From Da List -- Santos: Skin to Skin

     . . . . Pardon my delay in getting this out, but I wanted y'all to know that tonight (Thursday. Nov. 17)-- at 8 pm eastern, from New Orleans!  Postmambo Movie Night proudly presents a special virtual screening of Santos: Skin to Skin, 

 a new feature-length documentary -- still making the festival rounds -- about our colleague, percussion master John Santos, followed by a conversation with filmmakers Kathryn Golden and Ashley James, as well as Mr. Santos himself.

You need to be on the parallel [seminar] list to attend.  If you aren't already on it and want to attend, just send me an e-mail with the word [seminar] in the subject line.

The Zoom link goes out at 6 pm eastern. Thanks! 

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Whew, it's cold!  But not anywhere near as cold as it is back up in NY.  Worse They Say Buffalo and Watertown are probably getting 4 feet of snow between today and Sunday.

The Mothers of English Historical Novels - Plus Fèt Gede

     . . . .  Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontë by Devoney Looser (2022).

Washington Post review here, which upon reading the review, I immediately ordered the biography. These Porter sister novelists were the mothers of English historical fiction. I have often invoked Sir Walter Scott as the father of historical fiction (and Dumas as godfather), but as deep as my knowledge of English literary history is, I'd no idea these women had existed.  Can we guess why, one wonders . . . .

 Maria and Jane Porter published the first Brit historical fiction in novel form in several books in the first decade of the 19th century.  

Delaware Art Museum 

Book cover design for Thaddeus of Warsaw, by Jane Porter

ATTRIBUTED TO: Walter Stewart (American illustrator and painter, 1902–1981) 

Maria Porter, in her 1803 Thaddeus of Warsaw, created

... “the historical novel as we know it” in her 1803 tale of a Polish war hero who becomes a refugee in England. “What was new about ‘Thaddeus of Warsaw,’ ” Looser explains, “was its mingling of climactic historical events with the conventions of biographies, romantic tales, and probable domestic novels.” Contemporary critics dubbed it “a work of genius,” and it was a sensational bestseller. ....

ANTIQUE (1810) FIRST-EDITION HARDCOVER BOOK THE SCOTTISH CHIEFS. JANE PORTER. FRANKLIN EDITION. PUBLISHED PRINTED ENGLAND BY WORTHINGTON

In 1810 Jane Porter published The Scottish Chiefs, telling the tale of William Wallace’s battle for Scottish independence from Britain, published quite prior to Scott’s first novel, Waverly, 1814, that told of of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. 

These two sisters’ novels were massive hits, best sellers, out of the box. Would that have had any influence on Scott’s literary choice of form and subject?  One commentator to the review observed,

 "I find it interesting that of the twenty-six ‘Waverley novels’ written by Walter Scott not one was set during the time of William Wallace and King Robert I." 

Author Looser did address this -- how could she, how can we, not?

... [Looser] is more cogent on the question of why these popular and influential authors are virtually unknown today. The root cause of the sisters’ decline in literary reputation and, eventually, sales, Looser writes, was the phenomenal success of Walter Scott’s “Waverley” in 1814 and the author’s failure to acknowledge that the methods he employed in his historical novels were very similar to the Porters’: “Critics would increasingly claim that the Waverley novels had elevated the genre of fiction — and especially historical fiction — bringing to it a superior new (masculine) excellence, while correcting supposed previous (feminine) faults.”

Are we surprised yet?

.... Jane in particular resented this and in 1827 wrote a pointed short story, “Nobody’s Address,” that implicitly accused Scott of reducing his literary precursors to nobodies. By the time she died in 1850, having survived Maria by 18 years, Jane had been reduced to living with a brother and receiving charitable grants from the government. Her achievements deserved better recognition, and although Looser’s thickly detailed biography could stand to be a little less detailed, it pays overdue tribute to pioneering siblings unjustly neglected by literary history. ....

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     . . . . A perfect day -- gold, red and blue -- so clear and still, low humidity for a change, and the temperature in the seasonal 50's. Receiving audio royalties for The Books, was a good start to the day. However,  packed restaurants, streets and sidewalks. The annual Village Halloween Parade cattle stanchions are unloaded and going up too, for Monday, further blocking access to sidewalks and intersections.  Getting around down here is nearly impossible; I had to fight my way through the outsiders to my polling place. This is the first day of early voting in the Midterm election.  Alas there was so little, were so few, to vote for; mostly I was voting against. 

Weep for the city, weep for the state, weep for the nation, weep for the world. 

However, after Monday's Hell Night, Tuesday night, known in some places as El dia de los muertos and others as the Day of the Dead, in Haiti is Festival of the Dead,  Postmambo's Fèt Gede*, will zoom throughout the US and Europe.  This is the third year Postmambo is hosting a Gede festival: 

Postmambo Movie Night

presents

Fèt Gede in Weimar America

Tuesday, Nov. 1, 7 pm eastern

note earlier-than-usual start time

We'll warm up with some Haitian music videos, including some of my all-time favorites, namely RAM's videos featuring Gede, lwa of the dead. Including their new one, "Gede Vim Anwo." Mr. RAM himself, Richard A. Morse, has indicated that he will be able to drop in and talk to us from his pied-a-terre in New Orleans, where RAM is presently rehearsing and gigging, about these awe-inspiring videos.

==> Our main feature will be Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, shot between 1947 and 1954. We'll talk about it afterwards with my fave co-host, Dr. Elizabeth McAlister. (Revisit her January 2022 Postmambo Session on "Funerary Rites in Haitian Vodou" here.)

==> More guests to be announced, including an instructor in Gede dancing . . . Drop in for Fèt Gede / All Saints Day / Day of the Dead / at whatever time you can make it on Tuesday Nov. 1, starting at 7 eastern and continuing until 11 or so. More info to come.

I'll be sending the Zoom link out to this list on Tuesday at 5 p.m. eastern . . .

Get your purple, black and white, your single-lensed shades and black bowler hat, and be your own Gede self. 

* Fèt Gede is naturally huge in New Orleans, as well as Haiti and eastern Cuba.  The Morse and Ram's pied-à-terre there is so important, not only for the cross-aculturation going on between them and the city's indigenous vodun population and musicians and Head, but because Haiti is so very very dangerous -- no exaggeration to say Haiti is very dangerous -- for everyone, on so many fronts from the second invasion of cholera, lack of water and food, drugs, gang and 'government' violence -- climate change.  You name it, it's there in the perfect storm of calamity that has come to this nation, thanks to relentless, historical, racist politics on the part of the US and Europe.

Balzac: Fiction Needs Facts, Fiction Needs History, All Fiction Does

      . . . . The 19th C French novelists are a primary resource for thinking about writing/composing both fiction and history.  Balzac and Dumas are both particularly useful. But Dumas was nearly entirely concerned with the history of France provided in the pages of overt fiction. Balzac, however, thought constantly of the relationship of not just historical fiction to history, but the necessity of historical facts and verisimilitude to other fictional forms, particularly those forms we in the US, in this time, loosely call the realist novel, the novel of manners, and, the fiction of the fantastic.

Balzac came up a ‘system’ novel for the literature of realism – which term didn’t yet exist in his time – but was called by the 1820’s French Romantic painters, la couleur locale, and Balzac expanded to la couleur historique.

In describing that attempt, Balzac speaks of local color; in relation to the fiction of the period, his la couleur historique — is indeed more precise. For Balzac as for his contemporaries, truth could most easily be found in the history and expressed in literature with an historical setting: 

"Lit le roman historiques sont l'expression de la France et de la lit au XIXe siecle" (review of H. de Latouche, Fragoletta, 1829). He was to foreshadow Augustin Thierry's opinion, that history would impact nineteenth century fiction, as the young Romantics had experienced a violent reintegration into history, as a result of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The example of Sir Walter Scott merely gave a specifically literary dimension to an already intense fascination with history and historical change; and Scott would of course be Balzac's ideal for the whole of his mature literary career. His early aim was that of Scott and of Scott's other disciples, to reconstruct "l'esprit d'une epoque et d'un fait," to make popular the study of history through a form less boring perhaps than the scholarly essays inspired by la Clio classique. 

Even at this early stage, however, Balzac seems to call for a greater degree of truth than do many of his contemporaries. For him, historical fact was to serve as more than a mere springboard for the poetic imagination. He could say that the historical novel should not aspire to the rigorous veracity of scholarly history, that historical figures should have a peripheral role in what is after all a work of fiction. He criticized Vigny for having used history to his own ends:

avait vu quelques scenes poetiques, et il les avait Verite, pour nous convaincre que les artistes viven qu'il s'agit bien moins de mettre le vrai dans le fau le vrai" (review of M. James, Richelieu, 1830).

 Balzac, as he expressed it ten years later, was the exact opposite of literary truth which Vigny developed in his preface to Reflexions sur la verite dans l'art: "L'art du roman vrai dans tous les details, quand son personnage es la litterature, I, 1840).

Even Balzac's excursions into fantastique practiced by Ε. T. A. Hoffmann are dose of reality. The authenticity of details is a point many times in the articles and prefaces he wrote. A realist may deal in fiction, but he must never relinquish fact, "l'immense verite des details." Balzac's rapid abandonment of the historical and fantastique may well be explained by his judgment of  Indiana (1832)*:

 "Ce livre-la est une reaction de la verite contre le fantastique, du temps present contre le moyen-äge, du drame intime contre la bizarrerie des incidents ä la mode, de l'actualite simple contre l'exageration du genre historique."

What had originally been a quest for truth, an imitation of nature, had rapidly become the vehicle for the greatest excesses of the literary imagination. The public had grown tired, Balzac wrote in the preface to La Peau de chagrin (1831), his first important work with a contemporary setting, of "l'histoire de France." Les Chouans appeared in 1829, which also saw the publication of Merimee's Chronique du regne de Charles IX; only two years later Balzac followed his elder, Stendhal, in writing a chronique du XIXe siecle. ....

... the matter might change; the method had not.  The recreation of the past which is the task of the historian would  always remain for Balzac the most adequate analogy to the novelist's undertaking. He intended to write "l'histoire oubliee par tant  toriens, celle des moeurs." Charles Nodier had defined the novelist as historien de moeurs as early as 1817; for Balzac the term became a constant point of reference. He repeatedly proclaimed himself an historian of manners and morals, "plus historien que romancier"; he referrs to his work as "cette longue histoire des moeurs modernes mises en act. He claimed merely to be an humble copyist, the secretary of his society as he said novelists had always been. The gift he prized above addition to the ability to give artistic form to what one had to say, was the accurate observation of reality, which made the roman de mores a more difficult genre than the historical novel. The Balzacian notion of contemporary mores demands "des connaissances presque techniq tandis qu'un roman historique ne veut que la science, des recher et de la lecture". ....

- - - - Balzac's Theory of the Novel / Maurice Z. Shroder / L'Esprit Créateur / Vol. 7, No. 1, Honoré de Balzac (Spring 1967), pp. 3-10 (8 pages) / Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press / https://www-jstor-org.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/stable/26277449?

To see why Balzac believed it was more difficult to give artistic form to novels which are histoire des moeurs modernes mises en act -- the novels of contemporary manners -- one of his own works will provide an example. The subject of Illusians perdues (Lost Illusions) is a young man who burns to write literature, who has a decent gift, and the business of writing and publishing.

For those of us in the US, thinking of our own history and fiction that is inspired by our history, our own locale couleur and  locale historique, our National Archives (much available via online portal)  is and excellent resource.

When I'm asked what are the most important tools for writing good historical fiction, I always respond there are five.

1) voracious reading of the respected historians and fiction writers too -- and particularly those who wrote contemporary history of the period in which one's tale and characters are made;

2) Read the newspapers of the period -- that is, if your period had newspapers, but it will have some source of news, if only the local gossips. Indeed, George Eliot made brilliant use of these in Middlemarch, set several decades before she wrote it, though newspapers not only proliferated in that period already, and, indeed, a fictional newspaper is part of the fiction too; [Indeed, Laidislaw goes from his ambition to be a fine artist to working in newspapers and politics -- another case of literature's Illusions perdues!]

3) Look at the arts created in the period -- this includes listening to the music of the time, even though recording wasn't yet invented, probably, one may still learn something important, since making music played a role in so many lives, that speaks to class, and even to politics of those alive at the time;

4) Spend a lot of time with and the National Archives, and with JSTOR, generally now, since pandemic, available to you at home instead of needing to be at your local library, haunt the historical societies and museums of the place;

5) Go to the places one's characters go (which, as we see above, George Sand had not done).

* 

A novel by George Sand, published in 1832:

Indiana is a novel about love and marriage written by Amantine Aurore Dupin; it was the first work she published under her pseudonym George Sand. Published in April 1832, the novel blends the conventions of romanticism, realism and idealism. As the novel is set partly in France and partly in the French colony of Réunion, Sand had to base her descriptions of the colony, where she had never been, on the travel writing of her friend Jules Néraud.

If one has slogged through Indiana, as I have, one sees indeed how Balzac came to the conclusion that it was far more difficult to write fiction as convincing art for a novel of manners than for historical fiction

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In the meantime, things continue to roll along.  So much to do, so many places to go in the service of the doing -- please, please, please let neither of us contract covid.

The Heat Storm is reaching us today.  My concern goes out to our family and friends in West and the Southwest, and now the Middle West too.

Killing Eve - Again Watching Preposterous Clothes

      . . . . Killing Eve (2020) season 3 BBC-AMC. Continuing in this winter’s “Watching Preposterous Shows With Preposterous Clothes.”*

What to wear playing golf in Scotland when preparing to commit another murder.

I still have no idea why this psychopathic killer has the same name as this old and strict poetic form. Maybe the book series from which the BBC series was adapted says?  I've never read them.

Because I finished Inventing Anna (which I really liked, though I disliked all of the principal figures except Neff), and there's nothing compelling right now, I began watching season 3 of Killing Eve.  Which I'd been told by all and sundry of the media was just awful. So it must be its sheer makes no sense whatsoever that I enjoyed it so much? Also Jodie Comer's sociopathic grin?  Which comes so often? Especially after dumping a baby in a Parisian garbage bin, whose mother she had whimsically killed with a tuning fork?  Being given a new handler who is Succession's Shiv and Co.'s demented mom (Harriet Walter)? She is the world's meanest (surrogate)mom in Killing Eve too, (while Eve's birth mom is even meaner. We have one of this season's themes, folks.

Harriet Walker, being mean to her Succession kids

The cast is mainly terrific female actors, who, preposterous as the show might be, appear to be enjoying themselves in it, so whether the show itself makes any sense or not, there's plenty of value provided.  It's often a comedy, in its psychopathic way. I'm still laughing at the matter-of-fact manner in which Villanelle picks up the crying baby, carries him over to the garbage bin, comes back to the café table, while elderly Dasha, her Russian Keeper/Handler of Assassins, doesn't even comment, and doesn't care. And ya, I do really like Sandra Oh's hair as much as Villanelle does.

Villanelle giving Eve the side-eye.

Plus the great plus that Carolyn's character (Fiona Shaw) is so funny, 

and even funnier with demure daughter, Geraldine, played by Gemma Whelan (the the heavy boots and armor, the sword and dagger, which never leave her side, playing Yara Greyjoy, a buccaneering ship's captain for the Iron Islands, in GOT), while mom holds meetings in the bathtub and beats down the guys who interfere with what she wants.

O Geraldine, whose mom won't cry.

This seems to encapsulate this season – women behaving w/o even being aware of the millions of social norms societies everywhere have decreed are to govern every bit of behavior performed by women, from how they dress, to how they should behave when being pushed out of their job, to how they treat children, even to how they should react to the death of a son, a death of a brother – Carolyn’s character doesn’t grieve, she pulls out every devious capacity she’s achieved through years of practice and experience to find out if his murder was committed by The Twelve. She's obsessed with cracking them -- this is her job! That her daughter, who cries, is played by She-Who-Once-Was-Yara Lovejoy makes Carolyn's behavior all the more pointed for me somehow. 

“Just so you know, I’m kind of a big deal in this industry,” says Villanelle, who -- movin' on up the career chain -- supposedly is training a rookie assassin.  As on the job, he's an under-performer, she kills him.  Villanelle hasn’t got time for this shit of overseeing and training-on-the-job. Season 3 is so much about these women and their jobs, their work, in one unexpected, and often, very funny satiric scene, after another. All of them mention often, how good they are at their jobs, and how often the higher ups attempt to replace them with time-servers and incompetents. Which isn't how women are supposed to be, either.

Among the many complaints that Killing Eve, season 3, wasn't very good, was the story that seemingly everyone wants, Eve And/With Villanelle, their mutual obsession and thwarting of their mutual desire, their hunger for life that isn't day-to-day** was split up.  Mostly we follow this season's events of Eve and Villanelle separately, as on a split screen.  I'm not everyone, so I particularly like this split screen effect, because just Eve and Villanelle is claustrophobic.  I liked following all the other figures the show gives us, as they interact with each other, as well as with Eve and Villanelle, and the variety of their obsessions and thwarted desires, particularly for family ties with mum and dad, and the endless variants of betrayal, treachery and intrigue. 

“Are You From Pinner?” Episode #5, in which Villanelle re-visits her family, is sound tracked to Elton John, with whom the youngest family member is obsessed.  It mostly takes place in Villanelle’s Russian family, out of which she was expelled by Mom Tatiana at age 9 when she dumped Villanelle in the orphanage for being ‘dark’ – “Like you!” ripostes Villanelle. It includes the cray-cray conspiracy convictions held by the masses of the hinterlands, i.e. the ‘rural’ population of Russia (like the sacralized ‘rural’ population of the US), that we are being manipulated by lizard people, the government is trying to kill us, etc. – shared by a goodly portion of USians also lost to facts and reality. The episode hits its peak bonkers splendor in the Harvest Festival scenes in which great fun is found in the Dung Toss competition -- which Villanelle, of course, wins -- as she wins everything in which she competes, disturbing her mother. 

Such overt satire – that is at least as much a satire of contemporary Russia as of the contemporary UK and contemporary USA – quite different from the first two seasons.  For one thing, now BREXIT is in effect, no longer can UK citizens move w/o trouble to any country in the EU. Which means the production can’t travel either, w/o adding headache amounts of time and cost to the budget.  Also, a lot of this feels foreshadowing the current Russian invasion of Ukraine crisis.

So much reference to Russian manipulation and nefarious international dealing are in this season. Among those particularly striking are in Episode #7, where we glimpse a man who went out of his way to bump into Konstantin seconds before Konstantin collapses with a 'heart attack ' -- pricking people with poisons is an assassin go-to for those the Russian powers want eliminated, and they have done so in broad daylight even in London. Helene, another Russian Assassin Keeper Agent, says she loves Villanelle because she creates chaos, chaos in which dysfunction thrives and in which power can be overthrown and power seized -- see, o, well you know, not just Russia but so many others acting or trying to act on the world stage such as Our Most Famous Chaos Demon here in the USA.  

Starting with how the characters compel our eyeballs to look at them (with the assistance of Preposterous Clothes), this season had echoes of Orphan Black, such as how it uses music, as well as Villanelle taking on one identity after another. In “Are You From Pinner?” Villanelle’s mother is even named, ‘Tatiana,’ recalling Tatiana Maslany.  Unlike the clones, though, Villanelle is always and only Villanelle, no matter how impeccably she acts, impersonates, and costumes. This is intentional, because these are personas for Eve for only so long as it is useful, entertaining, or she’s interested in wearing them, just as the clones intentionally were different individuals.

In the end, it’s just Villanelle and Eve, on London's Tower Bridge, still unable to quit each other, though, as Villanelle observes in an earlier episode, “This isn’t good for both of us.”  Their people, their families, the agencies, and the governments are all revealed to be toxic and corrupt, disloyal and dishonest, only using them as they see fit until choosing to discard them.  This was brilliant satire on everything from family ties, international conspiracies, secret services, and work.  As Russian Keeper Agent Dasha says to Villanelle, ""Management is not easy. It's watching someone do job worse than you. That's why it sucks." Villanelle handles the younger competition that Helene brings in and kills her -- which so many, in other lines of work, wish they could do too, many times a day.

I am looking forward to how the fourth season will play out, since now it’s 2022, in a world that has been re-landscaped by BREXIT, the pandemic, Russia and the rise of authoritarianism everywhere.

“If I killed everyone who betrayed me there wouldn’t be anyone left.”

---- Villanelle/Oksana season 3, episode #1, " Slowly Slowly Catchy Monkey"

* On this list of television I've watched this winter, beyond Killing Eve, in which the costumes, the more ridiculous the better, are often the point:  Emily in Paris, My Fair Lady, The Eyes of  Tammy Bakker, And Just Like That, The Gilded Age, Agatha Raisin, and, Inventing Anna.

** I would love it so much if season 4, premiering here on BBC America - AMC next Sunday, February 27th, gives us at least a scene of Eve and Villanelle during pandemic lockdowns -- can you even imagine being locked down with Villanelle in the vicinity?  We've already seen what she does in an orphanage and in prison.

I'm sorry I won't be able to watch it like I did Season 3, one episode every night, back-to-back until finished. This is one of those series that benefits a great deal from binging because there are so many subtle connections and commentaries going on that one will not notice with seven days separating each episode -- and especially, when the connection is to an episode that was 2 - 3 weeks ago. I'm guessing that's one reason so many people felt disappointed in this season, that and that the show's always darkly comic tone and viewpoints shifted some degrees overtly satiric.  So many male viewers, who just adore the cringery Succession, the 'dark comedy' that demands our sympathy and identification with the very people who have destroyed us and our nation, just hated this season of Killing Eve.

"Where's my hot lezzie sex?  I was promised sex! Women=sex!  Where is it?" 

Instead, women killing anybody they decide needs killing.  Doing it without sex.  Being very funny. In twisted, deranged ways, but they are their own twisted, deranged ways.  A room of their own, so to speak.

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     . . . . In the meantime, it has been cold, so cold.  I don't quite remember it being like this before, here in NYC.  There were days in which nothing we did got us completely warm, no matter layers of wool and cashmere, no matter space heaters, no matter the radiators pumping, no matter the cooking and eating.  The only times were thoroughly warm all the way through, from top to bottom, from fingers, hands and feet, was in bed, sleeping cuddled together under blanket, quilt and comforter.  The good thing about that, was sleep was deep and peaceful.  Talking about this cold at the 6-person combo Valentine's and Birthday party some friends hosted for me last week, as one does/did, C said, "The only time I ever felt this penetration of cold right into my bones is when I've been London."  C nailed it.  That's exactly what it was like.  The air in this cold has stayed noticeably damp -- and more than twice we had snow, as well as rain for 12 - 15 hours straight.  Not heavy, generally, but constant.

Working on credit sequences, typefaces, and titles, getting Tierra Segrada in shape for the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, at the end of March. Continuing with Postmambo events and movie night via Zoom.  And cooking.  O lordessa, do I cook!  Tonight it's ground lamb, spinach, mushrooms and couscous.

Hooray For the Tulips! Gilded Age Screens and History in Books!

      . . . . These weeks of below freezing temperatures are good for three very important things:

1) Kills off many strains of bacterias unfriendly to humans and other living beings;

2) Kills off mosquito larvae!

3) Tulips!  Bulbs need days of seriously cold weather underground to burst their dormancy before they can explode in all their glory.

     . . . Still, it is cold, which tends to keep one inside despite having those terrific respirator N95 masks that prevent one's lenses from fogging over, and even though one is fortunate enough to have all the right things to wear outside in below freezing weather, still in possession of easy mobility, while being perfectly comfortable temperature-wise.

     . . . . Fortunately lots of tv to watch and books to read.  

So Many say Julian Fellowes, he brought us the wildly popular Downtown Abbey, has struck out with The Gilded Age, which premieres tonight on HBO. If he has indeed struck out, my theory will be (though I do not swear to stick to that theory) is that he's got Cynthia Nixon playing a sweet, but feisty, spinster sister to an old Dutch aristo glum bitch snob, who wants NO NEW  MONEY HERE! ROBBER BARONS DEPART THESE PRECINTS WHERE I AM NOW! This, when Nixon's simultaneously appearing on HBO in the Sex And the City sequel series, And Just Like That, playing a middle-aged woman who falls madly in lust with a younger hotter than hot Irish-Mexican, non-binary lesbian butch-bitch, and thus blows up her marriage.  Also a couple of years after a risible run to be ... get this, folks! ... governor of the state!  But then, considering the clownships the last governors have been, perhaps that is too harsh on Cynthia Nixon (but still I'm sticking with my own theory that she's often a much better actor than she'd ever have been as governor).

Among the many things to watch I will be checking out The Gilded Age despite the media already telling me to miss it.

Media faux ‘discussion’ about Fellowes’s debut HBO series often includes mentions of other films/tv set (roughly) in the era, always starting with Scorsese's adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1993), part of his life-long work of putting (his) historical NYC on film. Unlike Fellowes's series, all of such films are adapted from novels, and so many of them part of the classic American Fiction canon. The other thing to keep in mind as contrast with Fellowes's series, is none of them were written for that marketing classification that publishing has labeled "Historical Fiction."

All of them were written by people who were part and parcel of the era about which they were writing -- it wasn't history, but the their present day lives, even if the time of the novel had succeeded by another era by the time it was published, such as Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1920).  

I regret the second part of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women is left out of the list, particularly that week house party which open Meg's eyes to the realities of the age's marriage market. OTOH the only Little Women screen adaptation that even included the party was the latest, right before the pandemic. I also regret that no one has  thought of adapting for the screen several other Alcott works (which incidentally all are set in this Gilded Age and remark on its morals and mores, such as Eight Cousins, its sequel Rose in Bloom -- almost a harping on the excess of the era -- as is An Old-Fashioned Girl -- or the sequels to Little Women,  Little Men and Jo’s Boys. 

At the same time, these media writers don't include  Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and his Sister Carrie, both of which had films made from them too.  But then, they're in b&w, and don't have that kind of opulence of pretty things for our eyes to wallow in.

However, thanks to the BBC, Merchant-Ivory, Jane Campion and other fine directors, we have an entire set of on-screen adaptations from Henry James's many novels’ fractal examination of the manners and mores of the era!

     . . . . So many Fine Books to read to keep me from the cold of disenfrancisement and enforced isolation coz all the covidiots -- though lucky for us, our numbers for new infections are dropping, Yay.

Back to books. Currently reading:

Washington At the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery (2021) by Bruce A. Ragsdale; 

The Bright Ages : A New History of Medieval Europe (2021) by Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry.

What a unfortunate title! like that attempt to counter Grimdark with Noble Bright -- o gods! -- and how so many other terms so common in titles and labels are used so incorrectly, like HopePunk -- kiddos do you even know that punk was exactly about not having hope, that the future is only dystopian?, or for that matter, Blues, Jazz or Gumbo. It's as though the authors of their Bright Ages are determined to believe the 450's -800 are no different from 15th and 17th centuries -- and what about the centuries that come between?  They use Dark Ages and Medieval interchangeably. Argh! 

Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain (2020 -- just available in the US) by Padraic X. Scanlan

Yes, one must tell them this because even today, in the year 2022, the UK outside of Ireland that is, refuse to admit it.  See, even published just today in the UK Guardian, a review of Capitalism and Slavery by Dr. Eric Williams, written at Oxford in 1938, one of the first books I read, back in the 1980's, that shaped to this day my thinking on the subject of Atlantic-New World slave trade and slavery and how it made the capitalist system possible, and financed the Industrial Revolution. Plus, see the first title in this list of four!

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire (2022) by Jonathan M. Katz.

As he is writing about places and events I know very well, including having been in Cuba and all those locations many, many times, he's been caught out as wrong on a few things, but it's a fascinating, enlightening and useful book. Let's just not let being a journalist get one to thinking one is an historian. Among his journalist's expertise though, for which I'm grateful, Katz does a thorough job of describing the attempt to fascist reichwing, supremacist rich white to coup the US government with the same sorts of groups and financing that brought both Hitler and Mussolini to power -- all legally (Franco did by military conquest; they did not) -- and how we have the same sorts of groups right now, operating in exactly the same manner as with Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

 

 

Sunny, Warm Interregnum

      . . . . For the first time since sometime in December, when Omicron arrived, here is unaccustomed cheerfulness. The day began early, with stepping into the outdoors, into sun and warmth. Today's an interregnum after a stretch of below freezing days, and prior to the plunge into single digit temps for the weekend, plus a wind, snow, then rain storm into Monday and temperatures below freezing for the coming week.  

Dashed out wearing the respiratory N95 -- no fogged glasses! --  to TJ's, first thing, in hopes of an emptier store.  Late in the morning I danced out to the library, for another armload of mysteries, just in time for the freeze. Followed up with a big shopping at MW, this time el V with me for the carrying.  

Everybody is masked up, even on the street -- the tourists must have gone home. We've all been hunkering in self-imposed isolation, our sort of NYCers anyway, due to the Omicron forest fire, and the cold, so we're all running around today to stock up on more groceries, for the next week of  bunkering against the cold, and in the likely case of borked supply chains due to weather.  Today, though, anything one wants and needs are on the neatly stocked shelves. I do hear though, from the elderly in our building and others, what can be harder to get -- meaning, so far, only they've had to wait, are prescription medications.  As for groceries, I've been hearing our persent, local, good fortune isn't shared everywhere across the country.

They Are Saying that maybe Omicron's peaking here?  We should be so lucky, since before Christmas. everyday we were told of at least one more person we know down with it, or someone calling with the news, "Family member/s/me positive and / or down with it."

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     . . . . People elsewhere are also in self-isolation. 

Tonight's the first Postmambo Movie Night of 2022; Postmamboists across the country are saying, "Thank God! We're going crazy shut-in."  Tonight's program is NOLA Reconnect/Postmambo's first one of 2022.

Presiding, via Zoom, is Dr. Elizabeth McAlister, author of Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora:

 

Funerary Rites in Haitian Vodou

Honoring Frisner Augustin, Legendary Priest of the Drum

. . . . The second January Postmambo Movie Night is Thursday, January 20, 8 p.m. Eastern. 

In honor of the Jack Kerouac centennial, Postmambo Movie Night presents Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank, 1959)."We'll talk to the film's composer, David Amram, who sat next to Kerouac in the studio as he improvised the voice-over narration. David is still gigging at the age of 91! We'll talk with him about his scores for The Manchurian Candidate and Splendor in the Grass, his friendship with Thelonius Monk, his visit to then-forbidden Cuba on the path-breaking 1977 "jazz cruise," and lots more."

Here are some, not all, of our recent NOLA Reconnect Sessions

Dec. 9: Richard Morse with Dr. Elizabeth McAlister

Nov. 11: Erol Josué with Dr. Elizabeth McAlister

Oct. 31: Jean-Daniel Lafontant live from Temple Na-Ri-Vèh on Fèt Gède

Oct. 31: C. Daniel Dawson

Oct. 14: Paul Beaubrun with Dr. Elizabeth McAlister

Sep. 13: A Conversation with Dr. Ivor Miller

Aug. 12: Rafael Delgadillo on 19th-century New Orleans

July 8: Gianluca Tramontana and Dr. Ben Lapidus on changüí

"Life Changing!" has become one of the most common responses to the Postmambo/NOLA Reconnect experiences, despite Zoom!

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P.S.  El V has become a convert to toast, via my sour dough bread discovery.  He wants toast with everything! 

The Dark Ages On Three Kings Day

     . . . . Today is Three Kings Day, the day which begins the count down to Mardi Gras. 

In Roman Catholic countries, and here, in New Orleans, we eat King Cake.  We have some, from Mille Feuille, our local French bakery -- which makes all the very best of everything that it makes.  It feels all the more important to observe King's Day since, for a very long time, 01/6/21 will be thought of on this date, in the USA  

Mardi Gras's comin', BAAAAAAAAAABEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Doncha fergit it!

In the meantime, even in the Dark Ages, surely, at least in the monasteries, Three Kings Day a/ka/ Epiphany was observed.
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     . . . . A long time ago, 1938 in fact, Robert Graves, who made the Empress Livia live forever, thanks to his character of Emperor Claudius, the BBC, and actor Derek Jacobi, way back in 1972, published an historical novel of another age, a different Roman Empire, a newish religious era, titled Count Belisarius.

For newcomers to these names, Commander Belisarius is an historically lauded general of the 6th C -- 505 - 565. He was part of the times that historians have called Europe's "Dark Ages." This is the century that has been the favorite chronological location for Britain's King Arthur.

Looking through this so readable novel, it differs in so much from what the current historians of his time and actions I've been reading for the last ten years.  This was another effective military commander badly treated by a fearful, jealous Byzantine emperor. But even so, Graves seems to be wrong, deliberately or otherwise, about much of even the small, basic stuff we do know about the Commander.  For one thing, Graves has chosen, according to himself, to present this story as a Legend, a Romance in the mode of the Arthurian cycles as written in the Medieval period.  Partly that is due to Graves depending on Procopius as his major source -- as do all, of course, including respectable historians -- but Procopius is infamous for all the axes he grinds in his Secret History, his prejudices, his personal antagonisms, his conscious pay-back and sheer malicious joy in blackening reputations. Though he loved Belisarius, oooo how he hated the Empress Theodora!

Unlike Graves's two Claudian novels, which I've read several times, this is a first read of Count Belisarius. I'm starting to think  Gore Vidal's Julian (the Apostate) - 1964, and Robert Harris's Cicero Trilogy, were influenced by this earlier book, particularly with Vidal's structure, and Harris's choice for narrator.

It's been a bright spot in these damned Omicron-coupled-with-insane politico clowns weeks, to feel I've finally gotten something of a handle on the Gothic, Vandal and Hunnic wars of the 5th century, and some of the 6th century, for both the western and the eastern empires (which, by the end of the 5th century, the western empire was in the agony that transformed it into the states that became Europe). 

I'm really understanding why it is so many archaeologists and historians warn, "Be grateful you were not born in the 6th , 7th -- a century that brought Bubonic Plague to Constantinople and Europe, among all the other ordeals and horrors -- and 8th centuries -- though honestly, for So Many, the 5th and 9th + centuries don't look all that good either. At least in the 9th century Europe got Charlemagne and his dreams of a unity Christendom (he failed, as Christianity and all religions fail at that sort of unity), culture, civilization and knowledge.

I'm trying to get a firmer grip on the Goths in the Danubian lands, Italy, Africa, Gaul and Iberia prior to the Arab explosion in the 7th century. So dark, the written information so scarce -- and all of it biased as heck

I do not think I shall ever get even a slippery grip on the Persians -- there were so many iterations of the Persians, starting so far back, and going on for many eras.  So very very VERY many eras. To this day so many in Iran speak Farsi-Persian, as well as speakers of Dari Persian throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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Looking at the stat NYC covid map: there are large parts of the boroughs that are more than 50% infected -- or just positive?  They don't tell us that. Our nation hit 1,000,000 new cases today.  Yes.  One MILLION. So, we are not at all out and about these days. 

Plus. it's cold here.

Though not as frigid as it will be the weekend, and this weekend won't be as frigid as next week.  Tomorrow morning we have Maybe Snow. Tonight we're doing serious comfort food for dinner.

Some hearty red Spanish wine.    

Tempe Na-Ri-Véh -- Haiti

      . . . . El V made this in an attempt to assist those who are struggling so hard to provide assistance. 

I Say, You Say, They Say, All Say "Abbott (Who Needs Costello)"

 

Why, yes, as we say, say we all, so says AOC

‘He is not familiar with a female body’

Cortez went on to explain the basic biology surrounding pregnancies, and that many pregnancies are often undetected at six weeks. She said: “In case no one has informed him before in his life, six weeks pregnant means two weeks late on your period. And two weeks late on your period, for any person with a menstrual cycle, can happen if you’re stressed, if your diet changes, or for really no reason at all. So you don’t have six weeks.”

Cortez added: “He speaks from such a place of deep ignorance, and it’s not just ignorance. It’s ignorance that’s hurting people.”

Recall the New York woman who waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the day said, "If men got pregnant abortion would be a sacrament."? That was Gloria Steinem They (the blobmedia) was determined to tell us, but Steinem said it was Floryence Kennedy who said, she had heard it in Boston from an elderly Irish lady taxi cab driver.

And even further back than that in New York there were Susan B. Anthony and Cady Stanton.  The staging of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson's opera re Anthony, The Mother of Us All in February 2020, was the last time I've been there.  Sigh.

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     . . . .  Brain's been in a funk the last several days.  I hope I'm coming out of this state in which I just don't wanna bother because why bother?  A weekend without a hurricane, without a hurricane watch, without a hurricane, all of which were disasters to so very many of our near and dear, after three in row, has helped. El V insisted we Go Out to observe our Carnalversary, which is Labor Day Weekend (why yes, that was a date that lasted the entire long weekend!) helped too.  There's just been so much death, delta, destruction, voter suppression, and all around wickedness in the last few weeks that my processing capacitors seemed to have needed to shut down for a while.  All I want to do is watch old Poirets on Acorn tv and read novels.

Books, we have them.  I brought home two from the library this afternoon.

I'm going to re-read Sharon Kay Penman's second Plantagenet novel Time And Change (2002), now I've finished the re-read of When Christ and His Saints Slept (1995) -- well that one I listened to while working out.  This one I'll read with mine own eyes. Henry II and Eleanor have courted and married, he's become king.  In this second novel Henry and Beckett's alliance-friendship fails in murder; Henry and Eleanor's brilliant erotic, romantic, strategic marriage alliance of equals goes to hell yet with love abiding. Can there be anything more dramatic that that?

The second novel I brought home is The Personal Librarian (2021) by Mare  Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. This historical fiction is centered upon the mixed race, passing for white, brilliant woman, who was John Pierpont Morgan’s first librarian, in charge of his magnificent collection in the building that is now the Pierpont Morgan Library.  I've been looking forward to reading this novel since late spring / early summer.

Delivery brought three non-fiction books today too.  

Toby Green's A Fistful of Shells: West Africa From the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019) a history of the African slave trades -- not only the Atlantic slave trade.  I wish we'd had this book back when we were writing the bodies as money sections of The American Slave Coast (2015).  

We received Ada Ferrer's latest book, just released, Cuba: An American History.  We will not be suprised if she gets the Pulitzer for it. She's speaking tomorrow night at a NYPL event, but tomorrow night is Postmambo Movie Night, so we cannot participate.

September 9 and 16, 2021

NOLA Reconnect Sessions and Postmambo Movie Night present

 

Cuba and Africa: Ivor Miller and The Rumba Kings [Some serious Congo Guitar Godding going on' here! ]

The bidirectional flow of music between Cuba and Africa, with Abakuá and Congo perspective

And, a book that can't be more New York if it tried, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destablized America and Produced Trump (2021) by Spencer Ackerman. OK, so it's not just about New York, but it is stuffed with what we experienced up close and personal.

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      . . . . As for watching, I'm continuing with King of Boys (2021), Season 1, Netflix Original and the re-watch of The Last Kingdom, 4 seasons, the best 'period' television going. 

Brain, heart, soul in funk though, so bad has it been, that I missed working out one day last week, I keep wanting My Life Is Murder, season 2 (2021), in sunny, colorful Sydney, featuring Lucy Lawless as police consultant, Alexa Crowe.  In the latest episode we here learn that even if successful enough for Las Vegas, Sydney? New Zealand? drag queens cannot compare to the stunning, talented, spectacular drag beauties we are used to. Also, by time the drag duet was to go to Las Vegas, Las Vegas was closed, but they evidently didn't know that, even though Alexa's assistant, Madison called Vegas to learn for who rooms were booked. 

Thus -- I'm most confused.  Supposedly they are now somewhere in New Zealand ... for ... reasons? Family?  But it still looks like Sydney.

We  learn Alexa has a brother in prison and her father was something of a crook and con man -- just like Miss Fischer's dad!  The bro is played by the dude who plays Sam on Netflix's northern California soap opera, Virgin River. He isn't convincing as an Aussie, New Zealander, whatever.  

Alexa and Madison

They Say that Renee O'Conner will show up in one of the episodes, so Xena fan service, I guess? Alas, only a single episode released per week, just as with Vera's season 11. So I began re-watching the earlier BBC Suchet Poirots too. 

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     . . . . This afternoon I officially began preparing for the long cold winter ahead.  I have discovered REI Co-op, an outdoor activities store.  This means they carry some serious cold temperature kit.  I started with the over the calf heavy duty merino sox, with extra layers on the soles.  I'll pick up more items like caps and more sox, particularly for el V in the next few weeks, as it couldn't be more convenient to do so, located between here and one of the library branches where I pick up ordered materials.

Keep on truckin' all we all!  

We Take Refuge Where And When We Can

     . . . . Not been a good month here despite el V's lovely birthday, two superb Postmambo Events, and, additionally, the ophthalmologist monitoring the eye with the damaged optic nerve -- though what's going on can be signs of incipient glaucoma -- found actual improvement from the last check-up.  Maybe it's the new lenses?  Another positive thing is the spectacular greenery and the variety of greens, due to the heat and the moisture. Related to that positive are the flowers, particularly in the community garden that's been allowed to grow as it wants pretty much, without being cut back or off.  The range of vivid blossoms erupting out of the head tall greens is balm to the soul. That's purely personal though. Beyond the purely personal, things are very far away from good.

It's unnecessary for me to provide the details as to why both Haiti and Cuba are tragedies of political history, and our personal histories, that need not have happened, as surely by now all have heard of them and formed opinions, if there is among all and sundry enough interest to even bother forming an opinion -- or learning facts. Climate change feeds into both Haiti's and Cuba's disasters as well as political forces forcing both nations to go without medical supplies and food -- which forces merge into catastrophe for both the island nations. For Cuba certainly, there is no light at the end of the tunnel that begins and ends in Miami. Haiti too, as we've been told that's from where the conspiracy was hatched.

Weather They Sayers announced today our city has the most dangerous air quality of any city on the planet, due to the western US wildfires' smoke blowing right into us. One wishes to wear a good mask if one needs to go outdoors for this reason now too. Rain fell for a little while, so all that particulate from the West and Northwest can be flushed into our gardens, sewers, into the East and Hudson Rivers, the harbor and the ocean.  Like pandemics, climate catastrophe never stays in one place. No man is an island, what affects thee, affects me, and so on and so forth.

Yet despite the experts of many nations begging governments to impose mask mandates in public spaces and limit gatherings, like our own stupid mayor, the politicians and governments everywhere refuse to mandate masking and distance in public spaces now, because THE ECONOMY -- and future office seeking. So -- here we are again, spiking like crazy, including right here, when barely 2 weeks ago, our own zip code and so many others in the city and state were essentially at zero for positive tests, new infections, hospitalizations and deaths. All those anti-vaxxers, enemies of the people, surely are pleased with themselves all over again, as they bring down what's left of a health system. 

Again, with COVID, extreme weather, bikers, skateboarders, stupid tourists, guns/crime/mad/desperate people, mosquitos showing up infected with the Nile Virus, etc. etc. etc., being outdoors means anything but relaxation and refreshment, even at night. In many ways, particularly at night. But for the out-of-control, whether from racist hatred or years of being homeless or the conviction of utter privilege that no laws or regulations apply to ME shoving my Porsche at 90 MPH through the crowded streets and killing people so what? day and night make no difference.

     . . . . Spouses, Lovers, Friends, one way and another, these purely personal relationships are the greatest refuge from the horrors overwhelming our present cursed "interesting times."   About once a week, el V, B and I dine with, and catch-up with, 2 or 3 friends -- all of us vaccinated.  We've been to visit another historian in his Rhode Island beach shack, making us a mini history conference.  At the beginning of August, we will visit one of our terrific Postmambo friends in his beautiful, large old historic house upstate -- with a pool, massive yard and huge screened in annex, where we will have Thanksgiving in August, the Thanksgiving we'd planned for last November, but prudently called off due to Covid spiking, which it continued to do until the blessed vaccines showed up. But we are vaccinated, so we are keeping to the plan made last year to do our cancelled holiday celebration feast with friends this summer. Still, as originally planned, this will be a small gathering of 4 people, perhaps 5, depending on another's work schedule.

     . . . . History provides refuge and escape. One does speculate others too are looking for refuge in the past, thus so very many time-travel series showing up lately -- none of which I have the least inclination to look at even the first episodes.  How fortunate, one further speculates, that it is not possible to subject the present or the past to the pressures of future colonialism for the sake of the yet unborn's survival. The future would have every right to do so, considering how ours and every preceding generation has abused Earth. But alas, we cannot go back in time and save ourselves, since we didn't already do it. Beside, those who benefit would be, as usual the very rich and protected, not the future sort of thee and me -- while the already mentioned 0.01% make massive profit out of our lack of salvation.  Until, perhaps they too, despite anal dildo shaped escape space craft, are crushed by lack of oxygen and water.

Some of these latter sorts are getting spooked by Delta, getting the idea that the economy can tank from it.  This is the only way of course we will ever get a federal mandate anywhere in the world for masking and vaccination.  One does fear it's way too late now.

We continue our own plundering of the Dark Ages with Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400 – 1000. Wickham's thesis of the real changes and transformations of the West in the 5th century was the changes in the signatures of the wealthy and powerful. Free time, leisure, was the signature of wealth and power. Much of that was spent in the luxury of the country villas, where they cultivated the arts and learning, particularly the literary arts, as well as government and administration.  By the end of the 5th C, the signature of the wealthy and powerful were the manly martial arts.  The ruling class no longer affected togas as sartorial signatures of their status, but dressed like Roman army commanders.  However, even more so, the ruling class needed as much land as they could wheedle, conquer or steal. And steal away they did, which went on for centuries, as we know.

     . . . . Television has provided some good historical escape.

Straight-up historical - period scripted drama created in the present:  El Cid, 11th C, Spain and Andalus, season 2; No Sudden Move, 1950's Detroit, scripted now; The Rising Hawk, 13th C, refugeed tribes in the Carpathians invaded by the Blue Horde, scipted now; Borsalino, which was looked at here last time, is another splendid example, scripted at the end of the 1960's, located in 1930's

Women in the past re-created in the present: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (the 1920s, Melborne, scripted in the second decade of the 21st century); Ms Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries (sequel series scripted in the second decade of the 20th C, set in  1960's Melborne when niece inherits Aunt Fisher's possession and calling) Both of these were eras in which women claimed freedom and rights Horatio had not yet dreamed of. 

The present that is now the past: Bergerac, first season of 9, begins in 1981, on bi-lingual island of Jersey, featuring the young John Nettles who grew up to become Midsomer Murders's Barnaby, scripted then; House of Cards (the original, British version -- forget Kevin Spacey -- scripted then); The Midnight Garden of  Good and Evil, set in the late 1970's, semi-fictional, scripted then, and oops can't forget Spacey coz he's the driver. These three share the commonality of period: late 1970's and the first years of the '80's.

     . . . . Fiction has provided two works of historic escape that eschew cloying froth: Katherine (the Lady Swynford, Duke of Lancaster's mistress, eventually his wife, whose children ultimately ancestored many royal figures, while living in the England of Edward II and Richard and the Bubonic Plagues) by Anya Seton; The Noble Outlaw: Crowner John Mystery Series, Book 11 by Bernard Knight. This is a  series in which it seems to be always cold, always snowing.  "Crowner" in 12th century Essex, is our contemporary "coroner"; author's day job was as coroner.

2021: Half Empty? Still Half Full? How Did It Get To Be July?

      . . . . Return from Miami scheduled tomorrow, just ahead of Hurricane Elsa, in time for Pasta and Jazz Saturday at home.  Miami is, um, shall we say, terrified, having to admit it being ground between Condo Collapse and Climate Collapse, which latter involves both rising sea levels and rising numbers of tropical storms and hurricanes. Surfside's beach front condo catastrophe seems quite in the cards for so many, and not only in Miami-Dade. People in Canada, due to their own massive salt soaks due to highways, streets, sidewalks and roofs, with their own massive condo population, and now astounding high temperatures, are pretty terrified too.

In the meantime:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

     . . . . Though at one time I watched many French New Wave films, the French gangster noir was a subset mostly missing, perhaps because my mentors weren't interested in it themselves?  So I just watched for the first time Borsalino and Co. (1974),  featuring Alain Delon and produced by Alain Delon, on Amazon Prime. This is the 1974 sequel to the 1970 Borsalino, which co-starred Jean Paul Belmondo and Delain. Amazon provides subtitles or one can watch a dubbed into English version. As the time line is 1930’s Marseille, from the perspective of 2021, this is doubly a period film. As with most period screen work prior to very recently, and even now,  see women’s shoes! --  the women’s hair is anachronistic – still following that teased, sprayed variations on the Bardot big hair flip of the swingin’ 60’s. Otherwise, the details, whether the vehicles -- which includes horse's harness -- and particularly the men's suits, are period accurate. Men's suits, to die for, for sure -- hey the characters are French and Italian, so of course.  The women mostly don't wear much, but what they do wear would fit right into what is unworn mostly in contemporary fifty years after Borsalino and Co., in today's "Gentleman's Clubs." 

We begin in a cemetery, in silence, followed by a long, silent take of the hearse advancing out of the cemetery, front-on toward the viewer, infinitesimally slowly, during the credits roll.  First 5 + minutes, nobody speaks. People are merely watching, attending the action, as are we, the viewers. Yet, we quickly learn, that in the tradition of ancient connection between southern Italy and southern Gaul/France, the antagonists-protagonists are Mafia gangsters, who have the paid cooperation of the French police and politicians.

The plot emerges out of collusion of the Mafia w/ the contemporary fascist-nazi international movements, and their proponents in local and national governance, law enforcement and finance – German, Austrian, Italian, Spanish, and yes, in France's and the UK's too  -- who use them to get guns and muscle, financed by the gangsters' free rein with bootleg and smuggled booze, and the manufacture and distribution of heroin. Volpone, the bad Mafia Big, displays autographed photos of Mussolini, never specifically focused upon by the camera eye, but part of scenic decor. Volpone's sneers that Siffredi's style, taking revenge, is out-of-date and over for their kind; we gangsters are now part of the establishment, and taking over the whole world in tandem with the politics of the fascist international. 

When Siffredi gets his mojo kicking in again after his hero's arc reversal, he leaves Marseille for Genoa, to get the money to recruit for vengeance. Nothing during the Genoese chapter of Siffredi's life is shown or told as to how he and his no-back-story to explain his boy's bottomless loyalty, obtain the money and mojo to take “Borsalino and Co.” to France again, and work out that out-of-date revenge. But surely we the viewers know it wasn't done politely or legally, and surely there are bodies piled up.

Cinematic and history's style, period, tone, culture, meld elegantly. We see throughout what Peckinpah, Scorsese, Coppola -- particularly Scorsese -- took note of in their close studies of the French New Wave, particularly with the set dressing, mise-en-scéne in scenic structure. Demonstrated on the screen we see what the French directors learned from US directors of the gangster and western films. At one point, ever so suave Seffredi, not yet broken by the bad bad guy, shoots with a revolver in one hand and double barreled shot gun in the other, bodies falling over balconies, down stairs, blasted into wall, piled up in an anonymous heap of nobodies who matter only to illustrate how competent the Siffredi character is with guns. In a reflection of the silent credit roll of the opening, in the opening sequence to Our Hero's arc of redemption of his Marseille fall, is a long sequence which is a train speeding through the night, car after car, brightly lit inside, so we outside in the dark see into every compartment, even the details of passengers reading, eating, talking, sleeping, until the car in which Our Boys are interested appears. This long sequence is simple, elegant, hypnotic, so much longer on screen than anything we will see today, except overt, graphic scenes of violence. But, never fear, this section concludes with an act of brutality that not even Tarantino has out-done (who was nine when this film was made).

The film concludes on a luxury liner, with Siffredi, his boys (and one girl) going to America in 1937. Where "We surely will find  and make some very good friends." Which leaves me with my 2021 sensibility resenting that I've had to root for just-as-bad guy protagonists vs. their bad-bad guy antagonists, that the dominance of the screen has me cheering on bad guys. All of them are black Borsalinos.* Nevertheless, I was entirely engaged with the film's artistic, historic and political vision.

* In case: Borsalino.