Monday, January 11, 2021

Will The Real Bond, James Bond Stand Up- Sean Connery’s “You Only Live Twice” (1967)-A Film Review

Will The Real Bond, James Bond Stand Up- Sean Connery’s “You Only Live Twice” (1967)-A Film Review




DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon  

I am not sure what to say right now after reading Leslie Dumont’s scathing polemic cum review of one in the apparently never-ending series of James Bond films which new manager Greg Green went out of his way to have her write even though young Alden Riley and I have been running the rack on this series. The film, Tomorrow Never Dies with the lovely delicious Pierce Brosnan going through the paces of the legendary indestructible MI6 agent in the 1990s. That “apparently never-ending” no joke despite the fact that the original creator of the character Ian Fleming has long passed the shades (they were diddling with the plots when he was alive in any case including on the film I will attempt to review). James Bond, although I am not sure either party will like the comparison, now joins Bob Dylan in the never-ending category (for concerts still performed and Bootleg CD series never finished).

All of that though is not the beef today since Leslie whom I knew for a short time when she was a stringer for the American Film Gazette after she left her stringer job on this site and before she finally, finally landed a by-line at New York Today has thrown down the gauntlet. Leslie in that review of hers took on the whole James Bond male chauvinism bullshit mystique. (Although the fact that he is never really scratched despite an armada of weaponry thrown his way by every bad ass in the world, male or female, apparently does not bother her or the not so veiled battles between the good British Empire and the heathen commies of whatever designation.) But what has me in dither is that she went after the little pseudo-battle that Alden Riley, the former Associate Film Critic under the previous management and I, the former Senior Film Critic under that same management about who was the epitome of the James Bond character. When the deal went down it came down to two contestants-subtly handsome Connery or pretty boy Brosnan. She took us apart for not dwelling on the obvious 1950s sense of the male-female relationship. Seemingly the woman that I knew, even if slightly, with the wicked sense of irony has ditched that persona for the crusading third-wave feminist.

And Leslie might be right. No, not right about Alden and my little fisticuff but in light of the sexual harassment and sexual crimes of Harvey Weinstein and a now long trial of powerful Hollywood power brokers, Washington heavies, media hotshots, and hell the guys next door against women maybe this is a time to shed some light on the way business was done in the old days. Maybe the way the female eye candy in the various Bond films are portrayed aids and abets those real life situations but I believe that is Leslie’s place to speak about. And she did.

Look I have spent a zillion years doing freaking film reviews here and at American Film Gazette (according to the new site manager here Greg Green who also came over from that publication it has racked up forty thousand plus reviews in its long hard copy and on-line history). The angle I was looking at, Alden too except he wanted to look at it from the view of the more recent Bond films, was in the context of the silly plotlines, the improbable escapes and the silly concept of sexual allure developed in those films. It would have been false, and maybe that is wrong but that is the way it comes down, for me, Alden can speak for himself, if I started going on and on about the sexploitation inherent in the romanticizing of what after all in real life is a pretty dull and unrewarding profession-covert spying.  This is probable not the last of the dispute between Leslie and me on the social issues as she called thet but let’s fight that out on more serious looks at what is wrong with the still prevalent sexually unequal society that we live in. As we have found very graphically in the immediate past we do not live in a post-racial society and now we know we have been living in a “bubble” as well about living in a post-sexual inequality world.        

It almost seems silly to go through the plot now except there is no heavy lifting once you have seen a few of these formula films and can do a quick, very quick, summary since we have already hit Leslie’s male chauvinist pig aspect, my hero unscathed aspect, and that anti-communist angle as well. All we really have left is whether Sean Connery is the real Bond, James Bond or is that sniveling pretty boy the champ.   

An American spaceship is dragooned in space whereabouts unknown except it was probably brought down somewhere near Japan. Naturally in anti-communist, pre-Soviet meltdown times that country would be the number one fall guy. But the Bolsheviks don’t figure although not for trying since before long a second space almost goes missing and the POTUS (you know what that means today in text-speak) is ready to rain hell and damnation on Moscow and Leningrad if the caper goes off. Not to worry because not only is WWIII avoided but private citizen bad guys are put to the screws (although not forever since, as usual, the mastermind bad guy makes his escape to fight another inevitable day).


The whole caper was an outsourced job by the infamous SPECTRE organization that knows no limits, no boundaries and will do whatever is necessary for the highest bidder. Here the Reds, Red China, People’s Republic. After ten million kicks, about six millions rounds of ammo fired his way, a few new techno-toys driven escapes, some cavorting with women after a hard day’s work Bond, James Bond, once again saves the world. As Leslie quoting mad monk Phil Larkin, another wild man writer here, WFT. And maybe that is really what we should all take out of this stuff.      

The Con Is The Con-Is On-Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen’s “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1968)-A Film Review

The Con Is The Con-Is On-Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen’s “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1968)-A Film Review   





By William Bradley, Junior

[This review is not under the “in the pipeline” truce negotiated with the site manager here so is free from any mention of the previous site as per the agreement. Moreover this is William Bradley’s very first review and so he is unaware of, and had not been part of the previous turmoil. Greg Green]   

The Thomas Crown Affair, starring Faye Dunaway, Steve McQueen, 1968    

In my old growing up neighborhood back in the 1980 of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the Sacred Heart Parish part if anybody knows Pawtucket which is what we always called it although the city called it The Heights every guy around, some girls too but not too many and mainly the ones who hung around with the guys who cared about such things, loved the con. Loved the con artist above all others, the local favorites being Ben Jeffrey and Ralph Morris who pulled some serious capers (and later did serious time but that was when they got in coke and smack and lost their bearings and not in the days when they were on a roll). In the days when barely out of high school they clipped a society guy for fifteen thousand big ones in a time and place where that number meant something. So don’t think I am blowing smoke at you. Think I am a small time rube who gets all starry-eyed over criminals and bad asses.

Of course there was a corollary to the high regard that con artists were held in over mere bank robbers and burglars, people like that who had no style, unlike that possessed by the legendary Thomas Crown, played to cool hand perfection by dare-devil Steve McQueen in the film under review The Thomas Crowne Affair (the 1968 one not, as Bart Webber a helpful writer here told me, the re-make with pretty boy Pierce Brosnan in the 1990s). Everybody loves a con except when he or she is the victim. That is when the “ouch” comes in as it will to the supposedly inured to con artistry Vicki the very successful insurance investigator who runs up against our boy Thomas. And is overmatched, way overmatched  

Perfection itself is how the whole thing went. Poor little rich boy Tommy has a yen for the dark side, for stretching the limits just for the hell of it to tweak society or to prove something to himself. So he hires five guys all unknown to each other (four for the heist and then the weak link getaway car guy whom you should never trust sine they usually get the short end of the stick money) and him to them to pull the biggest Boston bank job since the Brink’s job. Two mil in small bills which he quickly ships over to Geneva in a couple of suitcases. Of course if for no other reason than the insurance companies do not like to take such hits, raises premiums there is blowback, big blowback. In the form of a beautiful ruthless and smart woman investigator Vicki, played by then new star Faye Dunaway. She will play a cat and mouse game with Tommy while the public coppers diddle and dandle. No problem except one big problem not for Tommy but for Vicki she falls for the guy while getting his chains ready for him, ready for the big step-off. As she closes in he proposes a way out-do the robbery again. She buys into the thing. But who had the last laugh. A classic double con-beautiful as he flies the coop and so Brother Crown will go into the Hall of Fame, become a legend for public coppers and private snoops alike.             

And whoever is left back in Sacred Heart Parish to sing the praises.   



When Legend Slayer Will Bradley Falls Down On The Job- Marvel Comic Universe’s So-Called Legendary Heroes Ride Again-Yawn-The Avengers: Infinite Wars (2018)-A Film Review


When Legend Slayer Will Bradley Falls Down On The Job- Marvel Comic Universe’s So-Called Legendary Heroes Ride Again-Yawn-The Avengers: Infinite Wars (2018)-A Film Review    

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

The Avengers: Infinity Wars, starring Robert Downey, Jr. and a cast of mutants, foul balls, quirky bastards, the merely ugly, dead-beats, grafter, drifters, grifters and the chronically unemployable, 2018


I am pissed off, and no don’t pardon my English, not with what I have say. I have been sidelined for a while doing other projects for site manager Greg Green. Stuff which will see the light of day this Spring under my by-line. That completion made me available for another assignment, a film review to get my hand back into that tough racket, that cutthroat business where since everything is essentially subjective you are only as good as your last review, maybe the last word of your last review. I was anxious to get back into the game after months of research, quiet writing, and editing. What I did not expect was to get this loser of a so-called superhero film, The Avengers: Infinity Wars (and whatnot). And that is the focus of why I am pissed off, and remember I am not looking for any pardon.

First off I thought we were supposed to be done with this Marvel/DC comic book characters come to the big screen after the internal rebellion when the writers here, young and old, unlike the purge of Allan Jackson the previous site manager which was before my time, and was essentially young against old refused to continue to 24/7/365 if it had come to that last number write about this type of film. The brainstorm of the clueless Greg Green (sorry Greg) who wished to boost the readership by appealing to the crowds interested in these bogus superheroes. I had not been paying that much attention to individual reviews but had thought that fever was over. Greg has assured me that it really was with the exception of an occasional foray to keep our hand in.         

Here is what I don’t get, don’t understand even if Greg and others want to grab an occasional spike in readership by ripping out a page from the comics to the chagrin of the serious and older readership who don’t give a fuck about such muck fouling up this publication and have been vocal about the matter. Beside this superhero stuff, this legend business is supposed to be the domain of Will Bradley who over the past couple of years has made a name for himself as the “legend-slayer.” The guy who wants us to face crummy reality without the crutch of undeserved or faked legends. Fair enough and I was happy when he took down guys like that rack-renter, Will’s expression, Robin Hood and that slave-driver Captain Blood among others. When Greg asked him to do this review he balked telling Greg that for the foreseeable future he was going all out to break the one legend that he has not been able put a dent in, the legend of early aviator Johnny Cielo.

You know what I say. Who the hell is this guy who nobody knows about, or as in my own case only knows from history class in high school where he was said to have something to do with the Wright Brothers down at Kitty Hawk back in the early days of flight. I asked around and the only ones who knew more about the guy were a couple of lefties I knew from Columbia University who told me he had been some important cog in the Cuban Revolution, had delivered guns and supplies to Fidel Castro up in the mountains when they needed that kind of help. Will couldn’t have spared the time to bust this weak-kneed Avenger crowd in about three paragraphs and go about his business with Johnny what’s his name.
     
Next ancient Sam Lowell who in the old days they tell me actually was the film editor and chief reviewer here who by rights should have been the “go to” guy when Will went into his tantrum. No such luck. It appears that the old goat (and in the interest of transparency an adversary in a couple of earlier film review battle of wits with me) is now knee-deep, Greg’s term, in trying to prove that the reason that the famous, famous to him and maybe some of the older crowd, private detective from California Lew Archer never made the Hall of Fame was that he suffered from sexual impotency. That seemingly two-minute job and done has got Sam (and poor Laura his long-time companion and something of mentor to me) staying up late at night trying to figure out what went wrong with this Lew. Lew, another guy nobody I know ever heard of since our P.I models are Savanah Duane and Ben Silver, neither of whom take beatings and grab slugs doing their private eye work like they say Phil Larkin and Sam Spade did. How primitive.

With those guys sidelined Greg came sauntering in to ask me for a big favor. Fortunately, as the “disclaimer” above pointed out we are in some cases, and this Avenger stuff is prime evidence for the policy, doing short reviews. Praise be. But why couldn’t I just do a thumbs up or down. Easy thumbs down. That would bust that legend is less than a minute. But no go as Greg wanted a few paragraphs to fill in some blank spot or something. So here goes.       

Actually before here goes let me say that I, like young writer Will Bradley who like me is still trying to grab a niche, go up the food chain as Seth Garth also something of a mentor to me likes to say I am not opposed to legends, solid deserved ones. I heartily agree that the Green Lantern operation which is now protecting the greater universe with a limited task force and our own section guardian Hal Jordan are doing a great job and grand public service in guarding us against our real and imagined fears. I can even buy the idea that maybe Superman or Iron Man has a small role to play in protecting us from an occasional bad actor who gets loose and who menace us for a minute. But the whole freaking Marvel Comic Universe stable for one simple job, no way.        

Thor, you know the guy who had the hammer, lost, found, lost again, one of the Marvel Comical Universe stalwarts was having dispute, a big time dispute with some Thanos, some bad ass guy who wants to control the universe and was willing to wipe out one half of said population if he didn’t get his way, get his magic elixir or something. Thor takes a well-deserved beating and Thanos is half way home to the fruition of his master plan. Since the rest of the Marvel clowns are unemployed, are sitting on their hands, are really otherwise unemployable they gather round their loser Thor. To yet again battle Thaos and his minions, a rough-edged crew that I would have advised Iron Man, the Black Widow, Spider Man, the Hulk and the other lesser has-beens to avoid at all costs since they looked meaner than Satan and his minions and you know what they did to Paradise, at least according to John Milton.

Naturally there are twelve million sham battles, a few altercations, some armed truces and then the final push which gets half of the citizenry of the universe blasted all for Marvel Comic Universe hubris. Wait until the next film. No, call up the Green Lantern organization and have them sent their ace Hal Jordan to come and deal with these cretins associated with this bastard Thanos. Then see how it was when real legends earned their keep.       


In The Beginning Was The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

In The Beginning Was The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

By Sam Lowell

No question I was, am, a central figure in the still on-going fallout over the purge, and that is exactly the right term although half the writers here who were down and dirty in the fight prefer to tell the tale that the previous site manger “retired.” Like Allan Jackson, yes, I am using his given name despite the notice from new site manager Greg Green that we were in the future in the interest of “moving on” not to mention him by name or speak of his accomplishments (presumably Allan’s down sides are still fair game), would voluntarily retire from something he helped create and loved. I also acknowledge here that although I was Allan closest and longest known friend going back to elementary school that I sided with the young rebel writers, the self-styled “Young Turks” although I hate that term when it came to choosing sides.

Allan was getting more and more wrapped into some 1960s and forget the rest thing that disturbed me no end as I continually told him especially when he went over the edge in that overkill of the 50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love, 1967 stuff. So when I “conspired” with the younger writers (some of who had before Allan went hog wild over the situation never heard of the event, were to young to give fuck about the legendary in the mist 1960s) I told everyone straight up that this would have to be a purge-no quotation marks needed. We, he and I, had come up in the rough and tumble of radical 1960s politics so Allan knew that my defection meant only one thing if we were to be successful. He would be out, in exile, although don’t believe all that stuff about him being holed up Utah sucking up to Mitt Romney and that white underwear Mormon crowd or Kansas with the hard-shell flat-landers that is just urban legend stuff he, or somebody at his direction, made up to make this whole thing seem like a Stalinist coup and he, Leon Trotsky-like suffered defeat and exile in some American Siberia for his efforts. I know my Allan and I would not be surprised that a counterattack against me and the blog will come any day.

As part of the change in course and presumably as a safeguard against things going haywire like they began to do under the Jackson regime Greg initiated on his own a seven member Editorial Board to filter ideas and motions through. Some people, some opponents have called the board a group of toadies and “yes” people for whatever Greg has in mind. That is their opinion. In any case I was asked to sit on the board and I have along with several younger writers and one of the older writers who had abstained on the Jackson removal vote (there were several abstentions by older writers which makes me think I was not alone in thinking Allan had gone over the edge but didn’t want to buck him for any number of reasons. I would argue that had any one of them voted for Allan then my “desertion” would have meant nothing except I might have been the guy rumored to be in Utah or Kansas. Such is life.) 

Although the board is up and running for a few months now it has only been asked to approve one item-the “erasing” of Allan’s name from this site in the interest of whatever Greg thought that served. I have been around enough to know that it is beyond poor form to “erase” the past especially on a site dedicated to putting a big shining light on that past particularly the parts that get short shrift in the history books and mainstream media. I voted “no,” the lone dissenter with that one older writer’s abstention which may be his mode of operation on tough questions. Maybe that dissent will put me in better grace with Allan. 

I took this jug band, Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band assignment because I am still crazy about this kind of music and because at least three of the original members of the band, Jim, Geoff, Maria are still performing occasionally together but usually individually and over the past several years I have seen them in various admittedly small venues around Greater Boston. I was surprised though when Greg mentioned to me that he no longer wanted to see pieces about “f—king” jug band music in the future and that this would be the last time he would let it pass since nobody under about the age of sixty gave a damn about this kind of music anymore.

Since Greg is considerable younger than I am I could see where it did not mean anything to him when he was growing up in Westchester County in New York but to cancel out in advance any reference to an important part of Americana in the 1920s and the revival in the 1960s seems short-sighted. Allan who also was crazy for jug music and who turned me onto the stuff in high school when he took me and our dates to the Unicorn Coffeehouse in Back Bay Boston to hear the legendary Harper Valley Boys do their jug, washtub, wringer magic. I will be bucking Greg a little on this one if I can find a spot to sneak a jug piece in.

Finally, and this part has nothing directly to do with jug music or anything else that has been presented here over the past almost fifteen years of this blog’s existence and prior to that the hard copy of it and it predecessors. I, like a number of irritated readers and a not a few writers have grown tired of seeing more than enough coverage of the internal crisis of the past few months here leading to the new regime. This new mandate by Greg with the majority of the Ed Board’s approval of “erasing” Allan Jackson’s name and work is kind of a watershed making me think the whole public airing has gone too far. Moreover the story is all over the place depending on who has their hackles up. This must stop and a return to ordinary commentary and reviews is in order.  

As a decisive member of the Editorial Board I have been able to negotiate with Greg a truce, an “armed truce” as one older wag put it which seems strange since the majority of personnel here have some very strong anti-war views. The “truce” has two parts. The first- all articles now in the pipeline, about fifteen, can carry whatever commentary about the internal dispute the writer wants to talk about. In return after that amnesty lot is posted there will be no overt references to the previous site manager or his achievements or failures. The second is that I will write as probably the most knowledgeable person around about all aspects of this publication and its personnel a full history of the site and of the internal dispute to be after it completion referenced in the archives as such for anybody to cite and refer others to -either writer or scholar. No guidance was given about how to do this task but I have decided to cut it up among the various parts of the American Songbook series which the jug band piece below is one example and then post the whole thing with comments from the two Ed Board members Greg has assigned to me for this work.              
********




Who knows how it happened maybe somebody in the band looked up some songs in the album archives, or found some gem in some record store, an institution that sustained many for hours back then in the cusp of the 1960s folk revival when there were record stores on almost every corner in places like Harvard Square and you could find some gems if you searched long enough and found Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (although sometimes the search was barren or, maybe worse, something by Miss Patti Page or Tennessee Ernie Ford stared you in the face). From there they found, maybe Cannon’s Stompers, the Mississippi Sheiks or the Memphis Jug Band, saw they could prosper going back to those days if they kept the arrangements simple, and that was that.
See, everybody then was looking for roots, American music roots, old country roots, roots of some ancient thoughts of a democratic America before the robber barons and their progeny grabbed everything with every hand. And that search was no accident, at least from the oral history evidence having grown up with rock and roll and found in that minute that genre wanting.  Some went reaching South to the homeland of much roots music and found some grizzled old geezers who had made a small name for themselves in the 1920s when labels like RCA and Paramount went out looking for talent in the hinterlands.

So there was history there, certainly for the individual members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Jim, Geoff Mulduar, Mel Lymon, Maria Muldaur, Fritz Richmond , all well-versed in many aspects of the American Songbook (hell, I would say so, even old tacky Irving Berlin got a hearing), history there for the taking. All they needed was a jug, a good old boy homemade corn liquor jug giving the best sound and so they were off, off to conquer places like Harvard Square, like the Village, like almost any place in the Bay area. And for a while they did, picking up chimes, kazoos, harmonicas, what the heck, even standard guitars and they made great music, great entertainment music, not heavy with social messages but just evoking those long lost spirits from the 1920s when jug music would sustain a crowd on a Saturday night. Yeah, in the beginning was the jug…    

Sunday, January 10, 2021

Will The Real James Bond Stand Up-With Pretty Boy Brosnan’s James, James Bond “Tomorrow Never Dies” (1997) In Mind

Will The Real James Bond Stand Up-With Pretty Boy Brosnan’s James, James Bond “Tomorrow Never Dies” (1997) In Mind 




DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

[Since Leslie Dumont was only recently hired to begin to yank the overwhelming male “good old boy club” previous character of this blog from its moorings she is naturally outside the truce agreement. Although, unlike recent hire Alex Radley also outside the agreement, strange as it may seem since she was very close, was a companion for several years of Josh Breslin who also writes in this space, and who was extremely close to the previous site manager she knew the previous site manager very well. Nevertheless that manager refused to hire her full time after she had been a stringer for a few years. Fed up she went elsewhere and finally got a by-line at New York Today. I deliberately assigned her this film which she accepted with good grace to finally get a woman’s view of this skirt-chasing fool Bond, James Bond. Greg Green]    

Tomorrow Never Dies, starring Pierce Brosnan, 1997

As my old friend and now fellow writer here Phil Larkin is fond of saying –WTF. (I have to laugh every time I think about his growing up moniker Foul-mouth, if ever a name.) In the year 2018 after all we have heard in gruesome detail about the misogynies of half the powerful men in Hollywood-land and who knows who else or what else it is rather fitting to be able to review a film that comes out of a series via the pen of bloody old British Empire aficionado Ian Fleming (did he ever may “Sir”) based on the character of one of the most cravenly misogynous men in fiction or film, Bond, James Bond (sorry Greg I couldn’t resist mimicking you).
Although it probable does not matter on these formula-driven vehicles now over the twenty hump in number this one is entitled Tomorrow Never Dies which is probably not true but at least gives this beast of a film a title. Another thing that clearly does not matter is who is playing the lead, the Bond, James Bond lead from Her Royal Highness’ the Queen’s first guy handsome Johnny Sean Connery through to whoever is doing the hard-scrabble chore these days. Pretty Boy Brosnan did four in the 1990s or so this one the second. Before I get into the play-by-play I should reference this silly little pissing contest that Sandy Salmon and Alden Riley both who should know better about who the real James Bond is have been having since Greg decided to run the road with this batch of films. Between from what I understand the two finalists Connery and Brosnan.

Beyond Phil’s classic WTF who cares. More important, more important for the future sanity of this space, why did neither of them even if only by implication if they were afraid to actually come out and say it that both these guys are twerps, male chauvinist pigs in second-wave feminist speak when it comes to what Josh (through the late Peter Paul Markin who I never met but who I heard a million too many stories about when Josh and I were bedmates) calls speaking the true no matter how bitter.         

It seem crazy to build the MCP case for something that is so obvious and has been through twenty something episodes but I will soldier on. Start with the main action (after ten senseless minutes of Jimmy proving he has metal blowing up terrorist supply dumps on the Russia border to show his “cred”). Sin number one as the “real” action opens up he is bedded with some alleged Danish professor, hell Jimbo probably couldn’t spell Danish or maybe thinks it was that awful breakfast treat before duty calls to prove his “cred” as a skirt-chaser, womanizer, stud, and not a latent homosexual as various academic feminists have speculated about over the years. And the every useful male chauvinist pig of blessed memory. Not only that but he answers that duty call, dutifully, in the middle of, well, let’s just call it coitus interruptus and move on. Like whatever the goddam assignment from that female MI5 boss of his couldn’t wait since everybody in the world knows or should be expected to know that when J.B. is on the case it is open and shut. Done.          

Jimmy only adds insult to injury by bedding an old flame who just so happens to be married to the arch-enemy in this saga, a Rupert Murdoch-type guy who wants to own the universe, or else. Finally he beds a commie agent. No, not the old time Soviet nemesis, the Russians, come on now this film is dated 1997 well after after the USSR went up in smoke and shot guys like Ian Fleming, John Le Carre and Tom Clancy’s reasons for existence all to hell. This young woman a versatile, brave Chinese agent who is far too bright for him but who after the action is over starts the inevitable action post-coitus pillow talk waiting for help to arrive. Funny because I have seen maybe five of these Bond things to get a sense of what the hell is the draw and guess what they all have this same 1950s era formula of bedding women who are just waiting to go down and dirty on the satin sheets. Like the women’s liberation movement now getting a third wind never existed never change the nature of the game.  Never let women be anything but vessels for male inadequacies (I already mentioned that latent homosexual point so I don’t need to repeat it here.)          

Oh yeah, yawn, the plot. Seems this guy Murdoch, no, Carter is setting up World War III between God Save The Queen England and the commies, remember not the USSR guys they are kaput, the Red Chinese as they said in the old days. Purpose? To sell a zillion newspapers, to run the rack on the world media market, and, hell, just to prove he can do it. (I will save my WTF on these reasons until later) The set-up is to sink a HMS ship and blame it on the nefarious Chinese Reds, grab a nuclear weapon from said sunken ship and then throw it at China and let the games begin. He is also looking for regime change backing a renegade Red General who will take over to avoid that WWIII. Reason? To break into the huge Chinese media market where he had been shut out by the wily Reds. Yeah, two things yawn and now that WTF.      


Like I tried to telegraph to you the reader so maybe you will go read a recent article I did for New York Today instead of going down this vagrant trail Jimmy and the Chinese agent kick, blast, fight, motorbike chase, detonate, sky-dive, leap tall buildings at a single bound, kick again after avoiding enough spent ammunition to have kept WWI going for another ten years without a scratch or even sweat on the upper lip on the way to that pillow talk at the end. I know I am rolling that Promethean stone up some fairly steep hill but isn’t 2018 the year to start pulling some thumbs down to this sullen silliness.         

The Legend-Slayer Cometh -Young Will Bradley Rides Against-Shattering The “Fake News, Alternate Facts” Myth Of Early Aviator Johnny Cielo-With A Vengeance-No Quarter Given-No Quarter Taken

The Legend-Slayer Cometh -Young Will Bradley Rides Against-Shattering The “Fake News, Alternate Facts” Myth Of Early Aviator Johnny Cielo-With A Vengeance-No Quarter Given-No Quarter Taken 




By Will Bradley

Here is genesis. A couple of years ago, at a time when fake news and alternate facts were in their infancy, no, when they surfaced after leading underground cultist existences and “all the news that’s fit to print” was the official mantra I got as one of my first assignments a dueling film review partnership with old-time “corner boy,” meaning one of those present at the creation of this publication when it was in hard copy form, Seth Garth to give our respective takes on one Sherlock Holmes (an alias real name Larry Lawrence but to avoid confusion here I will stick with his more well-known moniker). The original idea was that he was to give his review from an old guy perspective of one who grew up with the legend of this so-called master private detective and I from a young guy who was clueless about the guy perspective. Both of us dug deeply into every aspect, every public aspect and a few private ones of how Holmes’ legend got its start.

What we both found out was that the legend was made out of whole cloth, that Holmes was a fake, a fraud, and much more despite the big press agent, publicity department build-up with which the unknowing British people were hammered with from day one of the press campaign. Led by an English firm called Christie and Doyle at the time, although there were later dummy corporations to make it harder to track the bums down but whatever the name those were just covers for lots of illegal activity to get Holmes’ name in the prints and over the radio and in the movies, television had not come along by then. One example, Winston Churchill, yes, the guy who was President, Prime Minister or whatever the call the kingdom’s top lap dog kowtowing to royalty at every step, received a ton money, thousands of pounds, British money, for saying out loud that he wished some his Scotland Yard coppers were half as good as this Holmes. Another example, one of the Lords, a lord who later turned out to a mouthpiece for the Nazis during World War II took a big pay-off to try to get Holmes a knighthood, a “Sir” before his name, the OBE. One slow news days these flaks were able to get the London tabloids to print whatever swill these bums threw out as press releases usually the paper just cutting off the top putting one of their paid-off reporters names on it and let it fly. All for cold hard cash. And you thought this stuff only happened in long-ago ward-heeling America or in the post-Citizens United. Wise up, please.

Seth when he has time, or if he can remember, can fill the reader in on what he uncovered, the same basic swill but usually rawer, stuff about getting Holmes’ name into “girlie magazines” to show how virile he and Nigel somebody, his dear friend, Seth’s expression not mine, were to guard against those ever present insinuations that they were more than just dear friends. The best one I remember was the way these hounds were able to drop some poor bedraggled professor from Oxford into the deep blue sea, Moriarty I think the name was, and faking documents naming him as the mastermind of the Gunpowder Plot, or some such evil endeavor against the royal family, King George, at the time. This professor who had trouble tying his shoes or knowing what day it was. Beautiful. The guys and gals who are running big time publicity operations for starlets and reality television show entertainers could learn a few tricks from these guys as much as I hate to say it. The one thing that grizzled old Seth and I agree on.      

The battle between Seth and me which stretched endlessly and mercilessly over something like fourteen films each more cravenly worshipful of Holmes and his live-in dear friend Nigel than the last was a “no holds barred” fight to the end though as far as exposing this bum of the month (and indirectly putting the slams on C&D although those guys were able to ride out the storm grabbing a big contract from clients who wanted to build up the Robin Hood legend to claim some odd-ball inheritance by primogeniture, or some cloudy claim). Seth, maybe reliving some of his youthful anti-gay (then fag, homo, Nancy, “light on their feet” stuff) feelings, concluded that Holmes’ whole legend was the work of what he called the “Homintern” (which he told me was a word created as a take-off on the Comintern which guys he knew like Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender hung around by the English poet W. H. Auden, himself a known gay, or maybe not then but now known, who hung around with the British private school gay cotillion). The idea was to create myths about guys who were gay (I don’t know about lesbians since this never came up in our duel so I will stick with gays) to make them more intelligent, more virile, more cultured than ordinary guys and protect the clan.

Seth’s whole approach was to identify various aspects of Holmes’ life starting with his relationship to his “dear friend” Doc Watson in their little love nest on Baker Street and expose him as a second or third-rate private eye who was clueless about how solve a murder mystery without the aid of a battalion of Scotland Yard agents. He did present some strong evidence including eye-witness account of Holmes and Doc hanging around the notorious KitKat Club and haunting waterfront taverns looking for sailors who were looking for kinky kicks-on land. Something seemed wrong about his gay-baiting approach, something that didn’t seem to jell with the facts once I looked at Holmes’ police sheet (which is how I was able to figure out the Holmes name was an alias and his real name Larry Lawrence and which Seth was clueless about in his quest to discount anybody in the 20st century because he was gay). Of course one size fits all Seth would not have dreamed of checking police records even if he only was looking to see if he or Nigel had ever been arrested like poor Reading Gaol-bound Oscar Wilde for the “love that dare not speak its name.”

I was thus more than happy to concede that Holmes was gay, that he was playing house with Nigel on Baker Street but what of it. My take from the beginning had been though that Holmes was essentially asexual, was driven more by a lust for gold than for another man’s body, certainly not Doc’s (whose real name if I didn’t mention it before was Nigel something but don’t make a fuss about names because they were changed like underwear). Maybe it was a generational thing but who cared if they slept together or not. The key was an arrest made by the London bobbies when they made one of their periodic raids of the KitKat Club where Holmes and Doc had been hiding out. The coppers found tons of stolen goods, drugs, sexual paraphernalia, pornography, guns. As it turned out, although it was never conclusively proven as to the extend, Holmes was the master thief behind half the robberies, kidnappings, beatings, purse-snatchings and what have you in London. He spent six years in Dartmoor (under the name Larry Lawrence which is why it was originally hard to figure out why the legend was nothing but a press agent’s dream, dreamed up by a guy who worked for the publicity firm, Christie and Doyle who later turned state’s evidence or what every they called the British Empire in court.

But enough of Holmes and his man Doc. What that eye-opening experience led to for me was an extreme interest in finding out about other legends, see what some press agent dreamt up out of the blue to invent guys, gals too but as in much of history mostly guys got their stories told, true or not. Since them I have exposed guys like Robin Hood as a two-bit rack-renting landlord (despite the best efforts of those latter-day clients of Christie who never did prove their right to inheritance but who started a backlash by the descendants of those yeoman and tenant farmers who Hood gouged looking for their family lands back or reparations), Captain Blood as nothing but a dregs Middle Passage slaver (and whose still intact estate in Jamaica is the subject of a separate reparations effort), Don Juan as some convent maiden’s hormonal urgings and so on (no basis for reparations and in any case the initial outburst by that frustrated maiden ignited so rapidly it would be hard to see who to claim reparations from and the only realistic recourse would be to have Don Juan posthumously put in the dock for child molestation and unwanted sexual advances amounting to assault).

The more modern legends like Superman (proven to be a ninety-eight pound weakling who one day found a matchbook cover ad for developing muscles to shed the reputation that girls could kick sand in his face and that kryptonite stuff was just another PR hustle, this time by Mad Men working overtime to create somebody to save the sorry modern world on the quiet) and Batman (who in the end wound up facing charges of sexual assault on his “protégé” Robin and destruction of public property) dismissed out of hand as mutants and foul balls. What has spurred me on, what has let site manager Greg Green let me have free reign and moved me up the food chain in this dog eat dog journalism business is a recent survey conducted by UCal (and supported by the well-respected Harrison Foundation) where as a result of my work, and that of others, there has been a sharp decline in many legends. I take this as simple proof, contrary to what most of the writers here had expected, that at least some people are beginning to rebel against fake news and alternate facts, which is what legends live on that I have been successful.         

Moreover, as I have recently demonstrated with my defense of the Green Lantern, both the individual and universe-wide organization which is protecting us even I as write and of the luscious Red Sparrow, the Russian espionage agent who is keeping a check-up on things under Putin I am not dismissing all legends out of hand. Only those which are fake, made up, undeserved. I have worked out, no, am working out a kind of guideline to determinate who or what deserves legendary status.

The pro-legend cases just mentioned can serve as an evaluation tool for such efforts. The Green Lantern, organization first, is pretty much of a no-brainer, a motley band of citizens of the universe, 3600 in all earthlings take notice with your bloated military and security budgets that protect no one from serious harm by evil forces, have volunteered to protect us all. Hats off. Beyond that they are working in the service of the greater good, the struggle against fear that grips us all at times and which the evil genies depend on to wreak their havoc. As for our section protector Green Lantern, one Hal Jordan, yes, the Hal Jordan who flew, really flew the top of the line fighter planes and broke a million records for speed and altitude his record speaks for itself. While cynics have sneered that he took the Lantern job just to impress his girlfriend and have made fun of the fact that he can as the first earthling since Icarus’ ill-fated adventure fly without some superstructure holding him back, he is the real deal. Hats off again.

The Red Sparrow, the former ballerina turned seriously trained Russian espionage agent who was turned by her revulsion at the current situation in Russia, now working with the CIA via a field operative who went rogue to bring her in from the cold kind of speaks for herself. Every aspect of her case checks out. With those cases in mind I can truthfully say I have been very successful thus far in weeding out the bum of the month crowd from the real stars.  

Except, one big except in the case highlighted by the headline to this piece, the fake legend of one Johnny Cielo whose ratings have actually gone up as a result of my hammering his faded reputation. (I would add that a similar spike occurred in belief in angels which sobered me a little in the belief that people were buying into rational argument across the board. I will investigate the finding on this phenomenon more when I receive the actual data from UCal-maybe it is a skewed sample or maybe we are not further away from the primordial slime than I have led myself to believe.) Yes, Johnny Cielo who I didn’t know from Adam when I started my crusade has defied my best efforts to send him to well-deserved oblivion. Frankly when I started out slaying undeserved legends, I knew nothing about the guy and only half-consciously remembered him as having something to do with early aviation, although even that I was not sure of and had to look up in Wikipedia or one of those other Internet information services.  

How I even got the name was that a fellow reporter, a free-lancer, who has since caught on with the Miami Herald was in that town on a “spec” assignment from the Washington Post about continued CIA attempts to destabilize the Castro regime in Cuba (this before Fidel passed and Raul stepped down). They never showed up at the Flamingo bar where they were to meet my friend. Having been “stiffed” and with time on his hands he bellied up to the bar and started ordering shots of whisky straight up (a bad habit I gave up about three weeks after I came of legal drinking age). A guy, who called himself Billy Bond, as usual don’t make much of names in this legend business or you will go crazy with despair, asked my guy to buy him a drink. He did. They got to talking after four or five shots when this Billy started talking about how when he was a kid he had met the legendary, Billy’s word, Johnny Cielo, who was quite a character and who had flown guns and supplies to Fidel and his crowd back in the late 1950s when it counted. My guy sensing a story to replace the one that had just fallen down kept buying rum-dum Billy shots while pressing for details.     

The gist of what Billy had to say was that this Johnny had been the real guy who had followed Icarus’s dream, had been the first guy to fly and gave some details about places and times. Had been there later when Howard Hughes was ready to make aviation a mass consumer product worth billions of dollars with his TWA operation.

This next part is where things get interesting and where eventually I had to step in to break down this bogus legend which even by duped legend standards was a whopper. Johnny had been running various airmail services, essentially into the ground as I would find out later, when he had to flee the country since guys, tough guys, working for guys who had loaned Johnny money based on his “connections” with Howard Hughes were looking high and low for him. He wound up in golden Barranca in Central America running that airmail service into the ground. You ask so what. Well according to Billy and the other cultist believers Johnny had the real movie icon drop dead beautiful Rita Hayworth on his arm as he entered the country. I will get to debunking in a minute but the final act in the legend, literally, was that bit about Johnny running guns to Fidel over in Cuba. Billy added that Johnny had fallen down into the ocean, into the Caribbean on one desperate flight and that was that for poor Johnny.

After my reporter friend pumped Billy for whatever he could, whatever a dozen whiskey shots got him he left the bar, went to his hotel room and started making plans to verify the story. (Those were the halcyon days when reporters actually verified stuff before sending it along unlike today when everything is made of whole cloth and fast in the 24/7/365 news cycles.) That entailed going to Key West which is when Johnny operated out before he fell into the sea, and where Billy claimed he met Johnny as a kid in the 1950s. And that is where the story began to unravel. Not through refutation by anybody who knew anything there because everybody who knew about Johnny believed the legend intact. By the simple fact that no way Johnny could have been at the beginning of aviation, been with the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. Some cultists had built a shrine to Johnny Cielo, a small memorial with his name and dates of birth on it. Johnny was born in 1910 and died in 1958. It took a minute for my guy to realize that the Wright Brother followed Icarus (without his tragic fate) in 1903. From there everything else fell down, fell like a house of cards. That is when my friend contacted me knowing that I was interested in busting fake and undeserved legends.

Silly me I thought like with Sherlock and the more modern legends I would break this thing like a twig would expose the fakery once I got an handle on how it started, who benefitted from keeping the legend alive. Naturally it was as I surmised a work of an overzealous press agent, publicity guy who had been hired by the crowd of cultists in Key West to keep Johnny’s legend intact. No that was later after Johnny died. Johnny had hired the guy originally when he was in the chips running high-    end passengers from Key West to say Naples up the West Coast of Florida so they wouldn’t have to drive and get all sweaty or something. That is where John Kerr entered the lists in behalf of bedraggled Johnny Cielo.  John Kerr, yes, that John Kerr who had worked as the Society Page guy for the Times is the villain of the piece, is the guy who has through his long-ago work thwarted my efforts to bring some rational thought to the real life bum whose every breathe seemed to be a lie.    

Let me go by the numbers, go in order to yet again try to bring some sense to this damn Cielo legend. I have already mentioned that birth date which precludes Johnny being present at the creation. Funny there are of plenty of photographs of Wilbur and Orville, working their magic, at the museum, shrine whatever you want to call it which is nothing but a gold standard money-maker between the admission fee and the “company store” material for sale but not one picture of Johnny with them. Same thing with the Hughes so-called connection. There is every conceivable photo of the handsome Hughes and his various experimental planes and his first efforts with TWA but not one except one of Johnny working the engine of some beat down plane, some crate that would last about one minute in the air. Checking out employment records from the time, Hughes was a fanatic about many things and keeping tight fiscal accounts was one of them, I found out through the Hughes Archives that Johnny had worked in Omaha for the Hughes corporation but had been let go for stealing tools.

How Kerr buried that is a story I would dearly love to hear. See part, no, most of the roadblocks which I have encountered in busting Johnny’s legend have been set up by John Kerr who is the guy who set up the Johnny shrine in Key West and is the main beneficiary of the dough that comes pouring in from poor saps who don’t know enough history to know Johnny wasn’t even born when the Wrights went skyward. It took me a while, took me to investigating the so-called Cielo-Hayworth romance to realize the ninety-something Kerr was still working his PR bullshit on a gullible public using his former reputation for truth at the Times and rubbing stardust in the eyes to get away with some really crazy stuff.     

The Hayworth “affair” takes the cake. I don’t know all the details about why Johnny had to flee America except he was such a poor manager that he ran every airmail operation, including his brief stint delivering the U.S. mails, into the ground and so he was in hock up to his eyebrows. He wound up in fabled Barranca working for the bigwig postal guy there and since that guy didn’t know about the stuff in America hired him to deliver outpost mail. It didn’t hurt that he had that even now to the eye drop dead beautiful “Rita” on his arm, eye candy for guys away from foxy women for a while. I will tell you right now if you have not guessed already that was not the real Rita on his arm but some whore he met either a bordello or dime-a-dance joint in Hoboken. No question from the million photographs at the shrine although that this woman looked very much like Rita that it was not her, no way. First because even a fairly quick look can tell that she had been beaten down, been working on her ass too long and would not age well, not at all. Secondly, again a blow against alternate facts for what good it has done me thus far, the real Rita Hayworth in the time frame mentioned was playing footsies with a guy named the Aga Khan, a bigwig over in Morocco somewhere. By the way I will forewarn you that the number one selling items at the company store are photos and other memorabilia connected with Rita’s presence on Johnny’s arm.    

Now for the final blow, what should be the final blow, Johnny’s work for the heroic Castro brothers, Che and the fistful of other guerilla fighters up in the Sierra Madres looking to beat down America-supported Batista. The Kerr storyline which even got play in the Times supposedly the place that only deals with “all the news that’s fit to print” but where he had powerful connections from his previous work there, was that Johnny fell down into the Caribbean going on a gun run. Nonsense. Johnny did fall down, or at least I am willing to believe he fell down there in the Gulf of Mexico when his plane, his freaking stupid ass Piper Club ran out of gas and he had to ditch the plane with hm and three high society passengers aboard who were heading to Sarasota. The real deal was that Johnny finally did make some dough, enough to hire John Kerr, in the 1950s by ferrying passengers from Key West to points north. So much for the gun run noise. Never happened, totally made up by one John Kerr when he saw his meal ticket was being punched.  

Okay those are the bare outlines of the Cielo legend. One would think that it would be easy, very easy to just blow that away with the wind. Especially as I have gone way out of my way since my reporter friend tipped me to this story to document stuff. Still the cultists and desperate hero-worshipers have hung on, mainly by the brainwashing from Kerr. Here is what I have done to refute the legend to no avail. I have a notarized photostat of John Robert Cielo’s birth certificate from Elmira, New York his birthplace. I have sworn statements by people who knew Rita Hayworth, knew where she was, and where she wasn’t in the 1940s. I have that Hughes employment and unceremonious discharge record from Hughes Aviation and I have the flight manifests for Johnny’s last flight from Key West to the never gotten too Sarasota.

You would think that would be enough proof to sink any legend, any legend for guys who at least had done some of the stuff that their press agents distributed. No, all I get is so-called anonymous communications denying that I had the right Johnny, the right Johnny on the birth certificate when they claim he was born in Elmira, Ohio (checked out, no go). That “so what” if Johnny and Howard didn’t see eye to eye when Johnny was trying to save him money on some Golden Goose plane by saying it wouldn’t work, was not economically feasible, at the time. That Rita wasn’t down in Barranca with Johnny didn’t matter, implying that the foxy whore before she ran out on Johnny when he ran out of dough or was run out of Barranca when he ditched the postmaster’s last serviceable plane, was good enough for them to hang onto. Here is the clincher, the one that says it all about whether Johnny ran guns for the Castros or was just a bush pilot running tourist around sunny 1950s Florida went that place was a haven for the rich gringos. They claim that the Stalinists, the Cuban Communist, the “commies” the way one Johnny aficionado put the matter, have kept the archives locked up so we will not know for maybe fifty years what Johnny’s role with Castro boys will turnout to have been. Alluding to the possibility that Johnny at some point helped out the revolution. That has the mark of John Kerr all over it. Enough said.   

The Earrings Of Madame X-A Journey Through The Arts-John Singer Sargent’s Portrait Of Madame X (Yes, I Know Everybody Knows Who The Woman Was But Let’s Keep Up Appearances For The Sake Of Grand Art)

The Earrings Of Madame X-A Journey Through The Arts-John Singer Sargent’s Portrait Of Madame X (Yes, I Know Everybody Knows Who The Woman Was But Let’s Keep Up Appearances For The Sake Of Grand Art)





By Laura Perkins

One of the positive things about the dramatic change of leadership at this publication in 2017 has been the efforts on the part of new site manager Greg Green to give the audience, on occasion, some background about how decisions are made in this cutthroat no holds barred publishing business. This piece, something of an introductory piece for what is projected to be an on-going series if beautiful gentile if sometimes half-witted Greg doesn’t get sidetracked and demand one and all start writing about bowling or something like he did when he took over the reins and went berserk having every writer, young or old, paying hosannas to Marvel/DC Comic Universe comic book characters come to film nonsense, is one of those times. (By the way although I was not here at the time I am very well aware that “dramatic change of leadership” was nothing less than a purge of previous manager Allan Jackson and has since been recognized as such by all parties concerned except maybe Pollyanna Lance Lawrence. My long-time companion Sam Lowell, now on the skids down the food chain cast the deciding vote against keeping his longtime friend since elementary school Allan on under the theory that the “torch had to be passed”)

My understanding is that a few months ago as Greg Green was looking over the archives, he noted that there were very few pieces, sketches he calls them as did Allan before him, about art, by this he meant high art, cultured museum worthy art, except by way of making some political point. Not much what he called “art for art’s sake” stealing from some old time art theorist who hammered away at the idea that this was the artists highest duty (after getting paid the market rate for his or her work). Apparently, Greg had been getting some flak from the readership which given the demographics now has plenty of time to go to art museums or take that art class they meant to take about forty, fifty years ago (although now with very unsteady hand).

He called Sam Lowell in, now the head of the Editorial Board among his other duties, to see what to do about the deficiency. (One of the fall-outs from that fierce internal free-for-all which rattled the publication for months in 2017 was the institution of an Editorial Board which “theoretically” was to oversee the site manager’s work so that another Allan Jackson calling all the shots on his own hook would not lead to another “youth” uprising. Sam, have thrust the knife in his long-time friend’s back no matter the reason as recognized even by him in his candid moments was “rewarded” with the chair of the Board.) Greg’s idea was that he had heard that Sam had when he was in high school been directed by his art teacher to apply to his alma mater, Massachusetts School of Art in Boston, and he would grease the way for a scholarship or something.

Now Sam, as did some of the other older writers here came from desperate poverty in the working- class section, the Acre they called it, of North Adamsville south of Boston. His mother freaked out, a mother I never met since Sam and I did not take up company before he had gone through three failed marriages and was pretty estranged from his strait-laced Irish Catholic family. Her argument was that no way was a son of hers going to be some bohemian, beatnik is the word I think Sam said she used, starving artist in some cold-water flat garret with the rats and thugs for neighbors. That dampener plus his own inclinations toward cinema and politics pushed him in another direction. Still Sam was the only known candidate to unofficially lead the way to more art pieces and projects.         

Until recently that is when Sam started that slide down the food chain, my expression, after he decided that he had to playing avenging angel against the light-hearted harmless bill of fare that the Hallmark Channel presents at Christmas time. And of which I am a devoted follower of every year. Not the “fanatic” mentioned in one of his so-called reviews but having had a rough and tumble time growing up in upstate New York where my farmer father thought Christmas was an extra occasion to get drunk as a skunk with his farmer buddies I get some relief from the sad feelings I usually get this time of year by watching and “vegging out” while having the shows on in the background. Sam got some much blowback from his comments, including from me that he decided, and Greg approved, to do reviews of films with the idea of whether they would be Hallmark Channel-worthy or not. He is still working through that nonsense and good luck to him, no, bad luck to him on this one for posing the idea to Greg and for following through which has caused many a battle in the Perkins-Lowell household. And rightly so for the not so gentle into that good night bastard. I will, I have gotten even with him on that account.  

That left the art review spot open with no one to replace the self-inflicted wounded warrior. That is until Leslie Dumont, a good friend of mine, mentioned to Greg that I had taken an art class once, and maybe had gone to an art museum as well. With that resume he approached me with kid gloves and tried to coax me into doing the art stuff until he could find somebody else. I told him I had not taken an art class but an art appreciation class you know  a survey of what some art professor though we the great unwashed needed to see when I was at Rochester and had merely done some sketches, really some doodling at meetings when some windbag went on and one, on my own and had gone to an art museum or two in my time. That scant expertise was enough to get me the assignment. With the proviso that I could wander into whatever I liked and not have to make any disclaimer that I was some kind of art curator, had written a monogram or sometime.

Hence as my first subject, as noted in the headline of this piece, I am making commentary on American expatriate John Singer Sargent’s The Portrait Of Madame X another American expatriate which has intrigued ever since I was a young woman wondering about the X part, about why she had, or he, had to use an alias. Wondering too about those rumored affairs, about who she was sleeping with to get herself up the Parisian social ladder which had to say the least be tricky for even up and coming French women never mind an American who married her husband, a wheeler-dealer banker for his dough and his connections.

Of course in the gentile art world, the so-called academy, the tabloid critics and the erstwhile collectors who were clueless about what was good art and what was “going through the paces” centered in that late 19th century in Paris and nowhere else the whole thing was a scandal, scandalous since our Madame was showing to little strap, or rather too wayward a strap suggesting, well I guess suggesting more problems keeping her clothes on as the wine and night wore on, that exquisite dress and maybe too much bosom as well in that well-padded upper dress section. (Believe me as a small-breasted woman fitted that way by nature and genetics when I was younger, I was looking for every advance short of surgical breast enlargement to enhance my figure in that area so I know padding when I see it. Recently in preparing this sketch I had a close look at the dresses some of Sargent’s Mayfair swell sitters wore at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston so yes Madame was well padded-and painted on those bare shoulders with some kind of exotic powders to get so her complexion so white. By the way observing the structure of the dresses no way was that whalebone going to “slip” except in the imagination of those three name men who were thinking such things, or maybe all men regardless of number of names in their monikers.)         
  
Scandal aside, which from what I gathered from one of her lovers who wrote one of those “tell-all” books after she passed away she saw as a selling point on her way up the social ladder, it is very interesting that she did not show her front face and left the profile in one direction and her posed body in another. Vanity thy name is Madame X. The real reason beyond the allure of the profile in contrast to her full-figured black gown was that she had and ever so slight wrinkle under her left eye and refused to let Sargent who was no gentleman in this matter paint a frontal face position with that hideous deformity. (I will for now not speak of an even more obvious reason for no frontal pose-that beak of a nose she was trying to downplay but will stick with the wrinkle which more women of a certain age these days can relate to-despite the beauties of plastic surgery and the like) This information on Madame’s distress over that sign of aging wrinkle from the guy who provided Sargent with his paint mixtures (and who also for a short time on the sly when Madame was in one of her “plebian” lover moods was her lover). Confirmed by the house maid who for a few francs (now Euros) would let the guy, name unmentionable because the family subsequently became very famous, into the back door to Madame’s boudoir.     

Frankly Madame looked like an “ice queen,” a kind that Sam jokingly mentioned to me one time before we were intimate that he sensed I was (wrongly as he will now freely admit). This Madame X ice queen is nothing but drop dead beautiful who holds that beauty like a sword which even now in the modern age among a certain set, actresses come to mind, is a very effective way to get up that ladder, she was always seeking. That “mystery” and our lady reeks of it no question got her as far as the finance minister in the Thier’s government which meant she was on her way. (Apparently her banker husband was happy since it solved a little solvency problem he was having which got smoothed over I assume during Madame’s calculated bed talk with that smitten finance minister). Some say, and I believe Sargent did too, think this work was his greatest portrait. Maybe even his best work. I will not argue with that estimation but to this day I still wonder how those women got those tiny waists without suffocating in those horrible corsets.  

Blessed Are The Whistle-Blowers The Saviors Of The Republic-Maybe-Tom Hanks And Meryl Streep’s “The Post” (2018)-A Film Review

Blessed Are The Whistle-Blowers The Saviors Of The Republic-Maybe-Tom Hanks And Meryl Streep’s “The Post” (2018)-A Film Review  



DVD Review

By Frank Jackman

The Post, starring Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, and cameo appearances by Richard Milhous Nixon, H. R. Halderman, Little Johnny Erlichman, Big John Mitchell, and a cohort of cozy criminals and fixer men around them, 2018  


Sometimes in this age of fake news, alternate facts, and basic bullshit and craziness a story from the past can come smack dab at you and speak to our times (“our times” for me being the time in question, the early 1970s when one Richard Milhous Nixon was roiling the country and the age of Trump when he is roiling the country to is own tune maybe one of the real disadvantages of age, my age if you think about it but I digress). Many times in the past I have been as likely along with guys like Sam Eaton, Sam Lowell, and Ralph Morris of this publication all of us Vietnam War era veterans of one kind or another and so still pissed off at what our government did to us and to peoples across the China Seas with whom we had no quarrel, not guns in hand quarrel,  at least metaphorically bring down whatever government was fouling the air. These days I am, we are, worried, extremely worried about the fate of the Republic.

Let’s put it this way it has been a very long time, since the draconian Nixon times since I have had that fear crawling up my spine. I do not, once again and do not call it paranoia because the record is clear on this from every aspect of the crumb-bum Nixon-era police blotter, to have to look over my shoulder every time I write an “unkind” word about the government or step out in the public square and blast away at the perfidious bastards. (I will take a funny lesson from fellow writer here, young fellow writer by the way Sarah Lemoyne and NOT beg pardon for my language for I am as riled as I have ever been, or at least a long time, about our collective fates). With that in mind I review this film The Post about another time when the government did not “want to hear it, want to see it in the public prints,” was ready to go to the mat to suppress information we needed to know about. Needed as backup if any was really needed by the time the material came to our doorsteps, literally with the morning newspaper oy delivered newspaper. Namely about the long line of post-World War II decisions that got us, got my generation who had to fight the damn thing, into the lawnmower of Vietnam. Hell, and get this, we almost came to hot civil war like these times are portending, for just releasing information about what had happened in the past. Jesus they were tight-assed about even that information.

Hey, over the long course of the war, and a decade of serious escalations and refusal to withdraw, to draw down enough even, many people went from unwavering, unquestioning acceptance of whatever crap the government (and here I mean the long trial of POTUS from Harry Truman who dragged the Republic into the quagmire) to undying opposition. And were willing to pay the price. In my own small case which need not detain us long for this is about another type of opposition I had gone into the military in that same unknowing, uncomprehending way and wound up as a resister for refusing orders to Vietnam (and of course right on course wound up in the stockade for a over a year altogether). There were other types of opposition and that was the case with ex-Marine turned news reporter and then being in the thick of the bullshit coming down from guys like cowboy  Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of those deadbeat POSTUS guys, and the high sheriff whiz kid Robert McNamara who went to his un-mourned grave saying he was duped, nonsense like that, opponent Daniel Ellsberg who was thus in a position to “grab” the files. That aspect very important because in reality few insiders were ready to go down in the mud for their new-found convictions. This is Ellsberg’s story as much as anybody at the Post (or Times) although the great thrust of this film deals with the decisions made at the top, at the executive level both whether to print the material or when the government pulled the hammer down whether to fight the bastards.

Fight the bastards in court which would have seemed like the beginning of wisdom and a “slam dunk” if the various federal courts had had judges and justices who had not skipped law school classes the days they were discussing First Amendment legal issues under some freedom of the press and expression theory up against the government’s desire to suppress everything the have deemed classified information,

Still it takes a whistle-blower, a person with enough insider information to make it worthwhile to make it public. Back then the honorable role of whistle-blower was kind of unheard of as we generally went around assuming that every classified document needed to placed in that category and whoever made that decision was within his or her rights to the designation. That working under a general theory on their part just short of the divine right of kings that the government knows best and that was that. Although whistle-blowing has been more common it is still rare that somebody with important documentation will spill the beans. While there is legislation “protecting” whistle-blowers at the federal level that in honored more in the breach than in the observance as about a dozen recent cases especially the Chelsea Manning and now Reality Leigh Winner had made perfectly plain. The government it turns out is as interested in chilling this aspect of free speech as any other limitation they want to put on free expression in other contexts.  

That is the whistle-blower part, the part hat gets the ball rolling. Then the questions move onto who will publish the documents, who will risk that cozy relationship with the guys and gals at the top of government when the deal goes down. Obviously for documents the newspaper and now social media are the vehicle. And by a circuitous way the Times and Post got into the buzz-saw when the Nixon government went berserk that one of its own “in-house” evaluations of the Vietnam mud hit the front pages with a vengeance. (That “its own” generic since it was actually down under the high sheriff with blindfolds on McNamara the lying bastard who went to his grave, his un-mourned grave, claiming ignorance. And don’t make too much of that Nixon point although it was probable until recently the most paranoid government around but not so strangely the liberal constitutionalist Obama government prosecuted more whistle-blowers than any previous administration highlighted by that Manning case. (In the interest of transparency despite my riled-up feelings Obama did at the last minute before leaving office commute her sentence, for which we are thankful.)       

The bulk of the film though deals with the responsibility of newspapers to fight the good fight when the government gets overweening. Thus the film highlights the internal processes at The Post mainly at the top with increasingly feisty and assertive publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep’s role) and today strangely heavy-smoker Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks’ role) about how to respond to the very real full court press the Nixon administration went to in order to suppress what would become The Pentagon Papers. This struggle, this rare Fourth Estate struggle is one which the average citizen today a couple of generations removed from the showdown may not know about. The Supreme Court (SCOTUS in tweet speak) got it right but this film shows how close a call things could have gone the other way as we are more aware of these days when they routinely have and how hard it was to get the material to the public. Not everybody has the resources or the connections to go the distance. We should all be glad they did although it was a close thing. And we should hope that in these trying times for the Republic such forces will come to the fore again when the next governmental hammer comes down.