I can’t stop watching the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty. It was a sorta flop when it came out, but it’s one of those movies that allows for a great deal of reflection over the themes in it, which are profound. Or you could just gape at it. When I was but little, I remember seeing it on a drive-in screen the size of a football field, entirely enthralled with the blue of the Pacific sky and sea. A meal in a restaurant was exotic to us. Tahiti was as much another world to us as any tar on the Bounty.
You have to take Marlon Brando as Christian in the spirit in which it’s offered, I guess. He’s always interesting to look at, if not always exactly suited to the work. Trevor Howard is an enormously talented guy, mostly overlooked, and is perfect for the job of Bligh.
The theme that that which is allowed is not necessarily recommended, or even tolerated in retrospect, is important, and timely still.
It was assumed that a gentleman would have an internal moral clock that would keep him from what Churchill later called “frightfulness,” and so it was best to leave the direction of men to gentlemen. If only.
Oh how he railed at the bankers. Mother would remind him, occasionally, that he was a banker. He’d splutter and rage and Mother would leave to see what the cook was doing and return and neither of them ever missed a beat. I’d watch the dirty urban raindrops make their way down the panes, backlit by the milky sunshine that was our ration at the end of the brownstone canyons, and wait for it all to end. The rain, the impotent rage, all of it. Now it was done.
I wander through the rooms, and they are full of nothing. I never heard it put better than that. A life full of nothing. There was always someplace to be, something that required immediate attention, something that would bring on the stemwinding peroration, to no one in particular, about the hard, cold heart of everyone who came into his line of sight when he was trying to make the column on the left and the column on the right match up. A life devoted to those damn dots.
I never could muster any awe or fear of the old man. He was volcanic, and yet the rumblings signified nothing. The threat of the eruption is daily, but the actual item never comes, and so one develops a certain ambivalence about it. It was always like waiting for the last dull minutes of a boring sermon to end. There was no sin in it, and none in ignoring it. You endured it only, but did not suffer, really.
Father had that Irishman that worked for him. The only one. He was as full of life as Father was full of worms. Father mocked him when he was not here. There was a touch of the obsequious about the guy that my Father loved. “Oh, that Hibernian tugs his forelock and backs out of here like a serf, but you know he’s in the tavern right now in his cups and laughing at me, and all his cronies with him. He’ll never amount to anything.”
Now the old man was done. Mother was gone two decades ago. It fell to me. I’ll have nothing to do with this place. It had the smell of the grave in it all along. The lawyers pushed the papers under my nose, with the same dull mechanical mannerisms and basilisk expressions on their faces as their customer, laid out like a Pharoah in the funeral parlor. I suppose they laughed later, too, when they offered me a third of the value of the place, and I took it. I would have paid them to take it.
Gangster movies and the general media have a tendency to portray criminals as more interesting and sophisticated than they really are. They portray politicians, who are sometimes the same thing, in the same way. But few politicians are really all that shrewd. They’re just shameless. That’s different.
Hollywood likes to show gangsters being Machiavellian, but they’re usually just willing to use force to get what they want, and are willing to take chances. Fearless and arrogant will get you a long way in a world full of the meek. Gangsters are in a state of nature, red in tooth and claw, while John Q. Public thinks meat comes in little packages from a deli.
Al Capone was not a sophisticated man. He was a Camorra gangster, a Naples thing, which is not the same thing as the Mafia, which is a (the) Sicilian thing. Camorra gangsters don’t have a lot of redeeming family values to add spice to your Pacino movie. Just violent and grabby.
That picture is Capone’s cell in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. He spent eight months there for carrying a concealed weapon.
It would appear that the cell testifies that prison authorities could be easily bribed. Not exactly. I imagine that it was fear of Capone that got him his goodies, and the warders accepted his money as gravy. If they weren’t afraid of him, they would have just taken his money, or not taken his money, but he wouldn’t have got his goodies either way.
Al Capone was literally a barbarian. And yet he could assemble truly salubrious surroundings for himself in any circumstances. Tradition based in wholesomeness trumps intellect searching for thrills, every time, for comfort.
A Queen Anne wing chair is very comfortable to sit in. It affords motility -the ability to slightly shift your position without thinking to avoid discomfort. The wings and sides shield the occupant from drafts. The open shape of the arms invites the sitter visually. The patterned fabric has a certain light friction that keeps the occupant from slipping forward.
The floor lamp gives a pool of light. The shade is angled downward, because the purpose of the lamp is not general illumination. It is to make a well-lighted spot at a sitting area without producing any harsh glare. The other, table lamp does so even more, and softens the downward directed light with a tasseled fringe to avoid severity.
The carpet on a hard floor is a no-brainer. Living on hard floors so your Swiffer or Roomba is comfortable instead of you is not smart. And nailing the carpet down is like wearing the same underwear too long.
The Chippendale drop-front desk is elegant and useful. Books are precious, or should be, and you can keep them best where they can be seen, but are not open to dust. You can write and then close up the clutter writing brings.
There is a chair and a mirror at the entrance/exit. You need to look at yourself before you leave your abode, and you often need to put things down, including yourself, for a moment when you enter. Capone understood that even though his door was a modern porticullis.
There is a piece of art hung to contemplate while seated or standing. The radio for entertainment is not treated as solely an appliance; it needed to be as elegant as furniture, because when you put it in a room, it is furniture. And Al wanted to listen to opera in the evenings, because he knew it’s crazy to wallow in misery voluntarily, even for your entertainment. There is something green next to it, to amuse the occupant with its tending, and to suggest the outdoors indoors.
Picture a contemporary person, not even a criminal, put in this place. They’d put in Pergo floors and have an X-Box or a crummy computer on a shabby rickety IKEA monstrosity instead of a writing desk. They’d have a glorified office chair with lumbar support on the wrong lumbar. There’s be a nasty flatscreen instead of a radio and a picture, about as elegant as a water heater when considered dispassionately, playing porno and gangster movies all the time.
As I said, Al Capone was a barbarian. I’d rather live in his prison cell than your house.
Gangster movies and the general media have a tendency to portray criminals as more interesting and sophisticated than they really are. They portray politicians, who are sometimes the same thing, in the same way. But few politicians are really all that shrewd. They’re just shameless. That’s different.
Hollywood likes to show gangsters being Machiavellian, but they’re usually just willing to use force to get what they want, and are willing to take chances. Fearless and arrogant will get you a long way in a world full of the meek. Gangsters are in a state of nature, red in tooth and claw, while John Q. Public thinks meat comes in little packages from a deli.
Al Capone was not a sophisticated man. He was a Camorra gangster, a Naples thing, which is not the same thing as the Mafia, which is a (the) Sicilian thing. Camorra gangsters don’t have a lot of redeeming family values to add spice to your Pacino movie. Just violent and grabby.
That picture is Capone’s cell in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. He spent eight months there for carrying a concealed weapon.
It would appear that the cell testifies that prison authorities could be easily bribed. Not exactly. I imagine that it was fear of Capone that got him his goodies, and the warders accepted his money as gravy. If they weren’t afraid of him, they would have just taken his money, or not taken his money, but he wouldn’t have got his goodies either way.
Al Capone was literally a barbarian. And yet he could assemble truly salubrious surroundings for himself in any circumstances. Tradition based in wholesomeness trumps intellect searching for thrills, every time, for comfort.
A Queen Anne wing chair is very comfortable to sit in. It affords motility -the ability to slightly shift your position without thinking to avoid discomfort. The wings and sides shield the occupant from drafts. The open shape of the arms invites the sitter visually. The patterned fabric has a certain light friction that keeps the occupant from slipping forward.
The floor lamp gives a pool of light. The shade is angled downward, because the purpose of the lamp is not general illumination. It is to make a well-lighted spot at a sitting area without producing any harsh glare. The other, table lamp does so even more, and softens the downward directed light with a tasseled fringe to avoid severity.
The carpet on a hard floor is a no-brainer. Living on hard floors so your Swiffer or Roomba is comfortable instead of you is not smart. And nailing the carpet down is like wearing the same underwear too long.
The Chippendale drop-front desk is elegant and useful. Books are precious, or should be, and you can keep them best where they can be seen, but are not open to dust. You can write and then close up the clutter writing brings.
There is a chair and a mirror at the entrance/exit. You need to look at yourself before you leave your abode, and you often need to put things down, including yourself, for a moment when you enter. Capone understood that even though his door was a modern porticullis.
There is a piece of art hung to contemplate while seated or standing. The radio for entertainment is not treated as solely an appliance; it needed to be as elegant as furniture, because when you put it in a room, it is furniture. And Al wanted to listen to opera in the evenings, because he knew it’s crazy to wallow in misery voluntarily, even for your entertainment. There is something green next to it, to amuse the occupant with its tending, and to suggest the outdoors indoors.
Picture a contemporary person, not even a criminal, put in this place. They’d put in Pergo floors and have an X-Box or a crummy computer on a shabby rickety IKEA monstrosity instead of a writing desk. They’d have a glorified office chair with lumbar support on the wrong lumbar. There’s be a nasty flatscreen instead of a radio and a picture, about as elegant as a water heater when considered dispassionately, playing porno and gangster movies all the time.
As I said, Al Capone was a barbarian. I’d rather live in his prison cell than your house.
Month: April 2009
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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