La figlia, sua Mamma e sua Nonna

Mother's Day! What a complex, wonderous joy it has been to be J's mother (for the most part). We have our rocky days like anyone - yesterday morning for instance, tears and recriminations all around about a pair of missing swimming goggles! Ai yi yi - le lacrime!

But I am total marshmallow about my kid and handmade gifts like this one pictured above that she made for Mother's Day. J made it at The Clay Room on the Danforth. She saw an illustration in a book there and copied it by hand on to the plate. R made pancakes for all, a Sunday tradition. He had made a CD of classical baroque music and gave me a gift certificate for my favourite store French Country. Oh Daisy! I was a happy duck ...

My sister had a great idea, she asked that we all have cavati at her house and invite Nonna, all the sibs, their partners and the kids and partake at her spiffy apartment. The cavati look like this but we don't serve it with pork gravy (how strange) - we use just plain tomato sauce. Cavati are hand made, homemade pasta, shaped a bit like gnocchi but smaller, and very dense. Delicious!

I remember one of the first times that I brought the prospective husband home to meet the extended family. The aunts (or possibly Nonna, my mother) were serving cavati. One of my numerous uncles was trying to teach R how to say the word cavati. So R said, perfectly clearly, perfectly well ,"Cavati". Uncle said, "No, repeat after me: CA-VA-TI". So R said again perfectly clearly,"Ca-va-ti". Again he heard, "No, CA-VA-TI!" By this time, R and I are exchanging mischievous glances. This went on for some time.

Now spelling out ca-va-ti is our code word for someone deliberately mishearing or misunderstanding something you've said.

So we had a great day and lovely gifts. In particular, my sistah gave us a framed photo of the three of us from two years ago. It's so rare to have a nice shot of all three family members!

Dinner at Eight (1933)

Dinner at Eight (U.S., 1933) directed by George Cukor

I can't remember when R and I first saw this film together (I think it was at the delightful but now vanished St. Mark's Cinema in the 1980s in New York) but I remembered being absolutely delighted with it, especially with Jean Harlow's performance.

She is the only one I can watch in that film today and not wince doing so. The other actors are so preoccupied with Acting, with a capital "A", that it's almost painful to see. An unrepentant bad girl on screen, she is true to form as Kitty Packard, an uncouth little tart who squanders her husband's money and fools around with her doctor.

Directed by George Cukor, a virtual god in the pantheon of Hollywood film directors (The Women (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Gaslight (1944), Born Yesterday (1950), My Fair Lady (1964) and many, many more wonderful films), it's wonderful to see that this film was made only three years into a long, exemplary career. The film was based on the Broadway hit by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber.

Millicent Jordan (Billie Burke), an upper crust society hostess, is planning a dinner party and nothing will go right for her.

Among the guests are Dan Packard (Wallace Beery), a rough and tumble, power hungry, nouveau riche millionaire who is trying to get his hands on the Jordan shipping empire run by Millicent's husband, an ailing and largely ineffectual scion of the upper classes named Oliver Jordan (Lionel Barrymore). Jean Harlow is Packard's scheming but soft hearted wife with high society aspirations.

Their daughter Paula Jordan (Madge Evans) is having a secret affair with another dinner guest, failing movie icon Larry Renault (John Barrymore, aka "The Great Profile") who is on the skids with an alcohol problem, an enormous ego and, unfortunately, almost as much make up as Harlow.

Then there is the aging actress Carlotta (Marie Dressler), who leeches off the wealthy guests, in particular her former flame Oliver Jordan. Dressler, hailed as a comic genius at the time, doesn't fair so well with her mugging and vaguely Frankensteinish demeanor. I have never understood the appeal of this actress.

The dinner all threatens to go awry: one invited guest commits suicide; Oliver Jordan's business is threatened by Packard and a mysterious ailment which he refuses to divulge to his family; Kitty's philandering doctor/lover is discovered by his wife; servants have their own lives and inconsiderately intrude with the preparation of the menu.

However, the dinner will be served at eight.

The film script by Herman Mankiewicz, Frances Marion, and Donald Ogden Stewart is funny and irreverent and quick and even the dreadful mugging of the Barrymores, Beery and Dressler cannot ruin it.

A Dexter Devotee

Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay (Vintage Books, 2005) 292 pp.

Into a girl’s life a little trash must fall … Okay, I admit it. It’s not all high art and classic lit. I do have a passion for noir – film, literature, pulp fiction – and this book satisfies that perverse need. It is the second in the series (of which there are currently three).

The name Dexter Morgan may not be known to you but it should be because he is the main character of Dexter, a terrific TV series from Showtime with Michael C. Hall based on this so-so book with an ingenious twist: the “likable” serial killer, a vigilante, who only kills other killers.

Dexter is a crime scene investigator, a blood splatter expert, working for the Miami Police. He has learned to channel his lust for killing with the aid of his father Harry Morgan, a cop, who adopted Dexter after rescuing him from a horrific crime scene. To say more would spoil the plot.

The book opens with one of the most disturbing instances of an assault on a human being that I have ever read, so horrific, that I am relieved it never made it to the series in such a literal way (the plot surfaces somewhat in the series but in a modified, toned down form).

Dexter’s sister, Deb Morgan, is also a cop. In this novel she becomes involved with Kyle Chutsky, a fed, who becomes the victim of a serial killer's designs whom he is sent to investigate. She enlists Dexter's help to recover him. The killer is an ex-special ops cop gone AWOL who worked in El Salvador with Chutsky and one of the Morgans' fellow cop, a Sgt. Doakes, played menacingly by Eric King. Doakes is the only one who is suspicious of Dexter.

Dexter is always accompanied emotionally by the "Dark Passenger", the alter ego that kills and offers a running commentary on what transpires. I could do with a little less of the pithy remarks by the Dark Passenger and his repeated assertions that he feels nothing.

The Dexter character in the TV series is more morally complex, more intriguing. He does feel something for the people around him: Rita, his girlfriend, and her children; his sister and his father Harry. Michael C. Hall, formerly with the equally original TV series Six Feet Under invests a certain charm in the character that I think is largely absent from the book. Dexter, the character in the book, is extremely fascinating but not, I think, that likable.

It's very difficult to put down and a breeze to get through. I say, park it in neutral mentally and just go with it! On to book one (which I should have read first) ...

What a tender thing, then, is a man ...

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever (Harper & Row, 1957; republished Time-Life Books Inc., 1965) 379 pages

What a tender thing, then, is a man. How for all his crotch- hitching and swagger, a whisper can turn his soul into a cinder. The taste of alum in the rind of a grape, the smell of the sea, the heat of the spring sun, berries bitter and sweet, a grain of sand in his teeth - all of that which he meant by life seemed taken away from him.

A ruined upper middle class WASP family in post war America appeals to me like the decayed ruins of an exotic and unknown culture might to another reader.

Cheever, perhaps more than other American writers has been its chronicler; hence, the description "Chekhov of the suburbs". More than anything this book seems to me to be about the faltering and flimsy construction of masculinity in the mid 20th c.

Three men of old New England stock, Leander Wapshot and his two sons Coverly and Moses Wapshot, make their way in the world. Leander, a sea captain, older, dissolute, still clinging to past familial glories in a Massachusetts fishing village drives his boat the S.S. Topaze for a meager pittance. The boat is capriciously on loan to him by cousin Honora Wapshot, slightly senile and prone to vindictiveness when crossed, who holds the purse strings to the family fortune such as it is.

Honora has high expectations for the two Wapshot heirs, Coverly and Moses, who must marry and reproduce on pain of disinheritance. When she inadvertently catches one of them making love to a girl he is banished and forced to make his way in the world. The other son follows suit. Moses lands in Washington and Coverly in New York.

Desire propels these three men, father and sons, into amorous but perilous situations. Leander, in his youth, is blackmailed into marrying a pregnant teen despoiled by his lecherous, conniving employer only to see the child taken away and his new bride take her life in despair.

All sexual acts and attractions lead to tragedy or dead ends ("Lechery sat like worry on his thin face") rather than happiness and fulfillment. The book is filled with so much male rage against women that it boggles the mind. Women deceive, manipulate, and control the destinies of their hapless men and relations. One has to wonder what prompts this rage.

Leander, after crashing and ruining the S.S. Topaze, faces the horrifying prospect of having his wife Sarah turn it into a floating gift shoppe. Emasculating (which is a word that Cheever explicitly uses in the novel in this context) doesn't even begin to express the the effect upon Leander.

Moses, after a series of missteps, marries Melissa, the ward of an eccentric near relation Justina Wapshot who controls both of their fates with her wealth and hatred of the male sex. Wicked, controlling Justina, whose idea of a wedding gift is two single beds.

Coverly marries Betsey, a sweet but neurotic girl, and moves to a suburb outside of New York where he works as a Taper (he works in the Taping Dept. for the military). Cheever captures the sterility and boredom of suburban life and the hidden, unspoken of dramas when the lonely Betsey tries to make friends with another couple with almost near disasterous consequences.

It is always unwise to read too much autobiographical detail into a writer's work; however, the character of Coverly with his ambivalent sexual feelings towards men does seem to reflect Cheever's own, now widely known, conflicted bisexuality. Start with the section that begins: "And now we come to the homosexual part of the story ...." for further elucidation.

The book is beautiful in many ways, eloquently painting male ardor, sexual yearning and fascination with the mystery of femaleness ("desire seemed to darken and gild her figure like the cumulative coats of varnish on an old painting"). He paints small town life prettily ("The old clubhouse that looked as if it had been put together by old ladies and mice ...") but does not avoid the ugliness that sometimes lies beneath.

True, I could do without the rapturous descriptions of fishing and some of Leander's ruminations in his personal journal but I am happy that I finally picked up one of Cheever's books.

A Thing for Bandits

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (Random House, 2001)
369 pp.

In my favourite Japanese restaurant on Baldwin St. over futomaki and tempura, I listen to three surprisingly attractive Star Trek fans rhapsodize over the series (I think to myself still?). Well, we all have our obsessions.

If you have followed this blog at all you will know that I am partial to outlaws; hence, my fascination with Peter Carey's book, a fictionalized autobiographical memoir of the life of Ned Kelly, arguably Australia's most famous "bushranger". The premise is that Ned Kelly is writing this memoir for his young daughter and to clear his name.

(Oh no - the "Star Trek" couple have exchanged gifts - the third wheel has now left - a snowman design on the package she gives him reminds him of a giant sperm "Oh, I'm soooo embarrassed - I had no idea!" she shrieks - clearly these people have not slept together yet. I began this book at Xmas and my reading has been interrupted by book club obligations; hence, the oddity of me starting the post in the winter and posting it in the spring.)

Back to Kelly ... almost 200 pages are devoted to the first 24 years of his life - a reminder that these fellows (vide Salvatore Giuliano in Sicily, Jesse James in the U.S.) start and end their careers at a very young age. Carey works hard at reconstructing Kelly's world - the child of hard scrabble Irish immigrants in Australia with a shiftless father who dies young and an attractive mother who serves as a magnet for every lowlife in the vicinity.

Carey builds a believable world in a semi-literate prose style in which Kelly grows into a determined and violent outlaw. To "save" Ned from the wrath of his new prospective father Bill Frost, his mother "apprentices" Ned to the notorious bushranger Harry Powers (also one of her lovers and a real life figure in Australian history) until he escapes back home. Ned is not welcome there by his "step-father" Frost who sporadically runs away and leaves Ned's mother to cope with a pregnancy and a passel of children on land that needs cultivation and maintenance but receives none from him.

On one of Bill's sprees, Ned follows him, shoots him, and leaves him for dead. This makes him vulnerable to the authorities and his fate is sealed.

As convincing as it is that Carey has done his homework in terms of historical accuracy and lovely fluency in this style of writing, it is not until some 240 pages into it that Ned Kelly truly begins his journey as an outlaw and that is too long a wait to sustain our interest (or at least my interest). And guess what - it does not end well.

Not surprisingly, the way Kelly is portrayed here, Ned is fixated on his mother which lends a disconcerting Oedipal twist to what transpires.

There are also odd bits thrown in which boggle the mind such as a tradition of dressing in women's clothing when protesting the abuse of authority (I think - it was all a bit confusing). Both Ned's father and brother and members of the gang indulge in same. I am unclear if this is a fictional fabrication or whether this has a real historical source.

The similarities between Ned Kelly, Giuliano and James are pronounced and were reinforced in my mind when I read this book.

The men became ensnared in banditry at a young age, usually because of a perceived injustice or slight by the government or police officials. They thrived in rural areas, gaining the trust of the people who strove to protect them from the authorities. They were seen as heroes by many. They passionately tried to defend themselves in the press but were not always granted a forum to do so. Kelly adored his mother (as did Giuliano, James was a devoted husband). All were extremely loyal to family, died violently at a young age, usually at the hands of traitors and were venerated after death.

Today we are not fascianted by those who shot or captured these bandits but the bandits themselves. What does that say about us? About me and my fascination?

Bandits de jour

3.10 to Yuma (U.S., 2007) directed by James Mangold

I am developing, oddly enough, a disposition for Westerns, especially the kind of film that turn Westerns on their head. Three-Ten to Yuma was originally a short story written by Elmore Leonard in 1953 and then made into a film in 1957 by Delmer Daves with Glenn Ford; it was re-made in 2007 by James Mangold (Walk the Line, Girl Interrupted, Copland). Set shortly after the Civil War, it appeals to those of us with a weakness for bandits (and Russell Crowe).

What is it about the nature of storytelling and humanity that we feel compelled to paint bandits into something more honorable than what they probably are or ever were? I see the same tendency here as I do in my own writing about the bandit Salvatore Giuliano in Sicily, or fiction about the outlaw Jesse James in America or the bushranger Ned Kelly in Australia. All three of whom I have read about, thought about, seen films about, written about.

Dan Evans (played by the talented Christian Bale), is a struggling and honest rancher with two sons and a pretty wife (Gretchen Mol), who was seriously wounded in the Civil War, and who gets unwittingly embroiled in the capture of the bandit Ben Wade (Russell Crowe). Evans is a hero in the tradition of Gary Cooper in the 1952 classic High Noon; he is seen as weak and flawed but righteous, and who triumphs morally in the end with a little help.

Ben Wade, the charismatic and extremely dangerous leader of a band that has committed 22 stage coach robberies and stolen $400,000, not to mention murdered a number of men in the process, is captured in Bisbee, Arizona (a real town, and in a later Elmore Leonard novel LA Confidential, Lynn Bracken, a Veronica Lake look-a-like beauty originates from Bisbee).

Dan Evans, whose horses were stolen by Ben Wade and his gang, stumbles on to the capture of Wade by bounty hunters and marshals and then volunteers to assist in having Wade transported back to prison for $200. Dan's son, the teenaged William (played with cocky self-assurance by Logan Lerman), has a great deal of contempt for his father Dan whom he perceives to be ineffectual. He persuades the men that he should come along.

They are heading for Contention city which has a train at 3.10 that will go to the Yuma prison, a real prison in Arizona operating from 1876-1909. Wade is to be hanged. The marshals send a coach decoy in the opposite direction with someone dressed as Wade. Wade's minion and second in command, the sociopathic Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), who is possibly more vicious than Wade himself, sets fire to the coach and the unfortunate man bearing Wade's distinctive hat as the decoy, after forcing him to reveal where Wade is really heading.

You may remember the actor Ben Foster from his role as the frightening junkie, wannabe Nazi thug in Alpha Dog (2006) whose younger brother is kidnapped then killed by a strung out teenagers who are trying to extract a ransom from him. He plays a comparable role here: volatile, dangerous, possibly insane.

Ben Wade, slippery and charismatic as only Crowe can be, manages to seduce most women in his path, stabs a sleeping man in the throat with a fork while handcuffed, and creates a great deal of havoc while being transported. He escapes more than once and this leads to the death of a number of men, of varying moral integrity.

The story is rife with a number of individuals of varying morality, some "good" (marshals, bounty hunters) and some bad (Wade's band led by Charlie Prince, and other men simply with a desire to kill Wade or law enforcement officials for their own profit). Because this is Elmore Leonard, the good are not merely "good" nor are the bad merely "bad".

Conversely, the "heroic" rancher Dan Evans is seen as weak, though essentially honorable, and victimized by larger forces which make it difficult for him to sustain his ranch and therefore his family. The bounty hunter Byron McElroy (Peter Fonda), a self-avowed devout Christian, pursues criminals for a living yet, we are told, has gunned down dozens of defenseless Apache Indian women and children and then thrown them into a pit presumably for the crime of being Indian. The marshals in Contention city abandon Dan Evans at a crucial moment when they see that they are outnumbered by the bad guys.

Ben Wade, killer, thief and gang leader, is sensitive enough that sketches birds and naked women whom he has easily seduced but is decent enough to return horses that he has stolen from Dan Evans. He also extends a service to Dan so that he will not be humiliated in front of his son.

Evans and Wade, with a whole lot of law enforcement, end up in a hotel room in Contention city waiting for the 3.10 to Yuma. Wade's posse enters the town and you can imagine the end when Wade's posse bribes the townspeople to shoot any, or all, of the officers who subsequently flee. I won't spoil the ending but it is shocking and very affecting.

Best line of the film: after Ben Wade kills a man for insulting his mother, he says, "Even bad men love their mamas".

Second best line from minion Charlie Prince:
"Is that a posse ya got there?" "Yep," the men respond. He shoots the men one by one. "I hate posses," he sighs resignedly.

Ain't that the truth ...

The Various Lives of Florence Broadhurst

Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret & Extraordinary Lives by Helen O'Neill (Chronicle Books, 2006) 230 pages

Thanks to my partner R for bringing this book to my attention regarding the bizarre and highly entertaining life of Florence Broadhurst (1899 - 1977), an Australian born designer of wallpaper (who knew such things were "designed"? I plead my ignorance).

The writing in the book is, admittedly, awful riddled with cliches and uninspired writing ("evil Nazis"? "nightmarish horror"?). But the book is absolutely beautiful - resplendent with samples of some of the hundreds of really lovely wallpaper samples she produced and photographs from Broadhurst's exotic past.

But who was this mysterious, strange woman who assumed many guises during the course of her long life? She started as Bobby Broadhurst, a vaudeville vamp, touring the Orient in the 1920s; became a Parisian couturier by the name of Madame Pellier in the 1930s; moved to England and married an Englishman and then back to Australia in the 1940s to paint landscapes.

She stayed in Australia and, by chance, assumed the business operations of a young man who owed her back rent. He was involved in the design of wallpapers. She then began another career and became internationally famous for it employing a team of young designers who some say created all of her work which she took credit for.

She continued well into her 70s until she was murdered in her studio by an unknown assailant. There was some conjecture that she was murdered by John Wayne Glover, the "Granny killer", a serial killer who preyed on elderly women although it was never proven. He died in prison on another offense.

It's a very different sort of biography but worth a look at her designs.

Black, Bad and After the American Dream

American Gangster (U.S., 2007) directed by Ridley Scott

Frank Lucas loved his mother and his family. He was highly intelligent, disciplined, had a strong work ethic, dressed elegantly and was meticulous and careful in his personal style and business dealings. The real life Frank Lucas was all of these things as well as a ruthless drug kingpin who murdered effortlessly and became the most successful black gangster of his era in the 70s. Who else could play him but Denzel Washington?

After Frank's mentor Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson (Clarence Williams III), an extremely successful drug lord, unexpectedly dies, Frank, who had served as his driver and sometime executioner, decides to take over his illegal drug business. Frank creates a sprawling, efficiently run drug empire. With the collusion of military officials in Vietnam he begins to export heroin directly from Thailand which is uncut, purer, and can be sold cheaper than anything else on the street.

Director Ridley Scott conjures up vivid and convincing scenarios: black Harlem in the 1970s, drugged out military men in sleazy Bangkok nightclubs, down and out New Jersey landscapes, gritty police squadrons filled with disgruntled cops, and, the "Superfly" pimp apparel of these wannabe drug dealers.

Enter New Jersey detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a scrupulously honest detective whose claim to fame is that he once found $1 million in cash and turned it in much to the chagrin of his partner and his fellow law officers who deemed him a "rat" not to be trusted by other cops. Crowe is surprisingly restrained and even vulnerable here as the ostracized cop. After his partner dies of a drug overdose from "Blue Magic" heroin, Roberts is handpicked to lead a New Jersey drug task force and he sets out to find the source of his partner's demise.

This eventually leads him directly to Frank Lucas who has done so well that he is able to purchase several nightclubs and apartments and has married a Puerto Rican beauty queen. He is able to bring his entire family of five brothers (eventually to be known as the Country Boys in his drug empire) and his mother (Ruby Dee) up from rural North Carolina; he purchases a huge estate for his mother in New Jersey. Denzel is chilling, alternately loving and charming and then a murderous, remorseless sociopath ready to destroy anyone in his path to riches.

In real life, Richie Roberts alleges that Frank Lucas ordered a hit on his own brother when he was disappointed by his brother's failure to do as he had bid.

Lucas was generally conservative in manner and dress (at least as he is depicted in this film) and only on one occasion does he break with this, dressing in an ostentatious chinchilla fur coat and hat while attending the 1971 Frazier vs. Muhammad Ali fight at Madison Square Garden. In the movie, he catches the attention of Richie Roberts who is working undercover and notices not only his flamboyant attire but the fact hat he has superior seating to the local Italian mafia bigwigs. Richie begins to investigate Lucas.

Things begin to unravel for Frank. History and greed begin to pick away at his kingdom.

His corruption of NYC detectives through bribery goes sour when Det. Trupo (played by a very sinister Josh Brolin) tries to shake down Lucas for additional bribe money prompting a vendetta between the men with Frank destroying Trupo's beloved car and Trupo terrorizing Frank's wife and mother when he destroys his home searching for money. In addition, Trupo vindictively kills a family pet that Frank had inherited from Bumpy. Eventually he tries to kill both Frank and his wife prompting an all out war.

Vietnam ends, the U.S. military leaves the country and, with that, the heroin pipeline from the east into Harlem is jeopardized.

Nicky Barnes (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a rival drug lord, undermines the purity of Lucas' "product" by diluting it even further.

Through a series of wire taps, Richie is able to launch a massive bust of Frank's various enterprises eventually leading to Frank's arrest. Perhaps not surprisingly, he has trouble initially convincing his superiors of the enormity of the enterprise because they disbelieve that a black man could have orchestrated such a large, all encompassing empire.

Frank and Richie finally meet and an odd collaboration is forged where Lucas rats out the corrupt police officers, mafia figures and drug lords who have colluded in his trade (and have now become Richie's enemies as well). Richie, having passed the bar exam, prosecutes Frank who is sentenced to 70 years in prison but which is commuted to 15 years for his cooperation.

After Lucas' trial, we learn that, surprisingly, the real life Richie served as a defense attorney for Frank. He became a godfather to Frank's son and paid for the boy's schooling at a private Catholic school. Thirty of Frank's relations were sent to prison; his wife leaves him and returns to Puerto Rico, his mother returns to North Carolina without her sons. The film ends with Frank rejoining civilian life in 1991, alone, his empire destroyed and everyone that he cared for gone.

The script by Steven Zaillian is exceptionally well crafted and it is mentioned in a special feature of the DVD that the script had been kicking around for a number of years before the film was made with two unsuccessful attempts to start filming (once by director Antone Fuqua who left the film in 2004). Zaillan is responsible for a number of exceptional films including Gangs of New York (2002) and Schindler's List (1993).

Lucas’ real life (the film is not entirely accurate but seems true to the tenor of his life) was even more complicated than this and worth further examination ... No doubt Frank Lucas was a dangerous and vicious man who deserved what he got and probably more but you also have to wonder if this person had had other opportunities what could he have become? A CEO of a company? A visionary businessman? If only his talents had been directed towards a more productive life instead of the manufacture of a drug that destroyed many lives, most of them black.

It's hard not to glamorize this man when he is being played by Denzel Washington. Even at his most reprehensible, there is a core of integrity that makes us sympathetic to Lucas which I think, in retrospective, was a mistake in the film.

There was an intriguing series of discussions on a radio station which featured the real Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts (in two separate interviews). The DJs are stupefyingly dumb in their questioning and they seemed awed by Lucas' exploits rather than horrified but it's worth a listen to the principals involved as well as a look at the BET documentary on Frank Lucas.

No Country for Pretty Much Anyone

No Country for Old Men (U.S., 2007) directed by Ethan and Joel Coen

Based on the Cormac McCarthy book of the same name, this film deservedly won the Oscar for best picture this year and introduced the character of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a new and frightening villain into the zeitgeist.

This is not really a traditional Western nor an action film nor a chase film but an odd hybrid of all three. But it most entertains as a revisionist Western, a subversion of traditional Western films and its archetypes. As the Coens explained it, it involves Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a good man; Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a very bad man; and, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a man in between those two extreme values.

From the opening scene set in West Texas in 1980, when Anton Chigurh, a professional hit man of indeterminate ethnic origin, violently, and emotionlessly, strangles a sheriff's deputy with his own handcuffs you know that you are seeing a new type of villain. Llewelyn Moss unfortunately gets into Chigurh's sight lines when he stumbles across a number of corpses and a dying man begging for water in what is obviously a drug deal gone bad.

Moss finds two million dollars at the scene of the massacre and promptly leaves the dying man there. Later that night he wakes and thinks better of it, returning with water for the man only to be nearly caught by what appear to be Mexican gangsters returning to the scene. This precipitates a wild chase where Bell, the local sheriff, is chasing the professional hit man Chigurh who is chasing Moss and his millions. Chigurh tracks Moss through a hidden radio transponder across Texas.

I will not detail all the ins and outs of the plot which are both mesmerizing and convoluted. It is extremely bloody and oddly beautiful to look at it, clever and satisfying. Far more interesting I think is how the traditional
Western is turned on its head.

The Good Guy is the Primary Focus
Here the good guy is of marginal interest. As Bell hunts for Moss and Chigurh, he is of limited interest to the viewer, far less complex and interesting than the terrifying Chigurh or the morally ambiguous Moss who leaves a man to die and risks the life of his wife in his aim to keep his ill gotten gains. Chigurh is complex, his motives unexplained, his absolute singlemindedness in his "professionalism" is terrifying.

The Good Guy has the strictest moral principles
It ain't necessarily so. Here Chigurh lives by a rigid moral code. He made an offer to Moss to spare his wife if he forfeits the millions, Moss chooses not negotiate and suffers the consequences. True, Chigurh makes these decisions based on the flip of a coin then sticks to his decision ruthlessly.

Women are spared
Women often seem to exist n a separate, inviolable sphere in Westerns (unless being massacred by the ubiquitous Indians in older, more racist Westerns). Here Chigurh offers to spare Moss's wife Carla Jean Moss (Kelly MacDonald) if Moss returns the money, an offer that Moss angrily refuses. Moss gets his as does the dim-witted Carla Jean. No one is spared.

Evil does not triumph
In a traditional Western, the good guy (epitomized in old school Westerns by the White Hat) triumphs; perhaps he falters, perhaps he is weak but in the end he vanquishes evil. Here, Chigurh escapes, wounded and damaged, but lives again, presumably to kill again. Bell seems vanquished by the evil he has seen, broken (hence the title).

I am eager to find out if the book is as good as the film.

A Spectator at the Perpetual Orgy

The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary by Mario Vargas Llosa (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975) 240 pages

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy. Gustave Flaubert, 1858

When I recently read Llosa's The Bad Girl, I was very disappointed and could not glean why this writer had received such effusive praise from critics and readers alike. Here, in this book length essay on Flaubert and his most famous book Madame Bovary, I finally see the roots of this enthusiasm. He has encapsulated for me why I love Madame Bovary so much, why I am so affected by Emma Bovary the main character and by Flaubert's writing. This is a meticulous chronicle of Llosa's life long passion for Emma. He helped me understand why the book works as a piece of literature, why it is so affecting, why it is so pertinent to modern times.

A Right to Passion
Mario Vargas Llosa states that the story of Emma is that of "a blind, stubborn desperate rebellion against the social violence that stifles [her] right." The right to what? To pleasure, to love, to live passionately, to subvert the rules and the constrictions of her narrow, unhappy life. Is that why it is difficult to hate Emma, despite her wickedness, shallow nature, missteps, catastrophic decisions? Llosa feels that repression of passion has caused as great unhappiness as "economic exploitation, religious sectarianism or the thirst for conquest" and he is likely right.

Emma yearns for beauty as does Llosa. Llosa shares with Emma the qualities of "our incurable materialism, our greater predilection for pleasures of the body rather than the soul, our respect for the senses and instinct, our preference for this earthly life ..."

The commingling of the ugly and the beautiful
Flaubert stated that "It is easier in fact to draw an angel than a woman: the wings hide the hunched back." Llosa says of Flaubert that "the mean and the vulgar impress him because they are true". He has also defined for me why the then modern, realistic and the sometimes shocking style of the book, as it was considered to be then, has created a framework for my own work. Despite his future legal tribulations (after publishing the book, Flaubert and the editors of the Revue de Paris were put on trial because it was considered to be immoral), Flaubert remained convinced that he had chosen a new and revolutionary path. He was writing of the fate of an ordinary woman with astonishing beauty and insight.

Considered "mean and vulgar" by some readers, other artists would soon follow suit in establishing a more realistic style in other disciplines in the latter part of the 19th c.: composers Puccini and Verdi in opera, writers Ibsen and Chekhov in theatre, painter John Singer Sargent in painting. They moved away from stories and plots about gods, aristocrats and mythical beings to the tragedies and struggles of ordinary people, to realistic depictions of common people and to realistic depictions of desire.

There is beauty in strife, in suffering. Perhaps beauty is the wrong word; it is worthy of our examination as writers even if people or things are considered to be "ugly" and "sordid".

A Philosophy of Sex in Fiction
On a related note, Llosa argues for a more frank depiction of sex in fiction saying that "no novel arouses my fervent enthusiasm, holds me spellbound, fulfills me, unless it acts, if only to a slight degree as an erotic stimulant". This issue has intrigued me too: how to write about sex convincingly and not in a titillating fashion but in a realistic fashion? I think that Llosa fails in The Bad Girl but I admire the effort.

Flaubert, inhibited somewhat by the restrictions of the times regarding the depiction of sex, still manages to convey a highly charged erotic environment throughout the book, most notably in the ride that Emma takes with Leon in a fiacre when she tries to break with him in Part III of the novel. It's not graphic in any way but very erotic as the reader sees only the outside of the fiacre as it travels on and on, rocking and never stopping, and we see only Emma's hand as she throws out of the window pieces of a letter she wrote after she tries to breaks with Leon.

Consumption as a substitution for life
For Emma "erotic passion is inextricably bound up with a passion to possess, with a drive to own more and more things. In the novel there is an intimate relationship between love and money." Her illicit activities excite these spending sprees. Or are they merely another means, like her affairs, to disguise her boredom, her dissatisfaction with life? Her "consumption becomes an outlet for anxiety, the attempt to people with objects the emptiness that modern life has made a permanent feature of the existence of the individual". Flaubert captures the malaise of modern capitalist life especially for women of a certain class.

Emma is a "presage of that extraordinary phenomenon of the modern world whereby things, once the servants and instruments of mankind, becomes its masters and destroyers". And Emma is destroyed by her materialistic desires not only her sexual desires; it leads her to debt, the financial ruin of the family and hence her suicide when she is unable to extricate herself from her difficulties.

The alchemy of fact into fiction
Llosa captures for me the process of creating fiction and how one utilizes the personal, the historical, and transforms it into fiction. "Personal experience is a point of departure (the process of gestation); the point of arrival (the finished work) is reached through transmutation of the material". The material is changed no matter how how one attempts to catalogue a "real" event.

The Birth of the Anti-Hero
Emma represents for me a template for rebellion (largely misguided unfortunately) for the modern woman. Emma, influenced by romantic literature and music, wants to "surround her life with pleasing and superfluous things, elegance, refinement, to give concrete form by way of objects to that appetite for beauty that her imagination, her sensibility and reading have aroused in her. Emma wants to know other worlds, other people; she refuses to reconcile herself to the prospect of spending the rest of her days hemmed in by the narrow horizons of Yonville ... Emma's rebellion is born of one conviction, the root of all her acts: I am not resigned to my lot, the dubious compensation of the beyond doesn't matter to me, I want my life to be wholly and completely fulfilled here and now."

Where we part ways
The only place where I differ with Llosa is his assertion that Emma wants to be a man. He cites the many examples (unnoticed by me in my reading of the novel) of her donning male attire or certain male paraphernalia like a pince nez, her "mannishness". Llosa may perhaps be excused for this theory which he expounded more than 30 years ago. This theory, which I have heard many times about certain "wayward" women always puzzles me ... to me, it seems evident that what women want are the privileges and the rights of men, not to physically embody a male body.

Don't we all?

Blue and Angelic

The Blue Angel (German, 1929) directed by Joseph Von Sternberg

I had a real passion for Marlena Dietrich films when I was in my twenties (around the time I met R). Having seen this film again I remember clearly why. And despite the archaic message that certain women are evil temptresses who will lead to the downfall of virtuous men, I still love the film and the song that made her famous Falling in Love Again. Then again is it an archaic message? Perhaps not, this is not an uncommon view.

Marlena is such a stand out in every way. And it's not just her beauty, which is luminescent (her skin glows on screen like she is lit from within). It's the way she holds herself, her acting, her smirks of indifference, her elegance, even as the slightly trashy cabaret singer Lola Lola in a disreputable club. Did Von Sternberg deliberately choose those oafish, unattractive girls in The Blue Angel to contrast with Dietrich? Even though she is not quite the cinematic goddess that she will become in later years I think I liked her more here when she had this earthy, pretty quality that she exhibits as the unfaithful club singer with her curly dark hair, smirking bravado and slightly heavier frame.

Her acting is free of old fashioned cinematic mannerisms for the most part. Poor Emil Jannings, as the unfortunate Prof. Immanuel Rath who falls in love with her, seems to exhibit extremes of emotion that make the film viewer cringe today.

The film is based on the Heinrich Mann novel Professor Unrat. There is a nice synopsis and some lovely pics of the film here.

Prof. Rath (sometimes mocked as Prof. Unrath by his college students - unrath meaning garbage) finds some suggestive postcards of Lola Lola on his students and takes it upon himself to investigate this seedy nightclub they have been frequenting called The Blue Angel. He barges in like a German Eliot Spitzer (and we all know how that ended) to clear the place with his moral wrath and, of course, he is immediately smitten with the lovely, flirtatious Lola Lola. This guardian of the public virtue is reduced to holding her pots of paint and makeup as she prepares for each act, slavishly watching every move that she makes as his incredulous students, hidden from his view, watch.

A mute and forlorn clown, who works in the club, watches him dolefully from the periphery, foreshadowing the professor's tragic end, a silent, bedraggled doppelganger.

Of course his night of passion leads to the inevitable degradation and fall. We see from his waking up there in her bedroom how empty and bereft his home (and therefore his life) is compared to Lola Lola's; it's a brilliant metaphor for their lives. His house is dark, cluttered, depressing, filled with dusty books, a poor little bird that died unbeknownst to its owner and a surly maid servant who remarks tartly as she throws the dead bird into the furnace,"Well, he ceased to sing long ago". As did the Professor it seems.

Lola Lola's room is bright, filled with light and lined with gorgeous, illustrated club and circus posters and a ceaselessly chirping bird. She has fresh flowers, one of which she inserts into his lapel before he leaves for school to meet his fate.

The headmaster questions his judgment (the students have told everyone at the school all that has transpired). He leaves his post immediately because the headmaster insults his "future wife". He returns to the club, proposes to the incredulous Lola Lola who is poised to leave on a tour, and they marry.

He joins her on the tour and evolves from forbidding her to sell the naughty postcards to patrons to hawking them in the clubs himself. Without occupation, he is reduced to helping her dress, putting on her stockings for her, curling her hair. The message is clear: he has become emasculated by his desire (is this not the secret fear of many men?). He loses his occupation and his self esteem.

Five years pass and the professor has literally become a clown in the act. There are echoes of Leoncavallo's opera I Pagliacci here but unlike Canio, the murderous, jealous husband (who too is a clown) of that opera, Rath is too degraded by his misfortunes to act.

Lola Lola becomes involved with Mazeppa (the then hugely popular German movie star Hans Albers), a "strong man", whose path they cross when they are touring. As Mazeppa attempts to seduce Lola Lola, Rath prepares for his debut as the clown. They have returned to his hometown and all of the inhabitants have turned out to witness what has become of him.

Kliepert (Kurt Gerron), the vindictive manager of the troupe, uses Rath in his magic act, deliberately humiliating him, "magically" producing eggs and then smashing them against Rath's forehead, calling him a bird brain, urging him to crow as he did on his wedding night for the amusement of the wedding guests. The howls of laughter of the crowd, the humiliation of the act, his fleeting glimpses of Mazeppa's predatory moves on Lola Lola unhinge Rath mentally. He falls into a homicidal rage and then is placed into a straitjacket and restrained overnight by the frightened onlookers.

When he is finally released he staggers back to the college and finds his place in the classroom where he was held with such esteem (or so he thought) and promptly dies there, his hands clasping the desk in a death grip only to be found by the caretaker.

It is melodramatic and overwrought and Jannings is sometimes unwatchable, but Marlena still intrigues and amazes and you are entranced once again by her.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (Viking Press, 1962 - republished Penguin Group, 1970), 146 pages


Thi story has elements of classic suspense film "The Bad Seed", Jane Eyre and the movie "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" sprinkled with a very real post-Holocaust anxiety.

Something horrible has happened to the Blackwood family. The parents of the two girls in the story, a brother and an aunt all died of arsenic poisoning consumed through a sugar bowl during a family meal. All fingers point to Constance, the older of the two sisters, who cooked the meal but Constance was acquitted of the crime.

Now they live in isolation in their mansion with Uncle Julian, their father's brother, who somehow escaped the carnage, surrounded by suspicious and hate-filled townsfolk who wish them ill.

This book, at least initially, reads more like young adult fiction - perhaps I was influenced by the slightly gothic, graphic novel style cover featuring the main characters Constance and Merricat Blackwood surrounded by ominous looking townspeople.

Merricat (short for Mary Katherine) despite her odd interest in poisonous mushrooms and fantasy worlds appears to be, initially, a lovely, whimsical creature living an almost enchanted life despite what has happened. She buries "treasures" in the landscape near their home, ("All our land was enriched with my treasures ..." ) and weaves fantastic tales about life on the moon for her sister: "on the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands." She plays with her cat; she summons up magic words to protect herself and her family, practices acts of magic.

Merricat is fanciful, a bit strange, and, potentially it seems, a ruthless opponent intent on eliminating certain unpleasant elements from her quiet life peopled only by her sister Constance, innocuous Uncle Julian and cat Jonas. When cousin Charles appears on the scene, we see the true extent of Merricat's powers and malignant feelings ...

Fiction writer Jonathan Lethem's introduction is particularly insightful; he describes Merricat as the image of a "presexual tomboy" although she is 18 - with a fear, I think, of maturity, of growth, of the inevitable fertility of femaleness. This is why Constance's attraction to cousin Charles is so threatening to Merricat.

Constance is her blue eyed, blonde haired princess, the idea of Charles "defiling" or even merely attracting Constance is too threatening for Merricat who takes to reciting the poisonous properties of local mushrooms within his hearing. Constance, hidden away in the house, is a sort of domestic goddess, cooking for all, pickling, baking, "neatening" the house, caring for the family heirlooms, protecting Merricat and all her secrets.

As Lethem points out, it seems that the "male principle" is a source of danger and fear for Merricat. Uncle Julian doesn't count; he is incapacitated in a wheelchair, neutered somewhat, incontinent, sometimes mentally confused and incapable of seizing control of the situation or the girls' lives - he is utterly dependent on them. Perhaps that was why he was spared that fateful night. All males (father, brother, now cousin Charles) and female authority figures (her mother, her aunt) must be eliminated. But Merricat, despite her oddity, has excellent instincts about who is a danger to her world and acts accordingly.

Jackson owes more than a little to the plot of Jane Eyre which adds to a suspenseful and chilling ending. For more Jackson read the short story "The Lottery", an even more frightening twist on paranoia and misanthropy.