The Time Of The Troubles-Part One-Jimmy’s Hall-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Jimmy’s Hall, starring Barry Ward, Simone Kirby, directed by Ken Loach, 2014  

Forget the Nightmare on Elm’s Street cinematic series, forget the billion Halloween films, forget all the ghoul and horror shows you might have seen in your time this film under review, Jimmy’s Hall, despite its placid sounding title is one of the scariest movies I have ever seen. Why? Well in this film about the deportation of revolutionary stand-up guy Jimmy Grafton from Ireland by the Irish Free State government in 1933 there are several vignettes where the local parish priest, make no mistake the local Roman Catholic parish priest, holds forth in various settings about the damn communists, damn jazz, damn dancing, damn sin, sanctified and to be mercilessly obeyed Mother Church (a.k.a. the Roman Catholic Church), and the waywardness of modern world in general. And throw in a couple of jabs at Joe Stalin and the Soviet Union to boot. The scariest scene? Scary evoking shutters in me from my long ago Roman Catholic Church childhood was when the good Father began to spout forth about the wickedness of…..dancing and having fun in this wicked old world, naming the names of the damned who attended the dance in Jimmy’s hall in the process,  and not waiting like chaste boys and girls until the great by and by just like my old good Father did from his pulpit in my youth.     

The battle between Mother Church represented by the good Father (the old codger) and Jimmy Grafton (played by Barry Ward), the local red leader and icon of the democratic free-thinking secular life is thus set early on. Set too around the controversy over reestablishing Jimmy’s hall as a cultural center, a converted barn on the Grafton property which had gone to ground when Jimmy had set sail for America after having been on the wrong side of the Irish Civil War. That wrong side of the Civil War meant that he was in opposition to accepting the British-backed Treaty which gave up the six counties in the North (today’s Northern Ireland) and by the 1930s had established constitutionally the Roman Catholic Church as the state church and as the arbiter of morals and the parameters of social life. (That Civil war reflecting the part one “time of troubles” in the 1920s and not the latter ones of the late 1960s forward). So no question the issues were drawn rather shapely, the question of the North still thorny to this day despite the Peace Accords and the latter question of the power of the Church only recently broken a bit, broken most dramatically over the resounding victory vote on the question of same-sex marriage.                 

And like today’s more secular and tolerant young Irish in Jimmy Grafton’s time it was the youth who had heard faraway rumors that it was okay to dance, to paint, to sing secular songs (in Irish too), to listen to decadent jazz, to cavort in the night, hell, to think who upon Jimmy’s return to Ireland to take care of his aging mother in the Great Depression-torn world clamored for him to reopen the cultural center. And he did. But Ireland then was in the grip of a great darkness after that Civil War had been won not by those who stood by the General Proclamation posted on the Dublin General Post Office wall proclaiming the fight for a democratic secular Ireland come Easter, 1916 but the Church and the larger landlords. Those opponents would first badger and then turn to violence and mayhem to stop Jimmy’s operation.   

In this year of the 100^th anniversary of Easter, 1916, the liberation struggle, this film rather graphically highlights what happens when the laboring people who fought for liberation when it counted don’t win. Jimmy despite his best efforts, and of his mother when it came time for her to act, wound up being a non-person, a non-citizen since he held an American passport. Wound up being deported as an outside agitator and dying in exile in America in 1945. It took a long time to even get half of what Jimmy and his “red” circle were proposing back then and I am willing to bet six, two and even that there is still plenty of opposition in the “old sod” to conceding anything to modern life.

Oh yeah, there is as is almost inevitable a little romantic interplay (nice way to put it, right) between Jimmy and the now married girl he left behind, Oning, played by the fetching Simone Darby, but keep your eyes on the political struggle that is what gives this one five stars. And maybe close your eyes if you don’t want to see that scary scene with the good Father pontificating from the pulpit. Okay.   

Fraud, My Sweet-The Case Of Internet Love-A Detective Phillip Larkin Tale

 

For this story it was hard to find a Wikipedia entry or YouTube film clip to accompany the piece, to do it justice but the more I thought about Tom Clary's situation the more I thought about schoolboy stuff. Hence Frankie and the boys

 

By Zack James

You know I, I Phil Larkin, Private Investigator (not that silly detective business that Zack James put in the title of this piece) have done plenty of work for lawyers, private lawyers not those public prosecutors who couldn’t defend a case if they had the gun handed to them two seconds after some sicko killed his wife because she decided she would rather play with some hard dick than his stub, over my twenty plus years in the profession. Early on it was mostly divorce work, what unkind people call key-hole peeping, to get the goods on some adulterer, male or female what did I care as long as somebody paid the freight, when the divorce laws were a lot tougher on people trying to get out from under a bad marriage anyway they could. Lately though mainly missing persons cases for a whole lot of reasons, a whole lot of reasons why they went missing. An occasional looking for an heir not trying to go missing. Maybe some investigative work in a criminal case where a defense attorney has a client with enough dough to buy an alibi. Stuff like that. Stuff that sounds good, sounds good enough to write about to inform the public about what is what is real investigative until you realize to the average reader it would be their hum-drum lives which they have had their fill of.  

In the Internet Love caper though the lawyer, Tom Clary, working out of Lowell, Jack Kerouac’s old town, Jack the self-proclaimed “king of the beats” from what I heard, they have a little memorial park near the old mills near the Merrimack that says that, an old mill town that still has seen better days no matter what hyp they put on the publicity charts needed my help to get out from under some silly fraud thing he had gotten himself into when his member (okay, we are all adults, his cock, his woody, whatever) did his thinking and not his brain.   

This caper was just another example of how whatever you read in the detective pulp magazines, in the high gloss hardcover novels that you can barely read through once, can barely follow they are so full of silly scientific stuff that defies logic and good sense, at twenty plus bucks a copy, or watch on television or the movies real life private investigator is absolutely nothing like that-even when sex is involved, or the dream of sex as here. Usually I lay out the story that I get from my client (naturally discounted about fifty percent for lies even from lawyers, maybe especially for lawyers since they go to school for that kind of stuff) and then tell the good reader how I used my skill and experience to work out the case, sometimes successfully, sometimes no good just like in real life.

On Tom Clary’s case though I want to start out with the last e-mail he sent the bimbo to let you know how he let it get all out of hand in a short time, how he almost lost his ticket, his license to practice, for that silly cock instead of brain reason. Let you too wonder whether the days of snail mail were so bad after all when dealing with sex, or anything important. Here goes:    

Katerina sweetie I will have to pass on helping you financially with your insurance premium problem since I am, no, we are in some trouble around the previous help I tried to give you which I will describe below.

As you may know, or maybe you don’t know since you seem kind of naïve or not knowledgeable about a lot of things, lawyers when they are in trouble or need legal advice will not depend on their own understandings of the law but seek opinions from other lawyers. You might have heard the expression about “any lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a lawyer.” That is what I am talking about. So lawyers use another lawyer as their lawyer. So what I am about to tell you is done under advice from my lawyer who has told me that I have had to do the following based on my situation.

Since you have not been able to provide me with receipts and a copy of your mother’s death certificate for her funeral expenses and for which I loaned you one thousand dollars in United States currency via Western Union money transfer to the Philippines I have had to protect my law practice and myself by swearing out a warrant for your arrest when, and if, you come back inside the jurisdiction of the United States. I did this Monday March 14, 2016 with Assistant United States Attorney Emma Wright for the Federal District Court of New Hampshire in Concord as your home town and last known address was in Manchester which falls under that court’s jurisdiction charging you with Internet fraud (18 U.S. Code, section 1030 fraud using a computer) and telecommunications fraud (using Western Union for the money transfers which is regulated under the Federal Communications Commission and a violation of 18 U.S. Code, section 1343). You can do what you want when you come back to the United States but you should probably get in touch with Assistant United Attorney Wright who is handling the case. If you have trouble at U.S. Customs upon trying to re-enter the country and are detained then please call meet at 781-249-8326 and I will contact Attorney Wright and we will come to where you are being detained and can settle the matter there. 

All of this is not as terrible as it sounds and we, you and I, will be able to get out from under this problem if you are more forthcoming than you have been in the past about the fate of those funeral expenses. What triggered all of this legal necessity was when I put the money that I borrowed for you (the one thousand dollars for the funeral expenses) back into the office funds without explaining how or why it had been taken out and why it had been returned without explanation. My accountant informed that what I had done was both legally wrong and a violation of my legal responsibilities as a professional lawyer which would trigger an investigation from the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers, the organization that regulates lawyers in this state. My accountant said I would at least be no question in some kind of legal trouble from them.   

Since I acted in good faith with you and I need to keep my professional standing as a lawyer to earn a living for some time longer I have had to do the above action to show that I acted in good faith and that you did not. I have had to “throw you under the wheels of a bus” to use a current expression. That signing a warrant for your arrest will clear me, hopefully. I am sorry that I had to do this action but since I don’t really know you and whatever has motivated you through all of this I have had to think of myself.

Sweetie rest assured that if there is any way I can help you or you can help me to get this rock off our backs then I will do so but this is where the situation stands right now. Su amigo [Tom Clary].    

Jesus, you can imagine my snicker when I saw this little tidbit. What Attorney Clary, who I had worked for before on a couple of missing persons cases that went nowhere (that nowhere the result of the clients running out of dough, interest, or reason to pursue the person further) needed as much background information on the bimbo as I could find since he, as we shall see, in his love bug state neglected to find out much about her except a few saucy and raw nude photographs (like I said cock over brains). He knew my work, knew I could help him out-on the quiet. But I needed the story-the whole story minus the fifty percent bullshit I expected from lawyers and everybody else if I was to help get him out from under his rock in one piece. Needed to find out why a guy who was just horny which a lot of guys are, me included, had to send an e-mail telling some honey she could wind up in the federal slammer as some bull-dyke’s girlfriend for cooking up some two bit scheme to defraud a love-addled attorney. To make him look less stupid over some young sweet fluff than he really was if you wanted to know the truth.

So he gave me this run-down before giving me my marching orders and what little information he knew about Katerina.              

Tom Clary like a lot of fifty something guys, me too, had been unlucky in love, had had three marriages ending in three divorces and plenty of alimony and child support checks (me, two marriages, two divorces and ditto on the checks), had given up on love as a no-win investment. Had girlfriends and live-ins for various periods once he figured out that it was cheaper that way than marrying them like some Podunk Catholic schoolboy. However of late, the last couple of live-ins according to what Tom told me that night at Jimmy’s Tavern on Merrimac Street where we sipped a couple while he was telling his story had been “no-go” on the sex issue. Nice to be with but had had it with sex and its discomforts (and pleasures he added). So he started as he had done periodically in the past looking at the sex sites to see if he could find a sex partner. And not any old sex partner but, as he said if was going to go to the time and expense of joining one of those sites, a younger woman to make him feel young again. Not a bad idea if you can keep it up.      

Now this sex site thing with its million fake “come hither” come ons and women ready to jump into bed with you at the click of an icon is tricky, is mainly stuff to lure guys with some kind of unspoken loneliness and sadness into buying all kinds of stuff but mostly dreams and cash drain for no action. I had looked them at one point myself after my last divorce and kind of joined one site for “free” which meant nothing since any “action” required a buy-in to some credit card plan for X amount of months. I was saved knowing more about this racket by a thirty-something blonde gal who came into my office looking for help to find her missing teenage daughter who had run off with some carny grifter and she didn’t mind spending a little money trying to find the daughter. When the little money she really had ran out she persuaded me to continue for a little while longer with a barter offer I couldn’t refuse. Eventually while she was a wild one and worth the barter that trade-off  didn’t get the daughter back, and I never did find her, but that solved my immediate sex problem and so I never had to get deeper into the sex site racket.         

Tom did, did get onto one of those well-known sites where everybody is married (at least they say they are as Tom did and I suppose you could say with three marriages he was married, if not currently) and just on site to have a fling or short affair. No foul, no harm. He didn’t have much luck to begin with until he scrolled onto a profile (this site stuff is all about profiles and half a million lies) without a photograph (a sure sign that whoever is not up to showing herself in a photograph is some kind of Methuselah at best). But her “come on,” Katerina’s come on was that you could contact her directly by figuring out her email address which was in her greeting (it wasn’t hard and as Tom found out and I could have told him that ruse is used by rival sex sites or “independent” sex workers to either lure business to their sites or connect with guys for paid sex-all this stuff where I say guys goes for gals too if they are looking for sex okay).

So he did and Katerina responded quickly. They did the usual asking this and that question including her telling him she was a cam model ( a sex work on video who does whatever the viewer asks for sexually-for a price is the best way I can put it-one of the wonders of the Internet). This is when she asked him to go to another sex site and this is how he learned first-hand about the raiding of sex sites by rivals. Except that the front of this sex site was so amateurish that even horny Tom could see it was a scam (most sex sites even if they don’t deliver sex or sex dreams at least are legitimate sites and not total credit card or identity theft rip-offs whatever their shortcomings or ethics). That should have tipped him off-and it did for a while. Did until a few days later (after he had blown Katerina off as a stooge for some nefarious sex fraud bandits) she asked where he had been. That started another “conversation” which was actually progressing, Tom said, to the stage of meeting. (Meeting at hotel somewhere outside of Nashua, New Hampshire since he was from Lowell and she from Nashua.) Then the axe fell.  

Katerina from that point to the point of that e-mail I showed you that Tom showed me which got his wise finally (I think, you never know with guys who have the “rut” on) ran her “script” pretty straightforwardly and intensely. This is the play. She had received word from a cousin that her mother in the Philippines was sick and because she was poor (although naturally good-hearted whore Katerina was sending dough along to help out) the mother couldn’t afford the medicines necessary to save her. (This gag as smart as Tom is as a lawyer has been pulled a million times-although not always with the mother dying in the Philippines.) She pretty please asked Tom to “lend” her five hundred dollars U.S. to help out until next pay-day when Katerina would pay him back (that one has been played billion times including in the Philippines). This of course while they were making “arrangements” for their assignation. So Tom bit. Sent the dough to the cousin via Western Union (a money transfer that he had never done before which was interesting-the first time). Done, and he figured that he was on the way to great blow-jobs and whatever she had in her bag of sexual tricks.      

The day before the big assignation (remember that five hundred smackers was already sent along) Katerina e-mailed that the cousin had informed her that her mother had died. RIP. The next thing he knew, the next time he heard from her Katerina was on an airplane heading for the Philippines to give her mother a final send-off (and Tom was holding his sore cock, sore since he had taken some sex aid medication as a prelude to that big “date”). Told Tom not to worry she would grease his skids when she got back after the funeral.

End of story-right. Wrong. A few days later Katerina send an e-mail about how she could not claim her mother’s body until the hospital where she had been treated and had expired was paid for its services. The bill-eight hundred dollars. Could Tom pretty please sent the dough to get her mother out of the deep freeze and into the ground. I am just giving you the highlights here there was more to it but the reader can get the drift. The drift here being another Western Union money transfer to her in her name for eight big ones. (That money transfer process not so interesting this time.)   

Now end of story-right. No, still wrong. Of course the mother needed a funeral and there was no money to do so. Again a lot of back and forth and promises that this was the last hit (and promises by her about all she would do for him when she got back to America) but in the end he did the Western Union money transfer (a total bummer as to process this time but he was horny, he was love-bugged even though he had never actually talked to her on the phone or seen more than some nice, and some raw, photographs of her sent via e-mail) for, ouch, twelve hundred  smackeroos. Hell if it was that easy I would have liked to have gotten on Tom’s gravy train myself.    

Now finished. Well not quite because she put the bite on him for a thousand bucks to pay some insurance premiums that the mother had not paid and were overdue on a fifty-thousand dollar life insurance policy that all of a sudden after the funeral had surfaced and which would have left Katerina and her brother on “easy street” for a while anyway. Except Tom as a lawyer who knew about life insurance policies and the fact that those cold-hearted bastard insurance companies don’t like to pay out penny one if they don’t have to knew something was wrong about this set-up if not exactly what (to speak nothing of how all of a sudden a daughter who was living in the mother’s old apartment “found” the policy which would have taken care of everything Tom already paid for if it had been “discovered” earlier). Hence the stinging e-mail and hence my employment.

Hence too after checking out that the address Katerina had given him in Nashua and found it was bogus and few other facts that surfaced as I looked into matters that I was not able to produce much about her. In any case she has not surfaced in America or if she has she has not come forward to clear her name-and probably never will. So like I said forget about those smart lawyers on television and in the bookstores and remember Tom Clary’s saga-that’s your average lawyer, very average.   

The Mad Monk Of Music-Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours   

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Unfaithfully Yours, starring Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, 1948

Those readers familiar with my music, book and film reviews in this space know that when I come across musicians, authors and movies that I go crazy over I tend to go out and grab every available other piece of material done by them. So in a short period of time, for example, you would get maybe ten reviews running of the legendary hard-boiled detection writer Dashiell Hammett’s work (and maybe more for older work as some previously unknown work like some of Hammett’s very early writing see the light of day whether they should have or not). Right now I am “hot” on the trail of the “king” of the 1930s and 1940s romantic screwball comedy writers and directors Preston Sturges after having viewed his classic Sullivan’s Travels with Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake (she of that then 1940s fashionable tuff of hair hanging over the right eye). The film under review, Unfaithfully Yours, and as time goes on will be true of other Sturges’ efforts, not in the same league as the formerly mentioned film, had a fine performance by lead actor Rex Harrison and enough subtle and witty dialogue to, well, fill a concert hall.    

That concert hall reference is no accidental remark since this film centers on the ups and downs of a world famous English conductor, Sir Alfred, played with dry wit by Mister Harrison who having arrived back in the States after a tour of his native England is given confidential information that his much younger wife, Daphne, played by Linda Darnell, has been having an “affair” with his younger male secretary. Of course the theme of the older man-younger women, the theme of intergenerational sex to put it plainly, has a long history, a long history of suspicion and wonder, wonder on the part of the older man about whether he can keep up with the younger set. Whether a younger man will cut his time. That situation is the case here as well. The twist: the information gathered by Sir Alfred’s brother-in-law who was married to Daphne’s sister gathered by a hired private investigator was erroneous, had been based on “appearances being deceiving” information a well-worn literary and cinematic trick to move a plot along. The rest of the story hinges on resolving the how and what to do about the situation with that wrong information.               

Despite the erroneous information at the time before discovery of the real facts, despite all good sense, Sir Alfred began to believe the allegations against his “unfaithful wife.” Began to let that affect his conducting as well since his choice of musical performances for an upcoming important concert would descend into three separate pieces reflecting three separate ways in which he could resolve his problem. Three fantastic ways. The first one obviously a frame up murder which was plotted with the idea of letting the male secretary take the fall-and take the big step off as well. The second involved the modern concept being a man of the world, of letting fate take its course and wishing the couple well with a big check to keep them in the style Daphne had become accustomed to. Third, a theatrical act of despair at a world not worth living in without his Daphne and a bout of suicide via Russian roulette.    

But hold on a minute this is after all a romantic comedy, a black romantic comedy, a Sturges’ black comedy to boot, and so as Sir Alfred tried to really do Daphne in he is so incompetent that the whole thing turns into a comedy of errors, all three ways out of his dilemma way beyond his powers of commission, before he is told the error of his ways. That was how the deal went down, a little sophomoric, but the Sturges dialogue and clever interweaving of arcane social commentary make this one worth a watch if you can’t get hold of Sullivan’s Travels as a primer.     

Once I Was A Good Boy-With Guitarist T-Bone Walker In Mind 

By Lester Lannon 

No question Frank Jackman started out once as a good boy. Even his mother, Delores, brought up a pious Catholic and a “no tolerance” for evil type of mother admitted that up to the age of about eight he was a model child, went to school every day, got as good marks in school as he could with his limited abilities, went to church, that Roman Catholic Church thing his mother lived for, and was a star in Sunday school class. Then at about eight, maybe nine he fell in with the wrong crowd, fell in with some wrong gees as the saying went in the old neighborhood. Three of those young cronies spent many years in prison for armed something, one just finishing up a dime’s worth for armed robbery of a liquor store. Frank’s fate will be discussed further below after we figure out how he went from a good boy to bad.

A lot of people, you know, professional sociologists, criminologists and psychologists, blamed it on the neighborhood, “the projects,” where Frank and the others came of age. No question they had a point for the statistics bear out the facts of all kinds of strange pathologies among people at the bottom of the feeding chain, the hungry ones, “los olvidados” as one Spanish guy, one hip Spanish sociologist who came out of the place, called those “forgotten” hermanos (not hermanas so much) in the barrio when liberals were actually interested in trying to figure out how to make all boats rise. No question “from hunger” drove a lot of stuff back then when Frank was coming of age in the 1970s, now too although nobody is looking to closely at the subject (except to construct more jails or in the international case drop more bombs). And no question if Frank had been brought up in say leafy Forest Lawn or Glen Ellen he might not have run into those wrong gees, Ronnie, Ducky, Pistol, and Whiplash. Would maybe have found some Alfred, Harry and Bradley let us say and planned mayhem on the basketball court or something and not the local gas station which first got Frank into  trouble (unarmed robbery in the daytime). Actually that first troubled covered up in the courts so not counted was the ‘five-finger clip” at Kay’s Jewelry up in Riverdale Square. Like I said that didn’t count.        

But to Delores’ mind, to Paul his father’s too, Frank was strictly “bad seed,” although not put in such a graphic pseudo-sexual way. Bore the mark of Cain, the mark of the early banishment from Eden unto as the 1930s writer titled one of his novels –East of Eden. And they, their other three boys, Frank’s grandparents and the rest of the extended family bore down on him with those thoughts until he actually began to believe he was marked by the original sin we are all born with under high hell Catholic doctrine. Started almost the day that Frank (and Whiplash not known as Whiplash then, that came later at about age fourteen when he took a chain and nearly beat a guy to death for being on the “wrong” corner and needed to teach the guy a lesson about turf) got caught at Kay’s trying to “five-finger” a bunch of onyx with diamond chips rings to give to some girl Pistol was trying to get a blow job from. (That part, the head reason, never came out and would have freaked out the whole neighborhood, the adults anyway. To keep the record straight despite the lack of jewelry to entice the girl Pistol got his blow job anyway. She was that kind of guy-crazy girl.)       

So Frank (never Frankie, just Frank) went from bad to worse. Got sly as he grew older, got to thinking about what he didn’t have in the world, saw what his father had to grovel for to keep his family, to keep Frank, feed and clothed. The sight of the poor bedraggled man coming home always with his damn head down even when he had steady work and a reason to pull his head up for a moment made Frank swear to himself one night an oath to never be like his father, never grovel to anybody period if he could help it. As far as anybody ever knew Frank never did, but never did grow up to be half the man his father had been as he began to recognize long and too late afterward while serving an armed robbery rap for single-handedly robbing the First National Bank of Gloversville of a hundred thou (unfortunately he set off an alarm in the bank on his way out and the cops found him a few days later in New York. Lesson learned: always have another guy at your back).

But that was later, a half- dozen armed robberies and assaults later. The key one, the one that gave him that first record, on the way to a near permanent home in some state correctional institution including now at the “max” security Hammerhead joint. The first was the night he along with Fast Eddy Jones robbed at gunpoint the Cities Service gas station on Thorndike Street in Riverdale. Got away with it for a while, even got a free blow job from that girlfriend of Pistol’s she was so juiced up by what he had done, so yeah, she was that kind of girl but don’t tell Pistol that because he thinks she is still chastely waiting for him to finish up his dime at Shawshank up in Maine for robbing a grocery store when he was high as a kite on cousin cocaine. Pistol would kill her and every guy who even looked at her so please keep this to yourself.

Naturally kids of fourteen are going to brag about such an event if for no other reason than to prove their manhood out on the dangerous streets. At least naturally for Fast Eddy (Frank never bragged about nothing- his motto just do the thing-from robbery to boffing some frail who looked his way ever so slightly). So Frank and Fast Eddy took the fall, did the youth detention center, reform school, for a couple of years and that was that. (Fast Eddy would open his mouth once too often usually to some frail and wound up face down in the Merrimack River up in New Hampshire for his efforts.)

No need to list all the other felonies that Frank committed from that time to his thirty-fifth birthday because Frank was strictly an armed something guy and the only distinction between the crimes was the time served. Except that last one-that three strikes and you are out last one. The one where a bank sneeze, a bank cop at the Portland (Georgia) Trust Bank got hit between the eyes when he believed that the money he was guarding was his and got rum brave, but also got  very dead. Felony murder, murder one  and in death penalty crazy Georgia that meant the big step-off, the big kiss-off of the face of the earth. He is still waiting for the “hangman” as this written. Every once in a while his ancient mother is able to get down to Georgia to see her boy, her bad boy. And every time she says to Frank-“up to the age of about eight you were  a model child, went to school every day, got as good marks in school as you could with your limited abilities, went to church, that Roman Catholic Church thing that I lived for, and were a star in Sunday school class.” Frank just took that never-ending line in and sat in stony silence.      

Man And Superman-Woody Allen’s Irrational Man

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Irrational Man, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Emily Stone, written and  directed by Woody Allen, 2015

Well Woody Allen is up to his old existential man tricks again, (and again and again) with his latest well what will we call it-philosophical drama, mystery drama, semi-romantic, semi-black comedy under review here, Irrational Man. Once again the madman actor/director/writer goes down into the mud to try to figure out what makes modern humankind tick. What is the meaning of life in a world beyond our control that has dogged old Woody since he started making films. They could be as high art as Annie Hall or Manhattan or somewhere in the middle like this one but Woody is always trying to pose some great question of existence when he puts his mind to a script. A lot of this film is rehash of earlier material but all lot is a different not quite serio-comic take on one modern man’s attempts to live in the modern world- and fail.      

So take one Abe Lucas (played by Joaquin Phoenix last seen in this space as a drug-strung out Johnny Cash hounding Reese Witherspoon as June Carter for her hand in marriage), well-travelled, well-worn and well world-wearied college professor, a philosophy professor of course, a rock star in his profession and not some lowly adjunct being paid per course (although off of his teaching technique and style in the film maybe he should have been in that latter category) who as part of his never-ending mid-life existential crisis number 27 is slumming teaching at a small elite college in Rhode Island for the summer(Brown one would guess although the locale given was Newport so go figure except the occasional ocean scenes are spectacular). He carries his existential angst baggage with him of course.

That baggage entails a weariness with life, that middle age life problem everybody faces dressed up as angst, alienation, ennui and, hell, why not throw in hubris (or the film’s background music all instrumental to set the tone). Along the way we get a tour of the various currents in 19^th and 20^th century philosophy especially the Sartre-de Beauvoir-driven existentialism popular in Europe in the post-World War II period. Old Abe is bored, frustrated, blocked and temporally sexually impotent (with emphasis on the temporary). So naturally a good-looking philosophy professor with rock star quality is irresistibly attractive first to a fellow female professor and the big prize of every male college professor’s sexual fantasy dream, that budding co-ed who is ready willing and able to jump into bed with him, Jill, played by fetching Emma Stone.

That part is straight up college romance stuff and not enough these days to get anything but a yawn (or a review before the faculty board for corrupting the morals of the youth, the female youth and therefore a violation against the unwritten law of intergenerational sex). What jumps this one up after the long sexual foreplay before Abe and Jill hit the sheets is that Abe has an epiphany- gets religion at the local diner after overhearing some poor bedraggled woman speaking about how she is getting screwed over by the justice system in her divorce by a corrupt judge friendly to her husband’s case. That overheard conversation gets Abe’s juices flowing (literally as he jumps in the hay with that smitten fellow professor who had been trying to jump his bones during his temporary impotency). He decides to be not merely man but superman, decides to play God and change that woman’s fate-for the better of course. Kill the judge and end the misery.        

 And old Abe does so with poison after stalking the judge. Of course Jill who overheard that same diner conversation was shocked when she heard that the judge had died unexpectedly of what at first was called a heart attack then murder, murder most foul, murder by poison. Then as always the pieces started falling together. As always as well crime doesn’t pay, the criminal must pay the cinematic price for his foul deed, and Jill finally figures that Abe did that misbegotten judge in. She, middle class and conventional at heart, had no truck with some Nietzsche-crazed idea and tells Abe to turn himself in, or else. The “or else” is what Abe opted for trying to kill dear Jill in an elevator mishap. But rough justice will out in the end in this wicked old world sometimes and in the scuffle to throw Jill down the waiting elevator shaft Abe took the fall from Eden. And Jill, well, Jill is wiser for the experience. Enough of irrational supermen for her. Yeah, Woody was up to his old tricks- again.            

“Not Afraid Of Man Nor Beast”-The Continuing Saga Of Sand-Bagger Johnson-Part Five

 

“Just like my people before me I fear neither man nor beast when the deal goes down. Certainly I fear nobody on any of humankind’s golf courses, even that one we played yesterday, Tranquillo, or whatever the damn place was called,” blurred out Sand-Bagger Johnson to the fellow members of his foursome, Earl The Pearl, Roger The Dodger, and Jerry Jeff, as they say around drinking their drinks waiting on a table at La Mesa, one of a never-ending chain of steak houses in the never-ending strip malls that dot the Orlando landscape (some of a more genteel nature say mar the landscape but those fools adhere to some quaint Harvard Square, Rockport notion of the world so should be immediately discounted out of hand).

Sand-Bagger, maybe into his third, no, fourth glass of chardonnay (the wait at these never-ending chain of steak houses is also never-ending) was recapping the previous day’s adventures at the that Tranquillo course when he was challenged by Earl The Pearl to put up or shut up about his manly virtues in light of what he had just told the group about what had happened to him on the way to the seventeenth hole, a hole adjacent to the street and to some swamp refuge land -a hole which they all found out later was called Alligator Run. Needless to say as an early riser, a guy who liked to run early before the sun hit the skyline he had decided that he would take to the streets near and in the golf course they would play later that day.

As he jogged his painful miles (jog, not run, for the “purists” who only call somebody running who is like some Kenyan madman whirling dervish as “running”, you know those guys who sit around bragging about how they are going to beat up the course like a gong when they run a sleek half-marathon), flashing his little light before him to guide the way he finally got in to a pace where he stopped thinking about his knee, shoulder, ankle, hip and assorted other pains and ailments and got lost in the beauty of the run (okay, okay jog). When he ran down the dirt road along the outer edge of the seventeenth hole he noticed a bunch of what looked like logs near the large pond just after the teeing-out areas and decided to get a closer look-Jesus Christ the damn logs started to move in his direction as he suddenly realized that these were the well-known alligators who populate half the golf courses in the state of Florida. That recognition caused Sand-Bagger to pick up his pace a bit-he was able to slice a tenth of a second off Michael Boit’s world record for the 100 meters. And live to tell the tale.

Later in thinking about the matter, before being rudely challenged by the Pearl, he attributed his safe passage to the manly virtues inculcated in him since childhood, maybe some genetic disposition from generations gone by. “Yeah, old Sand-Bagger could say with no smirk on his face that he feared neither man nor beast on or off the links.                     

Oh yeah, summary for Casey-a sparkling 99 on a tough Tranquillo course and a pair of-two-two- and two victories against Jerry Jeff and Roger the Dodger. These guys never heard of five dollar bets like such a sum would only be proposed by some kind of golf hustler. The Pearl proved to be a bit faint-hearted claiming that he did not take to the idea of “paying” for his fellows golf excursions. He was taken for three bucks in the dangerous category of putting. Sand-Bagger did just then wish for the manly company of Lucky Pierre, Casey and Zow who knew how to put their monies where their mouths were. Selah.     

Like Some French Girls That He Knew-With The Musee D’ Orsay In Mind

 

By Zack James

He didn’t know exactly when he first noticed her in her short mini-skirt showing well-turned legs, her slender body always a plus with him, those eyes which from that distance he was not sure of but he would have predicted (giving hope to the answer) blue and that long ravishing hair, black and shiny sheen. It might have been as he left the Metro stop at the Musee D’ Orsay and headed toward the museum entrance and he had noticed that by the swish of her hips that she was that kind of sexy girl that if he had been America, his homeland, he would have gone up to and began some kind of half-clumsy school-boyish conversation and hoped for the best but that on foreign territory, sweet beloved Paris, he found that he wanted to be more circumspect.

That notice business might have been when she turned around and looked across the street toward the Seine wistfully to notice that storm clouds were forming that warm September day and that she probably rued the fact that she had not brought her umbrella (at least from hi vantage point then no umbrella against the day’s storms as noticed by him. Probably the first real connection though it was at the ticket counter when he, a couple of lines over from her as she turned to get her wallet out of her pocket book to get her Euros for admission, noticed that she looked in his direction and gave him a semi-Mona Lisa smile which he took for an interest of some sort. Of course under the influence of museum Paris and the Mona Lisa home across the river Louvre he very well could have imagined that smile designation. In any case that last quizzical smile was all he needed to make his plans for that afternoon. He would “stalk” her, discreetly of course until he could find some obvious reason to make a comment to her about some painting and see what played out.

An old trick, that sublime “what does that painting do for you” line that  he had learned long ago when somebody in Cambridge after he had suffered through his first divorce told him that spicy, spunky, sexy, intellectual young women, and older women too in that same category but then he was like now hung on the younger female set, would “troll” the bookstores then plentiful in the Square looking to be “picked up” to use a term of art of the times by guy who were looking for fetching intelligent company. One of those bookstore “pick-ups” had after a few dates told him that his friend’s intelligence was right but that the “real” pick up locale was the museums because while most guys would be willing to troll the bookshops that would probably balk at hanging around museums so anybody willing to go through that ordeal to meet interesting women must have something going for him.

 

So he had his game plan ready. He noticed that after paying her admission fee she went directly to the mezzanine to view the Gauguins and Van Goghs which then had a special section. Along her way around that section though he noticed that she had stopped at a painting of a secondary Expressionist painter who had been grouped with the “boys,” you know the “school of” artists, the subject matter which was of the fallen revolutionaries of the Paris Commune from May 1871 when the Thiers government unleased a bloodbath on working-class Paris. She stood before that painting for several minutes before he realized that this event was his was his big chance. Big chance on the off-chance that she might have some knowledge or connection with the events of the Commune which if she was French, and he was not sure if that was the case although everything about her “spoke” French to him, a lot of people he had met had some connection with even over hundred years later. In any case he had plenty of knowledge about the Paris Commune because when he was younger he had been devoted to that event as an example of working class solidarity and the possibilities of left-wing rule in those heady Commune days when if a couple of things had gone right they might have survived longer (he was not sure the thing could have survived in Paris alone then over the long haul)

He boldly, boldly for him seeing that he was probably twice her age and not sure of her nationality just then, slide up beside her and commented that those fallen brethren deserved all the pictorial commemoration any true artist could have given them. Back then when choosing sides counted-and could cost you your head. She turns around and after a confused moment gave that same semi-Mona Lisa smile that she had thrown his way earlier. Then she said, “My great-grandfather Dubois on my mother’s side suffered transportation to Tasmania for his devotion to the “cause.” Bingo. Then he went into a short spiel about how when he was younger he was devoted to the memory of the Communards, used to commemorate March 18^th every year with fellow radicals and reds in Cambridge when after the failure of bourgeois politics to change anything, to stop the Vietnam War particularly, everybody headed to start reading Marx and the others and in that pursuit came across the Marxist defense of the Communards.                       

Second bingo-the male model for one of the fallen Communards represented in the painting was great-grandfather Dubois’ son, her great- grand uncle who had passed away when she was very young but who was always spoken of in hushed terms both for the modeling job and for surviving the bloodbath of 1871 when he was only fourteen and on the barricades. They found that conversation required more attention and so sat down on the marble seats that are scattered around that great big train station of a museum. After talking about the Communards and those sorrowful beautiful memories of such heroic action for the benefit of working people they got around to their respective professions. He told her that while he tried for a very long time, longer than most of his friends, that he had eventually broken from his active radical past and gone back to law school and so had practiced law for a number of years (he, and probably every older guy trying to relate to younger women was vague of dates and number of year issues to avoid the generation whipsaw of non-recognition of events, personalities, and fads by the later).

She startled him when she told him, making him laugh when she said it must run in the family, referring to that long ago relative used as a model for the painting that drew them together, that she was a cam model. A cam model being then the new Internet come hither sex site novelty where a woman, presumably a young woman although nothing would have precluded an older woman from doing the same thing  then, maybe now too on a sex site catered to a taste for older women, acted provocatively on camera and “lured” guys in with texted sex talk…and more. For a price she laughed. Meaning she told him to get to see or hear anything of real sexual interest required the usual joining the site at so much a month on the credit card (with small print telling you that unless you opted out you would continue to be charged monthly even if you signed up only for say a month and didn’t expect to go further with the pursuit). She made him laugh at that last part since he had on occasion pursued such sex sites. 

Now that cam model stuff then was pretty tame, almost a public service for shy or inhibited men with big sex dreams and appetites (and credit cards0, compared to the anything goes stuff today but it still kind of made him a little fearful to go forward. But she had that winning smile and those nice bodily features that got his thinking up a bit of bedrooms and wild sex. Moreover she seemed to have no particular desire to leave his company when he asked her if she would join him for lunch. She smiled and said yes that she was hungry and that she liked the way the conversation was going.

At the Café Blanc up on Saint Germaine Boulevard toward Notre Dame after they had ordered some wine and a light lunch she told him more of the details of how she got into her profession as a sex worker (a term of art that he appreciated when she first mentioned that was really what a cam model was as he had in the back of his mind whore, prostitute, and call girl from his own upbringing none of those terms deemed by him to be offensive as he had in the early days of his legal career represented many streetwalkers and call girls from the “Combat Zone ” in Boston when the city authorities made their periodic raids to show they were doing something about crime but his religious upbringing was a hard thing to shake). She had come from a very pious family background of good Catholic radicals and had been a very good student at Saint Clare’s when she was in high school. Had dreamed of college maybe being a doctor, something like that. Still had the edges of those dreams in the back of her mind. But then her father, a well-known marine biologist, died when she was fourteen leaving her and three younger siblings, all boys, along with their mother to fend for themselves.                           

Initially there had been some family help, the mother worked and she juggled school and playing “mother” to the three younger boys while the mother was at work. Then her mother developed lots of unclear to her health issues and from there circumstances spiraled downward. She admitted that by the age of fourteen she had already had very quietly in another part of the town she had grown up in had sex with a boy a little older. She blushed when she said that saying that even now if anybody knew it would have been quite a family scandal. She also said that she had liked it, still did (which he noted with a wink at her when she said that), and that the boy had taught her a few things about what turned a guy on, and what a guy liked.    

Sometime when she was sixteen she decided on her own to take her interest in sex to another level. To help with the family financial stresses and help the younger boys in their studies toward entering college. Even now the priority in poor French families was toward making sure that the boys, or at least one boy got ahead. So she would come to Paris from her suburban home and on weekends “work the streets.” Not literally but she would go to places, hotels, swanky bars, always well made-up and with a set of nice clothes on after a while, and allow herself to be picked up by guys who were looking for a “good time.” (Her expression). By hook or by crook she made some serious money because she was good at her job (he thinking job, good blow job, and she probably was good at that from a look at those big ruby red lips, when she said that) and because she always acted like a sullen mistress who needed to be sexually satisfied she had built up a good clientage after.

After a while the weekend night life turned into four or five nights a week and so she quit school nobody then much minding that action since she was bringing in many Euros. As a cover she told her family she had made the money working as a waitperson at one of Paris’ finest hotels. She laughed at that thought since she had been taken there a number of times, mostly by American men, and so knew everything about the place, had stories to tell so nobody suspected her real “career.” At eighteen though she left her home after she got into trouble for “soliciting” (which was fixed by a client, a Paris judge) and knew that she had to leave home before anything else got exposed about her real life. So she worked the streets for a while, had been a short term mistress to an Englishman until his wife shut off the funds after finding out about the affair (she laughed about those stuffy English women and their cheap ways where a rich French woman would write the whole thing off and have an affair of her own), had worked in a couple of brothels and then tiring of being on her back some much (and “playing the flute,” which she told him later was just her term for a blow job that she had learned from that first boy lover who said for her to “play the flute for me” and she didn’t know what he meant until he pulled her head toward his cock and took her to put it in her mouth she would figure it out from there) made a connection which landed her the cam modelling job. She laughed when she said it was easier on the back-and the mouth too.

That story told as they sipped their after meal small wine as they went through the banter of what to do next. He suggested they go to his hotel. She asked where. He mentioned that same famous hotel that she knew so well which made her laugh as she accepted. They left the Café, stopped for a couple of bottles of wine and headed to the hotel. After a hard afternoon of love-making, including her “playing the flute,” which as he suspected she played well she told him she had to go. But before going she said she was still supporting that threesome of younger brothers these days through college. Could he give her, besides the taxi fare home, a “donation.” Now it was his turn to laugh as he unfolded a one hundred Euro note. Every time he was in Paris for the next couple of years he would call her up when he was in town. She would come and “play the flute” for him and other delights. And always ask for a “donation” with the cab fare. He would smile a wise smile as he unfolded the one hundred Euro note as he had that first time. Then one time he called her number and got no answer, got no forwarding message either. He figured, wanted to figure, that the last of the brothers had finished up school and so she had moved on too. But he would always remember some French girl that he knew.