Shorter Politico: It's Extremist To Say True Things And Care Whether People Are Tortured And Killed

No, 'Politico,' Bernie Sanders' views on the C.I.A. were not 'extreme': https://t.co/vWfNDyZA79 http://pic.twitter.com/0UnOiqRgtZ

— Esquire Magazine (@esquire) February 22, 2016

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Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 6

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

Image via VF: Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark; Left, by Paul Schraub/The Collection of Hank Risan; Right, from the Everett Collection.

That a gambling mogul has paid millions of dollars for prop Maltese Falcon of dubious provenance just feels ... perfect. [Vanity Fair]

The fake falcon is made of lead, Gutman tells us. Kemidov must have figured out what he had and crafted a replica to fool Gutman's agents. The question is, was there a real lead prop? Or, were they all plaster? If there was a lead prop, is that what Wynn has, or did he get Kemidoved? 
We may never know for sure.

(Have to admit, I've poked around looking for replica to put on my bookshelf. They're a little pricey though. On the cheap end, you can pick one up on etsy for about $85. But at that price point, what you can get is ... *coughs discreetly* ... rubbish. Go up $100 from there and the replicas start looking better, but $85 was already more than I was looking to spend, never mind the $200 ballpark.) 

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 5

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

What, we wonder (quite reasonably) does have Hammett have against gays? And Middle Easterners, for that matter.

Joel Cairo is, even more so than the women of The Maltese Falcon, less a character than a collection of stereotypes. He doesn't go anywhere without mincing steps. His voice is effeminate.  He's expected to take being slapped, and like it.

He's also the only character in novel defined by his ethnicity. Gutman is probably German. O'Shaughnessy must be Irish. But neither of them are identified as the Irish, or the German, the way Cairo is consistently identified in the text as "the Levantine."  He even gets a chapter named for him that way.

Cairo carries a Greek passport, among others, and Gutman, if I recall, refers to him as a Greek at some point in either the movie or the novel, but his wallet contains a note written in Arabic, and I don't think we'd imagine Cairo is a Greek name. He's probably Palestinian then, or Syrian, and that fact he's an effeminate queer earns him nothing but barely concealed contempt from the author.

Is it crazy to wonder if Hammett isn't perhaps showing signs of some repression by setting his story in San Francisco and treating his most prominent gay character so shabbily?  (I say "most prominent" because I think we are supposed to infer by his stroking of Wilmer's head after Gutman agrees to let him be Spade's fall guy that Wilmer is a ... kept boy?)  Hammett was actively left-wing throughout his life and, while progressive activism isn't a guarantee of open-mindedness to all ways of life and freedom from prejudice, it's a little surprising he seems so contemptuous of a character he crafted to be an underdog twice over. Hammett had children, was married, and had relationships with women throughout his adult life, there's no evidence I can see that he was gay or bi.

The times, I guess. We chalk this less-than-gallant portrayal of a homosexual Levantine up to mere parochialism and prejudice of the era.

Unless we're supposed to see how unfair he's being, and in recognizing the unfairness, hold him, ourselves, and a society that tolerates that unfairness accountable for their shortcomings. I'd prefer to think Hammett was doing undercover work here, and not merely taking cheap shots at an exotic Other to pander.

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 4

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

In the film, it's not clear what book Spade has at his bedside under the alarm clock and which Gutman enjoys later while they await Effie's delivery of the bundle. We know from the novel it's Duke's Celebrated Criminal Cases of America. 

We know from the Flitcraft tale that Spade worked for a detective agency in Seattle before coming to San Francisco, and that he's been partners with Archer for less than a year when he tells Effie he would sought to dissolve their partnership once their year contract was up. So, it tells us something that he's not just getting his information about the SFPD from experience, but that he's studying their history. Spade isn't only hard-boiled, he's well-read.

As an aside, he references Arnold Rothstein when discussing the case in the DA's office. I had always assumed that was a case from the book, but that's because my Tammany Hall and Black Sox scandal knowledge is somewhat and shamefully deficient. Also, because I haven't been watching Boardwalk Empire. Rothstein was  prominent New Jersey underworld figure who was shot to death during a poker game over failing to pay a debt. So Spade's observation that the DA has Rothstein on the brain while investigating Thursby is an astute one. (Rothstein was murdered in 1928, a year before Hammett started publishing The Maltese Falcon in Black Mask magazine. Timely for the story, but a reference that probably would have been stale by 1941.)

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 3

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

What's in a name? It's possible I've read too much into "La Paloma" as the name of Jacobi's ship already, so might as well speculate on the name Jacobi itself.

It strikes me as an apt name to use for a minor character in a detective novel. I can only speculate as to how Hammett landed on it, but I'd like to think it's a nod to the German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi: 

"It was in algebraic development that Jacobi’s peculiar power mainly lay, and he made important contributions of this kind to many areas of mathematics, as shown by his long list of papers in Crelle’s Journal and elsewhere from 1826 onwards. One of his maxims was: 'Invert, always invert' ('man muss immer umkehren'), expressing his belief that the solution of many hard problems can be clarified by re-expressing them in inverse form."

Detectives, after all, face hard problems, so how to think about solving problems would be a matter of some importance to them. The clues don't add up? Try reasoning by subtraction. Invert the problem and see if expressing it in different terms leads to insight.

To figure out who killed Archer, he's got to look at the problem outside the narrative O'Shaughnessy has fed him. He's got to see how it doesn't add up. O'Shaughnessy must be lying when she says she couldn't trust Thursby. Spade learns that Thursby's loyalty to her was unshakable. Miles may have been a fool, but he was too experienced a detective to be gunned down by a man he was tailing without getting his hands out of his pockets. "The man who shot him stood here," Archer says when re-enacting the shooting with Tom Polhaus. That a man did it is an assumption based on facts not in evidence. Spade's got to recognize the lazy thinking and subtract anything that followed from the false premise. He figures out while he and O'Shaughnessy await the inevitable arrival of the police after Gutman's gang have left his apartment to skip town. Jacobi, the mathematician, would have been proud. (Jacobi, the bullet-ridden ship's captain, would have liked to have know the sort of woman O'Shaughnessy was before falling in with her.)

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 2

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

Huston's adaptation hews so close to the novel that even the changed scenes and omitted characters could barely be said to haunt the movie as ghosts. Among the changes: we don't see Gutman's daughter; Spade's lawyer gets relegated to a single phone call; Effie doesn't call Cairo "a queer," and his handkerchiefs are said to smell of gardenias rather than the less recognizable chypre; we meet one hotel detective, instead of two; Spade doesn't force O'Shaughnessy to prove she didn't steal the thousand dollar bill that Gutman palmed. The changes are competent; they don't leave holes in the story or gaps we tend to notice. We don't see Spade take a meal in the movie, but the movie wouldn't have been improved by us watching him make a liverwurst sandwich. 

The one scene in the novel that doesn't make it in Huston's film that I would include, if I were to produce a new adaptation, is Spade telling O'Shaugnessy Flitcraft's story. It's a decidedly odd story, in and of itself, and it's even odder for it to be in The Maltese Falcon. While easy to see why the decision was made not to include it in the film for the very reason we can easily imagine the novel without it, I think we need to bear down and ask why it's there. Hammett wrote Spade as a man who spoke judiciously, a man who liked to talk, but wasn't a prattler. There's certainly a reason the Flitcraft story makes the cut. Can we make sense of it?

Hammett scholars will have no doubt covered this ground, and I'll circle back check my hypothesis against what more accomplished critics will have already had to say on the matter, but it seems to me that the story of a man whose perception of his life is blown open by a near-miss falling beam while walking past a construction site has something to say about Spade's love of Brigid O'Shaughnessy. 

Flitcraft walks away from his life, his family, internalizes the randomness of our existence, then eventually drifts back into a life that mirrors the one he lead before his satori and period of wandering. Beams stopped falling near him and he stopped living as if they did.

Spade has, by meeting O'Shaughnessy, found himself similarly having his reality shattered. He's in love with a woman he knows is lying to him, using him the way she's used other men as protectors for as long as she's needed them, one he finally recognizes as a cold-blooded killer. She's a beam that's fallen directly in his path. And he is very nearly ready to throw away his life and the terms by which he's lived it, to live a new one with her. She's shown him a glimpse of himself he's never seen and he's shaken to the core by her. Brigid is merely puzzled by the story, and it never comes up again in the novel.

Yet, when Spade tries to explain himself to her, to explain why he's going to turn her over the police, the Flitcraft story underscores the scene. He could upend his life, he could shield her from the law and carry on in a new way. He wants to. But won't. He refuses to be a Flitcraft. She's a capricious force of nature he won't bend his will to. His anguish is that he's seen what Flitcraft saw, but he's not going to let it change him. 

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 1

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

Gutman relates the story of the Knights of the Order of St. John to Spade. How, in 1539, they hit upon the idea of sending a golden falcon, encrusted beak to claw with precious stones, to King Charles V of Spain as tribute. The story he tells places the San Francisco-set noir in a (fictionalized) historical context stretching back through the 16th century to the Crusades. Gutman describes the Crusades as essentially centuries of sustained looting. The Order of St. John can pay such lavish tribute thanks to the Order's legacy of plundering untold hordes of gold, silks, ivory, jewels, and the like from the East hundreds of years earlier. Not schoolbook history, but history nevertheless, he assures him.

However, the historical motifs in The Maltese Falcon run deeper even than the Crusades. Hammett subtly, elegantly weaves a lyrical legend from Herodotus's history of the Persian wars into his pulpy detective story. Or, since I can't prove it, I've imagined that he has. It's part of the charm of Hammett's novel, and Huston's 1941 adaptation, that such a reading is possible.

Ships under the command of Mardonius, serving the Persian King Darius the Great, were caught in a storm in 492 B.C. while on an expedition to Greece. The Greeks, unfamiliar with doves, were fascinated by the site of the white birds escaping the sinking ships. They imagined, the story goes, that the doves were the last messages of love from the drowning sailors. The romantic idea made it's way into seafaring lore, and into song. From 1861,versions of the "La Paloma" ("The Dove") gained popularity in Spain, Cuba, and Mexico. This image, of a dove escaping a shipwreck, flying with a message of love, is not directly found in The Maltese Falcon, of course, but we see its dark reflection in Hammett's tale.

Brigid O'Shaughnessy, on the run with the stolen black statuette of a falcon, meets Captain Jacobi in Hong Kong and entrusts him with the treasure. He transports it to San Francisco for her while she tries to find a way to get rid of her no longer convienent ally, Floyd Thursby. Jacobi's ship is burned in the harbor when Gutman's henchman, young Wilmer, is careless with matches while attempting to find it in the hold. The falcon, dove-like, escapes the ship with Jacobi, and later is delivered to Spade's office by the bullet-ridden (again, Wilmer at work) ship's captain. Spade receives his love's black bird; but its message is of betrayal, and it brings death and blood with it from its downed ship.

Jacobi's ship is named "La Paloma."

Burr and Tillis, Predictably Disgraceful, Called Out For Their (And Their Party's) Radical Obstructionism

Our Opinion: Supreme opposition - Greensboro News & Record: N&R Editorials: 

“In this election year, the American people will have an opportunity to have their say in the future direction of our country,” Burr said in a statement released by his office Monday. “For this reason, I believe the vacancy left open by Justice Antonin Scalia should not be filled until there is a new president.” 

That notion is both wrong and a political miscalculation. 

There is no precedent for denying presidents the chance to appoint justices to the court in the final year of their presidency. They have done so several times, most recently in 1988 when the Senate unanimously confirmed President Ronald Reagan’s choice of current Justice Anthony Kennedy. 

Someone could just as credibly argue that Burr, who’s running for re-election this year, should leave important votes to whomever the people of North Carolina choose for his seat in November. But that’s absurd. Burr was elected to a full term; so was Obama. They shouldn’t stop doing their jobs just because their terms are running out. Obama will be in office for 11 more months — plenty of time for the nomination and confirmation of a Supreme Court justice, and too long to leave a vacancy.

How it must rankle the neoreactionary souls of the GOP to argue against the Presidency exercising its Constitutional powers, as it must when then they argue the illegality of Executive Orders as well, when they would so dearly love to have one of their own in the office and let the gloves come off.

Make no mistake, just as the right had no problem with Anthony Kennedy when nominated by Reagan, they would have no problem today if this were President Romney's second term in its final year. Their position now is nakedly partisan, hypocritical, and their willingness to pretend otherwise and a radical assault on Constitutional governance.

But, we shouldn't be surprised they care so little for the Constitution, only a sucker ever bought that act to begin with. They loathe democracy, human rights, and anything else that interferes with the ability of oligarchs to impose their will on the people. They love the Constitution only as it suits them.

.@SenThomTillis @SenatorBurr @wectnews Controversy?! There's no controversy. There's partisan obstruction & those enabling it. Do your jobs.

— cdogzilla (@cdogzilla) February 16, 2016

Placing Literature crowdsources literary mapping

Placing Literature

Placing Literature is a crowdsourcing website that maps literary scenes that take place in real locations. Anyone with a Google login can add a place to the literary database and share it over social media. Since its launch in May 2013, nearly 3,000 places from MacBeth’s castle to Forks High School have been mapped by users all over the world. 

Readers, tourists, authors, publishers, librarians, museum directors, cultural organizations and academics all use Placing Literature geo-tagged information to provide location context to literature. 

A great idea that's barely scratched the surface. I'm only afraid that if I start contributing, it's going to be hard to stop.

Messing Around With MapMe: My Guide to Fuquay and the Triangle

Haven't had much luck persuading my friends from back home to come down to Fuquay for a visit -- apart from Dubemonkey, who comes when he makes his annual NASCAR getaway -- so decided to use this web app to spotlight some of the things to do in the area, customized to what I think might appeal to the ol' gang. Hope it can help accomplish what my cheerful disposition alone has otherwise failed to do.

While waiting for Bryan Fuller's Trek, there's this ...

Watch the first 5 episodes of the fan-made sequel to the original Star Trek series / Boing Boing: 

"[Star Trek Continues] comes frighteningly close to replicating the original series, in the sets, make-up and hairstyles, costumes and music… The art direction precisely captures the Day-Glo visuals of early color TV. Most remarkable is Mr. Mignogna; no actor playing, for instance, James Bond has imitated Sean Connery outright, but Mr. Mignogna comes so scarily close to the dynamic, staccato energy of William Shatner that we keep forgetting we’re looking at another actor."

Five episodes are available on YouTube, with a sixth coming in May, 2016.

Mapping Old Blighty's Telly & Accents: A Primer for Us Yanks

Americans: Use this map to figure out where TV shows across the pond take place | Great Job, Internet! | The A.V. Club

Detail from the larger image at AV Club

And once you've mapped your way from Torquay's premier family-owned hotel, to the recently opened to the public for tours home of the Crawleys, you can train your ear to place the accents ...


Map Quiz Time - Accents | Maps Mania

RIP Scoundrel Jurist, Antonin Scalia | New ☆ Tweet from @billjanovitz

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
Clarence Darrow

— bill janovitz (@billjanovitz) February 13, 2016

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Is Bryan Fuller Enough to Get the Star Trek TV Revival a Streaming Audience?

Bryan Fuller to Helm New Star Trek TV Revival -- Vulture: 

image via Nerdist

Hannibal and Pushing Daisies producer Bryan Fuller is coming onboard the new Star Trek TV revival as a co-creator, executive producer, and — most important — showrunner.

Probably not. But it makes me more likely to pre-order the blu-ray of what will probably be the one season it gets when nobody signs up for CBS All Access to watch it.

Making a mockery of the law ...

IRS gives nonprofit status to Rove’s controversial dark money group | OpenSecrets Blog: 

More than any other group claiming to be a social welfare nonprofit, Crossroads has become a symbol of the current malleability of campaign finance rules. Run by some of the most seasoned political operatives in the country, it has almost no grassroots support — financially or in terms of volunteers—and is represented by some of the finest campaign finance lawyers in the country.

The brainchild of Republican strategist Karl Rove, Crossroads was established in June 2010, only months after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which freed 501(c)(4) organizations like GPS to engage in more direct politicking than before.

New Hampshire Feels the Bern

Bernie Sanders Wins Democratic New Hampshire Primary | Mother Jones

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was declared the winner of the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary as soon as polls closed at 8 p.m. EST on Tuesday night. Results are still trickling in at the moment—some polling locations are still open to accommodate people in line at the cutoff time—but it looks like Sanders will likely defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by double digits.

Iowa and New Hampshire are small, very white states. It's possible to read too much into this and, predictably, the hot takes are flying. That said, it's also possible to dismiss the Sanders win as nothing more than a popular neighbor winning where of course he was going to win; that's also a mistake though. The young and folks making less than $200k per year are breaking big for Bernie. Way big. Which is encouraging.

That Sanders will likely not do as well in upcoming "SEC" primaries and Nevada could disillusion those precise groups Sanders is doing well with now, the ones facing the harshest realities and for whom the stakes are the highest. As Clinton's delegate totals start to run up, we'll see whether Sanders's supporters become dispirited and resigned to a Clinton candidacy. If so, all that talk about the future of the party being the Sanders/Warren wing starts to fade away ...