westerling

My poem "The Burnt Layer" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It's the one with the sky axe and α Draconis: stone-time, star-time. It's been looking for a home for a while and I am very glad to have it bedded here.

As the currently compiling issue is still looking for more fiction: story-writing people of my acquaintance, please send it in! The website remains temporary, the 'zine remains its black-and-white, saddle-stapled, nearly forty-year-old self. There's nothing like it out there in any of the fields.

I am off to the doctor's, which is a lot less the kind of journey I enjoy making.

Otherwise mostly what goes on around here is capitalism, errands, and interacting with doctors: the usual. Wishing I could vaporize people with the power of my brain.

I had missed this article on the photographs of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, who memorialized on glass negatives, with a view camera in the improvised studio of their farmyard, thousands on thousands of soldiers and laborers from around the literal world passing through Vignacourt on their way to the British lines of the First World War. It started as a business; it became memory-work, ghost-work. They cannibalized their own windows rather than erase an exposure, the last and perhaps only record of the men who had marched on to the Somme. I was not surprised to read that they took no more photographs after the war, that the husband shot himself, that the wife did not destroy the collection but left it in the farmhouse's attic for history to deal with, too close to the epicenter herself. If I had ever seen any of their images, I had not known the story. The article makes much of the immediacy and casualness of their pictures, of which this one makes a shock of a calling card because only their uniforms and the tin hat one of them isn't wearing tell the time: their expressions aren't a century old. Time is plastic stuff. Don't even ask how long a decade ago feels.

I was in the car tonight at the right time to hear a live-in-studio set from local rockers JVK, reprising three-fifths of their debut EP Hello, Again (2022) for WERS. I get to feel slightly ahead of the curve discovering Tristwch y Fenywod at the start of this year, but I had not encountered Cerys Hafana's "Child Owlet" (2024), which without altering the ballad becomes in their telling a witch song.

The mango lassi pie from Petsi does not actually much resemble the experience of a mango lassi, but since it is constructed along the principle of a key lime pie except with mango, I love it.

The silver lining of having to think about the 17th Academy Awards has been the discovery of I Won't Play (1944), the year's winner in the since deprecated category of Best Short Subject, Two-Reeler. It had minor competition. Its vignette of down time in the Pacific theater is a cut above ephemera. It has nothing important to say about the war effort or American values except in the back-handed, Runyonesque fashion of popular music and tall tales. Frankly, good for it.

Directed by old-school all-rounder Crane Wilbur, the screenplay by James Bloodworth sticks close to its source short story by Laurence Schwab in setting up and knocking down the riddle of Fingers (Dane Clark), the dog-tagged Baron Munchausen-in-residence of an unidentified island in the South Pacific so currently overrun with very bored Marines that it's a wonder no one's busted out with the Rodgers and Hammerstein, whom the ever-modest Fingers would no doubt take the credit for introducing. If you believe what the gum-cracking, Variety-paging little bluffer gives out, he had a hand in every success of stage and screen from Gershwin to Sinatra, not to mention some sideman action on his own account with the likes of Goodman and Dorsey. He gave a hot tip to Bogart. Even the luscious pin-up of Kim Karol, lately classing up the sandbag-and-stenciled-crate decor of their dugout, he claims to have discovered at the nightspot on 52nd Street where he taught her the schmaltz that took her to Hollywood. He'd be insufferable except for his nonchalantly chutzpadik air of not seeming to care whether he's doubted, always with a wisecrack in the face of a direct challenge—put on the spot about his anonymity compared to the stardom of his alleged protégé, Fingers who couldn't look more Brooklyn Jewish if he were my grandfather tosses carelessly back, "'Cause I ain't got her big blue eyes." The scornfully spellbound audience of Chicago (William Haade), Rusty (Warren Douglas), and Florida (William Benedict) can't figure it any other way: "Fingers is either the biggest liar in the world or the most important guy in show business." The favorite is not Option B. On the other hand, on this tropical swamp of an island with nothing to do but sit around and read months-late mail and listen to Tokyo Rose, even an A-1 line of bull is better than a total cultural blackout, the closest any of his buddies is getting for the duration to the movie-palace, big-band comforts of home. It is a truth reluctantly acknowledged that for all his backstage bantam swagger and the nickname none of them has even seen him play a piano to justify, Fingers can be "kind of nice . . . to listen to, I mean."

Obviously, a spiel of this caliber cannot run indefinitely without either putting or shutting up and the wave function seems to collapse catastrophically when the cargo off the latest LST includes a beat-up traveling piano and in front of a rec hall's worth of eager witnesses, Fingers approaches the ivories with amazement and then ingloriously balks. He can't come through for an audience who'd thrill if he played "Chopsticks." He gets threatened with a personalized anvil chorus and digs in his heels on the title drop. Even for the chaplain (Robert Shayne) who's just as sternly worded as the next disappointed Marine, he can't muster more than the weak sauce of "Look, I don't mean to be a crab, Padre, but, well, I—I kind of made a vow, see?" which goes over even less well than his theatrical bluster about military pay not covering the rates he used to pull down nightly in New York. By the time the chaplain's finished with him for cheating the camp of the treat he as good as promised every time he sounded off about his hot combo nights on Swing Street, even his most traditionally skeptical critics are actually a little stunned. "I knew he was lying about all those people he was talking about, but imagine not even being able to play!" Lucky Fingers, if, after that exhibition, he can even get launched on one of his former anecdotes without being drowned out by the worse than silent treatment of Jolson in sarcastically three-part harmony. His glum demotion to persona insta-non grata, however, is nothing compared to the pasting his erstwhile buddies are prepared for him to receive when an unplanned refueling at the airfield gives the entertainment-starved Marines the windfall of a USO show by none other than Kim Karol (Janis Paige) her curvaceous, vivacious, flame-haired self, all set to knock what Fingers would have called the cash customers dead, especially if an accompanist can be found for the little box of a piano which is missing a couple of keys and still a better prospect than a torch song accordion. In agreement, the trio head off to collar their musical phony for a never-better chance to show him off to his own invention: "I wouldn't miss this for Tojo's funeral!"

If I have to spell out the denouement of this mishegos, I Won't Play has made such a bad job of its telegraphy that it might as well have used the Pony Express, but the sweetest twist is not what happens when Fingers gets shoved down in front of the piano or even at the airfield where he sees off Kim, but the fact that the camp braggart turns out to be surprisingly sensitive to the kind of dreams that soldiers half a globe from home sustain themselves on, whether it's a picture of a redheaded starlet or a lot of glitzy tall talk. "Everybody kisses everybody in show business." Showing off the brash and vulnerable persona that would serve him so well in his post-war noirs, Clark drops into conversations like an all-time kibitzer and sees himself out of a roomful of cut dead air with an elaborately unconvincing effort of not giving a damn. Paige was already a Hollywood singer as well as an authentic pin-up and could have wowed her audience accompanied by nothing at all, but she does such a knockout rendition of "Body and Soul" that I get mad all over again about The Pajama Game (1957). Audiences who liked their brief chemistry would get to see him strike out with her a month later in Hollywood Canteen (1944). Except that it provides the necessary distance between its antihero's claims and any means of proving them, the war remains mostly a matter of palm trees and G.I. shirts and the occasional patriotic detail like a game of darts played on a photo of Hirohito, but it's still a little jarring to hear the scene-setting narrator sound so blasé about suggesting a location of "maybe Tarawa," considering the winner of that year's Best Documentary Short Subject. Is this short fiction comparable cinema? Like hell, it's Saturday Evening Post-cute and it answers its outstanding question with a wink through the fourth wall; it looks terrible on taped-off-TCM YouTube, but I am delighted to have proof that the channel's chronically prestige 31 Days of Oscar does periodically dip into the discontinued categories instead of just the warhorses. After all, "Even a good liar is not to be lightly dismissed." This vow brought to you by my big backers at Patreon.