Running After My Hat

Be Sure to Get Arrested Before You Get Shot

July 22, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

The Biograph and John Dillinger - image found at the FBI site [Edit to add: would help if I’d included a title the first time around…]

Interesting: on this day, July 22, notorious bank robber (etc.) John Dillinger was shot dead outside the Biograph Theatre in Chicago. You can read the New York Times account of it here.

…as I did. And there I learned a couple of new names: Mrs. Etta Natalsky and Miss Theresa Paulus. They’re mentioned in passing, of interest because they were both wounded in the left leg in the hail of law-enforcement gunfire which erupted when Dillinger reached for his gun. I’d never even wondered about that before — if bystanders were struck — so off I went to see if I could dig up more information about the two ladies.

Haven’t yet found anything on Theresa Paulus. But I had to stop looking anyway, because I got totally sidetracked by a little detail: Etta Natalsky petitioned the US Government for reimbursement for her hospital expenses, and was turned down.

You can read the decision of the US Comptroller General here, at the Web site of the General Accounting Office, which includes background such as details of the cost. It also details three other vouchers, filed by a couple of guys who were bystanders injured in the “raid of the Little Bohemia Lodge, in connection with the investigation leading to the apprehension of John Dillinger.” As near as I can tell, the reason the Comptroller General’s office denied compensation to them all was: the victims were not — not — prisoners of and had not been arrested by the US government:

The necessary expense of medical or surgical treatment of persons who have been arrested by officers of the United States and are held as prisoners of the United States is an expense incident to the arrest which, if incurred under proper conditions and with due authority, is a lawful charge against the United States… There is, however, no authority for the payment of such expenses where the injuries were caused by a government officer and the injured person has not been arrested and charged with a crime against the United States.

Huh. Comment probably superfluous.

[Edit to add (2): this post has nothing to do with recent hot-button issues in the US. Please do not interpret it that way. It’s rather appalling that this possibility even occurred to me.]

Barbara Stanwyck, Crime of Passion, and What Goes on (and Doesn’t) Behind the Eyes

July 20, 2013 by John 11 Comments

Note: This is a detailed recap and review of a film now nearly 60 years old: I’m not going to be coy about spoilers (including stills from the film). If you don’t want to know what happens, I encourage you to stop reading right now. Every blogger loves getting readers, but only a bad — or deeply ignorant — blogger wants to anger them. Be sure to visit Aubyn Eli’s Girl with the White Parasol blog for much more about Barbara Stanwyck this week.

Barbara Stanwyck differed from most (all?) of her contemporaries in at least one regard: onscreen, she never seemed conscious of herself.

Much though I love Bette Davis, say, I can’t quite imagine her in a role in which she’s unaware of her — Bette Davis’s, not the character’s — own greatness, her superiority (on almost every scale) to everyone within a half-mile. She might dismiss it, she might crack wise about it, but in doing so she couldn’t help acknowledging and drawing your attention to it. Katherine Hepburn I’ll watch in anything, and I’ll laugh at or be heartwrenched by almost everything that issues forth from that Philadelphia Mainline throat. But Hepburn herself, although apparently modest in real life and dismissive of flattery, always radiated unapproachability by mere mortals. The planes of her face weren’t the only things those famous cheekbones cleft into separate regions of life.

But even when playing a character utterly out of the league of everyone around her, Stanwyck’s manner just said: Here I am. Take it or leave it. You’ve got your life, I’ve got mine, maybe they’ll intersect and maybe they won’t, and while I’m happy and maybe even delighted to meet you, I’ll survive if I never do.

In 1956’s Crime of Passion, she brings this manner to a role out of sync with the time.

[Read more…]

A Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon

July 20, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

'Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon' banner I don’t know Aubyn Eli and am not sure how I got to her blog, The Girl with the White Parasol, as I did for the first time back in May or June. But I know what attracted me there: her planned week-long celebration of Barbara Stanwyck’s 106th birthday. Later today I’ll add my own contribution to the blogathon: a review of Crime of Passion, from 1956.

Interested in “golden era” Hollywood films or, of course, in Stanwyck herself? You could do far worse this weekend than to set aside some time to browse Aubyn’s schedule of what’s already been posted by the forty-plus bloggers contributing — and to mark your calendars for what’s coming. Not all of Stanwyck’s eighty-plus films are covered (hmm: a foreshadowing of a 107th-birthday celebration in 2014?), but it’s a pretty impressive list nonetheless. And it covers not just her films, either. You’ll find essays on her TV work, her career, the blonde wig she donned for Double Indemnity, the gown (pictured at right) which inflamed Gary Cooper (and not a few male moviegoers) in Ball of Fire…

(Wikipedia says of that film’s wardrobe: “In World War II, a total of 12 servicemen were pen-pals with Stanwyck; two of them asked for a poster of her in the Ball of Fire outfit for their mess hall.”)

As for Aubyn herself, as I said, I know her only (and only very recently) through her blog, which focuses on “Classic Cinema, 1930-1965.” (Her Twitter profile identifies her as a “Full-time fantasist.” I want that job!)

But I do know what the blog’s title alludes to: an anecdote related by Everett Sloane’s character, named Bernstein, in Citizen Kane. He’s being interviewed by a reporter, Thompson, about his memories of Charles Foster Kane (Bernstein having been Kane’s long-time assistant). Thompson asks for Bernstein’s guess about the famous last word, “Rosebud,” and Bernstein suggests maybe it was a girl. Thompson scoffs — anyone so powerful could hardly have had just a girl on his mind at the very end — but Bernstein cuts him off with this story:

It’s one of my favorite moments in the film, actually in any film — one of the favorites of a lot of people, indeed. Of course Aubyn Eli isn’t suggesting a connection specifically with Stanwyck in her blog title, and I never saw a film in which Stanwyck was costumed in exactly this way. But I can confidently say that if I’d ever seen her as a young woman in a white dress with a white parasol over her shoulder, in any setting at all, yeah: I’d remember the moment at least once a month, too.

Anyway, I’ll be back later today with my writeup on Crime of Passion. [Edit to add: the review is here.]

________________

About the blogathon banner image: Wikipedia says of it only, “Barbara Stanwyck as a Ziegfeld girl (c. 1924).”

Aside: I’m so sorry that the video’s uploader didn’t get the memo about properly sizing a clip’s aspect ratio on YouTube. This squashed look drives me crazy.

Not So Very Empty

July 19, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: “Empty Space Is NOT Empty,” from Veritasium (Derek Muller’s “science video blog from atoms to astrophysics!”). To my knowledge there’s no plain-old Web page to point you to, but here’s the YouTube channel, and here’s the Facebook page for those of you who are all Facebooked up.]

From whiskey river:

The Moth, the Mountains, the Rivers

Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so
briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone
longing to be ground down, to be part again of
something livelier? Who can imagine in what
heaviness the rivers remember their original
clarity?

Strange questions, yet I have spent worthwhile
time with them. And I suggest them to you also,
that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life
be richer than it is, that we — so clever, and
ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained — are only
one design of the moving, the vivacious many.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Many people are afraid to empty their own minds lest they plunge into the Void. Ha! What they don’t realize is that their own Mind is the Void.

(Huang-po [source])

…and:

When Tesshu, the famous Japanese samurai master, was young and headstrong, he visited Master Dokuon and triumphantly announced to him the classic Buddhist teaching that all that exists is empty, and how there is really no you or me. The master listened to this in silence. Suddenly he snatched up his pipe and struck Tesshu’s head with it. This infuriated the young swordsman, and then Dokuon said calmly, “Emptiness is sure quick to show anger, is it not?”

(unattributed [but see here, among many other sources, in more or less these words])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Caitlin Rose, “Pink Champagne”

July 17, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Caitlin Rose, looking rather pensive and (if you ask me), well, a little Paris-in-the-’20s, no?]

In the photo above, she may look like some sort of exotic Continental anachronism. But Caitlin Rose is a Nashville native. (This may surprise you if you’d encountered her name but not her music. That name almost sounds like it belongs to someone performing with Celtic Woman, Enya, or Loreena McKennitt.) And while her music is not exactly country, the “Americana” label drapes easily about her shoulders. She’s got a great voice.

She has some songwriting chops, too, which she may have come by naturally, via genetics. According to the bio at her Web site:

Growing up in Nashville to music industry parents (her mother, Liz Rose, is a songwriter who found success working with artists like Taylor Swift, Leann Womack and others), Rose inherited her mother’s “inclination towards melody — the ability to naturally know where melody could and should go” early on and again credits her love of songwriting to a long list of influences, many of which would be easily found in either of her parents record collections.

Here’s “Pink Champagne,” from her most recent LP, The Stand-In (which was inspired, at least in part, by Bob Fosse’s film All That Jazz of all things!):

[Below, click Play button to begin Pink Champagne. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:05 long.]

[audio:pinkchampagne_caitlinrose.mp3|titles=’Pink Champagne’|artists=Caitlin Rose]

[Lyrics]

I’m not sure how best to describe NoiseTrade. It’s something like a musicians’ collective. The performers who list their work there may or may not be represented by “labels” as such; you can download music, tipping the artists as much (or, I guess, as little (you miserly, inconsiderate clod)) as you want. They’ve recently initiated a new live-music project they call the NoiseTrade EastSide Manor Sessions, and Rose brought hand-picked sidemen to kick the series off to a fine start. The video below includes three songs (time codes approximate):

“Pink Champagne” again (0:25-4:25)
“Everywhere I Go” (5:15-8:35)
“No More Lonely” (9:30-12:19)

There’s also some background chat, obviously. (And I’m a little disappointed that we don’t hear more of that spontaneous blues-y fooling around that the session musicians get into at the very end.) I kind of prefer these live versions, myself; the sound seems fuller to me, and a little less engineered.

(I was a smoker for decades, so maybe I’ve got no call to bring up that issue — but I really, really hope Rose kicks that habit. It contributes to her voice’s “smoky” sound, no doubt. But jeez, at what a potential cost…!)

Gobsmacked by Natural History

July 16, 2013 by John 7 Comments

[Image: Cover of The Golden Treasury of Natural History, by Bertha Morris Parker. Colors tinkered with a little to match its present look as closely as possible.]

A holiday, a small bedroom in a small house, The Boy, The Book…

I don’t know what triggered the recent obsession, but something must have. Not that I’ve ever really forgotten its object; years ago, I started referring to it this way: possibly the best book anyone ever gave me. I’m not kidding myself, or you: it may not be the best-written, the book I most wish I myself had written, even my favorite book. My original copy got swallowed up into Book Heaven long ago, and I had not (until recently) laid eyes on another copy for maybe forty or more years. But for its long-term impact on me — its staying power in my head — nothing else comes close.

It came to me as a Christmas present when I must have been, oh, maybe nine or ten years old. (It certainly feels like I’ve known it that long.) Dad had always held blue-collar jobs, and Mom — when she eventually went to work (as opposed to, haha, the sheer non-working pleasure of raising four kids) — held secretarial and clerical positions. So we never had anything you could call superficially “privileged.” But at Christmas, they annually went overboard. We got so much stuff.

In retrospect, I wonder if at that time of year they might have been just throwing things at the walls of our minds to see what would stick. I know they loved us — never once doubted it, even — but they’d had little if anything like training or orientation as parents. We were like four aliens deposited in their household: total strangers, maybe even only nominally of the same species. How could they entertain us? Would we like music, maybe? (Get them an LP!) Would we want to become homemakers, or mechanics? (Get them a toy oven, or a garage — made of finger-slashing tin in case they want to become surgeons!) Artists? (A Play-Do factory! a watercolor paints set! colored pencils! crayons and coloring books! heck, throw in a jigsaw puzzle! All in the same year!)

So this one year — again, I think somewhere between third and fifth grade — I found (among the rubble of childhood avarice) two books for me: both non-fiction, both about science. One was a large-format hardcover book, maybe 9″ x 12″, maybe fifty pages long,, entirely about astronomy. I don’t remember many specifics about that book — certainly not the title. It had no paper dust cover. The front, spine, and back were of some ultra-high-gloss material; the predominant color was deep navy blue, scattered with stars. Of all the sciences, astronomy has held my attention the most, and I think to that book must belong a great deal of the credit.

But the other book: ah, the other book. That was the unforgettable one.

[Read more…]

What to Do (with, for, in) Just One World

July 12, 2013 by John 2 Comments

[Video from the Slashdot “News for nerds, stuff that matters” discussion forum: Sarah Campagna
discusses her CyberCraft robot-rescue project: building new robots from scraps of old ones. The finished
works are statues — immobile, fine-art sculpture — rather than machines, but they do arrest the
attention. The company slogan: “Robots, Rayguns, and Spaceships You Will Covet.”]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Long Point Light

Long Point’s apparitional
this warm spring morning,
the strand a blur of sandy light,

and the square white
of the lighthouse—separated from us
by the bay’s ultramarine

as if it were nowhere
we could ever go—gleams
like a tower’s ghost, hazing

into the rinsed blue of March,
our last outpost in the huge
indetermination of sea.

It seems cheerful enough,
in the strengthening sunlight,
fixed point accompanying our walk

along the shore. Sometimes I think
it’s the where-we-will-be,
only not yet, like some visible outcropping

of the afterlife. In the dark
its deeper invitations emerge:
green witness at night’s end,

flickering margin of horizon,
marker of safety and limit.
But limitless, the way it calls us,

and where it seems to want us
to come. And so I invite it
into the poem, to speak,

and the lighthouse says:
Here is the world you asked for,
gorgeous and opportune,

here is nine o’clock, harbor-wide,
and a glinting code: promise and warning.
The morning’s the size of heaven.

What will you do with it?

(Mark Doty [source])

…and (in slightly different words):

As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so.

(Freeman Dyson [source])

…and:

Today

Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.

(Mary Oliver [source])

[Read more…]

You Don’t Have to Look for Everything to Find It

July 5, 2013 by John 9 Comments

[Image: Where the Baker was last seen. Plate 10 of Henry Holiday’s original illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s
The Hunting of the Snark. For an interesting report on some of the (possible) sources for Holiday’s
illustrations, see this paper (3.6MB PDF) by Goetz Kluge.]

From whiskey river:

There are poems
that are never written,
that simply move across
the mind
like skywriting
on a still day;
slowly the first word
drifts west,
the last letters dissolve
on the tongue,
and what is left
is the pure blue
of insight, without cloud
or comfort.

(Linda Pastan)

…and:

The journey is there and every single one of us has got to go through it, and you can’t dodge it, and the purpose of everything and the whole of existence is to equip you to take another step, and another step, and another step, and so on.

(Jesse Watkins)

…and:

Hope

It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.

(Lisel Mueller)

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(Belated, But Timely) Midweek Music Break: Fifes and Drums

July 4, 2013 by John 3 Comments

'Yankee Doodle,' a/k/a 'Spirit of '76'

It can be hard to take the music of fifes and drums seriously. Unlike Sousa marches, which I wrote of last year at this time, these marches have never had one single person’s name — a pop-culture champion, if you will — associated with them. They never even constituted a uniquely American genre: the form sprang from the battlefields of 17th- and 18th-century Continental Europe. Yet you almost never hear it played at other times of the year, only around July 4th*.

In the logbook of human civilization, the United States hasn’t even existed that long. Nevertheless, what we commonly refer to as the Revolutionary War feels like ancient history to us. Anyone who lived through it is long dead, and the manner in which it was conducted scarcely feels like warfare. In some engagements you could probably almost count the shots fired as they were fired. Total deaths on both sides together (considering battles only, not illness, starvation, and other war-related deaths) apparently numbered “only” in four figures. It almost feels like… well, like a toy war.

The sound of fife-and-drum music, to ears accustomed to the window-rattling brass of martial celebrations, itself feels like the perfect music for a toy war. Given enough schoolchildren who know how to whistle, and given enough empty picnic tables to slap their hands on, you could pretty convincingly recreate the sound (if not the discipline) of a fife-and-drum band. Wikipedia says that the flute “sounds an octave above the written music”; even someone musically unsophisticated can see a hint of, well, unseriousness in the instrument so described.

[Read more…]

Stanley Kubrick and One-Point Perspective

July 2, 2013 by John 3 Comments

After viewing this, it’s pretty hard to argue with the notion that one-point perspective was an obsession for Kubrick:

I found this via a commenter’s link in the Facebook Film Noir group, in a discussion of a still photo from Kubrick’s second feature, Killer’s Kiss. In most (all?) of the scenes captured in the above video, the one-point perspective takes place on a two-dimensional plane: the camera is aimed at the horizon, and the vanishing point is correspondingly horizontal from the viewer. Killer’s Kiss includes lots of other examples of that convention: alleys, warehouses, and so on. In this shot, though, he’s added a third dimension — you’re looking down, as well as across — making the moment even more vertiginously (and subconsciously) tense. Especially with the checkered tile, railings, and wall mouldings, it’s like looking into a shark’s mouth:

I love seeing this sort of thing.