The Chicken and the Yegg

I hadn’t realised the new film Public Enemies was based on a book, nor that the book was a straight history of the gangsters of the 1930s. I turned up a copy of it the other day and have not been able to put it down since. The revelation in it is that although I was vaguely familiar with the names and exploits of the prominent do-badders of the period, like Bonnie and Clyde, Baby-Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger, I never realised that they were all operating at the same time... nor that most of them knew one another. The gangs were in each other’s pockets the whole time. The crest of their crimewave took place during just two years, from 1933 to 1934, and the focus of Brian Burrough’s excellent history is how these ‘supervillains’ pushed the formation and development of the FBI. Out of this remarkable period in Depression-hit America come the stereotypes that informed so much of future crime fiction. I have long suspected that the pantheon of super-criminals of this era fuelled the imaginations of the cartoonists of both Dick Tracy and The Batman which emerged in the 1930s - Bob Kane’s Batman making his first outing in May 1939. Most striking was a reference in a contemporary newspaper to John Dillinger treating one of his many arrests ‘as a joke’. An inspiration for The Joker, perhaps? Certainly Two-Face and Baby Face are not a million miles apart. Pretty Boy Floyd must have been named ironically, as he wasn’t very pretty, indeed to my mind he did bear a vague resemblance to the Penguin, although it is also alleged that he served as the model for Chester Gould’s Flattop Jones. Bonnie and Clyde left mocking poems behind them, a little like The Riddler, maybe?
Without a doubt the idea of the supervillain emerges at the time, stoked by J Edgar Hoover, keen to promote a need for his ‘G-Men’ to combat the rising menace. Dick Tracy is much more the corporate detective, perhaps owing a little to Hoover’s star lawman, the effete and immaculate Melvin Purvis.
I was pleasantly surprised to read how much of Arthur Penn’s film Bonnie and Clyde actually seemed to be accurate, but I was disappointed to learn that Ma Barker was really a confused little old lady who lived only for her jigsaw puzzles - not the leader of the Barker-Karpis gang by any stretch of the imagination and nothing like the machine-gun toting Bloody Mama, or Ma Grissom in Roger Corman and Robert Aldritch’s versions of her life.
In the case of this outfit, something that has been forgotten is how much the emphasis was placed on kidnapping rather than bank jobs. The bank-robbers (or ‘yeggs’ as they were then called) made no secret of their Robin Hood ambitions, striking at the bankers who had caused the Depression. No prizes, then, for guessing why Michael Mann should be interested in the theme now that there is another great crisis in the banking system, but what sort of response should we expect? Will there be a new generation of supervillains, reincarnations of John Dillinger and Alvin Karpis? I somehow doubt it.
As noted, Karpis and the Barker brothers specialised in kidnapping the sons of mighty business magnates and holding them for extortionate ransoms. In each case, they paid up, anxious to be reunited with their loved ones. I cannot see that working nowadays. Who or what could anyone take away from, say, Fred Goodwin that he could possibly love more than his money? The supervillains of the 1930s were still dealing with robber-barons who had human emotions. I think that is long gone. The monsters of the old days have been reincarnated, but this time ‘Ugly Boy’ Goodwin and ‘Pruneface’ Paulson were running the banks, not robbing them. It’s now like the old Jack Benny radio sketch where a stick-up man points a gun and yells, ‘Your money or your life!’ There follows a long, long silence. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ shouts the stick-up man. ‘I said, your money or your life!’ After another long pause, Jack Benny replies, ‘I’m thinking about it.’ 1940s audiences thought that hilarious, but who would laugh now? With our new breed of super-banksters, there would be no thinking time necessary. ‘Kill the baby!’ they would scream. ‘Save my money!’

Barefoot in the Head

I had to clamp my hands over my mouth and nose and press hard to stop laughing out loud. I had found this source of merriment by chance while looking for something else and could not believe my eyes. Hooting with hysteria in the middle of the British Library is somewhat frowned upon, but all the same, this scientific paper had to be craziest I had ever encountered. Was it a joke? No, it was in a serious journal. It had been cited by other researchers, too.
Jarl Flensmark has discovered the cause of schizophrenia and it’s right under our feet. That’s right, under our feet, because the cause of schizophrenia is shoes! Shoes are the source of all mental disease! Shoes dampen down eccentric contractions of the foot when walking, and this produces tension signals from Golgi tendon organs. Calamity ensues, because the ‘electrical stimulation of the vermis inhibits the limbic structures and increases neurogenesis, and so do the signals from eccentric contractions...’
And, as we all know, the foot bone’s connected to the heel bone and ‘the use of heeled shoes results in less eccentric contractions with decreased neurogenesis.’ Now hear the word of the Lord! We are starving our brains of vital electricity by wearing shoes! As a result we suffer from depression, epilepsia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, diabetes, and myopia!
Of course, I wondered for a moment whether this had not been written by a schizophrenic, but no. This is peer-reviewed journal, and this article has been picked up by others. An anti-shoe movement must surely follow.
But there is hope... ‘Bicycle riding reduces depression in schizophrenia due to stronger stimulation by improved lengthening contractions of the triceps surae muscles.’
Was it about a bicycle? The spirit of Myles na Gopaleen was alive and well here. A case for the Third Policeman if ever I heard one!
As I gasped for air and wiped the tears from my eyes, I had a moment of disquiet. What if he was right? I have recently become aware of the Barfuss (or ‘barefoot’) movement and even snipped out an article for a friend on the Trentham Gardens Adventure Barfuss Play-Park.
Perhaps there is something to be said for going unshod, as nature intended.
Is humanity’s ill-judged embracing of heeled shoes a devilish plot by the Dolman-Saxlil Shoe Corporation after all?

(Flensmark’s paper, ‘Physical activity, eccentric contractions of plantar flexors, and neurogenesis: Therapeutic potential of flat shoes in psychiatric and neurological disorders’ is to be found in Medical Hypotheses, Volume 73, Issue Number 2, August 2009, pp 130 - 132)

Ptang! Ptow! Ptath!

For obscure but pertinent reasons I have become highly interested in the works of A.E. van Vogt once again. By chance I picked up an old Panther Books edition of his 1940s space opera The Book of Ptath. It’s a gem.
Nobody ever did utterly insane plots like old A.E van V and this one does not disappoint. A typical van Vogtian superman appears from nowhere, does all of Craig Raine’s ‘Martian’ poet concept forty years early and far better, then goes... oh, I’m bored with the superman discovering his powers thing, I’m going to make him a WWII fighter teleported into the far future... oh, no... er, he’s a reincarnation... It’s 200 million years AD. Er, no, I like ancient Egypt better. There’s a temple and a goddess with super powers too. Oh, no, er, I think I’ll have two goddesses. And there’s a magic chair... a magic chair to turn the superman into a god, if he sits down in it but he has to invade the supercontinent that’s stolen it first, but, er, for some reason he’s just been mistaken for a prince who’s got an army of billions and he’ll do it, but he’s not sure if he’s going to sit down in the chair or not. Only if it the opportunity presents itself. And one of the goddesses wants to kill him... er, no, to save him, er, no, she’s the reincarnation of his lost love... er, no, I think I’ll make her the Nemesis of the other goddess, and she wants to save the superman... or kill him... I’m not sure. Maybe both. And maybe the evil goddess wants him to start the war, or maybe she wants him not to invade after all... or maybe she wants both. Yeah. Both. That’s better...
Like I said, no-one wrote completely raving mad make-it-all-up-as-I-go-along plots like vV, and no-one managed to infuse every word with their own unique crazed brand of man-and-superman triumphant will philosophy better than him... not even Ayn Rand.
The best thing about the edition I have though, is that it features what has to be the laziest piece of SF cover art I have ever seen. Have a look. Is it a many tentacled creature from a black lagoon? Er, no. Is it a scene from a psychedelic freak-out? A little more homespun than that. A household object seen from an unusual angle, would you believe? No need to ask the family, though. Have another, closer look! That’s right! It’s a rubber bathmat!
Does the bathmat play an important part in the drama? It hasn’t so far, but it is so barking bonkers that it would not be out of place.

Right Herberts

Curious thing... Twice in the same week I have heard, on quite separate and unrelated podcast networks, former oil company executives turned New Age gurus insisting that the idea of oil being a fossil fuel is a mere conspiracy theory. It was the conclusion of just one man more than a hundred years ago. There is no other evidence that it is so, they said. Not only that, they revealed that this opinion is the accepted wisdom of the oil industry. They said this in tones that suggested their own exits from that industry had not changed their belief that oil is not a fossil.
Highly interesting. If oil is not a fossil, then what is it? That coal is a fossil ought to be without doubt, since even I have seen the ghost veins of ancient leaves etched onto the surface of that black stuff. Since you can compress and crack coal into oil does strongly suggest that it is merely an older form of the same fossil.
Yet, it seems, industry insiders are sceptical of this theory. I had never heard this before. I have, though, long wondered why they took the approach to oil that it do, namely one of always assuming they will find more of the stuff and that we should never worry about it running out. I have long wondered why our political leaders act as though there is no crisis coming, as though there will always be plenty of oil forever and infinitely into the future.
They have no Plan B because in their minds, evidently, there is no need for a Plan B. Presumably they must believe that oil is a living substance, that it is still being manufactured, generated by some underground organism that secretes it and fills pockets in the crust as it passes through its tiny burrows.
It dawned on me that I had heard this before. This is the origin of Spice on Dune... Arrakis... Desert Planet. The ‘Little Makers’, deep below the surface generate the beginnings of it, and then the sandworms feed and process their makings into the finished product...
I then remembered that Frank Herbert began his career as an oil company executive, and that Dune is a fantasy version of Arabia, the extraction of Spice based on his own experience on the rigs. Was Herbert telling us the secret theory of oil that industry high-ups believe?
I think he might have been. But is there anything in it?
I do doubt it, but even if it were true, were oil like the everlasting cheese in the Grimm Brothers’ folktale, we are tearing into it at far too great a speed for it ever to regenerate. Their story, after all, ends with no crumb of cheese left for it to regrow, so greedy have the family been to consume it all. Herbert’s novel, though, ends with the Spice provoking a powerful new level of consciousness that spreads across the galaxy... as does a Jihad which leaves billions dead and Dune a lifeless rock. That oil will provoke the former is already evident as the world wakes up to the effect it is having on our planet. Whether Herbert’s second avatar will also follow is another question.

Doing Alright With The Boys

You know who I feel sorry for? Gary Glitter. This must be very galling for him. “He was the same as me,” I can hear him thinking, “but they love him and they hate me.” Well, as the old saying goes, some animals are more equal than others. Gary, you didn‘t have $25,000,000 as a sweetener for accusers to drop the charges, did you? And you didn‘t have Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monnet, Chevalier de Lamarck in you corner, either. Learn from the master, Gary. That dead, French aristo is like two Johnny Cochranes on your team.
What the Chevalier de Lamarck taught us is that Darwin was wrong. Now, that’s a lesson every true Creationism-believing American wants to hear, so Jacko got the public on his side right away. He appealed to good, old fashioned common-sense, the kind that tells us iron ships sink and aeroplanes drop out of the sky.
Lamarckian evolution proposes not survival of the fittest, but improvement by design. Weaklings who become blacksmiths and build up bulging biceps at work will pass on their brawny arms to their sons. Short-necked giraffes have to stretch to reach the best leaves and they pass on the stretching to their off-spring who will have longer necks. Stands to reason doesn’t it?
So that is why a man who is born black and then undergoes years of painful plastic surgery to become white, will sire white children. And he did! Lamarck triumphant!
The only newspaper to discuss this topic in any detail, that I recall, was The Daily Star, which ran a memorable headline on the day Jackson’s first son was born:
“Jacko’s Kiddo Ain’t Blacko!”
What they lacked in English grammar, they made up for in basic biology. Even The Star knew something was strange there and anyone who has ever heard Public Enemy’s classic Fear of a Black Planet album would know why. But believers in the Chevalier’s theory had no qualms. Why shouldn’t his children inherit his new whiteness? Surely you’re not trying to say he hired surrogates to bear another man’s children and pretended he was the father just so as they’d be accepted as legally his, even though they weren’t? That’s the sickest thing I’ve ever heard! Only an evil paedophile would do that! This is Michael Jackson we’re talking about here!
Of course. No-one would ever suggest such a thing, because it would also imply that Jackson had bought his children. Certainly that he had paid for them... and I half remember the Americans had some sort of contretemps a while back about the rights and wrongs of buying human beings. Now I think of it, the question of being black or white was involved too. I wonder if they ever resolved that one.
You never thought of having your own captive clutch of kids, did you Gary, but I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking: “If I took an overdose of drugs, just like him, would they love me again then?”
Hold that thought, Gary, hold that thought.

We're bad, we're bad...

"Michael Jackson's family blame London for death" (Evening Standard headline)
It had to happen. Old Persian proverb: when you are walking through the desert and you trip on a stone, be sure an Englishman has placed it there.
That Ayatollah, he knows the score. What did I tell you? We’re EVIL! Yeah! A frail and somewhat wobbly pop singer keels over in his crib and croaks... terribly sad, ain’t it, but who are you going to blame it on? The boogie? No chance. Blame it on the bogeyman! Even from thousands of miles away, London - the most evil city in the most evil nation on Earth - is so poisonous it can reach out across the whole world and strike Jackson down in his prime. Oh, we’re good. Or rather, we’re bad! You weren’t baaad, Michael, we’re baaaaad! We’re the best at being bad. There is nothing evil in the universe but we are at the back of it somewhere. We’re number one, again! Is there no end to our infamy?
(Oh, don’t think I’ve finished about Michael Jackson either...)

We’re Number One!

He said the election was a "political earthquake" for Iran's enemies - singling out Britain as "the most evil of them" - whom he accused of trying to foment unrest in the country.

Yay us! We shoot, we score! Top of the World, ma! We’re the worst - official! We out-evil America, Russia and North Korea, put together! We were up against stiff competition, but we won the Ayatollah Trophy: Most Evil Nation on Earth! We’re bad widdle boys! Better watch your back, Barack. Don’t start shootin’, Putin. You’re out on a limb, Kim. We’re evil. Yeah! You know what I'm sayin’?