This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Legend-Slayer
Will Bradley Rides Again-Don’t Believe All That Dime-Store Zane Grey Nonsense
About How The West (Western United States) Was Won-Gary Cooper’s “Man Of The
West” (1958)- A Film Review, Of Sorts
By Will
Bradley
I must admit
that when I started out back in late 2016 feuding back and forth with fellow
film reviewer Seth Garth over the overblown reputation of English private
investigator or whatever he called himself back then Sherlock Holmes (since
exposed as a master criminal who was responsible for half the crime in greater
London in his time whose real name was Larry Lawrence, no relationship to our
own Lance) that I would have never believed that I could gather a following in
my lonely attempts to destroy, eliminate, banish or whatever word you like some
pretty bad characters. Guys, and it has been mainly guys thus far, maybe
reflecting his-story not her-story on the evil side of life in the past and
elsewhere who must have had pretty good press agents, publicity guys, who wrote
whatever drivel the hard-pressed populations would believe just to keep their
guys in the limelight. Keep their reputations all bright and shiny when the
reality was quite different.
I have
already given the example of the shoddy Holmes, oh, Lawrence and his dear
friend Doc Watson (I don’t want to get into that “gay” Homintern business that
Seth tried to run by a candid world which didn’t buy his take for a minute
after my expose about Larry and Doc’s serious criminal enterprises which helped
deflate those bastards’ reputations forthwith). There has also been since I
began my work a noticeable decline in the reputations of others I have exposed
like cheapjack slave-driver, sorry tenant farmer, peasant, serf, yeoman-driver Robin
Hood, besotted Don Juan (real name Jose Rios out of Aragon who gained his “fame”
via some convent beauties’ depraved fantasies while held captive those unholy
dungeons, impotent, yes impotent we now have some scientific evidence for what
for years was mere speculation, imposter Casanova and the wicked chattel owner
Captain Blood out of Jamaica slavery markets working night and day to expand
the fucking empire.
Strangely the
only one who I have not been able to bring down is the so-called legendary
early aviator and aeronautic innovator Johnny Cielo who claimed his whole
worthless life to have invented flight despite the fact that he was born in 1910
several years after the Wright Brother joined Icarus in the legendary category
down at Kitty Hawk. Maybe it is because he is a more modern example of bloated
reputation which people are more inclined to believe but if anything people I
run into despite the reams of documents proving he was nothing but a bush
pilot, never ran guns to Fidel and the hermanos in the old days, never knew
Rita Hayworth either have elevated this heel to some kind of god or something
rather than bum of the month. Despite my documentation, despite the manifest on
that last flight telling the whole candid world, or even the non-candid world,
that he was taking high-end passengers between Key West and Naples down in
Florida and had perished in the Gulf of Mexico not in the Caribbean heading
toward Cuba with a shipment of guns as the legend has it. I will have to see who his press agent was,
is. He or she should get a ton of money for their commissary at whatever prison
they should wind up in.
After all
that foreplay today we are going big again, going down and dirty with what in
America is something like the holy of holies-the Old West, the Wild West when
men, mostly men settled things with iron and plenty of slugs-bullets and
whiskey. From Jesse James to the famed and underrated Johnny Young just before World
War I which is really the last time you can talk about the Old West. You didn’t
have to be Professor Turner over at Harvard to know that once you got to the Pacific
your chances that the frontier was vanishing were pretty strong. Yeah from Jesse
and Johnny and everybody in between these bums have gotten a free ride, have
been made legends out of whole cloth. Got their respective legendary starts
from some guy in New York writing dime-store novels from the comfort of his
room at the Brown Hotel-in New York City. That in any case is how I was able to
track down the legend of a guy named Link Jones who went by a million other
names in his stealing, thieving murdering time like Dock Tobin, Billie Ellis,
and I think Gary Cooper, stealing the rangy homespun actor’s name even before he
had it although I couldn’t definitely confirm that last one.
This one
defies belief, belief that an admitted stone-cold killer and robber like Link
could throw sand in our eyes and go straight after a lifetime of crime, that
should have set alarms off right there. (Admitted his transgressions to Jackie
Jenkins, the famous, make that infamous New
York World reporter who did more than his fair share of bulling us about
these “men of the west” who downplayed the bloodthirsty part to make Link readership
worthy) But see old Mister Grey, Louie Le Marr, Cormac McCormick, Larry Murphy
and their ilk did their jobs well, sold a million copies of the bogus book,
books really detailing the bush-whackers, tramps, bums and sociopaths who really
populated the West back in the day all prettified and there you have it. Like I
said without leaving Manhattan. Nice work if you could get it, right. Reality
check: you had to have chewed up your chances in the East, had to have been on
the run or had no other recourse to pick up stakes and head West to drought,
famine, desperadoes, “injuns,” now indigenous peoples or Native American
depending on where you are, coyotes, avalanches, sod-busting, range wars, grifters,
water wars, coal dust, cannibals, train smoke and dreams, poison wells, buffalo
stampedes, social diseases, do I have to explain that, drifters, con men and
women and craven insects and tumbleweed.
With all those
strikes again success old Zane and his crowd really had their work cut out for
them although since they were writing for city-slickers who were not heading
west, not going to the aforementioned hazards except in books naturally the guy,
here one Link Jones, had to be ramrod straight in the saddle, long and tall,
with that “aw shucks” manner and slow-rolling drawl. Christ they cookie-cut
these guys except maybe the real deal Sam Shepard who really was long and tall
and slow-draw talking (not slow at shooting though as many a man found out). Sam
could have been on the cover of old Professor Turner’s opus, could have shown
rum brave Link Jones a thing or two.
Of course
today a million sociologists, and maybe half a million psychiatrists, will
defend Link, will say it was a dysfunctional homelife, no mother, a bastard of a
“father” figure in Dock Tobin, whose real name after my research was Cobb, wanted
in six states-dead or alive as was Link- and his natural sons, Jack and Slim,
plus a couple of stray villains in the mix, who taught him every evil known to
man, woman too. Bullshit. Link, at least according to legend which we will bust
quickly below, broke loose one day, repented, went straight after serving some time
in some purgatory town out in the prairie somewhere, got married, had kids.
Nice story right. More Grey-like malarkey.
Here is the
legend in all its glory with my refutations. Link, supposedly “reformed” was
sent on a mission from his Podunk town to go to Forth Worth down in Texas to
get the town a schoolteacher and had enough money to pay the required year’s
salary to get her to leave everything in a big city (for the time) to teach a
bunch of wooden-headed kids out on the prairie. Reel them in. Christ Link couldn’t
spell teacher never mind get one. Truth: he took the dough alright but spent it
all in a couple of days in Dallas on some whore named Billie, Billie something,
although the only one I was able to find who spent time with Link was a whore
named Julie who in the end ran off with the last of his dough when he was
running low after another blood-simple kill streak. Even better, with no dough
and nothing better to do he just happens to borrow some dough from some grifter
with a sad story and took a train ride to Fort Worth which just happened to get
robbed by Dock Tobin, remember Cobb, and his boys. Just happens to take some Judy,
Julie, some woman met on the rebound, there were almost as many desperate to
leave the East as men who figured to make a killing selling themselves and then
maybe see what happened when the dust settled, Billie if you like to the gang’s
hiding place, just happens to “play along” with Dock to the rob the El Dorado
Bank of their dreams and when that flushed down the toilet wastes the whole lot
of them after they had ravished Julie, his woman.
Believe all that
at your peril. Real deal, Link masterminded the robbery, had planted himself on
the train in order to get to Dock and his own worn-out dreams and only wasted
the gang, wasted Dock and the boys because they had wasted his time on a freaking
ghost town exploit. Had it planned he would take all the dough and was pissed
off when Dock hadn’t done his homework on the real situation in El Dorado.
Killed one cousin just for the hell of it. By the way all that reformed married
and kids’ stuff was just a cover when women “took a shine to him” like this Julie.
He might have begotten kids but he wasn’t claiming them, not supporting them. The
real Link would finally face the hangman in Colorado after about six more cold-blooded
murders and a dozen more bank and train robberies. Julie fell by the wayside
some time before Link’s end taking what was left of his and was never heard
from again probably went back to whoring in Denver when they became a big
cattle stockyard. Women like her always landed on their feet. I hope to high
hell that Link Jones doesn’t like Johnny Cielo prove to be “Teflon man” just
because half the American populations is enthralled by Old West nostalgia bits
and pieces.
Deal Them Off The Top, Brother, Deal Them Straight Off The Top--With Eric Holden’s “The Cincinnati Kid” In Mind
[Every once in a while a subject comes up, here gambling through the prism of high stakes poker to be the top dog, that someone has written about previously, then gambling through the prism of high stakes pool to be the top dog, and did such a well thought of job at it that good sense requires that person to take a stab at the new subject which in this case is really a variation on the older subject-who and how to get to be number one, numbero uno, in your chosen profession when the guy at the top seems immovable, seems immortal. That was the case when Josh Breslin wrote when he was younger for the East Bay Eye in the late 1960s and which subsequently has been posted in this space with some additional editing about young, handsome and here is the fatal kicker impetuous “Fast Eddie” Felton’s rise in the world of cigarette-strewn and whiskey bottle smoky pool halls until he came up against the king of the hill a guy named Jackie “Tubby” Gleason and got his clock cleaned. Lost his angel girl too to some one-eyed pimp daddy whom she took around the world on the rebound once Fast Eddie had that “loser” tag tattooed on him, on his forehead although anybody even vaguely familiar with that sport didn’t need that identification mark to know he had tapped out, news in such circles moves fast. Yeah impetuous had to go against the tiger before he was ready, before he broke his “impetuous jones” lost everything until he faded and went back to cheap street just another guy hustling nickels and dimes from punk kid amateurs out in some Joe’s Pool Hall in Peoria who didn’t know he touched the big time before he became pimp meat.
So we, the soon to be retired administrator on this site, Pete Markin, and I, Greg Green, now the acting administrator to see how I like it and see if I can help reverse some narrowing of perspective on this site over the past several years when a lot of the action has centered on the turbulent 1960s and not much else, invited Josh to give us what film critic emeritus Sam Lowell loves to call the “skinny” on the biggest poker game, stud poker of course what else, that ever hit the wicked sun- drenched and fucking humid town of New Orleans back in the 1930s, the time of the great hunger among plenty of guys looking to be top dog on the sly. Just to set the stage this is a tale about the rise of another young, handsome and here is without making this thing a cautionary tale the fatal kicker impetuous in the world of stud poker, a guy named Steve McQueen although he went by a million names. I think Josh said at the time of this event Eric Holden, but everybody called him the Cincinnati Kid although as Josh mentioned this kid had never been to that Ohio River city, had never really been north of Memphis and probably couldn’t pinpoint the place if you gave him three chances for a buck.
The rise of the Kid until he hit the buzz saw of ancient Lance Robinson who like Tubby Gleason with Fast Eddie cleaned his clock and sent him back to cheap street to nurse his wounds is what interested Josh. Interested the same way young Eddie Felton interested him when he got the story from Georgie Boy Scott out in some sleazy back-water pool hall when Tubby Gleason finally cashed his check and Josh wanted to what had happened to guys who had taken a run at him when he was in his prime. So when we sent him on the trail after hearing that Lance Robinson had recently gone on to his just rewards as an ancient warrior king of the poker parlors he was almost as eager as when he first sniffed that cigarette-strewn whisky besotted pool hall back in his young reporting days (That changing of names by the way according to Josh pervasive in gambling circles since you never know when you have to skip town owing a million markers to some rough guys and have to head into a dive town where if you used your real name to grab a stake from the hotshot local amateurs they would tar and feather you-they would know how to do that little number no matter how bad they were at your profession.)-Greg Green]
By Joshua Lawrence Breslin
I got this story straight from the “Shooter,” a guy whose real name or at least that is what I always knew him by when I got tipped that he was the guy to get whatever I needed to know about Lance and about his most famous challenger was Carl Malden. I had run into him around Jackson Square in New Orleans. Somebody from the now long faded Lafayette Hotel known more now for fast-hustling hookers paying room rent by the hour (or rather their Johns doing the honors) than poker-faced poker players had tipped me that Shooter might know where world historic defeated pool-player “Fast Eddie” Felton might be nursing his wounds and the Shooter told me that was old hat, Fast Eddie was working the steamboat tourist trade up and down the Mississippi since he got stripped naked by Tubby Gleason and was not story, zero in the pool hall world where it counted down in the human sink along with the whores, pimps and stone ass junkies. I got the Felton story almost despite the Shooter once he knew that I knew he, the Shooter, had taken his liberties like a lot of guys had with this kinky stone ass junkie Angelica who used to be Fast Eddie’s girl until he tanked out while she was riding high with Fast Eddie. I threatened Shooter with the hard ass fact that when I found Fast Eddie which I would do eventually I would lay that very juicy piece of information on him and the guy crumbled like a bent fender in the days when such things happened to fenders almost at the touch. (You already know from Greg Green’s thoughtful introduction that I did get the story, did get some awards for the piece, the coveted Globe for one, and that I did not tell Fast Eddie who had not aged gracefully what with a booze and jone habit stacked together that his angel girlfriend had taken Shooter around the world while Eddie was playing some rich Memphis banker downstairs in his hillside mansion. Fuck it he probably would not have cared one way or the other-yesterday’s news but Shooter was shaky to buy my line.)
The story Shooter really wanted to tell was about a guy named Eric Holden, something like that who was the cat’s meow at poker, five card stud poker in case anybody was asking, the only kind, serious kind to get a man’s blood up and who knew Fast Eddie in passing since they both had hung out at Sam Levine’s pool hall over on the low rent end of Bourbon Street where the amateurs, the rising stars with no dough backing them up hung looking for attention and the guys on the run who kept a low profile in the smoking background. I don’t think from what I learned later that Eddie and Eric knew each all that well since they were running different sides of the street once this Eric figured he would end up in some back alley face down if he played any serious money pools but had this almost mathematically precise mind for stud poker (and nerves of steel a not unimportant attribute if you are going up against the king of the hill). The Shooter told a story about how Fast Eddie always the hustler told Eric that he would spot him three balls if he would “shoot pools” his favorite expression for a hundred bucks. Eric told him to fuck off that “it was not his game.” Yeah both young, from hunger, handsome, ladies handsome but both young men maybe a little bit too blue-eyed pretty boy for the serious aficionados of pool or poker and fatally flawed with those impetuous natures like they were gods, gods pure and simple.
This Malden who got that Shooter moniker for always playing it straight, always telling the story true or as true as any guy who is around any gambling circles will tell the tale. This is the story of the rise and fall of his protégé, Eric, I will tell about how Eric got his moniker in a minute and then if you have been around gambling circles you might recognize the name before he dropped down among the peons, con men and cutthroat artists back in the old days. Back in the hard-bitten wide open days after World War II where there was loose money around and plenty of hungry guys ready to scoop it up around drifter towns like New Orleans and a million other port cities. His protégé being none other than real name, fuck that Eric Holden con, Steve McQueen who always except when he was laying low in some dive town trying to work up a stake to get back in the action carried the moniker Cincinnati Kid. The Kid a real comer until one Lance Robinson took him gently to the cleaners and pushed him back to cheap street and the low rent dive town hustle. Happens every time to those impetuous fools.
Before I retell the Shooter’s tale I had better give you his bone fides. Shooter like a lot of guys before World War II was pretty footloose, was from what later guys up my way in Olde Sacco in Maine would call “from hunger,” I know they were, I, was. Very early on he would hustle his friends for dimes and quarters playing card tricks to while away the time until he got his first stake. Maybe a hundred bucks which was real money then among the squares although before he hit bottom he was using hundred dollar bills as straws for his cocaine habit lines. He moved pretty quickly up the stud poker food chain, got a reputation as a tough guy to beat which is an excellent advertisement in that profession since it will draw all kind of guys to “prove” you are a one-shot wonder, just lucky with the rubes. Probably helped that build-up with about twenty shots of straight whisky. His aim all that time was to build a reputation in order to get a shot at the reigning king of the hill, guess who even back then, Lance Robinson. Well the long and short of it was that when that big match occurred in Memphis old King Lance kicked out the jams on the Shooter in less that twenty-four hours, something of a record in high stakes poker at the time among the top contenders.
That experience left the Shooter very shaken, left him always working the percentages thereafter, win a little, lose a little, and keep your hand in until you find a guy who could beat this Lance. Now when the Shooter is telling me this story he is already an old man, is reliving some younger dreams about bringing the Kid along. After his defeat at the hands of Lance the Shooter also began to toy with other gambling ventures which makes senses since win a little, lose a little makes for very tight budgets and screams from irate landlords and bill collectors. He took up horses, pool, and cock fights which is how his honey to be introduced in a minute got her sexual juices up watching those cocks go at it, strange bitch it seemed to me but the Shooter remained true blue to her even when she blew town on him the last time with a half a hundred thou. (On that barbarian cock fight stuff remember this is Louisiana, Cajun country where such “traditions” were still honored even though the sport was illegal in the state.)
Shooter would drift through the towns all up and down the Mississippi trying as he said “to do the best he could.” It was in Shreveport where he ran into the Kid the first time who was working in a pool hall. Shreveport is also where he met his first wife, this Maggie Ann, the cock fight frill, who was working in Madame LaRue’s whorehouse when he picked her out of the line-up and she took him around the world. This Maggie Ann is important to the story later when the big match comes around but every time the Shooter mentioned her name to me he added “that whore” so he was still hot under the collar about her whorish strutting ways even when they were married, maybe especially when they were married and he was out of town a lot trying hustle dough to keep her in clover. No dice in the end although not for the Shooter’s not trying since she led him a merry chase and that ain’t no lie.
So the Shooter once the Kid hits New Orleans teams up with him, teaches him a few things and starts working to get him a bankroll in order to face down this Lance. Things were moving along well until the Kid ran into some country girl, Laura, whom the Kid always called Tuesday since that was the day that they met and he had had big night cleaning up five Gs off the big boys at the Lafayette Hotel weekly game, with blonde hair and doe-like eyes all blue and he fell, fell hard for her (this despite grabbing Maggie Ann’s free ass for getting his ashes hauled every time Shooter was out of town-and a couple of times when he was in town and Maggie Ann was testing her coquettish whorish ways to see if he would belt her one). Although Shooter didn’t know about the stuff between Maggie Ann and the Kid until she was ready to leave town and wanted to rub it in, rub salt in Shooter’s loveless wounds and told him every detail about every guy she had done, and a couple of girls too, told him she had blown all his friends for good measure, he knew that having a girl hanging over the Kid as he was trying to go for the brass ring was the kiss of death, would be an albatross around his neck. He wouldn’t listen, told Shooter he could beat Lance, beat the old man like a gong without working up a sweat. Almost broke the whole thing off when just before the big Lafayette Hotel game he snuck down to Cajun country to see this Tuesday and have some sex with her which would, no doubt in the Shooter’s mind, make him too loose, too unfocused on his mission.
So the big day comes and everybody who is anybody around Louisiana gambling circles showed up for the Kid-Lance show-down. The Shooter could tell after about fifteen seconds that the Kid had had his way with this Tuesday and that his energies would be sapped. Jesus. Now the way these games, this high stakes stud poker works is a lot different from some back room at Mick’s gin mill where Mick has paid off the coppers for the amateurs to play for a few bucks and he gets a cut off the top for his services. They have certain protocol or they did until guys like Reno Red build a casino on up in the mountains just short of California and Bugsy Segal built Xanadu out in the Los Vegas deserts. A big game would take place in an up-scale hotel where the manager paid off the coppers to keep away and the gamblers would rent out a suite of rooms to do their business in.
High stakes stud poker was, is, played to the death, played until somebody cries “uncle” and can’t or won’t raise anymore dough to stay in the game. So the whole process can take hours, days and a suite with bedrooms and the like is a bare minimum requirement. Besides a high stakes game will draw many interested spectators to see if the champ will be dethroned but more likely to bet on the oncome, bet big. (One of the fastest pieces of action on the sidelines which would put those who bet today on each play in a football or basketball game to shame is to bet on every turn of the card for say $100 a shot-the money changes hands very quickly and somebody can get very rich very fast-or tap out the same way.
In the old days the once elegant now faded Lafayette Hotel down near the breakwaters of the Mississippi River was the stop for high rollers coming to play in New Orleans. Every half decent stud poker player dreamed of showing his (or occasionally her) stuff in those large well-provisioned rooms against all-comers. Up and coming guys would say “I’m heading to the Lafayette” even when they were stumbling around to get stakes to play in Riley’s Pub back room dollar limit games. That included the Kid when he was coming up, when the Shooter was bringing him along and wanted to entice him with that glitter. So the big game was played up in Suite 606, a suite specifically reserved for poker players who chipped into pay the freight, to pay the room rate.
Like I said these events would draw a crowd from all over, all over the East sometimes all the way up to Boston. I mentioned the side bettors but as well in most games others beside in this case the young Kid and the old Lance opted for a seat in the game to see if that day maybe their luck would change and they could by default become king of the hill. Such dreams keep certain men (and occasionally women) afloat in a tough and grimy world. This day would find a few guys who had been “gutted” somehow that inelegant word used to describe cutting up fish or livestock was the term of art for those thrown on the scrapheap by either the Kid or Lance.
There was Pig, a low rent guy who made his money from chiseling cheapjack guys in those back alley games enough to grab a stake and take his chances. Pig that day very early on sweating like a pig would fall early since he always worried about whether his stake would last long enough. Lance made toast of him. There was Doc who kept his numbers book, his lined drawn tables which showed him the percentages with each upturned card. He faded without a whimper once his figures went south on him as they naturally would when one is betting on whether a guy is bluffing or really has that down card to complete some combination that looked promising. Gone.
Then there was “Yella,” a name from a term familiar in race-conscious New Orleans which meant that somewhere along the way he had white blood in him which made him acceptable in white society somewhat, that somewhat being good enough to get “gutted” by both the Kid and Lance at the poker table in his time. Although Doc and Pig were pretty non-descript second-rate actors in this game Yella had an interesting past having gone to New York City when he was younger and set the town on fire at the Cotton Club when he had his own jazz band back in the 1920s Age of Jazz that the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald endlessly wrote about and coined the term. A New Orleans guy like Louie Armstrong was just too black for the white upper-crust crowd which frequented that uptown Harlem establishment but Yella fit right in. Then the Great Depression set in and jazz and jazz bands took a back seat. When he saw the writing on the wall the resourceful Yella won a handful of dough in a game at the Plaza Hotel against a bunch of Mayfair swells and returned to New Orleans and first pimped on Bourbon Street and the teamed with Madame LaRue to set up a high end bordello complete with girls for every kind of taste from a trip around the world to a quick blow-job when the latter was kind of an exotic treat unlike later when high school girls were doing it as a rite of passage in some places to keep some car freak lover at bay down in some Squaw Rock lovers’ lane. (As it turned out although nobody talked about it Yella had pimped for Maggie Ann when she first hit town from Podunk down in the bayou and he would later get Tuesday as a favor to the Kid going down that road although not before as he said “sampling the wares” in both cases.) Despite that interesting background when the deal went down Yella tapped out early. Gone too.
Taking up the last seat, usually six was the maximum number at the table at any one time, was the Shooter who was in for a while as a player until things settled out and he just dealt them out, dealt them from the top. We know Shooter’s story or enough to get us by once we know that he had been “gutted” by the old man and once we know his trials and tribulations trying to keep Maggie Ann in style and away from every stray dog of a man who caught her eye. Tough work which made dealing high stakes poker games to get some dough like child’s play. Shooter would fold after the first day and so deep into the second day it was Lance against the Kid, one on one.
Of course these high stakes games, actually even those back room ones, had a certain rhythm, a certain protocol. One was since the games were long, could be days long, any player could call himself out for a while and not lose his play at the table. Another was that if a player tapped out he or she had half an hour to raise additional cash. For known players, markers, IOUs, were acceptable and many times the only way to keep players going until they had to lay low and pay some dough toward the markers was to take markers or they would be shut out of games. Players, if they agreed, could deal themselves if there was no back-up dealer available that any players trusted enough. The dealer could also call himself out and that is why in most games a back-up dealer was hanging around.
In this meet they back up was none other than Missouri Moll who just then had tapped out having had a bad run at blackjack. She like Yella was interesting being one of the few high stakes female players. They say Moll had gotten her start in the famous Mrs. McCabe’s whorehouse up in the Klondike, up in gold country before that panned out where the girls in that girl-starved country charged (or rather Mrs. McCabe charged) five hundred dollars cash or gold for their “favors,” a quaint term of the times before World War II. This Mrs. McCabe (she was not married but having the Mrs. kept the men away from her door-mostly) is reputed to be the “inventor” of “going under the table,” of giving guys playing cards blowjobs, head, whatever you call oral sex in your neighborhood without having to leave the table to keep up their spirits so to speak (she did not do missionary sex just the blow-jobs although more than one guy would be willing to give her a fistful of gold when she was younger for the pleasure).
Whatever the truth of Mrs. McCabe’s invention Moll learned that little trick as she rose in the ranks of high stakes poker players. Any time she tapped out and needed to raise cash fast she would go to work (not always “under the table” giving new meaning to that expression but in an adjacent bedroom) and within a half hour would have five hundred or a thousand just like that. (Many guys would hope for her to tap out including Lance when he was younger just to keep their “spirits” up.). Now older and maybe wiser she was just backing up the action although she still had enough looks for the older guys to maybe take a run at her if she needed some dough.
Not all the action as I pointed out was around the table. Money is a magnet for the pure bettor and the interested parties with cash to wager on any outcomes. A couple of guys, Mack from Detroit (don’t ask for any other part of his moniker you might wind up floating down the Mississippi) and Ruby Red, can be seen here betting on every flip of the card, on every hand just like today’s sports junkies which as I mentioned before is a tough dollar, is very wearying. The guy though that is important to this part of the story is a guy named Varner, Jody Varner, who father Will left him 28,000 acres of the best bottom land in Mississippi and a company town to feed what he wanted to feed off of. This Jody Varner though was not present by happenstance but because he desperately wants to see Lance fall down. All I have to say is that he had been gutted by Lance and you by now know what the deal is. This Jody seems ready to go through Will’s lifetime of struggle fortune in as short a time as he could between his mulatto mistress and his sporting habits. (As an equal opportunity sexual partner he had his way with the very white Maggie Ann on more than one occasion and would later after the Kid’s fall have his way with that Tuesday when the Kid needed a stake and needed it quickly).
Jody wants Lance beaten so badly that he did not want to leave anything to chance. He has conned the Shooter who after-all only had his reputation for fair-dealing on the line to send a few off-hand high cards the Kid’s way. The Shooter balked but being vain about Maggie Ann and her tramp-like ways which were not generally known he succumbed when Jody told him he was going to send her back to some backwater whorehouse going down on Cajun boys if he did not do as told.
In the end it didn’t do Shooter any good since the Kid spotted what he was doing from the first hand he tried to do it. In the end it didn’t matter for Shooter either since that Maggie Ann ran off with some travelling salesman who promised her the world. More importantly in the end it didn’t matter as well since ancient Lance played the Kid like a fiddle. See the Kid never having played the old man and had only stories about how he gutted one guy or another the Kid had no clue, no clue at all about how Lance played out the play. About how without saying a word he would stand up and seem in pain over a back spasm. How he would after a couple of hours call for a rest while the Kid was hot and in the meantime went crazy waiting for Lance to return. Worse of all he was clueless when he mistook a few false hands that Lance let him win and left him suspecting Lance of senility. That was the real action leading up to the “kill”-that last hand when everything matter and the Kid was like putty in Lance’s hands.
Even though the Kid gave Lance the battle of his life he forgot the first rule of high stakes stud poker when two or more savvy guys are playing. If a guy keeps calling and raising, calling and raising at thousand dollar increments then you best fold and wait for a change of luck because as sure as shooting a guy like Lance has the goods. When he throws a check for five thou and takes your marker it is way too late-you are a goner. The Kid found out $5000 in the hole hard way when Lance turned over a Jack to complete a flush. Yeah, back to cheap street until Lance retired or kicked the bucket. It would never happen. Maybe he should have checked out where Fast Eddie Felton was hanging and take him up on that three ball handicap for a hundred bucks because he was finished as a big daddy stud poker player now that everybody knew he could be rattled. The only thing for certain after the Kid fell down was that sweet girlfriend Tuesday was going to wear out a few beds and maybe her knees getting that dough for the Kid when Lance called in that marker. (Jody even before she and the Kid left the room gave her his calling card and said he expected to see her soon-the bastard.)
Everybody Loves A Con, Con
Artists Unless TheyAre The Dreaded Con-
Steve Martin and Michael Caine, Oops And, Oh Yeah, Glenne Headly “Dirty Rotten
Scoundrels” (1988)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Leslie Dumont
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,
starting Glenne Headly, Steve Martin, Michael Caine, 1988
One of the virtues of
coming back to work at this publication occasionally after I retired from my
daily by-line at Women Today is to
hear the stories from some of the older writers about various characters,
mainly but not exclusively male con artists and armed robbers, they knew when
they were growing up. That includes my old flame and now fellow writer Josh
Breslin who along with one Sam Lowell live by the headline above that
“everybody loves a con artist except the conned.” That idea will come in handy
as I review the film Dirty Rotten
Scoundrels because the whole film, every waking minute, is spent
documenting a series of interrelated cons. Cons coming out of your ears before
the last frame. (By the way in case some other writer has betrayed a water
cooler thought the relationship between Josh and I these days is well, murky.
After my two failed due to the press of work marriages and his three due the
press of work failed marriages murky is good, very good.)
One day around the water
cooler on another occasion not related to the discussion mentioned above Sam,
Josh, Fritz, Frank and maybe Laura Perkins were talking about the legendary
Eddie Riley from Sam and Frank’s old neighborhood who pulled the biggest con they
had heard of on a New York banker who was looking tomake some easy money to get out from under
some Ponzi scheme he was running that was starting to go awry and he would
listen to anything that sounded like a life-saver. (Rule number one by cynical Sam
make sure your mark is desperate then it is like finding money on the ground to
take whatever you want.) Nobody was still sure of all the details since the
gaff had happened a couple of decades ago but basically Eddie set up a fake
stock brokerage house complete with agents and all putting up numbers for
stocks especially around say the Acme Toy Company. A sure thing, especially
when Eddie said he had inside information (illegal I know but goes on all the
time just be smart about it). So Mr. Investment Banker forked over a cool 100
thou and the game is on. Two or three days later the stock jumped from say ten
to fifteen dollars, a good rise with Eddie’s assurance that it was just the
start. Another 100 thou, no two hundred thou since Mr. Big was in a very deep
hole. Stock goes from say fifteen to twenty-two and Mr. Big is almost hooked.
Another couple of hundred thou to make a half million and the stock goes to
thirty then thirty-five in a short time.
Mr. Big is breathing a sigh
of relief. So he goes another two hundred thou. Eddie makes his smart move here
by not being too greedy and starts to wind the con up although he knew for
certain he could have gotten to a million no sweat. Of course on all of this
Eddie, really Mr. Big, is buying on margins, grabbing stock for say ten percent
down with the expectations that it will generally keep going up for a while
even with some blips. The blips start and eventually just to add salt to the
wound the stock goes low enough that margin calls come into play and Mr. Big
has to folk up another couple of hundred thou to cover his margins. Done. From
there the stock takes a slow nosedive all along Eddie “calming” the guy with a
new upturn soon. Never came as the stock when to about twenty cents and Eddie
wrote the guy a check for about a thousand dollars to close out the account. I
don’t think the guy committed suicide but I do believe that Sam said that he
fled the country. Here is the beauty-there is, was no Acme Toy Company, no
stock was ever issued-t was all mirrors-beautiful, even I can see the beauty of
the thing. And everybody else, well, except Mr. Big probably could as
well.
That was the high side but
of course that requires some skill and a deep understanding of human greed only
a greed-head could understand and work through. Mostly, and after Eddie’s
exploits got a serious airing at the water cooler that day, they began to talk
about small time grifters starting from street guys hustling blind routines or
from hunger stuff. Probably started with guys like this hustling their fellow
student out of their milk money or throwing counterfeit slugs in change
machines, stuff like that. That latter point is important because that idea,
that grifter business enters into the plot of the film under review via small
time Freddy, played by Steve Martin, whose idea of a big score is hustling some
passenger on a train for dinner and carfare. Kids’ stuff. But Eddie, you
remember Eddie of the big score, also enters the scene as the fast company for
the big-time scam artist, Lawrence, played by million film Michael Caine,
bilking rich widows and bored wives of enough money to keep his mansion and his
expensive appetites afloat. The rubber will hit the road when these two go mano
a mano as the action progresses.
They start as strangers on
a train to the French Rivera and Lawrence once he meets Freddy and find out
that he is planning on squatting on his turf tries to move heaven and earth to
get him out of town, and away from endangering his profit margins. And it works,
well, almost works as you could figure since Freddy on his way out of town runs
into one of those rich ladies Lawrence has been bilking based on his being an
exiled prince in need of funds to get his kingdom back, or something like that.
In order to avoid exposure as a fraud Lawrence agrees reluctantly to tutor
Freddie on the high-side economics and style of the con game. And he doesn’t do
badly but in a place like the Rivera only one king can survive.
Enter the con between cons,
always a good watch when titans go at each other no holds barred. The object
here is one Judy, really, Judy Colgate of the Colgate fortune they think. The
bet $50,000 but the real stakes are the first guy to bed her wins, the other
guy leaves sad sack out of town and back to cheap street and hustling winos for
beer money. For a good while the battle of the titans is something to watch as
they cut and feign, slash and burn and still get nowhere near a bedroom until
finally Freddie makes a score, or think he has. Faking the old cripple routine
that has melted many a woman’s heart her “love” has allowed him to walk, to
walk right up to the bed.Success. Well
almost, well no actually. See Judy is from hunger or rather is a con artist on
her own, the notorious Jackal that every con artist stays up late trying to
emulate (to no success). After she cons Freddy into taking a shower before
love-making she blows town. Or rather she heads over to Lawrence’s mansion
where he, suddenly soft after finding she was no heiress and from hunger herself,
gives her the 50K and she really does blow town after blowing the boys off and
sending them back to school chastised. Nice, and in a real twist on her next
caper to show no hard feeling she brings a boatload of suckers Freddie and
Lawrence’s way as they head off into the sunset. Nice, yeah, everybody loves a
con, no question, none whatsoever.
When The King Of Rock And
Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The
Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -On That Old
Hill-Billy Down In The Hills And Hollows Come Saturday Red Barn Dance Father
Moment
By Zack James
[Zack James has been on an
assignment covering the various 50th anniversary commemorations of
the year 1968 (and a few in 1967 and for the future 1969 which is to his mind
something of a watershed year rather than his brother Alex and friends
“generation of ‘68” designation they have wrapped themselves around) and
therefore has not graced these pages for a while. Going through his paces on
those assignments Zack realized that he was out of joint with his own
generation, having been born in 1958 and therefore too young to have been
present at the creation of what is now called, at least in the
demographical-etched commercials, the classic age of rock and roll. Too young
too for any sense of what a jailbreak that time was and a shortly later period
which Seth Garth who was deep into the genre has called the ‘folk minute
breeze” that ran rampart through the land say in the early 1960s. Too young as
well to have been “washed clean,” not my term but Si Lannon’s since I am also
too young to have been aware of the import by the second wave of rock, the acid
rock period. Hell, this is enough of an introduction to re-introducing the
legendary writer here. Lets’ leave it as Zack is back and let him go through
his paces. Greg Green, site manager]
Alex James was the king of
rock and roll. Of course he was not really the king, the king being Elvis and
no last name needed at least for the bulk of those who will read what I call a
“think piece,” a piece about what all the commemorations of events a million
years ago, or it like a million years ago even mentioning 50 or 60 year
anniversaries, mean. What Alex was though was the conduit for my own musical
experiences which have left me as a stepchild to fiveimportant musical moments, the birth of rock
and roll in the 1950s, the quick prairie fire called the “folk minute of the
early 1960s and the resurgence with a vengeance of rock in the mid-1960s which
for brevity’s sake call “acid” rock, along the way and intersecting that big
three came a closeted “country outlaw moment” initiated by father time Hank
Williams and carried through with vengeance by singers like Willie Nelson,
Townes Van Zandt, and Waylon Jennings, and Muddy Waters and friends blues as
the glue that bound what others who write here, Sam Lowell, in particular calls
the Generation of ’68- a seminal year in many ways which I have been exploring
for this and other publications. I am well placed to do since I was over a
decade too young to have been washed over by the movements. But that step-child
still sticks and one Alex James is the reason why.
This needs a short
explanation. As should be apparent Alex James is my brother, my oldest brother,
born in 1946 which means a lot in the chronology of what follows. My oldest
brother as well in a family with seven children, five boys and two twin girls,
me being the youngest of all born in 1958. As importantly this clan grew up in
the dirt- poor working- class Acre, as in local lore Hell’s Acre, section of
North Adamsville where my mother, under better circumstances, grew up and
remained after marrying her World War II Marine my father from dirt poor
Appalachia which will also become somewhat important later. To say we lacked
for many of the things that others in that now seen “golden age” of American
prosperity would be an understatement and forms the backdrop of how Alex kept
himself somewhat sane with music although we didn’t even have a record player
(the now ancient although retro revival way to hear music then) and he was
forced when at home to “fight” for the family radio to get in touch with what
was going on, what the late Pete Markin his best friend back then called “the
great jailbreak.”
A little about Alex’s
trajectory is important too. He was a charter member along with the late
Markin, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Allan Jackson, the later four
connected with this publication in various ways since its hard copy start in
the 1970s, of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys. These guys, and maybe it
reflected their time and milieu, hung out at Tonio’s for the simple reason they
never had money, or not enough, and while they were not above various acts of
larceny and burglary mostly they hung around there to listen to the music
coming out of Tonio’s to die for jukebox. That jukebox came alive in maybe
1955, 1956 when they first heard Elvis (and maybe others as well but Alex
always insisted that he was the first to “discover” Elvis in his crowd.)
Quickly that formed the backdrop of what Alex listened to for a few years until
the genre spent a few years sagging with vanilla songs and beats. That same
Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t, was the guy who
turned Alex on to folk music via his desperate trips to Harvard Square up in
Cambridge when he needed to get out of the hellish family household he dwelled
in. The third prong of the musical triad was also initiated by Markin who made
what everybody claims was a fatal mistake dropping out of Boston University in
his sophomore year in 1967 to follow his dream, to “find” himself, to go west
to San Francisco for what would be called the Summer of Love where he learned
about the emerging acid rock scene (drugs, sex and rock and roll being one
mantra). He dragged everybody, including Alex if you can believe this since he
would subsequently come back and go to law school and become the staid
successful lawyer he is today, out there with him for varying periods of time.
(The fateful mistake on the part of Markin stemming from him dropping out at
the wrong time, the escalation of the war in Vietnam subjecting him later to
the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service while more than the others unhinged him
and his dream.) The blues part came as mentioned as a component of the folk
minute, part of the new wave rock revival and on its own. The country outlaw
connections bears separate mention these days.
That’s Alex’s story-line.
My intersection with Alex’s musical trip was that one day after he had come
back from a hard night at law school (he lived at home, worked during the day
at some law firmas somekind of lacky, and went to law school nights
studying the rest of the time) he went to his room and began playing a whole
bunch of music starting I think with Bill Haley and the Comet’s Rock Around The Clock and kept playing
stuff for a long time. Loudly. Too loudly for me to get to sleep and I went and
knocked on his door to get him quiet down. When he opened the door he had on his
record playerJerry Lee Lewis’s High School Confidential. I flipped out.
I know I must have heard Alex playing this stuff earlier, but it was kind of a
blank before. Background music just like Mother’s listening to 1940s stuff on
her precious ancient RCA radio in the kitchen. What happened then, what got me
mesmerized as a twelve- year old was that this music “spoke” to me, spoke to my
own unformed and unarticulated alienation. I had not been particularly
interested in music, music mostly heard and sung in the obligatory junior high
school music class, but this was different, this got my hormonal horrors in
gear. I stayed in Alex’s room listening half the night as he told me above when
he had first heard such and such a song.
Although the age gap between
Alex and I was formidable, he was out the door originally even before I knew
him since at that point we were the only two in the house all the others in
college or on their own he became something of a mentor to me on the ins and
out of rock and roll once I showed an interest. From that night on it was not
just a question of say, why Jailhouse
Rock should be in the big American Songbook but would tell me about who or
what had influenced rock and roll. He was the first to tell me about what had
happened in Memphis with a guy named Sam Phillips and his Sun Record label
which minted an extraordinary number of hits by guys like Elvis, Warren Smith,
Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee. When I became curious about how the sound got going,
why my hands got clammy when I heard the music and I would start tapping my
toes he went chapter and verse on me. Like some god-awful preacher quoting how
Ike Turner, under a different name, may really have been the granddaddy of rock
with his Rocket 88 and how obscure
guys like Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner and Willie Lomax and their big bop
rhythm and blues was one key element. Another stuff from guys like Hack Devine,
Warren Smith and Lenny Larson who took the country flavor and melted it down to
its essence. Got rid of the shlock. Alex though did surprise me with the thing
he thought got our toes tapping-these guys, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Buddy
Holly and a whole slew of what I would later call good old boys took their
country roots not the Grand Ole Opry stuff but the stuff they played at the red
barn dances down in the hills and hollows come Saturday night and mixed it with
some good old fashion religion stuff learned through bare-foot Baptists or from
the black churches and created their “jailbreak” music.
One night Alex startled me
while we were listening to an old Louvain Brothers song, I forget which one maybe
Every Times You Leave, when he said
“daddy’s music” meaning that our father who had come from down in deep down in
the mud Appalachia had put the stuff in our genes. He didn’t call it DNA I
don’t’ think he knew the term and I certainly didn’t but that was the idea. I
resisted the idea then, and for a long time after but sisters and brothers look
at the selections that accompany this so-called think piece the whole thing is
clear now. I, we are our father’s sons after all. Sons welded by twelve
millions unacknowledged ties to those lonesome hills and hollows where the coal
ruled and the land got crummy before its time and Saturday brought out red barn
fiddles and mandolins an stringed basses with some mad monk calling the tune
and the guys drinking home-made hooch and the girls wondering whether the guy would
be sober enough to dance, hell, to ask for the last dance something out of a Child ballad turned Appalachian mud by the
time it got to the sixth generation fighting the land. Knew that they were
doomed even if they could not appreciate in words their fate unless something like
World War II exploded them out of their life routine like it had Dad when Pearl
Harbor sent him Pacific War bound and then up north to guard some naval depot
near North Adamsville toward war’s end. Alex knew that early on I only grabbed
the idea lately-too late since our father he has been gone a long time
now.
Alex had the advantage of
being the oldest son of a man who also had grown up as the oldest son in his
family brood of I think eleven. (Since I, we never met any of them when my
father came North to stay for good after being discharged from the Marine after
hard Pacific War military service, I can’t say much about that aspect of why my
father doted on his oldest son.) That meant a lot, meant that Dad confided as
much as a quiet, sullen hard-pressed man could or would confide in a youngster.
All I know is that sitting down at the bottom of the food chain (I will make
you laugh if you too were from the poor the “clothes chain” too as the
recipient of every older brother, sister too when I was too young to complain
or comprehend set of ragamuffin clothing) he was so distant that we might well
have been just passing strangers. Alex, for example, knew that Dad had been in
a country music trio which worked the Ohio River circuit, that river dividing
Ohio and Kentucky up north far from hometown Hazard, yes, that Hazard of legend
and song whenever anybody speaks of the hardscrabble days of the coal mine
civil wars that went on down there before the war, before World War II. I don’t
know what instrument he played although I do know that he had a guitar tucked
under his bed that he would play when he had a freaking minute in the days when
he was able to get work (which was less frequently than I would have guessed early
one until Alex clued me in that non-job time meaning that he spent every waking
hour looking for work and had no time for even that freaking minute to play
some fretted guitar).
That night Alex also
mentioned something that hit home once he mentioned it. He said that Dad who
tinkered a little fixing radios, a skill learned from who knows where although
apparently his skill level was not enough to get him a job in that industry,
figured out a way to get WAXE out of I think Wheeling, West Virginia which
would play old country stuff 24/7 and that he would always have that station on
in the background when he was doing something. Had stopped doing that at some
point before I recognized the country-etched sound but Alex said he was
spoon-fed on some of the stuff, citing Warren Smith and Smiley Jamison
particularly, as his personal entre into the country roots of one aspect of the
rock and roll craze. Said further that he was not all that shocked when say
Elvis’s It’s All Right Mama went off
the charts since he could sense that country beat up-tempo a little from what
Smith had been fooling around with, Carl Perkins too he said. They were what he
called “good old boys” who were happy as hell that they had enough musical
skills at the right time so they didn’t have to stick around the farm or work
in some hardware store in some small town down South.
Here is the real shocker,
well maybe not shocker, but the thing that made Alex’s initial so-called DNA
thought make sense. When Alex was maybe six or seven Dad would be playing
something on the guitar, just fooling around when he started playing Hank
Williams’ mournful lost love Cold, Cold
Heart. Alex couldn’t believe his ears and asked Dad to play it again. He
would for years after all the way to high school when Dad had the guitar out
and he was around request that Dad play that tune. I probably heard the song
too. I know I heard Come All You Fair and
Tender Ladies from the original Carter family or one branch of it. So,
yeah, maybe that DNA business is not so far off. And maybe, just maybe, over
fifty years later we are still our father’s sons. Thanks, Dad.
The selection posted here
culled from the merciful YouTube network thus represents one of the key pieces
of music that drove the denizens of the Generation of ’68 and their
stepchildren. And maybe now their grandchildren.
[Alex and I had our ups and
downs over the years and as befits a lawyer and journalist our paths seldom
passed except for occasional political things where we were on the same
wavelength like with the defense of Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning
(formerly Bradley). Indicative though of our closeness despite distance in 2017
when Alex had a full head of steam up about putting together a collective
corner boy memoir in honor of the late Markin after a business trip to San
Francisco where he went to a museum exhibition featuring the seminal Summer of
Love, 1967 he contacted me for the writing, editing and making sure of the
production values.]
To Sin By Silence When We Should Protest Makes Cowards Out Of Men (Women Too)!-Build The Resistance! This should be our mantra-“Keep building the resistance”-we have them on the run a little now-we have to keep up our organizing it is the only way-forget about the electoral process now the streets are our only defense against this cold civil war which has landed on our doorsteps. Remember too other earlier movements like the black civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam movement started small-very small especially the latter-keep the faith
To Sin By Silence When We Should Protest Makes Cowards Out Of Men (Women Too)!-Build The Resistance!
By Political Commentator Frank Jackman
To Sin By Silence When We Should Protest Makes Cowards Out Of Men … (and I added women too)-lines from “Protest” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Usually when I want to grab a line or two from some poem it would more likely by from say Bertolt Brecht’s “To Those Born After,” Langston Hughes’ “Homage To John Brown” or Claude McKay’s “Let’s Us Die Like Men (and I would add women here again) and not some relatively obscure American poet but when the point is made so succinctly I could not resist using the damn thing as it disturbed my sleep one night
Ella Wheeler Wilcox whatever her vices or virtues as an American working the ways of the late 19th and early 20th century had it exactly right-had a mantra that we need to live by these dark days on the American frontier (the frontier not Harvard Professor Turner’s old idea about the closing of the frontier once you hit the Pacific Ocean with all its consequences for a restless people ever since but the outer edge of civil society). We must continue to resist the Trump government with whatever resources we have. And whatever hubris we can gather in to keep us from the storm that has gathered right on our doorsteps.
Most of us didn’t want this fight, the older ones of us thinking that maybe we could pass on under conditions of an armed truce with the imperial government. But then the cold civil war descended on us and we had to pick sides, those of us who see the necessity of picking sides when bans are in place, when walls are being built and when the rich, no, hell no, the super-rich have literally stepped up to besieged every social program that our people need to face the next day. And act. Act to build the resistance which these days looks like it will need to be on the order of the French Resistance in World War II.
Do you really want to bend your head down when the deal, the hell train coming, goes down and your kids, if you have kids, your grandkids if you have grandkids, or just your own conscience asks you what did you when it was time to speak up. Remember Ella had it right, right as rain.
Here is Bertolt Brecht's "To Those Born After" if you need further reason-
I
To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn't care for much for love
And for nature's beauties I had little patience.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
My speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That's what I hoped.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
Clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
II
You who will come to the surface
From the flood that's overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you've not had to face:
Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.
Even so we realised
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.
And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence.
Over the past year I have been re-watching some and watching for the first time other of Woody Allen’s extensive accomplishments in film as an actor/writer and director. While Allen’s efforts have, on occasion, as with all culturati sometimes been mixed the overall effect is that of a master of film. Below is a potpourri of recently viewed material in no particular order.
Hollywood Ending, 1994
NYC-LA Culture Wars, Part II
As I noted last year in a review of Woody Allen’s classic Annie Hall, which is among other things a defense of New York City as the epicenter of American culture such as it is, this is matter that has preoccupied him from early in his career as a director/ writer/actor/comic. Allen is the quintessential New Yorker so one knows where his sledgehammer will fall. In the current movie under review Hollywood Ending that same premise underlies his story line as he, once again, portrays on screen the trials and tribulations of trying to maintain some kind of artistic integrity in the world of Hollywood commercial film making.
The plot line centers on Allen’s character, Val Waxman, an aging has-been director given another chance by, of all people, his ex-wife and her boyfriend studio owner. In the process Woody, seemingly without defying the laws of probability here, is paralyzed by the prospects to such an extent that he has become temporarily blind. Nevertheless in the interest of comedy and his career (and their careers, as well) Val and his friend’s con their way through the filming of the remake of a 1940’s film about New York City that is to be the key to his comeback.
Along the way Allen gets his licks in on Hollywood culture, commercial film making and the funny premise that commercial films are so dumb, for the most part, that a blind man is entirely capable of making a bad film just like most other directors. An interesting film and, as always, full of autobiographical references, Allen’s trademark cerebral humor and his extensive use of sight gags. Well worth a look see.
Alice, 1992
As mentioned above I having been retrospectively over the past year running through films Woody Allen directed, wrote, acted in or produced. Interestingly they run the gamut of his intellectual and cultural interests but I must admit that I did not realize how many of his films featured his old paramour Mia Farrow. She must be the number one actress featured in his various efforts. That is the case here with Allen’s whimsical modern day take on the Alice in Wonderland saga in good old New York City (naturally).
Here Farrow is the unfulfilled wife of a stockbroker who along the way has lost her moorings and her values and is desperately seeking a solution. In that effort she runs to the wisdom of the East exemplified by Doctor Yang, the acupuncturist. Going through a series of madcap false starts and pseudo-love affairs she finally is able to right her course, leave her husband and bring up her children out of harm’s way. Damn, I want the telephone (or more correctly these days, the cell phone number) of the good Doctor Yang, pronto. A piece of fluff. Woody has had better ideas for a film in his time but not a bad performance by Farrow here.
Small Time Crooks, 2000
Everyone I hope recognizes that, if one lives long enough, that one is bound to start recycling ideas. That is the definitely the case with Woody Allen’s partial revival of his early film classic Take the Money and Run, this time with a sharper class twist. Here Roy (Allen’s character) is just as dimwitted as old Virgil of Take the Money but as an older and wiser man he knows when to quit (for a while anyway). So when Roy and his associates’ attempted bank robbery is foiled by his bugling his wife’s successful cookie shop cover operation sees them through the rough spots, again for a while. After a trip through the wilds of bourgeois New York the couple, after some disasters- personal and financial, goes back to the old tricks of their former trade. I am not altogether sure what this says about class mobility in a democratic society but Roy please do not call me for your next caper. Funny, in Allen’s maniacal, acerbic and cerebral way, in spots but not his best in this genre.
Bullets Over Broadway, 1994
Apparently, as long as it involves a New York City scenario Woody Allen is more than happy to take a run at a plot that involves that locale in some way. Here it is the Great White Way- Broadway during its heyday in the Prohibition Era 1920’s that gets his attention (Broadway was also the subject of his classic Broadway Danny Rose). What really makes this plot line very, very funny and makes the film work however is the plot twist of interspersing semi-serious production of a play with nefarious (and deadly) gangster activity.
Here a struggling Greenwich Village writer (weren’t they all and presumably still are) has a thoughtful dramatic play in search of a backer and as the story progresses a gangster ‘ghostwriter’. Presto, up comes one backer-with a problem- his ‘doll’ wants in on the play and (on the side) he needs to stay one or two steps ahead of his gangster rivals. These antics drive the play nicely as does a brilliant performance by Diane Wiest doing a fantastic send up of Gloria Swanson as the has- been actress searching for a comeback in Billy Wilder’s classic Hollywood Boulevard. This one is definitely five stars, with no hype needed. See it.
Celebrity
The Chinese have their years named after various animals. Apparently this year for me is the Year of Woody Allen. For the better part of the year I have been watching, and in several cases re- watching films, that the comic has acted in, produced, directed or some combination of the three. Some have been disappointing. Some, like Annie Hall, have withstood the test of time and go into the pantheon. Others, reflecting the fact that if one lives long enough, as Allen has, then one is sure to repeat themes worked in the past, sometimes with uneven results. That is the case with Celebrity. There are some very funny individual scenes that rank with Allen classics but overall we have been here before. Allen’s look at the pranks and pitfalls of celebrity in New York City (his favorite locale, and correctly so) in the mid-1990’s is the updated version of his less than funny Zelig that looked at celebrity in the Jazz Age.
Moreover, the film has an overly manic quality, particularly on the part of the frustrated male writer (surprise, surprise) and his unfulfilled and bewildered schoolteacher wife soon to be separated so that said writer can ‘find’ himself. The mannerisms (to speak nothing of a certain vague similarity of appearance) of the pair reminded me of the good old days when Woody and Mia (oops, better not mention that) held forth. Except here on speed. If you love black and white film, if you love Woody Allen and most importantly if you are new to the Allen genre then get this film. Others, veterans, can take it or leave it.
Deconstructing Harry, written and directed by Woody Allen, 1997
Okay, I will admit that finally after almost a year of watching or re-watching films that the comedic legend Woody Allen wrote, directed, played in or produced I am Woody-ed out. Moreover, there is a reason for that beyond fatigue. As I have pointed out previously in this space if one lives long enough and produces enough work then one is bound to repeat oneself. And that is what has happened to brother Allen here.
Allen’s premise has been used before as he plays the part of Harry, a writer (what else?) down with a case of writer’s block who is also having romantic problems (again, what else?) because the young woman he truly, if belatedly, loves is getting married to a lesser writer. Sound familiar? There are many individually funny moments, mainly by Allen, alone the way even if not enough to sustain the film. Naturally, as is usually the case in an Allen feature in the end things are not qualitatively more resolved than at the beginning. Well that, after all, is life.
A nice cinematic touch used here is Harry’s (Allen’s) sequencing shots to show how autobiographical most novels and short stories really are. Changing the actors in the ‘real life’ story and in the ‘made up’ stories does this well. That part also gets nicely put together at the end. No so nice here, and a bit unusual for an Allen film, is the extensive use of profanity by Allen and the rest of the cast to show their frustrations with the various antics that Harry is up to and in their own lives. Every thing is moreover just a bit too frantic, partly to justify the profanity it would seem. That may tell the tale of why I had a problem with this film, as well. If you must see a Woody Allen film you must see Annie Hall or Manhattan, if you have an off hour and one half watch this.
Why America Does NOT Need Low Yield Nuclear Weapons.
Do not let the authors of the Post’s Nov. 29 Op Ed advocating low-yield nuclear weapons scare you or mislead you. Much of what they say is wrong.
By all measures of firepower and reach, US conventional forces are vastly superior to that of all other nations. The existing US nuclear arsenal is far greater than anything needed for deterrence.
While citing recent Russian and Chinese advances, the authors fail to mention the US has increased the accuracy of its own nuclear arsenal three-fold, giving it significant superiority. The notion that small nukes can be used tactically or “escalate to de-escalate” is nonsense. It was resoundingly put to rest by Daniel S. Geller’s definitive 1990 Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence, and Crisis Escalation (subsequently cited by no less than 112 publications in the field). His study demonstrates any use of nuclear weapons will not stop but further escalation.
In fact, the very name “low yield” nuclear device is wildly misleading. By its nature, a nuclear blast is orders of magnitude greater than that of a conventional weapon. Its heat ignites everything combustible in a vast area surrounding the detonation, incinerating or suffocating all living things. The radiation produced continues to kill indiscriminately over space and time. Studies have shown even a limited exchange could shut down global agriculture
The authors correctly note we once had lots of small nuclear weapons. But we weren’t duped into giving them up while others retained them. We agreed with another nuclear power that they made us all less safe and got rid of them.
The only way to end an arms race is to end it, not to spend our societies into ruin in an endless pursuit of nuclear superiority. That was the lesson learned at Reykjavik in 1986.
