More Noiring

Viale Parioli 25 on Google Earth

At the time, musing on the FX2 (articulated bus), listening to tunes, probably minimalist techno, I thought seeing Nuremberg would mark my break, from the noir streak. I'd been binging on noirs.

Well, contrary to my expectation, I'm back to noir-ing. Last night it was The Harder They Fall, Bogart's last. He passed away shortly after that.

Let's remember I came in in the 1950s, and I recognize those cars (the ones in the movie), but back then Bogart seemed impossibly old to me, and that's the relationship I canned: me the little guy, Bogart the craggy old man, right up there with Rod Steiger, but even craggier.

Rod Steiger was in this one too, by the way, and I'll get back to a story about him.

What amazes me is although I've always seen Humphrey Bogart as so much my elder, now today I'm ten years older than when he passed. "I'm older than Humphrey Bogart" says the wondering homunculus, the one who asks what time it is.

As is characteristic of a person my age, a senior as we've agreed to call us, which has resonance from high school, and also college, I'm given to perspectivals (made up word; retrospectives) of one kind or another, in my case reminiscing about Wanderers during the decades we'd meet almost weekly, alternating mornings and evenings for the convenience of different lifestyles.

I'd go to almost all, regardless of time, because the venue was so walkably convenient in my case, whereas others would need to cross town. Given I've been an avid blogger this whole time also, you'll find many of these meetups written up herein (check out Grain of Sand and BizMo Diaries for the other 2/3rds).

The way I tell local history is in terms of concentric spheres:

1. Pauling House; boyhood home of Linus Pauling is in..
2. Asylum District, a business / marketing name in keeping with...
3. Keep Portland Weird, so Greater Portland (GP), also known as Metro (several counties)...
4. Silicon Forest has a big presence in GP, we could even say origins, but spreads...
5. throughout Cascadia, distinguishing us from Silicon Forest, a parallel but different universe centered around the Bay Area

To recap my own bio: born in University of Chicago but we Urners moved to Portland, Jack and Carol having met in Seattle at U Dub. Jack's career as a planner took us to Rome, Manila (where I vectored off to college and a life on the east coast), them on to Cairo, Dhaka, Thimphu, Maseru. I vectored back to the west coast to resume living in Portland (1980s) where I've been ever since.

So, with that as context, my Rod Steiger story: we were told (but is it true?) that he and Claire Bloom were among the previous tenants at our Rome address of Viale Parioli 25.

Also, back to the Bogart movie: it features a boxer, a big, gentle Andre the Giant type guy who can't box worth beans but he's big and looks dangerous, so they build him up as Toro of the Andes. When they introduce him to the boxing ring, the announcers says he weighs in at some 270 plus pounds, a heavyweight. Except not only am I older than Bogart, I'm heavier than Toro.

Rod Steiger really made an impression on my younger self with his performance in Illustrated Man. Claire was in that one too.

Watching Noirs

Dr. D (exNASA) and I watched another noir last night: Murder Inc. (1960), wherein Robert Falk, soon to reincarnate as Columbo, the detective, is here a believable villain. 

The film itself is surprisingly choppy in how it shifts voice to documentary narration, pushing its “true to life” mystique. We the spectators feel we’re being made privy to the gangland badlands of the times (1930s-40s). 

Not unlike now. Prohibition continues, throughout the Union, ensuring a criminal under-culture profitable to prisons.

This was one more in a series of noirs I’ve been renting from Movie Madness.

Two of the noirs, one a Bogart-Becall, had the trope of a villain falling to their death, by accident, at the height of exposure for their crimes (making the death fall cathartic). 

Two had the pattern wherein the male fuckup, caught by police, tells the girl to forget about him, she’s still young and can start over. Murder Inc. was one of those.

These films are informative on several levels, in part simply for their windows on history. My earliest memories dovetail with some of those old Chevies they show us. 

“This is about where I came in” I’m thinking, “just a few years later”.

Building more consensus around lifestyles worth prototyping (the EPCOT mission) stays in focus here in Cascadia. 

Another theme is how scaredy-cat the academics are being, as more GST-informed thinking continues reforming the cyber talk, the often cryptic hubbub on the various channels and meetup networks, where various influencers have juice. 

We continue to look back on the Alaska Accords as another step forward for our World Game grid.

Of course the term “Murder, Inc.” takes me back to the Fletcher Prouty corpus, wherein he quotes LBJ regarding what it’s like around a president. We’re a gangland after all. Bodies happen. Very noir.

The grisly business of packing young men off to war came across as gratuitous violence (mostly self inflicted) to a younger so-called "flower child" generation, folks with an intuitive sense of why outward war was becoming obsolete and therefore farcical going forward.