ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
John William Tuohy is a writer who lives in
Washington DC. He holds an MFA in writing from Lindenwood University. He is the author of No Time to Say Goodbye:
Memoirs of a Life in Foster Care and Short Stories from a Small Town. He is
also the author of numerous non-fiction on the history of organized crime
including the ground break biography of bootlegger Roger Tuohy "When
Capone's Mob Murdered Touhy" and "Guns and Glamour: A History of
Organized Crime in Chicago."
His non-fiction crime short stories have
appeared in The New Criminologist, American Mafia and other publications. John
won the City of Chicago's Celtic Playfest for his work The Hannigan's of
Beverly, and his short story fiction work, Karma Finds Franny Glass, appeared
in AdmitTwo Magazine in October of 2008.
His play, Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a
public performance at the Actors Chapel in Manhattan in February of 2007 as
part of the groups Reading Series for New York project. In June of 2008, the
play won the Virginia Theater of The First Amendment Award for best new play.
Contact John:
MYWRITERSSITE.BLOGSPOT.COM
JWTUOHY95@GMAIL.COM
HERE'S MY
LATEST BOOKS.....
This is a book of short stories taken from
the things I saw and heard in my childhood in the factory town of Ansonia in
southwestern Connecticut.
Most of these stories, or as true as I recall
them because I witnessed these events many years ago through the eyes of child
and are retold to you now with the pen and hindsight of an older man. The only
exception is the story Beat Time which is based on the
disappearance of Beat poet Lew Welch. Decades before I knew who Welch was, I
was told that he had made his from California to New Haven, Connecticut, where
was an alcoholic living in a mission. The notion fascinated me and I filed it
away but never forgot it.
The collected stories are loosely modeled
around Joyce’s novel, Dubliners (I also borrowed from the
novels character and place names. Ivy Day, my character in “Local Orphan is
Hero” is also the name of chapter in Dubliners, etc.) and like
Joyce I wanted to write about my people, the people I knew as a child, the
working class in small town America and I wanted to give a complete view of
them as well. As a result the stories are about the divorced, Gays, black
people, the working poor, the middle class, the lost and the found, the
contented and the discontented.
Conversely many of the stories in this book
are about starting life over again as a result of suicide (The Hanging
Party, Small Town Tragedy, Beat Time) or from a near death experience (Anna
Bell Lee and the Charge of the Light Brigade, A Brief Summer) and natural
occurring death. (The Best Laid Plans, The Winter Years, Balanced and Serene)
With the exception of Jesus Loves
Shaqunda, in each story there is a rebirth from the death. (Shaqunda is
reported as having died of pneumonia in The Winter Years)
Sal, the desperate and depressed divorcee
in Things Change, changes his life in Lunch Hour when
asks the waitress for a date and she accepts. (Which we learn in Closing Time, the
last story in the book) In The Arranged Time, Thisby is given the
option of change and whether she takes it or, we don’t know. The death of
Greta’s husband in A Matter of Time has led her to the diner
and into the waiting arms of the outgoing and loveable Gabe.
Although the book is based on three sets of
time (breakfast, lunch and dinner) and the diner is opened in the early morning
and closed at night, time stands still inside the Diner. The hour on the big
clock on the wall never changes time and much like my memories of that place,
everything remains the same.
http://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Small-William-Tuohy/dp/1517270456/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444164878&sr=1-1&keywords=short+stories+from+a+small+town
REVIEWS FOR "SHORT STORIES FROM A SMALL
TOWN"
The
Valley Lives
By Marion Marchetto, author of The
Bridgewater Chronicles on October 15, 2015
Short Stores from a Small Town is set in The
Valley (known to outsiders as The Lower Naugatuck Valley) in Connecticut. While
the short stories are contemporary they provide insight into the timeless
qualities of an Industrial Era community and the values and morals of the
people who live there. Some are first or second generation Americans, some are
transplants, yet each takes on the mantle of Valleyite and wears it proudly. It
isn't easy for an author to take the reader on a journey down memory lane and
involve the reader in the life stories of a group of seemingly unrelated
characters. I say seemingly because by book's end the reader will realize that
he/she has done more than meet a group of loosely related characters.
We meet all of the characters during a
one-day time period as each of them finds their way to the Valley Diner on a
rainy autumn day. From our first meeting with Angel, the educationally
challenged man who opens and closes the diner, to our farewell for the day to
the young waitress whose smile hides her despair we meet a cross section of the
Valley population. Rich, poor, ambitious, and not so ambitious, each life proves
that there is more to it beneath the surface. And the one thing that binds
these lives together is The Valley itself. Not so much a place (or a memory)
but an almost palpable living thing that becomes a part of its inhabitants.
Let me be the first the congratulate author
John William Tuohy on a job well done. He has evoked the heart of The Valley
and in doing so brought to life the fabric that Valleyites wear as a mantle of
pride. While set in a specific region of the country, the stories that unfold within
the pages of this slim volume are similar to those that live in many a small
town from coast to coast.
By Sandra Mendyk
Just read "Short Stories from a Small
Town," and couldn't put it down! Like Mr. Tuohy's other books I read, they
keep your interest, especially if you're from a small town and can relate to
the lives of the people he writes about. I recommend this book for anyone
interested in human interest stories. His characters all have a central place
where the stories take place--a diner--and come from different walks of life
and wrestle with different problems of everyday life. Enjoyable and thoughtful.
I loved how the author wrote about "his
people"
By kathee
A touching thoughtful book. I loved how the
author wrote about "his people", the people he knew as a child from
his town. It is based on sets of time in the local diner, breakfast , lunch and
dinner, but time stands still ... Highly recommend !
WONDERFUL book, I loved it!
By John M. Cribbins
What wonderful stories...I just loved this
book.... It is great how it is written following, breakfast, lunch, dinner, at
a diner. Great characters.... I just loved it....
This kid (Below) should have gotten an A for thinking outside the box and besides that, he's right. Godzilla, the lazy bastard, didn't lift a finger to help Washington's troops
Photographs I’ve taken
I moved to Shepherdstown West Virginia about a month ago and I wanted to share some photos of my new town with you. Shepherdstown is in the West Virginia Panhandle, squeezed in between Maryland to our north and Virginia to our east and south. We're about an hour and half from Washington DC.
What's in a name? That which we
call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Visit
our Shakespeare Blog at the address below
http://shakespeareinamericanenglish.blogspot.com/
HERE'S PLEASANT POEM FOR YOU TO ENJOY................
Summer Morning
by Louis Simpson
There are whole blocks in New York
Where no one lives—
A district of small factories.
And there's a hotel; one morning
When I was there with a girl
We saw in the window opposite
Men and women working at their machines.
Now and then one looked up.
Toys, hardware—whatever they made,
It's been worn out.
I'm fifteen years older myself—
Bad years and good.
So I have spoiled my chances.
For what? Sheer laziness,
The thrill of an assignation,
My life that I hold in secret.
WHY THE WORLD NEEDS EDITORS..........
THE ART OF PULP
THE ART OF WAR............
Point
Blank (1967 film)
From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Point Blank is a 1967 American
neo-noir crime film directed by John Boorman, starring Lee Marvin and featuring
Angie Dickinson, adapted from the 1963 crime noir pulp novel The Hunter by
Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark. Boorman directed the film at
Marvin's request and Marvin played a central role in the film's development.
The film was not a box office
success in 1967, but has since gone on to become a cult classic, eliciting
praise from such critics as film historian David Thomson.
Plot
Walker (Lee Marvin) works
together with his friend Mal Reese (John Vernon in his first major role) to
steal a large amount of cash from a courier transporting funds for a major
gambling operation, with the deserted Alcatraz island as a drop point. Reese
then double-crosses Walker by shooting him, leaving him for dead. Reese also
makes off with Walker's wife Lynne (Sharon Acker).
Walker recovers. With assistance
from the mysterious Yost (Keenan Wynn), who seems to know everything about
everybody involved in the heist. Walker sets out to find Reese, take his
revenge, and recover the $93,000 he is owed. Reese used all of the money from
the job to pay back a debt to a crime syndicate; "The Organization",
and get back in its good graces.
With memories of happy times together,
Walker goes to Los Angeles to pay back his wife and his best friend for their
treachery. He bursts in on Lynne and riddles her bed with bullets, just in case
Reese is in it. A distraught Lynne tells him she no longer wants to live, then
takes an overdose of pills.
Walker is told a car dealer named
Stegman (Michael Strong) might know where Reese can be found. Posing as a
customer, he takes Stegman for a wild ride in one of his new cars, smashing the
car and terrorizing him, until Stegman reveals where Reese is living. He is
told Reese has now taken up with Walker's sister-in-law, Chris (Angie
Dickinson).
Breaking in on Chris, he learns
she actually despises Reese, and had considered Walker the best thing which
ever to happen to her sister.
Willing to help in any way, Chris
agrees to a sexual tryst with Reese, inside his heavily guarded penthouse
apartment, just so she can gain access and unbolt a door for Walker. Walker
ties up some men in an apartment across from the penthouse, and has a call made
to police to report a robbery, creating a diversion that enables him to slip
into the penthouse.
With a gun to Reese's head,
Walker persuades him to give up the names of his Organization superiors –
Carter, Brewster, and Fairfax – so he can make somebody pay back his $93,000.
Reese says he'll help Walker. Walker attempts to quickly move Reese to the
balcony by yanking on the blanket Reese has wrapped around himself. However,
whether due to too much force or Reese attempting to get away from Walker,
Reese is flung over the railing of the balcony, and Walker watches as a naked
Reese plunges to his death on the street below.
After next confronting Carter
(Lloyd Bochner) for his money, Carter promises to pay. Carter gives a package,
which he says contains the $93,000 to Stegman. When Stefman questions why he
was chosen for this task, Carter says its because he knows what Walker looks
like. In fact, Carter is trying to set Walker up.
Stegman arrives at the
destination (the Los Angeles River) and is standing out in the open on the
river's dry bed. Carter has followed to surreptitiously watch. Just as Carter
is feeling comfortable, Walker jumps out from behind him, surprising Carter.
Walker puts Carter in a
choke-hold, telling him he is to go get the package from Stegman, and hand it
to him.
Unbeknownst to Stegman, a hit man
(James Sikking) with a high-powered rifle, has been assigned to kill Walker,
when the transfer takes place. Carter knows the hit man is aiming his rifle at
that very second, and as Stegman tries to understand why Carter is there,
Carter frantically waves his arms, hoping that the hit man will see he is not
Walker.
Instead, the hit man fires, and
Carter drops. As the reality of the situation becomes clear to Stegman, he
tries to escape by walking quickly across the vast, desolate stretch of the
river bed, only to also be shot dead as well.
While the hit man packs up his
weapon on the bridge, Walker cautiously goes over to the package and, when he
rips it open, discovers that it is packed with nothing but paper.
Yost takes Walker to a home
belonging to Brewster (Carroll O'Connor). Walker visits Chris in her apartment,
which was trashed by the Organization. He brings her with him to Brewster's
home, claiming she will be safer with him than by herself.
As Walker waits for Brewster to
return, an angry Chris starts slapping and pounding Walker, over his apparent
disinterest in her. As Chris continues to punch him, Walker regards her
impassively, not defending himself. After Chris hits Walker over the head with
a pool cue, the two become entangled beneath the pool table, and their anger
turns passionate. They make love.
The following morning, Brewster
comes home and is ambushed by Walker, who demands his money. Brewster insists
no one will pay. Walker forces Brewster to make a phone call to the
Organization to get his money. Brewster speaks with a Mr. Fairfax, telling him
that if they do not pay the money, he is going to be shot, but Fairfax refuses
to pay, saying, "Threatening phone calls don't impress me."
Walker then shoots the phone.
Brewster says that they can still
get him the money up in San Francisco through "The Alcatraz Run," in
which large sums of money changes hands. "The drop has changed, but the
run is still the same," explains Brewster.
They travel to Fort Point in San
Francisco. Walker does not trust Brewster. As Brewster stands in the open space
of a courtyard, high above and hidden in the darkness, we see Walker, who
refuses to show himself.
Brewster receives the money by a
courier in a helicopter. The hit man is also in the darkness with his rifle. He
shoots Brewster, who falls to the ground, thinking Walker has shot him.
Yost emerges from the shadows,
telling him it was not Walker who shot him. Brewster calls out to Walker,
"This is Fairfax, Walker! Kill him!"
Yost/Fairfax thanks Walker, still
hiding in the shadows, for eliminating his dangerous underlings, telling him,
"Our deal's done, Walker. Brewster was the last one." Fairfax then
offers Walker an enforcer job, claiming he has looked for a man like Walker for
years. Walker does not answer.
The hit man is about to pick up
the package containing the money, but Fairfax tells him to leave it. Walker
remains unseen as the two men leave.
Production
Director Boorman met Marvin while
on the set of The Dirty Dozen in London. Boorman and Marvin talked about a
script based on the book The Hunter. Both hated the script, but loved the main
character of Walker. When they agreed to work on the film, Marvin discarded the
script and called a meeting with the head of the studio, the producers, his
agent, and Boorman. As Boorman recalled, "[Marvin] said, 'I have script
approval?' They said 'yes'. 'And I have approval of principal cast?'. 'Yes'. He
said, 'I defer all those approvals to John [Boorman].' And he walked out. So on
my very first film in Hollywood, I had final cut and I made use of it."[
The unusual structure of the film
was due in part to the original script and developments during the course of
shooting the film. Rehearsals took place at Marvin's house in Los Angeles.
On the rehearsal day in which
Marvin was to ask Sharon Acker what happened to the money, Marvin did not say
his lines, forcing Acker to continue the conversation on her own. "I saw
right away he was right," replied Boorman, "Lee never made
suggestions. He would just show you."
So Boorman changed the lines in
the script so that Acker would essentially ask and answer Marvin's questions,
and the result is in the finished film.
"It made a conventional
scene something more," added Boorman.
This was the first film ever to
shoot at Alcatraz, the infamous prison which had been shut down since 1963,
only three years before the production. Two weeks in the abandoned prison
facility required the services of 125 crew members. While Marvin and Wynn
enjoyed shooting on location, Wynn was concerned about the weather and the need
to loop half the dialogue.
During the shoot, Angie Dickinson and Sharon
Acker modeled contemporary fashions for a Life magazine exclusive against the
backdrop of the prison. Acker was accidentally hurt by the blanks that Vernon
used to shoot at Marvin early in the film.
Director Boorman chose locations
that were "stark". For example, the airplane terminal walkway that
Marvin walked down originally had flower pots lining the walls. Boorman had the
pots taken out to "make it all bare."
After Boorman showed the finished
cut to executives, they were "very perplexed and mumbling about
reshoots".
Margaret Booth, a legendarily
tradition-minded supervising editor then working for the studio, told Boorman
as the execs filed out, "You touch one frame of this film over my dead
body!"
The film earned $9 million during
its initial release.
Themes
Viewers and critics have often
questioned whether or not the film is really a dream that Walker has after he
is shot in the very beginning. Director Boorman claims to not have an opinion
on the matter. "What it is what you see," responded Boorman.
Steven Soderbergh has described
Point Blank as "memory film" for Marvin. Boorman believes the film is
about Lee Marvin's brutalizing experiences in World War II, which dehumanized
him and left him desperately searching for his humanity.
Critic David Thomson has written
that the character of Walker is actually dead throughout the entire movie and
the events of the film are a dream of the accumulating stages of revenge.
Others have also considered this
concept: Brynn White has questioned whether or not Walker is a mortal or a
ghost, "a vaporous embodiment of bitter vengeance barely clinging to Boorman’s
variegated frames", and Boorman himself has commented that: "He could
just as easily be a ghost or a shadow".
Some critics consider Point
Blank, "a haunted, dream-like film that draws upon the spatial and
temporal experiments of modernist European art cinema", especially the
"time-fractured" films of French director Alain Resnais.
Style
Point Blank combines elements of
film noir with stylistic touches of the European nouvelle vague. The film
features a fractured time-line, disconcerting narrative rhythms (long, slow
passages contrasted with sudden outbursts of violence) and a carefully calculated
use of film space (stylized compositions of concrete riverbeds, sweeping
bridges, empty prison cells).
Boorman credits Marvin with
coming up with a lot of the visual metaphors in the film. Boorman said that as
the film progressed, scenes would be filmed monochromatically around one
particular color (the chilly blues and grays of Acker's apartment, Dickinson's
butter yellow bathrobe, the startling red wall in Vernon's penthouse) to give
the proceedings a "sort of unreality".
To establish Walker's mythic
stature, Soderbergh noted in the commentary that the film cuts from a shot of
Walker swimming from Alcatraz to a shot of him on a ferry overlooking the same
island while a woman on the loudspeaker describes the impossibility of leaving
the island. Soderbergh said that this contrast of the character's ease of
escape with the loudspeaker's monologue makes the Walker character "mythic
immediately."
Legacy
Point Blank is hailed in the book
1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die as "The perfect thriller in both
form and vision."
Film historian David Thomson
calls the film a masterpiece. Thomson adds, "[...] this is not just a
cool, violent pursuit film, it is a wistful dream and one of the great
reflections on how movies are fantasies that we are reaching out for all the
time—it's singin' in the rain again, the white lie that erases night."
Director Steven Soderbergh has said that he used stylistic touches from Point
Blank many times in his film making career.
Point
Blank
BY NICK
SCHAGER
JULY 24,
2003
One of Lee Marvin's initial
claims to fame was disfiguring Gloria Grahame's face with a pot of scalding
coffee in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, but even for cinema's quintessential thug,
there was something more terrifyingly callous about his performance in John
Boorman's seminal 1967 neo-noir Point Blank. With daunting broad shoulders,
hard, searing eyes, and a face that looked like it had been carved out of iron,
Marvin was an imposing goliath, and as he rises from the dead during the title
credits of Boorman's tour de force, one becomes immediately aware of the
actor's enormous physicality. As he stomps stoically and silently amid Los
Angeles's glistening high-rises with an enormous .38 pistol at the ready,
Marvin's character seems almost inhuman; his one word moniker, Walker, and lack
of dialogue for the film's first 20 minutes merely confirms the impression that
he's less a man than an unbridled, indestructible elemental force. Long before
Mel Gibson turned the character into an endearing, wise-cracking anti-hero in
the pathetic remakePayback, Marvin's Walker was the cinema's ultimate
unsentimental badass—chillingly determined, unfettered by pesky human emotions
like love, sympathy, or remorse, and unwilling to halt the bloodshed until he
had fulfilled his quest.
That quest, as Boorman spells out
during Point Blank's masterful first few moments, involves reclaiming $93,000
that was stolen from him during a heist. Through a number of lightning-quick,
elliptically-assembled shots, we witness Walker, along with best friend Mal
Reese (a sniveling and exemplary John Vernon, in his first screen role) and
wife Lynne (Sharon Acker) successfully intercept a clandestine money drop-off
taking place on Alcatraz; when Reese finds that his share of the spoils isn't
satisfactory, he and Lynne plug Walker full of holes in a dank, shadowy prison
cell. Left for dead, Walker somehow manages to survive the ambush and, with a
stomach full of lead, returns to San Francisco by floating along the
treacherous Alcatraz currents on his back. A year later, a mysterious informer
tells him how to find his wife and Reese, but as Walker makes clear, his
motivations aren't revenge. He simply wants what's rightfully his: the $93,000.
If Walker isn't interested in the
retribution most men would crave after such a betrayal, Boorman is similarly
uninterested in merely replicating the style and tone of prototypical film
noir. (After the 1965 British comedy Catch Us if You Can, Point Blank was the
director's American film debut.) Influenced by the French New Wave's radical
formal innovations, the European ennui of Michelangelo Antonioni's films, and
the genre revisionism of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, Boorman set out to
make a thriller that looked and felt like nothing else before it, using
widescreen Panavision cinematography, explosive colors, and a multi-layered
soundtrack to re-envision the noir picture as highbrow Euro-art film. Whereas
noirs generally boast a shadowy, expressionistic interplay between light and
dark, Boorman casts most of his film in brilliant daylight and summery colors.
Where noir creates a visual and thematic atmosphere of constriction and
imprisonment, Boorman shoots everything in expansive widescreen that posits
characters in oppressively open spaces and, when more than one person is on
screen, at opposite ends of the frame. And instead of noir's typically
convoluted narratives involving plenty of unnecessary exposition, Boorman's
film is a model of silent visual storytelling that broke new ground in non-linear
cinematic narrative construction.
What makes Point Blank so
extraordinary, however, is not its departures from genre conventions, but
Boorman's virtuoso use of such unconventional avant-garde stylistics to
saturate the proceedings with a classical noir mood of existential torpor and
romanticized fatalism. The action is set against (and within) a sunny corporate
L.A. landscape characterized by its sterile, overwhelming enormity—situated in
the corners of Boorman's off-kilter compositions, a colossal architectural or
natural edifice weighing down upon his back (if not literally crowding him off
the screen), Walker is denied sanctuary. Through odd camera angles and stylized
compositions that position our hero as powerless and adrift amid this
malevolent, foreign metropolis, Boorman creates a tone of uneasy dislocation.
Los Angeles seems more menacingly inhospitable in sunshine than at night, and
this irony plays into the film's dichotomy between the old and new world. Just
as classic noir's sinister darkness is replaced in Point Blank by creepy
brightness, so has Walker's old-school criminal been replaced by the corporate
villains who work their nefarious schemes on behalf of faceless financial
entities (Reese has stolen Walker's money as a means of buying his way back
into the ominous “The Organization”). For these conglomerates, “Profit is the
only principle,” and unlike yesteryear's two-bit crook (of which Walker is
one), they do business in checks, not cash.
The film's pervading sense of
disorientation is heightened by the flashback structure of the screenplay
(adapted from Donald E. Westlake's novel by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse
and Rafe Newhouse). Like Don Siegel's 1962 remake of The Killers (which also
starred Marvin), Point Blank effortlessly jumps back and forth in time, but
Boorman's oblique narrative, as opposed to Siegel's more conventional thriller,
works on a somewhat subliminal level. The film feels refracted through its
protagonist's mind, with chronological logic blurred by a narrative free association
that finds particular sounds, colors and images subconsciously intertwined (a
technique Steven Soderbergh would ape in 1999's The Limey). Reese, begging for
his life, tells Walker to trust him, and the appeal conjures up the memory of
the last time his former friend made such a plea. Walker sees a broken bottle
of perfume in a sink, and the image of swirling red liquid immediately makes
him recall being shot on Alcatraz (or is he foreseeing a nightclub brawl that
has yet to occur?). Since the story is fluid and replete with detours and
digressions, any easy interpretation is challenged by the script's tantalizing
ambiguity.
Despite the film's reluctance to
provide definitive answers on the subject, one can safely assume that Walker is
fatally wounded during the film's opening scene, and that his recovery and
search for the $93,000 is merely a deathbed fever dream. Boorman repeatedly
hints at such a reading, from Walker's first meeting with his enigmatic
benefactor on a boat circling the Rock (the tour guide's speech about the near
impossibility of escaping the island fortress is intercut with the implausible
sight of Walker floating his way back to civilization) to numerous scenes in
which he's either framed by bar-like shadows (recalling the Alcatraz cell he
was shot in) or told by someone that he should just “lie down and die.”
Marvin's understated performance only reinforces this interpretation—with his
expressionless countenance and deathly silence, Walker resembles a walking
corpse, charging toward his singular goal like a specter that must fulfill one
last unfinished earthly task before gaining entry into the afterworld.
Noir protagonists are, in part,
defined by their spiritual, emotional, and/or psychological alienation, and
thus Marvin's impassivity—reflected in every one of his fractured
conversations—pinpoints him as a man cut off from, and alone in, the world.
When Walker finds his wife, he bursts into her house and, after tossing her
aside, instinctively fires his mammoth revolver into her empty bed. It's a
symbolic act of sexual violence aimed at purging himself of his love for Lynne,
but the gesture is an empty reflex rather than the by-product of pent-up
feelings—as his muteness during their subsequent conversation conveys, he's
incapable of forming even the most basic human connections, much less
experiencing passion, kindness, or misery. When Walker is repeatedly slapped by
Lynne's sister Chris (Angie Dickinson), he stands there and takes it; when
she's done, he methodically straightens his suit, walks over to the couch, and
turns on the TV to listen to an actor talk about “erotic inertia.” Later, when
he abandons Chris to finish his mission, she asks him “Hey, what's my last
name?” His response (“What's my first name?”) heartbreakingly sums up the
irremediable isolation that both Walker and those around him are doomed to
endure.
Though Point Blank is rife with
existential malaise, it is also one of the most ferociously sexy crime movies
ever made. Boorman shoots violence with more than a hint of sexualized
wickedness, and many of Walker's most brutal moments (bursting through Lynne's
door and grabbing her around the mouth as he spins in a circle with his gun
cocked and loaded; forcefully reaching between the legs of an Organization secretary
in order to disconnect the office's alarm) have more than a hint of wanton
salaciousness. Anything that doesn't feel impersonal in Boorman's world seems
tainted by cheap luridness (such as the blood-red jazz club that Walker can't
begin to comprehend), and it's to the film's credit that the director doesn't
shy away from providing the tawdry kicks (guns, babes, sex, murder) that have
always enlivened even the best noirs.
After dispatching everyone who
gets in his way (including old pal Reese, who meets an untimely demise
plummeting naked from a hotel balcony to the street below), Walker kidnaps an
Organization bigwig named Brewster (played by a roly-poly Carroll O'Connor) and
finally sets about getting his money. But because he's already deceased and, therefore,
the money really doesn't mean anything, it's unsurprising to find that, when
the job is done and the loot is there for the taking, Walker—staring emptily at
his prize while semi-cloaked in darkness—does nothing. For a film about a dead
man engaged in a self-originating, self-perpetuating, and wholly meaningless
pursuit of a relatively meager bounty, the final image of Walker receding into
the enveloping darkness is a fittingly despondent conclusion to one of noir's
most bleak, vicious and inventive masterpieces. Walker ultimately winds up just
where he began, but after Boorman's Point Blank, noir would never be quite the
same again.
Here, here's some Disney cartoons for you, enjoy!
Mish Mash: noun \ˈmish-ËŒmash, -ËŒmäsh\ A : hodgepodge, jumble “The painting was just a mishmash of colors and abstract shapes as far as we could tell”. Origin Middle English & Yiddish; Middle English mysse masche, perhaps reduplication of mash mash; Yiddish mish-mash, perhaps reduplication of mishn to mix. First Known Use: 15th century
Wall of the cellar in Ekaterinburg, Russia, against which the tsarist Romanov family was executed by the Bolsheviks, 1918.
THE ART AND BEAUTY OF BALLET
Olga Smirnova & Semyon Chudin of the Bolshoi Ballet in Apollo
I'm a big big Fan of Bukowski
Montmartre, Paris (by Marcel Kergourlay)
TODAY'S ALLEGED MOB GUY
Pierce,
Ralph: Born 1900. One of Murray Humphreys men, and a trusted
bodyguard, he was arrested at least 100 times but never convicted. At age ten,
Pierce shot and killed his 14 years old cousin while the boys were playing
cowboys and Indians. According to reports, Pierce put the gun to his cousins
temple and fired off a round, killing him instantly. Pierce said it was an
accident. No charges were field.
Pierce before the Kefauver Committe
During the 1928 elections, Pierce
operated a Capone jail house at 1352 South Peoria Street where political
opponents and their supporters were held until after the polls closed. As a
result, he was later named in indictments for one robbery, five assaults and
five kidnappings. The dapper and flashy
Pierce was indicted in the Bioff movie scandal in the 1940s, although he was
later acquitted of all charges brought against him.
Piece was arrested in connection to a 1929
kidnapping, but the charges were dropped without reason. In 1935, , he was
arrested as the probable killer of motion-pictures operators' union Tommy
Malloy and as one of the murderers in the gruesome killing of Estelle Carey in
1943. In both cases, the charges were dropped due to lack of evidence. Two
years after he was suspected of hacking Estelle Cary to death (Marshal Caifano
was also questioned in the murder)
Pierce was arrested in 1945 while running
the mobs operations along Roosevelt Road for questioning in connection with the
murder of James "Red" Forsythe, a long time underworld hoodlum.
In
the late 1940s, he was a co-investor with Sam "Golf Bag" Hunt (below) in a
series of floating casinos across the south side. Pierce was technically
employed by Laborers Local 714 although he was the virtual boss over the South
side rackets in the 1950s, meaning he earned millions of dollars each year.
He kept close contact to John D'Arco and
Pat Marcy, (below) the First Ward "fixers" with the ability to influence the
outcome of murder cases for the right price and was well liked by Sam Giancana
when Giancana was boss.
At the heyday of the Outfits involvement in Las Vegas,
through his connection with his direct boss, Murry Humphreys, Pierce was known
as the man to see for “Comps” by hoods traveling to Vegas on vacation.
Pierce towards the end of his life
In 1971, Ross DiMauro was a high-volume
bookmaker who also dabbled in real estate. received a three-year prison term
for criminal contempt of court after refusing to answer questions of a federal
grand jury concerning his dealing with Pierce.
In 1975, Piece, then 75 years old, was
still the gambling boss of the Loop until that, as well as his gambling empire
on the south side, were taken over by Black street gangs. Pierce died on July 8
1974 of a heart attack.
ROCCATAGLIATA, Nicolò Venetian school The Young St John
DON'T YOU JUST LOVE POP ART?
Marilyn, by DeVon
MUSIC FOR THE SOUL
From Wikipedia
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman (March 9, 1930– June 11, 2015)
was a jazz saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, and composer. He was one of the
major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s, a term he invented
with the name of an album. Coleman's timbre was easily recognized: his keening,
crying sound drew heavily on blues music. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship
in 1994. His album Sound Grammar received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music.
Coleman was born in 1930 in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was also
raised. He attended I.M. Terrell High School, where he participated in band
until he was dismissed for improvising during "The Washington Post."
He began performing R&B and bebop initially on tenor
saxophone, and started a band, the Jam Jivers, with some fellow students
including Prince Lasha and Charles Moffett.
Seeking a way to work his
way out of his home town, he took a job in 1949 with a Silas Green from New
Orleans traveling show and then with touring rhythm and blues shows. After a
show in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he was assaulted and his saxophone was
destroyed.
He switched to alto saxophone, which remained his primary
instrument, first playing it in New Orleans after the Baton Rouge incident. He
then joined the band of Pee Wee Crayton and travelled with them to Los Angeles.
He worked at various jobs, including as an elevator operator, while continuing
to pursue his musical career.
From the beginning of his career, Coleman's music and playing
were in many ways unorthodox. His approach to harmony and chord progression was
far less rigid than that of bebop performers; he was increasingly interested in
playing what he heard rather than fitting it into predetermined
chorus-structures and harmonies. His raw, highly vocalized sound and penchant
for playing "in the cracks" of the scale led many Los Angeles jazz
musicians to regard Coleman's playing as out-of-tune. He sometimes had
difficulty finding like-minded musicians with whom to perform. Nevertheless,
pianist Paul Bley was an early supporter and musical collaborator.
In 1958, Coleman led his first recording session for
Contemporary, Something Else!!!!: The Music of Ornette Coleman. The session
also featured trumpeter Don Cherry, drummer Billy Higgins, bassist Don Payne
and Walter Norris on piano.
1959 was a notably productive year for Coleman. His last release
on Contemporary was Tomorrow Is the Question! a quartet album, with Shelly
Manne on drums, and excluding the piano, which he would not use again until the
1990s. Next Coleman brought double bassist Charlie Haden – one of a handful of
his most important collaborators – into a regular group with Cherry and
Higgins. (All four had played with Paul Bley the previous year.) He signed a
multi-album contract with Atlantic Records, who released The Shape of Jazz to
Come in 1959. It was, according to critic Steve Huey, "a watershed event
in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and
throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven't come to grips with."
While definitely – if somewhat loosely – blues-based and often
quite melodic, the album's compositions were considered at that time
harmonically unusual and unstructured. Some musicians and critics saw Coleman
as an iconoclast; others, including conductor Leonard Bernstein and composer
Virgil Thomson regarded him as a genius and an innovator." Jazzwise listed
it #2 on their list of the 100 best jazz albums of all time.
Coleman's quartet received a lengthy – and sometimes
controversial – engagement at New York City's famed Five Spot jazz club. Such
notable figures as the Modern Jazz Quartet, Leonard Bernstein and Lionel
Hampton were favorably impressed, and offered encouragement. (Hampton was so
impressed he reportedly asked to perform with the quartet; Bernstein later
helped Haden obtain a composition grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation.) Opinion was, however, divided.
Trumpeter Miles Davis famously declared Coleman was "all
screwed up inside", although Davis later recanted this comment and became
a proponent of Coleman's musical innovations. Roy Eldridge stated, "I'd
listened to him all kinds of ways. I listened to him high and I listened to him
cold sober. I even played with him. I think he's jiving baby."
Coleman's unique early sound was due in part to his use of a
plastic saxophone. He had first bought a plastic horn in Los Angeles in 1954
because he was unable to afford a metal saxophone, though he didn't like the
sound of the plastic instrument at first. Coleman later claimed that it sounded
drier, without the pinging sound of metal. In later years, he played a metal
saxophone.
On the Atlantic recordings, Coleman's sidemen in the quartet are
Cherry on cornet or pocket trumpet, Haden, Scott LaFaro, and then Jimmy
Garrison on bass, and Higgins or his replacement Ed Blackwell on drums. The
complete released recordings for the label were collected on the box set Beauty
Is a Rare Thing.
In 1960, Coleman recorded Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation,
which featured a double quartet, including Cherry and Freddie Hubbard on
trumpet, Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, Haden and LaFaro on bass, and both
Higgins and Blackwell on drums. The record was recorded in stereo, with a
reed/brass/bass/drums quartet isolated in each stereo channel.
Free Jazz was, at nearly
40 minutes, the lengthiest recorded continuous jazz performance to date, and
was instantly one of Coleman's most controversial albums. The music features a
regular but complex pulse, one drummer playing "straight" while the
other played double-time; the thematic material is a series of brief, dissonant
fanfares. As is conventional in jazz, there are a series of solo features for
each member of the band, but the other soloists are free to chime in as they
wish, producing some extraordinary passages of collective improvisation by the full
octet. In the January 18, 1962 issue of Down Beat magazine, in a special review
titled "Double View of a Double Quartet," Pete Welding awarded the
album Five Stars while John A. Tynan rated it No Stars.
Coleman originally intended "Free Jazz" as simply an
album title, but his growing reputation placed him at the forefront of jazz
innovation, and free jazz was soon considered a new genre, though Coleman has
expressed discomfort with the term. Among the reasons Coleman may not have
entirely approved of the term 'free jazz' is that his music contains a
considerable amount of composition. His melodic material, although skeletal,
strongly recalls the melodies that Charlie Parker wrote over standard
harmonies, and in general the music is closer to the bebop that came before it
than is sometimes popularly imagined.
(Several early tunes of
his, for instance, are clearly based on favorite bop chord changes like
"Out of Nowhere" and "I Got Rhythm".) Coleman very rarely
played standards, concentrating on his own compositions, of which there seemed
to be an endless flow. There are exceptions, though, including a classic
reading (virtually a recomposition) of "Embraceable You" for
Atlantic, and an improvisation on Thelonious Monk's "Criss-Cross"
recorded with Gunther Schuller.
After the Atlantic period and into the early part of the 1970s,
Coleman's music became more angular and engaged fully with the jazz avant-garde
which had developed in part around his innovations.
His quartet dissolved, and Coleman formed a new trio with David
Izenzon on bass, and Charles Moffett on drums. Coleman began to extend the
sound-range of his music, introducing accompanying string players (though far
from the territory of Charlie Parker with Strings) and playing trumpet and
violin (which he played left-handed) himself. He initially had little
conventional musical technique and used the instruments to make large,
unrestrained gestures. His friendship with Albert Ayler influenced his
development on trumpet and violin. Haden would later sometimes join this trio
to form a two-bass quartet.
Between 1965 and 1967 Coleman signed with Blue Note Records and
released a number of recordings starting with the influential recordings of the
trio At the Golden Circle Stockholm.
In 1966, Coleman was criticized for recording The Empty Foxhole,
a trio with Haden, and Coleman's son Denardo Coleman – who was ten years old.
Some regarded this as perhaps an ill-advised piece of publicity on Coleman's
part and judged the move a mistake. Others, however, noted that despite his
youth, Denardo had studied drumming for several years. His technique – which,
though unrefined, was respectable and enthusiastic – owed more to
pulse-oriented free jazz drummers like Sunny Murray than to bebop drumming.
Denardo has matured into a respected musician, and has been his father's
primary drummer since the late 1970s.
Coleman formed another quartet. A number of bassists and
drummers (including Haden, Garrison and Elvin Jones) appeared, and Dewey Redman
joined the group, usually on tenor saxophone.
He also continued to explore his interest in string textures –
from Town Hall, 1962, culminating in Skies of America in 1972. (Sometimes this
had a practical value, as it facilitated his group's appearance in the UK in
1965, where jazz musicians were under a quota arrangement but classical
performers were exempt.)
In 1969, Coleman was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of
Fame.
Coleman, like Miles Davis before him, took to playing with
electrified instruments. Albums like Virgin Beauty and Of Human Feelings used
rock and funk rhythms, sometimes called free funk. The 1976 album Dancing in
Your Head, Coleman's first recording with the group which later became known as
Prime Time, prominently featured electric guitars. While this marked a
stylistic departure for Coleman, the music maintained certain similarilties to
his earlier work. These performances had the same angular melodies and
simultaneous group improvisations – what Joe Zawinul referred to as
"nobody solos, everybody solos" and what Coleman called harmolodics –
and although the nature of the pulse was altered, Coleman's own rhythmic
approach did not.
Jerry Garcia played guitar on three tracks from Coleman's 1988
album Virgin Beauty: "Three Wishes", "Singing in the
Shower", and "Desert Players". Coleman joined the Grateful Dead
on stage once in 1993 during "Space", and stayed for "The Other
One", "Stella Blue", Bobby Bland's "Turn on Your
Lovelight", and the encore "Brokedown Palace". Another
collaboration was with guitarist Pat Metheny, with whom Coleman recorded Song X
(1985); though released under Metheny's name, Coleman was essentially co-leader
(contributing all the compositions).
In 1990, the city of Reggio Emilia in Italy held a three-day
"Portrait of the Artist" featuring a Coleman quartet with Cherry,
Haden and Higgins. The festival also presented performances of his chamber
music and the symphonic Skies of America.
In 1991, Coleman played on the soundtrack for David Cronenberg's
Naked Lunch; the orchestra was conducted by Howard Shore. It is notable among
other things for including a rare sighting of Coleman playing a jazz standard:
Thelonious Monk's blues line "Misterioso". Two 1972 (pre-electric)
Coleman recordings, "Happy House" and "Foreigner in a Free
Land" were used in Gus Van Sant's 2000 Finding Forrester.
The mid-1990s saw a flurry of activity from Coleman: he released
four records in 1995 and 1996, and for the first time in many years worked
regularly with piano players (either Geri Allen or Joachim Kühn). He was
awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (genius grant) in 1994.
In 2001 Coleman was awarded a Praemium Imperial (World Culture
Prize in Memory of His Imperial Highness Prince Takamatsu), an international
art prize by the imperial family of Japan on behalf of the Japan Art
Association. The prize recognises outstanding contributions in the development,
promotion and progress of the arts in the fields of painting, sculpture,
architecture, music, and theatre/film—arguably one of the most prestigious art
prizes in the world. Coleman was the second and latest jazz musician to receive
the Praemium Imperial, after Oscar Peterson in 1999.
In 2004 Coleman was awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize,
one of the richest prizes in the arts, given annually to "a man or woman
who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to
mankind's enjoyment and understanding of life."
In September 2006 he released a live album titled Sound Grammar
with his newest quartet (Denardo drumming and two bassists, Gregory Cohen and
Tony Falanga). This was his first album of new material in ten years, and was
recorded in Germany in 2005. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music, Coleman
being only the second jazz artist to win the prize.
On February 11, 2007, Coleman was honored with a Grammy award
for lifetime achievement, in recognition of this legacy.
On July 9, 2009, Coleman received the Miles Davis Award, a
recognition given by the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal to
musicians who have contributed to continuing the tradition of jazz.
On May 1, 2010, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in music
from the University of Michigan for his musical contributions.
Jazz pianist Joanne Brackeen (who had only briefly studied music
as a child) stated in an interview with Marian McPartland that Coleman had been
mentoring her and giving her semi-formal music lessons in recent years.
Coleman continued to push himself into unusual playing
situations, often with much younger musicians or musicians from radically
different musical cultures. An increasing number of his compositions, while not
ubiquitous, have become minor jazz standards, including "Lonely
Woman", "Peace", "Turnaround", "When Will the
Blues Leave?", "The Blessing", "Law Years", "What
Reason Could I Give" and "I've Waited All My Life". He has influenced
virtually every saxophonist of a modern disposition, and nearly every such jazz
musician, of the generation that followed him. His songs have proven endlessly
malleable: pianists such as Paul Bley and Paul Plimley have managed to turn
them to their purposes; John Zorn recorded Spy vs Spy (1989), an album of
extremely loud, fast, and abrupt versions of Coleman songs. Finnish jazz singer
Carola covered Coleman's "Lonely Woman" and there have even been
progressive bluegrass versions of Coleman tunes (by Richard Greene).
Coleman married poet Jayne Cortez in 1954. The couple divorced
in 1964. They had one son, Denardo, born in 1956, who became a notable jazz
drummer in his own right.
Coleman died of a cardiac arrest at the age of 85 in New York
City on June 11, 2015. His funeral was a three-hour event with performances and
speeches by several of his collaborators and contemporaries.
What Love is…………………….
I believe that one defines
oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your
friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone. Henry Rollins
Your task is not to seek for
love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you
have built against it. Rumi
Love is but the discovery of
ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.
Alexander
True love stories never have
endings. Richard Bach
Love is a chain of love as nature
is a chain of life. Truman Capote
American modernist painter
Arthur Dove. While living in his family's Geneva, New York farmhouse, Dove
began to execute a series of sunrise paintings. This watercolor
"Sunrise" (1936-37)—a study for his oil painting "Sunrise
III"—employs simplified forms and uses color as the essence of imagery.
Arthur Dove, Sunrise, 1936-37,
Opaque and transparent watercolor, pen, and black ink on wove paper, Wadsworth
Atheneum Museum of Art, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner
Collection Fund, 1955
Edward Hopper Night Shaws 1921
A solitary figure hurries down an empty city street in this dramatic composition, a view from above. Hopper made this and other etchings early in his career, before turning exclusively to painting and drawing in 1928. Etching, a technique in which a composition is incised into a metal plate and then printed in ink on paper, was particularly suited to Hopper's style, allowing him to use strong, clean lines and cross-hatching to enhance the mystery of his chosen subject—here, the empty city at night.
Paint and Switch? Did Alec Baldwin Pay $190,000 for the
Wrong Picture?
By GRAHAM BOWLEY
The Ross Bleckner Sea and Mirror at Alec Baldwin’s Manhattan office. CreditSantiago MejiaThe New York Times
Ten years or so ago, as the actorAlec Baldwin remembers it, the
gallery owner Mary Boone sent him an invitation to a show of work by the
painter Ross Bleckner, an artist whom she represented and he had befriended.
The card featured a reproduction of Mr. Bleckner’s “Sea and
Mirror,” a work from 1996, when the artist was at the height of his popularity.
So began Mr. Baldwin’s love affair with the painting — an
infatuation that has ended with Mr. Baldwin, who occupies a central role in New
York’s cultural life, now pitted in a bitter dispute with two formidable
players in the city’s rarefied world of art and money — Ms. Boone, a prominent
art dealer, and Mr. Bleckner, one of her notable talents.
This has, to say the least, become awkward.
For years, Mr. Baldwin said he carried the image of “Sea and
Mirror” in his shoulder bag, alongside a picture of one of his daughters and
his father. In 2010, he asked Ms. Boone to find the collector who owned it and
pry it away.
“There was a kind of beauty and simplicity” to the work, Mr.
Baldwin recalled in an interview this month.
Happily, she reported back, the collector would sell — but at a
premium.
Mr. Baldwin put up the $190,000.
“I love this thing so much,” he said in a 2012 speech about
support for the arts at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, proudly
recounting his quest. “Three months later it was hanging in my house, in my
apartment in New York.”
But Mr. Baldwin said that something about the painting always
gave him unease. The colors weren’t quite the same. It smelled, somehow, new.
In fact, he said, just a few months ago he discovered that he had not bought
the painting he pined for. Instead, he said, for reasons that remain disputed,
Ms. Boone sent him another version of the painting. He claims she passed it off
as the original.
“I thought she had made my dream come true,” Mr. Baldwin said.
Instead, he said he believed that Ms. Boone, frustrated that the collector
would not agree to sell, persuaded Mr. Bleckner to take an unfinished work from
the same series, finish painting it and sell it to him without saying a word.
Mr. Bleckner’s office said he could not be reached for comment.
Ms. Boone, through her lawyer, disputed Mr. Baldwin’s account, asserting he was
never misled about the identity of the work.
“He’s wrong that the painting is a copy; it’s an original and
very fine work of art by Ross Bleckner,” Ms. Boone’s lawyer, Ted Poretz, said
in a statement.
Mr. Baldwin, however, has emails that buttress parts of his
account. The Boone gallery also stamped a number — 7449 — on the back of the
painting it sold to Mr. Baldwin, the same number it had listed next to the work
it had said it was pursuing from the collector.
Mr. Baldwin said he met with the Manhattan district attorney’s
office this summer but was told that a criminal case could not be made.
Ms. Boone’s lawyer declined to address in full the issues raised
by the emails or the number next to the painting.
“The gallery never likes to have unhappy clients,” Mr. Poretz
said in his statement, “and it has turned cartwheels to try to satisfy Alec
Baldwin. It has repeatedly offered Alec Baldwin a full refund, among other
things.”
The interaction is hardly the first to end badly in an opaque,
largely unregulated art market. It raises questions about why works created in
one era by an artist, operating under one set of motivations, are sometimes
different in value and reputation, compared with works that were perhaps
created by the same artist in another era.
But to Mr. Baldwin, the concerns are not nearly so esoteric: He
contends he was betrayed.
“Ross was a kind of friend of mine,” Mr. Baldwin said.
He continues to be a Bleckner supporter. Mr. Baldwin’s
foundation helped to underwrite an exhibition this month on Long Island that
featured Mr. Bleckner’s paintings. He owns five of Mr. Bleckner’s works.
Mr. Baldwin said that the flamboyant, outspoken Ms. Boone, from
whom he sometimes bought art, admitted this year that she had switched the
works.
“She said, ‘I didn’t want to disappoint you,’” he said.
Mr. Baldwin, who met Mr. Bleckner at parties in the Hamptons,
where the actor owns a home, became an admirer of his work in the 1990s. Mr.
Bleckner, who had a Guggenheim retrospective in 1995 at 45, had been an
ascendant art star of the 1980s. He belonged to a stable of young artists who
helped Ms. Boone build her reputation in the ’80s, though two of her stars from
that time, Eric Fischl and David Salle, have since left for rival dealers.
Mr. Baldwin bought his first Bleckner from Ms. Boone in 2010,
and during that transaction mentioned that he really wanted “Sea and Mirror.”
The painting had sold at auction at Sotheby’s in 2007 for
$121,000. Ms. Boone told Mr. Baldwin in an email that the collector now sought
$175,000 for it.
“The Gallery normally charges ten to twenty percent for this
kind of transaction,” she wrote. “To make this a friendly deal, we would charge
you even less — $190,000,” before adding, “I know Ross is so thrilled for you
to have a painting and so am I.”
Mr. Poretz said that shortly afterward Mr. Baldwin was told
that, in fact, he was getting a different version of “Sea and Mirror.”
“By the time Alec Baldwin paid for the painting and it was
delivered to him, he should not have misunderstood what he purchased,” Mr.
Poretz said in his statement.
Mr. Baldwin denies he was ever told he would be receiving a
different work. He said that when he received the canvas, he noticed the
composition lacked a feathery quality in the brush strokes he had admired in
the photos of the work sold at Sotheby’s, and seemed brighter.
Ms. Boone told him, he said, that it had been newly cleaned as a
courtesy.
This year, his suspicions growing, he sent emails to Mr.
Bleckner and Ms. Boone inquiring about the collector from whom he had bought
the painting and about the cleaning.
According to copies of the emails, Mr. Bleckner responded that
he did not know the name of the collector. Mr. Baldwin says Mr. Bleckner did
not point out that that transaction had never gone through. Mr. Bleckner also
discussed how he might have done the cleaning.
“I would usually do
that,” he wrote to Mr. Baldwin, “although I don’t actually remember.”
Mr. Baldwin finally had a Sotheby’s expert compare his painting
to a catalog image from the 2007 auction.
The expert said, “This is not that painting,” Mr. Baldwin
recalled.
He then confronted Ms. Boone and Mr. Bleckner. He said they
acknowledged having given him another work. Mr. Baldwin has an email in which
Mr. Bleckner is deeply apologetic but does not directly address about what.
“im so sorry about all of this,” he wrote. “I feel so bad about
this … what can I do to make this up to you?”
He said Mr. Bleckner told him that he had started the painting
in 1996 and finished it in 2010, though he had dated it 1996.
“I don’t know what Ross knew,” Mr. Baldwin said. “Ross may have
been instructed to make a copy. I don’t know.”
This summer, as Mr. Baldwin complained to Ms. Boone, he gave her
an ultimatum.
“Deliver to me the painting that I bought. The one you sold me,”
he wrote in an email.
Ms. Boone again asked Sotheby’s to contact the owner of the
painting sold at auction in 2007, according to an email supplied by Mr.
Baldwin. The collector, whose identity remains a mystery, was still not
interested in selling.
Ms. Boone’s lawyer, Mr. Poretz, also contacted Mr. Baldwin to
try to settle the matter.
In an interview, Mr. Baldwin acknowledged that the work he has
was created by Mr. Bleckner and that it looks quite similar to the painting he
coveted. But he said it was not the work he had fallen in love with — not a
painting, in his view, created when the artist was at the peak of his fame.
Still, he told Ms. Boone in a recent email, he did not want to
hurt Mr. Bleckner. “I’m less worried about you, Mary,” he wrote, “as you are
more of an armadillo and I’m sure you have been blasting your way out of
corners like this on more than one occasion.”
Ms. Boone wrote back to say that she was working to get him the
work he wanted.
“I am not an Armadillo however,” she added.
What a cool idea this is....ha! Cool idea....
Here's some entertaining animals for you.........................
Why animals do the thing they do
As a dog trainer, I can tell you
that probably 50% of dogs really don’t like hugs and at least another 48%
pretty much just tolerate them. Very few dogs I know genuinely like hugs the
way humans tend to give them. What’s funny is that the picture that Fox used
with this headline is one of the more common ways dogs do enjoy contact that
humans would consider a hug.
Stanley Coren - the dude who
wrote the article that is pissing everyone off about this - really does know
what he’s talking about. He wrote one of my favorite books, called how to speak
dog, which has some absolutely beautiful diagrams of dog behavior and body
language along the gamut of extreme situations.
The way humans hug dogs is often
really uncomfortable for them. We lean over them and trap them (think how many
dogs we already know are spooky when you loom over them, but are fine if you
get down to their level), and then we restrict their ability to move and shove
our faces close to theirs. That’s not fun. Keep in mind that most dogs have
personal space bubbles that are larger than we tend to think, and now you’re
not only invading it, you’re making it so they can’t move or defend themselves
if something happens.
Most dogs learn to tolerate hugs
because we do it to them so often. It’s pretty much a kind of learned
helplessness, plus, they like us and so they put up with our stupid human
behavior. When you hug most dogs, you’ll notice they get kinda stiff, they look
away or at other humans for help, you’ll see side-eyes or look-aways (not whale
eye). Often they’ll distract you by doing something else like pawing at you, or
licking your face as an appeasement signal. They’re all signs of discomfort
that we already routinely ignore when we deal with our dogs, so it makes sense
that people think their dogs are fine with it - they’re just still not
listening.
More often, you’ll get dogs that
will crawl up your chest when you sit and put their paws on your shoulders.
Sometimes their face is close to yours, sometimes it’s on your shoulder. In
that position - which they often initiate - they can easily withdraw and get
away if necessary and they’re not trapped or being leaned over. It’s not really
a hug, just close contact, but I think it’s about as close as humans are going
to get to one that a dog will enjoy.
casijaz @tealviola
Sadness does not come from bad
circumstances.....it comes from bad thoughts.
I LOVE BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS FROM FILM
Alfred Eisenstaedt - Goodbye and Pennsylvania Station, 1944.
Why Did the Mayan Civilization Collapse? A New
Study Points to Deforestation and Climate Change
A
severe drought, exacerbated by widespread logging, appears to have triggered
the mysterious Mayan demise
By
Joseph Stromberg
SMITHSONIAN.COM
one
of ancient history’s most intriguing mysteries: Why did the Maya, a remarkably
sophisticated civilization made up of more than 19 million people, suddenly
collapse sometime during the 8th or 9th centuries? Although the Mayan people
never entirely disappeared—their descendants still live across Central
America—dozens of core urban areas in the lowlands of the Yucatan peninsula,
such as Tikal, went from bustling cities to abandoned ruins over the course of
roughly a hundred years.
Scholars
and laypeople have proposed countless theories accounting for the collapse,
ranging from the plausible (overhunting, foreign invasion, peasant revolt) to
the absurd (alien invasion, supernatural forces). In his 2005 book Collapse,
though, Jared Diamond put forth a different sort of theory—that a prolonged
drought, exacerbated by ill-advised deforestation, forced Mayan populations to
abandon their cities. That hypothesis has finally been put to the test with
archaeological evidence and environmental data and the results published this
week in a pair of studies.
In
the first study, published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, researchers from Arizona State University analyzed archaeological
data from across the Yucatan to reach a better understanding of the
environmental conditions when the area was abandoned. Around this time, they
found, severe reductions in rainfall were coupled with an rapid rate of
deforestation, as the Mayans burned and chopped down more and more forest to
clear land for agriculture. Interestingly, they also required massive amounts
of wood to fuel the fires that cooked the lime plaster for their elaborate
constructions—experts estimate it would have taken 20 trees to produce a single
square meter of cityscape.
The
other study, published by researchers from Columbia University and elsewhere
this week in Geophysical Research Letters, applied quantitative data to these
trends. Using population records and measurements from current forested and
cleared lands in the region, they constructed a computer model of deforestation
in the Yucatan and ran simulations to see how this would have affected
rainfall.
Because
cleared land absorbs less solar radiation, less water evaporates from its
surface, making clouds and rainfall more scarce. As a result, the rapid
deforestation exacerbated an already severe drought—in the simulation,
deforestation reduced precipitation by five to 15 percent and was responsible
for 60 percent of the total drying that occurred over the course of a century
as the Mayan civilization collapsed. The lack of forest cover also contributed
to erosion and soil depletion.
In
a time of unprecedented population density, this combination of factors was
likely catastrophic. Crops failed, especially because the droughts occurred
disproportionately during the summer growing season. Coincidentally, trade
shifted from overland routes, which crossed the heart of the lowland, to
sea-based voyages, moving around the perimeter of the peninsula.
Since
the traditional elite relied largely upon this trade—along with annual crop
surpluses—to build wealth, they were sapped of much of their power. This forced
peasants and craftsmen into making a critical choice, perhaps necessary to
escape starvation: abandoning the lowlands. The results are the ornate ruins
that stretch across the peninsula today.
The
collapse is especially intriguing because it seemingly occurred at “a time in
which developed a sophisticated understanding of their environment, built and
sustained intensive production and water systems and withstood at least two long-term
episodes of aridity,” says B.L. Turner, the lead author of the ASU study. In
other words, the Maya were no fools. They knew their environment and how to
survive within it—and still they continued deforesting at a rapid pace, until
the local environment was unable to sustain their society.
One
of the lessons of these complementary studies, says climate modeler Robert
Oglesby of the University of Nebraska, who worked on the second paper, is that
our reshaping of the environment can often have unintended consequences—and we
may not have any idea of what they are until it’s too late. For a present-day
example, we can even look to another region where the ancient Maya lived,
Guatemala, which is undergoing rapid deforestation. “There’s a tremendous amount
of change going on in Guatemala,” said Oglesby. “They may be that much more
vulnerable to a severe drought.”
What caused the mystery of the Dark Day?
By
Tom de Castella
BBC
News Magazine
Three
centuries ago in parts of North America, a strange event turned morning to
night. It remains wreathed in mystery - so what caused the Dark Day?
Halfway
through the morning the sky turns yellow. Animals run for cover and darkness
descends, causing people to light candles and start to pray. By lunchtime night
has fallen. Is it the end of the world?
The
Dark Day, as it's become known, took place on May 19, 1780 in New England and
parts of eastern Canada. For the past 232 years historians and scientists have
argued over the origins of this strange event.
Today
there are many theories. Was it the result of volcanic eruption, fire, meteor
strike - or something more sinister?
With
little scientific knowledge amongst the populace in 1780, people would have
been afraid. Some lawmakers in Connecticut believed it was the day of
judgement. The sense that a decisive moment was afoot would have been bolstered
by the fact that during the preceding days, the sun and moon glowed red.
Historian
Mike Dash says the north-east corner of the US was a deeply Protestant society
with a profound interest in "guilt, sin and redemption". Dash, who
wrote about the paranormal in his book Borderlands, says that faced with sudden
darkness, people would look for biblical precedents.
"There
are some verses in Matthew that might have led them to believe that this is the
second coming of Christ. At the time, natural events - even birds fighting in
the sky - were a sign of God's intentions. The Dark Day would have seemed like
a warning to Man."
So
what might explain 1780's Dark Day?
The
Met Office points out that thick cloud can drop low enough to turn on automatic
street lights and require cars to use their lights. But it's unlikely this
alone would be enough to cause a Dark Day.
A
solar eclipse can be ruled out as there is a record of when these occur - and
they only last for a matter of minutes.
The
eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajokull in 2010 caused enough ash to enter the
atmosphere to ground flights across northern Europe.
Thomas
Choularton, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Manchester,
says volcanic ash clouds often cause "yellow days". Eruptions at
Mount St Helens in Washington State have lowered light levels in recent
decades, he adds.
And
yet there is no record of volcanic activity in 1780, he says, making a huge ash
cloud an unlikely explanation. A meteorite is equally unlikely, although
"you can't rule it out completely", Prof Choularton says.
The
answer to the puzzle can be found in the trees, many scientists believe.
Academics
at the University of Missouri's Department of Forestry analysed tree trunks
inland from New England, where westerly prevailing winds would originate. They
found signs of fire-scarred rings in tree trunks dating back to that period.
It
is also known that there was a drought there in 1780 making fire more likely,
says Dr Will Blake, associate professor of geography at Plymouth University.
But
could a forest fire cause such a change in light? "I've witnessed minor
fires in Australia where you get a very eerie light. The bigger the fire, the
darker it's going to get." Fog is common on the east coast. The mix of fog
and soot from the forest fire would combine to make darkness descend, Dr Blake
argues.
Eyewitness
accounts in New England support the forest fire hypothesis. Soot was spotted in
the rivers. And Jeremy Belknap of Boston wrote in a letter that the air had the
"smell of a malt-house or a coal-kiln".
William
Corliss, the physicist and chronicler of unexplained events, found 46 accounts
of dark days around the world between 1091 and 1971.
Nowadays
people can call upon scientific knowledge, satellite pictures and the media for
reassurance. But Dark Days have continued to unsettle people until surprisingly
recently.
A
Dark Day in a similar part of North America to 1780's occurred in 1950. It was
caused by forest fires in Alberta and prompted alarm and confusion, says David
Phillips, senior climatologist at Environment Canada.
"If
you'd woken up at noon you'd have believed it was midnight. People thought it
was nuclear attack or a solar eclipse."
Whatever
the cause in 1780, the geography must have exacerbated the fear, says Dash.
Settlements tended to go little more than 200 miles inland. In essence,
European settlers were living on the edge of a vast unknown continent.
"When
it goes dark for them, there's no guarantee it is ever going to get light
again. In those days it would be quite natural to think it was the Second
Coming," Dash says. When dawn arrived, it is likely that prayers of thanks
were said across the previously benighted land.
1816: The Year Without A Summer That Changed
The World
If
you think the recent weather has been strange lately, listen to this tale of a
year without a summer. In 1815 a volcanic eruption caused the following year’s
weather patterns to be drastically different. People across the world
experienced unusual weather and increased hardships, but they did not associate
the volcano with the conditions at the time. This strange phenomenon deeply
affected the Eastern U.S. and the Appalachian Mountains, but hit the whole
world, causing odd rain events and weather that could not be explained, and
altering the course of human history.
TAMBORA
The
eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia (then known as the Dutch East Indies) in
April of 1815 was the result of a highly pressurized volcanic environment. The
initial stages of eruption were reported to have sounded like an army attack
with guns and cannons. As flames shot up from the top, hot pumice and volcanic
rock were forced into the air. The geological event caused tons of ash and
sulphur-dioxide into the air over the course of five days, enough to cover a
100 mile radius with afoot of ash! This event and the resulting cloud, some
scientists proffer, is the cause of the the weather extremes and global cooling
the following year. Many experts do believe that this is the only reasonable
explanation for the year without a summer, though there is not total agreement
on the matter. This volcano is still active today, though volcanic activity is
closely monitored to ensure minimal losses if the pressure does build up again.
TRAGEDY
Folks
began to notice that the usual signs of spring weren’t there in 1816.
First-hand accounts tell us that the weather was so cold that birds dropped
from the sky mid-flight (presumably from exposure or starvation). The ground
was frost-covered in May in some regions, but that was the least of the
problems to come since snows in June and July were a huge problem for
Appalachian and New England farmers. The spring and summer months were dotted
with slightly warmer periods that did not last, giving false hope to some.
Crops could not grow and yields were reduced by 90% in some places. The prices
of produce and wheat soared dramatically as goods became increasingly hard to
come by. The “Poverty Year,” as it is also known, draws from the fact that
increased prices and decreased crops meant that the poor were even poorer this
year. Today it is also referred to as the “Little Ice Age.” In some parts of
Europe decreased crops and poor food production dragged on until 1817 and 1818,
showing the far-reaching effects of the volcanic spread.
Around
the world, the weather patterns of many areas were flipped backwards. In China,
the monsoon season hit so hard that flooding was unavoidable. In India, the
monsoons did not arrive as expected, causing drought and water shortages at
first, and then flooding during the dry season. This weather changes in India
caused the already-present cholera bacteria to mutate into a new strain as an
adaptation to the changing water supply. Humans in those areas had no immunity
to this new strain and the disease became rampant. Worldwide increases in
cholera cases occurred after this devastating event and cholera is still
pandemic in many parts of Africa and Asia today due to the high degree of
adaptability of the bacteria.
WORLDWIDE
CHANGES
Some
important changes came about because of this year without a summer. Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein was written in the gloomy months of the frigid summer of
1816. Hardship in the Yunnan province of China caused family farms to seek more
durable and profitable crops andopium was a prime choice that continued for
decades and gave rise to the “Golden Triangle” of opium production. Farmers in
New England drifted west, hoping that the summers would be warmer out there,
and perhaps changing the direction of our nation. Unlike the rest of the world,
the Arctic actually warmed up during this time, melting ice barriers and
allowing for historic expeditions and the search for the Northwest Passage, the
majority of which however, ended in tragedy.
This
one volcanic eruption impacted to the world for centuries due to how the
weather changed crops and bacteria. The incident helped invent the modern
science fiction novel, and a key drug became more common based on the events of
that infamous year. It’s amazing that we don’t learn the crazy story of the
year without a summer in school!
Let the stoics say
what they please we do not eat for the good of living but because the meat is
savory and the appetite is keen.
The roots of the Beat Poets
The First Hipster of New York
F.Y.I.
By KATIE ROGERS
Q. Did the hipster originate in New York? Or did hipsters
migrate here from some other bastion of cool?
A. We most likely have the jazz clubs of 1940s Harlem to thank
for the term, although its meaning may have changed some since then. A
Bronx-born, Juilliard-trained musician named Harry Raab helped popularize the
word with his stage name: Harry “the Hipster” Gibson.
But it’s doubtful that Mr. Raab, an expressive singer and gifted
piano player whose most recognizable song, for better or worse, was “Who Put
the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine,” coined the term.
Back then, as now, “hipster” was used to describe someone who
saw himself as hip and ahead of the curve, said Lewis Porter, a jazz historian
at Rutgers University. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is
also thought to be a modernized version of “hepcat,” which had the same meaning
in jazz circles. Dr. Porter said the word might also have been used to describe
white jazz musicians like Gibson who played in traditionally black clubs. “That
certainly was not its original meaning, but that could have become attached to
it later on,” he said.
In his 1957 essay “The White Negro” for Dissent magazine, Norman
Mailer examined beatnik culture, posing the theory that to be a hipster was to
be a white American who adopted black culture, worldviews and music as an act
of rebellion against capitalist greed, wartime violence and the ever-present
specter of nuclear war.
The New York Times has used the word “hipster” about 3,000 times
since 1851, the bulk of those references coming in a boomlet after the year
2000. It was typically used to describe a class of people who moved to
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, wearing white tank tops and clutching cans of Pabst
Blue Ribbon — until those people were priced out of the neighborhood, of
course.
Harry "The Hipster" Gibson (June 27, 1915 – May 3,
1991)
From Wikipedia
Gibson played New York style stride piano and boogie woogie while
singing in a wild, unrestrained style. His music career began in the late
1920s, when as the young Harry Raab, his birth name, he played stride piano in
Dixieland jazz bands in Harlem. He continued to perform there throughout the
1930s, adding the barrelhouse boogie of the time to his repertoire, and was
discovered byFats Waller in 1939 and brought down to mid-town Manhattan, where
he made a splash and changed his surname to Gibson.
Between 1939 and 1945, he played at various Manhattan jazz clubs
on 52nd Street ("Swing Street"), most notably the Three Deuces, run
by Irving Alexander, and Leon and Eddies, run by Leon Enkin and Eddie Davis.
In the 1940s, Gibson was known for writing unusual songs, which
are considered ahead of their time. He was also known for his unique, wild
singing style, his energetic and unorthodox piano styles, and for his intricate
mixture of hardcore, gutbucket boogie rhythms with ragtime, stride and jazz
piano styles. Gibson took the boogie woogie beat of his predecessors, but he
made it frantic, similar to the rock and roll music of the 1950s.
Examples of his wild
style are found in the songs "Riot in Boogie" and Barrelhouse Boogie". An example of his strange singing style is in the song "The
Baby and the Pup." Other songs that Gibson recorded were "Handsome
Harry, the Hipster", "I Stay Brown All Year 'Round", "Get
Your Juices at the Deuces", and "Stop That Dancin' Up There."
Gibson recorded a great deal, but there are very few visual examples of his
act. However, in New York in 1944, he filmed three songs for the Soundies film
jukeboxes, and he went to Hollywood in 1946 to guest star in the feature-length
film musical Junior Prom. Gibson preceded the first white rock and rollers by a
decade, but the Soundies he recorded show significant similarities to rock and
roll.
While working on "Swing Street" at night, Gibson was a
fellow at the Juilliard Graduate School during the day, at the time, Juilliard
was strictly a classical music academy, and Gibson excelled there, which partly
explains the richness of the music he brought to the jazz world. (if anything
he brought a richness to classical music, with his boogie WOOGIE training). The
other part of the explanation is, his own inventiveness, and Gibson was almost
always billed and promoted as a musical genius.
Unlike Mezz Mezzrow, who was white but consciously abandoned his
ethnicity to adopt the black music and culture as a "white negro,"
Gibson grew up near Harlem, New York City. Gibson's constant use of black jive
talk was not an affectation; it was simply his uptown New York dialect. His
song, "I Stay Brown All Year Round" is based on this issue. In his
autobiography, Gibson claims he coined the term hipster sometime between 1939
and 1945, when he was performing on Swing Street and he started using
"Harry the Hipster" as his stage name.
His career went into a tailspin in 1947, when his song "Who
Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine" put him on the music
industry blacklist.
Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs. Murphy's
Ovaltine?
Mrs.
Murphy couldn't sleep
Her
nerves were slightly off the bean
Until she
solved her problem
With a
can of Ovaltine
She drank
a cupful most every night
And ooh
how she would dream
Until
something rough got in the stuff
And made
her neighbors scream. OW!
Who put
the Benzedrine, in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?
Sure was
a shame, don't know who's to blame
Cause the
old lady didn't even get his name
Where did
she get that stuff?
Now she
just can't get enough
It might
have been the man who wasn't there
Now Jack,
that guy's a square
She never
ever wants to go to sleep
She says
that everything is solid all reet
Now Mr.
Murphy don't know what it's all about
Cause she
went and threw the old man out, Clout
Who put
the Benzedrine, in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?
Now she
wants to swing, the Highland Fling
She says
that Benzedrine's the thing that makes her spring.
This is
the second chorus you know
The name
of this chorus is called, "Who put the Nembutals in Mr. Murphy's overalls?
I don't
know
She
bought a can of Ovaltine, most every week or so
And she
always kept an extra can on hand
Just in
case that she'd run low
She never
never been so happy, since she left old Ireland
'Till
some one prowled her pantry, and tampered with her can. Wham!
Who put
the Benzedrine, in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?
Sure was
a shame, don't know who's to blame
Cause the
old lady didn't even get his name
Where did
she get that stuff
Now she
just can't get enough
It might
have been the man who wasn't there
Now Jack,
that guy's a square
She stays
up nights making all the rounds
They say
she lost about 69 pounds
Now Mr.
Murphy claims she's getting awful thin
And all
she says is, "Give me some skin." Mop!
Who put
the Benzedrine, in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?
Now she
wants to swing the Highland Fling
She says
that Benzedrine's the thing that makes her spring.
Spring it
now, Gibson
Note:
This song is Harry's adaptation of the old Irish folk song "Who put the
overalls
in Mrs. Murphy's Chowder." Two different versions of it can be found at:
http://sniff.numachi.com/pages/tiMRPHCHOW;ttMRPHCHOW.html
http://www.kididdles.com/lyrics/w057.html
His own drug use led to
his decline, and with the rising popularity of young rock-and-roll musicians
among teenagers in the 1950s, older musicians were not in demand. He spent time
in and around Miami during the 1950s, and just before Christmas 1956 he
appeared at the Ball & Chain on the same bill with Billie Holiday. In the
1960s, when Gibson saw the huge success of The Beatles, he decided to switch
over to rock-and-roll. By the 1970s, he was playing hard rock, blues, bop,
novelty songs and a few songs that mixed ragtime with rock-and-roll, and his
hipster act became a hippie act. His old records were revived by Dr. Demento,
particularly "Benzedrine" which was included in his 1975 compilation
album Dr. Demento's Delights.
His comeback resulted in three more albums. Harry the Hipster
Digs Christmas, made of new recordings in 1974, is a home recording and is not
noteworthy. Two professionally produced albums were released after this, which
were Everybody's Crazy but Me, (its title taken from the lyrics of "Stop
That Dancin' Up There"), by Progressive Records in 1986, and Who Put the
Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine released in 1989 by Delmark Records. Those
two albums include some jazz, blues, ragtime, and rock and roll songs about
reefer, nude bathing, hippie communes, strip clubs, male chauvinists,
"rocking the 88s", and getting hip to Shirley MacLaine.
Harry Gibson may have been the only pianist of the 1930s and
1940s to go on to play in full-scale rocking blues bands in the 1970s and
1980s. Unlike his 1940s contemporaries, most of whom continued to play the same
music for decades, Gibson gradually shifted gears between the 1940s and the
1970s, switching from jazz to rock. The only elements that remained constant
were his tendency to play hard-rocking boogie woogie, and his tongue-in-cheek
references to drug use.
Harry's family did a biographical movie short on Harry's life
and music in 1991, shortly before his death. The movie is called "Boogie
in Blue" and was published as a VHS video that year.
Suffering from congestive heart failure, Harry had long ago
decided that he would end life on his own terms if he ever became chronically
ill. Harry Gibson took his own life by putting a handgun to his head on May 3,
1991.
The White Negro (Fall 1957)
Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer ran in the
Democratic primaries for mayor of New York City in 1969 with journalist Jimmy
Breslin as his running mate (Breslin sought the nomination for President of the
City Council). Their program called for New York City to secede from the state
of New York. Political power was to devolve to the city’s neighborhoods. The
Mailer-Breslin slogan was “The Other Guys are the Joke.” Dissent published many
of Mailer’s controversial articles, including “The White Negro” (Fall 1957),
which is reprinted below, and Mailer served on Dissent’s editorial board for
more than three decades. The photograph above was taken by a seventeen-year-old
campaign worker who had then never heard of Dissent, Mitchell Cohen, who now
co-edits the magazine. Mailer died November 10th at the age of 84.
The White Negro
Superficial Reflections on the Hipster
Our search for the rebels of the generation led us to the
hipster. The hipster is an enfant terrible turned inside out. In character with
his time, he is trying to get back at the conformists by lying low. . . . You
can’t interview a hipster because his main goal is to keep out of a society
which, he thinks, trying to make everyone over in its own image. He takes
marijuana because it supplies him with experiences that can’t be shared with
“squares.” He may affect a broad-brimmed hat or a zoot suit, but usually he
prefers to skulk unmarked. The hipster may be a jazz musician; he is rarely an
artist, almost never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a
hobo, a carnival roustabout or a free-lance moving man in Greenwich Village,
but some hipsters have found a safe refuge in the upper income brackets as
television comics or movie actors. (The late James Dean, for one, was a hipster
hero.) . . . it is tempting to describe the hipster in psychiatric terms as
infantile, but the style of his infantilism is a sign of the times, he does not
try to enforce his will on others, Napoleon-fashion, but contents himself with
a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested. . . . As the only
extreme nonconformist of his generation, he exercises a powerful if underground
appeal for conformists, through newspaper accounts of his delinquencies, his structureless
jazz, and his emotive grunt words.
—“Born 1930: The Unlost Generation” by Caroline Bird, Harper’s
Bazaar, Feb. 1957
Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc
of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of
almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in civilized history,
perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with
the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the
most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the
absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to
die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would he
counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown,
unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a
possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death
bydeus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city; and so if in the
midst of civilization—that civilization founded upon the Faustian urge to
dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and
effect—in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence
that time could indeed he subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected
itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was
causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop.
The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition
which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in
concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of
super-states founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one
was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image
of man was the society he had created, it wits nonetheless his creation, his
collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past) and if
society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions
about his own nature?
Worse. One could hardly maintain the courage to be individual,
to speak with one’s own voice, for the years in which one could complacently
accept oneself as part of an elite by being a radical were forever gone. A. man
knew that when he dissented, he gave a note upon his life which could be called
in any year of overt crisis. No wonder then that these have been the years of
conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come out of every pore of
American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve. The only
courage, with rare exceptions, that we have been witness to, has been the
isolated courage of isolated people.
II
It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American
existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition
is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the
State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with
every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and
the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will
discover in a hurry) , if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with
death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving
answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger,
to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that
uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short,
whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the
psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is
boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous
present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention, the life
where a man must go until he is beat, where he must gamble with his energies
through all those small or large crises of courage and unforeseen situations
which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to swing. The
unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the
knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one’s power for new kinds of
perception; and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison
one’s energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people’s habits,
other people’s defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy
self-destroying rage. One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each
new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel) one is a rebel
or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life,
or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society,
doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.
A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of
men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands for the
general anxiety is greater. Indeed if one is to be a man, almost any kind of
unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no
accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the
margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. But the
presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is
probably due to jazz, and its knife-like entrance into culture, its subtle but
so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation—that post-war generation
of adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons
of disillusionment and disgust of the Twenties, the Depression, and the War.
Sharing a collective disbelief in the words of men who had too much money and
controlled too many things, they knew almost as powerful a disbelief in the
socially monolithic ideas of the single mate, the solid family and the
respectable love life. If the intellectual antecedents of this generation can
be traced to such separate influences as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and
Wilhelm Reich, the viable philosophy of Hemingway fits most of their facts: in
a bad world, as he was to say over and over again (while taking time out from
his parvenu snobbery and dedicated gourmandise), in a bad world there is no
love nor mercy nor charity nor justice unless a man can keep his courage, and
this indeed fitted some of the facts. What fitted the need of the adventurer
even more precisely was Hemingway’s categorical imperative that what made him
feel good became therefore The Good.
So no wonder that in certain cities of America, in New York of
course, and New Orleans, in Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, in such
American cities as Paris and Mexico, D.F., this particular part of a generation
was attracted to what the Negro had to offer. In such places as Greenwich
Village. a menage-a-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile
delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in
American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of
Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could
share, at least all who were Hip. And in this wedding of the white and the
black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry. Any Negro who wishes to
live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be
casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that
violence will not visit him on his walk. The cameos of security for the average
white: mother and the home, lob and the family, are not even a mockery to
millions of Negroes; they are impossible. The Negro has the simplest of
alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger. In
such a pass where paranoia is as vital to survival as blood, the Negro had
stayed alive and begun to grow by following the need of his body where he
could. Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but
war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated
inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the
primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday
night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory
pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and
quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust,
languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm. For jazz is
orgasm, it is the music of orgasm, good orgasm and bad, and so it spoke across
a nation, it had the communication of art even where it was watered, perverted,
corrupted, and almost killed, it spoke in no matter what laundered popular way
of instantaneous existential states to which some whites could respond, it was
indeed a communication by art because it said, “I feel this, and now you do
too.”
So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who
drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their
facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and
for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.
To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself—one
must know one’s desires, one’s rages, one’s anguish, one must be aware of the
character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it. The
over-civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it
quickly for the next chic. To be a real existentialist (Sartre admittedly to
the contrary) one must be religious, one must have one’s sense of the
“purpose”—whatever the purpose may be—but a life which is directed by one’s
faith in the necessity of action is a life committed to the notion that the
substratum of existence is the search, the end meaningful but mysterious; it is
impossible to live such a life unless one’s emotions provide their profound
conviction. Only the French, alienated beyond alienation from their unconscious
could welcome an existential philosophy without ever feeling it at all; indeed
only a Frenchman by declaring that the unconscious did not exist could then
proceed to explore the delicate involutions of consciousness, the
microscopically sensuous and all but ineffable frissons of mental becoming, in
order finally to create the theology of atheism and so submit that in a world
of absurdities the existential absurdity is most coherent.
In the dialogue between the atheist and the mystic, the atheist
is on the side of life, rational life, undialectical life—since he conceives of
death as emptiness, he can, no matter how weary or despairing, wish for nothing
but more life; his pride is that he does not transpose his weakness and
spiritual fatigue into a romantic longing for death, for such appreciation of
death is then all too capable of being elaborated by his imagination into a
universe of meaningful structure and moral orchestration.
Yet this masculine argument can mean very little for the mystic.
The mystic can accept the atheist’s description of his weakness, he can agree
that his mysticism was a response to despair. And yet . . . and yet his
argument is that he, the mystic, is the one finally who has chosen to live with
death, and so death is his experience and not the atheist’s, and the atheist by
eschewing the limitless dimensions of profound despair has rendered himself
incapable to judge the experience. The real argument which the mystic must
always advance is the very intensity of his private vision—his argument depends
from the vision precisely because what was felt in the vision is so
extraordinary that no rational argument, no hypotheses of ‘oceanic feelings”
and certainly no skeptical reductions can explain away what has become for him
the reality more real than the reality of closely reasoned logic. His inner
experience of the possibilities within death is his logic. So, too, for the
existentialist. And the psychopath. And the saint and the bullfighter and the
lover. The common denominator for all of them is their burning consciousness of
the present, exactly that incandescent consciousness which the possibilities
within death has opened for them. There is a depth of desperation to the
condition which enables one to remain in life only by engaging death, but the
reward is their knowledge that what is happening at each instant of the
electric present is good or bad for them, good or bad for their cause, their
love, their action, their need.
It is this knowledge which provides the curious community of
feeling in the world of the hipster, a muted cool religious revival to be sure,
but the element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that
incompatibles have come to bed, the inner life and the violent life, the orgy
and the dream of love, the desire to murder and the desire to create, a
dialectical conception of existence with a lust for power, a dark, romantic,
and yet undeniably dynamic view of existence for it sees every man and woman as
moving individually through each moment of life forward into growth or backward
into death.
III
It may be fruitful to consider the hipster a philosophical
psychopath, a man interested not only in the dangerous imperatives of his
psychopathy but in codifying, at least for himself, the suppositions on which
his inner universe is constructed. By this premise the hipster is a psychopath,
and yet not a psychopath but the negation of the psychopath for he possesses
the narcissistic detachment of the philosopher, that absorption in the
recessive nuances of one’s own motive which is so alien to the unreasoning
drive of the psychopath. In this country where new millions of psychopaths are
developed each year, stamped with the mint of our contradictory popular culture
(where sex is sin and yet sex is paradise), it is as if there has been room
already for the development of the antithetical psychopath who extrapolates
from his own condition, from the inner certainty that his rebellion is just, a
radical vision of the universe which thus separates him from the general
ignorance, reactionary prejudice, and self-doubt of the more conventional
psychopath. Having converted his unconscious experience into much conscious
knowledge, the hipster has shifted the focus of his desire from immediate
gratification toward that wider passion for future power which is the mark of
civilized man. Yet with an irreducible difference. For Hip is the
sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle, and so its appeal is
still beyond the civilized man. If there are ten million Americans who are more
or less psychopathic (and the figure is most modest) there are probably not
more than one hundred thousand men and women who consciously see themselves as
hipsters, but their importance is that they are an elite with the potential
ruthlessness of an elite, and a language most adolescents can understand
instinctively for the hipster’s intense view of existence matches their
experience and their desire to rebel.
Before one can say more about the hipster, there is obviously
much to be said about the psychic state of the psychopath—or, clinically, the
psychopathic personality. Now, for reasons which may be more curious than the
similarity of the words, even many people with a psychoanalytical orientation
often confuse the psychopath with the psychotic. Yet the terms are polar. The
psychotic is legally insane, the psychopath is not; the psychotic is almost
always incapable of discharging in physical acts the rage of his frustration, while
the psychopath at his extreme is virtually as incapable of restraining his
violence. The psychotic lives in so misty a world that what is happening at
each moment of his life is not very real to him whereas the psychopath seldom
knows any reality greater than the face, the voice, the being of the particular
people among whom he may find himself at any moment. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck
describe him as follows:
The psychopath . . . can be distinguished from the person
sliding into or clambering out of a true psychotic state by the long tough
persistence of his anti-social attitude and behaviour and the absence of
hallucinations, delusions, manic flight of ideas, confusion, disorientation,
and other dramatic signs of psychosis.
The late Robert Lindner, one of the few experts on the subject,
in his book Rebel Without A Cause—The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath
presented part of his definition in this way:
. . . the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator
without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program: in other words, his
rebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to himself alone; lie is
incapable of exertions for the sake of others. All his efforts, hidden under no
matter what disguise, represent investments designed to satisfy his immediate
wishes and desires
. . . The psychopath, like the child, cannot delay the pleasures
of gratification; and tins trait is one of his underlying, universal
characteristics. He cannot wait upon erotic gratification which convention
demands should be preceded by the chase before the kill: he must rape. He
cannot wait upon the development of prestige in society: his egoistic ambitions
lead him to leap into headlines by daring performances. Like a red thread the
predominance of this mechanism for immediate satisfaction runs through the
history of every psychopath. It explains not only his behavior but also the
violent nature of his acts.
Yet even Lindner who was the most imaginative and most
sympathetic of the psychoanalysts who have studied the psychopathic personality
was not ready to project himself into the essential sympathy— which is that the
psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind
of personality which could become the central expression of human nature before
the twentieth century is over. For the psychopath is better adapted to dominate
those mutually contradictory inhibitions upon violence and love which
civilization has exacted of us, and if it be remembered that not every
psychopath is an extreme case, and that the condition of psychopathy is present
in a host of people including many politicians, professional soldiers,
newspaper columnists, entertainers, artists, jazz musicians, call-girls,
promiscuous homosexuals and half the executives of Hollywood, television, and
advertising, it can be seen that there are aspects of psychopathy which already
exert considerable cultural influence.
What characterizes almost every psychopath and part-psychopath
is that they are trying to create a new nervous system for themselves.
Generally we are obliged to act with a nervous system which has been formed
from infancy, and which carries in the style of its circuits the very
contradictions of our parents and our early milieu. Therefore, we are obliged,
most of us, to meet the tempo of the present and the future with reflexes and
rhythms which come from the past. It is not only the “dead weight of the
institutions of the past” but indeed the inefficient and often antiquated
nervous circuits of the past which strangle our potentiality for responding to
new possibilities which might be exciting for our individual growth.
Through most of modern history, “sublimation” was possible: at
the expense of expressing only a small portion of oneself, that small portion
could be expressed intensely. But sublimation depends on a reasonable tempo to
history. If the collective life of a generation has moved too quickly, the
“past” by which particular men and women of that generation may function is
not, let us say, thirty years old, but relatively a hundred or two hundred
years old. And so the nervous system is overstressed beyond the possibility of
such compromises as sublimation, especially since the stable middle-class
values so prerequisite to sublimation have been virtually destroyed in our
time, at least as nourishing values free of confusion or doubt. In such a
crisis of accelerated historical tempo and deteriorated values, neurosis tends
to be replaced by psychopathy, and the success of psychoanalysis (which even
ten years ago gave promise of becoming a direct major force) diminishes because
of its inbuilt and characteristic incapacity to handle patients more complex,
more experienced, or more adventurous than the analyst himself. In practice,
psychoanalysis has by now become all too often no more than a psychic
blood-letting. The patient is not so much changed as aged, and the infantile
fantasies which he is encouraged to express are condemned to exhaust themselves
against the analyst’s non-responsive reactions. The result for all too many
patients is a diminution, a “tranquilizing” of their most interesting qualities
and vices. The patient is indeed not so much altered as worn out—less bad, less
good, less bright, less willful, less destructive, less creative. He is thus
able to conform to that contradictory and unbearable society which first
created his neurosis. He can conform to what he loathes because he no longer
has the passion to feel loathing so intensely.
The psychopath is notoriously difficult to analyze because the
fundamental decision of his nature is to try to live the infantile fantasy, and
in this decision (given the dreary alternative of psychoanalysis) there may be
a certain instinctive wisdom. For there is a dialectic to changing one’s
nature, the dialectic which underlies all psychoanalytic method: it is the
knowledge that if one is to change one’s habits, one must go back to the source
of their creation, and so the psychopath exploring backward along the road of
the homosexual, the orgiast, the drug-addict, the rapist, the robber and the
murderer seeks to find those violent parallels to the violent and often
hopeless contradictions he knew as an infant and as a child. For if he has the
courage to meet the parallel situation at the moment when he is ready, then he has
a chance to act as he has never acted before, and in satisfying the
frustration—if he can succeed—he may then pass by symbolic substitute through
the locks of incest. In thus giving expression to the buried infant in himself,
he can lessen the tension of those infantile desires and so free himself to
remake a bit of his nervous system. Like the neurotic he is looking for the
opportunity to grow up a second time, but the psychopath knows
instinctively that to express a forbidden impulse actively is
far more beneficial to him than merely to confess the desire in the safety of a
doctor’s room. The psychopath is ordinately ambitious, too ambitious ever to
trade his warped brilliant conception of his possible victories in life for the
grim if peaceful attrition of the analyst’s couch. So his associational journey
into the past is lived out in the theatre of the present, and he exists for
those charged situations where his senses are so alive that he can be aware
actively (as the analysand is aware passively) of what his habits are, and how
he can change them. The strength of the psychopath is that he knows (where most
of us can only guess) what is good for him and what is bad for him at exactly
those instants when an old crippling habit has become so attacked by experience
that the potentiality exists to change it, to replace a negative and empty fear
with an outward action, even if—and here I obey the logic of the extreme
psychopath—even if the fear is of himself, and the action is to murder. The
psychopath murders—if he has the courage—out of the necessity to purge his
violence, for if he cannot empty his hatred then he cannot love, his being is
frozen with implacable self-hatred for his cowardice. (It can of course be
suggested that it takes little courage for two strong eighteen-year old
hoodlums, let us say, to beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper, and indeed
the act—even by the logic of the psychopath—is not likely to prove very
therapeutic for the victim is not an immediate equal. Still, courage of a sort
is necessary, for one murders not only a weak fifty-year old man but an
institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new
relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life.
The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the
act it is not altogether cowardly)
At bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love.
Not love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more
apocalyptic than the one which preceded it. Orgasm is his therapy— he knows at
the seed of his being that good orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm
imprisons him. But in this search, the psychopath becomes an embodiment of the
extreme contradictions of the society which formed his character, and the
apocalyptic orgasm often remains as remote as the Holy Grail, for there are
clusters and nests and ambushes of violence in his own necessities and in the
imperatives and retaliations of the men and women among whom he lives his life,
so that even as he drains his hatred in one act or another, so the conditions
of his life create it anew in him until the drama of his movements bears a
sardonic resemblance to the frog who climbed a few feet in the well only to
drop back again.
Yet there is this to be said for the search after the good
orgasm: when one lives in a civilized world, and still can enjoy none of the
cultural nectar of such a world because the paradoxes on which civilization is
built demands that there remain a cultureless and alienated bottom of
exploitable human material, then the logic of becoming a sexual outlaw (if
one’s psychological roots are bedded in the bottom)
is that one has at least a running competitive chance to be
physically healthy so long as one stays alive. It is therefore no accident that
psychopathy is most prevalent with the Negro. Hated from outside and therefore
hating himself, the Negro was forced into the position of exploring all those
moral wildernesses of civilized life which the Square automatically condemns as
delinquent or evil or immature or morbid or self-destructive or corrupt.
(Actually the terms have equal weight. Depending on the telescope of the
cultural clique from which the Square surveys the universe, “evil” or
“immature” are equally strong terms of condemnation.) But the Negro, not being
privileged to gratify his self-esteem with the heady satisfactions of
categorical condemnation, chose to move instead in that other direction where
all situations are equally valid, and in the worst of perversion, promiscuity,
pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash, bottle-break, what-have-you, the
Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom, an ethical
differentiation between the good and the bad in every human activity from the
go-getter pimp (as opposed to the lazy one) to the relatively dependable pusher
or prostitute. Add to this, the cunning of their language, the abstract
ambiguous alternatives in which from the danger of their oppression they
learned to speak (“Well. now, man, like I’m looking for a cat to turn me on
..“), add even more the profound sensitivity of the Negro jazzman who was the
cultural mentor of a people, and it is not too difficult to believe that the
language of Hip which evolved was an artful language, tested and shaped by an
intense experience and therefore different in kind from white slang, as
different as the special obscenity of the soldier which in its emphasis upon
“ass” as the soul and “shit” as circumstance, was able to express the
existential states of the enlisted man. What makes Hip a special language is
that it cannot really be taught—if one shares none of the experiences of
elation and exhaustion which it is equipped to describe, then it seems merely
arch or vulgar or irritating. It is a pictorial language, but pictorial like
non-objective art, imbued with the dialectic of small but intense change, a
language for the microcosm, in this case, man, for it takes the immediate
experiences of any passing man and magnifies the dynamic of his movements, not
specifically but abstractly so that he is seen more as a vector in a network of
forces than as a static character in a crystallized field. (Which, latter, is
the practical view of the snob.) For example, there is real difficulty in
trying to find a Hip substitute for “stubborn.” The best possibility I can come
up with is: “That cat will never come off his groove, dad.” But groove implies
movement, narrow movement but motion nonetheless. There is really no way to
describe someone who does not move at all. Even a creep does move—if at a pace
exasperatingly more slow than the pace of the cool cats.
IV
Like children, hipsters are fighting for the sweet, and their
language is a set of subtle indications of their success or failure in the
competition for pleasure. Unstated but obvious is the social sense that there
is not nearly enough sweet for everyone. And so the sweet goes only to the
victor, the best, the most, the man who knows the most about how to find his
energy and how not to lose it. The emphasis is on energy because the psychopath
and the hipster are nothing without it since they do not have the protection of
a position or a class to rely on when they have overextended themselves. So the
language of Hip is a language of energy, how it is found, how it is lost.
But let us see. I have jotted down perhaps a dozen words, the
Hip perhaps most in use and most likely to last with the minimum of variation.
The words are man, go, put down, make, beat, cool, swing, with it, crazy, dig,
flip, creep, hip, square. They serve a variety of purposes, and the nuance of
the voice uses the nuance of the situation to convey the subtle contextual
difference. If the hipster moves through his night and through his life on a
constant search with glimpses of Mecca in many a turn of his experience (Mecca
being the apocalyptic orgasm) and if everyone in the civilized world is at
least in some small degree a sexual cripple the hipster lives with the
knowledge of how lie is sexually crippled and where he is sexually alive, and
the faces of experience which life presents to him each day are engaged,
dismissed or avoided as his need directs and his lifemanship makes possible.
For life is a contest between people in which the victor generally recuperates
quickly and the loser takes long to mend, a perpetual competition of colliding
explorers in which one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same, (pay
in sickness, or depression, or anguish for the lost opportunity) but pay or
grow.
Therefore one finds words like go, and make it, and with it, and
swing: “Go” with its sense that after hours or days or months. or years of
monotony, boredom, and depression one has finally had one’s chance, one has
amassed enough energy to meet an exciting opportunity with all one’s present
talents for the flip (up or down) and so one is ready to go, ready to gamble.
Movement is always to be preferred to inaction. In motion a man has a chance,
his body is warm, his instincts are quick, and when the crisis comes, whether
of love or violence, he can make it, he can win, he can release a little more
energy for himself since he hates himself a little less, he can make a little
better nervous systern, make it a little more possible to go again, to go
faster next time and so make more and thus find more people with whom he can
swing. For to swing is to communicate, is to convey the rhythms of one’s own
being to a lover, a friend, or an audience, and—equally necessary— be able to
feel the rhythms of their response. To swing with the rhythms of another is to
enrich oneself— the conception of the learning process as dug by Hip is that
one cannot really learn until one contains within oneself the implicit rhythm
of the subject or the person. As an example, I remember once hearing a Negro
friend have an intellectual discussion at a party for half an hour with a white
girl who was a few years out of college. The Negro literally could not read or
write, but he had an extraordinary ear and a fine sense of mimicry. So as the
girl spoke, he would detect the particular formal uncertainties in her
argument, and in a pleasant (if slightly Southern) English accent, he would
respond to one or another facet of her doubts. When she would finish what she
felt was a particularly well-articulated idea, he would smile privately and
say, “other-direction . . . do you really believe in that?”
“Well . . . No,” the girl would stammer, “now that you get down
to it, there is something disgusting about it to me,” and she would be off
again for five more minutes.
Of course the Negro was not learning anything about the merits
and demerits of the argument, hut he was learning a great deal about a type of
girl he had never met before, and that was what he wanted. Being unable to read
or write, he could hardly be interested in ideas nearly as much as in lifemanship,
and so he eschewed any attempt to obey the precision or lack of precision in
the girl’s language, and instead sensed her character (and the values of her
social type) by swinging with the nuances of her voice.
So to swing is to be able to learn, and by learning take a step
toward making it, toward creating. What is to be created is not nearly so
important as the hipster’s belief that when he really makes it, he will be able
to turn his hand to anything, even to self-discipline. What he must do before
that is find his courage at the moment of violence, or equally make it in the
act of love, find a little more of himself, create a little more between his
woman and himself, or indeed between his mate and himself (since many hipsters
are bisexual), but paramount, imperative, is the necessity to make it because
in making it, one is making the new habit, unearthing the new talent which the
old frustration denied.
Whereas if you goof (the ugliest word in Hip), if you lapse back
into being a frightened stupid child, or if you flip, if you lose your control,
reveal the buried weaker more feminine part of your nature, then it is more
difficult to swing the next time, your ear is less alive, your bad and
energy-wasting habits are further confirmed, you are farther away from being
with it. But to be with it is to have grace, is to be closer to the secrets of
that inner unconscious life which will nourish you if you can hear it, for you
are then nearer to that God which every hipster believes is located in the senses
of his body, that trapped, mutilated and nonetheless megalomaniacal God who is
It, who is energy, life, sex, force, the Yoga’s prana, the Reichian’s orgone,
Lawrence’s “blood,” Hemingway’s “good,” the Shavian life-force; “It”; God; not
the God of the churches hut the unachievable whisper of mystery within the sex,
the paradise of limitless energy and perception just beyond the next wave of
the next orgasm.
To which a cool cat might reply, “Crazy, man!”
Because, after all, what I have offered above is an hypothesis,
no more, and there is not the hipster alive who is not absorbed in his own
tumultuous hypotheses. Mine is interesting, mine is way out (on the avenue of
the mystery along the road to “It”) but still I am just one cat in a world of
cool cats, and everything interesting is crazy, or at least so the Squares who
do not know how to swing would say.
(And yet crazy is also the self-protective irony of the hipster.
Living with questions and not with answers, he is so different in his isolation
and in the far reach of his imagination from almost everyone with whom he deals
in the outer world of the Square, and meets generally so much enmity,
competition, and hatred in the world of Hip, that his isolation is always in
danger of turning upon itself, and leaving him indeed just that, crazy.)
If, however, yon agree with my hypothesis, if you as a cat are
way out too, and we are in the same groove (the universe now being glimpsed as
a series of ever-extending radii from the center) why then you say simply, “I
dig,” because neither knowledge nor imagination comes easily, it is buried in
the pain of one’s forgotten experience, and so one must work to find it, one
must occasionally exhaust oneself by digging into the self in order to perceive
the outside. And indeed it is essential to dig the most, for if you do not dig
you lose your superiority over the Square, and so you are less likely to be
cool (to be in control of a situation because you have swung where the Square
has not, or because you have allowed to come to consciousness a pain, a guilt,
a shame or a desire which the other has not had the courage to face) . To be
cool is to be equipped, and if you are equipped it is more difficult for the
next cat who comes along to put you down. And of course one can hardly afford
to be put down too often, or one is beat, one has lost one’s confidence, one
has lost one’s will, one is impotent in the world of action and so closer to
the demeaning flip of becoming a queer, or indeed closer to dying, and
therefore it is even more difficult to recover enough energy to try to make it
again, because once a cat is beat he has nothing to give, and no one is
interested any longer in making it with him. This is the terror of the
hipster—to be beat— because once the sweet of sex has deserted him, he still
cannot give up the search. It is not granted to the hipster to grow old
gracefully—he has been captured too early by the oldest dream of power, the
gold fountain of Ponce de Leon, the fountain of youth where the gold is in the
orgasm.
To be beat is therefore a flip, it is a situation beyond one’s
experience, impossible to anticipate—which indeed in the circular vocabulary of
Hip is still another meaning for flip, but then I have given just a few of the
connotations of these words. Like most primitive vocabularies each word is a
prime symbol and serves a dozen or a hundred functions of communication in the
instinctive dialectic through which the hipster perceives his experience, that
dialectic of the instantaneous differentials of existence in which one is
forever moving forward into more or retreating into less.
V
It is impossible to conceive a new philosophy until one creates
a new language, but a new popular language (while it must implicitly contain a
new philosophy) does not necessarily present its philosophy overtly. It can be
asked then what really is unique in the life-view of Hip which raises its argot
above the passing verbal whimsies of the bohemian or the lumpenproletariat.
The answer would be in the psychopathic element of Hip which has
almost no interest in viewing human nature, or better, in judging human nature
from a set of standards conceived a priori to the experience, standards
inherited from the past. Since Hip sees every answer as posing immediately a
new alternative, a new question, its emphasis is on complexity rather than
simplicity (such complexity that its language without the illumination of the
voice and the articulation of the face and body remains hopelessly
incommunicative). Given its emphasis on complexity, Hip abdicates from any
conventional moral responsibility because it would argue that the result of out
actions are unforeseeable, and so we cannot know if we do good or bad, we
cannot even know (in the Joycean sense of the good and the bad) whether unforeseeable,
and so we cannot know if we do good or bad, we cannot be certain that we have
given them energy, and indeed if we could, there would still be no idea of what
ultimately they would do with it.
Therefore, men are not seen as good or bad (that they are
good-and-bad is taken for granted) but rather each man is glimpsed as a
collection of possibilities, some more possible than others (the view of
character implicit in Hip) and some humans are considered more capable than
others of reaching more possibilities within themselves in less time, provided,
and this is the dynamic, provided the particular character can swing at the
right time. And here arises the sense of context which differentiates Hip from
a Square view of character. Hip sees the context as generally dominating the
man, dominating him because his character is less significant than the context
in which he must function. Since it is arbitrarily five times more demanding of
one’s energy to accomplish even an inconsequential action in an unfavorable
context than a favorable one, man is then not only his character but his
context, since the success or failure of an action in a given context reacts
upon the character and therefore affects what the character will be in the next
context. What dominates both character and context is the energy available at
the moment of intense context.
Character being thus seen as perpetually ambivalent and dynamic
enters then into an absolute relativity where there are no truths other than
the isolated truths of what each observer feels at each instant of his
existence. To take a perhaps unjustified metaphysical extrapolation, it is as
if the universe which has usually existed conceptually as a Fact (even if the
Fact were Berkeley’s God) but a ract which it was the aim of all science and
philosophy to reveal, becomes instead a changing reality whose laws are remade
at each instant by everything living, but most particularly man, man raised to
a neo-medieval summit where the truth is not what one has felt yesterday or
what one expects to feel tomorrow but rather truth is no more nor less than
what one feels at each instant in the perpetual climax of the present.
What is consequent therefore is the divorce of man from his
values, the liberation of the self from the Super-Ego of society. The only Hip
morality (but of course it is an ever-present morality) is to do what one feels
whenever and wherever it is possible, and—this is how the war of the Hip and
the Square begins—to be engaged in one primal battle: to open the limits of the
possible for oneself, for oneself alone because that is one’s need. Yet in
widening the arena of the possible, one widens it reciprocally for others as
well, so that the nihilistic fulfillment of each man’s desire contains its
antithesis of human cooperation.
If the ethic reduces to Know Thyself and Be Thyself, what makes
it radically different from Socratic moderation with its stern conservative
respect for the experience of the past, is that the Hip ethic is immoderation,
child-like in its adoration of the present (and indeed to respect the past
means that one must also respect such ugly consequences of the past as the
collective murders of the State) . It is this adoration of the present which
contains the affirmation of Hip, because its ultimate logic surpasses even the
unforgettable solution of the Marquis de Sade to sex, private property, and the
family, that all men and women have absolute but temporary rights over the
bodies of all other men and women—the nihilism of Hip proposes as its final
tendency that every social restraint and category be removed, and the
affirmation implicit in the proposal is that man would then prove to be more
creative than murderous and so would not destroy himself. Which is exactly what
separates Hip from the authoritarian philosophies which now appeal to the
conservative and liberal temper—what haunts the middle of the Twentieth Century
is that faith in man has been lost, and the appeal of authority has been that
it would restrain us from ourselves. Hip, which would return us to ourselves,
at no matter what price in individual violence, is the affirmation of the
barbarian for it requires a primitive passion about human nature to believe
that individual acts of violence are always to be preferred to the collective
violence of the State; it takes literal faith in the creative possibilities of
the human being to envisage acts of violence as the catharsis which prepares
growth.
Whether the hipster’s desire for absolute sexual freedom
contains any genuinely radical conception of a different world is of course
another matter, and it is possible, since the hipster lives with his hatred,
that many of them are the material for an elite of storm troopers ready to
follow the first truly magnetic leader whose view of mass murder is phrased in
a language which reaches their emotions. But given the desperation of his
condition as a psychic outlaw, the hipster is equally a candidate for the most
reactionary and most radical of movements, and so it is just as possible that
many hipsters will come—if the crisis deepens—to a radical comprehension of the
horror of society, for even as the radical has had his incommunicable dissent
confirmed in his experience by precisely the frustration, the denied
opportunities, and the bitter years which his ideas have cost him, so the
sexual adventurer deflected from his goal by the implacable animosity of a
society constructed to deny the sexual radical as well, may yet come to an
equally bitter comprehension of the slow relentless inhumanity of the
conservative power which controls him from without and from within. And in
being so controlled, denied, and starved into the attrition of conformity,
indeed the hipster may come to see that his condition is no more than an
exaggeration of the human condition, and if he would be free, then everyone
must be free. Yes, this is possible too, for the heart of Hip is its emphasis
upon courage at the moment of crisis, and it is pleasant to think that courage
contains within itself (as the explanation of its existence) some glimpse of
the necessity of life to become more than it has been.
It is obviously not very possible to speculate with sharp focus
on the future of the hipster. Certain possibilities must be evident, however,
and the most central is that the organic growth of Hip depends on whether the
Negro emerges as a dominating force in American life. Since the Negro knows
more about the ugliness and danger of life than the White, it is probable that
if the Negro can win his equality, he will possess a potential superiority, a
superiority so feared that the fear itself has become the underground drama of
domestic politics. Like all conservative political fear it is the fear of
unforeseeable consequences, for the Negro’s equality would tear a profound
shift into the psychology, the sexuality, and the moral imagination of every
White alive.
With this possible emergence of the Negro, Hip may erupt as a
psychically armed rebellion whose sexual impetus may rebound against the
anti-sexual foundation of every organized power in America, and bring into the
air such animosities, antipathies, and new conflicts of interest that the mean
empty hypocrisies of mass conformity will no longer work. A time of violence,
new hysteria, confusion and rebellion will then be likely to replace the time
of conformity. At that time, if the liberal should prove realistic in his
belief that there is peaceful room for every tendency in American life, then
Hip would end by being absorbed as a colorful figure in the tapestry. But if
this is not the reality, and the economic, the social, the psychological, and
finally the moral crises accompanying the rise of the Negro should prove
insupportable, then a time is coming when every political guide post will be
gone, and millions of liberals will be faced with political dilemmas they have
so far succeeded in evading, and with a view of human nature they do not wish
to accept. To take the desegregation of the schools in the South as an example,
it is quite likely that the reactionary sees the reality more closely than the
liberal when he argues that the deeper issue is not desegregation but
miscegenation. (As a radical I am of course facing in the opposite direction
from the White Citizen’s Councils—obviously I believe it is the absolute human
right of the Negro to mate with the White, and matings there will undoubtedly
be, for there will be Negro high school boys brave enough to chance their
lives.) But for the average liberal whose mind has been dulled by the
committee-ish cant of the professional liberal, miscegenation is not an issue
because he has been told that the Negro does not desire it. So, when it comes,
miscegenation will be a terror, comparable perhaps to the derangement of the
American Communists when the icons to Stalin came tumbling down. The average
American Communist held to the myth of Stalin for reasons which had little to
do with the political evidence and everything to do with their psychic
necessities. In this sense it is equally a psychic necessity for the liberal to
believe that the Negro and even the reactionary Southern White eventually and
fundamentally people like himself, capable of becoming good liberals too if
only they can be reached by good liberal reason. What the liberal cannot bear
to admit is the hatred beneath the skin of a society so unjust that the amount
of collective violence buried in the people is perhaps incapable of being
contained, and therefore if one wants a better world one does well to hold
one’s breath, for a worse world is bound to come first, and the dilemma may
well be this:
given such hatred, it must either vent itself nihilistically or
become turned into the cold murderous liquidations of the totalitarian state.
VI
No matter what its horrors the Twentieth Century is a vastly
exciting century for its tendency is to reduce all of life to its ultimate
alternatives. One can well wonder if the last war of them all will be between
the blacks and the whites, or between the women and the men, or between the
beautiful and ugly, the pillagers and managers, or the rebels and the
regulators. Which of course is carrying speculation beyond the point where
speculation is still serious, and yet despair at the monotony and bleakness of
the future have become so engrained in the radical temper that the radical is
in danger of abdicating from all imagination. What a man feels is the impulse
for his creative effort, and if an alien but nonetheless passionate instinct
about the meaning of life has come so unexpectedly from a virtually illiterate
people, come out of the most intense conditions of exploitation, cruelty,
violence, frustration, and lust, and yet has succeeded as an instinct in
keeping this tortured people alive, then it is perhaps possible that the Negro
holds more of the tail of the expanding elephant of truth than the radical, and
if this is so, the radical humanist could do worse than to and brood upon the
phenomenon. For if a revolutionary time should come again, there would be a
crucial difference if someone had already delineated a neo-Marxian calculus aimed
at comprehending every circuit and process of society from ukase to kiss as the
communications of human energy—a calculus capable of translating the economic
relations of man into his psychological relations and then back again, his
productive relations thereby embracing his sexual relations as well, until the
crises of capitalism in the Twentieth Century would yet be
understood as the unconscious adaptations of a society to solve its economic
imbalance at the expense of a new mass psychological imbalance. It is almost
beyond the imagination to conceive of a work in which the drama of human energy
is engaged, and a theory of its social currents and dissipations, its
imprisonments, expressions, and tragic wastes are fitted into some gigantic
synthesis of human action where the body of Marxist thought, and particularly
the epic grandeur of Dos Kapital (that first of the majorpsychologies to
approach the mystery of social cruelty so simply and practically as to say that
we are a collective body of humans whose life-energy is wasted, displaced, and
procedurally stolen as it passes from one of us to another) —where particularly
the epic grandeur of Das Kapital would find its place in an even more Godlike
view of human justice and injustice, in some more excruciating vision of those
intimate and institutional processes which lead to our creations and disasters,
our growth, our attrition, and our rebellion.
HERE'S SOME WORDS FROM FROM
EMERSON.....................
The
Quotable Emerson: Life lessons from the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Over 300
quotes
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Emerson-lessons-quotes
Concentration is the secret of
strength in politics in war in trade in short in all the management of human
affairs.
The only prudence in life is
concentration.
I can reason down or deny
everything except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will and I cannot make
him respectable.
BLOGLAPEDIA’S
BLOGS
ARCHITECTURE
Architecture
for the blog of it
http://architecturefortheblogofit.blogspot.com/
THE ARTS
Art
for the Blog of It
http://artfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/
Art
for the Pop of it
http://artforthepopofit.blogspot.com/
Photography
for the blog of it
http://photographyfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/
Music
for the Blog of it
http://musicfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/
Sculpture
this and Sculpture that
http://sculpturethisandsculpturethat.blogspot.com/
The
art of War (Propaganda art through the ages)
http://theartofwarcleverhuh.blogspot.com/
Album
Art (Photographic arts)
http://albumartsocheesyitsgood.blogspot.com/
Pulp
Fiction Trash (The art of Pulp Fiction covers)
http://pulpfictiontrash.blogspot.com/
Admit
it, you want to Read this Book (The art of Pulp Fiction covers)
http://goaheadadmitityouwanttoread.blogspot.com/
FILM
The
Godfather Trilogy BlogSpot
http://thegodfathertrilogyblogspot.blogspot.com/
On
the Waterfront: The Making of a great American Film
http://onthewaterfrontthefilm.blogspot.com/
FOOD
Absolutely
blogalicious
http://absolutelyblogalicious.blogspot.com/
The
Wee Book of Irish Recipes (Book support site)
http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/
Good
chowda (New England foods)
http://goodchowda.blogspot.com/
Old
New England Recipes (Book support site)
http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com/
And I
Love Clams (New England foods)
http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/
In
Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener (New England foods)
http://inpraiseoftherhodeislandwiener.blogspot.com/
Wicked
Cool New England Recipes (New England foods)
http://whickedcoolnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com
Old
New England Recipes (New England foods)
http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com
FOSTER CARE
Foster Care new and Updates
Aging out of the system
Murder, Death and Abuse in the
Foster Care system
Angel and Saints in the Foster
Care System
The Foster Children’s Blogs
Foster Care Legislation
The Foster Children’s Bill of
Right
Foster Kids own Story
The Adventures of Foster Kid.
HEALTH
Me
vs. Diabetes (Diabetes education site)
http://mevsdiabetes-bloglapedia.blogspot.com/
HISTORY
The
Quotable Helen Keller
http://thequotablehelenkeller.blogspot.com/
Teddy
Roosevelt's Letters to his children (Book support site)
http://teddyrooseveltsletterstohischildren.blogspot.com/
The
Quotable Machiavelli (Book support site)
http://thequotablemachiavelli.blogspot.com/
HUMOR
Whatever
you do, don't laugh
http://whateveryoudodontlaugh.blogspot.com/
The
Quotable Grouch Marx
http://thequotablegrouchmarx.blogspot.com/
IRISH-AMERICANA
A Big
Blog of Irish Literature
http://abigblogofirishliterature.blogspot.com/
The
Wee Blog of Irish Jokes (Book support blog)
http://theweeblogofirishjokes.blogspot.com/
The
Wee Blog of Irish Recipes
http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/
The
Irish American Gangster
http://irishamericangangsters.blogspot.com
The
Irish in their Own Words
http://theirishintheirownwords.blogspot.com/
When
Washington Was Irish
http://whenwashingtonwasirish.blogspot.com/
The
Wee Book of Irish Recipes (Book support site)
http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/
LITERATURE
Following
Fitzgerald
http://followingfitzgerald.blogspot.com/
Shakespeare
http://shakespeareinamericanenglish.blogspot.com/
The
Blogable Robert Frost
http://theblogablerobertfrost.blogspot.com/
Charles
Dickens
http://charlesdickensfan.blogspot.com/
The
Beat Poets of the Forever Generation
http://thebeatspoetsoftheforevergenera.blogspot.com/
Holden
Caulfield Blog Spot
http://holdencaulfieldblogspot.blogspot.com/
The
Quotable Oscar Wilde
http://thequotableoscarwilde.blogspot.com/
NEW ENGLAND BLOGS
The
Quotable Thoreau
http://thequotablethenrydavidthoreau.blogspot.com/
Old
New England Recipes
http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com
Wicked
Cool New England Recipes
http://whickedcoolnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com
Emerson
http://emersonsaidit.blogspot.com/
The
New England Mafia
http://thenewenglandmafia.blogspot.com/
And I
Love Clams
http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/
In
Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener
http://inpraiseoftherhodeislandwiener.blogspot.com/
Watch
Hill
http://watchhillwesterly.blogspot.com/
York
Beach
http://yorkbeachfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/
The
Connecticut History Blog
http://connecticuthistory.blogspot.com/
The
Connecticut Irish
http://theconnecticutirish.blogspot.com/
Good
chowda
http://goodchowda.blogspot.com/
NOSTALGIA
God,
How I hated the 70s
http://godhowihatedthe70s.blogspot.com/
Child
of the Sixties Forever
http://childofthesixtiesforeverandever.blogspot.com/
The
Kennedy’s in the 60’s
http://thekennedysinthe60s.blogspot.com/
Music
of the Sixties Forever
http://musicofthesixtiesforever.blogspot.com/
Elvis
and Nixon at the White House (Book support site)
http://elvisandnixonatthewhitehouse.blogspot.com/
Beatles
Fan Forever
http://beatlesfanforever.blogspot.com/
Year
One, 1955
http://yearone1955.blogspot.com/
Robert
Kennedy in His Own Words
The
1980s were fun
http://the1980swereokayactually.blogspot.com/
The
1990s. The last decade.
http://1990sthelastdecade.blogspot.com/
ORGANIZED CRIME
The
Russian Mafia
http://russianmafiagangster.blogspot.com/
The
American Jewish Gangster
http://theamericanjewishgangster.blogspot.com/
The
Mob in Hollywood
http://themobinhollywood.blogspot.com/
We
Only Kill Each Other
http://weonlykilleachother.blogspot.com/
Early
Gangsters of New York City
http://earlygangstersofnewyorkcity.blogspot.com/
Al
Capone: Biography of a self-made Man
http://alcaponethebiographyofaselfmademan.blogspot.com/
The
Life and World of Al Capone
http://thelifeandworldofalcapone.blogspot.com/
The
Salerno Report
http://salernoreportmafiaandurderjohnkennedy.blogspot.com/
Guns
and Glamour
http://gunsandglamourthechicagomobahistory.blogspot.com/
The
St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
http://thesaintvalentinesdaymassacre.blogspot.com/
Mob
Testimony
http://mobtestimony.blogspot.com/
Recipes
we would Die For
http://recipeswewoulddiefor.blogspot.com/
The
Prohibition in Pictures
http://theprohibitioninpictures.blogspot.com/
The
Mob in Pictures
http://themobinpictures.blogspot.com/
The
Mob in Vegas
http://themobinvegasinpictures.blogspot.com/
The
Irish American Gangster
http://irishamericangangsters.blogspot.com
Roger
Touhy Gangster
http://rogertouhygangsters.blogspot.com/
Chicago’s
Mob Bosses
http://chicagosmobbossesfromaccardoto.blogspot.com/
Chicago
Gang Land: It Happened Here
http://chicagoganglandithappenedhere.blogspot.com/
Whacked:
One Hundred years of Murder in Gangland
http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/
The
Mob Across America
http://themobacrossamerica.blogspot.com/
Mob
Cops, Lawyers and Front Men
http://mobcopslawyersandinformantsand.blogspot.com/
Shooting
the Mob: Dutch Schultz
http://shootingthemobdutchschultz.blogspot.com/
Bugsy&
His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill
http://bugsyandvirginiahill.blogspot.com/
After
Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate on Organized Crime
http://aftervalachi.blogspot.com/
Mob
Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee (Book
support site)
http://virgilpetersonmobbuster.blogspot.com/
The
US Government’s Timeline of Organized Crime (Book support site)
http://timelineoforganizedcrime.blogspot.com/
The
Kefauver Organized Crime Hearings (Book support site)
http://thekefauverorganizedcrimehearings.blogspot.com/
Joe
Valachi's testimony on the Mafia (Book support site)
http://joevalachistestimonyonthemafia.blogspot.com/
Mobsters
in the News
http://mobstersinthenews.blogspot.com/
Shooting
the Mob: Dead Mobsters (Book support site)
http://deadmobsters.blogspot.com/
The
Stolen Years Full Text (Roger Touhy)
http://thestolenyearsfulltext.blogspot.com/
Mobsters
in Black and White
http://mobstersinblackandwhite.blogspot.com/
Mafia
Gangsters, Wiseguys and Goodfellas
http://mafiagangsterswiseguysandgoodfellas.blogspot.com/
Whacked:
One Hundred Years of Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Mob (Book support site)
http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/
Gangland
Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal (Book support site)
http://ganglandgaslightrosyrosenthal.blogspot.com/
The
Best of the Mob Files Series (Book support site)
http://thebestofthemobfilesseries.blogspot.com/
PHILOSOPHY
It’s
All Greek Mythology to me
http://itsallgreekmythologytome.blogspot.com/
PSYCHOLOGY
Psychologically
Relevant
http://psychologicallyrelevant.blogspot.com/
SNOBBERY
The
Rarifieid Tribe
http://therarifiedtribe.blogspot.com/
Perfect
Behavior
http://perfectbehavior.blogspot.com/
TRAVEL
The
Upscale Traveler
http://theupscaletraveler.blogspot.com/
TRIVIA
The
Mish Mosh Blog
http://theupscaletraveler.blogspot.com/
WASHINGTON DC
DC
Behind the Monuments
http://dcbehindthemonuments.blogspot.com/
Washington
Oddities
http://washingtonoddities.blogspot.com/
When
Washington Was Irish
http://whenwashingtonwasirish.blogspot.com/
FROM LLR BOOKS. COM
Litchfield Literary Books. A
really small company run by writers.
AMERICAN HISTORY
The
Day Nixon Met Elvis
Paperback 46 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Day-Nixon-Met-elvis/
Theodore
Roosevelt: Letters to his Children. 1903-1918
Paperback 194 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Theodore-Roosevelt-Letters-Children-1903-1918/dp/
THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND
CIVILIZATIONS
The
Works of Horace
Paperback 174 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Works-Horace-Richard-Willoughby/
The
Quotable Greeks
Paperback 234 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby
The
Quotable Epictetus
Paperback 142 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Epictetus-Golden-Sayings
Quo
Vadis: A narrative of the time of Nero
Paperback 420 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quo-Vadis-Narrative-Time-Nero
CHILDRENS BOOKS
The
Porchless Pumpkin: A Halloween Story for Children
A Halloween play for young
children. By consent of the author, this play may be performed, at no charge,
by educational institutions, neighborhood organizations and other
not-for-profit-organizations.
A fun story with a moral
“I believe that Denny O'Day is an
American treasure and this little book proves it. Jack is a pumpkin who happens
to be very small, by pumpkins standards and as a result he goes unbought in the
pumpkin patch on Halloween eve, but at the last moment he is given his chance
to prove that just because you're small doesn't mean you can't be brave. Here
is the point that I found so wonderful, the book stresses that while size
doesn't matter when it comes to courage...ITS OKAY TO BE SCARED....as well. I
think children need to hear that, that's its okay to be unsure because life is
a ongoing lesson isn't it?”
Paperback: 42 pages
http://www.amazon.com/OLANTERN-PORCHLESS-PUMPKIN-Halloween-Children
It's
Not All Right to be a Foster Kid....no matter what they tell you: Tweet the
books contents
Paperback 94 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Right-Foster-Kid-no-matter-what
From the Author
I spent my childhood, from age
seven through seventeen, in foster care.
Over the course of those ten years, many decent, well-meaning, and
concerned people told me, "It's okay to be foster kid."
In saying that, those very good
people meant to encourage me, and I appreciated their kindness then, and all
these many decades later, I still appreciate their good intentions. But as I
was tossed around the foster care system, it began to dawn on me that they were
wrong. It was not all right to be a
foster kid.
During my time in the system, I
was bounced every eighteen months from three foster homes to an orphanage to a
boy's school and to a group home before I left on my own accord at age
seventeen.
In the course of my stay in
foster care, I was severely beaten in two homes by my "care givers"
and separated from my four siblings who were also in care, sometimes only
blocks away from where I was living.
I left the system rather than to
wait to age out, although the effects of leaving the system without any family,
means, or safety net of any kind, were the same as if I had aged out. I lived
in poverty for the first part of my life, dropped out of high school, and had
continuous problems with the law.
Today, almost nothing about foster care has
changed. Exactly what happened to me is
happening to some other child, somewhere in America, right now. The system, corrupt, bloated, and
inefficient, goes on, unchanging and secretive.
Something has gone wrong in a
system that was originally a compassionate social policy built to improve lives
but is now a definitive cause in ruining lives.
Due to gross negligence, mismanagement, apathy, and greed, mostly what
the foster care system builds are dangerous consequences. Truly, foster care
has become our epic national disgrace and a nightmare for those of us who have
lived through it.
Yet there is a suspicion among
some Americans that foster care costs too much, undermines the work ethic, and
is at odds with a satisfying life.
Others see foster care as a part of the welfare system, as legal plunder
of the public treasuries.
None of that is true; in fact, all that sort
of thinking does is to blame the victims.
There is not a single child in the system who wants to be there or asked
to be there. Foster kids are in foster
care because they had nowhere else to go.
It's that simple. And believe me,
if those kids could get out of the system and be reunited with their parents
and lead normal, healthy lives, they would. And if foster care is a sort of
legal plunder of the public treasuries, it's not the kids in the system who are
doing the plundering.
We need to end this needless suffering. We need to end it because it is morally and
ethically wrong and because the generations to come will not judge us on the
might of our armed forces or our technological advancements or on our fabulous
wealth.
Rather, they will judge us, I am certain, on
our compassion for those who are friendless, on our decency to those who have
nothing and on our efforts, successful or not, to make our nation and our world
a better place. And if we cannot
accomplish those things in the short time allotted to us, then let them say of
us "at least they tried."
You can change the tragedy of
foster care and here's how to do it. We
have created this book so that almost all of it can be tweeted out by you to
the world. You have the power to improve
the lives of those in our society who are least able to defend themselves. All you need is the will to do it.
If the American people, as good, decent and
generous as they are, knew what was going on in foster care, in their name and
with their money, they would stop it.
But, generally speaking, although the public has a vague notion that
foster care is a mess, they don't have the complete picture. They are not aware
of the human, economic and social cost that the mismanagement of the foster
care system puts on our nation.
By tweeting the facts laid out in
this work, you can help to change all of that.
You can make a difference. You
can change things for the better.
We can always change the future
for a foster kid; to make it better ...you have the power to do that. Speak up
(or tweet out) because it's your country.
Don't depend on the "The other guy" to speak up for these kids,
because you are the other guy.
We cannot build a future for
foster children, but we can build foster children for the future and the time
to start that change is today.
No
time to say Goodbye: Memoirs of a life in foster
Paperbook 440 Books
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir
BOOKS ABOUT
FILM
On
the Waterfront: The Making of a Great American Film
Paperback: 416 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Waterfront-Making-Great-American-Film/
BOOKS
ABOUT GHOSTS AND THE SUPERNATUAL
Scotish
Ghost Stories
Paperback 186 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Scottish-Ghost-Stories-Elliott-ODonell
HUMOR
BOOKS
The
Book of funny odd and interesting things people say
Paperback: 278 pages
http://www.amazon.com/book-funny-interesting-things-people
The
Wee Book of Irish Jokes
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook
Perfect
Behavior: A guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises
http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Behavior-Ladies-Gentlemen-Social
BOOKS
ABOUT THE 1960s
You
Don’t Need a Weatherman. Underground 1969
Paperback 122 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Weatherman-Notes-Weatherman-Underground-1969
Baby
Boomers Guide to the Beatles Songs of the Sixties
Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-Guide-Beatles-Songs-Sixties/
Baby
Boomers Guide to Songs of the 1960s
http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Boomers-Guide-Songs-1960s
IRISH- AMERICANA
The
Connecticut Irish
Paper back 140 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly
The Wee Book of Irish Jokes
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook/
The
Wee Book of Irish Recipes
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-Recipes/
The Wee Book of the American-Irish Gangsters
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-American-Gangsters/
The Wee book of Irish Blessings...
http://www.amazon.com/Series-Blessing-Proverbs-Toasts-ebook/
The
Wee Book of the American Irish in Their Own Words
http://www.amazon.com/Book-American-Irish-Their-Words/
Everything
you need to know about St. Patrick
Paperback 26 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Need-About-Saint-Patrick
A
Reading Book in Ancient Irish History
Paperback 147pages
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Book-Ancient-Irish-History
The
Book of Things Irish
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Things-Irish-William-Tuohy/
Poets
and Dreamer; Stories translated from the Irish
Paperback 158 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Poets-Dreamers-Stories-Translated-Irish/
The
History of the Great Irish Famine: Abridged and Illustrated
Paperback 356 pages
http://www.amazon.com/History-Great-Irish-Famine-Illustrated/
BOOKS ABOUT NEW ENGLAND
The
New England Mafia
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook/
Wicked
Good New England Recipes
http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Good-New-England-Recipes/
The
Connecticut Irish
Paper back 140 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly
The
Twenty-Fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers
Paperback 64 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Fifth-Regiment-Connecticut-Volunteers-Rebellion
The
Life of James Mars
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Life-James-Mars-Slave-Connecticut
Stories
of Colonial Connecticut
Paperback 116 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Colonial-Connnecticut-Caroline-Clifford
What
they Say in Old New England
Paperback 194 pages
http://www.amazon.com/What-they-say-New-England/
BOOK ABOUT ORGANIZED CRIME
Chicago Organized Crime
Chicago-Mob-Bosses
http://www.amazon.com/Chicagos-Mob-Bosses-Accardo-ebook
The
Mob Files: It Happened Here: Places of Note in Chicago gangland 1900-2000
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-1900-2000-ebook
An
Illustrated Chronological History of the Chicago Mob. Time Line 1837-2000
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Chronological-History-Chicago-1837-2000/
Mob
Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Buster-Peterson-Committee-ebook/
The
Mob Files. Guns and Glamour: The Chicago Mob. A History. 1900-2000
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Guns-Glamour-ebook/
Shooting
the Mob: Organized crime in photos. Crime Boss Tony Accardo
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-photos-Accardo/
Shooting
the Mob: Organized Crime in Photos: The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Valentines-Massacre
The
Life and World of Al Capone in Photos
http://www.amazon.com/Life-World-Al-Capone
AL
CAPONE: The Biography of a Self-Made Man.: Revised from the 0riginal 1930
edition.Over 200 new photographs
Paperback: 340 pages
http://www.amazon.com/CAPONE-Biography-Self-Made-Over-photographs
Whacked.
One Hundred Years Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Outfit
Paperback: 172 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Whacked-Hundred-Murder-Mayhem-Chicago/
Las Vegas Organized Crime
The
Mob in Vegas
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Vegas-ebook
Bugsy
& His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill
http://www.amazon.com/Bugsy-His-Flamingo-Testimony-Virginia/
Testimony
by Mobsters Lewis McWillie, Joseph Campisi and Irwin Weiner (The Mob Files
Series)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-ebook
Rattling
the Cup on Chicago Crime.
Paperback 264 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Rattling-Cup-Chicago-Crime-Abridged
The
Life and Times of Terrible Tommy O’Connor.
Paperback 94 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-Terrible-Tommy-OConnor
The
Mob, Sam Giancana and the overthrow of the Black Policy Racket in Chicago
Paperback 200 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Giancana-ovethrow-Policy-Rackets-Chicago
When
Capone’s Mob Murdered Roger Touhy. In Photos
Paperback 234 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Capones-Murdered-Roger-Touhy-photos
Organized
Crime in Hollywood
The Mob in Hollywood
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Hollywood-ebook/
The
Bioff Scandal
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Bioff-Scandal-Shakedown-Hollywood-Studios
Organized
Crime in New York
Joe Pistone’s war on the mafia
http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Petrosinos-War-Mafia-Files/
Mob
Testimony: Joe Pistone, Michael Scars DiLeonardo, Angelo Lonardo and others
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Testimony-DiLeonardo-testimony-Undercover/
The
New York Mafia: The Origins of the New York Mob
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mafia-Origins
The
New York Mob: The Bosses
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mob-Bosses/
Organized
Crime 25 Years after Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate
http://www.amazon.com/Organized-Crime-Valachi-Hearings-ebook
Shooting
the mob: Dutch Schultz
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Photographs-Schultz
Gangland
Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal. (Illustrated)
http://www.amazon.com/Gangland-Gaslight-Killing-Rosenthal-Illustrated/
Early
Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City
Paperback 382 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Early-Street-Gangs-Gangsters-York
THE RUSSIAN MOBS
The
Russian Mafia in America
http://www.amazon.com/The-Russian-Mafia-America-ebook/
The
Threat of Russian Organzied Crime
Paperback 192 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Threat-Russian-Organized-Crime-photographs-ebook
Organized Crime/General
Best
of Mob Stories
http://www.amazon.com/Files-Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-Crime/
Best
of Mob Stories Part 2
http://www.amazon.com/Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-ebook/
Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters-ebook
Mob
Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobsters in Photos
http://www.amazon.com/Recipes-For-Meals-Mobsters-Photos
More
Mob Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobs
http://www.amazon.com/More-Recipes-Meals-Mobsters-Photos
The
New England Mafia
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook
Shooting
the mob. Organized crime in photos. Dead Mobsters, Gangsters and Hoods.
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-mob-Organized-photos-Mobsters-Gangsters/
The
Salerno Report: The Mafia and the Murder of President John F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/The-Salerno-Report-President-ebook/
The Mob Files: Mob Wars. "We only kill
each other"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Wars-other/
The
Mob across America
http://www.amazon.com/The-Files-Across-America-ebook/
The
US Government’s Time Line of Organzied Crime 1920-1987
http://www.amazon.com/GOVERNMENTS-ORGANIZED-1920-1987-Illustrated-ebook/
Early
Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City: 1800-1919. Illustrated
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-1800-1919-Illustrated-Street-ebook/
The
Mob Files: Mob Cops, Lawyers and Informants and Fronts
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Informants-ebook/
Gangster
Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated
Paperback: 128 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/
The
Book of American-Jewish Gangsters: A Pictorial History.
Paperback: 436 pages
http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-American-Jewish-Gangsters-Pictorial/
The
Mob and the Kennedy Assassination
Paperback 414 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-Mobsters
BOOKS ABOUT THE OLD WEST
The
Last Outlaw: The story of Cole Younger, by Himself
Paperback 152 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Outlaw-Story-Younger-Himself
BOOKS ON PHOTOGRAPHY
Chicago:
A photographic essay.
Paperback: 200 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Chicago-Photographic-Essay-William-Thomas
STAGE PLAYS
Boomers
on a train: A ten minute play
Paperback 22 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-train-ten-minute-Play-ebook
Four
Short Plays
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy
Four
More Short Plays
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy/
High
and Goodbye: Everybody gets the Timothy Leary they deserve. A full length play
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/High-Goodbye-Everybody-Timothy-deserve
Cyberdate.
An Everyday Love Story about Everyday People
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Cyberdate-Everyday-Story-People-ebook/
The
Dutchman's Soliloquy: A one Act Play based on the factual last words of
Gangster Dutch Schultz.
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Dutchmans-Soliloquy-factual-Gangster-Schultz/
Fishbowling
on The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: Or William S. Burroughs intersects with
Dutch Schultz
Print Length: 57 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Fishbowling-Last-Words-Dutch-Schultz-ebook/
American
Shakespeare: August Wilson in his own words. A One Act Play
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/American-Shakespeare-August-Wilson-ebook
She
Stoops to Conquer
http://www.amazon.com/She-Stoops-Conquer-Oliver-Goldsmith/
The
Seven Deadly Sins of Gilligan’s Island: A ten minute play
Print Length: 14 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Deadly-Gilligans-Island-minute-ebook/
BOOKS ABOUT VIRGINIA
OUT
OF CONTROL: An Informal History of the Fairfax County Police
http://www.amazon.com/Control-Informal-History-Fairfax-Police/
McLean
Virginia. A short informal history
http://www.amazon.com/McLean-Virginia-Short-Informal-History/
The
Quotable Emerson: Life lessons from the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Over 300
quotes
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Emerson-lessons-quotes
The
Quotable John F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-John-F-Kennedy/
The
Quotable Oscar Wilde
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons/
The
Quotable Machiavelli
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-Thayer/
The
Quotable Confucius: Life Lesson from the Chinese Master
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese/
The
Quotable Henry David Thoreau
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Henry-Thoreau-Quotables-ebook
The
Quotable Robert F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Robert-F-Kennedy-Illustrated/
The
Quotable Writer: Writers on the Writers Life
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Writer-Quotables-ebook
The
words of Walt Whitman: An American Poet
Paperback: 162 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Words-Walt-Whitman-American-Poet
Gangster
Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated
Paperback: 128 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/
The
Quotable Popes
Paperback 66 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Popes-Maria-Conasenti
The
Quotable Kahlil Gibran with Artwork from Kahlil Gibran
Paperback 52 pages
Kahlil Gibran, an artist, poet,
and writer was born on January 6, 1883 n the north of modern-day Lebanon and in
what was then part of Ottoman Empire. He had no formal schooling in Lebanon. In
1895, the family immigrated to the United States when Kahlil was a young man
and settled in South Boston. Gibran enrolled in an art school and was soon a
member of the avant-garde community and became especially close to Boston
artist, photographer, and publisher Fred Holland Day who encouraged and
supported Gibran’s creative projects. An accomplished artist in drawing and
watercolor, Kahlil attended art school in Paris from 1908 to 1910, pursuing a
symbolist and romantic style. He held his first art exhibition of his drawings
in 1904 in Boston, at Day's studio. It was at this exhibition, that Gibran met
Mary Elizabeth Haskell, who ten years his senior. The two formed an important
friendship and love affair that lasted the rest of Gibran’s short life. Haskell
influenced every aspect of Gibran’s personal life and career. She became his
editor when he began to write and ushered his first book into publication in
1918, The Madman, a slim volume of aphorisms and parables written in biblical
cadence somewhere between poetry and prose. Gibran died in New York City on
April 10, 1931, at the age of 48 from cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis.
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Kahlil-Gibran-artwork/
The
Quotable Dorothy Parker
Paperback 86 pages
The
Quotable Machiavelli
Paperback 36 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-L-Thayer
The
Quotable Greeks
Paperback 230 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby
The
Quotabe Oscar Wilde
Paperback 24 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons-words/
The
Quotable Helen Keller
Paperback 66 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Helen-Keller-Richard-Willoughby
The
Art of War: Sun Tzu
Paperback 60 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese-Quotables-ebook
The
Quotable Shakespeare
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Shakespeare-Richard-W-Willoughby
The
Quotable Gorucho Marx
Paperback 46 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Groucho-Marx-Devon-Alexander