This blog has been established to provide space for stories, comments, and reflections on old North Quincy, your thoughts or mine. And for all those who have bled Raider red.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
***Out In The 2000s Crime Noir Night-“Sin City”-A Film Review
Sin City, starring Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, based on Frank Miller's graphic
novels, co-directed by Frank Miller, 2005
No question I am a film noir,
especially a crime film noir, aficionado. Recently I have been on a tear
reviewing various crime noir efforts and drawing comparisons between the
ones that “speak” to me and those that, perhaps, should have been better left
on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy and need no additional comment
from me as their plot lines stand on their own merits. Others, because they
have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, femme fatale to muddy the
waters also get a pass. Of course when I think of noir it is 1940s-50s noir,
black and white in film and in the good guys-bad guys constellation with a
little murder and mayhem mixed in to keep one’s eyes open just in case there is
no femme fatale to muddy the waters. Neo-noir, such as the film
under review, Sin City, is another matter, perhaps. Here’s the why of
the perhaps.
Central to the old time crime
noir was the notion that crime did not pay and as stated above the bad
guy(s) learned that lesson the hard way after a little mussing up or a date
with a bullet. Kids’ stuff really when compared to the over-the-top action of
this three vignettes series on modern day good guys versus bad guys. Three
separate male characters, all tough guys and guys you would want to have at
your back if real trouble headed your way, are trying, trying within the
parameters of common sense or believability, to clean up slices of Sin City.
Sin City as the rather obvious name implies, is in the grips of corruption from
the top down, including in virtually every civic institution. Our avengers are
trying to cut a wedge into that bad karma by individually, one, tracking down a
bizarre, politically connected heir whose thing was slice and dice of very
young girls, two, avenge the death of a high class call girl who was kind to
one tough guy, and, three, keep the pimps and cops at bay in the red light
district where the working girls have set up their own Hookers’ Commune.
All of this doing good is, of
necessity in today’s movie world, linked up with, frankly, over the top use of
violence of all sorts from cannibalism to barbaric death sentences, well beyond
what tame old time noir warranted. Apparently the succeeding crime waves
since the 1940s have upped the ante and something like total war is required to
exterminate the villains. That and some very up-to-date use of cinematography
to give a gritty black and white feel to the adventures. And also a not small
dose of magical realism, suspension of disbelief, and sparseness of language to
go along with the plot and visual action.
But here is the funny thing, funny for an old-time crime
noir aficionado, I really liked this film. Why? Well go back to the old
time crime noir premise. Good guys (and then it was mostly guys- here some very
wicked “dames” join in and I know I would not want to cross them, no way)
pushed their weight around or tilted at windmills for cheap dough or maybe a
little kiss. They got mussed, up, trussed up, busted up in the cause of some
individual justice drive that drove the “better angels of their natures.” Guess
what, sixty years later, a thousand years advanced cinematically, a million
years advanced socially (maybe) and these guys are still chasing windmills.
Nice, right.
***Out In The 1950s Be-Bop Night-Rick’s Flying Saucer
Rock Moment
He was glad, glad as hell that angel
thing, that guardian angel hovering over you and at your beck and call making
sure that you don’t fall off some wagon, don’t do any of the one thousand one
hundred and one that Mother had warned you off, and don’t do anything he (or
she as the case maybe), the angel wouldn’t do, was over and done with. You know
that Sunday school thing they beat you over head with about how your guardian
angel was there to keep you on the straight and narrow, or else. Yes, Rick
Roberts certainly was glad that was over although now that he thought about further
it just kind of passed out of sight as he got older and other things filled his
mind. Things like girls, the mystery of girls at first, but no strictly the
mystery of his June ("June Bug" was his pet name for her but he had
better not hear you call her that, especially one Freddie Jackson, or else).
Yes, Rick was now large enough, strong enough, and smart enough strong, not to
have to worry about some needlepoint guardian angel looking out for him. He
could look out for himself and his June Bug. Although truth to tell he was
worried, a little anyway, kind of vaguely like a long of the talk around the
subject, about this Cold War red scare Russian bear thing (his father, Rick, Senior,
an old World War II warrior and just as patriotic as the next man called them Russkies)
over here to take his brain away, or maybe put the big heat on him, the A-bomb
heat and creating alien things from outer space to haunt his dreams. But only a
little.
What was exercising Rick these days
was his June (you know her pet name but don’t say it, please) and causing him
no end of sleepless nights was that thing about Freddie Jackson, June’s old
flame. At least according to his sister, Celia, a reliable source of North
Adamsville High gossip, and not afraid to spread it when it pleased her, was
that Freddie was taking his peeks at June, and she was peeking back. So,
lately, in order to pass those sleepless fretful nights Rick had begun to sit
up in his bedroom at night with his transistor radio on, the one that he had
forced his parents to buy him, batteries included, last Christmas, rather than
the practical ties in some god awful colors and styles that he would not be
caught wearing they had intended to foist on him. And what Rick listened as the
hour turned to midnight was The Crazy Lazy Midnight Madness Show on
WMEX, the local be-bop, no stop, all rock radio station the that got the
sleepless, the half-awake, the lame and the lazy through the 1950s Cold War
night, and into the dawn.
Now this Crazy Lazy Show fare
was strictly for night owls, stuff that would not appeal to daytime rockers,
you know, those listening to guys like Elvis, Carl, Bo, Little Richard, and
Jerry Lee, or just stuff that appealed to Lazy’s off-center, off-beat funny
bone. One night, one really restless night, as Rick was revving up the
transistor around midnight he heard Buchanan and Goodman’s silly The Flying
Saucer, parts one and two back to back no less, so you see Crazy was
serious about presenting goofy stuff. That was followed by Sheb Wooley’s
devouring the Purple People Eater, and then, for a change of pace The
Royal Teens be-bop Short, Shorts and that got his to thinking about how
good June looked in them, and then back to zaniness when Bobby Pickett’s
flattened Monster Mash hit the air, and as he got a little drowsy, The
Detergents waved over Leader of the Laundromat.
That last one got to him, got to him
good, because, believe it or not the song had sentimental value to him. See he
met June at the North Adamsville All-Wash Laundromat one day. His mother’s
washing machine had broken down and she needed to bring the Roberts laundry to
the All-Wash and Rick drove her over. During that time June had passed by, he
had said hi, they had talked and then more seriously talked, and that was that.
Freddie Jackson was after that dust, a memory, nothing to June.
All this thinking really got Rick tired this night and as
the last chords of Laundromat echoed in his head he fell into a deep
sleep. Around four o’clock in the morning though he was awoken with a start,
with the high pitched whining sound coming from somewhere outside his window.
Next thing he knew a huge disc-like object was hovering over most of
Adamsville, and stayed there for maybe a minute before departing just as
quickly as it appeared. Rick took this for a sign, a sign that he and June
would hang together. And a sign, maybe a sign from some unknown benefactor, that Freddie Jackson probably should have
taken a trip on that flying saucer while he could, or else.
Boston, Mass.-May, 27, 2013: Peace activists gathered on Boston's waterfront to observe a Memorial Day For Peace-an alternative to the usual militaristic displays of the day.
Boston, Mass.-May 27, 2013: About 100 peace activists, including Veterans For Peace, Military Families Speak Out, United For Justice With Peace, and Mass Peace Action, gathered on Boston's Waterfront near Quincy Market to observe a solemn Memorial Day against war. Speakers included veterans, a Japanese Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor, and refugees from Iraq.Also, Military Families Speak Out co-founder Charley Richardson, who recently passed away, was memorialized as a true and dedicated man of peace. After the speakers, participants one by one tossed flowers into the bay as the names of Mass. US troops and Iraqi and Afghani civilians who were killed in the US wars were read aloud. Photos link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/protestphotos1/sets/72157633746882051/detai/
***Out On The Mean Streets- “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?”-Take Two
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
“Hey, brother (or sister), can you spare a dime?,” followed by “Got an extra cigarette, pal (or gal)?” Yah, Billy Bailey, used-to-be brash corner boy William James Bailey, certainly had the panhandler lingo down, down pat, after only a few days on the bum. Had his new “profession”down as one might have expected from a Southie corner boy, the corner brick wall in frontof Ma’s Variety over on Broadway, circa 1965 who had learned a few things in his time about the youthful clip (grabbing stuff from jewelry and department stores without paying, okay), the jack-roll (taking down a drunk or some poor wandering sap with a sap and leaving him penniless for being at the wrong place at the wrong time) and the midnight grift (a step up from the clip, taking stuff from houses not one’s own and selling itcheap through some shyster fence). This stuff was easy compared to that, and the couple of three month sentences he received courtesy of the county and state when he couldn’t explain why he had somebody’s stuff, somebody who had reported that stuff as stolen. The overhead of the profession he called in those days, those days when the world looked a lot rosier that it did just that moment. Yah , he had never been on the bum then whatever else happened .
Worse though on the bum in his own home town, his ever-loving’ roots, Boston. On the bum this time, this time a as a result of a real fall from grace fall, and not just some a vagrant short money, pick up some spare change, free campsite, Volkswagen bus pick-up sharing stews, brews and dope hitchhike road looking for the great blue-pink American West night with some honey, some Angelica honey, bum like a few years back after he had caught that breeze blowing through his generation’s window. Had given up as nothing but hubris and bad odor those old corner boy habits and had taken up a new age aura, had gotten “religion” about that peace and love stuff.For a while.
In those “for a while” days he practically made a religion, yah a religion out of living “free,” living out of the knapsack, living under a bridge in some makeshift reinforced cardboard hut, or living out in the open, before roaring campfires and hell broth kitchen sink stews, with someinteresting railroad jungle camp brothers, no sweat, if need be. But those “golden days” had dried up a few years back and now in 1976 he was facing a real skid row choice. How it happened that he came face to face with such a decision after that new age aura had turned to ashes, had turned in on itself, had turned nasty and greed-headed, if there was such a word, and started looking very much like that hard-edged corner boy night that he had grown up in we will get to along the way. First though let’s set the parameters of what 1976 panhandling, to put an eloquent name on it for “bumming”,shiftless bumming , looked like and how to survive in the new new age of everybody me-ing themselves, even with people who were not on the bum. Christ, lord the times were hard, hard times in old Babylon, no question.
See, a guy, a guy who called himself“Shorty” McGee for obviously physical reasons but who knows what his real name was, maybe he didn’t remember either after all the rum-dum sterno heat years and the endless backsides of skid row haunts, that he had hitched up with for a minute, an overnight minute at the Salvation Harbor Lights Center over in the South End kind of hipped him to the obvious tricks of the new down-at the-heels road. Like putting the two requests together deal when you were panhandling, the request for dough and then for a cigarette or coffee or something, anything to keep you moving, hustling, grabbing. Shorty said it was all a matter of psychology, of working the crowd, the downtown crowd, the bustling Park Street Station crowd, and the Copley Square sunning themselves crowd just right. The idea was that to get you out of their sights and back to whatever sweet thing they were doing that would piece you off with something and if not money then cigarettes or something like that which could be parlayed into something else in trade. So you endlessly put the two requests together, time after time after time, and always. And what happened was that when they turned you down for the dough, or maybe took you literally and pieced you off with just a dime or a quarter, Christ a dime that wouldn’t even buy a cup of joe, they could feel good about themselves, if they smoked, smoked cigarettes anyway, by passing you a butt.
Billy thought, nice, this Shorty really does have it worked out just about right. Of course dimes and drags were not going to get him out from under, not this time.
Well, rather than leaving the reader out in the dark, Billy Bailey that fair 1976 spring was not just on the bum, but on the lam as well, keeping his head very far down, very far down indeed, just in case there were some guys who were looking for him, including a few corner boys who wanted a desperate word with him. Or worse, the cops, in case some irate victim of one of his scams took a notion to “fry his ass.” and yelled for the law. Of course he was counting on them, those victims, being mainly friends and acquaintances, of the new age variety although in the end he tapped down to those corner boy roots, of not putting “the heat” on him since he had already promised through the grapevine that he would make restitution. But we are getting a little ahead of the story, let’s step back.
The early 1970s were not kind to“free spirits” the previous name for what in 1976 were “free-loaders,” strictly drifters, grifters and midnight shifters, and Billy, well, got behind in his expenses, and his bills, his ever expanding bills. You know keeping company with some honeys over on Beacon Street who were getting their kicks from slumming with jailbird corner boys before going off to marry some high-priced corporate lawyer of stockbroker who known the family for years and keeping the lid one a growing jones as result of sharing kicks with those Beacon Street swells. See the transition, the fast transition, from free “s” to free “l” caught him off-guard, moreover he was just then in the throes of a fit of “the world owes me a living,” a serious fit. Why? Well see, he as a pauper son of the desperate working poor, “felt” that since he missed out on the golden age benefits of his youth that he was to make up the difference by putting the “touch” on the richer (not really rich but richer than he knew of, no question) friends that he had acquired through his doing this and that, mainly high-end drug connections. And sampling the merchandise to, well, this is the way he put it, “get him well.”
The long and short it was that he would “borrow” money off Friend A under some scam pretext of putting it to good use (yes, his good use, including several long airplane fight trips to California and other points west-no more hitchhike roads for this moving up the food chain lad once he hipped to the changed scene) and then borrow dough off Friend B to cover some of his debt to Friend A. Something like an unconscious classic Ponzi scheme, as it turned out. And then when he got to Friend X or somewhere around there things got way too complicated and he started “kiting” checks, and on and on as far deep into his white- collar crime mind as he could think. Frankly though Billy was strictly muscle, strictly the hired gun, strictly the gofer and so he got in way over his head. That Ponzi scheme could only go on a for a short while and he calculated that "short while" almost to the day when he would have to go “underground” and that day had sprung up a couple of weeks before.
So it took no accountant or smart-ass attorney to know that dimes and drags, whatever the virtues of Shorty’s insights into the human psyche were not going to get him back on his feet. Nor many of the schemes that Shorty had outlined over at Harbor Lights as ways to grab quick cash. These were chicken feed for his needs, even his immediate needs, although some of the scams would fill the bill for a rum-dum or life-long skid row bum. But here was the secret, the deep secret that Billy Bailey held in his heart, after a few nights on bus station benches, cold spring night park benches, a night bout under the Andersen Bridge over by old haunt Harvard Square, and a few nights that he would rather not discuss just in case, he finally figured out, figured out kicking and screaming, that the world did not owe him a living and that if he wanted to survive past thirty he had better get the stardust and grit out of his eyes. But just this minute, just that underground spring 1976 minute, he needed to work the Commons. “Hey, brother, hey sister, can you spare a dime?” “Pal, have you got an extra cigarette?”
Postscript: Not all wisdom found ends happily, no matter how preciously fought for, and not all good intentions grow to fruition. Yes, Billy paid off his debts to his friends, mostly. (Not by that damn Shorty diems and drags strategy but by picking up a working relationship with a street hustler who turned him on to the growing cocaine industry as the way to get well, well with those who wanted to “fry his ass” first and foremost. Of course Billy could not leave well enough alone, couldn’t see that the thing was fixed from the beginning and rather than work his way up the food chain he got the bright idea that he would go independent. Billy Bailey was killed, murdered under suspicious circumstances never really investigated, left face down in some dusty back road while “muling” some product in a drug war shoot-out in Juarez, Mexico in late 1979. That was the official Federales report anyway, not much to hang a life on. Other sources, not narcs, said that Billy tried to skim a little something off the top, maybe a couple of kilos of cocaine, while he was doing that muling and took a couple of facedown slugs for his efforts. Billy Baily’s life was apparently so inconsequential that it was two years before his widowed mother found out what had happened to him through a hired private eyes she sent to Mexico- Jesus, maybe Billy’s should have stuck with dimes and drags-RIP Billy Bailey.
***Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night-“The Naked City”-A Film Review
The Naked City, starring Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Universal International, 1946
No question I am a film noir, especially a crime film noir, aficionado. Recently I have been on a tear reviewing various crime noir efforts and drawing comparisons between the ones that “speak” to me and those that, perhaps, should have been better left on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy and need no additional comment from me as their plot lines stand on their own merits. Others, because they have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, femme fatale to muddy the waters also get a free pass. Some, such as the film under review from 1946, The Naked City, offer neither although the stark New York City cinematography and the voice-over narration place it firmly in the genre. This film is that old noir stand-by from the period, the police procedural with its never-ending cautionary tale about how “crime does not pay.”
A little plot summary is in order. Yes, New York City, well the New York City of the 1940s and 1950s had eight million stories, although maybe really just two, rich and poor, or maybe better getting richer or sliding down poorer, but that is the subject for another day. Of course telling eight million stories, other than as a few seconds relief slice-of-life scenes, would make me very sleepy, very sleepy indeed.
So the plot line reduces the sleepiness to a minimum by telling one story, or rather one murder story that wraps quite a few people in its tentacles, including one major city homicide squad. A squad led by perennial Irish actor Barry Fitzgerald as the foot-sore but worldly-wise detective in charge. The grift (profit motive) that drives the story line is stealing jewelry from those self-same getting richer New York City swells, including an inside society swell finger man. But things turn awry when one drop-dead beautiful model winds up being murdered (maybe I should not have used just that phrase to describe that unseen model, but I will let it stand) by her some of her thieving confederates.
The twists and turns, such as they are, revolve around a mystery man lover, suitor, whatever it was never really clear, except he was daffy over that drop-dead beautiful model, and finding him since he was the logical guy to have done, or to have ordered the murder, is the order of the day. In New Jack City and elsewhere that is hard to do, one and one half hours hard to do. But in the end Barry and his homicide squad cohorts get their man, a strangely agile bad man for noir who are usually portrayed as just straight thugs. And the city moves on to the next…murder, mayhem or whatever. Not exactly my cup of tea in noir but if I recall this film was the model for a television series of the same name in the late 1950s so somebody must have though well of it beyond the slice-of-New York life scenes interspersed in the story and the great black and white cinematography of the Big Apple just after the end of World War II.
Get Ready to
March
Together in the DORCHESTER DAY PARADE!
This
SUNDAY, June 2
Dorchester People for
Peace
will be marching again this year in the Dorchester Day Parade on June 2 along
with our friends and allied organizations.Please join us!
Together,webring our
vision and our values to thousands of people along the four-mile route.
Our message will focus
on ending the war in Afghanistan and opposing any new military intervention in
Iran or Syria; reducing the military budget; and funding urgent needs at home in
our neighborhoods and communities.Thousands of marchers and parade
watchers will see our banners and get our anti-war flyers!
We’ll gather around Noon in Dorchester Lower Mills (Richmond St.) with the parade kick-off about 1pm.
We’ll have our
after-Parade barbeque and celebration at Jeff Klein’s house,
123 Cushing Ave. from about 3:30pm.Bring a dish or something to drink if
you can. Marchers can drop things off at Jeff’s house before the parade if they
want – please call ahead – 617-288-4578.
WHERE: Lower Mills,
Dorchester
Richmond Street between
Dorchester Ave and Adams Street
Look for the Dorchester People
for Peace van
You can’t drive or park
anywhere near there on Dorchester Day, so travel early and travel by T
(to Ashmont Station on the Red Line, Butler or Milton on the Mattapan trolley)
…. Or park a ways away and walk.
BRING: A
sun hat, comfortable walking shoes (it’s four miles), water. You
can bring a banner for your organization if you have the people to carry
it.
COOKOUT: After the parade at Jeff Klein’s,
123 Cushing Ave (near the end of the parade and near Savin Hill T
station)
Dorchester People for
Peace
works to end
the wars; to build a multi-racial peace movement against violence and militarism
at home and abroad; to oppose budget cuts, racism and political
repression.
Mass Rally at Ft. Meade, Maryland, Saturday, June
1
Court Martial Begins on Monday, June
3,
International Days of Action, June
1-8
Military veterans are turning out in force to show
support for PFC Bradley Manningon the eve of his historic court martial, which begins on Monday, June 3,
at Fort Meade, Maryland. The diminutive 25-year-old Manning, who has
acknowledged giving classified Army documents to Wikileaks about U.S. conduct of
the wars Iraq and Afghanistan, is facing the possibility of life in prison. In
what many people see as “overkill,” the Army has charged him with “Aiding the
Enemy,” the most serious of 22 charges. Many members of
Veterans For Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War will attend a large rally
at Fort Meade this Saturday, June 1. Veterans will also participate in
International Days of Action, June 1-8, in over 100 cities around the U.S. and
worldwide, to demonstrate widespread support for PFC Manning.
What Manning
released through Wikileaks was evidence of the routine killing of civilians
by US forces
in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the routine cover-up of these war crimes. The Iraq
War Logs and the Afghan War Diaries also revealed that military and civilian
leaders were lying to the U.S. people when they presented rosy assessments of
the progress of those wars.
“Bradley Manning is a hero who wanted
to aid the public, not a traitor who wanted to aid the enemy” said Gerry
Condon, a spokesperson for Veterans For Peace. “It is a shame that our nation
did not pay more attention to the information he shared with us three years ago.
Many lives could have been saved - hundreds of Afghani civilians and hundreds of
U.S. soldiers.”
PFC Manning has been
held in prison for over three years, much of it in solitary
confinement and under other abusive treatment, as documented by the United
Nationsl Special Rapporteur on Torture.
The Army's court
martial of Manning, which begins on Monday, is expected to continue throughout
the summer, with the prosecution presenting over 100 government witnesses, many
of them in secret testimony. Veterans For Peace will participate in a daily
vigil outside the front gate of Fort Meade.The Army's presecution
of Bradley Manning coincides with the Obama Administration's crackdown on whistle-blowers and
journalists alike. Over twice as many people are being prosecuted under the 1917
Espionage Act than in all previous administrations combined.
On Thursday, February
28, Bradley Manning made a profound and historic statement to a military court
and to the world. Reading from prepared notes for over an hour, Bradley detailed
how he released classified military and government documents to Wikileaks, and
he explained why he did so.
“I believed if the public,
particularly the American public, could see this it could spark a debate on
the military and our foreign policy in general as it applied to Iraq and
Afghanistan. It might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter
terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every
day.... I felt I accomplished something that would allow me to have a clear
conscience.”
One of the most moving aspects of Manning’s testimony was his explanation
as to why he released the so-called “Collateral
Murder” video, which shows the gunning down in
Baghdad of two Reuters journalists and bystanders by American soldiers in a US
Apache helicopter. Manning described being deeply troubled by
the video, especially the crew’s “lack of
concern for human life” and lack of “concern for injured children at the
scene.”
Veterans For Peace,
an international organization with chapters in over 100 cities,
demands that the US Army drop all
charges against Bradley Manning and release him from prison
immediately. We intend to stand with Bradley every
step of the way. We will protest at Fort Meade, Maryland and in our hometowns,
including at military recruiting stations. We will not stop until Bradley
Manning is free.
