When It Mattered

The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins

FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience

by Kristin Downey

In view of the nasty absurdities of the current Health Care and Insurance Debate, it is interesting to read about the implementation of Social Security---a radical departure in social reform.

Miss Perkins was the Great Depression's Secretary of Labor who, in her formative years, watched the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, and watched the immigrant female factory workers, who had been locked into their workroom to do their labors making mass produced blouses for American women, leap to their deaths in their attempt to evacuate their building and workroom to avoid being burned to death. She watched the women, girls, most of them, crash to their deaths on the sidewalk below the factory high rise. The firemen had arrived but the nets to catch the working girls did not work for leaps from that height.

Miss Perkins would be responsible for creating and maintaining a very strong social net for the working class (and later the middle class) when economic and familial financial disasters left them facing the fire or the fall.

She makes most of the women in politics these days look truly contemptible. Miss Perkins actually cared about the working poor and spent her life, from early days in Jane Adams' Hull House to her days of power in Washington DC, working to improve their lives. And she didn't make money lobbying off the poor.

And while Miss Perkins passed and implemented Social Security during the Great Depression, she cared for her family who were victims of genetic and mental depressions. Her husband was in and out of insane asylums during her service, and her daughter was also a victim of her father's curse.

Miss Perkins was a formidable woman.

Southern Musings

Imperial

by William T. Vollman

I really didn't read this book, I looked at the pictures. Mr. Vollman has a companion book, Imperial, that tells about the history of the Imperial Valley in California and Mexico. I've got a request in at the library for that one.

The Imperial Valley is an area in southern California and northern Baja Mexico that includes the border between the two nations and the Salton Sea and Colorado River. I don't know anything about the area but what I can see in the pictures that Mr. Vollman took and placed in this book.

Looking at the pictures, this is an agricultural area with some manufacturing gone very wrong areas (high lead contamination from an abandoned lead smelting facility and polluted waterways and canals). It is a poor area (people and environment) and contains the corrugated tin sided nightclubs and lap dancers and strippers and beer options along dusty roads that provide poor entertainment for the poor.

The people are mainly descended from native Americans (on both sides of the border) and there are some Anglo farmers and eccentrics. As an aside, I have to say that most of the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans that I know are of Lebanese descent, so there is that qualification when I use the term "Mexican". Am I making any sense---nah, I don't think so either.

The pictures are in black and white and some are sepia tinted. Mr. Vollman takes the viewer directly into the Imperial Valley with his photos. He has no captions below the pictures and explains nothing. He lets the viewer just look and draw her own conclusions.

There are two essays by Mr. Vollman in the back of the book. One is babble worthy of Aleister Crowley about taking photographs and what they represent. Skip it. Mr. Vollman was high when he wrote it and it was a talkative, dis-associative high. Just like one of those endless and fruitless marijuana high discussions about the meaning of Plato. Yeah, Doobie Socrates.

The second essay is labeled Technical Notes and discusses camera lens apertures and film and photo development. I know nothing about the subject and really don't care to know about it, but this was interesting to me. I still don't know the difference between 35mm or 270mm and a Kodack or Wisner camera, but I did find that Mr. Vollman's technical discussion gave me an idea of the photographer and what he valued and what he wanted to capture when he took his pictures. It gave me a better understanding and a viewpoint for his pictures.

There are also very brief and non-discursive photo captions in the back of the book. They were very informative for me, because when I was looking at a picture of a corrugated tin fence (corrugated tin is the main building block in this valley) with a tire placed high on the wall, I thought that it was the playground for some sort of ball game. Get the ball in the tire. When I finally read Mr. Vollman's caption, I found out that the wall was a border fence and that the tire was placed to aid the climber to get over the fence to the other side. That is a different sort of ball game scoring and refereeing and is much more crucial for the players and the spectator (me).

Thar She Blew

Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around: A memoir of floods, fires, parades, and plywood

by Cheryl Wagner

At the end of August in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and tore up that town.

Miss Wagner was a native Louisianian who had acheived her childhood dream of living in New Orleans and freelance writing and enjoying herself and her neighborhood. After Katrina, Miss Wagner and her husband Jake, a freelance musician, had to give up the enjoyment and work like dogs to rebuild their home and their lives. Well, not work like dogs exactly, Miss Wagner had two basset hounds, who just lazed around and watched all the work that she and Jake did.

The people who came back after Katrina to rebuild New Orleans, not only had to face raw sewage in the their houses and yards and streets, but they had to deal with human nature in the form of uncaring government and FEMA employees, rip-off construction grifters, drug dealers, copper thieves, and evangelical social workers.

Drugs were dealt and used in the open among the gutted and flood trashed houses without regard for the neighbors or law enforcement. I thought of the TV show, The Wire, where the police designate a certain street in Baltimore to be enforcement free and call it Amsterdam, after the city below the sea in Europe where drugs and prostitution are legal. Miss Wagner and her husband went to Amsterdam for a vacation and a rest from renovating their home and Miss Wagner felt constricted by the Dutch insistence on unvarying order---drugs must only be used in certain places and prostitution was only allowed at certain times and in certain areas. This proves that there really is no city quite like New Orleans, anywhere. What appears to be degenerate license or unlimited freedom elsewhere (Amsterdam and Baltimore) is just constricted restriction for a New Orleanser.

Miss Wagner and Jake were put on the list for FEMA trailers while they rebuilt their home, but after they secured an apartment in an unflooded part of New Orleans to live in while they worked on their Mid-town house, they called FEMA to get themselves off the list. FEMA told them, no problem, that they had been taken off the list a few months before. It was the first that the Wagners had heard of it.

They had to have their roof done twice, the first contractor took a lot of money and did a lousy job. Rain ran down the walls of their kitchen and living room in bad weather. It took them a year to get their electricity back, and they were ripped off by the electrician. The city came by and ripped up the water and sewage pipes every now and again. The Army Corps of Engineers rebuilt the levees with newspaper.

The insurance company dilly dallied for months before it finally paid up for the flood insurance that they had on the house. The insurance company paid it to the mortgage company. And New Orleans sent a home appraiser out to calculate what they could get to restore their house. It came to $0. The appraisal got the address right, but the house that they described was someone else's house. Whose? They never figured it out. The whole neighborhood was trashed by Katrina.

But no matter the discouragement and the irrational dishonesty of the various processes, the Wagners stayed and kept working on their home (and they did most of the work themselves).

The book began with a very detailed description of the evacuation of the Wagners and their dogs, and I thought it too detailed. But I came to appreciate the detail and the digressions rebuilding one's home and life after a catastrophe. If one thinks about it too long, one can go crazy. Scarlett O'Hara had that right.

Pericles

by William Shakespeare

I've decided that I need to keep reading Shakespeare---read the best and it influences you and your choices.

And for some reason, I am now fond of Shakespeare's older comedy/fantasy/dramas. It's as if Shakespeare became Lord Dunsany in his old age. And you know, I think that Shakespeare is writing a bit of Sci Fi too. Although, I think that Shakespeare always had it in him, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Shakespeare has a 14th century poet named John Gower narrate this tale. Mr. Gower was a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales fame, and I want to know why Gower? Why not Chaucer? I mean, Shakespeare has got John of Gaunt, Mr. Chaucer's patron and brother-in-law all over the Histories. Why not here? (Gower wrote the poem about Pericles that Shakespeare used as the basis for this play, but still---Chaucer!)

Anyway, Mr. Gower narrates the tale in the Middle English of Mr. Chaucer (and this brings up the question---why didn't Shakespeare do Beowulf? Come on---fights, monsters---I like to think that the banquet scene in Macbeth and the three witches were precursors for Grendel kicking knights' asses after their drunken revelry and Grendel's mom (or say, Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI's wife, that "flinty queen")).

Forget Mr. Gower, back to the tale. And this play is a tale---not so much a play. There are great skips of time and action and place in it. It is a 'narration play'.

The hero, Pericles, goes courting for a princess and finds one. He has to solve a riddle to get her. Unfortunately, he 'gets' the riddle---his soon to be princess bride has been deflowered by her father and they are going at it hot and heavy. So hot, in fact, later in the play, they will burn up---literally---burn up in the middle of the city in full view of everyone. That was one hot town. Oh come on---Shakespeare puns all the time!

Pericles is in a quandary. He really doesn't want a wife who puts her daddy first in all things. And if Pericles declines to marry her, politely, he is a guest in their town after all, he is likely to be butchered by daddy who knows that anyone who knows the riddle, KNOWS.

Pericles manages to escape and fake his death with a shipwreck and finds a more suitable mate who is also a princess, but an ignorant one. They marry and have a baby and go on a cruise, and dammit, a real shipwreck occurs and wrecks that family.

All these families in this play are being torn apart by fate, human nature, desire, and the weather.

The baby, a daughter (gasp!), is rescued from the sea and raised by another royal family and she outshines their own daughter, so good bye to Marina (get the name---a Shakespeare pun), she is sold to a brothel. Uh oh, this is getting close to the beginning of the play with sex problems. Marina is so pure, that she glamours all the pimps and customers and preaches the word of purity (or the goddess or whatever) and keeps her virtue. See, that first princess just didn't try hard enough or maybe her daddy had the magic persuasion, we really don't go into that.

Pericles has never met a shipwreck or sea squall that he can't survive (sounds like a super hero to me) and ambles into town and like any sailor heads for the nearest brothel. And you bet, it's the one that Marina has run into the ground with her preaching---make philosophical questions not lust---and Pericles is perilously (hah, now I get his name) close to making the 'sin of the father and daughter' again.

But no one can shut Marina up and she starts telling her tale and Pericles realizes that she is his daughter (happy proper family reunion) and Diana, the goddess, (couldn't Shakespeare have put a kracken in here?) shows up and tells Pericles to sail away to her temple with Marina.

Now Diana is not the goddess of the sea, just a niece of one, so why, after all his lousy sailing, Pericles would do this appalls me. I would just tell Diana, "Stay we will, on dry land, and the sea may swell and eat her own according to the tides." Only more poetically than that.

But Pericles manages to actually not sink to the bottom of the sea on this trip and finds his wife, alive in the temple of Diana (that sex virtue thing again) and also finds a suitable husband for Marina. And everybody is happy until the next sea voyage.

A Proper Job

by Brian Aherne

I like to follow Self-Styled Siren's blog. She gives me some good ideas for books that I should read and movies to see. She recently recommended A Proper Job by Brian Aherne, because he was a good friend of one of her favorite stars, George Sanders, and wrote a biography about Mr. Sanders, that delightful cad. She reviewed A Proper Job and read the review; it made me want to read the book.

Mr. Aherne was a good looking, tall, English actor who might have done better in the movies if he had applied himself in that job. But he preferred the theater and although he loved California and living there, he owned and ran a farm there for many years of his life, he was never a "star".

He was in the theater with Saint Joan with Tyrone Power and Maurice Evans, when Mr. Power came by the dressing room one night asking for advice. He had been offered a movie contract with 20th Century Fox and wanted Mr. Aherne's opinion on what to do about it.

Mr. Aherne gave him the following: " You have talent and a wonderful appearance, but you are very young and I think you have plenty of time, so why not take a few years to gain your experience and to make your name in the theater....Blah, blah, blah".

And Mr. Evans knew it: "Rubbish! Don't listen to him, Ty! Take your chances when they come. Get out to Hollywood fast."

Mr. Power listened to Mr. Evans and made 20th Century Fox with his star power.

Mr. Aherne made another questionable job choice that Jack Warner of Warner Brothers never forgave him for. I can't find the quote in the book (no bibliography---huh?), but it was essentially: "Damn that Aherne. He cost me time, money, and emotional grief when he turned down Captain Blood and I had to cast Errol Flynn in it!"

Mr. Aherne was to make his biggest hit in movies with Captain Fury which was a knockoff of Captain Blood.

Mr. Aherne wrote the book himself, and he can write.

It's a good Hollywood read, even thought only a third of the book is about Hollywood. The rest is about flying and the theater.

City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

Mr. Friedrich looks at the decade of 1940 for the Hollywood movie business. The consensus is that 1939 was the height of the American movie industry in Hollywood. The movie industry was solid for half a decade after that until the end of WWII and the beginning of television. The movie industry spent several decades after 1950 declining and adjusting to the new culture, technological advances, and economic and political re-adjustments of Post War America. In 1970, the Hollywood movie industry had a re-birth and television production came into its own.

But all this economic and political upheaval and stuff can be fun when it is analysed and illustrated with tales of Hollywood madness, folly, gossip, and envy. Bertrolt Brecht, the German playwright, always struck me as an ass when I had to read him in college. But in this book, he is a fun ass---Mother Courage, but Marx Brothers funny. Mr. Brecht's misadventures in trying to get into the movies and go Hollywood during his exile from Europe in WWII are sour human comedy that he never managed to achieve in his writings.

And Mr. Brecht is not the only European exile lost in the fragrant and fertile Hollywood Hills and landscape; Thomas Mann has a Life in Hollywood and tends his garden in Brentwood, Charles Laughton loses his garden in a Southern California mudslide, and Schonberg argues movie music with Irving Thalberg, the "Boy Genius" of movies before Orson Welles showed up to claim that title (it's all about "control"). And during the making of Fantasia, Disney declaims that he will "make" Beethoven ("Roll over Beethoven and tell Stravinsky that news.")

It is all wild and crazy fun, and travails gone absurdly wrong, in this book. I highly recommend it.

The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years

by David Shipman

The first thing to note, when reading this book, is that it was published in 1970, and the edition that I read, was revised in 1979. That means that this book is not comprehensive, for the last part of the 20th century (it doesn't note or take into account, the re-making of Hollywood movies and their production system of the 1970s that brought American movies back into high repute and opinion).

But Mr. Shipman has either seen every movie before 1970, or he writes as though he has, and as though he knows what he is talking about.

This is a good book to browse or even to read straight through. It gives the reader some ideas of movies and DVDs that she might want to see. I have got to see Limelight, if just for Buster Keaton.

However, every few pages a sentence much like the following will show up:

• "Their personal lives had many similarities, including early deaths, but why should the genuinely attractive Monroe have been constantly compared with Harlow, platinum blonde, cross-legged in her hideous shapeless body-revealing sateen dresses, her smile the genuine tooth past advert?"

Huh? Miss Monroe was naturally pretty and Miss Harlow was manufactured sort of attractive? Is that what I am supposed to infer from this sentence? Don't nobody tell Mr. Shipman that Miss Monroe had a nose job and that a seamstress had to sew her into her body-revealing dresses. And how can a dress be both "body-revealing" and yet "shapeless"? It's called a "bias cut", by the way, and I could make a pun about bias, but never mind.

The book gives a good overview, but Mr. Shipman is no fan of film noir, so note that as you read or skim the book.