later I would have gone through three stages about American Communist Party members-from ho-hum so what if they are Commies we need all the forces we can muster to oppose the Vietnam War to being glad they were organizing like crazy against that war to disdain as they attempted to corral the youth movement into building bigger and better demonstrations against the war when that idea had worn out.) What got me going was when a bunch of people, guys, were harassing us, calling us “reds” and why didn’t we get the hell out of America and go to the Soviet Union. Along the way somebody, some guy mentioned The Communist Manifesto by that “Jew” Karl Marx. I had never hear of it although I was familiar with the name Karl Marx.
Here’s the funny thing, funny in retrospect anyhow, I could not when I was interested in checking the Manifesto out for myself, find a copy in the school library or the public library. I never did find out the reason why and I was too timid once I saw it was not in the card catalogues to ask a librarian. Thus the way I got the document was looking through publications put out by the Government Printing Office, the U.S. government’s official printing operation. The reason they had printed it at the time, and it said right on the front page was that it had been a document used by the House Un-American Activities Committee and thus was part of the record of that nefarious entity (which in 1960 I think I found out later was almost run out of San Francisco by the demonstrations against it-one of the first breaks in the red scare Cold War phalanx).
I made no pretense at the time nor do I now that I understood all that Marx was trying to get at. Certainly was clueless about the various polemics in Section Four against various other mostly pro-socialist opponents. (That part made greater sense later when I swear I went through almost every one of those oppositional ideas before coming to Marxism except maybe that exotic “feudal socialism” Marx vented against). What drew me in, although only haltingly at the time, was the idea that working people, my people, my family and friends, would get a better shake out of a socialist society, out of a classless society than we were getting at the time. But in those days I was hung up on some kind of career as a political operative, remember that Kennedy point earlier (not a candidate but the guy behind the candidate). So while I was never hostile to the ideas in that document and maybe have even been a “closet” social democrat masquerading as a liberal there was nothing operative for me then, certainly I was not in favor of revolution as the way forward for myself or my people.
What changed things? I have written elsewhere about my induction into the American Army during the height of the Vietnam War and what that meant to me-and how I reacted to it by becoming a serious anti-war person (before I had been anti-war but in a wishy-washy way). Even then after I gave up the idea of a “normal” political career (that operative behind the scenes business) I was no Marxist but was in a search for some kind of way to change society short of revolution. (That is the period when I was engaging in those activities similar to the ones proposed by the groups Marx was polemicizing against in the Manifesto.)
By 1971 it was clear that the American government under Nixon (that same Nixon was beaten to a gong by Kennedy) was not going to end the war in Vietnam. Didn’t give a damn about the whole thing. At that time I was hanging around a radical commune in Cambridge where we were trying to work out ideas (in isolation) about ending the fucking thing. That was the year on May Day when under the banner “if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government” we attempted to do just that. Heady stuff and a dramatic move to the left on my part. All we got for that effort was tear gas, the police baton, and some days in Robert Kennedy Stadium (ironic, huh) for many thousands of good radicals and no end to the war.
After that I, having picked up a copy of Marx’s The Communist Manifesto at the Red Bookstore in Cambridge, began to sense that our isolated efforts were self-defeating if we didn’t have a larger force to bring down the damn system. Didn’t have in Marxian terms a class with the objective self-interest to lead the overturn. At the time, given the hostile attitude of the real American working class to us and to any ideas of socialism for the most part, I was unsure that such a strategy made sense. What I knew was that was where the work had to be done. It has not been a fruitful struggle but nevertheless a necessary one even today when such ideas seem even more utopian than in my young adulthood. Some of what Marx talked about needs serious updating but the general premise of class struggle and the revolution as way forward as still solid. Just look around. Are the capitalists (the right now winning capitalists in the one-sided class war) going to give anything of value up? No way- we will have to take it away from them if we want to get that equalitarian society we dreamed about in our youth. As for the Manifesto a lot of it still reads like it was written yesterday.
Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx-From The Archives- The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx
Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx-From The Archives- The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx
Workers Vanguard No. 1134
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18 May 2018
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx
(Quote of the Week)
May 5 marked the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. The excerpts below are taken from the beginning and conclusion of the Communist Manifesto, a seminal work that Marx co-wrote with his lifelong comrade, Friedrich Engels.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes....
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat....
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers....
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia)
As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day
11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived
Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –C. S. Lewis
(The Chronicles of Narnia)
By Seth Garth
A few years ago, starting in August 2104 the 100th
anniversary of what would become World War I, I started a series about the
cultural effects, some of them anyway, of the slaughter which mowed down the
flower of the European youth including an amazing number of artists, poets,
writers and other cultural figures. Those culturati left behind, those who
survived the shellings, the trenches, the diseases, and what was then called
“shell shock,” now more commonly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is
duly recognized, and compensated for at least in the United States by the
Veterans Administration in proven cases reacted in many different ways. Mainly,
the best of them, like the ordinary dog soldiers could not go back to the same
old, same old, could not revive the certitudes of the pre-war Western world
with it distorted sense of decorum and went to what even today seem quirky with
moderns like Dada, Minimalism, the literary sparseness of Hemingway, and so on.
I had my say there in a general sense but now as we are only a few months away
from the 100th anniversary of, mercifully, the armistice which
effectively ended that bloodbath I want to do a retrospective of creative
artistic works by those who survived the war and how those war visions got
translated into their works with some commentary if the spirit moves me but
this is their show-no question they earned a retrospective.
In Honor Of Johnny Hodges 112th Birthday-From The Archives (2009)The Duke Is Rockin’ His Castle- In Honor Of The 110th Birthday Anniversary Of Duke Ellington
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Duke Ellington And His Band Performing "C Jam Blues"
CD Review
In Honor Of The 110th Birthday Anniversary Of Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington: The Blanton-Webster Band, 1940-42, Bluebird, 1986
Those who follow the reviews in this space may have read a response to a commenter that I wrote recently in reviewing John Cohen’s (from the old folk group The New Lost City Ramblers) “There Is No Eye: Music For Photographs” CD. That CD contained many country blues, urban folk, city blues and rural mountain musical treats (as well as a little tribute to the “beats” of the 1950’s). The gist of my comment was an attempt to draw a connection between my leftist sympathies and the search for American roots music that has driven many of my reviews lately. That said, no one, at least no one with any sense of the American past can deny the importance of the emergence of jazz as a quintessentially American black music form of expression. In short, roots music. And if you want to look at the master, or at least one of the masters (if you need to include King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, as well), of the early years of this genre then look no further- you are home. Duke is in his castle.
Now I am by no means a jazz aficionado. In fact, if anything, I am a Johnnie-come- lately to an appreciation of jazz. More to the point as a youth I never really liked it (except some of the more bluesy-oriented pieces that I would occasionally hear like Armstrong’s “Potato Blues” that I was crazy for when I first heard them) as against the other musical genres that I was interested in. Then, with all the hoopla over Duke’s 100th birthday anniversary ten years ago, in 1999, I decided to investigate further. I had to ask someone what would be a good CD of Duke’s to listen to. This Blanton-Webster Band of 1940-42 was what was suggested. And that person was not wrong. This thing is hot, extremely hot.
Remember these Ellington tone poems, that is all I can think to call them, were done back in the day when dukes, counts, kings, queens and empresses ruled the jazz empire. Others may have their favorites from this period but can one really beat a jazz combo that has Cootie Williams, Barney Bigard, Harry Carney, Jimmy Blanton, Ben Webster and my favorite Ellington player, tenor sax man Johnny Hodges, on it. You had better go “big” if you’re going to beat that group of talented musicians. Okay, what about the pieces. On Disc One how about a jumping “Jack The Bear, “Ko-Ko’, “Dusk” and “In A Mellotone”. On Disc Two “Five O’clock Whistle”, the classic “Take The “A” Train”, “I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good) and “Blue Serge”. On Disc Three, a sultry carib-flavored “Moon Over Cuba”, the sardonic “Rocks In My Bed”, “Perdido”, the haunting “Moon Mist” and the famous “Sentimental Lady”. Nice. I may not be a jazz aficionado but that isn’t a bad list, is it?
CD Review
In Honor Of The 110th Birthday Anniversary Of Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington: The Blanton-Webster Band, 1940-42, Bluebird, 1986
Those who follow the reviews in this space may have read a response to a commenter that I wrote recently in reviewing John Cohen’s (from the old folk group The New Lost City Ramblers) “There Is No Eye: Music For Photographs” CD. That CD contained many country blues, urban folk, city blues and rural mountain musical treats (as well as a little tribute to the “beats” of the 1950’s). The gist of my comment was an attempt to draw a connection between my leftist sympathies and the search for American roots music that has driven many of my reviews lately. That said, no one, at least no one with any sense of the American past can deny the importance of the emergence of jazz as a quintessentially American black music form of expression. In short, roots music. And if you want to look at the master, or at least one of the masters (if you need to include King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, as well), of the early years of this genre then look no further- you are home. Duke is in his castle.
Now I am by no means a jazz aficionado. In fact, if anything, I am a Johnnie-come- lately to an appreciation of jazz. More to the point as a youth I never really liked it (except some of the more bluesy-oriented pieces that I would occasionally hear like Armstrong’s “Potato Blues” that I was crazy for when I first heard them) as against the other musical genres that I was interested in. Then, with all the hoopla over Duke’s 100th birthday anniversary ten years ago, in 1999, I decided to investigate further. I had to ask someone what would be a good CD of Duke’s to listen to. This Blanton-Webster Band of 1940-42 was what was suggested. And that person was not wrong. This thing is hot, extremely hot.
Remember these Ellington tone poems, that is all I can think to call them, were done back in the day when dukes, counts, kings, queens and empresses ruled the jazz empire. Others may have their favorites from this period but can one really beat a jazz combo that has Cootie Williams, Barney Bigard, Harry Carney, Jimmy Blanton, Ben Webster and my favorite Ellington player, tenor sax man Johnny Hodges, on it. You had better go “big” if you’re going to beat that group of talented musicians. Okay, what about the pieces. On Disc One how about a jumping “Jack The Bear, “Ko-Ko’, “Dusk” and “In A Mellotone”. On Disc Two “Five O’clock Whistle”, the classic “Take The “A” Train”, “I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good) and “Blue Serge”. On Disc Three, a sultry carib-flavored “Moon Over Cuba”, the sardonic “Rocks In My Bed”, “Perdido”, the haunting “Moon Mist” and the famous “Sentimental Lady”. Nice. I may not be a jazz aficionado but that isn’t a bad list, is it?
Friday, August 03, 2018
An Encore -Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits
An Encore -Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits
From the pen of the late Peter Paul Markin who fell by the wayside, fell to his notoriously monstrous “wanting habits” accumulated since childhood looking too hard, looking to hard in the wrong places down among the weeds in Mexico, looking for train smoke and dreams if you really thought about the matter, looking for his own heart of Saturday night-RIP, Brother,RIP.
******
If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of today’s bourgeois-driven push, bourgeois a better term than capitalist or imperialist if you are in America since it gives a better view of the unhindered social norms, the ethos rather than the sheer grab for filthy lucre; you know grab goods, grab the dough, grab every cheap-jack convenience like it was God’s own gold, grab some shelter from the storm, the storm that these days comes down like a hard rain falling, to get ahead in this wicked old world have to step back and take stock, maybe listen to some words of wisdom, or words that help explain how you got into that mess then you have come to the right address, the address of Mister Tom Waits if you missed the headline or missed who is writing this thing. (Or better "wrote" since this piece is being edited posthumously by Zack James who found this and three companion pieces in the attic of Josh Breslin's Olde Saco family house in Olde Saco, Maine when they were looking to dispose of whatever could be disposed of in preparation for selling the place so Josh and Lana could move into smaller quarters and Josh told him the long and at the end the sad story about Josh's and Markin's meeting out in San Francisco in the summer of love 1960s times and about Markin's awful fate down in Mexico. That story drove Zack to the editing job in order that a genuine mad monk writer could some forty years after his death receive a small recognition of his ambitious talent.)
Okay, okay on that bourgeois-driven today thing once I describe what was involved maybe it didn’t just start of late. Maybe the whole ill-starred rising went back to the time when this continent was, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald said way back in the 1920s when he made up the Jazz Age and reeled back in dismay once he saw how those coupon-clippers devoured all good sense and sober ethos, just a fresh green breast of land eyed by some hungry sailors, some hungry Dutch sailors who took what they wanted back the homeland and made a grave attempt to fatten their own chests. Just check out any Dutch master painting to see what I mean.
Going back to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflower boys and their city on the hill but you best ask Max Weber about that since he tried to hook these world-wise and world weary boys were no longer worrying about novenas and indulgences against some netherworld to the wheel of the capitalist profit. Profit (grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap) for "you at the expense of me" system with the new dispensation coming out like hellfire from Geneva and points east and west. The eternal story of the short end of the stick if you aren’t ready for sociological treatises and rely on guys like Tom Waits to wordsmith the lyrics to set you right about what is wrong. But you get the point.
If all that to-ing and fro-ing (nice touch, right) leaves you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city (edge city where you danced around with all the conventions of the days, danced around the get ahead world, grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap, with blinkers on before you got stuck in the human sink that you have still not been able to get out of) where big cloud outrageous youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, damn did you take risks, thought nothing of that fact either, landed on your ass more than a few times but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done stick around and listen up. Yeah, so if you are wondering, have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed off your sainted wheels, and gotten yourself into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, now faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half-forgotten, the wisp of the dream, the eternal peace dream, the figuring out how to contain that fire, that wanting habits fire in your belly dream sisters and brothers), and need some solace (need some way to stop the fret counting the coffee cups complete with spoons to measure that coffee out as the very modernist poet once said making his modern statement about the world created since the turn of the 19th century that while away your life). Need to reach back to roots, reach back to roots that the 1950s golden age of America, the vanilla red scare Cold War night that kicked the ass out of all the old to make us crave sameness, head down, run for cover, in order to forget about those old immigrant customs, made us forget those simple country blues, old country flames, Appalachia mountain breeze coming through the hills and hollows songs, lonely midnight by the fire cowboy ballads, Tex-Mex big ass brass sympatico squeezes Spanish is the loving tongue, Irish desperate struggles against John Bull sorrows and cautionary tale Child ballads, plucked out early by a professor over on Brattle Street back when the Brahmins very publicly ruled the roost, or Cajun Saturday night stewed drunks that made the people feel good times, reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter [oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay-Zack James] and remember what it was like when men and women sang just to sing the truth of what they saw and heard.
If the norms of don’t rock the boat (not in these uncertain times like any times in human existence were certain, damn, there was always something scary coming up from the first man-eating beast to the human race-eating nuclear bombs, brother even I Iearned early that it was a dangerous world, yeah, learned very early in the Adamsville projects where you got a very real taste of danger before you got too much older than five or six), the norms of keep your head down (that’s right brother, that’s right sister keep looking down, no left or rights for your placid world), keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual (that ritual looking more and more like the firing squad that took old Juan Romero’s life when he did bad those days out in Utah country), and excuses, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, very dark-skinned like some deathless, starless night disturbing your sleep, begging, I swear, begging you to put that gun in full view on the table, speaking some unknown language, maybe A-rab or I-talian, maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflower gang and that fresh green breast of land and that city on a hill that drove them cross-eyed and inflamed or ask Max Weber, he footnoted the whole thing, put paid to any idea of otherworldly virtue), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half-forgotten remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume up another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.
If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else’s sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run, recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side of the fence. And I have the list of brothers and sisters who took that wrong road, like that time Jack from Carver wound up face down in some dusty back road arroyo down Sonora way when the deal went bust or when she, maybe a little kinky for all I know, decided that she would try a needle and a spoon, I swear, or she swore just for kicks and she wound up in Madame LaRue’s whorehouse working that sagging bed to perdition and worse losing that thing she had for sex once she started selling it by the hour. Hey, sweet dreams baby I tried to tell you when you play with fire watch out.
So if you need to sort things out about boozers (and about titanic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, those who had gotten it taken away from them like some maiden virginity, those who just didn’t get it frankly in this fast old world taken in by some grifter’s bluster), those who never had anything but lost next to their names, those who never had a way to be lost, dopesters inhaling sweet dream snow in solitary hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor drunk stiff out of his room rent for kicks (how uncool to drink low-shelf whiskeys or rotgut wines hell the guy deserved to be rolled, should feel lucky he got away with just a flipped wallet), out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote (the sweet dreams of ten million years of ghost warriors working the layered canyon walls flickering against the campfire flames and the sight of two modern warriors shirtless, sweaty, in a trance, high as kites, dancing by themselves like whirling dervishes ready to do justice for the white man's greed until the flames flickered out and they fell in a heap exhausted) if that earth angel connection comes through (Aunt Sally, always, some Aunt Sally coming up the stairs to ease the pain, to make one feel, no, not feel better than any AMA doctor without a prescription pad), creating visions of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get “connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night, hipsters all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving, fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card Monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japan seas), the drift-less (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses, hell, call them flop houses, afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them” too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.
If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore–mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup, New Mexico Southern Pacific trestle (the old SP the only way to travel out west if you want to get west), some Hoboken broken down pier (ha, shades of the last page of Jack Kerouac’s classic), the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, some gringa for a change of pace, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just let that one pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, big book academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world (the big mass of world sweated field braceros, sharecroppers, landless peasants and now cold-water flat urban dwellers fresh from the played out land, or taken land) then Tom Waits is your stop.
Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record [CD or download okay-Zack] and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living.
See he ain’t looking for all haloed saints out there, some Saint Jerome spreading the word out to the desert tribes, out on the American mean streets he has pawed around the edges, maybe doesn’t believe in saints for all I know, but is out looking for busted black-hearted angels all dressed in some slinky silk thing to make a man, a high-shelf whiskey man having hustled some dough better left unexplained that night going off his moorings feeding her drinks and she a liquor sponge (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless, gin mill when she split, after she split her take with the bartender who watered her drinks, hell, the thing was sweet all she needed to do when he leaned into her was grab his sorry ass and get the damn wallet). Looking too, a child of the pin-up playboy 1950s, for girls with Monroe hips (hips swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and enflaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells by descendants of those aforementioned Mayflower boys for promising the world for one forbidden night), got real, and got left for dead with cigar wrapping rings. Yeah, looking for the desperate out there who went off the righteous path and wound up too young face down in some forsaken woods who said she needed to hold on to something, and for all the misbegotten.
Tom Waits once you get the habit gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Okie/Arkie Dove Linkhorns and Frankie Machines of the world who had to keep moving just for the sake of moving something in the DNA driving that whirlwind, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores (their forbears thrown out of Europe for venal crimes and lusts, pig-stealing, deer-pouching, working the commons without a license, highwaymen, ancient jack-rollers, the flotsam and jetsam of the old world, damn them, the master-less men and women, ask old Max about them too), having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, far from it, the wretched of the earth and their kin, the ones who the old blessed Paris communards were thinking of when they hanged a sign saying “Death to Thieves” from the Hotel de Ville balcony, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If you want to hear about those desperate brethren then here is your stop as well.
If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear to the scratchy earth and some occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Hey, let’s leave it at this- if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.
From the pen of the late Peter Paul Markin who fell by the wayside, fell to his notoriously monstrous “wanting habits” accumulated since childhood looking too hard, looking to hard in the wrong places down among the weeds in Mexico, looking for train smoke and dreams if you really thought about the matter, looking for his own heart of Saturday night-RIP, Brother,RIP.
If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of today’s bourgeois-driven push, bourgeois a better term than capitalist or imperialist if you are in America since it gives a better view of the unhindered social norms, the ethos rather than the sheer grab for filthy lucre; you know grab goods, grab the dough, grab every cheap-jack convenience like it was God’s own gold, grab some shelter from the storm, the storm that these days comes down like a hard rain falling, to get ahead in this wicked old world have to step back and take stock, maybe listen to some words of wisdom, or words that help explain how you got into that mess then you have come to the right address, the address of Mister Tom Waits if you missed the headline or missed who is writing this thing. (Or better "wrote" since this piece is being edited posthumously by Zack James who found this and three companion pieces in the attic of Josh Breslin's Olde Saco family house in Olde Saco, Maine when they were looking to dispose of whatever could be disposed of in preparation for selling the place so Josh and Lana could move into smaller quarters and Josh told him the long and at the end the sad story about Josh's and Markin's meeting out in San Francisco in the summer of love 1960s times and about Markin's awful fate down in Mexico. That story drove Zack to the editing job in order that a genuine mad monk writer could some forty years after his death receive a small recognition of his ambitious talent.)
Okay, okay on that bourgeois-driven today thing once I describe what was involved maybe it didn’t just start of late. Maybe the whole ill-starred rising went back to the time when this continent was, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald said way back in the 1920s when he made up the Jazz Age and reeled back in dismay once he saw how those coupon-clippers devoured all good sense and sober ethos, just a fresh green breast of land eyed by some hungry sailors, some hungry Dutch sailors who took what they wanted back the homeland and made a grave attempt to fatten their own chests. Just check out any Dutch master painting to see what I mean.
Going back to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflower boys and their city on the hill but you best ask Max Weber about that since he tried to hook these world-wise and world weary boys were no longer worrying about novenas and indulgences against some netherworld to the wheel of the capitalist profit. Profit (grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap) for "you at the expense of me" system with the new dispensation coming out like hellfire from Geneva and points east and west. The eternal story of the short end of the stick if you aren’t ready for sociological treatises and rely on guys like Tom Waits to wordsmith the lyrics to set you right about what is wrong. But you get the point.
If all that to-ing and fro-ing (nice touch, right) leaves you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city (edge city where you danced around with all the conventions of the days, danced around the get ahead world, grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap, with blinkers on before you got stuck in the human sink that you have still not been able to get out of) where big cloud outrageous youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, damn did you take risks, thought nothing of that fact either, landed on your ass more than a few times but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done stick around and listen up. Yeah, so if you are wondering, have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed off your sainted wheels, and gotten yourself into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, now faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half-forgotten, the wisp of the dream, the eternal peace dream, the figuring out how to contain that fire, that wanting habits fire in your belly dream sisters and brothers), and need some solace (need some way to stop the fret counting the coffee cups complete with spoons to measure that coffee out as the very modernist poet once said making his modern statement about the world created since the turn of the 19th century that while away your life). Need to reach back to roots, reach back to roots that the 1950s golden age of America, the vanilla red scare Cold War night that kicked the ass out of all the old to make us crave sameness, head down, run for cover, in order to forget about those old immigrant customs, made us forget those simple country blues, old country flames, Appalachia mountain breeze coming through the hills and hollows songs, lonely midnight by the fire cowboy ballads, Tex-Mex big ass brass sympatico squeezes Spanish is the loving tongue, Irish desperate struggles against John Bull sorrows and cautionary tale Child ballads, plucked out early by a professor over on Brattle Street back when the Brahmins very publicly ruled the roost, or Cajun Saturday night stewed drunks that made the people feel good times, reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter [oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay-Zack James] and remember what it was like when men and women sang just to sing the truth of what they saw and heard.
If the norms of don’t rock the boat (not in these uncertain times like any times in human existence were certain, damn, there was always something scary coming up from the first man-eating beast to the human race-eating nuclear bombs, brother even I Iearned early that it was a dangerous world, yeah, learned very early in the Adamsville projects where you got a very real taste of danger before you got too much older than five or six), the norms of keep your head down (that’s right brother, that’s right sister keep looking down, no left or rights for your placid world), keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual (that ritual looking more and more like the firing squad that took old Juan Romero’s life when he did bad those days out in Utah country), and excuses, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, very dark-skinned like some deathless, starless night disturbing your sleep, begging, I swear, begging you to put that gun in full view on the table, speaking some unknown language, maybe A-rab or I-talian, maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflower gang and that fresh green breast of land and that city on a hill that drove them cross-eyed and inflamed or ask Max Weber, he footnoted the whole thing, put paid to any idea of otherworldly virtue), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half-forgotten remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume up another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.
If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else’s sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run, recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side of the fence. And I have the list of brothers and sisters who took that wrong road, like that time Jack from Carver wound up face down in some dusty back road arroyo down Sonora way when the deal went bust or when she, maybe a little kinky for all I know, decided that she would try a needle and a spoon, I swear, or she swore just for kicks and she wound up in Madame LaRue’s whorehouse working that sagging bed to perdition and worse losing that thing she had for sex once she started selling it by the hour. Hey, sweet dreams baby I tried to tell you when you play with fire watch out.
So if you need to sort things out about boozers (and about titanic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, those who had gotten it taken away from them like some maiden virginity, those who just didn’t get it frankly in this fast old world taken in by some grifter’s bluster), those who never had anything but lost next to their names, those who never had a way to be lost, dopesters inhaling sweet dream snow in solitary hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor drunk stiff out of his room rent for kicks (how uncool to drink low-shelf whiskeys or rotgut wines hell the guy deserved to be rolled, should feel lucky he got away with just a flipped wallet), out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote (the sweet dreams of ten million years of ghost warriors working the layered canyon walls flickering against the campfire flames and the sight of two modern warriors shirtless, sweaty, in a trance, high as kites, dancing by themselves like whirling dervishes ready to do justice for the white man's greed until the flames flickered out and they fell in a heap exhausted) if that earth angel connection comes through (Aunt Sally, always, some Aunt Sally coming up the stairs to ease the pain, to make one feel, no, not feel better than any AMA doctor without a prescription pad), creating visions of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get “connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night, hipsters all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving, fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card Monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japan seas), the drift-less (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses, hell, call them flop houses, afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them” too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.
If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore–mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup, New Mexico Southern Pacific trestle (the old SP the only way to travel out west if you want to get west), some Hoboken broken down pier (ha, shades of the last page of Jack Kerouac’s classic), the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, some gringa for a change of pace, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just let that one pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, big book academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world (the big mass of world sweated field braceros, sharecroppers, landless peasants and now cold-water flat urban dwellers fresh from the played out land, or taken land) then Tom Waits is your stop.
Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record [CD or download okay-Zack] and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living.
See he ain’t looking for all haloed saints out there, some Saint Jerome spreading the word out to the desert tribes, out on the American mean streets he has pawed around the edges, maybe doesn’t believe in saints for all I know, but is out looking for busted black-hearted angels all dressed in some slinky silk thing to make a man, a high-shelf whiskey man having hustled some dough better left unexplained that night going off his moorings feeding her drinks and she a liquor sponge (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless, gin mill when she split, after she split her take with the bartender who watered her drinks, hell, the thing was sweet all she needed to do when he leaned into her was grab his sorry ass and get the damn wallet). Looking too, a child of the pin-up playboy 1950s, for girls with Monroe hips (hips swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and enflaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells by descendants of those aforementioned Mayflower boys for promising the world for one forbidden night), got real, and got left for dead with cigar wrapping rings. Yeah, looking for the desperate out there who went off the righteous path and wound up too young face down in some forsaken woods who said she needed to hold on to something, and for all the misbegotten.
Tom Waits once you get the habit gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Okie/Arkie Dove Linkhorns and Frankie Machines of the world who had to keep moving just for the sake of moving something in the DNA driving that whirlwind, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores (their forbears thrown out of Europe for venal crimes and lusts, pig-stealing, deer-pouching, working the commons without a license, highwaymen, ancient jack-rollers, the flotsam and jetsam of the old world, damn them, the master-less men and women, ask old Max about them too), having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, far from it, the wretched of the earth and their kin, the ones who the old blessed Paris communards were thinking of when they hanged a sign saying “Death to Thieves” from the Hotel de Ville balcony, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If you want to hear about those desperate brethren then here is your stop as well.
If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear to the scratchy earth and some occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Hey, let’s leave it at this- if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.
In The Days When Parlor Pink Private Detectives Ruled The Roost- The Film Adaptation Of Crime Novelist Agatha Christie’s “The Pale Horse” (1997)- A Review
In The Days When Parlor
Pink Private Detectives Ruled The Roost- The Film Adaptation Of Crime Novelist Agatha
Christie’s “The Pale Horse” (1997)- A Review
DVD Review
By Sam Lowell
The Pale Horse, starring
Colin Buchanan, based on the crime novel of the same name by Agatha Christie,
1997
[In the interest of
continuity although this review was written well after a previous one by Sarah
Lemoyne reviewing Dick Powell’s Varsity Show
I have placed it here today with hers since the pair are still in the throes of
their “dispute.” Greg Green, site manager]
This is no pun I am on
my high horse, pale or otherwise, today. No, not about this so-called dispute
between my old friend from high school day Seth Garth’s young protégé or
whatever else they have decided to call her relationship with him Sarah Lemoyne.
Mentor is the word I think they have been using to try to cover up whatever is
going on there. When Seth Garth is involved, as in the interest of transparency
I will admit was true of me as well when I was younger, when it comes to women
younger or older don’t believe a word of “just friends” noise, a word of
denial. That is when you double down on a guy like Seth as I have learned from
bitter experience in the days when he would think nothing of sweeping up some
woman I was interested in with no moral qualms whatsoever. Would laugh at an
expression like “moral qualms” a term unknown to hard corner boys from the old
Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville and by extension in the cutthroat world
of film reviewers where if you don’t cut somebody’s idea, some witty insight, some
weird take on a film then you are not long for the profession. Why else would
anybody put up with such doings when you are only giving your subjective
opinion for the world to feast on (and now on the downside of the Internet experience
have to put up with all kinds of dingbat thoughts from average citizens who
know think that based on having seen a film that gives them the right, the god-given
right to read some of the stuff to bore the rest of us with their ill-considered
“takes” on the spot).
In any case that is not
what I am after today although I continue to steam, mighty puffs of steam, over
the now almost libelous comments Ms. Lemoyne has made about who has, or hasn’t,
written my reviews for me other than myself once I moved up the film review
food chain many years ago. Totally libelous and subject to legal action if I
was that kind of guy but I am not a snitch is the false accusation that long
ago I used the studio press releases as my reviews with just the top snipped
off and mailed in to whatever publication I was writing for at the time. I have
just mentioned the cutthroat nature of our profession, so I am inured to such
misinformation about my career. I will admit Ms. Lemoyne writes good reviews
and had enough sense to go to Seth as a mentor or whatever he is to her at the
office or elsewhere, but I can handle these young and hungry types since that
is exactly where I started out trashing the legendary film critic Walt Wilson
when he was riding high and now nobody remembers his name. What has me burning
up today is one Greg Green’s lame attempt to bring back parlor pink private
detectives with this review of the film adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s
crime novels The Pale Rider. (Pale
rider a reference from the Bible meaning death a not unimportant part of the
plot line in both the novel and the film which diverts from the novel in
several ways but is on point about the death part, plenty of it and who the
hell the pale rider is when the deal, the final deal, goes down)
Everybody knows,
everybody seriously interested film noir which hinges in many cases on the
plots of crime novels, knows that I have written what many, except apparently
the totally ignorant Ms. Lemoyne who was not even born when I made my big
splash and whom Seth should have wised up, call the definitive book on film
noir. I like to think that the reason for that status was my ground-breaking
work on the private detective novel on film with its moody, dark scenarios and
hang-by the fingernails twists and turns before the crummy felons get some
quick and rough justice from our mere mortal no superhero bombast gumshoes. Moreover that noir explosion and the work of
crime novel writers like Jim Jenson, Jack Cullen, and above all Raymond
Chandler and Dashiell Hammett had put paid to the old-fashioned amateur
detective sitting around waiting for the villain to out of shame or something
throw up his or her hands and come clean, come to justice without so much as by
your leave. Take a warming cell or the big step-off for their errors in
judgment while the crafty amateur goes off to lunch or on holiday after such strenuous
work.
As Zack James, my and
Seth’s old friend Alex’s youngest brother, has made clear in a number of
astounding crime short stories about real private detectives this is no
business for amateurs. I heartily agree since that profession is mainly about
“repo” work the professional repo men can’t handle, bogus insurance claims,
missing husbands or wives, looking for lost animals, dogs and cats mainly, and
in the old days, peeping Toms on divorce cases involving sultry adultery (and
which saved many a struggle P.I. before no fault divorce and just living
together destroyed that part of the market leaving some guys, mostly guys, with
nothing but hanging around a beaten down desk taking generous slugs from the
low-shelf whiskey bottle in that bottom desk drawer). But on the screen, and in
crime novels, those gumshoes, those peepers get the royal treatment, get the
royal treatment if they are hard-nosed, tough, wind-mill chasers,
skirt-chasers, heavy smokers and drinkers, and not afraid to take a slug or
two, a roughing up for the good of the cause. Lenny Larkin was the epitome of
the type who was also not afraid to whiplash a guy for looking at him the wrong
way. Naturally when you mention Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe chasing a
million wind-mills for some old general, or looking for some lady in the lake,
or looking for big Moose’s lady friend comes to mind. Sam Spade of course from
the Dashiell Hammett stable not only chased skirts, took a few punches for her,
but when it was him or her he sent her over, sent her to the big step-off and
the fuck with the stuff of dreams trying to own some freaking fake bird.
Which brings us to this
little film. What we have here, a guy named Eric somebody does the last name
matter since he is not going into the annals of private detection, no way. A
damn sculptor, not even an amateur detective but a guy who makes art, modern
art and not bad from the quick looks we get when he is around his art gallery, a
guy who is trying to keep the noose from around his pretty head when he is accidently
involved in a murder when he looked too much like the real felon and the
coppers, the public coppers, as they will grabbed him and were ready to call it
a day on the case. Sent him off with a smile claiming he wasn’t much of a
sculptor anyway. Case closed.
They set this film in
1960s London so you get a modish crowd as background including two young women,
one very rich and proper taking a ride down in class to give our Eric a run for
his money but whom he spurns and another, Rhonda something does it matter her
last name since she will not go down in the annals of private detection, no
way. The latter he met at a funeral after her friend had died from what
appeared to be some natural cause disease. The connection. The priest who was
supposed to bring a message to a third party as the deathbed wish of another
women who also appears to have died of natural causes is the guy whom Eric is
supposed of have murdered and Rhonda friend’s name was on that message. Rhonda
is not buying natural causes and so she is on board as an assistant sleuth. No
femme fatale not at all but another freaking amateur detective to gum up the
works.
Later naturally as well
there will be a love interest between these two and I can’t blame Eric on that
score since she is one of those fetching types, yes, the ones who are not ice
cold beautiful with personalities to match but the ones who an hour later you
wonder what they are doing and are willing to do it with you. But just as
naturally in these parlor pink private detection novels there is a red flag,
although I hesitate to use that expression now that it is a catch word among
the world’s growing population of conspiracy theorists. A prime suspect for
this gumshoe pair centered on an eccentric wealthy art collector who had been
chair-ridden since youth with polio. That was a ruse though, a cover for a very
successful bank robbery in which the plotline involved taking the robbery
proceeds and investing in art. Investing in a time when the art market was
exploding, and he actually when “outed” as prime suspect for a while got to
keep his ill-gotten gains. No, the real villain, the guy who in his
psychopathic mind went over the edge was the attending physician of a number of
patients who had been involved in what turned out to be an insurance fraud
scheme with a few modern-day witches a la Macbeth
and a bookie covering the insurance angle and the good doctor subtlety
poisoning them using ordinary consumer goods like toothpaste as the murder
weapons.
Nice play, nice racket
which any old Acre corner boy would appreciate but when Rhonda became the
subject of the scheme and nobody knew how to cure her you know that mad monk
doctor was doomed. It was the toothpaste, stupid. Get the freaking antidote asap.
In the end Eric and Rhonda go off in the sunset their amateur private detection
minute over. Not a minute too soon either.
Everybody Loves A Con Man-Except-Ryan and Tatum O’Neal’s “Paper Moon” (1973)-A Film Review
Everybody Loves A Con Man-Except-Ryan and Tatum O’Neal’s “Paper Moon” (1973)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Film Critic Sandy Salmon
Paper Moon, starring Ryan O’Neil, Tatum O’Neal,directed by Peter Bogdanovich, 1973
Every theater-goer, at least I am going to assume so, likes a “feel good” storyline. Maybe not as first choice but in the basket. I confess to that feeling. But as an old corner boy from the working class neighborhoods where I grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire I also appreciate a good “con” storyline. Not con as in convict but as in con artist and although we had plenty of both in the old Acre neighborhood I gravitated toward the latter, except when the con was on me which it was a few times. The film under review Paper Moon with the father-daughter team of Ryan and Tatum O’Neal going through their paces gives us that combination I have mentioned.
Here’s the spiel. Here’s basis of the con in this one. Moses Pray (great name given the grift he is working) is a Bible salesmen in Great Depression-era Kansas and Missouri (that Great Depression the one in the 1930s not the more recent one this century). His grift, check out the obituary columns of the local newspapers to see what men had passed to the great beyond recently (in the days when such publications were plentiful) and head out to the bereaved widow and hustle her into paying for a Bible, a deluxe edition Bible, which the late breadwinner had ordered prior to passing away. Since the Bible was inscribed to the vulnerable widow they usually paid for the thing. Nice steady work. Later when times were tough Moses would step up in class and do the classic sell (bootleg whiskey in the specific case) the owner his own goods con (with untoward results). But the basic style of Moses had been etched in that Bible hustle.
The “feel good” parts in when Moses attends the funeral in Kansas of a woman friend with whom he had been intimate. That is when he met his nemesis (and maybe his on-screen daughter) Addie, played by Ryan’s real life daughter Tatum. She is an orphan with no place to go except her mother’s sister’s house in Missouri. Moses gets corralled into taking her to the sister’s house and the bulk of the film is centered on the adventures and misadventures of the pair on the way there. The most important part to note of this pairing is that Addie has almost as larcenous a heart as Moses. Maybe it was genetic if the suspicions about Addie’s unknown father had any basis. Through a series of events, cons, including that ill-fated hustle of that irate bootlegger Moses and Addie bond, bond as thick as thieves. Yeah, a con and “feel good” that is the ticket.
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