1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 64: L.A. Confidential

My “anchor” year is 1996, but now I’m casting a wider net. 1997 is well within what I consider to be a “golden” period of moviemaking – which, like other golden eras, hearkens back to previous ones. The English Patient (1996) hearkens back to David Lean; L.A. Confidential (1997) hearkens back to Chinatown, which itself hearkens to older crime dramas – the greatest of which, for me, is The Big Heat.

The Big Heat, Chinatown, L.A. Confidential. Three dramas about police or ex-police who have a special zeal for protecting women, and who end up hurting those women in one way or another.

That sounds as if the women were passive. They aren’t. Arguably, the most forceful and complex character in each of these movies is a woman. In L.A. Confidential, it’s Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a prostitute who specializes in reminding men of Veronica Lake; meanwhile, she loves those she is able to love.

But these movies are mainly about the men who try to save the women – foolishly, perhaps.

The “protector” in L.A. Confidential is Bud White (Russell Crowe). Rescuing domestic abuse victims and sex workers is his avocation. His temper often gets the better of him. His captain, Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), keeps him around to intimidate and beat confessions out of criminals. This is the 1950s. Los Angeles is growing. Mobsters from out of town try to move in, but the police keep them in check.

It’s the corrupt local bigwigs, cloaked in respectability, accumulating wealth and power in tandem with the city, who run the scene.

Bud seems like a brute, but he’s smart. He follows leads and quietly makes progress on tricky cases. The movie also follows two other smart police officers. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is running a side-hustle, sharing information with the tabloids. They get the scoops; he gets the collars and the publicity. Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce) is a careerist “boy scout” – upright but ruthless, and loyal to none but himself. His colleagues initially doubt that he has the stomach to perform the necessary brutalities. By the end, he’s laid out more bodies than anyone else.

The death toll is high, what with one mass murder, a few gunfights, and many assassinations. There are a lot of beatings, too, and an off-camera rape. People speak nastily enough to make each other cry. All of this taxes and ennervates the viewer. The movie isn’t shy about how morally compromised, even downright awful, these police are; but it revels in the exhibition. It invites the viewer to share in the thrill of pumping a shotgun or getting an interrogee to squirm. More than Chinatown, in which the spectacle descends into tragedy and then sordidness, or The Big Heat, which seethes with irony, L.A. Confidential helps us to understand the visceral attraction of policing that mixes sadism, cynicism, and self-righteousness.

Each protagonist is asked why he became a cop. Jack Vincennes can’t remember. Edmund Exley wants to catch the guys who don’t get caught: in other words, he wants to outsmart people. The hotheaded Bud White, the noblest of the three, simply responds to woundedness, inflicting it upon the wounders and rescuing the wounded. He breaks the most rules – while following orders, as often as not – but he takes the job more seriously than the others do. He also relishes it the least.

The best line is uttered by Lynn Bracken when she says goodbye to Exley, who has just climbed a few more rungs up the ladder: “Some men get the world. Others get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona.” Ex-hookers and Arizona is the better choice.

I don’t know how closely this movie resembles real policing. I just have other movies to compare it to.

Samuel’s sticker chart; a cat video

Samuel recently went through the worst tantrum-throwing period of his life. It lasted longer than a month.

Thankfully, that behavior has been curbed due to a simple innovation of Karin’s: a sticker chart. For his privileges, Samuel must now do chores or quietly endure hardship – teeth-brushing, Bible-reading, etc.

We use stickers to tally his past successes and forthcoming rewards.

He loves it. Even if he ends up with fewer benefits than he used to receive, he seems glad to exert more control over what is due him. Previously, he depended on our irregular whims. He had to plead. Or scream. It made him anxious (us, too).

No doubt, some lesson about distributive morality can be gleaned from this. …

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But what, exactly, are these new efforts teaching him?

They aren’t teaching him about the intrinsic value of working or of managing his outbursts. His efforts are mere means to ends.

He might develop a liking for some of these respectable new behaviors. That would be nice!

But I doubt he’s learning to enjoy work as such. Few do. People might enjoy working hard at X, but that’s not the same as enjoying hard work as such.

(Even hardworking people tend not to work hard in every sphere. They prefer to delegate what they dislike to do, or fear to do, to specialists and grunts. Presented with courses of action that are likely to generate similar results, they choose the course that requires the least work for themselves.)

Samuel might be learning some self-control. He certainly talks about it more since he was told about the Fruit of the Spirit in Sunday School. He came out of class saying, “Sammy is self-control.”

Again, the benefit is limited. A person may or may not be self-controlled. But it doesn’t count as “Fruit of the Spirit” unless, you know, it actually comes from the Holy Spirit. I wouldn’t know how to engineer that.

Samuel’d have to give his life to Jesus. …

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Daniel, meantime, is still utterly wild. …

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Sometimes I’m alone

Sometimes I’m not

Sometimes I’m alone

Hello?

This video is our new family favorite.

Vexillologists

I missed Flag Day – June 14 is the date – and, anyway, I’m not an admirer of “Old Glory.” But like Stephen when he was a child, and Samuel now, I do appreciate a good flag, and a bad one.

These are some noteworthy flags you may not have seen:

(1) The flag of Åland (an autonomous region of Finland). Good.

(2) The flag of the International Federation of Vexillological Associations. Good.

(3) Indeed, vexillological groups generally create good flags.

(4) The North American Vexillological Association, in keeping with its mission, has an elegant flag (and a hideous official seal – it’s a specialist group, for sure). The organization designs a different host-city-themed flag for each annual meeting. Some highlights: Salem, Mass. (1979); Indianapolis (2004); Charleston, S.C. (2009); Salt Lake City (2013); New Orleans (2014); Ottawa (2015); San Antonio (2019); and Zoom (2021).

(5) I went down this rabbit trail because I was reading about Pocatello, which has a very good flag but used to have an absolutely terrible one, rightly excoriated by vexillologists.

(4) Milwaukee’s flag is notorious enough to have its own Wikipedia page, but I kinda like it. The golden wheat stem and golden, vertically-written founding date on opposing edges of the flag confer a nice symmetry, and the whole is reminiscent of artwork for the Asociación Uruguaya de Fútbol. As for the other stuff on the flag, well, busy ain’t always bad (cf. Pieter Bruegel the Elder).

(5) Simple ain’t always good. I don’t like Provo’s awful old flag.

I could go on and on. Most of my readers could, I suspect. What topic is easier to opine on than flags? So far as I know, the late philosopher Josh Parsons was no trained vexillologist, but that didn’t stop him from grading the world’s flags. I must constantly battle the urge to do the same.

Coincidence? I THINK NOT!

Yesterday, the postman delivered these things:

(1) The latest issue of Harper’s, with Ian Buruma’s cover story, “Doing the Work: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Wokeness”;

and

(2) Elmer Gantry.

Then, today, my old history teacher, J.H., posted on Facebook about the article and the novel.

Someone has been snooping in my mailbox. …

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Daniel has been sleeping in until 9:30 or 10:00 a.m. and still managing to nap in the afternoon (today, from 1:30 to 4:00).

He’s most active around midnight, i.e., my bedtime.

Tonight he catnapped; but now, at 11:00, he’s vigorously “rocking out,” alternating between his little rocking-chair and Moby, his little rocking-whale.

Samuel is in the basement. He’s listening to nature sounds on Spotify. His bedtime routine is less eccentric than Daniel’s, but he’s increasingly particular about which track or YouTube video I play for him. He repeatedly changes his mind. Sometimes I’d like to just surrender the remote to him, but that’d be to abdicate my parental duty, wouldn’t it?

R.I.P. Dick, pt. 2; body-text fonts, pt. 16: Calisto; a Father’s Day joke

The Cornell Chronicle has published the best overview so far of Dick’s life and career. I especially like what it says about Dick’s contribution to the philosophy of science, and I like the reminiscences of Cornell PhDs Koltonski and Jezzi.

I also like the word “reminiscences.”

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The screenshot of this month’s body-text font has been chosen with Dick in mind. The passage is not a quotation from one of Dick’s books or articles. Rather, it showcases his patience. It’s the most self-indulgent footnote in the dissertation I wrote for him, which I set in Calisto.

Dick’s comment: What is tackling?

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Happy Father’s Day.

R.I.P. Dick

Dick, my adviser at Cornell, has died.

An obituary.

Cornell’s memorial notice, with reminiscences.

Brian Leiter’s notice, with a few more reminiscences in the comments.

Dick wrote on a wide range of topics. I’ll just mention some of the political ones.

He became known, early on, for his work on Marx.

His final views on economic justice can be glimpsed in:

this online profile …

this Washington Post opinion piece (he was always listening for wisdom from libertarians, utilitarians, and other sirens, but wasn’t seduced by those philosophies) …

and the 2019 article “Social Democracy and Free Enterprise” (listed with other writings here).

When I was at Cornell, Dick was writing Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power and conducting seminars on war, foreign aid and trade, global warming, and the rise of China.

His research into the last topic is another good example of how he would listen to lots of people as he formulated his views. He studied the Chinese language and got to know Chinese scholars and non-scholars. He even directed this documentary film about a provincial migrant to Beijing.

He also learned to cook delicious Chinese meals, which Karin & I enjoyed during our stay in his house. That was four years ago. I intended, later, to travel to Ithaca for a conference planned in his honor. The pandemic struck; the conference was put on hold. As far as I know, it was never rescheduled.

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I arrived at Cornell in 2005 expecting to focus on metaphysics or something comparably Laputan. Alas, I had a miserable first semester. In Dick’s political philosophy class, too, I was making a fool of myself; but at least I was learning. (Note: It’s not always good when your remarks cause the other graduate students to snigger into their sleeves.) Nevertheless, Dick treated my ideas with greater seriousness than anyone else ever had. I started to treat them more seriously, too.

The next semester, I was surprised when, at a departmental function, Dick impishly asked under whom I wished to write my dissertation. It took me another year to choose him. I wonder if he’d have been so nice about it if he’d known that the project would take more than a decade to complete. He retired the day after I defended the thing.

I used to bump into him at the Cornell Cinema, where he’d make some wry comment. Once, we both happened to come out of Scorsese’s The Departed. Boom, boom, boom, was all he said. His light reading was Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot. He hated lewdness. And greed. But he was willing to give people the benefit of the doubt when they decided that nice clothes and gourmet cooking really would significantly improve their lives. He was committed to stamping out poverty and injustice, but he was no ascetic. He wanted people to be empowered to discover their own meaningful projects and direct their own lives.

He was a good man. I’m still absorbing the lessons he taught me. Above all, I’m grateful for his kindness.

He was an atheist. He used to tell how his wife, who had lost her religious belief, would visit the nuns who had schooled her. They’d ask how her prayer life was going. He liked that about the nuns. I hope non-Catholics won’t mind if I pray for his soul. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.

Peril on the basement stairs!

Daniel, when hungry, points at food jars and rubs his belly. Or else he brings magazines to Karin and shows her pictures of food.

Samuel still fears our living room. But not as much as he used to.

He prefers the basement, though.

We three males nearly died on the stairs today. Both boys have learned to climb up and down, but slowly and with frequent changes of direction. They get into traffic jams and fights. I worry, especially, that Daniel will crash down the stairs, so I pick him up and carry him. He resists. He squirms. It takes all of my effort to keep from dropping him. Today, when he was squirming, I stepped on Samuel; Samuel howled; I tripped; I dropped Daniel; he landed gently on the top stair; he howled. Neither child recovered emotionally for the next hour or so. Eventually, they both went to sleep.

It could have been a scene out of The Pink Panther Strikes Again or The Three Stooges.

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I often sing them this:

June’s poem

“Lochinvar,” by Sir Walter Scott.

Thurber’s drawings can be viewed here (The New Yorker) or here (Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated).

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

O young Lochinvar is come out of the west,

Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;

And save his good broadsword he weapons had none,

He rode all unarm’d, and he rode all alone.

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,

There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.

He staid not for brake, and he stopp’d not for stone,

He swam the Eske river where ford there was none;

But ere he alighted at Netherby gate,

The bride had consented, the gallant came late:

For a laggard in love, and a dastard in war,

Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar.

So boldly he enter’d the Netherby Hall,

Among bride’s-men, and kinsmen, and brothers and all:

Then spoke the bride’s father, his hand on his sword,

(For the poor craven bridegroom said never a word,)

“O come ye in peace here, or come ye in war,

Or to dance at our bridal, young Lord Lochinvar?”

“I long woo’d your daughter, my suit you denied; –

Love swells like the Solway, but ebbs like its tide –

And now I am come, with this lost love of mine,

To lead but one measure, drink one cup of wine.

There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far,

That would gladly be bride to the young Lochinvar.”

The bride kiss’d the goblet: the knight took it up,

He quaff’d off the wine, and he threw down the cup.

She look’d down to blush, and she look’d up to sigh,

With a smile on her lips and a tear in her eye.

He took her soft hand, ere her mother could bar, –

“Now tread we a measure!” said young Lochinvar.

So stately his form, and so lovely her face,

That never a hall such a galliard did grace;

While her mother did fret, and her father did fume,

And the bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume;

And the bride-maidens whisper’d, “’twere better by far

To have match’d our fair cousin with young Lochinvar.”

One touch to her hand, and one word in her ear,

When they reach’d the hall-door, and the charger stood near;

So light to the croupe the fair lady he swung,

So light to the saddle before her he sprung!

“She is won! we are gone, over bank, bush, and scaur;

They’ll have fleet steeds that follow,” quoth young Lochinvar.

There was mounting ’mong Graemes of the Netherby clan;

Forsters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves, they rode and they ran:

There was racing and chasing on Cannobie Lee,

But the lost bride of Netherby ne’er did they see.

So daring in love, and so dauntless in war,

Have ye e’er heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Eat your heart out, Benjamin Braddock …

More sad news about Esmeraldas

Flooding, this time.

Here is a local report. Look for the video …

… which, tragicality aside, may interest readers because it shows what a typical Esmeraldas street looks like – at least, inland, away from the beach (which is now crammed with hotels, restaurants, etc.). The video shows Esmeraldas as I remember it.

In my time, the flooding was never this bad.

(The street in the video is actually a little south of the city limit.)

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After I read about the disaster, I went to Google Maps and found the lot where I used to live. It’d been vacant for some years. Now it has chain store on it – a Starbucks-like coffeeshop. That kind of store didn’t used to exist in my hometown.

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These have been tricky days for Samuel, who has decided that the living room is to be feared and avoided whether the curtains are open or closed. He’s been spending many hours in the basement. I’ve taken him outside, on walks – without incident – so his problem isn’t agoraphobia. He just fears the living room.

What about it, exactly, has been frightening him? The floor fan, perhaps. I took it to the basement.

Tonight, Samuel is watching TV in the living room. So far, so good.

Fantasy reading

I’m reading a kind of fantasy novel, or at least a fantastical novel: How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup, an underdog tale by J.L. Carr (who also wrote A Month in the Country). Today, in real life, the FA Cup final was disputed between two quintessential non-underdogs: Manchester City and Manchester United. The Citizens won. They scored the first goal after just fifteen seconds.

I’m also reading “fantasy proper”: Harry Potter, no. 4. I kept my promise to Karin, which was to read the first two novels, and then I decided to finish the series. If I’d known that they’re mystery novels, I would have read them sooner.

We’re also viewing the movies. Tonight we finished Chamber of Secrets (or, as I like to call it, Chamber of Toilets). It took three days to watch because we kept having to pause it, what with all the noise of Samuel’s crying out how he loves Harry, Hagrid, etc., and his loudly murmuring magical gibberish.

He’s going through a curious phase. He wants the living room curtains to stay closed. If I bring the street into view, he goes to his room and lies on his bed, in the dark. He might be onto something. Today we got junk mail with a photo of our house printed on the envelope.

He’s particularly afraid of the ice-cream truck. He might be onto something there, too.

P.S. As a family, we’re reading The Princess and the Goblin.

This is not a genre in which I especially like to read, but somehow I’ve already created a fantasy reading schedule for the next two years.