Dreams Of Easy Rider Pretty James Preston-With Bessie Smith’s “Yellow Dog Blues” In Mind

By Fritz Taylor

Minnie Murphy, despite two marriages, or maybe because of those marriages complete with consummated kids, still had dreams, moisture-laden dreams about her “easy rider,” her Pretty James Preston, her first love if it came right down to it. Pretty James had fallen down, had taken the big fall, almost twenty years before after attempting single-handedly to rob a branch of the Granite National Bank in Braintree about twenty miles from Boston. Minnie had been standing across the street from the bank when Pretty James came rumbling out of the bank after having shot dead a bank guard who thought the money in the bank was his personal stash or something like that and had run into a police barrage while trying to get to his getaway Vincent Black Lightning. That action had unlike his twelve or so previously armed robberies (and assorted gas station and store robberies too numerous to count since the age of fifteen when he started it all robbing the Citco gas station of one hundred and seven dollars and found his profession) had slowed him up enough to let the coppers get to the bank in time for their shoot-out. Pretty James Preston, 26, D.OA. at South Shore Hospital  went down in a hail of bullets as he lived, fast, very fast and easy always with those fates of film actor James Dean and legendary outlaw Harlow Court in mind-yeah, live fast and die young leave old age for the nervous and square, they could have that all for free.   

(After childhood nobody called James Preston anything but Pretty James or they would face a fistful of knuckles-strange since during that childhood you were very likely to get that same fistful of knuckles if you called him that moniker which had been bestowed on him by his mother.  Just ask Sam Lowell.)

Once Minnie had seen what had happened to Pretty James she left the scene quickly (a witness later would say that a red-headed woman, her, had appeared nervous and appeared to be waiting for somebody across the street from the bank, and did not look like anybody she recognized in that small town at that time of day) and headed to Boston to a whorehouse where she had a friend, or rather a friend of Pretty James, in order to make some money for a getaway. Minnie had been a virgin when Pretty James came up to her and her boyfriend Lester Lannon at the Adamsville Beach one summer day while they were walking down the seawall. Pretty James had spied her in her “come hither” diaphanous summer dress going by on the boulevard, turned his bike around for a better look, liked what he saw and bold as brass (or maybe knowing two things-Lester was no match for him and had sensed Minnie was having too many womanly feelings of late for her tender age of sixteen) nodded without a word for her to get on back of his ride. Without a word she did so and that started the sweet strange love affair between her and Pretty James Preston which would continue to haunt her dreams twenty years later.    

The strange part at least to an average person, maybe a little too square average person, was that when Pretty James needed some walking around money in between robberies he would send her over to Madame LeBlanc’s whorehouse near Symphony Hall to meet expenses. When he first proposed the idea the still not fully broken in Minnie was shocked but as only Pretty James could of all the men she had loved he coaxed her after a few arguments. It had not been too bad once she decided the best way to get by was to believe she was doing it for her love of Pretty James. Madame kind of cushioned the blow keeping her away from the kinkier clientele and their odd requests. Alone now that was her first refuge, and she was grateful to Madame for taking her in.        

Minnie would eventually wind up in a rooming house in Saco, Maine before she felt the coast was clear and finally settled in Portland where she consummated those two marriages and her eternal salacious dreams of her Pretty James. Pretty James who had always called her Sugar Bowl their private inside joke for what he liked to do with her while she was sleeping. (The old Bessie Smith tune “Put a little sugar in my bowl” had been playing from some weird airwaves Chicago blues program on the radio in their motel room that night he christened her). Many a night, married or in between, she would put herself to sleep with visions of Pretty James on that fast-super fast Black Lightning, Pretty James’ pride and joy an English bike that he said put Harleys and Nortons to shame once you got it out on some super-highway and let her rip.

Even the cops couldn’t catch the bike as Pretty James proved one night after robbing a White Hen convenience store with her at his back. He pulled the throttle down on Route 24 and blew those coppers away, left them in the dust. She was so excited after that caper that she let Pretty James take her right out on the Adamsville Beach in full view of cars full of young lovers doing their own private versions of what she and her man were doing in public. Yeah, Pretty James had had an easy ride that night didn’t even need to deal with any foreplay she was so wet.                 

Minnie had not always been a biker girl, been behind an easy rider, her easy rider who slipped her on back of his bike and revved her up as he revved up that blown-out engine. Far from it. In high school before she dropped out to be with her Pretty James she was in College Prep classes, had wanted to become like a lot of young women back then before the big sea-change a schoolteacher or an artist, probably more realistically a schoolteacher since a having come from hunger the life of a bohemian artist would not have sat well with her parents, and probably not her either when time came to make choices. She also had a pretty square boyfriend, Lester Lannon. (She thought he was pretty square as well but they had known each other forever and lived two streets apart in the old Acre neighborhood of Riverdale where she had grown up for he didn’t even respond to her come hither diaphanous summer dress she wore at the beach to maybe stir him up a little.) They were forced to take public transportation when they went on dates because neither she nor Lester had a car, or access to a car. Besides Lester was so nerdy that he had flunked his driver’s test and so even if he had access to a car that would not have helped them. Needless to say both were so square that they never even thought about having sex although as least Minnie thought about it, thought about it a lot as she matured.

Minnie and Lester went along as best they could even if once in a while Minnie seethed inside, seethed some unnamed hurt, some unnamed want, inside. Then the summer between junior and senior year her whole world turned upside down. She and Lester had been walking down to the Adamsville Beach after taking the bus to the last stop before the beach. Minnie acknowledged even then that she was a conventional pretty well-brought up Irish Catholic virginal girl and more than one boy had taken a run at her despite knowing she was “going steady” with Lester. That day she had on a sun dress against the heat and so looked very tempting to any passing boys. However she was not prepared for what was to come a few minutes after they had started walking when she heard this roar come up behind them. She, they turned around for her to see her first look at Pretty James and his exotic bike. Pretty James, she could tell was somewhat older than they were, did not say word one to her, to either of them but just nodded to her to get on the back of his bike. Minnie hesitated for a few seconds thinking very quickly what getting on the back of that bike would mean and then made decision. That was the last time she saw Lester. That night after talking for most of the afternoon Pretty James took her to a motel, took all she had to give, took her maidenhead, took her a couple of times even though she was sore for a couple of days after.                 

There was hell to pay when she went home and her mother could tell, could tell as any woman could, that a dramatic change had come over Minnie, that she had joined the ranks of womanhood. Her parents had thought it was Lester she had given herself to and were ready to crucify him, were ready to call the coppers on him for “raping” their daughter. Minnie was not sure what to do so she called Pretty James to explain what was going on. He said for her to get her things together and meet him out in back of her family’s house which was filled with trees and provided cover against any snooping parents. When he showed up Minnie with a knapsack and nothing else asked what was going to happen. Pretty James said they were going to split, to stay low for a while. Without another word Minnie got on the bike and they were off. That was the last that Minnie saw of her parents, the last she saw of Riverdale for many years. Pretty James would always be under her skin, would always be like that first summer day down at old Adamsville Beach.   

The Fate Of Eddie “Fingers”-With The Film Adaptation Of George V. Higgins’ “The Friends Of Eddie Coyle” In Mind                 

By Fritz Taylor

“Did yah hear about Eddie “Fingers,” Eddie Coyle who used to come in here all the time to do his drinking and his business if you know what I mean. That found him, his body, in some Impala, a damn Chevy for Christ sakes,  over in Dorchester, over at that all night bowling alley, Timmy’s Lanes I think it is called off of Gallivan Boulevard. Found him the cops did on a routine run when they saw the car there for a few hours just before dawn with two slugs to the head, to his brains it probably was not a pretty sight,” Dillon, John Dillon but everybody called him Dillion, yelled to Joe Ricco, Joey “Bangs” who was approaching the far end of the bar to do his drinking-and his business if anybody was asking (and nobody should except the parties involved or you were as likely as not  to find out why Joe Ricco was called Joey “Bangs” by friend and foe alike).      

Joey “Bangs” took the news with something less than full blown interest since Eddie “Fingers” and he worked different sides of the street in their various “transactions” although he looked at Dillion with a little side glance when he told the story since Eddie had obviously been taken out for some indiscretion, got on somebody’s wrong gee list, somebody high up in the food chain and had paid the price. The funny thing was that Dillon who gave the appearance to the world of being a chatty kind of hare-brained bartender, of being a guy who had taken a couple of rides to stir when he was young and so had an undisclosed interest in the bar since he was a convicted felon, was a “hit” man for hire, for hire mostly by the Rizzo mob out of Providence. Knew that about Dillon since one of the guys who he had “scragged” had been a guy that he was supposed to “hit” himself except he was on another “job” and the guy who wanted to hire him let it out that he would get Dillon to do what needed to be done. Since they found the guy who was supposed to be “hit,” Johnny Shine, washed up on the banks of the Neponset River he knew Dillon had taken the job.             

Joey, as a matter of professional interest despite given no fucking consideration to Eddie’s fate, Eddie was a guy pretty low in the his organization, “Butter” Carney’s tribe, the Irish tribe, over in Southie, decided to pump the talkative bartender to see which way he would go with his story, see what lies he could make up since Dillon always was most talkative when he had something on his mind, when he talked the talk about some guy being scragged. “Hey, Dillon while you are getting me a Jack Daniels Red neat what is your take on Eddie “Fingers” going down. He was so low in Butter’s organization I figure that he would not be worth offing, would maybe just get his other hand put in a drawer and slammed like the last time he fucked up when he said a guy was okay and he wasn’t and Jimmy “Scrambles” got a ticket for a dime at Walpole.”           

Dillon, sweating a little by the heat of the day even though the air conditioning was on, came up to Joey’s end of the bar with his finger glass of Jack’s Red for Joey and whispered, although at that time of day Joey and a couple of others sitting at far corner tables were the only ones in the place, 

“I heard that Eddie had turned “stoolie,” had gone to work for “Uncle” in order to get out from under some federal stolen goods charge he was facing up in New Hampshire. I know for a fact that he was scared to do any more time, said he was too old for that, and what would happen to his wife and kids. Said some shit about how his kids would get laughed at because their father was in stir. Like that was a reason to cry to “Uncle.”  I heard he was the guy who set Jimmy “Scags” up for the fall when they had that rash of robberies a few weeks ago and one of the jobs got botched up and some bank employee got killed in a crossfire. Heard too that he set some other guy up, a young kid who was selling guys to anybody who wanted them as long as they had the dough. Heard that this kid, Jacko something was selling machine guns and Eddie had brought him down to save his ass from doing time. How do you figure a stand- up guy, stand-up because he had to who took the fall a couple of times and caught a couple of years a couple of times and didn’t cry about it went ‘soft.’”      

Joey, usually pretty stone-faced especially when he knew a guy was lying or at least was skirting the truth, just sat there with that same expression waiting for Dillon to go on. The fact that he knew as much as he did convinced Joey that he had been part of Eddie’s execution for whatever reason. Dillon continued, “ Yeah, Eddie was in here the last several weeks like this was his home using the back room telephone I had put in for guys, hell, for you to take care of your business without a lot of daytime drunks listening in to your private conversations. Always asking if this guy or that guy had left a message for him here like I was some fucking answering service. Drinking hard too a few shots in a row just for warm-ups so I knew he was feeling some kind of pressure like when guys have something serious in front of them. Asking if Jimmy “Scags” had called so I knew there was some connection. What I heard was that Jimmy had asked Eddie to get him some guys for some job and somehow Eddie had found the kid who had a source for weapons as they were coming off the line, unused, and not traceable. Heard that some Army kids were grabbing half the weapons up at Devens and selling them to the kid to feed their cocaine habit, or their girlfriends’ habits something like that.”       

“I suppose you heard about that bunch of robberies down on the South Shore, a bunch of banks?” Joey nodded in the affirmative since everybody had heard about them at some point if not the first few then the last two where a bank employees was killed and the next one where Jimmy “Scags” and his boys were jolted by the Feds in some banker’s house as they were going for one last score. “You know Jimmy was master at robbing banks, no fooling, he would have the job cased out to perfection. The beautiful thing about these robberies was that it was like taking candy from a baby, see he knew who was vulnerable, who had something to lose, and he would take himself and the boys and grab the guy at his house and leave “Jerry The Lid” to keep watch over whatever hostages they had taken. Beautiful work. 

Except that one where “Fats” Malzone, probably full of dope, went crazy when he thought that bank employee had pulled the alarm. Then the last caper where the Feds were tipped off. Tipped off by Eddie the more you think about the matter since he was the “missing link,” the guy who provided the guns from what Lou Reilly told me since he had seen a grocery bag full of them one afternoon when Eddie had given him a ride to the supermarket and he saw the bags when Eddie opened the trunk of his car.”              

Joey, still sitting there stone-faced, knew that Dillon had been somehow involved in Eddie’s death since he knew far too much for a guy who was supposed to be on the outside on this stuff. In the closed-mouth world of doing this and that not always legal he just knew too much. Maybe he had “tipped” the coppers himself who knows, maybe he had something hanging over him and he needed to do something for “Uncle” to get well. “You know they, the Feds, grabbed that kid, that Jacko out at the Sharon commuter rail stop with a lot of machine guns in shopping bags so you know Eddie must have “snitched” trying to do himself some good since the kid was not connected, was a free-lancer from what Dougie the Dope told me after the kid was pinched and taken to the police station downtown to be held for arraignment before a federal judge. The kid was screaming bloody murder that somebody had turned him over. Yeah, Eddie fits the bill.”           

Joey sat there and ordered another drink, another Jack’s Red and thought hard about what Dillon had said and made certain conclusions about what he was to make his report about. Then Dillon, still sweating from his bald head said out loud that he wondered how Eddie had cashed his check. Joey had already pieced together that Dillon had probably got Eddie drunk, probably at some other place than this bar, probably had, since Dillon was notorious for not having a car, not having a driver’s license, his driver drive someplace and then dumped the body over at the fucking bowling alley. Yeah, this had Dillon’s fingerprints all over it.      

Joey figured out his report in his head as he got up from the bar, paid his bill and left a tip on the counter. As he exited the door he thought that Butter would be hiring him for a job pretty soon. See Joey Bangs knew, knew as well as he knew anything in his world that no matter how low the late  Eddie Fingers was in Butter’s organization you had to take care of your own, avenge what needed to be avenged. Just another job though. 

Traipsing Through The Arts-With The Ghost of Writer John Updike And His Three Books On His Travails Through The Art World In Mind- “Just Looking” (1989)-A Book Review And More

Book Review

By Laura Perkins

Just Looking, John Updike, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1989 

[Since we live in the age of transparency probably honored more in the breach that the observance what with everybody telling only what they need to tell and keep the rest as secret and silent as the grave unless some moneybags publisher comes hither with filthy lucre I should mention here that my “ghost” in this Traipsing Through The Arts on-going series Sam Lowell played in several charity golf tournaments in Ipswich and other North Shore of Massachusetts venues with the author under review. Despite both being golf nuts, and believe me that description is accurate on both counts as both have written extensively about their trials and tribulations “on the links,” whenever there was a chance to talk say at the after round banquet Sam and Updike would go round and round about art which both were crazy about although I would not use the word ‘nut” on that interest. They would get in dither especially if Sam had read one of Updike’s hot museum exhibition reviews in The New York Review Of Books which is where a good number of the reviews in the book under review got their first breath of life. Laura Perkins]

Since the beginning of an on-line series titled Traipsing Through The Arts series published in Growing Up Absurd In The 1950s and its sister and associated publication of, hopefully, off-beat personal takes on works of art that have interested me I have railed what I call the art cabal, what in an earlier time I might have scornfully called the academy. (The academy in various guises what the “Young Turks” of the art world rebelled against once enough of them were rejected and set up their own exhibitions, most famously the Impressionists in Paris and by extension the famous 1913 New York Amory show that brought that breathe of fresh air to America.

That cabal for your inspection includes the usual suspects, I could name names but today let us just scorn the generic universe, the up-ward striving art directors staging improbable mega-exhibitions filled with loads of hype not so much in the interest of art as expanding their revenue flows via outrageous ticket price sales, souvenir sales, and 24/7/365 (or however long the exhibition goes for) drumbeats about not missing the work of the latest previously correctly neglected artist, ancient or modern. On second thought under art directors I should mentioned one Allan Dallas, the now imprisoned ex-director who had until he was caught red-handed after many years of working the scam of having his still at large master forger do a reproduction of say a Renoir or whoever the greedy little hustler art collectors were directed to outbid each other on and “sell” that at a public auction and then the real one to some superrich and discreet private collector. Who knows he may have had a hand in the infamous mass art thefts at the Isabella Gardner Stewart Museum in Boston. Certainly Dallas could not be discounted any more than anybody else since the merchandise has not reappeared for many years. Now that I have my blood up in the future when my backlog of art works to review settles a little I will scorch earth this art cabal with plenty of names and their evil deeds. 

To continue with the rogues’ gallery the press agents and flak-catchers who protect their turf by merely re-writing the releases somebody in the director’s office threw together (the so-called arts journalists for the glossy magazines and nationally-known major newspapers are the worst not even re-writing this palaver but sending it straight in to the editor unedited maybe clipping the title off but usually not even then. Sam Lowell will give you all you ever need to know including his own similar slimy outrages in the days before he went into a twelve- step program). The upward striving curators hoping against hope that they will get to move up the ladder, what Sam always and maybe correctly calls the food chain, after curating some exhibition including the obligatory five-thousand-word essay about the meaning of whoever they are touting that day works not knowing that this profession is almost as cutthroat as the film review profession. The art patron/ donors whose only part in the drama is to pony up, look good at cocktail parties and make sure their names are etched correctly on whatever museum room, wall cafeteria, elevator, restroom, janitorial closet they ponied up for. The poor sappy hedge fund manager art collectors whose only knowledge of art is how much their agents bid at auction driving up the prices beyond any rational number, more importantly tucking those works away from public view for who knows how long.           

Worst, worst of all warranting their own separate paragraph the vaunted art gallery owners who without the infrastructure mentioned above to cater to the average collector off the street since most of the other stuff is at auction or private, very private sale, would be stuck with plenty of unsaleable merchandise. I made Sam laugh one time when I mentioned that these gallery owners without that backup from all the nefarious sources would have stiff competition with your off-hand priceless Velvet Elvis hangings at the local flea markets which they would be reduced to for hawking their wares, their various bricks and tiles thrown hither and yon and declared art.

The only ones connected with the cabal, if marginally, that have my sympathies are the poor, totally bored security guards who these days have all matter of device sticking out of their ears whether to keep eternal vigilance or to hear whatever music they have tapped into I don’t know. Oh, and the average museum-goer cum non-art critic writer like the author under review novelist John Updike and his travelling museum exhibition road show put in book form, non-coffee table book form Just Looking. Updike (see above in the brackets for his “relationship” with Sam Lowell) has loved art and going to art museums since he was a kid in Pennsylvania and his local art museum drew his attitude. He had something in common with me, and more generally Sam, in that he was an art aficionado, a self-described artist, without having the wherewithal to pursue that as a profession. Writing about art turned out to be his later in life métier. Join the amateur junior league club brother and welcome.

I have (along with my “ghost” Sam) staked out a certain way to look at art, especially the art of the 20^th century which is the period of art that “speaks” to me these days around the search, although that is not exactly the right word and I hate it as well, for sexual awakening and eroticism in the post-Freudian world. Not the only theme but the central one for which I, we, have decided to take on all comers to defend. And we have had to so far in the birthing process beat off self-serving Brahmin reputation protectors, and here I will mention the name of one dowdy Arthur Gilmore Doyle who seems to have been left adrift in social consciousness around 1898, irate evangelicals who could care less about art, hate it, would not let their kids go to an art museum for love nor money but are worried that their kids might read that art and sex and not mutually exclusive, and a hoary professional art critic who is fixated on the search for the sublime, for pure abstraction, art for art’s sake and maybe art to cure headaches and gout for all I know. He has a name Clarence Dewar from Art Today who Sam long ago exposed as a toady and sycophant. Updike’s beauty beyond the casual way he leads the reader to his insights is exactly that. Unlike Doyle, the rabid, or Dewar he has no axe to grind, he has no monstrous and ever-hungry cabal to protect and although he would by no stretch of the imagination subscribe to the sex theory of modern art (and a couple of other flaky but true observations not directly related to defending the thesis.)

Updike is as eclectic in his wanderings, observations and “takes” on his assignments as I am, (as Sam would be as well if he ever had taken the on-going series when he was offered it on a plate). A quick run-through of this the first of three books (one published posthumously) going through Updike’s keen-eyed writerly paces. Maybe not so strangely I have been able to “steal” a few ideas he has presented to go off on my own quirky tangent which I will mention as I detail his experiences at the world’s major (and a couple of minor) art museums.

After taking us on a two-edged trip through the changes, not all of them to his liking, at MoMA from his first times going through in the 1950s to a retrospective look in the 1980s he run through a potpourri of artists starting with Richard Estes (who had been interviewed about the question of sex in his work by Art Today saying that his telephone booth work (quaint these days when you could not find one except maybe in a museum exhibition (the real ones at the National Gallery have been long out of use) is filled with sexual meaning from trysts to exhibitionism although Updike passed on that one. Following Proust apparently in one of his volumes from his In Search Of Lost Time (my preferred translation) Updike went on and on about Vermeer’s painting of his native city of Delft which frankly made me yawn a bit since there are a million such scenes of cities by a million artists, especially seemingly nostalgic Dutch artists and Grand Tour devotees of Venice. What would have not made me yawn would have been if Updike had tackled Vermeer’s erotic The Girl With One Pearl Earring. This obviously an indication that we have different takes on some painter which is okay.     

        

I have staked out the 20^th century, post-Freudian, post-Jungian, post-Kleinian if there is such a word art work as the epitome of the search for sex and eroticism but that is hardly the only century or only art movements concerned with the subject and Updike draws closer to the nub in dealing with the famous nudes by Cranach. The famous take on Adam and Eve in the Garden as they grab the apple. No question that the Christian period has produced some very erotic art and these nudes are exemplars of that notion despite the previous say one thousand years of trying to make the memory of Greek and Roman naked and kinky art disappear. I showed the paintings that accompany Updike’s essay to Josh Breslin who almost flipped out when he saw Eve commenting that he had had a girlfriend in his hippie youth in the 1960s who looked just like her, including those long forever braids that took her forever to unwrap and unsnarl which he claims led him to become a serious dope fiend waiting for her to get ready. He was so awestruck he kept coming back to my desk to view the photograph. So you can image what some prince, priest or merchant must have thought when viewing the mother of us all in his private bedroom, monastic cell or counting room.       

We can safely pass over a few essays about children in art for one is, me, heartily tired of seeing Winslow Homer’s winsome sun-burned farm boys lolling away in a field and Singer Sargent’s overblown portrait of the impatience Boit sisters. I thought I was going to be thrown out of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on day when a matronly volunteer guide was going through her paces about the Boit painting on the second floor of the American Art wing and said within hearing distance that I was sure the Boit sisters were more that happy to unload that albatross from their fretted away childhoods on the museum since none of them wanted to keep the foolish thing once they got to the age of reason or from under their screwy parents thumbs. (I have since learned that at least one of the sisters, Cecelia her name I believe, the pubescent girl in the shadows was so pissed off at the long hour sittings that Sargent who seemed to have plenty of time on his hands in between dinner parties with the rich and connected put them through that she almost burned the damn thing one night. Reason: some boy she was interested in lost interest when she kept breaking their dates. Go, girl, go I could relate to that for sure.)  

While we are on the subject of Sargent, John Singer Sargent in case you forgot the days when everybody from stiff brush artists to Boston high-end merchants and bankers wore three names I swear as proof against illegitimacy, something less worrisome these days when plenty of unwed single mothers are raising their two name off-spring in quiet desperation, drew Updike’s soft pedal ire. (Having four children two each from two marriages and two divorces I know from whence I speak on the desperate mother issue.) It seems the guy whose reputation the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston beyond that silly Boit vase business is firmly wedded to enhance, has drawn more succor than you could shake a stick from exhibitions, displays, programs and the like is an overblown, overrated artist in his book. Sargent, having been born with a silver brush in his mouth and more skill and ease of painting than seems natural he never reached his full potential, always left something on the palette.

Maybe it was the fatal decision to spend his prime painting the rich and famous for big dollar commissions and a chance to sit at the bachelor seat at those elegant dinner parties where he fought dear friend Henry James (allegedly they called each other the improbable Hank and Jack) for invitations. Maybe it was not being washed clean by the Impressionists some of whom he actually painted alongside like Monet. Or maybe later getting hung up on murals which were in those days (and later except for guys from Mexico like Diego Rivera) seen as cheapjack, second-rate art by third-rate artists which led nowhere but saved the rotunda at the MFA from looking pretty drab. Whatever the reason Updike after viewing what was probably the umpteenth Sargent painting since it appears no museum in America is without at least one pulled the thumbs down on his overrated reputation. Thank, John.        

Of course, Updike, looking from a different perspective, didn’t come close to checking out some other obvious factors for why Sargent when all is said and done is only a second their member in good standing of the pantheon. The scandal over his Madame X portrait leading the way which sent the timid and oversensitive Sargent out of Paris on the fastest ship over to sweet home London exile. The scandal on its surface is bad enough having shown just too much bosom and a suggestive dropping dress strap of the famed professional beauty but having exposed her myriad extramarital sexual affairs to public scrutiny (egged on by her almost bankrupt husband) was too much for prissy French high society.

It was later revealed by one of his dear friends that Sargent actually hated women and that he either painted them as whores, or what you might as well call whores even if not working the streets or as puffy dowagers and brainless twits. Updike was on to that idea but never pursued the idea going on and on about his work lacking psychological depth. The elephant in the room and corollary to the hatred of women which Updike actually almost alluded to and which my “ghost” Sam Lowell, citing the great English poet W.H. Auden was deep into homosexual relations, “the love that dare not speak its name” and justifiably since the laws were harsh on that subject then. That explains a lot and a tip of the hat to Updike for at least letting a breath of fresh air in on the subject. 

As we move along we can blow off a couple of short nowhere and not worthy of his time essays on folk artist Erastus Field since even the liberal MFA throws his works and the few pieces of folk art they exhibit down in the dungeon, the netherworld ground floor of the American art wing where they generally do not even bother to post a security guard. The National Gallery specifically in its high horse days refused to let the stuff in the building and relegated it to the “garage” over on the first floor of the National Portrait Gallery where I did notice, once, they had a security guard although he was busy texting away. I will skip the essay on the incredible female nude that the drunken sod Modigliani painted as a throwback to medieval art since it would only unfairly buttress my argument about sex and the century. Certainly would give Cranach’s Eve a run for her money in the “hot” contest.

Updike then does a trifecta, or maybe the publisher who arranged the chronology since not everything is in order by period or by the time he went to an exhibit or had just hanging out at a museum to channel something, on the French Impressionists, Renoir, Monet, forever Monet, and the known pervert Degas. Renoir can be handled in a few sentences because everybody knows that beyond painting party-goers, working-class party-goers to boot and nude women, women whose baby doll faces betray their definitely womanly bodies and raise the question about why somebody didn’t have the guts to report him to the gendarmes as a child pornographer he was pretty shaky as an artist. Had terrible eyesight that only got worse with age unfortunately (although it did not seem to disturb his ability to what I finally figured left him out of the court system and out of prison to very accurately paint those cherubic girls in women’s form which was his “alibi” that he was doing the whole grift from memory). Okay, it is too late to grab him by the neck now in an age which is better able to defend the “best interests of the child” but he should be taken down a peg in his standing and maybe his paintings should be discounted to $9.95 in protest.

Monet, forever Monet the father of us all, the father of the modern and hence the max daddy of the sexual revolution that accompanied the shift from worrying about representation and more about painting for effect (erotic effect the great unspoken truth among that horde of professionally paid art critics like my antagonist Clarence Dewar from Art Today). Everybody remembers him for those morning/noon and night haystacks out in the wilderness in rural France and those morning/noon and night views of some medical church in Rouen of all places. Updike on one of his seemingly endless trip to the MFA in Boston to breathe the pungent air of culture sidestepped that stuff (having already clued us in that Monet to him, to me and Sam as well, really didn’t get modern until those big sexy vaginal waterlilies which some said aroused all kinds of prurient interests back around the turn of the 19^th but today are seen as just gestures) and decided to take a run a the portrait of his wife Carmille, a former street vendor flower girl in full kimono regalia.

Today we are more sensitive to “acts of appropriation” of other cultures, here ancient Japanese tea house hostesses and severe samurai warrior cults but in the late 19^th every European with enough cash grabbed whatever they could from the ships bringing a ton of loot in, including that beautiful opium bong pipe business which was scandalous at the time but today is strictly yawn stuff. In any case Monet was no exception to the European imperial rush and somehow got hold of a valuable kimono, probably from Whistler who when not pimping his muses for walking around dough was selling at exorbitant prices whatever he could find on the London waterfront (meaning he had had to deal with the notorious Anchor & Sail Tavern gang who controlled the waterfront black market for one “boss,” Larry Lawrence). This kimono, the real interesting part beyond asking why he had his dear wife, his beautiful flirty dear wife throw on a blonde wig since when was the last time anybody saw a blonde Japanese geisha was not just any kimono but had been the possession of one of Kazu’s concubines, Kazu the leader of the Seventh Samurai Brigade which defended the Lord High Emperor.

Moreover it had all kinds of references beyond the Brigade history of the various “conquests” of Kazu in the bedroom such as they were in Japan then. When Madame Monet found out she was wearing some tart’s dress he threw a fit and almost put a knife to the damn painting. ( I am not sure unlike with that sullen Boit girl whether I would say “go girl” on this one because unlike the dour Boit vase scene this one is a great work of art.) Of course the civilized art patron John Updike would rather die than spill the beans that Monet had made his wife another holy goof in his drive for the modern.

I accuse. Maybe Sargent hated women (and “liked” men). Maybe Alexander had a serious drug problem he hid by painting strange cult figures like the opium-entranced Isabella. Maybe the seemingly totally corrupt Whistler hustled his muses to keep himself in dough and then showing serious disrespect by calling them studies in every color under the sun. Maybe Hopper was a dirty old man covering his lusts in his “art” in the Bronx or Brooklyn where the young nubile women could not see where he lurked. Maybe Jackson Pollack had trouble with his zipper. Maybe Lamont was really painting to sell high-grade pornography. Maybe Renoir’s lame defense that his eyesight was failing was for real. Maybe Monet was really culturally insensitive. All that is kids’ stuff when we come to deal with one Edgar Degas, an artist of some distinction and a pervert. Criminally so although it is way too late to prosecute now.

If Degas had stuck to the horsey set and their race horses and odd social set manner we would think of him fondly. That work however was just a cover to make his money in order to hang around every available ballet studio and dance hall in France bothering underaged girls whose only “crime” was to love ballet. Sure there were rumors that Edgar paid off the ballet masters for the “privilege” (allegedly he paid the overdue rent at many studios as well) of watching the girls but nobody ever complained. Some stories from the girls, told much later when Degas had passed have the same feel as those being told today in the #MeToo movement. But there was no such movement then and who would believe some high-strung young girl against the French treasure Degas. My advice is that the next time some billionaire buys an overpriced Degas he or she put the same amount paid for the damn painting in a reparations fund for the remaining descendants of the poor young girls he molested, robbed of their girlhoods.

The skimpy essays on Diebenkorn and funny named Fairfield Porter can conveniently be overlooked since in the former case if you say Diebenkorn you say Matisse and nothing more. In fact a few years ago the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art had a combined Diebenkorn-Matisse exhibition with two works by their respectively artists side by side and almost everybody was hard-pressed to tell who was whose (except Matisse’s colors without exception were more dramatic than those of the staid Diebenkorn). What the hell could one say about wannabe three name Porter except he was an exceptional draftsman and painted nice views of his study. Neither skills allowing the guy to enter the pantheon of 20^th century serious art and therefore according to our standard must reek of sexuality (which his work does not) and does not put a dent in our general theory. Thanks.        

Every writer, for that matter every creative artist knows that except in exceptional cases you cannot sustain a whole book, painting, play with beginning to end, 24/7 delights. The last paragraph is a good example of exactly that. I needed to throw in an off-hand paragraph to fulfill my contact to provide X number of words or face either outright rejection of the transcripts or deduction in payment. Not wanting to face either of these legal guillotines I tossed in some not-essential noise about the infamous West Coast artist Richard Diebenkorn and his master-servant, or maybe master-mere copyist relationship with Henri Matisse. Longtime writer Updike who surely knows every such trick in the book had interspersed his splendid tour with some throwaway reviews. Stuff we can finish off in a few sentences like his little piece on Ray Deforest and movement in modern art, some screed upon a hand in some sculpture in some medieval church, the baffling article on early New Yorker illustrator par excellence Ralph Barton and his off-beat life (although his non-magazine work provides some very in your face sexual material), the brief fling through Japanese art portraying nostalgia for the boyhood quest for fireflies and the ho-hum life of a medieval scholar in the days when they were mainly priests and dog eat dog hierarchy who did not have the social graces to go down in the mud with mere parishioners. Done.           

After the filler and here is the beauty of the writer Updike when he was not writing middle-class male angst novels could fly with the eagles in a piece that he did on the sculptor Jean Ipousteguy. Updike captures the sense of the earthy if not necessarily massive sculptures that he created. Thinking about Ipousteguy and his works reminded me of a secondary battle I had with the professional art critic Clarence Dewar already well-advertised above. When he challenged my characterization of Edward Hopper’s more sexually explicit paintings, almost exclusively of young and nubile women and wanted to defend his position about some holy goof meaningless verbiage on the progressive search for the sublime made an erroneous assumption that I meant only painting, stuff you could throw on the walls. In response I noted that I had not mentioned that medium as part of my sex and sensuality theory of 20^th art for the simple reason that nobody that I have seen or read about has contested that theory for sculpture. Of course sculpture is part of the mix look at David Smith, Giacometti or Brancusi. Mr. Dewar surprised me by acknowledging the obvious as pointed out by Updike that even he believed all sculpture was driven by sometimes very weird ideas about sex. Thanks, Mr. Art Critic. By the way add Ipousteguy to the sex and erotic mix he simply reeked of metals hammered from that glorious search.                  

Nobody, especially in the 21^st century where what is considered art is captured in a very big tent, has to like certain works of art, and maybe thinks some artists touted for some social, political or financial reason by the art cartel have not withstood the test of time despite the best efforts of the cabal to hustle the reputation and the works. Updike had made his personal preferences and general ideas about what in art and whose reputation does or does not stand up clear in this volume (and the latter two as well). That is the case with one Andrew Wyeth whose most famous painting was of a young physically-challenged (then crippled and hopefully in the ever- changing quick draw shifts my characterization passes the current PC litmus test) Christina out in some woe begotten field but who had a lesser known body of work doing various portraits of a female neighbor/lover? Helga, including some nudes, actually many nudes. While Updike appreciated some of the work of his fellow Pennsylvanian he mainly put a thumb’s down on this painter. It is hard to blame him for his comment that basically once you’ve seen a couple of Helgas you have had enough. Oh my god, I have said that about a national treasury. Thanks, John.

Make no mistake John Updike except almost by indirection and inference has not added any fuel to my claims for the overriding sexual nature of serious modern art. Fair enough. But then in the very last essay on writers and artists he forsakes all the many acute observations he had about art, about the times of the art, and about where art stood in the cultural pantheon. Then, subdued, no that is not the right word, suppressed artist turned writer Updike bleeds all over himself about the sympathetic relationship between the narrative of the painting and the narrative of some piece of writing. He brings in a cast of characters like Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Larry Roman, Sid Smith and a fistful of others all to pay homage to his amateurish art work. In this good green earth is possible to do more than one profession, one hobby, one avocation well but sometimes one should check the ballast at the door. A great job overall though with a nice selection of paintings and photographs to ponder while reading his museum musings (and the same is true for the other two legs of the trifecta.)            

Once Again, If I Dare, On The Summer Of  Love, 1967 -To Be Young Was Very Heaven-Out Of The Blue- Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”-NPR’s “American Anthem” series

By Seth Garth

This is a link to an American Anthem segment on the famous Buffalo Springfield song For What It’s Worth which became, well, an anti-Vietnam War anthem although it did not start out that way:

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/20/693790065/buffalo-springfield-for-what-its-worth-american-anthem  

A couple of years ago back in 2017 Growing Up Absurd In The 1950s and its’ sister and associated publications commemorated what seemed like a 24/7/365 non-stop 50^th anniversary tribute to the Summer of Love, 1967. Although it would in the end cost the prime mover of that commemoration Allan Jackson his job as site manager (he has since come back as a contributing editor) that extensive coverage made sense to a lot of the older writers at this publication. Under the guidance of the late then free spirit and still missed Pete Markin a number of us from the old working-class Acre section of North Adamsville south of Boston out to San Francisco that year. That town, and especially Golden Gate Park and the Haight-Ashbury section, was the epicenter of what was something like the beginning of a cultural revolution among certain segments of the young.

Those events in San Francisco (and Big Sur and Todos el Mundo south of that town) were written about extensively by those still standing from those days. There is therefore no reason to drag those writings out of storage here. What is important to note is that San Francisco was by no means the only place on the West Coast (and eventually in certain clots across the country) where the young alienated or just looking for something different congregated to form youth nation. Los Angeles, as the link above details, was also a hotbed of such activities. It was there that the legendary group Buffalo Springfield learned to fly and where Steven Sills wrote what would become a youth and anti-war anthem For What It Is Worth. To parse a line from the English poet Wordsworth-“to be young was very heaven.”   

(The younger writers here who has either no clue or no interest in the Summer of Love, 1967 had to check with parents or grandparents about what they remembered if anything of those times. They would wind up rebelling against having to write about those times. That led to the show-down that sent Jackson into exile.)    

  

One Righteous Man-Gary Cooper’s “High Noon” (1952 )-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

No question the western trek back in the 19^th was filled with plenty of people who for one reason or another had cashed their checks in the East and headed out to some kind of new beginning, out to the frontier (and you didn’t have to be a high-flying Harvard professor back then to figure out that once you hit the Pacific Ocean the frontier spirt was done for-unless you wanted to swim the Japan seas looking for your place in the sun). The drift trek west drew plenty of weary sod farmers, budding capitalists especially with the coming of the railroads across the great expanse and, important for the film under review, High Noon, a big fistful of desperadoes, bandits and other preying sorts. So you had a mix of free spirits and free-loaders to contend with on an average day.      

No question the West, here we are talking about what was called the Wild West of legend, book and film, drew those who were individualistic sorts, you don’t leave where you are if you have some things going for you as a rule if you haven’t cashed your check but at the same time between the dramatic climate shifts, the wrath of the Native American who took umbrage at whites settling on their sacred lands and the shoot ‘em up bandits you also needed some sense of social cohesion-needed when the deal went down to stick together.   

Now I have heard and read a lot about this film produced deep in the red scare Cold War film being a metaphor for people in those days like those settlers in the film keeping their heads down. Probably so for like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible you needed to use metaphor to get some work if you didn’t want to get blacklisted need the services of a “front.” But this film also stands for the proposition good any time that one righteous unafraid man is good to have around anytime.   

Here’s the way this shoot-out played. The Sheriff, played by Oscar-winner Gary Cooper, got married to a Quaker lady, played by fetching even in a bonnet Grace Kelly, and was ready to leave his old law enforcement life behind. Problem was though that a desperado that he had sent to state prison five years before had gotten a pardon and with his gang of men looking to get even with the good sheriff. The new sheriff was not expected until the next day but our desperado was coming in at high noon that day. So the sheriff stayed, stayed and tried to recruit the townspeople to help back him up in the coming shoot-out. For many reasons, some good, some bad, he got no takers but he was just the type to go it alone if he had to. And he did, except that Quaker lady he married when they deal went down and they were going to gun down her man became very un-Quakerly. The sheriff and the Misses saved the town as he dropped his badge on the ground after the fight and headed out of town. Yeah, I can appreciate a righteous man anytime-especially when the times make the masses keep their heads down. A classic neo-Western.   

Searching For The High White Note-With The 20^th Century Artist Stuart Davis In Mind

By Lance Lawrence

…..dazzled by the shapes, the colors, the angles and the combinations at the big retrospective of Stuart Davis’ work featured at the National Gallery of  Art in Washington, D.C. in January, 2017

The end of the American frontier formed by the splash of the Pacific Ocean kiddie-cornered his dream of catching that high white note that Johnny blowing that big sax to heaven, the Prez blowing a bigger sax to that same destination, Louie when he cared about such matters, the Duke always, always tweaking his mood poems in sound to eke out the thing he saw coming through Cotton Club jungle nights up in kingdom Harlem with all those Mayfair swells sucking the life out of whatever the touched and he/they had to wait until after hours, after the clubs closed, the tables washed down, the chairs stacked and the fucking front door shut against the swell night and blow among themselves tethered by a little Johnny Walker, the best friend an artist ever had if you believed the advertisements, tethered too by a little weed, watch out for your precious club license, letting it all hang out, letting the notes blow out the door, no, the window that fucking door is locked against all perdition, blow out to the China sea once it crossed to the frontier’s end in Frisco town and you could just see the thing float around the rust colored golden gate and in the mist then back again making another world of tobaccos, bull durham, fis it man papers to roll your own and dream of tall-masted ships sitting in the harbor after a day’s haul on in the high seas, out in the Banks, bringing in food for thought and hungers that those Mayfair swells would never know and then he had an idea, had an idea like a million other Americans with ideas and with no desire to trespass against the borders of the burgeoning American scene he started to blow his own white note, decided, no, was impelled by those Art League dreams to put speed, put the fast pony express, telegraph, telephone, television, telepathy, speed, the rust to the subway, to the highway ,the freeway, the railroad track the runway, the fast up and down of daily existence, the hurly-burly of Ritz cracker existences, of milk cow sorrows, of pretty cities with funny names and funnier storefronts with even funnier names and you could feel the restless energy behind the placard placid scene, and turn the bell into buoy into bell tower in light house into all kinds of exotic lines and angel angles for effect, for the visions of the gone world that he tried to address, address through clipped scissors like some modern day Matisse dancing figures superimposed on crescent moons, triangular prisms, squares squared before anybody even knew what square was in a candid world, threw a pentagon, no, not that Pentagon which was only a military thought back then, hexed a hexagon, didn’t touch heptagon how could he and axed an octagon just for effect while finally, finally putting those forms together on a big placard proclaiming to one and all, maybe to the candid world again that “artists must not starve” and other such idealistic ideas and you know what he was right except nobody told him that not starving did not mean drinking up an ocean of gin, an ocean of Johnny Walker Red, and ocean of, oh well you get the picture and if you don’t picture, picture a guy who if you met him on the street might have thought that he had come out of the nearest pool hall after successfully hustling Fast Eddie out of cigar and booze money, and maybe a few bucks for art supplies, yeah a character out of a Bogie movie except he could those shapes, those triangles, those squares, those pentagons and you know which one I don’t mean, those hexed hexagons, forget the hepts and curlicue the octagons and blow pretty blues, stark blacks, ruby red lipped reds, ocean, no, China seas, blues, that blue-green before the big blow and maybe just maybe capture that damn elusive high white note-hell he tried.                          

….and, and then he started to do the whole thing over again, and again and again each time haunted by the search for that high white note that Duke, Johnny, the Prez, Charlie and even Louie when he cared about such thing spent restless after hour nights behind fucking closed doors full of bad whiskey and seedy herb blowing out to the great big mist-filled night without rest. Thanks, brother, thanks.

The Front Pages From The Distaff Side-Rosalind Russell And Cary Grant’s “His Girl Friday”-(1940)-A Short Film Review     

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

His Girl Friday, starring Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy, directed by Howard Hawks, from a play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, 1940  

Recently in reviewing another later (1960) Cary Grant vehicle, The Grass Is Greener, where he plays a cuckolded English Earl whose wife’s affections were stolen by an arriviste American oil man (played by also hunk Robert Mitchum) I noted that as a rule Cary Grant, the epitome of maleness, handsomeness, suaveness and whatever else matters to the majority females that made up the 1940s and 1950s audiences did not lose the woman (and in that vehicle he didn’t either but it was a close call when the deal went down). In the film under review Howard Hawk’s adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s screwball comedy, The Front Page, he almost let another dame get away, let his ex-wife Hildy beat it to upstate New York. So maybe I was a little wrong about Cary’s ability to swoop women off their feet-and keep them swooped (is that the right past tense, oh well).                 

Here’s the play and it may be familiar to those who saw the play or the later screen version with Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau except, a very big except the ‘‘ace” reporter is a woman, a female Hildy, played by rough and tumble, give as well as he received, Rosalind Russell, which allows the male-female tussle that drives the film to go forward. Tussle because one, Hildy had given Walter, Walter Burns, the mad monk editor-in-chief/owner of a New York City newspaper, his walking papers, no go, done, and two, she is now engaged and ready to let the rough and tumble life of an ace reporter fall by the wayside. Engaged to Bruce Baldwin, a nice safe middle of the road insurance man, played by Ralph Bellamy.      

But see Walter, since the nasty divorce had gotten “religion,” well maybe had gotten religion, since he is remorseful about the bad way he treated Hildy and wants her back. The hook: the hook for any good and resourceful journalist- a big career-making or enhancing front page story. The bait for the hook- covering the execution of a small time grafter whose upcoming date with death is being played by the political establishment for the impending elections as the final nail in the coffin for the anarchist plague that had descended upon the city. The felon nothing but a snook and so Walter lures Hildy into looking into what the whole plan is all about. Gets her in so deep she can’t even think about poor ordinary nice guy Bruce and his very average life plans. In the end the snook gets a reprieve and the local politicos have egg all over their faces for their cover-ups. And Hildy and Walter go about their merry way. As for Bruce, well, he is on his way back to Albany-alone. You know Cary had this one in the bag from the beginning when you think about it. Just don’t let your good woman loose around him-okay.