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editor
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 Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 9:10 am Post subject: |
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Wired
What Happens in Vegas...
By Chris Anderson
March, 2006
| Quote: | For the past seven years, the place to be in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve has been Jeff Jonas' mansion. This year's wild party was the biggest yet: 1,500 people and all-night entertainment ranging from go-go dancers to fire-eaters...And this year the bash had a new group of partygoers - senior government officials and IBM executives - checking out the spectacle along with the midget, the devil on stilts, and the tatooed Harley guys.
...What brought these worlds together? September 11. Jonas is a leading surveillance expert, a database whiz who made his name catching casino cheats. His claim to fame is something called "nonobvious relationshiop awareness," which is a way of letting computers connect the dots between different data sets - like the big roulette winner who turns out to have the same home phone number as the croupier.
But once the Twin Towers fell, surveillance became a national priority. Homeland Security officials realized that Las Vegas was essentially a state-of-the-art test bed. And Jonas became the go-to guy for sorting through mountains of data, looking not for scam artists but errorists. Last year IBM bought his company, SRD. Now he's one of about 300 "distinguished engineers" - even though he doesn't hold a college degree. (From Posts, at p. 090) |
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| Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2006 3:47 pm Post subject: |
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Good Night, and Good Luck
DVD
| Quote: | (A CBS News secretary interrupts a staff meeting to announce that junior Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, a Republican, would appear before the cameras April 6/54 to rebut criticisms by principled newsman Edward R. Murrow regarding the senator's anti-Communist witchhunts, which destroyed so many fine careers before McCarthy himself became the subject of investigation. News staff speculate noisily about what McCarthy might say in the broadcast).
Ed: Johnny, Johnny, we know what it's going to be. He's going to come after me. He's going to bet that a senator trumps a newsman.
Fellow broadcaster: He'll lose.
Ed: Not if we're playing bridge. |
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| Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 3:49 pm Post subject: |
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Sermons and Soda-Water
Three-Volume Set
Hardcover
By John O'Hara
| Quote: | | ...We had come to our maturity and our knowledgeability during the long decade of cynicism that was usually dismissed as "a cynical disregard of the law of the land," but that was something else, something deeper. The law had been passed with a "noble" but nevertheless cynical disregard of men's right to drink. It was a law that had been imposed on some who took pleasure in drinking by some who did not. And when the law was an instant failure, it was not admitted to be a failure by those who had imposed it. They fought to retain the law in spite of its immediate failure and its proliferating corruption, and they fought as hard as they would have for a law that had been an immediate success. They gained no recruits to their own way; they had only deserters, who were not brave deserters but furtive ones; there was no honest mutiny but only grumbling and small disobediences. And we grew up listening to the grumbling, watching the small disobediences; laughing along when the grumbling was intentionally funny, imitating the small disobediences in other ways besides the customs of drinking. It was not only a cynical disregard for a law of the land; the law was eventually changed. Prohibition, the zealots' attempt to force total abstinence on a temperate nation, made liars of a hundred million men and cheats of their children; the West Point cadets who cheated in examinations, the basketball players who connived with gamblers, the thousands of uncaught cheats in the high schools and colleges. We had grown up and away from our earlier esteem of God and country and valor, and had matured at a moment when riches were vanishing for reasons that we could not understand. We were the losing, not the lost, generation. (From Imagine Kissing Pete at pgs. 28-29) |
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| Posted: Thu Dec 21, 2006 10:29 am Post subject: |
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War Made New
Technology, Warfare, and
the Course of History
1500 to Today
Hardcover
By Max Boot
| Quote: | A somnolent country was finally jarred out of its reverie by a startling message sent at 7:58 a.m., December 7, from Ford Island Naval Air Station: "AIR RAID, PEARL HARBOR -- THIS IS NO DRILL." Amid the hoarse wail of Klaxons, the men aboard the battleship California received an earthier version of the same alert over their public address system: "Everyone get to your battle stations! This is no shit!"
Across the island, soldiers, sailors, and marines, their "adrenaline ... pumping about a thousand miles an hour," as one later recalled, broke into locked ammunition lockers, grabbed whatever weapons happened to be available -- ranging from .45 caliber pistols to .50 caliber machine guns -- and craft, especially in the second wave that began to appear around 9:00 a.m., their fighter aircraft were caught on the ground. The only notable success was Welch and Kenneth Taylor, who had been awake when the attack occurred because they had stayed up all night playing poker. Between them, they downed seven Japanese aircraft, mostly slow dive bombers. But most of the raiders reached their targets unimpeded. (From Flattops and Torpedoes at pg. 245). |
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| Posted: Mon Feb 26, 2007 2:57 pm Post subject: |
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Gentlemen, Scholars and Scoundrels
A Treasury of the Best of Harper's Magazine from 1850 to the Present (1972, in our case)
Hardcover
Edited by Horace Knowles
| Quote: | | Marks for swag, or loot readily convertible into cash, are still more numerous and usually even less well protected, but they have the considerable disadvantage that the take must be fenced, or sold. Since this involves a suicidal risk if undertaken through legitimate channels, swag is usually sold to a professional buyer of stolen goods. The fence not only helps himself to a whopping profit - he seldom pays more than 20 per cent even for gilt-edge swag - but often he is not reliable in the face of police pressure, and not uncommonly does business with police and politicians, or pays in money and information for tacit permission to operate. Sometimes, particularly when jewelfry or securities are involved, it is possible to by-pass the fence in favor of the company which has insured the loss. Settlement in such cases runs about 20 per cent of the insured amount, no questions asked. Several private detective agencies are widely known as specialists in negotiating such transactions, which also are often handled through attorneys. If the robbery was the doing of Americans, it is a safe bet that the $785,000 in jewelry heisted from the Aga Khan last fall will be recovered on this basis. (From The Heist - The Theory and Practice of Armed Robbery by Everett DeBaun, February, 1950, an insider's view written in prison. DeBaun also became a noted adviser on crime to the Hollywood movie industry). |
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| Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 12:10 pm Post subject: |
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A Victorian Scrapbook
Hardcover
A wonderful picture book for rainy days.
By Cynthia Hart, John Grossman and Priscilla Dunhill
| Quote: | With steadily mounting wealth and seduced by the heady tenor of the times, Victorians flocked to gambling. Fortunes were won and lost overnight in high-stakes games of faro, poker, roulette, and all manner of sports events - boxing, horse racing, wrestling, sailing.
First "opening its doors to Satan" in 1819, when city fathers winked at billiards, unchaperoned dancing and private gambling, Saratoga Springs had no peer when it came to the social station and inventiveness of its gamblers. Millionaires at the Springs dreamed up a new gambling game called Flo-lo, in which each player would set a cube of sugar saturated with honey in front of him at the dining table, place his bet, then wait to see which cube would first attract a fly. With the arrival in 1861 of John Morrissey, a huge, brawling, handsome Irish immigrant boxer, gambling was seriously - and openly - launched. At his Matilda Street club, Morrissey took cash only and barred women and local citizens from gaming. He was enormously successful, he gave large sums to charity and closed his doors on Sunday, but no blueblood dowagers ever welcomed him and his dazzling dark-eyed bride across the thresholds of their Broadway mansions.
Morrissey, cut to the quick, simply poured more energy into his trade. By the 1870s, rich carpetbaggers from the South, Nevada silver lode mining kings and the Eastern establishment industrial aristocracy all jostled for preferred places at his gambling events. Capitalizing on the Victorian appetite for sports, he built the Springs' first racetrack and sponsored boat racing on Lake Saratoga. Despite his efforts, Morrissey died at age forty-seven, porcine and worn out from overeating and other excesses, without ever having gained the social acceptance he so coveted.
His replacement was the dapper, elegant Richard Canfield, who came to be called the Prince of Gambling. Canfield bought Morrissey's club and redecorated it, much as it can be seen today, with red-flocked wallpapaer, moon-globe chandeliers, green satin draperies and cabbage-rose carpets. Importing the best chefs from France, he charged higher prices than New York's Delmonico's and Sherry's, and called his new place the Casino. Soon, ten gambling houses were imitating his success. The roulette wheels and dice clattered round the clock. Prodded by local citizens and sensing the circulation bonanza to be found in the high-life scandal of bluebloods, veteran newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer sent his star reporter, Nelly Bly, to expose the debaucheries of Saratoga. In August of 1894, the headlines of her story blazed across the pages of the New York World: "Money mad by night and day/Little children who play horses." The subhead was no less irate: "Reputable and disreputable women, solid merchants, bankers, touts, criminals and race track riff-raff crazed by the mania for gold."
The heyday would soon be over. (From Manly Pursuits at pgs. 101-104) |
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| Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 9:50 am Post subject: |
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Bootleg Series
Volume I
CD Audio
Bob Dylan
Listen at bobdylan.com.
and again in:
Older But No Wiser
Clancy Brothers and Robbie O'Connell
CD Audio
| Quote: | Rambling, Gambling Willie
Come around you rovin' gamblers and a story I will tell
About the greatest gambler, you all should know him well.
His name was Will O' Conley and he gambled all his life,
He had twenty-seven children, yet he never had a wife.
And it's ride, Willie, ride,
Roll, Willie, roll,
Wherever you are a-gamblin' now, nobody really knows.
He gambled in the White House and in the railroad yards,
Wherever there was people, there was Willie and his cards.
He had a reputation as the gamblin'est man around,
Wives would keep their husbands home when Willie came to town.
And it's ride, Willie, ride,
Roll, Willie, roll,
Wherever you are a-gamblin' now, nobody really knows.
Sailin' down the Mississippi to a town called New Orleans,
They're still talkin' about their card game on that Jackson River Queen.
"I've come to win some money," Gamblin' Willie says,
When the game finally ended up, the whole damn boat was his.
And it's ride, Willie, ride,
Roll, Willie, roll,
Wherever you are a-gamblin' now, nobody really knows.
Up in the Rocky Mountains in a town called Cripple Creek,
There was an all-night poker game, lasted about a week.
Nine hundred miners had laid their money down,
When Willie finally left the room, he owned the whole damn town.
And it's ride, Willie, ride,
Roll, Willie, roll,
Wherever you are a-gamblin' now, nobody really knows.
But Willie had a heart of gold and this I know is true,
He supported all his children, and all their mothers too.
He wore no rings or fancy things, like other gamblers wore,
He spread his money far and wide, to help the sick and the poor.
And it's ride, Willie, ride,
Roll, Willie, roll,
Wherever you are a-gamblin' now, nobody really knows.
When you played your cards with Willie, you never really knew
Whether he was bluffin' or whether he was true.
He won a fortune from a man who folded in his chair.
The man, he left a diamond flush, Willie didn't even have a pair.
And it's ride, Willie, ride,
Roll, Willie, roll,
Wherever you are a-gamblin' now, nobody really knows.
It was late one evenin' during a poker game,
A man lost all his money, he said Willie was to blame.
He shot poor Willie through the head, which was a tragic fate,
When Willie's cards fell on the floor, they were aces backed with eights.
And it's ride, Willie, ride,
Roll, Willie, roll,
Wherever you are a-gamblin' now, nobody really knows.
So all you rovin' gamblers, wherever you might be,
The moral of this story is very plain to see.
Make your money while you can, before you have to stop,
For when you pull that dead man's hand, your gamblin' days are up.
And it's ride, Willie, ride,
Roll, Willie, roll,
Wherever you are a-gamblin' now, nobody really knows. |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 9:14 am Post subject: |
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A Death in Belmont
Hardcover
By Sebastian Junger
View photo gallery and author interview in the story,
The perfect story, It seemed Sebastian Junger was destined to
write about the 1963 murder of Bessie Goldberg, by David Mehegan
April 5/06 at boston.com.
See also publisher's response to claims by the daughter of victim Bessie
Goldberg that author Junger got it all wrong.
| Quote: | Chelsea was a cramped little industrial city filled with people that Europe didn't want. The Irish came during the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s and established themselves by volunteering in huge numbers during the American Civil War. Every man who survived the war got a total of three hundred dollars, which many then used to start a small business in town. The Italians and the Poles came twenty years later, fleeing economic conditions that approached feudalism in their home countries. They were rough, uneducated people who were willing to work hard on the Chelsea waterfront and in the factories and freight businesses that sprang up in the postwar boom. The Jews came last, flushed out of Russia by a nationalistic frenzy instituted by Czar Alexander III in the 1880s. His ambition was to force Russia's Jews to convert, starve, or flee, and not surprisingly, many of them decided to flee. They arrived by the tens of thousands in New York and Boston and Chicago much the way blacks like Roy Smith arrived a generation or two later.
...Every wave of immigrants to Chelsea brought with them not only their particular brand of industry, but their particular brand of crime, and by (Albert) DeSalvo's time, Chelsea was awash in backroom hustles and illicit cash. It was said that the Irish ran Chelsea but that the Jews owned it. It was said that in Chelsea, a C-note would get you anything you wanted. It was said that Chelsea was the most corrupt city in America. "I can't remember a time when I wasn't learning something I was better off not knowing," DeSalvo later told investigators about growing up there. Boston gangsters oversaw high-stakes dice games in Chelsea and old ladies ran numbers from corner stores and bartenders cashed checks for bookies who walked around with thousands of dollars in their pockets. The entire enterprise was overseen by a succession of currupt mayors who financed their political campaigns by getting kickbacks from the thugs they were elected to protect. The corruption got so bad that when a fire burned much of West Chelsea in 1973, someone from the mayor's office tried to shake down a state telephone crew that had been sent to rehang the lines. The crew foreman tossed the mayor's man a hard hat from the back of a truck and told him to go back to city hall with that. (-- pgs. 165-166) |
| Quote: | | Albert DeSalvo, Bridgewater Correctional Institution: "Well, I been riding around all day like in the middle of the world and I got to this parking lot down on Commonwealth Avenue and I left my car there and I walked to number 1940. It was awful hot and I could feel the sweat on me and smell it, too, and I don't like that because I like to keep my body very clean. I look at the names on the mailboxes and the bells inside number 1940 and pick out a couple of women's names and press the first one. I stand there waiting, feeling the image build up and not thinking anout what I'm going to say to her because I know something will come to me like it always does. Nothing happens. I press the second doorbell and in a few minutes she buzzes the door, twice, and I walk into the hallway. The stairs are curved arund an elevator and to the right and I go up them, not in a hurry or nothing, just taking them one at a time. It's funny, isn't it, how the first woman didn't answer the bell or wasn't home or something and just that little chance, you understand what I mean? (-- p. 177) |
| Quote: | The story about Bessie Goldberg that I heard from my parents was that a nice old lady had been killed down the street and an innocent black man went to prison for the crime. Meanwhile - unknown to anyone - a violent psychopath named Al was working alone at our house all day and probably committed the murder. In our family this story eventually acquired the tidy symbolism of a folk tale. Roy Smith was a stand-in for everything that was unjust in the world, and Bessie Goldberg was a stand-in for everything that was decent but utterly defenseless, Albert DeSalvo, of course, was a stand-in for pure random evil.
Our family's story was so perfect that I didn't question its simplicity until I was much older. Its simplicity was rooted in the fact that the tragedy on Scott Road had brushed our family but had never really affected us. That was a piece of good luck that I eventually realized could easily have been otherwise. What if, for example, my mother hadn't gone out on the day of the murder; what if she had just stayed home with me? Would Al have gotten his terrible urge and killed my mother instead of Bessie Goldberg? Would some other journalist now be interviewing me, rather than the other way around? (From September, 2005 at pgs. 245-246) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 11:42 am Post subject: |
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Poker Nation
Hardcover
By * self-described Paris Review editor Andy Bellin
| Quote: | There's a guy who lives in Indiana.
One morning he wakes to hear a voice in his head. The voice says, "Quit your job, sell your house, take all your money, and go to Las Vegas."
He ignores the voice and goes to work.
Later in the day, he hears the voice again.
"Quit your job, sell your house, take all your money, and go to Las Vegas."
Again, he ignores the voice.
Soon he hears the voice every minute of the day.
"Quit your job, sell your house, take all your money, and go to Las Vegas."
He can't stand it anymore, so he takes the voice's advice. He quits his job, sells his house, takes all his money, and flies to Las Vegas.
As soon as he steps off the plane, the voice syas, "Go to Binion's Horseshe."
He goes to the Horseshoe.
The voice says, "Buy an entry to the World Series of Poker."
He puts up his $10,000 and buys a seat in the tournament.
He goes to his assigned table.
In his first hand the guy is dealt two Aces of spades.
The voice says, "Go all in."
He pushes his entire $10,000 bankroll into the pot.
Three players call.
The dealer lays down the flop: nine, ten, Jack of spades.
The voice says, "Fuck."
(From What card did you fold at the beginning of the game? at pgs. 186-187) |
* Not even a dyslexic editor can spoil the fun of this poker classic, though there is no evidence to support Bellin's claim to have toiled for the plum Paris literary pulp.
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2007 12:17 pm Post subject: |
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Harper's
Magazine Subscription
Undoing Bush
How to repair eight years of sabotage, bungling, and neglect
June, 2007
| Quote: | ...For a short parlor game, challenge your friends to name a constitutional right that Bush has not sought to undermine. After the right to bear arms and the guarantee against the quartering of soldiers, the game will be over. Those who prefer a longer game can reverse the exercise, but be prepared for an extended and dispiriting evening.
...The Fifth Amendment right to due process, meanwhile, has fallen victim to assertions that "enemy combatants" can be held indefinitely without trial, that suspicious organizations can have their assets frozen without notice or hearings, and that military tribunals can sentence defendants to death on the basis of hearsay and coerced testimony. For the administration, secrecy trumps all legal process; it has claimed that lawsuits challenging unconstitutional renditions to torture and warrantless wiretapping cannot even be adjudicated because the government's allegedly unconstitutional conduct is itself a secret, even when the facts in question have already been emblazoned across the pages of the country's newspapers.
...The first and most important step toward restoration of constitutional principle, then, will be the next election. If the public does not demand fidelity to our founding principles, our representatives will not do so on their own.
The remaining steps are straightforward. The next administration could start by proclaiming - loudly - that in wartime, as in peacetime, the American system of government includes tree branches, and the president's first job is to take care that the law is faithfully executed. Second, Guantanamo must be shut down and the prisoners there brought within our borders. When Defense Secretary Robert Graves suggested just that, the administration's lawyers objected that they would lose their argument that because the detainees are held offshore, they are unprotected by the Constitution. But the argument that Guantanamo is a "law-free zone" is precisely why that island has become a world symbol for U.S. arrogance and lawlessness - a "reverse Statue of Liberty," as some have called it. ((From 1. The Constitution by David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, at pgs. 44-45) |
Link to this entry using
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| Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2007 10:19 am Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
International Magazine Subscription
Sept. 11/06
| Quote: | The Joke
One afternoon you skipped school
to go for a swim in the river.
There were a few older boys there
splashing around naked,
their clothes in neat piles on the bank.
That time someone hid yours as a joke.
You squatted in shallow water
pleading, while they took their time
combing their hair, getting dressed,
running off without a glance back.
Little by little it got dark and cold.
The lights went on in the city.
Still, you were going to wait a bit longer
before stepping out of the river
to make a search among the rocks -
or, if no luck, scale the embankment,
dash bare-assed over the railroad tracks,
slip mothlike past the first lampost,
let shadows lying past the first lamppost,
let shadows lying in wait take you home
on small streets lined with trees.
-- Charles Simic
(-- p. 57) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Fri Sep 14, 2007 11:53 am Post subject: |
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Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie
Together in Concert (1975)
LIVE
Audio Cassette
Featuring Arlo on the Jimmie Rogers classic,
My Mother, the Queen of My Heart
A grey, even hairier Arlo 30+ years later on Youtube.com.
| Quote: | "There is no gap in the two generations of singers heard on this record. Rather, the music and songs express a continuity of understanding and a reflection of the world as it is and has been. The audience at these concerts- those who were lucky enough to get tickets- spanned several generations: grandfathers and grandmothers with their grandchildren, workers and students, young and old. A New York reviewer perhaps best summed up when he wrote,"It is another time, but the need for the Seegers and Guthries of whatever generation remains."
-Harold Leventhal (Sometime manager of Pete, Arlo and Woody)(From Rising Son Records) |
| Quote: | Mother, The Queen of My Heart
By Jimmie Rogers and 'Slim' Hoyt Bryant
I had a home down in Texas
Down where the bluebonnets grew
I had the kindest old mother
How happy we were, just we two
Then one day the angels called her
It's a debt that we all have to pay
She called me close to her bedside
These last few words to say
Son, don't start drinkin' and gamblin'
Promise you'll always go straight
Ten years have passed since that parting
That promise I broke I must say
I started in gambling for pastime
At last I was just like them all
I bet my clothes and my money
Not dreaming that I'd ever fall
One night I bet all my money
Nothing was left to be seen
And all that I needed to beat them
Was one card, and that was the queen
The cards were dealt all round the table
Each one took a card in the draw
And I drew the one that would beat them
I turned it and here's what I saw
I saw my mother's picture
And somehow she seemed to say
"Son, you have broken your promise"
So I tossed the cards all away
The winnings I gave to the newsboy
I knew I was wrong from the start
And I'll never forget my promise
To my mother, the queen of my heart |
| Quote: | Roving Gambler
*By Cisco Houston
I am a roving gambler, I gamble all around
Whenever I meet with a deck of cards I lay my money down.
I've gambled down in Washington, I've gambled over in Spain
I'm goin' down to Georgia to gamble my last game.
I had not been in Washington not many more weeks than three
When I fell in love with a pretty little gal, she fell in love with me.
She took me to her parlor, she cooled me with her fan
She whispered low in her mother's ear, "I love that gambling man."
"Oh daughter, Oh dear daughter, how can you treat me so?
To leave your dear old mother, and with a gambler go?"
"Oh mother, Oh dear mother, you know I love you well
But the love I have for this gambling man, no human tongue can tell."
"I would not marry a farmer, he's always in the dirt
The man I want is a gambling man who wears a silken shirt."
"I would not marry a railroad man, I'll tell you the reason why
I never knew a railroad man wouldn't tell his wife a lie."
"I would not marry a cowboy, he's always in the rain
The man I want is a gambling man who wears a golden chain."
"I hear that train a-coming, it's a-coming 'round the curve
A-whistling and a-blowing and a-straining every nerve"
"Oh mother, Oh dear mother, I'll tell you if I can
If you ever see me back again, it'll be with that gambling man." |
| Quote: | | *Note: "The Roving Gambler" had been a favorite in Minneapolis's Dinkytown folk-song circles since the late-1950's. (An 18-year-old Bob Dylan sang a version into a tape-recorder at his friend Karen Wallace's apartment in May 1960.) It was first recorded commercially, as far as anyone knows, in 1930, by a popular cowboy singer, Carson Robinson. Woody Guthrie's sidekick Cisco Houston also sang it, as did the Stanley Brothers, as did, years later, Marty Robbins, Jim Reeves, Frankie Laine ("High Noon," "Rawhide"), Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the actor Robert Mitchum, and Arlo Guthrie, among dozens of others. Alan Lomax included a transcription of "The Roving Gambler" in his definitive 1960 collection, Folk Songs of North America. And by then the song was enjoying another sort of revival in the American mass market. Tennessee Ernie Ford, of "Sixteen Tons" fame, hit the middle of the pop charts with his "Roving Gambler" in 1956. Two years later, the rock 'n' rolling Everly Brothers included a slow, reflective version on an acoustic album of old standards called Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. And in early 1961, the commercially-successful mainstream folk performers The Brothers Four, second in renown only to the Kingston Trio, released a new album with yet another version of "The Roving Gambler," this one arranged by the group's bass player Bob Flick. (From The Roving Gambler at Scenic Newport by Sean Wilentz at bobdylan.com Sept. 14/07) |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 10:51 am Post subject: |
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The Light of Evening
Hardcover
By Edna O'Brien
| Quote: | | Later in bed she said that people at home, her people, my people, believed that America was a land of riches but that nothing could be further from the truth. America was a land of bluff and blighted dreams and I would be lucky if I got a job as a maid in a big house. I would be a Biddy, a kitchen canary. (From The Great Hall, p. 42) |
| Quote: | | He leaned on me as we crossed the street, because they were still shouting and haranguing him, and we walked lopsided, but once on the other side he would not let go of me. I knew he was mad, he had to be mad, the way he raved: Walt Whitman, the city's poet, Walt Whitman's masts of Manhattan and tall hills of Brooklyn, Walt Whitman, who had fallen, just like the blind man, into the mire, as had Horace who succumbed to the lures of a perfume seller. I was a clean girl in a city of vice, ancient Egypt or ancient Babylon no more wicked or no more corrupt. He had been a player once, in the saloons, at the trotting races, chancing his arm, scoring, and even the reverent fathers had singled him out. Sold religious articles, up in the silk stocking district, going from door to door, his valise crammed with holy statues, books, leaflets, novenas, miniature altars, miraculous medals, could put the sales over with a real punch, sold more in a day than the peanut man or the hot dog man. Flying it. Long-lashed Lenny as he was known. Face to face with the ladies and their nice drawl, in their morning coats, with their little lap dogs nested in their laps, time on their hands, their husbands making the loot. Yes, the swank ladies in their swank houses. One in particular. A doll. Wanted for nothing but her cup was never full. He knew the cup she meant. He filled the cup. Sweet as butter grass. Blonds, brunettes, redheads. One played him false or maybe more than one. Went from being a player to a human cockroach. Wakened one morning in some dive to know the game was up. Nausea, the shivers, the disease that bums, stevedores, poets, and the city elders all fell foul to. The syph. Had to be burned out of him. Oh man, the mercury that cured also took away, a descent into blindness. "I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin and defiled my horn in the dust." (From A Blind Man, p. 44) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 1:02 pm Post subject: |
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Lucky Number Slevin
DVD
View the trailer at YouTube.com which
makes the movie look MUCH better than it is.
| Quote: | The Rabbi: You must be Mr. Fisher.
Slevin: Must I? Because that hasn't been working for me lately.
Rabbi: But I'm afraid you must.
Slevin: Well, if I must.
Rabbi: Do you know for what reason you've been brought here?
Slevin: For starters, I'm unlucky.
Rabbi: The unlucky are nothing more than a frame of reference for the lucky, Mr. Fisher. You are unlucky so that I may know that I'm not. Unfortunately, the lucky never realize that they are lucky until it's too late. Take yourself, for instance. Yesterday, you were better off than you are today, but it took today for you to realize it, but today has arrived, and it's too late. You see? People are never happy with what they have. They always wish they had what someone else has .
Slevin: Kind of like a rabbi who would rather be a gangster or a gangster who would rather be a rabbi. I mean, what is that? Some sort of 'the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence' thing? I mean, how do you justify being a rabbi and a gangster?
Rabbi: I don't. I'm a bad man who doesn't waste time wondering what could have been when I AM what could've been and could not have been. I live on both sides of the fence. My grass is always green. Consider, Mr. Fisher. There are two men sitting here before you and one of them you should be very afraid of. Where's my money? |
A charmless cast but for the excellent Ben Kinglesy. Somebody please call us when America passes Elocution 101. Honestly, how do these people get work?
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 11:44 am Post subject: |
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Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription,
A Legend with Legs
The secret crush of generations of male moviegoers, Angie
Dickinson walked into Hollywood history as the Rat Pack's gal
pal, kicking off a 10-year affair with Frank Sinatra, playing his
wife in the original Ocean's Eleven, and
catching the eye (if not more) of J.F.K. Now 76, Dickinson
talks to Sam Kashner about her marriage to Burt Bacharach,
the tragedy of their daughter's struggle with Asperger's, and
an erratic but memorable career - including the groundbraking
cop show Police Woman and her classic reverse striptease in
Dressed to Kill
January, 2008
| Quote: | Dickinson's most enduring passion may be poker. "I played every Saturday night instead of going to Daisy, or whatever was popular at the time," she says. Regular Sunday-night games at the Sinatras included Jack Lemmon and his wife, the Sammy Cahns, and the Gregory Pecks, although Sinatra himself never liked to play. "Frank never played poker," Dickinson explains. "Frank's game was the dice. He'd be going great at the crap tables, but he was an impatient man," and he liked the continual action of craps and baccarat. "Dean Martin was a professional poker player" at one time in his hometown of Steubenville, Ohio, she says, "but he got into a lot of trouble, and they broke his hands."The reason poker is so popular now, she believes, "is that they play Texas Hold 'Em. You've heard of the dumbing down of America? This is the dumbing down of poker."
Johnny Carson, who was a close friend for many years, was a "a great cardplayer. He was an amateur magician."... (-- pg. 134) |
Ocean's Eleven
DVD
Featuring Angie and the Rat Pack
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