The Godfather Reconsidered

I planned to post this last Friday, but how does review three of the greatest American films ever made: the Godfather trilogy (Paramount Pictures)–made by director Francis Ford Coppola. Collectively they cost about $74 million to make and raked in over $800 million worldwide. They also garnered 28 Oscar nominations.

Everyone from Cicero (first century AD) on has proclaimed, …there is honor among thieves,” but The Godfather casts doubt on that. The films hold up well, even though it’s rare these days to hear much about the Mafia, aka/ La Cosa Nostra (“Our Thing”).

Godfather One (175 minutes, R, ★★★★★) came out in 1972 with the impact of a machine gun fired on a crowded street. If you’ve ever wondered why Marlon Brando was such a big deal, see this film. Brando took the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Vito Corleone, the head (Don) of the Five Families crime syndicate in New York. All three films are a family affair; check the casts and you’ll find numerous people with the surname of Coppola.

The films’ Corleone family was based upon the Luciano family headed in New York by Frank Costello. Vito is in the twilight of his life, though he worries over who should head the family in the future. Frederico (“Fredo”/John Cazle) is the second oldest son, but has been given the job of go-fer because he doesn’t have enough grey matter. The first baton passes to the volatile “Sonny” (James Caan) who doesn’t understand his father’s patience-then-vengeance strategy. Vito dotes over younger brother Michael (Al Pacino) whom he hopes will go to college and make the Corleone family respectable. He does, however, have reservations about his girlfriend Kay Adams (Diane Keaton) who isn’t Italian.

Vito knows that Virgil Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) is pushing for the Godfather’s blessing to go into selling narcotics, but Corleone disapproves of the activity. This makes him an obstacle for the Tattaglia family. Disputes such as this generally begin with a summit meeting followed by gang warfare. Intrigue begins during the wedding of Connie Corleone (Talia Shire) to a wise guy. Even as Johnny Fontane (Al Martino) croons amidst the blue hairs and Mama Corleone (Mary King) tries to keep a watchful eye upon events, Vito huddles with Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), his consiglieri and an unofficially adopted Corleone. When the dust settles, Michael’s college dreams fall apart because family honor demands it. Michael cleans up the Tattaglia mess, but because he dispatched crooked cop Captain McCluskey (Sterling Hayden) Michael is sent to Sicily to hide until things settle down. He even acquires an Italian wife who becomes collateral damage before his return and marriage to Kay.

The Godfather has the complexity of a Greek tragedy. A lot of chances are taken, most of which were blood-soaked successes. Note that Pacino and Duvall went on to glory, but were relative unknowns at the time. The film won 7 Oscars with Coppola and novelist Mario Puzo sharing one for Best Adapted Screenplay. In most lists, Godfather I trails only Citizen Kane as the greatest American drama of all time. By the way, one of the film’s assassinations pays homage to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).  

 

 

Godfather Two (1974, 200 minutes, R, ★★★ ½) is often considered a continuation of the 1972 film. Many critics declared it superior to the first film. IMHO, it’s the weakest of the three. Oscars are often meted out to those who should have won for previous films. Coppola won two more Oscars, his father Carmine won for Best Dramatic Score, and Robert DeNiro got a Best Supporting Actor statue for his role as both Tom Hagen and as Vito Corleone in his twenties. Ironically, Godfather II is mostly about Michael’s rise to the Mob throne but Al Pacino did not win an Oscar for any of the three films, possibly because he was competing against himself as Best Actor. (He was also nominated for Dog Day Afternoon.)

Coppola did something daring in the second film; he made it both a prequel and a sequel. It cuts back and forth between the 1920s and 1958-63. We discover that Vito Andolini was born in the Sicilian town of Corleone. Nine-year-old Vito fled Sicily for New York in 1901, because Mafiosi Don Cicci (Joe Spinell) killed the rest of his family. He bore the name Corleone after Ellis Island officials confused his birthplace and surname. Vito survived in the streets by theft, but becomes a person of substance when he kills Don Fanuci (a wonderfully bombastic Gastone Moschin), a local neighborhood fixer. He also marries and fathers Sonny (James Caan), Fredo (John Cazale), and Michael (Pacino). Connie was born on a ship back to America. In 1922, Vito and his associates go back to Sicily, ostensibly to get Cicci’s blessing for an olive oil export business. Cicci is old and doesn’t recognize Vito but learns just before Vito disembowels his family’s killer.

The sequel parts follow Michael’s reluctant rise to his apex power. He has enterprises in both Cuba just before Castro’s 1959 takeover and at Lake Tahoe. You might need a scorecard to keep track of who is loyal to the Corleone family and who is feigning friendship in the hope of supplanting Michael. Several powerful enemies emerge in this cat-and-mouse game: the Pentangeli family, Jewish mobster Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg), and others. Michael’s plans for going legit–including promises made to his wife Kay (Diane Keaton) get lost in bloodshed, Congressional investigations into organized crime–based on real-life situations revealed in Valachi Papers and hearings in 1963–and in Fredo’s incompetence. After Mama Corleone dies, Fredo “drowns” (read shot and dumped) in Lake Tahoe.

Brando wasn’t in this film, he proved too expensive and too much of a pain in the old keister. (He infamously refused his Oscar in 1973 and designated Sacheen Littlefeather to harangue the Academy on the plight of Native Americans.) 

 

 

Godfather Three (1990, 179 minutes, R, ★★★★) is said to be unfathomable unless you’ve seen parts one and two. That’s true, but it’s much more coherent than the flashback style of part two. Michael is nearing 60, suffers remorse from ordering Fredo’s murder, and is divorced from Kay. He realizes that he has been on the same trajectory as his father and is weary of all the betrayals and murders. This time he means it when he says he wants out, but given that “family” is the Corleone keystone principle he keeps getting sucked back into the things he hates. He does make an agreement with Kay that their son Anthony (Franc D’Ambrosio) can pursue a music career instead of inheriting the family “business.” His daughter Mary (Sofia Coppola) isn’t blind to her father’s doings, but she dotes on him. Her one transgression is that she has a love affair with her first cousin Vincent (Andy García), an ambitious and sanguinary hothead. Connie (Talia Shire) convinces Michael to allow Vincent to set up a meeting with rival Joey Zasa (Joe Mantega), which ends badly, though Michael is impressed by Vincent’s loyalty. He tasks him with pretending to leave the Corleone family to get inside that of Don Altobello (Eli Wallach), who plans to assassinate Michael.   

Mainly Godfather Part Three is about how Michael fails to go straight. He has given tens of millions to charity and has been awarded a prestigious medal from the Catholic Church in the hope of making even more money by taking over Internazionale Immobiliare, a worldwide real estate firm. Michael has also been approached by Archbishop Gilday (a rat-faced Donal Donnelly), who heads the Vatican Bank and is more than $750,000 in arrears. Michael recognizes a swindler when he sees one, but he needs the Vatican’s support to secure a government commission’s okay for the real estate firm that would allow him to go legit. We learn that Michael has a gory plan for the crime families who want him to share the wealth.

There are emotionally affecting sequences in which Michael makes his confession to Cardinal Lamberto (Raf Vallone) in Palermo, where he, Kay, Mary, and Vincent traveled to hear Anthony’s operatic debut. Lamberto tells Michael he deserves to suffer but offers him absolution; shortly thereafter Lamberto becomes Pope John Paul I, who many believe was poisoned by Vatican Bank conspirators to sandbag his vow to reorganize it. It’s also satisfying to see the demise of Archbishop Gilday. Michael, though, will suffer the deaths of two people so close to him that he is reduced to a writhing version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” I would given Pacino an Oscar just for his gut-wrenching depiction of pure anguish. The film’s coda shows an aged, l hollowed out Michael sitting in a chair in a small Sicilian town waiting to die. We learn that.

Part Three has a central glue lacking in Part Two but any way you slice it, Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy is a masterpiece. Coppola was just 33 when he made the first film and it’s tempting to think that perhaps he peaked too early. The acting throughout is spectacular, even if Part Three won no Oscars and Sofia Coppola was awarded two Golden Raspberry trophies for bad acting. (She wasn’t that bad!) Coppola’s morality play about family, loyalty, ambition, greed, betrayal, revenge, and Catholic guilt continues to resonate, even when the period detail appears dated. The storyline is filled with fictional characters, but it is based on things that did happen.  

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

Another Circle Around the Sun

Did Emerson really say this? If he didn't, he should  have.

Once upon a time there was a five-year-old boy who spent summers on his grandparents’ farm. When he got older, he’d help with chores, but when he was young, he had the whole day to toss a rubber ball against the shed wall and pretend to be a baseball player. When he got tired on that activity he’d lie in the grass and imagine shapes in the clouds. Once he asked his grandma how old he’d be in the year 2000 and she told him he’d be close to 50. He returned to lying on the grass to contemplate being 50, but he couldn’t. He concluded that no one was actually that old.

A fairy tale? Nope. I was that little boy and when 2000 came around it seemed unfathomable that my grandparents had been dead for many years and I actually had only a few years until I reached the half century mark. I’ve heard it said that time speeds up as one gets older. Intellectually I know that’s not true. A day is still 24 hours and it still takes 365 ¼ of them to add up to a year. Yet, before I knew it, I was 60, then 70. I remember turning 40 because I was a high school teacher monitoring a study hall, a task akin to telling dogs not to chase squirrels.  A funny, delightful 8^th grade sprite named Julie bounded up to my desk and asked me if I knew that Paul McCartney “was in a band before Wings.” Tremulously I asked, “Do you mean The Beatles?” Her answer stunned me: “Yeah, that’s the one. Ever hear of them?” I was gobsmacked and told her to return to her seat, that I was depressed and would explain the next day, but I just couldn’t that moment. I felt ancient.

That’s the only reason I can remember 40, but if you ask me what happened on other birthdays, things get hazy. I recall thinking of my grandma at 50, but I haven’t the slightest idea about 60 or 70. Those blanks have nothing to do with being older per se–though it does freak me out to think of myself as a bona fide “senior citizen”–it’s that I’ve reached that awkward time in which my mental outlook is out of whack with my body’s age. I see myself as 28, until I try to grab a word or a name that’s not perched on the tip of my tongue, lift something heavier than a baguette, or try to keep pace with my speed-walking wife. I even took a memory test and pretty much aced verbal recall. (I was hopeless with shapes and drawing, but that didn’t faze me as I was always a person you’d never trust with a building or art project.) For the most part, all the knowledge I’ve acquired is still somewhere in my brain, though it takes me longer to retrieve things. A common phrase I use these days is, “I’ll think of the answer five minutes into my drive home,” and it’s usually the case.

But I can’t pretend that my body hasn’t changed. I try not to whinge about that as there are lots of people who have it worse than I–friends with cancer, heart problems, or Parkinson’s, those who’ve lost spouses, or have died. Another of my running jokes is that I awake each morning and check my pulse to make sure I’m still here. I try my best to deny it, but the reality is that my future is behind me. Another reality is that the 70s often hurt. I have a terrible back that aches all the time unless I’m too distracted to cry “ouch!” Compacted discs have robbed me of over two inches of height and I have neuropathy in my right leg resultant of having had only a partially successful laminectomy. Once I tripped over a tree root and smacked face down on the sidewalk with blood coming from my mouth. I feared I would lose my front teeth, though luckily, I had only a condition I had never heard of: sprained teeth. I also had a brain bleed a decade ago that, luckily again, was not an aneurysm or stroke. But enough with the organ recital. Again, many people have suffered more. I can’t recover my 28-year-old body, but I can be grateful for each new day.

Today is another birthday. It doesn’t end in five or zero, so it’s not a birthday that gets labeled “a Big One.” I’ll have my free Herrell’s sundae, a meal of my choice, and a slice of my favorite birthday dessert: carrot cake. Please hold the jokes that begin, “Wow! That’s a lot of sugar for an old dude like you.” Hold them because the other thing that will happen today is that many of you will send me fond birthday wishes. The best thing of being in my 70s is that I have collected a lot of friends, former students who still say in touch, and professional associates who like me. And that, my friends, is the best birthday gift anyone my age could ever wish to have.

Peace,

Rob

 

 

Trump is Courting Disaster

I planned to post this earlier but my first draft was as long as War and Peace. It’s still wordy, but it’s abridged.

Donald Trump’s ratings are in the dump, and you don’t need to be a genius to figure out that he’s not one! The war against Iran gives him a stage to play hero. It is, though, it’s a tragic comedy. He and I share one thing in common: Neither of us served in the U.S. military. Too bad the Orange Snollygoster didn’t study history; he’d know that reviews of his farce will not be good.

An advisor to Genghis Khan once said, “… one can conquer [China] on horseback, but one cannot govern it on horseback.” In modern terms this sagacious aphorism means that armed forces can conquer, but they cannot build stable nations. Victory parades–real or manufactured – are feel-good moments, but boots on the ground should march home once wars are over. Rebuilding is the work of financiers, planners, diplomats, and–above all else–honest indigenous leaders. An oft-repeated narrative holds that the United State “rebuilt” Europe and Japan after World War II. If you mean American dollars, yes. If you mean much beyond that, no! Don’t confuse what was made possible with American dollars and what was implemented by leaders and institutions.

The American government embraced men like Atlee and Churchill in Britain, General de Gaulle in France, Adenauer in West Germany, Nehru in India, and a chastened Hirohito in Japan. They were needed to execute postwar initiatives such the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the gold standard, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, and the United Nations. Democracy? The United States has long been inconsistent on that score. We even smuggled ex-Nazis out of Europe to work on military projects. Some erstwhile leaders were weak, plutocrats, or unsavory tyrants: the Saud family in Arabia, the Shah in Iran, the Hashemites in Iraq, Ben-Gurion in Israel, Chiang Kai-Shek in China, King Sihanouk in Cambodia, Syngman Rhee in Korea, Fulgencio Baptista in Cuba….

With the exceptions of Britain and Japan, most of those mentioned above proved to be intransigent or catastrophic. China quickly fell to Mao Zedong, who became a communist after the U.S. refused to support him; ditto Fidel Castro! Charles de Gaulle quarreled with virtually everyone and demanded that Vietnam be returned as a colonial possession; Nehru insisted India would follow a Third Way that was neither Western nor communist; and Germany was cut in half. Others made no pretense at being democratic: Baptista, antisemitic Palestinians, Ben-Gurion’s perpetual warfare policies in Israel, the robber baron mentality of the Saudis and Hashemites, radical nationalists in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Korea was the first mess. Rhee was an authoritarian leader who bilked South Korea after the wartime trusteeship dissolved. North Korea became communist and the Korean War (1950-53) saw a loss of over 730,000 Korean and 36,500 American lives. It took until 1987 for U.S. ally South Korea to cast off authoritarian rule.

Modern scholars view Korea as a dress rehearsal for the disastrous Vietnam War (1955-75). It collapsed the French government and wasted billions of U.S. dollars and left three million Vietnamese and over 58,000 Americans dead. The U.S. tried to remake the South in its image, including relocating 4.3 million Vietnamese into “strategic hamlets” provisioned with US goods. The war tore apart U.S. society and ended when communists overran South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Whatever the U.S. was selling was soundly rejected.

Since the end of World War II Korea and Vietnam have been the template for force-feeding democracy and the American Way of Life. The bulk of U.S. military interventions have been utter failures. We’ve sent troops to Africa–especially Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, and Somalia–dozens of times. I’m not seeing any democracies popping off that list. If we move to the Middle East, we’ve sent combat troops to Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Yemen. Afghanistan holds the dubious distinction of being America’s longest war. Before we went there the Taliban ruled. After the dust of 20 years of warfare settled, the Taliban rules. Does anyone remember Arab Spring, which was supposed to be a flowering of liberal democracy? Where?

Maybe you’ve read about the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 or the 1973 removal of the elected Allende in Chile in favor of the despot General Pinochet. But did you know we’ve sent combat soldiers to Central and South America 41 times. We’ve taken out leaders in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, not because they threatened American shores, but because, like Allende, we didn’t like their politics. Tell me what good it has done for the DR or basket-case Haiti. Did you know we’ve been in Peru, Brazil, Lebanon, and Venezuela three times? Yet, the only conflict the U.S. military has “won” in terms of improving standards of living is Grenada, though the Massachusetts State Police could have taken Grenada.

Donald Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize; that’s unlikely given his meddling in the Gulf of “America,” threats to Denmark over Greenland (!), the war against Iran, his incursion into Venezuela, and bombings of Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen. Since the end of World War II, approximately 105,000 U.S. personnel have died overseas. Yes, 90% perished in Korea and Vietnam, but what’s the final toll of lives lost (including suicides), PTSD cases, and money spent for counterproductive results? Is it any wonder that the United States has slipped to #14 in global quality of life ratings? But you know that when you go to the grocery store or fill your gas tank!

 

A Man Needs The Maid in an Actual Mystery

 

 

THE MAID (2023)

By Nita Prose

Ballantine Books, 285 pages

★★★

 

Nita Prose struck gold with The Maid, her debut mystery novel. It scored numerous awards, praise from established writers, and public acclaim. It has even been optioned to Universal Pictures for a yet-to-be-released movie starring Florence Pugh as Molly Gray, the book’s eponymous maid. (Don’t confuse Prose’s novel with a similarly named Thai horror film or Stephanie Land’s memoir.)

 

Maybe I’m a crank, but I found The Maid rather ordinary. It is definitely in the Agatha Christie genre of “cozy mysteries,” meaning that murder is treated in a genteel manner. I’ll concede that Molly is an unlikely central character. She invites descriptions such as naïve, mousy, neurodivergent, and socially awkward. One might also classify her as having OCD. How many people do you know whose primary goal in life is to clean hotel rooms and her home to a state of “perfection?” She works in the five-star Grand Regency Hotel, marvels over its grandeur, and loves to clean. In her words, “I like things simple and neat.” She is aware that her work colleagues think she’s an oddball and that for most, maids are a “lowly nobody.” Still, she considers herself lucky to work at the Grand Regency. Squalor, dirt, and tip-stealing Cheryl are her enemies, though she is happy to clean up the messes of guests, no matter how vile they might be. 

 

Molly’s sheltered life reminds me of Chauncey Gardner in Being There, though Molly’s life has not been a tidy bed of roses. Her mother died when she was young, she doesn’t know her father, and was been raised by her aunt in an apartment filed with collectibles. (Think porcelain made by Hummels, Goebel, and Royal Daulton.) Their tyrannical landlord gouges them and takes his time on needed repairs, but jumps like a panhandling jackrabbit when the rent is due. Molly’s aunt has built a nest egg for Molly, but doesn’t realize she lost most of it in a scam. Thus, when her aunt dies of cancer, Molly is left with very little money and an arsenal of her aunt’s aphorisms that she repeats like a talking doll. Alas, Molly’s salary and tips make paying the rent a challenge.

 

Prose doesn’t specify the novel’s setting. On one hand, we visualize a posh English hotel in the 1950s, perhaps in the Cotswolds, because of the proliferation of tea drinking, stiff manners, and deference to hierarchy. On the other hand, parts of the book (speech, plebian characters, Olive Garden, the legal system) seem very North American. Ms. Prose is Canadian, so perhaps her model is a grand Canadian Pacific Railroad hotel (Vancouver? Banff? Toronto? Quebec City?).   

 

Molly’s orderly life is upset when she befriends Giselle Black, the second spouse–think “trophy wife”–of Charles Black, who is filthy rich. How he got that way is mysterious, but both of them tip Molly generously and Giselle eventually pours out of her woes to Molly. In Molly’s parlance, Charles is “a bad egg” who is jealous and beats Giselle. One morning Molly begins to clean their room–including wiping all traces of a strange (to Molly) white dust from various surfaces–and discovers Mr. Black dead in the bedroom. Before you can say, “Count your blessings,” Molly is in for an adventurous week. It involves Rodney, a maybe boyfriend; a pawned ring; a gun, interference by Cheryl, who dislikes Molly; Juan Marichal, an undocumented worker; Molly’s friendship with the hotel doorman; her arrest for the murder of Charles Black; possible charges for drug running; revelations about Molly’s aunt; and a high-powered pro bono lawyer.

 

Here is a major plot problem. Even before we get the Christie-like reveal, we know Molly is innocent. (She even thanks the police interviewer who gave her a cup of water!) Nor will you not need Hercule Poirot’s “leetle gray cells” to finger the guilty parties. Prose does leave open the possibility of at least one guilty person who goes free, but the narrative so mannered that it’s unthinkable anyone would consider Molly as a murderess. It’s equally hard to imagine that Molly would change as much in a week as The Maid would have it.

 

The Maid is often charming, though it its chief attraction is entering a world and way of thinking that’s offbeat, old-fashioned, unintentionally funny, and charming. I’m not surprised there has been a sequel and a Molly Gray fan cult. If only there were an actual mystery!

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Vermont Winter Reconsidered

Not my photo, but it was one of my bad choices!

When I drive into town in the winter and see kids waiting for the bus wearing hoodies and sneakers in February, I often wonder at what age do humans experience WRP (weather-related pain). My theory is that we begin to feel symptoms in our late 20s and WRP full onset comes when we hit 30.

Several of you have made nice comments in texts, emails, or postings about my memories of Vermont winters. Now I must confess that most of my best pre-WRP days came before I reached the big 3-0. I’m more than twice as old now, but 30 bothered me more than any of the other Big-Zero birthdays I’ve had. Maybe it was because I was a teen when Young Turks insisted, “Never trust anyone over 30.” I think, though a 13-year-old eight grader named Julie is the reason.

I contend that hell is a place where bad people must monitor an eighth-grade study hall for eternity. I really liked Julie; she was spunky and funny, but her energy could test the patience of a saint. Especially in study hall! Trying to get “Jules” to sit for 45 minutes was like telling an avalanche to stop being annoying. My birthday is in March–decidedly a winter month in Vermont–and the very day I turned 30, Jules bounded up to my desk and said, “Mr. W, Mr. W., did you know that Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?” I ran my fingers through my hair and replied, “You mean The Beatles?” Said she, “Yes, have you ever heard of them?” When I scooped my jaw from the floor I told her, “Jules I promise to explain this to you tomorrow, but right now I need you to go back to your seat and leave me alone, or I might have to kill you.”

You can put Julie’s question in my box of remembrances of how I fell out of love with Vermont winters. She instantly made me feel like a dinosaur peering into the sky and wondering what those giant rock hurtling toward Earth portended. To add insult to injury, at age 31 I fell prey to WRP.

In 1983, Burlington held its inaugural First Night celebration. It wasn’t unusual for Lake Champlain to freeze over, but that usually didn’t occur in mid-December. The Vermont side of Champlain is usually warmer than the New York side, which lies in the shadow of the High Adirondacks. When it does freeze at Burlington, the winds from New York can sweep across a 12-mile ice sheet. One New Year’s Eve the temperature was well below zero as we marched down Winooski Avenue behind giant Bread and Circus puppets. Even dressed head to toe in insulated clothing it was like a cartoon in which we expected our words to freeze in midair and shatter.

That February we had a massive Friday snow storm in which flakes fell so hard everyone at the high school was sure they were going to send us all home. It didn’t happen and it was a tossup who was more off the rails, the students or the faculty. It took me over an hour to drive the four miles to home. I was crestfallen to see a solid blanket of deep snow in the driveway. Only someone burnt would I attempt what might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. I backed up until I could gain traction, gunned the engine, and slid into the drive. Call me Rocket Man.  I came to rest starring at the sky through my windshield with an acre of snow under the car’s frontend. It took hours to shovel it level to the drive and chisel snow from the engine. WRP supremo.

The following winter was the Great Blue Freezie caper. On a subzero morning I got a call from a colleague who lived ten miles north asking if I could come get him as his car wouldn’t start. We almost made it to school before my car halted outside of town where the Lamoille River tumbles over a power dam. I opened the hood, and witnessed a ten-inch column of blue ice coming from the radiator. Yes, friend, my anti-freeze froze. People stop if they see a disabled vehicle because one could die from exposure. We were delivered to school by a kind man in a pickup reeking of rancid oil and roughly as clean.

My last Vermont winter was quite a treat as well. It wasn’t all that cold, but the first snowfall came on October 15. We never got a blizzard, but it snowed a few inches a day through mid-April. Doable? Not really. By March there was nowhere to put the snow! It was the same winter our adventurous tabby Garp got stuck in a tree, but that’s a striped tale/tail for another time.

Moving to Western Mass for grad school was like landing in Miami. My new take on the Green Mountain State is that for six months of the year there’s no better place to be. The other six are called winter and I’m on medical leave.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

The Scarecrow: A Michael Connelly Thriller

 

 

 

 

THE SCARECROW (2009)

By Michael Connelly

Little, Brown and Company, 2009, 419 pages.

★★★★

 

At first, I didn’t think The Scarecrow was up to par with other Michael Connelly crime thrillers, but the more pages I turned, the more I was engrossed. This “scarecrow” is similar to the farmer’s decoy only in the sense that its intent is to scare away threats to the “farm,” secret, anonymous, and (in theory) untraceable transactions on the dark web. You can assume that most of those activities are illegal: selling weapons, looting accounts, spreading malware, running prostitution rings, payments for assassinations, and moving drugs. The sites are often called “onion routing” as they work by encrypting multiple layers of the web as if each was an onion peel. The scarecrow in this novel nefarious tech genius/serial killer who constructs those layers* and makes the onion nearly impossible to peel.

 

The Scarecrow features journalist Jack McEvoy, whom readers know from Connelly’s novels The Poet  1996) and its sequel The Narrows (2004), perennial fan favorites. McEvoy’s (fictional) brother was among the Poet’s gruesomely murdered victims. Connelly puts a lot of himself into McEvoy in The Scarecrow. Connelly, like McEvoy, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Unlike McEvoy, Connelly left journalism before the Times began mass layoffs. Connelly often includes current events in his novels. Big city newspapers began losing readership in the 1980s, but 2009, the year The Scarecrow was published in the United States, was when major layoffs became front-page news.

 

Connelly pulled off a bold tactic in The Scarecrow in that we know the identities of two of the bad guys before we know anything else. McGinnis thinks he runs Western Data, a security “farm,” but Wesley Carver, his scarecrow in charge of the servers, is the real power. He’s a brilliant MIT grad, but also a nefarious murderer. Meanwhile back at the Times, word has come down that 100 employees are subject to a RIF (Reduction in Force) and Jack is number 99. He’s less upset than you might imagine; he’s burned out but needs the dough so he stays on for another two weeks to train his replacement, the vivacious Angela Cook. Angela is bright, but relatively inexperienced and willing to work for about a third of what Jack makes.

 

Jack plans to go out in glory. After printing an account of the arrest of Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old, for murder Jack is lambasted by the suspect's grandmother who claims that Alonzo stole the car in which a woman’s body was found but didn’t kill her. Although Alonzo is a foul-mouthed drug-dealer, Jack comes to suspect Alonzo, though a vile jerk, is not guilty and was browbeaten into a confession because he’s a young gang member (the Crips). If Jack can prove that, he can probably win another Pulitzer and write a book about racial injustice. He holds his cards close to his vest, but Angela tips him off to a dark web site about trunk murders with similar MOs involving braces, sexual assault, and strangulation. Little do either Angela or Jack know that the very act of viewing the site trips a “manwire” that allows Carver to trace them and seek to ruin and/or murder Jack.

 

Jack flies to Nevada to interview a trunk murderer imprisoned there, but finds his cellphone is compromised, his back account is empty, all his passwords have been stolen, his interview has been pushed back, and he doesn’t have enough money to drive his rental car back to LA. Trust me when I say that this is merely the tip of the iceberg for Jack. He does, however, manage to touch base with Rachel Walling, his former lover and an FBI agent. Some passion is rekindled; though a roll in the hay literally saves Jack’s life, it also gets Rachel fired.

 

The Scarecrow becomes a test of wits between individuals who break rules for differing reasons and when told to keep their hands out of the fire thrust them into the flames to see what will happen. There will be collateral damage. Connelly once again masterfully builds enough tension for nails to be bitten to the quick. Pity the poor crow that sits on Wesley Carver’s shoulder.

 

Rob Weir

 

* Good uses of the dark web include protecting journalist sources and communicating with those in the witness protection program.

 

Winter Memories: Nostalgia or Analogy?

Covered bridge in Fairfax, VT near our house  (NMP)

Is it the curse of old men to dwell on the past? This winter has been so cold and snowy that it reminds me of when winter excited me. The 1970s were distressful: stagflation, gas shortages, high unemployment, appalling fashion and music, and inability to land a teaching job. Emily and I desperately wanted to leave Pennsylvania.

Lots of people like Pennsylvania, but it was too conservative, plus about all this working-class lad knew about the world was nearby Maryland, West Virginia, and Washington, DC. I got married in 1978; Emily and I wanted to live in New England, she because of relatives in the region and me because I was seduced by photos in National Geographic. Those are not the best reasons for pulling up stakes, but we vowed to move to move whenever one of us got a job up north. It happened eight months later. We’ve traveled a lot since then, but we always head back to our adopted homeland of New England.

We now reside in Massachusetts, but our first New England home was in northwestern Vermont where Emily got a job offer. That’s world-class irony, as Vermont and Rhode Island were the only New England states where none of Emily’s relatives lived. The only time either of us had ever seen Vermont was when we were driving to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, got turned around in its notorious traffic rotary, and accidentally drove across the border to Pownal, Vermont. It did not leave a good impression. Pownal was rundown and sported a tawdry greyhound betting track. Its parking lot was where we reversed direction and hightailed it back to Williamstown.

We moved to northwestern Vermont in early winter, before I drove back to Pennsylvania to finish my Masters degree courses. On my return trip, I stopped in Montpelier for a job interview. It was so cold I couldn’t feel my feet!  After all, I was armed with acrylic sweaters, light jackets, thin socks, and ankle-high footwear. I didn’t get that job, thus I was unemployed and, like many newlyweds, cash was tight. Burlington was out of our price range, so we rented a basement apartment in Milton, nearly 20 miles north. We froze our tushes off, but were sustained by the adrenaline of discovery before discovering wool, down parkas, tire chains, engine block heaters, and the wisdom of throwing a snow shovel in the trunk. 

 

We were once among the idiots walking across Button Bay! (NMP)

 

Somehow, it felt romantic to bundle up, dare to walk upon frozen Lake Champlain, hear the snow make a noise under our feet that was a cross between a crunch and a squeak, and watch the thermometer plunge below zero Fahrenheit. I took to calling Vermont “The Land of Right-Angle Smoke.” There were several weeks in which one degree would have constituted a thaw. The air was so heavy and laden with ice crystals that warmed air could not rise through it. River valleys were filled with homes where woodsmoke climbed 25-30 feet above the roofline, smacked into the cold air mass, and made an L-shaped turn. It couldn’t have been healthy to breathe that air, but I didn’t think about it back then.

I finally secured a teaching job, in Milton no less. The community was poor, but I adored teaching in the grades 7-12 high school. When I left after seven years, it had zilch to do with the kids. Oh, sure, I had occasional discipline problems, but nothing I couldn’t handle and I deeply empathized with those growing up without the resources that ought to be guaranteed every youngster. In a literal sense, Emily and I grew up in Vermont. Small wonder it holds a special place in our hearts and we seldom turn down a chance to venture across the border (near Brattleboro) and keep going until we make it to Burlington or beyond. 

Snow falling 1" per hour in our MA backyard

 

Maybe I’m remembering all this because right now, winter in Massachusetts feels like one in Vermont. We’ve had several large snowstorms that crunch-squeak beneath our now-appropriate footwear and numerous subzero nights. Is it geezer nostalgia? I’d plead guilty to miss being in my 20s when the cold didn’t make my joints throb or send me under a mountain of quilts. Maybe. Ask me again about nostalgia in June, when Vermont skies are blue, days are pleasantly warm, farmers’ markets are crowded, and small boats flash brightly-colored sails on Lake Champlain.

Rob Weir

NMP = Not My Photo. There were no consumer digital cameras until the 1990s.