Traipsing Through The Arts -In Cold Civil War Times-The Benumbed Will Always Be With Us-In Lieu Of The Inside Scoop On Sex And Sensibility In The Artistry Of Edward Hopper-Down And Dirty With The Holy Goofs

By Laura Perkins –

But, first… (originally an introduction but now its own piece) 

[I often wondered, questioned him about it too, why Sam Lowell, my long-time companion and fellow writer at American Left History as well as associated and connected publications, on occasion used brackets to introduce an idea, maybe get something off his mind when what he wanted to write about went into the other direction. What he would answer, and did recently when I inquired again, is that sometimes you don’t want to mess up the thread of what your main topic is with a lot of bilious ramblings. That notion struck right to the heart of why I asked the question. Through default, basically Sam being hung up on another project, site manager Greg Green asked me to start out a series on various pieces of art, American art for now, in order to correct what he saw as an on-going imbalance in the subjects covered at publications under his direction. Art getting short shrift against politics, literature and music. After giving him the obligatory “I am no art critic” which he countered with “Hell, you are the only one left standing who will admit to having gone to an art museum,” getting an assurance that Greg would have my back if I went a little sideways in my pieces I agreed.           

Fair enough and I thought that would be that. Although Sam, through many years of experience, especially on-line knows that you never know who is going to get their hackles raised by anything put on the Internet. Who will discover quite by chance when Googling something totally different that he or she has found a nice little home to throw grenades from-and that at least metaphorically not too far off the mark. Not to belabor the point unnecessarily Sam pointed out that one time when he was writing a big piece for Allan Jackson, the previous site manager, on the history of rock and roll he was waylaid by an irate clot of what he assumed were older women who had not gotten off the notion that “rock and roll was the devil’s music” and that he ought to ashamed to even be talking about the subject. Here is the ouch part, that lasted unendingly right up to the very last piece in the series. So you see what can happen almost by accident. (By the way an 2018 encore presentation of that history edited by Allan drew no fire from that quarter either they have passed from the scene or are holding forth elsewhere.)

That being dogged by holy goofs and lonely hearts had been the case with the first three artists, 19^th century artists, who I covered. My common theme, consciously pursued, was to highlight the off-hand sexuality of the three pieces under review (Sargent’s The Portrait of Madame X, Alexander’s Isabella, and the Pot Of Basil and Whistler’s The White Girl so the knowledgeable art devotee will know where I was heading). Two things happened as a result. The first is that I got into a running battle with a three-named Boston Brahmin progeny attempting to whitewash any thought of sex or sensuality in high society painting back then. The thorn in the side’s name was Arthur Gilmore Doyle and he was relentless for a while stating the obvious- “I am no art critic.” Fortunately, with a little help from Sam and his vast experience with these people who apparently have plenty of time on their hands I finally got him off my ass, yes, I said that to him directly, by a cute little devise, or rather two, one was to head to the 20^th century where every artist almost by definition is going on and on about sex and sensuality and by NOT saying anything at all about the “s” words in my fourth piece, my overview of some of Edward Hopper’s works.

That seemingly was the easy part. The hard part still with me is what Sam calls the “trolls,” those unlike say Doyle who at least was trying to make an argument, an art argument, just go on and on about whatever drove them to this publication in the first place. What I have gathered in though is a clot, cohort of born-agains, evangelicals, some kind of Christian cultists. Not all from the same denomination, not all with the same theology by any means but all with that tell-tale readiness to smite anything that is not some straight-forward homage to the Christian god. They have on occasion formed what Frank Jackman would call an unholy united front to denounce not my views on art, heavens no, they could care less about that but that I have talked about sex and sensuality in the public square. Worried themselves sick that any susceptible young person might see these reviews and do, do, do I don’t know what except maybe rapidly go back to texting or something (this worry courtesy of one woman who signed her name Irate Christian mother). WTF.

Now, and talking to Sam bears this out, normally this publication is far removed from any interest such types might have, left-wing politics, culture war stuff, literary things which are far removed from the salvation trips they like to pursue. In any case from early on, from that first piece about the whorish ways of Madame X (who everybody now knows was the wannabe courtesan Madame Guiteau who climbed her way up the high society ladder an old-fashioned way not acceptable today, not in the wake of the #MeToo movement certainly.) Here is the odd thing, the very odd thing about the collective troll response-there was not an ounce of Christian pity or sorrow for what Madame had to do to get ahead in a world where a woman’s profession beauty was her calling card. I don’t like it, don’t like that woman had to do it to get ahead in a narrow world but I don’t condemn her for eternity These holy goofs obviously have forgotten the streetwalker Mary Magdalene who had to ply her trade to keep herself ducats or whatever the coin of the realm was back then in their vaunted Jesus story. She may, or may not, have slept with him before becoming a follower, although most certainly with at least one of the apostles. Not all of them were closet homosexuals or asexual by any means the jury is still out on Jesus’ sexual orientation. Yet if I am not mistaken MM became a saint, at least in the Catholic Church so you never can tell. 

What is outrageous for me to hear and see is these good Christians who apparently in their theology don’t have room for post-mortem salvation threw mud at Madame X’s name, called her whore, slut, lesbian (never proven as far as a I know and beside the point since sleeping your way to the top in those days, in the 19^th century, was as much a co-ed sport as in modern times), defamer, slattern and a whole bunch more that do not bear repeating here. What made this craziness hard for me to hear was that say a guy like David Trout, an evangelical preacher of some note who slept with half his congregation, male and female, or like Reverend Ben Devine who was charged under the Mann Act drew a pass from these same people, get “redemption” just because they said they were sorry and asked the “Lord’s forgiveness.” Bullshit.

[Weirdly, apparently the trolls only salivate at the “s” words, nobody high-born or low challenged my insight about Madame X’s hideous bird-like nose forcing her to never allow a frontal portrait which would have at least given us a common theme around concepts of beauty in various ages, you know artistic ideas.] 

It didn’t get any better with Alexander’s Isabella, where I mentioned that Isabella way back in the 1500s was obviously involved in some dark satanic lustful severed head cult which has been going on since about John the Baptist and maybe before and that the plants, on good authority, were not basil but poppies, the stuff of opium and heroin dreams. They went wild on that one talking about pagan worship and Keil the devil’s servant, Keil being me as the messenger. Me, making it okay for them to blaspheme beloved Johnny who if I am not mistaken believed that only adults who have Jesus within should be baptized naked as jaybirds in a river running north to south and all others should wait until they meet those conditions. Yeah, Johnny was a weird dude as Salome or whoever had their insatiable desires granted with that severed head to while away her sweaty nights. Frankly I had never heard of Keil, assumed they were taking their lead from the Bible, from Scripture and when I looked it up I was shocked to find that there was a Keil who had indeed been the devil’s earthly servant but that from the Zoroaster religion, the religion of ancient Iran.     

Although if I am not mistaken were are in modern times many of the respondents gave their dire warnings of the approaching End Times (they always capitalize so I will follow their lead and maybe avoid a couple of Punch and Judy rabbit punches by a guy named Oswald who has been particularly adamant that I was maybe more than Keil the devil’s servant but maybe the big man himself in woman’s clothing, it would not be the first time that a woman had led the candid world astray according to reliable sources). What the hell End Times has to do with analyzing a private severed head community of  aficionados is beside me unless of course that is their way to warn me off where I have been heading. Of course it goes downhill from there once they get up to speed (really once somebody, somebody other than me since I refuse to get involved in the back and forth which would waste my time, time I could be spending looking at art works for future “sketches,” that’s Sam’s term for what we do, I prefer in general “piece” signifying a chunk of something, a nugget in the mother lode). 

They, really Wanda from Wabash on this tidbit, went on and on about the sanctity of blood ever since Christ pored it for a foreboding world and that some secret cult involving of all people Johnny the B, was beyond the pale, was outre. Funny nobody in this day in age involved as we are in the epidemic opioid crisis gave a rat’s ass about that discovery that the plants were serious opium producers even if Bella did pine away for her Johnny Cakes without a care in the world after handling the product.         

As I mentioned once this clot, no, Laura, be respectful, cohort, got on a roll, started to get into that ecstatic funk they brew up once they get holy rolling and moaning about E.T., about salvation about the redemption of the blood (making me wonder if they were really serious about being down on that cultish severed head worship) they kept accumulating brethren until it got rather maddening-I was getting a thousand hits a day of people reading and responding to each new twist on stuff that basically was an art-lover’s opinion. Here is where it really got weird when I started in on Whistler’s The White Girl and through much more research than I thought I would ever need discovered that what Brother Whistler was really paying homage to was not his live-in girlfriend at the time (mistress or whatever he was telling the landlady who was starting to worry that her freaking cold water flats were becoming the homesteads for “immoral” purposes, maybe low-end bordellos) but the sanctified whore of Babylon. The key: that wolf’s head which has been the “sign” of the courtesan, the ad that tells everyone who wants to know that she was open for business. I thought nothing of it but if you thought I took a beating with the pagan severed head cult take on Isabella’s fetish you should have seen how crazy they were to denounce the whore of Babylon, the poor gal who decided to model for and play house with old Whistler. I swear if I had said Jezebel I couldn’t have gotten a more rabid response from these yahoos.

The last piece though, the one that got Doyle off my ass was like a feast for this evangelical crowd once I said not one word about sex or sensuality. They were all in ready to fill in the blanks for me. That is when I finally figured out none of this had anything to do with art, which I kind of knew anyway but with giving them essentially a free whipping girl to proselytize around their fringes, grab people, maybe the young and dissolute who needed some saving, maybe some who need to work out some simple theology, need to spent all day Sunday not at some art museum or on the golf links but sweating in some backwater uncooled church listening to some reprobates going on and on about say E.T. Here was the key-“and everybody knows, every art lover knows, that once you get into the 20^th century (and now beyond) everything from abstract expressionism to color field work is all about sex.” Which of course is true and allowed me to skip having to mention anything about it when I dealt with staid old Hopper. It broke Doyle but only inflamed the, uh, cohort.

Basically, the crowd took on every piece of modern art possible except of course the Velvet Elvis stuff that adorns their trailer living rooms and perhaps the famous painting of dogs playing poker. Not to critique it but to cast it to the ash heap. I finally found out what it must have been like when Hitler and the boys called for burning books and destroying “degenerate” art. Found out how nasty some people can be when the hammer comes down and there are no known limits to their depravity. I will give one example which should suffuse because despite the Promethean uphill battle I am facing just to avoid all their hateful bullshit I will be discussing below in the real part of this piece sex and sensuality in Hopper, dirty old man. In Hopper’s most recognized work Nighthawks there are three customers, two, a man and a woman, whom you can see and a third, a man with his back to the viewer and of course the fourth is the rum-dum wino night short order cook serving up the goo. Serving the washed-out coffee and the steamed unto death midnight special calculated so since the clientele at the midnight hour have passed beyond caring about quality food have drunken the whiskey sills dry. Out of this devil’s work scene Wanda was able to see that the woman, “the fallen woman,” Wanda’s term so you know where this is going already, what was she called a modern day whore of Babylon (with the accompanying twelve million citations from Scripture about her, our your doom without J.C. which need not detain us just check the Bible at your local library), and was ready to “go to work” on the poor jamoka beside her. Get this though the rum-dum night cook was pimping her off (with another Wanda twelve million quotes along the same line about abetting and begetting sin, the eternal same line that I have been dealing with for weeks). This about par for the course.

[Again nobody gave a damn about the true revelation on Hopper, that he had flunked drawing people’s faces where they had to show something more than an ironic world-wary smile in what passed for art class in his day. An interesting real art tidbit which goes a long way to explaining his “king of the mopes” reputation.]   

There you have in a nutshell about why I have followed Sam Lowell’s advice and put the bullshit, the publicity flak hand-outs and press agent noise here where any self-respecting reader can totally ignore the noise but I just had to vent a little-Laura Perkins]               

  

Traipsing Through The Arts -Max Daddy Edward Hopper Unchained-In Defense Of Mope- All The Lonely People, Where Do They All Belong   

By Laura Perkins  

I really wish that one Arthur Gilmore Doyle hereafter Doyle since I refuse to play his three- name monte game like he was some Brahmin grandee out of the 19th century swilling us with his robber baron Heritage, pedigree some kenneled championship dog would get a life, would get some gainful employment other than clipping coupons or whatever the progeny of the robber barons does these days. Apparently after he arose out of his dead faint when I explained that James Abbott McNeill Whistler (four-name Montes are okay as long as you are an artist, once) was paying homage to the Whore of Babylon when he had his girlfriend of the time standing in a white dress with a sexually suggestive wolf’s head under her feet in painting variously titled The White Girl, Symphony In White and Homage To My Current Whore, well maybe not the last one. You would have thought that I had committed something like a mortal sin for having pretended that this great artist was not above some very risqué symbolism back in the days when such signs had to be submerged in polite society to sell to those self-same robber barons by the American ex-patriate (and other artists as well) The gist of Doyle’s argument beyond the now usual hosanna to the saintliness of every artist who put paint to brush back in the 19th century when his robber baron forbears started buying artworks to move into high culture was that I am no art critic. A fact. Real fact which I have been at pains to declare. Doyle then went through some litany of names Johns Ruskin, Clement Devine, Erasmus Land and a few others none of them who I knew from Adam. Nor need to know since what I am about here in this series is showing there are more than two ways to at look ta works of art-sublime and more sublime. Some of them, those other ways while not sublime a word that Doyle used repeatedly to describe what I find more erotic than anything else. In that sense I have staked out some territory that has included sex in the equation when it has been called for whatever prissy Doyle may think. Especially with a guy like Whistler who slept with every one of his models, every woman who crossed his path as far as I have been able to discover. He was sex-addled, I had to smirk to myself when one critic mentioned that Brother Whistler had a heathy interest in woman, oh really, as well as probably was high half the time, it would be interesting to see what kind of drugs he was doing let’s say when he was painting the so-called Symphony in Gray and Black or Etude in Beige and Chartreuse. Here, and this is only speculation not hard evidence, I think from that low-rent paint he was using so no wonder he had strange ideas about women, had called poor Johanna, his Whole of Babylon a lot worse than I have tagged him with. Once the medics revive Doyle again I may have a solution to our impasse.  Here is my plan though which I think might be foolproof. I am moving on to 20th century artists specifically to Edward Hopper in this piece. Since Hopper did not have or use three names for his moniker, and everybody knows once you hit the 20th century even the most pristine abstract expressionists and advanced colorists know that it is all about sex and the unconscious desire to throw it on canvas I should be home free. So that should throw our man off the sense, get him off my ass.

[Originally this is what I had to say about my plan which I have now scaled back. “So I have had enough of this. I have a plan, have been forced to devise a plan I think will work to keep Doyle off my ass. I have decided after three consecutive articles on 19^th century painters which has caused me nothing but grief Doyle only being the most high-brow of the lot. You would not believe what vile things proper evangelicals full to the brim with Bible quotations and the like will utter in the anonymous cyberspace where troll-like they call home. For people who believe in repentance and forgiveness I have been shocked by the language and the vitriolic blasts I have had to endure for simply stating that even Renaissance guys, Leonardo, Fra this and that, definitely Botticelli when he was in his cups, Raphael when the turpentine high was on him only cared about subliminal ecstasy and rapture, ah, sex, when the deal went down. For that I am exiled from the Garden, forced to spend the time until End Times being flogged by dimwits-L.P.]  

Now to Hopper the eternal mope-the guy who pictured alienation in about seven different ways. Really more since every freaking painting is like stab to the heart of modernity like we don’t already have enough nonsense going on without a guy endlessly painting bummers and having real critics like Alice Faye, Clem Devine, Lance Little and a fistful of others yakking about the man and moment meeting in about 1925 when Hopper was in his prime, before he started taking up with womenfolk and seeing where that led. Here is the kick though later on in life after he graced his canvases with alienated and angst-ridden folk he started to think about morality about the great arch of life from birth to death as he reached the age when men and women start to think about their own mortality. No big deal just had a country scene, a big old white house near some forest put an older woman, frail, what did Alice Faye call her, yes, matronly and then a younger woman dressed for the season, summer season and all that means. Beautiful-life and death. Along that same line had  a self-conscious woman young in a summer dress looking cool as a cucumber except for an outsized hat which dwarfed her face looking like some latter-day Genghis Khan, ready to do battle with all to keep her place in the sum. But that was latter stuff, stuff I will detail more in another piece or two for today I want to get that Doyle off my case and need to stay with this alienation and angst business to get him to stop his cyber-madness. (I have no expectations on those troll-like angel pinheads calling End Times on me for we all have our collective crosses to bear, Christian or not).           

That is later stuff when he got into the swing of things, when he had already made a name for himself as the master of the alienated and angst-ridden modern set. Who can forget that famous, maybe too famous, Nighthawks at the Diner where some Joe and Nemo’s crowd is waiting for Godot or somebody after the bars closed for the night and they need a saucer full of coffee and grease-laden hamburgers to set their world right. They might as well have been at the Automat for all the interaction between the lonely people. How about that great dimly lit drugstore with the Ex-Lax (or is it Ex-Lac) saying more about the world than any people-populated piece even though that whole scene is filled with more menace than if he had put a jack-roller over in the back behind that searchlight-like street light. One more to draw my point. How about that famous, or infamous, painting down at the National Gallery, now mercifully reopened, with the two people looking for all the world like they were ready for divorce court and the dog looking like the happiest one of the lot since at least he will land on his feet. I could go on and on, but I think I have made my point about Hopper being the king of alienation and angst in the post-Freudian world.     

Naturally as I have done with the previous three artists looked at in this on-going series I have a special presentation, a scoop if you will about the why of Hopper’s mopery, why his people don’t smile. I have had access from the archives to his art school or whatever training he had and have found a very interesting discovery looking over some of his early facial drawings. Hopper, hold onto your hats, never learned to draw faces with people smiling, except maybe ironic closed-mouth smiles. Never could quite get the hang of people opening up their lips in order to smile, hell, or look like they were capable of talking. I thought I was dreaming but then I showed the specimens to Sam Lowell and he agreed that the closest Hopper got to a smile, to an open mouth was some early tooth-decayed grotesque done when he was an illustrator, something hideous which would not reflect modern life, modern angst.      

I am sure that Doyle could care less about such niceties and so I think I am home free, finally got him off my back. Without using the “s” word once in reference to Hopper. Still… 

Didn’t Your Mother Ever Tell You Not To Talk To The Cops-Visions From The Acre Neighborhood-With The Hollywood Version Of “The Mod Squad” (1999) -Social Commentary Disguised As A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Seth Garth

The Mod Squad, Claire Danes, Giovanni Ribisi, Omar Epps, 1999  

[Those who have read my film reviews in various incarnations of American Left History and its associated publications or way back

in the early 1970s as a free-lance stringer at American Film Gazette know that at times I have gone off on a tangent when I have something which I think is socially relevant or political to say. Have a few times used the review as a vehicle to get something off my chest. This however is the first time, thanks to site manager Greg Green that I have telegraphed my intentions up front, have stated that this is social commentary fronted by a review of the movie version of the successful and fairly long-running television series The Mod Squad.

My problem as confessed to Greg was that I really wanted to take a swipe at the idea of young “hippie” type felons recruited by the public cops to get into places where a young straight crew-cut cop wearing a plaid shirt and chinos would not dare to go. To essentially for no jail time become civilian snitches. That strange arrangement is so contrary to both my own and a number of older writers here experiences with the cops in our own “hippie” period and more decisively going back to the old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville where both cops hassling us and us having a code of corner boy honor (which extended to other corner boy groupings as well, even hostile cohorts) to have no truck with them really has my blood pressure up even forty or fifty years later. So be forewarned that this is a screed and that film is just an occasion to vent. S.G]    

******

Hollywood is nothing if not ingenious, or opportunist as the case may be grabbing onto an idea that got its first workout on television which is kind of ass backwards since most of the time it is the other way around. Back in the 1970s after the dust of the 1960s had started to clear somebody got the bright idea that a cop show had to take a different twist if you were going to retain or grab the youth audience. A tough problem when so many kids had been busted for dope, been teargassed and billy-clubbed  for speaking out on a range of issues (then beaten again for mumbling out some answer when they were in the bastinado getting third degree grilling). Got hassled for hitchhiking (hell for jaywalking when they wanted to pull the hammer down) , and a ton of other things that among older more respectable folk would not have gotten them off their duffs at the local donut shop cadging their coffee and cakes and harassing the cute young waitresses who weren’t sure exactly how to respond to such unsolicited crap before #MeToo was not even a dreamed up idea. I will speak more personally on that issue and the growing up absurd ways that we dealt with the police back in the old Acre neighborhood.

For now though some wizard figured out that maybe if you took a clot of young troubled people, three, a manageable number to corral, two white, one black, two men, one women who were in legal distress and you offered them the lifeline of playing copper rather than jail maybe that battered youth nation might be brought back into the fold. I am not sure what the numbers were, the demographics either but the television show was on for a while. Solving crimes real coppers would not get off their duffs at the local donut shop for all while looking very civilian. Then they took their wares to Hollywood or glitter town took their idea and ran with it.

Bullshit. No self-respecting hippie, boy or girl, would be caught dead acting for the coppers, would rather do hard time among honest thieves, black-jack artists, armed robbers, mother murders and worse than be a snitch, which is what these Mod Squad pillars of society were really doing making the cops’ jobs easier for them. I won’t even deal with all the crap the FBI under one J. Edgar Hoover did on the national and local political fronts framing every militant, black or white but especially black when the Panthers raised the stakes and attempted to organize community youth with a very different perspective. Won’t even deal with the massive arrests, sweeps really grabbing everyone in their paths from New York 1966 to bloody Chicago 1968 to May Day in 1971 and beyond. That was the stuff of headlines, of archives. That was the coordination of national, state and local police working up a lather.

What I will mention is about the time the recently passed on Jimmy Higgins was sitting on the side of the road in Todos el Mundo out south of Big Sur in California, just sitting there backpack, rucksack really, in front of him when some Highway Patrol copper stopped and asked him why he was hitchhiking. After some argument, that was Jimmy’s way and not a bad one this time, the copper yanks him in the cruiser and takes him to the police barracks for transport to the clink. Jimmy had no dough, had nobody he knew out there although about a month before a half dozen of the old gang from the Acre neighborhood had been out there checking out the suburbs of the Summer of Love, 1967. I won’t even count the number of times we were hassled or busted by the notorious quota-driven Connecticut staties who would jack us up in full view of passing cars filled with respectables on the side of whatever highway they grabbed us on. Chickenshit drug busts for a simple joint would fill a book, thirty days here, fifteen there. This was life for a not insignificant number of young people, hippies if you will, just trying to break out for a while anyway from the nine to five number that society had hatched for us and would snare a lot of us later when the ebb tide of the times came crashing down around our heads.              

Going back even further No self-respecting corner boy would haul anything but bile for them, for the blood-stained coppers. What a lame excuse for a movie who’s only redeeming quality was that its plot involved getting the best of a bunch of crooked cops who had their hands in the till come drug trafficking time. The Acre reality was that you avoided the cops like black death, even though it seemed that every family that had three or more sons had a cop in one position (the other two, oneot the  of course was the gangster and the other was the boy with the “calling,” going into the priesthood, throw in a sister and you had a nun, or a whore maybe). The idea that you would say word one to a cop, to say hello, was beyond comprehension. Even though everybody knew that some outlier was singing his song to get out from under some serious jailtime (even that was not the same as being recruited to do the coppers’ dirty work for them as against the code as it was and as life-threatening as such a rash decision was if anything happened to anybody due to the ratting out)         

The classic case for how the code of honor worked, Omerta I heard it called in some neighborhoods although not ours even though it was the same thing when Red Riley, the king of the hill of the toughest corner boy crowd over at Harry’s Variety, just because he suspected some guy from some rival corner was “trespassing”  on his turf chain-whipped the guy into a bloody pool and just walked away. When the ambulance and coppers came nobody who had witnessed the scene including me said word one to the coppers. Not even the guy who got chain-whipped. A serious object lesson. (By the way Harry’s was just a front for a protected book-making operation with Red and friends as the protection. The cops? Well they just came in from their police cruisers to make their bets and grab some quick coffee and cakes.) There are a million stories but hey all run to a type. Later when we sort of outgrew the code of honor etched in the old neighborhood we would have rather lost a limp that given anything to the coppers but guff. Making this tale of three kids of no known origin frankly weird.    

Frankly I don’t understand why Freddie Murphy, an Acre product and a guy who had one brother doing time in the state pen and the other doing Hail Marys at Blessed Sacrament Church, about par for the course, who I knew for many years before he turned copper in LA wanted some young kids to see what was happening to the drug evidence boxes that were going out the door at the station house in Hollywood. Hell, even a rookie cop, a cop who had not gotten into the donut shop coffee and crullers groove, knew it was an inside job including protection going pretty far up the ladder, the chain of command. The older guys in the locker room come wash up time were laughing about the poor suckers who were going to have to do twenty and out if some perp didn’t waste them and they would have to not cash their checks. While they bathed on easy street with a couple of big scores, a couple of knock-offs.    

Frank was a funny guy, quirky, until he turned copper, until he broke the pledge, the old corner boy pledge never to say boo to a copper much less be one. But he had this idea, obviously he didn’t hang around the locker room, that it was guys who were running a high end nightclub who were getting a rogue cop to come up with the dope to keep their hipster young and wild crowd high as kites.  So the kids’ idea to get in and see what they could see. But before they could do their work, Frank made the cardinal error of trying to set a trap assuming it was just one bad apple copper-and got wasted out in some LA drainage ditch for his efforts. The boys in the know in the locker room had a big laugh as they put on their ceremonial blues to give Frank his big sent-off.        

        

Here is the funny thing though these kids, and forgive me if I don’t remember their names but like I said one was a holy goof white-bread, a surly black guy with a chip on his shoulder and a young white woman with tracks up her arms and the look of somebody who had worked the streets to support her habit who was trying to break a jones and not having much success decided to find out who killed their  mentor, who wanted Freddie six feet under over this drug stuff. And they did a pretty good job at least as far as they went. They went up a million wrong alleys before they realized that they were looking outside when they should have been looking inside. Looking more closely at that hostile, to them, locker room since they were outside the loop, weren’t anything but rent-a-cops really.

The key was when the young woman who was having an rekindled affair with an old boyfriend found out he was cheating on her, was a junkie with connections to the mob and to the coppers, wired. From there it was ABC to drag the deadbeat coppers out of their lair once they knew that they had to act fast to grab dope and go down easy street-one way. In the end though why did the kids do it, why did they give up their dignity just to find out what they already knew, knew what their mothers told them when they had to do the “talk,” the old Acre neighborhood talk that every mother even with cop sons had to do. The coppers are not your friends.   

The Other Thin Man-Ginger Rogers And William Powell’s “Star Of Midnight” (1935)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

[Although Sam is formally retired he has expressed a desire to help out when we have several films to review and not enough hands to do the tasks. He has graciously taken time away from his hot pursuit of why one very famous California ex-public cop turned private eye named Lew Archer, yes, that Lew Archer who solved the very important Galton, Turner and Hallman cases, that last one a real twister where the wife turned out to be the serial murderer never made the P.I. Hall of Fame despite a very promising start. He is following so far successfully the trail of sexual impotence as a key factor. That sex business, flirting with danger by messing with some hot maybe not so innocent femme on the way to closing down the case at least for old time P.I.s part of the package if you wanted to move up the food chain. Good luck. Since Sam is very familiar with PIs in general and with The Thin Man series in particular which as here had starred William Powell as the suave Nick Charles (and Myrna Loy as Nora) who did have the qualities to make the Hall he was the natural choice to cover this film. Thanks, Sam-Greg Green]

Star of Midnight, starring Ginger Rogers, William Powell, 1935 

One of the problems a few actors have had is to be type-cast into a certain cinematic persona. That was generally the case with William Powell, the male lead in the film under review, Star of Midnight where he plays a smart, sophisticated urban (New York City of course) man about town very similar to the role that he played in The Thin Man the year before this film was released (and would go on to star with Myrna Loy in six sequels, ouch) except here he is a high-priced lawyer, Dal, and not an ex-cop private dick Nick Charles. 

The play is the same though although the romantic interest is Donna a young smitten, smitten by Dal, played by Ginger Rogers who is not his boon companion as Myra Loy as Nora Charles was. Here a friend of Dal’s is looking for him to find his missing paramour who blew Chic town (okay, Chicago) a year before without leaving a forwarding address. (Forget it buddy, rule number one is when they don’t leave a forwarding address that means they don’t want to be found, move on, and that isn’t even high-priced legal advice.)  The plot thickens when the three of them attend a play and nobody but a masked girlfriend is on the stage. The guy yells out Alice. Bad move though since she is on the lam from somebody trying to silence her after she witnessed a murder in, ah, Chicago. Somebody has reason to silence her to cover up his own dastardly deeds so he let out that he was looking for Alice too. Don’t worry even though Dal was accused of killing a source killed in his own apartment he was left by the coppers to figure the whole thing out. And you know just like Nick (and Nora) he does. By the way Dal won’t be lonesome anymore. Donna snagged him. The killer: well grab the film and check it out. It could have been one of several people as usual.      

The Rise And Fall Of A Top-Rated Private Investigator- The Almost Legendary 1950s California Shamus Lew Archer-With The Doomed Hallman Case In Mind

By Sam Lowell

[There have been plenty of crime novels based on the exploits of very real private investigators like poor Lew Archer (some of public coppers too but they are usually s strictly by-the-book procedurals making it seem like there was no need for private investigation although the stacks of “cold cases” sitting in the police file freezer belie that fake news). Phil Larkin out of Albany maybe the best of the lot, of course Sam Spade and his partner Miles out of Frisco town and Phil Marlowe working the southern slumming streets of the same state come to mind. Guys who when their careers were over, when they hung up their guns and closed down the third desk drawer liquor cabinet, or who fell down and make a slight misjudgment about some bad ass’s intentions made the coveted entry into the Hall of Fame.     

It only takes a few pages of those lightly altered stories to figure these guys were built for the heavy lifting that goes with chasing after windmills, chasing after some rough justice in what the writer Seth Garth at American Left History has called “this wicked old world.” It has bothered me for a long time that Lew Archer, an ex-cop who got out of line one too many times for some lifer superior to give him the boot, and a guy who started out like a house on fire wrapping up the Galton case, the big Bay City kidnapping and extortion case in about a week after the public coppers had put the thing is deep cold storage after about two days fell down too early in his gumshoe career (by the way most P.I.s hate that “gumshoe” designation but I am trying to vary up the names for those in the profession). That concern got me on the trail of what happened, why Lew wound up, if I recall, peeping through keyholes, no, that is not right, doing leg work for Sally Langley who is now set to be inducted into the Hall in her own right. A lot of the decline is, no, was shrouded in mystery especially when a guy named Kenny Miller, I believe that is his name although some crime novel writers use aliases so as not to be bothered by holy goofs who want to know “the scoop” on some silly case, started to write about Lew when he had the goods. Wrote a very good one about Lew’s breakthrough case, that Galton one which really was great work even if he solved it faster than most P.I.s working on a per diem would have liked.                

Miller then wrote a few books where you could see he was pulling his punches, was letting Lew take a bow for stuff the public coppers finally had a handle on, could see Lew had some kind of trouble getting the last lap finished. Then Miller wrote about the doomed Hallman case, a case where everybody, or almost everybody, saw as the start of Lew’s downfall. The start of making way too many mistakes, of letting the bad guys get way ahead of him.

When I started my research, started to delve into what brought Lew low I did not know about the Hallman case, the Bay City coppers and whatever was left of the Hallman family when the killings were over had hushed the thing up so tight that it was like it did not happen. Apparently Miller went after the facts, after the record not to chart Lew’s decline but just to see where the decline had begun. The only way that I found out about the case was when Miller saw a piece I wrote in Nightshade, the P.I.-friendly magazine wondering about Lew and what happened to him at the end and he sent me an e-mail referring me to his lightly altered story about the Hallman case. We corresponded a bit to compare notes until we had a parting of the ways over my sound and well thought out analysis of Lew’s big problem-that sexual impotence in an age when that was fatal to big story P.I.s. Automatically froze you out of any consideration for the Hall. Miller’s take, his what he called sound and well-thought out analysis of Lew’s problem was that he never got over his wife divorcing him, and it gnawed at him worse when he was around women. Sure, Kenny every guy who has been chain-whipped by some woman falls down for the rest of his life because he screwed up a good thing. Get real. Get some facts and then come back with that lame idea. Compare that with what I have to say below. Sam Lowell]               

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I have a bombshell to report in the festering case of the late California private detective Lew Archer who I have been doing research on to try to figure out why he never made the P.I. Hall of Fame after starting out with such promise on the Galton case which made him a star-for a minute. Sadly, he wound up as a gofer for Sally Langley, yes, that Sally Langley who is about to be inducted into the Hall, after the divorce laws changed to “no fault” and keyhole peepers like taxi drivers today became passé. And after some punk beat him up and stole his car when he was doing “repo” work. Yeah, sad no way around it. But before I lay out my new information let me ask the gentle reader a question. I don’t need an answer but think about it.

Who was the greatest home run hitter of all times? The “Babe,” Henry Aaron, Bobby Bond (setting aside whatever enhancements he may have used)? What about the greatest quarterback? Sammy Baugh, Bart Starr, Joe Montana, Tom Brady? To pose the question is to give the answer. It is very hard to compare athletes from different generations working under very different condition and come up with a sensible comparison. The reason for this \normally silly sports stuff is that I have been pelted, no, inundated with all kinds of lame gibberish about my “unmanly” carping on Lew Archer’s sexual impotence as the reason he slipped down the shamus food chain, why he never made the Hall.

Somehow these deadbeats with apparently plenty of time on their hands and plenty of “cyber ink” can hardly wait to pounce on me for being unkind, or worse to Lew’s memory. What they don’t get at all, don’t understand especially those who see Sally Langley or maybe the “outed” gay private eye Lance Devine as the beeswax of the profession is that in Lew’s time being able to get under the silky sheets with some femme, some frail was part of the job, was part of the resume, was what got you clients and publicity in those circles who could afford to pay to get stuff investigated that the public coppers were either clueless about or would not touch with a ten-foot pole.

I hate to keep having to make a “teachable” moment for this clot of “trolls” who don’t think sex should have entered into the equation but in Lew’s time, as Lew was coming up he had models, good models, just like Sally had Meg Diamond and her post-feminist pushing women forward in the profession giving it a different twist, making taking slugs of either kind sort of old-fashioned and certainly ending that third drawer whisky bottle obsolete against the power of so-called women’s intuition (better stick-to-it-ness) and Lance had Carl Dover pushing gays forward for the same reason when having to bed women as part of the assignment sort of violated the new Code established by the American Association of Private Investigators (AAPI) after great pressure was put on after the heyday of the 1960s. Thus, we are clueless about who either of them slept with, if anybody, because that is not the question today in the private detection field but one’s ability to manipulate the explosive new technologies to put the bad guys to rest, to do what the public coppers can’t do or don’t want to do when all they want to do is have their coffee and crullers. (Some things never change having observed a fleet of them chowing down recently at a Dunkin’ Donut or is it just Dunkin’ not even leaving coin tips in the sacred tip jar) But back in Lew’s day the late 1940s and early 1950s you might as well have become a librarian, maybe a lab technician if you couldn’t rustle and tussle up some sheets while you were solving that heinous crime you were hired to find the perp who did the nasty deed.

Okay, for the millionth time here was the scorecard a guy like Lew had to follow. An old-timer named Sam, Sam Spade set the early standard in a couple of high-end cases also out in California which made that much more glaring about Lew’s downfall. Back East or maybe in Toledo he could have gotten away with the problem, could have faked it and made the Hall if he ever ran across a case that was worthy of his steel. Sam was beautiful in one case to give you an example. While solving about six murders by this femme, Mary, Mary something, Mary Astor, that’s it but don’t get too sentimental about names since everybody had about twelve, one for any occasion,     who was crazy for dough and used guys like washcloths to get this rare jewel he not only bedded her a few times including about five minutes before he tossed her over to the coppers (to save his own skin which is okay in this case because she had him set up as a patsy if things went awry as they did) he was bedding a few others just to keep things interesting. Knocked over his partner’s wife, Ivy something, his secretary, a female cab driver who was willing to take a warm bed in exchange for forgoing cab fare plus tip, maybe more.           

              

   So there was a standard, a California standard which is what a guy named Phil, Phil Marlowe, had to outdo. And did. Phil was a beautiful guy, nature’s nobleman. He worked the Sternwood case, yes, the Sternwood case an old man paid him good money for to find some old Irish revolutionary who befriended him, like a violin. I swear I don’t know how he did it. Bedded this old general who hired him to find some guy two daughters, one at a time or together was never mentioned, some frill in a bookstore, the female clerk working for some scumbag pornographer, a couple of hat check gals at a swank nightclub, another footloose female cab driver bartering the cab fare plus tip away, and the mobster behind lots of dirty stuff who ran that protected night club’s wife. All for a case that took maybe a week to solve. Gold standard.

And Lew? Poor suck-face Lew. The last anybody ever heard of him tussling with a woman, a woman involved in a case he was working was some frustrated wife of a doctor who ran a high-end clinic for the weak and unsure for big dough. Problem in Lew’s case was she was at that point any man’s woman if it is okay in the #MeToo age to say such a thing even if that was the call she made on herself once hubby saw dollar signs in them there hills and studiously avoided her in bed. Bigger problem when Miller interviewed her for background on what ailed Lew (remember that bogus pining over divorcing wife theory he had, sound and well thought out, Jesus) she mentioned that whatever he told anybody else he “couldn’t get it up” to be polite. So Lew was firing blanks, okay. Don’t shoot the messenger just because the message is not to your liking.               

What makes that social worker more important is that the case was the one immediately before the Hallman case, the doomed Hallman family who got picked off like rabbits before the whole thing was done, before the public coppers finished up what Lew had left like scrambled eggs. Here’s a rough outline of the play, really a scorecard of opportunities Lew blew. (I am willing to cut the guy some slack in those pre-Viagra times for his medical condition but remember I am only trying to figure out why he never made the Hall not what he couldn’t help himself with in those dark nights.)

I don’t know, Miller never gave a clue, about Lew’s mental condition upon taking the Hallman case, or really having it thrush upon him after some junkie he had helped when he was a kid referred young heir Hallman, Carl, to Lew to solve a few pressing problems. Like who killed his mother and father. A good- looking brunette was taking care of her aunt and batted her eyes as Lew as he was looking for leads to where this young Hallman might have gone after stealing Lew’s car for a getaway. No go, not even when she practically knocked him over in the foyer retrieving his hat. (That’s, by the way, two stolen joy ride cars in less than a year which should tell even the most devoted Lew adherent that something was wrong, something more than some inherent unmanliness). Next up a psychiatric social worker who was working with young Hallman and was ready to do anything, and from the reports, that meant anything to keep her man, her young Hallman from being killed by the so-called posse, really lynch mob, that was looking all over from Southern California to Nevada for him. Lew said  he would “take a rain check” like the offer would last forever.           

Things get juicier once Lew hits the huge ranch young Hallman is heir to and he runs into young Hallman’s older brother’s wife who can see that if Carl takes a tumble, falls in a rain of bullets as a fugitive and crazy murderer her man will grab everything. She showed up at Lew’s motel room with a proposition and you don’t have to be a genius to know what the terms included to have Lew lay off. Again, zero. Interlude: a couple of crazy townie girls looking for kicks and that was that approached Lew as he walked down the street. They had nothing to do with the case although they had gone to school with Carl and were just feeling their womanly oats but no go even if anybody would bother to argue that Lew was maintaining some kind of professional ethics by laying off women connected with the case. Bullshit. This is the closer, case closer against the defendant one Lew Archer, Carl’s wife who turned out to be an enraged serial killer piling up the bodies-father, mother, older brother, that slatternly wife of his all so she could be on easy street after a life on the wrong side of the tracks practically tore open her shirt showing a firm bosom to try to throw Lew off the scent. Strike four.       

I already have mentioned that this case marked the steady downhill trajectory in Lew’s once promising career. Worse, the coppers had to come in and rescue Lew when that deranged wife was holding him, rightly by her lights since Lew held her future in his hands, hostage and had him pinned down facing a big old-time Colt 45 which even a brave man had to respect, respect a lot. After this bad karma trip Lew just couldn’t get work, nobody wanted to hire a guy who couldn’t face down some looney dame without peeing all over himself. Eventually he went to work for Larry Larsen the big Hollywood divorce lawyer which started Lew’s peeping in keyholes career which as mentioned died out when the divorce laws got more liberal most places. Then down the scale to Manny’s, the main repo operation in town and that infamous stolen car by a guy he was supposed to repossess on. Then Gypsy Sally’s and taking deli sandwich orders from real private eyes in her employ.         

I have saved the bombshell for last although looking over the evidence against poor Lew I am not sure I need to bring in the heavy guns. Since I have it and since the “trolls” will not believe anything any way that has to do with real facts here goes. Seth Garth recently did an article in American Left History about the passing in 2017 of Dotty Malone at 97. Many readers may not know who she is, was, but she was a very famous screenwriter in Hollywood when such things counted with credits Dark Passage, A Lonely Place, Fit To Be Tied and a fistful of others, some which carried awards with them. Before Dotty made it in Hollywood she worked a high-end bookstore on Sunset in Hollywood. That is where she met Phil Marlowe, yes, that Phil Marlowe I have been touting forever as the king of the hill with femmes. This was during the early part of the Sternwood case, before he got seriously tangled up with the two wild child daughters. The afternoon he came in looking for information and looking him over she wound up shutting up shop for the afternoon to entertain Phil and his bottle of whiskey. They would thereafter meet off and on even when Phil married the older Sternwood daughter, Vivian, to take a trip on easy street. Once Phil got tired of playing house and  Vivian divorced him he and Dotty took up again seriously, got married. After Phil passed away in the 1970s Dotty ran into Lew, hadn’t seen him for a while (this P.I. fraternity was pretty inbred in those days when it was all guys and hell-raisers too). Despite their age differences, Dotty some years older but still a looker, a mature looker, they started an affair. Or what should have been an affair. That is when Lew told Dotty that he was having trouble, sexual trouble and while she was sympathetic she thought he had maybe gone queer, or something like that. That is what she told Seth in any case. While the trolls will deny reality, call her story a hoax or the blathering of an old woman the rational world can judge why Lew Archer never made the Hall. End of story.      

Didn’t Your Mother Ever Tell You Not To Talk To Strangers And Not To Cops Either, Not “Projects’ Boys” And That Is No Lie-With Cop Buddies Michael J. Fox And James Woods’ “The Hard Way” (1991) In Mind

DVD Review

By Bradley Fox, Jr. (no relation to the actor listed here but a relation to former and now retired American Film Gazette writer and editor Bradley Fox, Sr.)

The Hard Way, starring Michael Keaton, James Woods, 1991

[The reader may have not seen the name Bradley Fox, Jr. on a by-line at this publication for some time now. For a very good reason. A couple of years back when I was starting out at this publication as a stringer, I locked horns with the previous site manager Allan Jackson, who has recently returned as a contributing editor which is okay as long as he is not my boss. The reason, reasons really but the main one was his insistence that every writer delve deeply into the 1960s counterculture, general 1960s culture for that matter since a number of 50^th anniversary commemorations were coming up and Allan wanted blanket coverage. Even from younger writers who didn’t have a clue about the 1960s, could have cared less about that ancient history or had to reach out to parents or in my case grandparents to get a feel for the times. Not good, not good at all.

Greg Green, who Allan had brought over from American Film Gazette to run the day to day operations while he did the big strategic planning and gave out the assignments, knowing how unhappy I was, knowing I would be forever a stringer as long as Allan ran the show, ran it his way “or the highway” as some wag put the matter, got me a job over at Film Today. In late 2017 when all hell broke loose, and Allan was canned I thought about coming back. Problem was I had a two-year non-competition clause in my contract to not write for some other publication which meant that I had to wait it out. And I did. Once the contract restriction expired Greg called me up and asked me back. This is my first assignment back although not my first run at this film since I reviewed it at Film Today as well. Greg wanted me to revise that effort to fit in better with his idea that this kind of film did not need the three-thousand-word gloss that I had put on it. The revised and shortened piece is below minus the extended analysis of the place of “buddy movies,” male buddy movies until recently and now gal buddies as well in Hollywood film history. Brad Fox, Jr.]

      

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Sam Lowell, the now sort of retired film editor at this publication who still contributes a few pieces and who right now is working on a continuing project about why certain once well-known private investigators, specifically Lew Archer from out in California who wound up peeping through keyholes, never made it to the P.I. Hall of Fame despite some real promise starting out, once told my father when they both were working at American Film Review I think a few good tips about film reviewing. About film reviewing when you are totally without a clue about how to proceed with a review which is in many ways a piece of fluff like The Hard Way but which you must say something about if for no other reason than to keep the wolves from your door (and avoid taking hand-outs, cash outlays, from fathers and mothers as the case may be). Without a “hook” you might as well stay home and have a drink to drown your sorrows. Here are the three life-savers  in ascending order-“slice of life” for the time period especially if the theme has been totally superseded by newer social conventions; feature the “buddy” aspect; and, play up the “boy meets girl (or visa versa)” theme which has saved more Hollywood and now world-wide films than it would seem possible to do given some of the lame plotlines.

Today we do the middle life-line (which I used in a feverish pitch when I first reviewed this film at my previous job at Film Today loading up the piece with the history of “buddy movies” in Hollywood since on re-viewing the film for this piece I came up with the same problem as there. A piece of fluff. The difference was that the editor there was looking for “high culture” aspects hence the three-thousand-word minimum requirement. As well as a stringer I was being paid by the word at one of the last publications to use that relic of indentured servitude method of payment for stringers). As usual with buddy films there has to be some conflict of interest that gets resolved and lets them go off hand and hand into the sunset having bonded for eternity, or until the sequel if any. John Moss, James Woods’ character is a hard-nosed, no non-sense and basically politically incorrect public detective, a New York detective who has a major problem on his hands. A major crime problem which is that some new version of American psycho is running around dance halls, barrooms, frat houses, maybe even public restrooms off-handedly shooting people for kicks or some mysterious reason known only to him, as usual. Our Man Moss is bound and determined to bring this cretin to justice-by any means necessary.                 

           

Naturally the case in widely publicized as are Moss’ relentlessly baiting remarks about that psycho. Meanwhile Nick Lang played by Michael J. Fox as a movie star out in Hollywood is in a funk. You might remember Nick from back a couple of decades ago when everybody was touting him as the next Errol Flynn, on film not in personal life, an action movie guy bringing in big studio grosses for little dough but apparently only spending about six dollars on script-writers. Nick was having a mid-career crisis like a lot of people when he came up with either a brilliant idea, or one of pure genius. He would hook up with this John Moss and learn what it was like to be a real action guy, a real cop. Pulling a few thousand strings, or maybe the studio doing so he is in.

Of course our serious cop John is outraged that some punk movie star who has the liberty to endlessly shoot fantasy bang-bang scenes is going to play copper, play out in the mean streets of New York while this psycho is running amok. Nick, as expected made every mistake in the book, maybe more in real cop line of duty. Which only infuriated Moss more. Meanwhile the psycho is pulling their chains, has them looking in all the wrong places. Along the way, as expected as well, John lightens up a little on Nick although he is still desperate to get him out of town. (Probably the best scene in the whole film was when trigger-happy Nick “shoots” an innocent by-stander while they are on the trail of Mister Psycho. It turns out this was a scam way that Moss tried to get Nick out of town by setting up the scene with fellow coppers-sorry for the egg all over your face Nick.) In the end Nick will redeem himself by taking a few stray bullets as they go in for the kill after psycho kidnaps Moss’ estranged girlfriend out in Time Square and there is final action on a 3-D billboard touting some film Nick had made. The psycho goes down and is chalked up as no great lose. Yeah, thinking about it again I am glad Greg gave the okay to make this dopey film a subject for short review. I don’t believe even with padding I squeezed well over three-thousand words out of this mildly funny film.

This Ain’t Your Whistler’s Mother-Traipsing Through The National Gallery Of Art In Sunnier Pre-Shutdown Times-James McNeill  Whistler’s “The White Girl,” Symphony In White Whatever Hustle They Are Pulling Now With The Title 

By Laura Perkins      

Some people apparently, at least in the art world have a hard time moving on, letting things go. That is the case with one Arthur Gilmore Doyle (hereafter Doyle since I utterly refuse to buy into the late 19^th fashion among the bluebloods and their wannabes to set themselves apart from the plebian Tom, Dick and Harrys with the three-name moniker to prove I think that they were not illegitimate, foundlings or could trace their genealogy back to the “Mayflower”). Doyle has been my upscale upstart nemesis since I took on this assignment under duress (when my longtime companion Sam Lowell balked on the assignment to pursue other interests I was “ratted out” by Leslie Dumont for having taken a couple of art classes and gone to an art museum making me candidate number one against the rest of the field here).

First Doyle challenged my assertion that the famous, or infamous, Madame X (Madame Guiteau) of John Singer Sargent’s (ditto on the trifecta names) The Portrait of Madame X where she flouted her stuff was a tramp, originally, I said a whore, but we are being a little more high-toned now working against a blue-blooded scion. I replied, taking up way too much time away from my commentary on John White Alexander’ Isabella and the Pot of Basil at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (see, Archives, January 15, 2019) in my second foray, that all the documentation, all the memoirs and biographies not basically done by her press agents, then or now, pointed to her sleeping her way up the food chain into French high society. And with all regard to the #MeToo movement today what of it. History is replete with woman who have used their beauty to get ahead in the world, professional beauties who we hope don’t have to do so in the future. Doyle to the contrary argued showing his knowledge of the class as well as sex line, that if Sargent painted the woman, she must be as pure as the driven snow or he would not have truck with tramps, whores, professional beauties. We have gone over that so enough said except I still find it strange that neither he or anybody else wanted to spill their bile over my comment about Madame’s horrendous bird-like nose. Apparently that was a sign of beauty back then although today nothing by sorrow for her ghastly condition.                      

Now Mr. Doyle, seemingly with plenty of time on his hands indicative of the leisure class has after reading my screed on Alexander’s Isabella challenged my claims to be an art critic, that I am a disgrace to the profession for stating that this Isabella was some kind of doped up John the Baptist-initiated cultist for being sexually aroused by her murdered lover’s head (having been done in in by her fearful brothers) in that so-called pot of basil. Doyle apparently had not read the fine print or was so bilious about my take on Madame X that he “forgot” that I am not an art critic, not a member of the art museum curator, art gallery owner, high-end art collector, or art journal fraternity which runs the art world. I have already mentioned that I took this art assignment under duress when Greg Green approached me after hearing what Leslie Dumont has said about my art “resume.” I took this assignment with the understanding that I would following my muse, my art muse, and pepper my comments with ideas, with my take, which would not be found in the vocabularies of the curators, gallery owners, collectors and journal editors. And they have not.     

What has made Doyle’s temperature rise this time, why he felt the need to foul up cyberspace was my comments about dear Isabella’s drug problem and about her devotion to that bizarre “head in a pot” cult (or platter, bowl, in hand I have seen many variations on how the severed head was handled but they all shared that fetish to worship at the shrine with sensual, sexual desire hence bizarre). He challenged my assertion based on Sam Lowell’s expertise that the plants in the jar were not harmless if symbolic basil but poppies, the stuff of opium and heroin. Sam rechecked the plants at my request and asserted that definitely the plants were poppy. Here is where the class and sex issues totally go over Doyle’s head. Like with the purity of Madame X argument he believes that Alexander would never stoop, his word, to painting some twisted dope fiend hung up on a bizarre cult. That could be left to those Frenchman of the day who made their money by titillating the plebes. Doyle seems to have been oblivious to among other things in high Victorian times sniffing dope, snuff boxes, mixing up lanadum was an everyday occurrence to get through the day, especially but not exclusively by women. What about it though if it got them through the day, or through their sorrows. Beyond that I cannot educate the man, nor will I.

On to finally Whistler’s Woman in White, Symphony in White, Number 1, The White Girl or whatever name some curator or high-toned art critic wants to put on one of James McNeill Whistler’s great mood painting in order to argue that the model is either the Madonna, a whore, no, a tramp, somebody’s kept woman, a streetwalker or a nymphomaniac. I will stop there although I have not run out of names for the poor gal depending on the theory being presented. Some Earth mother thing connected with the Pre-Ralphelite Brotherhood being the most popular, although the most ludicrous since her lips are not nearly Angela Joie-full enough for Rosetti and the brethren, a sure tip off Whistler was in some deep opium funk when he created this piece and messed up the lips. Or ran out of ruby red paint. What it is not though is Whistler’s mother, oh, excuse me Symphony in Gray and Black if we want to humor the guy in his funk, and in his bogus “art for art’s sake” hustle like some preternatural colorist (meant to bring in big bucks from unknowing but rabid collectors looking for something for the wall above the fireplace mantle with cachet).

Let’s get real though this is not a down at the heels shop girl who didn’t know the score, didn’t know a certain truth that would forever haunt her image, her reputation.   It took about my fifth time down at the National Gallery of Art in sunnier times when it was open, now closed by government shutdown to figure what was going on here. The deep symbolism which puts Brother Whistler right in vortex as the precursor of the Surrealist movement of the next century. Maybe as one art critic speculated this was a tip of the hat to the coming storm in Whistler’s America, the gathering storm when they had painter’s bloc.  Doyle is not going to like my comments on this one any more than my sexual suggestiveness regard three-name moniker Singer and Alexander and Madame X and Isabella respectively. This portrait has nothing to do with first communion-like virginity, bride of Christ or lost innocence after the Edenic fall, far from it.

What this painting is though is a homage to the Whole of Babylon, the queen bee of courtesans which is how Whistler saw his model, his girlfriend what did they call their relationship in polite society then, yes, consort. Don’t be fooled like all the high-brow Victorian art critics with their handy snuff boxes and be taken in by the white dress, the too skinny red lips, the white curtain, that very convenient white rose. That is all show. That is for the gullible art collectors and museum patrons. The key is the wolf’s head, and I am surprised nobody else has caught the naked symbolism. Although I don’t read or speak Aramaic there is a clear reference in the Book of the Dead according to the Babylonian history scholar James Cee about the wolf’s head and the Whore of Babylon. That the wolf’s head and fur were both an advertisement for a high-born courtesan and as an aphrodisiac for her clients. Nice work, James. For those who have me written down as some Freudian sexual reference cretin or frustrated post-menopausal matron well go to work. As for Doyle when he comes out of his dead faint after reading this give it your best shot. Give it your best shot.