May as well write the inevitable post …
… about the Supreme Court ruling today.
So, the SCOTUS has ruled that PPACA (ObamaCare) is legal in almost every particular. Specifically, they ruled that the individual mandate is legal because it is a tax. They ruled against the individual mandate on Commerce Clause grounds, but since it is a tax that doesn’t matter. Simplified (probably overly so)*, Congress cannot make you buy health insurance under the Commerce Clause. However, they CAN tax the living hell out of you and let the IRS ream you until you die of sepsis unless you do – just so long as they call the penalty a tax.
Thus they say it is constitutional. Or rather, five of them say it is. The deciding vote was not Kennedy, but Roberts. It should not come as a surprise that a man appointed by a President who believed in ever-expanding powers of government in general (and of the Presidency in particular) ruled in favor of ever-expanding government intervention. The surprise is that Alito did NOT so rule. No doubt the Bush Family is disappointed in Alito, but you will recall that he was not their first choice for that position. And once again Bush pulls ahead of Obama in the race for the title of Worst President Ever.
Some are making a case that this is a partial victory for conservative leaning folks, as Roberts’ opinion limits Congress’s powers with regards to use of the Commerce Clause and spending powers. But that is grasping at straws and also bullshit. What Roberts’ sophistry does is show Congress how to enact almost anything without having to go looking for the authority somewhere in the Constitution. Just follow Roberts’ reasoning in this decision, and there won’t even be any point in taking the matter to court.
I have seen in argued that The People will limit Congress in this matter, as The People hate new taxes. The only problem with that is that The People had the wool pulled over their eyes this time, and there is no reason to think The People will be any less stupid the next time around.
At this point in time, Congress can now force Americans to do anything they can pass through Congress (just call the penalty for NOT doing the thing a tax, and sick IRS agents on anyone that doesn’t comply), and the President now has the power to assassinate American citizens anywhere at his whim, with no recourse for the doomed.
We owe a collective apology, much belated, to the ghost of George III.
* Via Althouse, more about the case:
In III-B, Roberts tells us that we need to shift from thinking about the individual mandate “as ordering individuals to buy insurance, but rather as imposing a tax on those who do not buy that product.”
The quotes indicate Roberts wording in the opinion. So I didn’t oversimplify at all.
Bath Salts ruled out. Zombie Apocalypse, the Munchies and Voodoo still possibilities.
Back on June 1st I blogged about a series of cannibal attacks here there and everywhere. The first attack to hit the news had been the highly disturbing (even by cannibalism story standards) attack by Rudy Eugene upon a homeless man on a causeway in Miami. At the time bath salts, the latest drug du jour, had caused Eugene to strip off his clothes, attack another human being and eat that person’s face.
Today the toxicology results from the autopsy on Eugenewere released to the public.
The much-anticipated toxicology report released by Miami-Dade Medical Examiner Dr. Bruce Hyma found marijuana in Eugene’s system, something CBS4 News had previously reported, but no evidence of any other street drugs, alcohol or prescription drugs, or any adulterants found in street drugs.
The report said this includes cocaine, LSD, amphetamines (Ecstasy, Meth and others), phencyclidine (PCP or Angel Dust), heroin, oxycodone, Xanax, synthetic marijuana (Spice), and many other similar compounds.
Hyma’s office specifically ruled out bath salts, a class of synthetic drugs that have been known to cause bizarre behavior and overheating of people who use them, two things that made some believe Eugene’s cannibalistic behavior could be blamed on the drugs.
So bath salts have been ruled out.
The remaining possibilities are not comforting. He could be Patient Zero for the outbreak of the Zombie Apocalypse. This, of course, is completely absurd.
Or perhaps Eugene had the worst case of the munchies ever. This is also absurd, as I’ve never heard of marijuana inducing straight-up zombie behavior before.
Voodoo is another possibility. The Miami Herald interviewed Eugene’s girlfriend and she offered voodoo as an explanation.
The man being depicted by the media as a “face eater” or a “monster” is not the man she knew, she said. He smoked marijuana often, though had recently said he wanted to quit, but he didn’t use stronger recreational drugs and even refused to take over-the-counter medication for simple ailments like headaches, she said. He was sweet and well-mannered, she said.
Eugene’s girlfriend has her own theory on what happened that day. She believes Eugene was drugged unknowingly. The only other explanation, she said, was supernatural — that someone put a Vodou curse on him. The girlfriend, who unlike Eugene is not Haitian, said she has never believed in Vodou, until now.
“I don’t know how else to explain this,” she said.
Faced with horror, the unbelievable becomes possible for those left behind. Personally I don’t believe in mysticism, so Voodoo as magic doesn’t convince me.
However, Voodoo does have its own rights and practices and herbal trreatments. I can believe that Eugene was dosed with some drug, maybe scopolamine or something similar, that wouldn’t show up on standard toxicology reports. Perhaps the labs didn’t look for the correct drug, and not looking they didn’t find the incriminating drug.
At least that’s what I hope, as the other options are both absurd and disturbing.
(Two other options exist, of course. One is that Eugene had a complete psychotic break. However, it seems that those that knew him were completely shocked by this. At the very least I haven’t heard anyone stating, “Well, Rudy was under a lot of stress and he was pretty high-strung, I knew something was going to happen….” Besides, how many people have breakdowns and start doing … this. I don’t think this hypothesis seems likely. The second option is “UNKNOWN”. That one not only encompasses everything not listed, it also creates a certain dread of its own. If we don’t know what caused Eugene to snap, we can’t be certain that it won’t happen to us.)
Tropical Storm Debby Does Orlando-area News Casters
We’ve got a tropical storm over in the Gulf of Mexico. Debby as a tropical system isn’t all that impressive but she _IS_ a tropical system. She’s got some of the usual attributes and at least one that is unusual. The unusual bit is that she has stalled out in the Gulf, with the consequence that we’re getting drenched here in the peninsula. We’ve been getting soaked by this system for several days now, even before it was an official system. The rain is needed but tiresome at this point.
Among the more usual aspects are those you would associate with a tropical system (wind, rain, etc.) and weather porn from the local news. Debby is a big, slow, wet, sloppy kiss from the tropics and the local news folks are aroused. They show their ardor by devoting as much coverage as possible to this storm. Back in March it was clear how hard up the newsies were getting as they devoted inordinate amounts of coverage to any little local storm that popped up. They really REALLY needed to get some, so Debby is a prayer answered.
Weather porn is the local news caster’s dream. Indeed, even some national news types love it too. Dan Rather made his bones covering a hurricane, and Geraldo doesn’t usually miss an opportunity to stand out in the wind & rain and look like a bigger fool than usual. Weather porn is big and dramatic, and even when death is involved it avoids the nastiness of talking about psycho-killers, child molesters, the deranged and the political. And once they get their fix of Act of God Drama they can go back to the regular stuff with a happy little glean in their eyes. So in the next few months when you see a newscaster reporting some grotesque of a story political or criminal (not mutually exclusive) with a twinkle in their eye, you’ll know that some locale just got the stuffing kicked out of it by weather in the previous weeks.
On to the next topic….
Via Althouse I saw the following.
Forbes has an article. I will note that the headline of the story gets it wrong: This would not revolutionize cancer treatment so much as it would revolutionize cancer diagnosis. (I’ll also note there can be downsides to having very sensitive tests, but that’s a topic for another time.)
Two things struck me about the video. I’m interested if anyone else here will be struck by the same two things. Actually, I’m sure everyone will be struck by one of them, it’s actually the second thing I’m curious about.
So, reactions?
(And no fair looking at the comment section over at Althouse first.)
UPDATE: Okay, so no one else picked up on the second thing I noticed. Jack Andraka has very few verbal ticks. Note especially the end of the clip, during the interview portion. I counted one brief “um” and that was it. He did throw in an “and stuff” near the end, but he was completely lacking in “uh”s, “er”s, “like”s, “you know”s, long pauses, grunts, drawn out words (e.g., “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnddddd”) and similar tricks to gain time to express a thought. A very sharp and very focused mind behind that voice.
Random example of my weirdness as a parent….
A few minutes ago I shouted at my daughter, “They HAVE to tell you about the astronomical basis of that!” I’ll let y’all figure out what that was about on your own.
Fun with Cannibals – or – What the F*ck is Up with Canada?
In the last few days the Western Hemisphere has seen three new notorious cannibals chew their way into the news.
The first story involves the Causeway Cannibal Case here in sunny Florida. Some Haitian emegre allegedly goes nuts on ‘bath salts’, strips off his clothes, assaults a homeless man, who he then strips naked before stripping the flesh off the guys face with his teeth. In broad daylight. On the side of the road in Miami. (I contend that in his drug induced stupor Rudy Eugene got his Haitian zombie lore and his American zombie lore all mixed up. I also contend this case isn’t as unusual as you might think down here in sunny Florida. Florida is really REALLY fucked up.)
The most disturbing two details* about this case so far are that (a) several people appear to have ridden by the assault while it was happening and didn’t do much about it, and (b) that pictures of the victim (who has lived, so far, with 75-80% of his face torn off) post-attack have appeared online in numerous places.
* The most disturbing BIG PICTURE item is that this occurred at all.
I’m not going to link to this story as it has received enough publicity, and on the off-chance someone here hasn’t heard about it yet and wants to know more can find the stories easily enough. Just watch out for the pictures. (I haven’t seen them, and don’t want to see them. Beyond the gore is the simple fact that I would feel like I was violating the victim’s privacy in most indecent fashion.)
This morning another cannibal attack was reported to have taken place in the Baltimore Maryland area.
Behind the door of a townhouse on Terrapin Terrace in Joppatowne, a house of horrors. It’s here police say 21-year-old Alexander Kinyua confessed to eating the heart and parts of the brain of a missing man. Police say Kinyua’s brother went down to the laundry room of the house and saw a blanket on a box. He pulled off the blanket and saw two metal tins. Police say he opened them and saw a head and two hands. When Kinyua’s brother confronted him about this, police say Kinyua said they were animal remains and not human.
The brother then got his dad. The dad went downstairs and the items were gone.
Kinyua’s brother called police.
“Human remains, specifically a head and hands, were recovered on the main floor of the residence,” Sheriff Jesse Bane of Harford County said.
Police believe they belong to 37-year-old Kujoe Agyei-Kodie, a family friend who was living at the house.
So, that makes two. Kinyua, BTW, is Kenyan.
Tonight a bizarre story out of Canada went off the deep-end. Yesterday a foot and a hand were sent via mail, the foot to the ruling Conservative Party’s HQ while the hand was found en route to wherever. It was determined that the suspect was a male porn star named Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, aka Eric Clinton Newman aka Vladimir Romanov. Okay, so far this is pretty fucked up, and I immediately thought of Walter in The Big Lebowski, “You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don’t wanna know about it, believe me.”
They were after the porn star because police found the torso associated with the foot and the hand near Magnotta’s apartment building (he was a ‘model’ tenant), which led naturally enough to his apartment, where the killing and the dismemberment took place. And the cannibalism, The Sun now tells us. (Yes, this means some crazy Canadian fucker was running around chopping up people and eating them. This MUST have been an episode of South Park.) It has been reported that Magnotta left a video behind of the killing, dismemberment and cannibalism.
Also, the diveresity freaks can now breath a sigh of relief – Magnotta is white, so the spectre of having nothing but black cannibal stories has come to an end. No more nasty old tropes here!
But this is only part of the weirdness. Apparently Magnotta had become known to The Sun several months back because of rather disturbing videos he had posted, among other things. The Sun interviewed him, leading to The Sun asking authorities to investigate Magnotta for being, well, psycho. The authorities ultimately weren’t able to do much, in part because they didn’t know where Magnotta was. If you want to know more you can read about this case here. I’m not going to post details about his prior videos. (Annie, you’ll want to skip that link.)
Other details about Magnotta have emerged. He’s allegedly bi-sexual and bi-polar. He has dated (allegedly) a paedophile serial killer, Karla Homolka. He wrote a blog on how to disappear completely. According to The Sun, police believe he has fled to Europe. Back to The Sun’s reporting:
Two days later a misspelled email was sent to The Sun.
It told of the writer’s love for London and warned: “Well, I have to say goodbye for now. But don’t worry, in the near future you will be hearing from me again. This time, however, the victims won’t be small animals. I will however, send you a copy of the new video I’m going to be making. You see, killing is different than smoking… with smoking you can actually quit.
“Once you kill, and taste blood, it’s impossible to stop.”
Our reporters were convinced it was from Magnotta.
And so on. All this leads one to ask, What the fuck is up with Canada that it is out-weirding Florida? This is way more fucked up that the bath-salt zombie case down here.
…
Finally, I want to go on record. The Causeway Cannibal chewed a hapless homeless human being in Florida. I live in Florida. Kinyua the Kenyan Kannibal self-served his mordantly macabre meal in the Baltimore Maryland area. Some of you may recall that I lived in the Baltimore Maryland area for a few years. And the Canadian Cannibal killed his vic with an ice pick. I had nothing to do with any of these cases, and I’ve got witnesses that place me far away from the cuisine, er, crime scenes! I didn’t do it, no one saw me do it, there’s no way you can prove anything!
Look back with satisfaction
That’s the essence of nostalgia. I’ve been looking through my blog archives tonight, first looking for a particular old post, and then just looking at what I had done, and some of the conversations that had taken place. I stumbled upon this in a comment from a reader, discussing a favored type of comfort music:
Deep saxophone jazz, the kind that sounds like having a cigarette in bed on a hot night after sex and feeling your pulse beat under the drumskin of your belly.
Makes ya want to take up smoking, doesn’t it? I’ll tell you who wrote it later.
Never Get Out of the Boat!
A Guest Post by Icepick
Never get out of the boat. Absolutely G*d-damned right. Unless you’re goin’ all the way.
This was a lesson NOT learned by Francesco Schettino, Captain of the cruise ship Costa Concordia.
Authorities were holding Schettino for suspected manslaughter and a prosecutor confirmed Sunday they were also investigating allegations the captain abandoned the stricken liner before all the passengers had escaped. According to the Italian navigation code, a captain who abandons a ship in danger can face up to 12 years in prison.
The accounts so far don’t look good for the Captain’s future. He should have stayed in the boat – or hightailed it to Brazil.
Better still, never get IN to the boat.
For blogger/opinion writer Steve Sailer this brought to mind a similar incident. In 1991 the cruise ship Oceanos sunk off the coast of South Africa. What happened was covered by People Magazine:
On Saturday evening, Aug. 3, as a 50-mph gale buffeted their ship, passengers aboard the Greek cruise liner Oceanos gamely made their way to the main lounge for the evening’s entertainment. No sooner had they settled in than the lights went out. The 492-foot ship, suddenly without power, tossed in high seas off South Africa’s aptly named Wild Coast. For 361 weekend tourists, one of the most harrowing nights of their lives had just begun. The Oceanos was sinking.
Disgracefully, many of the 184 crew members clambered aboard the lifeboats ahead of some of the passengers and paddled to the safety of tankers and trawlers that had drawn nearby. At daybreak on Sunday, South African Air Force helicopters joined the rescue operation. But to the astonishment and anger of the 217 passengers still aboard, Capt. Yannis Avranias grabbed the second chopper off the ship. With no one clearly in charge, an unlikely hero emerged among the remaining crew: Robin Boltman, 31, the ship’s magician.
Giving the performance of his career, Boltman entertained and calmed passengers throughout the pitch-black night. In the morning he ascended to the bridge and maintained radio contact with rescuers. Finally, at 11:30 A.M., after all other passengers and crew had been removed to safety, Boltman was lifted from the ship by a helicopter. At 1:45 P.M. the luxury liner nosed into the Indian Ocean and disappeared under the waves.
I had seen Sailer’s excerpt earlier in the day and left it up. I wanted to read it to my wife when she got home, and did so. This caused her to say, “I think I heard of this guy recently, before this wreck in Italy.” So I hit Yahoo up for some search engine action, and found a story up near the top with an interesting headline:
DID OUR SINKING MAGICIAN GO DOWN WITH THE CONCORDIA?
It’s an article from the Daily News of South Africa, written by Barbara Cole, and starts off with
[M]any are asking whether Midlands magician Robin Boltman was on the doomed cruise liner Costa Concordia. Boltman has a knack of being aboard cruise ships that go to watery graves.
Um, what? He’s been on more than one? Yes, he has, although he wasn’t on this Costa Concordia. Besides being on the Oceanos on her final voyage, Boltman was also on the final voyage of the Achille Lauro back in 1994. In that incident the ship caught fire off the coast of Somalia and eventually sank. Here’s a tidbit from the Daily News story:
When fire broke out on the Achille Lauro, the captain Guiseppi Orssi called Boltman to the bridge and asked for his advice, telling him he did not want to make the same mistakes as the Oceanos captain.
“I told him he first had to sound the alarms,” he said.
“It is important to stay calm and collected. Passengers should also go to their cabins and get their life jacket and any medication.”
So score one for Captain Orssi for consulting an expert!
For those of you who think the Achille Lauro sounds familiar, that would be because of the high seas hijacking back in 1985. So add that to the list of reasons to NOT get on a cruise ship.
So here’s a partial list of reasons to not get on cruise ships: sea sickness, sickness (there’s a freakin’ CDC page for this!), terrorists, pirates, rocks, icebergs, storms, U-boats, rogue waves (two links), drunk captains, dare devil captains, incompetent captains, incompetent crew, too few life boats, Bond villains. Not to mention the strange men in blue boxes looking for some chap named Alonzo OR the freakin’ tigers that try to eat your ass (and presumably the rest of you) when you go looking for mangos!
Never get in to the boat!
Ellroy Confidential
A guest post by Icepick
- Best place to start reading James Ellroy? was the question that started this glorious thunder rolling. It has made Ellroy irresistible to me. I’ll be hitting the bookstore tomorrow. ~ amba
Well, you will either love Ellroy or hate him. I don’t see how one can react to him any other way. His style became very refined, and like strong distillates isn’t for everyone. The language is very rough as well, and if you’re offended by racist language then skip this stuff altogether. And after the Black Dahlia there are no true Good Guys, and it’s an open question if there were good guys in that one.
(I mean of the main characters. Russ Millard is a secondary character of importance that comes across as good, competent and decent. That makes him the rarest bird in the books. Probably the next closest after that is the almost psychotically violent Bud White, whose strongest moral characteristic is his ability to beat anyone to within an inch of their life, or worse, if ordered to do so. The third most decent guy keeps killing all the wrong people, gets his wife killed for NOT killing the right person, sleeps with his stepmother, helps her kill his father, pushes heroin, is involved in slavery and human experimentation, etc. But he feels REALLY BAD about it. Not for the faint of fucking heart!)
OTOH there’s lots of great stuff. The way he can paint a picture of someone’s interior life is brilliant, and some of the chapters amaze. The final lines of American Tabloid are brilliant, as is the intro. (You can see the intro and a chunk of the first chapter on Amazon. The final lines: “She held him with her eyes and her mouth. The roar did a long slow fade. He braced himself for this big fucking scream….” The setting for that was just off Dealey Plaza.)
He’s got seven novels that really count – the L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz) and the Underworld USA Trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s a Rover).
The last three of the L.A. Quartet tie together, but any of them can be read separately. L.A. Confidential is the most well-known to non-Ellroy readers, just because of the highly successful movie. It and White Jazz are the two best written – by that point Ellroy had fully mastered his craft and his POV. But the books are dense and complicated, plot-wise. For example the movie L.A. Confidential only covers about a third of the story at best.
Anyway, each of the two groupings features characters that overlap from one novel to the next, and the Underworld USA stuff starts with a minor character from White Jazz. If this is sounding Byzantine, that’s because it is. For example, Ellroy says that the men that wrote the screenplay for L.A.C. took it from eight story lines down to three, and shaved off about two-thirds of the characters.
I’d recommend starting with L.A. Confidential. The Big Nowhere is good, and it explains how Buzz Meeks comes to have a bunch of Jack Dragna’s and Mickey Cohen’s heroin and money at the start of L.A.C., but it also lacks the driving force of L.A.C. The Commie Hunt at the center of TBN just seems silly. (To be fair, it seemed silly to most of the characters as well. It was done solely for reasons of political ambition.) White Jazz is perhaps the best written, but I really think it needs the set-up of L.A.C. to fully appreciate the ongoing clash between Edmund Exley and Dudley Liam Smith. The Black Dahlia has its moments, but the plot and especially the resolution are kind of out there. I swear, the last 60 or so pages of Dahlia feature more apparent endings that the LotRs novels, and about seven major plot twists per sentence.
(Incidentally, I think Dudley Smith is scarier, by the end of White Jazz, than Hannibal Lecter. Lecter was kind of a demigod amongst men, but essentially a loner. Smith is an organizational genius, a brilliant operator, ruthless, efficient and very intelligent, with a flair for extreme violence. And he’s got psychopaths that work for HIM.)
The L.A. Quartet is focused on the L.A. police department of the post-WWII era. Underworld USA is focused on the intersection of the various underworld types in the US from the late 1950s to the early 1970s: CIA, FBI, Mob, billionaire recluses with insane amounts of wealth (Howard Hughes), and a millionaire gangster (Joe Kennedy) intent on taking over the country by getting one son after another elected to the Presidency. Throw in white supremacists, scheming pols and Mormons and you round it out, with a bunch of nutty commies thrown in for leavening in Blood’s a Rover. The books are insanely conspiratorial, and ultra violent. Basically, almost every conspiracy about the JFK assassination you’ve heard is correct in Ellroy’s telling. Ditto the MLK and RFK assassinations. As he puts it in a later novel, “Everything you suspect is true, and not at all what you think.”
American Tabloid would be the place to start those novels. The LAQ novels aren’t necessary at all for these, but these three really should be read in order. Ellroy specializes in characters with deep flaws, and not the kind that are redeeming either. He’s rather disdainful of Raymond Chandler, although I can’t find the quote I want on that topic.
And this Wikipedia bit explains his narrative style quite nicely:
Hallmarks of his work include dense plotting and a relentlessly pessimistic—albeit moral—worldview. His work has earned Ellroy the nickname “Demon dog of American crime fiction.”
Ellroy writes longhand on legal pads rather than on a computer and prepares elaborate outlines for his books, most of which are several hundred pages long.
Dialog and narration in Ellroy novels often consists of a “heightened pastiche of jazz slang, cop patois, creative profanity and drug vernacular” with a particular use of period-appropriate slang. He often employs stripped-down staccato sentence structures, a style that reaches its apex in The Cold Six Thousand and which Ellroy describes as a “direct, shorter-rather-than-longer sentence style that’s declarative and ugly and right there, punching you in the nards.” This signature style is not the result of a conscious experimentation but of chance and came about when he was asked by his editor to shorten his novel White Jazz from 900 pages to 350. Rather than removing any subplots, Ellroy achieved this by eliminating verbs, creating a unique style of prose. While each sentence on its own is simple, the cumulative effect is a dense, baroque style.
The thing that gets me is that he can write in a variety of different styles, and do it well. The man is a true craftsman – it’s obvious he has worked and worked and worked on his craft, and as is the case with most masters, he makes it look easy.* It actually makes me despair of doing any writing, even blog comments.
Which is not to say I don’t have criticisms here and there. But criticism in general often comes down to complaints about how the nostrils flare on Michelangelo’s David. Nitnitnitnitnit….
The language as Ellroy uses it is appropriate for the milieu and for the characters. He mostly writes using third-person POV perspectives. Any given chapter will use the perspective of one character. Typically he uses three characters for each book. The Black Dahlia and White Jazz are exceptions, written as straight memoirs. Blood’s a Rover has a frame of sorts that makes it seem as though it should be a memoir, but that frame has no impact on the body of the book. There are characters in the Underworld USA trilogy that object to such language. They tell others so in conversation, and the language doesn’t appear in the non-dialogue portions of their chapters.
Incidentally, Blood’s a Rover is actually the weakest book of the bunch. The plot is murky, the character’s motivations don’t always make sense, and it has other problems. (Including, strangely, four obvious typos. Those were the only typos I saw in seven books. However, I think that was the only first edition I read, so that’s probably it.) But it still contains some brilliant writing, and it also has the best title. When I saw the title I thought, “Now THAT sounds like a noir title!” I was surprised to find it’s actually from an A. E. Housman poem:
Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad; when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough for sleep.
I confess I just don’t get most poetry, and thus I miss out on stuff like this.
White ethnic awareness (and friction) was one of the things that surprised me when I moved to Baltimore in 2000. I’d hear Germans complaining about “drunken Micks,” Irish folks bitching about “Polacks,” etc. And that was in the office! Having been born in Florida in 1968 almost the only ethnic difference I was aware of was White and Black. You were one or the other and that was that. (There was a smattering of “other” here and there – Vietnamese and Filipinos and such. Almost no Hispanic presence in Central Florida back then. And all the Others put together didn’t amount to any kind of presence.) I’m guessing that was a byproduct of The Movement.
But Ellroy’s heavy use of derogatory slang* terms for Blacks especially stands out to the modern reader – one just doesn’t SAY that kind of stuff anymore. If someone asks a question which has an affirmative answer, the person being questioned invariably responds “Can n*****s dance?” Whenever anyone is going to the Black section of LA it is referred to as N*****town. And since all the characters are jazz fiends someone is always going to that part of town. It actually reminds me of listening to my father and his buddies in construction talking back in the day – a “reckless verisimilitude” matches reality to a ‘T’.
* [1940s – ’50s period slang, remember ~ ed.]
*****
I only started reading Ellroy earlier this year. I was clicking around the tube one night when I couldn’t sleep and stumbled on the premier episode of James Ellroy’s LA: City of Demons on the Investigate Discovery (ID) channel. Ellroy doesn’t just write “detective fiction”, he is also a true crime buff. And so he did a six part series for ID about various crimes and criminals from the LA scene. The first episode focused on the unsolved murders of Elizabeth Short in 1947 (the Black Dahlia case – back in 1947 it was the Case of the Century. I don’t know what the Case of the Century was in 1948) and of his own mother in 1958, when Ellroy was ten years old. “Dead women own me” was the constant refrain. I was hooked.
I went to the library the next day and checked out The Black Dahlia (his fictionalized retelling of the Elizabeth Short murder) and L.A. Confidential. That library branch didn’t have The Big Nowhere so I read that one out of order after White Jazz. Down here in Orange County we have a very good public library system. The nicest feature is that they will deliver books to your home free of charge. I could have just ordered the books and waited, but I HAD to go to the nearest branch ASAP, even though I had to take my seven-and-a-half month old daughter with me and lug her around the branch with me. (Carrying a young squirming child while browsing the stacks isn’t the hardest thing I’ve done, but it wasn’t easy.)
(Incidentally, I don’t really read much in the detective/mystery genre. I’m off and on making my way through the original Sherlock Holmes stuff. I must have read Poe’s detective stuff when I was a teenager. And I have read Booked to Die, which was kind of fun. But that’s really it for me.)
Ellroy on camera is nothing like Ellroy the author. He has crafted a public persona that is much like the Sid Hudgens character from L.A. Confidential. (That was Danny DeVito’s character in the movie.) Speech suffused with gratuitous alliteration, absolute moral judgment, and a tabloid taste for scandal and depravity. That persona is somewhat buffoonish, and the alliterations often make no sense at all if you parse them out, but it is mesmerizing. Even the CGI talking police dog was a hoot. The next two episodes focused on the scandal rags (including a new interview with Lana Turner’s daughter – the one that stabbed Lana’s boyfriend Johnny Stompanato to death) and serial killers. AND THEN THEY TOOK IT OFF THE AIR! What the Hell? How bad do the ratings have to be to cancel a six part special series already in the can halfway through on the ID channel? What, you can’t air them at three in the morning on a Thursday? I’m still miffed.
(At least they stopped on a high note. Ellroy ends the episode on serial killers sitting in a diner speaking with Barko, the CGI police dog. Ellroy is bitching (ahem) that “the novelty of a talking dog is wearing thin. Besides, everyone knows you’re the real star of the show.” Barko offers to cheer him up by the two of them knocking over a liquor store and framing some gangbangers. Ellroy responds, “What about witnesses?” Barko: “What are they gonna say? ‘We were robbed by an aging burn-out and a talking dog’?”)
But by then I was already through Dahlia, into L.A. Confidential, and it was the written word that mattered. I didn’t finish the books until about week ago (I can only read in short bursts because of my daughter, so it took a LONG time), and I’m still kind of stuck in the Ellroy Zone. He’s got other stuff I can read, including the novels he wrote before Dahlia. But my impression is that Ellroy was still learning his craft at that point so I’m going to pass. There’re also memoirs (probably very interesting – he is one seriously fucked up individual), a couple of short story collections and some true crime stuff (Destination: Morgue!). But I really need to decompress, so I’m going to back off for now and search out something less intense to read.
PS It was unfair in one of the comments above to describe that one guy as the third most “good” character in the two series. He’s probably only the fifth or sixth most good character.
PPS My cat deleted well more than 200 words. I composed this in Word just to be safe. You’d think I’d do that with most comments after sharing homes with cats for the last 13 years, but the lesson never sticks.
One final Ellroy comment – at times the guy is fucking hilarious. There’s a scene in American Tabloid with Jimmy Hoffa talking with some Mob bosses. Jimmy starts off with “Those goddamned cocksucker Kennedys are trying to fuck me like the Pharoah fucked Jesus!” The conversation goes downhill from there and ends with “So don’t make Joe Kennedy sound like Jesus handing God the Ten Commandments on Mount Fucking Vesuvius,” which is, of course, in Yosemite National Park.
One FINAL final Ellroy comment. After I finished Dahlia I gave my wife (who wasn’t reading the book and hasn’t read the book) a three hour plus recap of the last sixty pages. She told me it was an interesting recap, but I was just completely wound up. She also tells me I’ve been recapping stuff regularly since then. (She actually said “nightly” but I don’t quite believe that – I’ve occassionally gone a few days without reading any Ellroy.) I’m still wound up over a week later, as perhaps you have surmised.
Ambiance 