Hazel Ying Lee

The Preposterously Dauntless Historical Figure of the Week


I love love LOVE this photo. Aviator hat on. Shit eating grin on her face. Cigarette dangling from her hand. She sits on the wing of a plane in one of those old fashioned balloon looking shorts and a pair of boots that just must be too big for her. That, my friends... is a plucky heroine. That, my friends, is a certain Hazel Ying Lee, World War II WASP Aviatrix.


Seriously, could I find me an aviator hat for Halloween? How awesome would that be?

Hazel grew up in Portland, Oregon. Not quite the espresso-sipping philosophy-reading it is today, the only job she could get as a Chinese American once she left school was as an elevator operator. But hey, at least she was a citizen by way of being born in the US, something that naturalized immigrants from China or anywhere else in that whole not so white region weren't allowed to become...by federal law.

Must have been boring to go from tomboy athlete high-schooler to elevator operator at a department store.

Then, when she was 20, Hazel Ying Lee learned how to fly. She was one of the first Chinese American women to earn her pilot's license when she passed her test in 1932. At this time, less than 1% of pilots in the US were women, but she knew from the first time she was in a plane that she wanted to be a pilot.

She went to China a year later and sought to join their air force. But you know, so what they needed pilots? So what Japan had just invaded part of their country under pretext of a suspiciously convenient act of sabotage against a Japanese railroad installed a puppet government? Women? Too erratic to be combat pilots. Sorry, honey.

So Hazel stayed in Canton, China working a deskjob and flying chartered private flights while one of her brothers and her husband joined the Chinese Air Force. She was still there in 1937 when Japan quit being cute with it and full-on invaded China. She stayed in Canton for a while longer, helping with civilian air-raids, then fled back to the US via Hong Kong.

Although I absolutely know in my heart of hearts that World War II was a horribly devastating time, why does so much of it lend itself to tragic romantic fantasy? I can see her coming to the decision that if they won't let her fight in this war, she's by god not going to die from some air-raid bomb when she should by all rights be dropping bombs herself. A dodgy stowaway sequence later and she's on the midnight plane from Hong Kong back to the West Coast, under constant threat of death from enemy anti-aircraft fire. This being 1938, there's probably a dramatically flapping scarf and some lipstick involved.

Hazel spent the next few years in New York buying and shipping wartime supplies to the Chinese government. And for a while, that was the best way for her to fight her war...until Pearl Harbor that is. Until the years of losing pilots and desperately needing to free up more pilots from their non-combat military roles to join the fight led the US Army to start entertaining a crazy notion brought forth to them by pilot Jacqueline Cochran.

To digress a bit, Jacqueline Cochran was total badass in her own right. She won the prestigious Bendix Race, which was an air-race across the country, set a transcontinental speed record (notice that there is no "for women" after that.) She was the first woman to fly across the ocean, the first woman to break the sound barrier and the first woman to fly a bomber across the ocean. And in that last one, came the idea that she brought to the army.

See, Jackie Cochran had flown that Lockheed across the Atlantic as part of the Wings for Britain program which ferried American-built aircraft to besieged England. While there, she joined the RAF and recruited women across Europe to join the RAF's non-combat airforce division. So the idea comes to her...why should women only be given this opportunity to help with wartime effort in England?

Cheeky wench starts lobbying with Eleanor Roosevelt to help her create a non-combat civilian aviation division for women in the US. This persuasion starts in September of 1940, mind you, before the US is even in the war. There was a lot of resistance to the idea but as pilot resources started to wear thin, first came the WAFS (Womens Auxiliary Ferry Squadron) to fly airplanes from factory to airbase and then Jacqueline got her wish in 1943 when the Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) division was started.

Hazel Ying Lee seized this opportunity and a decade after the Chinese army told her women were too erratic to fly in the air force, she was accepted into the WASP program, one of the 1,074 to pass training and join out of 25,000 female pilots who applied.

WASP did not enter combat which isn't to say their job wasn't dangerous. 38 ended up dying by the end of the program, and there were many emergency landings. One of their primary duties was to fly planes from the factory to a way station where it would then be flown by combat pilots to battleships or to give to allies. This was the first time that many of these planes were flown, and some didn't leave the assembly line without their flaws.

Another duty was to fly planes that towed targets for practice in combat training. That's probably not a good day.

Hazel was part of a select group within this program that learned to fly pursuit, i.e. to be able to fly the fastest, highest powered fighters the United States was producing, even if only from Buffalo, New York to North Dakota. Out of the thousand odd women in the program, only 134 were trained to fly these planes.

And did I mention that she did it in style? Hazel used to label the planes she flew and those of others with Chinese characters scrawled in lipstick on the tail. When there was a mission she was on that involved staying overnight in a city, her fellow pilots tried to get assigned with her, because even in the some airstrip town in the middle of nowhere, she could find a Chinese restaurant, make friends with the kitchen, and order in rapid Cantonese, or hell, help them cook it herself. One article I read said that some of her fellow pilots still had cartoons of her running around playing cook.

Oh and there was the time some farmer thought she was part of a Japanese invasion and held her back at pitchfork point after she'd had to make an emergency landing in his field. One version of the story has her talking him down and then getting fed up and flat out commanding him to drop his pitchfork. Another has his son realizing that a WASP from the nearby military base had a mishap and called the base after which his father calmed down enough to put down the pitchfork. I kind of like the latter one, just getting a mental picture of Hazel and the farmer's son exchanging shrugs and rolled eyes with some paranoid pitchfork holding old man in between them, desperate to believe he can repel an invasion with the power of agriculture.

But, as any viewer of WWII movies can tell you, one cannot engage in those kind of happy go lucky shenanigans for long and expect to last as long as the upright citizens of this world.

On Thanksgiving morning, 1944, Hazel was approaching the airport in Great Falls, North Dakota after being delayed in Fargo due to weather for several days. She was flying a P-63, as was another pilot who had a broken radio. She was cleared by the tower to land over the radio at the same time that he was by way of light signals. As they both headed in, the tower realized what was going to happen and radioed them both to pull up. But only Hazel had an operating radio so when she pulled up and the other pilot didn't, she crashed right into his plane.

The other pilot survived with minor images, but Hazel died from burns sustained in the crash two days later.

Her family learned of her death, and then of her brother Victor's on the battlefield in France within days of each other. Just to make it all better the cemetery in Portland didn't want to let them be buried in the plot that the Lees had selected...because the plot was in the white section of the cemetery.

One really shameful to contemplate court battle later (really? they're veterans for chrissakes!) and Victor and Hazel were laid to rest in Portland.

On a silver lining note, the P-63, the plane that Hazel and her fellow WASP members spent many days and nights flying from Buffalo to North Dakota was used in the liberation of Berlin, and also when the Soviets liberated Northeastern China. So, air force or no, Hazel got to play at least a bit of a role.

It just boggles me that this isn't the sort of thing that I learned about in history class. It paints a more interesting and comprehensive picture of just how enveloping this conflict was. Plus...labeling aircraft in lipstick in Chinese? Fucking Punk Rock is what that is.

Hmm...does this count as ironic?

So yeah, just read the other day that gunpowder was discovered by a monk alchemist who was trying to make an elixir of immortality. That's like if you were trying to cure the common cold and then accidentally started the bubonic plague.

Almost seems like a punishment doesn't it?

"You arrogant bastard, trying to have eternal life, ho ho, how about a substance that will make sudden violent death that much easier. Take that!"

We are strange creatures.

The Yakuza

Upon arriving back in Japan, after 20 years back in The States, Mitchum's Harry Kilmer takes a look out his friend's window at the towering skyscraper that was nothing like what he'd seen in the city as a GI back in the late 40s.

"Everywhere I look, I can't recognize a thing."
"It's still there." his friend tells him.

Harry's there to help out a friend whose daughter has been kidnapped by the Yakuza. He's getting the help of his old flame's brother, Ken, a man who hates Harry, but owes him. And he will help him out of giri, obligation, for a debt he can never repay.

Things get more complicated from there.

Mitchum is still a man not to screw with, even with salt and pepper hair and a bit of a gut. And those sad heavy lidded eyes just get sadder with age, lending creedence to the unspoken melancholy in the meeting between him and his old girlfriend. Sure it's a film noir convention, the hero meets with the woman who broke his heart all those years ago. But when all those years can be measured in decades, and both of the couple look like they've lived it, that's gut wrenching on a different level.

I don't want to say too much, and ruin it, but a whole lot of people aren't who they seem to be, and no one comes out clean. But then, them's the rules for noir, even if you're in Japan, and it's a martial arts flick too.

That's right. Robert Mitchum. In a martial-arts movie. With swords and shit. Don't worry, he's still guns a blazing.

The kitana battle at the end, fuck if it don't put an asterisk on Kill Bill.

Two More Wildly Divergent 70s Movies

Last week I watched Assault on Precinct 13, and finally got around to watching The Conformist. Guess the 70s coin has more than one side, but there's style enough for both.

I could probably go on for pages about how goddamn awesome Assault on Precinct 13 is, but since I went in knowing that, I guess it's kind of cheating to pretend I went out and experienced something new in order to write a blog post about it.

So I'll just leave it as this. Napoleon Wilson? Awesome. And they gave him a hell of a romantic foil in Leigh, smoker's voice, tough as nails, blood that runs cool in a firefight. She's the original Tulip O'Hare. Lt. Bishop? I'm going to have to find a place to surreptitiously put in that name somewheres in my zombie comic.

So yeah, style to spare and probably one of the most shocking 'I can't believe that's actually in a movie' deaths in the history of mainstream film.

The Conformist is also all about style. A couple of dozen different lighting styles and locations, each meant to evoke a different mood. A protagonist that is a total enigma for most of it, leaving you speculating on how he really feels about the decisions that he is making in order to conform to a so-called normal life.

Plus it's so damn sad. No one is happy, and anyone who scrabbles to get themselves a little breathing room and not confirm is in for it. A really intense case study in how institutions like fascism can thrive because there are always enough people who, in their unhappiness, will do anything to have something to fight for and some authority figure who will approve of them for doing so.

Not that it's that simple and trite. It's far more personal than political. But hell of a fine looking movie on top of that.

Boston Corbett

Preposterous Historical Figure of the Week
Boston Corbett

When it comes to presidential assassins and attempted assassins, we have their descriptions already in mind. The presidential assassin is a loner and outcast like Lee Harvey Oswald who couldn't even fit in with the Communists, a possibly mentally ill fanatic like Charles Guiteau, Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley, or a foreign radical like Leon Czolgosz or Giuseppe Zangara.

As for the people who catch up with these villains or prevent the deed, they are dashing men, filled with passion and derring do, and possibly mustachioed.

These presidential assassination archetypes…they didn’t start with the first presidential assassination, Lincoln's. In fact, you might say they started out the reverse.

In all the villainization that John Wilkes Booth has undergone over the years (and oh yes, deservedly so), it's easy to forget who he was before he became America's Judas. The man was a famous actor, and the brother and son of a famous actor as well, and quite the ladies man, dying with five women's portraits in his pocket. It'd be like if a young Jeff Bridges had decided to off the president. Booth likely used the shelter that this fame gave him in order to be a Confederate smuggler and spy during the war, though he never served in the army.

His assassination of the president was absolutely premeditated, due to his Southern nationalism, and the product of typical human egomania rather than any neurological disease or loose screw. He went about his assassination of the president and his flight from justice with an actor's flair for drama. He shot Lincoln on a balcony in Ford's Theater during a laugh line in the play, jumped down to the stage yelling "Sic Semper Tyrannis" but landed badly and broke his leg. He managed to escape and was on the run from the law for eleven days, penning several hilariously pathetic diary entries along the way bitching about the way he was being painted not as a hero but as a common killer.

But the law caught up with him at the Garrett family's tobacco shed in Virginia. Booth's accomplice gave himself up, but Booth remained inside the shed, even as it was set ablaze. Then a shot rang out, finding Booth through a sizable crack in the side of the shed. Booth staggered out of flaming shed, mortally wounded. His last request was for the people present to "Tell my mother I died for my country." Then he reportedly stared at his failing hands, muttered "Useless, useless" and died with the break of dawn.

What a drama queen.

Booth's killer, Boston Corbett had fired without orders, so he was placed under arrest as a formality. Some within the government and public had wanted Booth to be brought to trial so he could be executed publicly and properly. Corbett's stated reasons for shooting Booth varied. Once he told it as a matter of self defense, that Booth had raised his pistol and he was only defending his own life and the lives of the other men. He said at another point that not even Booth deserved to be burned to death like that. But judging by the man's prior history, and the course his life took afterwards, I tend to think his most honest version was when he claimed that God had told him to shoot Booth.

Corbett testified:"When the assassin lay at my feet, a wounded man, and I saw the bullet had taken effect about an inch back of the ear, and I remembered that Mr. Lincoln was wounded about the same part of the head, I said: 'What a God we have…God avenged Abraham Lincoln.'”

You see, Corbett saw himself as a rather dedicated servant of his Lord. He was born Thomas Corbett in England and came over as a child, making his living as a hatter when he was old enough. Anyone who has ever heard how Lewis Carroll came up with the idea of a Mad Hatter just might see where this is going, as mercury exposure can have a disastrous way with the mind. He wound up in Boston and this is where he was saved, so he rechristened himself after the city where he had found his Lord. He grew his hair long because that's how Jesus had worn his hair. He upheld the principles of the church in the face of opposition, even getting tossed in the guardhouse while serving in the Union army for reprimanding his superior for taking the Lord's name in vain, and went there cheerfully.

Oh yes, and then there's the time that he became a eunuch to live according to the Bible...by his own hand. Boston's wife had died in childbirth, and he never remarried. As the story was told by a contemporary who claimed to have known the man put it, one day while he was leaving a prayer meeting...

"He was accosted by two young women who sought unsuccessfully to inveigle him from the path of virtue. Desiring to have no inclinations in that direction (as he said "to be holy"), he proceeded to self-castration, for which he was treated in the Massachusetts General Hospital, from July 16 to August 18, 1858."

That's right. His wife died, and to avoid the lure of prostitutes, he castrated himself with a pair of scissors. In some reports of the incident, he came back down from his room, ate a hearty meal and went to another prayer meeting before seeking medical attention. In particularly lurid version of the tale that I found, the pair of bloody scissors was left in the Bible he was reading for guidance, holding it open to the motivating passage, Matthew 5:29 : "And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell."

Yup, so apparently you don't need much by way of a member to take down John Wilkes Booth.

Corbett's time in custody was a formality, considering that he'd probably shortened Booth's life about a week and a half, and it wasn't like those grieving Lincoln didn't want someone to rally around. Secretary of War Stanton proclaimed him a patriot and had him released.

Former Andersonville prisoner, current presidential avenger Boston Corbett found himself suddenly famous, posing for photographs, being pestered to make speeches, getting offered thousands of dollars for the pistol that had killed Booth. He didn't waste any chances to use his fame to sermonize and try to win souls, as the years wore on, his fame took a darker turn.

Doesn't he just radiate sanity?

He had trouble collecting his reward money and wound up only getting 1,653.95 of it, his split of the reward money that he had to split with all the other men that had been with him, as he'd shot Booth without orders, and the government was still a little miffed about that. Still a pretty big sum for the day, but a fraction of what the pistol that had killed Booth would have got him if he'd gone back on his decision not to sell it because "it was government property." Trouble was, his admirers had grown tired of trying to buy it off him, and someone stole it.

Also, it must be remembered here that Booth hadn't acted in a vacuum, that there were plenty who would have taken a shot at the president if he'd failed, and they weren't quite as taken with the austere long haired, wild-eyed Union soldier who'd shot Booth down like a dog. He began to get hate mail that said things like
"HELL, September 1, 1874
Boston Corbett: Nemesis is on your path.
J.Wilkes Booth"

Several newspapers printed the erroneous story that he'd been murdered in Baltimore and he considered it a portent of disaster. Receiving daily death threats would have been tough for a man with a wholly intact mind, and Boston Corbett didn't quite have that. Admirers and autograph-seekers didn't come 'round quite as often anymore after Corbett started greeting them with a drawn pistol, a frisking and heavy questioning. He was arrested and courtmartialed for pulling a gun on another sergeant while at a military stable and reprimanded.

Though I can't believe that he could have found much appreciation in the thought, Corbett was now feeling persecuted, pursued and conspired against, much like the man he'd killed to gain his fame. He got his discharge and took his reward money and got the hell out of the limelight, moving to Concordia, Kansas in 1878.

He got himself a homestead, and was much in demand in the area as a revival preacher. I don't know if it was his infamous past that people came for, or what was probably some top-notch fire and brimstone rhetoric. He'd still confide to people that he was sure that Booth's friends were conspiring against him.

There's also this amazing anecdote that seems almost beneath him. The town's young people would play ball by his homestead, and sometimes these games would fall on Sundays, which you can imagine would infuriate him. I feel bad for the guy, I really do, a desperately paranoid mentally ill man, who only got cracked up worse upon receiving fame instead of any sort of treatment. But the thought of him as the cranky old man who wants to chase kids off his lawn for playing ball on Sunday just kills me. The way that he did this by driving them away screaming that it was Jehovah's command, is a little less quaint.

When the ballplayers complained to the magistrate and had Corbett brought before the court to tell his side, things went a little more out of lovable crankpot territory. He told the judge and jury that they were in league with the devil, and must disperse. As he'd pulled out his revolver, they were happy to oblige. So he left and rode back home.

Apparently in 1887 in Kansas these sorts of actions qualify one for a role in government, and some upstanding citizen got the idea that they should reward the man who'd shot Booth with a civil service position. Boston Corbett was nominated and ran unopposed for the position of assistant doorkeeper of the Kansas State Legislature. According to an account of this questionable decision that I found in a history of Kansas "one member who knew Boston was heard to remark that the legislature would be in luck if Corbett didn’t get a notion in his head that he was called by the Lord to kill off a few lawmakers before the session ended."

It's nice to get a little confirmation that these people knew that Boston's career as assistant doorkeeper wasn't likely to last a great many years and end in graceful retirement, since it seems like it should be blindingly obvious. He didn't last a year before becoming convinced that some of these legislators were in league of the devil, as they were known to curse. He drew his revolver, and had himself a bit of a standoff until many police and deputies managed to overpower him.

He was brought before a judge who had him committed. But Corbett escaped the asylum in 1888 due to a young boy leaving his horse tied up too near to the hospital grounds, the 19th century equivalent of an unlocked car with keys in the ignition. Corbett rode away and left the horse tied up with a note to return it to its owner. He stayed with an old Andersonville buddy in Neodesha, KS, then left, claiming that he was sick and tired of this sort of treatment and was lighting out for Mexico.

There's no kind of confirmed word for him after that. Some people say he returned to East Coast and became a peddlar. Some say he became a hermit in Minnesota and died in the Great Hinckley fire. But Enid, Oklahoma thinks they are Boston Corbett's burial spot.

Interestingly enough Enid, OK is also the origin point of the John Wilkes Booth mummy. In Granbury, TX in 1873, a salesman named John St. Helen "confessed" on what he thought was his deathbed to lawyer Finis L. Bates, that he was John Wilkes Booth. St Helen then recovered from his illness and left town. Thirty years later in Enid, Oklahoma, David E. George , a local drunken house painter was also known to confess to being John Wilkes Booth. One day he bought a small dose of strychnine from one apothecary, then another dose from another apothecary, and mixed them into a suicidal dose in his hotel room.

Finis L. Bates showed up to view the body, identified it as John St. Helen, and parlayed into a lucrative career as the author books about the dark conspiracy behind Lincoln's death, and Booth's escape. He took the embalmed body with him on his speaking tour for his book, bringing this Booth mummy to the World's Fair in 1904. The mummy made the rounds in carnivals and sideshows until it disappeared sometime in the 70s.

Anything I looked into on whether Corbett had really died in Enid, Oklahoma eventually led back to this, and no other sort of evidence, so I'm wondering if the two men's fates just got so entwined together in people's minds that the Booth impostor's deathplace was assumed to be the last resting place of Boston Corbett as well. Or maybe Finis L. Bates started the rumor in order to prop up the idea that this mummy was Booth, maybe eventually planning to plant a story that Booth's supposed killer had recognized the mummy. Or hell, maybe the Enid Okies just wanted to drum up some kind of interest in the place.

A theory that I found in some guy's blog that I like but I can't begin to believe is that the Booth mummy is actually Boston Corbett, and in the final throes of his madness he began to believe that he was Booth. After all, for years Corbett had been paranoid that Booth's friends would kill him. He'd been obsessing over the man that he'd killed, and seeing the ways that this action would someday lead to his own end. What if, in a Hitchcockian turn of events, his mind scrambled to the point that he thought he was actually this man he was fixated with, and confessed it to Finis. L. Bates, and the good townspeople of Enid, Oklahoma? Wouldn't that be a hell of a yarn?

Sorry, monsigneur, that dog won't hunt. I want to think that Boston Corbett found some nice place in Mexico where no one knew him, and he farmed for a while, and had some peace and quiet in his twilight years. And that hopefully he never had to brandish a revolver in the name of his Lord again.

However he ended up, Boston Corbett sure is a neglected and weirdass footnote in the Lincoln assassination tale.

For Boston Corbett, I play the Gories. Because it seems appropriately Western, ominous and mad.

Leech Smuggling for Dummies.

One of the neat things that history teaches me over and over is that things haven't been how they are for very long, all things considered.

Take for instance, medicine. It may seem like we're a long long way out of the dark ages, but it's not quite as far as you'd like to think. Doctors have only been encouraged to wash their hands before an operation for about 160 years.

It's kind of amazing that we went from some Hungarian doctor noticing that mothers giving birth didn't die of childbed fever as often when the doctor WASHED HIS HANDS BEFORE GOING NEAR THEIR LADY PARTS in 1847 to having low-level antiseptics readily available on every street corner in about a century and a half. A real testament to how quickly humans can move to make new technology and revolutionize once the creative scientific spark has been ignited.

Yeah, except for the fact that this Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, was roundly ridiculed for this theory by the rest of the medical community. Guess they weren't too happy at the suggestion that they'd spent their entire career carelessly offing patients because they were too harried to use a little chlorinated water on their hands between autopsies and deliveries. He was eventually committed while his findings laid there ignored for another few decades.

People aren't always as willing to give up their old ideas of what is effective as we'd all like to think. For centuries, European physicians considered the draining of blood to be an effective treatment of all manner of illnesses, and the leech to be the best way to drain the blood. In fact, leech was term used for doctor in medieval times. The leech has long been an endangered species in Europe because of overexploitation of it as a medical resource. When it became rare, this actually created a black market for it. There were leech smugglers. Think of THAT job description. Surely this was in the 16 or 1700s right?

Nope, mid 19th century. Darwin's writing the Origin of Species, the transatlantic telegraph is being laid, Reuters is just starting out, and people are paying top dollar to use contraband leeches to cure what ails 'em.

An article I found from an 1850s British periodical said a million and a half were still imported each year, and that was after they were a scarce resource. Only a few decades earlier, France was importing something to the tune of 42 million, and America 30 million. Why the reason for the sudden drop (to let's face it, still a fascinatingly high number)? Was it because the demand had dropped? Nope, it was because nations like Hungary and Russia had realized that their leech resources were dwindling and they needed to start conserving them.

So leech farming and leech smuggling began to make their ways as professions. Before that leech collecting was done by going into a pond, stirring it up with poles and then skimming up the leeches that had come up to feed. Or sometimes by angling with a bit of meat or leather and then collecting the leeches that came up for a meal. But those days ended, spawning a mournful Wordsworth poem about the dying trade and a crisis of resources.

One article I found described the process by which French traders came by their illegal leeches. The descriptions of the lengths that people went to importing this snake oil solution are pretty humbling. They would gather them "by the hundred weight", dry them up and put them in bags where they rolled themselves into a large ball and went into a torpid state. Yes, I am picturing both Night of the Creeps and Slither right now.

Then these leeches were put them into wagons. They had fresh horses ready for them at different villages along the way. Occasionally there were pit stops where they'd empty the leeches into a pond to refresh them and sort out the ones that had died along the way. If the weather was too hot or too cold, they could lose a good part of their cargo.

Then when they got to the border past which exportation was forbidden, the leeches would be smuggled in among small parcels.

I found a bit about a Spanish smuggling that elaborated on what these small parcels might be, when the author asked the smuggler just where the devil the leeches he was offering to sell were, the smuggler responded by "unstrapping an enormous handkerchief which was swathed round his waist next the skin. The handkerchief was streaming with water to keep the leeches alive, and had at least two thousand coiled within its folds."

Okay. Ew.

Once they got these leeches into the country, most were sold, but some were put in leech farming ponds to try to revive the dying population. Considering they're still endangered today, this didn't go so well. Particularly disgusting is that they'd sometimes drive ailing livestock into the lake to let their cash crops of leeches have something to feed on. Even nastier is in the article I read from the time describing the practice, the author objected to it, not because it was cruel to these poor workhorses, but because it would make the leeches less effective - "it being a rule that a leech, once gorged with blood loses much of his natural eagerness for it, and is ever afterwards slow to bite. The leech dealers can tell at a glance those thus fed, of whatever species they may be, because the body of a virgin leech which has never tasted blood has a rough granulated and clean surface, while that of one which has been fed is smooth and slimy."

Again. Ew.

Not that leeches don't have their uses, hell they're just starting to be used again in microsurgery for their circulation increasing and anaesthetic properties, but they aren't a catch-all fix.

Kind of amazing that people went to all that trouble to get these little buggers for purposes they weren't suited for. Smuggling them in using methods that could squander much of what they were bringing over and disregarding the fact that they could be depriving future generations of the ability to get their blood sucked properly. Just clambering for more while ignoring all signs that this thing they were seeking so fiercely was doing more harm than good, just because it was the way things had always been done. While in the background, people looking to practice more effective medicine were maligned and underfunded.

Humbling, isn't it?

Oh also, this one guy got in the World's Fair for thinking leeches could predict the weather. Many workhorses may have died so that he could build a Merry Go Round.

And on that note, I can only leave you with Weird Al.

Night Moves

Gene Hackman was a hell of an everyman back in the day. As private eye Harry Moseby, he's smart sure, but not as smart as he thinks he is, and there's this palpable underlying vulnerability that in no way interferes with his ability to play the tough guy.

This movie is great, and so fucking BLEAK! Seriously, the last few minutes are just a gut punch of greed and futility and betrayal.

And The Wire cribbed that great line about the football game from this movie. Shame on you, Prezbo. Makes sense though, I think this is one of the first portrayals of the private eye that peels aside the trappings and style, and shows what's underneath someone with that sort of drive. I mean, you probably don't devote your life to hunting down other people's secrets, and see the truth as something that can be meticulously assembled from unearthed clues, strictly for good and noble reasons. Most likely it's because you're trying to work through (or avoid working through) your own stuff. Twenty-five years later, we got ourselves McNulty.

Plus, hats off to the ladies. As much as I looove the film noir genre, half the time the femme fatale and the good woman the anti-hero wants to want are just so black and white with no nuance between the two. This time around, each of them has a bit of good and evil to them. It's so awesome and rare to see a love triangle onscreen where I don't know from moment one which one I'm supposed to want the protagonist to choose.

Damn this is a good one. Yay for the 70s!

On the jukebox, John Lennon: I Found Out and Mother. The first is a bit obvious for a private eye thing, but I love this song. The second, well, I may have been a little too influenced by the essay I read after seeing this movie that goes into all these Freudian overtones that are supposedly present in the behavior of Harry Moseby who grew up parentless and abandoned. Some of them are there for certain, but I get a little suspicious of overdissection. Anyway the uncomprehending despair in this song kind of sums up a lot of what you see on his face in the last few minutes.

Grooveshark won't find it, so I can't make my pretty little widget to put here, but:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTkc1aKAVYY&ob=av2e
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGYX4e4JfG4&feature=related

Get This Over With, I Tee Off in an Hour or What Happens When You Go to Your Minor Citation Court Date

So yeah, I picked this song, and that title because it sums up the look on the face of the guy behind the bench when I was at court this afternoon. And you know, pretty much everyone else in the courtroom too. This time I wasn't on jury duty, and he wasn't a judge, he was a "Judicial Hearing Officer." You don't get to keep a shred of paper from the process so I might be a little off on that.

This is where you end up when a police officer gives you that little pink slip after you've been sighted doing something minorly stupid or illegal, like double-parking, public urination, having a disorderly conduct, or any number of silly things and you get a court date instead a mail-in form to pay your fine.

Open container was a pretty popular citation, judging by the three or four people I heard ask one of the police supervising the line where they could just pay the $25. And a hell of a line too because only one window was open.

Me? Littering. Which was a rather uncolorful way of putting it rather than "trying to dispose of evidence of open container in an obvious and incredibly stupid manner." The cop had told me “That was the stupidest thing you could have done.”

Waiting was an effective way of keeping me nervous. I’d had a stomach ache since last night when I dropped a beer bottle and was certain it was an omen. This time was by mistake (and erm, not thrown) and as I picked my destroyed Newcastle bottle off the floor, I’d had the flash of "oh shit, the last time I did that, tomorrow it might end up costing me $50-400."

At the window, they check and see if you’re scheduled for the day, then you get a piece of paper that has the courtroom you’re supposed to go to on it. You head in with all the other people waiting to hear their name called. In lieu of a jury trial, you get your case heard by only a judicial hearing officer.

I had a good twenty people ahead of me so I got a sense of how it was going to go down. They call your name, and you stand up in front of the judicial hearing officer and a baliff hands him a photostat of the police officer's version of your violation. To the right of you is your court appointed attorney and I just bet that this is the duty you get when you piss someone off. Because basically his job seems to be, when the judicial hearing officer says what the penalty will be if you plead guilty, he repeats it back to you.

I wasn't too clear on what happened if you plead not guilty. Maybe it meant you got a court date set for an actual trial. Or maybe it meant that the judicial hearing officer would just decide whether or not you were guilty based on whatever argument you had against it. The people who plead not guilty went to the back of the courtroom to wait until everyone else from that batch was processed.

I was a huge wuss, and just wanted to get it over with, plus, hell, I was guilty, so I took the $25 fine and plead guilty.

I've just always been gutless as a gambler. Sure there was a chance that right then I could have just made up some bullshit, and the cop not being there, it would be scribblings in a notebook vs. my story. Then I would have saved $25.

But I felt like there was also a chance that pleading not guilty meant that I'd get some court date, it would drag out and if the cop did show up, I had no leg to stand on short of perjury. At which point I’m sure that if I were convicted by jury, they’d be so annoyed I put them through it that I’d get the max end of the fine, and I just didn’t feel willing to maybe pay $400 because I tried to save $25.

There's probably a really good social experiment in there. See how much people are willing to pay as a default fine. If the conditions are either to pay $X now and know that that's all you'll have to pay or enter into a contest where there's a 60 or 70% chance you'll have to pay nothing but a 30-40% you'll have to pay five or six times X dollars. I wonder how high X would have to be for most people to pick the contest.

A more paranoid person than me would see all these petty fines as just a source of revolving door revenue for the City of New York. They don’t really explain to people exactly what rights they have when contesting these tickets. The video you watch when you're standing in line pretty much just tells you which courtroom to go to and the names for the people in the court with you. I bet lots of people, myself sadly included, are far more willing to fork over some smaller sum if the law says that they could charge us much more for our outdoor summer brews and being seen by a cop while acting stupid. I wonder what the stat is for how often citations are contested. Or how often there's a conviction when people contest them.

After all, if I'd contested my ticket, it isn't like they'd bring out twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against me. (Thanks, Arlo) It's probably a case where the cop comes in if he's not doing something that day and his boss tells him to and tells his recollection of events. At best. Then either the jury acquits and NYC loses some court costs, or it convicts and the judge, annoyed at wasting his time on Johnny Mack's drinking problem tosses him a heavy fine.

But you know, maybe it is a quality of life thing. Because sure, we don’t want to live in a New York City where people publicly urinate and drink, and act disorderly with impunity. Oh, wait. That is the New York City we live in.

Just another mundane hustle. This is why I can't watch Law and Order.

Vasili Arkhipov

Preposterously Awesome Historical Figure of the Week

Yeah, I was going to do these on Mondays, but then Labor Day got a little, well, labored. What Dylan Moran said about vodka is totally true. It's sneaky. One minute you're wondering why you're bothering drinking it, and then the next minute you're wondering where you are and how you got there. Wrestled with an adorable big puppy chocolate lab named Teddy, had some veggie burgers, and was in a very very good mood.

On to the Preposterously Awesome Historical Figure of the Week: Vasili Arkhipov.

There’s a guy whose name you probably don’t even know whose actions are the reason you exist, and why the last 45 years of history were able to happen in anything other than a smoking gray rubble pit where philosophical debate consisted of whether or not the sun was ever going to come out again. The director of the National Service Archive said it best, "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world".

Head on back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. You probably already know it as the time the world almost ended, and you’re right. In a way far more concrete than that the two world leaders sitting on enough nukes to end life as we know it were powerful pissed at each other. Even throw on the fact that they were receiving daily memos from their peons saying “think if we nuke first we can still save the breadbasket” and ludicrous shit like that. Plus a tinpot dictator was about to be sitting on some of these nukes himself, and anarchist college students, listen up because your beloved Che was firmly of the “nuke the shit out of the imperialists” camp and if he’d gotten his way none of you would probably exist.

But none of this is quite as scary as the explicit fact the world came to within one key turn on a nuclear sub away from a Soviet first strike.

In a nutshell, the Cuban Missile Crisis happened because the United States had put nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. The Russians did not like this, Fidel offered to help them out with a bit of tit for tat and let them put missiles in his country. The United States did not like this. And so started mutual threats, hostility, and the military equivalent of much forehead flicking.

But the argument was almost entirely about saving face rather than changing the game back to one that benefited either nation’s survival in case of nuclear war. Both countries had subs with nuclear missiles just sitting out there in the ocean within striking distance of the other’s major cities. They weren’t about to get in a tizzy telling each other to move those, because there was no way they would trust that the other side had, plus they weren’t about to move the ones they had placed.

It very nearly got proved to everyone that nukes on subs could be every bit as dangerous as the ones that Fidel was having the Soviets drill silos for.

There was a Soviet Foxtrot submarine class B-59 encircled by American destroyers and an aircraft carrier off the coast of Cuba. These ships started dropping practice depth charges, more like hand grenades than actual bombs, down at the sub. The practice depth charges being dropped were meant to be a signal for the sub to take an easterly course, surface, and identify itself. At least that is the message sent to Moscow by the Pentagon as a firm suggestion as to how everyone should conduct themselves in this period of heavily armed terror and paranoia. Though Moscow sent back no message saying they agreed to this, American crews were relayed this tactic as if it was a mutually agreed upon rule. The crew of the Soviet B-59 were not relayed these instructions, and so saw the fact that they were having explosive devices dropped on them not as a demand to surface, but as an attempt, to you know, hurl explosive devices down at them.

Another thing that the American did not know is that the Soviet submarine had nukes, and that the crew was authorized to use them if the three top officers: the captain, the political officer and the second in command, unanimously agreed upon it.

Once the charges started dropping, the captain, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky thought that this meant that the war had started. He wanted to retaliate with nukes. One report has him screaming “We’re going to blast them now! We will perish ourselves, but we will sink them all! We will not disgrace our Navy!”

The political officer agreed with the captain. 2/3 of the people necessary to start the use of nuclear weapons in the Soviet-US conflict were in agreement that starting a nuclear war without any sort of confirmation from their commanders was a fine idea.

But Vasili Arkhipov, was the voice of reason. Maybe brought up the point that causing armageddon was generally not a good military strategy, who knows what he said, but thankfully it was convincing and he got the Political Officer to agree with him. So the captain didn’t have the unanimity necessary to launch the nuke.

The sub surfaced 15 minutes after JFK sent the message to Khrushchev agreeing to take the missiles out of Turkey (secretly) if Khrushchev took the missiles out of Cuba (publicly.) The message that was the beginning of the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis was being hammered out in Kennedy's office, while unbeknownst to anyone in DC or in the Kremlin, a more important debate was being held in a submarine somewhere on the quarantine line off Florida.

Seriously, what if Vasili’s wife had left him? What if he was having a bad day? What if one of the depth charges had gotten a little close and incited a little more panic in him or knocked him out? Would we all be a fried glowing crisp right now?

Funnily, this was a pretty unknown incident until after the Cold War had ended and Soviet documents were declassified. Then we learned the world came so much closer to coming to an end than we'd ever heard before. It's terrifying to think that there are people out there able to start this whole nuclear train wreck going with the turn of a key because they’re scared, desperate or just plain nuts.

Oh, and on the jukebox? Fugazi, because for whatever reason they seem like they'd be a good soundtrack to nuclear fallout.

I was thinking that the gypsy wasn't lying.

Funny sight? Sand being emptied out of bathing suit pockets on the G train platform. It just looks so incongruous.
It takes a good long while to get to the beach from North Brooklyn, but as soon as you get out from underground and feel that sea breeze, the journey feels entirely justified. Plus there's that neat little preview when you're on the A shuttle and go across the bridge, staring out either side at rippling water, jetties and circling gulls.
The massive hangover I was experiencing tried its damndest to ruin the experience for me. That's what I get for not downing painkillers as soon as I woke up and for not wolfing the food down on the way back from DD instead of waiting until I got on the train. Or, you know, if I will be honest, that's what I get for drinking half a pint of whiskey, stealing various shots of vodka from my roommate, doing another shot of Johnny Walker, then going to a bar and while sipping on my responsible decision to switch to beer, getting two rounds of shots bought for me by my associates, all after eating a pretty meager dinner of a sandwich. But I'd rather believe that if I'd just timed my recovery program properly, I could have avoided throwing up under the boardwalk.
A dip into the ocean did wonders. Not in the least because as me and my buddy Ivan found out after a bit, Hurricane Earl didn't bring in a storm to ruin the day, but he sure as hell brought some bitchin' waves. I haven't been knocked over and knocked about by waves like that in a good long while. The first one really threw me for a loop, and I wound up with a mouthful of seawater, tossed end over end a few times then thrown to the seabed. Awesome. The next couple that pulled me over seemed much less scary, and truth be told, I didn't fight it quite as hard, because it was kind of refreshing.
I was still feeling pretty damn ill, but the rest of the day flew by. Maybe I dozed off, but I felt like I'd only been there like an hour instead of four.
Then I went home and totally betrayed my 70s movies only vow by watching The Great Dictator, because I didn't feel like working with my computer MC Frustrator McCrashy to use Netflix Watch Instantly, and the only 70s movies I could find of my roommate's exceeded the amount of brainpower I had available to understand them.
Never seen it before. In fact I'm not sure I've seen much Chaplin at all. Pretty nuts that it was made in 1940 before the US was in World War II, and that critics of the time thought that the fact that storm troopers were shooting Jews in ghettos was just too overdramatic. Sigh. Even though, Chaplin himself said he wouldn't have made it if he'd known how pervasive the Nazi persecution was.
The totally out-of-character speech by the barber at the end...it's cheesy I know it, but it's just so damn heartfelt. Fucking unconscionable that someone making that speech could get tossed out of this country for being a Communist. Yeah, they don't tell you that stuff when playing Chaplin clips in history class, do they? Being against fascism before it's been deemed appropriate by the American Government is a sure sign of communism.
Now, how best to use my labor day, hmm....

Must be a day with a Y

An argument in the back of a taxi cab. Jessie does not want to let go of her Early American Colonial love story.

"John Smith did not boff Pocahontas. She was 13 when they met."
"That doesn't mean anything, you know how those colonists were. They'd screw anything that moved."
"She may or may not have saved his life but they were just friends."
"Yeah, we all know what THAT means"
"She married another Englishman, John Rolfe then fucked off to Blighty to go die of smallpox. Not John Smith."

Lucy cuts the argument off by finding a clip of Colors of the Wind on her blackberry, starting a singalong in the back of the cab. "How has Kate Bush not covered this song?" she wonders.

My attempted initiation into the Jersey Shore earlier that night had failed because the sound wasn't working at the diner, but I got the gist. Drinks and text supervision at Union Hall where a guido scolds Jessie for staring at his shirt too long trying to figure out what it said. "I see you. Staring at my tits. I'm not just a piece of meat you know!"

And on that note...it's time to cab it north. Much soul searching at the local pub. Think I agreed to take the GRE. Not sure how I feel about that.

Today's jukebox selection - maybe something modern for damn once. I know I tend to leave modern music out of my diet. Florence and The Machines. Just found them today on a whim. The first song is MTV Britpop style junk, I know it, and just might endorse dating abuse. However I can't ignore that I listened it about three times in a row first time I heard it. Damn I am a sucker for fuzzed out fast-paced rock and roll, there are few questionable messages that it can't gloss over. Wikipedia says that it's in Jennifer's Body, probably why I recognized it. God, it may have been flawed, but that movie's existence makes me so very happy. The second one is evil and creepy. Two qualities I just can't resist in a song. The other stuff of hers I found I just couldn't get into though.




Off to find Friday Night!

Superfly

It's 70s September, baby! This month I'm going to watch 70s movies near exclusively. Preferably ones set in New York. Why? Because it just might be one of the best decades of movie making.

Censorship was crumbling, but violence, drug use, and sex in movies hadn't become passe yet. You can feel the filmmakers' eagerness to be able to finally show these realities onscreen instead of just implying it. There's this gritty honesty to it.

Plus good Jesus, the music? The anti-heroes? The CARS?

And why not start off with one that embodies all this awesomeness, Super Fly.

My jukebox selection, two off this soundtrack. Because up until now I've been criminally ignorant of Curtis Mayfield. The soundtrack on this movie is unrelentingly fantastic, and ties it together so beautifully. It's obviously made on the cheap, but the combo of the music and the style (the movie that launched a thousand Cadillac pimpmobiles) just pushes it to be so much greater than the sum of its parts.

I don't really feel the need to talk about the plot here. It's incidental, and the less you know about it the better. But pretty much a drug dealer wants to try to go straight but his world and The Man don't want him to. And much wandering of desolate streets looking like a badass in some of the finest coats and hats available to mankind ensues.

Watching this, I see its stamp on so much that has come after it, blaxploitation and otherwise. I don't even know how many times I just sat their incredulous and thought "damn, now THAT'S style." Which one often does while watching 70s movies. Which is why it's 70s September.

Gotta Start Somewhere

About this at least, I've decided to cease being all talk. Yes, it is time I start blogging. Because my twenties are cresting the hill, and though I have no plans to clean up my act and do all the things I'm supposed to be doing, and stop doing the things I should be too old for, at least if I document it, I'll have something to show for how I spend my time.

See I have this theory that if I start writing more often I'll start thinking more often. And if I start writing more often, I'll feel pressure to do or learn things worth reading about. Let's see how this will go. After all, the title of this bastard refers to the fact that this could just turn out to be a laundry list of songs I put on jukeboxes in bars where I drink too much cheap whiskey while having that special breed of fast superlative-laden expressive conversation that seems so particular to drunken New York City friendships.

Names will be changed to protect the wicked, of course.

Woke up this morning with the taste of cheap beer and cigarettes on my breath. My social smoking is reaching dangerous heights. It's gotten to the point where if I go back to Russia, I'll probably bring some of those cheap smokes back with me, if only to reimburse the smokers that I have stolen so many drags from. Jessie tells me that she thinks I should start smoking, since I seem like the kind of person that would learn how to do tricks like blow smoke rings. Oh god, I'd love to think I was that sort of person.

We're in an outdoor section of a bar on Berry. It's Lucy's birthday. Our trip to a Mars themed restaurant had failed, but we consoled ourselves on the M train back to Brooklyn with some pocketbook gin, and we're ready for tacos and spirits.

Birthday wishes and travel plans abound. In a true beat type fashion, Lucy has stumbled across the idea that people will pay you to drive their car from one city to another, and that one could travel on the cheap in this fashion. It is an exciting possibility and I hope it comes to pass.

But all is not birthday celebrations. My roommate's girlfriend is about to pull up stakes for sunny California, and clearly the only reasonable reaction to this is karaoke and alcohol. Things I learned, a karaoke system with a backing track that doesn't have a loud enough monitor doesn't do a damn thing to keep me from being self-conscious about the fact that my attorney and I's version of You Keep Me Hangin' On is pretty damn pitiful compared to the Supremes' Good thing the rest of the bar was singing along too. Did a hell of a duet of My Boyfriends Back with Cassie.

Somehow stumbled back towards Greenpoint and the last thing I remember before waking up with a taste in my mouth like the counter in a bar and a head that had shrunk a few sizes, is Ivan pointing across the highway at me and yelling "Beach! Sunday! Be there!"

I don't really want to think about how often I come into work hungover now, but a couple of things brightened up my day.

1) DELONTE WEST IS A FUCKING CELTIC ONCE MORE!
In tribute I'm posting a link to the greatest Valentines Day interview of all time.
Seriously, I have not stopped being excited about this since I heard it. Delonte West. Is. Back. Lock up your mothers, Beantown.

2) I might not be destroying myself! Studies have shown that people that drink often live longer than people who never drink. Well, with a few caveats.

3)Discovering there is a wealth of clips on Youtube of Warren Zevon filling in for Paul Schaefer. Just an example

4) The two songs above. I don't know what it is about the Ramones that makes me need them during hangovers. It makes no sense, they're loud, they're fast, but they're just so so comforting. They are all that is good and true and dammit, sometimes you just need nice boys from Queens wishing they were a girl group to make your life make sense.

That is all. I sure hope I keep this up.