Secret Mall Apartment and Other Dives

Okay, this is my new favorite documentary:

https://www.impawards.com/2025/secret_mall_apartment.html

Trailer here:  LINK

Available on Netflix

"In 2003, eight Rhode Islanders created a secret apartment inside a busy mall and lived there for four years, filming everything along the way. Far more than a prank, the secret apartment became a deeply meaningful place for all involved."

Ahem.  They were eight Rhode Island artists, led by Mike Townsend, who had been living and working in cheap slum housing (haven't we all...) all of which was knocked down and replaced by the Providence Place Mall and Marketplace.  To quote Townsend, 

"the only mantra they [the developers] have is if you see a space that’s underdeveloped, you have a God-given responsibility to develop it. And it was basically like having a complete stranger be like, “We’ve been thinking about it, and we think we want to knock your house down and make it a parking lot, if it’s cool with you.”"...

"Oh, our actual home? Oh, yeah, they [BLEEP] leveled that. They came in with bulldozers and cranes and knocked that sucker flat... I’m like, “Oh… Really? Game on.”"

Back when the Mall etc. was being built, Townsend had noticed "an accidental room–a remainder left over by the long division of the mall’s architecture" in the guts of the mall, only accessible by crawling up inside the walls of the mall. 

So... while their homes and studios were gone forever, this room, this underdeveloped space, was there, and no one knew about it but them.  After all, they had a God-given responsibility to develop it, and they did.  (Wait until you see how they moved the furniture in.)  

*****

Squatting is artful expression?  Sounds like a bunch of homeless trespassers

- Comment on a website about SMA.

I disagree.  

For one thing, Townsend's a hell of a good artist:  starting at 23:08 on the video are the sculptures he built in the tunnel under the railroad tracks (another hidden space) that are... haunting, to put it mildly. 

Secondly, while we live in a country that remembers with pride homesteaders and explorers, mountain men and hunters... there's no free space left to do any of that in.  Every scrap of land in this country is owned and controlled by somebody: private citizens, city/county/state/federal governments, Native American tribes, corporations.    

BTW, most farms in America are "family farms" - but as you can see, the top 4%(which earn $1 million+ and are structured like corporations) account for most of the production.  

And if you're homeless - OMG.  There's no place for the homeless to go, which gets hugely ironic when a city/corporate deal knocks down 32 acres of urban shops and housing to build a mall, without making any arrangements for relocating the people who used to live there. Oops! You're out! Good luck finding a new place to live! And how dare you hang around here and muck up our new upscale image?  

Similar stuff's happening here, too. The Sioux Falls City Council decided to build a Convention Center downtown, and in order to do that demolished the Sioux Falls Department of Social Services (DSS) building, moving it to a new, consolidated "One Stop" building way out on the perimeter, hard to get to for people who don't own a car and/or are disabled. 

Now the idea was that a Convention Center will bring in lots of revenue, decrease crime, and get rid of the pesky homeless who live on the river in the summer.  I find this hilarious, because conventions generally come with an increase of crime, especially prostitution, theft, assaults, DUIs, etc. After all, one of the major reasons people go to conventions is to get away from their home territory and let their hair down, not to mention their pants. Why do you think Grindr breaks down every time a convention hits a town? Look it up.  

And the idea that you can go out into the wilderness and live off the land - a favorite fantasy, BTW, of inmates and I don't blame them a bit – Well, you can't.  What wilderness? You can't even pull over to the side of the road in your car and crash out anymore, which is what my parents did when we used to travel cross country in the 1960s. Some law enforcement personnel is going to stop and ask you what you're doing and how intoxicated you are.  There is no more homesteading.  And even in the Alaskan wilderness, if you go out and build a cabin miles from anyone anywhere...  well, if the government finds it, they'll take it down.

Now let's talk rent: A 2 bedroom apartment in Providence, Rhode Island ran around $570+ in 1994, but then again, minimum wage was $4.25/hr = $170 a week = $680 a month.  That leaves $110 for food, clothing, utilities, etc.  Not much to actually live on, was it?  

Same when I was sharing a 4 bedroom house (old, with cockroaches, in what was basically a slum) with a bunch of artists in Atlanta back in 1973 - rent ran around $400 a month, while minimum wage was $1.60/hr = $64 a week = $256 a month.  You damn well better share to split the rent.  

BTW, we turned the place into a 6 bedroom simply by making every room except the bathroom, kitchen, and living room a bedroom.  Mine was the back porch, which had wrap-around windows and a gas space heater I lit with a match. I loved it - my sanctuary, where I wrote like a maniac, read like an opium addict, dreamed... oh, how I dreamed...  And with six of us (not to mention sleepovers), there was always someone available for talking, dreaming, drinking, laughing...   

So I'm all in favor of survival.  No one was using that room that was so well hidden that the mall administration and security guards themselves didn't know it was there. No harm, no foul in my book. Because if you're not born rich, you've got to be creative to stay alive in this world. 

Especially if you're becoming an artist. It takes a lot of work, obsession, talking, arguing, partying, debating, cooperating, and more work to get from the dream to the reality.  Every city has had and still has its neighborhood.  Some are more famous than others:  Left Bank!  Montmartre!  Greenwich Village!  Chelsea!  Florence!  Soho!  Tribeca!  Little Five Points!  And so many more.  

There's a reason Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème of starving artists and their muses has been translated into dozens of languages, made into movies, operas, musicals, etc. Because right now, there are a group of artists in your city that are living in a run-down section of town, working crap jobs and staying up all night to do the work to become their dream... Whether in a slum or a house or a Secret Mall Apartment.

I hope you enjoy it. I sure did. Both the documentary, and in real life.

"We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident"...

Some things never change...  

I clearly remember the assassination of JFK in 1963, especially the shock and the tears, the flags at half mast, and the endless television coverage, so that we all got to see quite clearly when Jack Ruby ran up to and shot Lee Harvey Oswald to death and the two detectives escorting Oswald simply made a lot of faces while it happened.  Nobody stopped Ruby or even tried.  Even as a child, it occurred to me that someone might not have wanted all the evidence to come out.

Things got worse.  Vietnam was going on, nightly on TV.  The My Lai massacre:

• Võ Suu's photo of the Saigon execution of a Viet Cong leader.  
• Buddhist monks burning themselves to death in protest, and the nightly battles and death counts on TV. 
• 1968, the Battle of Bến Tre, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."  
• The 1970s, the little Vietnamese girl running naked and screaming down the road because the napalm had burned all her clothing off of her.  

Vietnam had the 4th highest death toll in US war history.  Not to mention the troops who came back with PTSD, permanent mental and physical wounds, and addictions like you wouldn't believe.  Nightmares every night…

Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) 

demonstration during the 1976 US Bicentennial 

celebration in Philadelphia

And back at home, Birmingham's Bull Connor unleashing firehoses and police dogs on protesters: 

http://apushcanvas.pbworks.com/w/page/125950658/Birmingham%201963

And the pictures of the aftermath the Birmingham 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing, in which these four little black girls were killed. 

 https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-birmingham-news-6000-mourners-jam-r/138782787

BTW, the FBI did do an investigation into that bombing, and came up with the names of four white KKK men who committed the crime.  J. Edgar Hoover  promptly blocked any impending federal prosecutions against the suspects, refused to disclose any evidence his agents had obtained with state or federal prosecutors, and then sealed the records in 1968. The files weren't reopened until 1977, when the first conviction was made by Alabama AG Bill Baxley.  The other three were tried by Federal Attorney Doug Jones in 2001 and 2002.  Justice can take a long, long time.*

1968 was a hard year.  Besides Vietnam, Robert F. Kennedy Sr. and Martin Luther King, Jr. were both assassinated, followed by the incredible amount of police violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.  And it wasn't just the police:  Mayor Robert Daly, who ran Chicago with a strangulating hand, had 12,000 police, 5,000 National Guardsmen, and 7,500 regular army troops out in the streets, and he unleashed them to do anything they wanted. And they did. There were protesters rioting, but even the news said the police were rioting, too. A very young Dan Rather got sucker punched and dragged by security guards on the floor of the Convention.  (Link)  To which Walter Cronkite tersely replied, "I think we've got a bunch of thugs here, Dan."

And then on May 4, 1970, when the National Guard shot four students dead at Kent State in Ohio.  Four unarmed students, two of whom were walking to class, nine wounded, all unarmed…

"I survived the Kent State shootings. 

Why use force against college protests?"

The lies:  

• The chief military officer of the National Guard claimed that there had been a sniper firing on them, which is why they retaliated. 
• The guardsmen claimed they feared for their lives, but none of the students had weapons, and none of them were closer to the guardsmen than 71 feet. 
• Someone gave the order to fire.
• Initial newspaper reports had inaccurately stated that several National Guard members had been killed or seriously injured. 

A subsequent FBI investigation concluded that the Guard was not under fire and that the guardsmen fired the first shots. And while many guardsmen claimed to have been hit by stones that were pelted at them by protesters, only one Guardsman, Sgt. Lawrence Shafer, was injured enough to require medical treatment (he received a sling for his badly bruised arm and was given pain medication). In 1986, Shafer identified the person that he shot as student Joseph Lewis. Shafer nailed Lewis in his gut and in his leg.  

Kent State Victims

• Allison Beth Krause: A 19-year-old freshman from Pittsburgh, PA, she was participating in the protest and was shot in the chest.
• Jeffrey Glenn Miller: A 20-year-old sophomore from Plainview, NY, he was participating in the protest and was shot in the mouth.
• Sandra Lee Scheuer: A 20-year-old honors junior from Youngstown, OH, she was walking to class and was shot in the neck.
• William Knox Schroeder: A 19-year-old sophomore from Lorain, OH, he was an ROTC student walking to class and was shot in the chest/back.

Nine other students were wounded during the shooting. They were:

• Alan Michael Canfora: A junior who was hit in the right wrist.
• John R. Cleary: A freshman who was hit in the upper left chest.
• Thomas Mark Grace: A sophomore who was hit in his left ankle.
• Dean R. Kahler: A freshman who was shot in the back and permanently paralyzed from waist down.
• Joseph Lewis Jr.: A freshman who was hit twice, in the right abdomen and lower left leg.
• Donald Scott MacKenzie: A student who received a neck wound.
• Matthew J. McManus: A student (listed in one snippet, but specific wound details are limited).
• James Dennis Russell: A senior who was hit in his right thigh and grazed on his right forehead.
• Robert Follis Stamps: A sophomore who was hit in his right buttock.

"Gotta get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down

Should have been gone long ago

What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground

How can you run when you know?"

— "Four Dead In Ohio", Neil Young

"Afterwards a Gallup Poll showed that 58 percent of respondents blamed the students, 11 percent blamed the National Guard, and 31 percent expressed no opinion."  (LINK)  

None of this stopped me from joining in a couple of anti-Vietnam War protests.  But I knew what the risks were.  I still know what the risks are.  I just have too much arthritis to get out there.  

Meanwhile:  On social media, and this is a direct quote:  "Well, yeah, you can assemble peacefully but you can't protest!  Protest is unconstitutional!"  

Oh, p*** off.  Protest is not only constitutional, but it's the foundation of this country.  What do they think the Boston Tea Party was?  And I'll bet they never heard of the Boston Massacre, the Pine Tree Riot or the First Continental Congress which basically told the British Crown to go stuff itself.  

And the Declaration of Independence is a supremely radical manifesto saying:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."  READ THAT CAREFULLY.

BTW, also in the Declaration of Independence is summary from "The Crimes of the King":

• "He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
• He has made judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance.
• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
• He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended legislation:
• For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
• For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
• For imposing taxes on us without our Consent:
• For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:"

Read the whole Declaration of Independence HERE.  It's worth a careful read.  Our Founding Fathers were, by the standards of their day and apparently ours, radical.  

Meanwhile:

 

The (hopefully) good thing that's happened out of this is that ICE Agents have received updates on what is and what is NOT legal procedure  (LINK):

 

****************** NEWS ALERT UPDATE *********************

"ICE memo allows agents to enter homes 

without judge’s warrant, legal group says"

"The memo, allegedly signed by Todd M. Lyons, acting director of ICE, tells personnel that they only require a Form I-205 to force entry into a private residence. A Form I-205 is signed by an immigration enforcement official and authorizes an arrest following a final order of removal, which is typically issued by an immigration judge.

The whistleblowers believe new ICE recruits have been directed to follow this policy “while disregarding written course material instructing the opposite,” the disclosure says.  

They were aware of multiple DHS employees who had faced retaliation for expressing concerns about the memo and one instructor who resigned rather than teach it, it says." (LINK)  

^* Doug Jones is currently running for Governor of Alabama. God bless you, Mr. Jones.

Farewell Darkness, Welcome Light!

"We don't believe; we fear." Inuit spiritual healer Aua to explorer Knud Rasmussen (some time between 1921-1924).

"In the distance the dark outlines of the little hut emerge. Here, always on the same spot, I have for some time been startled by a remarkable fantasy. I imagine that something has risen out of the unquiet water in the last inlet before the hut, a dark form which is making its way towards me, bent, noiseless, and ineluctable. Again and again I try to banish this phantom, clear and sharp though its outlines may be in my imagination. How astonished I am then in the winter night, to find in an old case of books left behind by the hunter Nois an old number of Allers Familienjournal, containing an article on spectres which reproduces a faithful likeness of my own phantom. There is the hobgoblin and the legendary sea-serpent, and there also is the black figure as it rises out of the water and, stooping, slowly and inexorably approaches its victim. The caption reads: ‘A spectre of the shore which appears to fishermen.'"
— A Woman in the Polar Night (1938), by Christiane Ritter, translated by Jane Degras, p. 98.*

"Winter’s a dangerous thing to love. It’s pure and it’s gorgeous and it owns this land. It owns us. We sit in our houses with the heat turned up and think what a pretty day it is out there, with the sun gleaming on the snow or the snow dancing in the air. But a tree falls in the ice, and the power goes out and we’re ice men again. We’re out on the road and we’re full of the power of our automobiles and at the same time we know one little slip, one little mistake in judgment or speed or just the chance encounter with a pebble or a bird or a deer and there we are, with winter laughing all around us. You live up here, and it doesn’t take long to understand why crime rates drop like a stone come November. Winter takes the place of crime; winter takes the place of night; winter takes the place of the bogey-man and the mothman and the raptors and everything you’ve ever been afraid of. Winter rules everything, and if you don’t know that, you don’t know anything. And you will die."
— Eve Fisher, Drifts, AHMM (Jan/Feb 2006)

***

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
   - Traditional Scots Prayer

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Savior's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is the time.
--Marcellus.

So have I heard and do in part believe it.
--Horatio.

"So says the immortal Shakespeare [Hamlet, act 1, scene 1]; and the truth thereof few nowadays, I hope, will call in question. Grose observes, too, that those born on Christmas Day cannot see spirits; which is another incontrovertible fact.

"What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago and upwards, to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on the eve of this festival of all festivals; when the whole earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles, bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies, bugbears, black dogs, specters, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-Goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbies, hob-thrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mum-pokers, Jemmy-burties, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs, calcars, nymphs, imps, incubuses, spoorns, men-in-the-oak, hell-wains, fire-drakes, kit-a-can-sticks, Tom-tumblers, melch-dicks, larrs, kitty-witches, hobby-lanthorns, Dick-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tales, knockers, elves, rawheads, Meg-with-the-wads, old-shocks, ouphs, pad-foots, pixies, pictrees, giants, dwarfs, Tom-pokers, tutgots, snapdragons, sprets, spunks, conjurers, thurses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-the-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yeth-hounds, colt-pixies, Tom-thumbs, black-bugs, boggarts, scar-bugs, shag-foals, hodge-pochers, hob-thrushes, bugs, bull-beggars, bygorns, bolls, caddies, bomen, brags, wraiths, waffs, flay-boggarts, fiends, gallytrots, imps, gytrashes, patches, hob-and-lanthorns, gringes, boguests, bonelesses, Peg-powlers, pucks, fays, kidnappers, gallybeggars, hudskins, nickers, madcaps, trolls, robinets, friars' lanthorns, silkies, cauld-lads, death-hearses, goblins, hob-headlesses, bugaboos, kows, or cowes, nickies, nacks [necks], waiths, miffies, buckies, ghouls, sylphs, guests, swarths, freiths, freits, gy-carlins [Gyre-carling], pigmies, chittifaces, nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows, alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricauns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles korigans, sylvans, succubuses, blackmen, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabriel-hounds, mawkins, doubles, corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sibyls, nicknevins, whitewomen, fairies, thrummy-caps, cutties, and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost.

"Nay, every lone tenement, castle, or mansion-house, which could boast of any antiquity had its bogle, its specter, or its knocker. The churches, churchyards, and crossroads were all haunted. Every green lane had its boulder-stone on which an apparition kept watch at night. Every common had its circle of fairies belonging to it. And there was scarcely a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit!"

The Denham Tracts, edited by James Hardy  (SOURCE)**

Whew.  

***

Anyway, there's a reason why Christmas comes in the darkest time of the year (in ancient Rome, the winter solstice was on December 25... calendar time has changed with the centuries).  Four days after the winter solstice, when the 4-7 minutes you gain are barely noticeable, you need light, torches, songs, feasting, and and a Yule log that will burn all the way to Twelfth Night, to beat back everything and anything of monsters and death and endless darkness.  Even now, on January 8th, we've only gained 15 minutes of light.  And it's worse the further north you live in December, and in the Southern Hemisphere, the further south you live in June.  In each case, the polar night lasts around 4 months.  That's a long time to live in the dark.  

Except, of course, for the aurora borealis / aurora australis.  Light in absolute darkness...  (From Wikipedia):

The earliest depiction of the aurora may have been in Cro-Magnon cave paintings of northern Spain dating to 30,000 BC:

The oldest known written record of the wintertime aurora was in a Chinese legend written around 2600 BC; an autumnal aurora is recorded centuries later, around 2000 BC.  

The Aboriginal Australians say the aurora australis is bushfires, or a kootchee (an evil spirit creating a large fire), or the campfires of spirits in the Land of the Dead.  The Maori of New Zealand, the Dene and other northern Native Americans, all see their departed friends dancing the sky around the campfires.  Way up north, the Sami and the Inuit share similar beliefs of northern lights being the blood of the deceased, 'some believing they are caused by dead warriors' blood spraying on the sky as they engage in playing games, riding horses, or having fun in some other way.'

John W. Thompson, Jr., a Civil War survivor of the Battle of Fredericksburg, wrote "Louisiana sent those famous cosmopolitan Zouaves called the Louisiana Tigers, and there were Florida troops who, undismayed in fire, stampeded the night after Fredericksburg, when the Aurora Borealis snapped and crackled over that field of the frozen dead hard by the Rappahannock ..."

Speaking of the Lights making sound - they do. They really do.  

  

So light candles! Keep the hot drinks flowing, the sweet treats coming, and late at night, cuddle under the covers, and listen to the light crackling in the sky...  

The darkness is vanquished!  

The light is finally returning!    

*Back in 1933, Viennese Christiane Ritter spent a year on the remote archipelago of Svalbard, far above the Arctic Circle, with her husband and another hunter.  It's an amazing record, and I highly recommend it.  

**From "Folklord and Mythology Electronic Texts", edited and/or translated by D. L. Ashliman, University of Pittsburgh.  (HERE)  A wonderful source for just about any folklore you would want to know about.  Enjoy!

Christmas Movies for the Ages — at Our House At Least

(This first appeared 10 years ago, but I think it's always good to look at (my) classics again!)

I love a good Christmas movie or story, but I take my entertainment with a little salt, thanks. Or at least a shot glass. And a little murder just adds to the fun.  Here's a list of my favorite Christmas movies, the ones my husband and I watch every year, and yes, we know the lines by heart:

We're No Angels, 1955

I first saw this when I was ten years old, back in the 60's, watching it on a black and white TV set, all by myself. I laughed until I cried, and I remembered lines from it for years afterwards. It warped me for life.

"I read someplace that when a lady faints, you should loosen her clothing." - Albert (Aldo Ray)

Three convicts escape from the prison on Devil's Island on Christmas Eve. There's Humphrey Bogart as Joseph, a maniac and master forger, Peter Ustinov as Jules, an expert safe-cracker, in prison only because of a "slight difference of opinion with my wife", and Aldo Ray as Albert, "a swine" of a heart breaker who only fell afoul of the law after asking his uncle for money (the illegal part was when said uncle said "no" and Albert beat him to death with a poker – 29 times, mam'selle). Oh, and their fellow-traveler, Adolphe - or is it Adolf?

"We came here to rob them and that's what we're gonna do – beat their heads in, gouge their eyes out, slash their throats. Soon as we wash the dishes." – Joseph

Anyway, these 3 convicts need money, clothing, passports - and they find it all at Ducotel's General Store, the famous Ducotel's, "the one who gives credit". Along with Felix (Leo G. Carroll), the most inept, innocent, and financially challenged manager in history, his beautiful wife, Amelie (played by Joan Bennett), and their daughter Isobel (Gloria Talbott, in full super virgin mode).

You can see where this is going: they get hired, they get interested, they get all warm fuzzy, they change their ways, everyone is happy. Right? Well, not quite. Because the big fat plum in this pudding is Basil Rathbone as Andre Trochard, who owns Ducotel's, and has come to Devil's Island - with his sycophantic nephew Paul - to do the books on Christmas Day. I love a good villain, and Basil Rathbone is as snooty, snotty, sneering, vindictive, scheming, insulting, arrogant, belittling, and generally nasty as they come. ("Your opinion of me has no cash value." – Andre Trochard.) He makes Ebenezer Scrooge look like a warm pussy cat.

Andre Trochard - "Twenty years in solitary – how's that for a Christmas present?"

Jules – "That's a lovely Christmas present. But how are you going to wrap it up?"

There's no Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, or Future in this one; no "God bless us, every one"; no Tiny Tim; but there's theft and forgery, fraud and deceit, murder and mayhem, all done with sharp, hilarious dialog. Go. Rent it now. Pour a Chateau Yquem (you'll understand later) or its equivalent, pull out a turkey leg, and enjoy! Merry Christmas! Compliments of the Season!

The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), Monty Wooley, Bette Davis, Jimmy Durante, and more. The worst house guest in the world is also the most erudite, witty, arrogant, and popular man on the planet. Sheridan Whiteside was Kaufman and Hart's masterpiece (especially as played by Monty Wooley), based on (of course) the real Algonquin Club's founder, leader, gatekeeper and spoiled child, Alexander Woollcott.

Jimmy Durante, Mary Wickes (in her breakthrough screen role), and Monty Wooley

The play - and the movie - are chock full of characters who were based, almost libellously, on real people. Banjo = Harpo Marx. Beverly Carlton = Noel Coward. Lorraine Sheldon = Gertrude Lawrence, of whom Beverly Carlton says, in my favorite movie line of all time,

"They do say she set fire to her mother, but I don't believe it."

And Mary Wickes as Nurse Preen, who has to nurse the impossible Sheridan Whiteside:

"I am not only walking out on this case, Mr. Whiteside, I am leaving the nursing profession. I became a nurse because all my life, ever since I was a little girl, I was filled with the idea of serving a suffering humanity. After one month with you , Mr. Whiteside, I am going to work in a munitions factory. From now on , anything I can do to help exterminate the human race will fill me with the greatest of pleasure. If Florence Nightingale had ever nursed YOU, Mr. Whiteside, she would have married Jack the Ripper instead of founding the Red Cross!"

Somebody had to finally say it.

A/k/a Reborn (1981). Directed by Bigas Luna, "starring" Dennis Hopper as the snake-oil selling Reverend Tom Hartley, Michael Moriarty as Mark (a thickly-veiled Joseph), and (I kid you not, spoiler alert!) a helicopter as the Holy Spirit. While it has horrible production values, and was obviously made (in Italy, Spain, and Houston, TX) on rather less than a shoestring (I think all the money was spent on the helicopter), this may be one of the most interesting versions of the Nativity that's ever been done.  

"You're going to have a baby? I can't have a baby! I can't even take care of myself, much less a baby!" Mark.

The Thin Man (1934). William Powell and Myrna Loy. Machine-gun dialog, much of it hilarious. A middle-aged peroxide blonde and an incredibly young Maureen O'Sullivan. More drinking than anyone would dare put into a movie today, at least not without a quick trip to rehab for somebody, especially Nick Charles. And mostly true to Dashiell Hammett's plot.

"Is he working on the case?" "Yes, a case of scotch!"

Okay, a quick break for myself and the kids and the grandkids: A Muppet Christmas Carol (with Michael Caine), A Charlie Brown Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (narrated by Boris Karloff) A Christmas Story. Love, love, love them ALL.

"You'll shoot your eye out!"

Okay, back to more adult fare:

Love Actually (2003), mostly because I start laughing as soon as Bill Nighy starts cursing. (What can I say? I'm that kind of girl.)

"Hiya kids. Here is an important message from your Uncle Bill. Don't buy drugs. Become a pop star, and they give you them for free!" Truer words are rarely spoken in a Christmas movie…

© IMDb

Totally NON-secret NON-guilty pleasure: Blackadder's Christmas Carol (1988). Rowan Atkinson (Blackadder), Tony Robinson (Baldrick), Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Miranda Richardson, Jim Broadbent and Miram Margolyes as Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, and Robbie Coltrane as the Spirit of Christmas…

© IMDb

"Mrs. Scratchit, Tiny Tom is fifteen stone and built like a brick privy. If he eats any more heartily, he will turn into a pie shop." God bless us, everyone.

Scrooge (A Christmas Carol) (1951). Alistair Sim. This is my favorite version, mostly because it feels like Dickens to me, because I love Fezziwig's sideburns, because of the hysterical charwoman, but mostly because Mr. Sim's Scrooge really ENJOYS being a hard-hearted miser from hell. Which makes his delight, after coming back from his Christmas travels among the spirits, more believable. Or at least I always find myself grinning from ear to ear...

"I don't deserve to be this happy. But I simply can't help it!"

Hey, there's 12 Days of Christmas, and this is only the first one – there's PLENTY of time to watch them all!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Sudden Death Syndrome and the Missing Corpse: The Walshes

Mostly from CNN, but this picture is from the Boston Globe:

Ana Walshe

Ana Walshe was 39, a Serbian immigrant who worked for a real estate company in Washington, D.C. She made $300,000K a year (which wouldn't be that outrageous in our capitol city). Ana had over $1 million in insurance policies and substantial amounts of money in her bank accounts.

Brian, on the other hand, had pled guilty to federal crimes over a scheme to sell counterfeit Andy Warhol paintings, and was awaiting sentencing at the time of Ana’s disappearance.

The Walshes and their 3 children lived in Cohasset, Mass., but Ana worked in DC and stayed in a townhouse there. Brian claimed Ana left for work on Jan.1 between 6 and 7 am he hadn’t heard from her after sending a text message that her plane landed in Washington, D.C. Ana’s phone last interacted with Verizon on Jan. 2, at 3 am near the Walshe home. Brian and a coworker alerted authorities on Jan. 4, 2023, that Ana was missing.

Cohasset Police Department Detective Harrison Schmidt, the lead investigator on the case, responded to the Walshe home on Jan. 4, 2023, where he found Brian with his three children (ages 2, 4 and 6) eating McDonald’s. He testified that Brian claimed Ana left early Jan. 1 for an emergency work meeting in DC, and showed him texts and photos Ana sent about her JetBlue flight. Brian also claimed he lost his phone New Year’s Eve but his son found it later in the son’s room.

BTW, the detective conducted a walkthrough, they drained the pool, and probably the most interesting feature was that the trunk of the family's Volvo was lined in plastic.

And now, Brian Walshe's Google search history on multiple devices including his son's iPad: [my emphasis, because that's just plain COLD]

January 1:

4:55 a.m. - How long before a body starts to smell.

4:58 a.m. - How to stop a body from decomposing.

5:47 a.m. - 10 ways to dispose of a dead body if you really need to.

6:25 a.m. - How long for someone to be missing to inherit.

6:34 a.m. - Can you throw away body parts.

9:29 a.m. - What does formaldehyde do.

9:34 a.m. - How long does DNA last.

9:59 a.m. - Can identification be made on partial remains.

11:34 a.m. - Dismemberment and the best ways to dispose of a body.

11:44 a.m. - How to clean blood from wooden floor.

11:56 a.m. - Luminol to detect blood.

1:08 p.m. - What happens when you put body parts in ammonia.

1:21 p.m. - Is it better to put crime scene clothes away or wash them.

January 2: Walshe went to a Home Depot and paid $450 in cash for supplies, including mops, a bucket, goggles, tarps, a hatchet and baking soda.

12:45 p.m. - Hacksaw best tool to dismember.

1:10 p.m. - Can you be charged with murder without a body.

1:14 p.m. - Can you identify a body with broken teeth.

January 3:

1:02 p.m. - What happens to hair on a dead body.

1:13 p.m. - What is the rate of decomposition of a body found in a plastic bag compared to on a surface in the woods.

1:20 p.m. - Can baking soda mask or make a body smell good.

No grisly searches about how to dispose of a body or clean up blood occurred before the morning of January 1, 2023. (HERE)

Items found in a dumpster included Ana’s Hunter boots, a hatchet, and a hacksaw with DNA evidence linking to both Ana and Brian.

Evidence recovered from dumpster in January 2023
shown during Brian Walshe's murder trial. — Pool

Now the defense attorney, Larry Tipton, admitted that Brian lied to the police and made incriminating searches, but said he didn’t kill his wife and only panicked to dispose of her body, because Brian thought that no one would believe he didn’t cause her death (which is a very nice euphemism for 'kill her'). 

NOTE:  Whatever you do, do not "dispose" of a body the way Brian Walshe did, because it's illegal.  He pled guilty to illegally disposing of his wife's body and misleading police after her death - something, BTW, that the jury (so far) doesn't know.

He said there were loving text messages between the couple, and while there was stress, it was from the fraud case, not Ana's affair (with William Fastow, who helped her buy the townhouse in DC), which Brian knew nothing about. The defense attorney also declared that Ana died of Sudden Death Syndrome (at which point I nearly spit my hot tea across the room), and that he would bring medical experts to inform the jury and all the rest of us just what that is. [I can hardly wait to hear that…]

BTW, I can't help but think of the married Colorado dentist who fell in love with another woman & started looking up things on the internet like, “is arsenic detectable in an autopsy?” and “how to make murder look like a heart attack." And not only left a suspicious internet trail a mile long (PRO TIP: never use your own computer, cellphone, or your child's cellphone), but he actually ordered a rush shipment of potassium cyanide that he told the supplier was needed for a surgery. To his office. Where, of course, an employee opened it and went, "Wait, what does a dentist need with cyanide?" And that wasn't the only poison he ordered delivered. Sadly, all of this did not come out early enough to save his wife's life. (AP News) (Originally cited in my blogpost, "Great Mistakes in Criminal History" HERE.)

MY QUESTIONS:

1. Isn't Sudden Death Syndrome just a fancy term for murder?
2. And how can you prove that it is or isn't SDS if you can't find the body?
3. And if the only way to prove SDS is to look at the body, or at least the parts that might be recoverable (ugh…) then why won't Brian Walshe provide that, and prove himself stupid and panicky, but inherently innocent, albeit with a strong stomach?
4. My standard question whenever people murder their spouses - isn't it easier, cheaper, and safer to just get a damn divorce?
5. What part of "dying in prison" do they not understand?

The Ghosts of Turkeys are Among Us

"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." —  WKRP In Cincinnati "boss" Arthur Carlson.

But, of course, they can fly.  I saw two of them the other day hanging out around the penitentiary (I do not even inquire as to the motivations of turkeys, or who they were visiting), and when our car came one of them flew right up, landed in a tree, and started rearly expectorating.  

I have a lot of turkey stories, including the memorable time which I shared before in 2021 - but a good story is a good story.  I was walking on a trail in Lake Herman State Park here in South Dakota. Now that park has (had - things have changed) wild turkeys, deer, fox, coyotes owls, hawks, seagulls, pelicans, and once in a while some eagles, roaming free. And this day, the flock of wild turkeys was right there, in the middle of the trail, eating and gobbling. Well, I did a big loop around them, because I didn't want to disturb them, then got back on the trail further up, and walked on.  But after a while, I heard there was this tremendous rushing sound behind me, almost like water. So I looked over my shoulder, and by God, there was the whole flock coming towards me. RUNNING towards me. So I stopped. And they all skidded to a stop around me.

So there they were: gobble-gobble-gobble. Hooking their necks and looking up sideways at me. Gobble-gobble-gobble. I mean, it was interesting, but I didn't have any corn with me or anything, and I don't speak Gobble, so after a while I said, "Well, you caught me, now what are you going to do with me?" Gobble-gobble-gobble. And after a while, they finally got tired and went on. And so did I, chuckling away. But later, I thought, "I wonder if that's how a wooly mammoth felt, surrounded by humans in the Ice age?" and then, "If turkeys ever learn how to make tools, we're screwed."  

"Vengeance is mine! Gobble-gobble-gobble!"

Flock of Wild Turkeys, 

waiting for someone like me to come along

by Sarov702 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132330541

The Great Wild Turkey in Flight

by Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren - Wild Turkey, CC BY 2.0,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47672945

Speaking of turkeys, Allan and I were talking the other day and I said, "Have you ever noticed that Inspector Jacques Clouseau, Deputy Barney Fife, and Retired Corporal Foggy Dewhurst all have the same personality?  It's just different accents and countries."

Peter Sellers, The Inspector Clouseau Movies

Don Knotts, The Andy Griffith Show

Brian Wilde, Last of the Summer Wine

The most concise description of them all is a self-important, arrogant, interfering, and generally inept know-it-all who is nearly always wrong.  Hilarious without knowing why everyone's laughing.  And yet, somehow, loveable...  You know.  Turkeys.  Love them all.

And now for something completely different:

A Native American Prayer of Thanks:

Great and Eternal Mystery of Life, 

Master of the Universe, 

Creator of All Things, 

I give thanks for the beauty 

You put in every single one of Your creations. 

I give thanks that You did not fail 

in making every stone, plant, creature, and human being 

a perfect and whole part of Your Sacred world. 

I give thanks that You have allowed me 

to see the strength and beauty of Your creation. 

My humble request is that all of the children of earth 

will learn to see the same perfection in themselves. 

May none of Your human children doubt or question 

Your wisdom, Your grace, Your perfect, unending love. 

Amen.

Humans are a Puzzlement...

"Never say you know the last word about any human heart"

— Henry James

And as for the human mind… Of course, this is what makes communicating with each other so difficult, whether in person or in writing. And not only do we not know what's going on inside of someone else, we don't even know ourselves, and I'm not talking about repressions or neuroses. I'm talking about how the way we're built literally shuts us off from things about ourselves that are perfectly obvious to everyone else.

We don't know what we really look like. For one thing, all we ever see of ourselves is in a mirror.

(NOTE: This is a plot point in Agatha Christie's Funerals Are Fatal.) And when we do see ourselves in a photograph or a video, we're often shocked, shocked, shocked at what we see! Not to mention how we often carry around an image of ourselves from some time in our past. For example: I hit my current magnificent height of 5'5" when I was in grade school, and one of my best friends did too. We towered over everyone around us. And ever since, I've seen myself as tall. So it came as a shock, back in the late 1990s, to hear someone describe me to someone else as "kinda short". Kinda short? KINDA SHORT??? And then I realized that I had to look up at almost everyone around me. Damn. Still getting over that one.

We don't know what we really sound like. We hear everything we say from our own little skull's castle of flesh and bone and various fluids. Now I have always known that I have a very deep voice for a female (an alto or a baritone, not sure which, but I have been told that it's "sultry") because in grade school I often got cast as a boy in the school plays. I also have an odd combination of a Southern California and Kentucky drawl. (BTW, I can do a dead-on impression of Mitch McConnell.) I never heard a recording of myself until I was in almost 20, and I realized that I sound sarcastic even when I'm saying "So, how's it going?" Sultry and sarcastic: sounds like the subtitle on my future detective's card.

We don't know what we're feeling, and we don't know what to do with whatever we're feeling. Seriously. Ask any toddler, teenager, parent, or boss who is having a complete and utter meltdown. If they can breathe long enough to talk.

Kat Dennings doing a GREAT teenage girl freakout in The 40-Year-Old Virgin

I know I did a lot of Alternatives to Violence Project workshops up at the pen where the inmates couldn't handle most negative emotions, and rather than face boredom, sadness, frustration, anxiety, or fear, they would explode into anger. And of course, you can't just say, "oh, gee, I'm angry" and calm down. As many inmates - and others - told me, "You know how it is. You get disrespected, you gotta react. You can't let anything go, because then somebody's gonna f*** with you, and it's only gonna get worse." BTW, sadness often led to isolating, cutting and/or attempts (or success) at suicide.

Now that might sound like adolescent behavior, but studies have shown that a large number of people are first arrested as juveniles, with over two-thirds of those in state prisons having a first arrest before age 19, and 38% before age 16. So where and how are they supposed to grow up?

But then, I don't think humans do a very good job of teaching emotions. (Lately I don't think much of our skills at teaching reading, writing, history, science, civics, and arithmetic, either, but that's for another blogpost.) You want to see some real unbridled, spit-flecked meltdown rages? – go online, where the ubiquitous Usernames, Gamertags, etc. go after others the way Jack the Ripper went after his victims on the foggy streets of Whitechapel.

We don't know how to share any of this with others, because... We think they see, feel, hear, know what we see, feel, hear, and know, and oh how wrong that is.

Here's an example. I used to teach a community ed writing class back in the Reagan years. And the first thing I started with was talking about words, and what people see when they hear or read a word. So I told them, write down the first image or emotion or memory that comes in your head when I write a word on the board. And the first word was always "Apple".

Answers: red, yellow, green, Apple Music, Apple computers, 1980 Apple IPO, apple tree, apple scent, apple pie, sliced apple, whole apple… all of those were among the answers given.

So, every time we write what we think is a very obvious, simple description... it's not. We know what we see in our mind when read / hear it, but we have no idea what's firing off in other people's minds when they read / hear it. It's a wonder anyone understands anything. But then I'm the person who found the first five chapters of Moby Dick hilarious.

We don't know why we do at least some of the things we do. Because we assume that how we were raised, the food we ate, the way it was cooked, the way the clothes hung in the closet, the way the laundry was done, the way the garden (if any) was planted, the way we dressed to go out (if we went out), that was what was normal. And then you meet people who don't live the way you did... Obviously, they're doing it wrong. Or maybe you finally meet the people who are doing it right, but don't know how to imitate them.

We don't know why we're attracted to certain things, from the colors we prefer in our house (I've always been a big fan of cobalt blue) to people with a certain hair/eye color. Or why certain things repel us. I don't and can't wear jewelry, and never have, because back when my mother first put a little necklace on me (I mean, after all, I was a girl, and girls are supposed to love and wear jewelry), I smelled the most terrible smell... And it happened every time she tried to bejewel me. I have no idea why, and I don't WANT to know why. There's a nightmare there, and I don't want to have it.

We don't know why we annoy other people; nor why we are annoyed by someone else. And that we don't usually analyze. Obviously, they're jerks. See Robert Browning's

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

I	II
Gr-r- r – there go, my heart’s abhorrence! Water your damned flower-pots, do! If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, God’s blood, would not mine kill you! What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming? Oh, that rose has prior claims – Needs its leaden vase filled brimming? Hell dry you up with its flames!	At the meal we sit together; Salve tibi! I must hear Wise talk of the kind of weather, Sort of season, time of year: Not a plenteous cork crop: scarcely Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt; What’s the Latin name for “parsley”? What’s the Greek name for “swine’s snout”?

To hear the whole poem, listen here:

Don't you wonder why our narrator is so infuriated with / about Brother Lawrence?

We are so strange, and we know so little, about ourselves and others - and that right there is the biggest set up for any mystery, any at all. That's being human.