Bob Fosse’s Military

Title: Beau Travail

Rating: 2 Stars

Beau Travail is number seven on the Sight and Sound best 250 films list. Yeah, I’ve never heard of it either. A French film, set in Djibouti, it was made in 1999.

Beau Travail (which means Good Work) is loosely based upon Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd. I haven’t read Billy Budd in probably over thirty years, so a quick recap is in order. Billy Budd is in the Royal Navy. He has a natural charismatic innocence that makes him popular with the crew. The ship’s master-at-arms, John Claggart, develops an unnatural hatred of Budd. Claggart cooks up a false mutiny conspiracy centered around Budd. When called upon to defend himself, Budd is rendered speechless, and in his frustration lashes out and accidentally kills Claggart. Even though the ship captain sympathizes with Budd and thinks that he was justified, the captain feels that he has no choice but to court martial and condemn Budd to be hanged.

The Beau Travail’s characters are all in the French Foreign Legion. Standing in for Claggart is Galoup. A career officer, he is generally considered one of the best examples of a French Foreign Legion soldier. When recruit Sentain joins his section, Galoup immediately develops a dislike of him. This is despite the fact that Sentain does nothing to wrong him and is actually quite popular with the rest of the soldiers.

Galoup uses Sentain’s good will against him. Galoup harshly punishes a soldier for a comparatively minor violation. As the punished soldier struggles in pain and thirst, Sentain offers him his canteen. Galoup condemns Sentain and knocks the canteen out of his hands. In response, Sentain angrily strikes Galoup.

As punishment, Galoup strands Sentain far from base and forces him to make his way back on his own. Not only that, but he renders Sentain’s compass useless. Lost, Sentain nearly dies but is rescued by some nomads. He never makes his way back to the camp and is presumed dead by the soldiers.

Later, one of the soldiers comes across Sentain’s compass. Noticing that it is broken, he suspects Galoup of sending Sentain out to die. The captain, who Galoup worships, feels that he has no choice but to court martial Galoup and send him back home to France.

Back in France, Galoup thinks back upon all of this. Lying in bed, he brandishes a gun. In the last scene, we see him dancing alone in a disco.

My first impression is that this film proceeds at a pace that makes languid seem caffeinated. It’s a ninety minute film that felt at least two hours long. There is relatively little dialog. Perhaps the cinematography would be more impressive on a film theatre screen, but I just wasn’t all that amazed.

Some of the training exercises seem to be more modern dance choreography than military training. It all seems stylized to showcase the bodies of men. One military exercise features the men, paired off, rushing in, hugging each other, and then pushing the other away (some kind of statement on toxic masculinity?). Another exercise was underwater knife fighting. This scene wouldn’t have been out of place in an Esther Williams film.

What is Galoup’s motive for hating Sentain? In his voice over, Galoup claims nothing specific. He just hated him upon first sight. Sentain is a tall, handsome, young man whose warmth naturally draws men to him. This is in contrast to Galoup, who is shorter, older, and pockmarked. Is it simple envy? Did seeing someone with such natural gifts that he lacked motivate Galoup’s hatred? Or could it be that Galoup, despite having a girlfriend, is actually a closeted gay man? Has seeing a man with such natural beauty triggered an attraction in Galoup that he felt must extinguish at any cost?

In reading some reviews, critics mention seeing a gay subtext. The film certainly emphasizes and focuses on the beauty of young men’s bodies. It’s not unknown for films to make connections between the very male dominated military and the gay gaze (look no further than exhibits number one and two, Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick).

The dance at the end is a combination of amazing and perplexing. It’s the most unexpected dance performance since Napoleon Dynamite. Galoup, previously a stolid and seemingly unimaginative soldier, absolutely gets down on the dance floor. What does it mean? Has he committed suicide and this is his afterlife? Now free of the military and having purged himself by confession, is he now experiencing freedom for the first time? Previously closeted, is he now prepared to live a joyful, openly gay life?

Perhaps my rating of two stars is unfair. It could very well be that I’m not the target audience for this film. Regardless, even at 90 minutes, it was a slog to get through. Nearly nothing happens for the first hour. I’m not saying that it’s a bad film. This just seems to be the kind of foreign language art house film that gives art house films a bad name.

Given that, it’s hard for me to understand how it managed to rank so highly in the Sight and Sound film list.

Every Unhappy Family Is Unhappy In Its Own Way

Title: Tokyo Story

Rating: 4 Stars

In 2019 and 2020, I was able to work my way through the entire AFI list of best American films (2008 edition). Since then, I’ve continued to watch a lot of films. I’ve even now branched a little bit into foreign films.

A couple of months ago, the Sight and Sound magazine (published by the British Film Institute) released its version of the best 250 films ever made. Clearly these lists are highly subjective. How do you develop a relative ranking between Citizen Kane, Blazing Saddles, Pulp Fiction, and King Kong?

Even so, I find lists such as these useful because they do distill the tens of thousands (if not more) films that have been made over the last 100 or so years into a list of films that at least some people consider to be important. By this time, I now have a basic knowledge of international films. I’ve seen a small set of French, Japanese, Swedish, Korean, German, and Italian films. Eyeballing the Sight and Sound list, at least half of the films are international. The list could be a useful tool to point me towards films that I’ve missed or, more likely, have never heard of.

Of the top twelve films in the list, a full half of them (Citizen Kane, Vertigo, 2001, Sunrise, The Godfather, and Singin’ In The Rain) had already appeared in the AFI 100. Therefore, my first goal will be to watch the other six films so that I can at least claim to have watched the top twelve films.

I decided to start with Tokyo Story (coming in at number four, right behind Citizen Kane). It seemed like a good bet because I’ve at least heard of the film. I already knew a little something about it.

A Japanese film made in 1953, it’s the story of two parents and their relationship to their adult children. The parents visit Tokyo, where two of their children and their widowed daughter-in-law (her husband, their son, has died fighting in the war) live. Unfortunately, their son the doctor and their daughter who owns a hair salon have very little time for them. The children claim to be too busy to chaperone their parents around the city. It falls to their daughter-in-law, who herself is busy, to take time off from her work and to show them the sights of Tokyo. Although grateful for their daughter-in-law, the parents are disappointed that their children have no time for them.

To get their parents off their backs, their children pool money to send them to a spa. It’s too loud and busy for the parents’ taste, so they come back early, much to their children’s dismay. The parents, knowing that they are a burden to their children, cut their visit short and go home early. On their way back home, the mother falls ill.

Told that their mother is near death, all of the children (including the daughter-in-law) rush to her bedside. She dies shortly after. One child, off on a business trip, arrives after her mother has died. The children, as soon as possible, leave their father to head back to their busy lives. Once again, it’s up to the daughter-in-law to comfort the father in his grief.

As she’s leaving, in gratitude her father gives her the mother’s watch and tells her how much he appreciates her kindness even though she is not a blood relation. As she leaves, the father is left pensively contemplating his future days of loneliness.

First things first. Although I enjoyed the film, you need to come into with expectations. First of all, it’s subtitled, so you have to be comfortable with that. Secondly, it’s two and a half hours long. Third, there is not a lot of action. The director, Yasujirō Ozu, is a minimalist. Most of the action (eg train rides) take place off screen. He strongly favors stationary cameras. In fact, I believe that in the entire film there is only one shot where the camera is moving (and I’m not even sure why he did it there since it wasn’t really necessary). He nearly always positions his stationary camera at a low angle. In scenes, characters walk in and out of the stationary camera shot.

All of that is to say that it’s a pretty long, slow moving film. If you go into the film with that expectation, I think that you will be rewarded because Ozu brings out a number of themes revolving around family that still resonate today. However, if you go into the film expecting to see a Kurosawa style film full of action with Toshiro Mifune’s operatic level of emotional intense acting, you will be quite disappointed.

Since the film was made in 1953, it seems fair to say that the parents represent pre-war Japan and the children represent post-war. The parents live out in the country while their children are in bustling Tokyo. The parents move slowly and dress in old fashioned clothes while their children are hustling in the new much faster paced (Western based) world. The staging shots in the parent’s home town of Onomichi are of temples and old fashioned housing while the staging shots in Tokyo are modern buildings under construction and bustling streets. Although in the same country, the two generations are living lives almost unrecognizably different.

Although understated, this leads to generational differences. Not only are the children too busy to spend time with their parents, they seem to be embarrassed by them. Although apparently the parents very rarely visit, at the first opportunity the children shunt them away to the spa. At some level, the children are aware that they are behaving improperly but just can’t help but to see their parents as an inconvenience. The parents can’t but help noticing this disregard.

On other other hand, the parents are pretty clearly disappointed with their children. While drunk, the father admits that he’s disappointed that, with his medical education, his son is still nothing but a lowly neighborhood doctor. They come from a tradition where their elders were treated with respect. They’re disappointed that it’s their daughter-in-law, not their blood children, that seem to respect that tradition and treats them accordingly.

Wrapped in all of this is grief and guilt. When the mother dies, the children, especially the one that missed her death, understand that they have not treated their parents with the respect that they deserve. They feel the sting of their anguish.

Loneliness in the modern world is also a theme. The last scene is the father, sitting by himself, looking out a window. It appears that this will be how he will likely live out his remaining years. The daughter-in-law, widowed now for eight years, admits that she is desperately lonely. The father, understanding her pain, takes her by her hand and implores her to forget him and to seek out her happiness while she still has time.

Tokyo Story is a lovely story slowly told.

We Will Drive Mankind To Happiness With An Iron Fist

Title: Revolutionary Russia

Rating: 4 Stars

This is the second time that I’ve used this blog title. The first time was when I wrote my thoughts on the great Soviet prison novel, Darkness at Noon (read it here if you’re interested). It may or may not be true, but allegedly this phrase was posted over the entrance of a Soviet gulag. If true, it’s unclear to me if this statement was meant to be ironic or was truly the belief of some gulag commandant.

I haven’t read a lot of Russian / Soviet history. This book served as a good introduction to the Soviet years.

When people think of the Russian Revolution, usually they think about the events in 1917, or if they reach a bit further back, to the first uprisings in 1905. It is Figes’ thesis that the entire century of 1891 to 1991 was essentially a period of revolutionary upheaval.

He breaks up this century into three phases. The first phase, starting in 1891, was the rise of the revolutionary movement, the overthrow of the Tsar, and the installation of Lenin’s first Bolshevik government. The second phase was essentially the period of Stalin. The last phase started with Khrushchev’s secret speech describing Stalin’s crimes and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Figes starts in 1891 because that’s when a Russian famine strikes. As is typical for Tsar Nicholas II (to be clear, a man that apparently didn’t really want all that much to be Tsar so kind of made a botch of it at every step), he handled it poorly. His administration tried to pretend that it didn’t exist and tried to censor newspapers. In response to the famine, a number of public committees were started. This small start gave people a voice in government and they issued demands to the Tsar. Whenever challenged, the Tsar would fall back on his autocratic default and refuse the demands. This led to the development of the first generation of Bolshevik leaders.

Russia’s disastrous defeat in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War provided another opportunity for the revolution. Although the Tsar survived that, the revolutionary organization was growing and learning. Moving on from a disaster to a catastrophe, Russia’s performance in World War I was enough to force the Tsar to abdicate. There was still hope for a democratic government in Russia, but once Germany smuggled Lenin in the sealed train car, the Bolsheviks were able to bring out the workers and military units sympathetic to their cause to overrun the legislative body and to assume power.

By no means secure in power, a civil war between the Reds (the Bolsheviks) and the Whites (Tsar supporters) now started. By the time that settled, Lenin was ready to rebuild the Russian economy via the New Economic Policy (NEP). It was showing signs of progress when Lenin suffered a series of strokes that left him virtually incapacitated and would later kill him.

Concerned with Stalin’s ruthlessness, Lenin left a final statement recommending that Stalin not be given power. However, Stalin was able to outmaneuver his opponents and assume power.

Indeed Stalin proved to be ruthless. He abandoned the NEP and instituted brutal five year plans instead. Millions of peasants starved to death to meet his quotas. Nearly the entire generation of the old Bolsheviks, seen as threats, were either exiled or, more likely, executed. Entire communities were subject to a quota system of arrests. The gulag system, imprisoning millions, was initiated. Liquidating nearly the entire senior military staff proved disastrous when Germany invaded.

After Stalin’s death and Khrushchev was deposed, the Soviet bureaucracy became sclerotic. There seemed to be no optimism for the future. During Brezhnev’s time in power, people in rural Russia began spending a third of their income on vodka. In response, the central government raised taxes on vodka to increase their revenue. This struck me as symptomatic of that era.

Gorbachev was a true believer in Lenin and socialism. When he came to power, he thought that the combination of perestroika and glasnost would throw open the shuttered Soviet bureaucracy and bring in fresh ideas and energy. Instead, this openness exposed to all how truly rotten the entire system was and hastened its collapse.

Figes believes that this entire period is revolutionary because, during all three phases, the Soviets were intent on defending and furthering socialism abroad. At different times they had different ideas of how to bring this about, but they never deviated from this mission. Even in the midst of Stalin’s purges, there was an underpinning theory that his actions were protecting the fragile Soviet state against outsider threats and stratagems.

One obvious fact that is true across the entire century is the Russian population capacity for suffering. During each phase, under each leader, the Russian people suffered from purges, starvation, deprivation, and suffering. It’s a tragedy to witness a country’s government treat their citizenry so poorly.

One thing that amuses me when reading a history that’s more than a few years old is how current events render some of their statements obsolete. It discusses how Russia has become a much weaker power in the world. That is true. It then states that Russia is no longer an aggressive state and that it does not start foreign wars. Well, that statement didn’t age quite as well.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine is so much in the news, I was interested in how Ukraine would appear in these pages. I’ve written before how, during World War I, Tsar Nicholas II refused to countenance discussions of Ukrainian independence because he thought of Ukrainians as Russians. That was also one of the justifications that Putin used for his invasion of Ukraine.

In these pages, it’s pretty clear that Ukrainians, from the initial start of the Russian Revolution, considered themselves independent. Lenin and his successors, just like the Tsar, seem to refused to believe in an independent Ukraine. In 1991, when Gorbachev was trying to keep the USSR as a central government over a group of otherwise sovereign nations, it was Ukraine that cast the deciding vote refusing to join the USSR. It, along with two other nations, were instrumental in bringing about the end of the USSR.

It seems clear that Ukraine is bent upon independence and that any Russian leader that assumes otherwise is ultimately doomed to failure. I guess time will tell.

Law & Order This Ain’t

Title: Lush Life

Rating: 4 Stars

Three men are walking down a street in New York City. One man is so drunk that he has to be held up by the other two. Two young men walk up to them, pull out a gun, and demand their money. The drunk man falls and passes out on the ground. One man, knowing the drill, grimly holds out his wallet, careful not to make eye contact with either of the criminals. The third man takes a step forward towards the two robbers and says, “Not tonight, my man”. Panicked at this unusual behavior, the robber with the gun fires, mortally wounding the man that stepped forward. The two robbers take off in a panic. Equally panicked, the man who turned over his wallet runs into a building to escape.

The homicide detective assigned to the case must now make sense out of everything that happened, find the perpetrators, and try to mete out some form of rough justice to the survivors as well as to the victim’s family.

So far, this sounds like the beginning of any episode of Law & Order. As I was reading, I was waiting for those opening tones.

This is not Law & Order. It is, however, indeed a police procedural (the DA’s do make appearances, but play a small part).

What makes it different are the characters. Price shows us all of their disordered and chaotic lives. In his novel you see the victims, the criminals, the police, and all that know and love them.

Let’s start with the lead detective, Matty Clark. Between his moonlighting job of protecting a hipster bar and this case, I don’t see when he ever sleeps. By the novel’s end, he seems to be nodding off at any moment. Not only is he divorced and estranged from his children, he barely even knows their names (in his mind, he calls his two sons The Big One and the Other One). It’s not as if he’s some brilliant detective. He just plugs along. It doesn’t help that, at nearly every turn, he’s thwarted by his superiors as they adjust department priorities based upon their personal whim or by higher profile cases.

Eric Cash is the surviving victim that handed over his wallet. Thanks to a dubious pair of witnesses, he starts off as the murder suspect. The police interrogates him so extensively that he has a psychic breakdown. Even after he’s cleared, he refuses to cooperate with the police as the case gets increasingly colder. Meanwhile his mental downward spiral continues.

The murder victim’s father, Billy Marcus, is in a different kind of spiral of grief, denial, and guilt. He’s acting wildly, avoiding his grieving wife and stepdaughter while desperately trying, if ineffectually, to solve the case. He only accomplishes annoying Clark and impeding the investigation.

The shooter is Tristan. He didn’t even want to carry the gun. Being new to mugging, he didn’t know how to react when his potential victim challenged him. Having always been the low man on the totem pole, knowing that he’s shot someone has given him a boost of confidence. He stands up to his step-father. He refuses to be disrespected by his previously disdainful comrade in crime.

In the background, almost like a Greek Chorus, is the Quality of Life patrol. Driving around in an undercover taxi cab, they accost seemingly random people looking for any pretext to threaten them with arrest. The only way that their targets can escape their clutches is by informing on someone that they think is carrying an illegal gun. Finding illegal guns seems to be about the only purpose of the Quality of Life patrol.

If you can’t tell from what I’ve written, there’s a mosaic of stories all threading their way throughout this work. There’s many other characters fleshed out beyond what I’ve just described. Nearly all characters are flawed and troubled. Characters make decisions that they regret. They make mistakes difficult to recover from. These seem to be real people just trying to survive the day so that they can wake up and struggle again the next one.

Another interesting thing is that, for a police procedural, it describes procedures don’t work all that well. The detectives almost destroy a man trying to coerce him into confessing to a crime that he didn’t commit. Under pressure from their superiors or the DA office, they rush to judgment even though their guts tell them otherwise. Detectives have to violate procedures and cut corners just to keep the case creeping along its path to seeming irrelevance. All of their investigations and all of their long hours of work lead to nothing. When the crime does get solved, it’s due to completely unrelated police activity.

I enjoyed reading it. It’s a novel full of anti-heroes that are, by and large, kind of failing at their lives. I’ve read several Richard Price novels (including The Whites, written under the pseudonym Harry Brandt). They all seem to have this same somewhat bleak landscape. In some ways, I wish that he had an editor that could tighten the story a bit, but now that I’ve read more of his work, I think that I’m beginning to understand that the narrative mess that he writes is actually part of his art. The world in which he writes is messy, so it probably makes sense that his narrative style seems messy as well.

Jingoism, Xenophobia, and Racism, Oh My!

Title: American Midnight

Rating: 4 Stars

After saying that I was done with World War I after finishing A Farewell to Arms, it turns out that I lied. I have at least one more book in me.

There’s a pretty good chance that historians are going to look back at 2017 through 2021 and see it as a toxic time for our country. Blocking immigration from ‘shit hole’ countries, blocking immigration that was, behind the tissue of disingenuousness, based on religion, talking about ‘migrant caravans’ like they were some mongrel horde preparing to invade our country, and having a policy of heartlessly separating immigrant children from their parents are just a few of the lowlights that will be condemned in the decades to come.

Weirdly enough, nearly the exact same thing happened exactly a century ago. In fact, the period from 1917 through 1921 was even more extreme in its persecution of immigrants. This is in addition to the usual horrendous acts of violence perpetuated upon the American Black population. All of this is the subject of American Midnight, by Adam Hochschild.

Although there had been a long running series of conflicts between the forces of labor/socialism and US business/US government for decades, it all came to a head in the build up to and during the US involvement in World War I.

This seems odd to me. I’ve written before about how confused I am by the actual causes of WWI. If anything, the US involvement is even more confusing.

Sure, I get  the basic causes. There’s the Zimmerman telegram (decrypted and gleefully shared by British intelligence) where the German ambassador to Mexico promised to restore Mexico’s losses from the Mexican American War if Mexico joined in on their side. Since Mexico didn’t ally with Germany (and I’ve seen nothing that would tell me that they even semi-seriously contemplated it) and given Mexico’s chances in a war with the US, the whole telegram seems absurd.

There was the sinking of the Lusitania with American civilians aboard. Tragic it was, but it has been determined that Lusitania was also shipping military supplies, which makes it a legitimate target. Germany had announced unlimited U-boat attacks on even neutral ships. That wasn’t great, but the fact is that the US was shipping material to the Allied Powers to help their war effort, the British navy was enforcing a severe embargo on the Central Powers, and once convoys were established, the U-boat threat was severely diminished anyway.

Looking at from a purely financial perspective, the Allied Powers were in serious debt to the US, both through the purchase of bonds as well as loans for supplies. If the Allied Powers were to lose the war, it would have a significant impact upon financiers and lenders. True enough, but does the actual person on the street care whether some Wall Street banker loses their shirt?

On the other hand, the US is a nation of immigrants. This includes tons of people from Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and of course, England. You’d think that with such a hodge-podge of ethnicities spanning all parties in the conflict, that the US would want to stay out.

Be that as it may, once President Woodrow Wilson declared war on the Central Powers, war fever broke out all over the US. The military was deluged with recruits. Local governments outlawed speaking German in public.  Companies with German sounding names changed them. German streets were renamed.

It wasn’t just Germans. With the Bolshevik takeover of Russia; socialists, communists, or even just your every day Eastern European immigrant suddenly became targets. Since Americans associated socialism with Jewish people, they also came under attack.

This was not just happening at an ad hoc local level. The federal government, through the US Postal Service, the Department of Justice, and especially the Bureau of Investigation (led by the then 24 year old J Edgar Hoover), all conspired to strip away rights from immigrants and/or suspected socialists. This included rounding them up on bogus charges and then trying to get them deported to Russia.

If you were wondering how the Postal Service got into the act, in those days papers were distributed through the mail. From his perch atop the organization, the Post Master General was able to arbitrarily and unilaterally decide which newspapers were somehow not in the best interest of the US. Any paper that breathed a word of socialism or even the mildest criticism of the war or, for that matter, of the Postal Service itself, found itself banned in the mail. For any kind of paper that boasted a reach beyond its local municipality, it was a death knell. In so doing, many small rural papers were shuttered.

Private organizations got into the act. The American Protective League, which I must reinforce had no legal standing, went around with their own issued badges and investigated and arrested people. They were very interested in finding draft shirkers. If you were a draft age man and one of them collared you and you didn’t have your draft registration card, they’d haul you off to some mass site of incarceration. Hopefully, at some point some relative could find you and provide the necessary evidence to procure your release. The league had at least the tacit approval of the federal government.

In 1919, Mitchell Palmer became the Attorney General. Originally thought to be progressive due to his previous actions and Quaker heritage (apparently he still spoke in Thee and Thou), all of that changed when his home was bombed one night. This unleashed something inside of him. This led to the so-called Palmer raids (which should probably have been called Hoover raids since J Edgar was actually the one leading them) that really went after Italians, Eastern European immigrants, and supposed socialists/communists/anarchists.

Considering the fact that Ellis Island was the portal that welcomed millions of immigrants to the US, it is the height of irony that during this time Ellis Island was used as a prison to incarcerate immigrants. It was actually from here that Emma Goldman was deported from the US to Russia.

Under the subject of ships passing in the night, the book lists several chance encounters between historically significant people that I was not aware of. As Emma Goldman was being deported, she had a quick conversation with J Edgar Hoover. Even weirder, the great socialist and union leader, Eugene Debs, was finally released from prison. Immediately after his release, he went to Washington DC and had a meeting with President Warren Harding. Can you imagine a President today meeting a radical union leader days after having they had been released from prison?

As I said above, immigrants weren’t the only target. This was also a time of change for Black Americans. First of all, this was during the time of The Great Migration, when millions of Black people moved from the South to Northern cities to escape Southern racism and enjoy better economic opportunities. Southerners were unhappy to be losing their trapped low wage workers while Northerners were unhappy with wage competition and the mass influx of people that did not look like them. At the same time, Black soldiers, having fought bravely during WWI, expected to come back to a country that would recognize and reward their duty to their country. In response, lynchings (occasionally with the victim still wearing his military uniform), ‘race riots’ (more appropriately named white riots), and other acts of brutality came to the forefront.

Eventually, the fire of this tumult died down. Even so, ramifications from this time did carry forward. One of the results of this was an immigration law that throttled immigration from many countries for forty years.

It’s bizarre to me that so much of this was triggered by a war that no rational person could claim was in service to US vital interests.

Once again, as I read US history, I’m reminded of the line from the old Talking Head song: “Same as it ever was”.

A Tragedy Of Older Men

Title: The Banshees of Inisherin

Rating: 4 Stars

This is another one of those films that I saw some time ago but it seemed to have grab ahold of me and hasn’t let me go.

Set in 1923, near the end of The Irish Civil War, The Banshees of Inisherin tells the tale of two men, Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) and Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson). They both live on a tiny island that is part of Ireland. By tiny, I mean tiny. Everyone on the island knows everyone else and is in everyone’s business.

Súilleabháin and Doherty used to be the best of friends, sharing many nights at the local bar (probably the only bar on the island). Well, one day Doherty decides that he no longer wants to be Súilleabháin’s friend. There has been no falling out. Súilleabháin hasn’t done anything specifically to cause the breach. Doherty, the older man, simply decides that he doesn’t want to spend any more time with Súilleabháin. Instead, recognizing that as he gets older he has that much less time remaining in his life, he wants to focus on his music and other possible accomplishments instead of spending time in aimless dialog at the local pub.

Understandably, Súilleabháin is confused. How can a person just decide to discard his best friend? He thinks that Doherty must be kidding or that this is just a phase that Doherty will pass through. Even though Doherty has made it clear that he wants nothing to do with Súilleabháin, Súilleabháin  continues to persist. Finally, Doherty threatens to cut off one of his own fingers every time that Súilleabháin pesters him.

Thinking that this must be a jest, Súilleabháin persists. In response, Doherty chops off a finger and throws it against the door of Súilleabháin’s house.

Since it is a fairly new film, I don’t want to spoil the ending. Suffice it to say that their feud escalates and then escalates even further.

So, why did this small Irish film stick with me? Well, the acting is superb. Farrell and Gleeson first appeared together many years ago in the equally good In Bruges (the debut film of the director of Banshees, if I recollect correctly). Here again they do great work. Farrell is outstanding as the friendly, tedious, clueless Súilleabháin. Gleeson also shines as the gruff Doherty who really doesn’t want to hurt Súilleabháin’s feelings but really does want to be left alone. The other members of the cast, specifically Kerry Condon as Súilleabháin’s sister and Barry Keoghan as a troubled young man, also are outstanding.

More than the acting are the two main themes of the film. One is the loneliness of adult men. Cut off from his best friend and learning that his sister is contemplating taking a job on the mainland, Súilleabháin is lost. Especially in such a small community, losing his sister and his best friend is a tremendous blow. Probably since the bar is the only bar in their community, both Doherty and Súilleabháin continue to visit it. Súilleabháin can only stare wistfully at Doherty as Doherty makes music with his new friends. The despair of his loneliness is palpable.

The second theme is, as one ages, looking at all that you have lived and wondering, is this it? Clearly, Doherty, looking to be somewhere in his sixties, I’m guessing, has taken stock of what he has done thus far in his life and has found it wanting. Wanting to leave some mark, no matter how minor, he turns away from the congeniality of friendship to create something that might hopefully outlive him. That thing is his song, The Banshees of Inisherin.

As a man of somewhat mature age, both of these themes resonate with me. As you get older, acquiring new friends becomes ever more difficult. Especially in my case, having retired fairly recently, uprooted my life, and moved cross country, the prospect of forming new friendships at this age seems daunting. Having retired, I also look back upon the events of my life and wonder if what I’ve done is sufficient for a well lived life. For those reasons, I can relate both to Súilleabháin and Doherty.

If nothing else, it’s comforting to have a film that spoke so directly to me. I’m glad that in an age of sequels, superhero films, and wise cracking high speed crime capers (all of which I enjoy by the way), that such films are still able to be made and then found by the likes of me.

47 Endings Was Not Enough

Title: A Farewell To Arms

Rating: 3 Stars

Hopefully, I’m about done with my World War I phase. I’ve seen two film versions of All Quiet on the Western Front, read the novel, and read an exhaustive history of WWI (from the perspective of the Central Powers). Along with All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms is considered one of the classic novels coming out of this period.

Before I start, as someone who has been reading semi-seriously now for coming up on forty years, how my reading tastes have changed is interesting to me. For instance, in my younger days, I was a huge Chuck Palahniuk fan. I devoured Fight Club, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Choke when they came out. I was all into transgressive fiction. There did reach a point where it just didn’t do anything for me. I continued to read them, but with nowhere near the sense of excitement and joy that I used to. I started to lose interest around Snuff and I finally tuned out after Damned.

Similarly, I was a huge fan of Ernest Hemingway. I’ve read The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bells Toll several times over the years. In particular, I was amazed by the crisp succinctness of The Old Man and the Sea. Basically a novella, it feels as if Hemingway sweated over every single word. Not a single word in it appears wasted. Every word has a purpose.

Even though I’ve read Hemingway many times, it has now been at least fifteen years since I’ve last read one of his novels. I decided to give A Farewell to Arms a shot. A Farewell to Arms shot him to fame. The Sun Also Rises cemented his status as the voice of the lost generation. Having said that, A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises are not my favorite Hemingway novels. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I now chose A Farewell to Arms to read. I’ve only read it once and that was probably over thirty years ago. I was hoping that I was just too unsophisticated or inattentive when I read it the first time.

Set during World War I in 1917, it’s the story of Lieutenant Frederic Henry. The first plot is Henry’s service in the Italian army as an ambulance driver. Many Americans volunteered for other nation’s armies in the years before the US entered the war. The second plot is a love affair with Catherine Barkley, an English nurse.

His time near the Italian front is noteworthy. Here you see a different view of the war. This is not the view of the historian dispassionately discussing the causes and effects of the war. This is not even the view of Erich Maria Remarque and his German frontline soldiers grimly fighting in the trenches. Henry is an American fighting in a war in which his country, at least at this point, has no stake. Not only that, but he’s not a frontline participant. His job is to drive an ambulance in to a near frontline position, load up the wounded, and then drive them to a hospital in the rear. You don’t have the immediacy fear of life and death of the trench soldier.

Even so, danger is present. In an Austrian attack, Henry and his fellow ambulance drivers are waiting in a dugout for the injured to begin appearing. A mortar shot hits the dugout, killing one of the drivers and severely injuring Henry. Henry has to be evacuated himself to a hospital.

Due to the severity of his knee injury, Henry has to spend months convalescing. This is another side to the war not often seen. Due to his injury, he’s treated as a hero. This feels undeserved to him because he was doing nothing heroic at the point that he was injured. Eventually he recovers enough to make his way back to his ambulance unit.

Once there, he notices that morale has changed. Before, the Italians seemed confident of victory. Now they seem resigned to defeat. Sure enough, the Austrians attack and the Italians fall back. Trying to escape the clogged roads of the chaotic retreat, Henry tries to find another path for his ambulances. Unfortunately, they all get stuck. When two of the Italian soldiers refuse to try to dig out the ambulances, Henry shoots and kills one of them. That is the only shot in anger he fires in the war.

The Italian military police, looking for scapegoats, begin to shoot officers that are part of the retreat. Henry has to hide to evade capture and then has to figure out a way to make a desperate escape to the neutral Switzerland.

As all of this is happening, he meets and falls in love with Catherine Barkley. At first resistant to Henry because of the recent death of her fiancé in the war, she very quickly swoons in love over Henry. As he leaves to go off to the front (where he gets injured), they pledge their eternal love. Once injured, Henry ends up at the same hospital that Barkley works. Their love affair immediately recommences. After some months, Barkley discovers herself to be pregnant. Even though not formally married, they rejoice at their future life together. Later, after he manages to escape from the Italian military police, they get together again, enjoy great happiness, and manage to escape to Switzerland together. There they enjoy their time together until she goes into labor. After that point, the novel descends into tragedy.

This novel is highly autobiographical. In 1917, at the age of eighteen, after being rejected by the US army for poor eyesight, Hemingway did go to Italy to volunteer as an ambulance driver. He was seriously injured by mortar fire. He spent six months recuperating at a hospital. There he met and fell in love with a nurse. However, here fiction diverged from reality because, when he went back to the US, he fully expected the nurse to follow him. Instead she got engaged to an Italian officer. It was a rejection that had a profound influence upon Hemingway.

Given that, it’s probably not surprising that the military action was grounded in reality. After all, he lived it. His fellow comrades in arms displayed a diverse set of beliefs ranging from socialism to patriotism to defeatism. He effectively captured the life of a soldier that was not on the front line but in close proximity to it.

Reading it again, it was the love story that fell apart for me. Catherine Barkley barely qualifies as a two dimensional character. She is the meek, servile, and eternally adoring woman that is the dream of every incel. She apparently only lives for Henry and wants nothing more than to keep him happy. She worships at the feet of her idol Henry. Spoiler alert for a nearly 100 year old novel, during her labor, her child is stillborn and she dies hemorrhaging blood.  As she dies, she apologizes to Henry for the trouble that she is causing.

I’m not sure if this is some kind of writer’s revenge on the woman that actually jilted him during this time, but I found their relationship tedious if not actually ridiculous.

In fairness to Hemingway, he did have trouble coming up with an ending for this novel. He claimed that he wrote 39 different endings, but an edition was published that actually included 47 alternate endings. I have not seen any of these alternate endings, but I would have to guess that at least one of them was better than the one that Hemingway landed on.

So, fair to say, although I did enjoy sections of the book, several parts of the book did not impress me. This makes me a bit nervous. I still have great feelings for To Whom the Bell Tolls and even more so for The Old Man and the Sea.

Do I dare re-read those?

A Drink Through History

Today I decided to eat at the oldest continuing running bar/tavern/restaurant in Philadelphia. That would be McGillin’s Old Ale House, founded in 1860.

Even though running a business for over 160 years is quite impressive, I have to admit that I was a bit surprised. After all, Philadelphia was founded in 1682. 1860 is nearly 180 years after the founding of Philadelphia. Not a single restaurant from that period managed to survive? After all, in my home city of Seattle, which was founded much later, in 1851, boasts of the Merchant’s Cafe and Saloon, established in 1890.

It turns out that there is another claimant in Philadelphia. City Tavern was established at the much older date of 1773. George Washington, Paul Revere, and John Jay all are known to have at least visited City Tavern. Apparently, after having just signed the Constitution, the delegates celebrated at City Tavern. This is all quite impressive.

However.

In 1834, the tavern was severely damaged by fire. In 1854, the entire structure was demolished. In 1976, after discovering some of its original plans, the tavern was rebuilt and opened just in time for the bicentennial celebration. It’s still open now with the employees garbed in colonial attire and serving supposedly colonial authentic cuisine.

It’s pretty clear that, compared to City Tavern, McGillin’s has the more impressive lineage. Ma and Pa McGillin opened a tavern (they called it The Bell In Hand) on the first floor of their house while raising their thirteen children on the upper floors. Quickly, the denizens of the bar started calling it McGillin’s. In 1901, Pa dies and Ma continues to run it. In 1937, Ma dies and one of her daughters takes it over. In 1958, two brothers with last names of Spaniak and Shepaniak (yes, they spelled their last names differently, don’t ask) buy the bar. Their children and grandson continue to run the bar.

So, over the span of 160 years, only two families have owned it. You can see the evidence that they’ve been continuously running it because over the bar they have framed all of the liquor licenses that they have acquired since 1871. They only date back to 1871 because that’s when Philadelphia City Hall was constructed.

There you have it. Even though Philadelphia is some 340 years old, the oldest still running restaurant was only built in 1860.

It turns out that this isn’t all that unusual. If you take a look at the oldest restaurants in the US, you’ll (or at least, I was) be surprised by how few from colonial times are still around. Even those that make the list aren’t necessarily continuously running or, upon further research, their ancient claims are exaggerated.

The oldest restaurant in the US is considered to be the White Horse Tavern in Rhode Island. It was established in 1673. That’s quite impressive. Upon investigation, it turns out that it was a boarding house for quite a chunk of that time. It was only in 1952 that funds were donated to restore it as a tavern and restaurant.

It turns out that even the Seattle restaurant that I earlier mentioned, Merchant’s Cafe, wasn’t actually continuously running since 1890.

The oldest continuous restaurant appears to be The Wayside Inn in Massachusetts, established in 1686. The oldest continuous tavern is, bizarrely enough, also named The Bell In Hand, but it’s located in Boston (established in 1795). Did the Irish immigrants Ma and Pa McGillin make a stop in Boston before landing in Philadelphia and took that name? Or is The Bell In Hand a common 19th century name for a tavern? Interestingly, the founder of the Boston tavern named it because he was the town crier. In those days, the town crier went around ringing a bell in his hand. It’s all so confusing!

Boston is even older than Philadelphia. It was founded in 1630. No restaurants survived from its first 165 years of history. Is there a reason for this?

First of all, restaurants are known to be a brutal business. Depending upon your source, you’ll get different statistics, but they are all pretty sobering. Something like sixty percent of all restaurants fail in their first year. Eighty percent won’t make it to their fifth anniversary. The complexity of passing on a business across multiple generations is a daunting prospect.

Walking around downtown Philadelphia, you’ll see another reason. Restaurants that survive for long periods must be near a population center. Downtown Philadelphia is such a center. McGillin’s is in the heart of downtown. It is a mere three blocks or so from City Hall.

Such downtowns go through periods of vibrant rebirth. I don’t know the history of downtown Philadelphia, but I’d guess that it’s gone through multiple iterations. If a city is old enough, it’s probably suffered fires of some magnitude (Chicago, Seattle, and Charlotte all suffered devastating fires). I’ve read Gotham, the history of New York City. It was pretty much a continuing saga of building, destroying, and rebuilding.

So it was, I’m guessing, with Philadelphia. Now walking through downtown, you see some nice wide street with skyscrapers looming overhead. As you walk these streets, there are very few structures that date from the 19th century. Those that are are historically significant and thus protected. Normally, taverns or restaurants aren’t recognized as historically important until they are gone.

I believe that what saved McGillin’s is the fact that it’s not on a main street. It’s located on Drury Street. Calling it a street is vainglorious. It is a tiny alley. It’s one way and maybe 100 feet long. Drury is between two much larger streets, so there was probably not a lot of expansion possibilities. It’s a very lucky location that enabled a relatively tiny bar to survive undisturbed as the city grew around it.

So, as a result of the persistence and diligence of two families and the luck of a great location, a 160 year old bar continues to exist in the original structure in which it started in the heart of a very large city.

How Do We Treat The People We Hate?

Title: Halfway Home

Rating: 5 Stars

The provocative title of the blog is a sentence that comes directly out of this book. The author, Reuben Jonathan Miller, is a sociologist studying prisoners and how society treats them. He does this over the entire lifecycle of the process, from after the arrest but before the trial or while in prison or while on parole or even after they are off of parole. Not only is this his area of study, but having come from the de facto segregated neighborhoods of Chicago, it’s personal for him as well. His father spent decades in prison. He has a brother that was in prison and, once on parole, somewhat desperately tries to provide the support necessary to keep him from going back to prison. Outside of his family, the people that he knows from that same neighborhood all have either personal or close familial experience with the mass incarceration system.

Miller calls his book narrative nonfiction. That is apt. While he includes the statistics that buttress his points, the focus of the book is on the personal experiences of himself and others that he knows. These are wrenching stories that showcase the near inevitability of people of color getting enmeshed into our criminal system and, once enmeshed, how nearly impossible it is to escape from it.

To some extent, it has always been like that. However, it was during the Nixon administration that the mass incarceration movement got a turbo boost. It wasn’t about crime or drugs. This is an actual quote from John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s chief domestic advisor:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

There you have it. It doesn’t get too much more clear than that. From that start, the Reagan administration followed up with even more criminal penalties. It wasn’t just the Republican party. Bill Clinton, famous for trailblazing a ‘third way’ of politics, was bound and determined not to let the Republican party get to the right of him on crime. This brought about the 1994 crime bill (which Joe Biden had a big hand in, by the way), which increased prison sentences and incentivized states to build more prisons. During this time Hillary Clinton went around warning all of us about super predators.

I was there then. Crime was all over the news. Crack cocaine appeared to be everywhere. Gang members appeared to be running wild. There was a general sense that something had to be done. Criminals must be punished. Sure, three strikes and you’re out. If you’re a felon, we certainly don’t want you to be on government food or housing programs, right? After all, programs like that are for honest, hard working people temporarily down on their luck.

There’s an obvious problem here. The fact is that, no matter how tough the criminal sentences are, the overwhelming majority of prisoners actually do get released eventually into the general population. If a released prisoner’s mother living in public housing can’t let them sleep on her couch without fear of herself getting evicted, where are they supposed to go? If, when you’re released, you’re given thirty days at a halfway house to get yourself a job and housing, and if a criminal record is a scarlet letter that lets both employers and landlords reject you out of hand and deprives you of any food support, exactly how are you supposed to live? All during this time, you might have a hard ass parole officer that is just looking for you to slip up and mess up on any of the hundreds of rules that you must follow, revoke your parole, and send you back to prison.

At some point, what option does a person have but to turn back to a life of crime? Or just give up in despair?

Look, I get it. Especially if you have young children and you’ve worked hard to put yourself and them in what appears to be a safe neighborhood, you don’t want to live near someone convicted of a violent or other serious crime. No one wants a drug dealer for a neighbor.

But, where should they go? Especially once someone is off parole because they have fully paid their debt to society. Are they to be permanently excluded from having a chance at a successful life? Isn’t it in all of our best interests that they have a chance to make it?

These are tough and uncomfortable questions. However, after decades of laws which disproportionately targeted people of color and created this system of mass incarceration, we’ve ended up where millions and millions of people are in this situation.

These are questions that must be asked.