Curtis Mayfield - Here But I'm Gone

Curtis, after his fall from the stage. Curtis, with one foot in the grave. Curtis, delivering the goods even as his boat was leaving for the far shore. Thanks for everything, Curtis.

Curtis Mayfield - Move On Up

Curtis at the height of his powers. 

Dash Hammett And The Continental Op

The earth has cooled considerably since the day that I obtained an anthology of Dashiell Hammett's novels. It was one of those cheaply produced books, cheap paper, cheap glue, cheap everything, and I'm not 100% sure where I got it. Probably off of a sale table in a Manhattan bookstore. The Maltese Falcon; the Thin Man; and, I believe, the Glass Key. I never got around to the third one, Glass Key or not, but I loved the other two. They made a big impression on me. They made a big impression on a lot of people, evidently, because people have been more or less knocking-off Dash's style ever since.

Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald are often mentioned in the same breath with Hammett, but there are a hundred others. My personal favorite was Charles Willeford, who seems all but forgotten now. He wrote Miami Blues, which was turned into a very good movie staring a very young Alec Baldwin as the “blithe psychopath” around whom the action revolves. It's a great novel that moves from violence to comedy to poignant drama effortlessly. There are only a few more novels representing Mr. Willeford's mature work. He wrote pulp fiction in the early 1950s, but those are mostly useful for historical purposes.

All of it goes back to Dash, though. Everything remotely “hard boiled” owes its existence to Dash.* In fact, the term was coined by Dash in the novel under inspection today: Red Harvest. It's the first of the brief series of novels about the “Continental op.” The op is an operative, a gumshoe, a detective, almost a spy, for the San Francisco branch of a nation-wide private detective agency that Hammett modeled on the Pinkertons, for whom he had once worked in that capacity. (The Continental Detective Agency.)

The op's name is never given. His references to himself are very vague, and the novel has very little description in general. Half-way through he is described by a female character as “a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy . . .” Later, the op adds that, “at forty I could get along on gin as a substitute for sleep, but not comfortably.”

The novel Red Harvest, written in 1929, has aged remarkably well. It's character driven, and people haven't changed that much. Not really. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in hard boiled fiction, detective stories, historical gangsters, old-time American slang, or Prohibition America. It's a good read.

I don't know how Amazon gets away with charging full price for novels by guys who are long dead, but I'm no copyright expert. Supply and demand, I suppose. But it's only money. Better spent on Red Harvest for your Kindle than wasted on a couple of lattes.

*The word at least, and most of the genre anyway. With a nod to Hemingway's short story, the Killers, of 1927. 

Little Junior's Blue Flames Mystery Train SUN 192

Pat Hare is listed as a member of the band on this cut. I think that he does a fine job, too, but what a difference a year makes! The cut below is a solo effort from about a year later, and something has happened in the meantime. Here, he plays it pretty clean and he plays the part as it was written. One year later he had the throttles wide open all the way. What happened? 

 Either he could be a disciplined player when he felt like it, or he could do what he was told when he was getting paid by someone else, or he only discovered that heavy overdriven distortion in between these two cuts, or he just got a new big Fender amp, or he amped up his drinking, we may never know. 

One thing for sure. With a resume that includes that nuts sound later on, and being in the band playing the solo on this cut, and leading a prison band called "Sounds Incarcerated," Pat gets a spot in Rock n' Roll history. 

Pat Hare I'm Gonna Murder My Baby (1954)

Get on over to the Google and read about Pat Hare. Auburn "Pat" Hare, really. The story is as overdriven as the guitar in this cut. 

Pat only lived fifty years, and sixteen of those were behind bars for, wait for it, murdering his girlfriend (and, for good luck, a policeman who came to investigate). Some people just can't handle their alcohol. 

I'd never heard of him, but he had quite a career before he took up intentional homicide. He was the guy in Little Juniors Blue Flames, and made other noteworthy contributions to the guitaristic arts. His prison band was called Sounds Incarcerated, how cool is that? He died there, at age fifty. Sounds like a real live-wire, doesn't he? 

From The Millerites To Trump: The Big Tease

William Miller was a farmer from the Adirondacks in upstate New York. He had a side job as a Baptist minister. He was also what passed for a “student of the bible” in the mid-Nineteenth Century. He had a strong hunch that he knew when the second coming of Christ was going to occur, and he talked about it quite a bit for ten or twenty years before the projected date. He must have been fun at parties.

According to his calculations, Christ would show up sometime in April, 1843, and all of the chosen people would ship out for heaven October 23, 1844. He had developed quite a substantial following by then, and they exhibited a broad range of aberrant behaviors following the absence of an event on that day. There was a lot of arguing about the date, fault-finding about the math employed by Miller, conversion to other extreme Christian sects, and all of the general floundering around that idiocy creates. They, the “Millerites,” became the model for all of the end-of-the-worlders that have followed them.

Even now, hardly a year goes by but that some genius announces an impending date for the end of the world. The incident in 2012 was blamed on the Mayans, but more often the Christian Bible is the source of the revelation. I am offended every time this kind of thing makes the papers. I would like nothing better than to have a first-row seat for the end of the world, and it was long ago that I got tired of being teased with the granting of that wish. “Quit teasing me!” I mumble, not at an actual newspaper anymore. Now I do my mumbling at a computer screen. “Bunch of fucking idiots!” Rude too, to tease people like that. Message to the next guy who believes he has discovered that date, or has had it revealed to him by the neighbor's dog or something: Make your own peace with God and keep it all to yourself. The rest of us have work to do.

We're getting much the same thing these days about Trump. We've been putting up with his sabotage of all of our institutions, rights, and freedoms for almost two years now, and for one of those years not a day has gone by without predictions that his downfall was imminent. Impending, even! Any day now! Mueller will be filing those indictments next (fill in day of the week)! (Fill in name of member of Trump's family) will be arrested this week! These bits of news are easy to find, but the sparks of the original reporting become prairie fires on social media. There are a lot of people out there who are apoplectic about this whole Trump mess/tragedy/catastrophe. They are all over every little hint in the news. “This is it!” they write, in large type. And then the week passes, and the month, and the year, and we are standing on the hillside like a bunch of Millerites, experiencing our own version of their “Great Disappointment.”

What we are witnessing is no less than a revolution, but it is not a Trumpist revolution. No, it's the same old Republican revolution that has been chewing our furniture since the 1970s. One reads that the entire Republican party, along with Trump, will be ejected into space before long and we will be able to get back to some mythical “way things were.” This is no less of a terrible tease than the old Millerite bullshit.

As much as I would love to see the actual end of the world, I would dearly love to see Trump and some of the more egregious Republican operatives sent to big-wall prisons to spend a decade or more in the general population. But the odds are that I will be denied the pleasure of either thing. Neither thing will be happening any time soon.

The odds are that we will be suffering without the comforting presence of Mr. Jesus right up until the time when the entire world ecosystem collapses on us. There will be no heralds and no horns on that day, I'm afraid. We will all simply join those already lost to oblivion.

The odds also favor the Republican party continuing to make it's vicious, selfish mischief for the foreseeable future. As for Trump, well, don't hold your breath waiting for the end of this nightmare.

When the end comes, Trump, useful idiot that he has been, will be unceremoniously dumped in his favorite brier-patch: bankruptcy court. There's no prison fantastic enough to hold him. My best guess is that he'll be allowed to retire for health reasons as part of a deal to keep the kiddies out of prison. I'd be willing to bet that within five years he'll be back on TV. “Washington Apprentice,” or something similar.

Nothing at all could surprise me in this WTF bonanza that we call the Twenty-First Century.

What We Don't Know

Raise your glasses! Here's to what we do not know! May we sooner rather than later learn the things that we must know to survive, and may we, please God, may we learn to admit that we still don't have a clue about many, many things.

It seems to be surpassingly difficult for human beings to admit that they do not know something. Oddly, it seems to become more difficult as that particular human becomes more intelligent. They become more invested, perhaps, in the certainty of what they know. Our geniuses can admit to not knowing certain things. After all, they know so many things that we ordinary humans cannot begin to understand that they feel safe in saying, nope, that particular bit of knowledge has so far eluded me. The merely highly-intelligent are the worst offenders. They lack the security of the real geniuses. They fear that their entire house-of-cards will collapse if they admit that they do not know something. Take doctors, for instance.

The body of knowledge that currently constitutes modern medical science is huge. It includes several categories of scientific knowledge, and some math is involved. The vocabulary alone that must be mastered is truly daunting. Anyone aspiring to the status of MD must be born way up on the good side of the intelligence curve. Then there are the decades of school work and indentured servitude to consider. All of that time, the aspirant is being examined and judged not only for intelligence, not only for academic performance, but also for general suitability emotionally and socially for the role of “doctor.” It's amazing that anyone makes it through such a terrible process.

There is little wonder, therefore, that those who have achieved the status of doctor, medical doctor, try so hard to hide the fact that most of the matters that they deal with on a day to day basis are totally obscure to them. They really do not understand very much at all about what is happening to their patients. They are often like car mechanics who are not permitted to open the hood; they must stand back and look at the surface and try to imagine what might be happening in the hidden realm. I'm certain that they are specifically instructed never to admit the extent of their ignorance. I am equally certain that they themselves much prefer to maintain the illusion that they know what they are doing. There is a good reason that nurses refer to doctors as “M-Deities.” The doctors are only too happy to cut and swab and prescribe first according to their best guess, and just as happy next week to try something else when it doesn't work. They can schedule you for additional tests in the hope that the results will be illuminating, or they can prescribe more and stronger antibiotics in the hope that the offending phenomenon is bacterial in nature and will be killed in the onslaught. Otherwise, we'll just try something else. Certainty is almost always denied to medical doctors.

Many scientists are in the same boat. They learn the playbook at school, they study the programmed moves, but for most of the sciences there is a deeper game that has still not revealed itself. I admire their courage, pressing on into the valley of thorns and darkness that is the future of their chosen field. I can hardly imagine the frustration that must overtake someone in the field of physics, let's say, God forbid sub-atomic physics. What geniuses they must be to follow the progress of the field in the first place, only to realize that although they have learned a bit about the first few particles and phenomena involved, there are scores of deeper levels that are denied them. It must be hard to realize that the real knowledge that they seek is so far down there, or out there, that humans may take another thousand years to understand it.

I salute the brave men and women who soldier on in the certain knowledge that future scientists will look back on them and laugh at their primitive inadequacy.

It occurs to me that I was lucky to labor in a field like the law, where no math or science are involved. In the law, there is no scientific method, no truth, no justice, and often no right or wrong. There are only smoke and mirrors, and whatever the judge says, and whatever the jury decides. There is no science in the law. Two plus two is not automatically four. The only truth is that if you got paid for your work, it was a great day. For great lawyers, or difficult judges, two plus two can be anywhere from three to six. The entire field of law is somehow unmoored from reality. It's a blessing and a curse, I suppose. It may work for you or against you. But, like I say, if you got paid for your work it was a great day. Candidates for careers in the law must display a high tolerance for ambiguity. Except when it comes to getting paid. “Always get the money first,” was the best advice that I ever got. “If they won't pay you up front, they probably won't give it to you afterwards either.”

Don't expect the lawyers of the world to save us. Usually the best that a good lawyer can do is get you a two-to-five when another lawyer would have landed you a seven-to-ten (and an overworked public defender would've gotten you fifteen). Better lawyers get larger settlements for their clients in civil cases. There are no lawyers on the list of “People Likely to Save the World.”

I wish that the medical doctors knew a lot more than they do. There's only so much that they can do, though. They are in no position to save the world either.

Scientists could do a lot more than they are doing now to help us, but in our current dog-eat-dog, winner take all, you're on your own world, no one is paying scientists to actually help anyone. They are all wrapped up in projects designed to make more money for people who have too much money already.

Maybe it's not what we don't know that will kill us all. Maybe we'll all be killed off by our misplaced priorities.