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What Al Capone Understood That You Don’t (from 2009)

April 21, 2013 6 Comments
(Editor’s Note: From 2009. Still attracts readers fairly regularly. People are curious about Al Capone)

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.

We Took To The Ramshackle Victorian Near The Woods

July 21, 2012 7 Comments

“There is nothing that I so greatly admire as purposefulness. I have an
enormous respect for people who know exactly what they are doing and
where they are going. Such people are compact and integrated. They have
clear edges. They give an impression of invulnerability and balance, and
I wish I were one of them.” –Louise Dickinson Rich

I do not have any money, and suddenly I want some.

I’ve made rather a lot of money — for other people– at one time or another. Upon reflection I realize I didn’t like any of these people, and I made the most money for the people I liked the least.

If I made money for my own use, I’d have something to lavish it on today. I’d reach out the hand of the man with resources and make something happen for no reason other than that it should, and I could. I’d buy Louise Dickinson Rich’s Maine cottage. 

Oh, they want 1.3 million for it, but that’s not enough. I’ll need much more than that. There are two houses, a “winter” house and a “summer” house, and I want them both. They’re only selling the summer one. I want to offer the owner whatever it takes to stop monkeying around with it, and acting like a real estate vivisectionist by parceling out hams to fools. I want the whole pig.

Louise Dickinson Rich wrote We Took To The Woods in those houses. Hell, the chair she sat in and the typewriter she banged on is still in there.

The whole place is just as she left it, and it will be pulled to bits, or perhaps brined and immured in an aspic she never would have tolerated. One way or the other, the wrong people will get hold of this place, and do the wrong thing in it, and to it. Her Wikipedia entry mentions: “…a Thoreau-like existence…” Yeah, sure, if you don’t know anything about Thoreau, and never read her book.

We belong to no cult. We are not Nature Lovers. We don’t love nature
any more than we love breathing. Nature is simply something
indispensable, like air and light and water, that we accept as necessary
to living, and the nearer we can get to it the happier we are.

Don’t forget: Henry David Thoreau was a knucklehead.

When we first moved to Maine, our neighbor, a sterling fellow, gave us a copy of We Took To The Woods as a gift. It’s considered rather quotidian to an educator in Maine, I’m sure, but it was news to us and immediately gained a pride of place on the shelf with Twain and Bierce and Wodehouse and a few others. Everyone’s always trying to get me to read things. It’s a rare person that hits the mark on the first shot.

I love that book. It matters. My older child reads her history of Maine, called State O’ Maine, for his history lesson. He’s homeschooled. The local schools don’t require students to learn about the state they live in any longer as part of the curriculum. The book’s out of print, which tells you a lot about what Mainers worship these days. There’s always money for a homely mural about work where all the workers are on strike, but a Maine author writing the best history of Maine, who should rank with Longfellow and White, Millay and Stowe, goes out of print. The schoolchildren play with iPads instead of reading.

I felt a bit of wry amusement to read about her trips in from the wilderness to the big city of Rumford, and know that she had to pass right through the shadow of my house on the only road into town back then. She was my familiar all of a sudden. A neighbor, dead and buried, but not forgotten.

Someone cranky and pleasant and standoffish and friendly and outgoing and solitary should live there and write books about living in Maine. Ain’t gonna happen. We live in a weird world, where you have to write the book first, so you can afford the house later.

We Took To The Woods, at Amazon

I’m Ashamed Of My Shoulders And My Large, Awkward Hands

July 4, 2012 5 Comments

Edward Hopper And The House By The Railroad 

Out here in the exact middle of the day,
This strange, gawky house has the expression
Of someone being stared at, someone holding
His breath underwater, hushed and expectant;

This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed
Of its fantastic mansard rooftop
And its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamed
of its shoulders and large, awkward hands.

But the man behind the easel is relentless.
He is as brutal as sunlight, and believes
The house must have done something horrible
To the people who once lived here

Because now it is so desperately empty,
It must have done something to the sky
Because the sky, too, is utterly vacant
And devoid of meaning. There are no

Trees or shrubs anywhere–the house
Must have done something against the earth.
All that is present is a single pair of tracks
Straightening into the distance. No trains pass.

Now the stranger returns to this place daily
Until the house begins to suspect
That the man, too, is desolate, desolate
And even ashamed. Soon the house starts

To stare frankly at the man. And somehow
The empty white canvas slowly takes on
The expression of someone who is unnerved,
Someone holding his breath underwater.

And then one day the man simply disappears.
He is a last afternoon shadow moving
Across the tracks, making its way
Through the vast, darkening fields.

This man will paint other abandoned mansions,
And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered
Storefronts on the edges of small towns.
Always they will have this same expression,

The utterly naked look of someone
Being stared at, someone American and gawky.
Someone who is about to be left alone
Again, and can no longer stand it.

-Edward Hirsch 

 

Now Is Der Time On Schprockets When Ve Dahnce

June 1, 2012 7 Comments

“Mechanical Principles,” from 1930, by Ralph Steiner.

It’s another world. A mechanical world. A machinist’s world. Newtonian. Euclidian.

A few years ago I took my father to see a B-24J Liberator bomber like the one he flew in. It wasn’t an elegant machine. There was a B-25 and a B-17 at the airfield, too, and they both looked kinda sleek compared to the B-24. Dad’s plane was a sort-of flying dump truck.

We went inside the thing, and I found it jarring that I understood everything I was looking at, just by looking at it. There were wires and cables and tubes running hither and yon and they were all about as complicated as a hammer and nail. The ammo boxes were wood, and the machine guns just shot out of a open window on the side, like a well-armed barn would have.

Lots of things seem complicated to the modern eye because they’re unfamiliar, not because they’re sophisticated; just the opposite, mostly. Simplicity stuns people now. I can walk into a 150 year-old house and nothing in it surprises me. Most of it is simple, if not barbaric, compared to a lot of stuff in a brand new house. The old stuff is vastly superior in many ways, too. Sprockets go round and round when you turn the crank if the power goes out, unlike a 486.

It’s not just mechanisms that amaze many if they’re too simple to recognize nowadays. My wife sits next to my son, before a window and a calendar and a little flag, and slides sheets of work under his nose, one after another, as he sits at an antique school desk that cost five dollars at a flea market. People ask her, “Yes, but how do you educate him?”

Sprockets work.

Berlin, Infinite Recursion

April 17, 2012 10 Comments

Max Raabe singing Irving Berlin In Berlin. For a German, he’s a borderline wildman. I like the part where he raised his eyebrow that one time. Skating at the edge of the volcano of his inner torment, no doubt.

Tag: 1930s

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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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